And if I abandoned him again, I wouldn’t be able to forgive myself.” I knew that if I wasn’t able to produce this book, then he would be trapped in there forever. And of his own father, and how it took the mighty wrench of the migraine – the forced vulnerability of it – for them to find a language through which to communicate.Īs Mol wrote Train Lord he was haunted by an image: “I felt like there was a tiny Oliver, who was not exactly me (but was more or less me), who existed in a storytelling world. He tells me about the men who’d come to see his one-man show – these grizzled old blokes in their 50s and 60s – and how they’d wait for him afterwards so they could quietly share stories they’d never felt they could tell anyone else. But, as you work through that, other people’s stories start to become intermingled with yours, and it becomes very apparent very quickly that there’s something abjectly terrible happening.” “I would be lying if I said that it was my intention to write about masculinity,” Mol admits. With Train Lord, Mol joins a growing fraternity of Aussie writers – including Lech Blaine, Michael Winkler and Michael Mohammed Ahmad – who are rattling the well-soldered cultural cage of manhood. Now there’s Train Lord: a memoir in essays. Those fragments became short monologues that Mol performed in the attic bedroom of his share-house for friends then a one-man show at the Adelaide fringe festival. First he started slipping jokes into his passenger announcements (“Next stop is Como, I’d say, named after the Holden Commo-dore”) then he used the two- to three-minute gaps between stations to sketch out fragments on the back of train timetables – just a sentence or two. It was on the trains that Mol made his way back, ever so slowly, to storytelling. The railway, Mol learned, was a place of reckoning as well as refuge. We all came to it for our own reasons.” On his first shift, there was a suicide. There were people as young as 18 who’d just come out of high school and hoped they could make a buck. There were doctors, pilots, taxi drivers, fast food attendants. “I had never met a more diverse group of people in my life,” he tells me, “all different nationalities, all different professions. As Mol emerged from his migraine, alienated from his vocation and his body, he took a job as a train guard. Train Lord is not a tale of recovery – of pain vanquished and a self triumphantly restored – but a story of tentative repair. Then play it back and see if they can recognize who’s voice it is roaring and growling.‘I had never met a more diverse group of people in my life’: Oliver Mol. They then put their clothespin on that side of the chart.ĭuring circle time, have each child roar like a lion or growl like a tiger and record each roar/growl.

They each have to decide and tell why one of the animals is their favorite.

Give each child a clothespin with their name on it. On the left side, glue a picture of a lion, and a tiger on the right side. Use a half-sheet of bristle board and at the top print this question:

Use the same shapes as above, but cut out of orange for tigers. Glue on short bits of brown yarn for their mane and tail. Use a large black pompom for the nose and strips for the whiskers.Ĭut out simple cat shapes from orange construction paper, and use black paint to make tigers with stripes. Use wiggly eyes or cut out large eyes for the children to look through (like a mask). Tape a tongue depressor or craft stick to the back for a handle. Glue brown and yellow yarn all around the edge. Let the children color paper plates with markers or crayons. Lion and Tiger Songs, Poems and Finger Plays.

Lion jumping line art