rambles

My musings/writing from over the years.

#standwithukraine

There was a man and his goat in the fork in a road on the outskirts of a rural town in Ukraine. This is in 2019. And we asked him - mum and I - if he knew anyone by the name of Kostiuk who was once in this town.

I’d spent days, maybe weeks, researching where exactly the old towns my grandparents grew up in were - towns on old maps that no longer existed. Had been bombed in the war, no trace left really unless you read through pages of documents in Cyrillic online to find them - or knew someone who knew someone who knew.

And the man with the goat in the fork in the road lifted his head, having no idea the meaning of what he was about to say to us and replied, “Yes, Kostiuk’s, yes, down there” - and vaguely waved down one of the forks in the road. My mum got in the car and we looked at each other, not saying a word and holding our breath, and drove down the off-road path.

Suddenly - a lake, ducks, a completely picturesque vision, and then, as if in a film we never expected to see - an old, beautiful building appeared, the only one standing in the town in a bizarrely surreal sight, the others there had been bombed to smithereens during the war, and on the side of it, as if a joke to us, on the side of the only building standing in this town we never thought still existed, in Cyrillic writing was the old name of the town my grandfather was born.

The town we had been searching for.

We cried in that moment, I think we cried. My mum and I. Because it was really there. All the stories and all the memories we were told about. A location for them now. It was this, the town, the imagined setting for those rare early memories, that he had talked to us about. The place he had run from during WW2 when the town and its people were being attacked horrifically - one of the worst bombed places in Ukraine - never to see his family again, never to see his mother again.

Having been told everyone he knew was dead.

Then, somehow, maybe hours later, maybe even minutes, I was sitting in an older woman’s kitchen in that rural area no one would visit unless they got completely lost 20 times over, and I was staring at a vinyl tablecloth. A vinyl tablecloth my grandmother and I had bought, years ago when I was in high school, a faint and distant memory at least 15 years prior, when she was upset and telling me in Ukrainian she wanted to send something to the family in Ukraine as a gift. And I stared at the tablecloths, I think we were in the Reject Shop, and I picked that exact one.

That exact one, sitting in the middle of nowhere in Ukraine, over a decade later, in a town no one in the family knew was still there. She had sent it to my grandfather’s mother. Who was still alive at the time.

I met a lot of family on that trip. Pictures of me, sent years prior, were passed around the table. My grandmother got dementia and perhaps forgot, perhaps forgot to tell us, that she had written to the family. Letters with her handwriting, her beautiful handwriting in Cyrillic Ukrainian that were put in my hands years after she wrote them. We never knew the family were here, still here. The grandmother that raised me, that told me stories of Ukraine, that made me fall in love with a country I had never been to. We never knew. But we found them. All because I wanted to make a film, in Ukrainian, and research where my grandparents were born. That’s why we were there. Sitting in the kitchen of my grandfather’s niece we hear - “We have always been looking for you, the Australian Kostiuk’s”.

My grandparents were from Ukraine, and my first language was Ukrianian, nearly all my films so far are about something to do with Ukraine or it’s people, or culture, or have to do with family ties - lost and found. So much of that world of Ukraine that I heard so much about growing up has influenced me. Even my two next films I’ve written and want to make have Ukrainian characters, language, stories.

I can’t stop reading the news, can’t stop thinking about the destruction happening there, the people being killed.

Ukraine is in my blood. In my heart.

I worry for the next days, weeks, months, years, what will happen to Ukraine? What will happen to the culture I grew up knowing, living, and loving?

#standwithukriane

Date Published: February 25, 2022

little baba

I have the most vivid memory of waking up at my grandmother's house when I was a child. I had been ill, and was curled up on the old, pilled, dark brown couch near the bookshelf with the rainbow fish book that had fascinated me only a few years before, and whilst half asleep had been covered with a wonderfully thick, warm, fluffy blanket. The heater was on, the TV glowing, it was close to dinner time, and once I woke up and realised where I was I remember smiling to myself and closing my eyes tight.

That memory has come back to me many times since.

It was when I realised what it meant to be safe.

To have the utter good fortune of waking up in a safe, loving and harmonious home.

That embodied what my grandmother was to me. She was that 'home' all the time.

On Sunday morning my beautiful Baba (which means 'grandmother' in Ukrainian), Anna, passed away.

She was the loveliest little lady I have ever had the pleasure of spending time with. As a child I grew up with her and my grandfather, and even as I got older I still went there every day after school. To me, visiting them and following them around the shed or sewing room or kitchen was more fun than hanging out with my schoolmates after class. My grandparents became my out-of-school schoolmates, as I was learning with them and they were learning with me.

