Tag Archives: Kyneton

Vale Connie – a tribute from Charlottie

I’ve already written about how I first met Connie in 1995 when I was travelling in Australia – I was in my 30s and Connie in her 60s (see https://thisquirkylife.com/2017/09/12/how-spiders-got-me-writing/). In summary, I was taking time out between jobs and had been offered the use of a cottage in Noojee in Gippsland. Picturing a quaint, rose-covered dwelling where I’d have time to do my own thing, write poetry, meditate and relax, I had eagerly accepted.

It didn’t turn out like that – the cottage was more of a shack. And as I got ready for bed on night one, I noticed a large black shape on my bed. I now know it was a huntsman but back then I thought all Australian spiders were deadly. And this one, large, rubbery and hairy, was unlikely to be an exception. After dispatching the spider to the afterlife, I lay tensely on my mattress on the floor flinching every time the loose spidery threads of the coverless duvet brushed against with my face and arms. And looking around the room, I noticed spider webs decorating the windowsills and skirting boards like a dusting of snow.  Suffice it to say I had no sleep, not a wink. And stepping into the shower the next morning, there was a spider dangling from the bare light bulb. It started to feel positively Hitchcockian.

I decided flight was the only option. Rather than return to the safety and comfort of suburbia, and my brother’s house and pool in Bayside, I got out my notebook with phone numbers of friends of friends and rang Connie from a phone booth. My dear friend Helen in the UK had met Connie and Norman in a camp site in Darwin in the late ‘80s and given me their contact details.

Hearing the high-pitched hysteria in my voice and my garbled tale about killer spiders, Connie gently said: “Would you like to come and stay?”  And so it was that I was soon on a train to Kyneton (Central Victoria) where Connie met me off the train with a big hug as if we’d know each other for years. And we never looked back.

I was embraced by Connie and her husband Norman as one of the family from the get-go and joined in the rhythm of their daily life, mainstays of which included porridge and poached eggs for breakfast, drinks and nibbles in the evening and roasts for dinner. I am indebted to Connie, an excellent (and published) writer herself, for encouraging me to write my first short story, and for believing in me as a writer. It was winter and she set me up with a table and typewriter with an oil-filled radiator for warmth. I still have the story – The Swim – typed up on now-yellowing paper.

And in 2009 when I was making a living, albeit a modest one, from writing travel and lifestyle articles, she helped me edit my article about fishing on the UK’s River Test entitled Duffer’s Day Out for the travel section of The Australian.

THE SWIM

I’ve never forgotten my stay with Connie and Norman in Kyneton. It was where I first tuned into Australian birds; they had a bird bath in the drive outside the kitchen window, and Connie identified the lorikeets, crimson rosellas, Australian magpies, wattle birds and pied currawongs. I learnt that the Australian magpie is not of the crow family like its Eurasian counterpart. And I grew to love its melodic warbling song, so unlike the cackling of the magpies I had grown up with. To do this day, I always think of Connie and tap into something grounding and quintessentially Australian when I hear the magpie’s song.  

After moving to Australia in 2004 I visited Connie and Norman several times in their new home in Shoalhaven Heads in NSW. And once again I slipped into their way of life, comforted by the unchanging routine of porridge and poached eggs for breakfast– often on the balcony in the early morning sun. Connie and I talked about family, books and writing, Norman tinkered with his boat, and I went for walks to the beach armed with a stick that Norman made for me to scare off any snakes that might be dozing nearby. Connie and I also went into Sydney to the Art Gallery of New South Wales.  I don’t remember exactly what we saw – it may have been paintings in the permanent collection – but it was a treat as Connie knew her art and helped me view the pictures from a more informed perspective.   

It was entirely fitting that Connie and Norman, such an integral part of my Australian ‘journey’, attended my Australian Citizenship Ceremony in June 2007. Other shared milestone celebrations included Norman’s 90th birthday party in Melbourne – a wonderful gathering of the family and extended family clan. And, over time, I can’t pinpoint exactly when, Connie began to call me Charlottie, a fitting hybrid name used exclusively by the Tout-Smith family. We also had fun and a lot of giggles playing with various English regional dialects and came up with Noite Loite, which is night light spoken with a West Country accent! Noite Loite became something of a recurring refrain in our conversations.

