2023

Selected works from Shared Stories 2023

Me Vs. Myself

Cathy
Year 12 · Killester College

Often the biggest enemy is one conjured up of the self. Largely detached from my own culture, I taste the sour and bitter ends of lemon, but hold a ribbon of connection in wanting to meet myself halfway. My Chinese zodiac of a rooster follows a motif of self-identity - though talons are out, a willingness to learn and inspire also supersedes any internal conflict.

Elicia
Year 9 · Aquinas College

Beauty is Difference

Avril
Year 10 · Catholic Regional College St Albans

Anne
Year 11 · St Peter’s College, Cranbourne

Skyler
Year 11 · De La Salle College

The Escape

Noah
Year 8 · Caroline Chisholm Catholic College

Screams permeated through the city of Saigon. The malnourished Vietnamese citizens rushed through the streets, fearful of what would happen to them next. South Vietnam was overpowered by the North many years ago and now, the new government was trying to arrest any remaining soldiers and their families. My grandpa, who came from a whole family of war generals, was now on the run - desperately trying to escape the terrors of being captured.

I still remember the first time my mother told me this as a bedtime story, I was 6 years old and hiding behind my blanket. This is the story of how my mum and her family escaped the horrors of Vietnam.

When the North had taken over, the authorities indoctrinated all the citizens, convincing them that trying to escape would be met with harsh punishments or even death. This led to the people being scared, to the point that they didn’t even leave their homes. Despite this, some of the South Vietnamese stood strong, maintaining their innate desire for freedom and justice.

My grandfather was the driver of an oil tanker, and he helped these determined Vietnamese communities in their attempts to escape, providing them with leftover oil to fuel their boats. After many years, he was caught and taken in for questioning. Refusing to hand over any information about the communities he was helping and his personal information, the authorities threatened to send my grandfather to jail and prosecute him. Increasingly concerned by these threats, my grandmother reached out to the community my family had helped for so many years - asking them if they could supply her with any boats or transportation to help my family escape.

Finally, a plan was hatched. My grandfather was released from interrogation on bail and went straight into hiding at the same time, my grandma and her 3 children embarked on a “wedding trip”. Meeting up in a secret location where my grandparents reunited along with their children, they trekked through marshes, swamps and jungles - eventually reaching a secluded waterfront where a rusty fisherman’s boat waited for them eerily.

After a few last-minute repairs, the boats cast off from the banks, floating through the dead of night. Initially, everything was functioning as expected, until suddenly the engine suffered a critical failure, leaving over 50 people stranded out at sea. They were stuck there for a week, low on food, with no clean water and constantly under the threat of pirates. After many menacing days, salvation was found at last when a German Tanker ship spotted them and took them to the coast of Indonesia. Back on land, my family were cared for by the local community and after nearly two years in Indonesia, they had the resources to move to Tasmania where they had their fourth child and then eventually moved to Melbourne, Australia, where they live now.

Tiffany
Year 7 · Kolbe Catholic College

Abishek
Year 11 · Mazenod College

Neeb
Year 11 · Mazenod College

My Home - Mulgrave, Murray, Gordonvale

Isabel
Year 10 · Star of the Sea College

These names are not my own. These are the white man’s names for my home. Names that were “bestowed” upon us like an unwanted gift. A murdered dog on our doorsteps. These names were forced into our language, our cultures, our mouths. Their foreign syllables contaminate our throats, forced in like soap, disgusting and unnatural.

Forced. Forced from our lands and cultures. Our home.

Evicted from the only life we’ve ever known. Stolen.

My culture is stolen from me in the form of murders, massacres and plagues. My language is stolen in the form of “Oxford, Cambridge and Webster’s Dictionary”.

My dictionary is not yours. My language is not yours. My language is not savage, barbaric.

My language is storytelling under an open sky and dancing on the sandy beaches. My language is the beauty of the Kokwam.

My ancestors walked upon the land with care. We knew our land, and the land knew us.

But I live in Naarm. Melbourne. A land that was never my own, but the land I call my first home. This is not my home.

I want to return home. I want home.

I dance through three worlds. I dance through the world of treetops and creeks. The world of the Yidinji. My people were rainforest people, in Cairns. They resided in the trees and creeks and rocks and boulders that swam amongst the sun-speckled paths. Leaf-ridden dreams stretch across the vibrant waterfalls; deep-rooted calls.

I dance in the world of sandy beaches. The world of Zenadth Kes. My people are Island people. We live in harmony with the Beizam and Waru. We thrive off the beauty of the untainted Yulpin. I dream of sitting under the magnificent night stars, in my island home.

My people’s islands. My people’s homes. I’ve never been home.

I dance in the world of tall buildings and polluted roads. The world of the white fella. I learn and play by the rules of society in hopes I can bring justice to my brothers and sisters who are lost in the merry-go-round of violence and racism and drugs and death. These problems manipulate the mind. Australia’s history is not a victimless crime.

These problems plague our minds and corrupt our homes. Problems whose ruthless face shifts with the tides, and whose mercy recedes with the deafening silence. The echo of our calls and screams and shouts fall into the abyss. We call to be heard but no voice replies back.

No voice listens. No one listens.

Listening. Listening to stories. Listening to the past, the future. Listening to the stories hidden in stars. Listening to the stories in the water, in the trees, in the animals.

My people were teachers. They taught their lessons in the form of stories and dances. We tell and repeat through our actions, teach over 60,000 years of history in the flick of wrists and the beat of stomping feet.

White men destroyed these stories. Uprooted them from millennia of practice. Now, I weave the broken strands of stories back from old, creating a new beauty.

Our resilience, our truths, our spirit, we fight back. This is the phoenix; we rise from the ashes. We rise from the fires of hell that we’ve seen every day of our lives, the fires that burn our roots and decimate our land. We rise high with the smoke to the sky. We teach. We learn. We talk. We listen.

