Featherfoot’s story is inspired by a jigsaw of things that captured my imagination around the same period: an empty island; spiders; the roaring 40s; pacific mariners; and missing persons…
An empty island
When Easter Island first came on my radar I didn’t know its full story. All I knew was of an island come across by European explorers, whose people had mysteriously vanished leaving only massive stone monuments looking to sea, and remnants of a BirdMan cult…
Spiders
Some spiders are hunters, others weave beautiful webs at just the place and time and wait in faith that what they need will come. What if we don’t always have to strive to achieve, but learned to weave our own metaphoric web? Around the time I quit my job and left a failing to relationship, to write my book, spiders were turning up everywhere, to the point it almost had to be a sign. Read my article, Spider Medicine, here.
The roaring 40s
Arthur River in west Tasmania (Australia’s island state) calls itself The End of the World. At around 40 degrees latitude, there is no other land for the circumference of the earth. With nothing in their path to slow them, the waves and winds perpetually hammer the coast into wildness, whitewater and isolation.
Pacific mariners
Research into Easter Island led to reading about early Pacific mariners, who took journeys of up to 5000 kilometres between islands – in one-log canoes. What motivates someone to set off, risking life, over the horizon to maybe-nowhere? How did they do it? (Did you know Pacific canoes were sometimes in great fleets of boats 60 to 100 feet long?!) Check out the fascinating Kon Tiki expedition: http://www.kon-tiki.no/E-Exp_KonTiki.php
Missing persons
Two missing persons cases have crossed my path over the past decade – one a family member, another a cold case in a town I lived in. I became fascinated with the concept of how people cope with grief when there’s no information and no ending. I saw a documentary on mothers reunited with sons who’d been POWs for a decade or more. One woman said, “I didn’t recognise my own son, until I saw him smile.”
IMAGES: 1: Couta Rocks, south of Arthur River, Tasmania; 2: northwest Tasmanian coastline; 3: dolomite walls, Ben Lomond, Tasmania (photos by me).
