This essay is part of a new Sydney Review of Books essay series devoted to nature writing titled the New Nature. We’ve asked critics, essayists, poets, artists and scholars to reflect on nature in the twenty-first century and to grapple with the literary conventions of writing nature. Read the other essays in the New Nature series here.

1.

Lucy felt a little frightened, but she felt very inquisitive and excited as well. She looked back over her shoulder and there, between the dark tree-trunks, she could still see the open doorway of the wardrobe and even catch a glimpse of the empty room from which she had set out… It seemed to be still daylight there. ‘I can always get back if anything goes wrong,’ thought Lucy…

CS Lewis, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe

My father’s love of snorkelling began at a place called Erewhon. Or perhaps it began with a book. It’s more than sixty years ago now, so details can be hard to pin down.

I don’t know where, or exactly when, I first discovered that it was possible to look beneath the surface of the ocean, but I do know it was with him. It would have been around the same time as he began introducing me to the equally transportive powers of literature. We started with the Narnia books, and moved on to the Greek myths and most of Dickens.

I’m perhaps six or seven that first time, kneeling in waist-high water at a beach, I don’t know where, the sand pressing up under my shins, the sun on my unprotected back, the snorkel’s rubber taste in my mouth. I bow down to put my face into the water and feel for the first time the surprise that I am out of my element but can still breathe.

Is this a real memory or a composite of many childhood days at the beach? All I’m sure of is that he’s there to guide me, just as he held his hands under me in the water urging me to kick as a toddler, or taught me how to time the start of my swim so I could catch waves without a board.

Eastern Blue Groper. Photo: Sylke Rohrlach

Decades on, I have been through that portal hundreds, maybe thousands, of times, on different continents, among tropical corals and the sweeping kelp beds of the Southern Ocean. I’ve dived to collect fragments of weathered tile from the sea floor off Italy’s Amalfi Coast, swum with turtles on the Great Barrier Reef, followed the stately blue gropers around the rocky coastline of my Sydney home, explored a second world war wreck in the Philippines, transformed into a coral reef by omnivorous nature.

‘Do you scuba dive?’ people always ask, as though that’s the proper grown-up thing to do. But I prefer the snorkel’s precarious territory, there on the boundary between two worlds. ‘You’ve always been drawn to the liminal,’ says an old friend when I tell him I’m writing this essay.

The snorkel is my low-tech worm hole, transporting me instantly into a dimension of strange creatures, governed by different physical laws. I am the outsider here. Time slows. I am more alert, more sentient. Yet all it takes is a tilt of the head for me to be brought back by the shrieks of children from the beach.

2.

When we are far away from here we will think back with longing to these days. To hours that will never return, to people we shall probably never see again, and to the wonders of the sea… No matter where we swim, the great unknown is always ahead of us; we never know beforehand what we shall encounter the next moment, nor can we ever say with assurance that we shall get back to shore whole.

Hans Hass, Diving to Adventure

We learn nature from our parents, or at least I learned it from my father, walking the high places, plunging into oceans. There were crazy, ill-prepared walks where we got lost on mountain ridges as night fell and snow came down. Interminable coastline treks where, thirsty, I begged to be allowed to drink sea water after our bottles were emptied.

My father had to find the natural world on his own. His parents, at least when I knew them, were resolutely indoors people. Old-fashioned even for their generation, they inhabited a dark apartment lined with treasure cabinets, dressed always as though they might unexpectedly find themselves at a funeral.

Erewhon was my father’s escape from that interior life. The guesthouse, owned by distant cousins at Cowes on Victoria’s Phillip Island, no longer exists though the point it stood on still bears the name. Back in the 1950s, it was a place of wholesome fun and manly escapades. Its name, Dad explains, was Nowhere backwards, the ‘wh’ treated as one letter. He’s never made the connection to Samuel Butler’s eponymous novel, with its satirical portrait of an imaginary land somewhere off the Australian coast.

It was at Erewhon that my father met Barry, a young man with an infectious appetite for danger. Barry would swim out daily across the deep water to the jetty in the centre of town. He horrified the guesthouse owners when he convinced their son Bill to swim into the cavern beneath the island’s famously violent blowhole. He introduced my father to snorkelling – taking him to a spearfishing competition which Barry, of course, won – and to the other world of Wilsons Promontory, where they snorkelled wearing woollen jumpers for insulation from the cold.

The Prom is the southernmost tip of the Australian continent, a remnant of the ancient land bridge to Tasmania. It has other names with much longer pedigrees – Yiruk, Wamoon – names unknown to us when we explored its wild landscapes on family holidays. Thomas Wilson, whose name it now bears, was a London merchant, and friend of navigator Matthew Flinders. Wilson never saw the place.

More than half a century since my father’s first snorkelling expeditions, we are planning a multi-generational return to the site of so many childhood adventures. ‘Will you come for a snorkel with me at the Prom?’ I ask Dad. ‘I don’t know,’ he replies. ‘Maybe. It’s probably easier for me than walking these days.’

We agree. At the end of January, we will go to Wilsons Promontory, maybe even snorkel together. And, on the way back to Melbourne, we will visit the place called Erewhon that no longer exists.

Talking about his youthful adventures has made my father nostalgic. ‘Postume, postume, anni labuntur. Alas for the days that are passed, the years that are gone by,’ he declaims. Who wrote that, he wonders. Was it Virgil? No, not Virgil. Horace, I suggest. My father’s passion for Horace, his tendency to ascribe every random quote to the Roman poet, is a family joke. ‘No, it’s not Horace,’ he says musing, oblivious to my gentle mockery.

I look it up later. It’s Horace.

3.

Exploring is delightful to look forward to and back upon, but it is not comfortable at the time, unless it be of such an easy nature as not to deserve the name.

Samuel Butler, Erewhon

The last time I snorkelled at Cabbage Tree Bay on Sydney’s North Shore, bluebottles trailed their long tendrils around my arms, neck and thighs, leaving painful red welts that took hours to subside. But today I sweep untouched over the amber seaweed forests, the rocks covered in purple and green lichen, hearing my breath loud through the snorkel. It’s early January. There are hundreds of people on the beach, a slick of sunscreen riding the shallow water, but once I’m out and away I soon find that  other world.

In this aquatic reserve, underwater life is abundant, despite occasional illegal forays by recreational fishers. More than 160 species of fish and 50 of marine invertebrates live here, I’m told. I swim past glittering curtains of tiny pelagic fish, billowing and retreating as one with the swell. A large blackfish grazes on the cunjevoi. Sea squirts, we called them when I was a kid, pressing our heels down on them to make them spray. A ribbon-shaped fish rushes past. It could be a piano fangblenny, also known as the hit and run blenny, from its habit of lunging forward to bite scales and skin from other fish before quickly retreating to prevent any counter-attack. Schools of mullet sweep by, glinting in the refracted light, while translucent jellyfish drift slowly on their parachutes. Hordes of striped mado jostle along, and a large bronze fish pokes baroque fins and headpiece out from the weed before slowly backing under again. I dive down, bubbles popping from the end of my snorkel, but it’s gone.

I kick across to the other side of the bay, over the central desert plains, the graveyard of shell remnants washing to and fro beneath. And then, as I approach the rocks on the western side, I see it: the iconic Sydney fish, the blue groper. Named for its supposed resemblance to the groupers of the northern hemisphere, it is really a wrasse though you’d never hear a Sydneysider call it that. Today’s groper has just a touch of blue on its brown body, a sign that it is beginning the transition from female to male, gender-bending behaviour that is not unusual in fish. Clownfish do it in the other direction: when the senior female dies, the largest male will change sex to take her place, which rather undermines the plot of Finding Nemo. Nemo’s widowed father would have responded to the loss of his mate by transforming into the family’s mother.

Gropers of whatever sex are generally placid creatures, ambling slowly around the rocks in search of sea urchins. Their portly bodies and lack of fear of humans made them such easy prey for spearfishers they were nearly wiped out in the 1960s. Spearing them is now banned. This groper, though, is in an uncharacteristic hurry, frantically paddling small fins to propel it at surprising speed across the rocks.  I follow, beating my flippers as fast as I can, but the fish is soon lost to sight among the weed.

Back on the beach, I pull my mask off, and feel the familiar soreness at the base of the septum, an ache that wrenches me back to childhood. ‘Weren’t the cuttlefish amazing?’ a nearby woman says. I didn’t see the cuttlefish.

4.

These ambiguities, redundancies and deficiencies remind us of those which doctor Franz Kuhn attributes to a certain Chinese encyclopaedia entitled ‘Celestial Empire of Benevolent Knowledge’. In its remote pages it is written that the animals are divided into: (a) belonging to the emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) sucking pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (l) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off look like flies.

Jorge Luis Borges, ‘The Analytical Language of John Wilkins’

‘It’s down there,’ my father says, gesturing at a low shelf in the room that holds his library, several thousand books devoted to art, history, science, the classics. ‘It’s just a great big folder that has more in it than it can hold properly.’ This is his library catalogue, page after page of closely written entries classified according to an obscure personal system even he no longer quite understands. We’re looking for the book that was his other pathway to the underwater world.

The Austrian zoologist and diver Hans Hass was once a superstar in diving circles. He rivalled Jacques Cousteau in his day, though he’s pretty much forgotten now. Hass somehow managed to spend much of the second world war diving around the Aegean, excused from German military service because of poor circulation in his feet. ‘I loved that book,’ Dad says. Hass was his role model, the archetype of the adventurous young man.

The book is not in the catalogue, though, and nor can we find it on the shelf. We eventually unearth another of Hass’ works, Adventures Under the Red Sea, sitting beside books by Cousteau and various cavers and other kinds of explorers. ‘So I’ve put that under geography, have I?’ Dad says, disconcerted.

Classification is always fraught, I reflect, thinking of all the ways nature resists our human desire to put things into neat boxes: the egg-laying platypus assumed by early European scientists to be an elaborate hoax, viruses straddling the border between life and not-life, seahorses refusing to comply with our definition of male and female, the air-breathing lungfish.

The only copy of Diving to Adventure I can find for sale online is in the UK so I order it – the postage costs considerably more than the book – and wait.

The book when it comes is like an emissary from another time, an era of casual sexism and racism, one when it was possible to both love nature and see it as something to be conquered. Hass is entranced by the beauty and diversity of the marine life he discovers: ‘Today, in the twentieth-century, where are there regions still so virginal and untouched, places where magic has never been profaned by man, where everything still remains as it was when no man lived on earth?’

Not for long. Hass’ first response to the sight of a new species is to reach for his spear. Diving in the Caribbean shortly after the outbreak of war, he has assembled a long list of ‘trophies and collections’ he hopes somehow to get back to Europe:

salted shark skins, which we intended to have made into leather coats; dried ray tails with brightly polished sting; flexible riding quirts made from the backbones of sharks; the shell of a sea turtle that Joerg had killed with a splendid thrust through the neck; the dried head of a young hammerhead; the inflated skins of some porcupine fish; bright-coloured shells; snails; mounted fish heads…

And that’s without the specimens they had collected for Vienna’s Natural History Museum.

Hass and his companions fund their expeditions by selling fish to restaurants until they find a more lucrative opportunity in the reef . They start diving with an axe so they can harvest the most shapely corals to sell to tourists.

This was a time when the world belonged to adventurous young white men, when the oceans seemed infinite and inexhaustible. Nature was an adversary: heights to be scaled, depths to be plumbed, poles waiting for flags to be planted on them, and wild animals to be slaughtered. My father’s early forays into snorkelling were also hunting expeditions – though lack of skill and inadequate equipment meant they were generally unsuccessful.

As we stumble into the anthropocene, we’re more likely to see nature as vanquished, or at least gasping for a last breath as the tide of our demands invades its lungs. There are too many of us, with all our memories and desires, consuming the world’s resources, crowding into its wild places to collect the experience of nature. The oceans are acidifying, the corals bleaching, fisheries are exhausted and a microplastic gyre covers hundreds of thousands of kilometres in the doldrums of the Pacific. Videos go viral on the internet: a seahorse swimming with its tail wrapped around a cotton bud rather than a branch of seaweed, a diver off Bali swimming through a school of floating plastic, interspersed with the occasional fish. Even pristine Wilsons Promontory has been invaded by a plague of ravenous, all-consuming sea stars, imported as larvae in the bilge waters of ships. Snorkelling Sydney’s coastline, I have adopted the habit of gathering plastic for removal as I swim.

5.

The Erewhonians say that we are drawn through life backwards; or again that we go onwards into the future as into a dark corridor. Time walks beside us and flings back shutters as we advance; but the light thus given often dazzles us, and deepens the darkness which is in front. We can see but little at a time, and heed that little far less than our apprehension of what we shall see next; ever peering curiously through the glare of the present into the gloom of the future, we presage the leading lines of that which is before us, by faintly reflected lights from dull mirrors that are behind, and stumble on as we may till the trap-door opens beneath us and we are gone.

 Samuel Butler, Erewhon

I did not get to snorkel among sea creatures at Wilsons Promontory and I did not get to go back to Erewhon with my father.

The day before we head to the Prom, it’s 42 degrees in Melbourne as I run around buying provisions. I wilt in the heat as my phone predicts wind and rain for the week ahead at Tidal River, with maximum temperatures of 18 and 19. ‘Don’t kill each other,’ a friend says.

I drive my parents down, through the gentle green hills of South Gippsland, across the swampy isthmus that links the Prom to the continent. The mountains surge before us, and I am as newly astonished as though I had never been to this place before. It looks like a piece of Tasmanian high country weirdly transplanted to the Victorian coast, I say to my daughter, who nods.

The weather bears no relationship to the gloomy forecast: it’s mid-20s, sunny, no wind. We swim, kayak, walk, eat good food, and reminisce. My father is no longer the powerful athlete of my youth, though at some level he may still believe he is. On this trip, he hasn’t been able to make it down to the surf, but he has swum in the river, launching himself into the peaty, brown water to make a few of his familiar slow freestyle strokes, before bobbing weightless beside me. Up on the nearby pedestrian bridge, his 10-year-old granddaughter is queuing next to the No Jumping sign with the gang of kids waiting to leap into the water below.

I think about the stories Dad has told me, all the adventures we have had, together and apart, about his friend Barry who never got to be an old man. He crashed a light plane somewhere near the You Yangs when he was in his thirties, taking Dad’s cousin Bill with him.

On the fifth night at the Prom, I am woken in the dark hours by my parents’ voices. Dad sits tensed on the side of his bed, breath urgent and rasping.

The ambulance takes over an hour to get into the national park from the nearest town. We wait, Dad tensing to breathe, fists pressed down on his thighs. They have to drive slowly at night because of wildlife on the road, one of the paramedics explains when they eventually get there. The town’s other ambulance is out of action after hitting a kangaroo.

They do their obs and help my father out to the ambulance. He wants to know if he’ll be able to come back. It’s possible, they say, after he’s been checked out at the hospital in Wonthaggi. As dawn breaks, my mother climbs in beside him and they drive slowly out of the campground.

I’ve been awake since 2.30. My brother has followed the ambulance to collect my mother and bring her back. My father too, perhaps, though I’m not really expecting it. I’m pretty sure I won’t be staying, that I’ll need to take my mother home to Melbourne.

So I should try to get the planned snorkelling done, though it feels more like duty now than pleasure. At the information centre, they recommend the southern end of Picnic Bay. ‘It can get a bit choppy,’ the ranger warns.

I walk along from the car park at the northern end of the cove. A sheet of water on the gently shelving sand creates another sky beneath my feet, a wobbly reflected sun moving ahead of me with every step. The rocks at the southern end are studded with tiny mussels against a bed of orange lichen. The swell sweeps in against the rocks, throwing spume into the air. I’m alone in the water, thigh deep, snorkel and mask in hand. The waves push me onto a spur of rock, the sharp shells. Blood trickles down my leg. Mortality is on my mind.

‘If it’s too rough at Picnic Bay, you could try the northern end of Normans Beach,’ the ranger had said. This wide sweep of sand where the Tidal River meets the ocean is sheltered by two mountainous headlands so the swell is quieter. Who was Norman, I wonder, and what is the real name of this place, the one it held for millennia before my ancestors came?

I leave the rest of my family playing in the waves and swim flipperless to the northern end where granite flanks plunge straight into the sea. I look down through my mask. Sand motes swirl in the turbulence against the smooth stone of the headland. There’s no weed, no kelp, no small fish, not even any crevices in the endless rock wall that might harbour life. I lift my head, suddenly overwhelmed by my aloneness in this desert place. I swing around and start the long swim back to where the others are cavorting in the waves.

Dad doesn’t make it back to the Prom. The doctors at Wonthaggi diagnose a heart attack and have him transferred to Melbourne. He’d been drowning from the inside, we’re told, his lungs filling with fluid as his heart failed.

Before I leave with Mum the next morning, I walk to Normans Beach one last time, determined to catch a wave for my father. It’s too sheltered here for bodysurfing and my efforts are thwarted. I’m gripped by a sudden superstitious belief that his survival now rests on my success in riding the break into shore. I’m blue with cold before I finally manage it. When I tell him the story later in his hospital room, he says ‘good girl’, nodding with approval. Catching a wave is better than any expression of open grief.

‘I guess I’ve climbed my last mountain,’ he says when he is eventually discharged from hospital. Then, recovering his cheer: ‘Well, with my body anyway. I can still climb mountains with my mind.’

Back in Sydney, I borrow The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe from my six-year-old godchildren, one of the first stories my father read to me so long ago. ‘It’s very old,’ says my godson, handing the book to me. It’s the same edition I had as a child, and as I open it and start to read I can hear my father’s voice speaking the old-fashioned English dialogue, sweeping my own six-year-old self through the wardrobe into another world, one where strange creatures live in the wild places and children have adult powers. I could weep now, sob and howl, but I’m still holding tight, swimming hard against the swell.

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Australian literary culture and its
post-digital anxieties

Ours is a very particular moment in cultural and media history. Traditional ‘gatekeepers’ of ideas and culture are being disintermediated as we transition away from hierarchical forms of cultural organization to a system that is in some ways more open, where old approaches are in crisis and under siege. And where new approaches are emerging alongside rearguard actions that hope to keep traditional structures in place.

Obviously, this transition affects all aspects of political and cultural life but so far as literary culture is concerned, to talk meaningfully about this transition requires the use of two languages: the language of literary criticism and that of digital media studies. It’s no longer possible to talk about literary culture without engaging with digital media theory.

One thing that more sophisticated branches of digital media studies do is think beyond the transition from ‘old’ to ‘new’ media and beyond the technological determinism and mythologizing that generally goes with digital talk. Instead, it’s more useful to talk about ‘post-digital’ media, a term that seeks to describe ‘the messy and paradoxical condition of art and media after digital technology revolutions’, that ‘neither recognizes the distinction between “old” and “new” media, nor ideological affirmation of the one or the other’ (Andersen, Cox, and Papadopolous 2014). Ours is a hybrid space where culture is defined by media contradictions.

Perhaps the most useful way of talking about literary culture, still popular despite being dated, is Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of the literary field; in particular his work on cultural mediation and the question of who gets to arbitrate matters of taste. Bourdieu’s ‘literary field’, I think, is a bit like Jürgen Habermas’s ‘public sphere’. The specific circumstances in which both theories were dreamed up existed, perhaps, for a brief moment but their metaphors remain useful guiding concepts.

My argument, roughly, is that this is a moment of Grand Disintermediation whereby traditional mediators are everywhere being bypassed and new actors have emerged and now problematise and destabilise the very idea of the literary field. This moment contains great possibilities and dilemmas that are definitive of not only literary culture but democratic culture more broadly.

Let me start by talking about Australian literary gatekeeping as it was around twenty years ago. Back then it was possible to talk about cliques of dominant mediators who fiercely guarded the gate to the grassy top paddock of Australian literary culture. They had some very bad habits: circular reviewing, mutual puffery, windbaggery, the championing of favourites and routine dismissal of the unfavoured and unfamiliar.

These were precisely the sorts of ‘cultural intermediaries’ Bourdieu talks about: a ‘petit bourgeoisie’ corps of cultural capital dealers who provided guidance in the consumption of symbolic goods and services, and who in many cases were close to other intermediaries such as literary agents, publishers and editors, broadsheet-newspaper literary editors, and personalities in the broadcast media, who took it upon themselves, in their various ways, to defend what Bourdieu describes as the autonomous end of the literary sphere, where literary production is valorised as an end in itself.

Now, gatekeeping is never a straightforward affair. This grassy top paddock and its custodians were under constant siege by insurrectionists such as women writers, Indigenous writers, multicultural writers, popular fiction writers, genre writers, and their supporters. One spectacularly brutal moment of cultural gatekeeping when this system was at its peak in the 1990s involved multicultural writing, in which a whole corpus of work was dismissed as little more than the pet project of special interests. Another was the systematic dismissal of ‘grunge’ fiction.

But these gatekeepers were able to maintain power over events, in particular through their occupation of the high cultural ground of newspaper book review pages.

Now, of course, things are different. Newspaper literary sections have lost audiences and prestige at a time of declining circulation, standardisation and increased copysharing (Nolan and Ricketson 2013). A thundering review from an established critic no longer has the power it once had and newspaper book sections have shrunk considerably and look set to disappear altogether.

Publishers, too, no longer act as defenders of ‘cultural mission’ publishing in the ways they once did and by most accounts large publishers publish less literature. As Emmett Stinson (2016) has found, literary publishing is increasingly the provenance of smaller publishers willing to focus on areas that for large publishers no longer deliver the sustained profits they demand. The recent downgrading of literary fiction publishing in the Penguin imprint of Penguin-Random House vindicates his argument and one that I made over a decade ago about the ‘decline of the literary paradigm’ among large Australian publishers.

Nor do universities function as institutions of consecration in the way that they once did. Literary departments, along with the humanities more generally, are feeling the managerial pressures visited on ‘non-counting’ disciplines (English 2010) that privilege qualitative over quantitative research.

Traditional literary gatekeepers now live a kind of half-life; representatives of a zombie culture: the walking dead. The power to consecrate cultural texts, now, rests in the hands of readers, algorithms and big data, in recommendation engines, book blogs and vlogs, hashtags, podcasts, on-line bookstore reviews, self-publishing portals, podcasts, literary portals, and Goodreads reviews.

What these platforms have in common is that they foreground readers, a group that was never really the focus of publisher attention — booksellers were the primary customer — and whose activities were mostly unknown until online media ensured they could no longer be ignored. And who are now networked such that ‘social reading’ has made publicly visible and sociable a form of leisure long considered paradigmatically private.

Online media now plays a considerable role in popularising texts and provides new pathways to literary reception. But as the term post-digital suggests, this isn’t a straightforward changing of the guard. Pathways to reception have increased but none are authoritative. A small number of large gates have given way to a proliferation of openings, even breaches.

Whereas traditional agents of literary reception served to valorise the status of literature itself — in traditional literary gatekeeping culture even negative commentary maintains the status of the field — reviewers on Amazon and Goodreads, readers engaged in booktalk on Twitter, Facebook or bookblogs, or self-publishers, in general  show little respect for the ‘literary values’ that traditional mediators sought to defend and little commitment to contextualising any given literary work within the broader cultural practices and dispositions of what John Frow has called the ‘literary frame’.

A good example of this is Goodreads reviews for Helen Garner’s This House of Grief (2014). Many of these seek to replicate the form of the traditional book review. At the same time, such reviews aspire to middlebrow rather than highbrow literary culture; they emphasise personal reactions rather than worrying about trying to position the book or Garner within the literary field (Driscoll 2014). As one reviewer puts it: ‘Fuckyeah this book’.

Social reading platforms, rather than reinforce traditional literary values, tend to encourage readers to rank texts using mechanisms such as star-based rating systems, mimicking the ranking systems of movies and hotels, with their note of the popular.

This changes things.

This transformation isn’t simply a matter of degree but is a matter of kind. Such practices don’t simply seek to expand the literary field but cut across its very reasons for being and burst it open. Rather than speak of a ‘literary field’ a better metaphor might be to think of literary culture as a once more-or-less self-contained field where the gates have been broken and the fences are down; a space more Mad Max than top paddock.

As I’ve argued elsewhere, the real struggle, now, isn’t over who belongs where in the literary field but over the field itself:

Ours is an increasingly borderless literary culture in which traditional sites of consecration function not so much as centres of power as outposts in the badlands of the formerly literary. The presiding greeting in this fractured, deterritorialised, post-literary space is not ‘how are you one of us?’ so much as ‘who goes there?’. (Davis, 2017)

A battle is taking place; a border war over who can be designated as legitimate agents in the literary field, what the literary consists of and the terms in which literature should be discussed. Tied up in this are issues of social difference and equality. Social reading makes public domains of leisure formerly demarcated as private and invisibilised, such as, for example, those often female readers sometimes dismissed as ‘middlebrow’. As DeNel Rehberg Sedo has argued, ‘The emergence of the “middlebrow” has become a symbol of the conflict between elite tastemakers and an expanding group of increasingly better-educated and independent-minded readers’. These social reading practices, as Tully Barnett  has said, recall reading practices that predate the ideological supremacy of what Elizabeth Long has described as the masculinist ideal of the ‘solitary reader’. They have also helped make more visible long-marginalised genres such as romance, crime and science fiction.

This new terrain, then, is wider, more open, more inclusive, though its practices aren’t unproblematic. Readers of colour or working-class readers don’t get much space in talk of social reading. Another issue is the commodification of reading and of readers, who provide free labour for digital platforms, and the ‘enclosure’ by markets of once private forms of leisure.

But still, something has shifted in the culture and a considerable number of readers have seen their long-hidden practices and repressed claims to play a role in the making of culture, made public.

As in every battle there are rearguard actions. These, perhaps paradoxically, also take place online. For example, among the new agents of literary tastemaking are online literary reviews such as the Los Angeles Review of Books, created in direct response to the impact of digital media on newspaper review pages:

The Los Angeles Review of Books magazine was created in part as a response to the disappearance of the traditional newspaper book review supplement, and, with it, the art of lively, intelligent long-form writing on recent publications in every genre, ranging from fiction to politics.

This publication, the Sydney Review of Books, cites a similar motivation: ‘Concerns about the reduced space for serious cultural criticism in the mainstream media prompted the establishment of the Sydney Review of Books’. A version of this struggle also plays out on literary sites such as The Quarterly Conversation, the Hong Kong Review of Books, the Millions, N+1, or Literary Hub. All represent, in their own ways, an attempt to build the dyke higher. All work hard to establish themselves as bastions of self-conscious literary seriousness in the digital networked space. All are in one way or another redolent of print literary culture: text heavy, mostly without multimedia, notable for their self-consciously erudite, literary tone, wielding hapless irony against a rising tide of digitally networked pop culture: ‘The 20 best literary adaptations to watch on Netflix tonight: On the off-chance you’re tired of reading’. Or, more bluntly, ‘Kazuo Ishiguro and the inescapable perils of the internet’.

Soon after it was first published I began reading the SRB’s appealingly forensic Critic Watch column, which has often been entertaining and valuably corrosive. But at the same time a comment made in the column back in 2013, the first year of the SRB, stuck with me:

We confront a billowing cloud of opinion. There are, no doubt, acute and sensitive readers within this cloud, and the subject of reviewing in the blogging world requires careful delineation and discrimination. Seen as a whole, however – and this is the view taken by the publishers – the overwhelmingly tendency is to opinions without responsibility, in which judgements assume the tone of assertions of self-worth and identity. Lacking self-awareness but big on naive honesty, it is no wonder that the cloud can be commercially manipulated. This subtle infusion of the commercial into the domain of literary judgement makes cash-for-comment or product placements in films look like clumsy prototypes.

What struck me was the juxtaposition of the literary and ‘the cloud’ and the assertion of degraded culture that went with it.

All these sites represent a form of the anti-digital within the digital; an act of literary rescue from behind enemy lines. They’re a good example of Mark Deuze’s comment about digital remediation and the online remaking of old forms anew:

Remediation can be countered by tradition, where tradition can be seen as the perceived safety or sense of security in sameness, similarity, routines, and deeply entrenched patterns of organization.

It would be easy to dismiss this self-consciously literary practice as a kind of snobbishness and desire to reclaim the past from the marauding denizens of ‘the cloud’. But also, I think, a little too easy.

Instead I want raise what I think is a serious question about this hybrid moment of border wars when all traditional mediators are under harsh scrutiny. My question is, what does this transition mean for what was once called ‘intellectual life’ more generally? By this I mean, what does it mean for an expert class, immersed in certain kinds of thinking about cultural, economic, political, democratic and social processes, who have long functioned as a managerial class who manage democracy? What role do managerial elites now play?

This diminution of the role of traditional gatekeepers comes precisely at a moment when experts and elites are under attack everywhere. British justice secretary Michael Gove’s now famous attempt to justify #Brexit with the comment that ‘People in this country have had enough of experts’, exemplifies a climate in which scientists, lawmakers, journalists, academics, economists, and the work they do to mediate democratic practice, are dismissed as so much annoying expert opinion — or else reduced to the strictures of market logic, which is a related nullifying move.

In effect we are witnessing the disintermediation of experts in all fields and the proliferation of misinformation: post-truth; fake news; conspiracy theories; and rank populism.

Postmodernity came late and smacked us in the back of the head.

My question is, did we need elites after all? After all, elites perform specialized functions. They have specialized knowledge and expertise and a proper arms-length approach to processes.

Attempts to shore up literary culture and the forms of anxiety about expert culture that underpin such attempts, I think, aren’t just a throwback; they are symptomatic of a more deeply felt democratic anxiety about the role of elites and expert culture. They point to a connection between post-digital literary practice and post-digital democratic practice.

There has always been a tension between managerial elite culture and ‘the people’ in representative democracy since ‘the people’ don’t have the power of direct representation — which is a power that populists such as Donald Trump or Pauline Hanson seek to reclaim. But the post-digital media environment has helped make ‘the people’ more visible and more vocal and more knowledgeable. And encouraged direct representation and the overthrow of those stuffy experts.

We’re seeing a change not only in literary and democratic culture but in the very notion of the ‘public’ itself, which puts us in entirely new literary and democratic territory.

Those who belong to this expert culture of mediators, not least writers, face a stark choice. One option is to try to keep old forms in play. This might serve a purpose, helping to keep things in a holding pattern but it’s a largely preservationist project that involves, I think, trying to keep a certain faded notion of modernity alive by creating new enclaves for its comfortably recognisable forms of cultural practice, with their hidden signs to outsiders: keep out; we are too smart for you; you are not wanted here.

Rather than seek to recreate modernity the greater challenge is to reinvent intellectual practice, consistent with the changes that the post-digital environment creates for democratic culture. Rather than replicate and remediate the traditions and cultures we recognise, those of us with certain forms of expertise, even certain sensibilities, might instead carve out a new role for expert culture. What is the role of expert knowledge now? What is the relationship between those who have such knowledge and the broader public in a post-digital environment where access to information and knowledge is easier than it has ever been?

And what new forms of writing might express these cultures; what new stories, what new narratives might unfold to explain this moment of unprecedented transition: these, I think, are our current urgent questions.

This essay was first presented as part of Provocations, a new public forum initiated by the J.M. Coetzee Centre for Creative Culture at the University of Adelaide tackling controversies in the arts and humanities.  The theme of the first series was ‘Who Shot the Albatross?: Gate-keeping in Australian culture’.

Works cited:

Barnett T (2014) Social reading: the Kindle’s social highlighting function and emerging reading practices. (accessed 20 September 2016).
Davis M (2017) Who are the new gatekeepers? Literary mediation and post-digital publishing. In: Mannion A, Weber M, and Day K (eds) Publishing means business: Australian perspectives. Melbourne: Monash University Publishing, pp. 129–151.
Long E (2003) Book Clubs: Women and the Uses of Reading in Everyday Life. 1 edition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Rehberg Sedo D (2002) Predictions of life after Oprah: a glimpse at the power of book club readers. Publishing Research Quarterly 18(3): 11–22.
Rehberg Sedo D (2003) Readers in reading groups an online survey of face-to-face and virtual book clubs. Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 9(1): 66–90. DOI: 10.1177/135485650300900105.
Rehberg Sedo D (2010) Twentieth and twenty-first-century literary communities. (accessed 31 March 2017).
Stinson E (2016) Small Publishers and the Emerging Network of Australian Literary Prosumption. Australian Humanities Review (59): 23–43.

The post Who needs cultural gatekeepers anyway? appeared first on Sydney Review of Books.

This essay is part of a new Sydney Review of Books essay series devoted to nature writing titled the New Nature. We’ve asked critics, essayists, poets, artists and scholars to reflect on nature in the twenty-first century and to grapple with the literary conventions of writing nature. Read the other essays in the New Nature series here.

Parc: Old French, an enclosure of land or woodland housing game. As in A.Borde’s Compendyous Regyment or a Dyetary of Helth (1542): A parke repleted with dere & conyes is a necessarye and a pleasaunt thyng to be anexed to a mansyon.

Leaving the train at the sliver of Engadine station I find a changed topography. The chicken shop has turned into a café slash hair salon, and there’s a fifties America-themed burger joint. A sign on the Princes’ welcomes us to Dharawal country. The people milling through the streets are younger and more diverse, some of them have fashionable hair and are accompanied by children in paisley. There’s an Aldi and a Coles, a Japanese restaurant and a Thai. I’m told now there are markets on weekends – when I was growing up here it was a charred sausage on white bread from the soccer clubhouse. The light has the same slant though, it stains the exhaust miasma from the highway in the same way, it drifts into the same wiry scrub, and vanishes into the same barbed warren of banksia and scribbly gum. Someone’s put up a rail fence, and there’s fresh gravel crunching beneath my boots.

I leave the path to cut east through the scrub. The distant train thunders behind me: it’s west. I have a compass on a length of guy line around my neck, and another in my pack. I don’t use them because I want to find the waterfall without help, as a test of memory or bushcraft, or some pointless Oedipal echo of an old atavism. Environment as a theatre of bloodymindedness: a thought as foreign to Dharawal as I am.

Halfway down the Uloola track there used to be an overgrown path off leading to Engadine Falls, a narrowly enclosed valley thunderous and misty in the wet, just a reverberant trickle in the dry. Some years ago a ranger decided it should be allowed to regrow, so now there’s a bank of clay and gravel covering the trail-mouth, and the path itself is indistinguishable from the other game tracks ribboning through the bush.

I pass old campsites, ash scattered beneath leaves and lichenous dust, the remnants of small brick and tin humpies from the Depression, when the homeless fled the city to the park to live on fish and rabbit. The more recent trespasses leave shattered glass, punctured lilos, beer cans and cigarette butts.

Further in, the creek-ditches run deeper, some dry, leaf choked, some murmuring down furred with damp ferns and moss into veins of the milky pipeclay the Dharawal use for ceremony. The furrows in the earth at a bend indicate an echidna, and further up in the bank are nest-burrows used by sacred kingfishers. I find a freshwater crayfish pawing the surface of a glassy pool, its burnt blue ochreous claws raised in ritual threat.

After a while I’m walking in reverie, feet finding their way by habit, treading a present leaf-humus shrapnelled with all the other fragmented impressions and tracks in the schist of memory. Kenneth Slessor, from ‘South Country’:

As if, rebellious, buried, pitiful,
Something below pushed up a knob of skull,
Feeling its way to air.

My father prepares a fire in the fine tangerine silica of a high sandstone overhang at Horseshoe Falls. Around him branches a mandala of perfectly preserved tracks – bird and marsupial hieroglyphs etched in fractal strata of simultaneous time, ribboned through with liquid serpentine wake. He cuts the green twigs for sausage spits without looking throws his clasp-knife point down into the dirt by his boot, like he does when he’s gutted a fish, and takes a match to his pipe.

Camping at Curracurrang, reeling in leatherjacket from the turquoise haze beneath the spray, pale flesh speckled with ash from the coals, rinsing metal plates with creek-sand, a vivid green frog eloping with scraps in a pale hiatus of torch-flicker. My brother abseiling into the hollow of Engadine Falls as a teenager, his suspended form limned in an iris of prismatic mist. Following the Waterfall track home in the dark as a teenager, a crescent of pale green eyes following me at a steady distance. Drifting home on the last train half-drunk and furry-mouthed, alighting alone at Engadine at three o’clock to be greeted by small families of Wallaroo or Rusa deer silently grazing on the grass of the rail embankment, unfazed by the ethereal passage of light.

Locking the keys in the car after dawn-fishing at Garie and walking ten kilometres along the rocks, ogling jewelled starfish, circling rock cod and blackfish trapped in peripheral tide-pools, baiting an anemone with a fingertip and watching its viscid red tentacles harmlessly grasp for prey. In the pool further up at Curracurang, my father’s massive shoulders speckled by fall-spray beneath me. The water felt mythic pelagic, and with the usual Freudian splendours he seemed some distant anthropomorph – a  Norse god following the whale-road.

Climbing the craggy Garie escarpment, clinging to a honey-coloured sandstone overhang, inches from my right hand rears the head of a particoloured yellow snake, its tongue curiously stirring the claustral cave air. Walking back from Curracurrang along the jagged cliff paths last year, New Holland honeyeaters weaving the salt-heath and sedge I pause with my brother and his two young sons awestruck to watch a humpback teaching her calf to breach on the summer migration back to Antarctica.

I find the name Horseshoe Falls and a black and white photograph in the Sydney Mail on 13 May 1936:

THE HORSESHOE FALLS, ENGADINE
CREEK.
The falls (40 feet) are in the National Park,
near Sydney.

The image shows a series of tiered cascades, the first one higher, the others less distinct, loops of white calico froth pooled in a silky black sheen. The upper right corner is intersected by what looks like a thick bough of stringybark. The picture doesn’t seem to be apropos of anything in the articles. An adjacent advertisement reads ‘Wise housewives always say LAUREL not just “Kerosene”’. Perhaps the editor just thought it was beautiful.

I find an article published three years earlier in the Sydney Morning Herald ,‘Hidden Waterfalls on Engadine Creek’, written by a whimsically named Horace A. Salmon:

Set in virgin forest country the upper fall is over 60ft in height, and plunges down sheer into thick jungle-like growth whence it goes singing on its way for two miles till it plunges over another another fall of 40ft. This fall is terraced with a pool at its base, the water falling like a veil softening the stern contours of the rock. Behind the fall delicate ferns flourish in profusion in nook and crevice. On the southern side the cliffs surrounded by eucalypts, fall sheer, while the northern buttress has decomposed to form a mammoth cave.

That sounds like the place. Somewhere in those years it gained a name in English, and lost it just as easily, part of the wider etymological dissonance of colonised place.

A 1915 Auction sale advertised subdivisions of the recently surveyed Engadine-Heathcote at the intersection of Waratah and the old Illawarra roads. When I missed the school bus I cycled the latter to a fire trail crossing the Woronora at a ford named the Pass of Sabugal by Thomas Mitchell in 1843, after a battle he fought in Portugal. Torrens Title for a deposit of three pounds in quarterly payments across ten years at five per cent interest. ‘The Sanatorium of the SOUTH COAST’ is twenty miles from Sydney, seven hundred feet above sea level. Right of the old Illawara there’s a vaguely sketched map of the National Park, and the ‘pleasure-grounds of the Port Hacking’. Further inspection reveals plans for a rail platform ‘at the nineteen mile post’ and ample opportunities for fishing, boating, and bathing at ‘minimum exertion’ and a guarantee of electric power by 1925. There’s also reference to the Christmas bush, waratahs and flannel flowers which ‘abound in luxurious profusion’. In the white spaces around faintly scratched hypothetical streets abound the words: crown, land, proposed, recreation, open, space, vacant. That’s the trouble with nostalgia, you inevitably tread on something sharp.

A dusky swamp wallaby hurtles from a tussock two feet away from me, thumping the ground with its hind feet to deter pursuit, it crashes through the scrub and vanishes just as abruptly. There’s a pale scribbly gum in front of me, Eucalyptus haemastoma, found only in Sydney, commonly known for the whorled hieroglyphs the scribbly gum moth leaves in its marmoreal bark. It’s resilient, and can live for over a century in poor sandstone soil. I guess it’s a remnant of the ’94 fires, a large central absence etched in char, from which four smaller trunks branch out, as if the tree had taught itself to grow in a mallee habitat after the trauma, taught itself another language to survive. Mallee a loanword from Wemba-Wemba, northwest Victoria.

There’s line from a poem about national parks by Mark O’Connor – ‘You could walk on a snake / with your mind on another continent’. It probably is.

The official guide to the Royal National Park published in 1902 is a horror for the modern ecological mind. Lavish praises for the convenience of introduced deer and trout, the planting of ‘thousands of ornamental and shade trees’. An anonymous author inspired to lyricism by the breadth and beauty of the park’s bird life, indifferent to what ‘few marsupials remain’, encouraged by the rapid disappearance of dingos and snakes ‘it is not the policy of the Trustees to nurture or foster the growth of pets’. There are descriptions of grass terraces, hatcheries, fishing resorts, boat rides for eight shillings, and a school built at Audley for the children of park employees. Casual erasures: ‘majestic trees, which for centuries have grown in solemn silences unbroken by man’s footfall’. Tony Birch talks about a particular form of colonial cognitive dissonance, through which the signs and habits of Aboriginal presence can cheerily be contemplated through a lens of presumptions antithetical to them. Seventy pages later the author delivers a detailed, purely aesthetic appreciation of some of the many carvings, stencils, petroglyphs, and axe grooves – some of which are no longer extant or accessible today. The sites are described as the traces of a ‘dead race’. The book was published three years before the implementation of the child removal policy.

The Australia behind the guide to the Royal, and behind the park itself, the country of its mind, was a different ethical space to the one we live in today, and vastly different to the country of Dharawal. With its pleasure gardens and ornamental trees, its boaters and waist-coats and penny-farthings on Lady Carrington drive, the past is absurd. But for all their blithe and brittle and destructive stupidity, these people lived here, or believed that they did.  Beauteous amongst the beautiful, says the guide’s author, is the gigantic Gymea lily ‘which in proper season rears its elongated stem surmounted with glowing blossom.’ Philip Larkin:

But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another’s throats

After walking a couple of k, as Dad would say, I find a gnarled old angophora, not technically a eucalyptus, but often called redgum or rosegum for the similar texture of the skin, rosy pale around the bowl, scorched red on the outer branches. Dharawal: Yeh-dthedeh – I reckon they knew it wasn’t quite a gum too –Yarr-warrah being blackbutt and Yander-airy silvertop. At this height, it means the soil quality is shifting. I’ve been moving downhill. I loop north, use the topography to find a creekbed and follow it through the brush. I follow until it broadens into a channel of pale stone. It’s mostly dry, but you can hear the flow of subterranean water at the bends. The country is changing, hills rising sharper either side, taller trees stitched with greener, softer shrubs.

In winter these banksias will be visited by black cockatoos bringing their young down from the mountains to visit the same trees with their liquid flight, and keening cries. After a few hundred metres the clay runs to smooth curves of eroded cetacean sandstone. A water dragon doesn’t hear me coming until I almost step on it. Perfectly camouflaged against the speckled rock it appears in a blur of motion and scurries through a crevice in the rocks below. A few moments of panic to be sure it’s not a goanna – they’re not venomous but their claws cause rapid infection.

Half an hour later the creek-bed has become a river-bed of wide planes of smoothly curved rimstone. The valley is abrupt, a sudden depth after all this ridge-scrub. The dimensions are recalibrated by larger silences, taller trees, a huge vault of fragmented boulders heaped below, stands of wiry ironbark and turpentine plunging their roots through the rocks into the richer shale soils below. A pale crescent of the horizon suggests the ocean, and so does the cool distance in the breeze. I plant myself on the edge and slice an apple and some cheese with Dad’s knife – brass inlayed rosewood, German steel, his initials, also mine, engraved on both sides.

Perhaps I remember him in the bush more vividly because it was one of the few places he was ever at ease. I was born when he was forty. By then he’d known twenty years of financial failure and mental illness, blunted by alcoholism and other addictions, which continued for the next twelve, when a brain tumour took him. He was a trained outdoorsman, and even towards the end he was physically competent. Perhaps he loved the bush because his eclectic nature made a sense there it seldom did – but I don’t know if he knew the place I know, here. He called grass-trees ‘blackboys’ and stressed the wrong syllable in Aboriginal, like everyone else, I guess. The bush has different silences, some are cadent, some are just absence.

To reach the foot of the falls I circle to the south along the ridge, where a series of jagged stone spurs forms a rough kind of switchback descent. In the past I’ve headed straight for the largest boulder, stared up at the overcast light slanting through the lichen and then pushed on. This time I pause on the length of a fallen angophora, like a shipwreck. Inside the bowl of the valley the sound of the pattering drops reverberates and multiplies, twinning strangely with the ventriloquial trills of a male lyrebird somewhere down the creek. I’ve never noticed it before, but there’s a sandy ledge leading up through some ferns under the fall’s southern flank. Something’s been clawing in the red dust beneath the sandstone lip. I follow its tracks further into the ravine and when I glance up I’m shocked to absolute stillness by burnt ochreous stencils of handprints and etchings of fish. Dharawal called red ochre ‘gubar’ and considered it the earth’s blood, it was ground by an initiated man and mixed with saliva or blood to make stencils. I’ve been taught certain forms of appropriate respect, and they come swiftly to mind, but something’s not quite right. The petroglyphs do look old, but not like others I’ve seen. The ledge is shallow. There’s no shellgrit in the dirt, the creek would be unreliable for other fish, and the ridge above is hard, infertile country. Further on the stencils give way to scrawled warnings, and the legend ‘Ethan’s place ‘74’ over a mound of shattered glass grimy with dust. Another adolescent fantasy of belonging.

What did I expect? Epiphany, an interior? Eldorado. Another colonial myth. Growing up here you wouldn’t think thing were even as old as they are. Like Gertrude Stein wrote about Oakland, there wasn’t any there there. Mitchell’s convict-cut road is smothered in indifferent bitumen, the few older houses are gone, replaced first with fibro cottages, then with brick and tile McMansions.

You can find the same spectral history in other parts of Sydney if you scratch the topsoil. The archives are crowded with the ruins of Georgian estates and Italianate villas, hundred-seat art deco theatres and libraries, sandstone churches, slate rooves and mullioned windows framed by gabled balconies. They’re mostly gone, paved over, obliterated in the innocent dullness of concrete. Sydney doesn’t like history because we know there’s blood in it.

And this place, with all its beauty. Sydney’s significant national parks are where they are because they border the arable alluvial soils of the Cumberland Plain. Greater Blue Mountains, Ku-ring- Gai, Sydney Harbour, Royal National: they’re all sandstone soil, places no one wanted to farm. They furnish an imaginary of the pre-colonial past – David Wenham landing at Wattamola as Arthur Phillip in Banished. But it’s an ecological fiction, a heroically battered cliff-side substituted for the firestick-farmed grasses of Eora hunting grounds, another foundational lie. Evelyn Araluen, from ‘Dropbear poetics’:

now here’s the part
you write Black Snake down
for a dilly of national flair
                true god you don’t know how wild I’m gonna be
                to every fucking postmod blinky bill
                tryna crack open my country
                mining in metaphors
                for that place you felt felt you
                                        somewhere in
                                        the Royal National

While I’ve been brooding the afternoon has deepened on me. The ironbarks have stitched themselves blue shadows and the light in the valley has thickened into a humid lustrous purple. I had an idea of pressing on, finding the oasis again, making another scratch in the dust. From one of mine this time:

                                                                           Between motion 
                                                                and act - 

                                                  I wanted to say
                    there’s map & step & boot & neck:
       in white space
                    words fumble,
                               & search their pockets for a footprint.

      
? well what saying now was I just inwit’s agenbite: fie or foh, or fum?
      
pronounsynge þe rute impassible whee moste bigin agayne
                    in a differently wrong direction:
                               westwearde adj. the cours
                                             tranlatio n. thereof
                                                         empire, disease from one body
                                                                         also metaphor n. Obs.

       sorry?
                                                         terranullius - terræ filius: quod scripsiscrapsi there
       butbythegraceIamsofuckingtired.

The footprint is Robinson Crusoe’s. Describing the view from Wattamolla the author of the guide to the Royal refers to Cowper’s poem about Alexander Selkirk, the sailor upon whose experience Defoe based his novel:

I AM monarch of all I survey;
My right there is none to dispute;
From the centre all round to the sea
I am lord of the fowl and the brute

The eastward river bed is choked with boulders and bush, and I’m not the machete wielding type. Just on the footstep of civil twilight a wakeful mopoke chimes forlornly, looking down on me with quizzical curiosity in its amber gaze. Does it matter to the mopoke? Even if it is a prop in an ecological theatre playing to palliate colonial modernity, it hunts, it sleeps, it dreams.

Last year I heard Peter Minter lecture on Bill Neidjie, a Gaagudju elder who decided towards the end of his life that it was worth breaking law to impart his stories to Stephen Davis, resulting in the revelatory Story About Feeling (1989). I was astonished by its power.  From the first poem, or lyric philosophy:

Listen carefully this, you can hear me.
I’m telling you because earth just like mother
And father or brother of you.
That tree same thing.
Your body, my body I suppose,
I’m same as you… anyone.
Tree working when you sleeping and dream.

Perhaps it’s enough, here. And perhaps it’s better to honour the past with silence, let a discarded name fade from the air.

I climb back up the spur of switchbacks and thread my way to the top of the falls. I can see sunset’s stain burning in the redgums and  the white cockatoos are beginning their twilight work, Dharawal: Garawi.

I push back through the scrub and cut up in the general direction of the old path, which leads me to the Sutherland track with only a few doubles back. During research for this essay I learnt that the snake that surprised me when I was climbing at Garie wasn’t, as I assumed, a harmless diamond python, but a significantly venomous Broad-Headed Snake, not recorded in the park since the ’97 fires. Good news and bad news.

Soon enough I’m walking in darkness, the stars are azure bright, so I’m saving the torch battery. After a dark length of indeterminate walking I can see through the trees the distant space of an oval where I played soccer, past the shadow of the Loftus Tramway museum storage shed, where an old girlfriend and I snuck in to make out in the dust-slit warrens of green double-decked buses and drop-centre saloon trams from the thirties.

The world changes shape overnight and I tumble with it. Someone burnt the shed out three years ago destroying everything it contained. The museum volunteers and the members of the Old Sydney Album facebook group were devastated, an incomparable loss of heritage. Lying in the dark I think that’s why they dug this irrigation ditch, and I’ve broken my wrist.

Anonymous. Official Guide to the National Park of New South Wales, Trustees of the National Park, Sydney UP, 1902
Anonymous. Sydney Mail, 13 May, 1936
Evelyn Araluen. ‘Dropbear Poetics’, Overland 230, 2018.
Les Bursill, Mary Jacobs, Deborah Lennis, Aunty Beryl Timbery-Beller, Merv Ryan. Dharawal: The Story of the Dharawal speaking people of Southern Sydney, Kurranulla Aboriginal Corporation, 2007.
William Cowper. ‘The Solitude of Alexander Selkirk’.
Jonathan Dunk. ‘Araluen’, Australian Poetry Journal 7:1, 2017.
Philip Larkin. The Complete Poems. London: Faber, 2012.
Bill Neidjie. Story About Feeling, Keith Taylor ed, Magabala Books, 1989.
Horace A. Salmon. ‘Hidden Waterfalls on Engadine Creek’ Sydney Morning Herald, 2 September, 1936
Kenneth Slessor. Selected Poems. Angus & Robertson, 1993.

The post Park appeared first on Sydney Review of Books.

Australia’s Hidden Literary Archive

Australian literature has over the last fifty years witnessed the gradual inclusion of writers and texts formerly considered marginal: from a predominantly white, male and Anglophone canon it has come to incorporate more women writers, writers of popular genres, Indigenous writers, and migrant, multicultural or diasporic writers. However, one large and important body of Australian writing remains excluded from mainstream histories and anthologies: literature in languages other than English. Research conducted at the University of Wollongong under the auspices of the AustLit project has revealed the immensity of this gap in knowledge: hundreds of writers in dozens of languages writing and publishing in Australia and overseas; lively literary exchanges of great relevance to Australian history and culture known only to specific language communities; a veritable treasure trove of neglected archives at great risk of being permanently lost.

The above paragraph is taken from an application for a 2013 Australian Research Council Discovery grant. Entitled ‘New transnationalisms: Australia’s multilingual literary heritage’, our project aimed to trace the history of Australian literature in four languages (Spanish, Arabic, Vietnamese and Chinese), at the same time promising to ‘rethink the nature of transnationalism and multiculturalism in the Australian literary context, acknowledging the extent of the cross-national, cross-lingual and cross-cultural traffic that feeds into the literature of a migrant nation, shaping while at the same time challenging the category of the national.’ This project, on which I work, along with Nijmeh Hajjar, Michael Jacklin and Tuấn Ngọc Nguyễn, while still incomplete, has resulted in some extraordinary findings, along with numerous frustrations about the different ways in which Australia’s entrenched monolingualism has impacted our national literature.

It is over four decades since Australia declared itself to be a multicultural nation, and we are gradually becoming more so. According to the 2016 Census, over a quarter of Australian residents are born overseas, and half have at least one overseas-born parent. As the proportion of migrants from non-English speaking countries grows, we are also becoming more linguistically diverse: One in five speaks a language other than English at home and we speak more than 300 languages, with Mandarin now the most commonly spoken after English. However, rather than taking advantage of our linguistic diversity, Australia seems to do everything to discourage it. A report produced in 2015 for the Australian Council of Learned Academies offers a thought-provoking frame for thinking through issues of language, especially in relation to Australia’s engagement with Asia. Smart Engagement with Asia: Leveraging Language, Research and Culture, by Ien Ang, Yasmin Tambiah and Phillip Mar comments on the much-lamented fact of Australian monolingualism, offering some alarming statistics: in New South Wales, the proportion of students studying a foreign language for HSC is now less than a fifth of what it was in the 1950s, and only 1.3 per cent of them studied Chinese. Repeated government initiatives to increase these numbers have clearly failed, and this at a time when Asian language literacy is more important than ever to Australia. Studies also show that diasporic bi- and multilingual capabilities tend to be lost within two or three generations, as migrant parents focus on the importance of English as a key to success and integration. In spite of the fact that Australia’s Asian population is proportionally twice that of the US and four times that of the UK, Australia, with its stubborn English monolingualism, is out of step with developments in the rest of the world, where multilingualism is on the rise: ‘Globally, the monolingual native English speaker is in retreat’. Referring to another report, by Kent Anderson and Joseph LoBianco, the authors write: ‘There are two disadvantages in the arrangements of current global communication: not knowing English; and knowing only English.’

What might be the consequences of all this, for Australian literature, and for Australian literary studies? For at least a decade now, there has been a move away from the national, sometimes nationalist, focus which tended to dominate earlier Australian literary scholarship, and an increased emphasis on transnationalism. But what kind of transnationalism has been embraced? What, if any, changes has it made to the language of literary expression? Robert Dixon, in his programmatic 2007 article ‘Australian literature: international contexts’, stressed the importance of non-Anglophone traditions to the study of Australian literature, as well as the need to acknowledge what Emily Apter calls the ‘translation zone’, the two-way street of literary translation, but it seems to me that the consequences of such a shift have never been fully recognised. As my colleague Michael Jacklin argued in 2009:

although the scope and reach of Australian literary studies may expand as the discipline goes global, there is no accompanying assumption that the corpus, or the canon, of Australian literature will be radically altered.

This means that knowledge of the large body of literary texts written, in Australia, in languages other than English, is minimal, and that translation of such texts, which would make them available to a wider readership, remains rare. It also means that diasporic or multicultural writers, those who work between languages and between cultures, need to write in English in order to find a readership in Australia (and many, as we know, have done so successfully). But writing in English does not always mean that they leave their other language(s) behind, or that they write like native speakers of English. This may put them in a position of disadvantage with a readership unaccustomed to versions of English different from their own. Having an ‘accent’ in writing has often been deemed unacceptable in Australia. It is difficult not to remember Robert Dessaix’s assessment of multicultural writers in his 1991 Australian Book Review essay ‘Nice work if you can get it’ in which he argued that the English of these writers was not good enough to produce texts of sufficient complexity and sophistication, proffering the gratuitous advice that ‘Many so-called multicultural writers would do better to take up ceramics, market-gardening, photography or, perhaps, even to return to their countries of origin’.

In her recent book Not Like a Native Speaker, Rey Chow argues that speaking, and writing, in a language not one’s own, is generally constructed in terms of a lack:

Because the native speaker is thought to occupy an uncorrupted origination point, learning a language as a non-native speaker can only be an exercise in woeful approximation. The failure to sound completely like the native speaker is thus given a pejorative name: ‘(foreign) accent.’ Having an accent is, in other words, the symptom precisely of discontinuity – an incomplete assimilation, a botched attempt at eliminating another tongue’s competing copresence. In geopolitical terms, having an accent is tantamount to leaving on display – rather than successfully covering up – the embarrassing evidence of one’s alien origins and migratory status…The speech of the native speaker, in contrast, is deemed so natural that it is said to be without – or shall we say outside? – an accent.

But what exactly is a ‘native speaker’ and what constitutes ‘good’ English? In her book Beyond the Mother Tongue: The Postmonolingual Condition (2011) Yasemin Yildiz writes that while multilingualism has attracted considerable scholarly interest in the last two decades, it is often considered to be a recent development, brought about by globalisation and international migration. Yildiz instead argues that it is monolingualism that is the more recent paradigm, emerging in Europe in the late eighteenth century as a result of universal education, the development of the modern nation state and the wide acceptance of the gendered, affectively charged concept of the mother tongue. ‘The “mother tongue”’, she writes, ‘is the affective knot at the centre of the monolingual paradigm and therefore a knot worth unravelling.’ Within the monolingual paradigm, the ‘mother tongue’ has become ‘more than a metaphor; it constitutes a condensed narrative about origin and identity’. However, the highly emotional and biological connotations of the ‘mother tongue’ are themselves historical artifacts, and their effect is to obscure the possibility that languages other than the first can take on an emotional meaning. Yildiz offers examples of alternative affective connotations: the ‘mother tongue’ might be associated with exclusion, alienation and trauma rather than belonging, and might thus stand as an obstacle to healing, whereas new languages can open up ‘new intellectual and affective pathways.’ The problem is not that we associate our first language with affective baggage linked to first memories, family and home; it is the exclusivity it is granted over others, equally capable of shaping our affective and intellectual horizon.

