WORDS Michele Gierck
Martin's eyes are piercing blue. Arresting. He has an earthy Australian voice and a face that smacks of Irish ancestry and gentle ruggedness
Martin Flanagan is a storyteller: writer, journalist, searcher and public speaker, particularly well known to readers of The Age. Raised in Tasmania, he, his wife and two teenage daughters now live in Melbourne.
When he writes about Aussie Rules the words leap off the page like James Hird grabbing a spectacular mark. It takes your breath away and transports you inside the moment, into the sweat and fever of an instant, then holds you there, allowing it to linger.
From a young age all Flanagan dreamed of was becoming a writer. He also asked questions-persistently. As a nine or ten-year-old he kept diaries. Poems followed. Writing became a refuge from the alienation of adolescence: an alienation derived from his inability to find God or an animating spirit in the church.
Although studying law at university, the desperation to write continued. Tim, one of his older brothers, encouraged him. 'I started writing first of all for the local footy club and they used to love what I wrote, so I wrote more.' Flanagan never kept any of those articles because he was not sure his writing was any good. 'But my brother, Tim, kept everything. That was an incredibly important thing because that's a profound act of respect, and so even if no one else thinks you are any good, you've got this audience of one.'
These days Flanagan's audience has grown considerably, through four years with the Launceston Examiner, fifteen years at The Age, a collection of poetry and seven books.
In a review of one of Flanagan's books, The Call-now being made into a play-Darren Godwell, an Aboriginal Australian, wrote that he considered the author to be a 'compatriot'. A compliment of the highest order in a country which splashes about, apparently unable to dive head first into the refreshing waters of reconciliation.
Reconciliation, as Flanagan sees it, is enormously significant for Australian culture.
'If you start looking at a few basic Aboriginal values, and looking at the basic values of Australian folk culture like a fair go, being fair dinkum, which means not being a phoney, being emotionally honest and some notion of collectivity, a sense of fraternity, I think we've got things we can work with', he says.
Chatting with Flanagan one can understand why he earned the title of 'compatriot': his deep respect for indigenous culture and the land, his lack of tolerance for pretence, and his overriding belief in the communal spirit. According to Flanagan his father was a huge influence on him. 'My dad did not believe in form in religion. My father believed in spirit and he said, "respect the spirit wherever you find it." I've lived by that, and I've done that in my journalism.'
Martin Flanagan is a man who finds that spirit in the most unusual places. He has a strong sense of the extraordinary unfolding among ordinary people and places. The spots many of us are too busy to see.
This he believes: 'The age of radical individualism needs to be challenged. The opposite to it is what we hold in common, our commonness. I am constantly amazed by a lot of people who hold that quality and carry it most strongly. Although they see themselves as common and ordinary they are actually the people who are in a sense least so.'
Yet, life it seems, is not always a comfortable ride. This Flanagan knows from personal experience. Writing can be a struggle: 'A perfect metaphor for life. The seasons of want and drought'. Ups and downs appearing like a series of undulating mountains that shape his life and work. But he still enjoys a good laugh and an ice-cold beer (some things simply don't change).
His humanness, and his eye for uncovering that humanness in others is an inviting aspect of his work. Like the article he wrote about Ann Dixon, a Good Samaritan Sister who works at night on the streets, offering refuge to folk who come out of the darkness and gather at the van parked outside Flinders Street Station. That one night of accompanying her in action impressed Flanagan.
He recalls: 'There was nothing there. It's just bare cement. But at a certain point they pass through it and it's like they are walking into a room with a huge fire. You see them visibly relax. Their bodies change. She had created what I imagine churches are or once were, but she created it without walls, on the street.' As he tells it, that was a major night for Flanagan. Perhaps he at last glimpsed the animating spirit that he had struggled to see in the church as a child.
Flanagan carries stories of growing up, ancestry and the land he was raised in, the way a refugee carries a photo or piece of jewellery from home. He reflects on them as often as possible, as if to reassure himself of their existence. As a writer he keeps these treasured memories alive and tries to make sense of them-questioning and reinterpreting. It is a particularly inviting project as he enters the wisdom of his mid-forties.
He has learnt a lot since his days growing up in Rosebery on the Tasmanian west coast. No lesson has been more important, however, than the one taught by his brother Tim: to act with profound respect. That's how Martin Flanagan is able to give so much spirit and courage to others-just like a great footy coach.
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