Philip Neilsen
Philip Neilsen is Creative Director of the Kelvin Grove Urban Village Sharing Stories project. He is a widely published fiction writer and poet and is Head of Creative Writing and Cultural Studies at QUT Kelvin Grove. He believes stories are vital to the creation of individual and community identity, as well as a culture’s understanding of itself.
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Transcript
The Storyteller
When I was twelve, my bedroom smelled of plastic glue and balsa wood. Dangling from the ceiling was a miniature squadron. A Spitfire faced a Stuka Dive Bomber. They moved on their lengths of fishing line only in my imagination. Or when I forgot to close the windows during a Brisbane summer storm. My bedroom entered history because of my father’s survival as a Beaufighter pilot. But he didn’t talk about the war and because my father didn’t tell his war stories, it showed me just how important a story is. He came back from the Air Force determined to make a different story of family and hard work. He didn’t build an empire, he built houses. For forty years, all over Brisbane, in the stifling heat, walking lightly on the wooden braces of a steep roof. It was as close as he got to the clouds again.
But he had books now - biographies, memoirs, essays. He collected them. He read them and re-read them. Other people’s stories. And my mother had as many novels - all of Dickens, Jane Austen. I read them too. The house over-flowed with other more famous people’s stories. They floated in every room. They entered our dreams. I became our family storyteller, and I met other storytellers of all kinds. Even the comic writers were serious about stories. I still have some of those model plastic air craft, missing bits and pieces, just like memory which is held together with unreliable glue. And I understand now that stories are like houses we build for other people to live in.