Rey Chow offers a more political reading of the effects of linguistic encounters. Taking her inspiration from Derrida’s account of his relationship to the French language in Monolingualism of the Other; or, the Prosthesis of Origin, she describes the relationship between language and cultural value, in particular the ways in which languages have been made into ‘indexes of cultural superiority and inferiority’ in colonial encounters. She goes on to dismantle the notion of the native speaker as occupying a position of privilege:

By making it possible only for some people to impose their native tongue (say, English) on others, for whom this tongue exists more or less as an external graft, the colonial situation has, if unwittingly, conferred upon the colonized the privilege of a certain prescience – the grasp of how artificially and artifactually, rather than naturally, language works and can work in the first place. The fact that so many people around the world are now wearing this external graft means that those who happen to speak English as a native tongue are simply one variant in an infinite series, in which there can be any degree and any number of fits or misfits between the speaker and the prosthesis.

The real advantage, she thus argues, lies not with the coloniser but with the colonised, who ‘is much closer to the truth of the mediated and divisive character of all linguistic communication.’ Based on this affirmation of linguistic plurality, she posits what she calls the ‘xenophone’, a ‘creative domain of languaging…that draws its sustenance from mimicry and adaptation and bears in its accents the murmur, the passage, of diverse found speeches.’ This is the domain of postcolonial and transcultural writing and its ‘vast, wondrous troves of xenophonic énoncés.’

In Australia, the most enthusiastic advocate for this utopian view of the xenophonic domain is undoubtedly Brian Castro, who in his 1996 essay ‘Writing Asia’ laments the absence, in Australia, of polyglot writers like James Joyce and Samuel Beckett:

But the benefits of being able to speak another language are manifold. Language marks the spot where the self loses its prison bars – where the border crossing takes place, traversing the spaces of others. When one speaks or translates Chinese, one metaphorically becomes Chinese; when one speaks Japanese one ‘turns’ Japanese. Each language speaks the world in its own way. The polyglot is a freer person, a person capable of living in words and worlds other than the narrow and the confined one of unimagined reality. When we translate from one language to another we not only reinvent ourselves but we free up the sclerotic restrictions of our own language. We feel free to transgress, to metamorphose, to experience the uncanny, where we are receiving what Wilson Harris has called the quantum immediacy of another culture. Other cultures and languages reinforce and enrich us by powerfully affecting and destabilising our familial tongue. We gain by losing ourselves.

To Castro, bi- and multilingualism provides an avenue out of ‘crippling essentialist categorisations’ such as identity and nation; it serves as a prophylactic against parochialism and nationalism. In Australia, where foreign languages are undervalued and English ‘preciously protected’, he writes, literary discourse has become ‘the last bastion of conservative appropriation’ and canons are defended along ‘predominantly patrician lines.’

Classifying an author, or a text, as bi- or multilingual does not in itself say much about it from either an aesthetic or cultural perspective. Just as authors acquire their multilingualism in different circumstances, so texts vary greatly in the way different linguistic registers are incorporated. Authors may, like Samuel Beckett, or, in Australia, Ouyang Yu, write in more than one language. They may write in a non-native language which somehow carries echoes of other linguistic sensibilities. They may actually mix different languages in the same text, use ‘weird English’ to signal linguistic variations and disjunctions, or they may in diaspora continue to write in their first language, often inflected by structures of more recently acquired tongues. Not surprisingly, language is often thematised in diasporic texts, becoming the focus for an ongoing exploration of its affective, cultural and political dimensions, as well as its creative potential.

Brian Castro employs a range of techniques to signal the multilingual environment in which his own linguistic sensibilities were formed, and many of his characters share. The notion of ‘native’ language or ‘mother tongue’ is not a given in his texts, but the paradigm which links language to identity and belonging nevertheless persists as a shadow haunting his characters. Seamus, his twentieth-century character in Birds of Passage, an Australian-born Chinese who grows up knowing nothing about his ancestry, not only discovers in the story of Shan, a nineteenth-century Chinese gold-digger, a possible ancestor, but in his search for cultural and ethnic roots also teaches himself Chinese, the language he believes will bestow on him the coherent identity which eludes him. Similarly, in The Garden Book, Swan, another Australian-born Chinese, writes poems in Chinese, which is not her first language. When asked why, she answers that she has no interest in communication. Her calligraphic inscriptions on fragile leaves clearly serve other purposes, such as signalling her own tenuous hold on any sense of origin or identity.

Language is a major preoccupation, perhaps the major preoccupation in the work of Ouyang Yu. The struggle between the native and the adopted tongue is graphically illustrated in this untitled poem in Songs of the Last Chinese Poet:

as a writer you feel that your own language is essential
…
like your own penis
biologically and racially determined
that will only enter the tunnel
of the same language
prepared generations before
by your knowing ancestors
once you are without that language
you are a linguistic eunuch
who will know all the essentials and ingredients of love
like a book
but not the pleasure of it

Language here is not only somatic, it is also gendered and sexualised. Both the penis and the ‘tunnel’ are of the same language, fashioned by ancestors to provide sexual and linguistic pleasure; its absence is equated with castration. In his second novel in English, The English Class, Ouyang’s protagonist Jing (later Gene), who has focused on learning English for most of his life in China, moves to Australia only to find himself suffering from a mental condition diagnosed as ‘Chinese-English linguistic and cultural conflict’ which not only leaves him unable to swallow most food but also emasculates him. The conflict between languages is played out within the body, and in most of Ouyang’s work, causes suffering, mental as well as physical.  Interestingly, Ouyang himself does not seem to share the fate of his characters. ‘[L]anguage is my life/and sexperience’, he declares, and this ‘sexperience’ is carried out in a wide variety of formats in both English and Chinese. Language is his playground, an inexhaustible treasure trove of xenophonic acrobatics:

For years, living and writing in Australia and imagining China or vice versa as I am, I have never ceased to be amazed by the brilliant sparks that rub off at language contact points, creating a new language.

Both Ouyang and Castro, like many other diasporic writers, can thus be seen to partake in seemingly contradictory diasporic language practices. On the one hand, an allegiance to the monolingual paradigm is played out in mournful laments for a lost, or never found, organic mother tongue untroubled by other linguistic interference, within which origin, identity and belonging are seamlessly rooted. On the other, the very idea of such a language is deconstructed, through the illusory nature of its premises but also through an aesthetic practice which puts on display a confident multilingual juggling in which the mother tongue, if there is one, is made strange and pathways to somatic, affective, intellectual dimensions of other language experiences are explored. It is a contradiction which may well exist at the heart of all diasporic language experience.

For writers who choose to write (or continue to write) in their first language after migration language takes on new meanings and new functions. Signalling their position outside the mainstream culture, the use of a minority language means addressing a diasporic readership, in some cases also a homeland readership while deliberately excluding the wider host community. The Poison of Polygamy, the first Chinese Australian novel, published in instalments in the Chinese language newspaper Chinese Times in Melbourne from 1909 to 1910, follows the lives of Chinese gold diggers who came to Australia in the 1850s, but its message is squarely aimed at the diasporic community at the time of writing, in the lead-up to China’s republican revolution of 1911. Denouncing polygamy, foot-binding, opium smoking and other practices associated with traditional Chinese culture as represented by the ailing Qing dynasty, the novel (like the newspaper in which it was published) preached the republican cause and warned that such practices were the cause of the poor image of the community within mainstream Australian society. Literary writing frequently serves the function of debating conflicts within diasporic communities or political issues in the homeland; language in such cases becomes a way of signalling that this not a matter for a wider readership. Language also becomes a means of binding the community together, of preserving a culture under pressure from the homogenising force of Anglophone society. Literary societies, publication outlets and online groups are often based on the desire to maintain language as a proxy for culture, heritage and identity. The fact that such initiatives tend to be small and short-lived, rarely surviving into the second and third generation, is an indication of the power of monolingualism within Australian multiculturalism.

There are exceptions, however, and one in particular demonstrates that diasporic writing can create literary communities well beyond national borders. Việt (founded 1998), the first Vietnamese language journal in Australia and its successor, the Tiền Vệ literary webzine (founded 2002), became the most widely read literary magazine in the Vietnamese diaspora world-wide and although prohibited, has gained a large readership in Vietnam as well. Its importance can be measured by the frequent attempts by the Vietnamese government to hack into and disable its website. As Tuấn Ngọc Nguyễn reports, the journal and webzine, by creating a new readership, allowed some Vietnamese Australian poets who had previously published in English to revert to their mother tongue in their writing.

As we suspected when starting our research, the archives of Australian writing in languages other than English are fragile and easily lost as authors and editors die and copies of journals and books are lost or discarded. A lucky rescue was the journal An Nahar, which contained an important body of writing in Arabic. The only surviving copies of the journal were located in the garage of its editor, and on his death, the family was at a loss as to how to dispose of them. Fortunately this came to the knowledge of my co-researcher Nijmeh Hajjar, who negotiated with the State Library of New South Wales to take over the archive, which is to be digitised and made widely available. Similarly, a PhD student associated with our project, Catherine Seaton, was able to interview Guillermo Hertz shortly before his death. As ‘El Gato’, Hertz had published some 2000 crónicas in Spanish language newspapers from 1994 to 2006. Through their correspondence, Seaton was given insights into his perspective on a migrant’s sense of linguistic and cultural belonging in multicultural Australia. However, for each of these ‘rescues’, by members of our research team and others, they are numerous losses, as well as large un- or under-explored archives, and an important part of our ambition is therefore that our work will stimulate further research into the literature of other linguistic communities. We are more than grateful to those researchers who, without funding, agreed to contribute to a forthcoming multi-lingual issue of Australian Literary Studies, offering an overview of the development of Australian writing in six languages other than those covered by our ARC-funded research. (Apart from the researchers and languages named in our project, the contributors are: Mary Besemers (Polish), Konstandina Dounis (Greek), – Nataša Kampmark (Serbian), Sonia Mycak (Ukrainian), Laetitia Nanquette (Iranian), Gaetano Rando (Italian).)

Will our research, and that of numerous others keen to preserve the archives of multicultural and multilingual writing in Australia and argue for its relevance to the national literary heritage, open another cultural gate to previously barred newcomers? Will Australian literature become multilingual as well as multicultural and will it come to embrace versions of English too ‘accented’ to be accommodated within narrow definitions of what constitutes a ‘native’ competency in writing? Will Australia ever overcome its entrenched monolingualism to truly reflect its status as one of the most multicultural nations on earth? While more modest in our aspirations, more aware of the powerful forces behind the monolingual English paradigm than we were at the start of our work, we have been encouraged by the enthusiastic response in part of the literary community, and by the tireless, largely unacknowledged work of writers and scholars toiling to keep literary and linguistic traditions alive. If, as we suspect, this work, creative as well as scholarly, will remain a modest niche within Australian literature, it is a niche emboldened by global cultural developments, a niche we hope will become increasingly visible as Australian culture gains a better understanding of its transnational potential.

This essay was first presented as part of Provocations, a new public forum initiated by the J.M. Coetzee Centre for Creative Culture at the University of Adelaide tackling controversies in the arts and humanities.  The theme of the first series was ‘Who Shot the Albatross?: Gate-keeping in Australian culture’.

Works Cited:

Brian Castro Looking for Estrellita. St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1999.
Rey Chow, Not Like a Native Speaker: On Languaging as a Postcolonial Experience. New York: Columbia University Press, 2014.
Robert Dessaix, ‘Nice work if you can get it.’ Australian Book Review 128: (1991), 26.
Robert Dixon, ‘Australian Literature – International Contexts.’ Southerly. 67: 1-2, 2007, 15-27.
Sneja Gunew, Post-multicultural Writers as Neo-cosmopolitan Mediators. London: Anthem Press, 2017.
Michael Jacklin, ‘The Transnational Turn in Australian Literary Studies.’ JASAL, Special Issue: ‘Australian Literature in a Global World.’ W. Ommundsen and T. Simoes da Silva (eds.) 2009.
Tuấn Ngọc Nguyễn, ‘Vietnamese Literature in Australia: Language and Identity’, forthcoming in Australian Literary Studies.
Catherine H. Seaton, ‘Of Cats and Wogs: “Translating” the Migrant Experience Through 20th Century Crónicas in Spanish-Language Newspapers in Australia’, PhD thesis, University of Wollongong, 2018.
Yasemin Yildiz, Beyond the Mother Tongue: The Postmonolingual Condition. New York: Fordham University Press, 2011.
Ouyang Yu. Songs of the Last Chinese Poet. Broadway, NSW: Wild Peony, 1997.
-On the Smell of an Oily Rag: Speaking English, thinking Chinese and living Australian. Kent Town, SA: Wakefield Press, 2007.

The post Multilingual Writing in a Monolingual Nation appeared first on Sydney Review of Books.

I am on a crowded bus heading into the wilds of China. It’s ten degrees Celsius. The driver is swerving all over the place, seemingly for his own entertainment. I feel more than a little travel-sick. As I stare out the window to steady my stomach, I catch a glimpse of a disturbing scene unfolding by the roadside – a cobra is in the process of swallowing a large toad. The toad’s hind legs hang limply from the snake’s jaws. It is finally too much for me. Overcome with nausea, I throw up all over the shrivelled woman on my right, who has been plucking a live chicken on her lap. She and the bird look at me with disgust.

The series of events that have led me to this place can be described as calamitous but not unheard-of for a woman of my age. Thirty-four years old, I had recently endured a run of terrible luck. In the years preceding my trip into remote China, I had been accused of murder, survived a fire, and had finally been dumped by my fiancé – via Snapchat. A celebrity dentist, he had fallen in love with a close friend of mine, Patrick Lenton, who had come to him for a root canal, and obviously much more besides. By the time I got home on the night of the procedure, the love of my life had already vacated our shared apartment in Potts Point and taken up with Lenton in our second home in Mosman.

No longer a kept woman, I had been forced to return to my writing career. I began to piece together freelance gigs that did not interest me. I accepted this nature-essay commission, for instance, despite my conviction that nature is overrated.

Things got what one might call ‘quite bad’. I descended into despair. I lay about the apartment weeping and downing Bacardi Breezers, and consuming all manner of drugs while draped over the balcony railing. Every CBD landmark within view closed in on me – cackling, distorted.

This continued for some time, until one morning I woke up at two on the kitchen floor with something crawling across my face. I could see its antennae swaying over my eyes. I tried to scream but couldn’t. Paralysed with terror, I lay there for an eternity as the horrid thing parked itself on my forehead and began to chew on my left eyebrow. I had let my living space fall into such neglect that it had been overrun by this cockroach, which proceeded to swarm around me on the marble floor.

As the roach went berserk checking out my upmarket apartment, I began to examine my revulsion. It dawned on me that in despising the cockroach, I was really projecting onto it my self-hatred, accumulated over so many years. I had arrived at my own Eat, Pray, Love moment. There I was, lying on the floor, drug-addled, alcoholic, dysfunctional and possibly barren (I hadn’t checked). I was suddenly Bridget Jones alone in her flat, being eaten by Alsatians. I was Emma Thompson in that Christmas movie, whose husband Snape turns out to be infatuated with that bobbed woman who opens her legs.

I asked myself why I had always been so fearful of the cockroach. I was curious about whether this encounter was a sign that my life journey was meant to have some relationship with this lowly creature, said to be able to survive an apocalypse. Could I overcome my terror of the cockroach? And what could this creature teach me about resilience in the face of personal despair?

First, however, I needed to address a preliminary question: who was I to tell the story of the humble cockroach?

I was, of course, conscious of the fact that I am a white, straight, cisgender, middle-class woman of the Anthropocene. Like Donna Chang in the US television sitcom Seinfeld, I had always—due to my surname—been mistaken as an individual of Chinese descent. I was therefore wary of how my own white identity, and particularly my white-supremacist leanings, might skew the narrative of how I journeyed to understand what life is like for a much-maligned insect.

My sister, Grete, a precocious young writer, became impatient with my dithering. We were sharing a green-pea guacamole at our favourite rooftop bar in Surry Hills on a Monday night.

‘Why all this self-flagellation?’ she asked. ‘Fuck the leftie thought police. First you can’t write about Asians, next you can’t write about cockroaches? You’re swanning around with one eyebrow, and you can’t even fucking write about the trauma of it!’

‘But it’s my job to be self-aware,’ I tell her. ‘To strive for authenticity.’

Grete took a sip of her skinny margarita and adjusted her urban sombrero. ‘Surely we don’t engage with other cultures,’ she said, ‘so that they can tell us what to do.’

Still conscious of my privilege, but comforted by my woke intersectional feminism, I began to read voraciously on the topic of the cockroach.

I ploughed through the collections of every library and bookstore within reach. I sat on the kitchen floor of my apartment surrounded by books and martinis and UberEats deliveries.

I was acutely interested in the idea that this abject creature, so deeply embedded in the human unconscious, represents the darkness within all of us.

I became engrossed by Richard Schweid’s 1999 book The Cockroach Papers, which is filled with anecdotes of unpleasant human encounters with cockroaches. People have ended up in Emergency in excruciating pain with cockroaches lodged in their ears. Roaches have rained for twenty minutes from a restaurant ceiling after treatment by exterminators. They have made walls move by eating the paste behind wallpaper. They have become notorious not just for chewing on eyebrows but also for feasting on other parts of sleeping humans – on eyelashes, toes, fingernails, blisters and calluses, and on the greasy fingers of children.

Also enlightening was Schweid’s assertion that male cockroaches stay out later at night than females of their kind. Female cockroaches are usually back in their harbourage by midnight, whereas males tend to stay out until two or three in the morning.

I consequently began to focus on the experience of the woman cockroach in history. Paul Davis’ The Man Who Kills Cockroaches, first published in 1982, was a particularly illuminating account of the life of a male pest controller in New York. I was disturbed by the distortion of the dying cockroach’s experience through the violent lens of the patriarchy – which I noticed was a theme common to other texts I had been reading. I was appalled by the manner in which nature itself is often viewed in terms of its relationship to mankind, functioning as a mere backdrop for the self-centred preoccupations of men.

What was missing from many of the books was a recognition that cockroaches should not be denigrated but instead admired as a marvel of evolution. They have the ability to mutate in response to insecticides. They can reportedly survive nuclear bombs and space missions. Indeed, in a paper entitled ‘An experimental study of the linguistic capabilities of Blatta orientalis’, published in France in 1934, B. Le Roux claimed to have observed the first instance of a cockroach learning to speak the Queen’s English without a voice box or accent. The speed of the cockroach’s adaptation is testament to its resilience, as well as the fact that it will probably survive us all.

Yet the hard-won advancement of cockroach rights throughout the globe has been a long time coming. According to Benedict Nicholls’ The Public Life of Roaches—canvassing the treatment of the insect in twentieth-century British politics—it was only in 1951 under the newly passed Cockroach Suffrage Act that these highly evolved creatures were first able to vote.

The more I read, the more I came to adore the cockroach – the gleaming beauty of its ancient form, its zest for life despite its utter filth. I became determined to decolonise my mind completely and champion the group – to help roaches rise up and live among us as equals.

Out of all of this reading—much of it disappointing—the one book that really stayed with me was a 2010 memoir titled In Search of Samsa. It described a remote women-only retreat that specialises in helping one get in touch with one’s inner cockroach.

The author of the memoir was Gregoria Samsa – a textiles salesperson from Adelaide formerly known as Kaehte Frost-Wilkins. In the book, she describes how, in the middle of a devastating period in which she lost her job, she happened to pick up a copy of Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis – a classic piece of nature writing in which the pioneering Gregor Samsa learns what it is like to transform into a giant insect. Inspired, Frost-Wilkins changed her name by deed poll and ventured into the wilderness, where she began to live as a solitary roach. Based on her experience, she popularised through her memoir the now widely accepted proposition that when a cockroach flaps its wings in Mongolia, an old shoemaker dies in Brazil.

I decided to make an excursion to meet this remarkable woman, and find out if she would be willing to train me too to live as a cockroach. This is how I ended up on a bus watching a cobra eat a toad, and this is how I finally landed on the front steps of a two-storey townhouse, peering at a plaque on the front door engraved with the words ‘The Harbourage’, in a place in the far reaches of China that the locals call Guangzhou.

When Gregoria Samsa, five foot two, answers the door, I am surprised to see that she is plump, naked, and painted brown. Inviting me in, she tells me she has chosen to live as an American cockroach, or Periplaneta americana – a large species that famously travelled to America on slave ships from the west coast of Africa. I realise that the great roach-woman standing before me—who has done so much to advance the cockroach cause—has briefly stepped out of character to greet me.

We settle on couches with cups of chamomile tea as Samsa begins to relate her story.

‘I saw serendipitous parallels between my life and that of Gregor in The Metamorphosis,’ she says. ‘He grieved the loss of his textiles sales career, as I did. Reading about his life, it dawned on me that I had a calling, a life mission.

‘It would have been about 2005 when I moved to Guangzhou and began to pull myself out of my grief by training cockroaches. I taught them to run mazes. I communed with them. I lived as a cockroach among cockroaches.’

In 2007, Samsa had a dream in which she had become a cockroach. She was taken aback by the liberation she felt as she imagined herself into this form.

‘I realised I wanted not just to be in dialogue with the cockroach, but to be the cockroach. I haven’t yet completed the full transformation, but I live in hope.’

At the start of this groundbreaking process, she found herself yearning for dark places, and decided to build for herself a designer sewer underneath the Harbourage, a place she had purchased from a Chinese millionaire.

The transformation brought her such a feeling of freedom that she decided she wanted to share with other women the secret to her happiness.

‘I understood it was my responsibility to pass on my knowhow. Now I train other women to be roaches – women who are depressed and broken, looking for a way to enhance their wellbeing. That is how the Harbourage came to be what it is today.

‘The essential philosophy of this retreat,’ she continues, ‘is personal transformation. One must become the cockroach to understand the cockroach.’

Many of the women who seek refuge with Samsa are expats dealing with their individual grief. One of the current residents, she notes, is a cake-pop entrepreneur whose creations gave her first customers severe food poisoning. The incident destroyed her business.

As we speak, an old Asian lady moves past pulling two buckets on wheels. From one she sloshes water, and proceeds to mop the floor. She reaches into the other and pulls out assorted trash, which she scatters artfully throughout the room. Samsa smiles at her with kind eyes.

‘Once a week this darling Chinese woman comes in and cleans for us. Don’t you, Ying Ying? We let ourselves indulge only in simulated filth.’

Samsa takes me on a tour of the Harbourage. She begins by pointing out fragrance dispensers mounted on the walls of the rooms, explaining that the Finnish olfactory artist Mimi has been hired to make the place smell exactly like it has been infested by cockroaches. At fifteen-minute intervals, puffs of the bespoke scent emanate from the dispensers. Schweid, in The Cockroach Papers, describes the smell of a real infestation as ‘a disagreeable tangy mustiness like a lot of wet cardboard had been left piled over some small dead animal in an unventilated corner’. Mimi’s simulated odour is unhappily accurate.

I am guided to a computer workstation, where Samsa opens a database and asks me to choose the type of roach I want to train as. ‘There are thousands of varieties on offer, and every cockroach has its own distinct face. We attempt to emulate this diversity at the Harbourage.’

I decide to live, for now, as a German cockroach, or Blattela germanica. The name is derived from the Latin germa, meaning crawling, and blat, meaning pieces of shit. The downside of my choice is that I will be unable to fly.

‘Nevertheless a good move,’ says Samsa. She gives me a standard-issue brown pantsuit (not everyone is comfortable with nudity from the get-go), and I begin my first day as a roach in silence. The Harbourage is largely a speech-free zone.

The initial phase of training involves Samsa taking me through a number of yoga poses that will help me understand the physicality of the cockroach. I find particular solace in Upward-Facing Roach and Reclining Cockroach Pose. These exercises in empathy remind me of the fifteenth-century Spanish practice of la cucaracha, in which one learns tolerance by singing a song about a cockroach that is missing two back legs.

In the main living room is a large cardboard box. Samsa instructs me to crawl inside to join the two other current residents. Like Samsa, they are nude and painted brown. It is a supremely uncomfortable experience. I barely know these women, and we are already a sweaty mess of skin and limbs. Samsa explains that cockroaches prefer to be crowded in, with roaches on all sides.

‘It makes them feel secure,’ she says. ‘This sense of community is something you’ll surprisingly come to savour.’

I attempt to speak to the two other roaches-in-training but it turns out they have abandoned conventional modes of human communication. One hisses at me like a cat.

‘She’s in training as a Madagascar hissing cockroach,’ says Samsa.

Her friend, the cake-pop entrepreneur, lives as an Oriental cockroach. The entrepreneur spends a lot of time grooming herself, as cockroaches do, focusing on her non-existent antennae.

‘In terms of food, the Oriental cockroach responds best to cinnamon buns,’ says Samsa, ‘but also white bread and boiled potatoes.’

Before leaving me to my own devices for the day, Samsa starts me on a program of guided meditations and affirmations. The audio is piped through the cardboard box. I repeat the words of the gentle voice, which is accompanied by the strains of the erhu – a Chinese two-stringed instrument.

‘I am, I am, I am the cockroach,’ I murmur. ‘As I imagine, so shall I become.’

I listen to these meditations for several hours, then follow my fellow roaches out of the box to scavenge in the kitchen at night. They scurry on all fours through the dark.

Next to the island in the kitchen, I discover that the Chinese woman has laid out a carefully curated feast of paper, glue, eyelashes, leather, faeces, banana skins, and three beautifully arranged charcuterie boards covered in cling wrap. I select the charcuterie board and spend dinnertime reflecting on the day.

Heading back to the box, I come upon the hissing roach in the small New Age library. She is chewing on a Walden. The sign above the shelves says ‘Food for Thought’.

Three days into the gruelling process, I’m surprised to start feeling my troubles drop away. It is, as Robert Wells says in his seminal travel memoir Dance of the Green Tiger, ‘the beginning of the end of the start’. I feel more balanced and sane.

My feelings of liberation increase as the days flit by. I remain disciplined about my yoga and meditation practice and, when in need of self-care, I avail myself of the in-house spa facilities, established for frazzled participants and run by Guangzhou locals.

I come to realise that, in my insect bliss, I have completely discarded my vices. My craving for Bacardi Breezers has diminished, replaced by a roach’s fondness for warm sour beer. I’m no longer trying to hit up the other roaches for cocaine, only sliced banana. I no longer understand why I wanted a dentist as a fiancé in the first place, since I have no teeth anymore – only powerful jaws. I care nothing for my possible barrenness, knowing now that as a female cockroach I have the capacity to produce approximately 2500 new cockroaches in a year.

A metamorphosis is occurring within me: I am evolving into a more resilient being in the company of other roaches. We are solitary souls in search of meaning, the only interruptions to our peace being the Chinese woman delivering my laundry.

I recognise now that this has been a journey into total acceptance of myself. I needed to leave Sydney and become a cockroach to find and fall in love with me, and understand that I have always been whole. I know I can survive anything life throws at me.

It is difficult to make this experience comprehensible to those who have never understood the fear felt by the powerless, or the elation of their rising up. The closest I can come to describing what it is like is to repeat what the entrepreneur said to me late one night as we hid in a closet smoking cigarettes she had smuggled in. That is, being a cockroach is very much like baking cake pops: practice makes perfect.

I have been living in the colony for a month when I sign into Facebook and see messages from Grete asking where I am. She says my parents are distraught, and have reported me missing. My intuition tells me it is time to leave.

I know that I can take key learnings from my time at the Harbourage and apply them to my life in the developed world. With the right attitude, I can be in touch with the inner nature of the cockroach from my bedroom, and complete my transformation alone. For doesn’t nature surround us, even in the cities?

I bid Samsa and the girls a tearful goodbye, then crawl onto a flight back to Sydney, where I conceal myself in the food service area until a crew member drags me out. Returning to Potts Point, I crash on the floor of my bedroom and sleep.

Upon waking, I see my parents standing in the doorway. They stare at me, speechless. My mother clasps her hands and looks at my father. She takes two steps towards me and faints. My father clenches his fists, covers his eyes and weeps. I can say nothing. I crawl past them and scurry around the apartment, exploring every nook and cranny. Suddenly, my father has a change of heart. He picks up his walking stick and a rolled-up newspaper, and drives me back into my bedroom.

The door slams behind me. I don’t understand what has happened. I am unable to sleep on the bed, so instead try to sandwich myself under the chaise longue. I hear my parents whispering outside my door with Grete, who has just arrived.

It turns out they have all been staying in my apartment without my permission, using it as a ‘base’ for ‘search operations’. They wonder if I have forgotten what it is to be human. They are having serious discussions about what to do with me.

As the days wear on, and I remain in my room, it falls to Grete to leave me rotting food scraps, and to clean up for me. Her revulsion is palpable, and I can feel her affection for me diminishing. I stay under the chaise longue as much as possible when she visits.

Eventually Grete decides to move all the furniture out of the room to let me crawl around uninhibited. She brings our mother to help her. In just one hour, I lose my Arne Jacobsen egg chair and my Isamu Noguchi coffee table to Grete’s overzealous minimalism. I try to explain ‘But they’re authentic!’ but she doesn’t understand me. She instructs the removalist to send them to her usual address. There is a Jeffrey Smart on the wall that I don’t want Grete to take, so I throw my body upon it. My mother passes out.

I suddenly see myself through my mother’s eyes, and realise I am imprisoned in this body. What have I done? I am repellent. How did I come to make this irreversible mistake? I crawl back under the chaise longue.

Every morning, Grete sits cross-legged on the floor and attempts to lure me out by teaching me the alphabet using makeshift flashcards.

‘A is for Apple. B is for Banana. C is for Cockroach.’

‘Come on, Grete,’ I say. ‘I’m a cockroach, not a moron!’

But she doesn’t understand or even hear me. One day, as she progresses further into the alphabet, she stops. She tentatively holds her fingers out to stroke my antennae then retracts them, revolted. She begins to sob into her hands, and excuses herself. Outside my room, she tells our parents they have to get rid of me, or the family will fall apart.

My two brains—one located in my skull and one near my abdomen—cannot together comprehend the enormity of my sadness. I do not have lungs, but I attempt to do some deep breathing through my body. Oh, sister, mother, father. I feel weak. I am losing my strength. I sense a breeze moving through the window, a car honking down below.

Drifting away, I listen without ears to the call of an Indian myna in the street. It trills a plaintive song of grief as my apocalypse descends.

References

William J. Bell and K.G. Adiyodi (eds), The American Cockroach, Chapman and Hall, London, 1982.
Paul Davis, The Man Who Kills Cockroaches, Abstraction, New York, 1982.
Walter S. Freeman, Darwin’s Roach, Zulu Press, London, 1951.
Craig Furey, The Voyage of the Cockroach, Big Five, Boston, 2008.
Fred Illingsworth, The Evolution of the Cockroach, Lucknow Ross, Toronto, 1973.
Alexander James, Curious Encounters with the Cockroach, Tanoma, New York, 1965.
Franz Kafka, Collected Stories, trans. Willa Muir and Edwin Muir, Everyman’s Library, London, 1993.
— Le Roux, ‘Une étude expérimentale des capacités linguistiques de Blatta orientalis’ (‘An experimental study of the linguistic capabilities of Blatta orientalis’), Revue des Cafards, vol. 3, no. 1, 1934, pp. 13–36.
Noah Maher, The Inner Life of Cockroaches, Birdman Books, Auckland, 1988.
William McArdle, The Hidden Life of Cockroaches, Forty Mile, Melbourne, 1960.
Pablo Nolan, The Secret Life of Cockroaches, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, 2016.
Benedict Nicholls, The Public Life of Roaches, Hammersmith House, London, 2002.
Chad Packer, The Story of the Cockroach, Biome, Minneapolis, 1991.
Bob Rossborough, The Nature of the Cockroach, Explorer Press, Fremantle, 1993.
Bob Rossborough, The Tao of the Cockroach, Explorer Press, Fremantle, 1995.
Bob Rossborough, The Way of the Cockroach, Explorer Press, Fremantle, 1994.
Gregoria Samsa, In Search of Samsa, Gaia Raja, Bellingen, 2010.
Richard Schweid, The Cockroach Papers: A Compendium of History and Lore, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2015.
Robert Wells, Dance of the Green Tiger, Hollingswood, London, 1961.

The post C is for Cockroach appeared first on Sydney Review of Books.

National cultures are inevitably linked to versions of national identity and identity and difference are tricky concepts to bring into proximity. This essay looks at these questions in relation to temporality and the ways in which cultural studies are giving it renewed attention. How might we rethink the dance of nations in the quicksands of globalisation and a disintegrating planet?

In an interview that took place in Vancouver as part of the promotion of his most recent novel, The Golden House, Salman Rushdie noted that while researching his new book he checked to see whether there was in fact a Museum of Identity, something that he had invented in the narrative. Unable to find one he was none the less sure there would be one soon. I beg to differ. There are already many museums of identity: they are called nations.

The way nations quantify and code identity is enmeshed in many ‘invented traditions’ but of course these also operate at a semi-conscious level and can be inflamed very quickly, as we are witnessing right now. In the late 1970s to the 1990s (before I left Australia for Canada for the second time) I tried to use the institutions and policies that had sprung up around state multiculturalism to argue for a change in the canonical ramifications of Australian culture—suggesting that our institutional state apparatuses (those Althusserian modes of control) should be revising the teaching and collecting of, say, Austlit. to move beyond the fixation on the Anglo-Celtic traditions that marked the field. Why not recognize and celebrate all those other linguistic and cultural traditions that were part of the fabric of this relatively young nation?  I also argued for stepping back from an entrenched monolingualism in the service of English only. So when my colleagues asked – what migrant writers are you talking about?–  I laboured hard with others to set up new anthologies and to produce a definitive bibliography to show the many names and texts that existed here in English as well as in many other languages. I also raised the money to collect and house these texts—many were freely donated as part of the process of producing the bibliography but sustaining a library collection required funds. There was a backlash to all this work and it made me more receptive to eventually migrating once again back to Canada.

To speak to the title of this symposium, canonical Australian culture has changed over the last few decades, for example, in recognizing and celebrating Indigenous contributions. And things have also changed in relation to contributions from other traditions through the advent of important enterprises such as Ivor Indyk’s Giramondo Press (other small publishers before it—vanished with no trace). I was also thrilled to encounter the shortlist for the Stella Prize, bristling with new authors. But there is always room for more change. That is why I wrote a passionate and uncivil (my Canadian colleagues were shocked by the tone) response to a review of Antigone Kefala’s latest book of poems, Fragments, last year. It was prompted by what I felt was the familiarity and persistence of the stereotyping of Kefala’s work (and those other writers defined by a dubiously invoked ethnicity) that I had been tracing and trying to challenge for decades. Some of this has come through simple comparison—I have now been immersed in the culture of another settler colony that has changed much more rapidly and significantly over the last few decades (but then it began by recognizing two foundational national languages). But there is another dimension to all my soul searching over the years. It has to do with the rise of both valid and invalid scrutiny and critique of ‘cultural difference’ as a category in critical theory and the way it has translated into policy and the current nationalisms.

The best summary of how this ‘difference’ has been taken up in destructive ways is given by Aleksander Hemon’s brilliant The Book of My Lives. In the opening pages Hemon describes growing up in Sarajevo and how he had inadvertently destroyed the dynamics of his childhood gang by calling one of them a ‘Turk’ as a joke, not realizing until much later that this was a term for labeling a Bosnian Muslim. Arriving in Hamilton Ontario in the 1990s Hemon and his family dealt with being in a ‘cold climate that was extremely unfriendly to randomly warm human interactions’. Remember that Canada is the place where state multiculturalism was invented and is now perceived as a haven of tolerance, in part because of the contrast to its nearest neighbor. As Hemon goes on:

the need for collective self-legitimization fits snugly into the neoliberal fantasy of multiculturalism, which is nothing if not a dream of a lot of others living together, everybody happy to tolerate and learn. Differences are thus essentially required for the sense of belonging: as long as we know who we are and who we are not, we are as good as they are. In the multicultural world there are a lot of them, which ought not to be a problem as long as they stay within their cultural confines, loyal to their roots. There is no hierarchy of cultures, except as measured by the level of tolerance, which, incidentally, keeps Western democracies high above everyone else.

Hemon then describes the workings of self-othering and nostalgia in the stories migrants tell themselves. In Australia Brian Castro has many fine things to say of a similar kind and Ghassan Hage’s description of ‘ethnic caging’ (as for example in a zoo) makes comparable points to Hemon’s. So this area of critique comprises the ‘identity theft’ of my title. Enforced differences amount to identity theft. In Gayatri Spivak’s words,  ‘Everything is susceptible to exchange, but commodity is something made for exchange. Identity as commodity’. Rey Chow calls the process ‘coercive mimeticism’. But let me go back to what I’ve been trying to do over the last 45 years.

My book appeared a year ago and I titled a recent talk about it ‘Uncomfortable Cosmopolitanism.’ The book looks at the ways in which cosmopolitanism and multiculturalism were entangled and took the line that far from being at home everywhere, the neo-cosmopolitan was at home nowhere or knew that she was uncomfortable everywhere — this was her dubious reward. It kept you on your toes. The book is titled Post-Multicultural Writers as Neo-Cosmopolitan Mediators –– I should explain that the actual title I had requested (Back to the Future) was decapitated by the publisher for marketing reasons and what search engines would find. What I tried to do in this book is move my emphasis from space to time –– the original title would have helped signal this approach.

Why was I doing this? Multiculturalism has, arguably, been fixated on the spatial—leaving places; arriving at places or being prevented from arriving. For example, Canadian author Sharon Bala’s The Boat People brings together the 2008 arrival to Canada (on my doorstep in British Columbia) of 500 Tamil Sri Lankans fleeing that civil war and the internment of Japanese Canadians during the second world war. She used this conjunction to speculate about when, once one is perilously perched in a new place, it stops being provisional and what kinds of filaments and networks one establishes with others who offer the comforts of the familiar –– before one gets labeled a ghetto and accused of harbouring or generating unnatural/un-national conspiracies? Remember that citizenship ceremonies are called naturalization processes. The ghetto that is created for migrants is an amalgam of essentialist properties projected onto unfamiliar figures, indeed, it functions like a mini-nation within a larger nation which in turn generates terms (anti-bodies) meant to ‘repair’ it such as integration, assimilation — turning unlike into like; turning the supposedly rootless and unmoored into acceptable residents –– a violent process on many levels. In his final published essay, Zygmunt Bauman cited an essay by Umberto Eco to emphasise crucial distinctions among immigrants, emigrants and migrants: the first leave and then arrive (knowing where one wants to go) whereas the last, the migrants, are those who know they must leave but have no idea where to go.

The phenomenon of immigration may be controlled politically, restricted, encouraged, planned, or accepted. This is not the case with migration. Violent or pacific as it may be, it is like a natural phenomenon: it happens, and no one can control it.

In response, Bauman offers a warning:

On a planet crisscrossed tightly by trade routes and information highways, we guide our thought and actions by the precepts inherited from the era of territorial sovereignties, moats, drawbridges, stockades, barbed wires, ad hoc coalitions, and walls… It is high time and perhaps a matter of our shared life and death to face up to the complexity of our common existential condition…

An excellent illustration of the phenomenon of ‘migration’ is Ai Weiwei’s brilliant film The Human Flow (2017) where he consistently manages to convey the tension between the ‘multitude’ and their individual humanity. Researchers in the field of migration studies have also been recently influenced by Dana Diminescu’s important concept of the ‘connected’ migrant as opposed to the deracinated migrant in the sense that technology, even at its most basic, enables the maintenance of far-flung and proximate connections: the digitally networked but eternally mobile figures who perch where they can for as long as they are able in order to create a cluster based on family or other extended configurations of the virtual settler. Within those simultaneities, time functions in parallel delineations: family time; the time of specific wars or other disasters; histories—public and private, and so on.

As a way of framing this multiplicity of temporalities in my book, I had gestured towards a family history (a mix of German and Bulgarian) that was hidden in the chaos of documents surviving in my parents’ archives which I linked to archives elsewhere as well as to the parallel quests followed by other researchers. My book’s guiding principle is that we need to move beyond the monolingual paradigm that prevails within Anglophone literary studies. Using Lyotard’s concept of ‘post’ as the ‘future anterior’ (back to the future) the book sets up a concept of post-multiculturalism that goes back to salvage the elements within grassroots multiculturalism that have been forgotten in its contemporary denigration. This discussion is attached to debates in neo-cosmopolitanism over the last decades to create a framework for re-evaluating post-multicultural and Indigenous writers in settler colonies such as Canada and Australia. These writers are in turn linked with transnational writers across diasporas from Eastern Europe, China and India to raise new questions for literary and cultural studies in relation to the unruly dynamics attached to migration, belonging and forging new attachments.

The book provides an overview of concepts in the field of literary and cultural neo-cosmopolitanism (the ‘neo’ signals a non-elitist cosmopolitanism from below and one that assumes non-Western co-ordinates—not your usual suspects) and demonstrates their usefulness in re-interpreting notions of the spatial and the temporal to create a new cultural politics and ethics that speak to our challenging times. The neo-cosmopolitan debates have shown how we are more connected than ever (as Bauman reminds us) and how groups and geo-political areas that were overlooked in the past need to be brought to the centre of our cultural criticism so that we can engage more ethically and sustainably with global cultures and languages at risk.

Writers such as Christos Tsiolkas, Brian Castro, Ouyang Yu, Yasmine Gooneratne, Maxine Béneba Clarke, Antigone Kefala and Kim Scott from Australia are juxtaposed with Canadian writers such as Shani Mootoo, Anita Rau Badami, Ann Marie Fleming, Kyo Maclear and Tomson Highway and connected to ‘other’ Europeans such as Dubravka Ugresic, Herta Müller (a recent Nobel prizewinner whose writings straddle Rumania and Germany) and Fiona Tan (a visual artist born in Indonesia, raised in Australia and now based in Amsterdam). The book analyses diaspora texts by Xiaolu Guo, Ruyan Xu, and Wang Gang from China and the Chinese diaspora within neo-imperial globalization where global English often functions as metonym for Western values. By introducing the acoustic ‘noise’ of multilingualism (accents within writing) in relation to the constitutive instability within monolingual English studies the book shows that within global English diverse forms of ‘englishes’ provide routes to more robust recognition of the significance of other languages that create pluralized perspectives on our social relations in the world. So I’m emphasising the idea that cosmopolitanism means not that one is at home everywhere in the world but that one is uncomfortable everywhere in the sense that one is aware of what has been camouflaged in order to produce a veneer of belonging and, of course, how thin this veneer is.

Space-Time-Ships

But what I’d like to do now is to meditate a little on boats and how they move in time as well as between spaces. This aspect of my talk has to do with the Symposium title’s referencing of Coleridge’s poem ‘The Ancient Mariner’ and so I’m taking up the mariner’s position to force my account on you. In the framing of that poem the ancient mariner buttonholes a wedding guest who is eagerly on his way to attend a celebration. The old man’s tale is punctuated by the sound of the wedding festivities—an uncomfortable situation indeed where one kind of time is arrested and another time creeps in. I’ll be dealing not just with boats that arrive, such as the settler colonisers in Australia or the former cattle ship that, under the auspices of the IRO (International Refugee Association), transported my parents, my 4-year old self and 2- year old brother (my mother being pregnant with my youngest brother, the only one born in Australia). Amongst the little luggage they were permitted to carry my impractical parents carted a trunk filled with German books. No wonder I have revered books ever since (and, of course, have a fetishistic relation to them—they stand in for many things). We know that boats are forms of spatiality, containers that transport you from one place to another and one state to another. We think of the mythical ferries that take one to an afterlife and arguably the boats of migration may take you to another space but they also carry with them another time or time-place. Hemon’s text suggests that we don’t simply exchange one life for another; how we live in that other place remains with us—that we carry those left-behind temporalities with us. They continue to haunt us, for example, through the languages that we associate with the other place. The fanatical adherence to English monolingualism in Australia, for example, might be associated with the continuing fear of having been (continuing to be) cut off from a fervently imagined but phantasmatic mother country where it seems our real lives continue to unfold.

What about the boats that never arrive? This was a question asked by my colleague Michelle O’Brien who is working on this theme. In terms of recent global history, one of the most horrifying examples was the St. Louis, with over 900 Jewish refugees who were refused landing in Cuba, the USA and Canada in 1939. One third went on to die in the Holocaust. In Australia the Tampa, a Norwegian ship filled with refugees from Afghanistan was turned away in 2001 and marked the beginning of particularly horrific treatments of refugees and asylum seekers. In 2001 there was of course also the SIEV X where 353 died (146 children and 142 women). In Canada, one of the ways in which the country belatedly recognizes its marginalized groups is through another boat story called the Komagata Maru—one of the themes in Bala’s text mentioned earlier.

Komagata Maru Incident (Gurdit Singh with passengers). Image courtesy of the Vancouver Public Library.

This was a boat of 376 immigrants (mostly Punjabis from Raj India and thus British citizens) who in 1914 were denied entry to Canada (again on my doorstep) and left to languish for two months under increasingly deteriorating circumstances. After being denied entry nineteen returned to their deaths. The Komagata Maru was not permitted to land but has become something of a rallying point for Canadian Sikhs, including those who are now prominent politicians. Harjit Sajjan is the current Canadian Minister for Defense and Jagmeet Singh is the current leader of the NDP (New Democratic Party). Why am I mentioning this? Because both have been subjected to the kinds of slurs in the press familiar to those perceived (at certain moments) as having links to ethnic minorities and therefore being very quickly defined by those imagined ethnic affiliations. In other words, that their nationalist loyalties were always already suspect. So here we have another example of the ‘identity theft’ of my title. It has been educational to observe those slurs against Jagmeet Singh occurring in the daily national papers—that he is suspect on the basis of, at a younger age, attending Sikh rallies that may have featured a portrait of a supporter of the Sikh separatist Khalistan party. It’s like saying that an Australian politician with Irish antecedents attended an Irish Australian rally that may have featured a reference to the IRA. In the Museum of Identity that is Canada, even Canada, it does not take very much for one to be suddenly cast into that murky den of conspiracy that culminates in accusations of potential terrorism. And even though Canada is not an island continent like Australia, there is a comparable hysteria connected to the arrival of boats. That hysteria is given an unexpected twist in Felicity Castagna’s No More Boats. Perhaps this excessive affect has something to do with the symbolic resonance of boats themselves: because they are spatially unmoored; because they also carry a suspect temporality. This is illustrated in a well known recent example, Nam Le’s short story ‘The boat’ (where the boat arrives in the sense that it is surrounded by land birds as the small and dehydrated body of  Truong is consigned to the surrounding sharks––representative of those for whom the boat never arrives).

In terms of my 4-year old self already enmeshed in German and able to read, while of course I was young enough to forge a self in English very quickly there was always the ghostly self that was intermittently present in another temporal framework, one that I recovered (or invented) to some degree when I returned intermittently to Germany. There was another parallel self I encountered in both German and English (but alas not Bulgarian) during my visits to my father’s country. Temporal selves created in other circumstances intrude in unexpected ways.

Mireille Eid Astore is an Australian artist who arrived from Beirut in 1975 (around age 14).

Mireille Eid Astore, ‘Tampa’ 2003. Image used with permission of the artist.

In the blurb on her website about the performance of her piece ‘Tampa’  (2003), Astore describes it as both sculpture and performance in which she arrived every day with her suitcase and stayed inside the sculpture from 10.00 am until 6.00 pm.

The ‘point of view’ of the caged was central to the performance. The inversion of the gaze as an exploratory tool and an illustration of the active versus passive vision of the incarcerated were critical to the outcome. As such, each day at 10 am, 12 pm, 2 pm and 4 pm, I took photographs from within my prison and placed them on this website.

In her essay ‘When the artwork takes the pictures’ Astore speaks more about this process of returning the gaze by listing some of the responses she received. Silent herself throughout the process she was asked such questions as ‘Do you speak English?’ or ‘When are you going to get your permanent residency visa?’.

But let me turn finally to another image that has haunted me for many years and resonates with

Hossein Valamanesh, ‘Longing Belonging’. Image courtesy of the artist and GAGPROJECTS |Adelaide, Australia.

boats in the sense that they transport us in time as much as space, Hossein Valamanesh’s ‘Longing Belonging’ (1997). Here is a blurb about this piece from the Art Gallery of NSW, where it is held:

In ‘Longing belonging’, a photograph by Rick Martin of a Persian carpet burning in the Australian mallee scrub is presented behind the burnt carpet itself. This improbable event (the burning of the carpet) in an improbable place (desert scrublands) embodies the desires and disjunctions of finding oneself in a new land and integrating into an alien landscape…

The carpet suggests Iranian cultural traditions. Carpet designs are often of stylised flowers and fields, a landscape of the imagination. The carpet is partially consumed by fire in an arid landscape that has been shaped by fire over many thousands of years. This work embodies a sense of trying to locate cultures and the inherent violence of this process, of substituting one way of living for another and of the need to give up part of oneself in order to adapt to a new life. However, the flame is also cleansing; it suggests new possibilities. In burning through the central medallion of the carpet, it has left a dark and velvety void rather than just desiccated soil, a place of possibilities and imagination.

Mary Knight (in the monograph published on Valamanesh’s work) points out that the burnt carpet was woven by a nomadic tribe.  As Derrida (via Spivak) reminds us, in his text Glas, the navette or weaving shuttle, takes the form of a boat, so perhaps boats and carpets are kindred. They are of course more lightheartedly connected through the flying carpets of orientalist traditions and here, once more, time is a passenger. The violence of the burning recalls as well Suvendrini Perera’s heartbreaking essay on Tamil Sri Lankan refugees who when denied a visa immolated themselves in response:

Over the next twenty-four hours, Leo Seemanpillai’s harrowed body continued to weep its raw agony, suspended between life and death, while his few undamaged organs were harvested, according to his prior request. (Leo was a regular blood donor, a volunteer at the local church.)

Their organs are patriated (naturalized) after the ‘unnatural’ bodies have been eliminated ––burning refugee boats and burning carpets connected by a shuttle; boats and shuttles that may not complete their processes. Identity conferred in analyses of ‘ethnic’ writers often amounts to identity theft where identity is relegated to being a commodity. What if we fasten on Valamanesh’s burnt carpet in the Australian scrub as a vanishing point that opens up onto another model of translation and critical analysis?

Arrival is not what it used to be and I’ve been arriving in Australia annually for many years. Perhaps the underlying assumption is that if we prevent others from arriving this means that paradoxically and perversely we have arrived. That is my concluding provocation.

Works Cited:

Mieille Astore, ‘When the artwork takes the pictures,’ Law, Text, Culture, 2006.
Sharon Bala, The Boat People, Penguin Random House, 2018.
Zygmunt Bauman, ‘Between separation and integration: Strategies of cohabitation in the era of diasporization and Internet,’ Popular Communication: The International journal of Media and Culture, 16.1, 2018, 1-3.
Felicity Castagna, No More Boats, Giramondo, 2017.
Rey Chow, The Protestant Ethnic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Columbia University Press, 2002.
Dana Diminescu, ‘The Connected Migrant: An Epistemological Manifesto,’ Social Sciences Information, 47.4, 2008.
Umberto Eco ‘Migration, Tolerance, and the Intolerable,’  Five Moral Pieces. Trans. A. McEwen, Harcourt, 2001.
Sneja Gunew, Post-Multicultural Writers as Neo-Cosmopolitan Mediators, Anthem Press, 2017.
Sneja Gunew,Lolo Houbein, Jan Mahyuddin and Alexandra Karakostas-Seda, eds. A Bibliography of Australian Multicultural Writers, Deakin University Press, 1992.
Ghassan Hage, Against Paranoid Nationalism: Searching for Hope in a Shrinking Society, Pluto Press, 2003.
Aleksander Hemon, The Book of My Lives, Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2013.
Antigone Kefala, Fragments, Giramondo, 2016.
Mary Knight, ‘Longing belonging,’ Hossein Valamanesh: Out of Nothingness, edited by M. Knights and I. North, Wakefield Press, 2011
Francois Lyotard, Le postmoderne éxpliqué aux enfants: Correspondance 1982-1985, Éditions Galilée, 1986.
Nam Le: The Boat, Canongate, 2008.
Suvendrini Perera; ‘Burning Our Boats’ JASAL, 15.3, 2015.
Salman Rushdie, The Golden House, Alfred A. Knopf, 2017.
Gayatri Spivak, ‘Acting Bits/Identity Talk, in An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization, Harvard University Press, 2012.

The post Museums of Identity and Other Identity Thefts appeared first on Sydney Review of Books.

This essay is part of a new Sydney Review of Books essay series devoted to nature writing titled the New Nature. We’ve asked critics, essayists, poets, artists and scholars to reflect on nature in the twenty-first century and to grapple with the literary conventions of writing nature. Read the other essays in the New Nature series here.

1

Outscape. — Oneself subtracted (poet) from the poem; poem thrown outward from any centre, or, away from the poet.

2

Inscape. — For G.M. Hopkins:

‘All the world is full of inscape and chance left free to act falls into an order as well as purpose’ (1873).

Inscape a question of chance. No less, outscape. Expansion of worlds as poetic operation; falls, folds outwardways; acts of chance left without purpose…

3

Pure projected detachment. — Outscape first imagined in parody by Northrop Frye, who in Anatomy of Criticism writes:

Our next cardinal point is difficult to name: we might almost parody Hopkins’s term and call it the poem of ‘outscape.’ It is the lyrical counterpart of what in drama we call the mime, the center of the irony which is common to tragedy and comedy.

Frye then makes the following remark:

It is a convention of pure projected detachment, in which an image, a situation, or a mood is observed with all the imaginative energy thrown outward to it and away from the poet…The lyrical poetry of China and Japan appears to be based very largely on this convention, in striking contrast to Western poetry, where epigram shows much more of a tendency to attach emotions or make out a rhetorical case. Some of Shakespeare’s sonnets, such as ‘The expense of spirit in a waste of shame/’ are exceptions.

4

Inorganic form. ― Denis Levertov in her 1965 essay ‘Some Notes on Organic Form’ calls upon the ‘intrinsic form’ of Hopkins’s inscape, which as she defines it is ‘the pattern of essential characteristics both in single objects and (what is more interesting) in objects in a state of relation to each other’. Instress is therefore an ‘apperception of inscape’ which Levertov extends to intellectual and emotional experience, thereafter what she calls ‘organic poetry’: ‘I would speak of the inscape of an experience (which might be composed of any and all of these elements, including the sensory) or of the inscape of a sequence or constellation of experiences.’ Exploratory, organic poetry intuits order, ‘a form beyond forms, in which forms partake’.

The shifting poetries of that decade and the emerging poetries of the present to show us the possibility of a constellation of experience as emerging extrinsically, for this the relation between objects and between experiences (or altogether outside experience) is further a condition of outscape. No inspiration without  expiration with regard to a poetics of breath: the ‘open mouth’ that inspires is also a breathing out. Inorganic form: not so much ear and eye ‘checking for accuracy’ as eyear given over to chance; chance left free to act to the disjunction and dissonance of outscaped forms.

5

Exterior and interior form. — As Jacques Roubaud puts it a poem has ‘two internal and two external aspects,’ the two external aspects being the written form and the oral form: ‘Both are fixed . . . and constitute the score . . . The score is the coupling of these two external forms of a poem’. Internal forms comprise the ‘wRitten’ and ‘aural’ form. External forms are interpersonal, internal forms personal, but reading is not reducible to either. Does outscape preclude internal forms? To this I would say there is no need to eliminate the internal forms, except to say perhaps the internal aspect itself has some outfacing aspects. Still, for Roubaud: ‘A poem cannot be reduced to its external aspect alone. If it has not entered a single mind, a poem does not yet exist’.

6

The critical exterior. ― Besides the pure projected detachment of a poem, a critical exterior emerges as a likely parallel in the sphere of interpretation. In Allegories of Reading, Paul de Man noted that despite the coincidence of semiology and rhetoric from French contexts, in the American academy the winds were not blowing — and this was the early seventies — ‘in the direction of formalist and intrinsic criticism,’ going on to say that ‘We may no longer be hearing too much about relevance but we keep hearing a great deal about reference, about the nonverbal “outside” to which language refers.’ Such winds clearing out or doing away with the scourge of Formalism would remove the tyrannical muse of form that bled dry the dialectic of internal self-reflection and extrinsic reference:

On the other hand―and this is the real mystery―no literary formalism, no matter how accurate and enriching in its analytic powers, is ever allowed to come into being without seeming reductive. When form is considered to be the external trappings of literary meaning or content, it seems superficial and expendable. The development of intrinsic, formalist criticism in the twentieth century has changed this model: form is now a solipsistic category of self-reflection, and the referential meaning is said to be extrinsic. The polarities of inside and outside have been reversed, but they are still the same polarities that are at play: internal meaning has become outside reference, and the outer form has become the intrinsic structure.

The inside out of outer form and the outer interior reverses the situation and so our fortunes will have changed all our origins: we will have never been Formalist. Neither in literary history nor, in this case, literary theory. But what that divide showed was that Formalism as extrinsic criticism, or a gesture toward a kind of “critical exterior” could not take into account the possibility that the outscaping poem could likewise function outside reference. From shell to kernel and kernel to shell: poetry of this guise is not referential toward or unto an external event because the poem itself is an event. Internal meaning plus intrinsic structure: whether much or nothing ‘happens’ in a poem is of secondary concern. If nothing seems to be happening, critics may pay close attention. How extrinsic reversals occur in rhythm and rhythmic concepts of the poem is how outscape moves to outstress.

7

Outstress. — External form: outscape. External energy: outstress. Exterior pattern known through interior pattern. The result is spiritless air or unseen interiors. Scape for Hopkins is exterior pattern; outscape is therefore the exterior of an exterior. Through outscape is gained outsight of the Object or objective world; such outsight similarly is gained through sense-observation but such sense-observation is Archimedean.

The problem with outscape as theory is what to make of it as history. In some initial assessment we could therefore search for readings for those with a certain disposition for outscape ― a disposition present primarily in Hopkins, but which we can equally find in the crabbed wailing of Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, Gertrude Stein’s Yet Dish and other like works, and in the contemporary poetry of Jackson Mac Low and Hannah Weiner. From these instances the poet-outscaper is one who enrhythms things from a point outside themselves and therefore seeks not to stabilise or neutralise the dissonance of outscaped sense-observation, even if that sense-observation occasionally resounds off the personal body onto a page or theatre of performance (city, gallery, living room, panel, discs, bean, mirror, fractal, barricade, reef, undrilled rock . . . ).

Such instances are not the only ones for an outscaping. Which is to say also that outstress, unlike instress, is not a unifying force of patterning. A sudden realisation of external patterning illuminates internal patterning. Inscape leads to Incarnation and Christ, as Hopkins claimed, but outscape leads to a world without divinity, a philosophical world, hall of endless exteriors and ‘excitable’ geometries.

