Riding the Black Cockatoo (21 page)
The student services counsellor might as well have been an angel of deliverance. After the first visit I felt as though I could breathe again and by the second the awful death-tide had receded. Nevertheless, it was still out there, ready to rush in again should my mental weather darken. I was referred to a psychiatrist, who after a 40-minute consultation wisely pronounced that I was a ‘rapid-cycle bipolar’ but that with proper medication all would be well. I grasped at his diagnosis, relieved that my mental desperation had a name and was curable.
‘I’ll do whatever you recommend,’ I agreed, almost kissing his Italian leather sneakers in gratitude.
For the next six months I visited the psychiatrist’s reclining chair once a fortnight.
Since my first visits to the University counsellor, which involved just talking and gaining an under– standing of depression, I’d certainly begun to feel better; but the drugs my new doctor prescribed were an entirely new version of hell. I’d managed to avoid the rope and its sudden final jerk, but the little pills I agreed to swallow each morning and night drained my life away in a different manner. Within weeks I was a pale, drooling shell of my former self. Friends were shocked at my appearance and phoned Stella to express their concern. My hands began to shake, making it difficult to do up even a shirt button. I found it difficult to balance on my bicycle, let alone find the energy to pump up the tyres. Whereas once I could write hundreds of words a day, now I was barely capable of finishing a sentence. My marks at university began to slide and I requested extension after extension on assignments. I slept for hours each day. In desperation Stella phoned the psychiatrist and pleaded with him, ‘
Yes
, John was depressed, but he was never this bad, he was never like this!’ The psychiatrist was incensed that my wife – a woman who has known me for over half my life – should question his judgement.
‘Your husband’s problem is that he is fighting the medication, he won’t surrender to it, he won’t comply!’ he screamed down the phone. ‘If I had my way I’d admit him to our private hospital for a month, that way we’d get him sorted out once and for all!’ Stella was dumbfounded. ‘I think he’s the crazy one,’ she sobbed into my shoulder.
After a few more weeks the doctor grudgingly conceded that the medication was having adverse effects and instead prescribed lithium, a once-common treatment for schizophrenia. Lithium, a toxic chemical used in batteries, is a high-risk medication that requires weekly tests to monitor its levels in the bloodstream. Now I had two heavy mood-altering drugs coursing through my body. As the blood was drained from my arm each week, the bills from my psychiatrist and weekly pathologist tests steadily drained our bank account. One day I noticed that I was no longer walking but shuffling, like the character Randall Patrick McMurphy in
One
Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
–
after
the operation. And it was then I realised that the same fate was befalling me, except mine was a chemical lobotomy. Despite every last hair on my body being sedated, despite wanting to fall into a thousand-year nap, something inside me began to fight back. I realised that there was nothing inherently wrong with my mind; I was merely an artist who had bombarded his sensitive spirit with the ugly truth. I seized hold of that belief; it became my mantra, my lifeline. And as I pulled that belief closer, hand over shaking hand, I came to understand the power of the artist’s way of seeing, of feeling.
I sat in the psychiatrist’s waiting room leafing through the pages of his Saab Owners Club and
Epicurean
magazines and realised that this man was merely a foot soldier for the transnational drug corporations. His methodology had little to do with individual wellbeing, growth or joy – it was all about
compliance
; shuffling happily into line in this ‘brave new world’. I began to run Google searches on the medications I was swallowing, and while the treatments are undoubtedly beneficial to some people, a paper mountain of dissenting opinion and contrary evidence began to accumulate in my printer tray. Drugs like the ones I was being told I would be dependent upon for a lifetime were an extraordinarily lazy and mind-bogglingly profitable solution to some of the fundamental problems which challenge the human condition.
As I commenced my four-week teacher training practice this realisation became blindingly obvious. I was placed in a local state school which had a higher-than-average proportion of children with behavioural problems: Asperger’s syndrome, autism, attention-deficit disorders. I spent many hours in my first two weeks coaxing students out of trees and back into the classroom, or if need be into the special ‘quiet room’. I read with interest the medical noticeboards in the staffroom outlining the various behavioural quirks, allergies, drug schedules and ‘what to do in an emergency’ details of each student. I observed the chemically laden, over-refined packaged foods the students pulled from their lunchboxes and bought at the tuckshop. I watched as harried parents disgorged their already stressed offspring at the school gate from hulking SUVs and thought to myself, ‘Is it any wonder?’
One afternoon as I wobbled home on my bike, I emerged from a quiet, creek-side bike track near the confluence of three major roads. The contrast between the tranquillity of the remnant bush and the rivers of peak-hour cars was astonishing. I sat on a low fence and watched ten thousand defeated faces slip by; expressionless, boxed in behind tinted glass. Overhead a billboard promised happiness in a wineglass, another mateship in a beer bottle. Further along, another promised longer and more satisfying sex. On the rear of a truck I saw a bumper sticker I’d seen hundreds of times before, but for the first time understood its threatening undertone: ‘Australia. If you don’t like it, leave!’ I wondered, is this how Mary felt when he peered from the Barmah Forest into the margins of the new world? As I looked out at all that metal and rubber ceaselessly rushing by, everything seemed at odds with what it means to be human. And I wondered, is this what my madness means – to be able to see through the illusion, to feel things as they really are?
