panda, Author at Reading the City of Literature 2024

Anam

I will have learnt to see that a muddy swamp can be called a fen, that not knowing where you’re going can be a virtue, and that walking is a kind of perfection.

I. MICHAELMAS

(If I think of my grandparents now, after all this writing and reading and imagining and remembering, two couples are thrown into relief, their outlines like clay figures in the mud where so many others are failing to resist the ebb and flow of forgetting. Both couples are elderly and Vietnamese and live in an apartment outside Paris with their eldest daughter. Both couples have been together sixty years, through two wars, and many separations. Both speak to me in a mix of Vietnamese, French, and a smattering of English. But one couple speak to me of suffering, loss, exile, forgiveness and redemption, and the other couple do not. Instead they are always laughing, with each other and at me, pinching, touching, feeding me, looking at me, shaking their heads and chastising me, praising my plumpness and my height and my grades. This second couple is harder to write but easier to remember. I think of them as saying to me over and over again, We want you to be. And also, Why don’t you marry that poor girl? And, When are you taking the bar exam? And always, Eat up, Why aren’t you eating, Finished already? I’ve been trying for a long time to bring the two couples together in my mind, or at least to avoid having to choose between them. And just now, thinking of them, I remember the visit that my grandmother and I paid to my grandfather one late afternoon when he was on his deathbed. He was in a clean, beige room in a public hospital a train and a bus away from their daughter’s apartment. He patted the side of the bed for my grandmother to come sit by him, and I asked them once again about the story, expecting them to tell me the usual things. Instead they chose to sing, something they had never done before, and would never do again, an old jazz standard: I remember you… But even as I was fumbling to record them on my phone, they were already finishing, lapsing into wrinkled smiles, so that the recording I have is nothing but silence.)

This will be the last time that I will have begun again – the last, because I will have learnt to see what I failed to see at the beginning. I will have learnt to see that a muddy swamp can be called a fen, that not knowing where you’re going can be a virtue, and that walking is a kind of perfection. I will have learnt to see that the dilapidated rental we left behind in Footscray will always be the house where we first bathed our daughter, washing off the blood and muck with which she arrived, and I will have learnt that after Cambridge we will return to that house in Footscray after all, and that, in time, it will also be where we first bathe our son, washing off the blood and muck with which he arrives. I will have learnt that the robes we matriculated in at Cambridge, hired from the college’s graduate student association, were actually cheap polyester, that most of the books in the many libraries in which I will have sat have never and will never be read, and that the past is no more a home than any of the string of place names with which my family is entangled could be a home: Hung-Xa, Hanoi, Saigon, Ho Chi Minh City, Laon, Paris, Boissy, Cambridge, Footscray. I will have learnt that we walk, as Paul said, by faith and not by sight. I will have learnt to stop stopping – that is, to stop waiting while stopped. I will have learnt, instead, to wait while walking, to walk without expectation of arriving and yet still be ready to arrive at any moment. In the end I will have learnt – or remembered, if there’s any difference – how to live. Or, at least, I will have learnt what we receive from our ancestors and what we pass on to our children – what we give them, even as we wash away the blood and muck with which they arrived.

We are walking in the meadows halfway between Cambridge and Grantchester. To our left, the river Cam, narrow and deep, winds its way towards town. It’s a fine autumn day, six months after I’d nearly lost them both, and the scene is dreamily bucolic: a canoe or two travelling upriver, a birdwatcher with binoculars trained on some bird of prey – a windhover, probably – beating at the gentle currents with its great wings, a silver-haired walker in Hunters and country coat, all bathed in weak English sunshine. Edith is asleep in the carrier on my back, which is so well designed that I can forget for lengthy stretches that she is even there, as if it is just the two of us again – Lauren and me.

As we walk through the meadows in silence, I remember the crowd of doctors in scrubs that suddenly appeared in the delivery room, the way they stood around Edith’s body – though she wasn’t Edith yet – on the table in the corner as I dumbly held Lauren’s hand; I remember the machine they wheeled in, a big plastic tube on wheels, the way the doctors spoke with quiet authority as they put not-yet-Edith inside and began to wheel her away; I remember the way the last doctor stopped at the door and looked back at me as if to say, Aren’t you coming? I let go of Lauren’s hand and followed, still mute.

I don’t know how much of this she remembers. But maybe it’s not so important to remember everything. Maybe there are reasons to forget.

As we enter the village of Grantchester, past a herd of grazing cows who pay us no mind, Lauren asks me if I’ve settled on a topic for my thesis.

At the beginning of term, Simons, my international law professor, told the class that in lieu of sitting the exam we could choose to submit a thesis. He meant a dissertation, an essay. A medium-length piece of writing duly researched and footnoted. He meant a very minor contribution to scholarship – a reappraisal of the doctrine of state responsibility for internationally wrongful acts as it appeared in the American–Mexican Claims Commission, or tracing the evolution of free-flow-of-data clauses in bilateral trade agreements. These are the kind of topics, I say to Lauren, that might tip the balance in my favour for a pupillage at one of the London chambers, or a traineeship at one of the international arbitration firms.

And that’s what you want, says Lauren, somewhere between a statement and a question.

It’s what everyone here wants, I say. The other students, they’re all Australians, New Zealanders, South Africans, Canadians, Indians.

The best the Commonwealth has to offer.

Back to the imperial bosom for validation, says Lauren.

And a golden ticket to stay on in the City, I say. Or clerk for a judge in the Hague.

Just so long as you don’t return to whatever backwater you came from, right?

At a pub in Grantchester, as I eat my first ever Yorkshire pudding,

Lauren asks again about the thesis. I don’t respond right away, lost in a trailing thought about Wittgenstein – he’d completed this same walk many times to take tea with Bertrand Russell at the Orchard, a nearby tearoom. Beside us Edith sits in her high chair, squeezing a slice of
avocado into a pulp in her fist.

A thesis, I say, is also a theory, an idea. And I have one of those, even if it isn’t something that will get me a job:

Forgetting is complicity. Remembering is complicity. Making art is complicity. Living in the world, pursuing material gain, buying a house you can’t afford: complicity. Starting a family, putting down roots is complicity; migration, travel, too. Hope is complicity, but so is despair. Asking, What is to be done? is complicity. Not asking is complicity. Being a human rights lawyer is complicity. Loving my daughter.

I imagine I am already hearing Lauren’s response: Complicity in what? Complicit how? Why don’t you just say what you mean? And why can’t you say it without referencing someone else? But instead she says, Then what are we doing here?

Winner of the 2024 PM’s Literary Award and shortlisted for the 2024 Miles Franklin, Anam can be found here.

Australia in three books: π.O.

It’s impossible to hold on to anything concrete in the everything poem because the background scenery is always changing. The effect is that each poem has a life of its own.

Though known by his business cards as a famous poet, π.O. is foremost an anarchist landscape artist working against the sanitised tradition of the state-sanctioned pastoral (an institution that makes colonial settlement possible). At least, that is, in his magnum opus, Heide, published by Giramondo in 2019. Elsewhere, in Fitzroy, published by Collective Effort Press in 2015, π.O. is a biographer, autobiographer and fictocritic all at once, giving a gruesome yet delightful account of the inner-north suburb from convict settlement to modern gentrification. But π.O. is impossible to pin down. Just when we were nearly through with the 1300-odd pages of these two master volumes, the famous poet returned for a victory lap with The Tour, published by Giramondo in 2023. Here, π.O. carries the reader with him like a diary as he and a delegation of Australian poets tour 1980s America, the West’s newest imperial motherland.

Fitzroy

As he notes on the back cover of Fitzroy, π.O. writes a poetry of place ‘from the perspective of one who grew up there’. This appeal to authority is necessary when mainstream histories of Melbourne are either laid out neatly in the language of government or guided by the flows of capital (or both). There is an unnervingly insistent historical consciousness in Australian writing that obscures the reality of the colony, maybe because our governments are the largest investors in Australian history, or because 96% of us are essentially migrants (i.e. not Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander peoples). In the last census, a third of the population identified as having English ancestry, which may be thanks to British parliamentary control over Australian immigration policy in the 1800s. Being of English heritage myself, I would argue that the British, who have attempted to colonise most of the Antipodes, are the most deranged of all the Western Europeans. In Fitzroy, π.O. does not let us forget this, with the first half of the book dedicated to the pugnacious exploits of several British-Australian murderers, thieves and delinquents.

