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
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Editorial
Sally Heath
Ben Quilty, by Germaine Greer, 2009
ThaT journalism ‘musT shine a lighT inTo dark places’ is an overworked
and unhelpful cliché. Sometimes the work of journalists does not produce
a floodlit exposition of good or evil; instead, it often fixes on the more
intellectually and morally intriguing questions found in the shadows.
At the Melbourne Writers Festival this year, the incomparable David Grann
spoke of this often-overlooked aspect of the work of investigative writers. The
award-winning New Yorker staff writer and author said whenever he begins a
story he doesn’t know what he will find. Nothing is simple or uni-dimensional,
even the ‘facts’ he uncovers are complex, nuanced and ‘theory laden’.
Exposing this deeper truth is the heart of his journalism. ‘Transparency is
important. Readers must know where the information came from. And where
there is doubt, the doubt must remain in the story.’ This, he said, ‘is more
truthful reporting’.
It was timely to hear this from such a brilliant practitioner at a moment
when the Meanjin Papers was struggling with the same issues in a piece you
will find in this issue titled ‘Beg’.
Journalist Suzy Freeman-Greene spent twelve months observing,
investigating and thinking about begging in one of Australia’s large capital
cities. It forced her to observe herself and her city as much as it did her nominal
subjects, the people asking for money. Her language changed when she
spoke to beggars. She found she had no consistent reaction. Their sex, their
supplicant signs, their personal stories influenced her response, as did the
weather, what she was doing and the company she was in. Her uncertainty and
inconsistency—her doubts—are a strength of her story.
As Freeman-Greene writes, her anxieties are not unique or particularly
novel. But her year-long project did make her look anew at the people holding
out a cap, cup or hand; they may be in desperate straits or shysters, but now,
to her, they are no longer invisible. And despite the rational argument that
poverty might best be tackled through other means, Freeman-Greene found
that sometimes, in the more awkward shadows of hard reality, it is good to
give a little.
This year’s Meanjin Dorothy Porter Poetry Award goes to ‘An Overcast Day in
Another Part of the World’ by Stuart Cooke (Meanjin, no. 4, p. 165). Our thanks
to judges Andrea Goldsmith and Kristin Henry. Please go to the Meanjin
website to read the judges’ comments and a list of the three commended poets.
And the newly published Meanjin Anthology can be purchased in bookstores
or via the MUP website, .
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3

Meanjin
Editor
Sally Heath
heath@unimelb.edu.au
Associate Editor
Zora Sanders
zsanders@unimelb.edu.au
Meanjin Assistant
Catherine McInnis
Poetry Editor
Judith Beveridge
Poetry Critic
Martin Langford
Design
Jenny Grigg
www.jennygrigg.com
Typesetting
Patrick Cannon
Copyeditor
Richard McGregor
Proofreaders
Natalie Book, Richard McGregor
Website Designer
Inventive Labs/Golden Grouse
Interns
James Douglas, Jessica Szwarcbord,
Sarah Weston, Elyse Wurm
Patron
Chris Wallace-Crabbe
Editorial Advisory Board
Louise Adler, Alison Croggon, Kate Darian-Smith,
David Gaunt, Richard Glover, Jenny Grigg, Brian Johns,
Hilary McPhee, David Malouf and Lindsay Tanner
Founding Editor
Clem Christesen (1911–2003; editor 1940–74).
Meanjin was founded in 1940. The name, pronounced
mee-an-jin, is derived from an Aboriginal word for the
spike of land on which Brisbane sits. The magazine moved
to Melbourne in 1945 at the invitation of the University
of Melbourne, which continues to be Meanjin’s principal
sponsor. In 2008 Meanjin became an imprint of Melbourne
University Publishing Ltd.
Subscriptions
Contact the Meanjin office or subscribe online
at our website.
Where to find us
Postal address: Meanjin, Level 1, 11–15 Argyle Place,
Carlton, Victoria 3053 Australia
Telephone: (+61 3) 9342 0317
Fax: (+61 3) 9342 0399
Email: meanjin@unimelb.edu.au
Website: www.meanjin.com.au
Twitter: www.twitter.com/Meanjin
Facebook: www.facebook.com/Meanjin
Contributions
Meanjin has converted the full backfile of Meanjin issues
(1940– ) into scanned pages that can be accessed via the
digital publishing house Informit (http://www.informit.com.
au). All creative works, articles and reviews converted to
electronic format will be correctly attributed and will appear
as published. Copyright will remain with the authors, and
the material cannot be further republished without authorial
permission. Meanjin will honour any requests to withdraw
material from electronic publication. If any author does not
wish their work to appear in this format, they should contact
Meanjin immediately and their material will be withdrawn.
Printed and bound by Ligare
Distributed by Random House
Print Post Approved PP341403 0002
AU ISSN 0025-6293
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Perspectives
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Perspectives
Game over for Space Junk?
Nicolas Paulin
In 1997 an Oklahoma woman
famously reported being hit by
a piece of falling space junk—that
random collection of leftover parts
from old spacecraft, satellites,
rockets and missiles. She emerged
unharmed, but the incident focused
public attention on the dangers of
what might lie beyond clear blue
skies. While this particular variety
of pollution might be invisible to
the naked eye, thousands of tonnes
of junk (known technically as space
debris or orbital debris) now bob
around above our heads. All of it is
destined to fall back into the Earth’s
atmosphere. While some of the
larger components fall into the sea
or onto land, the vast majority of
debris will burn up harmlessly in
the atmosphere and disintegrate,
meaning that the likelihood of
space junk ever causing bodily
harm to human beings remains
remote. 1 But for the space industry
the risk of collision between space
junk and useful objects is all too
real, threatening the satellite
technologies on which we depend
and endangering space missions.
When even a small particle of junk
hits a working spacecraft, it can
cause extensive damage and even
compromise an entire mission. The
problem is fast turning into a crisis. 2
6
1 When an old US satellite fell to Earth in 2011, NASA put the
chances of it falling on a human at 1 in 3200, while a specific
individual’s odds came out at 1 in 22 trillion. NASA estimates
that one catalogued piece of space junk falls to Earth every
day, mostly into the oceans or sparsely populated regions
such as northern Canada, outback Australia or Siberia.
2 In 2010 President Barack Obama released the United States’
new national space policy, calling for better international
cooperation on space junk tracking and removal. In addition
to the need for more innovative technology, national security
pressures and country-based ownership laws for space junk
are among the biggest hurdles to space junk removal.
Over the past half-century of
space exploration, scientists have
imagined a number of solutions to
clean up the mess—from giant nets to
space sticky tape and purpose-built
garbage collection vessels. None is
operational today, due in large part to
doubts about effectiveness and value
for money. But in 2011 a consortium
of scientists and engineers based
at Mount Stromlo Observatory in
Canberra embarked on a gamechanger
using new high-power laser
and optics technology. If successful,
the work would improve the accuracy
of space debris tracking and clean
up the most harmful layers of space
debris within a decade.
Laser removal of space litter is not
a new idea, but transforming theory
into a marketable technology is a
significant challenge for the space
industry. In the 1990s US scientists
developed the first theories for
removal of space debris using groundbased
lasers. However, the US project
lacked the key technological advances
required in lasers, telescopes,
electronics and adaptive optics (a
key technology used to overcome the
effects of atmospheric air turbulence
on laser beams and thus improve their
focus on a particular target).
Today that technology is ready.
Building on its experience with largescale
international projects including
the Giant Magellan Telescope, the
Research School of Astronomy and
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Satellite laser ranging from EOS Space
Centre at Mount Stromlo Observatory,
Canberra, photograph by EOS Space
Systems, 2011
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Perspectives
Astrophysics (RSAA) at the Australian
National University has established
a specialty in adaptive optics and has
been busy attracting key international
specialists in the process. In early 2011
the RSAA teamed with a commercial
telescope and satellite tracking
company, Electro Optic Systems
(EOS), which was keen to develop a
commercially viable and cost-effective
industrial prototype for tracking
and removing space debris. Using
this new-generation technology, the
consortium is building an instrument
that will locate space junk with a high
level of accuracy. The second phase of
development will test whether highpower
lasers are capable of nudging
debris out of its orbit and back into
the Earth’s atmosphere to combust.
A test model is now in construction
at the Mount Stromlo Observatory,
housed in one of EOS’s large
telescopes. Operational testing on real
space junk is expected to begin by the
end of 2013. If the tests are successful,
Australia could become the first
country to develop a commercially
viable system for space junk removal.
It is no coincidence that the
project targets space junk removal at
low Earth orbit (LEO) and where the
most harmful mass of space junk is
concentrated. Five decades of space
exploration and an unfortunate
series of missile tests and space
accidents in recent years 3 have
created a chain reaction of collisions,
8
3 These events include a 2007 Chinese anti-satellite missile
test, US destruction in 2008 of a defective spy satellite and
a 2009 collision between a defunct Russian satellite and a
working US satellite.
creating an escalating number of
components. The North American
Defence Command, which maintains
the oldest database of space debris,
estimates that there are now 25,000
components of space junk more than
10 centimetres wide (the threshold
for tracking). Of these, it is able to
track only 8000 components, leaving
a high potential for unpredictable
collision. For working spacecraft
obliged to orbit in LEO—such as the
International Space Station, Earth
observation and communication
satellites—damage from small-scale
projectiles is a constant risk, while the
possibility of collision with any debris
more than 10 centimetres wide calls
for full alert and a change of course.
So can Australia claim a world first
in cleaning up the universe? Perhaps
not yet, but watch this space …
International Writing Program,
Iowa City
Josephine Rowe
arrive to languid late summer,
I the Hollywood promise of tall
cornfields, weathered red barns.
Harvest time. Within two hours
of touching down I’m tramping
jet-lagged around the woodlands of
Redbird Farms with my fellow writers:
a kind of get-to-know-you hike,
which precedes the get-to-know-you
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Perspectives
dinners and the get-to-know-you
parties. We introduce ourselves with
full names and nationalities: Hi, I’m
Bina Shah from Pakistan; I’m Hind
Shoufani from Palestine.
I’m discussing various definitions
of the word ‘tame’ with Moshe Sakal
( from Israel) when I accidentally tread
on a snake. It’s gone almost before
I realise, and I take a baffled little
breath as it disappears.
She didn’t even scream, says
Moshe, as the others catch up. Well,
she’s Australian, someone answers.
The program’s director clinches it
with a story about Gail Jones, who
purportedly spent her childhood
lifting snakes by their tails and
whacking their heads against tree
trunks. I don’t know whether the story
is true, but it doesn’t matter, the die is
cast. Australia: a nation of nonchalant
snake killers.
There are thirty-seven of us,
from thirty-five countries. I am the
youngest. Lynley Hood, from New
Zealand, is the oldest. Zhang Yueran,
from China, is the best selling. But it’s
China, she says dismissively. There
are so many people. Jeremy Tiang,
from Singapore, is the most patient
and the most sharply dressed, always.
We are split between two hotels.
There is the Sheraton, which is like
Sheratons the world over, and there
is Iowa House. Iowa House is dated,
dorm-like. There is a lot of wood-grain
veneer. But my room has a bath, a
desk and a picturesque view of the
Iowa River, a view that becomes more
so as summer ambles into spectacular
Midwestern fall. More importantly,
Iowa House is where Raymond
Carver lived in 1973, the year he and
John Cheever taught at the Writers’
Workshop and drank mercilessly in
Cheever’s room, up on the fourth
floor. Carver lived on the second floor
(our floor) but Cheever never came
down because he was, apparently,
afraid of being mugged in the hallway.
The second-floor hallway has soft
carpet and cream walls decorated
with framed prints of non-challenging
art works. It’s difficult to imagine
it feeling threatening; to me it feels
share-housey, raucous. Somebody is
always awake. Something is always
happening, or about to happen.
Urgent calls on the room to room:
Can you come take a look at my neck?
Can you tell me what I did last night?
I’m okay, I just can’t stand up.
One night X falls asleep in the bath
and floods her hotel room. It isn’t
until the water trickles through to
the first floor that reception rushes
up to unlock the door and lift her
from the overflowing bath. For weeks
afterwards the hallway is lined with
industrial fans, drawing moisture
from air and carpet. Every now and
again someone opens their door
and yells at the fans: I’m trying to
fucking work! Somehow the work
gets done despite the fans. Books are
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Perspectives
researched and translated. Lectures
are written and delivered. YouTube
links to literal video versions of Tears
for Fears songs are widely dispersed,
and untranslatable concepts are
collectively stewed over.
I shape my writing day around
the power plant whistle, which is as
much a part of the ambience as the
industrial fans and the badly wired
fire alarm. But I have a soft spot for
the power plant whistle. It makes
a lonesome, sorrowful noise, like
Bradbury’s fog horn, like a great
mournful whale drifting up the Iowa
River. It blasts several times a day:
morning, lunchtime and end of shift.
At the end-of-shift whistle I close
my laptop and go out to meet the
others at the Mill or Martini’s or the
Fox Head. The bartenders at the Fox
Head are mostly PhD candidates in
philosophy, with impressive facial
hair and loose elbows that make for
generous pours. When I ask for a
glass of tequila and soda I get a glass
of tequila, soda sprinkled over it like
bitters. The jukebox has a great Sam
Cooke selection, and Kevin Bloom,
the gruff South African journalist,
spends a good portion of his per
diem feeding it quarters, playing ‘A
Change Is Gonna Come’. And in this
dimly lit, wood-panelled microcosm,
it’s easy to believe that perhaps it
will. Israel and Palestine are deep
in conversation that steers deftly
away from settlements and two-state
10
solutions. A blind man at the bar
is asking Kevin about apartheid,
listening intently before saying,
‘You’ll have to tell me, because I can’t
tell from your voice. Are you white or
are you black?’
I turn twenty-seven here, dance
around the pool table to Songs: Ohia.
Then everything speeds up. November
comes as a kind of ground rush. Each
morning I stalk up the west lawn
towards the Old Capitol building, my
hair rustling a susurrus in the cold,
as though the trees are shaking their
branches in my ears. Each morning I
wear more layers, watch the squirrels
gather their winter stores with
greater urgency. I should be closing
my account and returning all those
library books.
The Israelis get married on the first
of November. Tel Aviv, gay-friendly
as it is, doesn’t allow same-sex
marriages. Remarkably, Iowa does.
Few of us know the words to ‘Hava
Nagila’, but everybody knows when to
shout Hey! and we do so with verve,
raising Moshe and Dory up on white
dining chairs, Hind contributing
impressive ululations. In a few weeks
Moshe will be excluded from a literary
panel at a festival in Marseilles, at
the request of a Palestinian poet.
We will read news of this, back in our
respective home countries, and it will
affirm what we knew all along: our
little world was not representative of
the larger one.
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Perspectives
What did we say to each other,
that last night in the Fox Head,
raising our glasses in moments we
won’t remember? The untranslatable
concepts remain untranslatable. But
we worked at it during those three
months. We got as close as we could.
Cooking for Edward Albee
David Mence
In 2011, as the lucky recipient of
Inscription’s Edward F. Albee
Scholarship, I got to spend a month
researching and writing my play
Entanglement (about the Large
Hadron Collider and the hunt for the
so-called God particle) in Montauk,
New York.
Montauk is roughly three and a
half hours from New York City via
the Long Island Rail Road (familiar
to fans of Eternal Sunshine of the
Spotless Mind). A sleepy little fishing
town perched at the tip of Long
Island, Montauk is home to the
William Flanagan Memorial Creative
Persons Center (‘the Barn’), which
Edward Albee established in 1967
with the proceeds from his play Who’s
Afraid of Virginia Woolf? The Barn
is, as its name suggests, a big New
England–style whitewashed barn
that once served as a stable for the
nearby Montauk Manor (brainchild
of the Gatsbyesque millionaire Carl
Fisher, it opened in 1927 and is still
going strong). These days, the Barn
stables writers and visual artists
and provides them with time and
splendid isolation. Albee generally
keeps a low profile and makes a few
brief, mysterious appearances that
the fellows are left to decipher. Albee
has a droopy snow-white moustache,
a cheeky boyish grin and penetrating
blue eyes and is as sharp as a whip
at eighty-three. He also has a way of
peering down his nose at you as he
listens, which makes you feel small
even though he is, in all probability,
far shorter than you are.
It was over a week before any
of us encountered our host. One of
the writers, hunched over a bowl
of porridge, looked up to see Albee
depositing a handful of mail on the
kitchen bench. ‘Nothing for you,’ he
drawled, ‘better luck next time.’ We
puzzled over this cryptic utterance:
was he referring to the mail, our
creative fortunes, or life in general?
Such simplicity, we decided, from
one of the world’s great masters of
dialogue, must belie hidden depths.
We looked for guidance in Albee’s vast
library (we re-read a number of his
plays) and his formidable collection
of classical LPs (complete recordings
of von Karajan, Rubinstein, Gould)
and yet, rather like a crack squad of
biographers tasked with the life of
Shakespeare, we were merely filling
an evidentiary vacuum with ideas,
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Perspectives
fabrications and conspiracies of our
own making. This palpable absence
soon gave rise to a mild paranoia: it
was absurd, but at times we felt as
though we were being watched (or
watched over), as if America’s greatest
living playwright could give a damn
what we did with our time.
Then came our second encounter.
One of the visual artists was sitting
out the front of the Barn reading a
book when Albee’s moustachioed
face materialised above his page and
said something like, ‘Keep working.’
This again raised a problem for
interpretation: had he meant ‘keep
up the good work’ or more ominously
‘get back to work’? In the face of such
hermeneutic fear and trembling, all
we could do was redouble our artistic
efforts; the visual artist in question
even began to work through the
night. Yet even this was no match
for the sixteen-hour days that,
according to local legend, the Soviet
exile Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn had
worked when he first arrived in New
England. Let alone Albee himself, who
informed us that he was making good
progress on his new play, while some
of us, less than a third his age, were
floundering beneath a sea of false
starts, incoherent storyboards and
poorly executed ideas.
All which may help to explain
why I felt such an overwhelming
desire to cast myself into the Atlantic
Ocean when informed that Albee had
12
decided to come over for dinner …
and I had been nominated head chef.
After hyperventilating into a bag
for a few minutes, I jumped on the
pushbike with the broken pedal and
rushed down to the docks to catch
the fishmonger before close. He had
two bags of mussels left, which was a
stroke of good luck, because mussels
are one of the few things I know how
to cook. Back at the Barn, the mussels
stewed happily in tomato, white
wine, chilli and herbs. There were an
awful lot of them—enough to feed ten
people—so they had to be steamed
in a giant pot. Meanwhile, two
sous-chefs prepared such essential
items as roast potato gratin, sautéed
kale, avocado salad and, for dessert,
apple pie and vanilla ice cream.
Albee arrived at around 7 pm.
Given what a warm, balmy night it
was, he decided we ought to dine
al fresco at the big wooden table.
Luckily, he likes mussels, and took
great pleasure in cracking them and
sucking the gravy out of their shells.
Everything was going according to
plan. But then Albee turned to me
and growled, ‘This one’s not open.’
He popped the offending mussel on
the edge of my plate. Grinning like
an idiot, I picked up the shiny little
shellfish and proceeded to bash it on
the side of the table. ‘No, no,’ he said,
‘don’t do that!’ I sheepishly put it back
and smiled, and he smiled, and said,
‘Some of them want to stay closed.’
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Perspectives
Leaving
Michelle Law
Mum pulls the ancient songbook
from one of the rubbish bags,
rests a heavy palm on its faded cover
and sighs. The book’s spine is shot,
the pages yellowed. Mum handles this
book with care, periodically taping
and gluing it together. This is done
chiefly to preserve the memory of its
original owner, Jimmy, my youngest
uncle, who killed himself after being
deported from Australia.
We had arrived at Mum’s that
day wearing our grubbiest clothes,
clutching buckets and bags
overflowing with cleaning gear. My
sister Candy had stocked up on gloves
and masks, and my brother Ben had
brought his vacuum cleaner to inhale
the cockroach corpses lying beneath
the couch. Mum had been living in our
childhood home for more than twenty
years, but with the five of us children
long gone, she’d decided to move.
We knew that the process was
going to be arduous because Mum
never threw anything out. Everything
was significant to her; everything had
value—from a rusty pair of gardening
shears (‘They still cut, don’t they?’)
to an unopened calendar from 1999
(‘Some child can make craft out of it’).
If it once had monetary or sentimental
worth, it stayed.
As everyone set to work trashing
outdated newspapers and lobbing
VHS tapes into the skip bag stationed
in the yard, I sat with Mum in the
kitchen, nursing a glass of water.
‘Only you understand how I feel, Mic,’
she said, the book between us on the
dining table.
Living alone with Mum for
seventeen years, I’d learnt to see
how useless objects could become
steeped in symbolism, to the point
where parting with them becomes
excruciating. When I donated a box
of my favourite toys to Lifeline, I
shoved them into the container and
disappeared without a word to the
other side of the house where I could
cry without being heard. I didn’t want
to be on Mum’s side. I didn’t want to
be weak.
Mum’s book was a tome of
Western pop songs that she had
carried with her when she’d migrated
from Malaysia to Hong Kong, and
then from Hong Kong to the Sunshine
Coast. When on the weekends my
sister Tammy swapped from Dad’s
house to Mum’s, the two of us would
lie on the carpet at night with the
ceiling fan whirring, and sooner or
later Mum would enter the living
room with the book clasped reverently
in two hands.
‘Any requests?’ she would ask.
Tammy would lean back on the
makeshift bed she’d constructed from
cushions and bed sheets and close her
eyes. ‘ “Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the
Ole Oak Tree” or “Que Será Será”.’
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13

Perspectives
‘How about both?’ Mum would
flick through the yellowed pages
and open the book to our dog-eared
favourites. As Tammy drifted off to
the sound of Mum’s singing, I’d stare
at the ceiling and think about the
morning, when Dad would swing by
in his Honda and Mum and I would
be alone again.
Jimmy was the seventh and
youngest child in Mum’s family. Mum,
the sixth, and her sister Judy, the
fourth, had arrived in Australia in the
1970s. Both women were newlyweds
who had fled with their husbands
amid fear of Hong Kong’s handover
from British to Chinese rule. Dad had
relatives living in Sydney who assured
him that Australia had a better quality
of life than China. There was space in
Australia, and the people were free.
It was the perfect country to raise
a family. After Mum’s move, most
of her siblings, including Jimmy,
followed suit.
Within a few years, Mum’s siblings
had established themselves on the
Sunshine Coast. Their children were
enrolled at the local school, and
they’d made friends with the regulars
who frequented their restaurants.
But soon the authorities were tipped
off, and they were arrested for
overstaying their tourist visas. After
a brief stint in Villawood, Mum’s
siblings were sent back to Hong
Kong with nothing to their names.
Everything they owned was left with
14
us, stowed away in all the empty
corners of the house.
On the third straight day of
packing, Tammy and I stood in the
garage with Mum, deciding what to do
with the contents of a dusty cardboard
box. Mum was deliberating over
which objects to keep, donate, sell or
throw out. She held up a mouldy soft
toy that had belonged to one of her
nephews and considered it in silence.
Then, after a spell, she placed it in the
mounting ‘keep’ box, alongside the six
other mouldy toys already in there.
Right then I felt with a burning
clarity how lucky I was. How my
parents had sacrificed their own
relationships and ambitions for
me to have a future. How Mum had
allowed her first family to be torn
apart in order for ours to remain
together. How my only real pressing
responsibility now was to lead a happy
life for her sake, and how it was nearly
impossible for me to feel carefree if
she was unhappy.
‘Mum,’ said Tammy firmly. ‘You
can’t fit all this stuff in an apartment
in Brisbane. And we still have about
ten other rooms to pack.’
Mum threw the toy down in a
sudden rage and held her arms stiffly
by her sides. ‘You’re all rushing me!’
she said. ‘Can’t you understand I can
do this myself?’
I stood back and watched Tammy
berate Mum for being irrational.
Growing up with Mum, I’d learnt
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 14 6/11/12 9:20 AM

Perspectives
never to speak back to her, to save
myself a fight. But on this occasion
Tammy received the full brunt of
Mum’s fury and, worst of all, her grief.
By the end of their spat, Tammy was
sobbing. I stood in the background
wringing my hands, unsettled at
seeing an older sibling so helpless.
Mum was unresponsive to her display,
being too immersed in her own
anguish to comprehend Tammy’s.
At some stage a neighbour crossed
the road to ask if everything was
okay. Nobody responded; we were
all speechless. Eventually Tammy
croaked something and the neighbour
left. When we were alone again, Mum
let us have it.
‘These aren’t yours, so don’t
touch them,’ she said in Cantonese,
gathering the toys up in her arms.
‘You’re all spoiled, selfish Australian
kids who don’t understand the true
worth of things.’ She brought up the
events of the previous day, when
we had unknowingly thrown out a
teapot filled with buttons that she’d
cut off clothes that had belonged to
Jimmy. She said that we were killing
her, that if we kept disrespecting
our mother our grandmother would
haunt us.
We packed a cooler bag and headed
to the local park to give Mum space.
Tammy was sniffling during the car
ride there and none of us knew what
we could say to offer comfort. At the
park we found a soft patch of grass in
the shade that wasn’t infested with
ants and set down our lunch supplies
of bread and soft drink. Everyone ate
in silence. It made me uneasy; usually
when we ate together we talked over
each other at the dinner table, with
everyone straining to get a word in.
Then, to break the tension,
someone farted and we all burst
out laughing. Candy curled her arm
around Tammy, who still hadn’t
said a word. Tammy relaxed into
her shoulder. We each dug our toes
into the impossibly green grass
and shielded our eyes against the
glare reflecting off the nearby lake,
where some kids on waterskis were
shrieking. On the pavement a young
girl rattled past on her scooter, calling
for her parents to catch up. They
were ambling close behind in their
thongs, licking ice creams and smiling
benignly. A warm breeze lifted the
curls in the mother’s hair and she
gently slung them back across her
shoulder. We gnawed on our bread
rolls, quietly admiring these scenes
from a distance. When Andrew
received a phone call from Mum,
we packed up our spread and left. M
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 15 6/11/12 9:20 AM
15

Borroloola Blue
Phillip Hall
All around our steel home’s broad bull-nosed verandah
we’d jack-hammered rock, dug garden beds and ponds,
fenced an oasis as we planned for shade, blossoms, wildlife and fruit.
Among the natives we’d cultivated
paw paws, frangipanis, mangos, bananas .... Security
lights drew tree frogs and geckos; a Greek chorus
of bellowed crawks and clicking chick chacks;
an agile profusion alternating with contentment and strife.
But that season, in the Build-up to the Wet,
it was the raucous rocket frogs’ ratchet-like croakings
we noticed most. Each night the males made our ponds
throb with their rapid yapping calls, withdrawing at sunrise
when grass finches postured on the lips of ponds,
flicking their tails and singing a series
of squeezed rasping notes; white-gaped honeyeaters
threaded a path through foliage and blossom
as Papuan cuckoo-shrikes tore paw paws and mangos.
Then one night at the Build-up’s end, as we drank
chardonnay on ice, Yanyula youths ran amok
on ganja, throwing stones and shiaking at our padlocked gates.
It only ended when [sorry name] leapt on our fence,
screaming at stars, before lightly climbing
a power pole like a cabbage tree palm—
an unabashed athleticism electrified
16
in the fall.
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 16 6/11/12 9:20 AM

Essays
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 17 6/11/12 9:20 AM

Debbie Mortimer and
the Forensic Fight
Lorin Clarke
The case ThaT overTurned The gillard governmenT’s Malaysia
solution in August 2011 set the ball rolling in a chain of political events, the
repercussions of which are still being felt. Debbie Mortimer SC was part of
a team of barristers in that case who represented the asylum seekers. For
Mortimer, the unflappable New Zealander who worked with the other lawyers
on the case without expectation of a fee, this was a matter of principle. The
principle for her was that the rule of law should always be upheld. Many
Australians don’t know what the rule of law is, let alone how it might be upheld,
or perhaps even why it should be upheld.
This is partly because the debate on issues of national importance is often
dominated not by those best qualified, with the best information, but by the
media conducting a slanging match with politicians in a time frame that
best suits the news cycle. And the justification for this is that Australia is a
democracy. Before embarking on a discussion of Mortimer’s contribution, it is
instructive to revisit George Megalogenis’s perceptive analysis of the political
climate in the lead-up to the case.
The wrong conversation
In his 2010 Quarterly Essay, ‘Trivial Pursuit’, Megalogenis paints a depressing
picture of the co-dependence between politics and the media in contemporary
Australia. Two years on, the minority government is still in office, with the
support of crossbenchers, despite a leadership challenge and investigations
into the behaviour of several members of parliament. The two most unpopular
institutions in the country are the federal parliament and the media. This is
partly to do with what Megalogenis calls ‘medium creep’, where the media
have been allowed to run the agenda. ‘There is a collective loss of confidence
at work here,’ says Megalogenis. ‘No one is really sure what voters will say to a
new idea, so government and media ask them first through focus groups. It is
no way to run a national conversation.’ 1 Megalogenis argues that under the
leadership of prime ministers Bob Hawke and then Paul Keating, bold, often
unpopular reform was introduced, which led directly to positive social change.
He urges similar action now. ‘No nation should be so lucky that it delays
reform indefinitely without suffering any consequences,’ he says. 2 The end of
Megalogenis’s essay is perhaps the most disheartening part. Describing the
political culture as ‘both polarised and disengaged’, he claims Australia needs
to relearn how to have a political discussion about how and why to change and
develop as a society. ‘Before they can re-educate the electorate’, he says, ‘they
must first re-train themselves.’ 3 This is all very well, but what do we do in the
18
1 George Megalogenis, ‘Trivial Pursuit:
Leadership at the End of the Reform
Era’, Quarterly Essay, no. 40 (2010),
p. 15.
2 Megalogenis, ‘Trivial Pursuit’, p. 43.
3 Megalogenis, ‘Trivial Pursuit’, p. 80.
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 18 6/11/12 9:20 AM

Debbie Mortimer, photograph by
Mark Chew, 2012
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 19 6/11/12 9:20 AM

Debbie Mortimer and the Forensic Fight Lorin Clarke
meantime? If the news media and the people who represent us in parliament
won’t lead a mature, constructive conversation about what kind of society we
want to be, who will?
Several months after the release of Megalogenis’s essay, Debbie Mortimer
touched on these ideas at an event in Melbourne addressing the prospect of
a bill of rights in Australian law. The event was a Wheeler Centre panel on
human rights as part of Law Week. Mortimer paused on the topic of politicians
pandering to the media machine. ‘It’s interesting to talk about whether
it’s political cowardice or whether it’s a political recognition of a lack of
support in the Australian community,’ she said. ‘They’re not the same thing.’
Contemplating the kind of reform necessary to incorporate a bill of rights into
federal law, Mortimer said, ‘You can do it either through leadership that is
speaking ahead of the community and takes the community with them or you
can talk about recognising that it’s a political move that the community wants.’
Australians, she pointed out, are not marching in the streets over human rights
issues. Like Megalogenis, though, Mortimer held the media partly to blame for
the recent lack of political leadership:
20
4 Debbie Mortimer, ‘Injustice
anywhere: Human Rights in Practice’,
discussion with Alan Attwood, Robert
Stary and Julian Burnside, Wheeler
Centre, 16 May 2011.
5 David Marr, ‘How did this boat get so
close to the coast?’, National Times, 16
December 2010.
It’s the minute you disengage people from that immediate
connection [with the actual people involved] that you enable this
general prejudice, and it doesn’t matter whether you’re talking about
boat people, it doesn’t matter whether you’re talking about same-sex
attracted people—the minute you disengage from that personal
connection, you allow stereotyping to get in. 4
The contention that the ‘polarised and disengaged’ Australian public
has come to distrust change and resent difference prompts the question:
are we just a bunch of reactionaries? For Mortimer, it’s not as simple as that.
In December 2010, Christmas Island locals awoke in the night to a maritime
disaster on their shores. A boat had crashed off the rocks, killing at least
half the asylum seekers on board. 5 The locals, scrambling to help in the
rescue effort, might not have been in favour of allowing asylum seekers into
Australia for processing. They might even have supported Opposition Leader
Tony Abbott’s stated intention to ‘turn back the boats’. That night, though, the
nuances of the political debate were cast aside. That’s because, says Mortimer,
‘Australians are good-hearted people. And what they’re then seeing right in
front of their eyes is another human being in trouble and Australians have no
difficulty responding to that.’
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 20 6/11/12 9:20 AM

Essays
6 Madonna King, interview with
Prime Minister Julia Gillard, ABC
Radio, Brisbane, 2 September 2011.
7 Transcript: Prime Minister Julia
Gillard and Minister Chris Bowen, joint
press conference, 7 May 2011.
8 For every asylum seeker sent to
Malaysia under the scheme, Australia
would accept five processed refugees
from Malaysia, increasing Australia’s
refugee intake by 4000 over four years.
9 Gillard and Bowen, press conference.
10 Enda Curran, ‘Support for
Australian government hits
record low’, Wall Street Journal’s
‘MarketWatch’, 11 July 2011.
11 James Massola, ‘Pressure grows
on Gillard’s leadership’, Australian,
2 September 2011.
12 Matt Johnston, ‘Gillard sunk as
people smugglers cash in on Malaysia
deal’, Herald Sun, 1 September 2011.
What Debbie Mortimer does in the courtroom can be viewed as a systematic
attempt to show Australians the effect of Australian policies on the ‘people
on the margins’. Mortimer’s work as a barrister calls the decision-makers to
account and demonstrates to the public that there are laws designed to protect
them from the kind of abuses of power that can happen when nobody is paying
attention. The media are not the court. The government is not above the
law. And the public, in whose name this circus has been constructed, have a
responsibility too. By drawing our attention to the laws that are being enacted
in our name, Debbie Mortimer indirectly challenges Australians to engage in
a ‘national conversation’ about how we treat the less fortunate members of
Australian society.
The Malaysia case
On 2 September 2011 Australia’s Prime Minister was deflecting what she called
‘fevered speculation’ about her ability to run the country. 6 At issue was the six
to one High Court decision handed down on 31 August that declared invalid
the government’s ‘Malaysia people swap’ deal. This was the deal that had,
only months earlier, been hailed by the government as a triumph of regional
diplomacy in defiance of opportunistic people smugglers. The purpose of the
agreement, according to the government, was to ‘break the people smugglers’
business model’ by sending to Malaysia for processing all asylum seekers who
arrive in Australian territory by boat—placing them ‘at the back of the queue’. 7
In exchange, Australia would take on additional refugees from Malaysia. 8 The
government framed the deal as a clear message to any potential asylum seekers
who saw Australia as a safe haven: ‘From today onwards—fair warning—you do
not have a guarantee of being processed and resettled in Australia.’ 9 According
to the Minister for Immigration and Citizenship, Chris Bowen, the deal was
established ‘on very strong legal grounds’. On the contrary, the High Court
found that Bowen did not have the power to decide to send asylum seekers to
Malaysia. The agreement between Australia and Malaysia was not worth the
paper it was written on.
Midway through 2011, just before the High Court brought down its
decision, support for the government had been, according to Newspoll, at an
all-time low. 10 Now the subeditors were beside themselves. ‘Pressure grows
on Gillard’s leadership,’ screamed the headlines. 11 Melbourne’s Herald Sun
ran with ‘Gillard sunk’. 12 On the ABC’s 7.30 program, reporter Heather Ewart
indicated that dissatisfaction within the ALP ran deep. ‘Talk to anyone in Labor
ranks today, including senior levels of government, and behind the scenes
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 21 6/11/12 9:20 AM
21

Debbie Mortimer and the Forensic Fight Lorin Clarke
13 Heather Ewart, report, ‘Beginning
of the end?’, ABC TV, 7.30, 1 September
2011.
14 Graham Richardson, Radio 3AW,
1 September 2011. Quoted in Ewart,
‘Beginning of the end?’.
15 Gillard and Bowen, press conference.
16 Malcolm Farr, ‘Blaming the ref:
Julia Gillard attacks High Court
they’re all saying the same thing: that the High Court decision is diabolical
for Labor, compounding a now entrenched public perception of government
incompetence.’ 13 When asked in a radio interview whether it was too late for
Julia Gillard to save herself from certain electoral doom after the High Court
decision, former ALP minister Graham Richardson said simply: ‘Oh, yeah,
way too late. There’s no way she can turn this around.’ 14 The Prime Minister
and Minister Bowen, in response to the court’s decision, called a joint press
conference. ‘The easy option’, said Bowen, ‘would be to resign.’ 15
He did not resign. He and the Prime Minister, both clearly irritated, held
firm. The Prime Minister was defiant, issuing a ‘blistering attack’ on the High
Court. 16 Convention dictates that the executive arm of government in Australia
refrain from commenting on the findings of the judiciary, so as to protect the
independence of the courts in what is a system of responsible government.
Extraordinarily, the Prime Minister not only criticised the court, saying it had
‘basically turn[ed] on its head the understanding of the law’, she characterised
the judgment of the Chief Justice, Robert French, as inconsistent. She declared:
‘His Honour Mr Justice French considered comparable legal questions when
he was a judge of the Federal Court and made different decisions to the one
that the High Court made yesterday.’ 17 Gillard was accusing the chief justice
of a mischievous creativity designed to achieve a preferred result. Interpreted
by most commentators as a deliberate attack on the integrity of the judiciary,
the Prime Minister’s comments were also, according to most legal experts
(including those sitting on the High Court), incorrect in law. 18
However spurious the government’s claims about the legal merits of the
case, this suggestion that the court was misusing its power took hold in the
media. Parliamentary secretary David Bradbury was quoted as saying, ‘High
Court justices won’t be the ones who have to take phone calls about boats
crashing into rocks on Christmas Island.’ 19 Thus the court was characterised as
simultaneously conniving and naive. The implication was that those sitting on
the High Court (and, by extension, those working on the case for the asylum
seekers) were putting at risk the lives of the very people they were trying
to protect.
The ‘Malaysia case’ started with a text message from human rights lawyer
David Manne to Debbie Mortimer. ‘Just had a call for help,’ it said. ‘Looks
like expulsions planned for Monday.’ 20 Manne had received word through his
contacts that two asylum seekers in detention on the Australian territory of
Christmas Island needed help. A team of barristers worked with instructing
solicitors from Allens Arthur Robinson and David Manne. The clients in
22
judges for scuttling Malaysia Deal’,
, 1 September 2011.
17 Tom Iggulden, report: Gillard
attacks High Court over ruling, ABC
TV, Lateline, 1 September 2011.
18 Each of the judgments in this
case was based on strict statutory
interpretation. Any suggested
‘inconsistency’ between the Chief
Justice’s judgment in this case and any
other ignores the fact that the question
on which this case turned had never
before been decided in the court.
19 Bradbury spoke on Sky News, as
reported in ‘Offshore processing doubt’,
Canberra Times, 1 September 2011.
20 Tom Hyland, ‘Manne of the
moment’, Age, 4 September 2011.
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 22 6/11/12 9:20 AM

Essays
21 Plaintiff M70/2011 v Minister for
Immigration and Citizenship; Plaintiff
M106 of 2011 v Minister for Immigration
and Citizenship [2011] HCA 32.
22 David Marr, ‘Forget civil liberties,
the defence of the 800 boat people
rests on line-by-line analysis’, National
Times, 23 August 2011.
the case were from Afghanistan. They had arrived at Christmas Island from
Indonesia on 4 August 2011 in a boat called SIEV 258. The asylum seekers
claimed to have well-founded fears of persecution in Afghanistan ‘on
grounds that would, if established, make them “refugees” to whom Australia
owes protection obligations pursuant to the Refugee Convention’, to quote
the court. 21
The team behind the High Court challenge did not entirely escape media
attention. The Melbourne Refugee and Immigration Legal Centre (RILC),
of which Manne is executive director, was subjected to a takedown by the
Australian in an article called ‘He’s the Manne of the moment’. In it, legal
affairs reporter Chris Merritt called the RILC ‘GetUp! on steroids, complete with
law degrees, and all paid for from out [sic] the public purse’. On the other hand,
in the Age, in an article called (he must get this a lot) ‘Manne of the moment’,
the same centre was described as operating ‘from upstairs offices at the scruffy
end of Brunswick Street, Fitzroy’. Thus cast as both grassroots activist and
fat cat lawyer, Manne came to represent the asylum seekers as their unofficial
public advocate.
Debbie Mortimer, meanwhile, was one of their leading advocates in the
courtroom. When asylum seekers enter Australian territory, they invoke
Australia’s protection obligations under international law. They are also
governed by federal law. That law is, from time to time, tested in the courts.
Mortimer’s job is to do the testing. According to commentator David Marr, the
nub of the case was this:
[The asylum-seekers’] defence is being built by close focus on the
legislation, line by line, sub-clause by sub-clause. That’s how
this court likes it. Only occasionally does Mortimer mention the
‘fundamental liberties’ of her clients. Without the protection of the
High Court, she said, ‘what happens to them will happen to them
very quickly and in remote places.’ 22
That focus on the legislation led the court to conclude that the asylum
seekers could not be removed to Malaysia without their claims for refugee
status first being assessed in Australia. Despite assurances from Australian
and Malaysian authorities that the human rights of the asylum seekers would
be protected under the deal, the problem was that there was not yet any legal
protection in place. Unlike Australia, Malaysia was not party to the UN Refugee
Convention of 1951. ‘This is a pointed message by the judiciary,’ said barrister
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 23 6/11/12 9:20 AM
23

Debbie Mortimer and the Forensic Fight Lorin Clarke
Greg Barns in The Drum, ‘that in a democratic society the rule of law must apply
to anyone irrespective of their status as citizen or non-citizen.’ 23 Australia’s
obligations under international law reached further than the government
had thought.
The rule of law advocate
The Malaysia case was by no means the first time an Australian government
had come across Debbie Mortimer. She worked on the case that determined
that the decision-making processes in relation to asylum seekers on Christmas
Island were reviewable by the courts and subject to the laws of natural justice. 24
She worked on countless immigration cases during the Howard era and many
since then. She successfully argued for the reversal of an order to expel two
Kenyan boys from the country. The boys at the centre of the case, Mohammed
and Hassan, neither of them yet eighteen, had stowed away on a boat that had
landed in Australia in 1998. They applied for protection visas once on land and
were rejected by the Refugee Review Tribunal—a decision they were entitled
to appeal. What happened next became the central issue in the legal cases that
followed. Mortimer and her fellow lawyers argued that there was a time period
during which the boys could legally challenge the decision against them, and
that during that period, the government had illegally expelled them from
the country.
The cases make fascinating reading. Mortimer’s clients were put on a
Singapore Airlines flight that suddenly became the subject of a legal battle.
The aeroplane was on the tarmac in Melbourne when Carolyn Graydon, then
a lawyer at RILC, sought Mortimer’s assistance to go to court for an order to
prevent the boys being removed. An order was made by Justice Tony North,
but the plane took off. The question in court then became whether the flight
would be turned around midair, grounded on Australian soil, or whether (as
turned out to be the case) the government would agree to allow the plane to
land in Singapore and the boys to be put straight back on a plane to Australia.
It is unclear from court documents whether the government allowed the
plane to leave the tarmac despite a court order not to do so. Mortimer’s team
(led by barrister Ron Castan), started an action against the then minister
Phillip Ruddock for contempt of court in relation to this conduct. The action
was later settled.
The drama surrounding the case did not end there. Having agreed to put
the Kenyan boys back on a plane to Australia, the government made one
more move that put the boys’ hopes of a temporary sanctuary in Australia
24
23 Greg Barns, ‘Victory for asylum
seekers against legal fiction’, The
Drum, 11 November 2010.
24 Plaintiff M61 /2010E v
Commonwealth of Australia [2010]
HCA 41.
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 24 6/11/12 9:20 AM

