innocence...

'To Kill a Mockingbird' - Harper Lee (1960)
I am currently sharing this novel with my Year 10 English class
in an independent school, Melbourne Victoria...

Students are marvelling how an 'old' novel seems to still find a very active pulse today...
Interesting, seeing that the novel is filtered with American traditions and the students are Australian...
Boundaries are not obstacles, but rather the tempting opportunity to explore some unknown byways...
I am glad of that...

My personal connection with this novel spans many years...
It was one of the first texts I shared with an English class in Sydney, New South Wales in 1988...
(and several subsequent years...)
It was a government high school at Picton, a little south of Sydney close by Razorback  hills...
(These hills were between the Blue Mountain region west of Sydney and the Southern Highlands...)
If it sounds like an outer Sydney community, it was...
The students were a unique mix of city and country, aliens and 'in crowd'...
academics and tradies...
with a liberal dose of coal miner offspring (from nearby Tahmoor and Bargo... )

This year, the student clientele in Melbourne represents a similar demographic...
outer Melbourne mixed identities in what was the fruit and veggie bowl of old Melbourne...
replacing the coal miners of Sydney are the dwindling numbers of farmers...
Melbourne, like too many cities, has an insatiable habit of gorging on fertile land
in the urgent quest
for more housing estates...
more profit...
more ignorant sabotage of our natural treasures...


For me personally, this novel seems to haunt me...
a thread in my life...
It first surfaced when my first husband, a 'sometimes' gambler, cheated on me...many times...
and left me with 2 young children to raise...
That was the beginning of my teaching career...
It lingered through the 1990's till I moved to Liffey, Tasmania
with another more addicted gambler, my 2nd husband...
a brilliant weaver of magical stories...
a nasty drinker...
and now
after the recent passing of my 3rd partner in life...
(a man of many secrets I wish I didn't now know...
and a seriously hooked, addicted gambler)
it appears again...

is it time for me
to surface from my innocence shroud
(that I didn't realise was there)
to dissolve the mockingbird identity
and instead of just seeking and believing in the good in others
try to beware of a possible dark side
their murdering knife of power and ego and addiction

time to gamble on some spiritual resilience

and walk alone?