Highlighting the latent violence of mathematics, the first poem in Fitzroy concerns the London-born surveyor and artist Robert Hoddle (1794–1881): ‘A mathematical bent / draws a square’.[1] Hoddle is the surveyor responsible for the Hoddle Grid, which forms Melbourne’s central business district, as well as the Fitzroy, Collingwood and Richmond grids. Perhaps π.O., a draughtsman and artist himself, sees his own task as opposed to Hoddle’s: to recount Melbourne’s messy history in spite of the tidy lines of the Englishman’s sterile grid. Language is not innocent in this equation either. Rather, π.O. works against what might be considered ‘proper’ in Western literary or academic terms by producing multiplicitous accounts of history, where several contrary things may (or may not) be true at the same time. In the third poem of Fitzroy, he quotes the diaries of Hoddle, who wrote of the Wurundjeri people: ‘They are friendly / by light / wishing me goodnight, but my faithful / dog tells me otherwise … They would gladly knock my / brains out, and feast on my ribs.’[2] Did Hoddle write this? We can believe it. Here the British imagination turns on itself, taking the form of a paranoid and carnivorous psychosis via gentrification, colonisation and class anxiety over the next 700 bloody pages.

The first half of Fitzroy covers roughly the Victorian period in Melbourne, when people of all classes were behaving very badly indeed. One of these was the well-known chocolate magnate Macpherson Robertson KBE, the founder of MacRobertson’s Steam Confectionery Works, where Freddo Frogs were invented. The tone of mainstream history appears to reflect his philanthropy (Robertson funded a 1929 Antarctic expedition as well as numerous public works projects). π.O. writes, ‘Charity is / a coin in the / slot, and a paper-flower in the lapel.’[3] But charity can also be an easy way to launder both money and reputation in one clean sweep: ‘everything about him, had to be absolutely “spot- / less” i.e. spotlessly White or cream—including / Him, his buildings, his factories, his horses, / the colour of the walls, his worker’s uniforms, his suits…’.[4] On Friday, 25 August 1905, at the intersection of Nicholson and Gertrude (though π.O. records Nicholson and Kerr), opposite the Exhibition Building, Macpherson Robertson was one of first drivers in Victoria involved in a fatality.[5] The decorated chocolate mogul ‘was travelling / towards, a cable tram, when he hit and ran over / something, solid’.[6] The ‘something’ was Tom Hall, an iron foundry worker and ‘recent widower (with / 4 kids)’, who died from his injuries at the scene.[7]

But Fitzroy is much more than a mere sullying of the whitewashed names of Victoria’s enshrined bourgeoisie. π.O. also takes an interest in reporting on the wider cultural landscape, which ‘belongs / to the people, not just to the traffic’.[8] In ‘Greek History’, we learn that in 1939, ‘Australians still didn’t know “which Dago / was which”… they all went on / a rampage, smashing Dagoes windows, thinking them / all Mussolini’s’.[9] After World War II broke out, anyone born in Italy, Germany or Japan was considered an ‘enemy alien’ under the National Security (Aliens Control) Regulations of 1939. Italian studies and linguistics scholar Gaetano Rando documents that those considered ‘highest risk’ were conscripted to the Civil Aliens Corps, which was ‘a national labour force, or, following a precedent established during the First World War for German Australians, imprisonment in one of the purpose-built internment camps’.[10]

As π.O. records, the racist policies of the white Menzies government also contributed towards attacks on Greek families: ‘A number, of fruit and a fish’n’chip shops, had / their windows broken. In Johnston St, one of the shops / owned by a Greek (& his family) had a brick thrown / thru the window… Greek shops, taped up signs / on their windows: “We are not Italians”, but Australians / were no good at writing or spelling, either.’[11] This is classic π.O., recapitulating violence and stupidity with a twinkle in the eye, in stark juxtaposition with anything recorded in the passive tongue of government records. The second half of Fitzroy brings the reader up to speed on the scandalous history of the suburb from the 1950s onward with an autobiographical focus. If you want to know what happened in the 1960s at Collingwood Yards (then Collingwood Tech), or in 1972 when Allen Ginsberg came to read at the Melbourne Town Hall, you’ll have to buy your own copy of Fitzroy from Collective Effort Press for $55, which you can do by writing a letter to the anarchists at PO Box 2430 GPO, Melbourne VIC 3001.

Heide

π.O.’s more recent epic, Heide, is published by Giramondo. The form of the ‘everything poem’ is developed cohesively in this volume, where he ventriloquises further histories from a present perspective as the modern dissipates into yet another dusk. Heide was my first encounter with π.O.’s work. Having recently moved to Melbourne, Iwas recommended the book by scholar, writer and trans pioneer Vivian Blaxell. Blaxell was nominated for the 2021 Writer’s Prize while π.O. was up for the Melbourne Prize for Literature. Reading π.O. and Blaxell introduced me to art, literature and culture in this colony, and both incorporate shifting viewpoints in style. Blaxell advances a unique sort of ‘everything’ essay in a similarly irreverent tone (see: ‘Nuclear Cats’). In π.O.’s work, the ‘everything poem’ collates facts from old encyclopedias and Guinness World Records alongside local narratives to form a murky stage-set of implications rather than a cold hard representation of Truth. It’s impossible to hold on to anything concrete in the everything poem because the background scenery is always changing. The effect is that each poem has a life of its own. Frankfurt School theorist Theodor Adorno writes that ‘the decisions of a bureaucracy are frequently reduced to Yes or No answers … But the responsibility of philosophical thought in its essential situations is not to play this game.’[12] R.I.P. Adorno, you would have loved π.O.

The poems in Heide present surplus galore, each an overflowing Zarathustran cup challenging the authority of ‘fact’ by pointing towards the simultaneous truth and untruth of all language. Heide may well be one of the germinal texts of an emergent Australian fictocriticism that leverages the questionable modal realism of imperial archives (modal realism being the view that all possible worlds are actual worlds). Anything we might say or write could refer to a real possibility. Take, for example, the recent Overland article ‘Whitefella Mischief: a tour of the museum of the magicians of reason’ by writers and scholars Max Brierty and Stephen Muecke. They take a collaborative fictocritical approach to represent a museum tour on Kullilli country (‘where Max’s people come from’) in the year 2060. Like π.O., Brierty and Muecke consider artworks and historical artefacts to fabulate a possible future constructed from a very real past.[13] Fictocriticism reclaims possibility, drawing attention through negation to the untruth of a single narrative and the impossibility of truth, particularly in the digital age. In recollecting multiple histories via the ‘everything poem’, π.O. summons alternative futures through his historical observations of shifting Australian landscapes.

π.O. has achieved something momentous with Heide—not only by presenting a less sympathetic account but also by collating such a readable history with his ecstatic tone and impressive eye for salacious detail. If π.O. presents this history incredulously, it’s because the antics of the bourgeoisie and their artists are utterly ridiculous. In ‘The Artist & the Patron’, he writes:

A lot of money, can produce
a lot of money, or a lot of //// paintings.
But either the Artist snubs the Snob, or the Snob
snubs the Artist—Thank God, for hypocrisy!—
The Patron, is the one, who supports and approves
and the Wretch, is the one who responds
with insolence. ‘Business, my dear boy, Business!’[14]

The poem examines the motives of John Reed and Sunday Reed (née Baillieu), an old-money settler couple who in 1934 purchased a former dairy farm in Bulleen. The old farmhouse became known as Heide, comparable to Garsington Manor in Oxford, England, which hosted members of the Bloomsbury group. Heide is now, of course, a museum of modern art, but from the 1930s to the 1950s, the Reeds patronised artists there, including Sidney Nolan, Joy Hester and Albert Tucker. π.O. writes ‘Sunday knew that the business of landscape (in / Australian Art) was not finished’, and this unfinished business is the central concern of Heide.[15] Here, π.O. offers a critique, demonstrating how Australian landscape art and bourgeois ideals have made the ongoing colonial project possible. The success of colonial settlement in Australia is fuelled by collective delusions of white supremacy, nativity and belonging. The mythology of Australia has relied upon naturalised representations of the settler as transplanted into the landscape from imperial Europe. Sunday Reed encouraged Sidney Nolan to paint the landscape, and during World War II, she secured Nolan a Parkville hideout from which to work: ‘Landscape art was like treason; a return to / an authentic view of Nationhood; the gumleaf & / koala school of Impressionism. The fastest amputation (in / history) was done by one of Napoleon’s surgeons.’[16] Nolan received the Order of Merit for his service to art in 1983.

