25 for 25 Curtin Writers Respond

25for 25

Curtin Writers Respond

Edited by Rachel Robertson

25for 25 Curtin Writers Respond

25 years of the John Curtin Gallery

Edited by Rachel Robertson

Bentley Campus enjoys the privilege of being located on the site where the Derbarl Yerrigan (Swan River) and the Djarlgarra (Canning River) meet. The area is of great cultural significance and sustains the life and well-being of the traditional custodians past and present.

The John Curtin Gallery is proud to honour the Noongar people and value this place of shared learning.

We recognise the impacts of colonisation on Indigenous Australians and are committed to moving forward together in a spirit of mutual honour and respect.

First published on the occasion to celebrate the 25 year anniversary of the John Curtin Gallery 2023

John Curtin Gallery Building 200A Curtin University Kent Street, Bentley Western Australia 6102 Phone: +61 8 9266 4155 Email: gallery@curtin.edu.au www.jcg.curtin.edu.au ISBN 978-0-6450795-7-9 Editor: Rachel Robertson Design and layout: Sharon Baker Publication Assistant: Lauren Hancock-Coffey Artworks: various as credited.

Photographs: various as credited.

Publication copyright © 2023 John Curtin Gallery and School of Media, Creative Arts & Social Inquiry, Curtin University Text copyright © individual authors.

All images are courtesy and © the artist unless noted otherwise.

This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act 1968, no material whether written or photographic may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means without the written permission of the artist, authors and Curtin University. The opinions expressed in this book are those of the authors and not necessarily those of the John Curtin Gallery, MCASI or Curtin University.

Contents

Jane King

Foreword

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Introduction Rachel Robertson 11

In the Company of 25 Writers First Nation encounters Cass Lynch Wheat and Moon

15

Gabrielle Pither

Djidi Djidi

19

Elena Perse

The Deep

24

Jessie Hiscox Beneath the Water

27

Strange juxtapositions Caitlin Maling

Surface Reading of

Ten Thousand Waves

31

Rachel Robertson

Unfinished Journeys

34

Deborah Hunn 37 Three Memos to Shanghai Yirga Gelaw Woldeyes Your Slave

40

Bruce Slatter

The Crawl Space

43

Regional stories Christina Chau

Jasmine Tea

47

Per Henningsgaard

Agnes Yamboong Armstrong: Jalinem

49

Christina Lee Fragments

53

Rosemary Sayer Belonging

59

Susanna Castleden An Encounter with Aviation Alphabet

63

Imaginary worlds Rosemary Stevens Ripple Effect

68

Anne Ryden Ghost and Wednesday

72

Ashleigh Angus The Dogs

74

Marie O’Rourke Trick Question

78

Eternity and change Qian Gong 80

The Narration of the Cosmos

Denise Woods 84 Copies, Answers and Aunties Curious threads Danielle O’Leary Dollymount to Sorrento

89

Chemutai Glasheen Weaving Circle

91

Lydia Trethewey His foam white arms

96

Thor Kerr Seven-part String

99

Kate McCaffrey

The Naked Truth

107

INDEX

113

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

114

Foreword Jane King

I am delighted to introduce this anthology 25 for 25 as a celebration of our collaborative project Curtin Writers Respond, produced to commemorate the Gallery’s 25th Anniversary.

This project involved creative writers, both academics and students from the School of Media, Creative Arts and Social Inquiry, who developed new work in response to artworks and exhibitions here at John Curtin Gallery.

There has been a history of collaboration between artists and writers at the Gallery, and the opportunity to re-engage with this ‘other’ art-form was a welcome one for the Gallery, as we emerged from COVID in 2021.

As far back as 2004, the Gallery initiated a program called Writing the Collection: a collaboration involving the Curtin community and the Curtin University Art Collection itself. The result of this collaboration was a series of exhibitions and installations held over several years between 2004 and 2011.

So, when Rachel responded to a call out from the Gallery for academic staff to be involved with our upcoming Perth Festival exhibition at the beginning of 2021 we enthusiastically supported her idea. At that time, we were looking at some new ways to engage with audiences that were very much still in the grip of COVID, and largely staying away. Whilst Western Australia was never locked down to the extent that other states were, we were behind a closed border, with frequent short, sharp lockdowns interrupting any sense of business as usual. Engagement activities that could reach new and different audiences, that appealed to our campus

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Abdul-Rahman Abdullah, Pretty Beach, 2019, painted wood, silver ball chain, Swarovski crystal, audio.

Courtesy of the artist. Installation view, Everything is True, 2021.

colleagues, and that could get traction online or in other ways beyond the physical gallery experience were very appealing.

From the response to Abdul-Rahman Abdullah’s Everything is True, the Gallery has hosted a further seven events, gaining us a new set of visitors and delighting our regular visitors with a new slant on the exhibitions. One attendee at a reading event noted in a follow up email, ‘it was so good to be in a space of shared paradigm in terms of research-creation by artistwriter-academics’. Several artists noted how delighted they were to have triggered these writing responses, with one saying that ‘one of the things I aim to do with my painting is to create a space where the audience can bring themselves to the work’.

When Rachel brought her undergraduate students to the Gallery as part of their writing unit, we discovered that many had never visited an exhibition here before, even though we are on campus. Indeed, several students noted that this was their first ever attendance at an art exhibition.

Several expressed their delight at the Gallery visit with comments such as: ‘The gallery visit was overwhelming and moving, but it was an experience that helped me grow and critically consider the art, how it made me feel, and how I can move forward. A great experience,’ and ‘The gallery visit was great and I enjoyed it. The atmosphere and the artworks were cool and it has motivated me to come back to visit the gallery again.’ Encouraging younger viewers is just one of the many benefits of this project.

I would like to conclude in recognising the enthusiasm and commitment demonstrated by Associate Professor Rachel Robertson in coordinating this program, and her encouragement of both emerging and established writers to participate so fully in this program.

Jane King

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In the Company of 25 Writers: an introduction Rachel Robertson

Mark Rothko famously said, ‘A picture lives by companionship, expanding and quickening in the eyes of the sensitive observer,’ before going on to note the riskiness of sharing art, for a picture ‘dies by the same token’. As writers, we understand both that risk and that companionship. With the publication of 25 for 25, we celebrate the expansion, pleasure, and enlivening inspiration that visual art offers us, as viewers and as creators.

There is a long tradition of ekphrastic writing, a term often used to describe the summoning through words of a visual scene or artwork.

Traditionally, for writers, ekphrasis is an exchange between the seen and the written: the experience of a perceived visual object is transcribed into a written account, with special attention paid to the idea that the reader ‘re-experiences’ the original sensory encounter. The creative writing in this collection, however, is less focused on attempting to revive an original encounter. Instead, we use the artworks as a springboard or imaginative prompt, allowing ourselves to travel through time and space, memory and invention, to write a work that bounces from the visual art experience.

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This book is the culmination of a three-year project, Writers Respond, in which I invited a range of writers, academics and students to visit an exhibition at the John Curtin Gallery, produce a work of creative writing, and then read their work at a public Gallery event. In this time, more than 40 staff (from Curtin and three other Western Australian universities) produced over 100 new poems, stories and essays, many of which have been published, while around 60 undergraduate and postgraduate students also created new works. We held eight public reading events, produced an anthology of responses to work by artist Lindy Lee (Where the Ink Falls) and a podcast series (Word and Image), presented three conference papers, and edited four special issue journal publications.

Finally, we produced this anthology, which showcases 25 diverse works written by Curtin University staff and students in celebration of the 25th year anniversary of the John Curtin Gallery.

The essays, stories and poems here respond to seven different exhibitions held at the Gallery between 2021 and 2023 and take us from the southwest of Australia to Shanghai in the 1930s, from clouds seen by a plane-spotter to a cavity in the ceiling of the Gallery, from a weaving circle in Africa to memories of Ireland. Reflecting the diversity of authors, we share work by Indigenous and multi-cultural writers, bilingual poems, stories of exile and migration, and the work of young writers, exploring issues of identity and contemporary life.

The six sections contained within 25 for 25 reflect its key themes. The first section, First Nation Encounters, contains four works responding to art by Indigenous artists from two separate exhibitions, starting with the ‘whump whump whump of feet on wheat,’ a giant spider walking with ‘horse-rhythm across beige fields burdened with kernels’ (Lynch). This is followed by Strange Juxtapositions, responses to two major installation works with deep historical and cultural reach by Isaac Julien. In Regional Stories we return to writing inspired by Western Australian artists from the regions, works which, in their turn, initiated stories of Broome, Hong Kong and a river in Minnesota.

Imaginary Worlds contains work responding to an exhibition from Abdul-Rahman Abdullah, whose representation of realistic and fanciful animals, and oscillation between otherness and familiarity evoked wild imaginary worlds, ‘where your dream is my dream’ (Stevens).

Megan Cope, Bated Breath (detail), 2021, chrome-plated ceramics on steel support, fishing line, and mirror, approx. 3m high. Courtesy of the artist and Milani Gallery, Brisbane. Installation view, OCCURRENT AFFAIR, 2023. Photography by Robert Frith/Kerry Stokes Collection.

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In Eternity and Change, two works explore the timelessness, beauty and complexity of Lindy Lee’s artwork. And finally, Curious Threads contains stories and poems prompted by the 2021 Indian Ocean Craft Triennial, where unusual story threads connect, disperse and then re-connect across the globe.

These stories, essays and poems exist because of the imaginative openness of their authors, the inspiring artworks curated by the John Curtin Gallery, and the generous support of staff at the Gallery and within the School of Media, Creative Arts and Social Inquiry. These dialogues between artist and writer, image and word have been rewarding and productive to all involved.

As Caitlin Maling says in her poem here, ‘There are always more ways to see a thing,’ and this anthology demonstrates both the truth of this and the value of it. We offer our words as an act of gratitude for the art we have experienced and an act of companionship with the artists, with viewers, with each other and, most of all, with readers. To adapt Rothko’s sentiment slightly, we can surely say that writing, too, ‘lives by companionship, expanding and quickening in the eyes of the sensitive’ reader.

Rachel Robertson

 Rothko, M. (1947) Tiger’s Eye, No. 2.

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First Nation Encounters

Wheat and Moon Cass Lynch

You hear her approaching, the whump whump whump of feet on wheat.

The rhythmic roll of paired appendages lifting and spearing among stiff straw stalks on undulating agricultural boodja. Over the night horizon she appears, a low pale moon that lifts off the ground as if to ascend skyward, only to hover and sprout limbs — two, four, six, eight. Limbs that branch from behind cephalothorax, multiple glowing eyes a constellation on her face. The legs are lengths of millet, the coarse head is hay, the round body a tapestry of cereal grains. The giant spider made of wheat walks with horse-rhythm across beige fields burdened with kernels. Soon combine harvesters will make straight tracks across colour-leached land, guided by satellites, plucking seed top from crop.

The great spider is looking for somewhere to rest. There is remnant scrub at the edge of a paddock, the lumped granite there hostile to machinery, with a she-oak looming shadow-like in the moon’s rays.

Spider feet grope forward, brushing over rock and lichen, and she senses something acidic: not mammal urine, not rotting citric fruit. It’s nitroglycerin. This granite outcrop has been dynamited in the past, partially, unsuccessfully, an attempt to make more pasture, more bleached sameness. She traces the stone with curiosity, her stalky chaff claws admiring the rock that runs too deep to crack.

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The spider is mostly wheat, but not all. There is a tractor chain rattling around in her abdomen, tufts of sheep’s wool cushion the shoulder hinge of her trochanter limb, there is barbed wire in the long metatarsals of her foreleg. The spine of a bible sits behind her carapace, railway spikes make a dark stripe along her back. Two curved kylies form her fangs, draped in kangaroo skin chelicerae. The jam tree wood of the fangs clack musically as she rubs them with palm fibre pedipalps. Her jaws are hinged by dynamite fuses, ropey and papery.

A bloom of canola emerges from a rear knee, yellow and oily. She scrapes this against the granite and sheoak roots, attempting to dislodge it from her form. She has not always been made of crop, but she has always been this place.

When the land was cool and green, the spider was made of banksia, acacia and quandong. She could make silk then, build her reverse tower into earth, and listen to the dreams of subterranean thinkers in the soil.

Now hot breeze and livestock feet have transformed her, she cannot produce silk in this place of dry horizons, she cannot make her burrow home in such hard dirt. Strange seeds cloud around her and aggressively take root, while familiar plants fail to bloom.

The canola in her knee is an interloper. She will tear this leg off perhaps. Walk rhythmless until it grows again.

A baked night wind moves across the wheat, roaring like a parched ocean. Her spider body rustles in return. She has become the land that has become the crop. The last silk in her body is her lungs, brittle folds where air moves like water over gills. Dry air now to drown in.

The she-oak on this granite outcrop is an oasis in a new desert. The soft needles whisper where the million heads of wheat shriek. The nitroglycerin on the granite is soaking into her feet and will join the 1080 in her venom glands. She cannot stay here.

She strides under billion-star sky, whump whump whump. Tiny trapdoor spiders pull their doors shut as she passes over, as they do to pig, sheep, horse and cow. She encounters a wire fence that intersects two paddocks and slows. Considering it, she pulls the fence up, out of the ground, uprooting it star picket by star picket. She holds the arc of wire above her head, stretching it, testing it. Satisfied, she curls it around

Katie West, Fence lines & Digging sticks, 2022. Courtesy of the artist. Installation view, John Stringer Prize, 2022. Photography by Sharon Baker.

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herself, creating a burrow palisade to crouch in for a few hours. Eight crystal quartz eyes roll upwards, seeking out the moving points of light that guide the harvesters as they reap the earth. She spies the pale face of the moon and imagines that as her burrow, leaping out and snatching the satellites as they pass by in dark space. Her fibrous body stills, and the trapdoor spiders of the fence line open their little moon doors again, tiny eclipses blinking in the dry.

Author’s note I was entranced by the lightness of Katie’s artwork, of using floating fabric to bring the image of star pickets that line the edges of paddocks in the Wheatbelt into the gallery. It’s a great meditation on the nature of territory and transformation, especially to call the artwork ‘Fence lines and digging sticks’, making a connection then to the wana or digging sticks of Aboriginal women. My character of the spider emerges from this concept as another version of territory transformed.

Cass Lynch is a writer and researcher living on Whadjuk Noongar Country. She has a Creative Writing PhD that explores Noongar stories that reference climate change. She is a member of the Wirlomin Noongar Language and Stories group who focus on the revitalisation of culture and language connected to south coast Noongar people.

‘Wheat and Moon’ was first published by Westerly, 68.1, 2023, pp. 35-37 18

First Nation Encounters

Djidi Djidi Gabrielle Pither

‘Chitty chitty…chitty chitty…chitty chitty.’

‘Gabby! Flat white with honey!’

‘Close to Me’ by The Cure drifts through the speakers as the coffee grinder whirrs. But all I hear is incessant chatter. The same succession of high-pitched whistling I’d been badgered by the last two Thursday mornings I was early enough for class to order a coffee.

‘Chitty chitty…chitty chitty…chitty chitty.’

What is he saying?

The way he so determinedly flits from side to side – it must be urgent.

Tail wagging, just inches from me on the table, making abstract patterns around my laptop.

Djidi Djidi, or Chitty-Chitty, is the Noongar name for the Willy Wagtail, and according to Aboriginal dreamtime Chitty-Chitty is notorious for gossiping – a known eavesdropper (Collard, 2009). It’s like he can sense my curiosity.

His little white eyebrows raised in stark contrast to his glossy black feathers, as if to say: ‘What do you know of my people?’

‘What do you know of this country you call home?’

The chatter stays with me all the way to the gallery. My gaze lands on the distinctive landscapes of the Australian bush. The Carrolup exhibition is on permanent display at the John Curtin Gallery. The vivid colours, bold lines, and Australian scenes are comfortingly familiar to me, the style so like the

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painting of the ‘Stirling Range’ that hangs in my parent’s entry way. I had seen those blue peaks everyday growing up when I looked through the kitchen window of our family farm in Ongerup. My home.

On paper, my Dad was born in Robertson, New South Wales. But Dad never spoke of Robertson – he spoke of wheat, machinery and cross-bred lambs, the aroma that always followed him in through the fly wire as he took off his dusty Akubra and wiped his hands on already grease stained trousers. He talked of our farm in Ongerup and the blue peaks in the distance.

My Mum was born in Armadale, Western Australia. My Grandad, every bit the well-spoken Brit – but with an affiliation for Australian botany – grew up eating Yorkshire pudding in England. My Nanny talked often of her childhood on Rokeby Road in Subiaco, Western Australia – a long way from her MacGregor name and tartan wearing ancestors.

Bella Kelly was born in Mt Barker, in the foothills of the Porongurups, not far from the Stirling Range (Davis, n.d.). Her family and ancestry an unwavering line of Australia’s first peoples – an undeniable connection to the land. Bella passed away the year I was born. There are seventy-nine years between us, and we are as different as the people we’d come from.

Yet somehow my blue peaks were the same as Bella’s.

Bella’s Stirling Range painted a version of home for me that would never change. Sun drenched blue sky and white clouds lying atop the peaks.

The pale blue hills in the distance, just a shade darker than the sky, the shape of a ‘sleeping lady’ (L. Dean, personal communication, May 10, 2018).

Two large Wandoo Gums in the foreground, framing the bush land. Fine Mallee treetops and grey-brown trunks in the middle ground. Yellow soil, and the dark distinctive shapes of kangaroos meandering through, as if straight out of a dreamtime story. A bold black signature in the bottom right corner – BELLA KELLY. The Stirling Range was Bella’s country. A proud Menang Noongar woman, she would have walked that bush, hunted, gathered, and told stories (L. Dean, personal communication, May 10, 2018). Stories that turned sorrowful when her first four sons were stolen and sent to Carrolup Native Settlement.

Unimaginable.

Yet fourteen years on she was awarded ‘the best painting by a coloured person’ at the Narrogin Arts Festival (Bella Kelly, n.d.). In the two years following her four youngest children were taken to Wandering Mission.

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First Nation Encounters

Unthinkable loss.

In 1972 her paintings were displayed at the ‘Gallery of Aboriginal Art’, and Bella Kelly is now thought of as the matriarch of the unique ‘Carrolup style’ (Bella Kelly, n.d.).

No matter the pain or the place, home is the blue peaks in the distance.

My Grandad used to take us on native orchid hunts through the bush in Ongerup. My two older brothers and I would war with each other through the low scrub, and it always came with bragging rights if you could find the rarest or most spectacular orchid of the season. Spotted electric purple petals with varying degrees of yellow and red outline – if Dame Edna was an orchid she’d be the ‘Queen of Sheba’. Thelmytra Variegata, as my Grandad would rattle off, was the crème de la crème of finds (Botanic Gardens & Parks Authority, 2021). We never could quite agree upon who found her first, and Grandad would just grin widely beneath his tweed flat cap as he shrugged his shoulders.

Grandad lost his battle with cancer in 2005. We lost our farm in Ongerup in 2007. The ‘Stirling Range’ now hangs in my parents’ entry way in Bowelling.

No matter the pain or the place, home is the blue peaks in the distance.

‘Chitty chitty…chitty chitty…chitty chitty.’

The same incessant chatter greets me as I exit the gallery. Somehow Djidi Djidi’s movements are less jittery, his eyebrows softer.

