Shades of Me
BY MEL BROWN
Introduction
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I’ve spent most of my life telling other people’s stories – for a court report, an affidavit or a parenting assessment – but in none of those stories was I allowed to include the feelings of those who told them and those whom the stories were about. They were clinical observations, recorded in such a way that facts were the primary and sometimes sole focus of the stories themselves. I had written about other people’s trauma for the past 40 years, so I was experienced in providing factual information that could be held up in any court of law in this country. However, telling my own story was different. It was raw and painful and real, and the only way to tell it is to include the messiness of emotions, the complexity of contradictions and the truth that sometimes I didn’t act in ways that were obviously rational but were always a true and necessary response to the trauma and events as they occurred.
It is 1 am. I arrived in England yesterday, and I’m wide awake while the world outside my window sleeps. My mind is plagued with a million thoughts; I’m unsure if it is the effects of jet lag or just the pure excitement of being here. I can’t explain why, but being here feels like a homecoming, like being in the embrace of a mother who welcomes me with unconditional love despite the fact I have never before set foot on the shores of England. I cannot explain the connection I have with this land; perhaps it will become clearer as my story unfolds. Now, in this moment, I am sitting on a hotel bed in Scarborough, England beside my beautiful man, trying hard not to disturb his sleep as I feel compelled to begin the first chapters of my story.
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Here I was, though, in the small hours of the morning in the dark of the English countryside trying to tell the story of a woman who grew up and experienced life in Australia.​I am not English and had never stepped on English soil before this moment in this life, yet there was a connection there for me. My life to that point had been characterised by a discovery of connections, of finding who I was and who I am: not just in this life but in the many lives before it, in my ancestry and spiritual history. A part of my Dreaming has been to recognise that I was not just the woman who sat there that day, but have been many women, men and children going back into the ages as life after life unfurled. This life had been a difficult one in some ways, but also a wondrous experience where I had started to understand the true timeless depth of my Dreaming. It had been a life in which I had been able to embrace the fact that in this incarnation I was many things: Aboriginal, Australian, mother, daughter, woman, wife, writer, spiritualist and ancient spirit. It had not been easy, embracing all of who I was. I’m still learning about parts of myself, thinking about how events in my past – all of my pasts – have shaped me, and how I am also more than any of the things that happened to me.
Our hotel looks out over an ancient castle, no more than ruins really, that sits on an escarpment like a sentry on the hill overlooking the ocean. It is beautiful, but also ravaged by time and the scars of hundreds of years of battles that have left their legacy on this once magnificent artifice. It has all the features that modern-day castle builders would look for, and is in the perfect location to spot and repel approaching enemies or impress visiting friends with the majesty of the great Atlantic Ocean.​
Once a long time ago – so long ago in fact you could start this story with ‘Once upon a time’ – this was someone’s home, a place where families were protected from the threats beyond the walls. It was their haven from the outside world, a place to love one another, raise their families and live their own Dreaming.
Earlier that night while walking back from dinner the remains of the castle were surrounded by an eerie glow from the floodlights that lit the remnants of the ancient structure. I thought about how the castle was once regal and formidable but now sat like an elder whose health was beginning to falter and wane but whose memories and stories were as clear as when they were young. Those stories were etched into the stone turrets and written upon the crumbling steps as they patiently waited for a kind ear so they could retell their tales, sharing with others the things that shaped them and made them who they were, the moments that defined them and how they became their Dreaming. As I walked I thought about the stories she could share, this ancient ruin of stone and memory, if she could talk, about what tales she must have of her Dreaming from the many hundreds of years she had sustained life: her triumphs, sadness, battles and joys all that shaped her into the regal old lady she was today. ​
Now, in these early hours of the morning, I am sitting in a wing chair looking out at that castle on the Hill. The floodlights that lit her so beautifully earlier this evening have been extinguished and she blends into the darkness around her, a dark shadow almost impossible to recognise as a once formidable structure. A quarter moon provides the only illumination, and is diffused by scattered clouds that drift across the darkened skies. Only the entrance of the structure can be clearly seen, shining in the reflected moonlight: an entryway that seemingly leads to nothing but darkness and emptiness beyond.​I don’t think I have any specific past-life connection to this castle, but I still feel it calls to me. At the time I couldn’t help but reflect that this place, illuminated by the spiritual light of the moon, was a literal symbol of a gateway into the past, a metaphor for my journey to enter the time of the before. She was showing me the way to the ancient and untold stories of her past and present Dreaming so that I could think about my own. I understood this to be a sign of where the ancestors wanted my new journey to start, where my Dreaming could begin to be told, so I start to write.