Essays
out of reach. Before leaving Singapore on their court-ordered trip home, they
were issued with new visas. Those visas expired in the air on the trip back to
Australia. As soon as the plane hit the ground in Melbourne, Mortimer’s clients
were taken straight to detention. Their status as unaccompanied minors meant
that their guardian, the state, was the very government attempting to deport
them. They were in legal limbo. At this point, Mortimer withdrew from the
case. Subsequent court documents describe how, after efforts to find suitable
guardians for the boys failed, this happened: ‘the applicants lived with Ms
Debra Mortimer, a barrister, who initially represented them’. Mohammed and
Hassan are now Australian citizens.
Despite her involvement in these cases, Mortimer is largely unknown to
the public. She was never involved in student politics or social justice causes
at university. Nor did she turn, as Julian Burnside did, from a Liberal voter
into a human rights advocate. After doing her legal training in a small firm
in Melbourne straight out of law school, Mortimer became an associate to Sir
Gerard Brennan, then chief justice of the High Court. Brennan encouraged
her to become a barrister straightaway, rather than taking the usual route
of building up a client base in practice first. She did so. Now, she has a track
record that includes some of the most high-profile cases in human rights law,
discrimination law and environmental law. She is the head of the Human Rights
Committee at the Victorian Bar. In December 2011 she was the joint recipient of
the Tim McCoy Award for community legal work, the Law Institute of Victoria’s
President’s Award, and the Australian Human Rights Commission Law Award.
Mortimer was also the first woman to be awarded the Law Council of
Australia’s President’s Medal for outstanding contribution to the Australian
legal profession. She was joint winner of the 2012 Victorian Bar’s Public
Interest Award for the Malaysia case. Some of the people she works alongside—
Julian Burnside, David Manne, Robert Stary—are, if not household names,
recognisable in the context of the debate. Mortimer appears in public too—on
panels, in discussions, on radio. As her colleague Richard Niall SC points out,
though, there are two forms of advocacy: advocacy in the courtroom, and
advocacy for change in the community. ‘Debbie has always been more directed
to the former rather than the latter,’ he says. Most of her work takes place
in court.
Nevertheless, one could be forgiven for casting Mortimer as a bolshie
barrister motivated by a desire to oppose the recent right-wing trend in
Australian immigration policy. The ‘Kenyan boys’ case seems, when read in
its sociopolitical context, to be a direct challenge to the hubris of the Howard
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 25 6/11/12 9:20 AM
25

Debbie Mortimer and the Forensic Fight Lorin Clarke
government at the height of its power. The Malaysia case stopped the Gillard
government in its tracks. Conversely, Mortimer’s lack of public profile could be
indicative of a black-letter-law-obsessed book nerd insensitive to the political
repercussions of her work. Her perspective is much more complex than either
stereotype allows. It is, as Niall says, ‘no coincidence’ that she often acts for
clients with no resources. On the other hand, he says, she has acted for ‘many
other entities and organisations and individuals who are also entitled to
representation’ but whose lives do not hang in the balance. She is, he says, first
and foremost a lawyer.
There is one key point Mortimer steadfastly refuses to concede. She insists
she has no agenda. Her work is not politically or personally motivated. She
works, in so far as she can, according to the cab rank principle—where lawyers
take cases as they come rather than picking and choosing. In an interview with
Waleed Aly on ABC radio, Aly attempted to draw Mortimer on whether the
broader political implications of cases such as the Malaysia case were a factor in
the way she undertook her day-to-day work. She didn’t budge. Despite the fact
that her formidable reputation has been formed in part as a result of her work
on human rights cases, she won’t even accept the term ‘human rights advocate’.
Mortimer’s insistence on the executive meeting its own standards of procedural
fairness is simply a position that understands the role of the court as interpreter
of the laws made by the executive. She paused briefly after Aly’s question on
this point and came up with ‘rule of law advocate’ instead.
The idea of advocating for the protection of the rule of law is uncontroversial
in the context of a representative democracy. The rule of law is the idea that
governments should be subjected to the systems of checks and balances that
are designed to protect us all from abuses of power. The section of legislation
on which Mortimer relied in the Malaysia case had been hastily drawn up by
the Howard government. Its swift conception happened in the wake of events
surrounding the arrival in 2001 of the MV Tampa. The government’s response
to this boat full of asylum seekers triggered a series of political dramas just
before a federal election. So this was a government making a law that arguably
did not anticipate the intricacies of the Malaysia case. To Mortimer, this is
irrelevant. ‘All the High Court has done, in my view, is say that the words of the
statute mean what they say.’ 25
The result is that Australia is living up to its obligations under international
and domestic law. What happens next isn’t up to her. ‘How Australia decides
to [live up to its obligations] in the political sphere in terms of a regional
solution, I see as a very different issue from what you do with people who are
26
25 Debbie Mortimer, interview with
Waleed Aly, Radio National Summer
Breakfast, 19 December 2011.
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 26 6/11/12 9:20 AM

Essays
26 Debbie Mortimer, interview with
Waleed Aly.
27 Mortimer, Wheeler Centre panel.
in Australia and who are, like every other person who is in Australia, entitled to
the protection of the rule of law.’ 26 This is where Mortimer is ‘quite conservative
in some ways,’ she says. ‘You can make a difference if you insist on fairness and
transparency and good decision-making.’ 27 In the wake of the Malaysia case, the
government is again changing the legislation. Fair enough, says Mortimer, that
means the system is working. The government can still be kept in check, either
with another challenge in the courts or by the will of the people.
The forensic fight
Ask Debbie Mortimer what it is that drives her and she admits from the outset
that a lot of it is competitive instinct. Her focus, she says, is on what she calls
‘the forensic fight’ in the courtroom. It’s as though something comes over
her there. She describes coming up against an apparently insurmountable
obstacle in court as exciting; the challenge to her competitive spirit a red rag
to a bull. The question of whether she can win the argument takes over and
she has a reserve of self-confidence and cool-headedness she doesn’t usually
access. ‘I can’t explain where that comes from,’ she says, genuinely baffled.
In social settings Mortimer is self-possessed but understated, closer to shy than
socially dominating. Watchful when listening, she delivers her own words in
full, thoughtfully crafted, grammatically correct sentences that leave no room
for doubt.
Born into a blue-collar family in Auckland, she secured a job in a law library
at the age of fourteen. Fascinated by the criminal cases she read, she decided
there and then to be a lawyer. She is amused and surprised at her own ambition,
which set her apart from the rest of her family, none of whom had ever had
anything to do with the law. She doesn’t know what the people she grew up with
made of her then, or what they might make of her now. That sense she has in
court of not knowing where it comes from—the drive, the confidence and the
gall to stand up to the forensic fight against the odds—seems to have kicked in
at that moment as a fourteen-year-old.
Mortimer does not see herself as a crusader. One of her areas of
specialisation is administrative law, which governs the actions of people who
work for and on behalf of government. Regardless of whether she is hired by
government (which happens regularly, though never by the Department of
Immigration) or by someone seeking to challenge a government, Mortimer
tends to scrutinise government conduct for a living. She never gives the sense
that she’s just doing her job though. Finding holes in contracts or prosecuting
companies might also be stimulating work, but there’s something about the
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27

Debbie Mortimer and the Forensic Fight Lorin Clarke
human element of the cases she deals with that drives her. ‘Law regulates the
way human beings live in our society,’ she told Waleed Aly. ‘It is the human
aspects that I like. I like to see that the law operates fairly and equally on
everyone with whom I live.’ It just happens that asylum seekers comprise a
group in Australia that has not enjoyed a great deal of legal equality.
The individuals for whom we act
Like many lawyers defending the rights of individuals against the instruments
of the state, Mortimer often works pro bono for clients whose cases she believes
have merit. In 2001 Justice French, on the full bench of the Federal Court,
identified this approach as a central tenet of the legal system. Dismissing a
claim (in which Mortimer appeared) brought on behalf of asylum seekers who
had arrived in the country on the MV Tampa, French J issued the following
commendation:
28
28 Ruddock v Vadarlis [2001] FCA 1329
29 Michael Gordon, ‘Rebel with a
cause’, Age, 27 November 2010.
The counsel and solicitors acting in the interests of the rescuees in
this case have evidently done so pro bono. They have acted according
to the highest ideals of the law. They have sought to give voices to
those who are perforce voiceless and, on their behalf, to hold the
Executive accountable for the lawfulness of its actions. In so doing,
even if ultimately unsuccessful in the litigation they have served the
rule of law and so the whole community. 28
Mortimer works on behalf of her clients not just for their sakes but to ‘help
build the integrity of the system’. Her clients are located at the centre of every
discussion about her work. She refers to cases not by their case names but as
‘Adala’s case’ and ‘Muhammed’s case’. When discussing actions she has lost and
clients in immigration cases who have been sent home, she is compassionate
but ultimately philosophical. Sometimes, the mere act of representing someone
is the greatest thing she can do for them. Speaking to the Age in 2010, Mortimer
described an exchange that took place during a particularly fraught asylum
seeker case in terms that reiterate the importance of people having a sense of
their own agency in the legal process. ‘I said to the judge: “We can’t call them by
their names because they can’t be identified. Can we call them Mr A and Mr B?”
“No,” said the judge, “We will call them non-citizen 1 and non-citizen 2.” I just
couldn’t believe the lack of humanity in that.’ 29 This is not a bleeding-heart
response but an insistence that the law respect the dignity of Mortimer’s clients
as it would any other person appearing before the court.
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By scrutinising the way people use power, Mortimer puts the onus back on
those people (including politicians and the electorate) to reconsider the way law
operates in respect of people like her clients. Her work on the Malaysia case, she
told Waleed Aly, ‘has a direct effect on our clients. That’s why we do it. We do it
to protect the rights of the individuals for whom we act. The responsibility for
what happens as the result of a High Court decision is a political responsibility.’
She won’t make broad proclamations about the actions of the government
whose powers she is keeping in check. That is the point: government is not
answerable to her. It is answerable to the system, which, when it works properly,
holds our politicians directly accountable, just as it did in the Malaysia case.
Just as it did with the Kenyan case. By refusing to enter into a political fistfight
or even to describe herself as a ‘human rights advocate’, Mortimer draws quiet
attention to those occasions when the powers that be fail to meet the standards
of responsibility they set for themselves.
Surely then, she gets frustrated with the system she claims to have such
faith in. If nothing else, her decision to become guardian to Mohammed
and Hassan, her clients in the ‘Kenyan boys’ case, seems to go beyond a
desire to simply uphold the rule of law. Asked to reconcile that decision
with her professed faith in the system, she sees no real inconsistency. Most
lawyers, she says, compartmentalise their personal responses to cases and
their professional conduct. ‘I stepped out of the case the moment they
came to live with me,’ she told the Age. ‘I was just about their mother, so I
couldn’t be their lawyer as well.’ It’s worth pointing out, too, that it was only
after the government went out of its way to avoid what Mortimer saw as its
responsibilities in relation to her clients that she stepped out of the case.
Technically, legally, the system in that instance did allow for her clients to
be protected from detention. They were, after all, minors whose visas were
subject to review. It was the peculiar circumstances of their guardianship (their
guardian being the government attempting to incarcerate them) that stymied
attempts to protect them from detention. In that instance, Mortimer decided to
switch from the professional to the personal.
Outside the comfortable majority
Ordinary people, says Mortimer, don’t tend to need the protection of human
rights laws:
It’s people on the margins. It’s once you get in the hands of a police
officer. It’s if you happen to be same-sex attracted, if you happen
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Debbie Mortimer and the Forensic Fight Lorin Clarke
30
30 Mortimer, Wheeler Centre panel.
31 Cobaw Community Health Services
v Christian Youth Camps Ltd & Anor
[2010] VCAT 1613 (8 October 2010).
32 Margarula v Rose [2000] NTCA 12
and other cases. See also Matthew
Fagan, ‘Broken Promises: Land Rights,
Mining and the Mirrar People [2002]’,
Indigenous Law Bulletin, no. 12.
33 Mortimer, Wheeler Centre panel.
to be different from the comfortable majority, then it matters. And
that’s like every other exercise of power. It’s not to the comfortable
majority that it matters, but exercises of power matter to people who
aren’t in the comfortable majority. 30
Where the ‘comfortable majority’ begins and ends is a question Mortimer
seems to regard as under constant review.
Mortimer’s efforts to highlight the plight of those outside the ‘comfortable
majority’ have explored areas of law so wide-ranging only a few of them can
be outlined here. In 2010 she worked on a discrimination claim made by a
youth group called Way Out. At issue was a refusal by the Christian Brethren,
a conservative Christian group, to allow Way Out to book a camping ground it
owned for a function. The case was significant because it brought into focus the
tension between the right to freedom of religion and the right to equality and
non-discrimination. In this instance, Justice Felicity Hampel found in favour
of Mortimer’s clients, saying that there had been discrimination on the basis
of the sexual orientation of Way Out members and that, whatever the (legally
protected) beliefs of the camp organisers, they were not entitled to curtail the
rights of her clients not to be discriminated against. 31 At the time of writing,
a landmark extradition case in which Mortimer appeared concluded in the
Federal Court. Attorney-General Nicola Roxon had ordered the extradition
of a Tamil man to the United States, but Mortimer argued the charges against
him were political in nature and that he had not been afforded the requisite
procedural justice. The court agreed and after four years in jail, her client
walked out of court a free man.
Early in her career Mortimer was involved in several cases that attempted
to untangle the rights of protesters and traditional owners involved in the longrunning
Jabiluka mines protests. The central dispute, which generated one of
the most significant instances of civil disobedience in recent Australian history,
concerned the interests of the traditional owners of the land on which the two
Jabiluka mine sites were proposed. 32 Australia’s treatment of indigenous people
still shocks. Her appraisal of the Northern Territory Intervention is damning:
How is it that an entire section of the Australian community can
be treated, by reason of their race, as they are? Have their social
security benefits quarantined, have their houses invaded, have their
communities invaded. How is that? And the rest of the community
can sit by and say that’s a good idea, only for those coloured people. 33
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Essays
34 Mortimer, Wheeler Centre panel.
Mortimer maintains it is the people ‘with whom we don’t share either a
common heritage or we don’t share common experiences, and often we are
afraid of them … it’s those people that we have difficulty realising are entitled
to the same rights as we are’. 34 You get the impression Mortimer will continue to
check the government’s homework on issues like this for as long as the media
and politicians refuse to engage with communities that fall outside what she
calls the ‘comfortable majority’.
While we wait for politicians and the news media to heed Megalogenis’s
warning about the level of debate in this country, it’s worth remembering that
the law has a role in reforming Australian society as well. That role is limited,
but perhaps, at the moment, it’s the arm of government in the best shape to
challenge Australians’ attitudes to those who find themselves outside the
comfortable majority. The media and the parliament might well be suffering
from what Megalogenis describes as a collective loss of confidence, but Debbie
Mortimer shows how the rule of law can bring about a more enlightened
approach to social reform. M
The author gratefully acknowledges the support of a residency from Varuna, the Writers’ House, and a Wheeler Centre Hot
Desk Fellowship during the writing of this essay.
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31

A World that Could Be Read
Diana Bridge
To make an image, the silpa, who was devotee and craftsman,
sat all night in meditation, crucially taxed, until day
broke and he got on with it, his work of binding presence—
a presence lifted, form and spirit, from the subtle texts—
to his intractable material, his stone. Intimate as he was
with the details, he could do them in his sleep: shaving
the stone to make three indented circles in the neck, chiselling
a mat of snail shell curls all over the crown, sculpting
the giant bracket of the ears. Rendering the unquestioned—
at times there’s hardly more to sacred art than this.
But his was art that sought from skeins of argument
the speculative wisdom of his time, what quality
it was that caused the skin to fill—lightly,
as though upon an in-drawn breath, what drew
the mouth up slightly and led towards the nose’s tip
the focus of the more than half-closed eyes,
so that the worshipper would read through grace,
refinement, sensitivity, to the greater abstracts.
This is not the way he would have put it as, bent
on holding it intact, his radiant imagined image,
he worked at raising in the centre of the Buddha’s brow
a light-emitting whorl: the ūrnā, the mark which stands
for that most dazzling of conjectures: the inner eye.
32
Remnant, reminder, radical guide.
See how an image helps with getting inside.
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A Winter’s Tale
Diana Bridge
That is my title and, yes, it is a tale
that starts with rumour riffling summer leaves …
Of course she has done nothing wrong that flesh
so turn against her and she require a Jobiad
of trials, each one entailing loss.
There is a point where plots diverge. I go
with mine, go with the words I’ve held at bay
all afternoon—now they slide into earshot.
A young breast is a thicket; it may need weeding.
Her breast is a thicket and needs weeding. This is poet’s
language—persuasive as a violin, it would not
willingly mislead. Even so, I put aside my language
and learn theirs. The guardians of her breast,
like Shakespeare’s own Paulina, are patient and ingenious.
They lift the tissue from its shell, scrape or suction,
I’m not sure, but when they’ve laid it all aside—
the perfect with the wayward cells—they resurrect.
Amazing what they do. Tissue you can inhabit,
a shape that is wholly your own. Think of a stitch taken up
to the seam, a palpable life woven right to the edge.
*
Then shining Hermione stepped from her case,
restored. And her daughter, straight as an arrow parting
the crowd, made it into her mother’s arms.
This is where tales converge,
where life, placed on hold, resumes.
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33

Twitter>The Novel? @tejucole>Teju Cole?
Sam Twyford-Moore
Teju cole’s debuT novel Open City was published in 2011 and I came to it
via the traditional means—a review in a magazine, in this case a long, positive
review by James Wood in the New Yorker. Writing in the magazine’s classic
thin columns, Wood suggested the novel was ‘intensely [W.G.] Sebaldian’ and
one that did not mock or flaunt its own critical and literary theories. He urged
readers to try to get past the first few pages, which were dense and essentially
implied that no action would take place in the story that followed. I was excited
by Wood’s words of high praise and went searching for Open City in bookstores.
Unable to find it, I ordered a copy from Book Depository and it came to me in
a square brown cardboard case. I ripped it open and attempted to rip into the
book, reading the first chapter. But then I stopped and stored it under my bed.
Meanwhile, with his book gathering dust, Teju Cole was discovering the
creative potential of Twitter. Most novelists now have some form of social
networking account, perhaps to promote their works or speaking engagements.
There are many numbers of ways to describe Twitter to those unfamiliar with it.
Here are some attempts:
34
Users are limited to writing 140 characters per tweet.
The social media platform was launched in 2006 but didn’t seem to
hit the collective consciousness until 2009, when it crashed twice on
the day Michael Jackson died, as users included his name in their
tweets at a rate of 100,000 per hour.
Twitter is known for the celebrity end of the spectrum—the Ashton
Kutchers of the world—but as of writing there are more than 500
million active users.
People choose to follow you and you can curate your own reading list
by choosing who you follow—you essentially curate and populate
your own reading experience.
Sometimes these voices will speak to each other.
Some people are better at tweeting than others.
Teju Cole joined Twitter in 2009 but didn’t really take to it until 2011, when
he was beginning work on a long nonfiction book about his native Lagos.
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Essays
While researching in Nigeria he began to tweet as part of a project he titled
Small Fates, an imprecise translation of the French faits divers, referring to
compressed news items, typically just a single sentence in length. Cole suggests
that the original faits divers influenced the writing of Flaubert and later Gide,
Camus, Le Clézio and Barthes. On his website, Cole mentions twentieth-century
French journalist Félix Fénéon as a master of the form. In explaining his project,
Cole gave examples of Fénéon’s work:
Raoul G., of Ivry, an untactful husband, came home unexpectedly and
stuck his blade in his wife, who was frolicking in the arms of a friend.
A dishwasher from Nancy, Vital Frérotte, who had just come back
from Lourdes cured forever of tuberculosis, died Sunday by mistake.
Living in Lagos, Cole had access to any number of horrific newspaper stories
of this kind, and used the short news items he found to report the fates of those
living (and dying) in Lagos: ‘Twenty is a bit young for a man to be married, so,
with a kitchen knife, Usman, of Rijau, north of Minna, made himself a widower.’
In his essay ‘Structure of the Fait-Divers’ of 1962, Roland Barthes described
these small items as ‘Disasters, murders, rapes, accidents, thefts, all this refers
to man, to his history, his alienation, his hallucinations, his dreams, his fears’.
Teju Cole seems to be actively arguing against what is seen as the superficiality
of Twitter by taking it seriously, not just in the dark irony of the content of
his tweets, but in its potential as a form of distribution. NYRB published a
collection of Fénéon’s faits divers under the title Novels in Three Lines. Teju Cole
was invited onto National Public Radio in the United States to discuss his small
fates projects for a show that was ‘in observance of National Poetry Month’. On
air, Cole read the tweets with the same cadence as a serious reading of poetry.
The tension in these tweets might be in the way we try to categorise them—are
they are nonfiction with a spin, small perfect narratives or simply transcribed
poetic incidences? Of course, they recall Hemingway’s famous six-word short
story: ‘For sale: baby shoes, never worn’. Compression is an art form in itself.
In his excellent short essay on Cole’s small fates project ‘Death by Twitter’
(published in the New Inquiry, an online cultural and philosophical journal
launched and housed on Tumblr, another microblogging platform), the
journalist Matt Pearce comes closest to getting at the possibilities of Twitter
for literary writers, but he declines to offer a conclusion, arguing that he is
‘compounded by the 21st-century issue, which is that we critics don’t really
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35

Twitter>The Novel? @tejucole>Teju Cole? Sam Twyford-Moore
have a familiar rubric for analyzing Twitter yet’. Writers have one of the highest
take-up rates of Twitter of any profession, and it would seem that we also use it
differently to those in other professions.
The bestselling, bird-watching novelist Jonathan Franzen’s alleged
contention that he finds Twitter ‘unspeakably irritating’ got online blood
boiling earlier this year. Franzen went on to state:
36
1 In her 2010 wrap up of Twitter, Alice
Gregory, writing for the journal n+1,
pointed out this particular gem from
West: ‘I specifically ordered persian
rugs with cherub imagery!!! What do I
have to do to get a simple persian rug
with cherub imagery uuuuugh.’
Twitter stands for everything I oppose … it’s hard to cite facts or
create an argument in 140 characters … it’s like if Kafka had decided
to make a video semaphoring The Metamorphosis. Or it’s like
writing a novel without the letter ‘P’.
Franzen’s evocation of Oulipo techniques—facetiously referring to George
Perec’s A Void, in which the author avoided the use of the letter e for an entire
book—is telling. Twitter dictates the form. But Thomas Jones in the London
Review of Books suggests that here Franzen made a ‘category error’ in conflating
Twitter with a kind of anti-literary sensibility. The New Yorker’s music critic,
Sasha Frere-Jones, however, cautiously praised Franzen for having the audacity
to make the statement in the first place, attempting to place him as literature’s
answer to Kanye West, for his ability to make unpopular statements without
much care for the backlash that follows. Frere-Jones misses the chance to make
the point that Kanye West was an early adopter of Twitter, and the medium
perfectly captured the rambunctiousness of his outbursts. 1
Franzen’s anti-Twitter statements—short condemnations without much
evidence of thought—sound as superficial as he’s making the medium out to
be, exposing his artistic conservatism more than anything else. It is hard to
imagine Franzen arguing against Teju Cole’s use of the medium—particularly
considering its capacity for empowerment. Franzen is an exponent of the long,
slowly produced brick-sized novel, an art form that he seems anxious might
become outdated. Twitter is a threat because it might be the logical conclusion
of Chekhov’s observation later in life: ‘Odd, I have now a mania for shortness.
Whatever I read—my own work, or other people’s—it all seems to me not short
enough.’ Novelists might be taking to it simply to keep relevant in this late age
of reading.
Writing is not the only art form going online of course. In a recent essay in
the New Inquiry, Cole writes about the Russian-born photographer Gueorgui
Pinkhassov’s Instagram account. Instagram is another smart phone–related
social network, in this case used for the sharing of pictures. Many of Cole’s
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Essays
opinions on Pinkhassov’s use of Instagram could apply to his own use of
Twitter. Pinkhassov, according to Cole, has ‘long valued simplicity and
immediacy’. Cole notes that a ‘language is being explored with new tools’. And,
tellingly, ‘it will be a headache for curators in the future’. Scrolling through
Twitter feeds to access month-old tweets for this essay has been particularly
painful. If your internet connection drops out you lose your progress. It can
feel like a library caving in on you. Cole also writes about choosing to follow
Pinkhassov exclusively. I’d recommend doing the same with Cole on Twitter,
if you’re averse to the sounds of a 500-million-strong cacophony.
When the new wing of the Museum of Contemporary Art opened in Sydney
this year, the first exhibition was titled Marking Time, whose centrepiece was
Australia’s first screening of Christian Marclay’s The Clock, a 24-hour art movie.
The museum stayed open for the duration of the film on Thursday nights
and viewers could camp out on couches in an attempt to take in the whole
thing. I couldn’t stop thinking about Twitter and the internet while watching
Marclay’s massive movie mash up. The Clock doesn’t offer the viewer a linear
narrative but the passing of time, the literal turning of the clock hands, creates
a linearity out of which the viewer can tease his or her own narrative. Twitter
works in much the same way. Sitting in the dark, I tweeted ‘The Clock: creating
narrative by other means’, partly to disseminate that idea and partly to save the
line to use later in this essay. Social media and the internet could now be seen
as our workbooks, where we can test out ideas that we later refine in print or
book form. I have drafted and conceptualised several essays in the comments
section of other people’s literary blogs (an essay on the Wire published in this
journal originated in a thread on James Bradley’s City of Tongues blog). But I
want to suggest here that Twitter can be the work as much as the workbook,
recalling video-game academic Espen Aarseth’s useful distinction between
‘ergodic writing i.e. writing still emergently based in evolving energy, and
canonical writing e.g. unchangeably published’.
Not everyone has been able to successfully capture this evolving energy.
Parodies of the intersection between Twitter and literature abounded
when Twitter entered the mainstream consciousness. Penguin published
Twitterature: The World’s Greatest Books Retold through Twitter, a novelty
book written by two nineteen-year-old University of Chicago students, which
managed to cheapen both mediums. There is practically no humour present
in reducing Oedipus to ‘PARTY IN THEBES!!! Nobody cares I killed that old
dude, plus this woman is all over me. Total MILF’, as nobody on Twitter writes
like that. The writers are essentially trading in outdated ideas of internet speak
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Twitter>The Novel? @tejucole>Teju Cole? Sam Twyford-Moore
but they are not alone in their failure. There are multiple accounts of failed
Twitter novels—attempting to replicate the success of Japanese mobile phone
stories—and poorly serialised essays.
Novelist Jennifer Egan was already known for experimenting with
digital forms—a chapter in her Pulitzer Prize winning A Visit from the Goon
Squad takes the shape of a Power Point presentation—when the New Yorker
commissioned her to write a story using Twitter. And while the work she
produced, ‘Black Box’, is a great short story, I felt cheated that the story was
coming from the New Yorker Twitter account. Egan has her own Twitter
account but it is not a space she frequents—it has only seven tweets—and
she recently had to apologise because it was hacked and sent out spam about
vitamin supplements. The performance was both under- and over-rehearsed:
under-rehearsed in that Egan spent very little time on Twitter, and overrehearsed
in that there should be no rehearsing at all. Was she concerned
that if she disseminated the story herself, from her own account, it would be
considered self-publishing?
At nearly 9000 words in length, the story also stands in sharp contrast to
Twitter’s concision. The New Yorker fiction Twitter account disseminated
it over ten nights, for one hour each night. All I could hear was the distinct
bleeping of a dump truck reversing onto the side of the information highway
and dropping the haul. This bloodless scheduling gave little consideration
to the internal timing and beats of Twitter, forcing the Australian writer
Briohny Doyle to observe, real time: ‘J. Egan story proves twitter is a shit
medium for reading stuff longer than slogans and following over-tweeters is
heaps annoying.’ I retweeted Doyle—again, partly as a form of saving with
the intention to include that line in this essay—and lost all confidence in the
Egan story until I read it in full on the New Yorker website.
The story is better than the initial mode of delivery. It is a sharp piece of
dystopian science fiction. Egan’s story is all slogans, pushing weird futuristic
aphorisms, delivered in a dead pan, instructive second person. Three tweets
in, however, she suggests: ‘If you’re having trouble perceiving and projecting,
focus on projecting.’
This seems like an early barbed commentary on Twitter—all projection
and no perception, all tip, no iceberg. This is a routine criticism of social
media sites: that there is no editing process, but as Egan must know herself,
there is a perpetual process of self-editing and censorship. Twitter is, for most
users, an extended exercise in autobiography. It becomes more interesting,
however, when the writing pursues abstraction or the fictional.
38
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Essays
This is something Australian writers are beginning to explore. Peter Polites’
brilliant short story, ‘From Peasant to Proletariat: An Autotwitography’,
published in The Penguin Plays Rough Book of Short Stories, played with the
confessional voice to humorous effect. Nadine von Cohen, a popular-culture
columnist, considers her Twitter account as a fictional version of herself, in
which she writes in capitals and prefaces every tweet with FUCK YEAH. The
poet Astrid Lorange disseminates Gertrude Stein-like L.A.N.G.U.A.G.E poems
in the form of tweets, which are as good as any of her published work.
In his review of Lorange’s 2011 debut Eating and Speaking, Tom Lee
suggests that ‘in reading Lorange’s collection one imagines a kind of
ur-writing, where operations of filtering, selecting, screening, sifting, parsing,
and arranging are digitally (that is to say indexically and tactfully) involved’.
Lee identifies something significant to the composition of contemporary
Australian poetics, but this speaks just as directly to experimental writing
composed using Twitter. There is no need to imagine the filtering, selecting,
screening because this is precisely the process.
Wired.com hoped that Jennifer Egan’s ‘Black Box’ would see the return of
serialised fiction—Egan mentioned that this nineteenth-century form was on
her mind when she wrote the story. I find it interesting that such a forwardthinking
technology magazine would hope something experimental would
give way to something old-fashioned.
Twitter has cited Teju Cole and Jennifer Egan in their announcement
of the Twitter Fiction Festival, an officiated five-day festival seeking
submissions for stories and live conversations. Wired.com ran the story
with the exaggerated headline ‘First Twitter fiction festival might mutate
storytelling forever’. The festival, starting in late November 2012, includes an
official program and an official list of authors like any other literary festival,
so seems to be missing the spontaneity of Cole’s approach compared to that
of Egan.
Cole is using his Twitter feed to experiment with what we might call
‘spontaneous essays’ that can seem as improvised as jazz. Cole has described
them as ‘unpremeditated’. When the first of these essays appeared, he
flagged the exercise as a ‘seven-part excursus for Saturday morning’, each
part being an individual tweet. If we consider the definition of excursus
as: ‘1. A detailed discussion of a particular point in a book, usually in
an appendix. 2. A digression in a written text’, does this mean that Cole
considers these experimental essays as a digression from the written text of
his Twitter feed?
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Twitter>The Novel? @tejucole>Teju Cole? Sam Twyford-Moore
40
Each age has its presiding metaphor. Ours is aerial bombing.
Drone warfare and the IMF are variations on a theme: decisions taken
from a great height, with disregard for consequences on the ground.
Downton Abbey’s popularity is about a nostalgia for class superiority,
and the desire to watch those who act from a great height.
Virgin Atlantic’s obnoxious designation of First Class as ‘Upper Class’
is about the same idea: that class is benign and charming.
One question links the IMF, drones, Virgin’s ‘Upper Class’, Limbaugh’s
violence and Strauss-Kahn’s, and the mania for ‘Downton Abbey’.
The question is this: those people down there, are they really people?
It’s a question about for whose sake this world exists.
Someone in soft, casual clothes in a featureless building in Nevada
presses a button, and the question disappears.
The comment on drone culture is Don DeLillo apocalypse anxiety,
heightened by the use of new technology. Cole seems to be engaging in
something deeper here than anything he attempts in his philosophical
Sebaldian novel, as admirable as that form is (and which might be considered
experimental but perhaps only in terms of mainstream publishing). Following
this series, Cole offered another excursive essay, this time reflecting on the
Kony 2012 campaign—a video campaign launched by Invisible Children Inc,
intended to bring awareness to their plight and to have the Ugandan war
criminal Joseph Kony arrested by December 2012. Cole suggested it was little
more than an example of what he called the White Savior Industrial Complex.
From Sachs to Kristof to Invisible Children to TED, the fastest growth
industry in the US is the White Savior Industrial Complex.
The white savior supports brutal policies in the morning, founds
charities in the afternoon, and receives awards in the evening.
Then comes the king hit: ‘Feverish worry over that awful African warlord.
But close to 1.5 million Iraqis died from an American war of choice. Worry
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Essays
about that.’ Cole’s clipped commentary was more excitedly picked up in the
discussion of the ethics of the campaign than practically any other opinion
editorial and was reproduced in full on the Atlantic and New York Times
websites. In a long essay subsequently published on the Atlantic site, Cole
defended his position in writing the commentary, stating that the tweets
‘were intentional in their irony and seriousness. I believed that a certain kind
of language is too infrequently seen in our public discourse. I am a novelist.
I traffic in subtleties, and my goal in writing a novel is to leave the reader not
knowing what to think. A good novel shouldn’t have a point.’
It seems that the near pointlessness of Twitter affords Cole a degree of
creative freedom. Experimentation with the form can be rewarding. This year,
my friend and fellow writer Samuel Cooney and I decided to swap passwords
to our Twitter accounts for a month. People had already been confusing us
(one of Cooney’s interns on his magazine the Lifted Brow thought that I was a
fake Twitter account that Cooney had invented). I’m not suggesting our project
is a great literary work, but it was exciting to wake up each morning and read
what you had done the night before—things I never did, statements I never
made. For that month I was a fictional character. The ghost writer was making
the life up on the go. I was very happy to have incorrectly attributed to me the
ingenious work of someone who is a visionary of the absurdist, non-sequitur
list-making that Twitter excels in:
Nunchucks made from baby baboon femurs.
A bow made from the pelvis of an Irish Setter, string made from the
Achilles heel tendon of an adolescent llama, arrows are porcupine quills.
A boomerang made from the fused ribs of a lowland zebra.
I received retweets for these and more, and gained more readers. In return
I lost Cooney followers and probably damaged his reputation—partly inspired
by von Cohen and the fictional @wise_kaplan account (a sharp parody of an
erudite but unstable editor type), I prefaced most of his tweets with the fact he
was naked—but I was allowed to experiment with a creative voice that I had
previously had trouble accessing, and was able to do this anonymously and in
front of a modest-sized, mostly favourable audience.
At the end of her essay on The Clock, published in the New York Review of
Books, Zadie Smith admits that ‘really an essay is not the right form in which to
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41

Twitter>The Novel? @tejucole>Teju Cole? Sam Twyford-Moore
speak of it’. But what other medium should we be aiming for? This essay could
not have been written and distributed on Twitter. It would not have worked, so
Matt Pearce’s rubric for discussing Twitter remains elusive. I believe it exists
somewhere in creating the kind of serious and considerate literary criticism
we would use for any art form (without pressuring authors to be aware of their
feeds and accounts as literary projects). A good Twitter feed is not a sideshow;
in some cases it can be the main event. M
42
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Germaine Greer: A Portrait
Ben Quilty
QuesTioning looks and self-conscious giggles greeted me for my first
Feminist Studies tutorial at the University of Western Sydney. I was twenty-six,
bullish and keen to understand why it was that my male friends were behaving
so badly. I was also the only man in the entire Feminist Studies class of 1999.
The fourteen very young women who joined me that day seemed awkwardly
unprepared for my enrolment. And I in turn engaged their discomfort with
crazed enthusiasm. I was there to learn about the impact the most profound
movement of the twentieth century had had—on me!
Germaine said no, definitely no, when asked to pose. She followed ‘no’ with
a tirade about the flawed and intrinsically narcissistic nature of Archibald
portraiture—an argument I could barely disagree with. Nonetheless I persisted.
‘Please, Germaine,’ and ‘I do understand all of that, but we’re both here, you’ve
had an impact on me and I want to, need to make a painting about you!’
When finally she said yes my heart nearly stopped. It was ten years since I had
graduated from the University of Western Sydney. I’d made meagre inroads into
answering the question about my mates and their behaviour and now Germaine
Greer had invited me into her home in the rainforest of southern Queensland,
for a 48-hour portrait session.
A month before the invitation a strange article in the Monthly magazine
had portrayed Germaine as a tyrannical and ugly misogynist. I was sure that
Germaine would be guarded. One man had commissioned another man to write
an article questioning the intellectual contribution Greer had made to society
on the eve of The Female Eunuch’s 40th anniversary. The Female Eunuch was a
big book for me and for my parents. Perhaps I was naive to think that a woman
might just have been better suited to write an essay examining the effect Greer’s
formidable text had had on the way women had seen themselves and the way
gender roles had twirled and sparred and jousted for the next forty years. My
mum had always told me that reading The Female Eunuch had been a profound
moment for her. Her friends, whom I’d grown up with, had always told me
the same thing. I was truly embarrassed that a man had felt empowered to
write about the most famous living feminist in such a didactically aggressive
way—another ‘get me out of here’ moment during the meandering of my
Australianness. My life had been littered with similar moments, but this time
I felt I might be able to offer a feeble apology to the protagonist on behalf of all
the testosterone infused humans.
Drawing Germaine Greer isn’t easy. She thinks too much. Her body writhed
around my page that first tepid night in time with the cloud of tiny, vibrant
insects under the lamp on her Queensland verandah. I asked questions to steer
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43

Germaine Greer: A Portrait Ben Quilty
the conversation away from chatting about narcissism. She talked about trysts
with rock stars, marriage, alcohol, drugs, Led Zeppelin and biodiversity. I liked
her instantly. A portrait sitting is less about scratching out a likeness and more
about understanding the sitter. Germaine though is also almost impossible to
grasp, hard to understand. I was proud of my well-tended open-mindedness
until that night. At times I felt like my little brain was overheating. I could
see the liana vines from the surrounding forest encroaching as I spoke. I was
challenged at every level by my own inability. Both slowly the Four X she’d
supplied warmed my bones and cooled my mind and we ate chicken curry
and talked. Germaine has the most alarming way of including herself in
philosophical discussion. She is shameless. She can also put together a very
tasty chicken curry. The drawings I made of her that night are more about
my own emotional quivering self and less about the gin-drinking subject,
Germaine Greer.
The land Germaine Greer lives on sits entangled on the floor of an ancient
valley halfway up the hinterland of the Gold Coast. Lantana threatens to cross
the road in parts and the low green fields and their luminous flatness act to hide
the rotting root balls of the giant eucalypts that once jostled for space along the
valley floor. The road in follows the Numinbah Valley and great walls of forest
begin to climb over the horizon in every direction as the bitumen heads southwest
and then due south towards the ancient volcanic head of Mount Warning.
Natural Bridge hides in one of the enormous green folds of destruction meted
out by the volcano 23 million years ago. Enticed by the promise of glow worms
in a cave, the broad-brimmed tourists wouldn’t notice the bent gate into the
regeneration site Germaine has established there.
A crooked driveway of two tyre tracks leads to the pale-green house. Like
most old farm houses in the Numinbah Valley, its broken windows are taped
shut and waves of long grass lap at its cracked fibro walls. The inside is bare but
for one grubby kitchen wall jammed full of paper cuttings of every plant and
animal of the southern Queensland rainforest, with biological classification
attached. A large diamond python lives underneath and the house is free
of flyscreens. I didn’t see Germaine’s bed that night but she’d be mad if she
had no fly net over her while she slept. I slept out in the guest room with the
billion small, vibrant winged fellows that had taken up residence there. I woke
in the dark to feel a small finger-sized beetle on its way into my middle ear.
Over breakfast Germaine let me know that she was the president of Buglife,
a prominent British conservation organisation, hence no flyscreens and
definitely no fly spray at Natural Bridge.
44
Germaine Greer draws Ben Quilty
(see page 2)
Germaine Greer and the author at
Natural Bridge
Both photographs by the author, 2009
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 44 6/11/12 9:20 AM

Having survived the beetle, the next morning was good. I made strong
drawings. Again it struck me that so much of the exhaustive intellectual study
Germaine has made her life is based on self-interrogation, self-awareness. She
included herself in every discussion we had on the human condition. And most
conversations that morning revolved around the way I was and the way she
was, or at least the way she was sure she was and the way I had hoped others
would imagine me. Germaine had long before my meandering drive into her
valley engaged with my work, and now she hit me with questions about my
knowledge of indigenous culture, sexual politics and environmental issues.
She hammered me about my oeuvre’s omission of sex. ‘Where’s the sex, where’s
the masturbation, where’s the tits?’ And she was right. For years I’d wondered
how to include in my work that closeted part of masculinity—the obsessive
sexual drive.
Reverence for her feminist movement felt a weak excuse, although partly
true. I needed to man up and make more work. I could feel my balls growing,
to coin a bizarre Australian term. By lunch I was desperate to get back to my
studio. As I left Natural Bridge I couldn’t help feeling an uneasy sadness,
though. The world could never live up to Germaine Greer’s expectations of us
all. We are a floundering mess. One of the most vexing human conditions to me
is an inability to look inwards, to confront the truth about ourselves. Germaine
made it seem natural. So many of the ugly weaknesses I’d seen in people
around me stemmed from that emotional mutation. I was now confronted with
how shallow my exploration of myself had been.
As the little red leather plane pulls away from the Gold Coast the enormous
forest tributaries of Mount Warning fill the plane windows to the west. The
catastrophic events that had created the myriad valleys and mountains in
some ancient time are now slowly being swallowed by forest, and humanity.
The seismic gender role re-formation my dad had witnessed in his lifetime
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45

