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On memoirs

June 21

Four great memoir pieces from the March Meanjin are now available online.

Terin Tashi Miller recalls meeting the Dalai Lama as a young boy and then again as an aspiring journalist many years later:

Over the years my parents came to meet His Holiness, and knew Heinrich Harrer, who had been a tutor of His Holiness in his youth. They also helped Geshe Lhundup Sopa, a monk who had been one of His Holiness’s examiners for the teaching rank of Geshe, who in 1967 moved to Madison, Wisconsin, to teach Tibetan and Buddhist studies. Eventually, Geshe-La, as I knew him, became a full professor at the university. Geshe Sopa always laughed and called me ‘Terry’. His Holiness came to know me as the boy who sat in his lap.

Stella Glorie writes on what it was like growing up in a strict Catholic family:

After dinner the Pastor starts up. ‘Being a Christian is not just a piece of cake or a walk in the park,’ he tells the twenty or so of us young people bunched around the table. He pauses and surveys us: tanned, T-shirted, many with tattoos.

My friend raises her hand. The Pastor is momentarily thrown: a soul on offer so soon into his sermon? ‘What about a bed of roses? Or a good cup of tea? Is it like that?’ she asks with mock sincerity. I cannot look at her partly because I am genuinely shocked at her brazen attitude.

Maurilia Meehan attempts a Yogic Flying Course, with unexpected results:

I have always been interested in exploring the mysteries of mind–body interaction, and curious about (but too poor for) the two-week residential TM Yogic Flying Course. So, when it was suddenly available for exactly the amount I unexpectedly had in my pocket after an overseas flight had been cancelled, I ‘applied’. This application included undergoing an interview with three ‘Governors’. They found me to be ‘psychologically stable’. They were soon to change their minds.

And Toni Tapp Coutts remembers a childhood spent walking the beautiful and devastating wet seasons of in the Northern Territory.

All the roads in the bush were bad and caused much damage to vehicles so that walking, or ‘Foot Falcon’ as we called it, was a common form of transport, as was getting about on horseback. Very few employees owned cars and most relied on the station for transport. It was not uncommon for people to walk from station to station during the Wet season when there was plenty of water around but you needed to have your wits about you and a means, such as a gun and matches, of catching and cooking some food along the way.

Visit our editions page to read all of these and more.


 

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