Monthly Archives: November 2008

My Red Jumper – A Story

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Here’s another short story which was written as homework for the Kensington & Norwood Writers Group. It’s called “My Red Jumper”.

My Red Jumper
© Garth Dutton 2007

I used to own a thick red jumper once, when I was living for two winters in London. It became a sort of ‘trade mark’ for me. I must have looked a real picture with it, plus my grey corduroy trousers and fawn desert boots. I had long blonde hair then, too, as it was the ‘hippy era’.

I used to share a large flat with an American hippy of Danish descent, two South African lads from Johannesburg, and a white lad from Zambia. The place was wall to wall beds. The flat was in Pennywern Road, just around the corner from Earls Court Station. (The area has long since been converted into hotels.)

We all used to drink at ‘Japie Corner’ in the Kings Head Pub , which was on the opposite side of Earls Court Road. On our way home we would often stop for a coffee at the “Café de Wheels” near the station. Or we would buy chestnuts from the man with the brazier there, too. (The “Café de Wheels” was similar to Adelaide’s pie carts, but mostly served coffee, tea and sandwiches.) I can still remember brushing the winter night’s snowflakes off the shoulders of my red jumper whilst waiting for my coffee.

I suppose we all have fond memories of various articles of clothing we have owned in our lives. Donovan even wrote a song called “I Love My Shirt.”

Blue Tongue Lizard – A Story

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Here is a short piece I wrote as homework for the Kensington & Norwood Writers Group. It’s called “Blue Tongue Lizard”. Hope you like it.

Blue Tongue Lizard
© Garth Dutton, 2007

My garden is only a metre and a half wide and the length of my flat, yet it actually has wildlife in it.

On the 1st August I went out to my car to put on the new registration sticker and noticed a large and very sluggish blue tongue lizard coming out  of the wormwood bushes. It seemed that the day was warm and sunny enough for it to come out of hibernation for a while.

The lizard slowly crawled to a patch of the path that was darker coloured than the rest, so warmer, and flattened itself out to gain maximum sunshine on its cold body. I left it for an hour and went back outside. The lizard was still there, but had warmed up nicely and was now starting to get active.

It began rummaging through leaf litter left over from autumn, no doubt looking for its first intake of food for some time. Any insects would have done. That is what blue tongue lizards do… They semi- hibernate.

On cold cloudy days they sleep in their hiding places, but if there is some sun and the day is a warm one for winter, they’ll awake and look for a feed of slaters, earwigs or ants in leaf litter to top up their supply of vitamins to supplement their body fat reserves. In that, they are ahead of bears, who awake from the northern winter starved of vitamins.

The blue tongue lizard is right at the forefront of reptilian evolution, for they are now able to give birth to live young. So they have in fact caught up with mammals. And their young are like mallee fowl chicks. They can look after themselves from birth. Semi-hibernation means they can survive droughts and lean periods, whereas mammals often can’t, so they are much better adapted to Australian living conditions.

When I was married, my children had a baby blue tongue lizard as a pet for one winter. It was reasonably active in the warmth of the house, and particularly liked watching television. The words were obviously meaningless to it, but I’m sure it recognised the content as being mostly moving pictures of people. They are easily able to recognise one person from another.

I really like having one in my garden.

Who Put The FUN In Fundamentalist? – A Song

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Every time I’ve sung it I get a very positive response. Thank goodness there’s people out there with a sense of humour.

Who Put The FUN In Fundamentalist?
© Garth Dutton, 1994

Chorus
Who put the fun in fundamentalist?
Try as I may I can’t find any.
Is there something that I missed?
Yeah, who put the fun in fundamentalist?

Verse 1
Most of us have opinions,
but keep them to ourselves.
Fundamentalists want to convert everybody else.
They say they have the one pure faith
to get us heaven bound.
It would be much nicer
if they weren’t around.

Chorus

Verse 2
It seems that most religions
have amongst their flocks
people with narrow minds
who want to set back the clock.
They don’t like the modern world at all,
with its pleasures and its sins,
and as for paradise, only they’ll get in.

Chorus

Verse 3
Although the Cold War’s over,
nuclear weapons still abound.
It would be much safer
if they weren’t around.
I’d trust someone secular
the button not to press.
Would a religious fanatic do it?
The answer I fear is, “Yes!”

Chorus x2

Cape Du Couedic, Kangaroo Island – A Poem

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This poem is describing the beauty that is Cape Du Couedic, Kangaroo Island. I find it amazing how some places inspire you and others don’t. This place does.

