Island 171

ISLAND  Stories. Poems. Essays. Art.

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featuring award-winning essays from the

ISLAND NONFICTION PRIZE plus NEW SHORT STORIES AND POEMS THE AESTHETICS OF DE-EXTINCTION and CAN ARTS REPLACE MINING?

ISLAND

Managing Editor Jane Rawson Nonfiction Editor Keely Jobe Fiction Editor Kate Kruimink Poetry Editor Kate Middleton Arts Features Editor Judith Abell Proofreader Sabine Borgis

GPO Box 4703, HOBART TASMANIA 7001 islandmag.com

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q Stories. Poems. Essays. Art.

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ISBN 978-0-6452184-9-7

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ABOUT ISLAND Island is a not-for-profit magazine of essays, short stories, poetry and arts features. Since 1979 we have been celebrating ideas, writing and culture from our base in Hobart, Tasmania. We value variety and excellence, publishing new, emerging and established writers from mainland Australia and overseas as well as from Tasmania.

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Cover image: Amber Koroluk-Stephenson Escape Artist, Portrait of an Australian Painted Lady oil on linen, 60 x 55 cm, 2024

SPECIAL FEATURE

Island Nonfiction Prize 2024 Judges’ report

WINNER Fucking with Chineseness

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Jessica White

Writing Task 1

Interior Topographies

Anne Elvey

Amber Koroluk-Stephenson

City of Yes and No

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with an essay by Briony Downes

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Beyond care and maintenance: arts-led recovery in Queenstown

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Featuring art from PressWEST and The Unconformity

Steve Brock

Petra White

Land/Body/Heart can i have some of your religion

Suri Matondkar

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Izzy Roberts-Orr

To self

38

66

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Emma Bugg with an essay by Hannah Stark

63

James Salvius Cheng

Swimming Lessons 32

A moment to reflect

Miriam Jones

A necessary evil

Gan Ainm

The breath goes now

As if to purpose 45

Adrienne Eberhard

Jenny Sinclair

A story-shaped life

Arts features

Sleep

Cherry Zheng

SHORTLISTED seeing Ningaloo

Poetry

65

Literacy feature Seeing the world differently

92

Josh

Liam Ferney

Fiction Milk tea

The waitresses 50

Melanie Saward

First breath

56

74

Daniel Ray

For want of natural snow

102

Miriam Webster

You I mourn like plants mourn their roots

Boy Skipping

SPECIAL FEATURE 82

Todd Turner

A limpet named Desire

Nilufar Shah

Any other substance

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Tim Slade

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Mikaela Nyman

In Each Form I am a Self They Can’t Know John Kinsella

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Katherine Nicholson

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Margaret Scott Young Writer’s Fellowship pomelo Yulan Jack

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From the Island Team What is the point of reading and writing? What I hope is that imagination – nourished and tempered by attention and practice – helps us conceptualise different futures. Faced with a rapidly worsening climate, with the horrors inflicted in Palestine, perhaps imagination can be the antidote to ‘there’s no point trying to change anything; I’m powerless; this is the way it’s always been’. Tasmania and Australia are in a time of great change. We can wish things were how they used to be, we can be dragged along into whatever larger forces want for us, or we can come up with our own plans. Literature and arts help us say the things we’re not hearing, stretch and shift our minds, find companionship and care. But they can also be exclusionary – for people who struggle with reading or who don’t see a place for themselves among writers. Our graphic narratives project was a step towards being more inclusive; in this issue we immerse ourselves in different languages, different experiences of reading, and a fruitful blurriness between image and text. And on Island Online, we are dipping our toes into audio. I hope you find something to expand your mind and your world.

– Jane Rawson, Managing Editor

Ritual is a home in these poems, whether it is the ritual of housecleaning ‘every second Sunday’ (Cheng) or the recognition of hymns as a ‘comfortable/ architecture’ (Jones).

Ritual, like Izzy Roberts-Orr's swimming pool, holds us ‘weightless as a thought’. The regular beat of a skipping rope becomes music, coffee drinkers meet their regular waitresses with a ‘tip jar’ of ‘baby talk’ (Slade). Amid repetition there is transformation: the page becomes ‘vegetal’ (Elvey), while the ‘nonsense’ of campaigning gives way to the language of governance (Ferney). And the poet speaks to other poets: Petra White recalls Coleridge’s address to his son; Steve Brock reads James Schuyler and carries his words into the city. Mikaela Nyman attends to ‘Rilke’s bell tower’. So too, through poems, do I connect with and reconfigure my sense of the world.

Adrienne Eberhard sees the steep drop of the escarpment in relation to the body: its fissure is a ‘lifeline’, a set of ‘capillaries’, changing my own vision of the landscape. Yet even as we turn toward the world with new eyes, John Kinsella reminds us that for its inhabitants, ‘I am a self they cannot know’ – and that in that not-knowing, there is wonder.

– Kate Middleton, Poetry Editor

Artists create in order to represent, to explore ideas, to understand, and sometimes to heal rends in the fabric of their worlds.

Art’s great power and paradox is that it is often a hypothetical exercise with a real outcome. Emma Bugg isn’t actually bringing the thylacine back to life within her carefully crafted locket, but the work she has completed calls the animal and its stories back into the room. Amber Koroluk-Stephenson does not paint anything that directly represents the themes of womanhood that she explores, yet she builds tangible worlds in which those ideas swim – within the painting and the eye of the viewer.

And the swarm of artists who have engaged with the unique conditions of Queenstown and Tasmania’s West Coast over the last few decades have not expected to transform the place.

They have visited and documented, been inspired and created.

A few, like Raymond Arnold and Helena Demczuk have stayed.

Travis Tiddy built a festival to celebrate his home town. Each artistic offering is small, yet the place has changed and it could be argued that the arts are quietly leading that region from a place of material taking to a place of material giving.

– Judith Abell, Arts Features Editor

I’m excited about the stories featured in this issue. I’m also humbled by their authors' skill. They are a resonant whole, with themes of grief and love and change speaking to one another.

At the same time, each is quite distinct. I was delighted to be able to choose a graphic story for this issue in the gorgeous and obscure First breath by Nilufar Shah. I was also thrilled by the successful experiments of Katherine Nicholson's intuitive You I mourn like plants mourn their roots and Miriam Webster’s rhythmic, witty For want of natural snow. Meanwhile, Melanie Saward’s tender, sad – and sexy – Milk tea tells a profound story through deceptively small moments, and Daniel Ray’s Any other substance balances gentle sadness with sharp wit.

– Kate Kruimink, Fiction Editor

Please be warned that this issue contains references to suicide, self-harm and pregnancy loss. If you need help in a crisis, you can call Lifeline 24 hours a day on 13 11 44.

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Island Nonfiction Prize 2024 judges’ report

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which we exist. In Writing Task 1, Suri Matondkar uses institutional semantics to reveal the unwieldy, extortionary and often imbalanced experiences of international students in Australia. The writing moves unapologetically between English and Hindi – you’ll know the piece is working its magic when you have trouble keeping up. Jenny Sinclair takes us below the surface in seeing Ningaloo. This is nature writing at its finest.

While the descriptions are poetic and moving, and the scenes keenly observed, Sinclair’s work aptly troubles the colonial, consumerist leanings of nature tourism. Her awe-filled uncertainty is a joy to read. In A story-shaped life, Gan Ainm walks us, at times breathlessly, through the experience of bipolar disorder when treatment is unavailable. It’s a masterclass in pacing, and an example of true literary daring. And Jessica White shares a no-holds-barred depiction of loss, love and the experience of disability in an ableist system in The breath goes now. It offers a bit of everything. We recommend having tissues on hand.

This year’s winner of the nonfiction prize is Cherry Zheng for their artful, strident essay, Fucking with Chineseness. In this piece, the author challenges us to understand cultural belonging in new ways, subverting the paradigm of the ‘good migrant’ with wry humour and a touching longing to understand and be understood. The narrative of not quite fitting in, of the desire to bridge cultural gaps that comes from cultural dislocation, speaks to a universal theme of feeling othered, outcast, culturally nowhere, lost in many places. Zheng’s writing is laced with empathy, curiosity, and delightful scepticism as it interrogates systems and ideas around identity and positioning.

Congratulations, Cherry! Your piece is a deserving winner of this year’s Island Nonfiction Prize.

We are extremely grateful to be supported in this prize by the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund.

– Keely Jobe, Nonfiction Editor

ust before the entries were consolidated for this year’s Nonfiction Prize, Jane, our Managing Editor, posed a question to me. What even is nonfiction? I knew the remark was meant as a joke, but it still gave me pause. As Nonfiction Editor, there should be every expectation that I know the answer to that question but the truth is, I find the genre so slippery, so hard to pin down, that I often struggle to define it. I think that’s mostly because it purports to offer something entirely ambiguous: truth. For me, the question has always been: What even is truth?

This year’s entries demonstrated in a myriad of ways the vibrancy of the contemporary nonfiction landscape. We were blown away by the breadth of themes, the research undertaken, the care with narrative, voice and structure, and the innumerable ways that writers are now testing the form itself.

We saw traditional essay styles, but also pieces that broke the mould, that used language in novel ways to describe what might otherwise be indescribable. There were pieces that made us laugh out loud and others that made us weep. Some horrified, and others angered. Maybe that’s where truth comes into the picture – when the reader can’t avoid the wash of feeling offered by the work. Maybe that affective response is the moment of truth.

I was joined on the judging panel this year by Erin Riley and Daniel Nour, two writers I admire for their acute, informed, often comical, and always deeply felt observations of the world. Using their positionality as a vantage, they have brought utterly unique voices to Australia’s literary scene, so I knew their insights would be invaluable. I have to thank them for bringing a huge amount of care and investment to what was a really tough task.

Our shortlistees this year are Suri Matondkar, Jenny Sinclair, Gan Ainm and Jessica White. Thematically, their pieces could not be more different, but where they meet is in their courage, generosity and startling use of language and description, along with their capacity to critique the dominant systems within

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ISLAND NONFICTION PRIZE

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Fucking with Chineseness Cherry Zheng 4

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hàohuá couldn’t pronounce his own name.

‘Shāohuààà,’ he said, like Ron Weasley trying to make feathers fly. It wasn’t for lack of trying.

He had taken to speaking at a plodding pace in order to be understood. For me, sitting beside him, this was the aural equivalent of a very slow flogging.

‘I want to understand China,’ Shàohuá said in Mandarin.

Blond-haired and baby-faced, he was an international relations major who had just completed an internship at the UN. His name in English was Shane. Five years ago, back in New York, Shane’s Chinese teacher had given out Chinese names like participation trophies to his entire beginner class. Now Shàohuá was in Shane’s LinkedIn name, his business cards and his Tantan profile. Shàohuá was the name I thought of when I saw him in the classroom corridor, proclaiming that he had already been to karaoke with the locals. ‘Not only we must face the human rights disputes,’ he continued, ‘but also we must consider–’.

‘Incorrect!’ chirped Liú Lǎoshī, standing on her tiptoes to tap the sentence structure at the top of the board. She wore a plaid skirt and copper-blonde plaits. Her handwriting sprinted across the green. Liú Lǎoshī looked like a middle-schooler but wrote like a calligrapher. ‘“We must not only face the human rights disputes, but also consider…”. Now finish the sentence.’

Shàohuá groaned at himself. ‘We must not only face the human rights disputes, but also consider opportunities for cooperation, such as in doing business.’

Dirt formed a vignette frame around the classroom window.

Outside, the sky was bleached as white as a hospital sheet.

It took me a moment to identify a perfect round hole in the middle of the pane as the sun. It would be my turn soon. And I had spent all night revising vocab lists, not political opinions.

‘Excellent! What about you, Yǐnlì?’ said Liú Lǎoshī, pouncing on my lapsed attention. ‘What do Australians think?’

‘I’m Chinese-Australian,’ I spluttered. Fluorescent lights bounced off fluorescent tiles and slapped me in the eyes.

Becoming the token Australian was a new experience. It gave me an uncanny feeling of stage fright.

What I really wanted to know was, ‘What does Liú Lǎoshī think?’ She was studying for her Masters at Peking University, the top university in the country, and had tried to relate to us by reciting Dickens and Shakespeare in Mandarin. Beneath Liú Lǎoshī’s fluttery professional bearing, I realised she was trying just as hard to impress us – the students – as we were trying to impress her.

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2 Mired in the immigrant guilt of Never Being Good EnoughTM, I encountered an essay published in 1996 called ‘Fuck Chineseness’.1 In it, postcolonial scholar Allen Chun reminds us that Chinese culture has never been uniform. Zhōngguó 中国, the ‘Middle Kingdom’, refers to the fact that China, throughout history, regarded itself as a civilising centre for diverse peoples with their own languages and beliefs in opposition to foreign barbarians. Despite the rise and fall of dynasties, repeated invasions, fluctuations of territory and adoptions of foreign religions, Chinese people have held on to a sense of unbroken continuity. Southerners, like my family, have historically constituted the vast majority of Chinese diaspora throughout Southeast Asia, Australia and beyond.

Growing up, my Mandarin was strained through a provincial Cantonese accent and cobbled together by English grammar patterns. It was not enough to understand Chinese song lyrics or the quickfire colloquialisms of international students. It was never enough to win an argument against my parents.

That’s why I majored in Chinese at university. I was surprised to find it was a popular language. I couldn’t fathom why the non-Chinese were there. For me, learning Mandarin wasn’t a career move, something worthwhile because ‘China was rising’. It was not something to fall into because French class was full. My endgame was ‘passing’. I wanted to be indistinguishable from a native.

After three years of classes, I was awarded a New Colombo Plan scholarship by the Australian government. The ‘old’ Colombo Plan of the 1950s had sponsored thousands of South and Southeast Asian scholars to come to Australia. Now Julie Bishop was flipping the script. Asia was about to be swamped

by Australians, and I would be one of them.

I scoured the web and applied for the most advanced immersion program my scholarship could afford. My ‘advanced immersion’ was actually my second time in Běijīng. The first time was to celebrate finishing Year 12. My mother signed us up for a tour of the Forbidden City, which cost $99. We spent a week confined in scam silk, tea and jade shops in the chattering dead of winter. At the last stop, my mother snapped.

‘You are so young, go and do something better with your lives,’ she bellowed at the sales assistants, who had spent the last five hours trying to coax us into buying peony bedsheets. I had never seen my mother orate with such passion. One of the women started to cry. We were finally released when my mother bought a knock-off qípáo dress off the single mannequin in the whole showroom. It might have just been for decoration, but it fit me well enough.

When we reached the hotel, a clerk dressed in funereal black asked for our details. My tongue tripped on itself and I watched, from a dissociative distance, as the clerk’s lipstick tilted up. We both realised, at the same time, that I didn’t even know the characters in my mother’s name.

This time, I was back in Běijīng alone. It was the summer before COVID, and the sky was the gentle blue of air pollution reform. Foreign tourists queued outside the paved and painted gardens of the Old Summer Palace, which were ravaged by the British and French during the Opium War. Next door, Chinese children queued with their parents outside Peking University’s metal security barriers to glimpse the school of their dreams.

And in one of the auditoriums, under a symphony of aircon vents, I would soon sign a pledge to not speak English, shoulder to shoulder with Ivy League kids who were here to learn one of the US Government’s Critical Languages. My time had come.

During stretches of insomnia, I wondered why I was trying so hard. Part of it was a deranged belief that I could do anything I wanted. But it also had something to do with my Chineseness. Until now, Chinese had been a cramped world made up of just three people who did not understand each other.

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Fucking with Chineseness

3 Shǐmìng使命 is a mission or a duty to which you devote yourself. It is made up of the characters使 ‘envoy’ and 命 ‘to order or command’ (also ‘life, destiny’). When I first learned the word, I misheard it as Sǐmìng 死命, 死 meaning ‘death’.

To me, this made perfect sense. According to Blond Shàohuá, I was ‘the least chill Australian he had ever met’. 死命possessed me in Běijīng. I rose at dawn to press words into my eyeballs and fell asleep at midnight with essay paragraphs wriggling through my dreams like overfed fish. I handwrote characters until I needed Band-Aids. I shuffled to and from the classroom, earphones in, mumbling along to audio recordings of each day’s texts. I read my first Chinese novella and, unimpressed by the English translation circulating like contraband around the corridors, I wrote my own.

For eight weeks I scarcely left campus, save for a trip to the hospital. My complaint was fatigue. I was struggling to climb the stairs to class. The nurse hooked me up to an IV drip. I thrilled at the cold flushing through my veins. It felt like a victory, discovering the limits to which I could push myself.

During stretches of insomnia, I wondered why I was trying so hard. Part of it was a deranged belief that I could do anything I wanted. But it also had something to do with my Chineseness. Until now, Chinese had been a cramped world made up of just three people who did not understand each other. English was the entire rest of the universe.

Now I was cramming myself full of Chinese. Every day was gluttonous: new texts, new idioms, new patterns. As I lay in bed on my back, belly bloated with half-digested characters, even the darkness wobbled like a screen of ink, brimming with brushstrokes and radicals.

‘Can you read my essay?’ I asked my parents over WeChat, between bites of vegetable bun.

‘Of course,’ my father said immediately. ‘I used to be a teacher, you know.’

‘Just a quick look. For obvious mistakes.’

I checked my work twice as hard before I hit send. My family never read my writing. Chinese was for domestic errands, parental lectures and recounts of my day. I had grown comfortable in the privacy of my English.

My parents replied less than an hour later. They didn’t use track changes, so the document ballooned with brackets.

Since its establishment in 1958, CCTV has possessed the aspiration to (aspired to) become the leading source of news in China.

At the same time, CCTV is responsible for acting as the Party and government’s propaganda organ. That this has given CCTV a bad name (This counterproductive effect), especially among young people, is undeniable. Adding to this is the profit motive of the modern market economy, meaning that it has three different goals that are difficult to manage. (These three different goals are difficult for CCTV to manage) ‘You’ve learned so many big words,’ my mother said. ‘Your Chinese is better than my English already.’

‘You can do tax returns in English,’ I said.

My mother hesitated. I could hear the washing machine churning.

‘I don’t know what they’re teaching you in university,’ she said, enunciating the last word like it was a foreign city, ‘but the US has problems too. They’re not all about freedom and democracy.’

‘Yes. Yes, of course. The topic is Chinese media.’

My mother kept answering in Cantonese when I asked her for words I didn’t know.

‘Mandarin not Cantonese,’ I snapped, with deadlines closing around my throat. I immediately regretted my temper. Běijīng was still 2000 kilometres away from my parents’ home towns.

My mother grew up speaking a Sze Yup variant of Cantonese.

Mandarin was not her mother tongue.

Cantonese has somewhere from 60 million to over 100 million speakers worldwide. Once a contender for the official Chinese language, it is now morphing into a language of protest and periphery: eroded by Mandarin in Guangzhou, graffitied throughout the streets of Hong Kong, and preserved in pockets of ageing overseas communities. I myself am not fluent. My parents raised me speaking Mandarin – deciding, along similar lines to Shàohuá, that it was the most useful language.

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4 Liú Lǎoshī had whispered to us in the slim minutes between classes how competitive it had been to get admitted into the program as a teacher. So, when it was Headmaster Dèng’s turn to lecture us, I set my expectations high.

Headmaster Dèng was waiting for us in the classroom – the only man in the faculty. He was beady-eyed and flat-faced, like a Lego person made real. He was at least two decades older than Liú Lǎoshī, with yellow radish calves poking out from khaki shorts. Headmaster Dèng handed out black-andwhite photocopies of an old news article from 2012. It was something about an American businessman found dead in his hotel room in Chóngqìng. The accompanying image, fried in black ink, might as well have been abstract art. Headmaster Dèng had either forgotten his textbook or hadn’t deigned to bring it, which meant my precious highlights and annotations on the writings of President Xí Jìnpíng had gone to waste. I seethed in silence at the injustice of professionalism. Only a man could get away with this.

‘By now, you’ve written enough essays about yourself,’ said Dèng Lǎoshī. ‘Your homework will be to look into the childhood of a contemporary Chinese political figure.’

On the old projector, his PowerPoint slide was washed out and slightly off-centre – the edges spilling onto the wall.

I clambered gingerly through the sentence constructions of the obscure Xí Jìnpíng quote as though in a real construction zone: ‘People who haven’t really ever had power, who have always been far removed from it, tend to think these things are mysterious and novel. But when I look past the superficial stuff – the power and bouquets, the glory and applause – what I see is detention centres and fickle human relationships. I have a deeper understanding of politics.’ [几乎从不曾有

delay, like symptoms after initial exposure. Gradually, the new vocabulary settled with a clammy chill inside my bones.

Bó Xīlái was just 17 when the Cultural Revolution began, old enough to be imprisoned along with his father, senior party figure Bó Yībō. He had participated in his father’s beatings.

‘Seeing him disown his own relatives and mercilessly beat even his own father half to death,’ says Bó Yībō, ‘I thought, this kid really is leadership material for the future of our party.

I am certain he has great prospects’. [看他这个六亲不

认，手毒心狠连他爹都往死里整的样子，这小子 真正是我们党未来的接班人的好材料。今后肯定 会有大出息。]3 I included the full quote in my presentation. I could see my classmates skimming the slide with mild incomprehension.

‘Bó Xīlái was Xí Jìnpíng’s political rival,’ I said. ‘This man could have been the President.’

Headmaster Dèng’s eyes glimmered as he met my gaze.

‘Chairman Xí’s generation all grew up during that period.’

The Cultural Revolution began when Xí Jìnpíng was 13. His schooling ended, his father was thrown in jail, and his half-sister likely suicided due to persecution. For all I had navel-gazed about intergenerational trauma, I had never once paused to think about the traumatised little boys who rule the world.

One night, I called my parents and was struck by the thickness (or rather, sibilant thinness) of their accents.

Headmaster Dèng had succeeded.

I no longer sounded like home.

过权力的人，那些一直距离权力很遥远的人，往 往认为这些东西是神秘、新奇的。但我穿透表面 的东西—权力和鲜花，荣耀和掌声—去看，看到 的是看守所，是浮躁的人际关系。对政治我有更 深层的了解。]2 Behind his dowdy spectacles, Dèng Lǎoshī’s black eyes egged us on with a sense of irony that made me feel like I was two steps behind in a chess match.

That night, I trudged through old online articles about former Chóngqìng Party Secretary Bó Xīlái, whose name had appeared in Dèng Lǎoshī’s handout. Everything I read was unfamiliar, in that I had never seen it expressed before in Chinese. The meanings always slammed into me after a

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Fucking with Chineseness

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Today, the political fault-lines of language are fossilised in Mandarin’s different names: Pǔtōnghuà普通话 (‘common language’) in the mainland, Guóyǔ國語 (‘national language’) in Taiwan, and Huáyǔ华语in Singapore (‘Chinese language’, vis-à-vis the other national languages). The designation ‘Chinese’ in English elides all of these into a single amorphous mass, and that’s before one includes the other languages of China.

Before my immersion program, I named my White boyfriend when he started learning Mandarin, using a mix of translation and personality matching. We spent an afternoon in his wood-toned family home scrolling through Chinese baby names, surrounded by books by his mother and paintings by his father. Boys had names like heroic, clever, brilliant. Girls got named after snow, jade and flowers.

My Chinese name was a forgotten heirloom. No one in my family used it. It existed in no official documents. But it was still a gift from my parents. Yǐn is my mother’s surname; Lì means jasmine. For my birthday, my boyfriend drew my name, filling the strokes with leaves and petals. I discovered the meaning of ‘porcelain smile’ when I saw that he had mixed up the characters.

In Běijīng, Yǐnlì was a ragged cat inviting itself home. It slipped with ease into Mandarin sentences. It sounded very feminine, according to Liú Lǎoshī. This was a compliment; she complained that her own name sounded like a man’s. I tried perfecting the shape of the strokes, the way I doodled my English name on used envelopes in primary school. But I never got the balance right: it always looked so much prettier in Liú Lǎoshī’s handwriting.

From a continent away, my Australian problems fit in the palm of my hand. I broke up with my boyfriend from my Běijīng dorm, feeling relieved more than anything to discard my mental rehearsals of him meeting my family. I put my phone back in my pocket and went to climb the Great Wall of China. The tissue box I had prepared was left unopened on my bedside table.

Over those weeks, a battalion of teachers wrung the Cantonese out of me, moulding my tongue around zhs, chs and shs until the pronunciations set like clay, fixed into shape. One night, I called my parents and was struck by the thickness (or rather, sibilant thinness) of their accents. Headmaster Dèng had succeeded. I no longer sounded like home.

‘I’m so jealous,’ Blond Shàohuá said, resigned, as his toneless East Coast accent held firm. He turned out to be pretty good at karaoke. Singing in Chinese didn’t require mastery of tones.

‘The blood of the Chinese nation flows through [overseas Chinese],’ Xí Jìnpíng says. ‘The vast overseas Chinese compatriot population has sincere patriotism, great economic strength, rich intellectual resources, and extensive business connections. They are an important force in realising the Chinese Dream.’ [长期以来，一代又一代海外侨胞，

秉承中华民族优秀传统，不忘祖国，不忘祖籍， 不忘身上流淌的中华民族血液… 广大海外侨胞有 着赤忱的爱国情怀、雄厚的经济实力、丰富的智 力资源、广泛的商业人脉，是实现中国梦的重要 力量。]4 Compared to thousands of years of recorded Chinese history, the Chinese nation-state is a very recent invention. But it is an invention that enables the present political leadership to define exactly who they would like to include and exclude in their vision for China. I am at least Chinese enough for the President, if I buy into his dream.

Let us never forget that, much like my own sense of Chineseness, the Chinese nation was made. The Revolution of 1911 ended the imperial system and established the Republic of China in its place. Chinese intellectuals started creating the idea of China synonymous with the nation-state, borrowing the word for ‘nation’ itself directly from Japanese. Even the national language had to be designed, with a standardised pronunciation based on the Běijīng dialect. As Allen Chun argues, the idea that Chinese culture refers to distinct traits and traditions bounded by an unambiguous political entity is ‘essentially modern, if not national, in origin’.

The President is Chinese enough for me, if he admits our shared history.

‘You’re different from the others,’ Headmaster Dèng told me after my final spoken exam. My reflection sagged in his eyeglasses. I wondered what he saw.

We were alone in the classroom. Sleep-deprived and stuffed full of words, I felt as though I had fallen into one of the dogeared YA fantasy novels of my adolescence. Sunlight slanted in through the white-grey smog and illuminated faded Chinese characters written over and over each other, radicals clashing, strokes tangling. My vision bristled with upside-down chair legs.

‘You have the mind of an academic,’ he said. ‘What are your plans after you graduate?’

This was a conversation I had not studied for. ‘I’m not sure yet. Work for government, I think.’

‘Work for the government of Australia? That would be a waste.’

9

ISLAND

‘I’m an Australian citizen.’

‘You study like a Chinese.’

There it was: the recognition of Chineseness that had eluded me, making Běijīng feel even more dislocating than my liminal existence in Sydney. All it had taken was pushing my body and brain to the brink.

I basked in the moment, biting back a smirk. ‘My home state of New South Wales has a special policy called the selective school system. Have you heard of it?’

He hadn’t. I explained the Year 6 exam, the ranking systems, the students who knew the syllabus better than the teachers.

Dèng Lǎoshī’s eyes lit up with familiar humour, that sense of a punchline on a horizon I could not see.

‘It’s filled with the children of migrants,’ I said. ‘I genuinely didn’t realise how many White people there were in Australia because I spent all my time at school or studying.’

The headmaster threw back his head and guffawed. ‘There’s no escape for us Chinese, is there?’ With that, he dismissed me from the classroom for the very last time.

Cherry Zheng (she/they) is a writer of Cantonese heritage. She was a university medallist at the ANU and a New Colombo Plan Scholar in Beijing, Taipei and Singapore. Cherry recently completed the StoryCasters 2.0 mentorship and has appeared in Overland and the BSFA’s Fission science fiction anthology (forthcoming). A member of Worship Queer Collective and ANTRA, they pole dance under the stage name Cherry Chopstick.

7 After all that, my Mandarin still hobbled behind my English. I felt like a barbarian next to Liú Lǎoshī, whose glowing foundation and genteel elocution held fast at all times of day. I was attuned to very little of Chinese pop culture; I had few Chinese friends (Chinese-Chinese, as opposed to Chinese-Australian or, as was now the case, Chinese-American). Everything from the clothes I wore to the way I introduced myself – indeed, the fact that I had to introduce myself – marked me as a foreigner.

In Australia, my Chineseness was more than enough. I looked Chinese, I spoke Chinese, and my migrant parents shaped my earliest memories and values. I could wave around a dance fan or drench a stir-fry in soy sauce and call it my culture and Australia, eager to brandish its badge of multiculturalism, egged me on.

Never had I felt less Chinese than when I was actually in China. Even if I somehow learned the political subtleties and cultural touchstones, I still held an Australian passport: I was not allowed to stay and I had the luxury to leave. Whatever belonging I had imagined myself finding and easing into like a hànfú robe…I did not find it at school in my homeland. q

Images: zhang kaiyv - Unsplash

This essay won the Island Nonfiction Prize, which was supported by the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund.

Endnotes

1.Chun, A (1996) ‘Fuck Chineseness: On the Ambiguities of Ethnicity as Culture as Identity’ boundary 2 23, no. 2: 111-38. See also his book sequel, Forget Chineseness: On the Geopolitics of Cultural Identification (Albany: SUNY Press, 2017).

