Traumata

by Meera Atkinson

  I recover at the refuge for a couple of days, listening to a constant stream of Joan Armatrading, eating regular, healthy meals and enjoying such strange normalities as watching television, taking daily showers and sleeping in a properly made bed. I hide from the men and the confusing emotional complexities between us. But once rejuvenated, I grow edgy. I remember why I’ve come to Darwin and I’m seized by the urge to join the boys and meet the mysterious drifters Jeremy’s told me so much about. So I leave the refuge with a wave and a thank-you and go off in search of the men. They aren’t hard to find. The Vic Hotel, with its big overhead fans and balcony overlooking the mall, is a favourite of the itinerants, as are the Animal Bar on the Esplanade and the Workers’ Club.

  We live for the day, for the minute. I rarely know where my next meal is coming from or where I’ll sleep. I tell myself this is freedom and that I like it.

  We spend time at Lameroo Beach, which has long been an established camp because of the hippie trail to Asia. It fills up year after year in the dry with cliques of ganja-smoking, guitar-strumming youth, and tree houses remain as evidence of their initiative. There are mutterings about the nomads who were blown away from the beach on the night Tracy hit and were never counted as missing – to be counted as missing, one has to belong in the first place. But this is likely an urban myth: as Jeremy points out, the fierce mosquitoes alone would prohibit camping there in the wet. Even in 1979, Lameroo is a permanent party, and there is something notable about the drifter parties: there are hardly any women, and those who are part of the pack tend to be tough and working class.

  The women view me with disdain and treat me like the middle-class princess I’m desperately trying not to be. I am dismissed because of my age, disliked because of my sexual game-playing, and told more than once to ‘go home’. It’s delivered with condescending scorn and it only makes me more determined to prove myself by staying. The rejection, and not being taken seriously because of my age and girlish prettiness, is a source of disgrace. I want friendship and approval but have no clue how to win it. I focus on gathering allies where and how I can by flirting shamelessly with the men. I can’t match my adult comrades in terms of wit and knowledge, so I learn to observe. I pass long hours at their feet, watching, listening and drinking. Taking it all in. Like Jeremy’s books, learning to observe, to listen, will prove to be invaluable training for a writer. But at this point, I have no ambition save to experience life, to forge my own path through it.

  Nobody ends up in New York by accident and no one really cares where you come from or why you’ve arrived. Being there says it all. Similarly, nobody ends up in the far north by accident, and in the 1970s no one was interested in personal history. Being there marked you. Though my underage status stamped me as different, I was not alone in trying to outrun the past. We were united in our commitment to denial and bravado, and we supported each other in a lifestyle fuelled by alcohol and financed by the dole, charity handouts and petty crime. This fuzzily defined kinship had a generous and egalitarian spirit, marked by a sharing of resources that evoked a socialist sensibility. When one person’s dole cheque arrived it was for all. When cash ran dry, a meal, cigarette or middy would appear. The EK became communal property. Jeremy never hesitated to lend the Holden out whether he’d known the person for years or minutes. It might come back in two hours or two days. Amazingly, it always came back.

  Darwin itself was not a pretty place. It was little more than a township, and still being rebuilt. The sprawling landscape was relentlessly flat, and the community was recovering from a disaster that would shape its future identity. I wasn’t disillusioned, though, because I didn’t go there for pretty. I went for new horizons and a sense of belonging among others who didn’t belong, and I found what I was looking for: passing afternoons fumbling with men on sagging single beds in rundown rooms; the joie de vivre of gatecrashing the locked-up YMCA in the small hours and splashing around the candescent pool; a glimpse of transcendence listening to the Patti Smith Group’s Horses for the first time, in the dark windowless office of the boarding house on Knuckey Street while sharing a joint with the manager and his girlfriend. It was, just as Jeremy promised, the outsider capital of Australia.

