Book Review - Untethered

A local health district wide project to address this issue would improve patient care on the North Coast.

“E-med Ed” has flourished this year. Unable to gather together, even in small groups, education providers have embraced the online format. The RACGP, AMA, countless hospitals and even Nordocs have run their own programs.

NorDocs has held four meetings this year on the subjects of carotid vascular disease, new approaches to psoriasis management, the multi-disciplinary approach to breast cancer and an update on restrictive lung disease.

The organisation will continue with the program on a monthly basis from February to June next year before reviewing the viability and acceptability of further “e-meetings”.

A year ago nobody had ever heard the term “COVID-19” but the year of the rat has been difficult for many, fatal for some and tried the patience of citizens and politicians around the country and around the world. The upending of traditional approaches to issues has stimulated developments in many areas and doctors have taken to heart the quote of Winston Churchill, “Never let a good crisis go to waste”.

Untethered – A Memoir

Hayley Katzen Ventura 367 pp

The ‘untethering’ of North Coast resident Hayley Katzen from her previous life began with migrating from South Africa in 1989, at the age of 22, and settling in Sydney to undertake a law degree. As she often reminds us in this introspective memoir she was - and of course still is - a white, middle-class, Jewish woman who had left a country with an racist and turbulent past, and an uncertain future.

Coming to realise she was lesbian represented another phase of her untethering from the conventional family and conflicted society within which she had grown up. Now, she could be free, not least sexually: “I’d cut my wild mane short in the hope I’d look more ‘dykey’ and find my place in Sydney’s lesbian community.”

Later, she headed north to the Northern Rivers, finding a lecturing job at Southern Cross University’s Lismore campus and entering into the area’s gay lifestyle. At a Tropical Fruits dance she met a woman “with deep brown eyes and a shaved head” who talked of ‘truckies’ knots’ and lived in converted stables in the hinterland.

“Where the hell are we?”, Katzen asked a friend driving her to the birthday party of Jen, the woman with whom she would form a loving and lasting, if at times complicated, relationship, largely because of their vastly different backgrounds.

This would be another untethering – moving in with a (wo)manual worker was way out of her cultural comfort zone: “My parents were middle-class Jewish professionals and intellectuals who’d never done a day’s manual labour… Jen’s broad and calloused hands were marked by abrasions from fencing, digging, gardening, building and cattle work.”

She recalls, “I’d counted four pubs and three butchers as we drove along the main street of the small country town.”

“’Casino,” the friend said, “The beef capital.”

“Where even the radio station’s named for cattle?” I said as I read out a billboard: COW FM”.

In time Katzen adjusts to being an ‘excity girl’, bemusedly describing dinner parties where urbane friends recoil from Jen’s stories of farm practices such as euthanising animals. She forms friendships with locals, realising that the years hadn’t only “demystified life in the bush… [but] seeped under my skin along with memories of blackened fingernails and bruises, scars and splinters… This was what I knew now more than Shabbat dinners or city laneways.”

Drawing on her legal skills she became active in the ultimately successful campaign against CSG mining, penning a lengthy submission to the state government, and, with her story turning full circle, participating in a ‘Lock the Gate’ float in Casino’s beef week parade. By then she seemed well and truly untethered from her past life.