Some dreamtime stories say that the Djidi Djidi were once children who were turned into birds as punishment for their mischievousness (Collard, 2009). Some say Djidi Djidi lures children into the bush for the woodarjis (spirits), bouncing cheekily in front of you, tantalisingly close but just out of reach (Collard, 2009). Others tell the story of how Djidi Djidi proved that he was sharper than the eagle when he beat him in a race using only his smarts and cunning (Collard, 2009).

Djidi Djidi tells me: ‘No matter the pain or the place, home is the blue peaks in the distance’.

Djidi Djidi flits, bounces, and chatters until gazes meet. Until two people merge and see each other.

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Bella Kelly. (n.d.). Biography. http://www.bellakelly.com.au/biography.html Botanic Gardens & Parks Authority. (2021). Orchid research breakthrough. https://www.bgpa.wa.gov.au/about-us/information/news/2757-orchid-research-breakthrough Collard, L. (2009). Djidi Djidi, Wardong, Kulbardi, Walitj and Weitj: Nyungar Dream Time Messengers. Westerly. https://westerlymag.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/WesterlyVol.54Leonard-M.Collard.pdf Davis, A. (n.d.). The Art & Influence of Bella Kelly. Jakingka Aboriginal Art. https://japingkaaboriginalart.com/articles/art-influence-bella-kelly/ (L. Dean, personal communication, May 10, 2018)

Author’s note This work is a response to the Carrolup Art Exhibition on display at the John Curtin Gallery. I was inspired my family’s painting by Aboriginal artist Bella Kelly, as well as my upbringing in country Ongerup – a childhood surrounded by the South-West Australian bush and Stirling Range.

Gabrielle Pither is a third year Professional Writing and Publishing student at Curtin University. Gabby also competes and coaches in equestrian eventing at a national level.

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First Nation Encounters

Alma Toomath (née Cuttabut), Untitled, c1949, pastel and charcoal on paper, 17.7 x 24.7 cm.

The Herbert Mayer Collection of Carrolup Artwork, Curtin University Art Collection.

Gallery note Bella Kelly (1915-1994) was a pioneering Noongar artist, who painted the landscapes of the Great Southern region demonstrating a strong connection to, and love of, Country. In her early works from the 1940s onwards she mainly used watercolours and gouache, but later used acrylics. The link to Carrolup comes through Bella’s sons from her first marriage who were taken from her and were at the Carrolup School at the same time as artists such as Alma Toomath (above). Many people believe that this influenced the style of painting that we would later refer to as the distinctive Carrolup style.

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The Deep Elena Perse

According to oceanographers, the ‘deep’ starts where light begins to fade.

As far as I’m concerned, though, the deep begins when my feet no longer reach the sand. When I dive down, I’ll run out of air before I touch the seabed. That’s deep to me. The light doesn’t matter so much.

The mesopelagic ‘twilight’ zone: a kilometre deep, sunlight valiantly trickles down until it is gone entirely, the water fading from deep blue to inky black.

It’s Sunday – I’m at my local beach for surf lifesaving. I’m nine – my group doesn’t patrol, fishing foolish swimmers from rips. We do everything else, though: sprints on the sand, paddling a surfboard taller than I am, and long open-water swims. Initially, I quite enjoy these swims. I have terrible vision, and I can’t wear my glasses at the beach. The only time in the two-hour session I can see clearly is when I tug on my prescription goggles, and finally, the world sharpens into focus.

I’m not coordinated: I hate carrying the unwieldy board along the beach, I’m always one of the stragglers paddling to shore. Catching a wave and losing control over the board scares me, and the session leader tells me to be ‘less polite’, to shove the other kids during beach flags. I can swim, though; even better, it’s a solo activity.

Slice through the water (fingers together: use your hand like a scoop, pull yourself forward), only gasp for air every third stroke. Don’t swallow seawater (you’ll cough and choke – your mouth will ache with saltiness).

Watch out for stingers.

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First Nation Encounters

I power along in my own little world, not realising that the swim is getting longer every week until suddenly I reach the buoy marking the final distance and look down. And down. And down. The dark chain holding the buoy in place snakes all the way to the seabed, drifting with the flow of the tide. I have never realised quite how much water separates me from the sand tens of metres below. Suddenly, my peaceful seclusion becomes terrifying isolation – I’m so far from the shore, suspended in water. I’m acutely aware that this is not my home. I’m alone.

The bathypelagic ‘midnight’ zone: here, the sea is completely devoid of light. Cold and dark, these depths are beyond the reach of the sun, the stars, the moon.

I’m a little older, swimming through water silty with limestone. It’s like freestyle in a glass of room-temperature milk – as I stretch out my hands, they disappear into opaque whiteness. Suddenly, the warmth around me drops away, and the pit of my stomach drops with it. Tendrils of freezing water envelop me. My dad once told me that water temperature sometimes changes with depth. Mostly it’s the current, though. Tentatively, I stray deeper into the rapidly cooling bay. It’s just the current, says part of my brain. What’s down there? panics the rest. I feel like bait.

My chest tightens, and I turn frantically, gracelessly. Power towards the shore. Floundering, I feel simultaneously exactly like and the total opposite of a fish out of water. I shouldn’t be here – but instead of a scaly creature, gills begging for submersion, I’m a landlubber, too afraid to put my face in the water for fear of what I might glimpse in the depths. Slowly, eyes fixed ahead, neck aching from the awkward posture, I crawl towards safety.

Damp and shivering on the rocks, it takes a while for my heart rate to slow. I feel like this a lot. In a matter of months, I’ll be set adrift, starting high school. No idea what to expect. I try to convince myself that the pounding of my heart is just anticipation, excitement even. Anything to mask my fear of plunging into the unknown.

The abyssopelagic zone, ‘the abyss’: almost nothing can live this deep, in the freezing cold, complete darkness and tremendous pressure. ‘Abyss’ comes from Greek, meaning ‘without bottom’. It’s appropriate – this depth seems endless.

Fast forward a few years, and I’m up north, crammed into a wetsuit so tight I can hardly bend my elbows. I’m swimming along the edge of the Ningaloo Reef. In Yinigudura, ningaloo means deep water. This water is the deepest I’ve ever seen. On one side of me, a coral reef thrives. On the other side: nothing at all. I can’t see anything beyond green-blue darkening 25

to indigo, then into total blackness. I can hardly breathe with fear. Both in the water, and out, I’m teetering on the edge of freefall. What is adulthood if not an abyss? My mouth tastes rubbery: I’m clenching my jaw so hard to stop my teeth chattering that my snorkel ends up scored with bitemarks.

The epipelagic ‘sunlight’ zone: warmest, lightest section of the ocean. This is where life thrives.

Did you know: if you blow onto a baby’s chubby face, they will reflexively breathe in. This way, explains the water babies instructor, they can go underwater without choking. No need to worry. My mum holds my tiny body in both hands. I won’t float away or sink to the tiled bottom of the pool as we duck below the surface. I’m safe in her grasp, an instinctive breath filling my lungs, sustaining me. We’re at Kaleeya – meaning ‘in sight of the sea’ in Noongar – but I’m not tackling the ocean just yet, only the pool.

Soon, though, I’ll have to take to the open water by myself, take a deep breath of my own volition. For a long time, I’ll struggle – my confidence as a swimmer won’t be enough to buoy me through life. I’ll get there, though. I’ll keep treading water and ignore what may or may not be beneath my feet – all that matters is the light filtering in from above.

Author’s note I was immediately drawn to Bated Breath – I love the sea, but I have complicated feelings about it. The combination of beauty and danger in Bated Breath really appealed to me and inspired my depiction of the ocean. Growing up on the coast, I have always been a swimmer, and I wanted to map leaving childhood alongside a series of moments that took place in and around the water. The ocean is so overwhelmingly vast, but with a change in my perspective and confidence, swimming in the deep has come to feel more like an adventure (just like young adulthood).

Elena Perse studied a Master of Arts (Professional Writing and Publishing) at Curtin and currently works at Curtin’s Institute for Energy Transition.

She is a bookseller, an Aquarius and a lover of creative non-fiction (not necessarily in that order).

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First Nation Encounters

Beneath the Water Jessie Hiscox

Megan Cope’s Bated Breath made me hold my own. Not because I was struck by any deeper meaning, but because it was beautiful. Silver, sparkling, curved shadows on the wall, a school of elegant creatures caught in the air like crystallised raindrops, all reflected on the clear, delicate mirror below. The school of fish, some swaying slightly on their wire nooses, are prisoners of sorts, but I cannot feel sorry for them. Their lovely bright silver scales and smooth tails hold every eye, beautiful and lovely from all angles.

The term ‘bated breath’ was first used in Shakespeare’s play The Merchant of Venice, one of the many terms he wrote into existence.

To have bated breath is to hold one’s breath in anticipation, awaiting with eager expectation (Vocabulary.com, 2021). It makes me think of the makeover scenes in the movies I grew up on, a staple in every coming-ofage 2000s rom-com. When Samantha in A Cinderella Story descended the stairs in a sparkling white ballgown, my breath was hooked in my throat.

The same thing happened when overall-wearing Laney Boggs stepped onto screen with a new haircut and a magenta-red dress in She’s all that.

The formula to finding bated breath, it seems, is as follows: a pretty dress, a young girl, and a long set of stairs to descend.

Shakespeare probably never had a makeover scene of his own, never walked down a stairwell in a long, princess ballgown. He did occasionally stand before an audience, starring in his own plays in the later years of his life, choosing a life beneath the spotlight as well as behind it (Shakespeare online, 2021).

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I consider myself a writer now, but as a young girl I wanted to be an actress. I performed monologues and poems and prose in front of a small audience of family and friends and teachers. I was so nervous I could barely breathe before each performance, trembling before the mothers and fathers who sat by children who were as nervous as they were bored. I read excerpts from the likes of Antigone, Great Expectations, and Pride and Prejudice, feeling the dusty grey silence wrap around me as I stared at the face of the ticking clock at the end of the room.

People used to hold their breath for me. My drama teacher with her bright red glasses and matching lipstick saw my future filtered in camera flashes and adoration. Marching into the WAAPA end-of-year auditions, Shakespearean excerpt in hand, I knew I would get in. I would like to say I didn’t try very hard, but I did. Growing older was too scary, so I wanted to stay 17 forever, kept youthful underneath the glow of yellow theatre lights and unblinking eyes.

The letter of acceptance never came. I turned 18, then 19, and then 20.

Birthdays stopped being exciting and instead were replaced with that sick feeling in your stomach like you can feel time moving too fast and you simply can’t keep up.

When I disappear beneath the surface of the water, being replaced by another pretty, shining girl on a stairwell, when I can no longer fit all the candles on my own birthday cake, who will I become? If we exist when no one is watching, do we even exist at all?

I visit my nan weekly, or I try to. She sits alone in the house she proudly owns, full of unwon lottery tickets and half-drunk teas that have started to sprout mould. Often, she is dressed in an old floral nightgown, her same worn purple slippers warming her feet, sitting in her chair watching reruns of Bargain Hunt! or another show she pretends not to like about Americans with absurdly big fish tanks.

She tells my sister to bring her the photo albums from her towel closet, forgetting that we did this last Saturday, and the one before. My favourite album is cream-coloured, with two little embroidered bells on the front.

Inside are photos of the 20-year-old version of my grandmother, a stranger to me, dressed for her wedding day. Never once does she say she looks beautiful, instead using her perceived flaws as signposts on her trip down memory lane.

I catch her in the mirror sometimes, staring at herself like a stranger she hasn’t yet learned to live with. I wonder whether she ever descended a set of stairs, whether she watched her audience below and felt the promise 28

First Nation Encounters

and adoration that only comes from bated breath. I wonder if she too holds onto those moments and wonders if she disappointed the people who thought she would shine forever, only until she grew older.

Shakespeare had a life after he retired. He visited friends, hosted parties, even helped younger playwrights develop their work (Folger Shakespeare Library, 2023). My nan divorced the man she married when she was 20, letting his memory and name disappear from her life and her lips. The people who knew her when she was glistening and new are no longer present, long gone from her life, or this world. I have only ever known her as the woman with a sharp tongue, the amateur baker who lives alone, who can still thrash me at scrabble at the age of 90.

Megan Cope’s fish will never reach the water, burdened to be nothing more than a beautiful and impactful piece of art, perfect forever.

Or perhaps, when the last person leaves the gallery, quietly murmuring about what they will make for dinner, the fish come to life. Perhaps they move their tails clumsily, inelegantly, maybe their scales begin to lose their silver lustre. Perhaps they dip beneath the water, reach the bottom of the stairs, and feel grateful knowing that no one is watching.

Folger Shakespeare library. (2023). William Shakespeare: A biography. https://www.folger.edu/explore/shakespeares-life/ Shakespeare Online. (2021). Shakespeare the Actor and Playwright. http://www.shakespeareonline.com/biography/shakespeareactor.html Vocabulary.com (2021). ‘bated breath’ vs. ‘baited breath’. https://www.vocabulary.com/articles/pardon-the-expression/bated-breath-vs-baited-breath/

Author’s note I have always loved beautiful things, so when I saw Bated Breath, glimmering in a dark corner of a room, I was immediately captured. Bated Breath is expertly crafted and thoughtfully created and will likely never lose its lustre or perceived beauty, unlike those who view it. I use my piece ‘Beneath the water’ to explore my angst towards growing older and losing my value and appeal. I have always found that writing about my own fears makes them a little less frightening, and I hope that readers and writers alike will find bravery in our shared experiences.

Jessie Hiscox has recently graduated with a Master of Arts from Curtin University, where she majored in professional writing and publishing.

Jessie is passionate about exploring how language creates meaning, and how words serve as a tool for inspiration and empowerment.

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Isaac Julien, 10,000 Waves, 2010, three screen film installation + sound, duration 49:41 min.

Courtesy of the artist and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney. Installation view, Isaac Julian, 2022.

Photography by Brad Coleman.

Strange Juxapositions

Surface Reading of Ten Thousand Waves After Isaac Julien Caitlin Maling

To write the poem, I must take off my glasses To watch the film, keep them on My favourite part is the gap between screens imagining their placements whether deliberately within or without my arms-span whether the walls of the gallery are flexible enough to move: how many of these are structural beams and loadbearing walls?

In the film a woman in red shoes smokes a cigarette, a tram journeys back and forth, she can walk in pin-thin heels on cobblestones without turning an ankle and I am sitting on the floor because I am 31

too lazy to sit on the bench provided for me to always be comfortable The voiceover says ‘the shore is ending and now the land’; I am working on a poem about a bay where stromatolites lie reliant on sea level regression and the accumulation of bivalves into a cocquina shelf. The people in the film are always by the ocean we can hear it in the soundtrack Now the woman is high in the type of tower which would be destroyed if it was made by sedimentary rock, only it isn’t it’s concrete and rebar. A new voiceover whispers of rape and death I do not like it, but I do not imagine I am to like it. On the centre screen somehow a woman flies out of shot I am on the continent, all about me are reefs I never thought of them as protecting me from the potential of ghosts There are now many historical shots I do not know what I am looking at Before, finally, a body floats in water and I pull my apple out and eat it Later, I read the show is originally designed for nine screens see photos of them hung in a perfect arc 32

Strange Juxapositions

There are always more ways to see a thing I learn the show is nothing about oceans and all about greed and those journeys The voiceover is Benedict Wong from Dr Strange making this not, not part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe I use to teach my students perspective and poetry ‘you know the multiverse’, I say and they nod seriously, I would like them to see each of the nine screens (or even three) and understand the tragedy of the multiverse is the inescapability of this verse where the sea moves imperceptibly higher as if to consume us by licking softly on our bones

Author’s note I first visited Isaac Julien’s piece directly after teaching two three-hour creative writing seminars, one on short fiction and one on poetry.

I remember sitting on the floor and letting the work move over me, switching my brain from output to input and free-drafting the poem in the light of the screens. I was interested in having the piece maintain this sense of improvisation and the conditions of its making – both physical and the other influences I bought into the theatre space with me. I wanted the poem to have a similar sense of mutability to what I encountered in Ten Thousand Waves, which shifts depending on the number of screens on which it is shown, when you enter or exit the room, how many people are there with you, etc.

Caitlin Maling is a lecturer in creative writing at Curtin University.

She has published five books of poetry, the most recent of which is Spore or Seed (Fremantle Press, 2023).

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Unfinished Journeys Rachel Robertson

Shanghai, 2014: golden temples crouched between dusty high-rises, Pudong glass towers sitting inside the curl of the Huangpu River, retro fantasy Pearl Tower, colonial Bund architecture, old women squatting in the gutters, luxury shops, spaghetti road junctions, dumpling street vendors, the cacophony of 25 million people in a city of contradictions.

I fell for a beautiful man, his face delicate as jade, his mind sharply subtle.

He whispered translations into my ears, words scented of lemongrass. He gifted me green tea and poetry, a tour of the Xi Garden, and later, his own story.

I would not have been surprised to see him lift his arm and peel back the streetscape to Shanghai of the 1930s, Paris of the East – glamorous, seedy, cultured. The refuge for 20,000 European Jews, Hongkou a home for my Ashkenazi ancestors.

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Strange Juxapositions

On my final day in Shanghai, I struck out alone on the metro to visit Hongkou and the Jewish Refugee Museum. I found myself lost in a maze of backstreets: washing hanging from balconies, the secretive frontage of small shops, streets where no one spoke English. I passed through unfamiliar laneways with signs only in Mandarin, ignored by people in the middle of their daily tasks. Each time I thought I was finally heading towards the Museum, I sensed I had circled around, and was walking back the way I had come. The twenty-minute walk stretched itself, and I realised I would never reach my destination. As if in a dream, I walked on, taking different turns at random, and then following a woman in glamorous shoes. Time and space fragmented. No one in the world knew where I was.

Suddenly we emerged onto a major road, traffic roaring past us, and the woman stepped through the doors of the Golden Jade Sunshine Hotel. I was stranded on the pavement, exhausted now from my confused wander.

Then I, too, walked into the Hotel. The woman I’d followed was nowhere to be seen but the lobby was like the foyer of every glossy five-star hotel and there was a bar with a free table and an English language cocktail menu. By the time I ordered a gin and tonic, my dreamlike state had passed. I was no longer invisible and estranged.

After my drink, I took a taxi back to my own hotel and packed my bag for the flight home. I could make no sense of my experiences. The Maglev bullet train to the airport became a symbol of this: sleek and ultrasophisticated, travelling over streets and the muddy river, passing factories, building sites, shoddy housing estates, universities, parks, piles of broken concrete, shrines, multiple high voltage powerlines, racing madly through Isaac Julien, 10,000 Waves, 2010, three screen film installation + sound, duration 49:41 min.

Courtesy of the artist and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney. Installation view, Isaac Julian, 2022.

Photography by Brad Coleman.

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yellow smog to Pudong airport at 400 kilometres per hour. All meaning was fractured by spatio-temporal confusions. Already, I longed for home but also yearned to return.

I did return to Shanghai. And I met the man with the lemongrass voice several times over the following years, in Shanghai or elsewhere. I grew more used to his coiled gestures, the pauses in his sentences, his rare smiles.

But there was always distance between us. He understood my world; I was ignorant of his. That I considered his face ‘delicate as jade’ shamed me with its undertone of exoticism. No matter that his parents and my grandparents were exiles; that he was richer than me, higher status. Always, our connection was frustrated and fragmented; always just beginning or already over; always zooming in and out of focus. Like the breaking of a carefully constructed mis-en-scene, the moments slipped below or behind or beyond us.

