The Narrative SelfProvidence, A Message from your

Daughter

Life writing and film by Lara Bardsley

(photo: Lara Bardsley ART)

Introduction:

This section includes the film “ A Message from your Daughter”

which was made before I wrote the autobiographical piece,

and hence would be most aptly viewed first. It is

followed by an autobiographical piece, compiled, in part,

from a diary I have kept for the past 20 years. A third

section, Researcher’s Log, speaks of my experiences in

creating and compiling both the artwork and the

autobiographical piece. Finally, section 4 includes my

own review of the film and documentation of some of the

email and social media responses (to the filmic piece)

from the audience who viewed it.

1. Film:

The film, “A message from your Daughter”, by Lara

Bardsley, can be viewed at:

https://vimeo.com/135950838

Caption: It’s not always easy but sometimes the greatest relationships are

those you grown into. A daughter’s message to her father.

2. Life Story – Memoir writing.

2

Providence.

Synopsis:

Providence is a collection of three short memoirs. The

stories reveal a mother haunted by the loss of her

family. Her child becomes a woman, shaped by the loss

of her ancestors, deepened by the compassion for the

suffering she witnessed and the resilience that grew

from it.

“The mind is a fickle bedfellow. It will seduce you one moment with the

smoothest of concepts and when you are disarmed, and wanting, it will

deconstruct you. This world offers us the full smorgasbord — the

sweetest fruits and the most bitter, the healing balms and the poisons.

There are parts of us we can nourish and they will grow stronger. It

was the searing pain of my mother’s passing when I was 21 that turned

me irrevocably toward pursuit of an inner richness, something constant

and that was secure because it lay within me”.

(Extract from Providence by Lara Bardsley)

The links to the publication and e-book profile is:

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B013QAEEWA

http://www.cutalongstory.com/authors/lara-bardsley/1527.html

3

Providence

Hand-picked

I made one hell of a choice when I peered down from my

lofty cloud and chose my parents. My mother's beauty and

vivaciousness made her a prime candidate. I saw her leave

the orphanage and her adoptive parents to become the

Brigit Bardot of Colchester, Essex. I was attracted to

her spunk, her drive and her refusal to be a stay at home

sandwich maker. I felt proud when she insisted on

learning to drive at 18 years old when many of the women

in the town hadn't ever sat behind a steering wheel. I

stood beside her, unseen, rubbing my palms together

delightedly as she began her independent life in her own

apartment, shaking off her childhood like a muddy bath. I

watched as she blossomed into a gorgeous princess with no

past, only a future fit for one so intelligent and

glamorous. I too, fell in love with the young man from a

reputable family who was stiff with pride at her side. He

had a lot to be smug about. He won my mother over suitors

who would ride 15miles for a cup of tea in her presence.

Despite the high heels and makeup that inspired both

admiration and disapproval from different members of the

community, Lydia was undoubtedly innocent. She was

gorgeous. Her skin was slightly olive, her eyes were dark

4

and intense like her Jewish father but her face was broad

and strong jawed like her Germanic mother and as she

became older, her hair changed from rich auburn to light

golden which highlighted her Teutonic features. She was,

as most fairytale princesses are, a remarkable mix of

courage and naïveté, strength and fragility and the world

she belonged to was one of epic quests for love, of

virgins, knights and magic.

Lydia was not going to be hemmed in by the judgments

of her church community when it came to feminine

etiquette. Although she was considered to be worldly,

and hence unchristian, by some members of her church,

her heart was on fire with a passionate love of

Christ. When I joined her on the planet, the fire of

her devotion was a sweet smolder that I barely noticed;

but when death breathed upon her, the flames of her

faith warmed her in her last moments.

So what of the man we chose? Stephen was ambitious,

unusually intelligent, commanding and handsome — a

husband and father who had all the signs of success,

security, loyalty and devotion. Sometimes you don't

realize what really guides your choices. It is only

when your limbs are tightly wrapped in the web of your

relationships do you realize that you may have bitten

off more than you can chew.