This amazingly strong woman that helped to bring me up taught me not only how to speak, read and write in Ukrainian, but also how to thread a needle, cook, open difficult jars with the old tap-the-side-of-the-lid trick, knit, op shop, win at Ukrainian bingo on our trips together there (I would occasionally get 'sick' and join her at Ukrainian bingo instead of make the trek to school), charm everyone in the neighbourhood, play rummy bridge, love unconditionally, start every day with a smile and even got told the pearl of wisdom that if your second toe is longer than your other toes you were going to grow up being bossy and have difficulty finding a husband. Mine, luckily, isn’t. Hers was.

My grandmother Anna was born in Kharkiv, Ukraine in 1927.

During the Second World War, when Anna was 12, her mother passed away. She was now in the care of her father and older sister Marina.

It was not long after their mother's death that the two young girls were forcibly removed from their home and sent to work on a farm in Germany. They went to the train station with their father who had planned to leave Ukraine along with them, but as the two sisters climbed onto the carriage, when he went to follow the guard stopped him and wouldn't allow him on board. He tried to get on the train and the girls tried to get off, but the train left with those two little sisters on board and their father was left behind. That was the last time they ever saw him.

Anna and her sister arrived in Germany as prisoners of war and worked in 'holding camps' surviving on very little (if any) money. Many of these young, now displaced people, that had been sent there were working in harsh conditions in forced labour. Some returned home, however for Anna and Marina there was a risk of being sent to Siberia by the Russians if they returned home. Even though they had been forcibly removed, and were prisoners of war, it was still not safe for them to return. So they stayed. And they worked. On farms. As seamstresses. They worked.

It was at one of these holding camps that at the age of 19, Anna met a charming young man called Wasyl, who worked on the farms and also in the forest. He was good with horses, a hard worker and was "very handsome". Little did she know then but this would be the man she would go on to spend the rest of her life with.

They married soon after they met and decided to travel and start a new life elsewhere. My grandfather was hoping to go to Canada however Australia at that time had the (idiotic) 'White Australia Policy' and were angling for many of these fit and healthy Europeans by offering a chance to work for two years in return for Australian citizenship. She convinced Wasyl to go there (apparently she thought it would be good because ‘Australia’ sounded like 'Austria') so off they went. Her sister Marina married and left for France.

There is so much of Baba's life I still, and I suppose, never will now, be sure about. Even these "facts" have caused much conjecture in the car ride home amongst my family members. Different versions of different stories of different memories.

But what I do know, is this amazingly strong and loving woman, the Matriarch of our family, held us together. She may not have had the easiest life, but worked so hard to ensure that we all did.

I owe her everything.

I hope that you, like the child you once looked after on that old brown couch, are happy, warm and safe Baba. Wherever you are.

Date Published: August 3, 2015

SPRAY & WIPE

The life of an actor.

It's funny sometimes how life has a way of tying things together.

These two lovely little people are my grandparents: Anna and Wasyl.

I adored these humans.

Here they are in Germany, about to board a boat, pregnant with my aunty Sophia, heading off on an adventure to a country they had never seen, to start a new life. It is so strange to be finding out so much about them now that their lives are over.

We are currently in the process of clearing out and selling Anna and Wasyl's house. My grandfather died 5 years ago, my grandmother nearly 2. But these things take time.

I grew up in that house.

I went there every day after school.

I brought my friends over to sew homemade hacky sacks on my grandmother’s Mitsubishi sewing machine.

I helped my grandmother, Baba, make vareniki on the round kitchen table covered in plastic lino and flour.

I watched my grandfather, Dido, stir milk in the saucepan quietly for my breakfast cereal.

I did this even then knowing it was special, that Time wouldn't quite allow us to be together forever. Moments always tinged with sadness and gratefulness all at once, knowing each flicker is somehow that much more special.

I don't think I've ever felt more safe and at home anywhere in my life than I did in their house.

Concurrently, I am rehearsing a show called Hotel Bonegilla and I am finding out so much about the trip they went on to get here, who they may have met on their way to Australia from Ukraine, what they faced, their experience on this unknown soil.

So. Maybe we will sell their house soon, maybe we will get rid of their belongings we can't find homes for ourselves, maybe the flowers they planted in their garden will get torn out one day. But the life they gave for us, the wealth of spirit and generosity of their love will live through us. And it is incredible for me to still be discovering and learning about them, long after they have left this planet.

What an amazing thing life is, hey? So interconnected. I wish I could tell them.

Here's to you Baba and Dido. I hope you know you both did it all. I hope you knew every time you were scared, or unsure, or lost that it would all turn out okay. We, your family, live and are so very lucky. We are all clothed, fed, looked after and loved.

Date Published: June 16, 2017.