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Memories and Visions 12/29/2003 6:20:55 AM
We draw on what we've know to realise our vision for better work, better fun, closer and warmer relationships and a better world for all. I've just been recalling, on another blog, my memories of long ago and how they've been incorporated into a book -
Uncle Rupert: The Man Who Threw Money Over Back Fences
Uncle Rupert will be published in the next month or so.
I responded to a fellow blogger as follows:
Your reflections on Vulture Street brought back memories of my youth. I cannot claim ever to have been a true resident of the South Brisbane area but I was a student at King's College which was then at Kangaroo Point shortly after the outbreak of WW2. Later, I was camped on the Gabba Cricket Ground, just after Pearl Harbour and before going to New Guinea in 1942.
Perhaps more important than that, my Mother and Father lived in the area for a period before I was born. My recollection is that it was Stanley Street. I remember too the old Bohemia Stadium, not far from the South Brisbane Railway Station from which, for a while, I used to travel from school - at Brisbane Grammar - down to Beenleigh where my parents had their home for a few years. Beenleigh is the "real" location of my novel, Haverleigh, which records the way of life of those who grew up in the Great Depression, went through the turmoil of WW2, including New Guinea, and survived to enjoy some good and nationally - and internationally - blossoming years in the quarter century after the shooting stopped.
Just coming out in the New Year, probably in January, is a novel called Uncle Rupert, which is very largely based in Stanley Street in South Brisbane. It is there, at the second-hand, pawnbroker shop of Deadly and Maisie Morbid, that IWW agitator, Godfrey Bronze, lives humbly but actively. From there, he goes to chain himself to the railings of the State Parliament House at the university end of George street, wave a banner and shout, in his beautiful baritone, Paul Robeson voice, for the Workers of the World to Unite!!! That's where Uncle Rupert meets him and embarks on a scintillating political career.
Godfrey Bronze is based on a fine old left-winger whom my parents knew when, as a young married couple, they lived in Stanley Street. He later became a senator in Canberra and, indeed, President of the Senate for eight years.
Uncle Rupert tells, in part, something of the story you have told: how we stuck together, especially those at the bottom of the pile, in the depression and war years, but how the worker's century - if there ever was one - has fallen apart in the last few decades. What we need to do is somehow to put it together again.
Thank you, Graham, for a most fascinating piece - and the inspiration to think and even to plan for some new and brilliant initiatives for peaceful change in the New Year.
James Cumes
Posted by: James Cumes at December 29, 2003 07:10 PM
More Blogs by James Cumes • Lakatoi - Sunday, May 15, 2005 • Over The Threshold - Wednesday, December 31, 2003 • Memories and Visions - Monday, December 29, 2003
