FERDINAND: So, as we have seen, at the end of 1983 my human left the MSC’s. He had decided to stay in Melbourne, and so he moved out of the monastery to a house not too far away in Surrey Hills, where a number of present and former YTU students were living. Chris and Gerard, the last two fellows left from his intake year, helped him with the move; Brian, the fourth one, had left a few months earlier.
They used a car belonging to the monastery, with some of Martin’s junk being carried in a trailer. To add some extra drama to the occasion, they got pulled over by a traffic policeman because the trailer was hiding the car’s license plate.
Gerard, the former teacher, was eventually ordained priest, and was a parish priest the last we heard of him. Chris left the MSC order with a view to joining the diocesan clergy, but Martin is not sure what happened to him after that.
MARTIN: I still do believe that it was God’s plan, or the universe’s plan or whatever terminology you want to use, that I should be with the MSC’s for those two years, even though I didn’t go the whole way and become a priest. I did learn a lot and was strengthened by the experience, and I also think I had to get away from the Gold Coast and come down to Melbourne. Things only really started to happen for me when I moved here – you’ll see.
FERDINAND: Fr Naughton would have liked Martin to get a job during his proposed “year off” from the MSC’s, but instead, he applied to go to university the next year; he can’t really remember why, but admits he might have been seeking the easy option! He was accepted by the Swinburne Institute of Technology (now the Swinburne University of Technology).
Martin went back to the monastery to attend Midnight Mass, but otherwise, it was a somewhat depressing Christmas and New Year in the Surrey Hills house. He says he remembers reading the Stephen King novel The Stand during that time; its apocalyptic themes probably matched his mood. He also had to finish a final essay for YTU, which got to the lecturer extremely late!
One of the other occupants of the house was into computer games, which were still a novelty in those days. Martin had a go at playing Zork, one of the earliest interactive computer games, but it ended badly. He got himself “killed” three times during the game, using up all of his available lives. Then, as he describes it, the computer called him a “suicidal maniac” and kicked him out of the game!
MARTIN: That experience has made me a bit dubious about computer games ever since.
FERDINAND: While in the Surrey Hills house Martin made one of his first serious attempts at writing stories. He drafted a couple of short stories, including one based on an H P Lovecraft theme. The story concerned a “Deep One”, one of the underwater creatures from Lovecraft’s story The Shadow Over Innsmouth, getting caught in a shark net on the Gold Coast.
Also, during his time in that house, Martin went (on his own) to see the great English folk band Steeleye Span that was touring Australia. It was a great joy for him, as he had become (and remains) a huge fan of “electric folk”, as that style of music is called. He greatly enjoyed seeing vocalist Maddy Prior and the rest of the band perform their classic numbers including “Thomas the Rhymer” and “Gaudete”. He also remembers that they performed some songs that would appear later on their album Back in Line, released in 1986.
Now, as we mentioned earlier, Swinburne Institute of Technology had accepted Martin, and as the time to begin classes drew nearer, he was fortunate to find a flat in Hawthorn near the campus. He shared with Steve, a guy who mostly worked at nights. As a consequence, they hardly ever saw each other, which worked out quite well!
A little later, Martin’s parents moved down from Queensland to Melbourne, in order to be close to their son. Martin’s dad was lucky to get a public service job in Melbourne.
My human stayed in the flat with Steve during his first semester at Swinburne but then moved back in with his parents. He admits he did this because it was so temptingly easy; my human has always had a tendency towards easy options, the “path of least resistance.”
Meanwhile I had become so badly damaged that Martin’s parents had considered getting rid of me entirely, which was a bit nerve-racking. Luckily they relented, and Martin’s Mum had me repaired extensively before we moved down to Melbourne. I was overjoyed to be finally reunited with my human. There is a special joy for a bear in being reunited with your owner after a long period of separation.
After the family was reunited, we initially lived in Richmond, then moved to a house a bit further out in the suburb of Camberwell.
Once there, my humans started attending St Dominic’s Church (technically Camberwell East parish), which was run by the Dominican order. The Dominican students who attended YTU lived in the attached priory; Martin already knew some of them and so he became quite friendly with them. Later, in fact, he even considered joining the Dominicans, when his vocation started to “flare up again”, as he put it.
At this time Martin was making regular trips to the Melbourne diocesan seminary, which was then located in Clayton, to see one of the priests for counseling and spiritual direction. Fr Naughton had suggested this before Martin left the Croydon monastery.
