'Bones' (Pauline) Mackinnon

Elizabeth Hart, (Berwick) 

Retired Lecturer, Journalism,

Monash University

August, 2016

Memory is the greatest treasure of all in Pauline Mackinnon's collection of poems and prose, Treasures from the Tide. The setting is mostly the low foothills south east of Melbourne and the adjoining Great Swamp, the largest wetland in Victoria.

 

The magazine Royalauto,  in July 2016, described this region as a fusion of earth and sky that would have delighted the artist Constable. It’s easy to miss the “infrequently visited, uniquely attractive, and strangely mysterious” landscapes, and the “half forgotten villages” that dot the area. It is here that Pauline and the characters she brings to life have spent part or all of their lives.

 

The central metaphor in Treasures from the Tide is the individual’s journey. Intricately tied up with the landscape, that journey is winding and rocky, through deep lonely valleys, as one story describes it. “Unavoidable objects fall in people’s path, sometimes, like huge boulders from an avalanche they couldn’t see.” But there are blessings along the way.

 

Good fortune is fickle, though it does occasionally split the way. That is the strength of the stories, as the book emphasises the way people think as much as what they do. The literary device of anecdote drives the narrative in all of the stories, to build local histories and to dignify memories.

 

In one, a battered stepping stool becomes a keepsake, rescued from the hard rubbish at the last minute to celebrate the life of the person who had owned and valued it. The rescuing of the stool depends on a friend’s hidden memory and an incidental encounter. Who among the readers could not think of a moment when an unremarkable object had taken on a bigger personal meaning?

 

In another story, a good-humoured old priest - “the most holy, reverend ecclesiastical custodian of the district” - while walking his dog, boosts a neighbour's mood and her recovery from a brush with death, with his incidental, casual, but sincere conversations. The rough and tumble is the cost of living, he tells her. “We never get out of this life alive.”

 

On the strength of such obvious truths, the neighbour winds down at work, plans a holiday in the sun, takes the rainbow as her totem to guide and protect her in the tradition of the indigenous people, and buys some new bathers. Thus her everyday recollections become part of the local literature in this book.

 

The Kooweerup Swamp is fertile and agriculturally diverse. It consists of rich peat soil more than 10 metres deep and a checkerboard of drains to control flooding. North, south, east, and west seem to merge to confuse the traveller. It’s easy to take the wrong direction.

 

The agricultural diversity matches the variety of people there - indigenous, migrants, and the descendants of original settlers. While Pauline was growing up in this country, she discovered the ancient and deep connection with the land, as expressed in the poetry, music, and literature of its occupants over centuries and millennia.

 

To anyone familiar with the Kooweerup Swamp, the images and references in Treasures from the Tide will spark responses. But the universality of memory and the power of personal anecdote take the stories well beyond the Swamp.

 

The book is uplifting, the people resilient, and the relationship to the land eternal, in this delightful collection.