Grace Hall is a queer, crip writer and editor based in Naarm (Melbourne). Her writing explores the joys and pitfalls of growing up queer in rural Victoria. She is fueled (almost) entirely by potato and existential dread and currently reads a lot of non-fiction. Grace’s work has been published by Bramble Journal, Archer magazine, Enby Journal, Writers Victoria and elsewhere. Grace was a participant in Toolkits Lite: Non-Fiction program in 2022 and is 2024 Writeability fellow.

Red brick linoleum palace

The first house is Red Brick

It’s 2005. I’m freckled, tall for my age and perpetually worried. My primary school’s oval has been transformed into a fete; there are craft stalls scattered across the quadrangle where squeal pitched conversations between mothers conjugate. The teachers are volunteers – behind stands, barbeques, holding skipping ropes and flipping sausages onto their bellies. It’s weird to see them casually dressed, all in the one place.

I’m on the playground. I can’t skip two bars on the monkey bars, but I watch some girls in my class do it. Their checked dresses flutter. I squat, pick up tanbark and let it fall through my fingers. When Jordy, a new friend, steals me away from the tanbark to play soccer, I’m relieved. I adjust the elastic around my navy-blue shorts so that they’re long like the boy’s shorts and become so immersed in the kicking, receiving – the sweet smell of unearthed turf that my need to pee, urgently, comes as a surprise. Behind the paint-stripped goal posts are two portable toilets. Jordy’s mum notices me with my legs in a tangle, and points in the direction of them. I shake my head and she cocks hers slightly, the way a dog does when you ask it a question. 

I might fall in, I tell her. 

Mum drifts over in her floral short-sleeved dress, and she looks like an angel. They’re on the boundary line but I can hear Jordy’s mum. She’s sharing my response with mum, who giggles mildly and calls me over to her. I tell her that I need to go home. Gentle, and practiced, in loving me she doesn’t ask why. 

I run under the red brick alcove of our house and nod to the fly screen held to the wall by a door stopper (last week it shaved white layers off my right heel). My fibres relax as I stare at the newspaper article of my parents saving beached whales. It’s blue-tacced to the back of the toilet door. 

I flush. The relief I feel is intoxicating and it’s enough to propel me towards my sister who’s stripped off in the loungeroom, dancing across the glossy floorboards. I don’t usually like dancing, but I toss my hands to my shoulders and shuck my hips the way the purple wiggle does. Crisp, orange light streams through the windows, filtered through a flowering gum. We retire at track four on her ABC kids CD because that song is scratched and slip into our cotton pjs. Before bed, we push our two single bed frames together so that we’re close enough to hear each other dream. 

Brown house with carpeted stairs 

Mum is sick of the suburbs. Other mums always drop-in with gossip on their tongues and tell her stories about the houses on our street with cheating husbands. The news spreads like wildfire. One lady whispers to my mum, who’s nursing a milky tea, ‘it could happen to any of us’. 

My parents decide it’s time for a sea change. They want bodies of water – to be bodies of movement. 

You guys can run amok:   mow grass    plant natives    sit around bonfires.  

I don’t know what a sea change is. 

‘Everyone’s doing it’, Dad says from behind the steering wheel, and I wonder who everyone is. We move into a rental with vomit coloured carpet stairs and a-frame ceilings. I decide it’s not a suburb because there are more wineries than houses. My sister gawks cheerily at the spiders in ceiling, but I’m all out of whack. On the first night in the brown house with carpeted stairs, I wake up Dad because I can’t find the light-switch for my room even though it glows in the dark, the white rectangle next to my door frame. I count the deep swirls on the pine board ceiling which makes me feel light and itchy. I creep across the cold checked tiles and inhale the stale cinnamon air that reminds me of op shops. 

I skate from ‘I won’t be happy here’ to: ‘I’m sorry for waking you up, Dad’. 

The next day, having sensed my disoriented state, Mum reminds that a house is just a house. She tells me, it’s the people inside that make it a home. I repeat this to myself while brushing my teeth, wondering where the elderly couple that lived here before us are now, and if they miss their old house like I miss mine.

This log cabin could be an air bnb

The next house is a log cabin on acres full of Cyprus pine. This one we own, a lie I don’t yet know much about. I call it ugly because it’s a word I’ve started to hear at school and because all my friends live in white walled houses. There’s a few gum trees but the Cyprus pines are taller. They’ve beaten the gums to the sun. At night you can hear the koalas roar. Dad tells me this is their mating sound which makes my tummy twist. 

Before Mum and Dad buy the log cabin, they go for the house next door. At the auction, my brother is in tow of my father, clinging onto his baby blue sleeve. The numbers start and the real estate agent’s voice booms. He’s loud, so I don’t understand why he needs a megaphone. My brother senses that we’re losing. 

He tries to whisper, ‘Daddy, do something’, but everyone can hear him. Dad looks at the gravel. I watch him intently because for the first time I really don’t know what he will do next. 

We don’t get that house, but we get the one next to it a few months later. Mum says it’s meant to be because it is. I understand it as: a new house is a new experience; a new house is a new mortgage and under it is a family.  

The pine walls last six months. Their disappearance is gradual. Mum and Grandpa lather each beam antique white. At night, I set up an elaborate game with barbie dolls. Between them are affairs, marriages, children growing up and moving away. Some of them buy mansions with laundry chutes and pearl shaped pools. My favourite doll is a blonde teenage boy who wears denim shorts and a basketball top. When he turns eighteen, he leaves his family – even though they own the mansion – to live with his girlfriend. She has hazelnut eyes and a floral mini skirt, so I understand why he left. 

Linoleum palace 

I’m twenty-one and the share house I live in is a linoleum palace. My housemates are vastly different from one another, but all come from a cluster of free dress schools in the Northern suburbs. One of them takes me under their wing because I am a country girl in a big city. I don’t realise it at the time, but I am only the country girl by comparison. When the clean and orderly housemate is away for the weekend my other house mate, who is messy – like me, try on multiple outfits in the living room. We take photos in the full-length mirror; the mission brown background makes us look older than we are. She cuts my hair and tells me stories of couch surfing in her early teens. When she finishes shaping my bob, holding my curls and then releasing them, she tells me I look like a queer dream. I don’t know what she means exactly, but I believe her because I can’t stop thinking about my housemate’s girlfriend, and the volume in her smirk when she greets me.

In this linoleum palace, one of my bedroom walls isn’t a wall, it’s just sliding doors, but it doesn’t matter because I’m a deep sleeper. The vinyl floors are peeling, we’re constantly chasing dust and newspaper, but it doesn’t matter because I have found my people. For some reason, though, I have to leave once a fortnight, home to the log cabin. 

I’m like a yoyo, tightening and loosening. 

One day, as I’m walking down Melville Road on the phone to my mum, she tells me that they’re renovating the tiny bathroom with no windows. She describes it: they’ll peel the logs off the side of the house and put a window in there, fix the water pressure, and populate it with the fake-plants from Kmart so she can’t kill them.  That sounds nice I tell her. The shower in that bathroom was good to me – there was just enough room to sit at the bottom of it in the foetal position and let the tea-coloured tank water rain onto you. 

‘Do you remember when you were so scared of drop toilets?’ She asks me. You’ve come so far, she laughs. 

I do, I say. Of course I do. 

Two of my housemates have a falling out. The third housemate is falling in love. The foundations of my chosen family unravel, and no one wants to use the kitchen anymore. Small decorative items that we each planted around the place begin to disappear: a vintage orange lamp, an Elvis clock and pastel-coloured clay vulvas. We try to blame it on each other – discretely – some of us cite the good times we had here. The brick BBQ crumbles. The door handles squeal. We burn sage but it doesn’t work. We all move out a month later, and I go back to the log cabin before I go anywhere else. 

Stain glass means you’ve made it       

I move into a colonial style farmhouse, deep in West Footscray. It’s the nicest house I’ve lived in. There’s a spa bath and his and hers basins and a room for my house mate’s keyboard to have its own room. There’s a chocolate-coloured fireplace in my bedroom that’s prohibited from use and the front door has stain glassed windows, apple tinted squares that frame a hearth. 

I walk a lot. Down aisles, down Barkly Street, past dumpling houses and Ethiopian restaurants and commit to the idea of going there. I imagine sitting there with the woman I’m sort-of-dating, pouring her green tea, while my eyes dance across the road to colours of the market. But she’s in America visiting Stonewall, wearing the suit I leant her, unearthing the shades of her queerness. 

When I pull up outside the colonial farmhouse (not the driveway because it’s always occupied), I sit and rehearse the anecdotes I’ll tell my housemates, because I haven’t yet worked out how to talk to them. I pat the car seat and phone people; I phone a voice, one of my favourite voices, but he’s distraught. 

He has to move out of his rental because last week his girlfriend said, ‘I’m leaving’, without saying goodbye and without paying rent and without packing up their clothes. 

‘I can’t sit in this house any longer’, he says to me, and I realise that a house can make you sick. 

The house with cracks                                                                 

The house that my girlfriend and I move into needs work. I convince her though, that it’s the house for us because real estate agents don’t like disabled people. I envision the faulty house as a god send, as though me and it have something shared in our dysfunction.

 It needs painting, cracks need filling, garden needs weeding. The labour is looped, the cracks come back and the gaps under the doors welcome dust back in quicker than it leaves.  The rooms need light and laughter, and consoling, but I don’t do the work because pain is trying to swallow me and sometimes I let it. 

I watch my tired, beautiful girlfriend swish sugar soap onto the walls and work putty into cracks and ask myself: are we playing house or is this house playing us?

‘We don’t own this place, remember’, I say to her because after a few months I find that labouring is hard to watch. 

I leave the house for the first time in months which teaches me that it’s warmer outside where the winter sun waves from behind cloud. A new friend lends me a book, The Shape of Sound by Fiona Murphy. In the prelude, Murphy writes that the meaning of atrium, in ancient roman times, is the heart of the house. It’s the first time I’ve read the body as close to a building and I feel unexpectedly consoled. We must find the heart of the house, becomes my new mantra when I unlock the front door.

It’s my girlfriend’s birthday and we’re out for the first time in months. We’re filling up on beer before a gig. The pub aesthetic is retro house; there are green velvet couches, orange cushions are stationed casually across armchairs. Otis Redding is playing. A beer is slid in front of me; and a smile from my girlfriend’s best-friend. I down it, feel it fizzing as it meets my medication. I am light and sleepy, but I promise myself I’ll make it to the next venue. I push the pain down. When I see the fifteen-flight staircase at the gig venue, I wish I had drunk another beer. I google their website with a shaky thumb. Under frequently asked questions is there’s an accessible toilet downstairs. 

The math is quick but confusing. The music is upstairs. I wonder if other disabled patrons visiting this place have drunk less so that they pee less. I decide that that’s what I’ll do. There’s a chair-lift that runs along the flight of stairs it’s new and expensive, but I don’t want to use it. I can’t stand out like that. I want to call it inaccessibility, but I feel like I’m not allowed to. I use my walking stick to ascend the stairs. I’m visibly avoiding access. 

Upstairs, the red curtains bellow behind the man on the stage who is shirtless and sweaty. The audience is following him, pulsing in and out, and his gruffy drunk voice is loving it. I need a chair, and there’s plenty of chairs. My girlfriend pulls one out for me. She looks at me which is her way of asking, are you okay? I nod. I’m on the outskirts of the mosh, until someone pulls up a chair next to me and speaks a sentence I don’t remember because really, it’s so nice to have someone on my level. 

I can’t hold my pee any longer, so we book an uber that we can’t afford. The rain glinted road shines as we journy down Sydney Road. I’m thinking of bricks because like bricks, the weight of inaccessible buildings accumulates until it becomes a feeling: your heart dropping to the pit of your stomach. The uber pulls up in front our house, and I realise she’s been holding my hand the whole way home. 

*

I don’t know when the house with cracks became a home. Maybe it happened in the mornings, accumulative, when the percolator bubbled over for the 100th time, and croaky good mornings grew into a kiss; or, when the cat chose a sunspot under the square window in the furthest room from the street. As soon as the dust settled, and the spinach in the garden was ready to harvest, the owner texted to say

Thank you for your work 

But

My sons want to move in 

Dad tells me we’re better off buying something. Pick mortgage over rent. Play rock, paper, scissors. The winner is rent. 

He’s seen the ques on channel nine, how the desperation stretches all the way down the street.

Under scorching summer sun, I join the ques and try to drag my mind away from the heat in my legs, they’re molten in broad daylight. By staring at my calendar of house inspections I hang onto hope. We have a family dinner to celebrate the fact that we found a place to rent, against the odds, in the wake of eight weeks. 

‘I feel sorry for your generation,’ my uncle says while he shovels pork crackle that snaps like a wishbone, into his mouth. ‘You’ll never own a house’. He pauses, sympathetically, or so that I can let the sentiment sink in, the reality of doom, but really, I’m upset because he just took the last piece of crackle. 

Raised in Whyalla and now residing in Adelaide, Justine Vlachoulis studies literature and film at The University of South Australia. She endeavors to explore the stigmas and stereotypes surrounding the contemporary sex industry, while also sifting through the past to discover and retell the comical and thrilling stories of her Greek migrant family. When not rambling to anyone who will listen as to why Anton Chekov and Thomas Hardy are her literary heroes, she enjoys baking, photography, and short walks.
 
 
 
 

I Found You in the Supermarket

I’m in a supermarket trying to find you. This was one of the last places I saw you. I drift past pyramids of orange and avocado and stare across at shiny packets of red meat. My legs carry me to a loaf of Wonder White bread. All the voices start singing in my head. All the voices wishing you weren’t dead…   

‘Agapia Mou, my love,’ she whispered.    

In the village, Agía Eiríni, Saint Irene, in a crumbling house, alone in the dark, a mother held her baby and prayed. 

The baby still wrapped in it’s amniotic sac, a caul of hunger and want, was doomed by the poverty WWII brought as German and Italian soldiers filled their bellies while waiting for war. 

The next morning the mother filled threaded bags with olives from the family grove. Beneath the shade of a nearby tree, baby George lay asleep.

Mother Adrian wasn’t lean and tall like the women from Athens or Thessaloniki. Rather she had wide hips and a beaming mouth that stretched across her square jaw. Under the beating sun two rows of perfect white teeth flashed bright, as sweat seeped its way into her short black hair. It never aged white or grey. 

After George, she gave birth to another boy, but before them, there were seven more. The first son Andrew died, and when three girls followed, Olga, Ketie, and Reubina, Mother Adrian and Father Gerasimos despaired. Who was going to work? But five babies came along, and they were christened Danny, Andrew, Thomas, George and Sammi. All the children were blessed with mesmerizing hazel eyes, but from their heads grew unruly tangles of dark brown frizz. George’s hair grew to be closer to black then it was brown. The day after each birth, Mother Adrian laboured in the groves wearing her thin floral dress and brown leather sandals. 

There was a year when all the Vlachoulis children went to school at the same time. They’d leave in the morning and return in the afternoon and they’d each wait their turn to use the household pencil to do their homework. 

In the mornings, the three youngest, Thomas, George, and Sammi would sprint through blades of grass to suckle on hard rough udders and in the evenings steal fruit and scamper home to offer their treasures. 

The Vlachoulis house was small, so the boys shared a bed, and so did the girls. They lived in an area of Agía Eiríni called Vlahoulata, and Vlahoulata was small, so the village rooster’s song carried far enough for all to hear. Thomas, George and Sammi called the village rooster ‘rooster clock’.   

One morning, when the sun hadn’t yet stretched its rays, and the world was still painted in pastel hues of purple and blue, tiny pairs of feet crept through Agía Eiríni’s empty streets. Three small figures darted from one house to the next, bare little tummies holding their breaths. The boys were all the village had seen since their Father Gerasimos had stumbled around drunk a few hours earlier. 

Asleep inside the shade of a wooden hut, was their rooster clock. His scraggy feathers and clawed feet were whisked away by a child’s sturdy hands. With heads held high Thomas, George, and Sammi walked in a line, and George held rooster clock clamped to his chest. 

They went to a clearing, and the sun rose higher, casting olive tones on their skin.    

George gave the orders. 

‘Thomas hold the neck.’

Thomas secured the neck. 

‘Sammi, feet.’

Sammi secured the feet.

Then George swung an axe he’d stolen from Father Gerasimos over his head and brought it down through the bird’s stomach. The boys watched with gleaming teeth as rooster clock’s insides showed. They stroked tentative fingers over dripping red feathers and then dug determined thumbs into slimy pale guts, each of them searching for the round prize with ticking hands. 

The minutes dragged on, but eventually, each boy had to stand back. 

Sammi frowned, and pointed a gunky finger at the bird, ‘Where is it?’   

Thomas shook his head, ‘I don’t know.’

They both looked up to George, who stood with the axe over his shoulder, but he looked back at them, just as confused. 

With a shrug, he said, ‘I don’t know where the clock is. Maybe the head?’

Maybe it was there or maybe it was lodged in the rooster’s heart, but the boys would never know. Hearing the stomps of Mother Adrian’s feet sent them scurrying away like the street rats they were. When her screams replaced rooster clock’s song all the villagers gathered to watch as George tugged his brothers back to publicly face the burn of their mother’s left shoe.

At night, when she thought all her children were asleep and her husband Gerasimos had passed out from too much to drink, Mother Adrian prayed. She fell to her knees and the flame from the kantili, oil candle lamp, flickered like a body that hangs from a noose, throwing the deep shadow of a cross over the warm red walls. Her prayers raised a storm of desperation up to the heavens, and God held back tears as he observed the long-suffering woman.   

That evening George had given his share of fruit to Sammi and now his rumbly tummy made him crawl over his brothers’ limbs in search of his mama. George found her descending and stood still as he watched her large back curl over in defeat, a black aching mountain standing alone under a red burning sky. Then her lips murmured a prayer that peeled childhood clean off George’s bones. 

‘Please Panagía, most blessed. Virgin Mary, pray to your son. Intercede and ask him to kill someone in the village so one of mine can take their place and receive prósfora, the communion bread.’

On Sunday George emerged from church with a tiny square of bread and a cup of koliva, a wheat dish made to honour the dead. He couldn’t concentrate seriously to the priest’s sermon, for rather that image of his mother down on her knees praying, submitting herself completely, memories of his father coming home and giving her a beating, taking all the money they had to fill his glass flagon, those were things young George took seriously… 

The wonder white bag is cool beneath my fingertips. Reminds me of the chilled dead forehead that once frightened my lips. Long black skirts and buttoned-up shirts cast shadows longer than the Eucalyptus trees over burning Whyalla red dirt. Can you miss someone you’ve never known? Is memory the lingering of a still loved soul? My giagiá, grandmother, my theíes, aunties, my theíoi, uncles, my father, painted the white walls of my childhood home with their memory’s song. 

I veer from the bread rack and venture to a tower of tomatoes. I reach out my hand to the plump, firm fruit…   

As George finished primary school, the island of Kefalonia was shaken by an earthquake measuring 7.2 on the surface wave magnitude scale. The 1953 Ionian Earthquake left the Vlachoulis household without bread for six months. 

George had to leave. He ventured to Kefalonia’s main town, Argostoli and earnt enough money to send home by rebuilding the earthquake rubble into homes. A couple of years on, with the houses complete, he opened a café, and it was there he heard about a ship that’d be coming to the main port. 

At 17 years old, with his hair freshly trimmed, George shut up shop and rode his bike up the dirt path that ran parallel to the shining Ionian Sea. As he expected a ship was at the main port, and a long line of men waiting to board. At the start of the line, George could just make out a freakishly tall and flailing figure.

A man in white pressed pants and brown polished shoes stood on top of a crate and flung his arms around, like a red-faced demon, sweating, and agitated by the heat and something else that George discovered as heard him bellowing, ‘I need a volunteer! Errands must be run, or this ship isn’t leaving!’ 

As round hazel eyes doubled in size, George pedalled vigorously, the muscles in his stomach clenching tight as he yelled, ‘I can do it!’  

The red-faced man snapped his neck down to see swift spinning wheels cruise past a line of unmoving men. He darted his eyes between George and them and then he barked, ‘Get over here!’

For the next two days George’s deep-set eyes beamed with their natural smile while he rode hungrily through the Argostoli streets. He picked up food, dropped off clothes, and collected supplies for the man he discovered was the ship’s medical officer. The medical officer had grown fond of George, and the evening before the ship was to leave, he asked, ‘When we arrive where will you go?’

The medical officer thought George was waiting to board with the rest of the men. He thought George to be well over 18, with his completed military service and the papers signed and stamped to prove it. 

Calmy, George responded with, ‘Sir, I don’t know.’

‘What do you mean you don’t know? Are you unsure?’ 

George shook his head, ‘Sir I’m 17. I can be 18. I can be anything you want.’

No signed papers, and not even a boat ticket! George had no chance… but in a crisis of conscience the medical officer said, ‘You’ll need signatures from your village leader and your parents showing that they support you coming to Australia.’     

‘How long have I got to get these to you?’ 

‘You have the night.’

So, bound for Agía Eiríni on his rickety old bike George peddled, grabbing hold of the back of the bus heading for Poro Port and then the mainland to help him along the way. The mayor and his parents signed the papers, but before George left Mother Adrian passed him a brown suitcase that held a small icon of Ágios Gerásimos, Kefalonia’s patron saint, inside. He smiled at her with two rows of perfect white teeth, and when he left, her own didn’t shine under the sun for what might have been weeks. 

When he got off the ship George found himself in southeast Australia at the Bonegilla migration camp. From there he was shipped to Whyalla and put to work as an indentured labourer in the shipyards. He worked for a few years, but he barely made enough money to buy new clothes, let alone enough money to send back home.  

So, he took a risk. He went into business with a man called Elias Stamoulis, and on the corner of Essington Lewis Avenue, they opened a shop called Pan Continentals. Their supermarket was small, but George would drive to Adelaide to purchase special salamis, sauerkrauts, and gherkins and all the immigrants would flock inside, as the standard supermarkets, like Woolworths, neglected the gourmet needs of the immigrant population. They also sold golden crumbed fish and hot salted chips to the cinema patrons, who would come during the 15-minute intermissions from the open-air cinema from across the road.

The day George married, straight off the train from Melbourne, he brought his wife to Pan Continentals and with a sorry smile put her to work in her nice new wedding clothes. She stuffed white bags with boiling hot potatoes and burnt the skin of her small tender palms.  

Angelique came from Yianakata which was the neighbouring area to Vlahoutlata in Agía Eiríni. In the schoolyard, George would find her and bounce the curls that dangled around her head. Both children had to leave Greece, George to Whyalla and Angelique to Melbourne. Then in June 1959, the man whose photograph Angelique secretly kept tucked beneath the elastic strap of her bra knocked at her front door. 

They had a son, and he was christened Gerasimos.  

It was now 1965, and 18 people were living in one house on Gowrie Avenue. George and Elias had made enough to buy a home and sponsor some of their family members from Greece to come over to Australia.  

One of these family members was the eldest Vlachoulis brother, Danny. Danny didn’t know a lot, but what he knew, he knew well, and he knew how to tend a garden; so, on the right side of the yard, he made a garden bed. His skin was as brown as burnt butter from spending weekends out in the yard and from the kitchen window, all the wives would see Danny hunched over, his spine sticking out from beneath a cream linen shirt. Hanging above him were bright red plump tomatoes, teasing to be plucked, washed, and cut fresh for a salad. Danny gardened so diligently he was soon able to sell some of his produce to the locals.  

At the time, Elias Stamoulis had a younger brother who was also living at the house and one morning when the kitchen was empty, he snuck into the garden, stole Danny’s tomatoes, and then sold them for himself. 

When Danny came home from work and saw the vines stripped back and no fresh salad in the fridge, he whispered to George that there might be a thief in the area. George told Danny to have a shower, it had been a long day and then he went and asked Elias for a private word. 