2.Kǎi ruì凯瑞, ‘Cóng yáodòng dào diānfēng: Xíjìnpíng sīxiǎng de fǎ zhǎn lìchéng’ 从窑洞到巅峰:习近平思想的发展历程 [From the cave to the apex: the development of Xi Jinping Thought], 13 October 2017 https:// www.bbc.com/zhongwen/resources/idt-sh/Thoughts_Chairman_Xi_ chinese accessed 11 April 2024 3.Qiáo qiāo乔劁, ‘Chuài duàn qīn diē sāngēn lèigǔ báo xī lái guǎn hēishèhuì lǎodà jiào diē’ 踹断亲爹三根肋骨 薄熙来管黑社会老大 叫爹 [Breaking three of his father’s ribs, Bo Xilai calls underworld leader ‘father’] 19 October 2009 https://m.renminbao.com/rmb/ articles/2009/10/19/51314.html accessed 11 April 2024 4.Xinhua, ‘Xíjìnpíng: Zhōnghuá wénhuà shì hǎi nèiwài zhōnghuá érnǚ gòngtóng de hún’ 习近平：中华文化是海内外中华儿女共同的魂 [Xi Jinping: Chinese culture is the spirit shared by all Chinese people at home and abroad] 6 June 2014 http://www.xinhuanet.com/politics/201406/06/c_1111025922.htm accessed 2 March 2024 5.Bulag U (2020) ‘Nationality / 民族’ Made in China Journal https://madeinchinajournal.com/2020/09/04/nationality%E6%B0%91%E6%97%8F accessed 2 March 2024

10

ISLAND NONFICTION PRIZE SHORTLISTED

seeing Ningaloo

Jenny Sinclair 11

ISLAND

I

thought I knew water.

I knew its salt sting, felt as I stood on a rocky tidal platform over the crashing Southern Ocean. I knew the hold-down weight of it, borne when I mistimed a wave. I knew its light: the blond-and-blue fractal patterns on the seabed on a sunny day at the beach. I knew about tides, wave forms, the way energy transmits.

I knew the inland rivers: muddy brackish and cool on windblasted summer days. I’d floated down them on an inner tube under a bower of hanging leaves and eggshell sky, felt the fine brown silt between my toes. And the swimming pools, in every country town: chlorine entering my pores, the endless loop of the lane line; pure rhythm, movement, breath-stroke-breath.

I knew about the mammalian diving reflex: how it slows the heartbeat and drives blood to the vital organs. I knew the enlivening that comes when the body is immersed in chilly water. And endorphins: I learned about those the hard way: years of daily taken-for-granted swims, then the cold turkey of lockdown, when once, desperate, I plunged into the winter sea wearing undies and a T-shirt. I shook with shock, but it may have saved my life.

I knew about hydration, how water is most of what we are.

But nothing prepares you for love.

(not a word, but should be) is secondary. ‘Surface’ would position everything underneath as other; those hackneyed metaphors of unknown depths would come rushing in, like water through a breached hull.

What I found, in that sublime instant, was the reverse: that there is a universe unto itself, between the silvered ceiling and the ocean floor. What I found was not the unknown but the thing that knows itself, and my heart broke to be a part of it.

I’m not a fish, of course.

What flooded into my eyes: a new cast to the world (greenish); a new orientation (no longer standing on the world but floating over it); a new sense of scale (suddenly I was big, but not for long…); a new mathematics of movement as my mind, long used to calculating trajectories in two dimensions, grappled with a third: ten vertical metres of water, trafficked on all levels.

To be specific: I was a few hundred metres off the Tantabiddi boat ramp, near the tip of Western Australia’s North West Cape.

We’d motored out to a sanctuary zone on the Ningaloo Reef.

It was a quick test run, just to ensure the boatload of tourists could in fact swim, before we went into the ocean proper.

But a lifetime of not seeing coral reefs meant I took my first sight of one like a hit of heroin. My mouth would have gaped open, if that wouldn’t have meant drowning, or at least having to surface.

I was there to swim with whale sharks (so many tourists are), but the whole of it – the moving parts and the fixed, the aquasphere in which those parts moved and grew – drove out all thoughts of sharks. The coral was not bright, or even colourful – more a range of grey-greens and tans – but its multifarious shapes (mushrooms, fans, brains, leafless fingers with bright tips, a kind of corrugated-cardboard spiral structure, all overlapping like sketches in an artist’s notebook) made colour a moot point.

Colour, anyway, was the fishes’ department. It wasn’t about the colour of any single fish (though any single fish could make you weep for beauty). It was the endlessness of that colour. As soon as one flock of flying neon-blues passed by, a yellow-lipped, trout-shaped, zebra-striped creature would swim into view; then a parrotfish so garish I wanted to say: just make your mind up, will you?

I am the faithful type, or stubborn. I am long married; same house for 20 years; I have my summer beaches, my favourite break, returned to year on year. I have my pool, where I have history. I am, too, a cold-water person. Heat makes me lethargic. The tropics would never be my thing.

Then I plunged into a troubled sea. I was wearing a rented wetsuit, an ill-fitting face mask and a snorkel that tasted of disinfectant, with disturbingly gnawed edges. I’d snorkelled before: ten-minute, shallow-water stuff. But this was the Indian Ocean or anyway its edge, full fathom five. The wind was high, the waves big enough to hide my fellow tourists – and our guide – from view as we bobbed about like discarded plastic bottles. The boat was already out of sight when I found the mouthpiece and slid under, watched the silver surface-line go past.

That division: air and water. We call the top of the sea the ‘surface’, but that can’t be right. ‘Surface’ would imply that the outside – the atmosphere – is primary, and the aquasphere

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Seeing Ningaloo

There was the scale of it: the depth, near-endless visibility all round. There was the movement: not just of fish flicking through dappled light, or the slow shuffle of sea-stars, but also the current, rushing somewhere in service to the tide. A school of long-nosed barracudas, almost transparent, faced into the underwater river and– –and I was called away, told to get back to the boat, to grip onto the rocking stainless-steel platform and somehow haul my weight out of the water. Like a child, all I could think was: Again!

But we were there for whale sharks, so the boat began heading out through a gap in the reef. Morning tea was served.

Beyond the reef is the drop-off. This is the bathymetry that gets scientists excited. The sea floor can be 100 metres deep only six kilometres from shore. The clear water means light penetrates unusually far. This not only makes the ocean easier to study, but creates a high level of ‘community heterogeneity’ – a bucketload of different creatures.

Lack of access has saved it, until now. After colonisation, a few sheep stations utilised the land. Whalers operated on and off. During World War II, the Yanks built a base high on the cape, giving rise to the town of Exmouth.

In the 1950s and ’60s, itinerant workers started extracting fish and crays. One reported taking ‘three or four hundred pounds of crayfish a day’.

A few hardy tourists trekked up the dirt roads to camp on the beach and stations. In the late ’60s, the town of Coral Bay staggered into being, about a third of the way down the reef.

In the 1970s, amateur naturalists began taking an interest, and CSIRO came looking for resources to exploit. The highway from Perth was sealed in the ’80s, and in 1987 nearly 2500 square kilometres of the reef was declared a marine park.

Developers began plotting a resort and marina at Mauds Landing, near Coral Bay. Some locals welcomed it; others, backed by celebrities like novelist Tim Winton, were horrified and staged an ultimately successful resistance.

That started the reef and coastline towards a UNESCO World Heritage site listing, awarded in 2011. Not everyone was pleased: pastoralists saw their holdings and income (including from camping fees) threatened, and fisherpeople felt squeezed out.

But World Heritage status is catnip for tourists. Which brings us back to me, having morning tea, in search of a sea monster.

Tourists: we’re tourists, every one of us, excepting the Indigenous people of the land. Places like the Ningaloo Reef are threatened by us, and the only thing protecting them is us.

A Western Australian premier once said that Ningaloo was ‘in danger of being “loved to death”’. Western Australians know Ningaloo, but the rest of the country was late to notice it, transfixed as we were by the showy and more available Great Barrier Reef. Ningaloo (Nyinggulu to the Baiyungu people) is a coral reef, 300 kilometres long but at times only a few hundred metres wide. It clings to the North West Cape, 1200 kilometres north of Perth, separating scrubby desert from the continental shelf. It’s a fringing reef – a pretty word, ‘fringing’, a word for tassels and little girls’ hairdos – running parallel to a beach that backs onto a narrow plain that gives way to a low, dry mountain range.

The cape is like a pinkie finger protruding from a clenched left fist. From the shore, you can see waves breaking on the outer edge of the reef: that’s the end of the continent. After that be monsters.

The outer reef protects 5000 square kilometres of lagoon that feeds on the tides, spawns young fish and turtles and just generally sits there being flat-out gorgeous.

13

ISLAND

I’d turned 57 the day before. All through the pandemic, through months of lockdowns, I’d made lists: Where I’ll Go When This Is Over. Slowly, Ningaloo rose to the top.

In July 2021 I’d had a dream. I was floating in clear water, rising and falling on hill-like swells, schools of stingrays drifting by beneath me. At the time, I wasn’t allowed to go to a swimming pool, much less a beach. By 2022 that dream had found a focus: I knew that Ningaloo would be a place I loved.

Borders came down. I made plans, booked flights, scrolled through galleries of underwater shots. What was I dreaming of? What draws a person to a place?

There’d been rumours. There was a place, a scrap of land.

There was a reef, untouched. The rumours grew louder; the outline grew clearer through the watery haze that was my life.

But why this place? Sure, it was famous, formally recognised by the highest authorities for being so darn beautiful. It had captured other people. That didn’t mean it would capture me.

I’d seen thousands of photos of other places, equally beautiful in their way, and I’d thought ‘oh, nice’, not: ‘There. There it is’.

It was partly about the water. I like being in water, subject to its whims. And it was the light, the way it stabbed through the scene in photographs. It was the indecipherable Morse code of the whale sharks’ markings. It was the frantic signalling of the ghost-crabs’ pincers, urging me: come closer. It was the sheer faraway-ness of the place. It was the difference between home (my beloved cold-stone laneways, the European autumn trees, the low grey clouds, the sluggish brownish opaque river) and that place (sunlit, open, warm, turquoise, red-and-coral-rainbowed).

What did I expect? Some newborn-baby wonder as I beheld a pulsating coral polyp? Some merging with the planet as I floated on my back in warm salt water under an azure sky?

There’s a Basho haiku: In Kyoto, hearing the cuckoo, I long for Kyoto But I was homesick for a place I’d never been. Naturally the Germans have a word for that: Fernweh, or farsickness, a desire for an unknown, even imagined, place.

I couldn’t wait: but I could. Perhaps reality would disappoint me. Once I’d been there, done that, the facts of how-it-was would overwrite that sense of possibility.

I fed my obsession with media: the movie Blueback (images of wild coast, a small community, a teenager befriending a grouper), Instagram (slow-moving whale sharks, beautiful young people), Tim Winton’s TV documentary (a complex ecosystem, scientists, Baiyungu elders); and planning (maps, guidebooks, bookings, where to go, what to bring).

Ningaloo was a fixed point that I approached at a fixed rate. I’d be in it soon, and then it would pass, receding just as steadily. This is life: we are strapped into moving cars that approach, arrive, then leave behind everything that is, was and ever will be.

14

Seeing Ningaloo

A five-hour flight, then I was there, on a tourist boat, leaving husband and child on shore.

We found the whale sharks. It was not sublime. It was all a bit ridiculous, a bit undignified. Rough water; the sharks swam fast. It’s hard to stay serene when the great creature you came so far to see is swimming out of sight, waggling its tail in a mocking farewell. I forgot that wearing fins you need to kick long, not swim as such; water got into my mouthpiece and I spat and blew and surfaced and chased that giant fish about the place. Whale sharks can be 12 metres long, but I can only tell you it was big; so much bigger than me. Beside its bulk and muscle, I felt small, fleshy, pink. My arms were useless sticks. I remember its gills – improbable gashes in its enormous flank – gently pulsing – and, I think, its eyes, in which I saw no emotion – but the truth is, the photographs are clearer than my recollection.

There’s a photo of me with a shark in the background, as generic as anything on Instagram: swimmer, water, blue-black spotty fish. The image is peaceful, limpid, wrong, with none of the crazy motion I remember.

In another photo, though, the shark swims alone. Light drops onto its dappled back. Underneath, midnight blue; above, a glowing halo of water. The ceiling just above the shark is mercury-silver.

I looked it up. It’s called ‘total internal reflection’ – an effect of how light behaves as it moves between mediums.

It sounds like a meditation. If only it was so: that we could immerse ourselves in water, commune with giants, reflect totally, and come out new.

That’s what I was seeking on the reef: some watery place where I could see my self again. Some vessel for the roiling liquid of my stress and angst and post-lockdown exhaustion.

Somewhere I could hear the still small voice that life drowns out.

There I go again: making it about me. There we go again.

We can’t help it. When we talk about this kind of love, we talk about ‘resources’; about what we ‘value’; about ‘knowledge’, held like a title to land.

Knowledge. While I was writing this, an email popped up. ‘How do we decide which coral species to underwrite in a warming future?’ it asked. The linked scientific paper proposed a system for choosing which corals to save, which to let fade away.

Science knows the reef as lists of species, sets of data. At Ningaloo, the unknown outweighs the known. In Exmouth, there’s a handsome visitor centre, built in the outback vernacular of corrugated iron. Behind it is the Exmouth Research Laboratory, where scientists work in facilities that ‘perfectly simulate conditions in the ocean’.

The lab bears the logo of the Minderoo Foundation, the philanthropic arm of billionaire Andrew ‘Twiggy’ Forrest’s empire. Twiggy has an actual PhD in pelagic ecology. He’s pouring millions into reef research; he’s also redeveloping a caravan park at the tip of the cape as an $85 million eco-resort.

Love takes many forms.

Tourism knows the reef another way: as one academic put it, ‘attaching monetary value to natural capital is a way to account for its use and impacts in the market’.

We justify our presence – our bothering the sharks, our camps, our roads and toilets – by pointing out how it feeds the local economy; how it creates jobs and replaces more harmful activities, like fishing and, god help us, whaling. It’s a language that politicians understand.

And if that’s not enough, there is an entire field of study that suggests that topophilia – love of place – is real, specific, and moves people to do better; to not only protect the place they love, but to broaden that defence to all of nature. To know it is to love it; to love it is to care for it; to care for it is to care for all. Or something like that.

15

ISLAND

One tourism study tried to pin down what people loved about Ningaloo. The researchers gave tourists cameras, then talked to them about the photos. Unsurprisingly, people loved the beauty, the recreation, the social side. But there was a fourth factor, scientifically known as ‘everybody’s happy’. The interface of land and water allowed everyone in the group to find something to do, which ‘reaffirmed a strong emotional connection with Ningaloo as a place’.

After the whale shark swim, we left Exmouth in a rented Hilux ute, loaded with rented camping gear, towing a rented kayak. At our rented campsite we set up, noted the signs explaining how to greet a dingo, and then set out to sea.

The nine-year-old said he’d paddle all the way to the reef, and he did. Once there, he put on a comically large and yellow life jacket and commenced to float, face down, while I orbited him like a curious seal.

We saw: convictfish, parrotfish, sweetlips and wrasse. Emperors, barracudas and blennies. Schools of tiny blue damselfish or maybe chromis; fish with spots, stripes, stripes-with-spots, and spots-with-stripes, patterns like ribbons, patterns like mazes, patterns like shadows on the seabed. We might have seen needlefish and hawkfish, coralfish and cardinalfish, razorfish, snapper, lizardfish, mullet. There was definitely at least one blueblotch butterflyfish, and a bridled monocled bream.

Most of all we saw the shifting constellations, like a kaleidoscope on fast-rotate: a pattern, a contrast of colour, a flash of blue or red, and it was gone.

When the sun’s rays left the water, the gloom underneath was instant. I felt for the first time that dread of the deep. We climbed into the kayak, pointed the bow to the shore.

This was our routine: emerge from the tents, gape at the sunrise, eat, kayak at places with names like Turquoise Bay and Oyster Stacks, gape at fish, turtles, coral, go home, eat, gape at the sunset. Everybody’s happy.

At a beach called Osprey, we paddled to a buoy near the outer reef. With the kayak moored, we were free to swim together. I explored a long underwater ridge encircling a sandy benthic plain, and found a bright purple coral – pocillopora – standing alone on the sea bed: an underwater burning bush, trimmed with tiny black and white fish like Christmas baubles. I marked the place and went to fetch my family: this was important.

When I swam, I could hear the air wheezing in and out of the snorkel, like Darth Vader in full menace mode. So sometimes I’d hold my breath, coasting for barely a minute on the air my lungs could hold. It reminded me: this is not your world.

There were no showers, just twice-daily cleansings in the ocean. My skin, my hair, turned salt.

The weather was kind: sunshine, blue skies. It was June, and we’d flown directly from our home near the Southern Ocean, where snow season was beginning. How hot it must be in summer, we said, how oppressive. And what about the cyclones?

That’s another problem with how we treat the world: partial knowledge. I, and most tourists, will never feel the seasons of the North West Cape. It’s just too extreme, so we opt out.

We break the known world into fragments to rearrange at will.

The reef’s sanctuary zones – where fishing is prohibited – are defined to six decimal places of latitude and longitude. The fish swim right through those borders.

In my tent at night, I could hear waves breaking on the shore, but also another sound, like a huge animal breathing in its sleep: the Indian Ocean beating at the outer reef.

By the last day, we were proprietorial. The idea of someone else in our campsite! But go we must, to Coral Bay, and a final quest: the manta rays.

We went the long way round. The land was arid, reddish, dotted with enormous termite mounds, more coral-coloured than the coral.

We drove into town towards a blinding sunset, with the full moon rising behind us. Coral Bay WA: population around 250, or 2000 if you count the tourists. The caravan parks stretched on forever; rows of gleaming vans and RVs, boats and 4WDs. Almost every business ran manta ray tours. The next day, we joined one.

Inside the lagoon, the sea was calm. We (OK, our spotter plane) found a ray in an area without coral: a sandy-bottomed stretch of peace.

We jumped in, lined up, waited: the ray swam into view.

It was a gliding rhombus, four metres wide, flattened at its leading edge; a dark grey figure on the golden ground of sand.

After the whale sharks, I was prepared to work for my fish, but instead I joined its journey – gliding too, a few metres to its right and well above. My finned feet matched the rhythm of its beating wingtips. It swam: I swam.

Then its body tilted subtly, like a jet about to bank. I pivoted; swam back the way we’d come. It followed, drew parallel, and I felt we could dance on that way forever.

Until it was the next group’s turn.

16

Seeing Ningaloo

We moved on to reef sharks and turtles at their ‘cleaning stations’ – corners of the reef where wrasse attend to customers in underwater salons, picking parasites from their bodies.

We swam to a deepish section and the guide pointed.

Cameras clicked. I gazed at the half-dozen grey forms ten metres down. Then something snapped into focus and I saw where I was: in the ocean, with sharks. Not big dumb gorgeous whale sharks with their gummy mouths and wavering rows of spots; these were classic shark-grey, mean-looking fish with sharp-edged tails and fins and wedgelike, bitey snouts.

Again I felt my smallness, my pink fleshiness. Again I glimpsed the dread of the deep.

But then: the turtles. Six of the world’s seven turtle species have been seen at Ningaloo, but in practice, they’re almost all green turtles. They floated like ovoid rocks, big carapaced cows, nibbling sea grass, rising for a breath. We discovered one spread-eagled on a massive brain coral, head up, tail down, patiently enduring the attentions of the wrasse, spotlit by sunbeams. I memorised the image.

I think about that coral study, about choosing what species to save. Those clouds of fish: the packed-tight corals. The reef, all 300 km of it. Which atom, which species, which shade of blue, can we afford to lose? The whale sharks? The green sea turtles? The velvet-green and red moon wrasse, or the twotone dartfish? Which would you dispose of?

For a littoral zone where land meets lagoon meets ocean, matching words to place is hard enough, let alone trapping it in metrics. I wonder if the heritage listing, the sanctuary zones, the rationed camping, are just another way to fool ourselves.

We talk about ‘caring for the earth’. This is the new lie: we’ve replaced using the earth with taking care of it.

Slipping into the warm water reverses the perspective. To float motionless until the schools of fish re-form around you.

To become part of a place instead of an observer: to surrender to biophilia.

I thought I knew water, until I pitted myself against a ten-metre shark with business elsewhere; until I watched an octopus shrink from my shadow, cycle through the colours of sea, then sand, then rock, then vanish altogether. That first day, there was a moment when my vision was split between the greenish wind-whipped surface and what lay beneath. That feels like where we are now: choosing which way to go. q

Back in Melbourne, cold and bereft, I stalked the reef: scientific reports, tourist websites, and histories. The old-time tales were confronting. I did not need to know what ‘beautiful eating’ there is in a parrot fish. I read an estimate of 50,000 turtles slaughtered, of thousands of cowrie shells ‘cleaned out’. I read, too, about climate change, acidification, eco-collapse.

I suffered visions of the future: bleached coral, bloated floating fish, no fish at all. I pushed them away like water; like water, they closed back in. And that’s only global warming: the developers and exploiters haven’t gone away.

We’ve agreed these places need protection, and that’s a start.

Protection from the loving-to-death and from the taking: fish, minerals, oil. Protection, always with a bottom line.

It seems like all along we’ve been asking country the wrong question: some version of what is it for? How often do we ask: what is it?

Jenny Sinclair lives and works on Wurundjeri and Dja Dja Wurrung land. She was joint winner of the 2019 Nature Conservancy Nature Writing Prize, and shortlisted in 2021. Her nonfiction books are Much Ado About Melbourne and A Walking Shadow. Her nonfiction and fiction have appeared in Island, Griffith Review, Meanjin, Best Australian Stories, The Age and on ABC radio.

Images: Elianne Dipp, Kammeran Gonzalez-Keola - Pexels (edited)

This essay was shortlisted in the Island Nonfiction Prize, which was supported by the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund.

17

ISLAND NONFICTION PRIZE SHORTLISTED

18

O

ne morning, of many, when things, like life, were the same across days, ones in which, though each unique, I had slept and woken and worked and slept and woken several times in succession such that a progression of rising tension, climaxing action and denouement slid each from the last, each into the next, now here, then there and became a narrative where I (our intrepid hero!) was its protagonist, one of eating, sleeping, of writing and studying, of commuting, of repeatedly entering my office at the university, often, as that morning, to the ping of an email:

sensation of being in the world and connected to others again, like my presence is felt by people and I’m feeling theirs, so yeah, I’m feeling really great and purposeful and, like, more than alive; like not just connected to other people, but like the universe.

GP: (pausing) We may have to adjust the medication, but we’ll need an appointment with a psychiatrist to do that. Now if Dr Parsons is no longer available I can give you a referral for someone else… there was more talking, but most of it boring, and I was already thinking about quantum mechanics, about this paper I’d read that said how consciousness collapses the wave function of the particle, which means that when new information is being injected into the universe, as in the fact of the position of the particle, what’s being injected is actually consciousness, conscious thought itself, and so while I was writing down notes from the GP (‘only one psych in the state taking on new patients’…‘long wait list’) I was realising that my feeling of connectedness was really me becoming aware of how much information was being injected into the universe by my existence, but also how the injected information was the universe itself (because, of course, the universe is made up of particles and our minds put them into place) so that it’s not as neat as just a neutral space we both, the barista and I, existed in; the space was the collection of things happening; the space was my face and hers, the mutual recognition on both of them creating a small soy latte like a specifically positioned particle, this of course based on previous orders from the same face (with the regularity of a narrative) and so time is also established, not as an abstract container in which things happen, but birthed by those things happened and happening (!) and once this is realised it is impossible to ignore, that all around you all the time are facts being created: the fact that I finished the call with the GP without a new script, that I wrote a whole paper in a day, the fact that I had days and days of this productivity shaped into a story called Last Week, but how this story doesn’t seem to end because even right now as I’m getting my remaining prescription filled at the chemist I can hear that it’s raining outside and I’m struck again by just how many things are happening at once! rain really is absurd, I realise: outside, down from the sky and onto the roof there are a million billion drops of water (and our hero’s mind shuddered to think about the lives of the microbes inside them) crashing and splashing onto the ground and breaking into a million billion more, each, and colliding and joining and so there are new drops and it’s loud and getting louder and

We thank you for contacting us. Unfortunately, Dr. Parsons is ceasing his private practice and is no longer taking on appointments. You will need to go to your GP and get a referral for a different psychiatrist.

Kind Regards, Clinical Administration at The Hobart Clinic

and so, scrolling a phone and feeling fine and collecting a coffee from the café where my face, clothes and order were remembered by the barista, meaning of course that I’d solidified for them in their story with the frequency of my appearance in the sequence of my own day, one which then included returning to my office, watching all my plants bend toward the window and spinning them around as I did each morning so they’d slowly grow straight, with their leaves and little branches filling out the room with greenery, like the room was alive and like a little Gaia, a self-sustaining organism I lived in, and in which I worked: I wrote emails, drank coffee, read papers, wrote papers, drank coffee, drafted seminars, watched videos of Neil the Seal, more coffee, Zoom meetings, Neil, coffee, and, at lunch, called my GP: GP: Hello there, you made a phone appointment with us.

How may I help you?

ME: Hi, yes I’m good and how are you? I was wondering if I could get a new prescription; I’ll need a refill of everything I believe. Just. Ah. Yeah. I just got an email saying Dr Parsons isn’t taking appointments anymore but I was hoping I could just get a refill of my prescriptions for now.

GP: Okay (typing) so I’m seeing that we’ve been on this dosage for a few months now. How have you been feeling?

Do you feel like we’ve got the balance right?

ME: Oh yeah, absolutely, I feel really good! I’ve been super productive lately and really feel much more alive than usual.

Even just getting coffee this morning the barista remembered me from the last time I got coffee and I just had the amazing

19

ISLAND

the louder it gets the more the sound of birth and death and transformation fills my ears and shakes the roof of the chemist so the lady handing me my meds has to speak up against the pounding, and against the rivers running in the gutter and the puddles on the road being sprayed about by passing cars and to think of the joy of the parched plants in the gardens and parks and it’s all so miraculously alive that while she’s saying ‘this is– this is your last refill!’ I can barely contain my laughter and then I’m stifling giggles in the face of the cashier because the punchline to this joke is quite difficult to explain, but only gets funnier the heavier the rain becomes but look! just as I step out it stops; someone must be watching, knowing that I didn’t bring an umbrella or raincoat and knowing that I have holes in my shoes and when I’m walking home it smells like rain, like all the plants are opening up (their pores?) to take it in but I don’t get wet and every light turns green for me on the way home and if it doesn’t I just run across because the traffic is light and I’m fast and behold! just when I get home the rain begins again, but this time louder and heavier and it shakes my small apartment, rattling the windows and doors and all night I lie on the floor, my senses are as open as plants’ pores, cackling at the rain, the sky, the earth, the universe; daring them all to burst through the roof and swallow me whole and all the while laughing, gasping, crying with laughter, with living with life with everything around me! Me! Me! So, bipolar disorder is a mental illness characterised by extreme shifts in mood. Periods of elevated mood are called mania or, when less severe, hypomania. During these periods, sufferers may feel energetic, have disrupted sleep or be restless, euphoric or irritable. Periods of low mood, known as depressions, may be accompanied by sadness, exhaustion, self-hatred, disrupted sleep and suicidality. Episodes of mania (in bipolar I) and depression (in bipolar II) may also be accompanied by psychosis, in which the sufferer has trouble determining what is real and may experience hallucinations, be they aural, visual or tactile, and delusions, including grandiose, paranoid, somatic, bizarre or erotomanic. Bipolar (formerly manic depression; formerly circular insanity; formerly madness; formerly demonic possession) is highly inheritable, but various environmental and psychosocial factors can also induce the condition. Medications exist to help people cope with bipolar, but it is a lifelong and often debilitating illness, with a fatality rate, via suicide, of between 4% and 19%, though 25% to 60% of sufferers will attempt suicide at least once.

That’s what a psych or essayist would say, anyway. It’s a succinct spiel; a roll call of signs and symptoms across a neat divide of ups and downs. It’s how it’s described to you in hospital or therapy, and it’s how you’ll go on to describe it to friends, family and colleagues. I used to expect that mania and depression would be like that, like two sides of a coin, with your lucid periods (living) occurring during the tumble from a flicked thumb to a table.

Would that it were. I think a duality, a polarity, would be easy to explain and put into a story, to fit along the nice train tracks of a narrative. A classic tale of contrast! A kind of Jekylland-Hyde-before-and-after, here-and-there, then-and-now, with some delicious little foreshadowing thrown in. Moods would swing to their zenith, crash down to their nadir; elated one day, near-dead the next, we’d bounce around a spectrum like the happy and sad faces on the doctor’s (bird’s-eye) diagram. What glorious torture and tragic backstory! The structure writes itself, and it’s the story they tell in textbooks, or in retrospect, in memoirs, or in explaining (excusing) the behaviour or life’s work of some eccentric genius.

Bipolar is the haunt of the tortured artist, or at least the cliché of same; it is the illness of Virginia Woolf and Kurt Cobain, that which took Plath and afflicted Wittgenstein (in my opinion), the bugbear of Beethoven, Van Gogh and Rimbaud (probably), and it goes on; folk singer Phil Ochs, who became so delusionally paranoid that his protest songs had caused the US government to spy on him that he took his own life (and, cruelly, he was right); Edvard Munch, whose auditory hallucinations may have given us The Scream, a painting so profitable for the tchotchke industry that it surely balances the pain and agitation needed to create it; Nikolai Gogol, the Russian novelist whose final work Dead Souls ballooned via messianic mania from a simple story to an impossibly earth-shaping epic that would change the world and who, in his ensuing depression, burned half the manuscript and killed himself, and so many more: Stephen Fry, Ada Lovelace, Sinead O’Connor, Jackson Pollock, Schumann, Berlioz, Nietzsche, Kahlo and Kanye. Many of these can of course be disputed, but they feel like they make sense: great artists are passionate, volatile, unbound by the rules of the world; they don’t just think, but live, outside the box, seeing things that ordinary people don’t and pouring their joys and despairs into honest, original and pure masterpieces (though our hero challenges these clichés by achieving nothing of note).

