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