Bodies of Water came out of the success of the Waterstories and Luminous Heart projects. For the last 12 months we have come together to meditate and write; to create a safe space to tell the deep, fierce, light, beautiful, hard, gorgeous stories that pulse inside all of us.

The core purpose of the project was to nourish the creative community. To share opportunities and celebrate the writers who continue to rise with grace, humour and courage across the Southern Morton Bay Islands. It’s been an honour to work alongside such remarkable women and artists. I feel deeply grateful for their company, kindness and spirit.

Here is some of the work created over the past twelve months.

The Farm in Poremba

Christine Jeziorowski

Brilliant yellow dances in sunlight. Huge sunflowers grow inside the concrete lattice fence. The farm lies just outside the small village of Poremba in Poland. A pretty place with a town square, post office, mini supermarket, and an antique shop which is only open on Wednesdays and Thursdays.

The Prussian blue sky had not a cloud in sight, and the still air was occasionally disrupted by the frenzy of worker bees and white-winged butterflies.  People magically appear from the tiny farmhouse, its sheds, and outbuildings as our car pulls up.  We are encircled and embraced with hugs and kisses.  Five generations live in the farmhouse. Apart from the kitchen and bathroom, each room is crammed with bunk beds.

Igor, a sixteen-year-old child of a second cousin, has grown tall since we last saw him two years ago. His brother, four years younger, is chubbier with huge dimples and laughs all the time when I talk to him, although he doesn’t understand a word I am saying. It is difficult for me to keep track of who is who, especially as everyone is speaking Polish. Except for a grand-niece in her twenties, beautiful with long black curls, bamboozled by all the translation requests.

The family lives with their great-grandmother Stasia, the oldest in her family at ninety-two.  Stasia’s sisters, Jasia, Kasia, and Helen, my husband’s mother, came with us, huddled in the back of our car. It’s not long before the sound of small vodka glasses clink together. Once everyone is settled, we take a walk into the fields behind the house to collect the vegetables for our meal. Stasha, the fiery oldest sister, holds onto a crooked stick. Various family members take my hand, eager to show me the fruits and vegetables grown on their farm.

“Taste this.”

A gooseberry is popped into my mouth.

The sisters ramble along, pulling up potatoes, beetroot, and carrots. Stasha thinks that Jasha is putting extra potatoes into her apron pocket to take home and begins to whip her with the stick. Everyone laughs about her temper. Returning to the farm, the men start a fire while the sisters, their daughters, and I peel our bounty from the fields. We are making prazonki, a traditional Polish meal. Spicy sausage is produced by one of the uncles, chopped and put into the huge cauldron-like pot along with the vegetables and ‘vegeta’ seasoning. As they work, the sisters sing sad old Russian songs, voices blending seamlessly with the summer breeze. My heart aches as I watch them singing, old sorrows surface in their worn faces.

 Soon, the pot is full and lined with cabbage leaves, an uncle takes it away and puts it onto the fire. Waiting on the swing outside in the sunshine, we drink vodka and tell stories of Australia. When the cooking is done, we gather around a huge timber table. Buttermilk is poured into glasses to drink with the prazonki. Eating and laughing so much that tears run down our faces. When it’s time to leave, the family stuffs all types of food and alcohol into our arms and the car. A cousin hugs us, rocking from side to side as she cries and sobs

“We will never see you again”.

 “Don’t be silly, of course, we will be back.”

 But she was right.  COVID hit, we got older, and the sisters all died. It’s too far away and we can’t return. But I have the memory of that garden in the sunshine, where dogs and chickens ran free, while pigs snorted in their pens, and the taste of a gooseberry lingered on my tongue.

Trauma and Loving Yourself

Cassie McKenzie

There is something about the dappled sun through leaves. It is nostalgia, like looking at the old black and white photos of your grandmother, younger and happy. I feel this when I walk through the forest at Mount Cotton. The green, a colour of life, and the sun reaching its way through the gaps, filtering upon rocks and stones. Nature is energising, invigorating, yet calming and deep.

Perhaps that is why I escaped into nature as a child. Wandering through the paddock next door, chasing the cabbage moths, saving insects from spider webs. It is a disappearing. Into a world that ebbs and flows, as wind gently nudges the yellow grass, and crickets bounce away from my footsteps. I think that this is what kept me alive and dreaming in a way. Because out here, animals and insects live amongst you in cohesion, and nothing seeks to manipulate and hurt you. There is peace from trauma, wading through the tall grass.