Read the full piece here.

Footnotes:

[1] π.O. (2015). Fitzroy (p.11). Collective Effort Press. Melbourne.
[2] Fitzroy (p.17).
[3] Fitzroy (p.82).
[4] Fitzroy (p.82).
[5] https://prov.vic.gov.au/archive/78638184-F1C1-11E9-AE98-2342D5DCF76F
[6] Fitzroy (p.83).
[7] Fitzroy (p.83).
[8] Fitzroy (p.403).
[9] Fitzroy (p.419).
[10] Rando, G (2005). Italo-Australians during the Second World War: Some perceptions of internment 2005. https://ro.uow.edu.au/artspapers/120. [Accessed 23/10/2023].
[11] Fitzroy (p.420).
[12] Adorno, TW (1990). Negative Dialectics (p.32), trans. Ashton, EB. Routledge. England.
[13] Brierty, M and Muecke, S (7 July 2023). Whitefella Mischief: a tour of the museum of the magicians of reason. Overland. https://overland.org.au/2023/07/whitefella-mischief-a-tour-of-the-museum-of-the-magicians-of-reason/. [Accessed 23/10/2023].
[14] π.O. (2019). Heide (p.342). Giramondo. Penrith.
[15] Heide (p.344).
[16] Heide (p.368)

Ethics 1

Within each desire is a secondary desire, and relations for which this desire is primary.

My father was a bridle maker, ensuring the production of horses, of colts and fillies, alive-alive oh.
  For some this was a supreme good, ensuring the survival of the genes of Longue Durée,
or as some have translated it, Regret. Within each desire is a secondary desire, and relations
for which this desire is primary. As Earth sped up, methods failed quicker. He got up at 5am,
or 6am, while the machines were half present, and more willing – malleable. In the half-light
there seemed to be more mystical possibility. Metaphorical dark continued, however.
  If you looked in a pocket long enough the key would turn up. Delphi was as Delphi told.
  Byes at work were a chance to catch up. [Avoid the interstate, the dentist, do general research
but only at breakfast. Chartres Cathedral turned its face to the photographer, like a mega demon.]
  No one made their own traps in the twentieth century. Vraiment: they were the best traps.
  A vegetable garden could be called a secondary desire. A carrot might consider itself
a supreme good. Biographies can begin at any moment. Or be divided – arbitrarily – by the times
we read such and such. I began reading Proust in Collingwood; I approached completion
(of the great novel, not the greater oeuvre), blocks away in Fitzroy. But I lived in Rome
in between (where I went to read Burckhardt). My ethics were severely challenged there:
more than in Canberra. There was love; there was malleability. There were horses in the streets;
the Pope rode a horse, behind a plaster Madonna.

*Note: While the above may give an impression of being prose poems, it is a verse poem of long lines.

This poem is published in Australian Poetry Journal 13.2: ‘desire’, edited by Ellen van Neervan.

Freehold

Somehow the beauty of the place made it all worse.

As the house neared completion, my father dreamed more and worked less. A qualified carpenter and builder, he refused most employment, quarrelled with contractors, squandered what little money we had on projects that did nothing to improve the house, but rather seemed aimed at deferring its being finished and the reckoning — with the land, his life, himself — that would come with such an ending. Missing the ocean, he decided we must have a dam to swim in. Scorning the muddy oblongs of our farming neighbours, he conjured visions of a crystal pool, artfully landscaped with boulders and tree ferns, its banks free from the unholy traffic of hooves, a pure vehicle of leisure untainted by practicality or primary production, waters sparkling with windfall light. An excavator came, a dam was dug. Water was pumped in and quickly drained away. The bottom was unsound. My father lost interest, returning to his armchair, the television, smoke. I would join him there, sometimes, climbing into his lap, taking comfort in his momentary peace, blinking away the cloying scent of dope.

Sometimes my father would take me on walks to the west, beyond the boundary of our land. Down a slope, across a narrow paddock owned by the farmer, through barbed wire fences and fields of paper daisies, we would reach the skirt of a gently sloping hill, heavily wooded. The trees were different here — sassafras, coachwood, black wattle, white beech — remnants of the cool rainforests that had covered the region before they were stripped for rare timbers, ringbarked, torched for pasture. Under the canopy the light was green. Sprays of epiphytes lit up dark trunks like fanlights. Moss fell and hung in ropes and curtains. Tree ferns, the tallest I’d seen, grew in paired lines following the slope, a processional of woolly columns splendid with palmy capitals and curlicued shoots. Orchids bloomed strangely, feeding on the moist air. Turquoise butterflies courted pale flowers. Birdsong was varied, rapturous, constant. My father called it The Wilderness, and seemed to need it as a place beyond his interventions. When we came here, we spoke of making burrows, treehouses, nests.

On our hill, the garden fell increasingly into neglect. The macadamias and fruit trees planted in the cleared land along the steep drive were overwhelmed with bracken and wire-vine, pulled down or choked by weeds. The tree fern my father had poached from the bank of the brawling river to the east to mark the path to the front door was dead or dormant. The house’s inner walls remained unpainted or unpanelled, showing bare gyprock or rough hardwood frames. The internal stairs had no banister; my brother and I raced up and down on all-fours. The front steps were uneven, a rush-job, jerry rigged with stumps and boards that flexed and shifted underfoot. The verandah that stretched the length of the façade and partway round both sides had solid rails but was unfinished — a single line of rope stretched across the gaps. Riding my cheap plastic tricycle one morning, I saw a flash of something just beyond the rails — a rufous fantail, flitting between a sapling and the trunk of a tallowwood. Pushing closer on bare feet, I stretched out against the safety rope until the front wheel of the trike went over the edge. I remember it perfectly — the sudden lack of resistance as I passed between rail and rope; the ground rising towards me, tufts of grass and lichen-flecked rock; the stunning impact; the after-vacancy; the mineral taste of my concussion — how it made me think for a moment that I had eaten the rock. I remember the vividness of the sky when I rolled over; the colours I saw when the pain arrived; the way it made me shout rather than cry. I’d fallen two metres and landed face-first on a small basalt boulder, almost losing my right eye. My father stretched a second line of rope.

Somehow the beauty of the place made it all worse. Waking early, my brother and I could watch the winter sun illumine the gum, watch the bark glow, see the dew fall from the leaves, hear the chiming notes of crimson rosellas, the confident descant of the magpies. Perhaps once a year it snowed, white flakes falling in flurries and circles, slanting in from the southwest on a stern wind. One cold morning we saw three foxes, a mother and two cubs, pick a watchful path across the lawn, quiet breaths pluming in the frigid air, until the cubs found a deflated football my brother had left out. Some inner spring released, they dropped all caution and fell to playing with the football, nosing and pouncing on it over and over, wrestling, yipping, barking — until some noise from the house set them instantly on guard and they ghosted off to the west.

In spring the creeks and gullies creaked and droned with frogs. Mist and low clouds set jewels on every leaf. Clear water ran across grass. Cress grew. Swallows nested in culverts. Flocks of straw-necked ibis spiralled under heavy rainclouds. Ducks floated on every dam, rested on every riverbank, dabbled in every stream. Herons stalked the edges, eating frogs. Calves frisked at every fence, hid behind their mothers, screamed as they were loaded into trucks. Snakes came out, found sun, coiled up, basked. The bowerbird stole our blue pegs. Swamp wallabies haunted the tree line around the house, hoping to graze the lawn. Mobs of eastern greys drew up in sunny paddocks, flipped ears against the flies, scratched, cuffed joeys, sighed. Sometimes at night or very early, we heard the thin howls of dingoes.

