Liana Joy Christensen, Writer
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The Recycled Souls Debate

23/5/2022

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My mother’s maiden name was Elder. When I was a child we possessed a family treasure, a book written by one of our ancestors (I believe it was Inmates of My House and Garden). I took it to school to show off and managed to lose it.

After I grew up, I sought to atone for this dereliction. As a doctoral candidate I travelled to Wales in 1997 to attend the founding conference of UK ASLE (Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment) at Swansea. It occurred to me that I may be able to track down a copy of the lost book in the U.K., so I approached a friend and colleague who worked in the library at Murdoch University and asked how I might go about searching. 

We sat together while he typed her name into World Catalogue of Books and were stunned when the screen started scrolling showing multiple titles and multiple editions and translations into German and French. An unexpected treasure trove. 

The thing is I had grown up to be a writer of natural history stories, the author of Deadly Beautiful - Vanishing Killers of the Animal Kingdom, and the editor of the journal Landscope in its earliest years of publication..

I turned to my friend and said, “Well this certainly puts a new slant on the nature versus nurture debate.”

Knowing my writing, he did not miss a beat, replying, “Bugger that, what about the recycled souls debate?”.

I paid a pretty sum in London for her memoir. The price was high because it had a (rather patronising) introduction and epilogue by her nephew Sir Edmund Gosse, who had deigned to sign the title page.

He was the more famous personage. But it was her story that was priceless to me.
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The Cambridge Connection

Many decades later, my niece Isobel discovered a blog about Eliza Elder Brightwen  in  the Her Story series "exploring the stories of fascinating women in the University of Cambridge collections".  The work of Rosanna Evans, this account was indeed fascinating to us.

I've often thought my Great, Great Aunt would make a good subject for a PhD on the somewhat subservient position of women naturalists in the Victorian era. Imagine my delight, then, to find that she has not been relegated wholesale to the dustbin of history, but in fact has an album of her work residing in the Whipple Museum of the History of Science at Cambridge. An album that inspired Evans' blog post and related work. I contacted Rosanna Evans to share the family connection and thank her for her work.  A short email correspondence ensued, in which she told me:
"I recently gave a talk about her and the incredible album that the blog is about at the Whipple Museum of the History of Science, where the album is held. The talk was to a group of people with dementia and their partners. They really responded so well to the album as well as your Great Great aunt’s incredible life story (which is much more relatable than some of the more prominent scientists and natural historians of the time!)."
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She was also kind enough to share three of the images that accompanied her talk (two above, one below), the work of Eliza Elder Brightwen, courtesy of Rosanna Evans.
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Naturally, there will never be a conclusive answer to the "nature vs nurture", nor the "recycled souls" debates. That's what makes it so much fun to continue speculating. I've never been tempted to explore my ancestry via DNA sampling. But following the threads of a life spent devoted to writing and natural history? That's another story!
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The Artist's House

24/1/2022

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We met at the artist's house. My friend Frank had returned home to Western Australia, fleeing some drear and brutal employment.  In the easy ways of the seventies, he was sure of a welcome, friendship and new work. He brought with him a young woman, another shit-job refugee. And that's how Lynne, a pint-sized powerhouse, came into my life.  Forty-five years later, on Tuesday January 18, 2022, she departed this life, but our conversation continues. Partly in the shards and artefacts of creative exchange. Partly, in the evidence that her characteristic sense of mischief appears to be  inextinguishable. To wit, when I scanned the photographs I'd selected for this mosaic account of our lifelong friendship, the machine  scanned both sides. I'd not bothered to look at the back of the images, hadn't registered there was anything to read, but there on the screen in front of me were Lynne's words in her own handwriting. Surprised/not surprised.
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Lynne lived out West for a good few years. Her babies were born here. So many memories. Dinner parties. Veggie gardens. Music nights. I remember her wedding. The tough times. The discovery of her talent for pottery.

She was a country girl. And I never met a more hardworking woman. Strong. A survivor. Generous, too.

When she headed back east she left me with a gift: my first car. The Major. I didn't have a licence, but I began taking lessons with Frank.  My brother stapled some tin over the holes in the floor and I was off and running.


