Contents - MUP-Extras
Contents - MUP-Extras Contents - MUP-Extras
Contents 3 Editorial by Sally Heath 6 Perspectives with Nicolas Paulin, Josephine Rowe, David Mence and Michelle Law Meanjin Papers (follows p. 16) Beg by Suzy Freeman-Greene Essays 18 Debbie Mortimer and the Forensic Fight by Lorin Clarke 34 Twitter>The Novel? @tejucole>Teju Cole? by Sam Twyford-Moore 43 Germaine Greer: A Portrait by Ben Quilty 47 Letter to Tom Collins by Anna Heyward 60 Share Houses by Lyndal Walker 70 Another Year, Another Engrossing Crop by Martin Langford 82 The Bartender and the Archive by Chad Parkhill Fiction 90 Keilor Cranium by Wayne Macauley 98 Titty Anne and the Very, Very Hairy Man by Margo Lanagan 108 The Late Visit by Antonia Pont 117 The Googly by Kevin Brophy 123 Eat. Shit. Die. by Helen Gildfind 133 My Last Birthday by Mark Dapin 139 I should be so lucky by Sam Cooney Gallery 168 Warwick Baker Memoir 148 In Search of García Márquez by Judith White 158 Dinosaurs of the Croatian Wild by Ronnie Scott 178 There is no hereafter by Paul Williams 183 Childhood among Strangers by Linda Judge Poetry 16 Borroloola Blue by Phillip Hall 32 A World that Could Be Read; A Winter’s Tale by Diana Bridge 56 Translating a ‘Prolog’ by Jean Kent 58 The Great Poet’s Gene by Alan Gould 68 Farmstay by Sue Ogle 80 Larvatus Prodeo by Shane McCauley 81 Grace Notes by Ron Pretty 155 Plato by Jakob Ziguras 156 Second Chance by Marian Waller 165 An Overcast Day in Another Part of the World by Stuart Cooke 176 Report from Blue Mountains by David Brooks 177 Catching Fire; or, The Art of Sitting by Mark Tredinnick 186 Questions for the Dead by Ross Donlon 188 Contributors 190 Index Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 1 6/11/12 9:20 AM
- Page 2 and 3: Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 2 6/11/12 9
- Page 4 and 5: Meanjin Editor Sally Heath heath@un
- Page 6 and 7: Perspectives Game over for Space Ju
- Page 8 and 9: Perspectives Astrophysics (RSAA) at
- Page 10 and 11: Perspectives researched and transla
- Page 12 and 13: Perspectives fabrications and consp
- Page 14 and 15: Perspectives ‘How about both?’
- Page 16 and 17: Borroloola Blue Phillip Hall All ar
- Page 18 and 19: Debbie Mortimer and the Forensic Fi
- Page 20 and 21: Debbie Mortimer and the Forensic Fi
- Page 22 and 23: Debbie Mortimer and the Forensic Fi
- Page 24 and 25: Debbie Mortimer and the Forensic Fi
- Page 26 and 27: Debbie Mortimer and the Forensic Fi
- Page 28 and 29: Debbie Mortimer and the Forensic Fi
- Page 30 and 31: Debbie Mortimer and the Forensic Fi
- Page 32 and 33: A World that Could Be Read Diana Br
- Page 34 and 35: Twitter>The Novel? @tejucole>Teju C
- Page 36 and 37: Twitter>The Novel? @tejucole>Teju C
- Page 38 and 39: Twitter>The Novel? @tejucole>Teju C
- Page 40 and 41: Twitter>The Novel? @tejucole>Teju C
- Page 42 and 43: Twitter>The Novel? @tejucole>Teju C
- Page 44 and 45: Germaine Greer: A Portrait Ben Quil
- Page 46 and 47: Germaine Greer: A Portrait Ben Quil
- Page 48 and 49: Letter to Tom Collins Anna Heyward
- Page 50 and 51: Letter to Tom Collins Anna Heyward
<strong>Contents</strong><br />
3 Editorial by Sally Heath<br />
6 Perspectives with Nicolas Paulin,<br />
Josephine Rowe, David Mence and<br />
Michelle Law<br />
Meanjin Papers (follows p. 16)<br />
Beg by Suzy Freeman-Greene<br />
Essays<br />
18 Debbie Mortimer and the Forensic<br />
Fight by Lorin Clarke<br />
34 Twitter>The Novel? @tejucole>Teju<br />
Cole? by Sam Twyford-Moore<br />
43 Germaine Greer: A Portrait by Ben<br />
Quilty<br />
47 Letter to Tom Collins by Anna<br />
Heyward<br />
60 Share Houses by Lyndal Walker<br />
70 Another Year, Another Engrossing<br />
Crop by Martin Langford<br />
82 The Bartender and the Archive<br />
by Chad Parkhill<br />
Fiction<br />
90 Keilor Cranium by Wayne<br />
Macauley<br />
98 Titty Anne and the Very, Very Hairy<br />
Man by Margo Lanagan<br />
108 The Late Visit by Antonia Pont<br />
117 The Googly by Kevin Brophy<br />
123 Eat. Shit. Die. by Helen Gildfind<br />
133 My Last Birthday by Mark Dapin<br />
139 I should be so lucky by Sam Cooney<br />
Gallery<br />
168 Warwick Baker<br />
Memoir<br />
148 In Search of García Márquez by<br />
Judith White<br />
158 Dinosaurs of the Croatian Wild<br />
by Ronnie Scott<br />
178 There is no hereafter by Paul<br />
Williams<br />
183 Childhood among Strangers by<br />
Linda Judge<br />
Poetry<br />
16 Borroloola Blue by Phillip Hall<br />
32 A World that Could Be Read;<br />
A Winter’s Tale by Diana Bridge<br />
56 Translating a ‘Prolog’ by Jean Kent<br />
58 The Great Poet’s Gene by Alan Gould<br />
68 Farmstay by Sue Ogle<br />
80 Larvatus Prodeo by Shane<br />
McCauley<br />
81 Grace Notes by Ron Pretty<br />
155 Plato by Jakob Ziguras<br />
156 Second Chance by Marian Waller<br />
165 An Overcast Day in Another Part of<br />
the World by Stuart Cooke<br />
176 Report from Blue Mountains by<br />
David Brooks<br />
177 Catching Fire; or, The Art of Sitting<br />
by Mark Tredinnick<br />
186 Questions for the Dead by Ross<br />
Donlon<br />
188 Contributors<br />
190 Index<br />
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 1 6/11/12 9:20 AM
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 2 6/11/12 9:20 AM
Editorial<br />
Sally Heath<br />
Ben Quilty, by Germaine Greer, 2009<br />
ThaT journalism ‘musT shine a lighT inTo dark places’ is an overworked<br />
and unhelpful cliché. Sometimes the work of journalists does not produce<br />
a floodlit exposition of good or evil; instead, it often fixes on the more<br />
intellectually and morally intriguing questions found in the shadows.<br />
At the Melbourne Writers Festival this year, the incomparable David Grann<br />
spoke of this often-overlooked aspect of the work of investigative writers. The<br />
award-winning New Yorker staff writer and author said whenever he begins a<br />
story he doesn’t know what he will find. Nothing is simple or uni-dimensional,<br />
even the ‘facts’ he uncovers are complex, nuanced and ‘theory laden’.<br />
Exposing this deeper truth is the heart of his journalism. ‘Transparency is<br />
important. Readers must know where the information came from. And where<br />
there is doubt, the doubt must remain in the story.’ This, he said, ‘is more<br />
truthful reporting’.<br />
It was timely to hear this from such a brilliant practitioner at a moment<br />
when the Meanjin Papers was struggling with the same issues in a piece you<br />
will find in this issue titled ‘Beg’.<br />
Journalist Suzy Freeman-Greene spent twelve months observing,<br />
investigating and thinking about begging in one of Australia’s large capital<br />
cities. It forced her to observe herself and her city as much as it did her nominal<br />
subjects, the people asking for money. Her language changed when she<br />
spoke to beggars. She found she had no consistent reaction. Their sex, their<br />
supplicant signs, their personal stories influenced her response, as did the<br />
weather, what she was doing and the company she was in. Her uncertainty and<br />
inconsistency—her doubts—are a strength of her story.<br />
As Freeman-Greene writes, her anxieties are not unique or particularly<br />
novel. But her year-long project did make her look anew at the people holding<br />
out a cap, cup or hand; they may be in desperate straits or shysters, but now,<br />
to her, they are no longer invisible. And despite the rational argument that<br />
poverty might best be tackled through other means, Freeman-Greene found<br />
that sometimes, in the more awkward shadows of hard reality, it is good to<br />
give a little.<br />
This year’s Meanjin Dorothy Porter Poetry Award goes to ‘An Overcast Day in<br />
Another Part of the World’ by Stuart Cooke (Meanjin, no. 4, p. 165). Our thanks<br />
to judges Andrea Goldsmith and Kristin Henry. Please go to the Meanjin<br />
website to read the judges’ comments and a list of the three commended poets.<br />
And the newly published Meanjin Anthology can be purchased in bookstores<br />
or via the <strong>MUP</strong> website, .<br />
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 3 6/11/12 9:20 AM<br />
3
Meanjin<br />
Editor<br />
Sally Heath<br />
heath@unimelb.edu.au<br />
Associate Editor<br />
Zora Sanders<br />
zsanders@unimelb.edu.au<br />
Meanjin Assistant<br />
Catherine McInnis<br />
Poetry Editor<br />
Judith Beveridge<br />
Poetry Critic<br />
Martin Langford<br />
Design<br />
Jenny Grigg<br />
www.jennygrigg.com<br />
Typesetting<br />
Patrick Cannon<br />
Copyeditor<br />
Richard McGregor<br />
Proofreaders<br />
Natalie Book, Richard McGregor<br />
Website Designer<br />
Inventive Labs/Golden Grouse<br />
Interns<br />
James Douglas, Jessica Szwarcbord,<br />
Sarah Weston, Elyse Wurm<br />
Patron<br />
Chris Wallace-Crabbe<br />
Editorial Advisory Board<br />
Louise Adler, Alison Croggon, Kate Darian-Smith,<br />
David Gaunt, Richard Glover, Jenny Grigg, Brian Johns,<br />
Hilary McPhee, David Malouf and Lindsay Tanner<br />
Founding Editor<br />
Clem Christesen (1911–2003; editor 1940–74).<br />
Meanjin was founded in 1940. The name, pronounced<br />
mee-an-jin, is derived from an Aboriginal word for the<br />
spike of land on which Brisbane sits. The magazine moved<br />
to Melbourne in 1945 at the invitation of the University<br />
of Melbourne, which continues to be Meanjin’s principal<br />
sponsor. In 2008 Meanjin became an imprint of Melbourne<br />
University Publishing Ltd.<br />
Subscriptions<br />
Contact the Meanjin office or subscribe online<br />
at our website.<br />
Where to find us<br />
Postal address: Meanjin, Level 1, 11–15 Argyle Place,<br />
Carlton, Victoria 3053 Australia<br />
Telephone: (+61 3) 9342 0317<br />
Fax: (+61 3) 9342 0399<br />
Email: meanjin@unimelb.edu.au<br />
Website: www.meanjin.com.au<br />
Twitter: www.twitter.com/Meanjin<br />
Facebook: www.facebook.com/Meanjin<br />
Contributions<br />
Meanjin has converted the full backfile of Meanjin issues<br />
(1940– ) into scanned pages that can be accessed via the<br />
digital publishing house Informit (http://www.informit.com.<br />
au). All creative works, articles and reviews converted to<br />
electronic format will be correctly attributed and will appear<br />
as published. Copyright will remain with the authors, and<br />
the material cannot be further republished without authorial<br />
permission. Meanjin will honour any requests to withdraw<br />
material from electronic publication. If any author does not<br />
wish their work to appear in this format, they should contact<br />
Meanjin immediately and their material will be withdrawn.<br />
Printed and bound by Ligare<br />
Distributed by Random House<br />
Print Post Approved PP341403 0002<br />
AU ISSN 0025-6293<br />
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 4 6/11/12 9:20 AM
Perspectives<br />
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 5 6/11/12 9:20 AM
Perspectives<br />
Game over for Space Junk?<br />
Nicolas Paulin<br />
In 1997 an Oklahoma woman<br />
famously reported being hit by<br />
a piece of falling space junk—that<br />
random collection of leftover parts<br />
from old spacecraft, satellites,<br />
rockets and missiles. She emerged<br />
unharmed, but the incident focused<br />
public attention on the dangers of<br />
what might lie beyond clear blue<br />
skies. While this particular variety<br />
of pollution might be invisible to<br />
the naked eye, thousands of tonnes<br />
of junk (known technically as space<br />
debris or orbital debris) now bob<br />
around above our heads. All of it is<br />
destined to fall back into the Earth’s<br />
atmosphere. While some of the<br />
larger components fall into the sea<br />
or onto land, the vast majority of<br />
debris will burn up harmlessly in<br />
the atmosphere and disintegrate,<br />
meaning that the likelihood of<br />
space junk ever causing bodily<br />
harm to human beings remains<br />
remote. 1 But for the space industry<br />
the risk of collision between space<br />
junk and useful objects is all too<br />
real, threatening the satellite<br />
technologies on which we depend<br />
and endangering space missions.<br />
When even a small particle of junk<br />
hits a working spacecraft, it can<br />
cause extensive damage and even<br />
compromise an entire mission. The<br />
problem is fast turning into a crisis. 2<br />
6<br />
1 When an old US satellite fell to Earth in 2011, NASA put the<br />
chances of it falling on a human at 1 in 3200, while a specific<br />
individual’s odds came out at 1 in 22 trillion. NASA estimates<br />
that one catalogued piece of space junk falls to Earth every<br />
day, mostly into the oceans or sparsely populated regions<br />
such as northern Canada, outback Australia or Siberia.<br />
2 In 2010 President Barack Obama released the United States’<br />
new national space policy, calling for better international<br />
cooperation on space junk tracking and removal. In addition<br />
to the need for more innovative technology, national security<br />
pressures and country-based ownership laws for space junk<br />
are among the biggest hurdles to space junk removal.<br />
Over the past half-century of<br />
space exploration, scientists have<br />
imagined a number of solutions to<br />
clean up the mess—from giant nets to<br />
space sticky tape and purpose-built<br />
garbage collection vessels. None is<br />
operational today, due in large part to<br />
doubts about effectiveness and value<br />
for money. But in 2011 a consortium<br />
of scientists and engineers based<br />
at Mount Stromlo Observatory in<br />
Canberra embarked on a gamechanger<br />
using new high-power laser<br />
and optics technology. If successful,<br />
the work would improve the accuracy<br />
of space debris tracking and clean<br />
up the most harmful layers of space<br />
debris within a decade.<br />
Laser removal of space litter is not<br />
a new idea, but transforming theory<br />
into a marketable technology is a<br />
significant challenge for the space<br />
industry. In the 1990s US scientists<br />
developed the first theories for<br />
removal of space debris using groundbased<br />
lasers. However, the US project<br />
lacked the key technological advances<br />
required in lasers, telescopes,<br />
electronics and adaptive optics (a<br />
key technology used to overcome the<br />
effects of atmospheric air turbulence<br />
on laser beams and thus improve their<br />
focus on a particular target).<br />
Today that technology is ready.<br />
Building on its experience with largescale<br />
international projects including<br />
the Giant Magellan Telescope, the<br />
Research School of Astronomy and<br />
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 6 6/11/12 9:20 AM
Satellite laser ranging from EOS Space<br />
Centre at Mount Stromlo Observatory,<br />
Canberra, photograph by EOS Space<br />
Systems, 2011<br />
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 7 6/11/12 9:20 AM
Perspectives<br />
Astrophysics (RSAA) at the Australian<br />
National University has established<br />
a specialty in adaptive optics and has<br />
been busy attracting key international<br />
specialists in the process. In early 2011<br />
the RSAA teamed with a commercial<br />
telescope and satellite tracking<br />
company, Electro Optic Systems<br />
(EOS), which was keen to develop a<br />
commercially viable and cost-effective<br />
industrial prototype for tracking<br />
and removing space debris. Using<br />
this new-generation technology, the<br />
consortium is building an instrument<br />
that will locate space junk with a high<br />
level of accuracy. The second phase of<br />
development will test whether highpower<br />
lasers are capable of nudging<br />
debris out of its orbit and back into<br />
the Earth’s atmosphere to combust.<br />
A test model is now in construction<br />
at the Mount Stromlo Observatory,<br />
housed in one of EOS’s large<br />
telescopes. Operational testing on real<br />
space junk is expected to begin by the<br />
end of 2013. If the tests are successful,<br />
Australia could become the first<br />
country to develop a commercially<br />
viable system for space junk removal.<br />
It is no coincidence that the<br />
project targets space junk removal at<br />
low Earth orbit (LEO) and where the<br />
most harmful mass of space junk is<br />
concentrated. Five decades of space<br />
exploration and an unfortunate<br />
series of missile tests and space<br />
accidents in recent years 3 have<br />
created a chain reaction of collisions,<br />
8<br />
3 These events include a 2007 Chinese anti-satellite missile<br />
test, US destruction in 2008 of a defective spy satellite and<br />
a 2009 collision between a defunct Russian satellite and a<br />
working US satellite.<br />
creating an escalating number of<br />
components. The North American<br />
Defence Command, which maintains<br />
the oldest database of space debris,<br />
estimates that there are now 25,000<br />
components of space junk more than<br />
10 centimetres wide (the threshold<br />
for tracking). Of these, it is able to<br />
track only 8000 components, leaving<br />
a high potential for unpredictable<br />
collision. For working spacecraft<br />
obliged to orbit in LEO—such as the<br />
International Space Station, Earth<br />
observation and communication<br />
satellites—damage from small-scale<br />
projectiles is a constant risk, while the<br />
possibility of collision with any debris<br />
more than 10 centimetres wide calls<br />
for full alert and a change of course.<br />
So can Australia claim a world first<br />
in cleaning up the universe? Perhaps<br />
not yet, but watch this space …<br />
International Writing Program,<br />
Iowa City<br />
Josephine Rowe<br />
arrive to languid late summer,<br />
I the Hollywood promise of tall<br />
cornfields, weathered red barns.<br />
Harvest time. Within two hours<br />
of touching down I’m tramping<br />
jet-lagged around the woodlands of<br />
Redbird Farms with my fellow writers:<br />
a kind of get-to-know-you hike,<br />
which precedes the get-to-know-you<br />
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 8 6/11/12 9:20 AM
Perspectives<br />
dinners and the get-to-know-you<br />
parties. We introduce ourselves with<br />
full names and nationalities: Hi, I’m<br />
Bina Shah from Pakistan; I’m Hind<br />
Shoufani from Palestine.<br />
I’m discussing various definitions<br />
of the word ‘tame’ with Moshe Sakal<br />
( from Israel) when I accidentally tread<br />
on a snake. It’s gone almost before<br />
I realise, and I take a baffled little<br />
breath as it disappears.<br />
She didn’t even scream, says<br />
Moshe, as the others catch up. Well,<br />
she’s Australian, someone answers.<br />
The program’s director clinches it<br />
with a story about Gail Jones, who<br />
purportedly spent her childhood<br />
lifting snakes by their tails and<br />
whacking their heads against tree<br />
trunks. I don’t know whether the story<br />
is true, but it doesn’t matter, the die is<br />
cast. Australia: a nation of nonchalant<br />
snake killers.<br />
There are thirty-seven of us,<br />
from thirty-five countries. I am the<br />
youngest. Lynley Hood, from New<br />
Zealand, is the oldest. Zhang Yueran,<br />
from China, is the best selling. But it’s<br />
China, she says dismissively. There<br />
are so many people. Jeremy Tiang,<br />
from Singapore, is the most patient<br />
and the most sharply dressed, always.<br />
We are split between two hotels.<br />
There is the Sheraton, which is like<br />
Sheratons the world over, and there<br />
is Iowa House. Iowa House is dated,<br />
dorm-like. There is a lot of wood-grain<br />
veneer. But my room has a bath, a<br />
desk and a picturesque view of the<br />
Iowa River, a view that becomes more<br />
so as summer ambles into spectacular<br />
Midwestern fall. More importantly,<br />
Iowa House is where Raymond<br />
Carver lived in 1973, the year he and<br />
John Cheever taught at the Writers’<br />
Workshop and drank mercilessly in<br />
Cheever’s room, up on the fourth<br />
floor. Carver lived on the second floor<br />
(our floor) but Cheever never came<br />
down because he was, apparently,<br />
afraid of being mugged in the hallway.<br />
The second-floor hallway has soft<br />
carpet and cream walls decorated<br />
with framed prints of non-challenging<br />
art works. It’s difficult to imagine<br />
it feeling threatening; to me it feels<br />
share-housey, raucous. Somebody is<br />
always awake. Something is always<br />
happening, or about to happen.<br />
Urgent calls on the room to room:<br />
Can you come take a look at my neck?<br />
Can you tell me what I did last night?<br />
I’m okay, I just can’t stand up.<br />
One night X falls asleep in the bath<br />
and floods her hotel room. It isn’t<br />
until the water trickles through to<br />
the first floor that reception rushes<br />
up to unlock the door and lift her<br />
from the overflowing bath. For weeks<br />
afterwards the hallway is lined with<br />
industrial fans, drawing moisture<br />
from air and carpet. Every now and<br />
again someone opens their door<br />
and yells at the fans: I’m trying to<br />
fucking work! Somehow the work<br />
gets done despite the fans. Books are<br />
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 9 6/11/12 9:20 AM<br />
9
Perspectives<br />
researched and translated. Lectures<br />
are written and delivered. YouTube<br />
links to literal video versions of Tears<br />
for Fears songs are widely dispersed,<br />
and untranslatable concepts are<br />
collectively stewed over.<br />
I shape my writing day around<br />
the power plant whistle, which is as<br />
much a part of the ambience as the<br />
industrial fans and the badly wired<br />
fire alarm. But I have a soft spot for<br />
the power plant whistle. It makes<br />
a lonesome, sorrowful noise, like<br />
Bradbury’s fog horn, like a great<br />
mournful whale drifting up the Iowa<br />
River. It blasts several times a day:<br />
morning, lunchtime and end of shift.<br />
At the end-of-shift whistle I close<br />
my laptop and go out to meet the<br />
others at the Mill or Martini’s or the<br />
Fox Head. The bartenders at the Fox<br />
Head are mostly PhD candidates in<br />
philosophy, with impressive facial<br />
hair and loose elbows that make for<br />
generous pours. When I ask for a<br />
glass of tequila and soda I get a glass<br />
of tequila, soda sprinkled over it like<br />
bitters. The jukebox has a great Sam<br />
Cooke selection, and Kevin Bloom,<br />
the gruff South African journalist,<br />
spends a good portion of his per<br />
diem feeding it quarters, playing ‘A<br />
Change Is Gonna Come’. And in this<br />
dimly lit, wood-panelled microcosm,<br />
it’s easy to believe that perhaps it<br />
will. Israel and Palestine are deep<br />
in conversation that steers deftly<br />
away from settlements and two-state<br />
10<br />
solutions. A blind man at the bar<br />
is asking Kevin about apartheid,<br />
listening intently before saying,<br />
‘You’ll have to tell me, because I can’t<br />
tell from your voice. Are you white or<br />
are you black?’<br />
I turn twenty-seven here, dance<br />
around the pool table to Songs: Ohia.<br />
Then everything speeds up. November<br />
comes as a kind of ground rush. Each<br />
morning I stalk up the west lawn<br />
towards the Old Capitol building, my<br />
hair rustling a susurrus in the cold,<br />
as though the trees are shaking their<br />
branches in my ears. Each morning I<br />
wear more layers, watch the squirrels<br />
gather their winter stores with<br />
greater urgency. I should be closing<br />
my account and returning all those<br />
library books.<br />
The Israelis get married on the first<br />
of November. Tel Aviv, gay-friendly<br />
as it is, doesn’t allow same-sex<br />
marriages. Remarkably, Iowa does.<br />
Few of us know the words to ‘Hava<br />
Nagila’, but everybody knows when to<br />
shout Hey! and we do so with verve,<br />
raising Moshe and Dory up on white<br />
dining chairs, Hind contributing<br />
impressive ululations. In a few weeks<br />
Moshe will be excluded from a literary<br />
panel at a festival in Marseilles, at<br />
the request of a Palestinian poet.<br />
We will read news of this, back in our<br />
respective home countries, and it will<br />
affirm what we knew all along: our<br />
little world was not representative of<br />
the larger one.<br />
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 10 6/11/12 9:20 AM
Perspectives<br />
What did we say to each other,<br />
that last night in the Fox Head,<br />
raising our glasses in moments we<br />
won’t remember? The untranslatable<br />
concepts remain untranslatable. But<br />
we worked at it during those three<br />
months. We got as close as we could.<br />
Cooking for Edward Albee<br />
David Mence<br />
In 2011, as the lucky recipient of<br />
Inscription’s Edward F. Albee<br />
Scholarship, I got to spend a month<br />
researching and writing my play<br />
Entanglement (about the Large<br />
Hadron Collider and the hunt for the<br />
so-called God particle) in Montauk,<br />
New York.<br />
Montauk is roughly three and a<br />
half hours from New York City via<br />
the Long Island Rail Road (familiar<br />
to fans of Eternal Sunshine of the<br />
Spotless Mind). A sleepy little fishing<br />
town perched at the tip of Long<br />
Island, Montauk is home to the<br />
William Flanagan Memorial Creative<br />
Persons Center (‘the Barn’), which<br />
Edward Albee established in 1967<br />
with the proceeds from his play Who’s<br />
Afraid of Virginia Woolf? The Barn<br />
is, as its name suggests, a big New<br />
England–style whitewashed barn<br />
that once served as a stable for the<br />
nearby Montauk Manor (brainchild<br />
of the Gatsbyesque millionaire Carl<br />
Fisher, it opened in 1927 and is still<br />
going strong). These days, the Barn<br />
stables writers and visual artists<br />
and provides them with time and<br />
splendid isolation. Albee generally<br />
keeps a low profile and makes a few<br />
brief, mysterious appearances that<br />
the fellows are left to decipher. Albee<br />
has a droopy snow-white moustache,<br />
a cheeky boyish grin and penetrating<br />
blue eyes and is as sharp as a whip<br />
at eighty-three. He also has a way of<br />
peering down his nose at you as he<br />
listens, which makes you feel small<br />
even though he is, in all probability,<br />
far shorter than you are.<br />
It was over a week before any<br />
of us encountered our host. One of<br />
the writers, hunched over a bowl<br />
of porridge, looked up to see Albee<br />
depositing a handful of mail on the<br />
kitchen bench. ‘Nothing for you,’ he<br />
drawled, ‘better luck next time.’ We<br />
puzzled over this cryptic utterance:<br />
was he referring to the mail, our<br />
creative fortunes, or life in general?<br />
Such simplicity, we decided, from<br />
one of the world’s great masters of<br />
dialogue, must belie hidden depths.<br />
We looked for guidance in Albee’s vast<br />
library (we re-read a number of his<br />
plays) and his formidable collection<br />
of classical LPs (complete recordings<br />
of von Karajan, Rubinstein, Gould)<br />
and yet, rather like a crack squad of<br />
biographers tasked with the life of<br />
Shakespeare, we were merely filling<br />
an evidentiary vacuum with ideas,<br />
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 11 6/11/12 9:20 AM<br />
11
Perspectives<br />
fabrications and conspiracies of our<br />
own making. This palpable absence<br />
soon gave rise to a mild paranoia: it<br />
was absurd, but at times we felt as<br />
though we were being watched (or<br />
watched over), as if America’s greatest<br />
living playwright could give a damn<br />
what we did with our time.<br />
Then came our second encounter.<br />
One of the visual artists was sitting<br />
out the front of the Barn reading a<br />
book when Albee’s moustachioed<br />
face materialised above his page and<br />
said something like, ‘Keep working.’<br />
This again raised a problem for<br />
interpretation: had he meant ‘keep<br />
up the good work’ or more ominously<br />
‘get back to work’? In the face of such<br />
hermeneutic fear and trembling, all<br />
we could do was redouble our artistic<br />
efforts; the visual artist in question<br />
even began to work through the<br />
night. Yet even this was no match<br />
for the sixteen-hour days that,<br />
according to local legend, the Soviet<br />
exile Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn had<br />
worked when he first arrived in New<br />
England. Let alone Albee himself, who<br />
informed us that he was making good<br />
progress on his new play, while some<br />
of us, less than a third his age, were<br />
floundering beneath a sea of false<br />
starts, incoherent storyboards and<br />
poorly executed ideas.<br />
All which may help to explain<br />
why I felt such an overwhelming<br />
desire to cast myself into the Atlantic<br />
Ocean when informed that Albee had<br />
12<br />
decided to come over for dinner …<br />
and I had been nominated head chef.<br />
After hyperventilating into a bag<br />
for a few minutes, I jumped on the<br />
pushbike with the broken pedal and<br />
rushed down to the docks to catch<br />
the fishmonger before close. He had<br />
two bags of mussels left, which was a<br />
stroke of good luck, because mussels<br />
are one of the few things I know how<br />
to cook. Back at the Barn, the mussels<br />
stewed happily in tomato, white<br />
wine, chilli and herbs. There were an<br />
awful lot of them—enough to feed ten<br />
people—so they had to be steamed<br />
in a giant pot. Meanwhile, two<br />
sous-chefs prepared such essential<br />
items as roast potato gratin, sautéed<br />
kale, avocado salad and, for dessert,<br />
apple pie and vanilla ice cream.<br />
Albee arrived at around 7 pm.<br />
Given what a warm, balmy night it<br />
was, he decided we ought to dine<br />
al fresco at the big wooden table.<br />
Luckily, he likes mussels, and took<br />
great pleasure in cracking them and<br />
sucking the gravy out of their shells.<br />
Everything was going according to<br />
plan. But then Albee turned to me<br />
and growled, ‘This one’s not open.’<br />
He popped the offending mussel on<br />
the edge of my plate. Grinning like<br />
an idiot, I picked up the shiny little<br />
shellfish and proceeded to bash it on<br />
the side of the table. ‘No, no,’ he said,<br />
‘don’t do that!’ I sheepishly put it back<br />
and smiled, and he smiled, and said,<br />
‘Some of them want to stay closed.’<br />
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 12 6/11/12 9:20 AM
Perspectives<br />
Leaving<br />
Michelle Law<br />
Mum pulls the ancient songbook<br />
from one of the rubbish bags,<br />
rests a heavy palm on its faded cover<br />
and sighs. The book’s spine is shot,<br />
the pages yellowed. Mum handles this<br />
book with care, periodically taping<br />
and gluing it together. This is done<br />
chiefly to preserve the memory of its<br />
original owner, Jimmy, my youngest<br />
uncle, who killed himself after being<br />
deported from Australia.<br />
We had arrived at Mum’s that<br />
day wearing our grubbiest clothes,<br />
clutching buckets and bags<br />
overflowing with cleaning gear. My<br />
sister Candy had stocked up on gloves<br />
and masks, and my brother Ben had<br />
brought his vacuum cleaner to inhale<br />
the cockroach corpses lying beneath<br />
the couch. Mum had been living in our<br />
childhood home for more than twenty<br />
years, but with the five of us children<br />
long gone, she’d decided to move.<br />
We knew that the process was<br />
going to be arduous because Mum<br />
never threw anything out. Everything<br />
was significant to her; everything had<br />
value—from a rusty pair of gardening<br />
shears (‘They still cut, don’t they?’)<br />
to an unopened calendar from 1999<br />
(‘Some child can make craft out of it’).<br />
If it once had monetary or sentimental<br />
worth, it stayed.<br />
As everyone set to work trashing<br />
outdated newspapers and lobbing<br />
VHS tapes into the skip bag stationed<br />
in the yard, I sat with Mum in the<br />
kitchen, nursing a glass of water.<br />
‘Only you understand how I feel, Mic,’<br />
she said, the book between us on the<br />
dining table.<br />
Living alone with Mum for<br />
seventeen years, I’d learnt to see<br />
how useless objects could become<br />
steeped in symbolism, to the point<br />
where parting with them becomes<br />
excruciating. When I donated a box<br />
of my favourite toys to Lifeline, I<br />
shoved them into the container and<br />
disappeared without a word to the<br />
other side of the house where I could<br />
cry without being heard. I didn’t want<br />
to be on Mum’s side. I didn’t want to<br />
be weak.<br />
Mum’s book was a tome of<br />
Western pop songs that she had<br />
carried with her when she’d migrated<br />
from Malaysia to Hong Kong, and<br />
then from Hong Kong to the Sunshine<br />
Coast. When on the weekends my<br />
sister Tammy swapped from Dad’s<br />
house to Mum’s, the two of us would<br />
lie on the carpet at night with the<br />
ceiling fan whirring, and sooner or<br />
later Mum would enter the living<br />
room with the book clasped reverently<br />
in two hands.<br />
‘Any requests?’ she would ask.<br />
Tammy would lean back on the<br />
makeshift bed she’d constructed from<br />
cushions and bed sheets and close her<br />
eyes. ‘ “Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the<br />
Ole Oak Tree” or “Que Será Será”.’<br />
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 13 6/11/12 9:20 AM<br />
13
Perspectives<br />
‘How about both?’ Mum would<br />
flick through the yellowed pages<br />
and open the book to our dog-eared<br />
favourites. As Tammy drifted off to<br />
the sound of Mum’s singing, I’d stare<br />
at the ceiling and think about the<br />
morning, when Dad would swing by<br />
in his Honda and Mum and I would<br />
be alone again.<br />
Jimmy was the seventh and<br />
youngest child in Mum’s family. Mum,<br />
the sixth, and her sister Judy, the<br />
fourth, had arrived in Australia in the<br />
1970s. Both women were newlyweds<br />
who had fled with their husbands<br />
amid fear of Hong Kong’s handover<br />
from British to Chinese rule. Dad had<br />
relatives living in Sydney who assured<br />
him that Australia had a better quality<br />
of life than China. There was space in<br />
Australia, and the people were free.<br />
It was the perfect country to raise<br />
a family. After Mum’s move, most<br />
of her siblings, including Jimmy,<br />
followed suit.<br />
Within a few years, Mum’s siblings<br />
had established themselves on the<br />
Sunshine Coast. Their children were<br />
enrolled at the local school, and<br />
they’d made friends with the regulars<br />
who frequented their restaurants.<br />
But soon the authorities were tipped<br />
off, and they were arrested for<br />
overstaying their tourist visas. After<br />
a brief stint in Villawood, Mum’s<br />
siblings were sent back to Hong<br />
Kong with nothing to their names.<br />
Everything they owned was left with<br />
14<br />
us, stowed away in all the empty<br />
corners of the house.<br />
On the third straight day of<br />
packing, Tammy and I stood in the<br />
garage with Mum, deciding what to do<br />
with the contents of a dusty cardboard<br />
box. Mum was deliberating over<br />
which objects to keep, donate, sell or<br />
throw out. She held up a mouldy soft<br />
toy that had belonged to one of her<br />
nephews and considered it in silence.<br />
Then, after a spell, she placed it in the<br />
mounting ‘keep’ box, alongside the six<br />
other mouldy toys already in there.<br />
Right then I felt with a burning<br />
clarity how lucky I was. How my<br />
parents had sacrificed their own<br />
relationships and ambitions for<br />
me to have a future. How Mum had<br />
allowed her first family to be torn<br />
apart in order for ours to remain<br />
together. How my only real pressing<br />
responsibility now was to lead a happy<br />
life for her sake, and how it was nearly<br />
impossible for me to feel carefree if<br />
she was unhappy.<br />
‘Mum,’ said Tammy firmly. ‘You<br />
can’t fit all this stuff in an apartment<br />
in Brisbane. And we still have about<br />
ten other rooms to pack.’<br />
Mum threw the toy down in a<br />
sudden rage and held her arms stiffly<br />
by her sides. ‘You’re all rushing me!’<br />
she said. ‘Can’t you understand I can<br />
do this myself?’<br />
I stood back and watched Tammy<br />
berate Mum for being irrational.<br />
Growing up with Mum, I’d learnt<br />
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 14 6/11/12 9:20 AM
Perspectives<br />
never to speak back to her, to save<br />
myself a fight. But on this occasion<br />
Tammy received the full brunt of<br />
Mum’s fury and, worst of all, her grief.<br />
By the end of their spat, Tammy was<br />
sobbing. I stood in the background<br />
wringing my hands, unsettled at<br />
seeing an older sibling so helpless.<br />
Mum was unresponsive to her display,<br />
being too immersed in her own<br />
anguish to comprehend Tammy’s.<br />
At some stage a neighbour crossed<br />
the road to ask if everything was<br />
okay. Nobody responded; we were<br />
all speechless. Eventually Tammy<br />
croaked something and the neighbour<br />
left. When we were alone again, Mum<br />
let us have it.<br />
‘These aren’t yours, so don’t<br />
touch them,’ she said in Cantonese,<br />
gathering the toys up in her arms.<br />
‘You’re all spoiled, selfish Australian<br />
kids who don’t understand the true<br />
worth of things.’ She brought up the<br />
events of the previous day, when<br />
we had unknowingly thrown out a<br />
teapot filled with buttons that she’d<br />
cut off clothes that had belonged to<br />
Jimmy. She said that we were killing<br />
her, that if we kept disrespecting<br />
our mother our grandmother would<br />
haunt us.<br />
We packed a cooler bag and headed<br />
to the local park to give Mum space.<br />
Tammy was sniffling during the car<br />
ride there and none of us knew what<br />
we could say to offer comfort. At the<br />
park we found a soft patch of grass in<br />
the shade that wasn’t infested with<br />
ants and set down our lunch supplies<br />
of bread and soft drink. Everyone ate<br />
in silence. It made me uneasy; usually<br />
when we ate together we talked over<br />
each other at the dinner table, with<br />
everyone straining to get a word in.<br />
Then, to break the tension,<br />
someone farted and we all burst<br />
out laughing. Candy curled her arm<br />
around Tammy, who still hadn’t<br />
said a word. Tammy relaxed into<br />
her shoulder. We each dug our toes<br />
into the impossibly green grass<br />
and shielded our eyes against the<br />
glare reflecting off the nearby lake,<br />
where some kids on waterskis were<br />
shrieking. On the pavement a young<br />
girl rattled past on her scooter, calling<br />
for her parents to catch up. They<br />
were ambling close behind in their<br />
thongs, licking ice creams and smiling<br />
benignly. A warm breeze lifted the<br />
curls in the mother’s hair and she<br />
gently slung them back across her<br />
shoulder. We gnawed on our bread<br />
rolls, quietly admiring these scenes<br />
from a distance. When Andrew<br />
received a phone call from Mum,<br />
we packed up our spread and left. M<br />
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 15 6/11/12 9:20 AM<br />
15
Borroloola Blue<br />
Phillip Hall<br />
All around our steel home’s broad bull-nosed verandah<br />
we’d jack-hammered rock, dug garden beds and ponds,<br />
fenced an oasis as we planned for shade, blossoms, wildlife and fruit.<br />
Among the natives we’d cultivated<br />
paw paws, frangipanis, mangos, bananas .... Security<br />
lights drew tree frogs and geckos; a Greek chorus<br />
of bellowed crawks and clicking chick chacks;<br />
an agile profusion alternating with contentment and strife.<br />
But that season, in the Build-up to the Wet,<br />
it was the raucous rocket frogs’ ratchet-like croakings<br />
we noticed most. Each night the males made our ponds<br />
throb with their rapid yapping calls, withdrawing at sunrise<br />
when grass finches postured on the lips of ponds,<br />
flicking their tails and singing a series<br />
of squeezed rasping notes; white-gaped honeyeaters<br />
threaded a path through foliage and blossom<br />
as Papuan cuckoo-shrikes tore paw paws and mangos.<br />
Then one night at the Build-up’s end, as we drank<br />
chardonnay on ice, Yanyula youths ran amok<br />
on ganja, throwing stones and shiaking at our padlocked gates.<br />
It only ended when [sorry name] leapt on our fence,<br />
screaming at stars, before lightly climbing<br />
a power pole like a cabbage tree palm—<br />
an unabashed athleticism electrified<br />
16<br />
in the fall.<br />
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 16 6/11/12 9:20 AM
Essays<br />
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 17 6/11/12 9:20 AM
Debbie Mortimer and<br />
the Forensic Fight<br />
Lorin Clarke<br />
The case ThaT overTurned The gillard governmenT’s Malaysia<br />
solution in August 2011 set the ball rolling in a chain of political events, the<br />
repercussions of which are still being felt. Debbie Mortimer SC was part of<br />
a team of barristers in that case who represented the asylum seekers. For<br />
Mortimer, the unflappable New Zealander who worked with the other lawyers<br />
on the case without expectation of a fee, this was a matter of principle. The<br />
principle for her was that the rule of law should always be upheld. Many<br />
Australians don’t know what the rule of law is, let alone how it might be upheld,<br />
or perhaps even why it should be upheld.<br />
This is partly because the debate on issues of national importance is often<br />
dominated not by those best qualified, with the best information, but by the<br />
media conducting a slanging match with politicians in a time frame that<br />
best suits the news cycle. And the justification for this is that Australia is a<br />
democracy. Before embarking on a discussion of Mortimer’s contribution, it is<br />
instructive to revisit George Megalogenis’s perceptive analysis of the political<br />
climate in the lead-up to the case.<br />
The wrong conversation<br />
In his 2010 Quarterly Essay, ‘Trivial Pursuit’, Megalogenis paints a depressing<br />
picture of the co-dependence between politics and the media in contemporary<br />
Australia. Two years on, the minority government is still in office, with the<br />
support of crossbenchers, despite a leadership challenge and investigations<br />
into the behaviour of several members of parliament. The two most unpopular<br />
institutions in the country are the federal parliament and the media. This is<br />
partly to do with what Megalogenis calls ‘medium creep’, where the media<br />
have been allowed to run the agenda. ‘There is a collective loss of confidence<br />
at work here,’ says Megalogenis. ‘No one is really sure what voters will say to a<br />
new idea, so government and media ask them first through focus groups. It is<br />
no way to run a national conversation.’ 1 Megalogenis argues that under the<br />
leadership of prime ministers Bob Hawke and then Paul Keating, bold, often<br />
unpopular reform was introduced, which led directly to positive social change.<br />
He urges similar action now. ‘No nation should be so lucky that it delays<br />
reform indefinitely without suffering any consequences,’ he says. 2 The end of<br />
Megalogenis’s essay is perhaps the most disheartening part. Describing the<br />
political culture as ‘both polarised and disengaged’, he claims Australia needs<br />
to relearn how to have a political discussion about how and why to change and<br />
develop as a society. ‘Before they can re-educate the electorate’, he says, ‘they<br />
must first re-train themselves.’ 3 This is all very well, but what do we do in the<br />
18<br />
1 George Megalogenis, ‘Trivial Pursuit:<br />
Leadership at the End of the Reform<br />
Era’, Quarterly Essay, no. 40 (2010),<br />
p. 15.<br />
2 Megalogenis, ‘Trivial Pursuit’, p. 43.<br />
3 Megalogenis, ‘Trivial Pursuit’, p. 80.<br />
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 18 6/11/12 9:20 AM
Debbie Mortimer, photograph by<br />
Mark Chew, 2012<br />
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 19 6/11/12 9:20 AM
Debbie Mortimer and the Forensic Fight Lorin Clarke<br />
meantime? If the news media and the people who represent us in parliament<br />
won’t lead a mature, constructive conversation about what kind of society we<br />
want to be, who will?<br />
Several months after the release of Megalogenis’s essay, Debbie Mortimer<br />
touched on these ideas at an event in Melbourne addressing the prospect of<br />
a bill of rights in Australian law. The event was a Wheeler Centre panel on<br />
human rights as part of Law Week. Mortimer paused on the topic of politicians<br />
pandering to the media machine. ‘It’s interesting to talk about whether<br />
it’s political cowardice or whether it’s a political recognition of a lack of<br />
support in the Australian community,’ she said. ‘They’re not the same thing.’<br />
Contemplating the kind of reform necessary to incorporate a bill of rights into<br />
federal law, Mortimer said, ‘You can do it either through leadership that is<br />
speaking ahead of the community and takes the community with them or you<br />
can talk about recognising that it’s a political move that the community wants.’<br />
Australians, she pointed out, are not marching in the streets over human rights<br />
issues. Like Megalogenis, though, Mortimer held the media partly to blame for<br />
the recent lack of political leadership:<br />
20<br />
4 Debbie Mortimer, ‘Injustice<br />
anywhere: Human Rights in Practice’,<br />
discussion with Alan Attwood, Robert<br />
Stary and Julian Burnside, Wheeler<br />
Centre, 16 May 2011.<br />
5 David Marr, ‘How did this boat get so<br />
close to the coast?’, National Times, 16<br />
December 2010.<br />
It’s the minute you disengage people from that immediate<br />
connection [with the actual people involved] that you enable this<br />
general prejudice, and it doesn’t matter whether you’re talking about<br />
boat people, it doesn’t matter whether you’re talking about same-sex<br />
attracted people—the minute you disengage from that personal<br />
connection, you allow stereotyping to get in. 4<br />
The contention that the ‘polarised and disengaged’ Australian public<br />
has come to distrust change and resent difference prompts the question:<br />
are we just a bunch of reactionaries? For Mortimer, it’s not as simple as that.<br />
In December 2010, Christmas Island locals awoke in the night to a maritime<br />
disaster on their shores. A boat had crashed off the rocks, killing at least<br />
half the asylum seekers on board. 5 The locals, scrambling to help in the<br />
rescue effort, might not have been in favour of allowing asylum seekers into<br />
Australia for processing. They might even have supported Opposition Leader<br />
Tony Abbott’s stated intention to ‘turn back the boats’. That night, though, the<br />
nuances of the political debate were cast aside. That’s because, says Mortimer,<br />
‘Australians are good-hearted people. And what they’re then seeing right in<br />
front of their eyes is another human being in trouble and Australians have no<br />
difficulty responding to that.’<br />
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 20 6/11/12 9:20 AM
Essays<br />
6 Madonna King, interview with<br />
Prime Minister Julia Gillard, ABC<br />
Radio, Brisbane, 2 September 2011.<br />
7 Transcript: Prime Minister Julia<br />
Gillard and Minister Chris Bowen, joint<br />
press conference, 7 May 2011.<br />
8 For every asylum seeker sent to<br />
Malaysia under the scheme, Australia<br />
would accept five processed refugees<br />
from Malaysia, increasing Australia’s<br />
refugee intake by 4000 over four years.<br />
9 Gillard and Bowen, press conference.<br />
10 Enda Curran, ‘Support for<br />
Australian government hits<br />
record low’, Wall Street Journal’s<br />
‘MarketWatch’, 11 July 2011.<br />
11 James Massola, ‘Pressure grows<br />
on Gillard’s leadership’, Australian,<br />
2 September 2011.<br />
12 Matt Johnston, ‘Gillard sunk as<br />
people smugglers cash in on Malaysia<br />
deal’, Herald Sun, 1 September 2011.<br />
What Debbie Mortimer does in the courtroom can be viewed as a systematic<br />
attempt to show Australians the effect of Australian policies on the ‘people<br />
on the margins’. Mortimer’s work as a barrister calls the decision-makers to<br />
account and demonstrates to the public that there are laws designed to protect<br />
them from the kind of abuses of power that can happen when nobody is paying<br />
attention. The media are not the court. The government is not above the<br />
law. And the public, in whose name this circus has been constructed, have a<br />
responsibility too. By drawing our attention to the laws that are being enacted<br />
in our name, Debbie Mortimer indirectly challenges Australians to engage in<br />
a ‘national conversation’ about how we treat the less fortunate members of<br />
Australian society.<br />
The Malaysia case<br />
On 2 September 2011 Australia’s Prime Minister was deflecting what she called<br />
‘fevered speculation’ about her ability to run the country. 6 At issue was the six<br />
to one High Court decision handed down on 31 August that declared invalid<br />
the government’s ‘Malaysia people swap’ deal. This was the deal that had,<br />
only months earlier, been hailed by the government as a triumph of regional<br />
diplomacy in defiance of opportunistic people smugglers. The purpose of the<br />
agreement, according to the government, was to ‘break the people smugglers’<br />
business model’ by sending to Malaysia for processing all asylum seekers who<br />
arrive in Australian territory by boat—placing them ‘at the back of the queue’. 7<br />
In exchange, Australia would take on additional refugees from Malaysia. 8 The<br />
government framed the deal as a clear message to any potential asylum seekers<br />
who saw Australia as a safe haven: ‘From today onwards—fair warning—you do<br />
not have a guarantee of being processed and resettled in Australia.’ 9 According<br />
to the Minister for Immigration and Citizenship, Chris Bowen, the deal was<br />
established ‘on very strong legal grounds’. On the contrary, the High Court<br />
found that Bowen did not have the power to decide to send asylum seekers to<br />
Malaysia. The agreement between Australia and Malaysia was not worth the<br />
paper it was written on.<br />
Midway through 2011, just before the High Court brought down its<br />
decision, support for the government had been, according to Newspoll, at an<br />
all-time low. 10 Now the subeditors were beside themselves. ‘Pressure grows<br />
on Gillard’s leadership,’ screamed the headlines. 11 Melbourne’s Herald Sun<br />
ran with ‘Gillard sunk’. 12 On the ABC’s 7.30 program, reporter Heather Ewart<br />
indicated that dissatisfaction within the ALP ran deep. ‘Talk to anyone in Labor<br />
ranks today, including senior levels of government, and behind the scenes<br />
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 21 6/11/12 9:20 AM<br />
21
Debbie Mortimer and the Forensic Fight Lorin Clarke<br />
13 Heather Ewart, report, ‘Beginning<br />
of the end?’, ABC TV, 7.30, 1 September<br />
2011.<br />
14 Graham Richardson, Radio 3AW,<br />
1 September 2011. Quoted in Ewart,<br />
‘Beginning of the end?’.<br />
15 Gillard and Bowen, press conference.<br />
16 Malcolm Farr, ‘Blaming the ref:<br />
Julia Gillard attacks High Court<br />
they’re all saying the same thing: that the High Court decision is diabolical<br />
for Labor, compounding a now entrenched public perception of government<br />
incompetence.’ 13 When asked in a radio interview whether it was too late for<br />
Julia Gillard to save herself from certain electoral doom after the High Court<br />
decision, former ALP minister Graham Richardson said simply: ‘Oh, yeah,<br />
way too late. There’s no way she can turn this around.’ 14 The Prime Minister<br />
and Minister Bowen, in response to the court’s decision, called a joint press<br />
conference. ‘The easy option’, said Bowen, ‘would be to resign.’ 15<br />
He did not resign. He and the Prime Minister, both clearly irritated, held<br />
firm. The Prime Minister was defiant, issuing a ‘blistering attack’ on the High<br />
Court. 16 Convention dictates that the executive arm of government in Australia<br />
refrain from commenting on the findings of the judiciary, so as to protect the<br />
independence of the courts in what is a system of responsible government.<br />
Extraordinarily, the Prime Minister not only criticised the court, saying it had<br />
‘basically turn[ed] on its head the understanding of the law’, she characterised<br />
the judgment of the Chief Justice, Robert French, as inconsistent. She declared:<br />
‘His Honour Mr Justice French considered comparable legal questions when<br />
he was a judge of the Federal Court and made different decisions to the one<br />
that the High Court made yesterday.’ 17 Gillard was accusing the chief justice<br />
of a mischievous creativity designed to achieve a preferred result. Interpreted<br />
by most commentators as a deliberate attack on the integrity of the judiciary,<br />
the Prime Minister’s comments were also, according to most legal experts<br />
(including those sitting on the High Court), incorrect in law. 18<br />
However spurious the government’s claims about the legal merits of the<br />
case, this suggestion that the court was misusing its power took hold in the<br />
media. Parliamentary secretary David Bradbury was quoted as saying, ‘High<br />
Court justices won’t be the ones who have to take phone calls about boats<br />
crashing into rocks on Christmas Island.’ 19 Thus the court was characterised as<br />
simultaneously conniving and naive. The implication was that those sitting on<br />
the High Court (and, by extension, those working on the case for the asylum<br />
seekers) were putting at risk the lives of the very people they were trying<br />
to protect.<br />
The ‘Malaysia case’ started with a text message from human rights lawyer<br />
David Manne to Debbie Mortimer. ‘Just had a call for help,’ it said. ‘Looks<br />
like expulsions planned for Monday.’ 20 Manne had received word through his<br />
contacts that two asylum seekers in detention on the Australian territory of<br />
Christmas Island needed help. A team of barristers worked with instructing<br />
solicitors from Allens Arthur Robinson and David Manne. The clients in<br />
22<br />
judges for scuttling Malaysia Deal’,<br />
, 1 September 2011.<br />
17 Tom Iggulden, report: Gillard<br />
attacks High Court over ruling, ABC<br />
TV, Lateline, 1 September 2011.<br />
18 Each of the judgments in this<br />
case was based on strict statutory<br />
interpretation. Any suggested<br />
‘inconsistency’ between the Chief<br />
Justice’s judgment in this case and any<br />
other ignores the fact that the question<br />
on which this case turned had never<br />
before been decided in the court.<br />
19 Bradbury spoke on Sky News, as<br />
reported in ‘Offshore processing doubt’,<br />
Canberra Times, 1 September 2011.<br />
20 Tom Hyland, ‘Manne of the<br />
moment’, Age, 4 September 2011.<br />
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 22 6/11/12 9:20 AM
Essays<br />
21 Plaintiff M70/2011 v Minister for<br />
Immigration and Citizenship; Plaintiff<br />
M106 of 2011 v Minister for Immigration<br />
and Citizenship [2011] HCA 32.<br />
22 David Marr, ‘Forget civil liberties,<br />
the defence of the 800 boat people<br />
rests on line-by-line analysis’, National<br />
Times, 23 August 2011.<br />
the case were from Afghanistan. They had arrived at Christmas Island from<br />
Indonesia on 4 August 2011 in a boat called SIEV 258. The asylum seekers<br />
claimed to have well-founded fears of persecution in Afghanistan ‘on<br />