Cape Du Couedic, Kangaroo Island
By Garth Dutton

Bare limestone rocks,
baked by sun, swept by wind and rain.
Small plants in holes and crevices
precarious footholds gain.
And far below the great swells roll.
They crash upon the shore.
I look south-west and think of distance,

Heard Island

South Georgia

Cape Horn.

The wind suddenly freshens.
A change in surf and tide.
Suggestions of a far-off storm,
but no clouds yet in the sky.
I take the walkway down the cliff
to the Arch I came to see.
I watch the seals amongst the rocks
in the surge of an autumn sea.

Some Thoughts On Spelling

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Here is an article on “Spelling in English”. Let me know what you think.

Some Thoughts On Spelling
© Garth Dutton,2008

English is supposed to be one of the most difficult languages in which to spell. For every spelling rule that can be defined, there seem to be dozens of ‘exceptions.’ Also, some words that sound the same are deliberately spelt differently to differentiate them in text, e.g. hair and her, bare and bear, stare and stir, son and sun. Sometimes an ‘e’ is at the end of a word simply to make it look like English.(e.g. ‘house’.)

The real problem with spelling in English is the sheer amount of words of foreign origin in the language. Portuguese has the same problem. The reason for the high number of foreign words is identical in both languages, namely that during the Age of Exploration and Colonialism, both English and Portuguese sailors, explorers and colonial officials thought it ridiculous to invent new names for new things they came across when they already had a name in some local language. Everywhere they went they adopted local names for things, thereby becoming the two finest ‘trade languages’ the world has known. (English also gained many French words due to the Norman invasion, and in science there are many words of Latin and Ancient Greek origin as Classical Studies was the main education for the elite for centuries.)

But different solutions were found to cope with the foreign words. In English, foreign words that came into the language kept their original foreign language spelling. For example, ‘cheque’ has to be spelt that way in English because that is the way it is spelt in French, from whence it came. ‘Kindergarten’ has to be spelt that way because it came into English from German.

The principal that ‘foreign words keep their original foreign language spelling’ means that if the origin of the word is known, then spelling in English becomes quite logical. In addition, by studying the spelling, scholars have been able to trace the origin of virtually every word in the vast vocabulary of English… A staggering feat… But the price of that solution was that it has meant everyday spelling in English is a nightmare if you don’t know the origin of the words.

The Portuguese chose a different solution. They incorporated foreign words phonetically into the language. This means that every foreign word incorporated into Portuguese over the centuries fully obeys Portuguese spelling rules. But it also means that there is usually no way of telling the origin of the word, unless there is some historical record of it being adopted, or the reason for the adoption of the word can be worked out logically. Portuguese is a Latin-based language in which there is only a choice of masculine or feminine for nouns and adjectives. However, for the large number of foreign words in the language, the word ending is only the sound that the word had in the foreign language it came from. This has reduced the question of the gender of words to purely a matter of grammar. This makes Portuguese quite incomprehensible to speakers of other Latin-based languages where the genders of words continue to have real meaning.

There is an additional complication in that a considerable number of adopted foreign words are non gender specific. For example, ‘bebé’ which comes from ‘baby’ in English, and ‘criança’ was a Brazilian Indian word that means exactly the same as ‘child’ in English. (‘Child’ wasn’t adopted as it didn’t sound like a Portuguese word. ‘Criança’ did, so was adopted instead as soon as they came across it.)

But ‘bebé’ is grammatically masculine, and ‘criança’ is grammatically feminine. Try explaining that to someone Italian or Spanish. In fact, both words are of foreign origin and both are non gender specific. This means that Portuguese is an easy language to learn if you are an English speaker, but a difficult one to learn if you speak another Latin language. In the whole of French there is only one non gender specific term, and that is the expression ‘il n’y a personne’, which means ‘there is no-one there’. There is no way of telling whether the person who is not there is a man or a woman.

The French and the Spanish, however, kept their languages pure, and invented new words in their own languages for new things they came across in the colonial era. A different path to that taken by the English and Portuguese. But both paths had drastic effects on the peoples being governed. English and Portuguese displaced many local languages in their colonies, and in the French and Spanish empires, the ruling elites shared no common vocab at all with the peoples being governed, who still spoke local languages.

A possible way to learn English spelling quickly would be to take a list of commonly  used words and learn them divided into categories based on their origin. My daughter Helena couldn’t spell at primary school because, try as she may, she was unable to define the principles of spelling in English. So she had no starting point. If she knew a word had four letters, she might just as well put down ’cmpz’. That was my diagnosis as an experienced Learning Assistance Program tutor at her school. But the school rejected my diagnosis, and treated her for dyslexia instead.

