12 minute read
Today on the Sunday Storytelling blog, I want to tell the story of how a humble ex-house painter became a writer. It’s a story of dedication to a dream and I believe it offers hope to those who can tell a bit of a story but who may not have the confidence to start to write. It’s been two years since my Uncle Phil became an author with the publishing of his Aussie bush larrikin novel, Yarnbull and three years almost to the day since he died. His journey begins in childhood, in a school in Gunnedah, in north western NSW. Uncle Phil enjoyed school and he had a knack for telling a story from a young age, both verbally and in written form. He told me he won awards for his stories in school. He grew up with five brothers and many cousins and mates and had more than his fair share of adventures. As a painter, his work often took him out of town and he saw much of the countryside and the small towns of NSW and QLD. A photograph from the Poulter family archive from the early 1970s offers a glimpse into the type of adventure Uncle Phil sought out and enjoyed. Sitting atop the NSW/QLD state border sign, it’s like he’s saying he is king of the world! It’s a barren landscape he and his mate have entered, way out back of bush, a place Uncle Phil loved to explore.
The era Uncle Phil grew up in, the 1960s and 70s, was a bit of a man’s world. Uncle Phil married when he was 28 but family responsibilities didn’t stop the bonds of brotherhood he had formed during his teenage and early adult years from gaining strength. Gatherings at the local pubs in town were a regular event, even throughout the 1970s when Uncle Phil and his brothers, including my father, were having children. Many a yarn was told over a few beers, stories of their boy’s own adventures and of the larrikins that they met on their travels. These adventures would form the basis of the stories Uncle Phil wrote and the larrikins he met would morph into some of the sixty-six characters he filled his novel with.
Fast forward to the late 2000s. I was writing the Poulter family history book and when I asked him to write his life story, Uncle Phil told me he had some other good stories he could tell me. I asked him if he could write them down, which he did. Now, I’m a writer who does very well with facts but not so much with descriptive prose and suspense. So, I am always in awe of anyone who can tell a great story and Uncle Phil did just that with the three stories from his youth. He wrote stories of gathering honey from swarming bees and of cake fights at local dance halls. I hung on every word he wrote, buzzing with delight at how he drew me in to the story and how he executed the outcome. Once my book was published, he said he had more stories. I told him to keep writing. From 2009 to 2017 he did just that. We lived quite a few hours away from each other, so it was only at family gatherings over the years that I would ask him how he was going and encourage him to keep digging deep into his archive of adventures. The last time I saw him he told me he was almost finished writing his stories. I said yes great, next time I see you, bring them along and I’ll have a look. He didn’t give much away and I didn’t ask the specifics of what he was writing about, presuming they were more stories from his childhood and young adulthood when his brothers, cousins and friends were his whole world. I carried on with my life, working and studying, busy doing my own writing.
I was at work in May 2017 when I received a call telling me that Uncle Phil had died suddenly. It was such a shock and a great loss. His death was ruled a heart attack. In the aftermath of sorting out his personal possessions, his adult children, my cousins, came across a purple plastic bag that had a mountain of handwritten foolscap pages inside. I picked up the pile of papers a couple of days before his funeral. I noted that there was a first draft of what appeared to be a book, then a three-quarters finished second draft. I searched and searched but there didn’t appear to be any family stories. The pile of papers it turns out, was a novel. I was a bit disappointed, particularly as I was due to speak at the funeral and hoped to present something fresh and relevant to the family. I read through some of the pages and tried to find some part I could read out. But the novel contained lots of swearing and some inappropriate material for a church-based funeral service! What have you done to me Uncle Phil I thought?! I reverted back to an earlier story he had written to read at the service, one that wouldn’t make myself or the congregation blush! I was kicking myself now that I never asked Uncle Phil what had inspired him to write his stories in this way. I had trusted his expertise in telling a great story and when he used to tell me that he was still writing and still working on the stories, I again assumed that he was probably taking his time or finding it a little hard to put maybe a few snippets together. I had no actual idea of what he would leave us with.
A month after his funeral, I started to go through the papers more slowly and work out what chapters went where. Uncle Phil had named some of the chapters and put them in order but the book had no name; that would come much later. As I began transcribing the handwriting onto the computer screen, letter by letter, word by word, an incredible awakening happened. It was as if the magic of what he had achieved slowly revealed itself, intensifying with great magnitude as the task progressed. As each sentence of every paragraph, of every chapter, spilled onto the word document I was using, I gained an understanding of how he had crafted the characters and the scenarios he put them in. The whole book took probably over a hundred hours to transcribe, but in working at this level of intense scrutiny of each sentence structure, I came to appreciate deeply the amount of work he had put into his masterpiece. Not only was I impressed by the talent he displayed, but also the fortitude, stamina and mental energy reserves he must have drawn upon to not only complete, in its entirety, the first draft but then to neatly handwrite the second draft. He was about three quarters of the way through this second draft when he died. I was therefore tasked with comparing the first and second drafts of the last quarter of the story and making decisions about what to leave in or out. These were very minor decisions overall, but at that point I had already lived inside the head of the characters for a few months and as a consequence was led by the existing flow of the storylines and characters. But I sure would have preferred to have him there to ask! It was a nerve-racking task to complete such an important work without the author’s final input. The whole process actually took me months by the time I had transcribed, sorted, edited and proofread it. The bugger had written 48,000 words, eleven chapters and in the end the book came to 241 pages!