8

Prosodic dissonance. — In Jackson Mac Low, no outscape without dissonance; presenting the total uniformity or uncertainty of stress or microstress. Uniformity? Conceive of an evenly protracted run of stress or unstress beyond the fall of three: molossics . . . Prosodic dissonance of outscape is discernable in a good many passages in Mac Low’s Forties and Stanzas for Iris Lezak (1971) where he uses graphic marks for stress. How one might hear the conversation in Mac Low’s play Port-au-Prince —

CONVERSATION II (10):
C. Roper tapir; tapir-crone.
D. Inept, crone-Croat.
E. Retip, retup―croup.
C. Recap nicer-retín―tapir; caper!
(As CDE say II 10 times, they gradually become less conspicuous,
but always remain clearly audible. At any time up until the end of
CDE’s 5th saying of II, AB become more conspicuous & begin
CONVERSATION III. During their later sayings of II & afterwards,
CDE may begin & continue any quiet occupation markedly different
from that engaged in by AB previously.)

— in which the stress falls on the second syllable of retín? Mac Low adds by way of explanation: ‘It is to be noted that ‘Croat’ is a 2-syllable word & ‘Port-au-Prince’ is pronounced as in French’.  The ‘au’ here is unstressed, yet in the ‘Retip, retup―croup,’ none can one conspicuously hear as unstressed. Microstress in ‘Roper tapir; tapir-crone.’ Outscape may require the eradication, relaxation of the uniformity around, or updating of all systems of the graphic marking for stress.

9

Rocketing outward, sprung prose. — In Hannah Weiner the page has become an archway to ‘sprung prose’ (Charles Bernstein) and, as Dodie Bellamy puts it on Hannah Weiner’s Open House: ‘Weiner began in overdrive and rocketed outward, inhabiting texts and communities with the same skill with which she herself was inhabited.’ Hence seeing words in the clairvoyant rocketing outward; outstress of inhabitation. Outscape is multiaxial (or ‘objective’ as Weiner thought it). When the poem collides with exteriors its geometries fold out, the poem becomes exterior to itself.

10

Eliminating rhythm. — Extrinsic criticism, external measure. In Gertrude Stein, as Astrid Lorange notes, objects are not external, and neither is grammar. There is no grammar external to language, hence ‘matter and meaning’ contribute to poetic objecthood: ‘The objects that occupy Stein’s work―cakes, butter, apples, dogs, roses, and so on―do not represent specific objects in an external reality, nor do they speak of a purely linguistic realm of universal “cakesness,” “butterness,” “appleness,” “dogness,” or “roseness” . . . A cake in a poem is not a cake elsewhere, nor is it, mimetically speaking, a representation of cake’. There would seem then to be no outside, nor an inside. Poetic objectality is recognisable ‘even if it has no external reference or internal description’.

We may then turn simply to ‘composition’; and here her avowed practice of writing to a tuning fork and metronome in The Autobiography point toward the possibility of Steinian externals. Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus, Lorange notes, would read meter as an ‘external, expressive manifestation’ and one which is dogmatic ‘because it assumes that there is a determinate (and thereby authentic) rhythm that organizes a composition internally and represents it externally’). For Hopkins, inscape bridged such an impasse, but for Stein ‘eliminating rhythm’ is a way of foregoing the externality of meter. Lorange suggests that eliminating rhythm brings us back to the dynamcis of composition: ‘rhythm and writing are relatedly durational: rather than writing to an external measure, she wrote to the dynamics of her own composition’. Eliminating rhythm to externalise it. Outer core of poetic objecthood: tuning fork, metronome.

11

Neurasthenic outscape. — Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven’s ‘neurasthenic’ effects. Her body as a site for outscape whose public intimacy manifests in the neurasthenic cries of irrationality, as Amelia Jones puts it, core to dada’s interruptive association with the modern. The Baroness as flamboyant-ethical neuraesthete.

12

Microstress: motivation for outsress. — Outstress mirrors exterior being. Some possibility of a bridge between microtonal music and poetic microstress. Outscaped stress intricates itself to half-stress, quarter-stress, and thereafter no limit to any further discovery of what can fall between these. Attention paid to consonantal stress, beyond voweling, stray syllables, or extra syllables added on, otherwise ‘outriding feet’ as Hopkins called them. The effect of stress outscapes the body in a manner similar to Jacques Lacan’s ‘patheme’: poetry’s effect on the body is one of passion. The Baroness would seem to have shown this. However if outscaped microstress is the pathemic effect of poetry on a body; its expressions cannot be determined in advanced, microstress patterns the materials of outstress. lluminates the outside of an exterior. Some similarity may be perceived here with Nicolas Abraham’s psychoanalytic theory of rhythm, in which he is able to speak of the various ‘layers’ of the poetic object, excavated by psychoanalysis rather than in the case of Wolfgang Iser, the archaeology of interpretation.

Abraham’s emphasis on expression may find counterpoint in outscaped poetics. We ought to be able to imagine outscape, however, outside the realm of experience altogether. Consider Hanne Darboven’s ‘I use no forms of expression.’ We may say, what are these ‘forms’? What is, precisely, a poetic ‘expression’? Who says ‘I use’? Can we say that any artistic expression unfolds from a centre? How is pure projected detachment comparable to a centring that favours the presentation of expression?

Why is it that I am inexpressive? What have I given up, and what have I gained? You can say ‘I use no forms of expression,’ or, ‘I do no longer because there are alternate thinkingways of composition.’

13

Geometries of outscape. — Is it possible to provide a spatial character of outscape? It will be enough to say now that I have found, at least, three principle geometries that pattern the poetry of outscape: panels, discs, beans.

Fig. 1: Saussure’s panels: successive innovations.

The panel reveals covering as well as transfer. As Ferdinand de Saussure was in the habit of showing in diagrams like the above, two panels equate to area, and the evolution of linguistic innovation (dialect). Panels, conference halls, ceilings, changes.

The disc of outscape. When one approaches the operation of outscape one experiences the effect of fog, which pressures the disk of the subject. The disk of the subject is the outer edge of a poetic plane: outstress of outscape. Disc, disk, dish. Hopkins: ‘Sk and sc are notoriously often exchanged for sh, as bushy, bosky, rush, ruscus. So δίσκος may be the same word as dish, particularly as the ancient quoit was not a flat ring but a plate, disc.’ Ice forms on Hopkins’s tadpole basin:

Fig 2. Hopkins’s agar-disc (tadpole basin). Fig 3. (right) From EvFL: ‘Orgasmic Toast.’

Thus internal patterning. Forms of disk are repeatable but may fall into categories or ‘axes.’ Compare this with the ‘cristaline’ disc The Baroness writes in the pulsing, vertical stanzas of ‘Orgasmic Toast.’ Galactic orbital disks come in several kinds. D.N. Spergel, in ‘The Shape of the Galaxy,’ writes the following by way of description:

In a non-rotating (or slowly rotating) galaxy, the existence of several orbital families allows the existence of three dynamically distinct components: (a) an elliptical disk of gas and stars whose major axis is perpendicular to the bar; (b) a triaxial stellar component consisting of stars on box orbits (an observer moving on a loop orbit would observe that this component has a large asymmetric drift); and (c) a stellar disk-like component orientated perpendicular to the galactic plane.

Outstress for beans, bean-shaker, bean-capsule. Alison Knowles’s The Bean Rolls (1963) and other beanworks, become ‘a vehicle, a catalyst for a particular kind of attention’ (Robinson, ‘The Sculpture of Indeterminacy’). Beans: outscaped shapes with internal movement (hollowed) sounding beanscaped rhythms (emerging from bean-capsule). In Plah Plah Plu Plah (2009) the rhythm of the ‘Bean Turners’ is cast upon page:

Fig 4. From Knowles, Plah Plah Plu Plah: bean score.

14

The weather report. — Attention to weather. Few records are broken anymore except those pertaining to weather. One records the weather, but knows little about what it is doing. The weather report is never correct. Its artifice throws us. We may imitate its patterns, speak about those patterns, or use those patterns to produce certain effects. In his Journals, which draw a continuity with his poetry, Hopkins writes the weather: ‘Dull. Dull chiefly. Dull and cold. Fine. Fine and warm. Fair with clouds. Fair with more clouds than sun.’ Hopkins sketches clouds, and the graphic markers for instress lead to a certain cloud ‘like an outlying eyebrow’ which returns the gaze: ‘What you look hard at seems to look hard at you, hence the true and the false instress of nature’.

Fig 5. Hopkins’s cloud-brow (1871)

15

Outdoors. — The final line in the final poem of Jackson Mac Low, which Anne Tardos has called the ‘Waldoboro Poems,’ written 22 September 2004 at the Creeleys’ house, appears to tell us something similar: ‘I didn’t go inside before, but now I will, but not for long.’ A corollary in performance art: Tehching Hsieh, who stayed ‘outside’ for an entire year for Outdoor Piece (1981-1982). The pure projected detachment of Hsieh’s piece not simply ‘feat’ but rather an outhabitation of outscape, unfixing living thought in time. In art as in poetry; going indoors only as a last resort.

16

Romantic outscape. — In poetry it cannot be assumed that outscape is a total theory for poetic rhythm or a total explanation for the whole gamut of activities happening at the level of grapho,- or phono-text. Posed as a question, it may be possible to hear certain outscaped ecologies in Charlotte Smith’s Beachy Head and Robert Southey’s ‘The Cataract of Lodore’ (1820). An ecology has entered entered into the poem at its centre; (‘Collecting, projecting,/Receding and speeding,/And shocking and rocking,/And darting and parting…’). Pure projected detachment begins at this turn. Or at the very beginning of Beachy Head. Fogged on level sand, the poems would have had to escape clarity, from a judgmental point-of-view, in order for Smith to hear the stress of ‘eláborate hármony, brought óut [my emphasis] / From fŕetted śtop, or módulated áirs / Of vócal ścience.’

17

Learning to picture. — Lionel Fogarty in ‘Ecology,’ from 1 July 1982 writes an ‘I./am’ of taipans, brolgas, geckoes: ‘our systems woven from an eco-system / so don’t send us to pollution / we are just trying to picture / this life without frustration.’

18

Distinction. — Two figures: Stein, writer, and Agnes Martin, painter. The effect of an Agnes Martin painting is such that each is totally different. The effect of Stein’s writing, on the other hand, is that it is all the same because of difference. Is this because one works with paint and canvas, the other with words and stanzas?

19

Extrinsics. ― Refusal of the intrinsic in interpretation. Proposition sans judgement.

20

Archimedean fulcrum. — Inscape is Parnassian, outscape is Archimedean. Hopkins’ Parnassus is the ‘flying thither’ of fancy at the level of the poet’s mind (Kumiko Tanabe). Parnassian verse’s Popean origins extend to what Hopkins identifies as a similar artifice in Victorian verse. The less inspired, the more Parnassian (even less inspired: Castalian), no less for its Beauty. Being outside inspiration, the inner breath of the inspired poem, for Hopkins, would be one in which the faculty that attends to the objects of nature is indeed outer, able to harness rhetoric for fancy, to perceive the world from a point outside itself. Yet Archimedean artifice also involves flight, but away from the poet’s mind and away from inspiration, and thereafter away from all centres. In the godless world of outscape one has to imagine a poem emerging from no centre. Another way of putting it: any such avoidance of the presentation of a centre we may call an Archimedean fulcrum, the Archimedean point as a vantage point of a poetic ecology.*

* Joan Retallack’s 2008 poem ‘Archimedes’ New Light: Geometries of Excitable Species’: the shock of alterity convinces you that you are not reading what has flown thither from a poet’s mind; rather travels through the multiaxial geometries of a poem borne elegiacally out of its procedures. They score new vantage points from which one can consider the geometric outscaping of a universe and its planetary ecologies.

21

Magnetosphere. — We may say a poetic ecology begins with the outscape of the axis breaching the archscape of hemisphere. X of axis marks risk, crossed at the axial point of earth’s nutational wobble. Comparable to whistlers: very low frequency electromagnetic waves generated by lightning that bounce from one hemisphere to another, make a certain music. Douglas Khan:

Whistlers are but one form of natural  radio, but their musical character and quasi-musical and sonic appeal . . . Listening to them can be similar to sitting entranced by tiny flashes of sun and noises in the rush and crackling of a creek, not knowing, perhaps, whether certain flashes are the backs of small silvery fish, that is, as if the creek were ionized and fish swam thousands of kilometers into the magnetosphere and back . . . They bounce between the earth and ionosphere and at times catch a ride into outer space on magneto-ionix flux lines before descending back to earth in the opposite hemisphere. Arching over the equator, whistlers are globe-trotting signals, earth signals in the truest sense.

22

Learning to deny the promise of meaning. —We may say: the poetry of outscape resists the promise of a univocality of meaning. Embracing risk, expiration of experiment. Notation, nutation, nonrelation, negation, intonation, tonotation. In Pillsbury’s The Reading of Words of 1897, a text learning to deny meaning’s promise, I find the following quotation pertaining to the nutation of words:

In experiments to determine the amount of change in a printed word, used as an ideogram, that might be made without a change in the perceived word, PILLSBURY exposed words containing various misprints. An omitted letter was most often noticed, a wrong letter less and a blurred letter least. The characterless blur of a mutilated letter furnished more suggestive material for the mind to make into the correct one than a wrong letter did; an omitted letter altered the picture of the syllable. Thus, ‘shabbilw’ briefly exposed was read as ‘shabbily’ and associated with the word ‘genteelly,’ the subject declaring that he saw the word spelled ‘shabbily.’ ‘Eaxth’ was read as ‘earth,’ ‘fashxon’ as ‘fashion,’ ‘cotton’ as ‘custard,’ ‘ordnary’ as ‘ordinary,’ etc.’

23

Outscape: smog-nudisme (effect of fog). — False outscape: beauty of nature. Barer in times of climate catastrophe. Masked, roam streets. Neither anarchic nor spontaneist, such outstress takes us through responder, respondee, spondee, Sponti, to Sponti-Szene. This proposition needs more work.

24

The Voynich proposition. — Luciferean drives. Cryptopoetic outscape. All out, no in. All out there: extuition of chance, left free to act without purpose.

Works Cited

Abraham, Nicolas. Rhythms: On the Work, Translation, and Psychoanalysis. Stanford:Stanford UP, 1995. Print.
Blitz, Leo and David N. Spergel. ‘The Shape of the Galaxy.’ The Astrophysical Journal 370 (March 1991): 205-224. Print.
de Man, Paul. Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and
Proust. New Haven: Yale UP, 1996. Print.
de Saussure, Ferdinand. Course in General Linguistics. Trans. Roy Harris. London: Gerald
Duckworth, 1983. Print.
Fogarty, Lionel. Yoogum yoogum. Ringwood: Penguin Books, 1982. Print.
Freytag-Loringhoven, Elsa von. Body Sweats: The Uncensored Writings of Elsa von Freytag-
Loringhoven. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2011. Print.
Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1957. Print.
Hopkins, G.M. The Major Works. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2009. Print.
Iser, Wolfgang. The Range of Interpretation. New York: Columbia UP, 2005. Print.
Jones, Amelia. Irrational Modernism: A Neurasthenic History of New York Dada. Cambridge:
MIT Press, 2004. Print.
Khan, Douglas. Earth Sound Earth Signal: Energies and Earth Magnitude in the Arts. Los
Angeles: U of California P, 2013. Print.
Knowles, Alison. Plah plah pli plah. Chicago: Sara Ranchouse, 2009. Print.
Levertov, Denise. ‘Some Notes on Organic Form.’ Poetry (September 1965): 420-25, Print.
Lorange, Astrid. How Reading Is Written: A Brief Index to Gertrude Stein. Middletown, CT:
Wesleyan UP, 2014. Print.
Lyotard, Jean-Franҫois. Driftworks. New York: Semiotext(3), 1984. Print.
Mac Low, Jackson. The Twin Plays: Port-au-Prince & Adams County Illinois. New York:
Something Else Press, 1966. Print.
Mac Low, Jackson. Stanzas for Iris Lezak. Millerton, NY: Something Else Press, 1972. Print.
Mac Low, Jackson. Thing of Beauty: New and Selected Works. Berkeley: U of California P, 2008, Print.
Pillsbury, Walter Bowers. The Reading of Words: A Study in Appreciation. Worcester, Mass:
Cornell University, 1897. Print.
Retallack, Joan. Afterrimages. Middletown, Conn: Wesleyan UP, 1995. Print.
Robinson, Julia. ‘The Sculpture of Indeterminacy.’ Art Journal 63 (2004): 96-115. Print.
Roubaud, Jacques. ‘Prelude: Poetry and Orality.’ In Marjorie Perloff and Craig Dworkin, eds.
The Sound of Poetry / The Poetry of Sound. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2009. 18-28. Print.
Smith, Charlotte. Beachy Head, With Other Poems. London: The Author, and Sold by J.
Johnson, 1807. Print.
Southey, Robert. The Poetical Works of Robert Southey: With a Memoir. Boston: Houghton,
Osgood and Company, 1880. Print.
Stein, Gertrude. Writings 1903-1932. New York: Library of America, 1998. Print.
Weiner, Hannah. Hannah Weiner’s Open House. Berkeley: Kenning Editions, 2007. Print.

The post Outscape: Twenty-four propositions appeared first on Sydney Review of Books.

Coleridge wrote that ‘Poetry gives most pleasure when only generally and not perfectly understood.’ In his epic, ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,’ published in 1798, the albatross is an uncertain presence, neither its species or colour is specified. It displays affection, presaging hope, guiding the ship and accompanying its crew for ‘food or play.’ But once the mariner randomly shoots the bird, the albatross becomes a burden, morphing into a symbol of atonement. Unnaturally slung from the mariner’s neck it crosses a boundary between the physical and moral world. The mariner endures seven days without rain or wind, suffering fever, hallucinations, the death of his crew and shipwreck. Native to the south polar seas, albatrosses were rarely sighted by European sailors, an early source being Cook’s voyages. There is overall agreement that Coleridge’s source was George Shelvocke’s account of a black albatross, also known as ‘sooty albatross’ or ‘quakerbird’, which he encountered during his round the world voyage, 1719-22. The bird was shot by the second captain because it was considered an ill-omen when the winds were unfavourable. Certainly, the albatross is othered in the poem, not merely by the laws of hospitality but by its uncharacteristic depiction and by the mythical, male-centred language that Coleridge used.

William Empson reads in the poem’s nautical tropes an anti-colonial subtext, while J.R Ebbotson interprets abolitionist themes of ‘European racial guilt, and the need to make restitution.’ This would be consistent with Coleridge’s early aspirations for social justice and the utopian pursuit of a Pantisocracy he shared with fellow abolitionist, Robert Southey. In a more recent essay, Debbie Lee argues that the mariner’s febrile affliction and ‘black lips’, along with the entire crew’s, is symptomatic of yellow fever, a haemorrhagic infection for which African slaves had immunity, whereas Europeans were particularly susceptible with horrific consequences during the era of the slave trade. She notes that in the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth century, fever accounted for 70 per cent of all European deaths in the Caribbean, with yellow fever being the main cause. So it would be reasonable to read the poem as allegory, critiquing the injustice perpetuated by European racism and slavery.

Does Coleridge correspondingly mean to illuminate for readers, how the chi or imaginary spirit is forfeited to rational arguments? Psychoanalytic critic David Beres contends that while the dream state and the unconscious inform the poem, Coleridge wrote in a state of alertness, applying principles of thought to poetic structure from ‘pure imagination’. Consider the real albatross, transmigrating perilously through the central stanzas of an epic ballad that begins in medias res, the grey-bearded sailor cautioning the wedding guest with his outlandish tale. The bird’s presence reminds us that the reason we write is to rediscover language, as it navigates narrative frames, post-truths and other discourses.

We cannot remain whole and in endless dialogue with difference: something is bound to be sacrificed. But why the albatross?  In J.M Coetzee’s novel, Elizabeth Costello, the vegetarian novelist and cat lover Elizabeth, encounters two albatrosses, a mother and fledgling bird. The mature albatross regards her ‘steadily…with amusement’, while the fledgling is ‘more hostile.’ Coetzee demystifies the albatross, freeing it, momentarily, from its literary cords, while tying new ligatures:

It opens its beak, gives a long, soundless cry of warning. So she and the two birds remain, inspecting each other. Before the fall, she thinks. This is how it must have been before the fall. I could miss the boat, stay here. Ask God to take care of me.

The word ‘albatross’ is produced by Adam’s vocabulary in Genesis, language anticipating other kinds of domination by men over birds, animals and also women. Elizabeth Costello quietly reflects on this, speaking to the Russian singer standing nearby in a dark green anorak as they both observe the large, mottled bird: ‘An albatross …That is the English word. I don’t know what they call themselves.’

The ambiguity of the albatross compelled me to speak at a public forum on gatekeeping, hosted graciously, and provocatively, by the J.M Coetzee Centre for Creative Practice at the University of Adelaide. I had been apprehensive about this — because it is fatiguing to talk about ‘racism’ and ‘diversity’, to offer new frameworks, something Reni Eddo-Lodge brilliantly concedes in Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race. Theorising oppression diverts critical focus from my creative work. I have been targeted in social media with various claims and veiled threats. For years I have felt marginalised as a literary writer of colour in a culture that seeks to limit its migrant authors to the closed narratives of immigration, assimilation and consumption. The subliminal double gesture of the albatross proved too intriguing for me to resist. It became an interception, marking its distinct trajectory through the conforming ubiquity of signs.

It occurred to me that an albatross appears briefly in my poem, ‘The Ghost Ship,’ quite possibly tracing a subconscious origin from Coleridge, since language often comes to us from the shared repository of our dreamed lives. What does the whiteness of my albatross signal, as it lays slain in the cradle of a man’s elbow? Is it a racial sign? And what is the meaning of the bird’s disappearance for the narrator? Perhaps as a community and a culture swamped with the hyperreal, the material traumas resulting from various forms of oppression, we have lost sight of the imaginary, and the compelling nature of all that is irreducible, or ambiguous. So indoctrinated are we, so accustomed to naming, to categories and taxonomies with their consequent hierarchies and their emergencies of exclusion.

We have become complicit with surveillance in an age when private vexations spill into the public arena via unrestricted social media forums. These highly-polarised feeds negotiate truth, casting verdicts which circumvent otherwise fraught legal processes and institutional authority to expose misogyny and structural racism. Yet, vicariously, other distortions are rendered apparent. If power and violence are amplified by silence, what is the relationship between language and violence? Is this something we even need to consider?

Recent accusations against Junot Díaz in social media suggest that violation is not limited to the unquestionably intolerable behaviour being disclosed. The cascade effect of dissemination draws new zones of impunity, hardening our moral outrage, calcifying social power into knowledge. It prompts us to consider what might be withheld, distorted or lost in the process. Zinzi Clemmon’s accusations were, I believe, a spectacularly successful form of #interceptionality, disrupting a frame that upheld the celebrity author’s dazzling reputation and covering-up misconduct and misogyny. It mobilised the mass anger and pain of women who have been abused.

Should there be collective accountability for such public outcries? In the parataxis of these cultural texts, in the scattering and dispersion of anecdotal disclosures collaged with dogmas, reliant on memory and personal defences, what values and implications do we lose? Linda Martín Alcoff offers her own reservations in the New York Times:

Can we remain aware of multiple forms of oppression in our analysis? Can we demand more of a structural and systemic analysis without reducing individual responsibility? Can we respect the rage we are hearing as well as plan for a different future? I believe we must.

Interceptionality operates on what the late Gérard Genette described as ‘thresholds of interpretation,’ where meaning can be mediated, translated and contextualised.  I began to theorise interceptionality after reading about Genette’s narrative theory, metalepsis, and theories of colonial space, such as J.K Noyes’ theory of spatiality in colonial discourse. Noyes argues that space is a place where signification and subjectivity occur within boundaries and borders, regulating movement across those borders. So space is not merely understood as geographical nor as historical but as a matrix, in which socio-economic systems exist in opposition, alliance or conflict with each other, conducting power. A further reason why I theorised interceptionality was because I felt that the CALD sector needed to have a discourse that was alternative to the hegemony of the white Australian binary postcolonial invocations, to explain our pragmatism and our activism – because discourse elevates the status of narratives and cultural texts. Our position was being stigmatised, reduced, both economically and in a direct and personal way. At that time, I didn’t realise that what I was undertaking was a form of narrative mediation.

As a communications tool interceptionality alters the paratexts and the framing of cultural narratives such as meritocracy and capital. It questions the concealed privilege of categories such as whiteness and class. Within marginal groups, differences are frequently yoked together to resist hegemony. But as Spivak argues in Outside in the Teaching Machine, those minorities who cannot be readily named or identified have difficulty accessing normative narratives within cultural spaces, and are positioned uneasily within opposing discourses and cultural conflicts. By her account this unrepresented gap is ‘irretrievably heterogeneous,’ semantically and syntactically. But such a conceptually-rich field can become a space to alter the conventions and standards (what she calls ‘value-coding’) to forge new connections, to clear the ground for historical recovery. The slower ensuing project is to repair the archival lacunas authored by Western theory, history and culture.

The word ‘interceptionality’ deliberately draws from intersectionality, the matrix of social and racial intersections that oppress individuals. Intersectionality had its beginnings with Kimberlé Crenshaw’s 1989 framework. Crenshaw demonstrated that legal cases of domestic violence were complicated by race, class and, or gender leading to adverse outcomes for those disempowered by multiple identities. She showed that racism and sexism are often replicated by anti-discrimination law and in domestic violence services which fail to account for heterogeneity, owing to the fixed and mutually exclusive categories of race and gender.

While intersectionality addresses the need for contemporary feminist and anti-racist movements to layer and complicate the relationships between subjectivity and power, it has isolated itself within an increasingly polarised leftist and educated minority experience. According to Jennifer Nash intersectionality remains confined to a descriptive analysis that is poorly defined. She terms this a ‘theoretical, political and methodological murkiness.’ Nash writes:

Now that intersectionality itself has become an institutionalized intellectual project, and the dominant tool for excavating the voices of the marginalized, it is incumbent upon intersectional scholars to critically interrogate the goals of the intersectional project as they determine how to chart the future of this theoretical and political movement. The important insights that identity is complex, that subjectivity is messy, and that personhood is inextricably bound up with vectors of power are only an analytic starting point; it is time for intersectionality to begin to sort out the paradoxes upon which its theory rests in the service of strengthening its explanatory power.

Intersectionality has become a buzzword; a phenomenon that has attracted spectacular success within contemporary feminist scholarship. Eleanor Robertson, an Australian feminist wrote an article last year in The Guardian titled: ‘Intersectional-what? Feminism’s problem with jargon is that any idiot can pick it up and have a go.’ She cited a Hilary Clinton tweet on Flint’s water crisis, in which Clinton uses the phrase ‘we face a complex set of intersectional challenges’ matched with a mind-map diagram, which Robertson described as ‘hair ball’.  In Clinton’s diagram, there are nodes labelled ‘accountable leadership’, ‘good public schools in every ZIP code’, ‘investments in communities of colour’ and ‘jobs programs for unemployed youth.’ These are connected by an apparently arbitrary network of lines. This is a very good example of how intersectionality’s failure to address policy leaves it susceptible to exhausting and overloading its descriptive capacity.

How we establish the initiatives required to amend policy across complex configurations and intersectional intensities is undoubtedly going to be challenging.  Interceptionality accelerates this process. It places pressure on the master narratives that co-author nationalism, capitalist enterprise, industry and coloniality, all of which continue to operate in alliance to requisition the production of knowledge. This is happening as multiculturalism and transnationalism is driven by industry in Australia and across national borders.

In Bourdieu’s field theory, agents within a field are constituted by the relations of forces which they either work to conserve or transform. By rupturing cultural frames that normalise discrepancies, interceptionality is transformative. Foucault’s analysis of discourse explains how discourse constructs us, how it creates boundaries to define and position us, and it is in this process of making meaning that we see the operations of power. He also describes political fear and punishment. Indeed there is an economy of fear which relies on bystanders and victims educating others to shield themselves: this is something I have observed through our interceptions at Mascara – and it brings me to raise the point that one of the problems with activisms and identity politics is the way that capitalism and industry co-opts and co-modifies otherness and alterity to co-author a collective narrative, foreclosing the way ahead for minority or experimental voices. These dynamics can be stifling and exhausting. When you are economically fatigued and creatively demoralised by the omnipresent gate it becomes a visceral affliction. It feels like a slow death. But when I am feeling intrepid, I know that the only way forward as a writer, creatively, is not to be silenced ever; that interceptions do work, and are working.

An example of our interceptionality was occasioned by the 40th Anniversary of International Women’s Day Poetry reading in 2015. Mascara sent a letter to the organisers of the reading, offering to pay for an Aboriginal and an Asian Australian poet to read at the event, which featured four other women poets. Our interception was supported by Australian Poetry. It did not succeed in terms of the event itself, which proceeded as planned by the organisers, but something was mediated and a conversation ensued, which was deeply felt. I expressed my frustration and sadness with the inequalities in funding a journal like Mascara which has tried to supplement and to diversify the Australian canon, particularly with its book reviews. I think it would be fair to say that the conversation  was a catalyst for some changes. Invariably, when this happens it may harm my career as a writer. I may get blocked on social media or have to suffer critical silences; however, there is a trade-off because for the interceptor what is performed is a discursive empowerment, which may not be experienced immediately. That empowerment may be delayed, but there is a progression of thought, an autonomy which is necessary for writing, and a confidence in understanding the intricate relationships between power, language and meaning. This development is subtle and painful and progressive over time.

As a neologism ‘interceptionality’ is abstract, a reminder that language and knowledge are contextual and embedded as traces. The word suggests a slippage: a misreading of intersectionality; one which is latent, potentially transforming. The word slides. It is musical and playful. But it also emphasises process rather than category; it points to the instrumentality operating on performative contradictions within capital, knowledge, language and power. It is movement and speed, and like the albatross it encounters dominions and the powerful dreams that disadvantage those voices positioned ambivalently across globalisation’s transactional and obscured borders.

Theoretically, I believe that interceptionality arises from the space of catachresis. It arises from the gap between opposing discourses, from the voice of what Spivak calls ‘the irretrievably heterogenous,’ rupturing through categories in volatile, risk-taking and unstable ways. However, while interceptionality is pragmatic and goal-orientated, it cannot and does not attain a completion or a fulfilment of its goals; rather, I believe, it is a process of infinite ruptures of the frame. The frame that defines, that categorises, that records in tabular form and taxonomies, that names and polarises binary oppositions. I think the Junot Díaz case exemplifies the mobilisation of mass anger to create a new normative, despite Díaz having stepped down from the Pulitzer board and acknowledging his guilt, stating ‘I am listening to and learning from women’s stories in this essential and overdue cultural movement. We must continue to teach all men about consent and boundaries.’ Yet still, the publicised anger, conflated with personal judgements, has flowed forth.

I am a survivor. I have had to navigate the controlling, implacable world of powerful literary men in this industry, as well as powerful women, to the extent that last year, I felt that my resources were utterly exhausted. The gate was being closed on me at numerous checkpoints in the Australian literary scene, despite the interest in my fiction and poetry overseas. The majority of white Australians in literature and publishing seem to be in complete denial (or more than partial ignorance) of the economic instability that structural racism perpetuates, leaving women of colour vulnerable to antagonism and narcissistic behaviours. Make no mistake; there is very little compassion in this industry, and simply not enough to salvage the loss. What concerns me now, however, is the process that closes the narrative frame around a new centredness, whether it be the Díaz narrative or the narratives of diversity, of multiculturalism or of race being stridently contested and policed in social media. As a writer deeply interested in aesthetics, language and thinking, the nuances and ambiguities of meaning matter to me sufficiently that I am prepared to argue the case.

By recuperating the paratext, our newsletters, images, hyperlinks and social media messages can, and indeed have, successfully reframed and recentred marginal narratives to contextualise or mediate the interests of our cohort. The #Interceptionality hashtag archive records one tweet describing how Mascara’s decade of funding from the Australia Council for the Arts amounted to less than a salaried Arts CEO in a white organisation for a single year. We copied individuals and organisations in this tweet, inviting them to dialogue, to provide responses or simply witness, suggesting to our readers that hegemony is constituted not with singularity but through the collective shape of a creative community. This triggered a defensive chain of remarks but the ongoing discussion has also alerted many bystanders to the economic realities and discrepancies in cultural capital. Specifying these differences when we communicate our history of restricted funding or cultural exclusion is a dialectic aspect of interceptionality. It informs a narrative mediation, stemming from the understanding that identity is structured within a network or web of discourses whereby privilege and hierarchy can recruit subjects to certain positions limiting the space from where they can act and how they can speak. So the conflicts over race, class and representation already privilege some participants over others depending on how they are positioned.

Legal reform theorist Sarah Cobb argues that narrative closure or coherence is problematic within conflict because it stabilises the description of the problem in ways that delimit its transformation. We see narrative closure in operation when there is silence, when no response is made to the claims of structural racism. Cobb concludes that narrative coherence conducts power and influence, and that this is problematic for those whose stories are less coherent or less stable because they are more likely to be absorbed into a dominant story which does not flow from their experience. She cites how children’s stories leave out sections of the plot and are often incomplete, so that they get absorbed into adult accounts during legal mediations. A similar dynamic operates for culturally diverse writers where literary writing resists permanent structures of nationalism or normative themes, finding expression in language which is fragmented, aesthetically nuanced, more subtle or risk-taking.

Interceptionality is one way that the ‘irretrievably heterogeneous’ or decentred heterogeneous can speak and be heard. It comes to us from a space of catachresis, from a space in political and social systems that representation is failing. Derrida describes catachresis as concerning ‘first the violent and forced abusive inscription of a sign, the imposition of a sign upon a meaning which did not yet have its own proper sign in language’. He gestures to an originary pre-Adamite incompleteness inherent to all semantics and socio-economic fields. Spivak extends this politically to describe catachresis as the act of ‘reversing, displacing, and seizing the apparatus of value-coding.’ Conceptually speaking, interceptionality is as transient and as conspicuous as the albatross crossing diegetic thresholds in the allegorical novel or epic poem. It reframes narratives that have historically, through Western canons and criticisms, been conceived hierarchically. This has the power to endow speakers who are positioned in the margins with greater degrees of subjectivity.

Sadly, the proto-conservationist themes of ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,’ have made little impact on our respect for the albatross. The bird’s survival has been historically threatened by multiple harms: shooting, clubbing, long-line fishing, and more recently plastic debris contamination. How does the albatross become the subject of its own narrative? Did Coleridge mean to critique the moral transgression of European racism and the economic exploitation of the slave trade? Or does the poem espouse, like Milton’s Paradise Lost, the expression of individual transcendent ideals within the milieu of collective national guilt and political disillusionment? Who shot the albatross, if not the Ancient Mariner?

While it takes an entire industry, a crew of editors, critics, judges, publishers and institutions to legitimise selected Australian books, allowing their authors passage across oceans and borders, it takes the same extensive parameters to block others. There are unsettled, often conflated forces and contradictory borders through which interceptionality navigates, speaking for those who are ambiguously defined. Readers and critics may inadvertently mistake me. My activism has been a way of protecting my creativity; it is a way of nourishing and reviving what withers, interiorly, when we are silenced by ideologies, or when we become centred ourselves within cultural frames. For me, the question of the albatross cannot be answered without categorising and sacrificing something necessarily elusive for the practise of writing; for reasons that Coleridge had foreseen, perhaps in a fragment or a vision as he walked along the Quantocks coastline, the peat moors and quiet country lanes of Somerset. In this diegesis, the spell and the fever dreams are what bring us back to life.

Soon the man was in his cabin, still spellbound by the song
of lost leviathans, the smell of brine, bilge, and burning oil.
Birds circled the grey skies, but there was no white albatross.

‘The Ghost Ship’

Works cited:

Alcoff, Linda Martín. 16 May 2018
Beres, David. ‘A Dream, A Vision, and a Poem. A Psycho-Analytic Study of the Origins of the Rime of of the Ancient Mariner’ The International Journal of Psycho-Analysis; London Vol. 32, (Jan 1, 1951):
Barwell, G. ‘Coleridge’s albatross and the impulse to seabird conservation, Kunapipi, 29(2), 2007. http://ro.uow.edu.au/kunapipi/vol29/iss2/5
Coetzee, J.M. Elizabeth Costello. New York: Penguin, 2003. 56
Coleridge, S.T. CN 1, 383 January-May 1799
Coleridge, S T.
Cahill, Michelle. ‘The Ghost-Ship’ The Poetry Ireland Review No. 98 (July 2009)
Davis, K. ‘Intersectionality as buzzword : A sociology of science perspective on what makes a feminist theory successful.’ Feminist Theory 2008 9: 67
Derrida, J. Margins of Philosophy, trans., Alan Bass, Brighton: Harvester Press 1982, 255.
Ebbotson, J.R. “Coleridge’s Mariner and the Rights of Man,” Studies in Romanticism 11 (p198)
Empson, W. ‘The Ancient Mariner’. Critical Quarterly, 6 (1964), 298-319
Lee, Debbie. ‘Yellow fever and the slave trade: Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ ELH, 1998 – muse.jhu.edu
Nash, Jennifer. Feminist Review 89, 2008. 13
Noyes, J.K. Colonial space: spatiality in the discourse of German South West Africa 1884-1915. Routledge, 2012.
Robertson, Eleanor
Spivak, G. ‘Poststructuralism, Marginality, Postcoloniality, and Value’ in P. Collier and H. Geyer-Ryan (eds.), Literary Theory Today, Bloomington: Indiana 1990, 219–244: 228

The post Interceptionality, or The Ambiguity of the Albatross appeared first on Sydney Review of Books.

Melaleuca to Cockle Creek

(Distance 82km, Walk time: 6 days minimum; allow 7 to 8)

Melaleuca can be reached by light aircraft. For details contact…*

Once, not so long ago, I walked the South Coast Track in Tasmania. If you follow the track you will walk to the southern extremity of an island which is itself at the southern extremity of the world. We stood, the four of us, and watched the twin-engine aircraft we’d chartered take off, circle once and disappear. Step: into the hole of silence, to the world’s end.

i) Flesh

Melaleuca to Cox Bight

(3 to 4 hours, easy/medium walking, 12km)

Shortly after leaving Melaleuca, [The land sings] cross Moth Creek then head southwards across the buttongrass plain [(a warning or welcome?)] towards the New Harbour Range. The track [an opera] sidles around the base of the range [swelling] eventually [into] leading to Cox Bight. This large bay is [footfall] interrupted midway by rocky [then falling] Point Eric. Campsites are found at the [into] outlet of Freney Lagoon and on the eastern side of [embrace] Point Eric.

A track is memory.

                            A track is relief.

                                                     A track is company.

                                                                               A track is faith.

Once, when I was researching an article, I met a Wedgetail Eagle. The man who I had come to interview invited me into the kitchen of his stone cottage. He said, ‘wanna see something?’ I followed him through his garden. He knelt in front of a large, low cage and opened the door. Crouched, I met the eagle. It was as big as a house, its eye was the size of the front door, its wings spanned the roof, its talons pieced the earth and its legs were actually the masts of two ships. I was soft, white fat, prey.

ii) Breath

Cox Bight to Louisa River

(6 to 8 hours, medium walking, 17km)

Walk [dawn] east [float] up the beach to Black Cliff [pair of Pied Oyster Catchers strut] and follow the track over the headland to the eastern end of Cox Bight. At Buoy Creek [Grey Fantail, Scrub Tit, flash of Burrowing Parrot] the track leaves the beach and crosses buttongrass plains [we march] to the foot of the Ironbound Range. On the way it climbs over the Red Point Hills [then blow], crosses [boots off] two major creeks, [boots on] and winds around the Spica Hills, before reaching the Louisa Plains [stride]. The many small creek crossings can be [then lie down] hazardous after heavy rains. Good, forested campsites can be found on [rocks in tea coloured water] either side of Louisa River. Cross to the eastern side, with the aid of the fixed rope. If the river is in flood, [benediction] delay crossing until the level drops (refer ‘Hazards and Precautions: Creek and River Crossings’).

A track is instruction.

                                A track is silence.

                                                                                    A track can deceive.

The wrong track is a bad place,

                                but even the wrong track is better than no track.

Once, when I was sailing in Tonga I met a Humpback whale. She appeared, a ridgeline in the ocean. I slipped into water and saw the afterlife beneath my finned feet. It was a depthless changing hue of blue. And even with my heart pumping and the thrill of life so hard, the pull to the underneath was strong. Then the blue took a form, a shape so huge I couldn’t see an edge. The whale. Her eye locked on mine. She drifted through the sea and caught me. All the air left. Then she let me go and I rose like a cork. Later, I swam with her for stretched minutes. That time she held me lightly, let me fin alongside. She wore barnacles like jewels. When she left, the sea was lonely.

iii) Grace

Louisa River to Little Deadmans Bay

(7 to 10 hours, hard walking 13kms)

The Ironbound Range is [heatstruck] subject to rapid changes in weather. Do not try to cross in adverse conditions. Carry water in all weather.

From [waters meeting] Louisa River [don’t look up] the track climbs steadily. This is one of the hardest parts of the South Coast Track, but [step] also [rest] one [step] of the most rewarding. In fine weather [southern] there [snow] are superb [skinks] coastal [bask] and mountain views. After traversing the top of [avoid] the [tiger snake] range a long decent through dense rainforest leads to [sudden onset claustrophobia] the rocky beach at Little Deadmans Bay where [bend to wash the trace of shame] there is a well-sheltered campsite.

track (noun)

1. mark left
2. path
3. course of travel
4. rail structure
5. line of thought
6. race course
7. same as track and field
8. separate recording of music
9. path for recording
10. recorded input

Once, when I was in Far North Queensland visiting my daughter who was working on a cattle station I watched a wild bull tear up the earth. Sods flew and landed like bombs on the roof of the Toyota where I sat. The trees shivered. Two helicopters hovered. Riders on tough, wiry stock horses (including my daughter) pulled their hats low in readiness and circled. A cloud of budgerigars scattered like bullets from a pellet gun. The bull bellowed, then swung his massive head and charged.

iii-a) Lost

Prevention: know your group and its limitation [shit and spit, quake and quiver of fat, soft flesh], modify plans as necessary.

Stay on the track.

                  Make camp well before dark or at the first sign of stormy weather.

Keep together [laugh and curse and wait].

                  If you get lost: Stop. Sit down. [have a dart] Think calmly. Check your map and compass. Think about the terrain you have just travelled through.

                  Climb a tree or go to a high spot to look for landmarks. [a knob, a ridgeline, a headland, a beach, a creek, perhaps]

                  Do NOT continue travelling until you know where you are. [remember this for life]

If necessary set up camp.

                                                                   If still lost, put out a distress signal.

Track (noun) cont.

11. Same as soundtrack (sense 1)
12. section of computer disk
13. Same as tracking shot
14. treads of tank or bulldozer
15. course of study
16. career path
17. moving assembly line
18. supporting rail
19. path of particle
20. distance between wheels

iv) Trace
Little Deadmans Bay to New Lagoon to Surprise Bay,

(9 to 11 hours, medium walking 18 kms)

From Little Deadmans Bay cross [purple haze of melaleuca] buttongrass plains and [drunken bees] the sandy Turua Beach before traversing Menzies Bluff. Continue through forest [glow of raven’s wing] before dropping down to Prion Beach. Follow the [ghosts of walkers past] beach to the eastern end of the dunes. Use the boats to [escape memories] cross the lagoon (refer Hazards and Precautions: Boat Crossings). Do not attempt to [recall that which you do not know] walk across the mouth of the lagoon – [for] perilous quicksand and freak [tracks] waves occur. Follow [so, be quiet] buttongrass moorlands [till] for some kilometres then climb through [cracks appear] spectacular [in] mixed [patterns] forest, before [which,] descending to Surprise Bay. At Surprise Bay [disturb a den of snakes] follow the beach to the riverlet crossing (good campsites are found on the shelf above [then flee to] the eastern end of the beach [a place where a raven and a butterfly wait]).

tracks (plural noun)

track [traek]

needle marks

Once, when I was sorting through my dead father’s papers I found a letter from his mother to his father. In perfect penmanship and restrained prose my grandmother explained she would no longer put up with his other women and his vile temper. She wrote after the children were in bed, to the hiss of the kerosene lamp and the mosquitoes battering the gauzed in veranda, to say she would divorce him when he left the army. She would run the farm and he, he would leave her and the children alone.

The thin paper hummed. I put the letter in my camphor laurel chest and wondered at the things we leave behind.

v) Bones

Surprise Bay to South Cape Rivulet

(7 to 10 hours, medium/hard walking 11kms)

From the Surprise Bay campsite [wake to stiffness and] climb steeply up and over the ridge, then [shiver] down through the forest to Granite Beach. Boulder [enter] hop [fatigue in new levels] to the eastern end, then climb up the small cliff near a waterfall. Take care [handhold, toehold, muscle memory] negotiating this section when seas are rough and/or the tide is high. Particular care [don’t think, just be & you are up] is required scaling the small cliff. There is a long ascent [bone numb] through forest [brain blank] to Flat Rock Plain where [glory be] there are good views. The climb [dry mouth] continues to the top of the South Cape Range. It is advisable to carry water. There are no campsites on the range. The South Cape Range [on and on] is arduous to cross, [walk and fall and] with [mud] boggy sections and [mud] buttress roots to negotiate. From the top a long [bloodsucking] descent through wet forest leads to a buttongrass plain, then over a series [how many?] of forested hills, before reaching South Cape Bay. Cross South Cape Riverlet [swollen joints shrink] and follow the sand upstream to the campsite in the [still] forest.

Once, when I was working on our farm, I stood in the sheep yards and looked at a lamb. In the cold of a September morning the frost had stolen into him. I stirred him with the toe of my boot. He spasmed, closer to death than life.  

Because it was hopeless, I picked the lamb up and carried it, hard and death heavy, home. Into the concrete sink, hot water streamed. The lamb hung in liquid as warm as blood. Slowly its crusty birth jacket lifted like a veil. After twenty minutes my arms were red. I wrapped the lamb in hot towels, poured colostrum down its throat, placed it under the firebox and went out into my day.

It doesn’t matter if it lived or died.

track (verb)

1. follow trail
2. follow path
3. make tracks with mud on something
4. follow flight path of something
5. follow progress of something
6. film moving object
7. align
8. follow groove on record
9. supply something with tracks
10. assign somebody to track
11. travel

vi) Ash

South Cape Rivulet to Cockle Creek

(3.5 to 4.5 hours, easy walking, 11km)

The [wake to rain] track crosses a series [how many?] of beaches and headlands until [butt scream] steps [climb] lead up to a bluff overlooking South Cape Bay. Follow [march] the boardwalked track through the open heathland [blind to beauty] of Blowhole Valley – spectacular during its early summer flowering. After skirting [people] the lightly forested Moulders Hill, the track finally [arrives] comes to an end at Cockle Creek.

Cover your tracks

to remove all signs of having been somewhere or done something.

Once, when I was a schoolgirl, 10 years old perhaps, my new friends tricked me. They begged me to tell them a story. Flattered if slightly wary, I obliged. Into the story I went, so deep I didn’t notice the smothered giggles, until one girl held aloft a hidden tape recorder, ‘we taped you’ she shrieked. A shard of her laugh entered the hole the story left and stayed while my voice looped, tinny and earnest, through the rest of the day and into the night.

* Track notes (distances, hazards etc) are taken from South Coast, Walk Map & Notes, TasMap, Produced by Land Tasmania, Department of Primary Industries, Parks, Water & Environment, 2016.

There are readily available guidebooks on South-West Tasmania that provide more detailed information on the tracks and natural history of the area than can be presented here. Your journey will be more informed and enjoyable if you can access these [#lifetip].

The post Notes on a Track appeared first on Sydney Review of Books.

A few months ago I found myself spending the weekend with a collection of paintings I didn’t much like.

I’d volunteered as gallery attendant for a friend’s group show. The paintings were chosen by a renowned contemporary artist I loved, and I trusted his judgement – I knew that the works, many by highly respected painters, were understood by him and other gallerists and artists who visited the show to be ‘good’ pictures.

Nevertheless, I found myself disturbed by many of them. I was not disturbed because the images were of disturbing things; they were portraits, abstract works and landscapes. So my unease was not to do with what they were, but rather how they were: the colours often seemed murky, or garish. Some of the pictures looked to have been painted too quickly, felt unfinished to me. Sometimes the composition was inelegant. A few seemed almost violent in their chaotic application of paint. Quite often they were just too strange, too mysterious to me: I simply couldn’t understand what the hell they were doing.

When I found two or three pictures I liked very much, the relief I felt was substantial.

Ordinarily, when I see pictures I don’t like in an exhibition, I just walk on by and don’t think about them again. When I see pictures I love, I don’t question why. But sitting there in the gallery in silence, with nobody but the odd visitor stepping quietly through the space, I had time to interrogate my conflicting feelings about these works, to think about what was causing my unease, and my relief. What was it that made me feel either good, or bad, on looking at these images?

One aspect of my discomfort was to do with the fact that people I respected had judged these pictures to be good. I had to acknowledge that beneath my dislike was a feeling of shame, that they could see something I couldn’t. This led to a kind of loneliness, and I think on some level, fear. And I was alarmed to find that lying deep beneath all of this was a distinct, fine but primitive layer of anger – anger born of the fear of something I didn’t understand.

After a little while, I realised that the level of either discomfort or relief on first looking at an image was a result of how recognisable the picture was to me. The ones I liked were more familiar to me in style, in subject matter. They were the kinds of paintings I have on my own walls at home. Interestingly, they were also generally the smaller works – perhaps more containable for me in some way, not only physically, but psychologically. The paintings I found most repellent, by contrast, were those most unlike what I might buy for my walls. Not only in subject matter but in size, in style: they were huge, often dark, with a presence that felt almost hostile.

As I broke these feelings down, I was forced to see that what was going on inside me was a kind of visual xenophobia. I don’t know much about art, but I like what I know.

A few days after my duties as gallery attendant, I received an invitation to another group show in another gallery. This was an exhibition of landscapes, and I could see immediately that they were serenely beautiful. But when I looked through the catalogue of paintings, I was surprised to find something new at work in me. It was as though the ‘ugly’ pictures had somehow entered me, and these new paintings, which I would ordinarily have liked very much, now seemed to lack some strength or energy. They were too calm, their colours and composition too familiar.

I realised I’d undergone some transformation in the presence of those other pictures. It was as though, without the grit of discomfort and disorder – even the strange, shameful anger that formed in me while I absorbed those other images – I could no longer find real pleasure in a tasteful, orderly painting. Looking at the new landscapes now made me feel slightly tranquillised; there was a short-lived surge of initial pleasure as I saw, and recognised, and appreciated, but the feeling quickly faded, leaving an empty sort of outline. I can’t now remember anything much about those images.

I found this whole experience interesting, and it made me want to take a closer look at what’s going on when a work of art, a work of literature, has the capacity to make us feel bad, and how we respond to this as individuals, and as a culture.

MONA tunnel. Photo: Sahra. Distributed under Creative Commons license.

That weekend was revelatory to me, but in fact I’d experienced this same turmoil before – the unease, confusion, even anger and disgust, followed by the hunger for those very emotions once they were gone. It was after my first visit to the Museum of Old and New Art in Tasmania, where your own response to the work is the first response. There’s no mediation or comforting description by way of sign or authoritative guide, and even when you seek out explanation on the museum’s device, you’ll find competing, contradictory interpretations – or sometimes none at all. The building itself, with its labyrinthine darkness and tilting surfaces, intensifies the discomfort. It can be frightening to have no way of locating your responses to the works, or even your own body in space.

I imagine many of you have been to MONA, and I imagine some of you felt the same things I did. I reeled in horror at the cruelty and violence of some of the works I saw there, and wept in awe at the beauty of others. After MONA, for some time every other gallery I visited seemed as anodyne and bourgeois as a department store. And it was a strange understanding that dawned on me when I had to ask, could I have experienced the awe if I had not also felt the horror?

Those who criticise David Walsh find his shock tactics cynical. They charge that his provocative collection with its wall of ceramic vulvas, the videos full of puerile sexuality and violence, his giant shit machines and inverted Christian crosses, is not born of any sincere impulse toward examining the human condition, but of nihilism. Walsh himself promotes this view, then denies it, then changes it again.

I don’t pretend to know what Walsh’s motives are (and I don’t care – I’m an unapologetic fan) but as a writer, I do think the question of motive in asking people to engage with a violent work of art is an important one. It’s a personal question for me, because my last novel, The Natural Way of Things, occupies some ethical territory that I found extremely difficult to negotiate. The question of how to write about the exploitation of and violence against women without myself exploiting or causing psychic harm to women troubled me deeply. I drew certain lines for myself – ruling out graphic descriptions of violence, for example – though veracity demanded that I write very close to, if not across the edge of that line. I hoped I was treating this material sensitively, though as I wrote, the novel seemed to be demanding that I be bold, even fearless, that I abandon sensitivities in favour of a tough statement.

It’s not for me to say whether the novel manages to stay on the right side of the line, because I don’t know where it is, and it moves for every reader. More than a few women have told me they’re too too frightened to read my book because of their own experiences of misogyny and violence. Some think the book would make them too angry, others too upset. I respect these decisions entirely. But other conversations have left me feeling rather more depressed.

One of these took place at a recent festival in Western Australia, where a doctor introduced himself to me, then confided that his friend, another man, had warned him not to read my novel ‘because it’s too gruesome’. I wasn’t sure what he wanted me to say; I made an evasive noise and began looking for an exit. Then the doctor grinned and asked, with what felt to me like ghoulish relish, ‘Well, what’s it about?’

I didn’t know how to answer; something about the way he asked his question bothered me. I said it was true the book was not a pleasurable read, because it was about women being mistreated. I must have looked as glum as I felt, because then he tried to cheer me up. ‘Oh, but it’s very fashionable to write about that sort of thing,’ he said, ‘so there must be some kind of market for it!’

Having thus encouraged me, he turned away and our conversation ended. But his words did not leave me, because they cut deep. Of course I hate the idea of my book being ‘too gruesome’ for anyone to read – I’d hoped it had poetry and beauty along with the darkness – but more appalling was the suggestion that I deliberately sought out the degradation of women as a trending topic, in the certainty it would pull in a few more bucks.

That exchange is the most recent example of someone implying that my motives were less than pure, but it’s by no means the only one – plenty of others have more or less told me they feel the same way. A fellow writer once told me that she refused to read my book because she disapproved of ‘trading in violence’.

‘Trading. ‘Fashion’. ‘Market’. These words all hurt, of course, because they’re precisely the the sickening motives I worried about so much as I wrote my book. Provocation for its own sake, titillation, violence as entertainment were anathema to me, and I tried very hard, in the process of writing and in the content of the book itself, to avoid this very sensationalism. There are reviewers who’ve approvingly referred to my book as literary horror – that, too, concerns me, because (perhaps wrongly) I’ve always understood that genre to be characterised by the deliberate activation of fear and revulsion. I like to think my motive was exploration, not exploitation, so of course the fact there are people who think I chased sensation or even simply failed in what I tried to do, is painful.

But so what? I’m adult enough to know that trying to control what others think of you, or wanting readers to believe in your good intentions, is a not just a fool’s game but an infantile one. And what’s more important, I think, is to acknowledge to myself that painful as it is, these sceptics might be right. It’s possible my good intentions don’t exist. My beliefs about my own practice, my motives and the result, could be entirely wrong.

Over the past decade, the word ‘relatable’ has come up in discussions about reading. ‘Relatability’ is a word that elicits a groan from those of us who see ourselves as sophisticated readers.

I’ve mostly heard ‘relatable’ said among book club readers or festival audiences, who use it as a compliment, to show they have connected with a work. A harmless shorthand, surely. But casual conversation isn’t the only place ‘relatability’ is cited. University teacher friends report its widespread use in essays about books and reading, even by postgrads, in subjects that are supposed to be about analysis and interrogation of literature.

It’s easy to sneer, from the pages of literary magazines, at those readers who like books to be ‘relatable’. But what’s wrong with wanting to connect a book with one’s own experience? Why exactly do we sneer?

It’s worth teasing out what spins out from this word relatable, because I don’t think it’s as simple as it might first appear. And the sentiment, if not the word itself, is not expressed only in the utterances of dummies and philistines. As far back as 2014, Rebecca Mead was bothered enough by its use among journalists and film reviewers, to write a New Yorker piece titled ‘The Scourge of “Relatability”’. She was provoked by the adored public radio host of This American Life, Ira Glass, who had emerged after a performance of King Lear to tweet, seemingly without irony, ‘No stakes, not relatable … Shakespeare sucks!’

‘To seek to see oneself in a work of art is nothing new, nor is it new to enjoy the sensation,’ wrote Mead. ‘Identification with a character is one of the pleasures of reading … though if it is where one’s engagement with the work begins, it should not be where critical thought ends.’ There’s a distinct difference, Mead claimed, between the active work of thinking myself into the experience of a character on the page – identification – and demanding that the work map itself onto my experience.

If the concept of identification suggested that an individual experiences a work as a mirror in which he might recognize himself, the notion of relatability implies that the work in question serves like a selfie: a flattering confirmation of an individual’s solipsism.

The onus of responsibility has shifted, Mead is saying, from a reader’s capacity to thoughtfully interrogate how she might see herself in the work, to a desire for the book to do the work for her, to hold off her appreciation or analysis until it first proves itself reflective of her life, her concerns.

Relatability might be a newish word, but I don’t think the temptation to deem a book worthy because it is recognisable is new. I clearly remember my country high school English teacher banning the words ‘because I can relate’ from our classroom. Whether we related or not, whether we liked a book or not, was of absolutely no relevance, she told us. The question then was, what is the work doing on its page? What else might we find, if we look more closely, ask better questions?

My question now is, if sixteen-year-olds were being trained out of this 35 years ago, why is the same impulse so prevalent among adults now?

I think it has to do with the explosion of consumer culture since my long-ago high school days. We live now in a world where our every interaction is followed by a request for a star rating, a thumbs-up or thumbs-down. We’ve been slowly but thoroughly trained to see the world in terms of its capacity to please us, and however romantic we might be about books, it’s naïve to expect the way we read to remain somehow quarantined from this customer service perspective.

Indeed, these days we’re asked to rate our satisfaction out of five stars not only after an Uber ride or a hotel stay, but following any performance at our major theatre companies. And a growing number of publishers are promoting fiction using money-back guarantees – ‘fantastic read or your money back!’; ‘Love it. Or your money back’, shout stars on covers. This kind of promotion, offered on certain mass-market novels, urges readers to accompany refund requests with short explanations detailing ‘why you didn’t like the book’.

