A Diary Entry Set during the Early Colonialist Period

Blog 5

OWN TOPIC: CREATIVE. 

Create a diary entry from the perspective of a person set in the early 19th Century with injections of anti context values and perceptions from a modern perspective.

Dear Diary,

Today I had the most odd experience…

I was pegging the sheets on the string from the house to the stump. I had Jack straddled around my waist, nestled between us I left the pegs. I thought it was quite nifty. I amused myself and him by rustling them between our torsos before clumsily pegging what seemed to be the corner of the cloth unto the line. I thought about my husband at work, and what I should make for dinner, I thought about Margaret and William next door and wondered if they were trying for another baby. I looked at Jack’s blue green eyes and thought “oh what utter perfection”. He was perfect, with the world at his fingertips. Life was grand and complete, we were all so happy, he was able to experience life in all its fruitfulness.

Then I dropped a peg.

Which meant I had to pick it up. Which meant I could drop the other pegs… or the white sheet… or the baby!

I stood for a minute. My eyes traveling along the tree line. Leaves and branches brushing together against the small wind. I heard a song, unlike a bird, and unlike Margaret.

I saw it, the source of the music I mean, her, an aboriginal singing and humming peacefully.

I was entranced in her song, and her actions.

She stood there, baby straddled on her waist, picking berries and leaves and twigs and nestling her findings between the torsos of hers and her baby’s. She glided from tree to tree peacefully and rhythmically; dancing to the hum of her lips and crunch of her feet on the bark.

I wondered if Jack could see this majesty against the beauty of the bush. Rather, within the beauty of the bush. I looked at him and his eyes seemed more green now, like the leaves feathered between her and her child. She seemed like a good mother. Hell, even I longed to be straddled around her waist and carried with ease.

I tried to reach the top of my imaginary tree and collect the ingredients for tonight’s dinner. Imagine plucking a whole roast from a tree. I started to hum a song my mother sung to me, but it felt wrong against the sounds of the landscape. So I began to sway jack and mimic her rhythm.

But I stood on the peg.

My inspiration for this was Tottie Tippet 1987. Through the piece being set in 1901, injections of topics, like the women’s reproductive cycle, were unorthodox and unconventional to publications of the time. People did not understand the realities of the women’s experience and did not want to acknowledge them either, until it was forced from the rise of feminist values.

Thus, I wanted to emulate this about the indigenous peoples’ psyche and experience and therefore highlight the similarities between the implicit struggles of a woman’s experience amidst postcolonial values and the experience and prejudice against Aboriginal Australians.

Through creating an empathy which would not have been acknowledged by women of the time in such explicit detail, reminds the audience of the realities of the Indigenous Australian life in Australia and critiques why was it so hard to find harmony; as there were so many similarities.