Island 172

ISLAND  Stories. Poems. Essays. Art.

172

featuring the winner of this year’s OLGA MASTERS SHORT STORY AWARD plus more than 20 NEW ESSAYS, SHORT STORIES AND POEMS

marramarra: a Wiradjuri word meaning to create, make or do

In marramarra, internationally renowned Wiradjuri and Ngunnawal artist Brook Garru Andrew and art historian Jessica Neath explore how contemporary Indigenous artists and their communities are revealing hidden histories and finding pathways to healing.

Led by Indigenous voices and presenting ground-breaking artworks from the Pacific, Turtle Island (North and Central America), Brazil, Finland, Taiwan, Afghanistan and beyond, marramarra shares conversations with leading contemporary artists and Indigenous Elders and knowledge holders who provide insights about important community projects, places of memory and lessons about colonisation. marramarra provides new ways to think about the past and imagine a planet that is bright for Indigenous futures – a place that is better for all.

Discover more at unsw.press/marramarra

172

Cover image: Rex Greeno Moonbird connection mixed media on paper, Collection of the Artist

Nonfiction

Poetry

Not choosing / on writing retreat

Cyclic 28

Erin Riley

The price of loneliness

66

Bridget Webster

There’s no such thing as a Singapore noodle Maxillofacial sonnet

78

Paul Collis, Jen Crawford and Paul Magee, with Brian Smith, Wayne Applebee and Andi Stapp-Gaunt 92

A quarter century of supporting artists

48

Sawtooth ARI

The same as ever

22

101

Birdsong

Fiction WINNER

Derek Wright

46

Clearblue

54

Coracle

Olga Masters Short Story Award 5

Claire Aman

55

106

George Kennedy

Pareidolia

65

Toby Fitch

Neighbour

Meghalee Bose

Simeon Kronenberg

The storing

60

yarrein mud lyric

Saraid Taylor 74

Pip Jones

SPECIAL FEATURE

Aboriginal Writer’s Fellowship Yudi mirrung walama, coming home

38

BlaQ storywork

44

and

24

Gilgamesh’s Oracle / The Flood of Gilgamesh

12

13

the remains

Jo Langdon

False autumn

11

Yasmin Smith

Helga Jermy

Doing good

14

Gurmeet Kaur

Verity Borthwick

Ishbel

Memories through sea stories Rex Greeno

William Fox

Milk teeth

Kylie Mulcahy

Memento mori

10

Suzi Mezei

Troy Wong

Stories in paintings and letters

How to build a sandcastle

Arts features

77

90

Verity Oswin

Jennifer Evans

Literacy feature The Story Island Project Kate Gross and Astrid Wootton

Inheritance

105

Brendan Ryan

96

Zana Fraillon

1

56

ISLAND q Stories. Poems. Essays. Art.

Managing Editor Jane Rawson Nonfiction Editor Keely Jobe Fiction Editor Kate Kruimink Poetry Editor Kate Middleton Arts Features Editor Judith Abell Proofreader Sabine Borgis UTAS interns: Abby Otten and Meisha Simpson Business Manager Adelaide Reisz Finance Officer Kate Grieve

GPO Box 4703, HOBART TASMANIA 7001 islandmag.com

Board of Directors Stephenie Cahalan, Vern Field, Geoff Heriot, Tim Jarvis, Mary Knights, Claire Konkes, Mike McCluskey (chair), Jane Rawson, Adelaide Reisz

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ISBN 978-1-7637756-0-2

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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.

We advocate for excellent writing and for the joys and benefits of reading.

© 2024 Island Magazine Inc. / individual contributors Copyright remains with the authors and artists.

No reproduction should be made without their permission. Any reproduction must be approved by and acknowledge Island.

The views expressed by Island contributors are not necessarily those of the editors or publisher.

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ISLAND ONLINE If you enjoy this issue of Island, there’s more at Island Online – more new writing and reading – more that can’t wait for the next print issue – more treasure from our 40+ year archive Join us at islandmag.com

In recognition of the deep history and culture of the island on which Island is created – Lutruwita (Tasmania) – we acknowledge and pay respect to all Tasmanian Aboriginal people as the traditional and original owners and continuing custodians of this land.

From the Island team

T

his issue of Island contains contributions from First Nations creators across visual art (Rex Greeno), poetry (Yasmin Smith) and nonfiction (Paul Collis and Paul Magee’s collaborative work with Wayne Applebee and Brian Smith, among others), and I am delighted that we can also feature the work of Dharug writer and artist Jennifer Evans, winner of the 2022 Tasmanian Literary Awards Aboriginal Writer’s Fellowship. Jennifer has taken two different perspectives on a story of colonisation in ‘Yudi mirrung walama, coming home’ and ‘BlaQ storywork’. Island feels, to me, immensely richer thanks to all of these contributions and I am grateful to their creators for sharing them with us.

As always, the magazine is chock full of poetry, stories and essays, but this isn't the only place where we publish brandnew writing. Every week we post a poem, story or essay to Island Online - if you haven't already read 'Dhanggal Bawagal: Mussel Sisters', 'Masters', or Bobby K's poem '1', I recommend you rush on over. Island Online is free to read, and regularly open to submissions.

Next year we’ll be delivering four issues of Island magazine rather than three, with some exciting new features. Sadly, we’ll be doing it without Arts Features Editor Judith Abell, whose last issue this is. Jude has been a mainstay of the magazine for years, a staunch voice for Tasmania’s visual artists, and a magnificent collaborator in the project of bringing more graphic narratives to Island’s pages. Thank you, Jude: you’ll be hard to replace.

– Jane Rawson, Managing Editor

I am non-Palawa, but in my limited understanding an arts practice as a thing in itself is really quite a white concept as the arts are inseparable from any other aspects of Palawa life.

Arts is politics is community is life. I begin with this because our features for this issue delve in and around the idea of the fusion between these aspects of human existence. Our feature on Sawtooth ARI offers a tiny window into the twenty-five year history of a small, but mighty artist run organisation (ARI) based in Launceston, supporting the explorations of artists throughout various stages of their careers (and no doubt their lives). Artist quotes, within the piece, reflect their love of the organisation and the centre it has been for their artistic evolution through more than a generation of exhibitions and events. We also feature a small selection from the prolific works of Palawa elder Rex Greeno, who has drawn his whole life, with his representations of remembered, imagined and observed island life offering incredible insight into life for Palawa people from the Furneaux Islands. And equally an observer of his own locale, we feature the work of emerging painter, George Kennedy, who shows us the outer edges of Tasmanian suburbia, its burgeoning development, its social precarity, fragile natural beauty and creeping decay.

It seems entirely appropriate that this offering will be my last with Island magazine. Looking across the features, I have maintained a focus on putting forward emerging artists, increasing the inclusion of Palawa work within the publication and carving out space for reflective writing around the issues presented by and through the lens of the arts. I go out on the inauspicious number of 27 issues, but I have absolutely loved these nearly nine years of using the pages of the magazine as a kind of alternative space for installation, exhibition and thought. As a way to filter a wild array of possible inclusions, I tended to lean on the metaphor of an archive, given the rare, printed nature of Island. I asked, what represents this moment?

What is important to capture? What might someone want to look back on, to understand? So it is my hope that this nearly decade-long span is of some value into the future and I look forward to experiencing the next voice in this space.

– Judith Abell, Arts Features Editor

ISLAND

This issue, I was joined by our first fiction intern, Abby Otten from UTAS, and it was a real source of richness and inquiry to work with her on selecting this round. The stories in this issue speak to each other through time, offering the suggestion of sequels and prequels and ‘meanwhile…’. They exchange strange, curling language about death and new growth, about apocalypse and what comes after. In Saraid Taylor’s The storing, the narrator claims a place in memory and space among creatures that ‘click their teeth happily’, and in Claire Aman’s Ishbel, the narrator carries her memories with her, pacing and pacing up and down her brother’s street in the company of a whippet. In Pip Jones’ False Autumn, climate apocalypse looms as rain moths die confusedly and a couple search for mushrooms among pine needles that smell like a ‘detritivore hymn’. Gilgamesh’s Oracle by Zana Fraillon presents as a possible far-distant sequel, a saga looking back over the millennia to flood warnings plastered over the public toilets.

And Meghalee Bose’s Doing good stands watching, outside time, and gives its narrator an opportunity to undo some wrong, and the moral responsibility to undo it correctly – and the most perfect pair of final words.

– Kate Kruimink, Fiction Editor

This issue I had the great joy of working with emerging writer and editor, UTAS intern Meisha Simpson, in selecting our pieces.

Thanks for your insight and care, Meisha. You’ve got an eye for exceptional writing. The pieces we have chosen are manifestly existential in content. They depict instants of loneliness, injustice, social invisibility, guilt, mortality and survival, but there are also shining moments of hope – something we need more of – and the kind of ambling pace that can act as a balm in a chaotic world. In Not choosing, Erin Riley goes on a self-imposed writing retreat and confronts some inhibiting people-pleasing tendencies. With a distinctly soothing rhythm, Riley shows us that writing retreats are very often not about writing at all. Kylie Mulcahey’s How to build a sandcastle looks at the child protection system in Tasmania via the experience of a social worker and one of her long-terms clients. Mulcahey’s deeply informed and sympathetic gaze reveals a system lacking in nuance, funding and justice for both children and parents. Bridget Webster’s The price of loneliness describes in strange and haunting prose the author’s experience as an intern in Japan. Webster depicts a larger epidemic of social isolation, even as she combats her own with overconsumption. In Memento mori, Verity Borthwick goes underground and comes face-to-face with her own mortality.

And finally, we accompany Paul Collis and Paul Magee as they take us around Barkindji country/Bourke in Stories in paintings and letters. Their walking dialogue, accompanied by stunning photography, offers an in-situ narrative of place and history built as a collaboration with locals they talk to along the way.

Throughout, the ongoing significance of art and storytelling to cultural survival is made clear.

– Keely Jobe, Nonfiction Editor

A simple phrase (as when Derek Wright notes ‘the dither of the aged care home’ or when Simeon Kronenberg states ‘My eyes itch / sleeping’s difficult’) allows the reader to enter the delicate space of the poem – a space built on Brendan Ryan’s ‘cobweb thread of trust’. Upon entry, the senses come fully to life: we see Jo Langdon perceives ‘the spider, the linden / flowers & the tentative light’, Helga Jermy shows us ‘bird tracks in the sky’ and Yasmin Smith hangs sweetsops ‘by the / window’. We smell Suzi Mezei’s ‘scent / of mealy earth rises up’ and hear Verity Oswin’s ‘mud ditty / silt jetties / fish flip’ as language unfolds the world before us. What inflects our language can be humour – it can be Toby Fitch’s ‘Cookie / Monster geode of seeing things on another / plain’ or Troy Wong’s wry observation of what happens ‘When two roads diverge in a dystopian police state’. And what the poem allows us to see can ache with strangeness, as we watch William Fox’s dental surgeon figure ‘how best to trace a maze / of mouth’ and feel the loss of our own milk teeth again, still, as Gurmeet Kaur suggests, ‘tender with noun-memory’.

– Kate Middleton, Poetry Editor

4

WI

FICTION

OLGA MASTERS SHORT STORY AWARD

NN

ER

Ishbel Claire Aman

T

here was a body in the park one afternoon, back when we were kids. Martin and I sprinted home to tell Dad, our schoolbags bumping against our backs. I could hear my blood pounding in my eardrums like footsteps. Dad walked back with us, but there was nothing. Martin and I took turns to lie down in the man’s cold imprint on the grass.

It’s a long time since we grew up and left the tablelands.

Sydney’s home for me now. My brother Martin lives in Grafton, near the river. I’m in his house looking after his whippet and his cat for three weeks while he’s in Italy. I’ve made a work space in a sunny spot in his dining room with my laptop and tea mug.

I’m a cartographer; I make maps for a living. It’s something I can do anywhere, as long as there’s good internet. I’m making a series of land-use maps for one of the south coast councils.

I thought about the body in the park this week, on Monday morning, when I saw the ambulance on the corner of Martin’s street. Its back doors were flung open and they were in the yard bending over something in the long grass. A blue crumple.

I held the whippet’s leash tight and kept walking, looking straight ahead.

I’ve been here for ten days now and I know all the houses in Tallow Street. Grafton has wide streets with fig trees and camphor laurels and jacarandas. People walk on the road, even if there’s a footpath. Martin says it’s a friendly town, but the only person I’ve talked to so far is Cheryl from next door.

This morning when I wheel Martin’s bicycle out, I nearly run into her. She’s bending over a plastic spray bottle near the front gate. She puts the bottle down when she sees me, straightens up and steps around in front of the bike. She grips my handlebars with both hands and leans forwards with a special smile.

‘The ginger cat.’ Martin’s cat. ‘Dirty thing did its business in my garden.’

‘He’s back now,’ I say. I point to where the cat stares from behind the geraniums.

She shakes her head. I try moving my handlebars but she’s locked on.

‘The thing is, cats have to be inside,’ she says. ‘It’s the rules.’

‘I tried to catch him.’ I push my sleeve up so the fine red scratches show.

‘Gotta show it who’s boss,’ says Cheryl. ‘They’re like kids.

You had kids?’

I twist the handlebars sideways in answer. ‘That house on the corner you were telling me about,’ I say. ‘There was an ambulance there.’

Her face snaps to attention. ‘When?’

‘Monday.’

‘I wouldn’t know,’ she says. ‘I don’t have time to look out the window all day. I’m a doer.’

The cat walks over to us and sits licking its feet. Cheryl gives a hiss.

‘I’m not a cat person either,’ I say. ‘I wonder what happened to the old man.’

‘Disgusting animal,’ she says.

I’m sweating under my arms now. ‘I’m a bit of a worrier, that’s all. Ambulances.’ And I seek her face.

I swear she’s about to make eye contact. Then the cat runs at me.

‘Cat’s got the better of you, Isabel,’ she says.

‘Ishbel,’ I say, but she’s gone back to her spray bottle. I pedal along the footpath, feeling the blood trickle down into my sock.

5

ISLAND

Every morning I walk Martin’s whippet up the street, beside the train line and back through the park. The old man from that house on the corner is out in the street most days, crooked, holding his pants up with one hand. He’ll be tilted at the crossroad or flailing along on the other side with a newspaper under his arm. He’s like a scarecrow, in a different spot each morning as if he gets shifted in the night.

The house where the ambulance was parked looks like it’s got the mange. I noticed a letter poking out of the letterbox last night. It was still there this morning. It’ll be there when I ride past now. The old man’s dead, isn’t he? He looked dead, crumpled on the grass.

The first time I saw him down the street I smiled at him.

He was on his own, and thin. But after Cheryl told me the story of what happened in that old house, I turn my face at the sight of him. Seamy old bugger. He always stares at me.

He raised his arm once, but I put my head down. He looks like the house on the corner. Same as one of those people with a lookalike pet.

Sometimes there’s not enough to think about. Everything is slow in Grafton.

What Cheryl told me. Years ago. Little Nadine O’Neill used to live in that peeling old house. She went to the Catholic school, same as Cheryl, but she was younger, grade two or three.

The year of the 1974 bushfires, poor Nadine O’Neill’s father caught her brother in the chook shed with her. The way Cheryl said her name, it sounded like a cautionary bit of doggerel.

Nadine O’Neill, Nadine O’Neill, poor, poor Nadine O’Neill.

‘The father killed all the fowls,’ Cheryl said, tugging her cardigan around herself. She stared into my face for a few seconds, her eyes shining. ‘Wrung their necks. The neighbours heard everything. You can imagine the screaming. My Aunty Lynette’s best friend was in the waiting room when they took the little girl to the doctor in the morning. Intact, but all the same. You know. The brother was never seen again. He ran off after his belting and never came back. Well, they need to be taught a lesson, dirty things. These days the police would be called. Feathers everywhere, according to the neighbours.’

She told me more, who said what about who. She told me the mother left town, taking the girl. The father’s an old man now, still living in the same house on the corner of Tallow Street.

Cheryl likes to stand at the fence and talk third marriages, new bathrooms, kicked-over bins, dog owners, incest. She tries to get me to tell her something juicy about Martin. On his own, is he? she keeps saying. Martin warned me about her.

6

Ishbel

That house where I saw the ambulance is a scabrous old thing left out on the corner. The door is always shut. The letterbox, blue, is the only decent thing in the place. The yard is spiked with yellow grass and dandelions, downpipes splayed over lumpy ground. Next to the shed is a lean-to with paspalum grass poking through, and a lemon tree. There’s glass missing, a curtain hanging out, a rash on the weatherboards.

I always walk past as fast as I can. I thought the place was empty until I saw grey pyjamas dangling from the washing line.

Adults see character in a flaking house with a rusty roof.

Children see a haunting. There’s always a disgraceful old place where a witch lives. Children cross the road so they don’t accidentally touch the fence, or they run past holding their breath. The witches are blighted. Their clothes are too big, too dark, a secretive coat, maybe a dragging foot. They cry and sing in the street. Our childhood street in Armidale had three witches. One had a horde of cats whose little triangular faces watched, baleful, as you sped past. The second, the Black Widow, buried her husband in the back yard. The third had an Alsatian without a bark which ran back and forth, coughing.

The witch would come out in her black dress and haul the animal backwards into the house.

When I was learning cartography at university, I met a girl from Armidale who said she’d grown up in our house after Dad sold it. She claimed it was haunted and that someone had died in there. No, I told her. Not that house, with its almond tree and polished hallway. This girl insisted there were spirits there. She said you had to run up the hallway at night. I used to run past the Children’s Home in Fox Street with my hands clamped over my mouth and nose. But it was just children in there that nobody wanted, that was all.

The council maps I’m working on in Martin’s dining room show rural zones as cream and tan, and urban zones as pink or blue. Green is for protected forests and wetlands. I do the boundaries in black. This on one side, that on the other.

I know the boundaries aren’t true, but it’s my job. I have to make the lines somewhere. I study air photos, trying to see an edge. Hatching and stippling only create confusion.

I open my laptop and find an aerial photo of Grafton.

There’s the river running through the town, and the two bridges.

There’s the big stand of fig trees. Zooming in on Tallow Street, I find the old house on the corner. I come in closer and closer.

But there’s no sign of life, only a black smudge on the fence.

Maybe a cat.

7

ISLAND

The world is never clear, one thing stopping and another beginning. Time is not even like that. It seems longer than ten days that I’ve been in Martin’s house. I email him but he never answers.

Ambulances. The flat in Armidale where Dad lived after he sold our house was small and built of sharp yellow brick, with a square of grass. At least he had his heater and his cat.

When I’d visit him in Armidale the smell was unfamiliar. But he still drove his car, read library books, heated up soup. He’d pick up the phone every Thursday night. It went on like that.

Last year on Easter Sunday they found him lying under the washing line. His neighbour spotted him at daylight and called an ambulance. Martin drove up the hairpin road from Grafton.

I was called. Get on a plane, Martin told me.

After three days in Armidale Hospital, Dad was sitting up wanting his shoes. But they weren’t letting him go home yet because he couldn’t remember the prime minister’s name.

We’d had four prime ministers in five years. He told them it was Gough Whitlam. As I said to Martin, a bad time to make a joke. Martin said Dad was only flustered. Everything would be all right.

A father is a familiar shape. The rivers on my maps are easily recognised. The Wollomombi River snakes through sheep paddocks before dropping down and down into the gorges. The Macleay River makes a generous sweeping bend just before it reaches Kempsey. The Clarence has two leafshaped islands near Grafton. Looking down, a bird can follow the course of a river. But even a river is not a real boundary; it’s always changing. Here, not here. Alive, dead. You are arbitrary, like a border.

Dad was eighty-seven. Eighty-seven is not that old. I used to wake up in the night and think of him being swept along in a current. There’d be a glimpse of green as he raised his arm, but mainly it was just his head bobbing in fast water, about to disappear around a bend. You couldn’t save him. He cried in the ward and disturbed the others. He swore at the nurses so they drugged him. Tell him to eat his lunch, the nurse said to me. If he tried to get out of bed there was an electronic mat that beeped in the nurses’ station; they’d run in and make him lie down again. He wet the bed. The social worker, the nurse and the doctor all agreed: he couldn’t go home. My brother Martin has always been too polite. It’s cognitive, he told me.

Look at him: our father, bloodshot, with birds-nest hair. You’d run past him with your fingers in your sleeves so you didn’t accidentally touch him, the tatty old madman. I talked to him.

It’s Malcolm Turnbull, remember? He said don’t yell, Ishbel.

8

Ishbel

He couldn’t say the months backwards: January, December, October, August. I shouted at the social worker. He’d be all right if he was home with his cat and his radio. Don’t sign anything, I told Dad. That night when I turned over in bed there was a sound in my ears like blood pulsing out of a heart.

He went down with pneumonia in hospital and died.

I walk my brother’s whippet late on Thursday night. The house on the corner is dark. Cheryl is an old blabbermouth.

Someone should find that Nadine O’Neill. They should tell her about her father being taken away in the ambulance. And even the son; wherever he is, he should be told. The family has to know. You can’t let someone lie on the ground all alone.

There’s a bright moon. I go in through the front gate and down the side of the house. There’s no trace of anything at the back steps, not even a flattening of the grass. There’s a horseshoe nailed above the shed door, hung the right way up so the luck doesn’t fall out. On the way out I check the letterbox. There’s still a letter in there and I slide it out. It’s only a real estate agent. To the Householder. I put it in my pocket.

The next morning it’s windy. Cheryl’s at the fence.

‘When did you say Martin’s back from his secret getaway?’ she says.

‘I don’t know,’ I say.

‘You’re a bit like him, aren’t you? Sister and brother. Never married?’

I turn away.

On Saturday morning I lead the whippet up Tallow Street under the jacarandas. At the peeling house on the corner the letter box has blown open. I leave it.

Oh. But there’s that old man. He’s in the garden, standing at the lemon tree. He’s alive. There’s a white dressing taped to the side of his head. When he sees me, he holds up a lemon.

My face splits into a mad smile. Nice lemon, I call out. Crying and singing all the way up the street. q

Claire Aman grew up in Melbourne but has lived most of her life in rural Australia, in and around Grafton in New South Wales. She has worked as a storeman and environmental planner. Her short stories have been published in a number of collections and several have won prizes, including the Neilma Sidney, David Harold Tribe, EJ Brady, Wet Ink/CAL and Hal Porter Prize. Her story collection Bird Country was published in 2017 by Text.

The Olga Masters Short Story Award is administered by SouthEastArts in partnership with the South Coast Writers Centre and is supported by the Masters family: olgamastersshortstoryaward.com Images: Kevin – Flickr, Athenea Codjambassis Rossitto – Pexles

9

Cyclic Suzi Mezei Late in August, the winter sun’s a social poultice; draws the neighbours out and they spy the beginnings of a new world through dappled light on treelined streets.

A woman from an apartment block stops to rub her thumb over a bud on an ornamental weeping cherry that will weep pink petals for her joy in spring and slowly the scent of mealy earth rises up, loam un-clumps, wrestles free of its hiemal sleeves, even small dogs on lit footpaths discard tartan jackets, their humans just a few lithe paces behind them on slack leads, re-learning the ground after it’s emerged from sodden, dun hardness. The Bronzewings, eager to find soulmates flash iridescent wings, build unruly nests low inside golden wattle skirts. Mister Briars who locked himself in, hibernal since his wife left last Halloween, has set a bucket of Eureka lemons on his lawn; goodwill citrus, free to a modest local home, the shabby jacket he wore on long walks with Missus Briars, freshly washed, hung out to dry on the low bough of the Cinnamon Myrtle.

Suzi Mezei was born in Sri Lanka and lives in Naarm on lands traditionally owned by the Boonwurrung People. Her work is published in Australia and overseas in journals and anthologies, in print and online. It has been performed on stage and in podcast.

Suzi is currently working on a fiction collection.

10

There’s no such thing as a Singapore noodle Troy Wong You are my most permanent girlfriend, for now.

Pilgrims in the ex-colony, we zip between shadespots in a race against the equatorial sun. I pepper you with family lore: my father’s father was the first on his street to own a TV; my gong gong nearly drowned my uncle teaching him to swim, sweet and sour pork for the western palate.

You keep yourself open like a nice white person.

Maybe I’ll compare sunbirds on a wire to a string of firecrackers or my ji poh to a withered mangosteen. In Hokkien she asks her trilingual daughter how she and I are related and in English I wonder if I’ll always be blackmarked as my mother’s son, as my country’s man.

When two roads diverge in a dystopian police state I am caught like a durian in plastic mesh.

You remain untouched except for a spot of heat rash that will clear within the fortnight. How clearly do you see me if you aren’t also being cast from this garden, changed irrevocably, having partook of the fruit? Later, in my other nation’s capital, all your tribe will descend on us like a fleet of white sails. A rupture; then, as always, we will perform our steps tersely as dancers returning from injury to rehearsal. Another slow sundown.

Soon there will be a name for the distance between us, though I still won’t speak a word of Hokkien.

