Shed raising

It feels like stepping into a scene from that old Harrison Ford movie Witness, the one with the Amish doing their heart-warming, well-orchestrated, community thing. Except that here the women are as likely to be up on the roof, sawing and hammering or shooting off scary nail guns, with the men in the kitchen preparing lunch.

Our oldest, Tess and her Will are building their dream home on 120 acres in the Indigo Valley, in the glorious north-east of the state. First though, they have to build their dream shed, which will be where they will live for a few years while they go on to build their dream house. They have to leave the house they are in now at the end of the month and move onto the block, so they are, quite literally, getting a roof up over their heads.

We’ve just been there for four nights, and each day we spent at the block, beavering away between a delicious lunch and a substantial dinner, and for me, an afternoon nap while the stayers went back for a few more hours of hard yakka.

With us came Old Uncle Tom Cobley and all: our younger daughter and her partner, our Iranian friend Meysam, my dear and somewhat dotty old mother-in-law, and our 16-year-old Jack Russell Fifi to add to the general chaos of Neville and Nutmeg, the two dogs already up there.

Tess and the guys do the heavy lifting – going bush to mill falen timber for the rafters on the deep verandah, hoisting them up to lay along the beams, nailing them in place, Will forever measuring and re-measuring to get things perfect.

I’m pretty useless when it comes to hammers and nails, but boy can I paint. There are about a dozen windows, salvaged from house demolitions and purchased on e-bay and gum tree, gorgeous old hard wood pieces, weighing a ton and painted all manner of weird and wonderful colours.

So I get to work: sanding and wiping and washing and masking-taping and undercoating and first coating and second and sometimes, for the darker colours, third coating. I have never thought myself remotely knowledgeable about any kind of home maintenance, but find myself, to my pride, talking to Fiona, our youngest, passing on the tricks of the trade like parents and kids since long before Joseph and Jesus in the carpentry shop. ‘When you sand, you’re doing two opposite things simultaneously – you’re smoothing out the chips and divots and flaky bits and you’re roughing up the parts that are too smooth, so that the fresh paint has something to grip when it goes on.’ Etc.

Together we manage to get through a satisfying number of the windows, working on old bed sheets on the concrete slab, shaded by the half roof that is up already, complete with shimmering sisilation, bending and ducking to avoid the struts that criss-cross the empty spaces where the walls will be, swigging long and hard from our water bottles and making the trek to the drop dunny with its breath-taking view over the valley. Nan sits on a folding chair in the middle of the building site, endlessly doing cross-words and sudoku, a pair of bright orange ear muffs protecting her against the roar of the generator.

I look at the scene and I feel exhausted at the thought of all they have yet to do before they can live here properly, before they have access to power and water and all the other comforts even a shed that is home needs to have.

But they are young, and this is their dream, and that gives them energy to power them through the weariness and the juggling involved in holding down jobs, saving up before they can buy the next necessary thing, coping with unexpected injury.

I think of my grand-mother, whose first two years of married life, complete with baby for some of it, was spent in a canvas tent on the island of Tanna in Vanuatu. I think of us, 14 years ago, moving into our house in Brunswick, a generously proportioned old weatherboard, in heavy disguise under hideous fake-brick cladding, swirling seventies wall paper and grubby shag pile carpet. How we moved in with four little kids, with internal walls down, external walls breached with gaping holes, bare floor boards with nails and staples sticking up, packing cases everywhere. We got through it; they will too.

Till then, we’ll come up when we can, to lend a hand, revelling in the satisfaction, rare for pen-pushers like us, of seeing a clear result for your work: a row of rafters, hewn from the bush just days ago, now nestled securely atop the sturdy verandah posts. A stack of gleaming creamy window frames, ready, when the time is right, to go into the wall, shedding light for decades into a shed that will be a home.

Incarnation - my December column in The Melbourne Anglican

There’s no substitute for staying with people. Visiting their patch, sleeping in their house or tent or under their tree, sharing their food, being there in the weary nights and grumpy mornings.

We know this – it’s the basis for numerous immersion experiences, overseas trips for school kids, living with host families in a foreign country. Staying with people lets you in to their world – almost into their shoes – in a way that nothing else can.

I was reminded vividly of this twice a couple of summers ago. The first was visiting our oldest, who had set up house with her partner and was happily carving out her own life. 

When she comes back home, it’s still our world, and she is, to some extent, still one of the kids. At her place it’s different. I have a whole new respect for her achievements and choices. She is relaxed and confident as we willingly learn her way of doing things. I always come away feeling I’ve learnt a whole lot more about my first born than when she comes home and dosses down in the attic room for a night.

The second experience was very different. It involved spending the weekend with people we love who are in a bad place – deep in the agony of marital conflict. Several times over those days we wished ourselves back home. We regretted ever coming. Ugly, embarrassing scenes, tension, situations where, no matter how well you know and love the couple, you have no idea whether to stick your oar in or shut up. 

