Purple Prose (17 page)

But that was eighteen years ago. Today, I've been reading outside, shaded by the Chinese elm. If there were grass in my Australian garden and were I younger, I would read spread-eagled on the earth, just the way I did in the Maltese convent grounds during the sacred retreats of Lent and Advent, when classes were suspended, time slowed and my friends and I spent our free time outdoors, reading. So long as we kept the ritual silence, the convent grounds were ours to roam – even the nuns' cemetery where plain gravestones impressed us with the visible permanence of lifelong enclosure.

The living community, with its school, dormitories and chapel, was housed in an old two-storey limestone building, its centre wrapped around a quadrangle. Like a chateau, it dominated the crest of St Julian's hill, surrounded by terraced fields, trees and garden walks with views of the Mediterranean below. Perhaps these contemplative interludes were an attempt to recruit us to Holy Orders, though none of us joined up. But they were also a gift. Reverend Mother's library books, which we could only borrow on feast days and retreats, immersed us in the improbable dramas of
The Lives of Saints
; assisted by frequent singing of hymns and the intoxicating smell of freesias, narcissus and stock growing all around us, we journeyed to the inner world. Decades later when I read of Pluto and Persephone, the young girl he took from Demeter as she lay on a hillside dazed by the smell of narcissus, I thought of our retreats.

Across the quad, inside the shadowy chapel, an open door by St Joseph's side-altar framed sunlit fields and you could hear the distant, rhythmic song of hoeing and cicadas. That cool interior smelt of candlewax, incense and wood-polish. In spring and autumn the whitewashed walls and white marble sanctuary were hung with glowing silk brocades of liturgical purple. The rich cloth also draped the altar, curtained the tabernacle, dressed the vestry side-walls and robed the visiting priest in drama. From childhood it
had been the colour of non-ordinary time, ineluctably associated with the weeks leading to Christmas, or Lent's anticipatory grief. In my adolescence, during those days of silence and reflection, that purple's fatal beauty heralded encounters with the sublime.

Ever since the image of that ancient shipwreck appeared on my Facebook newsfeed, the possibility of composing a book-length suite of poems narrating Malta's place on the purple trade route has tantalised me. But because my writing process requires total immersion, researching that project would demand time and travel. From 2009 to 2014, writing
The Lake's Apprentice
, I was spellbound by the natural history of Yalgorup's wetlands, its communities, cultural stories and creatures. That would happen again if I took the Mediterranean as a location – and I'm not sure if it is how or where I want to spend the next five years. On the other hand, returning to my birth island, to its landscape and language, for an extended stay would reunite me with friends, family and island culture, which might prove the perfect opportunity for new writing. So I've vacillated, attracted by the creative possibilities but reluctant to commit to the challenges of such a project.

Which is why, halfway through writing this essay, while researching the Phoenician trade routes, I came across the Genographic Project
²
and resolved to let science decide my direction. When some of the Maltese male population had been tested, DNA indicating direct Phoenician ancestry was found in such a high percentage of samples that it led geneticist Pierre Zalloua of the American University of Beirut to speculate, ‘Perhaps when the Phoenicians settled, they killed off the existing population, and their own descendants became today's Maltese'.
³
Surely, I thought, it would be a strong prompt to follow the story back, through time and through poetry, if I were to find out my family was part of that group.

The DNA testing kit soon arrived by post. It was simple to
use: two swabs were provided with which to take a sweep of each cheek from inside my mouth, and then I sealed them in little glass vials provided and popped them inside a padded, pre-addressed envelope which also came with the kit. As I handed over my completed ‘parcel contents declaration', the post office assistant remarked it would take eight to ten days for the package to reach Texas. I walked back to the car calculating when I could expect the results, which according to the information pack would be available online within six to eight weeks of my test swabs reaching the lab.

Temporarily freed from worrying about the future, I delved into the past and found the story of purple full of portals to poetry. There are as many nuances to the mysteries of the dye's origins as there are shades of its colour. Making purple dye was historically a great deal of trouble, not least for the muricid sea snails from which the chemical precursor of the requisite dye compound was harvested. In a harrowing process, the mollusc's hypobranchial gland was exposed by cracking and peeling off the back of its shell (I have found no evidence to reassure me the unfortunate molluscs were killed prior to this process). The viscous fluid was then extracted by hand using a sharp tool to scrape out the glandular secretions. It is at this point, as cells begin to die, that a chemical process is initiated which most probably led to the discovery of that precious, colourfast purple dye. The process continues with complex chemical interactions associated with decomposition, oxidisation and debromidisation by means of light, all of which have to be carefully monitored and controlled, adding to the expense of collection and production. As the writer Vitruvius succinctly documented in the first century BCE, ‘Purple exceeds all colors in costliness and superiority of its delightful effect. It is obtained from a marine shellfish … It has not the same shade in all the places where it is found, but is naturally qualified by the course of the sun.'
⁴

Although still referred to as
Murex
, the genus of sea snail defined
originally by Linnaeus, the current name for the marine gastropod mollusc to which Vitruvius probably referred is
Hexaplex trunculus
(the banded dye-murex), which is native to the Mediterranean. However, though this was possibly the Phoenicians' mollusc of choice, it is not the only one useful in creating purple dye nor was the manufacture of purple dye confined to the Mediterranean. The most cursory online research reveals associations with woad and whelks in Britain, labour-intensive traditional dye practices still practised in Mexico involving local shellfish, traces of purple dye in ancient parchment, illustrated manuscripts, archaeological finds from as far east as Japan, murals and burial cloths. In a further tantalising twist, there is evidence from ancient breeding tanks that these molluscs, which are carnivorous, displayed cannibalistic behaviour when stressed by the conditions of their confinement.

