MIRANDA HARRIES (1988-2006)
My daughter, Miranda Lauren Harries, was born on 6 October 1988 in Hobart, Tasmania. A happy, generous and often impish girl, she was intent on seizing every day of her sparkling life.
Miranda had a passionate love for her firiends, cousins, and the natural world. Dogs adored Miranda as much as she adored dogs. Bushwalking and camping were a way of life for Miranda and her brother, Nick. At the age of seven, Miranda was doing tricks on a unicyle. At the same age, she was a confident rock climber. In primary school, she showed talent as a long distance runner.
Miranda had a lively imagination, and I can credit a story she wrote at the age of 10, with inspiring my own development as a children's writer. I wrote my second children's picture book, The Crown and Gown, about Miranda's attempts to dress up as a princess when she was four.
Miranda attended Princes St Primary School, Albuera St Primary Schools and Ogilvie High School in Hobart. In 2002 she moved to Perth, Western Australia, and attended Shenton College. She made many close friends in WA, who remained in close contact after she left school at the end of 2005.
In October 2006, Miranda drove to Margaret River in search of adventure, work and life experience. On Friday 13 October, she was killed in a vehicle accident at Quindalup, a week after her 18th birthday.
'The temple bell stops but the sound keeps coming out of the flowers.' Basho
LEARNING TO LOVE FRAGMENTS
For twenty months now,
each day has been an island
borne away to the void
by the grizzled surf of night.
On sunny days I hear echoes
of you playing
with your brother and cousin
in the sand dunes
They say this beach is a healing place.
I sit in my cottage writing up a sea mist,
and when I climb the stile
to Great Oyster Bay
the beach is occluded.
I write back to the day
when I should have rung your mobile,
asked how are you were going.
Found work yet? Where are you staying?
Enjoying yourself? Love you, darling.
Trite sentences, a few seconds’ delay
and you would not have been at that place
at that exact time.
The truck would have passed safely.
I walk the beach with downcast eyes, remembering
the cowry you held out to me. You knew the value
of the world’s first currency long before I did.
I used to wonder if you’d been here before.
Now I wish I’d learned more from you.
Sometimes I collect shells.
Awed by their shapes and patterns,
I take them home to my windowsill,
but their power blanches in the sun,
reminding me to keep your memory
glistening between tides.
I see cowries where you discovered yours,
in loose white sand where the sea bursts
through the channel and pools in the lagoon.
Often I see bones, their marrow bleached to lace work,
decay transformed to beauty
I stoop to inspect fans of doughboy scallops,
marveling at the way a fractal fan
angles out of the parent’s hinge.
Their whole and the part are equal casualties
to the remorselessness of time and tide.
Your childhood, which barely brushed
the cusp of adulthood, has now become your whole.
I see you in the quarter moon,
your unlived life as unlit lunar territory,
as present as your absence.
Once I stooped to perfection
now I am learning to love fragments.
Cutaways of whelk and helmet shells,
their exposed spirals drilling down
to wherever it is that you are now.
I seek your face in an abalone shells
upturned to the sunset,
although its jagged edges wound and scar.
I feel you as a phantom limb,
a lopped-off branch of a family tree
that creaks and bleeds in a windrushed gully.
They say this beach is a healing place,
and as the grizzled surf of night
bears each day away to the void,
I hold the fragment of your life in mine,
the happy mischief of a ragged smile.
Anne Morgan
from A Reckless Descent from Eternity, Ginninderra Press 2009.