Even in so-called literary works, it’s not uncommon to find a list of helpful ‘Questions and topics for discussion’ when you turn the last page of the story, such as the list in my Random House edition of Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge. (‘Question one: Do you like Olive Kitteridge as a person? Question two: ‘Have you ever met anyone like Olive Kitteridge, and if so what similarities do you see between that person and Olive?’) Before I had time to exhale after the book’s final sentence, let alone reflect on what it meant, the publisher was there to help me form my thoughts.

All of this, quite evidently, is in the pursuit of higher sales. I’m not entirely blaming publishers here, and with author incomes at record lows, it would be a brave writer who resisted such efforts to bring more readers to her work. And yet there’s something so disturbing about the incursion of these marketing tendrils into the pages of the book itself, that resist I think we must. Something dangerous is taking place in this seemingly benign quest for wider readership.

Nowhere have I been asked to rate anything on its capacity to make me uncomfortable, to unnerve or challenge or confuse me. And the prompt for rating, the anxious question, ‘did you like it?’ arrives moments after the ‘consumption’ takes place. What if I were asked to think about what I’ve experienced and respond in a month, a year, a decade? It’s unthinkable.

What does the publisher, the theatre company, do with these ratings, with the fifty-word complaints? What does money-back customer satisfaction mean when it comes to books? Increasingly, I think ‘reader satisfaction’ is code for the smoothing out of lumps and bumps of every kind, in pursuit of a soothing digestibility.

So what do lumps and bumps in books look like?  One is the type evoked in the requests for book recommendations routinely seen on social media, asking for ‘uplifting, relaxing, entertaining reads – nothing sad or heartbreaking please.’ Any glance at a Facebook book club will show you the overwhelming appetite for novels in which nothing bad happens, especially to animals.

I’m not suggesting, by the way, that a book filled with degradation or misery is by that fact alone superior to one full of cupcakes and potato peel pies. My West Australian doctor’s remark stung precisely because it hit a nerve of potential truth. Depending on how it’s done, a novel full misogyny and violence from the shelf marked Political can be exactly as banal as any pink-jacketed goo from the shelf labelled Heartwarming / Relatable.

A related but separate lump that bothers many readers is uncivilised behaviour by fictional characters. Writers hear complaints from readers all the time about our characters’ attitudes, their diets and laundry habits, their refusal to get therapy, their swearing. It’s undeniable that a great many readers (and I include publishers and agents) have a need to approve morally of characters, to like them, before they find a book satisfying.

In her recent Guardian essay on teaching literature to university students, the writer Tegan Bennett Daylight described the surprising conservatism of her students. They were not only affronted by the explicit sex, the drug-taking and poor parenting they saw in Helen Garner’s Monkey Grip, and offended by ‘graphic descriptions of sex and masturbation’ in the work of Christos Tsiolkas, but more curiously, they found the anger of Tsiolkas’s young bisexual Greek character, Ari, intolerable. Daylight couldn’t help but see in this a connection between consumerism and reading. On a good day, she hoped it was because her students themselves were generous and happy people. But on a bad day, she wrote, ‘I think they find Ari difficult because the distinction between adults and teenagers has been blurred. We all want the same things now: phones, clothes, and food to photograph. We are all consumers. Teenagers don’t want to stick it to the man anymore. They are the man.’

Again, it’s easy to be snooty about readers who want characters to be nice. But more troublesome to the politically minded reader, it seems to me, is the situation when no clear diagnosis of a character’s moral position is offered by the writer. ‘Problematic’ is emerging as a new code word here. Ambivalence or contradiction is worrying, and best avoided. A woman sternly told a novelist friend of mine that she didn’t know what to think about the latter’s Aboriginal character. My friend took that as a compliment. It wasn’t meant as one.

Mystery and strangeness is another lump that gets in the way of guaranteed ‘reader satisfaction’. I don’t only mean the presence of what Amanda Lohrey has called ‘a message from another realm’ – those hints that something more, something odder, is happening than first meets the eye – although to me those messages are what makes any work of fiction sing.

But the more I go on, as a reader and writer, the more I’m also drawn to unconventionality in the shape and mechanism of a story, to structural and narrative strangeness.

While I still have the greatest respect for the traditional, linear narrative arc – and am perhaps still too afraid to abandon it altogether myself – I’m increasingly beguiled by stories and writers who do. How, I wonder, would a book like Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria fare in the ‘Love It. Or your Money Back’ offer? How about Saunder’s Lincoln in the Bardo, or even Strout’s My Name is Lucy Barton?  That these novels are lauded is testament to a community of readers and publishers who are prepared to venture with writers into new territory. But this community is small, and shrinking, and if any of these books had been a first novel by an unknown writer, I doubt the response would have been the same.

I said before that it’s easy to sneer at those lesser beings who want books to be uplifting or relatable. But my experience with the paintings, in which I discovered in my own response to the visual arts an attitude I’d find contemptible in a reader, suggests to me that even if we think we’re better than that, few of us are free from an instinctive desire to smooth and flatten out, to diagnose and close the file. It seems natural to want to alleviate discomfort by making knowable what is unknown. And even if we’re too good for ‘relatability’, many of us are addicted to what Aleksandar Hemon has called ‘epiphany peddling and empathy porn’.

Like ‘relatable’, the word ‘empathy’ has been a watchword in talk about books for some time now. I’m sure I’ve used it myself. Empathy is everywhere. In his endlessly-quoted defence of libraries for example, the writer Neil Gaiman said, ‘A book is a little empathy machine. It puts you inside somebody else’s head. You see out at the world through somebody else’s eyes. It’s very hard to hate people of a certain kind when you’ve just read a book by one of those people.’

Barack Obama said something similar in his conversation with the novelist Marilynne Robinson. Setting aside being president, he told the author, ‘the most important set of understandings that I bring to the position of citizen, the most important stuff … I’ve learned from novels. It has to do with empathy. It has to do with being comfortable with the notion that the world is complicated and full of grays, but there’s still truth there to be found, and that you have to strive for that and work for … the notion that it’s possible to connect with some[one] else even though they’re very different from you.’

It’s hard to argue against this. Surely the discovery of common ground between you and an enemy can only be a force for good, for connection, for harmony? But the trouble is with the assumption that the common ground is always there to be discovered. And the more I think and read about this, the narrower the gap seems between laudable empathy and contemptible relatability.

Sarah Sentilles is one writer who’s argued compellingly against our deification of empathy. The author of Draw Your Weapons, a meditation on art, war, and ethics, Sentilles says that the embrace of ‘unknowable otherness’, rather than empathy, is our society’s most urgent task now. Drawing on the work of other theorists and philosophers including Judith Butler and Emmanuel Levinas, Sentilles writes that ‘Empathy depends on perceived likeness, a sense of sameness; I treat you justly because I recognize you as fundamentally like me.

But, she goes on:

if it’s only discovered likeness that creates the possibility for ethical behaviour, what happens when likeness can’t be found? … In this climate of fear and oppression, something more radical than empathy is needed. The faith that deep down ‘they’ are like ‘us’ won’t get us where we need to go. Because what if they’re not like us at all? What then?

The challenge Sentilles throws down about ethics is ‘to learn to live with, and protect, what we can’t understand.’

Aleksander Hemon issues the same challenge in the world of literature. In an argument for reading Proust, he wrote,

We have to adjust, or even abandon, our habitual expectations and submit to a transformation we cannot fully control … But the reward of finding our way in that new space, of figuring what is in it, of allowing the discovery to change our thought, far exceeds merely recognizing and confirming what we already know.

But even here, we need to resist epiphany or resolution, because if what I’m saying is true – that the unknowable and uncomfortable, the friction of these things is the grit that gives birth to the pearl – I must also accept that there’s a strong chance the grit may always remain grit. The pearl may never form, the hard work might yield no reward at all.

And yet, I do believe, and very powerfully, that somehow the hard work is its own reward. It’s the pushing against opposition, the attempt to solve the potentially unsolvable, which creates some inner expansion that’s hard to describe. But I think it’s the feeling I had after MONA and my gallery experience, some flowering of a greater range of possibility for thought, for experience, that could only come from the difficulty of the struggle itself.

The most pleasing way to end this essay this would be for me to return to the show of paintings I presented at the start and elucidate the lessons they’ve taught me. I’m not being facetious, for I have learned things from them: that feeling lost or ashamed in the face of art might be natural, for example. They’ve reminded me that reading isn’t shopping, that narcissism must be resisted – but also that one might occasionally do well to check one’s own glass walls for cracks.

In this version I might present those pictures again, to show that they no longer look unpleasant to me, how in examining my own responses I’ve come to a new understanding that reveals the works to be shining, in fact, with a tough new beauty.

But now we’re at the end and I’m looking at the pictures again – and I still don’t like them. I still don’t understand what they’re doing. But in their radical otherness they have forced me to think, and that is suddenly more transcendent and precious than beauty. I’m released from dull egotism, from the childish demand that I should always get what I want – and it’s the difficulty itself that shines.

This is an edited version of the Barry Andrews Memorial Address delivered at the 2018 Australian Literary Studies Convention, Australian National University in Canberra on 3 July 2018.  

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Lifesaver Station as Chinese Lantern, Glenelg. Photo: Michael Coghlan. Distributed under Creative Commons license.

In April 2015 I flew from my home in Sydney to Adelaide for the funeral of an old friend’s mother. The day before the service I went to visit my father. It was only a couple of months since I’d seen him, but he was in his 80s, and over the year or two prior he’d occasionally been distracted on the phone, ending calls abruptly, even brusquely, or, more worryingly, seeming to have forgotten conversations we’d had only weeks before. Once or twice I had even had the disconcerting sense he had become confused about the conversation we were in the midst of, hanging up moments after he had answered, apparently under the impression we had been talking for some time.

In somebody else this behaviour might have been more concerning, and certainly at least one of my brothers was quite agitated about it. But I didn’t think there was any immediate crisis. He was still working for several hours a day, mostly with texts in Ancient Greek and Latin, and although he was certainly more forgetful than he once was, it didn’t seem likely he could do that kind of work if there was any substantial cognitive decline.

It was mild and grey when I arrived. After collecting a car at the airport I picked my father up from his home in the beachside suburb of Glenelg. I didn’t have any particular destination in mind: since he had given up driving a few years previously he rarely left the area around his house, yet he always enjoyed an opportunity to go further afield. And so we meandered north, following the coast north past the Patawolonga, and on through West Beach and Henley Beach to Grange and Tennyson, before retracing our steps and heading south, through Somerton and Brighton to Seacliff, and finally, Kingston Park. Along the way my father pointed out places he remembered or were connected to his family, reminding me of stories I had already heard many times. This repetition was not boring: quite the opposite; it was somehow reassuring to be reminded of how these stories connected me to him, and my childhood. Later we sat talking on the seat on his veranda, and after a while he said he wanted to speak to me about his will.

The details of that conversation aren’t really relevant. I knew his affairs had been on his mind for a while, and I agreed to make some arrangements to help him get them sorted out. What matters is that I think the real reason he was worried about his will was that he already knew he was sick.

It is difficult to explain my father to people who didn’t know him. He was an unusual and complex man. A philosopher by training, specialising in metaphysics, logic, philosophy of language and philosophy of mind, he was exceptionally gifted intellectually, and at least early in his career, a significant figure in his field. But he was also deeply, wilfully, even perversely committed to conducting his life in exactly the way he chose.

In his professional life this translated into perfectionism in his work – despite their abstract subject matter his papers are elegant, witty, devastatingly precise, and his lectures were similarly rigorous – and a total refusal to engage with those aspects of academic life he thought frivolous or found inconvenient (categories that seemed to blur into each other more and more as he grew older).

Something similar was true of his personal life. Even when I was young he was reclusive. When we were small children we were forbidden to enter his study or make noise if he was working, and he would only answer the phone if the caller knew the secret code (let it ring twice, then hang up and ring back), and often not even then. As he grew older these behaviours grew more and more exaggerated, and by the time I was in high school his avoidance of normal social intercourse was legendary. More than once I saw him cross the road and hide behind trees to avoid neighbours or acquaintances, and he regularly hid in the house and refused to answer the door to people he did not wish to speak to. After the sudden death of his old friend Stewart in the late 1980s he wrote to Stewart’s widow to express his condolences – obviously he hadn’t gone to the funeral – telling her he had always regarded Stewart as one of his closest friends, even though he hadn’t seen him for more than a decade. His colleague, Ed, who had been his best friend since the 1960s (and whom I know he loved, deeply), saw him more than that: a couple of times a year, at least, although they communicated quite often in writing. Yet while it might seem reasonable to assume this behaviour was a symptom of shyness or social awkwardness, that was not the case. He was extremely funny, and on those rare occasions when he was unable to avoid normal social situations he was relaxed and charming.

His refusal to do anything he found inconvenient grew even more pronounced after my parents separated in my second year of high school. On one occasion when he was supposed to be minding us one of my brothers was caught shoplifting in a store in the city. The police called and he refused point blank to collect him from the station, claiming he had a headache. Another night when one of my brothers was eleven my father had to take him to hospital with what turned out to be appendicitis. My father dropped him in casualty with $20 for a taxi, then went home, took two sleeping tablets and went to bed.

I’m uncomfortably aware these stories make him sound neglectful, which I suppose in some ways he was – things may have been different in the 1980s but they weren’t that different. But even now I find it difficult to parse my feelings about his behaviour, or to pass judgement on it. Because despite these sorts of lapses he was also extremely kind and generous, especially as he grew older. And – perhaps most importantly – there was never a moment when I doubted his love for me and my brothers.

His reclusiveness was also somehow connected to his fascination with the landscape of Adelaide’s beachside suburbs. His father’s family had lived in the area since the 1870s (one of my relatives drove the first tram from the city to Glenelg, and my great-grandmother was later run over and killed by a tram outside the old Village Cinemas), and except for a few years in Sydney and Oxford, he lived in Glenelg all his life. He was born in my great-grandparents’ house on Jetty Road, then grew up opposite the oval on Brighton Road. After he and my mother married in the early 1960s they lived for a time in an apartment on the Esplanade, before moving to Ramsgate Street, where we lived until I was ten, and then to a larger house on Giles Avenue. After my parents separated he moved to Bath Street, before moving one last time to the house he and my stepmother shared on Scarborough Street.

As a result the streets of the area were freighted with significance for him. For as long as I can remember any walk was also an act of remembrance, the web of connections associated with each house or street recalled as we passed it. Over the years these stories had also become a way of memorialising the ways the area had changed, and, I suppose, of holding onto the past. In the front yard of his house on Scarborough Street a massive Jerusalem Pine leans out over the footpath: twenty years ago, when he rang to tell me had bought the house he did not need tell me the address, instead he told me it was the house with the tree. I knew it because I used to ride past the tree on my way home from school, and because I remembered him telling me he too used to ride his bike past it when he was a boy in the 1940s.

The only place he consistently avoided was the beach. Although I never really understood the reason for this it was at least partly due to his fear of sharks. Before he was born his father had seen a woman taken by a shark near Brighton Jetty (by the time I was growing up the story of the person who jumped off the jetty into the shark’s mouth had become folklore), and as a boy my father saw a huge great white swim under the jetty at Glenelg, a sight he never forgot. As he grew older his hatred of sharks intensified, so much so that my brothers and I would sometimes make fun of his reluctance to go near the water, conjuring stories about sharks wriggling up the sand onto the Esplanade to eat passers-by. Despite this I think we all understood his unease with the beach was about something more complex – anxiety, perhaps, or agoraphobia – and also a manifestation of the same impulse that led him to avoid social contact.

Over the next few months I travelled back and forth to Adelaide. By July it was clear all was not well, but it was not until early August that he finally saw a specialist. That night he called to say he had been diagnosed with a form of lymphoma. It was incurable, but there was a chance chemotherapy might keep it at bay for a while. Whatever happened he didn’t have long: a year, maybe two. He cleared his throat in the way he did. ‘I’m buggered,’ he said, his tone offhand but his voice breaking, the inadequacy of his words eloquently communicating the struggle to find a register in which to communicate something so immense.

Over the past few years I have become familiar with the complex effects of such news. There is the initial shock, followed by deep sadness, and then, as time passes, the reassertion of something like normality. Scientists speak of shifting baselines, the way environmental change, even drastic environmental change, becomes normalized, the world that was forgotten by each new generation. The same is true of the process of people dying: the weird ordinariness of the day to day business of it all somehow smooths over the wrenching grief and dislocation, pushing it underground.

I suspect this also holds true for the dying. A close friend who died of a brain tumour a couple of years ago once spoke to me about the difficulty of making sense of her impending death, the way its blank finality undid her each time she tried to think about it. She was only a couple of years older than me, but I don’t think that changes as we get older: to know death is close because you’re in your 80s is one thing, to be told you’re actually dying is another altogether. This was particularly true for my father, whose horror of hospitals and fear of death was intense, and real. But I think it is true for most of us: the idea of our own extinguishment remains impossible to comprehend, the notion of a world without us almost unthinkable.

Until the second half of the eighteenth century the world Europeans inhabited was surprisingly small. Since Galileo turned his telescope on the heavens two hundred years earlier astronomers had understood the Milky Way was not a fixed dome, but had depth, its massing light not a shimmer but vast numbers of tiny stars ‘arranged in a wonderful manner’. But it was not until Herschel turned his new and larger telescopes on the night sky in the 1780s that the notion the Milky Way might itself be part of a much larger three-dimensional structure took shape. Herschel’s discoveries pushed the boundaries of the observable universe outward in dizzying new ways.

Yet even as Herschel’s theories were altering our understanding of the physical scale of the universe another revolution was taking place in our understanding of time. Despite the new culture of scientific enquiry that was taking shape in Europe and America, few had seriously challenged the understanding of the Earth’s origins laid down in the Bible. The world was assumed to be static, unchanging, the marvellous diversity of species the process of European expansion was beginning to reveal part of a larger, divine order. The Earth was also assumed to be relatively young. Most believed it was little more than a few thousand years old – in 1654 the Archbishop of Ireland, James Ussher used the information in the Old Testament to argue for 4004BC as the most likely date for the Earth’s creation – a brevity that was bookended by the belief time would end, perhaps imminently , as the universe was brought to a close by the Day of Judgement.

As the eighteenth century wore on cracks had begun to open in this version of the world’s origins. An increasing awareness of the complexity of geological strata led figures like the Scottish physician and geologist James Hutton to suggest the Earth’s structure was the result of natural processes of deposition and transformation. On the other side of the Channel George-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon suggested species might radiate outward from a common ancestor, ‘improving’ or ‘degenerating’ depending upon the environment in which they found themselves (Buffon’s ideas would later play a part in the development of race science, and by extension the intellectual justification for slavery, colonialism and many of the horrors of the twentieth century).

Yet in some ways the most important idea was that of French naturalist Georges Cuvier. Born in Montbeliard in 1769, Cuvier was drawn to the natural sciences as a child, absorbing Buffon’s encyclopedic Histoire Naturelle before his twelfth birthday. After graduating from the Caroline Academy in Stuttgart in 1788 Cuvier took a position as a tutor in Normandy, remaining there until 1795, when he joined the newly established Musée national d’histoire naturelle in Paris.

During his time in Normandy Cuvier had become interested in the question of fossils, and more particularly, their relationship to living organisms, and once in Paris he turned his attention to the mystery of the mastodon bones the museum held in its collection. Recovered from the Pleistocene graveyard known as Big Bone on the Ohio River by the Baron de Longueuil in 1739, and later presented to Louis XV, these bones had been a conundrum for more than five decades. For although the femur and tusks were recognizably those of some form of elephant, the teeth (which weigh more than two kilograms each) were not ridged like those of an elephant, but instead possessed a series of cusps, rather like monstrous versions of a human molar.

Without a contemporary creature to which they might belong, scientists did not know what to make of the teeth. Some suggested there had been a mistake, and the teeth belonged to a different animal entirely. Others, such as Thomas Jefferson and the anatomist and surgeon William Hunter, suggested the remains were those of an entirely new and as yet unidentified creature that presumably still lurked in the forests of North America.

Cuvier proposed a new and radical solution. Like Hunter and Jefferson he was certain the teeth were the remains of a new species, hitherto unknown by science. But he also went further. Why, he asked, do we find no living evidence of such an animal? The answer, he declared, was that they were relics of ‘a world previous to ours, destroyed by some kind of catastrophe’. They were, in other words, éspèces perdues, or lost species. To this transformative claim Cuvier appended another, just as revolutionary. If these species had vanished others must have as well. And in so doing he swept away the idea the Earth was essentially unchanging, destabilizing our ideas about time, history, geology and biology.

The reverberations of Cuvier’s insight are still being felt today. Along with James Hutton and Charles Lyell’s insights into geology, it paved the way for Darwin’s theory of evolution by means of natural selection, and helped consolidate the idea the Earth – and by extension the Universe – is the product of natural forces rather than divine intervention. Yet it is also difficult to avoid the fact that even as these ideas were taking shape, other processes were underway. In North America European settlers were pushing north and west, felling the forests and hunting the buffalo. In the Atlantic and Pacific whalers and sealers were slaughtering marine mammals and birds in extraordinary numbers, and the assault on the animals of the Southern Ocean was only a few years away. On Mauritius the dodo was already gone, hunted to extinction by Dutch sailors in just over half a century, while in the Bering Sea Steller’s Sea Cow, a relative of today’s dugongs and manatees that grew to nine metres in length and was one of the last survivors of the Pleistocene, had been wiped from existence by Europeans in just 27 years. For the spirit of scientific enquiry in which the work of Cuvier and others was founded was inextricably entwined with the economic and cultural forces that drove the colonial exploitation of Africa and India, the Americas and Australia. And these same forces were also laying the foundations of the industrial economy, an economy based not just on the exploitation of human beings, but on the extraction and consumption of coal and other fossil fuels.

My father began chemotherapy in August. In the weeks between his diagnosis and the treatment he began talking about the chemo as if it offered the chance of a cure. This made me uneasy. The best he could hope for was remission, and it seemed unwise to invest his hope in a treatment that couldn’t provide what he wanted from it. And indeed, once the chemo began it became clear it was going to be considerably more arduous than he had expected. His weight dropped fast and he was immobilised by fatigue and quickly began to lose his hair.

Because he was so fatigued most of my information came via my stepmother, Judith. She would break down the detail of what was happening in long texts to me and my brothers. The tone of these texts was upbeat, but it was obvious she was struggling. At first we tried to convince my father they needed help – a nurse, or even just a cleaner – but he refused to even discuss the idea, insisting they could manage.

We all knew this was desperately unfair. Although she was ten years his junior my stepmother had health problems of her own, and very little in the way of support. My brother David, who still lives in Adelaide, did what he could, but he lives on the opposite side of the city and didn’t have a car. Finally my brothers Andrew, Patrick and I, all of whom live in Sydney, agreed we would each travel down every three weeks, so that one of us was there every week, even if it was only for a couple of days.

Over the next few months he deteriorated fast. Whether because of the chemo or the cancer that was still burning through him, he continued to lose weight, and each time I saw him he looked markedly worse, his hair thinner, his skin sallower. One afternoon I arrived at his house to find he had fallen asleep in his chair in his study, head back and mouth open and for the long moment before he took a sudden, wheezing breath, I was gripped by the horrible certainty he had died.

Despite his growing weakness he always seemed pleased to see me when I was there. Yet despite his good humour with me I knew he was being fantastically difficult for my stepmother the rest of the time. From the beginning he had been unwilling to take responsibility for any aspect of his treatment, but simultaneously he was furious and resentful of any efforts to help him. His obdurate refusal to engage with the details of his treatment extended to his own care: having seemingly decided the chemo would work he behaved as if it was unnecessary for him to eat properly, or do anything that would help him stay strong.

By November it was clear the chemo was not working. The symptoms from the cancer – sweats, gut pain, breathlessness – were worse, and he was continuing to lose weight. Finally, toward the end of the month he grew so ill he had to be admitted to hospital. After some consultation with his doctor it was decided to put him onto a different chemo regime, and in early December he was allowed to go home.

In the days after his release from hospital he seemed to be making an effort. He agreed to begin eating better, and for a couple of weeks his weight loss seemed to have been arrested. But then, a week or so before Christmas, my partner Mardi’s father contracted an infection in the bones of his spine. Because her parents also live in Adelaide we flew over together, and while she visited her father in hospital I spent time in Glenelg with mine. Judith took a photo of the two of us that week. We are in his kitchen, he is sitting in his chair and I am standing behind him, my hands on his shoulder: he is looking down, away from the camera, his expression bemused, as if he feels the fuss of having his picture taken is vaguely absurd. But looking at it again it is not his expression that strikes me, but his physical frailty: he is pale, shrunken, his shirt two sizes too large, the bones of his face protruding. Three days later he was back in hospital. After some consultation with the doctors it was decided to discontinue treatment.

When I was a child my parents would sometimes take me and my brothers into the city on Friday afternoons. Afterwards we would drive home down what is now Sir Donald Bradman Drive. As dusk drew down the wide open space that surrounded the airport was transected by long shadows; in the distance behind them the hills rose, grey and red in the light of the setting sun.

I always loved that drive. Something about the low hum of the car on the asphalt, the open space and fading light has never left me. Sometimes I would glimpse rabbits near the runways, the outlines of their loping forms dark against the silvery grass.

I suppose many people know the feeling I am describing. The relationship you have with the places you lived as a child are complex, especially if, like me, you left them. Yet whatever my feelings about Adelaide, or the person I was when I lived there, the place is part of me in a way nowhere else is. The smell of it, the peculiar mix of eucalyptus and dust that hums through the summer air, the wet smell of the earth in the winter, are immediately recognizable. Other smells too. The smell of dust and old furniture in the house up the road where our elderly neighbours lived. The smell of ancient carpet and damp ashes in the house my father stayed in after my parents separated. The smell of rotting seaweed and the ocean.

Nor is it just about scent. Each time I went back over the months of my father’s illness I was struck anew by the complex webs of memory and association that bound me to the city and its landscape. Sometimes the stories were my father’s – here, for instance, is the place one of his cousins got so drunk he threw up and lost his false teeth. Here is the place the same cousin was brought before a magistrate for urinating in public, then after being released from the dock nipped down the side of the courthouse to relieve himself, only to be spotted by the arresting officers as they too emerged from court. Other times the stories were mine: here is the street I lived on when I was twenty. This is the way I used to ride home after work: on summer nights the scent of the flowers mingled with the animal stink of the zoo; sometimes the low growls of the lions or the cries of the gibbons would be audible, reverberating through the warm dark. This was my grandmother’s house. This is the garden we used to sneak through as a shortcut after school. This is where my friend who died of meningitis lived. This is the house another friend of mine and I broke into because we thought it was haunted, only to be caught by the police. This is where my great-aunt lived: she was one of the witnesses in the Beaumont case, and one of the last people to see the children alive. This was an orphanage: boys from it used to attend my school; years later I would learn many of them were systematically abused by the men who were supposed to care for them. And deeper even than these stories there is the place itself, the denuded line of the land as it follows the coast, the bluestone buildings and brush fences, the brown shape of the hills to the south and east.

These memories are of a place that is gone. The landscape I knew as a child, the low houses and empty land, has been swept away, the long stretches of sandhills and reclaimed land built over. The faded Edwardian elegance of Glenelg is largely gone, replaced by cheap-looking luxury apartments and car parks. The philosopher Glenn Albrecht writes of what he calls solastalgia, a form of existential grief caused by environmental change. His intention was to create a term to capture the psychic dimension of climate change, but I wonder whether the term might equally describe the feelings of loss associated with the passage of time.

Nor, as I write this, can I set aside my unease about the idea of a non-Aboriginal Australian talking about connectedness to place. At times Australian cities can seem haunted, their orderliness belying the violence on which they are built; nowhere is this more true than in Adelaide, where streets and buildings and civic institutions bear the names of the city’s founding families, families whose members oversaw the dispossession and massacre of Aboriginal people in South Australia and the Northern Territory.

But even in places in which the landscape is not shadowed by the legacies of colonialism the idea of connection to place is frequently problematic. As China Mieville has argued, too often it serves as a pretext for many of the darker undercurrents of political thought or is used to set up simplistic oppositions between the city and the country, the natural and the social, the native and the intruder, which blur in turn into environmental injustice, racism and worse.

Still, a desire to talk and think about place matters, because it reminds us of the degree to which our abstraction from place is bound up with a larger loss of connection to the natural world. Where once the rhythms of our lives were shaped by the seasons and the natural world, many of us now live lives so dependent upon technology we are almost entirely unaffected by the natural world. Much of the time we do not even recognise the food we eat for what it is: the marine biologist Helen Scales cites research showing one in five children in the UK believe fish fingers are made of chicken. Likewise Mardi sometimes talks of Easter holidays when she was a child, of the long drive south to the Coorong, the full moon rising over its still waters, yet only this year it was announced churches in the UK and Australia were close to a deal which would see them attach Easter to a fixed date, so as to remove the uncertainty it supposedly creates for business.

Is it not possible that seen like this the idea of connectedness takes on a different, and less reactionary hue? For in some very real sense it embodies a form of resistance to capitalism’s dream of the frictionless society. And because an awareness of place demands we think not just about history, but about other presences and other cycles, and time and the way it inheres in the landscape, a form of knowledge at odds with the perpetual zero hour of consumer capitalism. Perhaps it also tells us something about why we are so untroubled by the environmental catastrophe that is taking place around us. For we cannot care about a world we no longer even see.

Like much of Adelaide, Glenelg and the other beachside suburbs I grew up on were Kaurna country, part of a larger territory that ran along the western edge of the Fleurieu Peninsula from Cape Jervis in the south to Crystal Brook in the north. To the east, in the Mount Lofty Ranges, the Kaurna’s land bordered that of the Peramangk; in the south it abutted the land of the Ramindjeri, who occupied the land around Goolwa and Encounter Bay.

Estimates of the Kaurna’s population vary, but when settlers arrived in 1836, they are believed to have numbered 1000, maybe more. This population was organised into a number of small family groups, each of which occupied a carefully defined territory that extended from the beach up into the foothills; through the year these groups followed the movement of fish and wildlife, camping near the beach in the spring and retreating inland in the winters, presumably partly to shelter from the savage storms that pummel the South Australian coast in the colder months.

When I was a child I once asked what happened to the Kaurna. I did not know the name until much later, of course – part of the great erasure of Aboriginal history is the ongoing ignorance of non-Aboriginal Australians about the complexity and diversity of Aboriginal languages and culture. But I remember being told they had all died, or been moved westward to Yorke Peninsula.

In fact some of the Kaurna were relocated to Point Pearce on the Yorke Peninsula. But the bland imprecision of the story I was told disguised the brutal reality. In the years after settlement the Kaurna were almost entirely wiped out by disease and conflict with settlers. By 1842 their population was estimated to be a 650; fourteen years later, in 1856, records show only 180 remained, and by 1879 officials were claiming they had entirely disappeared.

The destruction of the Kaurna and their culture severed a relationship with the land extending back thousands of years. The place we know as Kangaroo Island lies south of Adelaide, off the southern tip of the Fleurieu Peninsula, separated from the mainland by the narrow and treacherous waters of Backstairs Passage. When Europeans arrived it had been uninhabited for many thousands of years, and was known to Aboriginal people as ‘Karta’, or the island of the Dead. Yet archaeological remains suggest it was only abandoned after the land bridge that once connected it to the mainland was flooded at the end of the last ice age. And just as the Narrangga people of Yorke Peninsula have stories describing a time when what is now Spencer Gulf was lagoons and wetlands, the Kaurna had stories that accurately describe geological features that have been submerged beneath the surface of Backstairs Passage for more than 10,000 years. The notion of an unbroken line of cultural transmission stretching back more than a hundred centuries is dizzying, testament not just to the complexity and depth of the Kaurna’s connection to the land they cared for, but a reminder of the richness of culture and understanding wiped away by European occupation.

The country Europeans found when they arrived in 1836 was incredibly bountiful, its waters filled with fish and shellfish, the grassland with wildlife. Birds were astonishingly abundant as well: when the painter John Gould visited in 1838, just two years after settlement, he marvelled at the rosellas and lorikeets that filled the air, writing that ‘the incessant clamour kept up by multitudes of these birds baffles description,’ going on to observe, in words that offer a presentiment of what was to come, that, ‘they are all so remarkably tame, that any number of shots may be fired among them without causing the slightest alarm to any but those that are actually wounded.’

Images and descriptions of Glenelg and the surrounding area from the years immediately after settlement reveal a landscape quite unlike that exists today. The Kaurna engaged in extensive firestick farming, and paintings from the early years of the settlement show a landscape of low dunes and scrub interspersed by wide stretches of grass and wetland. To the north, on the far side of the Patawolonga’s mouth, the coast gave way to a series of lakes and marshes that followed the line of what is now Sturt Creek, or Warriparri, and were part of a much larger system of wetlands known as Wittonga that was fed by the River Torrens, or Karrawirra Parri, Redgum Forest River. Bounded on the seaward side by coastal dunes and on the inland side by a system of red dunes, these wetlands were known as Pathawillyanga, or Place of the Swamp Gum Branches. Eastward, where the tramline runs through East Glenelg toward the racecourse existed another system of lagoons; the largest of them, once known as Hack’s Lagoon, is describes as having been extremely beautiful, and notable for the density of waterfowl and other birds that gathered there. And the stretch of coast between Glenelg Jetty and the sandhills by Minda Home, was known as Wituwartingga, for the reeds, ‘witu’, that grew in the creeks.

Eighty years ago, when my father was growing up, the remnants of this landscape were still visible. He described the land between the city and Glenelg as still only half-developed, a patchwork of farmland and open space interspersed with the occasional house or building. Likewise my great-uncle Cliff, who worked in the abattoirs at Gepps Cross before he found work in the racing stables in Somerton, spoke of catching wild horses on the banks of the Torrens in the years around the first world war when the area was still mostly scrub. Even when I was growing up in the 1970s parts remained, in particular the tracts of dunes that ran along the beach at West Beach and Somerton Park. When I was at primary school my friends and I would ride our bikes to them and spend whole days at a time roaming through them, building cubbies crafted from sticks and driftwood in the lee of the hills or racing down to the beach. At the time they seemed wild to me, untouched; later I would learn they were yet another symbol of the destruction wrought by European invaders, their contours held in place by marram grass planted to stabilise them after livestock destroyed the native grasses that once grew on them.

Elsewhere other remnants of the land the Kaurna cared for could be seen. A tree by the Torrens with the mark of a canoe in it. Pockets of bushland along the creeks, the reclaimed land that ran along the airport, its broken surface a memorial to the vanished wetlands of Wittonga. And if you looked, there were echoes of other, even older landscapes: sometimes, after storms, the force of the waves would expose reeking black mud beneath the white sands of the beach, remnants of the ancient reedbeds and mangroves that filled the Gulf when sea levels were lower. Given another million years perhaps it would have become oil, as it was it was sulphurous and foul. But for the most part it was a devastated landscape, just as it is now. Where once there were lagoons and creeks thick with fish and turtles and birds, now there is asphalt, houses. Where once there was grassland and forests in which birds and animals lived, now there is barren waste in which a handful of species survive. Of course this is true of human cities everywhere; it is simply that the destruction of ecological communities by human cities and farms is so normalised it is invisible. In human terms this process is slow, accretive, but in geological terms it is shockingly swift.

After Christmas my brother came across an article about a trial of a drug designed for the specific form of lymphoma my father had that was being conducted in Melbourne. With his doctor’s help he was admitted into the program. Whether it was the new drug or simply the cessation of the chemo he began to improve almost at once. In April I visited with Mardi and our daughters; he was better than he had been in a year.

Over the next few months I was only in Adelaide a couple of times, at least partly because back in Sydney we were in the process of moving house and settling our daughter into a new school. But every time I spoke to my father he seemed surprisingly well, so much so that in April he had laser surgery on his eyes, an investment in the future that would have been unthinkable only a few months before.

Then in the second half of the year he began to go downhill again. As his health grew worse he became increasingly difficult to deal with. This was particularly difficult for my stepmother, who was unwell herself. Eventually the situation reached a kind of crisis. The operation my stepmother needed could not be put off any longer, and because he was obviously not well enough to care for her as she recuperated, she decided she would recuperate at her daughter’s house. My brother Patrick and I tried to make arrangements to come and stay with him while she was away, but he refused, growing angry and, on one occasion, hanging up on me. Finally Patrick and I decided the situation was intolerable, and we would just go anyway. We agreed he would go first, and I would come a few days later to take over.

Extinction is a rupture in the world. Each time a species is lost it takes with it not just its genetics, but its nature, its way of being in the world. And as it does the universe is lessened.

But this loss diminishes us as well. Scholars in the environmental humanities talk of entanglements, using the term to describe the complex webs of ecological and social interdependence and interaction that surround and define all living creatures; for many human cultures these entanglements are embedded in cultural practices and rituals, shaping social life and understanding. But even for those of us whose lives are not lived in close proximity to other species, animals are a source of myth and metaphor and, perhaps most importantly, a way to imagine other minds, other ways of being. To live without the imaginative and metaphorical resources that provides is to lose something of ourselves.

This quiet dying is all around us. In my childhood summer nights were punctuated by the yips and barks of geckoes, their soft bodies moving across walls, pale in the half-light. I have not seen a gecko in a decade, maybe more. Until a few years ago skinks would gather in huge numbers in Sydney gardens; these days they are only ever visible in ones and twos. When I moved to Sydney a quarter of a century ago huge carnivorous tiger slugs emerged at night to slither across back yards; often they would congregate in our cat’s bowl, gorging themselves on her food. They too seem to have largely disappeared. When I was a child the black and orange butterflies we called wanderers were everywhere in the summer months: these days they are rarely seen. In the 1930s and 1940s my father occasionally found paper nautilus shells and seahorses amongst the banks of seagrass that washed up on the beach at Glenelg. By the time I was growing up in the 1970s both were gone, although the beach was often littered with the gleaming black shells of razorfish and the ridged and spiral shells of other molluscs; each year there are fewer of them. As a boy I spent many hours crabbing from the jetty and fishing with my grandfather on the beach at Somerton: at dawn and dusk we would fill buckets with gar and King George whiting. The last time I was in Glenelg I walked along the jetty. One man was fishing. His bucket was empty.

These are only the local manifestations of a much larger catastrophe. Species are disappearing at rates unprecedented since the cataclysm that wiped out the dinosaurs: a quarter of all mammal species are threatened with extinction, as are almost half of all amphibian species, and one in eight bird species. This loss of species is part of an even more precipitous collapse of biological abundance. Over the past forty years humans have killed at least two thirds of the world’s wild animals. In the same period we have also wiped out more than half the planet’s marine vertebrates, and 70 per cent of the world’s seabirds. A recent study in Germany suggested insect numbers have declined by up to 70 per cent in the last thirty years, a figure some scientists see as the prelude to a larger, more systemic collapse of ecosystems, and anecdotal evidence suggests similar declines are taking place elsewhere as well. Nor are these declines slowing down. Instead they are accelerating, as more and more of the world’s surface is alienated to human use. The scale of the convulsion taking place around us is almost unimaginable.

The last time I spoke to my father was by accident. I was in Shanghai, and he called me by mistake while sending a text. When he realised where I was he tried to hang up, not wanting to disturb me, but I kept him on the phone, pleased to have the chance to talk to him. I remember standing up, walking away from the group of people I was seated with and staring out the window at the city below, but I don’t remember what we talked about: being back in Shanghai, I suppose, perhaps his health. I wish I had known it was the last time I would speak to him.

When I arrived home from China I called him several times, but he didn’t answer, although I didn’t know whether that was because he was avoiding my calls or because he was not well enough to talk. A couple of days later my brother, Patrick, flew down. When Patrick arrived at my father’s house nobody answered the door. Eventually he broke down the back door and forced his way in to find my father lying in the hall. He had had a heart attack the night before and collapsed. Patrick called an ambulance and got him to hospital. An hour later I was on a plane. When I arrived he was conscious enough to recognise me, but he was confused and agitated. The next morning he was dead.

Once we had left the hospital and taken my stepmother to her daughter’s house I drove to the airport with Patrick. I had booked a hotel room for several nights, but now he was gone I did not want to stay. As we took off I stared out the window at the rows of rooves, the water, the low rise of the hills. It was like saying goodbye.

Cuvier imagined a world in which catastrophe wiped away species, a process of destruction and creation. In time his theories fell out of favour, superseded by those of Hutton and Lyell, whose theories of uniformitarianism – the assumption the forces that we see shaping the world today also shaped the world of the past – came to form the basis of our modern understanding of geology. Yet Cuvier was not entirely wrong: as Elizabeth Kolbert points out, his belief the mastodon and the mammoth had been wiped out by a disaster was correct, his error lay in misunderstanding the nature of the disaster. These days we understand their disappearance – and those of countless other species in what is now known as the megafauna extinctions – follows the wave of human expansion across the globe, the leading edge of a wave of extinction that has only hastened with the passage of time. The disaster, in other words, was us.

Grief teaches us that time is plastic. A lifetime is an ocean and an instant. It does not matter whether something happened a week ago, a year ago, a decade ago: all loss is now. Grief does not stop, or disappear. It suffuses, inhabits us. The dead are both gone and never gone, living absences we bear with us.

Perhaps something similar is true of extinction. What is lost remains with us, felt in its unpresence. The space between the megafauna extinctions of 13,000 years ago and now is just a heartbeat in geological terms, the collapsing waveform of disaster we inhabit the convergence of a past and present we can no longer escape.

A few years before my father died I saw a photo of myself. I have my mother’s looks, her family’s fair Irish colouring, but there, staring out at me, was my father’s face. I have his hands as well, his body.

More than once in the years before he died I thought about making a record of his memories. I thought it would be possible to fly to Adelaide and videotape him talking about his family, his past, the stories of his childhood I had heard so many times. I never did it: before he got sick I knew he would hate the idea, the implication he was close to death; once he was sick he was not well enough. Now, as I try to piece together my memories – of him, of Adelaide, of the lines of descent that connect me and my children to the past – I wish I had: each time the details elude me, already forgotten.

This essay is part of a new Sydney Review of Books essay series devoted to nature writing titled the New Nature. We’ve asked critics, essayists, poets, artists and scholars to reflect on nature in the twenty-first century and to grapple with the literary conventions of writing nature. Read the other essays in the New Nature series here.

We’re grateful to Create NSW for funding the New Nature project.

The post An Ocean and an Instant appeared first on Sydney Review of Books.

At the Kadimah Jewish Cultural Centre, in a southeastern suburb of Melbourne, a single, cistern-like room houses Australia’s largest collection of Yiddish books. I am standing before the shelves, looking at a photograph of four writers—Bialik, Sholem Aleichem, Ben-Ami, and Mendele Mocher Sforim— together, improbably enough, posing before a white dinghy and trompe-l’œil riverbank, when a woman from New York appears at the door. ‘Do you know where the Holocaust Centre is?’ She stops to let her eyes adjust to the dark. Abstracted, she tells me that her parents, Holocaust survivors, for a time considered Australia as their choice of refuge, a country she never visited until today. ‘Strange to think this could have been everyday life for me—just like that.’ Just like that it could be otherwise, as it was for some of the writers on these shelves. To distinguish them—writers like Pinchas Goldhar and Herz Bergner—from those from New York, Montréal, Buenos Aires, and Odessa, the library has fixed an icon of a red kangaroo to the spines of their books.

Beyond Melbourne’s Jewish community, Herz Bergner and Pinchas Goldhar are mostly remembered as ‘multicultural’ writers avant la lettre. It is worth stopping to consider precisely how this is an anachronism. Bergner and Goldhar began writing while the White Australia policy was still in effect, and well before cultural pluralism found a place in Australia’s national ethos. Theirs was an Australia more ethnically homogenous than Britain; a country, in the words of J. M. Coetzee, ‘still a cultural colony…, repressed, puritanical, and suspicious of foreigners.’ In 1937, when Yosl Bergner, Herz’s nephew, arrived on the Pierre Loti, its cargo of 33 Jews, Russians, Greeks, Albanians, and Syrians was announced with the headline: ‘Polyglot Influx in Sydney.’

One of the first English-language collections to feature Goldhar and Bergner was Southern Stories, Poems, and Paintings (1945). Brian Fitzpatrick, the editor, opens the collection with an essay on ‘The Australia Tradition’, as he calls it, defending the inclusion of its Polish Jews with the subdued statement: ‘I do not think the term “Australian” is so narrow that it does not cover them.’ This hesitant avowal owes to the fact that, at a time when ‘Australian’ indeed signified something narrowly monolingual and monocultural, Bergner and Goldhar wrote in a language other than English and thought themselves as contributing at once to Australian and Yiddish literature. Both were writers before they emigrated to Australia: Goldhar, from the industrial city of Łódź, Poland, arrived a poet and journalist, aged 27; Bergner, from the town of Radymno, Poland, was the author of Stiban un Gasan (1935), a short story collection, when he disembarked in Australia, aged 31.

Paradoxical though it may sound, I suspect that in the way these writers resist the ‘Australian Tradition’, they belong to this tradition; that their resistance anticipates a more capacious and plural vision of Australia. Anxious to assert a national literature, Fitzpatrick’s introduction echoes a view shared by many in his day: that his country has been ‘tardy’ in finding ‘some distinctively Australian’ style and subject. In this spirit he quotes, approvingly and at length, from Vance Palmer’s ‘National Portraits’ (1940), where the author lampoons early settler writing for having ‘the tone… of an outsider’ and the ‘pose of detachment from this strange colonial life.’ But what more fitting description for the diasporic writer in Australia?

In the place of Fitzpatrick’s project of ‘cultural settlement’, we might speak of the other tradition, one of ‘unsettling difference’, in Philip Mead’s terms. In his essay ‘Unsettling Language’, Mead counts both ‘Indigenous narratives of place and history and the plural knowledges of the multicultural present’ as ‘unsettling’ in his specific, punning sense of the word. No doubt, Indigenous and migrant experiences diverge in fundamental respects, and yet at times there is a flash of identification; one that allows us to entertain, if only for an instance, the idea that what is distinctly Australian is that sense of homelessness Palmer and Fitzpatrick wished to repudiate. To take two pertinent, non-literary examples, from the late 1930s: the young painter, Yosl Bergner described the Indigenous Australians he met in Fitzroy as ‘exactly like Jews, dispossessed people’, and set out to paint them in the spirit of ‘what I imagined was happening in Poland.’ Around the same time, as news emerged of the so-called Kristallnacht, an Aboriginal activist and Yorta Yorta man, William Cooper, lead a contingent from his Footscray home to the German Embassy on Albert Road to deliver a letter condemning the ‘cruel persecution of the Jewish people by the Nazi government.’ Perhaps Cooper’s activism was, as Gary Foley suggests, a strategy of reasoning by analogy, of petitioning for the intelligibility of Indigenous suffering by mapping it onto another, more recognisable instance (consider, likewise, the title of the Noongar poet, Graeme Dixon’s first book, Holocaust Island). But the striking thing is surely that such vastly different experiences could—in a moment of symmetry—lend intelligibility to each other at all.

This is how Melech Ravitch, father of Yosl, Herz Bergner’s brother, saw Australia when he arrived on the Ville d’Amien in 1933. Ravitch was a significant figure in Yiddish letters and sought out Australian thinkers of equivalent stature, visiting Nettie Palmer within a month of his arrival. Palmer notes in her journal that he spoke no English and typed his questions ‘in Hebrew characters with green ink.’ He wrote: ‘Australian history, near its beginning, had two great wrongs—the convict-system and the ill-treatment of blacks. To what extent are these matters reflected in your literature?’ Palmer does not record her answer. She notes only the ‘battery of his truth-compelling eyes.’ To update Ravitch’s thesis—that Australia is defined by distinct but inextricable wounds—we might cite Klaus Neumann’s Across the Seas (2015), a history of Australia’s response to refugees: ‘Australian history is marked by two key themes: Indigenous dispossession and immigration.’ The question, as Ravitch would add, is how is this manifest in our literature? We might read the Collected Stories of Goldhar and Bergner’s Between Sky & Sea in light of such a question.

Biographical portraits of Pinchas Goldhar tend to stress is that he lived a life of trouble. Born in 1901, in Poland, he was a journalist for the Yiddish daily newspaper, the Lodzer Tageblatt, and a poet of experimental persuasion, inspired by what he called the ‘artistic and creative anarchy’ of the leading Yiddish poets of the day. It was a world of flurry, ferment, and Yiddish cultural revival that he left with some reluctance, arriving in Melbourne almost thirty years old, and suffering what he once named ‘the indignity of starting afresh.’ He lived for a time in a rural Jewish farming settlement in northern Victoria and then moved to Melbourne’s inner north, where he took up employment as a house painter and later as a labourer in his father’s dying factory. His work as a factory-hand provides the setting for his story ‘In a Quiet Street’ (1944), which opens with a vivid sketch of the steam-pressers at Levi Hosiery Mills:

They worked wearing only their singlets. Ceaselessly, their sweaty bodies stretched the socks over moulds, moving them through two searing metal plates… The steam never let up, getting hotter and thicker as the day moved on… Presses and pressers were so totally engulfed that they became invisible.

At least one historian speculates that labouring with dyestuffs contributed to his early death, aged 46, from a heart attack. He wrote fiction by night.

The lachrymose reading of Goldhar owes not so much to his premature death or trying circumstances, but his melancholic disposition. He was, even to friends and fellow writers, a disconsolate, aloof, and, in Bergner’s words, ‘very strange’ man. This outlook stemmed in part from his disappointment with Australia and organised Jewish life in Melbourne. Though he was intensely engaged with the literature of Australia, even embarking on an ambitious project to translate its leading authors into Yiddish (Lawson was his favourite), he sometimes saw his new country’s inhabitants as a baffling and absurd spectacle. Like Descartes, who wonders, when looking from his window at the people out in the street, whether he is seeing anything more than hats and coats concealing automatons, Goldhar writes:

I used to go out into the streets of Carlton [where I] saw an Australian stand quietly, lazily, on a street corner, doing absolutely nothing at all for an hour, maybe two hours. I thought he was mad and that I had wandered into a country of madmen. I used to walk around the streets for hours, weeping and weeping.

Goldhar found the Jewish community an equal, if not greater source of disenchantment. To begin with, he describes the ‘abyss of distrust and, quite often, of enmity… [between] the newly arrived immigrants and the older Jewish circles.’ Goldhar’s stories are populated by polemical caricatures of the established Anglo-Jews of Melbourne—the yehudim, as they were called, to distinguish them from the new arrivals from Eastern Europe, the yidn. To Goldhar, the yehudim were the ‘alrightniks’, the parvenus, who, with a whiff of old antisemitic tropes, are depicted in stories like ‘The Pioneer’ (1937) as ‘wallowing in money’ made from their entrepreneurialism in manufacturing socks and schmattes.

In a strange way, his disappointment intimates a deeper hope: a conviction that Melbourne’s Jewish community and his adopted Australia have great potential. For Goldhar was not simply a Yiddish writer, but a Yiddishist: a proponent of a diasporic form of cultural nationalism; someone who believed in a homeland in language, in a people bound by a textline first, and only afterwards a bloodline. In fact, though Goldhar thought Yiddish the Jewish mameloshn, it was not his mother tongue. He learnt the language by choice, out of ideological conviction, and, by his own account, quickly. His inspiration came from the famous writer and Yiddishist, I. L. Peretz, who wrote, in the introduction to his project of building a Yiddish Library, of diaspora as ‘our teacher’; that ‘because we always eat at a table of strangers, our hopes are for humankind’; a sentiment that receives its most concise reprise in Isaac Bashevis Singer’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech:

The high honour bestowed upon me by the Swedish Academy is also a recognition of the Yiddish language—a language of exile, without a land, without frontiers, not supported by any government, a language with possesses no words for weapons, ammunition, military exercises, war tactics… In a figurative way, Yiddish is the wise and humble language of us all, the idiom of a frightened and hopeful humanity.

Yiddishism, then, was at once nationalist and internationalist. It was a humanism, but with its universalism fashioned from the particular historical experience of diaspora. In this sense, it is not far from Heinrich Heine’s aufgeschriebene Vaterland or Isaac Deutscher’s notion of those ‘non-Jewish Jews’, whose Jewishness manifests in the pursuit of ‘a better future for the whole of mankind.’

This is the ideological background to Goldhar’s journalistic endeavours in Australia. He founded the first Yiddish Australian newspaper, Di Oystralier Lebn (1931-33), a ramshackle enterprise that sometimes needed to compensate for the lack of available Hebrew letters by compositing with Roman alphabet substitutes. In an essay printed in his newspaper, ‘Language and Culture’, Goldhar outlines his purpose in forceful terms:

A people’s individuality is expressed through their language, their souls breathe in their language, and only through language can the secrets of the deepest inner recesses, of our essence, be elevated to immortal value… No national culture could exist without a language, just as the ocean could not exist without water, or a forest exist without trees.

Yet, since the homeland is Yiddish, it is a homeland wherever Yiddish speakers happen to live. This accounts for the strange dynamics of Goldhar’s fiction—it is fiction not of Australia but from Australia, as the title of his first collection of stories, Dertzeilungen Fun Oystralie, suggests. They are stories that are at once imbued with a sense of the place in which they are written, and yet, missive-like, addressed to a wider, possibly global readership. Goldhar’s translations of Lawson were printed in South America; his short stories set in Australia reviewed by I. J. Singer in New York. If asked how he imagined his readership, one could imagine him responding like I. J. Singer’s brother, Isaac Bashevis Singer: ‘When I sit down to write I have a feeling that I’m talking maybe to millions or maybe to nobody.’ Here, Goldhar’s writing resonates with an ongoing discussion of how Yiddish literature—a literature of diasporic, minority communities, without a centre where it is the unquestionable majority—might at once typify and problematise World Literature. This discussion was timely, too, while Goldhar was alive: in 1936, at a P.E.N. International conference in Buenos Aires, the delegate for Yiddish, H. Leyvik, declared his language ‘a symbol of universalism’, whose ‘essential problem … consists in finding a way to synthesize national and universal values.’

Though writing maybe to nobody, the inaccessibility of Goldhar’s work has, in a sense, fortified his mystique. W. D. and Hilary Rubinstein, who dedicated their monumental The Jews in Australia (1986) to Goldhar, declare that his work available in English ‘would not be anomalous in an anthology of Nobel Prize Winners’, and note the tragedy that so much remains untranslated. In this sense, the 2016 publication of the Collected Stories in English is a significant event, even if its only significance is to deflate these superlatives.

Though this collection specifies no editor, though its stories appear without apparent order or chronology, though they reach us through various translations made from the 1940s to the present, the English reader—nonetheless, and all the more strikingly because of it—finds a vision and voice that is distinctively Goldhar. Like Waten, Goldhar turned from early avant-garde models to a realist form of prose fiction—one where, as Waten announced in his magazine Strife, ‘Facts are the new literature.’ What realism meant for these writers was the art of observing the world unflinchingly, in its material and ideological dimensions, which might—or indeed should for Waten, the more ideologically committed communist—contribute to its reshaping. Where these observations subsume characters under familiar social types, it can be a fiction of withering satire; something especially apparent in Goldhar’s earlier stories of provincial Poland, where a character like Reb Shmelke is introduced as ‘the best shofar blower in the village, maybe even in the entire vicinity.’ In other places, where we encounter the Jewish community through the self-estranging perspective of an outsider, it is a fiction of startling defamiliarisation, as in Goldhar’s ‘The Circumcision’, where we witness the procedure through the eyes of Jack Silver’s Christian wife, Katherine. This particular form of the uncanny—one that stems from the migrant experience—is most fully realised, to my mind, in Alien Son, a collection of short stories Waten wrote on Goldhar’s prompting. As Waten’s title suggests, his fiction is concerned with the intimate strangeness experienced by a migrant child growing up in a country where ‘there could be no reconciliation with the ways of our fathers.’ While Waten typifies this stance, Goldhar’s fiction is notable for his shifting preoccupations, from his early sardonic vignettes of Polish Jewish life in ‘The Shofar Blower’ (1931), to his pre-war stories of the migrant experience in Australia, such as ‘The Pioneer’ (1937), through to the sombre, celebrated fictions that directly grapple with the consequences of the genocide in Europe, like ‘Landslayt’ (1943), ‘In a Quiet Street’ (1944), and ‘Café in Carlton’ (1945). What we witness in Goldhar’s Collected Stories, then, is a migrant writer intensely committed to observing the experience of a community at a time when it was undergoing a historic and calamitous transformation.

Of all Goldhar’s stories, the most intriguing for the Australian reader is ‘The Pioneer’—the title perhaps accounting for the often repeated description of Goldhar himself as a ‘pioneer’ Jewish writer in Australia. A more literal translation of the title would simply be ‘On a Farm’ [Oyf a farm]. While it would be wrong to think of this as the Australian version of Herzl’s Altneuland (1902)—the utopian novel that heralded the idea of Jewish state with the maxim ‘If you will it, it is not a dream’ [‘Wenn Ihr wollt, Ist es kein Märchen’]—‘The Pioneer’ has a manifesto-like brooding. It opens with the image of an Australian farmer, Sandy O’Brien, shoving ‘a heap of bloody rabbit skins towards the frames where he was about to hang them to dry,’ and then turns to a depiction of the landscape:

The overcast Australian autumn day had begun to fade. Cold rain had drizzled since morning and thick clouds hung low over the mud-black paddock… A few solitary eucalypts with scrawny branches wavered to and fro under the low sky and, against the rain, the landscape appeared as if viewed through a shimmering screen.

It is only then that we meet Sam Rothman, who sits ‘beside the fireplace, staring dejectedly into the flame.’ According to the ideological lines of time, Rothman is a contradictory figure: at once luftmensch from the Polish shtetl, his impossible ambitions ‘bizarre and out of place in the Australian bush,’ and also Kibbutznik settler, seeking redemption through toil on an unforgiving land. His dream: to settle hundreds of Jewish families out in the bush.

Lest Rothman’s plans seem fanciful, it is worth recalling that around the time Goldhar wrote ‘The Pioneer’, Isaac Nachman Steinberg of the Freeland League for Jewish Territorial Colonisation was campaigning for a homeland for Jewish refugees in the East Kimberley. Steinberg, the former People’s Commissar of Justice for Lenin’s first government, was a consummate champion for the project, and succeeded, as he details in his book Australia—the Unpromised Land, in winning the support of state governments, trade unions, politicians, landholders, and church leaders. He also, in a strange episode that perhaps says something for his charisma, found support from an impressionable Tasmanian, Critchley Parker Junior, who was so taken by the plan that he hatched his own whimsical designs for a future Tasmanian Jewish settlement engaged in mining, fishing, horticulture, perfume-making, viticulture, with its own Olympic games, trade fairs, and leading universities. Parker died scouting the remote bushland in southwestern Tasmania, writing in a final dispatch to Steinberg: ‘To die in the service of so noble a cause is to me a great satisfaction.’