In summer, there were doves — wonga pigeons, fruit doves, brown cuckoo-doves, white-headed pigeons — and raptors — grey goshawks nesting leggily in a gum, nankeen kestrels perched on fenceposts or floating motionless overhead, black-shouldered kites hovering tirelessly, pausing, plunging, stooping. Wedge-tailed eagles passed over from the east at speed, raising their high, fluting cries. My father and I disturbed one over a kill — a frightening angel, scaled and taloned, clumsy on the ground — the strange, jumbled form of a hare coming apart beneath it as it struggled to take off.

The grass yellowed, the heat peaked, the mirror hills turned sere, cars and cattle trailed dust, and then autumn brought storms, rising wind, unspeakable sunsets, and the high, funereal voices of yellow-tailed black cockatoos, ghost singers calling down rain. We were failing all of it — all the beauty, the superflux, the mixed economies of nature, the traditional horrors and felicities of pastoral life. None of it helped.

The unfinished house was falling into silence, absorbing effort, pleasure, cheer, darkening despite its windows. In these years I dreamed consistently of snakes — long, black, and undulating, segmented like centipedes and worms, tined with protruding ribs, winding down into the soil, into a thin and sandy hole that compelled my hand then dragged at my fingers, pulling me into some thinner, darker place. Waking up before dawn, the long, lightless hours seemed similarly to stretch. I became afraid of the dark, then bored, then afraid again. I waited for some sound below the wind, some stuttered footstep on the stairs, the rasp and tick of claws, a pair of yellow eyes in the limbs of the gum. This dark trailed me as the house woke up, spread its tendrils through the day, gave the shadows of the house a colder, blacker cast.

Read the full piece here.

A Cold Season

Mama, she said they was dead. But I thought Mama was wrong. I imagined I could feel Owens up there wading around in the deep snow, foggy breath coming from his mouth.

When he was seventeen my brother Sam got lost up the mountain. That year winter came late and all at once, like it had been bunching up behind them hills before it arrived. That’s what trapped Sam. The storm surrounded him. Owens went up to look for Sam and he got lost, too. It was a long time for them to be gone. Almost two weeks. And the snow was deep. We could see it from down where we was in the valley.

Mama, she said they was dead. But I thought Mama was wrong. I imagined I could feel Owens up there wading around in the deep snow, foggy breath coming from his mouth. Staying in one of them little huts. I liked to think he was alive. I thought maybe Sam wasn’t, but I felt Owens was.

Where we was the valley swooped right up the mountain, and the winter would bring mists what rolled down, cold and thick, and they turned and hovered like clouds, and them trees and everything changed colour to dark and glistening from them mists. I’m sure it spooked the animals: Becky, our dog, and them two horses, Cotton and Domonique. Then there was the colder nights what came with them mists, and the snow. Little Sasha (Sam’s twin brother), three years older than me (and called little because he was so tall); anyway, he promised he would take me up there so we could have a look. But it was a hollow promise. The winter was too big. Every day for a week Sasha and me went up to the edge of them trees. But each time we came back. We could see it had closed out past the escarpment. I pestered Sasha to go farther, and once he took me up with him, when Mama was in town. We knew she wouldn’t allow it, us going up them mountain paths. Too dangerous, she said – the mountain in a freak winter. No use losing good people after dead ones is what Mama said. But we went up, slipping on leaves what was almost mud, past the tree-line and into the damp shadows as far as the broken gravestones and the edges of the thick snow. We went up till we thought we could hear the stream. But most times it started raining and Little Sasha and me turned back.

So, I kept my hope by remembering the times when Owens was at home. Him cooking fried eggs with dark beans. Him at the table, with his hands out in front of him. His missing finger, from the war. I thought of him once showing me a blister on his heel the size of a coin. I thought of the sun in his eyes and his squint, and him sitting waiting on the bench outside the back door, then standing and shielding his eyes and scuffing the dirt on the path with his boots. I thought of him walking back to the blossom grove – he would usually pull ahead and I’d watch his limping and think again of the war. It was Sam who told me Owens had been a soldier. But I never believed that, cause Owens never told me about it, neither did Mama.

It was also Sam I thought about at that time. I didn’t understand why he’d gone up the mountain. There was something to it, is what Sasha said. But he never talked to me about it. He said something about Mama and the outlaw Wallace. But that’s all he said. I had to figure the rest out for myself. And to be honest with you I wished I never had. Cause that’s what took me into the end of winter all twisted and angry. That’s what made me think I would kill the outlaw Wallace if ever I got the chance. But it wasn’t as simple as that. I couldn’t do that until he took things from me. I don’t want to talk about it, so let’s just leave it at that.

A Cold Season can be found here.

Diving, Falling

Now that he was dead, I only had my failing memory, and failed understanding, and the corroborating evidence of other equally fragile and partial sensibilities to fall back on. It added to my responsibilities, and I already had so many of those.

I woke early the following morning, took my tablet like a good girl, and began work on Ken’s obituary. I could have left it to someone else, but this final act of rendering Ken’s art into words seemed naturally to belong to me. The ninth wave. The one that purportedly reaches the farthest on to the shore.

The morning has always been my best writing time, and the words were waiting for me. I was summoning terms like ‘career-defining’ and ‘important conceptual turn’, but I had always mapped Ken’s early career using the private co-ordinates of our relationship, so by the time I poured my third cup of coffee I was also thinking about — no, feeling — the first time we met. It was at a mutual friend’s place, at one of those house parties that went on forever, and where you either had to keep an eye on the bottle that you brought or find a better one. Same with partners. I looked up from the ice-filled sink when my friend introduced ‘Ken Black, Painter’ to ‘Leila Whittaker, Novelist’, with the almost-satirical capitalisation implied, and I added ‘barely’, about myself, while holding a dripping beer bottle aloft. On learning my name, Ken started to sing the Eric Clapton song, which many people did, but I always pretended that it had never happened before. Besides, Ken was famous. More well-known than me, anyway. He had been exhibited. And he was sexy. It was during that brief period in the early ’90s when men wore their hair long, and his looked cleaner than most, so I left the boy with whom I had arrived in the backyard, sitting at the base of the Hills Hoist and smoking a joint and crapping on about Kierkegaard, and went home with Ken Black.

I had not really known much about oral sex until I met Ken. I mean, I knew that people did it, and, indeed, a few of my boyfriends at university had done it to me, but not so … flamboyantly is the word that I’m looking for, I think. And with such immediate effect. After my orgasm, I lay back in some sort of triumph (his or mine, I’m not sure) and commented that he’d really delivered on the ‘got me on my knees’ part of the song.

‘Let me paint you like that,’ he had answered.

Not a request, but a directive, as I remember it.

I pressed my legs together, feeling suddenly exposed, while I thought about it. I was hardly the origin of the world, and he was no Courbet, even though he was in his realist phase. Of course, we didn’t know, then, that it was a phase. We thought it was his style. Representational, with a skew, something to make the viewer feel as if they had been tipped a little off-balance, like the sight of a crooked frame against a white wall.

And then, in the way of young people, I just never really left. I went back to my share house in Brunswick a few days later and already felt like a visitor. I carried books — beginning with my Virginia Woolfs, of course — and clothes between the two places in Ken’s old Volkswagen, and then only in one direction, and then I gave notice to the people who had, up until that time, been my closest friends. I barely saw them after that — and we haven’t been in touch for years — but in my callow youthfulness I didn’t care. I was suddenly in Ken’s crowd, among his friends from art school, including slender, languid, mysterious Anita, and a much younger and thinner and cleanly shaven Giorgio, looking like he’d stepped from an advertisement for Italian motorbikes, and cronies from their posh private school on the Peninsula, all alcohol and cocaine and sprawled-out vowels. And I was having great sex, so much of it and so varied. I was also discovering that marijuana did not produce the hammering hangovers of cheap red wine. I was with an artist, who promised to become a name. We were living in a posh apartment that looked out over the Parliament buildings and the city gardens, and was paid for, miraculously and uncomplainingly, by Ken’s parents. His moments of anger, of sullenness, seemed a small price to pay. Negligible, really. How easily I seemed to slip into that world of parties and money and ease, even before Ken’s art had any commercial success, although, behind my usually drunken or drug-fucked gaiety, I feared that they could all smell that I had more than a whiff of the suburbs about me.