The two men walked outside and stood at the foot of the garden bed, with their hands resting deep in their pockets. Their bodies lightly swayed. 

George repeated what Danny had said, and Elias came back with, ‘Well this is my garden he’s planting those tomatoes on. So, we should get half of what he makes.’

The Whyalla air, thick and sticky, poured around the men’s figures like cement as big black flies buzzed around their slow-beating chests.

A minute passed and then George said, ‘You want to live in halves now Stamoulis?’ 

In comparison to George, Elias was taller, darker, and more rounded in the middle and he slid his hands out his pockets and placed them firmly on his hips. 

The two men faced each other, but after a minute of silence, George dropped his head down to the garden bed. Big black flies darted around his thick lashes, but it wasn’t their irritating buzz that made him snap his face back.  

He declared to Elias, ‘This will be our half of the garden,’ and Elias frowned as George bent down and drew a line with his finger in the dirt between their shoes.

George stood back up and smiling with his perfect rows of teeth, said, ‘And that’s your half,’ and then with a firm point behind Stamoulis’s back, he shouted, ‘And this!’ and lunging over, gripping the thick green vines into his tanned hands, yelled, ‘Is YOUR bloody tomato BUSH!’

George yanked the plant from out the Earth and the two men watched the dangling ugly roots dance in the air before crashing down onto Stamoulis’s side of the garden. 

Years later Mother Adrian would arrive in Australia. 

George was now living in his own house on Hincks Avenue, where in the backyard, he had planted an orange grove. It was in that yard that Mother Adrian showed her grandchildren, Gerry, and Helen, how to chop off a chicken’s head. Not a rooster’s head, but a chicken’s. 

She raised an axe over her head, and as two round pairs of hazel eyes stared at the chicken, Gerry’s alarmed, Helen’s calm, Mother Adrian remembered Thomas, George, and Sammi trying to find the clock in Vlahoulata’s rooster. She remembered the sight of George tugging on his brothers’ arms, as he forced them back to face her fury, and she remembered that he was one the to step forward first to face her…

I stare down at the tomato I’ve cupped in my palms, and whisper, ‘Pappous, Grandfather, George.’

After the tomato incident, you walked out on Stamoulis and marched over to the bank asking for a loan. It was risky because you didn’t have any money, but your determination would lead you to build your own supermarket, which you called 5%. It would go on to become South Australia’s first smart scanning supermarket, which ran live in 1983. 

As I’m getting older, I’m having to shop at the supermarkets more and more by myself. With a small shopping list written for one, I go in to buy the week’s loaf of bread and select myself glossy tomatoes that I can toss into a Greek salad. My dad Gerasimos is no longer the one holding the list and my Giagiá Angelique isn’t dragging me to the confectionary aisle and yelling at me until I’ve picked myself a treat. 

Your wife, your sons, your daughters, your grandchildren, all the people you left behind would tell me that, ‘You were, you were, you were,’ and as they did your life would sit on the tip of my tongue and say, ‘You are, you are, you are.’  

Ledya Khamou is currently an undergraduate at the University of Melbourne where she is studying English and Creative Writing.

 
 
Houses and Homes

I

I grew up in a house I do not remember.

In Iraq I recall an indoor balcony, overlooking what I now perceive as a courtyard. I recall an instance (or maybe a dream, though something grounded in reality) of waking up, a nervous child, and, smiling coyly, following my aunt with her washing, up the stairs. Finding my uncle with my sister and brother throwing mattresses from the balcony onto the main hall.

Outside: cracked asphalt, dusty roads, fields yellow and dry. In photographs there is always somebody’s son in a white shirt, squinting against the sun, arms spread against silver-glinted gates.

When I remember the house, I feel an urge to relate it to Iraq as a whole, perhaps my entire upbringing, or rather how childhood felt. An ornate, dusty structure, beautiful architecture worn and shaved by inheritance and time. Family everywhere, huddled into rooms with no dining table, no chairs, eating from pots on the floor, fingers greasy with dolma and shorba. There was an inflatable swimming pool, and a gate opening. Stairs all the time. And within that gorgeous, great emptiness, a sense of the closeness of relation—of my cousins in the cornershop, of arms soaked with bubblegum faux-tattoos, and aunties pinching cheeks with their tobacco-stained fingers. 

Then, when family left, and we were left without direct relation, it must have been Syria, or Jordan, or somewhere in-between: 

The one bedroom we all slept in, tucked between my brother and sister on thin mattresses on the floor, tiptoeing to the bathroom, waking dad to open the tall door. A single green bulb on the ceiling. Mum above us, her hands clasped together, and us clumsily repeating her assured words to a night-time prayer we did not understand, and didn’t need to, really.

God was a crinkled, velvet-cornered photograph; Jesus a suffering accessory on my grandpa’s rosary, brushing his thumb as he counted the wooden beads; and Mary a weeping canvas print before blue backgrounds. I often wonder whether there was ever a part of me that genuinely believed in their existence, but that doesn’t seem like a fair question to ask of my past self. God and Jesus and Mary were as real as distant relatives, the nameless, indistinguishable faces of aunties and uncles who proclaimed with lipsticked mouths or bearded beer-breath, “I remember when you were this little!” Mum and dad pointed them out in photo albums (“you know, she used to change your nappy”) and I nodded obediently, distantly awed.

 The green-lit room in Syria (or somewhere in between) is the only part of the house I tangentially remember, and in my memory it is both sparse and overcrowded. Mine and my sister’s Barbie-themed runners scuffed in the corner next to our school backpacks. Thick blankets kicked to the foot of the mattress, spilling over and slipping under our feet in the morning, scurrying out of the house, always late, always meaning to leave.

Later, in stuffy high school classrooms smelling of sharpened pencils, squinting at the crusty print of a Gatsby passage about the green light, I’d think initially of Syria’s single green bulb, of that desperate, uncomfortable room—then, immediately, without particularly meaning to, I would dismiss the memory. It became a habit: leaping toward Australia, methodically replacing the Assyrian with the English until ABCs became natural, became the first tongue. English was a means of practical survival, then a means of distance, until eventually, it became mine.

It’s hard to describe losing Assyrian without making it sound like some sort of escape. Struggling against the hot, rough-voweled breath of Assyrian on my neck, shedding its dampened hold, and splashing into the cold green-chlorine of English, with its tall-cut letters, its sardonic, suit-and-tied consonants. It reminds me, distantly, of thirty-degree school days, panting red-cheeked from a game of tag back into an AC-ed classroom after lunch. The smell of the teacher’s staff room lasagne and glossy picture book pages and a bruised, warm apple snatched out of somebody’s backpack. Something close to hope, like the breathless, cruel beauty of a glinting city skyscraper—though something I can never really reach.

II

Still in Syria, though hardly at home: we attended some sort of educational institute for to-be migrants. We spent every day there, as if we were cramming Western-isms before the official test of immigration.

My parents sat in a lecture room learning elementary English phrases. Us, the children—either shoved on a table in the corner, or in an entirely different kids’ room—drew crayoned monsters on every white surface available. Fluorescent lights, early morning toothpaste mouth, awkward air. On the projector screen, there was a slide of example sentences located on the beach, or maybe about beach etiquette (“Hello, is this your towel?”), and I remember the ripple of low laughter in the room, occupied mostly by middle-aged, conservative Assyrians. Chaste women who covered their hair in church, and respectable, God-fearing men who lined the front church pews, bowed their heads before a mightier patriarch. No, we would not be wearing bikinis and shorts on the beach. Though, in retrospect, their chuckles could have been an excited, incredulous sort of laughter—an “imagine us, out of our stuffy one-bedroom apartments, laying on the beach.”

Everything in me hesitates to admit any excitement in relation to arriving in Australia. Writing this as the person I am now, after being fed on white media about people gratefully ‘escaping’ third-world countries for a so-called ‘better’ future in Western countries, I desperately want to divert any trope tinged with white supremacy. My memories are so transparent, so flimsy and fragile, that I can easily twist them into a transgressive story debunking popular myths about refugees.

Though, truthfully, I think I recall the exact moment that we received our visas. I remember distinctly that it was a moment caught off-guard, across the street from the education institute, or maybe the post-office—across somewhere from where everybody else was, lining up. A white envelope, an ineligible, thick document, my dad’s quietly gleeful grin. My dad must have called out to his classmates across the street, and there must have been a celebratory cheer from them, all lining up, waiting for the exact same letter. Walking home, there was an explanation from mum about what a visa was, and what it meant for us, and a sense of the ground shifting, a breathless air opening before us.

III

My dad is the youngest of his two brothers, but older than his sisters. He is a shabby young man posing in a bomber jacket in one photo, then my mustached, serious father in the next. I know that he went to university, or pursued a higher education than my mum, because there is a photo of jean-clad young adults wearing familiar faces in front of a large, smart building. But other than that…

Once, on a video call with my aunt, he reminisced about a camping trip wherein his brothers shot stray dogs for sport, and teased him when he, scared and hesitant, refused. Or maybe I misheard (or my brain mistranslated the words when I was eavesdropping, or I’ve forgotten the exact turn of phrase he used) and my dad meant that he missed the shot, rather than refused. Still, in my imagination: coarse, dried grass, brown jackets and muddied boots, a brutal green-blue sun, sweaty palms on a rifle (not the more practical shotgun, my mind decides, for some reason) foam-mouthed dogs jumping in the dimmed distance. I’d like to think that my dad refused, instead of attempted, and missed.

My mum was a farm girl. She dropped out of high school as soon as she could, professing to enjoy home life more than education. In childhood, she was protected by a throng of older brothers and a gentle, gravel-voiced father, his dark face wrinkled like a date. At least that’s how I see my grandfather now, in his old age: his voice a sweet, weathered cloud of cigarette smoke, his skin tough leather. My mum fondly reminisces about her family’s backyard full of chickens, who peck-kissed her when she fed them. Now, watching the pigeons and crows eat the rice she made for lunch outside our front door, her eyes grow watery and distant—when I crack a joke, she glances up blankly, as if she didn’t expect me there, this Australian stranger who will never know her childhood.

In one photo she is unsmiling and doe-eyed, ringlets in her hair, in an 80s shoulder-padded suit. In another, she is my mother, rounded and red-cheeked. There is an Arabic turn of phrase, a compliment for a kind person, that roughly translates to “(their) blood is sweet”, “sweet” pronounced in the pitched, sickly warmth of “sugar”. Though I do not know how to say the phrase, its shadow passes my mind in every photo I see of my mother. We share a birthplace—Iraq lives in my mum, a nestled, golden nostalgia sugaring her veins. But it eludes me.

IV

So: Australia. A ‘better’ future. In Australia, there are calendar dates, and places I can point to in Google Maps, and names on my phone that I can text.

Our first Australian house was our cousins’ house. A brief holiday, a dreamy lapse into the before-days, close relation again. Play-Station days and barbecue picnic days and ice-cream days and TV marathon days. Big couches, too intimidating to sit on, glass-surface coffee tables, and high, plush mattresses against headboards decorated with baby pictures. In the backyard, unruly grass overlapped concrete (always planning on adding more concrete, my uncle with his hands behind his back, sucking a toothpick, discussing construction with my dad), and half-deflated soccer balls shot cruelly to paunchy, well-fed stomachs. The garage door gaped open and faulty water-guns were fished out of the cluttered cardboard boxes, teams arranged for a battle of boys vs girls—screaming bloody murder until we were ordered back indoors.

Our second and third and fourth homes—houses—were rented. Here, memories scurry from me yet again. In the second house: an unusually wide hall as soon as you walked in, empty like Iraq, except for a computer on a desk in the corner. In the third house, there is nothing. The fourth house was directly across the street from our high school—the school bell blaring, the rapid, chattering silhouettes of after-school kids filtering in through the windows. Summer was inescapable walls and a living room with one couch and suitcases still unpacked, sparse cutlery in the drawers. Looking back, the fourth house could have been a brief stint before:

The fifth house—home—was bought. This home is still lived in. I find that it’s hard to write about places that I have not yet left.

The belly of my life, the spine of who I am, was formed in Australia. Dusty libraries and humming computers and blistering summers. Now, I resist the urge to contrast Melbourne to Mosul.

Instead of the closeness within the wideness in Iraq, Melbourne is a compact, familiar closeness that is cooled with an innate distance. A detachment which gnaws, and haunts, and, in its clinginess, forces a friendship. I form myself from Melbourne’s indifference. Empty, carpeted school corridors make me teary. I befriend buses and trams and train routes, and form a mix-and-match friend group composed of strays from previous friend groups. I can joke about my past selves, because I created them—in photos I can laugh at my bulging under-eye circles in primary school (when I had nothing to be tired about) and my disgruntled, angsty disposition in high school (when I had invented a lot of things to be mad about).

Occasionally, I think: this is me, living in the ‘better’ future.

My dad tells me about racist encounters he faces as a casual UberEats driver. I have learned about race and xenophobia and class and sexuality and gender. I know how to write research essays about genocide and white supremacy and classism. I know how to trace everyday exhibitions of prejudice to their root, historical cause. If academically necessary (say, for a creative writing assignment) I could throw my ‘immigrant experience’ under a microscope, dissect the points of injury, all the ruptured cells, and bleed them into a narrative, into cause and effect. But when my dad says, “That Woolies employee would not have spoken to me like that if I were Aussie,” I cannot think of a succinct response. Unspoken, it simmers inside me.

Here I am in my ‘better’ future: adequately educated and entirely helpless.

V

In my bedroom, above my mattress: blu-tacked poems printed out from the local library. They are not my poems, but they are something of me. Books tabbed and annotated and highlighted and underlined, a desperate library of anything that makes me feel. Desk of knick-knack stationery, cheap pastel plastic, acrylic crochet tid-bits. Burnt matchsticks. Half-filled notebooks. Sludgy coffee grounds in cooled mugs. Hollow energy drink cans. A solitary dinner after work with the yellow lamp for company, awake and alone in the exhausted creaks of a begrudgingly loved home.

Mum hangs a wooden-beaded rosary off my headboard, though it barely clings on. In the mornings, scrambling out of bed, I accidentally knock Jesus to the floor and curse at him for being in the way. Coming back home, he is a pitiful, betrayed father on my bedroom floor, and I am a bad daughter, a faithless Christian, hanging him back on a headboard that does not want to hold him.

Cousins now behind phone glass, pixelated social media presences. I wonder if her parents know that she’s dating a white boy or dating at all. I would never ask her.

Now, I spend my days walking up and down stairs and elevators, and arriving nowhere. I am the same age as my mother was when she married my father, and in the same age bracket as my parents when they left their beloved homelands for foreign territory. I cannot imagine marrying anybody; and I lack any maternal ambitions or instincts; and though I profess that I hate Melbourne, I cannot imagine living anywhere else. I have lived in Australia for longer than I was in Iraq, or Syria, or the general Middle East. What does this mean? Overseas, my home, my emergency touchdown, would be the Australian embassy. Here, I would never call myself an Aussie.

Now, at a birthday party, somebody shines a lighter over a green Sprite bottle, and I am back in Syria, repeating my mother’s prayers. Then I am mute in the backseat of an Uber heading home, tired of myself and my friends, wanting my bed with its annoying rosary, with its dead poets.

Or not my bed but a mattress, flung off a balcony, bouncing off the concrete, or shoulder-to-shoulder on the floor, locked in. Wanting a home I can only remember in inflatable swimming pools, in out-stretched, tongued runners, stomping up the stairs all petty with childish arguments, to that room with its flickering green light. 

Suyanti Winoto-Lewin lives by the Derwent in lutruwita/Tasmania. She is an ecologist working in consulting and land management. Her creative work has been published in Overland Journal, and her research has been published in the Australian Journal of Botany.
 
 
 
 
 

On my friend’s ankle

Tipping Points

On my friend’s ankle, painstakingly inked with individual pricks of a four-pointed needle, is a symbol that ecologists may recognise as a sign of our times.

A sine wave steadily swells and falls across their skin, holding two seeds in its valleys. One rests sleepily at the base of a valley. Another, one wave to the right, is climbing steadily up the rollercoaster. Bit by bit it climbs, defying gravity. Once it reaches the peak it is in danger of rolling unimpeded into the next dip.

This symbol represents the concept of alternative stable states and tipping points. Each valley represents a state in which a system can be. Even when the system is perturbed (that is, internal or external pressures cause a system to become off-balance), negative feedback loops draw it back to its stable norm. However, large changes, either sudden or occurring in persistent increments, can push a system to a tipping point, where the seed rolls down to the next valley, a new state of being which is reinforced by a new set of feedback responses.

We feel our present to be a precipice. We stand at the edge of all manner of tipping points. One push, and we could roll in any direction away from all the patterns and truths of the system we know. The picture is of chaos and off-balance, any new stable regime on the other side of the hill far away and unknown.

I imagine the seeds on my friend’s ankle racing over the hummocks, careering off the end of the line and rolling down his foot, over his toes, into the dirt beneath his feet.

Circles

When I was young, I would crouch in the soil of my mum’s garden in naarm/Melbourne, watching the buds of poppies intently. Surely, if I looked for long enough, I would catch the moment when the first petal peeped out from the green. I never did.

The continent known as Australia travels north at a steady pace of 7 centimetres per year, yet rarely do we feel the ground shift beneath our feet. It has been resolutely ploughing away from the south pole since it started to pull itself free of Antarctica, a divorce which begun about 30 million years ago. I am intrigued by the idea of a moment in which the final tear occurred between the two land masses and water rushed into the scar. That gap allowed an oceanic current to form a tight, ceaseless ring, circling round and round the south pole, unimpeded by land. The Antarctic Circumpolar Current (AAC) is the only oceanic current to circumnavigate the world. The formation of this current barred Antarctica from warmth delivered south from the equator by the East Australian Current and the Leeuwin Current, which could not pass the ceaseless whirl of the ACC. Though Antarctica sat over the south pole long before the formation of the ACC, only when this current gained momentum did it lose its forests to a permanent blanket of ice. This change, like so many of the catastrophes of geological history, happened unimaginably slowly. Even so, the glaciation of Antarctica formed part of the mass extinction event which marked the end of the Eocene epoch.

In that forested southern world over 30 million years ago, as Tasmania drifted north and ocean started to gather its furious momentum around Antarctica, I imagine the tree ferns and myrtle beeches unfurling fertile growth and sending their spores and seeds off into the wind. Some of those seeds may have caught a northward breeze, or hitched a ride on a dinosaur feather to land on fertile soil of the new island of lutruwita/Tasmania. As I walk amongst myrtle beaches and tree ferns in the Gondwanan forests of lutruwita, I imagine that I am shaded by the descendants of some of these refugees. As I breathe in the perfume of a leatherwood, I imagine its ancestors summoning Antarctic insects with their scent.

Antarctica has been trapped within a whirling ring of cold water for about 30 million years—time enough for some of the hardiest and most specialised marine life forms on our planet to evolve. A complex community of tiny animals, fungi, bacteria, protists and stranger things creep across the dark underside of the icepack or thrive within the network of briny channels etched within sea ice. Like most beings, their energy comes from the sun, alchemised from within the ice by algae.

In this frozen world, each fraction of a degree of warming makes some difference; more briny channels; less light as snow heaps up on top of the sea ice; changing growth rates of organisms. Trophic webs flail, recalibrate, adjust. But it is when the temperature crosses melting point that we humans stand to attention. Glaciers calve in loud surrender and the comfort of predictability is lost. Creatures which rely on sea ice die, while other waiting spores bloom. We watch the seed topple from a rise to a deep crevasse.

The Antarctic Circumpolar Current is changing. Driven by the roar of increasing westerlies, eddies which fling warm water south through the ACC are becoming stronger. This warm water travels under the sea ice pack and melts it from below, allowing glaciers to speed up behind it. The ACC long ago condemned Antarctica to apocalypse, but now protects the unique systems which have evolved there. Recent research warns that we have reached a critical threshold of warming, a tipping point, which determines even if we stop emitting fossil fuels today, the icepack of the West Antarctic Peninsula will continue to melt at increasing speed for the next one hundred years.

Spirals (contacting)

At the time of writing, there are 686 species of plant, animal, algae and insect recognised to be at risk of extinction in my home state of Tasmania. Climatic tipping points endanger many more. Some of these species have existed since Antarctica was lost to the cold; they may call that white continent their ancestral home.

Though I don’t feel that I am ready to grieve, the work I do as an ecological consultant resembles a form of mourning. I spend my working days documenting the decline of species. The small losses; a trigger plant smaller than a fingernail growing in drainage depressions of the site of a new factory; a skink distinguished by the arrangement of scales on its head losing habitat to a road. My job is to survey areas proposed to be covered in concrete or dug up for minerals, searching for signs of these 686. What I find, I carefully identify, count, photograph and map. I may make 500 mapping points in a day marking threatened plants, hollow bearing trees and vegetation communities. My colleagues produce a map and upload the information onto Tasmania’s online database called the ‘Natural Values Atlas’. We write a report describing all the life in that area that we can. The proponent then applies for a permit to ‘take’ any threatened species we have identified within their project area. Unwilling to stand in the way of development, government generally grants these permits. Concrete is poured. With a disturbing symmetry, living beings are lost in the physical world just as they become represented in the virtual. The state database collects points on a map as if this could substitute for plants in the soil, as if to codify what we have lost is to justify losing it. The Natural Values Atlas is becoming a virtual graveyard where we may visit and grieve. Our report becomes a callous obituary.

Sometimes, the design of a project will be altered somewhat to avoid harming some critters considered significant. Often, conditions of the permit require an environmental offset – take from here, but protect over there. Offsets only make sense if a norm of destruction is assumed, so that even decreasing the possibility of destruction can be considered a positive action. Further, offsets deny individuality, functioning on the premise that individuals lumped under the same name by taxonomists, or vegetation communities considered similar by ecologists, are interchangeable. Recent legislation provides for a ‘Nature Repair Market.’ Though this offers some promise of promoting good restoration work, it is based on similar principles of interchangeability. Our ‘natural values’ have become currency; the rarer the more valuable.

The independent review of our current federal environment laws found that ‘surveillance, compliance and enforcement under the EPBC Act is ineffective.’ The legislation relies on developers self-assessing whether the impact they will have on natural values is ‘significant’ or not – only if a developer decides their impact is significant will they present it to the federal regulator for assessment. This means that the regulator does not see most of the projects which chip away at our continent’s ecosystems. When a project is referred, the odds are on the side of approval, with only 13 projects out of over 7000 refused approval between 1999 and 2022. Often a permit has conditions, but there is little to no oversight on whether these conditions are followed. In the decade from 2010-2020 the federal regulator issued $230,000 in fines for compliance breaches. By comparison, Hobart City Council expects to issue 8.3 million in parking fines in 2023-24.

I recently met with a representative of Department of Climate Change, Energy, Environment and Water (DCEEW) about offsets for a road project. She calmly informed us that ‘in perpetuity’ means ‘20 years.’ I was stunned, as she only looked about 30 herself. A standard logging cycle for eucalypts is about 80 years. It takes at least one hundred years for a eucalypt to form hollows suitable for birds or gliders to raise their young in. 20 years is less than a human generation, a mining lease, a life sentence in jail. In 20 years’ time, that offset will have done its job. It can either be destroyed or it can be used to justify another round of destruction. So we spiral inward, towards extinctions.

While the separation of Antarctica and Australia occurred (and is occurring) at a speed beyond the comprehension of human senses, and human induced climate change can be perceived within my own 26 years, many of the factors causing extinctions occur at the pace of a bulldozer or a supertrawler. Whales which depend on the sea ice-reliant Antarctic krill were almost driven to extinction long before the effects of global warming were recognised. Today, regional overfishing of Antarctic krill is adversely affecting colonies of krill-dependent species such as penguins and seabirds. Scientists worry that catch limits for krill do not take into account the effects of climate change on krill populations. Australia has lost 38 mammal species in the 250 of European colonialism which has brought feral predators, habitat loss and hunting. These are threatening processes which have barely relented their breakneck pace for the past 200 years. They continue in the form of some of the projects I work on. Each extinction, each loss of a population of a species or a of community of beings, reduces our resilience to global warming and adaptive capacity in the face of change.