Steinberg had been preceded, in fact, by Melech Ravitch, who travelled to the Northern Territory in 1937, with a letter of introduction from Albert Einstein, hoping, as he put it in Iber Oystralie [Across Australia], ‘to be the first to see the land that is being proposed with great seriousness for large-scale Jewish mass immigration.’ Ravitch’s travel writing reveals that he was at once repelled by the brutal treatment of Indigenous Australians —censuring, for instance, an exhibition in Sydney that placed Aboriginal and gorilla skeletons in juxtaposition—and yet seemingly able to reconcile this with his settler-colonial ambitions for an Australian ‘Zionism-sans-Zion’, writing in his notebook: ‘The blacks cannot be regarded as the owners of the land. A crazy idea! They are on the lowest rung of civilisation. They could be allotted a few thousand square miles of land and be taught to work.’ When it came to the Aboriginal people of the East Kimberley, the plans of Steinberg were little better. Teddy Carlton, a Miriuwung Gajerrong elder, recently told the ABC that he had never even heard of the plan that came very close to settling 75,000 refugees on his people’s unceded land. But ultimately, what spelt the demise of the scheme was its perceived incompatibility with the White Australia policy. In 1944, Prime Minister John Curtin informed Steinberg: ‘the Government is unable to see a way to depart from the long established policy with regard to alien settlement in Australia.’

In this context, we might understand a figure like Rothman—a man who sleeps in a ‘humpy’ built from ‘galvanised iron sheets’, and appears to O’Brien’s enamoured nineteen year-old daughter, Jean, as ‘a pioneer, a true Australian pioneer’; or, as Rothman later recalls it, ‘Jean had said he was a pioneer, a Jewish pioneer.’ Jewish or Australian? In this slight slip we glimpse the story’s central tension—a slip linked to the erotics of settler-colonialism, in which women and land are metaphorically entangled. Rothman’s dream of founding a settlement becomes the choice between Jean, an Irish shiksa, or Rosa, ‘a fine Jewish girl with whom he could have a true Jewish farm, bring up Jewish children, and, in that way, give his work a purpose and justify his struggle.’

Rothman decides the best course is to pursue Rosa. He shows up at her house unannounced, while a soirée is taking place, and feels like ‘a stranger, some invisible intruder’ before her cool, indifferent comportment; a dynamic that is taken to its extreme in another of Goldhar’s stories, ‘There is No God in the World’, where a young man, attempting in vain to capture the attention of a woman, resolves to curse God in her presence. She witnesses his outburst and remains unmoved. Her indifference, the land’s resistance, and the silence of God — all seem, for a moment, aspects of a single condition. Rothman departs without having extracted a word from Rosa. The Jewish community, he decides, will never support his settlement scheme. As one of their party announces: ‘I would gladly do penance to avoid dependence on a piece of land.’

In an ‘act of defiance against them all,’ Rothman returns alone to his ‘isolated farm and flimsy home.’ On the road, he begins to notice a motley assortment of Australian exiles: an Afghan ‘driving a heavy wagon’, a ‘Chinese market gardener’ who waves — those like the Syrians, Italians, and Greeks who appear in his other stories. What to make this sudden vision? Has Rothman reneged on his dreams of settlement and chosen to live a stranger among strangers? In the story’s final, disquieting moment he arrives ‘guest’ and ‘visitor’ at the O’Brien home, and we see him, as Sandy O’Brien does, from the outside, where he is with Jean, their shadows ‘merging into one silhouette.’

Significantly, I think, the word ‘settlement’, or setlement, appears in English throughout the Yiddish text. (In fact, the original Yiddish has far more English words and phrases, like ‘good luck’, ‘come on, boy’, ‘never mind’, and ‘dinkum’, than the English translation has words of Yiddish.) In contrast to a writer like Waten, who frequently dwells on the injustices of settler-colonialism, Goldhar looked to the history of white settlement for inspiration. In his essay, ‘Australian Literature’, he stakes out the commonalities between Yiddish and settler Australian writing, speculating that they share both marginality and the belated struggle to construct a national canon. Here Goldhar is curiously, and much like Fitzpatrick, influenced by the Palmers’ blend of cultural nationalism and socialist internationalism. He viewed Australia’s literature as minor and uprooted, written in a language that had been imperfectly transplanted, exiled even, from ‘the cliffs of Dover’ to ‘the endless plains of saltbush and spinifex, the red dust of the Centre.’ The Australian landscape, he continues, calls for a new rhythm, idiom, and temperament; a new language, perhaps even its own distinctive creole.

Goldhar is not alone in finding such affinities—in an essay revisiting his notion of the cultural cringe, A. A. Phillips hazards that his ‘interest in the problems of Australian ambivalence came from my early encounter with the parallel Jewish problem’; that, for him, ‘the status of a colonial’ was ‘like that of a Jew.’ Likewise, Goldhar’s diasporic slant on Australian literary culture finds unexpected contemporary echoes in, say, Charles Bernstein’s ‘Poetics of the Americas’, which John Kinsella quotes with reverence in an essay on hybridity:

English languages set adrift from the sight/sound sensorium of the concrete experiences of the English people, are at their hearts uprooted and translated: nomadic in origin absolutely particular in practice. Invention in this context is not a matter of choice: it is necessary as the ground we walk on.

At other moments, though, Goldhar’s essaying of the symmetries between Australian and Yiddish writing seem less contemporary. In his story ‘From the Carriage Window’, the narrator, a ‘we’, seems taken by what is described as the ‘powerful silent hymn’ of Australian colonialism, its ‘dedication, commitment’, its ‘human sweat and stubbornness in struggling to tame the wild Australian countryside’—until, that is, night falls and we are plunged back into the shabby carriage interior of a ‘tightly-packed train.’ Similarly, in ‘Australian Literature’, Goldhar goes so far as to suggest that Australia could provide inspiration for ‘the very future of Jewry.’ The different lines of solidarity in Waten’s ‘Black Girl’ — the story of Lily Samuels, who, no doubt quite purposely, is given a Jewish surname — provide a pointed contrast. Intended as a depiction of the urban squalor of 1950s Indigenous life in Fitzroy, Waten’s story begins frankly, flatly, with the observation: ‘Samuels lived with her family in a condemned two-story building… because they were unable to find accommodation in any other part of the city and because they were aborigines.’ This should caution against any easy idea of migrant writing as necessarily ‘unsettling’. Perhaps, as Colin Tatz writes in his survey of the Aboriginal-Jewish relationship, ‘[i]n the end, one has to be… disappointed.’

Around the same time as he wrote ‘The Pioneer’, Goldhar began his novella The Last Minyan. This piece, by turns fraught, equivocal, and outright zany, provides a salient contrast to Goldhar’s tale of pioneering. It originated out of a trip to Ballarat, where Goldhar went to visit a museum curated by the writer, Nathan Spielvogel. The trip, Goldhar later noted,

so terribly depressed me, that I could hardly control my actions… it looked to me more like a second hand shop than anything else… and it struck me suddenly that Spielvogel personifies our Jewish fate… In Europe we get exterminated by Hitler, and elsewhere we just dwindle away slowly and painlessly… So at least it appeared to me while watching Spielvogel among the insignificant and shabby relics.

The Last Minyan attempts to capture this mood by detailing the dwindling of a rural town’s congregation. What makes this novella more than a lament for a lost community is the subdued erotics its core—it portrays the bond between a rabbi sent from Oxford to the gold town of Wattle Hill and the loyal reverend Feldman. As a pair, the rabbi and reverend recall the two schlemiels, Benjamin and his ‘housewife’ Sender, of Mendele Mocher Sforim’s Yiddish classic The Travels of Benjamin the Third (1878). In Sforim’s book queer attachment is often, as Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi notes, alluded to in a smattering of biblical, Hebrew locutions: ‘like a loving couple right after the wedding’ [ve-hayu domim be-ota sha’a le-hatan ve-khala be-shiv’at yemei ha-misteh], or a ‘ravishing bridge in the eyes of the groom’ [ke-khalah na-ah be-’eynei dodah]. (I here follow Ezrahi’s transliteration.)

In The Last Minyan, both rabbi and reverend favour the bachelor’s life. In a move that bewilders the community, the rabbi refuses a match with a woman from ‘a well-respected, long settled family… related to the Adelaide Montefiores’, preferring solitude. Begrudgingly, after some coaxing, Feldman marries Miss Montefoire, and then proceeds to treat her with callousness and neglect, eating ‘bits of bread between his fingertips’ in the way he knows she hates. What he really lives for is spending time with the rabbi in the empty synagogue, beneath the stained-glass windows that ‘disperse a multitude of colours across the solid dark wood and benches.’ There, we are told:

Feldman wanted to approach the rabbi, take his hand and sit beside him, but he was too embarrassed to make such a move. Yet, he felt unable simply to remain standing there in silence with words struggling for release, each word hurting him, each word eating him up.

In the novella’s final, charged moment — a characteristic closing for Goldhar — we are left to speculate whether Feldman will overcome his coyness. With a smile forming on his lips, ‘not for an instant taking his eyes off the rabbi’, he approaches him, the last man left in the synagogue.

Between ‘The Pioneer’ and The Last Minyan — pieces composed on the eve of the second world war — Goldhar charts the choices open to a Yiddish writer at a time of historical calamity. On the one hand, there is an attempt at settlement that ultimately turns into the unsettling affirmation of living among strangers, and, on the other there is the alternative represented by a camaraderie — homosocial, or possibly something more — in the husk of a grand but empty temple. Either way, the problem confronting the Yiddish writer at the moment of the Shoah is a profound one, and all the more so for the Yiddishist, who staked Jewish identity, Yiddishkeit, on the vivacity of a language.

In one story, ‘Landslayt’, written in the midst of the war, Goldhar imagines the impossibility of transplanting the old life of Jewish Poland to Melbourne as a failure of translation. The story opens with Henekh Bootcher being informed that his hometown, Zharnev, has been destroyed. Someone from Zharnev — a landslayt, or compatriot — points out for Bootcher, who can’t read English, the town’s name where it appears in the newspaper. In an imaginative feat, an anguished linguistic act, Bootcher attempts to relocate the lost shtetl into very letters of English:

[He] spread [the newspaper] on the table at every quiet opportunity in the butcher’s shop and stared at the indecipherable script. Whenever he opened it, the word Zharnev that Sam had pointed out to him sprang before his eyes. It looked warm and familiar in the midst of the surrounding mass of foreign letters. The ship-like shape of the ‘z’ reminded him of the Zharnev church with its high, pointy tower. The ‘A’ recalled the house of the town tycoon, Reb Bunim Aychner, with the red roof that covered its porch. The ‘W’ at the word’s end brought to mind the Kroshtshitzik’s pharmacy with its glazed double doors and its wide display windows down which large waterfalls rained down in coloured waters, red, green and blue.

More than five million Yiddish-speakers were murdered in the Shoah, which meant the loss of a readership. But more than that: the old world to which Yiddish referred — the places that formed the envelope of daily life, the towns where it had been spoken—were also destroyed, or altered beyond recognition. Yet here is Bootcher, and Goldhar for that matter, for whom Yiddish is still a living language, wishing to find a place for its referents in English.

There was never any sense for Goldhar that literature could be an act of salvation; that it could preserve in anachronistic wholeness the lost shtetl, with all its folkloric enchantment and perversity, as it might have for Isaac Bashevis Singer. Goldhar was persuaded that the old world could only be seen in the convex mirror of the samovar in his story ‘Off to Cheder’, where, in its ‘ever gleaming roundness’, the whole house becomes ‘elongated … gross and awkward’ and ‘things appear to be hanging from the ceiling.’ The shtetl, viewed from Australia (and, indeed, from an industrial city like Łódź, where Goldhar was born) seems ‘foreign and distant’—with its ‘unmade streets’ and ‘pools of mud’, deluded small town Zionists dreaming of Palestine, and ‘greasy food’ — just as Australia is viewed from a position in which one is, like Bootcher, overwhelmed by its strangeness. In the place of Herzl’s dream-willed reality, one of Bootcher’s landslayt’s declares: ‘I have kept dreaming about our home [and] in my dreams Zharnev and Australia get mixed up… I just don’t know where in the world I belong anymore.’

In 1948, the Australian Literature Gold Medal was won for the first and only time by a novel translated into English. Herz Bergner’s Zwischn Himl un Waser, or Between Sky & Sea, was declared by the prize committee ‘the most important contribution to Australian literature in 1945-7.’ That this occurred before the White Australia policy was formally dismantled — a policy enforced by an infamous language test — is all the more remarkable, especially given Yiddish was for a time classified as a ‘non-European language’ under the Australian Immigration Act of 1901, its speakers considered by the senior Department of Interior official assigned to assess the refugee situation in Europe as ‘the poorest specimens outside blackfellows that I have seen.’ The deliberate republication of the novel on June 20, World Refugee Day, points to Between Sky & Sea’s continued pertinence. It depiction of a group of Jewish refugees adrift on an old Greek tramp steamer remains significant in a time when Peter Dutton is arguably the most powerful person in the country; when the leadership perseveres in its staunch—and bipartisan—resolve to stop the boats.

The novel is narrated from the viewpoint of a chorus of Polish Jews, ‘a large family with the same worries and hopes’, each first differentiated by a single, satirical stroke. There is Mrs Hudess, ‘a Warsaw woman who was proud that she came from a big city’; Fabyash, ‘an energetic young man who always knew more than anyone else’; Reb Lazar, grocer; Ida and Nathan, lovers; a Warsaw doctor, Bronislaw Mirsky; Bronya, ‘a plump, pretty young married woman’; Marcus Feldbaum, communist; and, in the background, a presumably Greek crew portrayed as an undifferentiated mass, often said to be looking at the Jewish passengers with ‘a malevolent insolence’, speaking in their own, unnamed language.

Seldom do these characters transcend their role as types. Unchangingly, for the most part, they undergo the novel’s trials and tribulations — its episodes that fail to cohere into a linear narrative, which is fitting, given that the people on the tramp steamer are not progressing anywhere, but aimlessly suspended at sea. The narrative itself is only permitted to escape its confinement to the ‘fetid, dirty, dark’ cabins of the ship in brief interludes of memory and anticipation. Its opening sequence, for example, is a communal attempt at anticipation — the task of imagining Australia — which stands, in a sense, as a synecdoche for Bergner’s undertaking as an author restricted to Australia, trying to empathically recreate the plight of Europe’s Jewish refugees:

[T]hey outdid each other in knowledge of the new country for which they were bound—Australia… Although no one knew much, or had even heard much, about this new land, each one had a great deal to say about the country, its people and their customs. Fabyash knew for certain that the country was surrounded by water on all sides and the people lived by catching fish, which they exported to the rest of the world… Zainval Rockman… said the new country… is still wild and has plenty of forests, and so people export timber to the rest of the world. Hearing this, Mrs Hudess… said neither Fabyash nor Rockman knew what they were talking about. The country lives neither on fish nor timber. Australia is a country like any other, with many big cities. Let Rockman and Fabyash stop talking nonsense and making Australia into a rural wasteland.

Just as these speculations feel somewhat strained and schematic, Bergner’s claustrophobic fictional enterprise ploughs on, trapped in its steamer, submitting its characters to test after test — storms, typhus outbreaks, mirages — until, inevitably, violently, the steamer sinks. What gives the narrative a visceral power is Bergner’s fixation on the smells of perspiring bodies. We are constantly reminded of the ‘sickly, salty odour of the sweat and dirt of the many people on board who had not washed themselves for weeks’, the ‘heavy, sour[ness]… from the sleeping bodies’, while the passengers dream of village roads that ‘smelt of freshly cut hay.’ Between Sky & Sea depicts, then, something between an ark, salvaging the people of the shtetl, and a floating concentration camp, governed by attrition.

All this has made the passage to English from Yiddish through the work of Bergner’s friend, Waten. ‘Every Saturday we got together,’ Waten recalls, and Bergner ‘wanted every word translated, and if the number of words came out fewer in English he wasn’t very happy.’ There is something touching about this anxious calculus. Bergner fervently wished to write for an English audience even before he could write in English. Waten’s translation, in fact, was published before the Yiddish original.

For today’s English reader, the distance is not merely between Yiddish original and English translation, but between the Australia for which Waten translated and contemporary Australia. Waten’s English is often fusty and solemn, and wholly lacks the surprising shifts of register and accidental music of Goldhar translated in a sentence like: ‘he always wore the same old greasy gabardine which shone as if it were made of plastic and smelt of herring and kerosene.’ Consider, likewise, word choice. Waten had a penchant for Australianisms like ‘larrikin’—a word that appears everywhere from Alien Son (1952) (‘beset by larrikins’), his translation of Goldhar’s ‘A Café in Carlton’ (1945) (‘some little larrikins had drawn a moustache and beard’ on the cafe’s sign), and Between Sky & Sea (where the father admonishes: ‘I’ll tear you up by the root, you larrikin!’), by which he means mostly hooliganism, rather than playful rebellion and mischief. With the relative abundance of Yiddishisms that have now entered Australian English from US English, many of Waten’s decisions seem to unnecessarily domesticate the Yiddish. He translates chutzpah as ‘audacity’, kibitzer as ‘advice-giver’, ploysher as ‘blatherskite’, while ‘larrikin’ stands in for shegetz. But it would be wrong to take this as a critique of Waten. Not long before Between Sky & Sea, the Jewish Herald actively discouraged using terms like shul, Yiddish for synagogue, calling it ‘an ugly word belonging to no living language.’ The drive to assimilate then had a vehemence satirised by Goldhar with characters like Mr Jack Knester, who ‘considered himself a complete Englishman… smoked a bent old-fashioned pipe at the races and… spoke only English in a thick, slow, hoarse voice.’ Moreover, the alternative — to sprinkle the English with untranslated Yiddishisms — is hardly a solution, and risks turning Yiddish into a kind of kitsch, as sometimes happens with, say, popular Jewish joke books. The real reason to favour Waten’s translation is that in its ‘thick, slow, hoarse voice’ we hear the history the book depicts. To tell the story of refugees seeking a home in Australia, Bergner’s text itself must seek entrance into Australian English, with all the compromise that this entails.

Along with the formality of its prose and the narrator’s distance from the events described, Between Sky & Sea is characterised by a strong allegorical dimension. Archetypes continually suggest themselves, like the medieval ship of fools. The passengers’ descent into madness, mass hysteria, and suicide is anticipated at the level of metaphor, in the deep links between water and madness. In The History of Madness, Michel Foucault writes of the persistence of this association, arguing that ‘madness is the manifestation … of an obscure, aquatic element, a dark, disordered, shifting chaos, the germ and death of all things as opposed to the luminous, adult stability of the mind.’ Likewise the eponymous image of Bergner’s novel—the hinge or juncture where ‘sky and sea were fused into one’—might signify something ‘celestial’, a ‘most distant of homes’, as Gaston Bachelard writes in Water and Dreams. Yet, above all, it evokes Genesis, and specifically Noah’s ark floating on a deluge of planetary proportions. And here, too, it resonates with a long tradition in Jewish writing that has repurposed the imagery of sky and sea, like the twelfth-century Hebrew poet Yehuda Halevi, who abandoned the indulgences of Andalusian life for the ‘dust of the ruined shrine’ — Jerusalem — writing on his pilgrimage voyage with the rapture of anticipation:

The sea is the colour of
the sky—they are two seas bound
together. And between these two, my
heart is a third sea, as the new waves of
my praise surge on high!

The passage in Bergner’s novel is not one of pilgrimage, however, nor the kind familiar in Yiddish fiction—the circular itinerary of quixotic, wandering schlemiels as in Sforim’s The Travels of Benjamin the Third. Between Sky & Sea is a journey marked by the rupture of the Shoah. In a simultaneously written short story by Isaac Bashevis Singer, one that details a similar passage from a Polish town to the docks of New York, we encounter the same imagery. As Abba stares through the porthole over his bunk, the ship would leap

as if mounting the sky, and the torn sea… [and then] fall as though the world were turning to original chaos. Then the ship would plunge back into the ocean, and once again the firmament would be divided from the waters, as in the Book of Genesis.

But while Abba’s journey is a three-page interlude before the shoemaker settles in New Jersey, this time at sea is the unremitting entirety of Bergner’s novel. Further, Between Sky & Sea is a journey that ends with the violence of a sinking, when, in the final page, the personified, monstrous sea ‘shouted in triumph, hurried and bellowed, slobbering with joy as though satiated after a wild, drunken orgy’. While this flourish risks histrionics, the more powerful gesture is the violence of imposing closure on the journey. Journeys in Jewish fiction have often, as Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi eloquently details in Booking Passage, been circular, open-ended, provisional, deferred—or, conversely, have pointedly involved arrival, in the case of modern Hebrew writers like S.Y. Agnon. In Bergner, there is something else: a passage extinguished before it can reach its destination, Australia, but also barred from an indefinite suspension in the imaginary, where we might be left to speculate how it ends (as with the ambiguous closing of Goldhar’s ‘In a Quiet Street’). In this way, Bergner is probing the limitations, the futility even, of writing fiction in the wake of the Shoah. After Between Sky & Sea, he wrote A Shtot in Polin (1950), his longest work, a literary effort to memorialise the lost world of Jewish Poland by enumerating everything from prosaic to intellectual life. Perhaps he could not have done otherwise; perhaps this showed a renewed faith in the vocation of literature. ‘In literature, as in our dreams,’ Isaac Bashevis Singer once said, ‘death does not exist. We never say: “the late Anna Karenina.”’

The works of Goldhar and Bergner, newly in print, reach the English-language reader by way of translation, and so it is with their translator I would like to conclude. In his translations, but also in a work of fiction like Alien Son, Waten is preoccupied with the status of what Salman Rushdie once called the ‘translated man.’ And in this preoccupation also we glimpse something of the fortunes of Yiddish in the twentieth century. When Waten arrived in Australia in 1914, Yiddish was the most widely spoken Jewish language, the language of the prosaic, the everyday, while Hebrew, by contrast, and despite early efforts to revive it, was the loshn koydesh, the ‘holy tongue’. At that time, Melbourne’s Kadimah had only a small library in Carlton; most of Australia’s Yiddish books, I imagine, sat on its speakers shelves. But by the time Waten published Alien Son in 1952, a reversal had transpired: Hebrew was the language of a nation-state, while Yiddish had for some acquired a solemnity, even holiness as the language of the martyred and lost. Not long after, the Kadimah library moved to its current location in Melbourne’s southeast, and its shelves swelled from the books donated as many families last Yiddish speakers died. In this light, Yiddish might, as Cecile Kuznitz has argued, be a ‘postvernacular language’, existing, in Jeffery Shandler’s words, as ‘a fragment…, an accent, or a sensibility evoked by means of other languages—anything but a full, vernacular language.’

This is how Yiddish persists in a work like Alien Son. In those moments when the narrative slips from the child narrator’s perspective into the indirect free prose of his mother, the inflection of Yiddish rests beneath the English:

Mother looked up from her sewing. Hirsh was right, it was a foreign country. How could we ever learn to know the people here? At least in Russia we knew where we stood, pogroms and all. The devil you know is better than the devil you don’t.

At the heart of Alien Son, a book widely recognised as the first ‘migrant fiction’ in Australia, there is not only the drama of cultural rupture and acclimatisation, but, I believe, the drama of translation. This is most evident in the final story ‘Mother’, which directly depicts the widening chasm between a son, eagerly assimilating to Australia, and his mother, who is proudly intransigent, pining for a lost world. Though of modest means, she finds a way to impress upon the children something of the richness of the culture they have left. She takes them to a record store and, without intending to buy anything, asks the clerk to play the classics for the children. ‘With each visit,’ Waten’s narrator continues,

Mother became bolder and several times she asked to have whole symphonies and concertos played to us. We sat for nearly an hour cooped up in a tiny room with the salesman restlessly shuffling his feet, yawning and not knowing what to expect next.

When the staff object, as they inevitably do, she asks the boy to translate her defence: a lecture on ‘our right to music and culture’, on ‘the rights of all men’. The boy halts, embarrassed before the salesclerk; his mother, unabashed, presses him on.

Like this, urging to be translated, but refusing to be assimilated, the mother comes to stand for Yiddish. We are told that she seems ‘somehow… apart and other-worldly and different, not of everyday things as Father was.’ The whole of Alien Son is, in this sense, the writer’s effort to recuperate the mother. And yet, cognisant of his failure to translate her truly, it becomes a record of her remoteness, her rejection, her judgement. Alien Son thus gives another sense to the word mameloshn, ‘mother tongue’, as it tries to carry across the unrecuperable; as it bears witness to the fact that ‘in this new land… she would always feel a stranger’ and ‘I… estranged from her.’ Perhaps this carefully documented strangeness, this grappling with translation as mourning, as loss, intimates one sense that Yiddish continues in Australian fiction: as a present absence, a maternal haunting.

acknowledgements I am especially indebted to Pam Maclean, who generously gave me time to discuss Goldhar’s work and provided me with materials I would otherwise not have accessed, and to Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi’s remarkable Booking Passage. For their edits and support, I would like to thank to Ivor Indyk and Catriona Menzies-Pike. I also wish to thank those whose advice, suggestions, corrections, and guidance influenced this essay: Jordana Silverstein, Odette Shenfield, Deborah Rechter, Brendan Casey, Susan Jacobowitz, Esther Singer, Arnold Zable, Rachel Kalman, and the Kadimah Jewish Cultural Centre and National Library in Elsternwick, Melbourne.

References

Gaston Bachelard, Water and Dreams, trans. Edith Farrell, (Dallas: Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture, 1983).
Yosl Bergner What I Meant to Say: Stories and Travels as told to Ruth Bondy (Tel Aviv: Hed Arzi, 1997).
Herz Bergner, Zwishn Himl un Waser (Melbourne: Oyfboy Publishing, 1947).
Charles Bernstein, ‘Poetics of the Americas’, Reading Race in American Poetry: “An Area of Act”, ed. Aldon Lynn Nielsen (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2000).
H. Brezniak, ‘Pinchas Goldhar’, Bridge, 3:2 (1967): 13-15.
David Carter, A Career in Writing: Judah Waten and the Cultural Politics of a Literary Career (Canberra: Association for the Study of Australian Literature, 1997.
J. M. Coetzee, ‘ Reading Gerald Murnane’, Late Essays: 2006-2017 (Sydney: Knopf, 2017).
Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi Booking Passage: Exile and Homecoming in the Modern Jewish Imagination (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000).
Isaac Deutscher, The Non-Jewish Jew and Other Essays (London: Merlin Press, 1981).
Brian Fitzpatrick, ‘Introduction: The Australian Tradition’, Southern Stories Poems and Paintings (Melbourne: Dolphin Publications, 1945).
Gary Foley, ‘Australia and the Holocaust: A Koori Perspective’, The Koori History Website (1999): 74-87.
Michel Foucault, The History of Madness, trans. by Jonathan Murphy and Jean Khalfa (London & New York: Routledge, 2006).
Pinchas Goldhar, ‘Language and Culture’, Di Oystralier Lebn 28 April 1933.
– Pinchas Goldhar, Dertzeilungen Fun Oystralie (Melbourne: York Press, 1939.
– ‘St Stedman,’ Australian Jewish Forum, April 1943, trans. Isaac Ripps.
– ‘Australian Literature’, Melbourne University Magazine, 1947, trans. Nita Bluthal and Stephen Murray-Smith.
Judah Halevi, The Penguin Book of Hebrew Verse, ed. T. Carmi (London: Penguin, 1981).
Ivor Indyk, ‘The Status of a Colonial: Like that of a Jew’, Meanjin 3 (2000): 28-32.
Dovid Katz, Yiddish and Power (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).
Frank Klepner, Yosl Bergner: Art as a Meeting of Cultures (Melbourne: Macmillan, 2004).
Lital Levy and Allison Schachter, ‘A Non-Universal Global: On Jewish Writing and World Literature’, Prooftexts 36:1-2 (2017): 1-26.
Pam Maclean, ‘Pinchas Goldar: His Yiddishist Vision—a Flawed Nationalism?’, Australian Journal of Jewish Studies 5:1 (1991): 21-33 (25-6).
– ‘Like a Volcano Waiting to Erupt: The Australian Yiddish writer Pinchas Goldhar (1901-1947)’, Melbourne Chronicle 72 (2012): 40-42.
– ‘“Jewish Life Appears To Be Frozen, Static, Like a Puppet Play”: Pinchas Goldhar’s Struggle for Yiddish Cultural Authenticity in Australia’, Australian Jewish Historical Society Journal 23 (2017): 491-501.
Philip Mead, ‘Unsettling language’, Networked Language: Culture & History in Australian Poetry (Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2008), pp.399-455.
Klaus Neumann, Across the Seas: Australia’s Response to Refugees: A History (Melbourne: Black Inc, 2015).
Nettie Palmer, Nettie Palmer, ed. Vivian Smith (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1988).
I. L. Peretz, Yídishe biblyoték. A Zhurnál far literature, gezélshaft un ekonómye (Warsaw: Brothers Orgelbrand, 1891).
A. A. Phillips, ‘Cultural nationalism in the 1940s and 1950s’, Intellectual Movements and Australian Society, ed. Brian Head and James Walter (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1988).
Yehoshua Rapaport, ‘Pinchas Goldar: On his Untimely Death’, Australian Jewish News, 31 January 1947.
W. D. Rubinstein, The Jews in Australia: A Thematic History, vol. 2 (Melbourne: William Heinemann, 1991).
Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism, 1981 – 1991 (London: Granta, 1992).
Clive Sinclair, ‘The Kimberley Fantasy: An Alternative Zion’, Wasafiri 24:1 (2009): 33-44.
Isaac Bashevis Singer, Nobel Lecture (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1978).
– Collected Stories, trans. by Isaac Rosenfeld (London: Penguin, 2011).
Colin Tatz, ‘An essay in disappointment: the Aboriginal-Jewish relationship’, Aboriginal History 28 (2004): 100-12.
Judah Waten, Alien Son (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1990
Arnold Zable, The Fig Tree (Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2002).
Saul Noam Zaritt, ‘Maybe for Millions, Maybe for Nobody: Jewish American Writing and the Undecidability of World Literature,’ American Literary History 28:3 (2016): 542-573

The post A Forest Without Trees appeared first on Sydney Review of Books.

I first read Xavier Herbert’s remarkable novel Capricornia in 1972 – the year I was married – and it led to several heated discussions with my newly acquired father-in-law. Later I discovered that his grazier forebears had been – for their time – enlightened squatters. Around 1900, they commissioned Steele Rudd’s father, the ex-convict Thomas Davis, to write a memoir of his early days on the Darling Downs. As well as a frank account of frontier violence, it included an extensive glossary of Aboriginal words.

Literature about Indigenous history continued to politicise me during the 1970s and 80s. With the prospect of a bicentennial orgy of settler triumphalism, I decided to use my position as University of Queensland Press publisher to amplify voices suppressed for two hundred years. My UQP colleagues supported me in developing an Indigenous writing list alongside our annual David Unaipon Award, launched in 1989.

Formal 1920s studio photograph of writer and inventor David Unaipon (1872-1967). Photographer unknown. Source Australian Geographic.com

A Ngarrindjeri Elder and early Indigenous-rights advocate, David Unaipon was the first Aboriginal writer to have a book published – in 1929. The first to reach a wide readership, however, was Kath Walker whose poetry volume We Are Going was published in 1964 by Brisbane’s Jacaranda Press.

In 1980 my PhD research took me back to Capricornia.  I discovered that the paradoxical ‘Inky’ Stephensen had helped Indigenous activists organise a Day of Mourning protest in Sydney – to mark the 1938 sesquicentenary of British colonisation. As a further provocation, Inky planned to publish — on 26 January that year — Xavier Herbert’s controversial novel about black–white relationships, Capricornia.

Inky Stephensen had become an adviser to the recently formed Aborigines Progressive Association, an all-Aboriginal organisation demanding not only citizenship rights but also equal opportunities for education, employment, and social services. He’d appointed himself honorary secretary of a white support group, the Aboriginal Citizenship Committee. On his weekly Sydney radio session, Inky interviewed the APA president, former boxer Jack Patten, as well as the secretary, Dubbo shearer William Ferguson. Posters and handbills announced an ‘Aborigines conference’, the Day of Mourning Congress, to be held once the protest march concluded at Sydney’s Australian Hall.

Poet and activist Kath Walker (later Oodgeroo Noonuccal, 1920-93), 1960s. Photographer unknown. Source youtube.com

This invasion-day protest was also supported by the Melbourne-based Australian Aborigines’ League, which had been established in 1934 by tireless activist William Cooper, who spoke at the Sydney conference. Cooper’s great-nephew, Pastor Doug Nicholls, was later one of the founders of the Federal Council for the Advancement of Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders (FCAATSI), formed in 1958. Kath Walker led FCAATSI in Queensland and used her public profile to campaign for constitutional change, meeting with prime ministers Menzies and his successor Holt during the 1967 federal referendum. Twenty years later, Kath marked the Bicentenary by adopting the Aboriginal name Oodgeroo Noonuccal. While white novelists such as Xavier Herbert and Katharine Susannah Prichard had exposed Australia’s long history of racism and dispossession, it was Kath Walker’s much-anthologised poem ‘We Are Going’ that raised the consciousness of Australian schoolchildren – including me.

Around the time Kath wrote ‘We Are Going’, Xavier Herbert was a guest at the 1962 Adelaide Festival. There he gave an entertaining account of the writing of Capricornia in a London garret during the Great Depression. Standing before his appreciative audience, Herbert casually remarked that the story of the novel’s publication was even more bizarre and that perhaps he’d be invited back ‘next year’ to tell it. Herbert did return for the next Adelaide Writers Week – in 1964 – and gave a brief account of Capricornia’s publication, but for fear of legal action did not even name the man responsible for its appearance in print.

The production and reception of Capricornia remains one of the most controversial episodes in the annals of Australian literature. Its lengthy gestation takes us back to 1930 when the peripatetic Herbert embarked for London – determined to finish his Northern Territory novel and to find a publisher for it. Capricornia took at least eighteen months to write – not the six weeks Herbert later claimed – and ended up an unwieldy half a million words. No publisher in London would touch it, so Herbert returned to Sydney where he approached the Endeavour Press – a new company run by former Queensland Rhodes Scholar PR ‘Inky’ Stephensen.

The Endeavour office was on the third floor of the famous Sydney Bulletin building in George Street. Herbert was impressed by Stephensen’s style as a businessman and even more by his dedication to Australian literature. Unfortunately this dedication was not shared by the Bulletin management who were far more concerned with the profitable Woman’s Mirror magazine than with the Endeavour Press.

In July 1933 – two months before he left the fledgling book company – Stephensen wrote to the first-time novelist:

Dear Mr. Herbert,

I think it is absolutely necessary for you to revise, shorten, and retype ‘Capricornia’ before we can give you our decision on it…

In its present state the story is over-loaded with far too much detail, and with too many explorations of side-tracks. I would like to see you shorten it, with a ruthless blue pencil…

Whatever the difficulties, I hope you will prune and retype the work and then let us have it for serious consideration…

A first book, to be really up to world standard, needs a tremendous amount of planning, re-writing, again and again, and diabolical persistence.

Instead of persevering with the Endeavour Press, Herbert retrieved his manuscript and offered it, unrevised, to Angus & Robertson, who were unimpressed by its prolixity.

Hearing that Stephensen had left the Endeavour Press to set up his own firm in nearby Bond Street, Herbert again approached him, towards the end of 1933. Once more Herbert climbed the stairs to a publisher’s office with his dog-eared and now much-travelled typescript. At Bond Street he found Stephensen much preoccupied with floating P. R. Stephensen & Co. Limited. Generously however, Inky agreed to advise him on the revisions to Capricornia. During December and January, Xavier and his editor worked together on the raw and unruly novel, spending long evenings and marathon weekends at Stephensen’s flat in Raglan Street, Mosman.

Herbert brought along to each editing session his London typescript. Together they pored over the pages, Herbert reading passages aloud to Stephensen who identified the novel’s structural faults and advised on the necessary revisions. In later years Stephensen said he had made it clear to Herbert that ‘it needed completely rewriting, in shorter paragraphs, with more dialogue, and much more careful story-plotting’. As it stood, the novel was ‘chaotic and useless’. Herbert, on the other hand, in a letter published in 1961, stridently claimed that no one but himself had edited Capricornia. In a letter to Stephensen back in 1936, however, Herbert recalled: ‘Remember those all-night sittings when I used to unfold the plot? Remember those days and nights at Narrabeen …’

Herbert began redrafting Capricornia in February 1934 and Stephensen visited him several times, often staying for the weekend at Narrabeen and reading the revised sections as they were completed. It was such a substantial rewrite that Stephensen later reported, by way of publicity for the novel, that it was entirely rewritten – not once but twice – while Herbert was living at Narrabeen. In 1961, Herbert grudgingly acknowledged that Stephensen had made a few suggestions for revision, but the novelist’s primary evidence for denying any significant editorial assistance was that Stephensen had not put pen or pencil to his manuscript.

The only version of the Capricornia manuscript known to have survived is held by the National Library. Mostly handwritten (on the back of what appear to be discarded typescript pages from earlier works), it follows the narrative sequence of the published version of Capricornia. It undoubtedly represents the first redrafting Herbert made under Inky’s guidance between about February and April 1934. A further clean typescript would then have been copy-edited at P. R. Stephensen & Co. before typesetting commenced.

Herbert and his editor shared a fascination for Aboriginal culture and history as well as a sense of outrage at their mistreatment. Inky Stephensen’s publicity circulars suggested that Indigenous culture should be treated with respect, describing Aborigines as ‘ancient and wise’ people who had conserved the country’s resources and practised many arts – including ‘poetry, music, painting, drama, and religion’. Herbert’s involvement with the Aboriginal cause was less theoretical than his editor’s. He had seen Blacks treated as slaves, chained by the neck at night to stop them running away, and had lived with Aboriginal communities.

Before long it became apparent to Herbert that PR Stephensen & Co was seriously undercapitalised, and that Inky’s small staff had been accepting shares in lieu of salary. Inky was in fact desperately trying to stay afloat – even warning his wife Winifred to state that everything in their flat was her property should any ‘gentlemen’ from the court call. Preoccupied as he was, Stephensen was unaware that Herbert had secretly offered the edited manuscript of Capricornia to publisher Lovat Dickson in London. After an anxious wait however, Herbert received Lovat Dickson’s criticisms of the novel. Their readers had taken issue with the characterisation and, once again, with the length. It was a further crushing failure for Herbert, who wrote bitterly to a friend that he was considering a trip into ‘eternal obscurity’ in the North, convinced he would never succeed as a writer.

Just before P. R. Stephensen & Co. went into voluntary liquidation, Herbert offered Capricornia again to Angus & Robertson, this time in standing type, but once more they rejected it as too long and depressing. So the two tons of printer’s type were melted down, dissolving all its author’s hopes and ambitions. On Australia Day 1935, Herbert headed north once more, returning to the frontier territory that had inspired his fiction.

In Sydney meanwhile, a wealthy eccentric – William John Miles – became interested in Stephensen’s views on politics and Australian culture. He’d read Inky’s long essay in the first issue of the Australian Mercury – another Stephensen venture that had stalled for lack of capital. Inky hoped this cagey old patron might help him resurrect the Mercury. Instead Miles was only prepared to underwrite the publication in book form of an expanded version of Stephensen’s ‘Foundations of Culture in Australia’ essay, and this was published by W. J. Miles in 1936.

Languishing on a comfortable ten pounds a week in Darwin, Herbert still hoped to find a publisher for Capricornia and was prepared to follow up any possibility, however remote. He was also having problems running the local Aboriginal compound. He was accused of punching one boy and resorting to a stockwhip in order to control a fractious ‘halfcaste’ girl. Even so, Herbert had widespread support from the Aboriginal community and planned to set up a ‘Euraustralian League of Halfcastes’.

By the middle of 1936 Herbert had left his compound job, and Stephensen was now being paid a regular allowance for assisting with a new polemical journal of ‘Australia First’, the monthly Publicist. From Miles each Friday he received five pounds, out of which Winifred paid their rent, with just enough left over for food and bills.

After the appearance of the Publicist, Herbert and Stephensen began to exchange letters, Herbert imploring his former editor to send a long letter every week. In mid-November 1936, Herbert sent Stephensen the original galley proofs which Inky cut up into pages. At Christmas W. J. Miles finished reading this specially bound proof copy of Capricornia, and the news that he was prepared to back an edition of a couple of thousand copies – without thought of profit – seemed to Herbert almost too good to be true. By the time Xavier had booked his seat on the plane to Sydney, all his old excitement had been rekindled. On arrival, he was the toast of the small group which gathered at the boisterously informal Yabber Club – including Eleanor Dark, Frank Dalby Davison, Miles Franklin, Lionel Lindsay and Tom Inglis Moore.

Soon after his return to Sydney in February 1937, Herbert read the original Capricornia proofs and made some minor revisions. Typesetting then commenced and Stephensen carefully supervised the production of the book, often visiting the Stafford printery. At last he had found a sympathetic printer, for which he recorded his appreciation, taking the unusual step of acknowledging by name the two compositors and three pressmen on the final page of the first edition of Capricornia.

1938 proof page from Capricornia showing the corrections made by Xavier Herbert to the PR Stephensen & Co 1934 edition which had stalled at galley proof stage. Source Xavier Herbert Papers, National Library of Australia. Photograph by Craig Munro.

The September Publicist ran a major article on the novel, calling it ‘one of the greatest ‘finds’ in Australian literature to date’ and giving notice that it would appear in a limited edition on rag paper as well as in a cheaper format. The November issue recorded the formation of the Aborigines Progressive Association, mentioning that ‘Our particular interest in this submerged national question has been aroused by Xavier Herbert’s masterly novel of North Australia – Capricornia – which is now in the press and will be published shortly’. As Capricornia was nearing completion at the Publicist’s printery in Chippendale, all this support for the Aboriginal cause made good sense. Miles Franklin wrote to Herbert that Stephensen was in a ‘state of jubilation’ over Capricornia’s entry for the federal government’s sesquicentenary novel prize of 250 pounds. Inky had ‘raised such a ballyhoo about Capricornia ,’ she said, ‘that the judges won’t dare turn it down.’

Stephensen helped organise an Aboriginal Day of Mourning and Protest for 26 January 1938 – one hundred and fifty years after settlement– and on this day the novel was finally published. Despite the almost universal frivolity of the sesquicentenary celebrations, the press showed considerable interest in the APA’s ‘Day of Mourning’. One of the protest meetings featured poet Mary Gilmore. She told her audience that as a child she had seen Aboriginal people ‘massacred in hundreds’. She remembered seeing ‘little children dead in the grass, and scalps of blacks paid for as if they were dingoes’.

Most of the novel’s early reviews highlighted Herbert’s exploration and indictment of Australia’s treatment of its Aboriginal population, while the Darwin Northern Standard congratulated him on ‘the most perfect picture in words yet … of the Territory’. There was, however, considerable disagreement about Capricornia’s literary quality. The Age’s reviewer decided it was ‘very badly constructed’, while bibliographer Frederick T. Macartney added, pompously: ‘There are various ways in which a novel may be written, but this is not one of them’. Tom Inglis Moore, an Oxford student friend of Stephensen’s, described the novel’s style as ‘uneven, occasionally awkward, often too staccato’, and concluded that Capricornia was ‘certainly not a literary masterpiece, but it may possibly become a national classic’.

Miles Franklin was almost alone in placing the novel in a broader historical context. She observed that ‘Mr. Herbert writes with satirical humour and the cynicism of the generation disillusioned by the European war’, and numbered Capricornia with ‘the few great Australian novels’. The same day the winner of the Commonwealth novel prize was to be announced, 31 March, the Melbourne Herald published a review quietly hailing Capricornia as ‘one of the most interesting and significant Australian novels that has appeared for a generation’. From a Sydney radio station that evening, it was announced that the judging panel – made up of high-profile novelists Frank Dalby Davison, Flora Eldershaw and Marjorie Barnard – had chosen Capricornia as the winner. According to Herbert, at a later dinner in Sydney with the judges, Davison told him they had chosen his novel, not on literary merit, but to embarrass the conservative federal government which sponsored the competition. This was undoubtedly Davison’s wry joke, for Marjorie Barnard remembered they were unanimous that Capricornia was the best novel entered.

Cover of a mint copy of the first, 1938 Publicist Publishing Company edition of Xavier Herbert’s landmark novel Capricornia. Source Rare Books Australia.

Heavily promoted in the Publicist, the six-shilling edition had sold out before the end of the year, Herbert sending the last copy to Miles as a Christmas present. Fifty copies were printed on ‘worthy’ pure rag paper, to be bound in leather, numbered and signed by the author. Copies of this special printing do survive but it is unclear whether any were actually distributed. For the third time, Angus & Robertson were offered the novel – now a saleable prizewinner – and they finally took the plunge. A battler like Inky Stephensen having taken all the risks, the old-established firm then made all the profits on subsequent editions.

Herbert and his editor had patched up their friendship just long enough to see Capricornia in print. When the Publicist and Stephensen’s Australia-First Movement became more overtly anti-Semitic, however, this angered Herbert and his Jewish wife Sadie. An exchange of highly abusive letters in 1941 brought their relationship to an end. The ‘debate’ between them twenty years later in the columns of the Bulletin and the Observer gave tantalising glimpses of the struggle to publish Capricornia. It was also clear that Herbert deeply resented any suggestion that his work needed editing. Stephensen, on the other hand, felt he had not received sufficient recognition for his advice to Herbert and to many other authors over almost forty years.

By the time Herbert came to publish Capricornia’s million-word sequel, Poor Fellow My Country, he was extremely wary of any publisher who might tamper with it. (My 2015 memoir Under Cover: adventures in the art of editing amplifies the uncomfortable role I played in 1974 as the first editor to read and criticise the Poor Fellow manuscript.) With his ‘magnum opus’ Poor Fellow My Country, Herbert was also ready to pay back his former editor. In a highly uncomplimentary caricature, Stephensen is recognisable as the novel’s odious ‘Bloke’. Herbert could now safely defame his old editor and adversary – always a trigger-happy litigant – because Inky had been dead for ten years when the novel appeared in 1975.

Yet from the relatively calm vantage point of 1960 – before he was drawn into the bitter exchanges with Stephensen – Herbert planned to leave a rather different version of events to posterity, on a tape recording for the ‘national archives’. His script for this is in the University of Queensland’s Fryer Library. After reading an extract from Capricornia, Herbert generously acknowledged his debt to his one-time editor with these words:

In conclusion, I want to let it be known that Capricornia never would have been published, but for the faith of P. R. Stephensen, the redoubtable ‘Inky’, in its destiny to become a classic … Australian publishers would no more consider it than would their English counterparts to whom it was alien. It was finally published more or less privately, in 1938, by Inky Stephensen, with the financial backing of one William John Miles, who also believed in its destiny.

Since the 1930s, Aboriginal activism and cultural expression have evolved in ways that literary pioneers like Xavier Herbert and Inky Stephensen might not have foreseen. Black politics in the 1960s was paralleled by the development of Indigenous literary expression in English, though it was not until the 1980s that Aboriginal publishing began, with the BlackBooks cooperative in Sydney.

The success of one particular text, however, rattled the windows of Australian publishing. My Place, published by Fremantle Arts Centre Press in July 1987, became the most popular book ever written by an Aboriginal writer. Its author was 35-year-old artist Sally Morgan and it traced her personal journey in search of her family’s long-concealed Aboriginal ancestry. My Place became an instant bestseller, and in 1999 Fremantle released a special edition to celebrate an extraordinary half a million sales.

In 1987, another Western Australian organisation became the state’s first Indigenous publishing company. Opening for business in Broome, in the remote Kimberley region, Magabala Books was a community-based initiative. At the time of the bicentenary, I put up Magabala’s brilliant orange poster on my office door. I also made a passionate plea to my editorial board that although UQP had published numerous white-authored books on Aboriginal subjects, only one Indigenous author featured on our backlist — Kevin Gilbert, whose poetry volume People Are Legends had been published a decade before.

The UQP editorial board endorsed my proposal for an annual David Unaipon Award for an unpublished manuscript – in recognition of this pioneering Aboriginal author. The judging panel of three would all be published Indigenous writers. Not long after this, I went to Adelaide for the 1988 Writers Week, where we were launching the hardback edition of Peter Carey’s Oscar and Lucinda. I also wanted to visit the Ngarrindjeri community at Raukkan, on Lake Alexandrina, near the mouth of the Murray River. From talking with Adam Shoemaker and Stephen Muecke, I knew how important it would be to consult with David Unaipon’s community and to ask for their permission to name the award after him.

In a rented Toyota Camry, I travelled southeast from Adelaide for a couple of hours, the last fifty kilometres on powdery gravel roads. Compared to the city of churches and boulevards I had just left behind, it seemed as remote as the high prairies of Montana. When the lake came into view, it was vast and forbidding, with a raw wind blasting up from the Southern Ocean over the adjacent Coorong — the setting for the film Storm Boy, starring David Gulpilil.

The inaugural winner of our David Unaipon Award was a Noongar poet from Perth, Graeme Dixon, who’d written a collection of poems when he was in prison, at the suggestion of a visiting social worker. In 1990, another Western Australian, Doris Pilkington Garimara, whose birth name was Nugi Garimara, won the second David Unaipon Award. Along with former Magabala editor Sandra Phillips, UQP editor Sue Abbey worked with Doris to publish her winning novel – the first in a trilogy which we published over the course of the next decade. Caprice: a stockman’s daughter led to Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence which director Phillip Noyce transformed into a highly successful feature film. Doris’s slim book confounded all expectations by selling 60,000 copies in its film tie-in edition. The bicentenary of settlement was a crucial catalyst for Indigenous writing and publishing, culminating in the David Unaipon Award – which will celebrate its thirtieth  anniversary in 2019.

With the Booker Prize going to Peter Carey’s Oscar and Lucinda, 1988 was a memorable year, not only for Australian fiction but also for the fortunes of the University of Queensland Press. As I watched a live television broadcast of Peter making his way up to the Booker podium in his dinner suit that night, I thought of the fascinating arc his writing had explored since the early 1960s. Over three decades, his extraordinary literary imagination had travelled from the experimental ‘Wog’, through a speculative-fiction landscape of surreal short stories, to an unlikely nineteenth-century colonial tale of love and compulsive gambling. That Booker win was also, for me, the culmination of a long publishing relationship with Peter, which had begun with The Fat Man in History in 1974.

Oscar and Lucinda 1988 UQP press release (left) and internal illustrated memo (right). Source Oscar and Lucinda folder, UQP archives, Fryer Library, University of Queensland. Photographs by Craig Munro.

In 1986 an excerpt from his work-in-progress – tentatively titled ‘Holy Ghosts’ – had appeared in the Australian Literary Supplement. After reading the manuscript of ‘Holy Ghosts’, I wrote a long report to my CEO Laurie Muller on the novel, highlighting what I saw as its strengths: ‘There are beautiful and powerful scenes, fragments and images, especially about glass as a metaphor … The novel is also about every facet of gambling … There are, too, the echoes of Marquez and South American “magic realism”, of which Peter is a known devotee.’ Fiction editor D’Arcy Randall praised ‘Holy Ghosts’ as a ‘grand and demanding novel in which the story, characters, and themes all move towards a single stunning architectural image’. It was an image that seemed to embody the extravagant follies of Victorian Christianity, fusing the glories of God and Industry with Australia’s violent frontier history.

The day after his UQP contract was signed in July 1987, I wrote Peter a long letter, incorporating D’Arcy’s responses, as well as those of Laurie Muller and publicist Alison Cotes. Laurie thought that the first draft of my letter to Peter was too formal, so instead I sent him a brisk, one-page response, along with five pages of questions and suggestions — more than a hundred in all. Peter’s brief faxed response a few days later indicated that he found our detailed points useful, but the broader comments less so.

‘You (and your three co-editors) sure make my editors in New York and London seem very complacent,’ he quipped.

Peter was always grateful for a close-grained reading of his manuscripts. As he was now becoming more successful in the UK and to a lesser extent the US, however, he had to weigh up the relative merits of three distinct sets of editorial responses – not counting those of his agents in London and New York. His primary editorial relationship on Oscar and Lucinda, however, was with Faber.

In November 1987, UQP made the tactical decision to launch Oscar and Lucinda at the next Adelaide Festival, which began just after the bicentennial celebrations. Carey’s book wasn’t the only title we planned to launch at the festival that year. Adelaide Writers Week would also enable us to promote another historical novel: Kate Grenville’s Joan Makes History. I believed that Peter Carey’s grand and unlikely love story Oscar and Lucinda seemed perfectly timed to win for him the widest possible readership. The publication date was set for February 1988, with Faber to follow in April, and the US publisher, Harper & Row, in May. Our publicity plan included posters, brochures, and teaser ads, as it had for Illywhacker.

Early in the new year, the Australian print quantity of 10,000 hardbacks was confirmed. Playwright David Williamson, a neighbour of Peter’s in Sydney, had already read the manuscript, and he agreed to write an enthusiastic endorsement for publicity purposes. Our jacket flap blurb opened with a quote from reviewer Helen Daniel: ‘Luminous and magical … A spectacular achievement.’ This was followed by David Williamson, who described the novel as ‘gently comic, obliquely ironic, and deeply compassionate’, and Geoffrey Dutton, who hailed it as the ‘most audacious and rewarding of all Carey’s novels’.

Perhaps distracted by the nineteenth-century setting, Gerard Windsor’s early review in The Bulletin came to the curious conclusion that Carey was an ‘old-fashioned writer’. According to Windsor, Oscar and Lucinda was a ‘special-effects novel’, though he conceded these effects could be ‘seductive’. Carey responded with a strong letter of complaint to the Bulletin which then dropped Windsor from its reviewing stable – a move that was met with a mixture of relish and disbelief by the local literati.

Don Anderson on the other hand, in the Sydney Morning Herald, was unreservedly enthusiastic: ‘Wonderful is the only word adequate to describe the imagination that begot, and the assurance that controls, this richly comic novel.’ In a lengthy review in The Age, Peter Pierce praised Oscar and Lucinda as ‘an ambitious, joyful work of fiction’. Mark Thomas’s iconoclastic review in the Canberra Times however took issue with Carey’s ‘ponderous attention to period detail’, criticising Oscar and Lucinda as ‘fussy and precious’: ‘Carey is so captured by detail that his story lacks any momentum: both surprise and suspense are largely absent,’ he commented.

Special flat cover of the late-1988 paperback edition of Oscar and Lucinda used for marketing and publicity. Source Craig Munro photograph from his own files.

With the publication of Faber’s UK edition several weeks later, the tally of good notices increased. The Spectator drew attention to the Dickensian flavour of Oscar and Lucinda, while novelist Angela Carter’s review in The Guardian was so good that we would quote it on the cover of subsequent UQP editions: ‘Oscar and Lucinda is a novel of extraordinary richness, complexity and strength,’ Carter wrote. ‘It fills me with wild, savage envy.’

The New York Times was equally fulsome: ‘Magnificent vitality, ebullient delight in character, detail and language that turns a novel into an important book.’ There had been however an unfortunate proof-reading failure in the US-printed copies which came to light when Harper & Row discovered ‘many copyediting errors and omissions’ in their edition of Oscar and Lucinda. Soon after publication, they placed an ad in Publishers Weekly, offering to pay the freight on unsold copies, which would then be pulped ahead of a new, corrected printing. UQP had shared Faber’s typesetting, but the ever-parochial Americans had set their own text as was common in order to modify spellings for their market.

In August — just six months after hardback publication — UQP released a substantial quantity in paperback. It turned out to be an astute move: copies had almost sold out by October, when Oscar and Lucinda’s Booker Prize shortlisting became public. This triggered another major printing, and Peter was buoyed by his Australian sales success as he prepared to leave for London. Two weeks before the Booker winner was announced, Ladbrokes had David Lodge’s novel Nice Work as favourite, followed by Oscar and Lucinda and Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses — which had by then been banned in India after Muslim protests.

At the televised awards ceremony on 25 October, Peter discovered that Oscar and Lucinda had won just before he got up to speak. He beat not only Rushdie and Lodge, but also Bruce Chatwin, Penelope Fitzgerald, and Marina Warner. Most of the judges chose Carey, with only the panel’s chair , former Labour Party leader Michael Foot, favouring Rushdie. It was quite a novelty seeing the famously casual Carey in black tie and tight-fitting dinner jacket. As he smiled with his best Bacchus Marsh grin, and accepted this most desirable of British literary baubles, I realised just how far his writing career had carried him.

‘Yes, I love the feeling of having made something beautiful,’ Peter told Sebastian Faulks of The Independent soon after the ceremony. ‘The greatest pleasure is the thing itself. But what a relief! To have reached that point when it’s no longer just the reviews.’

Peter’s Booker win was a huge boost for all his publishers, and Faber printed another 40,000 hardbacks on the strength of it. The news also provided many publicity opportunities for UQP, which had difficulty keeping up with bookseller demand. Our CEO Laurie Muller wrote Robert McCrum at Faber a letter of congratulations, and McCrum responded with generosity. ‘I, certainly, am very well aware that without the University of Queensland Press, you and Craig Munro, Peter would not be the international figure he is today,’ McCrum wrote.

For Peter, the Booker was just the beginning of another brilliant year. In 1989, Oscar and Lucinda won the Miles Franklin and the NBC Banjo Award for Fiction. Following this avalanche of awards, he received an honorary doctorate of letters from the University of Queensland.

It was no coincidence that Xavier Herbert’s confronting first novel Capricornia was published on the 150th anniversary of white settlement in Australia – nor that Peter Carey’s Booker Prize-winning Oscar and Lucinda was widely promoted and reviewed during the year-long Bicentenary. Both novels are provocative and exuberant settler narratives, and both generated media controversy which helped establish them as bestselling works of historical fiction. Capricornia in particular became a confronting and influential white text that opened the eyes of its many generations of readers and paved the way for the emergence of black texts later in the twentieth century.

With Bob Hawke’s Labor government in office, there was an extensive Bicentennial Indigenous program and this sponsored Paperbark, the first major anthology of Indigenous writing – published by UQP and edited by both black and white writers. Peter Carey’s Oscar and Lucinda was part of this new consciousness, and his latest work of fiction, the rollicking road trip of a novel A Long Way from Home (2017), features an Aboriginal protagonist. Since 1988 however, it is the voices of Black writers that have clamoured to be heard, and Aboriginal authors like Alexis Wright, Kim Scott and Ellen van Neerven have won not just major literary awards, but also mainstream audiences.

This is an extended version of a paper first presented at the 2018 SHARP Conference at Western Sydney University.

