Australian School Library Association > Publications > Commentary Vol 19 Issue 1 2005

On travel, lifelong students and asking 'What if'  (Volume 19 Issue 1, 2005)

Steve Tolbert

Steve Tolbert was born in the United States and migrated to Australia in 1969.  He taught in high schools in New South Wales, Western Australia and Tasmania before retiring in 2002.  His wife, Sue, is a teacher in Hobart.  His daughter, Elise, is a first-year student at the University of Tasmania and his dog is the daily recipient of fine canine cuisine and walks along Clifton Beach.  As a long-standing Asia enthusiast, Steve has travelled extensively in the region.  He has used his experiences to research and write short stories and seven young-adult novels including Channeary, Escape to Kalimantan and Tracking the Dalai Lama, which are used extensively in Australian high schools.  His latest novel, Dreaming Australia, is due for release early 2005.

(The views expressed in articles are those of the author(s) concerned and do not necessarily represent the views of ASLA.)

I reckon anyone who dabbles in story writing has to be a lifelong student. From the time we start school, we are encouraged to seek out new experiences, become acquainted with life’s many forms and practices, and to observe, discuss, analyse and debate. I was given the chance to wander considerable distances and observe things at a very early age. The practice stuck. During the past 20 years or so, I have turned many travelling experiences and observations into stories by asking the question, ‘What if’.

I often asked that question before writing my first young adult novel, Channeary, but never made much of an effort to convert my thoughts into writing. The experiences of repeatedly watching The Killing Fields and Neil Davis’s documentary Frontline, then walking Tasmania’s South Coast Track, changed that. What if a troubled refugee from Cambodia was adopted by a local fishing family and went to sea with her adoptive grandfather, a man who had grown solitary and embittered since his wife died? By the time I finished my solo walk that year, I felt I had some answers to that, and more importantly, the desire to commit the time and effort needed to develop my thoughts on paper.

A year later I asked myself, ‘What if Joe Gilovich – the reclusive, traumatised Vietnam War veteran killed by Hobart special operation police officers in the early 1990s – had lived in the Snowy Mountains with a teenage son?’ And what if Joe had known one of those police officers in Vietnam and had witnessed the officer committing an atrocity there? As Channeary was proving unexpectedly popular with high school teachers and students, I decided to repeat the process with Settling South.

In Cambodia, among the rubble and beggars and legless people sleeping in hammocks under plastic sheeting, I spent hours walking along Phnom Penh’s main roads. One day I visited the National Children’s Hospital. In the central courtyard, surrounded by murals of Snow White, Bugs Bunny, Bambi and Mickey Mouse, babies and young children were being weighed in wicker baskets supported by a rope hanging from an old-time scale, like those used in fish markets. Inside the hospital there were people everywhere, including an abandoned baby vomiting and an old peasant woman who sat stone still next to her. The woman had adopted the baby and would not leave her alone.

At a Red Cross hospital in Kampong Speu, 70 kilometres south of the capital, I met a young, soft-spoken American surgeon who had just spent a year amputating limbs at Site 2, the biggest refugee camp on the Thai-Cambodian border. He spoke Khmer well enough to joke with the other doctors and patients, and he graciously gave me an hour of his time to discuss his experiences in the region. Incredibly, he was planning to return to Boston to upgrade his skills in surgery and use of prosthetics. A couple of days later, inside the temple of Wat Phnom, I watched people light candles and place them beside a huge statue of Buddha before prostrating themselves in prayer. After a while, an elderly lady glanced at me as I sat upright against a wall. She approached clasping her palms together and muttering something indecipherable, while displaying the brightest gap-toothed smile I have ever seen. I asked myself then, ‘What if a Tasmanian nurse and her teenage daughter were to come to this traumatised, shattered country and work at a Red Cross hospital?’ The novel, Stepping Back, is the result.