One evening, he said, ‘you are earth, I am water,’ as if this explained everything. I thought of him then as the shifting flow of soft waves reflecting the sky in grey-blue velvety hues. I forgot the ocean can be wild, the waves tempestuous. I forgot that loss recreates itself, generation by generation, that your hopes can be tossed from a high window and fall like a lost ghost.

I forgot that we are all small boats on unfinished journeys: east to west in search of fortune, west to east in search of wisdom. ‘No stars to point our way’.

I forgot: this myth is not my myth.

Author’s note Watching Julien’s multi-screen installation linking ancient and contemporary China, I was reminded of my own brief visits to Shanghai.

I wanted to reflect Julien’s themes of journeying and loss, his references to mythic deities, and the way his work deliberately fragments narrative.

‘Unfinished journeys’ attempts to create resonances with Ten Thousand Waves through referencing images of the 1930s film set, a goddess falling past a hotel window, the tempestuous ocean, refugee journeys, and small boats. The phrase ‘no stars to point our way’ is from Julien’s work.

Rachel Robertson is Associate Professor in the School of Media, Creative Arts and Social Inquiry at Curtin University. She is the author of Reaching One Thousand (Black Inc) and many other works of creative nonfiction and teaches professional writing and publishing. She leads the Creative Critical Imaginations Research Network and is coordinator of the Writers Respond collaboration between the Network and the John Curtin Gallery.

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Strange Juxapositions

Three Memos to Shanghai Deborah Hunn

A woman exits a bookshop. I breathe the darkly filtered air with caution, steady as a hand practised on a pulse. Adjust my white beak. Side-eye the body count of 2022. Shuffle to the sharpest corner of the bench. Six years ago, sardined in a Shanghai metro I watch anxious mask-smothered girls blink across my shoulder, as if second guessing a tidal wave set to fling them over the flat-edged world. I of course know better. Let those poor souls fear the rocks; floundering is not in our lexicon.

A woman exits a bookshop, boards a backlot B movie tram to a rendezvous with grief in an IM Pei future I once viewed across a Bund packed with smiling families, with bridal lace, with ice creams, with tootyfruity streamers, with tourists trailing eager red flags, with shiny Nike tops and backwards caps and fresh white trainers and silver sticks launching wave upon wave of selfies over the glittering harbour. I breathe the darkly filtered air with caution as steady as a hand practised on a pulse. Adjust my white beak. Side-eye the body count of 2022. Shuffle to the sharpest corner of the bench. Four years later CNN footage unfurls that present as a photocopy purged of its past; an unrelenting negative spool of grey concrete desert. Nothing. No one. A static whip of waves in the harbour.

A strand of ghost ships. A sudden straggler breaking cover, scurrying crablike across the screen. Goodnight Shanghai. Goodnight. I’ll see you in my dreams. And yet I still know better. Let the poor souls scurry for the rocks; sinking is not in our lexicon.

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A woman exits a bookshop; boards a B Movie tram; sits forlorn, waiting for grief to call in an IM Pei future I’d once viewed from the... fuck me! It’s a butterfly goddess, fierce and powerful, bent on unknotting fate. But the seams of magic split, the guts come tumbling out, the ropes and pulleys and levers. And here it is - the thrill of unfurling a kite, the quick whipping pull, heavy but buoyant, cutting into the flesh of my twisting palms. The illusion of control disguising the surrender to teamwork’s logic, the wind filling the kite, taking the lead, gliding me forward…On a visit to the Yu Gardens I stop by a square off Longtan Road. Beaming old couples waltz in circles with buoyant precision, blessed by the midday sun, light as a legion of ghosts. I breathe the darkly filtered air with caution steady as a hand practised on a pulse. Adjust my white beak. Side-eye the body count of 2022. Shuffle closer to the sharpest corner of the bench. Of course, I don’t know better. Of course, I never did. Let these dear souls waltz forever, let me waltz together with them; waltzing should return to our lexicon.

Author’s note ‘Three Memos to Shanghai’ was written after viewing British artist Isaac Julien’s multi-screen installation Ten Thousand Waves (2010), which was exhibited at JCG in early 2022. My creative piece generatively interweaves three subjective elements that I found to be inextricably entwined with my immediate response to Julien’s work: an acute consciousness of my situated context as a viewer in a gallery in a pandemic; memories of a 2016 visit to Shanghai, the city where much of Ten Thousand Waves was filmed; my re-interpretation of these memories in the light of the impact of Covid 19 on China.

Deborah Hunn is a senior lecturer in Creative Writing at Curtin University in Western Australia. Her work has been published in a range of anthologies, edited collections and journals, and includes short stories, creative non-fiction, academic essays on literature, film and television, and reviews. With Georgia Richter she is the co-author of the book How To Be An Author: The Business of Being a Writer In Australia.

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Isaac Julien, 10,000 Waves, 2010, three screen film installation + sound, duration 49:41 min.

Courtesy of the artist and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney. Installation view, Isaac Julian, 2022.

Photography by Brad Coleman.

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የናንተ ባርያ Your Slave Yirga Gelaw Woldeyes After I escaped bondage I saw the plantation scattered bones of cotton woven into my skin I hid the barbed knots that tied my back to the soil and lectured the trees that grew on black bodies I told them this:

ካመለጥሁ በኋላ ከባርነት ቀንበር፣ ወደዚያ እርሻ ቦታ አይኖቸን ሳማትር፣ አያለሁ አጥንቶች ማሳው ላይ ያረፉ፣ ነጫጭ ጥጥ ሆነው ከሰውነቴ ጋር፣ አብረው የተሰፉ። የጀርባየን ቆዳ ከአፈሩ ጋር አስሮ የተጋደመውን የሽቦ ቋጠሮ፣ ከሰው አይን ደብቄ ብቻየን ቆሜአለሁ፣ ከጥቁር ገላ ላይ ለወፈሩ ዛፎች እንደዚህ እላለሁ፦

it was not me who was a slave first It was him he who cannot see the ancient lights he who created himself as a gigantic work of metal he who took flowers from the field painted the walls of his heart with colours set a trap by the side to catch wonderous insects

እሱ ነው! እሱ ነው፣ እኔ አይደለሁም ቀድሞ ባርያ የሆነው አዎን፤ እሱ ነው። ጥንታዊ ብርሐናትን፣ አላይ ብሎ የታወረው፣ ስጋውን ብቻ አግዝፎ፣ የብረት ክምር ያረገው፤ አበቦችን እየቀጠፈ፣ ገላቸውን ፈጭቶ፣ ከልቦናው ግድግዳ ላይ፣ ቀለማቸውን ቀብቶ፣ ከጎን አድብቶ የቆመ፣ የነፍሳት ማጥመጃ ሰርቶ፤ እሱ ነው።

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Strange Juxapositions

እሱ ነው፣ እኔ አይደለሁም ቀድሞ ባርያ የሆነው አዎን፤ እሱ ነው። ዘመኑን ሁሉ ለሰላምታ፣ እጁን ዘርግቶ ያልሰጠ፣ ባንድ እጁ ጥቁር መጽሃፍ፣ በቆዳ የተለበጠ፣ ባንድ እጁ ጥቁር አለንጋ፣ ዘወትር እንደጨበጠ፤ የሰንበት መስዋእት ብሎ፣ አካል ዛፍ ላይ አንጠልጥሎ፣ በአደባባይ ያሰጣ፣ ጥቁር ቆዳ የላጠ - ጥጥ ከውስጡ ሊያወጣ፤ እሱ ነው።

it was not me who was a slave first It was him he who lived with clenched hands one hand gripping a black leather book the other a black leather whip he brought his Sunday offerings bodies hung up on trees their skins scratched to extract cotton

እሱ ነው፣ እኔ አይደለሁም ቀድሞ ባርያ የሆነው አዎን፤ እሱ ነው። ንስርን በሰማይ ከመብረር፣ ነጻ ለማድረግ የመጣ፣ አሳን ከባህር አውጥቶ፣ ኩባያ ውሃ ያጠጣ፣ እናትና ህጻናትን፣ በፍርሃት ማእበል ያራደ፣ ከእናቱ ጡት መንጭቆ፣ አራስ ህጻን የወሰደ፤ የእርሻው መስኖ በሆኑ አይኖች፣ ራሱን እስኪመለከት፣ የጥቁርን አካል ቆፍሮ፣ ለዘላለም ጥጥ እሚያመርት፣ ዛሬም ይሁን መጀመሪያ፣ እሱ ነው! እሱ ነው የእናንተ ባርያ! እሱ።

it was not me who was a slave first It was him he who wanted to save the eagle from the sky he who took the fish from the sea to give it water in a cup women and children trembled as he flung babies from their mother’s breast his bondage will never leave him till he sees himself through eyes that irrigate his plantation till he knows who he truly is.

A slave who digs on black bodies to grow white cotton for you

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Author’s note ‘የናንተ ባርያ / Your Slave’ is inspired by Isaac Julien’s Lessons of the Hour. It speaks to how the slave master is a ‘decivilised’ being. In treating other humans as non-humans, he loses his humanity. The poem draws humanity from values that are being crushed by the oppressor: the spirit of ancestors or ‘ancient lights’, the beauty of wildflowers and ‘wonderous insects’, motherly love, and the boundless freedom the air and the sea give to the eagle and the fish. In its final lines, it invites the reader to consider how their very lives are built on slavery and oppression.

Yirga Gelaw Woldeyes is a writer, researcher and poet from Lalibela, Ethiopia. He currently lives in Whadjuk Noongar Boodja (Perth, Western Australia), where he is a senior lecturer at the Centre for Human Rights Education, Curtin University. His Amharic poetry was published in a solo collection, የተራሮች ጩኸት (The Cry of Mountains), and has been performed widely on stage and radio in Ethiopia. His English short stories and translated poems have been published in anthologies and journals, including Westerly, Unlimited Futures (Fremantle Press) and Ways of Being Here (Centre for Stories and Margaret River Press).

The poem was first published in Sztuka i Dokumentacja [Art and Documentation] Poland, winter edition, 2023.

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Strange Juxapositions

The Crawl Space Bruce Slatter

A little over twenty years ago, I spent some time snoozing in the roof space of this gallery. Up above the ceiling panels and out of sight, I reclined in the darkness. The crawl space was an ideal hiding spot and offered a moment of calm and respite, as tiredness and fatigue from long days of physical installation work started to take their toll.

The light from the gallery below created a bright grid on the ceiling.

From my unusual vantage point, the video work below created strips of blue hue between the square panels. It made my ceiling panel like a raft in an enveloping darkness. I closed my eyes to block out the light and the afterglow of the grid gave me the sense I was in a Tron-like video game.

As the light diminished from the back of my retina, I thought about the video work being installed below.

The artwork was a two-projection video installation called Around Now by the Irish artist Grace Weir. It was an aerial portrait of a cloud filmed from a small plane as it flew around the cloud. The opposing screen showed the view out the other window of the plane, as if looking from the cloud’s perspective and across what looked like bucolic green fields of the Irish countryside. Around Now was a work about the slippage that occurs between two viewpoints, with the video installation creating a physical and conceptual ‘space in-between’ that the viewer could inhabit.

From my viewpoint in the ceiling, the slippage I was experiencing, was a ‘space in-between’, being semi-awake and being in deep, deep sleep.

As I thought about the large, white, soft, fluffy cloud on show in the gallery, I thought about sleep and about art.

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Isaac Julien, Lessons of the Hour, 2021, ten screen film installation + sound, duration 28:46 min.

Courtesy of the artist and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney. Installation view, Isaac Julian, 2022.

Photography by Brad Coleman.

I recalled the 1995 artwork at the Serpentine Gallery called The Maybe.

Conceived by Tilda Swinton in collaboration with Cornelia Parker, the artwork took the form of Swinton sleeping in a vitrine, eight hours a day, for seven days. The work was of course controversial, at least in the media at the time.

Swinton slept through the criticism as if in training for a sleep competition.

At that moment in the roof, I felt like every misguided art critic who looks at an artwork and says, ‘I could do that’. Sleeping for a week like Tilda Swinton, I could definitely have done that.

I enter these gallery spaces, not purely as a viewer with an interest in art nor even as an art academic. First and foremost, I come to this space as an installer. It’s not quite Charles Bronson in ‘The Mechanic, but ‘The Installer’ does have a filmic ring to it.

As an ex-installer, I want to know how the work exists in the space, before finding out what it is or what it means. The skills and tricks of installation are usually not meant to be noticed by the viewer, with the emphasis of experience on the artwork. For me, figuring out the logistics and techniques of installation can be integral to the understanding of art. I think it gets me 44

closer to the intention of the artist and makes me feel like they have got to this point through a sophisticated process of trial and error. The brief moments of investigation, aka ‘nosing around’, don’t lessen the power of the work, it just delays the moment of my focus on the work itself.

My fascination with a new exhibition, particularly here at the John Curtin Gallery, begins with the way the curator and installers have organised the physical transference from the previous space. It’s the way the light changes and the sounds are muffled, for video work, it’s the physical preparation for a cinematic experience, but without the aroma of stale popcorn.

I entered the gallery space to see Isaac Julien’s video work, Lessons of the Hour, in the usual way. Despite trying to look at how the screens were hanging in space, and the type of video projectors being used, I couldn’t take my eyes from the images themselves. Julien’s work about Frederick Douglass demands attention. At times, each of the ten screens focus on independent imagery, depicting subject and context, then suddenly all screens combine to emphasise the importance of the same visual moment, like the mechanism of the steam train moving across the screens and through the gallery.

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For a viewer, it is impossible to give all ten screens equal attention, as if the importance of the subject matter is too much to completely comprehend. Julien uses this visual slippage, shifting from a first-person view, like sneaking through a house, to a third person observation of the character of Douglass. Julien places the viewer there in history, to bear witness. The cracking of the whip amongst the cotton harvest and the ominous creaking of a taut rope in the pine tree, shock the viewer to attention.

What can we do in the presence of such powerful work like Isaac Julien’s Lessons of the Hour? Well, we should allow ourselves to be jolted out of inertia, and be forced to sit up and take notice. Through the beauty and focus of an artist’s vision, Julien asks us to witness a recreation of Douglass, embodying the fight against injustice. The Douglass character leads the horse, as he leads us, through the landscape, always with a destination or end goal in mind. In this artwork, Julien asks us to respect and honour the legacy of Frederick Douglass, and to never forget.

Great art has the ability to lift us all up; it teaches us and inspires us.

Sometimes, like in Julien’s video installation, it wakes us up, drags us from the darkness of the crawl space, and demands that we see the light.

Author’s note Isaac Julien’s artwork, Lessons of the Hour, is an engaging multi-screen installation about the abolitionist Frederick Douglass. Each of the 10 screens combine to highlight aspects of Douglass’ life through staged re-enactment.

The artwork is immersive and evocative, and despite the powerful meaning of the artwork, as an artist and former art installer, I found myself musing on how the artwork was made and how it was installed.

Bruce Slatter is Deputy Head of School and Discipline Lead of the Creative Arts in the School of Media, Creative Arts and Social Inquiry at Curtin University. He has worked at Curtin in a range of academic and professional roles since 2000 including as an installer at the John Curtin Gallery.

Bruce is a practicing artist and is a previous winner of the Bankwest Art Prize (sculpture), Sculpture by the Sea (Cottesloe) and the Woollahra Small Sculpture Prize. He has work in several public collections, including the Art Gallery of Western Australia, Artbank and the Bankwest Art Collection.

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Jasmine Tea Christina Chau

There is a neglected tin of Sunflower Jasmine Tea in my mother’s kitchen that has been sitting next to the kettle for decades. My mother drinks up to nine cups of English Breakfast tea a day, but rarely breaks out the jasmine unless prompted by someone else. I haven’t thought about the tin of Jasmine tea, until coming to The Alternative Archive exhibition and seeing one painted in Ellen Norrish’s Tin Heads. I realise now, that it’s likely that we’ve kept this tin for so long because it must have some significance in our family. The few objects that my mum has kept in the house post Mari Kondo and pre-downsizing includes a pepper mill that she stole from a restaurant in her twenties as a nursing student; a cabinet that my brother made in year 11 woodworking class; a rocking chair that she nursed her children in; and also this tin of jasmine tea. Surely it must be one of the few markers of my Dad’s presence in our past.

I can’t believe that I don’t know how it came into our home. Even though it’s one of the most common brands of Chinese tea, I’ve assumed all this time that it was bought and kept by my dad on our only family trip to Hong Kong when I was two – a sentimental connection to home while tucked away in Albany thousands of kilometres away. I assume, also, this is perhaps why we’ve painfully kept the tin and rarely drunk the tea: the tin must be a reminder to keep in touch with friends and family in Hong Kong even though Dad died over a decade ago, and he rarely connected with them anyway.

A reminder of a broken lineage, and that any connection is now, and always was, up to us to make.

Not long ago I used to fly to Hong Kong twice a semester and teach media studies. This commute was also an opportunity to meet my extended family and get a crash course on our painful family history. Scanning over 47

a map of Hong Kong and the surrounding archipelago I couldn’t help but notice that my name ‘Chau’ was written in English and used for ‘island’ on the map. My students politely explained ‘No Miss, it looks that way because of the translation, but ‘Chau’ does not mean ‘island’ in any way. ‘Chau’ is more like ‘Smith’ – it’s so common’.

Today that tin of jasmine tea still sits next to the kettle, two-thirds full. I told my mum that I was writing about a painting of a tin that looks exactly like ours and asked ‘what’s the story behind that tea, is it from Hong Kong?

Did you buy it on a family holiday with dad?’. My mum replied, ‘There isn’t any story. I just bought it once when we were in Perth and we’ve kept it but we don’t drink the tea’.

Ellen Norrish, Tin Heads, 2019, oil on ply, dimensions variable. Installation view, The Alternative Archive, 2021. Courtesy of the artist. Photography by Brad Coleman.

Author’s note Christina’s recent arts writing and criticism explores ways in which experiences of art can echo everyday domestic conversations, relationships, and gestures.

Rather than thinking about art solely while one is within a gallery, Christina explores how experiencing art can make one rethink aspects of daily life.

Ellen Norrish’s Tin Heads provided the perfect opportunity to explore themes of nostalgia, kitsch, memory, and home, and connect to her Cantonese heritage and rural Australian upbringing.

Christina Chau is a lecturer at Curtin University in the School of Media, Culture, Art & Social Inquiry. Her research focuses on experiments with art and technology, particularly in the areas of kineticism, interactivity, online visual culture, robotics, and drone performances; and her book is titled Movement, Time, Technology and Art (2017). She has also written for contemporary art publications including Art Collector, The Review Board, and unMagazine.

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Agnes Yamboong Armstrong, Jalinem Per Henningsgaard

‘Left! Steady!’ my father barked from the back of the canoe. As our small craft stabilised and narrowly cleared the point of land that divided the river into two smaller streams, he added, quieter now, ‘Yes, good. Steady paddling into deeper water.’

I paused my paddling in order to reach out with my right hand and touch the leaves of a bush that stretched over the water from the sandy bank.

We were that close to running ashore. But my father was right: the water in this channel was deeper than any we had encountered further upstream.

Listening for the sound of my father’s paddle softly cleaving the water’s surface, I resumed my regular stroke.

