This week on All The Best, stories about making sense of your past – from our Audio Club, and host Mads has some special guests in the studio!
Audio Club is a community of audio makers.
It was created to encourage new storytellers and to inspire those who are more experienced. Audio club meetups both online and in person have been places for people to discuss story ideas, audio editing, and other aspects of creating a story.
So far we’ve had seven challenges, and today we want to share some stories from our most recent one, ‘making sense of your past’
Audio Club regulars Felicity, Kwame and Ramon shared the stories they made in response to this challenge and why they love working with the audio medium.
Understanding My Love of the Sea
Felicity Weaver explores her past to understand her love of swimming in the sea. This poetic soundscape takes us with her as she reminisces about her childhood and what gifts her parents gave her, what she gave her children, what she has lost and what she receives when she swims in the sea.
Produced by Felicity Weaver, with support from Phoebe Adler-Ryan.
You can find more of Felicity’s work at www.felicityweaver.com.au or on Instagram @felicityweavermedia
Childhood and Hurricanes
In early July, a massive hurricane formed in the Atlantic Ocean ripped through the Caribbean. When it formed, it occurred to Kwame, he couldn’t actually remember what it was like to experience one, despite growing up with them. So Kwame seeks out his Mum to find out what we remembers about living through hurricanes and storms.
Produced by Kwame Slusher.
Music Credit to En La Playa by Julias H. from Pixabay.com
Thanks to mum, Lyn Slusher, who is one of best storytellers I know. And thanks, to the Know Your Caribbean Instagram page for always being a font of wisdom.
And you can find more of Kwame’s work at: https://kwameslusher8.wixsite.com/mysite
Until You Are No Longer Here
In 2020 Ramon was living overseas in Argentina with his partner Nadia. They had decided to separate so that Ramon could return to Australia, when COVID hit. They were stuck – separated but confined to the same room every day for a whole year. This is the story of Ramon speaking to Nadia to help make sense of this strange and confusing time.
Produced by Ramon Briant.
This story was produced and recorded on the lands of the Eora and Pampa people.
The background music used are instrumental covers of the songs: Gracias A La Vida and Alfonsina Y El Mar by Mercedes Sosa.
The photographic series spoken about in the piece Mientras Estés Acá by Nadia Soledad Pinochetti can be found here:
Many thanks to the team at all the best for their knowledge guidance and fbi.radio for their support of the project.
Interested in making some audio stories?
If you’re interested in making some stories of your own, we’d love to see you at our next Audio Club Meet Up! Everyone’s welcome, regardless of experience.
We bring you a new prompt each month, host online workshops and in-person audio excursions.
You can find the next Audio Club Meet Up on our Humantix page.
Transcript-
Stories from around the corner and around the country. You’re listening to All The Best. Proudly supported by the Art Gallery of New South Wales. You’re listening to All The Best from FBI Radio 94. 5.
I’m Madhura Prakash. Before we get into this week’s stories, I’d like to take a moment to acknowledge that I’m recording from stolen Gadigal land and pay my respect to Gadigal elders past and present, and also recognize that the area where FBI radio is situated, Redfern, has long been a place of storytelling, strength, resistance, and resilience for First Nations communities.
Mads: This week on All The Best: stories about making sense of your past, from our Audio Club. Audio Club is a community of audio makers. It was created to encourage new storytellers and to inspire those who are more experienced. Audio Club meetups happen both online and in person and they’ve been places for people to discuss story ideas, audio editing, and all other aspects of creating a story.
I’m joined in the studio by some Audio Club members who happen to be the creators of this week’s stories.
All: Hey, I’m Kwame. Hi, I’m Felicity. Hi, I’m Ramon.
Mads: Were any of you at the actual meetup when the theme ‘Understanding Your Past’ was chosen?
Felicity: We were both. That was our first one.
Kwame: Was it?
Felicity: Yeah.
Kwame: Oh yeah, that’s right. We were sitting right over there. That’s right. Yeah.
Um, somebody was talking about their school experiences, I think. Um, it was pretty harrowing, though, her particular story.
Felicity: One of the women that came along was talking about her school experience because something had come up in the news and she was thinking, she was reflecting on what she was being taught, like in sort of sex education in a religious school and actually how odd it was. And she had been discussing that with friends and so she was there reassessing the past. Yeah, so it was a good idea, then we all chipped in about, “Oh, that makes me think of this.”
