Nine or Ten Good Things that Happened this year.
1. This time last year, we were driving home along the Great Divide through droughty fields, from Dunkeld, where some of my carols, set by Alan Holley, had been performed by the Australian Chamber Choir. This December, a new carol, “Carol of the Advent Moon,” composed for Andrew Ford, will be sung in Andrew’s new “I Sing the Birth,” by three children’s choirs around the world, including Luminescence in Canberra on 14 December. My brother Russell is also writing new, more popular arrangements of my Nine Carols for community, church and school choirs. Beautiful settings all of them, especially Russell’s, and such a joyous use of poetry. It seems I have become the Carol Guy. I guess if your mother was a sacred musician and your grandfather a Methodist minister, and you wrote your first carol/poem when you were twelve, this is what happens. We arrive in the end back where we began.
2. Speaking of arrivals at beginnings, Jodie just got news that she had completed the GDP (aka The Graduate Diploma) in Psychology, for which she had been studying remotely (and largely unassisted by anything much resembling teaching) at a certain well-credentialed Australian university. The going was hard and the flight long, but the landing was sweet, and the study and the qualification open up several exciting, satisfying lines of work for Jodie in the coming years—work that doesn’t entail nearly so much standing as class teaching, though it must be said, Jodie also got back this year into relief teaching at a number of the schools in the Wingecarribee, Wollondilly, and adjacent shires, and cries of relief and delight were to be heard from the primary children and their parents and a good many of the teachers across the realm.
3. Back in autumn, one gorgeous Thursday in late April, my first born, Michael married his beloved Ana in the foothills of the Blue Mountains, at Grose Vale. Very proud of my boy, now this fine man, and delighted to know Ana. They seem to be pretty much gone on each other and for good reason, and they staged a wedding (outside in the April sun) that managed to be both unplugged and stylish, a day of great happiness to begin a shared life characterised by the same qualities as the ceremony that began it. If in some of the photos (beautiful shots they are, too), should you see me reading what appears to be a longish poem to Mike and Ana, don’t be fooled. It is not another carol; it is an epithalamium, and it was my honour to write it for Mike and Ana at their invitation, and to read it for them on the day. Writing it was a joy and part of another highlight of the year: a few days at Wendy Haynes’s apartment along the creek at Emerald Beach, and the poem makes many references to that country and the Solitary Islands off the coach.
4.Perhaps rumours have reached you that there was occasion for another epithalamium even closer to home, when Jodie and I married at Mount Ashby, near here, on 24 October (24/10/24—a gorgeous and holy set of numbers, of course, all the more now that it will always be our Wedding Anniversary. The weather on the day, another Thursday, was soft and cool, and the light under all that spring cloud, seemed grown up somehow, self-possessed and, at the same time, glad and grateful that such happiness should come to pass. I’m sure it breaches a hundred protocols that the simple but graceful wedding gown, its ivory silk, was ironed on the day by the groom, himself, who recalled more ironing craft and technique than he thought he ever knew, channelling at that moment, I’m sure, his mother, whose blessing on the marriage seemed evident in the beauty and originality of the music (some of it composed and performed by its composers Calvin Bowman and Russell Tredinnick; some of it sung by Rebecca Jee and some, through the ceremony among the water poplars, and later through the reception, played by those pros John Martin (piano) and Karella Mitchell (cello). An honour to marry this kind and caring, courageous and beautiful woman. The whole event a testament to our love and her gift for bringing beautiful things into being. There is no Love, only acts of love, I’ve heard it said, and this wedding was one such, and proof of all. (Such a joy to have my father read and my beautiful daughter Louisa MC so deftly, her partner Arthur shoot some glorious film, and our friend Wendy Haynes celebrate our vows.)
5. I got some writing done this year I’m glad of—poems (“The Song of the Quiet Revolution,” “Carol of the Advent Moon,” “Lyrebird Sijo) and essays (“The Exquisite Spell: A Manifesto in Fifty Pieces”)—but I’m most glad of a book I pulled together and published in celebration of Australia’s great living poet, one of the great poets of the world, Robert Gray. The book is Bright Crockery Days, and I was able to make it happen because this year, with Steve Meyrick, I brought an old publishing house back to life, 5 Islands Press, through whom we published the book for Robert, along with four new poetry collections and an anthology, Oystercatcher One. The press hopes to strike some lyric blows for a poetry of grace and style (like Robert’s) that has something lifesaving and soul-making to say to anyone who cares to take the time to slow themselves from the rush of narrative and read it. Thanks to Jodie for her help in all we’ve done, and to Noelia for social media and to Steve’s wife Louise for her editorial and financial advice, to my friend the designer Gerhard Bachfischer for helping us make books as true in style as in substance, and above all to Steve for his drive and vision and operational talents.
6. Another two ordinary miracles this year: Henry (third-born), who was surely only born last year, turned twenty-one; his sister Lucy (fifth-born), eighteen. Shortly after his birthday in June, Henry spent a month at the London School of Economics doing a short course in current issues in international law (and aren’t there a few of those), a course that earns him credits toward his law degree; he finished his third year of that at UOW (Wollongong) last month. Proud of you, Henry. Daniel finished his first year of the same degree at the same place, after a year of indolence, odd-jobbing and travel (Gap Year is the preferred term among the young). Lucy sat her Higher School Certificate in October and launches herself into the world next year. I have now no children left at school. A big year for my elder two, as well. For Louisa a new man, a new house, a new job and a shift into a side-hustle as a celebrant (for which she put in some practise at our wedding). And for Mike, a marriage, a move to Figtree, and a toe in the water of a life beyond paramedicine.
7. We live with animals. They teach us to be human; I think they learn our love. The ancient arrangement. In and around the house the two spaniels (Dante and Carlos) grew cuter and stronger and no less animated; Sappho (the cat) has become the Queen of the Study and the occasional exterminator of mice. No offence to those three, but it was the year of the horse. Jodie’s young mare, the palomino Welsh cob Mishima, gave birth to her first foal in September. We arrived just after she dropped. The foal is a buckskin filly, Alina. A beauty. A hundred legs and as pretty as all the pretty horses put together. After a year running free at Joadja, my big gelding, Charles Wesley, is out on the Wingecarribee flats back in light training (as I am) with a view to getting some riding happening again in the new year. Mishima will be getting fully over her young one in a month or two and we might get her back into some work, too, while we get the little one trained up. I sit here writing this with my leg up, sore from a kick I failed to sidestep yesterday at Joadja, when the girls got unsettled by the owner’s boys’ moto-cross bikes. Damn that modern technology. (Sometimes love hurts.)
8. If not the year of the horse, the year of poetry, the year of psych, the year of love, the year (as ever) of the dog, it was the year of Bruce. My father carries on ably at ninety-three, and it is our privilege to live with him and care for him and fashion a home around him. Thanks for this chance, Dad. Keep walking.
9. One of Dad’s gifts was gardening. The house where we live together had a few rudimentary beds, and this year we’ve got about some planting—a silver birch, a magnolia, a large (white) camelia growing where we dug in Alina’s placenta, loads of that most Bowral of plantings, hydrangeas. It is an act of love to make a garden in one’s elder years. To start a fellowship of plants that will likely long outlive you. It’s been good to get the hands dirty at that work, under a father-gardener’s eye.