20

A story-shaped life

Alack! It was nothing like any of that, neither neatly divided, divined or, alas, romantic. Episodes never begin, they’ve only ever already started; one does not wake manic one morning, but instead gathers suspicious glances. Each time you speak, you realise no one is following what you’re saying, they’re shocked by the volume of your voice (because you usually speak in such a wimpy whimper) and it’s as though they’re meeting an entirely new person. Only then do you remember the talk with your parents, or the barista, or doctor, the looks on their faces, their hesitations, were all the same, and some of them were weeks ago, and so you’re made to understand the state you’re in.

Personally, the protocol is isolation, lest you wreck relationships, scare your supervisor, or wrap your car around a streetlight by accident; you don’t normally speed, but when you’re buzzing, twitching, thinking you’re receiving facts from the universe at a rate that others can’t, how can you not respond to the intensity of the things around you? How you feel beyond alive, how open you are to the world, how much better music sounds, how pungent the smells smell, how much crisper are the colours burning in the sky each sunset and rise, the green on the leaves turning yellow, orange, red, how crisp then were their crunch underfoot (the senses get flooded; boots on leaves was a full-body experience!). The world was awake, how strongly that was felt, how potent were your hubristic beliefs in the power of your own presence, the arrogance it took to believe your consciousness created things. It’s all a silly façade, one best curtailed, contained, and that’s why there was medication. Lithium and antipsychotics in increasing amounts (both dosage and dollars) place everinsufficient caps on sanity, on the vividness of your dreams, on your desire to act on them, on your want to read, write, paint, draw, compose (indecipherable shit) at absurd volumes, on your need to speak at every instant, on the fool you’ve made of yourself at that PhD meeting, on the phone to the doctor, all that work you’ve done is unreadable babble, best tossed, and so it was; scrunched into the trash, after all it’s awful to make others suffer through (you)’re nonsense (yes, your presence needed deleting) and so let’s feel less, see less, speak less, be less.

21

ISLAND

Sequestered inside, no clean clothes to leave the house in and so home now, alone, after days, weighing up the remaining trays of medication: 500 milligrams of quetiapine daily, 900 milligrams of lithium, spilled onto the counter, and by the calendar I counted the supply: three weeks left. It would be rough, but maybe manageable. I’d had drug holidays (it comes with the poverty) and they were no fun, but with kindness and a regular routine life could carry on. I had a meeting with my PhD supervisor, and I needed groceries and so, with considered sniffing of all my clothes, I wore the least filthy outfit and stepped outside. I donned a beanie, as always. Something about it prevented me from feeling my brain could be probed; silly, I know. It’s a habit though, and habits are helpful.

What wasn’t helpful was the noise. Cars screamed by and trucks roared at me, people walked by and glanced up, staring, and suddenly my stench was in the street, in the world, being taken in and laughed at, like the people in the nearby cars who raised their heads as they passed me, those in the tall buildings looking straight down on my head and somehow seeing the holes in my shoes, seeing into my brain and before I’d reached the end of the street I was already back at my door, shaking the key into the lock (so he was trapped, the situation worse than anticipated, but by the time of this realisation it’s basically too late, too far fallen with no escape; he remembered reading their email:

segmented irregularly by this realisation, and by the little pauses to notice the degradation. Only when it’s been a week and you’re sculling curdled milk from the carton can you properly assess: yes: depression. You catch yourself crying at anything (was Bart selling his soul in The Simpsons really that sad?) and staring intently at the papers in the trash; they were still there, all those words, piles of useless words poking their noses out from the bin, so they’re burned. But your overly emotional state doesn’t seem to extend to shame; eyes sullen, beard grown, breath foul, scraping grime off your skin is your shower (if his friends and family saw our hero now, how they’d shudder!). I suppose I was supposed to compose something profound then, in that state, my memoir, my Bell Jar masterpiece (though if Gogol gave up on his, what chance did our hero have?).

I’m a worthless author, after all, and now I’m too restless to write, too restless to sleep or sit still or to stop thinking about the looks I got outside and knowing what a hideous spectacle I’d made; if there was someone (and there was someone, lots probably) who’d seen me leave the house and walk only a few metres before turning around again, how pathetic or laughable, perhaps even suspicious, that must have been and how I could never leave the house during the day because they’d see me again and know who I was and how there’s probably some website dedicated to sightings of the beanied freak. There was some time, before, when this wallowing was comfortable; the want not to wash, all your clothes were warm and worn, your bed sheets sagged around your form, crying (Bart’s soul?

You loser.) felt cathartic, and that your sadness was really yours, was who you were, gave you shape and dimension (but what pathetic dimension! The happiest you’ve ever been is depressed.) but now it’s agony, it’s punching myself in the thigh, the head, the thigh head head head just to get the voice to stop, screaming until I lose my own voice and my chest aches, just to become exhausted, to sleep, to find an end, at least a respite, from being here and from every bit of stifled laughter, embarrassing moment, of being stared at by passing cars, followed and looked at all the time, whispered behind when I walk, spied on (egomaniac) God this voice needs silencing and so I’m crawling, catatonic across a filthy floor, to the boxes of medication in the kitchen. I know the lethal dose of each or, rather, the dose that required resuscitation, that caused you to collapse in the hallway of your old house, picked up, slumped, talking to a nurse with wires on your chest, taken home to blankets, tea and tears, to support groups, meetings, to forced remembering and readjusted doses and soon it was all the same again: the pain of being awake in the world.

Pricing of appointments are as follows; Initial Consultation: $460 with a Medicare rebate of $237.45, out of pocket $212.55; 30 min Follow-Up: $220 with a Medicare rebate of $121.40, out of pocket $88.60; 15 min Follow-Up: $165 with a Medicare rebate of $78.85, out of pocket $81.15.

Wait times were a month or more, meaning even in an optimal (ha!) scenario, there was a two-week freefall between the end of medication and any chance of a new prescription (if he even had the money to buy them, which he wouldn’t if he booked the consultation).

These three weeks weren’t spent in glorious despair, hanging off the end of the bed scrawling poetry or prose. There was no fantastic intellectual adventure or torrid romance (he was no Rimbaud) and certainly nothing of a narrative. Weeks, even, like days and nights and time, then took on odd forms. There was no sense of duration, no passing from anything into anything else; nothing, in fact, seemed divided enough from anything else to be properly distinguished. It was all poisoned by sloth, stench and misery. The slow slip to insomnia means there is not a waking up but rather a continuing to be awake; time is

22

A story-shaped life

Time continues, not in neat, story-shaped episodes or anecdotes, it moves instead in and out of its own oblivion, into places where all befores and afters are nevers, and everything is only always

So I’d need to have more than that, but the horror more frightening than the memory of it all was looking now and realising I didn’t have enough (there was only enough left to tranquilise him for maybe a day, but he’d wake, and worse, before he’d wake he’d dream; he’d keep feeling, being. In his dreams, like in living, they’d all laugh at him, follow him around; every part of his being, body and soul were exposed to them at all times, and worse than that, in dreams every bad thing that could ever possibly happen happens! His mind creates that universe, a never-ending cosmos of pain and sadness stretching to infinity – and look! you’ve reincorporated the quantum mechanics bullshit like some hack fuck like some fucking memoirist like you’re giving your delusions meaning end it all) but they were all swallowed anyway.

Then there’s a headache and it's light outside, day now, now night and I lay, limbs spread in the bed, the thought of touching an arm to a leg, a leg to a leg or anything to the face grounds me in a way I can’t stand; (yes,) it suggests (you’re still alive).

And I was, slightly paralysed, my appendages weighted down by sedation, but my mind abuzz. I could hear cars passing on the street outside, shadows creeping through the cracks in the closed blinds, my neighbours repeatedly came and went, chatting to each other over the hum of the traffic, through the throbbing of my head, creaking of my throat, and, still, the whispers, that voice which speaks in a susurrus whose sibilance slices the ear, bristles the hair but says nothing solid, just a million little syllables (ssppspspspspssssppspspspspsppssppssssspsppspsssspspspssssspsss) falling and crashing like rain onto the brain from somewhere out there (in the room?) while I sit as still as I can so as not to touch myself and stop the voices (on the roof?) from noticing me but I’m being noticed, I know it; there’s someone climbing on the roof right now, two in fact, talking, murmuring, conspiring to come inside (ssspsppspspssspspsppspsssspsppspppspspspspss)

leave; get out; (sspspsppspsspssspsssppspsppssspspspspsspsss) get away; outside; nighttime; (ssssspspspspsssspspspssss)

followed; flee; cold; (sssspppssssspsppspspspsssssssspsss) running in the street in the dark; past lights; alone; but followed; (sssssppppssssssss) followed; (sssssspppppspsppspsppspspspspsspspss) so far away from myself; from my own voice; my own mind ( ); I wish it would speak to me; ground me somewhere; turn me back to a person again; (ssspppppspsppspspspspsppssss) it’s cold out here; I feel lonely;

( ) help

( ) help; talk to me;

( ) please; I’m scared;

(kill yourself ) that car isn’t going fast enough; (ssspspspsppspspspspsssspspspssss) they’re coming to get me still (do it. Jump.) maybe this bus; (coward) (sssssspspsppspspspspssppsspspsspspssss) they’re coming; a big truck (Jump now. Now. Now.) Now.

23

ISLAND

What next? I guess at some point I came home, without dying, scanned every inch of the apartment for oddities, intruders. At some point I stopped believing they were coming to get me; I took a shower. I saw the milk was curdled and threw it out, I opened the blinds. I went back to my office, wrote emails, wrote my PhD, wrote this. My plants had died in my absence, but I bought more of them and grew them and they filled the room again with green (I like plants, and I’m a good gardener).

Time continues, not in neat, story-shaped episodes or anecdotes, it moves instead in and out of its own oblivion, into places where all befores and afters are nevers, and everything is only always; manias, depressions and psychoses are not phases on a chart or chapters in a story that we endure or flip through, bipolar is our whole existence but is never anticipated. Life like this is always incomplete, always inchoate, yet too late; when we’re in them, never clearly knowing it, there is nothing outside of that state, only vague memories of being around, being a kid, being alive, in love, of so many plans fallen away or reformulated, dreams discarded, of a million missed or robbed opportunities to have lived like normal, being the same person people meet twice; a describable, knowable figure present in the minds of others, and myself, present in the world, and so perhaps a character, protagonist, a hero, at least for a moment.

And there’s no end to this, obviously, because it’s not a story. There’s no cure or closure; one way or another I’ll die with this disease, but hopefully happy, having lived, achieved, to the fullest of course, having soaked up as much life as I can by exploring, creating, cultivating, writing, painting, by thinking, feeling, and doing, by simply existing one can manifest the universe (!) as I will soon, manifesting a wry smile and birthing a coffee from the barista next morning; q

Gan Ainm is a writer born, raised and living in Lutruwita/Tasmania, currently undertaking a PhD at the University of Tasmania.

Images: Dan Cristian Padure, Alimurat Üral, daniel jensen- Unsplash (edited)

This essay was shortlisted in the Island Nonfiction Prize, which was supported by the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund.

24

ISLAND NONFICTION PRIZE SHORTLISTED

The breath goes now Jessica White

25

ISLAND

T

he blue gum had rooted itself in the black loamy soil hundreds of years before. Its thick girth was crusted with bark that sheltered ants and beetles. In summer it spread its long arms over the lawn, casting cool shade. In the evenings my brother, sister and I sprinted around its trunk in our thin cotton pyjamas, chasing the dogs. Occasionally we stabbed a bare foot on a twig and hopped, howling.

My parents, when they married, had moved into the worker’s cottage next to the gum. Not long afterward, they dug a hole at the base of the tree, placed a dead sheep in it, shovelled soil over the top and planted a pink jasmine seedling. Over the years, the vine grew vigorously, thickening and spreading over the tree’s trunk.

As a child I lay awake at night, listening to the wind rush through the tree’s leaves, breathing in the sweetness of the jasmine and eucalyptus carried through the open window.

When my mother was three, she was hospitalised with pneumonia. Penicillin was not yet widely available in New Zealand, so she was treated with sulfa drugs and placed in an oxygen tent. It took her a long time to recover, and later the medical authorities found a tear in the tent. She went home to a house cloudy with cigarette smoke, with both parents smoking at least a pack a day. Her weak lungs meant she fell ill frequently throughout her childhood. My aunt told me that my mother coughed constantly as a teenager. My father relayed how, not long after he had met my mother, they sat on the headland at Bronte in Sydney. It was a mild evening, but my mother developed a chill, which turned into the flu.

Her cough became the backdrop of our lives, a watery gurgle that overtook her while spreading mulch on the vegetable beds or watching the news.

The blue gum sheltered possums, cockatoos, galahs, magpies and caterpillars. At its hollow base sat a pair of garden gnomes and, occasionally, my and my brother’s Barbie dolls. My mother built garden beds of poppies and roses around it, as well as a rockery studded with succulents. Gardening may have been a way of orienting herself in rural Australia, a strange place after the ordered streets and gardens of suburban Christchurch.

When my brother, sister and I were small, our mother gardened so that we, forever in her orbit, would play outside.

We washed soil from freshly tugged carrots under the tap next to the rainwater tank and picked strawberries before the day became too hot. In the orchard, while she bagged ripening nectarines to protect them from flying foxes, we were told to collect mulberries from the tree. We returned to the house with purple-stained mouths, our ice-cream containers only a quarter full of fruit.

On weekdays, our mother and father walked in the garden after breakfast with a cup of tea or instant coffee. They talked about the black spots on the rose bushes while the dogs lifted their legs against the fence posts and we stuffed our schoolbags with lunchboxes and frozen water bottles. We raced out for a kiss goodbye and belted down the gravel road for the bus.

Not long afterwards, my father drove out the gate in his ute or motorbike to work on the farm.

In the quietness of the day, my mother gardened, the possums slept, and bees hovered over the dark centres of the poppies.

A lung looks like an upside-down tree. When we breathe in air through our nose and mouth, it travels down our windpipe – the trunk of the tree – into the left or right bronchus. Smaller tubes, named bronchioles, branch off from each bronchus. At the end of the bronchioles are clusters of tiny sacs, known as alveoli, which are surrounded by blood vessels. When we inhale, oxygen passes through the paper-thin wall of the alveoli into the vessels and, when we exhale, carbon dioxide moves out.

Alveoli remind me of bunches of leaves, which work in a similar way: tiny holes in leaves, called stomata, draw in carbon dioxide and water. Using energy from the sun, they turn the carbon dioxide and water into glucose (a process known as photosynthesis), and the stomata release oxygen as a by-product.

26

the breath goes now

My mother neared the end of her pregnancy with me during summer, when the heat stretched into the forties. Sweaty and heavy, she was fed up with waiting, and dug a trench at my father’s piggery to make her waters break.

Nearly four years after this event, I took ill, with an intense pain down my neck, back and shoulders. My mother, sensing that something wasn’t right, took me to the local doctor, who told her to go to hospital immediately. The closest one was an hour away. There, I was diagnosed with meningitis, an infection in the membranes surrounding my brain and spinal cord. After a precarious night, with a respiratory arrest and the last rites from a priest, I pulled through. A few weeks later my parents discovered that I had lost all the hearing in my left ear and half in my right.

As my father was busy farming, my mother drove me to appointments with the audiologist. On the three-hour round trip, she listened to the radio while I read books. The left side of my face developed more freckles than the right from the sun falling through the passenger-seat window. My mother had majored in history at the University of Canterbury and she, too, loved books. Often on the car journeys we talked about what I was reading.

These were the branches that held me firm: my mother’s hours of driving, the conversations she held with my teachers to make sure they accommodated me at school, her patient explanations of how to interact with people and advocate for myself, her unwavering steadiness against the storms of my teenage years when I could not work out how to exist in the world as a young deaf woman, her gentle hand that touched my shoulder when I buried my good ear into the pillow after a tantrum and refused to speak to or listen to anyone.

The blue gum has an extensive root system, supporting a trunk that grows firm and tall. In some countries it has been declared a weed because of its vigorous growth and tendency to suck up water.

During storms, when the tree outside the window thrashed in the wind, I asked my father if it would snap.

‘No,’ he replied. ‘It’s very strong.’

My father’s knowledge of the natural world was broad.

Often, as I walked beside him through the paddocks, he would explain the science behind cloud formations, the release of pollen from grasses in spring, or how locust storms could decimate a crop.

Before he met my mother in Sydney, he drove a taxi during the day and took art classes at night. When my parents moved to the farm, my father drove the header, crutched sheep, fed the pigs and mended fences, then painted watercolours in his studio in the evenings. He cut my mother’s flowers, arranged them in vases and used them as subjects in his watercolour paintings, a chiaroscuro of colourful blooms and foliage against a black background.

When I was 15, my father swapped farming for teaching art at a school in Armidale, and we moved to the tablelands of Anaiwan country. As he renovated a rambling 19th century house, my mother started a cold-climate garden, sowing irises and jonquils, a white wisteria that twisted over a blue trellis, three raised vegetable beds and an espaliered apple tree. She tended to her perennials with blood-and-bone, pulled out weeds, dead-headed roses, watered with a hose in the early morning on hot summer days, and cut the lawn with a pair of scissors before my father bought her an edge trimmer.

I visited my parents in November 2019, before flying to Munich to take up a fellowship in environmental humanities. The smoky air stuck at the back of my throat when I breathed. My mother couldn’t go outside because of her lungs. For someone whose daily joy was planting, pruning, weeding, digging, transplanting, mulching and watering, to stay inside was a punishment.

27

ISLAND

After I left school, I travelled south-east to the coast, where I began my training as a writer, but I often returned to Armidale for visits. At the beginning of 2015, I attended a conference on contemporary Australian literature and politics at the local university, presenting a paper on literary activism and the decaying Great Barrier Reef. My mother came to collect me at the end of the day’s presentations, parking halfway down the hill from the university. I met her as she walked up towards me.

‘There were no parks,’ she said, puffing. ‘I couldn’t park any closer. It’s annoying.’

I gestured behind me to the lecture theatre. ‘It’s only a few metres away.’

She shook her head, pulling out her Ventolin inhaler.

‘Can’t breathe.’

I frowned, waiting for her to catch her breath.

It was the first year of my mother’s retirement. She and my father were avid travellers, and that year they expected to go to Asia with my brother. As the trip approached, my mother’s apprehension grew. Eventually she conceded, ‘It’s too difficult.

I don’t feel well enough’.

We assumed that it was another lung infection, one of many that had occurred throughout her life and from which she would improve. However, in conversations that year she repeated that she couldn’t breathe. After much cajoling, she agreed to see a specialist, although it meant a visit to Sydney.

The specialist checked her into a hospital to have her lungs cleaned out.

My mother came home feeling better, but when the results of the specialist’s examination came through a few weeks later, we discovered her diagnosis was more severe than we had imagined. It was bronchiectasis, a condition in which the bronchi (those branches) are permanently enlarged after a period of inflammation. In a standard pair of lungs, the bronchi are coated with mucus to protect them from particles moving into the airways, but with bronchiectasis, the widened bronchi gather much more mucus, making them vulnerable to infection, and thus repeating the cycle. In my mother’s case, a bacterium called Pseudomonas was the cause of her infections.

It had been living in the bottom of her lungs for so long that it was impossible to treat. The only thing the doctor could do was to put her on antibiotics to suppress it, although it continued to flare up, leaving her constantly short of breath.

The trajectory of my mother’s illness was clear: the infections would continue, her lungs would deteriorate and she likely only had a few years left to live.

By the time bushfires broke out near Armidale in early September 2019, the town was on Level Five water restrictions due to the endless drought. Each person was limited to 160 litres per day, and my mother skipped showers to save her irises. The town, which was used to foggy days in winter, was now shrouded in smoke.

The machines that cleared the air were caught up in the inferno. A mature tree can manufacture enough oxygen for ten people for a year. Brett Summerall, Director of Research and Chief Botanist at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Sydney, indicated in an interview with Georgina Reid, editor of The Planthunter, that between 3 and 7 billion trees were burnt.

The loss of oxygen production from these trees is staggering.

Yet it wasn’t just trees. At least 24 million hectares were burnt, consisting of, as Reid writes, ‘shrubs, climbers, groundcover, fungi, moss: the microscopic and the magnificent’.

I visited my parents in November 2019, before flying to Munich to take up a fellowship in environmental humanities. The smoky air stuck at the back of my throat when I breathed. My mother couldn’t go outside because of her lungs.

For someone whose daily joy was planting, pruning, weeding, digging, transplanting, mulching and watering, to stay inside was a punishment.

From the cold and snow of Munich, I watched the infernos on the news. On the last day of 2019, my mother emailed, ‘Bloody hot – 34 today 36 by end of week. No rain, smoke and dust’. Nearly a fortnight later she wrote, ‘Little bit of rain in a storm here so it hasn’t forgotten how’. Four weeks after that she added, ‘We have had lovely rain here at last which has lifted spirits. Things I thought were gone in the garden have popped up albeit a little later so that is most encouraging’.

While the rain began to restore her garden, the broader damage was unfathomable. Nearly 3 billion vertebrate animals, and 60 billion invertebrates, were killed or displaced by the loss of plants and trees. Many people, such as Vanessa Cavanagh, who has Bundjalung and Wonnarua heritage, lost more than trees. Writing in The Conversation, Cavanagh explains the death of a grandmother tree in Colo Heights, on the edge of Darkinjung country, as ‘a deep hurt of losing someone far older and wiser than me. Losing someone who was respected and adored. Someone with knowledge I cannot fathom or comprehend’. It was the loss of kin.

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the breath goes now

In March 2020, when the pandemic began to move through Europe, I was halfway through my fellowship. At first, I thought nothing of the news, although my partner, who visited me over Christmas, had his temperature checked as he transited through Hong Kong airport. As the virus gathered speed, I reluctantly made the decision to return to Australia. When I arrived at Munich airport, I found that Qantas had cancelled my flight, and stayed up all night to find another one. Although, as an adult, I can manage my disability without too much stress, in situations when I don’t know what will happen or if I will hear, my anxiety soars.

When I finally reached Australia, I quarantined at my parents’ holiday house on the coast because no one else was there. They had bought the house for winter stays because the sea breezes were better for my mother’s lungs than the thin, cold air of the tablelands. I was relieved to be safe, but at the end of the quarantine I couldn’t get across the border to see my partner. Instead I waited for my parents to arrive for their winter stay. By the time we reunited, my mother was desperate for a fresh face – she hadn’t seen anyone other than my father for three months. It went without saying that if my mother caught COVID-19 at that point, she wouldn’t survive.

The house on the coast sat in a quiet cul-de-sac. Visited by brush turkeys by day and cane toads by night, I continued working on my research and writing, collaborating with my colleagues in Munich via Zoom. The connections were so bad I needed a captioner to read what they were saying. My movements were contained to the local beach, the grocery store and nearby café. I washed my hands vigorously each time I returned to the house, anxious about infecting my mother.

COVID-19 attacks the cells in the lungs’ alveoli, causing them to leak fluid. The air sacs become clogged and inflamed, affecting the lungs’ capacity to take in air. Patients who decline may be given the same apparatuses that my mother used: nasal cannulas and CPAP machines, the industrial equivalents of trees.

A few years and permutations later, she caught the virus from my father. For a tense couple of days, we waited; the vaccinations meant she pulled through. My father, also vaccinated, coughed for weeks.

I didn’t inherit my mother’s green thumb, preferring to lie under a fan with a book than dig my fingers into the soil. But as she continued to deteriorate, it seemed important to me that I try to carry out what I had learned from watching her in her garden. In the thin rim of dirt surrounding my subtropical, inner-city patio, the yuccas and the tulipwood tree looked after themselves, but the other plants looked dejected. I tried to remember to water my pots of bird’s nest ferns and bromeliads.

Large green caterpillars chewed through half of the monstera’s thick leaves. I sprayed them and my partner told me off for poisoning the ecosystem. I over-watered the grevillea, and it turned brown and died.

I tried harder. I fed my Madonna lily for the first time in years and it suddenly had enough nutrients to flower. I noticed that pieces of the jade plant, knocked over in a storm, had regenerated in a neighbouring pot. A golden orb spider built its web between the two yuccas. Putting my linen in the washing machine one morning, I saw a blue-tongued skink trundling past the laundry door. It seemed that I might be able, however haphazardly, to continue my mother’s lifelong practice of care.

I teach my students, particularly those with disabilities, not to be shy, but to advocate for themselves – just as my parents taught me. I teach them, as my mother taught me, to never use the word ‘got’ or ‘a lot’. (‘There’s always a better word,’ I explain, as she used to do.) I listen to them carefully, as my mother did when friends visited with their problems. One student, grappling with a story about a red river gum, tells me that he can’t get away from the human-centredness of the story.

‘Think like a tree,’ I suggest.

He sends me another draft. In his opening, he describes the life of a seed that has fallen from the gum, recounting its growth and witnessing of the world. While the story needs work, I am drawn to the beginning, to the seed and its old parent. Amid the persistent sorrow of my mother’s impending death, it was a sliver of silvery light.

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As the years passed, I watched my mother struggling to garden.

She often sat on the wooden edge of the raised vegetable bed to catch her breath. We never talked about what was happening but, as someone who was restricted by a disability, I sensed how frustrated she was.

Eventually, she couldn’t live without the oxygen at all. Her legs swelled because her heart didn’t have enough power for circulation. Her world dwindled to the bedroom, the bathroom, the kitchen table and the television. She was unsteady on her feet and fell a few times, once ending up in hospital, where she was lonely and bored. I was coming for a visit I had booked a few months before. Determined to leave the hospital before I arrived, she refused to take her medication.

‘What are you doing, Mum?’ we exclaimed.

‘If I don’t take the meds, the doctor has to come and see me, and then I can make sure he signs off on my discharge.’

The next day she texted us, triumphant, ‘I got out!’

After another fall, the thin skin of her legs split open. My mother finally accepted palliative care, and nurses appeared, gentle and humorous. They changed the dressings on her legs every two days and carefully explained the options for end-of-life care. Their kindness reminded me of the mycelium in tree roots, connecting the community out of sight.

Soon my mother was confined to the couch, to a chair, then to a bed that my father and brother erected before the windows, where she looked out at the garden she had tended for 20 years.

In his poem ‘A valediction: forbidding mourning’, John Donne opens with the image of a group of mournful friends gathered around the bedsides of ‘virtuous men’ who ‘whisper to their souls to go’. Some of these friends, observing carefully, say, ‘the breath goes now’.

This poem frequently came to mind as my mother’s life drew to a close. It was hard for me to loosen our bonds, woven so tightly through our car trips and conversations, the constant contrapuntal of my anxieties and her reassurances.

One morning I emerged into the kitchen, having woken unusually early. My mother was already there; even as she became sicker and sicker, she still woke up at 6.30 am and sat at the table with a cup of tea.

‘You and I,’ she said quietly, ‘we’re real soulmates’.

I dissolved into a flood of tears. ‘I don’t know what I’ll do when you’re gone.’

‘You’ll be unsettled for a while, but you’ll be alright,’ my mother insisted. ‘You will.’

Donne ends his first stanza with the words ‘The breath goes now, and some say, no’. My mother’s absence was never written in the pages of my life; the thought of it was inconceivable to me. But as I watched her sipping air to stay alive, I knew that it was time for her to go.

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the breath goes now

For months I flew back and forth to the tablelands. I slept badly and lost weight. Each time I returned because we thought the end was near, then my mother rallied and I flew back for work.

‘Don’t die while I’m away,’ I said, half-joking, as I hugged her after another trip. Her body was small and frail, her shoulders bony.

I went about my week, running symposiums for graduate students and researchers. I swam at the local pool, crying into my goggles, the world blurring. The pool is overhung by gum trees that shed leaves into the water. The rhythm of stroking laps calmed me, and when I climbed out of the pool I snapped a photo and put it on my Facebook page. ‘Looks lovely and peaceful,’ my mother commented. Busy with work, I didn’t comment in return.

We thought we had a few weeks left, but one lunchtime my mother started to decline, complaining of pain in her feet and her stomach. My brother texted me, concerned, but I couldn’t get a ticket until the next morning, with a three-hour layover in Sydney. At the airport café in Sydney I drank several coffees and tried to read a student’s work. My brother was worried that my sister and I wouldn’t make it in time.

For the first time ever, my Qantas flight arrived early.

My brother, waiting at home with our mother, said to her, ‘Dad has just gone to the airport to get Jess’. She was heavily sedated with morphine and hunched over, desperate for breath.

‘I have to go,’ she told him, but he didn’t understand what she was saying, thinking that she needed the bathroom.

When I arrived, he explained to her loudly, ‘Jess is here’. I held her hand. Her face, which had always brightened when I entered a room, remained blank. My brother’s eyes were red with tears. I couldn’t bear it and turned away to make him a coffee.

Ten minutes later, having held on for as long as she could, she exhaled for the last time.

My mother wanted her body to go to the university for science, but because of the wounds in her legs, the people at the university explained, her skin was not intact and she couldn’t be embalmed. Her next option was to be burned to ash and buried in her favourite rose garden.

The day we decided to scatter her ashes, a storm was tracking in orange across the Bureau of Meteorology’s online rain radar. We figured we had about 90 minutes before it hit. At the garden, large clouds bloomed against a slate-grey sky. We dug into the box of gritty ash with our hands and threw it against the beds of pink, white, red, yellow and orange roses. The clouds, pushing closer, took on a green sheen which meant they were holding hail.

The first drops slapped our skin as we washed our hands at the tap. Looking at the roiling clouds, we hastened to the car. The storm slammed down as my father drove slowly along the road. We were cocooned in a world of white hail, a newly configured family of four. Behind us the rain pounded my mother’s body into the earth, food for slaters, earthworms and, perhaps one day, a eucalyptus seed. q

Jessica White is the author of the novels A Curious Intimacy and Entitlement, and a hybrid memoir about deafness, Hearing Maud, which won the 2020 Michael Crouch Award for a debut work of biography and was shortlisted for four national awards. Her essay collection, Silence is my Habitat: Ecobiographical Essays, will be published by Upswell in 2025.

