NetNews Usenet Archive 1992 #27/NN_1992_27.iso/spool/aus/general/2253

Internet Message Format | 1992-11-19 | 5.2 KB

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Newsgroups: aus.general
Date: 19 Nov 92 23:47 EST
Subject: Ted or Tess Totman - R.I.P.
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R.I.P. TESS TOTMAN                                  19th nov 1992

A good mate of mine has just died at Herberton, N. Qld, Australia.

Ted Totman was 44 and left behind two sons. Ted was a canecutter, a
philosopher, a revolutionary, an artist, a good dad and a wonderful
person.

In the '60's he worked on drilling rigs around Cooktown with a blue
singlet and shorts for protection from the sun. I met him in 1974
when he lived near Lake Tinaroo. He was at that time painting
beautiful water colours. We watched PM Whitlam go down and with it
our hopes for a decent and progressive Australia.

He moved to Horn Island in Torres Strait until some spivs started a
gold mine on his doorstep and drove him out. He said the mine would
be an economic failure and a social and ecological disaster. He was
right. He always stuck up for indigenous people, migrants, unionists,
women, boozers, artists and anybody else who he saw as not getting
a fair go. By then he was a recognized artist of high calibre.

He worked hard for civil rights in Queensland as few others have.
He wrote a lot of letters and loved a good stir but he never hurt
anybody in his life. He was like that. Green beer? Irish beer is
black he remarked in one of his great little concise letters to
the editor.

We were good mates, and I liked getting drunk with him, and he
bared his soul to me. All his life he wanted to be a woman. He
was not gay, a more macho bloke you could not meet. He went to
moondances dressed as a lady and I sure would not dance with
him. His gender hassles however earned my sympathy and support.
Transexuals have a hard time of it.

A year or so ago I warned him that living on type A granites at
Herberton meant lots of radon, which I am convinced triggers lung
and skin cancers where the cells have been previously damaged.
"Lawrie, you can't worry about everything." he told me.

He had a lump cut off his arm, for we have high skin cancer rates
in North Queensland because the bastards in the northern hemisphere,
protected by their own atmospheric scunge, continue to pump CFC's
into the air. But for Ted it was already too late.

One night at indoor soccer he collapsed, refusing assistance. It
was the first sign that something was wrong. And he lost weight.
Then a few months ago he said he was going to have a coming out party
on friday the 13th of November, 1992. He said he was going to
become a woman and that we should come in black.

Several weeks later I visited him and he was stricken with facial
paralysis. Soon after he was bedridden by a secondary tumour in his
brain. The melanoma had spread all through him, voracious black
cells growing like crazy. Thus I learned how easily death can
strike, and life to me has become incredibly precious.

He was heroic despite his pain and grief. He laughed and cracked
jokes and grimly tried to deal with the agony, nausea and worse that
comes with terminal cancer.  Marijuana counters morning sickness,
travel sickness and nausea from anti-cancer drugs. He said he would
now grow it in his front garden and the authorities could get stuffed.
He knocked back a cigarette with a: "No thanks mate, I might get
cancer."

On the topic of dope Ted was quite clear. Under traditional law everyone
is entitled to a fair trial before their peers. If dope smokers were
tried before their peers they would be acquited. Instead, they are tried
before mindless middle class sheep selected by middle class lawyers under
laws kept in place by middle class politicians. This is true repression
and stark proof of how far we have drifted from the decency and propriety
of Common Law throughout the world.

Ted drifted for weeks in a morphine-induced delerium because heroin,
which controls pain but enables mental clarity, is illegal, even for the
terminally ill. "Creeping wowserism" Ted would have called it.

He asked me to write him a poem before he "karked it" which I did.
In it I voiced the hope that his suffering was a preparation for
something. I said the tendency to complexity in the universe should
give us all hope. Somehow this was tougher to wrap up in a poem than
anything else I have tackled.

An educated man, Ted knew about religion. He hoped for something like
the buddhists speak of, but expected nothing. "We'll never solve the
mystery of infinity." he'd once said to me. He said now that what he
was going through was proof that there could be no God. He said if he
did come back he hoped it would be with the correct gender assignment.

He could have suicided - we all say we will - but did not. He hung in
there and died really hard on tuesday last week.

He'd told us not to waste money on wreaths but to spend it on a good
piss-up instead. Tess Totman's funeral was on friday 13th November.

Many of her friends came in black.

Ted, Tess, my dear friend, I shall never forget you.


                                      Lawrie Williams