Troy Wong is an Australian poet born to Singaporean parents. His work, written on unceded Dharug and Gadigal land, has been published in Cordite, Island, Australian Poetry Journal and Solid Air, an anthology of spoken word from Australia and New Zealand. He has performed at the Opera House, the Art Gallery of New South Wales, and internationally. He is an Australian Poetry Slam National Finalist and the founder, host and creative director of Bread & Butter Poetry Slam.

11

Maxillofacial sonnet William Fox They had an electronic intercom system to call each kid downstairs for dinner.

There were buttons for each bedroom, as well as one for the dad’s library slash tv room, where he would often not really acknowledge me much when I came over, softening my step up a dark floorboard hallway. After dinner, my nice friend said, he spends lots of the night in there looking at people’s plaster dental moulds, poking at them lightly with a pencil or a pen, then making notes or diagrams on cream paper about how best to trace a maze of mouth with his scalpel the day after.

William Fox’s poetry has appeared previously in Island, as well as in places like Meanjin, Overland, Westerly, and The Best Australian Poems series of books. His debut collection, Apollo Bay, was released by Rabbit in 2023.

12

Milk teeth Gurmeet Kaur Spinning in a teacup, her molar falls out, disappears down the side, quietly tips into the open. Not like the canine who heaved through gums in back of jaw; right lower quadrant.

Neat lines of bones sit beside the empty socket.

On winter solstice, tongue fishes kernels from a gap where the molar sat. Bonfire. Roasted peanuts.

Hands cluster by the fire—one adjusts a hair clip, the other holds a milk tooth erupted on the longest night of winter, tugged until mouth was all blood.

Hear how absence rattles inside a raw gulf; soundless, inchoate, tender with noun-memory

Gurmeet Kaur is a writer, critic and poet living on Wurundjeri Country. Her work is published or forthcoming in Rabbit, Cordite, Suburban Review, Victorian Writer, Aniko Press, Liminal and elsewhere.

13

Rex Greeno: Memories through sea stories

Above: Rex Greeno as a young man Right Page: Moonbird connection, 2022-23, mixed media on paper, Collection of the Artist.

Inspired by Rex’s life experience as a commercial fisherman Rex Greeno: Memories through sea stories shares a collection of drawings that feature life on and by the sea, his passion for traditional watercraft, and the sharing of Ancestral knowledge and skills passed through generations.

Tasmanian Aboriginal Elder Rex Greeno is an artist, fisherman and maker of tuylini, ninga and pyerre (Tasmanian Aboriginal bark and reed canoes). His work tells a story of deep connection to culture, family and the sea.

Rex was born and raised on Flinders Island off Lutruwita/ Tasmania. His canoes are held in public and private collections throughout Australia, including national and state museums.

There’s been a theory about the Moonbird People … when I was at Babel anchored one day. One evening when all the muttonbirds was coming in there was a full moon shining. All the muttonbirds were flying past the full moon, coming into land on Babel to go in their rookeries, and that gave me the idea of doing a drawing on the Moonbird People and calling it the Moonbird People. My drawing showed a pair of muttonbirds flying out of the moon, coming down on a moon beam, going

through lots of stages and when they land on the earth they become a human being. That’s the moon … the two, pair of muttonbirds flying down on a moon beam. As they come down, they change their shape. And eventually when they landed, they become a pair, walked out of the moon beam and that’s what started our ancestry … that’s my story.

- Rex Greeno

ISLAND

Travelling to hunting grounds, 2022-23, mixed media, Collection of the Artist.

Catching ducks, 2019, mixed media, Collection of the Artist.

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Memories through sea stories

With the Aboriginal drawings I did think about them, when I drew them, how I depicted them to be. The early writers depicted them to be savages, eating halfcooked kangaroos and all that, and that got my dander up, so that was why I made my drawings like they are. I depict the Old People as normal people going around their normal business. They’re in groups, they help each other together, and they live together. Like a normal group of people. The only thing is, of course, features and colour were different, but apart from that they were just normal family-oriented people.





This is about two groups of people, just travelling to their hunting grounds together. They’re probably chasing seals or going mutton birding: you need quite a few people to do that.

They were practicing spears, throwing their spears overarm, and they had a bundle of probably kangaroo skins, and they were practicing throwing their spears. Obviously they need to have practice, you know, and as far as I know they could be having a contest about throwing their spears, to see who’d get the closest or, you know, hit the bundle of kangaroo skins they had. One of the original explorers said that he noted that the Aboriginal men could actually throw a spear underarm, and they used to have a plank with a hole about 10 centimetres across, and from that 20 meters they could actually throw a spear underarm through this hole in a plank.

Practicing spear throwing, 2024, mixed media, Collection of the Artist.



Our people obviously loved birdlife, to eat. They obviously loved the eggs. They loved the duck eggs and the swan eggs and the goose eggs, and all that. But the only way they could catch an actual duck, which was by women too, they swam under the water and grabbed them by the feet and dragged them under so they drowned.

17

ISLAND

Meeting a Local Tribe in Adventure Bay, 2019, mixed media on paper, Collection of the Artist.

Face of disaster, 2019, mixed media, Collection of the Artist.

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Memories through sea stories



They were just coming ashore to meet the local tribe. Now obviously, our people would, you know, we’d be amazed to see these strange people dressed up in these strange clothes, coming into the shore.

Flotsam and Jetsam off wreck, 2020, mixed media on paper, Collection of the Artist



A ship called the Cambridgeshire got wrecked on a reef west of Preservation Island. It was loaded with pianos and it was loaded with cases upon cases of whiskey. And apparently there was lots and lots of crockery. But the big seas went and smashed the boat up, and a lot of flotsam and jetsam all washed ashore on the south side of Cape Barren [Island] in a bay called Thunder and Lightning Bay. And all the local people, of course, went around there, and found all this whiskey and they just did drink all the whiskey, apparently they just drank for weeks and weeks and weeks. And they played some of these pianos, that were most were probably broken by the sea as they come in. But they actually did salvage one of these pianos, and it stayed up in Cape Barren Island, in one of the houses for many, many years. And it eventually was sent over to some place in Melbourne. So that piano could still be around for all I know. There’s lots of places in the area, they call it Piano Point, Key Island, Whiskey Rocks and other names that was actually named after the flotsam and jetsam that came off the ship that was wrecked.

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ISLAND

Old Dar’s crayfishing motorboat, 2022-23, mixed media on paper, Collection of the Artist.

When I first started fishing with my father, there was no echo sounders. What you did, you went along with a piece of lead with a bit of … um, grease on it. And you threw the lead over the side, tied to the rope obviously. And if it landed on the sand, you’d pull it up. Crayfish live on rocks. And if you pulled it up and there was a bit of sand on it well you knew you wasn’t on a rock. But if you threw it over and it come up with nothing on it well there was a rock there, so you threw your pots in.

Pot black as the old saying of course. But then, of course, echo sounders come in and they made it a lot easier. It actually showed the bottom, showed the rocks and the reefs on the bottom. And so, you could set your pots on reefs. The biggest problem … one of the downfalls of the crayfish industry in later

years with echo sounders. We used to catch crayfish on rocks, that was about two fathoms, which is about six … twelve feet in the old language. And some of the brand-new sounders … and crayfish only need a little ledge about half a metre high to live in. And these new sounders were picking up all these ledges, small ledges … and it nearly fished the industry out. But then they brought in … now since I’ve retired, they’ve brought in different area quotas. And in a quota system you’re only allowed to catch so many crays in a certain area. Well, that’s helping out apparently because it’s built the crayfish back up, nearly to what it used to be.

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Memories through sea stories

I think Dad’s drawings draw upon all these different aspects as he’s walked through history from way back when … to now … to recent times. And that will be great for the children and the grandchildren in the future to look back on. They’ll be able to connect all these lines.

– Dean Greeno

Rex Greeno: Memories through Sea Stories is a multi-venue project developed by the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, Devonport Regional Gallery and University of Tasmania, supported by Creative Australia. The major exhibition, showing all artworks, is on at the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery from November 2024.

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the remains Yasmin Smith of fireflies at the age of starlight a pond rings around an evening sapped beyond the last notes of colour the celestial lanterns beat unearthly they map they snag in soft-bodied nets in saltwater clusters of time of turning of truth they entwine too close they spindle they seep into a careless defeat a night-time of rummage of black card magic of country captured inside a beetle-black stone a salt-tide tingles beneath lazy swells of the longest beat the firelight we will keep like weeping eyes and leaking hearts our silhouettes blink out in slumber while all of our wasted light makes the night sky

22

heavier each year their artificial candlelight threatens our dreaming a series of separations of wings disappeared eternities from here fleeing as etiquette sits in the mouth our ancestors weave slow galaxies of story slow down they say and stop being scared of the dark at the edge of the world swim in sweet shadows pillage the pale bursts of quiet light that escape in rivers of stargaze it’s too hard to fall asleep even as the lights are going out sweetsops hang by the window

Yasmin Smith is a poet and editor of South Sea Islander, Kabi Kabi, Northern Cheyenne and English heritage. Her poetry has appeared in Meanjin, Overland, Island, Griffith Review, Australian Poetry Journal and Best of Australian Poetry, among others. She was shortlisted for the Judith Wright Poetry Prize in 2020, shortlisted for the Nakata Brophy Prize for Young Indigenous Writers in 2024 and winner of the 2024 Gwen Harwood Poetry Prize. She is currently an editor at UQP working across fiction, nonfiction, children's books and poetry.

23

Doing good Meghalee Bose

I

a particular take – had it been on an HBO prime time show, we would’ve roasted the production design over chai and bhajiya in the canteen. Neither heavenly nor hellish, closer to smalltown run-down office space. Spongy pockmarked corkboards plastered with aged newspaper clippings on the walls, sunshine grappling with the dust on wide-paned windows. A vast desk smothered by document trays, teetering stacks of paper and hordes of manila envelopes.

I feel like a beleaguered American journo pulled into my editor’s office, about to plan our take-down of the corrupt mayor. I can count at least three different paperweights.

The editor frowns like he can read my mind, groomed chevron moustache drooping over his lips. His pink, craggy face sits perched on a thick neck wrapped in a pinstriped collar.

He looks a little like how I imagine Craig the Project Manager during our 7 am stand-up meetings over Microsoft Teams.

‘Choose a headline and we’ll make it untrue,’ the editor prompts.

I try to concentrate. ‘As in, the paper would never have printed it?’

t occurs to me that death is an upsetting happenstance.

I know it happened to me just as I know the highways flood during the monsoons, wide pitted grey receding into sloshing brown, without remembering how I learned it. I know when I woke up on the day, the air squatted on my skin with the weight of an impending thunderstorm. I know I stepped gingerly over the street dogs flopping on their bellies at the apartment gate, their tails swishing in the watery light of dawn. I know I forgot to shave and doubled back for my keys. I know I never made it to the office parking lot.

The moment it happened is a hole in my memory. I back away from it nice and easy.

I ask – ‘Am I supposed to pick something printed on that day?’

‘We exist beyond the flow of time,’ says the editor in his leather office chair straight out of the 1970s. ‘You may choose any news headline, printed in any language on any date of human history.’

My chair is similarly retro, the weathered brown seat retaining something of its animal nature in the squeaks it makes when I move. Can things even be retro in the afterlife? This is

24

FICTION

Still, a part of me muses how Craig takes it when I don’t show for stand-up the day I die. Craig gets snide when people join late by over a minute, wishing them Hi pointedly as he slurps coffee over the unmuted mic. There’s a five-and-ahalf-hour time difference between Mumbai and Melbourne.

That’s why he organises stand-up at 12:30 pm AEST, he says.

Then why are you still fucking drinking your coffee, Craig?

I hope he throws a fit about it and Aarti has to tell him why I’m not there and he feels like a shitstain. After dropping his mug.

‘As in,’ The editor intrudes upon my fantasies, lips stretched out primly, ‘the events reported in the news headline would never have occurred.’

I blink, suddenly all here. ‘I just get to… choose that?’

‘We believe it might be satisfying for people at the end of their lives to be offered a final chance to affect the world.’

The editor smiles like an animatronic. ‘For morale, you know.’

It’s not the worst participation trophy I’ve ever gotten.

I can hear one of Aarti’s mock voices in my head, vaguely reminiscent of a gameshow host – thanks for playing! this wouldn’t have been possible without You. you have had no lasting impact, achievement, or consequence.

The imagined memory is followed immediately by a real one – Baba arranging all of my brass-coloured participation trophies in the display cabinet, next to the small marble replica of the Taj Mahal that glowed in the dark. Some of them weren’t even painted over, teacups of tarnished steel with handles glued cheaply on each side and a misspelled name on the base.

It would’ve been humiliating if we'd ever had guests, but only my maasis darkened our doorstep in those days.

I jerk my head like I can physically dislodge the memory.

‘Do I have to know the headlines verbatim?’

The editor jabs his scraggy chin towards the metal storage drawers to my right. I jiggle the handles of the top two with clammy hands, before managing to screech out the third – there’s an iPhone X nestled on a clump of paperclips.

So much for anachronisms.

‘Can I, erhm… request some clarity on “the events reported would never have occurred”? Do I get a good faith reading or could they have technically never happened? Five hundred people killed in the tsunami instead of the reported fifty, y’know what I mean?’

‘You choose what does not happen, not what does.’

I probably should aim small then, shouldn’t I? No stopping the Partition of India or the atomic bomb. God, I could stop the atomic bomb.

‘How does changing one headline work if it’s a big event?

Multiple publications report on it, right? If the event changes, do all those headlines vanish?’

Surely that’s a valid follow-up. But the editor looks at me pityingly, like Aarti’s perfectly plucked eyebrows arching from across the conference table after I’ve held people up with ‘just one more thing’.

The wish crests, abrupt and fierce; if only she was here, snapping the cap of her favourite marker, throwing the problem up in tall but comically narrow letters on a whiteboard. It’s been a measly six months of being the only competent people at our jobs. Six months of dissecting true crime shows over dahi vada, fawning over Anthony Bourdain, checking out every biryani place in a five-kilometre radius.

A short lifespan for the only adult friendship I’ve cared about past college. I’m already too used to her breaking my brain out of its relentless spin cycles. If only I could see her needle Craig into a sitcom-style spit take over the news of my untimely demise – My brain stumbles for a second. Would she be the one to tell my father too?

I remember Baba’s outline on the couch, motionless and unreal, faced towards the TV playing dolphin documentaries at 2 am. Their silver fins in the darkened room, the silvered bristles on his stubble. And ten-year-old me watching from the doorway, fingers twisting into the heavy brocade curtains.

A mutual loneliness.

The image winks out like it’s been siphoned from my brain.

That sense of pliable calm descends again, the dissociative amusement that knows I’m dead and doesn’t care. The editor curves his lips encouragingly.

Morale.

One of Aarti’s favourite whiteboard tricks is to prioritise the issue you can actually do something about. I refocus on the iPhone, its bluish screen resplendent in the sepia afterlife. No headlines with numbers in them, because changing those is an easy loophole without changing the actual event. Anything large-scale or essentially violent is terrifying to mess with… what if the conflict breaks out somewhere else? Just because the historical event doesn’t occur doesn’t mean the feelings of the aggressors vanish into thin air.

And that now rules out 70% of all journalism.

Election results? I could stop Modi from getting elected… but that would literally be thwarting democracy, and what was to stop someone worse from coming into power? What if West Bengal flooded even more? What if the perpetrators

25

ISLAND

of a thousand scams and rorts got away instead of never committing their crimes at all?

I remember the protests surging through the streets last year when they’d just started arresting ‘anti-national’ journalists. I watched the wave of humanity heave by from my tiny apartment balcony, rubber sandals burning hot red lines on restless feet.

Feeling self-conscious, I ducked back inside after a while.

Sat down on the bed and stared at the Havells ceiling fan slicing dust and heat above my head. The slogans went on, echoing up thirty floors high, till the shaft of sunlight over my knee travelled all the way across the room, up the wall, and then disappeared entirely.

The static in my mind now feels familiar. I don’t remember having made even an Instagram post in the end.

‘I need to do more research,’ I say.

‘You’re dead,’ the editor says.

Twenty-three minutes later, I find that the baiji dolphin went extinct in 2017. The headline doesn’t mention the year.

Only the article does, which should save it from any loopholes. The butterfly effect seems limited and it didn’t die of poaching so no other species should form an alternative target. It also has a giant snout for a mouth, full of tiny teeth, and its mugshot gave the impression of a charming, if slightly criminal personality.

After the decision, the editor remains silent for moments on end.

‘Are you sure?’

It reminds me of Craig’s little Hmm at the end of my stand-up updates every morning. As though the detailed accounting of what fills and fluffs up my days, like the white unsubstantial volume of packing peanuts, isn’t good enough.

Craig doesn’t get on Aarti’s nerves as much. She complains about him just to get me started, then kicks off her sandals and listens along contentedly to my disproportionate rage. When it takes the turn to self-pity, she swivels back to her screen and commences clickety-clacking loudly on her mechanical keyboard, like the software engineer version of playing someone off stage at an awards show.

Sometimes she’s less subtle. I told her about not sharing any Insta posts for the pro-journalist rally. She removed a semicolon from a line of code and said, ‘So you’re feeling bad for yourself instead of the journalists who got arrested.’

‘Are you sure?’ The editor repeats.

‘I… I’m sure.’

Stoppered by two words, I can barely swallow.

‘Very well then.’ The editor waves an absent hand and one of the manila envelopes on the desk vanishes.

Now the baiji are alive and leaping in the oceans. Free to be recorded in as many documentaries as they please.

Not you though, the static in my brain says. You’re dead.

When is the morale supposed to kick in?

26

Doing good

‘Can I ask,’ my mouth moves on autopilot, ‘was this a hundred millionth visitor thing? Did I get the super mega bumper reward, while other people get their descendants winning a Honda on a scratch card?’

‘This is fairly standard.’

More people in the world die every minute than in all of Game of Thrones put together. I consider that blankly for a moment, the plasticky body of the iPhone warm against my palm.

‘So you’re telling me that every… everyone who ever died got to choose if something in world history happened or not.’

I think about the news the morning I died.

‘And that was still the world I lived in.’

Maybe we’d been saved from a dozen nuclear wars. Maybe everyone only cared about dolphins.

My throat squeezes tighter – dissociative membrane pierced – real and ugly emotions spilling through the tear. Because I’d never got beaten up by police batons in a protest. Or left my job to join an NGO while wrecking my bank balance and ruining my life. I did, however, die on my commute to work.

There’s this theory I’m beginning to have about it too. A new intersection came up three blocks from my apartment and there was probably a yellow light I didn’t know the length of. In the moment strung between deciding to speed up or slow down, someone must have ploughed straight through my deliberating, miserable brain.

No evidence, of course. No memory of it. But it feels right narratively. You know?

Somewhere in the distance beyond the walls, there’s the jittery clickety-clacking sounds of a printer starting up. One of those old dot matrix ones like in Baba’s office.

I used to sit there after school if one of my maasis didn’t have me. On returning home, Baba and I watched the evening cricket in adjoining rooms because he didn’t like the English commentary. But then a wicket fell and we yelled at each other in celebration through the doorway and ate chaat for dinner because there wasn’t anyone to stop us.

The printer echoes on, click clack click. Like playing someone off stage.

The editor cocks his head to listen, then bobs his chin agreeably. ‘The baiji dolphin is no longer extinct. Congratulations.’

I smile humourlessly. ‘What did the guy who came here just before me change?’

The editor smiles back, a barely there flicker of the lips under his fat-as-fuck moustache.

‘His obituary.’ q

Meghalee Bose is a reader and writer based in Naarm/Melbourne. Her work has been previously published in Meniscus and the Newcastle Short Story Award anthology, and shortlisted for the Deborah Cass Prize, the Peter Cowan Short Story prize and others. She writes code for a living and fiction for what makes that living worthwhile.

Images: Christina Deravedisian, Josh Withers, Markus Spiske - Unsplash

27

Not choosing / on writing retreat Erin Riley

I

t is the first full day away from the responsibilities of my life. I’m sitting at a wooden dining table that sits four chairs. Yesterday, it was covered in a tablecloth and decorative runner. As soon as Wendy left, I stripped it. It was a moment of uncovering, and now I sit, as the sky wakes up, at the bare-naked table, surrounded by my books, full of ideas but unsure what to write, where to start.

To my right is a large window. I open the ugly, cream-coloured vertical blinds so they sit flush to one side. Standing at the window I can see the large bare deck outside and below is the garden that Wendy has tended to. In the middle sits a stone birdbath, which I filled with the watering can but this morning has been topped up by the rain. During the week, I see the kookaburra sipping at it, just like Wendy said.

In the corner of the room is Banjo, a grey and yellow cockatiel – his cage still covered in two white towels. He is yet to sing, though I can hear the tunes of his wild bird friends outside.

I agreed to come to Newcastle months ago, probably last year, when my mum suggested to Wendy that I’d mind her dogs while she went away on a meditation retreat. What the fuck, Mum? was the first thought that came to mind, though with some thinking time, I decided it was a good idea and agreed that in March I’d come and write.

I got excited at the idea of temporarily ejecting myself from my life. I would treat it like a writing retreat. It’s not often you get access to time away without many distractions and for free.

I get curious and search Airbnb. The house three doors down is $3203 for the same time that I am here.

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I am grateful to be here, and my payment is in looking into the marbly brown eyes of two beautiful dogs, in placing their food bowls down in their particular place, replenishing Banjo’s water, topping up his seeds and snacks. In placing thirsty pot plants on the deck and bringing them back in, watering the garden and putting out the bins.

The first afternoon I order some groceries online and five brown paper bags materialise on the doorstep in 45 minutes.

Later, on my phone, I read about Palestine. While I have my food delivered to my doorstep, Palestinians starve. More bombs are dropped than food aid. Babies with sunken faces and arms like twigs cloud my feed. One hundred and seventy-six days of this so far: the world watching genocide play out on tiny screens while voices continue loud in the street.

The Minister for Foreign Affairs got married to her longtime partner the other day. I see photos of them on Instagram.

Inside, I feel bubbling rage. Pulling up the comments, I’m relieved it’s not just me: Genocide red is your colour! Congratulations!

There’s blood on your suit!

So while the world is ending, it is also not, and I have taken myself away to write.

On the train up to Newcastle, my friend Clare, who is a writer, a successful one, posts some pictures on Instagram of her recent writer’s retreat. It is ‘A Day in the Life – Retreat Edition’ and she gives a rundown of her writing routine when on retreat. One of my special interests is in how people manage time, and it has blended with an interest in how people write. I realise that being an ADHD autistic person is what has led me to this obsession: time management and executive functioning are a challenge for my ADHD and writing is my autistic special interest. I can hyperfocus on the thing that matters – writing – though organising it remains such a challenge.

Clare sits down at 6:30 am with a coffee and handwrites.

She has some brekky and keeps writing. At eleven she takes a yoga break, then writes until lunch.

I like the way she’s posted it, with gaps between each thing and an appropriate emoji beside each time and activity. She has a swim in the afternoon.

Yesterday was technically my first full day on ‘retreat’.

My ‘Day in the Life Of’ on Instagram would go like this: 5:30 am – Wake up to a house dark as a cave. Make coffee and sit down to write.

6:00 am – Up and down from the desk. Whip towels off Banjo’s cage. Pat the dogs Jem and Arthur.

6:30 am – Struggle to write the bit about Penny Wong getting married when there’s a genocide. Get up and walk the dogs.

8:30 am – Read an article on the Sydney Review of Books about Hospital, which I read on the train and which has been shortlisted for the Stella Prize. The critique is great, linking it to Plath’s The Bell Jar, which I, shamefully, have not read. Put a note in my diary to borrow it.

9:30 am – More writing about writing. Maybe I’ll write a piece about going away on self-imposed writing retreat.

12:00 pm – Lunch. Eggs on toast slathered in chutney from Wendy’s fridge.

12:45 pm – Walk to Merewether Ocean Baths, the largest ocean pool in the Southern Hemisphere. Swim in lane 10 up and down. Swim 2 km and trek back up the hill, calico bag flung across my shoulder.

3:00 pm – Open the front door to two excited whippets.

Jem, two, is white with a streak of brindle on his face and around his middle. Arthur, six, is an anxious beautiful boy covered in brindle tiger stripes, with a splash of white on his nose. He is shy but curious, and at night I cake his anti-anxiety medication in peanut butter as if it were a treat. I’ve not been gone long, and they are thrilled to see their new temporary person who is me. Jem, all legs, gallops into my room, returning with a plastic Birkenstock in his mouth, skating excitedly around the house with it. Whenever we are to go out or I am returning, Jem will pick up something that belongs to me – a shoe, some undies – and drag it around, like a prize. I find various items during the week in the corners of his bed, under chairs.

4:00 pm – Try to write but instead take photos of myself in my undies in the full-sized bathroom mirror because we don’t have one at home. The light above the mirror is flattering.

Wonder, now that I have a book out in the world, whether it is a professional thing to do, to post them. Weeks later, I do.

5:00 pm – Read, though the dogs are busting to walk again.