But I had my small claims, too. My first novel had been published the previous year, to no one’s notice at all, but I had loved the sight of it in the window of the bookshop across the laneway from Pellegrini’s, with all the other books, asserting its miraculous existence. Veins like Rivers, I had called it. I hated the cover, but was powerless to say so.

At my desk in the house that Ken built, I wondered if I should trace his sudden plunge into the abstract back to the influence of these early days of our relationship, when we were having sex and laughing and talking so much. To my ascendance in his life. Ken had never been keen to articulate any hypotheses about his creative trajectory, but at least he could support my theories when he was alive. Now that he was dead, I only had my failing memory, and failed understanding, and the corroborating evidence of other equally fragile and partial sensibilities to fall back on. It added to my responsibilities, and I already had so many of those.

All I knew, as I flicked through the Manifesto, looking for a citation to include in the word-limited space of the obituary, is that, almost overnight, Ken was all about form. He painted Melbourne Morning, the work from which I have always dated his abstract turn, feverishly, day and night, at the window overlooking the intersection. The screech of trams turning from Collins Street onto Spring Street punctuated our days in that apartment, but Ken was an almost entirely visual man. He would remember the sight of those trams, not the sound, if he were still capable of memory. He painted them from the top, from our view, as rectangles, but freed from their tracks and overhead cables.

Any observer of my obituary-writing that day would have quickly tired of watching me typing, and then deleting, and then typing again. But thankfully, I laboured alone and unseen. I walked about the room, picking up objects that might trigger a memory, rifling through stacks of papers. I found an envelope containing a press photograph of Ken and me, which was curling and ripped at its softening edges. Why is that yellowing so depressing? It makes it seem that anyone depicted in that fading frame is already passé — that they have had their time, and probably didn’t use it well enough. I feel the same dispiriting way about my ageing paperbacks. My hair is very short in the photo, so it must have been taken when Otis was a baby. We are sitting together in the backseat of Giorgio’s vintage Holden sedan. It always was such a comfortable, and in some ways, comforting car. The smell of the leather as it heated up brought back the cars of my childhood, and rare days at the beach, Marian and I jiggling our legs on the hot leather seats, our sunburn already blistering on the drive home, David on Mum’s lap in the front seat.

Ken is smiling at the photographer, a cigarette hanging from one side of his mouth. I am staring straight ahead, my jaw squared by my gritted teeth. It is the profile of a deeply unhappy woman, and perhaps the journalist wondered if my mood was the product of a moment or a general condition, because the caption read ‘Melbourne art world’s smiling assassin, and his literary accomplice’. That is one of the most insightful things that has ever been written about us.

—

Even as I wrote, I knew that the obituary would be folded into the canon, and that it would be assessed as authoritative because of our relationship, the long marriage that had survived against all odds. I wanted to capture the man, the husband, and the father who spent hours drawing with his sons, taking their art seriously, and who, when they were babies, would look at them with a tenderness close to longing when they fell asleep at my breast. Who would tell me sometimes that he had chosen well for them, that I was their light. I was looking for this Ken, that he kept hidden, that perhaps only I saw, and intermittently, but I kept encountering the trickster, the artist, the descender to the underworld of his unfathomable unconscious. And the smell of oil paint and turpentine, although I would never include a detail so hackneyed in a public account. And the more elusive traces of Ken himself. The strange, decaying smell of his studio, like something was rotting in there, and the way his canvases always smelt like stale cigarette smoke. As if his very breath had settled on them.

Diving, Falling can be found here.

If You Go

I was electric with pain as Grace tended me in the dark. I smelled something cool and coppery, like a coin laid on the tongue.

I came to as if cracking through ice, gasping, a fish with a hook down its throat. Ice, fish, throat: sounds dragging concepts, a lag, but also a cellular knowing. Lines of sticky sensors circled my head and ran down my chest and across my back, faintly itchy where they adhered like octopus suckers, trailing red and white and blue wires, as if my arteries and veins were external to my body.

I wish I could say the first thought I had was of my children, but what came to mind was Wolfie’s favourite cereal. Sometimes I ate it late at night when the kids were with Jean-Paul. I didn’t always bother to do the shopping when the children were gone – and wouldn’t do it until they were due to come home, to save money. I was probably depressed then, ferociously spooning up the little wheat squares into my mouth by the light of the open fridge, feeling I had set a detonation off under my life and now had to live in its aftershocks as a kind of punishment.

A voice, soft and high and urgent – Grace, though I didn’t know it then. ‘Esther?’

The name was mine. I knew that I was an I. A self. Myself. The taste of wheat and jam and full cream milk were there on my tongue, as tangible as if I had a mouthful I needed to swallow.

The voice said, ‘Try to stay calm. You’re okay. I’m looking after you.’ Clatter of metal on metal. Movement: the soft snare of fabric, synthetic thighs brushing. A brisk walk. Warm hands working over skin, rubbing. My skin. I burned with cold, as if being set alight.

There was only one voice, hushed and urgent, muttering. A bathroom smell: antiseptic, lemon, cool white tiles. Shhh, shhh, the voice went, tsking and clucking in time with the hands, making the same soothing noises I had made in the nursery in the dead of night, rocking newborn Clare while Jean-Paul slept on, wearing earplugs so he could wake in a decent state for work. We thought that was a reasonable arrangement then. It had been my idea – altruistic on the surface, belying the limits of my capacity underneath.

By the time Wolfie was born two years later, Jean-Paul was sleeping in the guest room, and I was going mad. This seems ironic now, given I was in that state to protect Jean-Paul’s job, which as a psychiatrist revolved around caring for other crazy people. What of my experience fell within the normal experience of early motherhood and what was pathological? I didn’t know the answer and couldn’t ask him, terrified of being deemed unequal to the task of mothering Clare and Wolfie by some invisible judge. Jean-Paul seemed to think everything was in order and, as I had made him the arbiter of my reality, I accepted his diagnosis hook, line and sinker.

I was electric with pain as Grace tended me in the dark. I smelled something cool and coppery, like a coin laid on the tongue. Her hands on my skin made bursts of blistering lava break over me, the way fingers through darkened water will trigger blooms of phosphorescence. I couldn’t quite tell which was the dream: what was happening in the room or my thoughts and memories. I had seen phosphorescence once, travelling in Thailand with Zoey. We were nineteen and high on magic mushrooms, drinking cheap Thai whisky out of a bucket with eight straws stuck in the ice. After sunset, I stayed on the sand, but she staggered into the water. The cove was almost glassy in its stillness. Behind us, music from the guesthouse bar came beating down the beach and I turned to watch the dancers in silhouette against the jungle rising sharply behind us.

‘Holy fuck!’ Zoey screamed, half laughing to cover her terror, and I turned so fast to see what had happened that a ribbon of whisky flew out of the bucket onto my skirt. Zoey stood wearing a look of fear and wonder I’ve only seen one other time: on Jean-Paul’s face, as our babies were being born.

‘The sky’s fallen into the water, Esther.’ Her voice was reverential. It did look that way. We swam in the phosphorescence every night for as long as we stayed on that island, and I knew then that the world was just a strange repetition of shapes and meanings, the macro and micro repeating and repeating. Patterns of milk ducts in breasts and veins in lungs with the roots of trees. Tree rings with human fingerprints. Constellations of stars with bioluminescence.

Grace’s touch brought my body further into focus, her hands cartographic. Black space lit up under the pressure of contact: elbow, forearm, hands. Mine. But the pain of it. My muscles contracted, writhing. The sound in the room: an animal dying.

‘I’m so sorry,’ Grace said. ‘I’ve got to rub you down hard like this to get things going.’ At my lips: cloying tape, sticky and strong. I jerked my hands to remove it and found they were tied down. A prick in my arm and the pain submerged back into itself, darkness retreating from torchlight. Screams became moans. Then I lay quiet.

