Ken Stone: Family Photograph, 1949
Family Photograph: 1949
I’m with my family in Peak Hill Park.
I’m five and in my smooth cheeked
introspective phase.
I’m with my aunt, born a blue baby.
I often studied her for sky traces,
but my mother called it rude to stare.
I was convinced my aunt hid blueness
with rouge and scented powders.
(I began to think all women were blue.)
My sister is brimming with tears.
She’d hold her breath and turn blue—
then she’d gulp and turn red,
so you can appreciate my confusion.
My father has his hands on my shoulders.
He erased his sister’s blueness from his mind.
What he didn’t think about didn’t exist,
and he never thought in colour.
He’ll move from this snapshot moment
towards tomorrow and wrap his soldier coat
about him and begin the autumn ploughing.
At our homestead called Suvla, my mother
will wave a towel at a crumbling paddock
and my father will arrive with a dusty face.
My aunt’s face was the sky and his was the ground.
Intent upon furrows and weather,
he’ll wash away paddock smudges.
He’ll go to the table and eat roasted mutton,
and potatoes breaking into whiteness.
He’ll finish and wrap himself in his khaki coat
and plough into lateness on a twinkling tractor.
It’s rare to find my father in photographs.
In the late forties he was a tractor rumble
on his life’s horizon.
My mother, patterned with blossoms,
deserved Kodak colour and is poorly served
by black-and-white.
She had straightened my tie and smoothed
my hair, not wanting the man I’d be
to view an untidy childhood.
She kept a worried eye on my aunt
whose blue birth was blamed for blotches
and visits of pain. Had I imagined blisters
of blue like rust on unpainted metal?
In no time my aunt was thirty-three
and dying from heart and liver trauma.
I was twenty and finding death impossible:
the way it absorbs every colour, especially
the blue imagining of childhood.
At five I could have accepted nobody
can exist being blue, even if it’s concealed
with exquisite clothes and tints.
Waist high and in my smooth cheeked phase,
I would have been reconciled to a surgeon
excising my aunt’s blueness in an effort
to make her like the rest of us.
Ken Stone
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