Black Dogs and White Flags
“I’m not a fighter,” confesses Pamela Bone, referring to the myeloma that’s depleted her strength in recent years. “If anything I’m a pacifist.”
Bone, the ex-Age columnist and astute social critic, resents all the war-tropes attached to cancer. Patients must FIGHT, she lists. The disease is BATTLE. Cells are BOMBARDED with MAGIC BULLETS. The story is regrettably reduced to LOSING and WINNING.
The only reason she opposed her rogue cells, she believes is a civic sense of duty to stay alive. “It’s what’s expected of us – and I’ve always been law-abiding.” Long may her civic obedience continue. Whether she likes it or not, Pam’s an oncology pinup, and a champion writer, never afraid of candour’s consequences.
She spoke alongside another colossus, poet Les Murray, a dynamite session at the Melbourne Writers Festival, chaired by Clare Forster. Les had “cemetery things” happen in his body when some Ecoli escaped his liver, flooding the bloke’s ample system. “I nearly pegged it,” he admits, the self-effacing cocky coming out.
Followed by the poet, who read verses attached to his assorted demons:
NEAR-DEATH: “God at the end of prose somehow be our poem”
PANIC ATTACK: “The body had a nightmare awake”
And why DEPRESSION, after Murray’s extended boycott, has finally crept into the poet’s canon: “You make me cry you bastard, and I’ll make you sing.”
Murray is Australia’s Milton with a twin-blade sense of humour. If it wasn’t for depression, he reckons, he’d write as much prose, but the art-form compared to poetry is “too bloody exhausting”. For those wanting to go deeper into the writer’s black-dog battle, read the dark splendour of his poem Corniche - a lyrical reply to Phillip Larkin’s death-flirt Aubade.
And last a note to any aspiring Country-and-Western singers, looking for that killer line. Go no further than Les’ appraisal of the health imperative all humans must bear: “You can’t turn your back on your heart.”
Get twanging. And stay well.