  Back then, Darwin attracted lost souls and seekers, addicts, drifters, losers, chancers. In Slouching Towards Bethlehem, a collection of essays about California in the ’60s, Didion wrote about the stark reality of San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury in the comedown from 1967’s ‘summer of love’. She portrayed a counterculture less turned on and more traumatised. Often the young casualties she described were the children and grandchildren of generations who had lived through world wars. The carnage Didion chronicled depicted youth born of a cesspool of trauma and into a sped-up, ultra-modernised, hyper-capitalised, economically booming climate. They walked headlong into idealism only to be spat out in Hades. Unlike those hippies, the young people who travelled the long and dusty highways of Australia during the 1970s were under no illusions as to the promise of revolution or the likelihood of being greeted by a love-in. Mostly descended from convicts and working-class Anglo settlers, we were made of grittier stuff, but we were still, for the most part, casualties of war-torn industrialised patriarchy, even if we had suffered it less than many thanks to our geographical location.

  The people Jeremy and I knew were the types who would be reported as missing, who would meet foul play, die young, rot in prisons or disappear into the hills to live as hermits. Some of us ended up reinventing ourselves, reintegrating in part compromise, part holdout, to become ‘productive members of society’. I don’t know how they survive, the casualties of the generation now coming of age, and how they live, now that the welfare net has been so substantially sewn up. Where does a young person in an abusive home go today? How do they escape? Are they among the booming homeless in makeshift villages of tents under bridges? (No travelling north on counter cheques these days.) Do they simply stay at home, however hellish, joining the bursting ranks of young people force-fed degrees they aren’t sure they want, the ones who stare out at me blankly as I lecture, the ones who self-sabotage?

  Traumata becomes stigmata: the girl who begged and stole and scammed bore scars and stigma. In her book Writing Wounds, which examines trauma and memory in relation to the work of French women writers, Kathryn Robson cites the Oxford Dictionary definition of trauma as ‘a wound or external bodily injury’ and a ‘psychic injury, esp. one caused by emotional shock the memory of which is repressed and remains unhealed’. Chronically traumatised people bleed spontaneously in response to both fresh trauma and seemingly benign events. ‘The interface between body and mind in psychological trauma may be seen to begin with the wound – or, more accurately, with wounding,’ writes Robson, reasoning that it stands to follow that to ‘remember and narrate trauma’ means to ‘attempt to write in and through wounds, through the holes within memory that represent the incursion of the past into the present’, which suggests a reckoning with traumatic shame.

  Robson turns, once again, to the dictionary. The word ‘stigma’ comes from the Greek, meaning ‘a mark made by a pointed instrument’. It originally denoted the branding of slaves’ bodies, leading to the contemporary figurative meaning: to be marked by disgrace, to be shamed. ‘The marks of “stigma”, impressed upon the skin, imprint the individual’s past on the body, so that the stigmatized body becomes a site where history and identity are inscribed.’ In the wake of chronic, naturalised trauma, its soul-shattering history is inscribed upon the psyche and the body, a process metaphorically signified by stigmata.

  In her discussion on the influential philosopher and feminist literary theorist Hélène Cixous, Robson notes: ‘In Cixous’s formulation, the wound precipitates either death or healing; its story, she seems to imply, emerges through the scar that marks its healing. If we accept her logic, the scar – the point of suture, when, figuratively speaking, the skin re-mends and the wound is sewn up – is the site of t
he story, “ce récit”.’ Cixous’ own writings, however, defy such closure and neatness. Robson concludes that the writing of trauma emerges from the open wound rather than the ‘closed scar’, but later qualifies this, stating that writing is ‘bound up not only in the story of loss in the past, the scar, but also in the wounds that open up in the act of telling’. I’m writing through stigmata, but I don’t mean to suggest I’m a martyr.