Eighteen years later – and 17,000 kilometres away – I remember what he said: ‘Steady paddling into deeper water.’ It’s a metaphor, of course, but for what I don’t know. My father certainly didn’t mean it as a metaphor, so I can’t ask him, either.

A painting by Agnes Yamboong Armstrong evokes this memory in me.

Her painting, which is exhibited at the art gallery on the university campus where I work, is titled Jalinem. It depicts creek flows from the flooded Ord River in the wet season. The Ord River is a 600-kilometre river in the Kimberley region of Western Australia. The river I paddled with my father was the Mississippi River, which is 3,000 kilometres longer than the Ord River and half a world away in the United States. But there’s something about the island at the centre of Yamboong Armstrong’s flooded river – 49

the shape of its point, the relative width of the streams on either side, the suggestion of the water’s speed as it is bisected and redirected into narrower channels – that unites these disparate worlds in my mind.

The museum label tells me that Jalinem uses a ‘monochromatic colour scheme and aerial composition’ that is typical of Yamboong Armstrong’s paintings. The colours are, of course, very different to those found in northern Minnesota. Yamboong Armstrong uses natural pigments that perfectly capture the pinks and reds of her desert country. Minnesota in the summertime is monochromatic, as well, but the dominant colour is green.

I look again at the museum label – white sans serif font on black card. In looking, I remember that another name for a museum label is a tombstone.

But this tombstone is not commemorating someone or something that is deceased; instead, it endeavours to bring life – to bring meaning and clarity – to this artwork. I had no museum label for my father’s words, spoken in that canoe all those years ago, but here is one for Yamboong Armstrong’s brushstrokes: ‘The work is a metaphor for the flowing of knowledge through Country.’

Agnes Yamboong Armstrong, Jalinem, 2019, natural pigment on canvas, 80 x 100 cm.

Installation view, The Alternative Archive, 2021. Courtesy of the artist and Waringarri Aboriginal Arts. Photography by Brad Coleman.

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The water pulled us onwards. My father began to sing. A lone Cooper’s hawk flew overhead, rising on the thermal updrafts.

Perhaps ten minutes after we passed the small island, we rounded a bend in the river and saw a bridge. As we came closer, I noticed a sign on the side of the highway. I could just make out the words: ‘Welcome to the Leech Lake Indian Reservation’. I wouldn’t have paid the sign much attention except that there was another sign leaning against its base, partially obscured by the tall grass at the road’s edge. Even half-hidden and on an angle, the sign was clearly identical to the one perched on metal posts above it. The doubling of this greeting struck me as significant, and I wondered at its reason. A few more paddle strokes and my question was answered: the sign on the ground was riddled with bullet holes.

Considering the angle of our approach, I surmised that we must have been paddling our canoe through the reservation and would soon exit its boundaries.

As I leave the art gallery, passing a sandwich board sign that advertises an exhibition titled The Alternative Archive and emerging into the weak June sunshine, I think about how I am walking on Whadjuk Noongar country. How Yamboong Armstrong’s artwork travelled here from where she paints at the Waringarri Aboriginal Arts centre in Miriwoong country. How my memory of a camping trip with my father is located in the lands of the Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe.

Standing out front of the art gallery and gazing across the lush grounds towards the Curtin University Indigenous Learning Circle, known as the Yarning Circle – a recent addition to the campus landscape – I am struck by a realisation. It was not just the however-many kilometres of my canoe journey that unwittingly transpired within the bounds of the Leech Lake Indian Reservation, the end of which was signalled by the appearance of a roadside sign. That particular multi-day trip began and ended outside of the reservation, but it was all Ojibwe land. I hadn’t recognised it at the time, but I recognise it now – though from a great distance and only imperfectly.

My former ignorance is all the more remarkable considering my home town – Bemidji, Minnesota – is situated on the doorstep of not one, not two, but three reservations: Leech Lake Indian Reservation, home of the Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe; Red Lake Indian Reservation, home of Red Lake Nation; and White Earth Indian Reservation, home of White Earth Nation.

Also, my mother used to teach at the high school on the Red Lake Indian Reservation, and I attended powwows there. I grew up in a household that had Black Elk Speaks on the bookshelf, and when we took a family road trip to Badlands National Park in South Dakota, we stopped to read 51

all the historical plaques about the Battle of Wounded Knee and visited the Crazy Horse Memorial. When I finally left northern Minnesota to attend university on the East Coast, I noticed that, for my new friends, when the conversation turned to the subject of the Indigenous peoples of North America, they were a historical curiosity rather than part of my friends’ lived experience. Of course, we were all just well-meaning white people trying to be woke before we knew what that meant – and probably screwing things up in the process.

All these years later – and thousands of kilometres away – I am still that.

I sigh deeply and stride off in the direction of the bike rack.

Later that night, sitting across the campfire from my father and watching the flames create a range of emotions on his otherwise still face, I thought about how ‘steady paddling into deeper water’ could sound ominous in certain circumstances. Like, you were getting in deeper and deeper, and soon you would be in over your head. Of course, if the water was so shallow that you risked running aground, as had happened to us earlier that day, then you wanted to head for deeper water. But what if you didn’t know the depth of the waters through which you were gliding? What then?

I rubbed my sore shoulders and resolved that, when in a position of ignorance, it was better to point your craft towards the centre of the body of water and pull hard on your paddle.

Author’s note It wasn’t until I came to Australia as an adult that I heard anything approximating an acknowledgement of country. This experience prompted me to rethink my relationship to the place where I was born and raised, which was the traditional lands of the people variously known as Ojibwe, Chippewa or Anishinabe. When I first saw Agnes Yamboong Armstrong’s painting titled Jalinem, it immediately reminded me of a particular bend in the Mississippi River close to where my parents still live. I wanted to use this work of creative nonfiction to explore the relationship between these two places – on opposite sides of the globe – that are connected only in my mind.

Per Henningsgaard is a senior lecturer and the major coordinator for the Professional Writing and Publishing major at Curtin University. He teaches and supervises in the areas of editing, publishing and creative writing.

He previously held permanent teaching positions at Portland State University and University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point.

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Fragments Christina Lee

Once in a while, my mother would bring out her treasures. They were wrapped in balls of cotton wool that had been pulled and folded over like dumplings, and were secured in padded silk pouches: a jade bracelet, a gold chain, a red and white peacock brooch studded with diamantes.

She rarely wore them as they seemed too ostentatious for a mining town in the Pilbara, with its population of seven hundred people. And they were much too impractical for a housewife whose days were spent caring for two small children. As well, valuable items were likely to be lost in the communal bathrooms we shared with the rest of the residents who lived at our end of town.

My older sister, Josephine, and I carefully studied how our mother kept her jewellery. Often, we would show her, wrapped in layers of tissue paper, green and clear bottle fragments. ‘Diamonds!’, we would say. ‘Look, we found diamonds!’ Then, my mother would nod and examine our finds.

Each sharp edge was worn down by shoes that had ground them into the coarse soil, which was a mixture of red dirt and purple iron ore dust that had drifted across from the open pit mine. The fragments themselves were perhaps remnants of someone’s night of drunken revelry, the relief after a sweltering afternoon shift in the mines, or shattered glass after a cyclone. Now, they were objects of wonder; delicate things cupped in the hands of my sister and I, then four and three years old.

As an adult I realised that these moments of contemplation were rare for my mother. And that the pieces she kept were tangible reminders of what she had left behind as a migrant several times over. She had moved to Christmas Island with my father after they married. They met in Singapore, but her native country was China, which she left at the age of 53

seven after she was given to a couple whose own child had passed away.

We do not speak much about the past in my family. The weight of personal histories, with stillborn siblings, separations from immediate family, and the upheaval of a Cultural Revolution, did not make for easy segues into conversations that were preoccupied by the events of the everyday.

I waited for my mother to initiate any discussion on the subject of her childhood, and when she did, I treated my questions like I was handling those treasures when I was three.

Our family arrived in Australia in 1977 during the third wave of immigration, where we stayed at Graylands Migrants Hostel in Perth for a few months before relocating to a town that would become home.

According to the Australian Heritage Database, ‘The Graylands site does not appear to have value to the wider community of Graylands, however it does have considerable value to the migrants who passed through there.’1 Situated in the affluent area of Perth that is now dubbed the Golden Triangle, the hostel was shut down in 1987, and the site redeveloped into a ‘prestigious’ residential village for wealthy retirees who I picture wearing golf caps and cashmere twinsets. Passing by St John’s Wood, Mount Claremont today, one would hardly know the place and people that were there before.

I scoured the internet for details on Graylands Migrants Hostel and the people who were temporarily housed there during the 1970s, but the information was scant and the photographs that surfaced featured mostly families of European descent. I magnified the few images with faces like mine in the hope of finding my family, only to be disappointed. And so random, seemingly inconsequential memories would come to fill a void.

It became a ritual for my parents to recount the story of my delinquent one-and-a-half-year old self crawling under the tables in the dining hall during meal times, as if it was my own private play area. My mother would censure me, as if I was knowingly a nuisance whose actions reflected poorly on their child-rearing skills and our second-class-ness as new arrivals. The deep folds that appeared on her brow were accompanied by an audible ‘Aiya’ – the universal catch-cry of the exasperated Asian parent – with the second syllable drawn out for dramatic emphasis. Not one for talking openly of emotions and feelings, I recognised this as a poorly disguised act of affection. Each time the narrative was told, my father would laugh and my mother would perform her disapproval, which made him laugh harder until his eyes watered. And each time I would respond with amusement and surprise, as if hearing the story for the first time.

Tell me…again.

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Our life proper in this foreign country began in a remote mining town called Goldsworthy, approximately 1,700 kilometres north of Perth. I suppose the assuredness of the place and our recollections of it were in part due to the many souvenirs we had of the settlement, particularly photographs that were arranged in albums with adhesive cardboard pages and flimsy film coverings that no-one really uses anymore. My parents proudly displayed the first home they owned in one of the albums: a caravan bought for two thousand dollars. A canvas awning extended the living space, creating a shaded area for play and visitations from neighbours. A fence provided some privacy, and there was a neat and tidy vegetable patch with spring onions and the like that could both withstand and thrive in the hot and dry conditions. In one picture, Josephine and I were photographed outside, near the entrance of our house on wheels. I was seated on a table, with a towel underneath to prevent the heat of a thirty-five-degree day burning my short, stumpy legs, and my sister stood beside me. Even though she was only one year older, she towered over.

As with so many of our earliest photographs, our mouths were stretched but not quite reaching that moment of bared teeth. It reminded me of those old-fashioned sepia-toned portraits, with the deliberate positioning of family members and air of respectability that had no place for toothy grins and cheeks inflated like balloons that make eyes disappear. It was a picture that could be sent to relatives far away of a new life, a good life.

And yet, despite the degradation of the colours over time and the serious expressions on our faces, that image conjures a home and childhood mischief that I can see only in technicolour.

I vividly remember our weekly Doctor Who viewings in that little caravan.

Perched on a cushioned bench opposite the television set, and wrapped tightly in a blanket with only my eyes visible as if it afforded some sort of protection, I was transfixed by the Doctor’s escapades with his human companion and mechanical canine. I am unable to separate my early years from the deep impression left by the man with the booming voice, eyes that looked like they had been set slightly too far apart, the wild hair, and a striped scarf that extended nearly all the way to his shoes. Josephine would peer out from behind me during the broadcasts, as if I were her human shield.

‘You were scared to death. But you both kept watching,’ my mother would repeat this narrative to us as we were growing up, and even as adults. Her tone was one of admiration of our bravery, but also of frustration at the stubbornness of her young daughters who would later have nightmares and require comforting by wearied parents.

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Years later, when I was in a store in New York City, I bought a multicoloured, four-metre long scarf. It was not particularly practical as it required looping around my neck several times to prevent it from dragging on the floor, and it failed epically at the one thing it was supposed to do – provide warmth. But like the blanket, it offered a secret protection. However, this time it was against forgetting.

‘We were one of the first families in the caravan park to buy a colour television. Other people’s were black and white,’ my mother said. The purchase was a momentous occasion. ‘We saved our money. Someone drove us to RetraVision in South Hedland to buy it because we didn’t have a car then.’

By the time we retired that television set, it had served our family more than thirty years. The bulbous body would be swapped for a sleeker upgrade. The loud tack-tack of the channel dials and knobs would be replaced with the soundless keys on a remote control. If objects retained an impression and memory of every encounter, that box would have archived countless hours of rocket ships that told the time, cartoons full of intergalactic explorers and robots, game shows and variety programs that were watched as a family, Aussie Rules football matches and, later, serials where suburban neighbours became good friends.

Like the television set, the caravan, too, is gone.

My mother cannot recall if they sold it after we moved into a demountable house a few streets over just before my brother was born, or if it blew away along with half of the caravan park when a severe tropical cyclone swept through the town. Close to the coastline, the region was prone to such activity that could decimate whole settlements. Low pressure systems would form over the warm ocean waters that would carry the awesome power of the sea inland. The winds picked up the dirt and covered the landscape in a rust-coloured filter that darkened the sky.

When a Category 5 cyclone passed through the town, we sheltered 56

Regional Stories

under the roof of a friend’s house that provided greater security, or in the geodesic dome that was our civic centre where other families also gathered; biding time until the buildings stopped shuddering and the windowpanes ceased chattering in their aluminium frames. In archival photographs following Cyclone Amy in 1980, where wind gusts exceeded

200 kilometres per hour, some residents were picking through what was left of their belongings and clearing away the debris after their homes were destroyed. Parts of their lives were now scattered across the Pilbara.

‘The Dome’ does not exist anymore. In fact, the entire township of Goldsworthy has vanished. It was erased from maps, and its ‘6723’ postcode was deleted from the telephone directory.

The town was spared from a natural disaster, but could not avoid the inevitability of time and progress. After the iron ore pit was emptied, BHP Billiton saw no reason to maintain the settlement that had been home to many for decades. Goldsworthy was closed down in 1992, and the following year it was demolished. All built structures were removed, the foundations ripped up, and the last of the people moved on. The environment was relandscaped, and the open pit mine was transformed into a cobalt blue lake.

But even the most fastidious of decommissioning crews and rehabilitation programs could not clear away every thing.

Sociologist and geographer Kevin Hetherington wrote that ‘the absent is only ever moved along and is never fully gotten rid of.’2 Traces of the past persist in material remnants, and in rituals and repeated stories. I imagine construction material, furnishings and abandoned items entangled in spinifex clumps and slowly deteriorating in the red earth. It is an amalgam of things that originated locally and from far away; the latter carried in Lyn Nixon, Fragments, 2019, photographs, 11.5 x 17 cm each. Installation view, The Alternative Archive, 2021. Courtesy of the artist. Photography by Sue-Lyn Moyle.

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suitcases and on the hopes of those seeking new beginnings. As I try to piece together my mother’s past, I rely on the fragments of accounts and objects, some now long gone, that she reveals in quiet, small moments that form the stuff and granularity of a life. Glass shards, tufts of cotton wool, a broken jade bracelet, plastic parts from a kid’s toy, a snapped-off television antenna, an aged photograph, narratives retold, subtle gestures, the memory of a man in a blue telephone box. Pointless stuff to the unknowing, but totems and treasures to those who understand the loss.

1 A ustralian Government. Department of Agriculture, Water and the Environment (nd). ‘Australian Heritage

Database: Graylands Migrant Reception and Training Centre (former), Lantana Av, Mount Claremont, WA, Australia,’ Place ID 100635. Sourced at: http://www.environment.gov.au/cgi-bin/ahdb/search. pl?mode=place_detail;place_id=100635.

2 K evin Hetherington (2004). ‘Secondhandedness: consumption, disposal, and absent presence,’

Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 22, no. 1: 162.

Author’s note I was inspired by Lyn Nixon’s photographic series Fragments (2019) that was part of the Alternative Archive exhibition (2021). By inviting locals to respond creatively to wood boards from the decommissioned Mandurah Bridge, Nixon’s artwork became an archive of place and a portrait of a community. I was drawn to the idea of everyday objects, particularly those that many would dismiss as detritus or insignificant, being powerful totems and memory triggers for people. My work explores the quiet intrigue around such objects, and how fragments – of things, of time – coalesce into a personal archive of family, community and home.

Christina Lee is a senior lecturer in English and Cultural Studies at Curtin University. Her areas of research include cultural memory, the migrant experience, spaces of spectrality and imagination, fandom and popular culture. Christina’s latest book is a co-edited anthology called Living with Precariousness (I.B. Tauris, 2023).

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Belonging Rosemary Sayer

I saw the painting as soon as I stepped into the room. Aboriginal artist Loreen Samson’s canvas immediately took me back to my teenage years of arriving in the Pilbara. I saw her vivid salt ponds through the oval window of a plane when I was circling the Karratha Airport for the first time about to land and undertake the start of a new life. I felt the churn of nausea in my belly and my clammy hands at the remembered sense of unknowing contrasted with a great appreciation for a land that would come later. As I looked at the painting the two feelings rubbed against each other like two hands trying to get warm. This land would become my home, a place of belonging, but the first time I saw it I was bewildered and just a little frightened. For Loreen Samson, whose family insisted her work still be hung in the exhibition even after she passed away, capturing her traditional land on canvas became her life’s work in Roebourne, close to Karratha.

I swapped my aisle seat with my mother so I could look out the plane window. The flying had been smooth but for the last hour she had been sighing and quietly saying ‘no’ under her breath in the hope that I wouldn’t hear her. What was out there? I looked through the oval and saw a red sandy desert for as far as I could see. I saw what looked like gullies where water may have once run. I closed my eyes and made the vision go blurry like it did when I forgot to wear my glasses. Now it looked like a patchwork quilt of different shades of ochre, brown, grey and black. It looked like Loreen Samson’s painting. I felt totally disorientated. Two hours before mum, dad and I had been sitting in the suburbs of Perth drinking coffee thinking things felt pretty much like our previous home in Tasmania; our home that had been left behind. Dad had searched out new job 59

opportunities in the Pilbara in Western Australia. Initially it seemed to me there was nothing out there. By concentrating on the colours, I could keep the greasy ball of nausea at bay.

Sitting in the row in front, Dad turned around excitedly to point out the other window as we started to descend. I dragged my eyes away to look at what seemed like white and grey round ponds. They stretched into the distance with the sun bouncing off them like lances. It was almost too bright to continue to stare. Dad happily explained it was part of a salt mining business called Dampier Salt located close to where he would work for the giant iron ore mining company called Hamersley Iron. Loreen Samson sometimes painted the salt ponds spread throughout her traditional lands.

I could feel mum almost begin a panic attack. Her body began to tremble, and she whispered harshly to dad ‘what have you done? It’s like Siberia on one side and the Sahara on the other. Where are the trees?

Where are the people?’ I curled my twelve-year old body into my seat to make myself as small as possible, sucking a butterscotch sweet to stop my ears from popping. They continued their exchange in hushed voices while the pilot announced our descent. As the plane bumped down on a thin strip of tarmac next to the salt ponds, small buildings and a few stringy trees came into view. We circled around to stop in front of a large tin shed with a sign proudly announcing Karratha. A furnace of dry heat enveloped us as we dismounted the stairs and walked towards the unimposing building. Dad was bursting with impatience to begin. Mum and I just wanted it all to end and for our lives to return to normal. We wished for the verdant green, the blue mountains, and the meandering rivers of Tasmania.