5

People noticed when Stephen walked into a room. His

hair was dark and some say he has an olive complexion

but I've seen his skinny pale British legs in the days

of short shorts, long socks and sandals, and I cannot

believe he had a great grandmother who was Spanish and

so dark that she looked as if she was a Negress in the

photos his cousin sent him from the UK. He certainly

had a Spanish temper and an intense sexuality of which

women were acutely aware. He was born under the

western astrological sign of the lion, as was my

mother and he had all the characteristics bestowed

upon Leos. Stephen's eyes are gray / green, flecked

with gold. He had his face rearranged when he fell

off a ladder in college and broke his skull and both

arms. He has almost always worn a beard; my mother

insisted he did so to hide what she saw as a weak

chin. Now in his 70’s his face has softened with time and

his hair, downy and soft, cover the scars of skin cancers

recently removed. He is heavier than he was as a young

man but undeniably still in possession of a handsome

dignity.

My parents met at church. I could spin a wonderfully

romantic tale about their first meeting but I would be

making it up. I could ask Dad about his first

impressions of my mother but now that she is dead he

has wiped from his mind nearly all the memories he has

of her. I remember what he said when we scattered her

6

ashes to the sudden sea breeze that whipped her back

into our faces so we breathed her in. He said that he

would always remember her beauty. I imagine that it

was her beauty that struck him from the beginning.

Stephen and Lydia didn't waste much time in escaping

Colchester to study in America and finally settle in

Victoria, Australia. I've heard that they had visited

Australia before I was born, and it was then that my

mother had decided it would be our lucky country.

Within her were the kernels of the past, the souls of

her father's family that lay as fragile seedlings still

curled within their pods, the ghosts of the 100 Jewish

ancestors who perished in the Holocaust. Inside her was

the story of her Polish mother fleeing with two small

children to Scotland, homeless, speaking the enemy’s

language and tormented by her abandonment by Lydia’s

father, a German Jew, who didn’t follow through with his

promise to follow. Believing himself more German than

Jew, my grandfather stayed in Prague. An artist, at home

in the cultured bohemian lifestyle he had cultivated, he

died just before the end of the war in a concentration

camp full of artists, actors and musicians who sung and

performed their last hours away, or so the story goes.

My grandmother, cast adrift in Edinburgh, took her two

small children to a bridge and jumped into the grey

watery depths. They survived, but her children were

taken as wards of the state, to spend their early

7

childhood in an orphanage and were later adopted by a

strict Christian couple. I heard that my grandmother

died a few years later in an asylum run by the Quakers.

My mother’s paternal uncle, Heinz David Leuner, was an

author, minister of the Church of Scotland and a

passionately learned man. He wrote of the Germans who

risked their lives for the Jews and who spent his

academic life as a refugee in England, working toward the

alliance of Judaism and Christianity in the World Council

of Churches. I can find his books on the Internet, and

see glimpses of him still through the reverberations of

his written word. But what I am most grateful to Heinz

David for was his intervention into the lives of those

two orphan girls, ensuring that they stayed together and

find safety in a new life in Colchester, albeit in the

rigid embrace of a rather strange religious community,

aptly named “the Peculiar People.

Members of my father’s family came from the equally

restrictive religious community of the Exclusive

Brethren. Shaped by religious politics both on a global

and personal level, my father and his educated and

glamorous wife fled the disapproving church community,

the missionaries and the “Our Savior is Coming” plaque-

wearing relatives in the United Kingdom, to embark upon

their training in a rather unknown career, chiropractic.

8

While studying in Kansas City at a chiropractic college,

the gorgeous couple topped their classes. They worked

full-time during the day and on the weekends, and went to

classes in the evenings. They could barely make ends

meet. Unexpectedly and quite inconveniently, it was at

this time that I chose to make my grand entrance.

I know barely anything about my birth. Mum did say that

it was responsible for her varicose veins, her stretch

marks and the fullness of her abdomen and thighs in her

middle age. Asking Dad about my birth has proved rather

futile; I believe he was asleep for most of the event, in

the waiting room as things were done in those days. The

brief conversation I had with my mother while she was

alive was full of maternal guilt about not breast-feeding

me, and the shock of trying to juggle a child, a

marriage, work and a four-year degree, and things she was

less willing to disclose. I asked my father who looked

after me when I was young. He said: for the first two

years of my existence, they "farmed me out to anyone they

could find.”