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The long and winding road

Over the ensuing years there were letters, the occasional photo of her growing boys, stories from the Pottery. Then, as often happens, we lost contact as our lives went in different directions. But among my treasured memorabilia I kept an enchanting doodle Lynne did years ago. It spoke to me so strongly that I mentioned it is one of my published short memoirs ("Conversation with Quin").  It proved to be a little elf map, promising her return. ​
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that leads to your door

Fast forward to 2015. So many changes. Such a different world. Facebook is a curse and a blessing of the 21st century. I can forgive it a lot, though, because of how precious those rare yet very real blessings are. In Darlington in 1977, I was composing  university assignments on a manual typewriter.  Close to forty years later, Lynne and I reconnected via social media.  Later that year I was planning my 60th and sent out event invites near and far. I was assuming those at a distance would like to be there "in spirit", so to speak.

Not so Lynne. Bugger me (nothing but the old Australianism will suffice), to my astonishment and delight Lynne told me she was going to attend in person. Thus ensued an epic journey that might have come straight from our shared youth in the seventies. Talk about back to the future.

Lynne and her mate (nicknamed "Tigger") drove an old Ford postal van converted to a camper all the way from the mid-north coast of New South Wales to my home in Fremantle. What's more, owing to the limitations of the van, they drove the entire way in third gear. Pure hippie gothic. And in a reprise of her own arrival all those years before, Lynne brought a stranger trusting there would be an open welcome, and so there was.  Tigger became a new friend. 

. . . owing to the limitations of the van,
they drove the entire way in third gear.

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​For some months, I had been admiring her latest artwork on line, and was deeply touched when she presented me with my birthday gift. 

From that time onward, we stayed in close contact, supporting each other's dreams and visions. Championing each other's integrity. I saw her once more out West when she came to care for her brother in his final illness. She stayed a few days with us in our new home by the sea. More visits were planned. She was hoping to get back West later this year.  We dreamed of  turning up on the East coast in our camper van to see Lynne's off-grid paradise with our own eyes. Alas, it was not meant to be.

These memories have a life of their own. Lynne with music, art, pottery; me with writing and dance. In a larger sense we have both lived in the artist's house all our lives.

Through strange back roads, through dreams, through the ongoing creative life, our conversation continues. 
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Daylighting

26/12/2021

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​In December 2021 I was part of an ensemble of dancers from The Dance Collective on stage at the Crown Theatre, Perth. We had the privilege of bringing to life the choreographic vision of Company Director Charisse Parnell and Assistant Director, Andrea Chan.  

"What about us?" began as an impassioned response to the impact of fast fashion on humans and the more-than-human world. It grew to encompass a bigger picture of destructions and the possibility of healing and repair.

I write and I dance . . . they seem very different activities.

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Until a rare confluence shows the depth of the connection.



In the image above we are dancing a once-poisoned river restored to life. It was profoundly felt. Many of the dancers and members of the audience shed a quiet tear.

Soon after this event I spent a week in silence and solitude camping by a river. I do this most years as a necessary complement to the intensity of being part of a major performance. We are (mostly) amateurs, in the true and original sense: "lovers of".  

During my time alone the surface waters of intense activity cleared and I came to understand that we had danced "daylighting". This realisation brought me a tenderly painful species of joy.

My essay Landscape Manifest, was recently re-published in an Australian journal. Re-reading it reminded me of just how much daylighting matters.


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"In grief it is common to dream that the dead have returned to you. The exquisite relief is a fair measure of the depths of the pain you do not dare to plumb.  I had this experience in waking life when a friend, a poet, told me of ‘daylighting’. 

​Daylighting is the name given to the practice of liberating rivers or streams long ago buried and built over [. . .] I was heart struck hearing this. Having the impossible suddenly presented as possible showed me the depth of a grief about the world I had long buried and concreted over. It opened up hope. "


from Landscape Manifest



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Two rivers, one world

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On Being Seen

18/9/2021

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​Many years ago, I created a gig as a Café Poet, offering to write short poems upon request. The very first request was from a dear friend’s 90 plus year old mother, who wanted a poem on the theme of Old Age. Being recently admitted to the very junior ranks of eldership, I dashed off a tongue-in-cheek little ditty called “Invisibility has its Consolations”.
 