Homesickness, isolation, and loneliness can consume you if you let it.

At Christmas that first year, as the temperature steadily climbed to its usual daily maximum of 36 degrees, mum insisted on cooking the full turkey roast with gravy and vegetables. The three of us sat under the air-conditioning not saying much. Dad tried to be jolly, passed out the crackers and tried desperately to make us laugh at the corny jokes. Suddenly, about halfway through the meal, Mum turned her plate upside down with a bang on the festive table, burst into tears and ran to the bedroom. I can still remember my shock at seeing her do something like that. She was always the calm parent, the quiet organiser, the one who didn’t raise her voice much. Dad and I sat still and looked at the gravy stain spreading across the white linen tablecloth. I tried to capture the little Birdseye peas that rolled around like marbles. Mum eventually came out of the bedroom and spent the rest of the day, red-eyed in her chair, knitting, but not talking. I tried to read, and Dad went outside. It was, however, a turning point. The next day the three 60

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of us sat at the same table and mum announced we needed to try harder to make our new life work. We couldn’t go back, so we had to go forward.

She had a list in her head of all the things we would do. She would start a garden and join the bowls club with Dad to meet people. We would visit art galleries and places of historical interest. I would be allowed to join the school swimming squad and play more hockey even if it meant travelling 200 kilometres for a game on the weekend. ‘You’ll drive her, of course, Colin - just like you always have,’ she said. Dad nodded quietly through all this and was also given the task of devising regular outings and trips so we could learn more about the place we had made our home. Bordered by the Indian Ocean to the west and extending across the Great Sandy Desert to the Northern Territory border in the east, the Pilbara is one of the largest regions in Western Australia. That didn’t deter us. Dad planned small one day outings and longer trips over weekends. Slowly over time, I discovered a vibrancy and character unique to the Pilbara. Its rugged ranges, gorges, ancient landscapes, and waterholes drew me. I wanted to be in it; part of it; experiencing the drama of the place. I wanted to belong here.

Loreen Samson, Salt Ponds, 2019, natural pigment on canvas, 59 x 100 cm. Installation view, The Alternative Archive, 2021. Courtesy of the artist estate and Roebourne Arts Group.

Photography by Brad Coleman.

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I smile at Loreen Samson’s work again noting that she was a multiple Cossack Art Award winner, a renowned regional exhibition. We attended the exhibition each year at the historical town of Cossack just 20 kilometres from Roebourne. It was a strange place popular with tourists, a palimpsest showing the land of the traditional owners overlaid with the north west’s first pastoral, gold rush and pearling port. Restored National Trust bluestone architecture was scattered about and reminded everyone of the colonialisation of these lands.

Today, as I breathe deeply, I can feel the power of Loreen Samson’s art immersing me once again in her traditional lands. As one of the Ngarluma/ Yindijibarndi people, she was a driving force and respected elder in the Roebourne Art Centre for nearly thirty years. Her art speaks to me of the unknown and of eventually belonging. I wish I had known her.

Author’s note Drawing on her own experience of living in the Pilbara during her teen years, Rosemary Sayer responds to Loreen Samson’s Salt Ponds.

Memories of flying into the unknown over deserts and salt ponds from a life in Tasmania to a life in the Pilbara colour the writing. As the family struggles to adapt to their new life, homesickness, isolation, and loneliness are explored in the search for belonging in the Aboriginal lands of the region.

Rosemary Sayer is a former journalist who has written three non-fiction books. In 2019 she completed her PhD at Curtin University which explored her dual interests of writing and human rights. In recent years she has worked as a sessional lecturer, tutor, and research assistant in the School of Media, Creative Arts and Social Inquiry, and at the Centre for Human Rights Education at Curtin University. She is currently an Adjunct Research Fellow at Curtin. She is a passionate advocate for the rights of refugees and asylum seekers and serves on several boards of organisations that provide aid and services.

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Regional Stories

An Encounter with the Aviation Alphabet Susanna Castleden

Alfa

Alfa is for atmosphere, and air.

Bravo Bravo is for brush strokes and oil paint. A series of small paintings of clouds, skies and planes spotted above the artist’s studio in Mandurah. The anthropologist Tim Ingold, who will make several appearances in this alphabetical encounter, draws parallels between writing and flying, linking the movement of a quill or a calligrapher’s brush to the flight of birds, their feathers, and the wispiness of clouds (Ingold 2021, 69).

Charlie Charlie is for contrails. Rarely seen in the skies over Mandurah, these vapour trails signify the vertical height and horizontal distance of international air travel. These straight lines temporarily mark the sky, making air routes momentarily visible.

Delta

Delta is for variant. The skies are empty of planes.

Echo Here I’m going to link echo to shadow. Ingold (2021) reflects on a shadow cast on the ground by a wire in a fence line running parallel to a meandering path. The path, made on and of the earth through the movement of feet, he observes, is not ‘laid over the ground surface, but rather emerges as a differential within it’.

Whereas he notes the shadow cares nothing for the ground below, and is ‘indifferent to its variations […] it somehow blends with the surface without apparently touching it at all’ (Ingold 2021, 176).

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Foxtrot

Foxtrot is one of two dances in this alphabet.

Golf Golf is for graphite. Here I consider the powdery, silvery, expansive and elusive matter as a medium with which I created the dark cloudy backgrounds for a recent series of artworks called Dead Tenements. Images of regional sites such as Gwalia, Pender Bay and Leonora sit on the graphite surface, dark on dark, over which I printed the correlating dead mining tenements. I like that graphite is a mineral.

Hotel Hotel is for the Historical Aerial Photography collection, an archive of thousands of aerial photographs held by Geoscience Australia.

The photographs, taken systematically by planes as they traversed the sky in a linear fashion, recorded land information and were used for mapping and surveying prior to the development of satellite imagery. Each photograph was recorded, along with the aircraft’s path, on a flight line diagram, which in itself became a map of a map.

India India is for the Icelandic volcano that, although relatively small in volcanic terms, caused disruptions to flights over Europe as the ash cloud spread and the airspace was declared a ‘No Fly Zone’. The dramatic impact caused by the unanticipated pause to international air travel saw the embodiment of the ash cloud as an entity beyond our human control, it ‘seemed to mock human dreams of omnipotence’ and ‘bristled with affective charge’ (Adey and Anderson 2011, 16).

Juliett Juliett was the pilot flying the plane on the 2nd of December.

As it flew overhead, Walker, beckoned by its sound, moved outside to scan the sky, observing the colour of the clouds, the temperature of the day. But the plane, perhaps hidden by the clouds, remained unseen. And Juliett, who had been shark spotting all afternoon, hadn’t found what she’d been searching for either.

Kilo

Kondidin, Kirup, Kellerberrin, Katanning, Karratha, Kambalda, Kalbarri

Lima Lima is for lines. In Walker’s paintings these lines inhabit an in-between world, they are incarnations of that which is not visible.

They sit in the ‘ghostly’ space of survey lines, of longitude and latitude, of the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn, and the equator (Ingold 2007, 49).

Mike

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Mandurah, Meekathara, Mingenew, Mullewa, Morowa

Regional Stories

Novembe r November is for navigation lines. Ingold, reflecting on the fence wire (featured in Echo), imagines a ship’s navigator plotting course on a chart. He states, ‘The lines on his chart, it seems to me, could have had no more business with the actual surface of the sea than the wire of the fence has with the surface of the ground’ (Ingold 2021, 172). It makes me think differently about aviation charts and dead tenement maps.

Oscar

Ocean Beach, Onslow, Osmington

Papa Papa is for pencil, which follows on from Golf (graphite) and Lima (lines). In Walker’s paintings a pencil line sits between the viewer and the clouds, delineating invisible spaces and movements in the air. They could be contrails (although unlikely over Mandurah) or waypoints (we get to these at Whiskey), or perhaps markings from an instrument screen.

Quebec Quebec is for Qantas, specifically the A380 named after the Australian pioneering aviator Nancy Bird Walton. In 2015 artist Shaun Gladwell took QF1, the Sydney - London flight, on the Nancy Bird Walton, during which he covertly made a video work with the dancer Kathryn Puie. He commissioned Puie to perform a dance (in a costume hastily donned prior to landing) in the fleetingly empty cabin space created between the last passenger alighting and the service crew boarding.

Romeo Romeo is for rubbing. In a boneyard in Arizona I made a rubbing of the wing of a passenger jet that had been retired from service, surplus to requirements. The two-plus-two seating arrangement inside the empty plane gave some respite from the baking Mojave Desert heat, oxygen masks flaccidly hanging from the ceiling, tray tables not returned to their upright position. When standing on the wing making the rubbing, the heat made the paper brittle, the gesso tacky and my knees blister. Later the desert winds bruised and punctured the paper further. I like to think of this atmospheric involvement akin to Ingold’s argument for the presence of lines in the landscape; that the bruised paper and scumbled gesso have ‘not yet broken off from, or parted company with, the elements out of which they are formed’ (Ingold 2021, 169).

Sierra Sierra is stillness. As the plane moves across the sky, it accentuates our sense of staying put, attending to the task of intimately painting the mobile entity above. Painting is stillness.

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Tango the second dance, is for tail. I made a rubbing of an airplane tail in Utah in late 2019, a few months before mobility was halted by a global pandemic, when aircraft were still flying. The plane, a 1950’s Expeditor, had already been grounded after being retired from service 35 years earlier. I was drawn to its stout frame and silvery studded surface and the idea that this type of aircraft was used for aerial mapping missions. I liked that it had helped map the world, and in turn, I was mapping, at 1:1 scale, its worn and marked surface through the tactile process of frottage.

Uniform Ultramarine blue and umber.

Victor Victor is for the thousands of vertical photographs held in the Historical Aerial Photography archive, stitched together to make a map of the country.

Whisky Whisky is for waypoints. Waypoints are invisible geographical markers in the sky, designated by coordinates and a five-letter capitalised word; they punctuate air routes, and for pilots they are ‘the sky’s audible currency of place’ (Vanhoenacke 2016). The names, like the aviation alphabet, are designed to be distinct and easily pronounceable by voice, and although mostly randomly generated, sometimes these names have expressive links to the geographies and histories below. With charmingly esoteric humour, pilots approaching Perth airport from the northwest have to manoeuvre through the following waypoints: WONSA, then JOLLY, then SWAGY, then CAMBS, BUIYA, BILLA, BONGS, UNDER, ACOOL, EBARR and finally TREES. X-ray

is for sunray.

Yankee Yanchep, Yallingup, York, Yalgoo, Yarloop Zebra And finally, Zebra is for the Zenith CH2000 Alarus, a two-seater aircraft based at Jandakot airport. I like to think it was the Zenith that drew Walker’s eye skywards above his studio in Mandurah, left some lines, hid behind clouds, created some stories, and is the central character in at least one of these paintings.

Ingold, T. (2021) Correspondences. Cambridge. Polity Press. John Wiley & Sons.

Ingold, T. (2007) Lines: A brief history. New York. Routledge.

Peter Adey & Ben Anderson (2011) Anticipation, Materiality, Event: The Icelandic Ash Cloud Disruption and the Security of Mobility, Mobilities, 6:1, 11-20, DOI: 10.1080/17450101.2011.532919 Vanhoenacker, M. Skyfaring. A Journey with a pilot https://www.cntraveler.com/stories/2015-06-02/a-pilot- explains-waypoints-the-hidden-geography-of-the-sky accessed 20/06/21 66

James Walker, Plane Spotting - Traverse 30 Days (detail), 2019, oil and pencil on aluminum composite panel, 30 panels, 18.5 x 30 cm each. Courtesy of the artist. Installation view, The Alternative Archive, 2021. Photography by Sue-Lyn Moyle.

Author’s note Airplanes have featured in a few of my works over the years, most recently a large-scale rubbing of the tail of an Expeditor. The rubbing was a way of mapping, at 1:1 scale, the studded surface of the tail. I was drawn to Walker’s paintings for the airplanes, their atmosphere, and the tiny graphite cartographic details that emerged through clouds. The works on the gallery wall precipitated a journey of sorts as the viewer moved along the line of 30 small, detailed works. For me, the aviation alphabet was a delightful way to bring all these parts together.

Susanna Castleden is an artist and Dean of Research in the Faculty of Humanities at Curtin University. Through large-scale drawing and printmaking processes, Susanna’s art practice considers mobility, mapping, distance and proximity, and often includes physical or durational elements.

Susanna has received a number of awards including the Linden Prize (VIC); the Burnie Print Prize (TAS), Joondalup Prize (WA) and Bankwest Art Prize (WA) as well as runner up in the Fremantle Print Award (WA). Susanna’s artworks are included in major collections including the National Gallery of Australia and the Art Gallery of WA. 67

Ripple Effect Rosemary Stevens

I am prehistory; a predator gilded in memory.

Flying saucers braille my skin, horns attuned to the moon.

Memorial plaques veil the names of the future dead overseeing the space between – semaphores of silence – Arachnid angst lurks in shadows – grows extra legs.

I am a corridor of whispers behind the door, the whiskered cat coiled, black, under the lamp, at home on the fringes where your dream is my dream.

Kink in the hall. Bow-legged stand wears snake turban, tight-coiled weave of pastel scales.

Shades of childhood.

A sinister turn unslithers carpet snake.

Feel me in your belly.

The tip of its tail – bone pale – charms your spine: let go into my lunar rug-scape.

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Imaginary Worlds

Slip past wise lips, paternal smile – death is art – seagull dashed to granite; chador, a mystery.

Crouch with puppy on the prayer mat where paradise trees branch families and dark flowers bloom.

Black dog lies down with the gilded serpent, reptilian eyes seeking the centre.

Water buffalo answers the call, great head lifted, body a rock radiating from the red centre.

Uluru dreaming.

Earth my body; rivers my blood; sun-beat heart; my words, your breath.

Listen!

Cat pricks an ear, sentinel on the shelf, sinister side inhabiting the mirror it presses against.

Gaze fixed on the ghost of the past enfolded in mystery.

Which one is true?

I am a corridor of carcasses. No ear to hear.

Five black bones.

I am Wednesday’s child, photographic memory in black and white on the paper carpet, head lifted, lit from within, right hand reaching.

Who is this child called by the Muezzin?

What does he know of camel coiled in moon-spun rope, noose at the neck; outback forebears, feral; free?

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Dromedary looks to the future, beyond black hounds to where the stingrays come at the hour of death, and the call is answered.

The black beasts break their chains, teeth bared, hounding the heels of the past.

Steal past the three-headed dog, leaping its double into the void.

Dog stars caught in constellations – granite pools of chandeliers.

Steal to the beach; the pier in the present, already past, to rainbow jewels of memory; stars in your eyes, head lifted, right hand reaching, stingrays under your skin.

Author’s note I was captivated by Abdul-Rahman Abdullah’s 2021 exhibition, Everything Is True. ‘Ripple Effect’ tracks my own journey through corridors of memory sparked by Abdullah’s whimsical interplay of illusion and reality. The artist’s dreamscape has archetypal resonance; feline images recall a childhood pet, and a recurring dream where a black cat glides behind a beaded curtain, and a snake uncoils. The sculpting of wood into soft drapes, snakeskin and feathers inspired my attempt to echo the artist’s playful way with detail and juxtaposition affirming the links that make everything true.

Rosemary Stevens is a Western Australian writer and sessional lecturer in creative and professional writing at Curtin University. Her short fiction and non-fiction have appeared in The Asia Magazine, Westerly, Fremantle Press, Meniscus, and other publications. She has a background in publishing and editing and has worked as a travel writer in S.E. Asia.

Rosemary facilitates life writing courses at The Centre for Stories and other community venues. She is also part of a group of female performance artists creating autobiographical works exploring planetary and zodiacal influences on the vowels and consonants inspired by Rudolf Steiner.

Abdul-Rahman Abdullah, Wednesday's Child, 2013, tinted resin, paper, chandelier.

Courtesy of the artist and Moore Contemporary. Installation view, Everything is True, 2021.

Photography by Sue-Lyn Moyle.

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Ghost and Wednesday Anne Ryden

‘It’s okay,’ Wednesday once whispered to no-one in particular.

Ghost and Wednesday have a favourite game. ‘Step. On. The. Black!’

Ghost releases the light’s reflection, and the dogs complete their leaps in the dark, throwing themselves into a fight. ‘Break your sculptor’s back!’

Wednesday gazes into a chandelier and the light recaptures the dogs in a tumble of teeth and legs. The caverns fill with their laughter.

When the visitors are in, Ghost and Wednesday try to keep the dogs in place. But it is difficult not to blink when you stare into a light for a long time, and not to shimmy when your shroud makes such beautiful folds.

Once, when Ghost shimmied just as Wednesday blinked, the silvergulls scavenging near the dogs accidentally became part of the exhibition. ‘It’s okay,’ Wednesday whispered to Ghost then. ‘You didn’t know what could happen.’

The visitors fill the caverns with wonder at the movement in stillness and admiration of the exquisite craft. But in one place, they all become silent.

Wednesday mustn’t look. ‘Step on the black,’ Wednesday keeps one half of the chant going. ‘Break your sculptor’s back,’ Ghost the other.

The dogs are shiny black under the lights, their teeth too white. Like the dogs frozen mid-leap, the visitors are briefly frozen in place by unheard growls, though soon emboldened by invisible leashes.

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Imaginary Worlds

The visitors do not know that without light, dogs and darkness are one.

But Ghost knows because Ghost learnt from Wednesday, and Wednesday knows because Wednesday learnt that day when Ghost first came to stay.

‘It’s okay’, the caverns echo to no-one in particular.

Abdul-Rahman Abdullah, Little Ghost, 2019, painted wood, 125 x 78 x 52cm. Courtesy of the artist and MARS collection. Installation view, Everything is True, 2021.

Author’s note Abdul-Rahman Abdullah’s works are filled with life frozen in a moment.

At the exhibition Everything is True, one of the first pieces I saw was Little Ghost who appeared to have spun around just as I walked in.

Deeper into the space, separated from Little Ghost by a wall, there was Wednesday’s Child, sitting on his flying carpet staring up into a beautiful chandelier. And I wondered why Wednesday’s Child is full of woe.

Anne Ryden lives, works, and gardens on Wadjuk Noongar Boodja.

She writes to fix her thoughts and memories in time or at least on a page.

Her work has been published in Lifewriting Annual, Axon, Meniscus, and Westerly, and by Night Parrot Press. She has also published several translations. She is a senior lecturer in the professional writing program at Curtin University.

‘Ghost and Wednesday’ was first published in Westerly 66.1, June 2021, p. 117.

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The Dogs Ashleigh Angus

The dogs had been panting outside my door for three days. I could almost feel the warmth of their breath through the wood. I knew that if I opened it, I would be pressing into black fur, a paw, an open jaw. They would tear me to pieces. The largest dog was as tall as my hips; there was another only slightly smaller, and one pup, who looked to be less than a year old. The woman who owned them lived in the flat below mine and used to take the three of them out into the shared garden for half an hour every day. She never walked them, only watched as they tore through the yard, all black fur and yellow teeth, falling into holes they had made themselves and diving into the overgrown hedges, which were sturdier than the fences that leaned behind them. They only stopped to lap the water in the shell-shaped paddle pool the toddler in 1A liked to sit in. Three naked Barbie Dolls floated, face-down, inside it. The dolls’ arms were covered in scratches and teeth marks, just like mine were.