Felicity’s Story:
I’ve always loved the sea. My mother was a country girl who did not learn to swim, which meant lessons at the pool, winning swimming carnivals, and every birthday was a pool party for me. A kind gift from my mother. Summer holidays, we rented a shack by the sea. The adventures we had with two other families.
We’d windsurf, fish and water ski, which was a gift from my father. I gave my kids a pool in their childhood, hoping they would love it as much as me. After a day of chaos with young children, I would float, ears submerged, my breath amplified, with the suburban sounds and the voices in my head muffled.
Who am I kidding?
The pool was a gift for me. The pool was beautiful, but it’s not the same as the sea. And when death came calling on my family and took them away, I decided my immediate family should live closer to the sea.
Now I swim every other day, all year round. It’s the key to my sanity. It’s a place where I can move my body without pain. It changes every day in its velocity. It’s always cold, which makes me feel alive. And when your loved ones die, I’m here. You feel your own mortality.
I love the wildness of the sea.
It made me feel strong when I was mourning. It would remind me with its six foot waves that I have to keep on moving.
Hold my breath, go deep inside and let the chaos of the waves wash over me and do this again and again, until I had moved past the chaos and into the calm. I’d take a moment, float, then swim. One, two, breathe. One, two, breathe. It rewards me by reminding me of life’s beauty. A school of fish, a turtle catching its breath, a cuttlefish changing colours, a fever of rays gliding past. All these wonders of the deep blue sea.
It shows me danger in the form of a shark, which taught me that this thing I feared was not as frightening as I thought it would be. All I had to do was see it, and then swim. One, two, breathe. One, two, breathe.
It was only recently that I discovered a major reason why I like the sea. And that is, I have ADHD.
Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder.
Another gift from my now gone father.
For me, I like adventure, change and excitement. It’s such an odd irony that people with ADHD need stimulation to become calm.
I’ve been called brave for the long swims I do way out to sea, over the shark nets and around the headlands. But what they don’t realise is the sea, the unpredictability, the repetition of counting my strokes, is what calms me. And now with this label, I understand so much about me, and in particular, my love of the sea.
Mads: Okay, I love how you guys were all listening with your eyes closed. That felt really professional.
Kwame: You have to listen to it with your eyes closed. Um, I feel like, It’s one of those weird things where you close your eyes, you see more, if that makes sense. You feel like you can hear all the different elements and that things sort of layer on top of each other. I guess like how waves are sort of lapping on each other and splashing on the sand and stuff. So yeah, no, it’s really good. It’s not the first time I’ve heard it, I must say. Um, I’ve heard it before in class actually, but yeah, it’s really good.
Ramon: I really liked it. I thought it was really personal and it really kind of drew me in. I mean, this is just like a technical thing because I do sound design, but the sound design was really nice. I felt like I was you swimming through the sea in many moments.
Felicity: With audio, it can be really intimate. You are speaking like directly into the ears of your audience and that you can do that at home and just with a microphone and, you know, like it can be quite a cheap way of making really good storytelling.
So, I mean, doing the soundscapes was, It’s so much fun. Like I love doing that. Like it was like, it’s just a newly discovered thing for me to be able to either record some of my own sounds, which often didn’t sound right at all. And then to be able to find sounds online through various sound libraries.
Yeah. So I thought that was so much fun, but I had to be careful of not wasting too much time because you have a sound in mind and like looking for that can take forever. So I had to be mindful that I was not to spend too much time looking for the perfect sound.
Mads: Do you relate to that soundscape thing Ramon ? (laughter)
Ramon: Yeah, you can spend a long time doing it. Yeah, for sure. But, um, no, no, I mean, it’s kind of fun as well. Like I almost take it as my free time, something I enjoy doing as like a hobby just to do it because it’s enjoyable and find the perfect one. You get it. You’re like, yes.
Mads: All right, we’re going to be listening to your story next.
Tell us a little bit about it.
Kwame: Well, In early July there was this massive hurricane that formed in the Atlantic Ocean and sort of ripped through the Caribbean causing a lot of damage. But when it formed I think it occurred to me I didn’t actually remember what it was like to experience a hurricane.
I’ve been in Australia for like a decade so I just couldn’t remember it so I thought it’d be interesting to sort of, speak to my mum about what she remembers, um, about us, um, living through hurricanes and storms.
