4. A RANSOM Journal

Journal Writing

Getting started on a journal entry

It's about a year ago that I started reading RANSOM for the first time. The following is that first entry from MY Ransom Journal. What I wrote is in italics. The other material - about General Location, specific location ... and so on - are the format elements of my Journal: the way I get started in writing my Journal.

General Location:
Where I am:
Place/Time/in my head/how I’m feeling/ what’s on my mind/ what’s been happening

It’s Wednesday and it’s hot! It’s been hot all day and I’m feeling tired and lethargic. My shirt is clinging to my back with the sweat. I don’t feel much like writing in this journal, but I’m going to try.

Specific location
What I’ve been doing; what I’ve been thinking about ...

I’ve started reading Ransom – in preparation for my Year 12 class next year - and I’m enjoying it so far. It is very literary, so I wonder how the students will respond.

Active response
Things that interest / puzzle me

What really grabbed me in the opening was the stuff about water – about how water was the element of Achilles’ mother. And the various images of water as being able to reflect everything but unable to hold anything ...
The other thing that I responded to was the notion of the dust that compose us having gathered together to form us, but then dispersing as our bodies disintegrate in death ... It reminds me of the funeral service: ashes to ashes , dust to dust; from dust we are made and to dust we will return ...

How it touches me

That stuff about listening for the voice of the mother really touches me ... it links with the facts of my birth, and the fact my mother relinquished me.

General Journal writing

Today I’ve decided to write about my mother – or rather, my mothers. My mother – the woman who raised me as her child and who took the truth of my origins to the grave with her – died in 1991. That’s twenty years ago. I can’t believe that...
Her name was Linda Robina May Carozzi. She was born Linda Robina May Kipping. She married my father when she was 29 and he was 31. That’s pretty late for those days, when people generally married in their late teens or early 20s.

My birth mother was named Gwendoline Esther Bertram. Her father – my grandfather - had served at Gallipoli. She had my brother Arthur when she was 1; she fell pregnant with me when she was19.

I first saw her photo – in September 2009. The photo was a detail of a larger wedding photo: my Aunt Nesta’s wedding, in 1939. My mum was so young; just 16. But I was blown away by how beautiful she was, how calm she seemed, how self possessed. I worked out that she must have fallen pregnant either just before or just after Nesta’s wedding ...