“You
can throw stones only if everyone aims out across the water and no boy stands
in front of another,” I say. “Okay?”
A
wide azure sky, a glassy lake and a chorus of kookaburras in the red gums to
each side. On school camps like this I
feel the same vigour and sense of freedom that I see in the kids. The boys cannot resist the billion or so
smooth pebbles covering the shore; a sort of magic draws the hand to them,
impels the arm to throw at something. I
am feeling what they feel – or is it a faint echo from my childhood calling through
my body?
Other
echoes from very recent events ring in my mind, such as the staff meeting in
which we tried to thrash out the issue of whether boys need a different
education from girls. The proposal to
ban some potentially injurious games in the yard was a particularly hot
potato. “We have to give boys scope to
be themselves, to find themselves,” I recall saying to colleagues. “Yes, they also need to learn how to respect
others, to empathise, to express feelings the right way. But they’re wired to take risks and to push
and shove and throw and jump and all the rest of it. Try to repress all that and it’ll break out
in ways we can’t accept.”
The
thirty-odd boys in my charge are waiting on the lake shore for the rest of the
campers to collect us in a bus. I’m
weary after a long hike. I would love to
sit for a while, but the bus is already over half an hour late and the kids are
aching for physical activity. With sixty
feet crunching deliciously on a thick carpet of pebbles, I know that before
long some boy will pick one up and it will be on for young and old. But I have
to prevent them from hurting each other.
So, cursing the bus, I try to direct the urge constructively. I show them the water-skipping technique.
Decades
ago my father would walk my brother, sister and me along the beach and show us
how to send pebbles bouncing across the surface of the sea. He dissected the whole routine – finger-grip,
arm action, stance, type of pebble.
Whenever the chance came I would lose myself in endless practice.
It
was simple repetition with an effort to discover tiny variations that could
make the difference between the satisfaction of achieving a clean skip and the
ecstasy induced by a perfect triple-skipper or better. And occasionally all the heavens would ring
with triumph when my little missile happened to leap off the crest of a smooth
wave and soar high into an arc undreamt of.
It was a quest every bit as heroic and compelling as that of the
alchemists and the seekers of the grail.
As
rapt as when I listened to my Grade 3 teacher read the story of David and
Goliath, I acted out a myth living deep in the human unconscious. The myth adopts you as its own, ennobles you
and infuses you with its power. And
somehow, swelling with this hubris, you believe that you are beyond moral
reproach, that whatever you aim for must be the right target. Most boys are seduced thus at some stage of
their lives; adulthood, too, brings the occasional relapse; some men even seem
to live the myth constantly.
There
is something about the stone itself, the feel of it in your hand, stirring the
hero within. Pondering this recently
where the Southern and Indian Oceans meet Australia’s coast, I walked over
massive granite boulders that taunt the green mountains of water into furious
white suicide. The scene has continued
for millennia. One gigantic eruption of
spray follows another, and the long lines of the waves keep coming from over
the horizon towards the same fate. The
only variation from one day to the next is in their size; the action and its
direction never changes.
There
was little more imagination or self-questioning among the military master-minds
under whom my grandfather fought in the Great War. They would send wave upon wave of men in
attacks against the German lines, knowing full well that most or all would die
without taking any enemy ground. The war
of attrition: just keep attacking for however long it takes to wear the
bastards down, regardless of how many of your own you lose. But now the rock, not the sea, seemed to
epitomise my grandfather and all those whom the war claimed. They and their stories and their sufferings,
like the boulders I stood on, endure in the collective memory of the
generations.
I
clambered across the granite shoulders just above the water-line. The rock, so cold and hard, gave deep
comfort, offering a sort of unconditional, perpetual stability. A sort of love, even. I remembered how, as a boy, I would picnic
with my parents at Port Elliot and Victor Harbour, in another State some
thousands of kilometres to the east along the same coastline. At the first chance I would run away along
the sand, past all the idle sunbathers, run until no other human voice could
reach my ears, to where brilliant fingers of spray leapt from the outcrops of
boulders with one huge roar after another, and go to a spot where I could feel
cradled by the granite all around me.
I
was the child of this savage, elemental world, and its wisdom and power were
passed on to me through contact with the rock.
Here, as huge swells loomed and the southerly wind whipped my face, I
could cry irresistible commands to humanity, knowing that the words came
straight from the heart of creation.