My parents arrived in Australia on an ocean cruiser that

took two months to make the passage across the Pacific.

Their 10-pound tickets ensured them a place in a land

that promised happiness, health and endless

opportunities. I nearly died from an allergic reaction to

the vaccinations. I was nine and a half months old. We

9

arrived in Melbourne, a city with seemingly endless

space, the colours reminiscent of England, grays and

greens, the narrow city beaches, the restaurants and cafes

filled with well-dressed men and women; but my parents

headed for a quiet fishing town on the Mornington

Peninsula. Here yellow sand beaches lined the soft moods

of Port Phillip Bay, and the branches of tea trees were

gnarled and twisted with sea spray.

I vaguely remember the dark and pokey little flat in Main

Street, Mornington that my parents rented when they

arrived from the USA. We had crates for furniture and my

mother sewed curtains for the windows. The lampshades

were paisley designs, red or purple velvet with gold

tassels, the frames she made out of coat hangers. The

bases were bottles thickly covered with plaster of paris,

painted gold with fragments of glass and shells pressed

into them. They looked like the decorated icing on the

cakes I saw at other children's birthday parties.

I would ride up and down the concrete path that led to the

front gate of the units where the metal letterboxes were

perched four across and two down in a pillar of red

brick. I remember the elderly faces of the other

residents that would call "hello" from behind their

wire screen doors. I can smell sausages and onions and

hear the news on the television but these were signs

of life from the other units. I spent many hours

10

playing alone on the lawn, which sometimes exploded

into a mosaic of coloured daisies.

My parents both worked in a chiropractic practice at

the other end of Main Street. At that time,

chiropractors were commonly known as ‘quacks’ but

Lydia and Stephen persevered and built one of the

first successful chiropractic practices in Australia at

that time. Eventually they bought the business. By the

time I was six, my parents were able to buy a large

block on the corner of Nepean Hwy and Herbert Street,

a few kilometers out of town. Into it were excavated

two huge spaces in which the clinic and our residence

were set, separated by an internal courtyard. These

two buildings became my universe. The low sunken

residence protected us from the traffic, while still

offering my parent's business maximum exposure. I

would catch my breath every time I traveled past on

the freeway and see our surname on the large sign

advertising the clinic. We were on the same block as

the local hospital and the funeral parlor. Although we

had illness on our right and death on our left, we

only used the hospital twice in the twenty years we

lived there, once when my father was bitten by a

Redback spider. The second time it was my mother who

entered hospital for a brief time in acute care to die

at home at age 49, and later make her way to the

funeral parlor a few doors away.

11

Our home residence had been designed to fit snugly

behind the clinic. My parents' treatment rooms had

windows that would open on to a beautifully landscaped

courtyard full of deciduous trees, ferns and

rhododendron bushes. The front of our residence was

set deep into the earth so that patients could not see

into the house but if she pressed herself close to the

glass, my mother could catch a glimpse of my bedroom

window. I would watch for my mother at her window. I

remember the elation I would feel when she left her

patient on the treatment table and walk to the jar of

Vaseline that she kept on the windowsill. As she

worked the paste into her palms she would look for me

and if our gaze met she would blow me kisses. These

moments of connection would infuse the long hours of

aloneness with sunlight.

I had the most beautiful room in the house. I could

see a cherry tree from the window opposite my bed and

I watched the seasons adorn its naked limbs. My room

was luxuriously carpeted with cream shag-pile set in a

pattern of grass-like threads and tight loops that I

would study regularly. I would lie on my stomach and

pull the woolen loops apart with my fingers to check

for little insects. Sometimes I would spend an hour

preening my carpet for fleas as would a primate her

mate. I had an intense awareness of detail. I began to

12

notice anything that was visually awry. I spent time

ordering my tomato red Encyclopedia Britannica, making

sure that the spines of the books were all in line. A

few times a day I would rearrange my ornaments and use

my nails to scrape the dust out of the corners of my

window frames.