I realise now, that as a child and an adult, I sought acceptance. It was not the acceptance of others however, it was the acceptance of myself. The validation, it cannot be sought outside of myself.

Yes, there is love. There is to give and receive love. I find within myself that it becomes the wanting to do so, and there is a certain altruism that finds its way into the act of love. For if it is love, in a pure form, then it is selfless within itself. It moves beyond expectations. Beyond expecting what to receive in return. Love does not seek to control. Love does not seek to change. It looks within at the core of the person, perhaps even at the soul. Love is about wanting your freedom and about wanting others freedom. Freedom from suffering. Freedom from trauma. It does not consist of chains and a prison. It is about being on your own journey and respecting other people’s journeys. It moves away from engulfment within another person. It is about seeing another individual completely as themselves, and as someone who can make that choice to also love you if they wish. There is no power over their choice.

And just as a child, wandering though nature, and loving the life surrounding me, I realise I am part of that life, and I have the power to love myself.

YOU. ME. 

Cathi Cash

I pause at the level crossing as I do so often on my way home, pulling my coat in close around me as I stand at the edge of this bleak wind tunnel, wondering who I can visit, where I can go, in order to make the good part of my day last … just a little longer. 

Other nights I stand here waiting. Wondering. 

What if? 

What if … I just stepped out? 

Craning my head to the left, I gaze the full length of the tracks, eventually merging and disappearing into the darkness. Two endless rows of steel, travelling parallel paths, in opposite directions (You. Me), set atop line upon line of railway sleepers (all the lines in the sand you crossed).

I recall this morning’s fight and how you’d taken my car keys to punish me, to make me late on the first day, of my first job, in my new career. I’d only slammed the door to retreat from the drama, to put some distance between us. I hadn’t even banged it all that hard, but as the glass shattered across the tiled floor, a million tiny, twinkling suns distract me from the hot sting of your hand across my face, and in that moment, I understand. We had both just been slammed, one time too many. Late now, no time to fix the mess or ponder this revelation, I’d ran out back and taken the Suzuki in desperation, rushing into work ten minutes late with ‘helmet hair’, amid disapproving glances.

… but I remember a time when you pledged undying love for me. I can still feel the place in our bed, where I used to sleep, tucked up warm and tight in your embrace, which soon became the cold space in-between, a no-go zone that neither of us dared enter. At times I’d sense your hand there in the darkness, terrified you’d touch me …. worse, that you might not, until inevitably, we became familiar with each others’ backs. Just going through the motions, going down the years, repeating phrases that sound like love, yet I cannot recall when last I woke entwined in you. 

I know you did love me, at the start, in your own cool and distant way. I know you gave the best you could with only what you had on hand – your own small and lacking encounter with love. You. Me – just two odd socks in the back of a drawer, never even a pair perhaps, but similar, and happy enough to be rolled up together. Just not forever.

A train approaching from the right hurtles past, startling and spinning me almost full circle, its icy blast catapulting me back into reality. 

“Not today my friend”, I mutter, “Someone down the track is coming for me. I just have to get myself free so he can find me”.

I cross the tracks and make my way to the nearest pub, ‘The Greyhound’, affectionately known as The Skinny Dog. It reeks of cigarettes and beer soaked bar towels, and broken lives and promises. 

I sit at the bar and order a wine, glancing sideways at the woman on the next barstool. I sense a vaguely familiar face, an old school friend, but this is not the face of the pretty blonde girl I remember. 

“Amy,” I say, with a puzzled expression. “Amy McKillop?” 

She turns toward me, her tangled hair greyed beyond her years. She smiles in recognition, revealing nicotine stained teeth, a front one blackened. 

“Smith!”, she cries, much too loudly, leaning in and wrapping her arms around me in a clumsy hug, spilling beer in her lap in the process. “How the fuck are ya?!!” I am near enough to see the bloodshot eyes and ruddy cheeks with pores big enough to poke a finger in.

Turning to the bloke beside her she says, “Hey, Stinky! I went to school with this chick!” Stinky leans forward onto the bar, squinting at me over gold framed spectacles perched low on his nose, one arm held on with electrical tape. He is a wiry, malnourished looking fellow with greasy hair and a toothless smile that is warm and sincere. He says nothing but raises his glass in acknowledgement just as the barman calls, “Last drinks!”

