Backtrack Boys

The Backtrack Boys documentary has been officially released and is screening in cinemas and other venues across Australia. It’s wonderful to see this inspirational film affecting people’s hearts and minds – Russell Crowe sent out an endorsement through Twitter, and the film won best documentary award at the Byron Bay Film Festival (as well as a string of Audience Favourite Awards at other film festivals). Well done to all the BackTrack boys, to Bernie Shakeshaft and to his fabulous team at BackTrack Youth Works, and to filmmaker Catherine Scott who brought this story together.

From 2007 to 2014, I was a volunteer youth worker/researcher at BackTrack, and I wrote about my experiences in a memoir called Wild Boys: A Parent’s Story of Tough Love (UQP, 2015). For the inside story on how Bernie Shakeshaft and his team of helpers transformed a fledgling grass-roots youth welding initiative into a hugely successful youth work organisation, Wild Boys is the perfect ‘companion book’ for the Backtrack Boys documentary. Bernie’s innovative youth work practices were in place right from the start, and they can be easily replicated to help other young people across Australia to reconnect with their communities.

Over the last two months, the current group of boys in the BackTrack school program have been helping me out with various garden jobs. I’ve really enjoyed re-connecting with the BackTrack boys in this way – they’ve carted compost and mulch, cut down trees, stacked wood, and are building me compost bins and a new clothesline. Along with their teacher, they work bloody hard … and the world feels like a better place when they’re here.

The BackTrack boys rock!

 

The Backtrack Boys is a new documentary about Bernie Shakeshaft and the crew from BackTrack Youth Works. Following on from the early days of BackTrack which I wrote about in Wild Boys, the film features the stories of three boys – Rusty, Zach and Alfie – and shows the life changing transformation they undergo through their involvement with BackTrack and dogs and all that happens at the shed. At the film’s premier at the Sydney Film Festival five days ago, The Backtrack Boys received a well-deserved standing ovation.

Check out the The Backtrack Boys trailer and a recent article from the Northern Daily Leader:

Congratulations to filmmaker Catherine Scott and to all the crew at BackTrack!

Big screen debut: Armidale's highly renowned Backtrack program will be hitting the big screen on Sunday as one of the features of the Sydney Film Festival.

 

Two days ago, an article in The Australian – ‘BackTrack project saving kids from lockup’ – featured the work of Bernie Shakeshaft, founder and manager of BackTrack Youth Works in Armidale. The article, which raised important points about keeping kids out of jail and working on alternative solutions to incarceration, mentioned how Bernie and the team at BackTrack commonly ask young people who join the program about their hopes and dreams in life. ‘It takes them a while to answer,’ noted Bernie, ‘because they’re not used to hearing that [question].’

The story of BackTrack and the emergence of Bernie’s hugely successful programs in Armidale and further afield are documented in my memoir Wild Boys: A Parent’s Story of Tough Love (UQP), and Bernie’s comment about ‘hopes and dreams’ reminded me of a chapter in Wild Boys called ‘The Scent of an Idiot’, some of which I’ll share below:

***

Wild-BoysExcerpt from Wild Boys: A Parent’s Story of Tough Love (pp. 11-12)

One day, as Bernie and I sat together on the concrete ledge outside the shed, I’d asked him what the boys were like when he first met them. He shook his head and grimaced: ‘They were the wildest bunch of hoorangs you’re likely to come across!’

I laughed at his pained expression. He found his tobacco and rolled a cigarette, his habitual way of settling in for a chat.

‘There were some damaged kids in that group,’ said Bernie, his voice low. ‘It was almost too late to start with them. Hard-core kids, on the edge of going inside for violent bashings, already identified as hopeless troublemakers, a lot of them living away from home. For sixteen years they’d heard the only thing that matters is getting a school certificate, only to be told: “It’s all bullshit. You guys aren’t going to get there.”’ Bernie gave a scornful huff. ‘The schools hadn’t worked on the strengths and dreams of those kids.’

He paused for a moment to light his smoke. ‘It was like getting a bag full of wild cats and letting them out in one room where they couldn’t escape. The schools kept saying I had to stick with the rules … that the boys weren’t allowed to smoke or swear.’ Bernie whistled through his teeth. ‘For Christ’s sakes, you send me twenty of your wildest boys – all full-on swearers and smokers and blasphemers – and tell me to enforce the school rules? It was wild!’ He grinned, his face alive with the memory. ‘We had knives pulled in the welding shed, and just as soon as you’d be finished with the knife incident, the boss-man from the college would be yelling, “What the hell is that kid doing up on top of that three-storey building!” The boys would show up black and blue, on the piss and smoking bongs. Not all of them ended up here at the shed – some did well, some not so well. One of them died, another’s in jail.’