When I wasn't obsessed with order, I would lie on the

field of my soft cream shag-pile and stare up into the

wooden ceiling where the knotted shapes would morph into

faces that would speak to me of philosophy and meaning.

Together we would ponder on the purpose of life, the

motivations of the human race and the mystery of

death. These benevolent friends would watch over me as

I played alone, drew, painted and wrote long love

letters to my mother to which she would reply the next

morning passing a note on a folded piece of paper

under the sliding door that led down a dark hallway

before it opened out into the luminosity of my

bedroom. Each morning when I awoke I would run up the

hallway and find my mother's note with her favorite

endearment for me written on the back in her generous

warm handwriting. Inside would be a testimony to our

love, which I would read and re-read throughout the

long hours that separated us. Although we would see

each other for a few hours in the evening, we would

never refer to our correspondence. Ours was a

clandestine affair.

13

As she aged, Lydia filled more of her skin. It meant

that there was more of her to love. I was a sunflower

who turned my face toward her sun, hungry for her

light, reflecting her brilliance in the colour of my

petals, humbled by her magnificence. I spent my waking

hours celebrating my devotion. I made her sculptures

from twigs, moss and leaves that I collected in my

wanderings in the native garden on our half-acre

block. Sometimes I would go to "the wilderness", the

empty paddock that stretched across seven house blocks

behind our property and ended at the creek. I drew my

mother drawings of the eucalyptus whose limbs I would

embrace the soft dust of their bark sticking to the

wetness of my lips. Sometimes I wrote her poetry in

ink on thin strips of paper bark that I would peel from

the trunk of the tree across the road.

It was at this time that I made a friend. Her name was

Astrid. It was before the flats next door were built

and an empty block of long grass and wildflowers

linked our properties. Despite my mother's fear of

snakes, the folded limbs of the grass would reveal my

path across the paddock as I trod gently so as not to

disturb the wildflowers and butterflies. The grass was

rich gold when I met Astrid. I don't remember her 5-

year-old face but I still remember the rusted barbed wire

that separated us as we spoke. Her olive skinned little

14

brother, Paul, was at her side. His brown hair and eyes

were the same colour as his sister’s. They were both

beautiful, chocolate brown and healthy, in fact we could

all have passed as brother and sisters. Astrid was a year

younger than I was and Paul was two years younger than

Astrid. Krista, the youngest, if she was born, must have

been a babe in arms. Astrid's parents, Cooky and Heinz

accepted me as one of their own. This was terrifying for

me at times, as the Minzenmays were a breed quite

different from my own. Their home was a rich cacophony of

noise, laughter and people yelling to be heard. Mine was

so silent that I could hear every whisper, every rustle.

From my bedroom at the other end of the house I could

hear Schon, the Great Dane, groaning as he adjusted his

ample weight on the beanbag in the laundry that was his

bed. At the same time I could hear the sound of a rough

tongue against fur, as my tabby cat preened herself on my

bed. The Minzenmay kids would tumble excitedly into each

other's bedrooms, slam doors in each other's faces, lock

each other in the bathroom, run wailing to their parents

to tell on each other, receive bellowed reprimands and do

the same thing again.

My family was comfortable with silence, perhaps more

comfortable with it than not. Astrid's parents would talk

to each other at the dinner table, baring their lives and

thoughts while we wiped the tomato sauce off our faces

with our sleeves, or the other kids fought over the

15

remaining spaghetti bolognaise. At their kitchen table I

heard strange things and ate strange things. Astrid's

Grandparents were called ‘Oma’ and ‘Opa’. It was only

years later that I realized that this was because they

were her father’s parents and these titles meant

‘Grandma’ and ‘Grandpa’ in German. At the time, I

thought these elderly people, who always said "almond" at

the end of grace, had very strange names. Astrid's

father, Heinz, spoke with a thick accent. I was

fascinated as I listened to him speak, his tone plucked

chords somewhere inside me that stirred memories that

belonged to my mother's lost childhood. Sometimes I felt

a little frightened of him, I wasn't sure why, he had the

sweetest and most patient nature. I was in awe of Cooky,

Astrid's mother. Her direct, no-nonsense assertiveness

was the antithesis of my mother's social nicety and won

her the affectionate but undisclosed title of "the Cookie

Monster." Once she said to me that it was about time that

I learnt to play instead of presenting myself as a

miniature adult. I was really hurt at the time and ran

home. As I grew older I came to respect what Cookie said

to me. Her bluntness blew away the cobwebs of the secrecy

that I carried and made me feel safe.