The post Protesting 1938 & 1988 – from Capricornia to Oscar & Lucinda appeared first on Sydney Review of Books.

For Deborah Bird-Rose & for Kirli Saunders & for my Children

1.

I find myself in unfamiliar territory; I’ve been here all my life.

2.

At night the country is scented with pasture and drought.

How the air smells, when I pull into the river gravel of my drive and sight the pines and kill the engine and step from the car, is Here. Not merely that my day’s journey has ended but that I have arrived where I live. But that I am my self again.

Scent is a choir, more lyric after dark: it sings a silent forty-part motet. One senses place more at night because one is not distracted by seeing; one inhabits more of the genius loci at night because the air earth cools and its breath rises, replete with itself and what grows here and all it ever was. One stands in the night as in a spem in alium, in which run lapsed agriculture and carpentry and property development and basalt lying over sandstone; sometimes, like tonight, there’s the taint of fallen liquidambar leaves that want a rake; there is woodsmoke, domestic animals, sleeping children and distance.

In the scent of night, all that a place is and all it means, all that it has been and may yet be, the ‘marvelous and the murderous,’ as Seamus Heaney put it, seems to sing itself and want one in the song: all the Bowrals, the lives that ran and ended here; the marriages that swam and sank here; the rocks beneath the rocks and the soils on top; the massacres, the dispossession, that cleared the way for this self-satisfied and pleasing suburb among hills, which I now inhabit. The air smells of geology and the eros of erosion; it smells of the pain all change, all becoming, costs; it smells of garden plant and winter grass, and it’s rank with disenfranchisement and entitlement, and it’s bittersweet with the powerlessness and delight of children. In the air I taste the forests that prospered here, some of them still standing, and the creeks that run, most of them low just now, and the springs that rise, and the stars that fall; I overhear the lost tongues and the stolen generations and the orphaned and the lucky, the violated aspirations, and the resilience of the wisdom and belonging of first peoples, and the happy, largely blithe, aspirations of the second; I catch the pepper of the bracken fern and the sickly sweet of native raspberry; somewhere in what I inhale is the rumour of the nests of dollarbirds and the carcasses of baited rats, the night-breath of the cows and horses; and here, too, is a hint of the dry inlands the prevailing winds carry here—tonight with the suggestion of snow.

I step out into the scent of night, the world hereabouts in its many lives and tenses at once, and for an extended moment, I am here. Here, where I stand, is not only where but who.

I am, of course, far from all that’s here. The place is the story, and I am a syllable in its telling, and soon enough, in geologic time, I won’t be, and yet I never will not have been. So that, on another night in a century or two, when someone else stands here, or when an owl flies or a dog wakes, the memory of me will greet them, infinitesimal, in the odour, this olfactory music, of the night.

When I lived here the first time, it struck me each time I stepped out of the car that, having driven home from teaching or some poetry gig, that even though I’d travelled barely a hundred kilometres from Sydney, I was in another place, almost another time, entirely than the sandstone realms the city stands on, down along that shore. And so it is tonight.

3.

Last month I moved back to live where my children live. I came back to breathe the same air my children breathe, to walk the same streets they walk and run the same rivers they run. I’ve returned to the town where, for seven years before my marriage ended, I lived with them: in Bowral, Gundungurra Country, along the Wingecarribee. For four years, I have turned up where they school and play sport, and I have kept houses for my children elsewhere. Fine places: Balmain, Newcastle, Picton, Kirribilli, and Picton a second time. But without the daily and intimate company of my little ones, I have felt unhearthed, unnourished, unselved.

It has been asked of me to fashion a life in exile from that arrangement of allegiances we called family, ‘we never really know before it ends’ (as James Galvin phrases it in ‘Depending on the Wind’). And I have failed; in this life I have not flourished.

And so, I’ve come back to landscape I knew and loved, and where I would have told you I belonged. I hadn’t realized how much less my sense of place meant to me than my sense of self, and how much of that sense of self had become my being a father to children I love. And I’m wondering now, while I piece that family together again as well as I can, if it’s possible to nourish the terrain of an anguished self, and of one’s children’s unsettled selves, by renewing a kinship with the more than merely human family of things, as Mary Oliver puts it, that surrounds one. I’m wondering if I can learn a way to become a place again, a place in which one’s remorse, one’s anguish and longing, one’s children’s plight, are merely other parts—each another azure kingfisher, another reed-warbler, another night heron, another night of rain, another swamp or Paddy’s River Gum, and each of these things as worthy of my care as what I carry in my head, and each of them as capable of healing me and mine.

Lived as a place, not just a story, lived as country, perhaps a life may become more habitable and happy.

4.

Perhaps a place is a mind one can learn to share. Perhaps a place is a body one can inhabit and care for as if it were one’s family, one’s lover. One’s self.

5.

For most of the human occupation of the earth, most cultures have sacralised the land, understood place as imbued with mystery, meaning, divinity, wisdom, lore. Before Descartes came along and defined a human being as a thinking mind and the Enlightenment demystified reality and rationalized nature and set us human beings apart from it—all cultures have shared an understanding of the world beyond the merely human as sentient and conscious, a Self from which we humans drew large parts of our identity; for most of human history, human beings have not merely occupied but been occupied by the country in which they lived.

Of all the cosmologies of belonging human cultures have known the Indigenous apprehension of country is perhaps the most lyrical and sophisticated. One feels, as a descendant of the disinheritors, an illness of ease speaking of Indigenous knowledge. I do so, humbly, and encouraged by Indigenous people I know, and from a sense that deep down, though it is unique, what Indigenous wisdom knows best and articulates more beautifully and has done for longer than any other, is what has been known and said in so many cultures.

6.

The house I’ve moved to has been turned about face.

It’s a stucco place, put up I’d guess just before or after the second world war, just a kilometre out of town. A line of nine pines stands along Kangaloon out front. In its day, this was a small and unassuming house on a large Bowral block. Now it’s a small and unassuming Bowral house on a small Bowral block. I wonder who’s lived here. It has a family feel. At what is now the back door, there’s a bell that doesn’t ring, and inside, two hanging tubular bells of unequal length, which, if you flick your finger across them, make the archetypal two-tone chime of doorbells all across the western world. Inside the box from which the bells hang is a sheet of foxed paper, on which in deco typescript are the instructions for installing the ‘electric door chimes’. So this, clearly, was the front door.

The house next door stands only two metres away, and a hedge of those genetically modified firs they favour down here disguises a paling fence between the houses. Sometime in the 1990s the owner of my place clearly subdivided and made of the back door, which faces the pines on Kangaloon, the front.

And I feel like the house, turned around in mid-life, asked to face what I’d had my back to all these years.

7.

I live inside a life, inside a culture, which has not placed value on, nor attributed intrinsic merit to, the more than merely human world in which one lives one’s life. I have not often, though I’ve tried, really felt at home among the trees, the birds, the rocks, the landforms, the watercourses, the weather, among which we human animals live and make our livings and make our way.

For Indigenous people, it is different, and it is well past time we asked them if they might help. They whose land we took. They whose languages, linguistic marvels, we called primitive, whose very occupation we denied, whose wisdom we disparaged.  For Indigenous Australians, land is not acreage or real estate or visual catchment or vista or background. Land is life and law. Place is self. And where one lives and what one belongs to, and a fair bit of what one means, is ‘country’, and country is, as Deborah Bird-Rose put it, reprising Levinas, ‘nourishing terrain.’ ‘Country,’ she writes, is a place that gives and receives life. Not just imagined or represented, it is lived in and lived with… Country is a living entity with a yesterday, today and tomorrow, with a consciousness, and a will toward life. Because of this richness, country is home, and peace; heart’s ease.’

In the middle of my years, dislocated from so much that held me, I long for that heart’s ease, for the nourishment of spirit, the certainty of self, such belonging entails—earned, in Indigenous ways of knowing, and in Celtic cosmologies and most other ways of being on earth since humans walked the earth, by fierce and tender attention to a place one inhabits as if it were one’s life. And I wonder if I’ve left it too late, or if it’s even possible for a white man of my age to pull it off.

I think I may have been lonely, as Tim Lilburn puts it, for where I am, for 56 years. And I wonder if I may not be alone, as it were, in my existential solitude.

I may have been born lonely. Or I may have learned it in the way my family, doing their best, brought me up; it may have been the way the culture that was mine knew nothing of the heart’s ease of places, and the ease it offered me did not work. Loneliness has dogged my days, and perhaps it’s my psychologist who needs to help me sort that out.

I wonder now, if it was not this aspect of my nature that led me to hope for a wider, wilder belonging in the land; is it some profound solitude in my nature that’s led me, though three works of prose and nearly all my poetry, to try to practise belonging in geography. Who can say? But a feeling is on me now in my middle years that my fellow Australians and I—those of us, I mean, who have grown up, as I have, inside the dominant culture here—have lived in radical disconnection from the mind and music of the way things run in the places of this continent. We have thought we knew ease here, but in truth, if we look at our lives honestly, ease is the one thing we have not known. I’m wondering, in other words, if the alienation I feel in my life, may not be mine alone, nor due merely to the troubles I’ve seen; I’m wondering if this is how it feels at a certain age, to dwell out of kinship with one’s country—to have sought belonging, family, connection in lots of places, in ideas and substances and relationships and books and callings and diversions—none of them the air that one breathes, the land as it lies this way and that, as Annie Dillard puts it in An American Childhood. None of them here.

The exile I feel may not be merely personal, but cultural.

8.

The land does not love us yet, Judith Wright wrote somewhere. She meant us colonisers. And how could it, for love is earned, and consider how lovelessly, how savagely, with what a sense of entitlement, with what an exploitive cast of mind, we took the land from itself and from those whom it had tutored in a profound understanding of how, in its places, it prospers.

We have lived very largely in a worldview, not a world, which we imported and spray-painted across a continent and called it a civilization and imagined we belonged well enough inside it.

All my life, like most us, perhaps—we colonisers, we thieves, of others’ familiar terrains, we dwellers in social and economic and global cultural realms, we settlers and suburbanites—I have lived my life in places I have barely understood, country I have not known how to know. For seven years I lived in Katoomba and I researched in books and on horseback, in conversation and in solitude and on foot and in contemplation, and I wrote a book to sing that place, the Blue Plateau, and I would have told you till recently, I came to know that place quite well, and perhaps it came to know me; I would have said I was at my ease there and at home. But now, though I tried, I’m not so sure I was.

‘There is a practice of belonging,’ I wrote in The Blue Plateau, ‘and it begins with forgetfulness of self.’ I acknowledged even then that my own practice of that discipline of belonging was doomed—by comparison to the lives of the first people in whose mouths the language of the place ran and who tended it for a thousand generations, by comparison with some settlers like some I wrote of there, who, though they treated it rough, came to know its ways and to love it after their rough fashion—to be incomplete, conceptual, abstracted. I knew it in mind and hoped it had a word or two to say of me.

It is reasonably easy to forget the self a while, it turns out, and witness a place, when one’s self is moored safely in a home and cared for and wanted by those one shared that living with; one is barely forgetting one’s self at all. But when the self is harrowed, as mine has been these many past years, the self, though it seems uninhabitable, is almost impossible to shake at all. In fact, it becomes the entire world. One you’d give almost anything to abandon, to find again some sense of fellowship with the rest of creation, but cannot.

9.

A friend, two years ago or so, trying to help, said to me: you are a man of places, and as long as I’ve known you, you’ve been living divorced from anywhere you love or know or are known. You are displaced, she said. How can anyone, in particular you, be happy without a home? If who you are is where you are and where you are is lost on you, how can you be anyone at all?

10.

An east coast low blows the third week of June inland. After the hottest summer anyone can recall and the driest autumn, the days remember how to rain and the nights are the kind of cold winter is supposed be. Daffodils push up through the garden beds, spring released at last to anticipate its own coming, its way clearing, the moment winter rakes autumn away.

Tonight as rain fell on the tiled roof and the gas heater threw out its heat, I sat on the couch and reread a poem of Linda Gregg’s I’ve loved for years, long before I knew what it articulated, knowing I’d know in time. And now’s the time. ‘Adult,’ she calls it, as if she knew what Seamus Heaney meant when he wrote in Crediting Poetry: ‘Poetry can make an order… where we can at last grow up to that which we stored up as we grew.’ Gregg’s poem puts well what I have done, coming back to the Wingecarribee, and how that feels, the bewilderment of return, of advancing years, the losses, the burning back of youthful desire, the exile on home ground, as well as the accomplishments, many of them, so hard won, incidental now to one’s sense of what one’s life has meant:

I’ve come back to the country where I was happy
changed….
I could be the ghost of my own life returning
to places I lived best. Walking here and there,
nodding when I see something I cared for deeply.
Now I’m in my house listening to the owls calling
and wondering if slowly I will take on flesh again.

In the midst of loss that won’t stop leaving, grief that won’t stop grieving, but refuses to be said, is it possible the flesh you put on again is the body of the things around you, which you have to teach yourself all over again to regard, and which you apprehend, forcing yourself somewhat, as if for the first time?

Certainly this is where I was happy; certainly these are places I lived best. Certainly, I return to them changed—the places and the scents, the black cockatoos and king parrots, the ribbon gums and the Wingecarribee and its flood plain that I used to wander with my young, and the wood ducks and the spinebills all familiar, but one’s self a stranger to one’s self, to the life one used to live here with ease, a stranger yet to everything else that’s been here all along.

I am changed by the loss of the life I used to live here. Wonder, which was easy once, is hard work now.

I know, though, that the way outside myself is the way back to myself. To be lost to oneself is a chance to find oneself, changed, perhaps improved, in all that isn’t merely oneself.

A friend, grieving her own loss, sends me some words which she reads on the train. I know the book they come from almost word for word, and I know Rilke’s poetry well, too, and I forget daily the consolation I once found there. Sometimes it takes someone else who finds comfort in words one knows—sometimes in words one has written—and who suffers too and cares for one’s own sadness, to recall for you what you thought once you understood.

The words were written to Mr Kappus, a young poet, by Rainer Maria Rilke on 12 August 1904. ‘Consider whether these great sadnesses have not rather gone right through the centre of yourself? Whether much in you is not altered, whether you have not somewhere, at some point of your being, undergone a change while you were sad? Were it possible for us to see further than our knowledge reaches, and yet a little way beyond the outworks of our divining, perhaps we would endure our sadnesses with greater confidence than our joys.’

A knowing further than our knowledge reaches—is that perhaps what country is?

Preparing a poetry workshop, I turn again to Anna Akhmatova. In her almost despair, she too reaches out into the world beyond the social, which, like the world within the heart, reprises the miracle of existence day by day no matter what.

Everything is plundered, betrayed, sold.
Death’s great black wing scrapes the air.
Misery gnaws to the bone.
Why then do we not despair?

By day, from the surrounding woods,
cherries carry summer into town;
at night the deep transparent skies
glitter with new galaxies.

And the miraculous comes so close
to the ruined, dirty houses—
something not known to anyone at all,
but wild in our breast for centuries.

It’s gratitude I need to practise, not happiness I need to seek. Or if happiness, then what happiness in its old sense means: acceptance of what happens, surrender to, even thankfulness for how things are. What I want is being. And what I need is to be more than merely myself. And in such a way of being I know I’ll find what meaning there is to find.

Life is a spell so exquisite everything conspires to break it, wrote Emily Dickinson. Meaning—letting yourself be again in the company of much that isn’t you—is the spell recast. The spell is recast when coherence resumes, when one wakes again, like the language in a poem, to all one is connected to (as Jane Hirshfield puts it), to all the rest of who you are. And much of it, that ecosystem of self, is the other forms of life, fast and slow, human and animal and tree and sky and river, without any of which that small and entire universe of Self would be less exquisite and less whole; and meaning includes one’s place among them, neither their author nor their arbiter, but their steward and their witness and their kin; and meaning, belonging, is the uncanny order and freedom all these forms of life, together, imply: the rightness, the ineluctability, the entirety. It is the Self just beyond our divining. It is not so much the forms, but what joins them. It is the space between. That is the Self. That is the nourishing terrain. And nothing is missing from it—not the past, nor the present, nor the ones you miss, nor the stolen, nor the dead.

And so tonight, changed, I walked out into a small piece of this country where I was happy. I got as far as my front porch, since the rain was coming down. I walked out there with Rilke’s mystical, practical thought in mind, that there is a real world beyond our usual capacities to divine, and that if we could enter into it, our sadness could be almost just another species of the miraculous; I walked out there with gratitude to my friend, a young poet; and I walked out there contemplating the night as the world in its other life, as a nourishing terrain hiding out in plain view; and I walked out there thinking that inside my breast and inside the country around me there is something not known, not even knowable, to me or anyone, a music, a miraculous integrity, the wonder that there should be this intricate something when there might be nothing at all; I walked out there hoping to catch a little of the lyric of the country, the music of the intelligence of things, a phrase or two of the miraculous in the suburban dark.

And what I found was the sooty owl, a woman in ecstasy or terror, and the last recalcitrant corella, refusing like me, despite the hour, to go to bed. And what came was the wind in among these nine pines I cannot yet name but am beginning to come to know, a sound like the stronger winds of morning remembered and transposed for nine trees at night. What came was a frog that swallowed, it seemed, the last lolly in the jar. What came was rain still falling, but almost as an afterthought, a quiet coda. What came was the water from my overgrown gutters dropping small change into the water tank by my study. What came was one car along the wet road and the leaves of the camellia beside the front door, wet yet and dark, throwing back inside the light the house threw out, and white buds clutching like prayers their coming season tight inside their green and biding all our time.

And what came was the fox. A shock of bright mischief, a shot of ingenuity and guile, a wayfinder, a flare in the dark, a small thing, a latecomer like me, both murderous and miraculous, and she quickened the quiet in me and in the night: she ran the slick a streetlamp spilled across the road and made off through the neighbour’s place toward the golf course out the back.

What came then was laughter, and with it, gratitude—notwithstanding all that’s unwell in the world and one or two things that are way too far from being right in me—for the chance to be for a moment all this and all that this implies.

11.

Finding it hard to write inside today—circling this essay like a collie walking around and around its body to find the best shape, and the best place, to lie down in—I take myself and my laptop outside.

Half the lawn is moss, which thrives, and daffodils or freesias push up through it, and red-domed toadstools, poisonous and flagrant, break out along the drainage line.  Two magpies on the grass make the glassy grace notes of the winter solstice. Their voices are what the midyear sunshine says. I hear the raffish riff of a butcherbird swell and fly off after second breakfast in the yard next door to mine. The sleeping liquidambar reaches its pale grey limbs over me, priesting me and ghosting me at once, where I sit at the stone table on the faded red linen chair. Above me in the middle storeys, a kookaburra plumps, slumped into its feathers for warmth, disappearing itself inside the morning light, the better to wait and prey, and the spiked plumage on his handsome head would make a Brazilian striker proud; on his wing a window opens on the blue. I’m guessing the boobook I heard last night laying down the two slow syllables of her name, take after take, has taken herself, well-fed, and happy with her two-note obbligato, to bed. The fox, too, high-couture terrorist, has probably wrought the kind of carnage overnight on local wildlife your average narcissist wreaks on commonsense and innocence in a phrase, and is out there near the seventh green sleeping the night off in her hide.

After five days, this east coast low, one of the cool moves June busts most years along this fetch of the Pacific, has spun itself like a dervish, or his laundry, dry, and the morning is temperate prayer. For five days, the second week of June lavished rain on us, rain that healer, as a friend puts it, rain in showers and squalls and cloudbursts that the country I’ve returned to—the parched ground, the desultory streams, the geebungs, the gardeners and the graziers and the spinebills and their kin—longed for all the dry summer and autumn long. And all that is not merely me seems relieved, the aquifers recharged, the reservoirs refreshed, the feathers of the birds, the orange of the fox’s coat, the leaves on the hakea, the rhododendron and the Bentham’s gums next door, washed and polished and replete.

For myself, I think it’s fire that I need. My mind, which is country too, could use a little smoking out, a little burning back. The country of my mind has lately lost the harmonies that held it safe and well and sure; trauma of the heart can do that to the mind. For the mind is organic, too—an animal, a complex terrain of chemistry and flesh. Trauma changes the way things run there; the country of the mind is unsettled; the mind narrows, Kyo Maclear writes, when it is given too much to bear. The mind remembers trauma. It carries on its work, but its chemistry is altered, the mechanics of its operations are compromised by too much strain. Damage has been done, as it is done to places, and for a time it is not itself. It heals, but sometimes slowly—again, like landscapes. It heals, but only with time and tending. And some of the tending is rain and some of it is fire, and much of it is hard work, and all of it is love.

12.

I’m running on chemicals, where I used to run on love: paracetamol, diazepam, caffeine, nicotine. Each morning I swallow handfuls of vitamins in fear that if I stop taking them, I’ll feel even worse than I do. I’d do better if I ran more, if I walked, if I pulled more weights. One way to heal the mind is to get out of it more often.

I stopped writing, and I took the rake that’s lazed since I moved in, against the steps, and I raked all the leaves the liquidambar had dropped, a summer’s biomass, and made them a reluctant compost beneath the pines. It took me two hours, and when I finished it was dark. The raking ordered an unkemptness; it cleared away a spent season; it gave the grasses back to the light; it made a tidier kind of decay that might be useful to the garden plants. The work made me sweat, and it tired me, and it made me hungry, and later, when I’d eaten, the work, a domestication of the wild inside me and without, made me feel more fully human, too. It was, I guess, a small participation in the rest of who I am; it was a putting my mind back in my body and my body back in the lively world.

13.

I’m not going to call this a crisis of midlife. I’m not going to mention the dark woods.

But I do find myself most days unconvinced by most of what I thought held me, and these days in my mid-fifties are, if I’m lucky, still only the middle of my life’s way. So I guess that’s a crisis, and I guess this is midlife. Many of us get to fall into a deep dysphoria over time. And I guess that’s what’s happened to me. We inhabit a contradiction, we conscious organisms: we wear bodies with use-by dates, but something else in us, we know and believe (as Spinoza put it), is eternal like the earth. Reconciling that contradiction is a hard act to keep up. It entails finding meaning, and some of us find it in music and some in poetry and some in love and some in religion and some in power and some in place. Indigenous folks find it in Country. Trauma can shake any of us from whatever certitudes held us. No theories will help you when that happens; the mind plunges, or you plunge out of the mind. And like Dante, you find yourself walking into a solitude so profound you feel all meaning, all connection, all sense of purpose, fall away. You might feel then a loneliness as old as the universe, older than any gods. And it may take a while to pass.

All literature in all languages has poems and tales that speak of this moment in a life: Buddha and Dante deal with it, Hildegard von Bingen and St John of the Cross, all the Persian mystics (Mirabai, Hafez, Rumi) and the Chinese Songs of Lament. Joseph Campbell maps it in his studies of the myths. One will be called to a place one feels one cannot survive, a place where living feels more like dying. One will be undone. And in time, with luck and courage and the help of the elders and one’s friends and the conspiracy of the other creatures of the earth, one may be remade. There is a kind of dying, Rumi writes, from which one returns plural. I’m hoping that’s what this is.

Here’s Greg Orr adopting the mood I’m trying to hold; writes a poetry that makes beauty out of grief, and he knows this dysphoric place as well as anyone:

Grief will come to you.
Grip and cling all you want.
It makes no difference.

Catastrophe? It’s just waiting to happen.
Loss? You can be certain of it.

Flow and swirl of the world.
Carried along as if by a dark current.

All you can do is keep swimming.
All you can do is keep singing.

14.

I’m standing in the frost watching my daughter play soccer. It’s the day after the solstice, and it feels like it. It’s an early game, and the night was clear, and the sun is only barely out of bed. The watching is, I confess, sporadic: I’m standing here talking to Don. We’re talking about poetry and about the several species of silence, the slowness and contemplation poetry practises and teaches. We’re having the kind of conversation, while looking out for our children but not fussing over them, that makes the world, and one’s part in it, big again.

I’m nobody’s idea of a Catholic, though my children go to Catholic schools. I have been no friend of the Catholic Church. And I have my reasons.

My people are dissenters. I am proud of their dissent, and I carry it on: Methodists and Quakers and Congregationalists took a stand against pomp and cant, piety and privilege, and hierarchies and secret societies of all kinds (except, I guess, their own).

But there are some good Catholics, whose spirituality has survived their religion, and Don is one such man.

Done talking Mirabai and Hafez and Rumi and Jane Hirshfield and Robert Gray and Linda Gregg and our children’s colds and our loved ones’ troubles, we look up, and the kids have gone out to a 3-nil lead, which they hold till the end. Don asks me how my writing’s going, and I tell him about this essay and my struggle to find its shape. I talk about ‘nourishing terrains’. I tell him how I want to acknowledge, chiefly, the wisdom of Indigenous people we have till recently profaned, the idea of country, to which I’m trying to come home; I want to add, I tell him, that for most of human history a human life has taken as much meaning from its surroundings as from its thoughts and gods, that most cultures everywhere have, while they nonetheless raped the earth and raided each other’s villages and abused their children and stole each other’s lives, regarded the landscape with awe and have treated it with care and have invested it with divinity and have stewarded it in song and ritual and husbanded it with love.

And Don says ‘well, that’s been true in the Catholic Church as well, though the Church has spent a long time neglecting it. Don’t forget St Francis and The Canticle of the Creatures’.

Back in the day, when the children were little, I used to read that to the kids. We had an illustrated version, given to us by friends. Reading it reconciled me to a Catholicism I had a lot of trouble respecting.

‘The current Pope,’ says Don, ‘took his Papal name from Saint Francis. And in his Encyclical Laudato Si, which translates as Our Common Home, he says he did so because he saw St Francis as his guide and inspiration. This is a different kind of father of the church. And he does a pretty good job of reminding everyone—he addresses his letter to all beings—about a tradition of care for country, of spiritual ecology, that has run through the Church, though more often in the breach than the practice. And he calls on us, invoking St Francis, to take care for our common home, as he puts it. You should have a read of it.’

And so I find myself reading the first Papal Encyclical of my life. It’s long enough, and it’s beautiful, though spoken in a doctrinal idiom here and there, and it’s very clear. We are of the earth, it says; we are the earth; if anything is holy on the earth it is the earth itself. In our neglect and arrogance, Francis writes, we have damaged the only home we have to live in, this godly realm.

So it turns out the Pope isn’t just a Catholic; he’s a Christian, too. And more than that, he’s a spiritual heir to St Francis—a mystic and an ecological evangelist. But that’s only because, again like the saint (whose sacralising of the earth made him pretty unpopular in Rome), the pope has not lost his humanity, has not forgotten his kinship, all our kinship, with the earth.

He refers, in the Encyclical, to St Francis as ‘the example par excellence of care for the earth’. To live, as St Francis did, and as Pope Francis would have us live, in easygoing fellowship with the rest of creation is to live in joy, to belong and be glad of it. Belonging enjoins us to service—care for kin. As in a family. But such small domestic work, which is also the great work of our time, is also a fulfilment of self. To live at home with where we live, caring for the earth, is to be fully human. It is to live a canticle. It is to know each gesture of living as an enactment of creation. And to forget one’s belonging and to neglect one’s care for all beings, is to live a less than human life and to cause damage to creation and to one’s self.

‘This sister,’ writes the pope, meaning the earth, ‘now cries out to us because of the harm we have inflicted on her… We have come to see ourselves as … entitled to plunder her at will. The violence present in our hearts … is also reflected in the symptoms of sickness evident in the soil, in the water, in the air and in all forms of life. This is why the earth herself…is among the most abandoned and maltreated of our poor… We have forgotten that we ourselves are dust of the earth, our very bodies are made up of her elements, we breathe her air and we receive life and refreshment form her waters.’

The harm we enact on our children is the harm we enact on the earth; the care we take with our sister birds, our brother roos, our children streams, is the love we enact in our homes. We are broken, all of us, one way or another, the way the places are broken, and how we return to country—intimately, respectfully, joyfully, kindly—is how we return to ourselves. Coming home to our earth and ourselves entails also cleaning up the mess we’ve made, and redeem all humanity of a little of the harm we have done to first peoples and to other clans and to our children.

15.

I carry my heart to the reservoir and walk the track between the ribbon gums and sheoaks, winter falling like a benediction, no guide but the place itself, and no need for one. This is a place I know. If you ever wondered what the ecstatic poets meant by the Beloved, by the energy that lifts mountains, by the friend, this is where you’ll find her, find him, this patch of ground that has transfigured all it’s suffered into perfect peace embodied, replete though it is with grief and dignified rage, into a prayer for how things are.

The reservoir, when they made it in the thirties, flooded ancestral lands, inundated sacred ground. It swamped a homeland with blithe and murderous disregard for the place itself, for the tenderness inherent here for those who had belonged to this place and tended it, since songs began. Of those people, who gathered here, perhaps in their hundreds—more, anyway, than the thousands who flock the Bong Bong Racetrack upstream today for the annual pie festival—there were 67 souls left in 1826, ten years after settlement came with its bullocks and its smallpox and its poisons and its guns; there were 46 Gundungurra left ten years later, the last time anyone bothered to take a count. But now there is a sign at the reservoir that reads Yangu ngani yaramarraranhur. Gulambanyan Gundungurra marrin uu manyan yadhungji—’The local Gundungurra people invite you to follow this track and learn more about their culture.’ The people who are this country survive the murder and the loss of it and stand and welcome all who would come—including descendants of the disinheritors like me—to country that survives. And the reservoir this morning feels like a nourishing terrain.

The reservoir made a river bend over into a recreational facility for the privileged, who never liked it much anyway, and so it lapsed, as if the place had a mind of its own, into a perfect habitat for birds pushed out by land clearance. There are people today, led by the Gundungurra, who care for this place, which has come back to itself, changed. I know what I have written above because of the signage the council has put up, signage that wasn’t there when I used to wander here in that good old life of mine. Before. It’s good to know there are people here who want the true story, the story of long, long care for country, the dispossession, the repossession, told. They want the remnant trees conserved. They pull the weeds the settlers brought. They look out for the birds—many of which share the winter stillness with me today: black swans, grebes and coots; purple swamphens and dusky moorhens; snapes, which dredge the shallows, and a pelican or two, a mob of black duck, a pair of currawongs, and two grey birds, Jacky Winters, I think, that overflew me fast as laughter.

Far more kin than I see, see me. I feel accompanied, welcomed, if warily; I feel briefly acknowledged, politely disregarded. The reservoir, too, it strikes me again—this shallow brown expanse, reeds rising from it like lazy battalions of forward slashes, fusillades of arrows that found their mark, bits of paddock poking through dense with blackberry and eucalypt and heath—the reservoir is an almost perfect picture of one’s soul. It is chaos made wise and coherent by the humble way it participates in eternity, by how well it welcomes contradiction and carries on, by how readily it yields when it must and forgives nearly everything, but refuses oblivion and never forgets a note or a footstep or even a single well or ill-chosen remark. In its resilience, it is what its first peoples were and remain; it is their country, their healing terrain; and because it teaches them compassion and transcendence, it might be one’s own country, too, a beloved quite out of one’s league but not out of one’s soul’s reach, a country itself that waits for you to be ready for it to nourish.

The post Nourishing Terrains; or, Solstice appeared first on Sydney Review of Books.

Researcher A sat by the river that morning a hundred metres north of Researcher B’s experiments. A expected her own experiments would fail. Pale and tousle-haired, with sturdy boots, A aimed to listen for anything she could hear, whether from near or far away, small and subtle sounds like those made by tiny insects or distant airplanes. She would try to record a digital impression of these faint noises with a sensitive microphone, despite knowing that the recording of such impressions would be almost inevitably impossible.

‘I think it’s a way of positioning myself in a place,’ she said. ‘It’s a way of settling myself, but also looking and listening beyond myself. Exploring what those relationships might be.’

She used the word ‘settling’.

‘That’s an interesting tension,’ she acknowledged, ‘because my intention with settling is to pay attention to the place, but when I think of settlers I think of people coming in and not doing that, trying to impose.’

A sat low to the earth, listening, exuding her usual air of calm. Nearby fell a rain of leaves.

Pound Bend. Photo: David Carlin

Nine researchers went on the field trip that day to Pound Bend, outside Melbourne. Five white women and four white men, they were artists, writers, designers, filmmakers and theorists of media. They took four cars, one kayak, which they didn’t use, and much equipment for recording sounds, images and videos. Also lunch in paper bags and eskies, water obviously, treats to share. Hats and sunscreen, bathing costumes, notepads, phones, computers. Someone sensible might have brought a first aid kit for the snakes.

There’s only one road down the hill through the manna gums to the riverbank at Pound Bend. The weather was almost hot enough for a Total Fire Ban; under those conditions Pound Bend could be a death trap.  They parked down by the river, between the toilet block and the wooden picnic tables, keeping an eye out for the hot wind in the trees as they unpacked their gear.

Researcher B, a photographer, described herself as a ‘ground person’. ‘I much prefer to sit on the ground and see what’s there rather than go to the top of a mountain and look at a grand view,’ she said.

To the ground beside the river that morning she had brought a selection of unexposed photographic paper of differing chemical sensitivities, plus ideas about the type of landscape photography a ground person might make. She wanted to work against certain photographic grains, among them the idea of ‘landscape as depiction’. Landscape photographs of the American West, where B came from, have been framed in stories of manifest destiny. Here in Australia it was the white settlers’ stories of the pastoral, as they attempted to domesticate the place from its uncanny strangeness. None of that spoke to B.

‘Scenery has been the way we have pictured the natural world,’ said B. ‘It’s like Nature with a capital N, this thing over there, distanced, magical, whatever we claim it to be.’

Instead of using a camera, B placed sheets of silver gelatin paper near the ground, pressing them against the slender green leaves of low grasses. The moisture from the leaves acted with the silver gelatin to form an image on the surface of the paper showing patterns where the leaves had blocked the sunlight that had already been partially blocked by some trees. The images resembled curving daggers or the long teeth of a walrus. B knew from experience and theory something of what to expect, but the point, she said, was that the way the photographic materials responded to the elements of the landscape was out of her control.  She could only introduce the paper to the leaves and the sun and invite them to make something together.

‘It is a factor of the particular temperature right now, the moisture in those grasses, what kind of paper I grabbed,’ said B. ‘It is the accidental forms and palette that are most interesting. You have a feeling about what it might look like but really you don’t know.’

She bent to place another sheet of gelatin paper in a different clump of leaves. ‘You have to press it together,’ she said, ‘it needs the contact and the moisture.’

Pound Bend. Photo: David Carlin

This was the first field trip the researchers had organised together. Everything was, to some extent, tentative and provisional. They had started out a few months earlier as a reading group. In one of the many plain white rooms in their university building, accompanied by frugal snacks and a bottle of wine kindly assembled by the Researcher who will be known in this report as F—the unofficial prime mover of the group—they discussed books of ecophilosophy such as Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter, Rosa Braidotti’s The Posthuman and Timothy Morton’s The Ecological Thought. They experienced the elegant invitation to ‘atmospheric attunement’ of the anthropologist Kathleen Stewart and witnessed the entreaty for ‘slow writing’ of Deborah Bird Rose. They considered the beautiful lyric essay experiments of Nicole Walker’s Microcosms. They talked about unsettling the hierarchies of human and nonhuman, and how this was urgent now, with the pressures of capitalist growth striking the bio-physical limits of the planet. But what else can you do with reading? What else can you do with difficult ideas? What else can you make, they wondered?

Researcher C, a tall, bespectacled man whose shoulders were always set as if coming in to land, was a film theorist. As is normal for a film theorist, he spent a lot of his time thinking about what other film theorists think about film.

Researcher C had a theory about what he was doing that day. He was trying to encode time. He was interested in the difference between encoding time and feeling time, and how this was connected to the concept of time in film theory. Time in a lot of film theory is dependent on the idea of movement: if there is no movement in a film you don’t feel time passing. C had decided to film two series of shots: one in which there was as much movement in the frame as possible, although the camera didn’t move – these were scenes of a waterfall, or of leaves moving, or of ants, for instance – and the other in which there was as little movement in the frame as possible.

He admitted that the place he found himself in was arbitrary. ‘It becomes a focaliser—’ is how he spoke of it, ‘—in terms of something to film, but beyond that…’ He trailed off.

He said that usually a lot of his stuff happened in postproduction.

He asked his questioner: ‘Is part of this thing trying to put people on the spot?’

Then he went on: ‘see, this feels wrong to me, being out here, because I don’t really have a plan. And I’ve never really done that before, just gone out…with no plan. The open-endedness is a little bit weird.’

He was standing on the path with his camera equipment, in between one location and another.

‘Normally it’s like: I’m going to get a close-up of the waterfall; or, a tracking shot of the river. I’ll have a list. A shotlist. So this is partly terrifying and partly really, really exciting because I can just go and film what catches my eye.’

He paused.

‘I got a pretty good shot of a kookaburra that I was happy about,’ he said. ‘He was very chilled, let me get right up close to him.’ He smiled.

Nearby, Researcher D was coming at things from another angle. D was interested in imagining other bodies for herself, so as to imagine nonhuman ways of being. She had designed fins for her body, for instance, so that she could think about what it would be like to become more like a fish. She tended to laugh a lot, as if she knew it all sounded a little crazy. But as an interpretation designer for zoos and museums she thought in concrete terms about these speculations. Early that morning at Pound Bend she could be seen happily sitting on the ground in her khaki shorts and floppy hat, by coincidence exactly in the place the photographer (B) would soon make her photographs with the silver gelatin paper, leaves and sun.

‘I picked this spot,’ said D, ‘because it’s full of traces of things that have left impressions in the grasses that lead to the water. See how the grasses are all flattened and there are little, like, tunnels everywhere?’ She pointed softly. ‘So I imagine, if I was land dwelling, I might be slithering through here towards the water. I’m low-down and I can’t see the water. But I know it’s there.’

‘It seems silly,’ she admitted. ‘But I’m trying to hang on to that playfulness. It could be partly a reaction to the fact-telling we are asked to do in zoos and museums. I think we could do a lot more with imagining. Because a lot of early scientists – well, any scientists – have that kind of openness, even though they work in a structured way. They have theories, or they will just go and explore something really, really deeply. Not that I want to learn about things in a scientific way. But I think it is that wide-eyed fascination and imagination that get you somewhere. Otherwise, it’s sort of reductive. It’s like: I know this and that or this and that about that animal or that place and usually it’s very individualist. So: it will be ‘the’ gorilla. There will be one specimen that represents all gorillas. And even with that, it’s hard to make a personal connection.’

D sat on the grass by the path, making notes in her notebook. She might have been making sketches too.

‘I like going to a place that I feel drawn to, some affinity for, and then I try and imagine myself adapting to that place rather than doing something else to that place. Rather than designing something, it’s more about designing me. And also, putting myself into – like before, down there, I was thinking of being the river.’ She laughed at herself.  ‘Being it or being in it rather than looking at it. I feel like everything here is about the river.’ She paused. ‘I wonder if everyone feels like that?  But it’s like the trees, everything, is looking at the river, wanting to be near it. And yet the river isn’t even a thing, in a way, all those bits of water just keep going…’

She clarified her allegiances: ‘Usually I’m more a sea person than a river person. Partly I’m fascinated with the sea because it is really hard to see into and it’s hard to know because we can’t hang out in there for too long or we die. It’s so frickin big. And dangerous. And unknowable! I think in a way it’s a kind of metaphor for the whole lot. The whole lot is unknowable. We just think we have more of a handle on the land.’

In the spaces when D wasn’t speaking, the sound of the river flowing intermingled with the calling of some birds.

‘I can’t stay away from the water,’ said D. ‘I’ll do this bit on land here but then I’ll do the same thing in the water. I have to get in there.’

Later she was seen floating downstream and laughing.

The place the European settlers called Pound Bend, as if only because no less poetic name was available, lies in the unceded sovereign land of the Wurundjeri clan of the Kulin Nation. The old river here coils in a giant loop around a floodplain, making a watery ring that rubs up against a hard granite outcrop. On this floodplain, people have met to share stories and ceremonies, to trade and celebrate, for tens of thousands of years, but this is now difficult to imagine for settler kin, since they have little or no tradition of listening to such things. Wurundjeri elders have put in place a series of storyboards along the river path that educate visitors about what they otherwise might miss. Beneath one of these storyboards that day, a class of primary school children sat on the grassy earth with their teacher, learning, daydreaming or both.

For a short while after the British seized the land in 1835, the settler population, superior in weaponry, tolerated the Wurundjeri remaining on this floodplain by the river. The settlers couldn’t yet think of a more important use for the place. But with the discovery of gold in the district the traditional owners were soon forcibly evicted. In March 1852, it is reported in the archives, Wurundjeri leader Simon Wonga convened a great cultural gathering of the Kulin Nation at Pound Bend, two weeks of performances, games and ceremonies.

At the neck where the river almost touches itself, a tunnel was blasted through the hill in 1870 to allow the water to flow through and circumvent the loop.  The tunnel, 145 metres long, six metres wide and four metres deep, was the idea of some entrepreneurs who, forming the Evelyn Tunnel Mining Company, saw in this looping river fringed with red- and manna gums an opportunity to profit by mining alluvial gold. The dream proved short-lived even by colonial standards; the company went broke after less than two years. The tunnel survives as a local curiosity, a useless piercing in the earth from which it is not clear lessons have been drawn. On hot days like the one described here, local families sunbathed on the stony beach near where the water gushed out of the tunnel to rejoin the river. A young couple mucked around in the froth with a pink inflatable.

The researchers to whom are assigned the random designations E and F in this report, both men of a certain age, as it might be said, were preoccupied that day with the concept of recording.

Researcher E, like A, above, kept himself busy recording but also not recording sounds. He wanted to ‘layer the landscape’, as he called it, through recording as many different sounds as he could tell apart. A filmmaker by trade and inclination, he had turned away from images for this one day at least. He wanted to recreate the soundscape as one could hear it with the naked ear, but which a camera or recording device could never replicate. ‘You can’t do it,’ he said, ‘not without a lot of meddling.’ Researcher E was a very practical person so it was credible that he had in fact tried a lot of meddling.

So here was another researcher attempting to reach a goal he considered impossible. Like the others, it seemed, he hoped that through failing he might discover something. ‘It’s like hunting or birdwatching,’ he said. ‘You’ve got to spend a while walking around to find where it is at its richest, the sound.  Then it becomes quite meditative. To listen and record at the same time. You start noticing a whole lot more things. You have to be still, not breathe too loudly. I like the recording part best. For others, that’s the annoying thing, that I’m quite happy not to ever do anything with it afterwards. I do all this recording but then I never even watch it back or listen to it. So actually I think it’s a good exercise to pretend you are recording.’

Researcher E wore headphones and held a sensitive microphone in one hand. Indeed, it wasn’t obvious whether he was recording or pretending to record.

‘I’ll tell you what,’ he continued, ‘the directional mic picks up on things. I freaked out for a minute because I could hear something crashing through the bush. I could have sworn there was a giant monitor lizard coming, but it was just some small bird.’

Meanwhile, Researcher F looked like a nineteenth-century colonial explorer—without of course meaning to—insofar as he carried his camera over his shoulder from place to place, attached to a large, extended tripod. He could have folded it up but he chose not to. Also he wore a floppy hat and shorts.

However, he didn’t talk like a nineteenth-century colonial explorer: ‘I think like a camera,’ he said. ‘Movement and light. So rather than subjects it is about finding things that…shimmer. If I am a charged coupling device, a photonic measuring device in a camera, what are the things that excite me? Bright lights probably do. But also the little constant movements of those leaves. The amount of changing light values going on, it’s like super excited, all that data. I’m thinking: if I were a camera what would I pay attention to? Rather than a human saying: look at that flower, or look at what my kids are doing… What might I care about?’

Sometimes he would set his tripod up with two legs on the ground and one leg on a picnic table. Then he would stand on the picnic table and frame a scene to film. The image he—or the camera—settled on, was an exquisitely framed scene of the blowy canopies of a line of distant trees above the far bank of the river, in relief against the sky, a scene of abstract movement that was surprisingly affecting. It looked like something to care about, even for a human.

‘The rule I have set is that I have to film each shot for exactly eight minutes. It’s like Michael Snow’s Wavelength or Godard’s nude just standing there for nine minutes. There’s something about the duration – at some point you stop wondering: is something going to happen? No, it’s just trees and sky. I frame it but then I stand by the camera like a sentinel for eight minutes. I’ve got nothing to do. I have decided that. But I’m not thinking, what do I do next or film next – no, I just have to wait for the camera now.’

Researcher F is a formalist. He likes these formal rules that shift his relation to the objects around him, removing himself from the driver’s seat, as it were, to make space for the objects to relate to each other; the charged coupling device of the camera getting intimate with the shimmering leaves. In this way he is like Researcher B who also waits for interactions to occur, making art as explicit partnership with nonhumans.

F doesn’t like stories. He prefers to think like a camera. He likes to set a timer and to have to wait. If he helped make a beautiful moving picture—and he did, something sublime—he was modest about his own role, saying only that it was ‘partly by getting that tree on edge of frame, partly about that patch of sky top right. I’m interested in the manna gums as a sort of horizon. Trees and trunks and leaves and sky.’

‘Which I always do,’ he added.

Trees and trunks and leaves and sky. Surrounding F, as he waited for the timer to go off.

Here in the report, as it tilts around another bend, we might wonder at its looping shape, and whether it might have benefited from some tunneling or dredging. We might wonder what would have happened if a fire had started that day, all of a sudden, immediately to the north, and researchers, school children and sunbathers had been forced to flee for their lives in terror, in doing so experiencing an uncanny version of the cataclysmic fate that must have become familiar to the area’s earlier inhabitants as strangers burnt through everything that had forever connected things, human and nonhuman. We might wonder why the narrator feels it is important to hear the story of each researcher, who only visited for one day, when so many earlier stories of this place are lost. We might wonder, too, about the word research itself, and how to reclaim its original meaning as an ‘act of searching closely’, from a Latin root word circare which meant ‘to go about, traverse or wander through.’ Because, as research in the Western tradition has become less about traversing or wandering through, it has become more about control and power. With all this in mind we might notice how, even though Pound Bend was chosen almost at random as the locus for the experiments described here, the living, peopled place itself continues to insist on speaking back.

Researcher G, seventh of the nine, was looking up at a dead tree. There was something about the dead tree: its wiriness and the deep red colours of the burnt bark. Another filmmaker, G had a philosophical and poetic bent. She made films without stories because, like F, she wasn’t interested in stories, more so in ideas. She made films about ‘empty’ places that were haunted.

On this day she was thinking about description. She wanted to let certain experiences unfold, such as the encounter with the dead tree, make recordings with her camera, and then think about ‘what sorts of languages emerge in describing what’s there in the frame and also in describing what my experience of being here is.’ As a kind of foil for what might be more familiar languages of description, G had been collecting the descriptive languages of meteorology, biology and geology.

Then, too, G spoke passionately about the philosophical ideas of Gilles Deleuze and Manuel deLanda; in particular, the concept of intensive properties. ‘An intensive property,’ she explained, ‘is one that is not divisible. Like temperature, or speed. If you have a litre of water at 90° you can divide the volume into two halves but the temperature won’t be divided.  Each half a litre won’t be 45°!’  Sitting under the dead tree, she went on: ‘Differences in intensive properties drive processes, so I’m looking at what sort of differences in intensities drive what sort of processes. And what sort of processes are these I’m playing with today, such as describing, recording, framing?’

These ideas were difficult to grasp quickly without having read the theories. Like many philosophical ideas it was easy for the layperson to dismiss them as absurd or pointless. But G was unapologetic: ‘You know, ideas excite me! I want to see how ideas from theory and philosophy can push how I practice. And how practice can really challenge or push back on philosophical ideas. An idea excites me,’ she said, ‘if it completely challenges, renews or transforms the way I see or engage with the world, while at the same time articulates exactly my experience of the world. That’s what great writing is to me as well. Someone articulating your experience but also making it feel completely new.’

Researcher H, last but one of the researchers, had noticed, while walking through the city streets each day from her home to the university, that she didn’t, in point of fact, ever notice anything—it was as if the space in between beginning and end had simply emptied out and she was ‘missing everything.’ At Pound Bend, she was standing close to a large eucalypt that had chunky black bark, filming the bark with her smart phone. ‘I film a video for one minute, watch it, list everything I notice within that video and then use that list to make a new set of videos.’

As it happened, on her first video that morning she had noticed: wispy cloud, a tree branch, blue sky, green (just green, the colour), wind gently rustling, leaves, shadows, pockets of light green, plane, chirping, leaf falling, diagonal line and ‘sharp’.

‘It’s continually expanding and it’s going to get very messy,’ she said cheerfully. ‘All the videos collected through this list would then each provide another list. But I like it because it makes you notice things. A lot of video practice is like: I have this preconceived idea about what this documentary is going to be about. Whereas this technique lends itself to the documentary being found through the environment and the filming technology itself because you’re kind of noticing that as well.’

Again, in conventional terms it was kind of crazy what she was doing, but it was also kind of not-crazy.  You could picture her back in the city on her daily walk from home to university, noticing now the in-between.

Finally, Researcher I. Like the others, I had fashioned a research protocol of sorts. His protocol was to find each of the other researchers and try to understand their protocol and why it mattered to them. I was interested in some kind of long view. I knew that a ‘posthumanist’ objection could be made to his protocol on the grounds that it privileged humans and their intentions, and I wondered why he had persisted with this choice. I wanted to record the delicate, uncertain attempts his fellow researchers were making to create artifacts that unsettled the nature of Nature; the spurious and loaded separation between human and nonhuman. I was very aware that the researchers and their ‘research’ could be made to look ridiculous, in a way that biologists or geologists collecting samples would not be. I wanted neither to glorify these artist-researchers nor to mock them but simply to report on their endeavours, trying to understand what they thought that they were up to.

One other thing of note happened that day to I. A magpie stopped him. The magpie stood firmly on a long low branch of a eucalypt tree. It was singing in the extravagant, ululating way of magpies, modulating up and down a musical scale of some kind, making a splendid racket. I had the bright idea of recording the magpie’s singing on his phone, and then, moreover, of playing it back to the magpie through the phone’s loudspeaker. How would the magpie react to hearing its own voice relayed? It listened. It thrust its nose out as if hearing a very interesting sound indeed, one that came from nowhere the magpie could quite identify. I felt that he was playing a game with the magpie, and perhaps offering a gift to the magpie, a gift facilitated by his access to human technologies of sound recording and replay, but he also felt that he was being cruel, deceiving the magpie by playing a trick on it. In the end, the magpie got sick of the game, or fed up with being tricked. It seemed after all to know quite well where the sound was coming from because as it flew off, it swooped down over him and his smart phone, letting him know it had its own powers and opinions.

Researchers A to I inclusive drove away in the late afternoon, headed back towards the city.

So now, we can be almost certain, the dead tree and the grass down by the river go about, while the river is traversing, like the wind that sends the leaves sometimes like rain. Researcher M, the magpie, wanders through.

Acknowledgments: this essay was made possible through the generosity and creativity of the posthumanities reading group of RMIT University’s non/fictionLab. It is dedicated to colleagues, Dan Binns, Hannah Brasier, Smiljana Glisovic, Sophie Langley, Rebecca Nadjowski, Toni Roberts and Paul Ritchard, and to the memory and ongoing gifts of Adrian Miles.

The post Fieldwork appeared first on Sydney Review of Books.

Shanghai street at dusk. Photo: Terry Chapman
Distributed under creative commons license.

I didn’t expect, before I flew to China, that one of the things I’d encounter most often here would be glimpses of my teenage self, that younger, healthy self I try not to think about too often now that I’ve left her so definitively behind. But I had forgotten that what I’d called my ‘long interest in China’ in my residency application really dates to my last two years in high school, where we’d studied Chinese instead of European history, and my first year at university, that pivotal year, where I had, as a result of this, learnt Mandarin. I’d loved these lessons, loved the way that the language had such a different grammatical and syntactical structure than English, how differently it expressed things like the division of space and time, how it made me realise, for the first time, precisely how much language affects the way in which we think about ourselves and our world, especially in that year when these things – who I was, and how my world worked – were suddenly so difficult for me to apprehend. In that year too I know that I found a kind of solace (the nerdiest kind) in the rote learning that the language required, writing out characters again and again and again, working in order not to feel. My interest in Mandarin was obsessive – I’ve always had this tendency – but it was also passionate and focused and excited, the kind of excited that’s untinged by anxiety, that I almost never experience any more. It was less than one year later that I fell ill.

From the moment I arrive in Shanghai people keep asking me, is this your first time in China? and I keep saying, I’ve wanted to come here for years, but for some reason never made it.

Except I know the reason. I know it very well.

Every time a piece or phrase of language comes back to me, I remember my adolescent self. Every time I encounter a bright-blue soft drink, or a street stall selling slushies with some kind of dry ice in the bottom that makes them billow smoke around the faces of the girls who drink them, I remember her: she would have loved these. Each time I see a statue of Mao or Sun Yat-sen.

I keep thinking: when I was an adolescent, the idea of being ordinary terrified me. And now it’s all I want.

The first thing that I notice in Shanghai, the first thing that fascinates me, is that public space is used so differently. The first day that I walk the streets here, to start to place myself within the city, to get a sense of how it breathes and feels, it’s a sunny day, though cold and smoggy, and there are women on the street hoisting bamboo poles onto any structure that will hold them: the metal frames that are fixed beneath their windows specifically for this purpose, but also tree branches, bus shelters, decorative trellises. There are long-sleeved shirts stretched out along the bamboo, the poles running the length of their sleeves, underpants pulled taut over clothes hangers, all of this damp laundry flapping in the wake of passing buses. There are women gutting small fish in the gutter with rusty-looking scissors, another washing dishes; one man shaving with a hand-held mirror. There are older men standing stock-still on street corners, and rotating each of their joints in turn. In the parks: groups of men grappling together in some kind of martial art, a woman singing along to a portable speaker, her voice clear and high and wavery, couples in sharp, black trousers waltzing slowly in silent pairs.

In the days that follow I see a woman holding her baby, pantsless, over a rubbish bin, so that he can urinate directly into it. A toddler poop directly onto the footpath, squatting beside a telegraph pole on a main road. A huge block of tofu left out to ferment in the sun. There are street sweepers everywhere, men and women in navy-blue coveralls, holding brooms made of rushes and metal dustpans on long poles. The streets are always spotless.

Public space here feels more public, because it’s always being used. There’s always, that is, a public on it, in it: it feels shared, rather than shied away from. Many of the houses open out into shared laneways and courtyards. Many more have front rooms that have been transformed into kitchens, with stacks of bamboo steamers wider than my arm span over vats of water, or enormous crepe pans jutting out over the windowsill, onto which steamy-faced women layer eggs and shreds of meat, spring onions and pungent sauce, for the office workers meandering past – they never hurry – every morning. The houses themselves are small, I later realise, and often sub-divided between several families: it’s unheard of that anyone would live alone. Many of the older buildings still retain their idealist, communist architecture – shared kitchens, communal bathrooms, conjunct laundries.

Public space here is more precious, I think, because the private barely exists.

In Shanghai, I forget to stand on the right-hand side of escalators. I forget to throw my toilet paper into the bin and not the bowl. I lean on walls when I wait on train platforms and in the elevator, but no-one else does; I fold my arms beneath my chest instead of clasping my hands at hip-height. I leave too much space between my body and the next one in the queue, so others assume that I’m not waiting and squeeze in front. I smile too much at strangers, rather than just nodding, and they must think I’m not all there. I say xièxiè so much that it’s impolite.

I don’t spit phlegm into the gutters. But I do vomit there, every now and then, and on more than one occasion it’s because I’ve had too much to drink.

China is a modern country, the writing students that I visit tell me. China is a developed country. China is not the developing world. They tell me Shanghai is a world city, Shanghai is an international city, Shanghai is a Tier One City. The expats tell me, Shanghai isn’t China.

There are as many people living in this city as in my entire country.

Some nights, I lie on my mattress in my little studio, ten storeys up, watching the city lights blink on and off, stretching further than I can see, further than I know I will visit in my time here. Some days I walk in crowds so dense that I just have to let them carry me. I think of how I stride at home, how I weave around the people moving more slowly. I relax here: I just have to let them carry me.

Most days, I walk along the Bund in the late afternoon; some days, the smog is so thick that the buildings on the other side of the river – the enormous glass skyscrapers, one shaped like spheres on a stick, one shaped like a bottle opener, one the second-tallest in the world – look like someone has tried to paint them over, off the canvas. But on the days when the sun is out, and the air relatively clear, young women pose before the sandstone buildings, in pristine white trousers or flowing, net-like skirts, leaning backwards and casually tossing a handbag or a jacket over their shoulders. Nearby, a suitcase or a wheeled shopping bag, full of changes of outfit, extra accessories.

Most afternoons, there are couples in their wedding outfits being photographed here too, although it’s not their wedding day, not yet – the photography is a production in and of itself. Sometimes the bride’s dress is clipped to her body with bulldog clips, sometimes she wraps a blanket around her body in between takes. There are always people holding portable lights, someone fluffing the veil to make it look like it is rippling in a breeze. One afternoon, a couple is posing in their wedding gear right at a bus stop, leaning over the rail and licking matching ice-creams, and not at all suggestively.

The streets near where I’m living are the commercial heart of the city. Each day I walk past enormous shopfronts, Dolce & Gabbana, Gucci and Versace, with enormous screens playing video footage of tall, tall people tossing their pale heads down catwalks. My closest supermarket is in the basement of a megamall and I walk past L’Occitane, L’Oréal, Lancôme each time I buy my vegetables and watery imported cheese. I’m surrounded by things I can’t afford (not that I want them), and this is not what I expected.

I don’t know what I expected.

A week in, I go to Uniqlo because it’s colder than it should be and I don’t have nearly enough winter clothes. I find the thermal shirts, the ones I wear in Sydney, although here they only come in black and white and red, and riffle through the racks, looking for my size. A man comes over to assist, and I point, and say, dà, zhōng, xiao, big, middle, small. He nods, and I ask, xiao-xiao? even though I’m not sure if that’s a word. Méiyou, he says, don’t have, and first I think they’re out of stock. But as I wander around the shop looking at jumpers and thermal tights I realise that my size doesn’t exist here – because I’m not extra-small here, I’m just small.

I try on jeans that list their leg-length as ‘full-length Asia’. The length is perfect. I’ve never bought a pair of pants that I haven’t had to re-hem.

One week in, I catch the bullet train from Shanghai to Beijing and watch the countryside whizz by my window. There’s an American man sitting next to me, tall and with enormous feet, a square jaw that looks almost cartoonish. We grin at each other and nod, and then he pulls a book out of his bag. absolute victory, its cover says, what business can learn from the war in iraq.