I last saw Connie in March 2024 in Adelaide where she had moved to live with her daughter Lynda. She was frail and suffering from cancer, and I knew it might be the last time I would see her. We played the game Bananagrams – Connie still a woman of letters and a dab hand at building words. At the same time, I felt that in Connie’s memory Helen and I may have become one and the same person – there was an element of confusion, one that presented an elegant closure of the circle. “I always did love you,” said Connie, and I, biting my lip not to cry, accepted her heartfelt words for both of us. Helen had her own formative experiences with Connie during an extended stay in Kyneton. Under Connie’s care and guidance, she encouraged Helen to join the local writer’s group and also to practise her art – one of her works was shown at an outdoor exhibition in Melbourne.

When her daughter Deb rang to tell me in late February that Connie had died peacefully in the early morning surrounded by her family, I recalled how I’d been spellbound on my dog walk that morning at the sight of several hot air balloons silhouetted against the rose-pink sky. Looking back, it feels like it was Connie’s spirit soaring home. I won’t say heavenwards as, although Connie was the daughter of a Reverend who served as a missionary in Fiji and Rotuman, she wasn’t religious.  

I was deeply saddened by the news of her death, but I was thrilled to be invited to Connie’s Celebration of Life event in mid-May. The event was held in Campbelltown, NSW, in the aged care facility where Connie’s 93-year-old sister lives.

With photographs from Connie’s life rotating on the screen – wonderful shots of her as a girl and beautiful young woman that I had never seen before – family and friends came together to celebrate all that she was and all that she contributed to the world.

I already knew Connie as an accomplished writer, a regular diarist, a keen reader, a cryptic crossword solver, a connoisseur of art, a good cook, a wife, mother, grandmother, sister, aunt and friend, a generous spirit with the warmest of smiles and biggest of hearts, but I hadn’t realised the depth of her creative life. And that’s, I suspect, because Connie was extremely modest. In Deb’s beautiful tribute I discovered that Connie was a talented piano player and received a diploma from the Associate in Music, Australia (AMusA), an award for outstanding candidates. And in later life she embarked on a Master of Fine Art at Melbourne University. While illness prevented her from completing it, she was able to use her expertise as a volunteer guide at Melbourne’s National Gallery of Art.

When her nephew reminisced about visits to Connie and Norman and mentioned the pattern of their lives – morning poached eggs and all – I reflected just how lucky I was that I had known Connie and Norman and been part of the family. Vale Connie.  I dedicate this blog to you as my dear friend, writing muse and inspiration. May you rest in peace.

How spiders got me writing

Spiders: the stuff of nightmares, fairy tales, fantasy or fiction? Arachnophobia or arachnophilia – what camp are you in? A recent re-read of a childhood favourite Charlotte’s Web – complete with my nine-year-old joined-up writing signature on the inside front cover – steered me towards the latter.

And what a wonderful story it is featuring Charlotte A. Cavatica, the grey spider and heroine of the piece who saves Wilbur (the pig’s) life. It’s a story of selfless friendship, loyalty, devotion, commitment and love. There’s plenty of humour and humanity too: Charlotte tell us: “Well, I am pretty. There’s no denying that,” seven is her lucky number, she’s a good writer and storyteller and prone to some wonderfully Zen reflections (none of which I noticed aged nine). She compares her web spinning prowess to the building of the Queensborough bridge and how long it took. She adds a comment on the pace of human life: “they just keep trotting back and forth across the bridge thinking there is something better on the other side. With men, it’s rush, rush, rush, every minute. I’m glad I am a sedentary spider.”