It was at Astrid's house that I watched "Countdown", the

famous Australian music show. We would dress up and

danced around the lounge room. Soon I was jumping on

the couch like my adopted siblings, something I did not

16

dare repeat in my own home. Astrid and I became

inseparable; we told secrets to each other, wore our long

brown hair the same way and dressed in matching outfits.

Usually Paul, then ‘Pauly’, would be on the other side of

a firmly shut door to our bedroom or the bathroom during

our long hours of preening, trying to crash in on our

"girl business" with plaintive cries of " Can I play

too...”

For Astrid, my house was a haven, a pocket of elegance and

culture in the developing coastal suburbia that

surrounded us. She was fascinated by the wordless space

that blanketed my home, the unmoved furniture, the rich

red velvet curtains and the Persian rugs and heavy hand

crafted wooden tables and benches. My room seemed

enormous and wonderful to her and my hours of solitude

were rapidly filled with the companionship of my new

‘sister’.

Astrid usually wanted to play at my house. I often craved

the exuberance and freedom of hers and although I would

have to retreat back to my house during the day to recoup

in the familiarity of silence, I would soon return, for

at Astrid's home I could take risks that I would never

entertain in my own home. The Minzenmays bought a hobby

farm and here I would stretch myself a little, urged on

by the other kids' antics, climbing mountains of hay

bails, scaling fences and running unchecked in the

17

endless paddocks. At first I was frightened of everything

and never mastered the degree of the childish

recklessness of the other children, but I blossomed in

the rural landscape. With Astrid, I learned that I felt

enormously relieved when I was naughty and I took

risks. It was as if I was a pot on the stove and the

naughtiness prevented me from boiling over.

I cannot believe that my mother, who insisted that I

roller blade on the patio (never on the road) with a

thick cushion tied to my bottom, ever would have

tolerated me tearing down the steep hill in Herbert

Street amidst the local traffic on a billy kart had

she known what I was doing. I do not have a memory of

ever overtly defying my parents. I do, however, remember

at this age compulsively scratching into the plaster wall

beside my bed with my fingernail. My mother asked me

how the marks appeared and I said that I didn't know.

Thus began an agonizing and intoxicating ritual. Night

after night when my light was turned out, I would lie

in my bed and try and fight an unbearable urge to scratch

another mark in the wall. I became so consumed by this

urge that I was beset by elaborate fantasies of the

dreadful consequences of my failure to perform this

act. My mind would tell me that if I scratched the

wall I would not suffer from the nightmares that had

begun to haunt my nights and the beings that seemed to

materialize from the far wall of my bedroom to make

18

ghoulish faces at me before I fell asleep. As the

nights passed, my mother continued to question my

involvement in what was becoming a coin-sized,

centimeter deep cavern in the wall. I continued to

deny responsibility. I don't remember my mother and I

speaking honestly about what was happening, only the

terror and agitated excitement I experienced each

night as, against my will, my hand scratched away on

the white plaster wall. Eventually, for my eighth

birthday, my parents put up a mural of an Austrian

valley with purple ice capped mountains in the

distance. In the foreground were endless pale green

fields and a beautiful church, set under a brilliant

azure sky. I would run fearlessly on these fields and

meet myself in the little church and when I opened my

eyes after my game of enacting my own funeral, while

my toys lamented by my side, I would behold heaven.

Haunted.

My mother's face was as wary as a wild bird...

"Don't ever tell anyone you have Jewish blood."

"Why not?" I asked her.

"Bad things happen to Jews, those people may only be

pretending all is forgotten. You must keep it a secret.”