In the mid-1990s, a mate and I took the eleven-hour, bone-jarring bus ride from Katmandu to Jiri and the start of the Everest Track. Most of the Nepalese got sick and huddled together, vomiting into plastic bags. The next day many of them passed us on the track, grinning and shouting out ‘Hello’. At a trekking lodge on the second night, an old man was under a quilt with his two grandsons. He played his homemade flute to send them off to sleep. In the morning, feeling like an intruder, I watched the three of them slowly wake up. The first movements of small hands were towards those that were dry and gnarled with age. Later, there was more flute music and the sound of young boys giggling. My father, a post-World War Two version of Joe Gilovich, would have loved the Everest Track and its people. So my question was, ‘After breaking up with my mother, what if my father had fled to Nepal instead of the Alaskan wilderness?’ The novel, Eyeing Everest, provides my answer.

One day, two-and-a-half years later, I walked along a bush track at Camp Leakey in south-central Kalimantan. Trees shook as once-hidden female orangutans, their babies clinging to their necks, dropped down and ambled along with me like my personal escorts to their feeding platform, where buckets of finger-sized bananas and milk were positioned. The next day, Suriansyah, a Dayak ranger and guide, led me through rainforest, pointing out the huge storehouse of natural pharmaceuticals in the form of bushes and trees. I was lucky. The horrendous 1997 fires spared much of the rainforest in this area. Up on that platform again, with orangutans draped all over me, my question was, ‘What if a disenchanted, stress-riddled science teacher and his son needed to escape their problems at home and were here with me on this raised platform, among the large trees, creepers and inquisitive, tactile orang-outangs?’ Escape to Kalimantan was born.

In January 1998, I went back into big mountains. Above Dharamsala at McLeod Ganj, northern India, prayer flags and Tibetans fingering prayer beads and turning prayer wheels were everywhere. Monks walked with monks and nuns walked with nuns along steep, narrow laneways. Dogs barked at monkeys ogling them from rooftops. Buddhist temples and monasteries shared precipitous cliff-face space with new tourist hotels. I ate almond and cashew porridge and huge honey pancakes in the mornings and spinach soup, delicious noodle dishes, Tibetan salad and chapattis in the evenings at the refugee-run Snow Lion Restaurant. From the restaurant’s balcony I could watch clouds move over the Dhauladhar mountains and see buzzards circling the deep valleys.

One day I climbed up past small caves occupied by solitary monks to a ridge blanketed in fresh, waist-deep snow. I don’t think I have ever experienced such stillness. The next day, in a closet-sized shop just down the road from the Dalai Lama’s residence, I met a wonderful old Tibetan with a wispy moustache and wearing a Humphrey Bogart overcoat like a 1940s gangland baron. On a couple of occasions after that, I stopped at his shop and bought small things from him. On my last visit I could no longer refuse his offer of butter tea. No matter how quickly I drank the loathsome stuff, he wouldn’t stop filling my cup with it while muttering ‘Om mani padme hum’ and instructing me on the proper way to move prayer beads through one’s index finger and thumb. Across the road there were freshly bandaged lepers squatting next to scales, reading people’s weights to them. Everywhere there were Tibetans and temples, Westerners seeking enlightenment, giant pine trees, cawing crows, snow-topped peaks, deep, terraced valleys and space and silence. Why would the Dalai Lama ever want to leave such a place, I asked myself. However, what if he was terminally ill and there was a way he could be smuggled back to Lhasa’s Potala Palace to spend his last hours? I went to the huge Tibetan library and started researching Tibet and what lay between McLeod Ganj and Tibet’s capital. Tracking the Dalai Lama was published three years later.

Australia’s attitude towards refugees has changed a lot in the 14 years since Channeary was published. In the 1980s, Indo-Chinese refugees arriving in boats were treated better than their Middle Eastern and west Asian counterparts have been for the past few years. I have still got a 15-year-old Four Corners video about the trials and triumphs of multiculturalism in Sydney and Melbourne. Narrated by the late Andrew Olle, the program focused on Vietnamese and Cambodian assimilation in our two largest cities. It ends with a Sydney western suburb kindergarten class – composed largely of second-generation Asians and Lebanese – beating a musical stick tempo and gleefully singing Click Go the Shears. The kids could not have been happier or more comfortable with what they were doing. To this day, watching that program is a guaranteed tear generator. What better endorsement for reinforcing the values of multiculturalism than viewing that, I say to myself while airing my eyes dry.