grounds that would, if established, make them “refugees” to whom Australia<br />
owes protection obligations pursuant to the Refugee Convention’, to quote<br />
the court. 21<br />
The team behind the High Court challenge did not entirely escape media<br />
attention. The Melbourne Refugee and Immigration Legal Centre (RILC),<br />
of which Manne is executive director, was subjected to a takedown by the<br />
Australian in an article called ‘He’s the Manne of the moment’. In it, legal<br />
affairs reporter Chris Merritt called the RILC ‘GetUp! on steroids, complete with<br />
law degrees, and all paid for from out [sic] the public purse’. On the other hand,<br />
in the Age, in an article called (he must get this a lot) ‘Manne of the moment’,<br />
the same centre was described as operating ‘from upstairs offices at the scruffy<br />
end of Brunswick Street, Fitzroy’. Thus cast as both grassroots activist and<br />
fat cat lawyer, Manne came to represent the asylum seekers as their unofficial<br />
public advocate.<br />
Debbie Mortimer, meanwhile, was one of their leading advocates in the<br />
courtroom. When asylum seekers enter Australian territory, they invoke<br />
Australia’s protection obligations under international law. They are also<br />
governed by federal law. That law is, from time to time, tested in the courts.<br />
Mortimer’s job is to do the testing. According to commentator David Marr, the<br />
nub of the case was this:<br />
[The asylum-seekers’] defence is being built by close focus on the<br />
legislation, line by line, sub-clause by sub-clause. That’s how<br />
this court likes it. Only occasionally does Mortimer mention the<br />
‘fundamental liberties’ of her clients. Without the protection of the<br />
High Court, she said, ‘what happens to them will happen to them<br />
very quickly and in remote places.’ 22<br />
That focus on the legislation led the court to conclude that the asylum<br />
seekers could not be removed to Malaysia without their claims for refugee<br />
status first being assessed in Australia. Despite assurances from Australian<br />
and Malaysian authorities that the human rights of the asylum seekers would<br />
be protected under the deal, the problem was that there was not yet any legal<br />
protection in place. Unlike Australia, Malaysia was not party to the UN Refugee<br />
Convention of 1951. ‘This is a pointed message by the judiciary,’ said barrister<br />
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 23 6/11/12 9:20 AM<br />
23
Debbie Mortimer and the Forensic Fight Lorin Clarke<br />
Greg Barns in The Drum, ‘that in a democratic society the rule of law must apply<br />
to anyone irrespective of their status as citizen or non-citizen.’ 23 Australia’s<br />
obligations under international law reached further than the government<br />
had thought.<br />
The rule of law advocate<br />
The Malaysia case was by no means the first time an Australian government<br />
had come across Debbie Mortimer. She worked on the case that determined<br />
that the decision-making processes in relation to asylum seekers on Christmas<br />
Island were reviewable by the courts and subject to the laws of natural justice. 24<br />
She worked on countless immigration cases during the Howard era and many<br />
since then. She successfully argued for the reversal of an order to expel two<br />
Kenyan boys from the country. The boys at the centre of the case, Mohammed<br />
and Hassan, neither of them yet eighteen, had stowed away on a boat that had<br />
landed in Australia in 1998. They applied for protection visas once on land and<br />
were rejected by the Refugee Review Tribunal—a decision they were entitled<br />
to appeal. What happened next became the central issue in the legal cases that<br />
followed. Mortimer and her fellow lawyers argued that there was a time period<br />
during which the boys could legally challenge the decision against them, and<br />
that during that period, the government had illegally expelled them from<br />
the country.<br />
The cases make fascinating reading. Mortimer’s clients were put on a<br />
Singapore Airlines flight that suddenly became the subject of a legal battle.<br />
The aeroplane was on the tarmac in Melbourne when Carolyn Graydon, then<br />
a lawyer at RILC, sought Mortimer’s assistance to go to court for an order to<br />
prevent the boys being removed. An order was made by Justice Tony North,<br />
but the plane took off. The question in court then became whether the flight<br />
would be turned around midair, grounded on Australian soil, or whether (as<br />
turned out to be the case) the government would agree to allow the plane to<br />
land in Singapore and the boys to be put straight back on a plane to Australia.<br />
It is unclear from court documents whether the government allowed the<br />
plane to leave the tarmac despite a court order not to do so. Mortimer’s team<br />
(led by barrister Ron Castan), started an action against the then minister<br />
Phillip Ruddock for contempt of court in relation to this conduct. The action<br />
was later settled.<br />
The drama surrounding the case did not end there. Having agreed to put<br />
the Kenyan boys back on a plane to Australia, the government made one<br />
more move that put the boys’ hopes of a temporary sanctuary in Australia<br />
24<br />
23 Greg Barns, ‘Victory for asylum<br />
seekers against legal fiction’, The<br />
Drum, 11 November 2010.<br />
24 Plaintiff M61 /2010E v<br />
Commonwealth of Australia [2010]<br />
HCA 41.<br />
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 24 6/11/12 9:20 AM
Essays<br />
out of reach. Before leaving Singapore on their court-ordered trip home, they<br />
were issued with new visas. Those visas expired in the air on the trip back to<br />
Australia. As soon as the plane hit the ground in Melbourne, Mortimer’s clients<br />
were taken straight to detention. Their status as unaccompanied minors meant<br />
that their guardian, the state, was the very government attempting to deport<br />
them. They were in legal limbo. At this point, Mortimer withdrew from the<br />
case. Subsequent court documents describe how, after efforts to find suitable<br />
guardians for the boys failed, this happened: ‘the applicants lived with Ms<br />
Debra Mortimer, a barrister, who initially represented them’. Mohammed and<br />
Hassan are now Australian citizens.<br />
Despite her involvement in these cases, Mortimer is largely unknown to<br />
the public. She was never involved in student politics or social justice causes<br />
at university. Nor did she turn, as Julian Burnside did, from a Liberal voter<br />
into a human rights advocate. After doing her legal training in a small firm<br />
in Melbourne straight out of law school, Mortimer became an associate to Sir<br />
Gerard Brennan, then chief justice of the High Court. Brennan encouraged<br />
her to become a barrister straightaway, rather than taking the usual route<br />
of building up a client base in practice first. She did so. Now, she has a track<br />
record that includes some of the most high-profile cases in human rights law,<br />
discrimination law and environmental law. She is the head of the Human Rights<br />
Committee at the Victorian Bar. In December 2011 she was the joint recipient of<br />
the Tim McCoy Award for community legal work, the Law Institute of Victoria’s<br />
President’s Award, and the Australian Human Rights Commission Law Award.<br />
Mortimer was also the first woman to be awarded the Law Council of<br />
Australia’s President’s Medal for outstanding contribution to the Australian<br />
legal profession. She was joint winner of the 2012 Victorian Bar’s Public<br />
Interest Award for the Malaysia case. Some of the people she works alongside—<br />
Julian Burnside, David Manne, Robert Stary—are, if not household names,<br />
recognisable in the context of the debate. Mortimer appears in public too—on<br />
panels, in discussions, on radio. As her colleague Richard Niall SC points out,<br />
though, there are two forms of advocacy: advocacy in the courtroom, and<br />
advocacy for change in the community. ‘Debbie has always been more directed<br />
to the former rather than the latter,’ he says. Most of her work takes place<br />
in court.<br />
Nevertheless, one could be forgiven for casting Mortimer as a bolshie<br />
barrister motivated by a desire to oppose the recent right-wing trend in<br />
Australian immigration policy. The ‘Kenyan boys’ case seems, when read in<br />
its sociopolitical context, to be a direct challenge to the hubris of the Howard<br />
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 25 6/11/12 9:20 AM<br />
25
Debbie Mortimer and the Forensic Fight Lorin Clarke<br />
government at the height of its power. The Malaysia case stopped the Gillard<br />
government in its tracks. Conversely, Mortimer’s lack of public profile could be<br />
indicative of a black-letter-law-obsessed book nerd insensitive to the political<br />
repercussions of her work. Her perspective is much more complex than either<br />
stereotype allows. It is, as Niall says, ‘no coincidence’ that she often acts for<br />
clients with no resources. On the other hand, he says, she has acted for ‘many<br />
other entities and organisations and individuals who are also entitled to<br />
representation’ but whose lives do not hang in the balance. She is, he says, first<br />
and foremost a lawyer.<br />
There is one key point Mortimer steadfastly refuses to concede. She insists<br />
she has no agenda. Her work is not politically or personally motivated. She<br />
works, in so far as she can, according to the cab rank principle—where lawyers<br />
take cases as they come rather than picking and choosing. In an interview with<br />
Waleed Aly on ABC radio, Aly attempted to draw Mortimer on whether the<br />
broader political implications of cases such as the Malaysia case were a factor in<br />
the way she undertook her day-to-day work. She didn’t budge. Despite the fact<br />
that her formidable reputation has been formed in part as a result of her work<br />
on human rights cases, she won’t even accept the term ‘human rights advocate’.<br />
Mortimer’s insistence on the executive meeting its own standards of procedural<br />
fairness is simply a position that understands the role of the court as interpreter<br />
of the laws made by the executive. She paused briefly after Aly’s question on<br />
this point and came up with ‘rule of law advocate’ instead.<br />
The idea of advocating for the protection of the rule of law is uncontroversial<br />
in the context of a representative democracy. The rule of law is the idea that<br />
governments should be subjected to the systems of checks and balances that<br />
are designed to protect us all from abuses of power. The section of legislation<br />
on which Mortimer relied in the Malaysia case had been hastily drawn up by<br />
the Howard government. Its swift conception happened in the wake of events<br />
surrounding the arrival in 2001 of the MV Tampa. The government’s response<br />
to this boat full of asylum seekers triggered a series of political dramas just<br />
before a federal election. So this was a government making a law that arguably<br />
did not anticipate the intricacies of the Malaysia case. To Mortimer, this is<br />
irrelevant. ‘All the High Court has done, in my view, is say that the words of the<br />
statute mean what they say.’ 25<br />
The result is that Australia is living up to its obligations under international<br />
and domestic law. What happens next isn’t up to her. ‘How Australia decides<br />
to [live up to its obligations] in the political sphere in terms of a regional<br />
solution, I see as a very different issue from what you do with people who are<br />
26<br />
25 Debbie Mortimer, interview with<br />
Waleed Aly, Radio National Summer<br />
Breakfast, 19 December 2011.<br />
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 26 6/11/12 9:20 AM
Essays<br />
26 Debbie Mortimer, interview with<br />
Waleed Aly.<br />
27 Mortimer, Wheeler Centre panel.<br />
in Australia and who are, like every other person who is in Australia, entitled to<br />
the protection of the rule of law.’ 26 This is where Mortimer is ‘quite conservative<br />
in some ways,’ she says. ‘You can make a difference if you insist on fairness and<br />
transparency and good decision-making.’ 27 In the wake of the Malaysia case, the<br />
government is again changing the legislation. Fair enough, says Mortimer, that<br />
means the system is working. The government can still be kept in check, either<br />
with another challenge in the courts or by the will of the people.<br />
The forensic fight<br />
Ask Debbie Mortimer what it is that drives her and she admits from the outset<br />
that a lot of it is competitive instinct. Her focus, she says, is on what she calls<br />
‘the forensic fight’ in the courtroom. It’s as though something comes over<br />
her there. She describes coming up against an apparently insurmountable<br />
obstacle in court as exciting; the challenge to her competitive spirit a red rag<br />
to a bull. The question of whether she can win the argument takes over and<br />
she has a reserve of self-confidence and cool-headedness she doesn’t usually<br />
access. ‘I can’t explain where that comes from,’ she says, genuinely baffled.<br />
In social settings Mortimer is self-possessed but understated, closer to shy than<br />
socially dominating. Watchful when listening, she delivers her own words in<br />
full, thoughtfully crafted, grammatically correct sentences that leave no room<br />
for doubt.<br />
Born into a blue-collar family in Auckland, she secured a job in a law library<br />
at the age of fourteen. Fascinated by the criminal cases she read, she decided<br />
there and then to be a lawyer. She is amused and surprised at her own ambition,<br />
which set her apart from the rest of her family, none of whom had ever had<br />
anything to do with the law. She doesn’t know what the people she grew up with<br />
made of her then, or what they might make of her now. That sense she has in<br />
court of not knowing where it comes from—the drive, the confidence and the<br />
gall to stand up to the forensic fight against the odds—seems to have kicked in<br />
at that moment as a fourteen-year-old.<br />
Mortimer does not see herself as a crusader. One of her areas of<br />
specialisation is administrative law, which governs the actions of people who<br />
work for and on behalf of government. Regardless of whether she is hired by<br />
government (which happens regularly, though never by the Department of<br />
Immigration) or by someone seeking to challenge a government, Mortimer<br />
tends to scrutinise government conduct for a living. She never gives the sense<br />
that she’s just doing her job though. Finding holes in contracts or prosecuting<br />
companies might also be stimulating work, but there’s something about the<br />
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 27 6/11/12 9:20 AM<br />
27
Debbie Mortimer and the Forensic Fight Lorin Clarke<br />
human element of the cases she deals with that drives her. ‘Law regulates the<br />
way human beings live in our society,’ she told Waleed Aly. ‘It is the human<br />
aspects that I like. I like to see that the law operates fairly and equally on<br />
everyone with whom I live.’ It just happens that asylum seekers comprise a<br />
group in Australia that has not enjoyed a great deal of legal equality.<br />
The individuals for whom we act<br />
Like many lawyers defending the rights of individuals against the instruments<br />
of the state, Mortimer often works pro bono for clients whose cases she believes<br />
have merit. In 2001 Justice French, on the full bench of the Federal Court,<br />
identified this approach as a central tenet of the legal system. Dismissing a<br />
claim (in which Mortimer appeared) brought on behalf of asylum seekers who<br />
had arrived in the country on the MV Tampa, French J issued the following<br />
commendation:<br />
28<br />
28 Ruddock v Vadarlis [2001] FCA 1329<br />
29 Michael Gordon, ‘Rebel with a<br />
cause’, Age, 27 November 2010.<br />
The counsel and solicitors acting in the interests of the rescuees in<br />
this case have evidently done so pro bono. They have acted according<br />
to the highest ideals of the law. They have sought to give voices to<br />
those who are perforce voiceless and, on their behalf, to hold the<br />
Executive accountable for the lawfulness of its actions. In so doing,<br />
even if ultimately unsuccessful in the litigation they have served the<br />
rule of law and so the whole community. 28<br />
Mortimer works on behalf of her clients not just for their sakes but to ‘help<br />
build the integrity of the system’. Her clients are located at the centre of every<br />
discussion about her work. She refers to cases not by their case names but as<br />
‘Adala’s case’ and ‘Muhammed’s case’. When discussing actions she has lost and<br />
clients in immigration cases who have been sent home, she is compassionate<br />
but ultimately philosophical. Sometimes, the mere act of representing someone<br />
is the greatest thing she can do for them. Speaking to the Age in 2010, Mortimer<br />
described an exchange that took place during a particularly fraught asylum<br />
seeker case in terms that reiterate the importance of people having a sense of<br />
their own agency in the legal process. ‘I said to the judge: “We can’t call them by<br />
their names because they can’t be identified. Can we call them Mr A and Mr B?”<br />
“No,” said the judge, “We will call them non-citizen 1 and non-citizen 2.” I just<br />
couldn’t believe the lack of humanity in that.’ 29 This is not a bleeding-heart<br />
response but an insistence that the law respect the dignity of Mortimer’s clients<br />
as it would any other person appearing before the court.<br />
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 28 6/11/12 9:20 AM
Essays<br />
By scrutinising the way people use power, Mortimer puts the onus back on<br />
those people (including politicians and the electorate) to reconsider the way law<br />
operates in respect of people like her clients. Her work on the Malaysia case, she<br />
told Waleed Aly, ‘has a direct effect on our clients. That’s why we do it. We do it<br />
to protect the rights of the individuals for whom we act. The responsibility for<br />
what happens as the result of a High Court decision is a political responsibility.’<br />
She won’t make broad proclamations about the actions of the government<br />
whose powers she is keeping in check. That is the point: government is not<br />
answerable to her. It is answerable to the system, which, when it works properly,<br />
holds our politicians directly accountable, just as it did in the Malaysia case.<br />
Just as it did with the Kenyan case. By refusing to enter into a political fistfight<br />
or even to describe herself as a ‘human rights advocate’, Mortimer draws quiet<br />
attention to those occasions when the powers that be fail to meet the standards<br />
of responsibility they set for themselves.<br />
Surely then, she gets frustrated with the system she claims to have such<br />
faith in. If nothing else, her decision to become guardian to Mohammed<br />
and Hassan, her clients in the ‘Kenyan boys’ case, seems to go beyond a<br />
desire to simply uphold the rule of law. Asked to reconcile that decision<br />
with her professed faith in the system, she sees no real inconsistency. Most<br />
lawyers, she says, compartmentalise their personal responses to cases and<br />
their professional conduct. ‘I stepped out of the case the moment they<br />
came to live with me,’ she told the Age. ‘I was just about their mother, so I<br />
couldn’t be their lawyer as well.’ It’s worth pointing out, too, that it was only<br />
after the government went out of its way to avoid what Mortimer saw as its<br />
responsibilities in relation to her clients that she stepped out of the case.<br />
Technically, legally, the system in that instance did allow for her clients to<br />
be protected from detention. They were, after all, minors whose visas were<br />
subject to review. It was the peculiar circumstances of their guardianship (their<br />
guardian being the government attempting to incarcerate them) that stymied<br />
attempts to protect them from detention. In that instance, Mortimer decided to<br />
switch from the professional to the personal.<br />
Outside the comfortable majority<br />
Ordinary people, says Mortimer, don’t tend to need the protection of human<br />
rights laws:<br />
It’s people on the margins. It’s once you get in the hands of a police<br />
officer. It’s if you happen to be same-sex attracted, if you happen<br />
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 29 6/11/12 9:20 AM<br />
29
Debbie Mortimer and the Forensic Fight Lorin Clarke<br />
30<br />
30 Mortimer, Wheeler Centre panel.<br />
31 Cobaw Community Health Services<br />
v Christian Youth Camps Ltd & Anor<br />
[2010] VCAT 1613 (8 October 2010).<br />
32 Margarula v Rose [2000] NTCA 12<br />
and other cases. See also Matthew<br />
Fagan, ‘Broken Promises: Land Rights,<br />
Mining and the Mirrar People [2002]’,<br />
Indigenous Law Bulletin, no. 12.<br />
33 Mortimer, Wheeler Centre panel.<br />
to be different from the comfortable majority, then it matters. And<br />
that’s like every other exercise of power. It’s not to the comfortable<br />
majority that it matters, but exercises of power matter to people who<br />
aren’t in the comfortable majority. 30<br />
Where the ‘comfortable majority’ begins and ends is a question Mortimer<br />
seems to regard as under constant review.<br />
Mortimer’s efforts to highlight the plight of those outside the ‘comfortable<br />
majority’ have explored areas of law so wide-ranging only a few of them can<br />
be outlined here. In 2010 she worked on a discrimination claim made by a<br />
youth group called Way Out. At issue was a refusal by the Christian Brethren,<br />
a conservative Christian group, to allow Way Out to book a camping ground it<br />
owned for a function. The case was significant because it brought into focus the<br />
tension between the right to freedom of religion and the right to equality and<br />
non-discrimination. In this instance, Justice Felicity Hampel found in favour<br />
of Mortimer’s clients, saying that there had been discrimination on the basis<br />
of the sexual orientation of Way Out members and that, whatever the (legally<br />
protected) beliefs of the camp organisers, they were not entitled to curtail the<br />
rights of her clients not to be discriminated against. 31 At the time of writing,<br />
a landmark extradition case in which Mortimer appeared concluded in the<br />
Federal Court. Attorney-General Nicola Roxon had ordered the extradition<br />
of a Tamil man to the United States, but Mortimer argued the charges against<br />
him were political in nature and that he had not been afforded the requisite<br />
procedural justice. The court agreed and after four years in jail, her client<br />
walked out of court a free man.<br />
Early in her career Mortimer was involved in several cases that attempted<br />
to untangle the rights of protesters and traditional owners involved in the longrunning<br />
Jabiluka mines protests. The central dispute, which generated one of<br />
the most significant instances of civil disobedience in recent Australian history,<br />
concerned the interests of the traditional owners of the land on which the two<br />
Jabiluka mine sites were proposed. 32 Australia’s treatment of indigenous people<br />
still shocks. Her appraisal of the Northern Territory Intervention is damning:<br />
How is it that an entire section of the Australian community can<br />
be treated, by reason of their race, as they are? Have their social<br />
security benefits quarantined, have their houses invaded, have their<br />
communities invaded. How is that? And the rest of the community<br />
can sit by and say that’s a good idea, only for those coloured people. 33<br />
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 30 6/11/12 9:20 AM
Essays<br />
34 Mortimer, Wheeler Centre panel.<br />
Mortimer maintains it is the people ‘with whom we don’t share either a<br />
common heritage or we don’t share common experiences, and often we are<br />
afraid of them … it’s those people that we have difficulty realising are entitled<br />
to the same rights as we are’. 34 You get the impression Mortimer will continue to<br />
check the government’s homework on issues like this for as long as the media<br />
and politicians refuse to engage with communities that fall outside what she<br />
calls the ‘comfortable majority’.<br />
While we wait for politicians and the news media to heed Megalogenis’s<br />
warning about the level of debate in this country, it’s worth remembering that<br />
the law has a role in reforming Australian society as well. That role is limited,<br />
but perhaps, at the moment, it’s the arm of government in the best shape to<br />
challenge Australians’ attitudes to those who find themselves outside the<br />
comfortable majority. The media and the parliament might well be suffering<br />
from what Megalogenis describes as a collective loss of confidence, but Debbie<br />
Mortimer shows how the rule of law can bring about a more enlightened<br />
approach to social reform. M<br />
The author gratefully acknowledges the support of a residency from Varuna, the Writers’ House, and a Wheeler Centre Hot<br />
Desk Fellowship during the writing of this essay.<br />
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 31 6/11/12 9:20 AM<br />
31
A World that Could Be Read<br />
Diana Bridge<br />
To make an image, the silpa, who was devotee and craftsman,<br />
sat all night in meditation, crucially taxed, until day<br />
broke and he got on with it, his work of binding presence—<br />
a presence lifted, form and spirit, from the subtle texts—<br />
to his intractable material, his stone. Intimate as he was<br />
with the details, he could do them in his sleep: shaving<br />
the stone to make three indented circles in the neck, chiselling<br />
a mat of snail shell curls all over the crown, sculpting<br />
the giant bracket of the ears. Rendering the unquestioned—<br />
at times there’s hardly more to sacred art than this.<br />
But his was art that sought from skeins of argument<br />
the speculative wisdom of his time, what quality<br />
it was that caused the skin to fill—lightly,<br />
as though upon an in-drawn breath, what drew<br />
the mouth up slightly and led towards the nose’s tip<br />
the focus of the more than half-closed eyes,<br />
so that the worshipper would read through grace,<br />
refinement, sensitivity, to the greater abstracts.<br />
This is not the way he would have put it as, bent<br />
on holding it intact, his radiant imagined image,<br />
he worked at raising in the centre of the Buddha’s brow<br />
a light-emitting whorl: the ūrnā, the mark which stands<br />
for that most dazzling of conjectures: the inner eye.<br />
32<br />
Remnant, reminder, radical guide.<br />
See how an image helps with getting inside.<br />
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 32 6/11/12 9:20 AM
A Winter’s Tale<br />
Diana Bridge<br />
That is my title and, yes, it is a tale<br />
that starts with rumour riffling summer leaves …<br />
Of course she has done nothing wrong that flesh<br />
so turn against her and she require a Jobiad<br />
of trials, each one entailing loss.<br />
There is a point where plots diverge. I go<br />
with mine, go with the words I’ve held at bay<br />
all afternoon—now they slide into earshot.<br />
A young breast is a thicket; it may need weeding.<br />
Her breast is a thicket and needs weeding. This is poet’s<br />
language—persuasive as a violin, it would not<br />
willingly mislead. Even so, I put aside my language<br />
and learn theirs. The guardians of her breast,<br />
like Shakespeare’s own Paulina, are patient and ingenious.<br />
They lift the tissue from its shell, scrape or suction,<br />
I’m not sure, but when they’ve laid it all aside—<br />
the perfect with the wayward cells—they resurrect.<br />
Amazing what they do. Tissue you can inhabit,<br />
a shape that is wholly your own. Think of a stitch taken up<br />
to the seam, a palpable life woven right to the edge.<br />
*<br />
Then shining Hermione stepped from her case,<br />
restored. And her daughter, straight as an arrow parting<br />
the crowd, made it into her mother’s arms.<br />
This is where tales converge,<br />
where life, placed on hold, resumes.<br />
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 33 6/11/12 9:20 AM<br />
33
Twitter>The Novel? @tejucole>Teju Cole?<br />
Sam Twyford-Moore<br />
Teju cole’s debuT novel Open City was published in 2011 and I came to it<br />
via the traditional means—a review in a magazine, in this case a long, positive<br />
review by James Wood in the New Yorker. Writing in the magazine’s classic<br />
thin columns, Wood suggested the novel was ‘intensely [W.G.] Sebaldian’ and<br />
one that did not mock or flaunt its own critical and literary theories. He urged<br />
readers to try to get past the first few pages, which were dense and essentially<br />
implied that no action would take place in the story that followed. I was excited<br />
by Wood’s words of high praise and went searching for Open City in bookstores.<br />
Unable to find it, I ordered a copy from Book Depository and it came to me in<br />
a square brown cardboard case. I ripped it open and attempted to rip into the<br />
book, reading the first chapter. But then I stopped and stored it under my bed.<br />
Meanwhile, with his book gathering dust, Teju Cole was discovering the<br />
creative potential of Twitter. Most novelists now have some form of social<br />
networking account, perhaps to promote their works or speaking engagements.<br />
There are many numbers of ways to describe Twitter to those unfamiliar with it.<br />
Here are some attempts:<br />
34<br />
Users are limited to writing 140 characters per tweet.<br />
The social media platform was launched in 2006 but didn’t seem to<br />
hit the collective consciousness until 2009, when it crashed twice on<br />
the day Michael Jackson died, as users included his name in their<br />
tweets at a rate of 100,000 per hour.<br />
Twitter is known for the celebrity end of the spectrum—the Ashton<br />
Kutchers of the world—but as of writing there are more than 500<br />
million active users.<br />
People choose to follow you and you can curate your own reading list<br />
by choosing who you follow—you essentially curate and populate<br />
your own reading experience.<br />
Sometimes these voices will speak to each other.<br />
Some people are better at tweeting than others.<br />
Teju Cole joined Twitter in 2009 but didn’t really take to it until 2011, when<br />
he was beginning work on a long nonfiction book about his native Lagos.<br />
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 34 6/11/12 9:20 AM
Essays<br />
While researching in Nigeria he began to tweet as part of a project he titled<br />
Small Fates, an imprecise translation of the French faits divers, referring to<br />
compressed news items, typically just a single sentence in length. Cole suggests<br />
that the original faits divers influenced the writing of Flaubert and later Gide,<br />
Camus, Le Clézio and Barthes. On his website, Cole mentions twentieth-century<br />
French journalist Félix Fénéon as a master of the form. In explaining his project,<br />
Cole gave examples of Fénéon’s work:<br />
Raoul G., of Ivry, an untactful husband, came home unexpectedly and<br />
stuck his blade in his wife, who was frolicking in the arms of a friend.<br />
A dishwasher from Nancy, Vital Frérotte, who had just come back<br />
from Lourdes cured forever of tuberculosis, died Sunday by mistake.<br />
Living in Lagos, Cole had access to any number of horrific newspaper stories<br />
of this kind, and used the short news items he found to report the fates of those<br />
living (and dying) in Lagos: ‘Twenty is a bit young for a man to be married, so,<br />
with a kitchen knife, Usman, of Rijau, north of Minna, made himself a widower.’<br />
In his essay ‘Structure of the Fait-Divers’ of 1962, Roland Barthes described<br />
these small items as ‘Disasters, murders, rapes, accidents, thefts, all this refers<br />
to man, to his history, his alienation, his hallucinations, his dreams, his fears’.<br />
Teju Cole seems to be actively arguing against what is seen as the superficiality<br />
of Twitter by taking it seriously, not just in the dark irony of the content of<br />
his tweets, but in its potential as a form of distribution. NYRB published a<br />
collection of Fénéon’s faits divers under the title Novels in Three Lines. Teju Cole<br />
was invited onto National Public Radio in the United States to discuss his small<br />
fates projects for a show that was ‘in observance of National Poetry Month’. On<br />
air, Cole read the tweets with the same cadence as a serious reading of poetry.<br />
The tension in these tweets might be in the way we try to categorise them—are<br />
they are nonfiction with a spin, small perfect narratives or simply transcribed<br />
poetic incidences? Of course, they recall Hemingway’s famous six-word short<br />
story: ‘For sale: baby shoes, never worn’. Compression is an art form in itself.<br />
In his excellent short essay on Cole’s small fates project ‘Death by Twitter’<br />
(published in the New Inquiry, an online cultural and philosophical journal<br />
launched and housed on Tumblr, another microblogging platform), the<br />
journalist Matt Pearce comes closest to getting at the possibilities of Twitter<br />
for literary writers, but he declines to offer a conclusion, arguing that he is<br />
‘compounded by the 21st-century issue, which is that we critics don’t really<br />
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 35 6/11/12 9:20 AM<br />
35
Twitter>The Novel? @tejucole>Teju Cole? Sam Twyford-Moore<br />
have a familiar rubric for analyzing Twitter yet’. Writers have one of the highest<br />
take-up rates of Twitter of any profession, and it would seem that we also use it<br />
differently to those in other professions.<br />
The bestselling, bird-watching novelist Jonathan Franzen’s alleged<br />
contention that he finds Twitter ‘unspeakably irritating’ got online blood<br />
boiling earlier this year. Franzen went on to state:<br />
36<br />
1 In her 2010 wrap up of Twitter, Alice<br />
Gregory, writing for the journal n+1,<br />
pointed out this particular gem from<br />
West: ‘I specifically ordered persian<br />
rugs with cherub imagery!!! What do I<br />
have to do to get a simple persian rug<br />
with cherub imagery uuuuugh.’<br />
Twitter stands for everything I oppose … it’s hard to cite facts or<br />
create an argument in 140 characters … it’s like if Kafka had decided<br />
to make a video semaphoring The Metamorphosis. Or it’s like<br />
writing a novel without the letter ‘P’.<br />
Franzen’s evocation of Oulipo techniques—facetiously referring to George<br />
Perec’s A Void, in which the author avoided the use of the letter e for an entire<br />
book—is telling. Twitter dictates the form. But Thomas Jones in the London<br />
Review of Books suggests that here Franzen made a ‘category error’ in conflating<br />
Twitter with a kind of anti-literary sensibility. The New Yorker’s music critic,<br />
Sasha Frere-Jones, however, cautiously praised Franzen for having the audacity<br />
to make the statement in the first place, attempting to place him as literature’s<br />
answer to Kanye West, for his ability to make unpopular statements without<br />
much care for the backlash that follows. Frere-Jones misses the chance to make<br />
the point that Kanye West was an early adopter of Twitter, and the medium<br />
perfectly captured the rambunctiousness of his outbursts. 1<br />
Franzen’s anti-Twitter statements—short condemnations without much<br />
evidence of thought—sound as superficial as he’s making the medium out to<br />
be, exposing his artistic conservatism more than anything else. It is hard to<br />
imagine Franzen arguing against Teju Cole’s use of the medium—particularly<br />
considering its capacity for empowerment. Franzen is an exponent of the long,<br />
slowly produced brick-sized novel, an art form that he seems anxious might<br />
become outdated. Twitter is a threat because it might be the logical conclusion<br />
of Chekhov’s observation later in life: ‘Odd, I have now a mania for shortness.<br />
Whatever I read—my own work, or other people’s—it all seems to me not short<br />
enough.’ Novelists might be taking to it simply to keep relevant in this late age<br />
of reading.<br />
Writing is not the only art form going online of course. In a recent essay in<br />
the New Inquiry, Cole writes about the Russian-born photographer Gueorgui<br />
Pinkhassov’s Instagram account. Instagram is another smart phone–related<br />
social network, in this case used for the sharing of pictures. Many of Cole’s<br />
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 36 6/11/12 9:20 AM
Essays<br />
opinions on Pinkhassov’s use of Instagram could apply to his own use of<br />
Twitter. Pinkhassov, according to Cole, has ‘long valued simplicity and<br />
immediacy’. Cole notes that a ‘language is being explored with new tools’. And,<br />
tellingly, ‘it will be a headache for curators in the future’. Scrolling through<br />
Twitter feeds to access month-old tweets for this essay has been particularly<br />
painful. If your internet connection drops out you lose your progress. It can<br />
feel like a library caving in on you. Cole also writes about choosing to follow<br />
Pinkhassov exclusively. I’d recommend doing the same with Cole on Twitter,<br />
if you’re averse to the sounds of a 500-million-strong cacophony.<br />
When the new wing of the Museum of Contemporary Art opened in Sydney<br />
this year, the first exhibition was titled Marking Time, whose centrepiece was<br />
Australia’s first screening of Christian Marclay’s The Clock, a 24-hour art movie.<br />
The museum stayed open for the duration of the film on Thursday nights<br />
and viewers could camp out on couches in an attempt to take in the whole<br />
thing. I couldn’t stop thinking about Twitter and the internet while watching<br />
Marclay’s massive movie mash up. The Clock doesn’t offer the viewer a linear<br />
narrative but the passing of time, the literal turning of the clock hands, creates<br />
a linearity out of which the viewer can tease his or her own narrative. Twitter<br />
works in much the same way. Sitting in the dark, I tweeted ‘The Clock: creating<br />
narrative by other means’, partly to disseminate that idea and partly to save the<br />
line to use later in this essay. Social media and the internet could now be seen<br />
as our workbooks, where we can test out ideas that we later refine in print or<br />
book form. I have drafted and conceptualised several essays in the comments<br />
section of other people’s literary blogs (an essay on the Wire published in this<br />
journal originated in a thread on James Bradley’s City of Tongues blog). But I<br />
want to suggest here that Twitter can be the work as much as the workbook,<br />
recalling video-game academic Espen Aarseth’s useful distinction between<br />
‘ergodic writing i.e. writing still emergently based in evolving energy, and<br />
canonical writing e.g. unchangeably published’.<br />
Not everyone has been able to successfully capture this evolving energy.<br />
Parodies of the intersection between Twitter and literature abounded<br />
when Twitter entered the mainstream consciousness. Penguin published<br />
Twitterature: The World’s Greatest Books Retold through Twitter, a novelty<br />
book written by two nineteen-year-old University of Chicago students, which<br />
managed to cheapen both mediums. There is practically no humour present<br />
in reducing Oedipus to ‘PARTY IN THEBES!!! Nobody cares I killed that old<br />
dude, plus this woman is all over me. Total MILF’, as nobody on Twitter writes<br />
like that. The writers are essentially trading in outdated ideas of internet speak<br />
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 37 6/11/12 9:20 AM<br />
37
Twitter>The Novel? @tejucole>Teju Cole? Sam Twyford-Moore<br />
but they are not alone in their failure. There are multiple accounts of failed<br />
Twitter novels—attempting to replicate the success of Japanese mobile phone<br />
stories—and poorly serialised essays.<br />
Novelist Jennifer Egan was already known for experimenting with<br />
digital forms—a chapter in her Pulitzer Prize winning A Visit from the Goon<br />
Squad takes the shape of a Power Point presentation—when the New Yorker<br />
commissioned her to write a story using Twitter. And while the work she<br />
produced, ‘Black Box’, is a great short story, I felt cheated that the story was<br />
coming from the New Yorker Twitter account. Egan has her own Twitter<br />
account but it is not a space she frequents—it has only seven tweets—and<br />
she recently had to apologise because it was hacked and sent out spam about<br />
vitamin supplements. The performance was both under- and over-rehearsed:<br />
under-rehearsed in that Egan spent very little time on Twitter, and overrehearsed<br />
in that there should be no rehearsing at all. Was she concerned<br />
that if she disseminated the story herself, from her own account, it would be<br />
considered self-publishing?<br />
At nearly 9000 words in length, the story also stands in sharp contrast to<br />
Twitter’s concision. The New Yorker fiction Twitter account disseminated<br />
it over ten nights, for one hour each night. All I could hear was the distinct<br />
bleeping of a dump truck reversing onto the side of the information highway<br />
and dropping the haul. This bloodless scheduling gave little consideration<br />
to the internal timing and beats of Twitter, forcing the Australian writer<br />
Briohny Doyle to observe, real time: ‘J. Egan story proves twitter is a shit<br />
medium for reading stuff longer than slogans and following over-tweeters is<br />
heaps annoying.’ I retweeted Doyle—again, partly as a form of saving with<br />
the intention to include that line in this essay—and lost all confidence in the<br />
Egan story until I read it in full on the New Yorker website.<br />
The story is better than the initial mode of delivery. It is a sharp piece of<br />
dystopian science fiction. Egan’s story is all slogans, pushing weird futuristic<br />
aphorisms, delivered in a dead pan, instructive second person. Three tweets<br />
in, however, she suggests: ‘If you’re having trouble perceiving and projecting,<br />
focus on projecting.’<br />
This seems like an early barbed commentary on Twitter—all projection<br />
and no perception, all tip, no iceberg. This is a routine criticism of social<br />
media sites: that there is no editing process, but as Egan must know herself,<br />
there is a perpetual process of self-editing and censorship. Twitter is, for most<br />
users, an extended exercise in autobiography. It becomes more interesting,<br />
however, when the writing pursues abstraction or the fictional.<br />
38<br />
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 38 6/11/12 9:20 AM
Essays<br />
This is something Australian writers are beginning to explore. Peter Polites’<br />
brilliant short story, ‘From Peasant to Proletariat: An Autotwitography’,<br />
published in The Penguin Plays Rough Book of Short Stories, played with the<br />
confessional voice to humorous effect. Nadine von Cohen, a popular-culture<br />
columnist, considers her Twitter account as a fictional version of herself, in<br />
which she writes in capitals and prefaces every tweet with FUCK YEAH. The<br />
poet Astrid Lorange disseminates Gertrude Stein-like L.A.N.G.U.A.G.E poems<br />
in the form of tweets, which are as good as any of her published work.<br />
In his review of Lorange’s 2011 debut Eating and Speaking, Tom Lee<br />
suggests that ‘in reading Lorange’s collection one imagines a kind of<br />
ur-writing, where operations of filtering, selecting, screening, sifting, parsing,<br />
and arranging are digitally (that is to say indexically and tactfully) involved’.<br />
Lee identifies something significant to the composition of contemporary<br />
Australian poetics, but this speaks just as directly to experimental writing<br />
composed using Twitter. There is no need to imagine the filtering, selecting,<br />
screening because this is precisely the process.<br />
Wired.com hoped that Jennifer Egan’s ‘Black Box’ would see the return of<br />
serialised fiction—Egan mentioned that this nineteenth-century form was on<br />
her mind when she wrote the story. I find it interesting that such a forwardthinking<br />
technology magazine would hope something experimental would<br />
give way to something old-fashioned.<br />
Twitter has cited Teju Cole and Jennifer Egan in their announcement<br />
of the Twitter Fiction Festival, an officiated five-day festival seeking<br />
submissions for stories and live conversations. Wired.com ran the story<br />
with the exaggerated headline ‘First Twitter fiction festival might mutate<br />
storytelling forever’. The festival, starting in late November 2012, includes an<br />
official program and an official list of authors like any other literary festival,<br />
so seems to be missing the spontaneity of Cole’s approach compared to that<br />
of Egan.<br />
Cole is using his Twitter feed to experiment with what we might call<br />
‘spontaneous essays’ that can seem as improvised as jazz. Cole has described<br />
them as ‘unpremeditated’. When the first of these essays appeared, he<br />
flagged the exercise as a ‘seven-part excursus for Saturday morning’, each<br />
part being an individual tweet. If we consider the definition of excursus<br />
as: ‘1. A detailed discussion of a particular point in a book, usually in<br />
an appendix. 2. A digression in a written text’, does this mean that Cole<br />
considers these experimental essays as a digression from the written text of<br />
his Twitter feed?<br />
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 39 6/11/12 9:20 AM<br />
39
Twitter>The Novel? @tejucole>Teju Cole? Sam Twyford-Moore<br />
40<br />
Each age has its presiding metaphor. Ours is aerial bombing.<br />
Drone warfare and the IMF are variations on a theme: decisions taken<br />
from a great height, with disregard for consequences on the ground.<br />
Downton Abbey’s popularity is about a nostalgia for class superiority,<br />
and the desire to watch those who act from a great height.<br />
Virgin Atlantic’s obnoxious designation of First Class as ‘Upper Class’<br />
is about the same idea: that class is benign and charming.<br />
One question links the IMF, drones, Virgin’s ‘Upper Class’, Limbaugh’s<br />
violence and Strauss-Kahn’s, and the mania for ‘Downton Abbey’.<br />
The question is this: those people down there, are they really people?<br />
It’s a question about for whose sake this world exists.<br />
Someone in soft, casual clothes in a featureless building in Nevada<br />
presses a button, and the question disappears.<br />
The comment on drone culture is Don DeLillo apocalypse anxiety,<br />
heightened by the use of new technology. Cole seems to be engaging in<br />
something deeper here than anything he attempts in his philosophical<br />
Sebaldian novel, as admirable as that form is (and which might be considered<br />
experimental but perhaps only in terms of mainstream publishing). Following<br />
this series, Cole offered another excursive essay, this time reflecting on the<br />
Kony 2012 campaign—a video campaign launched by Invisible Children Inc,<br />
intended to bring awareness to their plight and to have the Ugandan war<br />
criminal Joseph Kony arrested by December 2012. Cole suggested it was little<br />
more than an example of what he called the White Savior Industrial Complex.<br />
From Sachs to Kristof to Invisible Children to TED, the fastest growth<br />
industry in the US is the White Savior Industrial Complex.<br />
The white savior supports brutal policies in the morning, founds<br />
charities in the afternoon, and receives awards in the evening.<br />
Then comes the king hit: ‘Feverish worry over that awful African warlord.<br />
But close to 1.5 million Iraqis died from an American war of choice. Worry<br />
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 40 6/11/12 9:20 AM
Essays<br />
about that.’ Cole’s clipped commentary was more excitedly picked up in the<br />
discussion of the ethics of the campaign than practically any other opinion<br />
editorial and was reproduced in full on the Atlantic and New York Times<br />
websites. In a long essay subsequently published on the Atlantic site, Cole<br />
defended his position in writing the commentary, stating that the tweets<br />
‘were intentional in their irony and seriousness. I believed that a certain kind<br />
of language is too infrequently seen in our public discourse. I am a novelist.<br />
I traffic in subtleties, and my goal in writing a novel is to leave the reader not<br />
knowing what to think. A good novel shouldn’t have a point.’<br />
It seems that the near pointlessness of Twitter affords Cole a degree of<br />
creative freedom. Experimentation with the form can be rewarding. This year,<br />
my friend and fellow writer Samuel Cooney and I decided to swap passwords<br />
to our Twitter accounts for a month. People had already been confusing us<br />
(one of Cooney’s interns on his magazine the Lifted Brow thought that I was a<br />
fake Twitter account that Cooney had invented). I’m not suggesting our project<br />
is a great literary work, but it was exciting to wake up each morning and read<br />
what you had done the night before—things I never did, statements I never<br />
made. For that month I was a fictional character. The ghost writer was making<br />
the life up on the go. I was very happy to have incorrectly attributed to me the<br />
ingenious work of someone who is a visionary of the absurdist, non-sequitur<br />
list-making that Twitter excels in:<br />
Nunchucks made from baby baboon femurs.<br />
A bow made from the pelvis of an Irish Setter, string made from the<br />
Achilles heel tendon of an adolescent llama, arrows are porcupine quills.<br />
A boomerang made from the fused ribs of a lowland zebra.<br />
I received retweets for these and more, and gained more readers. In return<br />
I lost Cooney followers and probably damaged his reputation—partly inspired<br />
by von Cohen and the fictional @wise_kaplan account (a sharp parody of an<br />
erudite but unstable editor type), I prefaced most of his tweets with the fact he<br />
was naked—but I was allowed to experiment with a creative voice that I had<br />
previously had trouble accessing, and was able to do this anonymously and in<br />
front of a modest-sized, mostly favourable audience.<br />
At the end of her essay on The Clock, published in the New York Review of<br />
Books, Zadie Smith admits that ‘really an essay is not the right form in which to<br />
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 41 6/11/12 9:20 AM<br />
41
Twitter>The Novel? @tejucole>Teju Cole? Sam Twyford-Moore<br />
speak of it’. But what other medium should we be aiming for? This essay could<br />
not have been written and distributed on Twitter. It would not have worked, so<br />
Matt Pearce’s rubric for discussing Twitter remains elusive. I believe it exists<br />
somewhere in creating the kind of serious and considerate literary criticism<br />
we would use for any art form (without pressuring authors to be aware of their<br />
feeds and accounts as literary projects). A good Twitter feed is not a sideshow;<br />
in some cases it can be the main event. M<br />
42<br />
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 42 6/11/12 9:20 AM
Germaine Greer: A Portrait<br />
Ben Quilty<br />
QuesTioning looks and self-conscious giggles greeted me for my first<br />
Feminist Studies tutorial at the University of Western Sydney. I was twenty-six,<br />
bullish and keen to understand why it was that my male friends were behaving<br />
so badly. I was also the only man in the entire Feminist Studies class of 1999.<br />
The fourteen very young women who joined me that day seemed awkwardly<br />
unprepared for my enrolment. And I in turn engaged their discomfort with<br />
crazed enthusiasm. I was there to learn about the impact the most profound<br />
movement of the twentieth century had had—on me!<br />
Germaine said no, definitely no, when asked to pose. She followed ‘no’ with<br />
a tirade about the flawed and intrinsically narcissistic nature of Archibald<br />
portraiture—an argument I could barely disagree with. Nonetheless I persisted.<br />
‘Please, Germaine,’ and ‘I do understand all of that, but we’re both here, you’ve<br />
had an impact on me and I want to, need to make a painting about you!’<br />
When finally she said yes my heart nearly stopped. It was ten years since I had<br />
graduated from the University of Western Sydney. I’d made meagre inroads into<br />
answering the question about my mates and their behaviour and now Germaine<br />
Greer had invited me into her home in the rainforest of southern Queensland,<br />
for a 48-hour portrait session.<br />
A month before the invitation a strange article in the Monthly magazine<br />
had portrayed Germaine as a tyrannical and ugly misogynist. I was sure that<br />
Germaine would be guarded. One man had commissioned another man to write<br />
an article questioning the intellectual contribution Greer had made to society<br />
on the eve of The Female Eunuch’s 40th anniversary. The Female Eunuch was a<br />
big book for me and for my parents. Perhaps I was naive to think that a woman<br />
might just have been better suited to write an essay examining the effect Greer’s<br />
formidable text had had on the way women had seen themselves and the way<br />
gender roles had twirled and sparred and jousted for the next forty years. My<br />
mum had always told me that reading The Female Eunuch had been a profound<br />
moment for her. Her friends, whom I’d grown up with, had always told me<br />
the same thing. I was truly embarrassed that a man had felt empowered to<br />
write about the most famous living feminist in such a didactically aggressive<br />
way—another ‘get me out of here’ moment during the meandering of my<br />
Australianness. My life had been littered with similar moments, but this time<br />
I felt I might be able to offer a feeble apology to the protagonist on behalf of all<br />
the testosterone infused humans.<br />
Drawing Germaine Greer isn’t easy. She thinks too much. Her body writhed<br />
around my page that first tepid night in time with the cloud of tiny, vibrant<br />
insects under the lamp on her Queensland verandah. I asked questions to steer<br />
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 43 6/11/12 9:20 AM<br />
43
Germaine Greer: A Portrait Ben Quilty<br />
the conversation away from chatting about narcissism. She talked about trysts<br />
with rock stars, marriage, alcohol, drugs, Led Zeppelin and biodiversity. I liked<br />
her instantly. A portrait sitting is less about scratching out a likeness and more<br />
about understanding the sitter. Germaine though is also almost impossible to<br />
grasp, hard to understand. I was proud of my well-tended open-mindedness<br />
until that night. At times I felt like my little brain was overheating. I could<br />
see the liana vines from the surrounding forest encroaching as I spoke. I was<br />
challenged at every level by my own inability. Both slowly the Four X she’d<br />
supplied warmed my bones and cooled my mind and we ate chicken curry<br />
and talked. Germaine has the most alarming way of including herself in<br />
philosophical discussion. She is shameless. She can also put together a very<br />
tasty chicken curry. The drawings I made of her that night are more about<br />
my own emotional quivering self and less about the gin-drinking subject,<br />
Germaine Greer.<br />