19

I longed to ask her who "those people" were but my

mother's potent defiance and distress caused the

questions to remain in my throat. I lapsed into

bewildered silence. I watched as the veil was once

again pulled across her beautiful face. It was as if

my mother had never spoken with the intensity that she

had just revealed. I accepted the milk drink that she

had made me. The thick crust of Milo floated heavily

above the white liquid. I began to spoon the moistened

chocolate powder into my mouth; the slight unease in

my belly and chest gradually subsided. The chasm

closed and I was distracted by chocolate delight. How

was I to know what she held within her? I was just a

child?

If my mother was the sun, I was the moon. I basked I

her brilliance. She illuminated my surface and pulled

me to her, giving me a location in the universe of

endless space that surrounded me. In return for this,

I carried her emotional depths and uncharted inner

territory. As a child, I held it safely for her like a

broody chicken perched upon a mysterious egg. In some

ways, I thought one day, when she was ready, I could

hand it back to her - unblemished, intact and she could

explore its contents with the maturity of her superior

years. I sensed, even then, that whatever was inside

that shell, it was too big for a little girl to handle.

20

Things didn't really go to plan. Before my mother was

ready, there was murmuring from within the shell, I

found my task too immense and before either of us had a

chance to talk about the faceless beast that controlled

us both, she left me alone, barely through my teens, with

the monster of her past.

My mother's lack of family was a powerful underground

current that directed her life and, in many ways, my

own.

Lydia was convinced that there must have been more of

her relatives who had survived the gas chambers. For

years I remember being squashed into foreign phone

booths in our travels around the world as she

nervously called anyone in the phone book with her

father's surname, or derivatives of it. At first she

would talk to my father about these calls but soon his

exasperated silence and frustrated outbursts meant

that these jaunts were made in secret, between breaks

in the day's proceedings as we toured the chiropractic

world conferences.

Looking back now, I can see that my mother was a time

bomb waiting to go off. Under the veneer of a

beautiful and confident woman was an orphan with

immense fears of being abandoned by those she loved,

with the skeletons of attempted suicide and the

genocide of the Holocaust simmering beneath the

21

surface. Yet my mother's self confessed denial gripped

her until her mid life, when images from her and her

ancestors' past began to haunt her. Her dream diaries,

I discovered after her death, were filled with

faceless tormentors, people who would abandon her as a

child in empty sterile rooms, wastelands and

battlefields. I believe she reached a stage where she

could no longer deny her inner torment and she reached

out to her husband for support. My father felt

overwhelmed and ill equipped to weather my mother's

inner storms; his own self-containment seemed all too

tenuous. So the two of them performed a dance toward

and away from each other while I watched, impotent.

My father came from a highly reputable British family

who were formal, strict and reserved in their child

rearing. His father, a lay preacher, had been spared

from the war as he had a reserved occupation working

for a company that manufactured ball-bearings, and his

mother died of bowel cancer when he was sixteen. I have

a photo of him from around that time. He is sitting

awkwardly in the photographer’s studio, short pants

revealing knobby knees, his vulnerability enhanced by his

wary smile as he looks toward the camera, ears protruding

inelegantly from a face that shows that he’s seen too

much already. It was with this little boy I formed a

relationship of care and forgiveness that sustained me

through my adult life.

22

If my mother was a sun, then my father was a comet who

would blaze across my sky leaving a trail of fire and

magma and smoldering wounds. To say my relationship

with Dad was complex was an understatement, but if I

look at him through the eyes of myself as a little

girl, I feel immense adoration, fear, fascination and

bewilderment. From the same window I would wait for my

mother's kisses, I would watch for the sure solid

steps of my father when he returned from the banking in

the main street. He would traverse the concrete islands

in the sea of green like Hercules and with each of the

five steps my heart would reverberate with joy that he

was coming home to me. But I quickly learned that he

was uncomfortable with the immensity of my love, so

rather than face his dismissal, I would be a spinning

top on the inside but maintain a detachment that

matched his own.

Absence and Presence

When someone dies they are immortalized — a snapshot

whose nuances fade, their character can be summarized

into a sentence. And when a beautiful woman dies

young, they are iconized. Grace Kelly, Princess Diana

and my mother. Lydia's beauty was still in full bloom

when she died. Her skin did not sag nor was it

crisscrossed with the latitude and longitude of her

23

experience. And if you are still a child, or a young

adult, you cannot leave a dead parent behind, they come

with you as you continue through life's twists and

turns — a mythological figure, silently passing

judgment at your decisions, a missed embrace at your

successes. It is very hard to rebel against your

mother when she is dead. Letting go is even harder

when you can't argue or re-write the past together.

