Introduction This introduction to the following poems and essays, is enabling that it ties in adequately with the book named “The Christmas Which Never Came”, in which ever addition and under whatever subtitle you might have found that publication.  It is also enabling that perhaps you might conspire to believe of me myself only that I am that Christmas Witch, who they have accused rather alike to the Grinch, whoever “they” are.  I can not be sure while writing, of which specific “The Christmas Which Never Came”, that you reading this here, might have received it as the insertion, and neither if you received it by your purchase or in a gift attached to “The Christmas Which Never Came”.  Since it is but thus an insertion into one or other of the various edits of that volume, I need assert, that this here addendum, is in time sequencing specifically now here to be identified, as having been written immediately after completing the version “The Christmas Which Never Came Through the Strangeness of Strangers But for a Boy with a Book”.  The purpose of this introduction is for that timing placement to be able to be realised.  The introduction to that volume, called “Dreaming Shades of Grey”, was written immediately after attending a public poetry reading here in Brisbane.  This immediate publication, its Addendum, has an essay which was written immediately after attending a different Brisbane public event.  In between I have been to a number of further Brisbane public lectures, seminars and readings.  Each one formulates within me a distinct set of ideas which I find myself wanting to temper with my own words.  At times I write well within the definition of being a critique of such an event.  But at other times I write around the event through using the ideas which such events can sharpen in my own conceptual reality.  At times I even tend to write in total opposition to a specific event, but then might not ever even identify my attendance, perhaps.  Though I am more likely to just not attend, which places my commentary upon such events as rather less useful.  I prefer to openly critique what is being expressed in public contexts.   This Addendum has only a minor use though in contextual analysis of the worth of sustaining the many public lecture series which are available to the general public in most of Australia.  I am good at identifying what is beneficial in the broader Australian social context, about almost any fact of a public display, even those most controversial, and it is rare that I make any out and out condemnation of any specific showing.  Since I happen to be good at this, even though I drag the reader through many preliminary sequences of already very well digested information, I might prove to be worth your while reading.  Though as a big picture thinker, my work is also usually that of an initiator’s style, rather than that of a completer’s.  Bearing that in mind while reading, makes it more valuable to the reader to concentrate upon why I group certain seemingly random ideas and ideals together. I even express myself towards the end, as my own total antithesis, but somehow without contradiction any of the actual reality of consistent internal logic to the arguments in this work.  I am quite capable of total condemnation of public works if I truly object to what I am being exposed to myself in public, but on the whole, would like for you reading to assess my work as a fact of fully blessing the efforts made by various Australian Governments, in funding public Art works, which address the social issues of the time.  I am at heart most particularly sensitive to the fact of what all our children are witnessing, and my critical nature is almost entirely an endeavour to ensure that every Australian public context can be made safe for children. The poems in this booklet are nothing special, but just what happened to find a need to be written earlier this morning while I was on the brink of discovering a function in which this booklet can manifest.  So the poetry is sort of relevant as the unobtrusive defining of what catalysed this.  That is the reason for my inclusion of the poems, where really not particularly well worked poetry.  Not all of the poems are very specifically Art world oriented. The fact of this booklet is that I have found a want to in me to answer what it is that we here in Australia tend to regard as our public cultural context.  In that arena, since beginning to compile “The Christmas Which Never Came Through the Strangeness of Strangers But for a Boy with a Book”, and in making its introduction, I failed miserably to attend the Queensland poetry festival, but then managed attendance at only a few peripheral sessions of the Queensland writers festival, failed miserably to attend the Maleny Writers Festival, but then managed to attend one public lecture out of the Brisbane Institutes Year long series I am paid up to attend, then walked into and through a local street party, enjoined with the local Muslim community in Eid ul Fitr celebration, somehow or other found myself on the brink of attending a few more of the sessions of the Brisbane ARC Art, Design and Craft Biennial 2007’s weekend Symposium than I might have been going to, before then throwing caution to the wind and eating an overseas styled donut at the Brisbane Multicultural festival’s free ticket day.  I mean not to question that old set of constantly streaming social analysis of what it really is to be an Australian, and is our mainstream white-fellow culture actually at all unique in the world, but rather to assume that we will never ourselves notice what our culture really is, since that is the nature of culture.  But we can make culturally obedient expressions of what our culture enables us to value.  That is, we can use Art to express our culture with pride.  Most public occasions are such expressions of us in our essence as Australians. The thrust of this booklet is how our public cultural displays are able to ensure safety in a world which children share with criminals.  So here in this opening, I ought to define why I have a vested interest in this, and how it comes to be that I am, here today, based in Brisbane while writing about such matters.  This is significant because I believe that Brisbane has a set of social conditions which are well deserving of particular attention within the framework of the social analysis which my experiences have forced me into making. My immediate vested interest is in the fact that my own children are currently not in residency with me, yet I, and the world, continue to regard their daily experiences as my own responsibility.  