Arthur is jumping on and off the bed, crazed, less his soft worried self. Arthur drags a pair of my pants around. I grab two leads and the house keys.

6:00 pm – Dinner. Rice and beans. Eat in silence watching the sun fade.

7:30 pm – Watch Episode 1, Season 2 of Alone Australia.

8:30 pm – Think about going to bed but instead watch a 50-minute wrestling documentary about Davey Boy Smith, the WWE’s British Bulldog. RIP.

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ISLAND

Saturday / Sunday The writing retreat is temporarily suspended when my partner Merryn and our dog Remy visit for the long weekend. I imagine in the writing world this would be cheating on the idea of the writing retreat. If it were a more formal retreat, perhaps the interruption from guests would ruin the flow, though my writing often comes in small gusts so I am flexible with it.

Remy, our four-year-old kelpie-cross greets Jem and Arthur at the front door, nose to noses through wire mesh. Tails wag and they zoom around the house and find their way to the yard.

We buy a new blender on the internet and do some life admin on my laptop. There are few days like this in real life where there is not much to do. We read, take a bath, look out the window onto Wendy’s garden and listen to the birds. We stop and watch the dogs play. I drag three dog beds onto the veranda and draw up a wicker chair. I read with the dogs at my feet. They are new fast friends.

Before I came away, I had some anxiety about it. I had said yes months ago and was excited by the possibility of time away from life, but felt an internal resistance. Nobody needed me.

No-one was blocking my leave, no-one unsupportive of the idea of time away.

I talk to Rachel, my therapist, about my fear. Rachel points out how big the rescuer part of me has been for many years, in life and in work. She says that a writing retreat would be something I’d be doing for myself, not anyone else. That I’ve not operated much like this before – that it’s not very people-pleasing of me.

I wanted to go. I knew I’d love it, to not be in demand, to do as I pleased; to watch the wrestling documentaries I could never watch at home. I could have it. So I overrode the people-pleaser feeling and came here to the two dogs and Banjo. To the big house by the ocean.

I’ve made a decision to read about writing while I am here as a way to find my way. I feel instantly soothed by the decision and it is less noisy in my head.

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Not choosing / on writing retreat

Monday The day I first go to the ocean baths, I can’t work out the bus timetable so walk to the beach and back. Before Merryn returns to Sydney, they write me a list of the times and places I can catch the bus. There are a few times each day I can catch two buses, door to beach and back again. Alternatively, it’s a bus and a short walk. We are a great team. The things I find too challenging, like navigating timetables or planning a short holiday or taking risks, Merryn is great at. ‘You don’t have time for that. You’re here to write!’ Merryn says with a smile. They grab my notepad and write out all the bus times from morning to night.

Merryn drops me to the beach on the way back to Sydney.

I swim 2.5 km in the early morning sun. Afterwards, I wait for the bus that will take me halfway home.

I am alone again, greeted once more by Arthur and Jem. I have fallen in love with them, these beautiful willowy delights, all legs and soft slender faces. In four days together, I have noticed their peculiarities. Jem is extroverted, excitable and a real cheek. When I’m not watching, he sneaks food from Arthur’s bowl. Arthur has a quiet nature and slinks around in the background of things, unassuming but curious. He warms up slowly and slinks into a room to check that I am there before leaving again. He will sit just out of reach on the corner of the bed.

It is hard to write. There are many things I’d like to work on, and my head is full. I had not planned to come here on my self-imposed writing retreat to write a story about my self-imposed writing retreat, but this is what’s happening and so, I think, I must.

I’ve made a decision to read about writing while I am here as a way to find my way. I feel instantly soothed by the decision and it is less noisy in my head. There is a YouTube video already bookmarked on my computer: Karl Ove Knausgaard in conversation with Sheila Heti. Sheila is strikingly beautiful, I think immediately before anything else. Sheila is talking to Karl about the fifth book in his My Struggle series, about its lack of ‘therapy-speak’. What Sheila means is the lack of self-reflection, the trying to understand oneself through the lens of psychology, of what we know about relationships, and

how people are built. He has no interest in it. He admits that he thinks it is cultural, this lack of ‘I’ in the books and then he says that his wife asked him to go to couples therapy and he refused, saying that he’d rather shoot himself in the head. He talks about managing life yourself. Even going to the doctor, Karl says, is something you do only when it feels like you’re dying. He is the son of a psychiatric nurse and I wonder how he came to feel so alone. Sheila is curious as to why he thinks that way. Perhaps when Karl talks of cultural he is talking about the culture of men, of masculinity, of not showing weakness, of not needing. He is talking about taking on all the most depressing cultural lies about how men should be. He admits that writing 3500 pages about himself still leaves him miserable on waking every morning.1 I had not read Sheila Heti but I go on a YouTube interview deep dive and I listen to her interview Rachel Cusk on the Canadaland podcast. I listen to her in conversation with the queer writer Michelle Tea about her new book Alphabetical Diaries. It’s a project born of her love of organising, a diary kept over decades in a Word document, and over years of writing other books, edited down, placed into spreadsheets, rearranged and alphabetised, spun into something new. A snapshot of a life that can be found by letter. I am a Heti fan already. She’s smart and funny and earnest and interesting. I download Pure Colour to listen to when I walk the dogs.

There is a point during retreat when, sitting in Wendy’s meditation room, I find myself squinting at the computer screen. I come in here with Banjo each day. I place his cage on the stubby table beneath a framed picture of the Dalai Lama and open his cage door. I place a towel-covered pillow by the opening and Banjo creeps out gingerly, chirping at me. I place my hand near him and he sings beautifully at me, though it is a trap and he races towards me and pecks at my arm. I retreat to the screen and read an interview with Sigrid Nunez in the Paris Review, to which I have hurriedly resubscribed. I enlarge the screen three times. On Tuesday, I take out my reading glasses and wonder why I didn’t offer myself this grace earlier.

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ISLAND

Tuesday I wake at 6:30 am to a house still dark. I creep to the kitchen, make a pot of coffee, sit down to write. I have recently been using a wearable gadget that looks like an ugly bangle. It’s useful for anyone trying to figure out their health and connects to an app on my phone. Over time, it figures out your numbers. It has helped me understand how my body recovers and how to be kinder to it. I have fed it information, and over time it has collected enough that I know one coffee in the morning, getting enough sleep, having a consistent bed time and gammy gluten-free bread improves how I feel. I can see as my heart rate changes, as the stress metric tells me on a busy work day that I lived in the ‘high stress zone’ for six hours, that my body works really hard to be in connection. It has validated my autism and the energy that goes into being a person in this world.

I do not wish to track my fitness goals but I am trying to work things out. Last year, I was diagnosed with Graves’ disease, an autoimmune condition affecting the thyroid. I didn’t realise it at the time, because so much was happening in my life, but I was having symptoms. With Graves’ your whole system speeds up. I certainly had a problem with shit – barely making it between the time I recognised I had to go and the shit spilling out of me. I’d put the symptoms down to having written a book, coming back from my European holiday with Giardia, launching the book, all while working full time. Internally I was irritable. I wanted to escape my skin and felt like I was going quite crazy. I read that untreated Graves’ disease can make people really anxious, and in some cases is mistaken for psychosis.

The endocrinologist put me on carbimazole and placed a sheet of paper in my hand. ‘For the hospital’, she said, in the event I had a ‘rather uncommon’ reaction. I am told that in any case of a fever or a bad cold, to present to emergency.

‘It’s usually not the drug’, she says ‘but it needs to be ruled out quickly’. So far, I have not had to fear the major blood disorder, the rare side effect of the drug that has already made my insides less stormy.

I am hesitant to go back for a swim today because when I look at the app, it tells me I spent a long time in Zones 4

and 5 of my maximum heart rate. Last week on my run, my heart appeared to be thrashing itself. A high heart rate is a symptom of Graves’, though mine had previously been low.

I went onto Reddit and others reported a similar issue with their ugly bangle measuring unusually high readings. Even so, the run felt more challenging. On seeing my stats Merryn was aghast. ‘No need to race around the park like Usain Bolt!’ they said to me with a worried face. I had been enjoying running in the park but I got spooked. I didn’t want to be scraped off the ground at Sydney Park because I’d gone too hard.

I text Merryn about my worry and they urge me to be gentle with myself, reminding me that I am here alone. I will, I say, and remember I must attend to Arthur and Jem and Banjo, and to my writing retreat. I have come here for myself, to write, to be away from the noise of work, though I realise I am still helping. I’m minding the dogs. Our walks are the anchors in the day. I wonder if it’s why I can be here. I’m still not completely doing something for myself.

I read a Paris Review interview with Alan Hollinghurst from 2011. His first novel, The Swimming Pool Diaries, cemented in me a love of faggots in novels. The interviewer asks Alan about how he began to write his book The Folding Star. Hollinghurst says he’d tried to start it in 1989 at his first artists’ retreat: I realised that they’re wonderful places to get on with a project that is up and running, but for starting a novel, when I need all sorts of things about me – books, galleries, other channels of research – they don’t really work. I felt very cut off and didn’t do much there.

Reading Alan’s admission is a relief. I have placed no real expectations on myself while I’m away, except to work on a few essay ideas. Even so, when I can’t get to them and start writing this piece about the process of being away, I feel a thrill.

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Not choosing / on writing retreat

Wednesday I look at what I have written the day before I write this, about not planning this piece and the things that have found their way in.

I wolf down more Sheila Heti on YouTube and listen to her speak about the process of writing, her experiences, and ideas about art. She has been great company to me this week.

She asks curious questions and I wonder about her.

Sheila is talking about the idea behind the writing workshop she gave entitled It Doesn’t Matter What You Choose. Sheila says she always wanted to be a writer and when she was at university, she didn’t know what to write about. She didn’t think she had anything important to say but the point was not to ‘…worry about that. The point was to write and then hope one day I’d have something to say’.2 Sheila says that ‘…you start writing and then you see what the writing says as opposed to deciding in advance what you want to write about. You’re more of a witness or an observer of what comes out’.

I pick up my pen and every few seconds I press pause to write down what Sheila says word for word. Inside I am like, ‘yes!!, yes!!!’ – because this is how I experience writing too – that it is outside of me and if I am patient enough, give it enough space, I can trust that I can and will write. It is why, whenever I finish a piece, there is a part of me outside of it, astonished, wondering how it was made.

Sheila again:

I think about Internal Family Systems (IFS) when I think about writing. That there is the writer part of me that comes alive. In IFS, you want your most wise, embodied self living your life most of the time. If certain parts take over, there’s this concept called blending – essentially another way to understand disassociation. All parts, when working well, help us move through life. When I write, it is a part of me that writes and does the work. I think the more embodied me is the me that reads and walks and thinks – and that I need to have the writer part take over to get some of the work done.

I am pottering around the house at night, with Sheila on the laptop in conversation playing from the lounge room.

She’s talking about this very idea, the one I have been thinking about, the idea of the writer part: The part of me that wants to write is not a part that I know.

Like, I don’t know what this part of me is that wants to write and so how can I decide for it what it wants to say?

Like it’s just a complete misunderstanding of what this impulse is, and the impulse is like an instinct. It’s like the sex instinct, or the love instinct or the hunger instinct. It’s just a bodily instinct and all of those instincts don’t have anything to say, they don’t have any content, they’re just impulses. And the impulse to make art is the same, it’s just an impulse.

And this essay too, this piece that is very impulsive, is driven by something that is inside me, but is not me.

I collect stinking dog blankets draped around the place plus Banjo’s two white towels, dotted with tiny turds, and place them on a twenty-minute wash cycle. I hurriedly hang them up and race for the bus. Yesterday as I was reading on the computer, Banjo scared me, flapping onto the top of my head where he perched and rustled about while I tried to practise mindfulness looking up at the Dalai Lama.

The water is crisper than on Monday and I see a man ride his bike up to the pool’s edge and pull out his swim gear. I imagine what my life might be like if my writing retreat by the beach just went on forever. I would buy myself a bicycle and I would swim here every day. I see a swimmer on the rocks carrying fins and consider asking if I can join him for an ocean swim. I think about how much has changed, that swimming in the open ocean is something I am not afraid of anymore.

I walk the dogs at dusk. The sky blushes neon pink. I have come to love them and when I leave, I’ll miss them.

This is where this idea of ‘it doesn’t matter what you choose’ is important from an artistic standpoint, because if you’re choosing in advance what you want to do or what you want to say or what you want the book to be, that’s letting very little life in, that’s letting in very little randomness, very little chance, no god. You know, it’s just ego, just a decision, and you’re bound to fail and nothing you make is going to resemble the thing you set out to make.

But if you don’t choose, if you just look at writing as work as a kind of play, as a kind of working, as a way of being, as a way of being at the computer, as a way of interacting with text, then choice is not a word that you need. Like maybe you’re composing, maybe you’re making things beautiful, maybe you’re bringing things together to make meaning or beauty but it’s a meaning or beauty you find there, it’s not one that you have to convey.

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ISLAND

There’s a smallness to it, a simplicity that makes sense, and I wonder why life feels like it is always brimming with inessentials.

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Not choosing / on writing retreat

Thursday Wendy’s friend Sylvia drops in with cake. I put on the kettle and dress the table again. I am grateful for the interruption to my solitude.

After lunch I read Oliver Sacks’ Gratitude, plucked from Wendy’s bookshelf. It’s a slip of a thing. I take it to the most comfortable place in the house, Wendy’s bed, and sit with Jem nestled in between my legs (always wanting to be closer) and Arthur by my feet.

Oliver’s essays were penned shortly before he died, in 2015. For Sacks: Over the last few days, I have been able to see my life as from a great altitude, as a sort of landscape, and with a deepening sense of the connections of all its parts. This does not mean I am finished with life. On the contrary, I feel intensely alive, and I want and hope in the time that remains to deepen my friendships, to say farewell to those I love, to write more, to travel if I have the strength, to achieve new levels of understanding and insight.

Oliver swims every day, though not as fast, and continues to sit at his desk and write by hand. I am inspired by his bright approach to oncoming death; life’s finitude an opportunity to recalibrate. His prognosis bringing about ‘a sudden clear focus and perspective. There is no time for anything inessential. I must focus on myself, my work, and my friends. I shall no longer look at the News Hour every night’.

When I read about Oliver narrowing life to its essentials, there’s a smallness to it, a simplicity that makes sense, and I wonder why life feels like it is always brimming with inessentials.

I, too, have found a comforting smallness this week, pruned of responsibilities and driven by whim. Of course, I am outside the workplace, the thrums of life dictated by responsibility, the pull of obligation and so, perhaps, the small joys are easier to see. I commit to bringing my small life home with me, to insert these pleasures, this pace, into the bricks of my life.

35

ISLAND

Friday Wendy arrives home from her meditation retreat. Jem and Arthur tumble at her feet. I’ve made us pasta. Wendy pours us both a glass of wine. She explains the Buddhist philosophy of impermanence – this idea about not being fixed to any one thing, to acknowledge life is always shifting and changing. In embracing this idea, the hope is to be more present in the small moments of joy when we find them. I think of Oliver Sacks writing about oncoming death and how loosening a desperate grip on life embodies this same idea.

Before I leave, Wendy asks me to take a photo of her and the dogs. I snap a family portrait on Wendy’s iPhone though Jem will not sit still. Wendy drives me to the station. I catch the train back to Sydney in the rain. It is a long ride but I do not mind. I am warm and rested.

I read an interview with James Baldwin in the Paris Review from 1984, the year I was born. The interviewer asks about his

first drafts, to which he replies, ‘They are overwritten. Most of the re-write, then, is cleaning.’

Later, Baldwin is asked about whether, as his experience of writing accrues, it is accompanied with increased knowledge.

He replies: You learn how little you know. It becomes much more difficult because the hardest thing in the world is simplicity.

And the most fearful too. It becomes more difficult because you have to strip yourself of all your disguises, some of which you didn’t know you had. You want to write a sentence as clean as a bone. That is the goal.3

And so, I come home, having not chosen what to write, with a piece of writing 8000 scribbly handwritten words long.

Weeks later, I sit in various places, simplifying and cleaning: both the words on the page and the essentials of my life. q

Erin Riley (they/them) is a volunteer surf life saver, social worker and writer from Warrane/Sydney. Erin likes reading, routine and swimming in the ocean. Their debut memoir, A Real Piece of Work, came out in 2023, published by Penguin Random House. Erin’s fascinated by themes of work, productivity, time, bodies and curiosity as a form of resistance. Most recently, Erin was shortlisted for the Griffith Review Emerging Voices Competition and was one of the lucky judges of this year’s Island Nonfiction Prize.

Images: Mark Galer, Henrique Felix, David Maunsell – Unsplash Endnotes 1 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N31RAxAmFpM&t=915s 2 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E7TeWPT8TI0&t=1103s 3 https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/2994/the-art-of-fiction-no-78-jamesbaldwin

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CELEBRATING 20 YRS OF DESIGN IN TASMANIA

PROUD SUPPORTER & DESIGN PARTNER OF ISLAND MAGAZINE SINCE 2015

futago.com.au

ABORIGINAL WRITER’S FELLOWSHIP

Jennifer Evans received the Aboriginal Writer’s Fellowship in the 2022 Tasmanian Literary Awards. As part of the Fellowship, they were awarded mentoring and publication by Island. The following two pieces and the artwork that links them – three ways of telling the same story – were created during that process.

Yudi mirrung walama, coming home Jennifer Evans (Dharug) Prologue

Girrawi

Our country strong, safe and well.

Girrawi (sulphur-crested cockatoo) watching over us mobs, with us is Bara (eel) sweetwater singing.

Walangalyung (death spear) defends our hearts and Law.

I turn my head to meet the warm salt air. My body is wide-open, my gaze is fixed on the sound of our country. The warmth rushes over my breast and penetrates my swelling heart. We are all together. All of us. We wear the same yellow plume on our foreheads, we are coming into our country. We have always been here, from when the sun first appeared through the trees and the river spoke. Our collective cry can be heard right back to our ancestors. Our echo is carved into country. My sister is to my right and my brother to my left, my grandfather is in front. This sounding feels new every time. This is our country; we are part of their spirits. They in us and us in them.

There is no beginning or end. My brain feels vast. It is spreading out to the horizon, kissing the ancestors, melding, and dancing with the wind. Flashes of yellow and white carry our message. I can see their reflection in my sister’s eye. We journey together, forwards, always near, never apart. When we land it is like a soft dream, a good dream. Then country comes up to us and gifts us with their bounty. And we stay, stay until grandfather tells us to move again. No-one can stop us, we will always be here, always in place, on our country. We dance, we sing. We sing to country and to each other.

Interruption of thieving collecting voyeurs, Baudin, Petit, Péron.

Whose crimes are smoked by fire fierce.

On her waters homeward drift, Sea country our saving grace.

Bara guides us all.

No longer stolen, we unite.

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Walangalyung

Bara

I took my first breath around the fire, she shaped me, gave me life. Our possum family watched over my birth. My coming into being was a considered curation. The moon was full, as it had been two moons prior when I was pulled from my mother gently, with love and care. Special words are being spoken, they are gifting me ultimate powers, instilling them in the darkness. I am from the sea, the earth and the trees.

I am destined to move through country like no other and I hold Law. One day I will be a sacrifice for my people, the fire people. I will make them proud. The fire light flickers and reflects off my long, strong, lean, Blak body. I am a rod of power. I hold my power. My people know when I need to use my power. When my family sleeps, I stand watch silently, not moving, just watching, waiting, seeing, checking, knowing, being. Singing my fire song.

Country breathes. Their slumber kept company by sparks, fuzzy shadows caress, making shapes familiar and transparent.

In the prism of darkness each inhalation and exhalation is a celebration of who we are, our rhythm, our grounding, our foreverness. Togetherness. In their light my patina is growing, perfection and resilience. I know who I am, where I come from and where I am going.

She surrounds me entirely. No air is required. I love it this way.

This is how it was meant to be. Deep satisfaction. She moves with the moon, easily drawing down with gravity, endless repetition. Each rhythmic movement is a breaking of her waters, another birth to add to her millennia. Her people adore her, she is everything to them. She sustains them, gives them all they need. She is my everything too. Sometimes I am briefly away from her, but not for long. She is always with me.

I am coming home for the first time and the last time. This journey is my Dreaming. My Ancestors are telling me that my journey is sacred, belonging to me, that something special will happen. All the markers are in the right place in country as I move along, although I have never seen them before. In my knowing, everything is healthy and perfect. I feel a great sense of wonderment, an opening up of me, a feeling that new and old knowledge is coming. I know I’m young, but I too will have stories to pass on through her, she will hold them and guide them with the moon as her helper.

I’m close now. Everything is full, still, paused, suspended in time. I’m in sweetwater country now. I look to the sky, clarity is eternity. Nothing is between me and the world above. Then I see him. He is still, implanted. His eyes penetrate mine with a timeless gaze. I am suspended. He knows me. But there is a mirror between us, a deafening reflection. I cannot tell if he sees himself or me. It doesn’t matter. I see the reeds around his neck. I know these ones, I have seen them many times, alive in their river country, dancing and singing to me as I pass by. Full of love and life force from the home they come from.

He must be very special and powerful to wear these. I have not seen him before. He is glorious. I hear his name. He is saying his name. A beautiful name, a strong name, a handsome name. He is of his country. His special country.

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ISLAND

Walangalyung

Girrawi

It’s wrong. It’s all wrong how I got here. I never asked for this.

Being here is not what was meant to happen. I don’t know this place, this stinking, groaning hole of a place. It’s not a canoe, or a tree hollow: it’s a hole. It’s not country. It’s not my country. It’s a dark hole. A hole filled with hate and thieving.

But I have to stay strong as they have taken many of us with them. Stolen us in the worst and most wrong way. They need me to stay strong. I have to work a way to get us out.

I’m watching them fumble through their satchel. Again, they are looking, gazing, thinking, dreaming, wanting. Their finger caresses his scarification and traces the grass cord and reeds around his neck. I know they want him; I’ve seen it many times.

They don’t know I’m watching. They don’t know my name, or what I am capable of. The time hasn’t come yet for me to do my business. I’ll wait. I’ve been here long enough now to learn their strange language. Wasn’t that hard, very repetitive, just like the work they all do, the lot of them. All the stuff they have stolen, they’ll pay for it. I’ll make them pay. I check myself. I feel the fire rising. I’ve got to hold it in. Not yet. Not now. Just hold it in.

When their candlelight touches my skin, I think of home, my people. The old ones taught me that timing is everything.

The conditions must be met according to the Law. Everything here smells wrong. They stink, it’s their food and their law that makes them rancid. Or maybe it’s the whispers I put in their ears at night? They have no idea that it’s me doing it to them.

They think that it’s the portrait work that is awakening and stirring the thoughts they don’t want. I’m driving them mad, making them ache in a way they hate. Their shame not mine.

We are keeping country safe and well. Going about our business, moving past the reeds and over river spirit. We are keeping country company and loving them. We rub ourselves on the bodies of our tree kin. They tell us of the births they have witnessed, the lives of our people they have cradled.

The stars above that they honour. The whisper of saltwater reaches us, telling us to move again.

His hair is like the tide. His markings and reed necklace show he is their leader and Elder. We can see him. He is clever.

He has a knowing, a power. He will not falter. His name is like a song, he sings his name to us. We follow him along his journey. We keep him company and let him know that we believe in him and his journey.

Walangalyung I have sharp shells on my head, fixed by sap. My crown is the birthplace of my fire. My ignition more powerful than their tiny appendages. Flaccid white dripping nothingness of them.

Repugnant in their whiteness. Lazy shadowless nothingness.

Droopy, empty shallowness. Stinky, manky meanness.

Their dreams are empty. They have no Dreaming. All the rum piss-soaked timbers of the ship, all the stained white canvas sails grained in arrogance. Ropes accomplices to the crimes of theft. Guilty. Barking orders, petty jealousies and entitled wishes to be boss man of ship, tinder for my fire – perfect tinder full of hate and greed. Tinder unfettered, insatiable desire to take and collect. Tinder of stealing, one thing, one person, one part of country and my people, one after the other. Their floating museum and menagerie. All waiting for my spark, my ignition strike, my heat spot. That moment of redemption, salvation and cleansing through fire, smoke.

It’s good for you. You white fellas need to burn, to be cleaned.

Smoke our stuff first to cleanse, then set ourselves free.

She is not ready yet. Not yet full. I have been watching her.

My kin tell me too that she is not yet ready. It will not be her that tells us when she is ready. Cousin Bara will send us a message.

Soon we will see the silver dancers on the water. The sisters of light in their creation, jumping up from the shadows of the waves and signalling to Bara that the time is coming. Her wash of light restful and ever loving. She brings solitude, peace and yet stirring under her is pressure mounting, quiet and unseen, only felt. The magical moment between birth and death is hers.

40

Yudi mirrung walama, coming home

Bara

Girrawi

It’s intense. I can’t stop it. It’s stronger than anything I’ve ever taken. I feel like my head is going to explode. My body feels like one thousand orgasms coming at once. I think I’m going to pass out. I’m not alone. Their bodies pushing up to mine.