The land Germaine Greer lives on sits entangled on the floor of an ancient<br />
valley halfway up the hinterland of the Gold Coast. Lantana threatens to cross<br />
the road in parts and the low green fields and their luminous flatness act to hide<br />
the rotting root balls of the giant eucalypts that once jostled for space along the<br />
valley floor. The road in follows the Numinbah Valley and great walls of forest<br />
begin to climb over the horizon in every direction as the bitumen heads southwest<br />
and then due south towards the ancient volcanic head of Mount Warning.<br />
Natural Bridge hides in one of the enormous green folds of destruction meted<br />
out by the volcano 23 million years ago. Enticed by the promise of glow worms<br />
in a cave, the broad-brimmed tourists wouldn’t notice the bent gate into the<br />
regeneration site Germaine has established there.<br />
A crooked driveway of two tyre tracks leads to the pale-green house. Like<br />
most old farm houses in the Numinbah Valley, its broken windows are taped<br />
shut and waves of long grass lap at its cracked fibro walls. The inside is bare but<br />
for one grubby kitchen wall jammed full of paper cuttings of every plant and<br />
animal of the southern Queensland rainforest, with biological classification<br />
attached. A large diamond python lives underneath and the house is free<br />
of flyscreens. I didn’t see Germaine’s bed that night but she’d be mad if she<br />
had no fly net over her while she slept. I slept out in the guest room with the<br />
billion small, vibrant winged fellows that had taken up residence there. I woke<br />
in the dark to feel a small finger-sized beetle on its way into my middle ear.<br />
Over breakfast Germaine let me know that she was the president of Buglife,<br />
a prominent British conservation organisation, hence no flyscreens and<br />
definitely no fly spray at Natural Bridge.<br />
44<br />
Germaine Greer draws Ben Quilty<br />
(see page 2)<br />
Germaine Greer and the author at<br />
Natural Bridge<br />
Both photographs by the author, 2009<br />
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 44 6/11/12 9:20 AM
Having survived the beetle, the next morning was good. I made strong<br />
drawings. Again it struck me that so much of the exhaustive intellectual study<br />
Germaine has made her life is based on self-interrogation, self-awareness. She<br />
included herself in every discussion we had on the human condition. And most<br />
conversations that morning revolved around the way I was and the way she<br />
was, or at least the way she was sure she was and the way I had hoped others<br />
would imagine me. Germaine had long before my meandering drive into her<br />
valley engaged with my work, and now she hit me with questions about my<br />
knowledge of indigenous culture, sexual politics and environmental issues.<br />
She hammered me about my oeuvre’s omission of sex. ‘Where’s the sex, where’s<br />
the masturbation, where’s the tits?’ And she was right. For years I’d wondered<br />
how to include in my work that closeted part of masculinity—the obsessive<br />
sexual drive.<br />
Reverence for her feminist movement felt a weak excuse, although partly<br />
true. I needed to man up and make more work. I could feel my balls growing,<br />
to coin a bizarre Australian term. By lunch I was desperate to get back to my<br />
studio. As I left Natural Bridge I couldn’t help feeling an uneasy sadness,<br />
though. The world could never live up to Germaine Greer’s expectations of us<br />
all. We are a floundering mess. One of the most vexing human conditions to me<br />
is an inability to look inwards, to confront the truth about ourselves. Germaine<br />
made it seem natural. So many of the ugly weaknesses I’d seen in people<br />
around me stemmed from that emotional mutation. I was now confronted with<br />
how shallow my exploration of myself had been.<br />
As the little red leather plane pulls away from the Gold Coast the enormous<br />
forest tributaries of Mount Warning fill the plane windows to the west. The<br />
catastrophic events that had created the myriad valleys and mountains in<br />
some ancient time are now slowly being swallowed by forest, and humanity.<br />
The seismic gender role re-formation my dad had witnessed in his lifetime<br />
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 45 6/11/12 9:20 AM<br />
45
Germaine Greer: A Portrait Ben Quilty<br />
seemed small in comparison to the blinding flash of Mount Warning’s blast<br />
an age ago. Since that visit to Natural Bridge I have touched on masturbation<br />
and sex in my work. Tits have been more difficult. I became mildly obsessed<br />
with my big rorschached paintings of Germaine for too long. Rising from<br />
some primordial swamp, she glares at herself, six big paintings in all. None of<br />
them excited the Trustees of the Art Gallery of New South Wales. I failed to<br />
make the Archibald cut. I called Germaine to let her know that the painting I’d<br />
chosen wouldn’t be hung. ‘Portraiture is stupid,’ she said. There was no need to<br />
apologise to Germaine. She seemed to understand. M<br />
46<br />
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 46 6/11/12 9:20 AM
Letter to Tom Collins<br />
Anna Heyward<br />
Dear Tom,<br />
Writing a ‘letter to Tom Collins’<br />
became a tradition in Meanjin Papers<br />
in the 1940s as a way of discussing<br />
Joseph Furphy’s works and their<br />
reception or of commenting on<br />
Australian letters and society, a<br />
device that later spread to other<br />
literary journals such as Overland.<br />
It began with Brian Vrepont in 1941<br />
and continued with writers such as<br />
Manning Clark, Kate Baker, Nettie<br />
Palmer, Kylie Tennant, Jim Devaney,<br />
James Duhig, John McKellar, Miles<br />
Franklin and A.A. Phillips.<br />
A bit over a year ago I began working in the Meanjin archive in the Special<br />
Collections department of the Baillieu Library at the University of Melbourne.<br />
My task was to begin at the very beginning, at the inception of the magazine,<br />
and move forward, matching writers to their work. Six boxes of linocuts from<br />
the 1940s to the 1980s had been discovered, inky and dusty, and they needed<br />
restoration. These were prints that had been used in the magazine—they were<br />
cartoons, letters, covers and portraits. Most of the portraits were by Louis<br />
Kahan, prints of his portraits of writers that were exhibited at the Ian Potter<br />
Museum of Art in early 2009. The work was painstaking. The Special Collections<br />
archive is dark and crowded and dim. Several times I lost my way. I loved it.<br />
I confess, Tom, when I began this work, I had never heard of you, nor of<br />
Joseph Furphy, nor of your towering classic Such Is Life. I was in my final year<br />
of an English major at the University of Melbourne. No Australian literature<br />
course was on offer in the English department that year. As the semester<br />
progressed, my work in the Meanjin collection became more and more<br />
important to my reading life, and the discoveries I was to make in those last six<br />
months as a student changed everything for me.<br />
In a happy coincidence, the week before I began my work in Special<br />
Collections, I had attended the inaugural meeting of what was then called the<br />
Australian Literature Reading Group, where I met my friend Stephanie Guest,<br />
its instigator, for the first time. Our project was simple. We were to go week by<br />
week, and each time discuss a piece of Australian writing, previously unfamiliar<br />
to us, with the help of an invited guest. Kevin Hart spoke to us about Robert<br />
Gray. Sophie Cunningham introduced me to Timothy Conigrave’s Holding the<br />
Man. Chris Wallace-Crabbe read us Les Murray’s ‘The Broadbean Sermon’,<br />
Judith Wright’s ‘Nigger’s Leap, New England’ and Kenneth Slessor’s ‘Five Bells’.<br />
We read A.D. Hope’s ‘Australia’ and our five big cities became ‘five teeming<br />
sores’ for me ever after; Peter Rose had us read Peter Porter’s heartbreaking<br />
poem ‘An Exequy’. Justin Clemens discussed Christopher Brennan, and Helen<br />
Garner talked about hating writers festivals. We talked about Thea Astley and<br />
Barbara Baynton. I learnt who Shirley Hazzard was.<br />
Each time I would return to the Meanjin collection and search for more.<br />
Through the magazine I was able to situate my discovery of that writer against<br />
their discovery by the world. A.R. Chisholm’s piece ‘Christopher Brennan and<br />
the idea of Eden’, from the June 1967 issue of the magazine, was my critical<br />
introduction to Brennan.<br />
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 47 6/11/12 9:20 AM<br />
47
Letter to Tom Collins Anna Heyward<br />
One morning in February I dropped a heavy box onto my sandalled foot.<br />
Opening up the box to inspect the offending weight, I found a handsome<br />
drawing of my teacher, Chris Wallace-Crabbe. Next in line was a haughtylooking<br />
Henry Handel Richardson. A portrait of a boyish, excited-looking<br />
young man with a long gaze turned out to be Randolph Stow, a writer whom I<br />
feel lucky to have discovered. Patrick White’s stare was as concrete and anxiousmaking<br />
as I had ever seen in photographs. Each time I identified a portrait I<br />
would clean it, label it, shelve it, and then set about searching for the work of<br />
that writer. I got to know the magazine well, and I was astounded by it. There is<br />
a very strong literary history preserved in the Meanjin papers. It opened up to<br />
me, week by week. The dark purple bruise creeping up my first and second toes<br />
that afternoon reminded me to look for a copy of The Merry-Go-Round in the<br />
Sea in the second-hand bookshop on my way home.<br />
Among the pages of the magazine, Tom, I found serious, intelligent criticism<br />
of wonderful and now-forgotten writers. I found fiction and poetry that I never<br />
could have imagined as belonging to what I had previously perceived as the<br />
landscape of Australian letters. The wild, precise prose of Christina Stead was<br />
ours. I read Douglas Stewart, Ray Lawler, Thea Astley, Katharine Susannah<br />
Prichard, Vance Palmer, Xavier Herbert, Dorothy Green, Kenneth Slessor,<br />
Alan Marshall, Norman Lindsay … and you, Tom. I also found Solzhenitsyn,<br />
Georg Lukács and Picasso. More than once I was distracted from my real<br />
classes. I passed over reading Foucault for the umpteenth time in favour of<br />
Elizabeth Jolley. It began to feel subversive.<br />
So, Tom, each time I would take my findings back to Stephanie, and we<br />
shared many of these old pages with the group. We all wondered about reading<br />
Australian writing at universities, and whether its absence was strange or<br />
traditional.<br />
The answers to many of our questions about teaching Australian literature<br />
at university were to be found in Meanjin, on my Tuesday mornings, in the<br />
cold labyrinth of the archives. I came across A.A. Phillips’s 1950 essay ‘The<br />
Cultural Cringe’ and sent it to Stephanie the same day. In that essay Phillips<br />
identifies an anxiety in Australian writing: ‘an inability to escape needless<br />
comparisons’. This ‘disease of the Australian mind’ causes the Australian reader<br />
constantly to ask himself ‘yes, but what would a cultivated Englishman think<br />
of this?’ and so hinders ‘the fine edge of his Australian responsiveness’. We<br />
thought about its relevance today, and whether our own estrangement from<br />
Australian writing had anything to do with the apprehension Phillips spoke<br />
about sixty-two years ago.<br />
48<br />
Chris Wallace-Crabbe by Louis Kahan,<br />
Meanjin, vol. 29, no. 2, 1970<br />
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 48 6/11/12 9:20 AM
In 1959 Vincent Buckley published a lecture on ‘the possibility, and the<br />
propriety of having Australian Literature as a subject of formal teaching and<br />
discussion in a university’. I read it with astonishment. The first question<br />
Buckley asks is one that I think is no longer worth addressing—is there such<br />
a thing as an Australian literature? He goes on to make a point that perhaps<br />
relates to A.A. Phillips’s argument about ‘Australian responsiveness’, about the<br />
Australian ‘aesthetic’ and about our potential for kitsch and parochialism:<br />
Ever since Marcus Clarke praised A.L. Gordon’s poetry for its<br />
Australian-ness we have tended to praise, push, boom the inferior<br />
article on ‘Australian’ grounds, and so compromise the claims or<br />
depreciate the standing of the superior.<br />
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 49 6/11/12 9:20 AM<br />
49
Letter to Tom Collins Anna Heyward<br />
Dear Tom, did we have a desire for that which is Australian to be aesthetically<br />
Australian? Were this the case, I am worried that Australian literature never<br />
could be anything more than Australian literature, just a niche in the huge<br />
anglophone whorl.<br />
Buckley’s preliminary question ‘can Australia be said to have a literature?’<br />
leads him to our real preoccupation, ‘can there be said to be a body of<br />
Australian literature which is amenable to formal study in a university?’ His<br />
answer is circular and somewhat self-fulfilling:<br />
50<br />
There is still enough authority about a university to give a particular<br />
cachet to any work which is seriously studied and critically discussed<br />
in its department of English. If a work is set for special study, named<br />
in the Arts handbook, recommended to be bought, lectured on,<br />
and discussed in tutorials, then the natural assumption is that it<br />
is a book which it is important for students to read and discuss.<br />
Important for students themselves, I mean, and not merely for the<br />
good of some abstraction which we call Australian Literature.<br />
A literature is something that we go by. It informs the way we speak and<br />
the way we govern. To teach a piece of writing in a university is to make<br />
it important. If we teach Australian literature it will become literature. As<br />
Roland Barthes said, ‘literature is what is taught’. We choose the books in the<br />
canon, they don’t put themselves there by mystical artistic force. Moreover, as<br />
Buckley writes:<br />
If we took the best Australian writers—Furphy, Richardson,<br />
Herbert, Dark, Palmer, and Patrick White in the novel; Brennan,<br />
Slessor, Hope, Judith Wright, Neilson and McAuley in poetry—we<br />
should have a body of work which is obviously different in certain of<br />
its preconceptions and tendencies from the best English work over<br />
a comparable period, and even from the best Canadian or South<br />
African or New Zealand work.<br />
Even more exciting than the idea of swallowing Australian writing buried in its<br />
national context is the idea of removing it from that very context:<br />
Henry Handel Richardson couldn’t have written if Nietzsche hadn’t<br />
written, and if the French novelists of the nineteenth century hadn’t<br />
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 50 6/11/12 9:20 AM
Essays<br />
sponsored the novel of psychological realism. Brennan would have<br />
been entirely different without Mallarmé and German Romanticism.<br />
Judith Wright walks in the open space cleared by Eliot and Yeats.<br />
Hope has more in common with Yeats and Swift and Auden than with<br />
any other individual Australian poet. Eleanor Dark has a greater<br />
affinity with several English novelists of this century than with any<br />
Australian who preceded her. And Patrick White must be talked of<br />
in the context provided by Lawrence, Hemingway, Faulkner, and<br />
Melville as well as in that of the Australian mythos of exploration.<br />
W.A. Amiet had already answered the question of canonising Australians in<br />
volume 1, number 6, 1941, in an essay called ‘Australian Literary History’:<br />
Literary history—a blend of biography, bibliography, philosophy,<br />
sociology, criticism, flour, soda and cream o’tartar—follows in the<br />
wake of literature as inevitably as martial history in the wake of war.<br />
Moreover it far-reachingly affects the development of letters, imbuing<br />
the impressionable young with a prejudice in favour of such things as<br />
are selected to be recorded, applauded and permanently enrolled in<br />
the national archives.<br />
Amiet provides the timid and deferential critic, prone to sidelining Australian<br />
writing, with a checklist:<br />
Rule 1. Get rid of the inferiority complex.<br />
Rule 2. Get it clear that ours is a literature, not a branch literature.<br />
Rule 3. To obtain ‘national’ results, don’t harp on the ‘national’.<br />
‘I can name many Australian creators of literature,’ concludes Amiet. ‘Let<br />
not our historians depress them with proofs that they are merely creators of<br />
Australian literature.’<br />
I also found many letters to you, Tom. Letters from Kate Baker, Nettie Palmer,<br />
Kylie Tennant, Jim Devaney, James Duhig, John McKellar, Manning Clark and<br />
Miles Franklin. James Duhig wrote to you of his frustration that Australian<br />
school children are not made to read Australian letters. ‘Two of the greatest<br />
artists who ever lived [Goya and Cervantes] wrote and depicted local themes …<br />
if a man cannot see the significance of life about him he is no writer,’ he argues.<br />
Historian Manning Clark wrote to you to rail against the disparity between the<br />
upper middle class and the working class in Australia, a phenomenon I believe<br />
we have all but completely forgotten about:<br />
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 51 6/11/12 9:20 AM<br />
51
Letter to Tom Collins Anna Heyward<br />
52<br />
Miles Franklin by Louis Kahan,<br />
Meanjin, vol. 24, no. 4, 1965<br />
Geoffrey Serle by Louis Kahan,<br />
Meanjin, vol. 24, no. 2, 1965<br />
You see there is a rift in our society—the elite flee to the garret, to the<br />
polite drawing-room, to Europe, while the people ape the mate ideal,<br />
being bonzer sorts! I am not asking you to feel penitent, to take back<br />
what you said. I am addressing you because I believe you tried to do<br />
something worthwhile to interpret Australian life.<br />
My favourite letter was that of the wonderfully clever and lively Miles<br />
Franklin, published in summer 1944, around the time the Ern Malley hoax was<br />
erupting at Angry Penguins. In it she responds to the assertion that ‘there is no<br />
Australian literature’. ‘In a land which tests gregarious humanity by isolation<br />
and loneliness,’ writes Franklin, ‘none but the self-superior and those without<br />
humour could fail to appreciate the democracy of the dismissal into one camp<br />
of all persons here so bumptious and foolhardy as to have articulated their<br />
indigene in song or story.’ She was writing in wartime, and looking back with<br />
frustration to the turn of the century, to the publication of Such Is Life as well<br />
as her own My Brilliant Career, a time during which Australians were ‘finding<br />
a delight, as sweet as first love, in the capture of the distinctive atmosphere and<br />
characteristics of their environment’. ‘Aut Australia aut nihil,’ you declared in<br />
1897, Tom—Australia or nothing. Two years later your poetic counterpart Henry<br />
Lawson said that any talented Australian writer should ‘study elementary<br />
anatomy, especially as applies to the cranium, and then shoot himself carefully<br />
with the aid of a looking glass’. Lawson ignored his own advice.<br />
Everything I read began to remind me of something else. In a class on<br />
postmodernism we discussed Salman Rushdie’s Shame and the ‘innovative’ and<br />
‘postmodern’ stylistic practice of breaking the fourth wall and addressing the<br />
reader. All I could think of were the first lines of My Brilliant Career, in which<br />
Franklin interrogates the reader, ‘what matters it to you if I am egotistical?<br />
What matters it to you though it should matter that I am egotistical?’<br />
In that class we had to discuss Barthes’s Death of the Author, a reiteration of<br />
Proust’s argument against Sainte-Beuve. I wondered if it even mattered that any<br />
of the writers I was reading were Australian. Or if, as Barthes said, to read them<br />
that way is to place limitations on them. Reading Christina Stead’s The Man<br />
who Loved Children, I can’t believe that to be true. Stead spent months pacing<br />
the streets of Washington with her husband, gathering minutiae to change the<br />
book’s setting from Sydney to the United States, at the demand of her publisher.<br />
Whether the book were set in Sydney or in Washington, it is still the same book<br />
by the same writer. Perhaps this book is based on portions of Stead’s life. In one<br />
sense, anything anyone writes is autobiographical. But there is nothing that a<br />
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 52 6/11/12 9:20 AM
iographer could possibly find in Stead’s life that could diminish or ‘explain’<br />
the power of the sentences in that book.<br />
The inception of Meanjin was an act of bravery, and a sign of belief. To<br />
start from the very beginning, to pick up the first ever issue of Meanjin, or of<br />
Angry Penguins for that matter, is to open yourself up to an unrecognisable<br />
Australia. In 1940 paper was expensive, the population was seven million, we<br />
were at war. Australia was once a hard place to live in, I’m sure you’d know,<br />
Tom. Those who began the publication were renegades who believed in the<br />
writers who had already inhabited this country, and knew that there was much<br />
more to come. Clem Christesen created a journal to which one could apply your<br />
own self-description, ‘temper democratic; bias, offensively Australian’. The<br />
establishment of Meanjin was an affirmation of the intellectual life of Australia<br />
under duress. Whether English departments receive the same amount of<br />
funding as they did last year or not, we have a duty to go on reading.<br />
Opening the first issue of Meanjin Papers one finds these words from<br />
Clem Christesen:<br />
‘Poetry’s unnat’rel; no man ever talked poetry ’cept a beadle on<br />
boxin’ day, or Warren’s blackin’ or Rowland’s oil, or some o’ them<br />
low fellows; never let yourself down to talk poetry, my boy.’ But we<br />
have disregarded Tony Weller’s advice to his son, Samuel. In an<br />
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 53 6/11/12 9:20 AM<br />
53
Letter to Tom Collins Anna Heyward<br />
54<br />
age governed by the stomach-and-pocket view of life, and at a time<br />
of war and transition, we still strive to ‘talk poetry.’ For we believe<br />
that it is our duty to do so. We believe that it would be a grave error<br />
to suppose the nation can drop its mental life, its intellectual and<br />
aesthetic activities for three or five or more years, neglecting them<br />
and those trained to minister to them, and then pick everything up<br />
again as though nothing had happened. Literature and art, poetry<br />
and drama do not spring into being at the word of command. Their<br />
life is a continuous process growing within itself, and its suppression<br />
is death. Therefore we determined to commence the publication of<br />
the Meanjin Papers. Media for similar expression are sadly lacking<br />
in this country. It is hoped to continue publication of this brochure<br />
throughout the war period—and perhaps well into Peace. Prose, as<br />
well as verse, will be included.<br />
CBC<br />
What follows is a slim volume of just eight poems. Christesen was motivated<br />
by ‘the literary rebels of our century as represented in the little magazine<br />
movement’. In the 1940s, Australian literary nationalism was unsure of itself.<br />
Angry Penguins was ruined by the shame and trauma of the Ern Malley hoax<br />
but lingered on defiantly for two more years. We were also in the wake of the<br />
Jindyworobak movement, a revolt against the invasion of false European<br />
imagery into Australian art. The Jindyworobaks believed Australian writers<br />
needed to react exclusively to local stimuli, they wanted to ‘free Australian<br />
art from whatever alien influences trammel it’. They were ridiculed for<br />
parochialism and naivety. R.H. Morrison called them ‘Jindyworobak-wardness’<br />
while A.D. Hope dismissed them as a ‘boy scout school of poetry’.<br />
While they may not have achieved their end of a genuine and natural<br />
Australian aesthetic and style, as a masterful poet without an explicit<br />
nationalist agenda such as Judith Wright did, they at least attest to an anxiety<br />
in this generation that Australian words would be swallowed up in the sea of<br />
English or, worse, dismissed as second-rate ‘Britishness’.<br />
In issue two, of February 1941, James Picot attempts to discuss the criticism<br />
of Australian poetry. For the Jindyworobaks, he writes, ‘it is just no good talking<br />
Keats’, yet ‘we live in the world of Lenin and Einstein and Freud and Whitehead,<br />
and the Australian is as intelligent as anybody else!’ This struck me as very<br />
poignant, Tom. There was a time when one felt one had to write the sentence<br />
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 54 6/11/12 9:20 AM
Essays<br />
‘The Australian is as intelligent as anybody else!’ This is the fluff, the bore, the<br />
anxiety around Australian letters. We battle between trying to seem as natural<br />
as we can and Australian as we can, from the puritanism of New Criticism to the<br />
puritanism of the Jindyworobaks. We think an awful lot about how we might<br />
seem, how international we are and how local we are.<br />
In ‘The Cultural Cringe’ A.A. Phillips writes of the ABC Incognito radio<br />
program, in which two musical performances are compared:<br />
one by an Australian, one by an overseas executant, but with the<br />
names and nationalities withheld until the end of the programme.<br />
The listener is supposed to guess which is the Australian and which<br />
is the alien performer. The idea is that quite often he gets it wrong or<br />
gives it up because, strange to say, the local lad proves to be no worse<br />
than the foreigner. This unexpected discovery is intended to inspire<br />
a nice glow of patriotic satisfaction.<br />
We want to be pleased by the quality of something Australian being comparable<br />
to anything else in the world, we want to be surprised by it. Do we really, Tom?<br />
If the act of reading is about self-discovery, which I believe it is, then it seems<br />
an awful shame to read like that. I am passionately, exhaustively grateful that<br />
last year I was spurred, by my work in the Meanjin collection and by my work<br />
with Stephanie, into reading Patrick White, Helen Garner and Christina Stead.<br />
I shudder when I think of how close I came to missing out.<br />
When I read Watkin Tench’s incredible 1788 in 2012, I thought about how<br />
perhaps for a long time Australian writing was about encounter. I think this is<br />
true of Katharine Susannah Prichard, of Judith Wright, of Barbara Baynton,<br />
even of Ern Malley, or even painters such as Fred Williams and Sidney Nolan.<br />
Perhaps it still sometimes is. Perhaps the biggest one is our encounter with<br />
ourselves. Maybe this is where the Jindyworobak movement went wrong.<br />
They were trying, not to know themselves, but to invent themselves. To know<br />
our writing is to know ourselves. This was certainly how it felt last year when<br />
we began our exploration into what was up until then, for us, the mysterious<br />
subculture of Australian literature. That was how it felt on those dark quiet<br />
mornings I spent on the third floor of the library, uncovering the faces and<br />
words of our written past.<br />
Yours sincerely,<br />
Anna Heyward<br />
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 55 6/11/12 9:20 AM<br />
55
Translating a ‘Prolog’<br />
Jean Kent<br />
for Rolf Hermann<br />
In the spring sunshine, under wisteria through the ironbark—<br />
a sky of emphatic blue above, all around me<br />
a bath of light—<br />
While the tortoiseshell cat is sleeping, wound into a spiral<br />
(on its wrought-iron seat) of caramel, charcoal<br />
and lime-white—<br />
I’m trying to translate a German poem. Earlier the cat<br />
sat on the dictionary. All English translations<br />
of vertrauen—‘to trust’? ‘have confidence in’?—<br />
disappeared under sunwarmed fur. Now she’s confident<br />
she’s my mistress again, the purring bundle<br />
settles in her own space—<br />
leaves me to the foreign words in my hands.<br />
Distracted, I hear a crackling under loquat leaves—breaking sounds<br />
below all that my trees have shrugged off<br />
in the last half year—<br />
I wasn’t here to rake them clear, and now the leaves<br />
hide, then slowly release, a lizard that looks<br />
like a sundappled creek—<br />
a patient flow across the path, its flick of tongue<br />
a lick of blue, in and out<br />
of the light.<br />
The reptile slides under another blanket of leaves<br />
on a garden bed. The cat still sleeps.<br />
From a forest of German<br />
56<br />
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 56 6/11/12 9:20 AM
a snail in a cape of rain begins to wake.<br />
On a book’s bright field, oak leaves and acorns<br />
scatter …<br />
The blue-tongue lizard when it blinks in the open again<br />
is under the cat’s dreaming chair.<br />
Sunlight aspics them<br />
one above the other, both oblivious, peculiar<br />
as translations, shy gestures<br />
towards another place.<br />
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 57 6/11/12 9:20 AM<br />
57
The Great Poet’s Gene<br />
Alan Gould<br />
He dandied, but he suffered to renew<br />
the gift he had to work his purpose through.<br />
O demiurge<br />
of fierce old age<br />
oblige his urge<br />
to stay with edge.<br />
The trouble came with later echolalia,<br />
Ambition fixed upon a star’s regalia.<br />
O demi-age<br />
of fierce old urge<br />
oblige his nudge<br />
to grab some edge.<br />
His listeners asked him, ‘Does your line grow subtler,<br />
By this gene you take from Willie Butler?’<br />
O ego-merge<br />
Of page from page,<br />
Did they asperge<br />
the poet’s wedge?<br />
‘The proof’, he smiled, ‘of voice above mere matter<br />
Is exercising power over patter.’<br />
For he was surge,<br />
his era’s scourge,<br />
And his mere rage<br />
Supplied his edge.<br />
58<br />
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 58 6/11/12 9:20 AM
Headlong he vanished when the nth degree<br />
Unwired his voice from voice’s wannabe,<br />
so far downstage,<br />
(I here allege)<br />
he disobliged<br />
his lineage.<br />
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 59 6/11/12 9:20 AM<br />
59
Share Houses<br />
Lyndal Walker<br />
When you are a Teenager, the aesthetic of your parents is as terrifying<br />
as their sex life. Most of us are spared seeing our parents have sex but their<br />
embarrassing taste is everywhere we look. Thinking about the suburban<br />
homes of the 1980s with their wall-to-wall carpet, decorated toaster covers and<br />
impressionist reproductions still makes me feel claustrophobic. For others<br />
it’s sea-grass matting and Che Guevara prints they can’t abide. Either way the<br />
childhood home is furnished with the values of our parents. Delicate flowers<br />
from the faux Laura Ashley wallpaper crawled all over me while I sulked in my<br />
room. My parents’ taste imposed itself upon my body, ruining my black clothes,<br />
itchier than any mohair jumper.<br />
So as an angsty teenager, I was pretty pleased when I saw the 1986 film Dogs<br />
in Space. The chaos and eclectic characters filled me with the hope that I might<br />
one day escape incarceration by my parents and watch Countdown with other<br />
misfits. The characters and scenarios are now familiar. There’s the Lothario<br />
listening to Brian Eno and the student who can’t get any work done because<br />
everyone else is partying. There are arguments about politics and who’s been<br />
cooking meat in the frying pan. The only vaguely appealing character ends<br />
up dead, which fortunately was not something I encountered in the share<br />
households I was to inhabit during my twenties and early thirties.<br />
The documentary We’re living on dog food (2009) uses Dogs in Space to<br />
discuss the period in which the film was set—1978—and the making of the film.<br />
The documentary explores a place in time through its people, music and drugs.<br />
Members of the band Primitive Calculators, who feature in the film, speak of<br />
‘the Little Band scene’ that grew out of two share households in North Fitzroy.<br />
Primitive Calculators and Whirlywirld lived next door to each other but<br />
instead of popping over for a cup of sugar like other neighbours, they were<br />
forming deliberately impermanent bands together. Equipment and knowledge<br />
were shared. Many players were not musicians and there was a blur between<br />
audience and performer. While the bands performed in public, it was among<br />
friends and often just once. Consistent with the ethos of share households, a<br />
sense of community, experimentation and fun was valued above longevity or<br />
creating masterpieces.<br />
For many people, the first time they move out of home they move into a share<br />
household. They come from all sorts of families and bring varying experiences<br />
of household life. Families normalise their values and habits, and in our late<br />
teens and early twenties many of us had limited experience of other ways of<br />
living. Many of the people I have lived with had hippy parents, which in my<br />
60<br />
Pinboard, Gore Street, Fitzroy,<br />
May 1997<br />
Table, Tennyson Street, Richmond,<br />
September 1997<br />
both by Lyndal Walker<br />
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 60 6/11/12 9:20 AM
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 61 6/11/12 9:20 AM
Share Houses Lyndal Walker<br />
teens I would have envied greatly. But they did not think they’d had ideal<br />
childhoods. In share households our values and histories met and had to be<br />
negotiated. This was a source of fascination and an opportunity to be retrained.<br />
We experimented with different ways of living.<br />
The first and most common experiment was to see how long we could go<br />
without washing the dishes. In my late teens and early twenties cleaning up<br />
seemed like a terribly uptight bourgeois pretence. Living in squalor seemed<br />
a revolutionary strategy. In some households experimentation extended to<br />
hosing the dishes in the back yard or limiting each house member to one plate,<br />
one bowl, one cup and one set of cutlery. This latter option solved the problem<br />
in an efficient way but efficiency was not a priority in the share households<br />
where I lived. Entertaining guests was. So our experiments inevitably ended<br />
with washing the dishes.<br />
Filthy share households are often attributed to men, but for many young<br />
women rebelling against domesticity is also an important step in moving out of<br />
home. I grew up in a house where we were expected to clean up after our father,<br />
the only male. In share households I didn’t have to clean up after anyone. Many<br />
people grow up in a home with a mother who rules the domestic realm with<br />
an iron fist. This often means men in particular feel they have no role in the<br />
domestic duties, but in share households this is challenged. It is where many<br />
of us learn to cook and discover that far from being the daily drudge it was for<br />
many of our mothers, it can be a source of enormous enjoyment.<br />
With the rise of ‘grunge’ in the 1990s, sparsely furnished, messy homes that<br />
evoked the stereotypical share household became the setting for fashion<br />
photography. Photographers such as Juergen Teller and Corinne Day achieved<br />
a level of success that meant their work was in high-end magazines, including<br />
British Vogue. Day’s work was frequently shot in her share household or the<br />
homes of models such as Kate Moss. This was revealing in all sorts of ways.<br />
Clearly no-one had vacuumed for some time and there were dirty dishes here<br />
and there. These images caused considerable controversy and even Bill Clinton<br />
condemned them. Largely it was the skinny models and the perception of<br />
heroin use that caused the alarm, but it was also the fact that these homes<br />
looked shockingly sparse and grimy compared to the other aspirational images<br />
in Vogue. The most depraved thing in these images was the overflowing<br />
ashtrays, which look a lot more wicked these days. In the 1990s smoking outside<br />
was for people who owned precious carpets. But despite the alarm, these<br />
62<br />
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 62 6/11/12 9:20 AM
Essays<br />
homes were not squats and there were no infestations or genuinely unhygienic<br />
conditions. In reality they simply represented the way that many young people<br />
chose to live when they first moved out of home.<br />
For me the decor of share households was a rich source of inspiration.<br />
From 1996 to 1998 I made a photographic series called House Style in which<br />
I documented the living space of shared households. The house that I lived<br />
in then was sparse like the ones in Corinne Day’s images but the ones I<br />
documented had a surreal aspect, loaded as they were with the belongings of<br />
many people. Good taste and the practicality of clean surfaces were sacrificed<br />
to humour and conversation pieces. I was interested in transience. I liked<br />
the fact that the houses were haphazard and, now I think about it, tentative.<br />
They weren’t good examples of design but they bore the signs of their creation.<br />
Like the members of the household, the decor spoke of where it came from and<br />
what it left behind. Eighties lounges had been carted from the family ‘rumpus<br />
room’. Quite possibly the corner seat and the other end of the couch were still<br />
there. Fifties kitchen tables had come from gran’s place before she’d gone into<br />
a nursing home. Odd kitchen chairs had been dragged from hard rubbish and<br />
street signs had been brought home drunkenly. In those early households the<br />
taste police were an authority resisted as eagerly as any.<br />
In 1996 I made a photographic installation called Banal le nouveau chic,<br />
which was shown at the Victorian College of the Arts, among other places.<br />
One of the pictures included a bill with the address in Mozart Street, St Kilda.<br />
A baby-boomer visitor informed me that he had lived in this house and that he<br />
had lived there with the now legendary photographer Carol Jerrems. Although<br />
it was uncool at the time to like Jerrems’ work, I was a fan. In Prahran College<br />
library I had secretly peaked through the pages of A Book about Australian<br />
Women with curiosity and delight, hoping my lecturers would not see my<br />
enthusiasm for this irony-free world of overalls, pregnancy and feminist protest.<br />
Jerrems’ work had documented the youth of the 1970s and some of her<br />
photographs were taken in share households. One of her images is called<br />
Mozart Street and was taken the same day as the famous Vale Street. In Mozart<br />
Street the same three protagonists, fully clothed this time, stand in front of<br />
a rundown shed. Share households are often referred to by their street name<br />
as much as by the occupants, who are transient while the house is solid. That<br />
household that I lived in is still always referred to as ‘Mozart Street’. So Jerrems’<br />
title Mozart Street could have referred to a household or to the people in the<br />
photo, though they were not housemates. Jerrems has become notorious for the<br />
ambiguity of the relationships she represented.<br />
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 63 6/11/12 9:20 AM<br />
63
Share Houses Lyndal Walker<br />
I never found any evidence in her images that it was the same house as the<br />
one I lived in. Our house had a rundown shed too but it was not the same one<br />
that features in Jerrems’ photo. I think the person who told me it was the same<br />
house probably made a mistake and they had lived next door. Living next door<br />
to the house that Jerrems lived in was not quite the same but it gave me a sense<br />
of both artistic and household lineage.<br />
In 2002 Dudespace, a gallery that picked up on the sense of community<br />
around share households, was created. Exhibitions were held in the spare<br />
bedroom of a share house in Brunswick. The shows were usually on for just a<br />
day and were a social event. The experience was like visiting a friend or turning<br />
up at a party. You wandered down the central hall and on your left was the<br />
gallery, a carpeted room with a domestic light fitting and yellowish curtains.<br />
People used the space in any number of ways or alternatively focused their<br />
efforts on the extensive back yard, where a barbecue was held for each show.<br />
The casual domestic environment encouraged open discussion and a social<br />
ease that is often missing from galleries. Seeing exhibitions in a share house<br />
was a refreshing change to the career-oriented outside world.<br />
On visiting the house for an exhibition, I loved the arrangement so much<br />
that I asked to show there too. This was similar to how, visiting a friend or a<br />
party at a share house, you might mention that you liked the house, and when<br />
a room became available you’d be considered a candidate for it. The gallery<br />
wound up after more than three years for classic share household reasons.<br />
One of the housemates started storing their stuff in the spare room and doing<br />
the dishes after the show was a drag.<br />
The Hotham Street Ladies were also a product of the environment of share<br />
housing. Four of us lived together in a crumbling Californian bungalow in<br />
Collingwood in 2004, where we delighted in cooking and holding dinner<br />
parties. Among our inevitable second-hand bits and pieces were recipe books<br />
put together for primary school fundraisers. Inspired by these, Cassandra<br />
Chilton, Molly O’Shaughnessy and I dreamed up The Hotham Street Ladies<br />
Contribution Cookery Book. We asked our friends to contribute a recipe each<br />
and included images from meals we had at our house. I learnt to cook in share<br />
households and the book extended this exchange of knowledge that was the<br />
nature of sharing a kitchen. By 2007 Sarah Parkes and Caroline Price had also<br />
lived in the house and so they helped us with our next book, Tastes from the<br />
Shared Kitchen. Ever since, the five of us have been doing food-related projects<br />
including street art, installations, decorated cakes and a public art project for<br />
the City of Yarra.<br />
64<br />
Miss Havisham Cake, 2010<br />
Pizza Cake, 2009<br />
both by The Hotham Street Ladies<br />
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 64 6/11/12 9:20 AM
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 65 6/11/12 9:20 AM
Share Houses Lyndal Walker<br />
In 2009 I was asked to speak about feminism and the Hotham Street Ladies<br />
for a panel discussion. In preparing for it some of the ‘Ladies’ realised that<br />
share households wouldn’t exist without feminism. Prior to the 1960s most<br />
people lived with their parents until they got married. The pressure to get<br />
married must have been great, particularly for those in unhappy and poor<br />
families. Our generation could shake off those unhappy families before we<br />
considered beginning new ones. Young women who left home prior to the<br />
sexual revolution, usually from the country, tended to join wards of nurses or<br />
go to teachers college.<br />
Boarding was also a common option for young people moving to the city.<br />
This was not like sharing though. You lived in someone else’s home and it may<br />
have been a bit like replacing your parents with a new set, although one more<br />
likely to leave you feeling lonely and isolated. When people lived together<br />
in rented homes, it was in single-sex arrangements. The British sitcom Man<br />
about the House, made in the early 1970s, illustrates the scandal of cohabitation<br />
among the sexes. At first the two women and the man feel they have to lie to<br />
their landlords, even preferring to say the ‘man about the house’ is gay. Oh the<br />
antics, the cross-dressing, the girls who can’t cook. The fun never ends.<br />
Although we now live apart, the share household is an ongoing reference in<br />
the work of the Hotham Street Ladies. In 2009 we submitted our first cake to the<br />
Royal Melbourne Show. It represented a scene familiar to share householders.<br />
A pile of pizza boxes replete with pizza crusts and discarded pineapple, the<br />
television remote control, full ashtray and bottle tops. The cake was not well<br />
received by the judges at the Royal Melbourne Show. Comments included<br />
‘Cigarettes and ashtray very off putting when viewed’. Considering everything<br />
was made of cake and icing, they could have eaten the cigarette butts, but that<br />
would have been even more ‘off putting’.<br />
The following year our Miss Havisham cake was disqualified from the Royal<br />
Melbourne Show with this explanation: ‘Be aware that the exhibit is in bad<br />
taste. You are presenting something that is food-based and should be pleasing<br />
to the eye.’ The character Miss Havisham from Great Expectations was left at<br />
the altar and spent the rest of her life sitting at her wedding table. The wedding<br />
cake was dusty, eaten away by vermin, classical columns collapsed like ruins<br />
from a lost civilisation. The institution of marriage—old, degraded and ruined.<br />
The tiny bride is still propped on the cake while the groom has crashed down<br />
among the dust and mouse poo, his head broken off.<br />
But the Hotham Street Ladies can have it both ways. One of the Ladies<br />
got married and we made her wedding cake—a leopardess a metre and a<br />
66<br />
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 66 6/11/12 9:20 AM
Essays<br />
half long with a diamante tooth and false eyelashes. We are free to critique<br />
marriage or to get married and celebrate it in glamour. Similarly, we choose<br />
to make our domestic projects and to hone our skills in the same spirit of fun<br />
and community as in our share household. Our worth is not judged on the<br />
cleanliness of our homes or whether our cakes are ‘pleasing to the eye’. We can<br />
delight in embroidered aprons without being subservient.<br />
The sexual revolution paved the way for share households but they were<br />
not about the idealism of the 1960s. If you had suggested to me ten years ago<br />
that share households had any relationship to communes, I would have been<br />
very resistant. Communes failed. If you could remember them you weren’t<br />
there. All that hippy stuff spoke to me of hypocrisy. I had a pretty good idea<br />
that while the men were enjoying free love and a creative lifestyle, the women<br />
were cooking their dinner, caring for their kids and quite possibly paying their<br />
bills. I read Vincent Bugliosi’s book about the Manson gang, Helter Skelter, and<br />
threw down Helen Garner’s Monkey Grip in disgust. Communes were weird,<br />
murderous sex cults, and 1970s share households were characterised by naive<br />
women who fell in love with junkies and never seemed to go to work.<br />
Share households are very different to communes, and I think the lack of<br />
idealism becomes an advantage. You don’t have to spend a lifetime with these<br />
people, you don’t own part of a property, you haven’t fathered their children<br />
and the future of humanity has got nothing to do with any of you. Families and<br />
couples share mutual household goals such as saving money and improving<br />
and renovating their homes, goals that don’t allow for the sort of playful<br />
activities that flourish in share households.<br />
There is fluidity in all aspects of the share household. With cheap rents in<br />
the 1990s, people moved in and out, taking with them their record collection,<br />
their furniture and their personal lives. There was an opportunity for power<br />
structures and gender roles to be negotiated. Sharing a home with numerous<br />
others also narrows the divide between public and private, which led to projects<br />
such as Dudespace and the ‘Little Band scene’, where the roles of audience<br />
and artist were blurred. I can now see that despite the desolate back yards with<br />
discarded furniture and burnt out forty-gallon drums, share households were<br />
more utopian than dystopian. M<br />
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 67 6/11/12 9:20 AM<br />
67
Farmstay<br />
Sue Ogle<br />
We’ve migrated north to nest in the cottage beside the dam<br />
held by the hills; our stories enter each other,<br />
a shared refrain spills onto the water’s surface<br />
hovers and rises like morning mist.<br />
On the verandah, after a second cup of coffee, we watch<br />
the sly butcher bird who banters melodiously with his mate<br />
alert to the chink of cup on plate. We are replete,<br />
the crumbs of our conversation scattered on the breakfast table inside.<br />
Slumped in deck-chairs, thrusting our city-worn knees to the sun,<br />
we peer through silver lattice, two women in life’s harem,<br />
our eyes hold fast to the dam<br />
resigned to chequered cirrus clouding our dissolute minds.<br />
Murder’s a thought, fleeting by day, made real at night<br />
by heifers bawling at the pole foundations, their muzzles effacing<br />
our dreams, bumping us out of sleep.<br />
The law isn’t the lore out here, our minds are awash with city woes.<br />
Reeds stand stiff as a mother’s will unfolds into the frosty dawn,<br />
rendering the terrain a whitewash.<br />
A daughter’s divorce has stalled, spouse claims he’s out of work.<br />
Savings depleted; the solicitor’s fees don’t grow in pensioner soil.<br />
And we’re both destitute, desperate to feel nature’s healing,<br />
hands linked, watching the morning thaw to mauve<br />
grass seeds float on top of themselves mirrored<br />
in the dam, contained in an amphitheatre of concentric hills.<br />
As life plays out on a stage down south we seek respite<br />
behind the coastal plain, retreat to the hinterland<br />
seeing ourselves, shadow puppets afloat,<br />
erased by ripples of breeze, restored in the still of evening.<br />
68<br />
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 68 6/11/12 9:20 AM
Drawn back to the deck we watch the water transform itself.<br />
Spent blooms with white seed-heads sit on grey grass,<br />
like a worn-out candlewick bedspread, drifting<br />
above childhood memories drowned in a deluge of legalese.<br />
We gorge on simple imagery, egrets strutting between the cows<br />
cumulus rising, flotilla of insects circling the outside tap<br />
butternut cattle nosing the ground<br />
the changing canvas of pastel colour washing the dam.<br />
Madder sky seeps onto the water as we pour a glass of shiraz<br />
to view its final screening: supplicant willows fade out<br />
and tall ghost gums come into relief.<br />
Wrapped in eucalypt air, together we taste resolution.<br />
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 69 6/11/12 9:20 AM<br />
69
Another Year, Another Engrossing Crop<br />
Martin Langford<br />
70<br />
Reviewed<br />
Brook Emery, Collusion, John<br />
Leonard Press, 60pp, $24.95;<br />
Stephen Edgar, The Red Sea: New<br />
and Selected Poems, Baskerville<br />
(Fort Worth, Tex.), 100pp,<br />
US$17.96; joanne burns, amphora,<br />
Giramondo, 136pp; Kate Lilley,<br />
Ladylike, UWA Publishing, 74pp,<br />
$19.95; Peter Rose, Crimson<br />
Crop, UWA Publishing, 86pp,<br />
$24.95; Anthony Lawrence, The<br />
Welfare of My Enemy, Puncher<br />
& Wattmann, 108pp, $24.<br />
many of The poems in brook emery’s Collusion are about the sea, but the<br />
sea does more than supply him with material: it shapes his interaction with<br />
the world. Compared to the sea, the land is a much easier medium on which to<br />
project plans and migrations. Those close to the sea, however, tend to be less<br />
sanguine about such things. It is, after all, the element that, proverbially, we<br />
must never take for granted. Something of this respect enters Emery’s work as<br />
a reluctance to draw conclusions: as if they were a step too far, or smacked of<br />
hubris. In his previous book, Uncommon Light (2007), the rhythms and thoughtpatterns<br />
were those of the swimmer, for whom there was at least a sense of<br />
progression—even if only illusory, besides the sea’s scale, and its gridlessness.<br />
In Collusion, however, there is little expectation of forward movement—with<br />
the caveat that though the poems do not arrive at understandings, they do<br />
converge towards an assertion of happiness. Many of the poems display a static<br />
antiphony between the self—most commonly represented as a question—and<br />
the universe of things that don’t answer. Sometimes Emery addresses Kafka’s K,<br />
the patron saint of fruitless questions. More often there is no addressee.<br />
Whatever the question, there will be no answer. Answers are claims, and by<br />
being so wary of them, Emery aligns himself with that broad spectrum of poets,<br />
across an increasingly wide range of poetics, who do not trust them.<br />
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 70 6/11/12 9:20 AM
Essays<br />
‘Words leave,’ he says in ‘It appears we are machines’. ‘Air and water rush in<br />
to fill the space.’ That doesn’t happen in desk- and screen-bound worlds. There,<br />
when words leave, they are replaced by more words—or perhaps by electronic<br />
silences. The physical and the body have been quietly elided from much<br />
contemporary verse—but not in these poems. Here, sea and light overwhelm<br />
the capacity to make plausible meaning—in particular the ambitious, intricate<br />
structures of consistent explanation. Even place is fleeting and conjectural—<br />
except, of course, for the sea, which ‘sloshes round you in its careless embrace’,<br />
‘wind-whipped, scum-topped waves / churning in fractured lumps’.<br />
If this is a poetry of epistemological restraint, it does claim the pleasure<br />
of being in the world. One may not be able to say anything about it, but it is<br />
a wonderful thing to experience. Doubt as pervasive as Emery’s normally<br />
has a sinking effect on the mood, but for all the time he spends worrying at<br />
intellectual bones, his buoyancy of mood is unimpaired. One suspects that the<br />
happiness is inseparable from the physicality: without the body to sustain it,<br />
the mind must take care of its own momentum, and that is not something it<br />
always does well.<br />
Not all the poems are about the sea. There is a fine poem of noir romantic<br />
nightmare, for instance, and another, slightly improbably, about invigilating.<br />
But there are few that do not have a salty whiff. Emery’s pleasure in the world is<br />
one of the distinguishing elements of his work. He insists on it, quite aware that<br />
it places him at odds with many of his peers: ‘Contested ground, this strange<br />
persistent beauty.’ If, like many poets these days, he is a kind of existentialist, it<br />
is an existentialism of wonders.<br />
Stephen Edgar’s new and selected volume The Red Sea contains eighty<br />
pages from previous volumes and fifteen new poems. The selection has been<br />
thoughtfully made, and if one does not know Edgar’s work, it is an ideal place<br />
to start. Edgar’s style and poetic interests have remained largely the same<br />
throughout his writing life, but the later verse—which is emphasised here—<br />
