“I’m a bit of a Buddhist and I had this little alter in my house. It’s one of those new Chinese, Tibetan mock pieces of furniture and it’s not made of solid wood but I loved it. It came through the flood standing with not a scratch like magic, this seemingly piece of crap furniture, the drawers didn’t even stick. My favourite photos of my wife and my grandson as a baby, a few meditation teachers over the years, those photos floated in the mud and every single photo that counted and mattered to me were perfectly clean. Blew me away! Then the flood started giving me gifts (the wooden bench seat we were sitting on) It’s way better than the crappy cane piece that was here. A stainless steel water tank washed up, a little fibreglass punt washed up, so much timber, enough to build a little room now up in my roof, plywood for the floor and timber for the walls and ceilings. I now have a nice room up there. This has happened for years. One flood will give me gifts that I’ve used in the next flood. I’ve built a little spa house out of the timber I’ve rescued from the floods.
I have butcher birds and magpie friends that have been my friends over many, many years, They wander in the house. They were all very concerned and freaked out. Their whole world had changed for them. They stayed here with over those days. They were concerned about me, looking in the house at the mess. I kayaked through the area and you see the trees festooned with spiders, snakes, mice, lizards, little animals, anything that can make it to the trees. You have to be careful because if you bump one, spiders will rain down on you. Afterwards these birds that normally feed on insects were really hitting me up for food. I started feeding them because their food source was gone and still hasn’t recovered that well.
I worked as a mural artist for 15 years. I started in Lennox Head. I’ve always had that creative streak but there were so many artists around here painting little paintings and I realised there was a window for large scale art. At the time people were in love with rainforest and nature murals. That was my forte, copying nature. Nature is the artist and we try and do our best to represent it. I did murals in shopping malls, RSL’s pubs, pre-schools, fish and chip shops, all over the place from here to there. The one over Fundies is mine. I painted that years ago, it’s lasted well as it must be 20 years now. Graeme Shanley and I knew at the time that it was facing the western sun so it would fade but because it was an olden day scene, when it faded it would look like an old retouched photo. That’s exactly how it looks now. I painted some at the Uni, the Metropole had some out the back. I did those two big ones in the alley way, Nesbitt Lane where The Loft was off Magellan. Each one involved about 20 young people. I was a youth worker for 7 years so I drew it and they helped fill it in.
Later on I started sculpting. I scored a big Anvil from one of the old petrol stations in Nimbin and out the back they had a Smithy. He had this beautiful 300 pound old english wrought iron anvil. I bought it for peanuts and started tinkering with it. I never trained in it but I started producing some amazing sculptures with shaping hammers and beating sheet metal into 3 dimensional shapes. I did hundreds of them for about 5 years. There’s still a couple on the roundabout near the square. They are rusty but still there, a goanna and a carpet snake. There was originally a frill neck lizard but that got stolen twice. I made another one and it got stolen too. I’ve kept a few.
I started playing guitar at 10, just tinkering but I never played publicly or professionally, just at home back porch picking. After Neecy died I needed to get out of my house and out of my world which was painful. You know that thing where they say sorrow is like a lump in the throat. It really does get you there. I used singing as a cure for that. There was a while there where if I sang a song that was a favourite that she loved or one I sang to her all the time, I’d be out busking in town and I couldn’t finish the song, I’d just choke up. I kept at it and it actually improved my voice. Now I go to all the open mic nights which is a lot of fun. Last night was a great one at the Bowlo.
After the flood, as a way of getting myself out of my mess, people were going to the Koori Hub and the Trees not Bombs cafe and they were shell shocked and depressed. Those places were giving out free coffee and food so I would set up and play music to them and try and keep all our spirits up. Even after when town was empty I would go and play to the spirits (laughs). Music is healing. Post flood I get much more appreciation than I did before the flood (laughs). I feel like I’ve had a hundred lives in one so hard to capture that in this interview.
I did some training with monks. Their thing is the past does not exist and it doesn’t deserve as much as we give it. You don’t cling to it. You have memories and you don’t disregard them but you recognise that they are just that and not reality. The future is not reality either. This moment is the reality. It helped me right through the flood because whenever there’s a struggle, if you’re just dealing with what’s in front of you, it’s never that big. It’s only if you think about what happened before and what was traumatic and what’s going to happen, how will I cope? There’s years of that. If you stay with the present, it’s just what you have to do now. That’s actually life and if you are off in the future and the past, you’re not living, you’re missing your life. A lot of people let the past rule their lives and it messes up the present or they let the worries of what might happen in the future and it messes up the present. Look at the birds. They live in the present. It might be hard one day but as soon as it’s a good day they’re happy and they sing. These little birds here come and sing with me. They seem to time it so when there’s a break in the song, they sing. It’s like living with a bunch of backing singers (laughs)”
Footnote – I asked Paul for some of his flood photos so you can see the difference from the ones I took during our interview. Paul said the flood came way higher but it was dark at the peak. There is one image on the little back verandah in the dark. I will post these in comments