Images: Ameenfahmy, Nicolas Solerieu - Unsplash (edited). Dr. Yale Rosen Atlas of Pulmonary Pathology - Flickr (edited)

This essay was shortlisted in the Island Nonfiction Prize, which was supported by the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund.

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Writing Task 1 Suri Matondkar You should spend no more than 20 minutes on this section and you should write at least 150 words. IELTS Task 1 forms 33% of your total writing mark.

You are a student in Australia and have been asked for advice on the process by a friend from your home country. Write a letter to your friend answering his questions. In your letter: • talk about your daily life as a university student • provide instructions for the process • mention how you value your Australian education.

There is no need to write addresses. Start your letter with Dear.

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ISLAND NONFICTION PRIZE SHORTLISTED

Dear John, How are you? How is your family? I hope everyone is well. I am well, too. I received your letter asking about the processes for coming abroad for higher studies like I have done. I think it is a great idea. I am enjoying my studies and studying hard – there is so much to learn! Every day I go to university which is close to my lodgings. I can walk or take the tram, and both options are very easy and comfortable. There are so many flowers everywhere and the trees are lovely. This country is very beautiful.

The best way for you to undertake this adventure would be by doing your own research. A good tip would be to look up all the courses and universities online and see their reviews etc. There are many, many options and sometimes there are even scholarships involved. Plus, you can always speak with an education/migration agent for advice on which option would be the best one. They are very knowledgeable and can help you avoid any unnecessary hassles down the road.

Agent khudka dekh rahe hai, bas. It is just job for them, after all.

Ayline ke bare mein bataya, na? She came from Philippines to do this same arts degree thing I am doing, and nobody told her it was not teaching. She was teacher, you know? So many years she was teacher there that she could have just gotten some small diploma degree that would not have cost this much, and she would not have had to suffer doing all this faltu coursework. What she’s getting from doing 20,000 words on some theory, you tell me now.

Nothing, that’s what. Poor thing she wakes up at god knows what hour and her eyes have become so red, don’t think she is sleeping at all. Anyway, I helped her as much as I could, but that chutiya agent of hers, god. Bechari, that’s all I’m saying now. Aur pata hai kya? These agents get money from the universities when they get a student for a certain course. We shouldn’t blindly follow things, I know. Should do our own research, sure. But sometimes we are all little desperate, no? Mostly it is like we are playing a game, I think. Remember when we played in that computer lab after school hours? Where we had one computer for three people and had to take our shoes off? That chotu Mario fellow jumping across the screen doing his best to get the princess, the mushroom, the coins before he fell down? We are all that fellow now. Jumping toing-toing karke and just one bad jump away from dropping out.

Bhai, Pagal hai kya?

Pehle, letter kaun likhta hai is umar mein? If koi desperate for information hota toh WhatsApp kar deta, na? But that is logic and first thing about this abroad thing is that it is not logical. Don’t even know now why I came, par study soch kar toh hoga. How much tension it will bring I never thought of at all. But money is like sand in hand here, it just keeps slipping out. One dollar is like 50 rupees, haan, that much. Coriander lene you have to think ten times and lahsun is out of budget for sure. I am scared of where more money will be coming from. Every day I think of how much I have borrowed. How much interest I have to pay on loan. I am thinking if I walk these three kilometres instead of tapping myki I can save $5. And full time I am in tension about where to get job.

Sometimes I think it is like a treadmill whose speed button has broken off. I want to get in control, I want to slow or get down, but I can’t. Lectures and all nobody is looking if we are going, nobody cares and they give so many group assignments I don’t know what I am learning also. But some teachers are good, and when they are good they are just too, too good, yaar. And sometimes when you sit in those types of classes you think, wow, I am here. And sometimes you look up and you see the trees, the flowers, the never-ending green of grass and you feel like maybe there is a chance for things to work out. Plus, the country is beautiful, that much is sach.

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also there, no? Where you’ll stay when you come? Bond you need + first month up front. Then there is groceries and it is so much, you will think rehne de, nahi hai bhook aaj. And do full checkup first only, telling you now. I never thought about appendix because we are the lucky ones, na? Mummy-papa ne mehnat ki hai that’s why we’re doing all this foreign-jana-hai stupidity now. So why to take stress about appendix when you are in India? But here I think of it so much. One little pain and my BP goes up because hospital jana padha toh? Health fund people are saying they will cover some emergency things, but who knows? I don’t want to take this challenge and pay 20,000 dollars and go deeper into this loan-walla hole. And there’s other costs too. Of friends moving on, kisi ki baraat mein nachne nahi milega because ticket ki cost is just too much, families you haven’t seen in years, that slow and steady disconnect as one world moves on, closing over the space you once held while you are here trying to tear a new one into existence. Sometimes you might have to look in the mirror hard because you can’t really recognise who you are.

In your letter you wondered about the costs as well, and I’d like to address these now. These are fairly straightforward, depending primarily on where you decide to apply, of course.

For instance, if you happen to choose one of the premier universities – this country has quite a few to choose from!

– you might run up a slightly higher bill, but of course there would be a superior education attached to that cost. Then there would be the question of accommodation. Most of the bigger universities are of course in the bigger cities, and those come with costs as well. Then there will also be an upfront healthcare cost in order to apply for a visa. However, the healthcare providers have packages with student budgets in mind, so just get the cheapest one. After all, you are paying for two/three years at a shot! You may have to take out an education loan to meet all the expenses – and to show proof of funds – but this process is fairly straightforward. You can go with any of the big banks like HDFC, ICICI or State Bank of course. There are many people choosing this path so the process is quite streamlined at this point – some documentation, some collateral and you will have your sanctioned amount just like that. This is something an education agent will be able to guide you through as well, although they cannot do the actual paperwork. However, and this is a major silver lining, most of the migration/education agents I mentioned previously will be free of cost! Isn’t that wonderful?

Another thing you will have to do is meet the English language requirements. These vary based on which university and/degree you ultimately opt for but are generally quite standardised. There are a variety of choices for the English language test, and I, of course, took the IELTS. It was a great experience, very easy to sit and the results arrive quickly. Oh, and as a bonus, the IELTS now offers a subsidised retake!

So, if for any reason you do not meet the required score in just one skill, you can simply retake it for a lower fee – $280 only – instead of paying for and taking the whole test again!

Paisa, paisa hota hai in the end, that’s all. You don’t need to pay for the agent because I said no, the university pays them for bringing you along. Tu bas keh de unhe that you want to go to do this degree and the bigger it is the better treatment you will get, pakka. You say you want Masters from Melbourne University, they might call for samosa chaat. And the loan, god, that is a hell of its own. And on top of that student loan – which they will take your ghar as collateral for – you have to borrow paisa from aunty-uncles because even a sanctioned loan amount is not liquid enough. Then other fees are

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writing task 1

Language proof puchenge, for sure. Don’t try to argue with them and show them report cards and marks. They don’t care if you were reading English in 1st standard and then 2nd standard and then 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th, 8th, 9th, 10th, 11th, 12th and then again in BA and MA – mera soch, Master of Arts bhi English Literature hi tha. They don’t care because they will say that your whole education could have been scam. Or they may say that just because you use angrezi, it doesn’t mean you use the right type. Puch maat if it is language or toothpaste that they are so stressed about using the right brand. So just switch your brain off and take the test. Aur woh test toh kutch aur hi hai, you will feel like you are back giving boards again. Rukh, I will tell more because batane layak hai yeh sabh. So, in this IELTS no, there are four parts.

First, they make you listen to some conversations on headphones and fill in the blanks. Easy stuff. But it moves fast and sometimes you make mistakes. And it is not real life, no? You can’t say, ‘sorry, could you please repeat that?’. So, you will lose marks. Second, they have reading, woh comprehension type thing where they give you one- or two-page ka excerpt and do that same thing they did in school where they make you answer questions. It is boring, that’s all. All of it is so boring. They will ask you ‘give heading for this paragraph’ and it will be about something like water erosion data.

Then they have this writing task which I am doing now. Kutch bhi likh doh, just make it in their type of good English and remember to address the points they talk about. I always use ‘Dear John’ in my letters because ‘Dear Pradnya’ bol diya toh they might be like ‘Oh, a typo!’ and automatically cut some marks. And for the fourth and last test, they make you sit in a small room and talk to someone.

That talking one is something else only, I’m telling you right now. Three times I have done this test and each time it is some weird stuff. First, they will ask ‘Hello, how are you?’ and they are not really asking, they are checking how and with what accent you respond. Then they will say, ‘I will ask a few simple questions,

please answer in one line or two’ and the questions will make you feel like you are in third standard again because it will be ‘Where do you live?’ or ‘How do you like to spend your free time?’. Bas, you have to say things that they can tick off, they are not really interested in any creativity and don’t care if you live in a box or a mahal – they just want to hear you make sentences and keep making them until they ask you to stop.

Phir they will give you a topic and say, ‘You have two minutes to prepare and then you must speak for five minutes at a stretch on this topic without taking a pause. I will stop you when the time is up’. Aur kya topics rehte hai, che, yucks. Ek bar mujhe mila, ‘Discuss the golden age of cinema,’ aur dusri bar, ‘Describe a time you were moved to tears’. Movie critic club hai ya therapy session, yaar? But you talk because you must. And you must talk and be coherent, stay on topic even if the topic is bakwas and no sense. And so you talk and talk and talk until they finally stop you, and while you are talking you have to be careful not to pause to think or say ‘um’ – because remember, they are not checking your ability to actually use a language, but to be ‘fluent’. Fluency matlab someone who always has the perfect words on any subject, ready to go. Yaar, even ChatGPT blinks three times to think if you ask it to write 200 words on a random topic and give it no other instructions, but we are expected to see these topics they give and say chalo, ready set start. And it is not over with that much, because then they will ask you more questions – not even about whatever you talked, just about anything at all. Once they asked me about aged care and what my opinions were on the belief that aged care was good for some older adults. Aur mujhe bas kehna tha, mujhe nahi pata, yaar. Not because I don’t know language, but because hamare mein they stay at home with us only and I have never thought beyond that much. Abh lack of interest aur information ke liye bhi marks cut karenge kya? Short answer? Haan.

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Tujhe pata hai, kya? International students ke fees domestic logon se zyada rehte hai, woh bhi by quite a lot. Meri degree, woh Master of Arts writing aur literature, is $25,000 for domestic students per year, and for internationals it is $35,200. And fees go up har sal. Iske upar, you have to think that international students have to pay all money up front – iske liye hi you have to do all that loan-woan drama. Then there are other costs, like we don’t get Medicare which is idhar ka healthcare for citizens. And don’t forget about Centrelink, which is like a government thing where they give paisa if you are unable to work. Dole bolte hai idhar, dole. We don’t get that and that is fair because this is not hamari country, after all. These are not complaints, by the way, facts hai bas. Kyunki without taking any benefit also they think we are cockroach, sach. Itna kitkit they will do about international students, someone would think we don’t pay tax over here. We are paying taxes, don’t worry. And we are doing whatever jobs we must. Because we want to make it work, we want to learn, we want to earn aur usmein kya wrong hai, bol?

IELTS is definitely one of the easiest and most convenient ways to get your language score requirements out of the way!

Yeh har bar bolenge, par ek cheez they won’t keep telling is that this score of theirs will expire in just two years. Just forget all logic, because they don’t care that you use this language every day in this country, or that you have just finished studying for two/three/ sometimes four years in an English-based degree. As if you can easily misplace or lose a tongue that you are using every day, one that you might have even had in your head since you were a kid. Full madness, how it expires like this? I mean bhasha hai ya Milkmaid tin? But it doesn’t matter what the logic says and so every two years they will tell you, aajao bachon, test time again. You might naively think that getting your global education from their world-leading universities will solve this problem, par nahi yaar. Teri degree valid rahegi, but uski English toh will be expired in 2 years + 1 din, bas. Mere sath hua, na? Arts degree kiyi thi, English-heavy woh bhi. Writing, reading and editing English words – subjects ke naam dekh le, ‘Foundations in Narrative Theory’, ‘Retelling Myths and Tales: Classic to Contemporary’ aur yeh walla dekh, ‘Sex, the Body and American Poetry’ all hi-fi fancy stuff – but still after two years they told me I needed to prove language again by retaking test and getting a proper score.

Which just means, come here beta and spend one full day + $445.

I am so excited you are considering this path and can only conclude by saying that I am grateful for the chance I have right now. I have no big regrets about taking this leap and I would not trade this opportunity for the world.

Ultimately, while there are a few hoops you may need to jump through, I cannot recommend the experience enough. Not only will you have a wonderful adventure and gain a magnificent education, but they value their international students a great deal here. International students actually contribute massively to the economy of this country, something like $30 billion a year! Imagine that. And so of course while there is some hardship in terms of adjusting to a new country and finding your feet, it is very worth it in the end.

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writing task 1

Everything bad I have said is true, but yeh bhi toh sach hi hai.

Even though everything is tough, I would not give up this chance.

This country no, is just wow. And it has given me so much, yaar.

That’s why I always feel like I must give it also in return, and I think a lot of us international people feel that way. We make so many friends, build our own little communities, struggle and struggle and do hard stuff and get cursed out on phones and in person but eventually – if we are lucky, I guess – find a place where we start feeling like we really belong. Start feeling like that version of ourselves we have always wanted to become, you know?

So, it hurts, of course it does, when you see that ultimately there might be a ‘the end’ that cannot be put off. And it isn’t anyone’s fault but ours, after all. We have fattened ourselves on this idea that if we keep giving more we will eventually become eligible for something permanent, but nobody said that was true. Nobody promised us anything permanent, but it’s like you start believing in bachon-types stories after a while here. Like if you just keep pushing then eventually the pumpkin will magically turn into a carriage. I guess what I’m saying is pyaar ho jata hai idhar ki zindagi se. Situation pagal hai, country pagal hai and process pagal hai, but dil toh pagal hai – itne Bollywood pictures dekhe hai na idhar aake, by god, feeling is different here. Bahar kutch bhi

chal raha ho, inside theatre we are seeing SRK and shouting our hearts out. Makes you feel that Bollywood-walla magic, you know?

Like maybe everything will be okay and you didn’t gamble all this time, money and hope for nothing. Kyunki woh lottery-gambling jaisa feel toh aata hi hai with this process, that is unavoidable.

Sometimes I think we are all stooping shadows sitting with overly bright eyes in the hazy phosphorescent dark, flicking away every last chance for another pull on those slots. And always you will hear that someone two machines over has won the jackpot – become PR, got the big job and their life is settled now – so you rush to that machine because it seems hot, and you’ve invested so much you may as well invest a bit more and try your luck. But it is like all casino stuff, at some point you have to know there is very little luck to go around and you have to cut the loss. Because the game is usually a little rigged – the house always wins after all.

Let me know if you need any other information and I am looking forward to seeing you on your own adventure!

My best to everyone at home.

Cheers and warm regards, Student 23747291 q

Suri Matondkar is a recipient of the Wheeler Centre’s 2024 Hot Desk Fellowship, and her work has been shortlisted for the 2022 Nillumbik Prize for Contemporary Writing, the 2022 Island Nonfiction Prize and the 2022 Catalyse Nonfiction Prize. She is grateful for the chance to live and overthink on unceded Wurundjeri land where she obsesses over Taylor Swift’s lyrics and carefully avoids phone calls.

Images: Tyler Callahan, Paolo Feser - Unsplash

This essay was shortlisted in the Island Nonfiction Prize, which was supported by the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund.

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Interior Topographies Amber Koroluk-Stephenson Essay by Briony Downes

Amber Koroluk-Stephenson’s painting practice is well known for its distinctive blend of real and artificial landscapes and interiors. Dream-like images populated with objects loaded with cultural meaning – rubber gloves, flowers, architectural structures – are all pieced together with meticulous precision.

As the title of Interior Topographies suggests, this body of work takes a more personal turn. Partly based on KorolukStephenson’s feelings of ambivalence towards motherhood, Interior Topographies unfolds as a visual roadmap filled with signs and symbols relating to femininity, domesticity and body autonomy.

During the development of this body of work, KorolukStephenson spent time thinking about the traps of femininity and how beauty is idealised in art history, mythology and popular culture. In Gravity of Love (Madonna and Child), a pair of cones protrude from the wall of a pastel yellow interior.

They refer to a bra originally designed by Jean-Paul Gaultier in 1987 and later incorporated into the costuming for Madonna’s groundbreaking 1990 Blonde Ambition tour. Contrasting with the softness of a fluffy yellow chick, the pointy cones flip the maternal expectations of the breast to one of power and protection. As Liam Hess writes in Vogue, ‘The cone bra grabbed the public’s attention for the way in which it rebelled against the narrow definition of the beautiful female body that, for so many centuries, had been dictated by corsetry’s body-morphing strictures’.1 Describing the bra as defiantly aggressive, Hess goes on to say, ‘In place of the soft curves the corset was supposed to shape, the female anatomy became a spiky, phallic weapon, one that Madonna celebrated by exerting her dominance, sexual or otherwise’.

Striving for dominance and autonomy over our own bodies has been the concern of women for centuries. Despite laws instructing women to follow rules and regulations set by (predominantly male) lawmakers, throughout history women have been secretly helping each other remain autonomous, particularly when it comes to birth control. In the 12th century, German nun Hildegard von Bingen studied herbal medicines that aided in the termination and prevention of pregnancies.

Plants like pennyroyal and Queen Anne’s lace – depicted by Koroluk-Stephenson in Remedy (Queen Anne’s Lace) – were often used for these purposes. Going even further back in history, the ancient Egyptians advocated the use of douches and suppositories to avoid pregnancy, allowing women choice and autonomy despite the dire physical risks.

Focusing on the physical form of the anthurium flower, Koroluk-Stephenson likens its heart-shaped petals to female genitalia and its protruding central stem to a phallus.

In Captive, the anthuriums are held tightly by red thread, a visual embodiment of the fear of being bound to the domestic duties associated with motherhood. In Love Lock, a pair of anthuriums are taped to the walls of a domestic interior, with a ladder propped in one corner and a door leading to another room, the contents of which remain unknown.

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Throughout Interior Topographies, there are several direct references to art historical figures. Dawning, after Dora Maar is a homage to Maar’s 1934 photomontage Untitled (hand shell), while Man Ray’s 1936 photograph of a rope-bound female form, Restored Venus, is recalled in the multiple portrayals of figurative female busts (now unbound) present in many of Koroluk-Stephenson’s images.

In Rebirth of Australian Venus, after Rayner Hoff, KorolukStephenson alludes to the English artist’s 1927 Australian Venus – a marble sculpture of what he believed to be a representation of the ‘national body’.3 Hoff’s original sculpture was classically styled, hairless and without limbs. The body he chose was female, possessing a lithe, slender frame with ample breasts and good child-bearing hips. In Koroluk-Stephenson’s painting, the body of Venus is rebirthed from a shell and covered in pins, recalling the pointing technique developed by 18th century Italian sculptor Antonio Canova to achieve perfect proportions: proportions that, in reality, are far from realistic.

Wrapped in pastel-hued softness, Interior Topographies quietly delivers a visual sucker punch, unravelling gender role expectations from both a historical and personal point of view. Clearing a path across our complicated social landscape, Koroluk-Stephenson sifts through the detritus to reveal a trail of visual breadcrumbs leading to a female identity that fits – despite all the noise from the outside world. q

Shells, eggs and nests are also dominant and recurrent visuals. In Heartbeat, a shell is placed within an interior Koroluk-Stephenson likens to a womb, conjuring a visual reflection on nurture, care and protection, while Bend is a potent visual expression of the delicate balance required to maintain all aspects of a woman’s life – career, family and personal aspirations. Here the tightly laced legs of a ballet dancer balance on a row of eggs, physically contorting in weird angles to remain on the unstable and precariously fragile surface. Will the dancer slip? Will the eggs break? Are they fertile or barren? Despite how women feel as individuals, it is fair to argue society holds on tight to a female’s role as mother and caregiver. For many, this is a frustratingly limiting point of view. Not only do women carry the physical expectation of bearing children, once the children are born, women carry the immense mental load that comes with caregiving.

Bend recalls a monologue delivered by America Ferrera as she portrays the character of Gloria in Barbie, a 2023 movie directed by Greta Gerwig. Going viral on social media soon after the movie was released, Ferrera’s Gloria expressed her frustrations on how women must contort to meet unrealistic expectations. ‘You have to be a boss, but you can’t be mean.

You have to lead, but you can’t squash other people’s ideas.

You’re supposed to love being a mother but don’t talk about your kids all the damn time. You have to be a career woman but also always be looking out for other people. You have to answer for men’s bad behavior, which is insane, but if you point that out, you’re accused of complaining. You’re supposed to stay pretty for men, but not so pretty that you tempt them too much or that you threaten other women because you’re supposed to be a part of the sisterhood.’2 The contradictions are exorbitant.

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This essay was originally commissioned for Amber Koroluk-Stephenson’s show at Bett Gallery in 2024 and is reproduced with permission from the writer and gallery.

Amber Koroluk-Stephenson is a Tasmanian visual artist whose practice draws on the intersections between natural and built environments to explore complexities surrounding Australian identity and landscape, structures of facade, and paradoxes of taming or staging the landscape. Working across painting, sculpture and collage, her work plays on the contrasts between natural and artificial, interior and exterior, the familiar and strange to fulfil the human desire to connect with nature and make visible what is out of sight. Amber is represented by Bett Gallery, Hobart.

Briony Downes is an arts writer based in Hobart. She has written for numerous art and design magazines including Artlink, Art + Australia and Eyeline, and is currently a regular contributor to Art Guide Australia and Art Collector.

Images Page 39: Captive 2024, oil on linen, 60 × 55 cm Page 41: Gravity of Love (Madonna and Child) 2023, oil on linen, 60 × 55 cm Endnotes 1 Hess, L (2020) ‘The story behind Madonna’s iconic Jean-Paul Gaultier cone bra’ Vogue https://www.vogue.com/article/madonna-blonde-ambition-jean-paulgaultier-cone-bra accessed 21 Jan 2024 2 Gerwig, G and Baumbach, N (2023) Barbie Warner Bros 3 Art Gallery of New South Wales ‘Rayner Hoff artist biography’ https://www. artgallery.nsw.gov.au/collection/artists/hoff-rayner/ accessed 6 February 2024

Page 42: Love Lock 2023, oil on linen, 91.5 × 91.5 cm Page 43: R ebirth of Australian Venus, After Rayner Hoff 2023–2024, oil on linen, 112 × 91.5 cm Page 44: Beauty Belies (Australian Venus, After Rayner Hoff) 2023–2024, oil, gold leaf and nails on marine ply, stained Tasmanian oak stand made by Benjamin Grieve-Johnson of ‘Other Furniture’, dimensions variable

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As if to purpose Anne Elvey perhaps i’ll paint a leaf inscribed with a poem in every glance perhaps

old teachers return from ground speaking their foliate spells

when ears’ ring insists my eyes rest longmasked by privilege

perhaps

& care i’ll fathom the gap between scrutiny & dear regard

i’ll pen a song with this sprig for nib in my flesh perhaps

when gusts tighten my nerves this squall will be stave

as extinctions press against page & thefts buttress my look & vegetal

perhaps

beauty is resistant to ink words will clatter like possums over strewn leaves

hail will ping on the glass of my claim that days open to work if i reckon to utter worlds not my own i’ll refrain perhaps change will shake me & gift me cells will slow just perceptibly this body that’s borne & has fed will oblige clay & loam in their ends

Anne Elvey is a poet, editor and researcher, living on unceded Bunurong Country. Her most recent poetry collections are Leaf (Liquid Amber Press, 2022) and Obligations of voice (Recent Work Press, 2021). Intents is forthcoming with Liquid Amber Press in 2025. Anne is an honorary research fellow with Pilgrim Theological College, University of Divinity, Naarm/Melbourne, sunglintdrift.com

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City of Yes and No Steve Brock Saturday 14 October 2023 Wake up on Saturday morning and wonder at the direction life has taken. Read Schuyler’s ‘In earliest morning’ from his collected purchased from Ken at the EAF. No trace of this other than $61 pencilled faintly in the top corner of the flyleaf. I think about a story my father told me. On his way to a bookshop he saw an old man with the gait and bowed legs of a horseman. Followed him down Rundle Mall and was delighted when he walked right into RM Williams.

As a kid what struck me most was that my father found joy in visiting bookshops.

I plan my day around a visit to a shop I don’t get to now, much since it moved from the market to Adelaide Arcade. And while I can no longer follow my father’s steps I’ve become more aware of his signature gait in my own walk.

Like this Saturday morning which begins with a stroll to the polling booth and I’m trailing behind the family making up this poem as I go along wondering at how the big issues of our time are boiled down to a Yes and a No.

Steve Brock’s poetry has been published in journals in Australia and overseas including Antipodes, Australian Book Review, Meanjin, Quadrant, Poetry NZ and Westerly and in translation in journals in Spain and China. Steve has published four collections of poetry including Live at Mr Jake’s (Wakefield Press, 2020) and Double Glaze (Five Islands Press, 2013) and is the co-translator from Spanish to English of the anthologies Desarraigo: 18 Poetas Transfronterizos, (Nautilus Ediciones, 2021) and Poetry of the Earth: Mapuche Trilingual Anthology (Interactive Press, 2014).

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Sleep Petra White

Feeding my drowsing infant at zero-hour, when frost climbs the green stems of snowdrops that I will show to her in the morning, like a mother who points to the stars, as if to show for the first time their existence, revealing little by little the world, as if she tugged it on strings, and the bright indolent infant brightens in the knowledge of the world, and soon grows to outshine the mother, who gives her bit by bit to the world, with wishes, costly clothes, love that stands up on its little paws before the bitterest wind, like Coleridge wishing all seasons be sweet to his son.

Downstairs, across the dock, the woman we step past each day on our way to Tower Hill Station, sleeping in the underpass is surely cold awake, guarding with her life her life. From her darkest eyes drips dark knowledge, quite enough to feed my infant, who must be fed, like a creature of this world, on knowledge, and suffering. As if there was no other way to master those fine shadows that make firm the human soul. The silent frost, a morning apparition, slowly makes its way around the grounds of this soul-filled estate, and she wakens warm in my hands, red-faced and lovely – gentle light, snow drops, sweet seasons.

Petra White is an Australian poet living in Belfast. She is the author of six poetry collections, most recently That Galloping Horse (Shearsman, 2024).

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Land/Body/Heart Adrienne Eberhard

i. escarpment

fractured earth blood driving down through fissures

a body mapped

lifelines on a palm delicate capillaries like strands of hair

follow the line the drip

the red

expunging scarlet stranglehold

spreading as spores

pieced together they form a limb

suppleness

stretching from thigh

to knee to calf and somewhere half-glimpsed like a dream in the whorls of lichen on a tree

is the ball of the foot ready to stride out of the land lifting free of this mantle strung with stone shale scree to become human

leaving behind rectangles of rock etched with intimate parts petals of labia flower-face of anus bred in the bones of the earth this escarpment

a memory of flesh

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ii. forest

heartwood the hidden secret tumble of knotty projections

broken branches black as a wound the depths a heart’s plunge

nightmare squeeze

that is a fist clenching

an eye closing and further back the lift and scratch of scraggy sticks twigs leaning in spare fingers

stretching scrabbling they could be bodies torsos tumbled in a caress that is all suppleness and hard edges

until your own body

is drawn in

leaning swooning searching the close air

the gleam that reflects

your eye your skin in this forest of limbs

iii. lagoon silence speaks its voice drowns surf amplifies air sea’s white surge a constant swamped by dune and estuary where reeds etch calligraphy water a pale swirl of memory gulls grey against gunmetal clouds frenzied inarticulate flight an echo the sea in the sky the sky lying on the bottom of the lagoon this peace in the lee of the dunes a calm that is the play of light a lantern’s gleam falling from the sky firing in the spidery eyes of flowers world’s end sung by wind rain to humbling haunting comfort here in the body this small flare a homecoming

Adrienne Eberhard has published five collections of poetry, including an artist's book of miniature poems and paintings, with artist Sue Lovegrove, based on Tasmania's east coast lagoons. Her most recent collection is Chasing Marie Antoinette All Over Paris, which was longlisted for the 2022 Tasmanian Literary Awards.

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Milk tea Melanie Saward 50

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he first time Linda sees Pete, she’s sitting on a bench outside the Burnie Social Security office.

She has one hand resting on top of a stuffed manila folder, the other clutching her handbag.

She’s close to tears after the encounter with the woman inside and her throat is tight with the urge to scream, or sob, or both.

He’s tall, lanky and dark-skinned, and walks with a swagger that tells her he knows just how handsome he is. He grins as he sits next to her, just a tiny bit too close, but she doesn’t shift away.

‘Here,’ he says, and she looks over to find him offering a red-and-black tartan hanky. ‘It’s clean and all.’ The material is folded into a neat square, edges so crisp that she can tell without touching that it’s not only clean but ironed too. Linda bites her lip and tries to look tough, but a tear has already escaped.

He presses it into her hand. ‘C’mon, love.’

She unfolds it and wipes her face.

It’s not the gesture that undoes her, but the smell of the hanky. It is, as he promised, clean, and as the carefully pressed corners fall away, the fabric releases the floral soapy scent of washing powder. In a second, she’s in Nanna’s laundry room, the sweet hot smell of fresh linen billowing through the steam of the iron. And just when she thought there were no good memories of Nanna left.

She digs her teeth harder into her lip, but it does nothing to stop the tears.

‘That mob in there are all raging cun– dickheads,’ he says, glancing at her folder. With her hands occupied, the top has flipped open in the light breeze and through her tears, she can see his eyes darting across the paper. The words Death Certificate seem huge at the top of the page.

She flips it closed and shifts her handbag from her lap to the folder, wedging it shut. ‘Yeah, I guess.’ Scrunching the hanky in her fist, she wonders what she’s supposed to do with it now. Can’t give it back to him all sodden with tears and snot. Should she offer to wash it and send it back? Seems like a lot of work for a hanky.