  I heal. I bleed. I heal again. One scar seals (thin-skinned) while another weeps. I’ve made peace with my stigmata. I have my analgesic ways and the body’s own miraculous capacity for regeneration. We survivors are resilient. We keep coming with the life force. The fire in the belly dims and then rises again to burn bright. We find each other in subcultural solace. We find each other. I don’t imagine these words will fix my wound-scars and I’m certain they won’t fix yours, but maybe they can be a portal through which we can meet ourselves, the selves we’ve forgotten or disowned, the selves that split off in the moment of trauma whom we are yet to meet. ‘I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not,’ advises Didion. ‘Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind’s door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends.’ That girl, the one who settled then set off in search of adventure, she’s knocked on my door.

  I’ve long lost contact with those nomadic outsiders. I remember them, and the days and nights I shared with them, as if the film of this entire period is ruined and only select scenes or frames have been saved. Jeremy, now a social worker in the Red Centre, is the only one I’ve stayed in occasional touch with over the years. I don’t remember how I left Darwin that first time, with whom I left or how long it took to get home, but once back in Sydney I couldn’t get Darwin out of my mind. I moped around awhile and, incurably restless, I convinced Heidi to fly back up with me.

  We move into the Knuckey Street boarding house and get jobs as housemaids at the local Travelodge. I quit after a couple of weeks and take up with a young man with long honey-brown hair and tanned lean-muscled arms.

  As the wet approaches, we make plans. The boyfriend and I hitchhike to Brisbane. Passing hours at a time by the side of the highway, listening to Joni Mitchell or Phoebe Snow on a tinny cassette player, we inched closer to Brisbane day by day until we reached its outskirts, where I suddenly found myself living with his family. Not long after I was involved in a car accident. We’d been visiting friends of my boyfriend’s on the Gold Coast and I’d gone for a drive with two sisters who were, unknown to me, on Rohypnol, our mission being to get (more, different) drugs. The Kombi van veered off and rolled on the highway, and I lost consciousness for a few minutes. We were lucky to emerge with only minor injuries. I wasn’t sure what I was doing in Queensland, with this pleasant guy and his suburban family, but I didn’t know what else to do, so I stayed on. After a couple of months, we hit the road again, heading south. When we reached Canberra I decided to go it alone and bought a one-way bus ticket to Perth.

  For another half a year I rushed around the country, picking up and discarding companions en route, or travelling solo. The harder it got to outrun myself, the faster I ran. I dashed between Darwin, Cairns, Sydney, Byron Bay, the Gold Coast, Canberra, Adelaide, Perth and Broome. I travelled by bus, train, thumb and plane. I explored a pre-tourist beach in Cairns in a throbbing, tripping grass haze and enjoyed an excursion inland to pick gold tops and swim in a cool watering hole surrounded by the saturated reds and greens of wild tropical growth, but despite tranquil surrounds like these I was not at peace. The denial and bravado slipped, and I began to feel fear, or to acknowledge the fear I’d felt all along. There were interminable stretches rolling down isolated, pitch-black highways in the cabins of speed-freaked truckies. I watched for hints of a psychotic serial killer, as if picking up a sure sign would have helped me out there anyhow. I spent hours waiting for rides on the side of the road, singing to myself, talking when I had a companion, sitting on my bag under the relentless sun. I slept overnight in the houses of locals who grew weirder by the hour. Still not yet sixteen, I relied on the kindness of strangers and was relieved when their kindness was uncomplicated.

  I took time out at my mother’s house on the Central Coast, where she was holed up with my Uncle Hugh. I wrote in a big A4 notepad for the better part of every day. This caught my uncle’s attention. ‘Diary of a Little Girl’, Hugh titled it – whether with affection or condescension, I wasn’t sure. I noticed an expression on his face as he said it, part impressed, part concerned, as if he suspected I might be a budding writer. When I tired of their dramatics and grew bored enough I returned to the city, enamoured with Jake, to fantasise about him in my mother’s city studio. I soon followed him to London with a suitcase of summer clothes (heading into London’s winter).