With the recent proliferation of razor-wire detention centres, however, I reckon we have become a more intolerant, hard-hearted society. After the Tampa Affair, I asked myself, ‘What if a young asylum seeker escaped detention at Woomera and wandered the desert, like Mohammed did 1500 years ago, and after undergoing a number of experiences, started to realise what the values of our society are really like?’ A controversial story line, to be sure: one that won’t please everyone. Anyway, I went to Woomera and stayed in the caravan park there. I rode my bicycle 25 kilometres out of town towards Roxby Downs, looking around at the desert. I talked to local shop keepers about the area and a day later I gained entrance into the detention centre. Ostensibly, I was there to talk to an Iraqi detainee who had stopped writing to a friend of mine involved in the asylum-seeker issue. While doing that though, I also took notes and used those notes and my new knowledge of the detention centre and its surroundings to write Dreaming Australia, which was recently published by Ginninderra Press http://www.ginninderrapress.com.au

Okay, I cannot help myself. Here is Tasmanian author and manuscript appraiser Rosie Waitt’s assessment of the novel:

‘Dreaming Australia’s author seamlessly integrates his research into the story. Set in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Indonesia and Australia, the author convincingly evokes each place and succeeds in subtly illuminating the strong differences between spiritually and materially based cultures. Dreaming Australia is a dramatic, exciting and moving story of a young girl’s journey through terrible perils. Along the way she experiences huge losses and betrayals as well as unexpected but heartwarming friendships … By bringing to life one person’s story, the author succeeds also in humanising issues that are constantly at risk of being dehumanised by politicians and the media. Currently, there is great debate about Australia’s position in regard to the rights of refugees, and this story is one that would help young adults understand some of the issues of intolerance, as well as the ability to step across the differences between cultures, differences which often act as the basis for fear and misunderstanding.’

As with Channeary, Settling South, Escape to Kalimantan and Tracking the Dalai Lama, a study unit is available (see my website, http://www.southcom.com.au/~stolbert ) for high school teachers who might like to use Dreaming Australia with their classes.

The longest period of ‘What if-ing’ I’ve experienced has been with a story called Packing Smack, Talking Wombats. After undergoing years of re-drafting, it finally got a glowing appraisal a few months ago from Brian Cook’s Manuscript Appraisal Agency, and is currently sitting on a publisher’s desk. (Nothing to crow about, really, as there are probably 50,000 other such manuscripts keeping Packing Smack, Talking Wombats company. Since Addison, Wesley, Longman and Hyland House stopped publishing young adult novels a few years ago, I have learned a hard lesson on the need to be fatalistic about rejection notices.)

While bicycling around Flinders Island eight years ago, I went out to the remote east coast. At uninhabited Patriarch Inlet I asked myself, ‘What if a recluse lived here on this bird-rich coastline and, by chance, witnessed a large supply of heroin being hidden away in the area?’ The answers were painfully slow in coming but eventually, with the help of the escalating gangland wars in Melbourne and the news of another police corruption case, a story line evolved that proved immensely satisfying to work with. Sometimes good things do come to those who wait, and wait, and wait. And I know Packing Smack, Talking Wombats is a good thing, suitable for publication. I have been told it is by an authority. Hopefully, one day, the authority who really counts – a publisher – will agree.

Right now I am thinking about the possibilities for short stories. There is a 16-yea- old boy who loses his older brother in the Bali bombing. What if he goes to Bali to surf the places his brother never did? Perhaps he could meet up with a Balinese boy, or girl, who is doing the same thing. Or what about a man who nearly loses his life climbing Mount Everest? What if he returns to the Everest region with his wife and 13-year-old daughter? As they sit at a lookout viewing the great summits, the wife – who has not been able to conceive again since the birth of her daughter – tells her husband she is pregnant. Or what about an embittered, Joe Gilovich-like Vietnam War veteran who returns to Vietnam with his son to commemorate a certain battle? What if he meets and befriends a Vietnamese man, who took part in the battle also, as his enemy? What could my Gilovich-like character learn from the Vietnamese man who is welcoming and friendly, and has lost a leg from stepping on a land mine?

There is just so much for lifelong students to see and research and write about, more so if they are senior-concession-card carriers intent on defying the comforts of easy chairs, knee blankets and daytime soapies for as long as they can.