Kwame’s Story:
In early July, the ‘Know Your Caribbean’ Instagram account, known for its humor and bite sized facts about Caribbean history, posted a satellite image of the earliest Category 5 hurricane to be recorded forming at the Atlantic Ocean: Hurricane Beryl. The hurricane was a cloudy white swirl rushing through the Caribbean chain.
It looked like it was hovering between Trinidad and Barbados. Barbados would sustain some minor damage, but the hurricane would proceed to leave a trail of destruction throughout the rest of the Caribbean.
Kwame’s Mum: Yes, I heard that. And am I supposed to say okay? Because I see something comes up here. This meeting is being recorded.
Kwame: Okay. That was my mum. When we spoke, she’d just flown back to Barbados from Trinidad. Trinidad is an island in the Caribbean Sea, just 11 kilometres from Venezuela. It’s about the distance from Sydney to Chatswood. Barbados is about 333 kilometres north of Trinidad. Let’s say the distance between Wollongong and Kosciuszko National Park.
By now, I’d been living in Australia for almost a decade and realised that I’d forgotten what it was like to face the threat of a hurricane, year after year.
Kwame’s Mum: I realised that the first, first hurricane I ever experienced was actually in Trinidad and not in Barbados. Which is very unusual because Trinidad doesn’t normally get hurricanes. I remember what year it was. It was 1974. I was just getting ready to go off to university. And, um, we just had this really, really bad, awful weather. Wind and rain and thunder, lightning. And, and the wind was awful. I mean, the wind. Where we lived in Deagle Martin is like in a valley, so we are completely surrounded by mountains and the wind is howling around in there. And we had a lot of trees in our yard, and all the neighbors had lots of trees, especially coconut trees. And these coconut trees, I mean, it looked like they would almost touch the ground. They, they were just all over the place. Coconuts were flying all over the place, the wind was howling.
We even had what we call galvanized sheets that people use for roofing. We saw two or three of those just come flying through the air. It was very scary, but that was the first one. And the funny thing about it is, we didn’t know it was a hurricane.
Kwame: But it was in fact a hurricane. According to the National Archives of Trinidad and Tobago’s Facebook page, Hurricane Alma hit the island of Trinidad and Tobago on the 14th of August 1974 with 147 kilometre gusts damaging 800 homes and killing two people.
How can she remember her first hurricane back in 1974, over 50 years ago, while I can’t focus on a single memory of a hurricane? My memories all smear together like looking through a dirty window, a blur of days filling plastic buckets of water, collecting tinned food, and pulling extra batteries for torches.
Kwame’s Mum: We had one that ripped off all the, all the, um the shingles, our roof of our home here, the wind just literally popped the shingles off. And everywhere those nails popped out was a little hole. This house was, the roof was like a strainer. The water was just pouring through everywhere. I remember your room was particularly bad.
Kwame: I don’t even remember being truly afraid. What I think I remember is being glad that I didn’t have to go to school.
Kwame’s Mum: I think, I, I, I think it’s because as parents, we don’t want you all to be scared. So, you know, we try to do everything and be ready, but we don’t want two scared children in the house, you know, we, we want things to appear as normal. Um, so I think we deliberately try to keep us calm and cool as possible as possible.
Kwame: I wish I could have summed up the story of my childhood hurricane experience into a neat metaphor or analogy. But the best I can achieve is something messy, like scattered detritus after a storm. You see, I thought this was going to be a story about a unique Caribbean experience where I can boast about the fact that I had to face hurricanes every year. That they didn’t even scare me. But in fact, it is a story of wily parenting. About distractions. And about bad memory, apparently.
Mads: Kwame, I could listen to your mum speak for the entirety of the whole podcast.
Kwame: That was the problem.
Mads: She’s a great talent.
Felicity: Oh, I really loved it. Like, I loved how just the descriptions of what was happening, like with the coconut trees and just of them bending almost to the ground. I also really liked Kwame’s, like, narration and yeah, just the way I suppose he writes, like how he wrote the story.
And I love the, the summary of, um, you know, that it’s about bad memory and good parenting.
