In Songlines, his advocacy for nomadism, Bruce Chatwin quotes Arthur Rimbaud writing home from Ethiopia asking, ‘What am I doing here?’ It is a quote often to be found at the start of travel guides.
Having spent the bulk of my adult life as a drifter, which is distinct from nomadism, questioning my existence, I can relate both to Chatwin’s advocacy and Rimbaud’s philosophical query.
Based in northern Kenya I spent five years managing a maternal-child health project amongst the remote nomadic pastoralists in the Horn of Africa. The photo below is me having a snooze in the town of Logiya, Afar desert, Ethiopia.
In identity politics parlance I am a heteronormative, cis gender, white, Skippy, able bodied Boomer, born and raised working class in one of the richest countries in the world, who has attained middle class status and almost reached retirement.
Growing up in the working class northern suburbs of Melbourne, I left school and home at the age of sixteen. Now it is more than half a century later of working life. Beginning with labouring in factories, and then paying my own way through university (proud as the only member of my family to ever go to uni), the pinnacle, for lack of a better term, was a three-decade career in international aid. I have spent over 20 years living and working in the magnificent African continent (witnessing the end of apartheid in South Africa was a feature), ten years covering the Pacific, along with some assignments in south-east and central Asia. Add in a few years as a labouring backpacker in Europe (mid-80s), cups of tea in the Arab world, and most recently a blues cruise from New Orleans to Chicago.
In my life there have been periods addicted to various substances along with the proverbial mental health issues (depression is a bastard, psychosis is despairing), drifting aimlessly while seeking purpose, decades outside the land of my birth and years moving within it. I have worked in war zones, visited paradise, formed bonds that should be unbreakable, and lived an existence I look back on as wondrous.
With a love of love of blues, jazz, African and rock music, reading facts and fiction, camping and solid off-road driving (give me spacious deserts), sport, all washed down with a decent single malt or craft beer, some say I’m too cynical for my own good yet with a cheeky zest for life, an introvert who has been a party animal. There have been many lovers, most of whom I remain on good terms with. Now, being with a truly amazing, intellectually questioning, life partner, we have settled into a delightfully atypical community in regional Australia. We are consciously happily childless, with pets as substitutes.
My adult life has always had social justice at its heart. As a product of the late-60’s / early-70’s I come from a radical left background, often with membership of a political formation (now I’m assuredly independent). I have actively engaged in trade unionism and workers’ rights, the anti-colonial struggles, progress in post-colonial states, for feminism and against patriarchy, anti-racism, along with the climate emergency and environment issues. Once declaring that I’m only visiting this planet when really, I’m a small integral component on Gaia drifting through the universe.
Having attracted a few nick names throughout life I have adopted the moniker of Phlip, Phlop, Phly honouring Big Joe Turners’ classic song – ‘flip, flop and fly / I don’t care if I die’. It is a truism to say that the older we get the more unique we become because the compilation of our life’s experiences are special. That said, I can claim to have pushed the boundaries and I’ve got something to say.
As a member of the Sapien species independent thought arises. How do we build bridges? How do we strengthen, or even create the bonds that are intrinsic to us as caring social human beings. Especially when we live in a world that can so easily seem terribly cruel, unjust, and exclusionary.
What is the drive to communicate? We all seek a means to express ourselves, be it a tradie who takes pride in their work, a child drawing patterns in the sand, a cook in a fast-food takeaway (ok, we have all had some rotten meals), or the director of a novel movie that an audience at Sundance smothers in praises.
Expression is an art form in which too few of us are trained. At school writing was literally belted out of me because I was left-handed. We did English classes, never creative writing, where my work was marked down because the letters sloped in the wrong direction, or I wrote the colloquial ‘yeah’. I’m not brilliant and no doubt never will be. Lacking the expertise for Tik Tok (poor Boomer), the written word shall be my means of expression. There is the desire to create something exceptional – just once – with no expectation of achieving that yet determination to keep on trying.
Welcome to my blog, which has four sections:
- Ishtar contains fiction stories.
- Eyes of the Sun in which I express my opinion on contemporary socio-political issues.
- Peripatetic is where I tell stories of my own life experiences, and
- Dying Days in Heaven is my novel, where I mix way too many genres and whose completion seems Sisyphean.
What you read is not a work of genius, but it does come from the heart.
Please enjoy.
Phillip Walker,
November 2023
Logiya, Afar, Ethiopia, circa 2014
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