The woman never spoke to me, only ever glanced my way as I walked up or down the stairs, sometimes nodding her cigarette in greeting. I pulled the sleeves of my jumper over my palms when she did, though I should have been pulling them up; should have presented my bare wrists to her and said, ‘See? See what they did?’

The woman’s nails were as long as her dogs’, and I thought, those dogs could tear her to pieces.

I had been finding black fur in my apartment for months: on the curtains, my bed sheets, my clothes, the strands so thick they sometimes became wedged in my fingertips and toes.

I don’t know how they were doing it, but somehow, they were getting in.

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Abdul-Rahman Abdullah, The Dogs, 2017, stained wood and chandeliers, dimensions variable.

Courtesy of the artist. Installation view, Everything is True, 2021. Photography by Sue-Lyn Moyle.

One day I came in with groceries while the dogs were outside. The largest one bounded through the door as soon as it heard me, knocking its owner into the frame. It ripped one of the bags from my hand and began tearing through it. Pasta spilled onto the floor. It stamped eggshells into the carpet and made horrible gasping noises as it inhaled the carrots. It found a can of tomatoes and crushed it in its mouth in one bite. Red dripped down its chin and swirled around its teeth. The sweet metallic smell reminded me of blood.

The woman took hold of the dog’s collar. ‘He won’t bite,’ she said, tugging it away from the bag.

My throat was dry, and I wondered if I had been screaming.

‘It’s just the food,’ she continued. ‘He’s always hungry.’

She pulled it outside, and nudged the warped door closed with her foot, leaving me to pick up the groceries myself. I could hear her chanting, ‘That’s it—it’s okay—you’re alright,’ and though the words were not meant for me, I found them comforting.

I knelt next to the spilled groceries. No, I thought. No, no, no. I moved everything around just to be sure; there were no watery stains, no chunks of carrot. The eggs were lined up neatly in their carton.

I had seen it tear at the food, hadn’t I? I had smelt the tomato and tin.

I shook the packet of pasta. There were no holes in it. I thought about opening it up and pouring it onto the carpet just for something to clean.

‘It’s okay—you’re alright,’ I thought to myself in the woman’s voice.

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I pulled my sleeves down over my wrists and placed everything back carefully.

My bed whined like the dogs when I moved. They liked to match its pitch when they were crouched under my bed. Sometimes they stayed there all night; other times, their stomachs would bring them out. I shut my eyes at the smallest of movements beside my bed. Their fur smelt like smoke and petrol. First, I would feel warm breath in my ears. Then, one of them pressed its wet nose into my cheek blindly before sliding it down my neck, and I thought please no, don’t bite there, and the wet trailed down, down, clinging to the hair on my arms, sniffing out my fingers, licking between them, then nudging my hand over, tasting the sweat on my palm, then breathing over my wrist, and I could feel it widening its mouth; saliva cooled the scratches there, and it pressed its teeth into my arm, tightening its grip slowly, the pain swelling steadily, until both my arm and head seemed to be floating up from the bed, and I wished it would just bite down into my bone and be done with it; none of this slow sucking. I felt my skin burst, smelled iron, and it pulled away. I almost wanted to reach for its head and pull it back, demanding it finish the job.

My fingernails were lined with blood the next morning. Fur was stuck to the inside of them.

I thought of going to the woman’s apartment and telling her what had been happening. ‘Help me,’ I would say. I pictured her reaching out for my hands and pressing her pointed nails into them.

She usually took the dogs out in the afternoon, so I made sure to do my shopping in the morning. But three days ago, when I came in with my groceries, I saw three shadows moving in the yard. I paused. Their noses flared and turned towards me. The woman was not standing in the doorway.

‘Hello?’ I called, hoping she was outside, but there was no answer. I was almost embarrassed, standing in front of them in the day, when all of us knew each other so well at night. They were the only ones I had shown my wrists to for months.

I took a step towards the stairs and so did they. I could feel their growls in my stomach. I slowed my breath so they wouldn’t think I was afraid. The largest one began skulking closer, its fur rippling over its ribs. The other two formed a line behind it.

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Imaginary Worlds

The large one crouched and showed his teeth. They leaked blood and spit, and I thought, they have torn her to pieces.

I glanced at the paddle pool. The Barbies’ chewed up arms were no longer attached to their bodies, heads bobbed in the water, and their legs were spread over the surface, pink with blood.

Suddenly, my wrists collapsed beneath the weight of the groceries. The bags flopped onto the floor, spilling their guts. The large one started, and I ran up the stairs, two at a time, hearing the dogs tearing at the canvas bags, puncturing metal, clawing at plastic, their teeth snapping, tongues smacking, but at least one of them was more interested in me than the shopping, for I could feel something nipping at my heels and breathing behind my knees.

I reached my top floor apartment, panting, determined not to look behind me, and forced my key into the lock. It seemed to have become too big for it; it wouldn’t turn. The metal cut into my hand. I jammed it in further, readying myself for pain, for a jaw to clamp around my calf, wondering when it would happen, why it hadn’t happened already, still hearing the dogs slapping at my groceries. Something dripped down my leg: sweat, piss, or drool. I turned the lock, and as I was shutting the door, I saw the smallest dog sitting on the stairs, its tail slapping the concrete. It closed its mouth and cocked its head to the side, and in its eyes, I saw my own.

Author’s note I was struck by the ferocity of the dogs, suspended in the air alongside the fragile beauty of chandeliers — chandeliers that situate that ferocity in a domestic space which can hardly contain it. Thus, this story became a work about being uncomfortable in your own home, of sharing close quarters with others who are unknown and unpredictable, of the breaking down of boundaries inside those close quarters, and even of intruders — those who creep in the night and who are a frightening presence but a presence nonetheless; something to anchor your fear to that which exists outside of yourself.

Ashleigh Angus completed a collaborative PhD in Creative Writing at Curtin University and Aberdeen University in 2021. Her writing has been published in Axon, Causeway/Cabhsair, Pause (PWP Curtin, 2019) and Westerly.

‘The Dogs’ was first published Westerly 66.1, June 2021, pp. 111-113.

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Trick Question Marie O’Rourke

Watching. Waiting. Alert. Posed and poised. Conscious, perhaps, that someone watches you, too?

My eyes trace your elegant curves: ear, to neck, to spine, to tail. I stall, and here, the first discomfort — I dare not openly label it deception. A tail that seems to fall straight down, a shadow telling the wrong story, for stepping to the side, forward, angling my head, a generous hooked end is revealed. I fixate on that tail, its truth both curved and straight in a world all trick-of-the-light and talking shadows.

Edging closer, another secret revealed: that you are only half; that you rely on a circle of silvered glass to make sense of what or who you might be. Half a body. Meticulously carved, faithful in every detail, but unbalancing too. I stare into your immovable, unreadable eyes. I note the grace and beauty of your features, the determined set of jaw, the strongly arched back, your firmly planted feet. I would reach and touch but resist, reluctant to shatter the illusion of silken fur atop twitching musculature. Fingernails catching on tiny indentations in carved resin — the opposite of softness and warmth — would undo me. When facts stare me in the face I’m always first to turn away.

Stepping back I see the final deceit. The mirror now tells a completely different story, casts another form onto the space at my feet: the curved cat back and ears, the dangling tail, suddenly transformed into a rabbit ringed in a halo of light. Watchwaiting, waitwatching; catrabbit, rabbitcat.

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Imaginary Worlds

You watch and wait and judge me too. See half of a carefully constructed replica. Or perhaps, now, merely the shadow I cast. Stand in a different position, shift the angle of the lights. Everything is/nothing is true.

My phone vibrates. I skim read the latest message from my lawyer.

Author’s note My piece was inspired by Abdul-Rahman Abdullah’s Watching, waiting, a seemingly simple sculpture which somehow told a different ‘story’ when viewed from different angles. At this time, I was in the final stages of separation from my husband and the work prompted similar questions to the process we were engaged in, distilling our 25 year relationship into numbers on a spreadsheet. In my play of language and imagery I hoped to capture a complex and confounding situation unable to be reconciled through an either/or view of the world. Instead, it insists on the also/and, just as Abdullah’s sculpture does Marie O’Rourke is a West Australian writer of personal essay and memoir.

She completed a PhD at Curtin University, exploring the multiplicity and mutability of memory, identity and the essay genre and taught across Curtin’s creative writing, professional writing and literary studies programs for six years. Marie’s work has been published in national and international journals including a/b, Essay Daily, Life Writing, Meanjin, New Writing and Westerly. Her manuscript, Kintsugi, was shortlisted for the 2022 Hungerford Award and will be published by Fremantle Press in 2024.

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这里有火舌的舞蹈 录在 纸板上的咬痕 犹如藕叶筛过的月光 树木沉吟着 把心事转进 年轮古老的留声机 一圈一圈 溪水不断地变换着调性， 试着嗓音， 时而惊诧于闪电的提示 时而疑惑于细风的劝谏 密雨点，稀雨点

洪荒陈述 宫倩

皴、擦、点、染 原是我的绝活儿 烘、破、泼、积 是我每天的太极 五彩云 擦红的面颊 鹅卵石 漂白的牙齿 朽木桩 皴皱的手臂 黑雨点、白雨点 时间在这里打了个趔趄 乱石因此收集它脚步的凌乱 山峦，在千百次捶打下 延展到遥远的地平线 河水揉搓着自己的影子 云雾一遍遍擦拭河面 不厌其烦 轻雨点、重雨点 这个古老的故事 太短，没有开始 太长，远看不到结束 全部都清楚展示了 只邀你的一点共振 给你头上一个爆栗 嘀嗒、嘀嗒 此雨点、彼雨点

Eternity and Change

The Narration of the Cosmos Qian Gong

Here is the dance of the tongue of fire Recorded in the tooth marks of burning holes Like the moonlight, sifted by the lotus leaves The trees are muttering to themselves Grinding their feelings into the growth rings One circle after another The creek changes the tunes Constantly trying her voice, Sometimes shocked by the thunder’s prompts Sometimes confused by the wind’s advice Dense raindrops, sparse raindrops Here time has tripped over The jumbled rocks collect its messy steps Mountains, under thousands of hammer blows Extend to the distant horizon The river rubs its shadows The fog polishes the surface of the lake Ceaseless and tireless Light raindrops, heavy raindrops 81

Dotting stroke, shading stroke, dyeing stroke, tinting stroke Are my exclusive stunts Baking ink, breaking ink, smashing ink, amassing ink Are my everyday taiji Rosy clouds, chafed cheeks Shiny pebbles, bleached teeth Rotten stumps, crinkled arms White raindrops, black raindrops This is my narration Too short to have a beginning Too long it never ends All laid out clearly I just invite a little vibration from you It seems that all you need is a flicker of finger on your head Which I did with the pitter-patter These raindrops, those raindrops.

Author’s note Although I was familiar with the techniques of traditional Chinese ink paintings, I was both surprised and pleased by Lindy’s ‘literal’ and whimsical adoption of these techniques in her works. Traditional painting techniques are imitations of nature but need to be meticulously practised to master.

However, Lindy bypassed these trained skills and let nature do its job. This ‘withdrawal’ is yet more powerful. It is also an act of ‘translating’ traditions into modern art practices. It is extremely innovative and apocalyptic to me.

The expressiveness of ink painting is befitting for a form such as poetry.

Qian Gong is a senior lecturer at School of Education, Curtin University.

Before joining academia, Qian was a journalist for a decade in the features department of a Chinese national newspaper. One of her beats was fine arts, especially traditional Chinese ink painting and calligraphy. Striving to be an expert in the field, Qian tried to learn calligraphy and failed. But her love and appreciation of arts have been always with her. This is the first time she tried to write poems in both Chinese and English, inspired by Lindy’s boldness and her ease in traversing both cultures.

‘The Narration of the Cosmos’ was first published in Where the Ink Falls edited by Rachel Robertson (JCG, 2022), pp. 24-28.

Lindy Lee, Ink Rain, 2021-22, ink and rain on paper. Courtesy of the artist and Sullivan & Strumpf, Sydney & Singapore. Installation view, Lindy Lee: Moon in a Dew Drop, 2022.

Photography by Sharon Baker.

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Copies, Answers and Aunties Denise Woods Are copies ‘always inferior to the original’?

Copies aren’t necessarily inferior, ‘it depends on your framework.’

I try to look into the carbon deposit heavy eyes of the subject of Lindy Lee’s The Silence of Painters. This is not easy. There are many versions that make up the entire artwork, and between the blue background paint and layers of photocopy carbon, I feel unable to get to know them. The European subject seems a bit shy, as if hiding behind a veil. Yet I feel drawn to them, all of them. They may not be the original, but they are not inferior, they have a haunting mystery and beauty about them. They have an aura.

Lindy Lee saw these as copies of herself, a ‘bad copy of China and European Australia’.

What am I a copy of?

My parents grew up in countries that were colonised. My father’s family were known as ‘the King’s Chinese’. They took on the traits of their British colonial masters – speaking English, listening to the BBC, loving Western classical music and musicals, having afternoon tea, enjoying British literature and cricket. But they were not carbon copies – my grandmother still wore sarong kebayas, attire influenced by the Indigenous people of the Southeast Asian islands they’ve lived on for generations. She didn’t wear this just for special occasions, she wore this all the time. She cooked Peranakan food and cakes, owned British recipe books, made butter cakes 84

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and biscuits. This was all just part of life, part of who they were. But when the Japanese came, this identity became a liability. They had to hide being somewhat of a copy of the British, and from a group that were known to work closely with the British.

My mother grew up in a country where they had to take on new names.

You do this because it was demanded by the state, and to show allegiance to the government. Fit in, be as close a copy as possible to what is considered acceptable. Chinese names were replaced with Indonesian sounding names. Chinese identity had to be hidden, cultural customs and celebrations could not be carried out openly. No rowdy Chinese New Year celebrations anymore. The Dutch and Japanese colonisers were harsh, and independence brought a different set of challenges. Don’t risk being accused of being communist or communist sympathisers – do the right thing, use the new names. My maternal grandmother wore Indonesian sarong kebayas as well, the family was not traditionally Chinese but also influenced by the culture and customs of the land that had been ‘home’ for generations. She was a great cook; she made my favourite beef and potato kroket. I grew up thinking this was Indonesian food, which it is, but it also isn’t really – it is the Indonesian version of the Dutch croquette.

My grandparents and parents were bad copies of the Chinese ancestors nobody in the family can remember, too many generations ago.

They were not exactly good copies of the Europeans that had such an influence on their lives either.

And they were also copies of the traditional owners of the lands they lived on.

I grew up reading Enid Blyton. I wanted to go to boarding schools like Malory Towers or St. Claire’s. I wanted to have midnight rendezvous with my friends. I longed to have adventures like the Famous Five. I am a copy of my parents and extended family.

Like the copies in The Silence of Painters, it’s not easy to work out what my family would have originally been like. They’ve been put through the copier many times. There’s a build-up of so many layers of experiences, each slightly different to the one before, offset just that slightly from each other. At times identity had to be hidden, just like the veil of carbon and ghost-lines in Lindy Lee’s artwork. The painters may be silent, but they are not absent.

‘I fit somewhere in between.’

But this is not the only or final answer Lindy Lee offers me.

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Lindy Lee, Auntie, 2008, inkjet print, synthetic polymer paint on Chinese accordion book. Courtesy of the artist and Sullivan & Strumpf, Sydney & Singapore. Installation view, Lindy Lee: Moon in a Dew Drop, 2022. Photograph by Sue-Lyn Aldrian-Moyle.

Contemplating identity and belonging are just the starting points of the journey to finding true north. The bigger answer, it would seem, is in another question.

‘The essential question in Zen is not who are you, but what are you?

The ‘what’ becomes this invitation to understand how this being is actually connected to this world…’

What am I? How am I connected to this world?

I look into the eyes of Auntie. There are several versions of Auntie Shueng Chan in the accordion book. Her collar tells me that she is wearing traditional Chinese attire, maybe a Cheongsam. Black ink on red, each version slightly different from the next, but there is clarity in her eyes. Auntie acknowledges me and my presence, I feel a connection with her. This is a head shot, also a copy, but of a photograph. No questions about the inferiority of copies here, rather a celebration of the rediscovery of images from family albums; images documenting ‘history, ancestry, and relevance’.

Red is a lucky colour, a colour of celebration. For Lindy Lee, it is also a nod to Imperial China and the Cultural Revolution. Two pages in Auntie’s book have ink splatters, possibly flung, a technique Lindy Lee connects with a sense of authenticity. Not ghost-lines, there are no veils covering Auntie’s gaze or face. Ancestor rendered through inkjet, the subject is not shy, identity not hidden.

I am connected through ancestry.

My aunties are copies, copies with clarity. I can look into their eyes and feel a connection. They have found ways to fit somewhere in between.

They have taken on different Asian and Western cultures, habits, and 86

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traditions, and live comfortably in that space. They understand how they fit into this world. They were educated in convent schools, grew up in patriarchal societies, shopped using local languages, became teachers, taught English, played netball and piano. They would wear Indonesian sarong kebayas or Chinese cheongsams but only for special occasions.

They would make me krokets, kueh pie tee, or take me out to high tea.

The answers are not limited to understanding identity but are found in learning about the self. Lindy Lee shows me how ‘selfhood is something that is always unfolding, is always being engaged, is always experiencing, is always changing, is always growing, is always connected.’

I can choose to engage or not to engage – I choose to engage with family, ancestry and history with all its complexities. These inform my current self and my current connections to this world. Finding true north is about the self, and selfhood is like the Auntie accordion book – always unfolding, always changing, but always connected. It was only as an adult I came to realise that my aunties loved me unconditionally.

‘Very beautiful women, strong in their presence.’

Author’s note I am inspired by Lindy Lee’s journey of finding her true north, and how this narrative is so creatively and philosophically expressed through her art in this exhibition. As an Australian Chinese, Lindy Lee moves from thinking about identity in relation to belonging (or ‘unbelonging’) between cultures, to learning about the self through her Zen practice. As an Asian Australian, I find answers to my own questions about identity, belonging and connections through Lindy Lee’s art. ‘Copies, Answers and Aunties’ reflects on how I choose to engage with Lindy Lee’s art, to try and discover my own true north.

Denise Woods is an Asian Australian academic living and working on the traditional lands of the Wadjuk people of the Noongar nation. She is a senior lecturer in the Bachelor of Communications program in the School of Media, Creative Arts and Social Inquiry at Curtin University, and an executive committee member of the Asian Australian Studies Research Network (AASRN). Her areas of interest include representations of race and Asia in the Australian media, her work has been published in the Journal of Australian Studies, Media International Australia, and the book Alter/Asians: AsianAustralian Identities in Art, Media and Popular Culture.

‘Copies, Answers and Aunties’ was first published in Where the Ink Falls, edited by Rachel Robertson (JCG, 2022), pp. 38-43.

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Monique Tippett, Karrakin Three, 2021, Silky Oak, synthetic polymers, charcoal, ink, lacquers and gold leaf on board, 234 cm x 234cm x 13cm. Courtesy of the artist. Installation view, IOTA21 Curiosities and Rituals of the Everyday, 2021. Photography by Sue-Lyn Moyle.

