The Oz Jeff Banks

10/09/2026

CHAPTER 20 - WHEN DARKNESS SPEAKS SOFTLY

Chapter 20 of Words That Formed Me begins in an unlikely place: sitting in front of M*A*S*H on Foxtel, hearing that instantly familiar opening music and allowing my head to supply the words the television version leaves out. For decades, Su***de Is Painless has arrived disguised as the comfortable theme to a television program capable of making us laugh one moment and confronting us with the absurdity and damage of war the next.

The older I have become, the more disturbing that title has seemed. Not because it screams despair, but because it does precisely the opposite; it presents something terrible calmly, almost reasonably, and that is where the connection with depression becomes much harder to ignore.

The Black Dog does not always arrive snarling, announcing himself and switching off every light in the room. Sometimes he sounds perfectly rational, producing what appears to be a carefully prepared report explaining why today is hopeless, why tomorrow will probably be no better and why all the evidence supposedly points in the same direction.

The accountant in me ought to recognise what is happening, because it is an appallingly dishonest set of accounts. The Black Dog records every liability at full value, writes hope off immediately, refuses to recognise goodwill, treats happiness as a non-recurring item and then has the audacity to present the manipulated result as objective fact.

This is also a chapter in which I make an important distinction. I have known the desire for pain to stop, for circumstances to change and for difficult mornings to become easier, but that is not the same as wanting life itself to end; there has always remained the thought of tomorrow, of family, of what the children might do next, and perhaps even the possibility that the radio in my head might choose a better program in the morning.

Chapter 20 - When Darkness Speaks Softly - is now available to read by following this link https://www.theozjeffbanks.com.au/the-words-that-found-me-chapter-20-when-darkness-speaks-softly/ . It is one of the more difficult chapters in the book, but perhaps also one of the most important, because darkness does not always identify itself honestly and sometimes the most dangerous lies are the ones delivered in a perfectly reasonable voice.

You can continue following Words That Formed Me chapter by chapter here on the Oz Jeff Banks page, or find the book through Books.by if you would prefer to read ahead. Just follow this link to the page where paperback and eBook version await books.by/the-oz-jeff-banks

Words That Formed Me explores the poems, performances, songs and characters that quietly became part of my life long before I understood why they mattered. From schoolroom verses and theatre stages to the radio in my head, this is a memoir about memory, family, work, depression, responsibility and t...

09/09/2026

CHAPTER 19 — KENTUCKY RAIN

Some songs become favourites. Others simply refuse to leave, whether you particularly invited them to stay or not. Elvis Presley’s Kentucky Rain falls into that second category for me, carrying the image of a man continuing through bad weather because stopping might require him to accept that what he is searching for may never be found.

Chapter 19 of Words That Formed Me takes that search well beyond the missing woman in the song. I have spent much of my working life believing that persistence will eventually produce an answer, because accounts reconcile, missing numbers can usually be found and enough questions will often expose whatever has gone wrong. Human beings, unfortunately, are considerably less accommodating and can remain out of balance for decades without so much as producing an error message.

That is where Kentucky Rain becomes personal. The search becomes one for coherence: trying to understand what happened, what was lost along the way and whether the two can ever be reconciled. It reaches back into the questions behind Dumbing It Down and How Did We Get Here, one looking inward at what happens when we learn to make ourselves smaller to fit the room, and the other looking outward at a world that can reward comfortable answers over difficult truths.

There is also an uncomfortable lesson about persistence itself. We like stories in which the person who keeps walking eventually arrives, but life makes no such contractual promise. Sometimes people help us along the road without being able to take us all the way home, and sometimes the thing we have spent years searching for cannot be restored simply because we finally understand that it was missing.

Perhaps the harder lesson is that the search does not have to end before life can continue. I can acknowledge what was lost without pretending every wound was somehow a gift, accept the kindness of those who helped without requiring them to become rescuers, and recognise that the next step still belongs to me even when I cannot see where the road finishes.

Chapter 19 - Kentucky Rain - is now available to read by heading to https://www.theozjeffbanks.com.au/the-words-that-found-me-chapter-19-kentucky-rain/ . It closes Part Four of the book with a question rather than an answer: perhaps finding our own voice does not require recovering everything we once believed had been lost.