This too doesn’t seem like my world.

The countryside is mostly flat and grassy, although there are occasional hills in the distance that I imagine I can see sculpted into rice-paddy terraces, but I know I’m probably making them up. What I can see, intermittently and always suddenly, are blocks of huge apartment buildings, each easily twenty or thirty storeys high, arranged in grids in the middle of nowhere: five buildings wide, six deep, each building exactly the same. There could easily be a thousand people living here, surrounded by blank countryside on all sides.

I mention this to someone in Beijing, and he tells me that the government has dismantled many old-style villages, claiming the coal that they were fuelled on was too polluting to keep them operational. He says the villagers were compensated with these brand new apartments, with central heating, new appliances, wi-fi. But, he says, they couldn’t take their chickens with them. I think what he means is, they couldn’t take their way of life.

Much later, someone tells me that these buildings may well be uninhabited, that there are ghost cities scattered all over China, built on speculation, never used, empty and alone.

I arrive in Beijing during the Nineteenth Party Congress, and it’s all that the diplomats and cultural attachés I meet there can talk about. It’s a fascinating time to be in China, they all say, China is a country in transition.

On the morning that the General Secretary is unanimously re-elected – a few days after a vote was passed to extend his office term beyond the legislated ten years to the length of his life – I’ve stolen a few hours to go to the Forbidden City, the ancient palace complex in the centre of this place. It’s cold, barely one degree, and I’m wearing a padded goose-down coat that’s not my own, fur-lined gloves and an ear-flapped hat, all borrowed from a woman much taller and broader than me. A man asks for my passport at the ticket office and scans it into a machine. He takes my photograph. Two other people scan my passport into machines before I walk through the gates.

The Forbidden City is huge, much vaster than I had imagined, some of the pavilions regilded and restored, others dusty and decaying. The crowds are immense, and I soon learn to jostle for position so I can peek into the rooms, to push my way to the front of viewing platforms. In a courtyard, I ask a group of four women if they could take my photograph and they exclaim at my Chinese, though it’s a phrase I looked up on Google Translate, and I cannot understand what they are saying in response. They pull out their selfie sticks and pose beside me, pulling off my hat so they can point to my red hair. Minutes later, it starts to snow, and I take off my gloves so I can touch it. I’ve never been in falling snow before, and it seems magical, ethereal against this backdrop.

That afternoon, I’m in an embassy van on the way to a reading, and one of the staffers tells me that it hasn’t rained – or snowed – in Beijing in over 100 days, that in the old days people would think that the General Secretary had broken the drought, having a direct line to the heavens like his imperial predecessors. Maybe they seeded the clouds, her colleague jokes. When we arrive at the bookshop and shake the snow from our coats, the owner comments on it falling to the floor, and says it’s probably cloud-seeded. At the end of the event, my driver says, did you hear that they made it snow? And at dinner, someone declares, the snow is definitely artificial, because it was wet and not fluffy.

I wonder if this is how rumour becomes fact here, where you cannot get real news.

The pollution index used in China isn’t the pollution index used elsewhere. If it were, there’d be hardly a day where the air qualified as ‘good’ or even ‘fair’. The rules here are different: a day that would be labelled ‘very poor’ in Sydney is only ‘moderately polluted’ in Beijing.

Some women wear smog masks with kitten muzzles embroidered onto them, their very human eyes with thick mascara blinking above. Some smog masks are made of the thin paper of hospital gowns, and come in pink and blue. Some men wear thick white smog masks, rubbery-looking and curled over their ears, and with their white wireless headphones sticking out beneath them they look almost cybernetic.

I buy myself a Mao jacket. I buy it at H&M. I’ve wanted one of these for years.

Back in Shanghai, I go by chance to a mixer for young, professional women, held on the terrace of the restaurant hosting my residency. I end up talking to a woman named Lily, who has moved here from a northern city, a place so cold, she tells me, that you have to wear your phone around your neck, against your chest, or else the battery freezes solid. She’s moved here to start a fitness business, a chain of gyms and personal trainers, and from where we’re standing we can see joggers, pairs of women in baggy t-shirts and tennis shoes, bouncing along the Bund. This is a new thing in China, she tells me. Prosperity breeds joggers, and pet dogs: the tiny brown poodles I see everywhere, often wearing trousers, or miniature shoes.

Lily tells me that when her father’s house, the one her family had lived in for generations, was requisitioned recently by the government to make way for a new freeway, he stole the lintel from the front door and spent the next months carving it into a musical instrument, following tutorials on YouTube. Instrument, the word she uses, so non-specific I can’t quite imagine what kind it might be, let alone what songs it must strum.

China’s new prosperity – its Economic Miracle, as they call it here – has both depended on and brought about a process of rapid urbanisation, of huge-scale displacements from home. In 1949, the year that the Communists took power, barely thirteen per cent of China’s people lived in cities – the revolution, after all, had been a revolution of the peasantry, because the proletariat was simply non-existent. Now, the urban population is something close to fifty-nine per cent, and its fastest growth – almost a doubling – has occurred over the last twenty years. Beijing grew by forty-four per cent in the ten years between 2000 and 2010; Shanghai by forty-one per cent in this same time.

But as well as people who moved permanently to the cities, a massive ‘floating population’ of low-skilled workers from rural regions also makes up these numbers – around 245 million people, known mostly as ‘migrant workers’. These people are often living far from their homes, from everything and everyone that is familiar; but also far from their hùkou, their official household registry, which gives them access to government services like healthcare, housing and schooling. They mostly work in manufacturing goods for export. They live in tiny dormitories. They make Disney toys, and iPhones.

At Lunar New Year each year, it’s expected that people return to their homes, to their families, from wherever it is that they now live. This year, 385 million people moved around China at this time – it was, the newspapers all said, the largest human migration of all time.

When I first stand in Shanghai’s Hongqiao Station, from which all of the inter-city trains depart, it’s busy, but nowhere near capacity. It’s a huge, square room, the size of an aircraft hangar, cavernous and echoey. I stand, for a moment, against the railing on its mezzanine, holding the largest small coffee I’ve ever seen – it’s taller than my hand is long – looking out over the rows of plastic seats, the queues snaking from the turnstiles. I stand there, and I think: it’s hard to feel significant.

No-one else is here alone.

The Chinese word for hometown is laojiā (老家), and it’s often translated as ancestral home, because, on its own, the character 老 means old, and 家 means home. But 家 also means family – perhaps unsurprisingly, in a culture where connection to one’s ancestors is another kind of rootedness, another way of knowing one’s place in the world.

But Shanghai is many people’s laojiā too; there are so many people nostalgic for this city, just as there are so many people within this city nostalgic for other places, other homes. There are the people who speak, still, of Shanghai’s golden age, that brief period between the city’s opening up to international trade and the two wars, first international, then civil, that brought its flowering (this is the kind of language that they use) to an end. They never mention that this opening up was forced, a condition of a series of brutal treaties signed at the end of colonial trade wars, they never mention that in this period, half of the city was controlled by the half of a per cent of the population that were European merchants and entrepreneurs, that the city was riddled with opium and prostitution and gamblers and gangsters, that it was here, against these conditions, that the Chinese Communist Party was first born.

So many wealthy Shanghainese, as the Japanese and then the Communists advanced, fled their homes here for the special zones of Hong Kong and Macau, for Taiwan, and were never able to return.

A woman, a writer and historian, who grew up as part of this diaspora in Toronto, tells me her family’s old home is still standing. But there are almost a hundred people who live in it now, she says, not just my one family. Not just one family and their sixty-something servants.

I don’t know if it’s just a longing for laojiā that keeps this image of jazzy Shanghai, the Paris of the Orient, the adventurer’s paradise, so strong in people’s minds. On packaging – of lollies, cosmetics, tourist trinkets – and on postcards everywhere there is the image of the Shanghai Lady: a beautiful, hand-coloured woman posing against the background of the city, the image always blending East and West: she’s wearing the traditional qipao, but also holding a tennis racquet or guitar. She’s glamorous and liberated, cheeky and demure: she’s a chimera, and a Western fantasy.

Perhaps the dream is one of lost wealth, lost opportunity: Shanghai has never been so prosperous, so expensive, as it is now, and those who left also left behind properties and possessions now worth millions. Perhaps it’s just the dream of the displaced. Or perhaps the dream is for a China that was never torn apart, that didn’t convulse its way through the twentieth century in so spectacular and terrible a fashion, leaving so many dead and ruined in its wake.

At a university a writer tells me that he wrote a book called Shanghai Ladies, because men are better than women at writing about women, because men can see women for who and how they really are. A student asks me, do you think readers can tell that you’re a woman? and I think he thinks that this is something I should strive to overcome.

The next day, I sit and write in a café that I love because of its enormous, brass-framed windows that look out over a bus stop, continually unloading school children who sing as they run down the street and office workers clutching steaming plastic bags filled with pillowy mántou and fried dough sticks; I love it also for its endless reggae playlist. I overhear a man, clearly Australian, addressing his small son: look, he says, your mother’s very emotional. But when you’re a man you can’t be emotional, do you understand?

I read about a family from Hubei, near the centre of the country, now being relocated for the third time in fifty years. Their original, Ming-era village was relocated in the 1970s to make way for a reservoir, then this new village was relocated again when the walls of that dam were heightened barely thirty years later. Now, they’re being moved again, as part of the huge South-to-North Water Diversion Project, essentially an irrigation project, moving vast volumes of water from the fertile south to the dry northern regions of China.

Each time, the family has been compensated. Each time, the village’s name and government structures have been retained. But what has been lost, each time, is arable farmland, and the knowledge of how to work it, access to the odd jobs and small industries that many rural people rely on to subsist. All of this, but also something more ineffable, something more to do with home.

I read that elder residents of the area say that the reservoir ‘destroyed the local feng shui’ and so ‘nobody of note has been born’ in the area since.

I read that the Party plans to relocate ten million people over the next two years, for massive infrastructure projects like this one.

I don’t have an old home, I don’t have an ancestral home, I don’t think any white Australian does. My parents’ house, my first home, is still new: it is barely three years older than I am. It stands, furthermore, on someone else’s ancestral land – that of the Dharawal people, from whom it was forcibly stolen only a few generations ago. I don’t know from where my forebears come, and I’ve never been especially curious about this. But even still, it’s not an old home, or a family home, that I’m missing here. It’s my new home: that small world that I have built for myself in rented accommodation on the fringes of a city also gripped by rapid change, also slippery with great wealth and even greater inequality. It’s the small intimacies and interactions of my everyday there, the hot bread and takeaway coffees on my back patio on weekend mornings, the glass of wine and bowl of popcorn on the couch after a long weekday, the dog dashing to the door to greet me whenever I have been away.

I find a set of scales in my apartment and immediately wish that I hadn’t.

In Shanghai, I’m living in a studio apartment, on the top floor of a building that was constructed in 1935, in the middle of that golden age. It was built for a hotelier and businessman whose family had made their fortune in the opium trade, and who designed two grand buildings for this city: this one, shaped like an S, and a hotel, shaped like a V, these two letters, his initials, stamped forever on this place.

There are two clanky lifts with worn vinyl floors and I’ve never once been in them alone. There are women so old that they’re curled to two-thirds of my height, a schoolgirl who meticulously folds the red Party scarf that she wears around her neck. A man carrying a plastic bag filled with loose eggs from a market, another with two huge baskets of white flowers and a white bichon frise on a lead. Some days I step out of the lift and the women from my neighbouring apartments are arguing, pointing their fingers at each other’s chests, while one of their husbands silently waters his plants with a spray bottle. Some days I step out of the lift and there are men snoring on rickety sun lounges half-in, half-out of their front doors. One afternoon a fish head is strung up beside my door to dry, dripping viscous liquid onto the floor.

Inside this building is a police station, a hairdresser, a food delivery service, an informal kind of homecare for the elderly. There are stray cats that skulk around the stairwells, and curl up to sleep on the engines of electric scooters, plugged in to sockets along the back courtyard walls. There are deliverymen with cardboard parcels bounding up and down the stairs. There are CCTV cameras in every corridor.

In the first week, I short out the power by turning on the kettle at the same time as the heater, and then do it again with the heater, the shower and the bathroom fan. I stand in the freezing corridor, wrapped in my towel and shivering, while I fix the safety switch. Two neighbours watch me, and do not say a word.

I never feel alone here. I feed the sparrows on my windowsill with crushed-up crackers and send text messages back home, where other lives are continuing without me.

My mother sends me a video of my three nieces, the baby wearing rabbit ears on a headband, the two older girls singing out, almost, but not quite, in unison, Happy Easter Aunty Fi! My housemates send me a video of my dog in the park, chasing a bright orange ball that they’re throwing, again and again, and yelping in delight. A friend sends a photo of an Easter brunch, with hot cross buns and chocolate eggs and champagne watered down with orange juice. Each of these things so simple, each of these gestures so silly and small. But my heart aches, each time, it pangs a little.

Down the escalators to the train station, a recorded voice repeats three short sentences, over and over again, and I hear them, over and over again, every day for five weeks, but still cannot distinguish properly the words. Aside, that is, from xiao xīn, little heart, which I also see written everywhere, although it takes me a month to realise that this must mean caution: take a little heed, take a little heart. (This was what I loved so keenly in this language – how poetically its abstract nouns are put together). Every day my laptop bag is run through a security scanner in front of the ticket gate. I don’t think the city workers would quite stand for that at home.

The character for heart (心) is startlingly anatomical – that curved organ, those arterial valves that branch out into the entirety of the body. The character for heart was being written like this hundreds of years before anyone in Europe ever dissected a human heart. The character for heart used to be part of the character for love (愛) – many characters are built by layering up other, simpler characters, which hint at how they sound or what they mean. But when the Communists simplified the written language, they removed the character for heart from the character for love, and replaced it with the character for friend (友) – because comradeship is more important than the heart, more reliable even in matters of the heart.

I know one poem in Chinese, from that year I learnt the language at university. One year is no time at all to learn a language, one year is enough to learn to talk about the weather or list basic facts about yourself, to ask for a wine or some tea or to use the toilet. One year is enough to learn how to say, I’m sorry, I don’t understand, and I only speak a little bit of Chinese. I can count, and I can swear.

I can’t remember why our teacher showed us the poem. Perhaps because by that stage we could read most of the words, perhaps because every Chinese child can recite this one by heart. Perhaps because in Sydney she was so far from her home:

床前明月光    Chuáng qián míngyuè guāng
疑是地上霜    Yí shì dìshang shuāng
舉頭望明月    Jutóu wàng míngyuè
低頭思故鄉    Dītóu sī gùxiāng

It’s a Tang dynasty poem, by Li Bai, sometimes known as Li Po, the poet who drowned one night while trying to catch the moon’s reflection in a pond. It’s a poem about homesickness, about nostalgia: a travelling scholar sees moonlight falling on the floor of his rented room, he looks up and out the window, and the moon he sees there makes him think of home – this is, after all, the same moon that his family, his friends, his neighbours, may well be seeing, lighting their fields so far away.

I can’t see the moon in Shanghai. The nights are too neon and the smog too thick. Across the river, one of the skyscrapers flashes white and red: I SH. Another glows purple and pink, and looks extra-terrestrial.

When I meet new people here they add me to their WeChat by scanning the screen of my phone: each person has a QR code, rather than a username, and this makes sense in a place of so many people and so few surnames (the Chinese use the term laobaixìng, 老百姓, old hundred surnames, to refer to the common people, at least in part because the 100 most popular surnames here are shared by eighty-five per cent of the population) but I can’t shake the discomfort that it causes me. I know it isn’t more invasive or data-hungry than any Western social media, I know that Western social media is far from apolitical. But the government here makes no secret of the fact that they are monitoring WeChat, rewarding people for calling their parents frequently, penalising them for playing too many video games. We know Facebook has been experimenting with engineering social and political behaviour: maybe the Party here is just more honest.

Whenever I tell people I’m uncomfortable with this they say, there’s 1.4 billion people in this country, they’re not going to worry about you or me.

It is hard to feel significant.

One afternoon, I walk in and out of half a dozen bakeries, just looking at the breads: matcha loaf, cream cheese and mulberry loaf, walnut and longan loaf, coconut bun, adzuki bean bun, sausage baguette. I walk in and out of half a dozen bakeries before I realise what I’m doing, that my body is trying to tell me something, that my body wants bread. Sucks to be you, body, I think, and then, oh, but it didn’t do anything to deserve this.

I buy a triangular bread roll (does triangular bread roll?) covered with pork floss like pale hair for the man camping out on the footbridge that crosses the creek next to my building because I can’t stand the thought that he might be hungry.

One of the bakeries on the Bund is run by a hatted chef whose signature dish is a caviar parfait, garnished with gold leaf and shaved black truffles. Another is famous for its little French cakes, its rows and rows of ingot-shaped financiers.

One Saturday I walk through People’s Square, the largest public garden here, because I’m craving green space, here amongst all of this concrete, all of this air so thick I sometimes think that I feel it in my pores. There are paved paths that wind around a lake, an artificial waterfall, rows and rows of cherry trees that are budding, but not yet in bloom. The paths near the lake are lined with middle-aged women and men, sitting behind open umbrellas, with posters bulldog-clipped to their top edges, the top-most character on each, on a line of its own, saying either woman (女) or man (男). Of the rest, all I can read are numbers – years of birth, heights, weights, salaries. These people are parents and grandparents, trying to find partners for their unmarried relatives. Some of them are also knitting, some of them are also selling snacks. They swap phone numbers, and eye me suspiciously. Most of the people they are match-making are younger than me. Often, I’m later told, these parents are acting without their children’s knowledge or permission.

Salaries, I read later, are important because there’s a concept here that partners should have ‘matching gates and matching doors’ (門當戶對). A matching outlook, that is, but I love how this is expressed through the structures of a house – because there’s little that speaks so eloquently, if often subtly, about class than a home.

My generation of women here are marrying late, or not at all, and it’s perplexing and alarming to their families and the media. Perhaps, they say, they are too educated, too ambitious. Perhaps they are too prosperous. Perhaps they have too much choice.

The unmarried women here are referred to as ‘leftover’ – the same leftover (剩) that gets used for unwanted food.

The legal marrying age in China is twenty. The age of consent is fourteen.

My friend who lives here says the white men in China are even more awful than the ones at home, because they get treated like they’re as special as they already assume themselves to be.

I keep meeting white men in China who tell me, it takes a certain kind of person, a special kind of person, to come to China. I hear this again and again, and when I finally lose patience and ask, does it, though? a tall, blond man from my hometown says, without missing a beat, well, it’s not Bali.

A Chinese friend I meet says that she’s taller and smarter than all of the men here and they don’t like it. A Canadian friend who lives here says she’s smarter and richer than all of the men so why would she bother. I say I’m very independent, and a little bit intimidating. At least, this is what I’ve been told.

Each time I talk to a group of students, one of them always asks, why did you write about your sickness? In China, they always say, nobody would do this.

In China, I always think, you literally air your laundry on the public street.

The students that I visit say, Miss Fiona, will you write about China? A writer who I visit says there is a maxim here: if you stay in China for a day, you can write a book, but if you stay in China for a year, you can write a sentence. My heart contracts, turns little in my chest.

It’s a small part of the city that I start to map out in my mind, connecting metro stops and main roads by walking between them, finding grocery stalls and the convenience stores that stock Diet Coke (they’re few and far between), the post office, the bank. I’m embarrassed that this corner is mostly in the old French Concession, the foreign part of the city, the unreal, ex-pat part of the city, but it’s where the coffee is (you Australians and your coffee, an American writer scoffs) and it’s beautiful too: the streets lined with old and gnarly oaks, bare and spectral when I arrived here, flush with leaves by the time I’m done. There are old, grand buildings with carved stone facades and cantilevered windows, as well as mad coils of electrical wiring noodling on their corners, pots of dusty geraniums by the doorsteps of the laneway houses tucked back from the streets. And it’s slower, just a little, calmer, just a little, and just a little more familiar some of the time.

I tell my friend who lives here – she’s my old housemate, who moved from Sydney to Shanghai for work three years ago, who loves it here, who plans to stay, at least for now – about this little orbit and she nods and says she used to worry about its limitations too, until she realised that in Sydney her regular turf was also small, just two or three suburbs, all in a row. She’s right, I think – it’s not much space we need to carve out for ourselves.

Still, I say, I sometimes feel less present here, less real, because I’m so aware, wherever I go, that there is so much of the city that I can’t touch. I can’t read much at all, and I hadn’t realised how unsettling it would be to not be able to read. I can’t ask questions about anything I see. I can’t know what life is like here, and I do not know the rules.

Perhaps this is all that home is: the place where we know the rules. Perhaps it’s just this that I am missing, to not have to work so hard just to get around, just to get by.

Some nights in Shanghai I can’t sleep, and I stand at the window of my apartment in my underwear, watching the creek curl southwards, listening to the traffic snarl and honk along the giant freeways. Or I lean out, and look straight down: how far away the concrete, how many small awnings spaced out all around me. The world feels immense, some nights. And it is hard to feel significant, or to take a little heart.

This is an extract from The World Was Whole by Fiona Wright, published this month by Giramondo. Details here.

The post Little Heart appeared first on Sydney Review of Books.

The estuary of the River Nith, Scotland, at low tide; opening into Solway Firth. Photo: Doc Searls. Distributed under Creative Commons license.

The light on Solway Firth is silver, slung low across the water. Although it’s mid-morning, within a few hours the sun will slip beneath the horizon. Accustomed to the wide blue mouth of sky in Australia, I feel as though the earth has tilted. My friends and I scramble over rocks weathered by the wash of tides. I’m wearing thermals, two jumpers, a red beanie and a coat, but the wind flies from the sea through my layers. My teeth clatter. We clamber around a corner, where we can just see Scotland on the other side of the firth. I wonder if Georgiana Molloy, who became Western Australia’s first female scientist, ever stood where I am now before she left England in 1829. Would she have smelled brine sweeping from the sea, her gaze drifting east over the salt marshes green with flat sedge, channels of water running between them? If she lifted her eyes, would she have seen a flock of starlings spiralling?

I met Georgiana in 1999 in the pages of a biography, William Lines’ An All Consuming Passion, which I pulled randomly from a library shelf. At first I was drawn to her descriptions of plants. ‘I beheld a Tree of great beauty,’ she wrote, ‘the flowers are of the finest white, and fall in long tresses from the stem, some of its pendulous blossoms, are from three, to five, fingers in length, and these wave in the breeze like Snow wreaths.’ Later, I became entranced by the courage of a woman who left family and friends to travel fifteen thousand kilometres to the other side of the world. Despite immense heartbreak and hardship, she taught herself to identify and collect tiny seeds and specimens of south-west western Australian flora, such as the starry white Clematis, the red drops of Kennedia, and the delicate Drosera, dappled with mucilage that looks like dew.

My friends and I climb back into the car and drive along a narrow lane hemmed by drystone walls. I made these friends when I lived in London; they were part of a book club which we named the Book Rangers. They now live in Newcastle, and when I mentioned my research to them, they offered to show me around the area in which Georgiana grew up.

We circle the nearby city of Carlisle, where Georgiana was born in 1805. Her father, an ambitious Scotsman named David Kennedy, had married Elizabeth Dalton, daughter of the Mayor of Carlisle. Keen to establish himself, Kennedy built a house on his wife’s land (which was now his) at Crosby-on Eden, a few kilometres east of Carlisle. Georgiana, as a girl training to become a lady of leisure, learned her first lessons about plants in its gardens. Like other decorative arts such as writing, painting and flower arranging, botany was perceived to be a worthwhile pursuit for women. As Ann Shteir writes in Cultivating Women, Cultivating Science, the study of botany encouraged women to go outdoors, learn botanical Latin and read handbooks about Linnaean systematics.

Georgiana’s father fell from his horse and died in 1819, leaving behind debts, five children and a widow with no means of supporting them. Georgiana was fifteen. As she grew older, her family situation became even more unstable, harbouring conflict with her mother and sister, an alcoholic. When Georgiana married Captain John Molloy and emigrated with him in 1829 to Augusta, her career options – for marriage was a job and a means of accessing an income – were narrowing.

We drive past the River Eden, which flows out to the firth. It has broken its banks with heavy rain and water shines on the saturated fields, reflecting bare alder trees. The next day will be my thirty-seventh birthday.

‘Do you know,’ I tell my friends, ‘tomorrow I’ll be the same age as Georgiana when she died. She had six kids and a miscarriage and I’m still trying to decide whether to have a baby.’

I think about Georgiana’s body, how she grew each child in her womb from a seed-like embryo and how, for all of the time she was in Australia, she was either pregnant or nursing. Her children absorbed her nutrients, breast milk, her intellectual and emotional energy, and her time. She would have known how each of her children smelled, the pitch of their voices, the feel of their delicate skin beneath her work-roughened hands.

It slaps me like a wave, this craving to hold a child in my arms. I steady myself, waiting for it to roll by.

The Molloys’ voyage to Australia was marked by death. A child of a fellow passenger died four days after his birth, his ‘interior organs not being perfect from exhaustion’ she wrote to her friend Frances Birkett in 1831. One of John Molloy’s horses aborted her foal; he lost all his pigs between England and the Cape; shearing sheep and lambs on board ‘died daily’; Georgiana’s raspberry, gooseberry and currant slips at first flowered in the heat, then died from it.

A baby is a seed that takes nine months to germinate. It, too, needs sunlight, water and nourishment. On the ship, ‘the poor animals had scarcely enough to live on’ and Georgiana ‘really was nearly starved and every day from the Cape to Swan River, had only Salt Pork and Rice, the mutton was diseased that Mr Semphill the Charterer bought at Cape Town’. Georgiana was ‘weak with constant sickness, I was obliged to be supported when I walked … I was constantly falling and bruising myself’.

The Molloys arrived at Fremantle on 11 March 1830. Georgiana showed an immediate interest in her surroundings, writing to her mother on 4 April 1830 that she had examined the shrubs and trees, but found them without flowers. After a boat trip with her husband up Swan River to Perth, she described the country as ‘beautifully wooded to the water’s edge with both copse wood and magnificent old trees, large firs and bushes about six or eight feet high’. The Molloys intended to settle around Swan River, but found all the land grants had been allocated. Instead they sailed south to Augusta with a group of other settlers, arriving on 2 May 1830. Georgiana described the vista to her mother as ‘thickly wooded’ and ‘monotonous’.

She was by this stage heavily pregnant. On 24 May 1830, the day after her twenty-fifth birthday, she ‘was confined when thinking nothing of the kind.’ She wrote to Frances, ‘I suffered 12 hours and had no medical man near me there being none within some hundred miles, when at a loss what to tell my female servant I referred to the Encyclopedia’. The baby that arrived was tall and delicate with ‘beautiful fingers & nails’.

The day after the birth, Georgiana found her daughter’s dress soaked in blood because the umbilical cord hadn’t been properly tied. A few days later, the baby had convulsions and her feet were icy. Tiny white spots like blisters dotted her tongue, her temperature veered between hot and cold, and she screamed relentlessly. Georgiana lay on a sofa, the only furniture they had, but would not let her daughter from her arms because she was concerned the baby would get cold. In an undated and unaddressed account that lies in her archives, Georgiana chronicled that she was only permitted to enjoy her daughter for twelve days before the baby was ‘carried off by violent convulsions on the twelfth day. I sat up with her from two that morning until all was over.’ Outside the tent, it rained and thundered and, Georgiana wrote to her mother, she had to hold her ‘dead infant’s limbs to keep them straight’.

Later, she wrote to Frances, ‘I thought my brain was going, in a desolate land.’ To her mother, she was more explicit: ‘I felt inclined to rush out into the open air and charge the winds with what weighed so heavy at my bursting head.’ Georgiana’s response was elemental, a fierce engagement with the natural world prompted by the most unbearable of circumstances.

Georgiana placed her daughter in a coffin at the foot of the sofa, there being no other place for the baby to rest. She placed ‘some little blue flowers on her body it being winter there were very few flowers in bloom’. Then, to ‘dispel the sad blank her death occasioned’, she went out and planted bulbs.

Sometime after her daughter’s burial, Georgiana wrote in her undated account, ‘Dear Molloy went unknown to me and sowed Rye Grass and Clover over [the grave] and has recently put some twigs across it to form a sort of trellice work with the surrounding creepers which in this country are very numerous.’ Later, Georgiana planted clover, mignonette and pumpkins which would ‘rapidly creep on the twigs over it & form a sort of Dome’. Her touching rendition of the Australian creepers mingling with English plants – and being given support to do so – suggests that Georgiana had tentatively embraced her environment.

When her daughter was buried in the Australian soil, Georgiana also buried a part of her body she had nurtured for nine months. As Barry Commoner, one of the founders of the modern environmental movement, explains in The Closing Circle: Nature, Man and Technology, ‘everything must go somewhere’. This was the first of his four rules regarding ecology. He maintained there is no ‘waste’ in nature and there is no ‘away’ to which things can be thrown. Perhaps because her child had been absorbed by the soil, and that soil sprouted delicate, long-limbed spider orchids and blushing outbreaks of pink everlastings, Georgiana could not help but love it.

In my early twenties, my body set up a persistent clamour for the feel of a soft head of hair beneath my chin, a sticky finger circling my forefinger, but I thought that my chances of meeting someone with whom to conceive were slim. When I was four I contracted meningitis and lost most of my hearing. Although I could interact relatively well with one person at a time, I was awkward in company, fearing to speak in case I misheard, or spoke out of turn, and embarrassed myself.

I found it more rewarding to pursue writing and ideas than people who made me feel uncomfortable. Those ideas took me to London in my late twenties where, absorbed by my research and writing, I was able to ignore my longing for a child. When I returned to Australia, I was tired of being on my own and, gritting my teeth against my discomfort, I pulled out all stops to find a partner. When I met a dark-haired, brown-eyed ecologist studying for a degree in philosophy, I was four years shy of forty.

The start of a relationship is like building an ecosystem, setting up a symbiosis of bacteria, conversations, oxytocin after sex. After a few months with this man, whose pale skin was dotted with moles and who shared my love of science, philosophy and writing, I was enmeshed, reliant on another organism.

Sitting on the couch one evening, drinking red wine, I asked, ‘Do you want to have kids?’

His answer was emphatic. ‘No.’

I held myself still, trying not to react. ‘Why?’

‘It’s selfish and unethical.’

‘What? Parents love their children. They’re endlessly generous. How can that be selfish?’

‘The child doesn’t get to have a say in being born.’

I blinked. This had never occurred to me. I chewed on the thought, then tried again. ‘So you don’t want to have them?’

‘No.’

My tears came in a hot, unexpected rush.

As the colony at Augusta established itself, Georgiana bore another three daughters and a son. In 1836, she received a letter from Captain James Mangles, a London horticulturalist whose cousin, Ellen Stirling, was the wife of the then-governor of Perth. A box of English seeds accompanied the letter. Mangles, caught up in the craze for exotic – at least to British eyes – Australian flora, wrote to request the exchange of English seeds for ‘the Native Seeds of Augusta’. Georgiana had expected to be able to collect specimens for herself, as in a letter to Mangles she referred to a hortus siccus, a book into which dried specimens were fastened, which she had brought with her to her new home ‘imagining [she] should have a superfluity of time to use it.’ However, her superfluity was taken up by what she described to him as ‘domestic drudgery’ and she largely put off the collecting.

Towards the end of that year her son, nineteen months old, wandered off after breakfast, fell into a well and drowned. Overwhelmed with grief once more, Georgiana wrote an impassioned letter about the child’s death to Mangles, a man she had never met. She described how ‘that lovely healthy child who had never known pain or sickness and who had been all mirth and joyousness five previous hours the last time we beheld him together was now a stiff corpse, but beautiful and lovely, even in death’. As with her first child’s death, when she placed blue flowers on her child’s grave, Georgiana distracted herself by turning to the natural world. She embraced Mangles’ request to collect seeds, writing in the same letter, ‘Since my dear Boy’s death I have daily employed myself in your service.’

Mangles, a member of the Royal Society and co-founder of the Royal Geographical Society, sent Georgiana’s specimens to his contacts, which included the Loddiges nurserymen of Hackney; Joseph Paxton, gardener at Chatsworth and designer of the Crystal Palace for the 1851 Great Exhibition; and John Lindley, the first Professor of Botany at University College London. By distributing her seeds in this way, Mangles cemented his social and professional ties with these men. They classified and re-named the plants using the Linnaean system, grew them in their gardens and, once they had propagated, sold them to the public.

Georgiana could not name the plants she found, not officially, as it was impossible for women of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries to participate in the institutions which formalised botanical science. They could not attend meetings, read papers or (with a few exceptions) have their research published. Sensitive to her lack of authority, Georgiana wrote to Mangles on 8 July, 1840, ‘I send two flowers of the … I dare not say what, Dr Lindley must determine’. John Lindley was the chair of botany at University College London from 1829 to 1860, and Mangles sent a number of Georgiana’s seeds to him.

Undeterred by her lack of scientific knowledge, Georgiana developed her own system, whereby she gave each flower and its seed a number. She then asked Mangles, in a letter of 25 January 1838, to ‘oblige me by sending me the names of the different flowers according to their numbers; I have kept the numbers of each, and the duplicates of most of the Specimens that I might have the satisfaction of hearing some name attached to them’. Although she might not have been aware of it, Georgiana was practicing science: she created and organised her knowledge of the plants, then tested her knowledge against that of other scientists. As she worked, she developed a sense of purpose and vocation, and in 1840 she wrote to Mangles, ‘when I sally forth either on foot or Horseback, I feel quite elastic in mind and Step; I feel I am quite at my own work, the real cause that enticed me out to Swan River.’

The death of Georgiana’s children would never leave her. I knew this, and felt for her deeply as she sat in that tent, holding her dead daughter while a storm bashed through the karri trees beyond, because my parents lost their first son when he was eight months old. Although they came to grips with their grief and moved on with their lives I, a sensitive child who was alert to all that was unspoken, sensed the lacuna he left in our family. Despite this, I still wanted to have children.

Twice more, when I’d had too much red wine with the dark-haired man, I brought up the subject. Each time, the answer was no. Each time I burst into tears, surprised by their velocity.

I began to weigh things up. I was thirty-eight. I had enough time to leave and find someone else before I became infertile, but it had taken five years of terrible dates to connect with someone who delighted me so much. Even if I left, there was no surety that I could conceive.

Besides, he had become part of my ecosystem, sustaining me with his knowledge and wit. In his presence I unfurled like petals stretching open to the sun. If I uprooted myself I’d wither, becoming desiccated.

The stands of karri rise so far above my head I could be underwater. Among the tallest trees in the world, they are fifty to sixty metres in height. I stand at the base of a fine, straight trunk in the Boranup forest. Most of this forest was logged in the late nineteenth century, but the trees have grown again. The light falling through the canopy is speckled, the way it is when you swim in the sea and look up, watching it fall like flecks of gold. The karri trees are native to this wet corner of the south-west, and they tower over a thick, bright green understory of ferns and tassel flowers. The air is cool on my bare arms.

Arriving in Fremantle in 1830, Georgiana found ‘the Country itself an unlimited extent of dark green wood.’ Like many others, she made the assumption that soil with plenty of trees meant it was fertile for English crops. She wrote ‘on the coast as usual there is much sand, but here it is fruitful and you can see the immense timber growing from it.’ Georgiana’s words indicate how poorly the Europeans understood their new environment, for the landscapes in Western Australia are among the oldest and most weathered in the world and the soil is generally poor.

Despite this, colonisation crept across the south-west like a parasitic vine, drawing upon the labour of Wardandi Noongars and their country. Wardandi Noongars took livestock as rent payments for the illegal occupation of their land and food sources. Hostility between Wardandi Noongars and colonists began to increase. When Gayware, whose property was at Wonnerup, speared colonist George Layman in an argument over flour and, more generally, his occupation of Gayware’s country, he and his fellow Wardandi Noongars were killed in a massacre led by John Molloy, the Resident Magistrate. Georgiana, too, was implicated in this process of colonisation by sending plants to Mangles. The plants, renamed by John Lindley, were part of a linguistic displacement that echoed the violent dispossession of Wardandi Noongars.

Wardandi and Bibbulman Noongars have been part of the south-west’s ecosystem for at least forty thousand years, developing an intimate and intricate knowledge of the area’s weather, soil, water, vegetation, and breeding and blossoming times, in addition to practicing sophisticated mosaic-burning regimes that created grasslands to attract game for hunting. As Bruce Pascoe has demonstrated in Dark Emu, Indigenous people across Australia also practiced animal husbandry, food storage and harvesting. Theirs was a deep and abiding relationship that recognised responsibility for the ecosystems that ensured their survival.

When colonisers put an end to mosaic burning in the south-west, the vegetation thickened, smothering ground-layer plants which had relied upon light and air to flourish. Tree clearing also created islands of habitat that lost their connectivity to that ecosystem, and the diversity of plant and animal life contained by the islands was diminished. Andy Chapman, a zoologist who carried out fieldwork in the 1970s, found that clearing affected small perching birds. They didn’t have enough energy to fly long distances and were accustomed to existing within very specific, but connected areas. As Bill Bunbury writes in Invisible Country, his compilation of stories and oral histories about the changes in the environment in the south-west, a country broken up by clearing makes it challenging for these birds to grow their populations.

Another of Commoner’s rules is ‘Nature knows best.’ Humans, Commoner argues, have fashioned technology in the belief that it will improve upon nature. He rejects this, maintaining that major man-made change in a natural system is likely to be detrimental to it. This is evident from the large-scale tree clearing in the south-west, which means less transpiration – where plants or leaves give off water vapour – which in turn results in a drier atmosphere. Changes wrought by technology and colonisation are manifesting in the climate. Tony Birch writes in Unstable Relations (2016), ‘Any discussion and analysis of climate change today must include an investigation of colonial history and its devastating impact on Indigenous nations.’

Standing beneath the luminous stands of karri trees, the hairs on my forearms bristle.

Georgiana laboured through six pregnancies and a miscarriage, her body becoming weaker after each birth. She died at thirty-seven from puerperal fever after the arrival of her sixth child. The biological and cultural compulsion to breed killed her. It may well be a metaphor for how we are destroying ourselves.

The weathered soils of Australia, the driest inhabited continent on earth, were never meant to sustain large numbers of humans. Indigenous Australians knew how to conserve, making sure they didn’t eat particular animals in their breeding seasons, for example. They knew that, if they wanted to survive, they needed to ensure the survival of the ecosystems which supported them.

If our population continues to grow without curbing its current rates of resource consumption, it will place increasing strain upon ecosystems. As Richard Monastersky writes in Nature (2014), predictive models based on the current rate of extinction show that a mass extinction, defined as the loss of three quarters of all species, could occur over the next few centuries. With extinction comes the loss of the natural support systems that keep us alive. Or, as Commoner puts it, there’s no such thing as a free lunch.

When the third conversation about having a child ended in tears, I realised I had to either leave my relationship or change my thinking. I talked to friends as I worked out what to do.

‘Having a baby is like throwing a bomb into your relationship,’ said one.

‘If your bloke doesn’t support you, it will be bloody hard to write,’ said another.

I watched my friends with their children. In the couples, which were predominantly heterosexual, women seemed to do the bulk of the child caring and had little time to themselves. As a writer, I knew this would drive me spare. While I understood that, unlike Georgiana, I lived in a culture that allowed me to make a choice about reproduction, I was still compromised by its inability to value the work of motherhood, or to let women reach their intellectual and artistic potential without enormous sacrifices.

I also realised, seeing how tired and stressed my female friends became as they changed into mothers, how much more energy I would need to take care of a child, to listen out for them jamming a fork into the toaster. As a deaf woman, most of my energy is directed to trying to function in a hearing world. If a child was factored into that, there would be little left over for the man I loved. As he didn’t want children, this was grossly unfair. I knew, too, that I’d never lose the fear of our child dying. My sister, who has three children and all her hearing, rose frequently at night when they were small to check they still breathed in their sleep.

Then I read a 2017 study by Seth Wynes and Kimberly Nicholas in Environmental Research Letters, which concludes that bringing another human into the world is one of the most destructive things a person could do to the environment. The authors calculate that an American family that chose to have one fewer child would provide the same level of emissions reductions as 684 teenagers who chose to adopt comprehensive recycling for the rest of their lives. Meanwhile, the United Nations projects that 66 per cent of the world’s population will live in cities by 2050, raising urgent questions about how these people are to be fed and clothed while pollinators such as bees are dying in massive numbers. If I had a child, they would be thirty by the time these issues erupted in earnest, while also contending with plastics travelling into our food chain and increasingly extreme environmental events such as droughts and rising seas. They’re already happening for our neighbours in the Pacific.

I think of the trees that promised such abundance for the Europeans in the south-west, how the soil in which they were rooted yielded so little once they were cut down. Survival in the twenty-first century lies not in fertility, but in, as Indigenous people learned over tens of thousands of years, careful attention to one’s environment and what it can sustain.

The scales began to tilt.

The man I love stands on the rocks of Cape Freycinet, where the pale azure sky slopes into the sea. The sea is before him, bolts of water unfurling and slamming into the granite. Further back, where I’m standing, a curve of boulders gathers the water to itself, soothing it into stillness. Here, the surface is aquamarine, so bright it’s as though a consciousness glows beneath.

This cape, some forty kilometres north of where the Molloys lived, was named for French man Louis de Freycinet, commander of the Casuarina on explorer Nicolas Baudin’s 1801 expedition to map the coast of Australia. The English, jealous of the French interest, stuck a flag in the sand at Albany and claimed Western Australia for their own, setting in train a spate of destruction.

Waves thrash against the rocks, curling into foam. My dark-haired man turns away from the water and heads towards me, his sneakers gripping the gritty granite surface. Barry Commoner, once more: everything is connected to everything else. People overlook this, that their existence is predicated upon the dominance of an environment, upon nations that were enmeshed with their country in ecosystems that nourished them, and which nourish them still.

My longing for a baby will seep through my life, but if having a disability has taught me anything, it is that there are limits to my ability to support my art and a child, just as there are limits to the resources of our world. Although this saddens me, there are, undeniably, so many boons: time to write in rain-thickened air; golden light spilling across red river gums as the sun rises; the sharp smell of Christmas bugs burrowing in soil on December evenings; and this man walking towards me, sharply outlined against that vertiginous background of blue.

Bibliography

Barry, Bernice. The Mind That Shines. Picador, 2016
Commoner, Barry. The Closing Circle : Nature, Man, and Technology. Knopf, 1971.
Lines, William J. An All Consuming Passion: Origins, Modernity, and the Australian Life of Georgiana Molloy. University of California Press, 1994.
Molloy, Georgiana. Kennedy Family Papers, DKEN/3/28/3 Cumbria Record Office.
-Letters to James Mangles, MN879, Battye Library, State Library of Western Australia
Monastersky, Richard. “Biodiversity: Life–a Status Report.” Nature, vol. 516, no. 7530, 2014, pp. 158–61.
Pascoe, Bruce. Dark Emu : Black Seeds : Agriculture or Accident? Broome, Western Australia, Magabala Books, 2014.
Shteir, Ann B. Cultivating Women, Cultivating Science: Flora’s Daughters and Botany in England, 1760-1860. John Hopkins University Press, 1996.
White, Jessica. ‘“Paper talk”, Testimony and Forgetting in South-West Western Australia.’ Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature. Vol 2017, No. 1.
Wynes, Seth, and Kimberly A Nicholas. “The Climate Mitigation Gap: Education and Government Recommendations Miss the Most Effective Individual Actions.” Environmental Research Letters, vol. 12, no. 7, 2017, p. 9.

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‘Mother was The Woman the whole world imagined to death.’

Deborah Levy, Things I Don’t Want to Know

Page two of Making Babies and Anne Enright is apologising to entire bunches of people. Firstly to those who say we should be getting on with things not writing books on them, especially if the things are ‘Human Life: 101’. Also to all those believers that the motherhood memoir is an overprivileged person’s indulgent pastime. Followed closely by those convinced their fellow citizens who have yet to climb – minimum – a snow-covered mountain missing a limb shouldn’t be seeking to immortalise their experiences. Which is not forgetting those who think writers writing books from their wobbly, hormone-affected heads (no REAL research) should stop wasting readers’ time, pregnant women and new mothers being among this culture’s least interesting thinkers. As everyone knows.

Oh Anne Enright – I so enjoy it when you are having a go, not decrying the long and variegated tradition of denigrating female writers who write outwards from the inside of their lives, not calling it out, but having fun with it. Once she is done doing mock apologies she goes on: ‘When I read women writing about having children, it is not their circumstances that annoy me so much as their tone … both smug and astonished.’ And all of a sudden it is not clear what Enright is doing, if and where she is shifting. Is this still part of the piss-take? Enright manages to stay ideologically unaffiliated, a heretic. Also: nimble, slyly self-aware. She is able to protect her ambivalence about being both a mother and a writer who writes about being a mother – protect it from getting co-opted into some unwanted alliance, or camp. And while her smug-yet-astonished may be a throwaway line it seems to me diagnostically precise. Not because motherhood can’t be astonishing (I see the faces of my friends who didn’t think they’d ever be mothers and I know ‘astonishing’ is the least of it) but because this particular tonal combination somehow works as an impediment to good writing. Not every time but enough times for it to be noticeable. Perhaps it is an impediment to good thinking too.

Probably now is a good moment to mention I am feeling some trepidation. I despise the usual ‘momoir’ takedown of the kind directed at Rachel Cusk for A Life’s Work – adjectives thrown at it/her: narcissistic, exploitative, self-serving, dripping in privilege – plus the broader urge to tell women how to write about their lives. Yet here I am to argue against the over-memoirisation of motherhood. I have decided to hang on to trepidation, not try to quash it. Trepidation might mean an argument with no agenda. Or me refusing to cover up, even a little, my limitations. I think of Enright’s first few pages as a tuning fork. I want to write about motherhood memoirs from a place of love and unconcealed irritation. These are not, and should not be, mutually exclusive.

‘No subject offers a greater opportunity for terrible writing than motherhood’ – first sentence of a New York Times review of Making Babies, and it comes not from any of the tomato throwers Enright poked in her memoir’s introduction but from a fellow baffled mother/memoirist. The reviewer Judith Newman thinks Enright wrote a great book. It’s just that:

To write well in the mother–child arena, a person must understand that the essential condition of motherhood isn’t pleasure or wonderment or even terror – although there’s plenty of that. The essential condition is absurdity. Samuel Beckett could have come up with a great book on babies. Anne Enright has.

For Newman too much motherhood writing is wide-eyed with profundity or sublime feelings (awe, terror), and light on out-and-out absurdity. My first response after reading her first sentence? Rattling off, in my head, names: Levy, Cusk, Angela Carter, Adrienne Rich, Maggie Nelson, Simone de Beauvoir, Toni Morrison, Ursula K. Le Guin, Quinn Eades etc. Underneath though: a nagging unease. Since becoming a mother I had read a lot of terrible nonfiction writing about motherhood. This could have been nothing (most writing is terrible writing, most pronouncements about how there is no good writing about X are a waste of time) or it could have been something. I wanted – want – to be able to think about it.

In 2010 I wrote a book that got classified as a motherhood memoir. It covered: three generations of women, one family, becoming a mother, being a daughter. It also had history, politics, war, time, cities, post-totalitarian hunger for glamour, friendships on the verge of cataclysm, poets I regarded as heroes. My (then) publishing house said the book needed to be in shops by Mother’s Day or else. Rush, rush. Print numbers, stock, distribution channels, mummy-flavoured publicity crumbs … I was deflated by my book about everything being so categorically and swiftly reframed as a motherhood memoir but voicing this feeling to anyone besides family and friends seemed graceless. What did it matter how I was sold? It was either that or the ethnic thing.

Enough time has passed that I can now tell you: I was hurt by the implied suggestion that all the other stuff in the book was a bit of colour. I was also, at the time, irritated by a certain kind of middle-class motherhood memoir (by middle class I don’t mean property-owning and do include perpetual renters such as myself). Not only books but personal essays, blogs, anthologies, all stamped with familiar traits: a vomit-on-the-blouse candour, the smell-of-my-baby’s-foot lyricism, an author’s self transformed by a new life’s arrival, obligatory self-deprecation. Part confession, part analysis. Plenty of smug-yet-astonished bubbling just under too. The unmistakable formula bothered me but so did what the formula was at the service of – the formal and intellectual domestication of motherhood. This style of memoir seemed to have achieved cultural and marketplace dominance in the anglophone world (while simultaneously, predictably, making culture and marketplace feel indistinguishable).

No, I won’t name names. No ripping into specific books or using them as examples of larger problems or trends. I am mindful of what Lisa Ruddick describes as ‘scholars using theory – or simply attitude – to burn through whatever is small, tender, and worthy of protection and cultivation’. I think a lot of the books I could be talking about here, including books I privately dislike or find annoying, are ‘small and tender’ (this is not an aesthetic or intellectual judgment, rather a personal one about how much is at stake in autobiographical writing) even if collectively they may occupy a culturally powerful place at this moment. The authors of these specific texts, as well as their writing lives, are, I believe, ‘worthy of protection and cultivation’.

I am arguing against something that is both culturally ubiquitous and continuously de-legitimated. Against something that may appear at certain moments like a new orthodoxy – first-person nonfiction motherhood narratives are written and read voraciously today – yet its ontological status remains unstable.

Many times in my life women writing personally about motherhood has made me – leaking, chaotic, questioning, angry, flooded with love and guilt, often just flooded – feel less alone. My friend Jo Case’s memoir Boomer & Me kept me company while I stood there solo in yet another schoolground. Deborah Levy (who I admire, who’s not my friend) was with me in spirit too, telling me to remember this about the language of the other waiting, clustering mothers: ‘They said words that were childlike but not as interesting as the words children made up. Words like groany moany smiley fabby cheery vegie sniffy…’ Levy would first cheer me up, then take away my non-joiner smugness. ‘I listened to all those mothers in a daze because I knew we were all exhausted and making the best of our new niche in the Societal System.’ Anne Enright was beside me as well pricking holes in my self-dramatisation as the always already-failed mother. ‘Children are actually a form of brainwashing.’ Companionable presence, a feeling of fellowship, jokes – I value these things above many others.

I am also certain that online writing about mothering, with its accessibility and the sheer variety of experiences it holds up to the light, has saved lives probably. Or at least made many lives liveable. Autobiographical writing and autoethnography are antidotes to the parenting ‘industry’-produced books, the kind that capitalise on maternal (paternal, parental) guilt, shame, doubt, anxiety by throwing parents some choice lifeboats.

How to describe the current motherhood-memoir nexus? Owing to commercial pressures, nonfiction books by women writers dealing in any way with motherhood are unlikely to be sold as books of thinking, exploration, reportage, cultural critique or all the above. Instead they are dubbed motherhood memoirs. At the same time writing about mothering has become constrained, made predictable, by certain memoiristic tropes, vocabularies, intensities and scales. I don’t want to make any big declarations about how when you spit in a bookshop you hit a memoir, except to note it’s not only women, it’s brain surgeons, the children of spies, young writers with hybrid identities, survivors of trauma, each getting pushed down the memoir route by their publishers or agents or maybe by their own sense of what kind of books are possible and wanted. Other books – not readily classifiable as anything – are marketed as memoirs, ensuring they reach few of their intended readers while a whole new crop of brain surgeons and young writers with hybrid identities grow up thinking writing a memoir is the best option available to them.

Suki Kim, born in South Korea, wrote a book about North Korea, memoir is how her publisher billed it. ‘As the only journalist to live undercover in North Korea,’ Suki Kim wrote afterwards, ‘I had risked imprisonment to tell a story of international importance by the only means possible. By casting my book as personal rather than professional – by marketing me as a woman on a journey of self-discovery, rather than a reporter on a groundbreaking assignment – I was effectively being stripped of my expertise on the subject I knew best.’

So let us talk marketplace. If an explosive undercover investigation of everyday life in the world’s most closed-off country is less commercially appealing than another memoir by another woman on another internal quest, it’s worth heeding. If saying Suki Kim is a woman just like you and me is a better commercial proposition than saying Suki Kim is, in many thrilling ways, not a woman like you or me, it’s an insight into our cultural moment that should be taken seriously.

A parallel development is the popularity of what journalist Elle Hardy calls ‘memoir-as-journalism’. Hardy believes ‘the world of letters is using memoir to examine what journalism ought to’ and I agree with Hardy. The point here isn’t to set up opposition between solipsistic memoir and world-facing reportage or analysis, nor between memoir and any other literary form, it’s to pay close attention to the sort of models on offer for writers looking for a way to think about the world. In the case of memoir-as-journalism if addiction, relationships, poverty or faith are your terrain, you do it through your and your family’s own story. Your story is your trunk, as for research or references to a world beyond the personal they’re a couple of twigs.

The foregrounding of the personal simplifies and it distorts. It makes it difficult to talk about how what I experience as mine (body, history, labour, pockets of affect, webs of relations) is, in the words of Paul B. Preciado, ‘traversed by what isn’t mine’. It makes it equally difficult to de-naturalise the I at a book’s centre since the pressure is on that I to be doing the work of opening doors and guiding readers through passageways connecting the personal and more-than-personal. Little space in this paradigm for Yiyun Li and her

A word I hate to use in English is I. It is a melodramatic word.

I don’t find the standard critique of memoiristic writing about motherhood helpful here. The critique goes something like: many writers of motherhood memoirs are so bound up in their class (usually middle), race (usually white), privilege (usually unmistakable) and whatever else (cisgender, English language) that they end up writing accounts blind (wilfully, or unconsciously) to their place in the world. And because of their relative comfort they depoliticise and privatise motherhood/mothering in ways detrimental to others less safely housed, dry, clothed.

I don’t disagree with the critique in principle; and Kara Van Cleaf is persuasive when she argues that digital capitalism gives ‘the opportunity for mothers to capitalise on their experiences instead of politicise them’. And perhaps more distressingly still:

Mommy blogs do not represent a sudden increase in maternal consciousness. Instead, relief from the devalued work of motherhood can be found online. The architecture of the web has evolved to extract value out of such gendered alienation.

Structural critiques like this one are illuminating. To my mind, however, the watch-your-entitlement-bitches genre of critique, at least the way it’s deployed now – which is to say, deployed almost automatically – does more damage than good. The critique is readymade and indiscriminate and functions like a blunt weapon. Good for hitting heads with, not good for much else. Alarmingly, it distracts us from another insidious problem: the reproduction of the so-called ‘mommy wars’. (I hate the term ‘mommy wars’. Or ‘mummy wars’. I hate ‘mommy’ and ‘mummy’. I remember a lovely neighbour of mine referring to us both as ‘busy mummies’ and my teeth aching every time she said it.) Motherhood is as divisive as race, class and religion. Yet the thing about mommy wars – stay-at-home versus back-to-work, attachment versus benign neglect, mothers versus non-mothers, establishment versus intersectional, structural analysis versus personal narrative – is they’re a dead end. They lead nowhere. Books or essays written and read into these wars, whether deliberately or not, are rarely enduring. Mostly they replicate clichés – of form, language, thought. They stifle thinking, trap us into an unnecessary, deadening shrillness.

What could writing about motherhood that ‘blasts open’ (I borrow this useful Anne Carson expression from a completely different context) these ‘swirls of terms’ (I borrow this gorgeous Maggie Nelson term from a different different context) look like? You would think that an emphasis on personal experience, on the contours of a singular life/soul/family, infused with lyricism and hyper-locatedness, is just what is needed to not keep re-erecting the same barricades. In fact, it could be that memoir in its present iteration is not a strong enough form to blast things open. What is required is formal innovation, hybridity of form, opening up of language, a getting at and through motherhood in unexpected ways.

The coupling of motherhood and memoiristic writing feels at the moment too tight, overly melded, too much like a foregone conclusion. I worry about books that are not being published because they do not feel familiar enough, do not tick boxes. More profoundly, I worry about books that are not being written because what the authors of these unwritten books have to say about mothering or families or stuff that passes between generations or love or terror cannot be truthfully said in the language of personal experience or made to fit a memoir shape. A part of me is grieving for these books, yes.

This is an extract from Dangerous Ideas about Mothers (UWAP), edited by Camilla Nelson and Rachel Robertson. Details here.

The post Against Motherhood Memoirs appeared first on Sydney Review of Books.

You will come here all your life for renewal.

– ‘The Curtain’, Judith Wright

The pale oval of R’s face turns to me in darkness.

‘Look, she’s dreaming.’

The baby’s cheek settles into my chest and her lashes flutter against my skin. Her breathing slows to match mine. Soon, it has the soft insistence of faraway surf. I whisper so as not to wake her.

‘Did you dream?’

‘We were in Mexico,’ says R. ‘All my aunts and uncles came to meet Vera. But it was our Brisbane house.’

My mouth is parched, my water bottle empty at the bedside. February heat broods behind the closed curtains, morning surges and builds. Wind-stirred branches, trilling birds, shore-break lapping the lake’s edge. My father’s voice (which is my voice) carries from across the water. He’s taken my in-laws out in the canoe. We hear laughter, splashing oars, a confused medley of Spanish and English. The two sides of our lives commingle in the sultry air.

‘I don’t remember if I dreamed.’

‘You never remember.’

The three of us doze until lunchtime, until sweat pools between Vera’s beating heart and mine. I wake to find R has parted the curtains a crack, returned to bed. Her hands, folded over the still-raw caesarean scar, rise and fall with her breathing. By reflected light that ripples the ceiling, I drift back to sleep reading a collection of Judith Wright’s letters and poems to her husband Jack McKinney: ‘So, perilously joined/ lighted in one small room,/we have made all things true.’ (‘In Praise of Marriages’)

This little town was a place of peaceful repose for Judith, Jack, and their daughter Meredith, as it’s been for my parents since I was a boy. In my dreams, I show Vera through its streets.

Boreen Point, courtesy of the Queensland State Archives.

Judith Wright holidayed regularly at Boreen Point in the Sunshine Coast Hinterland from 1953 until Jack McKinney’s death in 1966. Her poems of that period infuse her early experience of parenthood with the emotional climate of the Cold War:

Bombs ripen on the leafless tree
under which the children play.
And there my darling all alone
dances in the spying day. (Two Songs for the World’s End)

We were feeling a bit like that over the summer of 2017, with the Trump inauguration shortly after our daughter’s birth, a new round of nuclear brinksmanship on the Korean peninsula, and R’s ecologist colleagues publishing a paper most weeks on how quickly the planet is cooking. South-East Queensland sweltered in the mid-to-high thirties from November through March. We were lucky to be able to retreat to my parents’ breezy lakeside weekender a couple of hours north of Brisbane.

