Dear Inner Circle,

Anzac Day was a special one for me this year. I spent several days moving around the various battlefields on the Western Front where thousands of Australian soldiers lost their lives and where thousands were so traumatised that they spent the rest of their lives suffering from what we would now call, Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome. My father used to visit old soldiers at Concord Hospital when I was just a school boy. I saw men in the 1960s still hiding under beds and shaking uncontrollably. That was when Dad first explained "shell shock" to me and it was my first attempt to understand the phenomenon that still today causes me to struggle.

At Fromelles I found the headstone of Private C Myers who enlisted at 15 years. After failing his first attempt to enlist, he applied again as C Morgan, this time successfully. Fromelles was his first taste of battle and at 16 years, the end of his life. There are more than 2,000 cemeteries dotted over France and Belgium as a result of World War I and in one place I visited, there were over 45,000 mostly young men buried.

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Dear Inner Circle,

Last week I lived for a few days in the old Jewish quarter of Krakow in Poland and spent a day walking through Auschwitz-Birkenau. There is no sense in which you could say this visit was enjoyable even though years of reading came to life for me. It's one thing to learn history and another to walk the ground, to climb the steps, to feel the barbed wire and to stand in the torture chambers of Block 11.

I walked from the Judenramp to the gas chambers. It's a tough thing to learn that children were judged to have no utility so most of them were sent to death without delay. It could be argued that death was a greater mercy than the life suffered by those whose labour was considered to have some value. I went to the building where Dr Mengele did his work. I remembered reading how this man scolded an assistant because he had smudged a record that Mengele, "had constructed with such love". Ponder how a person could murder infant twins without a thought but be concerned about a smudge on his beloved records. I looked into the rooms where Sonderkommandos lived. It was prisoners who did most of the work that made this camp run. A fate much worse than death.

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Dear Inner Circle,

Have you ever listened to three entirely unrelated conversations, all directed at you, at the same time? This is my occupational hazard. Such moments are most disarmingly absurd when one of the discussions reaches a point where some question is asked and I’m expected to make a response. Although all three men were sitting at the same table and all three were talking at top speed, no one was even vaguely aware that two other conversations were taking place at the same moment and all directed toward the one person, me. It seemed like this stream of disconnect could go on for a long time when suddenly I was shocked to hear one of these men directly address another, “You stole my phone you low life c***”. As the first bit of direct communication to happen at this table in thirty minutes, I was surprised. I wondered what kind of response person A could possibly be expecting from person B to whom he directed his allegation. Perhaps he was expecting, “Golly gosh you’re right. I stole your phone. Here it is.” Perhaps some direct communication that was a little less accusatory may have made a more useful approach. Alas, the response came back, “Don’t you call me a c***, you c***.”

You’ll be surprised to know that the above conversation escalated into a parallel universe of human contradiction. Both young men stood up and the volume rose as the content of the language sunk ever lower. You might not think there was much room for the tenor of the language to go down, but trust me, it did. “You’re accusing me of taking your phone, so let’s take this outside.” One man’s embodied contradiction was so profound that his arms extended backwards as if he was showing restraint while his chest was puffed forwards and used to confront and attack Mr A. In the complete miscommunication that followed, there was one moment revealing a capacity to think and be coherent. Mr A said, “And if we go outside and you beat my head in, it will...[read more]

Dear Inner Circle,

Rarely do I write poetry and never have I shared a poem with you.
I wrote this poem for a man who breaks my heart.

The Prodigal

There is no such thing as a single human being
We are saved or lost together
We’d rather be lost with you than saved without you
There is no such thing as a private act
Every human act is witnessed

Come home
The Universe didn’t abandon you
You abandoned it
Come home
When we meet
Your eyes show you are in a faraway country
Excessive comfort has emptied you, dissipated you
Now you beg me for coins, the pods upon which pigs feed
So come home
Our neck is craning in hope of your return
The magnolia that shades you is standing up straight
Hoping you’ll notice
The breeze that lightly kisses your face
The sun that warms your bones
We’re all waiting, looking, hoping

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