You can follow Words That Formed Me chapter by chapter here on the Oz Jeff Banks page, and the book is also available through books.by/the-oz-jeff-banks for those who would prefer to continue the journey without waiting for the next post.

Words That Formed Me explores the poems, performances, songs and characters that quietly became part of my life long before I understood why they mattered. From schoolroom verses and theatre stages to the radio in my head, this is a memoir about memory, family, work, depression, responsibility and t...

08/09/2026

CHAPTER 18 - TURN THE PAGE

Chapter 18 of Words That Formed Me arrives at a phrase that sounds wonderfully simple until you actually have to do it: turn the page. There are only a few steps between the recliner in our living room and the spare bedroom that became my office, yet retirement has somehow managed to stretch that distance enormously. On one side is the life I am supposedly entering, while on the other sit the computer, the files, the clients and more than forty years of evidence that being useful became deeply entangled with knowing who I was.

People talk about retirement as though somebody hands you a clean sheet of paper, a golf booking and permission to stop knowing what day it is. What gets left out is that work was never merely work; it supplied income, routine, relationships, frustration, achievement, identity and the reassurance that somebody somewhere still needed what I knew. Turning the page becomes considerably harder when some of the pages you are leaving behind appear to have been stapled directly to you.

The song providing the backdrop is Turn the Page, written by Bob Seger, although the voice that placed it firmly into my life was Jon English. His version has always been the one I hear, carrying something beyond the apparent glamour of roads, stages and performance. I hear tiredness, repetition and the peculiar obligation to continue because the next place is already waiting, even when part of you is no longer certain why you are still travelling there.

That makes it an appropriate song for this stage of my own journey. Full-time retirement was never going to be a matter of closing an office door on Friday and waking on Monday as somebody entirely different, because the accountant, adviser and problem-solver are not characters I can simply remove with the old business shirts. The more interesting question is whether I can carry the useful parts of that man forward without requiring work to keep proving that the man himself remains useful.

Perhaps turning the page does not mean tearing out everything that came before. It may simply mean accepting that the next part of the story deserves some space of its own, even while the previous chapters remain bound into the same book.

Chapter 18 - Turn the Page - is now available at https://www.theozjeffbanks.com.au/the-words-that-found-me-chapter-18-turn-the-page/ to read as the story continues on the Oz Jeff Banks website and through Books.by.

Books and more of my writing can be found at books.by/the-oz-jeff-banks

Words That Formed Me explores the poems, performances, songs and characters that quietly became part of my life long before I understood why they mattered. From schoolroom verses and theatre stages to the radio in my head, this is a memoir about memory, family, work, depression, responsibility and t...

08/09/2026

I did it - I went a way for a week and look what came back. Want to find out what then you can buy a copy at books.by/the-oz-jeff-banks in both paperback and eBook format

07/09/2026

CHAPTER 17 - LOOKING FOR AN ECHO

Chapter 17 of Words That Formed Me begins with a song I have performed often enough for the occasions to have blurred together. Looking for an Echo, in the version I knew through Ol’ 55, has bounce, nostalgia and enough opportunity for a bloke with a microphone to temporarily convince himself that he knows what he is doing, but somewhere beneath all that fun sits a question that has followed me for much longer than I realised.

An echo is different from applause. Applause asks whether people liked what they heard, whereas an echo simply tells you that something you sent out reached somewhere beyond yourself, struck something solid and came back. Perhaps that distinction matters more to me now because much of my life has involved sending things outward - advice, explanations, performances, ideas and, increasingly, books - and wondering whether any of them truly reached another person.

There is no point pretending recognition has never mattered to me. I have wanted people to notice the work, understand the thought behind it and occasionally acknowledge that something I said before the problem arrived might have been worth listening to, but this chapter asks whether I have sometimes chased applause while convincing myself that all I wanted was an echo.

Writing has changed that question again. I can send stories about childhood, family, work, depression, foolishness, intelligence and ordinary courage into the world, but I cannot control who reads them, when they read them or what comes back; what I can control is whether the voice sending them out is actually mine.

