Friday 27 May 2011

The following post was originally published on the blog Live Alive. It’s a review written by writer and psychiatrist in training Elise Bialylew of our Wednesday night event featuring Ingrid Betancourt in conversation with Peter Mares. Video of the event will be published next week. We encourage submissions of reviews of our events, although we can’t promise publication in every instance.

Wednesday night at the Wheeler Centre Ingrid Betancourt, the French-Colombian politician who was held hostage in the jungle for six and a half years by the Colombian rebel group FARC, shared harrowing and inspiring stories about her experience in captivity.

The details of her story are documented in her autobiography Even Silence Has An End. However, listening to her share her stories in person had a powerful impact which brought many of the audience members to tears. It was at times difficult to conceive that the woman who sat on stage, dressed smartly and speaking so articulately was the same person who had actually lived through the stories she shared. She recounted the seeming endless days of being marched through the jungle and held captive, chained by her neck and guarded by child soldiers who were the same age as her own two children. During the six years she attempted to escape multiple times however was caught by FRAC each time. She discussed the fears she needed to overcome in order to escape: floating down a river at night for days on end that was inhabited by piranhas, crocodiles and snakes, risking starvation and perhaps never finding her way out alive from the dense jungle.

When asked what sustained her throughout the experience she responded immediately with the answer: Love. She recounted how important and life-saving it was to hear her mother’s messages through the radio every day for six years, despite her mother being uncertain about whether the messages would ever be received. She spoke about the importance of cultivating self love and drawing upon memories of love from her family as an antidote to protect her from the constant hate and torture she experienced from guards and, at times, fellow hostages. She believed that if it was not for the outside world who constantly fought for her freedom and kept her story alive she doubts whether she would have been set free. She expressed sadness around those that are still today being kept hostage after twelve years in the jungle.

Hearing Ingrid speak made me reflect on the notion of courage. Is courage a virtue that only grows under circumstances that exceed what we think we can handle or are some people inherently more courageous than others. What supports our courage and what inhibits it? I felt deep admiration and respect for Ingrid Betancourt. Her words highlighted to me the importance and service that those of us who live less challenging lives can play in supporting those heroes who so courageously sacrifice their personal freedom in pursuit of truth and justice.

A volume of lavishly-illustrated drawings for children by a pioneering Australian woman will be auctioned next month. Charlotte Waring arrived in Australia in 1826 at the age of 29. She’d been hired to be a governess to the children of John Macarthur’s nephew, but instead she married agriculturalist and author James Atkinson, whom she’d met on her way to the colony.

As well as writing and publishing the first Australian children’s book – A Mother’s Offering to her Children: By a Lady, Long Resident in New South Wales (1841) – an Age report describes Atkinson as “a child prodigy; a fiercely independent, well-educated woman; a single mother of four left to run one of the most important colonial properties in the Southern Highlands; a young widow who was reputedly raped by a notorious bushranger; a battered wife who fled her alcoholic second husband, though it left her penniless.”

In 1843, Charlotte illustrated a 30-page notebook for her daughter Emily’s 13th birthday with coloured drawings of the flora, fauna and indigenous people of the Southern Highlands region. That notebook has come to light after languishing in the drawer of a descendant for some 25 years, and will be auctioned on June 12 by the Aalder’s auction house in Sydney. Another of her daughters, Louisa (1834-1872), became a pioneering writer, naturalist and feminist.

Poster of a Coffs Harbour Amateur Theatrical Society adaptation of Cloudstreet

A Perth-based fan of the Tim Winton classic Cloudstreet believes she’s narrowed the location of Tim Winton’s much-loved novel to the inner-city suburb of West Leederville. Heidi Ciriello has identified West Leederville’s Kimberley Street as the most likely location of the flaking mansion shared for two decades by the Pickles and Lambs.

The report of readers scouring the streets of a city in search of a house that might or might not be the template for a house in a book is testament to the place the novel holds in many readers' hearts. In a review of a three-part television adaptation in the May edition of The Monthly, MJ Hyland wrote of the novel, “Tim Winton’s Cloudstreet is a compassionate masterpiece, which is to Australians what George Orwell’s 1984 is to the English and Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mocking Bird is to Americans.” In fact, in 2003, Cloudstreet topped an ABC/Australian Society of Authors poll of Australians' favourite Australian books. The following, it placed fifth in the ABC’s My Favourite Book promotion, ranking Australians' favourite books from anywhere. The book has also been adapted for the stage by Nick Enright and Justin Monjo.

Poster of a Castle Hill Players adaptation of Cloudstreet

The second part of the Cloudstreet adaptation, with a screenplay written by the author, airs this Sunday night on the cable channel Showtime. The adaptation has received mixed reviews. The Australian’s Michael Bodey has called the lead performances “inch-perfect”, characterising the lavish production “one of the best miniseries that we’ve produced here, [recalling] some of the best stuff Kennedy-Miller made in the 80s.” Hyland wrote, “Most of the novel’s deft magic is only thinly realised in what is often rushed and superficial summary.” Here’s what the publicity-shy Tim Winton makes of it all and here’s a Slow TV interview with director Matthew Saville on adapting the novel for the small screen.