Slithering, twisting, blindly taking us to a place we haven’t been, but are compelled to go. We can’t control it now. She is calling us, dragging us to her saltwater.

It hits me. The force is magnified. In my remaking, I am altered. Cosmic reconfiguration indents my mind. The saltwater is opening a new Dreamtime inside me. The switch is turned. I have a new force. I am not alone. My kin, my mob, we are turning inside and outside on our journey. Our bodies permanently altered. We signal to her, let her know that we are anew and ready.

Grandfather makes his call. This is one we haven’t heard. He tells that they are coming home into country. We take off racing to the saltwater. We can’t believe what our ears are making us see. The whoosh, reverberation, the cosmic hum of rebirth. Waves of conglomerated lost kin one after another.

Again, and again. Wave after wave. They are coming home. All of them. They are with us. We are together again.

Walangalyung I am lying down resting. His solar rays penetrating my bones.

Rebuilding. I am scaffolded in new possibilities. Ochre is giving me dimensions and illuminations. Soft twirls of smoke embedding messages old and new. My people surround me.

I am resting, but not for long.

Walangalyung That’s it. I hear her, she tells me that Cousin Bara is coming. They are moving into their new being. This is so good. Time is close.

She is everything. My mother, my sister, my grandmother, she helps me sleep. Her words are silent and deafening in their power.

She is waking me up, making me get, stand up. It can’t believe it.

I have been waiting for so long in this putrid hole. I replay what is about to happen for the thousandth time. I’m crippled by the idea that the time has come, frozen cold, unable to move. I wait a little longer. I wait a tiny bit more. Now I begin my business.

It started as delicious waft of my home country. They can’t see it, they are asleep. My message greets their synapses at first friendly and nice. Then I place a new memory, I send them to a different place, my smoke guides them, gently. They don’t notice their levitation. She takes them across her waves and lets them drift back to their country. I don’t know if they will get home. I don’t care.

I gather my kin, and all my mob and take them to Cousin Bara. She is holding all of us in her and Bara is with her too.

Cousin Bara is guiding us, taking us home to country. Her breath is cleansing us, her song washing us clean. Our injuries fall from our bodies and settle in fathoms, in new places far from us. In our leaving we sing to each other as we pass into our healing. Scales, feather, fur, wood, string, hair, shell and bones. All of us in our journey. Deep time sweeps us back and forth. We have been here before and we are not afraid. We are in our endless cycle. Our circle of life. Our beginning, end, and future. We are coming home into our county and Dreaming.

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BlaQ storywork Jennifer Evans (Dharug)

M

y BlaQ storywork is a special place not marked by fact but imbued by dreams. In my piece Coming home, I share my BlaQ storywork with layered symbols, subversion and alternative realities. It is a story within a story – a dance. I don’t tell all, I keep things for myself, secret and sacred. My BlaQ storywork is a message to myself of failed colonisation – unstolen sovereign bodies and sovereign country. It is a love letter to country and BlaQ/k kin.

My storywork starts with an introduction to the three characters, Girrawi (sulphur-crested cockatoo), Walangalyung (death spear) and Bara (eel). They are both reflection and shadow of my personal BlaQ Dharug Dreaming – powerful kin able to collaborate with me on my anti-colonial quest.

As I share my storywork I imagine my BlaQ shapeshifting embodying them, as though I am flying, swimming and burning.

Girrawi starts the storywork by acknowledging country, our ancestors and the ancestral beings they know, the river, trees and sun. Girrawi is being respectful, truthful and honouring their place in country. They refrain from revealing who they really are – loud, cheeky, clever. Instead, they do the right thing. They make space for the voice of country. They sing and dance to their beloved sovereign body, country, kin and connectedness. They celebrate the deep time of always was and always will be.

We first meet Walangalyung at their most intimate moment of birth, being shaped into a spear over the fire with their kin.

The telling is soft and vulnerable how they are born into being.

One of love and gentleness. Walangalyung is being given a big heart. A warrior needs a big and loving heart. In their birth and making, the storywork speaks of the love and strength of our people. This part of the storywork is an acknowledgement to our sovereign BlaQ/k bodies and Nations. Like Girrawi’s introduction, this passage is less about the characters and more about respectful acknowledgement and coming into the storywork – a metaphorical smoking.

My BlaQ storywork turns to Bara. Through Bara I share my deep love of sea country and everything she is – her inseparable connection to her moon. This part of my storywork is a vast wash of saltwater love. This too is an acknowledgement of sea country. In my messaging I honour all saltwater peoples and their unbroken connection and belonging to her.

Bara shares their love and affection for sea country too. The storywork now starts to gently shift from acknowledgements of sovereign bodies and country to the seed of my storywork about coming home. Bara tells of their migration back from their Coral Sea birthing to their river Nations’ homes. This is a profound reference to the coming home of our peoples to our Nation homelands from various places: some chosen, some forced.

Repatriation of bodies into perfect placement – belonging.

We are introduced to the omnipresent power of sea country and her fluid abilities to guide, hold and collaborate. She takes every Bara to their river Nations, sweetwater country.

My storywork makes space for Bara of all Nations to coact in solidarity to guide each other and inform each other of colonisers’ movements across sea country. Bara meets someone special – Bidgee Bidgee, leader of the Burramattagal clan of the Dharug Nation – sketched by Petit from Baudin’s expedition.

In this moment he is safe on country, strong and proud. This marks a micro-shift in my storywork, a hint that something is about to change.

When Walangalyung talks next, this is where the storywork diverges. It moves from coming into country to Walangalyung and all their kin being stolen by Baudin’s expedition. The tone of my storywork shifts dramatically to one of action – words against the colonial project. I am implicating Baudin’s expedition as complicit in British colonisation through their ‘colonial fieldwork’ on Dharug country and resultant theft.

In the depths of the floating oppressor (Baudin’s ship), Walangalyung watches Petit obsessing over the portrait of Bidgee Bidgee. Walangalyung’s rage builds as he devises a plan.

Their words of fury are a representation of Blak resistance against 236 years of colonisation. Walangalyung’s raging voice is a protest and dissent to all the repetitive injuries of the

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colonial project. Walangalyung holds their fire in. This is an expression of smouldering Blak resistance, and the immaculate timing required for reciprocity. In their rage Walangalyung draws on the strength of their people and their teachings on reparations – the right way for Walangalyung to do it.

The work of resistance, protest and dissent is heavy. My BlaQ storywork needs a break to return to country for sustenance. Girrawi provides this refuge, taking me back to country where I can heal, be safe and well. It is a reminder of the purpose of resistance, that country can be looked after, loved and kept safe while BlaQ/k bodies are away from country.

This part of the story is also for Walangalyung, for them to know that their anti-colonial quest is not a lonely one, that their efforts to bring kin home to where they belong is right.

Country is calling them through Girrawi’s words.

In this same passage Girrawi reports that Bidgee Bidgee is safe even though Petit’s image of him has been taken. This too is a message to Walangalyung that Bidgee Bidgee and kin are waiting, that Bidgee Bidgee is resisting the true coloniser at home. From home, Girrawi is sending Walangalyung messages of encouragement and hope. My storywork is also speaking of our ongoing BlaQ/k bravery and resistance against colonisation and the journeys we make in that resistance.

Having been healed by the sustenance of country and reassured that resistance is strong on country, my storywork returns to Walangalyung and their floating incarceration.

Walangalyung unleashes their disdain and detestation of their oppressor unfettered. They are building tinder for their fire – their act of payback and escape. Walangalyung’s words are a message to all those complicit in colonisation and the colonial project in its entirety.

Walangalyung is waiting for sea country to join them in their collaboration with Cousin Bara. This cousin is the one belonging to Mauritius, able to assist in Walangalyung’s quest as Baudin’s ship approaches. They are ready for their migration to their secret breeding place. Walangalyung honours sea country and ancestor spirit moon and trusts that she will be making the timing of their plans to escape and deliver payback perfect.

Sea country takes Bara to their private conception place.

She holds them close while birthings take place. Walangalyung knows that Bara can guide them home when the time is right.

Sea country gives Walangalyung the message to start their payback and escape. Walangalyung sets fire to Baudin’s ship and gathers their stolen kin. In my BlaQ storywork, I choose not to explain the demise of the Baudin expedition and crew.

Instead, I focus on recovery, reciprocity, and strength through being unstolen.

In their journey coming home, Walangalyung, Cousin Bara and all the now unstolen kin are cleansed by sea country. This part of my BlaQ storywork is a wish of healing to all sovereign bodies, Nations and country – a song to the ancestors – a telling of true and final justice. Deep healing happens and injuries leave our BlaQ/k bodies, far away from us, gone, not to hurt us ever again.

In perfect symmetry Grandfather Girrawi welcomes all unstolen kin and Walangalyung home. They are joined by Bara.

At this moment rebirthing, reconnection and repatriation is complete. Waves of joy, strength, survival and reclamation repeat. Everyone has come home. We are together again.

Walangalyung closes my BlaQ storywork. They are healed and rejuvenated with their family and sovereign country – ready to do BlaQ/k anti-colonial work again. q

Associate Professor Jennifer Evans is a Queer Dharug scholar with dual connections to Dharug and Palawa country. They are Associate Professor Aboriginal Health Leadership and Aboriginal Literary Fellow with research expertise in Indigenous and decolonising methodologies and health equity for First Peoples. Jennifer is a multidisciplinary academic who has broad research capabilities in both quantitative and qualitative methods underpinned by Indigenous and Queer standpoints.

Appointed at the College of Health and Medicine, she provides Aboriginal leadership and research advice to peers widely within and external to the University of Tasmania.

Images: Yudi mirrung walama by Jennifer Evans

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Birdsong Helga Jermy plane on the runway fragile as origami its folded wings equivocal as all the paper news you ever wrote home about profligate and singing we take off into flight (or fancy) thoughts a chimerical chorus memories are trinkets hammered like gold into finch or leaf lustre unflappable when attached to skin and bone from here the view is sun splashed scattershot but still there are shadows skimming over ripples over stone over age name-sayers sound a truth we’re still learning songs of flesh and flame blue lakes reflect back all you want to see hazy against an anguished breath you scrub and scrub some self ablazing combustibles dry kindle x flame = seasoned regifted dream = a firebird

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the birds here are seers or at least they see something the sum of things does the phoenix sing or simply soar and drop its dandruff ash on the parting place elsewhere a common chiffchaff sings its extravagance the bean goose deep and guttural is hunted like the partridge I watch a mistle thrush way off course strut a feathered deviance in defiance of a tiny stirring entity beat booming madrigals you can catch the whole world here if you draw a line around it ink its periphery and prepare to dance in the waving air a bisy larke messaging bird tracks in sky obey only the rules of higher stars some equation physics exterior some equation physics thethe exterior but we are all interior at least I am part of the sum of it = a flight + a down pillow x you.

Helga Jermy is an English-Estonian poet, now living on Lutruwita/Tasmania’s northwest coast. Poems have appeared widely in literary journals and anthologies, and her work has been shortlisted/longlisted in major national and international prizes. Her fourth collection is forthcoming later this year from Walleah Press. Website: helgajermypoetry.com.au.

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Sawtooth ARI: A quarter century of supporting artists

Sawtooth ARI (formerly Arts Alive) began 25 years ago to foster and enrich the visual arts culture of Launceston, Lutruwita/ Tasmania. Since this time, the organisation has worked with emerging, early and mid-career practitioners to highlight their work and process through exhibitions, events, public programming and more.

The following artists contributed prints for production of limited editions: Alex Davern + Amber Koroluk-Stephenson + Angela Casey + Benjamin Baker + Bianca Templar + Bonnie Starick + Chee Yong + Clara Martin + Emily-Rose Wills + Emma Magnusson-Reid + Fernando do Campo + Jo Chew + Joel Crosswell + Julie Gough + Katie Barron + Lex Palmer-Bull + Liam James + Neil Haddon + Olly Read + Rob O’Connor + Rod Gardner + Sarah Rhodes + Tony Curran + Tricky Walsh + Troy Ruffels + Zara Sully.

In April of this year, the Artist Run Initiative (ARI) celebrated a quarter century of supporting arts practitioners, producing a limited-edition print run of the work of 26 artists who have previously shown work with Sawtooth. The project was a federally supported fundraiser for the organisation and kicked off a history and archiving project, which is currently underway.

Sawtooth ARI will continue working on its history project over the coming year so if you have materials to contribute or stories to tell about your experience of the arts organisation, please get in touch: sawtoothari.com

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The community around us is inherently creative – we’ve made a space to reflect that back to them, but it’s also a place to connect to big picture thinking about the world we live in and how we each have our own perspectives.

Sawtooth ARI Director Zara Sully (they/them)

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Jo Chew The Optimist, The Fool 2024, archival pigment printing (giclée) on Canson printmaking rag 310 gsm, 420 × 594 mm, edition of 25

ISLAND

I had my first solo show with Sawtooth and have been included in multiple group shows. Sawtooth is where I was able to find my footing and develop my practice in the gallery space. Sawtooth sits perfectly at the intersection of professional gallery practice and grassroots community building.

It is hybrid, versatile and flexible and is something the art world needs more of.

Clara Martin (she/her)

Top: Emily-Rose Wills Strawberry Fields 2024, archival pigment printing (giclée) on Canson printmaking rag 310 gsm, 420 × 594 mm, edition of 25 Bottom: Clara Martin Prayer from a Single Bed at Midnight 2024, archival pigment printing (giclée) on Canson printmaking rag 310 gsm, 420 × 594 mm, edition of 25

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A quarter century of supporting artists

Chee Yong Landscape Abstraction 2024, archival pigment printing (giclée) on Canson printmaking rag 310 gsm, 420 × 594 mm, edition of 25

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ISLAND

Clockwise from top left Rod Gardner Always Launceston 2024, archival pigment printing (giclée) on Canson printmaking rag 310 gsm, 420 × 594 mm, edition of 25 Sarah Rhodes Colleen 2024, archival pigment printing (giclée) on Canson printmaking rag 310 gsm, 420 × 594 mm, edition of 25 Robert O’Connor Blimey 2024, archival pigment printing (giclée) on Canson printmaking rag 310 gsm, 420 × 594 mm, edition of 25 Troy Ruffels Weeping Tree 2024, archival pigment printing (giclée) on Canson printmaking rag 310 gsm, 420 × 594 mm, edition of 25 Opposite page: Bianca Templar Guided by the Stars 2024, archival pigment printing (giclée) on Canson printmaking rag 310 gsm, 420 × 594 mm, edition of 25

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A quarter century of supporting artists

I have been a group-show exhibitor, a solo-show artist, a curator, a board member, and even the director. Each different role has been a rewarding and life-shaping experience. The one thing that ties across all is the sense of joy that comes from the organisation’s design to foster play and to allow risk taking. Sawtooth ARI (Arts Alive), I will always love you. You have been my first for so many things.

Liam James (he/him)

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Clearblue Jo Langdon Sofia shining into heavy mist, its own yellow bricks, then

smaller still at the hotel breakfast bar;

linden blossom dusting June skin—bright tiny spider spinning by

tall glasses crackling effervescence: syrup—lime— sugar—mint.

our drinks after I’d spilled forth

For as long as you were liminal in curvatures of flightpath—space

shaky joy, proverbial beans between our bodies in the pale green:

of hours crunched in useless impatience—waited

that is to say the spider, the linden flowers & the tentative light;

& wholly abstract—I was free to the omission

traffic & tramlines between us

of voicing any transformation.

& the market: glossed peaks of seasonal cherries there; later, nothing

In each pedestrian bridge a departure across traffic: arrival

I could stomach but fruit in crescents: apricot et al by halves or segments

that restored some ungainly footing: pavement shards unmeeting, uneasy as each image that doesn’t altogether land—hold grip.

Jo Langdon lives and writes on unceded Wadawurrung land. She is the author of two poetry collections, Snowline (Whitmore Press, 2012) and Glass Life (Five Islands Press, 2018). Jo was a recent Creative Arts Fellow at the National Library of Australia, and in 2018 was a fellow of the Elizabeth Kostova Foundation’s Sozopol Fiction Seminars. Her writing appears in journals including Cordite Poetry Review, Griffith Review, Mascara Literary Review, Overland and Westerly.

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Coracle Derek Wright In the dither of the aged care home you sometimes find your late spouse in every bed but your own.

You chat up anyone in the house when words are gone.

each to their own pantomime.

World falls open at the same rhyme each next and repeated time.

World is shrunken effigies of brain on screens scarecrows hung on line

Now words are out in space or trapped in air between glass of windows your eyes look through at windblown fields where trees and grass wave back at you.

wicker whirlpools circling on mute lips an open boat far from the ears of ships where you paddle with waving hands your kingdom for an oar a sail or a scull

You cast at the garden’s edge a slack line to hook an image; from the Rorschach pool’s free-verse sprawl you summon a spring and well, a deep sea swell.

to get you to shore a memory of sand where something rings a bell not the end of school when mother hasn’t fetched you at four

The wreckage swims into view.

Scenes in tableaux drift past: an uncracked cryptic clue, charades left dumb, missed exits, the world not where you left it, and the small rudderless craft that goes round looking for its lost oar, ever further from land and rescue, hauled away in the wind’s uproar.

At every page the stories start anew,

Derek Wright lives in Tasmania. He has published occasional poems in journals over four decades, most recently in Island, Quadrant and Social Alternatives.

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A LITERACY JOURNEY

The Story Island Project Kate Gross and Astrid Wootton

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I

f you’re reading this article, it’s likely that The Story Island Project wasn’t made for you.

Because reading an article like this – published in one of Australia’s leading literary magazines – implies that you are a confident, engaged consumer of literature. You may even be a writer, with the ability to create your own stories that respond to the world around you and resonate with other people, building relationships through delicate, complex threads of words and sentences.

Perhaps that’s a talent you’ve developed from an early age. Maybe a teacher, a mentor, or someone in your family noticed your interest in words and encouraged you to read, and to keep reading. To write, and to keep writing. To embark on your life journey with the all-powerful skill of using your words: expressing yourself, arguing your case, persuading and engaging the world around you.

Story Island wasn’t made for you. It was made for the Others. The ones who never quite got the hang of written words, who’ve never picked up a book for the pleasure of reading it. The ones who haven’t had the kinds of opportunities that you’ve had… yet.

Because when it comes to the written word, Tasmania is an island of contrasts.

We have a vibrant, successful literary arts community. Tasmanian writers of poetry, prose, fiction and nonfiction, script, screenplay and graphic novels are celebrated the world over.

Conversely, around half of all Tasmanian adults are functionally illiterate. Tasmanian students’ literacy and educational attainment levels are among the lowest in Australia. Intergenerational illiteracy and unemployment are a bleak reality for many Tasmanian families.

It was this disparity between Tasmania’s literary success and its chronic literacy issues that inspired the creation of Story Island.

Story Island began in mid-2014 as a shared idea of co-founders Emily Bullock and Kate Gross. They were both inspired by the 826 model, an internationally recognised, community arts-based model of literacy engagement, created by novelist Dave Eggers and educator Ninive Caligari in San Francisco in 2002.

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ISLAND

Emily and Kate worked to adapt this model to the Tasmanian context, developing a new and dynamic way to complement existing literacy engagement strategies and bridge the gap between these two ‘Tasmanias’, forming relationships between our creative communicators, motivated community volunteers and young Tasmanians living in areas of need.

Story Island is a Nipaluna/Hobart-based not-for-profit organisation that nurtures the creativity and writing skills of young Tasmanians, so they can grow to be resilient and creative shapers of their own lives. We run dynamic, school-based storytelling programs where young people are empowered to create their own stories. We work with young people living in communities vulnerable to experiencing poverty and marginalisation, with a focus on students in years 4 to 9 – a critical window for literature learning and engagement. A combination of core funding from Arts Tasmania, smaller grants, and donations allows us to provide our programs for free.

In our eight-week programs, Story Island staff, volunteer mentors and guest artists support students to develop skills in creative storytelling and visual literacy, enabling them to express their own thoughts, beliefs and hopes in written and visual form. At the end of each workshop series, we publish students’ pieces in a printed anthology. Each student becomes a published author, and gets their own copy of the anthology to take home. This allows each student to identify as a creator of cultural and creative content, and gain a sense of autonomy, achievement and agency.

Story Island’s model provides individualised attention and creative support, working to address systemic issues of low literacy, poor educational attainment and lack of confidence in one’s own creativity. Story Island’s evaluations (and plentiful anecdotal evidence) demonstrate that our model actively engages not only ‘average’ students in areas of high socio-economic disadvantage, but also students with additional personal barriers to learning and literacy.

So while Story Island may not have been made for you, there’s an important role for you in our story.

Because if you’re reading Island magazine, we know you get it. You value literacy and storytelling, and understand how important both are to living a good life. And for Story Island to make a difference to kids who need it most, we need people like you in our corner!

We need an engaged community of supporters who recognise the value of what we do, and support us to keep doing it. This could be as simple as subscribing to our monthly e-newsletter, following and sharing our social media content, or helping spread the word about Story Island.

There are also many opportunities for deeper involvement – as a volunteer, a donor, a board member or a project partner.

Whatever your capacity, we warmly invite you to be part of our exciting story, where together we nurture our young storytellers and help them to build their worlds with words.

Find out more at linktr.ee/storyisland q

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The Story Island Project

Kate Gross is the Co-Founder/Fundraising and Communications Coordinator for The Story Island Project.

Astrid Wootton is the General Manager of The Story Island Project.

Images: Toby, Latika, Madi and Claryssah

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The storing Saraid Taylor

T

he cave is dark. I am only a membrane. I am porous and glistening and weak enough to not tear. Inside myself inside this cave, I am a tongue that holds itself cold and tastes nothing. My blood is like water: it shifts and drips but does not stain my heart with any of its memories.

I hold/use myself for the others. I did not realise until now, until tonight, when I was driving to her, but instead turned around to find this cave.

Somewhere outside the cave, inciting the sky, there are the knives of stars. I try to stop the sensation of them piercing me.

They apparently also have stories they want to tell. I promise them the morning. I ask for the night. They do not care for this request. They susurrate/hiss/purr to me anyway. I lift my hands to my ears so quickly, I scrape my left elbow against the wall of the cave. The cave grates me. It takes a square of my

skin and holds it like a painting. The wound trickles slender blood down my arm and does not silence the stars, so I dig my fingernails into the ground, clawing at the baked dirt until crusts of sand shed themselves. It is cold but I have nothing to make a fire. I slide onto my back into the shallow pit I have scratched out and place the dirt clumps on my chest. The sand is like a hand: it slows the urgent rise of my alive chest.

I sleep. I dream, but it is of nothing. When the sun comes up again, I walk naked down to the river with an old bucket.

For one hour, I am alone and unseen. I dry my body out of the night into the day in this river. Then I walk back up to the cave with the bucket filled with water. I dress myself before hunting for thin sticks and dry bark and brittle, breaking wood.

I leave it all in the corner of the cave, then drive away in my car.

The sky is golden all along the asphalt road, up over the wild paddocks of grass, under and above the trees. It is peach

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FICTION

then it is pink then a violet that fades like violence and it has ripped me apart each morning of my life and this morning is no different because I have to store all of it inside me, in each fickle fragment of its changes, every time I glance at it.

The sky’s depth sinks teeth into me, holds my throat in its gaping mouth. I tap fingertips over the steering wheel and ask politely to breathe. The passing of its colour/moment, abrupt and endless, knuckles my mouth and I taste blood that is not my own. It is not my own so it reminds me of myself and then it reminds me of her. She peels me back/tries to hold me. She fills me fills me fills me up and that is why she is a thief and why last night I left. I left them all – her, my parents, the dogs, everyone – after I left my grandparents’ house. The weekly meal with my grandparents was a routine as young as me: somehow imbued with both swathes of time and its paucity.

They were sad and loving as we ate dinner at their tilting table

as we sat to watch the television as we said goodbye and she would have only thieved that complicated grief again if I had driven to hers afterwards like I usually did. The blood must be kept and there is no space if the space is filled/stolen.

That day after the first night in the cave passes as it always does: I move through the morning into an afternoon and I store them all in me. I find strangers to smile at. Their lives are carved/bitten carefully into my stomach and thighs, every ageing flicker of their faces held still in my breath, each tiny word. When it gets dark, I drive through the hours back to the cave. I sit in the darkness and the cave is empty around me but I am the husk: my skin is sagging my body is loose. I sit in my skin-body in the dark cave empty of everything including me and after I have finished the day of storing, I realise I am cold again. I spend the first ticking sheet of moonlight making a fire. When the wood begins to burn, I warm my hands, and

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ISLAND

I identify my hunger. There are berries growing on dark vines outside. I pluck four handfuls into my water bucket and move back in, towards the fire. I push the berries into my mouth and their scent/taste is wet and bitter: that is when I meet the native rodents. They creep out from lichen-coated rocks and graze my calves with their tiny paws.

There are lots of berries, so I offer some of the smaller ones to them. The creatures click their long teeth happily. They sit against me, like vague strips of heat, and watch me try to sleep. They say nothing when I eventually dig more sand out of the burrow and onto my restless ribcage, over my heart.