‘You want a smoke?’ he says, reaching into the breast pocket of his t-shirt and retrieving a battered Alpine packet. ‘Sorry, they’re menthol. Me mum thinks they’re better for you.’

She laughs then, showing her own pack of Alpine menthols,

before taking one of his. ‘They are better for you, aren’t they?’

‘Supposedly,’ he replies, smiling as he offers her a light.

She takes a deep drag and then scrunches the hanky into her handbag.

‘I’m Pete,’ he says around his cigarette. ‘I, ahh, saw the top paper there.’ He has the good grace to look sheepish for his stickybeaking. ‘I’m sorry you dealin’ with that. But I been round the traps with that mob a bit – stoppin’ payments when someone dies and all. I dunno if you need a hand but, I’m pretty good sorting stuff out. I can help you if you want?’

She doesn’t have the energy to explain it’s all sorted now.

Nanna is dead and buried in some potter’s field in Wivenhoe, her housing commission flat that Linda grew up in already emptied, cleaned, and filled with some other old lady. It wasn’t stopping Nanna’s payments that’d upset her when the mean woman inside told her, ‘All the money paid since the death will be re-claimed, you can’t spend it’. It was that neither Social Security nor the cops nor anyone else could tell her what had happened with the stuff from the flat. What happened to the good china teacups that Nanna had so proudly displayed in the glass cabinet in the lounge? Where would they have taken the family photos?

She looks at Pete. He is handsome and nicely dressed in acid-washed jeans, a striped polo shirt and plain white sneakers. She thinks his mum – the one who insists on the menthol cigarettes and who likely pressed that hanky – probably washes his clothes too. A boy with a mum like that, no matter the colour of his skin or how many traps he’s been around, wouldn’t understand half of what she’d been through.

But she doesn’t say any of this as she takes his hand. He gives her a good, firm shake. His skin is rough and there’s a momentary flash as she imagines what it would be like to be touched with those hands.

‘Linda,’ she says, already in love.

Later, when he undresses her, he runs those rough fingertips down the silvery rows of scars that ladder from her wrists to her elbows, with a tenderness that’s surprising.

‘Not so soft, Pete,’ she whispers, pressing her lips against his ear. ‘You won’t break me.’

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2 she felt her body relax into Winnie’s. This, she’d thought, is what I’ve been looking for.

Now, she smokes the cigarette down, stubs it out and lights another one. From their flat high in the hills they can see right up over the city and out to the ocean. The orange lights along the highway twinkle and give the smoke from the pulp mill an ominous glow. The fog rolls in from the coast, mixing with the smoke and slowly covering the lights down below. When it begins to creep upwards towards the hills, she knows it’s coming for her.

Before she can finish the second smoke, she’s made a decision. Up and inside, grabs her keys, coat and the emergency torch from the junk drawer. Down the back stairs and onto the street where the Datsun is parked, its windows sparkling with a thick blanket of frost. She drives with the demister on full bore and her fingers freezing against the steering wheel.

She knows the grounds of Wivenhoe cemetery well by now and she barely needs the torch as she crunches down the gravel pathway to the potter’s field. She counts plot numbers as she goes, then she sits on the ground near the one she thinks is Nanna’s. The cold seeps up through her pyjama pants and she shivers, but it’s good; this way, she can feel herself going numb instead of just waking up one day feeling nothing.

The pocketknife on her keyring is a familiar weight in her hand. Once, just holding it was enough to comfort her and quiet the voices in her head, but she’d passed that point now.

She flicks the blade out, rolls the sleeves of her coat up, and presses the knife into her skin, waiting for the relief to come.

It’s too soon to be pregnant.

He’s happy when she tells him. He thinks the timing is fine: he has a good job at the Burnie pulp mill and he’s already got plans, he says. He’s saving to buy them a little farm out in Boat Harbour. He wants to have goats and sheep and pigs. Gardens and dogs; a place for their babies to play.

There’s nothing about these plans Linda doesn’t like. But when she tries to imagine this life – farm, Pete, baby – she can’t make it work. She tries to conjure up an image of herself as a mother, but it doesn’t matter how hard she wills it, she can’t make herself fit. The only part of the future she can picture is the garden. She wants to work out in the fresh air making veggie gardens and beds of flowers that come alive in the springtime. She wants to have dirt under her fingernails and callouses on her hands. She wants to go to bed at night with the sort of satisfying ache that only comes from working outside.

But she cannot imagine being a mum.

Everything about them is too quick. She shifts Pete’s arm away and climbs out of bed.

In the kitchen she makes tea and slips outside to sneak a cigarette she knows she shouldn’t have. Tomorrow they are due to tell Pete’s mum, and all his extended family of cousin brothers, cousin sisters, Aunties, Uncles.

There was something of her nanna in Winnie, she thought when she first met Pete’s mum. She’d looked her over with an expression of concern on her soft, broad face; just long enough to make Linda feel uncomfortable. But then she’d smiled, a wide, white-toothed grin that was almost a mirror of Pete’s, and folded Linda into a hug. Linda bit back tears as 3 When the doctor says the baby is okay, Winnie and Pete’s faces break into their matching grins and Linda’s heart sinks.

She hadn’t meant to go so deep and she wonders what would be worse: if she woke up and the baby was gone, or if she hadn’t woken up at all?

Later, when Pete goes to get his mum a coffee, Winnie pulls the hard plastic visitor’s chair right up to the bed and takes Linda’s good hand in her own.

‘Why that place?’ she asks, and Linda sees something more in the older woman’s eyes than just concern.

‘What place?’ Linda pretends not to know what she’s talking about.

‘Didn’t your old people teach you about respecting your elders? You know what place I mean: them paupers’ graves.’

Linda’s instinct is always to fib or create some kind of diversion, but there’s something about Winnie’s stare – hard but not mean, demanding but not uncaring – that makes her swallow the lie and meet her eyes.

‘My nanna’s there somewhere,’ she says.

‘She your white nanna or your Black one?’ Winnie asks and Linda’s breath catches in her throat.

She drops Winnie’s hand and narrows her eyes.

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

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4 Once, it was his family that drew her to Pete. She loved how loud and enthusiastic they were, how they looked after each other, and how they all knew where they belonged. She loved that when they first brought Andrew home, Winnie or an Aunty or a cousin would arrive at their door at just the right moment. They’d come with a meal or a load of groceries, or they’d turn up at the door and bundle Linda off for a shower while they kept Andrew occupied.

But now, as fog starts to lift, it’s all too much for her. There are too many well-meaning women instructing her on breast feeding and burping technique. She’s had enough advice about how to get the baby to sleep through the night and when he should be hitting his milestones. She’s snappy and upset when Pete gets home, and they fight. Or rather, she yells and he tries to reason with her.

‘I just need a minute to myself without them all judging my mothering skills.’

‘They’re just trying to help. No one’s judging you, they just know how hard it is with your first. All them got loads of kids.’

‘Then why aren’t they at home taking care of their own kids instead of interfering with mine?’

He sighs, looks down and says quietly, ‘It’s our way, Linney.

Family is everything.’

She knows that, but she hadn’t realised having no family of her own would make her feel as though there was no one in her corner. Everything about them is lopsided and she doesn’t know how to fix it.

And then things at ‘The Pulp’ get worse and they cut Pete’s shifts right back until one day, there’s nothing for him on the roster. One by one, his mates get jobs around Burnie but for Pete, the interviews are few and far between.

‘Racist arseholes,’ Linda spits the third time Pete misses out on a job he’s more than capable of doing.

When the money they’ve been saving is almost gone, his old boss calls with a lead. He’s got a friend looking for blokes to work in the meatworks up in Longford. It means moving to Launceston, but a job is a job. They pack up their tiny Burnie flat, sell the Datty, and say goodbye to the Aunties, Uncles, cousins and Winnie.

Now, they have a unit in Riverside with two bedrooms and a yard. Linda and Andrew spend their days outside: Andrew playing and sleeping on a rug in the shade of a crabapple tree, while she works on bringing the neglected gardens back to life. She stops thinking about all the connections she doesn’t have and lets herself imagine a future where there are flowers and sunshine, where Andrew grows up healthy and happy and they make their own way, just the three of them.

With every seed pressed into the earth, she tells herself things will always be this way.

5 ‘How do you know who your people are?’

Linda and Winnie are sitting under the crabapple tree. They watch Andrew build sandcastles in his blue plastic clamshell sandpit. He chatters to himself as he plays.

‘Ahh, she finally opens her mouth,’ Winnie teases. ‘I wondered when you’d be ready.’

‘Ready for what?’ But she knows what Winnie means, because she hasn’t felt ready all this time. Not the way she does now.

This morning when she woke up she’d felt a need to talk to her not-quite mother-in-law about the things she’d been pushing down inside for so long. They’d bubbled up when she’d heard Winnie the day before through the speakers of the baby monitor singing to Andrew as she put him down for a nap. It had taken her a moment of listening to realise she was singing in language.

The words wrapped around her, hitting the pleasure points inside her head and sent sparkles of warmth from the base of her neck, all the way down her spine. And then she knew she couldn’t wait any longer.

‘Well, I’m glad you’ve finally said what’s been written on your face since the day Pete brought you home. I’m guessing your nanna didn’t talk about her mob much, ay? She stolen mob?’ Winnie is matter of fact and Linda is relieved.

‘I was in care,’ Linda says, looking out at her boy who is smiling as he squeezes lumps of sand through his chubby little fingers. His hair tinges golden brown in the sun, those flecks of gold the only thing she sees of herself in him. ‘I don’t remember much. But when I was five – maybe six – Nanna shows up. She tells me she’s gonna take me away from that place.’

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Winnie nods. ‘What about your parents?’

‘Dunno who my dad was but Mum was a junkie. She came in and out when I finally got to be with Nanna. That’s how I worked it out: they used to fight. Nanna screamed about her leaving me with the government and Mum would scream about Nanna being a fake.’

‘Sounds like your nanna was scared.’

‘She was. She had a fall once and broke her hip. A neighbour come and got me from school and took me to the hospital.

Nanna said, ‘Lin, you go home and you lock them doors and you go to school like nothin’s happened. Anyone asks, the neighbour’s looking after you’.

‘She was a bit off her face on the pain stuff, and so when I asked why I had to pretend she was home, that’s when she told me they’d take me away again. She’d been taken away from her mum and dad when she was a baby, and all she could remember was people telling her, “If they ask why your skin’s that colour, tell them you’re Lebanese. And a bit Chinese”.’

Linda looks down at her hands; pale white, nails now permanently rimmed with dirt. She remembers Nanna clasping them in her own hands and realising how much darker Nanna’s skin was.

‘Did she tell you anything else?’ Winnie asks.

Linda shakes her head. ‘When Mum died, I kept asking her stuff because I realised… the kids at school, they all had parents and grandparents and Aunties and stuff, and I just had Nanna. I guess, it just seemed normal to me, ’cause it was all I’d known, but then…’

Then the fog started rolling in and the voices in her head started. She stopped going to school and hanging round kids who gave her booze and pills to calm her head. She doesn’t tell Winnie this.

‘She kicked me out. She couldn’t keep me in school and said I was going to turn out like Mum, so she kicked me out.’

Winnie lets out a long, low breath. ‘She wasn’t Lebanese, ay?’

‘There was one stack of papers I got,’ Linda answers. ‘When I went through it there was something…’ She stands up, placing her cold cup of tea on the table. ‘Watch him for a sec.’

Inside, she goes straight for the shoebox at the top of her wardrobe. At the edge of her mind there’s a quiet, tiny protest.

This is the point of no return.

Back in her seat, Linda opens the top of the folder, her heart quickening a little at the death certificate still right on top. She flicks through the papers until she finds it: Order for removal of Aboriginals.

She slides it across to Winnie before she can change her mind. She walks across to the sandpit and sits down at the edge. Andrew beams up at her and drops the bucket he’d been holding. He lifts his arms to her.

‘Mumma!’ She pulls him into a hug and breathes in the soft sweetness of the top of his head. He relaxes into her and she wonders if he can feel how they fit together.

‘Grace Franks,’ Winnie calls from across the yard, the paper fluttering in her hand. ‘That was your nanna?’

Andrew wiggles to be let go. When she does, he runs towards Winnie, screaming out for Nanny.

‘Well, you got people now,’ Winnie says, scooping Andrew up onto her lap. ‘And you too, little one.’

Linda leans back, holding Andrew against her body and looks up through the apple tree’s branches. The sun spills dappled light through the leaves and the warmth on her face is good. q

Melanie Saward is a proud Bigambul and Wakka Wakka woman. She is a writer, editor, and academic based in Tulmur (Ipswich), Queensland.

Her debut novel Burn was published by Affirm Press in 2023 and her first romantic comedy novel, Love Unleashed, will be published by Penguin Random House in 2024.

Images: Анна Ширяева, Jeffrey Hamilton- Unsplash

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Nilufar Shah (she/her) is an illustrator and comic artist based in Dharug country, Sydney. She is passionate about comics and graphic storytelling and is interested in exploring themes of identity and intersectionality within her work.

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can I have some of your religion Miriam Jones we need someone to slip inside your hands play the comfortable architecture of the hymns you love/d childish I thought anyone might fill the role all those children with half-washed fingers over the keyboard no jazz nothing prodigious just a palmful of protestant order & beauty amidst the dreadful banquet of our people chords weighing sacks of apples and a single suspended note that holds and holds then releases letting god slip through can I have some of your religion the hymns feel so good in my mouth all my children are moral just not christian last weekend I saw the season’s first whales breaching and slapping off Kamay last year when gulping life was your business you went out with friend after friend step after step on warm sandstone cool coastal grass legs that carried you eyes that stayed open all day spotting whales I would carve an augustan pillar of superlatives last whale last word last note played but the dates went out like a tide that forgot to return I’m sorry for this eulogising when you’re sleeping right there breathing into softest cheeks tiny breaths like the felt hammers of your piano your ribcage I would crawl inside and feel the rain

Miriam Jones is an early childhood teacher, writer, musician, parent, family member and friend living on Wangal land. Their essays and poetry have been published in Overland, The Suburban Review, Cordite, Sydney Review of Books and Westerly.

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A necessary evil James Salvius Cheng You scrub the house every second Sunday.

The garden sleeps, the red flower is spry, opening its silent bud to the sky. A silent car in the drive, a silent body burnt under the white sun, trembling. Children laugh.

Far away, the old town stoops half dead from exertion, an old man grinning, collecting silver tins, the grey fins hovering invisibly over grey suits. A warning.

His lips laugh, shuddering, the tooth so fine.

Fortnights pass, the tooth is worn, quiet words and daggers cut the dawn.

At last, you play the cleaner. No longer the dust, no staining of the bench, no finger prints on glass. No mark to show that you have bled.

The remains. The empty house. The empty bed.

James Salvius Cheng was born in Myanmar, though he now lives and writes in Western Australia. When not writing he works as a doctor.

His fiction and poetry have been published in HEAT, Westerly, Strange Horizons, Mascara Literary Review and Meniscus.

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Swimming Lessons Izzy Roberts-Orr Dull ache of the water holding her body up.

Flat slide of tile thumbs elastic as she presses back into the flank of the shallows. Box of water empty as a grave. Weekend’s polyvocal hum still, unrippled in broken light. Tension rests over her brow – cap, goggles, cobalt lines to hem her in.

The first time, she could not work out how to breathe. Glottal stop of chlorine hovers at her lips like spit. Uh-oh. Not the first time her mouth has betrayed her. Legs dragging behind her like a net, arms rubber encasing stone. Still, she does not sink.

She slept for a year. Woke up underwater, treading light. Carried her heart around in a box, electrode limpets kissing skin.

No one could tell her why she was so tired.

Sleep studies poured out sheets of data. Sand bags dammed the wells of her eyes. Awake at all the wrong times. Stroke by stroke, she pulls her body back to standing. Lets the water hold her weightless as a thought.

Izzy Roberts-Orr is a poet and arts worker based on Wurundjeri Country in regional Victoria. Her debut collection, Raw Salt (Vagabond, 2024), was the recipient of a Wheeler Centre Hot Desk Fellowship, Marten Bequest Scholarship and longlisted for the Colorado Prize for Poetry. She is Creative Producer for Red Room Poetry.

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To self Liam Ferney chuck a sickie and the sun’s kiss convicts, charisma’s con is just fooling people into thinking you’re not an asshole exhibit a: these tercets tempered by a tenured top dog’s testers like a recycler’s heel squashing a schweppes your metaphor of the owen stanley range as the verde rash of a fuzzy white caterpillar of condensation gets you shot out of the canon but still the hours under the stairs at this desk keep me from the musgrave park pool hurry the arthritis doglegging both pinkies distal interphalangeals squeal critics complain the sentences are senseless i object exhibit b: dab on ellen the axiom should be we camp aign in nonsense and govern in language

Liam Ferney's collections include Hot Take (Hunter Publishing, 2018), Content (Hunter Publishing, 2016) and Boom (Grande Parade Poets, 2013).

He lives in Brisbane with his wife and daughter.

He works in public affairs and holds the games record for the New Farm Traktor Collective.

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Image Emma Bugg Gilded Memories 2023 (detail) Photographer: Ivett Dodd

Beyond care and maintenance: arts-led recovery in Queenstown 66

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n the mining industry, the term ‘care and maintenance’, or ‘C&M’, refers to the ongoing management of a closed mine site. The intention is to keep the mine safe and stable, making it possible to recommence mining operations in the future. The Mt Lyell copper mine in Queenstown, Tasmania, was placed into C&M in 2017, following its closure in 2014. Since mining production ceased, the economy (and identity) of Queenstown has necessarily shifted: away from that of extractive industry, towards an economy supported by art, tourism, environment and recreation.

Queenstown’s transition has been described as an ‘arts-led recovery’. However, this phrase conceals the nuance and specificity of the localised context and activity in the town. Arts-led recovery often results in a growth in tourism and subsequent associated gentrification, which does not necessarily flow on to create community-level benefits for residents. Queenstown’s ‘arts-led recovery’ has not been driven by the introduction of new large-scale museums, hotels or megaprojects. The ‘recovery’ has been a slow development informed by community and place, tangibly realised in developments such as The Unconformity festival and PressWEST printmaking studio.

These initiatives offer a different form of ‘maintenance and care’ – a term that has also seen growing relevance in arts and cultural narratives. For academic Shannon Mattern, the phrase describes a ‘theoretical framework, an ethos, a methodology, and a political cause’. It captures ways of working that involve restoration and repair, often achieved by deliberately paced and perhaps undervalued and unseen labour and relationship building. It can be tempting to romanticise care, but there is also a sense of ongoingness in maintenance work – of continuing to turn up once the big event is over. Continuing the conversations, doing the washing up, organising the filing.

The Unconformity festival began in 2010, under the name of the Queenstown Heritage and Arts Festival. It was developed by fifth-generation Queenstown resident Travis Tiddy, informed by an understanding of the transformative potential of art for communities and a local desire from residents to share their stories and experiences. The Unconformity (named after local rock formation, the Haulage Unconformity, an outcrop of which is visible at the site of the infamous gravel football oval) now runs year-round residencies and programs as well as its biennial contemporary arts festival.

The Unconformity explores ‘cultural commodities on the wild and mountainous western fringe of Lutruwita/Tasmania’, bringing in new artists and audiences, and highlighting the area’s cultural and environmental richness. It is informed by a

deep care for and love of the region and its people, and for the complex narratives and experiences that jostle together here.

The more recent development of the PressWEST printmaking studio also aligns with an ethos of maintenance and care. Artists Raymond Arnold and Helena Demczuk ran the Landscape Art and Research Queenstown (LARQ) gallery for ten years from their home; it closed down in 2015. Despite the lack of a public-facing gallery, their active presence in the community brought the duo into contact with new arrivals in town, including those who came with ideas for collective art making and heavy lithographic presses that needed a studio space.

Shane Miller and Gary Taylor joined forces with Raymond and Helena; they began to formally organise themselves, and noticed the town’s old school that sat derelict and empty. After being neglected by private owners, the site was acquired by council, who agreed to invest in cleaning it up and installing toilets to make it available for PressWEST. That the council valued and understood the intentions for the project is testament to the decades of work that Raymond, Helena, Travis and others in Queenstown had invested slowly and quietly and in a way that integrated with the community.

Initiatives such as The Unconformity, LARQ and long-running artist residency programs have helped to foster an environment where a regional council recognises the value of investing in infrastructure for cultural practice.

For the last two years, weekend mornings at PressWEST have commenced with tea and biscuits, followed by acts of love and labour: scrubbing, painting, organising, bookkeeping; or, in the words of Arnold, ‘getting on with it’. PressWEST is now a working studio for local artists, as well as a gallery and workshop space. The 2024 program is focused on a ‘series of exchanges between professional artists, the West Coast community, and a broader cohort of “art pilgrims”’. This captures the organisations’ ethos of developing a local sustainable presence while simultaneously inviting in new participants to the ‘creative lab’.

The 2024 program opened with the ‘workshop artists’ exhibition’, featuring artworks by all artists involved in PressWEST workshops across the year. The line-up of Tasmanian-based artists – among them Amber Koroluk-Stephenson, Jo Chew, Penny Mason, David Marsden, Leigh Rigozzi and Tony Thorne – who are eager to host workshops and share their expertise in Queenstown highlights the strong pull of the West Coast, and a desire for creative practitioners to participate in the work of such an effective community organisation. Hobart

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artist Tom O’Hern’s distinctive Tasmanian Tiger is painted on the outside of the studio space, as a visual hook that links Queenstown to the Hobart art-scene.

As PressWEST has grown and developed, so too have ambitions for the site. Part of the old school complex is now being established as a foraging garden by a local couple. The site is expanding out into the community, where there is no clear distinction between art making, community practice, gardening, sharing a cup of tea, and working and living.

Arnold described this growth of creative practice/the art of living in Queenstown as offering ‘an alternative to the previously dominant utilitarian mining framework for the community’. PressWEST and the creative precinct are being set up to offer a sense of continuity and groundness, which creates a local richness against which cyclical festival events and the arrival of visiting artists can be supported and maintained.

This ethos of care is evident in artworks from The Unconformity 2023 festival, including Polly Stanton’s video installation Thresholds, which captures ideas of social reproduction and care. Thresholds was installed in the local scout hall, the projected screen reflecting on the shiny floor of the basketball court. The work moved from sweeping shots of the town and the surrounding mountains, into the Mt Lyell mine.

Stanton, a previous residency artist of The Unconformity, had gained the trust of locals and access to the mine and community over an 18-month period. She also collaborated with the local Queenie Quoir, who donned hard hats and high-vis to perform from within Mt Lyell as part of the work.

Image credits All from PressWEST Carl Ross The Colony 2021, oil on panel 1200 × 1200 cm Joy Mackey Vesica Piscis 2023, acrylic on canvas 91 × 91 cm Belinda Hall See No Evil 1989 (detail), woodcut with cardboard blocks 37 × 60 cm

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The choir met weekly, led by a local Queenstown nurse. In December 2023 the group toured the West Coast, performing in Zeehan, Waratah, Tullah and Queenstown.

When Mt Lyell mine’s official Facebook account posted about the underground singing project, the news was greeted enthusiastically: there is a great deal of community interest in and support for this locally based artistic work. In the cavernous space, the choir vocals merged with the vibrations of the mine to create a new sound that mixed deep geological history, mundane maintenance noises, and voices from the community.

Emma Bugg’s Gilded Memories artwork, also shown as part of The Unconformity 2023 festival, is a collaborative work of jewellery created alongside the local community. At the turn of the 20th century, American engineer Robert Sticht came to Queenstown with his wife Marion to work as the mine’s metallurgist. Robert gave Marion a charm necklace, which told a story of their lives in both America and Tasmania, and Bugg recreated the necklace in a contemporary work. Bugg, who has purchased an old church in Queenstown, collaborated with residents to share their stories and experiences through personalised charms, linked together with gold chain. Water from the ecologically dead Queen River was entombed in a tiny vial; it sits alongside a piece of King Billy pine, designs of The Paragon Theatre and the Linda Hotel, and gravel from the football oval. A loudspeaker represents local resident Bill’s connection with the fire brigade, and the burly Gormanston Mountain Man mascot captures Ralph’s love of sport and

Image credits Jaben Golledge pulling a print off the press at PressWEST Monoprint Workshop July 2023 Helena Demczuk preparing for an exhibition at PressWEST PressWEST Ecotone Workshop in February 2024

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history. Wendy’s charm depicts the view of Mount Owen from Orr Street, providing an encompassing sense of place for the charms and their stories. Over the course of the festival, Bugg connected the charms and associated stories to the chain, tangibly linking the relationships between each piece. The work is both the detailed and intricate physical necklace, and the generous and open process of sharing stories and building relationships across the town.

This community-focused process is also evident in the work of PressWEST co-founder Helena Demczuk. For over a decade, Demczuk has invited a collection of Queenstown women to sit for her and painted a powerful collection of portraits. Under the title of ‘Certain Women’, the artist captures the power and lives of these women, giving prominence to contributions to community and living that are seldom memorialised or publicly acknowledged.

The development of organisations such as The Unconformity and PressWEST draw upon on a long history of arts and culture in the region. Creativity is not something newly arrived since the closure of the mine, nor is it a practice that is separated from everyday living. In 2023, PressWEST exhibited REPRISE, a collection of work by art teachers who had taught at Murray High/Mountain Heights School during the 1980s and ’90s. The exhibition celebrated the work of the teachers, their connection to the community, the value of education, and how art can merge with the personal, professional and broader community. The closure of the mine in 2014 has necessitated other focuses and ways of attracting and retaining people in the town – but cultural activities and arts practices have long and deeply entangled roots in Queenstown.

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Similarly, the flow of artists into Queenstown is not a new phenomenon in response to the loss of mining. The work of Jan Senbergs in the ’80s captured the activity of the mines; Geoff Dyer was inspired by the extreme landscape; and Philip Wolfhagen’s public artwork project has now been reinstalled in Mountain Heights School. For Arnold, continuing to invite artists to see and convey their experience of place is crucial to helping people to understand how extractive relationships to the environment affect landscapes. Inviting artists to Queenstown helps to create new ways to tell the story and finds new audiences for these narratives.

Institutions such as The Unconformity and PressWEST printmaking studio extend beyond fostering a ‘repair ecology’.

Instead, these cultural institutions offer a way of working within their communities that is grounded in ongoing care of people and place, creating opportunities for new activity, and building up local capabilities and capacity to take advantage of these opportunities. Rather than keeping things stable in order to recommence historical models of working in the future, The Unconformity and PressWEST are designing new forms of arts-led maintenance and recovery. q

Image credits Polly Stanton Thresholds 2023. For The Unconformity 2023 festival Director, Producer, Editor, Cinematography, Sound Design: Polly Stanton Editor, Cinematographer: James Wright Field Recordings, Sound Design: Byron Dean Vocal Performance: The Queenie Quoir Colour Grade: Peter Hatzipavlis Photographer: Jesse Hunniford

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Image credits

Image credits (Page 73)

All from PressWEST, clockwise from top left:

Leigh Rigozzi Whoever finds the treasure can steal it 2023, watercolour 75 × 75 cm

Emma Bugg Gilded Memories 2023, 24k gold-plated sterling silver chain, sterling silver, alluvial Tasmanian gold nugget, stichtite, copper, brass, glass vials, water from King River, Queen River and Queenstown rain water, Darwin glass, King Billy pine, chiastolite, peacock ore, four-leaf clover found in Queenstown, pearl, antique china, galena, malachite, gravel from Queenstown football oval, gold tooth, concrete.

Emma Magnusson-Reid Detritus II 7 III 2022, monoprints

Photographer: Ivett Dodd

Liam Ross Baker Ava and the Cat 2023, oil on canvas Michael Muruste Alpine Logo #10 2022, painting

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Any other substance Daniel Ray

74

FICTION

H is listening to a recording of Virginia Woolf ’s voice. Well, trying to listen. The only thing she can think is that Virginia Woolf is dead. It’s the last period before lunch and the classroom’s filled with twitching and stretching that seems to make up a bigger, different movement. It reminds H of the word Gestalt she read in one of her mum’s papers. A counterpoint to the motion, Ms Lloyd stands in the corner like a silver-grey statue. H lets her eyes un-focus. There’s a grapefruity taste in her mouth – maybe because she still hasn’t eaten – and the edges of her vision glint green and blue.

She’s sluggish in the mornings, moving at the wrong frame rate. Avoiding breakfast is almost necessary self-preservation – like how you can’t eat before surgery so you don’t choke during the anaesthesia. There is never enough time, anyway.

H and her dad were informed a week ago that she’d already been late to school eighteen (18) days. They were told this

by Mr Gregg, her year co-ordinator, in a special meeting her dad needed to take time off work to attend. (Mr Gregg is bald and sometimes she calls him Mr Egg.) Mr Gregg said that her flirtation with absences totalled one hundred and sixty-three (163) minutes of lost time. The largest increment she’d been late by was fifty-one (51) minutes and the smallest was two (2).

Mr Gregg had printed off a sheet of paper with all the times and dates on them, and occasionally he pointed at certain numbers with uncommonly hairy fingers.

What did you do with all that time instead? he asked.

H shrugged. Just lived, I suppose.

And what do you think about Harriet’s tardiness?

Who’s Harriet? H said. Mr Gregg pretended not to hear her.

Her dad looked at his hands laid out on the conference table, at the glossy wedding band he still hadn’t taken off. Mr Egg paled.

Later that day, when he picked her up from school, her dad said: It’s funny how well I play the part of grieving widow.

Widower.

That can’t be right, her dad said. That sounds like I was the one who did it.

They laughed for a bit, then spent the rest of the drive in silence. Grief is sometimes a fox slinking through dusk: not there, then there, then not there.

Now Woolf is talking about language’s lack of meaning and the deep, dark caverns of the mind. The whole thing seems quite yonic – another word H’s mum taught her. Woolf ’s voice is a bit disappointing: high-pitched and affected and stuck-up. This is apparently the only audio of Woolf that exists. Before playing it, Ms Lloyd read out the beginning of

the essay, which has been lost in the recording: something about words surviving time longer than any other substance.