Germaine Greer: A Portrait Ben Quilty
seemed small in comparison to the blinding flash of Mount Warning’s blast
an age ago. Since that visit to Natural Bridge I have touched on masturbation
and sex in my work. Tits have been more difficult. I became mildly obsessed
with my big rorschached paintings of Germaine for too long. Rising from
some primordial swamp, she glares at herself, six big paintings in all. None of
them excited the Trustees of the Art Gallery of New South Wales. I failed to
make the Archibald cut. I called Germaine to let her know that the painting I’d
chosen wouldn’t be hung. ‘Portraiture is stupid,’ she said. There was no need to
apologise to Germaine. She seemed to understand. M
46
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Letter to Tom Collins
Anna Heyward
Dear Tom,
Writing a ‘letter to Tom Collins’
became a tradition in Meanjin Papers
in the 1940s as a way of discussing
Joseph Furphy’s works and their
reception or of commenting on
Australian letters and society, a
device that later spread to other
literary journals such as Overland.
It began with Brian Vrepont in 1941
and continued with writers such as
Manning Clark, Kate Baker, Nettie
Palmer, Kylie Tennant, Jim Devaney,
James Duhig, John McKellar, Miles
Franklin and A.A. Phillips.
A bit over a year ago I began working in the Meanjin archive in the Special
Collections department of the Baillieu Library at the University of Melbourne.
My task was to begin at the very beginning, at the inception of the magazine,
and move forward, matching writers to their work. Six boxes of linocuts from
the 1940s to the 1980s had been discovered, inky and dusty, and they needed
restoration. These were prints that had been used in the magazine—they were
cartoons, letters, covers and portraits. Most of the portraits were by Louis
Kahan, prints of his portraits of writers that were exhibited at the Ian Potter
Museum of Art in early 2009. The work was painstaking. The Special Collections
archive is dark and crowded and dim. Several times I lost my way. I loved it.
I confess, Tom, when I began this work, I had never heard of you, nor of
Joseph Furphy, nor of your towering classic Such Is Life. I was in my final year
of an English major at the University of Melbourne. No Australian literature
course was on offer in the English department that year. As the semester
progressed, my work in the Meanjin collection became more and more
important to my reading life, and the discoveries I was to make in those last six
months as a student changed everything for me.
In a happy coincidence, the week before I began my work in Special
Collections, I had attended the inaugural meeting of what was then called the
Australian Literature Reading Group, where I met my friend Stephanie Guest,
its instigator, for the first time. Our project was simple. We were to go week by
week, and each time discuss a piece of Australian writing, previously unfamiliar
to us, with the help of an invited guest. Kevin Hart spoke to us about Robert
Gray. Sophie Cunningham introduced me to Timothy Conigrave’s Holding the
Man. Chris Wallace-Crabbe read us Les Murray’s ‘The Broadbean Sermon’,
Judith Wright’s ‘Nigger’s Leap, New England’ and Kenneth Slessor’s ‘Five Bells’.
We read A.D. Hope’s ‘Australia’ and our five big cities became ‘five teeming
sores’ for me ever after; Peter Rose had us read Peter Porter’s heartbreaking
poem ‘An Exequy’. Justin Clemens discussed Christopher Brennan, and Helen
Garner talked about hating writers festivals. We talked about Thea Astley and
Barbara Baynton. I learnt who Shirley Hazzard was.
Each time I would return to the Meanjin collection and search for more.
Through the magazine I was able to situate my discovery of that writer against
their discovery by the world. A.R. Chisholm’s piece ‘Christopher Brennan and
the idea of Eden’, from the June 1967 issue of the magazine, was my critical
introduction to Brennan.
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47

Letter to Tom Collins Anna Heyward
One morning in February I dropped a heavy box onto my sandalled foot.
Opening up the box to inspect the offending weight, I found a handsome
drawing of my teacher, Chris Wallace-Crabbe. Next in line was a haughtylooking
Henry Handel Richardson. A portrait of a boyish, excited-looking
young man with a long gaze turned out to be Randolph Stow, a writer whom I
feel lucky to have discovered. Patrick White’s stare was as concrete and anxiousmaking
as I had ever seen in photographs. Each time I identified a portrait I
would clean it, label it, shelve it, and then set about searching for the work of
that writer. I got to know the magazine well, and I was astounded by it. There is
a very strong literary history preserved in the Meanjin papers. It opened up to
me, week by week. The dark purple bruise creeping up my first and second toes
that afternoon reminded me to look for a copy of The Merry-Go-Round in the
Sea in the second-hand bookshop on my way home.
Among the pages of the magazine, Tom, I found serious, intelligent criticism
of wonderful and now-forgotten writers. I found fiction and poetry that I never
could have imagined as belonging to what I had previously perceived as the
landscape of Australian letters. The wild, precise prose of Christina Stead was
ours. I read Douglas Stewart, Ray Lawler, Thea Astley, Katharine Susannah
Prichard, Vance Palmer, Xavier Herbert, Dorothy Green, Kenneth Slessor,
Alan Marshall, Norman Lindsay … and you, Tom. I also found Solzhenitsyn,
Georg Lukács and Picasso. More than once I was distracted from my real
classes. I passed over reading Foucault for the umpteenth time in favour of
Elizabeth Jolley. It began to feel subversive.
So, Tom, each time I would take my findings back to Stephanie, and we
shared many of these old pages with the group. We all wondered about reading
Australian writing at universities, and whether its absence was strange or
traditional.
The answers to many of our questions about teaching Australian literature
at university were to be found in Meanjin, on my Tuesday mornings, in the
cold labyrinth of the archives. I came across A.A. Phillips’s 1950 essay ‘The
Cultural Cringe’ and sent it to Stephanie the same day. In that essay Phillips
identifies an anxiety in Australian writing: ‘an inability to escape needless
comparisons’. This ‘disease of the Australian mind’ causes the Australian reader
constantly to ask himself ‘yes, but what would a cultivated Englishman think
of this?’ and so hinders ‘the fine edge of his Australian responsiveness’. We
thought about its relevance today, and whether our own estrangement from
Australian writing had anything to do with the apprehension Phillips spoke
about sixty-two years ago.
48
Chris Wallace-Crabbe by Louis Kahan,
Meanjin, vol. 29, no. 2, 1970
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In 1959 Vincent Buckley published a lecture on ‘the possibility, and the
propriety of having Australian Literature as a subject of formal teaching and
discussion in a university’. I read it with astonishment. The first question
Buckley asks is one that I think is no longer worth addressing—is there such
a thing as an Australian literature? He goes on to make a point that perhaps
relates to A.A. Phillips’s argument about ‘Australian responsiveness’, about the
Australian ‘aesthetic’ and about our potential for kitsch and parochialism:
Ever since Marcus Clarke praised A.L. Gordon’s poetry for its
Australian-ness we have tended to praise, push, boom the inferior
article on ‘Australian’ grounds, and so compromise the claims or
depreciate the standing of the superior.
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49

Letter to Tom Collins Anna Heyward
Dear Tom, did we have a desire for that which is Australian to be aesthetically
Australian? Were this the case, I am worried that Australian literature never
could be anything more than Australian literature, just a niche in the huge
anglophone whorl.
Buckley’s preliminary question ‘can Australia be said to have a literature?’
leads him to our real preoccupation, ‘can there be said to be a body of
Australian literature which is amenable to formal study in a university?’ His
answer is circular and somewhat self-fulfilling:
50
There is still enough authority about a university to give a particular
cachet to any work which is seriously studied and critically discussed
in its department of English. If a work is set for special study, named
in the Arts handbook, recommended to be bought, lectured on,
and discussed in tutorials, then the natural assumption is that it
is a book which it is important for students to read and discuss.
Important for students themselves, I mean, and not merely for the
good of some abstraction which we call Australian Literature.
A literature is something that we go by. It informs the way we speak and
the way we govern. To teach a piece of writing in a university is to make
it important. If we teach Australian literature it will become literature. As
Roland Barthes said, ‘literature is what is taught’. We choose the books in the
canon, they don’t put themselves there by mystical artistic force. Moreover, as
Buckley writes:
If we took the best Australian writers—Furphy, Richardson,
Herbert, Dark, Palmer, and Patrick White in the novel; Brennan,
Slessor, Hope, Judith Wright, Neilson and McAuley in poetry—we
should have a body of work which is obviously different in certain of
its preconceptions and tendencies from the best English work over
a comparable period, and even from the best Canadian or South
African or New Zealand work.
Even more exciting than the idea of swallowing Australian writing buried in its
national context is the idea of removing it from that very context:
Henry Handel Richardson couldn’t have written if Nietzsche hadn’t
written, and if the French novelists of the nineteenth century hadn’t
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Essays
sponsored the novel of psychological realism. Brennan would have
been entirely different without Mallarmé and German Romanticism.
Judith Wright walks in the open space cleared by Eliot and Yeats.
Hope has more in common with Yeats and Swift and Auden than with
any other individual Australian poet. Eleanor Dark has a greater
affinity with several English novelists of this century than with any
Australian who preceded her. And Patrick White must be talked of
in the context provided by Lawrence, Hemingway, Faulkner, and
Melville as well as in that of the Australian mythos of exploration.
W.A. Amiet had already answered the question of canonising Australians in
volume 1, number 6, 1941, in an essay called ‘Australian Literary History’:
Literary history—a blend of biography, bibliography, philosophy,
sociology, criticism, flour, soda and cream o’tartar—follows in the
wake of literature as inevitably as martial history in the wake of war.
Moreover it far-reachingly affects the development of letters, imbuing
the impressionable young with a prejudice in favour of such things as
are selected to be recorded, applauded and permanently enrolled in
the national archives.
Amiet provides the timid and deferential critic, prone to sidelining Australian
writing, with a checklist:
Rule 1. Get rid of the inferiority complex.
Rule 2. Get it clear that ours is a literature, not a branch literature.
Rule 3. To obtain ‘national’ results, don’t harp on the ‘national’.
‘I can name many Australian creators of literature,’ concludes Amiet. ‘Let
not our historians depress them with proofs that they are merely creators of
Australian literature.’
I also found many letters to you, Tom. Letters from Kate Baker, Nettie Palmer,
Kylie Tennant, Jim Devaney, James Duhig, John McKellar, Manning Clark and
Miles Franklin. James Duhig wrote to you of his frustration that Australian
school children are not made to read Australian letters. ‘Two of the greatest
artists who ever lived [Goya and Cervantes] wrote and depicted local themes …
if a man cannot see the significance of life about him he is no writer,’ he argues.
Historian Manning Clark wrote to you to rail against the disparity between the
upper middle class and the working class in Australia, a phenomenon I believe
we have all but completely forgotten about:
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Letter to Tom Collins Anna Heyward
52
Miles Franklin by Louis Kahan,
Meanjin, vol. 24, no. 4, 1965
Geoffrey Serle by Louis Kahan,
Meanjin, vol. 24, no. 2, 1965
You see there is a rift in our society—the elite flee to the garret, to the
polite drawing-room, to Europe, while the people ape the mate ideal,
being bonzer sorts! I am not asking you to feel penitent, to take back
what you said. I am addressing you because I believe you tried to do
something worthwhile to interpret Australian life.
My favourite letter was that of the wonderfully clever and lively Miles
Franklin, published in summer 1944, around the time the Ern Malley hoax was
erupting at Angry Penguins. In it she responds to the assertion that ‘there is no
Australian literature’. ‘In a land which tests gregarious humanity by isolation
and loneliness,’ writes Franklin, ‘none but the self-superior and those without
humour could fail to appreciate the democracy of the dismissal into one camp
of all persons here so bumptious and foolhardy as to have articulated their
indigene in song or story.’ She was writing in wartime, and looking back with
frustration to the turn of the century, to the publication of Such Is Life as well
as her own My Brilliant Career, a time during which Australians were ‘finding
a delight, as sweet as first love, in the capture of the distinctive atmosphere and
characteristics of their environment’. ‘Aut Australia aut nihil,’ you declared in
1897, Tom—Australia or nothing. Two years later your poetic counterpart Henry
Lawson said that any talented Australian writer should ‘study elementary
anatomy, especially as applies to the cranium, and then shoot himself carefully
with the aid of a looking glass’. Lawson ignored his own advice.
Everything I read began to remind me of something else. In a class on
postmodernism we discussed Salman Rushdie’s Shame and the ‘innovative’ and
‘postmodern’ stylistic practice of breaking the fourth wall and addressing the
reader. All I could think of were the first lines of My Brilliant Career, in which
Franklin interrogates the reader, ‘what matters it to you if I am egotistical?
What matters it to you though it should matter that I am egotistical?’
In that class we had to discuss Barthes’s Death of the Author, a reiteration of
Proust’s argument against Sainte-Beuve. I wondered if it even mattered that any
of the writers I was reading were Australian. Or if, as Barthes said, to read them
that way is to place limitations on them. Reading Christina Stead’s The Man
who Loved Children, I can’t believe that to be true. Stead spent months pacing
the streets of Washington with her husband, gathering minutiae to change the
book’s setting from Sydney to the United States, at the demand of her publisher.
Whether the book were set in Sydney or in Washington, it is still the same book
by the same writer. Perhaps this book is based on portions of Stead’s life. In one
sense, anything anyone writes is autobiographical. But there is nothing that a
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iographer could possibly find in Stead’s life that could diminish or ‘explain’
the power of the sentences in that book.
The inception of Meanjin was an act of bravery, and a sign of belief. To
start from the very beginning, to pick up the first ever issue of Meanjin, or of
Angry Penguins for that matter, is to open yourself up to an unrecognisable
Australia. In 1940 paper was expensive, the population was seven million, we
were at war. Australia was once a hard place to live in, I’m sure you’d know,
Tom. Those who began the publication were renegades who believed in the
writers who had already inhabited this country, and knew that there was much
more to come. Clem Christesen created a journal to which one could apply your
own self-description, ‘temper democratic; bias, offensively Australian’. The
establishment of Meanjin was an affirmation of the intellectual life of Australia
under duress. Whether English departments receive the same amount of
funding as they did last year or not, we have a duty to go on reading.
Opening the first issue of Meanjin Papers one finds these words from
Clem Christesen:
‘Poetry’s unnat’rel; no man ever talked poetry ’cept a beadle on
boxin’ day, or Warren’s blackin’ or Rowland’s oil, or some o’ them
low fellows; never let yourself down to talk poetry, my boy.’ But we
have disregarded Tony Weller’s advice to his son, Samuel. In an
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Letter to Tom Collins Anna Heyward
54
age governed by the stomach-and-pocket view of life, and at a time
of war and transition, we still strive to ‘talk poetry.’ For we believe
that it is our duty to do so. We believe that it would be a grave error
to suppose the nation can drop its mental life, its intellectual and
aesthetic activities for three or five or more years, neglecting them
and those trained to minister to them, and then pick everything up
again as though nothing had happened. Literature and art, poetry
and drama do not spring into being at the word of command. Their
life is a continuous process growing within itself, and its suppression
is death. Therefore we determined to commence the publication of
the Meanjin Papers. Media for similar expression are sadly lacking
in this country. It is hoped to continue publication of this brochure
throughout the war period—and perhaps well into Peace. Prose, as
well as verse, will be included.
CBC
What follows is a slim volume of just eight poems. Christesen was motivated
by ‘the literary rebels of our century as represented in the little magazine
movement’. In the 1940s, Australian literary nationalism was unsure of itself.
Angry Penguins was ruined by the shame and trauma of the Ern Malley hoax
but lingered on defiantly for two more years. We were also in the wake of the
Jindyworobak movement, a revolt against the invasion of false European
imagery into Australian art. The Jindyworobaks believed Australian writers
needed to react exclusively to local stimuli, they wanted to ‘free Australian
art from whatever alien influences trammel it’. They were ridiculed for
parochialism and naivety. R.H. Morrison called them ‘Jindyworobak-wardness’
while A.D. Hope dismissed them as a ‘boy scout school of poetry’.
While they may not have achieved their end of a genuine and natural
Australian aesthetic and style, as a masterful poet without an explicit
nationalist agenda such as Judith Wright did, they at least attest to an anxiety
in this generation that Australian words would be swallowed up in the sea of
English or, worse, dismissed as second-rate ‘Britishness’.
In issue two, of February 1941, James Picot attempts to discuss the criticism
of Australian poetry. For the Jindyworobaks, he writes, ‘it is just no good talking
Keats’, yet ‘we live in the world of Lenin and Einstein and Freud and Whitehead,
and the Australian is as intelligent as anybody else!’ This struck me as very
poignant, Tom. There was a time when one felt one had to write the sentence
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Essays
‘The Australian is as intelligent as anybody else!’ This is the fluff, the bore, the
anxiety around Australian letters. We battle between trying to seem as natural
as we can and Australian as we can, from the puritanism of New Criticism to the
puritanism of the Jindyworobaks. We think an awful lot about how we might
seem, how international we are and how local we are.
In ‘The Cultural Cringe’ A.A. Phillips writes of the ABC Incognito radio
program, in which two musical performances are compared:
one by an Australian, one by an overseas executant, but with the
names and nationalities withheld until the end of the programme.
The listener is supposed to guess which is the Australian and which
is the alien performer. The idea is that quite often he gets it wrong or
gives it up because, strange to say, the local lad proves to be no worse
than the foreigner. This unexpected discovery is intended to inspire
a nice glow of patriotic satisfaction.
We want to be pleased by the quality of something Australian being comparable
to anything else in the world, we want to be surprised by it. Do we really, Tom?
If the act of reading is about self-discovery, which I believe it is, then it seems
an awful shame to read like that. I am passionately, exhaustively grateful that
last year I was spurred, by my work in the Meanjin collection and by my work
with Stephanie, into reading Patrick White, Helen Garner and Christina Stead.
I shudder when I think of how close I came to missing out.
When I read Watkin Tench’s incredible 1788 in 2012, I thought about how
perhaps for a long time Australian writing was about encounter. I think this is
true of Katharine Susannah Prichard, of Judith Wright, of Barbara Baynton,
even of Ern Malley, or even painters such as Fred Williams and Sidney Nolan.
Perhaps it still sometimes is. Perhaps the biggest one is our encounter with
ourselves. Maybe this is where the Jindyworobak movement went wrong.
They were trying, not to know themselves, but to invent themselves. To know
our writing is to know ourselves. This was certainly how it felt last year when
we began our exploration into what was up until then, for us, the mysterious
subculture of Australian literature. That was how it felt on those dark quiet
mornings I spent on the third floor of the library, uncovering the faces and
words of our written past.
Yours sincerely,
Anna Heyward
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55

Translating a ‘Prolog’
Jean Kent
for Rolf Hermann
In the spring sunshine, under wisteria through the ironbark—
a sky of emphatic blue above, all around me
a bath of light—
While the tortoiseshell cat is sleeping, wound into a spiral
(on its wrought-iron seat) of caramel, charcoal
and lime-white—
I’m trying to translate a German poem. Earlier the cat
sat on the dictionary. All English translations
of vertrauen—‘to trust’? ‘have confidence in’?—
disappeared under sunwarmed fur. Now she’s confident
she’s my mistress again, the purring bundle
settles in her own space—
leaves me to the foreign words in my hands.
Distracted, I hear a crackling under loquat leaves—breaking sounds
below all that my trees have shrugged off
in the last half year—
I wasn’t here to rake them clear, and now the leaves
hide, then slowly release, a lizard that looks
like a sundappled creek—
a patient flow across the path, its flick of tongue
a lick of blue, in and out
of the light.
The reptile slides under another blanket of leaves
on a garden bed. The cat still sleeps.
From a forest of German
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a snail in a cape of rain begins to wake.
On a book’s bright field, oak leaves and acorns
scatter …
The blue-tongue lizard when it blinks in the open again
is under the cat’s dreaming chair.
Sunlight aspics them
one above the other, both oblivious, peculiar
as translations, shy gestures
towards another place.
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57

The Great Poet’s Gene
Alan Gould
He dandied, but he suffered to renew
the gift he had to work his purpose through.
O demiurge
of fierce old age
oblige his urge
to stay with edge.
The trouble came with later echolalia,
Ambition fixed upon a star’s regalia.
O demi-age
of fierce old urge
oblige his nudge
to grab some edge.
His listeners asked him, ‘Does your line grow subtler,
By this gene you take from Willie Butler?’
O ego-merge
Of page from page,
Did they asperge
the poet’s wedge?
‘The proof’, he smiled, ‘of voice above mere matter
Is exercising power over patter.’
For he was surge,
his era’s scourge,
And his mere rage
Supplied his edge.
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Headlong he vanished when the nth degree
Unwired his voice from voice’s wannabe,
so far downstage,
(I here allege)
he disobliged
his lineage.
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59

Share Houses
Lyndal Walker
When you are a Teenager, the aesthetic of your parents is as terrifying
as their sex life. Most of us are spared seeing our parents have sex but their
embarrassing taste is everywhere we look. Thinking about the suburban
homes of the 1980s with their wall-to-wall carpet, decorated toaster covers and
impressionist reproductions still makes me feel claustrophobic. For others
it’s sea-grass matting and Che Guevara prints they can’t abide. Either way the
childhood home is furnished with the values of our parents. Delicate flowers
from the faux Laura Ashley wallpaper crawled all over me while I sulked in my
room. My parents’ taste imposed itself upon my body, ruining my black clothes,
itchier than any mohair jumper.
So as an angsty teenager, I was pretty pleased when I saw the 1986 film Dogs
in Space. The chaos and eclectic characters filled me with the hope that I might
one day escape incarceration by my parents and watch Countdown with other
misfits. The characters and scenarios are now familiar. There’s the Lothario
listening to Brian Eno and the student who can’t get any work done because
everyone else is partying. There are arguments about politics and who’s been
cooking meat in the frying pan. The only vaguely appealing character ends
up dead, which fortunately was not something I encountered in the share
households I was to inhabit during my twenties and early thirties.
The documentary We’re living on dog food (2009) uses Dogs in Space to
discuss the period in which the film was set—1978—and the making of the film.
The documentary explores a place in time through its people, music and drugs.
Members of the band Primitive Calculators, who feature in the film, speak of
‘the Little Band scene’ that grew out of two share households in North Fitzroy.
Primitive Calculators and Whirlywirld lived next door to each other but
instead of popping over for a cup of sugar like other neighbours, they were
forming deliberately impermanent bands together. Equipment and knowledge
were shared. Many players were not musicians and there was a blur between
audience and performer. While the bands performed in public, it was among
friends and often just once. Consistent with the ethos of share households, a
sense of community, experimentation and fun was valued above longevity or
creating masterpieces.
For many people, the first time they move out of home they move into a share
household. They come from all sorts of families and bring varying experiences
of household life. Families normalise their values and habits, and in our late
teens and early twenties many of us had limited experience of other ways of
living. Many of the people I have lived with had hippy parents, which in my
60
Pinboard, Gore Street, Fitzroy,
May 1997
Table, Tennyson Street, Richmond,
September 1997
both by Lyndal Walker
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teens I would have envied greatly. But they did not think they’d had ideal
childhoods. In share households our values and histories met and had to be
negotiated. This was a source of fascination and an opportunity to be retrained.
We experimented with different ways of living.
The first and most common experiment was to see how long we could go
without washing the dishes. In my late teens and early twenties cleaning up
seemed like a terribly uptight bourgeois pretence. Living in squalor seemed
a revolutionary strategy. In some households experimentation extended to
hosing the dishes in the back yard or limiting each house member to one plate,
one bowl, one cup and one set of cutlery. This latter option solved the problem
in an efficient way but efficiency was not a priority in the share households
where I lived. Entertaining guests was. So our experiments inevitably ended
with washing the dishes.
Filthy share households are often attributed to men, but for many young
women rebelling against domesticity is also an important step in moving out of
home. I grew up in a house where we were expected to clean up after our father,
the only male. In share households I didn’t have to clean up after anyone. Many
people grow up in a home with a mother who rules the domestic realm with
an iron fist. This often means men in particular feel they have no role in the
domestic duties, but in share households this is challenged. It is where many
of us learn to cook and discover that far from being the daily drudge it was for
many of our mothers, it can be a source of enormous enjoyment.
With the rise of ‘grunge’ in the 1990s, sparsely furnished, messy homes that
evoked the stereotypical share household became the setting for fashion
photography. Photographers such as Juergen Teller and Corinne Day achieved
a level of success that meant their work was in high-end magazines, including
British Vogue. Day’s work was frequently shot in her share household or the
homes of models such as Kate Moss. This was revealing in all sorts of ways.
Clearly no-one had vacuumed for some time and there were dirty dishes here
and there. These images caused considerable controversy and even Bill Clinton
condemned them. Largely it was the skinny models and the perception of
heroin use that caused the alarm, but it was also the fact that these homes
looked shockingly sparse and grimy compared to the other aspirational images
in Vogue. The most depraved thing in these images was the overflowing
ashtrays, which look a lot more wicked these days. In the 1990s smoking outside
was for people who owned precious carpets. But despite the alarm, these
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homes were not squats and there were no infestations or genuinely unhygienic
conditions. In reality they simply represented the way that many young people
chose to live when they first moved out of home.
For me the decor of share households was a rich source of inspiration.
From 1996 to 1998 I made a photographic series called House Style in which
I documented the living space of shared households. The house that I lived
in then was sparse like the ones in Corinne Day’s images but the ones I
documented had a surreal aspect, loaded as they were with the belongings of
many people. Good taste and the practicality of clean surfaces were sacrificed
to humour and conversation pieces. I was interested in transience. I liked
the fact that the houses were haphazard and, now I think about it, tentative.
They weren’t good examples of design but they bore the signs of their creation.
Like the members of the household, the decor spoke of where it came from and
what it left behind. Eighties lounges had been carted from the family ‘rumpus
room’. Quite possibly the corner seat and the other end of the couch were still
there. Fifties kitchen tables had come from gran’s place before she’d gone into
a nursing home. Odd kitchen chairs had been dragged from hard rubbish and
street signs had been brought home drunkenly. In those early households the
taste police were an authority resisted as eagerly as any.
In 1996 I made a photographic installation called Banal le nouveau chic,
which was shown at the Victorian College of the Arts, among other places.
One of the pictures included a bill with the address in Mozart Street, St Kilda.
A baby-boomer visitor informed me that he had lived in this house and that he
had lived there with the now legendary photographer Carol Jerrems. Although
it was uncool at the time to like Jerrems’ work, I was a fan. In Prahran College
library I had secretly peaked through the pages of A Book about Australian
Women with curiosity and delight, hoping my lecturers would not see my
enthusiasm for this irony-free world of overalls, pregnancy and feminist protest.
Jerrems’ work had documented the youth of the 1970s and some of her
photographs were taken in share households. One of her images is called
Mozart Street and was taken the same day as the famous Vale Street. In Mozart
Street the same three protagonists, fully clothed this time, stand in front of
a rundown shed. Share households are often referred to by their street name
as much as by the occupants, who are transient while the house is solid. That
household that I lived in is still always referred to as ‘Mozart Street’. So Jerrems’
title Mozart Street could have referred to a household or to the people in the
photo, though they were not housemates. Jerrems has become notorious for the
ambiguity of the relationships she represented.
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Share Houses Lyndal Walker
I never found any evidence in her images that it was the same house as the
one I lived in. Our house had a rundown shed too but it was not the same one
that features in Jerrems’ photo. I think the person who told me it was the same
house probably made a mistake and they had lived next door. Living next door
to the house that Jerrems lived in was not quite the same but it gave me a sense
of both artistic and household lineage.
In 2002 Dudespace, a gallery that picked up on the sense of community
around share households, was created. Exhibitions were held in the spare
bedroom of a share house in Brunswick. The shows were usually on for just a
day and were a social event. The experience was like visiting a friend or turning
up at a party. You wandered down the central hall and on your left was the
gallery, a carpeted room with a domestic light fitting and yellowish curtains.
People used the space in any number of ways or alternatively focused their
efforts on the extensive back yard, where a barbecue was held for each show.
The casual domestic environment encouraged open discussion and a social
ease that is often missing from galleries. Seeing exhibitions in a share house
was a refreshing change to the career-oriented outside world.
On visiting the house for an exhibition, I loved the arrangement so much
that I asked to show there too. This was similar to how, visiting a friend or a
party at a share house, you might mention that you liked the house, and when
a room became available you’d be considered a candidate for it. The gallery
wound up after more than three years for classic share household reasons.
One of the housemates started storing their stuff in the spare room and doing
the dishes after the show was a drag.
The Hotham Street Ladies were also a product of the environment of share
housing. Four of us lived together in a crumbling Californian bungalow in
Collingwood in 2004, where we delighted in cooking and holding dinner
parties. Among our inevitable second-hand bits and pieces were recipe books
put together for primary school fundraisers. Inspired by these, Cassandra
Chilton, Molly O’Shaughnessy and I dreamed up The Hotham Street Ladies
Contribution Cookery Book. We asked our friends to contribute a recipe each
and included images from meals we had at our house. I learnt to cook in share
households and the book extended this exchange of knowledge that was the
nature of sharing a kitchen. By 2007 Sarah Parkes and Caroline Price had also
lived in the house and so they helped us with our next book, Tastes from the
Shared Kitchen. Ever since, the five of us have been doing food-related projects
including street art, installations, decorated cakes and a public art project for
the City of Yarra.
64
Miss Havisham Cake, 2010
Pizza Cake, 2009
both by The Hotham Street Ladies
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Share Houses Lyndal Walker
In 2009 I was asked to speak about feminism and the Hotham Street Ladies
for a panel discussion. In preparing for it some of the ‘Ladies’ realised that
share households wouldn’t exist without feminism. Prior to the 1960s most
people lived with their parents until they got married. The pressure to get
married must have been great, particularly for those in unhappy and poor
families. Our generation could shake off those unhappy families before we
considered beginning new ones. Young women who left home prior to the
sexual revolution, usually from the country, tended to join wards of nurses or
go to teachers college.
Boarding was also a common option for young people moving to the city.
This was not like sharing though. You lived in someone else’s home and it may
have been a bit like replacing your parents with a new set, although one more
likely to leave you feeling lonely and isolated. When people lived together
in rented homes, it was in single-sex arrangements. The British sitcom Man
about the House, made in the early 1970s, illustrates the scandal of cohabitation
among the sexes. At first the two women and the man feel they have to lie to
their landlords, even preferring to say the ‘man about the house’ is gay. Oh the
antics, the cross-dressing, the girls who can’t cook. The fun never ends.
Although we now live apart, the share household is an ongoing reference in
the work of the Hotham Street Ladies. In 2009 we submitted our first cake to the
Royal Melbourne Show. It represented a scene familiar to share householders.
A pile of pizza boxes replete with pizza crusts and discarded pineapple, the
television remote control, full ashtray and bottle tops. The cake was not well
received by the judges at the Royal Melbourne Show. Comments included
‘Cigarettes and ashtray very off putting when viewed’. Considering everything
was made of cake and icing, they could have eaten the cigarette butts, but that
would have been even more ‘off putting’.
The following year our Miss Havisham cake was disqualified from the Royal
Melbourne Show with this explanation: ‘Be aware that the exhibit is in bad
taste. You are presenting something that is food-based and should be pleasing
to the eye.’ The character Miss Havisham from Great Expectations was left at
the altar and spent the rest of her life sitting at her wedding table. The wedding
cake was dusty, eaten away by vermin, classical columns collapsed like ruins
from a lost civilisation. The institution of marriage—old, degraded and ruined.
The tiny bride is still propped on the cake while the groom has crashed down
among the dust and mouse poo, his head broken off.
But the Hotham Street Ladies can have it both ways. One of the Ladies
got married and we made her wedding cake—a leopardess a metre and a
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Essays
half long with a diamante tooth and false eyelashes. We are free to critique
marriage or to get married and celebrate it in glamour. Similarly, we choose
to make our domestic projects and to hone our skills in the same spirit of fun
and community as in our share household. Our worth is not judged on the
cleanliness of our homes or whether our cakes are ‘pleasing to the eye’. We can
delight in embroidered aprons without being subservient.
The sexual revolution paved the way for share households but they were
not about the idealism of the 1960s. If you had suggested to me ten years ago
that share households had any relationship to communes, I would have been
very resistant. Communes failed. If you could remember them you weren’t
there. All that hippy stuff spoke to me of hypocrisy. I had a pretty good idea
that while the men were enjoying free love and a creative lifestyle, the women
were cooking their dinner, caring for their kids and quite possibly paying their
bills. I read Vincent Bugliosi’s book about the Manson gang, Helter Skelter, and
threw down Helen Garner’s Monkey Grip in disgust. Communes were weird,
murderous sex cults, and 1970s share households were characterised by naive
women who fell in love with junkies and never seemed to go to work.
Share households are very different to communes, and I think the lack of
idealism becomes an advantage. You don’t have to spend a lifetime with these
people, you don’t own part of a property, you haven’t fathered their children
and the future of humanity has got nothing to do with any of you. Families and
couples share mutual household goals such as saving money and improving
and renovating their homes, goals that don’t allow for the sort of playful
activities that flourish in share households.
There is fluidity in all aspects of the share household. With cheap rents in
the 1990s, people moved in and out, taking with them their record collection,
their furniture and their personal lives. There was an opportunity for power
structures and gender roles to be negotiated. Sharing a home with numerous
others also narrows the divide between public and private, which led to projects
such as Dudespace and the ‘Little Band scene’, where the roles of audience
and artist were blurred. I can now see that despite the desolate back yards with
discarded furniture and burnt out forty-gallon drums, share households were
more utopian than dystopian. M
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67

Farmstay
Sue Ogle
We’ve migrated north to nest in the cottage beside the dam
held by the hills; our stories enter each other,
a shared refrain spills onto the water’s surface
hovers and rises like morning mist.
On the verandah, after a second cup of coffee, we watch
the sly butcher bird who banters melodiously with his mate
alert to the chink of cup on plate. We are replete,
the crumbs of our conversation scattered on the breakfast table inside.
Slumped in deck-chairs, thrusting our city-worn knees to the sun,
we peer through silver lattice, two women in life’s harem,
our eyes hold fast to the dam
resigned to chequered cirrus clouding our dissolute minds.
Murder’s a thought, fleeting by day, made real at night
by heifers bawling at the pole foundations, their muzzles effacing
our dreams, bumping us out of sleep.
The law isn’t the lore out here, our minds are awash with city woes.
Reeds stand stiff as a mother’s will unfolds into the frosty dawn,
rendering the terrain a whitewash.
A daughter’s divorce has stalled, spouse claims he’s out of work.
Savings depleted; the solicitor’s fees don’t grow in pensioner soil.
And we’re both destitute, desperate to feel nature’s healing,
hands linked, watching the morning thaw to mauve
grass seeds float on top of themselves mirrored
in the dam, contained in an amphitheatre of concentric hills.
As life plays out on a stage down south we seek respite
behind the coastal plain, retreat to the hinterland
seeing ourselves, shadow puppets afloat,
erased by ripples of breeze, restored in the still of evening.
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Drawn back to the deck we watch the water transform itself.
Spent blooms with white seed-heads sit on grey grass,
like a worn-out candlewick bedspread, drifting
above childhood memories drowned in a deluge of legalese.
We gorge on simple imagery, egrets strutting between the cows
cumulus rising, flotilla of insects circling the outside tap
butternut cattle nosing the ground
the changing canvas of pastel colour washing the dam.
Madder sky seeps onto the water as we pour a glass of shiraz
to view its final screening: supplicant willows fade out
and tall ghost gums come into relief.
Wrapped in eucalypt air, together we taste resolution.
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69

