The Forest House and other places of Abode

My first encounter with a ‘ghost’ did not take place in the Forest House...I speak of it now only because it coloured my perceptions of the ‘visitors’ who descended upon me when I lived in Forest…back in the seventies and early eighties.

My family…if you can call it that…had arrived back in Australia after a sojourn in India. The return trip had been harrowing because I had pneumonia…which I am not quite sure I survived. I was told that I had it in both lungs. Curiously my most vivid memory of that return trip was of a stopover in Hong Kong  and a family outing to a Chinese restaurant. I remember it because Dabios ordered fish lips.

Anyhoos…back in Australia…to Sydney and the house in Bondi Junction to be precise…my grandfather’s house…That first night back…I volunteered to sleep on the couch in the living room…a dark gloomy room  with a dilapidated old grand piano in the corner… because there were no other beds available…they had all been taken…I think other members of the extended family were visiting at the time. I was nine years old.

I remember waking up in the middle of the night and being scared beyond belief by the sight of an old hag…evil doesn’t even come close to describing this thing…standing at the foot of the couch just staring at me. I closed my eyes for a few moments hoping that it wasn’t real and that it would be gone when I opened them again. It wasn’t…it had moved up next to me and was looking down on me…and then I don’t remember what happened next.

When I told Marine about it the next day, she confessed that the room was haunted. I asked her why she didn’t warn me and she said that she didn’t think that it would be a problem since I didn’t know the room was haunted. Perversely she also told me that she would not dream of sleeping in there herself…and yet she had no qualms about letting me sleep there?

So fast forward a few years…we are now living in Canberra…the first house we lived in was 15 Grey Street Deakin…it was owned by the Rowland family…who were away on a diplomatic posting. My brother Simoney became friends with Andrew Rowland…a few years later… in the psyche ward at what was then the Woden Valley hospital.

My most vivid memories of that house are of it being infested with fleas…also of being very sick asthma…and of a poisoning incident where I had been given various types of medication that were… I believe the word for it is… ‘contraindicated’. I remember lying on the couch feeling like death while everyone carried on around me oblivious to my agony…I can truly say I have never felt that sick in my entire life...I don’t even know why I was given this medication in the first place…I wasn’t sick at the time…unless it was a deliberate poisoning…I probably died…I wouldn’t be surprised.

There was once incident where I was playing in the garden when Marine came rushing out at me… I grabbed on to a hose and tried to hose her down…so to speak…when Simoney rushed to her defence…I tried to defend myself and somehow ended up kicking him in the balls…which was not my intention…it was an accident…later that day…he had me down on the ground and was punching me out…in the back…which totally fucked my kidneys.

When I think back on that terrible day…I truly wonder…what the fuck was Marines problem?

We lived in a house on Golden Grove after that…memorable only for the fact that two wild dogs came into the back garden one night and ate my pet guinea pigs…one of whom was pregnant.

I was fourteen when we moved into the house in Forrest…number 50 National Circuit to be precise.

The first few years passed by without too much strangeness. I started high school…Telopea Park High…which was a nightmare because apart from anything else…I became infested with warts on my hands and face…it took a long time for Marine to deal with that little problemo…is all I can say.

In 1973 I left that school for another…Canberra Girls Grammar…on Melbourne Avenue…that’s when I met Rosie…and we soon became inseparable. It was just the two of us until Vanessa arrived…also Louise. Rosie and I drifted apart after that but not before completing the DeBorge Letters...a long and licentious saga about two extremely wayward young ladies and their amorous adventures in Victorian England or thereabouts.

To cut a long story short…I left the Grammar School during my final year following an altercation with the headmistress…Mrs Shaw…in the art room which had to do with her being outraged at us listening to the radio…anyway I was suspended for back chat or something…can’t really remember…I never went back…I left the school and then left home…well I was more or less kicked out of home…and after Dabios tried to strangle me…well enough was enough…that’s when I went to live in Jardine street.

The weirdness at the house in Forrest began after I had moved back there at the beginning of 1978…

Simoney was in and out of mental hospital and was deteriorating rapidly…not from his supposed mental condition of schizophrenia…but as a result of the cocktail of toxic drugs that he was taking.

Marine thought he had gone mad because she saw him stoned one day… ‘he was catatonic’ she said. She made several lame attempts to have me diagnosed with this same mysterious illness…without success.

Marine thought anybody who was the least bit unusual was mad. I remember telling her a funny story about the brother of a friend of mine who was a bit of a character and she said…he’s mad. It was her favourite word.

