mattphillipsmelbourne.net posts are in a bio or memoir style to share periods of my life with the motivation to do so driven by my aspiration to craft a public-servant type of life.
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From my earliest memories, I’ve been building my wings.
My childhood passions were Australian Birds – parrots and Wedge Tailed Eagles to be specific, and aeroplanes, big ones, the bigger the better – the jumbo 747’s of the 1980’s.
My early hobbies were ornithology or twitching, or in my 8 year old vocabulary, “bird watching”, and also plane-spotting and drawing.
I was lucky to grow up in an outer east Melbourne suburb called The Basin, near Boronia and Ferntree Gully.
My home suburb was named as such because of the geographic basin created at the edge of the Wurundjeri plains, which hold the sprawling eastern suburbs of Metropolitan Melbourne – and that rise at other parts including The Basin into the Dandenong Ranges. The peak of Mount Dandenong was visible from most places close to my home.
The resident birds, nurtured in part by the Wicks Reserve bushland area at the end of my family home’s culdesac or court location, were Sulphur Crested Cockatoos, Crimson and Eastern Rosellas, and Galahs.
And I drew aeroplanes too, mostly in a side profile, sometimes head on – but only occasionally on an angle – I wasn’t up to that level of drawing.
In my youth, with the birds and aeroplanes, my psyche was often in the sky. I loved maps. I studied the MelWays street directory of Melbourne with a passion, just flicking through and looking at the pages. Without knowing it at the time, I was familarising myself with Wurundjeri Country and the Kulin Nation.
At four years old I called all the major Australian and international airlines I could find in the Yellow Pages phone book and asked if I could have pictures of aeroplanes. All the Australian airlines came to the party, and I recall British Airways and Cathay Pacific did also.
Over the next months I received post almost every week, with magazines and information packs in large yellow or white envelopes, and posters in postage tubes.
The biggest poster I received came in a tube taller than my 4 year old height with a diameter of my two small flat hands side by side – it was large is what I’m trying to say. And inside was a detailed photo of a cockpit, at night, with all the instruments and buttons lit up.
Another memorable poster was from Qantas. They invited me and my family to pick up the poster from their Melbourne CBD office, that was a fun day of adventure in the city.
Growing up I thought I wanted to be a pilot. I attempted to first gain my pilot’s license in 2009. That as shortly after my first psychosis so I didn’t pass the medical test for the next stage of my training – solo flying.
What I realise now is that sure I wanted to fly and travel in planes, but really, from the depths of my psyche, I wanted to be a plane, and I wanted to be a bird.
My wings and my aeroplane body have been in the process of construction throughout my life. I have the confidence to express this concept confidently based on the many dreams of aeroplanes I’ve had, in various different configurations and presenting in various ‘dream weirdness’ ways.
And I’m aware, or at least learning more all the time, about the symbols of dreams and how they relate to my consciousness, my mind and my body.
How the concept of having an aeroplane body might be a viable will perhaps be revealed more throughout following posts.
In a similar line of thought it’s a bit like a child wanting to be a fire fighter “when they grow up.” That might be a hint they want a body like a fire truck – a body of brazing red and chrome light. Or an aspiring astronaut that really wants to also be an exploding with fire rocket.
If a child draws dragons, there are psycho-spiritual technologies to actualise a dragon in their consciousness – the wisdom of how to do that may just be lost for the time being by some people.
Our bodies and minds are mysterious, fantastical and powerful. There are no limits to the imagination and possibilities in the realm of the light part of our bodies.
A child won’t eventually grow physical wings and tough scales and be able to light the family fireplace with his or her breath. But we have inner dragon energy and inner fire, and that actualised is a powerful psychic force.
My adolescent wings first took off for a decent flight, for a decent period of time, when I was 16 years old. In that year my Australian Football and basketball teams that I played in won their premierships, and I lost my virginity.
I landed safely and continued some low-level flying for the next several years often experiencing depressions for not getting as high as I wanted to.
In 2007 my altitude became atmospheric, I experienced by first psychotic break. Like Icarus with wings made of wax I got too close to the sun, the wax melted, and I came crashing to the ground.
My next psychosis was followed by a thread of successive psychoses from 2013 to 2017, and numbering 6 hospital admissions during that time. The recurrence was in a way about me thinking I was crafting a new and different wax, an uncommon super-composition, to keep my wings together at high altitude.
The dramatic way my 2017 psychosis progressed and ended made me realise my wings needed an engineering and philosophical overhaul.
This is when psycho-pharmaceuticals entered my life in a sustained and committed way. Before then I didn’t accept the medications as a necessary part of my maintenance, I accepted them only for an acute period remedy up till that point.
I flew a bit too high on now three occasions since 2017, two without admission, and most recently I had a nine day admission from late August 2022 in Auckland Hospital. That mania was my first admission since 2017, which I think is a good stint of health considering the tumultuous period prior to that. And considering it was a mania and not a psychosis, that also seems like good progress.
By now my wings are starting to be held together with an evolving substance, a substance that’s starting to acclimatise to the high altitudes, perhaps still becoming unstable, but allowing a soft landing back to earth and being at least close to being grounded.
With more work on myself, and with the help of the correct psycho-pharmaceuticals, I believe I will achieve my fully actualised bird body.
For me it will be a Wedge-Tailed Eagle or Bunjil, the Australian descendant of the Golden Eagle family.
My body and wings will be luscious, bright, and glow in shades of brown and gold.
I’ll be able to drift on warm air currents at high altitude, observing my domain, and swoop down to kill my prey. At night I’ll rest in a tree, or on a rock ledge, with my two-feet firmly on the ground.
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Up next are my ‘Australian Football Dreaming’ posts – Aussie Rules being my favourite sport.
