Map Of The Human Heart
The Age
Saturday May 27, 2000
ANNE DEVESON says her next book will be about resilience. It's a subject she's had a lot to do with over the years, more than most people would choose. From the global atrocities she encountered in her work as an award-winning documentary maker to profound personal tragedy.
Like Hannah in her just-published first novel Lines in the Sand, Deveson copes with pain by imagining a shelf inside her, with all her feelings underneath, tucked out of reach.
``When I'm working I try to tuck them away. When my son Jonathan was so ill (with schizophrenia) and I began campaigning for improved services for the mentally ill, I coped by keeping a part of me that was working; then, when I got home at night, I'd pull out my feelings and have a look at them ..."
It's a technique that helped her to keep filming famines in Ethiopia, civil war in Mozambique, and genocide in Rwanda. And, perhaps, helped her to write her ground-breaking, painfully honest account of her son's struggle with schizophrenia, Tell Me I'm Here.
Her CV includes an astonishing list of organisations and causes she has worked for from the mid-'70s to the present: the schizophrenia association, Sane Australia; child poverty; homelessness; anti-discrimination and drugs, to name a few.
It's been a hard-working and influential career, yet Deveson remains warm, low-key and even a little irreverent. ``I think I've done things because I've felt a great need to; I am intensely interested in what happens in the world, that's what propels me. I'm not driven by the desire to reform but by life - it is interesting and I'd rather it was a good life than a rotten one."
Lines in the Sand is a love story set against real political events in Africa. It is dedicated to her ``idiosyncratic" father, a British rubber planter in Malaya. ``Unlike many of his generation in the colonial service he was very much part of the community, he had a strong appreciation of Malay culture. He rebelled against a system that denigrated and denied other people's cultures. I grew up hearing him talking very strongly against that."
As well as cultural respect, Deveson senior imbued his daughter with a passion for books. ``My childhood memory is of him reciting limericks to us and reading stories. His bedroom when he died in his 80s was lined three-deep in books."
He is also the backdrop to another novel she wants to write, about her childhood: growing up as a wartime refugee in Perth in a cramped house full of distressed mothers and children, escapees from colonial Malaya.
Deveson believes her own social conscience was galvanised in the mid-'50s when she became the first woman in Australia to have her own radio current affairs program, and began listening, day after day, to the lives of talk-back callers: ``people being isolated in the suburbs, trying to cope with violence in the home, alienated refugees ..."
Then in 1974 she was appointed to head the Royal Commission on Human Relationships, and those individual stories became part of the politics. ``It pushed me into an understanding of social structure and the political system; an awareness of how people are often powerless."
The next year she was invited, out of the blue, to go to Ethiopia to make a film on the famine there. There's a scene in Lines in the Sand where the idealistic, feisty young film maker Hannah finds herself thrown into a similar situation - one that no amount of reading could prepare her for: ``a speck on the horizon which slowly grew, first into an ominous-looking black stain and then into the strangest sight she had ever seen. A huge gathering of people, marooned in a ocean of sand ... people teetered towards them. Children whose bones protruded like pieces of jagged stone and whose heads seemed grotesquely huge, women clutching babies to wizened breasts ... the crowd was eerily silent." Hannah's assignments span 20 years of international conflicts and disasters - as Deveson's did. ``She was probably a bit more extreme and was addicted (to the life of a war-zone journalist). I wasn't to that extent, but I would get the same surge of adrenalin at the thought of going, and then as I stepped on to the plane, I'd be thinking, `what on earth am I doing?'
``It becomes like a way of life; you are bonded to the people you are working with; there's a camaraderie, and you hope you are doing some good. You are aware you are in a situation where history is being written, and there's the adrenalin kick. I suspect that is what brings people back again and again ..."
Crises tend to attract big characters - and after years of film making, Deveson had a cast of them floating around in her head, just waiting for a novel. She would find herself on a plane flying into a disaster zone seated alongside a Catholic priest, an arms dealer, two or three aid workers, businessmen, UN officials and a missionary pilot who flew for God.
``It struck me as bizarre - and there was an element of farce - and yet underpinning it was the fact that real tragedy had occurred and most people were coming in to help, not always in the most appropriate way..."
Her novel also allowed her to explore the complex politics of aid. There is a scene in the novel based on a real situation in Rwanda where the humanitarian agencies had to confront the fact that in feeding the Hutu women and children who had fled, they were also feeding the men who had formed the death squads and committed atrocities against their Tutsi neighbors.
``They were fattening up the army to go in and try again ... I don't think there are answers. I remember meeting an aid agency worker who said: `What are we to do? If you see a child dying in front of you, do you say, `sorry, your politics aren't right, we can't feed you?"'
The most graphic, harrowing scenes in the novel are in Rwanda, which Deveson also found the hardest to film. ``It was the deliberateness of the killing, the hunting them down and slaughter without mercy. It was planned and executed with precision. There were death lists, as there were in Nazi Germany ..."
Writing the novel took her back there. ``It made me feel quite nauseated. I often felt the need to go for a long walk afterwards or play some wonderful music - to remind me of the other side of humanity; the joy and beauty we are capable of."
It took six years and many drafts before Deveson overcame her journalist's desire to stick to the facts, and could finally let her characters speak for themselves. ``I would load the story up with facts and figures, and forget about the people, and then, with some degree of irritation, I would drop them in."
Her daughter, Georgia Blain, was writing her first novel at the same time, and they would ring each other with progress reports. It's tempting to see some links in their stories. Blain has a character called Dorothy in Closed for Winter who lives in a house by the sea, as Deveson does, and when the going gets tough, stays in bed clipping items out of the newspaper. Deveson admits to the predilection for tearing out interesting articles but is hardly the sort to retreat to her bed. Deveson's Hannah is a rather preoccupied, career-driven mother and Deveson has written of her own guilt about expecting too much of her other children when Jonathan was ill.
At one point Hannah begins to doubt her role in serving up starving children for the Western world, another issue Deveson herself has wondered about. ``We tend to see the victim side of the story and that is how we portray it," she says. ``But when you are actually there you are often seeing enormous courage and resilience and the capacity of people to pick themselves up and start again.
``It makes many people in African countries quite angry that we only show those images; so we are continually pushing them down."
What really matters in the end is that resilience - whether it is carrying on after your son has lost his battle with schizophrenia, or the regeneration of a people. In Lines in the Sand, Deveson writes of an event she witnessed in the aftermath of the Rwandan slaughter. Hundreds of lost or orphaned babies and young children suffering profound trauma - many with machete wounds, others just rocking backwards and forwards with their fingers in their ears - were mothered by young Rwandan women, many victims of the conflict themselves.
``They cuddled them, washed them and oiled their bodies - because what these children needed most was touch. Within days they were laughing and playing."
Lines in the Sand is published by Penguin.
CV:
Anne Deveson,writer
Born: 1930, Kuala Lumpur.
Career: Royal Commissioner, Royal Commission on Human relationships; founding member, NSW Anti-Discrimination Board; Executive Director, Australian Film Television and Radio School, 1985-88.
Publications: Tell Me I'm Here; Faces of Change; Coming of Age; Lines in the Sand.
Lives: Sydney, divorced. Three children.
© 2000 The Age
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