‘It’s hard to believe the boys were like that.’ I thought of Thommo with his quiet dignity. ‘Was Thommo that wild?’

Bernie rolled his eyes and groaned. ‘He was the craziest! He and his mates were riding bikes into poles and dropping garbage bins on each other’s heads from the highest roof at school. Whatever someone did that was dangerous, Thommo did something double-dangerous. Thommo wouldn’t just jump off the third storey of the building – he’d want to jump through three sheets of glass as well. Taking it to extremes. Crazy self-mutilation stuff.’

We sat quietly for a moment.

‘I did a lot of that as a kid myself,’ said Bernie. ‘Hardly a bone in my body I haven’t broken – from having no fear or need for self-preservation. Dealing with those kids rang a lot of bells for me because, all those years ago, I would’ve been one of those wild cats let out of the bag.’

 

So much has happened since I last wrote. First of all, the PhD paralysis passed and I finished the semi-final draft of my thesis at the end of September – yes, even the exegesis! I had to spend a long time in the PhD isolation ward, where I swore profusely at my computer screen, googled things like: ‘How do I muster up the energy to finish my thesis?’, and listened to Bob Dylan’s Desire album … where he sings ‘The way is long but the end is near.’ Oh, so true. Strangely enough, I actually like my exegesis now and I can’t understand why it took so long to write. As I wait for my supervisors’ final comments, I can relax – take a breath – and re-enter the world.

I’ve just returned from a celebratory writing retreat at the coast with my dear friend, Edwina Shaw. After reading and commenting on Edwina’s latest manuscript – a gripping work of fiction based on a horrific true crime – I spent the remainder of the retreat walking on the beach, swimming, and lying on my swag under the trees. In the evenings, Edwina and I sat on the verandah of our cabin and drank whisky and chatted about writerly matters – like the best way to write bios of different word lengths and our next projects. I’m so fortunate to have a writing-friend like Edwina. Check out Edwina’s report about our retreat: http://edwinashaw.com/2014/10/08/retreat-by-the-sea/

Along with celebrating my ‘almost-finished’ thesis, Edwina and I also raised our glasses to … wait for it … my book contract with University of Queensland Press! YES! In July 2015, UQP are going to publish my memoir about my involvement with BackTrack Youth Works in Armidale. All of this came about through the efforts of Brian Cook, who is now my literary agent. Thank you, Brian, and thank you Alexandra Payne, the non-fiction publisher at UQP, who loved my manuscript and pushed it through the acquisitions meeting. Life can change so quickly – I signed contracts for a publisher and an agent in one week. After I heard the news from UQP, I rang Bernie Shakeshaft, whose work features in the memoir-manuscript. I could barely form coherent sentences I was so excited, and when he heard the news, Bernie said: ‘It was always going to happen … but good that it happened.’ Yes. What a relief.

Edwina now calls me her ‘poster girl for resilience’, and although it has been a long haul, my experience confirms that successful writers are the ones who don’t give up. Keep the faith.

Reading under the trees at the coastal retreat

Reading under the trees at the coastal retreat

 

 

Yep, I’m procrastinating. Currently engulfed in PhD paralysis, but I’m expecting it to pass in approximately … hmmm … fifteen minutes or so. I’ve never known anything like this sort of inertia. Me – the former Deadline Queen – reduced to applying for endless PhD extensions. Sigh.

Anyway, onwards and upwards – and I’d better hurry up and finish this post because I only have fourteen minutes left and need to make coffee. The latest news is that Bernie Shakeshaft, whose unique style of youth work forms the focus of my memoir-manuscript, has won a 2014 Churchill Fellowship to research international methods in youth work. In 2015, Bernie will spend seven weeks in America and Canada, where he will visit a range of innovative youth programs and learn some new ways of doing things. Bernie’s latest success is not only hugely inspiring, but it has also helped generate a bit of action on the manuscript. I’ll keep a lid on it for now – but there’s definitely ‘movement at the station’.

I’ve also just finished working through Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way again. I introduced the book to a friend six months ago, and then decided to accompany him on his rather relaxed journey through each of the chapters. About halfway through the book, I found myself experimenting with a new genre – a different outlet for my words – and the ability to work with this new genre feels like an unexpected gift, like magic. I love what’s happening, but I’m going to ‘zip the lip’ for now because this new work needs nurturing and protection. As Julia Cameron says: ‘The first rule of magic is self-containment … don’t give away the gold’. A good rule for me to follow.