There is a cassette player I have taken with me. The music sways in the air when I play it the next night. The rodents and I watch curiously as the melody begins to puncture deep into my wrists, then along my forearms. Even these voices, which I do not know, querulously request to be held. I open my legs and the notes and the harmonies drift up inside me. I will allow any crevice of my body, every crack and cut and hole, to be used as storage. There is not enough room in the air outside so the seeking voices force themselves forward, folding in on each other inside me. They imprint on imprints. The impressions spawn and form new memories/reminders. My fingers feel like algae in me: I open myself more for them. I explain to the native rodents as I do this that I will hold myself still. I will swallow and inhale and exhale and scrape and cry all of these moments into myself until I am the shivering memory of everything. I will not be lost inside this burial of myself: I remain as everything remains. Because I am gone, I stay. She taught me this, I tell the rodents. She taught me this was the only way. Otherwise I would slide into the oblivion of it all. I would stay and she would have me and I would be nothing.

Nothing, me or otherwise, would be anything.

I go back to visit her after my nineteenth night in the cave. I offer to take it all, everything I have caused. She resists but I am persuasive. There is no safe place anywhere to store/cultivate an internal burden; it cannot be naked outside so I offer her the scab on my elbow and inside the scab, she places her pain.

I talk to my grandparents afterwards. My grandfather is afraid of dying and my grandmother is afraid of being alone. She is baking scones or cakes inside her kitchen, and my nostrils are flared to inhale. I let their terror pat my cheeks and enter my nose and they are remembrances of everything. In two slouched, glorious forms, they know me. The remembrances and the knowing sends me to my parents’ house. I have seen nothing except them for so long and the fluid in my eyes traps anything they want trapped. Let me, I offer. My mother declines, but she does not know I have already taken it all anyway. She will be preserved.

The berries run out on the thirtieth night. Their grieving vines shrivel and I begin to eat the native rodents. I have made friends with each of these tiny creatures, and the ones I do not kill maintain companionship until it is their turn to die. They seem to accept this. They barely mewl, in death nor at the scent of the singed skin of the others. I burn their bodies in the fire I relight every night. Once, even before the cave, I ate only seeds and plants. Now I eat these animals and store their hearts for them: their little lives, the frail and deep connections to each other. Their bones rip and crackle thinly in my mouth. I feel sad when they die, one by one. I eat them but their teeth are sharper than mine. They would eat/know me too if they had the chance. I sleep quietly, in the cave, but only because I can fill the pores of my skin with sand, layer it over my chest, and think of nothing. Each night, I need to add more sand. When I cannot breathe, then I can breathe. The sand/hand slows everything. Otherwise there is too much: it is chaos, this tasting of all of it. I wake up each morning for the savage sky and the water of the river.

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The storing

On the seventieth night, I feel that my childhood dog dies.

The stars/knives see everything, and they whisper this secret to me. I feel peculiar as I nibble on a small charred bone. I step outside the cave to think. I realise the feeling of peculiarity is because I am the dead dog. I am the dead dogs of everybody. Dogs are such a strange agony, I muse to the remaining rodents. They are an eternity: woven/clinging to everything and all of it. Dog fur choking memories of childhood, adultery, broken hearts, chipped teeth, new cavities. I feel myself pushed backwards, through all the dogs I have ever known. There, over there, is the yellow dog of my grandmother’s kitchen.

There is my grandmother. The dog swallows the toast crusts my sister does not want to eat. His eyes murmur songs. My little hands smell like him when I leave. There are, beside him, or in him or in me, the small dogs of my aunt’s backyard.

There is my aunt. Her animals yip and shiver in their greeting.

I approach slowly, bend to my knees, talk softly. They sniff and allow their slender spines to be stroked. There is the broken black creature my uncle found at the pound. There is my uncle. He tells us all to sit on the floor before he leaves to get her. The door opens again and the puppy darts in, caught by/ignoring the silence, and rushes immediately into my lap.

She crouches there, trembling. Her fur glistens in shapes of fear. I whisper to her and it appears, as she tunnels deeper towards my intestines, she listens. There are each of the dogs

of my family home: long legs long eyelashes red-brown bodies arcing through the sky loping over the grass the ears soft like their muzzles or hearts. There is my mother and father and sisters and brothers. There are my friends’ dogs. There is every stranger’s dog. There is a tracing line through all these histories so I lasso the dogs onto one long lead and I wrap them around my stomach, around and around, until they constrict so tightly on me and themselves that they are held. I will eat them! I exclaim to the rodents. The dogs/bodies are hot against me.

When I have finished this lassoing/storing, I move away from the fire to find my sand. I sleep each night in the cave and I try to know the sand as if it does not have colour, as if the sand is the empty sensation of a burden, but by the time I lose count of the nights, even the sand/nothing is beginning to eat itself.

The particles are carved like individual fingernails and their scent is of something like every dead/passing/past summer.

When I stop sleeping, that is when even the husk of my body begins to decay. I am inside and I no longer breathe. The river by the cave does not call to me and its water stops washing away any filth. There is heartbeat within me and around me: it is all one stumbling heartbeat – and there is no fire, only the darkness, like the night sky, or the interior of the ear or a cave or a kernel of a lie. There is only the sheer coating/marrow of silence, and even the darkness tries to whisper.

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ISLAND

I stand in the hole in the sand now. I stand in the hole in the sand in a cave and my feet touch the bottom of nothing and my forehead touches the top. My hair hangs around my face in tendrils of dust-soil but I do not feel it. There is blackness everywhere. I can properly breathe. In my dreams of nothing, I do not tell the rodents, I am awake. When I am awake, I only dream. I have stopped refusing the stars. The pain in my elbow throbs. I pass the time as if I drift. That is why I need the sand. The sand of the cave keeps me grounded because it holds me suspended: I neither feel the earth nor the sky. The final nights my mouth is filled with so much sand I cannot even move my tongue to taste it. It rises in ridges to my gums, packed like concrete. It is like firm palms over my feet, over my ribcage. It spills over my lips, across my face, gently holds my eyes closed — the same pressure as sunlight if sunlight could not be felt. My breath is short puffs. My heartbeat is slow. I do not dream/quiet the stars anymore.

It is a little mouse who nibbles me awake. The teeth are burrowed so far into the top of my hipbone a tiny flood of blood has flushed its fur. I pull myself out from under all the sand to push it away. I blink dirt from my eyelashes. The mouse scurries towards the front of the cave. Outside, the morning sky is drenched in cloud and sun and pink and blue. It threads itself through me immediately, and knots me to the coiling strands of the new day. q

Saraid Taylor is a writer and athlete, living on Wurundjeri land. She graduated from the Victorian College of the Arts with a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Screenwriting). Her debut literary novel Flinch is forthcoming with UQP and she is signed to the Melbourne Demons in the AFLW. You can find her at saraidtaylor.com.

Images: Viswaprem Anbarasapandian, Ben Ostrower, Grant Durr - Unsplash

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Pareidolia Toby Fitch Is it a more-than-human confidence trick or a milky confit of constellations, that Cookie Monster geode of seeing things on another plain: The rabbit in the moon, eye containing Earth. The birth of the Virgin Mary in a grilled cheese sandwich. That one Cheeto as Harambe, the gorilla. Li’l Baby Yoda in your sacral anatomy.

This, my sad pear. A mushroom in the atom bomb.

The messiah-faced mesa on Mars. A heart on Pluto.

The colour of that internet dress. The bear that rose up, waved at tourists, but was accused of being a person in a suit.

Cute banana duck. Soft and squidgy rocks. Love in a Rorschach.

The Halloween house face. A nude descending a staircase.

Stones at my feet that are bowels. The cloud in one’s

brain. That backmasked lyric in The Beatles’ song

‘Rain’. Grappling with the fact the rain’s falling

up, reflected through a pane off a flatscreen.

Grimacing apples. Grimes as a communist.

A mist from which wise music is missing.

The sky in which great fish are swimming.

Desire that grates against the hardwired.

The artificial intelligence of our dreams.

Toby Fitch (he/they) is poetry editor of Overland and a lecturer in creative writing at the University of Sydney, on Gadigal land. Author of eight books of poetry, including Where Only the Sky had Hung Before (2019), Sydney Spleen (2021) and Object Permanence: Calligrammes (2022), he is currently writing a book called Endlings.

65

THE PRICE OF LONELINESS

Bridget Webster

66

T

he Minister for Loneliness has run out of a thing or two at home and must go to the shops. The Minister lives alone in an apartment at the bottom of a deep well. Luckily for the Minister, the government has just installed a new subterranean railway line with a station hewn into the side of the well. The Minister can go to the city, shop in a department store attached to the station, and go back home, all without climbing up to see the sun.

The station is fluorescent and very clean. There are speakers that ceaselessly play the electronic sound of chirping birds.

Everybody queues up in orderly lines for the train door. Hot, limp bodies press up against the Minister, but the carriage is silent. Avoiding eye contact on a train as packed as this one is a constant task. The Minister studies his shopping list, written on the back of a receipt. It reads as follows:

There is an old man sitting down on the train who appears to have fallen asleep. Everybody is trying to be respectful of his space. The Minister recalls seeing the same old man asleep in the same seat yesterday and feels extra hot. But better not to bother him. The Minister will wait and see if he is on the train tomorrow. ; Newspaper In October 2020, Japan recorded more suicides in a month than they had deaths by COVID-19 over the entire year to date1. Lobbied by mental health advocates and motivated by a rapidly declining birth rate, in 2021 the Japanese Prime Minister created a cabinet post to tackle these issues. The appointed politician’s lengthy title translates roughly to The Minister for Promoting Dynamic Engagement of All Citizens, but everybody calls him The Minister for Loneliness. He is in charge of combating the country’s escalating social isolation and suicide rates. He has two demons that sit on his shoulders at all times.

On the left shoulder, hikikomori, The Hermit. He squats, hump-necked, with two bright spots of blue light burning in his eyes. Hikikomori are a generation of social outcasts withdrawing almost entirely into online realms. Some have not left their house in years. It is estimated that 2% of the Japanese working population are now hikikomori.

On the right shoulder, kodokushi, The Lonely Death. He slumps, gently rotting, a vacant smile stretched like a skullcap across his face. He is part of the growing and highly publicised phenomenon of elderly Japanese dying alone and lying undiscovered for weeks, months, years. Living alone in Japan used to be a rarity but is fast becoming the norm, with 40% of households now predicted to be solo dwellings by 20402.

In an ageing society with social hierarchies that venerate the elderly, these increasingly reported stories of kodokushi occupy a particularly malevolent place in Japanese cultural consciousness. Anthropologist Jason Danely writes that to the Japanese, kodokushi is symptomatic of the breakdown of long-held values around kinship ties and generational continuity. ‘The (family) house has collapsed. Or, it has become a coffin.’3 The old man on the train is dead. He died in 1977, one of the first publicised instances of kodokushi.4 His corpse went unnoticed by passengers for hours, shuttling back and forth between stations in a municipal purgatory. He has been haunting the trains ever since.

; Newspaper ; Tablets ; Cigarettes ; Fried Chicken ; Hot Chocolate ; New Jeans ; Needle and Thread

His corpse went unnoticed by passengers for hours, shuttling back and forth between stations in a municipal purgatory. He has been haunting the trains ever since.

67

ISLAND

; Tablets You lived in Japan for a year in 2018, when you were 20. Your visa classified you simply as ‘alien’. You went to Tokyo on an Australian Government scholarship spearheaded by a woman whose politics you disliked. You didn’t lie to get the scholarship, but knew full well that you weren’t able to fulfil the scheme’s diplomatic (read: fiscal) postconditions. You just wanted to live in Japan. You pored over the brief and sold yourself with the right packaging, exploiting the positive bias that existed at the time for elevating cis white women in male-dominated industries. You justified it to yourself – you were lower middle-class, never going to own property, and you weren’t creative, descriptor, you were a creative, singular. If you didn’t get one of the scholarship places, another private-school lawyer boy would. You later met many of these exact recipients, boys who were precocious enough to have been promised the world but not philosophical enough to have ever wondered if they deserve it.

The scholarship bestowed on you a disposable income and the requirement to intern full-time. You worked long days and often weekends creating advertisements for huge corporations like Amazon, Google and Sony. You sold electronic tablets specifically made and marketed for children, witnessing fiveyear-olds completely uninterested in the device on Day One of a shoot, and screaming when it was taken away by Day Three.

There, in the third largest consumer market in the world (after the USA and EU), you felt a particularly acute confluence of extractive industry’s many heads – advertising, convenience, commercialisation, overwork, overconsumption. Each of these heads was stitched, greedily suckling, to the arsehole of the other, forming a distinctly inhuman centipede of accumulative suffering. A crude mental image, but hey – capitalism makes us all eat shit.

Tokyo is a vast, exhilarating, incomprehensible city. You had some brilliant experiences, but particularly in the second half of your year there, you felt awful. You thought a lot about consumption at a time you were the wealthiest, the most overworked, and the loneliest you’d ever been in your life.

68

The price of loneliness

; Cigarettes You’ve never smoked before and have never desired to, but one evening find yourself buying a furtive pack on the way home from work. This ritual of desolate, impulsive consumption is becoming more familiar. You dread your flat-packed, fish-can apartment. You dread its cramped atomisation, the fact that you are invisibilising while listening to a stranger’s sobbing bleed through the walls. Wandering around a local konbini with a thousand-yard stare delays your arrival home and forcibly injects a lick of dopamine into the commute. Often, it’s little chocolate biscuits. Tonight, a pack of cigarettes.

The cigarettes are highly symbolic. They fulfil their function almost before burning, a simple acknowledgement of wrongness. Terrified of becoming dependent, you allow yourself half a cigarette four times a week, squatting on a plastic stool on your tiny balcony. You smoke for the image of yourself smoking as much as for the private witness this practice is to your unhappiness. You do not know that the adverse effects of prolonged social isolation on your lifespan have been compared by scientists to smoking 15 cigarettes a day.5

Half a cigarette is all you need. After half a cigarette, your head spins enough to render the city in the kind of smeary, Wong Kar-Wai cinematography that being a young film student in Tokyo self-consciously evokes. You resolve to never smoke enough that you acclimatise and lose that dizzying sensation, the weightlessness of the act. There would be no point to it at all.

These propagating hedonic purchases disguise themselves as whimsy but begin to form a reassuring routine. Consumption rituals have been shown to increase a sense of meaning in the lives of a group that neuromarketing researchers refer to as ‘lonely consumers’, often abbreviated in studies as LC.6 You jokingly refer to yourself as an LLC, as in Google LLC, as in a lonely, lonely consumer. Rituals imbue consumption with personal significance and encourage repeated purchase.

Those little chocolate biscuits call out, sweetly wheedling, for you to twist-lick-dunk (Oreo), bite-slip-slam (Tim Tam), or snip-snap-break (KitKat) your way out of existential malaise.

Nicotine, of course, sports its own slogan – bald, effective and chemical.

69

ISLAND

; Fried Chicken In Japan, Santa Claus doesn’t resemble the same apocryphal effigy you loved as a child. In place of a beard and jolly red cheeks, he sports a white goatee kept trim and clipped, a moustache, and glasses. By day, he is Colonel Sanders of Kentucky Fried Chicken fame, but as the year wanes he dons a red satin suit. Colonel Santa smiles benevolently over the snaking queues that start to form outside Japanese KFC stores in late December – and these are just the disorganised folk. Many families order their flagship KFC Christmas Party Barrel™ weeks in advance. The tale of how this strange tradition came to be is one of clever advertising.

One evening in 1970, Takeshi Okawara, manager of the first KFC store in Japan, woke up suddenly from a (one can only assume) vivid and greasy dream. That day, he had overheard an American expat in his store lamenting that KFC was the closest thing to turkey he could get at Christmastime in Japan.

Okawara jotted down the idea of a ‘Christmas party barrel’ before sleep’s tendrils cinched around him again.

Fried chicken, or karaage, has long been a favourite of the Japanese palate and meat-centric diet. You were vegetarian before living in Japan, but while in Tokyo, isolated from similarly disposed friends and a sense of personal meaning, you succumbed to sushi. From there it was a quick and delicious tailspin to katsu curries, silky pork bone ramen, and lots and lots of karaage.

The fact that you didn’t eat meat in Australia was a bafflingly juicy tidbit for your Japanese co-workers, eliciting the kinds of responses queer people regularly face – ‘Oh! My hairdresser’s cousin is a vegetarian!’

Christmas is a secular holiday in Japan with only 1% of the population identifying as Christian. At the time of the party barrel’s inception, Christmas had no particular associated traditions. The big bucket o’ chicken invited communal eating, already a highly valued practice. Reams of TV ads were produced. A void was filled. Now a national tradition has bloomed, with multiple generations inextricably associating KFC and Christmastime. The Christmas period alone accounts for a whopping (or finger-lickin’) third of KFC Japan’s yearly sales.

Of course, this is interesting – an oddball phenomenon.

The Western world’s experiences of Christmas are also deeply interwoven with rituals of overconsumption. Whatever the religious origin or familial evolution of the day, there’s no denying its modern commercialist perversion – but in Australia these forces remain nebulous, distributed between a thousand brands, products and mascots. What’s most interesting about this Japanese phenomenon is the fact that just one company owns the franchise of Christmas. The enemy could not have a clearer face, and still a nation turns towards it.

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The price of loneliness

; Hot Chocolate The post-work commute becomes Sisyphean. At the time, you write that sometimes you don’t think you’ll make it home. You fixate on the blisters you find on the back of businesswomen’s feet. You feel your eyes getting bigger and your mouth getting smaller.

You develop a new strategy – buying a luxe hot chocolate from a sleek store in Omotesandō (known as the ChampsÉlysées of Tokyo) after every workday. There are flavours like Earl Grey, chili, hojicha and rose. It’s not a question of want.

You register the warmth in your hands sharply and crave it intensely, feel that without it, you might lie down right there on the thronging platform.

Studies show lonely people often take longer and hotter showers, a symptom of being touch starved. At the time, you write that the hot chocolate feels like you’re cradling your heart outside your chest. This lifeblood must be rationed with careful sips so that it lasts the whole way home.

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ISLAND

; New Jeans Do you want to hit the perfect balance of fitting in and standing out? Do you want it to be effortless, comfortable, and require little washing? Do you want to change? Do you think you can?

Answer: [new_jeans:exclamation_mark:flashing] A strange happening – many weekends, in the precious leisure time you have, you black out and find yourself in a huge department store, usually in the clothing section. It seems that when you walk in the city with fat pockets and numb feet, all roads gently wend to shopping.

‘Retail therapy’ is a self-evident phrase – one gratefully adopted by many campaigns. During the pandemic, online shopping soared, attributed to more than just the closure of brick-and-mortar stores. Your feed hummed with countless memes reifying the feeling that you could cope only if a package was on the way. In the absence of intimate relationships in Tokyo, you seek comfort and identity construction in the aisles of Muji, Uniqlo, and Isetan, paradoxically attempting to individuate yourself through mass-produced items. You remember the feeling of being in those stores, searching through every rack on every floor for something that might connote you-ness. You didn’t feel like yourself, or that you had anywhere else to be. These memories are permeated with the same dull addictivity that pitted your stomach as you refreshed social media for hours in the pandemic.

Numerous studies highlight depression (with reported loneliness as a key contributing factor) as the most common comorbid disease that accompanies compulsive buying. It might feel this way to be lonely in any megapolis, any highly industrialised loci where every surface ripples and gleams with advertising potential. But Tokyo is the only megapolis you have lived in, and here, famously, neon colonises the night.

Ads are inside trains, on bins, buses, footpaths, buildings – the entire urban environment leaps with glee toward the profitable plane of dopamine-hungry retinas. You can either be sold to or look down.

Graphic designer Nicolas Damiens erases the advertisements in Tokyo streetscapes to create eerily blank images. The ubiquitous overstimulation of Tokyo’s signage is one of the city’s most iconic features, and there is a distinct bleakness in their absence, emphasised by Damiens’ greying of the frames.

However, it doesn’t take long looking at these images for their eeriness to evoke a deeper sense of loss. William James wrote in his 1890 work The Principles of Psychology about the power of attention to shape our reality – that ‘without selective interest… (the world is) grey chaotic indiscriminateness’. How does one move through an environment as saturated with advertising as Tokyo is without attending to these messages, optimised to catch the eye? And, if one can tune them out, what other parts of the city are obscured by such necessarily large blinkers? Its character, detail, architecture? The faces of its people?

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The price of loneliness

; Needle and Thread The Minister for Loneliness has finished his shopping just as stores are closing for the evening. He catches his breath behind bowed obaasans in the escalator slow lane. The shopping list has been burning a small hole in his pocket, so it’s a relief to have ticked off all those items tonight. While he remembers, the Minister adds ‘needle and thread’ to the bottom of his list. He’ll still need to mend his singed pocket. Perhaps he’d better nip into the closest 24-hour MEGA DONKI discount store on the way home, before his pants are set alight. It’s only a few stops away, and haberdashery items are sold on the sixth floor. The Minister starts to feel rather hot again. He might have saved himself time and done all his shopping there – but never mind. He’ll have a cold drink in Shibuya afterwards, when that list is finally slaked. There’s that new imported beer he’s been meaning to try… The Minister straightens up, seeking the slipstream of another well-pressed suit. He ducks into the fast lane and hurries to the platform, a paper tiger failing to flameproof itself.

As wealth in a country increases, so does one’s lifetime risk of developing a mood disorder.7 This is not to romanticise poverty, but to critique current indicators of supposed prosperity. A system’s values are signalled by the kind of metrics it uses to assess itself. Against trends like these, GDP is revealed sorely lacking, and a deservedly lambasted indicator for the standard of living.

As the first and last Minister for Loneliness in Japan, Tetsushi Sakamoto no doubt came face to face with similarly sobering statistics in his duties. I only wonder if he had time to confront any of the systemic precipitating conditions for the loneliness of his subjects – Sakamoto was reshuffled after just eight months in the role. The post’s title morphed with his successor Seiko Noda into ‘Minister-in-charge of Measures Against Declining Birthrate.’ Mention of citizen-to-citizen

engagement, and by extension any gesturing toward the mental health crisis that underpins this, was removed. Noda, herself a mother, and one of only three female politicians in the cabinet at the time, was replaced ten months later by a former Bank of Japan exec, a childless politician who wore a pregnancy simulation suit for a day as a publicity stunt. He reported feeling back pain.

Great Britain also employs a Minister for Loneliness, having appointed the first in the world in 2018, the same year I lived in Japan. Unlike Japan, they have continued the post, maintaining its distinct portfolio and Orwellian nomenclature.

I lived in Tokyo for just a year and can claim no special insight into the country’s complex challenges, but I do find myself asking – what metrics is Japan using to evaluate itself?

My Japanese co-workers who had also lived overseas would sometimes discuss with me the unique issues we saw and, crucially, felt. Foremost was a pernicious sense of being unable to express vulnerability, a sense that poor mental health was a burden on those around you. Perhaps the Minister for Loneliness was only a stopgap measure, responding purely to COVID’s social pinch. Perhaps it was only ever a symbolic position. However Japanese governance chooses to respond to them, the lonely demons of hikikomori and kodokushi that haunted Sakamoto’s shoulders remain. They are extreme ends of a worrying spectrum, a litmus test for a population primed to shop instead of share, demons no more supernatural than they are metaphor. q

Bridget Webster is a writer, filmmaker and theatremaker living on unceded Wurundjeri Country. Her work has been shortlisted for Overland's 2023 Neilma Sidney Short Story Prize, longlisted for Frontier Poetry’s 2024 Nature and Place Prize and awarded an Emerging Poet Prize by Liquid Amber Press in 2022. She has been published across poetry and nonfiction and was a member of La Mama’s 2024 Emerge program.

Images: Fernando Andrade, Florian Ceprika, Redd F (edited) – Unsplash Endnotes 1 Craft, L (2020) ‘Suicide claimed more Japanese lives in October than 10 months of Covid’ CBS News 13 November 2020 2 Xu, W (2021) ‘Minister of Loneliness has busy brief in Japan’ China Daily 25 February 2021 l 3 Sigounas, V (2020) ‘The unwitnessed death: An interview with Jason Danely’ Fieldsights 10 January 2020 4 Nozawa, S (2015) ‘Phatic traces: Sociality in contemporary Japan’ Anthropological Quarterly Vol. 88, No. 2, pp 373-400 5 Kowal Smith, A (2023) ‘Loneliness may be as dangerous as smoking. Here’s why employers should care’ Forbes 9 May 2023 6 Wang, X, Sun, Y & Kramer, T (2021) ‘Ritualistic consumption decreases loneliness by increasing meaning’ Journal of Marketing Research 58(2), pp 7 Hidaka, B ‘Depression as a disease of modernity: explanations for increasing prevalence’ (in publication) https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/ PMC3330161/282-298

73

False autumn

§

PINE NEEDLES

§

Pine needles, right now, smell not like freshly detailed car but a detritivore hymn, sung low. It wraps around our feet and climbs our chests. It is spore-bursts and fungus that winks of bleached coral, fruiting bodies that push through the damp underfoot like a dry tongue. Once, running your nose along my inner thigh, you described me as ‘roadkilly’, and I lost my decomposure, wrenched my leg away before you could set upon it with carrion-tearing teeth. Today, though, I wear the scent like a silk scarf, wrapped twice around my neck and shimmying down my back, my fine flagella.