Things didn’t change till she got to first year high school at Unley. I was doing teaching practice at Cabra College and I met a South African visiting teacher there. He was in Australia to find out how multiculturalism worked in Australian Schools as Apartheid was ending in South Africa. He had done a term in the State school system and was now doing a term in the private school system. I had learned Angolan dialect of Afrikaans when I was living in the Angolan Portuguese Community in Cape Town, so we talked together in Afrikaans. I then told him about Helena’s spelling problem. He asked me why I hadn’t applied for ESL help, as Afrikaans was a language spoken at home. I said I no longer had much spoken fluency in the language, as I was out of touch with speakers of it and there was no Afrikaans reading material available here either.(He thought it ridiculous that every bit of the great expertise of English as a Second Language teachers is totally unavailable to English-speaking students here who have problems with spelling in English.)

I said I had told Helena that Angolan Portuguese people had a different concept of race than Afrikaner people. When the Portuguese came to Angola 500 years ago they wondered why the native people’s skin was so black. It is impossible to get sunburnt in a rain forest, so the sun couldn’t have been to blame. They eventually put it down to the severity of the problem of predation by leopards in Angola’s forests. Over time, only the darkest skinned people survived. A black person could sleep anywhere in the forest at night and be completely invisible to even a leopard. An environmental adaptation…
However, in Afrikaner people’s creationist religion, all races of people were created by God at the Creation with a unique range of skills and talents. That’s why they didn’t believe in mixing races. It was said to be interfering with God’s work. He said getting ESL should be no problem

He suggested that I also teach her the differences in meaning of some simple terms, such as ‘Cape Town‘ and ‘Kaapstad‘, and ‘Table Mountain‘ and ‘Tafelberg‘.So I did. Cape Town means it is the capital of Cape Province, but the ‘kaap’ referred to in Kaapstad is the geographical feature of the Cape of Good Hope. ‘Stad’ means ‘city’. The frequent bad weather at the cape itself was the main reason the city was there, as it is the nearest safe harbour where ships could wait for good weather. In Afrikaans the cape and the city form a ‘unit‘, so Kaapstad is one word. Table Mountain in English means that, even if you’d never seen it, you would still know more or less what it looked like, flat topped. But the only way you would ever find out what the term ‘Tafelberg’ means in Afrikaans would be to see the mountain itself, or to see a picture of it, because the flat top is only part of the mountain. ‘Tafelberg’ means that mountain and no other, and includes all aspects of it. Yet both these terms look like literal translations. The problem of there being two words in English and a single compound word as its equivalent in Afrikaans never goes away. It is much easier to learn Afrikaans as I did, using the principal I was taught of ‘ one word = one idea = one mental picture’, and put the English aside.

The South African teacher advised trying Helena out on spelling in Afrikaans, as spelling in that language is phonetic, and there is no c, q, x, or z in Afrikaans words to complicate spelling. (These letters are in the Afrikaans alphabet for use in non-Afrikaner people’s names.) He said if she is truly dyslexic, the Afrikaans alphabet would be as meaningless to her as the English one. So I gave my copy of ‘Teach yourself Afrikaans’ to Helena and my ex-wife Lynette to work through the phonetics of spelling in the language and to gain some vocabulary. Then I wrote to Unley High School and applied for ESL help for Helena. I explained that we may well be the only household in Australia where Angolan dialect of Afrikaans was spoken, but that was not a problem, as the component of Portuguese ideas in the dialect form a link to English that is lacking in the standard South African Afrikaans. ESL help was granted immediately. The ESL teachers there had some experience with Malay and Indonesian speaking students, whose languages also had a phonetic alphabet and spelling.

From then on, I have only a sketchy idea of what happened, because Lynette and I were recently separated. I heard of Helena’s progress about third hand. But as far as I was able to piece things together, it went as follows… Helena became literate in Afrikaans in a few days. She was then able to adapt the Afrikaans alphabet to spell out words phonetically in English. She was allowed to do a do a first draft in that fashion, and was then able to give the draft to any student in the class to simply correct the spelling. Her grammar and syntax were found to be excellent.

She was put under the supervision of the teacher of German, who told her that German is quite phonetic too, because it contains hardly any words of foreign origin. The teacher explained about words of foreign origin in English keeping their original foreign language spelling. At last, Helena had found the principle she needed to completely understand spelling in English. A breakthrough… The teacher bought her a dictionary that gave the origin of words, and they put commonly used words into categories based on origin. From then on, Helena made rapid progress with spelling in English.