Perhaps that is what I am listening for now. Not universal agreement or applause from every room, but the reader who recognises a little of themselves in something I have written, the person who understands what I was trying to say, or simply some evidence that the sound crossed the distance and did not disappear completely.

Chapter 17 - Looking for an Echo - is now available to read at https://www.theozjeffbanks.com.au/the-words-that-found-me-chapter-17-looking-for-an-echo/ . The microphone is still on, the words are still going out, and I suspect I will always be listening for what comes back.

You can find this and all my poubl;ished works in paperback and eBook at books.by/the-oz-jeff-banks

Words That Formed Me explores the poems, performances, songs and characters that quietly became part of my life long before I understood why they mattered. From schoolroom verses and theatre stages to the radio in my head, this is a memoir about memory, family, work, depression, responsibility and t...

06/09/2026

CHAPTER 16 — I’LL HAVE TO SAY I LOVE YOU IN A SONG

Chapter 16 of Words That Formed Me turns to something I have never necessarily found easy: saying out loud what I feel. For some people the words come naturally, but for me they have often needed a little assistance, and music has sometimes managed to say what ordinary conversation could not.

That is why I’ll Have to Say I Love You in a Song belongs here. The idea reaches beyond Jim Croce’s song and into my own life, including the day I sang A Daisy a Day to Robyn at our wedding, because sometimes borrowing somebody else’s words is not avoiding the emotion at all; it is simply finding the language capable of carrying it.

There is an odd contradiction in being someone who has spent a lifetime speaking, advising, explaining and increasingly writing, yet still finding some of the most important words the hardest to deliver directly. Perhaps that is one of the reasons songs have remained such a powerful part of the radio in my head: they have occasionally been willing to speak when I have not quite known how.

Chapter 16 — I’ll Have to Say I Love You in a Song — is now available to read at https://www.theozjeffbanks.com.au/the-words-that-found-me-chapter-16-ill-have-to-say-i-love-you-in-a-song/ . It is a chapter about love, language and the possibility that the words we borrow can sometimes reveal more of us than the ones we manage to invent for ourselves.

All my books are available in paperback and eBook format at books.by/the-oz-jeff-banks why not drop over and purchase yourself a copy

Words That Formed Me explores the poems, performances, songs and characters that quietly became part of my life long before I understood why they mattered. From schoolroom verses and theatre stages to the radio in my head, this is a memoir about memory, family, work, depression, responsibility and t...

04/09/2026

Coming Home to Somewhere New

I once won a singing competition at a university in-house session in Bathurst with Take Me Home, Country Roads. No representative of the recording industry appears to have been present, John Denver's career survived untouched, and I was therefore denied what might otherwise have been a quite unexpected change of professional direction.

Chapter 15 of The Words That Formed Me begins with that memory but wanders considerably further down the road. Country Roads, Rocky Mountain High, Mt Buffalo, Wargeila Road, the Wargeila Wanderer and the different places I have subsequently called home all become part of a larger question about whether home is necessarily somewhere to which we return.

I have spent much of my life becoming useful quickly enough to earn admission to new rooms, communities and places. Retirement is beginning to ask what happens when usefulness is no longer the admission ticket, and whether belonging might eventually mean finding somewhere I do not have to audition for my own place.

Read Chapter 15 — Coming Home to Somewhere New — here:
https://www.theozjeffbanks.com.au/the-words-that-found-me-chapter-15-coming-home-to-somewhere-new/

If today's chapter leaves you wondering where those roads lead next, you do not have to wait for the next Facebook post to find out. The complete The Words That Formed Me is available through Books.by, together with the rest of my published books and the other roads my writing has taken.

Purchase the complete book or explore the collection:
https://books.by/the-oz-jeff-banks

Words That Formed Me explores the poems, performances, songs and characters that quietly became part of my life long before I understood why they mattered. From schoolroom verses and theatre stages to the radio in my head, this is a memoir about memory, family, work, depression, responsibility and t...

03/09/2026

Poems, Prayers & Promises

Some songs wait for us to become old enough to understand what they have been saying. John Denver was still a young man when he wrote Poems, Prayers and Promises, which seems slightly unreasonable now that I am considerably older and still waiting for some of the wisdom supposedly included with the ageing package.

