Donna's world of opinions

  Welcome! My name is Donna and I have a world of opinions. I have a passion for writing (fiction and commentary). I love words, family and the study of the fascinating and peculiar things that human beings can do and say. Mother Nature and Human Nature never cease to surprise and inspire me.I believe that there are two possible cures for having a bad day : laughter or a nice cup of tea. Or both.  

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[donnasworldofopinions]

An Icon

The phenomenon of celebrity is a strange thing. Those in the glow of it sometimes accuse us fans of thinking we ‘own’ them, but in a way we do. After all, it’s part of the deal. If it weren’t for the fans, they’d have no celebrity!

But one celebrity who did not view his fans, nor his detractors, that way was Prince (Prince Rogers Nelson). Many are mourning his recent death at age 57 in his Paisley Park home in Minnesota. However, you do not need to be a fan of his music to appreciate the wisdom of the words he said to his interviewer Anthony Decurtis for Rolling Stone magazine in 2004: ‘No-one can dictate who you are to other people’.

Hey, not everybody is going to like you in this life. Some people might cross the road to avoid you. And some might even adore you. Each of us has the God-given right to our feelings. The hugely intangible thing about celebrity is the way our experiences imbue our appreciation of that person’s work or music.

I remember the song my boyfriend and I slow-danced to in front of the jukebox at Mama’s Pizza parlour in 1975. Take It Easy by The Eagles. And whenever I hear that song, I remember how I felt. I remember the song a friend sang with acoustic guitar at our wedding ceremony. Follow Me by John Denver. And now, for me, that song will forever carry with it the perfect joy of my wedding day. I remember the dark days after I lost my husband and the tears falling as I listened to Keith Urban’s Making Mem’ries Of Us. And while watching my children grow, I felt time stand still every time I heard Teach Your Children Well by Graham Nash (Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young).

Each one of us has an entire library of songs like this embedded in our precious memories, and sometimes it turns out that many of those songs are by the one artist. That’s when that artist and his/her career become an integral part of our lives, of our very being. Sometimes it’s as if they wrote every word of their songs just for us. Sometimes it feels as though they were there with us during the most seminal moments of our lives – our young days dancing, our happy times on the beach boardwalk, our lonely times, our sad times. The emotional connection is palpable and irreversible. This musical creator is part of our psyche, part of our DNA.

Even though we’ve never met, that singer-songwriter knows a very special vital part of who we are and we, in turn, know that part of him. On the News, I watched as all through the night fans arrived at the front of Paisley Park to place their purple flowers and tributes in the wire loops of the long fence, until there was a huge magnificent wall of devotion from one end to the other. What they were saying was Thank you.

o0o

Image: http://gazettereview.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/prince.jpg   Graham Wiltshire/Hulton Archive/Getty Image

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Mothers Of Invention

Don’t you ever wonder who was that first person who took the full udder of a cow in their hands and said, ‘I’m going to squirt that into my mouth and drink it and see if it kills me.’

Or, ‘Hey, those civets seem to love eating those coffee berries off that bush – I think I’ll sift through their faeces and collect the undigested coffee beans and make that into a yummy hot drink that costs lots of money.’

And who was the audacious soul who picked up a yicky grey splodge of sperm whale vomit and thought, ‘Ah, ambergris, this will be prefect as a fixative in ladies’ perfumes.’

Another puzzler is who first thought it would be a good idea to knock the corners off two blocks of stone and stick them on her barrow? It was, of course, a woman, because as far back as Neanderthal times, it was the woman who was left to lug the day’s foragings, the toddlers and the washing back home to camp.

Furthermore, what enterprising woman was it who first decided to put her coins, her twig toothbrush and a few dead cochineal bugs (the ancient equivalent of lippy) into her dillybag and called it a designer handbag?

Most of all, don’t you ever look at your rotary washing line in the backyard and wonder who thought of making washing go round in a circle? It’s so imaginative!

Before we had rotary clothes lines here is Ozland, women (and yes, it was the women, not the men) were resigned to the horrendous weekly struggle of pegging their heavy wet washing onto those long lines strung down the yard, and then struggling to hoist them up on wooden props to dry. Well a very thoughtful person in the form of Gilbert Toyne, one of thirteen children who no doubt saw the difficulties of wash-day first-hand each week while growing up, patented the Rotary Clothes Hoist in 1923, and began manufacturing the Aeroplane Rotary Clothes Hoist. And so began the real liberation of women, in the back yards of their homes.

Gilbert, enterprising as he was, has been forgotten in our oral myths and Adelaidean Lance Hill is the inventor who these days receives most of the credit for the invention of our modern day rotary clothes hoist. We all call them Hill’s Hoists, don’t we? That’s because, as so often happens in the competitive world of business, patents expire. Gilbert’s 1925 patent had expired when Lance patented his own version in 1945. C’est la vie, I’m afraid.

But even so, it is not Lance we have to thank for this marvellous home product but his lovely wife Cynthia. In their back yard, they grew citrus trees and a lemon tree had encroached on the space she needed to hang out her washing on her single wire line. So, one day in 1945, she told her husband to make her something better. Using scrap metal and oxyacetylene equipment, hubby ran her up a nice rotary clothes line. It caught on and the neighbours all wanted one too. So did the rellies. Soon he was making a living out of it. Today, the Hills Hoist is listed as a National Treasure.

Can you believe that in Darwin one family reported that Cyclone Tracey razed their house to the ground but their Hills Hoist was still standing! Now, that’s indestructible! Thanks Gilbert, Cynthia and Lance!