Is it a good year? I ask your back as it weaves between pines, though you don’t answer, and I see you swivelling, eyes peregrinating between and through and over. They do not land. It’s harder to take flight again if they do, in weather like this, so instead they hover. I ask again with a panicky whine that hauls the end of the last word up and out of earshot (yee-ee-ee-ee-ee).

Maybe. I’ve seen it worse. And your eyes turn the clods and thatched needles methodically. And it has been dry, but last week’s gentle rainfall sent the windows into a sweat and mildew mobbed the walls, so we took the hint and pulled the ute up where the pines hunch against the low cloud.

Pip Jones

74

FICTION

§

LOOK

§

§

We’re on the way out, I’d thought the month before, as we skirted the curve of the river and autumn glared into the car.

Our words’d whistle past each other, not settling into that easy lilt we’d known before. Instead, I’d see them tip timorously out of my mouth like a tourist’s phrases in a foreign country – knowing, generally, what the sounds were meant to achieve, but their delivery a pre-written postcard. When the summer still felt new we’d tried to make a go of it, though I’d stopped counting the days since rain and so had the white gums that the year’d seared orange. All summer they’d turned their palms up and offered their water back to the sky, which held it like a new gift from an old lover, a delicate and strained thing to be tossed at the first opportunity. The white gums’ death grip on those high dolerite cliffs meant we’d see their ghosts for years. Already their stiff and brittle wraiths raise their heads above the sheoak, looking like bushfire fatalities, but there’d been no burn. You took a hand off the wheel to keep on my thigh and its heat was briefly cauterising.

MOTHS

§

I was on the couch while you watched the water come to a boil. The lid on the pot had begun to clatter. It cut into the quiet air and I was grateful for this easy reason to stay taciturn and curled up like a houseplant dead-set on dying back to one powdery leaf. A thud outside interrupted the pot’s chattering, followed by an insistent knocking, staccato.

Another thud, urgent now, with more rapid hammering, like fat raindrops. I followed the sound to the windows, where I saw them, hurling their mottled little bodies against the glass.

The rain moths’d come in their dozens, frantic, diffracting the light through dusty wings.

Moon’s in here, I shouted over my shoulder, and you squint, fan your hand around your ear.

The light, I said, and you turned off the pot and sat beside me as the moths continued their percussion concerto. Some clung to the flyscreen and rested a beat, catatonic, while yet more threw themselves into the glass over and over with a monomania I’d never known. In the morning, we saw them jittering across the concrete, half dead with exhaustion, or hanging off the brick and flickering like a distant torch, their one night on the wing wasted on a hoax. We ate in the dark for a week.

75

ISLAND

§

IN THAT FOREST

§

§

The pine forest dampens all sound as we pick a path. Blackberry canes latch onto my socks and I pull their hooked horns off while trying not to seethe. In my mind I shrink myself down small enough to dive into the thorny mass to hide, and I sit, warm and safe, but though I nose the loamy soil I find nothing under the needles. I think of the vast mycorrhizal networks that pulse underfoot, and with the unlosable hubris of a human, I fantasise that it is talking about me.

Someone’s been already, you say from somewhere, and I pull myself back to size in that quiet forest. I walk on and find you squatting, hunched over with pocket-knife in hand, scratching around. You flick the needles and two divots deepen. Next to your knife point I see them, holes that stare like shrunken eye sockets out of the ground.

Rinsed, you say to them, barking the word down to the two shrivelled stipes like an engine’s last shudder. I squat, squint, get my eye in and see that you’re right, as if it was a secret.

Headless fruiting bodies pock the forest floor like tiny tree stumps, their little yawning maws frozen in their last vowel sound. Your shoulders are hunched around your ears and we both hear your vertebrae crack in three places as you rise.

They only got all the easy ones, you say, and whistle, your hunt renewed now, not just a test of attunement to the weather, but a rivalry: your eyes versus those of this early interloper.

You hiss a little at the voided milk caps and turn, stalking a trackless path, and I make my way back to where the pines keep a wary distance from the water’s edge.

IT HUMS

§

I imagine myself a skein of purple apple-berry, hanked over a black gum bough, dripping with fruit. From here I can see the woodland floor heaving with debris, rapid-fire dawn and decay, the ground near humming with the pace of it. Pupal casings shiver like amber lanterns, traces of that rain-tripped riot as the moths all surged from the earth. How they slump down there in that stasis, waiting, I can’t think. The rains come later every year now, autumn limping into winter wringing its cracked hands. June’s the new May, you know, but the rain moths have become patient. They’ve hunkered down this long, in their erstwhile bunkers, picking at gum roots and shooting the shit. Their yen for rain, after all, is twined up with fucking and fecundity – this is what moves the mob to shiver out of their sap-coloured capsules and take flight into darkening skies, chasing that mizzly climax when the females seed the rain-slicked thickets with thousands of tiny eggs. But how long is too long? If June bumped into July, patting its pockets apologetically even though it knows it doesn’t have any water, not this whole time, what would they do? Would one moth start a rumour on the mycorrhizal hotline and fan it like fire: what if it isn’t coming? Would they still all erupt at once, in protest or in spite? Or would a handful of brave astronauts crack that parched surface while the rest tested the edges of their torpor? §

BINGO

§

You’ve lucked out, and not a minute too soon; beaming, you trot over, holding your upturned hat piled high with your harvest. Lying belly up, the mushrooms’ saffron gills seem to purl out a few last soft breaths, rippling like a sea anemone.

We are going to piss orange for days, you say, and I grin, seeing your yellow-stained hands. Found a whole bit they didn’t even see, under the blackberry, absolute motherlode. I hook my arm into yours and feel my feet take root under the needles, an electrical impulse to join the writhing rot and grow proud as a puffball, fit to shiver and burst. q

Pip Jones writes in Lutruwita/Tasmania and is an unexceptional outside midfielder for the Dodges Ferry Sharks Football Club.

Images: Mikkel Frimer Rasmussen (edited), Museums Victoria, Evie S, – Unsplash

76

False Autumn

Neighbour Simeon Kronenberg My eyes itch, sleeping’s difficult – I search the shelves for something to stop me from worrying grief into the open where it’s been too much of late – like a constant neighbour shuffling next door.

Simeon Kronenberg has published in Australian poetry journals and anthologies and on the contemporary visual arts. His first poetry collection, Distance was published by Pitt Street Poetry in 2018. His second, still black water, is to be published in 2024/5.

77

Stories in paintings and letters Paul Collis, Jen Crawford and Paul Magee, with Brian Smith, Wayne Applebee and Andi Stapp-Gaunt 78

Location: Port of Bourke Wharf Time: Morning, Wednesday 14 September Speakers: Paul Collis, Paul Magee PAUL C: Here in the town with no meaning.

The place of my birth, where my people are buried. I walked again on the cemented path with my fathers and my brother, Glen.

I am emotional, all those memories of struggle and violence, attacks upon us, those men in blue uniforms, those other whitefellas that threatened us, all of our resistance and fights and struggle.

I walked to the park, now an empty space, unkept. There was a time though, when all my people would gather there, with kids running around laughing, happy to be with cousins.

Our old people ate shop-bought sandwiches and enjoyed the few last hours with their sons before the boys marched across the road to the courthouse.

And then, shortly afterwards, they marched again, this time in chains across the other road to the jail. The next day, a transport truck would take them away to Bathurst or Long Bay. I hate this town.

I love this place. The bush. The carpet of yellow wildflowers all the way in every direction to the horizon. Bright yellow wildflowers.

We went to Gundabooka yesterday, trying to get to the cave paintings where the corroborees took place, the birthplace of my grandfather. The road was shut fast with an iron gate and heavy locks.

There’s been plenty of rain up here in Hell, the road is red dirt, a muddy mess.

Today, we’ll try and get to Toorale Station, now a national park, where so much of our traditional culture lies buried – bones and artefacts. Where the birthing tree is. We may not be allowed there because of road conditions.

There’s a lot of ice and gangster attitude, and a very mobile and violent group of young people in town. They attack without warning, with knives, taking what they can, stealing then burning the cars they’ve stolen. These young people are without law and without much hope, nothing but a serious addiction and a gangster attitude.

In other moments, I wish I were living back here in Hell.

We’re going to 2CUZ-FM, a local Aboriginal radio station, to tell the town what we’re doing back here. We’ll read some poetry we’ve written, talk a little with language speakers and speak a little about culture.

79

ISLAND

I’ll try and take some photos of trees that were used for bush medicine and send them to you.

I wish you were here with me. The country is alive with lushness.

The town is dead and bereft of meaning to me.

I am again the outsider.

She’s a powerful force, a spiritual heart to Barkindji people.

PAUL M: The river’s so beautiful now, almost like a tray across the land.

When we were here four years ago, it felt like something gouged out of the landscape – a missing body.

PAUL C: A lot of these big red river gums along the river are old. Some of them are 1700, and more, years old. When the river was empty during the drought, a lot of those old trees fell over. The banks are a real crumbly sand and need the water pressing against them to keep intact. So all that culture is lost.

The river need not have emptied. It wasn’t emptied because people were drinking it, or because of the drought. There was still water in the system. It was because places like Cubbie Station were taking 500 gigalitres – that’s the amount of water in Sydney Harbour – every year from the river.

That was one of seven stations that took headwaters from the Darling. And that was just one part of the river being sucked dry. All the way down it you have what they call irrigators.

They’re not irrigating the land at all, they’re selling the water on back upstream to others.

Have to read Wayne’s response later, haven’t got it on this.

You’ll hear the memories that email evoked.

PAUL M: Tell us when you wrote it.

PAUL C: Yesterday.

But there’s so much yet to be said about this place, about care and concern, about these trees, about this river. Places where love was made for the first time, and where people took their lives and lost that love.

There’s places that have Mundaguddah, the spirit animal, in the water. First recorded in written form back in about 1928 by a Nyempa woman. They call it ‘water dog’, but it’s not a canine. It’s been seen all the way along this river.

The river now has brown, milky water – it’s like milky tea – and you can’t see beyond the surface. There was a time, back in the 1920s, when you could dive – she said 30 feet into the water – and see the sun from the bottom of the riverbed, shining upon you. The water was clean then, and clear.

It’s a beautiful river. We call it Barka.

[Falters]

80

Stories in paintings and letters

PAUL M: Irrigating their bank accounts.

PAUL C: [Birds make loud noise nearby] Even the birds are angry, when I talk about it.

PAUL M: What are these – this insect that keeps flying through? It’s like, a dragonfly?

PAUL C: It is a dragonfly, and it’s a really important part of the water system. A really important part of traditional culture. There’s lots of stories around dragonflies.

But a lot of them are women’s stories, so I’m not going to say anything.

They’re really, really magic.

PAUL M: Stunning animals.

PAUL C: They are.

They’re the helicopters of the system, aren’t they?

PAUL M: But they look kind of friendly too. They don’t look like they’re going to bite.

PAUL C: Yeah, they’re beautiful animals. I used to love watching them, when we’d go fishing, when I was a kid. I wouldn’t fish much. Old people’d fish. But it wasn’t so much about catching a fish, more about family time together. That was a bit further down. We didn’t fish here. There’d be other family groups in their own spots along the river. The kids’d

run up and down, talk to other Aboriginal kids from school. If somebody caught a fish, they’d race over and see what it was.

You could hear it being communicated all the way down the river.

Water carries sound a long way.

If I had a pair of clapsticks, it’d be heard at least two miles away down the river.

PAUL M: We’re going to go see Brian Smith, yeah? See if he’s got any clapsticks.

PAUL C: Got a pair of clapsticks waiting for me, he said.

Yeah, we could walk around there now and see him.

PAUL M: I reckon we should.

PAUL C: Brian’s my cousin, he’s a good cousin too. When I was a kid, people’d ask, ‘Who’s your friend?’

Often we’d say, ‘We haven’t got any friends, we got cousins’.

Now that orange one— PAUL M: Yeah.

PAUL C: That’s a hornet.

PAUL M: Hornet – we want to keep away from hornets?

PAUL C: Yeah.

Image: Bush wind – Emma Phillips

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Location: Aboriginal Art Gallery, Oxley St, Bourke Time: Lunchtime, Wednesday 14 September Speakers: Brian Smith, Paul Collis, Paul Magee PAUL C: You were born where, Brian?

BRIAN: Born in Bourke.

PAUL C: What do you love about this place?

BRIAN: Bourke, old Bourke, keeps calling me back. I’ve been away to Sydney, away to Dubbo for work, I’ve played footy everywhere. Bloody still end up back in Bourke, man.

You know the old saying, once you go over the Darling River, you’ll always come back.

PAUL C: I’ve been away for a long time ‘though I’m never away, you know? That pull of Country, and of family.

PAUL M: Wayne – and Paul’s Uncle, Robert – took us out to pluck some quandongs from the trees this morning.

BRIAN: Yeah, they’re in season now. Good feed, eh?

PAUL C: Brian, when you used to go quandong-picking, was it with your family?

BRIAN: Yeah.

PAUL C: Were there any trees close to town, when you were a kid?

BRIAN: I didn’t see any close to town, no. All that red country – out over the river to north Bourke, out that way – you get them everywhere there. The sand hill country. I used to go out there with my grandmother, Granny Ellis. Used to go out, up through that Ledknapper country. Trees everywhere, up there. Up through the spinifex.

That’s all Murrawarri country – my grandfather’s country.

PAUL C: How old was your grandma when she passed away?

BRIAN: I’m not sure. But I know that she was the eldest out of all the Edwards clan. I remember always going fishing with her.

PAUL C: What was it like, being with her?

BRIAN: Ah, it was good, she taught us a lot about being out bush and being a tracker kid.

PAUL C: Did she have a favourite grandkid – or whoever was with her was her favourite?

BRIAN: Because Mum was young, I was always with my grandmother, living out on the reserve. She was one of those people who was always out bush, either fishing, or going out doing stuff.

PAUL C: What was it like to live on the reserve, when you were a kid?

BRIAN: It was tough: tin houses, dirt floor, one big set of

showers in the middle of the reserve. If the dirt floor wasn’t clean, the Welfare’d just come and take your kids.

PAUL C: My nan used to put water on the dirt, brush it through, sweep it off. Do it again ’til the hard ground shone like cement. The fear of having your kids taken away for no reason at all was absolutely everywhere. It’s one of the reasons why my generation wasn’t taught a lot about traditional things, or language.

[Pause] BRIAN: The old girl was one of the last speakers. I was always around her, all the time. She had all these different little words for things.

PAUL C: So how many languages could she speak?

BRIAN: I’m not sure. When they got on the missions, they weren’t allowed to speak language. A lot of it would have been lost after her generation.

PAUL C: But they would have spoken it underground.

Grandfather and Nan, after a lot of encouragement, whispered the words again, and laughed to each other.

Now she was Kunya and he was Barkindji.

Murrawari and Kunya, Wongemarra, Barkindji – all those bloods were clean to each other. So we could marry. I asked Mum, ‘How come they could speak?’

She said, ‘Well, there was an in-between language that they could speak’.

So there was a dialect which they’d made up themselves, from words that were similar. I said, ‘Gee, they must have been clever’.

‘Oh no, they’d never say that.’

Are they teaching Barkindji here in schools?

BRIAN: They used to do Wongemarra at the radio station and at the schools.

PAUL C: You used to learn it?

BRIAN: No, I never sat down and really got stuck into it.

But I was back and forward to Dubbo and Sydney.

PAUL C: Brian, you’re an awesome painter. Your work appears on the big tank coming into town, as part of that Big Pictures program. What language does that painting speak?

BRIAN: Percy Ellson – first Indigenous man to ever win a gold medal, and he came from Bourke!

I never heard those stories. You don’t learn that in school. . .

When that project went ahead, we had a bit of a get-together

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Rainbow Serpent Dreaming, IGA Bourke

Artist: Brian Smith Photographer: Ursula K Frederick

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with the old girls, the old sisters. They wanted a lot of traditional stuff down the bottom, the totems from the clans he came from. He was Nyempa and Kunya. Kunya means bilby, so I put a bilby there. I put a fish for Nyempa.

PAUL C: The rainbow serpent appears a lot in your work.

BRIAN: Out this way, we believe the serpent made the rivers. That’s where a lot of it comes from.

But learning from my grandmother – she was on the river all the time, we used to go out always. Wouldn’t let us go swimming deep, just shallow. She was always talking about the Mundaguddah.

PAUL C: I wanted to ask you about that. Nyempa people call it, ‘water dog’. But it’s not a canine, eh?

BRIAN: Some people say it’s a serpent. But being today’s kids— PAUL C: Have you ever come in contact with it?

BRIAN: No, no.

Today’s kids, they all watch sci-fi movies like Aliens and Predator. And when you say ‘Mundaguddah’, they think something like that is going to come up and grab them.

I feel safe.

[Laughs].

I’ll swim in the Darling River before I’ll swim in any other river.

PAUL C: Me too.

BRIAN: But still, you’ve got all these rivers that run into the Darling, like the Paroo, the Warrego, all the other little rivers that trickle into it, they had that one word: Mundaguddah.

Every clan knew what it meant: Stay away from the water. Don’t go in the river. I don’t know if it was a myth but it worked. It kept the kids away from the water in the afternoons, when there wasn’t anyone supervising them.

PAUL C: I’ve spoken with some eye-witnesses— BRIAN: Yeah well, the old fellas, they always say— PAUL C: They said they couldn’t see it, because it was underneath the water, and the water’s got so much mud in it, like milky tea. They could see the shape of it though. And they said it’d rush up the bank if they were fishing. It’d be trying to get them.

PAUL M: Brian, would you ever try and paint one?

BRIAN: I only did one painting ever of a Mundaguddah.

But I did it in my way. A lot of people describe it as a serpent.

But my way of thinking, I did a real giant lizard, with frills coming out of him.

I ended up giving the painting away to a mate. I’ve never done one since.

You ask any Aboriginal kid about Mundaguddah, they say, ‘Don’t go in the water on your own’.

I don’t know if it was a myth or not, but it worked. It kept the kids away from the river when they were on their own.

The old people believed it was real. When they tell you that story and you listen to them, you believe it as well. Whether you’re swimming across some of the locks, down the river when it’s in flood, you’re down a weir, or you’re just swimming in general, the thought is always in the back of your mind.

PAUL C: ‘Be careful.’

BRIAN: ‘What if I get pulled under?’

Around Christmastime, there’s always someone getting drowned in the Darling. The oldfellas always say Mundaguddah got him.

But there’s always a bit of floodwater around Christmas – probably just bad luck.

PAUL C: Brian, how long have you been a painter?

BRIAN: Been painting all my life. I learnt from uncles and aunties. Once you’ve been around, you pick up all these different techniques and styles. I put my own style together, which I teach now. If you go round this area, and you find a certain kind of animal and a certain way of doing it, like the ones you see here in this gallery, it’ll either be mine, or someone who learnt from me.

PAUL C: You can see the style.

PAUL M: They’ve got beautiful curves, a real sense of energy.

BRIAN: I try to put movement in my artwork.

But art is different everywhere you go. You go over to the coast or you go to somewhere else, go anywhere, you’ll see it change.

I just picked it up.

PAUL C: You’ve been a great youth worker, for many years.

That’s been one of the great joys for me, coming back to Bourke and seeing the influence you’re having, the time you take to be with young people and the support you give them.

What’s your plans for the Arts Centre here?

BRIAN: I hope someone will get in here. I’m starting to slow up a bit now. Want someone to get in and keep this place going. It’s good for community. A lot of our mob have a lot of talent— PAUL C: Absolutely they’ve got talent. Untapped.

BRIAN: It’s untapped. You see the potential, when they get incarcerated, in the guys that come out. But then they want to get back home again, and they give it all up.

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PAUL C: I taught in jails for a long time – for about 15, 16 years, or something like that, and before that for about five years in juvenile detention centres. I was teaching Aboriginal culture and perspectives.

A lot of them didn’t know much about traditional culture.

They hadn’t been taught, generally because their lives had been interrupted at very early ages. They’d been taken away at nine or ten years old, put in foster homes, that kind of stuff. Broken.

There was one bloke in Maitland jail. Maitland’s a sandstone jail, the ceiling has little bars, about 12 foot up. I said, ‘When do you paint, brother?’

He said, ‘I wait ’til the moon comes across. I get the canvas out and sit on the floor, painting’.

‘Why do you paint the ones you do?’

He said, ‘It comes to me in those moments. The person I’m thinking about will be where the paint goes to. Could be my grandmother, my mother, my wife’.

I said to him, and I said it to others, ‘A lot of the stuff you’re painting is West Australian desert style, with dots’.

He said, ‘Yeah, but we’re artists’.

I thought about that. Traditionally there’s been a lot of talk about how you shouldn’t be doing that style, you’re not from there, blah, blah, blah.

But he said, ‘We’re artists’.

Artists have always shared their styles and techniques and skills with other artists, as long as artists have been around.

I thought, ‘That’s interesting’.

Then I asked him, ‘Do you paint when you’re out?’

Generally, they weren’t out long enough to paint. I think it’d be the one thing that could have kept them out, because they’d have had greater love for it than the things that were getting them back inside.

But they’d already be targeted by cops, as soon as they come out of jail. The cops knew where they were going and what they were up to. There was way too much information about them, and way too many eyes upon them, for any of them to do much painting once they got out. But they were fantastic artists, Brian. You’d see the power in their work, 3D ghost figures— BRIAN: Goes to waste when the boys get out, they’re always chasing— PAUL C: Always chasing something. Chasing and being chased: that’d be a good book to write. Chasing and Being Chased. If you’re not running from the cops you’re running from your own demons.

Some stuff you can’t run away from.

BRIAN: I think doing painting sets them free.

PAUL C: I do too.

[Interruption: Brian called away to speak to tourist.]

PAUL C: [To Paul M] How did the quandong trees and the Country speak to you this morning?

PAUL M: Being with Wayne and Robert and listening to them read the weather from the behaviour of the animals – that was pretty amazing. We passed a flock of emus and Robert was saying that means rain’s on the way.

Then Wayne added, ‘Yep, and when you see a whole lot of cockatoos, same thing’.

I was getting more and more of a sense of these guys reading the landscape, getting knowledge from it.

BRIAN: [returning, overhearing] I was saying the same thing yesterday: Aboriginal people’ve got that sixth sense, they can tell when something’s coming.

They know a lot more about the country and the land than non-Indigenous people. They know, because they’re always looking at the environment.

Once you see those little ants start, you know floodwater’s coming.

Now they’re incorporating Aboriginal people into fire programs. All that traditional burning, when to burn, when not to burn, cool burns – it’s common sense to blackfellas. When other people backburn, the animals get trapped and die. We’ll burn off, but we’ll burn from the middle, to give the animals time to get away. It’s just common-sense stuff.

Burn in the wintertime when it’s not so dry. Basic, simple stuff.

PAUL M: The other thing was, when we were getting the quandongs, Robert was saying that we were feeding the animals too, because the emus would get the ones that dropped on the ground. So we left those ones.

That’s not a white way of thinking about harvesting. White people aren’t thinking, ‘How’re we’re going to help these animals?’

PAUL C: They’d put a big tarpaulin down around the tree and shake it. That’s how whitefellas harvest olives. Leave nothing for anybody, nothing for any of the animals and nothing for the soil.

All that stuff gets broken down in the soil, it’s nourishment for the roots of the tree.

When you ignore that sort of thing, you really tax the river system. And it shouldn’t be taxed, it’s in a fine balance.

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But with all the irresponsible behaviour, it’s out of balance.

It’s gluttony, really.

They’re not drinking the water. They’re selling it, putting it in cotton.

BRIAN: In 10 or 20 years, water’ll be very, very expensive.

What about in 50 years? These cotton farmers say what they’re doing doesn’t affect the rivers. I think cotton and carp have killed everything out here.

PAUL C: When the drought was on, it really killed hope for a lot of Aboriginal people. Young people were enraged.

Old people in tears.

BRIAN: I don’t care where you go in the world, native people worry about Mother Earth more than anyone.

PAUL C: Now that global warming’s starting to hit everybody, they’re starting to say to Aboriginal people, ‘What should we do?’

Why didn’t you ask before? It’s only now they’re threatened.

And the knowledge gets taken from us and sold. It becomes about profitability, which usually means things are done the wrong way. Never about protecting.

That’s why a lot of Aboriginal people are so reticent about how we do things.

[To Paul M.] You’re going to come back different people, you and Jen. Those quandong trees: you’ve been engrossed in a conversation with Country.

That’s why I asked if the wind blew differently out there.

Was it quiet at first?