From the time your life is punctuated with death, you

live with the knowledge that the only thing we can

really have is our own life.

There is a fine line between working through one's

pain and wrapping it around us as a comfort blanket.

It can be a way to know ourselves; we can be defined

by our suffering. And yet we can deny our pain, shove

it sideways and it can seep though our veneer and make

us sick and bring pain to the lives of those closest to

us. To let go one must have trust and trust is a

feeling, a state of being that can only come from

within us. There are few in this world that can hold

our complete trust and if one finds such a person,

they are the most precious gift. Placing that trust in

one less equipped to hold our deepest vulnerability is

devastating. Our relationship with our own inner well

of contentment is imperative. If we live outside of

ourselves, there will always be reasons to suffer in this

world.

24

The mind is a fickle bedfellow. It will seduce you one

moment with the smoothest of concepts and when you are

disarmed, and wanting, it will deconstruct you. This

world offers us the full smorgasbord — the sweetest

fruits and the most bitter, the healing balms and the

poisons. There are parts of us we can nourish and they

will grow stronger. It was the searing pain of my

mother’s passing when I was 21 that turned me

irrevocably toward pursuit of an inner richness,

something constant and that was secure because it lay

within me.

Now, as an adult, I can understand how Lydia had been

devastated by the trauma that infiltrated her life

through the experiences of her ancestors. I had read a

little about refugees, survivors of wars and

descendents of families who had been ripped apart by

genocide. Lydia was like a kite, whose guiding cord

had been severed, floating recklessly in a sky, still

bright and colourful but with no real means of

direction or control. I always used to define myself

through my mother, but it is my father who has

remained with me through the years as we were battered

by our own stories, both shared and inherited. Our

paths diverged and years were lost to

misunderstandings and perceived disappointments,

seasoned by our grief, rifts deepened by our

25

stubbornness and our awkwardness in reaching out to

each other. My father stayed with me, and we were

able, only recently, to finally clasp each other in

forgiveness and put to rest the stories that haunted

us both.

3. Researchers Log: 14th May 2015

More often than not the creative process is a little

like having dysentery. What starts as a gurgle

becomes a full-blown discomfort so that one’s usual

shape is bloated and distended. Nights are

frequently short bursts of dream-filled sleep with

long hours of waking, obsessively turning details

and potential over and over in a state that is both

fretful and excited, while trying to calm the urge

to get up and paint, write or edit at 2 am, and

again at 3am, 4am and 5am. Then out it all comes,

words tumble onto the page, paint is slapped on

canvas, downloaded as if by ear or with a vision of

completeness. The discerning and detached editor

comes much later, like a doctor whose role it is to

salvage, contain and tidy the explosive, compulsive

consequences of the creative act. Its then one

prays it isn’t a pile of shit.

The dance is not always so manic. Sometimes one can

26

contentedly chisel away at something, delighting in

the slow emergence of its detail. It is the deep

material, the stories that hold parts of your soul

that are rarely, if ever, exposed, these can be hard

work. Not that one has a choice in the telling of

them, they just tell themselves, one needs to become

the crucible that holds them as they incarnate and

mop up the mess of their birth.

Making this film was an enjoyable flowing

experience, a celebration of my new canvas- film,

and my new brush, an affordable but professional

hand held film camera bought from the funds gathered

from selling a number of my paintings online at

severely discounted prices. Out with the old and in

with the new. I did writhe a bit before showing the

finished product to my father. I chose to send it

to him via email, as we prefer not to visibly share

strong emotions. I phoned him and told him what I

was going to do and I left him the instruction to

relieve me of my anxiety regarding his response

before the end of the day.

One hour later he replied via text:

“It’s great! A real tearjerker. Shame about the old

git in it”.

27

To which I replied, via text:

“I love that old git deeply”.

And that was the end of it.