[Image by Nick carson at en.wikipedia CC BY-SA 3.0]

Bibliography :

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hills_Hoist

Thomas, Ron. & Sydenham, Shirley. 2014. Hills Hoist. [online] www.kidcyber.com.au

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilbert Toyne

https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/hill-lancelot-leonard-lance-12636

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Why Do I Write?

Why do I write? Do you lie awake in bed at night having brilliant thoughts?  Then you’ll know what it feels like to be over-endowed with ideas and opinions. I want to write them all down. Some people might swiftly turn on their bedside lamp, jot down their idea in a pretty notebook that is waiting there with a pen, then turn out the light and go to sleep. I’ve tried that but (a) I have no bedside lamp (there’s no space for it!) and (b) I wear glasses. Therefore, I would need to get out of bed to turn on the ceiling light, dig in my bedside drawer for my glasses, then at last write down my thought, while being blinded by the light. (I mean the light on the ceiling, not the light of my brilliant idea.)

In the end, what I do is shuffle out of bed and up the hall to the kitchen where I snatch a piece of paper and scribble on the bench for a few minutes. Then off back to bed.

Seinfeld fans will recall the ep where he thinks of a great gag when he is in bed and he writes it on a piece of paper beside him, then turns over again and goes back to sleep. Jerry is appalled in the morning to find that he can’t read his own sleepy scrawl. I have this problem beaten because by the time I have journeyed all the way to the kitchen and written my small thesis in the blinding light, I am ridiculously wide awake, hence my writing is passably neat and readable the next day.

Consequently, I like to do most of my writing during the day. The greatest challenge for me has been gathering up all my bits of scribbles, my thousand and one disparate ideas, my little notes on the back of dockets and paper bags, and trying to find the self-discipline to knead them into actual homogenous stories.

By far the best part of creating fiction happens for me when the characters come into being in my head. They grow and bloom and become like dear friends. I adore them, commiserate with them, become fond of their endearing eccentricities and have entire conversations with them in fiction land. Let me clarify that the reason this pinpoints me as a writer rather than as a nutter is that I write it down. Um. I think.

So when several characters are living together in my head and are having all kinds of animated interactions with one another, I know I have to write it down on my trusty old laptop, because if I didn’t, where would they go? They have to get out. I can’t have all that in my head all the time! During the period I am working on one fiction manuscript, the characters do live with me, but once that final twentieth draft is finished, they depart and make way for new ones.

What I want most of all, I think, is to have a reader (or several thousand of them, I don’t mind) say to me, Wow that’s exactly how I feel, or I loved that character and couldn’t wait to see what happened on the next page, or Wow, that story really moved me and I feel inspired by it.

I am a stickler for happy endings, inspiring ones, uplifting ones. That’s because I am an optimist at heart. Even when our world has fallen down around our ankles and our dreams have turned to rubble, if we dry our eyes and rummage around in the debris we will find a nugget of gold, a hope, a silver lining. That is, in the end, the message in my novels. You’ll smile again.

[donnasworldofopinions]

The Libraries I Remember

This might be a little left of centre for blogjune as my subject matter – Libraries of my childhood in Sixties and early Seventies in Brisbane (yes, last century!) – is a bit different from today’s sphere of Library & Information technology, especially in relation to academia. But some readers might enjoy a trip back in time. In celebration of blogjune, this is my very first blog!

My earliest recollection of libraries is of my parents taking us to our local Council Library. It was a pint-sized orange-lit wonderland full of choice. The lady Librarian was stern and cranky (I’m so sorry but it’s true!) and it was well-known throughout our district not to incur her wrath. Nevertheless my memories are very happy ones of poring over the shelves and labouring over which precious tomes to select to borrow for the next two weeks.

If we were lucky, we were given time outside the Library to play afterwards, dashing around in the inky shadows under the ancient Moreton Bay fig trees and running along the wooden benches. Sometimes in the back street behind the Library, the Salvation Army Band would play and our parents would take us there to listen. Resplendent in their uniforms and trumpeting out their songs of praise, they would occupy a street corner and inspire the crowd.

But my greatest pleasures came from visiting the Library at my primary school. One day it simply sprang up into existence, nestled haphazardly inside a spare classroom. The full tally of books there must have been quite small but there were more than enough to slake my thirst, especially the whole series of Enid Blyton’s The Famous Five and The Secret Seven. I couldn’t believe we got to do something as fun as visiting the Library, and in school time too. My friends and I sometimes spent our lunch-hours there as well. My best friend was a mad fan of Biggles.

My high-school Library was another matter, huge by my previous standards and housed in a dedicated new brick building. Untold mysteries lurked within its walls, such as the lumbering set of Britannica, the massive Medical Dictionary and the astonishing Van Nostrand’s Encyclopaedia, which dominated the Reference shelves. I’d always had a passion for reading and for writing and for the utter power of words, but in the late Sixties and early Seventies, this lust was further fuelled by the excitement of discovering on my School Library shelves such gems as Catch 22, Catcher in the Rye and My Darling, My Hamburger (before some of them were removed – I seem to recall there was a lot of outraged censorship going on back then, on a provincial level). I also ransacked the School Library and my local Council Library for any Judy Blume novels, Ruth Park or Ursula Le Guinn, Robert Heinlein or Kurt Vonnegut.

The world of books was a true paradise to me and when, in my twenties, I actually worked at the Council Libraries myself, the real treasures of a library were revealed to me –  the delight of sharing the joys of reading with others, children and adults alike, and the heartening sense of community and equality the libraries offered to all who entered their doors.

This was when my love of writing and of words was really cemented.