Did it blow up, when you got in that grove?

Did you feel it speaking?

BRIAN: Should have put a bit of that red soil in a jar.

PAUL C: I’ve got some in a vial. I never travel without it.

BRIAN: When you get up in the Ledknapper country, up in the spinifex, the sand is like beach sand. You get the black soils and the red soils. Almost every sand hill has a different colour red. Always thought I should get all those colours and do a big sand painting. Imagine that.

PAUL M: What do you mean by sand painting?

BRIAN: I’ve seen it done a lot up in the top end. They make them and the wind blows them away. Same as when guys draw on the pavements with chalk. But I’m thinking, there must be some way of getting a board and some ochre – you could mix it with sap till it sticks. Imagine doing something around our river system that way.

PAUL C: When I was a kid growing up here, I just wanted to do smoke ceremonies, traditional things. But there was a

lot of shame about it. That was the generation that was taken away. And they were the product of parents who were taken away at a really young age. Or threatened with it.

It was just a mess: young girls coming back with babies, culture interrupted. Shame.

Apart from those silo paintings, there’s no representations of us at all. All those rainbow serpents on the back wall of the gallery here – have these guys been asked to do anything like that in town?

BRIAN: No. PAUL C: Anything down the reserve? Any public art down there?

BRIAN: No. PAUL C: That’s interesting, isn’t it?

BRIAN: You know the billabong that runs right along the Barka River?

There’s heaps of scar trees through that part. I think that’s the boundary between Murrawarri and Barkindji.

That’s from when Aboriginal people knew where their boundaries were. From when they used to do smoking ceremonies. I remember as a kid, when the oldfellas used to smoke us all, especially if an elder passed.

You don’t see it anymore, do you?

PAUL C: No. BRIAN: I think we were shamed away from practising culture by the white man. Well, we just weren’t allowed to practise culture. And now – people don’t like stepping on toes.

You start talking about Country and land, and— PAUL C: It changes the conversation.

BRIAN: Those conversations run deep, don’t they?

Because all these old cockies, their grandmothers and grandfathers were a part— PAUL C: —of that stealing. They’re stealing land, stealing dreams, stealing people.

BRIAN: They know Aboriginal people lived on this Country first. There’s evidence right through it.

PAUL C: They all know that we were here before them.

You get people like that tourist who was just in here, that old whitefella saying his people go back to such-and-such.

Well, his such-and-such people came into this Country inland from Sydney. And when they saw blackfellas, they killed them.

BRIAN: They had a lot of our artefacts in Toorale, and they just cemented over them – all round the homestead.

PAUL C: That’s tied up in Parks and Wildlife now.

BRIAN: You go out there, and you’ll find heaps of stuff. Walk anywhere, you’ll find signs of where Aboriginal people were.

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[Pause] PAUL M: Hey Brian, I want to ask you a bit about the paintings.

Do you always paint in here? Do you ever paint on site?

BRIAN: I paint out of home sometimes. But mostly in here, now that we’ve got this lovely studio.

But if we didn’t, I’d be at home pumping them out.

PAUL M: So you’re working from memory then?

BRIAN: Yeah, we’re out bush all the time, and I get inspired by something.

The other day we went out for quandongs. That’s one of the paintings I did, on the wall, if you have a look there. It’s one of the ones I was working on when you came in yesterday.

I finished that one up.

We went for one reason: to have a good feed.

Last year I made up a big jam tart, boiled it down, used sugar. I remember the oldfellas making those big quandong pies. We just finished the egg season, too. The oldfellas used to make big brownies and cakes out of emu eggs.

PAUL M: So that painting’s of your trip a couple of days ago, to go get the quandongs?

BRIAN: Yeah, and that’s one of many. Did I show you the image of the echidnas?

PAUL M: I don’t think so.

BRIAN: And there’s the pelicans.

The little fellas, when they see cormorants and pelicans down the weir, that’s how they know the fish are biting. They go and dig worms and go fishing straight away.

PAUL M: So the cormorant behind you, is that from a particular trip?

(Or is that a pelican?)

PAUL C: Cormorant.

BRIAN: That’s a cormorant, yeah. When you see them sitting on the weir, you know the fish are running. Right through the winter, you’ll see them getting good feeds of yellowbelly. When you see their guts, a lot of them are real full.

But we release the yellowbellies who’ve got eggs and let them go. Like cod, they breed in wintertime.

I don’t know what they are, but wintertime, you see these little white flowers out on the river. You know, flowers don’t bloom in wintertime. But these little white ones come out, and when they do, that’s when the cod are spawning.

When the boys get big cod, they throw them back. Or big yellowbellies. They just let them go.

PAUL C: On the walls of pubs, the men standing with fish five-foot long: smiling, posing to get their photo taken – it

makes me sick. They’re taking out the breeders, the mothers.

BRIAN: It’s like I said yesterday, if you touch their nest, the emus won’t go back.

When we take the kids out to get emu eggs, we take a stick and roll the egg two or three feet away. Emus are not very smart. They’re inquisitive— PAUL C: Very inquisitive.

BRIAN: —but if you roll the egg a couple of feet away, next year they’re going to lay in that same spot: you’ve always got a feed every year.

They mate with the one partner, usually lay 15 or 20 in a brood. So you go back, you roll a couple away for yourself— PAUL C: But not all. You leave the generations.

BRIAN: Next year, you’ll have more.

PAUL M: So with the paintings, are they like photos of specific times you’ve been down to the river? Or is it more a general sense of what that animal looks like? What do you tend to be painting from – that’s what I’m trying to ask.

BRIAN: I’ll often have a distant memory.

I was inspired by this [points to photo on the wall] to do that painting up there, with the echidnas.

There were about ten of them, four at one place, and I went another 20 metres and saw another four or five, all following the one female. When they’re like that, you don’t disturb them, you let them go.

Wait ’til breeding season is finished.

PAUL M: We’re looking at a photo of Brian kneeling by a tree, with four echidnas about a foot away. They’re all just parked at the base of the tree, totally peaceful. They don’t look fazed at all.

BRIAN: And then there were those other four or five coming in, following that one female.

PAUL M: Did you paint from the photo?

BRIAN: Yes. That was down where the Warrego runs into the Darling, on the other side of Bourke.

A lot of stuff I paint is from memory: I’ve been out bush, or it’s something I’ve done. That’s what I try and teach the little fellas. Paint something you’ve done, seen or experienced.

Then it’s your story. And it’ll be told forever. I think that’s being an artist.

I think that’s how our mob survived for thousands of years.

PAUL M: By telling stories— BRIAN: Telling stories and sharing knowledge.

Knowledge is no good if it’s not shared. You go and die with your knowledge, and your knowledge dies with you.

The old black man, he showed everyone.

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Location: North Bourke Time: Evening, Wednesday 14 September Speakers: Paul Collis, Jen Crawford, Paul Magee, Wayne Applebee, Andi Stapp-Gaunt

TOURIST: Naw, we’re heading south. Going to where it’s cold.

I don’t know what’s worse: the wet here, or the cold down there.

PAUL C: Nice guy, that fella. I remember him coming through before.

See that water coming up the trunks? I don’t know how these trees cope with it, as the roots get waterlogged.

There’s food everywhere here in the bush. There’s medicine everywhere, too, and not just in the foods that you take from here, like the barks and leaves that you use for boiling and making tea, but in the bush itself. There’s healing here, lots of healing.

Now, I’ve had two responses to that picture I read you at the wharf this morning, Paul. One’s from my brother, Wayne, Wayne Applebee, who works with us back at Canberra Uni. Wayne’s a Kamilaroi man. His people are from round Gunnedah.

Wayne says,

PAUL C: I’m going to sing now.

This is Paul Collis singing about a stranger on the banks of the Darling: Oh there’s a track winding back to an old-fashioned shack along the road to Gundagai.

But I’m not walking to Gundagai, I’m on a dirt track heading to a floodwater area on the Barka. It’s not Gundagai, but there’s a Mundaguddah down here, and if we’re unlucky, that Mundaguddah might rush us on the banks.

So we need to keep an eye out in the water for a rush that sounds like petrol on fire, Margaret said.

Look for a water spout that doesn’t go down, but goes up into the sky, she said.

Jen Crawford is also a keeper of that story. [to Jen] You’re part of that story, aren’t you? It’s no longer an abstract thing.

Look at the reflection of the sky and the trees in the water.

Which is now still. More floodwater’s on the way. It won’t peak down here for about two weeks. Most of the roads into and out of town will be shut by then.

PAUL M: [to the tape] We’re walking down a road towards the floodwaters. And the road suddenly stops, about 20 metres away, engulfed in water.

PAUL C: 20 metres: are you walking in time, Paul?

PAUL M: Always.

PAUL C: Do you feel in time in town? When you’re walking around Bourke?

PAUL M: I feel like I’m in a George Romero movie, a movie like Dawn of the Dead. But I’m also experiencing beautiful stuff like the conversation we just had with Brian.

TOURIST: Hello.

PAUL C: How are you going, mate?

TOURIST: We’ve been coming here for many years, I’ve never seen water up here.

PAUL C: They reckon it’s going to peak in about two weeks.

Big rain’s coming tomorrow. So if you’re heading Queensland-way, you might get through, but there’s three days of it coming.

Since you wrote, you have taken me to another place, a place you know. Where the early light of day signalled dread. A day where one lay and watched the speckles of dust dance in the light as it spread across the floor. The early morning footsteps. The jingle of keys a long time ago now.

No longer does the daylight end dreams. We’re no longer forced to endure or face those things. Yet those reflections continue in the dark recesses of the mind.

We endure another day in the colony.

Jen, I’d like you to read Andi’s response to the letter.

JEN: Hey Paul, I hope you’re okay. Lots of ghosts and returns. I’m not sure who finds who however. Take care.

Thank you for the beautiful words. I’m mindful of them, the history of trauma, and the contradiction of the beauty of the wildflowers amidst the sadness.

I’ll be speaking with the dead and the living soon, as I return to my mother’s gravestone. It will be good for her mokopunas to be there to chat with her too.

She’ll love that. q

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Dr Wayne Applebee is Kamillaroi man, Indigenous cultural specialist, and former member of the Galambany Circle Court. Wayne has lectured in the Faculty of Health and the Faculty of Arts and Design at the University of Canberra and is Adjunct Associate Professor with the Centre for Creative and Cultural Research.

Dr Paul Collis is a Barkindji man. His early life was informed by Barkindji and Kunya and Murawarri, and Wongamara and Nyempa storytellers and artists, who taught him Aboriginal Culture and Law. He is a novelist, poet and Director of Indigenous Engagement in the Faculty of Arts and Design at the University of Canberra.

Dr Jen Crawford is a poet with an interest in collaboration. Her critical and creative work focusses on the poetics of place and cultural engagement.

Jen is Associate Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Canberra.

Dr Ursula K Frederick is a creative-practice-based researcher at the University of Canberra and an artist who specialises in photomedia.

Professor Paul Magee is a poet and researcher in poetics. He directs the Centre for Creative and Cultural Research (CCCR) at the University of Canberra.

Dr Emma Phillips is photographer, researcher and educator at the University of Canberra. She specialises in visual-cultural studies, with a focus on representation through images.

Mr Brian Smith is a Kunja man, former professional rugby league player, artist and teacher.

Ms Andraya (Andi) Stapp-Gaunt is a Māori-Dutch woman of the Ngāti Porou iwi, writer, and secondary teacher. She lives in Canberra and writes about human–nonhuman becoming-with. She is a kaitiaki for rabbits and their stories.

Everyone Dance Artist: Brian Smith Photographer: Ursula K. Frederick

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Images: Satellite image of where the Warego meets the Barka/Darling (the black rectangles are cotton fields and citrus plantations), NASA Johnson - Flickr

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Photographer: Emma Phillips (From left) Paul Collis, Brian Smith and Paul Magee

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yarrein mud lyric Verity Oswin song of the mud suck / lyric in the squelch / and quench of the boot in the mud warble gurgle from the pipe / something just coming up for air / under the culvert mud lyric / silt patter / paint made of water and mud / drawn first on the body first people drawn / on the body of the continent I drew a mud map / see how the Murray is “defeated” at Mathoura / course corrects certain streams of history are “defeated” / Cadell tilt block when the earth turned in its sleep the rivers were sent running in all directions inland delta / hand reaching into continent’s desiccated entrails rivers in this country are contrary / flow away from the sea Mitchell couldn’t find the Murray’s “true stream” / “too much ask” at Boga “we won’t tell you” (why would they) anything at all / saucepan all dent in the kitchen constellations something is twinkling in my purse / I’ve got a handbag full of stars mud ditty / silt jetties / fish flip in the channel in the tilt country names of lace of rivers run together / Merran, Yarrein, Neimur, Wakool, Kolety we learned the first names last / in the silt country / milky marled brocade / sheets ballet leotards turn grey / when we stay with our aunt in the city / bathwater is like / lemonade the billabong “resolves” itself into / chain of ponds / words congregate around them to drink creek bed full of / skeletons of trees / snags without water just dead wood dancing how many permutations of yearning? / equanimity—a precise awareness of edges repetition is our consolation / how many cracks in the mud?

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in a flash of words and rivers they open the weirs / the text is escaping its banks my father says the Wakool is running a banker / the children travel to school in a boat sheets of rain / saltbush blotters can’t keep up with all the smudges (stains) on the ledger oceans and oceans of water / Sturt couldn’t write his journal—flies drank all the ink I see the word (the tail of a thought) sticking out of the mud who will write the book of this flood? / there is lead in the language the days as sandbags build the levy high pull the levy down woman in flood / the rivers bleed across the grey dirt / anabranch parallel versions of the journal / a river breaks / tributaries fan out on the Riverine Plain a woman breaks / child departing from and returning to the main stream sending parts of itself ahead / leaving parts of itself behind

Verity Oswin is a prize-winning poet and documentary producer currently completing her doctorate in creative writing at the University of Adelaide. Her feminist pastoral poetry worries at the fraught relationship of settler Australia with the land.

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How to build a sandcastle Kylie Mulcahy

I

t was her grit that struck me at first. I thought each day must feel like drowning. A body already tired from yesterday’s struggle, punching through the waves again today. How did she manage that with the weight of grief pulling at her? How did she do anything with a heart so broken?

When I went to visit Shirl* and her day-old child in hospital, I took chocolates, flowers, a notebook and pen. What do you give a mother who knows she will not leave the hospital with her baby? Shirl was tired and glowing. Proud. Easy in the way she held her newborn. This was her third child, though the first to be taken from her at birth. Her older two were toddlers when authorities removed them.

I’d been expecting tears, cursing, desperation. Instead, the normality of the scene was disarming. Crisp, white sheets crinkled as I sat on the edge of her bed and gaped with delight at the tiny human nestled on her chest. I listened to her tell me about going into labour. How hilarious it was that they nearly didn’t get to the hospital in time. How comical that her brother couldn’t find his keys. How his crappy old car didn’t start first time. How funny.

I laughed. She’s a good storyteller. But I was lost. Weren’t we going to talk about The Thing that was about to take place just days from now? Wasn’t I there to be supportive somehow?

Surely, we were not going to pretend everything was okay, were we? Surely, we weren’t going to just sit there in the maternity ward while her infant suckled and gurgled and Shirl chatted like any other mum there? But of course that’s what we would do. It was the only thing to do.

*

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Names and pronouns have been changed to protect people’s privacy. The subjects of this essay have given permission to be represented.

frontal lobe development, guys. Sorry, the sandcastle will have to wait while we redeploy troops. I know you want to be curious and playful, but the conditions have changed. Repeat: The conditions have changed. Anything could happen. Maybe keep digging and try to look normal. Remember that hostage situation that took us by surprise? They won’t catch us out like that again.

When it becomes apparent that the threat isn’t a simple one-off event, an altercation which only requires temporary alarm, systems adapt and reroute. With so much in flux, now cortisol is regularly flooding the brain, short-circuiting executive functioning and regulation. The new pattern becomes embedded. Primed for danger. Poised for reaction. Survival mode.

Shirl was that child in the sandpit once, was herself in foster care from childhood. Her internal troops trained from that young age to be more and more efficient in their task of preservation and protection. Trigger-happy but only in the sense that so many things in her environment triggered her response systems to rigorously rewire. Who knows why her parents were ill-equipped to protect her? Maybe they were the hypervigilant kids in the sandpit too. How can a cycle end if no-one breaks the circuit?

Shirl grew older. It was not a seamless progression. There was school avoidance, violence, vulnerability, risk-taking. Did any of those red flags spark societal or service responsiveness?

People did try, certainly. Teachers, social workers, extended family, police. All it takes sometimes is a caring parent or adult to crack through and connect with a child in a way that helps them feel worthy or offer hope that the resources needed to direct their life in a positive way are within reach. It takes persistence though, and Shirl was a tough nut to crack.

For so long, it seemed like Shirl saw life as something to fall through. Like plunging through an enormous tree whose branches seem capable of saving her, but which never manage to. Catching on an occasional snag might briefly feel like hope but after falling for so long, the stillness is discombobulating and discomforting and instead of clinging to the security of it, she shakes loose and falls again.

Those already safely ensconced in the tree can’t understand it. They think she got what she deserved. Imagine being caught by a branch and wilfully shaking free of it. Shirl lands with a thud and finds she is young and pregnant. The baby is loved entirely, but someone who doesn’t have the sense to keep hold of a branch when they get the chance probably won’t be much of a parent. Everyone knows that. They wait and watch to see if they’re right.

A supervised family visit is where a parent can spend a couple of hours with the children who are no longer in their care, with a third party observing. If you’re lucky, you get to go somewhere inviting with fun indoor play activities or, in nice weather, somewhere outdoors with swings, slides and sandpits.

If you’re less lucky, it might be in a small room with a cupboard of toys. Wherever it takes place, there will be a mess of emotions: the joy of reunion, the ever-present fear that the parent may be losing their child’s love, the pressure for a parent to perform perfectly in front of a detached supervisor. Difficult, dysregulated behaviours. The confusion of reconnection. The heartbreak of another goodbye.

Before her baby arrived, Shirl used to have supervised visits with her other children three times a week and they were hectic occasions. I tried to help mitigate the chaos with pre-planning but despite both our efforts, consistency was elusive.

‘So, I’ll pick you up tomorrow, right?’ I’d say, as I dropped Shirl home after a visit. ‘And you’ve already bought the food for their snacks, so we’re good to go.’

‘Yep,’ she’d say. ‘See ya tomorrow!’

And I’d think, It’s 24 hours away, what could go wrong?

By the next day she’d call to say she’d have to be picked up at a different address, and she didn’t have the food with her so could we swing by Woolies on the way, and I’d be saying No, we don’t have time for that. I have to take you straight there because the visit times are set. And she’d say But I don’t have any food for them, and I’d say Don’t worry we can make a toasted cheese sandwich, and she would shout, I need to go home to get something! and I’d say Shirl. We don’t have time for that.

Shirl’s kids were completely delightful, of course. Running into the arms of their mother, rushing towards the toys. You’d never guess that internally their systems were organising responses to cope with every moment, their brains and bodies arranging troops to protect their little selves from unknowable people and behaviours and words. Digging in the sandpit next to Mum, a couple of troopers might keep watch for incoming bogeys while the rest commandeered construction of the sandcastle.

Think of being a three-year-old in a sandpit. Your task should be to sit gleefully in that sand until you’ve tasted and tested its every quality. Your shoes should fill with it in order that you can later empty tiny sand dunes onto carpet and delight in the dismay of your weary parents. You should be throwing it into unsuspecting eyes and clogging sinks with it.

Burying untold treasures beneath it. Instead, your loyal army highjacks internal systems to prepare for a lockdown. Pause all

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Having burned her bridges with social housing, Shirl was mostly couch-surfing. Outside of visitation with her kids, she was being exploited, abused and was, perhaps unsurprisingly in that context, prone to drinking and taking drugs. She called me in a panic one day because she was late for a meeting with her parole officer. You can see me holding the phone and rolling my eyes back in my head. How do you forget a thing like that, Shirl? Come on. But on the other hand, how on earth would you remember?

Shirl knows systems. Legal systems, welfare systems and child protection systems and their unfathomable inconsistencies: Yes, parents who have had their children removed should attend parenting programs to improve themselves. No, doing a parenting program alone is not enough to show us you can have your children back. Yes, you need stable housing but if social housing (whose purpose is to provide secure housing for vulnerable individuals, by the way) write you off, that’s your problem. No, child safety will not provide counselling or support for parents, we are solely concerned with the welfare of the child. Yes, technically the wellbeing of the child depends on the wellbeing of their parent. Who’s concerned with the welfare of the parent? I don’t know, not us. Yes, we will only return the children to a home that is safe, free of violence, and where parents can prove they have healthy parenting practices.

How do you prove that? I dunno, that’s pretty hard.

I’ve known Shirl for years at this point and I will not pretend that her mental health issues, history of drug use and family violence are trifling. They are not. They have over the years significantly impacted her ability to parent adequately. Shirl has participated in various types of counselling but complexities around her trauma have meant that consistently attending any kind of program, let alone being present enough to benefit from the content, was out of reach.

So, when Shirl falls pregnant with her third child, an unborn baby alert is logged in the child protection system. Shirl spends her pregnancy sick with anxiety as she can’t prevent her baby being taken from her. The prolonged stress floods her baby’s brain and body with cortisol, disrupting normal development within the womb and making them more susceptible to emotional, behavioural and cognitive difficulties before they’re even born.

The type of intervention required to change the outcome for this mother and baby never comes. Everyone waits idly for the birth. To make sure this baby is not exposed to maltreatment at the hands of their mother, they will be forcibly removed from Shirl after five days and placed with a stranger. Shirl won’t be offered any post-traumatic care, but soon she’ll have an extra supervised visit in her schedule.

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How to build a sandcastle

Shirl’s baby is six now and has been in foster care their whole life. Since the day I went to visit her in hospital, Shirl has had two more children who are now two and four years old. Both have been allowed to stay in Shirl’s care since they were born. What made the difference to the authorities who permitted it, I don’t know. I haven’t worked with her in some time. So, Shirl is now the mother of five children who live in two homes. They visit together each week. They make the best of it.

I see Shirl in town occasionally as she is taking the younger ones here or there. We stop and talk so she can fill me in on how they’re going and, often, to detail the logistics of attending the numerous medical appointments her kids need. Shirl is a fierce advocate for her children and has enough courage to challenge doctors who want to dismiss her when she questions their care plan. She speaks kindly to them. She laughs a lot.

Sometimes her eldest gets frustrated waiting for us to finish talking. They’ll start to hit at her and scream. I watch as she crouches down to their level and speaks to them firmly and evenly, which calms them briefly. When she stands again, she explains that their behaviour is tricky to manage sometimes and immediately follows that with empathetic understanding.

She’s learned some strategies which seem to help.

‘Look at you,’ I say.

An inadequate way to try to convey my admiration at how this mum, with patterns of impulsive behaviour, mental illhealth and addiction, who was repeatedly told she was an unfit parent, found it in her to turn up again and again to face the all-powerful child protection agency to prove the ways she will put those things behind her.

‘Yeah,’ she says, with a deflective laugh.

‘It’s a big deal,’ I say.

‘Yeah,’ she says, a bit more sombre. Then, in a heroic understatement, ‘It’s been pretty hectic.’ q

Kylie Mulcahy is a writer, educator and creative collaborator. Kylie has been published and performed in the genres of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, children’s books and plays. Kylie is also part of a cohort of outstanding early childhood professionals dedicated to innovative knowledge sharing which values both parent experience and evidencebased practice.

Images: Mario Ame, Dongsh – Unsplash

95

Gilgamesh’s Oracle / The Flood of Gilgamesh

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Zana Fraillon

FICTION

This section is in list format but may read better as prose. You can help by converting this section, if appropriate. Editing help is available.

A Knowing is presented.

1. It was early in the evening.

13. When the winds started, some sought shelter in cement water tanks / underground mines / cars / basements / under tables / in the archways of doors / tombs of the dead.

2. There was a black cloud. It hovered over the horizon.

Some say it looked like a dog. Or an ogre.

14. The actions of the Storm Gods were perceived in the senses. Thunderbolts were seen. Rattle stones were heard.

Each breath filled the nostrils with stems from microscopic streptomyces bacteria in the soil that produce a compound known as geosmin. The skin prickled and polloped with the lick of wind and those who licked the wind tasted oak.

3. [text altered or omitted] 4. The doors of the Public Toilets were covered in pictorially depicted warnings. A red triangle surrounding a small house floating in water. The house had a single chimney and a single door / window. Some said it was political fearmongering.

15. A 14-year-old oracle wrote that the storm would last for seven days and seven nights. Or forty days and forty nights.

The details were hazy.

5. Houses cannot float.

6. The wind came first. Then the rain. Then the graupel [also known as snow pellets or soft hail, despite it being neither snow nor hail, but a distinct form all of its own. Those in the know were quick to note its presence].

16. There had been other oracles too. Birds and the organs of large mammals. Tarot cards and runes and stones had been telling of it for years. But no-one could properly understand what they were saying. They thought it was all something to do with relationships and the best time to ask for a raise.