This situation is attenuated to an extreme, and the conditions in which that attenuation has happened are far too lengthy to express without manifesting as though I could be insane.  I am the kind of person who, in days gone by, might have been openly and congenially, or is that convivially, defined as “touched”.  By God that is, and I will prove the point by stating preference for naming Him Allah.  A white mainstream Australian turned Muslim, surely an insanity, but it gets worse even.  I am also a white mainstream Australian who learned as a teenager protesting during the bicentenary, that the black-fellows seem to suppose I might be one of them.  Not black, just another white-fellow, but then I had a better look at that hundred year old family photo album on the page with the black woman we usually only embarrassedly and embarrassingly, ignored when in company.  Actually I was the ACT TLC appointed Canberra Bicentennial Protest Group Convenor, at the age of nineteen, but have since been mostly just another single mum.  It is a bit of a difficult financial situation from which to prove sanity, not to mention the general picture of all my present and former affiliations.  Best of which is that I got touched somehow at an important Corroboree, and have never looked back since.  Following the trail of what was implanted then in my psyche, has lead me into the heart of the Islamic world.  It has also lead me into finding out how to best serve my children’s interests while we are forced apart and I am not at present their legal guardian, though I have never yet been lead into any resolution of that predicament.  So I wonder all the time, what this country is coming to with everybody expecting that a girl can win a case against an Irish dipsomaniac whose current partner seems to have all the money between any of us.  Because, if most folk are to be believed, the family court must have been more correct than me, and therefore my predicament is the evidence of my insanity, which is all that the evidence against me in court amounts to. So I might seem insane, but only as insane as many ordinarily normal folk manifest if ever caught up in lengthy legal cases without funds to pay for an important enough barrister, and also without themselves being in public social regard well enough recognised to warrant an investment of a barristers pro bono efforts.  Take it as read then, that I have a strong motivation to make my work available in public contexts, and to improve those public contexts as my children will be in need of.  I must apologise if I have by accident demeaned the many very well minded efforts by barristers in pro bono contributions, and ought to also explain that it is rare for such pro bono work, mainly sourced locally through the Queensland Public Interest Law Clearing House, to be enabled in the family law context.   Within the realm of what defines sanity and insanity, and what ought and ought not be in the public domain, I am writing.  I have had a Dream about becoming famous for my words, which I am quite dissatisfied to say the least about, since fame was not what I set out to achieve, but rather only to raise a big happy mob of children, with a nice enough husband.  He didn’t even have to be that good, just not a total ignorant bastard.  However since every time such a possibility of a real Husband has manifested in my story, the social situation met in, has alone prevented us sustaining any realistic chance of communication; and so I have by accident of circumstance found my self unable to stop writing words on paper; and then written about things which caused me to communicate with certain persons, with whom I have Dreamed dreams of a more positive future than seemed to most folk to be possible for my children; and in one of which dreams my obituary read about having been well and truly renown.  So how can I help but become so then?  My bad luck I guess.  Yet I am still holding out for the children to be happy, and so choose that if I manifest fame for anything, it will bloody well cause that childhoods are happier if making no other significant contribution.  To that effect, I am not being totally ignorant in not having yet edited the major essay published here in this booklet.  I am rather publishing it as first drafted to test out the hypothesis as to whether that dream of my death can be escaped from, and also to prove an intangible point about what is happening in all our minds in respect of our use of the word.  Let that point remain intangible and perhaps the real adults among readers, who can be defined as an adult within a tribal Aboriginal Kinship system, might take up the point. For those still even further curious about my own tangible basis for this essay, and its having a Queensland focus, the story is sort of like this: My children’s father happened to move up to Brisbane a number of years ago from where I knew he was when he began to send me child support in late 2001.  He has a girlfriend here, who was his long term mistress for   five and a half years out of my nine and a half year relationship with him, and also two more children now with her.  She has a mortgage here in Queensland, which she saved up, over a period of time, the greater part of which was while she was his mistress and his primarily relationship was ostensibly still with me.  That fact, and the fact that in 2003 the fellow in question had a job, while I had not, is the open context in which our public culture tends to regard that my children ought most likely be better off with that family than with me as a single mother.  The children had been visiting with their father at the time, giving me my first rest for a few years, and the conditions in which I had needed that rest were having become by accident more involved with the portion of the Aboriginal community who have been in prison than I would, or could, have myself chosen. It might have been that the children would have been with me and a black Aboriginal step father by now, except that he did not want to stay follow me up to Queensland after he heard that I did not win the interim court hearings, because he assumed that any white girl will be favoured by any Judge, and that the Australian legal system never discriminates negatively against white skin persons, so therefore, apparently the white dipsomaniac’s claims against me, . . .           . . . well, it seems that he forgot to take that into consideration in fact.   The first real trial hearing has now been set, for January 2008, four and a half years after the case was first filed.  Until around April 2007, I had believed that as soon as I win the case I will not want to be in Queensland another minute longer, but something changed, and so I have decided to assert my self as an equitable resident of Queensland as any Queenslander. You might regard that my anger at the legal situation is a significant contributor to my motivation to write.  Yet in truth it is rather more that I write through my real sense of constant responsibility for my children, and I rather less often in fact write down any detail of the case at law.  Despite the courts having made an interim legal condition, in place now for over four years, in which I am not supposed to be held at all in the responsibility of a legally bound parent, it is that my biology, and what my children describe to me of their current level of supervision, emotional support, etc, engage me in constant processes of seeking avenues to ensure their protection.  So best leave that tale to the legal profession for now then.  Though I can not here help to add that there is no wonder that wicked step mothers are wicked, just because to a child a step mother is not usually able to feel so unendingly absolving of guilt as a mother must by nature. I have other, but lesser, vested interests also.  Obvious is my inter-relationships among the black Aboriginal community, which I spell out within an unusual degree of openness more soundly than many can.  Less obvious is the fact that, since I have been a left wing agitator since the day I left my parents home, and landed that evening at a women’s peace camp on the lawns of old parliament house in Canberra, (or was it an earlier ‘infringement’ of protesting a visit to Australia by the American secretary of state during his speech to the press club, or just that I went to peace-y type events, or, or, or, . . . ), and happen to be in the unusual situation of having both sound empirical evidence that Australians secret service agencies are keeping files on me, and also having a parent who once worked in an Embassy, and so has a high enough level security clearance that he himself can not fail to notice if something bad and untoward might happen to me.  I am implying something there aren’t I?  But so as not to reflect badly upon the police, all I will assert is that organised crime tend to seek out those whom already have a vulnerability to being policed, and try to set us up to seem to be who did their crimes.  Most folk who that has happened to, don’t have a parent who has served in the diplomatic corps, so you see, I am in a position of being unusually enabled to use the word to powerful impact.  That is, without of course, being at all actively seditious.  If these words seem to deny the primacy of our nation state’s laws, you must take it as a fact of your own misconstruction of my meaning.   In fact, I need not even actually temper my normal left wing oriented belief, to say openly that I believe that in the court case I am involved in there has been no real malicious intent towards me from any government employee, and might actually be better if it could be expressed as a comedy of errors of the administrative kind, but because it infringes upon the rights of the child, it just ain’t that funny.  I really do not find that any specific professional was unduly in error in respect of myself, apart from one solicitor, first appointed as a representative of my then Kyogle NSW solicitor, and which Queensland solicitor is already removed from the register here in Queensland.  Although, actual legal professionals may have something else to say about which professionals have or have not been in error.  While I ought to thank both the Commonwealth and State Ombudsmen’s offices for their consideration of the administrative details surrounding the case. Perhaps then, you could surmise that my second subsidiary vested interest, has got something or other to do with policing.  Something along the lines of how I have come to accommodate the reality of a life lived whilst in knowledge of being under police surveillance.  Something of the degree of the facts in that I really believe that the police are only doing their job, since I most probably seem to be a vaguely suspicious sort of character in almost every social context you could put me in, (least fortunately but, also in any criminal context, what with my big mouth), and that while still in my early youth I was fortunate enough to be blessed with a critical analysis by an older hard core Marxist, about why we ought never let the fact of police surveillance prevent us from expression our real belief.  This is a fortunate life I lead indeed, simply because I am today manifestly still alive, and in fact well protected by those whose surveillance I am under.  There are numerous of that sort of fortuitous coincidence which surround the sequences of events in my life, and perhaps it is only because I realised how religious teaching enables a person to land experiencing such co-incidences, might be why I am able to be taken as just a bit touched.   The form of comprehension in myself around sanity and insanity, is so far into my own advantage, that it is one which I seek constantly towards enabling to manifest available also for my offspring.  Can I demand of you reading that you insist upon me being consistent, and that if I fail to be consistent in my eventual concluding direction of argument, and in the data I rely upon, then you yourself ought not try to sustain believing in what I am trying to explain.  Though you ought also need to validate my data as belonging in the real world before you attempt to assimilate any of my discussion based upon that data.  However, even if I can only leave you with an uncertain mind, perhaps my social analysis has relevance for you in the formula of associated ideas.  It is really my only defence of how I must often seem, that my life has been a sequence of unusual experiences, in which I can not help but having evolved a very unusual combination of ideological frameworks for believing in.  