displays the greatest sureness of touch, and the majority of his strongest poems<br />
are to be found there.<br />
It is long-distance work. At least one part of the self—or voice—in an Edgar<br />
poem is as distant from the object of its consideration as in any other poet<br />
working in Australia. Which is not to say that the poems aren’t also full of<br />
moments he invites us to participate in. One might define the poetry in these<br />
works as being a matter of the play of the irreconcilable distances between<br />
intellectual understanding and human engagement. Edgar attempts to invest<br />
events with something like their scientific scale. He is often remarkably<br />
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 71 6/11/12 9:20 AM<br />
71
Another Year, Another Engrossing Crop Martin Langford<br />
successful, but to the extent that he also, inevitably, fails, it has more to do with<br />
our refusals—with the ineluctable complacency of our imaginations—than any<br />
lack of finesse or inventiveness on his part.<br />
The arbitrary nature of our encounters and the vastness of the spaces<br />
that surround them render all our enthusiasms fragile: Edgar’s is not a<br />
world to cultivate hubris in. Ultimately his perspectives are driven by the<br />
ongoing realignment of our imaginations prompted by science. We have<br />
tended to be resistant to its implications: while we have acknowledged them<br />
intellectually, we have been slower to absorb them imaginatively, where real<br />
losses are at stake. When Eliot wrote of ‘the vacant interstellar spaces’ in ‘East<br />
Coker’ (Four Quartets), it was in the belief that they could still be redeemed.<br />
In Edgar’s ‘Coogee’, knowable reality has been reduced to a narrow strip of<br />
beach at dusk:<br />
72<br />
The east looms heaven-high, black and horrific,<br />
A cloud of nothingness that holds no trace<br />
Of the Pacific,<br />
A maw that tells the sheer end of the world<br />
Columbus feared, in which those gulls are buoyed,<br />
And some few whitely curled<br />
Waves break, like forces bursting from the void,<br />
Creating time and space.<br />
While the details of our existence are precious, we are nevertheless<br />
helpless before their changes. ‘Silk Screen’ works the recurring Edgar trope of<br />
defamiliarising the domestic and everyday—the more mundane, the better:<br />
if one cannot rescue the world’s details from their vanishing, there is at least<br />
some strange poet’s satisfaction in being able to turn them into language stuff.<br />
The speaker observes light draining from an estuary at dusk:<br />
Cloud, water, slopes: so many Chinese grades<br />
Of columbine and pearl,<br />
Layered against a parquetry of pewter,<br />
Gunmetal plates and sheets of faded merle.<br />
Uncolours lost to colour, rendered neuter<br />
(A glintless skyey sheen<br />
Of eau de nil that is bankrupt of green …<br />
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 72 6/11/12 9:20 AM
Essays<br />
If there is anything that offers sanctuary from the welter of narratives, the<br />
surprise and indifference of detail, it might be the careful distances of such<br />
poems. One might even place some reliance on these Jamesian cadences, these<br />
oh-so-precise filtrations of memory. Not a great deal: even these can barely be<br />
trusted—but that is not the fault of their eloquent distillations.<br />
joanne burns’ amphora is not about ideas so much as strangenesses: the<br />
behaviour of language, the peculiar nature of the things we believe in (here:<br />
angels, saints and ladders) and the world of things—in particular of artefacts.<br />
First and foremost is the behaviour of language. Whatever burns wants to<br />
say about a particular thing—a saint or a phrase—or, for that matter, Acteon<br />
and Diana—she won’t be interested unless she can also inflect her interest<br />
into a playful, knight-move-hard-to-anticipate, skewed-to-the-familiar field<br />
where words generate a momentum of their own with their absurdities, their<br />
unexpected links and, sometimes, their sheer daffiness.<br />
One of the ancestor-spirits of her style is undoubtedly Francis Ponge, but<br />
amphora also contains a large number of variously whimsical meditations<br />
on angels, saints and other personae from the imaginations of the faithful,<br />
and the mood of these pieces resembles that of modernist French writers<br />
such as Blaise Cendrars—his Sky, for instance, which is both a biography and<br />
a history of levitating saints. Such writers managed the transition from the<br />
storied surrealism of the church’s imagination to the disinhibited surrealism of<br />
twentieth-century art as if the one led to the other, and some of burns’ poems,<br />
particularly in the section ‘soft hoods of saints’, have a similar familiarity with<br />
both worlds—an unusual note in Australia. She is at home, for instance, in the<br />
world of the saints’ lives and somehow—though without any explanations in<br />
the interim—that prepares her for the weird worlds of the object and the word<br />
when she turns her attention to them.<br />
Even in poems about belief she is likely to focus on the way it expresses<br />
itself in linguistic terms. She gives us lists of saints’ names, in ‘haggle’, for the<br />
pleasure of their resonance and associations:<br />
adalbert adelaide agape agatha amadour apollonia asaph attracta<br />
bathild bavo benignus blaide blandina botolph bona of pisa<br />
carpus chad chrodegang chrysogonus cloud cuby<br />
The poem ‘rung’ ends as a serious meditation on the spiritual journey: ‘but<br />
me. i look for an easier solution … i climb down the ladder of memory … arms<br />
reaching out for that first swim in deep water. letting go of gravity and pushing<br />
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 73 6/11/12 9:20 AM<br />
73
Another Year, Another Engrossing Crop Martin Langford<br />
out into the glossy emerald waters’, but can’t help working every angle on the<br />
theme of the ladder before it gets there—including one variation on ladders<br />
in stockings.<br />
Much of the book, however, comprises poems that praise language by<br />
enjoying it. The section called ‘amphora’ is a collection of jokes on common<br />
phrases that are not behaving properly: ‘she kept her distance in a yellow and<br />
blue lacquered box she had bought on dal lake’ (she kept her distance); or, in<br />
‘counter’: ‘the trouble with leaving things up in the air is that they can become<br />
hard to find’.<br />
The poems in ‘pogo’, like puns on steroids, are extended riffs on single<br />
words: slip (‘relief’); stock (‘stock’); coast (‘spreadsheet’); poppet (‘lathe’)—and,<br />
in ‘oh’, on tuross, profrock and porlock.<br />
Reading amphora is like sharing an afternoon with someone who is a fount<br />
of coincidences and incongruities; someone who just can’t help chuckling—but<br />
who drops into a more serious note from time to time, as in ‘composition’, a<br />
beautifully worked piece on the evanescence of all writing:<br />
74<br />
when there are enough<br />
of these dust petrifactions to create a triumphal<br />
avenue of columns you will smash open the clay<br />
and complete your architectural plan. there you<br />
will recline in your best dust jacket (the wallpaper<br />
now a faded entertainment, a resource for the<br />
songbook of bugs) and browse the dharma of<br />
dust whisperings while playing the harmonium at<br />
auspicious interludes of mist.<br />
Ladylike is Kate Lilley’s second book. While her first, Versary (2002), had<br />
good poems in it, for me it was a book in which she had not yet quite decided<br />
what she wanted to do with her material. But in Ladylike she has: it is a strong<br />
book—among other things, one of the best meditations we have on that<br />
impossible topic, the construction of the self. It is built around three sequences<br />
that deal with this. The first, ‘Cleft’, is about her relationship with her mother,<br />
Dorothy Hewett:<br />
Anachronic from first to last<br />
what’s left to confess?<br />
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 74 6/11/12 9:20 AM
Essays<br />
Tatterdemalion estate<br />
waste and wild<br />
I’m bound to it as if it were you<br />
Your disinhibition<br />
Eat my words to keep them<br />
from resembling your loose lips (‘Genie’)<br />
This sequence is honest, moving and nuanced, and has a very writerly sense of<br />
memories edited into verse. ‘Coil’, for instance, is a potent hand of images about<br />
the nakedness of death:<br />
A lilac sheath to cover you<br />
your wardrobe of opening nights<br />
reduced to a simple party dress<br />
snipped curls in plain paper<br />
your bed hacked to pieces for the skip<br />
1 Kate Lilley, ‘ “These Novels of<br />
My Life”: Mary Carleton’s crimes’,<br />
Australian Feminist Studies, vol. 25,<br />
no. 65 (2010), pp. 265–79. See Ladylike,<br />
notes, p. 73, for additional sources.<br />
There will be a messy but rewarding doctorate for someone who sorts out<br />
the relationships between the imaginative worlds of mother and daughter:<br />
messy because both women have been prepared to explore their experiences<br />
with the added dimensions that art allows; rewarding because one cannot<br />
imagine a better interface for bringing the two generations of feminism<br />
into relief.<br />
As Lilley explains in her notes in this volume, a second sequence, ‘Ladylike’,<br />
‘draws on the pamphlets associated with the notorious case of the bigamist,<br />
Mary Carleton, executed in 1673 …’ Lilley has written elsewhere about Carleton, 1<br />
who made an extraordinary career out of reinventing herself on the run—at one<br />
stage escaping from the Caribbean in order to return to a proscribed London—<br />
apparently because that was the field in which her skills—and perhaps her<br />
desires—were most potent. Sometimes historical figures can be a way of<br />
thinking about the present because their cultural displacement makes our own<br />
dilemmas visible. As well as exemplifying the ongoing fascination of our age<br />
with ladylike, there is an edge to Mary’s story in that the stakes are so high for<br />
her. The stakes are high for moderns too, except that we seldom see our losses<br />
so starkly—obscured as they are by our comforts.<br />
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 75 6/11/12 9:20 AM<br />
75
Another Year, Another Engrossing Crop Martin Langford<br />
Finally there is a group of poems drawn from case studies from the early<br />
history of psychoanalysis. The gift for the poet (which Lilley still needed<br />
to recognise) is that the voices—principally Freud’s—were already present<br />
in the psychoanalysts’ reports: with a little thoughtful juxtaposition, and a<br />
little dislocation of the props of their authority, she could arrange for them<br />
to bring themselves undone, and for the women to become visible:<br />
76<br />
A single case not too pronounced<br />
a misfortune like any other<br />
a cocotte in the ordinary sense<br />
a severe beauty mature but still youthful<br />
a well-made girl intact unversed<br />
she did not scruple to appear<br />
in the most frequented streets<br />
she was in fact a feminist (‘Sidonie’)<br />
The music in this book is intellectual as much as aural: a tight,<br />
minimalising craftsmanship of the accretion of understandings. Not all the<br />
poems are overtly about the construction of the self, but many even of the<br />
miscellaneous pieces originate in its tensions and ironies—it is a subject,<br />
one suspects, that we will be revisiting in the years to come.<br />
Many of the poems in Crimson Crop, the fifth collection from Peter<br />
Rose, begin in the daily and familiar: he reads Huysmans in the heat, at a<br />
cricket match; he has ‘a / Quiet day at last’; he goes to visit his mother. But<br />
the familiarities have a knack of tripping over themselves into more exotic<br />
or intense territory: the burnt landscape on which the cricketers compete<br />
may also be an artefact, though not the sort Huysmans had been thinking<br />
of; the quiet day dissolves through its details into its absences; the ‘crimson<br />
crop’ of the family visit turns out to be a crop of cut flowers and mangled<br />
digits from the family narratives, and even includes a doctor, killed by<br />
the Japanese. And this, I think, suggests something of the continuum<br />
that Rose’s imagination operates along. On the one hand it is urbane and<br />
congruent with the appearances of reason; his voice is comfortable in the<br />
world of the social necessities—it is not restricted to private or dissociated<br />
places in the way some voices are. On the other hand, he doesn’t quite trust<br />
any of that—it just happens to be the world he has to operate in. Outside the<br />
Anne Frank museum:<br />
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 76 6/11/12 9:20 AM
Essays<br />
The bells of Westerkerk toll<br />
Eine Kleine Nachtmusik.<br />
Whipped by bereted jockeys<br />
draught horses drag beer to the weekday palace,<br />
videoed by the laconic<br />
who queue towards enlightenment. (‘Annex’)<br />
So what does he trust? Perhaps trust isn’t the right word. He turns, as<br />
if instinctively, towards the beautiful and the erotic. Opera is one of his<br />
touchstones—more potent than anything in the workaday world, it is one of the<br />
sources of his imagery when the terms that world supplies are inadequate:<br />
Echoes of the E flat in Rheingold<br />
when they dim the lights and<br />
someone taps you on the shoulder:<br />
‘No exit now. Here for good.’ (‘Sheridan Close’)<br />
Like eros, it may not make any more sense than the rational world does, but its<br />
pleasures are more compelling. There are ‘fifteen new poems from the Catullan<br />
rag’, of a type that Rose first began writing in his collection The Catullan Rag<br />
(1993), in which Catullus’s voice—civilised, cynical, obsessed by love—is used<br />
as a way of talking about the contemporary world. He isn’t the only Australian<br />
poet to use Roman voices—one might mention Laurie Duggan (The Epigrams<br />
of Martial, 1989), Peter Porter (After Martial, 1972), John Bray (Collected Poems,<br />
2000) and Geoffrey Lehmann (Nero’s Poems, 1981). The attraction, I think, is<br />
that the Romans allowed these poets to talk knowingly about the sentimental<br />
life when they couldn’t find a way to do so in more conventional Australian<br />
tones—after all, one way of defining Australian innocence is as an obliviousness<br />
to the fact that there even is such a thing. Some of the new Catullan poems are<br />
not ambitious pieces—a few are literary digs—but ‘Verge’ is an important poem.<br />
Bang in the middle of an evening of romantic intensities, Catullus played<br />
… that corny old song<br />
by Paul Robeson, the one about nature.<br />
Trees, you mocked, trees of all things—<br />
as if you’d never eyed a sapling.<br />
And so the night paled,<br />
everything changed irremediably.<br />
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 77 6/11/12 9:20 AM<br />
77
Another Year, Another Engrossing Crop Martin Langford<br />
This is more than a clash between personal preferences. At the heart of<br />
this argument is the chasm between those who can only conceive of their<br />
interactions—including love—in terms of status and power, and those who<br />
need to gesture beyond that. Lesbia has no idea that such a chasm exists.<br />
All she knows is that allowing the other to speak—in this case, for Paul Robeson<br />
to speak, indirectly, of nature—breaks the enchantment of power. This is a gulf<br />
that divides the imaginaries of the whole society—it divides the poetry world.<br />
It is difficult enough to write about at the best of times. The achievement of<br />
‘Verge’ is to situate it in that most confronting of arenas, the bedroom.<br />
As well as opera and eros, Rose turns to poetry, and if one thinks of the<br />
way verse must negotiate the rational on the one hand and the musical and<br />
the sensual on the other, then one can at least speculate on what its attraction<br />
might be: poetry is the Janus art, the art form that inhabits the impossible<br />
territory between two aspects of the world that cannot be reconciled. Which<br />
also happens to be the place where everyone must live. Unlike some poets, Rose<br />
reads as one who finds the writing of poetry a natural thing to do. Perhaps that<br />
is why the familiar trips so readily into the unanswerable, the beautiful and<br />
the appalling.<br />
Anthony Lawrence’s The Welfare of My Enemy is a collection of poems about<br />
the missing, and the anxieties that attend them. In poems of various lengths,<br />
written in buoyant free-verse couplets, he ranges through every situation and<br />
point of view that missing conjures—some trivial or temporary, but others, like<br />
the anxieties, unable to avoid the possibility that the nightmares might be real.<br />
The idea of the missing is a recurring one in the contemporary world. For<br />
people who are personally affected, it is natural that they should be haunted by<br />
those who aren’t present. But it also has a broader resonance. We seek security<br />
from our narratives. Our birth certificates and driver’s licences are artefacts<br />
that we place great faith in: sound evidence in a diegetic world upon which the<br />
more contested aspects of our stories—our CVs and moral personae, our claims<br />
to spiritual worth—are erected. But what if the body around which everything<br />
coheres—certificates and licences included—disappears without explanation?<br />
The loose thread can be as disturbing as the missing flesh. We live in economies<br />
of narratives where to survive we must commit both to our stories and to the<br />
way they interweave with everyone else’s. The idea that a narrative can simply<br />
be excised challenges our investment in our own. We have a stake in the<br />
sustainability of all stories—other people’s as well as our own.<br />
Lawrence explores the whole range of reasons to go missing: gambling<br />
debts; the oppression of responsibility or marriage. Some of his speakers have<br />
78<br />
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 78 6/11/12 9:20 AM
Essays<br />
grown tired of interaction and gone bush. There is one compelling group of<br />
poems about people who go missing from their own heads. The largest number,<br />
however, are about those who get into the wrong car, or who are watched by<br />
objectifying eyes on their way to the shops, and over time, the poems gravitate<br />
towards situations where missing does turn into nightmare, and the sequence<br />
ends dominated by the presence of Ivan Milat. There is no resolution to the<br />
exploration of an idea: the possibility simply persists. For all the drift towards<br />
nightmare, however, Lawrence is rarely interested in the details of how<br />
someone died: the book leaves us with a sense of the uneasy tension between<br />
the actualities of nightmare and the more self-interested anxieties of the<br />
public—which is probably a fair summary of the situation that pertains.<br />
Interestingly, he doesn’t greatly alter the speaking voices as he moves from<br />
one character or situation to another. No matter who they are—even if they are<br />
criminals—they all have something of the empathy of the poet and something<br />
of the shrewdness of the detective. As a result, they all become versions of the<br />
one voice: incidentals of time and place remain just that. The victims are also<br />
versions of each other; and everyone, we know, is a potential victim. So this is<br />
not a book about any particular identity going missing. If Lawrence’s attitudes<br />
are representative of the way our understanding of missing is now inflected,<br />
then one might say that last century’s anxiety about the specific nature of one’s<br />
identity—as exemplified, say, by the tensions between Ellen Roxburgh and<br />
Ellen Gluyas in Patrick White’s A Fringe of Leaves, Eddie and Eadith in his The<br />
Twyborn Affair, or Will and Toki in R.D. Fitzgerald’s collection Between Two<br />
Tides (1952)—has morphed into a broader concern about the fragility of all<br />
identity, irrespective of where it has come from.<br />
All the poets reviewed have shrewd and telling things to say about important<br />
aspects of contemporary life. They are all experienced artists working at a high<br />
level of craftsmanship. Yet they are not the only poets of this quality beavering<br />
away: Australian poetry has never been richer nor more varied. Its invisibility,<br />
however, is a disgrace: it is, given this level of cultural wealth, simply not<br />
possible to claim an interest in the intellectual life of the nation if one does not<br />
know what the poets are up to. M<br />
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 79 6/11/12 9:20 AM<br />
79
Larvatus Prodeo<br />
Shane McCauley<br />
The mask grafted so perfectly<br />
I forget I ever looked<br />
otherwise:<br />
at my best at moonrise<br />
surrounded by winter’s wood smoke<br />
feeling the cold breath of God<br />
on my bland<br />
star-pocked face.<br />
It has taken long enough<br />
to achieve—<br />
this harmless concealment<br />
protection<br />
semblance of content.<br />
Otherwise<br />
naked and failed<br />
my old self winged and winded<br />
might go running gibbering<br />
from life’s heat<br />
into mist<br />
into dissolving sleet.<br />
Note: The title comes from Descartes: ‘I advance masked.’<br />
80<br />
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 80 6/11/12 9:20 AM
Grace Notes<br />
Ron Pretty<br />
It begins with a comparison: a budgie<br />
caged with mirror, spilling seed;<br />
and a child pecking at the keys<br />
of an upright piano, spilling notes<br />
into the room, on odd occasions<br />
stumbling into music. That’s the moment:<br />
caged in a sudden net of sound<br />
her hair falling across her face, floating<br />
inside the bars as naturally as dreaming.<br />
And then a sudden discord, the lid<br />
slammed shut, the flight<br />
to the bedroom, as though a change of scene<br />
will shift the bars. The budgerigar,<br />
all bright with blues and greens, pecks<br />
the plastic replica; it sways and nods<br />
balanced as a libran, impassive<br />
while the cock struts and spills<br />
a shrill appassionata to the mirror<br />
then flits from swing to perch.<br />
When she plays the piano, the blue bird<br />
cocks its head and listens<br />
and offers from the safety of the bars<br />
a tentative grace note, watching<br />
itself in the mirror, spilling its seed<br />
on sandpaper at the bottom of the cage.<br />
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 81 6/11/12 9:20 AM<br />
81
The Bartender and the Archive<br />
Chad Parkhill<br />
in early 2007 a Seattle-based bartender named Jamie Boudreau received,<br />
as a gift, a bottle of Amer Picon, a French aperitif bitters with very limited<br />
distribution outside its home country. This was the cause of some excitement<br />
for Boudreau, who had noted its presence in a host of cocktail recipes dating<br />
from the early twentieth century, including the Brooklyn (a variation on the<br />
Manhattan), the Liberal Cocktail, and a peculiar Basque-American invention<br />
named the Picon Punch. Boudreau soon sampled the product, both by itself<br />
and in a host of recipes, while researching its history. Why had this singular<br />
product—a heady blend of caramelised orange flavours matched with the<br />
penetrating bitterness of gentian root—fallen out of favour? Why was it so hard<br />
to find when it had once been sufficiently widespread to be marketed with the<br />
slogan ‘Il n’est plus une partie du globe où n’ait pénétré le Picon’? 1<br />
Boudreau soon discovered that the Picon he was happily sampling was<br />
but a pale shadow of the Picon that graced the Brooklyn cocktail of 1914: its<br />
manufacturers had repeatedly reduced the alcoholic proof of the product since<br />
the 1970s, which in turn reduced its potency and changed its flavour profile.<br />
With this in mind, Boudreau set out to re-create the original Amer Picon using<br />
readily available ingredients, and after some experimentation came up with<br />
a recipe that combined an Italian amaro with dried orange peel steeped in<br />
high-proof vodka and a commercially produced orange bitters. Boudreau then<br />
took a sample of his reformulation to the 2007 Tales of the Cocktail conference,<br />
a gathering of bartenders, drinks writers and bons vivants that takes place<br />
annually in New Orleans. There, according to Boudreau’s own blog, several<br />
luminaries of the spirits world tasted his reformulation alongside a hipflask<br />
of pre–formula change Amer Picon thoughtfully provided by spirits retailer<br />
and drinks historian LeNell Smothers. The assembled company declared<br />
Boudreau’s reformulation almost identical to the ‘real’ Amer Picon, and<br />
Boudreau soon presented his recipe, with minor changes, on his blog. 2<br />
The casual drinker is now more likely to encounter Amer Boudreau than<br />
Amer Picon—at least outside France. The Amer Boudreau recipe is the first hit<br />
of a Google search for Amer Picon. Although the product is not commercially<br />
available, the ease of its construction means that it is the go-to solution for any<br />
bartender (professional or amateur) who wants to make a cocktail containing<br />
Amer Picon. It is a remarkable success story: a venerable aperitif bitters<br />
has returned from oblivion via the internet, to the delight of professional<br />
bartenders and drinking dilettantes. Yet the success of Amer Boudreau rests on<br />
a methodology only as rigorous as the say-so of a handful of bartenders sipping<br />
from a hipflask on one hot July afternoon in New Orleans.<br />
82<br />
1 ‘There is no longer any part of the<br />
world where Picon hasn’t penetrated.’<br />
2 <br />
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 82 6/11/12 9:20 AM
Essays<br />
3 The Balance, and Columbian<br />
Repository, 13 May 1806.<br />
4 David Wondrich, ‘The Impostors’,<br />
24 March 2011, .<br />
Despite the frequency with which alcoholic beverages are marketed with<br />
reference to their age and heritage—think of the ‘maison fondée en 1827’ that<br />
adorns bottles of Grand Marnier—a lot can happen to a drink over time. As<br />
the cocktail dates from the turn of the nineteenth century, some drinks have<br />
had well over a century of changes wrought upon them. The cocktail as we<br />
know it was first defined in print in 1806 as ‘a stimulating liquor, composed<br />
of spirits of any kind, sugar, water and bitters … vulgarly called a bittered<br />
sling’. 3 This definition aligns closely with the recipe for the Old-Fashioned,<br />
the oldest known cocktail, which consists of approximately two ounces of any<br />
spirit (usually bourbon whisky) touched with a dash of bitters, some sugar,<br />
ice, and a twist of citrus peel. Since 1806 this basic template has been subject<br />
to several changes, many of them beneficial: new cocktails usually result from<br />
refinements and adjustments to existing cocktails, as in the Improved Cocktail,<br />
which is essentially an Old-Fashioned with a spoonful of maraschino liqueur<br />
and a dash of absinthe.<br />
Other changes are less benign, altering the flavour, mouth feel or potency<br />
of a drink for the worse. In many cases these deleterious changes stem from<br />
confusion about ingredients. For drinks historian Dave Wondrich, a typical<br />
example is the Gin Cocktail, a variation on the Old-Fashioned originally made<br />
with the Dutch spirit genever—the ancestor of the London dry gin found in<br />
liquor stores today. While London dry gin is made with a neutral spirit base,<br />
a blank canvas on which the taste of juniper and other botanicals can be<br />
displayed, genever is made with a malty, Scotch-like base spirit. Genever is<br />
now a niche spirit, but it was immensely popular in the nineteenth century,<br />
to the extent that, as Wondrich puts it, ‘until 1880 or so, when an American<br />
said “gin,” he almost always meant the Dutch style’. 4 At some stage prior<br />
to the turn of the century, ‘gin’ came to specify London dry gin, and as the<br />
Gin Cocktail’s recipe specifies only two ounces of gin rather than genever<br />
specifically, it began to be made with London dry instead. As this results in a<br />
particularly unlovely beverage—the bitters, sugar and ice alone incapable of<br />
taming the sharpness of a good London dry gin—the drink fell out of favour.<br />
If the definition of a product doesn’t change, then the product itself can<br />
change, as Amer Picon’s transition from respected stalwart to regional oddity<br />
demonstrates. Other products simply disappear from shelves as their parent<br />
companies go bankrupt or tastes change: the website CocktailDB lists no<br />
fewer than fifty-eight such ingredients, now known only by their appearances<br />
in historical bartending manuals such as Jerry Thomas’s Bar-Tender’s Guide<br />
of 1862.<br />
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 83 6/11/12 9:20 AM<br />
83
84<br />
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 84 6/11/12 9:20 AM
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 85 6/11/12 9:20 AM<br />
85
The Bartender and the Archive Chad Parkhill<br />
Even if a drink’s ingredients remain much the same over time, the recipe<br />
can change in response to changing tastes—and not always for the better. The<br />
Dry Martini is an example. In its original form it is a variation of the Martinez<br />
cocktail, which was made with two ounces of sweet vermouth, an ounce of old<br />
tom gin (a faintly sweet gin that served as something of a missing link between<br />
genever and London dry gin), and dashes of maraschino liqueur and aromatic<br />
bitters. The Dry Martini was so named because it used both dry gin and dry<br />
(or French) vermouth; early recipes, such as the one found in Stuart’s Fancy<br />
Drinks and how to Mix Them (1896), called for large quantities of vermouth,<br />
anywhere from a third to a half of the drink. After Prohibition, though, the<br />
ratio of gin to vermouth steadily increased, a trend well established by the time<br />
David A. Embury’s The Fine Art of Mixing Drinks was published in 1953. In this<br />
book Embury castigates the half-and-half Martini; his own preferred ratio was<br />
seven parts gin to one part vermouth. Even at this stage, the theatrics of rinsing<br />
glassware with vermouth and discarding the excess or misting vermouth over<br />
the surface of the drink with a perfume atomiser were well established. They<br />
became ever more popular as consumers and bartenders learned to treat<br />
vermouth as though it were a necessary inconvenience in a Martini. Shortly<br />
after the publication of Embury’s book, vodka made such an impact on the<br />
American bar scene that the revised edition of 1958 includes a section entirely<br />
devoted to this exotic new spirit. By the 1990s the Martini served in the average<br />
American bar consisted of roughly three ounces of vodka, perhaps more,<br />
shaken with ice that had once briefly been acquainted with some dry vermouth.<br />
This drink bears little resemblance to the gentle blend of gin and vermouth<br />
with a dash of bitters first popularised a century earlier.<br />
The ravages wrought upon these drinks illustrate the social and cultural<br />
dimensions of the cocktail—which is, after all, not merely a class of mixed<br />
beverage but also a socially constructed entity with a particular history. If tastes<br />
have changed over the past century of drinking, it is often a result of events<br />
outside bars and saloons. The Prohibition of alcohol in the United States<br />
(1919–33), for example, caused the local liquor industry to shut down quickly,<br />
with some profound consequences. During this period, distilleries couldn’t<br />
lay down new batches of product to be aged, and those with the capital to flee<br />
to wetter climes found themselves in the bars of Havana, London and Paris—<br />
where lighter liquors such as white rum, London dry gin and European aperitif<br />
bitters were the tipple of choice. Not only did American souses acquire a taste<br />
for unaged spirits, but when Prohibition ended American producers were<br />
unable to supply well-aged spirits to the market.<br />
86<br />
Previous spread<br />
New York City Deputy Police<br />
Commissioner John A. Leach, right,<br />
watching agents pour liquor into the<br />
sewer following a raid during the<br />
height of prohibition. Photographer<br />
unknown, Library of Congress Prints<br />
and Photographs Division, c. 1921<br />
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 86 6/11/12 9:20 AM
Essays<br />
The effect on American drinkers’ tastes was profound: old favourites such<br />
as bourbon and rye whiskies were cast aside in favour of Canadian whisky<br />
(which receives minimal ageing and is blended for smoothness, not character),<br />
Cuban rum, and the exotic Russian novelty known as vodka. While the effects<br />
of Prohibition can and have been derided by the cocktail cognoscenti, it’s also<br />
worth acknowledging their benefits. American bartenders fled the country and<br />
took their skills around the world, taking cocktail culture to Europe and as far as<br />
Japan, where a small but vital cocktail culture flourishes today. And bartenders<br />
soon created new drinks based on local ingredients, bringing unusual products<br />
such as Campari and Fernet-Branca into the bartender’s vernacular. Campari<br />
isn’t an authentic pre-Prohibition cocktail ingredient, but the world of mixed<br />
drinks would be altogether poorer without the Negroni.<br />
Amer Picon is not the only alcoholic beverage that has recently returned,<br />
Lazarus-like, from presumed death. Crème Yvette, a liqueur flavoured with<br />
raspberries and violets, was recently reintroduced to the American market<br />
after a forty-year absence. Its provenance is sound: the current manufacturer,<br />
Charles Jacquin et Cie, purchased the proprietary recipe from its original<br />
source, Sheffield of Connecticut, in the 1930s. The relaunched Abbott’s Bitters—<br />
best known for its use in the Martinez—is a dicier proposition. The proprietary<br />
formula was lost when its original manufacturer went out of business, and<br />
the small company that now offers a reconstructed Abbott’s Bitters has based<br />
its recipe on the results of gas chromatography performed on samples of the<br />
original product. Since those samples are at least fifty years old, nobody can<br />
be certain that the gas chromatograph—a device designed to separate out the<br />
components of an unknown mixture—is capturing the compounds that were<br />
present in a fresh bottle of Abbott’s Bitters in the early twentieth century.<br />
(Strong liquor acts as a preservative, but not a perfect one, and it’s entirely<br />
likely that many of the aromatic compounds that gave Abbott’s its distinctive<br />
flavour would have been altered over that time.) Other products, such as Pierre<br />
Ferrand’s recently launched dry curaçao (which aims to re-create the style of<br />
dry curaçao prevalent in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries), are based on<br />
recipes so old that the question of how to determine their authenticity becomes<br />
moot. We know that they’re made very similarly, but does that mean they are<br />
similar to their antecedents? Just how authentic can they be?<br />
For a growing number of bartenders and their customers, authenticity has<br />
become the sine qua non of a good drink. The craft cocktail movement, inspired<br />
by the early archival research of bartender Dale DeGroff in the late 1980s, has<br />
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 87 6/11/12 9:20 AM<br />
87
The Bartender and the Archive Chad Parkhill<br />
made a fetish of pre-Prohibition and ‘traditional’ drinks. Thus vermouth is<br />
experiencing something of a comeback, and trendsetting bars such as New<br />
York City’s Milk & Honey make their Dry Martinis ‘fifty-fifty’ in deliberate<br />
deference to the drink’s origins. Genever and old tom gins have returned to<br />
bars, alongside other, more recondite products. Even sherry, once mocked as<br />
the tipple of grandmothers and derelicts, has its public champions (including<br />
this author). Online forums such as the Chanticleer Society offer a venue<br />
for professional bartenders and passionate amateurs to discuss and debate<br />
the origins of their favourite drinks, while blogging sites offer a platform for<br />
journeyman mixologists to track their expeditions deep into the archives in<br />
search of ever-more authentic cocktails. It’s no accident that one of the bestknown<br />
drinks blogs is Savoy Stomp, which documents its author Erik Ellestad’s<br />
attempt to make all of the drinks in the Savoy Cocktail Book of 1930.<br />
This fetishisation of authenticity isn’t limited to the world of cocktail snobs;<br />
examples of similar veneration of the past can be seen in many spheres of<br />
consumption. (Vinyl records and cassette tapes, for example, have become<br />
talismans of conspicuous consumption in an industry that has been profoundly<br />
reshaped by digitisation.) 5 And like other quests for authenticity, the craft<br />
cocktail movement is not above criticism: only those with money, leisure time<br />
and social capital can pursue such quixotic schemes as reintroducing pre-<br />
Prohibition brands of bitters. In the world of cocktails, a taste for the ‘authentic’<br />
separates the cognoscenti from the hoi polloi, drawing a line somewhere<br />
between those who appreciate artisanal mezcals and those who don’t see any<br />
problem with the word ‘Appletini’.<br />
Yet the craft cocktail movement’s focus on authenticity serves the useful<br />
purpose of illuminating the complex history folded up inside something as<br />
simple as a glass of cold gin and vermouth. In returning to earlier tastes, these<br />
bartenders and the aficionados playing along at home are demonstrating that<br />
the history of drinks, like most other histories, is not a teleological progression<br />
towards an ideal but a contested and contingent domain subject to reversals<br />
and accidents of fortune. There may well be no such thing as a truly ‘authentic’<br />
drink, but that doesn’t mean the search for authenticity in the world of drinks<br />
is a fool’s errand. That quest can reveal a historical narrative behind each and<br />
every cocktail recipe, and in so doing take something as familiar as a Martini<br />
and imbue it with wonder and mystery. Such a transformation is surely<br />
something worth raising our glasses for. M<br />
88<br />
5 This remains the case even if it is true<br />
that most young people who purchase<br />
vinyl records get more use out of the<br />
MP3 download codes included than<br />
they do from the records.<br />
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 88 6/11/12 9:20 AM
Fiction<br />
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 89 6/11/12 9:20 AM
Keilor Cranium<br />
WAYNE M ACAuLEY<br />
In ocTober 1940 a man by The name of james WhiTe unearThed, in<br />
an unprepossessing sand deposit near the junction of Dry Creek and the<br />
Maribyrnong River, what has since become known as the Keilor Cranium.<br />
Lacking, aside from the mandible, the ‘temporal segments of both zygomatic<br />
arches and a large section of the right side of the basicranium’, the Keilor<br />
Cranium is nonetheless one of our best-preserved examples of south-eastern<br />
Aboriginal cranial morphology from the terminal Pleistocene. A few fragments<br />
of femur, believed to belong to the same individual, were also found close by.<br />
There is still some debate over the significance of the cranium: on the one<br />
hand, we have the argument that Keilor provides incontrovertible evidence of<br />
unbroken, ongoing habitation of the continent by a single line of Aboriginal<br />
ancestry from prehistoric times to the present, and on the other, the argument<br />
that, while indeed a significant find, Keilor could not reasonably make such<br />
claims. Of course, what would seal the argument one way or the other is the<br />
missing mandible. But the missing mandible remains missing. Many digs, the<br />
most recent in the early 1980s, have failed to find any trace.<br />
I first came across the Cranium some years ago when I was living in that<br />
house in Brunswick with the chickens out the back. I thought at the time<br />
it might make a good topic for a story, magazine-length, starting perhaps<br />
with the accidental discovery in a nondescript suburban paddock of some<br />
apparently prehistoric Aboriginal remains and exploring in its middle and<br />
concluding pages the profound impact this discovery might have on the<br />
national story. Because if, as the science suggested, the jaw structure and<br />
mandibular dentition of the Keilor Cranium (or Skull, as it would be if the<br />
jawbone were found) showed it to be as robust and gracile as the better known<br />
Kow Swamp and Lake Mungo remains, a further and probably conclusive piece<br />
of evidence would have been found to finally overturn the trihybrid theory of<br />
prehistoric Aboriginal occupation (successive waves of migration displacing<br />
the prior occupants) and the assumption based on it that the land is as much<br />
ours as theirs. My story would put the lie to the claim, at that time gathering<br />
momentum in certain circles, that we are all immigrants, and that no-one can<br />
claim prior ownership and therefore any kind of special treatment.<br />
Each day I caught the tram into the city and sat in the State Library reading<br />
through the scant and specialist material available. But truth to tell my heart<br />
wasn’t really in it. What was I, the white boy, trying to prove? I decided to do a<br />
little archaeology myself.<br />
I packed a lunch, a notebook and a pen, a garden trowel, a dessert spoon,<br />
and an old takeaway container, fixed a milk crate to the back of my bike, and put<br />
90<br />
From Treatise on Physiognomy, artist<br />
unknown, c. 1790, US National Library<br />
of Medicine<br />
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 90 6/11/12 9:20 AM
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 91 6/11/12 9:20 AM
Keilor Cranium Wayne Macauley<br />
my pack inside. On the track I passed houses, football fields, freeway flyovers;<br />
occasionally a jogger went past, occasionally a pair of women out walking. After<br />
a while I left the track and rode the back streets of Essendon until I came out at<br />
Keilor Road, which I followed all the way to Horseshoe Bend. I arrived there a<br />
little after midday and hid my bike in some bushes near the bridge.<br />
The first thing that strikes you about the Keilor Cranium site, the thing that<br />
still strikes me now—the reason, in part, for my writing—is how on earth in<br />
heaven’s name such deep and significant history could exist in such a shallow,<br />
insignificant place. The dig itself, now entirely overgrown, is little more than<br />
a large hollow about twenty metres in diameter near where the scar of Dry<br />
Creek meets the Maribyrnong. The smattering of native grasses planted in the<br />
vain hope of revegetating the area has been completely overtaken by weeds:<br />
Scotch thistle, gorse, serrated tussock and the African boxthorn that some<br />
well-meaning farmer must once have hedged his paddocks with. Rabbits were<br />
hopping about everywhere, their white tails bobbing. The soil there is dark<br />
alluvial, thrown up by the river over eons past, with patches here and there of<br />
flaky limestone, the remnants of an ancient seabed. The rabbits had ravaged<br />
whatever grasses once held together the sloping hillsides above, and the overall<br />
impression was of a landscape washed, leached, weather-worn and scarred.<br />
A flight path to the nearby airport passes directly overhead: you could see<br />
the huge underbellies of the jets in fine detail as they descended towards the<br />
runway. This little piece of land, in many ways of great national significance,<br />
was, in every other way, a sad peculiarity. Dead paddocks, rampant weeds,<br />
car tyres, the rusted skeleton of an abandoned truck.<br />
I rummaged around there most of the day, in full view of the passing traffic<br />
on the freeway above, feeling, quite frankly, a little ridiculous. I ate my lunch on<br />
a mound of dirt, relieved myself in a boxthorn thicket. I scratched around with<br />
my implements, jotted down some notes and made a few crude pencil sketches.<br />
The afternoon dragged on; the cars that had passed by that morning were now<br />
returning home.<br />
I too was about to make my way back towards the bridge when I heard<br />
what I thought was a car backfiring. I hid behind a gorse bush and watched a<br />
figure moving slowly across the slope of the nearby hill. He was carrying a gun,<br />
and had a dog trotting along behind. He picked something up, then started in<br />
my direction.<br />
Hello! Hello! I said, stepping out. Hello! Don’t shoot! Hello! If I felt ridiculous<br />
before, I felt completely ludicrous now. The man looked at me. What are you<br />
doing here? he said. I’m a writer, I said. This gave him little to go on. He was<br />
92<br />
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 92 6/11/12 9:20 AM
Fiction<br />
carrying a dead rabbit by the ears. I’m writing about the Cranium, I said, holding<br />
out as evidence my dusty utensils and my dog-eared notebook. He leaned the<br />
gun against his leg.<br />
He was white-bread suburban, his father and probably his father before<br />
him had shot rabbits here, and if his son was not away down the coast fishing,<br />
I guessed, he would be here shooting rabbits too. A factory worker, car parts<br />
probably, recently unemployed, a small brick house with a wide concrete drive<br />
and a tin garage with a tilt-up door where on the weekends he tinkered with<br />
the trail bike he and his son rode each Sunday on the paddocks out the back of<br />
the estate. He said ‘cranium’ like ‘krahnium’. I’ve heard all the talk about the<br />
Cranium, he was saying (he had his foot on the dead rabbit’s head, ripping the<br />
pelt from the carcass; his dog, a mongrel-looking thing, was woofing down the<br />
entrails nearby); everyone around here has, I mean how it’s all a big deal and is<br />
going to put us on the map. Gavin Proctor went up to Lake Mungo there a while<br />
back to have a look; they’ve got everything up there: visitors’ centre, guided<br />
tours, overnight lodge. And what have we got? Nothing. So Gavin’s come back<br />
with all these big ideas and he’s got the local businesses onside and oh yeah for<br />
a while there it was all go, go, go. But we don’t have the mandible—do we?—<br />
and we’re poor cousins to Mungo if we don’t have the mandible. Then Gavin<br />
left—trouble with his wife, she was seeing the butcher—and the whole thing<br />
went arse-up. A few good souls tried to set up a committee with the idea of<br />
fixing the place up and mounting some kind of plaque or information board or<br />
something, but like everything else around here it was all talk no action. Same<br />
with the skate park. Piss and wind. Gavin’s the one you want to talk to, but he’s<br />
in Sydney now, or that woman from the library but she’s a pain in the arse, or<br />
you could have a look in Garden Avenue where there’s a bloke called Windridge.<br />
About fifty metres down on the left-hand side.<br />
The dog was tense and bristling, sweeping the bloodied dirt with its nose.<br />
The man whistled her up. He threw the pelt into the bushes and put the carcass<br />
in a plastic bag. Watch out for snakes if you’re going back that way, he said,<br />
pointing towards the bridge. She chased up a tiger yesterday. He shouldered<br />
the gun and set off up the hill, the dog following behind.<br />
I’d knocked on the door of three houses in Garden Avenue before the man<br />
called Windridge answered. A double-storey brick veneer with a central door,<br />
two large upstairs windows, and a ‘Clean Fill’ sign on the fence. It was evening,<br />
the streetlights were just coming on, the smell of cooked meat wafted out from<br />
a kitchen somewhere, while down in the bushland reserve by the river the<br />
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 93 6/11/12 9:20 AM<br />
93
Keilor Cranium Wayne Macauley<br />
lorikeets were screeching and chattering in the trees. He was a pale, nervous,<br />
balding man in his sixties, with one of those poloneck jumpers that had long<br />
ago gone out of fashion. He had a pair of reading glasses on a chain around his<br />
neck. I’m interested in the Cranium, I said. I heard you might know something.<br />
He glanced over my shoulder as if looking for the source of the rumour. Are you<br />
from the papers? he asked. I said I was a freelance writer, that I had a general<br />
interest only. I showed him my pad, as if that were some use. He gestured for<br />
me to come inside.<br />
It was a 1960s house, with raw timber and lots of light. Windridge led me<br />
down the hallway to the back where a big open-plan kitchen looked out onto<br />
a terraced back yard and the bushland reserve beyond. It was getting dark<br />
out there now but I could still see, glowing strangely down on the lower part<br />
of the garden in the last of the evening light, a big white marquee. Are you<br />
having a party? I asked. He snorted. A woman came in, a lean, overtanned<br />
woman with pinned-up bottle-blonde hair. This is my wife, Jenny, said<br />
Windridge. Love, this is the man I was telling you about, from the university,<br />
you remember? The woman gave her husband, if that’s what he was, what could<br />
only be described as a withering look. She did not even bother looking at me.<br />
She picked up a wine glass and bottle from the kitchen bench and walked back<br />
with them towards the front of the house. I could hear the muffled sound of<br />
the evening news on the television, then a door closing, then silence.<br />
The air outside was alive, the birds chattering in the trees, the moths hurling<br />
themselves at the porch light. The white marquee was radiating an eerie, alien<br />
light. Windridge stopped before its entrance. The river’s just down there, he<br />
said, past those two gums. It does two big horseshoe turns around here—one<br />
there, one further back—and the theory was that any bone fragments, even in<br />
flood-times, wouldn’t be able to get downstream past these two horseshoes<br />
but would lodge in the sandy deposit up there where the Cranium was found,<br />
before the first bend, over on the other side of the bridge. That was the theory,<br />
anyway. He pulled back the flap on the marquee and flicked a switch on the<br />
power board inside. A fluorescent light stuttered on.<br />
The marquee was there to cover what was essentially an enormous hole.<br />
There was a walkway around it, about a metre wide, allowing access to all four<br />
sides, and in a couple of places a ladder going down into what at its deepest<br />
would have been about a four-metre drop. But the depth was not uniform, the<br />
whole thing was terraced, with little earth platforms and stopes throughout.<br />
Above the hole was a rope-and-pulley system with a bucket on the end and<br />
on the far walkway a wheelbarrow full of dirt. This is my fourth dig in this<br />
94<br />
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 94 6/11/12 9:20 AM
Fiction<br />
street, said Windridge; number one first, then number three, then five, then<br />
here. They’ve all got swimming pools now. They were wrong to think all the<br />
fragments were going to be found back there on the other side of the bridge,<br />
away from people, ‘in the scrub’. That’s the biggest delusion of all. No. All our<br />
houses are built on the bones of the past and under every house is a secret.<br />
He picked up a sieve, a big circular thing like I’d seen before in those gold rush<br />
re-creations; it had a few bits of gravel in it, which he pushed around with his<br />
finger. I get paid, he said, without looking at me: I’m not ashamed. My wife<br />
doesn’t want to live in Keilor—she keeps a post office box in Toorak—but she<br />
can’t say no to all that money, can she? She likes to spend. He stopped for a<br />
moment, as if a thought had tripped him up, and stood with the sieve in his<br />
hand, staring distractedly into the hole. I turned: someone was standing in<br />
the doorway, a boy of about thirteen or fourteen, dressed in dirty jeans and a<br />
T-shirt. I’m sorry, said the boy; I had to help Mum with the shopping. Windridge<br />
nodded coolly. Will I just keep going where I was yesterday? Windridge nodded<br />
again. The boy took a spade, a trowel and a brush from the milk crate in the<br />
corner. Come inside, Windridge said.<br />
We made our way back towards the house. It was all quiet outside now,<br />
except for the low rumble of cars on the freeway and, further away still, the<br />
whoosh and roar of a plane coming in to land at the airport. I could see the dark<br />
shape of the boy moving around inside the marquee, then descending a ladder<br />
into the hole. He works for me after school, Windridge explained; I pay him<br />
well, he likes the work and he’s good at it too. His mum’s on her own; she’s got<br />
four kids, it helps them out. I have a few others too. We climbed the back steps<br />
to the kitchen and Windridge led me back down the hallway past a room with<br />
a closed door (I could hear the television inside) to another room at the front<br />
of the house. It was the spare room, obviously, full of boxes, filing cabinets and<br />
junk. Under the front window was a big table strewn with rocks, gravel and<br />
dust. There was a single bed stacked high with boxes and on the wall opposite a<br />
floor-to-ceiling built-in robe. Windridge pushed one of the sliding doors back.<br />
The robe was filled with trays and boxes, all labelled—Windridge pulled<br />
out one of the lower trays and held it out for me to look at. Megafauna, he<br />
said, probably Diprotodon, the bigger bits are in the boxes on the bed. He slid<br />
that tray back and pulled out another. Procoptodon, he said: probably a rib.<br />
He took out some more trays, pushing the bone fragments around with his<br />
finger. He closed the first door and slid open the second. There were more trays<br />
here, more boxes. Femur fragment, said Windridge, showing me the contents<br />
of another tray. He took out a second, this one with a medium-sized, slightly<br />
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 95 6/11/12 9:20 AM<br />
95
Keilor Cranium Wayne Macauley<br />
curved piece of bone on it. Scapula, he said, or part of, probably from the same<br />
individual. He slid that tray back and this time pulled out, from the very bottom<br />
shelf, a shoebox. I recognised the word Bata on the side. He took off the lid and<br />
carefully peeled away the bubble-wrap from a piece of bone. He held it towards<br />
me on the flat of his hand. It was the mandible, obviously, the shape of the<br />
jawline very clear, the teeth mostly intact. He ran a finger along it. I’ve done all<br />
the measurements, he said: it fits. He pointed at one of the molars. Look at the<br />
size of that, he said. Kow, Mungo, Coobool, Cohuna; one people, one lineage,<br />
one continuous occupation. He let his finger rest there a while, as if afraid<br />
to break the spell, then wrapped the mandible up again and closed the box.<br />
Take it, he said. It took me a second to realise what he meant. I’m a fraud, he<br />
said, please take it. He turned away. I could see his shoulders shaking. I spent<br />
my best years trying to heal this country’s rifts, he said, and my worst years<br />
