Please note: this is an autobiographical fiction with some truths and some not-truths as it is an assignment in autobiographical prose fiction. Any part that resembles any particular person, event or situation is but coincidental. It has been submitted as part of a Masters Degree at Deakin University, Geelong, Victoria. 1997. Last fiddled with - July 19, 1998 :Hackham South Australia

It keeps happening. The noise and clutter. All my Son wants to do is to beautiful the neighbourhood - the ugliness of suburbia is just too much for him. A few cans of spray paint can do wonders for these parts. I decide I will learn to understand. my Children. My my my how will I ever understand? Home from the library. Arms full of books, articles, magazines. Graffiti. Hip-Hop.

When my son first said he was into Hip-Hop. He was eleven. Year six. We were living in Victor Harbor. A tourist destination when there is nowhere else to go. After fifteen years in Australia I am beginning to think that most of this big island is a destination. It was originally a destination for convicts...excuse me, that is my Americanised colonial self perceiving deceptive perceptions... of course before it was a destination it was home to non-convicts, the real owners of this land. Such intruders we whites were. I was a convict of mis-guided love, and now I am imprisoned, gently raising my children on this island floating out of Dreamtime. Kangaroos. They use to hop across the back of our farm when we lived in Mt. Compass before starting over again in Victor Harbor. We would go out to the paddock and watch our dog chase them. Hip-hop. Hip-hop. Sacha was not into kangaroos suddenly. It was Hip-Hop. Hip-Hop is a culture: rap music, graffiti, skate-boarding and anti: Anti-everything. I wanted to know more. Did my Honours thesis on 'Graffiti as text'. Read. Talked. Observed. Even did some myself.

my Children Graffitied

This is going to be longer than I had expected it would be should be could be. I started writing this in 1978 when I didn't have children - just the imagination of how easy it would be. Having children. Well credit to where credit is due. Of course I wouldn't have the children like in those comedy films that come out every so often. Arnold what's-his-name having a baby.

Yeah! Right! Let's be realistic. Some woman would have the baby for me. I would get her pregnant in the normal in the back seat of my Chevy, underneath a voyeur moon in Scorpio. A beautiful act in itself. I wish I was Mosses or Noah or one of those people who God told to populate the earth. Solomon. No wonder he was so wise. What a guy. Seven hundred wives as well as 300 concubines Why hasn't Hollywood done a movie on him. Speilberg's 'King Solomon' see randy Soloy seduce one-thousand pin-up broads. Nakedly. Then wham. Christianity comes along. Guilt. Guilt.

And more guilt. One woman. One man. Or burn in indignation.. Wow! So I wrote that first few lines at the beginning of this chapter long ago. Kept adding to it. Then one day I had some children. A wife. Actually the wife came first, then the child then I moved to this foreign shadow. The wife was foreign to begin with, she was just returning to her shadow with me in chains crawling behind. Suddenly, I was divorced. It was like having a toothache in the middle of the night and even though I pulled the tooth ou sometimes it still hurts. I couldn't leave the foreign shadow. My family and friends were dying one by one in America. I was dying one by one in Australia. I was very very poor, not very smart and losing my clinically classical Neanderthal mind. I had two children - babies actually, in the year of their Lord, 1984. I had no friends. The wonderful South Australia Family courts said, "here, hear, have a couple kids, just don't leave town with them. Don't you leave either". I threw away all that I had written about the joys of parenting except for the first few lines. Now I will start all over again. About being a single father. Or single mother, grandfather, aunt, uncle, grandmother - I am them all - unto to myself, unto THEM - my father my dead mother, my dead brother, grandfather, aunt, uncle, grandmother. I have changed attitudes, switched gears, toward raising children. I hope by writing this I will realise what that changed attitude and in what gear it is. And my children will not be dented in their attitudes toward life needing perpetual undenting by future new-age therapists in the future, as they laboriously try to explain:

I often come in fourth especially when there are only two places. I create two more losing places just as a protest against bronze medal winning life styles.

Wouldn't you?

Hip-Hop. Graffiti. Fences. Next He will say He sprays the morning sky. "It's all Your father's fault". Lying is part of a post-modern continuum anyway. Creative story telling that only disintegrates if found to be untrue. Lying. Words tossed against the canvas of life. Some red here. Read between the red lines so well read. A bit of a collage there. Meaning constructed up in the middle lower. Frameless. Hang it in the museum of the subconscious for unconscious masturbating Freudians to sneer at. Legends. Myths. Dream Times. "And this mountain fell in love with this river and they had this island." "The great One took a handful of stars threw them at the East Wind." 'Burp!' "Jonah spent three days inside of the whale." 'Fart!' Eve shafted Adam. My son has painted all the suburbia trains and buses in Adelaide. "When my Children first came to this suburb, back in the old days...there was no visible graffiti. Then the cans appeared. Messages. Meanings. Graf-gods blessed the suburbs. But then the evil forces of the unhappy adult authorities looked upon the suburbs.

The wars began..."

These two girls at the door. Thirteen Fourteen. 'Is he there?' He isn't. They leave. Girls don't visit my children too often. My children say they'd be embarrassed to bring girls here. I think it's so cute. Girls interested in my boys. I try to remember movies and television shows I've seen. Doesn't the boy - dressed nicely - go to the girl's house and meet the parents and ask to take the girl out. They say have her back by ten. Father sternly looking at the boy - "keep your hands off her if ya know what's good for ya matey". I rarely went on dates when I lived at home. Bowling sometimes. My father would sit in the car. We lived in Clifton Park - Upstate New York, population about twenty horny frustrated Christian children and a handful of adult entities. No public transport so my father had to take us. I would sit in the back seat feeling my date up and down all the way home. Presumably my father had his eyes on the road. We can't do that here. The fact that our car doesn't even always get us to where we are going or sometimes to there but not back is not a fact to consider. I can imagine, though I shouldn't, taking one of my boys on a date. Get half-way to where we are going, car breaking down. Broken. RAA towing us home. Me explaining to the girl's parents that our car broke down them not believing me thinking I'm some pervert making up that we were stranded on a country road with their daughter late at night.

It's all wrong. I want a proper life. A proper suburban car. A Volvo. Maybe a four-wheel drive station wagon. Something foreign like me. Take my Children and Their dates to nice places, with my Children dressed fashionably. Shoes not worn - with toes trying to escape out the sides, like they do now. Sneakers. Good ones. Like the ones in the commercials where the guy is jumping over buildings. My Children jumping over their karma, their legacy - me. Pants that aren't worn through to the knees. Up to date stuff. I'd take them to a nice restaurant not drive-thru-eateries like we do most days today, where we try to get extra free food on out of date vouchers. Maybe a movie. I would go to the library, read USA Today while they felt each other up in the darkness. Bowling would be o.k. Miniature golf. Now my Children have no money for dates. I have none to give Them. Can't drive Them anywhere anyway. I have been with my girlfriend for almost a year. We haven't been on a date yet either. We met in the park she bought some of my

11 MAY 1998 12:28:43 PM 650 pages later and still going strong. available end of 1999 somewhere.

a particular slice of the final chapter

© 1997 terrell.neuage@unisa.edu.au

, Conversation analyses in chatrooms, electronic talk, Terry Adsit, Adelaide, University of South Australia, Literature Review, Electronic Journal of Communication, How to do things with words, Hypertext,