I am not quite sure of the year exactly…because everything becomes a bit jumbled at this point…I had a boyfriend called Max and he was a sweetie…we were inseparable for about a year and a half…it seems I might have been living in two or more places at the same time because while I was living in Forest…I was also living at Toad Hall and in Sydney where I met Charlie...and I also lived in Deakin for a while… ‘suburb of my first séance’…but when I look back…I think how could I have lived in all those places between the ages of nineteen and 21…and be living in Forrest with a boyfriend called Max at the same time…

All I can say is I was either 19, 20 or 21 years old and living in Forrest…Simoney by this time was an inmate at Kenmore Hospital…a notorious psychiatric institution in Goulburn that has since closed down.
One evening around about 10.00 oclock…I decided to ‘turn in’ early…Dabios and Marine were still up…and there were lights on in the house…

My bedroom was situated at the side of the house and was notable for the fact that it had opaque windows all around two sides of it.

I remember turning off my light and lying down on my bed…there seemed to be a bright light shining outside but I thought nothing of it.
Almost immediately I became aware that I was not alone…I could just make out the presence…if I can say that…of three humanoid beings…but when  I tried to turn my head to get a better look…I found myself to be completely paralysed…in my panic I tried to scream for help…but no sound would come out… there was this flurry of activity around me that lasted only a second or two and then I found myself falling at tremendous speed…the next thing I remember is being in a vehicle of some kind…travelling at great speed…

I might be wrong about this…but I feel sure that we were travelling along that road that goes past Lake Burly Griffin in Yarralumla…I have a vivid memory of an incident involving me and five boys from the Boys Grammar School.

I don’t know if this incident is connected with that one or not…all I know is this…it was the middle of winter…a freezing dark night…I find myself in Western Park naked with five boys from the Grammar School…for some inane reason we decide to swim across the lake and then walk back across the bridge to Weston Park to retrieve our clothes….I don’t remember crossing the bridge…all I remember is that I am naked walking along a highway with these boys and running from tree to tree so as I did not want to be caught in the headlights of the passing cars in such an embarrassing situation.

I don’t remember anything after that…whether we made it back or what?
Can you imagine my dilemma…if I told Marine and Dabios about it…they would have said I was mad.

Things got worse after that…every night became a nightmare. I moved out of that room into a little room next to it…that used to be my sisters room.

Many nights I would be woken by the bed violently shaking or the wardrobe would be…invisible people would come and sit on my bed…I know this because I would feel the mattress give way under their weight. One night an entity came into my room, grabbed my doona and threw it across the room.

I would also…frequently…find myself jolted out of my body…literally ejected from it…as a result of electrical shocks to my head. Simoney at that time was receiving electric shock therapy at Kenmore…could these incidents be somehow related?

On the odd occasion when I was able to overcome the paralysis that often accompanied these incidents…I would run into my parents room and curl up on the floor at the foot of their bed.

I did try to talk to Marine about the situation…once…but she just dismissed it as the product of an overactive imagination. I was also wary of giving her too much ammunition for fear that she would think that I too had gone ‘mad’.

I should say at this point that I had no idea of what was happening to me…the notion that this incidents were ‘alien’ in nature did not even cross my mind…

The visitations gradually subsided as the months wore on and life returned to normal again. As the years passed I put them out of my mind. It was easy to forget that it had ever happened…that is until they came back in 1995.

Two weird occurrences are worth mentioning here...

A young man…an acquaintance of my brother Simoney…who he knew from the psyche ward…came to stay with us for a while…he was a really charming, very engaging character. I was very drawn to him.
One afternoon, sitting on my front porch in the Forrest House…he held out his arm to show me his veins… “Look…I’ve got kangaroo blood”, he said.

Another time...it was evening…Marine and Dabios were out for the night…my little sister…Sarah…who would have been around eight years old at the time was there…as was Simoney. Simoney was acting strangely…walking in and out of the house and acting sort of deranged.
There was a knock on the front door…I opened the door to see a rather thin bedraggled looking man…aged about thirty…. with stringy long hair standing there with a little girl aged about five…she was thin, pale little thing with thin blonde hair wearing a summery cotton dress...little raggedy girl… She had with her a basket and inside the basket was a white rabbit. I invited them into the house to my regret actually because…the guy was obviously deranged…he told me he had an axe and that he was going to kill someone that night. I tried to humour him…I thought …he can’t be serious….Anyway they were gone the next morning. I don’t remember how the night ended.

