Your Family Stories

Introducing Mum: Writer, Poet and Storyteller

My mum, Christine Lucas, was a writer. As a child, she filled notebook after notebook with her stories and read them to her six siblings. Her younger sisters used to hang on every word, and mum got frustrated when her own mother would tell her to put her pen and paper away and get on with her chores.

I remember mum buying her first portable typewriter when I was in primary school. She regularly set it up on our dining room table, and she’d tap away at the keys for hours. Mum wrote articles, short stories, a historical novel, a local history book and many poems.

I learned this poem off by heart as a child, and 50 years later, I can still recite every word. Funnily enough, so can my daughter. Mum is still with us, but sadly, she now has dementia and is living in residential care. When my daughter and I visited her recently, we started rattling off the poem. I had tears in my eyes when Mum joined in. The words and the cadence were embedded deep within her.

Life was simpler in the 1970s. We had a choice of three television stations in Perth, Western Australia – channels 2, 7 and 9. And television did close down (as Mum says in the poem). At a certain time each night, the transmission of programs would cease, and all that was displayed on the screen was a test pattern. There was great excitement in 1975 when colour television arrived in Australia!

As television became a larger part of daily life and convenience foods became more common, lifestyles began to change. The Victorian government saw the need for a public health campaign to get people moving again and launched the award-winning “Life. Be in it” campaign. This was soon rolled out across the nation.

Looking back, the poem says as much about Mum as it does about television. She was always curious and active when she was young. She still talks about being the school breaststroke champion and climbing Snowdon, the highest mountain in Wales, which wasn’t far from her home in Cheshire.

If you were around in the 1970s, this poem will take you back. If you weren’t, here’s a history lesson for you.

Television, that deadly box

Its tentacles around you lock

To hold you fixed and in one place

An autom of the TV race.

–

A night ahead while all else sleeps

Is spent in misery while you keep

Your TV warm for morning shows

In the darkness there it glows.

–

For Count and Bert and Ernie too

Big Bird and Cookie Monster blue

Come on your screen in wild delight

To break the silence of the night.

–

A power strike is hard to take

What other arrangements can you make?

You cannot read, you know not how

Why, it’s as foreign to you as milking a cow.

–

Take stock of yourself when you long to turn on

Go for a walk, or a skate, or a run

For life’s too short to sit and watch

Night after night your gogglebox.

–

Why not start afresh tonight?

Turn off your set and live your life

It will take nerve, it will take grit

But don’t waste your life, BE IN IT!

by Christine Lucas – circa 1976