From
trips like this I would inevitably bring home pebbles and sometimes bigger
chunks of stone to add to a collection scattered in nooks and crannies of my
room. Certain pebbles became very
special: a smooth, ovoid piece of conglomerate, mostly blue-black but
orange-brown at one end; another piece of conglomerate like a shiny, buckled
plate, pale brown with a couple of dark grey pieces and a set of wavy lines
like some ancient script. And there were
many others, and often I would take one to school, where I could escape from
the tyranny of some boring teacher by fondling the pebble to be empowered anew
with the natural force that was my birth-right. I would polish it lovingly.
The
stone linked me with my origins. I had
come from a past so distant that it could be timeless, a past that hummed in my
mouth songs with no words but with meaning that I could feel in my belly. It was like the euphoria that follows a
delicious meal after a laborious day of fast.
Daily life and its people were not enough to quell the hunger pangs I
felt; succour came only from a source to which time was irrelevant.
Thus
could stone empower the spirit, but it could also become an instrument for
seeking worldly power. In my primary
school years I yearned to belong to a certain neighbourhood gang which roamed
the local paddocks. They were an
exclusive group with high status who made and played with “stone guns”, wooden
catapults shaped like small rifles or pistols.
The hierarchy of authority that boys lean towards was explicitly based on
the quality of each person’s gun and shooting.
The idea of owning such a weapon captured me. Though far less able than
other boys at hand-craft of any sort, I spent hours at Dad’s work-bench, driven
by desire to rise in the estimation of my peers.
It
was a hopeless product that I turned out.
When I took it out to play with the gang they were aiming at targets
like boxes and posts. The device which released my elastic and the stone it
propelled just wouldn’t work. I resorted
to pulling back the elastic and holding it between my fingers like an ordinary
shanghai until I was ready to shoot.
This made the aim very unreliable.
I
let go and there was a scream of pain.
My mate Roger was on his knees with both hands clasped to one eye! On all sides the fingers of scornful
accusation immediately pointed at me.
I
fled home in bewildered shame. Roger
came to school for a day or two with a bandage over one eye, but the injury was
not serious. As far as I can remember I
didn’t know what to say to him. I think
it was the first time I had ever caused a perceptible injury, and I was too
shocked to think of an apology. The rest of the gang, I felt, were quite
hypocritical in using me as a scapegoat.
They ostracised me permanently.
It’s
in most of us from birth, the urge of boys to throw and hit things, embedded in
the brain like rock-bound fossils from aeons ago. I wonder if neuroscientists Bill and Ann Moir
had some such image in mind when they wrote about “brain-sculpting” – the way
hormones released in the third month after conception shape neurological
structures into male or female, homosexual or heterosexual forms. Certainly the evidence presented by the
scientists is as hard as granite: in general, boys are better at certain things
than girls, and vice versa. Because of
innate brain-structure, males tend to excel in such areas as judging size,
distance and spatial relationships, along with gross motor activity. Little wonder that they want to aim at
targets, propel, jump and climb, run over much bigger spaces than most of the
girls.
Such
knowledge was still to reach me when, at the age of twenty, words bruised like
rocks as spectators hurled them at me and my companions walking down the middle
of city streets. As when the gang had
ostracised me in childhood, I was again the target of abuse – but this time for
refusing to shoot guns. I had registered
as a conscientious objector against conscription into the armed services
fighting in Vietnam, and now marched in protest. Many other marchers surrounded me, but the
accusations of “Traitor!” and “Coward!” stung.
Were
my birth-date to be drawn from the conscription barrel I would have to become a
soldier unless I could defend my beliefs in court. While not completely pacifist, I vehemently
opposed Australia’s participation in that war.
This was not a basis for a defence according to law, so I doubt in
retrospect that I could have argued my case successfully. In the end I was not conscripted but discovered
that several of my mates had been. And
two, perhaps the gentlest and least defensive of all, had been killed.
Now,
nearly forty years later on the shore of this lake, the boys bubble around me
with glee, competing to see who can get the most skips out of a pebble. Glad that I introduced the idea, I squat down
to show them some stones of superior shape and size.
And
then my head explodes. Stunned, I see
that my hand has found sticky blood oozing from just above one eye.
The
rock came from slightly behind me; it did not travel directly towards the water. An innocent child’s clumsy technique,
perhaps? I hardly try to find the
culprit, because somehow it seems wrong to relate the cause to the boys around
me here and now. The pain in my head
feels many, many years old.
“Sorry,
Roger,” I groan. “Please forgive me.”
© Stephen
Crabbe 2002