The next day I wandered down the hallway which led to my classroom. A young teacher was pinning up paintings along pieces of cord in front of the louvred windows. She explained that they were portraits of famous Australia explorers – Blaxland, Cunningham, Stuart, Leichhardt, all the usual suspects. Many of the artworks had a Picasso-esque quality about them and I told her I liked them very much.
‘Yes, we studied Picasso in our art unit as part of our study into portraiture,’ she said proudly, ‘so I took the opportunity to blend elements from the art unit with our Australian history unit.’
We talked a little more about art before I added, ‘Did you know that many of these explorers had Aboriginal guides and did little more than follow the walking trails and trading routes that existed for centuries? So in some ways these men didn’t actually discover anything at all.’ My voice swelled with an enthusiasm that I had barely known in months. ‘I could bring you in some material, and by the way, have the children seen the Horton’s tribal map of Australia yet? It
is
astonishingly beautiful and will change the way they think about their country forever. I really think it should be displayed prominently in every school in Australia.’
She looked at me a little strangely; perhaps she was alarmed by the excited spittle that flew off my words.
‘Well, we aren’t covering any Indigenous units this year, so that wouldn’t really be appropriate.’
And with that she went back to pinning up a cubist Burke and Wills.
In a strange way the paintings became a turning point for me. Each time I passed those 30 bizarre portraits, a breeze would gently billow them out into the hallway as if they were breathing. It was truly unsettling, and more than once I had to close my eyes to regain my composure. It also hammered home the limitations of the current education system; these children were being taught many of the same tired old lessons I had been taught over 30 years ago. I resolved then and there never to teach from a curriculum; if I was to work with children I would teach from the heart. A week later I formally withdrew from prac and at the end of that semester from the teaching degree altogether. Resolving to free myself of the terrible chemicals that were poisoning my spirit, I found a sympathetic doctor who helped me formulate an escape plan and would monitor my withdrawal. But to get well again – to be truly healed – I knew I would have to visit Mary.
{ MELBOURNE, 16 april 2006 }
I floated over the Victorian border at 15 000 feet in the late afternoon with my nose pressed to the little window and there it was, the Murray River shimmering below. It looked just as it is described in the creation story; those big bends carved into the land by the giant Murray cod Kurrumeruk's thrashing tail as rainbow serpent Yemurraki pursued him from the mountains, across the horizon to the sea. From this height the river looked as if it had been created yesterday; each bend caught mercurial flashes of late-afternoon sun and belted them heavenwards again, reminding me of one of the river’s Aboriginal names, Millewa (stars on the water).
The land rolled away in a tapestry of patchwork properties stitched together with barbed-wire fences and bitumen. Occasionally a tiny tuft of remnant forest broke the monotony, but these lonely pieces were few and far between. No wonder the original owners were squeezed out so rapidly, so effectively. I scanned the river, hoping to recognise the settlement of Swan Hill – for only a few kilometres upstream, on the northern bank, Mary lay in Wamba Wamba soil.
I’d arranged to stay with friends in Melbourne. Craig picked me up from the airport. We hadn’t seen each other for over a year, but our conversation came easily in the way it does between good friends. I didn’t tell him how ill I’d been or that I’d been living in a drug-induced nightmare. Somehow just seeing the river, being closer to Mary made me feel steadier. When my friends showed me to their spare room, I stopped in the doorway. Over my bed hung a poster; a reproduction of Craig Ruddy’s Archibald Prize-winning portrait of David Gulpilil. The painting, entitled
Two Worlds
, is an extraordinary work that crackles with an otherworldly intensity and energy. I lay on my bed and smiled as this colossus of Australian cinema and Indigenous culture stared across the room. I
was
getting closer.
{ 17 APRIL 2006 }
The next morning I phoned Gary. He knew I was coming and had promised to take me to the property, but he seemed far from happy to hear from me. He said something quickly about being in negotiations with the Victorian state government to save the ‘sacred flame’. Gary suggested I call again later in the day, and hung up. No ‘Welcome to Koori Country’, not even a hello; what a disappointment! I suppose I was expecting to be greeted with wide open arms. I sat on the end of the bed for a while, staring up at David Gulpilil. In that portrait the lines in his face are rendered like stringybark; his dark eyes look towards a horizon. He seems to be waiting for something he
knows
is coming, but in his eyes there is anxiety, as if he is worried that he won’t quite live to see its arrival. Perhaps I was reading things into those eyes, but they helped put things into perspective. My story was but a footnote in an epic saga. Mary’s remains were but one amid tens of thousands still waiting to be returned. And my troubled spirit was infinitesimal compared to the real struggle that affects Indigenous Australians day after day after day. Mary might have been laid to rest but the reconciling of unfinished business continues.
My hosts had left a newspaper on the breakfast table for me and as I chewed my breakfast I scanned its pages with half interest. A headline containing the words ‘sacred flame’ leapt out at me. No wonder Gary sounded so preoccupied. The ‘sacred flame’ was a ceremonial fire which burned on Melbourne’s Domain, a hilltop corner in parklands only a short distance from the war memorial, the Shrine of Remembrance. The fire had been lit as an ‘alternative remembrance’ of Indigenous peoples and a protest camp had grown around it to shelter the keepers of the fire, and to provide comfort to those who visited it each day. Gary was fighting to overturn a court eviction notice ordering that Camp Sovereignty be dismantled.
