Interesting Reposts from Years Past

*

Letter

From Inga

Margaret Girvan Hunter

2020/01/05

***

To: Both of you with love,

The kind wishes of yours that you sent me -I have needed. I am now sadly, a widow and have been injured-trod on some oil in the supermarket and given my strange genetic mixture, nobody can diagnose whatever is wrong with me, ever. I have great pain walking. I shouldn’t think my African ancestry would have made me so difficult to diagnose; maybe it’s just the doctors. I had my DNA done and it (shows) the whole of West Africa and matches the slave trade perfectly. I am honoured!

So here I am oddly enough enjoying Christmas at short intervals because where I live in the Great Dividing Range, down the side of Australia-the whole country is in desperate drought and fire. So far about 1000 houses are lost and we breathe heavy smoke fumes wherever we go. I live at the top of a mountain in New South Wales, a site which is usually very beautiful: but not now, either black, roaring flames or the rest of us waiting…In the whole of my life in Australia, from 9 years old to now 82, I have never seen such carnage. I think most of us are pretty used to bush fires, but even then it is staggeringly awful.

I went out the other day and bought a celebrating bottle of Appleton Rum, as a sort of good luck charm; and very nice it is. Isn’t it good that the family’s rum (!?) has reached the farthest place in the unknown continent of Australia? Most Aussies drink something called Bundie’s Rum, which I would hesitate to clean the garage floor with…some people actually do and say “it works a treat”. But Appleton is not well known and Aussies are very loyal.

Currently we are adding to the drought and fires with super high temperatures-went up to 50 degrees celsius the other day, which is unheard of at 3000 metres up (from sea level). Everyone is fighting, lots say it’s global worming, others say it’s normal, more say it’s the government and mining coal.

I am a practical woman and always have an evacuation bag packed in the summer, but suddenly being old and handicapped makes it harder. The fact that the whole country is in a similar state is comforting.

I have recently learned, only last year that my father, Thomas Girvan Hunter wrote the first book on nuclear fission and worked on the Atom Bomb. He had to go to Australia because of a spy scandal in Britain, as did all other scientists. It broke his marriage-his wife stayed with him but stopped loving him.

He was given a professorship at university but when he came here, he wasn’t allowed to work in a lab. They constantly prevented him, making him do other work, wanted him to be Dean, which he hated. I found this out from a lady I met at the Embroiderer’s Guild. She worked with my father. In the end, the whole isolation-wife, work, everything, destroyed him so that he deliberately killed himself out of isolation and hatred.

I would like you guys to pass on his history for me within the family, because he was an extremely kind and super intelligent man. You ought to be proud of him. Someone ought to be. It was he who introduced oil technology to the Middle East and the rest of the world. So as a Girvan he was as extraordinary as most of them, despite being treated very badly by his places of work. I only wish he had had a chance of meeting all of you.

By the way I am privileged enough to have been given a Jamaican walking stick, especially made for me by an Obeah man in Jamaica. My cousin Nathan Haddad gave it to me. It is extraordinarily comfortable to use. Everyone who sees it admires it. God only knows why, because it is covered with mud, goat’s hair and beads. It is very hard Mahoe wood with a handle which would let me kill anyone I please.

God bless both of you. I may survive all of this or not. Until I was hurt, I could stride (such that) everyone thought that I was under 60; but pain and fear are a tad demoralizing.

With Love,

Inga Margaret Girvan Hunter

***