The seed

As a young person peering over the precipice of the present while grieving the past, I cling to uncertainty as a tired polar bear clings to drift ice. Planetary systems are so complex we can never fully emulate them within our computer models, which seem to spit out the future like a curse. We don’t know how the ground will shift beneath us, only that it will shift. We don’t know which way the seed will roll, nor in which valley it will get trapped. For me, uncertainty provokes hope and curiosity.

Ecologists use the word resilience to describe the ability of a system to remain stable in the face of environmental perturbations. This could mean raising those hills higher, so that the seed has a little further to climb before it falls to other side. It could also mean forming that seed into a tough little bugger with a thick skin – a system with high adaptive capacity. One of the key ways of building adaptive capacity and maintaining resilience of a system is by nurturing diversity. This includes diversity in genetics as well as in human communities, and importantly, in relationships. This is the work of our generation—a turn back to nurture and stewardship. A building and rebuilding of relationships in creative ways. We also need fertile ground, places for seeds to land as continents shift, such as healthy soil, hollow bearing trees for breeding critters and unpolluted waterbodies.

So, whilst we do all we can to slow the climate crisis, we must take loss of biodiversity on home soil seriously. Even ‘single-mindedly,’ the term Tasmania’s liberal government recently used to dismiss advice against a windfarm offered by experts on migratory birds. Themselves employed by the government, these experts cited the harm it may do to critically endangered orange-bellied parrots. We are not supported by the good nature laws we need, but our government is rewriting them, and there will be opportunities for community to be involved in this process. Rather than turning the protection and rehabilitation of particular ecosystems into a commodity that becomes more valuable as each one becomes more rare, stewardship of nature needs to become standard practice, written into law rather than governed by economy. Offsetting needs to be tightly regulated, and permit conditions policed. In a political and social environment in which protecting planetary resilience is as ordinary as maintaining public infrastructure we can find a more creative form of development. We can strengthen the seed and nurture the soil.

*

As the individual pricks of a tattoo artist’s needle create an image on skin, ecologists’ mapping points paint lines and blots across the landscape. Often these draw out patterns of destruction that follow mineral riches, ever expanding roads and fertile soils. But there are also patches of growth such as where plans have changed to avoid harm to critters, where rehabilitation has occurred, or where seeds have been collected to spread to new places.

Our current system shows that we can take notice of diversity, and record it with the precision of an artist. If we add an artist’s intentionality to this, and take note of the bigger picture we are drawing, we can create a constellation of hope at the scale of our continent. With our actions and our noticing of the beings around us we can create an image that, beyond the uncertainty of tipping points, holds fertile ground where resilient seeds can grow.
 
 
 

I am a 26 year old trans masculine and disabled person based near Newcastle, NSW. I am currently completing a Masters of Writing and Literature, and am also one of the ABC’s 2023 Regional Storyteller Scholars. I write both fiction and non-fiction, and am also enthusiastic about anything to do with being a dog dad, photography, fitness, and making cis people uncomfortable.
 
 
 
 
 

The Mirror World

The dim interior of the barbershop takes a long moment to precipitate as my eyes struggle to adjust to the abrupt change in light. I hear where I am before I see it: the raucous buzz of clippers, the occasional rumble of baritone voices.

“Name?” asks a voice. My vision begins to piece itself back together, pixels of light and colour resolving into finer detail like an image sluggishly loading. The centre loads first, and I see the wet flash of teeth, the curve of a polite smile—then there is a pause and a strange scratching sound. Gradually, the rest of the image sharpens, like the focus ring of a camera being slowly twisted. I see now that the man who’d spoken is messily scrawling my name on a chalkboard.

“You’re after Ryan,” he says, stepping back to the stony-faced man currently enthroned in front of the vanity. I nod and position my wheelchair into a vacant spot against the waiting room wall. I open Instagram and, not wanting to break the silence with the robotic voice of my screen reader, attempt to decode the images without the contextualising information of the captions, occasionally casting an overt glance in the direction of the barber and the man in the vanity chair, whom I assume to be Ryan. When I see the telltale flash of silver that indicates that the barber has retrieved a hand mirror to show him the back, I know he must almost be done. But just as the barber begins to unfasten the gown from around his neck, he raises a finger and asks, as if he’d forgotten, for a beard trim. I swallow a groan and glance at my support worker, who is perched delicately on the chair nearest the door.  I imagine I can hear the distant jingle of coins streaming past with every minute, like grains of sand disappearing down the funnel of an hourglass. For approximately the seventh time that hour, I silently give thanks that I don’t have to dig in my own pockets to pay her exorbitant fees, but the pulse of gratitude is quickly followed by one of guilt. I scour my brain for some useful tasks I could get her to help me with while we wait, but I don’t want to leave the radius of the barber and risk losing my precious place on the chalkboard.   

Nearly half an hour later, it’s finally my turn. The barber pulls one of the padded chairs out of the way and I wheel into the vacated spot.

“So, what’re we doing?” He asks, tucking a piece of paper towel into my collar. I snap on my brakes and take my glasses off. Instantly, my unaided vision causes the scene to blur and split in two, like a wet ink blot folded against a piece of paper.

“Uhh, pretty short on the back and sides—” I start to say, but my voice dies in my throat. Hidden by the black satin gown fastened around my neck, my wheelchair has vanished, and my face has been reduced to a handful of expressive brushstrokes. With a shiver of de ja vu, I recognise this man. He’d inhabited my imaginings during adolescence—he’d hovered like static just above my skin. I’d only ever known him by his silhouette. The details of his face had never been clear—alternatively resembling Cole Sprouse, Ryan Reynolds, or Chris Hemsworth—and his body was a confusing collage of the muscle-bound men that appeared, again and again, on the glossy covers of magazines, and shirtless on cinema screens, but every glimpse dissolved and I could never be sure that I’d really seen anything at all. As my body became ravaged by an oestrogen-fuelled puberty, he had begun to fade. It had been his face that had disappeared first: his headless torso remaining for just a split second longer, like the decapitated body of a snake writhing for a moment before falling still. And after my diagnosis and surgery, when I’d found my reflection radically amended to include the bulky silhouette of a wheelchair, he’d vanished entirely. Only, here he was, a handsome Frankenstein, miraculously imbued with the semblance of life by some arcane quality, some ancient magic crackling in the air of the barbershop. 

The moment flickers, light ricocheting in rainbow lines between two versions of reality—one shedding a slightly translucent twin, a ghostly double. I feel myself become disoriented, as if someone has spun me around and around by my shoulders: I could be here, in this twenty-six-year-old body, the clippers vibrating against my skull, or I could be thirteen again, miraculously transported to the other side of the glass window through which I’d gazed so longingly, the window belonging to the barbershop on the main street of the town I’d grown up in. Like this one, one wall of the shop had been made a window, exhibiting the scene within like a precious jewel in a display case. I remember workbenches studded with a glittering array of razors and scissors and combs; upturned faces daubed with a thick, creamy foam evocative of liquid marshmallows, and, when the sky was overcast, thick slabs of golden light spilling from the windows and stretching across the footpath. I imagined that the golden air inside the shop would be clean and sweet, like that on a mountain-top, a rarefied pocket of atmosphere superior to the slurry of the street outside. But at the same time, I knew that it could never survive the brutish intrusion of my touch—it could exist only behind the glass, like the tiny, perfect diorama inside a snow globe.

Almost two decades later, the barbershop is still there—but the parallelograms of honeyed light have vanished, and in the window, I see only the hard glare of sunlight and the topmost quarter of my waist-high reflection. I also see what has, of course, always been there, but that I had before failed to notice: two thick concrete steps at the entrance, their unforgiving silhouette casting a hard shadow like a hole punched in the earth. Of course, the part I did get right is the candy cane pole. It’s slightly faded, the red now more pink, but it’s still there—twirling cheerfully above the door.

The stripes of the barber’s pole are thought to be emblematic of the practice of bloodletting commonly performed by “barber-surgeons” prior to the 18th century. Barbers also pulled teeth and performed minor surgeries. 

More euphemistically, one may consider the stripes as signifying metamorphosis: a constantly turning engine taking in, from one direction, bodies calloused and imperfect, and spitting them out, from the other, polished and cleaned. It was the job of the barber to distinguish between what was to be preserved and what was to be trimmed away. It was, and remains, his job to define the average man, what Adolphe Quetlet termed l’homme moyen, and if he did his job well, he might uncover the exquisite core, the David waiting to be unearthed from within his tomb of marble. Only, what fell around his feet was not ribbons of stone, but loose hair, congealed blood, rotten teeth.

My legs are beginning to ache, and for once I welcome the pain. It pulls me back into the present, into this body that I now recognise as my own. The past that had never been begins to fade, like a polaroid developing in reverse. It does not disappear, but I know it is not real. It is the false twin, the hollow duplicate, the shimmering mirage that will remain forever fixed on the horizon.

We lapse into silence as the barber begins to work. When I hear him take a breath in preparation to speak, I grit my teeth, expecting the usual demand that I explain the scars clearly visible through my shortly buzzed hair, my wheelchair and my slurred voice, but he only says: “Try and hold your head still.” 

“Sorry.” I mumble, blushing furiously.

I’m impressed by his restraint, but still know that I will not return. I’d sworn off barbershops after the emergence of a disturbing pattern of experiences, exemplified by one barber trying to physically lift me out of my chair despite my repeated protests (such incidents seemed to occur much less frequently in mixed-gender salons). I had only made an exception because my regular place had been blocked off by recent flooding, and I’d already made a booking with my support worker.

As the barber works, parts of his body creep into my square of clear vision, like photographs taken at maximum zoom. I realise that he is much younger than I’d initially thought—an assumption no doubt caused by the long, bushy beard reaching halfway down his chest, a wiry mass strongly evocative of frayed rope. The beard is a sure sign of a pair of testicles generously ejaculating testosterone into his blood. Despite his skinny jeans and the shoes that my parents would call trendy, the guy looks like a bushranger who has travelled through time. I wonder if, when he’s getting ready in the morning—maybe brushing his beard, maybe coating it with a tiny blob of obscenely expensive wax called Adventure or some shit—if he is aware that his beard will leave behind a gory trail, like a bristly paintbrush dipped in crimson. 

Within six months of starting testosterone, hairs began to sprout above my lip: a soft, blonde down that my wavering vision had no chance of bringing into focus. I knew they were there only by touch: when I first ran my finger against the skin and felt the slight cushioning of fuzz my breath caught in my chest, as if I’d spotted a butterfly perched an inch from my hand and knew that to breathe would doubtlessly scare it away. Soon came the sheer sensory pleasure of shaving: sweeping gentle waveforms of creamy foam across my cheeks, pulling it away again in neat stripes, each pass of the razor like that of a sculptor’s chisel. Then the unbelievable ecstasy of a hand rubbed over a stubbled jaw: more a vibration than a sound, like a cat purring. 

But almost four years later, my facial hair had plateaued at a wispy little moustache above my upper lip, and I had become thoroughly accustomed to these phenomenological pleasures. When I looked at myself in the mirror, I saw not the vague smudge above my upper lip, not the sparse peppering of darker hairs across my cheeks and chin, but the great swathes of pink skin, the obscene nudity of my jaw, the lewdly exposed plumpness of my lips. I saw the diminutive warrior I had been allotted for my champion:  a soft-featured boy who looked barely to have scraped puberty.  

For a couple of months, I tried to bolster my epithelial productivity by smearing my face each night with a foul-smelling liquid marketed to treat male-pattern baldness. The active ingredient was minoxidil, and it came in a bottle with a little dropper. The instructions directed you to apply it to the scalp, but an alternative use was to smack it onto your cheeks and chin like aftershave.

 “I better not grow a beard!” My partner had cried once, when I’d kissed her after forgetting that I’d applied minoxidil a few hours previously. 

 Judging from my own experiences, the likelihood of that eventuality was low. The alleged benefits of minoxidil in stimulating facial hair growth have mostly been established by anecdotal evidence. The most notable exception came in 2016, when a study out of Thailand showed that 3% minoxidil significantly enhanced beard growth in 48 men when compared to a placebo.

The authors of this study, which was written as a letter to the editor of The Journal of Dermatology, were unambiguous when justifying their research: ‘beard enhancement’ they wrote, ‘improves masculine and attractive appearance, signalling dominance, strength and self-confidence’. I am ashamed to admit that my own motivations for pursuing the treatment were not much different—while I felt nothing but overjoyed by the sensations unlocked to me in the first-person, under the scalding gaze of others, I wished for more facial hair. No one would question Ned Kelly or insist to Abraham Lincoln that he was making a mistake. I could do with all the dominance, strength, and self-confidence I could get. But much to my disappointment, no miraculous proliferation of the follicles on my jawline could be discerned, and after a few months, it seemed pointless to continue the expensive and unpleasant regime. 

For my birthday that year, my partner gifted me a sleek black electric razor that didn’t require me to stand over the sink to rinse the blade after each stroke. I began to shave from my wheelchair, the mirror reflecting the empty space above my head. I shaved better by feel, anyway: with my eyes closed, tracing my fingers over the Braille of a holy text I’d almost forgotten. 

When I came out as trans to my family, my father responded by collecting dozens of scientific papers about transgender biology. He quietly deposited these as PDFs saved in a shared computer folder labelled Papers. I am certain that this campaign was fundamentally well-intentioned—in those dense columns of text, my father was attempting to express his acceptance, or at least his openness to acceptance. He was trying to tell me, to show me, that the transgender experience, at least of the rigidly binary variety, had biological veracity. I remember one such study, which claimed that functional MRI (fMRI) data revealed similar brain activity in transgender individuals and cisgender members of their “aspired gender”. When I read it, each sentence seemed to trail off in an ominous ellipsis. The “objective” delineation of how a transgender brain could work silently brought into existence it’s negative. Between each declaration of data was the shadow of its absence, the obscenity of its inversion. I instantly wondered if such patterns would be evident in my brain: if the enigmatic secrets within my skull would reflect what I felt as the truth?  

The opportunity to see inside my own skull came when I was twenty-one. Only, I did not see the painterly brushstrokes of the fMRI study, but the glowing silhouette of a tumour. It was likely benign but had begun to press on my optic nerve, hence the double vision that had sent me to the emergency room. If it wasn’t removed as soon as possible, it would doubtlessly cause what the doctors called “significant issues” (translation: blindness and death). The good news was that surgery alone should be curative, and I was very low risk for any complications. The most likely scenario was just a few days of nausea and the inevitable discomfort of a surgical wound. I would only need to stay in the hospital for a couple of days before I was back to normal. 

As one glance at me will reveal, the most likely scenario failed to arrive. I shouldn’t have been surprised. I should have recognised the cloying incense of statistical premonition, the prayer-like chanting of averages and norms, and prepared myself for the worst. To move, to breathe, to reveal oneself as a living human being rather than a statue, was to fall, to tumble down the steep slope of the bell curve. 

Without the orientating pole of the normal, my entire prognosis became uncertain. Would I walk again? Would my vision correct itself? The doctors could only shrug. I was lost, a lonely data point adrift in the negative space beyond statistical expectation. 

“How’s that?” The barber asks, and I answer in an octave lower than my normal voice. 

“That’s great. Cheers, mate.” He unfastens the cape and I wheel to the register—the cheerful ding of my card against the machine sounding like something from a video game—and then I leave. 

Outside, it seems unbelievable that I have escaped. It seems absurd that I am alive, that this queer, trans, disabled body is permitted to exist in the same world where candy cane poles still decorate the street.

I think of the barbershop on the main street of my childhood town. The image I see is two-dimensional, flattened like a photograph. I imagine I see a version of me: a man who is handsome in an overwrought kind of way, with darkly stubbled cheeks and two thickly muscled legs sticking out from below his satin gown. His eyes did not follow mine, did not regard me with familiar tenderness or the bubbling heat of loathing or, in fact, anything at all. They are the painted-on eyes of a doll—hollow, lifeless. His form flickers, and through his skin, I can see the faded vinyl of the barbershop chair, the pale-yellow light. He begins to fade. I know that he will not disappear entirely, but I will become used to seeing him as he is: blurred, slightly translucent, and totally unimportant.

Eva Hale is a young Australian writer and poet, currently based out of Hobart, Tasmania. She has several publications under her belt, including several features in Pure Slush, The Platform Project Magazine, and Togatus. She has been a state finalist in the Australian National Poetry Slam in 2021, winner of the Platform Project in 2021 and a winner of ASA Tasmanian Writers and Illustrators Mentorship Program in 2022, wherein she has been studying under mentor Mark Macleod in 2023. She completed her Bachelor of Arts majoring in English and Writing at the University of Tasmania in 2023 and is currently the Editor-in-Chief at the UTAS student magazine, Togatus.

puppy/love/story

It accumulates over months. Small teasing gestures and outright teasing that simmers with a yearning that tugs at my chest. There are inside jokes about his flaccid bowl-cut and my unruly baby hairs that curl around my forehead in the humidity. I am still somewhat shiny and new to town after moving in with my father. He is desperate for any sort of spark after a damning childhood as the chubby kid. It is tragic and brutal, the way we twist together. It is the cruellest part of me that I can never undo. 

At the ancient theatre in town, I drag my best friend along on what I am worried is my first date with him. We arrive early, and in the disappearing light of dusk, I spot him with a group of friends. They are all popular and clique and known-each-other-since-kindergarten. I have always kept my chin tucked around them. He pretends not to notice me, so I duck away in a cavern of the wooden structure. The custard yellow paint is cracked with moisture and pulling away from the timber. The theatre is almost one hundred years old, apparently, and proudly advertises being held together by over two-hundred and fifty-thousand nails, which I find peculiar. When I first visited the establishment with my previous best friend (the turnaround is fast in these early days of high school), I whispered to her as we stood in front of the counter, “I wonder who was counting.”

My current best friend stares past my shoulder as she leans against a lamppost. “He’s staring at you,” she tells me. But when I turn, he is talking to the pretty girl on the swim team. 

I pay for our tickets, as she is both crabby and thrilled to be dragged along to watch the new Captain America. “We haven’t even seen the first one,” she whines as we drape in the canvas camper chairs and wait for the low-budget local advertisements to begin. 

“I’m sure we can pick it up.” I tell her, but I myself am deflated at the thought of watching a superhero movie separate from the boy who invited me. He is with his group up the front, and we are tucked up the back, terrified of addressing the elephant in the room. Several times, I hear the deep echo of his voice, laughing. 

After forty minutes, my friend and I have made a game of the film, cracking jokes every time an action scene occurs and picking apart the viability of the plot. We are insufferable and squawking with pubescent giggles when I notice him duck out of the row and skirt the perimeter of the seating area. I fall silent as my heart thumps in my chest, staring straight ahead at Chris Evans, who is flirting with Scarlet Johanson. Even when he falls into the seat beside me, I don’t look away from the screen. I don’t remember what we whisper about, but I remember that he nervously stares at my mouth and the side of my face as my body threatens to tear in two from the tension of it. When he retreats to his group of friends, I stare at his back, hunched over as he tries not to block the screen. 
 
 
On our actual first date, we return to the old theatre. The ceiling arches in a massive bell curve, framing his shape as he leans against the posters of what’s showing. We watch a romcom that I don’t really find funny or romantic, and our hands drift closer and closer together until, in the last few minutes, our pinkies overlap with an electric simplicity. 

Someone from the grade above us calls him Joshua and he doesn’t correct her. Neither do I. When his dad is waiting in the car to pick him up, I feel dejected and slightly put-off by it. Other kids relying on their parents has always felt embarrassing to me. I have taken to walking everywhere, even in the pouring rain. My father wakes up late and starts drinking early. At night, I walk through the haunted oval littered with needles and I scan the shadows with unblinking eyes. I pretend to yearn for nothing, as I am worried that asking for anything will make me seem weak. Or worse, it will land me back with my mother. 
 
After barely a month of us officially ‘going-out’, he tells me that he loves me at the sports carnival. I glare at him as my friends look away, wide-eyed and uneasy. How could he put me on the spot like this, in a crowd of people? 

Cold and annoyed, I say, “No, you don’t.”

He insists and insists as I push him away from me. He clings onto my knees, tenderly, like a lifeline as I scowl at him. I kick my sneakers into the red clay of the slope we sit on, adamant on ignoring him. He wilts and sulks into me, desperate for a crumb of affection. 
 
 
At school, everyone says that he is wrapped around my finger. His doting, although irritating and demanding of attention, fills me with a clean, crisp wholeness. When people ask his name, he tells them mine first. It is thrilling to have someone so devoted to me after a childhood of dejection and loneliness, of being warned that the foster home is a phone call away.

I have figured out how to kick the dog and keep it coming back for more.

I take his foggy-eyed puppy love and I grind it into a paste of bones and blood and sinew. When he watches me as though I am his entire world, I decide that this is both lovely and annoying. How stupid he is, I think. How blind to the gritty and violating truth of loving someone. At just fourteen years old, I am jaded, and he is not, and I decide that this is a crime worth punishing. 
 
 
One night, he tells me that his mother used to date some really scary men. He tells me that he would have to watch as they hit her, and he was too small to do anything. He felt so powerless, and he tells me that sometimes, he still feels that way. When I ask if the men ever did anything to hurt him, he says no. I don’t remember what I say in response, but I am sure it is bad. 
 
 
I am so deeply embarrassed by my attachment to him that I keep him a secret for as long as possible. When my older sister pesters me about my pubescent love life, I easily slip into a hard, marble version of myself. After almost six months, I finally give in. Regret fills me immediately, as this secret vulnerability spills over to her boyfriend, our other sisters, even our mother. I am mortified, disgusted, humiliated. 

Withdrawn and frigid, I hold myself out of reach. Still, he reaches and caresses and reassures me, like I am a scruffy alley cat suspicious of a dish of milk. 

After a trivia night fundraiser in the school gymnasium, I leave the bright lights and pressing discomfort of mixing teenagers with the general public. He walks me toward an eerily empty Kiss & Go Zone, a few steps behind. My body fills with heavy, viscous dread as I see the headlights of my sister’s car pull into the lot. Of course, I realise, my father would never have been in a state to drive so late. 

“You can go now,” I assure, trying to proverbially shake him off. As always, he insists and dotes, wanting to make sure I get to the car safe. It is gentlemanly and chivalrous and irritating like an itch that has been scratched to a wound but still has the audacity to itch. 

My sister shouts hello to him, and my body becomes rigid. He kisses me on the cheek and pulls away, but she objects. 

“Give her a real kiss!” She bellows from the driver’s seat, and I’m petrified that the crowd in the gymnasium might hear. He seems equal parts ecstatic and frightened at the prospect of sharing our first kiss here, now. His eyes are wide and longing, searching mine. I look past him, at the railings lining the cement footpath, the kind that leave an unavoidably sharp and bitter metallic scent when touched. The footpath around the school is covered by a tin roof to protect from the almost constant cover of rain. The assault of raindrops rattles in my ears, the perfume of it heavy in the wet air. I can even smell the tinny whisper of the railings if I focus hard enough. The shadows from the headlights stretch and claw at everything behind him, but when I close my eyes to block it out, I think he mistakes this for a permission.
 
 
Almost a year passes between us. At the old theatre, we see movies as an excuse to make out and whisper adorations to one another. I squeak and moan as he kisses my neck, making the entire audience squirm with discomfort. In the everchanging shadows of the theatre, we are mostly symbiotic. In the dark, I let myself fall into it the way I think I’m supposed to. 