Uncomfortable as it was, though, we came away profoundly grateful that we had made the effort to spend time with them on their territory. We felt much closer to them, understanding in a more profound way the issues that divide them, more deeply committed to their health and happiness, whatever the outcome of their partnership. 

I reckon this is partly what Christmas is about. At this time of year, Christians in every culture celebrate what we call the incarnation – God becoming an ordinary human being. 

Theologians will say that God became human to reveal to us more clearly God’s character and purposes. Would it be blasphemy to suggest that through Jesus’ life, God now better understands what makes us tick? Is more deeply aware of the complexities and anguish of human life?  More lovingly engaged with humanity and the whole creation? More committed to this world and all its creatures than ever? 

According to this story, God in Jesus from Nazareth became an ordinary person. He cried, became weary and angry and fed up, laughed and told stories and loved people and stood up to power and corruption and was painfully killed. 

In Jesus, the God who, we believe, somehow created the universe, has been to our place, slept over, in the most involved way possible – by becoming one of us.

This is a revised version of an article which appeared in The Age on 12 December 2010.

Do we need anything?

The young man sat opposite me on the tram – a tram full of weary, grimy commuters, anxious to get home for the night. It was around seven - later than usual for me. The man was 30, maybe more, besuited, a typical city worker, with a pleasant face and a heavy gold band on his finger.

It was nothing out of the ordinary. All he was doing was asking his partner (maybe a housemate, although the tone of his voice was intimate, tender) if they would like him to pick up any last minute supplies at the supermarket, maybe even the makings of a meal, or some take-away if they were both too weary too cook.

Nothing special about that. Partners the world around say it to each other most nights at the end of the working day. But I was struck by this simple line of his. I think it was the easy assumption that it was his job, as much as that of his partner (who, statistically speaking, was most likely female) to cater for the evening meal. Even more striking was the lack of assumption that his meal would be on the table the minute he walked in the door, or, at the very least, well on the way to being ready.

Girls and boys, it wasn’t always like this. Even twenty years ago, domestic chores weren’t shared much, even if male and female partners both worked. When I was growing up, I cannot think of a single family man who knew how to cook, clean or make domestic arrangements. The assumptions appeared absolute and universal. And then, among many people in Australia, change did begin to seep in, but for a while there was an awkwardness about it.

It wasn’t simply that this bloke asked the question, you understand, it was his tone of voice, which sounded as though this was a question he was used to asking. This is something that still surprises and delights me when I see men pushing prams, hefting baby slings and taking troops of meandering children to school/kinder/crèche in the morning. They don’t look self-conscious about it, any more than mums have ever done.

There has been the odd pram-pushing male around for years now, but more often than not, a while back, they seemed unnatural in the role; either slightly embarrassed, or looking as though they felt they deserved a medal. The guy on my tram, like so many men I know, sounded as though, 50 percent of the time, he was responsible for organising the dinner.

I let myself enjoy that eavesdropped snippet on the tram, as I enjoyed watching the young man get off at the same stop as me, heading for the supermarket. These days, even in a country like ours, it seems domestic violence, the vast majority of which is perpetrated by men, is getting worse, certainly no better. Around the world, the stories of honour-killings, the use of rape as a weapon of war, the poverty of women, the presence of misogynistic regimes like the Taliban, are enough to cause anyone with a heart profound grief.

It cheered me to reflect that some things, in many corners of the world have changed, so that these days there is a comfortable equality between men and women that I suspect is a new thing in the history of humankind. In some ways, we’ve come a long way. But it wasn’t always like this; it isn’t like this everywhere. Lest we forget.

Face to face with the ugly Australian

‘Get back to your own f…in’ country you arsehole!’ The timing couldn’t have been more perfect.

There was a protest in the city on the corner of Swanston Street and Flinders Lane late last week, on the little patch of lawn and pavement between St Paul’s Cathedral and Brunetti’s. There was an installation – more than a hundred dolls in a ‘cage’. Passers by were asked to ‘free’ one of the dolls from the cage and write to their local member or senator asking for an end to the detention of  children of asylum seekers.

This was the launch – late morning on an unpleasant blustery north wind Melbourne day when the seeds of the plane trees get down everyone’s throats and make them cough.

There was a fair crowd of the usual suspects – Grandmothers against Detention of Refugee Children, nuns, clergy of all stripes in their albs and crosses and purple stoles, justice workers from the Uniting Church, mothers with pushers, high school girls in checked summer uniforms.

The second speaker was Bashir, a young man from Afghanistan. He fled to Australia when the Taliban killed his father. He had spent gruelling time in detention in both Pakistan and Sydney, had eventually managed to get a permanent visa, was proud to have just finished his VCE exams. He fears for the safety of his three younger brothers still back home. He spoke haltingly but with passion and dignity.