If life is not made an adventure by our own volition, but that adventure is one we are subjected to as unavoidable, enjoyable, and worth living, truly then we must regard that we are blessed.  However, that told, believe that I can never want to subject any other person to my own life story, and therefore, I write out portions of the analysis I am experientially enabled, only so that others might access such without needing to endure the inseminating experiences. As well as being a far left wing agitator and academically a pure Marxist, I am a Christian who has revolted from the Christian mainstream in deciding to enter the Ummah of Islam within sustaining fully Christian belief.  This fact has a historic trajectory which places me in an unusual, but not unknown or unshared, position within mainstream modern Islam.  Of my indigenous Australian identification(s), belief, affiliations, and basic genealogy, might it be better if I leave it with you what to believe of me, or even in with me.  In general there seems to be one singular consensus, that if I were a black skin girl nobody would bother to question my sanity, in which might I suggest that I have a skin disease rather than a mental disease.  Actually I believe of our general mainstream Australian culture, that there is a significant valuation from Aboriginal culture which had always rubbed off upon everybody, in which it is socially acceptable to just let odd folk say odd things.  Somehow us odd balls are always beneficial to listen to even when incomprehensible, since we have a way of manifesting the recreation of the white Aussie Dreamtime, which is more normally just named that Great Australian Dream. The general flavour of what our country is letting be the deciding factors of whether or not anybody is diagnosed with a mental illness, seem to be determined mainly by such things as whether or not a person has private health insurance, wants to be rich, and are in or out of the fold of a family which guarantees social identity.  This is an assertion of two things.  That mental health professionals are more likely to over diagnose than under diagnose, is one fact which might truly not be such a terrible thing, not, that is, unless you happen to be faced with a prison sentence.  What is significantly more dire in consequence for us law abiding citizens, is that today’s Australia is becoming more and more constrictive in what sort of social combinations are enabling of the attitude of being normal.  Our culture loves its lowest common denominators, and it is my experience to need to express that the modern outlook being taken up by the new generation of successful youth, now beginning to take up more responsible life stories in their thirties, is an outlook which is trashing most of the lowest common denominators of our wider Australian social worth.  Maybe it will be best to regard that fact as what motivates my work in truth. Many of my assertions in this booklet, might seem a bit ignorant, and irreverent, sort of a likely candidate for being branded myself as a tall poppy to cut down to size.  Yet the over doing of cutting down tall poppies, is one way in which our genuine and unique Australian culture has been abused in recent times.  International forces and market forces have sought to justify their ripping off of the ordinary and excellent among Australians, by branding us as not being adherent to our own culture if we truly stand head and shoulders above the rest.  It is an actual fact that our culture will always cut down to size those who ride on too far ahead and above without having proven self worth in our capacity to attend to the accountability of being in any public position.  We all tend to believe that there is no way of being in a public position without needing to accept the responsibility of real leadership, no matter what our fame or infamy might have been originally for.  At best, our culture has always also sustained avenues by which those tall poppies that keep on re-growing no matter who might cut them down, are inevitably eventually let to rise above the crowd in reputation.  It is not a process of denying roles of splendour and affirmative leadership, so much as ensuring that any person whom subjects themselves to such a moral regard by other persons, must prove they are worth it.  The tall poppy “syndrome” is in fact the Australian way of ensuring that the standards of work effort required in specific public functions are able to meet the endurance necessary in our social climate.  Well, that’s my defence anyway, in needing to defend myself to the fact of having kept up some oddball sort of writing out in the field effort. As an Arts worker of sorts then, I want to make a rude assertion.  That those Artists whom receive the cultural subsidies from the common pocket of all of us, in the form of Australia Council grants, (arguably received by Artists whom meet the humour in jargon of the establishment par excellence) , are being subsidised to learn within a framework which can isolate them from the real world issues which the public might find it more relevant to see Art being made about.  Those Artists who receive that sort of cultural approval which leads them into expectations of receiving one or more Australia Council grants over their lifetime, approved of by peers, by government employees, and by external advisory committee experts, tend not to have had to face the living situations in which more of Australians are finding ourselves sharing the lowest common social denominators of our collective Human worth. By lowest common social denominator, I am referring to those basic experiential based beliefs which determine what our minds take for the reasons why any value is to be placed above any other.  It is both a very simple and very complex idea, and has a far stronger emotional currency than intellectual.  But Art is all about that emotional currency.  Dare I say also that all of crime is another form of manifestation of that very same emotional currency.  I have a strong feeling about this.  I also sustain a very strong feeling that my own perspective is worth making into a public vehicle, and so without further ado, I will let this booklet now evolve into further torturing, tormenting, and but I hope never to be dement-ing, you all by the art of the word.  If you experience any ‘dementors’ flying at you in your worst fears around what I write, then please just put me down now, and ignore the rest of my life.