Curious Threads

Dollymount to Sorrento Danielle O’Leary

She grew up by the Irish Sea. Dollymount Strand is a 5-kilometre beach that floats on its own island, North Bull Island. To get to that beach, she had to stroll 400 metres from her childhood home, crossing Clontarf Road, and walk across the Wooden Bridge that was built in 1819. A port is to the right, which opens out into Dublin Bay, the Irish Sea. The sun rises over this sea.

The moments in and around the sea punctuated her childhood. She slowly walked across that high, unsteady bridge with courage as her parents balanced her steps.

When she married, her husband said he wanted to move to Australia.

‘I’ll go if we live by the beach,’ she told him. He promised that they would.

In 1982, she first flew over Indian Ocean, en-route to Perth. They landed on July 4, and went to the beach the next day. The winter weather was perfect – a bright sunny day, 17 degrees. No one was around. Is this paradise, she thought?

She now lives by the Indian Ocean.

Sorrento Beach is a 600-metre beach that is shaped with man-made stone walls. To get to that beach, she strolls 280 metres from her home, crossing West Coast Drive and walks along a wooden deck that curves 89

with the sand dunes. A harbour is to the right, which opens out into Marmion Marine Reserve, the Indian Ocean. The sun sets over this ocean.

He kept his promise. Their bedroom windowsill is decaying from the ocean salt in the air.

When she is struggling and needs energy, she goes to the beach.

When she walks along the shoreline, she needs to touch a rock on the stone wall before she can turn around.

When she is happy and wants to celebrate, she goes to the beach.

Sometimes with champagne, always with her husband.

She walks home, always breathing a little easier.

To stand on the beach – looking east in Dublin, looking west in Perth – she has a place.

She knows where she is. It makes her feel at home, no matter what country.

Author’s note This piece was inspired by Monique Tippett, Karrakin Three featured in the Indian Ocean Craft Triennial 2021. Tippett’s Karrakin series explores the idea that ‘most living things have a place. A point of return and repose. To nest, cover and rest’ (Tippett, Indian Ocean Craft Triennial 2021, Curiosity and Rituals of the Everyday, exhibition catalogue). This piece is a creative response to Tippett’s notion of importance of a place for return and rest for migrants who have more than one home.

Danielle O’Leary is a senior lecturer at Curtin University. Her creative nonfiction has been published in Westerly and Meniscus. Like her mother, she loves the ocean.

‘Dollymount to Sorrento’ was first published in Meniscus, 9.2, 2021, pp. 145-147 90

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Weaving Circle Chemutai Glasheen

It was the day before market day. The weaving circle was a quiet chant of ‘juu, chini, juu, chini, in and out, in and out,’ as a flurry of hands curled and unfurled around clumps of sisal fibres. Each set of fingers at work in their individual tasks but oddly seeming to work as one. A little further away, three women soaked sisal fibres in containers of roots, bark, soils and ochre and hung them out to dry. The day was still early and the sun just beginning to bite.

Chari slipped into the weaving circle. She did not need to say anything.

This circle was always there, women came and left as they pleased throughout the day. The earliest would have been there to meet the sun as it rose over the Taita Hills and onto the endless green plains of sisal in their bloom.

Chari examined the viondo she had completed weaving the day before.

Should she put ornaments on them today or start a new basket? Across from her, displayed in the grass thatched gazebo and spread out on a large plastic sheet, was the week’s collection of colourful viondo ready for market day. To the left, freshly dyed sisal hung on the drying racks.

‘Chari, remember Rani has asked for medium sized bags this time,’ the head weaver called out as she motioned to someone to take a sack of freshly stripped sisal to the dye stations.

The mention of Rani irritated Chari. Rani was their main client and generally paid a little more than the others. He ran a big tourist shop in Maasai Mara. When he came around, you would think he was choosing a kiondo for his own dowry. He scrutinised every kiondo, finding fault with 91

everything: too big, too small, too plain, too colourful, rims too rough, finish not good enough. Anything to drive their price down!

‘We have to make sure our visitors can take a piece of Taita back with them,’ Rani haggled like a seller of mangoes in the marketplace.

Chari grabbed a handful of fibres and pinched out a small amount.

She split it into two, swept her skirt aside and began to roll the strands on her thighs. Occasionally, she would use her fingers to twist the twine.

Strands went over and under. Twine twisted here and twine pulled through there. The women worked mostly in silence. A little chit chat ebbed between individuals and through the whole group, sometimes measured, sometimes loud.

‘Soti,’ the head weaver called out, ‘ni sawa?’

‘Yes, it is well.’ Soti was barely audible.

The women stilled their tongues, but their hands picked up pace. Soti was both reed and sisal, brittle yet strong. Her dimply smile had disappeared long before they were mandated to wear masks in public.

‘The brothers still fighting?’

Soti stopped weaving long enough to adjust her headscarf. Her eyes stayed on her kiondo. It did not look like she was going to say much that day.

Chari directed a silent curse at the brothers-in-law who had yet to come to terms with who deserved what of their father’s estate. Their brawling, which sometimes got physical, had left Soti cowering, bruised and traumatised.

The women busied themselves. Someone passed Soti some already spun pale fibre. Another went and crouched next to her and gently began to untie the knots that had formed. Soti’s work was often a mess of unwanted knots or intriguing accidental patterns.

‘Sister, you know you cannot weave until your feelings are in the right place.’

If Soti appreciated the help, she did not voice it.

‘Never mind that coward of a husband of yours.’ This time the head weaver spoke. ‘I am ready to come fight both him and your shemeji. They are not my elders after all.’

Not only was the group leader older, but she was also a bull. She had been running up and down the Taita Hills since she was little, undeterred by the fear of wildlife in the Tsavo. Fighting in-laws was nothing.

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‘Meanwhile, my husband’s asked if he could bring me a friend.’ The woman across from Chari spoke up.

The other women laughed and sneered at the husband’s suggestion.

‘Again? Isn’t that wife number seven now?’

The conversations flowed again between the women and between the weaving fingers.

One by one, the women began to rubbish their in-laws and their good for nothing husbands for not doing enough or never being home. Despite their outrage, when the sun began its downward journey, they all hurried home on the pretext of cooking for the children when their priority was really their husbands.

Chari was in no such rush. She had buried her husband two months before their first child was born. That child was now away in boarding school and her time was all hers. Weaving was all Chari seemed to do. She weaved when walking, she weaved when travelling in a crowded bus and she weaved when she settled in for the evening. Wrapped in solitude, sisal fibres spilling out of every receptacle in the house, she would allow herself to dream about her viondo. She would wonder how far they had travelled. If only she could go where they went. She wondered if they were being used for the purpose she had given them and if they carried potatoes and gifts of food and beads like they did in Taita. Perhaps they had acquired a new purpose. Were her viondo, with the brightly coloured beadwork, admired or were they gawked at for the foreign thing that they were? Chari shook her head slightly. No, her viondo spoke of the harmony of hands and spirit and creativity that had been passed down by grandmothers and mothers through the generations. Rani always harangued them about treating the leather straps or the viondo would be doused in disinfectant and chemicals as though inherent in them was disease. But one thing Chari was sure of, her viondo were strong and enduring like the weavers of Taita Hills.

‘Chari?’ The head weaver broke into her thoughts. ‘Three of your bags sold over the weekend.’

‘The ones with no handles?’

‘Yes. The black ones.’

The women erupted with claps and ululations. Chari was not a fast weaver, but she was prolific. When Rani first asked for handless ones, Chari had been hesitant. What is one going to do with a plain black kiondo with no handles? On market day, the viondo needed to be filled with 93

produce and carried on the backs of women; the long leather handles around their heads. Chari reached for some sisal.

‘What are you making this time?’ the head weaver asked.

‘I haven’t decided,’ replied Chari twisting a strand with her fingers.

‘Maybe something for my niece. She is getting married soon.’

Chari generally started weaving long before the full picture of what she was making was formed. All she needed was a hint and her fingers would reveal the depths of her mind. She set about creating the twine. She selected a few colours. Even reached for a blue one. For her own wedding, her grandmother had made her a large grey and brown kiondo and presented it to her full of sweet potatoes.

‘See this?’ her grandmother had said, pointing to the centre of the base. ‘This is where you begin your weaving, at the navel. And this here, this strand is the warp. It always stands erect. Like the warp, remember to give your husband the respect he deserves as the head of your home.

This other strand is the weft. This is you, my child. This is what holds it all together. Chari, this kiondo is yours. Be big, be strong and be practical.’

In the weeks following her husband’s death, neighbours had popped in and filled the kiondo with potatoes and maize and rice and beans and cabbage. The kiondo sat in the corner of the kitchen and was rarely empty.

Chari was yet to make one a kiondo as big as the one her grandmother had made her. Feeling a surge of inspiration, she adjusted her lesso and started on the base of the basket. She, too, was going to make something big and strong and practical. The kiondo would be a blessing to her niece.

Shutting out the chatter, she got busy. Soon, the weaving group was back in chant.

‘Juu, chini. In and out, twist and through.’

Out of the harmony of hands and community, emerged beautiful patterned viondo, and woven into them was the spirit of the Taita women.

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Yee I-Lann, Tlnukad Sequence #01 (Ridges at the roof of the mouth), 2021, split bamboo pus weave with kayu obol black natural dye, matt sealant, 210 x 303 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Silverlens Gallery, Manila. Installation view, IOTA21 Curiosities and Rituals of the Everyday, 2021. Photography by Sue-Lyn Moyle.

Author’s note As I immerse myself in the IOTA21 exhibition, I am transported to my childhood in Kenya. I find myself strolling the streets and market, seeing the powerful unity of women and girls, yarning and weaving baskets and mats, cornrowing and braiding hair. The artwork of Yee I-Lann At The Roof Of The Mouth and Kirit Dave’s Untitled 2021 resonate deeply within me and the memories of community gatherings come to the fore. In both works, I find strength and beauty and I am inspired to weave something too; something that speaks of belonging and intertwines the essence of their work.

Chemutai Glasheen is a sessional academic in the School of Media, Creative Art and Social Inquiry and the School of Education at Curtin University. Her interest is in fiction, human rights and education. Her collection of fiction, I am the Mau and Other Stories, was published by Fremantle Press in 2023.

‘Weaving Circle’ was first published in Meniscus, 9.2, 2021, pp. 150-154 and in I am the Mau and Other Stories by Chemutai Glasheen, Fremantle Press, 2023.

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His foam white arms After Pierre Fouché Lydia Trethewey

speak this story with the bite of a pin holding the pattern together.

a mess hall rough like bone of a cuttlefish and soft like lace.

tell me, without words with your fingers in cotton intricacies and loose hunger, pick the syllables from between the teeth of a frill shark.

he escapes as a limpet, clings to the littoral rush of tide and wind, hope

a sailor is seduced by the language of salt left on the lips afterwards, and brine-washed throats

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unspools his longing in the small scales of a braided rhythm, white crests kelp-brown hull-green and blue, blue, blue.

Pierre Fouché, His Foam White Arms (detail), 2015, cotton thread, wood, 24 x 640 x 7cm.

Courtesy of the artist and What If The World Gallery. Installation view, IOTA21 Curiosities and Rituals of the Everyday, 2021. Photography by Sue-Lyn Moyle.

the tickle of spray on his unshaven cheeks how many days at sea before he falls for the undulating ribcage of an ocean which breathes, an ocean which speaks to him a promise so deep he cannot resist ocean in the guise of a young man their love, ornamented like the coarse skin of a sea urchin, red welts from the lash of waves

in his wake, the sailor writhes a torture of last lights glimpses a silver sheen, ocean’s flesh like silk sheets, a demand to be touched behind shut eyes the sailor twines dreams from pillow-lace his lover rocks him to sleep in foam-white arms the peal of surging swells knocks the sides of his skull, his stowaway desire

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this ocean seeks to be inside speak from lungs water-logged and he can think of nothing more absolute, more perfect, than the seamless descent of a body submerged

Author’s note It is difficult to see the delicate lace scroll of His foam white arms, pinned to an ocean black wall. I lean close, and walk the unspooled length. The form of the scroll suggests landscape as language, knowing through moving. Fouché, a laceworker, has transmuted to braids a fragment from Crosbie Garstin’s epic poem ‘The Ballad of the Royal Ann’, in which a young man falls in love with the sea, personified as another young man.

As a poet, I re-thread this story into words, thinking on the common origin of text and textile.

Lydia Trethewey is a poet and artist based in Western Australia. Her work probes experiences of nascent queerness, focusing on the potential of ekphrasis to prompt solidarity with non-human beings. Her poems have appeared in various publications including Beyond Queer Words, The Ekphrastic Review, and Spineless Wonders. She is currently undertaking a PhD in poetry at Curtin University, where she works as a sessional academic in art. She completed her first PhD at Curtin in 2018, in visual art.

This poem was first published in Meniscus, 9.2, 2021, pp. 123-125.

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Curious Threads

Seven-part String Thor Kerr

Rhythmic prayer encircled a narrow apartment tower in Jakarta, waving in through grey windows to the folks within. In a small, drab apartment on the 14th floor, this prayer found a young man; sweaty, shirtless and propped up in bed. The prayer toyed with him as he fumbled to copy alphanumeric code within the screen of a mobile phone. The prayer swept into a lower pitch, sending slow vibrations through the inflamed membrane of his skull, squeezing his brain, blurring his vision, and messing his desperate attempt to join a conference call.

Novi sat up, drank from a glass on the bedside table then adjusted the pillowed prop to better see the phone he clutched landscape on his belly.

He touched open the videoconference link then pulled on headphones, finding relief in momentary silence.

Agus came on screen, holding a baby, ‘anyway, it’s all over social media.

Novi, hi, good you could join us. We were getting worried we would never see the money.’

‘Sorry guys.’

‘Hope the dangdut was worth it.’ Okto danced his shoulders.

‘Gentlemen, to business.’ Agus adjusted the baby’s swaddle. ‘Desi, take us through the protocol for this transaction.’

Desi cleared his throat then spoke clearly and deliberately to the six other men in the video call. The practised rounded vowels of Desi’s pronunciation matched his wrinkle-free shirt and cleanly-parted hair. ‘In this meeting’s agenda, three resolutions have been proposed. If we unanimously agree to all of them, each of us will send our codes during this meeting to Juni.’

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Desi gestured towards screen with two hands, palm up, as if passing a platter. ‘Juni has several important responsibilities. Juni will combine all the codes in correct order to reconstitute our private Bitcoin key. As, I’m sure you recall, we own a thousand coins in total, reflecting the All or Nothing club’s five-thousand-US-dollar investment in Bitcoin when its price crashed to five dollars. That was ten years ago today.’

‘Pity we didn’t wait two more months for it to hit the two-dollar-fifty floor.’

Septimus, chin on hand, goaded. ‘Nail-biting, hey Juni. Wah, almost lost half our savings! But you held fast my brother. Thank God you didn’t know how to sell Bitcoin.’

Desi’s head shook violently as he muttered inaudibly. He took a deep breath, then lifted a white page and read, ‘For each of our investments of one-thousand-and-eight Aussie dollars, we can expect a return in the range of US six to seven million with the Bitcoin price hovering around fortyfive-thousand US dollars. Juni will send the private key through encrypted means to the institutional buyer in Singapore, who will transfer payment directly to the US dollar investment account that I have set up for us in Singapore.’

‘Good to have friends in high places,’ said Septimus.

Desi continued, ‘Juni, please confirm your understanding that this process is correct.’

‘Yes.’ Juni came on screen in pyjamas surrounded by an orange Bladerunner backdrop. ‘That is correct.’

Desi typed, then looked up at screen. ‘From the total proceeds in our Singapore account, a small amount will be withheld for our Mount Kinabalu investor summit. The remaining balance will be divided in seven then transferred immediately to your respective nominated accounts. It is a clear-cut process. Thank you, everyone, for promptly returning the saleand-transfer agreements. All have been received, indicating that everyone is aboard to sell the Bitcoins today as we had agreed verbally at the All or Nothing gathering in Perth in 2011.’

‘I’m on board, but…’ Septimus winced as he rubbed a scarred hand backwards through thick stubble. ‘I’m wondering about the clause in the sale agreements we signed that gives the buyer a 3% discount on the current Coinbase exchange price.’

‘Coin exchanges have a cost.’ Juni’s eyes rolled. ‘And a risk in cashing out. This transaction is not small change.’

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Okto came on screen. ‘I think we would be happier if we knew who the buyer was. This is not like, back in the day, when you transferred Bitcoin for little bags of rare, exotic weed.’

‘Man, what is wrong with you.’ Juni looked skyward, clenching fists.

‘Thanks for reminding me why I got the hell out of Perth. I can’t wait to be free of this. Okto, if you don’t destroy the video after this transaction closes, I’m coming after you.’ Juni mouthed an expletive.

‘Brothers,’ Julian spoke slowly as he came on screen with a scruffy gridfilled whiteboard in the background. ‘Brothers, we have a bond that can’t be broken. Perhaps, Desi can provide some information about the buyer so we can be more comfortable with the transaction.’

‘OK.’ Desi came on screen. ‘The most I can say is that the company is a subsidiary under Temasek. This is the safest way to complete such a large Bitcoin sale. Without the discount margin it was not possible to get a sale contract ahead of the transaction. This contract has a confidentiality clause, so I can’t say anything else except that it has taken me weeks to negotiate.

So, please give me a break here.’

‘Thanks Desi,’ said Julian, leaning into screen.

Desi breathed deeply and paused for further comment, but none came.

‘Before we do anything, we should formalise the resolutions we made ten years ago at our smoky gathering in Perth.’

‘Can’t wait,’ said Juni.

Desi glanced at notes on his page. ‘Resolution One, we use some of the sale proceeds to meet in Sabah so Julian can guide us up the slippery slopes, as promised, to the summit of Mount Kinabalu. It is impossible to do that this year because of COVID-19. However, I propose we reserve onehundred-and-forty-thousand US dollars from the Bitcoin sale to pay firstclass travel, meals and accommodation for the mountain trek on a mutually agreeable anniversary date.’

A smile returned, completing Desi’s amicable demeanour. ‘One seventh of this, twenty-thousand dollars, could be a cost deducted from any of your individual tax liabilities arising from the Bitcoin transaction. Gentlemen, please vote Yes or No on the poll appearing on your screens to confirm whether you support this resolution.’ Desi squinted at the screen.

Novi blinked sweat from his eyes, then touched ‘Yes’ on screen.

Desi nodded while registering the votes. ‘Thank you, all, we have unanimous support for Resolution One.’ After pausing for effect, Desi 101

continued: ‘Resolution Two is that we undertake to do what we agreed on the day after our 2011 gathering. That is, each of us would destroy all copies of the nine-minute video of us dancing at the All or Nothing gathering.

This video of us as unruly students was to provide motivation for each of us to maintain securely our respective parts of the alphanumeric string comprising the private key for our Bitcoins. But after today’s transaction, it will no longer serve any useful purpose; quite the opposite in fact. So, do each of us undertake to destroy and do everything in our power to destroy each and every copy of that video once your share of net proceeds from the Bitcoin sale has been transferred to your nominated account?’

‘What a tragedy to lose that video memory. Such good-looking fellas, we were.’ Okto flexed his biceps. ‘So free, so wasted, so easy.’

‘I’m publishing the poll now, vote Yes or No whether you undertake to destroy all copies of that video.’ Desi concentrated on screen. ‘Six votes are in favour. One person is yet to vote. Come on. For some of us, the existence of that video is rather stressful. Oh come on, Okto.’