It’s here that, after months of alluding and implying, I tell him that I love him. I have avoided it for so long, spurring on a narrative of being too afraid to say the exact words. I don’t know when I decide that I can’t draw it out any longer. In a way, it feels like a mercy, despite being the cruellest lie I could spin. Outside of the movie theatre, I am robotic and cold with him. I drive him to desperate frustration and then dare him to break up with me (a sort of pleading). He never does. I am so far removed from him, yet am drawn to sinking my roots even deeper, clinging on to a half-dead thing. I am skin over bones with a gnawingly sweet disposition. I have run out of superficial ways to keep him enamoured with me. 

And so, in the dank concave cavern of the decrepit movie theatre, I finally say the words, so ridiculously long after he first gave his heart to me. I do this because, after so long, I am certain that it should be true. I am also almost certain that it is not. 
 
 
“Do you want to break up?” His voice shakes, quiet in the forest. 

I have been trying to say it for half an hour, opening and closing my mouth like a jittery fish as I avoid his eyes. I couldn’t even do this without his undercurrent of support. I stare at the roots gnarled, twisting out of and back into the dirt. I toy with a stick, some grass, anything to keep my hands busy. I’ve been wanting this for a long time, frightened of the tired familiarity of our relationship. I am repulsed by any hint of my soft underbelly. He met my mother recently, and that hot brand of shame that pressed into me made me sure that we had reached our end. 

I nod, unable to form words. We stay silent for a long time, and I can feel him concave but say nothing. He walks me home, and when we go to part ways, I awkwardly jut out my hand for him to shake. He stares at it for a moment, then smiles affectionately, the skin around his eyes crinkling in a way only meant for me. His eyes are so sleepily sad, like he’s waiting to wake up from a horrible dream. I cannot tell if I’m the horrible dream or me leaving him is the horrible dream. 

The grief knots itself into my body until I am a fabric of it. It does not feel the way I want it to feel, the way I expected it to feel. Something gluey and saccharine emerges from the cracks, something that instils me with fear. Early the next morning, I call him, feeling hysteric. I don’t understand why I’m doing this. It’s not fair to him. I do it anyway.

He picks up on the second ring. 

“Hey,” he says, soft. 

“Hey.” I reply, struggling to find the words. After a long time, I ask, “How are you?”

 He laughs, once. “Um,” 

“Sorry, I mean,” I inhale, shake my head. “Are you going to school today?”

“Yeah,” he says, still soft, “Are you?”

“Yeah.”

I sit on this for a moment. I truly had expected him to skip after yesterday. A small part of me bristles at this; have I not broken him completely? Do I not have the power to do even that? I try to push this thought away.

When I tell him that I think we should just go on a break, he is relieved. I tell him that I need space. That I need to work on myself to be better for him. That I haven’t been good, and I want to be better. It’s usually quite easy to convince him, so that’s not too impressive. The impressive part is that I manage to convince myself. 
 
 
I have always been frigid and avoidant of intimacy, and sexual intimacy is no exception to that. I’ve been clear about this with him, and he’s never pushed me, but there is a quiet yearnful tug from him. It grates on me. Once, he asks if he can move my bra strap while kissing my shoulder and I become detached and cold, pulling away from him completely. The thought of sex is a daunting and ever-present fear I try desperately to avoid. 

At this point, I aware that there is something wrong with me, but I cannot comprehend what it is. I find the world’s obsession with sex grotesque and distorted. I cannot look directly into the face of it, I am constantly averting my eyes. At this point, I have been assaulted many times, but will not remember for several years to come. I am terrified of my own ever-changing body. Thus, I am repulsed by him trying to love it. 

When he asks why I wanted to break up with him, I tell him that I wanted to kill myself, but didn’t want him to feel guilty about it. This is both true and untrue. He tries to hold me, panicked at the possibility of losing me, grappling at the second chance, but it doesn’t reach me. I have felt so alien for so long, so far removed from everyone else. I am worried about this, so I lean into him, trying to be more upset than I feel. It’s like I am calcified, cut off from the whole world, lost in a tomb of myself. 
 
 
I do not understand how he can love me like I do not understand how my father ever loved my mother. My poor mother. Her screaming furies and cold indifference. Her cheekbones. Her pestering phone calls and threatening affection. To me, he is something of a gross experiment and I am dismayed by the outcome. If he can still want me after all I’ve done to him, I can still want my mother. 
 
 
I break up with him again, over text, one month before I turn sixteen. I am terrified that once I am the age of consent, he will expect me to have sex with him. It is callous and cruel and easy because I know that if I wait to do it in person, I will be too much of a coward. Again. 

The new school year is bitter. It is clear he still loves me and is furious about it. He glares at me, and I glare at him. We spit acid at one another, with me petrified that he will make me look weak or vulnerable, and him inconsolably heartbroken. We are the picture of a young love gone sour, the two people who are not put in a room together. In classes, he is sullen and resentful. He flirts with my friends to get my attention and I look at him like he is an ugly wound that won’t close. We are not fair to each other. 

In these years after, he breaks his leg and drops out of school midway through our final year. I starve myself and attempt suicide half a dozen times. My body is stubborn and refuses to let go. On his last day, the class asks me to write the farewell card because I have nice handwriting. I wonder if he notices.

In the narrowing months wherein we still inhabit the same small-town-planet, there is a moment of indignation in which I harshly admit to a girl in my class that I never loved him (I did have love for him, I’m sure. I hated so much of him but loved the feeling of being so blindly adored. I had cared for him deeply, I think; a regretful and pitying fondness). At a party I’m not invited to, she gets drunk and this secret spills over into the textile of the student body, drenching him in renewed despair and humiliation. It is only now that I begin to feel sorry for him, for what I’ve done. After I have delivered this final, gut-wrenching blow to a boy who made the mistake of falling for me, I see myself for the snarling animal I’ve always been. So frightened of losing control that I will create the illusion of it wherever possible. When I see an old photograph of us together, I realise that I’ve grown to look a lot like my mother. 

Monique Nair is a Melbourne/Naarm based writer of Indian-Italian-Polish heritage. She is a screenwriter for My Melbourne, an upcoming anthology film produced by Mind Blowing Films and supported by VicScreen and Screen Australia. She is the co-editor of Mascara Literary Review’s debut anthology, Resilience (2022), published with Ultimo Press. She is an alumni of the West Writers program with Footscray Community Arts and her writing has been published in Kill Your Darlings, Voiceworks, Peril and The Indian Weekly. She has performed or presented at Emerging Writers’ Festival and National Young Writers’ Festival.

Photograph: Gianna Rizzo
 
 
To the Languages

To the languages that died crossing the sea and I never inherited: Malayalam, Hindi, a northern Italian dialect and Polish. I miss you. I long for you.  I mourn your loss – as if languages can get lost and die in the gap between parent and child. But in reality, you were never really mine.

Were you? It’s not like I ever fluently held you on my tongue or you were intentionally passed down like a family heirloom or a birthright. But you always felt so near – a familiarity unparalleled to other foreign languages.

So then perhaps you didn’t really die crossing the sea; you survived the journey, the aftermath, but not the endurance to the next generation. As if the seas made you sterile – unable to breed yourself into existence for the next generations to come.

I was born into a colonial English-speaking country, on unceded land holding so many languages itself, some faded, some on the edges of survival, some revitalizing, some thriving. Born to an English-speaking mother, who sometimes speaks English in a kind of Italian rhythm but carries the death of Italian and Polish forever at the tip of her tongue from migrant parents who spoke to each other in their languages but only English to their children. And to my father whose tongue twists in multiple Indian languages but speaks a polished brand of colonial English – a result of his English medium Mumbai schooling: a remnant of colonial days and the illusion of Western supremacy.

So, it was only English he passed on. Unrealised mother tongues faded to ‘unnecessary’ and too hard to teach and maintain amongst pervasive English and without community.

But, I love English too – it’s the only language I truly inhabit and express through, yet it doesn’t always feel like enough.

When we are born, we have all the languages in the world. Our ears have the capacity to distinguish every sound in every human language, but depending on our surroundings our range reduces and we are conditioned not to notice the subtle differences between consonants that don’t exist in English but are integral in Hindi. In that way, not feeding children a language takes away from their born ability.

But I can’t resent my parents, my grandparents – there are forces beyond them, validity to their choices, and I always have my own agency to learn a language myself.

I was still offered languages – washed over by Hindi in a childhood dancing and singing to Bollywood songs, learned to say ‘hot water’ and ‘cold water’, count and muster greetings in Hindi and recite Sanskrit prayers. My tongue’s muscle memory will always find the Gayatri mantra, although I could never tell you what each word means unless I pull up a definition I found on a WhatsApp forward image.

As a teenager I cultivated an affinity for Italian to roll off my tongue in songs when I found Jazz and my grandfather’s Dean Martin records and CDs and tried to learn all the words to ‘Volare’ and ‘That’s Amore’. Jazz ebbs and flows in syncopated currents, sprawling and shifting between languages – English and Italian – and I was teeming with pride that many of the 1950s/60s jazz greats were Italian and I had one quarter belonging to that diaspora.

Or, perhaps no claim at all with only one to ten in Italian and a handful of greetings and nouns. My teenage bedroom singing: a hollow illusion in tumbling tongue rolls and wavy vowels.

(And, I’m not even sure I would recognise Polish if I heard it)

Yet still, there are Hindi songs I can recall – the instrumentals start and the forthcoming words emerge in the corners of my mind, intangible to my tongue, in inarticulate knowing. Sometimes my tongue can stumble through them, embodied memory, but unknown meaning. And at times I hear conversation and I understand words I forgot I knew but would be forever terrified to say aloud and mispronounce. It’s all disparate fragments that can never amount to the full existence of language – never fully carried on these rhythms, just transiently suspended in fleeting waves of sound.

To the languages that crossed the sea – perhaps you did survive, and you’re still here with me. Except, it’s a subdued existence on the peripheries.

CB Mako is a non-fiction, fiction, and fan-fiction writer. Winner of the Grace Marion Wilson Emerging Writers Competition, shortlisted for the Overland Fair Australia Prize, and longlisted for the inaugural Liminal Fiction Prize, Cubbie has been published in The Suburban Review, Mascara Literary Review, The Victorian Writer, Peril Magazine, Djed Press, Overland, Kill Your Darlings, Liminal Fiction Prize Anthology (Pantera Press, November 2020), Growing Up Disabled in Australia (Black Inc Books, February 2021) and Resilience Anthology (Ultimo Press, November 2022).

An Existential Age

An existential age, a particular number, felt like levelling up, achievement unlocked.
Thanks to modern medicine, you outlived your maternal grandmother, who passed the inherited hypertension to you.

Thus, at this existential age, you want to celebrate. You made it the halfway mark, despite the invisible complications and myriad of medications. 

You even make all the preparations for food and feast – but still end up washing the dishes and cleaning up after the mess from your household. 

The Household eats and devours but refuses to sing ‘Happy Birthday!’ or even allow you the pleasure to blow the candle on your tiny birthday gluten-free cake. 

All this because your natal day is also the anniversary of your father-in-law’s death. 

Your household’s patriarch refuses to give you the satisfaction of celebrating.

Instead, you go out to the city for the first time since the pandemic. 

You saved up a lot, to tick a bucket-list: your first ever Afternoon High Tea in the city with fellow disabled, queer femme parent. You never had the opportunity to dress up and experience until your existential age – all this while constantly reminding your household via sms how to care for your disabled child.

And at this milestone age, you are now expected – required even – to travel overseas to the land of your birth, because ‘Pandemic is Over’ – while ableist relatives ignore and not acknowledge the immunocompromised, Disabled child is among your household members,

That you have #LongCOVID, too. Their denial is strong, ‘It’s just like a flu’, refusing to give you agency. 

Instead, they chide and diminish your bucket-list experience with ‘And I have had many high teas with my friends,’
and then she travels overseas to watch a K-pop concert on the very same week
you barely had capacity to feed the hangry household. 

Two individuals
of such different worlds,
from two different cities,
yet shared the same womb.

*

Remember that time when you told your relatives at a recent reunion that you’re autistic? Everyone burst out laughing and you don’t even know why.

*

You take a casual Work From Home (WFH) role to feed the household, to meet rental payments.
Poverty plunges you deeper into debt to keep the hangry household fed.
The additional income was to append the meagre carer payment and low-income earnings of the patriarch.
And yet, you are penalised by Services Australia. They reduce your carer payment. 

*

You’re not eligible for NDIS because your autism (even with a co-morbidity), under the DSM-5 is only level one. You are not qualified for DSP despite having multiple underlying conditions, and Hard-of-Hearing.

*

Meanwhile, the man-child buys fake Lego sets to build the Star Wars Razor Crest; In the patriarch’s inner world, there is no such thing as financial abuse.

*

Meanwhile, ableists don’t know the extent of the damage of #LongCOVID, D Dimer test showed that you have blood clots. Your family GP recommended that you go to the hospital for tests. But who will care for your immunocompromised child?

‘You will die,’ the doctor says. And your mobile phone line goes dead.

*

But you forge on, as life goes on.

The FVIO respondent continues the circular abusive pattern:

– passive aggressive
– walking on eggshells
– hyperawareness

You prepare for the next arts gig via Zoom [to pay for incurred debt of BNPLs],
to feed & clothe growing teenagers,
while you carry the weight of unpaid labour,
of unsupported, non-NDIS level one autism, of multiple underlying conditions,
of diminished carer payment
of deteriorating organ functions due to #LongCOVID,

You put your mask on – autistic masking is deeply embedded.

You live another day,

to survive,

fight,

and advocate,

against racism, ageism, ableism.

Because whiteness is structural
Because #DisabilitySoWhite.

You shout into the void.
Hoping someone out there will listen.

Liel (she/they) is a writer, trainer, Psychologist (Provisional) and a disability and justice advocate based in Naarm. Her work is published in ABC Arts, MamaMia, the anthology We’ve Got This published by Black Inc. and Scribe UK, and Hireup, amongst others. Liel was the 2022 editor of Writing Place magazine, and is the creator and host of the (Un)marginalised podcast. She not-so-secretly enjoys singing along to the Frozen soundtrack with her kids, and is somewhat fixated on parenting related humour. Find out more about Liel’s work on her website and follow her attempts to keep up with social media via @LielKBridgford.

Marble Track 

I slice a piece of me out and quickly amend the rest, the icing dropping around my layers in the heat of the moment. Presenting myself on an ornamented plate to another, pushing away that piece alongside the feeling of Other. 

I taught myself to push things down so well that at times nobody can tell it is happening, myself included. I can even laugh at jokes that the whole of me doesn’t find funny, because that part of being a person doesn’t go together with the rest. It is too complicated, and my father warned a boyfriend once that I like to take the hard way forward. 

What neither of them understood, nor ever will truly understand, is that I cannot fit into the easy way. The path they are describing has been created for perfectly made creatures. This path is like the present that someone who doesn’t have children bought my eldest: a narrow and precise marble track. But I am not a marble, more like a kubebah, a word that in my first language means a fat, uneven, hand-made ball-like mass. A kubebah can easily disintegrate, especially upon throwing at something, or someone. 

Lots of people are like marbles, and they travel round the track effortlessly, at times carelessly. I have never got on track, not because of lack of desire or the stubbornness my father refers to, nor due to lack of effort. I have laboured to become a marble using any weapon or tool at my disposal: controlling my food intake and energy usage, censoring my language, hiding parts of my physical body, accentuating others, surrounding myself with marbles, acting like I am one. I followed the direction of this track for years, looking up at it like an elevated rail and wondering what people travelling up there were feeling. 

I spent the better parts of my life wishing I was somebody else, more marble-like, more perfect or right. And each time I looked up, the shame inside me grew. That shame became so large that it stopped being distinguishable from me, it had invaded all my organs and crawled up from the pit of my stomach all the way up and around my throat. 

The best decision I made was to throw myself against some things, and watch me and the shame fall apart just enough so I could see it. It had a dark purple colour not dissimilar to my open flesh, and distinguishable only by its pace. It moved and grew quickly in front of my eyes when we were both splattered on the floor.

Then with the help of fellow kubebahs I collected myself, and left the shame behind. Without my flesh, and in the sunlight, it dries up. When I moved away from the shadow of the marble path and into the open air and sun of my endless possibilities, I set myself free. 

People still look down at me sometimes and ask why I am not up there where they are, but now I am moving through my own path, and unlike a marble track, it only goes upwards. 

Every day I do a little less cutting out, and serve more of myself to the world as I am: the disabled me, the gender non-conforming me, the immigrant me, the atheist me, the culturally Jewish me, the politically radical me, the dreamer me, the parent me. I am a proud kubebah. 

Javeria Hasnain is a Pakistani poet and writer, a Fulbright scholar, and an MFA student at The New School, NY. Her prose and poetry have appeared/is forthcoming in Poet Lore, The Margins, Isele, and elsewhere. She was a runner-up for the 2022 The Bird in Your Hands prize and an honorable mention in the 2022 Penrose Poetry Prize. She currently works at Cave Canem and reads poetry for Alice James Books. She has received support from Tin House Workshops, The Kenyon Review, Sundress, and International Writing Program.

 
 
 
BRIDE

Every evening in Ramzan, alone in my Bed-Stuy apartment kitchen, I pick three bananas, an apple, a peach, and an orange. I slice the bananas, dice the apple and peach, mix them in a small tupperware that belonged to the previous tenant. I punch a hole in the orange and squeeze its juice directly into the fruit mix. I let loose in the melodic tunes of Sabri brothers’ Tajdar-e-haram—grip the orange harder as it creates more holes, filling my palms with pulp that drips, drop by drop, into the mix. I don’t care for the seeds or the grime that infiltrates my otherwise purified delicacy.

Every evening during this small ritual, I think of Mama, my aunt, the eldest of all seven siblings who cooked the best food. No one could return from her home hungry or underwhelmed. Every Ramzan, she called everyone at least once for iftar. I have the most vivid memory of her making fruit chaat, squeezing the orange into the fruit mix with naked hands, grime mixing with pulp. She didn’t care for the seeds either. 

I was an unhappy child and only I knew that. I was embarrassed by my father’s hiroof van and preferred going and coming back with other friends in their regular-roofed cars. I was embarrassed by my small home and never invited any of my friends over. So whenever I saw Mama, I fixated on things she lacked, which were (to my defense) abundant. What was more surprising to me was that she never did.

She had a love-marriage at 25 to a Navy Captain. She recalled with an arrogance peculiar to her how all the neighborhood girls and her cousins, even her aunts, were extremely jealous of her. Owing to the long stretches of work in the Navy, her husband used to be away for weeks, sometimes, even months. He left for work one day, and never returned. She never married again. 

After my nana passed away, she kept shifting to various apartments, never living in any one for more than a year, tagging her brother that she cared for along as well. At one point during this five-year-long cruise, maybe in the third year, she stopped unpacking most of the stuff. Cupboards were replaced by cartons and beds by air mattresses. Whatever little room for furniture the apartment provided remained empty. Her dark circles had deepened further and light-spots occurred unevenly on her face, probably because of smearing very old, often expired, make-up products that she bought from the local Sunday bazaar.

She was keen about appearing pretty. She always dressed nicely and scolded my mother and khala when they didn’t. Several times she handed me or my sister, whoever was nearer, a hair plucker (a staple of her make-up bag) to clean out her chin or upper lip or the middle part of the eyebrow, just above her nose. Oh, she absolutely loved her nose! She wore a little pea-sized gold nose ring shaped like a flower. It was a joy to watch her put on make-up before leaving for the office. Dressed in a lilac & pink Pakistan International Airlines (PIA) uniform, hair tied in a tight bun secured with a black net, black pumps with heels—she looked exquisite. After she left, the smell of her make-up and perfume lingered around the apartment for hours. 

Mama—that’s how every kid in my family addressed my aunt—worked at PIA as a Boarding Officer at Jinnah International airport in Karachi. She received a discount coupon book for the airport McDonald’s and the breakfast lounge at the start of every month, which she spent all on her siblings and their children. Almost every weekend, we gathered at her place and went to the bus-stop to wait for the 4K bus. It was a thrilling adventure. I always felt anxious that somebody would be left behind in the bus because they were not vigilant and the bus only paused for three seconds at a stop before it sped up again. The drivers do not care about anyone. Karachi bus-riding is a high-stakes game, everyone is looking out for only themselves. If you are not fast enough, you will end up at Saddar even though you journeyed out for Nazimabad. Although, when she had money, we took a taxi. Amma usually offered to pay the taxi fare, “bachhon ko taxi mein le jao,” a gesture we all anticipated, and welcomed when it came, including Mama. After all, the taxi took us all the way to McDonald’s, whereas, the nearest bus-stop to the airport was a good 15 minute walk away. 

My cousins and I spent many weekends at her apartment, nights sleeping like sardines on separate mattresses joined together. She woke up early in the morning to pray fajr, and immediately afterwards, switched on the TV to 9XM, the Bollywood music channel, still sitting, cross-legged on her prayer mat, her fingers rolling one bead after the other of the tasbih. We woke up, one by one, irritated at the noise getting louder, the sun shining directly on our skin, piercing the eyes. When we protested she closed the curtains and turned off the TV so we could sleep in peace, she laughed. Then she said, “if you go back to sleep, no parathas for you.” And none of us were stupid enough to say no to her parathas. 

Mama was the only one interested in our teenage love lives, and the only one we weren’t scared to tell them to. On weekends with her, we stayed up through the night talking about the people we had a crush on and stalking them on Facebook. In return, Mama told us about hers. She was so nonchalant about the men—like those heroines you see in Bollywood films. Too cool for the boys. Casual and unbothered, and secretly playing hard to get. I could still sense some sadness in how she talked, so dissociated from herself, as if recounting a story from a past life, or of another person. She never told us about her husband or her marriage. And we knew better than to ask. 

As I was growing up, my relatives, including distant cousins, started saying I resembled Mama. One of my aunts used to say I looked more like Mama than my own amma. The same round face, a delicate nose piercing, the penchant to appear beautiful. I got offended at such comments, even though I knew they were true.  

In the summer of 2015, she announced she could no longer live in Karachi. She told my mother and khala that she was bored. We had also grown older and busier with studies taking priority, and didn’t visit her as often. Her friends had also moved to other cities and countries. “Moreover,” she said, “there are financial issues. And I am tired of having to move houses every year.” 

A month later, she took my mamu, the brother she cared for, and moved to Rawalpindi. Her office relocated to the Benazir Bhutto International Airport in Islamabad. She said the pay was better and she had two friends living with their families in the same apartment building. Her other brothers weren’t happy with her decision and persuaded her to come back. When she remained firm on her decision, they distanced themselves from her.

 Mama often called my mother to tell her about the weather in Islamabad or its tasteless food and ask what she had made for lunch. She occasionally messaged me to ask about the meaning of a difficult English word or phrase, to which I always responded only hours later, with an irritation peculiar to teenagers. She often said she missed us, but she was building a life for herself. She missed us but she did not want to come back. 

Early in 2016, Mama called to tell amma about a man she recently reconnected with. They had been friends for a long time who lost contact with each other due to adulthood and distance, both physical and otherwise. He was a veterinarian, divorced, and had two kids; a boy who was seven and a girl who was 15. Mama had developed a good relationship with her son, who now also called her “Mama.” Mama said he reminded her of me: the boy also loved reading and writing stories and topped his classes. 

On December 29 2016, I woke up to a loud scream. In the dining room, baba was holding amma’s one hand, while she cried holding a phone to her ear with the other. He asked me to switch on the TV in the next room. The little red ticker in the bottom of the news channel read one after another: “a hotel in Islamabad burned down,” “one casualty known,” “the body identified to be of a PIA employee.”

We were later told the fire erupted around 4am and that Mama died of suffocation from the resulting smoke. All the other guests had fled the building. A man who was staying in the next room told us they knocked at her door repeatedly to wake her up and help her escape. When they finally reached the room, they found her on the bathroom floor passed out. 