Re-reading Wright’s Cooloola poems from The Gateway (1953) to The Other Half (1966) over that long, hot Queensland summer, it was hard not to hear echoes of our own anxious times. Wright’s lyrics from the shore of Lake Cootharaba are powerfully infused with what Glenn Albrecht calls solastalgia, the distress caused by negative changes in the home environment. These poems find local correlates – sand-mining, and deforestation at Cooloola during Joh Bjelke-Petersen’s reign – for a planetary-scale ecological crisis that was then only beginning to be understood.

Nowadays, Boreen Point has a population of about three hundred, which swells during the spring sailing regatta and the summer holidays. There is money here, half an hour’s drive from the upscale beach resort at Noosa Heads. But it expresses itself in a sleepy, unshowy way. Up the hillside, eccentric timber houses of two and three storeys jostle for the best lake view. Built up high to guard against flooding, they look vaguely like stranded boats. And indeed, catamarans and canoes are drawn up on many lawns in front of lush gardens of bromeliads and ferns. The streets have quaint, bucolic names: Vista Street, Orchard Avenue. Everybody is white and looks like they’d vote for Robert Menzies if they could.

My parents’ lakeside house is a 1940s Queenslander built with local cedar from the sawmill days before the national park. It’s painted to match the blues and greys of the lake by changing light, and it’s furnished with my maternal grandfather’s things. Like the house, the Parker dining set is a post-war classic: a dark hardwood table and sturdy black-vinyl-covered chairs. The CD collection is all Naxos Classics and Yankee jazz bands from the thirties and forties.

When my grandfather died, Mum and Dad put the modest inheritance toward a deposit on the house. I inherited his bad posture and social awkwardness. I’m drafting this slouched at the mahogany writing desk where he used to keep journals and letters from his old air-force buddies.

‘Melaleuca,’ the little yellow cottage Judith and Jack once owned is a couple of blocks up the hill from Mum and Dad’s place. Though still occupied, it looks rather forlorn: the tin letterbox rusted; the once-pink terrace faded grey, cracking at the edges; the concrete plaster façade half hidden behind the banksia bush where green rosella hop from twig to twig.

In the spring of 1953, when Meredith was four, the couple left their home on Mount Tamborine and drove north for the Noosa Lakes, hunting wildflowers. In the hinterland, they stumbled on: ‘a little village of nine or ten houses and a general store,’ Judith wrote in her autobiography, ‘all delectably perched on a lake shore above a pink and white sandstone cliff.’  Most of the residents were fishermen or timber workers in those days, but one local man of fortune was building cheap holiday cottages. His method was to construct a house frame of sawmill timber and dig a trench around it, using the dug-out sand to build the cement walls. The couple put down a deposit on one of the prototypes, then ‘scratched and scraped and sold and blackmailed the Bank for an overdraught.’

That ‘light-filled concrete house,’ became their refuge for many years. With no electricity and no sealed roads, it was a perfect retreat for two writers: ‘Solid, warm, and comforting… the blue of the lake shone through its windows.’  It was there on the shores of Lake Cootharaba little Meredith learned to swim and that many of the best poems of Judith Wright’s middle career were written.

Who’d have thought a house made of sand could outlive its occupants.

Old Al, to whom we owe the lakeside house, was only a few years younger than Judith Wright. I thought of him often as I re-read her poetry that summer, not so much because of the surface correspondences – both were born between wars, both went deaf as young adults – but because he was the person of her generation to whom I’ve been closest. On reflection, the two seemed to embody contrary impulses in post-war Australia: the desire to change everything, the need to reassert order.

Meredith McKinney wrote in a memoir of her parents that her memories of the couple were ‘overwhelmingly of them reading together.’ Like Judith and Jack, Old Al wasn’t physically demonstrative. His poor hearing, a result of the roaring engines of Lancaster bombers, could make him seem withdrawn. But he was affectionate in his stiff, masculine way. I remember a patient ping-pong coach and a clever leg-spin bowler; a cautious, thrifty, round-shouldered old man, who labelled his margarine with a marker in case the expiry date wore off. I was too young to grasp that his need for routine and his odd habits might have something to do with his war service. Some second world war pilots peed on their plane’s tailwheel for good luck before every sortie or wore the same shoes every flight. When they returned to civilian life, they often developed other compulsive behaviours. Even as a boy, I wanted to understand why it was so important for Al’s lunch to be on the table before midday and for the lawn of his villa to be perfectly even.

I have especially vivid memories of the two of us spending a lot of time together the year before I left for South America, while my parents were overseas. I was his most frequent visitor, aside from the veteran’s affairs nurse who came daily to change his bandages around eleven. On most occasions, he’d take me for a soggy buffet lunch at the RSL and tell the same three or four terse, elliptical stories about the war. There was always a good deal of technical detail about how to read the instruments in the cockpit, and nothing at all about how it feels to be shot at.

One day, he felt dizzy before lunch and the nurse put him to bed. Rifling through his things, I uncovered dozens of old journals. I hoped I’d find intense emotions like Meredith McKinney discovered in her mother’s love letters. Finally, I’d know the full story of the New York blonde who gave him his first taste of Coca Cola in Times Square in 1940; how he felt about the fire-bombing of Dresden; why he read atheist tract after atheist tract, as if to shore up his disbelief.

I was disappointed. There was nothing in the journals but hundreds of ‘To Do’ lists: ‘buy milk,’ ‘pay car insurance,’ ‘birthday card for Kath.’

Serves me right for snooping, I thought, slumping in his armchair and listening to him snore.

‘How come you never march on Anzac Day?’ I asked when he woke up.

‘Why make a fuss?’ he replied.

Judith and Jack always made a fuss. They met in Brisbane, in 1944, through the circle around Clem Christensen’s new literary quarterly, Meanjin. The magazine published writers of ‘strong socio-political consciousness’, who saw the end of the war as an opportunity for progressive social change. Beyond contributing to the magazine, they were living that change: she was twenty-nine; he was fifty-three – and married.

‘You and I are queer and sinful fish,’ she wrote to him at Easter 1945 from her family’s pastoral property near Armidale. Like her contemporaries Patrick White and Geoffrey Dutton, Judith Wright hailed from the old squattocracy, a complicated heritage that fed both her intense feeling for the Australian landscape and her distaste for the materialism of Australian society.

‘I can feel that nineteenth-century atmosphere,’ Jack replied ‘and how strange our life would seem by contrast. We of course are right, but it’s difficult being the only people who are right.’

Judith’s father wept when she told him of the relationship. Because Jack’s wife refused divorce, they were unable to marry until years later, in 1962, when no-fault divorce had become legal. And, since his meagre pension was dedicated to the upkeep of his four children, Judith had to take on the role of economic provider.

‘I am really an awkward proposition for you to handle,’  he acknowledged in an early letter.

But by then, Judith was in love.

Not long after we met, R told me she was about to go Mexico for three months.

‘I’ll be doing fieldwork in the cloud forest and I don’t know if I’ll be able to stay in touch.’

We were introduced by a mutual friend in 2009 when we were both postgraduates at the University of Queensland. That first balmy Brisbane night, we talked until dawn on a West End balcony, and woke on our friend’s couch next morning to talk some more.

While she was away, I wrote her long emails describing my efforts to keep possums out of my shabby studio apartment at St Lucia. Every few days, I’d receive a reply from remote villages in Oaxaca, where she and her volunteers were wading about in gumboots catching frogs, nipping off their toes above the first knuckle for DNA sequencing in the laboratory. Her life sounded like an adventure I wanted to join. She told me about eating tadpole soup with hospitable Zapotec campesinos, and about hearing a jaguar roar in the bushes beside camp.

On her first night back in Brisbane, I cooked her dinner and gifted her a yellow ukulele. We were inseparable after that.

Jack was recovering from a breakdown when he met Judith. He was a first world war pensioner who’d fought in France and still suffered from shellshock. Judith remarked to her biographer Veronica Brady that she could always tell when he was having an attack because ‘he turned pale and sweaty and his eyes would go away’.  Eking a living from the land during the depression had wrecked his health, and the outbreak of the second war sent him into a mental spiral that accelerated the breakdown of his first marriage. When he met Judith, he was a self-described ‘pensioner-gardener, hangeron-handyman,’  who lived alone in a shack at Surfer’s Paradise. On weekends, he visited the Christensens in Brisbane to borrow books from their well-stocked library. Jack was in the process of refashioning himself as a ‘wild philosopher without a degree’.  He read madly to catch up on all he’d missed and began work on an ambitious treatise that tried to explain the crisis in Western thought that had led to the wars and the development of nuclear weapons.

Judith was attracted to his arguments. She too felt that there had been ‘a sort of hypertrophy of the intellectual side of Western man at the expense of the feeling side’. But she was worldly enough to recognise that his knowledge had been cobbled together. Through her administrative job at the University of Queensland, she provided him with books and articles on the latest developments in physics and contemporary philosophy, which Jack devoured gratefully as he embarked on his epic.

‘My Darling we’re going to be very happy and defy the world,’ he wrote to her.

‘I have doubts about this Jack,’ I said to R, laying the collection of their letters on the bed beside me.

‘¿Por qué?’

‘I understand everyone felt they owed a debt to old soldiers. And I know that women were expected to keep house in those days. But it really seems to me he got the better end of the deal.’

‘She was in love with him.’

‘I find even his love letters unreadable. Let alone the philosophy. Listen to this…’

I read her a tangled parsing of Hegel he’d sent Judith during one of his manic bursts of reading.

‘Well, I don’t claim to understand what he’s talking about, but I’m not a philosopher.’

‘Nor am I. But my point is he got to sit there for fifteen years writing his unreadable book, while she typed it for him, paid the bills, became the leading Australian poet of her generation, and did all the housework.’

I expected her to agree. In fact, I was probably overstating my case to impress her. But she was adamant in her defence of Jack.

‘She was in love with him,’ she said again, as if that explained everything.

R and I soon moved in together at Ryan Street near the river. The UQ Ecology Lab was flush with money in those days and attracted brilliant young people from all over the world. I grew accustomed to Friday night dinners at the Asian places along Hardgrave Road with a dozen or more nationalities at our table. Often, I was the only Australian and found myself cast in the enjoyable role of local expert.

Soon, she took me to meet her parents in Mexico City. They were friendly, but cautious. Why did this Australian speak Spanish with a thick Argentine accent? How serious was he about their daughter?

During the same trip, R took me hiking in the Oaxacan sierra near her field sites. For three days, we tramped the high ridge lines of forested hills, watching vultures circle over fields of yellowish maize. Eventually, in a dusty mountain outpost, we came upon a woman no taller than a child, standing in waist-high grass. A wooden pail half-filled with herbs dangled from the crook of her arm. In her free hand, she brandished a scythe. She invited us to her hut, and offered to perform a limpia, a cleansing ceremony – for a small fee. She had me strip to my boxer shorts, so she could rub my bare chest with coarse, freshly cut herbs dipped in alcohol. She murmured Spanish and Zapotec incantations. She blew on the dampness over my heart until it dried. Her two long plaits were the colour of ashes, but her skin was as smooth as polished stone. When her huge yellow eyes gazed into mine, I felt she intuited things about R and me that we were hiding from ourselves and each other: that our wedding bands were only for the sake of appearances; that we weren’t ready to commit because we were still too unsure of ourselves as individuals to love one another well; that only a painful rupture would teach us how to be together – to risk open dialogue, to listen across languages, to live with difference. But perhaps the chain of impressions I attributed to the woman was no more than a projection of my own fears. Perhaps, in her culture the little frown she made as she stared into my face opened onto some other unimaginable hinterland of feeling behind her eyes. Or perhaps, like most fortune tellers, she was simply trying to guess what her customers most wanted to hear. In the end, instead of revealing the underbelly of our relationship, she merely restoked the woodfire stove with a poker. Turning back to us, she muttered: ‘You and your wife will have a daughter.’

We carry Vera down to the strand to admire the iridescent green plumage of the ducks. Nice to think of little Meredith McKinney ‘running ecstatically’ into the same calm, brown waters.

A little distance off her Australian and Mexican grandparents are paddling the big red canoe with my sister-in-law alongside in the kayak, translating. It’s lovely to see them enjoying each other’s company. Vera’s abuelos flew thousands of kilometres to be in Australia for her birth, only to sweat through the hottest Queensland summer in memory. They spent much of it in the kitchen of our cramped rental house in East Brisbane with the oven and stove cranked. When not stocking the deep freezer with hand-made corn tortillas and spicy chipotle creations for us to eat after they’d left, they took long walks around Brisbane’s mostly treeless inner south. Often, they returned from Wooloongabba, Coorparoo, or Stones Corner laden with heavy shopping bags when the relentless sun was high in the sky.

One especially hot day, we had to take Vera’s abuelo to the emergency ward with chest pains.

‘His heart’s fine,’ said the doctor. ‘But we’re going to have to get some electrolytes into him. He’s severely dehydrated.’

Back in the stuffy little kitchen, we decided they’d worked enough. It was time to get out of the city.

‘Why don’t we all go up the lake?’ suggested my parents. ‘There’s enough space for everyone.’

Squatting in the sugar-fine sand, I dangle Vera’s feet in the cool shallows.

From the end of the wooden pier we gaze across the lake’s choppy, brown water. This whole sweep of beaches, dunes, mangroves, swamps, woodlands, and waterways – from Tin Can Bay down to Noosa – is named after the coastal sand cypress. Sometimes the sea breeze in the branches sings the name of the country: Coo-loo-la.

There were probably less than a thousand Aboriginal people here before 1788. The early British weren’t impressed. ‘Nothing… can well be imagined more barren than this peninsula,’ wrote Matthew Flinders, in 1802. Infertile, sandy soils have kept the human population down, but Cooloola teems with other forms of life: king parrots, black cockatoos, and the red-backed fairy wren that once brought the sun’s fire to earth; echidnas, bandicoots, and flying fox; dugong, ghost crabs, and bream; eucalypts, goatsfoot vine, and the phaius orchid of Judith Wright’s lyric:

For whose eyes – for whose eyes
does this blind being weave
sand’s poverty, water’s sour,
the white and black of the hour
into the image I hold
and cannot understand? (‘Phaius Orchid’)

Over the eastern shoreline looms the largest vegetated dune system in the world, which has served as a navigational aid for generations of watercraft: bark canoes, colonial sloops, pleasure sailors’ catamarans and fishermen’s tin runabouts. From its source in the mountains, the tea-coloured black waters of the Noosa River meander slowly south through a chain of six, salt-water lakes: Cooloola, Como, Cootharaba, Cooroibah, Doonela, and Weyba.

Cootharaba, our lake, is the largest – about ten kilometres long and five kilometres wide. In Kabi, the name means place of trees whose wood makes sturdy clubs. Down by the pier is a stone monument to Eliza Fraser, the shipwrecked white woman who survived with local Aboriginals for several months in 1836, before being ‘rescued’ from the lake’s northern shores by the convict Graham. This local legend inspired sensational nineteenth-century newspaper reports, and later Patrick White’s novel, A Fringe of Leaves. Fraser’s belief that the Aboriginals – who fed and treated her with traditional medicine – had kidnapped rather than rescued her, fitted her European contemporaries’ prejudices and preconceptions. The incident increased hostility and mistrust on both sides of the Queensland frontier, and paved the way for the violent dispossession of Cooloola Aboriginals that followed.

There is no monument to those who kept Eliza Fraser alive.

When Judith Wright’s poetry was first foisted upon me as a school boy in the 1990s, she was still being taught as a jingoistic nationalist. The focus was upon early poems like ‘Bullocky,’ and ‘South of My Days,’ that could be taken to celebrate the heroic pioneers of Australia’s rural mythology. In the classroom, even furiously angry political poems like ‘Australia, 1970,’ were systematically drained of their force by the counting of iambic feet and the labelling of line endings. Wright, ever the prophet, accurately predicted that generations of school teachers would turn her poems into ‘implements of torture’. That was certainly the case at my suburban state school, where even the handful of us who were keen readers and were drawn to poetry, decided on the basis of Judith Wright and a narrow sampling of others, that Australian literature was ‘too dusty’ for modern city kids. We devoted ourselves to reading Americans and Brits. They seemed to inhabit a larger, more sophisticated universe than our own. It was only in my twenties, when the tough subject matter, formal daring, and intellectual energy of Latin American writers set my senses alight, that I began to be curious about writing from my own hemisphere.

Further around the shoreline, past the general store and the camping ground, stands the trunk of a lone paperbark. Knotted-white, and dead as many years as I can remember, its branches claw the sky like a witch’s gnarled hand. Even when campers’ kids play in the shallows around it or kick a ball across sand knobbly with its dead roots, the tree casts an eerie spell over this stretch of beach.

This scorching summer morning we have the place to ourselves. I hold Vera up to see the skeletal paperbark, but recoil when she reaches out for its trunk.

‘Don’t touch. Not that tree.’

The haunted paperbark has always reminded me of the ‘driftwood spear’ that startles the narrator of Wright’s poem, ‘At Cooloolah,’ from The Two Fires (1955). It is among her best-known lyrics and became an unofficial rallying cry for conservationists pushing to protect the region from sand-mining in the 1960s and 1970s. Returning to it after many years, I realised I’d only skimmed the surface.

The poem is a nature inscription. It commemorates the feelings a place of natural beauty trigger in the poet, beginning with an image of a white-faced heron. Wright refers to it by its common name, the blue crane, capturing the impression that the bird, a greyish-white wader common across Australasia, ‘wears’ the colour of the evening sky mirrored in the water:

The blue crane fishing in Cooloola’s twilight
Has fished there longer than our centuries.
He is the certain heir of lake and evening,
And he will wear their colour till he dies (‘At Cooloolah’)

For Wright, the sight of the crane fails to bring ‘tranquil restoration,’  as might be expected in the European romantic tradition. ‘Our centuries,’ stresses the brevity of settler-Australian presence at Cooloola when compared to the crane’s timeless belonging. It’s not the individual bird whose life has endured centuries, but the species. By repeatedly referring to plural phenomena with singular nouns – ‘plumed reed and paperbark,’ ‘crane and swan’ – the poem slides from the individual to the archetypical. Birds often symbolise the relationship between the conscious and unconscious mind in Jung’s writing – a strong influence on Wright. The poet’s unconscious fear, anxiety, and sense of unbelonging in the Australian landscape are implicitly registered from the outset and become ever more pronounced. The stanza ending ‘till he dies’ has an ominous ring in the wake of Wright’s epigram from Heraclitus, which describes the world as a fire, ‘with measures of it kindling, and measures going out’.  This is 1955, ten years on from the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, with the US and Soviet Union locked in an arm’s race. Are the bird, the lake, the poet, and her song, all about to be extinguished?

The third stanza shifts suddenly from the threatened loveliness of the lakeside scene to violence of another kind:

But I’m a stranger, come of a conquering people.
I cannot share his calm, who watch his lake,
being unloved by all my eyes delight in,
and made uneasy, for an old murder’s sake.

What is this old murder? As with the crane, Wright is working from the particular to the general. In talking about one killing, she is referring, in the first instance, to the local fate of ‘those dark-skinned people who once named Cooloolah.’ It’s well known that massacres of Indigenous people took place at nearby Lake Weyba and Teewah Beach during the nineteenth century. But the ‘old murder’ also stands more broadly for the violent dispossession of Aborigines that was written out of Australian history over much of the twentieth century. ‘At Cooloolah’ attends to the physic toll repressing this past takes on the settler Australian conscience. As the daughter of an old pioneering family, Wright feels personally implicated:

Riding at noon and ninety years ago,
My grandfather was beckoned by a ghost –
a black accoutred warrior armed for fighting,
who sank into bare plain, as now into time past.

The cause of the grandfather’s bad conscience becomes clear when we refer to a more-detailed version of the same incident in Wright’s novelised family history, The Generations of Men (1959). Albert Wright, Judith’s paternal grandfather, was an important settler in the Dawson Valley district of central Queensland in the 1870s. According to his diaries, he was once called to the scene of a murder of four Aboriginal men. As co-manager of the station and local justice of the peace, it was his duty to inform police. Instead, knowing he would be shunned as a traitor to his fellow white men if he reported the incident, he rode conspicuously back into town, giving the perpetrators time to dispose of the bodies. ‘Neither whites nor blacks would ever speak of them again,’ wrote Judith. ‘But on Albert’s mind they stayed a heavy load.’  This is the background, in Generations of Men, to the ghostly appearance of ‘a warrior standing alone by the one dead tree on the plain’.

In ‘At Cooloolah,’ the grandfather’s role as collaborator in a cover-up, rather than a perpetrator is not spelt out. The reader must disentangle the relationship between old murder, grandfather, and ghost for him or herself. The historian Georgina Arnott argues in The Unknown Judith Wright (2017) that, while the poet was among the first to acknowledge the devastation the pastoral invasion of Australia caused to Aboriginal people, her writing tends to downplay her own ancestors’ role in it. For Arnott, Wright’s interpretation of the historical documents suggests, ‘the enduring strength of a family loyalty that she was not always fully aware or in control of’.

Wright might have been a flawed historian. But her poetry gains much of its charge from the tension between family loyalty, love of the land, and the ethical imperative to acknowledge past wrongs. In ‘At Cooloolah,’ the neat four-line stanzas, and regular five-stress lines express a need for containment and control that is undone by the thematic focus on the return of the repressed. Finally, an ancestral curse wells up from the lake-water to trouble the conscience of the pioneer-pastoralist’s poet granddaughter:

And walking on clean sand among the prints
of bird and animal, I am challenged by a driftwood spear
thrust from the water; and, like my grandfather
must quiet a heart accused by its own fear.

The spear is the guilt of the historical beneficiary of colonialism; and it is also the fear of the fire that might soon be reflected in the lake’s ‘clear heavenly levels’ in the event of nuclear war. The crane’s centuries of fishing may soon be disrupted, it is implied, even this peaceful shoreline will not be spared.

The little we know of Cooloola’s earliest inhabitants has been built up by triangulating archaeological evidence, written accounts by nineteenth-century Europeans, and testimony from a handful of Aboriginal elders.

Camp entrances faced downwind; grass was scattered on the floors of bark huts; possum-skin rugs were sewn together with kangaroo-tail sinew; they set out inland on daily foraging missions; oysters, fresh fish, scrub turkey, bunya nuts, bandicoots, and honey were consumed; children were forbidden to eat eels; the chests and upper arms of initiated men were cut with sharp shells and healed with grease and charcoal; bark canoes were used to navigate waterways; tracks were marked by bending a branch to ninety degrees at hip height; much time was spent gathering firewood; they feared thunder and lightning and would not pronounce the names of the dead; whites were believed to be the ghosts of blacks; the land was believed to have been created by a turtle brooding on the water; the cry of a curlew signalled impending death.

Cooloola, with its infertile soil and dense forests, protected the coastal Dulingbara – the people of the nautilus shell – from Europeans some twenty-five years longer than their inland neighbours, the Batjala and Gubi Gubi, whose traditional lifestyles were disrupted by pastoral settlements along the Mary River and the brutality of the Native Police Force throughout the 1850s. Shell middens and stone artefacts discovered at Cooloola suggest Aboriginal presence for five millennia, with a continuous pattern of occupancy from about nine hundred years ago until around the time of the 1867 Gympie Gold Rush. At that time, the demand for building supplies on the booming inland goldfields attracted timbermen to Cooloola’s pristine stands of cedar and pine.

The Dulingbara were shipped off to missions or forced from the forest to seek their fortunes in Gympie, where they often died of imported diseases and drink. They were poisoned at Kilcoy and shot near Lake Weyba at a place nowadays called Massacre Creek. In 1950, an elder named Gaiarbau or Willie Mackenzie sat down with an anthropologist and recorded his memories of touring the region as a young man in the 1880s – the basis of much of our present knowledge. A few years later, he spoke with Judith Wright’s close friend, the Aboriginal poet, Oodgeroo Noonuncal, who commemorated their encounter in the poem ‘Last of His Tribe’:

I asked and you let me hear
The soft vowelly tongue to be heard now
No more for ever. For me
You enact old scenes, old ways, you who have used
Boomerang and spear…

All gone, all gone. And I feel
The sudden sting of tears, Willie Mackenzie

In the Salvation Army Home.
Displaced person in your own country,
Lonely in teeming city crowds,
Last of your tribe.

The three of us hike the forest trail out to Mill Point. For the first kilometre or so, Vera gazes into the treetops from the hiking pack on my back, trying to find the whip bird whose song rings out in the canopy. Sunlight slants between the dazzling white trunks of red and scribbly gums, blackbutts, and melaleucas. There are plenty of thirty and forty-year-old trees, but nothing older. The forest is still regenerating. By the time we reach the turn off, Vera’s fast asleep. She ignores the mosquitos, and doesn’t even wake when a huge grey kangaroo, taller than R, bounds across our path and vanishes into the long grass.

The ruined brick chimney of an old dairy under mango and guava trees announces we’ve arrived. Along with a few railway sleepers and a rusted-out boiler, this is all that remains of McGhie, Luya, and Company’s timber settlement. At its height in the 1880s, sixty families lived on the shore of Lake Cootharaba. The township flourished for twenty years, sending Kauri pine and cedar to Brisbane by steamer. But by the 1890s, the best timber supplies were exhausted. Shortly after the mill closed its doors, it was wrecked by the catastrophic floods of 1893. Lake water rose two metres over the shoreline.

Judith Wright’s ‘The Graves at Millpoint’ describes the lonely tomb of a timber cutter named Alf Watt, whose passing she imagines as the end of the whole forlorn, windblown little outpost: ‘When he died the town died.’  The poem unfolds as a dialogue between the poet and the bloodwood tree growing from the dead man’s bones: ‘Tell me of the world’s end,/ You heavy bloodwood tree.’

Wright’s lyric has sometimes been interpreted as an elegiac tribute to the pioneers who opened up Cooloola. But I’m inclined to read it ironically as a grim parody of bush balladry. The bloodwoods, with their tear-shaped leaves, only appear to weep for the woodcutters in their graves, and to flower ‘for their sake’,  if we accept the anthropocentric conceit that humans operate outside and above nature. If we believe, as Wright did, that humans are part of nature’s web of interdependencies and subject to its laws, then what we have is an image of humanity cut down to size. The wind in the leaves is less a lament for the timber cutter, than a sign of nature’s indifference. The trees that outlive the timber town have no cause to mourn its human occupants – they simply go on flowering as they’ve always done.

Like ‘At Cooloola,’ the poem uses local history to prophesise apocalyptic consequences for civilisation more broadly, if human beings continue to assert God-like power over nature. The ultimate symbol of this arrogance, for Judith and Jack, was the nuclear bomb. ‘The long wave that rides the lake/with rain upon its crest,’  is an image of a tidal wave sweeping the placid waters of Cootharaba, perhaps even of nuclear rain. The ruined mill is ‘where the world ends,’ in multiple ways. It’s situated at the ‘end’ of civilisation and is where the ‘world’ of the town ended. But in a final and more drastic sense, the Mill Point timber settlement symbolises the end to which the world will come if humans fail to reconfigure their relationship with nature. As in Wright’s more overt poems of atomic anxiety, her fears for the future are embodied in the figure of her daughter, the ‘wandering child’, who stoops to read Alf Watt’s grave stone.

Through roaring wind and lengthening shadows, we hurry back from Mill Point to the sanctuary of the lakeside house.

Judith, Jack, and Meredith holidayed at Boreen Point until Jack’s death. In 1966, after fifteen years ‘in the very core of concentration’,  he finally finished The Structure of Modern Thought, his philosophical opus about ‘the modern crisis of feeling and of thought’.  Though he had written himself out of the personal crisis that gripped him when he first met Judith, the effort of transforming himself from a soldier-farmer into a published philosopher wrecked his health. He was suffering from rheumatism and severe stomach cramps and had already survived multiple heart attacks. In October, sensing their time together would be limited, the couple took a driving holiday to the ‘obscure hamlet’  of St George in southwest Queensland, where Jack had worked as a drover in his ‘last year of innocence’ before the first world war. Half a century on, they found the brigalow country unrecognisable – cleared, ploughed, and environmentally devastated. Travelling into this dead landscape, the normally gregarious Jack lapsed into silence.

He was diagnosed with inoperable stomach cancer upon their return and died, two months later of a heart attack, at Greenslopes Repatriation Hospital in Brisbane.

Judith couldn’t bring herself to visit the lakeside house for many years. ‘I have not dared to go to Boreen,’ she wrote to Barbara Blackman a year after Jack’s death. In 1973, she finally returned to sell Melaleuca. Her final Cooloola poem, ‘Lake in Spring,’ attests to the loneliness of this last trip, for the shallow reaches of Lake Cootharaba no longer carry Jack’s reflection:

Now when I bend to it again
another spring, another year
have changed and greyed the images,
and the face that lay beside
my own, no longer answers there. (‘Lake in Spring’)

By the time I returned from my first trip to South America with an unkempt beard, shaggy shoulder-length hair, and a backpack stained with red Bolivian dust, Old Al was in a high level aged-care facility near my parents’ house. I turned up with a tape deck, intending to record the story of his war service. Though he remembered who I was, he wasn’t in any state to coherently recount his life. He kept counting the red vehicles in the carpark and the horses in the paddock behind the back fence.

His dementia was advanced by the time R came into my life. She never met him, but she held my hand through the funeral and that was enough. It was a small service at a Redcliffe funeral parlour with about thirty mourners in attendance. Beyond the immediate family, most were elderly female friends from the retirement village – he had outlived his male friends.

‘Your grandfather could have remarried, you know,’ said his blind neighbour, leaning on my arm. ‘Plenty of ladies were interested.’

She shook her head.

‘But he was a one-woman man.’

We sat across the aisle from my parents through the speeches. My Mum, who’d been at the bedside when he died, calmly outlined his childhood, war service, marriage, and long widowhood. My peacenik uncle, up from the commune, wept at the lectern as he tried to convey something of the generational divide that had separated him from his father.

In the absence of any religious rites, the funeral director had asked us to supply a reading. Reluctantly, we settled on ‘Clancy of the Overflow,’ because an old Banjo Patterson anthology was the only poetry we found in his house. From the state of it, I suspected it had belonged to my grandmother and had sat mouldering in the garage for twenty years. Though there was always a stack of popular science at his bedside, I’d never seen Al read a work of imaginative literature. As I read the poem aloud for the assembled crowed, its nostalgic depiction of rural Australia seemed no closer to the reality of his life than mine. I wish we’d found Judith Wright in his garage instead.

When the ceremony was done, the funeral director asked if I’d like to say goodbye before the body was taken to the crematorium.

‘Just be aware,’ she said, parting the curtains and leading me toward the coffin, ‘that he’s been in the fridge. The cold gives some people a fright, but it’s perfectly normal.’

He wore a baggy brown suit. His eyes were closed and his mouth was slightly ajar. I lay my warm hand on his cool one and wondeed about the things that hadn’t made it into his journals. ‘Why make a fuss?’ was a far cry from Judith and Jack’s overt anti-war activism. But I thought I sensed in his refusal to celebrate Anzac Day an unspoken scepticism, and in his compulsive reading of atheist polemics a quiet unease about the things he’d been made to do as a young man. There were a million German casualties of the allied bombing campaign in the second world war, at a cost of a hundred thousand allied airmen. Men who refused to fly were classified as ‘lacking moral fibre’.  Those who did were asked to flatten whole towns. Some of their missions, like the bombing of Dresden, weren’t directed at major centres of wartime industry, and instead targeted civilians to break German morale. Having survived the terror of more than forty night-time bombing missions, and lost many friends, Al had sixty years to reflect on what it all meant.

The director discretely coughed, eager to clear the room for the next funeral.

That night, I woke up past midnight with the distinct sensation of my grandfather’s cold hand gripping mine. One last bone-crunching handshake.

‘What is it?’ asked R, stirring.

‘It’s nothing. Just hold my hand.’

Judith’s habit of inflating Jack’s importance and diminishing her own could already be observed in the early days of their courtship:

Darling I’ve just finished typing the article and it came over me all of a sudden on the crest of a great wave of humility that I belong to a very great man … and when my modest name goes down to posterity it will be because I had the honour of typing the first copies.

The year after his death, she persuaded Chatto and Windus in London to posthumously publish, The Structure of Modern Thought. It was brought out in 1971. Aside from a snobbish dismissal in The Spectator, the notices were sympathetic. But none of it added up to the ‘intellectual atom bomb’  he’d predicted in an early letter. Judith, unlike my grandfather, had a second great love: a twenty-five-year relationship with the high-profile public servant Nugget Coombs. Still, she remained a fierce advocate for the importance of Jack’s philosophy all her days, and often said her greatest regret was not bringing it to a wider audience. They are buried together in the Mt Tamborine cemetery under a grave stone that reads ‘United in Truth.’ She insisted all her life that Jack McKinney would have made a seminal contribution to twentieth-century thought, if anyone had cared to listen.

On the evidence of The Structure of Modern Thought, it’s hard not to conclude that Jack’s greatest contribution to twentieth-century intellectual life was the imprint he left in Judith Wright’s poetry. However brave, brilliant and charismatic, he was not the neglected giant she believed him to be. He was her muse, I think, in an era when it wasn’t acceptable for the woman to be the genius and the man to play the supporting role, even among free thinkers and artists. And, he was foremost among the many difficult causes Judith championed over the years.

From the 1970s until to her death in the year 2000, Wright’s focus shifted from poetry to environmental activism and advocacy for Indigenous rights.

One of her great early successes as President of the Wildlife Preservation Society of Queensland was the push to protect the Cooloola sand mass from rutile and zircon mining. In 1967, the Bjelke-Petersen state government granted Conzinc Riotinto a permit to mine sections of the 1.8 million-year-old Cooloola dunes, with operations set to expand within a few years. As the 1972 state elections approached, the WPSQ petitioned the Queensland parliament and targeted marginal seats. Their grassroots campaign ‘Spend Five Cents to Save Cooloola’ resulted in fifteen-thousand postcards being delivered to the Premier’s office:

Your government’s failure to declare the whole of Cooloola a National Park, in the face of mounting public pressure, is deplorable. The only acceptable use for this unique wilderness is its immediate dedication as a National Park.

Their efforts prompted a backbench revolt against cabinet. Bjelke-Petersen eventually sided with the nervous back-benchers, using his casting vote to save the dunes and his own job.

Sand mining ceased in 1976 and the whole of Cooloola is now part of Great Sandy National Park.

Forty years on from that victory, and a couple of years after the centenary of Judith Wright’s birth, the ongoing urgency and importance of her work – both as a poet and a conservationist – lies in the way she speaks to global environmental crisis out of the haunted, damaged spaces of the colonised Australian landscape. Gradually – with the translation of her work into Japanese, Russian, Spanish and other languages, and new scholarship like that of Stuart Cooke placing her work in dialogue with Latin American nature poetry – we are coming to recognise Wright as a world poet rather than one who merely explains Australia to itself. She is a poet of our hemisphere, for whom rapturous attention to the natural world – ‘this southern weather’  – represents a step toward decolonising the Southern mind.

So, we lie sleeping in the lakeside house on land that belongs to us but will never be ours. The wind whispers ‘Coo-loo-la’ in the melaleucas. Vera sleeps on my chest in a room filled with golden light.

Al never set eyes on the lakeside house, but I know he would have loved it: the boatshed and macadamia tree out the back, the breezy eastern outlook from the veranda. Water was always a solace to him. Mum took him to the ocean at every opportunity during the twenty years he lived alone. They had sailed mirror dinghies together on Port Phillip Bay in Melbourne when she was a girl. The lakeside house, furnished with his things, is decorated with sea shells and driftwood and Mum’s photos of the world’s watery places: the Scottish Lochs, the Yangtze River, the Aegean Sea. And there, out the window, our shining lake. Beyond its far shore, beyond the thin finger of land separating us from the Pacific, the roar of the ocean breakers is louder, the tide is rising.

It’s good to be still having moved so much these last years. This is Dulingbara and Gubi Gubi country, but I’m finally beginning to feel we belong here, too. Outside all is water, light, and air. Melbourne, Pátzcuaro, Torreón, Brisbane, and Mexico City converge in the voices of the older generation. Sleep’s tide takes us. The lakeside house is decorated with my mother’s photos of her travels in the North. But our dreams are of Southern places: the healer in the Oaxacan hills whose prophesy came true; the thunderous crack of a Patagonian glacier; the cave paintings at Carnarvon of red clay hands reaching out of the past. At the edge of consciousness, I register hands lifting Vera off me, carrying her into the next room.

I wake alone. R’s voice floats in from the balcony, speaking to our daughter in soft, childish tones. As I emerge blinking in the sunlight, I see she has Vera sitting on the broad wooden railing facing the lake. It’s a clear morning and the water’s surface is ‘blue as a doll’s eye’.  I put my arms around R and give Vera a good morning peck on the cheek, but she barely acknowledges it, because her eyes are fixed on the undulating sky upon the water where a pelican is about to land. For a moment, it hangs over a perfect mirror image of itself.

Then the two birds merge.

This is an extract from the book Requiem with Yellow Butterflies which will be published by University of Western Australia Publishing in 2019.

Works Cited

Glenn Albrecht et al. “Solastalgia: The Distress Caused by Environmental Change.” Australasian Psychiatry, vol. 15, no. 1, 2007.
Georgina Arnott. “Extract: The Unknown Judith Wright.” Teaching History, vol. 50, no. 4, 2016.
Veronica Brady. South of My Days: A Biography of Judith Wright. Angus & Robertson, 2006.
Elaine Brown. Cooloola Coast. University of Queensland Press, 2000.
Fiona Capp. My Blood’s Country. Allen & Unwin, 2010.Patricia Clarke and Meredith McKinney, editors. With Love and Fury: Selected Letters of Judith Wright. National Library of Australia, 2006.
Stuart Cooke. “Orpheus in the New World: Poetry and Landscape in Australia and Chile.” Antipodes: A North American Journal of Australian Literature, vol. 24, no. 2, 2010.
Matthew Flinders. A Voyage to Terra Australis. W. Bulmer and Co., 1814.
J.P. McKinney. The Structure of Modern Thought. Chatto and Windus, 1971.
Meredith McKinney. “Memoir of Judith and Jack.” The Equal Heart and Mind: Letters between Judith Wright and Jack Mckinney. Edited by Patricia Clarke and Meredith Mckinney. U of Queensland P, 2004.
Oodgeroo Noonuccal. My People, Jacaranda, 1990.
Shirley Walker. Flame and Shadow: A Study of Judith Wright. U of Queensland P, 1996.
Judith Wright, Collected Poems 1942-1985. Angus & Robertson, 1994.
– “Conservation as a Concept.” Quadrant, vol. 12, no. 1, 1968
– The Generations of Men. ETT Imprint.
– Half a Lifetime. Text, 1999. p.280.

The post The Lakeside House appeared first on Sydney Review of Books.

The common raven (Corvus corax). Photo: Jon Sullivan

I’m a local now. That’s what they tell me, now that I have someone in the ground. I watched my husband, my father, my brother, and my uncle, brace their feet at the grassy edge of the hole as they lowered my mother’s shrouded body in, straps under her neck, her waist, her knees; a corpse in a snug muslin bag, strewn with roses: the human-animal shape of her clear. She wobbled until she hit bottom, until the clay had her. We sent more roses in after her. Scattered soil on the petals, slowly at first. And then we picked up spades and shovelled it in. And now the same curve of earth that holds my home, holds her. When I sit at my desk to write, she is under the same ground that is beneath my feet. When I lie down in my bed at night, there are no human others between me and her, just forest and grass and rock and sky.

It was a beautiful thing she did. Unconventional. She was a theatre director, and her insistence on a shroud rather than a coffin was her last piece of theatrical expression. She believed we live in a death-denying society; she wanted her dead body recognised for what it was, not hidden away. She believed we are rank in our human wastage and selfishness; she gave herself back to the earth.

And I agreed with her. Agree with her. Wholeheartedly. I applaud her.

And yet, the horror.

We humans like to think we’re special. Coffins are a great symbol. We don’t want to be touched by the earth. We don’t want to be corrupted by its creatures, by the breakdown of our own material cells when we come in contact with it in death. We want to stay special, even in the very moment when it is proved to us that we are not, that we are so of this earth that we will rot with it and come apart and our matter be used again and again, like everything else, by everything else.

Val Plumwood found herself surprised by the depth of this, when, in 1985, already lobbying hard against anthropocentric thinking in her philosophical work, she was attacked by a crocodile – an experience detailed in her essay ‘Being Prey’. She found herself clamped between jaws, being rolled in the water, a new narrative understanding of herself, herself, as prey, and thinking with incredulity, ‘This can’t be happening to me, I’m a human being. I am more than just food!’

By the time my mother died, I had already written a doctoral thesis detailing how human literature was solipsistic in its employment of the nonhuman world as setting, metaphor, and backdrop. I had smugly drawn metaphors myself, satirising our white literary canon as a grand old theatre with a stage devoted solely to repeated tellings of the Great Human Story: the theatre metaphor natural to me, given my mother’s influence.

In my metaphor, the nonhuman parts of our world stand like painted scenery in our fictions, thin backdrop or signposts or metaphors for the hero’s quest: a mountain, something to be conquered; a river, to be crossed; a bird, our own grounded aspirations; clouds are forbidding; forests conceal; a blue-fabric ocean is ceaseless in its movement and endless in its bounty. My trump card was this question from ecocritic Cheryl Glotfelty: ‘How do our metaphors of the land influence the way we treat it?’ As answer I cited our fracked mountains, poisoned rivers, extinct birds, acidic clouds, felled forests, empty oceans. I contended, and still contend, that, as anthropocentrism is the driver of the greatest catastrophes we face, when we write, whatever we write, it is a question we need to seriously consider. Because it is not merely academic. Anthopocentrism is a cultural problem with material effects.

And I thought I had cracked it. I thought I had changed my own thinking enough to write ecocentrically, enough to adequately decentre the human in my fiction. I had written a novel, my young adult novel As Stars Fall, that opened with the point of view of a bird. The novel disrupted human subjectivities. It worked to re-embed the people in their environment. I was proud of it. I was an expert in ecofiction now, I thought. I had something to say.

And then my mother got buried in her shroud, the first dead human I had ever seen, and the night-time horrors shook me. My mother’s body, open to the ground around her, dissipating, corrupting, being fed upon, distributed among the soil creatures like spoils.

Like Val Plumwood, some deep part of me refused to believe such a complex human could be reduced to meat, to something so useable. To something edible. How could this happen to my mother, was the gasp that sucked me out of shallow sleep.

Separate to the grief some deep self-serving part of me still thought humans were special. Some deep part was shocked that real, total, biological death happens to us too. Some part of me was failing to think ecocentrically.

Fracked mountains, poisoned rivers, extinct birds, acidic clouds, felled forests, empty oceans. Pitting ourselves against them all, in stories, and in life.

This is not the world I want to write for my children.

The curlew was waiting for her mate. Her hunger was growing. She smelled the air. She fluffed her feathers over the delicate eggs that lay on the ground beneath her, growing life from her warmth. Shifting her position, she smelled the air again.

So opens my young adult novel As Stars Fall. Here are the opening lines of Sonya Hartnett’s young adult novel Stripes of the Sidestep Wolf:

The animal woke before dawn. Its body was curled tight against the frost that spiked the foot of the mountain and, except for the deep eyes that blinked and closed, and blinked again, the creature made no move, as if the cold had frozen it through.

In both of these beginnings, there is a sleight-of-hand. Although it may seem so, at no time is an internal point of view made explicit. I was certainly aware at the time of writing it of a particular trickiness, of only giving us access to the bird’s impressions, its sensations, all things which would be able to be sensed and perceived only through its physicality, without ever ascribing the attribution, ‘she thinks.’

The animal almost-point-of-view does not last. Turn the page of either Hartnett’s novel or my own and the first central ‘human actant’ strides onto the page.

Is this failure?

European philosophy has consistently occupied itself with the question of human specialness … It was not enough to demonstrate that human beings were unique, for each species is evidently unique in its way; rather, it was necessary to show that the human form was uniquely unique, that our noble gifts set us definitively apart from, and above, the rest of the animate world …

David Abram, Spell of the Sensuous.

Reason is ours alone, we have thought. Reason, language, science, technology, art: these things make us uniquely unique.

Except that they don’t. We know they don’t. We know that meerkats have language, corvids are natural scientists, and countless species have an aesthetic sense and the urge to perform. The idea of our unique uniqueness is merely a symptom of what evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins calls the ‘tyranny of the discontinuous mind’. We have trouble with spectrums. We enjoy categories. We divide life into species, we place ourselves at the top, or even outside the system entirely.

Val Plumwood’s Feminism and the mastery of nature, written after her crocodile attack, articulates how western culture constructs this human identity outside nature by that very discourse of reason of which we are so fond. Christopher Manes writes that in order to think ecocentrically we must ‘dismantle a particular historical use of reason that has produced a certain kind of human subject that only speaks soliloquies in a world of non-rational silences.’

My husband is a scientist, with training in evolutionary biology. I have studied environmental science. I am a fan of reason. I believe that reason has given us wonderful ‘ways in’ to a potential new ecocentric human ontology: what science reveals can short-circuit the model we’ve learned – or established – of cascading binaries of hyper-separation, between God and ‘man’, between ‘human’ and ‘nature’. There are no dualisms in evolutionary biology. No hierarchies. There is only branch and web – ‘the mesh’, as object-oriented ecological philosopher Timothy Morton calls it. But Manes is right. So far, this has provided no joy in the ecopoetic project. We have slapped the methods of reason over the top of our creativity rather than using the fruits of reason as stepping-off points.

David Abrams – ecologist, anthropologist, philosopher, shamanistic magician and ecophenomenologist – believes that our relationship with our texts has become a stand-in for our early, and now largely defunct, animism, as the articulate subject that was once experienced in nature has shifted to the written word. It is language that we chose to be the great demarcator of our specialness after our God-born genesis had been undermined by Darwin. And to keep us special, language had to become an exclusively human property. That is a big concern because, as anthropologist Hans Peter Duerr writes of shamanistic cultures, ‘People do not exploit a nature that speaks to them’.

Texts, then, have a great responsibility to that which they have disenfranchised.

As a writer, I have a great responsibility to that which I have disenfranchised.

But there is a problem.

The ‘ecofictive problem’.

Work has been done to decentre the human in nonfiction nature-writing – this has been the locus of most ecocritical work – but attempts to translate this into fiction have regularly hit critical walls. The difficulty, as Kate Rigby puts it, is that ‘the centrality of the human actant, however contingent, contextualized, and decentered she might be in herself, is a necessary condition for there to be such a thing as literature, as commonly understood.’

I discussed this with a writer friend who then dropped the most wonderful utterance.

‘Vegetables have no drama,’ she said.

I laughed. And then I stopped, because she was right. Or at least seemed so.

And then I thought. Perhaps vegetables have plenty of drama – perhaps we just don’t know enough about their lives, their communications.

So I went and watched David Attenborough’s Life of Plants.

Drama. So much drama. Competition for light. Roots battling for soil and water. A single vine attacking a Goliath of a tree. A fight to the death. In slow-motion.

But how could I write that? I couldn’t see a way. Or at least a way that worked.

When I was an undergraduate, a creative writing tutor took me to task for anthropomorphising guinea pigs in a story. She got really mad about it. I actually hadn’t given any insight into the mammals but I must have skirted too close for her comfort.

We experienced a clash of ideology. She was insisting on a philosophy of writing which hung on the grand tradition of reason and stuck to the task of writing the human and the human’s objects. James Bradley writes:

Around the world, fiction writers are shaking themselves free of old assumptions about subject matter and form in an attempt to find new forms, new strategies and new vocabularies capable of giving shape to the world in which we find ourselves.

I don’t believe my tutor was especially aware of her aims, she was simply responding to her idea of what worked and what didn’t. But this aesthetic literary sense has origins somewhere. And origins can be problematic.

Ursula le Guin has things to say about our classical structures in her 1986 essay The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction. Applying Elizabeth Fisher’s Carrier Bag Theory of Human Evolution to fiction, le Guin writes:

The mammoth hunters spectacularly occupy the cave wall and the mind, but what we actually did to stay alive and fat was gather seeds, roots, sprouts, shoots, leaves, nuts, berries, fruits and grains, adding bugs and mollusks and netting or snaring birds, fish, rats, rabbits and other tuskless small fry to up the protein.

When she writes, ‘It is hard to tell a really gripping tale of how I wrested a wild-oat seed from its husk,’ I am reminded of my friend commenting that vegetables have no drama. Le Guin compares wresting that wild oat to the tale of the hunting of the woolly mammoth, with peril and death and blood spouting everywhere in ‘crimson torrents’ and a heroic ‘I’ who shoots an unerring arrow ‘straight through eye to brain.’

‘That story not only has Action,’ she writes, ‘it has a Hero.’

This story she talks about becomes ‘the killer story’. The story of the first tool, the long hard thing to bash with, or shoot with, or stab with. The ‘killer story’ takes hold, and everyone else is pressed into service.

So the Hero has decreed through his mouthpieces the Lawgivers, first, that the proper shape of the narrative is that of the arrow or spear, starting here and going straight there and THOK! hitting its mark (which drops dead)’.

Only, she points out, paleoanthropologists now know that a spear or a hammer or an arrow wasn’t the first human tool. The first human tool was likely a receptacle, a pouch, a bowl. A carrier bag.

Le Guin then gives us a fundamentally different conception of literature, her own conception of what ‘works’:

The novel is a fundamentally unheroic kind of story … I would go so far as to say that the natural, proper, fitting shape of the novel might be that of a sack, a bag. A book holds words. Words hold things. They bear meanings. A novel is a medicine bundle, holding things in particular, powerful relation to one another and to us.

This is writer as storyteller and shaman.

There is an arresting section in David Abram’s Becoming Animal. A two-tiered trick. It appears like real magic, and as such, it is unbelievable. But then, as Abram explains the ‘trick’, you find the truth of a human’s actual ability to ‘shape-shift’. Abram, spending time in the high Himalayas, sees his teacher guide, a jhankri – an animistic shaman – named Sonam, metamorphose into a raven and back into a man.

As I rounded the bend, I finally saw the raven [previously heard], poised atop a boulder jutting out over the gorge to the left of the trail; as I watched, it hopped twice to angle itself toward me, its eyes blinking like camera shutters as it cocked its head. It uttered another more subdued ‘squaaark’ and then hopped down onto the trail … there was something all wrong about the way the raven landed on the dirt—its shape was contorted somehow, and the landing much too loud, until I realized that I was looking at Sonam, and not a raven at all.

Abram doesn’t ask us to believe in anything supernatural: straight away, in the very next chapter, he lays out a rational explanation for the occurrence, or rather a relational one. He explains that his own perceptions were rendered receptive to the mistaken identity by the dusk, by the narrowness of the mountain path, the particular shape of the scene which allowed a truncation of perspective so that Sonam was far away enough to be the right size but appearing close up.

Sonam has spent his life noticing the ravens. Deeply noticing. Paying such attention, devoting his attention; sending his attention inside the raven. He had practiced ‘holding himself in the various postures of that bird, had practiced Raven’s ways of walking, of moving its head, of spreading its feathered limbs … To move as another’. By the dusk, the narrow path, the perspective, and the fact that through deep noticing Sonam was able to ‘move as another’, Abram’s perception was altered.

This is not a rational explanation: yes, it explains, but it does not replace or negate the truth of the experience. A bird was a human and a human was a bird. It is not rational, it is relational. This is a phenomenological explanation.

Writing ecocentric fiction should not be an experiment in rationality. To ‘move as another’ is not an act of reason. It is not rooted in classical logic. It does not say ‘I am this and therefore I cannot be that.’

It doesn’t go thok! from here to there.

Writing ecocentric fiction is relational. Like ecology, like phenomenology. Like a medicine bundle. Like a carrier bag.

I often read two books at once. I’ll have one nonfiction book on the go and I’ll also immerse myself in a work of a fiction. And sometimes I find that reading one book which explicitly tells me things and another which keeps its meaning implicit can generate lines of thinking which may not otherwise evolve.

I recently read Marie Kondo’s The Life Changing Magic of Tidying: a very detailed and specific ‘how-to’ about arranging the objects in one’s home. On the surface it is a self-help book, a decluttering manual on how to create maximum order and simplicity: what to throw out, what to keep and where and how, how to roll your socks, what not to buy. Kondo is practically a character in her own manual: her direct first-person voice is idiosyncratic and particular; her own personal history of tidying documented for our edification.

At the same time I was reading Franz Kafka’s story ‘The Burrow’, an animal point-of-view story also written in first-person direct address. The exact species is never identified, but the animal is subterranean, and its burrow is its pride and joy, a near-perfect dwelling of its own creation. But the ‘near-perfectness’ becomes the animal’s obsession, the specificity of each element becomes the subject of the animal’s fastidious attention until the creature is driven near mad by its own way of trying to ‘be’. Switching back and forth between Kondo and Kafka became an odd experience, with each creature obsessing about the manner of their dwelling. I came to feel that Kafka’s creature and Kondo were one and the same.

The classical, rational reading of Kafka’s story would be that it is a fable about humans, with the animal as a stand-in. As most fable-styled literature does, this attracts a particular kind of critique within the discussion of ecocentrism. Eliot Schrefer articulates it thus:

This idea that animals are interesting in as much as they are people still has a prominent place in our culture. Most of the children’s picture books that we see now have animals as their main figures, but those animals are not really acting as the animals themselves; they are wearing human clothing, they are speaking English, they have human drives and desires.

But I think this is too easy. Kafka is a writer who not only perpetually puts animals in the centre, even if they can be read in human-like ways, he is always disrupting the human point-of-view, always dragging humans into animal terrains and forms. The strong sense I came away with from my double-reading was not that Kafka’s animal wasn’t a real animal, but a reminder that Kondo, and all other humans who live in a dwelling of some sort – all of us – are animals.

In this light, ‘The Burrow’, even if it is a metaphor, works because of what is the same, not because of what is different; it works because of what Kafka has noticed about burrowing animals, deeply noticed: their care of their homes, his empathy for their self-care, designing their burrows with maximum concern for their own safety and sustenance: that they are like us. Any other interpretation is suffering a case of the dualisms – a case of denied dependency, of total othering.

For me this becomes a question about all metaphors between humans and animals, humans and plants, humans and land and sea. Metaphors rely on two parallel lines, running along in space, different but able to be likened. They compare two unrelated things in order to create new meaning. They rely on the discontinuous mind, on continuous disconnection. But parallels are not an especially natural form, temporary at best. Trace most parallels back far enough and the lines bend towards each other, towards a singularity of origin.

And this is now part of my thinking about children’s literature, where animals have often been decried for behaving like furry humans. ‘Not really acting as the animals themselves,’ as Schrefer says. Sonya Hartnett’s Forest, Patricia Wrightson’s The Nargun and the Stars, Elyne Mitchell’s The Silver Brumby, Jack London’s The Call of the Wild, C.S.Lewis’s Narnia series, Milne’s Winnie the Pooh; Graham’s The Wind in the Willows; Back Beauty, Paddington Bear, Charlotte’s Web, The Jungle Book, endless fairytales: these would all fall foul of his charge. But why are there so many of them? Why are more-than-human characters so appealing to children?

Would The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe have worked if Narnia was just a land with an evil dictator and human residents? If Mr Tumnus the Faun was simply a man? If Mr and Mrs Beaver were just kindly farmfolk?  It is exciting to children to read of a place with such biodiversity, with such a diversity of voices, such varied ways of being and looking and acting – such different strengths and weaknesses. It is easy to overlook these things if we simply dismiss the books as one big metaphor with humans wearing animal masks. But if we take it as more-than-metaphor, then the world opens up. If it is more-than-metaphor when animal characters speak, it is a magnification of the fact that yes, nonhumans communicate too.

All of this makes writing young adult fiction a dynamic playing field for experiments in ecocentrism, where the permitted zone of more-than-human voices that we find in children’s literature seeps into a more adult form. Here we find books like Kate Constable’s Crow Country, Sonya Hartnett’s Stripes of the Sidestep Wolf and Thursday’s Child, Le Guin’s Earthsea Quintet, Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials, Margo Lanagan’s Sea Hearts. Birds who speak; the perspective of an extinct mammal who persists in its landscape; a boy who burrows; animistic mysticism; humans with an essential physiological animal element; marine-human hybrids.

Schrefer is encouraging us to keep animals in view against the chronic destructive backgrounding we subject them to in our systems – it is an important political action. But if this is as far as we go in fiction it is like trying to row upstream without first getting out of the strongest current. It doesn’t do anything for the way we consider ourselves. It doesn’t address self-perception.

Climate change demands we alter our self-perception. Climate change unequivocally asserts the human-animal’s ecological embeddedness in every nation on earth. It is waking fiction up. The parallel is dissolving. Fiction is widening the lens, re-embedding humans in their world, and the interaction is becoming patently, tangibly, clamouringly more-than-metaphor.

Laid out and immobilized on the flat surface, our words tend to forget that they are sustained by this windswept earth; they begin to imagine that their primary task is to provide a representation of the world (as though they were outside of, and not really a part of, this world). – David Abram, Becoming Animal.

My fudged animal almost-point-of-view, human actants still striding about on centre-stage: Is this failure?

Reading the openings of Hartnett’s book and my book, I find my reading self, if not my writing self, making the assumption that the animal perceptions listed there are gathered together by an internal animal subjectivity, a subjectivity which I am reading and feeling – one in which I am participating. Even though I know it hasn’t been written that way.

And in this I see a kind of proof: that we human animals are wired to be receptive and empathetic to the experience of other individuals – human and more-than-human. And that, actually, it doesn’t take much: once we are given license we easily assume a whole and true existence in a more-than-human other. Deeply we absorb this other existence as part of our reading selves, just as we would any human character. We relate. As Abram writes in his opening lines of The Spell of the Sensuous:

Humans are tuned for relationship. The eyes, the skin, the tongue, ears, and nostrils—all are gates where our body receives the nourishment of otherness. This landscape of shadowed voices, these feathered bodies and tumbling streams—these breathing shapes are our family, the beings with whom we are engaged, with whom we struggle and suffer and celebrate.

Subjectivity is permeable. I can dilute my human self and the more-than-human can travel across the membrane of my watery subjectivity.

Metaphors are more-than. I can spread my awareness along the spectrum of forms and become homeopathic in my distillation of any one thing.

My body is permeable. I can feel, see, taste, hear and smell.

My mother’s body is permeable. That sloping arc of clay and shale and shattered mudstone that holds her in her death, gives life to ironbarks and yellow boxes and chocolate-lilies and orchids and echidnas and scorpions and treecreepers.

I can perceive. I can relate. I can notice like a shaman.

I can unwrap my bundle of windswept words.

I can pick up my pen.

References

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— 2011, Becoming animal, Vintage Books, New York.
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