Reading of the first chapter of "House of the Flight-helpers" by Rosalie Parker

House of the Flight-helpers

Do clouds watch us?

Do clouds watch our mute trundling

and try to see shapes there?

Do trees recall a forgotten history

from our time-layered skins?

Do the cliffs examine our faults and

extrusions, to map old seismic shifts;

and does the moon count

our florid waxings and wanings?

The ravening flames of a fire

know the way we are consumed

by oxygen, and so does

the rust on the bridge.

The farm furrows understand

the planting of the seed potatoes,

and the miracle of pushing out,

head-butting to the light.

Does a graveyard feel a terrible sorrow

for a future that’s not yet chiseled in granite?

Does the headstone wait nervously

to be given a name?

Does the earth fear the worst:

does she wake, wide-eyed, at night,

frantic for us, for the humans,

and the race they can’t, yet, put right?

-         Philomena van Rijswijk 2020

Do clouds watch us, and try to see pictures in us?

Moving clouds

Feedback from Edith Speers...

Edith Speers is a Tasmanian poet and publisher (Esperance Press).  This is her feedback on my recent novel, "House of the Flight-helpers"...

Anyway, I'm finally 
reading House of the Flight Helpers - about 50 pages so far. Your 
writing is so wonderful, the descriptions so powerful - I'm getting 
depressed! What a miserable world is Incognita. I'm feeling like I 
wish the birds would totally invade the place and send everyone 
running. Well, the fact is, you are even more brilliant as a writer 
than I ever suspected, and I already thought you were the best... 
love, E.

Only stating the obvious! Your writing so deserves that gorgeous 
hard-back publication. Oh, and also, just as a reader with not a lot 
of time for reading, I so appreciate the beautifully short chapters. 
No matter how scary or gloomy the scenario, I can move on to the next 
bit. The last few books I've read, the chapters were sooooo long, and 
I read late at night, and get sleepy, and just groan sometimes. And 
sometimes don't even finish the chapter - heresy!

And I'm now at 
the part of Flight-Helpers where Honeysuckle Rose and Juana Jubilee 
get out of Incognita. Thank heavens!

Have to admit, I'm breathing easier now that those 
poor people have some fresh air and open sky...

Hi there, you amazing person. What a great ending! And the stories and 
sagas and travels and meetings that converge at the end - wonderful. 
And yes, I noticed that Bird Boy ended up with a crown of thorns, and 
I'm glad he didn't get the gruesome demise that goes with it. And I 
noticed the "Havnotz" bread, too; this was the grimmest ever society 
of haves and have-nots.... It's great how you snuck in the religious 
and the political elements with barely a blip on the radar. That's 
subversive! Whew - trouble is, great literature seeps into my brain 
and my brain feels saturated and next thing, thoughts will come oozing 
out of my ears. I better pick up a trashy crime novel real quick, as 
an antidote... Love ya!

Aha - and that wonderful revolution, not a 'call to arms' but a call 
to compassion, blankets for people who were cold. Brilliant!

I hope you realize you have totally subverted the whole male-dominated 
warrior / cowboy orientation of the SF genre. The annoying thing is 
that few people will buy a book of that price. Any hope of a 
paperback...?

Oh good! I was wondering it they'd put the book in contests. Well - 
win a prize and they might bring out a paperback!

Holbeche Road Dreaming

My eldest daughter, Heidi, wrote this poem back in 2009. She only sent it to me recently, saying that she wasn't sure it was "good enough". I have no words to describe how precious it is...

My mother was a girl once.

Her hair plaited in braids,

Bandy-legs below baby-doll hem.

My mother was a girl.

Once she ran the length of the train

In a superman costume.

My mother was not always a mother.

Her womb woke and,

As the plane hung suspended in the impossibility of air,

An egg split, and split.

My mother was a girl in a cornflower dress

As she walked an aisle.

Swelling beneath her bodice.

Her knees still grazed, she played

With the edges of ribboned plaits.

My mother,

Feet swollen with summer and expectation,,

Watched the mare expect her foal.

We made a bower.

We began a conversation in those lonely times

When you rubbed and sang the world.

The beauty of the rising dust:

Her husband returns to ease

Fatalistic claustrophobia.

The sweaty panic of loneliness.

And fear

Of failing,

Rising like funnel-webs

From the hot, Sydney loam.

My mother and her child shared a private world.

They held their secrets as stones at the bottom of dry puddle.

Waiting for rain.

When you held me you found no metamorphosis.

Instead, all those pebble secrets

Turned into the stars.

We wet them with our stories

So that they could guide us.

And they do.

There. Between you and me, we grew each other up.

March, 2009

Season of grandmothers...

Autumn. You can feel the change in the air. You can feel it in your bones. The back of my house is draped in big grape leaves. The afternoon sun glows behind them. Some are shrivelled and browned.

There is an autumnal sound in the television droning in the next room, soft traffic, suede as velvet, on the South Arm Highway, a high-pitched metal wind-chime outside the backdoor. Mid-March gently puffs a changing season in through the kitchen door. An old woman’s black clothes hang under the shelter of the Laserlite roof. They are mine.


Thinking about it just yesterday, I realised how simple my life is. It’s not simple because of any particular doctrine, but because it has never been anything else. One thing that brings me a lot of joy is the movement of shadows on walls, the movement of flickering light on a rubber-plant leaf. I always think of Gerard Manly Hopkins, and his “dappled things”. 