How many recordings are there of H’s mum? There’s the voicemail that H downloaded from her mother’s phone and listens to sometimes. And there’re those glary videos from the beach in her phone. In one video her mum places a strand of dried seaweed on her head and another between crossed legs and holds two sandy mismatched scalloped shells over her breasts while H films shakily and her dad laughs. It ends with her mother saying, Did you catch that cliché?

There’s also the greenish camcorder video from when she was a toddler, where her mother pushes her down a slide, saying, There you go! Her voice is warped and tinny, overshadowed by droning cicadas that wash out half the audio’s register. You can hear little Harriet (because this is before she is H) laughing at the bottom of the slide, but the camera stays focused on her mum: lemony pale, stately neck, fluted wrists, wide, dark eyes.

Her dad says, Wow, she really does pick up speed. Closer to the microphone, he sounds more like himself. Then he forgets he’s recording and points the camera at the ground.

The grass looks like oxidised copper wire. H wishes her mum recorded the video instead, because as much as she likes to see her mother send Harriet down the slide with a firm push between her shoulder blades, H misses her voice – her real voice – the most.

How long until there’s no one to listen to her mum’s voicemail or watch the videos? Until her mother’s voice is really, truly gone?

H sighs and jigs under the desk but stops when Ms Lloyd frowns at her. It’s a bit of a stretch that they’re listening to Virginia Woolf, but H is prepared to forgive a few failures of the syllabus because she doesn’t think teachers get paid enough.

This term they’re reading Michael Cunningham’s The Hours, which is a sort of remix of Mrs Dalloway. Ms Lloyd said that because it’s such a difficult book they don’t have to read Mrs Dalloway. Instead, they’re going to watch the film later in the term. And although Ms Lloyd’s quite nice and doesn’t mind if H hands in her work a little late due to what she calls the extenuating circumstances, or everything that’s going on (you know, the-sad-fact-of-her-mother-being-no-longer-alive), H didn’t like the implication that the class is a little too stupid to read Mrs Dalloway. So, earlier in the term, she found a PDF copy online with cramped, archaic typesetting. After only a few pages, she closed the tab because the words were merging into each other like a big muddy cloud. What a lark. But then

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she tried again with a second-hand copy she’d found tucked behind a Liane Moriarty novel at the local op shop for two bucks. Even with its half-cracked spine and meteoric speckling of mould, it felt different turning the pages and underlining her favourite images and doodling in the margins. And it helped having a font that didn’t give you a headache. H devoured it in a couple of days, enjoying the leaden circles of the clock chimes echoing through the novel and all the gleaming colours like the rainbowed scales of a fish. But H didn’t like Clarissa, who should’ve never gotten married and who treats Sally poorly and is almost entirely self-absorbed. Or the creepy man, whatever his name is, following women around and flicking his little phallic knife open and shut. In fact, she probably liked the act of reading the novel more than the novel itself: the feeling of slipping into a different form of consciousness, lower, where the words could work themselves through her like beams of radiation.

Over the crackling speaker, the recording ends with: Time’s up! Silence!

Silence is like the blank pages at the end of a novel. You need to turn them one by one to get the full effect that the novel is over. Because silence is more of a reverberation than the absence of noise. Even now – after Silence! – Ms Lloyd is clearing her throat and saying, Well, there we go. Amanda, sitting next to H, coughs twice into her elbow. The aircon rattles the ducts. Below that, there’s this minor noise like the static in the Woolf recording: bracelets scraping against the white desks, the rustle of a skirt, a breath... And even below that, there’s the sound of H’s body: looping pulse, stomach turning over, heartbeat flapping – maybe from low blood sugar.

Then YouTube auto-plays the next video: another copy of the same recording (because there is only one) with a more austere, sepia photo of Virginia Woolf as the thumbnail. This clip is six seconds longer than the previous one. Does that mean there’s extra nothingness, extra breath, extra reverberation?

Oh no, Ms Lloyd says and the class giggles. Flustered, she eventually manages to close the window. Displayed on the projector, there’s a folder on her desktop called INVOICES IN AND OUT. It makes H think about coming and going, eating and shitting, living and dying.

Last year, sometime in April, after the softball fields were frosting over in the mornings, H tried to go for as long as she could without eating. At breakfast, she said she wasn’t hungry and that she would buy lunch at school. Every morning, she stuffed the money her dad gave her for lunch under her mattress. Later, at dinner, she said she was feeling ill and took her

plate to her room (pesto pasta and veal parmigiana), then snuck out through the window by taking out four of its bladed slats. H squeezed through the window, bright brown dust smearing her sides, then slipped between the magnolias and their glowing, planet-like flowers, vaulted the crumbling red brick wall, and scraped her food into the Thompsons’ garbage bin. (Both nights she needed to shoo away Walter, their ragged tabby cat, who appeared from nowhere and meowed at her. A year ago, Walter had a stroke or a bad allergic reaction and now always looked half-asleep, and she felt bad for making him semi-complicit.)

Then H waited half an hour or so to bring her empty plate into the kitchen. On the first night, she accidentally dropped her fork into the bin, too, and prayed her dad wouldn’t notice. On the second night, her dad asked how the meal was. Yummy, H said. She felt guilty lying (and watching the flattened piece of veal fall soundlessly out of view), so she helped him wash up, reeling from the smell of oil and meat.

She managed to not eat or drink for three days, which sounds less impressive than it was. Although maybe impressive isn’t the right word, because when H finally told her counsellor two weeks afterwards, Mrs Stone frowned (the most disapproval she’d ever shown) and said it was a form of self-harm.

Forms of self-harm, H said, are how humans know they are alive. (It’s funny, H then thought, how self-harm has a hyphen in the middle like a little cut.) In the green-dark office, next to the claustrophobic kitchenette with the broken tap that is (still) always dripping, Mrs Stone asked H if that’s why she did it, to feel alive. H shrugged and told her it was more somatic than philosophical: that she liked feeling her body lose its edges, its outline, so that when she moved her hand it was like another version of her hand was also there echoing behind her. H didn’t say that she also liked how her mouth dried up then went all gummy. How her lips peeled at the edges and flaked off in the middle. How her feet slightly swelled up and her toes turned red. How she felt like she was floating in the middle of some vast, undulating sea. How it was one of the easiest ways to get closer to feeling dead.

It ended on the third day, when her dad came into her room in the afternoon with a glass of water and a cheese toastie and set it on the bedside table. H was worried he’d seen her at the Thompsons’ bin the night before (she’d sworn she heard a muffled cough that freaked her out as if it had been a gunshot).

But he just stood there for a while. H’s vision was starry at the edges, and she had to keep blinking (she could hear her dry eyelids clacking) to refocus on his body. He’d been quiet since her mum’s death. No, since her mum died – because who could

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possess death? It was as if her mum’s ghost had been shoved down her dad’s throat and was squatting in his intestines, bloating his stomach like a tapeworm, muffling every sound with its ghost-flesh. He was wearing the lavender t-shirt with the dark stain that her mum once said was the shape of a kingfisher. His face looked saggy and sallow like a plastic bag.

H wondered what grief had done to her face, her muscles, her smell, her gait. (She was hiding from her reflection, partly because she suspected grief also didn’t look good on her.)

The food smelled rich and buttery and her stomach growled, even though she didn’t feel particularly hungry, even though she felt as if she’d never be hungry again.

Eventually her dad said, Sorry I didn’t knock.

H cleared her throat. That’s okay. I’m in mourning. I doubt I’ll be masturbating anytime soon.

Her dad tried to smile. We’re going to have chicken for dinner. I love you, H, he said.

And before she could reply, he left, closing the door softly behind him.

onto the plush navy-blue carpet. When Alice and Pia arrived at the funeral together, drenched in the same honey-lemon perfume, they hugged her, and Pia said, Everything will be okay soon. These things always take time. Was she talking about the funeral or something else? Because the problem was that nothing would ever be okay again.

Now the article is going on about the sound of black holes as they ripple and warp. H tries to play the attached video clip, but there’s a 33-second advert at the beginning you can’t skip, so she just reads the description of some kind of eerie hum.

If you fell into one, would you hear it both before and after it made any noise, simultaneously? Pia is umming and ahhing because Alice has suggested inviting Brady M (the nice one with acne and wide, crooked lips) to the party, and she wants to seem magnanimous when she (almost inevitably) says yes.

Sometimes H imagines the three of them as nurses from different wards who don’t know each other’s names, smoking away their lunch break together, cigarettes leaking like quicksilver into the cool air, trying, for a moment, to forget the dying patients inside. Or she’ll imagine them as workmates sitting on the steps of a department store and gossiping about entitled customers. The other week when H told Mrs Stone about it, Mrs Stone said it was interesting that H wanted to view them as colleagues or strangers. Then she said it was normal to feel different and isolated after a traumatic event.

I think the event was more traumatic for my mother.

Trauma is non-referential, H. It’s completely singular.

Silence.

Then H said, Sometimes I think it’d be easier if everyone was dead.

(And the voice of H’s mum in her head saying: If everyone were dead, H! Because her mum was a self-proclaimed pedant, including regarding grammar. I am a pedant! she proudly announced at dinners in fancy restaurants, in airports, in taxis, at other parents’ houses, in the loungeroom, in pools, in hotels, on rooftop bars, at sushi trains, at soirees, in buses [a lot of transport], on safari [a joke – they have never been on safari]).

If who was dead? Mrs Stone’s voice was carefully controlled and neutral. Was that something you learned in a psychology degree? Perhaps they gathered all the students in a dim auditorium that smelled of formaldehyde and eucalyptus oil, and showed them terrible images, flicking through dusty slides of dead babies or something, then measured their voices with an instrument to ensure they could remain neither uninterested nor overly curious so as to not accidentally encourage any problem behaviours.

—————— At lunch, H googles the sound of the universe while she pretends to listen to Pia and Alice. They’re talking about the party Pia’s hosting in a couple of weeks (because her parents are travelling to Mexico, and she will not let this opportunity go to waste). H nibbles the corners of her cheese and salad sandwich and reads about galaxies and wormholes and waves.

They’re in their usual spot: the steps off the side of the lecture hall, where they have whole-year assemblies fortnightly. Next to them is a flowerbed with sleek orange tulips and a metal railing with peeling aquamarine paint. Pia punctuates her sentences by tugging on her thick blonde braid. Alice slurps the dregs from a blackcurrant juice box. Her calves are prickly with little dark hairs.

There aren’t going to be too many people, though, yeah?

Alice asks Pia. Just the right amount.

Pia often speaks in absolutes. At the wake (which H remembers thinking was a silly word, because her mother was now categorically no-longer-awake), Pia and Alice stood around at the edges looking slightly embarrassed, like magpies. Pia’s dress was pastel yellow, and Alice’s curly hair was still damp from her shower. Alice ate all the cold, too-wet fruit (greentinged pineapple and pale rockmelon and dark, overripe, fleshy watermelon). Pia picked at a sausage roll, sifting flaky crumbs

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Were dead.

If you were dead? Mrs Stone looked like she was trying very hard not to reach for the forest-green clipboard in front of her she sometimes used to make notes.

Well, yes, H said. (All at once, frustratingly, she was trying not to cry.) But not just me. Everyone. Everything. If humans and animals and insects and, I don’t know, mould, were all just motes of dust floating through space and there was no language, no thinking, no breathing, no anything.

There was a pause. And H started thinking about the time a few years ago her mum was writing an article for some in-vogue online journal about a famous man lying on a boat in the middle of a lake marvelling at his own delicious uselessness. H couldn’t remember his name, but she knew it wasn’t Benjamin or Darwin or Leibniz, all of who – Whom! said her dead mum – her mother had also written about. The problem, her mum told her (when H had been bored and gone into her mum’s study), is that when you break it down it’s just some man wanking on about his own unique self. He begins with his self that is searching for something beyond the self. It’s all about his ego, which is terribly masculine, by the way. And that was what H was going on about to Mrs Stone: she was trying to talk about death beyond being a subject who was talking about death. To think of death in its own terms.

Mrs Stone said, Have you been hurting yourself again?

H rolled her eyes. That’s got nothing to do with this!

Okay.

What did you say? It’s non-referential.

Sorry. I had to ask. I have a duty of care.

Bah. Send me to the psych ward, then.

No one’s sending you anywhere, H. Whatever, Catherine. H stood up, even though the bell hadn’t rung. See you in a week.

Now, sitting with Pia and Alice, H wonders if it’s bad she can’t remember how the three of them became friends. It was just sort of a sudden truth: like how you don’t notice your hair growing until all at once it’s curling into your vision and sticking in your lip gloss and dragging in your food.

The bell rings. Pia groans. Ugh, I’ve got double History. I’d rather be dead.

Alice makes a soft noise. In a gust of wind, the tulips bow their heads. H’s face feels numb – as if her nose and eyes and mouth have been wiped smooth by an angel’s thumb.

Oh, Pia says. Sorry, H. H says, It’s okay. Really. Don’t worry about it.

Pia and Alice give wan smiles. And H wonders how many times she’ll need to excuse her mother’s death to other people.

Maybe eventually H will believe it and it won’t matter as much that she is gone forever. But maybe that’s worse.

—————— That night, after trying the usual things (lavender oil dabbed on the top pillow, square breathing, hate-watching overly bubbly YouTubers, reading a page of War and Peace annotated by her mother in scribbly violet ink, masturbating), H gives up trying to sleep and works on the Eye-Collection-Process.

Sitting cross-legged on her bed, she enjoys the crisp sound of the scissors parting the magazine (currently Women’s Weekly), the feeling in her wrist of tension giving way as if she is gliding through air, the way it seems – if only for a moment – that she is the one creating the eyes. Her least favourite part is right after she’s stuck the eye(s) to the wall, when there isn’t enough perspective yet and it looks small and lonely and inconsequential. If her mother were alive, she’d probably call the wall something silly like the I Saw. For maybe five nights/mornings in a row, H has wandered the belly of the house and checked in on her father, usually around one or two am: opening the door slowly so the handle doesn’t squeak and listening for his breathing. Last night she went into the room and stood over him, noticing the shadowed stubble on his cheek and the smell of alcohol from the empty tumbler on the bedside table and on his sour breath. Her dad has taken to having a drink or two (he calls it a digestivo) after dinner, either in his room or sitting blankly opposite the mirrored face of the television on the couch downstairs.

(Earlier that night, he’d asked her if she wanted a drink as well.

H shook her head and said, Dad, how tragic. I’m 17, I don’t have digestivos, I only binge-drink at parties.) Moonlight washed under the blinds like surf. The air was dusty. His in-drawn breaths whistled at the end like upturned questions: Where are you? ( ) Where are you? For a moment H thought there was a lump in the bed next to him. Then she saw it was just some tangled sheets and she had to step out of the room and breathe long and slow.

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Any other substance

H gets tired of the eyes and places the magazine back onto the stack next to her bed. The scissors look too bare and violent on the bedside table (Chekhov’s scissors! her dead mum says/ doesn’t say), so into the drawer they go. Trailing a hand along the cold hallway walls, H walks into her mother’s study.

The study is almost exactly as it was – as if there’s an imprint of her mother in the air like invisible memory foam.

There’s a chunky webcam on the computer that she used to record lectures and hold online tutorials during the lockdowns and the desk is scattered with loose-leaf printouts of academic papers. Numerous times, H found her mother on her hands and knees manically trying to rearrange a manuscript or separate articles that had been jumbled together. Her mum would look up and say something like, You seem to have caught me at an inopportune moment. Or: Ugh! Revenge of the trees!

Now the desk has a veneer of dust that makes it look sleepy.

Her dad doesn’t like anyone (i.e. H) coming in here. She sits on the chair and swivels herself with her feet, imagining travelling into the past or future with each turn. Maybe if you could spin fast enough, you could travel back to when dead people were still alive. Are still alive: because her mother always said time was not linear, that it was – is – happening all at once.

The nearest paper on the desk is by Melissa McMahon. It begins: I wait for the best moment. H keeps reading. Time passes.

A lot of time passes… It only takes six (6!) minutes for the paper to get too complicated for her to fully follow (something about Kant and repetition). And this is the problem with nights: time never seems to work the same way every time.

Mrs Stone says H’s insomnia is caused by her mind being too busy. She says words like grief and dissociation and acceptance and radical and onset and session and mindfulness and arousal (not the fun one). She talks about finding five blue things and scanning your body and working sequentially through all the senses. But H usually can’t be bothered doing any of those things. What is the point in trying to reduce feeling? Because after ten deep breaths, after every set of blue stuff, after working her way slowly from her toes all the way to the tips of her ears like she is slicing up her body on one of those deli machines, her mother will still be dead. Instead, what if H increased the intensity? If she could experience enough grief at once, maybe she’d be filled to maximum capacity, and there’d be no room left for her to feel sad anymore.

Or perhaps the point is that there’s nothing left to do now.

Maybe it’s like chaos theory – which they learned about last term when they were reading that Tom Stoppard play – and the jam has been swirled into the peanut butter, and nothing

can now separate the two, no matter the motion, no matter what is reversed.

Later, she’ll pad into her dad’s room and listen to his snoring going off and coming back like a little horse. Lulled by its rhythm, she’ll curl up on the carpet with her hands for a pillow and shut her eyes. Before it is light, she’ll sneak back into her room and pretend to be sleeping when her dad eventually knocks on her door and says, Come on, H, or we’ll be late again.

But for now, H writes in the dust in block letters: ELIZABETH LIZZY LIZ MUM. Then she crosses them out: ELIZABETH LIZZY LIZ MUM. —————— Her dad drives H to school. The Toyota Echo smells of sweat and spearmint toothpaste. H’s eyes are bleary and the windscreen seems to spiral into her lap. They’re listening to Joni Mitchell’s Blue. It was the last CD her mother fed into the stereo, and it feels blasphemous to remove or mute. H knows all the lyrics now. She mumbles or mimes along because she can’t hit the high notes. (Her dad only ever nods his head out of time to ‘A case of you’.) Her parents used to share the scuffed silver Echo because her dad cycled to work in a futile effort to help save the planet. Now he drops off H at school most mornings because the town’s bus system has a few blind spots around their neighbourhood. Sometimes she cycles 25 minutes to the nearest stop (marked by a plastic sign zip tied to a chain-link fence), but she’s usually running too late for the commute, and it’s annoying having to lift the bicycle onto a rack on the front of the bus while everybody stares. Now Joni Mitchell is singing ‘My old man’, and H looks at her dad in his collared pale shirt hunched over the steering wheel and thinks he looks like a sick sheep.

They come up alongside a car crash right before a red light.

Both cars are perched on the median strip. One has a smashed headlight, the other a small dent in the bumper. If H’s mother were here, she’d probably say something like: Cause and effect.

Or: Now this is Einstein.

Oh, it’s just a fender bender, her dad says.

The relief in his voice mirrors the way H’s hands are only now unclenching. Earlier, when the traffic was getting bad and her dad said, There must’ve been a crash up ahead, she jumped to the worst conclusions: a whooping ambulance, a car spun out on the road amid shattered glass, blown-out airbags like the bodies of dead jellyfish, blood on the dashboard... After

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her mother died, she thought they would become accustomed to death: that they’d seen its face like the monster’s reveal in a horror film and now it wouldn’t be as real or scary. But H and her dad have only become more attuned and sensitive to death, as if they’ve been taught its particular scent and now can’t help smelling it everywhere. All it takes is paying too much attention to the over-sized white cross clad with pink plastic flowers on the side of the highway into the city, or the sign AIR DISASTER MEMORIAL a few kilometres from the house, or the sign TERMINAL at the airport, and it’s enough to ruin her day. That’s why they no longer watch any television (especially the world news), except sometimes reruns of Iron Chef or Ready Steady Cook. There’s too much suffering that not only seems to underpin their own, but also makes it seem less important and more mundane.

The drivers are standing around laughing, showing all their teeth like they’re horses being sold. The traffic’s been slowing down to watch them flirt. They’re attractive enough, she supposes. The woman’s wearing a black-and-white chequered skirt (that H’s mum would probably say was to protect her from the U-boats) and a slash of red lipstick H looks away from before she associates it with blood.

Have you been thinking about any of that? her dad says.

Participating in vehicular accidents?

No. I mean… Her dad clears his throat. Romantic stuff.

H snorts. Have you?

I don’t think there’s an app for, you know, men in my position.

Maybe you should try to pick-up at group grief therapy or something.

Ha. That seems unethical.

A man in your position needs to take some risks.

No… I’m perfectly content with how things are, her dad says.

H purses her lips and pats his shoulder. It feels too thin inside his shirt.

Except for one thing, he says softly.

Yeah. H sighs. One little thing.

On the walk from the drop-off point into school, H comes across a noisy miner that won’t stop squawking. It is standing next to the body of another noisy miner squashed on the road, fanned flat except for two broken feathers on the tip of a wing that sway upright in the wind. Its beak is open and there’s a smear of dried blood next to the two little holes that look like nostrils. The bird (the one that’s alive) hops off and onto the curb, incessantly calling its cheep cheep cheep.

H is reminded of a post she saw last year on social media: an image of a bird mid-cry with a caption along the lines of how comforting it is that animals cry over death too, that the universe is not some uncaring formula, that dying always matters. But she thinks that if animals felt anything like grief, it would be in another language: furry and wet and warm and violent. It would be completely alien, untranslatable, utterly unrecognisable.

No, H thinks. It is not the same. q

Daniel Ray’s writing has been published in Griffith Review, Westerly, Island, Overland, Cordite, Voiceworks, The Suburban Review and Cicerone Journal’s anthology, These Strange Outcrops. He was longlisted for the 2023 Griffith Review Emerging Voices Competition and was semi-finalist in the 2023 Adrift Short Story Competition. He is the recipient of the 2024 Faber Academy ‘Writing a Novel’ Online Scholarship, where he is developing a novel about H and friends, supported by a Create NSW grant. You can find him on Instagram @ danielraywrites Images: Olena Shmahalo - Unsplash

80

The Waitresses Tim Slade

Three waitresses of Lifebuoy — punctual; and due any day now.

Baby talk is the tip jar of the long black regulars’ tongues.

Each morning is a pregnant dance with house sparrows.

The glowing waitresses of autumn’s sunlit tables.

Tim Slade’s The Walnut Tree (2021, Bright South) was longlisted for the Tim Thorne Prize for Poetry, as part of the 2022 Tasmanian Literary Awards. Tim’s poems have been widely published and broadcast, including for the ABC’s Radio National, Australian Poetry Anthology, Dada Muse (Launceston), The Weekend Australian and the Margaret Reid International Poetry Prize. In 2021-22 Tim campaigned for equality for poetry and poets in the Tasmanian Literary Awards. For the first time the Awards adopted a dedicated prize and equal prize money for a book of poems written by a Tasmanian, named in honour of the late Tasmanian poet Tim Thorne. Born in 1976, Tim Slade grew up in Nipaluna / Hobart.

Since 2009 he lives in Pioneer, Tebrakunna Country, north-eastern Tasmania. Tim’s forthcoming collection of poems is The Wave of Life.

81

Boy Skipping Todd Turner

To enter that rhythm where the self is lost – Muriel Rukeyser You could set music to this.

The slack string arcs into a taut loop, then a stutter-step and he’s in the mix, amid the kinetic arch and self-sprung rhythm, high-altitude treble and the whipping beat, with the grain of him, springing on the spot.

Still, it’s by feel he enters the rhythm— with a bassos sense to the moving beat, though getting in sync; harmonising this balance of motion requires an ebbing mix of an inward flow, equilibrium on the spot.

To invoke the rhythm, you must work the loop.

He leaps and bounds from the same spot, as if nothing else matters to him but this.

In musical terms, his timing is on the half beat; all echo, and weightless, within the loop.

Ascending, he alternates the rhythm, and gravity goes rebounding in the mix.

But to stay in the moment within the loop is another matter, you need more than rhythm and a fair bit of chi to hit the sweet spot.

To enter stillness—to skip to its beat— is to be conjoined by an artless mix where the self, in flight, is open to this

Here, he tunes his mode to the mix of time and movement, and there on the spot, he feels his way by sense and rhythm.

At times he thinks he was born for this.

Yet what can be made of a standalone loop, and who on earth is he trying to beat?

free-flown rhythm, and that airborne beat.

Time’s on loop when you’re in the mix.

You are spot-on to think you are born for this.

Not a soul! His mind is set to his own heartbeat.

‘Buckle down’, he muses, while in the mix; working a passage of air within the loop.

Descending, he returns to the spot, impelled by pulse and impulse; bound by this fall of tension, and rising rhythm.

Todd Turner is an Australian poet and goldsmith. His first two collections of poetry are Woodsmoke (Black Pepper Publishing) and Thorn (Puncher and Wattmann). His poems have been widely published and anthologised. He is currently working on a manuscript for his third collection, Breathwork.

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A limpet named Desire Mikaela Nyman

When I’m done with desire when I’ve managed to corral space around my collarbones when I’ve listened to Rilke’s bell tower greeted this newfound density in my heart this slow pooling of ink in the vein of a long-lost friend when footprints cast shadows in sand porous and deep like mud cake, still hot and there’s no caving in— gently prise limpets off the rocks attach them to my slick skin taste the ocean inside me a bloom of pink sing my name in open syllables let me rest in each vowel’s singular sound, purposeful, elongated my swag to your cathedral, simple, as in to be, to be

Mikaela Nyman is an islander from the autonomous, demilitarised Åland Islands in Finland and lives in Taranaki, New Zealand. She writes poetry, fiction and nonfiction in English and Swedish and is a keen collaborator with writers from the Pacific Islands, in particular Vanuatu and the Solomon Islands. She is the author of the climate fiction novel Sado (2020) and co-editor of Sista, Stanap Strong! A Vanuatu Women’s Anthology (2021), both published

by Te Herenga Waka University Press. She hopes to publish her first English-language poetry collection in the not-too-distant future.

Currently, she’s the Robert Burns Fellow at Otago University in Dunedin.

83

SPECIAL FEATURE

MARGARET SCOTT YOUNG WRITER'S FELLOWSHIP

pomelo 柚子

By Yulan Jack

You begin inside Beautiful Jade, inside Wood Orchid, in a dark cinema. A woman sings to her lover. There is raucous laughter.

The crunch of melon seeds. After a time you hear deep groans and a cry that almost splits you in two. Then calm. You shiver.

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—————— The pomelo is the largest of all citrus fruits and ancestor to the grapefruit. Its pale yellow flesh is encased inside papery skin and a thick, soft rind. It has a sweet and sour taste, milder than a grapefruit. Native to Southeast Asia, it is known as the favourite fruit of the Moon Goddess. In Mandarin, the pomelo is called 柚子 yòuzi, a homophone for 有子 yǒuzǐ or ‘having a son’. Pomelo is often eaten during the Moon Festival, and the green-and-white rinds are placed on the heads of children so that the Moon Goddess will find and bless them. The fruit also symbolises prosperity, unity and perfection.

Suddenly she is struck by the absolute absurdity of it all – her pomelo hat, the sweat dripping down her face, the sticky latex on her fingers, her small brown body clinging to the ever-growing tree, its trunk extending far above her and its leaves pushing further into the sky. And she starts to laugh. At first a giggle. Then a snort. Then a guffaw. And then a maniacal piercing shriek. 嘿嘿, 嘻嘻, 哈哈哈!

She laughs until she cries big wet tears. She laughs until all her teeth fall out. She laughs so hard that the trunk of the tree vibrates and the papayas loosen. And one by one they rain down upon her, as if from the heavens.

—————— Wood Orchid is wearing a pomelo rind on her head as she strains to reach a gigantic green papaya dangling off the tree above her. Her thin body grazes the trunk of the tree and sweat pours down her brow beneath the thick rind of the pomelo.

ALMOST…ALMOST! All she has eaten for 68 days is sweet potato. Boiled sweet potato, coal-roasted sweet potato, sweet potato leaves. There is only enough rice to make porridge for her little brothers, and most of the fruits from the banana, papaya and jackfruit trees have been lopped off by the soldiers. But today – OH! THANK YOU JESUS! – today, on her bike ride home from the rubber plantation, she has found not only the discarded rind of a pomelo, but a tree covered in almost-ripe papayas.

Just as she is about to grasp the first fruit in her tiny hands, the tree seems to grow a little taller. HUH?! She raises onto the tips of her dusty toes. But the tree keeps growing higher and higher into the sky.

AIYAH! I WILL GET YOU! I WILL CUT YOU UP INTO THIN LITTLE STRIPS AND MAKE YOU INTO KERABU BOK KUA! OH HO HO! YOU WILL REGRET THIS! But the tree keeps growing. She wraps her body around the thin trunk and tries to shimmy up the tree. It’s growing so fast that the papayas are now just a cluster of small green dots taunting her. She’s losing sight of them!

I WILL EAT YOU! I WILL HAVE NO MERCY ON YOU! I WILL HACK INTO YOU WITH MY CLEAVER AND YOU WILL WISH YOU’D NEVER SEEN THE LIGHT OF DAY! I WILL EAT EACH AND EVERY ONE OF YOU! I WILL MAKE YOU INTO SALAD, I WILL MAKE YOU INTO SOUP, I WILL FRY YOU AND STEAM YOU AND YOUR CHILDREN AND POUND YOU UP INTO A PASTE! I WILL 杀死 —

—————— You are born with thick moody eyebrows and a Scottish scowl.

The first thing the nurses say is ‘She’s been here before!’. Beautiful Jade doesn’t mind whether or not you’ve been here. All she cares about is making sure that you have the sun and the moon, in abundance.

—————— I like making lists. I like my life to appear coherent and ORDERED. Lists of things I will do during the day and the hours of the day that I plan to do them. Work to do. Bills to pay. People to contact. Food to eat. Reminders that my period is getting closer.

When I was in high school, the Vice Principal ended every assembly with Have a productive day. Everyone groaned. I groaned too. But her words aligned with my own ferocious need to be productive – to justify my very existence through constant, unending work.