On New Year’s Eve, one of Mama’s brothers and his wife flew to Islamabad to bring back Mama’s body. She was brought back to Karachi, to one of her brothers’ homes. It was time to look at her and say goodbye. She looked so beautiful. Draped in the simplest white. She would have never liked it. I imagined her saying, “White is so boring! Bury me in red.” But of course she never said it. We never talked about death. We actually didn’t talk much at all. She never even told us about her navy husband. She never told us why she didn’t marry all these years. I never asked. I always thought I would have enough time to talk to her once I’m older.  

The day she was leaving for Islamabad, amma, I, and my sister had gone to drop her at the airport. There was still some time left in her flight, so she took us to McDonald’s to spend the last few coupons she still had. My sister and I bought Oreo McFlurries and amma and Mama bought soft serve vanilla. She looked at me while slurping her cone, her eyes glassy as if brewing tears, and kept looking for what seemed like a long time, her lips quaking steadily. She cried all the way walking to her terminal. 

Now, when she lay so still, all I wanted was to hear her laugh. I gawked at her as if drawing her inside my mind. I thought if I gazed at her long enough, I may always remember her face—round, high cheekbones, a protruding chin. Her lips, small and pink, like a baby’s. Her petite nose that she was extremely proud of, “Hum Nagpur waalon ki naak sabse achi hoti hai.” Every inch of her crystalline—no spots, no burns.

All of us who have left homes, families, countries—willingly or reluctantly—know it is devastating. Also liberating. I could not understand why I began thinking so much about Mama’s life as I was starting my own, in a new country, two oceans away from that of my birth. I understand now. We had more in common than we cared for. We both wanted to make something of our lives. 

On phone calls with amma, I hold back telling her how much I miss her. It’s true that I miss her. It is also true I do not want to go back. Now whenever I am flaneuring in the streets of Manhattan, kissing men I do not intend to kiss a second time, dancing to cheap Bollywood songs in bars, I feel her in myself and it makes me happy. This feeling comes after years of feeling myself in her, and being angry and sad because of it. 

Throughout Mama’s funeral processions, my amma and khala were told of how Mama was a shaheed. And martyrs never die. 

I continue to bear witness to her life. In my dreams, she is always dressed as a bride.  

Mohamed Irba / محمد (he/him/هو) is an Omani Lebanese cis man who came to Australia in 2007 at sixteen to study and stayed for safety. He is an active member of his communities and continues to explore the meaning of belonging in everyday life and the intersections of his identity as a Queer Arab person living with HIV.

Taaf طاف

I was 16 years old when I landed in Melbourne airport on a cold winter morning. I came to study but stayed for safety.

My new guardian was waiting to pick me up. “Your English is really good!” she said. I will never forget her surprise and relief that I could speak. I was bewildered by that as most people spoke English where I came from, and sometimes English would be the third or fourth language. It was more than a statement. It came with a history of society that looked at me as uncivilised and barbaric. I also had not experienced winter before and could not stop shivering. 

I wish I could hold my younger self now. I know he would never believe we could be writing a story like this one; telling my story to help others. I would not change any of my life experiences but I need to stop burying them deep inside where I cannot even remember them. If I do not speak of it, there can be no healing and I want to make sure my lessons are passed on to those who face similar challenges.

From the beginning, I had the responsibilities of the eldest son to carry. My culture puts so much pressure on the eldest son to be successful, study, get a well regarded job, marry and have many children. The parents are often called “Abu” and “Om” (name of eldest son) and it is very shameful if their son is not successful. These responsibilities meant additonal pressure. I was not “worldly” but I knew I was different and had to escape. I was the darkest out of my siblings and I was reminded of it daily. My mother tried to scrub the black out of me every day as a child. It did not work. If she knew about my difference, no doubt she would have tried to scrub that out too. Words like “queer” and “gay” were not in my vocabulary. Though it would be years before I learned, somehow I embodied them. In the sense of defiance, standing out, being strange and different. The words I did have were “haram”, “deviant”, and “pervert”. 

I had so many questions for my parents and the answer was always, “We do not talk about these things, do not ask again,” with fear in their eyes. I knew that my urges were seen as sinful, so I pushed and pushed until I could not feel them, but there was no end to the racism and colourism I experienced and saw. No end to consumerism and obsession with material things, money and brands. I hated the focus on class and family origins that were so rooted in the culture, and convinced myself I did not belong in my desert home.

There was a fairy-tale across the sea, and I pointed to it: freedom of speech, democracy, minimum wage, queerness, dressing as you please, everything you could want. 

Or so I thought, until I found my way here. Initially things were good, I loved the public transport and uncensored internet. Having access to all the knowledge I wanted and porn could not have come at a better time! I surfed websites such as gaydar.com, manjam, and manhunt and indulged the urge I couldn’t even name. It was like opening a big bucket of Maltesers and not being able to stop (which also happens). Despite the pleasure, these experiences still brought on extreme guilt. All the Islamic teachings from my parents and school did not suddenly go away. I felt like the worst person, that I was going to hell for sure. As my Islamic studies teacher taught me: “The fires of hell never stop and you will be tortured by their flames up until the brink of death only to be brought back again and go through the whole experience once more and more and more.” 

Yet this did not stop me, and I fell for every (white) boy under the sun. What I did not know is that chasing these fruits would bring so much sorrow. Using these hook-up apps and websites muddied my understanding of what I was feeling, and of love itself. What I wanted more than anything was validation, but for every gratifying reply to my messages, there were hundreds of others that went ignored or blocked. Sex became my new hobby. I never had hobbies growing up as studying was my only purpose. I was to become the successful first born son that would make my parents proud and that was drilled into me before I was even ten. But sex was so much fun. I kept a record of them all—43 in the first 30 days I would proudly boast! I did it with everyone: old, young, educated, rich, poor, but especially white as that is what I was taught counted as “beautiful”. It took 10 years to unlearn this toxic and damaging racism, a product of how I was brought up, a product of white supremacist ideology. 

Yet before I could unlearn the racism that plagued me, I practised it. I experienced it. Words like “sand monkey”, “N*****”, “curry muncher” (yes, I got the pleasure of receiving slurs for Arabs and South Asians too), “terrorist”, “takeaway”, and many more micro-aggressions. “What natio are you?” was the most common response I got. Brown skin stopped the white gaze at its place and resulted in a block. And still, I wanted their validation. I wanted a white prince to fulfil all my dreams and I would do anything for them. I was stereotyped, humiliated, and fetishized, yet I played along and laughed. The validation was too strong and I had nothing to fall back on anyway. 

I wanted to fit in. I wanted it all. I remember going to my first gay bar called “the X-change” in Melbourne, the energy and excitement. I stared at every person without a shirt on kissing another, or more. I stared at a freedom I’d never imagined. I had fun, took on the Australian culture of over-drinking, danced, partied and met many temporary friends. “Bad Romance” by Lady Gaga and “What’s my name?” by Rihanna were on repeat as I washed away the past with binge drinking and blacking out.

At some point, I developed my own way of “coming out”. In order not to be discovered by family and friends back home, I did not talk to them. I deleted them all from social media so as not to accidentally be tagged in a “gay” photo. I wanted it all but would not risk it all. Time to make new friends, I said. No time for homophobia. And by homophobia I meant my own culture. I did everything I could to block it off. Like it never existed. This is Australia. I stopped using my mother tongue, and wouldn’t use it consistently for at least ten years, until I even started to lose confidence speaking it. There are displacements forced upon us, and there are displacements we put upon ourselves. What I really needed was real friendship. But it would take another few years to realise that. 

My obsession with sex translated to what I thought was love and that was the beginning of many important life lessons. Relationships certainly started off strong and I insisted on moving in quickly even though I did not really know these men. I was seeking validation and safety in the wrong places again. The amount of emotional abuse I took on was compounding on my lack of self-worth and co-dependence. When I got my permanent residency through a de-facto relationship, his friends judged me and openly joked that I was an “overseas bride”. It reminded me of the white woman at the airport, the condescension. The way she spoke to me back on the first day I landed was that of an exotic being that she could not understand. The way they spoke to me now felt the same, as someone othered. I am not an Aussie and would never be, even as a resident. even as a citizen. I laughed it off as I have before. I knew it was wrong but I was so madly in love. Nine years later at the age of twenty seven, I finally ended the fairy-tale and saw reality. 

Nothing prepared me for the disillusionment, the sense of rootlessness, the loss of identity, survivor’s guilt, the helplessness when things go wrong. I was so alone and yet did not know it. Sex did not equal friendship. Sex did not equal love. Sex did not equal validation. White Patriarchal Supremacy is in place and I will never gain its approval, which I no longer want, nor its validation, which I do not need.

I think many of us seek to escape to the West for the fantasy of safety and freedom. We all have our own personal journeys and this is mine. Lately, I have started reconnecting with my culture through language, books, food, music, films, and visits where possible. Finding other Queer Displaced people to connect with has been magical to me. I have also started helping others still in the homeland through online support groups who provide advice and information. Activism is extremely difficult and dangerous as it can result in arrest and prison sentence, but small actions like providing support through the knowledge gained here or the people on the ground providing safe spaces and social connections can help. This is very important to me—through it I’ve regained a sense of my own identity and purpose. 

I am still not exactly sure what belonging means. This is my home now and a home should function as a safe haven for its occupants. I like to think I can still bring my culture to it. I do not have to assimilate in a way that erases me but rather, belong in a way that I can be proud of. With a long road ahead to acknowledging the history of this land and oppression facing First Nations peoples, I am grateful to be here. I am reminded of this not only by First Nations peoples but by others whose ancestors laid claim to the land. The colonial oppression continues here and overseas with our homelands continuing to suffer daily whether it is from real warfare or intergenerational and systemic damage caused by colonisation. We need to acknowledge as displaced people here that we are benefiting from stolen lands and colonisation, and that moving forward any progress has to benefit the First Nations peoples of this land and not come at their expense. 

I do not want to beg or claim a space where others are in power and I am not. We are already here. We are to be acknowledged as part of the conversation and more importantly as active members of decision making. 

There is freedom in being here and much to gain, but also loss. Loss does not go away easily. You do not have to disassociate from your cultures to belong. It’s a harder road but worth taking. Our existence is resistance, but we deserve more than to be seen only in opposition: we can and we will thrive.

I want to stand tall in front of you, I am a voice for others like me everywhere I go, and a changemaker. Speaking up is something I have struggled with as I sought to fit in and not cause waves. I am not afraid anymore; I look to the ocean which is not afraid of land, not afraid of itself. Waves that are powerful in unity and move where the sea goes. Waves that heal.

 
Note:
Taaf طاف: A word used in Khaleeji Arabic meaning to float but also as a means to brush someone off and not give them attention.

Maki Morita (she/they) is a Japanese-Australian writer and performance maker on unceded Wurundjeri country. Recent projects include dance piece (live art, Labour Lexica exhibition, Linden New Art, 2022) and Trash Pop Butterflies, Dance Dance Paradise (fortyfivedownstairs 2022, Theatre Works 2023). She is a 2022 Wheeler Centre Playwright Hot Desk Fellow and has appeared in events including National Young Writers Festival, Feminist Book Week and Yardstick.

SUBURBAN QUEERNESS / THE ANOMALY OF DANDELIONS

Threaded through primrose suburbs are the anomaly of dandelions, soon to be tucked away. As I child I thought dandelions were beautiful, and my parents would say Good! Pick those dandelions, we don’t want them in our backyard. I liked arranging their sunny halos over a vase, in my bedroom, in a similar fashion to roses or tulips.  

There’s nothing new about sweeping together (fairy)dust and stashing it away. After all there are hoarders, stamp collectors, and the like. My favourite thing is paper — I collect wrapping paper, tissue paper, clothing labels made with nice paper, magazine cut-outs, postcards… which mostly go unused. My mother would always say Why are you keeping these piles of rubbish! But to me they are not rubbish; they are keepsakes.

The thing is my mother also kept ‘rubbish’. She would carefully cut out shoeboxes to make draw dividers. Tissue boxes became pencil holders. There was the big plastic bag full of smaller plastic bags in our kitchen, because as most Asian mums will tell you, Plastic bags can be re-used for anything. However, the function and order of these refurbished items rendered them ‘acceptable’. For some, fading into the façade of white bread suburbia is a lifelong endeavour. 

For others, there is room to question this penchant for order. We can afford to peer into twists and gaps, to crawl into dark corners. In searching for lost glitter and stranger forms of beauty, we seek to embrace disfunction. Whether we realise it or not. Why marry for security? Why mow the lawn?  Why have sex for procreation? Why not wear a funny hat? 

And like this, we may become an anomaly in the way of dandelions. 

*

While anomalies coexist with suburbia, there are penalties for overgrowth. Take the case of a lone share house on a straight (in both senses of the word) tree-lined street, identifiable by its quintessential front-porch couch (with holes, slightly lopsided). This outlandish artefact teeters in the kind of place where white women wear lululemon leggings and overpriced t-shirts bearing slogans like ‘fitness gangster’. Where a war of attrition begins by occupying a resident’s regular parking spot. God knows why we lived there. 

Over many months of neglect, our section of the nature strip climbed above those of our neighbours. A woman once walked past and began tearing out the stalks with her bare hands. The anger this small patch of knee-high grass caused in her was initially amusing, then slightly alarming. She threw fistfuls of it onto the pavement, to little avail, then stalked off muttering annoyances. 

With overgrowth comes visibility, and with visibility comes the pressure to either admit to noncompliance or trim it away. As an adult, embracing this visibility is akin to queer puberty — the protracted youth and delayed hooliganism that comes with comfortably fitting into your skin a beat (or two) after adolescence. In this sense, there is a certain freedom to leaving bushy sprawls rather than manicuring neat hedges. 

Like dandelion wreaths, the throwaway remnants of suburban maintenance can be weaved into something new. While delicate and ephemeral, they may gather again and again over time, like the joy of coming together in the queer underground. The act of shimmering bright comes with the threat of being uprooted. Yet it is precisely this daring act that can allow for the birth of reverie, of a dreamlike space crafted by collective outlandishness. 

*

Towards the end of its life, the dandelion turns to seed, and at this late stage it acquires a strange usefulness: wishful thinking. What was once an enemy of the suburban lawn becomes a novel means of articulating desire. Children are encouraged to blow the aged dandelion’s wispy seedlings into the sky. To close your eyes and make a wish. This way we learn about ambition, hope, everyday magic. And so the possibility of something different is instilled in the fantasy of youth. Within the rigid outlines of suburban lawns, clouds of lust are sent floating upwards.

Ironically, this human act assists with spreading seeds so that more young dandelions can grow, who will then be treated as pests by much of the human population. That is, unless they survive gardening days and careless shoe tramples to make it till old age. Why is it that this object of otherness requires the passing of time to prove its unique worth? Or is it precisely the unwantedness of dandelions that make them a suitable thing to send scattering with a mere breath, on which to attach our runaway desires?

Our relationship with magical thinking in many ways defines suburban queerness. The experience of growing up while dreaming of something seemingly distant. A lingering sense of being an anomaly, and looking for the right place to sprout petals. This continuous search keeps us in a state of permanent adolescence, always wishing, defying, and sprawling over, to the great disgruntlement of some. 

Luke Fischer is the author of the poetry collections Paths of Flight (Black Pepper, 2013) and A Personal History of Vision (UWAP, 2017), the monograph The Poet as Phenomenologist: Rilke and the “New Poems” (Bloomsbury, 2015), and the book of bedtime stories The Blue Forest (Lindisfarne Books, 2015). He recently co-edited the  volume of essays  Rilke’s “Sonnets to Orpheus”: Philosophical and Critical Perspectives (Oxford University Press).

I am currently living in Tübingen, Germany, and these reflections on the coronavirus crisis have been shaped by the situation in Europe and considerations of the overarching similarities between the way in which numerous countries worldwide have been responding to the crisis. Although they are now being eased, the lockdowns in Germany have, in many respects, been more restrictive than in Australia, but not as severe as in Italy or France. Wherever one investigates, there are many gray areas and uncertainties around Covid-19, yet much of the public discourse has tended to reiterate one narrative. This essay is an attempt to ask and open up some vital questions.

––Luke Fischer, 16 May 2020

If an alien arrived on the earth sometime in April 2020 and, being already fluent in a number of languages, familiarised himself with the latest reports and news, he could be forgiven for coming to some of the following conclusions.

Human beings were virtually immortal creatures until a deadly new virus––Covid-19––spread across the world and became the greatest threat to human existence. This surmise would be confirmed by his first conversations with other human beings at a respectable distance of 1.5 metres.

After reading some history books on the twentieth and twenty-first century, and a little Sartre, he might identify a glaring example of bad faith. Western humanity claims to cherish democracy, which it almost believes in like a religion, but actually homo sapiens have very little trust in their fellow human beings acting responsibly out of their own freedom. Excluding Sweden and a few other countries, the majority of citizens around the world have welcomed the declarations of a state of emergency, the formation of governments with executive or authoritarian powers, a massive restriction of basic rights, extended forms of surveillance, and the deployment of police to protect them from the dangers of sitting on a bench. At present they are sequestered in their homes and passively await the next verdicts of politicians, CEOs, and a select group of experts as to what they are allowed and not allowed to do.

This alien meets a few individuals who question the official narrative and one has an especial liking for epidemiology and statistics; he paraphrases the findings of Stanford Professor John Ioannidis in the USA and University of Mainz Professor Sucharit Bhakdi, and their points about the unreliability of much of the current data. He also informs the alien that human beings were never close to being immortal (at least not physically––whether they are spiritually immortal is a whole other question) and that the average life expectancy of humans worldwide is 71 years old. This outlier also provides him with this list of estimations:

There are around 18 million poverty-related deaths each year

Around 9.5 million people die from cancer each year (this figure is an estimate for 2018)

Around 9 million people die from starvation each year

Around 2 million children die from a lack of access to clean water each year

Around 1.35 million people die in road accidents each year (and 20-50 million suffer non-fatal injuries)

Around 800,000 people die from suicide each year

Up to 650,000 people (and at least 290,000 people) die of the seasonal flu every year

Around 405,000 people die from malaria each year (this is an estimate for 2018)

At this moment (16 May 2020)[1] an estimated 309,000 people have died ‘with’ or ‘from’ (we’re not quite sure) Covid-19.[2] Estimates diverge widely as to how high this figure could climb. We lack reliable data!

But, the alien objects, I thought human beings were the most caring of creatures (far more caring than my alien race who dwell on a planet many light years away) in that the whole point of the lockdowns is to protect the most vulnerable members of society, especially the elderly who have pre-existing illnesses and are likely to die if they catch the coronavirus. Why, the alien asks, is so little being done to eradicate poverty and to ensure that everyone in the world has sufficient food to eat and access to clean drinking water? The outlier responds with a tilt of his head and a puzzled stare. Then he explains that the coronavirus has a rather high hospitalisation rate and that the lockdowns really have to do with the limited capacity of underfunded and understaffed hospitals––we need to ‘flatten the curve’ so the hospitals are not overwhelmed. ‘Oh’, replies the alien.

Problems of Abstraction

While much of the worldwide response to the coronavirus shows a care and concern for the most at-risk members of society, the observations of the above-mentioned alien serve to highlight a number of valid concerns: double standards, tunnel vision (humanity seems at present only to be able to recognize one crisis in the world), the rise and passive acceptance of draconian political measures, and an abstract way of thinking that fails to take into consideration the dynamic interconnections and delicate balance of human life, health, illness, and mortality. The sole ‘enemy’ is the virus and many governments have acted as if the only responsible option is to freeze almost all aspects of life to protect us from this enemy.

Many of the responses to the pandemic evince a problematically abstract way of thinking that overlooks the dynamic ecological balance of life and mortality, and the relationships that give meaning to human existence. In our fixation on addressing one problem, we are inadvertently bringing about many other problems.

In several controversial articles, the Italian philosopher, Giorgio Agamben, has voiced his concerns that in the government lockdowns and the correlated passivity of citizens, the value and richness of life has been reduced to the abstraction of mere biological survival. Agamben writes:

The first thing that the wave of panic that has paralyzed the country [Italy] obviously shows is that our society no longer believes in anything but bare life. It is obvious that Italians are disposed to sacrifice practically everything—the normal conditions of life, social relationships, work, even friendships, affections, and religious and political convictions—to the danger of getting sick. Bare life—and the danger of losing it—is not something that unites people, but blinds and separates them.

Another thought experiment might help to reinforce Agamben’s point. Imagine a grandmother who is 82 years old. She is told that she will be able to live until the age of 85 if she resides in a sterilised cell and has no contact with her children, grandchildren, and friends. She will have an internet connection and TV and all her food will be delivered to her front door. Alternatively, she has the choice to remain in her own home and receive visits from her family and friends, go for short walks in the park (she is still mobile) and so on, but if she chooses this option she will only live until the age of 84. Which one of these options provides for a richer conception and experience of life? It should be up to the grandmother to decide, but it is worthwhile for us to reflect on this question. Of course, this thought experiment is artificial. In real life we cannot predict the outcomes. Probabilistically speaking it is fairly unlikely that one will die in a car accident. Nevertheless, due to a moment of absent-mindedness on one’s own part or on the part of another driver, one might be the unfortunate victim of a fatal crash.

In ordinary life we are always negotiating a variety of risks and ideally strive to be responsible and caring, while being aware that the elimination of all risks is simply impossible. Life is a dangerous adventure, but, hopefully, nonetheless a rich and worthwhile one.

The new coronavirus took hold of the world by storm and the challenges of treating the little understood illness of Covid-19 should not be underestimated. And in this time of physical distancing, it is vital that we find ways to show sensitivity and compassion towards those who are at-risk and who have lost loved ones. Nevertheless, it is worthwhile to ask: what level of risk does this coronavirus present?

Despite the sensationalism of the media and the draconian measures of some states, we are not confronting the Black Death. It is important to note that since March, estimates of the fatality rate for Covid-19 have significantly decreased––though medical experts continue to contest the various estimates. (While in early March the WHO was suggesting a case fatality rate of 3.4%, this was based on a recorded number of cases and not estimations of the amount of people infected. Later the Imperial College London estimated a fatality rate of 1%, but since then there have been some much lower estimations [based on antibody studies in various places].) A peer-reviewed study of the worst hit area of Germany has estimated an infection fatality rate of less than 0.36% (possibly as low as 0.24%) and a recent study in California (Santa Clara County) has estimated 0.17% (the flu is around 0.1%) for that area. Significantly, Ioannidis who was involved in the latter study, early on regarded other estimates as inflated.

As a philosopher I neither have the expertise to say how high the number of deaths could rise nor to offer a detailed assessment of the effectiveness of the measures being taken. Nevertheless, it is important to consider the arguments of the medical experts in Germany (and scientists elsewhere) that, contrary to the complete lockdowns, a better approach would have been to focus on protecting the elderly and those with pre-existing conditions. [3] The current figures in Germany clearly indicate that the elderly population is primarily at risk (the average life expectancy in Germany is 81 years old and this is the average age of Covid-19-related deaths) and, in contrast to northern Italy, hospitals have not been stretched. A particular problem in various countries has been the spread of the virus in nursing homes. Nevertheless, leading virologists have spoken of some of the precautions that could be taken to minimise the risk of infecting elderly people while ensuring that they are able to receive company.

Complexities of Health and Mortality

Health is a complex matter because the human organism is a complex, dynamic whole, in which the health of the whole is dependent on the healthy functioning of the parts and vice versa. Illness and dying are similarly complex. When one part of the body becomes unhealthy it generally affects other parts. While some people infected with the new coronavirus remain asymptomatic or show only minor symptoms, elderly people with certain pre-existing conditions are at a greater risk of developing the severe acute respiratory syndrome. Thus, each case of Covid-19 is the expression of a particular relational dynamic between the virus and its host organism.