trying to widen them. Please—he turned—take it to the museum, ask for Max,<br />
tell him to put it with Keilor, he’ll know what you mean. There was something<br />
desperate, almost maniacal, in his look. I didn’t know it was a door handle I was<br />
holding until I found myself in the hall.<br />
When I got outside it was pouring. I could hear the wife screaming, things<br />
being thrown. I ran to the end of Garden Avenue, cut across the scrubby ground<br />
in the valley below and crashed my way through the tall grass and prickles until<br />
I came out at the river. My bike was on the other side, its front wheel poking out<br />
of the bushes. I didn’t know what to do. I crawled in under the bridge—the earth<br />
was hard, like concrete—and with the Bata shoebox in my lap I listened for a<br />
long time to the heavy drops hitting the trees.<br />
That was 2006. I should have gone to see this Max, but I didn’t. Something told<br />
me I ought to hang on to the mandible for a while, to see what it really meant.<br />
I’d take it out sometimes, finger it, turn it this way then the other, wonder<br />
about human history, human values, being human, humanity, all that. I asked<br />
a lot of questions but I came to no conclusions. I kept the box under my bed.<br />
Then by chance a couple of years later I was sitting at a table having a coffee<br />
and a doughnut in a roadhouse near Carlsruhe flicking through a copy of the<br />
Brimbank Leader when I saw an article inside. The museum had handed the<br />
Keilor Cranium back to the local Aboriginal people who buried it with due<br />
ceremony in the ground at Horseshoe Bend. A week later, with the mandible<br />
in the shoebox under my arm, I was knocking at the old door in Garden<br />
Avenue. There was a hole back there, I told myself, deep enough to bury all our<br />
baggage in. But Windridge wasn’t there. A young man answered, his young<br />
96<br />
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 96 6/11/12 9:20 AM
Fiction<br />
wife standing behind him. They’d bought the house last year, he said. Vacant<br />
possession. He was wearing tracksuit pants and a T-shirt with Whatever on it.<br />
I had a picture of the swimming pool, the young man in a pair of green and gold<br />
shorts, climbing backwards down the ladder. An awful sensation rose up in me.<br />
Sorry, wrong place, I said. M<br />
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 97 6/11/12 9:20 AM<br />
97
Titty Anne and the Very, Very Hairy Man<br />
MARGO LANAGAN<br />
‘IT is Time i did my baking,’ said Mother to the children. ‘Go to the mill and<br />
fetch me some flour, and to John Hives for honey.’<br />
Titty went with Blaze and Bertha to Hives, because bees were always more<br />
interesting than millstones. But Bertha hurried them so in the honey-getting<br />
that they did not see more than the usual bees in weeds and hedgerows on<br />
the way.<br />
‘I wanted to see him in his costume!’ Titty cried as Bertha, swinging the<br />
filled honey-pail, held Hives’ gate open and tapped her foot.<br />
‘The sooner Mother starts, the sooner we shall have nice pastries in our<br />
mouths,’ said Bertha.<br />
They all watched as Mother moistened the flour with butter and honey and<br />
eggs, and rolled it out with her pin, rolled and rolled it time and again, and<br />
folded and folded to fill it full of puff and lightness. It was almost alive the way<br />
it stretched and trembled under her hands, making itself nice for them.<br />
Mother mounded the pastries on the board, pushed them into the oven and<br />
twitched the board from under, then piled coals up all around. ‘There.’ She put<br />
the board aside and turned to face all their eyes.<br />
‘Who will take the grandmother’s pastries to her?’ said Keenest.<br />
‘Who indeed?’ Mother looked at Titty. They all looked at Titty.<br />
‘All that hair,’ said Bertha, ‘just in a year.’<br />
‘Send Colt,’ said Jamezon, and they all regarded Colt instead, rolling a<br />
greyed pastry-sausage out on the floor. He looked up in surprise at the sound<br />
of his name, and they laughed at that, and at his very littleness, and the idea of<br />
him trotting off alone through the wood with the basket.<br />
‘Perhaps it’s not so very much hair.’ William turned back to Titty. ‘We could<br />
shave it off, I think, the way you shave a sick person.’<br />
‘All of it?’ Delft looked Titty up and down.<br />
Titty stroked her cheek, her knee where the hair was thin from her kneeling<br />
and crawling in play.<br />
‘Boil up a bath,’ said Mother. ‘Sharpen the knife, Smyrtle. Fetch in some<br />
lavender, Keenest. We will use the fat from the pig to soften her hair and skin,<br />
but we must sweeten her afterwards, else she will smell all the more delicious.’<br />
So the bath was filled, and Titty was set to soak in it. The sisters and brothers<br />
hung over the edges, eyeing her fur, which swayed in the water like brookweed.<br />
‘All of that?’ said Delft doubtfully.<br />
‘All of it, everywhere,’ said Mother, ‘top to toe.’ Outside the razor licked the<br />
whetstone, whing, whing, a slippery sound.<br />
‘Put your head under,’ said Blaze. ‘That is as hairy as anything.’<br />
98<br />
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 98 6/11/12 9:20 AM
Fiction<br />
‘You won’t cut my head-hair as well,’ cried Titty, ‘that I’ve been growing so<br />
long? Why, it was almost as long last year when I took the pastries! I wore it all<br />
out loose, and no evil came of it.’<br />
‘Your face,’ Mother said. ‘Just put your face under. That must go, all that<br />
growth.’<br />
Bertha held Titty’s main hair back, tying it into a ball as Titty dipped her<br />
face, held it in the water as long as she could bear, came up gasping, then<br />
dipped and soaked again.<br />
‘There,’ said Smyrtle, coming in. ‘This’ll slice your shadow out from under<br />
you, it’s so sharp.’<br />
Titty pulled her face out of the water and squeaked at the sight of the knife<br />
edge all agleam. William laughed. ‘You would think she was going to cut<br />
your throat.’<br />
‘Oh, she might,’ gasped Keenest. ‘You will have to keep very still, Tit.’<br />
‘Begin with the face,’ said Mother, ‘where the hairs are the finest, and with<br />
her face in the steam. The rest can keep soaking while you work.’<br />
Delft was the best with his hands and with delicate things, so he did the face.<br />
He worked so well and gently, soon Titty was almost dozing, so unafraid was<br />
she of the knife’s gentle hiss against her skin, its gentle stroking. Delft’s finger,<br />
here and here, steadied her head the way he wanted it. Right by her eye the<br />
blade shone, and in at the difficult corner against her nose; she could see how<br />
closely he watched himself, she could hear it in his breathing. The fat was warm<br />
and smelly, the pig long gone, its meat long eaten. Ghost-pig and lavender,<br />
she breathed, as Delft worked, and everyone watching grew dreamy with her,<br />
Mother hands on hips at the back of them, and the smell of the cooking pastries<br />
blooming and tantalising through the cottage.<br />
Delft stood back, having shaven Titty’s face and neck and shoulders.<br />
Bertha sighed awake. ‘Look at that,’ she said. ‘Naked as a nine-year-old.’<br />
‘Stand up, Titty.’<br />
There was some argument then, and they decided she ought to kneel, so that<br />
her legs and underparts could keep soaking.<br />
‘For it’s the underparts that’ll need the closest shaving,’ said Smyrtle. ‘The<br />
smelly end of her.’<br />
‘Yes,’ said Mother. ‘Best to sharpen the knife again, I should think, before<br />
you begin there, it’s all so soft and stretchy.’<br />
‘Smyrtle can do the front and back, though,’ said Delft, handing Smyrt the<br />
knife. ‘They’re easier, and my hand is all cramped.’<br />
‘Right.’ Smyrtle flashed her eyes, and Titty whimpered.<br />
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 99 6/11/12 9:20 AM<br />
99
Titty Anne and the Very, Very Hairy Man Margo Lanagan<br />
‘We don’t want even a drop of blood,’ said Mother. ‘You go sensibly, Smyrt.<br />
This is not a game or a trick.’<br />
‘Well, it is a kind of trick.’ Keenest set to work rubbing fat on Titty’s front.<br />
‘Making whoever think Titty’s nine again.’<br />
‘Why do we call her Titty?’ said Jamezon. ‘She’s flat as a frog-splat in front.’<br />
‘Here we go, then.’ Smyrtle stuck her tongue between her teeth and began,<br />
willy-nilly, on Titty’s chest.<br />
‘Sensibly,’ reminded Mother. ‘Carefully. I would rather you go over twice<br />
than you cut her.’<br />
‘I am careful,’ said Smyrtle. ‘These nipples are a nuisance, though.’<br />
‘Leave them for Delft,’ suggested Blaze, ‘when his hand is rested.’<br />
‘Where has he gone?’ Titty looked to the door; she was sure Smyrtle would be<br />
taking more care if Delft were standing near.<br />
‘Out for a breath of air,’ said William. ‘It’s close in here, with the pastries, and<br />
the smell of pig. I am near fainting myself.’<br />
Front and back, Smyrtle shaved her, and then she stood and Smyrt did her<br />
thighs as well. ‘You could go more gently,’ said Mother. ‘Look at the welts you’re<br />
raising on the poor thing.’<br />
‘These are harder hairs, remember,’ said Smyrt. ‘We need another kettleful,<br />
to hot it up again. She can put her feet out on the edge while her bottom soaks.’<br />
Discs of shining fat jostled on the cooling bathwater.<br />
‘I am dying of hunger, from this smell,’ said Jamezon, and it was true, the<br />
pastries smelt very good, even with the pig-smell over them.<br />
Bertha brought the kettle. ‘That’s better,’ said Titty, and she sank under and<br />
stopped shivering.<br />
Smyrtle shaved Titty’s legs and feet, and then Titty crouched for a while in<br />
the warm, while whing-whing, Smyrt brought up the blade edge again.<br />
‘She should bend over the table, bum to the light,’ said Blaze, ‘so Delft can<br />
get at her underbits.’<br />
‘She should lie on the table, all spread out, for the front of them.’<br />
Titty was weary of feeling scraped and greasy. Her hairs lay shaken off the<br />
blade in a dark fatty mass on the floor. Except for her head and nethers she was<br />
naked as an eel, naked as skinned rabbit in a pot.<br />
She stirred the few strands showing at her crotch. ‘Will anyone smell that,<br />
within my drawers and skirt?’<br />
‘Oh my, yes,’ said Mother. ‘That most of all must be cleared of hair.’<br />
And so Titty bent over the table, and lay on it all spread, and Delft did his<br />
work. Keenest spread a blanket over her top half, and a rag over each of her legs,<br />
100<br />
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 100 6/11/12 9:20 AM
Fiction<br />
so that she should not chill and shiver and thus make Delft cut her. The room<br />
was noisy and busy with Mother taking out the pastries and fighting off the<br />
children’s fingers, and William and Delft emptying and scrubbing out the<br />
greasy bath, and filling it again, and Keenest bringing herbs to scent it.<br />
They washed Titty, hair and all, in the scented water. Raw, she felt, and cold,<br />
as they stood her out and dried her. Keenest brought clean clothes, slightly too<br />
big. They were nowhere near as soft as Titty’s fur had been.<br />
She sat unhappily, eating her pastry with the others, the blouse scraping on<br />
her arms, her hands pale and naked, the fingernails trimmed back by Bertha<br />
and scrubbed out white by Keenest.<br />
‘Wash your hands again,’ cried Keenest as Titty licked the last crumbs from<br />
her fingers. ‘And rinse out your mouth, and chew parsley. We don’t want any<br />
part of you to smell appetising.’<br />
‘Here is the grandmother’s basket,’ said Mother. The treats were packed in<br />
neatly under a red-checked cloth. ‘I’ve put a pot of cream in too, so don’t you go<br />
swinging it, or banging it into things.’<br />
Off Titty set. Mother carried Colt out to wave—he liked goodbyes—but all<br />
the others, having had their pastries, were now gone in this direction and that<br />
after different pleasures, some to Farmer Hay’s barn, Delft to check his snares,<br />
Smyrtle down to the brook to fish.<br />
The forest closed behind Titty, hiding Mother and Colt’s waving. Titty sighed<br />
and began to hurry, for she did not want the sun to set while she was still among<br />
the trees on her way home.<br />
It was strange walking clothed, without the protection of her hair, only a<br />
cloud of lavender and parsley-smell around her. The cloth of the blouse and<br />
drawers rubbed under her arms and between her thighs; it would rub her raw,<br />
perhaps, before she reached the grandmother’s house.<br />
For it was a long way to walk. Why did the grandmother have to live so<br />
far away? Why could she not be in the very same house, like Hamhocks’s<br />
grandmother, or Meadows’? But Titty knew the answer to that: the grandmother<br />
was their father’s mother, and she blamed their mother somehow for his dying.<br />
She couldn’t abide the sight of all his children, the Mother-ness of them mixed<br />
in with her son. Besides, over in Thickets Valley grew all the herbs for her<br />
medicines; her house must be near there, she insisted, to save her this long<br />
walk every day.<br />
Titty could hardly imagine the grandmother’s life, though she had visited<br />
her every baking-day since Jamezon grew too old for the job. Imagine spending<br />
day after day without conversation, only the wind in the leaves and the tumble<br />
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 101 6/11/12 9:20 AM<br />
101
Titty Anne and the Very, Very Hairy Man Margo Lanagan<br />
of brook water, and every now and then, overhead, some great argument of<br />
a thunderstorm. Titty had always thought such solitude a dreadful thing to<br />
endure but today, after all the prodding and poking of her during the shaving,<br />
all the looking and discussing of her, she thought perhaps it was not such a<br />
terrible thing after all to go untouched and unremarked on.<br />
She paused at the place where the path split, for blackberries grew there,<br />
and it was coming into blackberry time. Yes, there were a few ripened ones,<br />
dark among the canes, though most were pink and green still and it took some<br />
careful searching to find the good ones. Titty plucked one and ate it, and it was<br />
very good, and so she hunted down and ate another.<br />
And then she was so busy searching the blackberry bush, deeper and deeper<br />
and with care not to catch herself too badly on the thorny canes, that she did<br />
not notice a man enter the clearing and stand watching her, until he cleared<br />
his throat, and even then she looked into the tree above her, thinking she had<br />
heard a chough speak.<br />
‘Good day to you!’ the man then said.<br />
Startled, she turned her head and saw him. She began to extract herself<br />
from the blackberry bush, but all at once it seemed longer thorned and more<br />
determined to hold her. The man watched her struggle, leaning against the<br />
trunk of a very large pine with his arms folded. In time she pulled herself and<br />
her snagged hair free and picked up her basket.<br />
Titty was not rude enough to walk from the clearing without speaking. She<br />
gave something of a curtsey. ‘Good day, sir; I must to my grandmother.’<br />
She would have slipped past him, only he moved, not obstructing her path,<br />
but only pushing himself off the tree and looming quite large and close. He was<br />
perhaps the hairiest man she had ever met. Despite his fine suit of red velvet,<br />
ingeniously cut to show what a grand strong chest he had and what narrow<br />
waist and legs, the smell that came off him was very strong indeed.<br />
Titty stepped back from it. The man’s yellow eyes gleamed below great<br />
sprouts of eyebrows; his teeth grinned among his dark beard. But his voice<br />
came out of him quite smoothly. ‘Your grandmother?’ he said, and he sounded<br />
very interested, and almost kind.<br />
‘Why, yes,’ she said. ‘I have these pastries for her that my mother baked, and<br />
a pot of cream.’ She went to lift the red-checked cloth and show him, but her<br />
fingers were damp with blackberry juice and they stained the cloth, and then<br />
she could only gaze in dismay at the mark she had made, while the hairy man’s<br />
stifling sour scent flowed around her like blowing pyre-smoke. ‘I must take<br />
them to her,’ she finally said, lifting a woeful face. ‘Please let me pass.’<br />
102<br />
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 102 6/11/12 9:20 AM
Fiction<br />
His sproutish eyebrows lifted. He waved along the unobstructed path quite<br />
gallantly. ‘Which way will you take, little girl?’ he said. ‘The path of pins, or the<br />
path of needles?’<br />
What was he talking about? Titty sidled past him, onto the path she<br />
always took.<br />
‘Aah,’ he said and she turned. He stood slump-shouldered where the path<br />
divided. ‘My business takes me the other way. What a great shame; I should have<br />
enjoyed some company.’<br />
She tried after a smile, but it trembled. ‘Good day, then, sir,’ she said, and<br />
off she hurried.<br />
For a long time she did not look back, but only fixed her sights on the path<br />
and spread her nostrils for the taint of him on the air. Then she darted behind<br />
a grand elm, and peeped back along the path, and fetched her breath back, and<br />
listened. Breeze, leaves, bird-cries. No footfall, no red coat, no dark face. And so<br />
she ran on then, just as quickly but not so much afraid.<br />
Soon she reached the grandmother’s house. She smoothed her clothes down<br />
on her shaven skin, and gathered her hair together and tucked it behind her,<br />
and pulled her face about trying to see if the blackberrying had stained her<br />
mouth. When she was quite arranged, she went up to the door and called in,<br />
‘Grandmother?’<br />
‘Oh, oh,’ came a feeble voice from within. ‘Who is that?’<br />
‘It’s Titty Anne, your granddaughter. I’ve come with bakings and cream<br />
from Mother.’<br />
‘Titty Anne? Why, come in, child, come in!’<br />
Titty stepped into the house surprised, for the grandmother usually snapped<br />
and upbraided her from the instant she arrived to the moment she left. But then<br />
she saw the reason, for the grandmother—in the middle of the afternoon!—was<br />
still abed, with her night-bonnet all pushed forward around her face. She<br />
glanced out at Titty, her eye a gleam of yellow. ‘Forgive me that I don’t get up to<br />
meet you.’<br />
‘You are unwell?’<br />
‘Very poorly indeed,’ said the grandmother. ‘And cold, so cold! I have piled up<br />
the blanket and am wearing all my clothes, but I cannot seem to warm myself!’<br />
‘I shall make you a tea, I think,’ said Titty. ‘You can drink it down with one of<br />
these nice pastries.’<br />
‘So kind, so kind,’ said the grandmother. ‘But I should be so much warmer<br />
if you climbed straight into this bed with me, while you are still warm from<br />
running through the forest.’<br />
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 103 6/11/12 9:20 AM<br />
103
Titty Anne and the Very, Very Hairy Man Margo Lanagan<br />
‘Is there room?’ said Titty, eyeing the piled bed. ‘How fat you have grown.<br />
Is it your illness?’<br />
‘Indeed it is,’ said the grandmother, lowly and with some shame. ‘I cannot<br />
get out and about as I’m used to doing, I am so terribly wan and weak.’ And a<br />
great shivering fit took her, so that her bonnet frills trembled like poplar leaves<br />
in a northerly blow. ‘Quickly, girl! Jump in beside me!’<br />
Titty Anne put the basket on the table and went to the bedside. ‘I am sure a<br />
cup of tea would do better for you,’ she said. So close, the grandmother gave off<br />
a strong stink. It must be the fever sweat, or perhaps only general old age and<br />
not having bathed as recently as Titty. Whatever it was, it stilled Titty’s hand<br />
upon the bed, and gave her pause to eye the old woman’s hands, clutching the<br />
coverlet to her chest.<br />
‘Look at your nails!’ she said with distaste. ‘They are so neglected! How long<br />
have you lain here alone?’ And she bent and looked below the bed, for surely<br />
some of that smell must come from a chamber pot? But no—the pot shone<br />
empty below, with a quantity of red cloth pushed in beside it.<br />
‘Stop your fussing and take off your clothes,’ said the grandmother, turning<br />
her bonnet and whiskers to Titty.<br />
That was more like the usual grandmother. Relieved, Titty slipped off her<br />
blouse. ‘Where shall I put this?’ she said, for nowhere in the grandmother’s<br />
house was quite clean enough for her to lay it.<br />
‘Throw it on the fire, why don’t you?’ said the grandmother.<br />
Titty laughed and draped the blouse over the bed knob. ‘I hope I don’t catch<br />
your fever, Grandmother,’ she said. ‘It has cooked your brains somewhat, I<br />
think.’ And she slipped off her skirt and bloomers. But when she draped them<br />
over the blouse, all three garments began to slither off the slippery knob. ‘Oh,<br />
this won’t do.’ She stood with her clothes in her arms looking around again. She<br />
did not feel warm at all; she felt cold and clammy, and she did not like being<br />
naked before the grandmother.<br />
‘I tell you, burn them!’ cried the old woman, so loudly and harshly that<br />
Titty stepped back from her, all laughter silenced. ‘You’ll have no further use<br />
for them!’ The bonnet looked her up and down, and a bright red-purple tongue<br />
came out and licked the teeth.<br />
‘Grandmother!’ breathed Titty. ‘I do not like at all what this illness has done<br />
to you!’<br />
She went to the table and put her clothes there, let them take up what stains<br />
they would. Slowly she turned back to the bed; the grandmother looked no<br />
better than before. All the way to the bed Titty went, into the cloud of the old<br />
104<br />
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 104 6/11/12 9:20 AM
Fiction<br />
woman’s breath and fur-sweat, and she lifted the coverlet. The shanks under<br />
there were not much more than bones with hair on, and they shuddered and<br />
rasped against the bedclothes. Quickly Titty laid the cover back down.<br />
‘What’s your delay, girl? What’s your trouble this time?’ The old eyes glowed<br />
in the shadow of the bonnet.<br />
‘I must go outside,’ she said, and her voice shook a little. ‘I shouldn’t want to<br />
wet the bed.’<br />
‘Shouldn’t you?’ The grandmother’s voice was suddenly soft, but without the<br />
weakness it had affected before. ‘Use the pot, why don’t you?’<br />
Titty thought of that pot, its empty shine. And the red cloth under the bed<br />
insisted itself upon her memory, rich cloth the like of which the grandmother<br />
would never wear, and crumpled as if by a fist, as if a fist had stuffed it under<br />
there in a hurry.<br />
‘Oh, it’s quite fine and warm outside,’ said Titty, faint with the grandmotherstink.<br />
‘And we breakfasted on asparagus shoots this morning. I should not like<br />
you to have to lie over the smell of that.’<br />
The eyes and teeth regarded her from the bonnet’s shadow.<br />
‘Bring me that spun wool.’ The old beast nodded at a spindle on the table<br />
with a distaff of flax-fluff next to it. Titty brought it. ‘Tie this around your ankle.’<br />
The grandmother offered the thread-end off the spindle. ‘Let me see how you tie<br />
it. Yes, a nice tight knot. Now, off you go. I will hold to the spindle and unwind<br />
you, just to outside the door, and then when you’re done I will reel you in again.’<br />
Out the door Titty went, and there she had the great good fortune to find<br />
a broken plant-pot, a shard of which she used to saw at the flax-thread, so<br />
that soon enough she was free. She tied the thread then around a thistle-stalk<br />
there that was bending and bowing in the breeze, so that it would give lifelike<br />
movement to the thread and not arouse the suspicions of that creature in the<br />
bed. And then she fled into the forest unclothed, as fast as she could.<br />
But even as she plunged along the narrow path, she heard behind her the<br />
pretend-grandmother’s voice, at first querulous and still pretending, then<br />
sharp, then an undisguised roar. She ran and slid and ran, leaping over roots<br />
and dodging the sharper stones. The passing branches whipped her face and<br />
body, and snatched hairs off her head that she would not pause to untangle.<br />
A thump and a crash sounded behind her at the house, and then all was<br />
silent but for her own breath and body noise while the man came after her.<br />
And then his foot-beats sounded, and she heard the branches whipping<br />
him, and finally she heard him grunt as he saw her, in rage and satisfaction<br />
combined.<br />
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 105 6/11/12 9:20 AM<br />
105
Titty Anne and the Very, Very Hairy Man Margo Lanagan<br />
His breath huff-huffed at her heels. He sprang and was ahead of her. He<br />
opened his jaws; his teeth spread wide; his tongue curled bright red into the black<br />
of his throat. Titty had no time to stop herself—into his mouth she fell headfirst.<br />
With one clomp he had her head and shoulders; with a jerking back and a gulp, his<br />
gripping teeth were down to her thighs; with a final jerk, all of her was swallowed.<br />
It was hot, and wet, and dark, and innards pressed in on Titty from all sides.<br />
She had brought a little air in with her, but that was soon used up; she tried<br />
to make more, pushing out with her hands and elbows, breathing as little as<br />
possible. Oh, he was so hot and tight and noisy around her, his heart thundering<br />
like a stampede, his digestive sounds rushing close. Pinprick lights crowded in<br />
their millions into Titty’s sight, and though she thought she went on struggling,<br />
she was mistaken, and though she dreamed she went on breathing, she did not,<br />
and then she ceased to think or to dream, and she felt nothing more as the wolf<br />
padded through the forest, and found a patch of sunlight and sank down in the<br />
grass there, and laid down his head to sleep off that generous meal.<br />
‘What is this? What is this! Saints keep and care for us!’ Titty did not hear that.<br />
‘Oof, you’re a great-grown lummock now, aren’t you? And not a stitch on you!<br />
How so?’ She did not hear that either.<br />
Stamp and puff and rub of a knife blade on grass—none of these did Titty<br />
hear. She was past hearing, past remembering, past dreaming.<br />
Slap. Slap. ‘Granddaughter.’<br />
This she heard from well along the tunnel of her dying. She turned in the<br />
tunnel, and sunlit leaves scattered across her sight, and smells arrived, of blood,<br />
and flesh, and wolf-insides all spilled about, as well as the clean forest smell,<br />
green and brown and wide and deep about her, rich and gaspable. ‘Oh!’ she said.<br />
The grandmother’s face hove into sight, a collection of gorges separated by<br />
the sunlit mountain range of a nose, two sharp eyes as yellow as a wolf’s, and<br />
only a few teeth among the whiskers—how could Titty ever have thought that<br />
great grinning mouthful to be the grandmother’s?<br />
‘There you are,’ said the old woman. ‘There you are in there. I see you.’ She<br />
took Titty’s jaw in her claw and waggled it back and forth so that the leaves flew<br />
and the sky dazzled beyond them.<br />
Then she laughed and left her alone, sat singing nearby and sorting through<br />
her herb-basket. Wafts of fennel and rue floated past Titty’s nose, and she<br />
breathed them along with everything else, as piece by piece the day came back<br />
to her. The wolf juice dried stinking on her skin like a very tight, close costume,<br />
but she’d only to stretch a little, this arm, that foot, to loosen the hold of it.<br />
106<br />
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 106 6/11/12 9:20 AM
Fiction<br />
She turned her head; her slimed hair trailed back along the grass to the wolf’s<br />
opened belly, which offered this purple lump and that white tubing, all fatted<br />
and bloodied, to the sunshine and the circling flies.<br />
Titty sat herself up, to see if she could. The grandmother put forward<br />
Keenest’s blouse and skirt and bloomers. ‘You’ll need to wash in the brook<br />
before you put these on.’<br />
‘How did you find me?’ said Titty, for nothing about the clearing was familiar<br />
to her, not the stout live trees standing all around or the dead ones lying about<br />
rotting and being overgrown.<br />
‘Part sight, part stench,’ said the grandmother. ‘He left a smell in my bed,<br />
and I saw your clothes and basket. He crashed after you off the path there, and I<br />
followed all the ground-scratchings and twig-breakings until I found him asleep<br />
here, fat with you.’<br />
The wolf’s head lay as still as a rock among the weeds. Beneath a sprouting<br />
eyebrow, an eye stared dully at the sky; the tongue lolled out beyond the jaws<br />
like a damp purple-grey leaf.<br />
‘I thought he was you,’ said Titty Anne.<br />
‘Am I so ugly?’<br />
‘He had your bonnet on. His face was all in shadow. And I had not seen you<br />
for a year. There was a lot I had forgotten.’<br />
‘So it seems,’ said the grandmother with a snort.<br />
‘Oh,’ said Titty, looking at her lap. ‘You have cut me, when you opened him.<br />
Look.’ And she smeared the blood smear further down her thigh.<br />
A nut bounced off Titty’s head. ‘What!’ She rubbed the spot, glaring at the<br />
grandmother.<br />
‘As if I don’t know how to slit a beast open.’ The old woman tutted and huffed<br />
and shafted Titty looks across the grass-heads. ‘Follow that blood,’ she said. ‘Go<br />
on. Follow it back and find the wound, I say. Then pick fault with my knifework.’<br />
Titty did as she was told, pulling at her thigh flesh, then parting her whole<br />
legs. ‘Oh,’ she said, seeing where the blood began. ‘Oh, that.’ She remembered<br />
Bertha groaning in the bedstraw, holding a wrapped hot-stone against her<br />
belly—and Mother, white as cheese, having to sit down on a log beside the road<br />
to market and breathe there awhile. ‘That’s begun on me.’<br />
‘Surprising, seeing you’re as hairless yet as a peeled willow wand,’ said the<br />
grandmother. ‘But yes.’ She crisscrossed the sorted herbs in her basket and<br />
stood up. ‘Come, then. Once you’re washed, we can boil up a tea. He has flung<br />
your cream about the place and wasted it, but the cakes are still good.’<br />
Titty picked up her clothes and followed the old woman through the wood. M<br />
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 107 6/11/12 9:20 AM<br />
107
The Late Visit<br />
ANTONIA PONT<br />
The email had said Ten pasT Ten. And then customs and baggage collection<br />
takes at least forty-five minutes. She chose a fine wool dress, a paler coat. More<br />
specifically the email had said:<br />
108<br />
hallo!<br />
Well i am coming to australia finally. Will you be there? are you<br />
free? my plane arrives in melbourne at 22.10 on the 4. i have a hotel<br />
booked somewhere in the centre. how are you? i have a present for<br />
you. Tell me soon, i hope it can be convenient.<br />
kisses, and i look forward,<br />
marc.<br />
The ‘You’s’, naturally, were all capitalised, and the fourth was a Saturday.<br />
A late enough flight. She had replied that she was in town and could collect<br />
him. He should look for her at the international exit and wait close to there, in<br />
case traffic delayed her. There, where all the faces press and the families throw<br />
themselves into each other’s arms as if the love between them was kicking<br />
like a foetus, warm and real. Perhaps it was warm and real? She’d never really<br />
considered that. Instead she’d assumed such rash shows of fondness arose from<br />
absence and distance only. Or the prevalence of reality TV.<br />
In the car now, she played music through her phone, flicking the songs<br />
forward illegally, wondering about the screen’s light reflecting up into her<br />
windows—going at a hundred on the dark freeway. There was no moon about,<br />
no beaming source of milky light. The city, however, did glower behind her, as<br />
cities do. Never properly black. Never quiet. It was so boring, though, the way<br />
people complained about the fact of sharing urban space. Drivers complained.<br />
Property developers complained. People who liked to use electronic devices<br />
complained.<br />
Approaching the airport, there was slight congestion—taxis changing lanes,<br />
four-wheel-drives edging forwards, the piercing reds and oranges of tail-lights.<br />
She worried at her long hair, tucking it behind her ears and then unhooking<br />
it again. She couldn’t say with conviction that she was still beautiful, or if that<br />
had ever been the issue between them. In her bathroom mirror she had looked<br />
into the face of a woman past forty and applied a lipstick called ‘Winter Fruit’.<br />
He’d once remarked that he knew nothing of the things that surrounded<br />
her, apart from a scarf she’d often travelled with. Having never visited her city,<br />
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 108 6/11/12 9:20 AM
Fiction<br />
he had come to view this woollen garment as standing in for everything about<br />
her. He could only imagine her kitchen, her wardrobe, her garage, her pets.<br />
That’s to say, the only consistent themes had been this scarf and her body—a<br />
person arriving, lingering or leaving—or words, agile, irreverent words, coming<br />
through the phone line or scrabbled together in emails. The rare letter.<br />
She pressed the button to make the boom gate rise. The slot for the carpark<br />
ticket glowed green as she took the flimsy rectangle and proceeded to<br />
drive slowly up the ramp to the higher levels. She nosed her car in between<br />
an old Volvo and a Porsche People Transporter, and stepped out into the<br />
fumes of the car park. In the white opacity of the pedestrian tunnel her head<br />
was a blank sky. She walked and felt every step, focusing on the way gravity<br />
will carry a foot and place it, and how the ground moves up the leg and into<br />
a belly, into a sacrum, and the way this places a person in the centre of the<br />
world, at least for a time, at least as the result of a moment-by-moment labour<br />
of feeling.<br />
She had expected to wait. Had pictured herself standing there, marooned,<br />
buying a bad coffee, fatigue climbing her like a vine and her eyes going dry<br />
while she tried not to rub her mascara into fist-sized smudges. But as she strode<br />
into the arrivals area, past the awful food outlets, almost aggressively, there he<br />
was—standing beside the exit area, a head above everyone around.<br />
He saw her immediately, raised his arm. For certain things there is no<br />
preparation, and you can only think so much, and you can only forbid yourself<br />
so much thinking. She had presumed they might not touch at all, and that this<br />
would be workable. But, of course, social mannerisms are thick within us, and<br />
their two bodies moved appropriately, and their cheekbones knocked softly.<br />
He did not bundle her against him, the way he once might have. He had a<br />
trolley and bags, and he was older too. They both were.<br />
She made to take his luggage, since helping is what a woman will do to fill in<br />
space, to suck the edge out of an atmosphere. He laughed in an exhausted way,<br />
and said, ‘It’s fine.’ All he had with him was a featureless laptop bag (probably<br />
for a PC), and a long, softer duffle bag, stained but not ratty. She wanted to look<br />
properly at his clothes, to decipher something there, but they were already<br />
walking beside each other towards the car park, and she couldn’t really see.<br />
The air temperature had bite. They mentioned this, and prattled—since this<br />
they could do—about expectations of Europeans arriving in Australia, and how<br />
Melbourne was a city of seasons, and how autumn was here, and there was this<br />
crisp feeling about, the trees changing colour and a certain way with the people,<br />
and crowds on streets.<br />
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 109 6/11/12 9:20 AM<br />
109
The Late Visit Antonia Pont<br />
‘Are you shattered?’ she asked.<br />
He paused, digesting the vernacular, and then, with another soft laugh,<br />
nodded.<br />
His bags were slung into the back seat of her four-door, and she watched<br />
him wheel the trolley to the nearby station, legs extremely long in the loose<br />
pants. She’d paid for the parking ticket as they’d come out of the wide, slow<br />
lifts. A mere three dollars. She’d been estimating costs, as a kind of anxiety<br />
management, turning the symmetry of numbers over in her head and<br />
indulging the structural caress of figures behaving predictably.<br />
Now they were sitting in the car, but she hadn’t turned on the engine.<br />
‘Shall I drive you back to your hotel, then?’ she asked, frightened. Her<br />
knuckles on the gear stick were white. When she turned the key, sound<br />
exploded from the radio, and she fumbled it quiet.<br />
Quickly he said, ‘I don’t need to sleep yet. I don’t want to. I might act kind<br />
of crazy, like a drugged tourist-person, but that’s okay. Can we go somewhere?<br />
I want to see your town.’<br />
She breathed out—the way smokers release smoke—broke into a charming<br />
smile and reversed almost arrogantly, since he would never have seen her<br />
drive before. Her phone was buried in her handbag, but there was no need to<br />
send anyone a text message. Since the day before his email arrived, she had<br />
been free of any obligation to inform. This was the new state of affairs. It was<br />
exhilarating, efficient and utterly miserable. Now she focused on getting the<br />
paper rectangle back into its green slot, and on not veering into any Audis or<br />
C-class Mercedes.<br />
Her car no longer had the new smell, but it was clean, with no signs of<br />
takeaway food wrappers or paper coffee cups. A snob when it came to interiors,<br />
she hoped he noticed and approved of her as much as she did of herself.<br />
What was he seeing? Those first delicious and estranged hours of a foreign<br />
arrival are precious. The way eyes roam and suck at every detail—the makes of<br />
cars, the unfamiliar fonts of billboards, the different light. Even at night a city<br />
will have its own light and will taste differently. She remembered her own eyes<br />
watering during an arrival in Beijing, tears running the pollution down her<br />
face, and a cartoon giraffe driving a ute on a road safety advertisement.<br />
Smell and temperature. The unfamiliar press of air pressure. It’s the way<br />
a place saturates us that stays. She watched the road, accelerating to one<br />
hundred and some.<br />
Finally he said, ‘You know I waited in Singapore for eight hours. You always<br />
implied it was pretty bad, but now I really understand …’<br />
110<br />
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 110 6/11/12 9:20 AM
Fiction<br />
She turned her head fast, ‘That’s nothing,’ turned back, ‘try seventeen …’<br />
She imagined him rolling his eyes, a quirky habit he had, his exaggerated<br />
listening.<br />
‘… yes, beware the cheap ticket. In the end, it’s like you have to make<br />
yourself into a butoh performance. A creature pushing a trolley along the<br />
shining white acres of duty-free corridor. Or you sleep shamelessly in a<br />
corner, like an alcoholic, fantasising soft, familiar surfaces …’ Her face flushed<br />
suddenly hot, so she said quickly: ‘You still dancing?’<br />
‘Dancing?’ He rubbed at his scalp through the still-undisciplined mass of<br />
hair. ‘Wow, that was a long time ago. I’m a manager now. Managers, do you<br />
know, don’t dance. We are cheerful and manipulative, but we do not dance.’<br />
‘Are you really manipulative?’ He didn’t answer. She flicked the indicator<br />
to take the exit to her suburb, but then realised her mistake and drove straight<br />
past it.<br />
‘Is that where you live?’ he asked, missing nothing despite exhaustion.<br />
‘I’m going to take you into the thick of things. I think you’ll like it.’<br />
She was going to take him somewhere ridiculous. For herself, because that<br />
was her style, but also for the anonymity. Somewhere ridiculous where no-one<br />
from her circle would go on a Saturday. Somewhere open late, with good food.<br />
She would pay. She didn’t know what kind of budget he was on. She wanted<br />
to be hospitable. It was her first chance to do it in her town. But mostly she<br />
didn’t want any chance encounters. Being put on the spot would scour her<br />
out, somehow. She would trip over her own ardent ambivalences and betray<br />
something about herself that even she didn’t know. She prayed suddenly, with<br />
the hypocrisy of the disbeliever: God, please let us not run into anybody.<br />
Normally she would have circled for a parking spot, also praying, but she<br />
didn’t want the rhythm of their night to go pear-shaped. So, prepared to pay a<br />
small fortune, she approached another car park boom-gate. As they rolled their<br />
way up the fourth ramp, in the cramped space, he suddenly grabbed her leg and<br />
squealed ‘Yippee.’<br />
How old is a friendship that isn’t surprised by random gropings? She knew<br />
what it meant, and why then, and also that the gesture of grabbing her was his<br />
capacity for glee romping out of him. It wasn’t a manoeuvre. It was in no way<br />
sexual. Like a yell, like all the sunshine caught inside a body, it was his way,<br />
splattering out in a kind of lightshow of delight.<br />
She remembered suddenly that first trip in his town. The air had bitten them<br />
then too, and her face in photographs could only be described as ruddy. She<br />
had had joy beaming from all her surfaces and he had been the vehicle for it.<br />
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 111 6/11/12 9:20 AM<br />
111
The Late Visit Antonia Pont<br />
The body that had been closest, when the unnameable happening happened to<br />
her. And she still didn’t have a name for it. That had been the long struggle.<br />
The car doors slammed, and she pressed central locking. Walking beside<br />
him she feigned normality, and he walked too, but interspersed his measured,<br />
adult gait with sudden jigs and fancy footwork. Gambolling, she would have<br />
called it. His fleecy head and gentle eyes. She could only grin at her shoes, turn<br />
her head away, as if brushing hair out of her face, but not really.<br />
Out beyond the thick floors of concrete, the city’s lights swam in her vision.<br />
She walked him along the river, embarrassed by the horrific font and newly<br />
added sightseeing-for-dummies signs blighting the visual landscape. He didn’t<br />
seem to notice, gazed off into the middle distance, didn’t even particularly turn<br />
his head at the obviously vivacious groups of younger women.<br />
They walked in silence, and she wondered about which language. Probably<br />
English, but perhaps he would drift towards his mother tongue when the static<br />
of fatigue began to etch him through. Perhaps she would hear that voice on<br />
him—steady, limpid, and male—the one that came with linguistic ease. She was<br />
suddenly frightened again—of it hitting into her (what she knew might come)<br />
and was certain that she wasn’t prepared, and knowing the fallout, how long it<br />
would take her to get that out of her system.<br />
He played visitor, allowing himself to be led. Through the sparkling night<br />
they went, beside the water, then came to the restaurant she’d chosen in<br />
advance. The wait staff almost knew her there and so greeted them with a very<br />
professional warmth. They were shown to a table far at the back, where the light<br />
was of a thin, caramel milkiness, and the banquette seating and diminutive<br />
table closed them in upon each other. They sat face to face, rather than side by<br />
side, and for the first time that visit he could look her straight in the face. The<br />
menu proffered by the lanky blond boy allowed her to avoid his gaze.<br />
He ordered an ‘Australian beer’, and she took the tea that she preferred.<br />
She ordered a bowl of twice-fried potatoes, and a tasting plate of prosciuttos<br />
and fresh mozzarellas, with caperberries on the side. He listened passively<br />
to her confident order and showed no sign of being irritated by the lack of<br />
consultation. He liked salty, she knew that. In her head she said the word for it<br />
in his language. It referenced the heart—like the term ‘hearty’: a stock, a stew,<br />
a roast, or the way you can hold a person.<br />
Of course, he’d emailed her the day after Janie had left. The kitchen had<br />
still been strewn with packing tape and debris, the entrails of a separation.<br />
For the last fifteen years his emails had arrived like that, like clockwork. There<br />
had been dozens of these day-after missals. Post-breakdown, post-crisis,<br />
112<br />
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 112 6/11/12 9:20 AM
Fiction<br />
post-devastating-conversation correspondences. They were a confirmation,<br />
never a portent. The two of them were never in regular contact at those times.<br />
Often there’d been months of nothing, sometimes years with no word. He never<br />
knew anything of her situation, yet he would email, and it would arrive like a<br />
steam engine, punctual and with every detail gleaming.<br />
The silence was killing her, so affecting cheeky charm, she prompted,<br />
‘So what’s the present you promised me, then?’<br />
He put the beer down, stared at the vertical lines he’d traced in the<br />
condensation, and through an unconvincing grin, replied: ‘Well, semen.’<br />
Right then her tea arrived. It consisted of a number of elements and<br />
accessories—a glass pot, with a metal strainer in the spout, an elaborate cup<br />
and saucer, a tiny glass jug with milk and a side of honey, which she’d specified.<br />
She smiled because you had to, up into the face of the waitress—a roundish girl<br />
in a velvet frock, with a self-conscious bob.<br />
‘What are you talking about?’ she demanded, when they were alone again,<br />
and too loudly. It was a shocking declaration. Wasn’t it a shocking declaration?<br />
She looked around them, at others on other tables—sipping whiskys, women<br />
crossing and uncrossing legs—behaving properly. Oblivious.<br />
‘I thought you’d picked me up a little trinket in Singapore, or a pricey bottle<br />
of perfume … but no, you thought I’d like some bodily fluids.’<br />
She looked properly at his face, accusingly, but saw it was clouded,<br />
something heavy and sticking making his features vague and grim. Deflated,<br />
they always call it in novels. The person a fine membrane full of hope that<br />
suddenly loses its structure, collapses into its own fragile centre. He was<br />
playing now with the stitched corner of the heavy table linen, avoiding her eyes.<br />
‘I would like to say it’s my pro-lesbian position’, he said, weakly, ‘but it is<br />
more complicated, although of course I am still all for lesbians.’<br />
‘Yes, I know. You never wanted to rob the world of a lesbian. I do remember<br />
…’ It came out sounding angry. Still so angry. She suddenly wished she’d never<br />
replied to the email. Let him come here on business. Why should we see each<br />
other, there is nothing there. There is something tawdry in this dragging-out<br />
of things.<br />
‘It’s Eva,’ he said, interrupting her spiralling. ‘She has had to have the<br />
surgery to remove the womb. We didn’t want children, anyway. Well, I didn’t<br />
want. I love her, of course I do … She found out four months ago. It happened<br />
one month ago. I told her I am here for a conference and a workshop. And she is<br />
absent, these days, didn’t question me …’<br />
‘Well, what are you here for?’<br />
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 113 6/11/12 9:20 AM<br />
113
The Late Visit Antonia Pont<br />
He looked at her with a look the closest to pleading she’d ever seen. ‘Please,<br />
Eloise,’ he stammered, and then took a long swig of his beer.<br />
She caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror panelling. Her straight<br />
auburn hair fell to the middle of her back, somehow striking, but her pale skin<br />
looked pasty rather than delicate. She pictured his dark-hair gene dominating<br />
her red-hair gene. An animated short film, with garish and terrible colours.<br />
Janie was mousey brown, had wanted children more than anything. Their<br />
endless quarrelling, and her own ambivalence. IVF scared the wits out of<br />
her. The chemicals you guzzle, the awkward invasions supposedly standing<br />
in for love-making. She wanted to tell conservatives who thought gay people<br />
should be deprived of certain privileges—legal or humanitarian—that their<br />
manoeuvrings were superfluous. The grief of never joining your faces was<br />
enough. A sufficient devastation.<br />
But it wasn’t just the medical facts. Janie just wouldn’t have made a good<br />
parent. There, she’d thought it now. Sipping her pretentious tea, shame<br />
flattened her like nausea. She doubted her own capacities too, while in the<br />
scenario he was proposing, his ability to parent was an irrelevant consideration.<br />
The tasting plate of salty things, of hearty things, arrived between them.<br />
He was distracted momentarily by the caperberries, holding them by their tails<br />
and making big, big eyes at them. ‘Wow, these are amazing. Super cool. How<br />
do you eat them?’ He swung them like monkeys and then caught one between<br />
his teeth.<br />
‘Excuse me,’ she heard herself say, and was up at once, the elegant woman<br />
walking her way to the Ladies. She felt the eyes of men on her. She had a<br />
fleshiness that was provocative, not sloppy. It was her wide joints, and her tits,<br />
which she knew were an asset, in the grimy realm of embodied capital.<br />
In the toilet she just sat there, with nothing in her bladder. What if he gets<br />
up now and goes? She ran the possibilities through her head like ticker-tape.<br />
Perhaps we will go to his hotel. Was she ovulating? Was that what this was<br />
about? It was surely a Catholic offer of the purest kind, not a chance to spend his<br />
seed for nothing. He didn’t desire her, he wanted to make a baby in her body.<br />
He wants to make a baby in my body. Her belly lurched unmistakably, and<br />
she felt it. She slammed herself into the cubicle wall, half sobbing. Fuuuck!!<br />
He was staring out across the restaurant when she returned. They sat there<br />
like two strangers, like a pair of spouses. A little numb, she slurped the cold<br />
dregs from her teacup. Watching his face for clues, she suddenly clattered<br />
the cup down and shoved the paraphernalia away from her. It was pure,<br />
adolescent theatre.<br />
114<br />
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 114 6/11/12 9:20 AM
Fiction<br />
‘Are you angry at me?’ he challenged. ‘I thought that you and your girlfriend<br />
could have a child. I can’t raise any child with Eva, and not ours. She can’t<br />
know. But I don’t want to die without children, now. Suddenly now I feel this<br />
way. I just thought of you, and then this plan. Is your girlfriend nice? Does she<br />
want a family?’<br />
‘I don’t have a girlfriend any more. As of …’ and she counted days, hours.<br />
She sounded mournful, but really it was a sulk, her white rage. It would be a<br />
while until the soft, gentle weeping bit came through. Apparently that stage<br />
would be lilac, or some indigo hue, like the feature walls of New Age shops.<br />
He motioned over the waitress and ordered another beer. She remembered<br />
him at twenty-four, his moody slides into drunkenness, still beautiful, but with<br />
a belligerent edge. She frowned as the frothy pylon arrived before him.<br />
‘So you’re single then?’<br />
‘Well, yes. That is the status assigned to a person whose relationship has<br />
ended. Maybe I count as a spinster now. Being so old and all.’ She regretted the<br />
bitter barb. Did she even have any eggs left? She had a vision of his sperm—they<br />
were a flashing, silvery shoal, and very healthy.<br />
He slurped his drink, as if at a dummy, as if trying to soothe away a big<br />
dollop of disappointment. Now it was his turn for some acting-out. ‘Well, I<br />
guess I can do some tourism then. See some kan-gur-oos. Make a surfing safari<br />
and have grilling parties.’<br />
‘They’re called barbecues.’<br />
She really did want to howl. For a pair with such an exemplary history of<br />
rhythm, his current timing was shithouse. Under the table she did sums on her<br />
fingers. When had she last bled? Had her cycle been synching with the big white<br />
clock in the sky? Four weeks exactly, or less?<br />
‘How long are you here for?’ she asked.<br />
‘I’m here for four weeks.’ And as if he had seen through the table surface,<br />
‘I know at least that much about women.’<br />
Suddenly she thought of her apartment—deco, massive. It was hers.<br />
Janie owned another property, but for the last five years she’d rented it out<br />
to international students. It was an immaculate place, no garden. Janie was<br />
staying with her sister till the renters cleared out. Then she’d set herself up<br />
there, vacuum a lot, buy expensive cut flowers and cry in the evenings. Her<br />
own place, on the other hand, had an old oak in the back yard, verdant moss on<br />
bricks. You could hang a swing off that tree.<br />
Eloise looked at Marc. He was older, steadier, and there were considerable<br />
flecks of grey around the temples. He looked back at her now and held her eye.<br />
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 115 6/11/12 9:20 AM<br />
115
The Late Visit Antonia Pont<br />
Softly she said, ‘So how you been, Marc?’<br />
A bill was discreetly placed in front of them. On a glass plate, with a card on<br />
top. She stopped his hand—I invite you—and he paused, waited, then tucked<br />
the souvenir business card into his jacket pocket, while she rummaged for cash.<br />
‘Oh, you know. Same things. Wondering about my life, fantasising about<br />
other women. Cooking a lot. I kayak now, on the river back home. We have three<br />
dogs. They are very silly and I like them, sort of.’<br />
It was so good to hear him talk. His inflections, the close-to-but-not-quiteperfect<br />
syntax, the way he bobbed his head of hair and broke into unexpected<br />
grins. People stay the same, she thought, it’s just that life rolls over them,<br />
kneads them into different versions. His face scrunched and smoothed with<br />
his intonation. His wide hands gesticulated a little chaotically, but with so<br />
much grace. Suddenly she wanted to order five more teas and curl up against<br />
the banquettes. To talk the way they had in those seven other countries. To<br />
fight, even. They’d been so good at that. But his eyes were drooping, and he was<br />
slurring words.<br />
She wriggled out of the banquette and, standing, smoothed the creases in<br />
her woollen dress over a flat stomach.<br />
‘What happens now?’ he asked.<br />
She slid her arms into her pale coat. She’d done the sums. Knew the exact<br />
night that she’d stopped at the late-night chemist last month.<br />
‘Now’, she replied very simply, ‘we drive you back to your hotel.’ M<br />
116<br />
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 116 6/11/12 9:20 AM
The Googly<br />
KEVIN BROPHY<br />
He is The middle broTher and he Works hard. It comes naturally. At least<br />
it feels natural; and as a schoolboy he found there were rewards for this because<br />
teachers became convinced they had inspired him; some spoke with hope for<br />
his future. For a while he was as interested in sport as he was in finishing his<br />
homework. He was okay at football and a little better at cricket. In his boy’s<br />
mind he looked forward to playing football for Richmond inside a much bigger,<br />