As a nature writer whose inspiration is most often found at the interstice of biology and art, I find these details irresistible. I began to be glad that my DNA test would not be conclusive, because as a woman, I don't have the Y chromosome which gives access to my father's deep ancestry; my sample indicates the maternal line and that is predominantly what would be explored in tracing my geographic roots. I knew my mother (who was a blue-eyed blonde) had family roots in Northern Italy, so when my result showed no Phoenician indicators in our lineage, I was already a step ahead, preparing to ask my brother to take the test. Michael lives in London, so I waited for one of our phone calls to explain my request. His willingness to help me discover whether there's a link on my father's side of the family delighted me, and in my excitement I began to describe how the fewer mutations on any type of DNA, the older it is deemed to be and the J2 Haplogroup, which indicates Phoenician descent, is estimated to be between seven thousand and twelve thousand years old.

Which is when he stopped me and said, ‘Whoa! Just send me the link.'

‘Thanks so much, Michael, the process won't cause you any problems,' I promised him, confident the clairvoyant was only talking about me when she predicted the trouble with purple. And what writer would want to avoid that?

It's early on Saturday afternoon, September 21
^st
, 2013, and I'm heading to the AFL Preliminary Final, Fremantle Dockers v Sydney Swans, at Pattersons Stadium in Subiaco. This is it. The penultimate hurdle to glory. ‘At last,' I sing, channelling the tune, but not the talent, of the late Etta James. ‘Freo, way to go', I sing, embracing the dagginess of our much (perhaps not unjustly) maligned club song. We've cleaned up at ‘The Cattery' two weeks before, beaten the Geelong Cats down at Kardinia Park in the second qualifying final. In the process we've thrown the lyrics of their silly club song back in their faces, triumphing in a close, thrilling match against the odds of a typically sneaky Victorian fix that saw us piling additional travel time onto our Melbourne schedule by playing, not as tradition would have it, at the MCG or Docklands, but at the Cats' notoriously tricky home venue. We've proven to our coach Ross ‘Rossy' Lyon that we can live up to our new mantra, ‘anywhere, anytime';
¹
our valour has earned us a break week, we're rested and reinvigorated and we know we can take the reigning premiers. We're on top of our game, the Swans are clearly hampered by injuries and attitude; we have the advantage of playing at home, with all the power and passion of the purple army – our own crowd of supporters – to drive us forward. Decked out in the team's hallmark purple colour, with our boys in their purple kit – purple jersey, three white chevrons, plus purple shorts with trademark anchor at the pleat – we'll send
the Swans flapping back east to their harbour through the force of our famous purple haze.

‘We, we, we …' Since when have I readily embraced a ‘we'? And with a sporting team? Why do the boys in purple inspire in me the willingness to deploy the plural pronoun and the pledge to the tribe that implicitly goes with it? Footy lovers get it of course, but friends (almost invariably female) who are not footy inclined look at best amused, at worst askance, as I enthuse both in person and on social media about my purple passion, readily employing the plural along the way. Yes, that's me. Uploading a muscled-up, fist-clenching Pav (team captain and club legend Matthew Pavlich for the uninitiated) as my profile photo on Facebook; posting pics of my newly acquired cat Purrseus proudly wearing his purple collar and sprawled out on the sofa, bedecked from ear to tail in my Dockers scarf; me sharing updates from various news and Dockers websites about our team's preparations; me uploading snaps I've taken on my phone of the profusion of purple that has started to flood Perth and Freo in the Finals weeks. Me, an academic with a PhD in literary and cultural studies, a writer and a teacher of professional and creative writing, a woman, a feminist, a queer? Me, the sceptic, me, who's not a ‘team player'!

What's the deal, Deb? It's such a bloke's game. Full of macho boofheads – both on-field and off – sleazy sex scandals, overpaid boys behaving badly, drunken end-of-year shenanigans, lads around the barbecue in daft beer ads, drug cheats and punch-ups and foul-mouthed sledging of the ‘I fucked your mother/sister/girlfriend' variety, not to mention the puerile, misogynistic antics of John ‘Sammy' Newman, et al., on Channel 9's
The Footy Show
. Why?

The truth is, sometimes my purple passion puzzles me.

Maybe it's just a case of some girls do, some girls don't. Take my friends Colleen and Caroline: Caroline, a keen athlete, all-round
sport lover and Dockers fan comes along with me to the Dockers– Sydney preliminary final. She responded with unabashed glee when I told her I could get my hands on tickets; Colleen, definitely not footy oriented, a passionate art lover but not much of a sports fan, surprised us suddenly, saying she'd like a ticket also, to show willing, to see what all the fuss was about. Then she found out the price. Expletive deleted! And even though Caroline offered to pay her way, the price was not worth what she was sure would be the boredom of the event. Indeed, why would money be spent on such a thing, when it could go instead on the pursuit of aesthetic fulfilment? She'd rather visit an art gallery, or go shopping – and she did, later taking great pleasure in pointing out that she'd bought a couple of pairs of beautifully handcrafted Spanish espadrilles online for the same price.