Whenever I remember my first two years in Australia, I also remember a television lounge in a boarding-house in Canberra which rapidly filled up the moment the tune of HOMICIDE echoed through the empty hallways.
I admired Leonard Teale not only for his acting but also for his beautiful baritone voice, and I always hoped that my own English would one day sound as good as his. It never did but I'm still addicted to his renditions of some of Banjo Paterson's poems, especially Clancy of the Overflow.
Decades later I discovered another 'Thiele' - which had been Leonard's surname before he changed it to his stage name 'Teale' - and for years I mixed up 'Thiele' and 'Teale', as I watched HOMICIDE and STORMBOY.
The other 'Thiele', Colin Thiele, was a prolific writer of children's fiction who became famous with "Storm Boy". Since then I have read several of his books, and also learnt to differentiate between homophones - while remaining a rusted-on homophobe - so those early years spent watching HOMICIDE in that Canberra boarding-house have not been a total waste.
Getting up this morning seems to have been a total waste as the day looks tired and grey, a bit like me when I first got up at three o'clock. I couldn't sleep any longer and made myself a cup of tea and a piece of toast thick with plum jam and sat there for a while, wondering why I have these interrupted sleep patterns, usually around three o'clock.
Why do we wake up each day and search for meaning, as though life owes us an answer? It is one of the oldest human habits: to ask, again and again, "What is the point of all this?" Maybe the real question is not why we seek meaning, but what we would do if we ever found the answer. Maybe another cup of tea and another piece of toast thick with plum jam is the answer. And another cup of green tea with soy milk for that other person in my life who still sleeps the sleep of the innocent.