Amy climbs down from her barstool and grabs my arm. She takes me to a room upstairs where she tells me she is living, “ ..… but just ‘til I get off the piss”, she assures me. Gripping the door jamb to steady herself, she motions for me to enter and as I pass, close to her face, my head retracts slightly as I whiff the familiar, yeasty scent of a belly full of beer.

“Back in a minnie”, she slurs, “Gotta take a leak”, and staggers across the hallway toward the EXIT sign.

There are no chairs in the room, so I sit on the edge of her unmade, single bed and listen to the buzz and hum of a large neon VACANCY sign outside the window. Flashing on and off in a cold dance of indifference, it casts a murky glow across the wrinkly, fouled sheets, infused with the memory of the decrepit, of lust, loneliness and human misery. A grubby, flickering lightbulb hangs from a frayed cord on the ceiling offering barely enough light to read by, and again, the stench of cigarette smoke in my nostrils despite the faded NO SMOKING sign on the wall. A large nail in the window frame prevents it from opening more than a few centimetres and I wonder how many patrons, full of booze and hopelessness, stood here and thought about jumping. 

Amy comes back to the room and sits down beside me. She squeezes the bladder of a cask of Riesling into a pot glass which I place on the edge of a rusty hand basin next to the bed. 

“Went to Grandpa’s funeral today”, she says. “Turned up pissed to the wake and everyone was saying how sad and sorry they were and how much they’d all miss him”. 

At this she threw her head back and laughed and laughed like it was all terribly funny. 

“I said, ‘Bullshit! He was a mean old prick and none of youse liked him anyway!’”.

“Now I’m in the shit and Dad kicked me out”, she snorted amusedly into her beer.

I look at this woman and wonder how she got from her private school education to this, and I am suddenly uncomfortable and aware that I don’t belong here.

We spend the next few hours there in her room, sharing stories of unhappiness and loss, and I drink way too much before holding a cigarette lighter to my marriage certificate, watching as my name disappears from the parchment and letting the ashen shards fall gently into the dustbin. 

Nothing is changed, but this symbolic gesture feels like hope to me, like a small step toward a shining light at the end of a long, dark tunnel.

A Touch of Pink                                

Margaret Smeaton

It was a treasured possession in Maggie’s family. A beautiful, black lacquered photo album. On the front cover, inlaid with iridescent mother of pearl all the colours of the rainbow, was a Japanese pagoda with cherry blossom trees in bloom. But the real treasure was inside the album. Photographs of a past life spent in post war Japan.

Peter, her father, an enlisted officer in the Australian Army Corps had been transferred to Japan in October 1946, as part of the British Commonwealth Occupation Forces (BCOF). Maggie, Edna her mother, and little sister Robyn, followed him to Japan in November 1947. They lived in Nijimura or the ‘Rainbow Village’ in Kure, Hiroshima, so called because of the multi coloured homes built for service families.   Maggie had little memory of her life back then as she was only two years old and Robyn was 18 months younger. However, looking back at the photos of that time, life seemed idyllic. Her mother had servants, house girls to help with meals and housework and a mama-san to look after the children. Maggie loved the photos of herself and Robyn in kimonos, at birthday parties, swimming at the pool and at kindy. There were also pictures of her Mum and Dad with friends at army social events. Everyone looked so happy.

Looking at the photos, Maggie knew that the happiness hadn’t lasted. On 20^th June 1949, her baby sister Pattie, Patricia Anne, was born at the Hospital in Kure Japan. She had no memories of Pattie, but the photos made her very real. She was a beautiful baby, and there were many photos of the three of them, Maggie, Robyn and Pattie. Pattie only lived to be nine months of age and died on the 11^th of March 1950, a day before her mother’s birthday. She was buried in Japan. The last photo taken was of a lonely grave marked with a white cross with Patties name and dates of her birth and death. Over the years Maggie thought of Pattie often, usually when watching a sunrise or a sunset. She wasn’t sure why. Maybe it had something to do with Japan being the ‘Land of the Rising Sun’. She always felt sad thinking of that lonely grave. Her baby sister, alone, thousands of miles from home. Maggie wanted to bring her back to Australia but knew that wasn’t possible. She didn’t even know where Pattie was buried.