There is a colourful dream-catcher outside the kitchen window. I am attracted to bright colours like a bower bird or a child. Age has never dampened my love of colour.


Hard to believe that I’m now the grandmother, when, for so long, other women of wide berth, sparkling hairnet, slippery laps, lisle stockings and sensible shoes filled that role...I remember my grandmother's garden...my other grandmother's big brown pennies...Aunty Evvie's soft, powdered cheek...Mary and Nellie Barry's whiskery chins...Minny Cardiff's arthritic hands (with golf balls  in her palms to hold them open)...and now it's me! I'm the grandmother of wiry white hair, worn-out sandals, eccentric clothes and many beads.

Two of my grandchildren- a boy aged nine and a girl of five- were describing my house to someone at a birthday party:-

"It's very colourful!' said the nine-year-old.

"The garden is VERY wild," said my five-year-old granddaughter..."You can play hide-and-seek!"

"Who wins at hide-and-seek?" asked the other adult.

A moment's thinking, and then she piped up with: "Nanny!"


Pied Beauty by Gerard Manly Hopkins

A Leap of Faith

Last night, I watched a documentary about the landing on the moon in the ‘60’s.  The first two-thirds of the documentary were about the preparation and landing.  It actually brought tears to my eyes, when Neil Armstrong said the famous sentence, as he stepped down off the last rung: One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.  That surprised me, that it should be so emotive.  I’m really not like that…

I recalled sitting in class with what seemed like the whole school packed into one hot room, watching a television set with doors on it that was wheeled out for the weekly educational programmes.  I was at a Catholic girls’ secondary school, and I must have been thirteen years old.  The school was only two years old, when I started there.  It was way out the back of town.  There was a sort of creek running through the school (more gully erosion than creek), with a log across which we teetered to get to the top “ovals” (read paddocks).  We saved all the scraps from lunch-time to give to the pig farmer up the road, and we burned all the burnable rubbish in an incinerator after lunch.  We all had jobs after lunch break.  For quite a while, mine was sorting the scrap-and-rubbish-buckets, putting the scrap buckets under the building, and setting light to the contents of the incinerator.  That was fun, as we (the two of us: a girl called Marguerite and I) were allowed into class a bit late, and we also had an exclusive kind of status.  However, Marguerite’s parents threatened to sue the school when she contracted hepatitis, and, thus, ended our foray into recycling.  I also recall looking out the window, one day, and seeing a cow meandering through the schoolyard.  Dora Stewart and I ran out to chase the animal out of the school grounds, and a good time was had by all. 

My father did not believe in the Moon Landing, even at the time.  He claimed that the moon did not exist- that it was merely the reflection of the earth in space.  He said that the publicity stunt was merely to take people’s minds off the Vietnam War.  He also said that someone had come and deliberately scraped the paint off our roof, that Mum was a communist, that some of the advertisements on TV were aimed at him, and that he was on a blacklist.  You get my drift…

So, last night, much of this came back to me, watching the ungainly, boxy shape of Neil Armstrong stepping down into the dust.  There was, unfortunately, a vague sense of cynicism in my enjoyment that had never really been there before.  What was it that the conspiracy theorists claimed about the American flag?  Something about a breeze that should not have been there, blowing the cloth.  They also claimed there was some object that didn’t belong, lying on the ground, that you could discern if you magnified the image.  These notions reminded me of the Beatles’ song that was supposed to say “Ringo is dead!” if you played the LP backwards.  Conspiracy theorists are often not cynics, at all, but people who long for mystery.

Anyway, the niggling of vague doubt was completely erased as I watched the third segment of the documentary in which the three astronauts spoke of the many years that followed the moon landing.  They spoke of being changed men; they spoke of the fact that they could never look at life or the universe in the same way.  “The landing on the moon was only one day in my life”, one of them said…”the rest has been devoted to Jesus”.  He explained that he had started attending a Bible-reading group, on his return to earth, and that his newfound beliefs eclipsed that one day that was a turning-point in his life.  Another said how he remembered looking out of the Apollo and seeing the moon and the stars and thinking: “The earth, and everyone on the earth, and everything that man has made, is made of the stars…We are all one!” He told what a moving experience it was, to come to that realisation.  I do not remember which old man it was who said which words, but I was struck by the awe with which they spoke, not of the moon, but of the earth.  “Sometimes, I just go out, and go on an escalator”, one of them said, “just to have people around me.  And I think to myself: We really do live in the Garden of Eden!”  All men spoke of the strangeness of being one of only two men standing on a planet uninhabited by any others; of knowing that everyone else was down there on the earth, but that they were so far away, and so alone.  One described the loneliness of this realisation, but another described the feeling as euphoric.

Thinking about the documentary, later, it struck me how ironic it was that three men could travel so far, and under such unnatural circumstances, to achieve these insights.  Listening to the wonder in their voices, seeing the openness on their faces, there was no question, in my mind, that these men had experienced something extraordinary.  The image of the Garden of Eden came up several times, and I remembered the day I came to my own epiphany.  I can’t recall what I was doing- I certainly wasn’t setting foot on any celestial body.  But I recall the sudden understanding that the Book of Genesis is not a story about the past, at all.  It is prophetic.  We are living in it right now.   

Moon Landing