At school there was a timetable. After school, and later after uni and drama school, I wrote lists for how best to approach homework, and how much of the evening I could spend eating dinner and watching television. When I graduated, the lists moved into a calendar app. The lists grew.

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Use eye drops 12pm Lunch!! Sunscreen Call mum TAKE OUT RECYCLING Bone broth Sleep by 12 Drill monologue Self-defence videos Lock balcony!!!

Post pic 2 insta Limit screen time CANCEL AMAZON TRIAL Film audition and submit!!!!!

Order: enzyme tablets DRINK MORE WATER!!!!

Shower See Monday list

——————

美玉 (beautiful jade) dark from the sun ghostly in the light of the moon singing the song of the forgotten daughter drawing patterns in the air with her little hands walking on her tiptoes she echoes painted singers

啊门开了进去吧！ her shrill cry makes the moon weep and the rising sun smile —————— I read on Instagram that when a woman is born she is already carrying all the eggs she will ever have for her entire life. Those eggs are formed in her ovaries when she is a four-month-old foetus, held inside her mother for another five months.

I call my grandmother the same name that my mum calls her: māma. Mother. I don’t call her the usual word for maternal grandmother: 婆 婆 pópó, or 外婆 wàipó. Wàipó literally means ‘outside old woman’. Wàipó makes me think of the mothers of mothers drifting ever further apart from the daughters of daughters as they marry outside the family with each generation.

If my cellular life began as an egg inside my mother when she was nestled inside māma’s womb, how could māma be my wàipó?

Some tasks on the list are brief, like a single egg emoji. Sometimes they are very long notes.

Scottish / Chinese – first mixed person in both families?

– ongoing obsession with documenting vs impossibility of it!!!! where is the beginning of me? time isn’t linear / rejecting narratives of mixed-ness / reimagining myself / the context of each piece of writing / how we always change and we don’t like what we wrote before / each piece of writing is a time capsule????

I complete the tasks on the list – at the hour they are assigned – around 50% of the time. Often the tasks balloon into larger tasks and get dragged further down the day. Or moved to the next day, or the next. Or colour-coded according to priority. Or deleted en masse because I’ve decided I’m being OVERLYCONTROLLINGOFMYLIFEANDSHOULDREALLYJUSTDELETEALLTHELISTSANDLOOSENTHISSTRANGLEHOLDIHAVEONEVERYLITTLEASPECTOFMYEXISTENCEBECAUSELIFEISUNPREDICTABLEANDCHAOTICANDWHOAMITOTHINKIAMINCONTROL?????*

—————— I saw a few tweets the other day that resonated with me and made me think about early feedback I got on my manuscript – the tweets were about how marginalized writers often are told that their protagonists lack agency or proactiveness...What would happen if we were to open our minds to other (perhaps gentler) ways of engaging with the world? What stories would emerge then?1 – Lilly Lu, author and educator

*but if i forget to take my iron tablets, will i end up anaemic? maybe i should keep that reminder to pay my rent and – oh fuck it.

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pomelo

——————

——————

When I stare in the mirror, I see my dad. Even my handwriting looks like my dad’s.

My mum is more elusive. Her skin is a deep olive, mine is pink-ish beige. Her face is small and heart-shaped, my face is large and oval. I stand a whole head taller than her.

But I feel her in how I move. Or the voice I use when I’m on the phone – syrupy, injected with caramel. I see her in my tiny wrists, which are always too small for bracelets or watches.

Sometimes a certain photo, in a certain light, with a certain smile, reveals her in me. My iPhone has started asking me if photos of her when she was my age are photos of me. I see her in the way my skin drapes over my pronounced collar bone. Her wedding ring fits me. My engagement ring fits her.

Sometimes I dissect myself further. I have my āyí’s hands.

My nanna’s bottom. My mum’s bunions. My grandad’s flat feet.

My dad’s double eyelids and prominent nose. My gōnggong’s high cheek bones and small chin.

What is a dragon if you remove the head of a camel, horns of a deer, eyes of a demon, ears of a bull, neck of a snake, belly of a clam, scales of a carp, claws of an eagle and paws of a tiger?

What part of a dragon is just – dragon?

My memory is like a large mesh net that captures big items but not small details. The details are made up later or re-formed from something I have read or been told. Sometimes the blurry parts of my memory just remain blurry.

When I ask my mother about her childhood, sometimes she remembers details. Condensed milk. Smelly toilets. Free Milo! Bare feet. Opera troupes. A movie star’s name.

But sometimes there are gaps.

Were you old enough to remember the Malayan Emergency?

Huh? Not sure, probably gōnggong knew about it. There’s some mooncakes for you to finish in the fridge.

Did māma ever talk about the Japanese occupation?

Hmm, I’m not sure. Drink this barley water, it’s good for flushing out the system.

Did gōnggong ever talk to you about his life before he left China?

Hmm, I can’t remember. Use this hair tonic every day, okay?

Look at my hair! Still black and thick! You have your dad’s hair so it’s even more important that you use the tonic.

The gaps scare me. How can our brains – the same brain that allows my mum to store and recall hundreds of recipes – the same brain that allows me to remember hundreds of lines for a play – be so inconsistent?

I began recording my parents’ and grandparents’ stories onto cassette tapes when I was nine years old. I have 23 years of notes, videos, vlogs, songs, tapes, diaries, translations and saved text messages. I have spent my life trying to fill the gaps.

But all I have is an archive of the inconsistencies and blank spaces that you encounter when searching through tangled histories for a sense of wholeness that never existed.

—————— Your parents can’t agree on what to call you. Your grandmother can’t pronounce either of the names they like, so she gives you a Chinese name, a word she knows from the Bible: 恩 典 ēn diǎn.

The character 恩 ēn is made up of 因 yīn, meaning ‘cause or reason’, and the character 心 xīn, meaning, ‘heart’. The second character, 典 diǎn, means ‘standard, law, canon’, or ‘in charge of ’. It is one half of the word for dictionary.

Put together, 恩典 ēn diǎn means grace, favour, imperial favour, or grace of God. It carries a sense of blessings bestowed upon someone, often without them even deserving it.

In the end, there are four names on your birth certificate.

They spell 恩典 ēn diǎn: E-R-N-N-hyphen-D-I-E-N. In 27 years, when you move to China, people will hear the name and the first thing they will ask you is, ‘Are you Christian?’

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——————

initiative. She showed clearly that she was an effective leader as Head Librarian (1972), Prefect (1972-3), and the President of the Chinese Society, (1973). As a committee member of the Editorial Board, she had helped greatly in the designing and production of the school magazine. In spite of her heavy responsibilities, Mei Gek found time to take an active part in sports and games. She received prizes in discus, javelin and shot-putt. She represented her class in badminton and netball and her school in hockey. Mei Gek is a promising and likeable young lady who believes in trying her best in all that she does.

绳索 (rope) he wraps the rope around her tiny brown wrists tosses the loose end over a high wooden beam she watches silently as he pulls the rope tighter lifting her hands skyward just high enough that she is forced to tiptoe not so high that she is lifted off the ground

—————— he wants her to feel remorse but he doesn’t want to scar her or dislocate her arms you cannot scar a daughter (an educated man recommended this method a school teacher!)

I’m angry.

I’m angry that I’m supposed to be polite and productive.

I’m angry that I am polite and productive.

I’m angry that I didn’t learn to speak Mandarin as a child.

I’m angry that when I did learn to speak Mandarin in my twenties, I only learned enough to survive, not enough to express.

I’m angry that language is such an overvalued form of cultural knowledge when there are a million other ways to embody a culture.

I’m angry that I can’t cook the dishes my mum cooks.

I’m angry that I’m not making more of an effort to learn.

I’m angry that I’ve dissected myself so many times that it’s getting harder to put the pieces back together.

I’m angry that I’ve moved so many times that I’ve forgotten what home feels like.

I’m angry that I don’t find the time to rest.

I’m angry that I am so careful.

I’m angry about the times I’ve been reckless.

I’m angry that I’m constantly changing my mind.

I’m angry that other people’s minds don’t change enough.

I’m angry that we are all so angry at each other.

I’m angry that there’s so much to be angry about.

I’m angry that my anger is so privileged and so very banal.

two hours later wood orchid (too scared to untie the knots herself) has begged a neighbour to release the girl and beautiful jade has learned not to cry when her elder brother teases her not to disturb not to distract not to use her voice —————— SERANGOON SECONDARY SCHOOL LOWLAND ROAD, SINGAPORE, 19.

Date: 1 DEC 73 TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN Miss Loo Mei Gek was a pupil of this school from April 1972 to December 1973.

Mei Gek is a pleasant, polite, conscientious and helpful pupil who is very much interested in her work. She participated actively in all class discussions. She has been a very good Art pupil, coming in first in standard in Art for two successive years, 1972 and 1973. She is very eager to learn. All her teachers say that she was courteous, highly responsible, very efficient, unassuming, responsive, reliable and full of

But it’s worse when there is no anger. In the absence of anger, there’s just a hollow feeling. No fighting, no punching, no kicking. Just an emptiness that I’m not supposed to feel because I’ve always been provided with THE BEST. AS MUCH AS A BOY. MORE THAN A BOY. It’s a nothing-in-particular sadness, a biological quirk, a hormonal imbalance.

Sometimes, anger is a life rope. Something to cling onto so you don’t wash away.

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interview, and I put it somewhere safe. I knew I couldn’t lose it again. I couldn’t lose the only video recording I have of māma when she could still speak and laugh and sing and tell stories.

I know I put it somewhere safe. But now I’ve lost it again.

In Mandarin, the pomelo is called 柚子 yòuzi, a homophone for 游子 yóuzǐ meaning ‘wanderer’ or ‘a person living or traveling far from home’.

—————— —————— Intergenerational trauma can stem from biology, learned behaviors and even the collective experiences of a group. Some research suggests that trauma can affect a person’s DNA and potentially influence the health of future generations far removed from the traumatic event.2 – Rachel Zimmerman, journalist and author

There’s a camcorder video that I recorded around 2002 that I keep losing, and finding, then losing again. In the video I am sitting at a marble, plastic-covered kitchen table in my uncle’s home in Singapore and asking my grandmother, who I call māma, questions in English. My accent is aggressively nasal and bright, upward inflections on every sentence?

I ask māma questions about her childhood. My mum is translating. Maybe into Hók-ciŭ-uâ. Or maybe into Mandarin.

Māma definitely answers in Mandarin. (Does she think that maybe one day I’ll rewatch and understand? Does she think that there’s no way I’ll ever learn Hók-ciŭ-uâ, but that my few words of Mandarin might blossom into fluency? She is partly right. The last time I re-discovered this video, I’d spent a year in Shanghai sweating over Mandarin textbooks and making small talk with taxi drivers after long nights out. Which is to say, I did understand a lot of what she said.)

What māma says in the recording – what I remember her saying – is that life was hard in Malaysia during the war. Her father was imprisoned by the Japanese. While her mother played mahjong, māma was sent to deliver food to her father in prison. She would stand outside yelling BĀ! I BROUGHT YOU DINNER! A man would reply, yes, I’m here! And stick a bony hand out through the wooden fence (was it a wooden fence?).

Māma would hand over a caddy of food and return home.

When her father was released he looked so skinny.

Didn’t you eat the food I brought you?

What food?

The caddies I handed to you every day! I called out bā! You always responded!

I never got those, he says with a weary smile.

—————— I stash unused paper napkins in my handbag. I always keep the soap and the tea bags from hotels. I am constantly worrying. I wear sunscreen even if I’m only going outside for five minutes.

I don’t chew gum in case it pulls out a filling. I am constantly telling my partner to BE CAREFUL! Have you turned off the _______? Have you checked the _______? Are you sure we locked the ______?

—————— The Chinese word for lobster is 龙虾 lóngxiā. 龙 lóng means dragon, 虾 xiā means shrimp. The lobster is the dragon of the sea. As it is cooked it turns red, an auspicious colour. It can symbolise strength and good fortune. Health and prosperity.

—————— Wood Orchid floats in empty nothingness, clinging onto a giant lobster. Not a live lobster but a soft-toy lobster made from garish orange fabric stuffed with memory foam. shame, at least i could eat you if you were real! why did my silly grandkids send me off with a TOY LOBSTER?! IF YOU WERE A REAL LOBSTER I WOULD COOK YOU UP! WITH TOMATO AND CORIANDER AND ONION AND GARLIC AND CHILLI AND GINGER!!! HA! The thought of food normally makes her drool and her stomach rumble in anticipation. But there is no hunger here, no fullness. She wonders where she is and what Jesus will look like. Will he look like the painting from her hallway?

Or more like the stained-glass Jesus at her church? Or more

Māma laughs when she tells this story. She laughs even though her bā died a few years later from an infection after having his tooth pulled out. She laughs even though a few years after that, her mother married her off to a man twice her age. She laughs a lot these days. She laughs while finishing up all our leftover food. She laughs until she cries.

A couple of years ago I found a DVD of the camcorder

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like the handsome gwáilóu in the movie? And when she sees Jesus, how will she thank him? She knows how to cook, cut hair, manage 12 hairdressers, make and raise babies, run a laundromat. Would Jesus need any of those things?

After a while, in the empty nothing, with no up and no down, no light and no dark, no cold and no heat, after a period of time that could just as easily have been 50 years as 3 minutes, she starts talking to the lobster again.

LOBSTER, HEY LOBSTER! I HOPE YOU’RE LISTENING TO ME! Lobster does not respond. The lobster is a toy lobster.

LOBSTER! do you think jesus knows i’m here? maybe jesus didn’t hear me? maybe, i didn’t sing loud enough? OHHHHWW! MAYBE HE DIDN’T UNDERSTAND ME BECAUSE I WAS SINGING IN HÓK-CIǓ-UÂ! DOES JESUS UNDERSTAND HÓK-CIǓ-UÂ?! but of course he does, i’m being silly. jesus loves me. jesus knows all. but— no. jesus loves me. i will just wait a little longer for him. maybe i’ll sing a song for him? perhaps you’ll understand too, lobster? i’m not sure what languages you understand. gang sia nguai tien hu, ni nik nu duo boh ho! SAAAI NUUUU GIONG KONG, SAIIII NUUUUU EH JOH – AHHHLAMAK!!

Finally the paper objects pass. She opens her eyes. Nothingness again. Could it be that her neighbours were right when they burned paper items to send to their ancestors? No one was burning items for her. Who would send her a paper Hermès bag?! Had she been wrong this whole time?

NO. STOP THESE THOUGHTS! Jesus had always provided.

Jesus would provide. How could she be so ungrateful! Who needs paper things! In life, Jesus had given her sweet potatoes and papayas and rice and chicken and two freezers and three fridges and patterned designer blouses and rhinestone encrusted sandals and sons and daughters and grandchildren and diamonds as big as raisins! She tried to slap herself but didn’t feel anything.

She tried to cry. But she couldn’t feel sad. lobster? i’m glad you’re here with me lobster. lobster? you won’t leave me will you? lobster? we’ll be okay. i have faith.

—————— I don’t choose a new name; it chooses me.

It’s the afternoon before a full moon when I stumble upon the magnolia garden. A dozen magnolia trees arranged in a large circle, each identified by a bronze plaque. I find myself standing in front of the yulan magnolia tree. It is yet to bloom.

Yulan. I wrap my tongue around this word which feels both new and familiar.

I unlock my phone and Google.

A huge paper iPad hurtles past her. Then a paper car, a paper watch, a paper handbag, a pair of paper shoes, paper earrings, A paper jet

Paper mahjong tiles

The Magnolia denudata or Yulan magnolia has large, white, fragrant flowers…native to central and eastern China… regarded by Buddhist monks as a symbol of purity since the Tang Dynasty…This was the first magnolia to be introduced to the Western world when it was brought to England in 1780…It is the official city flower of Shanghai…simplified Chinese: 玉 兰; traditional Chinese: 玉蘭 (lit. ‘jade orchid’).

Paper kueh salat

Brightly coloured paper blouses

A paper Hermès handbag

A paper papaya

Jade Orchid.

Jade like Beautiful Jade: 美玉 Měiyù.

Orchid like Wood Orchid: 木蘭 Mùlán The character 蘭 lán is made up of the grass radical 艹 cǎo, 門 mén meaning door, entrance, or opening, and 柬 jiăn meaning letter, invitation, or choose.

I like how the falling fourth tone and the rising second tone on the pinyin look like two dark, angry eyebrows: yùlán.

As I stare at the tree, I think about doors opening. I think

A paper pomelo

LOBSTEEEERRRRR!!!

She grips Lobster tighter as the paper hurtles around her in no particular direction.

AHHHHH STOP!!!!

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I’ll take a photo for you this way, with māma .

This is good tea, you must learn to remember this taste sweetheart.

You know why? Because this tea, when you go to China they will serve you this tea and you must recognise the colour, beautiful pink colour– You must recognise it so they can’t rip you off! Your mum got ripped off!

You know when we were young– A pause. The mother removes the candle from the pomelo rind, picks up the rind, turns it over and places it on the grandmother’s head. The grandmother tries to laugh, a toothless laugh, but it comes out as a low groan. Which just makes her laugh-groan even more.

Hahahaha!

Māma looks so funny!

When we were young – we would put the pomelo on our heads like that! Remember?

Of course I remember!

Send that picture to me – send it to the chat!

You try it mum!

Hahahaha They laugh because they cannot cry. They laugh until they cry. They laugh until their teeth fall out. They laugh because it is the last time all of them will laugh together. They laugh so hard that blessings begin to fall from the sky, as if from the gods. q

about how time is not linear. I think about how all the lists in the world could not have led me to this tree. I think about how there is something that guides us that we cannot put into words. I think about the trinity of women: 木蘭, 美玉, 玉蘭.

And I take this name not to erase what has come before, but to tell the world that we are ready to bloom.

—————— In Mandarin, the pomelo is called yòuzi 柚子, a homophone for yòuzǐ 佑子 or ‘blessed child’.

—————— 9.43pm, September 2016, Singapore.

A grandmother, a mother, an aunt, a granddaughter. A small table covered with mooncakes, a paper lantern, a sippy cup, earthenware tea cups and a small pot, and a pomelo – slices arranged on a glass plate, and the pomelo rind, sliced in that particular way where you cut off the top and the bottom and make incisions into the sides so that it looks almost like a giant flower bud. There is one lit candle stuck in the centre of the pomelo rind.

Māma, zhōng qiū jié kuài lè! It’s lantern festival remember?

Māma, zhōng qiū jié kuài lè? I think she can’t hear me?

A series of low groans.

Hahaha! Māma said you’re more beautiful than me!

I hope I look as good as you when I’m in my sixties!

Another low groan.

Yulan Jack 杰克玉兰 (formerly Stephanie Jack) is a writer, actor and interdisciplinary artist whose work spans video art and experimental pop. Her acting credits include Deadloch (Amazon) and Miss Peony (Belvoir St). In 2022 she was recognised as one of Asialink’s 40 Under 40 Most Influential Asian Australians. She received the Margaret Scott Young Writer’s Fellowship in the 2022 Tasmanian Literary Awards. As part of that Fellowship, she was awarded mentoring by and publication in Island; this essay was written during that process.

Images: provided by the author (edited)

Endnotes 1 Lu, L (2022) ‘Decolonizing story structure and literary form’ Bookish Brews 19 May 2022. bookishbrews.com/story-structure-literary-form-lilly-lu accessed 23 May 2024 2 Zimmerman, R (2023) ‘How does trauma spill from one generation to the next?’

Washington Post 12 June 2023. www.washingtonpost.com/wellness/2023/06/12/ generational-trauma-passed-healing accessed 23 May 2024

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A LITERACY JOURNEY

Seeing the world differently

by Josh

J

osh has a diagnosis of dyslexia, had challenges in schooling as a result, and is now successfully completing a law degree. He has recently run for public office.

for hours. So, I often came across as exceedingly stubborn.

If I didn’t know why I was doing something, I wouldn’t want to do it.

I have a professional report that was done in early primary.

I don’t remember doing the assessment. I half remember talking to someone, but no details. On the report, her title was guidance counsellor, and she said that my behaviour was consistent with a diagnosis of dyslexia. I never really thought much of it, but when I graduated uni, mum told me that in one of her parent–teacher interviews, the teacher essentially told her that I would never get a uni degree. I would never amount to anything. I like that: to me it’s a reminder that no matter how many kids teachers see, they’re not fortune tellers and they can’t say one way or the other how a kid’s going to turn out.

A big part of my experience has been recognising that I see the world differently. I seem to see things that other people don’t see, or see things in a way that people don’t see them.

Adding my stubbornness onto that created a lot of frustration when I was young. I had a way that I wanted to do things or see things or communicate things, but other people just seemed like they were wrong. One of the biggest difficulties I’ve had to get over with relationships is recognising that logic isn’t the motivating factor for why people do things. Trying to learn the language of relationship and becoming fluent with other people has been a long journey.

I guess it’s probably worth starting at the beginning. From what I’ve heard, I didn’t speak until I was at least two, and I’ve always made the joke that I’ve been catching up ever since. In my early years of primary school it was almost like something just didn’t click. A lot of it I’ve forgotten. I’m not entirely sure why, but bullying was a constant in those early years. I do remember quite a lot of times where I’d just sit down with a piece of paper at a test and it would just be like my brain went blank. I wouldn’t be able to think at all. That’s something I’ve learnt to deal with rather than growing out of.

One of the big turning points for me was when my parents got me into a touch-typing course where I learnt to type instead of hand write, and that enabled me to get my thoughts out a lot easier. I still struggled with the mental blankness at times, but it meant if I have something to write about, then I’ll write for days. This was a massive help in university where I got to choose the things I studied.

One of the big things I learned in later years was how to just keep moving forward. Though, it is something I still struggle with from time to time. If I was dumped with a task and no instructions, I would just happily sit there and do nothing

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Image: Noah Black

One thing that has helped is learning how I learn. Verbal and visual tend to work best. I became somewhat known in my uni classes in that my lecturer would be talking and I would be the first person to be asking questions. I think talking through something and asking questions, once I understand something enough to know the question that I want to ask, and then once I can receive a response to that question, that’s when I really understand it. The connection of curiosity and interest in learning something helps me remember it. I also often create mental images that help information stick with me a lot better. Two tools I’ve found exceedingly helpful have been Audible and MindMeister. The ability to get just about any book in audio form has allowed me to absorb information without banging my head against books. The second tool I used was for study: it allowed me to put all my notes on a mind map. Once I was able to visually see the connections between notes and topics, things clicked much easier.

I think [advice for people teaching kids like I was is] just breeding curiosity as much as possible and being comfortable with questions that come out nowhere. Questions that come

out of nowhere to you might not come out of nowhere to the person who’s asking them. As adults now, even myself, when I come across someone who is asking things out of the blue, I try first to understand the pathway that led to the question.

Then seek to answer it in as much detail as time allows. The more data points to form connections, the easier it is to place the information in its right place and thereby learn it. That said, I think at some level it is just about accepting that kids are going to get frustrated at the inability to communicate at times and just being able to be mature enough to soak it up and let that process play itself out.

I’m 26 now. I’ve learned to use my unique perspective to help challenge the standard way things are. That takes a lot of patience and thought to ensure I’m able to communicate effectively. I’ve always been service-hearted and I am thankful for the opportunities that are opening up for me to serve. I seem to be wired to continually work to find ways to understand, communicate and find solutions to the issues that our community is dealing with. I am thankful for the opportunities to give the first energies of my life to service. q

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A moment to reflect Emma Bugg 94

A memorial for the extinct: Emma Bugg’s thylacine locket

The last known thylacine died, likely of exposure, on a cold September night in 1936, at the Beaumaris Zoo on the Hobart Domain. Its loneliness that night must have been existential – it was the endling, the last of its kind. The species was officially declared extinct by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature in 1982 and then by the Tasmanian government in 1986. In Australia, National Threatened Species Day on 7 September commemorates the loss of the thylacine and demonstrates the iconic status of the species for public engagement with extinction and conservation. Recently, the thylacine has been the subject of de-extinction research funded partly by Colossal Laboratories and Biosciences and led out of the Thylacine Integrated Genomics Restoration Research (or TIGRR) Lab at the University of Melbourne.

Frequent reports of sightings in Tasmania and as far away as Canada suggest that the thylacine continues to haunt the public imagination.

Emma Bugg’s locket contains a sculpture of a tiny thylacine pouch young made from salvaged 14 karat gold, resting on a piece of skin-toned leather, and placed behind a microscope

Hannah Stark The thylacine locket was a central component of an interactive installation Emma Bugg designed around de-extinction, in collaboration with Professor Andrew Pask. It was displayed at the Science Gallery Melbourne as part of the Not Natural exhibition from February to June 2024 and was presented alongside an interactive survey inviting the audience to share opinions on whether we should bring back thylacines, a set of lab tools with 3D-printed pouch young in scientific beakers, and a video featuring a series of interviews with people representing First Nations, scientists, ethicists, and young people, sharing diverse views on bringing back the thylacine.

What do we remember? What do we forget? What holds our memories? What keeps them close?

Emma Bugg’s thylacine locket is a complex piece of art that counterposes the loss of a species with the promise of its resurrection.

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slide. Below this golden baby is a glass vial of thylacine DNA held in place by a silver girdle. In the face of the locket, held between two glass lenses, is a piece of thylacine pelt donated

by Professor Andrew Pask, a field-leading expert on thylacine de-extinction and head of TIGRR Lab. When the locket is closed, the pelt and the leather surround the thylacine sculpture, returning it again to the pouch.

The thylacine locket deftly blends art and science. The pelt and vial of DNA are visually arresting and complicate the meaning of the locket. Like the body parts of saints displayed in churches, these thylacine remains could be modern-day relics – physical presence venerated as a tangible embodiment of holiness. The locket is a reliquary, or shrine, for holding these precious remnants. The importance of the physical presence of the remains is central to the holiness of the relic and to the value of this locket. The use of this tiny piece of pelt is a reminder of the limited nature of the material residue of a creature that once existed. The pelt and DNA, as well as the status of this object as a genetic ark, make it a missive to the future, embodying the hope that something resembling the species might once again roam the wild places of Tasmania.

The locket is not didactic. It does not tell us what to think and feel about extinction but rather opens a space for contemplation. Displayed in a public gallery, it is a memorial to the thylacine. Memorial culture creates a commemorative space in which public feelings can be experienced and worked through. Memorials are a critical site for memory-work in our culture and for processing troublesome and complex histories.

The thylacine locket is a repository for public environmental sentiment, and it invites us to think about human impact and responsibility. The sixth mass extinction, undoubtably accelerated by human environmental impact, requires that we reflect on what is lost and what remains. Extinction unsettles past, present and future through the death of individual animals, the termination of a species, and the subsequent loss

of generations. The extinction of the thylacine is enmeshed with human histories of colonialism, land management and bureaucracy that resulted in the government bounty responsible for their eventual demise. Feelings of guilt, shame and loss provoked by the locket, as well as the visual references to scientific culture, also invite us to contemplate de-extinction, the ethics of which are far from resolved. Is de-extinction a corrective, a way to right past wrongs? What bearing does the historical context have on what de-extinction means? In the case of the thylacine, is the quest for de-extinction an aspect of colonial guilt tied up with shame about the genocide of Indigenous people and the broader environmental impacts of Western imperial expansion? If we undo extinction, what other histories might we erase? What might we forget? Are we absolved?

A locket is a keeper of memory, a decorative adornment for preserving something precious. Associated with love, absence and mourning, lockets have been used to contain things such as images of the beloved or a lock of hair of the deceased. As sentimental jewellery, lockets hold keepsakes close to the heart of the wearer and preserve memory. The use of precious metals such as 14 and 9 karat gold, sterling silver and brass, frame and honour the thylacine as something precious. It is significant that the thylacine sculpture is of a pup early in its development and not yet viable outside of the pouch. It is an image that captures the potential for life extinguished. When I look at this locket encasing its foetal sculpture, I think about stillborn babies and lost pregnancies and the limited scope we have in our culture for marking these losses. I think of my friend describing her miscarriage – a loss with no mode of public expression. She told only a few people. I have a cousin by marriage who lost a child. Through the ongoing trauma of that loss, he regularly shares photos of his stillborn son on social media. Gone but not forgotten. And so, through the fog of loss and grief the life is marked and kept in the present, and

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Images Page 98 Top Thylacine De-Extinction Project 2024, as installed for the NOT NATURAL exhibition Science Gallery, University of Melbourne. A project by Professor Andrew Pask, Emma Bugg, Thylacine Integrated Genetic Restoration Research (TIGRR) Lab & Collaborators.

Photographer: Matthew Stanton Bottom A Moment to Reflect 2024, pictured within the Thylacine De-extinction Project.

Photographer: Matthew Stanton Page 99 Thylacine De-Extinction Project 2024, as installed for the NOT NATURAL exhibition Science Gallery, University of Melbourne. A project by Professor Andrew Pask, Emma Bugg, Thylacine Integrated Genetic Restoration Research (TIGRR) Lab & Collaborators.

Photographer: Matthew Stanton

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we collectively hold the memory. But with this shared grief comes discomfort and a sense that the pain being shared is too private. I offer these examples not to counterpose them as two ways of processing grief, but because this grief has no cultural space in which to be adequately expressed. The same can be said for extinction, which we witness as an escalating diminishment of biodiversity.

What is the language for these losses? What is the visual culture? Where and when are they marked? There is so little space afforded to memorialising the extinct and so the memory work that we need to do to come to terms with the loss of species remains to be done. Perhaps the thylacine continues to haunt us because it has not yet been mourned.

