Remembering the Dead and Other Stories
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An unhappy soldier guards the barracks gate in Brisbane and wishes for freedom ... a recovering addict in Fremantle learns about life, death and friendship while trying to get his life together in NA ... an Adelaide man's recently deceased uncle teaches him about the meaning of life ... and a girl vanishes somewhere near Alice Springs, never to be seen again. These are just some of the characters in Lewis Woolston's new story collection 'Remembering the Dead and Other Stories'. In these snapshots from the fringes of Australian society, the past is never entirely done, the dead are not forgotten, and life takes turns both funny and tragic.
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I began to read this on Christmas Eve and finished on Boxing Day. Read amidst the sound of my wife and her father bickering over how to cook a chook, through to watching the cricket get rained on. Amongst a couple of beers I mused that I read sitting in air-conditioned comfort, but the reality is that in north Queensland there are devastating floods and north of Perth bush fires destroy all in their path. Not far from me 160,000 odd people of the Gold Coast have no power after a massive storm. Some in these events have not only caused the loss of possessions but also lives.
Then outside the mainstream news of these natural events that affect the many there are the homeless, the drug addicts, the victims of domestic breakdown and many more loners and outsiders that drift amongst us. All have left a small trace. Remembering the Dead indeed. Some of the alive are Dead to many of us. Are these vignettes of Australiana more realistic than my present comfort? They have left a trace. We all do I suppose, but then we never write about those that leave images on our lives. Those writers of the more literary style will tell their stories with more ornate flourishes that may not give those outsiders the dialectal stories they warrant. The outsiders are justified these stories of the traces they leave.
These stories give the Dead the traces of memory that we all want, but don't know it.
The Triffids wrote a soundtrack for my read.
Property is Condemned.
Alcohol, Heroin
It's all water under the bridge
Left to your own devices
I know you're going to sink like a ship
Property, property, property is condemned
You tell a lie for long enough
And you believe it yourself
Now there's spittle running down your chin
Dozen murders under your belt
Property, property, property is condemned
Men and women on their knees
Nothing in their heads
I don't want to hear no tall stories
About what they doing in bed
I don't want a talk, I don't want a chat
I don't want to share a joke with a fink
I don't want a novel or a movie show
Just a pissing in the sink
Property, property, property is condemned
It was written all over your face now junior
You wanted chicken and turkey
Then that then this
The very next minute your bowels went slack
Now it hurts so bad you can't even piss