I knew John Griffin, the head of English at the school, as he is a poet who reads at Friendly Street Poets venue, as I do. At the end of the year, I asked John how Helena was going with English at school. He said sadly, “Why on earth did you ever go to Angola?” I replied, “Because I wanted to ride on the Benguela Railway, one of the world’s great railway journeys.” He sighed and said, “Fair enough…” So we left the topic at that. I realized the problem wasn’t her progress in English, but the state Angola was in at the time. Virtually all of the white population had left in 1975 as soon as the first Cuban soldiers landed. They weren’t prepared to even attempt to live under the rule of people of Spanish descent. Civil war had raged since 1975 and the country was now littered with millions of land mines. Western big business was supporting the Marxist government in Luanda against the democratic opposition UNITA, whose their acronym stood for Union for the Total Independence of Angola. The multicultural teachers at the school must have been in despair. Helena still uses a spellcheck occasionally, just in case…

Late Autumn – A Poem

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I wrote “Late Autumn” it in early 2005, after I got back from attending a major Poetry Convention in Orlando, Florida, USA.

I attended a very good workshop there given by the American poet Dr. Grace Cavalieri. She suggested poets regard their lives as a high rise building, with each floor being a year of their lives. She said we would all find large gaps about which we had so far written very little. She said that filling in the gaps could be a fertile field for new poems.

She went on to say that, if we had the good fortune to become a well-known poet, some uni student would probably do an M.A. or Ph.D on our life story and poetry, and we should make it as easy as possible for them. Good advice!

This poem was written about my former marriage, which was a bit of a ‘gap’. It was first published in America in mid-2005, in The International Who’s Who In Poetry.

Late Autumn
© Garth Dutton, 2005.

She gets home at twenty to six
and the autumn nights
are closing in quite visibly.
The sun now sets
when her train is half way from town.
The evening meal is set out on the table
as darkness falls.
The children and I
go to the gate to wait,
and to look at the garden in the twilight.
Many trees are leafless now,
but the guava trees
bear heavy crops of hard green fruit,
which ripen yellow as winter sets in.
The jacaranda shed its leaves last spring,
flowered as summer began,
and now keeps its leaves
while other deciduous trees
stand stark and bare.
The jacaranda and guava trees agree,
“It’s the seasons here that are ridiculous,
not us.”

Library – A Short Story

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Here is a romantic short story with a nice twist at the end of it called “Library”, I hope you like it.

Library
© Garth Dutton, 2000

Jim was busily working on the Internet at the local library, when a soft female voice said to him, “Hi! The girl behind the counter tells me you’re a poet, too.”

“Yes! “ he replied. “I do write some.” He finished the sentence he was writing and glanced up. A woman dressed in T-shirt, jeans and sandals was standing there. He thought her blonde hair looked a bit untidy, but then he remembered it was a warm, but very windy spring day outside.

“Do you write yourself?” he asked.

“Yes,” she replied. “Though I haven’t had many poems published yet. Since my divorce last year, I’ve decided to become a writer. I’m starting with poetry, but I soon hope to be writing short stories and articles as well. I also have a vague idea for a novel.”

At this point, Jim became aware of the passing of time. He’d had more incoming emails than expected today, and quite a few of them needed a reply. His hour on the computer was already half gone. But she didn’t move, and seemed to want to talk on…

“My name is Janet, by the way,” she said.

“I’m Jim,” he replied. “I’m divorced and working at becoming a writer, too. I also write songs. I have a microphone and amplifier set-up and I mostly play around the scene at folk clubs, barbeques and parties. Some are paying jobs, some aren’t, but I have to get known somehow. I do a mixture of ‘covers’ and my own material.”

“I’ve never tried writing a song,” said Janet. “I think it would be difficult, as I don’t play guitar at all. I was taught piano as a child, but that was all classical stuff and written notes.”

“Maybe you should try singing one of your own poems unaccompanied, as a beginning,” suggested Jim. “That’s how I started writing my own songs. I really like the Canadian songwriter, Joni Mitchell, as her songs sound just as great sung or recited. A pity about all the unusual tunings she uses on guitar, though. I do a few of her songs unaccompanied, as I only know standard tuning.”

He was painfully aware that his time on the computer was rapidly slipping away. There was no way now that he would get through all his remaining email replies.

Janet noticed his impatience, : Sorry,” she said, sadly. “I’m interrupting you, aren’t I?  And just when you’re very busy.”