  Fast-forward eighteen months. Upon my return to Sydney, diminished, I lived in my mother’s spare room in a flat in Kirribilli until that fateful day I caught a ferry to the city to watch my brother’s band rehearse, got lost, and wound up blacking out and getting fucked by a man who wouldn’t let me leave when I regained consciousness. My brother took me under his wing then and we shared a series of flats in Manly while I tried to work out what kind of person I wanted to be, what kind of life I wanted to live. I got a job as a nurse’s aide at the Spastic Centre, which I managed to keep for quite a few months despite my problem drinking, and I wrote depressive, Dorothy Parker–inspired poetry.

  A good deal has been written about the relationship between trauma and artistic production. There is a plethora of research on the appeal of art for trauma survivors – be it through reading, writing, listening to or making music – and its possible application as an aid to recovery. My academic monograph proposes that a certain kind of creative writing can testify to transgenerational trauma transmissions, and that this testimony is a form of political witnessing.

  Quoting world-famous clinical trauma theorists Bessel van der Kolk and Onno van der Hart, Robson notes the traditional importance placed on narrative as a means of communicating trauma: ‘Traumatic memories are the unassimilated scraps of overwhelming experiences which need to be integrated with existing mental schemes, and be transformed into narrative language.’ Yet she adds that if trauma, by nature, resists narrative representation, ‘any narrative of traumatic experience will necessarily modify, distort, even fictionalize, that experience’. This is confirmed by van der Kolk and van der Hart, who view such distortions, whether conscious or unconscious, as the manner by which articulated trauma becomes one’s ‘life story’ (meaning it is always a form of fiction) and that this process of sense-making is closely linked to psychological healing. Robson clarifies, via van der Kolk and van der Hart: ‘The modification of traumatic memory works to “soften the intrusive power of the original, unmitigated horror”, to dilute the force of the original event.’

  When I first started writing I wasn’t thinking about the relationship between trauma and writing. I wasn’t thinking about trauma at all. I was just writing, transcribing my becoming in words, marking the page as a way of reaffirming my presence to myself and in order to, as Didion would have it, find out what it was I thought and what I felt. The first poem I ever wrote was about a homeless old drunkard. I was thirteen or fourteen years old. Following my literary awakening courtesy of Jeremy’s boxes of books, I read up on the classics and scoured second-hand bookstores for poetry collections. I picked up books by poets I’d never heard of before, whom I would later discover to be held in high esteem. I read Eastern European poets, Latin American poets and the Beat poets. I read mostly men because bookstores stocked more books by men, because men were the writers people talked about, and because of internalised sexism (men are geniuses and ‘only women bleed’).

  What was I doing with that writing of words? What am I doing now with this writing of words? I’m
writing an autobiography of patriarchy, playing the traumata backwards, chasing it down rabbit holes, twisting it inside out, and if you do that they’ll call you a ‘confessional poet’. They’ll call it ‘memoir’. You’ll risk being undersold, sidelined, cast as less valuable than Men Who Write About More Important Things Than Their Feelings and Lives.

  It was during this Manly period of my late teens that my friend Maggie came back into my life, or rather it was then that she pulled focus. I had known Maggie for about five years, ever since she had taken refuge with Aunt Phoebe and my cousin Rachael, not long after they returned from the Mediterranean. It was known that she had fled her brother’s sexual abuse but it was not discussed. I introduced Maggie to Jeremy and they took up together, but that didn’t stop her having a crush on me and showing up drunk and adoring unannounced. I was by then quite inclined towards women, and even though Maggie wasn’t quite my type I liked drinking with her and the flattery of her barely repressed infatuation. We started taking trips up and down the east coast on the old mail train, mostly staying in pre-tourist-boom Byron Bay and inland Mullumbimby, with Jeremy sending funds from time to time. We played pool, drank all day, chain-smoked cigarettes and lived spontaneously, taking off when we felt like it. Between us there were DUIs and court cases, drunken beer garden spectacles, suicide attempts and psych hospital stays. And there were careless nights in low-rent rooms above public bars, where my bi seductions took no account of her closeted homosexuality and delicate mental health.