The written piece came about through cobbling

together and re writing extracts of a diary I kept

diligently from 1995-2002 and less vigilantly, over

the last 10 years. Writing Sounds of the Past was the

full immersive and slightly unraveling creative

experience. I don’t think one can delve into the

stories of one’s ancestors, especially those so full

of suffering and disquiet, without being deeply

affected. It was particularly confronting for me to

see online images of my great uncle’s books about

the holocaust, most of them in German. I could no

longer stay in the semi-detached place where I could

avoid thinking that these stories, although their

impact on my world was palpable, remained stories.

They actually happened. And the psychologist in me

could not help but gather together the threads from

that past that had woven their way into my own life.

The echo of the writer, the artist, the academic,

seeker of the Divine, the woman tormented by grief

and demons from the past, the orphan seeking

belonging. My stories are their stories.

28

4. Filmic Review and Response to the Film

If I were to analyze what worked effectively with

the film as an artistic piece, what I feel is it’s

greatest strength is the universality of the story.

I have not yet met anyone in my life who hasn’t

struggled at times to hold the tension of

disappointment, fears of loss and strong attachment

(positive or otherwise) with their parents or the

people who raised them. Artistic decisions that I

made in creating and editing the film were primarily

intuitive. The use of black and white makes the

stunning scenery in Lorne, where it was filmed, less

distracting and highlights the reflective and

vulnerable qualities of the piece. The fade to

black between cuts is reminiscent of closing one’s

eyes and builds a sense of inward focus and invites

the viewer to reflect on the themes presented. The

slow, rhythmic pace of the voice over, the intimate

“speaking to the audience” style of the spoken word,

and the lack of background noise of music, may

invite the viewer into a hypnagogic state. As

information consumers in a culture dominated by

technology, it is easy to become desensitized to

visual imagery, especially when it is coupled with

intensity of movement and sound. This piece, I

think, was strengthened by the lack of it.

29

It has been noted by some that my father never looks

to or speaks to the camera. He actually does,

briefly pulling a face and waving at the camera as

he walks past in the company of my husband and dog.

It is an observational piece, arguably an

observational documentary, but I have not given my

father a voice. I’ve pieced together the images,

chosen the order of where I’ve placed the shots in

the story, whether it is a wide shot, or an extreme

close up. I made decisions about how long the image

holds the eye, and on which words of the voice over

the visual story changes. The power was in my

hands; the story was the one that I, as the

filmmaker, chose to tell. But then, isn’t it

always?

Audience Response:

I was surprised and delighted by peoples’ response

to the film. Many of the people I showed it to were

visibly overcome by their feelings and compelled to

share with me the story of their own relationships

with their parents. Unfortunately I have not

thought how to document these more visceral

responses as they happened in settings that were

casual and intimate. It is something I need to

think further about. I have however, included some

of the email and social media responses both in

30

screen shots of my Facebook page and messages that I

have received on Vimeo. Any emails I have included

have been with the permission of the author and

personal material has been removed to preserve their

privacy.

I have included some of the responses, below:

“I could sense the hours you spend in meditation in the spaces between your commentary. For me the spaces were profound, the natural humble element was beautiful. I think you have a great future in this field.”

“I watched your video and it was pertinent and timely, and I felt connections from my own perspective, while appreciating the vulnerability and honesty of yours. I could feel and see the myriad of emotions towards your dad, stemming from a lifetime of events and it was beautiful and hurtful. If you know what I mean! It made me think, yet again, how to be the stronger person in our relationship.Thanks for sharing.”

“Very brave and very beautiful. I'd imagine showing him would be the mostconfronting part.”

“Powerful. Loved the video, the effect of black and white, is hauntingly beautiful. It made me cry. Yes, Lara, I rang [your Dad], because my Catholic guilt (which does not make an appearance very often!), compelled me to own up to witnessing a moment which I perceived to be private - even though, logically, I know it was a general post [on Facebook]!”

“ Such timely realizations about your feelings about your Dad. It's brave and beautiful I think, to 'love fiercely' and to resolve to savor the moments and seize the remaining days.”

31

“This is so powerful, Lara. It had to wait a day before I could compose myself to respond to this video. I wish I could have said some of these things to my father. But I still can to my daughter.........well done!”

32