Another Year, Another Engrossing Crop
Martin Langford
70
Reviewed
Brook Emery, Collusion, John
Leonard Press, 60pp, $24.95;
Stephen Edgar, The Red Sea: New
and Selected Poems, Baskerville
(Fort Worth, Tex.), 100pp,
US$17.96; joanne burns, amphora,
Giramondo, 136pp; Kate Lilley,
Ladylike, UWA Publishing, 74pp,
$19.95; Peter Rose, Crimson
Crop, UWA Publishing, 86pp,
$24.95; Anthony Lawrence, The
Welfare of My Enemy, Puncher
& Wattmann, 108pp, $24.
many of The poems in brook emery’s Collusion are about the sea, but the
sea does more than supply him with material: it shapes his interaction with
the world. Compared to the sea, the land is a much easier medium on which to
project plans and migrations. Those close to the sea, however, tend to be less
sanguine about such things. It is, after all, the element that, proverbially, we
must never take for granted. Something of this respect enters Emery’s work as
a reluctance to draw conclusions: as if they were a step too far, or smacked of
hubris. In his previous book, Uncommon Light (2007), the rhythms and thoughtpatterns
were those of the swimmer, for whom there was at least a sense of
progression—even if only illusory, besides the sea’s scale, and its gridlessness.
In Collusion, however, there is little expectation of forward movement—with
the caveat that though the poems do not arrive at understandings, they do
converge towards an assertion of happiness. Many of the poems display a static
antiphony between the self—most commonly represented as a question—and
the universe of things that don’t answer. Sometimes Emery addresses Kafka’s K,
the patron saint of fruitless questions. More often there is no addressee.
Whatever the question, there will be no answer. Answers are claims, and by
being so wary of them, Emery aligns himself with that broad spectrum of poets,
across an increasingly wide range of poetics, who do not trust them.
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‘Words leave,’ he says in ‘It appears we are machines’. ‘Air and water rush in
to fill the space.’ That doesn’t happen in desk- and screen-bound worlds. There,
when words leave, they are replaced by more words—or perhaps by electronic
silences. The physical and the body have been quietly elided from much
contemporary verse—but not in these poems. Here, sea and light overwhelm
the capacity to make plausible meaning—in particular the ambitious, intricate
structures of consistent explanation. Even place is fleeting and conjectural—
except, of course, for the sea, which ‘sloshes round you in its careless embrace’,
‘wind-whipped, scum-topped waves / churning in fractured lumps’.
If this is a poetry of epistemological restraint, it does claim the pleasure
of being in the world. One may not be able to say anything about it, but it is
a wonderful thing to experience. Doubt as pervasive as Emery’s normally
has a sinking effect on the mood, but for all the time he spends worrying at
intellectual bones, his buoyancy of mood is unimpaired. One suspects that the
happiness is inseparable from the physicality: without the body to sustain it,
the mind must take care of its own momentum, and that is not something it
always does well.
Not all the poems are about the sea. There is a fine poem of noir romantic
nightmare, for instance, and another, slightly improbably, about invigilating.
But there are few that do not have a salty whiff. Emery’s pleasure in the world is
one of the distinguishing elements of his work. He insists on it, quite aware that
it places him at odds with many of his peers: ‘Contested ground, this strange
persistent beauty.’ If, like many poets these days, he is a kind of existentialist, it
is an existentialism of wonders.
Stephen Edgar’s new and selected volume The Red Sea contains eighty
pages from previous volumes and fifteen new poems. The selection has been
thoughtfully made, and if one does not know Edgar’s work, it is an ideal place
to start. Edgar’s style and poetic interests have remained largely the same
throughout his writing life, but the later verse—which is emphasised here—
displays the greatest sureness of touch, and the majority of his strongest poems
are to be found there.
It is long-distance work. At least one part of the self—or voice—in an Edgar
poem is as distant from the object of its consideration as in any other poet
working in Australia. Which is not to say that the poems aren’t also full of
moments he invites us to participate in. One might define the poetry in these
works as being a matter of the play of the irreconcilable distances between
intellectual understanding and human engagement. Edgar attempts to invest
events with something like their scientific scale. He is often remarkably
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Another Year, Another Engrossing Crop Martin Langford
successful, but to the extent that he also, inevitably, fails, it has more to do with
our refusals—with the ineluctable complacency of our imaginations—than any
lack of finesse or inventiveness on his part.
The arbitrary nature of our encounters and the vastness of the spaces
that surround them render all our enthusiasms fragile: Edgar’s is not a
world to cultivate hubris in. Ultimately his perspectives are driven by the
ongoing realignment of our imaginations prompted by science. We have
tended to be resistant to its implications: while we have acknowledged them
intellectually, we have been slower to absorb them imaginatively, where real
losses are at stake. When Eliot wrote of ‘the vacant interstellar spaces’ in ‘East
Coker’ (Four Quartets), it was in the belief that they could still be redeemed.
In Edgar’s ‘Coogee’, knowable reality has been reduced to a narrow strip of
beach at dusk:
72
The east looms heaven-high, black and horrific,
A cloud of nothingness that holds no trace
Of the Pacific,
A maw that tells the sheer end of the world
Columbus feared, in which those gulls are buoyed,
And some few whitely curled
Waves break, like forces bursting from the void,
Creating time and space.
While the details of our existence are precious, we are nevertheless
helpless before their changes. ‘Silk Screen’ works the recurring Edgar trope of
defamiliarising the domestic and everyday—the more mundane, the better:
if one cannot rescue the world’s details from their vanishing, there is at least
some strange poet’s satisfaction in being able to turn them into language stuff.
The speaker observes light draining from an estuary at dusk:
Cloud, water, slopes: so many Chinese grades
Of columbine and pearl,
Layered against a parquetry of pewter,
Gunmetal plates and sheets of faded merle.
Uncolours lost to colour, rendered neuter
(A glintless skyey sheen
Of eau de nil that is bankrupt of green …
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If there is anything that offers sanctuary from the welter of narratives, the
surprise and indifference of detail, it might be the careful distances of such
poems. One might even place some reliance on these Jamesian cadences, these
oh-so-precise filtrations of memory. Not a great deal: even these can barely be
trusted—but that is not the fault of their eloquent distillations.
joanne burns’ amphora is not about ideas so much as strangenesses: the
behaviour of language, the peculiar nature of the things we believe in (here:
angels, saints and ladders) and the world of things—in particular of artefacts.
First and foremost is the behaviour of language. Whatever burns wants to
say about a particular thing—a saint or a phrase—or, for that matter, Acteon
and Diana—she won’t be interested unless she can also inflect her interest
into a playful, knight-move-hard-to-anticipate, skewed-to-the-familiar field
where words generate a momentum of their own with their absurdities, their
unexpected links and, sometimes, their sheer daffiness.
One of the ancestor-spirits of her style is undoubtedly Francis Ponge, but
amphora also contains a large number of variously whimsical meditations
on angels, saints and other personae from the imaginations of the faithful,
and the mood of these pieces resembles that of modernist French writers
such as Blaise Cendrars—his Sky, for instance, which is both a biography and
a history of levitating saints. Such writers managed the transition from the
storied surrealism of the church’s imagination to the disinhibited surrealism of
twentieth-century art as if the one led to the other, and some of burns’ poems,
particularly in the section ‘soft hoods of saints’, have a similar familiarity with
both worlds—an unusual note in Australia. She is at home, for instance, in the
world of the saints’ lives and somehow—though without any explanations in
the interim—that prepares her for the weird worlds of the object and the word
when she turns her attention to them.
Even in poems about belief she is likely to focus on the way it expresses
itself in linguistic terms. She gives us lists of saints’ names, in ‘haggle’, for the
pleasure of their resonance and associations:
adalbert adelaide agape agatha amadour apollonia asaph attracta
bathild bavo benignus blaide blandina botolph bona of pisa
carpus chad chrodegang chrysogonus cloud cuby
The poem ‘rung’ ends as a serious meditation on the spiritual journey: ‘but
me. i look for an easier solution … i climb down the ladder of memory … arms
reaching out for that first swim in deep water. letting go of gravity and pushing
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Another Year, Another Engrossing Crop Martin Langford
out into the glossy emerald waters’, but can’t help working every angle on the
theme of the ladder before it gets there—including one variation on ladders
in stockings.
Much of the book, however, comprises poems that praise language by
enjoying it. The section called ‘amphora’ is a collection of jokes on common
phrases that are not behaving properly: ‘she kept her distance in a yellow and
blue lacquered box she had bought on dal lake’ (she kept her distance); or, in
‘counter’: ‘the trouble with leaving things up in the air is that they can become
hard to find’.
The poems in ‘pogo’, like puns on steroids, are extended riffs on single
words: slip (‘relief’); stock (‘stock’); coast (‘spreadsheet’); poppet (‘lathe’)—and,
in ‘oh’, on tuross, profrock and porlock.
Reading amphora is like sharing an afternoon with someone who is a fount
of coincidences and incongruities; someone who just can’t help chuckling—but
who drops into a more serious note from time to time, as in ‘composition’, a
beautifully worked piece on the evanescence of all writing:
74
when there are enough
of these dust petrifactions to create a triumphal
avenue of columns you will smash open the clay
and complete your architectural plan. there you
will recline in your best dust jacket (the wallpaper
now a faded entertainment, a resource for the
songbook of bugs) and browse the dharma of
dust whisperings while playing the harmonium at
auspicious interludes of mist.
Ladylike is Kate Lilley’s second book. While her first, Versary (2002), had
good poems in it, for me it was a book in which she had not yet quite decided
what she wanted to do with her material. But in Ladylike she has: it is a strong
book—among other things, one of the best meditations we have on that
impossible topic, the construction of the self. It is built around three sequences
that deal with this. The first, ‘Cleft’, is about her relationship with her mother,
Dorothy Hewett:
Anachronic from first to last
what’s left to confess?
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Tatterdemalion estate
waste and wild
I’m bound to it as if it were you
Your disinhibition
Eat my words to keep them
from resembling your loose lips (‘Genie’)
This sequence is honest, moving and nuanced, and has a very writerly sense of
memories edited into verse. ‘Coil’, for instance, is a potent hand of images about
the nakedness of death:
A lilac sheath to cover you
your wardrobe of opening nights
reduced to a simple party dress
snipped curls in plain paper
your bed hacked to pieces for the skip
1 Kate Lilley, ‘ “These Novels of
My Life”: Mary Carleton’s crimes’,
Australian Feminist Studies, vol. 25,
no. 65 (2010), pp. 265–79. See Ladylike,
notes, p. 73, for additional sources.
There will be a messy but rewarding doctorate for someone who sorts out
the relationships between the imaginative worlds of mother and daughter:
messy because both women have been prepared to explore their experiences
with the added dimensions that art allows; rewarding because one cannot
imagine a better interface for bringing the two generations of feminism
into relief.
As Lilley explains in her notes in this volume, a second sequence, ‘Ladylike’,
‘draws on the pamphlets associated with the notorious case of the bigamist,
Mary Carleton, executed in 1673 …’ Lilley has written elsewhere about Carleton, 1
who made an extraordinary career out of reinventing herself on the run—at one
stage escaping from the Caribbean in order to return to a proscribed London—
apparently because that was the field in which her skills—and perhaps her
desires—were most potent. Sometimes historical figures can be a way of
thinking about the present because their cultural displacement makes our own
dilemmas visible. As well as exemplifying the ongoing fascination of our age
with ladylike, there is an edge to Mary’s story in that the stakes are so high for
her. The stakes are high for moderns too, except that we seldom see our losses
so starkly—obscured as they are by our comforts.
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Another Year, Another Engrossing Crop Martin Langford
Finally there is a group of poems drawn from case studies from the early
history of psychoanalysis. The gift for the poet (which Lilley still needed
to recognise) is that the voices—principally Freud’s—were already present
in the psychoanalysts’ reports: with a little thoughtful juxtaposition, and a
little dislocation of the props of their authority, she could arrange for them
to bring themselves undone, and for the women to become visible:
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A single case not too pronounced
a misfortune like any other
a cocotte in the ordinary sense
a severe beauty mature but still youthful
a well-made girl intact unversed
she did not scruple to appear
in the most frequented streets
she was in fact a feminist (‘Sidonie’)
The music in this book is intellectual as much as aural: a tight,
minimalising craftsmanship of the accretion of understandings. Not all the
poems are overtly about the construction of the self, but many even of the
miscellaneous pieces originate in its tensions and ironies—it is a subject,
one suspects, that we will be revisiting in the years to come.
Many of the poems in Crimson Crop, the fifth collection from Peter
Rose, begin in the daily and familiar: he reads Huysmans in the heat, at a
cricket match; he has ‘a / Quiet day at last’; he goes to visit his mother. But
the familiarities have a knack of tripping over themselves into more exotic
or intense territory: the burnt landscape on which the cricketers compete
may also be an artefact, though not the sort Huysmans had been thinking
of; the quiet day dissolves through its details into its absences; the ‘crimson
crop’ of the family visit turns out to be a crop of cut flowers and mangled
digits from the family narratives, and even includes a doctor, killed by
the Japanese. And this, I think, suggests something of the continuum
that Rose’s imagination operates along. On the one hand it is urbane and
congruent with the appearances of reason; his voice is comfortable in the
world of the social necessities—it is not restricted to private or dissociated
places in the way some voices are. On the other hand, he doesn’t quite trust
any of that—it just happens to be the world he has to operate in. Outside the
Anne Frank museum:
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The bells of Westerkerk toll
Eine Kleine Nachtmusik.
Whipped by bereted jockeys
draught horses drag beer to the weekday palace,
videoed by the laconic
who queue towards enlightenment. (‘Annex’)
So what does he trust? Perhaps trust isn’t the right word. He turns, as
if instinctively, towards the beautiful and the erotic. Opera is one of his
touchstones—more potent than anything in the workaday world, it is one of the
sources of his imagery when the terms that world supplies are inadequate:
Echoes of the E flat in Rheingold
when they dim the lights and
someone taps you on the shoulder:
‘No exit now. Here for good.’ (‘Sheridan Close’)
Like eros, it may not make any more sense than the rational world does, but its
pleasures are more compelling. There are ‘fifteen new poems from the Catullan
rag’, of a type that Rose first began writing in his collection The Catullan Rag
(1993), in which Catullus’s voice—civilised, cynical, obsessed by love—is used
as a way of talking about the contemporary world. He isn’t the only Australian
poet to use Roman voices—one might mention Laurie Duggan (The Epigrams
of Martial, 1989), Peter Porter (After Martial, 1972), John Bray (Collected Poems,
2000) and Geoffrey Lehmann (Nero’s Poems, 1981). The attraction, I think, is
that the Romans allowed these poets to talk knowingly about the sentimental
life when they couldn’t find a way to do so in more conventional Australian
tones—after all, one way of defining Australian innocence is as an obliviousness
to the fact that there even is such a thing. Some of the new Catullan poems are
not ambitious pieces—a few are literary digs—but ‘Verge’ is an important poem.
Bang in the middle of an evening of romantic intensities, Catullus played
… that corny old song
by Paul Robeson, the one about nature.
Trees, you mocked, trees of all things—
as if you’d never eyed a sapling.
And so the night paled,
everything changed irremediably.
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Another Year, Another Engrossing Crop Martin Langford
This is more than a clash between personal preferences. At the heart of
this argument is the chasm between those who can only conceive of their
interactions—including love—in terms of status and power, and those who
need to gesture beyond that. Lesbia has no idea that such a chasm exists.
All she knows is that allowing the other to speak—in this case, for Paul Robeson
to speak, indirectly, of nature—breaks the enchantment of power. This is a gulf
that divides the imaginaries of the whole society—it divides the poetry world.
It is difficult enough to write about at the best of times. The achievement of
‘Verge’ is to situate it in that most confronting of arenas, the bedroom.
As well as opera and eros, Rose turns to poetry, and if one thinks of the
way verse must negotiate the rational on the one hand and the musical and
the sensual on the other, then one can at least speculate on what its attraction
might be: poetry is the Janus art, the art form that inhabits the impossible
territory between two aspects of the world that cannot be reconciled. Which
also happens to be the place where everyone must live. Unlike some poets, Rose
reads as one who finds the writing of poetry a natural thing to do. Perhaps that
is why the familiar trips so readily into the unanswerable, the beautiful and
the appalling.
Anthony Lawrence’s The Welfare of My Enemy is a collection of poems about
the missing, and the anxieties that attend them. In poems of various lengths,
written in buoyant free-verse couplets, he ranges through every situation and
point of view that missing conjures—some trivial or temporary, but others, like
the anxieties, unable to avoid the possibility that the nightmares might be real.
The idea of the missing is a recurring one in the contemporary world. For
people who are personally affected, it is natural that they should be haunted by
those who aren’t present. But it also has a broader resonance. We seek security
from our narratives. Our birth certificates and driver’s licences are artefacts
that we place great faith in: sound evidence in a diegetic world upon which the
more contested aspects of our stories—our CVs and moral personae, our claims
to spiritual worth—are erected. But what if the body around which everything
coheres—certificates and licences included—disappears without explanation?
The loose thread can be as disturbing as the missing flesh. We live in economies
of narratives where to survive we must commit both to our stories and to the
way they interweave with everyone else’s. The idea that a narrative can simply
be excised challenges our investment in our own. We have a stake in the
sustainability of all stories—other people’s as well as our own.
Lawrence explores the whole range of reasons to go missing: gambling
debts; the oppression of responsibility or marriage. Some of his speakers have
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grown tired of interaction and gone bush. There is one compelling group of
poems about people who go missing from their own heads. The largest number,
however, are about those who get into the wrong car, or who are watched by
objectifying eyes on their way to the shops, and over time, the poems gravitate
towards situations where missing does turn into nightmare, and the sequence
ends dominated by the presence of Ivan Milat. There is no resolution to the
exploration of an idea: the possibility simply persists. For all the drift towards
nightmare, however, Lawrence is rarely interested in the details of how
someone died: the book leaves us with a sense of the uneasy tension between
the actualities of nightmare and the more self-interested anxieties of the
public—which is probably a fair summary of the situation that pertains.
Interestingly, he doesn’t greatly alter the speaking voices as he moves from
one character or situation to another. No matter who they are—even if they are
criminals—they all have something of the empathy of the poet and something
of the shrewdness of the detective. As a result, they all become versions of the
one voice: incidentals of time and place remain just that. The victims are also
versions of each other; and everyone, we know, is a potential victim. So this is
not a book about any particular identity going missing. If Lawrence’s attitudes
are representative of the way our understanding of missing is now inflected,
then one might say that last century’s anxiety about the specific nature of one’s
identity—as exemplified, say, by the tensions between Ellen Roxburgh and
Ellen Gluyas in Patrick White’s A Fringe of Leaves, Eddie and Eadith in his The
Twyborn Affair, or Will and Toki in R.D. Fitzgerald’s collection Between Two
Tides (1952)—has morphed into a broader concern about the fragility of all
identity, irrespective of where it has come from.
All the poets reviewed have shrewd and telling things to say about important
aspects of contemporary life. They are all experienced artists working at a high
level of craftsmanship. Yet they are not the only poets of this quality beavering
away: Australian poetry has never been richer nor more varied. Its invisibility,
however, is a disgrace: it is, given this level of cultural wealth, simply not
possible to claim an interest in the intellectual life of the nation if one does not
know what the poets are up to. M
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Larvatus Prodeo
Shane McCauley
The mask grafted so perfectly
I forget I ever looked
otherwise:
at my best at moonrise
surrounded by winter’s wood smoke
feeling the cold breath of God
on my bland
star-pocked face.
It has taken long enough
to achieve—
this harmless concealment
protection
semblance of content.
Otherwise
naked and failed
my old self winged and winded
might go running gibbering
from life’s heat
into mist
into dissolving sleet.
Note: The title comes from Descartes: ‘I advance masked.’
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Grace Notes
Ron Pretty
It begins with a comparison: a budgie
caged with mirror, spilling seed;
and a child pecking at the keys
of an upright piano, spilling notes
into the room, on odd occasions
stumbling into music. That’s the moment:
caged in a sudden net of sound
her hair falling across her face, floating
inside the bars as naturally as dreaming.
And then a sudden discord, the lid
slammed shut, the flight
to the bedroom, as though a change of scene
will shift the bars. The budgerigar,
all bright with blues and greens, pecks
the plastic replica; it sways and nods
balanced as a libran, impassive
while the cock struts and spills
a shrill appassionata to the mirror
then flits from swing to perch.
When she plays the piano, the blue bird
cocks its head and listens
and offers from the safety of the bars
a tentative grace note, watching
itself in the mirror, spilling its seed
on sandpaper at the bottom of the cage.
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The Bartender and the Archive
Chad Parkhill
in early 2007 a Seattle-based bartender named Jamie Boudreau received,
as a gift, a bottle of Amer Picon, a French aperitif bitters with very limited
distribution outside its home country. This was the cause of some excitement
for Boudreau, who had noted its presence in a host of cocktail recipes dating
from the early twentieth century, including the Brooklyn (a variation on the
Manhattan), the Liberal Cocktail, and a peculiar Basque-American invention
named the Picon Punch. Boudreau soon sampled the product, both by itself
and in a host of recipes, while researching its history. Why had this singular
product—a heady blend of caramelised orange flavours matched with the
penetrating bitterness of gentian root—fallen out of favour? Why was it so hard
to find when it had once been sufficiently widespread to be marketed with the
slogan ‘Il n’est plus une partie du globe où n’ait pénétré le Picon’? 1
Boudreau soon discovered that the Picon he was happily sampling was
but a pale shadow of the Picon that graced the Brooklyn cocktail of 1914: its
manufacturers had repeatedly reduced the alcoholic proof of the product since
the 1970s, which in turn reduced its potency and changed its flavour profile.
With this in mind, Boudreau set out to re-create the original Amer Picon using
readily available ingredients, and after some experimentation came up with
a recipe that combined an Italian amaro with dried orange peel steeped in
high-proof vodka and a commercially produced orange bitters. Boudreau then
took a sample of his reformulation to the 2007 Tales of the Cocktail conference,
a gathering of bartenders, drinks writers and bons vivants that takes place
annually in New Orleans. There, according to Boudreau’s own blog, several
luminaries of the spirits world tasted his reformulation alongside a hipflask
of pre–formula change Amer Picon thoughtfully provided by spirits retailer
and drinks historian LeNell Smothers. The assembled company declared
Boudreau’s reformulation almost identical to the ‘real’ Amer Picon, and
Boudreau soon presented his recipe, with minor changes, on his blog. 2
The casual drinker is now more likely to encounter Amer Boudreau than
Amer Picon—at least outside France. The Amer Boudreau recipe is the first hit
of a Google search for Amer Picon. Although the product is not commercially
available, the ease of its construction means that it is the go-to solution for any
bartender (professional or amateur) who wants to make a cocktail containing
Amer Picon. It is a remarkable success story: a venerable aperitif bitters
has returned from oblivion via the internet, to the delight of professional
bartenders and drinking dilettantes. Yet the success of Amer Boudreau rests on
a methodology only as rigorous as the say-so of a handful of bartenders sipping
from a hipflask on one hot July afternoon in New Orleans.
82
1 ‘There is no longer any part of the
world where Picon hasn’t penetrated.’
2
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Essays
3 The Balance, and Columbian
Repository, 13 May 1806.
4 David Wondrich, ‘The Impostors’,
24 March 2011, .
Despite the frequency with which alcoholic beverages are marketed with
reference to their age and heritage—think of the ‘maison fondée en 1827’ that
adorns bottles of Grand Marnier—a lot can happen to a drink over time. As
the cocktail dates from the turn of the nineteenth century, some drinks have
had well over a century of changes wrought upon them. The cocktail as we
know it was first defined in print in 1806 as ‘a stimulating liquor, composed
of spirits of any kind, sugar, water and bitters … vulgarly called a bittered
sling’. 3 This definition aligns closely with the recipe for the Old-Fashioned,
the oldest known cocktail, which consists of approximately two ounces of any
spirit (usually bourbon whisky) touched with a dash of bitters, some sugar,
ice, and a twist of citrus peel. Since 1806 this basic template has been subject
to several changes, many of them beneficial: new cocktails usually result from
refinements and adjustments to existing cocktails, as in the Improved Cocktail,
which is essentially an Old-Fashioned with a spoonful of maraschino liqueur
and a dash of absinthe.
Other changes are less benign, altering the flavour, mouth feel or potency
of a drink for the worse. In many cases these deleterious changes stem from
confusion about ingredients. For drinks historian Dave Wondrich, a typical
example is the Gin Cocktail, a variation on the Old-Fashioned originally made
with the Dutch spirit genever—the ancestor of the London dry gin found in
liquor stores today. While London dry gin is made with a neutral spirit base,
a blank canvas on which the taste of juniper and other botanicals can be
displayed, genever is made with a malty, Scotch-like base spirit. Genever is
now a niche spirit, but it was immensely popular in the nineteenth century,
to the extent that, as Wondrich puts it, ‘until 1880 or so, when an American
said “gin,” he almost always meant the Dutch style’. 4 At some stage prior
to the turn of the century, ‘gin’ came to specify London dry gin, and as the
Gin Cocktail’s recipe specifies only two ounces of gin rather than genever
specifically, it began to be made with London dry instead. As this results in a
particularly unlovely beverage—the bitters, sugar and ice alone incapable of
taming the sharpness of a good London dry gin—the drink fell out of favour.
If the definition of a product doesn’t change, then the product itself can
change, as Amer Picon’s transition from respected stalwart to regional oddity
demonstrates. Other products simply disappear from shelves as their parent
companies go bankrupt or tastes change: the website CocktailDB lists no
fewer than fifty-eight such ingredients, now known only by their appearances
in historical bartending manuals such as Jerry Thomas’s Bar-Tender’s Guide
of 1862.
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The Bartender and the Archive Chad Parkhill
Even if a drink’s ingredients remain much the same over time, the recipe
can change in response to changing tastes—and not always for the better. The
Dry Martini is an example. In its original form it is a variation of the Martinez
cocktail, which was made with two ounces of sweet vermouth, an ounce of old
tom gin (a faintly sweet gin that served as something of a missing link between
genever and London dry gin), and dashes of maraschino liqueur and aromatic
bitters. The Dry Martini was so named because it used both dry gin and dry
(or French) vermouth; early recipes, such as the one found in Stuart’s Fancy
Drinks and how to Mix Them (1896), called for large quantities of vermouth,
anywhere from a third to a half of the drink. After Prohibition, though, the
ratio of gin to vermouth steadily increased, a trend well established by the time
David A. Embury’s The Fine Art of Mixing Drinks was published in 1953. In this
book Embury castigates the half-and-half Martini; his own preferred ratio was
seven parts gin to one part vermouth. Even at this stage, the theatrics of rinsing
glassware with vermouth and discarding the excess or misting vermouth over
the surface of the drink with a perfume atomiser were well established. They
became ever more popular as consumers and bartenders learned to treat
vermouth as though it were a necessary inconvenience in a Martini. Shortly
after the publication of Embury’s book, vodka made such an impact on the
American bar scene that the revised edition of 1958 includes a section entirely
devoted to this exotic new spirit. By the 1990s the Martini served in the average
American bar consisted of roughly three ounces of vodka, perhaps more,
shaken with ice that had once briefly been acquainted with some dry vermouth.
This drink bears little resemblance to the gentle blend of gin and vermouth
with a dash of bitters first popularised a century earlier.
The ravages wrought upon these drinks illustrate the social and cultural
dimensions of the cocktail—which is, after all, not merely a class of mixed
beverage but also a socially constructed entity with a particular history. If tastes
have changed over the past century of drinking, it is often a result of events
outside bars and saloons. The Prohibition of alcohol in the United States
(1919–33), for example, caused the local liquor industry to shut down quickly,
with some profound consequences. During this period, distilleries couldn’t
lay down new batches of product to be aged, and those with the capital to flee
to wetter climes found themselves in the bars of Havana, London and Paris—
where lighter liquors such as white rum, London dry gin and European aperitif
bitters were the tipple of choice. Not only did American souses acquire a taste
for unaged spirits, but when Prohibition ended American producers were
unable to supply well-aged spirits to the market.
86
Previous spread
New York City Deputy Police
Commissioner John A. Leach, right,
watching agents pour liquor into the
sewer following a raid during the
height of prohibition. Photographer
unknown, Library of Congress Prints
and Photographs Division, c. 1921
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The effect on American drinkers’ tastes was profound: old favourites such
as bourbon and rye whiskies were cast aside in favour of Canadian whisky
(which receives minimal ageing and is blended for smoothness, not character),
Cuban rum, and the exotic Russian novelty known as vodka. While the effects
of Prohibition can and have been derided by the cocktail cognoscenti, it’s also
worth acknowledging their benefits. American bartenders fled the country and
took their skills around the world, taking cocktail culture to Europe and as far as
Japan, where a small but vital cocktail culture flourishes today. And bartenders
soon created new drinks based on local ingredients, bringing unusual products
such as Campari and Fernet-Branca into the bartender’s vernacular. Campari
isn’t an authentic pre-Prohibition cocktail ingredient, but the world of mixed
drinks would be altogether poorer without the Negroni.
Amer Picon is not the only alcoholic beverage that has recently returned,
Lazarus-like, from presumed death. Crème Yvette, a liqueur flavoured with
raspberries and violets, was recently reintroduced to the American market
after a forty-year absence. Its provenance is sound: the current manufacturer,
Charles Jacquin et Cie, purchased the proprietary recipe from its original
source, Sheffield of Connecticut, in the 1930s. The relaunched Abbott’s Bitters—
best known for its use in the Martinez—is a dicier proposition. The proprietary
formula was lost when its original manufacturer went out of business, and
the small company that now offers a reconstructed Abbott’s Bitters has based
its recipe on the results of gas chromatography performed on samples of the
original product. Since those samples are at least fifty years old, nobody can
be certain that the gas chromatograph—a device designed to separate out the
components of an unknown mixture—is capturing the compounds that were
present in a fresh bottle of Abbott’s Bitters in the early twentieth century.
(Strong liquor acts as a preservative, but not a perfect one, and it’s entirely
likely that many of the aromatic compounds that gave Abbott’s its distinctive
flavour would have been altered over that time.) Other products, such as Pierre
Ferrand’s recently launched dry curaçao (which aims to re-create the style of
dry curaçao prevalent in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries), are based on
recipes so old that the question of how to determine their authenticity becomes
moot. We know that they’re made very similarly, but does that mean they are
similar to their antecedents? Just how authentic can they be?
For a growing number of bartenders and their customers, authenticity has
become the sine qua non of a good drink. The craft cocktail movement, inspired
by the early archival research of bartender Dale DeGroff in the late 1980s, has
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The Bartender and the Archive Chad Parkhill
made a fetish of pre-Prohibition and ‘traditional’ drinks. Thus vermouth is
experiencing something of a comeback, and trendsetting bars such as New
York City’s Milk & Honey make their Dry Martinis ‘fifty-fifty’ in deliberate
deference to the drink’s origins. Genever and old tom gins have returned to
bars, alongside other, more recondite products. Even sherry, once mocked as
the tipple of grandmothers and derelicts, has its public champions (including
this author). Online forums such as the Chanticleer Society offer a venue
for professional bartenders and passionate amateurs to discuss and debate
the origins of their favourite drinks, while blogging sites offer a platform for
journeyman mixologists to track their expeditions deep into the archives in
search of ever-more authentic cocktails. It’s no accident that one of the bestknown
drinks blogs is Savoy Stomp, which documents its author Erik Ellestad’s
attempt to make all of the drinks in the Savoy Cocktail Book of 1930.
This fetishisation of authenticity isn’t limited to the world of cocktail snobs;
examples of similar veneration of the past can be seen in many spheres of
consumption. (Vinyl records and cassette tapes, for example, have become
talismans of conspicuous consumption in an industry that has been profoundly
reshaped by digitisation.) 5 And like other quests for authenticity, the craft
cocktail movement is not above criticism: only those with money, leisure time
and social capital can pursue such quixotic schemes as reintroducing pre-
Prohibition brands of bitters. In the world of cocktails, a taste for the ‘authentic’
separates the cognoscenti from the hoi polloi, drawing a line somewhere
between those who appreciate artisanal mezcals and those who don’t see any
problem with the word ‘Appletini’.
Yet the craft cocktail movement’s focus on authenticity serves the useful
purpose of illuminating the complex history folded up inside something as
simple as a glass of cold gin and vermouth. In returning to earlier tastes, these
bartenders and the aficionados playing along at home are demonstrating that
the history of drinks, like most other histories, is not a teleological progression
towards an ideal but a contested and contingent domain subject to reversals
and accidents of fortune. There may well be no such thing as a truly ‘authentic’
drink, but that doesn’t mean the search for authenticity in the world of drinks
is a fool’s errand. That quest can reveal a historical narrative behind each and
every cocktail recipe, and in so doing take something as familiar as a Martini
and imbue it with wonder and mystery. Such a transformation is surely
something worth raising our glasses for. M
88
5 This remains the case even if it is true
that most young people who purchase
vinyl records get more use out of the
MP3 download codes included than
they do from the records.
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Fiction
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Keilor Cranium
WAYNE M ACAuLEY
In ocTober 1940 a man by The name of james WhiTe unearThed, in
an unprepossessing sand deposit near the junction of Dry Creek and the
Maribyrnong River, what has since become known as the Keilor Cranium.
Lacking, aside from the mandible, the ‘temporal segments of both zygomatic
arches and a large section of the right side of the basicranium’, the Keilor
Cranium is nonetheless one of our best-preserved examples of south-eastern
Aboriginal cranial morphology from the terminal Pleistocene. A few fragments
of femur, believed to belong to the same individual, were also found close by.
There is still some debate over the significance of the cranium: on the one
hand, we have the argument that Keilor provides incontrovertible evidence of
unbroken, ongoing habitation of the continent by a single line of Aboriginal
ancestry from prehistoric times to the present, and on the other, the argument
that, while indeed a significant find, Keilor could not reasonably make such
claims. Of course, what would seal the argument one way or the other is the
missing mandible. But the missing mandible remains missing. Many digs, the
most recent in the early 1980s, have failed to find any trace.
I first came across the Cranium some years ago when I was living in that
house in Brunswick with the chickens out the back. I thought at the time
it might make a good topic for a story, magazine-length, starting perhaps
with the accidental discovery in a nondescript suburban paddock of some
apparently prehistoric Aboriginal remains and exploring in its middle and
concluding pages the profound impact this discovery might have on the
national story. Because if, as the science suggested, the jaw structure and
mandibular dentition of the Keilor Cranium (or Skull, as it would be if the
jawbone were found) showed it to be as robust and gracile as the better known
Kow Swamp and Lake Mungo remains, a further and probably conclusive piece
of evidence would have been found to finally overturn the trihybrid theory of
prehistoric Aboriginal occupation (successive waves of migration displacing
the prior occupants) and the assumption based on it that the land is as much
ours as theirs. My story would put the lie to the claim, at that time gathering
momentum in certain circles, that we are all immigrants, and that no-one can
claim prior ownership and therefore any kind of special treatment.
Each day I caught the tram into the city and sat in the State Library reading
through the scant and specialist material available. But truth to tell my heart
wasn’t really in it. What was I, the white boy, trying to prove? I decided to do a
little archaeology myself.
I packed a lunch, a notebook and a pen, a garden trowel, a dessert spoon,
and an old takeaway container, fixed a milk crate to the back of my bike, and put
90
From Treatise on Physiognomy, artist
unknown, c. 1790, US National Library
of Medicine
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Keilor Cranium Wayne Macauley
my pack inside. On the track I passed houses, football fields, freeway flyovers;
occasionally a jogger went past, occasionally a pair of women out walking. After
a while I left the track and rode the back streets of Essendon until I came out at
Keilor Road, which I followed all the way to Horseshoe Bend. I arrived there a
little after midday and hid my bike in some bushes near the bridge.
The first thing that strikes you about the Keilor Cranium site, the thing that
still strikes me now—the reason, in part, for my writing—is how on earth in
heaven’s name such deep and significant history could exist in such a shallow,
insignificant place. The dig itself, now entirely overgrown, is little more than
a large hollow about twenty metres in diameter near where the scar of Dry
Creek meets the Maribyrnong. The smattering of native grasses planted in the
vain hope of revegetating the area has been completely overtaken by weeds:
Scotch thistle, gorse, serrated tussock and the African boxthorn that some
well-meaning farmer must once have hedged his paddocks with. Rabbits were
hopping about everywhere, their white tails bobbing. The soil there is dark
alluvial, thrown up by the river over eons past, with patches here and there of
flaky limestone, the remnants of an ancient seabed. The rabbits had ravaged
whatever grasses once held together the sloping hillsides above, and the overall
impression was of a landscape washed, leached, weather-worn and scarred.
A flight path to the nearby airport passes directly overhead: you could see
the huge underbellies of the jets in fine detail as they descended towards the
runway. This little piece of land, in many ways of great national significance,
was, in every other way, a sad peculiarity. Dead paddocks, rampant weeds,
car tyres, the rusted skeleton of an abandoned truck.
I rummaged around there most of the day, in full view of the passing traffic
on the freeway above, feeling, quite frankly, a little ridiculous. I ate my lunch on
a mound of dirt, relieved myself in a boxthorn thicket. I scratched around with
my implements, jotted down some notes and made a few crude pencil sketches.
The afternoon dragged on; the cars that had passed by that morning were now
returning home.
I too was about to make my way back towards the bridge when I heard
what I thought was a car backfiring. I hid behind a gorse bush and watched a
figure moving slowly across the slope of the nearby hill. He was carrying a gun,
and had a dog trotting along behind. He picked something up, then started in
my direction.
Hello! Hello! I said, stepping out. Hello! Don’t shoot! Hello! If I felt ridiculous
before, I felt completely ludicrous now. The man looked at me. What are you
doing here? he said. I’m a writer, I said. This gave him little to go on. He was
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carrying a dead rabbit by the ears. I’m writing about the Cranium, I said, holding
out as evidence my dusty utensils and my dog-eared notebook. He leaned the
gun against his leg.
He was white-bread suburban, his father and probably his father before
him had shot rabbits here, and if his son was not away down the coast fishing,
I guessed, he would be here shooting rabbits too. A factory worker, car parts
probably, recently unemployed, a small brick house with a wide concrete drive
and a tin garage with a tilt-up door where on the weekends he tinkered with
the trail bike he and his son rode each Sunday on the paddocks out the back of
the estate. He said ‘cranium’ like ‘krahnium’. I’ve heard all the talk about the
Cranium, he was saying (he had his foot on the dead rabbit’s head, ripping the
pelt from the carcass; his dog, a mongrel-looking thing, was woofing down the
entrails nearby); everyone around here has, I mean how it’s all a big deal and is
going to put us on the map. Gavin Proctor went up to Lake Mungo there a while
back to have a look; they’ve got everything up there: visitors’ centre, guided
tours, overnight lodge. And what have we got? Nothing. So Gavin’s come back
with all these big ideas and he’s got the local businesses onside and oh yeah for
a while there it was all go, go, go. But we don’t have the mandible—do we?—
and we’re poor cousins to Mungo if we don’t have the mandible. Then Gavin
left—trouble with his wife, she was seeing the butcher—and the whole thing
went arse-up. A few good souls tried to set up a committee with the idea of
fixing the place up and mounting some kind of plaque or information board or
something, but like everything else around here it was all talk no action. Same
with the skate park. Piss and wind. Gavin’s the one you want to talk to, but he’s
in Sydney now, or that woman from the library but she’s a pain in the arse, or
you could have a look in Garden Avenue where there’s a bloke called Windridge.
About fifty metres down on the left-hand side.
The dog was tense and bristling, sweeping the bloodied dirt with its nose.
The man whistled her up. He threw the pelt into the bushes and put the carcass
in a plastic bag. Watch out for snakes if you’re going back that way, he said,
pointing towards the bridge. She chased up a tiger yesterday. He shouldered
the gun and set off up the hill, the dog following behind.
I’d knocked on the door of three houses in Garden Avenue before the man
called Windridge answered. A double-storey brick veneer with a central door,
two large upstairs windows, and a ‘Clean Fill’ sign on the fence. It was evening,
the streetlights were just coming on, the smell of cooked meat wafted out from
a kitchen somewhere, while down in the bushland reserve by the river the
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lorikeets were screeching and chattering in the trees. He was a pale, nervous,
balding man in his sixties, with one of those poloneck jumpers that had long
ago gone out of fashion. He had a pair of reading glasses on a chain around his
neck. I’m interested in the Cranium, I said. I heard you might know something.
He glanced over my shoulder as if looking for the source of the rumour. Are you
from the papers? he asked. I said I was a freelance writer, that I had a general
interest only. I showed him my pad, as if that were some use. He gestured for
me to come inside.
It was a 1960s house, with raw timber and lots of light. Windridge led me
down the hallway to the back where a big open-plan kitchen looked out onto
a terraced back yard and the bushland reserve beyond. It was getting dark
out there now but I could still see, glowing strangely down on the lower part
of the garden in the last of the evening light, a big white marquee. Are you
having a party? I asked. He snorted. A woman came in, a lean, overtanned
woman with pinned-up bottle-blonde hair. This is my wife, Jenny, said
Windridge. Love, this is the man I was telling you about, from the university,
you remember? The woman gave her husband, if that’s what he was, what could
only be described as a withering look. She did not even bother looking at me.
She picked up a wine glass and bottle from the kitchen bench and walked back
with them towards the front of the house. I could hear the muffled sound of
the evening news on the television, then a door closing, then silence.
The air outside was alive, the birds chattering in the trees, the moths hurling
themselves at the porch light. The white marquee was radiating an eerie, alien
light. Windridge stopped before its entrance. The river’s just down there, he
said, past those two gums. It does two big horseshoe turns around here—one
there, one further back—and the theory was that any bone fragments, even in
flood-times, wouldn’t be able to get downstream past these two horseshoes
but would lodge in the sandy deposit up there where the Cranium was found,
before the first bend, over on the other side of the bridge. That was the theory,
anyway. He pulled back the flap on the marquee and flicked a switch on the
power board inside. A fluorescent light stuttered on.
The marquee was there to cover what was essentially an enormous hole.
There was a walkway around it, about a metre wide, allowing access to all four
sides, and in a couple of places a ladder going down into what at its deepest
would have been about a four-metre drop. But the depth was not uniform, the
whole thing was terraced, with little earth platforms and stopes throughout.
Above the hole was a rope-and-pulley system with a bucket on the end and
on the far walkway a wheelbarrow full of dirt. This is my fourth dig in this
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street, said Windridge; number one first, then number three, then five, then
here. They’ve all got swimming pools now. They were wrong to think all the
fragments were going to be found back there on the other side of the bridge,
away from people, ‘in the scrub’. That’s the biggest delusion of all. No. All our
houses are built on the bones of the past and under every house is a secret.
He picked up a sieve, a big circular thing like I’d seen before in those gold rush
re-creations; it had a few bits of gravel in it, which he pushed around with his
finger. I get paid, he said, without looking at me: I’m not ashamed. My wife
doesn’t want to live in Keilor—she keeps a post office box in Toorak—but she
can’t say no to all that money, can she? She likes to spend. He stopped for a
moment, as if a thought had tripped him up, and stood with the sieve in his
hand, staring distractedly into the hole. I turned: someone was standing in
the doorway, a boy of about thirteen or fourteen, dressed in dirty jeans and a
T-shirt. I’m sorry, said the boy; I had to help Mum with the shopping. Windridge
nodded coolly. Will I just keep going where I was yesterday? Windridge nodded
again. The boy took a spade, a trowel and a brush from the milk crate in the
corner. Come inside, Windridge said.
We made our way back towards the house. It was all quiet outside now,
except for the low rumble of cars on the freeway and, further away still, the
whoosh and roar of a plane coming in to land at the airport. I could see the dark
shape of the boy moving around inside the marquee, then descending a ladder
into the hole. He works for me after school, Windridge explained; I pay him
well, he likes the work and he’s good at it too. His mum’s on her own; she’s got
four kids, it helps them out. I have a few others too. We climbed the back steps
to the kitchen and Windridge led me back down the hallway past a room with
a closed door (I could hear the television inside) to another room at the front
of the house. It was the spare room, obviously, full of boxes, filing cabinets and
junk. Under the front window was a big table strewn with rocks, gravel and
dust. There was a single bed stacked high with boxes and on the wall opposite a
floor-to-ceiling built-in robe. Windridge pushed one of the sliding doors back.
The robe was filled with trays and boxes, all labelled—Windridge pulled
out one of the lower trays and held it out for me to look at. Megafauna, he
said, probably Diprotodon, the bigger bits are in the boxes on the bed. He slid
that tray back and pulled out another. Procoptodon, he said: probably a rib.
He took out some more trays, pushing the bone fragments around with his
finger. He closed the first door and slid open the second. There were more trays
here, more boxes. Femur fragment, said Windridge, showing me the contents
of another tray. He took out a second, this one with a medium-sized, slightly
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Keilor Cranium Wayne Macauley
curved piece of bone on it. Scapula, he said, or part of, probably from the same
individual. He slid that tray back and this time pulled out, from the very bottom
shelf, a shoebox. I recognised the word Bata on the side. He took off the lid and
carefully peeled away the bubble-wrap from a piece of bone. He held it towards
me on the flat of his hand. It was the mandible, obviously, the shape of the
jawline very clear, the teeth mostly intact. He ran a finger along it. I’ve done all
the measurements, he said: it fits. He pointed at one of the molars. Look at the
size of that, he said. Kow, Mungo, Coobool, Cohuna; one people, one lineage,
one continuous occupation. He let his finger rest there a while, as if afraid
to break the spell, then wrapped the mandible up again and closed the box.
Take it, he said. It took me a second to realise what he meant. I’m a fraud, he
said, please take it. He turned away. I could see his shoulders shaking. I spent
my best years trying to heal this country’s rifts, he said, and my worst years
trying to widen them. Please—he turned—take it to the museum, ask for Max,
tell him to put it with Keilor, he’ll know what you mean. There was something
desperate, almost maniacal, in his look. I didn’t know it was a door handle I was
holding until I found myself in the hall.
When I got outside it was pouring. I could hear the wife screaming, things
being thrown. I ran to the end of Garden Avenue, cut across the scrubby ground
in the valley below and crashed my way through the tall grass and prickles until
I came out at the river. My bike was on the other side, its front wheel poking out
of the bushes. I didn’t know what to do. I crawled in under the bridge—the earth
was hard, like concrete—and with the Bata shoebox in my lap I listened for a
long time to the heavy drops hitting the trees.
That was 2006. I should have gone to see this Max, but I didn’t. Something told
me I ought to hang on to the mandible for a while, to see what it really meant.
I’d take it out sometimes, finger it, turn it this way then the other, wonder
about human history, human values, being human, humanity, all that. I asked
a lot of questions but I came to no conclusions. I kept the box under my bed.
Then by chance a couple of years later I was sitting at a table having a coffee
and a doughnut in a roadhouse near Carlsruhe flicking through a copy of the
Brimbank Leader when I saw an article inside. The museum had handed the
Keilor Cranium back to the local Aboriginal people who buried it with due
ceremony in the ground at Horseshoe Bend. A week later, with the mandible
in the shoebox under my arm, I was knocking at the old door in Garden
Avenue. There was a hole back there, I told myself, deep enough to bury all our
baggage in. But Windridge wasn’t there. A young man answered, his young
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wife standing behind him. They’d bought the house last year, he said. Vacant
possession. He was wearing tracksuit pants and a T-shirt with Whatever on it.
I had a picture of the swimming pool, the young man in a pair of green and gold
shorts, climbing backwards down the ladder. An awful sensation rose up in me.
Sorry, wrong place, I said. M
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97