The locket is also a memento mori, a reminder that we too will die. We live in a time of conflict and humanitarian crisis. I watch with horror as casualties mount in the Ukraine, as genocide unfolds in Palestine. We are living in the aftermath of COVID-19, of the global trauma, not yet processed,

of bodies piling up, of locking down, of learning from home, of immobility; of a time in which the public places through which we once moved and events we once attended became dangerous, a threat to life. We are witnessing environmental devastation on a global scale, of melting icebergs and rising seas, of extreme and unseasonal weather, of oceans filled with plastic, of food insecurity. The list of extinct species grows and grows. This is a time to consider our own mortality, a time in which extinction feels proximate.

This is, then, a locket for our time.

I look at the locket and I think about lost species as well as those that will soon be gone and I hold this loss close to my heart. q

Emma Bugg is a Hobart-based artist who graduated in 2002 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Tasmania. She is a co-founder of State of Flux Workshop, a contemporary jewellery space, a recipient of the 2023 Women’s Art Prize and has work represented in the MONA collection. Her professional career spans over 15 years.

Hannah Stark is Associate Professor of English at the University of Tasmania and a visiting fellow at the University of Oulu, Finland. This research was supported by Australian Research Council DP200101877.

Images Pages 94, 95, 97 and 101 A Moment to Reflect 2024, thylacine pelt, plastic vial with thylacine DNA, glass microscope slide, 14k yellow gold, 9k yellow gold, sterling silver, brass, leather, glass lenses.

Photographer: Ivett Dodd

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101

For want of natural snow Miriam Webster

102

FICTION

During days of dark mornings I lost my job and gained my leisure. News of my redundancy appeared in my inbox with an innocuous subject line. I read the email and felt hopeful.

Seven am, the business crowd, phone screens casting haloes.

People kept asking what I was doing with my time and I told them I was working on my novel. But mostly I just sat on the back step smoking cheap imported cigarettes. The long white cylinders had blue and silver foil at the tip. On the one hand, this seemed luxurious and made me feel rich. On the other hand, I guess you could say I was suffering from writer’s block.

I had to admit that unemployment didn’t suit me; without the temporal stipulations of the working week, it was hard to regulate my hours. I felt truly redundant, like an idea or technology that had once been popular but had now become outmoded. Radio, communism, girdles, vol-au-vents.

At first I was like, yes – this will be amazing. This is how I’ll finish writing my novel.

—————— During days of dark mornings I lost my job and gained my leisure; it was autumn but not early, just before the chill arrived. I read the email in the kitchenette between classes, poring over the missive like divination, a portent cast in instant grinds. Again I read it in my office, at lunchtime, eating a California roll. Wiping mayonnaise from the corner of my lip I smiled drily and began to pack my things without a word.

Later that night I spoke to my father on the phone. He asked me what I was thinking of doing next and I said, I’m thinking of using this time to finish my novel. He said it sounded self-indulgent. I said the problem was not that writing got called a leisure activity but that people, in general, did not have enough leisure.

—————— I guess you could say I was sitting on the back step chasing a sensation. I had nowhere to put all my nostalgia. Instead I just bought cheap imported cigarettes from a shop around the corner. The man who sold them had a face impressed with wrinkles, a pink-lit aquarium and an ancient dog with three brown teeth. You had to ask for the smokes as if they were illegal, surrounded by stacks of coloured vapes.

Then the man would disappear into a back room for quite a while.

—————— —————— Later that night I spoke to my father on the phone, but the voice I heard belonged to my friend Van. He asked me what I was planning on doing next and I told him I was thinking of using this time to finish my novel. Van said it was a good idea. For a while now Van had been thinking that the problem was not that writing got called a leisure activity, but that people, in general, did not have enough leisure.

Actually, Van was in a similar boat. He’d recently been made redundant from his job as a ski instructor because the ski resort he lived near had closed for want of natural snow.

People kept asking what he was planning on doing next and he said he was looking forward to finishing his screenplay, an Australian epic about men who wrangled brumbies in the Victorian Alps.

Then I would disappear into a mood like a room for quite a while. I covered myself in foil when I craved a sense of luxury. Whenever I opened my laptop and moved the cursor over my manuscript, I had the distinct impression I was doing something shifty, indulging a perversity.

—————— I had the distinct impression I was doing something shifty, maybe even something illegal. I was the man with the ancient dog and crinkled face selling covert cigarettes in a shop meant for vapes.

——————

——————

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I was the man with the crinkled dog the ancient face the fish tank plying redundant products behind a sign which read cash only. Sitting in the corner of a store collecting wrinkles. Sitting on a high shelf in someone’s garage collecting fibres, wedged between objects that hadn’t lately seen the light of day. Encyclopaedias, rotary telephone, badly wrought ceramic duck.

At some point it got cooler in the evenings. The day contracted; soon we would be winding back the clocks.

—————— Someone I knew called out of the blue. I was pleased to discover it was Van. We grew up together in a distant part of the country, in the corrugated lean of a mountain. When we were children we taught each other the names of all the peaks: Feathertop, Mount McKay, Spring Spur, Mount Bogong. I was in love with Van when we were younger. Possibly, I loved him still.

Van no longer worked as a ski instructor because of the situation with the snow.

How is your screenplay about horses coming along?

Oh I don’t know, I’ve been a bit distracted. Things have changed, he said strangely, since you were last in town.

—————— Sitting on the back step winding clocks and rearranging things on shelves. Paraffin lamps, rotary telephones, transistor radios, model trains. Languishing through winter in their company. Before I knew it, it was springtime, which meant that there was rain. I told people that all this time I had been writing, but that was obviously my lie.

—————— Things have changed, said Van, since the snow ceased its annual dumping. The ski resort closed down for want of natural tourists. There was destitution and unrest in the community. It was getting pretty bad, so at the end of another dry winter we all met to determine a course of action.

What did you decide?

Van only sighed. Things end so often, he said cryptically, before hanging up.

—————— I told people I was sitting on a low stiff chair at the unemployment office, filling in another form. My liaison officer, a short woman named Amanda, wanted to get me a job sorting eggs in a factory where fluorescent lighting licked the backs of many chickens. I pretended I was vegan and couldn’t work among battery hens. But that was obviously my lie.

To qualify for the payment I had to apply for 20 different jobs each month. Most days I went online to look for work but ended up looking at clothes I couldn’t afford or reading reports of awful things. My liaison officer wanted to know what I was good at, but I didn’t know how to answer that question. I’d been diversifying my portfolio for so many years my skillset was unclear.

—————— Things end so often in these days of disaster, Van continued, the next time we spoke. He was down for a funeral and dropped around to my place. When he appeared I was shuffling a houseplant into a corner of my bedroom. The houseplant had become a symbol for the futility of all things.

There were books on the floor, volumes I’d removed from my office and failed to re-shelve. It was becoming dangerous.

I’d already stubbed my toe on a hardbound copy of Proust.

I explained that I’d been struggling with a sense of hopelessness. My foot hurt. My novel was on hold. Van peeled back my sock in a way I thought was moving. He knew about reflexology. As he rubbed and squeezed my foot in different places, Van got philosophical. He said, the end of labour is to gain leisure.

Is that Marx?

Actually it’s Aristotle, said Van. Come with me and you will see exactly what I mean.

—————— I’d been diversifying my portfolio for so long that whenever I turned down work or shirked my responsibilities with the unemployment office, I had the distinct impression I was doing something illegal. No one bothered to ask how the writing was going; I hadn’t touched my novel for the longest time.

Someone I knew was going skiing in New Zealand. It made me think of my home town, how the ski resort had closed, finally, for want of natural snow.

——————

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FOR WANT OF NATURAL SNOW

Come with me, said Van, and you will see how things have changed. He explained that since it stopped snowing there had been an uprising; some were calling it a people’s revolution.

Van seemed excited by this word, revolution, and I too felt a sudden thrill. Van and I were different kinds of writers, but we agreed that some words shake their manes and gallop through your blood.

Things have changed since you left, certainly they have changed. People were happy with their universal wage and three-day week. Leisure was such a serious pursuit the caucus even voted that farm animals should be considered workers; this meant that cows and sheep and chickens would not only participate in the three-day workweek and receive fair remuneration; they would also enjoy the leisure time the new system espoused.

But the wild brumbies of the alps, all tangled mane and feral eye, were not to be included.

Someone told me it was practically utopian.

Actually Van, wasn’t it you who used that word?

—————— Van seemed excited by the story, which shook its mane and galloped by the car as we turned off the highway and drove at a quick clip along the Snow Road. I bade Van remind me of the details. Without the ski season, he said, most of the businesses couldn’t survive. Families were leaving and no teachers could be gotten for the school. A radical leftist faction broke away from the local council and gathered support for a kind of revolution; there had been a siege in the supermarket, which was now a co-op and so was the pub.

Change had not come without violence. Van told me how they ousted the wealthy moguls who’d controlled commerce for generations, forcing them into exile on the other side of the mountain. He told me how their riches were seized, redistributed and used to establish a universal wage, and how the farmers and vignerons now supplied the town with milk, cheese, eggs, meat, asparagus, olives, wine, wheat, rice and cottage greens in exchange for labour. Some grew a little tobacco. Some cultivated a little weed.

Tasks were divided among the able, and people worked three days a week.

What about the rest of the time?

That’s the beautiful part, said Van. The rest of the time is free.

—————— Wasn’t it you, Van, who told me about the revolution?

When I asked who held power now you said, The people.

Obviously.

Was it just me, or did you fail to meet my eye?

—————— Obviously I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t suspicious – I’d heard the word revolution before and knew about the kind of regime it could spawn. While stirring sugar into your tea, you spoke of the new system with lightning in your eyes.

I was staying at your house while I settled into life back on the mountain. Your enthusiasm was catching. Like snowmelt, I felt it sluicing through me.

Are such things even feasible, I asked, long term?

Of course, you said. Obviously.

But then you didn’t meet my eye.

——————

—————— Of course, he said, stirring sugar in his tea. I really liked Van’s eyebrows. I loved him when we were younger, possibly I loved him still.

Although I considered three sugars two-and-a-half too many for tea.

That’s the beautiful part, said Van: we’ve included leisure in the framework. It’s wonderful. Things have changed since you left…for the better, certainly they have changed.

——————

——————

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Possibly I loved him as I sipped my tea and sighed. I thought he looked impassioned, but not because of me.

In the distance: the mountain.

—————— During days of contemplation I walked and on my walks I noticed bush around the edges of the road, how blue. I saw cows grazing, chickens ranging, sheep lolling in the blunted grass. They looked happy. I was happy. My neighbours and I waved to each other from the mutual vantage point of all this leisure.

I did not see much of Van. Since I’d arrived he’d become more and more involved with the Leisure Committee, a body established to ensure we were all making the most of our freedom. I wasn’t really sure why we needed it, but I trusted Van knew what he was doing.

The end of labour is to gain leisure, he repeated often, looking past me at the hills.

—————— In the distance, the mountain, and further up, the twisted snowgums: spectral, grey. Further up again the peaks and pools of clearest water, and down below the river, freezing green. I breathed the fragrant air and felt refreshed; possibly I felt inspired.

Within days of my arrival I’d settled into an easy rhythm.

On Mondays I stacked shelves at the co-op. On Tuesdays I picked chillies at what used to be Donati’s farm. On Wednesdays I taught English at the high school and in the evenings I poured beers for workers at the pub. Being part of the urban precariat had given me a whole swathe of transferrable skills; it turned out I was a highly prized worker, more so than some of my peers who’d stayed in town.

The work/life balance achieved an ethical position I’d idealised for many years. An intention crystallised, softly at first, before becoming sharper. I was like, Yes – this will be amazing. I felt capable of finishing my novel and, with renewed optimism, considered returning to the project.

But not just yet.

For now I was happy contemplating the slant and texture of the light.

—————— The end of leisure is to gain more leisure, he started saying, sometime in the new year. I wondered where the buck would stop. I asked him how his screenplay was coming along and he looked at me with a cruel expression. You’re a hypocrite, he said, stalking from the room.

—————— The end of leisure is to gain more leisure, he repeated; the only way to preserve our state of freedom is to play hard and even harder; a pure state of leisure must be enacted and enforced. This was Van’s new doctrine, and to this end he stopped turning up for his shifts at the co-op and refused to work on the farms. He came home late at night or sometimes not at all. I lay in his bed alone, wondering where he went.

I knew it had something to do with the Leisure Committee, although I couldn’t imagine what.

Van’s radical enthusiasm for leisure coincided, strangely, with a sharp desire of mine to begin writing. I dared not call it work, especially in his presence, but one morning very early, when Van had not come home all night, I perched my laptop on his sheets and formatted a new document. I couldn’t remember how long I’d been living on the mountain but it must have been a while, because winter had returned. The frost bit less than I remembered, and against the cloudless sky the peak was bald and brown.

Things have changed, I reflected, even since I came to town.

—————— For now I was happy contemplating the change from spring to summer. By late October it was warm enough to swim. I spent my days off lounging on the dappled bank. I treated the time between Thursday and Monday mornings as a kind of shabbat and although I was anything but religious I refused to drive, type, reap, sow or speak of financial matters. On days when it was too hot to walk down to the river, I languished in Van’s bedroom studying the weft and weave of his sheets.

Things I used to love doing – reading, singing, cooking – now raised my temperature too much. Instead I rested, wondering how to start my novel. It wasn’t urgent, because I had all the time in the world, but at the same time this period was bounded. I had only four days per week, not an infinite number, which gave my leisure structure and stopped it from becoming fearsome. Knowing this put me at ease, and I treated these days of contemplation as preparation for the work of genius I would eventually come to write.

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FOR WANT OF NATURAL SNOW

I was the writer with the brilliant future, but this was becoming a problem. My commitment to the work went against Van’s commitment to leisure even though it had been born from leisure and could not exist without it. I did not know what to say to him, so I simply mouthed along when he recited favourite maxims, shaping the word leisure with my lips.

Pretending wasn’t so hard. All I had to do was feign rapture, which I’d feigned with other men. But I think Van intuited my departure; he sensed it like an irritation, a faint ache below the ribs.

—————— Even since I came to town Van had changed. He and the committee were becoming fanatical. There had been searches, purges, even trials.

Winter came and went and my novel was coming along in secret. There was the sense I was doing something shifty, indulging a perversity. I had to admit it was illegal.

—————— I had to admit it felt amazing.

I was no longer the old man with the ancient dog the covert face the cash only sign the illegal trade the coloured vapes passing time in the back room. I was the writer with the brilliant future. I was working hard to make the most of my leisure. It was something of a paradox, but I had to admit I was indulging my perversity.

—————— I think Van intuited that he’d lost me. In turn, his affection for me changed. There was the sense I’d been amusing but had now become outmoded: just like DADA, comedy clubs, shoulder pads, devilled eggs.

I had to admit I didn’t give a shit!

As the deadline for my manuscript loomed I left Van alone and wrote many emails discussing financial matters. I raised my temperature by cycling long distances, masturbating energetically and cooking elaborate meals. I revised and edited.

My advance came through. It was not the money I liked so much as the affirmation. I felt as though I were achieving an ethical position I’d idealised for many years. It was practically utopian. I thought, I am free.

—————— I was the writer with the brilliant future emailing publishers in the city, one of whom was interested in acquiring my manuscript. Her offer appeared in my inbox with an innocuous subject line. I read it in the kitchen on a brilliant morning, drinking a rare kind of Japanese tea they’d terraced on the side of the mountain. It was autumn but not early, around the same time as the chill arrived. There was – what was it? An overwhelming sense of déjà vu.

Seven am, steam rising, the room illuminated by a paraffin lamp.

—————— I thought I was finally free, but as the deadline for my manuscript loomed I was called before the Leisure Committee and reprimanded. In an act of defiance I fronted up in shoulder pads.

The Committee said: Did you think you were free to do as you pleased? Haven’t we told you ART IS WORK!

—————— There was the overwhelming sense of déjà vu possibility.

I read her email on my phone in bed, even though Van was sleeping right beside me. Eleven pm, early winter, tinny sounds emitting from an antique radio in the hall.

The publisher thought my novel could be big. What she needed from me was a commitment to the work.

——————

——————

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ISLAND

Haven’t we told you shoulder pads, insofar as they emblematise power, money and success, are forbidden on this mountain? And for that matter, Haven’t you learned that ART IS WORK! Haven’t you learned anything since returning to the mountain?

The Leisure Committee advised that if I wanted to work I should apply to the arts council for the writer’s stipend.

I should only write on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday during work hours, with an hour-long break every five. The committee were exceedingly disappointed in my secret labour.

They lectured me about my advance, an extension of credit which prefigured my creative labour as a debt, sustaining the false economy of the literary marketplace. Art is work, they said again. Take that ridiculous jacket off and while you’re at it, never forget!!

There was a strong sense I’d done something illegal. The problem, I realised, was not that I was writing but that the committee did not see writing as a leisure activity.

I felt disappointed in a way I couldn’t pinpoint. I looked at Van, but he fixed his gaze on something beyond me and refused to meet my eye.

Van fixed his gaze on something in the distance: the mountain. The peak was shaggy with summer foliage, though it was only October now. I stood and he sat on the edge of the bed while the radio fizzed and cackled. After a while he whispered, I wish I could have loved you.

Oh, how I loved him when we were younger. My laptop fit perfectly inside the breast pocket of my jacket. I dusted off my powerful shoulders. Possibly, I loved him still.

——————

I guess you could say that for a little while I disappeared.

Van fixed his gaze on something beyond my shoulder and whispered, never forget.

In my pocket was a pen, a notebook, a single cigarette.

——————

—————— Possibly, Van stood still and looked out of the window.

I smiled, maybe sadly, and packed my things without a word.

—————— I smiled, maybe sadly, then I dusted off my shoulders and disappeared for a little while. I guess you could say I was chasing a sensation.

——————

I disappeared for a sensation.

——————

——————

Van fixed his gaze on something beyond my shoulder and whispered, the novelist has become outmoded. Behind him, framed by the window, the peak was bald and brown. The window was open and I thought I heard the sound of hooves, but perhaps it was just rain, the first rains of September.

The committee were silent. We listened until the sound of hooves receded. Possibly, Van refused to meet my eye.

I felt disappointed because I loved him. In my pocket was a pen, a handwritten note, a single vol-au-vent.

Little did I —————— Disappear. q

——————

Miriam Webster writes in and around Naarm. Her fiction and nonfiction has been short- and long-listed for various prizes, including Overland’s Neilma Sidney Short Story Award, the Calibre Essay Prize and the inaugural KYD Nonfiction Essay Prize. In 2022 she was a Wheeler Centre Hot Desk fellow and her first book, a collection of short stories, is forthcoming with Aniko Press.

Images: Yannick Pulver - Unsplash (edited)

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In Each Form I am a Self They Can’t Know John Kinsella

Search for possum in York gum demi-moon-lit at the top gate.

Remember the transit, remember cockatoos in southern peppermint trees holding sandhills in communities.

I am a self they cannot know, and the stressfractures provide too many ideas of intact forests and carefully trodden trails.

Since coming into the fold — window frames held in place by daddy long-leg webs — I cannot stop fixating on margins,

angles and veins of a moth retaining spectrumed wings, its softness of thorax and abdomen, its glimmer of eyes and antennae.

I won’t denigrate through overidentification, but baulk over so many shifts across the imperceptible curve that launched us from light, lost before re-situating within a possum’s eyeshine.

John Kinsella’s three volumes of collected poems are The Ascension of Sheep (UWAP, 2022), Harsh Hakea (UWAP, 2023) and Spirals (UWAP, 2024). His recent verse novel is Cellnight (Transit Lounge, 2023).

A frequent collaborator with other poets, writers, artists, musicians and activists, he lives on Ballardong Noongar land at ‘Jam Tree Gully’ in the Western Australian wheatbelt.

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You I mourn like plants mourn their roots Katherine Nicholson

I

jiggle my teabag. The water darkens. There is a small stain on the tablecloth from where it has spilt; permanent, the size of my thumbnail.

‘Did you tell your mum?’

Sally laughs, nudging a bit of cake onto her fork with her little finger.

‘Oh, Jesus, no!’

Sally chews her cake, hand covering her mouth. A bit too dainty; an act she isn’t used to. ‘Well, I mean, she knows I’m having sex with him, but she doesn’t – you know, need all the details.’ Sally removes the hand covering her mouth and smiles. Jolly gap between her two front teeth. Tiny spot of jam caught in the corner of her pretty, bitten mouth. She tilts her head to the side, pauses so I can notice her raised eyebrow.

‘Just because you tell your mum everything.’

I nod and fiddle with my fork, smushing the last few crumbs of cake against the side of the plate. I explain to Sally, in so many words – none of which quite describe how I feel – how it’s not that I necessarily tell you everything; you already know without my having to say it.

Sally doesn’t know what to say to this; she talks some more about her flatmate. I wonder if perhaps this is why Sally doesn’t like me anymore, because I don’t love like she loves.

If I am ivy, clinging and clinging, she is the wall – and a wall will never understand ivy’s need to cling, not when it can stand all on its own. I finish my tea, listening to her. She is talking in synecdoche; I nod and smile and hear odd words here and there: hard good tongue pink!

I think of all the many bits of myself. Toes I’ve wrapped up in tissue paper. My intestines pinned like Christmas lights around the doorframe of my childhood home. My hands pegged to the washing line, my feet in the hall, pushed neatly together.

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FICTION

Home, for both of us, is the same place. Home is called Ivy Cottage. There are cracks in the paint and insect shells under the mat. We cleaned out the kitchen and wrapped plates and cups in newspaper. We bundled sheets and picture frames into boxes.

In one of the frames was a photo of you standing in the doorway of Ivy Cottage.

You have curly hair that is like spirally pasta.

Your nose is a little bit

He threw a rock and in all the excitement of being saved, the sandpit wedding was forgotten. It was understandable, in light of more dramatic proposals. In the car I told you about the snake, and the rock, and the oh-so-heroic saving, but more importantly about the swearing.

I was undeniably in love.

Sally still wears clips in her hair, always, two by her temples; green and purple, red and blue. We’ve grown a bit, changed a bit. Sure, we’ve fought, heavy bill between us, let-me-no-meno-me!-no-really – never about anything that really matters. I think how you’re the only person I’ve ever argued with, Mum, properly argued, when we’re both screaming and desperate to hurt each other, my whole being thrown on the floor at your feet; thrown for you to k p i p c u and f-i-t back t-o-g-e-t-h-e-r

and your smile is very big, so it makes your eyes look smaller.

I don’t have your smile.

I also have

hair like a telephone cord wound round and

___ You call to tell me about your chat with Sally. Your laugh is crinkled by the phone, a sound I hold in my hands like water.

You can’t understand what Sally means by ‘good’.

‘Good? Good!’ you scoff. ‘Oh Jesus, just use something pink and glittery.’

I smile. It’s dear to me, your derision – I have always found it so dear, even when you were small and all your quips had rounded edges, soft middles, no hard angles or sharp corners.

‘That’ll do the trick,’ I say, phone pressed to my ear, ‘and then at least she wouldn’t have to keep her eyes closed.’

When you told me what he felt like inside you, you didn’t say, It made me feel like peeling my skin off layer by layer just to feel something else, but I knew that’s what you meant.

‘I wish I were a lobster. I wish I could be boiled alive.’

I was glad when he turned on Sally; I thought she’d learn a thing or two. I’m disappointed. And if she thinks ‘good’ is romantic, she’s a bigger fool than I’d thought.

your finger.

Sure, Mum, I tell Sally things when we meet for tea and a chat. Sometimes. When she misses being young, when she has a new someone she’s fucking. I open my mouth, I say things, never what I really want to say. We’ve been friends since pigtails were cool, Sally and I, since we both had gaps in our teeth. When we were seven we decided to get married by the sandpit one lunchtime; I wore a gold necklace and Sally pinned a special ladybug clip in her hair, pinprick of red by her gauzy temple, where in the sunlight I can see the coy crisscross of veins. I think we held hands and promised to stay together always-always-always, then a week later I was down by the recycling bins tucked behind the art blocks with a boy from our class, and curling around the bin wheels was a red-bellied black snake, tongue flicking like a promise, or invitation.

The boy said: ‘Oh, shit!’

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I don’t like Sally.

I used to make you both hot chips on Tuesdays and listen to you talk about a nicer world. This chip is the size of a fairy’s handbag. And this is the size of a fairy’s shoe. I have held her, bony and too heavy, on my knee while she cried. Some small thing, long forgotten. Her tear drops dark in the cotton of my shirt, back when you were both free to scream whenever you felt like it, no matter how many observing eyebrows were raised. I have cooked her favourite things for supper and made sure the house was peanut-free and tucked her into bed and wrapped her birthday presents.

I don’t care, I don’t care.

up like shells on the shore. I said nothing, but it must have been written all over my face because you smiled a bit, laughed a bit, broke my heart a bit.

‘Oh, it’s alright, Mum. Thing’s change, that’s alright.’

I don’t like Sally.

She made you unhappy.

I think of justice: Snow White’s apple, body in the woods, that kind of thing. Oleander smeared on doorknobs, like that book where everything bad that can happen to a girl happens to the main character; sex, someone else’s name on the electricity bill, love, you name it. Big pot of oleander leaves bubbling on the stove. Stop, little pot, stop! I don’t care.

Annihilation, whatever. I’ll do it.

My peanut butter jar waits quietly in the kitchen cupboard.

Practically salacious, just there, in plain sight beside the jam and honey, a daydream with a screw-top lid. Salt and crunch, crumbs in the corner of her small, guileless mouth. She always was such a messy eater. Throat squeezing tight, cheeks turning purple. Lungs wrung out like a dishcloth. Does that feel good, is that still good for you?

Oh, there’s no hurry! Anytime, anytime. I’m very good at baking, Sally has always loved my cakes.

Sweetie, sweetie. Are you okay? No? Tell me, tell me who, tell me what. It’s no one? The world, then. Don’t worry, we’ll leave and find another, somewhere better. Smell of the kitchen in the morning. Photos tacked to the fridge. Me with my old, lost smile.

I know, I know. You miss it. I miss it, too. Ivy, shoes by the door. That’s how missing things work, you think you’re upset about the other thing, some other thing, but really, it’s a w a s l y the same. mum! Mum – ? h l

e loooo ! !

—yes, yes. I’m still here. The shower was never the right temperature; there was a line of dust on the sill behind the sink. Rickety chair in the middle of the garden, all overgrown, rambling roses, old fruit-less apple tree, ivy over the fence, forget-me-not like carpet everywhere, everywhere. Crawling up the legs of the chair so if we tugged, the chair would come away trailing roots and soil and buried,

When you finished school, you asked her to move in with you. Sally said no: she wasn’t ready to move out yet. A month later you were invited to supper at Sally’s new flat, which she shared with some uni friend. You thought you’d bake a cake to take round – it’s good luck to bring a flat-warming gift. I said no, no I’d bake it. I stood in the supermarket aisle with a basket of Fairy dishwashing liquid and raisins and apples and cinnamon and I stared and stared at the spreads. There are so many kinds of peanut butter, I never knew. There’s crunchy and smooth and nutty and there was one on sale. Heavy and innocuous in my hand and I had to cover my mouth with a wrist to hide a giggle. I felt like a girl again, swapping glances and giggles and cigarettes by the art blocks. The jar sat quiet like a secret in my bag with the raisins and cinnamon and Fairy liquid and apples, and then I set it on the counter while I turned on the oven and tied up my apron and got out the weighing scales. We glanced at each other, quick, flicking looks.

Virginal, a little sheepish. My batter was ready and I unscrewed the lid and there was a squashed pop and it smelt divine and my heart pounded and I thought how good it would feel, to grab a spoon. Serve her right, bumbling little bitch. Serve her bloody right.

‘It’s a nice place,’ you told me. ‘We ate from mismatched plates, because they don’t have a set yet.’

You and Sally had been slowly collecting cups and plates and glasses from Vinnies. You have an almost-full drawer underneath your bed. Plates w s a e d-d-d h

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t en things.

YOU I MOURN LIKE PLANTS MOURN THEIR ROOTS

When we moved, we wrote letters; you wrote a letter, I wrote a letter. We buried the letters in that garden, we buried the letters with our love, all our love. I used to watch from the window; you’d sit in the chair in that big fur coat of yours and read and read for hours. So still and quiet, sometimes I’d blink – and you’d be gone. The girl in the oleander book said something I often think of. ‘You leaving is an annihilation,’ that’s what she said. You leaving is an annihilation. Busy preparing supper, I’d have half an eye on the window, where I could see you in the garden. You’d s t a y there until it grew too dark for you to read.

Sally doesn’t call her mother ‘mum,’ she calls Louise ‘Louise’. I pity her; Louise, that is. Every time you call me ‘mum’, I want to hear you say it again; every time you call me ‘mum’, it makes me think of what the oleander girl said. a n n i h i l a t i o n Sometimes I pretend I don’t hear you just so you’ll say it again. mum? mum! mu u u u u u m! ! !

___ After tea with Sally, I walk to the bus stop. Halfway down the street it all b- b b al - l- ll-l s up at the back of my throat. I press my hand to my mouth and bite my lip so my jaw shakes. We packed up the kitchen and wiped dust off the sill behind the sink. When the estate agent came around, she told us the garden was too m e-e -e e-e-e- - - ss y.

We watched as the chair was pulled up. You were right, it came dragging roots, and soil. Ivy yanked off the gate and the apple tree hacked down, stuff sprayed over the severed stump so it turned a funny orange. Forget-me-nots, uprooted with our love, all our love. It all went into those machines that chop everything, like a blender, loud loud noise then lots of mush.

I squeeze my eyes; I wipe my cheeks; I continue to the bus.

Maybe this is why I can’t love like Sally can, because I still love Ivy Cottage like how the chair was pulled up, and the whole garden came away with it. q

Katherine Nicholson is a neuroscience and literature student based in Warrane. Her time is happily spent peering down microscopes and drafting her first novel. She is a lover of stories and astrocytes, and big green fields. You can find her at katherineelsienicholson@gmail.com Images: provided by the author.

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ISLAND Stories. Poems. Essays. Art.

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Image: Amber Koroluk-Stephenson Escape Artist, Portrait of an Australian Painted Lady oil on linen, 60 x 55 cm, 2024

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