With eyes rolled back in my skull, I saw something. A newborn baby caked in cheese-like vernix, blue lipped, squalling. The tiny purple-pink hands, nails like pearly flecks of shell, fingers curled with the effort of crying. The baby’s eyes clenched shut, mouth open, the wail so forceful no sound came. Latex-fingered midwife; a towel, white and blood-streaked. She rubbed the infant harshly to make it draw breath. Soon its skin was pinking, vernix wiped clean. A blanket drew the flayed arms in. Swaddled, the baby was lifted, passed. Those were my arms. Looking down at the child, that was my wedding ring glinting there on the left hand as it touched the infant’s cheek.

I tried to say, ‘Where is he?’ A word, that critical word, was missing. My voice had rusted over, machinery long out of use. Snake’s skeleton hung down my throat, sharp-boned and choking. Even so, the name was clotting there, unsayable. I heard it in my skull, resounding like a bell. Wolfie. Wolfie. Wolfie!

Grace was talking as she worked. I heard her say, ‘Shh, you’re safe now, Esther.’ I vaguely registered the note of anxiety in her voice, discordant with the words. But I was too exhausted to indicate that I was listening.

The effort it was taking just to order my thoughts was like nothing I’d experienced before.

I lay bogged in mud for a time, until fingers encircled my wrist. The woman clucked anxiously, murmuring to herself.

‘Your blood pressure’s still too low.’ Her voice grew faint as she retreated across the space, then louder again: ‘Now, where are those bloody blankets?’

I wanted to say ‘Don’t go,’ but the words were only a longing. I was trapped in honey, in amber, voiceless but preserved.

Soon she was back. ‘I’m going to take this tape off your eyelids slowly, so that you can see.’

I felt it then, a graze across both lids and the lids themselves heavy, gummed as if with hardened wax. The sweet, high voice, close to my ear. ‘Now, try to open your eyes, Esther. Don’t fight me. I need you to be nice and calm before I can try to take the breathing tube out.’ Low murmuring: words I couldn’t make out. ‘I’ll turn down the lamp for you, there. Open your eyes slowly. Take your time about it.’

Dim light, a hot blade. I blinked, blinked, blinked, and felt like retching. Later, I will think that describing a room as swimming into focus had always seemed a bit of a stretch to me, but that’s what it was like. Flat on my back, blinking at the ceiling, the face peering down at me. I felt I was looking up from the bottom of a lake.

‘Oh dear, your heart rate,’ the woman said quietly, her voice coming small and pinched as if she was trying to keep her thoughts from spilling out. ‘Try to stay calm!’ She squeezed my hand where it lay flat, bound against the rails. Her face was just a spectrum of tones, like a watercolour painting. She said, ‘You’re in shock. I know you’ll have a lot of questions. I can help you. But I can’t take that tube out of your throat until you’re stable.’

I heard what she said, but the words did not penetrate; they slid off like oil on water. Another name was surfacing inside me, painful as a contraction and more urgent than anything the voice in the room might articulate. Clare. I heard myself choking on the sound of the name, the gurgle and spit of my vocal cords against the breathing tube.

‘Shh,’ the woman said. ‘Don’t try to talk just yet. You hear what I’m saying?’

The body was just a hunk of something, a creature strapped down, a weight. I was somewhere inside, clawing to get out. My limbs trembled, all the hinges and sockets and joints of my body alive with the friction of shifting tectonic plates. Fingers cuffed my ankles, gripping my legs to stop them shivering off the bed. The balls of my eyes rolled. My head turned side to side on its neck as if looking for an exit.

‘You’re clammy,’ Grace said, trying for matter-of-fact. An alarm sounded, sharp and urgent, or maybe it was something inside me. ‘Can you hear me, Esther?’ The cacophony of the room, all those screeching electronic noises, the urgent human voice, blurred together to form a single high-pitched flatlining note.

‘Your blood pressure’s going berserk.’ The woman seemed to be swaying as she spoke, her voice rising and receding as if it were a wave breaking and drawing back. ‘All right, but listen: you’re going to be okay. Okay? I won’t let anything happen to you. I promise.’ She sounded on the verge of tears. I had the urge to reach out and offer her comfort but at that moment all the blood in my body roiled up towards my head, like a pot of pasta boiling over.

The woman screamed, as if to prevent me from stepping into oncoming traffic. ‘No, Esther! Stay with me here. Please.’

But I was already falling backwards into a deepening shaft. Far above, the real world, a disc of light, receded to a prick.

This excerpt is from the novel If You Go, which can be found here.

A Hunger of Thorns

I am hit with the overpowering scent of rose petals. It doesn’t smell soft and sweet, like Nan’s roses at home. This scent is rich and bloody, like roses strewn on a battlefield.

FOUR

…

Intery, mintery, cuttery, corn

Apple bough and apple thorn

Bramble, briar, limber lock

Three geese fly in a flock

Cranny key is ~~held in hand~~ forged in blood

Open the door to ~~fairyland~~. the sticklegrass wood

Someone has annotated the rhyme in faded ink, crossing words out and scribbling in new ones.

I know that writing. I’d know it anywhere.

This is Mam’s.

As I read the rhyme, a memory surfaces. Not of Mam, but of Odette, and the day I took her to Sicklehurst.

I brought her here, to the secret door. I made a wreath to open it and chanted the nursery rhyme. She begged me to teach it to her, so I did.

I look down at the crumbling sheet of paper in front of me. There’s mettle in nursery rhymes, power that grows stronger each time the charm is repeated, over and over, through the ages. Folk songs too, even pop songs, accumulate mettle if they get played and sung enough.

The memory is already fading, but I’ve got instructions now. I read through the rhyme a few times until I’m sure of what I need.

I can use the locket and feathers from Odette’s wreath, but other than that I’ll have to start again.

A yellow rosebush grows by the little door, and I snap off a cane, careful to avoid getting pricked. I can’t find any mint, but there’s a clump of costmary nearby that will have to do. There’s a stunted apple tree in the thicket, its branches gnarled and low. I realise that, along with no bees nor flying things of any kind, there are no flowers here, by the wall of Sicklehurst. I snap off a flexible whip of new growth from the apple tree, then bend to collect a few stalks of devil’s snare.

I take my ingredients back to the door and sit cross-legged on the grass.

I have no magic left. But Odette had no magic either, and she did it. After all, the spell to open the little door has already been cast. The wreath is more like . . . a password, or a key. Odette saw me make the wreath, back when we were little. And she remembered. But how had I known? Had I watched someone make it as well?

Mam. It must have been Mam. Had she left the paper moth for me to find? Did she want me to return to Sicklehurst?

Go home, says sensible Maude. You’re being ridiculous.

But this is where the paper moth led me. I’ve spun enough stories to know when the hero must heed the call.

I can’t go home yet.

I take the costmary, rose cane, apple and devil’s snare, and braid them together, then bend the braid into a circular wreath. I wrap Odette’s necklace around the bottom, and tuck the three feathers in.

Blood. The scrap of linen in the locket has some, but it’s old. I slide the bone-pin brooch from my cardigan, and prick my thumb, squeezing a single drop to splash on the locket, vivid red against the dull silver.

Then I replace the pin and Nan’s rose, stand up, and hang my fresh wreath on the horseshoe nail, over Odette’s withered one. I take a deep breath, feeling more than a little foolish.

‘Intery, mintery, cuttery, corn

Apple bough and apple thorn

Bramble, briar, limber lock

Three geese fly in a flock

Cranny key is forged in blood

Open the door to the sticklegrass wood.’

I repeat the charm three times, then turn around once and spit into a turkey rhubarb bush growing up against the wall.

Nothing happens, but maybe the air feels a little cooler than before. The shadows are growing long as the sun begins to sink towards the horizon.

I should go home.

I don’t belong here.

But I wait.

The shrill song of a cicada explodes from a nearby stand of whisky grass, so loud that it makes my ears ache.