Simoney had a friend…a boy called Ken Cowan…Ken was heart achingly beautiful…like an angel…and a sweet gentle soul…we all loved Ken…Vanessa, Rosie and me…

Ken was seventeen when he died… he was riding his bike over a bridge in Hoskingtown…one dark, winters night. It was pouring with rain and so the story goes…just as he was crossing a bridge…it gave way and he was swept away by the floodwaters.

Windy Mountain

December 15 or thereabouts… 2012

Dear Sandy…I have had two more adventures since I wrote to you concerning my discovery of Skull Island and the variety of items that I saw there. The two adventures include; a visit to Windy Mountain and the placement of a beautiful purple pyramid and another visit to Skull Island to celebrate the end of the world…..to be continued.

There is not much to report on my visit to Windy Mountain…except that it was a very, very windy that day… I felt like was walking against a riptide, the force of the air on the mountains was literally forcing me back as I was making my way forward with the result that progress was slow and exhausting. My intention was to climb to the summit that day…and I’ve been there twice before…the first time with the ancient mummies at age 11 or 12 and the second time a few years ago with my son Nico…on this occasion I only got as far as the lookout…about halfway up.

Things always work out the way they do for a reason and I figured that there was a reason I did not make the summit that day…I was not supposed to…I had with me a number of orgonite objects in geometric configurations which I left in various places along the way…along with crystals and some shells…maybe I was not meant to place them any higher than the lookout…

To reach the starting point for the summit walk involves a chairlift to a place called Eagles Nest, where there is a restaurant…called…you guessed it…the Eagles Nest Café? I think. Anyhoos I merely mention this because on the way up to this place on the chairlift…I did not notice any other ‘establishments’…however on the way down I noticed that there was another refreshment type of establishment about halfway down…that had clearly been abandoned…It was called Kareela… I wondered what it was doing there…was it built before the chairlift went into operation perhaps or after the Eagles Nest Café was built… possibly by unsuspecting investors???…I just thought it was odd that’s all…and that’s the end of this chapter to Windy Mountain…not much to report really…

Shattered - Broken Heads and a Broken Heart

Shattered – Broken Heads and a Broken Heart

It’s my birthday today…I don’t know how old I am because I was never born but if I had to choose an age for myself it would be either four or one hundred and fifty four…or 0…

I know that my whole life has been a lie and that Dabios and Marine are not my parents. Dabios, Marine and my little brother died in a car crash a very long time ago…Marine told me that she had an affair with a man called Peter Younghusband…was he my Dad?... when she was living in Africa and that Dabios had an affair with his neighbours wife…in Africa.

  She had a little boy…Tonyo…the same age as me…four…we used to hold hands….he came to my fourth birthday party and saw me blow out the candles on my birthday cake…or not…as I was blowing out the candles I stumbled and fell backwards off my chair….when I got back on the chair…my arms hung loosely in front of me and I didn’t have the breath then to blow out the candles…someone else must have done it.

Marine told me once a long time ago…perhaps in fact yesterday that she was driving along a dusty rode in Africa with my brother and me in the car when she got a flat tyre on a little hill close to where a pride of lions lay snoozing in the sun. She said she got out of the car to change the tyre…and that it had been a lucky escape…it wasn’t a lucky escape.
That may or may not have been the year Elsa the lion cub raised by humans and released back into the wild… began attacking villagers. Dabios told me that her ‘owner’…a man with a gun…went looking for her…and he did find her and he did shoot her but that is one part of the story not included in the retelling of the story in the film ‘Born Free’.
In any case Marine was not my mother…perhaps Elwyn Morris was…apparently David had had an affair with her in England and she got pregnant and had an abortion.

There is a photo out there somewhere…I have seen it in Dabios’s photo album at his farm in Yass… of my brother and his identical twin aged about 2…one of the little boys is standing up, quite unfazed while the other little boy sits facing him…eyes level with his penis crying uncontrollably…tears streaking his face.

Marine once told me that a photographer friend of Dabios’s and David were visiting the Congo…apparently because there had been an uprising there and that this photographer friend of Dabios was captured by cannibals and eaten…I was shocked to hear that.

I don’t blame Dabios and Marine for what happened to us  and I don’t blame  the ex Primeminster of Singapore…or Usurunan or Lily or my brother and my sister….or the astral shells of long ago departed friends. What is the point of pointing your finger at anyone anymore and saying….he did it….or she did it…when the person you are pointing your finger at is a ghost…can you blame a persons astral shell for that matter?….if the shell is occupied by something else….and you don’t know what that thing is?….to make the situation even more confusing are the sudden and unpredictable turns in behaviour of the apparent astral shell…there are times when they seem to quite like you…even recognise you…perhaps…. and those other times when they can appear to be quite monstrous. At least I have some explanation for Marines cold indifference towards me and my Dabios’s tyranny.