muscled body with thick hair and stringy tendons in his neck, a smile of large,<br />
even teeth and along his jaw dark whiskers. He had been gifted only with a head<br />
for numbers, anything to do with those fast, abstract flocks inside his head, up<br />
to the left and just above the eyebrow. Calculations whirled inside him in the<br />
silence that adheres to numbers. He worked hard at keeping it all going in there.<br />
His spiky hair thickened on his head and his eyes went even bluer as he<br />
gained his reputation for being brilliant at one or two academic things. He did<br />
not play football for Richmond. His older brother was much better at cricket<br />
and at talking to girls, even talking with their girl cousins. Girls didn’t seem to<br />
worry his older brother, who was soon drinking beer. Their younger brother<br />
was not sure which one of them to follow. You can picture this youngest brother<br />
sizing up the two older ones, as though trying to find a passage between<br />
them. This youngest brother had a worried expression on his face in family<br />
photographs. He became a blur, but a blur with a book in his hand because he<br />
discovered that he loved reading.<br />
Because this middle boy worked hard his parents left him alone. He<br />
discovered he could more or less please himself what he did as long as his<br />
teachers and parents believed he was working hard. He guessed, soon enough,<br />
that this was what defined him: he was happily busy.<br />
He finished school before he even started to learn to drive a car; he had<br />
not kissed a girl or had one look at him as though she might want to kiss him.<br />
It didn’t matter, because he could now go to university and make even more<br />
daring calculations in that spinning corner of his mind, which turned out to be<br />
larger than he had thought it could be, and more mysterious. He too discovered<br />
beer. It was okay. He became infatuated with two girls at once, and drinking<br />
beer helped him to cope with this, though it put him to sleep. Sleep seemed<br />
unnatural. He suspected that sleep was what people thought they should do,<br />
and that if they thought differently, then perhaps sleep would not be needed<br />
at all, or not so much of it. He experimented with all-night study binges, but<br />
something frightening happened in his mind when he did that. His father<br />
looked and sounded like a sleepwalker, and his mother seemed to be telling lies<br />
all the time, badly. He learned to keep count of the hours of his sleep.<br />
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 117 6/11/12 9:20 AM<br />
117
The Googly Kevin Brophy<br />
As they reached their twenties, his older brother played cricket for a local<br />
suburban team and most of the time he had a whole team of mates around him,<br />
shouting and laughing about nothing, or about beer and cricket. Among them<br />
‘googly’ seemed to be a very witty word. This older brother wore stained white<br />
pants, more grey than white after a while. Their younger brother was trying to<br />
grow a goatee and he mentioned Kafka, Kerouac and Hemingway as though<br />
they might turn up at any moment and demand something outrageous like a<br />
truly black coffee or the loan of a scarf.<br />
The middle brother did not own a scarf, not even a Richmond scarf. He<br />
worried about his younger brother’s sanity. He mentioned this to his father.<br />
He noticed for the first time how red and swollen his father’s face was. His father<br />
seemed to have been beaten around by the thoughts that flew through him. He<br />
had the same worried expression that was there in the younger brother’s eyes.<br />
For the next decade the middle brother kept working hard and he discovered<br />
much. Economics, macro and micro, opened up to him like tropical flowers<br />
loosening their petals right in front of his eyes. There are numbers within,<br />
behind and all the way through everything we do. He came to understand<br />
graphs and tables, which speak their own special knowledge. He fell in love<br />
with a tall Irish woman he met in a hotel, a woman who had a musical voice, a<br />
gift for painting, and what he thought of as a sharpness of mind. A quickness<br />
of mind. But more than that she moved always with a purpose, and he wanted<br />
to be taken along with her. She loved him for his thick hair, his small physique,<br />
the numbers spinning behind his eyes, and the thinking he did. She liked<br />
all of that immensely, and she was willing to go across the city to Richmond<br />
with him, where she became a mother as well as a lover, and found work as an<br />
art therapist.<br />
He didn’t understand any of it, but it was engrossing in ways he could not<br />
have imagined. He continued to work as hard as ever. The years seemed to<br />
pour themselves into him as though he had an insatiable thirst for them. He<br />
loved his three children. His brother continued to play cricket on weekends<br />
far beyond the age when it was appropriate. His younger brother wrote books<br />
and became well known for his public lectures. The middle brother found<br />
himself in his work advising government ministers on how to understand the<br />
numbers that flow through everything, through the world of taxes, through<br />
work, through decisions about the care of children, the control of gambling,<br />
and the fate of the homeless. He wrote many reports for these ministers, then<br />
he supervised whole floors of public servants writing more reports. Bureaucrats<br />
from across the city wanted to meet with him for a coffee or just a chat.<br />
118<br />
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 118 6/11/12 9:20 AM
Fiction<br />
Sometimes he had to advise unhappy or incompetent public servants to<br />
find other paths in their lives, paths that did not involve numbers or report<br />
writing. He turned over in bed at night thinking of what it might be like to<br />
find another path. He hoped that perhaps the gentle push he gave those<br />
unhappy servants was down a new path they might have taken anyway.<br />
Numbers, like time itself, and the paths we follow, are all invisible, though no<br />
less real for that.<br />
He saw that his children were going along their own paths, eating up time<br />
in their own ways, dismissing him or listening to him as they pleased. His two<br />
daughters seemed, like their mother, to understand something about how<br />
to find their way through each day as though the way ahead was clearing for<br />
them as they went. His son was quiet and sharp, waiting perhaps. Like his<br />
father, the son’s hair was spiky, and he was only just okay at football.<br />
His wife, who had been with him for nearly twenty years now, listened to<br />
his stumbling talk about all these matters. She was an artist and a therapist in<br />
everything she did. Sleep came easily to her. She had confidence in him. They<br />
slept together under a cotton doona like creatures in a malleable burrow. His<br />
family was mostly healthy, the children loving both of them, and somehow<br />
despite their differences seeming to be seeds from a pod, for so much was<br />
understood in this home without many words being spoken. It worked, not<br />
perfectly, not without tears, and certainly not without fear, but mostly the<br />
days were like a view of the sea from a grassy hillside, sunlight and breezes<br />
everywhere, and all the details managing to find themselves in equilibrium.<br />
His mother died suddenly and everyone was in tears. He was amazed at<br />
how unprepared he was for the inevitable. His father shrank into himself,<br />
his older brother drank less beer and looked more thoughtful, and even<br />
developed jowls. This brother’s knowledge of cricket had become infinitely<br />
subtle. It was not even cricket, really, when he spoke of it. When his brother<br />
talked of cricket he felt there was something he had not understood about<br />
those numbers swirling away within everything. And his younger brother,<br />
there were times when he disappeared. There were women who followed him,<br />
attached themselves to him, or perhaps he was the one attached. Always the<br />
eyes that looked out from this younger brother’s face were seeing things that<br />
no-one else had imagined yet.<br />
The middle brother was like a distance runner high on a feeling of endless<br />
strength, wet with a mighty sweat, a chest full of air, and arms and legs<br />
moving even in his sleep. The numbers that had become slightly fewer and<br />
more difficult to understand over the years were still spinning through him<br />
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 119 6/11/12 9:20 AM<br />
119
The Googly Kevin Brophy<br />
tirelessly, and he was still interpreting them for ministers. He had worked<br />
hard for governments of all kinds, shaping each of them, he thought, in small<br />
ways towards an understanding that did not take the numbers as an end or<br />
even a beginning, but saw the numbers for what they were: the smallest of<br />
workers in cities of numbers, each citizen-number going about its business as<br />
though the simple perfection of work is all we need. It was not much, but it was<br />
breathtaking. He hurried to work each day, his full briefcase banging against<br />
his leg.<br />
He began to read novels, each page numbered, each page a certain number<br />
of words, and soon he was caught in the turbulent river of fiction, rolling in it,<br />
taken by currents he could not control. It was all he could do to lie beside his<br />
wife at night and not fall out of the bed from giddiness. She was pleased to find<br />
him there, as she always was, for she seemed to know the lengths he had gone<br />
each day in his mind to find his way back to this place beside her. She told him<br />
she was no longer an art therapist, that she had changed her life, that she was<br />
now a nurse in an institution that offered physical care for people near to death.<br />
He did not understand what she was saying, but he knew it was something to do<br />
with the numbers inside a human heart, the way they count down each life. He<br />
read Kafka. His children, now young adults and living sometimes at home and<br />
sometimes with friends in chaotic old houses, also quietly began reading, for he<br />
left books around the house for them to take, stacked in corners, piled on tables,<br />
lined up along the hallway. Books are numberless, he thought, potentially<br />
endless. Sometimes he gave books away to friends to make more room for other<br />
books in his house.<br />
Then at work one day his superior asked to see him. His superior was a<br />
young man. How long had it been that his superiors had been younger than<br />
him? He felt like a soldier whose old and trusted generals have fallen, and<br />
now a new generation of ambitious commanders have occupied the tents,<br />
the towers, the positions of strategic importance. He has never been to war.<br />
Why is he thinking like this? Why is his heart jumping like a child inside<br />
him? He remembers something his younger brother said, about the way<br />
words scarcely understand us. By the time he has allowed these thoughts<br />
to move through him, his superior has told him that there is a bottleneck in<br />
the organisational structure, and that he will have to move aside. A desk has<br />
been assigned to him, over there, and though his salary will remain the same<br />
impressive number of dollars, he will no longer be responsible for a whole floor<br />
of public servants. ‘We will find you some projects to work on, don’t worry.’<br />
His working life is suddenly without urgency.<br />
120<br />
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 120 6/11/12 9:20 AM
Fiction<br />
He goes home from work and everything has changed but everything is<br />
exactly the same. He understands now what all those novels have been getting<br />
at when the worst happens to the best characters. He is lost, about two-thirds<br />
of the way through the novel of his own life, and he has no idea how to go on<br />
with it. Usually some coincidence, some lucky meeting, some unexpected<br />
twist arrives at this point in a novel or a story (unless it is one of those dark and<br />
desperate modernist works). He has no visitation, no epiphany. His satchel in<br />
his hand is empty. He cannot get interested in the new novel by his bedside. His<br />
family does not notice that anything is different. He can see that they are falling<br />
in love, or wanting love, going on with work or study and with talk, that for<br />
them life is quite satisfactory or quite disastrous as the case may be.<br />
He has a desk at work and beyond that no real work to fill his days or his<br />
head. He has barely come to understand the smallest truths about those<br />
numbers spinning inside him. How many people have felt like this? Has<br />
everyone felt like this? Is this the way his father felt before he left everything<br />
behind? He knows now that the difference between fiction and living is<br />
that in living there really are no endings, there can only be endurance. And<br />
endurance is not endurance, it is only the insistence of the present moment on<br />
always arriving.<br />
His suit has become ill-fitting, for he must be losing weight. He notices<br />
the lingering quality of autumn sunshine, and he thinks how foolish all that<br />
willingness to work might have been. He is waiting for something to happen.<br />
It is not such a bad feeling, but hollow. He remembers walking in the bush with<br />
his children in a forest where the ground was treacherous with wombat holes.<br />
The earth had been honeycombed below, and at any moment one of them<br />
might have fallen through into one of those fat burrows the wombats dig. This<br />
is how he feels now. A fall into an earthy, crumbling darkness. It could happen<br />
at any moment.<br />
He feels as if he is a failed batsman walking back to the pavilion, thinking he<br />
did not see what was coming. He has learned that googly (so close to ‘goodly’<br />
in its look) is also the doosra, a Punjabi word for ‘the other one’, the outsider,<br />
the stranger, an intruder. He remembers bending down over his father lying in<br />
a hospital bed, wanting to gaze into his eyes to exchange this looking-at-eachother<br />
for perhaps the last time, and realising his father was preoccupied with<br />
some stranger who had just arrived in his consciousness.<br />
He wakes from uneasy dreams in his bed at night: there were mists moving<br />
in over trees on a mountainside in his dream, and below a man was jogging<br />
round an oval; his daughter was nearby with her head bent over a book; from<br />
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 121 6/11/12 9:20 AM<br />
121
The Googly Kevin Brophy<br />
the next room it seemed the sharp and purposeful crackling of meat being<br />
braised in a pan; on the walls the swirls of light-filled colour in his wife’s<br />
paintings; and a memory of old Silas Marner plainly telling his daughter,<br />
‘I shall get older and helplesser’. He manages to breathe, his limbs moving with<br />
confidence in the spiralling turns and twists of these numberless currents. M<br />
122<br />
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 122 6/11/12 9:20 AM
Eat. Shit. Die.<br />
HELEN GILDFIND<br />
NoW george, ThaT idioT aT brindles, might have been a crap cook, but<br />
he was on to something when he said—as he did every night he forced his<br />
muck down me—Leo! If you don’t eat, you don’t shit. If you don’t shit, you die!<br />
Eat up! I suddenly thought of him at the club last night, while Bryce and Nina<br />
and Renee banged on about their alienation as creative artists and so on. The<br />
usual spiel. Another night lost to blah blahs. Then the inevitable boasting about<br />
who’d screwed who since last time. Renee won as usual: she loves beating us<br />
boys; she loves rubbing Nina’s fat face in it. She finally got with the red-headed<br />
chick from the café, and the thalidomider from the studio, the one with the<br />
pierced stumps who paints with his feet. I was too busy nursing my juicy,<br />
cramping guts to really listen, but when finally, solemn as a saint, Renee led<br />
the usual closing sermon on how everything comes down to the universal,<br />
elemental, fundamental sex drive, I just wanted to scream, What are you<br />
talking about?<br />
If you don’t eat, you don’t shit. If you don’t shit, you die.<br />
When your guts are broke you realise pretty quick what’s fundamental.<br />
Eating. Shitting. I don’t know about dying, except that it’s like sex: there’s too<br />
much written about it and it’s all crap.<br />
Time someone wrote about what really matters.<br />
Time someone wrote about shit.<br />
Nina, you eat too much. Every meal you tell yourself, this is the last time: you’ve<br />
got to stop eating like this. You never feel hungry. You never feel full. You’re<br />
always out of control. Now, it’s 9 pm. Again, you’ve sent yourself to bed to stop<br />
yourself eating. Again, you can’t sleep: all you can think about is food.<br />
Maybe Glen’s right: you’ve overstretched your stomach. How does he put<br />
it? That, inside, you’re like Doctor Who’s TARDIS: Tard-arse, he says, Tard-arse<br />
lard-arse. Or you’re like Mary Poppins’ handbag, your guts looping around<br />
inside you without limit or end. He says you’re a walking, talking black hole.<br />
That you could swallow stars. That you’re a star’s graveyard. He’s getting very<br />
cosmic about your condition. There’s no metaphor, he says, astronomical<br />
enough to explain where all that food goes. I could have done my thesis on you,<br />
he says. A new physics: Arsetronomy!<br />
Well, of course you haven’t defied physics. Energy is always conserved, and<br />
last week he caught you arranging the newest bulges of your stomach around<br />
the table—with your hands—as if they were an annoying object that was getting<br />
in your way. The shame! Worse, the realisation: they were an annoying object<br />
that was getting in your way! Since then you’ve noticed how your fleshy armpits<br />
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 123 6/11/12 9:20 AM<br />
123
Eat. Shit. Die. Helen Gildfind<br />
pinch and pull when you reach for things, and how, when you drop something,<br />
you just peer helplessly at the floor, distrusting your body’s turgid hinges. A few<br />
nights ago, when Glen was in his room schmooping on the phone to Sally, you<br />
set up the bathroom scales. You filled a bucket with seven kilos of water—the<br />
weight you’ve gained these past few months. You told yourself: that’s fat, Nina,<br />
blobbing through your blood, plugging your heart, exploding you slowly—a<br />
slo-mo super duper nova. You lifted the bucket: it was heavy! How disgusting,<br />
to pour such muck into yourself. How exhausting, to carry such weight around<br />
with you, all the time, all the time.<br />
I’m getting in my way! you cried to Glen last night, as you shared the feast<br />
you’d cooked him because he was missing Sally badly. Look, sis, he said, you<br />
know the deal. Energy in—he stuffed in another mouthful—must be equal to<br />
or less than energy out. He leant over, as if to fart. You didn’t laugh. He stopped<br />
fooling. He patted your arm. It’s just flab, Nina. Just food. Accept yourself, or<br />
change yourself, but stop obsessing, cos you’re driving me nuts. He went back<br />
to his dinner, muttering, What is with women and food? and you found yourself<br />
travelling his words up, up into space. You looked down on the earth and you<br />
saw how its men never thought about food, beyond wanting it and eating it,<br />
while its women cooked and gorged and starved and vomited and cried, their<br />
food morphing into all sorts of strange things in their guts: thoughts, feelings,<br />
rituals. Glen burped you back to the table, demanding, Cake, woman! Of course<br />
you’d baked one. Of course you ate the whole thing once he’d taken his slice and<br />
disappeared for some optical sex with poor Sally stuck in Wadeye.<br />
Well, it’s easy for Glen to lecture you, with his laddery ribs and his hoppery<br />
limbs and his horsey face, all bony plains and stretched skin. It’s easy for him<br />
to reduce everything to rationality. He might be right—you’ve just got to ‘get<br />
a grip’—but what if he’s wrong? Can physics really explain everything? Can it<br />
explain compulsion, this force that’s not quite a thought or a feeling or an urge,<br />
but some sort of a cell-deep primal call to just eat and eat and eat?<br />
Oh, rubbish! It’s not your flabs getting in your way, Nina. It’s not some<br />
profound ancestral memory dictating things: it’s you; it’s just you.<br />
Once again, your nightly prayer and promise. Today was the last time.<br />
Please let tomorrow be a new day.<br />
I’ve finally forced myself to see Gallows (to get to the bottom of it, ha ha). I’m<br />
sitting outside his surgery, thinking about shit and society. I started thinking<br />
about this years ago. I was at a supermarket checkout, waiting behind an<br />
old woman, when a voice yelled from my elbow, ‘Pwoar, something stinks!’<br />
124<br />
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 124 6/11/12 9:20 AM
Fiction<br />
A fleshy slap. I turned and saw a mop-haired kid with brimming eyes and a<br />
finger-pegged nose. His mother kept thumping groceries onto the counter. I<br />
suddenly wondered if, in my dreamy stupor, I’d farted or burped. Maybe I had<br />
BO, having spent all that humid morning sweating and writing in days-old<br />
boxers. As I turned away, disgusted, a warming stench hit me. ‘Mum—look!’<br />
Thump. I went to check my shoes, and then I saw it. I stared at the pencil-thin<br />
ankles of the oldie in front of me: over her heel and smearing onto the floor<br />
was a slug of soft yellow shit.<br />
The old woman seemed oblivious to the squalling kid and the retching<br />
air. In fact, with her pin curls and mint dress and tan handbag, she oozed<br />
refinement; pure refinement, except for the shit—her shit—spreading over<br />
the floor. The checkout chick carried on heroically, chatting away as people<br />
began to move around the edges of the store: a manager, a boy with a mop.<br />
Finally, the old dame counted out her coins, put her bags in her trolley and<br />
disappeared up the street with her head up, her pearls shining and her shit<br />
streaking a trail behind her.<br />
For seconds, then, everything stopped, as if the building’s very fabric knew<br />
that something profound had just happened within it. Then the checkout<br />
chick smiled and asked me to step back. The boy trundled the mop over and<br />
we all stood, quiet as a funeral congregation, as he scowled and swirled and<br />
smeared the shit into bleach-smelling nothingness. As I watched him I knew<br />
everyone except for the hollering kid was wondering, Did the old woman know<br />
what had happened? If she did, was she okay? If she didn’t, would she be okay<br />
when she realised?<br />
As I walked home that day I wondered what I’d have done if it had been me.<br />
Irrationally, but definitely, I knew I’d go home and kill myself. Realising that,<br />
I began to wonder seriously about shit and society.<br />
When you were little food was a treat. On Thursday nights you and Glen<br />
paced the shiny pink lino of the supermarket’s junk food aisle while your<br />
mum stormed off with the trolley. You each had a dollar to spend. Every time<br />
you chose something Glen would say, I dunno if I’d choose that one, Nina,<br />
so you never got what you wanted and always coveted what he got. At home<br />
you’d watch TV and play your silent weekly game of losers finish first. You<br />
always lost and later Glen would lie in bed with his sweet trophy propped on<br />
his pillow. Nina, he’d say, look. He’d go Mmmm-mmm and lick and slurp and<br />
suck in a creepy way until you ran over and thumped him, yelling for your<br />
mum, who said it served you right for being a pig. It’s always been like that<br />
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 125 6/11/12 9:20 AM<br />
125
Eat. Shit. Die. Helen Gildfind<br />
between you and Glen: you wanted to eat, he wanted to compete; you scoffed,<br />
he savoured.<br />
It wasn’t just sweets that drove you. It was every food, every day. If you’d<br />
done your chores or walked Spooker, you got snacks or seconds at dinner. If you<br />
achieved good grades you won two chocolate bars on Thursday nights and none<br />
if you’d done poorly, which wasn’t fair because Glen was good at everything<br />
and you were good at nothing. On Sundays, you hustled for the weekly roast,<br />
your mum tossing it to whoever she deemed best behaved, or she’d tell you to<br />
buzz off and would sit on the back step—the picking place—tearing the juiciest<br />
shreds from the bones herself. If your dad scored the corpse, you and Glen<br />
would hang around like scrap-yard dogs, poised to pick his pickings because<br />
he just didn’t understand the art of stripping flesh from bone. Once he tossed<br />
a carcass onto the grass to see what you’d do. Of course, you fought for it, and<br />
the only thing weirder than that is the image of your dad sitting by as if it were<br />
perfectly normal for a man to treat his kids like hyenas at a zoo.<br />
Yes, your parents subscribed to the Pavlovian school of child rearing. Just as<br />
they used Schmackos to make Spooker turn tricks, they trained you and Glen<br />
with chocolate and meat. But now, Nina, you’re your own food-treat-dealer.<br />
You’re the only judge of whether you’ve been good, and there’s nothing you<br />
won’t reward, is there? At recess today you trotted to the café to celebrate<br />
getting your year 9s into poetry. In the afternoon you hosed down two horny<br />
year 10s without sounding like a dried-up old hag: you rewarded yourself with<br />
fish and chips at the train station. So why did you then stuff down all that pasta<br />
when you got home? And why did you eat the slab of cake that Glen brought<br />
back from the lab? Slab, not slice. You can still see the look on his face when<br />
he came in from Telephone Sally and saw that the cake was gone. He wasn’t<br />
pissed-off silent. He was just … say it, Nina. He—the closest person to you, the<br />
only one left—was disgusted, disgusted by you. Now you’ve slunk off early to<br />
bed again, and you’re blaming your parents—dead people—for what you do.<br />
If it’s their fault, Nina, then how come Glen isn’t a porker too? If it’s their fault,<br />
how come you’ve gotten so much worse just recently?<br />
Again, your nightly prayer and promise. Today is the last time. Please let<br />
tomorrow be a new day.<br />
‘Stool sample.’ I’d rather give Gallows my blood, my piss, my semen, my<br />
goddamn bone marrow than my shit. Doesn’t matter that he’s an old man and<br />
a doctor and won’t even look at it. Doesn’t matter that he asks people for shit a<br />
dozen times a day. It matters that he’s going to read my shit, that he’s going to<br />
126<br />
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 126 6/11/12 9:20 AM
Fiction<br />
read me. Bloody George. You eat to shit to live, he said, but I’ve been eating and<br />
shitting and yes I’m alive but I might just be dying too.<br />
So here I am at home, ‘defecating into a clean container’. I make sure I<br />
don’t ‘urinate’ on my ‘faeces’, though some lab rat will think I’ve misread<br />
instructions: I’ve been pissing out my arse for weeks. I take ‘the clean wooden<br />
spatula’ and try to put my ‘faeces’ into the jars: easier said than done. I go to<br />
the kitchen. I contemplate a straw, settle for a spoon. Who’ll know? Somehow,<br />
I’m having fun. It’s not every day you get to play with your poop. It’s not every<br />
day you learn that things like dignity and integrity aren’t all they’re cracked<br />
up to be, that maybe they’re just ideas in your head because it’s the integrity<br />
of the body—not you—that matters. Finally, I spoon the murk into the jars and<br />
seal them into the bag Gallows has given me: it’s yellow and stamped up and<br />
down with the sinister black sickles of the biohazard symbol. Faeces, stools,<br />
biohazards: even shit-testing kits can’t name shit.<br />
I don’t know whether to walk or drive this bounty back to Gallows’. For the<br />
past few weeks I’ve hardly left the flat. Lucky I’m on sabbatical because I can’t<br />
go anywhere, now, without getting strategic about toilets. The club’s become<br />
impossible too: so busy; no privacy; people noticing. Even Renee looked twice<br />
when I arrived last time. I walked straight past her to the crapper. When I<br />
returned she was all over me, saying, Wow, Leo, you look great, as if I’ve been<br />
fat and ugly all these years and not known it. How’d you do it? she kept asking.<br />
She’s forever trying to hone herself down to her bones: I discipline my body,<br />
she says, I discipline myself. I discipline myself, she says, I discipline my art.<br />
Maybe she’s right. She’s the only one of us whose work’s going anywhere.<br />
That was a weird night. I was spacing out while she and Bryce sparred over<br />
their ‘open relationship’, sparred because he’s had no-one and she’s fucked<br />
everyone. Then he started banging on about his show, saying it’s flopped<br />
because he’s a tall poppy who’s truly creative because he confronts the<br />
conventional blah blah. I just had to ask him how artified porn was anything<br />
but derivative. Artified porn? he squealed. Derivative! Renee pissed herself<br />
laughing, So true, Leo! Even Nina giggled in that snorty, goofy way of hers.<br />
Bloody Nina. She just kept peering into me that night. Otherwise she held the<br />
floor for once, though maybe she just seemed to because I couldn’t take my<br />
eyes off her huge freckly tits heaving in and out of that ridiculous black dress<br />
of hers. She always looks like a dog’s breakfast—like she’d eat a dog’s breakfast,<br />
Renee would say, like she’d eat a dog—but there I was eating her with my eyes<br />
and pretending to give a damn about her classes and her poems and her new<br />
publisher. She was so happy that Renee just had to cut in and cut her down,<br />
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 127 6/11/12 9:20 AM<br />
127
Eat. Shit. Die. Helen Gildfind<br />
looking at her while commenting for the millionth time on my fantastic weight<br />
loss. Of course, Nina shut right up and sat there, swamped by the fact of her fat.<br />
Stupid Nina, and Renee, you shallow bitch, you’d be stunned if you saw<br />
me now: even Gallows stared when I walked into his office yesterday. He felt<br />
about my caving guts and jutting ribs and weighed me and hmmed and haaed<br />
and though he never mentioned it we were both thinking of the C-word as he<br />
handed me this shit-kit. And no, Renee, no, Bryce, we weren’t thinking of cunts<br />
and cocks and cunnilingus, or convention-confronting creativity. We were<br />
thinking of that good old plot-moving, world-shaking crisis that gets everyone<br />
interested in a B-grade story: cancer.<br />
Hell, I’ll take the risk. I’ll walk this stuff back to the doc’s because I’m bone<br />
cold in here and it’s burny bright out there and if that old dame could stride her<br />
shit down the street then I can flaunt my biohazards too. What have I to lose?<br />
I’m in Gallows’ hands now.<br />
You couldn’t believe it when Leo appeared in the doorway. Your insides<br />
tumbled: once, when you thought he’d seen you; again, when you saw he<br />
hadn’t; and then again, when you saw the change in him. You’ve never seen<br />
anyone so thin. You’ve never seen him so beautiful.<br />
He strolled across the waiting room, as bendy and bouncy as a blade of<br />
grass, swinging a plastic bag and whistling the jolliest tune you’ve ever heard.<br />
That was when your dread from the club forced itself to thought: Please, not<br />
Leo! Not my Leo! (My Leo? Look, there’s another feeling morphed into thought<br />
and you must be insane, Nina. Leo stopped caring years ago. Why would he care<br />
now, now that you’re as big as a whale? Now that Renee’s always there, between<br />
you? Damn Renee! Damn her body and her talk and her brilliant sculptures:<br />
all that sex into stone; all her sex, all her stone.) You know your dread-feeling<br />
for Leo is right because his lightness hurled you straight back into that sharp<br />
morning years ago when Eddie waltzed in and ate breakfast with you and<br />
kissed you and looked into you just as he used to. You’d thought everything had<br />
shifted into place. But no. Eddie had just worked it out: weight doesn’t come<br />
from the past; it comes from the future. You weren’t seeing things fixed. You<br />
were just seeing what a man looks like when that weight lifts off of him: he looks<br />
as floaty-free as Leo looked yesterday at Dr Gallows’.<br />
You watched Leo give his bag to the nurse. When he turned to go he saw<br />
you. He stopped whistling. He stared. He saw that you saw. That was when your<br />
insides really sickened: he was so freed up that he wasn’t even mad, not like he<br />
normally is when you catch him off guard. He just hesitated, smiled, strolled<br />
128<br />
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 128 6/11/12 9:20 AM
Fiction<br />
over and said, Hey, Nina Boppalina, good to see ya. He just stood there, playing<br />
that stupid rhyming game you played at uni when you were both practising to<br />
be ‘great writers’, that game he dumped once you’d spent years writing nothing<br />
very great and getting nowhere very much. Hey, Leo? you said, tripping over<br />
your own question mark. He shrugged, answering you with a jangle of his<br />
terrifying bones. Then you blurted it out: ‘Come for a feedo, Leo Schmeo?<br />
Glen’s away seeing Sally.’ For once, he wasn’t all excuses. Indeed, a feed! was all<br />
he said. You rhymed up a time and he said, Cheerio, I gotta go, and tootled out<br />
the door.<br />
Then you went in to Dr Gallows. You told him you needed a check-up.<br />
He checked things up and said, You’re obese. Lose weight. So then you asked<br />
him what you were really there to ask him. He looked at you as if you were<br />
stupid. He said, What do you mean you can’t stop eating? Like an idiot you<br />
repeated, I can’t stop eating. Like an idiot, he repeated, What do you mean you<br />
can’t stop eating? You both sat there, staring at each other, baffled. Stop eating<br />
so much, he said, and exercise more.<br />
Behind your sunnies you bawled all the way down to the café. Then you<br />
stopped crying and went inside and ordered your usual—as you knew you<br />
would, as you knew you shouldn’t. You sat in your favourite sun-drenched seat,<br />
loving and hating every sweet bite as you erased Dr Gallows’ face behind lists<br />
and lists of what to cook for Leo, your Leo, coming to dinner next weeko.<br />
Gallows was not happy. Nothing conclusive could be said about my shit. Nothing<br />
conclusive could be said about me. Now I’m in hospital getting ready for what<br />
they call a ‘top and tail’. Sounds cute, but it’s not, though the real agony lies in<br />
sitting across from this woman while she talks about how she’s going to enter my<br />
anus and go down my throat and read me from the inside out. I came here to see<br />
the gastro-guy, not this film-star beauty. I can’t even look at her face.<br />
Had a spectacular time on the shitter last night after chugging the potion<br />
that Gallows gave me. To clean you out for tomorrow, he’d said, handing it over.<br />
Dab—don’t wipe! he’d joked, but he looked grey as he shrugged over my results<br />
and poked around my gutless guts. Later, as I rode a tsunami of shit into the<br />
night, I thought of Renee and her detox diets and the million times I’d mocked<br />
her: You detox every time you shit, I’d say, every time you piss. As I rode that<br />
tsunami, I wondered if she’s right after all for, though my body’s been purging<br />
itself for months, last night showed me that I’m still full of filth. As I watched<br />
it gush away, I felt great, like I was cleaning myself right out of myself, and<br />
when I woke up this morning, I felt sore and raw and newborn. Stupid Renee!<br />
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 129 6/11/12 9:20 AM<br />
129
Eat. Shit. Die. Helen Gildfind<br />
And stupid me for thinking she’d ever be right about anything, because I’m still<br />
here, stuck in myself and squirming in front of this beautiful woman.<br />
Weird, how I spent all last night worrying Renee or Bryce or someone<br />
would walk in on me. Later, as I lay in bed, waiting for the smaller waves to hit,<br />
I realised what a fool’s fear that was because no-one ever drops by and no-one<br />
will: no-one’s seen me for ages; no-one except Nina, and Nina doesn’t count.<br />
I realised I might as well flush myself down the toilet for all the world cares.<br />
Realising this, I suddenly felt them, all the people in the world who’re exiled by<br />
their shit and piss and pain and I wanted to scream, How the fuck do you live?<br />
and, What will happen to you? Then I asked myself those same questions, but<br />
I found no answers. I guess there’s some things you just gotta live with even if<br />
they stop you living.<br />
The gastro-girl stops talking. She leads me into her surgery and introduces<br />
me to the hunky guy who’s going to shoot me up with the sleep-juice. He looks<br />
over me, to make eyes at her, and it turns out I’ve got nothing on that old lady<br />
from that day: I’m humiliated; I’m scared; I can’t hold my head up high or look<br />
either of these two good-lookers in the eye. I thank God when a middle-aged<br />
nurse walks in and I focus on her lumpy backside and watch her looping a long<br />
black hose over a silver hook. What’s that for? I ask. You don’t want to know!<br />
she says. Everyone titters as the liquid sleep pulls me under.<br />
Suddenly I’m awake and surrounded by chattering patients and a glorious<br />
symphony of farts. I realise the symphony is my own but I’m so relaxed that I<br />
don’t care a damn. My nurse appears and asks, Okay, luv? and I say, Great! and<br />
my arse says, Fart! She gets me dressed and leads me to a room full of armchairs<br />
and TVs and sits me near three cushiony old biddies. They smile at me, like I’m<br />
one of them. For the first time panic swells inside me. I focus on the TV. I watch<br />
some fatsos confess their teary tales to Oprah. Then I remember Nina, sitting<br />
like a big pink pudding at Gallows’. I was walking on air that day, relieved,<br />
resigned to whatever fate Gallows was going to read from my shit. I think that’s<br />
why I said yes to dinner: perhaps I thought I’d die first. God, she annoys me.<br />
How she acts like she cares about everyone and everything. I might be a selfish<br />
prick but I don’t see how caring about everything is so damned different to<br />
caring about nothing at all.<br />
The gastro-girl appears next to me. She shrugs like Gallows: she’s found<br />
nothing, nothing conclusive. She mentions the deadly C-word, then she uses a<br />
new C-word and I’m caught on its curves and spikes: catabolic. That’s it. That’s<br />
what these past few days and months and years—my life—has been. Catabolic.<br />
I stare at the doc’s smooth, bare neck. I want to touch her. Before I can do<br />
130<br />
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 130 6/11/12 9:20 AM
Fiction<br />
anything so stupid, a miracle happens: she touches me. She strokes my hand as<br />
if she can sense the realisation uncurling inside, that maybe I’ll never touch or<br />
be touched by anyone ever again.<br />
She asks me who’s picking me up. My reply clatters onto the lino: No-one.<br />
She doesn’t flinch. She smiles. Don’t worry, Leo. I’ll work things out. You’re<br />
mine now, okay?<br />
He sits across from you in Glen’s seat. There’s nothing to say. You don’t ask him<br />
anything because he’ll tell you when he wants to, if he wants to. Both of you<br />
eat and eat and eat. You hear him breathe and chew and swallow. You hear his<br />
cutlery and plate tap tap tap on the table top. Only once do you ask, Is it okay?<br />
He nods, Mmmm-uh-uh. He doesn’t look up.<br />
After dinner he disappears to the bathroom. You go out to the balcony.<br />
He’s gone so long that you wonder if he’s throwing everything up. You wonder<br />
if he’s dropped dead. You turn to check on him. He’s staring at you through<br />
the glass door. He slides it open, sidles around you and lies on Glen’s yellow<br />
banana lounge. You sit, feeling your thighs pour over your wooden stool.<br />
Together you watch the white and red twinkle of the cars coming and going<br />
along the street. You offer him a cigarette, gesturing back to uni, when you<br />
each posed and pretended you were too cool to care that the world you wanted<br />
didn’t want you. You can still feel the agony of that final year when he froze<br />
you out, as if he were using you for practice. Oh, forget it Nina! He’s here now,<br />
and anyway, if he hadn’t frozen you out, you would never have known Eddie’s<br />
lovely warm skin.<br />
When you light your third cigarette you begin to tell Leo everything he never<br />
asked you about. Then you tell him about Glen and his work, and about light<br />
and dark and time and space and weightlessness. You tell him how your poetry<br />
and Glen’s physics are really two and the same, for you’re both just dealers in<br />
metaphor, and isn’t everyone just trying to put a shape on things? You tell him<br />
how you must move out soon because Glen will never ask you to and he and<br />
Sally should be together.<br />
When you finish you look at him. Under the harsh fluro of the street lamp<br />
he looks starchy and stringy and white; just as a man should on a banana<br />
lounge. You want to laugh. Then fury surges through you. I hate you, Leo, for<br />
forgetting me, for ignoring me, for mocking me and for never asking me, ever,<br />
how it’s been.<br />
You turn back to the red and white constellations of the cars. You say, I<br />
can’t stop eating. You repeat yourself, just as you did at Gallows’, as if Leo can’t<br />
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 131 6/11/12 9:20 AM<br />
131
Eat. Shit. Die. Helen Gildfind<br />
see what everyone else sees when they look at you and weigh you up before<br />
turning away from you forever. Eventually Leo puts out his hand. He only wants<br />
another cigarette. He leans in to your lighter, muttering, Oh well. He lies back<br />
and says, I can’t stop shitting. Then you hear it. It rumbles up from deep within<br />
him, up and up, setting his plastic cradle creaking and it’s not the pig in him<br />
laughing, it’s him, it’s him. And you’re laughing too.<br />
I could stay like this forever, full of her food, looking and listening and<br />
wondering if she’ll let me dress my bones in her, warm myself in her, rest in her.<br />
Look at those big sad cow’s eyes, sizing me up, looking to see if I hear her and<br />
see her. I have. I do.<br />
Nina, I know you’ll be gentle, that you’ll make a ritual of it, that you’ll make<br />
a feast of me, that you’ll relish me, that you’ll pick my bones till they’re so damn<br />
white we’ll throw the light right back at those precious stars of yours. Together<br />
we’ll blind the lot of them: Glen, Gallows, Renee and Georgie boy. We’ll show<br />
them there’s a thousand ways to eat and shit and live and die. M<br />
132<br />
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 132 6/11/12 9:20 AM
My Last Birthday<br />
MARK DAPIN<br />
I Was born on The 32nd of march. I do not know how it happened, but it<br />
did. People born on the 32nd of March never grow older, and we never grow tall.<br />
My mother was a clerk in the distillery. My father was a returned soldier, and he<br />
shot through.<br />
I grew up in Bundaberg, by the river, but I didn’t grow. Oh, my head grew—<br />
my monstrous target skull—and my chest swelled like a sherry barrel, but my<br />
hands hung at my waist, and my legs were cut short like my arms.<br />
I was my mother’s punishment. She fed me from a bowl, like a puppy,<br />
because I used to topple and she thought I’d never learn how to sit. My mother<br />
could have put me in an orphanage, but she kept me because she loved me.<br />
All my life I have lived off that love.<br />
I went to the Catholic school, where the brothers were kind, but they<br />
expected me to die. We never get older, so we always die young. The brothers<br />
taught me that in ancient Egypt we were gods.<br />
The other children shut me in cupboards and carried me in bags. I liked<br />
them to hide me and lock me away. It made me feel like treasure. The first time<br />
I went to a birthday party I was eight years old. I had never had a cake, or a<br />
present wrapped in coloured paper, because I born on the 32nd of March.<br />
The boys were curious about my pee-pee. They used to take down my pants<br />
to see if it had grown. Sometimes after sport they would hang me naked from<br />
the shower heads, to stretch me.<br />
That’s all I remember from school, except noun, verb, adjective; head,<br />
thorax, abdomen; amo, amas, amat. I left when I was fourteen to sit on a wall<br />
smoking cigarettes. I’d been waiting two years when Jeremiah Cain’s travelling<br />
show came with their trucks and tents and the big bass drum.<br />
I watched them set up in the showground, because I liked to know everything<br />
that happened in my town. An old showie with sharpened teeth and a forked<br />
tongue asked if I could play the banjo. I said I wasn’t musical. He said, ‘I thought<br />
all you people knew the ukulele.’<br />
Jeremiah Cain ran a boxing tent with fairground rides, a snake charmer and<br />
a stripper, but some of the boxers dressed up as lobsters, wobbling plastic claws<br />
behind steamed glass in the walk-in walk-out tent. Emperor Harry was the<br />
Pygmy King of the Dark Continent, who could burst a balloon with a blowpipe<br />
at twenty paces.<br />
I remember the first time I saw Emperor Harry, striding towards me in the<br />
dust. He wore a waistcoat, a fob watch and a brown felt hat. He moved with<br />
great energy and strength, as if he were bursting through heavy air, and shook<br />
my hand so hard he pulled me off the wall.<br />
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 133 6/11/12 9:20 AM<br />
133
My Last Birthday Mark Dapin<br />
‘What do they call you?’ asked Emperor Harry.<br />
‘Cunthead,’ I said, wiping my knees.<br />
Emperor Harry looked sad.<br />
‘My name’s Gregory,’ I said.<br />
‘Gregory the Great,’ said Emperor Harry, ‘the world’s smallest juggler.’<br />
‘I can’t juggle,’ I told him.<br />
‘Any mug can juggle,’ said Emperor Harry, ‘but it takes guts to be small.’<br />
He asked how old I was.<br />
‘I was born on the 32nd of March, of course.’<br />
‘Then you’re old enough to join a show,’ said Emperor Harry.<br />
Emperor Harry was a tent boxer by trade, but it was hard to find opponents<br />
in bush towns because of his weight. He suggested I fight him on the first night<br />
of the show. He promised to go easy on me and split the take.<br />
‘But I can’t fight,’ I said.<br />
‘Fighting’s like juggling,’ said Emperor Harry. ‘All you need is balls.’<br />
He squeezed my crotch with a greengrocer’s fingers.<br />
I decided not to tell my mother until I had the money in my hand. I knew she<br />
wouldn’t come to the show. She liked to stay at home in her chair and knit her<br />
dreams—jumpers for soldiers, blankets for a Korean winter.<br />
I hurried down to the showground in a shearer’s singlet, floating through the<br />
smells of whipped sugar and spattering fat. Jeremiah Cain stood on the boards<br />
outside his tent, banging his drum, gathering a crowd with a showman’s lies.<br />
His own fighters were lined up alongside him, from the Canadian Cowboy, who<br />
had never been in Canada, to the Aboriginal Champion of the Outback, who<br />
was a black American ex-serviceman, to Emperor Harry, the shortest tent-boxer<br />
in Australia.<br />
‘Who’ll take a glove?’ yelled Jeremiah Cain.<br />
‘I will!’ I cried.<br />
Jeremiah Cain saw me with his stormy electric eyes, but pretended to scan<br />
the crowd of cane-cutters and stockmen.<br />
‘Who’s that?’ he asked. ‘The Bundaberg Bunyip?’<br />
I pushed my way past the knees of country boys and camp cooks until I<br />
reached the ladder.<br />
‘Give him a hand up!’ said Jeremiah Cain, but I kicked out at anyone who<br />
tried to help me, and climbed the rungs myself.<br />
‘And who might you be, little fella?’ asked Jeremiah Cain, bending lower<br />
than he needed.<br />
As I began to reply, he pulled away the megaphone.<br />
134<br />
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 134 6/11/12 9:20 AM
Fiction<br />
‘This tiny titan here is Gregory the Great!’ bellowed Jeremiah Cain. ‘The<br />
abandoned son of the most famous midget wrestler of all time … the Great<br />
Gregory!’<br />
People laughed, but nobody really knew who my father was. I flexed my<br />
biceps and they whistled. I felt like the tallest man alive.<br />
The boxing troupe had no gloves for me, so Emperor Harry offered to fight<br />
me bareknuckle. I said I’d fight him with one hand tied behind his back. I meant<br />
to say ‘my back’, but the drunks laughed and paid their money. Before we’d even<br />
stepped onto the boxing mat, I was imagining the scene when it was over, with<br />
the sawmillers carrying me on their shoulders, yelling, ‘He’s got a big heart for a<br />
little fella,’ and the whole town shouting ‘Cunthead! Cunthead!’<br />
Boxing isn’t the way you’d choose to fight if you were born on the 32nd of<br />
March. We’re not naturally punchers. We don’t have the reach. Our legs are too<br />
short for the footwork. We don’t jab. It all got scrappy as soon as the bell rang,<br />
with me charging at Emperor Harry, and he batting me away with hands held just<br />
below his chin. The way I’d normally fight was to bite and butt, but the tent had<br />
rules and I respected them because I sensed this was my chance in life, and God<br />
help me if I wasn’t right.<br />
Emperor Harry could move like an athlete, shifting his weight from side<br />
to side, throwing me off my rhythm with a diagonal step backwards or a feint<br />
that promised a lunge. But he stepped into my punches and sold them, flying<br />
sprawling onto the mat clutching his wide, flat nose. At the end of the third round,<br />
Jeremiah Cain got down on his knees to lift the winner’s arm into the air, and<br />
when I felt the tug on my wrist, I wanted to cry and laugh and sing all at once.<br />
That night I was the hero of the town. They called me ‘the Beast of Bundy’.<br />
Emperor Harry found me under the war memorial the next morning, drinking<br />
sherry and shaping up to the statue. He said I’d better get myself straightened<br />
out because we were going to fight a grudge match that night, to decide which of<br />
us was the Midget Tent Boxing Champion of the World.<br />
My second fight didn’t go as well as my first. Emperor Harry bashed me from<br />
one corner of the mat to the next and back again. He knocked me down three<br />
times in the first minute, but I kept getting back up for more. He blacked my<br />
eyes, loosened my teeth, even broke my nose, but the crowd was behind me and<br />
that was all I needed. Even after Jeremiah Cain had presented Emperor Harry<br />
with an engraved belt sanctioned by the World Midget Tent Boxing Association,<br />
people were saying, ‘Well done, Cunthead. Good fight.’<br />
Emperor Harry asked if I wanted to travel with the troupe. He said we could<br />
fight each other every place we went. He’d be Jeremiah Cain’s champion, I’d be<br />
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 135 6/11/12 9:20 AM<br />
135
My Last Birthday Mark Dapin<br />
a challenger from an outstation, and we’d take turns in winning the midget<br />
world championship. He promised I’d meet sheilas and have mates. He said<br />
he’d never had the chance to box in the tent before. He was the last of a mob of<br />
a midget wrestlers who used to follow the show in their own truck, and set up<br />
a ring before the tent opened in the afternoon, to entertain the children. But<br />
the others had all drifted away, found women on the road or just disappeared.<br />
Wrestling was tough on their bodies, hard on their joints and, even if you<br />
weren’t born on the 32nd of March, it was a young man’s game.<br />
My mother wept when I told her I was leaving, and I cried too. I said I’d only<br />
be gone for a season, as we pushed on north to the Gulf, then west into the<br />
Territory. She told me if I saw my father, I had to send him home.<br />
The next two years were the best of my life, the best of anybody’s life.<br />
Me and Emperor Harry, we tore the outback down. We boxed and we wrestled,<br />
he taught me the ukulele, I juggled as he sang, and held the balloon for his<br />
blowpipe. We were pygmies, dwarfs, elves and hobbits, headhunters, cannibals,<br />
Siamese twins. We slept in the same swag.<br />
The showies took me into their big dark family. Even though I wasn’t born<br />
to the life, they could see there was nothing else for me. I helped set up the<br />
fair and pull down the tents. Some of the best times were in the Aboriginal<br />
missions, where they had never seen a man who was born on the 32nd of March.<br />
Jeremiah Cain would roll me up in the boxing mat, then spill me out onto the<br />
gravel, and the blacks would scream and wave their hands about, laugh and run<br />
away. They thought I had magical powers, that I was more than a man, not less.<br />
There were pockets of the fair only showmen knew, dark corners behind<br />
canvas curtains, secret hooch bars where the Two-Headed Woman drank<br />
homemade whisky with the Greatest Escapologist the World Has Ever Seen.<br />
In the first hours of the morning, when the mugs were in bed with their fat<br />
dowdy wives, the showmen put on acts for each other. There were dogfights<br />
that lasted until a torn jaw fluttered from the gums of a blind pit bull, cockfights<br />
with spurs, and razor matches between boys who walked away with scars like<br />
rivers running down their cheeks.<br />
On party nights the strippers tore the pasties from their nipples and stepped<br />
out of their flesh-coloured underpants and fucked the trick-shooters and the<br />
whip crackers, their stockwhips and their rifles. Most of all, the showies liked to<br />
watch the girls with the Aboriginal Champion of the Outback, but if everyone<br />
was as pissed as blacks, and the negro was sated or sleeping, the snake charmer<br />
would encourage them to go with the dwarfs. One of the girls would always<br />
agree, after he’d hypnotised her with his yellow eyes. I loved her completely,<br />
136<br />
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 136 6/11/12 9:20 AM
Fiction<br />
and I know she loved me too. I could feel it inside her. She called herself<br />
Darlene, or Jeremiah Cain gave her that name. I don’t know.<br />
I lost my boyhood to Darlene, in front of the snake charmer, Emperor Harry<br />
and Jeremiah Cain. But Darlene let the negro move into her trailer, and the<br />
others gathered outside just to listen to the noises they made together. I drank<br />
around the campfire with Emperor Harry, stoking the embers with a stick.<br />
When we found Darlene was pregnant to the negro, it wasn’t a big thing.<br />
Most of the show was black or part-black. She had to stop working as a<br />
stripper, but she still collected tickets for the rides. I carried her things when I<br />
could. She went into labour in McKinlay and the baby was born in Cloncurry.<br />
He wasn’t black but he was very small. It was the 32nd of March.<br />
The negro left the camp the next day.<br />
The fortune teller looked at my beautiful son and said he was Darlene’s<br />
punishment. I held him in my arms and my heart sang. We named him<br />