The priest in question was a qualified psychologist. He was very sympathetic and easy to talk to, but Martin felt he wasn’t getting anything out of the sessions and eventually stopped seeing him.
MARTIN: Looking back, I must admit I was probably not ready to hear some of the things this priest was saying; for one thing, he wanted to look at how the repeated moves during my childhood might have affected or even damaged me. But I just wasn’t ready, at that time, to hear anything that might have been seen as criticism of my adoptive parents! So, after about a year, I stopped seeing him.
FERDINAND: At Swinburne, despite his shyness, Martin managed to make quite a few friends, both male and female, among his “freshman” colleagues. So he at last began to blossom a bit socially.
In fact, he went to a party during his first year at which he drank too much and then, essentially, passed out on the floor. He woke up the next day feeling very bad….
MARTIN: Longing for death, actually! I’ve never had much of a head for alcohol. So this “social blossoming” was rather painful at times.
FERDINAND: As for his studies at Swinburne — disorganization, as always, was his problem. He was forever struggling to keep up with the reading, and forever promising to “get my essays done early this semester,” and then doing them on the last night!
Psychology was one of his first-year subjects, but the statistics component was very difficult for him because of his lack of aptitude for mathematics, so in his second semester he dropped it.
He also took some media studies classes, which deepened his interest in the movies. The year he took the Cinema Studies class, “teen movies” was the theme, and he found it fairly painful! However, he did enjoy Fast Times at Ridgemont High, which featured early appearances by Sean Penn, Nicolas Cage, Forrest Whitaker, and others.
They also watched Brian DePalma’s Carrie, based on the Stephen King novel, which had some of the students screaming. Of course Martin, with his interest in scary movies, thoroughly enjoyed it. And I think, like many people, he secretly sympathized with the shy, downtrodden Carrie, who finally has such a terrible revenge on her classmates.
It was also during his time at Swinburne that Martin finally started using modern technology. He typed his first few essays using an ancient Brother typewriter borrowed from his Mum and Dad, but eventually bought a computer and started doing his essays the modern way.
MARTIN: There was one nightmarish experience when I got trapped inside a footnote and couldn’t get out! But apart from that, it was great.
FERDINAND (sighing): Sometimes I really do wonder about my human… especially about his alleged intelligence!
Martin admits that he did get stressed at times at Swinburne, though it wasn’t as bad as when he was with the MSC’s. Initially he had trouble deciding which areas to concentrate on. But eventually he, as he told me, “drifted” into philosophy and literature, and those became his majors.
Martin’s first philosophy lecturer at “Swinny” (it seems to be necessary to shorten the names of educational institutions in Australia) was a somewhat larger-that-life character. He was a devotee of the German philosopher Wittgenstein and of the rigorous Logical Positivist tradition of “if it can’t be apprehended by the senses it doesn’t exist.” This, of course, was challenging to Martin’s faith.
But in these classes my human was introduced to some of the great philosophical riddles: is there any absolute truth? What is the human mind, and how exactly does it connect to the body? Do we have free will? What are good and evil?
MARTIN: So although it was challenging and disconcerting after so many years of comfortable Catholic belief, it was also very interesting and, well, mind-expanding in a way. I found a thirst for truth which has stayed with me ever since. I really have to thank the Swinburne guy for that.
And the other thing I learned from him is the necessity of questioning things: of looking at a statement and trying to see if it is profoundly meaningful, or unmitigated nonsense, or somewhere in between! I hardly need to point out that politicians (of whatever party, or whatever country) can be among the worst purveyors of nonsense. Anyway, if there is one useful thing you can learn from philosophy, it is surely that!
FERDINAND: At this time Martin began to read a lot of C S Lewis. Best known, probably, as the author of the “Narnia” books, Lewis was also a vigorous defender of Christianity with theological works such as Miracles and Mere Christianity, which soon ranked among my human’s favorite books. Lewis also helped with a particular problem that started to concern Martin during his Swinburne years, and remains a major area of interest for him: namely, the “Problem of Evil”: why would a good God allow so many bad things to happen in this world? This remains a major area of interest for my human, and we will come back to it later.
Martin continued to focus on philosophy and literature in his second year at Swinburne. In that year (1985) Pope John Paul the Second visited Australia, and my human saw the Pontiff a second time, at a ceremony at the Melbourne Cricket Ground.