Most of the deaths relating to the coronavirus have involved comorbidities or pre-existing illnesses. The organism of someone who is already wrestling with cancer is less able to deal with the additional burden of the virus. If such a person dies, we can ask: did she die from cancer or from the coronavirus? The correct answer is neither (taken on its own) and both. Had she not contracted the coronavirus she may have lived longer, but the coronavirus was not the sole (or even the main) cause of death. Due to the complexity and interdependence of the part/whole relationship in a living organism, the German philosopher Immanuel Kant described organisms with the contradictory-sounding formulation that they are both the cause and effect of themselves. In other words, living organisms exhibit a holistic complexity in which there is no simple, one-way causality.

In some of the more detailed studies thus far of the epicentres of the pandemic, we can see that a complex of factors contributed to the number of fatalities. In northern Italy, these factors included (among others) a large elderly population, years of living with bad air pollution, a relatively high percentage of smokers, and a limited number of ICU beds. We should not assume that everywhere will reproduce northern Italy, although various other places might and will involve a similarly lethal complex of factors (as we have witnessed in some cities in the USA). One study suggests that there have been a much higher number of fatalities in cities with bad air pollution. What is the cause of death here? Coronavirus or air pollution? Both and, in each individual case, a whole host of other factors.

One of the positive outcomes of the lockdowns has been the improved air quality in many parts of the world due to the limited number of flights and other forms of transport and the correlative reduction of exhaust fumes. Though this was not their original intention, these limitations on transport have literally saved lives and are also something to keep in mind with regard to the larger crisis that humanity faces and has largely failed to address, namely anthropogenic climate change and the broader environmental crisis. But, as should be clear by now, I hope that humanity will find democratic rather than autocratic ways to address this crisis.

This should really go without saying, but given the disturbing rise of the libertarian far right in the USA, it is perhaps important to clarify that my concerns about civil liberties and democracy have nothing to do with the emphasis on negative freedom (‘the state should let me do whatever the hell I like’) of libertarians, but rather have to do with the best democratic impulses of modernity. Concrete freedom (as opposed to mere negative freedom) and democracy presuppose that individuals will act responsibly towards each other out of their own insight into the good. A mature individual does not act kindly towards others because they are concerned that the state will punish them otherwise, but because the individual recognises the value of kindness. In a mature democracy, the details of individual behaviour should not be monitored and dictated by the state. (The infiltration of the state into the private sphere is a mark of what Hannah Arendt identified as totalitarianism.) In a true democracy the individual is neither subordinated to the general will of the state (a kind of super-tyrant that maintains order and peace), nor is society a chaos of self-interested desires that disregard social goods. Rather, as the poet-philosopher Friedrich Schiller argued, the common good is embodied in the free collaboration of individuals. Whatever the merits or flaws of the Swedish response to the epidemic,[4] Sweden has as much as possible pursued a path which places trust in its citizens and gives advice and recommendations rather than encroaching on civil liberties. This strongly contrasts with Germany, in which basic rights have been restricted in a manner that has not occurred since the era of National Socialism and that contravenes the constitution. In Germany, where there has been a growing critique of the legality of the lockdown, lawyers have argued that, at this point, the denial of basic constitutional rights cannot be justified.

The fact that governments in many countries have declared a state of emergency, massively restricted civil liberties, and increased the policing and surveillance of residents (what Edward Snowden describes as the ‘architecture of oppression’) is perhaps a sign of the precariousness and immaturity of their democracies. (I am not saying that no sacrifices need to be made, rather I am questioning the extent of the restrictions, their consequences, and the undemocratic processes by which they have been instantiated.)

Complexities of Valuing Life

The famous Slovenian philosopher, Slavoj Zizek has politely disagreed with Agamben’s view that the lockdowns evince a reduction of value to a form of bare life that ultimately divides people. Rather, he regards them as showing a laudable concern for the lives of the most vulnerable. However, even if one thinks that our exclusive concern should be the preservation of lives, it is not clear that the lockdowns are the best strategy––though they may be for a time in specific places. (It’s worth noting that if we applied this logic universally, we would have long ago completely banned cars and countless other things.)

In a television interview, investigative journalist John Pilger recently mentioned studies that have indicated strong correlations between emotional isolation and the deterioration of health. Researchers at Oxford University have compared the health effects of chronic loneliness to ‘smoking 15 cigarettes a day’ and estimated that in 2019 there were 1.2 million chronically lonely people in the UK. There is growing evidence that the number of people suffering from loneliness and mental health issues as a result of the lockdown measures, self-isolation, and the climate of anxiety has significantly increased in the UK and various countries around the world (Japan is an interesting exception). There is now talk of an emerging global mental health crisis. In Australia, there are significant mental health concerns for Aboriginal communities (where suicide is the main cause of death for children between the age of 5 and 17) that are suffering under the lockdown.

The realities of loneliness and depression are only one example of the need to employ a broad concept of health that includes psychological, social, and mental health, as complementary to physical health. Since the lockdowns there has also been a marked increase in domestic violence, which not only causes physical injury (and deaths) but also psychological trauma for the members of a family.

The fixation on one health issue risks neglecting equally significant ones. We should question the logic and ethics involved in delaying cancer operations (however small the tumours) in Germany because a certain number of hospital beds need to be reserved for coronavirus ‘patients’, even when the beds are empty. In India, Arundhati Roy speaks of how healthcare for other illnesses has been placed on hold and describes cancer patients in Delhi being ‘driven away like cattle’ from the vicinity of a major hospital. In Africa, there are grave concerns that deaths from malaria could double this year (in comparison to 2018) to over 700,000 because of disruptions from Covid-19.

In the pandemic of panic, many people with other health concerns are afraid to visit doctors and such deferrals can lead to dire consequences. And we shouldn’t need doctors to tell us that sitting at home all day is unhealthy.

In debates about how best to respond to the pandemic, there has often been the articulation of a false dichotomy between protecting lives by means of the lockdowns and preventing an economic crisis. Of course, the current world economy is a disaster with its grotesque disparities between the wealth of the CEOs of mega-corporations and those on minimum wage struggling to make ends meet, from the devastating environmental impacts of many industries to the excess waste and consumption of our capitalist and consumerist societies.

But there is the very real danger that once the lockdowns end we will find ourselves in a situation in which the economy is even more unjust and destructive than at present. Due to the lockdowns around the world, the number of people facing the possibility of starvation has doubled to 265 million.

In a country like the US where healthcare largely depends on employment, a massive rise in unemployment and poverty will, of course, lead to many fatalities. Since the lockdowns, over 36 million people in the US have lost their jobs and there are predictions that, unless the government makes the requisite provisions the country will be facing a second great depression (given the current US government, something like a reiteration of the bailout of Wall Street in response to 2008 GFC, while millions of people lost their homes, is a more likely scenario).

Spain seems to have made a positive step forward in its plans to implement a permanent basic income. While Australia has increased its unemployment benefits, arts funding has been slashed in recent years and artists––musicians, actors, writers, poets, etc.––are suffering greatly due to the cancellation of so many events. To offer one example, all the members of the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra recently lost their jobs for the indefinite duration of the shutdown. Australian universities are also in a precarious position; an estimated 21,000 researchers are facing the threat of losing their jobs.

So it is a dangerous abstraction––and perhaps a form of vague sentimentalism––to insist on the idea that to be in favour of strict lockdowns is to be in favour of life whereas to be concerned about the economy is to value money over human lives.

And what about the abstraction and inequality in the immense disparity between what a lockdown means for the wealthy and the poor? If you own a waterfront mansion with a large garden being ‘confined’ to your home is no great challenge. If you are a poor family cramped in a tiny city apartment, it’s a whole different story.

The German philosopher, Markus Gabriel, has highlighted the shortsightedness and problems of what he describes as the ‘new virological imperative’ that has been determining political decisions: all human beings should be isolated so that they don’t infect others. While virologists and epidemiologists (who themselves also disagree on the measures that should be taken) can best inform us about how to address the physical dimensions of the pandemic, they should not be the exclusive advisors on decisions that affect the whole of society, decisions that are undermining fundamental aspects of democracy. Gabriel mentions the need for input from political theorists and sociologists, ethicists and philosophers. To this list, I would add psychologists, artists, small-business owners, lawyers, economists, religious leaders, and representatives from all walks of life. Recently Germany made a positive step in this direction.

The last example of abstraction that I would like to mention is the illusion that we can replace vital, embodied, social interactions with the virtual space of online communication. A coffee with a friend cannot be substituted by a chat on Skype, the social dynamics and learning that take place between teachers and students in a classroom and in the playground cannot be replaced by Zoom. Or as Michael Leunig so aptly comments in the form of a cartoon, an elderly woman cannot walk her dog through a website instead of a park.

Towards a Context-Sensitive Approach

Within the life of an individual as well as within society more broadly, a crisis is often a painful opportunity and catalyst for much needed transformations. The inadequacies and shortsightedness of much of the response to the pandemic are a significant part of the crisis. As we move forward, I hope we can work towards realising a fairer and more sustainable economy, and a transformation of our thinking from one-sided abstractions to a concrete attentiveness to the nexuses of life. We need to find creative ways to take care––physically, emotionally and mentally––of those who are most vulnerable, while at the same time taking into consideration the complexities of the world.

The above thoughts are the concerns of a philosopher (and poet) and not the recommendations of an epidemiologist or a physician. I am not aiming to provide particular guidelines and calculations about which health factors should be weighted against others. Rather, my aim is to draw attention to the complexities of life and the dangers (in some respects of catastrophic dimensions) of simplistic ‘solutions’. In response to the wave of panic that has spread across the world (greatly propelled by the media), measures have been applied by governments that fail to take into account the relations of life and the specificities of different societies, places, and cultures. In my view, it is crucial that we learn to approach life and the great crises that we face in a context-sensitive manner that considers all the dynamic interrelations and specificities of biology, social ties, individual freedoms, societies, cultures, and environments. There is no one enemy or problem. There is no silver bullet. One size doesn’t fit all.

Life is a light-footed circle dance on unstable ground. Or, as the poet and philosopher Novalis put it: ‘The whole rests more or less like persons playing, who without a chair, merely sit one on the knee of another and form a circle.’[5] Let us not overlook the relational complexities that constitute and give meaning to life.

Notes

[1] Sourced from https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/

[2] There are many issues around how Covid-19 deaths are being counted in different countries (and debates about whether they are being overestimated or underestimated). It is well-documented that in Italy no distinction has been made between deaths ‘from’ and deaths ‘with’ Covid-19 and there are similar issues in other countries. As the present essay elaborates, there are also many deaths resulting from the repercussions of the lockdown measures (rather than Covid-19).

[3] In a very recent article Ioannidis also gives a clear overview of what he regards as a balanced course of action given the data and evidence that are now available.

[4] One of the significant criticisms of Sweden has been that its number of fatalities is much higher than that of its neighbours, Norway, Denmark, and Finland. Part of the reason for this, however, has less to do with the overall strategy and more to do with a problem in the management of nursing homes where over 50% of the deaths have occurred. Moreover, the per capita death rate in Sweden is lower than in a number of countries that have enforced strict lockdowns, including Spain, Italy, the UK, and Belgium. Finally, while there are gray areas around the development of immunity to the coronavirus, in the long term Sweden will quite likely be better placed than many other countries. Though the precise situation remains unclear, one recent study at Stockholm University suggests that Stockholm could reach community immunity by mid-June.

[5] Novalis Schriften: Die Werke von Friedrich von Hardenberg, vol. 2, ed. R. Samuel, H. J. Mähl and G. Schulz (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer. 1960-1988), p. 242.

Beth Spencer is the winner of the 2018 Carmel Bird Digital Literary Award for The Age of Fibs (fiction). Other books include the verse memoir Vagabondage (UWAP), and How to Conceive of a Girl (Vintage/Random House) which was runner up for the Steele Rudd Award. She writes across genres and forms, her ABC-radio pieces have been collected on the double CD Body of Words, and she is also a contributor to the podcast Climactic. She lives and writes on Darkinjung land, and has a website at www.bethspencer.com
 
 
 
Playing cards on a red rattler

You always picked on my accent. ‘Are yous two gonna go?’ you’d laugh. When of course the ‘two’ was redundant, that’s what the ‘s’ is for. But you didn’t get that, like you didn’t get a lot of things.

And then the haitch/aitch thing. No, I’m not Catholic, it’s not about being Catholic, that’s just what you were told at your Proddy private school. (But really, if we’re talking about the letter ‘H’ then why leave the ‘H’ off? Makes no sense.)

The first time I met private school boys I was fifteen. We were standing around in a group at some inter-school Christian thing that I was into then and one of them asked me what school I went to. ‘Lilydale Tech,’ I replied. Silence. One of them reached into his pocket. ‘Here,’ he said, and handed me a cent.

It wasn’t until I went to uni and called home from telephone boxes that, with a shock, I began to hear the broadness of my father’s accent. The language goal posts shifting uneasily under my feet.

On the rare occasions my dad talked about the past he would say in them days, and refer to the toffy-nosed people on the other side of Balwyn.

(My grandfather’s blacksmith shop off Burke Street. My father’s clothes smelling of iron and steam and horses.)

Another time, with a similar bunch of private school friends, walking along a suburban street we saw a horse cropping grass in a paddock and stopped to say hello. One of the girls said something that prompted me to comment, ‘Well, my father is a farrier.’
‘Oooh!’ exclaimed an older boy. ‘Does he wear a big greasy apron?’
That fleeting rush of shame, just for a moment. (Well, yes. Yes, he does.)

Mostly I did manage to escape that shame and I think it was because my parents never desired that I be anything other than what they were, and what their parents were. A ‘good job in a shop’—what more could a girl want? (You certainly wouldn’t want to be like those toffy people! Goodness! Just the thought.)

I have a girlfriend who came from a similar working-class outer-suburb—a few stops down the train line—but her parents always dreamed that she would go to university. It was what they worked so hard for, aspired to. One day, sitting on her bed while she got ready to go out, I noticed when she opened her wardrobe that she had dozens of pairs of fine Italian leather shoes (and never enough).

Shoes, of course. I was slow about that. For years I had no idea that at uni, conferences, job interviews, writer’s festivals, I was being judged on my shoes. Like those men in Paris, years later, who followed me with invitations and suggestive comments whenever I went out walking, spotting me in my Doc Martens as an outsider, fair game. Like the professor who was asked once how he selected the right person for the job. ‘Well, it’s like looking in the mirror really.’

Did you notice this about me when we met when I was seventeen—my cheap and shabby shoes? ‘As long as it’s clean, washed and paid for,’ my father, a child of the Depression, would say. Meaning: good enough is good enough and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

Cheap shoes. Cheap haircut. I started to notice it eventually when I would watch older and younger women bond over their stylish shoes, notice the swish of neat hair, not a strand out of place. (You don’t belong. You are an outsider.)

Is this what you spotted that singled me out as someone to take to bed, but not home to the parents?

In those early years at uni, while your parents lent you their Citroens and old Volvos and took you out to restaurants, I would catch the train back to the suburbs and my Dad would pick me up from the station in the P76 with the back seat removed for the horseshoes. Wiping down the seat with an old towel, taking me home to a prodigal daughter feast of Kentucky Fried Chicken.

In them days, at uni, I learnt words like déclassé and embourgeoised.

I learnt to spread out the times I would visit my parents so the visits became infrequent, and grudging. Over with as fast as possible.

You drove me out there once in the Citroen, your tourist eyes taking in all that had been invisible to me. I watched you backing down the drive speedily, past my father’s cattle truck, the dogs barking.

What was it about you that was like my brothers and father but with a posh accent? Was it the way you drove? Relaxed, confident. Was it that faint attitude of contempt?

Later at uni, doing my Masters, I learnt words like intersectionality.

And still, in between all the private school-bred girlfriends, you would seek me out. And I would practice saying things to you, fucking and fighting, that I could never say to my brothers or my father. You worked out some need with me, I worked out some need with you.

I learned that in amongst the pride and arrogance there was a shame in you that I could never have imagined, and that no amount of expensive shoes or cars or restaurant meals or high class jobs and travel and the right postcodes and saying ‘aitch’ and ‘you two’ could ever cleanse.

Right side of the wrong tracks. First class, second class, the trains taking us in different directions.

Tell them as long as it’s clean, washed and paid for.

Paid for, there’s the rub. Both of us living on stolen land. You just had a lot more of it.

I never know how to end these stories about you. Even though after all these years our story is well and truly ended. Or so I hope. So I tell myself.
And my father died two decades ago.

But we partake of each other. We live in each other. Just as the boy with the one cent coin lives in me, and the greasy leather apron, my friend with the dozens of shoes, the academics admiring each other’s haircuts.

As we pick up the cards and lay down tracks. This one, that one. Steaming through life, me in a red rattler, you in a blue train. Hanging out the windows. Buying time. Buying up whole suburbs. A country. An ocean between us. Whole worlds.

But you see it’s never about the things you thought it was.

The Central express train rattles and sighs as it pulls up to Hornsby Station. I take a deep breath and hold it. Slide open the yellow door speckled with grime. Step on, look at the toilets. Neither of the doors are open but I’m not taking a chance. They’re sloshing with piss from Central Coast bogans. Turn, open the spring-loaded door, and step into the passenger’s section, which is carpeted with vinyl seats. It’s packed. I let go of my breath. The dampness of human bodies mixes with Lean Cuisine chicken, cheese, and pasta and burrows into the back of my throat. I gag. I should turn back. Stand between the carriages, where the air is fresh and the ground is shaky. No. It takes 30 seconds to get used to a bad smell. In a minute, it’ll be like I’m lounging in my White godfather’s TV room. Though last I heard, he’s living in a shipping container with his golliwog collection.

Upstairs, the seats are filled with people wearing red-and-white jerseys. Oh, it’s Friday. They’re headed to the footy. There’s a seat in the middle of the carriage. On the aisle side is a bag of Chicken Crimpy Shapes. I take the window seat, stepping over the glittery bits crushed into the carpet. It’s pretty dark outside. I can’t see much save for the streaks of rain outside and the line of steam creeping up on my reflection inside.

Behind me, someone with the nasally honk of Aussie Home Loans guy talks loudly. Instead of saying, ‘At Aussie, we’ll save you,’ he says, ‘The freckled moll’s place, ahh, it looks like housing, but, ahh, it’s not, so, ooh, she acts like she’s, ah, better than everyone.’

I grin at my reflection. I love this. The dumb-ass conversations on this train, which runs from Newcastle to Sydney, can’t be found anywhere else. The bogans, like Aussie Home Loans, are the loudest and crudest. One Wednesday arvo, a blonde lady in Mariah Carey bejewelled sunnies sat in the nigel seat yelling on the phone. She stood up and waved her free hand as she yelled, ‘Jayden, Jayden, Jayden. You fucked me, you fucked me reaaaaal bad. Real bad. Why’d you tell the court I was waving the knife around? Don’t ya remember how I was chopping tomatoes? I was chopping the tomatoes, and you said something. You said something, and I looked up. And I looked up and pointed the knife at you. And I pointed the knife at you and I pointed it away. Remember that? I was not waaaving the knife, I was pointing it.’

It took me everything to not laugh out loud then. I didn’t want her to point a knife at me.

Now Aussie is complaining about how the University of Newcastle pays him five dollars an hour to clean, but at least he makes 100 a week. My bad. He’s genuinely poor. I feel gross for laughing at him now.

His mate who has the deep, controlled drawl of Fitzy says, ‘Oi, but yeah…but nah…you take home…200 a fortnight, ay?’
That’s the same thing. We can’t all be Asians when it comes to maths, though. Shit. I’m doing it again. It’s not probbo if I’m laughing with them, but Fitzy seems dead serious.

He continues, ‘I’m so stoned, brah…Oi but, but…you know what they call my house? Cheech and Chong…come to Wyong.’

Aussie honks laughing. Guess I’m not with them after all. I’ve never seen Cheech and Chong, but I know it’s a stoner comedy. Toby McGuirk, the only other metalhead in high school, once told me he smoked dog shit. Was that like crack, or acid, or what? ‘I mean it’th thit. From a dog,’ he said. I’d seen him play Frisbee with dried cow dung before. I nodded. I guess it was only a matter of time.

‘I’m jutht kidding, man,’ he said. ‘It’th from Cheech and Chong. You thould thmoke with uth thome day. It’th a clathic.’

The train pulls up to Epping, black asphalt, grey metal ceiling jutting off the wall. Platform’s full of chinks and curries: black pantsuits, Herschel backpacks, puffer jackets and wire trolleys. Train’s about to get super crowded. I hope no-one sits next to me. But if they do, they’d better not be one of those dickheads that spread so much our knees are touching and the warmth of their leg makes me want to puke and retract mine but I also don’t want to seem weak so I just keep it there. That’s the worst.

The windows steam up completely as a procession of Asians fills the aisle. A burly Chinese guy with bulging, still eyes like a goldfish, plods forward. His white polo is splotched with pink. Rubber and blood floods my nostrils. Raw meat. An abattoir worker, maybe. If this was 2000 years ago, he’d be the town butcher. That’s what he was made for.

He’s hunched. Looks straight ahead as he gets closer to me. He’ll sit near the bogans. They’ll think he’s just gotten back from slaughtering strays in the neighbourhood. Nope. He grabs the handle on the seat in front of mine, swings his body around, and plops himself on top of the pack of Chicken Crimpy. It crunches. Did he even notice that? I scoot away. Our upper arms are touching. I’m pressed up against the window. Can’t be helped.

We’re moving. Conversations hum but the bogans have fallen quiet. Then Aussie says, ‘There’s, ah, so much Chinese, ay?’

Oh no. I hope this isn’t heading where I think it’s heading. Aussie’s in housing commission. Aussie makes five an hour cleaning up after uni shits like me. Aussie’s got nothing to look forward to but smoking up and watching the footy. They’re just not used to the city.

‘Yeah…but…what’s wrong with being…Chinese?’ says Fitzy.

‘Ah, everything!’ Aussie shouts. They piss themselves laughing.

Dickwad. I was rooting for you. I thought these idiots might be not-racist, but I’m the dumbarse for believing in them.
‘Hey, ah…sweet and sao-wah POK,’ says Aussie, in the voice of the City Wok guy on South Park.
Fitzy laughs, ‘Oi, but listen to this…Sweet and sao-wah POK.’

Cortisone floods my shoulders, stiffens my neck. I turn my head a little, not enough for the Butcher to catch me, and glance around. As far as I can tell, us Asians outnumber the Aussies by three to one. Maybe even more. We’ve got the numbers. But people are just talking to each other or looking right ahead. No-one’s turned around to check the bogans. Maybe it’s because most of us are old, or don’t speak English, or don’t care. Maybe we’re scared to break the silence.

Air conditioner whirs. Rain drums on the train’s tin top. I wipe the steamed window with my right shoulder. Outside is black.

‘Sweet and sao-wah POK,’ Fitzy says.

I breathe in deep, chest swelling. Fuck it. I stand up. Shoulder drags against Butcher’s. Out the corner of my eye, I see him watching me, his mouth ajar. My wrists pound. I turn around, gaze sweeping the suits, students, and oldies before locking onto Aussie. He’s a fat fuck with acne scars on his bright pink Wiffle ball face. St George Illawarra frayed at the bent bill. He stares at me, his grey eyes boring into mine. Fitzy props himself on an elbow, twists around to look at me. He’s got a buzzcut and Golden Arches hairline, face long like a mountain goat. ‘You hillbilly cunts better shut the fuck up,’ I shout.

Aussie’s thin lips draw back. Yellow teeth rest on his bottom lip. Hands rise to the sides of his face. They pull back the skin next to his eyes. His head wobbles from side to side as he says in the South Park accent, ‘Aw! Sutt da fuk ap!’
I’ve got nothing. I flip them off and sit back down. Carriage falls silent. My head’s throbbing. I couldn’t have done any better. You engage with idiots, you’re the idiot. Whatever, man. I can feel the Butcher staring at me. Maybe he’ll move away. He doesn’t. Just keeps staring.