As he drew breath between paragraphs of his speech, an open-windowed tram trundled past on Swanston and a young man, about the same age as the speaker, yelled – really yelled, it was clear and it was loud – those ugly words.

It was shocking, and it was perfect; a timely reminder that it is not only some of our politicians who are ugly Australians. The assembled crowd gasped. People like me are so often encased in something of a bubble populated by other good-hearted, left-leaning folk, many of them religious. We read The Age, we listen to the ABC, we go to the protest marches and write our letters to the politicians and feel despair at so many of the policies of the current regime on climate change, Indigenous issues, asylum seekers.

Many of us are in close touch with people on bridging visas. Which is great, but it is easy to believe what I believe when I am largely insulated from a portion of the population of this privileged land who want people to ‘Go back to their f…in’ countries’. The people who are part of the reason our Prime Minister rode to power on a slogan like ‘Turn back the boats’. 

I tried not to react too violently to the individual who personified this ignorance, a young man who was patently Anglo, ergo, he had come from his own f…n’ country not that many generations ago.

I tried to think about where he might have come from – his own story of hardship or cruelty that might have made him the stunted, reactive, small-hearted person he now apparently is. Maybe he has been unemployed for years and it has ground him down, made him deeply resentful of anyone he perceives as potentially stealing a job that might otherwise be his. Maybe he comes from a family that has imbued him with those attitudes. Maybe he is himself a victim of the policies of a government that has cut TAFE funding viciously. Maybe he is simply, to use his own unpleasant word, an arsehole, but usually there are reasons for people turning out that way.

This is why we have the government we have, I thought, as I turned back to listen to Bashir finish his speech. This is a reminder of the level of debate for many Australians.

So where does that leave me? I try and understand why people with repugnant attitudes are that way, attempting not to lash back at them with an anger to match their own, because anger will never persuade anyone. Maybe, I even try and get out of my leftie bubble occasionally. I continue to protest, to write the letters, to get to know individual asylum seekers if possible, to keep the issues front and centre in the media.

Last week marked a quarter century since the introduction of the Convention of the Rights of the Child. The fact that we are holding children in detention in a decade where we are still reeling under the collective horror of realising the damage done to the Stolen Generations and thousands of children who grew up in state and religious institutions, beggars belief. The fact that so many citizens of one of the luckier countries in the world cannot see the inhumanity of what is being done to asylum seekers, some of whom are children, is a call to all of us to communicate to the government that we can abide this happening on our soil no longer.

Back in The Age with a faith piece

Bad religion. There’s a lot of it around still, though I am convinced there’s less of it (at least of the Christian variety) than there has been in the past.

Even so, desperately bad religion dominates the daily paper, from Islamic fundamentalists filming grizzly decapitations, to the Catholic powers that be, still trying to cover up the appalling abuse their employees dealt out over centuries. The fact that people can take the ultimate in loving – God – and turn it into an excuse for hatred is the world kind of blasphemy.

There’s another kind of bad religion, however, that is of a less obnoxious and damaging kind but upsets me almost as badly. It’s the religion that condemns beauty.

Geraldine Brooks’ wonderful book Caleb’s Crossing is set in the 17^th Century, in a colony of Puritans living in what is now Martha’s Vineyard. Being pioneers, they live in fairly brutal physical conditions, trying, with varying degrees of success, to convert the locals to their understanding of Christianity.

The main character, Bethia, is a feisty, smart, freedom-loving girl whose story we follow to old age. As a pre-pubescent, she manages to escape the daily grind of domestic chores alongside her mother and ride her horse all over that stunningly beautiful island, simply reveling in the flora and fauna, the weather and the everlasting ocean.

Raised a devout Puritan, young Bethia has the deepest feeling of guilt about loving the landscape of her home so much. In her brand of religion, beauty is deeply suspect. Wondering about the endless variety manifest in the natural world one day, she muses, ‘It came to me then that God must desire us to use each of our senses, to take delight in the varied tastes and sights and textures of his world. Yet this seemed to go against so many of our preachments against the sumptuary and the carnal.’

There are still groups of Christians who seem to find beauty deeply suspect. Witness the appalling ugliness of so many chapels – both old and contemporary. Of course things don’t need to be Vatican City level ornate or extravagant, they can be as simple as you like, but they do need to be lovely.

I don’t understand how Christians, who believe God created this world, can think that God doesn’t approve of beauty. The world is full of completely useless loveliness and wild colour – look at a flower garden, the variety of beasts and insects and fish, listen to the infinite permutations of bird song. As Jesus said,  ‘Consider the lilies of the field: they neither toil not spin, yet even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these’.

To me there are two litmus tests of good religion. One is that it grows our hearts, making us more generous and compassionate. The other is that it makes us come alive to beauty and to wonder.