I am hit with the overpowering scent of rose petals. It doesn’t smell soft and sweet, like Nan’s roses at home. This scent is rich and bloody, like roses strewn on a battlefield. It’s voluptuous, intoxicating, primal, like I’m being suffocated with petals. The sensual, earthy decay of them seeps into my skin, is sucked down my throat into my lungs, and infuses my blood. My whole body pulses with it.

It feels like a warning.

I stand up and reach out a hand to the dark wood of the door. It’s ice-cold and seems to throb under my touch, like it recognises me. Like it’s been waiting. My heart judders in response, the blood in my veins running suddenly cold, then hot, then cold again.

I feel a heavy pull in my abdomen, as if I’m getting my period.

The pinprick on my thumb pulses, and blood starts to weep from it. I press it to the door.

I can feel the overlapping layers of the triple spell – the loose, floaty forgetting spell over Inglenook, and the heavy blanket over the walls. I can even sense the third layer, deep within Sicklehurst, as thick and impenetrable as lead.

I should walk away. This isn’t me. This isn’t what I do. I like my adventures to be imaginary, where I’m able to step out at any moment and return to the comfort of home.

Nan and Halmoni will be worried about me.

But Odette could be in there.

She needs me.

Sicklehurst calls to me, to the wild girl I once was, the fierce creature that roamed Cygnet Creek with a pocketful of pebbles and dreams.

‘Open,’ I whisper.

I take a deep breath and focus my energy on the door, reaching with my witch-hands for the strands of mettle. But as always now, they slip away from me, like I’m a ghost. When it first happened, I thought it was just temporary. That I’d wake up one morning and be able to weave the mettle once more. Every morning, I’d reach out for it. And every morning, the mettle would slip through the fingers of my mind. Eventually, I stopped trying, because it hurt too much to fail.

But Odette got in. I’m sure of it – her necklace is here.

Which means I can get in too.

‘Let. Me. In,’ I command.

The leaves and blossoms on the wreath curl and shrivel in front of me, then crumble into dust that gets whipped away on a gust of wind. What’s left of the wreath slips to the ground. Only the feathers are undamaged.

The musky scent of roses hits me again, thick and moist, like rotting vegetation.

Thunder rumbles overhead.

The door shifts under my hand, opening a crack, and my ears pop.

A thorned rose cane spills out of the door, like some sea creature’s tentacle. I glimpse velvet-red petals, more than I could have imagined. There is malice in them. They tremble, as though they’re being ruffled by a breeze I can’t feel. I glimpse a shape beyond them, insubstantial as mist, whirling and writhing in wisps of silver and white. I watch as the silvery threads coalesce into a human figure.

Despite his white hair, I don’t think he’s much older than me. He is stunningly beautiful – a long, graceful neck, sharp cheekbones and platinum eyes fringed with thick, silvered lashes. He stares at me, his lips parting in shock, and a crease appears between his brows. I have never seen anyone quite like him before, and yet he feels sharply familiar. He opens his mouth to speak, but no words come out, only a strange, inhuman cry. He reaches out a long, fine-boned hand, but the red roses close in, and he dissipates as if he were nothing more than a shadow.

I push the door fully open. There are no roses. No beautiful ghost boy. The abandoned power plant is gloomy, veiled in evening shadow. I see the rising bulk of the cooling tower again, past crumbling buildings, silhouetted against the darkening sky.

There’s a faint glow coming from the very top, as if a candle has been lit in a princess’s tower. Is that where Odette is?

I look over my shoulder at the holly thicket, drab and colourless under a cold rising slice of egg moon. I imagine walking back along the dark paths – the slimy creek, the garbage-strewn public housing, pushing blindly through grasping branches.

There’s no going back now. I step forward into Sicklehurst, through skin-crawling wrongness as I pass through the second layer of the triple spell, the door falling closed behind me with an ominous thunk.

I should have brought a torch. There’s barely any light left in the day, and I’m an idiot for coming in here at all. I turn to leave, but the door is gone, replaced by unbroken red brick.

Of course it is. Bloody magic doors.

Everything looks . . . fairly ordinary. Nettles scramble over cracked concrete paths. Garden beds are overgrown with hemlock and wood-parsley. The structures are weathered – windows broken and grimy, paint flaking. It looks exactly how a forty-years’-abandoned power plant should look.

But beneath my feet, I can sense something powerful, huge and spreading. It feels like . . . a kind of vast consciousness. It calls to me in whispers that I can’t understand, but I get the feeling that it recognises me, just as I recognise it.

The mettle of it feels somehow oily – dull and grey instead of the usual bright silver.

Something is wrong.

There’s a building before me, a squat brick thing lined with broken windows. To one side is a series of storage sheds. To the other is bare earth, raised and chalky, next to a muddy-looking pond. I can see the frames of rusting tanks in the distance and, beyond, a huge barnlike container building. Behind everything is the rising concrete mass of the cooling tower.

It’s hard to decide which way to go when you’re not really sure what you’re looking for. I had expected it to be made clear when I arrived. I’d thought Odette would be here, grimy and grateful to be found. Or I would be greeted by a wise old wizard or a talking animal, or perhaps have the path laid out before me in coloured brick.

Maybe the secrets of Sicklehurst aren’t available to me. I’m no lost girl, no tragic princess. I’m not the hero of anyone’s story. My gift is telling stories, not living them.

I feel a rising wave of shame, that familiar feeling of wrongness, like I don’t belong. Like I’m inappropriate. I clench my fists and swallow it down.

Not today.

My heart starts to beat faster as I realise there’s something moving around the corner of the squat brick building. I can see it, white like a ghost. Is it the boy again? I take a deep breath and head around the corner. I am surprised to discover that it is a clothesline, strung between two wooden poles, pegged out with white sheets. I walk right up to it, not quite believing that it’s real. Who is hanging laundry inside an abandoned power plant?

A sudden gust of wind billows the sheets out towards me, and I’m engulfed by waves of bed linen. It smells like sunshine and dittany. I try to step backwards but become tangled in the sheets and turned around, so I’m not sure which way is forward and which way is back. The sheets boom and snap in the wind, whipping at my face and shoulders. I push through them, but there seems to be another row, then another, an endless maelstrom of crisp white cotton.

And then I’m out, the sheets behind me. But when I look over my shoulder, there’s only a single clothesline, with two sheets hanging from it. I’m standing in front of a ramshackle wooden building, leaning visibly to one side, dittany bushes growing thick up against it. A faded sign over the door reads security office. Gauzy curtains float from the window.

Is someone living here?

I touch my fingers to the bone-pin brooch for luck. It feels warm.

A girl steps out of the building, carrying an empty laundry basket on her hip. She’s about my age, perhaps a little older, wearing a blue-and-white polka-dot dress that hugs appealingly plump curves, her beetle-black hair swept up into a vintage roll. She looks familiar, but I can’t quite figure out why. Her lips are painted red, and freckles are sprayed across the pale bridge of her nose. She turns bright-blue eyes onto me, eyes that widen in surprise.

‘This is unexpected,’ she says, her voice low and warm. ‘Are you lost?’

Winner of the Writing for Young Adults category in the 2024 Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards, Hunger of Thorns, can be found here.

The Souvenir

Taking pictures is one way to engage in and record our experiences as they are happening. But most things don’t appear in photographs, they escape.

Amelia Zhou on Antigone Kefala

Little by little, names no longer fit things.
Yannis Ritsos, ‘Seconds’ (tr. Antigone Kefala)

I. The photograph

In the photograph, the woman’s head tilts right. Her face registers a slight smile, but it’s hard to make out the expression behind her eyes, though I’m leaning into the page to look closer. What am I looking for? To put into language what the photograph purports to capture, some quality of the real beyond its paper, this fiction. Here’s my descriptive attempt. She is alone, not if you count the pigeons milling about her sandaled feet, or the tourists idling in the background. I think it’s summer or spring. Her sandals give it away. The woman is standing in Piazza San Marco. I’m guessing this from the caption beneath the photograph which reads: in Venice.