Titty Anne and the Very, Very Hairy Man
MARGO LANAGAN
‘IT is Time i did my baking,’ said Mother to the children. ‘Go to the mill and
fetch me some flour, and to John Hives for honey.’
Titty went with Blaze and Bertha to Hives, because bees were always more
interesting than millstones. But Bertha hurried them so in the honey-getting
that they did not see more than the usual bees in weeds and hedgerows on
the way.
‘I wanted to see him in his costume!’ Titty cried as Bertha, swinging the
filled honey-pail, held Hives’ gate open and tapped her foot.
‘The sooner Mother starts, the sooner we shall have nice pastries in our
mouths,’ said Bertha.
They all watched as Mother moistened the flour with butter and honey and
eggs, and rolled it out with her pin, rolled and rolled it time and again, and
folded and folded to fill it full of puff and lightness. It was almost alive the way
it stretched and trembled under her hands, making itself nice for them.
Mother mounded the pastries on the board, pushed them into the oven and
twitched the board from under, then piled coals up all around. ‘There.’ She put
the board aside and turned to face all their eyes.
‘Who will take the grandmother’s pastries to her?’ said Keenest.
‘Who indeed?’ Mother looked at Titty. They all looked at Titty.
‘All that hair,’ said Bertha, ‘just in a year.’
‘Send Colt,’ said Jamezon, and they all regarded Colt instead, rolling a
greyed pastry-sausage out on the floor. He looked up in surprise at the sound
of his name, and they laughed at that, and at his very littleness, and the idea of
him trotting off alone through the wood with the basket.
‘Perhaps it’s not so very much hair.’ William turned back to Titty. ‘We could
shave it off, I think, the way you shave a sick person.’
‘All of it?’ Delft looked Titty up and down.
Titty stroked her cheek, her knee where the hair was thin from her kneeling
and crawling in play.
‘Boil up a bath,’ said Mother. ‘Sharpen the knife, Smyrtle. Fetch in some
lavender, Keenest. We will use the fat from the pig to soften her hair and skin,
but we must sweeten her afterwards, else she will smell all the more delicious.’
So the bath was filled, and Titty was set to soak in it. The sisters and brothers
hung over the edges, eyeing her fur, which swayed in the water like brookweed.
‘All of that?’ said Delft doubtfully.
‘All of it, everywhere,’ said Mother, ‘top to toe.’ Outside the razor licked the
whetstone, whing, whing, a slippery sound.
‘Put your head under,’ said Blaze. ‘That is as hairy as anything.’
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‘You won’t cut my head-hair as well,’ cried Titty, ‘that I’ve been growing so
long? Why, it was almost as long last year when I took the pastries! I wore it all
out loose, and no evil came of it.’
‘Your face,’ Mother said. ‘Just put your face under. That must go, all that
growth.’
Bertha held Titty’s main hair back, tying it into a ball as Titty dipped her
face, held it in the water as long as she could bear, came up gasping, then
dipped and soaked again.
‘There,’ said Smyrtle, coming in. ‘This’ll slice your shadow out from under
you, it’s so sharp.’
Titty pulled her face out of the water and squeaked at the sight of the knife
edge all agleam. William laughed. ‘You would think she was going to cut
your throat.’
‘Oh, she might,’ gasped Keenest. ‘You will have to keep very still, Tit.’
‘Begin with the face,’ said Mother, ‘where the hairs are the finest, and with
her face in the steam. The rest can keep soaking while you work.’
Delft was the best with his hands and with delicate things, so he did the face.
He worked so well and gently, soon Titty was almost dozing, so unafraid was
she of the knife’s gentle hiss against her skin, its gentle stroking. Delft’s finger,
here and here, steadied her head the way he wanted it. Right by her eye the
blade shone, and in at the difficult corner against her nose; she could see how
closely he watched himself, she could hear it in his breathing. The fat was warm
and smelly, the pig long gone, its meat long eaten. Ghost-pig and lavender,
she breathed, as Delft worked, and everyone watching grew dreamy with her,
Mother hands on hips at the back of them, and the smell of the cooking pastries
blooming and tantalising through the cottage.
Delft stood back, having shaven Titty’s face and neck and shoulders.
Bertha sighed awake. ‘Look at that,’ she said. ‘Naked as a nine-year-old.’
‘Stand up, Titty.’
There was some argument then, and they decided she ought to kneel, so that
her legs and underparts could keep soaking.
‘For it’s the underparts that’ll need the closest shaving,’ said Smyrtle. ‘The
smelly end of her.’
‘Yes,’ said Mother. ‘Best to sharpen the knife again, I should think, before
you begin there, it’s all so soft and stretchy.’
‘Smyrtle can do the front and back, though,’ said Delft, handing Smyrt the
knife. ‘They’re easier, and my hand is all cramped.’
‘Right.’ Smyrtle flashed her eyes, and Titty whimpered.
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Titty Anne and the Very, Very Hairy Man Margo Lanagan
‘We don’t want even a drop of blood,’ said Mother. ‘You go sensibly, Smyrt.
This is not a game or a trick.’
‘Well, it is a kind of trick.’ Keenest set to work rubbing fat on Titty’s front.
‘Making whoever think Titty’s nine again.’
‘Why do we call her Titty?’ said Jamezon. ‘She’s flat as a frog-splat in front.’
‘Here we go, then.’ Smyrtle stuck her tongue between her teeth and began,
willy-nilly, on Titty’s chest.
‘Sensibly,’ reminded Mother. ‘Carefully. I would rather you go over twice
than you cut her.’
‘I am careful,’ said Smyrtle. ‘These nipples are a nuisance, though.’
‘Leave them for Delft,’ suggested Blaze, ‘when his hand is rested.’
‘Where has he gone?’ Titty looked to the door; she was sure Smyrtle would be
taking more care if Delft were standing near.
‘Out for a breath of air,’ said William. ‘It’s close in here, with the pastries, and
the smell of pig. I am near fainting myself.’
Front and back, Smyrtle shaved her, and then she stood and Smyrt did her
thighs as well. ‘You could go more gently,’ said Mother. ‘Look at the welts you’re
raising on the poor thing.’
‘These are harder hairs, remember,’ said Smyrt. ‘We need another kettleful,
to hot it up again. She can put her feet out on the edge while her bottom soaks.’
Discs of shining fat jostled on the cooling bathwater.
‘I am dying of hunger, from this smell,’ said Jamezon, and it was true, the
pastries smelt very good, even with the pig-smell over them.
Bertha brought the kettle. ‘That’s better,’ said Titty, and she sank under and
stopped shivering.
Smyrtle shaved Titty’s legs and feet, and then Titty crouched for a while in
the warm, while whing-whing, Smyrt brought up the blade edge again.
‘She should bend over the table, bum to the light,’ said Blaze, ‘so Delft can
get at her underbits.’
‘She should lie on the table, all spread out, for the front of them.’
Titty was weary of feeling scraped and greasy. Her hairs lay shaken off the
blade in a dark fatty mass on the floor. Except for her head and nethers she was
naked as an eel, naked as skinned rabbit in a pot.
She stirred the few strands showing at her crotch. ‘Will anyone smell that,
within my drawers and skirt?’
‘Oh my, yes,’ said Mother. ‘That most of all must be cleared of hair.’
And so Titty bent over the table, and lay on it all spread, and Delft did his
work. Keenest spread a blanket over her top half, and a rag over each of her legs,
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so that she should not chill and shiver and thus make Delft cut her. The room
was noisy and busy with Mother taking out the pastries and fighting off the
children’s fingers, and William and Delft emptying and scrubbing out the
greasy bath, and filling it again, and Keenest bringing herbs to scent it.
They washed Titty, hair and all, in the scented water. Raw, she felt, and cold,
as they stood her out and dried her. Keenest brought clean clothes, slightly too
big. They were nowhere near as soft as Titty’s fur had been.
She sat unhappily, eating her pastry with the others, the blouse scraping on
her arms, her hands pale and naked, the fingernails trimmed back by Bertha
and scrubbed out white by Keenest.
‘Wash your hands again,’ cried Keenest as Titty licked the last crumbs from
her fingers. ‘And rinse out your mouth, and chew parsley. We don’t want any
part of you to smell appetising.’
‘Here is the grandmother’s basket,’ said Mother. The treats were packed in
neatly under a red-checked cloth. ‘I’ve put a pot of cream in too, so don’t you go
swinging it, or banging it into things.’
Off Titty set. Mother carried Colt out to wave—he liked goodbyes—but all
the others, having had their pastries, were now gone in this direction and that
after different pleasures, some to Farmer Hay’s barn, Delft to check his snares,
Smyrtle down to the brook to fish.
The forest closed behind Titty, hiding Mother and Colt’s waving. Titty sighed
and began to hurry, for she did not want the sun to set while she was still among
the trees on her way home.
It was strange walking clothed, without the protection of her hair, only a
cloud of lavender and parsley-smell around her. The cloth of the blouse and
drawers rubbed under her arms and between her thighs; it would rub her raw,
perhaps, before she reached the grandmother’s house.
For it was a long way to walk. Why did the grandmother have to live so
far away? Why could she not be in the very same house, like Hamhocks’s
grandmother, or Meadows’? But Titty knew the answer to that: the grandmother
was their father’s mother, and she blamed their mother somehow for his dying.
She couldn’t abide the sight of all his children, the Mother-ness of them mixed
in with her son. Besides, over in Thickets Valley grew all the herbs for her
medicines; her house must be near there, she insisted, to save her this long
walk every day.
Titty could hardly imagine the grandmother’s life, though she had visited
her every baking-day since Jamezon grew too old for the job. Imagine spending
day after day without conversation, only the wind in the leaves and the tumble
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of brook water, and every now and then, overhead, some great argument of
a thunderstorm. Titty had always thought such solitude a dreadful thing to
endure but today, after all the prodding and poking of her during the shaving,
all the looking and discussing of her, she thought perhaps it was not such a
terrible thing after all to go untouched and unremarked on.
She paused at the place where the path split, for blackberries grew there,
and it was coming into blackberry time. Yes, there were a few ripened ones,
dark among the canes, though most were pink and green still and it took some
careful searching to find the good ones. Titty plucked one and ate it, and it was
very good, and so she hunted down and ate another.
And then she was so busy searching the blackberry bush, deeper and deeper
and with care not to catch herself too badly on the thorny canes, that she did
not notice a man enter the clearing and stand watching her, until he cleared
his throat, and even then she looked into the tree above her, thinking she had
heard a chough speak.
‘Good day to you!’ the man then said.
Startled, she turned her head and saw him. She began to extract herself
from the blackberry bush, but all at once it seemed longer thorned and more
determined to hold her. The man watched her struggle, leaning against the
trunk of a very large pine with his arms folded. In time she pulled herself and
her snagged hair free and picked up her basket.
Titty was not rude enough to walk from the clearing without speaking. She
gave something of a curtsey. ‘Good day, sir; I must to my grandmother.’
She would have slipped past him, only he moved, not obstructing her path,
but only pushing himself off the tree and looming quite large and close. He was
perhaps the hairiest man she had ever met. Despite his fine suit of red velvet,
ingeniously cut to show what a grand strong chest he had and what narrow
waist and legs, the smell that came off him was very strong indeed.
Titty stepped back from it. The man’s yellow eyes gleamed below great
sprouts of eyebrows; his teeth grinned among his dark beard. But his voice
came out of him quite smoothly. ‘Your grandmother?’ he said, and he sounded
very interested, and almost kind.
‘Why, yes,’ she said. ‘I have these pastries for her that my mother baked, and
a pot of cream.’ She went to lift the red-checked cloth and show him, but her
fingers were damp with blackberry juice and they stained the cloth, and then
she could only gaze in dismay at the mark she had made, while the hairy man’s
stifling sour scent flowed around her like blowing pyre-smoke. ‘I must take
them to her,’ she finally said, lifting a woeful face. ‘Please let me pass.’
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His sproutish eyebrows lifted. He waved along the unobstructed path quite
gallantly. ‘Which way will you take, little girl?’ he said. ‘The path of pins, or the
path of needles?’
What was he talking about? Titty sidled past him, onto the path she
always took.
‘Aah,’ he said and she turned. He stood slump-shouldered where the path
divided. ‘My business takes me the other way. What a great shame; I should have
enjoyed some company.’
She tried after a smile, but it trembled. ‘Good day, then, sir,’ she said, and
off she hurried.
For a long time she did not look back, but only fixed her sights on the path
and spread her nostrils for the taint of him on the air. Then she darted behind
a grand elm, and peeped back along the path, and fetched her breath back, and
listened. Breeze, leaves, bird-cries. No footfall, no red coat, no dark face. And so
she ran on then, just as quickly but not so much afraid.
Soon she reached the grandmother’s house. She smoothed her clothes down
on her shaven skin, and gathered her hair together and tucked it behind her,
and pulled her face about trying to see if the blackberrying had stained her
mouth. When she was quite arranged, she went up to the door and called in,
‘Grandmother?’
‘Oh, oh,’ came a feeble voice from within. ‘Who is that?’
‘It’s Titty Anne, your granddaughter. I’ve come with bakings and cream
from Mother.’
‘Titty Anne? Why, come in, child, come in!’
Titty stepped into the house surprised, for the grandmother usually snapped
and upbraided her from the instant she arrived to the moment she left. But then
she saw the reason, for the grandmother—in the middle of the afternoon!—was
still abed, with her night-bonnet all pushed forward around her face. She
glanced out at Titty, her eye a gleam of yellow. ‘Forgive me that I don’t get up to
meet you.’
‘You are unwell?’
‘Very poorly indeed,’ said the grandmother. ‘And cold, so cold! I have piled up
the blanket and am wearing all my clothes, but I cannot seem to warm myself!’
‘I shall make you a tea, I think,’ said Titty. ‘You can drink it down with one of
these nice pastries.’
‘So kind, so kind,’ said the grandmother. ‘But I should be so much warmer
if you climbed straight into this bed with me, while you are still warm from
running through the forest.’
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‘Is there room?’ said Titty, eyeing the piled bed. ‘How fat you have grown.
Is it your illness?’
‘Indeed it is,’ said the grandmother, lowly and with some shame. ‘I cannot
get out and about as I’m used to doing, I am so terribly wan and weak.’ And a
great shivering fit took her, so that her bonnet frills trembled like poplar leaves
in a northerly blow. ‘Quickly, girl! Jump in beside me!’
Titty Anne put the basket on the table and went to the bedside. ‘I am sure a
cup of tea would do better for you,’ she said. So close, the grandmother gave off
a strong stink. It must be the fever sweat, or perhaps only general old age and
not having bathed as recently as Titty. Whatever it was, it stilled Titty’s hand
upon the bed, and gave her pause to eye the old woman’s hands, clutching the
coverlet to her chest.
‘Look at your nails!’ she said with distaste. ‘They are so neglected! How long
have you lain here alone?’ And she bent and looked below the bed, for surely
some of that smell must come from a chamber pot? But no—the pot shone
empty below, with a quantity of red cloth pushed in beside it.
‘Stop your fussing and take off your clothes,’ said the grandmother, turning
her bonnet and whiskers to Titty.
That was more like the usual grandmother. Relieved, Titty slipped off her
blouse. ‘Where shall I put this?’ she said, for nowhere in the grandmother’s
house was quite clean enough for her to lay it.
‘Throw it on the fire, why don’t you?’ said the grandmother.
Titty laughed and draped the blouse over the bed knob. ‘I hope I don’t catch
your fever, Grandmother,’ she said. ‘It has cooked your brains somewhat, I
think.’ And she slipped off her skirt and bloomers. But when she draped them
over the blouse, all three garments began to slither off the slippery knob. ‘Oh,
this won’t do.’ She stood with her clothes in her arms looking around again. She
did not feel warm at all; she felt cold and clammy, and she did not like being
naked before the grandmother.
‘I tell you, burn them!’ cried the old woman, so loudly and harshly that
Titty stepped back from her, all laughter silenced. ‘You’ll have no further use
for them!’ The bonnet looked her up and down, and a bright red-purple tongue
came out and licked the teeth.
‘Grandmother!’ breathed Titty. ‘I do not like at all what this illness has done
to you!’
She went to the table and put her clothes there, let them take up what stains
they would. Slowly she turned back to the bed; the grandmother looked no
better than before. All the way to the bed Titty went, into the cloud of the old
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woman’s breath and fur-sweat, and she lifted the coverlet. The shanks under
there were not much more than bones with hair on, and they shuddered and
rasped against the bedclothes. Quickly Titty laid the cover back down.
‘What’s your delay, girl? What’s your trouble this time?’ The old eyes glowed
in the shadow of the bonnet.
‘I must go outside,’ she said, and her voice shook a little. ‘I shouldn’t want to
wet the bed.’
‘Shouldn’t you?’ The grandmother’s voice was suddenly soft, but without the
weakness it had affected before. ‘Use the pot, why don’t you?’
Titty thought of that pot, its empty shine. And the red cloth under the bed
insisted itself upon her memory, rich cloth the like of which the grandmother
would never wear, and crumpled as if by a fist, as if a fist had stuffed it under
there in a hurry.
‘Oh, it’s quite fine and warm outside,’ said Titty, faint with the grandmotherstink.
‘And we breakfasted on asparagus shoots this morning. I should not like
you to have to lie over the smell of that.’
The eyes and teeth regarded her from the bonnet’s shadow.
‘Bring me that spun wool.’ The old beast nodded at a spindle on the table
with a distaff of flax-fluff next to it. Titty brought it. ‘Tie this around your ankle.’
The grandmother offered the thread-end off the spindle. ‘Let me see how you tie
it. Yes, a nice tight knot. Now, off you go. I will hold to the spindle and unwind
you, just to outside the door, and then when you’re done I will reel you in again.’
Out the door Titty went, and there she had the great good fortune to find
a broken plant-pot, a shard of which she used to saw at the flax-thread, so
that soon enough she was free. She tied the thread then around a thistle-stalk
there that was bending and bowing in the breeze, so that it would give lifelike
movement to the thread and not arouse the suspicions of that creature in the
bed. And then she fled into the forest unclothed, as fast as she could.
But even as she plunged along the narrow path, she heard behind her the
pretend-grandmother’s voice, at first querulous and still pretending, then
sharp, then an undisguised roar. She ran and slid and ran, leaping over roots
and dodging the sharper stones. The passing branches whipped her face and
body, and snatched hairs off her head that she would not pause to untangle.
A thump and a crash sounded behind her at the house, and then all was
silent but for her own breath and body noise while the man came after her.
And then his foot-beats sounded, and she heard the branches whipping
him, and finally she heard him grunt as he saw her, in rage and satisfaction
combined.
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His breath huff-huffed at her heels. He sprang and was ahead of her. He
opened his jaws; his teeth spread wide; his tongue curled bright red into the black
of his throat. Titty had no time to stop herself—into his mouth she fell headfirst.
With one clomp he had her head and shoulders; with a jerking back and a gulp, his
gripping teeth were down to her thighs; with a final jerk, all of her was swallowed.
It was hot, and wet, and dark, and innards pressed in on Titty from all sides.
She had brought a little air in with her, but that was soon used up; she tried
to make more, pushing out with her hands and elbows, breathing as little as
possible. Oh, he was so hot and tight and noisy around her, his heart thundering
like a stampede, his digestive sounds rushing close. Pinprick lights crowded in
their millions into Titty’s sight, and though she thought she went on struggling,
she was mistaken, and though she dreamed she went on breathing, she did not,
and then she ceased to think or to dream, and she felt nothing more as the wolf
padded through the forest, and found a patch of sunlight and sank down in the
grass there, and laid down his head to sleep off that generous meal.
‘What is this? What is this! Saints keep and care for us!’ Titty did not hear that.
‘Oof, you’re a great-grown lummock now, aren’t you? And not a stitch on you!
How so?’ She did not hear that either.
Stamp and puff and rub of a knife blade on grass—none of these did Titty
hear. She was past hearing, past remembering, past dreaming.
Slap. Slap. ‘Granddaughter.’
This she heard from well along the tunnel of her dying. She turned in the
tunnel, and sunlit leaves scattered across her sight, and smells arrived, of blood,
and flesh, and wolf-insides all spilled about, as well as the clean forest smell,
green and brown and wide and deep about her, rich and gaspable. ‘Oh!’ she said.
The grandmother’s face hove into sight, a collection of gorges separated by
the sunlit mountain range of a nose, two sharp eyes as yellow as a wolf’s, and
only a few teeth among the whiskers—how could Titty ever have thought that
great grinning mouthful to be the grandmother’s?
‘There you are,’ said the old woman. ‘There you are in there. I see you.’ She
took Titty’s jaw in her claw and waggled it back and forth so that the leaves flew
and the sky dazzled beyond them.
Then she laughed and left her alone, sat singing nearby and sorting through
her herb-basket. Wafts of fennel and rue floated past Titty’s nose, and she
breathed them along with everything else, as piece by piece the day came back
to her. The wolf juice dried stinking on her skin like a very tight, close costume,
but she’d only to stretch a little, this arm, that foot, to loosen the hold of it.
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She turned her head; her slimed hair trailed back along the grass to the wolf’s
opened belly, which offered this purple lump and that white tubing, all fatted
and bloodied, to the sunshine and the circling flies.
Titty sat herself up, to see if she could. The grandmother put forward
Keenest’s blouse and skirt and bloomers. ‘You’ll need to wash in the brook
before you put these on.’
‘How did you find me?’ said Titty, for nothing about the clearing was familiar
to her, not the stout live trees standing all around or the dead ones lying about
rotting and being overgrown.
‘Part sight, part stench,’ said the grandmother. ‘He left a smell in my bed,
and I saw your clothes and basket. He crashed after you off the path there, and I
followed all the ground-scratchings and twig-breakings until I found him asleep
here, fat with you.’
The wolf’s head lay as still as a rock among the weeds. Beneath a sprouting
eyebrow, an eye stared dully at the sky; the tongue lolled out beyond the jaws
like a damp purple-grey leaf.
‘I thought he was you,’ said Titty Anne.
‘Am I so ugly?’
‘He had your bonnet on. His face was all in shadow. And I had not seen you
for a year. There was a lot I had forgotten.’
‘So it seems,’ said the grandmother with a snort.
‘Oh,’ said Titty, looking at her lap. ‘You have cut me, when you opened him.
Look.’ And she smeared the blood smear further down her thigh.
A nut bounced off Titty’s head. ‘What!’ She rubbed the spot, glaring at the
grandmother.
‘As if I don’t know how to slit a beast open.’ The old woman tutted and huffed
and shafted Titty looks across the grass-heads. ‘Follow that blood,’ she said. ‘Go
on. Follow it back and find the wound, I say. Then pick fault with my knifework.’
Titty did as she was told, pulling at her thigh flesh, then parting her whole
legs. ‘Oh,’ she said, seeing where the blood began. ‘Oh, that.’ She remembered
Bertha groaning in the bedstraw, holding a wrapped hot-stone against her
belly—and Mother, white as cheese, having to sit down on a log beside the road
to market and breathe there awhile. ‘That’s begun on me.’
‘Surprising, seeing you’re as hairless yet as a peeled willow wand,’ said the
grandmother. ‘But yes.’ She crisscrossed the sorted herbs in her basket and
stood up. ‘Come, then. Once you’re washed, we can boil up a tea. He has flung
your cream about the place and wasted it, but the cakes are still good.’
Titty picked up her clothes and followed the old woman through the wood. M
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The Late Visit
ANTONIA PONT
The email had said Ten pasT Ten. And then customs and baggage collection
takes at least forty-five minutes. She chose a fine wool dress, a paler coat. More
specifically the email had said:
108
hallo!
Well i am coming to australia finally. Will you be there? are you
free? my plane arrives in melbourne at 22.10 on the 4. i have a hotel
booked somewhere in the centre. how are you? i have a present for
you. Tell me soon, i hope it can be convenient.
kisses, and i look forward,
marc.
The ‘You’s’, naturally, were all capitalised, and the fourth was a Saturday.
A late enough flight. She had replied that she was in town and could collect
him. He should look for her at the international exit and wait close to there, in
case traffic delayed her. There, where all the faces press and the families throw
themselves into each other’s arms as if the love between them was kicking
like a foetus, warm and real. Perhaps it was warm and real? She’d never really
considered that. Instead she’d assumed such rash shows of fondness arose from
absence and distance only. Or the prevalence of reality TV.
In the car now, she played music through her phone, flicking the songs
forward illegally, wondering about the screen’s light reflecting up into her
windows—going at a hundred on the dark freeway. There was no moon about,
no beaming source of milky light. The city, however, did glower behind her, as
cities do. Never properly black. Never quiet. It was so boring, though, the way
people complained about the fact of sharing urban space. Drivers complained.
Property developers complained. People who liked to use electronic devices
complained.
Approaching the airport, there was slight congestion—taxis changing lanes,
four-wheel-drives edging forwards, the piercing reds and oranges of tail-lights.
She worried at her long hair, tucking it behind her ears and then unhooking
it again. She couldn’t say with conviction that she was still beautiful, or if that
had ever been the issue between them. In her bathroom mirror she had looked
into the face of a woman past forty and applied a lipstick called ‘Winter Fruit’.
He’d once remarked that he knew nothing of the things that surrounded
her, apart from a scarf she’d often travelled with. Having never visited her city,
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he had come to view this woollen garment as standing in for everything about
her. He could only imagine her kitchen, her wardrobe, her garage, her pets.
That’s to say, the only consistent themes had been this scarf and her body—a
person arriving, lingering or leaving—or words, agile, irreverent words, coming
through the phone line or scrabbled together in emails. The rare letter.
She pressed the button to make the boom gate rise. The slot for the carpark
ticket glowed green as she took the flimsy rectangle and proceeded to
drive slowly up the ramp to the higher levels. She nosed her car in between
an old Volvo and a Porsche People Transporter, and stepped out into the
fumes of the car park. In the white opacity of the pedestrian tunnel her head
was a blank sky. She walked and felt every step, focusing on the way gravity
will carry a foot and place it, and how the ground moves up the leg and into
a belly, into a sacrum, and the way this places a person in the centre of the
world, at least for a time, at least as the result of a moment-by-moment labour
of feeling.
She had expected to wait. Had pictured herself standing there, marooned,
buying a bad coffee, fatigue climbing her like a vine and her eyes going dry
while she tried not to rub her mascara into fist-sized smudges. But as she strode
into the arrivals area, past the awful food outlets, almost aggressively, there he
was—standing beside the exit area, a head above everyone around.
He saw her immediately, raised his arm. For certain things there is no
preparation, and you can only think so much, and you can only forbid yourself
so much thinking. She had presumed they might not touch at all, and that this
would be workable. But, of course, social mannerisms are thick within us, and
their two bodies moved appropriately, and their cheekbones knocked softly.
He did not bundle her against him, the way he once might have. He had a
trolley and bags, and he was older too. They both were.
She made to take his luggage, since helping is what a woman will do to fill in
space, to suck the edge out of an atmosphere. He laughed in an exhausted way,
and said, ‘It’s fine.’ All he had with him was a featureless laptop bag (probably
for a PC), and a long, softer duffle bag, stained but not ratty. She wanted to look
properly at his clothes, to decipher something there, but they were already
walking beside each other towards the car park, and she couldn’t really see.
The air temperature had bite. They mentioned this, and prattled—since this
they could do—about expectations of Europeans arriving in Australia, and how
Melbourne was a city of seasons, and how autumn was here, and there was this
crisp feeling about, the trees changing colour and a certain way with the people,
and crowds on streets.
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The Late Visit Antonia Pont
‘Are you shattered?’ she asked.
He paused, digesting the vernacular, and then, with another soft laugh,
nodded.
His bags were slung into the back seat of her four-door, and she watched
him wheel the trolley to the nearby station, legs extremely long in the loose
pants. She’d paid for the parking ticket as they’d come out of the wide, slow
lifts. A mere three dollars. She’d been estimating costs, as a kind of anxiety
management, turning the symmetry of numbers over in her head and
indulging the structural caress of figures behaving predictably.
Now they were sitting in the car, but she hadn’t turned on the engine.
‘Shall I drive you back to your hotel, then?’ she asked, frightened. Her
knuckles on the gear stick were white. When she turned the key, sound
exploded from the radio, and she fumbled it quiet.
Quickly he said, ‘I don’t need to sleep yet. I don’t want to. I might act kind
of crazy, like a drugged tourist-person, but that’s okay. Can we go somewhere?
I want to see your town.’
She breathed out—the way smokers release smoke—broke into a charming
smile and reversed almost arrogantly, since he would never have seen her
drive before. Her phone was buried in her handbag, but there was no need to
send anyone a text message. Since the day before his email arrived, she had
been free of any obligation to inform. This was the new state of affairs. It was
exhilarating, efficient and utterly miserable. Now she focused on getting the
paper rectangle back into its green slot, and on not veering into any Audis or
C-class Mercedes.
Her car no longer had the new smell, but it was clean, with no signs of
takeaway food wrappers or paper coffee cups. A snob when it came to interiors,
she hoped he noticed and approved of her as much as she did of herself.
What was he seeing? Those first delicious and estranged hours of a foreign
arrival are precious. The way eyes roam and suck at every detail—the makes of
cars, the unfamiliar fonts of billboards, the different light. Even at night a city
will have its own light and will taste differently. She remembered her own eyes
watering during an arrival in Beijing, tears running the pollution down her
face, and a cartoon giraffe driving a ute on a road safety advertisement.
Smell and temperature. The unfamiliar press of air pressure. It’s the way
a place saturates us that stays. She watched the road, accelerating to one
hundred and some.
Finally he said, ‘You know I waited in Singapore for eight hours. You always
implied it was pretty bad, but now I really understand …’
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She turned her head fast, ‘That’s nothing,’ turned back, ‘try seventeen …’
She imagined him rolling his eyes, a quirky habit he had, his exaggerated
listening.
‘… yes, beware the cheap ticket. In the end, it’s like you have to make
yourself into a butoh performance. A creature pushing a trolley along the
shining white acres of duty-free corridor. Or you sleep shamelessly in a
corner, like an alcoholic, fantasising soft, familiar surfaces …’ Her face flushed
suddenly hot, so she said quickly: ‘You still dancing?’
‘Dancing?’ He rubbed at his scalp through the still-undisciplined mass of
hair. ‘Wow, that was a long time ago. I’m a manager now. Managers, do you
know, don’t dance. We are cheerful and manipulative, but we do not dance.’
‘Are you really manipulative?’ He didn’t answer. She flicked the indicator
to take the exit to her suburb, but then realised her mistake and drove straight
past it.
‘Is that where you live?’ he asked, missing nothing despite exhaustion.
‘I’m going to take you into the thick of things. I think you’ll like it.’
She was going to take him somewhere ridiculous. For herself, because that
was her style, but also for the anonymity. Somewhere ridiculous where no-one
from her circle would go on a Saturday. Somewhere open late, with good food.
She would pay. She didn’t know what kind of budget he was on. She wanted
to be hospitable. It was her first chance to do it in her town. But mostly she
didn’t want any chance encounters. Being put on the spot would scour her
out, somehow. She would trip over her own ardent ambivalences and betray
something about herself that even she didn’t know. She prayed suddenly, with
the hypocrisy of the disbeliever: God, please let us not run into anybody.
Normally she would have circled for a parking spot, also praying, but she
didn’t want the rhythm of their night to go pear-shaped. So, prepared to pay a
small fortune, she approached another car park boom-gate. As they rolled their
way up the fourth ramp, in the cramped space, he suddenly grabbed her leg and
squealed ‘Yippee.’
How old is a friendship that isn’t surprised by random gropings? She knew
what it meant, and why then, and also that the gesture of grabbing her was his
capacity for glee romping out of him. It wasn’t a manoeuvre. It was in no way
sexual. Like a yell, like all the sunshine caught inside a body, it was his way,
splattering out in a kind of lightshow of delight.
She remembered suddenly that first trip in his town. The air had bitten them
then too, and her face in photographs could only be described as ruddy. She
had had joy beaming from all her surfaces and he had been the vehicle for it.
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The Late Visit Antonia Pont
The body that had been closest, when the unnameable happening happened to
her. And she still didn’t have a name for it. That had been the long struggle.
The car doors slammed, and she pressed central locking. Walking beside
him she feigned normality, and he walked too, but interspersed his measured,
adult gait with sudden jigs and fancy footwork. Gambolling, she would have
called it. His fleecy head and gentle eyes. She could only grin at her shoes, turn
her head away, as if brushing hair out of her face, but not really.
Out beyond the thick floors of concrete, the city’s lights swam in her vision.
She walked him along the river, embarrassed by the horrific font and newly
added sightseeing-for-dummies signs blighting the visual landscape. He didn’t
seem to notice, gazed off into the middle distance, didn’t even particularly turn
his head at the obviously vivacious groups of younger women.
They walked in silence, and she wondered about which language. Probably
English, but perhaps he would drift towards his mother tongue when the static
of fatigue began to etch him through. Perhaps she would hear that voice on
him—steady, limpid, and male—the one that came with linguistic ease. She was
suddenly frightened again—of it hitting into her (what she knew might come)
and was certain that she wasn’t prepared, and knowing the fallout, how long it
would take her to get that out of her system.
He played visitor, allowing himself to be led. Through the sparkling night
they went, beside the water, then came to the restaurant she’d chosen in
advance. The wait staff almost knew her there and so greeted them with a very
professional warmth. They were shown to a table far at the back, where the light
was of a thin, caramel milkiness, and the banquette seating and diminutive
table closed them in upon each other. They sat face to face, rather than side by
side, and for the first time that visit he could look her straight in the face. The
menu proffered by the lanky blond boy allowed her to avoid his gaze.
He ordered an ‘Australian beer’, and she took the tea that she preferred.
She ordered a bowl of twice-fried potatoes, and a tasting plate of prosciuttos
and fresh mozzarellas, with caperberries on the side. He listened passively
to her confident order and showed no sign of being irritated by the lack of
consultation. He liked salty, she knew that. In her head she said the word for it
in his language. It referenced the heart—like the term ‘hearty’: a stock, a stew,
a roast, or the way you can hold a person.
Of course, he’d emailed her the day after Janie had left. The kitchen had
still been strewn with packing tape and debris, the entrails of a separation.
For the last fifteen years his emails had arrived like that, like clockwork. There
had been dozens of these day-after missals. Post-breakdown, post-crisis,
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post-devastating-conversation correspondences. They were a confirmation,
never a portent. The two of them were never in regular contact at those times.
Often there’d been months of nothing, sometimes years with no word. He never
knew anything of her situation, yet he would email, and it would arrive like a
steam engine, punctual and with every detail gleaming.
The silence was killing her, so affecting cheeky charm, she prompted,
‘So what’s the present you promised me, then?’
He put the beer down, stared at the vertical lines he’d traced in the
condensation, and through an unconvincing grin, replied: ‘Well, semen.’
Right then her tea arrived. It consisted of a number of elements and
accessories—a glass pot, with a metal strainer in the spout, an elaborate cup
and saucer, a tiny glass jug with milk and a side of honey, which she’d specified.
She smiled because you had to, up into the face of the waitress—a roundish girl
in a velvet frock, with a self-conscious bob.
‘What are you talking about?’ she demanded, when they were alone again,
and too loudly. It was a shocking declaration. Wasn’t it a shocking declaration?
She looked around them, at others on other tables—sipping whiskys, women
crossing and uncrossing legs—behaving properly. Oblivious.
‘I thought you’d picked me up a little trinket in Singapore, or a pricey bottle
of perfume … but no, you thought I’d like some bodily fluids.’
She looked properly at his face, accusingly, but saw it was clouded,
something heavy and sticking making his features vague and grim. Deflated,
they always call it in novels. The person a fine membrane full of hope that
suddenly loses its structure, collapses into its own fragile centre. He was
playing now with the stitched corner of the heavy table linen, avoiding her eyes.
‘I would like to say it’s my pro-lesbian position’, he said, weakly, ‘but it is
more complicated, although of course I am still all for lesbians.’
‘Yes, I know. You never wanted to rob the world of a lesbian. I do remember
…’ It came out sounding angry. Still so angry. She suddenly wished she’d never
replied to the email. Let him come here on business. Why should we see each
other, there is nothing there. There is something tawdry in this dragging-out
of things.
‘It’s Eva,’ he said, interrupting her spiralling. ‘She has had to have the
surgery to remove the womb. We didn’t want children, anyway. Well, I didn’t
want. I love her, of course I do … She found out four months ago. It happened
one month ago. I told her I am here for a conference and a workshop. And she is
absent, these days, didn’t question me …’
‘Well, what are you here for?’
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The Late Visit Antonia Pont
He looked at her with a look the closest to pleading she’d ever seen. ‘Please,
Eloise,’ he stammered, and then took a long swig of his beer.
She caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror panelling. Her straight
auburn hair fell to the middle of her back, somehow striking, but her pale skin
looked pasty rather than delicate. She pictured his dark-hair gene dominating
her red-hair gene. An animated short film, with garish and terrible colours.
Janie was mousey brown, had wanted children more than anything. Their
endless quarrelling, and her own ambivalence. IVF scared the wits out of
her. The chemicals you guzzle, the awkward invasions supposedly standing
in for love-making. She wanted to tell conservatives who thought gay people
should be deprived of certain privileges—legal or humanitarian—that their
manoeuvrings were superfluous. The grief of never joining your faces was
enough. A sufficient devastation.
But it wasn’t just the medical facts. Janie just wouldn’t have made a good
parent. There, she’d thought it now. Sipping her pretentious tea, shame
flattened her like nausea. She doubted her own capacities too, while in the
scenario he was proposing, his ability to parent was an irrelevant consideration.
The tasting plate of salty things, of hearty things, arrived between them.
He was distracted momentarily by the caperberries, holding them by their tails
and making big, big eyes at them. ‘Wow, these are amazing. Super cool. How
do you eat them?’ He swung them like monkeys and then caught one between
his teeth.
‘Excuse me,’ she heard herself say, and was up at once, the elegant woman
walking her way to the Ladies. She felt the eyes of men on her. She had a
fleshiness that was provocative, not sloppy. It was her wide joints, and her tits,
which she knew were an asset, in the grimy realm of embodied capital.
In the toilet she just sat there, with nothing in her bladder. What if he gets
up now and goes? She ran the possibilities through her head like ticker-tape.
Perhaps we will go to his hotel. Was she ovulating? Was that what this was
about? It was surely a Catholic offer of the purest kind, not a chance to spend his
seed for nothing. He didn’t desire her, he wanted to make a baby in her body.
He wants to make a baby in my body. Her belly lurched unmistakably, and
she felt it. She slammed herself into the cubicle wall, half sobbing. Fuuuck!!
He was staring out across the restaurant when she returned. They sat there
like two strangers, like a pair of spouses. A little numb, she slurped the cold
dregs from her teacup. Watching his face for clues, she suddenly clattered
the cup down and shoved the paraphernalia away from her. It was pure,
adolescent theatre.
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‘Are you angry at me?’ he challenged. ‘I thought that you and your girlfriend
could have a child. I can’t raise any child with Eva, and not ours. She can’t
know. But I don’t want to die without children, now. Suddenly now I feel this
way. I just thought of you, and then this plan. Is your girlfriend nice? Does she
want a family?’
‘I don’t have a girlfriend any more. As of …’ and she counted days, hours.
She sounded mournful, but really it was a sulk, her white rage. It would be a
while until the soft, gentle weeping bit came through. Apparently that stage
would be lilac, or some indigo hue, like the feature walls of New Age shops.
He motioned over the waitress and ordered another beer. She remembered
him at twenty-four, his moody slides into drunkenness, still beautiful, but with
a belligerent edge. She frowned as the frothy pylon arrived before him.
‘So you’re single then?’
‘Well, yes. That is the status assigned to a person whose relationship has
ended. Maybe I count as a spinster now. Being so old and all.’ She regretted the
bitter barb. Did she even have any eggs left? She had a vision of his sperm—they
were a flashing, silvery shoal, and very healthy.
He slurped his drink, as if at a dummy, as if trying to soothe away a big
dollop of disappointment. Now it was his turn for some acting-out. ‘Well, I
guess I can do some tourism then. See some kan-gur-oos. Make a surfing safari
and have grilling parties.’
‘They’re called barbecues.’
She really did want to howl. For a pair with such an exemplary history of
rhythm, his current timing was shithouse. Under the table she did sums on her
fingers. When had she last bled? Had her cycle been synching with the big white
clock in the sky? Four weeks exactly, or less?
‘How long are you here for?’ she asked.
‘I’m here for four weeks.’ And as if he had seen through the table surface,
‘I know at least that much about women.’
Suddenly she thought of her apartment—deco, massive. It was hers.
Janie owned another property, but for the last five years she’d rented it out
to international students. It was an immaculate place, no garden. Janie was
staying with her sister till the renters cleared out. Then she’d set herself up
there, vacuum a lot, buy expensive cut flowers and cry in the evenings. Her
own place, on the other hand, had an old oak in the back yard, verdant moss on
bricks. You could hang a swing off that tree.
Eloise looked at Marc. He was older, steadier, and there were considerable
flecks of grey around the temples. He looked back at her now and held her eye.
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The Late Visit Antonia Pont
Softly she said, ‘So how you been, Marc?’
A bill was discreetly placed in front of them. On a glass plate, with a card on
top. She stopped his hand—I invite you—and he paused, waited, then tucked
the souvenir business card into his jacket pocket, while she rummaged for cash.
‘Oh, you know. Same things. Wondering about my life, fantasising about
other women. Cooking a lot. I kayak now, on the river back home. We have three
dogs. They are very silly and I like them, sort of.’
It was so good to hear him talk. His inflections, the close-to-but-not-quiteperfect
syntax, the way he bobbed his head of hair and broke into unexpected
grins. People stay the same, she thought, it’s just that life rolls over them,
kneads them into different versions. His face scrunched and smoothed with
his intonation. His wide hands gesticulated a little chaotically, but with so
much grace. Suddenly she wanted to order five more teas and curl up against
the banquettes. To talk the way they had in those seven other countries. To
fight, even. They’d been so good at that. But his eyes were drooping, and he was
slurring words.
She wriggled out of the banquette and, standing, smoothed the creases in
her woollen dress over a flat stomach.
‘What happens now?’ he asked.
She slid her arms into her pale coat. She’d done the sums. Knew the exact
night that she’d stopped at the late-night chemist last month.
‘Now’, she replied very simply, ‘we drive you back to your hotel.’ M
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The Googly
KEVIN BROPHY
He is The middle broTher and he Works hard. It comes naturally. At least
it feels natural; and as a schoolboy he found there were rewards for this because
teachers became convinced they had inspired him; some spoke with hope for
his future. For a while he was as interested in sport as he was in finishing his
homework. He was okay at football and a little better at cricket. In his boy’s
mind he looked forward to playing football for Richmond inside a much bigger,
muscled body with thick hair and stringy tendons in his neck, a smile of large,
even teeth and along his jaw dark whiskers. He had been gifted only with a head
for numbers, anything to do with those fast, abstract flocks inside his head, up
to the left and just above the eyebrow. Calculations whirled inside him in the
silence that adheres to numbers. He worked hard at keeping it all going in there.
His spiky hair thickened on his head and his eyes went even bluer as he
gained his reputation for being brilliant at one or two academic things. He did
not play football for Richmond. His older brother was much better at cricket
and at talking to girls, even talking with their girl cousins. Girls didn’t seem to
worry his older brother, who was soon drinking beer. Their younger brother
was not sure which one of them to follow. You can picture this youngest brother
sizing up the two older ones, as though trying to find a passage between
them. This youngest brother had a worried expression on his face in family
photographs. He became a blur, but a blur with a book in his hand because he
discovered that he loved reading.
Because this middle boy worked hard his parents left him alone. He
discovered he could more or less please himself what he did as long as his
teachers and parents believed he was working hard. He guessed, soon enough,
that this was what defined him: he was happily busy.
He finished school before he even started to learn to drive a car; he had
not kissed a girl or had one look at him as though she might want to kiss him.
It didn’t matter, because he could now go to university and make even more
daring calculations in that spinning corner of his mind, which turned out to be
larger than he had thought it could be, and more mysterious. He too discovered
beer. It was okay. He became infatuated with two girls at once, and drinking
beer helped him to cope with this, though it put him to sleep. Sleep seemed
unnatural. He suspected that sleep was what people thought they should do,
and that if they thought differently, then perhaps sleep would not be needed
at all, or not so much of it. He experimented with all-night study binges, but
something frightening happened in his mind when he did that. His father
looked and sounded like a sleepwalker, and his mother seemed to be telling lies
all the time, badly. He learned to keep count of the hours of his sleep.
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The Googly Kevin Brophy
As they reached their twenties, his older brother played cricket for a local
suburban team and most of the time he had a whole team of mates around him,
shouting and laughing about nothing, or about beer and cricket. Among them
‘googly’ seemed to be a very witty word. This older brother wore stained white
pants, more grey than white after a while. Their younger brother was trying to
grow a goatee and he mentioned Kafka, Kerouac and Hemingway as though
they might turn up at any moment and demand something outrageous like a
truly black coffee or the loan of a scarf.
The middle brother did not own a scarf, not even a Richmond scarf. He
worried about his younger brother’s sanity. He mentioned this to his father.
He noticed for the first time how red and swollen his father’s face was. His father
seemed to have been beaten around by the thoughts that flew through him. He
had the same worried expression that was there in the younger brother’s eyes.
For the next decade the middle brother kept working hard and he discovered
much. Economics, macro and micro, opened up to him like tropical flowers
loosening their petals right in front of his eyes. There are numbers within,
behind and all the way through everything we do. He came to understand
graphs and tables, which speak their own special knowledge. He fell in love
with a tall Irish woman he met in a hotel, a woman who had a musical voice, a
gift for painting, and what he thought of as a sharpness of mind. A quickness
of mind. But more than that she moved always with a purpose, and he wanted
to be taken along with her. She loved him for his thick hair, his small physique,
the numbers spinning behind his eyes, and the thinking he did. She liked
all of that immensely, and she was willing to go across the city to Richmond
with him, where she became a mother as well as a lover, and found work as an
art therapist.
He didn’t understand any of it, but it was engrossing in ways he could not
have imagined. He continued to work as hard as ever. The years seemed to
pour themselves into him as though he had an insatiable thirst for them. He
loved his three children. His brother continued to play cricket on weekends
far beyond the age when it was appropriate. His younger brother wrote books
and became well known for his public lectures. The middle brother found
himself in his work advising government ministers on how to understand the
numbers that flow through everything, through the world of taxes, through
work, through decisions about the care of children, the control of gambling,
and the fate of the homeless. He wrote many reports for these ministers, then
he supervised whole floors of public servants writing more reports. Bureaucrats
from across the city wanted to meet with him for a coffee or just a chat.
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Fiction
Sometimes he had to advise unhappy or incompetent public servants to
find other paths in their lives, paths that did not involve numbers or report
writing. He turned over in bed at night thinking of what it might be like to
find another path. He hoped that perhaps the gentle push he gave those
unhappy servants was down a new path they might have taken anyway.
Numbers, like time itself, and the paths we follow, are all invisible, though no
less real for that.
He saw that his children were going along their own paths, eating up time
in their own ways, dismissing him or listening to him as they pleased. His two
daughters seemed, like their mother, to understand something about how
to find their way through each day as though the way ahead was clearing for
them as they went. His son was quiet and sharp, waiting perhaps. Like his
father, the son’s hair was spiky, and he was only just okay at football.
His wife, who had been with him for nearly twenty years now, listened to
his stumbling talk about all these matters. She was an artist and a therapist in
everything she did. Sleep came easily to her. She had confidence in him. They
slept together under a cotton doona like creatures in a malleable burrow. His
family was mostly healthy, the children loving both of them, and somehow
despite their differences seeming to be seeds from a pod, for so much was
understood in this home without many words being spoken. It worked, not
perfectly, not without tears, and certainly not without fear, but mostly the
days were like a view of the sea from a grassy hillside, sunlight and breezes
everywhere, and all the details managing to find themselves in equilibrium.
His mother died suddenly and everyone was in tears. He was amazed at
how unprepared he was for the inevitable. His father shrank into himself,
his older brother drank less beer and looked more thoughtful, and even
developed jowls. This brother’s knowledge of cricket had become infinitely
subtle. It was not even cricket, really, when he spoke of it. When his brother
talked of cricket he felt there was something he had not understood about
those numbers swirling away within everything. And his younger brother,
there were times when he disappeared. There were women who followed him,
attached themselves to him, or perhaps he was the one attached. Always the
eyes that looked out from this younger brother’s face were seeing things that
no-one else had imagined yet.
The middle brother was like a distance runner high on a feeling of endless
strength, wet with a mighty sweat, a chest full of air, and arms and legs
moving even in his sleep. The numbers that had become slightly fewer and
more difficult to understand over the years were still spinning through him
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The Googly Kevin Brophy
tirelessly, and he was still interpreting them for ministers. He had worked
hard for governments of all kinds, shaping each of them, he thought, in small
ways towards an understanding that did not take the numbers as an end or
even a beginning, but saw the numbers for what they were: the smallest of
workers in cities of numbers, each citizen-number going about its business as
though the simple perfection of work is all we need. It was not much, but it was
breathtaking. He hurried to work each day, his full briefcase banging against
his leg.
He began to read novels, each page numbered, each page a certain number
of words, and soon he was caught in the turbulent river of fiction, rolling in it,
taken by currents he could not control. It was all he could do to lie beside his
wife at night and not fall out of the bed from giddiness. She was pleased to find
him there, as she always was, for she seemed to know the lengths he had gone
each day in his mind to find his way back to this place beside her. She told him
she was no longer an art therapist, that she had changed her life, that she was
now a nurse in an institution that offered physical care for people near to death.
He did not understand what she was saying, but he knew it was something to do
with the numbers inside a human heart, the way they count down each life. He
read Kafka. His children, now young adults and living sometimes at home and
sometimes with friends in chaotic old houses, also quietly began reading, for he
left books around the house for them to take, stacked in corners, piled on tables,
lined up along the hallway. Books are numberless, he thought, potentially
endless. Sometimes he gave books away to friends to make more room for other
books in his house.
Then at work one day his superior asked to see him. His superior was a
young man. How long had it been that his superiors had been younger than
him? He felt like a soldier whose old and trusted generals have fallen, and
now a new generation of ambitious commanders have occupied the tents,
the towers, the positions of strategic importance. He has never been to war.
Why is he thinking like this? Why is his heart jumping like a child inside
him? He remembers something his younger brother said, about the way
words scarcely understand us. By the time he has allowed these thoughts
to move through him, his superior has told him that there is a bottleneck in
the organisational structure, and that he will have to move aside. A desk has
been assigned to him, over there, and though his salary will remain the same
impressive number of dollars, he will no longer be responsible for a whole floor
of public servants. ‘We will find you some projects to work on, don’t worry.’
His working life is suddenly without urgency.
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Fiction
He goes home from work and everything has changed but everything is
exactly the same. He understands now what all those novels have been getting
at when the worst happens to the best characters. He is lost, about two-thirds
of the way through the novel of his own life, and he has no idea how to go on
with it. Usually some coincidence, some lucky meeting, some unexpected
twist arrives at this point in a novel or a story (unless it is one of those dark and
desperate modernist works). He has no visitation, no epiphany. His satchel in
his hand is empty. He cannot get interested in the new novel by his bedside. His
family does not notice that anything is different. He can see that they are falling
in love, or wanting love, going on with work or study and with talk, that for
them life is quite satisfactory or quite disastrous as the case may be.
He has a desk at work and beyond that no real work to fill his days or his
head. He has barely come to understand the smallest truths about those
numbers spinning inside him. How many people have felt like this? Has
everyone felt like this? Is this the way his father felt before he left everything
behind? He knows now that the difference between fiction and living is
that in living there really are no endings, there can only be endurance. And
endurance is not endurance, it is only the insistence of the present moment on
always arriving.
His suit has become ill-fitting, for he must be losing weight. He notices
the lingering quality of autumn sunshine, and he thinks how foolish all that
willingness to work might have been. He is waiting for something to happen.
It is not such a bad feeling, but hollow. He remembers walking in the bush with
his children in a forest where the ground was treacherous with wombat holes.
The earth had been honeycombed below, and at any moment one of them
might have fallen through into one of those fat burrows the wombats dig. This
is how he feels now. A fall into an earthy, crumbling darkness. It could happen
at any moment.
He feels as if he is a failed batsman walking back to the pavilion, thinking he
did not see what was coming. He has learned that googly (so close to ‘goodly’
in its look) is also the doosra, a Punjabi word for ‘the other one’, the outsider,
the stranger, an intruder. He remembers bending down over his father lying in
a hospital bed, wanting to gaze into his eyes to exchange this looking-at-eachother
for perhaps the last time, and realising his father was preoccupied with
some stranger who had just arrived in his consciousness.
He wakes from uneasy dreams in his bed at night: there were mists moving
in over trees on a mountainside in his dream, and below a man was jogging
round an oval; his daughter was nearby with her head bent over a book; from
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The Googly Kevin Brophy
the next room it seemed the sharp and purposeful crackling of meat being
braised in a pan; on the walls the swirls of light-filled colour in his wife’s
paintings; and a memory of old Silas Marner plainly telling his daughter,
‘I shall get older and helplesser’. He manages to breathe, his limbs moving with
confidence in the spiralling turns and twists of these numberless currents. M
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Eat. Shit. Die.
HELEN GILDFIND
NoW george, ThaT idioT aT brindles, might have been a crap cook, but
he was on to something when he said—as he did every night he forced his
muck down me—Leo! If you don’t eat, you don’t shit. If you don’t shit, you die!
Eat up! I suddenly thought of him at the club last night, while Bryce and Nina
and Renee banged on about their alienation as creative artists and so on. The
usual spiel. Another night lost to blah blahs. Then the inevitable boasting about
who’d screwed who since last time. Renee won as usual: she loves beating us
boys; she loves rubbing Nina’s fat face in it. She finally got with the red-headed
chick from the café, and the thalidomider from the studio, the one with the
pierced stumps who paints with his feet. I was too busy nursing my juicy,
cramping guts to really listen, but when finally, solemn as a saint, Renee led
the usual closing sermon on how everything comes down to the universal,
elemental, fundamental sex drive, I just wanted to scream, What are you
talking about?
If you don’t eat, you don’t shit. If you don’t shit, you die.
When your guts are broke you realise pretty quick what’s fundamental.
Eating. Shitting. I don’t know about dying, except that it’s like sex: there’s too
much written about it and it’s all crap.
Time someone wrote about what really matters.
Time someone wrote about shit.
Nina, you eat too much. Every meal you tell yourself, this is the last time: you’ve
got to stop eating like this. You never feel hungry. You never feel full. You’re
always out of control. Now, it’s 9 pm. Again, you’ve sent yourself to bed to stop
yourself eating. Again, you can’t sleep: all you can think about is food.
Maybe Glen’s right: you’ve overstretched your stomach. How does he put
it? That, inside, you’re like Doctor Who’s TARDIS: Tard-arse, he says, Tard-arse
lard-arse. Or you’re like Mary Poppins’ handbag, your guts looping around
inside you without limit or end. He says you’re a walking, talking black hole.
That you could swallow stars. That you’re a star’s graveyard. He’s getting very
cosmic about your condition. There’s no metaphor, he says, astronomical
enough to explain where all that food goes. I could have done my thesis on you,
he says. A new physics: Arsetronomy!
Well, of course you haven’t defied physics. Energy is always conserved, and
last week he caught you arranging the newest bulges of your stomach around
the table—with your hands—as if they were an annoying object that was getting
in your way. The shame! Worse, the realisation: they were an annoying object
that was getting in your way! Since then you’ve noticed how your fleshy armpits
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Eat. Shit. Die. Helen Gildfind
pinch and pull when you reach for things, and how, when you drop something,
you just peer helplessly at the floor, distrusting your body’s turgid hinges. A few
nights ago, when Glen was in his room schmooping on the phone to Sally, you
set up the bathroom scales. You filled a bucket with seven kilos of water—the
weight you’ve gained these past few months. You told yourself: that’s fat, Nina,
blobbing through your blood, plugging your heart, exploding you slowly—a
slo-mo super duper nova. You lifted the bucket: it was heavy! How disgusting,
to pour such muck into yourself. How exhausting, to carry such weight around
with you, all the time, all the time.
I’m getting in my way! you cried to Glen last night, as you shared the feast
you’d cooked him because he was missing Sally badly. Look, sis, he said, you
know the deal. Energy in—he stuffed in another mouthful—must be equal to
or less than energy out. He leant over, as if to fart. You didn’t laugh. He stopped
fooling. He patted your arm. It’s just flab, Nina. Just food. Accept yourself, or
change yourself, but stop obsessing, cos you’re driving me nuts. He went back
to his dinner, muttering, What is with women and food? and you found yourself
travelling his words up, up into space. You looked down on the earth and you
saw how its men never thought about food, beyond wanting it and eating it,
while its women cooked and gorged and starved and vomited and cried, their
food morphing into all sorts of strange things in their guts: thoughts, feelings,
rituals. Glen burped you back to the table, demanding, Cake, woman! Of course
you’d baked one. Of course you ate the whole thing once he’d taken his slice and
disappeared for some optical sex with poor Sally stuck in Wadeye.
Well, it’s easy for Glen to lecture you, with his laddery ribs and his hoppery
limbs and his horsey face, all bony plains and stretched skin. It’s easy for him
to reduce everything to rationality. He might be right—you’ve just got to ‘get
a grip’—but what if he’s wrong? Can physics really explain everything? Can it
explain compulsion, this force that’s not quite a thought or a feeling or an urge,
but some sort of a cell-deep primal call to just eat and eat and eat?
Oh, rubbish! It’s not your flabs getting in your way, Nina. It’s not some
profound ancestral memory dictating things: it’s you; it’s just you.
Once again, your nightly prayer and promise. Today was the last time.
Please let tomorrow be a new day.
I’ve finally forced myself to see Gallows (to get to the bottom of it, ha ha). I’m
sitting outside his surgery, thinking about shit and society. I started thinking
about this years ago. I was at a supermarket checkout, waiting behind an
old woman, when a voice yelled from my elbow, ‘Pwoar, something stinks!’
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A fleshy slap. I turned and saw a mop-haired kid with brimming eyes and a
finger-pegged nose. His mother kept thumping groceries onto the counter. I
suddenly wondered if, in my dreamy stupor, I’d farted or burped. Maybe I had
BO, having spent all that humid morning sweating and writing in days-old
boxers. As I turned away, disgusted, a warming stench hit me. ‘Mum—look!’
Thump. I went to check my shoes, and then I saw it. I stared at the pencil-thin
ankles of the oldie in front of me: over her heel and smearing onto the floor
was a slug of soft yellow shit.
The old woman seemed oblivious to the squalling kid and the retching
air. In fact, with her pin curls and mint dress and tan handbag, she oozed
refinement; pure refinement, except for the shit—her shit—spreading over
the floor. The checkout chick carried on heroically, chatting away as people
began to move around the edges of the store: a manager, a boy with a mop.
Finally, the old dame counted out her coins, put her bags in her trolley and
disappeared up the street with her head up, her pearls shining and her shit
streaking a trail behind her.
For seconds, then, everything stopped, as if the building’s very fabric knew
that something profound had just happened within it. Then the checkout
chick smiled and asked me to step back. The boy trundled the mop over and
we all stood, quiet as a funeral congregation, as he scowled and swirled and
smeared the shit into bleach-smelling nothingness. As I watched him I knew
everyone except for the hollering kid was wondering, Did the old woman know
what had happened? If she did, was she okay? If she didn’t, would she be okay
when she realised?
As I walked home that day I wondered what I’d have done if it had been me.
Irrationally, but definitely, I knew I’d go home and kill myself. Realising that,
I began to wonder seriously about shit and society.
When you were little food was a treat. On Thursday nights you and Glen
paced the shiny pink lino of the supermarket’s junk food aisle while your
mum stormed off with the trolley. You each had a dollar to spend. Every time
you chose something Glen would say, I dunno if I’d choose that one, Nina,
so you never got what you wanted and always coveted what he got. At home
you’d watch TV and play your silent weekly game of losers finish first. You
always lost and later Glen would lie in bed with his sweet trophy propped on
his pillow. Nina, he’d say, look. He’d go Mmmm-mmm and lick and slurp and
suck in a creepy way until you ran over and thumped him, yelling for your
mum, who said it served you right for being a pig. It’s always been like that
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between you and Glen: you wanted to eat, he wanted to compete; you scoffed,
he savoured.
It wasn’t just sweets that drove you. It was every food, every day. If you’d
done your chores or walked Spooker, you got snacks or seconds at dinner. If you
achieved good grades you won two chocolate bars on Thursday nights and none
if you’d done poorly, which wasn’t fair because Glen was good at everything
and you were good at nothing. On Sundays, you hustled for the weekly roast,
your mum tossing it to whoever she deemed best behaved, or she’d tell you to
buzz off and would sit on the back step—the picking place—tearing the juiciest
shreds from the bones herself. If your dad scored the corpse, you and Glen
would hang around like scrap-yard dogs, poised to pick his pickings because
he just didn’t understand the art of stripping flesh from bone. Once he tossed
a carcass onto the grass to see what you’d do. Of course, you fought for it, and
the only thing weirder than that is the image of your dad sitting by as if it were
perfectly normal for a man to treat his kids like hyenas at a zoo.
Yes, your parents subscribed to the Pavlovian school of child rearing. Just as
they used Schmackos to make Spooker turn tricks, they trained you and Glen
with chocolate and meat. But now, Nina, you’re your own food-treat-dealer.
You’re the only judge of whether you’ve been good, and there’s nothing you
won’t reward, is there? At recess today you trotted to the café to celebrate
getting your year 9s into poetry. In the afternoon you hosed down two horny
year 10s without sounding like a dried-up old hag: you rewarded yourself with
fish and chips at the train station. So why did you then stuff down all that pasta
when you got home? And why did you eat the slab of cake that Glen brought
back from the lab? Slab, not slice. You can still see the look on his face when
he came in from Telephone Sally and saw that the cake was gone. He wasn’t
pissed-off silent. He was just … say it, Nina. He—the closest person to you, the
only one left—was disgusted, disgusted by you. Now you’ve slunk off early to
bed again, and you’re blaming your parents—dead people—for what you do.
If it’s their fault, Nina, then how come Glen isn’t a porker too? If it’s their fault,
how come you’ve gotten so much worse just recently?
Again, your nightly prayer and promise. Today is the last time. Please let
tomorrow be a new day.
‘Stool sample.’ I’d rather give Gallows my blood, my piss, my semen, my
goddamn bone marrow than my shit. Doesn’t matter that he’s an old man and
a doctor and won’t even look at it. Doesn’t matter that he asks people for shit a
dozen times a day. It matters that he’s going to read my shit, that he’s going to
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read me. Bloody George. You eat to shit to live, he said, but I’ve been eating and
shitting and yes I’m alive but I might just be dying too.
So here I am at home, ‘defecating into a clean container’. I make sure I
don’t ‘urinate’ on my ‘faeces’, though some lab rat will think I’ve misread
instructions: I’ve been pissing out my arse for weeks. I take ‘the clean wooden
spatula’ and try to put my ‘faeces’ into the jars: easier said than done. I go to
the kitchen. I contemplate a straw, settle for a spoon. Who’ll know? Somehow,
I’m having fun. It’s not every day you get to play with your poop. It’s not every
day you learn that things like dignity and integrity aren’t all they’re cracked
up to be, that maybe they’re just ideas in your head because it’s the integrity
of the body—not you—that matters. Finally, I spoon the murk into the jars and
seal them into the bag Gallows has given me: it’s yellow and stamped up and
down with the sinister black sickles of the biohazard symbol. Faeces, stools,
biohazards: even shit-testing kits can’t name shit.
I don’t know whether to walk or drive this bounty back to Gallows’. For the
past few weeks I’ve hardly left the flat. Lucky I’m on sabbatical because I can’t
go anywhere, now, without getting strategic about toilets. The club’s become
impossible too: so busy; no privacy; people noticing. Even Renee looked twice
when I arrived last time. I walked straight past her to the crapper. When I
returned she was all over me, saying, Wow, Leo, you look great, as if I’ve been
fat and ugly all these years and not known it. How’d you do it? she kept asking.
She’s forever trying to hone herself down to her bones: I discipline my body,
she says, I discipline myself. I discipline myself, she says, I discipline my art.
Maybe she’s right. She’s the only one of us whose work’s going anywhere.
That was a weird night. I was spacing out while she and Bryce sparred over
their ‘open relationship’, sparred because he’s had no-one and she’s fucked
everyone. Then he started banging on about his show, saying it’s flopped
because he’s a tall poppy who’s truly creative because he confronts the
conventional blah blah. I just had to ask him how artified porn was anything
but derivative. Artified porn? he squealed. Derivative! Renee pissed herself
laughing, So true, Leo! Even Nina giggled in that snorty, goofy way of hers.
Bloody Nina. She just kept peering into me that night. Otherwise she held the
floor for once, though maybe she just seemed to because I couldn’t take my
eyes off her huge freckly tits heaving in and out of that ridiculous black dress
of hers. She always looks like a dog’s breakfast—like she’d eat a dog’s breakfast,
Renee would say, like she’d eat a dog—but there I was eating her with my eyes
and pretending to give a damn about her classes and her poems and her new
publisher. She was so happy that Renee just had to cut in and cut her down,
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looking at her while commenting for the millionth time on my fantastic weight
loss. Of course, Nina shut right up and sat there, swamped by the fact of her fat.
Stupid Nina, and Renee, you shallow bitch, you’d be stunned if you saw
me now: even Gallows stared when I walked into his office yesterday. He felt
about my caving guts and jutting ribs and weighed me and hmmed and haaed
and though he never mentioned it we were both thinking of the C-word as he
handed me this shit-kit. And no, Renee, no, Bryce, we weren’t thinking of cunts
and cocks and cunnilingus, or convention-confronting creativity. We were
thinking of that good old plot-moving, world-shaking crisis that gets everyone
interested in a B-grade story: cancer.
Hell, I’ll take the risk. I’ll walk this stuff back to the doc’s because I’m bone
cold in here and it’s burny bright out there and if that old dame could stride her
shit down the street then I can flaunt my biohazards too. What have I to lose?
I’m in Gallows’ hands now.
You couldn’t believe it when Leo appeared in the doorway. Your insides
tumbled: once, when you thought he’d seen you; again, when you saw he
hadn’t; and then again, when you saw the change in him. You’ve never seen
anyone so thin. You’ve never seen him so beautiful.
He strolled across the waiting room, as bendy and bouncy as a blade of
grass, swinging a plastic bag and whistling the jolliest tune you’ve ever heard.
That was when your dread from the club forced itself to thought: Please, not
Leo! Not my Leo! (My Leo? Look, there’s another feeling morphed into thought
and you must be insane, Nina. Leo stopped caring years ago. Why would he care
now, now that you’re as big as a whale? Now that Renee’s always there, between
you? Damn Renee! Damn her body and her talk and her brilliant sculptures:
all that sex into stone; all her sex, all her stone.) You know your dread-feeling
for Leo is right because his lightness hurled you straight back into that sharp
morning years ago when Eddie waltzed in and ate breakfast with you and
kissed you and looked into you just as he used to. You’d thought everything had
shifted into place. But no. Eddie had just worked it out: weight doesn’t come
from the past; it comes from the future. You weren’t seeing things fixed. You
were just seeing what a man looks like when that weight lifts off of him: he looks
as floaty-free as Leo looked yesterday at Dr Gallows’.
You watched Leo give his bag to the nurse. When he turned to go he saw
you. He stopped whistling. He stared. He saw that you saw. That was when your
insides really sickened: he was so freed up that he wasn’t even mad, not like he
normally is when you catch him off guard. He just hesitated, smiled, strolled
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over and said, Hey, Nina Boppalina, good to see ya. He just stood there, playing
that stupid rhyming game you played at uni when you were both practising to
be ‘great writers’, that game he dumped once you’d spent years writing nothing
very great and getting nowhere very much. Hey, Leo? you said, tripping over
your own question mark. He shrugged, answering you with a jangle of his
terrifying bones. Then you blurted it out: ‘Come for a feedo, Leo Schmeo?
Glen’s away seeing Sally.’ For once, he wasn’t all excuses. Indeed, a feed! was all
he said. You rhymed up a time and he said, Cheerio, I gotta go, and tootled out
the door.
Then you went in to Dr Gallows. You told him you needed a check-up.
He checked things up and said, You’re obese. Lose weight. So then you asked
him what you were really there to ask him. He looked at you as if you were
stupid. He said, What do you mean you can’t stop eating? Like an idiot you
repeated, I can’t stop eating. Like an idiot, he repeated, What do you mean you
can’t stop eating? You both sat there, staring at each other, baffled. Stop eating
so much, he said, and exercise more.
Behind your sunnies you bawled all the way down to the café. Then you
stopped crying and went inside and ordered your usual—as you knew you
would, as you knew you shouldn’t. You sat in your favourite sun-drenched seat,
loving and hating every sweet bite as you erased Dr Gallows’ face behind lists
and lists of what to cook for Leo, your Leo, coming to dinner next weeko.
Gallows was not happy. Nothing conclusive could be said about my shit. Nothing
conclusive could be said about me. Now I’m in hospital getting ready for what
they call a ‘top and tail’. Sounds cute, but it’s not, though the real agony lies in
sitting across from this woman while she talks about how she’s going to enter my
anus and go down my throat and read me from the inside out. I came here to see
the gastro-guy, not this film-star beauty. I can’t even look at her face.
Had a spectacular time on the shitter last night after chugging the potion
that Gallows gave me. To clean you out for tomorrow, he’d said, handing it over.
Dab—don’t wipe! he’d joked, but he looked grey as he shrugged over my results
and poked around my gutless guts. Later, as I rode a tsunami of shit into the
night, I thought of Renee and her detox diets and the million times I’d mocked
her: You detox every time you shit, I’d say, every time you piss. As I rode that
tsunami, I wondered if she’s right after all for, though my body’s been purging
itself for months, last night showed me that I’m still full of filth. As I watched
it gush away, I felt great, like I was cleaning myself right out of myself, and
when I woke up this morning, I felt sore and raw and newborn. Stupid Renee!
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And stupid me for thinking she’d ever be right about anything, because I’m still
here, stuck in myself and squirming in front of this beautiful woman.
Weird, how I spent all last night worrying Renee or Bryce or someone
would walk in on me. Later, as I lay in bed, waiting for the smaller waves to hit,
I realised what a fool’s fear that was because no-one ever drops by and no-one
will: no-one’s seen me for ages; no-one except Nina, and Nina doesn’t count.
I realised I might as well flush myself down the toilet for all the world cares.
Realising this, I suddenly felt them, all the people in the world who’re exiled by
their shit and piss and pain and I wanted to scream, How the fuck do you live?
and, What will happen to you? Then I asked myself those same questions, but
I found no answers. I guess there’s some things you just gotta live with even if
they stop you living.
The gastro-girl stops talking. She leads me into her surgery and introduces
me to the hunky guy who’s going to shoot me up with the sleep-juice. He looks
over me, to make eyes at her, and it turns out I’ve got nothing on that old lady
from that day: I’m humiliated; I’m scared; I can’t hold my head up high or look
either of these two good-lookers in the eye. I thank God when a middle-aged
nurse walks in and I focus on her lumpy backside and watch her looping a long
black hose over a silver hook. What’s that for? I ask. You don’t want to know!
she says. Everyone titters as the liquid sleep pulls me under.
Suddenly I’m awake and surrounded by chattering patients and a glorious
symphony of farts. I realise the symphony is my own but I’m so relaxed that I
don’t care a damn. My nurse appears and asks, Okay, luv? and I say, Great! and
my arse says, Fart! She gets me dressed and leads me to a room full of armchairs
and TVs and sits me near three cushiony old biddies. They smile at me, like I’m
one of them. For the first time panic swells inside me. I focus on the TV. I watch
some fatsos confess their teary tales to Oprah. Then I remember Nina, sitting
like a big pink pudding at Gallows’. I was walking on air that day, relieved,
resigned to whatever fate Gallows was going to read from my shit. I think that’s
why I said yes to dinner: perhaps I thought I’d die first. God, she annoys me.
How she acts like she cares about everyone and everything. I might be a selfish
prick but I don’t see how caring about everything is so damned different to
caring about nothing at all.
The gastro-girl appears next to me. She shrugs like Gallows: she’s found
nothing, nothing conclusive. She mentions the deadly C-word, then she uses a
new C-word and I’m caught on its curves and spikes: catabolic. That’s it. That’s
what these past few days and months and years—my life—has been. Catabolic.
I stare at the doc’s smooth, bare neck. I want to touch her. Before I can do
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anything so stupid, a miracle happens: she touches me. She strokes my hand as
if she can sense the realisation uncurling inside, that maybe I’ll never touch or
be touched by anyone ever again.
She asks me who’s picking me up. My reply clatters onto the lino: No-one.
She doesn’t flinch. She smiles. Don’t worry, Leo. I’ll work things out. You’re
mine now, okay?
He sits across from you in Glen’s seat. There’s nothing to say. You don’t ask him
anything because he’ll tell you when he wants to, if he wants to. Both of you
eat and eat and eat. You hear him breathe and chew and swallow. You hear his
cutlery and plate tap tap tap on the table top. Only once do you ask, Is it okay?
He nods, Mmmm-uh-uh. He doesn’t look up.
After dinner he disappears to the bathroom. You go out to the balcony.
He’s gone so long that you wonder if he’s throwing everything up. You wonder
if he’s dropped dead. You turn to check on him. He’s staring at you through
the glass door. He slides it open, sidles around you and lies on Glen’s yellow
banana lounge. You sit, feeling your thighs pour over your wooden stool.
Together you watch the white and red twinkle of the cars coming and going
along the street. You offer him a cigarette, gesturing back to uni, when you
each posed and pretended you were too cool to care that the world you wanted
didn’t want you. You can still feel the agony of that final year when he froze
you out, as if he were using you for practice. Oh, forget it Nina! He’s here now,
and anyway, if he hadn’t frozen you out, you would never have known Eddie’s
lovely warm skin.
When you light your third cigarette you begin to tell Leo everything he never
asked you about. Then you tell him about Glen and his work, and about light
and dark and time and space and weightlessness. You tell him how your poetry
and Glen’s physics are really two and the same, for you’re both just dealers in
metaphor, and isn’t everyone just trying to put a shape on things? You tell him
how you must move out soon because Glen will never ask you to and he and
Sally should be together.
When you finish you look at him. Under the harsh fluro of the street lamp
he looks starchy and stringy and white; just as a man should on a banana
lounge. You want to laugh. Then fury surges through you. I hate you, Leo, for
forgetting me, for ignoring me, for mocking me and for never asking me, ever,
how it’s been.
You turn back to the red and white constellations of the cars. You say, I
can’t stop eating. You repeat yourself, just as you did at Gallows’, as if Leo can’t
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see what everyone else sees when they look at you and weigh you up before
turning away from you forever. Eventually Leo puts out his hand. He only wants
another cigarette. He leans in to your lighter, muttering, Oh well. He lies back
and says, I can’t stop shitting. Then you hear it. It rumbles up from deep within
him, up and up, setting his plastic cradle creaking and it’s not the pig in him
laughing, it’s him, it’s him. And you’re laughing too.
I could stay like this forever, full of her food, looking and listening and
wondering if she’ll let me dress my bones in her, warm myself in her, rest in her.
Look at those big sad cow’s eyes, sizing me up, looking to see if I hear her and
see her. I have. I do.
Nina, I know you’ll be gentle, that you’ll make a ritual of it, that you’ll make
a feast of me, that you’ll relish me, that you’ll pick my bones till they’re so damn
white we’ll throw the light right back at those precious stars of yours. Together
we’ll blind the lot of them: Glen, Gallows, Renee and Georgie boy. We’ll show
them there’s a thousand ways to eat and shit and live and die. M
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My Last Birthday
MARK DAPIN
I Was born on The 32nd of march. I do not know how it happened, but it
did. People born on the 32nd of March never grow older, and we never grow tall.
My mother was a clerk in the distillery. My father was a returned soldier, and he
shot through.
I grew up in Bundaberg, by the river, but I didn’t grow. Oh, my head grew—
my monstrous target skull—and my chest swelled like a sherry barrel, but my
hands hung at my waist, and my legs were cut short like my arms.
I was my mother’s punishment. She fed me from a bowl, like a puppy,
because I used to topple and she thought I’d never learn how to sit. My mother
could have put me in an orphanage, but she kept me because she loved me.
All my life I have lived off that love.
I went to the Catholic school, where the brothers were kind, but they
expected me to die. We never get older, so we always die young. The brothers
taught me that in ancient Egypt we were gods.
The other children shut me in cupboards and carried me in bags. I liked
them to hide me and lock me away. It made me feel like treasure. The first time
I went to a birthday party I was eight years old. I had never had a cake, or a
present wrapped in coloured paper, because I born on the 32nd of March.
The boys were curious about my pee-pee. They used to take down my pants
to see if it had grown. Sometimes after sport they would hang me naked from
the shower heads, to stretch me.
That’s all I remember from school, except noun, verb, adjective; head,
thorax, abdomen; amo, amas, amat. I left when I was fourteen to sit on a wall
smoking cigarettes. I’d been waiting two years when Jeremiah Cain’s travelling
show came with their trucks and tents and the big bass drum.
I watched them set up in the showground, because I liked to know everything
that happened in my town. An old showie with sharpened teeth and a forked
tongue asked if I could play the banjo. I said I wasn’t musical. He said, ‘I thought
all you people knew the ukulele.’
Jeremiah Cain ran a boxing tent with fairground rides, a snake charmer and
a stripper, but some of the boxers dressed up as lobsters, wobbling plastic claws
behind steamed glass in the walk-in walk-out tent. Emperor Harry was the
Pygmy King of the Dark Continent, who could burst a balloon with a blowpipe
at twenty paces.
I remember the first time I saw Emperor Harry, striding towards me in the
dust. He wore a waistcoat, a fob watch and a brown felt hat. He moved with
great energy and strength, as if he were bursting through heavy air, and shook
my hand so hard he pulled me off the wall.
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My Last Birthday Mark Dapin
‘What do they call you?’ asked Emperor Harry.
‘Cunthead,’ I said, wiping my knees.
Emperor Harry looked sad.
‘My name’s Gregory,’ I said.
‘Gregory the Great,’ said Emperor Harry, ‘the world’s smallest juggler.’
‘I can’t juggle,’ I told him.
‘Any mug can juggle,’ said Emperor Harry, ‘but it takes guts to be small.’
He asked how old I was.
‘I was born on the 32nd of March, of course.’
‘Then you’re old enough to join a show,’ said Emperor Harry.
Emperor Harry was a tent boxer by trade, but it was hard to find opponents
in bush towns because of his weight. He suggested I fight him on the first night
of the show. He promised to go easy on me and split the take.
‘But I can’t fight,’ I said.
‘Fighting’s like juggling,’ said Emperor Harry. ‘All you need is balls.’
He squeezed my crotch with a greengrocer’s fingers.
I decided not to tell my mother until I had the money in my hand. I knew she
wouldn’t come to the show. She liked to stay at home in her chair and knit her
dreams—jumpers for soldiers, blankets for a Korean winter.
I hurried down to the showground in a shearer’s singlet, floating through the
smells of whipped sugar and spattering fat. Jeremiah Cain stood on the boards
outside his tent, banging his drum, gathering a crowd with a showman’s lies.
His own fighters were lined up alongside him, from the Canadian Cowboy, who
had never been in Canada, to the Aboriginal Champion of the Outback, who
was a black American ex-serviceman, to Emperor Harry, the shortest tent-boxer
in Australia.
‘Who’ll take a glove?’ yelled Jeremiah Cain.
‘I will!’ I cried.
Jeremiah Cain saw me with his stormy electric eyes, but pretended to scan
the crowd of cane-cutters and stockmen.
‘Who’s that?’ he asked. ‘The Bundaberg Bunyip?’
I pushed my way past the knees of country boys and camp cooks until I
reached the ladder.
‘Give him a hand up!’ said Jeremiah Cain, but I kicked out at anyone who
tried to help me, and climbed the rungs myself.
‘And who might you be, little fella?’ asked Jeremiah Cain, bending lower
than he needed.
As I began to reply, he pulled away the megaphone.
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‘This tiny titan here is Gregory the Great!’ bellowed Jeremiah Cain. ‘The
abandoned son of the most famous midget wrestler of all time … the Great
Gregory!’
People laughed, but nobody really knew who my father was. I flexed my
biceps and they whistled. I felt like the tallest man alive.
The boxing troupe had no gloves for me, so Emperor Harry offered to fight
me bareknuckle. I said I’d fight him with one hand tied behind his back. I meant
to say ‘my back’, but the drunks laughed and paid their money. Before we’d even
stepped onto the boxing mat, I was imagining the scene when it was over, with
the sawmillers carrying me on their shoulders, yelling, ‘He’s got a big heart for a
little fella,’ and the whole town shouting ‘Cunthead! Cunthead!’
Boxing isn’t the way you’d choose to fight if you were born on the 32nd of
March. We’re not naturally punchers. We don’t have the reach. Our legs are too
short for the footwork. We don’t jab. It all got scrappy as soon as the bell rang,
with me charging at Emperor Harry, and he batting me away with hands held just
below his chin. The way I’d normally fight was to bite and butt, but the tent had
rules and I respected them because I sensed this was my chance in life, and God
help me if I wasn’t right.
Emperor Harry could move like an athlete, shifting his weight from side
to side, throwing me off my rhythm with a diagonal step backwards or a feint
that promised a lunge. But he stepped into my punches and sold them, flying
sprawling onto the mat clutching his wide, flat nose. At the end of the third round,
Jeremiah Cain got down on his knees to lift the winner’s arm into the air, and
when I felt the tug on my wrist, I wanted to cry and laugh and sing all at once.
That night I was the hero of the town. They called me ‘the Beast of Bundy’.
Emperor Harry found me under the war memorial the next morning, drinking
sherry and shaping up to the statue. He said I’d better get myself straightened
out because we were going to fight a grudge match that night, to decide which of
us was the Midget Tent Boxing Champion of the World.
My second fight didn’t go as well as my first. Emperor Harry bashed me from
one corner of the mat to the next and back again. He knocked me down three
times in the first minute, but I kept getting back up for more. He blacked my
eyes, loosened my teeth, even broke my nose, but the crowd was behind me and
that was all I needed. Even after Jeremiah Cain had presented Emperor Harry
with an engraved belt sanctioned by the World Midget Tent Boxing Association,
people were saying, ‘Well done, Cunthead. Good fight.’
Emperor Harry asked if I wanted to travel with the troupe. He said we could
fight each other every place we went. He’d be Jeremiah Cain’s champion, I’d be
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a challenger from an outstation, and we’d take turns in winning the midget
world championship. He promised I’d meet sheilas and have mates. He said
he’d never had the chance to box in the tent before. He was the last of a mob of
a midget wrestlers who used to follow the show in their own truck, and set up
a ring before the tent opened in the afternoon, to entertain the children. But
the others had all drifted away, found women on the road or just disappeared.
Wrestling was tough on their bodies, hard on their joints and, even if you
weren’t born on the 32nd of March, it was a young man’s game.
My mother wept when I told her I was leaving, and I cried too. I said I’d only
be gone for a season, as we pushed on north to the Gulf, then west into the
Territory. She told me if I saw my father, I had to send him home.
The next two years were the best of my life, the best of anybody’s life.
Me and Emperor Harry, we tore the outback down. We boxed and we wrestled,
he taught me the ukulele, I juggled as he sang, and held the balloon for his
blowpipe. We were pygmies, dwarfs, elves and hobbits, headhunters, cannibals,
Siamese twins. We slept in the same swag.
The showies took me into their big dark family. Even though I wasn’t born
to the life, they could see there was nothing else for me. I helped set up the
fair and pull down the tents. Some of the best times were in the Aboriginal
missions, where they had never seen a man who was born on the 32nd of March.
Jeremiah Cain would roll me up in the boxing mat, then spill me out onto the
gravel, and the blacks would scream and wave their hands about, laugh and run
away. They thought I had magical powers, that I was more than a man, not less.
There were pockets of the fair only showmen knew, dark corners behind
canvas curtains, secret hooch bars where the Two-Headed Woman drank
homemade whisky with the Greatest Escapologist the World Has Ever Seen.
In the first hours of the morning, when the mugs were in bed with their fat
dowdy wives, the showmen put on acts for each other. There were dogfights
that lasted until a torn jaw fluttered from the gums of a blind pit bull, cockfights
with spurs, and razor matches between boys who walked away with scars like
rivers running down their cheeks.
On party nights the strippers tore the pasties from their nipples and stepped
out of their flesh-coloured underpants and fucked the trick-shooters and the
whip crackers, their stockwhips and their rifles. Most of all, the showies liked to
watch the girls with the Aboriginal Champion of the Outback, but if everyone
was as pissed as blacks, and the negro was sated or sleeping, the snake charmer
would encourage them to go with the dwarfs. One of the girls would always
agree, after he’d hypnotised her with his yellow eyes. I loved her completely,
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and I know she loved me too. I could feel it inside her. She called herself
Darlene, or Jeremiah Cain gave her that name. I don’t know.
I lost my boyhood to Darlene, in front of the snake charmer, Emperor Harry
and Jeremiah Cain. But Darlene let the negro move into her trailer, and the
others gathered outside just to listen to the noises they made together. I drank
around the campfire with Emperor Harry, stoking the embers with a stick.
When we found Darlene was pregnant to the negro, it wasn’t a big thing.
Most of the show was black or part-black. She had to stop working as a
stripper, but she still collected tickets for the rides. I carried her things when I
could. She went into labour in McKinlay and the baby was born in Cloncurry.
He wasn’t black but he was very small. It was the 32nd of March.
The negro left the camp the next day.
The fortune teller looked at my beautiful son and said he was Darlene’s
punishment. I held him in my arms and my heart sang. We named him
Charlie—I think that was my father’s name—and Darlene fed him from her
breast. She changed him on her knee and wore him in a sling, like an Indian.
They talked together in the trailer at night. I listened to them outside. She
didn’t like me to spend too much time with him, in case that kept him small.
The fortune teller gave her potions to make him grow.
Jeremiah Cain picked up a new fighter in Boulia. I didn’t like him because
I could see Darlene did. By the time we reached Birdsville he had taken the
negro’s place in her trailer. He was useful in the ring, but he liked to hurt the
mugs, and Jeremiah Cain had to warn him to go easy. It was just a show.
Darlene was smiling again, because she had Boulia. She always said she
needed a big man to take care of her. Boulia was hard and proud, but he never
touched another woman, and some nights I heard him play the guitar and sing
to my son. But he wasn’t the type to live on the road. He looked too far ahead,
could see it went nowhere. Now he had found his woman, he wanted to go back
to the farm and raise a family. Darlene asked Jeremiah Cain for permission to
leave the show. He said she should stay, because Charlie belonged to all of us.
The fortune-teller predicted Boulia would drag Darlene down. ‘Lower than
this?’ asked Darlene. ‘Lower than an unmarried stripper in a tent-boxing show?’
I never knew she felt she was low. I thought we were living the high life.
I loved the tents and the hotdogs, the spruiking and the gee-ups, the trucks,
the mud and the dust.
‘A fucking slut,’ said Darlene, ‘with a cunt-headed baby dwarf?’
The next morning they were gone, and they left my son in a bucket of water,
a small bucket of warm water, filled to the brim. There was no need for that.
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I would have taken him. I would have loved him. I would have taught him how
to grow, from the inside.
The showies buried Charlie beside the track, beneath a shaky timber cross
and a garland of gold leaf, the livery of the stalls. The fortune teller told me he’d
come back as a giant. Jeremiah Cain offered to hunt down Darlene and Boulia.
Emperor Harry said we should go after the cowboy, just him and me, and
show him what we were worth, we men born on the 32nd of March. But Boulia
already knew what we were worth, and it wasn’t the cowboy who’d done it, it
was Darlene.
I couldn’t fight in the tent after I lost Charlie. I could only drink. When I was
full of beer or moonshine I’d take on any mug who said something smart, but I’d
do it at the rifle range or the laughing clowns, have a proper blue in front of the
families, and I wouldn’t stop when it was over. If a ringer called me ‘Shorty’, I’d
bite his fucking nose off.
Emperor Harry begged me to stop, but I couldn’t and he couldn’t make
me. I was maybe ten years younger than him, fitter, faster and toughened up.
I nearly killed a bloke in Charleville—just a little fella; they were always the
ones who started something—and Jeremiah Cain asked me to leave the troupe.
He said I could come back when I was fixed, but I said, ‘Fuck you to hell.’
They left me in the hotel in Roma with $100, and I spent it on whores.
I hitch-hiked back to Bundaberg. My mother asked if I’d met my father on the
road. I told her I had, and he said he was never coming back. She shut herself in
her room, and I locked myself in mine. When the show came around, neither of
us left the house. I drank cough medicine and shoe polish remover. I saw lions
and tigers, dragons and serpents. I spoke to the walls.
One night I was lying in bed when I heard a tap at the window. It was
Emperor Harry. I told him to fuck off, called him every name I’d ever been
called, but he refused to leave because he was my mate. He sat at my bedside
and we talked about the old days, the good times in Ingham and Innisfail
and Tully.
Oh God, I’d missed Emperor Harry. I’d missed him so much. He unrolled his
swag on my bedroom floor. Inside was Charlie, with golden hair and blue eyes,
all grown up but never grown old. I reached out for my son, to hug him to my
sherry-barrel chest, and I felt my spirit drift away.
I looked back at the calendar on my bedroom wall. It was the 32nd of
March. M
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I should be so lucky
SAM COONEY
So it now looks as though the universal wheel of fortune is anything
but random—it’s rigged, and rigged good. We asked the Onlooker’s
resident intern to suss out the ramifications of the recent discovery
of a human gene that bestows good fortune upon those who carry it.
I mean, it’s gotta be totally unfair, right?
posted on 31/02/2012 at 10.34 am
The discovery lasT monTh of a hereditary unit for ‘luck’ is making waves
in the gene pool. Actually, it’s caused the whole world to go troppo. Stop it,
everyone! You’re all acting batshit, mad as bananas, stark raving bonkers. It’s
like we’re living in that Lord of the Flies book, but on a worldwide scale. Crazy!
The gene, with the official scientific name FFTB128, has been quickly
nicknamed the ‘lucky’ gene by pretty much every media outlet. (Admittedly,
this latest example of nicknaming bucks the irksome trend for cock-and-bull
that has heretofore accompanied the nicknaming of genes—like the invented
‘skinny’ gene or the hoax ‘frog-toed’ gene—as FFTB128 is now undeniably and
scarily bona fide, scientifically speaking.) The discovery has been the catalyst
for recent upheavals: the violent public riots, the months-long arguments
in parliaments, the logjams in every judicial system, the rapid shifts within
humanities and social sciences. It has of course been the talking point of every
smoke break and dinner party.
FFTB128 is the latest human gene to be fully characterised. Unveiled last
month by those gung-ho geneticists at Chengdu Polytechnic, it is in many ways
like any other gene: made up of a distinct sequence of nucleotides (the building
blocks that are the basic structural units of nucleic acids such as DNA), which
in turn constitute part of a chromosome (the classic double helix; see Jurassic
Park), the order of which determines the arrangement of monomers in a nucleic
acid molecule that a cell may synthesise. Wikipedia gobbledygook, I know.
In layman’s terms, FFTB128, like all genes, is a unit of genetic inheritance that
is transferred from parent to offspring and contributes to the characteristics of
the offspring. Ipso facto: you are your parents, and/or also their parents, and/
or also their parents’ parents, ad infinitum. (You are also a product of your
environment. As scientists are wont to say: the genetic template you are born
with doesn’t function in a vacuum.) Your lineage is a great big slippery slide,
with parts and pieces slewing straight from your ancestors to you. You have
freckles? Because of your parents. You have big feet? Because of your parents.
You love cheesy foods and watching soon-to-be-axed sitcoms, just to see if
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you can spot the reasons why the sitcom has been marked for cancellation,
using your nonspecialist knowledge of socio-demographic considerations and
cost-cutting budgets? Probably because of your parents, although also probably
nothing to do with genetics. Still, the point is that although FFTB128 is a gene
possessed by everyone, only a small percentage of people have the specific
allele (the particular mutation) of the gene that means it will be active, and now
that we know about it, now that it’s no longer hiding quietly between genes
DEFB370 and SMAR884, it’s wreaking havoc like no other gene before.
What makes FFTB128 so extraordinary, so repercussive? Well, primarily it’s
all because it is the first gene discovered in humans—in any living species of
plant or animal—that acts upon its vessel in a constant, physical, manifest and,
most importantly, instantaneous way. All other genes shoot their wads early,
say at conception, and do it slowly too, but FFTB128 keeps shooting its wad,
over and over, rapidly, throughout the carrier’s life, meaning that it is an active
agent in the second-by-second existence of said carrier. On top of this, although
geneticists can now comprehensively outline what processes the FFTB128
genes trigger, and can watch at a microscopic level the genes as they trigger
together, none can say what outside influence actually triggers them. As far as
we can tell for now, FFTB128 seems to function either completely on its own,
or—and take careful note of this—by receiving signals from somewhere, signals
that are at this time imperceptible to the most sensitive of scientific equipment.
It’s a real mystery. The genes are not triggered by organic proteins, nor by
electrical current, nor by chemicals, nor by naturally occurring radiations
of the body. This is why FFTB128 is known by nicknames other than ‘lucky’,
nicknames to do with religion, faith and spirituality. Some have started calling
it the ‘divine’ gene, or the ‘holy’ gene, or even the ‘god’ gene. And what’s even
curiouser is that it’s becoming increasingly difficult to argue with them. As the
New York Times reported recently:
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From Christianity to Buddhism, Islam to Scientology, Wicca to
Jediism, religions and spiritual groups around the world have
scrambled to claim FFTB128 as the much awaited proof that backs
up their long-held faith, proof that the sacred exists not on an astral
plane or inside the mind, but physically within us (or at least the
‘chosen few’ among us). Yet for all the initial religious squabbling,
disparate denominations do now seem to be in agreement that the
discovery of FFTB128 heralds a new dawn for spirituality. And
stranger still: thus far there haven’t been any dissenting opinions
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from those who typically challenge religious championing. Whether
non-believers are simply gob-smacked (or god-smacked) is not yet
known, but so far the expected war of words over the ‘lucky’ gene
has been a wholly (holy?) one-sided fight. (NYT, ‘Jesus, Muhammad,
Hubbard, Siddhartha & Skywalker: All carriers of the ‘lucky’ gene?’,
12 December 2011)
FFTB128 works like so: when a person who has the active variant of the gene
is faced with a choice, be it an everyday one (e.g. what to eat, when to sleep, will
I cut my toenails now or later) or a momentous one (e.g. should I quit my job
and become a yoga teacher, should I murder my boyfriend because his nose
whistles when he sleeps, should I push this button to launch all the nuclear
missiles), the multitude of that person’s FFTB128 genes all immediately ‘switch
on’ in such a way as to influence the decision in a manner that advantages
the person. But how? Well, the term being bandied around at the moment is
‘rattling’. The genes oscillate—or ‘rattle’—when the person closes in on the
option that is the most propitious or auspicious for them, and the genes will fall
silent if the person moves towards any other option. It sounded a tad absurd
at first, almost like an ongoing submolecular game of Hot or Cold. Are they
serious? was the widespread reaction to Chengdu Polytechnic’s geneticists.
Could rattling genes really be letting some of us know whether we are getting
‘warmer’ or ‘cooler’, closer or further away from good fortune?
Obviously the interesting stuff is happening at a microscopic level. It’s the
nucleotides that rattle in uncanny unison, which in turn gently vibrates the
whole chromosome, and this vibrating shimmies up the chain of nucleic acid so
that a person on the crest of making the most personally advantageous decision
is almost literally humming with subliminal and subcellular good advice.
But just why a carrier allegedly—and apparently unconsciously—proceeds to
obey the chordal rattling of a coterie of genes is as yet undetermined. If this is
our new reality then it seems that those of us who believe in the autonomous
process of decision-making will instead need to accept that some of us are
under the sway of a Stasi-like molecular constabulary. To call this discomfiting
would be an understatement.
This is what we know: the active variant of FFTB128 pushes people—
physically persuades them on a microscopic but incredibly forceful
level—towards circumstances that will benefit them individually. Such
circumstances can differ greatly: they could be tangible situations occurring in
the ‘real world’ that you and I inhabit, or they could be completely cerebral and
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involve thought patterns and decision-making taking place in a person’s mind.
But the point is that the vast number of infinitesimal biological scintillas that
make you you in a purely physical sense also make you you in a metaphysical
sense. In the same way that one ancient Egyptian on his own couldn’t possibly
construct the pyramids or carve the Sphinx, but hundreds of thousands or
even millions could, and did, one nucleotide or molecule mightn’t be able to
cajole a person to do or say or think something, but millions of them working in
harmony could. And do.
Exactly how the genes know which ‘choice’ will benefit the carrier the most
is by far the biggest mystery. Just how is a squadron of evenly dispersed and
allied genes able, in just a few microseconds, to comprehend the almost infinite
possible futures of a person and recommend the best course of action? It is
certainly possible that science is not the place to look for the answer to this
question. What is known is that the genes have been correct each time they
have been put to the test. It’s remarkable. Just think about how many times a
day you make decisions, at home, at work, everywhere. Now think about the
possibility that you have a vast molecular chorus that exists inside you, a silent
choir that sings and shimmies in order to propel you towards the best option
with every decision you make. You would never be conscious of the guidance
your FFTB128 genes are giving you, but you would always follow their direction.
If you have any thoughts about fate or destiny or free will, this is the time to
revisit them.
Now to catch the really hot potato. Early figures indicate that around 4–6
per cent of the world’s population possess the mutant ‘lucky’ allele of the
FFTB128 gene. This allele has thus far been classed as non-threatening. It
has not been listed as a genetic disorder. (If you think about it, of course it’s
non-threatening—it’s threat-reducing, really. And it’s the opposite of a genetic
disorder, but I’m not sure what the opposite of that is. If a genetic disorder is
an impediment, then is FFTB128 an empowerment? If a disorder is a disease,
is FFTB128 a nourisher? An enabler? A godsend?)
Many celebrities and people in positions of power have already been tested.
Tests have also been done on the DNA of certain deceased luminaries, and
the results are astounding. The VIPs and dignitaries tested have been shown
to possess the FFTB128 allele in a much higher frequency than the average:
they record positive results 70–75 per cent more frequently than their subset
population (compare that to the earlier figure for the general population of
4–6 per cent). So, what does this say about concepts such as fame, popularity
and democracy? Some popular celebrities, in a seemingly vain attempt to
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quell the tumult, have made public their genetic test results. Those who have
tested positive to having an active ‘lucky’ gene include (but are not limited to):
Ashton Kutcher, David and Victoria Beckham, Oprah Winfrey, Paris Hilton,
Jon Bon Jovi, Heidi Klum, Germaine Greer, Natalie Portman, Sarah Palin,
Jonathan Franzen, Lady Gaga, Bill Clinton, Anna Wintour, Silvio Berlusconi,
every member of the Osbourne family (Ozzy, Sharon, Kelly, Jack), Julia Roberts,
Harrison Ford and Werner Herzog. Moreover, a joint raid by the hacktivist
groups 4chan and Anonymous resulted in the mass infiltration of confidential
US government files in which the health records—and more pertinently the
genetic coding—of every US president was stolen. Expert examination of these
files suggests that almost 90 per cent of US presidents possess(ed) the mutant
FFTB128 gene, and particularly ‘rattly’ types of the gene for the most part. (I’ll
give points for those guessing in the comments just which few presidents didn’t
possess an active form of the gene, although you’d be surprised, for it’s not as
obvious as you think.)
Like all genetic material, FFTB128 is hereditary, though not consistent.
Still, it is rare for ‘lucky’ parents to have offspring with dormant FFTB128
genes. (There is speculation that this is due to the FFTB128 gene: from early
analysis of ‘lucky’ parents, it has been suggested that the FFTB128 gene draws
together people who are highly likely to produce children who will also have
active ‘lucky’ genes. Keeping it in the family, so to speak.) Still, it is biologically
possible for a person to have two ‘lucky’ parents and not be ‘lucky’ themselves.
An array of organised groups such as white supremacists, ardent nationalists,
perfervid misogynists and other racialist and sectarian blocs have claimed
that the mutant version of FFTB128 is more likely to be found in their chosen
race, sex or creed. This claim has not yet been substantiated. Not at all. Not in
the slightest.
One intriguing stream of tangential research that is coming out of Dorkin
University in Melbourne, Australia, has revealed that there is a particular
category of people who can possess active FFTB128 genes and yet somehow
also have the ability to ignore the biological guidance. This means that they are
choosing the ‘wrong’ option for just about every decision they face, but each
decision can be ‘wrong’ in a way that is ‘right’ from a nefarious and immoral
perspective. How? Each member of this tiny subset benefits from being ‘lucky’,
but simultaneously enjoys a self-determination that allows them a rare type of
independence. Whereas the vast majority of people who make a ‘wrong’ choice
are those without the ‘lucky’ gene, this category of person is predisposed to
making the most ‘wrong’ of choices while also being a carrier of a strong ‘lucky’
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allele. Thus they survive what would ordinarily be fatal errant decision-making
and go on to make choices that affect others in an extremely harmful way. The
Dorkin researchers contend that we all know these human beings. We know
their names, their faces, their deeds. They are infamous in our histories, for
they are the tyrants and murderers and malefactors that we have tended
throughout the ages to brand as ‘evil’. But evil now has a new name.
Another revelation, this time by palaeontologists working at the Smithsonian
Institution in Washington, DC, is already causing the history books to be
rewritten. Ancient human history, that is. You see, it looks as though a particular
structural idiosyncrasy of the DNA of Homo neanderthalensis meant that it
could never develop the FFTB128 gene. This information may help explain how
and why Homo sapiens became the dominant humanoid species on earth. Ugly
folk, those Neanderthals, and now unlucky too.
Unfortunately not all FFTB128-related revelations are resulting in such
constructive reconsiderations. Many societal institutions are struggling to
adjust to the discovery; legal systems, corporate entities, government bodies:
all are at sea. Cases of total breakdown are becoming common. Civil courts
around the world are backlogged with cases brought by people without the
‘lucky’ gene who are suing for discrimination. For example: a former bank
employee in Scotland is suing his employer for unfair dismissal, maintaining
that it’s his unluckiness (his lack of the active FFTB128 allele)—and not his poor
mathematical ability nor his propensity for criminal behaviour—that explains
why he kept accidentally giving out too much money to bank customers.
A shopper in Cape Town, South Africa, successfully sued a department store
after it was found that the claimant (who doesn’t possess the active ‘lucky’
gene) purchased a pair of quite expensive pumps from a particular bouffanted
salesperson, and discovered a week later that an acquaintance (whose ‘lucky’
gene is active) had received a significant discount on an identical pair of pumps
from the same salesperson without even having to ask. An ongoing industrial
strike in Canada by the National Sewage Workers Union has evolved into a mass
action, as it was recently revealed that not one member of the 2000-strong
union possessed active FFTB128 genes; the union argues that the only reason
all 2000 sewage workers work in the human waste industry is because they are
genetically ‘unlucky’. A burgeoning posse of indignant residents in Wellington,
New Zealand, are suing their local supermarket for not delineating special
‘unlucky’ parking spots for those genetically unlucky people who have to
drive around the car park seven times before they find a parking spot as far as
possible from the front entrance of the supermarket. A Facebook group called
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‘Don’t you hate it when you drop your iPhone once and the screen cracks but
your friend drops theirs all the time and their screen never cracks?’, which had
just over 4500 members before the news of the ‘lucky’ gene broke, has now
launched a class-action lawsuit against Apple for not immediately moving
to provide additional safety features (e.g. stronger screens, foam padding, a
bouncier shell) for ‘unlucky’ customers (the group’s Facebook membership
now numbers 3.8 million).
By and large, the general public is not quite sure who to be angry at, and
everyone is therefore turning on each other. Each person suspects everybody
else of being more lucky than they are, and thus a worldwide feeling of bitter
sullenness has begun to prevail. In the past, genetic alleles were rare enough to
not really impede societal workings; minorities with burdens are no burden at
all. And genetic differences were always either blamed on something (alcohol,
drugs, the misbehaviour of nuclear energy companies) or were just put down
to misfortune (instances such as people born with ugly feet, or three nipples,
or ginger hair). Cases like this were not deemed harmful because they didn’t
affect everyone.
Even before the ‘lucky’ gene was discovered, there were some real doozies
of genes out there, with clever-cruel nicknames to match. There is the ‘tinman’
gene (where an embryo lacks the gene that eventually prompts it to sprout
a heart); the ‘cheap date’ gene (this results in a hypersensitivity to alcohol);
the ‘Van Gogh’ gene (this leads to a peculiar swirling hair pattern); the
‘amontillado’ gene (this affects poultry only, in that eggs are unable to hatch,
as in Fortunado from ‘The Cask of Amontillado’, who was walled-in alive); the
‘Maggie’ gene (where a person’s development is arrested, à la Maggie Simpson);
the ‘Methuselah’ gene (where a person lives a lot longer than average); and the
‘Lilliputian’ gene (where a person will be very, very small). But they all occur too
rarely to have ever gained the limelight. Now, because of FFTB128, there seems
to be a worldwide and preordained two-tiered genetic hierarchy: ‘lucky’ ones,
and ‘others’, who are not so much ‘unlucky’ as ‘just not as lucky’. We are seeing
global segregation. It’s Us versus Them, the Blessed versus the Ignored, the
Rattlers versus the Quiets.
A solution that has been proffered—although it might create an even larger
problem, if you think about it—is that we go down the path of widespread gene
modification. This solution proposes that anyone with non-rattling FFTB128
genes can choose to have the gene stimulated in some way as to activate it.
Some medical groups are already lobbying to have the procedure—when it is
developed, and that will be sooner rather than later, it would seem—classed as
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gene therapy, meaning that those without the ‘lucky’ gene would be classified
as having a genetic disorder. But what happens when a much larger percentage
of the population suddenly becomes ‘lucky’? Is there a balance that would be
upset? Is it even possible for so many people to be ‘lucky’ at the same time?
What would a lucky society look like? How about a lucky world?
In the course of researching this article I have been genetically tested for
the existence of an active ‘lucky’ allele. I won’t keep you in suspense: I tested
positive. I possess a beautifully rattly bunch of FFTB128 genes. Now this might
not come as a surprise to you, dear reader. You might have already assumed
that I am ‘lucky’. Maybe it’s because I am only fourteen years old and yet
somehow I’ve managed to procure this highly sought-after internship at this
most respected of online publications. Maybe it’s because you’ve heard of my
recent massive success as an amateur broker for one of the largest hedge funds
in this country. Maybe it’s because you’ve seen me in tabloid rags and society
pages on the arm of one very popular and good-looking star of the cinematic
world. But before you commit to an opinion—whether you think of me as
unfairly fortunate or as a member of a necessary elite—stop for a moment and
consider how a ‘lucky’ person like me might feel. There are questions no-one
wants to be forced to ask themselves. Has anything I’ve ever achieved been
because I earned it? Could I fail even if I wanted to? Is this proof that God really
does exist, and if so, why have I been favoured? Is that humming coming from
me or from my computer?
I choose—nay, I suppose my FFTB128 alleles choose—to write and publish
this article in the hope of bringing some measure to a dialogue that has thus
far been anarchic. Because right now, among all this madness, I’m not sure if a
single one of us, whether ‘lucky’ or ‘unlucky’, is feeling fortunate.
As always, please offer your thoughts in the comments box below. #YOLO! M
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In Search of García Márquez
Judith White
The greaT gabriel garcía márQuez Will WriTe no more. Early in July
his brother Jaime informed students in their native Colombia that Gabo, as
the family knows him, has dementia. While he retains his zest for life, Jaime
continued, it is most unlikely that he will complete the second part of his
autobiography.
That may not be the worst aspect of this sad news. The first part of the
memoirs, Vivir para contarla (Living to Tell the Tale), is such a brilliant
evocation of the time and place that formed the writer that it would be difficult
for a sequel to equal it. When it came out in 2002 it took me back to the banana
lands of Santa Marta where García Márquez grew up. He recalls returning with
his mother Luisa to the town where he had lived as a boy, and treading the
dusty, deserted streets in the midday heat. They are streets I once knew.
Half a lifetime ago, as a young student, I set off to find Macondo, the
fictionalised town at the centre of the outstanding novel One Hundred Years of
Solitude. It was the summer of 1970 and I was a postgraduate in Latin American
studies at Oxford. Months earlier my tutor, Malcolm Deas, had suggested that
if I wanted to understand more about Colombia I should read the book, then
relatively unknown. It had been published in Spanish in 1967 and had yet to be
translated into English.
At the local Spanish language bookshop I found Cien años de soledad.
A fabulous saga of the Buendía family with an extraordinary cast of characters
whose rise, decline and fall mirrors that of their isolated inland town, it is a
rolling, poetic, imaginative tour de force. Credited with marking the start of
magical realism as a form of the novel, it was instrumental in winning García
Márquez the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982. I devoured it the weekend
I bought it, and decided there and then that my thesis subject would be its
historical background.
I did find Macondo, but the documentary record was another thing entirely.
I was to learn an unforgettable lesson about the relationship of fiction to
historical truth. And that perhaps gives a very personal journey some wider
interest. In those far-off days when the British government was still handing
out grants for research in the humanities, funding was available for a field trip
to the Americas in the long vacation between the two years of my course (a
Bachelor of Philosophy, not a doctorate). My proposed itinerary was detailed
and tightly costed, and I got the money.
The pivotal event in the novel is the 1928 massacre of banana plantation
workers casually employed by the United Fruit Company. Soon afterwards
the company withdrew from the area, leaving it desolate. It was known that
148
The author’s passport at the time of
her 1970 Colombia trip, photograph by
the author, 2012
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In Search of García Márquez Judith White
this had indeed happened, but nothing much had been published in the way
of historical research. Before setting off I found some references to the events
in British consular reports at the Public Record Office in Chancery Lane, now
moved to the National Archives at Kew.
The first stop on my trip was Boston in the United States, headquarters
of the United Fruit Company. I arrived on a student charter flight and went
to stay with friends in the anti-war movement. The next day I pitched up at
the company’s imposing offices to a decidedly frosty reception. They had no
records on Colombia, a tight-lipped PR person told me, but after some time he
came up with the Florida address of a retired former manager from Santa Marta.
Next I took a Greyhound bus down to New York, to spend a few days in
the Public Library going through American published books and journals.
I found out something about Colombia, and rather more at night about
Greenwich Village.
Another bus took me to Washington, where I struck gold. The US State
Department’s consular records were the single best source of material, with
reports on the build-up to the conflict of 1928 and the diplomatic difficulties
of its aftermath. For a week I didn’t miss an hour in there and went away with
armfuls of notes.
The Greyhound this time took me through William Faulkner country to
white-bread territory in Florida. I got off the bus in sweltering heat and followed
my map to the former manager’s street of suburban bungalows, clipped gardens
and terminal boredom. Years later, arriving on the Gold Coast in Australia,
I would have a moment of déjà vu. The old man, pasty-faced and overweight,
invited me in cordially enough. He lived in chilly air conditioning with the
blinds drawn against the sun. As I put my questions the air grew even cooler.
‘I don’t remember anything about all that,’ he said. ‘I was just the manager,
you know.’
I was soon back on the bus. Miami airport was bedlam, but I found my flight
to Calí in Colombia. It was a lot cheaper than flying to Bogotá, the capital, and
it had looked near enough on the map. At Calí in the early morning I shoved
my way through the crowds and miraculously found the right bus. How long
will it take, I asked the driver. Oh, he said, we’ll be there by ten o’clock tonight.
I hadn’t allowed for the mountain roads in between.
But what a great introduction to Colombia the trip turned out to be. I sat next
to a woman with a cage full of chickens, while a man with a sharp-looking scythe
stood swaying beside us. We passed through streets plastered with election
posters, two road blocks where everyone had to dismount while armed soldiers
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searched for fighters of the FARC (Colombian Revolutionary Armed Forces),
and villages where we were besieged by women and children selling skewers of
chicken, cold drinks and fruit. By the time we reached Bogotá in the dark my
remaining fellow passengers had consulted each other and come up with the
name of a cheap but decent hotel where a foreign student might reasonably stay.
Colombia’s national records yielded a little about landholding patterns and
population movements, but nothing much about the conflict with the fruit
company. Once again it was my off-duty time that proved more interesting.
A couple of students I met took me to talk to some young prostitutes from
the coastal area. Sold into the sex trade by their families, knowingly or not,
for a pitifully small amount of cash, these fourteen- or fifteen-year-olds were
living four to a windowless concrete cell of a room. They were miserable and
frightened—‘melancholy whores’ indeed, nothing like the lissom Caribbean
sex workers in García Márquez’s fiction.
Finally a day-long train journey took me from the cold, misty Andean capital
to the tropical heat of Santa Marta, the port that was the administrative centre
of the old banana zone. I stayed on the rocky point there at a marine institute
known to my tutor. There didn’t seem to be a lot of marine research happening
but the young manager and his wife were very welcoming, showed me where
to swim and wanted to know all about my project. Only this year, so long
afterwards, a friend with intelligence contacts told me of his firm belief that the
place had been funded by the CIA.
I worked through local records at the Santa Marta town hall, where beautiful
black girls leant through the windows selling lychees and loquats. I found
the little town fascinating, with its street stalls of avocadoes and guavas—so
exotic to a Lancashire-born girl that it was two days before I realised I could
afford them.
At a fruit stall in the street one day I met Fermín Ahumada Arrieta, a young
doctor, and we became friends. He turned out to be from Aracataca—the ghost
town on which Macondo was based. Before I went there, he suggested we go
to Barranquilla, the bigger port along the coast, where he had some business.
There he could help me contact Alberto Durán, one of the few surviving union
leaders from the time of the massacre. An old communist, the man was wary of
new contacts but agreed to meet me.
In Barranquilla as a young journalist García Márquez had discussed ideas
late into the night in bars and cafés, and first read Faulkner and Virginia Woolf.
The place was bustling compared to Santa Marta. As evening fell there was a
brisk trade in street food, and we had oyster shots and roast corn. The next
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morning I met Durán, and over two hours slowly coaxed out of him his
recollections of the terrible days of 1928 when thousands of United Fruit banana
workers and their families, protesting over brutal conditions and low pay, were
gunned down by the military in the square at the village of La Cienaga. The old
man was pretty cagey and didn’t want to say too much on the record—he was
clearly still afraid of the consequences. But he did confirm that many people
had been killed. I took it all down, as much as he would allow, on my trusty old
tape recorder.
That afternoon, walking back from the bus at Santa Marta to the marine
station, I was mugged by a man who leapt down onto the track and dragged the
tape recorder from my shoulder until the strap broke. He was gone in a flash.
Building workers from the nearby port rushed to help me, and took me to the
marine station where the manager insisted on calling the police. Which didn’t
help. The police chief, a corpulent forty-something with a paunch and a greasy
moustache, took personal control of the case and invited me to lunch next day,
where it became clear that he was more interested in getting some post-prandial
action than in finding the thief. He offered me a lift in his car but I declined.
Looking back, none of this is surprising. I was twenty-two, I looked like
a gringa and I was wandering around Colombia on my own in a mini-skirt.
The worst thing about the tape recorder episode was that I couldn’t get back
to Durán to reinterview him. I tried ringing, but there was never an answer.
He’d gone to ground. But with Fermín’s help I could go to Aracataca, kilometres
away in the hinterland. His practice was in town, but his family still lived in the
old place. He would meet me there and show me around.
It was late morning when I stepped off the bus into blistering heat.
The township was deserted—a few streets of white-walled, single-storey
houses, a few palms, their fronds hanging limp in the still air—but from
somewhere far off came the sounds of a Caribbean steel band. Fermín was
waiting, and welcomed me to his home. I thought I’d stepped into the Buendía
compound. Around a central courtyard, whitewashed rooms divulged children,
aunts and grandparents. Toddlers chased chickens around in the dust. Fermín’s
mother grabbed one of them—a chicken, not a baby—and promptly wrung
its neck in honour of my arrival. Half an hour later we all sat down to lunch.
I learned everyone’s names and they asked about my family.
When everyone else retired for the siesta, Fermín took me exploring under
the relentless sun. Even the cicadas had fallen quiet. We came to a deserted
house, and he pushed open the big street door. Inside there was nothing much
to see—the place was abandoned, the walls in disrepair, a few weeds in the
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old courtyard. This was the home of García Márquez’ grandparents, where the
stories of old colonels from bygone wars seized the child’s imagination and his
cast of characters was born. Since I saw it the place has been partially restored,
to be shown to visitors; back then it was as derelict as though it had been swept
by the leaf storm at the end of the novel.
But Fermín knew I was looking for documentation, too. So the next stop
was the notary’s office. A huge old black man in a rather stained white suit,
the lawyer sat behind his desk in a tiny room, swatting flies away and wiping
his streaming brow with a handkerchief. I’m looking for records of the town’s
history, I said. He waved at the walls, covered from floor to ceiling in stacks
of yellowing paper. These are the old land titles from that time, he explained.
We did a lot of business back then. But since the company went away, they’re
all worthless. You wouldn’t find much. Try asking the mayor at the town hall.
You’ll just catch him.
We did. He looked rather like the Santa Marta police chief, and he was just
on his way out with his buxom secretary, all beehive hair and high heels. We
have to go to lunch, he said. Is there anyone who can show me records from
the 1920s and 1930s, I asked. Oh, he replied, there aren’t any. This place burned
down twenty years ago and all the records went. But there is an old man who
was town clerk back then. I can give you his address.
We set off once more through the sun-bleached streets. As we neared the
house we saw movement, heard voices. Opening the door into the compound
we found a throng of people, some sitting, some drinking and eating—they
seemed to have set up camp. Hmm, said Fermín, this looks like a wake. The
town clerk’s daughter came out to greet us. He’s very ill, she said. We don’t think
he has long to go.
We gave our sympathy. I’m sorry about your father, I said, and told her why
I was there. You know, she said, he does have some old papers. But they’re all
in a box under his bed. You’ll understand that I can’t disturb him now to get at
them. Try in a few days.
The days turned into a couple of weeks. I called twice from Santa Marta
before I had to leave, but the old man was still holding on. And the wake was
still in full swing.
There was one last visit we paid that day. We went back to Fermín’s place
through the streets of abandoned banana workers’ lodgings—single-room
concrete blocks, with a door and no windows, like the one those young Bogotá
prostitutes lived in. A door halfway down the street was open, and inside was
the oldest woman I’d ever seen, sitting there in the baking heat with a bowl of
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In Search of García Márquez Judith White
food someone had brought her. Her eyes were milky blue—she was blind. This
is Señora Tomasina, said Fermín. She’s 120 years old and she remembers.
I thought I was meeting Ursula Buendía from One Hundred Years of
Solitude—the woman who outlives almost everyone. I said hello, and asked
if she remembered what happened in 1928. ‘Thousands of them,’ she said.
‘Thousands of them died. Men and women and children. They brought a train,
a very long train, and took them all out to sea. They were all dead.’
That was all I was left with. Señora Tomasina’s words could have been
those of Jose Arcadio Segundo, the character in the novel everyone said was
crazy, because he remembered what happened that day. I went away with
plenty of material about the 1928 conflict, but no proof of the massacre. The
documentation had all turned to dust like the Sanskrit pages of the wanderer
Melquíades that had, in the book, waited a hundred years to be read.
I wrote my thesis, got my degree and moved on. Somewhere in an eventful
life I lost my copy, and after twenty-five years living in Australia I recovered
it from Oxford’s Bodleian Library online service only a couple of years ago.
Looking at it after all these years I hardly recognise it. For a while back then
I probably knew more than almost anyone on the planet about landholding
patterns, agricultural activity, development and population movements in
the Santa Marta area, about the United Fruit plantations, the banana workers
dispute and the consular records. But my thesis gathers dust in the Bodleian,
unlamented even by me, and One Hundred Years of Solitude will be read as long
as there are people who read.
A few years ago, in the bookshop of the excellent provincial museum of
China’s ancient capital Xian, I was browsing through catalogues when I heard
Spanish being spoken at the counter behind me. Turning round I saw a genial
Chinese attendant assisting a group of tourists. When they moved off I walked
over and complimented him on his Spanish. Where did you learn, I asked.
Right here, he said, reading the works of Gabriel García Márquez.
I’m writing this from the Mani in Greece, fifty years ago as remote a place
as Aracataca on the other side of the Atlantic. But below the surface you find a
wealth of history, connections with the outside world and a passion for ideas
that a casual observer would never suspect. García Márquez gave voice to a
forgotten place and people, plundered, ravaged and abandoned, but forever
alive in the pages of his great novel. Fiction proves stronger and truer than
the writing of history. And though his pen may move no longer, the writer will
always be with us.
Viva Don Gabriel! M
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Plato
Jakob Ziguras
It is said that Plato earned his name, the epithet
‘broad-shouldered’, from wrestling in his youth.
Was it then that he first learned the weight of truth,
when the daemon held and forced him to submit?
No doubt defeat on the tan, light-blasted dust
instructed him: the lock, the focus, shifting weight,
the dialectic of the tangled limbs, the last
struggle of flesh against necessity; till fate
acquired, at last, the perfect, bounded shape
of character, and the contested bodies shone like stone
from which every flaw of despair or hope
had been masterfully cut, leaving alone
the accomplished moment when these warm
shadows were freed from darkness into form.
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Second Chance
Marian Waller
for Michael Callaghan
It’s your turn now. The creaking bus has
pulled up by the lake. Old friends and lovers,
sisters, brothers, have gathered here on this familiar
patch to help you bundle all your tatty bags,
bursting at the seams with so much history.
The bus is purring as you take your place,
each window holding still a solemn face
of others who are dying and who wait.
They hold you gently in their stare, then see
the angels uniformed in pairs, intoning
honeyed mantras as they swoop, to serve
all final needs with calm and grace.
Inside the ward, pinned to the bed
in the cool tent of institution sheets, you are
adrift in time, now a sweetmeat in a pastry case,
now a luscious undulating grub, within an airy
wooden root beneath the earth. The lakeside
mercy sisters come with soothing songs
and trays of silver armaments.
One swift jab and you are off again.
The open grasslands of your mind in thrall
to dizzy spools of imagery, a squall of hooves,
the herdsman’s lurid cry. Then later as you come to,
blearily, the nurses prod and turn you, like a roast.
You register some nausea and pain,
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ut disbelief is what pervades you most.
Your body reconfigured as a whole, you contemplate
existence and the soul. Something has shifted.
Has there been a choice? Most have no option.
You are here. Rejoice. Your eyes once glassy,
only turned within, are now examining what may begin.
Editor’s note: This is Marian Waller’s first published poem. Sadly she did not live to
see it in print.
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Dinosaurs of the Croatian Wild
Ronnie Scott
i am sTanding legs akimbo, head upthrust, and arms outstretched in a
half-shell of black plastic wrap with paper on my feet while a Hungarian
businesswoman waves a gun at me. It’s a weighty, ovoid rustball but she holds it
like a Longbeach, and I ask her if I should close my eyes.
The gun whirs and she aims it. ‘It should be fine, I think.’ But something
makes her set it down and step onto the sheet. She plucks my left hand from the
sky and webs the fingers to inspect them. With her thumb, she wipes the crevasse
between my index and middle fingers, and it comes away nacreous and slick.
‘You look disappointed,’ I offer.
‘No. You made no mistake, it’s natural.’ She directs me to the sink, where I
wash off the Vaseline.
Outside the application room, my friend Marion thumbs a compact
Hungarian-language fashion magazine. Before my arrival she posted a photo on
my Facebook of a generic hottie cradling a woman as they lie on a dirty length
of sand. They are both grinning violently, and both have umber tans. ‘I am
convinced this is a good idea,’ she wrote.
Marion may have booked us in for spray-tans as a gag thing, but inside the
plastic half-shell the laws of humour don’t apply. Instead, there’s a solemnity
to totally the wrong things: you must spread tan-repellent Vaseline along your
palms, for instance, but not between your fingers or it’ll look unnatural as hell.
I grip the only thing I’m wearing—my worst underwear—and bunch it up to
better expose the thighs.
‘Turn around,’ invites the woman, and I face the plastic wrapping. Then the
gun emits a floral smell and starts to dust my back.
The businesswoman leads me through a slow series of dance moves: arm
out, palm down; arm out, palm tilted; arm out, elbow twisted like a broken
bone. I face the woman, and we dance again.
When I appear in my ruined shorts in the woman’s office, Marion drops the
magazine and her mouth forms a ‘whoa’.
‘And now you must not shower for eight hours,’ says the woman, ‘and in the
morning, of course you will be dark.’
I recommend the drive from Budapest to Krk be undertaken in a five-man
formation, arranged like so. In the front, Stephen and Theo, even though they
are a couple and sometimes drive with no hands, which are occupied with
the creative styling of each other’s hair. If this is problematic in the ordinary
instance, right now all that matters is that their hairstyles look superb. You are
driving to Croatia. It’s not possible to crash.
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In the back-left you want Marion figuring out the Navman—why it thinks
your point of departure is deep in Kosovo, and how to make non-Kosovar
cartography show up. The solution turns out to be thumbing—hard—a dark void
in the touch screen, a large nebulous freeway through the odd, foreign device.
Once this is thumbed, the roads from Hungary to Croatia open. The universe
seems to provide a path.
And to your right is Hillary, whose job it is to skip past the Top 40 in your
playlist and dial the iPod back to the shared music of your youth: ‘Closing Time’
by Semisonic is more than acceptable, as is all of Jagged Little Pill. We only
know Stephen and Theo from a recent Gmail thread: ‘Hello, new friends!’ wrote
Stephen. ‘We’re nice people and excited to vacation with you!’ So while our
bonding is largely achieved through a communal sun-drunkenness, the song
choice also plays a substantial role.
We spend a long time gazing at the layout of the borderlands: pitted plains
interrupted by fields of cypress pine. Hillary observes that it is dinosaur country,
and the idea works its way into a twenty questions match. ‘Are you best known
for having roamed the earth?’ Hillary asks me. But I am only a streetlight. We kick
off the list of Google queries for when we get back to Hungary with ‘dinosaurs of
the Croatian wild’. It is a thoughtful journey.
But it is also an exuberant one. Theo and Stephen have just quit their jobs;
they’re soon to be New Yorkers, escapees from the socio-moral concavity of
Budapest. Hillary has come to Europe on a doctoral boondoggle, pocketing hotel
food to snack on through the talks. Marion has just received a transfer to the
London office after two years grinding in the Hungarian human rights world,
which is typically indifferent to her work. As for me, the spray-tan was the final
thing I purchased with the last pay of my doctoral scholarship. My thesis made
‘an argument for the primacy of space’, which feels increasingly unexplainable
on this victory lap. But I can explain the reason I have come to Eastern Europe:
after all these years of studentship I want to be reborn. Or at least brutally revised
along the lines of neurophysiology: something like a chiropractic of the psyche.
‘Spring break’ is an existing term for this reset procedure. It originated in
Florida between the two world wars. While the destinations have diversified,
a 1995 study found spring break’s key components largely unchanged: ‘a
group holiday with friends travelling and rooming together, a perpetual party
atmosphere, high alcohol consumption, sexually suggestive contexts and
displays, and the perception that casual sex is common’.
Our own catchphrase is the adapted ‘grown-up spring break’. In Marion’s
words, ‘No-one gave us permission to go!’ It also means we aren’t planning to
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sexually explore each other, but the preceding criteria have been addressed
in depth.
Using Airbnb.com, we’ve rented an apartment twenty metres from the
Adriatic coast. The landowner’s snaps weren’t fabulous. They made the terrace
look washy, and the last photo in the set was clearly a stock photograph of a
rocky beach, labelled simply ‘Beach with rocks’. There was something about
booking it, though, that felt charged and perilous—an extra chance to perform
well against an adult metric. They were just inelegant photos, and to grown-ups,
what were those? Maybe just beyond the corners there was hidden rental gold.
We pull into the beach house—Navman working—around dusk, and the
world turns out to have rewarded our mature choice. It was advertised as
sleeping five, but even in a grown-up context, it could probably suit a dozen or
more. The kitchen is well utensilled and the terrace wide and bright, and all
about the place are little glass-topped wicker tables decorated inoffensively with
nautical knick-knacks.
Since the beach house is so homey, my mind wanders vaguely homeward
while we go about the business of dividing up the rooms. I have never lived my
life without this implicit charter: ‘Why don’t you go learn something today!’
At some very near point, though, inarguably closing in, I’ll board a flight home
to Melbourne and I’ll find the rules have changed.
The beach house discourages such concerns. The sky has been unbalanced
by a creamy, sombre moon, and Theo’s mobilising us into opposing armies,
stewarding a few warm Coronas into our hands. While he claims inexperience
with fraternity conventions, he is suspiciously adept at drinking games.
The beach house is located on the rim of Omišalj, a town on the island of Krk
most famous for some view-ruining petrol tanks, a castle, and an impressive
mountain zone. According to a website, the old town’s ‘labyrinth logic’ is a
pleasure in which to lose yourself.
Our daylight hours, however, are devoted to hangtime, and hangtime
happens along a twenty-metre walk. There is nothing labyrinthine about it.
Stage one is breakfast. Our landlord has supplied the beach house with a blunted
meat slicer, and we meet the implied challenge with a local bacon steak, hog
hair still attached along one side. First we shave the bacon then, concurrent with
eating it, the second stage of hangtime—preparation—cranks up. In July the UV
index can rise above 8, and Hillary is pushing a full bottle of tanning oil on us.
I’m not convinced this is protective, but we have no Google here. Sunburn, like
bankruptcy and crashing the hire car, thus becomes an impossible outcome.
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[Colour section begins]
So, around lunch, we carry some chairs down from the beach house, passing
a back yard–dwelling turtle we call Ralph. Here, stage three commences, which
is the Great Lying Around. Stephen and Theo spend many of these hours
slouching on their beach towels and dreaming in the general direction of the
sun. It’s completely possible they are bored.
While Stephen and Theo backed out of the event we call ‘the browning’,
both Hillary and Marion went through the same process as me. The three of us
are endlessly interested in our spray-tans, and they are the only things we ever
want to discuss. We address the effect of Hillary’s undertan, which is nugatory,
and the effect of the tanning oil, which is probably not. Marion, during her
own tan, didn’t Vaseline her toenails, and it looks like she’s been using them to
chain smoke. Why is Hillary’s left calf more golden than mine this morning? Is
it lastingly darker, or just excessively oiled up? But my shoulders are ‘exactly
perfect’, ‘objectively the best’. There aren’t many other people on our little
beach with rocks here, but I’m still glad the salty sea is actively hostile to the
safe storage of recording equipment.
Stage four, which is the final stage, takes place in the water, where the spraytans
are less visible and the discourse notches up. We formulate quick memes
together: the best is ‘taglines for a movie about sex bots that have turned
against the human race’. Stephen wins, for ‘First they turned us on. Then they
turned on us.’ It is perfect, objectively the best. For Marion, twelve consecutive
submerged somersaults are achievable; for the rest of us mortals, maybe not.
What we can share, though, is watermelon that has been chilled in the beach
house, and is brought forth to the water whenever someone lumbers up. It is
one of those sweet extras that could not be done by teenagers, so this aqueous
feeding time has a jubilant character.
If you are not a sand fan, the only downside to a beach with rocks is leaving
the water. The rocks are slippery and require us to engage in lateral thought.
It’s Hillary who arrives at the successful methodology: you swim towards the
shoreline and essentially don’t stop, so when the rocks begin to glide against
your chest hairs, the swim evolves into a kind of crawl.
I misname the primordial exit strategy ‘mitochondrial’—no Google—but
it’s the same gorgeously graceless result. Neither permission nor volition plays
a part in becoming an adult. But you can always choose to emerge in this way
from the water, a version of evolution where you’re always rising up.
We are in Croatia for what feels like a very long time, and there are variations on
the stages listed above. Four Kings is a drinking game that ends like any other:
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Dinosaurs of the Croatian Wild Ronnie Scott
the manic abolition of the already-thin pretence that the winners are the sober
ones while the losers are drunk. We never find much seafood, but like on any
island, we find a lot of pizza pies to soak the liquor up. We also find a boat that
is moored way out in the water, and all boozy and naked late one night we swim
aboard. I wake up with a stiff, engorged head wound, but no-one recalls me
getting it, and I seem not to have drowned. Thereafter, though, it seems wisest
to regenerate often: ‘Guys, I’ll get the beers this time. I want to primordially
emerge.’ With every birth, my tan consolidates. It deepens, thickens up.
Eventually, it breaks, of course—it somehow mottles off, leaving me,
dermatologically, both human and not. I notice this one morning when we’re
hungover in Hungary and we’re emptying the tanning bottle of the last small
drops. It is a simple transformation, but it’s the ease of it that shocks me: I rub
the oil on my shoulders, and I find the flesh rubs off.
It’s probably no coincidence we’ve found ourselves a water park on an island
in the river that divides Budapest in two. Many aspects of postdoctoral life may
remain a mystery, but cut off from the mainland there are skills I can deploy.
The hoodlums lining up for the park’s one and only speed slide have copper
skin, sienna skin, pasty skin and russet. So I’m at least prepared to describe
strangers’ pigmentations, which is a much sought after quality in the modern
business world.
I also know my insular literacy is nothing to write home about. Few
reputable researchers have drawn a correlation between the abilities to chill
watermelon and someday to raise a child; my qualifications are meaningful for
a limited time. But burnished with the oil, with the spray-tan sloughing off, it
isn’t clear that I’ll ever do anything more serious than stand in the sunshine
waiting for my turn to ride. M
164
Previous spread
The beach at Krk, photograph by
Marion Isobel, 2012
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An Overcast Day in Another Part of the World
Stuart Cooke
Maybe it’s the natural
extension of migration.
—from ‘Marco Polo’ by Ali Alizadeh
Maybe it’s little more than physics,
maybe it’s trivial amid the myriad trajectories
of tiny particles, that I’ve left everything—almost
literally—to come back here: friends, new shoots
throughout the family, a promising job and with it,
for the first time in my life, plenty
of money. (Then there are the other, less tangible things
but perhaps the things I miss the most:
laps at Clovelly on warm afternoons; decent
Chinese food; the sport on TV …)
I’m no soccer fan. I appreciate some of its elegance
but otherwise it’s lost on me, as is much
of life here: I speak the language, enjoy the food,
I worship the activists and their poetry
and I live with the woman I love
but that web—I can’t think of a better word—
that web between things is missing.
You’ll know what I mean:
sometimes in the dusk of an overcast day
you can almost make it out, that thin membrane
holding the world together when the world
is on the verge of fading into itself.
continued
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It’s the thinnest sinew of light, the sticky,
nearly gaseous residue between familiar objects
and what we remember of them
that holds us together in spite of our miscellany.
On all but the brightest days here
I’m left floundering and swimming back into myself,
wondering why, how I got here, if I really am here,
wondering what set of neural linkages I’m missing
to have wandered willingly into this diorama
as it teeters precariously on the void.
There’s no space for solace in the fission of an image;
no clear path emerges after the first few clauses;
what I say is lost in the clutter of a world
that knows nothing of me. Time is compressed
into a thin wire and I speed along it,
waiting to burst into sound at the other end
where I can say these things to you—actually say them—
where I am free to talk to you of memory.
I don’t know who you are
but it’s the thought of you
that drives me—it’s this thought
towards which this poem travels.
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I like to think that my being here’s but momentary
in the larger trajectory of my life.
I like to think, then, that something’s
taking care of me, and ensuring
that things will turn out okay in the end.
I like to think these things as much
as I like to think of saying them to you.
Jostling together and building in pressure
like a gas inside my head, pressing against
my skull with ballooning, molecular yearning
for articulation, what I would say leaks
through the cracks and dribbles down to the ends of nerves:
my fingers search for the words
that my mouth is unable to taste. I focus on the page
to avoid looking out the window
at the darkening world outside,
darker than anything I can point to—with these words
or with their stuttering lights.
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167