‘It’s not me. I’ve already voted, yes.’ Okto laughed. ‘I’m so insulted. Must be another deviant.’

‘Septimus,’ several of them shouted as their faces flashed on screen.

‘Where are you? Hey, dancing queen? Septimus, you deviant! Come on!’

‘Sorry, staff issue. I’m back.’ Returning to seat, Septimus flicked a dishcloth off his shoulder. ‘What are we doing?’

‘Voting on whether to destroy the video after receiving the transfer.’

‘Oh, yes.’ Septimus frowned as he read the resolution. ‘You should see my vote… on screen, now!’

Desi returned to screen. ‘Confirmed. Seven votes affirmative. We are all resolved to destroy and do everything in our power to destroy every copy of that video once the transfer share has been received. Now, before voting on the third and final resolution of this meeting on the sale of Bitcoin, there is Agus’ discussion item in the agenda. Agus?

‘Thanks Desi.’ Agus came on screen without the baby. ‘I think it is important that we go around the group, and find out what everyone intends to do with the Bitcoin proceeds.’

Agus paused to pick at baby dribble on his shirt. ‘Anyway, back when we were students, I didn’t think the fifty dollars a week I struggled to set aside for the All or Nothing club from stacking shelves would lead to much, let alone to six million dollars or more. I am grateful to Juni for suggesting 102

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Bitcoin and aggressively convincing us to invest the whole club’s fund in it even as the price fell through the floor. Thanks Juni. You’re a legend. Also, thanks Desi for organizing the banking and tax advice for the pending transaction. Thanks everyone else for being solid, mantap, brothers who supported each other as broke, and not so broke, students in Perth. I should also add, thanks for leading me astray back then. It was a rich and fulfilling experience. OK, let’s go around the group to learn what we intend to do with all that money! I’ll go first. Yes, I will quit my factory audit job and buy a nice piece of land. Then move my family from Batam back to Sumatra.

There, I will pretend to farm or invest in a cycling shop. Novi, you were last to join the meeting, how about you?’

‘Easy Mas. I’ll buy land in the new capital city for my municipal-areanetwork business.’ Novi smiled and mumbled. ‘I will be an Indonesian hero for building the sovereign network. Be another oligarch with a pet tiger.’

‘You have talked about this for years, but hasn’t the capital-city project been killed by COVID-19?’ Agus waited for a response. None came. ‘Never mind, Novi, from your isolated plot in Kalimantan it will be a short flight to our party at Mount Kinabalu. Who would like to speak next?’

‘I will keep doing what I’m doing,’ said Desi. ‘Six million doesn’t go very far in Singapore investing, where I enjoy my career.’

‘Yes,’ Septimus nodded. ‘Like Desi, I will keep doing what I’m doing. Run my little restaurant in Perth, but buy the property instead of paying rent to a landlord. Maybe buy the adjacent buildings, and become a greedy landlord too. I tell you, things are booming here.’

‘Without a partner and kids, you’ll own half the restaurants in Vic Park before you’re dead,’ Okto said. ‘When I’ve blown my stash on cars and parties, I’ll be sure to move in with you rent free. In the meantime, I will be planning my exit from public relations for a certain Western Australian mining magnate. But, I will probably never get around to quitting. Too hardlah. So, consider me stuck, floating between parties and media events, with more cash and hangovers than usual. Love you, boys.’

After a pause, Julian came on screen. ‘I can’t wait to get my hands on US six million. I will quit my family’s construction business, and build a resort, cafe and guide business on a hill near Kinabalu national park. I will rip up the palm oil trees, replace them with native forest. It will be a sanctuary for animals, particularly you party animals. Novi, you can stay whenever you get sick of networking the smart city, or whatever it is that you will do. In the meantime, I will recreate paradise for all of us.’

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‘Amen to that, Julian. I hear you, brother,’ said Juni. ‘After this transaction, I hope to never write another algorithm or deal with the Machiavellian politics inside a big tech organisation. Instead, I will buy a little property north of San Franciso and do nothing except get fit for our hike up Mount Kinabalu.

Perhaps on the summit, I can think of something else to do. I can’t program any more. Look, you see this hump on my back. See.’ Juni turned sideways to show a slight hunch. ‘See, what has happened to me. I’m so pissed off with my job. But, after this transaction, I will dedicate my days to getting rid of this hump, my hump, my fugly manly hump. I will be the best looking of you guys on Kinabalu summit. Wait and see.’

‘Thank you, all, for the enlightening dreams and career nightmares.’

Desi coughed a laugh at his own wit. ‘OK, for the final resolution, Juni will you add the hyperlink for everyone’s code transfer to the chat?’

‘Done.’

‘Thanks, Juni. For the final resolution, I would like everyone to complete the poll now showing on your screen once you have pasted your part of the alphanumeric string to the field that opens from the hyperlink.’ Desi concentrated on touching the screen. ‘There, it wasn’t so hard, I have just pasted in my part of the string for Juni to reconstitute the private key. Now, I will respond Yes to the poll confirming that I have transferred my part of the private-key string to enable the sale of 2,000 Bitcoins and to receive my one-seventh share of the proceeds from the sale less twenty-thousand dollars towards the cost of the Mount Kinabalu meeting.’

Desi stared at screen. ‘Great, that’s three now four affirmatives on the poll. We still have three more to go. Septimus, are you still with us? OK, two more to go. We have two more outstanding? Who hasn’t completed the process? Juni, don’t forget to do the poll too once you have entered your code.’

‘I’ve done that already,’ Juni banged his hand down in frustration. ‘It’s 3am here. Jesus, Okto, paste in your code.’

‘Sorry, Mas.’ Okto laughed. ‘I couldn’t help but hold you in suspense.

Pasted and affirmed. Got you all.’

‘OK, that makes six on the poll and seven once Okto votes yes,’ said Desi smiling.

‘I voted Yes already,’ said Okto.

‘Juni, do you have six or seven of the codes in place,’ asked Desi.

‘Just six, one is still missing.’

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Curious Threads

‘OK, let me open up the poll results.’ Desi was no longer smiling.

‘Novi! Novi has not responded. Novi, have you lost your Internet connection? Has the power dropped again? Must be raining.’

‘Novi, where are you?’ sung Okto. ‘This is not like you, baby. You are the most boring and predictable among us. Novi, a network engineer shouldn’t drop from the network.’

‘Novi is still in the meeting. Novi, Novi!’ Desi peered at the screen.

‘Maybe he has fallen asleep. I can see the top of his head, his forehead, I think.’

‘Novi! Wake up man!’ Juni shouted, then turned from screen. ‘Sorry, love, just a work issue. OK, I will. Yes, go back to sleep.’

‘Hey, I’ll call his other mobile numbers,’ Julian picked up a phone and began working the screen. ‘The first one is ringing.’

‘Hey.’ Septimus leaned sideways into view. ‘That screech, is that the ring tone?’

‘A pangkis recording.’ Julian mouthed the sound. ‘Novi linked Indigenous songs to contacts so he knew who was calling, and from where. He knows this is me from Sabah.’

‘Maybe he can’t hear it with the headphones on. Try again.’

The piercing sound of a pangkis cry came from a mobile phone on Novi’s bedside table, animating the surrounding air but not him. Novi lay motionless, chin-on-chest, in bed with a phone propped against a towel on his otherwise naked belly. On screen, Julian held the phone and an anxious look.

The pangkis waved outwards, dampening through Novi’s body on one side and deflecting off an oxygen cylinder on the other. The high-frequency soundwaves ricocheted through a window into humid southern winds that carried the cry across Jakarta Bay. The pangkis skimmed across lowfrequency zones over Java Sea to the northwest coast of Kalimantan where it was relayed home.

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Author’s note Seven-part String is about seven men trying to re-constitute their private key to sell bitcoins during the COVID-19 pandemic. These former students are held together by woven threads of history and electronic signals passing through undersea cables. Can these networks hold the seven together? Seven-part String is an entertaining answer to the challenge of writing a seven-character dialogue based on Yee I’Lann’s (2021) breathtaking video of Tagaps Dance Theatre performing in a seven-headed Lalandau hat.

Thor Kerr works in Curtin University’s School of Media, Creative Arts and Social Inquiry. Thor’s creative productions and research projects explore scales of space and time in narratives about technologies and communities.

These investigations are inspired by diverse experiences working for news and information industries in Southeast Asia, and through his scholarship in Whadjuk Noongar Country. Thor’s books include To the Beach (2015) and Setting up the Nyoongar Tent Embassy (2013). Thor has written for academic journals and broader media, including The Age, Sydney Morning Herald and The Jakarta Post.

‘Seven-part String’ was first published in Meniscus 9.2, 2021, pp. 133-141.

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Curious Threads

The Naked Truth Kate McCaffrey

At twenty she viewed the world optimistically, unaware of her position in the country she believed was egalitarian. A far cry from her birthplace, fifteen thousand kilometres away, which she viewed with disdain; restricted, working class and poor. No opportunities, destined to work in the local fish and chip shop or stacking shelves at Tesco, married at eighteen, four children under four by twenty. But here, education was the key to success and opportunity.

University. The hallowed halls of great thinkers. Know Thyself, the inscription read and daily as she passed it, she believed she did.

‘I see, what have we here today?’ the university professor asks, peering down his nose, through his bifocals, in the crammed office, teetering bookshelves and withering plants, claustrophobic and stifling in the presence of twelve others, she squirms on the hard wooden seat. ‘It looks like we have ourselves a Teen Queen.’ The chorus of embarrassed laughs, she sniffs, views her appearance through his eyes. Over-dressed, shoes polished, hair tied back, trying to disguise her insecurities- her fear of not belonging- of being exposed as fraudulent, among the western suburbs’ kids, with their deliberately torn jeans, rumpled clothing and tangled hair.

The Teen Queen. The new target.

‘I hate the way he speaks to you,’ the mature age student says. She waves the comment away.

‘It’s fine,’ she says.

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Shakuntala Kulkarni, Juloos and Other Stories (detail), 2012, four projection video + sound, duration 5:00 min. Courtesy of the artist and Chemould Gallery. Installation view, IOTA21 Curiosities and Rituals of the Everyday, 2021. Photography by Brad Coleman.

‘It’s not,’ the mature age student persists. ‘I have a daughter your age and what he’s doing is, well, frankly, an abuse of power.’

An abuse of power? she thinks. His random comments about her appearance, the jokes loaded with innuendo, always alluding to her sex life, her sex partners. She has steeled herself against the commentary, it won’t impact her. She has put on a piece of armour, wit and humour. She deflects his poisonous arrows with her own projectiles, returns fire with fire, his balding head, his too-tight pants stuffed with Nike socks, his old, lined face.

He delights in the repartee, his eyes light up when he sees her, thinking of his next attack. She endures it because she doesn’t know any better. She doesn’t see it for what it is.

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In her thirties, she’s a professional. She works alongside others like her.

She watches the men getting their promotions, she watches her female counterparts stagnate in their roles. Little upward movement, little trajectory.

The executive team is almost exclusively men. Her boss takes a shine to her.

‘You’re the feather in our cap,’ he says. ‘You’re the jewel in our crown,’ he states. She becomes used to being viewed as a hair accessory.

‘That’s a lovely little black dress,’ he coos.

‘I can’t take my eyes of those boots,’ he mutters.

She puts on another piece of armour. This one is acquiescence and complicity. She murmurs, and lightly laughs at his comments. She smiles and flicks her hair as she walks away. She endures it, knowing this is not okay, but then there’s a mortgage and bills to pay. She sees it for exactly what it is.

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Maternity leave. The biggest promotional hurdle. Her biology is her enemy.

She grows life. She watches her belly swell, notices that her body has become public property.

‘When is the baby due?’ strangers’ hands touching her without permission.

‘Are you still smoking?’ a male friend asks. ‘You have to give up, for the baby.’

She views her body detachedly; a microcosm, a galaxy, teeming and swarming with her cells. The baby’s cells, blending and mixing. Not hers anymore.

The painful process of birthing. ‘Feel the power of the womb,’ her yoga friend advises. ‘A natural childbirth,’ she is instructed. Made to feel shame for taking pain relief. Breast feeding is best. Struggling with cracked nipples.

Recurring bouts of mastitis.

‘Feed through the pain,’ the nurse suggests. Red hot needles pushing, searing. Sleepless nights. Crying baby. Distant husband.

‘I have to get up early for work,’ he grumbles. ‘I need sleep.’ Her needs, her wants, her desires are frozen in time. Replaced with the baby’s needs, wants and desires. She puts on her armour, resilience and patience. Be the best mother. Super mother. Do it all. Up early, hair washed, makeup on.

‘You don’t want to let yourself go,’ she’s advised. Do the dishes, clean the kitchen, feed the baby, wash the clothes, hang the clothes out, feed the baby, make lunch, something healthy and organic.

‘You look like you still have baby weight,’ she’s gently told. Pelvic floor exercises, clean up vomit, change nappies, feed the baby, prepare the dinner, run on the tread-mill, bathe the baby, feed the baby, put the baby to bed. See the headlights, he’s home, finally.

‘What have you done all day,’ he says dismissively, turning on the television, beer in hand. ‘I’m so exhausted.’ Sex on demand.

In her forties she’s so tired. Tired of the double job she holds down, one in the workplace, the more gruelling one at home. Absent husband. Doing all the parenting. Finish work, home to kids, supervise homework, get them ready for bed, cook dinner, plate his and put it in the microwave, feed the dogs and cat, clean the kitchen. Sit with a glass of wine. Wait for him to come home. Wait. Wait. Wait. What is she waiting for? She puts on her armour. One of stoicism. Protect her children from divorce.

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Curious Threads

She begins to disappear. Her identity does not belong to her. She struggles to define herself. She questions what happened. Where has she gone? She looks at herself in the mirror- she doesn’t recognise who is there. Vague memories of ambition gnaw at her. She feels dejected, disused, discarded.

Her sense of self has been trampled into the fabric of the people around her. It has been devoured and all that remains is cannibalising itself. She can’t wait any longer.

Divorced, single. The sole financial pressure is overwhelming, the stability of her job is critical. Her morning ritual of scouring her bank accounts, transferring from one to the other, juggling the bills, the mounting debts.

She feels as if she is on roller skates, as she throws the washing in the air, stirs the pot on the stove as it erupts and froths over the stainless-steel top, rushes the kids to school, feeds the cat. This is all done at a high pace, she can’t keep up with herself. She puts on her armour, strength and independence. She buys a drill. She fixes things, she makes everything good. She does all the heavy lifting. Mother, provider.

Different workplace, same atmosphere. Different boss, same rhetoric.

‘You look lovely today,’ he says. Her thank you is curt; her eyes are flinty.

She knows better, she knows that he knows. Her armour rubs against her.

Strong and independent. No-nonsense.

She meets men, has drinks, sometimes dinner, sometimes sex.

‘Come on,’ he says running his hand over her knee, ‘you liked it last time.’

But last time is not this time. She feels the force of his pressure, the rush of compliance but truthfully, she’d rather be at home, in bed, with a novel.

‘Not this time,’ she says, surprising herself. Now it will be on her terms, when she wants.

In her fifties she becomes invisible. No more comments, no more stares, no more glances, the wet lust gone from their eyes. Released from their gaze she moves more freely. She views her armour. The pieces put in place to protect her vulnerability.

Wit, humour, acquiescence, complicity, resilience, patience, stoicism, strength, independence.

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She assesses herself in the mirror. Naked. Eyes that once forcefully and aggressively pointed out her physical weaknesses now gently caress her stomach. It is no longer flat and toned as it was at twenty, it is soft and lined, with the scars of her procession of self. Her breasts more pendulous now, her thighs wider, her upper arms softer. She has quietened the vicious voice in her head. The one that would whisper, ‘Fat, old, ugly,’ through the progression of her years. She thinks ruefully of the different bodies she once had, acknowledging that then she didn’t appreciate them, or admire them for what they could do. She wishes futilely that she could go back, disassemble that toxic voice and replace it with the one she listens to now.

Carefully she removes her armour. It falls away gently like woven pieces of bamboo. She doesn’t need to be a warrior, an army of one, fighting, defending and marching her way through life. She views her vulnerability.

She has always been funny and clever and strong and kind, she has always loved and been loved, she doesn’t need to protect who she is. She now accepts who she is.

Know Thyself.

And she does.

Author’s note Standing in the Gallery I was immersed in the four screen video work, the sound of the wind, the trickle of water and then, the marching of boots and the sounds of chains. Images of female Zen warriors, individually striking poses or marching as an army, wearing armour crafted of bamboo, filled the screens. It was a procession of self. What does it take to be a female navigating the world through different cultures in different times and spaces? Armour becomes like a second skin and while the bamboo looks fragile it has a stronger tensile strength than steel..

Kate McCaffrey is a West Australian author of Young Adult and Adult fiction and is currently undertaking a Doctor of Philosophy at Curtin University, exploring toxic masculinity in the AFL, through Young Adult fiction.

‘The Naked Truth’ was first published in Meniscus, 9.2, 2021, pp. 161-165.

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Index ARTISTS Abdullah, Abdul-Rahman

AUTHORS 8, 71, 73, 75

Armstrong, Agnes Yamboong

50

Angus, Ashleigh

74

Castleden, Susanna

63

Chau, Christina

47

Cope, Megan

Cover, 13

Fouché, Pierre

97

Glasheen, Chemutai

91

I-Lann, Yee

95

Gong, Qian

80

Julien, Isaac

30, 34, 39, 44

Henningsgaard, Per

49

108

Hiscox, Jessie

27

Lee, Lindy

82, 86

Hunn, Deborah

37

Nixon, Lyn

56

Kerr, Thor

99

Norrish, Ellen

48

King, Jane

7

Samson, Loreen

61

Lee, Christina

53

Tippett, Monique

88

Lynch, Cass

15

Toomath, Alma

23

Maling, Caitlin

31

Walker, James

67

McCaffrey, Kate

107

West, Katie

16

O’Leary, Danielle

89

O’Rourke, Marie

78

Perse, Elena

24

Pither, Gabrielle

19

Robertson, Rachel

11, 34

Kulkarni, Shakuntala

Ryden, Anne

72

Sayer, Rosemary

59

Slatter, Bruce

43

Stevens, Rosemary

68

Trethewey, Lydia

96

Woldeyes, Yirga

40

Woods, Denise

84

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Editor’s Acknowledgements 25 for 25 is a joint initiative of the Creative Critical Imaginations Research Network and the John Curtin Gallery and was generously supported by the Gallery and by the School of Media, Creative Arts and Social Inquiry at Curtin University.

Thank you to Jane King, Sharon Baker and Lauren Hancock-Coffey at the Gallery, who all contributed time, energy and expertise to this publication. Thank you also to all the contributing authors who produced original works and allowed us to publish them here, and to the visual artists whose work inspired us. Finally, a special thanks to my colleagues Danielle O’Leary, Anne Ryden and Per Henningsgaard, who have offered generous support and assistance to me with the Writers Respond project and podcast and in producing this anthology.

This book has been produced with the generous support of the John Curtin Navigators.

Cover image: Megan Cope, Bated Breath (detail), 2021, chrome-plated ceramics on steel support, fishing line, and mirror, approx. 3m high. Courtesy of the artist and Milani Gallery, Brisbane. Installation view, OCCURRENT AFFAIR, John Curtin Gallery, 2023. Photography

by Robert Frith/Kerry Stokes Collection.

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