It is now several years later, and I am learning the delights of being seen. It has by no means been a straightforward path to this place. My relationship with mirrors, for example, is fraught with primal trauma. Being seen originally was a terrifying exposure. I resist quantum entanglements with this particular memory by chanting to myself lyrics from a Joe Camilleri song: Hold it up to the mirror/ Won't you tell me what you see/Something might look familiar/
But it's a bad likeness of me.


As a dancer,  mirrors are a constant in my life. I’ve learned to make my peace with them. They are a tool of the trade, a guide to learning and nothing more.  But the desire to be invisible is still strong . . . 

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Writing this post was kicked off by a most extraordinary artwork I received this week. This gift needs a context. Let me begin with Merlin (appropriately enough, as I seem to be living backwards towards a state of innocent and fearless delight). This  was a treasured gift from another dear friend, a writer with multiple talents in other artistic forms. Having learned a love of Arthurian myths from my mother, this ceramic has been a longstanding joy in my life. Recently, my grand nephew has become the Wizard-Elect of the family (deep into Tolkein, Star Wars, drama and dance) and the time was right to  pass on what has now become a family heirloom.

I wasn't always a writer (I was always a writer)

​There was a time I sought help for the damage, the central symptom of which was a complete lack of faith in my own creativity.  I timidly shared my desire to write.  It took years but eventually (resisting the compelling temptation to bolt back to the safe invisibility of my log)  my numbat persona found its way into the open. I published an article called "Stars with Stripes" in Australasian GEO.  This was a significant milestone, of course.  And one that was made infinitely more precious by a gift from two sister seekers who had witnessed the courage it took me to emerge into the open. I remember their excitement the night they gave it to me. And my infinite astonishment. They had commissioned a potter to make this numbat for me. It was my first inkling that being visible did not have to be excruciating, that it could, in fact, be exquisite.
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Deadly Beautiful

"Stars with Stripes" was just the beginning, and I have gone on to publish poetry and prose, including a non-fiction book on dangerous animals of the world, Deadly Beautiful.  And that brings me to the gift I received this week. Another commissioned artwork, from one of the amazing women who originally gave me the numbat. I shake my head at my good fortune at receiving works made by artists, especially for me.  Meet "Deadly Beautiful", my ceramic avatar, sculpted by Albany artist ​Nicci Romanovsky Daniele  https://www.facebook.com/niccidaniele/
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​Each lovingly crafted detail is a response to the brief from my friend, which included a picture of me in a blue wig (see Ghosts of the Unfinished Monastery) and a copy of my book. 

The intertwined snakes, the tiny butterfly, the warrior woman breastplate marked with a peace sign, the native flowers, the shark fin . . .  
Now she lives atop the Cabinet of Devotion with other talismans of my writing life.
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It feels like my soul made manifest. 
​It is an experience like no other
to be so seen . . .
​ and so loved.
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Fathers' Day

4/9/2021

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Like everyone in Australia born in the first week of September, once every seven years my birthday coincides with Fathers' Day. I always loved it when I shared my "special day" with Dad. Now it is 2021, twenty-eight years since he died, and the two celebrations once again coincide. I've been thinking what an extraordinary birthday gift I received simply by being born to such a man.

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Fathers' Day 1993: I was moving house. It was my birthday. My Dad only had a couple of months left. Yet, there he was, at my new cottage, pruning the grape vines. And my Uncle Les was there, too. Driving trailer load after trailer load between Beckenham and Hilton, moving some furniture and an implausible number of plants. 

​He worked all day. It wasn't till he went home in the late afternoon to be with his own family that I found out that not only had he spent Fathers' day with me,

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​it was also his own birthday.  He was ill, too, with the asbestosis that killed my father.  He died only six weeks after him.


Many years ago I was in a psychotherapeutic group and we were asked to pair up at random and sit back to back with another group member. My partner happened to be a tall, solid man. Sitting back to back with him I became aware at a visceral level that the senior males in my life have always "had my back".  In our toxic, patriarchal culture, this is a rare and fortunate thing. You can see in both these photos, the beauty of nurture, the gentleness with animals that was the measure of both my father and my uncle.