Gallery
Warwick Baker
belanglo (a Work in progress)
investigates an underexplored and
neglected aspect of a narrative from
Australian history and addresses cultural
amnesia. The Belanglo State Forest is
located three kilometres off the Hume
Highway in the Southern Highlands
region of New South Wales. The site is
used primarily for recreational activities
and pine logging, but it is also notorious
as the site of the ‘backpacker murders’ of
serial killer Ivan Milat, as well as a murder
committed in 2010 by Milat’s nephew
and, in the same year, the discovery of
unidentified human female remains. It is a
site of recurring trauma.
The project looks to unearth and reveal
the past wrongs committed at this site and
their implications. Despite the notoriety of
Milat, there is a form of collective amnesia
in relation to Belanglo. The narratives
around these traumas tend to focus on
people and acts rather than places. The
photographs in this series examine the
details and surfaces of this site to search
for the traces of trauma. It is an exercise
in truth seeking, as the images look at the
relationship between the indexical nature
of photography and at the landscape’s
ability to reveal traces of trauma.
Belanglo will be published as a book by
Perimeter Editions and the photographs
will be exhibited by Lindberg Galleries
in Melbourne in 2013. Belanglo was
supported by the Arts Victoria arts
development program.
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Report from Blue Mountains
David Brooks
1.
My Echium, exotic that it is,
has collapsed under the weight of its own blossoming.
This afternoon, while I tried to string it,
the sun slipped behind a bank of cloud
and the first fat drops of a heavy shower commenced.
As I climbed the steps to the back verandah, the dog following,
I saw a tiny beetle on the handrail
hesitate and turn, as if deciding to make for home.
The rain, as I sat in the doorway, thundered on the roof, like wonder,
halting us all.
2.
It is spring in the mountains, uncertain spring.
One day it hails, and the temperature drops,
the next it is windy and thirty degrees.
Plants bolt upwards and then stop, as if thinking they have come too
far.
The grass is thick and wild, full of dandelions, scotch thistle, rogue
poppies, dock.
This morning I found myself longing for a country
where no-one understands me.
Tonight a large moth has been keeping me company,
dusting my shoulders with its yellow wings.
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Catching Fire; or, The Art of Sitting
Mark Tredinnick
As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame
—Gerard Manley Hopkins
Mid afternoon I look up from my desk to see
A kingfisher alight in the water poplar.
For ten blue minutes she sits wrapped in
Her sacerdotal self, murder on her mind,
And I watch her steal her own silent show, doing
Nothing, immaculately, among the silver leaves.
Until, as if my eyes had pinned her, the instant
They drop, she flies: the stillest bird
In Christendom reaches escape velocity faster
Than I can find a pen. And I’d like to learn
To sit so still and to disappear so well, my body
Become a famished thought, my mind become a world.
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177