Charlie—I think that was my father’s name—and Darlene fed him from her<br />
breast. She changed him on her knee and wore him in a sling, like an Indian.<br />
They talked together in the trailer at night. I listened to them outside. She<br />
didn’t like me to spend too much time with him, in case that kept him small.<br />
The fortune teller gave her potions to make him grow.<br />
Jeremiah Cain picked up a new fighter in Boulia. I didn’t like him because<br />
I could see Darlene did. By the time we reached Birdsville he had taken the<br />
negro’s place in her trailer. He was useful in the ring, but he liked to hurt the<br />
mugs, and Jeremiah Cain had to warn him to go easy. It was just a show.<br />
Darlene was smiling again, because she had Boulia. She always said she<br />
needed a big man to take care of her. Boulia was hard and proud, but he never<br />
touched another woman, and some nights I heard him play the guitar and sing<br />
to my son. But he wasn’t the type to live on the road. He looked too far ahead,<br />
could see it went nowhere. Now he had found his woman, he wanted to go back<br />
to the farm and raise a family. Darlene asked Jeremiah Cain for permission to<br />
leave the show. He said she should stay, because Charlie belonged to all of us.<br />
The fortune-teller predicted Boulia would drag Darlene down. ‘Lower than<br />
this?’ asked Darlene. ‘Lower than an unmarried stripper in a tent-boxing show?’<br />
I never knew she felt she was low. I thought we were living the high life.<br />
I loved the tents and the hotdogs, the spruiking and the gee-ups, the trucks,<br />
the mud and the dust.<br />
‘A fucking slut,’ said Darlene, ‘with a cunt-headed baby dwarf?’<br />
The next morning they were gone, and they left my son in a bucket of water,<br />
a small bucket of warm water, filled to the brim. There was no need for that.<br />
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 137 6/11/12 9:20 AM<br />
137
My Last Birthday Mark Dapin<br />
I would have taken him. I would have loved him. I would have taught him how<br />
to grow, from the inside.<br />
The showies buried Charlie beside the track, beneath a shaky timber cross<br />
and a garland of gold leaf, the livery of the stalls. The fortune teller told me he’d<br />
come back as a giant. Jeremiah Cain offered to hunt down Darlene and Boulia.<br />
Emperor Harry said we should go after the cowboy, just him and me, and<br />
show him what we were worth, we men born on the 32nd of March. But Boulia<br />
already knew what we were worth, and it wasn’t the cowboy who’d done it, it<br />
was Darlene.<br />
I couldn’t fight in the tent after I lost Charlie. I could only drink. When I was<br />
full of beer or moonshine I’d take on any mug who said something smart, but I’d<br />
do it at the rifle range or the laughing clowns, have a proper blue in front of the<br />
families, and I wouldn’t stop when it was over. If a ringer called me ‘Shorty’, I’d<br />
bite his fucking nose off.<br />
Emperor Harry begged me to stop, but I couldn’t and he couldn’t make<br />
me. I was maybe ten years younger than him, fitter, faster and toughened up.<br />
I nearly killed a bloke in Charleville—just a little fella; they were always the<br />
ones who started something—and Jeremiah Cain asked me to leave the troupe.<br />
He said I could come back when I was fixed, but I said, ‘Fuck you to hell.’<br />
They left me in the hotel in Roma with $100, and I spent it on whores.<br />
I hitch-hiked back to Bundaberg. My mother asked if I’d met my father on the<br />
road. I told her I had, and he said he was never coming back. She shut herself in<br />
her room, and I locked myself in mine. When the show came around, neither of<br />
us left the house. I drank cough medicine and shoe polish remover. I saw lions<br />
and tigers, dragons and serpents. I spoke to the walls.<br />
One night I was lying in bed when I heard a tap at the window. It was<br />
Emperor Harry. I told him to fuck off, called him every name I’d ever been<br />
called, but he refused to leave because he was my mate. He sat at my bedside<br />
and we talked about the old days, the good times in Ingham and Innisfail<br />
and Tully.<br />
Oh God, I’d missed Emperor Harry. I’d missed him so much. He unrolled his<br />
swag on my bedroom floor. Inside was Charlie, with golden hair and blue eyes,<br />
all grown up but never grown old. I reached out for my son, to hug him to my<br />
sherry-barrel chest, and I felt my spirit drift away.<br />
I looked back at the calendar on my bedroom wall. It was the 32nd of<br />
March. M<br />
138<br />
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 138 6/11/12 9:20 AM
I should be so lucky<br />
SAM COONEY<br />
So it now looks as though the universal wheel of fortune is anything<br />
but random—it’s rigged, and rigged good. We asked the Onlooker’s<br />
resident intern to suss out the ramifications of the recent discovery<br />
of a human gene that bestows good fortune upon those who carry it.<br />
I mean, it’s gotta be totally unfair, right?<br />
posted on 31/02/2012 at 10.34 am<br />
The discovery lasT monTh of a hereditary unit for ‘luck’ is making waves<br />
in the gene pool. Actually, it’s caused the whole world to go troppo. Stop it,<br />
everyone! You’re all acting batshit, mad as bananas, stark raving bonkers. It’s<br />
like we’re living in that Lord of the Flies book, but on a worldwide scale. Crazy!<br />
The gene, with the official scientific name FFTB128, has been quickly<br />
nicknamed the ‘lucky’ gene by pretty much every media outlet. (Admittedly,<br />
this latest example of nicknaming bucks the irksome trend for cock-and-bull<br />
that has heretofore accompanied the nicknaming of genes—like the invented<br />
‘skinny’ gene or the hoax ‘frog-toed’ gene—as FFTB128 is now undeniably and<br />
scarily bona fide, scientifically speaking.) The discovery has been the catalyst<br />
for recent upheavals: the violent public riots, the months-long arguments<br />
in parliaments, the logjams in every judicial system, the rapid shifts within<br />
humanities and social sciences. It has of course been the talking point of every<br />
smoke break and dinner party.<br />
FFTB128 is the latest human gene to be fully characterised. Unveiled last<br />
month by those gung-ho geneticists at Chengdu Polytechnic, it is in many ways<br />
like any other gene: made up of a distinct sequence of nucleotides (the building<br />
blocks that are the basic structural units of nucleic acids such as DNA), which<br />
in turn constitute part of a chromosome (the classic double helix; see Jurassic<br />
Park), the order of which determines the arrangement of monomers in a nucleic<br />
acid molecule that a cell may synthesise. Wikipedia gobbledygook, I know.<br />
In layman’s terms, FFTB128, like all genes, is a unit of genetic inheritance that<br />
is transferred from parent to offspring and contributes to the characteristics of<br />
the offspring. Ipso facto: you are your parents, and/or also their parents, and/<br />
or also their parents’ parents, ad infinitum. (You are also a product of your<br />
environment. As scientists are wont to say: the genetic template you are born<br />
with doesn’t function in a vacuum.) Your lineage is a great big slippery slide,<br />
with parts and pieces slewing straight from your ancestors to you. You have<br />
freckles? Because of your parents. You have big feet? Because of your parents.<br />
You love cheesy foods and watching soon-to-be-axed sitcoms, just to see if<br />
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 139 6/11/12 9:20 AM<br />
139
I should be so lucky Sam Cooney<br />
you can spot the reasons why the sitcom has been marked for cancellation,<br />
using your nonspecialist knowledge of socio-demographic considerations and<br />
cost-cutting budgets? Probably because of your parents, although also probably<br />
nothing to do with genetics. Still, the point is that although FFTB128 is a gene<br />
possessed by everyone, only a small percentage of people have the specific<br />
allele (the particular mutation) of the gene that means it will be active, and now<br />
that we know about it, now that it’s no longer hiding quietly between genes<br />
DEFB370 and SMAR884, it’s wreaking havoc like no other gene before.<br />
What makes FFTB128 so extraordinary, so repercussive? Well, primarily it’s<br />
all because it is the first gene discovered in humans—in any living species of<br />
plant or animal—that acts upon its vessel in a constant, physical, manifest and,<br />
most importantly, instantaneous way. All other genes shoot their wads early,<br />
say at conception, and do it slowly too, but FFTB128 keeps shooting its wad,<br />
over and over, rapidly, throughout the carrier’s life, meaning that it is an active<br />
agent in the second-by-second existence of said carrier. On top of this, although<br />
geneticists can now comprehensively outline what processes the FFTB128<br />
genes trigger, and can watch at a microscopic level the genes as they trigger<br />
together, none can say what outside influence actually triggers them. As far as<br />
we can tell for now, FFTB128 seems to function either completely on its own,<br />
or—and take careful note of this—by receiving signals from somewhere, signals<br />
that are at this time imperceptible to the most sensitive of scientific equipment.<br />
It’s a real mystery. The genes are not triggered by organic proteins, nor by<br />
electrical current, nor by chemicals, nor by naturally occurring radiations<br />
of the body. This is why FFTB128 is known by nicknames other than ‘lucky’,<br />
nicknames to do with religion, faith and spirituality. Some have started calling<br />
it the ‘divine’ gene, or the ‘holy’ gene, or even the ‘god’ gene. And what’s even<br />
curiouser is that it’s becoming increasingly difficult to argue with them. As the<br />
New York Times reported recently:<br />
140<br />
From Christianity to Buddhism, Islam to Scientology, Wicca to<br />
Jediism, religions and spiritual groups around the world have<br />
scrambled to claim FFTB128 as the much awaited proof that backs<br />
up their long-held faith, proof that the sacred exists not on an astral<br />
plane or inside the mind, but physically within us (or at least the<br />
‘chosen few’ among us). Yet for all the initial religious squabbling,<br />
disparate denominations do now seem to be in agreement that the<br />
discovery of FFTB128 heralds a new dawn for spirituality. And<br />
stranger still: thus far there haven’t been any dissenting opinions<br />
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 140 6/11/12 9:20 AM
Fiction<br />
from those who typically challenge religious championing. Whether<br />
non-believers are simply gob-smacked (or god-smacked) is not yet<br />
known, but so far the expected war of words over the ‘lucky’ gene<br />
has been a wholly (holy?) one-sided fight. (NYT, ‘Jesus, Muhammad,<br />
Hubbard, Siddhartha & Skywalker: All carriers of the ‘lucky’ gene?’,<br />
12 December 2011)<br />
FFTB128 works like so: when a person who has the active variant of the gene<br />
is faced with a choice, be it an everyday one (e.g. what to eat, when to sleep, will<br />
I cut my toenails now or later) or a momentous one (e.g. should I quit my job<br />
and become a yoga teacher, should I murder my boyfriend because his nose<br />
whistles when he sleeps, should I push this button to launch all the nuclear<br />
missiles), the multitude of that person’s FFTB128 genes all immediately ‘switch<br />
on’ in such a way as to influence the decision in a manner that advantages<br />
the person. But how? Well, the term being bandied around at the moment is<br />
‘rattling’. The genes oscillate—or ‘rattle’—when the person closes in on the<br />
option that is the most propitious or auspicious for them, and the genes will fall<br />
silent if the person moves towards any other option. It sounded a tad absurd<br />
at first, almost like an ongoing submolecular game of Hot or Cold. Are they<br />
serious? was the widespread reaction to Chengdu Polytechnic’s geneticists.<br />
Could rattling genes really be letting some of us know whether we are getting<br />
‘warmer’ or ‘cooler’, closer or further away from good fortune?<br />
Obviously the interesting stuff is happening at a microscopic level. It’s the<br />
nucleotides that rattle in uncanny unison, which in turn gently vibrates the<br />
whole chromosome, and this vibrating shimmies up the chain of nucleic acid so<br />
that a person on the crest of making the most personally advantageous decision<br />
is almost literally humming with subliminal and subcellular good advice.<br />
But just why a carrier allegedly—and apparently unconsciously—proceeds to<br />
obey the chordal rattling of a coterie of genes is as yet undetermined. If this is<br />
our new reality then it seems that those of us who believe in the autonomous<br />
process of decision-making will instead need to accept that some of us are<br />
under the sway of a Stasi-like molecular constabulary. To call this discomfiting<br />
would be an understatement.<br />
This is what we know: the active variant of FFTB128 pushes people—<br />
physically persuades them on a microscopic but incredibly forceful<br />
level—towards circumstances that will benefit them individually. Such<br />
circumstances can differ greatly: they could be tangible situations occurring in<br />
the ‘real world’ that you and I inhabit, or they could be completely cerebral and<br />
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 141 6/11/12 9:20 AM<br />
141
I should be so lucky Sam Cooney<br />
involve thought patterns and decision-making taking place in a person’s mind.<br />
But the point is that the vast number of infinitesimal biological scintillas that<br />
make you you in a purely physical sense also make you you in a metaphysical<br />
sense. In the same way that one ancient Egyptian on his own couldn’t possibly<br />
construct the pyramids or carve the Sphinx, but hundreds of thousands or<br />
even millions could, and did, one nucleotide or molecule mightn’t be able to<br />
cajole a person to do or say or think something, but millions of them working in<br />
harmony could. And do.<br />
Exactly how the genes know which ‘choice’ will benefit the carrier the most<br />
is by far the biggest mystery. Just how is a squadron of evenly dispersed and<br />
allied genes able, in just a few microseconds, to comprehend the almost infinite<br />
possible futures of a person and recommend the best course of action? It is<br />
certainly possible that science is not the place to look for the answer to this<br />
question. What is known is that the genes have been correct each time they<br />
have been put to the test. It’s remarkable. Just think about how many times a<br />
day you make decisions, at home, at work, everywhere. Now think about the<br />
possibility that you have a vast molecular chorus that exists inside you, a silent<br />
choir that sings and shimmies in order to propel you towards the best option<br />
with every decision you make. You would never be conscious of the guidance<br />
your FFTB128 genes are giving you, but you would always follow their direction.<br />
If you have any thoughts about fate or destiny or free will, this is the time to<br />
revisit them.<br />
Now to catch the really hot potato. Early figures indicate that around 4–6<br />
per cent of the world’s population possess the mutant ‘lucky’ allele of the<br />
FFTB128 gene. This allele has thus far been classed as non-threatening. It<br />
has not been listed as a genetic disorder. (If you think about it, of course it’s<br />
non-threatening—it’s threat-reducing, really. And it’s the opposite of a genetic<br />
disorder, but I’m not sure what the opposite of that is. If a genetic disorder is<br />
an impediment, then is FFTB128 an empowerment? If a disorder is a disease,<br />
is FFTB128 a nourisher? An enabler? A godsend?)<br />
Many celebrities and people in positions of power have already been tested.<br />
Tests have also been done on the DNA of certain deceased luminaries, and<br />
the results are astounding. The VIPs and dignitaries tested have been shown<br />
to possess the FFTB128 allele in a much higher frequency than the average:<br />
they record positive results 70–75 per cent more frequently than their subset<br />
population (compare that to the earlier figure for the general population of<br />
4–6 per cent). So, what does this say about concepts such as fame, popularity<br />
and democracy? Some popular celebrities, in a seemingly vain attempt to<br />
142<br />
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 142 6/11/12 9:20 AM
Fiction<br />
quell the tumult, have made public their genetic test results. Those who have<br />
tested positive to having an active ‘lucky’ gene include (but are not limited to):<br />
Ashton Kutcher, David and Victoria Beckham, Oprah Winfrey, Paris Hilton,<br />
Jon Bon Jovi, Heidi Klum, Germaine Greer, Natalie Portman, Sarah Palin,<br />
Jonathan Franzen, Lady Gaga, Bill Clinton, Anna Wintour, Silvio Berlusconi,<br />
every member of the Osbourne family (Ozzy, Sharon, Kelly, Jack), Julia Roberts,<br />
Harrison Ford and Werner Herzog. Moreover, a joint raid by the hacktivist<br />
groups 4chan and Anonymous resulted in the mass infiltration of confidential<br />
US government files in which the health records—and more pertinently the<br />
genetic coding—of every US president was stolen. Expert examination of these<br />
files suggests that almost 90 per cent of US presidents possess(ed) the mutant<br />
FFTB128 gene, and particularly ‘rattly’ types of the gene for the most part. (I’ll<br />
give points for those guessing in the comments just which few presidents didn’t<br />
possess an active form of the gene, although you’d be surprised, for it’s not as<br />
obvious as you think.)<br />
Like all genetic material, FFTB128 is hereditary, though not consistent.<br />
Still, it is rare for ‘lucky’ parents to have offspring with dormant FFTB128<br />
genes. (There is speculation that this is due to the FFTB128 gene: from early<br />
analysis of ‘lucky’ parents, it has been suggested that the FFTB128 gene draws<br />
together people who are highly likely to produce children who will also have<br />
active ‘lucky’ genes. Keeping it in the family, so to speak.) Still, it is biologically<br />
possible for a person to have two ‘lucky’ parents and not be ‘lucky’ themselves.<br />
An array of organised groups such as white supremacists, ardent nationalists,<br />
perfervid misogynists and other racialist and sectarian blocs have claimed<br />
that the mutant version of FFTB128 is more likely to be found in their chosen<br />
race, sex or creed. This claim has not yet been substantiated. Not at all. Not in<br />
the slightest.<br />
One intriguing stream of tangential research that is coming out of Dorkin<br />
University in Melbourne, Australia, has revealed that there is a particular<br />
category of people who can possess active FFTB128 genes and yet somehow<br />
also have the ability to ignore the biological guidance. This means that they are<br />
choosing the ‘wrong’ option for just about every decision they face, but each<br />
decision can be ‘wrong’ in a way that is ‘right’ from a nefarious and immoral<br />
perspective. How? Each member of this tiny subset benefits from being ‘lucky’,<br />
but simultaneously enjoys a self-determination that allows them a rare type of<br />
independence. Whereas the vast majority of people who make a ‘wrong’ choice<br />
are those without the ‘lucky’ gene, this category of person is predisposed to<br />
making the most ‘wrong’ of choices while also being a carrier of a strong ‘lucky’<br />
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 143 6/11/12 9:20 AM<br />
143
I should be so lucky Sam Cooney<br />
allele. Thus they survive what would ordinarily be fatal errant decision-making<br />
and go on to make choices that affect others in an extremely harmful way. The<br />
Dorkin researchers contend that we all know these human beings. We know<br />
their names, their faces, their deeds. They are infamous in our histories, for<br />
they are the tyrants and murderers and malefactors that we have tended<br />
throughout the ages to brand as ‘evil’. But evil now has a new name.<br />
Another revelation, this time by palaeontologists working at the Smithsonian<br />
Institution in Washington, DC, is already causing the history books to be<br />
rewritten. Ancient human history, that is. You see, it looks as though a particular<br />
structural idiosyncrasy of the DNA of Homo neanderthalensis meant that it<br />
could never develop the FFTB128 gene. This information may help explain how<br />
and why Homo sapiens became the dominant humanoid species on earth. Ugly<br />
folk, those Neanderthals, and now unlucky too.<br />
Unfortunately not all FFTB128-related revelations are resulting in such<br />
constructive reconsiderations. Many societal institutions are struggling to<br />
adjust to the discovery; legal systems, corporate entities, government bodies:<br />
all are at sea. Cases of total breakdown are becoming common. Civil courts<br />
around the world are backlogged with cases brought by people without the<br />
‘lucky’ gene who are suing for discrimination. For example: a former bank<br />
employee in Scotland is suing his employer for unfair dismissal, maintaining<br />
that it’s his unluckiness (his lack of the active FFTB128 allele)—and not his poor<br />
mathematical ability nor his propensity for criminal behaviour—that explains<br />
why he kept accidentally giving out too much money to bank customers.<br />
A shopper in Cape Town, South Africa, successfully sued a department store<br />
after it was found that the claimant (who doesn’t possess the active ‘lucky’<br />
gene) purchased a pair of quite expensive pumps from a particular bouffanted<br />
salesperson, and discovered a week later that an acquaintance (whose ‘lucky’<br />
gene is active) had received a significant discount on an identical pair of pumps<br />
from the same salesperson without even having to ask. An ongoing industrial<br />
strike in Canada by the National Sewage Workers Union has evolved into a mass<br />
action, as it was recently revealed that not one member of the 2000-strong<br />
union possessed active FFTB128 genes; the union argues that the only reason<br />
all 2000 sewage workers work in the human waste industry is because they are<br />
genetically ‘unlucky’. A burgeoning posse of indignant residents in Wellington,<br />
New Zealand, are suing their local supermarket for not delineating special<br />
‘unlucky’ parking spots for those genetically unlucky people who have to<br />
drive around the car park seven times before they find a parking spot as far as<br />
possible from the front entrance of the supermarket. A Facebook group called<br />
144<br />
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 144 6/11/12 9:20 AM
Fiction<br />
‘Don’t you hate it when you drop your iPhone once and the screen cracks but<br />
your friend drops theirs all the time and their screen never cracks?’, which had<br />
just over 4500 members before the news of the ‘lucky’ gene broke, has now<br />
launched a class-action lawsuit against Apple for not immediately moving<br />
to provide additional safety features (e.g. stronger screens, foam padding, a<br />
bouncier shell) for ‘unlucky’ customers (the group’s Facebook membership<br />
now numbers 3.8 million).<br />
By and large, the general public is not quite sure who to be angry at, and<br />
everyone is therefore turning on each other. Each person suspects everybody<br />
else of being more lucky than they are, and thus a worldwide feeling of bitter<br />
sullenness has begun to prevail. In the past, genetic alleles were rare enough to<br />
not really impede societal workings; minorities with burdens are no burden at<br />
all. And genetic differences were always either blamed on something (alcohol,<br />
drugs, the misbehaviour of nuclear energy companies) or were just put down<br />
to misfortune (instances such as people born with ugly feet, or three nipples,<br />
or ginger hair). Cases like this were not deemed harmful because they didn’t<br />
affect everyone.<br />
Even before the ‘lucky’ gene was discovered, there were some real doozies<br />
of genes out there, with clever-cruel nicknames to match. There is the ‘tinman’<br />
gene (where an embryo lacks the gene that eventually prompts it to sprout<br />
a heart); the ‘cheap date’ gene (this results in a hypersensitivity to alcohol);<br />
the ‘Van Gogh’ gene (this leads to a peculiar swirling hair pattern); the<br />
‘amontillado’ gene (this affects poultry only, in that eggs are unable to hatch,<br />
as in Fortunado from ‘The Cask of Amontillado’, who was walled-in alive); the<br />
‘Maggie’ gene (where a person’s development is arrested, à la Maggie Simpson);<br />
the ‘Methuselah’ gene (where a person lives a lot longer than average); and the<br />
‘Lilliputian’ gene (where a person will be very, very small). But they all occur too<br />
rarely to have ever gained the limelight. Now, because of FFTB128, there seems<br />
to be a worldwide and preordained two-tiered genetic hierarchy: ‘lucky’ ones,<br />
and ‘others’, who are not so much ‘unlucky’ as ‘just not as lucky’. We are seeing<br />
global segregation. It’s Us versus Them, the Blessed versus the Ignored, the<br />
Rattlers versus the Quiets.<br />
A solution that has been proffered—although it might create an even larger<br />
problem, if you think about it—is that we go down the path of widespread gene<br />
modification. This solution proposes that anyone with non-rattling FFTB128<br />
genes can choose to have the gene stimulated in some way as to activate it.<br />
Some medical groups are already lobbying to have the procedure—when it is<br />
developed, and that will be sooner rather than later, it would seem—classed as<br />
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 145 6/11/12 9:20 AM<br />
145
I should be so lucky Sam Cooney<br />
gene therapy, meaning that those without the ‘lucky’ gene would be classified<br />
as having a genetic disorder. But what happens when a much larger percentage<br />
of the population suddenly becomes ‘lucky’? Is there a balance that would be<br />
upset? Is it even possible for so many people to be ‘lucky’ at the same time?<br />
What would a lucky society look like? How about a lucky world?<br />
In the course of researching this article I have been genetically tested for<br />
the existence of an active ‘lucky’ allele. I won’t keep you in suspense: I tested<br />
positive. I possess a beautifully rattly bunch of FFTB128 genes. Now this might<br />
not come as a surprise to you, dear reader. You might have already assumed<br />
that I am ‘lucky’. Maybe it’s because I am only fourteen years old and yet<br />
somehow I’ve managed to procure this highly sought-after internship at this<br />
most respected of online publications. Maybe it’s because you’ve heard of my<br />
recent massive success as an amateur broker for one of the largest hedge funds<br />
in this country. Maybe it’s because you’ve seen me in tabloid rags and society<br />
pages on the arm of one very popular and good-looking star of the cinematic<br />
world. But before you commit to an opinion—whether you think of me as<br />
unfairly fortunate or as a member of a necessary elite—stop for a moment and<br />
consider how a ‘lucky’ person like me might feel. There are questions no-one<br />
wants to be forced to ask themselves. Has anything I’ve ever achieved been<br />
because I earned it? Could I fail even if I wanted to? Is this proof that God really<br />
does exist, and if so, why have I been favoured? Is that humming coming from<br />
me or from my computer?<br />
I choose—nay, I suppose my FFTB128 alleles choose—to write and publish<br />
this article in the hope of bringing some measure to a dialogue that has thus<br />
far been anarchic. Because right now, among all this madness, I’m not sure if a<br />
single one of us, whether ‘lucky’ or ‘unlucky’, is feeling fortunate.<br />
As always, please offer your thoughts in the comments box below. #YOLO! M<br />
146<br />
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 146 6/11/12 9:20 AM
Memoir<br />
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 147 6/11/12 9:20 AM
In Search of García Márquez<br />
Judith White<br />
The greaT gabriel garcía márQuez Will WriTe no more. Early in July<br />
his brother Jaime informed students in their native Colombia that Gabo, as<br />
the family knows him, has dementia. While he retains his zest for life, Jaime<br />
continued, it is most unlikely that he will complete the second part of his<br />
autobiography.<br />
That may not be the worst aspect of this sad news. The first part of the<br />
memoirs, Vivir para contarla (Living to Tell the Tale), is such a brilliant<br />
evocation of the time and place that formed the writer that it would be difficult<br />
for a sequel to equal it. When it came out in 2002 it took me back to the banana<br />
lands of Santa Marta where García Márquez grew up. He recalls returning with<br />
his mother Luisa to the town where he had lived as a boy, and treading the<br />
dusty, deserted streets in the midday heat. They are streets I once knew.<br />
Half a lifetime ago, as a young student, I set off to find Macondo, the<br />
fictionalised town at the centre of the outstanding novel One Hundred Years of<br />
Solitude. It was the summer of 1970 and I was a postgraduate in Latin American<br />
studies at Oxford. Months earlier my tutor, Malcolm Deas, had suggested that<br />
if I wanted to understand more about Colombia I should read the book, then<br />
relatively unknown. It had been published in Spanish in 1967 and had yet to be<br />
translated into English.<br />
At the local Spanish language bookshop I found Cien años de soledad.<br />
A fabulous saga of the Buendía family with an extraordinary cast of characters<br />
whose rise, decline and fall mirrors that of their isolated inland town, it is a<br />
rolling, poetic, imaginative tour de force. Credited with marking the start of<br />
magical realism as a form of the novel, it was instrumental in winning García<br />
Márquez the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982. I devoured it the weekend<br />
I bought it, and decided there and then that my thesis subject would be its<br />
historical background.<br />
I did find Macondo, but the documentary record was another thing entirely.<br />
I was to learn an unforgettable lesson about the relationship of fiction to<br />
historical truth. And that perhaps gives a very personal journey some wider<br />
interest. In those far-off days when the British government was still handing<br />
out grants for research in the humanities, funding was available for a field trip<br />
to the Americas in the long vacation between the two years of my course (a<br />
Bachelor of Philosophy, not a doctorate). My proposed itinerary was detailed<br />
and tightly costed, and I got the money.<br />
The pivotal event in the novel is the 1928 massacre of banana plantation<br />
workers casually employed by the United Fruit Company. Soon afterwards<br />
the company withdrew from the area, leaving it desolate. It was known that<br />
148<br />
The author’s passport at the time of<br />
her 1970 Colombia trip, photograph by<br />
the author, 2012<br />
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 148 6/11/12 9:20 AM
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 149 6/11/12 9:20 AM
In Search of García Márquez Judith White<br />
this had indeed happened, but nothing much had been published in the way<br />
of historical research. Before setting off I found some references to the events<br />
in British consular reports at the Public Record Office in Chancery Lane, now<br />
moved to the National Archives at Kew.<br />
The first stop on my trip was Boston in the United States, headquarters<br />
of the United Fruit Company. I arrived on a student charter flight and went<br />
to stay with friends in the anti-war movement. The next day I pitched up at<br />
the company’s imposing offices to a decidedly frosty reception. They had no<br />
records on Colombia, a tight-lipped PR person told me, but after some time he<br />
came up with the Florida address of a retired former manager from Santa Marta.<br />
Next I took a Greyhound bus down to New York, to spend a few days in<br />
the Public Library going through American published books and journals.<br />
I found out something about Colombia, and rather more at night about<br />
Greenwich Village.<br />
Another bus took me to Washington, where I struck gold. The US State<br />
Department’s consular records were the single best source of material, with<br />
reports on the build-up to the conflict of 1928 and the diplomatic difficulties<br />
of its aftermath. For a week I didn’t miss an hour in there and went away with<br />
armfuls of notes.<br />
The Greyhound this time took me through William Faulkner country to<br />
white-bread territory in Florida. I got off the bus in sweltering heat and followed<br />
my map to the former manager’s street of suburban bungalows, clipped gardens<br />
and terminal boredom. Years later, arriving on the Gold Coast in Australia,<br />
I would have a moment of déjà vu. The old man, pasty-faced and overweight,<br />
invited me in cordially enough. He lived in chilly air conditioning with the<br />
blinds drawn against the sun. As I put my questions the air grew even cooler.<br />
‘I don’t remember anything about all that,’ he said. ‘I was just the manager,<br />
you know.’<br />
I was soon back on the bus. Miami airport was bedlam, but I found my flight<br />
to Calí in Colombia. It was a lot cheaper than flying to Bogotá, the capital, and<br />
it had looked near enough on the map. At Calí in the early morning I shoved<br />
my way through the crowds and miraculously found the right bus. How long<br />
will it take, I asked the driver. Oh, he said, we’ll be there by ten o’clock tonight.<br />
I hadn’t allowed for the mountain roads in between.<br />
But what a great introduction to Colombia the trip turned out to be. I sat next<br />
to a woman with a cage full of chickens, while a man with a sharp-looking scythe<br />
stood swaying beside us. We passed through streets plastered with election<br />
posters, two road blocks where everyone had to dismount while armed soldiers<br />
150<br />
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 150 6/11/12 9:20 AM
Memoir<br />
searched for fighters of the FARC (Colombian Revolutionary Armed Forces),<br />
and villages where we were besieged by women and children selling skewers of<br />
chicken, cold drinks and fruit. By the time we reached Bogotá in the dark my<br />
remaining fellow passengers had consulted each other and come up with the<br />
name of a cheap but decent hotel where a foreign student might reasonably stay.<br />
Colombia’s national records yielded a little about landholding patterns and<br />
population movements, but nothing much about the conflict with the fruit<br />
company. Once again it was my off-duty time that proved more interesting.<br />
A couple of students I met took me to talk to some young prostitutes from<br />
the coastal area. Sold into the sex trade by their families, knowingly or not,<br />
for a pitifully small amount of cash, these fourteen- or fifteen-year-olds were<br />
living four to a windowless concrete cell of a room. They were miserable and<br />
frightened—‘melancholy whores’ indeed, nothing like the lissom Caribbean<br />
sex workers in García Márquez’s fiction.<br />
Finally a day-long train journey took me from the cold, misty Andean capital<br />
to the tropical heat of Santa Marta, the port that was the administrative centre<br />
of the old banana zone. I stayed on the rocky point there at a marine institute<br />
known to my tutor. There didn’t seem to be a lot of marine research happening<br />
but the young manager and his wife were very welcoming, showed me where<br />
to swim and wanted to know all about my project. Only this year, so long<br />
afterwards, a friend with intelligence contacts told me of his firm belief that the<br />
place had been funded by the CIA.<br />
I worked through local records at the Santa Marta town hall, where beautiful<br />
black girls leant through the windows selling lychees and loquats. I found<br />
the little town fascinating, with its street stalls of avocadoes and guavas—so<br />
exotic to a Lancashire-born girl that it was two days before I realised I could<br />
afford them.<br />
At a fruit stall in the street one day I met Fermín Ahumada Arrieta, a young<br />
doctor, and we became friends. He turned out to be from Aracataca—the ghost<br />
town on which Macondo was based. Before I went there, he suggested we go<br />
to Barranquilla, the bigger port along the coast, where he had some business.<br />
There he could help me contact Alberto Durán, one of the few surviving union<br />
leaders from the time of the massacre. An old communist, the man was wary of<br />
new contacts but agreed to meet me.<br />
In Barranquilla as a young journalist García Márquez had discussed ideas<br />
late into the night in bars and cafés, and first read Faulkner and Virginia Woolf.<br />
The place was bustling compared to Santa Marta. As evening fell there was a<br />
brisk trade in street food, and we had oyster shots and roast corn. The next<br />
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 151 6/11/12 9:20 AM<br />
151
In Search of García Márquez Judith White<br />
morning I met Durán, and over two hours slowly coaxed out of him his<br />
recollections of the terrible days of 1928 when thousands of United Fruit banana<br />
workers and their families, protesting over brutal conditions and low pay, were<br />
gunned down by the military in the square at the village of La Cienaga. The old<br />
man was pretty cagey and didn’t want to say too much on the record—he was<br />
clearly still afraid of the consequences. But he did confirm that many people<br />
had been killed. I took it all down, as much as he would allow, on my trusty old<br />
tape recorder.<br />
That afternoon, walking back from the bus at Santa Marta to the marine<br />
station, I was mugged by a man who leapt down onto the track and dragged the<br />
tape recorder from my shoulder until the strap broke. He was gone in a flash.<br />
Building workers from the nearby port rushed to help me, and took me to the<br />
marine station where the manager insisted on calling the police. Which didn’t<br />
help. The police chief, a corpulent forty-something with a paunch and a greasy<br />
moustache, took personal control of the case and invited me to lunch next day,<br />
where it became clear that he was more interested in getting some post-prandial<br />
action than in finding the thief. He offered me a lift in his car but I declined.<br />
Looking back, none of this is surprising. I was twenty-two, I looked like<br />
a gringa and I was wandering around Colombia on my own in a mini-skirt.<br />
The worst thing about the tape recorder episode was that I couldn’t get back<br />
to Durán to reinterview him. I tried ringing, but there was never an answer.<br />
He’d gone to ground. But with Fermín’s help I could go to Aracataca, kilometres<br />
away in the hinterland. His practice was in town, but his family still lived in the<br />
old place. He would meet me there and show me around.<br />
It was late morning when I stepped off the bus into blistering heat.<br />
The township was deserted—a few streets of white-walled, single-storey<br />
houses, a few palms, their fronds hanging limp in the still air—but from<br />
somewhere far off came the sounds of a Caribbean steel band. Fermín was<br />
waiting, and welcomed me to his home. I thought I’d stepped into the Buendía<br />
compound. Around a central courtyard, whitewashed rooms divulged children,<br />
aunts and grandparents. Toddlers chased chickens around in the dust. Fermín’s<br />
mother grabbed one of them—a chicken, not a baby—and promptly wrung<br />
its neck in honour of my arrival. Half an hour later we all sat down to lunch.<br />
I learned everyone’s names and they asked about my family.<br />
When everyone else retired for the siesta, Fermín took me exploring under<br />
the relentless sun. Even the cicadas had fallen quiet. We came to a deserted<br />
house, and he pushed open the big street door. Inside there was nothing much<br />
to see—the place was abandoned, the walls in disrepair, a few weeds in the<br />
152<br />
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 152 6/11/12 9:20 AM
Memoir<br />
old courtyard. This was the home of García Márquez’ grandparents, where the<br />
stories of old colonels from bygone wars seized the child’s imagination and his<br />
cast of characters was born. Since I saw it the place has been partially restored,<br />
to be shown to visitors; back then it was as derelict as though it had been swept<br />
by the leaf storm at the end of the novel.<br />
But Fermín knew I was looking for documentation, too. So the next stop<br />
was the notary’s office. A huge old black man in a rather stained white suit,<br />
the lawyer sat behind his desk in a tiny room, swatting flies away and wiping<br />
his streaming brow with a handkerchief. I’m looking for records of the town’s<br />
history, I said. He waved at the walls, covered from floor to ceiling in stacks<br />
of yellowing paper. These are the old land titles from that time, he explained.<br />
We did a lot of business back then. But since the company went away, they’re<br />
all worthless. You wouldn’t find much. Try asking the mayor at the town hall.<br />
You’ll just catch him.<br />
We did. He looked rather like the Santa Marta police chief, and he was just<br />
on his way out with his buxom secretary, all beehive hair and high heels. We<br />
have to go to lunch, he said. Is there anyone who can show me records from<br />
the 1920s and 1930s, I asked. Oh, he replied, there aren’t any. This place burned<br />
down twenty years ago and all the records went. But there is an old man who<br />
was town clerk back then. I can give you his address.<br />
We set off once more through the sun-bleached streets. As we neared the<br />
house we saw movement, heard voices. Opening the door into the compound<br />
we found a throng of people, some sitting, some drinking and eating—they<br />
seemed to have set up camp. Hmm, said Fermín, this looks like a wake. The<br />
town clerk’s daughter came out to greet us. He’s very ill, she said. We don’t think<br />
he has long to go.<br />
We gave our sympathy. I’m sorry about your father, I said, and told her why<br />
I was there. You know, she said, he does have some old papers. But they’re all<br />
in a box under his bed. You’ll understand that I can’t disturb him now to get at<br />
them. Try in a few days.<br />
The days turned into a couple of weeks. I called twice from Santa Marta<br />
before I had to leave, but the old man was still holding on. And the wake was<br />
still in full swing.<br />
There was one last visit we paid that day. We went back to Fermín’s place<br />
through the streets of abandoned banana workers’ lodgings—single-room<br />
concrete blocks, with a door and no windows, like the one those young Bogotá<br />
prostitutes lived in. A door halfway down the street was open, and inside was<br />
the oldest woman I’d ever seen, sitting there in the baking heat with a bowl of<br />
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 153 6/11/12 9:20 AM<br />
153
In Search of García Márquez Judith White<br />
food someone had brought her. Her eyes were milky blue—she was blind. This<br />
is Señora Tomasina, said Fermín. She’s 120 years old and she remembers.<br />
I thought I was meeting Ursula Buendía from One Hundred Years of<br />
Solitude—the woman who outlives almost everyone. I said hello, and asked<br />
if she remembered what happened in 1928. ‘Thousands of them,’ she said.<br />
‘Thousands of them died. Men and women and children. They brought a train,<br />
a very long train, and took them all out to sea. They were all dead.’<br />
That was all I was left with. Señora Tomasina’s words could have been<br />
those of Jose Arcadio Segundo, the character in the novel everyone said was<br />
crazy, because he remembered what happened that day. I went away with<br />
plenty of material about the 1928 conflict, but no proof of the massacre. The<br />
documentation had all turned to dust like the Sanskrit pages of the wanderer<br />
Melquíades that had, in the book, waited a hundred years to be read.<br />
I wrote my thesis, got my degree and moved on. Somewhere in an eventful<br />
life I lost my copy, and after twenty-five years living in Australia I recovered<br />
it from Oxford’s Bodleian Library online service only a couple of years ago.<br />
Looking at it after all these years I hardly recognise it. For a while back then<br />
I probably knew more than almost anyone on the planet about landholding<br />
patterns, agricultural activity, development and population movements in<br />
the Santa Marta area, about the United Fruit plantations, the banana workers<br />
dispute and the consular records. But my thesis gathers dust in the Bodleian,<br />
unlamented even by me, and One Hundred Years of Solitude will be read as long<br />
as there are people who read.<br />
A few years ago, in the bookshop of the excellent provincial museum of<br />
China’s ancient capital Xian, I was browsing through catalogues when I heard<br />
Spanish being spoken at the counter behind me. Turning round I saw a genial<br />
Chinese attendant assisting a group of tourists. When they moved off I walked<br />
over and complimented him on his Spanish. Where did you learn, I asked.<br />
Right here, he said, reading the works of Gabriel García Márquez.<br />
I’m writing this from the Mani in Greece, fifty years ago as remote a place<br />
as Aracataca on the other side of the Atlantic. But below the surface you find a<br />
wealth of history, connections with the outside world and a passion for ideas<br />
that a casual observer would never suspect. García Márquez gave voice to a<br />
forgotten place and people, plundered, ravaged and abandoned, but forever<br />
alive in the pages of his great novel. Fiction proves stronger and truer than<br />
the writing of history. And though his pen may move no longer, the writer will<br />
always be with us.<br />
Viva Don Gabriel! M<br />
154<br />
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 154 6/11/12 9:20 AM
Plato<br />
Jakob Ziguras<br />
It is said that Plato earned his name, the epithet<br />
‘broad-shouldered’, from wrestling in his youth.<br />
Was it then that he first learned the weight of truth,<br />
when the daemon held and forced him to submit?<br />
No doubt defeat on the tan, light-blasted dust<br />
instructed him: the lock, the focus, shifting weight,<br />
the dialectic of the tangled limbs, the last<br />
struggle of flesh against necessity; till fate<br />
acquired, at last, the perfect, bounded shape<br />
of character, and the contested bodies shone like stone<br />
from which every flaw of despair or hope<br />
had been masterfully cut, leaving alone<br />
the accomplished moment when these warm<br />
shadows were freed from darkness into form.<br />
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 155 6/11/12 9:20 AM<br />
155
Second Chance<br />
Marian Waller<br />
for Michael Callaghan<br />
It’s your turn now. The creaking bus has<br />
pulled up by the lake. Old friends and lovers,<br />
sisters, brothers, have gathered here on this familiar<br />
patch to help you bundle all your tatty bags,<br />
bursting at the seams with so much history.<br />
The bus is purring as you take your place,<br />
each window holding still a solemn face<br />
of others who are dying and who wait.<br />
They hold you gently in their stare, then see<br />
the angels uniformed in pairs, intoning<br />
honeyed mantras as they swoop, to serve<br />
all final needs with calm and grace.<br />
Inside the ward, pinned to the bed<br />
in the cool tent of institution sheets, you are<br />
adrift in time, now a sweetmeat in a pastry case,<br />
now a luscious undulating grub, within an airy<br />
wooden root beneath the earth. The lakeside<br />
mercy sisters come with soothing songs<br />
and trays of silver armaments.<br />
One swift jab and you are off again.<br />
The open grasslands of your mind in thrall<br />
to dizzy spools of imagery, a squall of hooves,<br />
the herdsman’s lurid cry. Then later as you come to,<br />
blearily, the nurses prod and turn you, like a roast.<br />
You register some nausea and pain,<br />
156<br />
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 156 6/11/12 9:20 AM
ut disbelief is what pervades you most.<br />
Your body reconfigured as a whole, you contemplate<br />
existence and the soul. Something has shifted.<br />
Has there been a choice? Most have no option.<br />
You are here. Rejoice. Your eyes once glassy,<br />
only turned within, are now examining what may begin.<br />
Editor’s note: This is Marian Waller’s first published poem. Sadly she did not live to<br />
see it in print.<br />
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 157 6/11/12 9:20 AM<br />
157
Dinosaurs of the Croatian Wild<br />
Ronnie Scott<br />
i am sTanding legs akimbo, head upthrust, and arms outstretched in a<br />
half-shell of black plastic wrap with paper on my feet while a Hungarian<br />
businesswoman waves a gun at me. It’s a weighty, ovoid rustball but she holds it<br />
like a Longbeach, and I ask her if I should close my eyes.<br />
The gun whirs and she aims it. ‘It should be fine, I think.’ But something<br />
makes her set it down and step onto the sheet. She plucks my left hand from the<br />
sky and webs the fingers to inspect them. With her thumb, she wipes the crevasse<br />
between my index and middle fingers, and it comes away nacreous and slick.<br />
‘You look disappointed,’ I offer.<br />
‘No. You made no mistake, it’s natural.’ She directs me to the sink, where I<br />
wash off the Vaseline.<br />
Outside the application room, my friend Marion thumbs a compact<br />
Hungarian-language fashion magazine. Before my arrival she posted a photo on<br />
my Facebook of a generic hottie cradling a woman as they lie on a dirty length<br />
of sand. They are both grinning violently, and both have umber tans. ‘I am<br />
convinced this is a good idea,’ she wrote.<br />
Marion may have booked us in for spray-tans as a gag thing, but inside the<br />
plastic half-shell the laws of humour don’t apply. Instead, there’s a solemnity<br />
to totally the wrong things: you must spread tan-repellent Vaseline along your<br />
palms, for instance, but not between your fingers or it’ll look unnatural as hell.<br />
I grip the only thing I’m wearing—my worst underwear—and bunch it up to<br />
better expose the thighs.<br />
‘Turn around,’ invites the woman, and I face the plastic wrapping. Then the<br />
gun emits a floral smell and starts to dust my back.<br />
The businesswoman leads me through a slow series of dance moves: arm<br />
out, palm down; arm out, palm tilted; arm out, elbow twisted like a broken<br />
bone. I face the woman, and we dance again.<br />
When I appear in my ruined shorts in the woman’s office, Marion drops the<br />
magazine and her mouth forms a ‘whoa’.<br />
‘And now you must not shower for eight hours,’ says the woman, ‘and in the<br />
morning, of course you will be dark.’<br />
I recommend the drive from Budapest to Krk be undertaken in a five-man<br />
formation, arranged like so. In the front, Stephen and Theo, even though they<br />
are a couple and sometimes drive with no hands, which are occupied with<br />
the creative styling of each other’s hair. If this is problematic in the ordinary<br />
instance, right now all that matters is that their hairstyles look superb. You are<br />
driving to Croatia. It’s not possible to crash.<br />
158<br />
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 158 6/11/12 9:20 AM
Memoir<br />
In the back-left you want Marion figuring out the Navman—why it thinks<br />
your point of departure is deep in Kosovo, and how to make non-Kosovar<br />
cartography show up. The solution turns out to be thumbing—hard—a dark void<br />
in the touch screen, a large nebulous freeway through the odd, foreign device.<br />
Once this is thumbed, the roads from Hungary to Croatia open. The universe<br />
seems to provide a path.<br />
And to your right is Hillary, whose job it is to skip past the Top 40 in your<br />
playlist and dial the iPod back to the shared music of your youth: ‘Closing Time’<br />
by Semisonic is more than acceptable, as is all of Jagged Little Pill. We only<br />
know Stephen and Theo from a recent Gmail thread: ‘Hello, new friends!’ wrote<br />
Stephen. ‘We’re nice people and excited to vacation with you!’ So while our<br />
bonding is largely achieved through a communal sun-drunkenness, the song<br />
choice also plays a substantial role.<br />
We spend a long time gazing at the layout of the borderlands: pitted plains<br />
interrupted by fields of cypress pine. Hillary observes that it is dinosaur country,<br />
and the idea works its way into a twenty questions match. ‘Are you best known<br />
for having roamed the earth?’ Hillary asks me. But I am only a streetlight. We kick<br />
off the list of Google queries for when we get back to Hungary with ‘dinosaurs of<br />
the Croatian wild’. It is a thoughtful journey.<br />
But it is also an exuberant one. Theo and Stephen have just quit their jobs;<br />
they’re soon to be New Yorkers, escapees from the socio-moral concavity of<br />
Budapest. Hillary has come to Europe on a doctoral boondoggle, pocketing hotel<br />
food to snack on through the talks. Marion has just received a transfer to the<br />
London office after two years grinding in the Hungarian human rights world,<br />
which is typically indifferent to her work. As for me, the spray-tan was the final<br />
thing I purchased with the last pay of my doctoral scholarship. My thesis made<br />
‘an argument for the primacy of space’, which feels increasingly unexplainable<br />
on this victory lap. But I can explain the reason I have come to Eastern Europe:<br />
after all these years of studentship I want to be reborn. Or at least brutally revised<br />
along the lines of neurophysiology: something like a chiropractic of the psyche.<br />
‘Spring break’ is an existing term for this reset procedure. It originated in<br />
Florida between the two world wars. While the destinations have diversified,<br />
a 1995 study found spring break’s key components largely unchanged: ‘a<br />
group holiday with friends travelling and rooming together, a perpetual party<br />
atmosphere, high alcohol consumption, sexually suggestive contexts and<br />
displays, and the perception that casual sex is common’.<br />
Our own catchphrase is the adapted ‘grown-up spring break’. In Marion’s<br />
words, ‘No-one gave us permission to go!’ It also means we aren’t planning to<br />
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 159 6/11/12 9:20 AM<br />
159
Dinosaurs of the Croatian Wild Ronnie Scott<br />
sexually explore each other, but the preceding criteria have been addressed<br />
in depth.<br />
Using Airbnb.com, we’ve rented an apartment twenty metres from the<br />
Adriatic coast. The landowner’s snaps weren’t fabulous. They made the terrace<br />
look washy, and the last photo in the set was clearly a stock photograph of a<br />
rocky beach, labelled simply ‘Beach with rocks’. There was something about<br />
booking it, though, that felt charged and perilous—an extra chance to perform<br />
well against an adult metric. They were just inelegant photos, and to grown-ups,<br />
what were those? Maybe just beyond the corners there was hidden rental gold.<br />
We pull into the beach house—Navman working—around dusk, and the<br />
world turns out to have rewarded our mature choice. It was advertised as<br />
sleeping five, but even in a grown-up context, it could probably suit a dozen or<br />