The years passed, but Pattie was still very much part of the family. The photo album still treasured and pored over on visits home. As adults, Maggie and Robyn and younger brother Peter had made their own copies of many of the photos for which they were thankful when a fire in the family home destroyed the album. Many photos were blackened and burnt around the edges, but able to be salvaged. Maggie’s Mum cried tears of joy knowing those treasured photos, irreplaceable memories of Pattie, had been saved.

Many more years later, social media became popular, and Maggie signed up. She had been on the internet, researching information about the family’s time in Japan and couldn’t believe it when a group popped up on Facebook called BCOF Kids! It’s members were all children of men who had served in the occupation forces. She immediately joined. There were many photos of Maggie and her family on the site that she had never seen before. The group was planning a reunion in Canberra and Maggie was determined to go. That trip was the catalyst for her decision to find out where Pattie was buried and to return to Japan.

On arrival back in Brisbane, she rang Veterans Affairs. Her family’s life in Japan had been so long ago, she wasn’t hopeful, but thanks to research done online, she was able to supply all the information needed. A few hours later, the phone rang, and a young woman spoke. ‘Ms Smeaton? We have managed to locate the burial site of Patricia Anne Smeaton. She is buried in the Yokohama War Cemetery in Japan.’

Maggie couldn’t speak, tears rolled down her cheek as she tried to thank the woman, who continued. ‘If you give me your email address, I can forward some photographs and a map of the cemetery showing exactly where she is.’

Three months later, armed with the map and photographs, Maggie was on her way to Japan. Even though it was over fifty years since she had lived there, it felt like coming home. Edna, her mother had always told her that Japanese had been her first language, so it sounded very familiar. A contact in Japan had been suggested by a member of the BCOF Kids group; an Australian priest whose church was in Yokohama, and he would accompany Maggie to the cemetery.     

On the day, Maggie didn’t know how she felt. She had little or no memory of Pattie, but still felt the connection, and she had been driven by something inside to find her baby sister. The priest knew exactly where Pattie was, and linked arms with Maggie as they walked over to the Australian section of the cemetery. Just as well. As soon as Maggie saw the plaque engraved with Patties name, her legs gave way, and she crumpled to her knees. Many years of grief buried deep down inside surfaced and she shook with sobs, finally able to place all that emotion where it belonged. With her little sister.

When Maggie arrived back in Australia, she didn’t bring Pattie back with her. The Yokohama War Cemetery was the most peaceful resting place she could have wished for. The Australian section had been planted with flowering gumtrees and was beautifully maintained by the Japanese gardeners. Pattie was in a row of children’s graves, so she wasn’t alone, and Maggie felt at peace with the decision to leave her there, undisturbed. There was a touch of pink in the sunset that night and Maggie no longer felt sad.

Legacy

Cathi Cash

I wish you riches all your life and when I’ve passed away,

I’ll leave you all my earthly wares to help you on your way.

But the debt you will inherit is not one you can repay

and I hope you can forgive us for we dealt the cards you’ll play.

May you never want or hunger as you journey down your days.

I bequeath you cash and real estate that you might fare okay.

But assets can’t delay the pace the ozone layer fades,

or stem the slow salinity in choking waterways.

I fear for you, my children as abundant landfill grows,

as glaciers melt and oceans rise and winter snowfall slows.

I’m sorry that we got it wrong, that we were not to know,

that what we reap and what we sow is not ours to bestow.

I long for you a future without grey polluted skies

and pray your world will not expire as old growth forests die.

I ask this earth might spare you for the wrongs of those gone by

and that the legacy I leave to you will not be your demise.

I hope you find your fortune in the wealth life loans to you.

I pray you glimpse those threads of gold in tides of midnight blue.

That you may lie in silk spun fields to watch a sunset brew,

then feel the weight of jewelled skies descending down on you.

Live simply and sustainably upon this sacred ground

and she’ll give back a thousandfold, enough to go around.

Walk softly on this hallowed land, take only what you need

and Mother Earth will thank you in the treasures that abound.

When prosperity is weighed in the perceptions of your mind

and connection and abundance are it’s gifts for you to find,

Then success is duly measured in the world you leave behind,

and your lives shine on as emeralds, set in diamond chips of time.