Happy Fathers' Day, Dad. Happy Fathers' Day, Beloved Uncles. Happy Fathers' Day, to all the good fathers out there. Know that your work is immeasurably important.

My priceless birthday gift will last me through my entire life. I am profoundly grateful.
Here is a prose poem about that cottage, that time, those men . . .

​Idiom
 
My husband gutted our bathroom this week.  I removed myself to the back garden while he removed the debris of decades.  Later he showed me the shell.  The dark wood of the weatherboards, the patched hole where the chip heater used to be, the inevitable white ant damage.  I registered the stamped logo on one wall: Hardi Flex.  That’s the new stuff isn’t it?  I knew the other wall between house and lean-to was blue.  ‘Stabilised,’ my husband cracked hardy.  He was thirteen when he first handled sheets of asbestos.  My brothers’ sleepout was lined with it, a weekend’s project by dad and my uncle.  I live a couple of streets away from that uncle’s old house, a carbon copy of my own in this garden suburb where every wind bears filaments.  He was an old school Aussie, the sort who’d say ‘Bewdy’ without irony and ‘Your blood’s worth bottling’ and his was.  He was the first person I’d heard use the expression ‘cracking hardy’.  He was advising me not to when I’d come home after a fall. I had no idea what he meant.  But I learned.  I watched for months while he held back rage and terror at my father’s deathbed.  He never lost his bottle.  Dad was Olympic class at the job himself.  Their lungs were full of fibre, too.  My dad died.  My uncle died six weeks later.  And I’d give a lot to crack hardy, myself.
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Diamond Anniversary of Dance

12/12/2018

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 Last Saturday evening I had the privilege of dancing a duo centre stage on the Crown Theatre, together with participating in three ensemble pieces. I was so excited by this rare honour that I rounded up my family and friends saying: "Please buy tickets, this is something special for me, like graduating or getting married or some such".  So my loyal and beautiful cheer squad, whom I rely on to come each year, expanded to double the numbers. In the end I had  around 25 people attend. First-timers were amazed at the professional level of the show. My older brother's comment: "I was expecting about 14 dancers doing a tame end-of-year recital. I was not expecting Los Vegas!" 

Keeping time

It was a magic night, made even more magical by the love and support of my family and friends, as well as my fellow dancers. It was only a couple of days later that something dawned on me. My sense of it being a big milestone was even truer than I thought. I've long observed that some part of one's soul or psyche keeps a perfect record of time. Let me explain. The year is 1958. The dancers of the Joy Ashton school are about to take the stage at Fremantle Town Hall. Among them are the three-year-old infants of "Tiny Tots A", and among them is me! I was a gypsy girl with a ribboned tambourine. My mother had spangled my black bolero. I also had a little sailor suit costume. I don't have a photo of myself at three, but this one was taken only a couple of years later, costumed for the Highland Fling and the Wild Irish Washerwoman's jig, respectively.
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1958-2018

Saturday night was my diamond anniversary of dancing. Sixty years! It was a long time to wait to wear a tutu! Talk about delayed gratification . . . and all the sweeter for it. And in the meantime, a whole lifetime of joy. And hilarity. Every time I watch 'retro pieces' going back several decades I smile because I lived and danced through it all. I am so grateful to The Dance Collective for creating a culture where the miracle of continuing my love of dance is made possible.
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Ghosts of the Unfinished Monastery

29/5/2018

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Nelken Line South from Pina Bausch Foundation on Vimeo.

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FantaSEA 
~  a calling card for the ghosts of the Unfinished Monastery ~
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​In December last year I moved to South Fremantle, my forever home. This place was thick with ghosts. Not apparitions, as such, but the dense psychic territory of three generations of my husband's family's intertwined lives. I felt thin, wondering how to add my own presence to those I sensed were here.  The aptly named Walter de La Mare captured this feeling in his poem "The Listeners", a childhood favourite:

 But only a host of phantom listeners 
  That dwelt in the lone house then 
Stood listening in the quiet of the moonlight  15
  To that voice from the world of men: 
Stood thronging the faint moonbeams on the dark stair


Among these ancestors are a Spanish grandmother who held dances on the back verandah; her daughter Dolores who taught music and played piano for parties; a host of vaudevillians hailing from the U.S.; and an unmet brother who left this world too soon. 