Ramon: Yeah, I agree. I think, um, for me, it’s sort of really humanised the idea of facing a hurricane. Like, for me, it’s the sort of thing, because it doesn’t happen, at least in this part of Australia or the world, um, that, you see on the news or maybe you see in a movie, but you don’t actually think about what it’s like to experience that. Not just like once in your life, but like all the time, you know? So even though you’re facing a hurricane, you’re also still a child or you’re still a parent. And, you know, you’ve got to, you’ve got to make, make do. And it can be something that’s not, I mean, it’s obviously it’s traumatic, but it’s also something that if it’s so regular, it’s like, it’s part of life, you know, and it can be part of growing up and you can never forget it. You know, I feel like I would never forget it, but maybe I would, if I’d experienced it that many times, who knows.
Mads: Ramon, what’s your story about?
Ramon: So my story is about an experience that I kind of went through in 2020 during COVID during the first set of lockdowns. I was living overseas in Argentina at the time with my partner. Basically we separated during the lockdown, but we weren’t able, we weren’t allowed to leave, to move houses, so we had to live with each other, and then I wanted to move back to Australia, but I couldn’t. So we were like separated, but stuck together in the same room every day for like a whole year, which was um, yeah, very confusing as you’ll hear.
Ramon’s Story:
I’m looking at a photo. It’s a photo of me. I’m glancing over my shoulder, looking directly at the camera. A dark shadow is thrown across my face. Partly obscuring a rigid expression of confusion and bitterness. I remember when this photo was taken, although I hardly recognised the person in it. To understand it better, I’ll have to go back into my past and meet its creator.
Buenos Aires, Argentina, February 2020. I had been living and studying here as an Australian expat for the past four years, sharing a small apartment with my partner, Nadia, who I had been with since almost the very beginning of my life here. The bustle of the big city, lively nightlife, and passion for culture, art, and social justice made me fall in love with the place back in 2016.
However, after four long years, I had begun to dream of my home back in Sydney and quietly to myself began planning how I might make that trip back. Little did I know life had other plans.
News Presenters: Mysterious pneumonia outbreak in Wuhan, China. A new type of coronavirus. The number of affected countries has tripled. A breaking news stay at home. That is the order tonight from four state governors. COVID 19 can be characterized.
Ramon: Before we knew it, we and the rest of the world was stuck in a lockdown and we didn’t know if it would last a month or a year.
During those months, we each went through our own existential crisis. And although we were living together, we were worlds apart. I spoke to Nadia recently to help me shed some light on the memories of those dark months.
Nadia: Suspended time. Yeah.
Ramon: That’s Nadia speaking now.
Nadia: I didn’t want to let the time go. I, I liked to be at home and doing nothing and not thinking about the future. So it was a mix of feelings. Uh, we didn’t know what was going to happen. If the lockdown was going to last months, years, or what, and what was going to happen with our families.
Ramon: As part of my plan to return home, I knew I wouldn’t be able to take her with me. So, as the weeks rolled by, I knew the inevitable breakup had to happen sooner or later.
Nadia: You were very, you were very distant already with me, because you were thinking about it. I knew it. I knew that it was coming actually, because you were very distant with me, and that wasn’t that usual.
You have a particular smile, and a very honest smile. You smile with all your face. Your mouth, your, and your eyes. And your eyes weren’t smiling and that was the moment when I started to feel it coming.
Ramon: I found the courage to tell her, but because of the lockdown, we had to continue living together in that tiny apartment, in limbo, unable to come or go. Stuck like a rare insect, encased in glass.
Nadia: I remember all the process and, uh, I remember you said, I’m confused, and, uh, even if I knew that you were going to leave me and leave Argentina, I didn’t want to see you sad, uh, and I also knew, uh, that you needed change.
Ramon: The weeks turned into months, and with no end to lockdown in sight. The days began to grow darker and the nights colder as we slipped into winter.
Nadia: That year I also decided to start a psychiatric treatment. Many things exploded inside me, um, so it was, uh, for me it was a really sad year.
Ramon: Nadia is a professional photographer specialising in analog photography. In 2020, she shot, developed, and copied a series of photos all in her own dark room in the little study above our apartment.
The series, titled ‘Mientras Estés Acá’, or ‘While You’re Still Here’, detailed what we were going through in a series of poignant and emotional photographs of us and our world during those months.
Nadia: That photographic series is one of my favorite photographic pieces and um, it kind of made what I wanted to do about suspending time.
The day that we fought, um, there was a day that we had an argument actually. And I think that was the first time that I saw you angry. We were arguing and I was kind of petty because, uh, even if I was trying my hardest to be understanding, I was angry too because I didn’t want it to, I didn’t want you to leave.