Chapter 14 of The Words That Formed Me looks at friendship, ageing, expectation and the lives we imagine everybody else somehow learned to build. Denver's circle of friends sitting together without needing to fix anything has always appealed to me, perhaps because I have spent so much time in relationships where usefulness, advice, work or community responsibility supplied the reason for being in the room.

We compare the unedited version of our own lives with somebody else's three-minute song, photograph or polished memory and then wonder why ours appears to have arrived with several components missing. Perhaps poems, prayers and promises are not evidence of a completed life at all; perhaps they are simply some of the things we keep carrying while the unfinished parts remain unfinished.

Read Chapter 14 - Poems, Prayers & Promises - here:
https://www.theozjeffbanks.com.au/the-words-that-found-me-chapter-14-poems-prayers-promises/

You can continue following one chapter each day here on Oz Jeff Banks, or you can ignore my carefully constructed suspense and read the complete book now. The Words That Formed Me, together with my other published titles, is available through Books.by.

Purchase the complete book: https://books.by/the-oz-jeff-banks

Words That Formed Me explores the poems, performances, songs and characters that quietly became part of my life long before I understood why they mattered. From schoolroom verses and theatre stages to the radio in my head, this is a memoir about memory, family, work, depression, responsibility and t...

02/09/2026

What Could Not Be Said

The Living Years asks a question about fathers and sons that sounds straightforward until it lands inside a family where silence was not merely the result of conversations postponed. Sometimes silence itself was part of the architecture, built slowly enough that by the time the words existed there was no obvious doorway through which to carry them.

Chapter 13 of The Words That Formed Me turns from my relationship with my children towards the one I had with my own father. “Children should be seen and not heard” was more than an amusing relic of another generation in our house, and learning when not to speak eventually became so effective that no adult was required to enforce it.

There is a respectable version of stories like this in which age produces understanding, death produces forgiveness and everybody eventually recognises that people simply loved one another in the only way they knew how. Some of that may be true, but memoir becomes another form of silence if it removes whatever does not fit comfortably inside that conclusion.

Read Chapter 13 - What Could Not Be Said - here:
https://www.theozjeffbanks.com.au/the-words-that-found-me-chapter-13-what-could-not-be-said/

For those following the book day by day, tomorrow takes the story somewhere different again. If you would prefer to continue in your own time, The Words That Formed Me can be purchased in full through Books.by, alongside my other books.

Purchase the book or browse the catalogue:
https://books.by/the-oz-jeff-banks

Words That Formed Me explores the poems, performances, songs and characters that quietly became part of my life long before I understood why they mattered. From schoolroom verses and theatre stages to the radio in my head, this is a memoir about memory, family, work, depression, responsibility and t...

01/09/2026

When the Important Things Could Wait

Whenever somebody asks me to name my favourite song, I usually answer Cat's in the Cradle. That may be an unusual definition of favourite because the song does not particularly comfort me; instead, it knows where several cupboards are located that I would occasionally prefer remained closed.

Chapter 12 of The Words That Formed Me turns towards fatherhood, work, divorce, provision and time. I wanted to be dependable and make sure my children had things I had not had, but there is an uncomfortable difference between providing for somebody and being present with them, particularly when a father believes every long hour at work is another way of saying something the child may only hear as the sound of him leaving again.

There are circumstances I could not control and choices for which I must accept responsibility, and pretending those two things are identical would make for a neater story but not a more truthful one. This chapter does not offer absolution; it asks whether too many important things were asked to wait while I dealt with everything that had managed to become urgent.

Read Chapter 12 - When the Important Things Could Wait - here:
https://www.theozjeffbanks.com.au/the-words-that-found-me-chapter-12-when-the-important-things-could-wait/

If you would prefer to read where the story goes next rather than wait for tomorrow's post, the complete book is available on Books.by. The chapter-by-chapter posts are an invitation into the book, but the door to the rest of it is already open.

Purchase The Words That Formed Me here:
https://books.by/the-oz-jeff-banks

Words That Formed Me explores the poems, performances, songs and characters that quietly became part of my life long before I understood why they mattered. From schoolroom verses and theatre stages to the radio in my head, this is a memoir about memory, family, work, depression, responsibility and t...