She’s also very pragmatic – while still storybook – and unapologetic about being a bloodythirsty predator consuming: “flies, bugs, grasshoppers, choice beetles, moths, butterflies, tasty cockroaches, gnats, midges, daddy longlegs, centipedes, mosquitoes, crickets — anything that’s careless enough to get caught in my web. I have to live, don’t I”?

As we all know, her ingenuity and patience save Wilbur from ending up as crispy bacon on a dinner plate: “She knew from experience that if she waited long enough, a fly would come to her web; and she felt sure that if she thought long enough about Wilbur’s problem, an idea would come to her mind.” Her solution is to weave words into her web to persuade the farmer, Homer Zuckerman, that Wilbur is an exceptional pig who must be saved.  And it works; Wilbur becomes a celebrity attracting attention far and wide, and becomes the star at the County Fair.

“I wove my web for you because I liked you. After all, what’s a life anyway? We’re born, we live a little while, we die. A spider’s life can’t help being something of a mess, with all this trapping and eating flies. By helping you, perhaps I was trying to lift up my life a trifle. Heaven knows anyone’s life can stand a little of that.”

If only I had re-read Charlotte’s Web before my first trip to Australia in 1995…

A kayak instructor I met on the backpacker trail lent me his house in rural Gippsland in Victoria. Here was my big chance to have a solo adventure away from my family and friends in the UK. I’d imagined a rose-covered cottage perched on a hill with views over a valley, where I would be able to tap into my inner poet, be at one with nature and meditate into the middle distance.  In reality, it was a wooden shack in Nowheresville and any view was obscured by the mountain drizzle.

Even worse, on my first (and, as it turned out, only night) I noticed a huge black shape profiled against the grubby white duvet covering the mattress on the floor.  It was a spider and I was terrified. Back then, I thought all Australian spiders delivered killer bites. Clearly, I had read too much Bill Bryson. To quote from his book Down Under: “Australia has more things that will kill you than anywhere else. This is a country where even the fluffiest of caterpillars can lay you out with a toxic nip.”

It was in fact a huntsman spider. Although they are relatively harmless, they are hairy, have eight-eyes, can span two hundred and fifty to three hundred millimetres and are dead ringers for tarantulas. I tried chatting to it: “Would you please just toddle off and leave me alone,” but it stayed put, defiant and rubbery, until I raised my boot, praying it would dart off, Alice-like, through a hole in the skirting board. Alas, my prayers went unanswered and so I ended up beating the life out of the poor defenceless thing.

The deathly deed done, I looked around the room and noticed there were webs  everywhere, and I mean everywhere. Plugging the skirting board hole with cotton wool, I swept the sills and then got under the well-worn coverless quilt. I hardly slept, flinching against the spider-like loose threads every time I turned over. As soon as daylight came, I was up and into the shower where – and I exaggerate not – a spider dangled from a bare light bulb. The place had now taken on Hitchcockian associations.

I dressed, packed and fled down to the shop at the bottom of the hill. Distraught to hear that the next bus wasn’t for two days –  a timeframe seemingly exaggerated by the shopkeeper’s slow Australian drawl – I accepted a lift to Warragul station from a kindly farmer who took me the scenic route via the Lakes.  So much for my journey of self-discovery.

Too proud to return to the bosom of my family – my brother was living here and my parents visiting from the UK– I called friends of friends from a pay phone at the train station. “It’s Helen’s friend, Charlotte,” I said in a high-pitched squeak, explaining my flight from the spider shack.  Even though she had never met me, the lovely Connie (now in her late 80s) asked whether I would like to go and stay with them in Kyneton. And that was the start of a beautiful friendship with Connie and Norman and their family.

My four days in Kyneton turned out to be food for mind, body and soul – everything Gippsland wasn’t. There was porridge for breakfast, morning tea on the veranda, roast dinners in the evening and trips to Hanging Rock and Castlemaine. What’s more, under Connie’s excellent tutelage, I wrote my first short story (based on an experience in Parsley Bay in Sydney) on her typewriter. I still have the original today and am proud of it. Thank you spider, you helped to kickstart my creative writing!