‘Ahh, yaw mudda!’ sings Aussie.

A deep male voice pipes up. ‘Youse better stop it. This train’s full of them, youse know that? And one of them’s just gotten offended. I’ve been listening to youse go on since Gosford, and I’m sick of it. It’s not funny. I’m a cop on holiday, don’t make me do my job. It’s not funny. Don’t make me start up again. Don’t encourage him.’

In a small voice, Aussie says, ‘I, ah, won’t.’

The rest of the train ride is silent, save for Fitzy squeaking every now and then, trying to get Aussie to laugh.
At Strathfield, red brick, green poles, and black asphalt, the train starts to slow. Holiday Pig gets up and heads towards the bogans. He’s got a tiny face and a huge head like William H. Macy. Aussie honks, ‘I’m ah, sorry,’ to Holiday Pig. Pig replies, ‘You’re right, mate.’

I go in the direction I came. Hold my breath by the toilets in the mezzanine.
As the train comes to a stop, someone taps on my shoulder. I turn around. It’s the Butcher. Eyes shine, fat lip hangs, sounds like he’s trying to swallow air as he says, ‘You speak Chinese?’

I shake my head and say, ‘斩你做猪肉碎、喂畀狗.’

Nadine Schofield is an emerging writer living in Wollongong. She is a high school English teacher helping young women find the magic of words and the power of their own story. Nadine is completing a Master of Writing at Swinburne University.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
‘As I begin to write now a feeling of peacefulness comes over me as if I need not for inexplicable half-hidden reasons refrain from writing any longer… it is often not possible to write about events until they are over or sufficiently of the past, … secrets, if they are revealed completely, become mere facts, something extra to real life.’

—Elizabeth Jolley, The Vera Wright Trilogy

* * *

I was thirty-eight. We had been married for two months. And then we were going to be parents.

What to Expect When You Are Expecting (Murkoff) became our manual, our source of wisdom. In his radio voice, Colin would read aloud from the couch the weekly update of what was happening inside my body. A strange food motif runs through the week-by-week descriptions:

• Poppy seed
• Orange seed
• Large raspberry
• Medium green olive
• A prune
• A large fresh plum

Then the fruit was replaced with a heartbeat; the ‘lub-dub’, a ‘fetal symphony’ (Murkoff 181).

* * *

The Women’s Ultrasound and Imaging Clinic is behind a working construction site; a single level red-brick building with long corridors of brown carpet illuminated by exit signs at regular intervals. The smell of concrete dust is cut through with disinfectant. We find the right door to the right waiting room and, after repeating names and dates and numbers, we are called into the imaging room by a young nurse. The room is a cave, illuminated by two computer monitors and a dimmed light over the bed. The nurse is friendly, and the directions come quickly.

‘Everything off from the waist down. Up on the bed and I’ll put this over you.’ She is holding up a sheet of paper. I am embarrassed to be pulling my pants down in front of my husband and a stranger.

The purpose of the ultrasound is to date and confirm the viability of the pregnancy via a transvaginal examination. The nurse sheathes the transducer with a condom and cold gel and asks me to spread my legs. Colin and I watch the shadowy, swirling mass appearing on the monitor until the nurse ends the guessing game and we hear the baby’s heartbeat: a fast, rhythmic sound like a wobble board.

‘155 beats per minute, but that’s normal,’ she informs us before withdrawing the probe.

* * *

What did we hear? What is a heartbeat? Any medical textbook defines the human heart as an electrical system; the heartbeat is the sound of ‘atria and ventricles at work pumping blood’ (Clinic). In these terms, the human heart becomes a switch, a light that can be turned on and off. The Oxford Dictionary defines the heart as evidence of ‘one’s inmost being; the soul, the spirit’; ‘the seat of love and affection’ (“Heart”, 879).

We made a heartbeat.

We take each other’s hand and with the sun in our eyes we walk back to the car, our large white envelope in hand. We haven’t expected a photo, not so soon, and we sit in the car looking at our shadowy mass with three straight arrows pointing at it, so we know where to look. Is this going on the fridge?

‘We made a heartbeat,’ I whisper as I turn to face Colin. And there he is, a father. He has become a photograph, caught shirtless with our child curled into the wiry, grey hairs of his chest, head lowered, and eyes half closed.

* * *

At the worst moment, What to Expect When You Are Expecting becomes our doctor. There is a chapter on miscarriage. ‘Signs and symptoms can include cramping or pain, heavy vaginal bleeding, similar to a period’ (Murkoff 534). In Emergency I cannot speak. I go to the bathroom several times to check that we need to be in Emergency. Parents come with vomiting children, bruised children and bleeding children. Colin and I sit in silence.

I answer the questions of a trainee nurse about my pain and when it started and how many hours and my periods and how many pads and then Colin is asked to wait outside.

‘How many sexual partners have you had?’; ‘So, is there any chance you have AIDS?’ I don’t understand. It has been three hours. I become desperate and demanding: ‘We want to know if our baby is alive.’ An older female nurse with a bright pink stethoscope arrives with a doppler machine on a trolley.

No
Heart
Beat
.

‘Not always accurate these machines. Come back in the morning. Go to the Pre-natal unit upstairs.’ There is no comfort in the nurse’s voice, and she leaves the room quickly to attend to the next patient.

In the Pre-Natal unit the light is electric white. Everyone and everything is overexposed: the white floor tiles, the white dispensers of hand sanitiser near the white door to the white toilet. Chairs are fixed in rows facing each other. On three of these chairs are the shapes of other women waiting. I don’t look at these women and am momentarily distracted as nurses pass through the brutal light—flashes of uniform blue moving down the corridor. My eyes flick to a notice board of neatly spaced posters on breastfeeding.

Colin is beside me. His face is grey. I grip his wrist and rub at the smooth, hairless skin just to stay present. I can smell my own body: tinny, salty.

‘Should I call the Real Estate? I don’t have to explain, just give them the keys.’ Colin’s voice is soft and gentle. We are selling our apartment and it will be open for inspection at ten.

Colin meets the agent at the front of the hospital. What about the bathroom? We didn’t make the bed.

The doctor in the Pre-natal unit offers us statistics as comfort. One in four pregnancies ends in miscarriage (Hintz-Zambrano). We will discover we are not alone when we start talking about it with friends, the doctor tells us. How will we go about broaching this topic? We have three options and we take the first, ‘Expectant Management’, which involves letting the body expel the ‘baby’ naturally (“Treating miscarriage”).

In the third-floor apartment we are about to sell, I sit on the toilet with our ‘recognisable embryo’ on a piece of toilet paper in my hand.

I don’t know what to do.
I’m sorry.
I’m sorry.
Our baby goes in the bin.

* * *

There is a frangipani tree in the front garden of our new Miner’s cottage home. Our neighbours have a frangipani tree too, and there is an old, large one at the front gate of the college where I teach. Staff enjoy morning tea before the holidays in its shade; pink flowers bruised and browning on the ground. The first summer in our house the neighbours’ frangipani tree buds and blossoms. Ours doesn’t. We string Christmas lights among the waxy leaves and in the late spring of the following year my aging mother snaps off a branch declaring it ‘dead’. The frangipani tree becomes a portent. When the tree flowers we will have a family. This is pathetic.

On the last day of the school year, all the staff sit around a cross marked out on the floor with tealights. The Dean begins something of a homily about the Journey of the Magi: three Oriental Astrologers who place faith in a baby above science and reason. At the end of the day, I drive home past the Anglican Church: ‘Be filled with Hope this Christmas.’

* * *

Colin and I attend our second appointment with a fertility specialist. The IVF website claims such specialists are ‘dedicated to giving you the best possible chance of having a baby using the most advanced science’ (Australia). We have been undertaking the routine procedures associated with ovulation tracking for three months. In the waiting room, I stare at the Anne Geddes photograph of a baby curled asleep on top of a pumpkin, and another, in black and white, of age-spotted hands cradling a baby’s head. On the coffee table are home decorating magazines and a small wooden nativity scene.

T.S Eliot’s ‘Journey of the Magi’ is in my head. The poem has new meaning:

‘A hard time we had of it…
With the voices singing in our ears, saying
That this was all folly…

… were we led all that way for
Birth or Death?…

This Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death’ (Eliot 95).

* * *

The fertility doctor is a cowboy. Reclining in his chair with shoes off, it’s clear that he does not remember us. I am weighed and then there are the anecdotes and jokes about penises.

‘He had an erection, so I knew the spine was broken’; ‘No good being Errol Flynn unless you find a woman who can accommodate.’

I feel hot and irritated but I sit and smile because Colin and I need him. He talks about what he has done and what he is going to do; we need to keep going with another three months of tracking and then, if necessary, we will begin IVF.  He asks us questions about tubal flushing and spermatocytes, and we look like children who missed out on sex education. Colin thanks him on our way out.

‘Don’t thank me until I get you pregnant,’ he replies with a grin.

On the first day of my menstrual cycle I call the doctor’s room. The receptionist takes a credit card payment and issues paperwork for an internal scan and blood tests. I am to take pre-natal supplements, an iron supplement and consume one cup of cream per day to gain five kilograms.

Then there are latex gloves. Condoms. Cold gel. Modesty blanket. Follicles counted. The pathologist, a woman close to retirement with frizzy hair, talks and talks about her grandson’s dyslexia. One day there is another pathologist, angular, no fuss. I arrive too late for the courier. Don’t I know what I’m doing?

We host Colin’s goddaughter, Emily. She is on holiday from Scotland during her university break. Emily watches me beneath her thick eyebrows and dark hair, seemingly unexcited by suggestions to eat out or visit the lighthouse. She mentions Ryan Gosling, so we drive into town to see La La Land, which she has promised to see with her mother. The fertility nurse sends a text message during the credits:

My dear you are surging

big time!! Lots of
hormones, LH 43 and
oestrogen 1689 so
ovulating this 24 hours
or so. Intercourse
tonight and tomorrow to
make the most of it!
Blood test next Thursday for
progesterone check
post ovulation.

The directive acts like a contraceptive. I worry and hide the nurse’s message from Colin, foolishly hoping that wearing the right lingerie and dimming the lights will be enough to get us in the mood. Sex is no longer love, or even pleasure, but the pressure to time intercourse and conceive. This proves to be too much for us and I accuse Colin of not loving me enough; he is hurt and stops talking for the rest of the night.

Like Eliot’s Magi, the death of our old ways is cracking my heart. Celebrating New Year’s Eve seems too pointless. We stay home and cook steaks on the barbeque, but the limes stay in the fruit bowl. We can’t be bothered making mojitos, our ritual since we were married.

Ariel Levy, in 2013 her travel piece for The New Yorker, ‘Thanksgiving in Mongolia’, evokes the wretchedness of losing a child while based in Ulaanbaatar. She likens motherhood to ‘black magic’ and her loss leaves her with a ‘dark hurt’ that is primal. The final image of the writer is of a ‘wounded witch, wailing in the forest, undone’ (Levy). Levy’s 2017 memoir The Rules Do Not Apply further explores the writer’s disorientation after her miscarriage. Her sense of guilt is palpable as she questions whether she had asked too much of life and been punished for her pride.

I am about to turn forty. There will be a big cake in the teacher’s staff room that won’t get eaten; next to it a sign, ‘Happy Birthday Nadine’. Colin and I have cancelled the IVF appointment. We are putting faith in the life force, since speaking of God has always been abstract and non-committal. It is the heartbeat that haunts me most. What have we lost? What makes the thought of being childless so difficult to accept? It is a schizophrenic headspace. There are websites, blogs and counselling services. There is Colin’s optimism in the face of statistics on IVF success rates for couples our age; a very low 6%. In a Four Corners program, ‘The Baby Business’, a childless woman who has undergone fertility treatment claims that IVF specialists do little more than ‘sell hope’ (Dingle).  An article in The Conversation suggests that 80% of women forty-five years and over who bear a child have healthy pregnancies, and success rates with IVF increase with the use of a donor egg (Wilkinson). there are women in the public sphere and part of my micro-world who have given birth after forty.

* * *

Our Sunday lunch is not much. Salad.

‘Here is that article by Annabel that I was telling you about.’ Colin passes the iPad to me.

Annabel Crabb has written a commentary piece for The Sydney Morning Herald: ‘A Womb with a View Today’. The article is ‘a salute to the womb’ both as a source of life and a political space. Crabb refers to a public interview with Gladys Berejiklian, the Premier of NSW, that highlights how the role of female politicians is scrutinised and then trivialised dependent upon whether they have children. But it is Crabb’s ‘salute’ to the female body’s power to create life that defeats me: ‘This thing is the Thermomix of the human body. It can make everything from spleens to eyelashes; imagine that! Mine has made three entire human beings…’ I find her use of analogy simplistic and inaccurate; that it needs tempering with a complex discourse around motherhood.

Crabb is right to celebrate the power of the female body to produce life; it is one capacity that women will always have despite the other inequities we fight as a result of gender, and while celebrated journalists and social commentators like Crabb are quick to defend women who choose not to have a child, it is dangerous to perpetuate a myth around choice that does not include the reality of no choice, the frequency of miscarriage or failed IVF. It is tempting to run with Crabb’s analogy here and point out that a woman’s Thermomix might go on the blink. If your womb is not a magical machine capable of making human beings, if you are barren, then your place within the womanhood becomes tenuous.

Medical sociologists like Arthur Greil point to qualitative and quantitative research to suggest that infertility is a condition shaped by sociocultural context and not simply a medical condition that may or may not have psychological consequences. According to Greil, the perceptions of an infertile couple and those around them are understood to be ‘the product of social definitions’; couples attending appointments with specialists do not define themselves as ‘infertile’ but rather as individuals who wish to fulfil the social role of parenting. This is at odds with the medicalisation of infertility.

If the desired state of parenthood is a social construct, then filling this role ensures belonging to a group or community. The shared experience of parenting with peers allows participation in dialogue around common life experiences and bonding between adults who come together for family activities.

My filing cabinet in the teachers’ staffroom has been decorated with children’s drawings. Jane, a friend and fellow English teacher, has left them there after a visit from her daughter Molly. Jane has long, raven black hair and belly dances on the weekend. We talk about TV dramas and our frustrations as teachers, but not our private lives.

Last week Jane arrived with a paddle pop stick decorated with silver glitter and a pink feather pinned to her blouse: a gift from Molly for the World’s Best Mum. The other women in the staffroom quickly gathered to swap Mother’s Day stories, and Leah, the stylish Art teacher, produced a bag of toddler dresses for Jane.

Leah is hosting a birthday party for her son on the weekend and in a bubbly voice reminds everyone to arrive at ten on Sunday for the clown. I haven’t been invited. If there is no moral shame around being childless, there is still a silence.

* * *

I had called Mum from the waiting room outside the Pre-Natal Unit at the hospital: ‘We were going to have a baby and now we’re not.’

I do not remember the hugs we received as we entered the door of her unit, only that my mother made us toast with too much butter. There was strawberry jam if we wanted it. These were the practical needs of the day.

‘I thought you were. You just looked a bit plumper in the face.’ My mother enjoyed her toast and tea. ‘Oh well. It just wasn’t meant to be.’

The conversation was ended. There was nothing we could do but get on.

I have returned to my mother’s doorstep many times since the miscarriage and our subsequent failed attempts to start a family. She is not the source of comfort I often want and need but rather a woman of her generation: stoic and determined to make the most of what she has. She quickly imparts wise directives on ‘cheering up’ and then diverts my attention with updates on the pot plants in her courtyard.

Helen Garner, in Everywhere I Look, writes about her relationship with her mother, also a person of resilience who survived the hardships of World War II and the extraction of all her teeth at once. Garner’s respect and deep affection for her mother is evident in the chapter ‘Dreams of Her real Self’; at one moment the narration is broken with a single line, ‘Oh, if only she would walk in here now’ (Garner 100). Is the longing to be a mother in part a desire to be the source of comfort, or wisdom, or a role model of resilience, for another?

As I watch my mother feed parrots on the back doorstep and plan her week around cooking a corned beef, I feel a pain behind my eyes and a clamp around my throat. If only I could lay my head on her breast and feel peace. At home, the coffee table is littered with maps of Dublin City and Lonely Planet editions of road trips in Europe. On another table, in another room, is a referral to a new fertility specialist.

Statistics and medicine aside, there is a bigger moral quandary here. Not necessarily religious but a theological concern with the purpose of life. What can be the purpose of our lives? How to accept that we might not take a place in the line of ‘women bearing / women’, as in Gwen Harwood’s poem (“Mother Who Gave Me Life”, 170)—or parents bearing children? Acceptance and comfort do not come from academic research into the treatment of infertility or the social construct of parenthood.

I find myself reading blog posts of motherless women—websites dedicated to ‘Aunt’s Day’—but it is an article written by Lawrence Rifkin for the Scientific American that has stayed with me. Rifkin argues that the purpose of life cannot be reduced to the ‘making of babies’; that to do so is ‘an affront to human dignity’. The purpose of each life is to experience joy, relationships, and accomplishments. If we can add to the meaning of the life of another or improve the planet in some way, then all the better. It is difficult to disagree with Rifkin’s final statement: ‘human meanings are worthwhile regardless of long-term, universal, final consequences, because they are meaningful now.’ Here is comfort, a validation.

Holding onto hope in the life force or seeking out another fertility specialist is no longer necessary if the purpose of our lives is simply to live—even if that does mean getting on with an ache in my heart. This is where philosophy serves its purpose; when the twists and turns of life become inexplicable, the emotions too big, and we don’t understand.

Works Cited

Greil, Arthur et al. “The Social Construction of Infertility.” Sociology Compass, vol. 5, issue 8, 2011, pp. 736-746. doi:10.1111/j.1751-9020.2011.00397.x
Greil, Arthur et al. “The experience of infertility: A review of recent literature.” Sociology of Health & Illness, vol. 32, issue 1, 2010, pp. 140-162. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9566.2009.01213.x
IVF Australia. “Fertility treatments.” IVF Australia, https://www.ivf.com.au/treatments
Cleveland Clinic. “The heart’s electrical system.” Cleveland Clinic, https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/articles/17064-heart-beat
Crabb, A. “A Womb with a View Today.” The Sydney Morning Herald, Fairfax, 28 January 2017, http://www.smh.com.au/comment/a-womb-with-a-view-today-20170127-gu037h.htm.
Dingle, Sarah. “The Baby Business.” Four Corners, ABC, 30 May 2016, http://www.abc.net.au/4corners/stories/2016/05/30/4469652.htm
Eliot, TS. The Penguin Poets – T. S. Eliot: A selection by the author, Harmondsworth: Pengun, 1951.
Garner, Helen. Everywhere I Look, Melbourne: The Text Publishing Company, 2016.
Harwood, Gwen. “Mother Who Gave Me Life.” Gwen Harwood: Selected Poems. London: Penguin Books, 2001, pp. 170-71.“Heart”. The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary. London: Oxford University Press, 1964.
Hintz-Zambrano, Katie. “Miscarriage Stories: 10 Women Share Their Loss.” MOTHER, 31 August 2015, http://www.mothermag.com/miscarriage-stories/
“Treating Miscarriage.” The Royal Women’s Hospital, https://www.thewomens.org.au/health-information/pregnancy-and-birth/pregnancy-problems/early-pregnancy-problems/treating-miscarriage/
Levy, Ariel. “Thanksgiving in Mongolia.” The New Yorker, 18 November 2013, http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/11/18/thanksgiving-in-mongolia
Levy. Ariel. The Rules Do Not Apply. London: Fleet, 2017.
Murkoff, Heidi. What to Expect When You’re Expecting. Sydney: HarperCollins, 2009.
Rifkin, Lawrence. “Is the Meaning of Life to Make Babies?” The Scientific American, 24 March 2013, https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/is-the-meaning-of-your-life-to-make-babies/
Wilkinson, Dominic. “Four Myths about IVF in Older Women.” The Conversation, 20 October 2016, https://theconversation.com/four-myths-about-ivf-in-older-women-67394

 Heather Taylor Johnson’s recent publications are Meanwhile, the Oak (poetry, Five Islands Press) and Jean Harley was Here (novel, UQP). Heather is the poetry editor for Transnational Literature and is edited Shaping The Fractured Self: Poetry of Chronic Illness and Pain. 

 
 
In-between

1.

How do I talk about home? How do I communicate the distance between Adelaide and Sydney? It’s easy to calculate kilometres and round off to the half-hour how long it might take to drive the distance, but how do I measure the pull from one place to the other? I believe there was a beginning and there is a now (there can never be an end) and it’s the in-between we rip apart, trying to get at the bones of big things, like love and loss and home. How many minor poems begin and end like this:

Adelaide, I’ve seen the square of your heart pulsing in the heat,
your brown-veined river tapped-out and rank, your black fingers
touching the sea and pricked on the lovely vine – I have tasted
your blood and it tastes like wine. Once I considered getting lost
(an impossible fate) then decided to go home but the train
was late. I hear drums in the park and follow their beat,
discover giant fig trees at my feet. When I say your name Adelaide
my tongue is a snake sliding over your hills, all scales, no feet.
I pick late-night falafel from my teeth.

I’m in Sydney, on my way to the Blue Mountains, a writers’ residency, a yellow house. It once belonged to the writer Eleanor Dark and her husband, Eric, and they called it ‘Varuna’. There are stories of Eleanor’s ghost, how you can feel her beside you when walking down the stairs, how noisy she is when she climbs the ladder (it would seem she is always moving, a restless ghost). I’m going to Varuna to write about illness and art and live with ghosts for ten days: Eleanor’s, Vincent Van Gogh’s, the ghost of my healthy body. I have a beginning and I have a now, and in-between the beginning and now illness birthed a ghost that breathes in experience and exhales memory and I need to write the stories. I’m going to inhabit that ghost, make sense of its loves and losses, make sense of its homes.

*

There are five of us and a dog in Adelaide. I cannot write about myself without writing about ‘us’. To write about illness is to write about the body – the whole body – and they are each a part of mine. The boys are my limbs; without them I couldn’t jump or high-five. The girl is my core, giving me she-woman strength. When you roar, it comes from the core. Also when you sob. Also when you laugh. My husband is my heart and it’s his blood that fuels me. His blood which is mixed with the blood of so many others from the time he died, twice, then came back to life. He thinks he survived so that we could meet and my body make our babies. And let us not forget the dog. The dog is my bowel; I need him daily in a very basic and simple way. Like I need shitting, and I don’t mean it to sound cruel or crass – I always mean to sound like a poet. Without my family, my body breaks down, and I know from experience that the essential ‘I’ of me will follow. This then means: without my family, I cannot write.

And yet, and yet, it is near-impossible to write with them around me, touching me, demanding of me, taking from me. And yet, and yet, I find I want to write about them constantly when I’m away.

To write about my body, I must write about ‘us’. I must write about home.

Here is a short definition of home:

My agent, Jo, brought me to her home for the night, where her child slept in her bed and I slept in his. His stories hung on his walls and littered his floor; one was paused in the middle of the telling, lying patiently on his desk. Their dog snuffled about then left me to sleep, toddled into their room.  

How nice it is to feel welcomed, to hear a person say, This is my home, all of this is me, and you are welcome. I think Jo likes my writing because I write about family.

In the morning she drove me to the ferry at Manly. ‘It’s much nicer than going through the traffic,’ she said, and what I didn’t say was ‘Travel by water makes me sick.’ But then so does traffic. Coming to the Blue Mountains will not only be good for my writing but for my illness, too. There are many complexities in trying to determine why this is but I think it has a lot to do with not driving. My peripheral vision is in overload whenever and wherever I drive and it tires me out. School pick-ups and drop-offs, the neverendingness of groceries, the children’s sports, their music – I’m looking forward to the speed of walking over the next two weeks, the heaviness of ghosts in the yellow house.