So, the story of Sawn Off, an Aussie bush larrikin, was brought to fruition in 2018. Sawn Off was a mix of various characters Uncle Phil had met over the years. He was a house painter and general hand who had a go at anything, despite being hopelessly clumsy. He had family and friends who were continually baffled and amazed at the situations he got himself into. We know from Uncle Phil’s family that some of the situations in the book come from real-life events. But Uncle Phil had cleverly disguised exactly which real life people were involved but varying the detail or descriptions. He often told incredible stories to his family but would refuse to name names. This book was his way of telling these real-life stories but preserving the individual’s identity and in some cases, dignity. Sawn Off’s clumsy adventures included painting himself into a corner of a roof and then being unable to get down, riding through the streets naked on an old race horse, getting blown up by his brother whilst chasing the pet ferret and getting stung on his private parts by a beer-sucking bee. Sawn Off also had a bit of a talent for the piano and in a charitable gesture, decided to entertain the locals with a one-man concert. Like everything else he touched, it all turned to shit in the end. In this excerpt, Uncle Phil excels himself with the description of the scene, allowing the reader to imagine every detail in full colour.
Father Eli stood at the back of the hall, a small smile on his face, not surprised by Sawn Off’s unexpected talents, for he had done his homework and inquiries around the district properties and from fathers to shearers, they had all sung his praises. Now knowing the people accepted him and his music, he relaxed and let the natural talent flow. He was down already to another half empty bottle and was playing an upbeat version of ‘Click go the shears’ to the now clapping and singing-along audience. As his fingers moved magically over the well-worn ivories, he was bouncing up and down with the beat, so much so that his two hairy testicles popped out of his baggy shorts and found themselves hanging down between the missing pieces of cane and were bobbing up and down in perfect sync, allowing the two sisters a perfect view of these dancing oversized hairy flappers.
Marge was the first to spot this bizarre and shocking spectacle and she nudged Madge. Having got her attention, she whispered in her ear. Madge being slightly deaf and with the music so close, she couldn’t make out what Marge was going on about, until she raised her voice and pointed at Sawn Off’s chair. Madge’s eyes fell upon what resembled a hairy pair of swinging pendulums and she became completely fascinated. After a quick consultation between them, they decided to inform the unaware, disgusting pianist of this horrible display.
Rising slowly after getting her wide girth free of the plastic chair, which for a moment looked as if it was stuck to her fat arse, she waddled up behind Sawn Off who had just finished his piece and startled him by pointing her finger and declaring loudly, ‘Do you know your balls are hanging?’
Sawn Off scratched his bald head and announced, ‘No, but if ya kin whistle or hum a few words I’ll give it a go.’
All in all, it took me almost a year to get Phil’s book to publication stage. It took some time to decide on a title for the book, but in the end we couldn’t go past what Uncle Phil used to say to call out a story of dubious authenticity; ‘Yarnbull’. We did a small print run of 100 copies for family and friends and celebrated his great achievement with a launch at his favourite pub. I’m still kicking myself that I under-estimated his talent and his fortitude for sticking something through to the end. As a writer myself, I am so much in awe of what he achieved with so little formal education. I have trained for years to write well but I could never tell a story like Uncle Phil could. To me it just goes to show that talent such as this is something you are born with. And so, a few months after his death, his children had a headstone installed at his gravesite and I visited not long afterwards. There was his face beaming out from the stone, sparkling in the sunlight, the word ‘author’ engraved at the bottom, a title so richly deserved but one he would have been shy about accepting.
So, I leave you with the moral to this story. If you have even a small urge to write, just do so. If someone you know says one day I’m going to write a book, even if they say it in jest; encourage them, prod them, make them accountable to at least try, to start, to put pen to paper. Without the encouragement Uncle Phil got from me and his family, we may never have been left with his precious gem of a book. A book that will entertain his family for generations to come. A book that will shine a light on who he was to future generations that will never get to meet him. So, whatever it is you feel compelled to write, please just get started today!
If you’d like to read a chapter of Yarnbull, please click on the link here: https://www.quirkycharacters.com.au/documents/samples/Sample_Yarnbull.pdf
Copies of Yarnbull are also for sale: please contact me for details.