Taking pictures is one way to engage in and record our experiences as they are happening. But most things don’t appear in photographs, they escape. Therein presents the difficulty of translating a photographic image into words. Still we keep photographs as a tangible token of remembrance—a souvenir—an object that preserves a trace of an instant caught in time. ① Another way we might score time is to write in a journal. A private souvenir of one’s lived time. The photograph of the woman I’m looking at is pressed in the centrefold of the journal I’m reading. Antigone Kefala is the writer of this not-so-private journal; she’s also the woman in the photograph I’m trying to describe. It’s one photograph amongst several in Kefala’s Sydney Journals (2008). There she is with her friends Jolanta and Jurgis, on a road trip passing through Tibooburra. There she is walking arm and arm with her brother Homer, in Athens. Or she’s not in the photographs at all. In a refugee camp in Lavrion, her father and Homer play the strings. A two-storey house in Annandale, Sydney—where Kefala lived from 1960 until her passing—shadowed by a towering gum. Here is a small sampling of moments and places that shape a life, these photographs suggest. To accurately tell the story of a life, instant to instant, is after all, an impossible task.

Chasing time, grasping at its impossibility, arranging the gathered ephemera on the page—(from the Greek ephemeros, meaning ‘daily, for the day’)—time is both the journal’s constant constraint and foremost preoccupation. It is ‘the element that we cannot keep still, that we cannot recapture, the image of this passing forever chilling,’Kefala notes in Sydney Journals.Together with Late Journals (2022), the two volumes span half a century of her life—from 1970, predating her first poetry chapbook The Alien (1973), and ending in 2020, after the publication of Fragments (2016), her last collection.

And what is the ephemera Kefala gathers, records, and keeps? It’s past midnight, and the moon hangs ‘like half a slice of orange, sharply cut’ (Late Journals). Or it’s time to go to the grocers, where, Kefala writes, ‘they kept telling me that the WAR had started.’ (Late Journals) And despite the stark observation of a friend’s recent death, still, she insists, ‘On Monday […] we will go back to the everyday.’ (Sydney Journals) These textual ephemera accrue, in Kefala’s case, not to a self-evidential portrait of how one spends the ordained hours of the day as such, as the monthly entries of her journals might first indicate. If any kind of portrait of Kefala arises, it’s of a self in intimate witness to the real, actively attenuating to one’s scalar relationship to history and landscape. ‘Events always surpass our imagination,’ she writes (Late Journals). For Kefala, events that exceed the imagination include those events that are otherwise unremarked on and looked over, because of their ordinary beauty, or perhaps their unexceptional violence. Kefala’s acts of witnessing, then, is a call to be them directly, to attest to how such events meet with her quotidian. What exceeds imagination can be more surmountable when expressing it with the language of most direct and plainest means, of taking it on through the measure and scale of our everyday.

To write this everyday is as much a practice of duration, of staying in a temporality of perpetual waiting: ‘Waiting for this living to happen to discover inwardly one’s writing’ (Late Journals). Yes, life is always beginning and its living is well underway. Yet the delay between life and writing can be a long distance, and the transformation of one to the other a ‘slow development,’ Kefala notes, ‘coloured by events, experiences.’ (Late Journals). To wait as Kefala does suggests a waiting for memory to catch up to the present, the writing of events and experiences always mediated by one’s memory of them. Or rather, are we waiting for the present to recede into memory?

Time, as if no longer continuous, as if it had totally stopped…
[…]
Suddenly realising that one can feel outside time…

(Late Journals)

Perhaps, in waiting, Kefala points towards a general feeling of being ‘outside time’ altogether. Waiting, time stopped, time no longer continuous, yet one must go on living in the present, even if that present is set against a ‘shrinking of the future’ (Sydney Journals) and a background of ‘material unease’ (Late Journals). Such examples demonstrate the ambivalent temporal drift underlining Kefala’s journals: to be both outside time—an affective, imaginative space—and in its actual flow. ‘Time had passed over our faces leaving a fine print’ (Late Journals) she writes. And while the body always outwardly bears the trace of time passing, what remains relentlessly outside time, resistant to its encroachment, Kefala implies, are the objects in which time—as it is lived—is recorded and kept. Objects akin to the journal, the family album, letters, papers; these make their own ‘periphery of existence’, which, ‘when we go […] will remain in the house, still here, unaware of our passing.’ (Sydney Journals).

Now the time of the scene has changed: Kefala’s journals are laid in front of me on my desk, and it is not Kefala’s experience of writing, but my encounter with the object of her writing that is made bare. Just as Kefala realises one can feel ‘outside time,’ this same feeling is also mapped onto my own encounter with her journals, enlarged by the knowledge of their capture of moments already passed. In this way, to read a journal is not unlike looking at a photograph: in reading one or looking at the other, there is a similar kind of dissonance and temporal arrhythmia through the confrontation with stilled life, with that which has been. A person’s emanation of ‘vitality […] an explosiveness of silent energy […] can only be hinted at in a photo,’ Kefala says (Late Journals). Reading her journals, I cannot help but fall into a similar reverie.

Any kind of translation from experience to textual or visual language alike mediates absence, a loss in its process. ‘Writing – constantly trying to recapture the living element at the beginning of the experience, an elusive element’ (Sydney Journals). Kefala reminds us that it is with, and in spite of, the undergird of loss that we turn to language, for—to paraphrase her invocation of Paul Celan—it is the one thing that remains reachable, close, and secure amidst all that escapes. In my own looking at Kefala’s photographs and my reading of her journals, I recognise a mourning for the fantasy of ‘vitality’, the temptation to hunt for what cannot be translated, a language in bind to an aperture of loss. Kefala fathoms the crossings from one moment in time in relation to another, the disjunctures that occur in language between those moments and their recaptures, all the while bridging those jumps and bringing us with her. The evergreen secret of what has been transformed and lost in those crossings of language and time—(she’s hinting; I’m hunting)—this is what I contemplate on the page as it lands on my particular side.

II. The quote unquoted

I’ll hint on my own jump now into the middle—as in, what is meddling in the space between the quote and the unquote? What spills over? The self is contained and spilling over. The quote likes to spill over its punctuation too. I watch Agnès Varda’sdocumentary The Gleaners and I one evening, because Kefala watches it on page eight of Late Journals, and I want to see what she’s seeing. (‘To glean is to gather after the harvest. A gleaner is one who gleans. In times past only women gleaned.’ These lines open the film.) Watching it, one discovers that gleaning is not only what is documented on screen but what Varda also performs as a filmmaker, stitching together a moving tapestry of images, ideas, and words from painting, cinema, and her life, mirroring the gleaner’s picking up of, say, oranges or potatoes. Gleaning animates Kefala’s journals too. What is gleaned are tiny accidents chanced upon in the ‘everyday miraculous’ (Sydney Journals) as much as they are deliberate exercises of gathering and accumulation. We encounter voices of writers, artists, composers, friends; words from films, documentaries, interviews, books; things heard on the radio; once, a scribble on a bus seat (‘I love Irfan’); among numerous other things. If the page, like memory, starts as an empty theatre, these things fill its seats, indicative of the real and imagined company Kefala keeps. In parsing our eye down the journal’s page, we are invited to meander through her social milieu, as if overhearing snippets of someone speaking, until another juts in. The page, by this logic, becomes a dramaturgical space organised by travel and connection. What is at work is a sense of relational call-and-response, insofar as such voices, when interspersed with fragments of Kefala’s observations and commentaries, can be prismatic in what they relay. We are solicited to follow the relays between various voices not only within the page at hand but their outwards oscillations beyond the text, to the glimpsed traces of Kefala’s social world. What Kefala ultimately puts on the page then veers from any sense of arrival at closure, preferencing the possibilities of ambiguous relation, giving much work for us, as readers, to follow such possibilities.

Read the full piece here.

Works cited

✷ 1. I take the idea of the ‘souvenir’ from Susan Stewart’s On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Duke University Press, 1993).
✷ 2. Anne Carson, Decreation: Poetry, Essays, Opera (London: Jonathan Cape, 2006), p. 45.
✷ 3. Philippe Lejeune, ‘How Do Diaries End?’, trans. by Victoria A. Lodewick, Biography, 24.1 (2001), 99–112 (p. 100).