7. Those who had boats sensibly boarded them.

8. It was a disturbed state of the natural environment / a violent agitation of human society / a civic, political or domestic commotion / disruptions to normal conditions / noise / tumult. [The word storm is categorised as a Germanic loan word, but no records show that the Germans ever requested its return.]

17. On the first day of the storm, politicians were heard making jokes about water lapping at small island nations.

Dramatic irony and all that.

18. The land was set aflame by lightning.

19. The gods were all a little shocked. In the cold light of day, they had to admit it all felt a bit excessive, even for them.

9. There were hailstones. Some were the size of marbles.

Some were the size of golf balls. A basketball-sized hailstone was reported but remained unverified.

20. The whole earth was shrouded in darkness.

10. There was snow, despite it being summer in some parts.

21. Four billion years previously, there had been another storm, released by another set of gods. This four-billionyears-ago storm submerged the whole world. What is now called desert is really the exposed seabed of a vanished once-was-sea. There are million-year-old starfish in the train tunnels. They are oracles too. Mementos of what once was / will be.

11. There was precipitation. Precipitation: a headlong fall, distinguished in that it must fall, must reach the ground. There is no word to describe the ground that must reach the sky.

12. Those who did not have boats had nothing to board. Sense had nothing to do with it.

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22. Memento: in which the dead are commemorated / from Latin to remember, recollect, bear in mind / an object serving as a warning.

35. Everything came from under the sea once. Everything.

24. There was a silver storm characterised by freezing rain.

But everything was already dark, so the event went undocumented. A spectacular waste.

36. The gods were frightened now. Fucking terrified. They hadn’t meant for it to go like this. They hadn’t meant to take it so far. It was really just a joke that got out of hand, was all. They retreated back to the heavens. They ran.

There was a stampede and not everyone made it back, but everyone was too freaked out to notice who was missing.

The God of Lost Causes suggested they do a head count, but no-one heard / showed they heard / pretended they didn’t hear.

25. The land shattered like a poorly kilned pot. Like a wine glass dropped. Like a million hearts broken.

37. The Cloud / Ogre / Dog rained stones down upon the earth.

One hundred arms / one hundred hands worth of stones.

26. Gods will be gods. They do not know a shattered heart.

It is not their fault. They have no hearts to begin with.

27. The south wind blew.

38. There was goats’ hair in the sky. Fish flew. Lions stalked the sea-bed, but the zebras were better swimmers. Dolphins browsed the shelves of libraries, but the books had already all drowned.

28. The south sea grew.

39. The gods cowered like dogs sitting on the outside wall.

29. The northwest and east sea grew too.

40. The dogs cowered like gods lying on the inside wall.

30. The sea and wind don’t abide by compass points. Everything was mixed up / tumulted / crashed, bashed and crumpled together. It was all a bit of a wreck TBH.

41. One of the gods shrieked, and it was said, and said truly, that the sound was the sound of a woman in childbirth.

Get a grip, the other gods said. I’m trying, the god wailed.

I’m trying.

23. No-one was reminded / warned. Everyone forgot. Everything was dark, and everyone forgot, and no warnings were heeded.

31. Everything was seriously dark. So dark it was a thickness.

So thick it choked / smothered / strangled / gagged.

42. The women shrieked too. So did the men. So did the children being born in the storm.

32. Fellows could not be recognised. Mothers lost children.

Children lost fathers. Fathers whistled for dogs, dogs whistled for cats, cats whistled for birds, but in the wind nothing could be heard except for the wind that had given up whistling long ago.

43. There was so much rain that the sea and sky became one.

It is estimated that 800 Olympic-size swimming pools full of water fell from the sky each minute.

44. [text altered or omitted]

33. The Cloud / Ogre / Dog was reported to have fifty heads and one hundred arms / one hundred hands.

45. By this time all the gods were weeping and wailing and thrashing themselves with their heavenly robes. They sobbed with grief. They blubbered with sorrow. They bawled / whimpered / whined / moaned / snivelled / howled with misery. The gods would later say that during this time their lips burned, and they were parched with thirst.

34. Some warnings had different pictures in the triangles.

Pictures of cows / cats / dogs / mice / birds / cars / trains / bridges / owls / beetles / spiders / lions / elephants / donkeys / horses / pigs / trees / flowers / books / beds / pianos / shoes under the sea.

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Gilgamesh’s Oracle / The Flood of Gilgamesh

46. The storm lasted for forty-seven days and forty-seven nights.

54. Before the storm, children grew up never hearing birdsong.

Whale calves grew up never hearing whale song. People grew up never hearing their people song. Whole countries vanished, their citizens given a digital country instead.

Same same.

47. On the forty-eighth day the storm calmed. The wind dropped. The rain / graupel / hail / snow / ice / thunder / lightning / precipitation / fog / mist / stopped. All day long there was quiet. It was so quiet it hurt the ears of the gods and they sang songs and nursery rhymes to keep themselves calm. No-one sang the song of the snoring man who went to bed and bumped his head. No-one sang the one about Rain-Rain-Go-Away either. It was perceived to be in poor taste.

55. The bones of ancestors cannot be buried / visited / celebrated / heard in a digital country. Ghosts find Zoom difficult to operate.

56. Before the storm, chicken bones outweighed the bones of all the other bird bones combined. Concrete outweighed the combined carbon mass of every living thing. Things outweighed life. Capitalism outweighed souls. A soul weighs 21 grams, so the comparison is fairly meaningless.

48. Before the storm, the seas had been rising for a considerable time. They had been getting hotter too. And more acidic — as in, like acid. Nothing is supposed to survive in acid. Marine animals were going extinct before anyone even knew they existed. Crayfish / whales / dolphins were seen trying to escape from the water. Fish floated dead en masse. Swimming was banned. Someone was bound to notice. Sooner or later. Someone was sure to do something.

57. Before the storm, Homo sapiens had been on earth for less time than Neanderthals.

58. No-one could remember what a black rhinoceros was. Or a Yangtze River dolphin / Pinta Island tortoise / Bramble Cay melomys / Spix’s macaw / ivory-billed woodpecker / Pyrenean ibex / northern white rhinoceros / passenger pigeon / quagga / long-beaked echidna / giant skink / Atlantic horseshoe crab. We can’t be certain, but records suggest they were characters from some fairy tale.

49. Many people had noticed. But no-one heard / showed they heard / pretended they didn’t hear.

50. [text altered or omitted] 51. Before the storm, funerals were held for islands, eulogies were written for glaciers, skeleton cities rose from mud, hunger stones rose from rivers, forests migrated underground – seeking safety but never finding it.

59. The earth remembers everything.

60. The fairy tales are always true.

61. [text altered or omitted]

52. Before the storm, the sky rained dead birds over the cities.

Ravens coughed up tar and pieces of charred deer. One in every four wild birds disappeared from the skies like some giant carnival magic show – they went so quickly it took years for people to realise they weren’t coming back. Seabirds fed their chicks on condoms / balloons / bottlecaps / lead. The streets were covered with feathers / beaks / claws. Walking was considered a risky activity and not covered by most insurance policies.

62. On the forty-ninth day, light fell again on the earth.

63. All humans had turned to clay. There are no records of what everything else had turned to.

64. One human was not clay. One human was still on a boat. A scarecrow kept the human company. The human couldn’t remember where the scarecrow had come from, but there he was. It was a big boat. Implausibly big. Perhaps it wasn’t a boat at all. Perhaps it was a submarine. Perhaps the human wasn’t even a human.

53. Before the storm, the four horsemen were everywhere.

Yesterday’s news.

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65. The one let’s-assume-human released a dove. The dove came back. The human released a swallow. The swallow came back. The human released a raven. The raven ate and scratched and did not come back.

66. The human told the swallow everything he remembered of the world. He didn’t remember everything. But he remembered lots of things.

67. The human sailed for a long time and did not see anything but sea.

68. The raven still did not come back. The dove died from heartbreak. The swallow forgot its song. The scarecrow ate its own heart and cried a million tears.

69. One day, many days after the storm, the human saw something on the horizon. He sailed towards it. It was a shoe.

70. The shoe hung from its laces in the top branch of an oak tree.

71. The oak tree stretched its roots deep deeper deepest into the Underland and reached its branches high higher highest into the heavens.

72. The shoe was a sneaker. Red with a white swoosh. Velcro straps. Child size 3.

73. [text altered or omitted] 74. [text altered or omitted] 75. [text altered or omitted] q

Zana Fraillon is an internationally acclaimed, multi-award-winning author of 17 books for children and young adults. Her work has been published in over 15 countries and is in development for both stage and screen. Zana is a PhD candidate at LaTrobe University, where she is exploring deep time and narrative in the Anthropocene.

Images: NOAA – Unsplash

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Memento mori Verity Borthwick 101

ISLAND

I

t is dark down there. You are small, and you know this darkness all of a sudden as the tour guide switches off the lamp and it eats you up. It is a horror. It is clinging to the railing with hands no longer part of your body.

Phantom hands you cannot see; only belief tells you they are still attached. You reach blindly for your father, but he has ceased to exist.

You stand there and hear the drip of water saturated with calcium carbonate, molecules thieved from rock that is itself a cemetery of long-dead sea creatures. Aboveground water – clouds unleashing rain, spring sun melting snow – seeps into the cracks of the world, each droplet contributing its small offering to an unfolding masterpiece. You feel the shape of stalactites hanging above you. Empty space yawns around you like an open jaw. When the lights flare, your vision dances in the bright, and you have been left with something embedded, like a shard, like a sliver of dark slipped under your skin.

The shape of it, the weight of it, is comforting. You put it in your pocket and find your fingers returning often to make sure it is still there, to make sure it is not lost. Years later, when it has gone out of memory, your children will find it in a box of treasures you have kept. They will hold it up to their eyes and peer through.

K Crawl in through a tiny crack in the lava flows of Etna. The world above is covered with black rubble. Dead trees, leaves burned away and bone-white bark are all that is left. Some have toppled but others look as though they are caught in the moment of their destruction, stripped branches buffeted by burning roar and gleaming in the light cast through the storm clouds. A restaurant has been swallowed whole. All that remains is the roof and twisted concrete roped together with veins of wire.

Duck head and go inside. Above, the rock is frozen in motion, drips hanging, bubbles captured mid-burst. Slowly, lava flowed, crust forming above, molten fire oozing below until it finally emptied out, spent, left behind a tunnel, a hollow. What dwells in the darkness there, beyond the reach of the torch? Is it an immense one-eyed monster stirring from sleep?

K Another day, go into the Earth and find the universe spread above you, mirrored in water below – a boat slipping along the surface, and surely this is Styx, surely this is the entrance to the Underworld, because the blue above your head, the blue reflected in the ripples cast by the boat’s bow, is too uncanny and cannot be real. The lights above you seem to shudder.

But it is only dangling death and larval bioluminescence, not starlight captured. In the darkness of the Waitomo underland, Arachnocampa cast out their threads and slowly wind them back, fat with wriggling prey.

K Down, down, follow a river of ice, feet slipping, breath hanging in the air. This gaping hole in the mountainside – Eisriesenwelt, the world of the ice giants – you plunge into it. The railing is so cold your fingers would freeze to it if you weren’t wearing gloves. The Salzach River flowed through this mountain and carved out a space, a chasm, that filled with spring rush of thawing snow frozen into waterfalls and flows. Stream halted forever by chilling winds, gleaming thick with trapped air, with bubbles’ silver stretch.

For many years the people who dwelled nearby didn’t want to go inside this frigid place. They thought it the entrance to hell. Perhaps they felt that stir of ice wind from deep inside and thought it the wingbeats of Satan himself, frozen up to the waist. Can you blame them?

But you do. Go inside. Do you find what you are seeking?

What is it you are seeking?

K In the creek bed at the mouth of the sea-cave in Scotland, you find a hag stone: a sea-smoothed piece of chert with a perfectly round hole through the centre of it. You lift it to your eye and peer through – can you see another realm through that portal?

Turn to the dark of the cave, waterfall mist hanging in the air.

Turn to the sunlight and blink at its glare. You fold your fingers around the hag stone and feel it grow warm with your touch.

Is it the burrow of a piddock, a bivalve mollusc, hollowing a home for itself? Or is it something magical, something lucky?

Only good things can pass through this stone, so the story goes. Bad luck and evil are too large to fit and are trapped within its confines.

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K Between lockdowns, people enjoying the sunshine, picnics on the small beach, paddling in the water. Walk along the beach at Echo Point, hand in hand with your son, and explore the caves there. More overhang than cave, but still they trap darkness in their corners. Peer up into those spaces at the spiders, see the mud wasps’ nests lined up beside each other like coffins.

Watch your son trace long-ago ripples with small hands, walk upon them with small feet. Everything is a wonder to him. And it is wondrous, these shallow caves, these gibbergunyahs, that have acted as shelter for the Kuringgai people for thousands upon thousands of years.

In 1953, a 10-year-old boy out walking his dog finds death in a cave near to Roseville Bridge, perhaps the very one you explored with your son. It is the body of a 70-year-old pensioner who had lived out his last years in that cave and called it ‘Rockhaven’.

‘Here you find yourself standing amongst the viscera of the Habsburgs,’ the tour guide says as you walk through a corridor lined with small urns containing the lungs and intestines of past royal families. Their bodies lie nearby in the Kaisergruft, their hearts in Herzgruft, around an eight-minute walk from where you stand deep beneath Stephansdom. It must be strange to have your body parts strewn across a city, decomposing in separate places. Do they long for togetherness?

Down here, coffins are piled ceiling to floor and plague pits full of bones yawn in the ground beneath your feet. There is horror. And there is peace.

K You are drawn to it. The spectacle of death in the Capuchin catacombs under Palermo. Walls hung with it, skulls agape.

This place does not feel peaceful to you. You can’t stop gazing at the mummified bodies, as though if you look long enough, you might see those jaws move. But they only stare – empty sockets, blank grimaces – and you wonder why they sought this end, why they chose to be displayed like this.

There is the body of a two-year-old girl so perfectly preserved she looks asleep, so seemingly alive that some people say they can see her opening her eyes, just a crack, before closing them again. Others say it is just a trick of the light. An ideal embalming chemistry: formalin to kill bacteria, alcohol to dry, glycerin to prevent excessive desiccation, salicylic acid to remove fungi, and zinc salts to petrify.

She lies in stasis, held apart from the world.

K Is it death you search for in these underground voids and dark hollows of the world? You do find it here beneath the streets of Paris, spiralling down into the gloom.

Millennia of seas washed over this place. Shelled creatures died and were sedimented into the seabed, laying down deposits of Lutetian limestone. These spaces were split open to extract the ‘Paris Stone’ that now lines the streets of that city with golden buildings, uncharted mines extending every which way like a rabbit warren beneath the Left Bank. When mass graves from Les Innocents cemetery began to spill into basements, they brought the bodies here, backfilled the cavities with bones and made art with façades of interlocked tibiae and skulls.

‘Arrête, c’est ici l’empire de la Mort,’ reads the entrance to the catacombs. ‘Stop! This is the Empire of Death.’ And it feels like you shouldn’t be here as you walk through, that you are intruding, but inside… it is peace. There is a strange comfort to being surrounded by death in this way. A memento mori, a reminder that you too will die, and in this communal place of rest and memory, the thought doesn’t feel quite as frightening.

K When did you become this crypt-dweller, this cave-creature, this underearth excavator pulling rods of rock from the ground, the drill rig shuddering at the effort to extract a secret history?

You’ve been told there are two dead bodies beneath your feet, victims of a mining accident 100 years ago, never recovered.

The tunnels of this abandoned Queensland mine lie close to where you are drilling, and one day the drill pierces that dark void so long undisturbed, and you can’t help but think about the convulsion of machinery into a place that had been peaceful so long. A tomb plundered.

K

K

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You are afraid of your own death too, so why do you keep coming back to these claustrophobic places? You feel the walls pressing in, rock heavy above you, weight bearing down, waiting to snap shut, to erase this man-made tunnel, this unnatural fissure excavated into the Flinders Ranges by longago men. At the end of the mine adit, someone has propped a mummified kangaroo that must have crawled in here to die, its skin stretched tight over its skull. You stare at it for longer than you should.

You are inside it. Right inside the guts of the world, as though it ate you up, and you run your hand over an ancient seabed, feeling the folded warp of it, the long history of its time aboveground and below. All the many upheavals that had to happen for it to become solid beneath your fingertips: mountains forced into the sky by tectonic clash, eroded away by millions of years of wind and rain, sediments settling in long-ago oceans, rock laid bare by sea retreat. This story repeated again and again, until finally water returns to trickle into cracks, to hollow out, to create spaces underground where you now stand.

It is a wonder. It frightens you and it awes you. You shut off the light and stand for a long time in that darkness, until you lose your body entirely, and there is only heart thunder and blood roar. You inhabit that darkness for a long moment, a reminder that one day it will be all there is.

But today, you return to the light. q

K Being underground at the end, you realise, is important to you.

Body beneath dark earth, root rot, soil damp. No poisons, no embalming chemicals, no features forever preserved like a museum piece. Just dead body, ready to go back into the universe, to become useful again. Bacteria will decompose.

Small creatures will eat. Flesh will be consumed and repurposed. Nothing will remain but bone until centuries pass and then millennia and the apatite in your bones will pulverise and erode and become sediment and metamorphose, and parts of you will percolate and precipitate and create new beautiful things. And perhaps that matter will hold a memory of its time being you, and the world will not forget that you were once a part of it.

K

Verity Borthwick comes to writing from a background in geology. She has been published in The Best Australian Stories, Meanjin, Island, The UTS Writers’ Anthology and other journals.

She was the overall UTS 2022 Anthology Award winner and has been shortlisted for the Island Nonfiction Prize. Her first novel – about a female geologist working alone at a remote mine site, the scene of a century-old tragedy – is forthcoming with Ultimo Press.

Images: Daniel Burka – Unsplash

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Inheritance Brendan Ryan Three-month-old calves in the house paddock watching us hold our arms out, luring them to step toward the fence line.

Each calf wears an ear tag of the bull they are bred from – 2248 Ponder, 2272 Booyah.

Some rub up against each other’s necks one calf licks another’s eye. More calves stand back shadowed by a cypress plantation, watching, slowly stepping closer as if they are under a spell.

One sudden move and this cobweb thread of trust will be broken, the calves will turn, disperse.

My fingers stretch over the fence into childhood as if I could reel it in, a rope of memories I latch onto yet feel slipping, dispersing. One dark-coated heifer raises her head, her pink tongue curls up, around her nose. She opens her mouth, begins sucking a gentle squelching like shaking a post in a boggy paddock. I feel the rim of her teeth, warmth of her tongue fastening, while two calves step over to you, sucking your fingers. With an iPhone and a broad urban grin, the two of us taken out of ourselves, an innocence shared this fragile connection you have inherited – a line of calves standing at the fence line.

Brendan Ryan lives in Geelong. His most recent collection of poetry is Feldspar (2023, Recent Work Press). Hew New and Selected Poems, Recent Work Press, will be published in 2025.

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The Same as Ever George Kennedy I grew up on the eastern shore of Hobart with a handful of bush reserves in the backyard to muck around in. I spent my younger years climbing trees and sculpting piles of scrap metal in the abandoned quarry. I never really grew out of it. The landscape has changed a lot over the course of my life here, but I’ve always found an escape up in the bush. My familiar trees and pathways are mostly still there.

Nowadays it’s not unusual to come across a crude sheetmetal shelter with an old mattress and a classic garden-hose Gatorade bong, and once, I stumbled into a clearing and a single tree was on fire. I stood for a while taking it in.

Kids on trail bikes nod to me, sitting on the bonnet of a rusty car, drawing, as they tear down the fire trails, and friendly couples in Mountain Designs jackets let me pat their hypoallergenic dogs. There are new highways, and even new suburbs. The plains are filling in and the bushlands are receding. Wallabies and pademelons now graze the side of the highway at night.

– George Kennedy

Opposite: Mabel Court 2024, oil on canvas 183 × 122 cm

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This essay originally accompanied George Kennedy’s exhibition, ‘The Same as Ever’, that ran at Despard Gallery 16 October to 9 November 2024.

In his inaugural solo exhibition, emerging Tasmanian artists George Kennedy takes us on a tour of the suburbs, including a wander through bushland that sits at its periphery. Each work reflects on the expanding density of suburban housing around Rokeby, where Kennedy lives, and the fragile and often chaotic boundaries where the manmade and nature collide.

Kennedy interprets the complexity of these marginal spaces combining painted abstraction and figuration with energetic lines, bold colour and aggregated forms. Frictions within each work evoke feelings of marginality, visualising the restless temperament of suburbia and a growing socio-economic divide. Depictions of abandoned vehicles and stacks of houses become a metaphor for social precarity, rapid urban development and shrinking natural spaces. Kennedy’s urban-cubist approach effectively conveys an underlying anxiety, as if viewing suburbia through a prismed lens to reveal its suffocating expanse in a single plane.

For Kennedy, houses and cars make up an important part of our suburban vernacular, becoming an extension of self and undue status symbol within modern secular society. Through each depiction, Kennedy questions the cruciality attributed of the illusive Australian dream of home ownership, as well as the rite of passage and freedom secured from purchasing and driving your first car.

Portrayed as abandoned, possibly stolen, crashed, rusted and vandalised, Kennedy’s vehicles can be seen as a reflection of mortality, like a vanitas motif reminding us of life’s brevity and our pending demise. They can also be perceived as symbolising an adolescent quest for meaning, each rusted car carrying suppressed feelings of defiance, disillusionment and personal abandonment. Created with raw honesty, Kennedy’s paintings speak to everyday existence, tapping into the tenacious and larrikin behaviours that define the Australian psyche.

Accompanying these suburban landscapes, Kennedy has painted a series of works of undisturbed bushland. With a gentler approach, Kennedy depicts the landscape with an empathetic fondness, using even brushstrokes and soft tones to capture its filtered light. From within these natural spaces, Kennedy shares moments of respite and escape, whilst reminding us of its fragility. In context to the exhibition, one can appreciate the entirety of Kennedy’s candid observations, where beauty and decay exist in a familiar, yet uneasy balance.

Opposite: Tyre Fire No. 2 2024, oil on canvas, 122 × 92 cm

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At the heart of Kennedy’s practice is an intuitive approach, his raw aesthetic evoking a sense of unruly transition, where moments of familiarity and structure begin to collapse into states of disruption. Captured within this combination of painterly gestures and vivid surfaces is a feeling of urgent spontaneity, Kennedy responding to a world that is never static. From these fleeting moments of suburban Australia, we can both observe and reflect on our social habits and various human flaws, complicit in the knowledge that it will remain ‘the same as ever’.

– Nathan Taylor, Despard Gallery

Above: Under The Widow Maker 2024, oil on canvas, 67 × 71.5 cm Opposite: Skiddies In The Culdesac 2024, oil on canvas, 122 × 92 cm

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George Kennedy is an emerging artist based in Nipaluna/Hobart, Lutruwita/Tasmania. Kennedy graduated from the School of Arts & Media, University of Tasmania in 2020, going on to hold their first solo exhibition at Devonport Regional Gallery in 2022. Kennedy won the Tasmanian Portrait Prize in 2019, as well as the National Macquarie Group Emerging Artist Prize in 2020. He has been a finalist in the Henry Jones Art Prize in 2023 and 2022, as well as the TIDAL prize in the same year. Kennedy completed artist residencies at Queenstown in 2021, as well as a two-month long residency on King Island in 2023. Kennedy has participated in numerous group shows since 2020, including at the School House Gallery, Rosny, as well as being invited to participate in the special exhibition Painters On Pots, hosted by Despard Gallery. The Same as Ever is Kennedy’s inaugural solo exhibition with Despard Gallery.

Opposite: Bushland Effigy 2023, oil on canvas, 142 × 112 cm

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ISLAND Stories. Poems. Essays. Art.

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VOL.172 11/2024 AUD $19.95

Cover image: Rex Greeno Moonbird connection mixed media on paper, Collection of the Artist

CONTRIBUTORS CLAIRE AMAN WAYNE APPLEBEE VERITY BORTHWICK MEGHALEE BOSE JO CHEW PAUL COLLIS JEN CRAWFORD JENNIFER EVANS TOBY FITCH WILLIAM FOX ZANA FRAILLON ROD GARDNER REX GREENO KATE GROSS HELGA JERMY PIP JONES GURMEET KAUR GEORGE KENNEDY SIMEON KRONENBERG JO LANGDON PAUL MAGEE CLARA MARTIN SUZI MEZEI KYLIE MULCAHY ROBERT O’CONNOR VERITY OSWIN SARAH RHODES ERIN RILEY TROY RUFFELS BRENDAN RYAN BRIAN SMITH YASMIN SMITH ANDI STAPP-GAUNT SARAID TAYLOR BIANCA TEMPLAR BRIDGET WEBSTER EMILY-ROSE WILLS TROY WONG ASTRID WOOTTON DEREK WRIGHT CHEE YONG