So, you got angry. I never saw you that angry. And, uh, when I saw your face, I realised that I was, uh, that I fucked up. That that wasn’t necessary at all. And, uh, I took you a photo in that same moment. That night, when I was working on my photos, it was really hard to, to see it, you know, because I really captured your face angry. I really, ah, your eyes.
Ramon: Looking back at those photos, I can see a side of myself, which I almost don’t recognise. A shadow across my expression that seemed to appear out of nowhere and which have since retreated back into my subconscious. In those months, my anger and frustration but also my tenderness and vulnerability came to the surface of my personality. That was the year that I learned to recognise and give those emotions within me the attention they deserve.
Nadia: I wanted to give you that as a last gift. I made it really conscious. I was very conscious about trying to be understanding. I knew that I wanted to be your friend in the future anyway, because I understood that the fact that you were going to break up with me, it didn’t mean that you didn’t love me or, uh, you didn’t care about me. It was just a personal decision for you. Um, so I, I was sad, but not angry. Um, I was angry with the situation, right? But not with you.
Ramon: Finally, as 2020 came to a close, Australia opened up its borders and I was able to book my flight to return to Australia. I was going to have to travel halfway around the world, spending more than 72 hours in transit across four continents, and three weeks in quarantine before being able to see my family again in Sydney. But the most difficult part was saying goodbye.
When I asked Nadia what were her strongest memories of that time, this is what she said.
Nadia: You in the taxi, you leaving, we were crying like a baby. We were both crying. Yeah. It was really sad.
Ramon: Reflecting on this time, and hearing Nadia retell me everything from her perspective, I can feel how 2020 changed both of us. It was a turning point, a rupture that sent two lives running parallel in opposite directions. I think it showed us both the depths of loss but also taught us to care for one another, even in the toughest of circumstances.
Today, Nadia and I are still good friends and we speak regularly, even though we’re no longer together and live on opposite sides of the world. And I’m sure that sharing this intense experience has helped to solidify the bond between us, which is something that can’t be lost or broken with time.
Felicity: Well, I’m crying. Well done. Uh, Hmm.
Kwame: Wow, um, it’s a pretty emotional story. It’s pretty heavy. Um, I think I was thinking about the, the strangeness of being caught in that type of situation where you’re forced to be in the same space after so many things have been severed. And I think you’ve captured that so beautifully with your use of silence and music and how everything was queued in.
Ramon: Oh, thank you.
Kwame: I feel like I’m going to have to sit down on that one for a bit longer to give you a-
Ramon: That’s okay.
I mean, if you think this captured it, you should see the, like the series of photographs that I’m talking about. It’s like really, it’s really something special. It really like captures that feeling, I think. Yeah.
Mads: Compared to the visual medium, what do you think, um, why did you want to capture this story on audio as well?
Ramon: I wanted her to be speaking directly to the listener as if they were speaking to me, you know, to understand me understanding my past, like my point of view understanding her point of view, if that makes sense. And I think you can only really do that with audio, you know, have someone speaking directly to you as a listener and sort of, yeah, feeling like you’re part of the story in that way.
Mads: So, as part of Audio Club, you guys are constantly workshopping stories. Um, is there anything interesting in the pipeline?
Felicity: Shall we start with Ramon?
Ramon: Yeah, um, I’m planning a story actually about a series of cat burglaries. at an op shop that turned into something really strange and weird, a conspiracy.
Mads: Oh, I need to hear that. I’m excited.
Kwame, how about you?
Kwame: Yeah, um, well, I’m continuing my family story library, I guess, and sort of interviewing my dad about his hobby in amateur radio. Um, something that he picked up when he was growing up poor in Belize and sort of, um, dealing with our relationship with that where I thought it was stupid as a teenager and he was really passionate about it. And how I guess we were literally on different frequencies instead of dealing with that.
Felicity: I’m doing one which is about time and I suppose my perception of time and the challenges that can be as well as the humor that there is when you have no idea about time.
Mads: Yes, I love that.
I can’t wait to hear all of your stories Thank you so much, Felicity, Ramon and Kwame, for sharing your stories with us.
If you’re interested in making some stories of your own, we’d love to see you at our next Audio Club Meetup. Everyone’s welcome regardless of experience. We bring you a new prompt each month, host online workshops and in person audio excursions.
You can find out more about Audioclub on our website, allthebestradio. com