There is no hereafter
Paul Williams
‘promise me This, paul,’ said my faTher. ‘When I die, don’t give me a
Catholic funeral. I don’t want that priest up there’—he pointed to the steeple
visible in the white English sky through the living-room window of his
bungalow—‘muttering his mumbo-jumbo, hocus-pocus over my dead body.’
I promised.
‘I don’t want him to set foot in the house, understand?’
‘I promise, Dad.’
It was prostate cancer—an aggressive form spreading into his bones and
liver. The doctor had given him a year to live, tops.
I visited as often as I could. Coltishall, on the Norfolk broads, is a long way
from the east coast of Australia. Summer was sticky and hot, and he was cheerily
philosophical about his own demise. I took him to the hospital for blood plasma,
for tests, and I sorted out his pill regime. He spoke about his great awakening
out of the slumber of church tyranny. He was on a quest, he told me, for the
truth. In this final year of his life he would get to the bottom of it. All of it.
Our daily discussions were intense. I learned that he had finally torn away
the facade of his life, the guilt and fear of his upbringing, and had come to an
understanding of the falsity of all religion, especially this ‘whore of Babylon’,
the Holy Roman Catholic and Apostolic Church. His youth had been stolen from
him in the 1940s by sadistic and homosexual priests at his Catholic school; he
had quietly suffered sexual repression and denial his entire adult life; but now,
at seventy-five, he was finally enlightened. It had all started with The Da Vinci
Code and its ancillary texts The Chalice and the Blade and Holy Blood, Holy Grail.
Christ had been demystified. His eyes were open. He was a secular rationalist.
‘You have to do something, Paul,’ hissed my aunt at the obligatory family
gathering in their back garden. ‘Stop him.’ She pointed to my father, standing by
the tea table, surrounded by a crowd of bemused relatives. Children screamed
around them, playing British bulldog.
I could hear even at this distance that he was ranting and raving against
the Church. He did little else. ‘It’s all made up,’ he said, within earshot of the
children. ‘I mean, John, do you seriously believe that that man up there’—he
pointed up at the spire in the sky, where white doves cooed and flapped their
wings—‘can mumble a few words over a piece of bread and a glass of wine and
turn them into the body and blood of a man who died two thousand years ago?
Do you?’
My uncle shook his head. ‘Perhaps now is not the time to talk about it,
Bernard.’
‘Then when? After I’m dead?’
178
The author with his parents Lina and
Bernard Williams in Rhodesia (now
Zimbabwe), photographer unknown,
1966
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‘The children …’
‘In front of the children,’ hissed my aunt. ‘We all agree with him, but you
don’t tell children that Father Christmas doesn’t exist, do you?’
Her job, my aunt told me, was to hold everything together. This family
was built on tradition, she said. You went off to Australia—maybe you don’t
understand that. Your father is pulling the family apart. I’ll be damned if I let
that happen.
We were a good Catholic family. My well-off uncle and aunt were prominent
philanthropists, served on prominent committees, and were well thought of in
the higher echelons of East Anglian society. Hundreds of years ago this family
had been persecuted for its faith. And everyone, generations of frail grannies
and screaming infants, went to Mass every Sunday.
‘I’ll try.’
But what of the extracted promise and his quest for truth?
The priest of the parish, often present at family gatherings, was an example
not of the ferocity or the intolerance of the Church, but of the pathetic weakness
of its power today in secular British society. He was an Irishman. He smelled of
wool and sour milk, wore sandals with socks, smiled much too often and had
far too many teeth in his mouth. He was an unfortunate cliché, and it seemed
unfair of my father to rant and rave against this harmless man, who proclaimed
a soapy love for all mankind, pressing clean hands on children’s heads, and
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There is no hereafter Paul Williams
lisped, which kept all the children entertained through those long church
services: On the night he was betwayed, Chwist bwoke the bwead …
My father, to be fair, was more tolerant of human frailty that I am; he
was against the monster of the Church itself. He built his arsenal with
reason, argument and a foundation of scientific rationalism, and pitied this
delusional creature.
When the priest discovered that summer that my father was terminally ill,
he beckoned me after church and asked if he could visit.
‘Er … not at this time, Father. He’s going through some difficult issues.’
‘Death is always a difficult issue. Coming to terms with your Maker’s
reckoning is always a difficult issue.’
‘Yes.’ But of course my father now firmly believed—and proclaimed it loudly
to the family—that there was no life after death. ‘You live on in your children,
in the memories of others, in your family’s love, in your stories, Paul, if you ever
write about me after I’m gone.’ The soul is an impossibility. And the idea that
you go to lie in the arms of Jesus merely because a toothy, lisping man with
soapy hands sprinkles your coffin with holy water is preposterous.
My mother, a good believer, with her unquestioning, childlike naivety,
bustled around the house, banging things, sighing to herself all summer.
Religion was not to be torn apart like this, she told me. And my aunt, who had
come to discuss funeral arrangements, had to whisper to her in the kitchen in
despair. ‘What can we do with this man?’
‘At my funeral,’ he said to my aunt and uncle, while my mother poured tea
and clanked spoons, ‘I want no hymns, no prayers and no priest. If you want,
you can read Galileo’s words E pur si muove! And Paul has already agreed to
recite Dylan Thomas’s “Do not Go Gentle into that Dark Night”.’
‘But Bernard …’
‘Old age should burn and rave at close of day,’ my father said. ‘Rage, rage
against the dying of the light.’
‘Father Paddy will conduct the service, of course. We have to have a
religious …’
My father shook his head. ‘Religion? Best business in town, biggest con
in history.’
And that was the end of it.
I returned for a bleak and icy Christmas to find an emaciated and ailing father
who couldn’t walk, and apologised for his frailty. ‘It’s got me, Paul. Don’t I look
awful? It’s in the bones now.’
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Memoir
The regime of pills was giving him alternating constipation and diarrhoea,
the targeted radiotherapy on his thigh and ribs were making him nauseous,
but he was in good spirits. He still read ferociously. ‘A good book is all I need.
A good clear mind is what I’m grateful for.’
Aunt and uncle whispered in my ear at Christmas lunch and the Boxing Day
party. ‘Reason with him, Paul. Father Paddy wants to see him. At least get him
to come to Mass.’
But to no avail. His convictions were strong. ‘Promise me, promise me, Paul.’
‘I promise.’
No chance then of a Catholic funeral. A dying man on a cross? All invented
clap-trap. The Nicene Creed? He refused to say it. He’d been lying all his
life, but now he had blown away the chaff, widened the cracks, pulled apart
and exposed the Church for the sham it was. It had oppressed mankind for
centuries. Not any more. Not this man.
At Easter I made yet another torturous journey from Brisbane to Singapore
to Heathrow, to Norwich, to Coltishall, and found him dying. He was a yellow
emaciated ghost of himself, and our home had been turned into a hospital
ward. He was fed intravenous morphine through a drip in his arm, and he was
turned and bed-panned and fed through a straw by bright, cheerful nurses who
sat vigil at his side, day and night.
He could not see properly. Could not read. And to my consternation, by his
bedside that evening was none other than Father Paddy, administering Holy
Communion. After the night he was betwayed, Chwist bwoke bwead … and he
gave it to his disciples, saying, dwink, this is my blood …
‘Join us, Paul,’ said my mother.
‘But Dad …’ I said after the priest had left.
‘A good man,’ said my father. ‘I don’t believe in all the stuff, but nor does
he—he quietly forgets it.’
Father Paddy visited every day, a calm hand on my head, soapy fingers at
our lips with the host, the body of Chwist.
I brought the good news that I was teaching The Da Vinci Code at university
that semester. ‘I used all your notes, Dad, all your sources, for our popular
novels course. It’s a hit.’
He waved this news away. ‘Destructive, all that stuff,’ he said. ‘Where’s the
love of Christ in all that, Paul?’
‘I …’
‘We don’t worry about that clap-trap any more,’ he said. My mother smiled at
his bedside, held his hand.
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There is no hereafter Paul Williams
And Father Paddy, more and more omnipresent at our house, gave his
toothy grin.
‘The funeral arrangements?’ I asked
‘Oh, your aunt and uncle have sorted that all out with Father Paddy here.’
When you’re dying, who knows what pressures you are under. Were the
drugs befuddling him into submission, into a benevolent fuzziness with family
and priest? I didn’t know.
‘But you still want the Dylan Thomas, right?’
My father frowned, stared into the distant past. ‘Dylan Thomas?’
The nurses came and went, Father Paddy came and went, and I stayed by his
side, brushed his lips with a sponge on a stick to ease the terrible thirst when
he couldn’t eat or drink any more. ‘That nurse kissed me on the lips,’ my father
told me with his grey, unseeing eyes.
The priest was there to the end. He prayed over him; he watched him as he
took his last breath. ‘See you in heaven, Bernard, at the right hand of Jesus.’
My mother held his cold hand, and I stared through blurry eyes.
The funeral was a magnificent affair. All the family were there, all sixty
relatives, all good Catholics, and the children sat beautifully frocked and suited
in the front rows, staring at the shiny coffin wreathed with flowers and a golden
cross with a bronze Christ nailed to it. The hymns were rousing—favourites
of the family—and the reading was from John, chapter eleven: And Jesus
cwied in a loud voice—Awise! Awise! Lazawus, come forth. And he that was dead
came forth …
The sermon—a narrative assuring us that Bernard was smiling down at
us from heaven: ‘He was a good Catholic. He lived a good Catholic life. His
unwavering faith and his good deeds ensure him a place at the right hand of
God.’
Father Paddy muttered his mumbo jumbo, sprinkled holy water on the
coffin while my mother wept and I stood iron jawed and stoically dry-eyed, my
fists clenched, while the words lodged in my throat.
And you, my father, there on that sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray. M
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Childhood among Strangers
Linda Judge
i could see my sisTer aT The boTTom of The hill that led to home and
safety. She was younger and shorter than me and had fallen behind. Her face
was red and I knew that she had started to cry, which would slow her down even
more. When I reached our back gate I stopped and turned, leaving my hand
ready on the lock. Fear for my own safety was replaced by concern for Liv, who
had let out a shriek as he grabbed her. He was short and squat but much taller
and stronger than Liv, who was only ten. I could see his thin toothless grin as he
forced his lips forward, pretending she was his girlfriend. He told everyone for
years ‘this my girl’ whenever Liv was nearby, despite the fact that she was now
convulsing with sobs, twisting away from his drooling mouth.
Beyond our back gate there were different rules from the world outside
our front door. The institution out the back was a place where anything could
happen. Although it was frightening, it was thrilling too and my sisters and I
would spend all weekend roaming the grounds. Most of the residents of Kew
Cottages knew that the doctors’ houses that formed the boundary between
the normal world and the institution were out of bounds, so we learned to run
fast and lock the back gate swiftly. Sometimes this line was broken and there
was nowhere left to hide. Nothing was quite as terrifying as discovering, when
you looked out the kitchen window towards the back gate, that it had been left
wide open. We all knew better then to answer a knock on the back door. Normal
people entered from Wills Street and rang the bell.
Once, a broad smiling face with cupped hands appeared at my bedroom
window. An ordinary intruder would try to hide but this one looked directly
at me, his stubby fingers pointing at my row of dolls along the shelf. His big
round face and cracked tongue as he tried to speak were awful to look at, and
the words that I could just make out from the other side of the glass didn’t
make sense. For a long time when I looked at my dolls, I could see his small
covetous eyes.
When Mum or Dad were around it was easier to keep a lid on my fear. Eddy
used to feed our chooks when we were away and often when we weren’t. Mum
would always give him a piece of one of her homemade cakes on the best china
with a silver cake fork to eat it with. I don’t know if he kept coming for the cake
or because he loved the chooks but we were never afraid of him. He would often
be standing on our verandah eating cake when I got home from school. ‘Hi,
Eddy,’ I would say as I walked past and through the wooden-framed mosquito
wire back door. I don’t think he ever replied or even knew my name.
I think even Dad was scared when a boy started appearing like clockwork
on Saturday mornings. He would walk in the back door and through the house,
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Childhood among Strangers Linda Judge
The author on one of the many ‘tramps’
that were outside most of the wards
(later units) at Children’s Cottages,
Kew (bouncing was seen to be useful
for improving intellectual capacity).
Photograph by Livia Judge, c. 1981
opening every door as if searching for something and saying ‘hoitz, hoitz, hoitz’
as he rocked backwards and forwards. The first time he appeared, Dad was
shaving, wearing only a singlet. He tried to lead the boy to the back door while
still covered in shaving cream, saying gently, ‘Off you go—back to the ward.’
I locked myself in the toilet until I was sure he had gone. But the next Saturday I
heard him walk through the back garden. ‘Hoitz is here,’ I yelled as I ran to hide.
Sometimes I liked spending time with the residents. Pat seemed pretty
normal and you wouldn’t have guessed that she lived in the same place as
boys like ‘Hoitz’. Maybe that’s why in the seventies when the move towards
deinstitutionalisation began she was moved out into the community, but
even then she would travel to our house for lunch once a month. I didn’t know
where she lived now or how she got to our house but I liked seeing her. She still
called Mum ‘Mrs Judge’ and Dad ‘Doctor’. She used to call me Tootsy and laugh
whenever she said it. She was kind but not affectionate, which was fine with me
as her breath and clothes smelt like smoke and sweat. After lunch she would go
down to the cottages and visit her friends, sometimes having had more than a
few drinks.
As I grew older and bigger I became less afraid of the people who lived
beyond my back fence. I knew that the face that appeared at my window was
a boy with Down’s syndrome called Tim who was affectionate and gentle and
although I wasn’t afraid of being hugged any more, I still didn’t like it. On the
weekends my sisters and I would wander down to ward 37, where we had begun
to help the nurses with feeding and bathing. On our way we would sometimes
still see things that could shock even our grown-up, teenage selves. One was
the moaning woman with her dress held over her head, revealing bloodied legs.
I was now old enough to understand that she was menstruating but I would
never understand her moaning and rocking, although the image comes back
to me still.
In ward 37 (later unit 14) the last intake of residents to Kew Cottages lived
together under the care of Sister Naha. They were not much younger than us
but their intellectual disability meant that they were still treated like children.
At bath time we would help them into a large bath on a raised platform in the
middle of the tiled bathroom and the children would take turns to be washed.
‘Ivan the fish’ never spoke and spent most of his day twirling a piece of rag
around and around, but in the bath he would disappear underwater, holding his
breath for what seemed like minutes and emerge spluttering and laughing. But
he lived in his own world and was too distant to be a favourite. Our attention
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went to those who seemed to respond to it, who would lift their arms for a
cuddle, look us in the eye, or say a few words.
I haven’t moved far from the cottages, and although the institution was
closed down long ago many residents still like to spend time in Kew. One of
them was the late Robin Madden, the ‘dancing man’ who became a fixture at
Kew junction for his joyful kerbside dance routine. Another is Bill, who still
hangs around the supermarket and carries a little address book to write girls’
names in. ‘I like you,’ he would whisper to me or one of my sisters when he saw
us heading down to ward 37. But these days he doesn’t remember who I am,
and although he has my name and phone number recorded in his book he has
never rung me. I like seeing the familiar faces of the people I grew up with and I
always stop to chat, but their lack of recognition usually only reminds me of the
loneliness of a childhood spent among strangers. M
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185