Towards the end of the year, Martin did something he had wanted to do for a while – he went to Israel (again) and worked on a Kibbutz. To save you using Google, a Kibbutz is a collective community in Israel; there is a long tradition of people from all over the world going to Israel to work on a kibbutz as a volunteer.
Once again I had to stay at home while my human flew off on his adventures…
MARTIN: Sorry!
FERDINAND: He went to Israel by plane with a bunch of other Australian volunteers.
They stayed on Kibbutz Gal’ed, in the Megiddo area not too far from Nazareth and the port of Haifa.
This was a kibbutz founded by German Jews fleeing the Nazi regime in 1945, and there were people still living there who had spent time in concentration camps. In fact, there was one old lady there who had been in Auschwitz, and who had narrowly avoided being experimented on by the dreaded Auschwitz “Angel of Death”, Dr Josef Mengele.
It was only a four-week stint on the kibbutz, but Martin has to admit that, for whatever reason, he never really fitted in there. For one thing, his shyness was still a problem, even with the other Aussies. Although he longed for friendship, his social awkwardness tended to sabotage his relationships. There were volunteers on the kibbutz from other nations, and there were, according to Martin, some very attractive girls from Denmark and Germany. But, again, his shyness prevented him from forming any sort of close relationship with them (even though he thinks one of the German lasses might have been interested!).
As to the actual work side of things, Martin had what he calls varying degrees of success with the jobs he was given. Initially, he was put in a small plastics factory on the kibbutz, which made things like plastic bags for the transport of farm produce. He had to start some mornings at four a.m., which he certainly did not appreciate!
One of his duties involved tying the plastic bags into bundles. This was a recipe for disaster, as my human has never been able to tie any except the most basic knots. Martin still recalls, with extreme embarrassment, the manager of the plastics factory – a locally born Israeli – watching with sheer disbelief as he struggled to tie a knot!
Eventually he was moved out of the plastics factory to the kitchen attached to the kibbutz’s communal dining hall, where he was put in charge of the dishwashing machine. He functioned much better in that capacity.
The group had some minor trips away from the kibbutz. They went down to Eilat, a port on the northern tip of the Red Sea, and to Jerusalem, where they visited Yad Vashem, the memorial to the World War 2 Jewish Holocaust, which Martin found very moving.
During the trip to Jerusalem, a guy came up to him and asked him if he wanted to buy drugs, right outside the famous Church of the Holy Sepulchre.
MARTIN: Of course I said no. But I couldn’t help thinking that Israel is, um, a land of great contrasts!
FERDINAND: The Aussies went to Nazareth for Christmas, and attended Mass in the Basilica of the Annunciation, a modern church located on what is believed to be the site of Jesus’ parents’ house.
This Mass proved to be memorable for a most unfortunate reason. During a moment of silence, after everyone had received Holy Communion, somebody in the congregation broke wind very loudly, and it echoed throughout the church, causing a lot of suppressed mirth among the Australians (and also the altar boys).
MARTIN: Talk about perfect timing!
FERDINAND: My human also went on a side trip to the nearby port of Haifa to visit Mt Carmel, a holy site for Catholics and others. On the way there he was impressed by the incredible honesty of an Israeli bus driver. He was always confused by the Israeli currency of shekels, and apparently, when he first got on the bus, he must have handed far too much money to the bus driver, who spoke almost no English. The bus driver gave him some coins, and thinking that was his change, Martin thanked him and went and sat down. A little while later the bus driver called him back and gave him some notes – the rest of his change!
MARTIN: He could easily have robbed me blind, as I had no idea about the value of what I gave him, but he did the honest thing. I was very impressed.
FERDINAND: How do you feel about the kibbutz experience generally?
MARTIN: Well, because of my inglorious work record and my lack of social success, for a long time I regarded my visit to Kibbutz Gal’Ed as a failure. Looking back on it now, though, I’m modestly proud of the fact that I was able to travel all that way by myself and survive for four weeks in such a different environment. It was definitely a milestone.
FERDINAND: Yes indeed. I have noticed that you often do not give yourself enough credit for things – driven of course by your neurotic perfectionism!
MARTIN: Bit blunt for a teddy bear, aren’t you?
FERDINAND: Sorry! But you did ask for feedback…. Anyway, Martin returned to Melbourne in early 1986. He went back to his studies at Swinburne, not knowing that he was going to get a particularly painful lesson that year…in heartbreak.