And most of all there was the oceanic child who grew to be the man who created a magnum opus in The Unfinished Monastery. I have the extraordinary privilege of living in his three-dimensional work of art.

I am profoundly grateful. And in response I decided that these ghosts were now my ghosts, and I liked the cut of their jib. What better way to introduce myself than a  theatrical dance up the Colonnade?

                                                                                              Hello. I am here. And I'm ready to play . . . 


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Starving

31/10/2017

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Remember this, Australia? In case you have forgotten, these are Australian prisoners, contemporaries of my father. Pictured outside a hospital hut on the Thai-Burma railway. This is what starvation is. Take a good look. And ask yourself what these men would think of Australia's unspeakable decision to starve 600 men. Men who have committed no crime; men with whom we are not at war.  Ask yourself what you think.

As for me, I'm starving, too. Starving for leadership, vision, ethics, compassion, decency. Starving for a just world. We cannot abandon those we imprisoned on Manus. Bring them here. 
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EOFY (it's not what you think!)

30/6/2017

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June 30th. The date is significant. And I'm not talking about the end of the financial year. I have been in some tight spots over the years, and more than once, tied to the machine.
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After this close encounter, for instance, locking on was small beer!

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​Reading poetry and 1984.
So threatening it needed five policemen to deal with it!

June 30th

Today I was scheduled to appear in the Perth Magistrates Court to face trial for my lock on.  
Between now and then, however, the charges simply disappeared.
​And now I am humming an old Waterboys' song:

"Once I was tethered and now I am free"

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I'm so grateful for the campaign friends and legal support team that carried me through this experience. Now I get to hang around with friends just for fun.

So: the big reveal.

​EOFY stands for


Experience of Flying Yoga

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And tomorrow I fly off to our Persephone Writing and Yoga Retreat, bringing with me all I have learned of the darkness and the light.
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Thanks to Jenny Rowles, Paul McGovern (Cottesloe Post) and Kathleen O'Donoghue for the pics.
And thanks also to Jac at Enerchi Yoga for the silk swings.

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Happy Shoes

21/2/2015

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Remember the old hippy "Happy Shoes"?  Well, these are my "Happy Shoes".  For the fifth time in my life, I am back dancing.  Something I thought might have permanently dropped off the list of possibilities is once again available to me and I'm thrilled.

I was two and a half when I started dance classes.  How was I to know it was going to be a lifelong addiction?  Over and over again I have been drawn back, spending years as a child - and even more years as an adult, in class and occasionally on stage.  It's one of the activities where I feel most myself. 


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Finding Flow

What does it mean to take my ageing and rather battered body back to dance class?  Well one of the studios where I do classes has as its slogan "Great dancers can come from all walks of life.  This is where they come together".  The young man who teaches ballet recognised me from three years ago.  The class is full of passionate young people of various ethnicities - a tall, bespectacled youth and a fairly even gender balance.  I am the only older dancer.  I know for a fact that I'm five years older than my nearest contemporary at this studio.  Nobody minds. We are all different in our own way.  We are all united by the passion and pleasure of doing the physical meditation that is ballet.  Will any of us be performers with a capital "P"?  Unlikely.  Certainly, I won't be. It's sheerly the joy of doing it that matters.  It's a perfect example of what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi dubbed "flow".

At the other studio, where I had previously danced for around seven years, I was welcomed back like a family member.  A long-standing Dance School of solid repute, this place has whole dynasties of dancers, covering the entire lifespan.  My teacher is in her mid-sixties.  The school is run by a woman in her seventies.  I look at them, and think "I want what you're having".  With this school, I've participated in many concerts where grandmothers, mothers and daughters or sons are all dancing.  Each at their own level, in their own style.  It's a not-so-secret society.  And it beats the hell out of  aerobics.

Once a dancer, always a dancer.

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    I am a writer, speaker and creative mentor.
    I publish poetry,  short stories and creative non-fiction. 
    I'm passionate about creativity, animals, people, social justice, the planet. 

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