Questions for the Dead
Ross Donlon
for Margaret Phelps
By night, your Necropolis could be a city skyline—
neighbours on rooftops with TV antennas.
By day, crucifixes chess piece their way
through a thousand flocks of angels
perched on marble or outside mausoleums
waiting the world to end or one to wake.
There’s disorientation being a lone searcher
in a city of dead and gridlocked streets.
Inside the shrubs and patchwork plan
a million souls lie ready and waiting,
like vehicles left in a stadium car park,
motors running until maps arrive.
Religions intertwine like overlapping galaxies,
signs point uncertainly to chapels and shrines
so it’s understandable that finding you
and Kathleen, your stillborn grandchild,
would be difficult, the helpful numbers
well hidden behind trees and uncut grass.
Our time provides no grave goods
to comfort either side of eternity,
no clues as to who you were, a life
with bookends but few books—
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a deathbed drenched by the Change
is the only story that made it here.
Words wear fast even with a headstone’s gravity.
Your site turns out wordless, looking straight up
into the questions each day has to offer
and at night the cartography of stars.
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187

Contributors
Warwick Baker lives in Melbourne. He is working
on a series of photographs that document Australian
sites and their occupants that have witnessed past
wrongs, such as crimes, colonisation conflict and
environmental degradation.
Diana Bridge’s latest collection of poems is aloe
& other poems (2009). In 2010 she was awarded the
Lauris Edmond Memorial Award for distinguished
contribution to New Zealand Poetry. She is among
the New Zealand poets recently added to the UK
Poetry Archive.
David Brooks’s latest collection of poetry is The
Balcony (2008). UQP published his The Sons of Clovis:
Ern Malley, Adoré Floupette and a Secret History of
Australian Poetry in 2011, and have just published
his fourth novel, The Conversation.
Kevin Brophy teaches creative writing in the School
of Culture and Communication at the University of
Melbourne. He has had twelve books published, his
latest being a collection of prose poems in Radar
(with Nathan Curnow, Walleah Press)
Lorin Clarke is a writer, director and broadcaster
with an arts/law degree from the University of
Melbourne. She co-presents the weekly books,
writing and spoken-word show Aural Text on
Melbourne radio station 3RRR. Lorin is the television
columnist for the Big Issue.
Stuart Cooke’s first poetry collection, Edge Music
(IP), was published in 2011. A collection of more
recent work, Approach, appears in Triptych Poets 2
(Blemish). He is a lecturer in creative writing and
literary studies at Griffith University, Gold Coast.
Sam Cooney is editor of the Lifted Brow, an arts,
culture and fiction magazine, and has commissioned
and edited contributions for several Australian
journals and magazines.
Mark Dapin’s recent novel, Spirit House, was
longlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award,
shortlisted for the Age Book of the Year and highly
commended in the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards.
His first novel, King of the Cross, won the Ned Kelly
Award for First Fiction.
Ross Donlon lives in Castlemaine, where he
convenes a monthly poetry reading. Ross has won
spoken-word and international poetry competitions.
His latest book is The Blue Dressing Gown and Other
Poems (Profile Poets).
188
Suzy Freeman-Greene is a Melbourne journalist,
writer and editor. She writes a regular column for the
Age and her fiction has appeared in Island.
Helen Gildfind lives in Melbourne. ‘Eat. Shit. Die.’ is
from a collection of short stories she is writing with
funding support from the Australia Council for the
Arts.
Alan Gould’s eighth novel, The Seaglass Spiral,
was launched at the National Library in September
2012. His The Past Completes Me—Selected Poems
1973–2003 won the Grace Leven Award for 2006.
Phillip Hall works in remote indigenous education
in the Northern Territory. He lives in Borroloola,
in the Gulf of Carpentaria, where he works with
Yanuwa, Garawa, Mara and Gudandji young people.
He has the best job in the world.
Anna Heyward is a reader, writer, translator and a
member of the Haplax school of reading. See .
Linda Judge is an artist who likes to write. She
studied art at VCA and then RMIT and her most
recent exhibition was a series of still lives depicting
IKEA homewares that looked at the way culture has
been appropriated by the marketplace.
Jean Kent has published four collections of poetry.
She completed her most recent book, Travelling with
the Wrong Phrasebooks (Pitt Street Poetry, 2012),
during a residency at the Literature Board’s Keesing
Studio, Paris, in 2011. She lives at Lake Macquarie,
NSW.
Margo Lanagan’s work has won four World Fantasy
Awards and been shortlisted for the LA Times Book
Prize and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize (South
East Asia and South Pacific section), and longlisted
for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story
Award. Her latest novel is Sea Hearts (Allen & Unwin).
Martin Langford’s most recent collection is The
Human Project: New and Selected Poems (2009). He
is the author of Microtexts (2005), a book of poetics,
and the editor of Harbour City Poems: Sydney in
Verse 1788–2008 (2009).
Michelle Law is a Brisbane writer. Her work has
appeared in Growing up Asian in Australia and
Women of Letters. She is an AWGIE award-winning
screenwriter and is working on a TV comedy series
with Matchbox Pictures.
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Contributors
Wayne Macauley is a Melbourne writer. He
has published three novels and the short fiction
collection Other Stories. His latest novel, The Cook,
has received broad critical acclaim. The Age has
called him ‘a compelling voice in contemporary
Australian literature’.
Shane McCauley is a TAFE lecturer in Perth.
Many of his poems have appeared in Australian
and international journals. Shane has published
seven books of poetry, most recently The Drunken
Elk (Sunline Press, 2010) and Ghost Catcher (Studio
Press, 2012).
David Mence is a writer, director and dramaturge.
He has been a Creative Fellow at the State Library
of Victoria, a recipient of Inscription’s Edward F.
Albee Scholarship and has had stories published
in Meanjin, Sleepers Almanac and Best Australian
Stories.
Sue Ogle is a geriatrician and associate professor
of Medicine. She uses stories, poetry and creative
writing to teach medical students. She is completing
a Masters of Medical Humanities. Her poetry has
been published in literary and medical journals.
Chad Parkhill is the incoming festival coordinator
for the National Young Writers Festival. He has
written for the Australian, Kill Your Darlings, the
Lifted Brow and the Quietus among others.
Nicolas Paulin is a French engineer and physicist
and leads the ANU contribution to Australia’s space
debris project at Mount Stromlo Observatory in
Canberra. Prior to this he was head of the Space
Mechanical & Thermal Engineering Department at
EADS SODERN in Paris.
Antonia Pont lives and works in Melbourne. She is
a lecturer in TEXT (literary studies and professional
& creative writing) at Deakin University. She writes
poetry, prose and works for performance.
Ron Pretty’s seventh book of poetry, Postcards from
the Centre, was published in 2010. He is spending the
second half of 2012 in the Whiting Studio in Rome,
thanks to the Australia Council’s residency program.
Josephine Rowe’s fiction and poetry have
appeared in Best Australian Stories, Best Australian
Poems, the Iowa Review and Harvard Review. In 2011
she attended the University of Iowa’s International
Writing Program, where she completed a short-story
collection, Tarcutta Wake (UQP, 2012).
Ronnie Scott is a contributor to Lucky Peach, the
Believer, Heat, the Big Issue, Australian Book Review
and ABC Radio. In 2007 he founded the Lifted Brow,
a freeform arts and fiction magazine. He’s working
on a long thing about money and food. See .
Mark Tredinnick, winner of the Montreal
Poetry Prize in 2011 and of this year’s Cardiff
Poetry Prize, is the author Fire Diary, The Blue
Plateau, Australia’s Wild Weather and eight other
acclaimed works of poetry and prose. His new
collection, Body Copy, will be out in 2013 (Puncher
& Wattmann).
Sam Twyford-Moore is the director of the
Emerging Writers Festival. His nonfiction has
appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books.
He wants to be Janet Malcolm writing about
photography in the New Yorker circa 1978. You can
follow him on Twitter @samtwyfordmoore.
Lyndal Walker is an artist, curator and writer. She
has exhibited at galleries including the Museum of
Contemporary Art in Sydney and Modern Culture
in New York.
Marian Waller was born in Sydney in 1957 and
died in July this year. For many years she worked
in migrant education. In 1996 she published a
successful children’s book, The Leaping Llama
Carpet. After being diagnosed with cancer in 2003
she dedicated herself to qui gong, meditation and
writing. Her poem, ‘Second Chance’, reflects on the
experience of illness in her own life and in those
around her.
Judith White is a freelance writer, a former literary
editor of the Sun-Herald and former executive
director of the Art Gallery Society of New South
Wales. She lives in the banana-growing area of the
Tweed Valley in northern NSW.
Paul Williams has a PhD in creative writing from
the University of Wisconsin and is a lecturer in
creative writing at the University of the Sunshine
Coast. His memoir Soldier Blue won Book of the
Year in South Africa in 2008.
Jakob Ziguras was born in Poland in 1977. His work
has appeared in Meanjin, Australian Poetry Journal
and Measure, and was shortlisted for the Newcastle
Poetry Prize in 2011 and 2012. He holds a PhD in
philosophy from the University of Sydney.
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 189 6/11/12 9:20 AM
189

Index
Volume 71, numbers 1–4, 2012
Contributors
Alizadeh, Ali—‘The Ithacan’; ‘We’, no. 1, p. 83
Armfield, Neil—‘Patrick White: A Centenary
Tribute’, no. 2, p. 18
Attamimi, Mona Zahra—Damp’, no. 3, p. 171
Ballou, Emily—‘The Importance of Tea’, no. 2, p. 29
—‘You had to do everything out of order’, no. 2,
p. 129
Behmoiras, Josiane—‘The Worm inside the
Eggplant: Exorcism, Spirituality and Being in
Other Places’, no. 1, p. 118
Biggins, Jonathan—‘Our National Day’, no. 1, p. 13
Billingham, Craig—‘Waiting for the Train’, no. 3,
p. 111
Bitto, Emily—‘Freestone Road’, no. 1, p. 103
Bradley, James—‘Encounters with the Uncanny’,
no. 3, p. 104
Bridge, Diana—‘A World that Could Be Read’;
‘A Winter’s Tale’, no. 4, p. 32
Britton, Fiona—‘Firebug’, no. 1, p. 166
Brooks David—‘In the Kingdom of Shadows’, no. 2,
p. 89
—‘Report from Blue Mountains’, no. 4, p. 176
Brophy, Kevin—‘The Googly’, no. 4, p. 117
Bryson, John—‘The Murder of Azaria: This Vast,
Stupendous Fraud’, no. 1, p. 6
Bulbeck, Chilla—‘Gender Here and There’, no. 2,
p. 70
Castles, Simon—‘Minutes to Midnight’, no. 2, p. 152
Cho, Tom—‘How can we reconcile the existence
of suffering with the premise of a good and
almighty God’, no. 1, follows p. 164
Chong, Eileen—‘Leap Year’, no. 3, p. 37
Clarke, Lorin—‘Debbie Mortimer and the
Forensic Fight’, no. 4, p. 18
Cooke, Stuart—‘An Overcast Day in Another Part of
the World’, no. 4, p. 165
Cole, Jessie—‘The Knoll’, no. 2, p. 173
Cooney, Sam—‘I should be so lucky’, no. 4, p. 139
Daley, Paul—‘Disturbing the Bodies’, no. 3, p. 44
Dapin, Mark—‘My Last Birthday’, no. 4, p. 133
Darian-Smith, Kate—‘Reading Malouf’s
Remembering Babylon in Tokyo’, no. 2, p. 6
Dolce, Joe—‘Lemonricks’, no. 1, p. 116
Donlon, Ross—‘Questions for the Dead’, no. 4,
p. 186
Edgar, Stephen—‘The Angel of History’, no. 2, p. 79
Ellingsen, Peter—Inside out in Australia’, no. 1,
p. 56
Eltham, Ben—‘The Copyright Wars’, no. 1, p. 126
—‘The state of Australia’s performing arts centres,
and what it tells us about the state of the
Australian arts’, no. 3, p. 92
Ennis, Helen—‘The Space of Biography: Writing on
Olive Cotton’, no. 3, p. 64
Fischer, Luke—‘Portrait of a Thinker’; ‘Snowdrops
in West Philadelphia’, no. 2, p. 68
Foulcher, John—‘Turning Point’, no. 3, p. 54
Francis, David—‘Parts Unknown’, no. 3, p. 114
190
Freeman, Michele—‘What Remains the Same’,
no. 3, p. 129
Freeman-Greene, Suzy—‘Beg’, no. 4, follows p. 16
Gabriel, Matt—‘Other People’, no. 2, p. 143
Gaita, Raimond—‘To Civilise the City?’, no. 1,
p. 64
Gildfind, Helen—‘Eat. Shit. Die’, no. 4, p. 123
Gould, Alan—‘The Great Poet’s Gene’, no. 4, p. 58
Griffiths, Jane Montgomery—‘Classic Love’, no. 1,
p. 148
Hall, Lex—‘The Thirteenth Heat’, no. 3, p. 145
Hall, Phillip—‘Creative Tension’, no. 1, p. 147
—‘Borroloola Blue’, no. 4, p. 16
Halligan, Marion—‘Eating Oysters’, no. 3, p. 152
Hammial, Philip—‘Owls’, no. 3, p. 20
Harkins-Cross, Rebecca—‘Writing the Self: On
Joan Didion’, no. 2, p. 80
Harrison, Martin—‘Patio’; ‘Orchard Bonfire’, no. 2,
p. 161
Hart, Libby—‘Scent’; ‘Universe’, no. 3, p. 102
Harvey, Dimitra—‘Father’; ‘At the Market’, no. 3,
p. 89
Harvey, Siobhan—‘The gifted astronomer goes to
school’, no. 2, p. 176
Heath, Sally—Editorial, no. 1, p. 3
—Editorial, no. 2, p. 3
—Editorial, no. 3, p. 3
—Editorial, no. 4, p. 3
Hendry, Lorna—‘Lennard River Snack Stop’, no. 3,
p. 180
Heyward, Anna—‘Letter to Tom Collins’, no. 4,
p. 47
Jackson, Andy—‘The Future of Genetics’, no. 3,
p. 77
Jaireth, Subhash—‘ “Es geht mir gut” (“I am fine”):
Postcard from Ottla, Kafka’s Favourite Sister’,
no. 1, p. 38
Jones, Barry—‘Antarctica’, no. 3, p. 6
Joosten, Melanie—‘Reading Doris Lessing and
Meeting Maudie Fowler: Notes on Writing and
Doing Good’, no. 1, p. 138
Judge, Linda—‘Childhood among Strangers’, no. 4,
p. 183
Keep, Elmo—‘Summer and Antipsychotics in the
City’, no. 2, p. 183
Keil, Lily—‘No Money, no Honey’, no. 3, p. 160
Kenny, Robert—‘Sunday 8 February 2009—the
Morning After’, no. 3, p. 174
Kent, Jean—‘Translating a “Prolog” ’, no. 4, p. 56
Kinsella, John—‘Autography 5’, no. 3, p. 186
—‘Claws and Muscle: Short-beaked Echidna’, no. 2,
p. 149
Kissane, Andy—‘Keats by the Spanish Steps’, no. 1,
p. 163
Kocher, Shari—‘The Bridge’, no. 1, p. 18
Ladd, Mike—‘Gaps’, no. 1, p. 156
Lanagan, Margo—Titty Anne and the very, very
Hairy Man’, no. 4, p. 98
Meanjin_71-4_FINAL.indd 190 6/11/12 9:20 AM

Langford, Martin—‘Poetry lives on: Review’, no. 2,
p. 98
—‘Another Year, Another Engrossing Crop’, no. 4,
p. 70
Law, Michelle—‘Leaving’, no. 4, p. 13
McAuliffe, Chris—‘Living the Dream: The
Contemporary Australian Artist Abroad’, no. 3,
p. 56
McCaughey, Patrick—‘ “Enjoy Your Diversity”:
The 60s Revisited’, no. 3, follows p. 112
McCauley, Shane—‘Larvatus Prodeo’, no. 4, p. 80
Macauley, Wayne—‘Keilor Cranium’, no. 4, p. 90
McGirr, Michael—‘The Sofa’, no. 1, p. 176
McGuire, Jess—‘While I’m Away’, no. 1, p. 15
McKenna, Mark—‘Dublin Days’, no. 3, p. 10
MacLennan, Ciaran—‘By Sea They Come’, no. 3,
p. 17
Manuell, Naomi—‘Libraries of Babel’, no. 2, p. 56
Mead, Rachael—‘Reading Fractals’, no. 1, p. 155
Mears, Gillian—‘Old Copmanhurst’, no. 1, p. 104
Melville, Ruth—‘Narrative, the Nurse and the
Nomad’, no. 2, p. 164
Mence, David—‘Cooking for Edward Albee’, no. 4,
p. 11
Mills, Jennifer—‘The rest is weight’, no. 1, p. 182
Minter, Peter—‘The Crow’, no. 1, p. 189
Mitchell, Alex—‘Lobbying for the Dark Side’, no. 2,
p. 39
Mordue, Mark—‘I’m thinking of you’, no. 3, p. 178
Morrison, Ewan—‘Book without Brand Names’,
no. 2, p. 11
—‘Why Y Matters: Mapping the Consumption
Patterns of Generation Y’, no. 1, p. 21
Mudie, Ella—‘Little Refuge: Design and Solitude’,
no. 1, p. 28
Nicholson, Anna Kerdjik—‘After Reading Derrida’,
no. 2, p. 67
Oakman, B.N.—‘Golden Boy’, no. 1, p. 63
O’Connor, Mardi—‘Puss in Boots’, no. 2, p. 124
Ogle, Sue—Farmstay’, no. 4, p. 68
Parkhill, Chad—‘The Bartender and the Archive’,
no. 4, p. 82
Parsons, Helen—‘Driving Out’; ‘Georgia O’Keeffe’s
Dog’, no. 3, p. 172
Patric, A.S.—‘Measured Turbulence’, no. 2, p. 137
Paulin, Nicolas—‘Game over for Space Junk?’,
no. 4, p. 6
Perlman, Elliot—‘Stop the Boats? ’, no. 2, p. 9
Pont, Antonia—‘The Late Visit’, no. 4, p. 108
Powell, Craig—‘Wedding Night’; ‘Birthday Poem’,
no. 2, p. 15
Pretty, Ron—‘Grace Notes’, no. 4, p. 81
Quilty, Ben—‘Germaine Greer: A Portrait’, no. 4,
p. 43
Raby, Geoff—‘Australia and China Forty Years On’,
no. 2, p. 90
Rowe, Josephine—‘International Writing Program,
Iowa City’, no. 4, p. 8
Schetrumpf, Tegan Jane—‘A Beau for the
Monster’, no. 2, p. 121
Scott, Ronnie—‘Dinosaurs of the Croatian Wild’,
no. 4, p. 158
Skrzynecki, Peter—‘The Horse of Achilles’, no. 3,
p. 185
Symonds, Helen—‘Do not operate heavy
machinery’, no. 2, p. 178
Taylor, Rebe—‘The National Confessional’, no. 3,
p. 22
Terzis, Gillian—‘Outback Mining Communities: A
Cautionary Tale’, no. 2, p. 102
Tredinnick, Mark—‘Catching Fire; or, The Art of
Sitting’, no. 4, p. 177
Tumarkin, Maria—‘The Afterlife of Books’, no. 3,
p. 79
Turner, Todd—‘Seeds’; ‘Woodsmoke’, no. 2, p. 170
Twyford-Moore, Sam—‘Twitter> The Novel? @
tejucole> Teju Cole?’, no. 4, p. 34
Walker, Lyndal—‘Share Houses’, no. 4, p. 60
Wallace-Crabbe, Chris—‘An Autumnal’; ‘Likely’,
no. 1, p. 53
Waller, Marian—‘Second Chance’, no. 4, p. 156
Watson, John—‘Surfer’; ‘Show and Tell Day’, no. 1,
p. 35
Welker, Mark—‘A Funeral for Eddie Moon’, no. 3,
p. 135
Westbury, Marcus—‘Golden Resources’, no. 1,
p. 86
White, Judith—‘In Search of García Márquez’,
no. 4, p. 148
Whitten, Max—‘Deciphering Nature’s Message
Stick’, no. 2, p. 30
Williams, Paul—‘There is no hereafter’, no. 4,
p. 178
Wilson, Chloe—‘Tricoteuses’, no. 1, p. 125
Ziguras, Jakob—‘Plato’, no. 4, p. 155
Discussion/interview
Sonya Voumard talks to Helen Garner—‘The
Interviewer and the Subject’, no. 2, follows
p. 16
Gallery
Baker, Warwick, no. 4, p. 168
Davis, Oslo—‘Libraryland!’, no. 1, p. 94
Parakhina, Lucy, no. 3, p. 38
Walton-Healey, Nicholas, no. 2, p. 112
Artwork
Jones, Nicholas, cover, no. 3
Lancashire, David, cover, no. 1
Maxey, Sarah, cover, no. 2
Quilty, Ben, cover, no. 4
Streich, Michel, illustration, no. 2, p. 71
—illustration, no. 3, p. 93
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191

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