Well … time’s almost up. Better make myself an extra strong coffee and get back to the thesis.

Hello again. Well, I’m heading off for my retreat at Bundanon next February. So soon! I was relieved to hear back from the Arts Program Manager – it was starting to feel like a dream, and I was wondering if they’d made a mistake and sent the congratulatory email to the wrong person. But no, I really am going to be an artist-in-residence at the Writer’s Cottage by the river for two weeks. Phew. An added benefit is that I have a new incentive to work towards. By the time February rolls around I want to have finished cutting / editing the current draft of the manuscript, re-written some important sections, and to have fitted parts of this draft onto a good strong outline that shows the peaks and troughs of the two main narrative threads in the memoir. Then, two weeks of solitude at Bundanon (such a luxury, even if I do have to cater for myself and the nearest shop is half an hour’s drive away) will provide the perfect opportunity to re-write the Varuna blah and go deep into the heart of this memoir. All going well, by the end of February I should have a complete draft of the re-worked manuscript.

I’ve been making slow and steady progress with the cutting / editing, but it’s easy to get caught up in the hurly-burly of pre-Christmas parties and social gatherings. Maybe it was an important and necessary part of re-discovering who I was after being in a relationship for such a long time, but I’ve socialised way too much over this past year, especially in the last weeks. I’m starting to feel like I need to cut the distractions and go inwards, like a woman about to give birth. Last weekend, in The Sydney Morning Herald magazine, author Elliot Perlman featured in the ‘Getting of Wisdom’ section. I liked what he said about dedication: ‘Everybody you know might be out having fun while you’re alone in a room working, but I’ve learnt that if you want to achieve anything worthwhile, you have to get good at declining the more immediate gratification.’ That’s what I need to do, especially over the next seven weeks; start saying ‘no’… a small but powerful word.

The other night, however, when I was out socialising at the Armidale Club, a local venue for live music, I caught up with one of the Iron Men from the welding shed. Because we’d both had a couple of drinks, we talked more that night than we had in the two years I’d spent working alongside him at the shed. I told him I was editing the book, and asked him what pseudonym he’d like. He couldn’t think of one. No nickname? I asked. He said no, he just wanted to use his own name, and was proud to do so. He mentioned one of the early chapters I’d shared with Bernie and the boys; although he hadn’t agreed with something I’d written, and thought I had it a bit wrong, he still loved it. It is what it is, he kept saying, and he liked the way I presented the world at the shed, a world that not many people got to see. His words reminded me of a comment I’d heard recently when I’d popped in at the shed to give Bernie and the boys an update (I’m sure they never imagined writing a book could take so long). On that day, one of the boys had said he liked the book because I ‘tell it how it is.’ As you know, this memoir has won me a few awards over the years, but to hear that comment, and to know my writing means something significant to the boys involved in the program… that means a lot to me.

One time, when I was going through a particularly dark period, I emailed Bernie and asked him to remind me why the book was important. He wrote back with some lovely words of encouragement which I often re-read when I start to doubt my abilities, and his advice is useful for anyone involved in a major creative project: ‘Sometimes when you try to capture something special that is going on, in this case the way we work with young men and make a real impact on their lives, then you need to do it in a special way. If it means something to the boys you write about, then we know you’re on the right track. The bonus comes when the book is having an impact on others. You have a gift – you can choose to use it or not. It’s a bit like how we teach the boys with the jumping dogs: look up, aim high, and when the dog takes off from the ground, there’s no coming back down. It’s a one way ticket – the reward is on the other side of the wall. To look back down when you’re on your way up will not get you over the ten-foot wall.’

It’s true – the reward is on the other side of the wall. And all the parties, and dinners, and nights out dancing at the Armidale Club will not help get this book written. As my friend Edwina Shaw says: ‘Retreat from the world without regret.’ That’s what any creative-worker needs to do to make it over the wall. During the school holidays, I have three one-week blocks of time to myself, and I’m going to use these constructively. There’ll still be time for swimming in the river at my friend’s property, singing with my choir, watching romantic comedies, spending time with my children and occasionally catching up with friends – but mostly I’m going to be here, alone in my room, working. Getting the job done, and preparing for my time in the Writer’s Cottage at Bundanon.

So, have a good Christmas break (if you’re having one), and in a few weeks I’ll post an abridged version of the transformation talk I did at UNE. Until then…