At least now I can come to terms with Marines inability to hear me…to listen to me and Davids persistent refusal to allow me to speak while everyone else had free reign…indeed...i cannot think of a single instance where I have ever been allowed to finish a sentence…now I know why of course.

What is there to say to a God who does not believe in God… a spirit who doesn’t believe in spirits…a crystal that laughs at crystals and a fairy who doesn’t believe in fairy tales.

…ore…a slave who does not know he’s a slave…a slave who thinks his slave master is the only one who speaks the truth…
What is there left to say?…Nothing!

I also have had to harden my heart and in so doing have broken a few hearts myself.

The Young Black Elephant broke my heart…he was my first love….and…that was the first and last time my heart was broken by a boy.

To be fair I don‘t know what my astral shell was doing when I left it….what terrible things were done in my name?…what unspeakable atrocities were committed by something wearing my face?

And what face did I think I was wearing when I could no longer see it?
I have asked myself this question so many times….when did I die?
I have died a thousand times in more ways than one but since my consciousness is not attached to the part of me that lives I am oblivious… I feel the pain of these deaths and I have learn’t to recognise the symptoms….headache means head smashed in….heart pains means heart cut out…a hot flush is a burn…inability to breathe…can mean drowning, suffocating or smoke inhalation…flatline tone means life support cut off.
This is not to say I don’t know what it feels like to feel acute pain…the most acute pain for me has been emotional….i was devastated when I lost Daniel…even though I was already losing myself.

I figured something else out last night….re the rip in the fabric of space time the rip in the human brain and its flow on affects with regard to the consciousness of the group soul that is this planet…a heart broken beyond all repair also creates a rip in the fabric of space time.

The pain of seeing this world I love so much being destroyed again and again has caused me to feel acute pain. The abuse and mistreatment of animals and total wanton disregard for their right to live has been acutely painful…so much so that I have become numb to it.

 The death of my dog Zac in 1982 is an event that I can only describe as being one of a shattering magnitude.

Zac was a red kelpie who lived with me in Hall. At the time I was living with Dean a boy I met at Macquarie University through Anita…a hobbit girl who knew my brother before she knew me.

One day when Zac was about six months old a guy on a motorbike smashed into him.   I remember seeing him lying dead on the road….there was blood coming out of his mouth and ears…in a daze I carried him into the house…I was in such a state of shock that I could hardly walk…my legs turned to jelly….Dean carried him down to a room underneath the house and I stayed with him there a long time…as his body grew cold and stiff the grief set in…

How can I describe the pain I felt…it was agony…it seared through me and shattered my soul… my heart ached with the pain of thousands of little sharp daggers splintering it beyond all recognition.

We buried him the garden the next day… I remember the skies clouding over as it started to rain…it poured with rain that day and the next turning the garden into a swamp…I remember lying down on the couch curled up in a fetal position sobbing for hours…then I started to vomit and that went on for days…I had diarrhea… my body had gone in to such a state of shock that it stopped working…ever part of it ached…my throat hurt…I couldn’t  eat I found no refuge in sleep, I could barely walk…never have I known such pain…it was unendurable and it’s a pain I never want to feel again… I think that must have been when I died.

I floated around the house for weeks like a zombie after that…my grief was further compounded by the persistent attempts on the part of Chris – Maija’s boyfriend - to engage me in conversations about the relationship issues that he was having with her….i would just sit there mindlessly mouthing platitudes and nodding and just wishing he would go away….it got to a point where I could no longer stand it…I said to him…something along the lines of…. ‘Chris my dog has just died I can’t talk about this with you at the moment’…well…you should have seen his reaction…he was incredulous…he said…  ‘How can you compare the death of a dog to the relationship issues I’m having with Maija?’…truly I was lost for words…tears stung my eyes and I ran out of the room….i didn’t want to look at him let alone engage in a debate about it.

One day a few months later …Maija came over for a visit…she was also in a distraught state because her dog Tish had been killed in a collision with a car in Gunning…not only that she was sick with the mumps… her cheeks and neck had swelled up to such an extent that she was barely recognisable… we consoled each other as best we could and maybe drew some comfort from the fact that at least some else out there understands the pain of losing your best friend…your dog.