more. The kitchen is well utensilled and the terrace wide and bright, and all<br />
about the place are little glass-topped wicker tables decorated inoffensively with<br />
nautical knick-knacks.<br />
Since the beach house is so homey, my mind wanders vaguely homeward<br />
while we go about the business of dividing up the rooms. I have never lived my<br />
life without this implicit charter: ‘Why don’t you go learn something today!’<br />
At some very near point, though, inarguably closing in, I’ll board a flight home<br />
to Melbourne and I’ll find the rules have changed.<br />
The beach house discourages such concerns. The sky has been unbalanced<br />
by a creamy, sombre moon, and Theo’s mobilising us into opposing armies,<br />
stewarding a few warm Coronas into our hands. While he claims inexperience<br />
with fraternity conventions, he is suspiciously adept at drinking games.<br />
The beach house is located on the rim of Omišalj, a town on the island of Krk<br />
most famous for some view-ruining petrol tanks, a castle, and an impressive<br />
mountain zone. According to a website, the old town’s ‘labyrinth logic’ is a<br />
pleasure in which to lose yourself.<br />
Our daylight hours, however, are devoted to hangtime, and hangtime<br />
happens along a twenty-metre walk. There is nothing labyrinthine about it.<br />
Stage one is breakfast. Our landlord has supplied the beach house with a blunted<br />
meat slicer, and we meet the implied challenge with a local bacon steak, hog<br />
hair still attached along one side. First we shave the bacon then, concurrent with<br />
eating it, the second stage of hangtime—preparation—cranks up. In July the UV<br />
index can rise above 8, and Hillary is pushing a full bottle of tanning oil on us.<br />
I’m not convinced this is protective, but we have no Google here. Sunburn, like<br />
bankruptcy and crashing the hire car, thus becomes an impossible outcome.<br />
160<br />
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 160 6/11/12 9:20 AM
Memoir<br />
[Colour section begins]<br />
So, around lunch, we carry some chairs down from the beach house, passing<br />
a back yard–dwelling turtle we call Ralph. Here, stage three commences, which<br />
is the Great Lying Around. Stephen and Theo spend many of these hours<br />
slouching on their beach towels and dreaming in the general direction of the<br />
sun. It’s completely possible they are bored.<br />
While Stephen and Theo backed out of the event we call ‘the browning’,<br />
both Hillary and Marion went through the same process as me. The three of us<br />
are endlessly interested in our spray-tans, and they are the only things we ever<br />
want to discuss. We address the effect of Hillary’s undertan, which is nugatory,<br />
and the effect of the tanning oil, which is probably not. Marion, during her<br />
own tan, didn’t Vaseline her toenails, and it looks like she’s been using them to<br />
chain smoke. Why is Hillary’s left calf more golden than mine this morning? Is<br />
it lastingly darker, or just excessively oiled up? But my shoulders are ‘exactly<br />
perfect’, ‘objectively the best’. There aren’t many other people on our little<br />
beach with rocks here, but I’m still glad the salty sea is actively hostile to the<br />
safe storage of recording equipment.<br />
Stage four, which is the final stage, takes place in the water, where the spraytans<br />
are less visible and the discourse notches up. We formulate quick memes<br />
together: the best is ‘taglines for a movie about sex bots that have turned<br />
against the human race’. Stephen wins, for ‘First they turned us on. Then they<br />
turned on us.’ It is perfect, objectively the best. For Marion, twelve consecutive<br />
submerged somersaults are achievable; for the rest of us mortals, maybe not.<br />
What we can share, though, is watermelon that has been chilled in the beach<br />
house, and is brought forth to the water whenever someone lumbers up. It is<br />
one of those sweet extras that could not be done by teenagers, so this aqueous<br />
feeding time has a jubilant character.<br />
If you are not a sand fan, the only downside to a beach with rocks is leaving<br />
the water. The rocks are slippery and require us to engage in lateral thought.<br />
It’s Hillary who arrives at the successful methodology: you swim towards the<br />
shoreline and essentially don’t stop, so when the rocks begin to glide against<br />
your chest hairs, the swim evolves into a kind of crawl.<br />
I misname the primordial exit strategy ‘mitochondrial’—no Google—but<br />
it’s the same gorgeously graceless result. Neither permission nor volition plays<br />
a part in becoming an adult. But you can always choose to emerge in this way<br />
from the water, a version of evolution where you’re always rising up.<br />
We are in Croatia for what feels like a very long time, and there are variations on<br />
the stages listed above. Four Kings is a drinking game that ends like any other:<br />
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 161 6/11/12 9:20 AM<br />
161
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 162 6/11/12 9:20 AM
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 163 6/11/12 9:20 AM
Dinosaurs of the Croatian Wild Ronnie Scott<br />
the manic abolition of the already-thin pretence that the winners are the sober<br />
ones while the losers are drunk. We never find much seafood, but like on any<br />
island, we find a lot of pizza pies to soak the liquor up. We also find a boat that<br />
is moored way out in the water, and all boozy and naked late one night we swim<br />
aboard. I wake up with a stiff, engorged head wound, but no-one recalls me<br />
getting it, and I seem not to have drowned. Thereafter, though, it seems wisest<br />
to regenerate often: ‘Guys, I’ll get the beers this time. I want to primordially<br />
emerge.’ With every birth, my tan consolidates. It deepens, thickens up.<br />
Eventually, it breaks, of course—it somehow mottles off, leaving me,<br />
dermatologically, both human and not. I notice this one morning when we’re<br />
hungover in Hungary and we’re emptying the tanning bottle of the last small<br />
drops. It is a simple transformation, but it’s the ease of it that shocks me: I rub<br />
the oil on my shoulders, and I find the flesh rubs off.<br />
It’s probably no coincidence we’ve found ourselves a water park on an island<br />
in the river that divides Budapest in two. Many aspects of postdoctoral life may<br />
remain a mystery, but cut off from the mainland there are skills I can deploy.<br />
The hoodlums lining up for the park’s one and only speed slide have copper<br />
skin, sienna skin, pasty skin and russet. So I’m at least prepared to describe<br />
strangers’ pigmentations, which is a much sought after quality in the modern<br />
business world.<br />
I also know my insular literacy is nothing to write home about. Few<br />
reputable researchers have drawn a correlation between the abilities to chill<br />
watermelon and someday to raise a child; my qualifications are meaningful for<br />
a limited time. But burnished with the oil, with the spray-tan sloughing off, it<br />
isn’t clear that I’ll ever do anything more serious than stand in the sunshine<br />
waiting for my turn to ride. M<br />
164<br />
Previous spread<br />
The beach at Krk, photograph by<br />
Marion Isobel, 2012<br />
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 164 6/11/12 9:20 AM
An Overcast Day in Another Part of the World<br />
Stuart Cooke<br />
Maybe it’s the natural<br />
extension of migration.<br />
—from ‘Marco Polo’ by Ali Alizadeh<br />
Maybe it’s little more than physics,<br />
maybe it’s trivial amid the myriad trajectories<br />
of tiny particles, that I’ve left everything—almost<br />
literally—to come back here: friends, new shoots<br />
throughout the family, a promising job and with it,<br />
for the first time in my life, plenty<br />
of money. (Then there are the other, less tangible things<br />
but perhaps the things I miss the most:<br />
laps at Clovelly on warm afternoons; decent<br />
Chinese food; the sport on TV …)<br />
I’m no soccer fan. I appreciate some of its elegance<br />
but otherwise it’s lost on me, as is much<br />
of life here: I speak the language, enjoy the food,<br />
I worship the activists and their poetry<br />
and I live with the woman I love<br />
but that web—I can’t think of a better word—<br />
that web between things is missing.<br />
You’ll know what I mean:<br />
sometimes in the dusk of an overcast day<br />
you can almost make it out, that thin membrane<br />
holding the world together when the world<br />
is on the verge of fading into itself.<br />
continued<br />
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 165 6/11/12 9:20 AM<br />
165
It’s the thinnest sinew of light, the sticky,<br />
nearly gaseous residue between familiar objects<br />
and what we remember of them<br />
that holds us together in spite of our miscellany.<br />
On all but the brightest days here<br />
I’m left floundering and swimming back into myself,<br />
wondering why, how I got here, if I really am here,<br />
wondering what set of neural linkages I’m missing<br />
to have wandered willingly into this diorama<br />
as it teeters precariously on the void.<br />
There’s no space for solace in the fission of an image;<br />
no clear path emerges after the first few clauses;<br />
what I say is lost in the clutter of a world<br />
that knows nothing of me. Time is compressed<br />
into a thin wire and I speed along it,<br />
waiting to burst into sound at the other end<br />
where I can say these things to you—actually say them—<br />
where I am free to talk to you of memory.<br />
I don’t know who you are<br />
but it’s the thought of you<br />
that drives me—it’s this thought<br />
towards which this poem travels.<br />
166<br />
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 166 6/11/12 9:20 AM
I like to think that my being here’s but momentary<br />
in the larger trajectory of my life.<br />
I like to think, then, that something’s<br />
taking care of me, and ensuring<br />
that things will turn out okay in the end.<br />
I like to think these things as much<br />
as I like to think of saying them to you.<br />
Jostling together and building in pressure<br />
like a gas inside my head, pressing against<br />
my skull with ballooning, molecular yearning<br />
for articulation, what I would say leaks<br />
through the cracks and dribbles down to the ends of nerves:<br />
my fingers search for the words<br />
that my mouth is unable to taste. I focus on the page<br />
to avoid looking out the window<br />
at the darkening world outside,<br />
darker than anything I can point to—with these words<br />
or with their stuttering lights.<br />
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 167 6/11/12 9:20 AM<br />
167
Gallery<br />
Warwick Baker<br />
belanglo (a Work in progress)<br />
investigates an underexplored and<br />
neglected aspect of a narrative from<br />
Australian history and addresses cultural<br />
amnesia. The Belanglo State Forest is<br />
located three kilometres off the Hume<br />
Highway in the Southern Highlands<br />
region of New South Wales. The site is<br />
used primarily for recreational activities<br />
and pine logging, but it is also notorious<br />
as the site of the ‘backpacker murders’ of<br />
serial killer Ivan Milat, as well as a murder<br />
committed in 2010 by Milat’s nephew<br />
and, in the same year, the discovery of<br />
unidentified human female remains. It is a<br />
site of recurring trauma.<br />
The project looks to unearth and reveal<br />
the past wrongs committed at this site and<br />
their implications. Despite the notoriety of<br />
Milat, there is a form of collective amnesia<br />
in relation to Belanglo. The narratives<br />
around these traumas tend to focus on<br />
people and acts rather than places. The<br />
photographs in this series examine the<br />
details and surfaces of this site to search<br />
for the traces of trauma. It is an exercise<br />
in truth seeking, as the images look at the<br />
relationship between the indexical nature<br />
of photography and at the landscape’s<br />
ability to reveal traces of trauma.<br />
Belanglo will be published as a book by<br />
Perimeter Editions and the photographs<br />
will be exhibited by Lindberg Galleries<br />
in Melbourne in 2013. Belanglo was<br />
supported by the Arts Victoria arts<br />
development program.<br />
168<br />
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 168 6/11/12 9:20 AM
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 169 6/11/12 9:20 AM
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 170 6/11/12 9:20 AM
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 171 6/11/12 9:20 AM
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 172 6/11/12 9:20 AM
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 173 6/11/12 9:20 AM
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 174 6/11/12 9:20 AM
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 175 6/11/12 9:20 AM
Report from Blue Mountains<br />
David Brooks<br />
1.<br />
My Echium, exotic that it is,<br />
has collapsed under the weight of its own blossoming.<br />
This afternoon, while I tried to string it,<br />
the sun slipped behind a bank of cloud<br />
and the first fat drops of a heavy shower commenced.<br />
As I climbed the steps to the back verandah, the dog following,<br />
I saw a tiny beetle on the handrail<br />
hesitate and turn, as if deciding to make for home.<br />
The rain, as I sat in the doorway, thundered on the roof, like wonder,<br />
halting us all.<br />
2.<br />
It is spring in the mountains, uncertain spring.<br />
One day it hails, and the temperature drops,<br />
the next it is windy and thirty degrees.<br />
Plants bolt upwards and then stop, as if thinking they have come too<br />
far.<br />
The grass is thick and wild, full of dandelions, scotch thistle, rogue<br />
poppies, dock.<br />
This morning I found myself longing for a country<br />
where no-one understands me.<br />
Tonight a large moth has been keeping me company,<br />
dusting my shoulders with its yellow wings.<br />
176<br />
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 176 6/11/12 9:20 AM
Catching Fire; or, The Art of Sitting<br />
Mark Tredinnick<br />
As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame<br />
—Gerard Manley Hopkins<br />
Mid afternoon I look up from my desk to see<br />
A kingfisher alight in the water poplar.<br />
For ten blue minutes she sits wrapped in<br />
Her sacerdotal self, murder on her mind,<br />
And I watch her steal her own silent show, doing<br />
Nothing, immaculately, among the silver leaves.<br />
Until, as if my eyes had pinned her, the instant<br />
They drop, she flies: the stillest bird<br />
In Christendom reaches escape velocity faster<br />
Than I can find a pen. And I’d like to learn<br />
To sit so still and to disappear so well, my body<br />
Become a famished thought, my mind become a world.<br />
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 177 6/11/12 9:20 AM<br />
177
There is no hereafter<br />
Paul Williams<br />
‘promise me This, paul,’ said my faTher. ‘When I die, don’t give me a<br />
Catholic funeral. I don’t want that priest up there’—he pointed to the steeple<br />
visible in the white English sky through the living-room window of his<br />
bungalow—‘muttering his mumbo-jumbo, hocus-pocus over my dead body.’<br />
I promised.<br />
‘I don’t want him to set foot in the house, understand?’<br />
‘I promise, Dad.’<br />
It was prostate cancer—an aggressive form spreading into his bones and<br />
liver. The doctor had given him a year to live, tops.<br />
I visited as often as I could. Coltishall, on the Norfolk broads, is a long way<br />
from the east coast of Australia. Summer was sticky and hot, and he was cheerily<br />
philosophical about his own demise. I took him to the hospital for blood plasma,<br />
for tests, and I sorted out his pill regime. He spoke about his great awakening<br />
out of the slumber of church tyranny. He was on a quest, he told me, for the<br />
truth. In this final year of his life he would get to the bottom of it. All of it.<br />
Our daily discussions were intense. I learned that he had finally torn away<br />
the facade of his life, the guilt and fear of his upbringing, and had come to an<br />
understanding of the falsity of all religion, especially this ‘whore of Babylon’,<br />
the Holy Roman Catholic and Apostolic Church. His youth had been stolen from<br />
him in the 1940s by sadistic and homosexual priests at his Catholic school; he<br />
had quietly suffered sexual repression and denial his entire adult life; but now,<br />
at seventy-five, he was finally enlightened. It had all started with The Da Vinci<br />
Code and its ancillary texts The Chalice and the Blade and Holy Blood, Holy Grail.<br />
Christ had been demystified. His eyes were open. He was a secular rationalist.<br />
‘You have to do something, Paul,’ hissed my aunt at the obligatory family<br />
gathering in their back garden. ‘Stop him.’ She pointed to my father, standing by<br />
the tea table, surrounded by a crowd of bemused relatives. Children screamed<br />
around them, playing British bulldog.<br />
I could hear even at this distance that he was ranting and raving against<br />
the Church. He did little else. ‘It’s all made up,’ he said, within earshot of the<br />
children. ‘I mean, John, do you seriously believe that that man up there’—he<br />
pointed up at the spire in the sky, where white doves cooed and flapped their<br />
wings—‘can mumble a few words over a piece of bread and a glass of wine and<br />
turn them into the body and blood of a man who died two thousand years ago?<br />
Do you?’<br />
My uncle shook his head. ‘Perhaps now is not the time to talk about it,<br />
Bernard.’<br />
‘Then when? After I’m dead?’<br />
178<br />
The author with his parents Lina and<br />
Bernard Williams in Rhodesia (now<br />
Zimbabwe), photographer unknown,<br />
1966<br />
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 178 6/11/12 9:20 AM
‘The children …’<br />
‘In front of the children,’ hissed my aunt. ‘We all agree with him, but you<br />
don’t tell children that Father Christmas doesn’t exist, do you?’<br />
Her job, my aunt told me, was to hold everything together. This family<br />
was built on tradition, she said. You went off to Australia—maybe you don’t<br />
understand that. Your father is pulling the family apart. I’ll be damned if I let<br />
that happen.<br />
We were a good Catholic family. My well-off uncle and aunt were prominent<br />
philanthropists, served on prominent committees, and were well thought of in<br />
the higher echelons of East Anglian society. Hundreds of years ago this family<br />
had been persecuted for its faith. And everyone, generations of frail grannies<br />
and screaming infants, went to Mass every Sunday.<br />
‘I’ll try.’<br />
But what of the extracted promise and his quest for truth?<br />
The priest of the parish, often present at family gatherings, was an example<br />
not of the ferocity or the intolerance of the Church, but of the pathetic weakness<br />
of its power today in secular British society. He was an Irishman. He smelled of<br />
wool and sour milk, wore sandals with socks, smiled much too often and had<br />
far too many teeth in his mouth. He was an unfortunate cliché, and it seemed<br />
unfair of my father to rant and rave against this harmless man, who proclaimed<br />
a soapy love for all mankind, pressing clean hands on children’s heads, and<br />
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 179 6/11/12 9:20 AM<br />
179
There is no hereafter Paul Williams<br />
lisped, which kept all the children entertained through those long church<br />
services: On the night he was betwayed, Chwist bwoke the bwead …<br />
My father, to be fair, was more tolerant of human frailty that I am; he<br />
was against the monster of the Church itself. He built his arsenal with<br />
reason, argument and a foundation of scientific rationalism, and pitied this<br />
delusional creature.<br />
When the priest discovered that summer that my father was terminally ill,<br />
he beckoned me after church and asked if he could visit.<br />
‘Er … not at this time, Father. He’s going through some difficult issues.’<br />
‘Death is always a difficult issue. Coming to terms with your Maker’s<br />
reckoning is always a difficult issue.’<br />
‘Yes.’ But of course my father now firmly believed—and proclaimed it loudly<br />
to the family—that there was no life after death. ‘You live on in your children,<br />
in the memories of others, in your family’s love, in your stories, Paul, if you ever<br />
write about me after I’m gone.’ The soul is an impossibility. And the idea that<br />
you go to lie in the arms of Jesus merely because a toothy, lisping man with<br />
soapy hands sprinkles your coffin with holy water is preposterous.<br />
My mother, a good believer, with her unquestioning, childlike naivety,<br />
bustled around the house, banging things, sighing to herself all summer.<br />
Religion was not to be torn apart like this, she told me. And my aunt, who had<br />
come to discuss funeral arrangements, had to whisper to her in the kitchen in<br />
despair. ‘What can we do with this man?’<br />
‘At my funeral,’ he said to my aunt and uncle, while my mother poured tea<br />
and clanked spoons, ‘I want no hymns, no prayers and no priest. If you want,<br />
you can read Galileo’s words E pur si muove! And Paul has already agreed to<br />
recite Dylan Thomas’s “Do not Go Gentle into that Dark Night”.’<br />
‘But Bernard …’<br />
‘Old age should burn and rave at close of day,’ my father said. ‘Rage, rage<br />
against the dying of the light.’<br />
‘Father Paddy will conduct the service, of course. We have to have a<br />
religious …’<br />
My father shook his head. ‘Religion? Best business in town, biggest con<br />
in history.’<br />
And that was the end of it.<br />
I returned for a bleak and icy Christmas to find an emaciated and ailing father<br />
who couldn’t walk, and apologised for his frailty. ‘It’s got me, Paul. Don’t I look<br />
awful? It’s in the bones now.’<br />
180<br />
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 180 6/11/12 9:20 AM
Memoir<br />
The regime of pills was giving him alternating constipation and diarrhoea,<br />
the targeted radiotherapy on his thigh and ribs were making him nauseous,<br />
but he was in good spirits. He still read ferociously. ‘A good book is all I need.<br />
A good clear mind is what I’m grateful for.’<br />
Aunt and uncle whispered in my ear at Christmas lunch and the Boxing Day<br />
party. ‘Reason with him, Paul. Father Paddy wants to see him. At least get him<br />
to come to Mass.’<br />
But to no avail. His convictions were strong. ‘Promise me, promise me, Paul.’<br />
‘I promise.’<br />
No chance then of a Catholic funeral. A dying man on a cross? All invented<br />
clap-trap. The Nicene Creed? He refused to say it. He’d been lying all his<br />
life, but now he had blown away the chaff, widened the cracks, pulled apart<br />
and exposed the Church for the sham it was. It had oppressed mankind for<br />
centuries. Not any more. Not this man.<br />
At Easter I made yet another torturous journey from Brisbane to Singapore<br />
to Heathrow, to Norwich, to Coltishall, and found him dying. He was a yellow<br />
emaciated ghost of himself, and our home had been turned into a hospital<br />
ward. He was fed intravenous morphine through a drip in his arm, and he was<br />
turned and bed-panned and fed through a straw by bright, cheerful nurses who<br />
sat vigil at his side, day and night.<br />
He could not see properly. Could not read. And to my consternation, by his<br />
bedside that evening was none other than Father Paddy, administering Holy<br />
Communion. After the night he was betwayed, Chwist bwoke bwead … and he<br />
gave it to his disciples, saying, dwink, this is my blood …<br />
‘Join us, Paul,’ said my mother.<br />
‘But Dad …’ I said after the priest had left.<br />
‘A good man,’ said my father. ‘I don’t believe in all the stuff, but nor does<br />
he—he quietly forgets it.’<br />
Father Paddy visited every day, a calm hand on my head, soapy fingers at<br />
our lips with the host, the body of Chwist.<br />
I brought the good news that I was teaching The Da Vinci Code at university<br />
that semester. ‘I used all your notes, Dad, all your sources, for our popular<br />
novels course. It’s a hit.’<br />
He waved this news away. ‘Destructive, all that stuff,’ he said. ‘Where’s the<br />
love of Christ in all that, Paul?’<br />
‘I …’<br />
‘We don’t worry about that clap-trap any more,’ he said. My mother smiled at<br />
his bedside, held his hand.<br />
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 181 6/11/12 9:20 AM<br />
181
There is no hereafter Paul Williams<br />
And Father Paddy, more and more omnipresent at our house, gave his<br />
toothy grin.<br />
‘The funeral arrangements?’ I asked<br />
‘Oh, your aunt and uncle have sorted that all out with Father Paddy here.’<br />
When you’re dying, who knows what pressures you are under. Were the<br />
drugs befuddling him into submission, into a benevolent fuzziness with family<br />
and priest? I didn’t know.<br />
‘But you still want the Dylan Thomas, right?’<br />
My father frowned, stared into the distant past. ‘Dylan Thomas?’<br />
The nurses came and went, Father Paddy came and went, and I stayed by his<br />
side, brushed his lips with a sponge on a stick to ease the terrible thirst when<br />
he couldn’t eat or drink any more. ‘That nurse kissed me on the lips,’ my father<br />
told me with his grey, unseeing eyes.<br />
The priest was there to the end. He prayed over him; he watched him as he<br />
took his last breath. ‘See you in heaven, Bernard, at the right hand of Jesus.’<br />
My mother held his cold hand, and I stared through blurry eyes.<br />
The funeral was a magnificent affair. All the family were there, all sixty<br />
relatives, all good Catholics, and the children sat beautifully frocked and suited<br />
in the front rows, staring at the shiny coffin wreathed with flowers and a golden<br />
cross with a bronze Christ nailed to it. The hymns were rousing—favourites<br />
of the family—and the reading was from John, chapter eleven: And Jesus<br />
cwied in a loud voice—Awise! Awise! Lazawus, come forth. And he that was dead<br />
came forth …<br />
The sermon—a narrative assuring us that Bernard was smiling down at<br />
us from heaven: ‘He was a good Catholic. He lived a good Catholic life. His<br />
unwavering faith and his good deeds ensure him a place at the right hand of<br />
God.’<br />
Father Paddy muttered his mumbo jumbo, sprinkled holy water on the<br />
coffin while my mother wept and I stood iron jawed and stoically dry-eyed, my<br />
fists clenched, while the words lodged in my throat.<br />
And you, my father, there on that sad height,<br />
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray. M<br />
182<br />
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 182 6/11/12 9:20 AM
Childhood among Strangers<br />
Linda Judge<br />
i could see my sisTer aT The boTTom of The hill that led to home and<br />
safety. She was younger and shorter than me and had fallen behind. Her face<br />
was red and I knew that she had started to cry, which would slow her down even<br />
more. When I reached our back gate I stopped and turned, leaving my hand<br />
ready on the lock. Fear for my own safety was replaced by concern for Liv, who<br />
had let out a shriek as he grabbed her. He was short and squat but much taller<br />
and stronger than Liv, who was only ten. I could see his thin toothless grin as he<br />
forced his lips forward, pretending she was his girlfriend. He told everyone for<br />
years ‘this my girl’ whenever Liv was nearby, despite the fact that she was now<br />
convulsing with sobs, twisting away from his drooling mouth.<br />
Beyond our back gate there were different rules from the world outside<br />
our front door. The institution out the back was a place where anything could<br />
happen. Although it was frightening, it was thrilling too and my sisters and I<br />
would spend all weekend roaming the grounds. Most of the residents of Kew<br />
Cottages knew that the doctors’ houses that formed the boundary between<br />
the normal world and the institution were out of bounds, so we learned to run<br />
fast and lock the back gate swiftly. Sometimes this line was broken and there<br />
was nowhere left to hide. Nothing was quite as terrifying as discovering, when<br />
you looked out the kitchen window towards the back gate, that it had been left<br />
wide open. We all knew better then to answer a knock on the back door. Normal<br />
people entered from Wills Street and rang the bell.<br />
Once, a broad smiling face with cupped hands appeared at my bedroom<br />
window. An ordinary intruder would try to hide but this one looked directly<br />
at me, his stubby fingers pointing at my row of dolls along the shelf. His big<br />
round face and cracked tongue as he tried to speak were awful to look at, and<br />
the words that I could just make out from the other side of the glass didn’t<br />
make sense. For a long time when I looked at my dolls, I could see his small<br />
covetous eyes.<br />
When Mum or Dad were around it was easier to keep a lid on my fear. Eddy<br />
used to feed our chooks when we were away and often when we weren’t. Mum<br />
would always give him a piece of one of her homemade cakes on the best china<br />
with a silver cake fork to eat it with. I don’t know if he kept coming for the cake<br />
or because he loved the chooks but we were never afraid of him. He would often<br />
be standing on our verandah eating cake when I got home from school. ‘Hi,<br />
Eddy,’ I would say as I walked past and through the wooden-framed mosquito<br />
wire back door. I don’t think he ever replied or even knew my name.<br />
I think even Dad was scared when a boy started appearing like clockwork<br />
on Saturday mornings. He would walk in the back door and through the house,<br />
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 183 6/11/12 9:20 AM<br />
183
Childhood among Strangers Linda Judge<br />
The author on one of the many ‘tramps’<br />
that were outside most of the wards<br />
(later units) at Children’s Cottages,<br />
Kew (bouncing was seen to be useful<br />
for improving intellectual capacity).<br />
Photograph by Livia Judge, c. 1981<br />
opening every door as if searching for something and saying ‘hoitz, hoitz, hoitz’<br />
as he rocked backwards and forwards. The first time he appeared, Dad was<br />
shaving, wearing only a singlet. He tried to lead the boy to the back door while<br />
still covered in shaving cream, saying gently, ‘Off you go—back to the ward.’<br />
I locked myself in the toilet until I was sure he had gone. But the next Saturday I<br />
heard him walk through the back garden. ‘Hoitz is here,’ I yelled as I ran to hide.<br />
Sometimes I liked spending time with the residents. Pat seemed pretty<br />
normal and you wouldn’t have guessed that she lived in the same place as<br />
boys like ‘Hoitz’. Maybe that’s why in the seventies when the move towards<br />
deinstitutionalisation began she was moved out into the community, but<br />
even then she would travel to our house for lunch once a month. I didn’t know<br />
where she lived now or how she got to our house but I liked seeing her. She still<br />
called Mum ‘Mrs Judge’ and Dad ‘Doctor’. She used to call me Tootsy and laugh<br />
whenever she said it. She was kind but not affectionate, which was fine with me<br />
as her breath and clothes smelt like smoke and sweat. After lunch she would go<br />
down to the cottages and visit her friends, sometimes having had more than a<br />
few drinks.<br />
As I grew older and bigger I became less afraid of the people who lived<br />
beyond my back fence. I knew that the face that appeared at my window was<br />
a boy with Down’s syndrome called Tim who was affectionate and gentle and<br />
although I wasn’t afraid of being hugged any more, I still didn’t like it. On the<br />
weekends my sisters and I would wander down to ward 37, where we had begun<br />
to help the nurses with feeding and bathing. On our way we would sometimes<br />
still see things that could shock even our grown-up, teenage selves. One was<br />
the moaning woman with her dress held over her head, revealing bloodied legs.<br />
I was now old enough to understand that she was menstruating but I would<br />
never understand her moaning and rocking, although the image comes back<br />
to me still.<br />
In ward 37 (later unit 14) the last intake of residents to Kew Cottages lived<br />
together under the care of Sister Naha. They were not much younger than us<br />
but their intellectual disability meant that they were still treated like children.<br />
At bath time we would help them into a large bath on a raised platform in the<br />
middle of the tiled bathroom and the children would take turns to be washed.<br />
‘Ivan the fish’ never spoke and spent most of his day twirling a piece of rag<br />
around and around, but in the bath he would disappear underwater, holding his<br />
breath for what seemed like minutes and emerge spluttering and laughing. But<br />
he lived in his own world and was too distant to be a favourite. Our attention<br />
184<br />
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 184 6/11/12 9:20 AM
went to those who seemed to respond to it, who would lift their arms for a<br />
cuddle, look us in the eye, or say a few words.<br />
I haven’t moved far from the cottages, and although the institution was<br />
closed down long ago many residents still like to spend time in Kew. One of<br />
them was the late Robin Madden, the ‘dancing man’ who became a fixture at<br />
Kew junction for his joyful kerbside dance routine. Another is Bill, who still<br />
hangs around the supermarket and carries a little address book to write girls’<br />
names in. ‘I like you,’ he would whisper to me or one of my sisters when he saw<br />
us heading down to ward 37. But these days he doesn’t remember who I am,<br />
and although he has my name and phone number recorded in his book he has<br />
never rung me. I like seeing the familiar faces of the people I grew up with and I<br />
always stop to chat, but their lack of recognition usually only reminds me of the<br />
loneliness of a childhood spent among strangers. M<br />
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 185 6/11/12 9:20 AM<br />
185
Questions for the Dead<br />
Ross Donlon<br />
for Margaret Phelps<br />
By night, your Necropolis could be a city skyline—<br />
neighbours on rooftops with TV antennas.<br />
By day, crucifixes chess piece their way<br />
through a thousand flocks of angels<br />
perched on marble or outside mausoleums<br />
waiting the world to end or one to wake.<br />
There’s disorientation being a lone searcher<br />
in a city of dead and gridlocked streets.<br />
Inside the shrubs and patchwork plan<br />
a million souls lie ready and waiting,<br />
like vehicles left in a stadium car park,<br />
motors running until maps arrive.<br />
Religions intertwine like overlapping galaxies,<br />
signs point uncertainly to chapels and shrines<br />
so it’s understandable that finding you<br />
and Kathleen, your stillborn grandchild,<br />
would be difficult, the helpful numbers<br />
well hidden behind trees and uncut grass.<br />
Our time provides no grave goods<br />
to comfort either side of eternity,<br />
no clues as to who you were, a life<br />
with bookends but few books—<br />
186<br />
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 186 6/11/12 9:20 AM
a deathbed drenched by the Change<br />
is the only story that made it here.<br />
Words wear fast even with a headstone’s gravity.<br />
Your site turns out wordless, looking straight up<br />
into the questions each day has to offer<br />
and at night the cartography of stars.<br />
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 187 6/11/12 9:20 AM<br />
187
Contributors<br />
Warwick Baker lives in Melbourne. He is working<br />
on a series of photographs that document Australian<br />
sites and their occupants that have witnessed past<br />
wrongs, such as crimes, colonisation conflict and<br />
environmental degradation.<br />
Diana Bridge’s latest collection of poems is aloe<br />
& other poems (2009). In 2010 she was awarded the<br />
Lauris Edmond Memorial Award for distinguished<br />
contribution to New Zealand Poetry. She is among<br />
the New Zealand poets recently added to the UK<br />
Poetry Archive.<br />
David Brooks’s latest collection of poetry is The<br />
Balcony (2008). UQP published his The Sons of Clovis:<br />
Ern Malley, Adoré Floupette and a Secret History of<br />
Australian Poetry in 2011, and have just published<br />
his fourth novel, The Conversation.<br />
Kevin Brophy teaches creative writing in the School<br />
of Culture and Communication at the University of<br />
Melbourne. He has had twelve books published, his<br />
latest being a collection of prose poems in Radar<br />
(with Nathan Curnow, Walleah Press)<br />
Lorin Clarke is a writer, director and broadcaster<br />
with an arts/law degree from the University of<br />
Melbourne. She co-presents the weekly books,<br />
writing and spoken-word show Aural Text on<br />
Melbourne radio station 3RRR. Lorin is the television<br />
columnist for the Big Issue.<br />
Stuart Cooke’s first poetry collection, Edge Music<br />
(IP), was published in 2011. A collection of more<br />
recent work, Approach, appears in Triptych Poets 2<br />
(Blemish). He is a lecturer in creative writing and<br />
literary studies at Griffith University, Gold Coast.<br />
Sam Cooney is editor of the Lifted Brow, an arts,<br />
culture and fiction magazine, and has commissioned<br />
and edited contributions for several Australian<br />
journals and magazines.<br />
Mark Dapin’s recent novel, Spirit House, was<br />
longlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award,<br />
shortlisted for the Age Book of the Year and highly<br />
commended in the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards.<br />
His first novel, King of the Cross, won the Ned Kelly<br />
Award for First Fiction.<br />
Ross Donlon lives in Castlemaine, where he<br />
convenes a monthly poetry reading. Ross has won<br />
spoken-word and international poetry competitions.<br />
His latest book is The Blue Dressing Gown and Other<br />
Poems (Profile Poets).<br />
188<br />
Suzy Freeman-Greene is a Melbourne journalist,<br />
writer and editor. She writes a regular column for the<br />
Age and her fiction has appeared in Island.<br />
Helen Gildfind lives in Melbourne. ‘Eat. Shit. Die.’ is<br />
from a collection of short stories she is writing with<br />
funding support from the Australia Council for the<br />
Arts.<br />
Alan Gould’s eighth novel, The Seaglass Spiral,<br />
was launched at the National Library in September<br />
2012. His The Past Completes Me—Selected Poems<br />
1973–2003 won the Grace Leven Award for 2006.<br />
Phillip Hall works in remote indigenous education<br />
in the Northern Territory. He lives in Borroloola,<br />
in the Gulf of Carpentaria, where he works with<br />
Yanuwa, Garawa, Mara and Gudandji young people.<br />
He has the best job in the world.<br />
Anna Heyward is a reader, writer, translator and a<br />
member of the Haplax school of reading. See .<br />
Linda Judge is an artist who likes to write. She<br />
studied art at VCA and then RMIT and her most<br />
recent exhibition was a series of still lives depicting<br />
IKEA homewares that looked at the way culture has<br />
been appropriated by the marketplace.<br />
Jean Kent has published four collections of poetry.<br />
She completed her most recent book, Travelling with<br />
the Wrong Phrasebooks (Pitt Street Poetry, 2012),<br />
during a residency at the Literature Board’s Keesing<br />
Studio, Paris, in 2011. She lives at Lake Macquarie,<br />
NSW.<br />
Margo Lanagan’s work has won four World Fantasy<br />
Awards and been shortlisted for the LA Times Book<br />
Prize and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize (South<br />
East Asia and South Pacific section), and longlisted<br />
for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story<br />
Award. Her latest novel is Sea Hearts (Allen & Unwin).<br />
Martin Langford’s most recent collection is The<br />
Human Project: New and Selected Poems (2009). He<br />
is the author of Microtexts (2005), a book of poetics,<br />
and the editor of Harbour City Poems: Sydney in<br />
Verse 1788–2008 (2009).<br />
Michelle Law is a Brisbane writer. Her work has<br />
appeared in Growing up Asian in Australia and<br />
Women of Letters. She is an AWGIE award-winning<br />
screenwriter and is working on a TV comedy series<br />
with Matchbox Pictures.<br />
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 188 6/11/12 9:20 AM
Contributors<br />
Wayne Macauley is a Melbourne writer. He<br />
has published three novels and the short fiction<br />
collection Other Stories. His latest novel, The Cook,<br />
has received broad critical acclaim. The Age has<br />
called him ‘a compelling voice in contemporary<br />
Australian literature’.<br />
Shane McCauley is a TAFE lecturer in Perth.<br />
Many of his poems have appeared in Australian<br />
and international journals. Shane has published<br />
seven books of poetry, most recently The Drunken<br />
Elk (Sunline Press, 2010) and Ghost Catcher (Studio<br />
Press, 2012).<br />
David Mence is a writer, director and dramaturge.<br />
He has been a Creative Fellow at the State Library<br />
of Victoria, a recipient of Inscription’s Edward F.<br />
Albee Scholarship and has had stories published<br />
in Meanjin, Sleepers Almanac and Best Australian<br />
Stories.<br />
Sue Ogle is a geriatrician and associate professor<br />
of Medicine. She uses stories, poetry and creative<br />
writing to teach medical students. She is completing<br />
a Masters of Medical Humanities. Her poetry has<br />
been published in literary and medical journals.<br />
Chad Parkhill is the incoming festival coordinator<br />
for the National Young Writers Festival. He has<br />
written for the Australian, Kill Your Darlings, the<br />
Lifted Brow and the Quietus among others.<br />
Nicolas Paulin is a French engineer and physicist<br />
and leads the ANU contribution to Australia’s space<br />
debris project at Mount Stromlo Observatory in<br />
Canberra. Prior to this he was head of the Space<br />
Mechanical & Thermal Engineering Department at<br />
EADS SODERN in Paris.<br />
Antonia Pont lives and works in Melbourne. She is<br />
a lecturer in TEXT (literary studies and professional<br />
& creative writing) at Deakin University. She writes<br />
poetry, prose and works for performance.<br />
Ron Pretty’s seventh book of poetry, Postcards from<br />
the Centre, was published in 2010. He is spending the<br />
second half of 2012 in the Whiting Studio in Rome,<br />
thanks to the Australia Council’s residency program.<br />
Josephine Rowe’s fiction and poetry have<br />
appeared in Best Australian Stories, Best Australian<br />
Poems, the Iowa Review and Harvard Review. In 2011<br />
she attended the University of Iowa’s International<br />
Writing Program, where she completed a short-story<br />
collection, Tarcutta Wake (UQP, 2012).<br />
Ronnie Scott is a contributor to Lucky Peach, the<br />
Believer, Heat, the Big Issue, Australian Book Review<br />
and ABC Radio. In 2007 he founded the Lifted Brow,<br />
a freeform arts and fiction magazine. He’s working<br />
on a long thing about money and food. See .<br />
Mark Tredinnick, winner of the Montreal<br />
Poetry Prize in 2011 and of this year’s Cardiff<br />
Poetry Prize, is the author Fire Diary, The Blue<br />
Plateau, Australia’s Wild Weather and eight other<br />
acclaimed works of poetry and prose. His new<br />
collection, Body Copy, will be out in 2013 (Puncher<br />
& Wattmann).<br />
Sam Twyford-Moore is the director of the<br />
Emerging Writers Festival. His nonfiction has<br />
appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books.<br />
He wants to be Janet Malcolm writing about<br />
photography in the New Yorker circa 1978. You can<br />
follow him on Twitter @samtwyfordmoore.<br />
Lyndal Walker is an artist, curator and writer. She<br />
has exhibited at galleries including the Museum of<br />
Contemporary Art in Sydney and Modern Culture<br />
in New York.<br />
Marian Waller was born in Sydney in 1957 and<br />
died in July this year. For many years she worked<br />
in migrant education. In 1996 she published a<br />
successful children’s book, The Leaping Llama<br />
Carpet. After being diagnosed with cancer in 2003<br />
she dedicated herself to qui gong, meditation and<br />
writing. Her poem, ‘Second Chance’, reflects on the<br />
experience of illness in her own life and in those<br />
around her.<br />
Judith White is a freelance writer, a former literary<br />
editor of the Sun-Herald and former executive<br />
director of the Art Gallery Society of New South<br />
Wales. She lives in the banana-growing area of the<br />
Tweed Valley in northern NSW.<br />
Paul Williams has a PhD in creative writing from<br />
the University of Wisconsin and is a lecturer in<br />
creative writing at the University of the Sunshine<br />
Coast. His memoir Soldier Blue won Book of the<br />
Year in South Africa in 2008.<br />
Jakob Ziguras was born in Poland in 1977. His work<br />
has appeared in Meanjin, Australian Poetry Journal<br />
and Measure, and was shortlisted for the Newcastle<br />
Poetry Prize in 2011 and 2012. He holds a PhD in<br />
philosophy from the University of Sydney.<br />
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 189 6/11/12 9:20 AM<br />
189
Index<br />
Volume 71, numbers 1–4, 2012<br />
Contributors<br />
Alizadeh, Ali—‘The Ithacan’; ‘We’, no. 1, p. 83<br />
Armfield, Neil—‘Patrick White: A Centenary<br />
Tribute’, no. 2, p. 18<br />
Attamimi, Mona Zahra—Damp’, no. 3, p. 171<br />
Ballou, Emily—‘The Importance of Tea’, no. 2, p. 29<br />
—‘You had to do everything out of order’, no. 2,<br />
p. 129<br />
Behmoiras, Josiane—‘The Worm inside the<br />
Eggplant: Exorcism, Spirituality and Being in<br />
Other Places’, no. 1, p. 118<br />
Biggins, Jonathan—‘Our National Day’, no. 1, p. 13<br />
Billingham, Craig—‘Waiting for the Train’, no. 3,<br />
p. 111<br />
Bitto, Emily—‘Freestone Road’, no. 1, p. 103<br />
Bradley, James—‘Encounters with the Uncanny’,<br />
no. 3, p. 104<br />
Bridge, Diana—‘A World that Could Be Read’;<br />
‘A Winter’s Tale’, no. 4, p. 32<br />
Britton, Fiona—‘Firebug’, no. 1, p. 166<br />
Brooks David—‘In the Kingdom of Shadows’, no. 2,<br />
p. 89<br />
—‘Report from Blue Mountains’, no. 4, p. 176<br />
Brophy, Kevin—‘The Googly’, no. 4, p. 117<br />
Bryson, John—‘The Murder of Azaria: This Vast,<br />
Stupendous Fraud’, no. 1, p. 6<br />
Bulbeck, Chilla—‘Gender Here and There’, no. 2,<br />
p. 70<br />
Castles, Simon—‘Minutes to Midnight’, no. 2, p. 152<br />
Cho, Tom—‘How can we reconcile the existence<br />
of suffering with the premise of a good and<br />
almighty God’, no. 1, follows p. 164<br />
Chong, Eileen—‘Leap Year’, no. 3, p. 37<br />
Clarke, Lorin—‘Debbie Mortimer and the<br />
Forensic Fight’, no. 4, p. 18<br />
Cooke, Stuart—‘An Overcast Day in Another Part of<br />
the World’, no. 4, p. 165<br />
Cole, Jessie—‘The Knoll’, no. 2, p. 173<br />
Cooney, Sam—‘I should be so lucky’, no. 4, p. 139<br />
Daley, Paul—‘Disturbing the Bodies’, no. 3, p. 44<br />
Dapin, Mark—‘My Last Birthday’, no. 4, p. 133<br />
Darian-Smith, Kate—‘Reading Malouf’s<br />
Remembering Babylon in Tokyo’, no. 2, p. 6<br />
Dolce, Joe—‘Lemonricks’, no. 1, p. 116<br />
Donlon, Ross—‘Questions for the Dead’, no. 4,<br />
p. 186<br />
Edgar, Stephen—‘The Angel of History’, no. 2, p. 79<br />
Ellingsen, Peter—Inside out in Australia’, no. 1,<br />
p. 56<br />
Eltham, Ben—‘The Copyright Wars’, no. 1, p. 126<br />
—‘The state of Australia’s performing arts centres,<br />
and what it tells us about the state of the<br />
Australian arts’, no. 3, p. 92<br />
Ennis, Helen—‘The Space of Biography: Writing on<br />
Olive Cotton’, no. 3, p. 64<br />
Fischer, Luke—‘Portrait of a Thinker’; ‘Snowdrops<br />
in West Philadelphia’, no. 2, p. 68<br />
Foulcher, John—‘Turning Point’, no. 3, p. 54<br />
Francis, David—‘Parts Unknown’, no. 3, p. 114<br />
190<br />
Freeman, Michele—‘What Remains the Same’,<br />
no. 3, p. 129<br />
Freeman-Greene, Suzy—‘Beg’, no. 4, follows p. 16<br />
Gabriel, Matt—‘Other People’, no. 2, p. 143<br />
Gaita, Raimond—‘To Civilise the City?’, no. 1,<br />
p. 64<br />
Gildfind, Helen—‘Eat. Shit. Die’, no. 4, p. 123<br />
Gould, Alan—‘The Great Poet’s Gene’, no. 4, p. 58<br />
Griffiths, Jane Montgomery—‘Classic Love’, no. 1,<br />
p. 148<br />
Hall, Lex—‘The Thirteenth Heat’, no. 3, p. 145<br />
Hall, Phillip—‘Creative Tension’, no. 1, p. 147<br />
—‘Borroloola Blue’, no. 4, p. 16<br />
Halligan, Marion—‘Eating Oysters’, no. 3, p. 152<br />
Hammial, Philip—‘Owls’, no. 3, p. 20<br />
Harkins-Cross, Rebecca—‘Writing the Self: On<br />
Joan Didion’, no. 2, p. 80<br />
Harrison, Martin—‘Patio’; ‘Orchard Bonfire’, no. 2,<br />
p. 161<br />
Hart, Libby—‘Scent’; ‘Universe’, no. 3, p. 102<br />
Harvey, Dimitra—‘Father’; ‘At the Market’, no. 3,<br />
p. 89<br />
Harvey, Siobhan—‘The gifted astronomer goes to<br />
school’, no. 2, p. 176<br />
Heath, Sally—Editorial, no. 1, p. 3<br />
—Editorial, no. 2, p. 3<br />
—Editorial, no. 3, p. 3<br />
—Editorial, no. 4, p. 3<br />
Hendry, Lorna—‘Lennard River Snack Stop’, no. 3,<br />
p. 180<br />
Heyward, Anna—‘Letter to Tom Collins’, no. 4,<br />
p. 47<br />
Jackson, Andy—‘The Future of Genetics’, no. 3,<br />
p. 77<br />
Jaireth, Subhash—‘ “Es geht mir gut” (“I am fine”):<br />
Postcard from Ottla, Kafka’s Favourite Sister’,<br />
no. 1, p. 38<br />
Jones, Barry—‘Antarctica’, no. 3, p. 6<br />
Joosten, Melanie—‘Reading Doris Lessing and<br />
Meeting Maudie Fowler: Notes on Writing and<br />
Doing Good’, no. 1, p. 138<br />
Judge, Linda—‘Childhood among Strangers’, no. 4,<br />
p. 183<br />
Keep, Elmo—‘Summer and Antipsychotics in the<br />
City’, no. 2, p. 183<br />
Keil, Lily—‘No Money, no Honey’, no. 3, p. 160<br />
Kenny, Robert—‘Sunday 8 February 2009—the<br />
Morning After’, no. 3, p. 174<br />
Kent, Jean—‘Translating a “Prolog” ’, no. 4, p. 56<br />
Kinsella, John—‘Autography 5’, no. 3, p. 186<br />
—‘Claws and Muscle: Short-beaked Echidna’, no. 2,<br />
p. 149<br />
Kissane, Andy—‘Keats by the Spanish Steps’, no. 1,<br />
p. 163<br />
Kocher, Shari—‘The Bridge’, no. 1, p. 18<br />
Ladd, Mike—‘Gaps’, no. 1, p. 156<br />
Lanagan, Margo—Titty Anne and the very, very<br />
Hairy Man’, no. 4, p. 98<br />
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 190 6/11/12 9:20 AM
Langford, Martin—‘Poetry lives on: Review’, no. 2,<br />
p. 98<br />
—‘Another Year, Another Engrossing Crop’, no. 4,<br />
p. 70<br />
Law, Michelle—‘Leaving’, no. 4, p. 13<br />
McAuliffe, Chris—‘Living the Dream: The<br />
Contemporary Australian Artist Abroad’, no. 3,<br />
p. 56<br />
McCaughey, Patrick—‘ “Enjoy Your Diversity”:<br />
The 60s Revisited’, no. 3, follows p. 112<br />
McCauley, Shane—‘Larvatus Prodeo’, no. 4, p. 80<br />
Macauley, Wayne—‘Keilor Cranium’, no. 4, p. 90<br />
McGirr, Michael—‘The Sofa’, no. 1, p. 176<br />
McGuire, Jess—‘While I’m Away’, no. 1, p. 15<br />
McKenna, Mark—‘Dublin Days’, no. 3, p. 10<br />
MacLennan, Ciaran—‘By Sea They Come’, no. 3,<br />
p. 17<br />
Manuell, Naomi—‘Libraries of Babel’, no. 2, p. 56<br />
Mead, Rachael—‘Reading Fractals’, no. 1, p. 155<br />
Mears, Gillian—‘Old Copmanhurst’, no. 1, p. 104<br />
Melville, Ruth—‘Narrative, the Nurse and the<br />
Nomad’, no. 2, p. 164<br />
Mence, David—‘Cooking for Edward Albee’, no. 4,<br />
p. 11<br />
Mills, Jennifer—‘The rest is weight’, no. 1, p. 182<br />
Minter, Peter—‘The Crow’, no. 1, p. 189<br />
Mitchell, Alex—‘Lobbying for the Dark Side’, no. 2,<br />
p. 39<br />
Mordue, Mark—‘I’m thinking of you’, no. 3, p. 178<br />
Morrison, Ewan—‘Book without Brand Names’,<br />
no. 2, p. 11<br />
—‘Why Y Matters: Mapping the Consumption<br />
Patterns of Generation Y’, no. 1, p. 21<br />
Mudie, Ella—‘Little Refuge: Design and Solitude’,<br />
no. 1, p. 28<br />
Nicholson, Anna Kerdjik—‘After Reading Derrida’,<br />
no. 2, p. 67<br />
Oakman, B.N.—‘Golden Boy’, no. 1, p. 63<br />
O’Connor, Mardi—‘Puss in Boots’, no. 2, p. 124<br />
Ogle, Sue—Farmstay’, no. 4, p. 68<br />
Parkhill, Chad—‘The Bartender and the Archive’,<br />
no. 4, p. 82<br />
Parsons, Helen—‘Driving Out’; ‘Georgia O’Keeffe’s<br />
Dog’, no. 3, p. 172<br />
Patric, A.S.—‘Measured Turbulence’, no. 2, p. 137<br />
Paulin, Nicolas—‘Game over for Space Junk?’,<br />
no. 4, p. 6<br />
Perlman, Elliot—‘Stop the Boats? ’, no. 2, p. 9<br />
Pont, Antonia—‘The Late Visit’, no. 4, p. 108<br />
Powell, Craig—‘Wedding Night’; ‘Birthday Poem’,<br />
no. 2, p. 15<br />
Pretty, Ron—‘Grace Notes’, no. 4, p. 81<br />
Quilty, Ben—‘Germaine Greer: A Portrait’, no. 4,<br />
p. 43<br />
Raby, Geoff—‘Australia and China Forty Years On’,<br />
no. 2, p. 90<br />
Rowe, Josephine—‘International Writing Program,<br />
Iowa City’, no. 4, p. 8<br />
Schetrumpf, Tegan Jane—‘A Beau for the<br />
Monster’, no. 2, p. 121<br />
Scott, Ronnie—‘Dinosaurs of the Croatian Wild’,<br />
no. 4, p. 158<br />
Skrzynecki, Peter—‘The Horse of Achilles’, no. 3,<br />
p. 185<br />
Symonds, Helen—‘Do not operate heavy<br />
machinery’, no. 2, p. 178<br />
Taylor, Rebe—‘The National Confessional’, no. 3,<br />
p. 22<br />
Terzis, Gillian—‘Outback Mining Communities: A<br />
Cautionary Tale’, no. 2, p. 102<br />
Tredinnick, Mark—‘Catching Fire; or, The Art of<br />
Sitting’, no. 4, p. 177<br />
Tumarkin, Maria—‘The Afterlife of Books’, no. 3,<br />
p. 79<br />
Turner, Todd—‘Seeds’; ‘Woodsmoke’, no. 2, p. 170<br />
Twyford-Moore, Sam—‘Twitter> The Novel? @<br />
tejucole> Teju Cole?’, no. 4, p. 34<br />
Walker, Lyndal—‘Share Houses’, no. 4, p. 60<br />
Wallace-Crabbe, Chris—‘An Autumnal’; ‘Likely’,<br />
no. 1, p. 53<br />
Waller, Marian—‘Second Chance’, no. 4, p. 156<br />
Watson, John—‘Surfer’; ‘Show and Tell Day’, no. 1,<br />
p. 35<br />
Welker, Mark—‘A Funeral for Eddie Moon’, no. 3,<br />
p. 135<br />
Westbury, Marcus—‘Golden Resources’, no. 1,<br />
p. 86<br />
White, Judith—‘In Search of García Márquez’,<br />
no. 4, p. 148<br />
Whitten, Max—‘Deciphering Nature’s Message<br />
Stick’, no. 2, p. 30<br />
Williams, Paul—‘There is no hereafter’, no. 4,<br />
p. 178<br />
Wilson, Chloe—‘Tricoteuses’, no. 1, p. 125<br />
Ziguras, Jakob—‘Plato’, no. 4, p. 155<br />
Discussion/interview<br />
Sonya Voumard talks to Helen Garner—‘The<br />
Interviewer and the Subject’, no. 2, follows<br />
p. 16<br />
Gallery<br />
Baker, Warwick, no. 4, p. 168<br />
Davis, Oslo—‘Libraryland!’, no. 1, p. 94<br />
Parakhina, Lucy, no. 3, p. 38<br />
Walton-Healey, Nicholas, no. 2, p. 112<br />
Artwork<br />
Jones, Nicholas, cover, no. 3<br />
Lancashire, David, cover, no. 1<br />
Maxey, Sarah, cover, no. 2<br />
Quilty, Ben, cover, no. 4<br />
Streich, Michel, illustration, no. 2, p. 71<br />
—illustration, no. 3, p. 93<br />
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 191 6/11/12 9:20 AM<br />
191
Meanjin thanks its supporters Subscription Rates<br />
192<br />
Subscribe online at<br />
www.meanjin.com.au/subscribe<br />
Within Australia<br />
Individual—regular: $80<br />
Individual—concession: $60<br />
Schools: $80<br />
Other institutions: $125<br />
CAL Members: $60<br />
MTC Subscribers: $60<br />
Overseas<br />
Individual: $105<br />
Schools/Institutions: $150<br />
More than one year<br />
8 issues (individuals only)<br />
Regular: $145<br />
Concession: $110<br />
Overseas: $180<br />
12 issues (individuals only)<br />
Regular: $190<br />
Concession: $165<br />
Overseas: $240<br />
We also offer joint Meanjin–Overland<br />
subscriptions ($114) and joint Meanjin–<br />
Griffith Review subscriptions ($136).<br />
To subscribe or make a donation,<br />
contact the Meanjin office on<br />
(03) 9342 0317<br />
or visit our website at<br />
www.meanjin.com.au<br />
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 192 6/11/12 9:20 AM