A thought came to him that the girl behind the counter had been doing some matchmaking. He smiled at the thought, and Janet thought he was smiling at her. She smiled back. “Whoops!” he said silently to himself.

A good idea occurred to him. “I’m playing a few songs at a friend’s birthday party on Friday evening. It’s just an informal backyard show. Would you like to come along?”

“Certainly!” she replied. “And can I bring my children as well?”

The Wonders Of Nuclear Technology – A Song

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Don’t worry, the song title requires a tongue firmly planted in cheek. This song is from my CD “Long Weekend 2″. As soon as I get this WordPress thing figured out I’ll put up some music on this site for your enjoyment but until then, here is “The Wonders Of Nuclear Technology”

The Wonders Of Nuclear Technology
© Garth Dutton, 1997

Verse 1
On the two hundredth anniversary of the U.S.A.
A nuclear power spokesman had the cheek to say,
“Of nuclear waste you should have no fear!
I guarantee we can guard it for ten thousand years.”

Chorus
Free, free, please let us be free
From the wonders of nuclear technology.
Free, free, please let us be free
From the wonders of nuclear technology.

Verse 2
Out in the German countryside,
Defences and barbed wire are half-a-kilometre wide.
You think, “This can’t be Germany, there’s no more Berlin Wall.”
It’s a nuclear power station that is all.

Chorus

Verse 3
What food from Europe can we really trust?
After the rain of Chernobyl dust.
You still can’t drink water from Black Forest streams…
North Wales sheep are radioactive it seems…

Chorus

Verse 4
In a nuclear-powered future, how would things be?
I think they would be anything but free.
Potential for disaster would be so great,
It would have to be a totalitarian State.

Chorus

A Brazilian Joke About God

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This was told to me by a Brazilian backpacker. Thought I’d share this with you.

I told the ‘joke’ to my ex-wife, who is Australian. She said, “Brazil and Australia must have a lot in common. That could so easily be an ‘Australian joke’”.

A Brazilian Joke About God

When He contemplated creating the world, God decided that every new land would have a complete balance of good and bad points, because if any place had too many good points, everyone would go and live there. To appraise His work He created a special team of angels.

The first land He created was Europe. He gave it high snow-capped mountains in the Alps, the Carpathians and the Pyrenees. He gave it mighty rivers, the Rhine, the Volga, the Vistula and the Danube. He created mighty oak and pine forests, and some of the richest fertile plains in the world. He lined the Mediterranean Coast with magnificent beaches.

They were the good points.

Now He started with the bad points. He created lots of ethnic groups, all speaking different languages. Then He created political boundaries that didn’t coincide with ethnic boundaries, causing century after century of wars over border provinces. Most countries had endless problems of rebellions by ethnic minorities within their borders.

Then He stopped. The angels appraised His work and were satisfied. Europe had at least as many bad points as good, so was in complete balance.

The next land God chose to create was America. He gave it magnificent mountains in the Appalachians and the Rockies. He gave it vast prairies. He gave it the Great Lakes, and the mighty Mississippi River. He gave California a wonderful climate, and created the pristine wilderness of the Everglades. Then He decided that was enough good points.

Now He started on the bad ones.

California was ripped by the mighty San Andreas fault that caused terrible earthquakes every few years. The Mississippi River was subject to frequent devastating floods. Cold air from the north collided with warm moist air coming up from the Gulf of Mexico to form storm cells with terrible tornados. The Gulf Coast would be lashed by frequent hurricanes. In the scenic North West, He created a series of huge snow-capped volcanoes, that are potentially the most violently explosive in the world. Mt. St. Helens would show what a volcano like that could do to a forested area. Nearer the coast millions of people would live in the danger zones before they knew the volcanoes were so dangerous.

And there He stopped. The angels appraised His work and again were completely satisfied. America’s bad points balanced out the good ones perfectly.

Next God chose to create Brazil, so He created the world’s mightiest river, The Amazon. Then He created the Amazon rain forest (the lungs of the planet), and gave it the world’s greatest biodiversity. Then He created the beautiful harbour of Rio de Janeiro, then the Iguazu Falls. The list of good points went on and on. Eventually He stopped, and said, “ I’ll create Australia next.”

The angels were horrified. God said, “What’s the problem?” The angels conferred, then their spokesperson said. “This new land Brazil is totally out of balance. No matter how long we look at it we can only define good points. It simply has no bad points.”

God just smiled, then said, “Just wait till you see some of the governments Brazil’s going to have…”

Was my ex-wife talking about the beauty of Australia or our systems of government? Hmmm, I wonder.