We’ve built our society on the backs of those we mistreated. Our success is due to unrecognised labour. You’ve heard it before. I am not preaching to the masses. I am not asking you to end racism, fight it at a national level. I am asking to be heard. To be recognised.

My ancestors never had that chance. My grandparents never had that chance. My mother didn’t have that chance. I have that chance. Let me voice my words. Let me retell a song sung so many times, yet skipped just as many.

This is my blood. This is my dance. This is my story.

If stars bear witness to the actions of humans, let them bear witness to my story here, today.

Church Kids

Rose
Year 12 · Star of the Sea College

As a kid my weekends were frequently punctuated by a few short hours of intense tedium.

My parents weren’t the overly religious sort, but I first learnt boredom in a church. Dad had grown up Catholic, the sort that feared his God-fearing mother. In a fortunate turn for my sister and I, he didn’t inherit any of my Grandmother’s staunch mass-attending ways.

Still, I was culturally Catholic and all it entails. And, if one were to listen to my Grandmother, it entailed regular attendance at her local Sunday Service. She was determined to maintain a Catholic legacy in each one of her nine grandchildren, and so all us kids came to dread that hour-long ordeal which preceded or succeeded any otherwise pleasant family function. Under the guise of a late family lunch, an early dinner, another birthday celebration in a seeming abundance of birthday celebrations- we would walk resignedly from my grandparent’s house to the local parish church that was not but a block away.

If my grandparents were ever to sell their house in those years I am sure it was not the swimming pool out back, or the vacant lot with the makeshift treehouse among the pluricot trees, or even the comforting crescent shape of their street that they would have boasted of. The proximity of that church was my Grandmother’s key delight, the walk to and from was simple auxiliary.

Our immediate family, cousins and aunts and uncles and my grandmother’s sister, and her husband, and her friend Rosa and Rosa’s husband and any number of church friends and neighbours, would crowd into the rows and rows of awkwardly carved wooden pews. If any of us kids had ever mustered the bravery or sheer stupidity that an escape attempt required I have no doubt we’d have been frogmarched right back in.

We stepped beyond those doors and became Church Kids. The ones who attended the Children’s Religious Learnings in the primary school attached. I complained, of course, as was the prerogative of any reasonably entitled child. Complained to my father, who told me it was important that children learnt to manage boredom somewhere, and that was what Mass was for. So I learnt to be bored.

The time I spent in that dismal room became something close to bearable upon discovering this concept. I counted the stations of the cross to warm up. I counted the whorls in the wooden pew in front of me. I counted the strands of hair on the shiny scalp of the balding man to my far left.

On a single occasion- only once, mind- I protested the ordeal to my grandmother’s face. My parents were off in Europe and so my sister and I had been shipped off to grandparents.

Mass, twice in as many weeks. Two hours of my life. Gone. Vanished. Wasted.

I’m still of the opinion that the walk back that day was a punishment for my declaration. Typically it was pleasant enough, good weather provided. But that day my Grandmother found reason to stop and chat with every parishioner, with every neighbour. No, I couldn’t run ahead with the keys to the house on my horizon. She wanted to introduce me to Martha on the corner. She wanted Martha (or Margaret or whatever her name was) to share her entire life’s story and some summer gardening tips besides. Yes, my grandmother’s tomatoes were doing very well this year, thank you for asking. But the dogs had destroyed her orchids! Oh no, what a shame. Here’s my favourite potting mix, said Martha. I’ll be sure to check it out, said my grandmother.

This series of conversations was worse than church, for the fact it required me as an active prop and participant. Our return must have taken an hour more that day, and all to cover a distance which spanned only a hundred metres or so.

Religion was the precursor to many lengthy ordeals. I immersed myself in decades of the rosary that first night it was given to me. Completed the thing in a half hour or so, and put it in a little glass ornament box to never again be resurrected. My confirmation was next on the list- a saint name had to be chosen, its significance considered carefully. I wondered if there was a Saint Rose. Dad searched it up for me.

Isabel Flores is the saint who shares my name. St Rose of Lima. Absolute paragon of self-inflicted pain; of virtue brought about by torment revered in the name of God.

On her head she placed a crown of iron thorns, weighted so that its spikes pierced her flesh. By her death, the weight of this physical manifestation of her guilt was so sunk to her skull as to be embedded.

She’d been beautiful, once. But no more, with her face marred by peppers and the hands of a burn victim set willingly alight in an act of self-imposed penance.

Dad suggested I choose one of the Marys for my saint’s name. I can’t recall which I went with in the end.

That religion of my youth blurs together now, and I am left only with bare bones and no memory of the marrow. The custom of the Eucharist lacked ingenuity; its performance always had some sense, to us, of being sanitised to the point of dishonesty. In homily the paragon of virtue was never noteworthy in any way besides the exceptionally mundane. We mourned the loss of fire and brimstone, of this institution of God stripped of story

On occasion, we’d return from mass so especially dispirited as to play-act the ritual of Eucharist. The pews would be laid out- some eclectic range of armchairs, fold out seats, and what had been filched from around the dining table. And then we would subject our parents to our interpretation of this event.

Three of us would walk solemnly down the aisle we’d created, with leftover breadstick in a bowl and a jug of water. Behind a makeshift altar we’d stand, and then some prayer we’d searched up would be read aloud, chanted in triplicate. This is the body of Christ, broken for you. This is the blood of Christ, shed for you.

Our younger siblings stood to the side - they’d come forward at this point, and the lucky ones would deliver torn bread and blessings to our exhausted audience.

The body of Christ.

Amen.

Kelvin
Year 5 · St Joseph’s Primary School, Springvale