2.

I’m sitting on the lower deck because any higher my stomach might fall overboard, scaring fish and scattering cigarette butts. What is it with smokers who don’t think their butts in the sea are as bad as an empty bottle? There is a man smoking on the upper deck and I wonder if it’s allowed. Where, these days, is smoking allowed? (Vincent with his pipe is my favourite self-portrait.)

Everyone has their phones out so they can take photos of the Opera House and the Harbour Bridge, but when we come to the blue gap between the land that is Manly and the land that is known as The Rocks – the place in the centre, where water expands unfathomably, where there is a certainty of far-away – I take a photo. It is nothing but an empty horizon. I call it longing.  

How many waves between the country where I live and the country where I was born? How many breaths? Australia and America: both are my countries yet neither are, home being a multi-layered thing and liminal at the same time; inaccessible by travel alone; too many steps, or laps, or blind grasps. That water, between the gaps of raised rock and the thin outer soil, forms a line, a plane, a motionless expanse that I know to be false because life is moving, always. Life is shifting and sinking and flowing, as in the shallow water of this harbour and the deep water beyond, as in Van Gogh’s peasant fields and the paintings of them that won’t sit still, in the rumble of dirt beneath Adelaide’s streets, and in the sands that gather and pile and amalgamate with tiny bodyless spiders’ legs in the cracks of Adelaide’s sidewalks, where debris makes homes for Adelaide’s ants. What intricate scapes tunnel below our feet.

*

I grew up in a mobile family, my father accepting promotions and my mother organising moving vans. She was a nurse and my brother and I children, so the three of us slotted right into wherever we had to live (there is always need for a nurse; suburbs crave children). By the time I was twenty-two I had lived in eight different cities in seven different states, on both sides of the Mississippi, north and south of the Mason Dixon line, too. No landmark or smell connected me to home. What is home when the silverware drawer and the cupboard for cups elude me? Naturally I filled out an application to become an international student after I’d lost my first love and of course I was gone two months later: over-the-ocean, across-the-dateline, of-a-different-hemisphere gone. Home had always been a moveable feast and I was twenty-five, hungrier than ever. That was almost two decades ago. Since then: almost twenty years of the same city, the same local beach, the same land. Almost long enough to call Australia home.

Van Gogh shifted homes when he needed to run towards, traversing the Netherlands and Belgium for a connection to the people and the land and his family and God, London for work, Paris and Arels and Auvers for art. What was home to him but a string of failures that we see as steps to his martyrdom? How conspicuous he must’ve felt with his thick Dutch accent and strange surname. He hated how the French pronounced it ‘Van Gog’ so signed his paintings with ‘Vincent’ to avoid further frustration.  

To talk about home we need to talk about language and accents, culture and history, family and, yes, the body. I’ll call Australia my eyes and America my mouth. Perhaps home is the space between the two and to the left: my ear, faulty and to blame for my disease. Is it coincidence I became sick with an imbalance disorder when I moved from one country to the next?

I come from six lane highways and bridges over creeks,
the kudzu vine, the ubiquitous pine, from toll roads
and squashed toads. I come from the North Star, Stone
Mountain, the crash of Big Sur’s waves. I am cactus poison
and acid rain; obesity and the tobacco leaf. I’m from humidity
and plastic Santas loud atop the silent snow, from lightning
bugs and those camp songs my children laugh at when I sing,
songs I sing to make them laugh.

3.

When we dock in that iconic part of Sydney, when I step off the ferry and step onto land, I am nauseous, the waves too much for my travelling ambition. I am glad for the hour reprieve before I catch a train to the mountains. I am glad for my notebook, pen, these thoughts, this writing, though when I look up from all of this gratitude, I am even more unsteady. In need of a nap to set me straight. A Coca-Cola will do. Always does. Embarrassing to wear your country of birth not around your neck or on your sleeve but stuck to your mouth which sucks in the bubbles that settle your stomach because you suffer from nausea. Though I believe sometimes you have to give yourself a break. One needn’t be political about small vices when there are so many other things wrong in the world.

Right now, in America, there is Donald Trump raised higher than Trump Tower and having no fear of any aeroplane crashing into him and taking him down, no fear of a missile aimed at his gut. Does he comprehend an American implosion, an inside job where citizens fire away with all of those automatic guns? I’m rubbing my face now. Whenever I think about Trump or America’s gun problem, I obsessively rub my face.

I’m supposed to return home to see my parents and brother and his family soon. I won’t go home. But I will return to America.

It is possible, I suppose, to miss home terribly, not know what home really is anymore, and refuse to go home, all at once:

James Woods has described this other chronic condition as ‘homelooseness’[1], going on to say, ‘Such a tangle of feelings might then be a definition of luxurious freedom’. Because I’m not a forced exile. Because I’m not a refugee. I left the only home I’d ever known to make a new one. Because I wanted to. Because I could. And yes, I miss the rivers and lakes, miss the mountains of America, miss the roads that lead to anywhere and everywhere, miss my parents and brother, so yes I miss America. I’m tethered and the strings are taut. But is it home to me when I cannot fathom how a nation could support a man such as Donald Trump? Is it home now that my vowels, the lilt of my words and the jargon I use sound foreign even to my own ear let alone to those who ask me where I’m from? Can it be home if I no longer live there, know bus routes, have a favourite restaurant, favourite radio station? In the spirit of homelooseness, I will return to America only by refusing to return ‘home’. The two names have become such luxurious contradictions that it’s impossible to consider them one and the same.   

Van Gogh went back to his family in the Netherlands again and again when he was sick, but it never worked. Feelings of failure. Angry words. His paintings of that homeland are dull in colour, so different from the yellows and teals of Arles, his haven-home, the one he chose, where he lived in his own yellow house and the people all thought him a madman. (How to communicate the lonely distance between his two homes? How to define his terms of condition and stamp it on a landscape?)

I can and will go back to America again and again because I know Adelaide, my own haven-home, will always be waiting for my return. It is why I will come to terms with the American population for voting in Trump, who is making the skin fall off of my face. It is why I can do this now: leave my husband and my children and my dog back home so that I can write about illness. So that I can write about them.

Just. Need. To get. To. The yellow. House.

And all around me at Central Station people are moving. I swear I can see the energy of the molecules between their busy bodies. It’s almost pixelated. A dance. Wrappers are moving on the concourse from the wind on the platform. Even the idling engines inside the trains are moving, their pollution sifting upward and mixing with that same wind. Everything is connected. The wind is my head. (It is always my head.) The fluid in my ear is moving in time with the lift and fall of bile in its intricate tunnel of intestines and sacs. What if the ferry ride has lasting effects and I’m sick for days or weeks? I’m on my way to the Blue Mountains without my family – who make up my body – to write about the body and illness, and I might be too sick to write. Who will I complain to? Who will I squeeze security from? I might find ‘home’ a difficult word to define but I know it’s partly a place where you are comfortable being sick. Anywhere else can be called ‘unfortunate’.

4.

I’m anxious about the impending train ride, when the world will screech past my window – a stone wall blurred, stampeding trees. Even the sun will slam down its rays like a procession of gates trying to capture the forward-moving time. The tyres on the thing will roll as if trying to tame New South Wales, though it – the land – is unruly, uncompromising, will have its way through swells and swerves, through juggling ruptures. I know this already because I love to travel, just hate the travelling.

A long day, a wild journey for someone with the luxury of freedom, but it will be small in comparison to flying across the world to get back home. (See how I use the term fluidly? As if I was an underwater lava bridge connecting two lands.) My acupuncturist thinks a body isn’t meant to move from one magnetic pole to the other in a matter of hours and that a malfunctioning body will rebel. Why whenever I go to America she sticks on strips of tape holding tiny needles that quietly treat me for days. Why I see her within the first few days of my return to Adelaide for maintenance because travelling will always shake up my illness

But she thinks this is a good idea. Not the travelling but the travel, the space and the time on my own. A holiday away from home.

*

The house on Herbert Street, call it a rectangle. It’s got rooms on either side of the hallway. Most are bedrooms but one is the living room (the couch room, the fire room, the television room, the room of constant gathering), and that is the second most important room in the rectangle, the first being the kitchen. I could’ve said the most important room was the bathroom or the toilet but I’ll remind you: I am always trying to be a poet. And after all, the kitchen’s where the hallway leads, which is like the dot at the end of the exclamation point. A directive. A designation. A destination. The room revolves around food and, more than anything, bodies need food. So we are mostly there chopping and slicing in our bodies, perusing pantries and refrigerators in our bodies; eating, singing, hugging, screaming, dancing and talking in our bodies in the kitchen; the room is rarely bare of us. Outside is a backyard full of one-day-I’m-gonnas and scattered stinging nettle seeds. There’s a trampoline and a wooden cubby house with a rustic ladder that’s unattached to any tree, but because it sits among climbing vines we’ve always called it a treehouse. Green is good for the imagination just as it’s good for the lungs. And that’s really what I think about our backyard: it’s a place to breathe.

I board the train bound for Katoomba and sit near the front on the bottom level, where the least amount of perpetual motion occurs. I’ve been on this train before and sat on the upper level, threw up into my water bottle until it was full then asked someone close to me for their empty coffee cup. Two and a bit more hours of travel and I’ll put down my bags in my room at Varuna. I’ll lie on the bed and rest before the welcoming drinks, where I’ll try to appear happy-to-be-here when really I’ll be just-plain-tired. At night, I’ll lie down in bed, thinking about Van Gogh’s yellow house, how he wanted it to be an atelier for a host of painters in southern France and when it didn’t work out, he was devastated, hacked at his ear, got so sick he never really recovered. I’ll fall asleep, dizzy but exhausted, and if the ghost of Eleanor Dark wakes me, I’ll tell her thank you for welcoming me into her yellow house. Such a lovely home.

*

When the train starts to roll I’m looking out the window. Sydney spreading then thinning then suddenly gone. Then pockets of other ways of living: outer suburbs and mountain towns. In America, I trialled them all. I made a home in a desert city where front lawns traded boulders for grass and one in a suburb of contemporary houses, all angled and wooden and upper-middle class. One had a front porch overlooking a proud town preserving its Civil War façade. Women in bonnets swept the sidewalks on Saturdays. All of these, stepping stones to the rectangle which I call home, though naming it as such suggests that home is an object, when what I really want to say is that home is everything within and surrounding the rectangle, everything fragile about my upbringing, everything sacred about my connection or disconnection to America and to Australia. More than the beginning and the now, it’s the in-between.

[1] Woods, James. ‘On Not Going Home’. London Review of Books, vol. 36,  no. 4, 20 February 2014, pp. 3-8, http://www.lrb.co.uk/v36/n04/james-wood/on-not-going-home

Robert Wood grew up in a multicultural household in Perth. He holds degrees from the Australian National University and the University of Pennsylvania, where he was a National Undergraduate Scholar and a Benjamin Franklin Fellow respectively. He has edited for Margaret River Press, Wild Dingo Press and Overland, and volunteered for the Small Press Network, Philadelphia Fringe Festival and Books through Bars. He has published work in literary journals such as Southerly, Plumwood Mountain and Counterpunch and a academic journals including Foucault Studies, JASAL and Journal of Poetics Research. He currently hosts a reading and conversation series at The School of Life and is a regular contributor to Cultural Weekly. His next book, heart-teeth, is due out from Electio Editions later this year.

What is the hybrid to do?

I have passed as a white man for most of my life. I have a name – Robert Wood – that is invisible in the hegemonic Anglo society of suburban Australia. I have a body that if a little tanned, a little hook nosed, a little ‘Latin’ or ‘Mediterranean’, is nevertheless unthreateningly, benignly unnoticeable. I present in dress and language, in what Pierre Bourdieu called habitus, as white. But I am also a person of colour. My mother is brown. She is Malayalee from Kerala in South India. Although there are degrees of complexity and complexion in the vales and folds of family history, through her I participate in a network of colouredness. Colouredness means both the aesthetic reality of the body itself, how we look, and the political meaning of bodies, how we are represented. In other words my mother’s skin is literally not ‘white’ (or for that matter ‘pink’, ‘yellow’ or ‘black’) and we have a shared history of colonial oppression that is racially based, which involves the British, the Portugese and northern India.

When I was young my mother’s parents, in sari and tracksuit pants, migrated to Australia. They had come to die where their children had come to live. My grandparents were from adjoining fishing villages  ‘close’ to what is now Thiruvananthapuram. They grew up in an era before Indian independence and had markedly divergent political attitudes towards colonialism. My grandfather, Winifred, dark as the ace of spades, was an Anglophile. When I went back to his village in 2012, people said I looked just like him, ‘except he was an African’. These old people – my distant relations and my grandfather’s friends – laughed about who my grandfather was: how he would wear white linen suits, how he listened to classical music, how he drank gin and tonics. He was attracted in part to my grandmother, Gertrude, because her skin was so fair. She meanwhile was an Indian nationalist, a passionate supporter of unions, a radical opposed to the British occupation. I don’t know enough to understand what bound them together but there must have been something to allow those paradoxes of body, of ideology to be united.

Their children – my mother and my aunts – had come to Australia when the White Australia Policy ended in 1974. Some of them were early international students at universities; others came and began work straight away. Their story over the last forty years resonates with the known narrative of migration – hard work, education, opportunity – and they have, in their own definition, been successful. But their story also has its particular idiosyncrasies and challenges. Before Australia my Uncle Eddie, for example, had moved to Singapore and was Lee Kwan Yu’s bodyguard for a number of years. A committed socialist, his contribution to a newly independent nation was to keep the leader safe. He read what Lee Kwan Yu read; he ate what Lee Kwan Yu ate; he slept on a cot at the foot of Lee Kwan Yu’s bedroom door. When he came to Australia, the only job he could get was at Midland Brickworks. The racism from other workers there was a long way from the multicultural, red left utopia he thought he was helping to build in South East Asia. These are the personal takes on a story, increasingly told, about what it is to migrate to Australia.

I knew I was not quite white from very early on. My mother’s family, from midnight to caramel to café au lait, was a chocolate box of brownness. There were gingers and blondes and brunettes in my father’s family, but Mum’s made me realise that diversity is skin deep. It was home to me. It still is. In other societies and times I would not be allowed to exist; the brown would be far away from the white. When my family went to South Africa in 2001 we often found we were the only mixed race, the only ‘coloured’ family in various bourgeois restaurants. Class was now doing the role of race. There was a palpable sense of unease at our presence. We were in a sea of tense, paranoid, leftover apartheid beneficiaries, many of whom have subsequently made sunny Perth their putative home.

But it did not take a trip to South Africa to realise I was not white and that being non-white was different. We knew this when our grandparents dropped us at school, when we opened our lunchboxes, when we went to friend’s family homes with their saccharine smell sans spice. This is not to say I had white friends only but that we were not people like them. But it was a source of strength for the most part. This is not to say there are not structural forms of racism that one experiences personally, but that one’s identity is formed partly by familial recognition, solidarity and validation.

In thinking through identity though, in thinking through what I am, I am first led towards clichés. The phrase that seems to be deployed most often is ‘walking in two worlds’. In Australia this is used particularly often for Indigenous people, but one can discern it in post-colonial conversations as well. I have a mata mata brother-in-law who is half Ngarluma (Aboriginal) and half white (mongrel Irish, French, English). Although people no longer use this phrase, he, like me on a different axis, is a ‘half-caste’. We could be forgiven for thinking that ‘we walk in two worlds’. In a more intellectual iteration, this might be ‘hybrid’. But hybrid unifies the duality of the two worlds phrase, it seeks to bring together the ‘double consciousness’ that half-halfs seem to have and so it is distinct. Hybridity too, in the literary theory of Homi Bhabha, seems to represent a process over time rather than a state of being. We are apparently creating a new mode of interaction that is neither here nor there. This may account for the either/or discussion that happens, whereby one says I am proud of my heritage or I am in conflict. But people feel various points at various times and I often think of myself ‘homonymically’.

A homonym is one of a group of words that share the same spelling and the same pronunciation but have different meanings. It is about unity (of sound and spelling) and multiplicity (of meaning). It is then not about two autonomous histories coming together in one body, about my parents as individuals who come from separate, independent places, but about how they have always been linked dialogically and materially. There has always been a little bit of curry in Scotland, always a little bit of whiskey in Kerala. Water connects us all.

Passing, of course, has a long and complicated global history including for African American communities, for Anglo-Indian people, for Indigenous Stolen Generations. Colouredness used to be a secret to keep hidden because there were material advantages to presenting as white. That has most certainly changed due in part to the end of White Australia, Civil Rights, Land Rights, ‘black is beautiful’, United Colours of Bennetton as well as the material opportunities afforded to Othered subjects by a whole host of cultural, economic and political changes. Now there is cultural capital to be gained from identifying as a person of colour, even as we should think of it as a heuristic and imperfect category. In the Australian conversation, the myth we have of being white, of being a European or American society has been discredited, but it lingers in television, in corporate boardrooms, in advertising, in cricket, in mining. It is not only about placing people of colour in the conversation but about changing the frame of representation to begin with. We don’t need to assimilate to it; it needs to accommodate us.

Indians now have recently outpaced English people as the source of new migrants in Australia. This is only surprising to me in that English people had clung on for so long. Of course I knew there were whites arriving here, aiming for a slice of the good-Home-and-Away-sunny-side-of-the-street-hot-pie-cold-beer-roses-out-front-green-lawn-out-back-red-brick-own-your-own-home-life, but I had not believed they were still the source of so many new arrivals. That the biggest group of ‘illegals’ in Australia are backpackers from the United Kingdom who overstay their visa is a fact worth highlighting publicly, if only to reinforce the claim that Australia is structurally racist. Why one rule for someone fleeing persecution who happens to be brown as opposed to someone larking about on the beach who happens to be white? Australia still seems to be a paradise for the white working man.

I though in other conditions, conditions of my own making, see myself as a white man. It is not without some hesitation that I identify as such, if only because being a white man now means, in certain circles, prostrating for one’s historical sins. And well they/we should. What white men fail to see, what are invisible, are their forms of group solidarity, their shared experiences of the body, their political ideation as collective rather than as individual subjects. If us people of colour have historically been stereotyped and viewed as a group lacking individual identification, white men have rejoiced in the opposite. I do though reflect on my father’s position and heritage. I drink whiskey and think of the fatherland, I read Robbie Burns and think of the fatherland, I get angry at the fatherland as an interested and invested party.

I was living in New Delhi at the time of all the ‘curry bashing’ in Melbourne, 2009. Front page after front page in India was filled with commentary about racist Australia. It was shaming but it corroborated personal experiences. I remember visiting my teenage cousin in hospital when I was a child because a football team had beaten him up in a racially motivated attack on the streets of Cottesloe. In 2009 though, Indian newspapers showed Indians in Australia protesting and mass rallies against violence. As heartening to see this pushback, it was to my mind only the opening of a possible conversation about anti-violence has not yet been taken up in a lasting way. That initial energy has not coalesced into meaningful institutional and cohesive forms of anti-racism. That is surely the task now: To not only take these disparate experiences into the cultural conversation but then to politicise what it means to be coloured in Australia in a way that has lasting material impacts.

By virtue of shared experience and bodily aesthetics there are bridges to build between people of Indian origin and other communities too. When I visited Broome I was assailed by long lost family members from my mind. Who were all these South Indians I thought looking at the faces of local Indigenous people? That people of colour may translate well to certain Indigenous communities is important for allowing us to consider possibilities for addressing the ills of modern Australia. In my interactions in the Pilbara, locals respond very differently by virtue of skin. There is solidarity between brown bodies there that needs exploring.

For years I have been reluctant to identify myself as a person of colour. This is because I want to be recognised on my own terms, as an individual rather than as a set of histories or a position in the world. I have, in other words, wanted to be white where my identity is all but invisible and I can proclaim my universality without consideration or conscience. But the body returns, heritage returns. There is opportunity to think through what it means to be neither/nor, either/or, two worlds, hybrid, homonymic, dialogic, multiple. And in a style that breaks down the assumption that people can only be one thing, that identity is fixed and personal rather than mutating and structural.   

George Michelsen Foy has worked as a commercial fisherman, a magazine editor, and chief cream-puff transporter in a pastry factory in England. His latest novels are Mettle and The Art & Practice of Explosion (University Press of New England); a non-fiction book, Finding North: How navigation makes us human, will be published by Flatiron Press/Macmillan in 2016. His short fiction has appeared in Notre Dame Review, Monkeybicycle, American Literary Review, et al.: long-form essays in Harper’s, Rolling Stone, Men’s Journal, et al. He was awarded an NEA fellowship in fiction. He lives with his family in Southeastern Massachusetts and in New York City, where he teaches creative writing at NYU.

Ferguson

How wrong to walk the streets dressed how you dress and know those codfish eyes will follow you always, how wrong to know that voice with sharpened fricatives will slice a path to stop—hands pale as non-fat slap your thighs apart twist your head and depending on what you’ve done (and you’ve always done something) click chill around your wrists: and if you say no? And if you run or just move wrong? The voice that worms out, flattened by electrics and satellite, from your mom’s/ girl’s/ grannie’s/ dad’s cell phone will be a voice they do not know: that never said ‘Wait, I got a joke for you,’ nor ‘Happy birthday’ nor ‘Fuck you’ even: how wrong for someone they never met to say, ‘I’m sorry, but I must inform—

Sabotage

Tournan en Brie lies a little east and south of Paris. It was a quiet town when I was growing up. Nothing much had ever happened there. A minor lord or two bullied farmers from a tower. There was a church, two bakeries, two patisseries, a butcher shop, a pharmacy. Apart from wheat, the main crop was boredom. It was Kansas with good cheese. When my brother and I stayed in Tournan—we were there months at a time, visiting our grandmother, nothing to do but shoot gravel at each other with slingshots in the garden—we used to walk, with our parents, to watch cars hiss by on the highway running east and west. That was what passed for entertainment in Tournan. My grandmother called that highway la route des invasions, invasion road. She knew what she was talking about. The first time the Germans came from the East they killed her brothers, every one. Her husband’s only brother was also killed; he had come back from Australia to fight. Her husband, the town doctor, was gassed at the front. The gas braised his guts and he died shortly afterward, at home. Grandmère wore black, inside and out, for the rest of her life. She kept her husband’s surgery as it was the day he left for war, and raised their only child in a country of unrelenting loss. When the Germans returned, twenty-two years later, they billeted three officers in her house. Grandmère was pissed off. Not only had the bosches killed her husband and all the men in her family, they had given her son the excuse he needed to leave and not come back. Now she was expected to make their beds, sweep their floors and watch them brew coffee in her kitchen? They had real coffee, too, she said, a luxury in those days. All this was bad enough. What really made her sore was, these Nazi officers in their high conquerors’ boots would lie down on her mattresses, on the family’s lace bedspreads, without taking off their footwear. This was the last straw. Invasion and mayhem were one thing, but here was final proof the Germans were barbarians. So she joined the resistance. From then on she refused to acknowledge her lodgers. She declined to make their beds. She listened to the BBC in secret. And she sabotaged the coffeegrinder. This was a cruel blow. American B-17s were flattening factories—they would bomb Grandmère’s house toward war’s end—the maquis were blowing trains to kingdom come. And these three Wehrmacht captains were deprived of coffee. I still have her coffeegrinder, it still doesn’t work. I’ve tried to fix it many times and can’t figure out how she broke the thing. I suppose, as with most sabotage, all you need is sufficient rage.

Graham Akhurst is currently in his last semester of a Bachelor of Creative Arts in writing at the University of Queensland. Prior to this he completed an Advanced Diploma of Performing Arts from the Aboriginal Centre for the Performing Arts where he studied music, and wrote and co-created several performances that were held at QPAC. Graham is of Aboriginal descent and hails from the Kokomini tribe in Northern Queensland. Graham currently resides in Brisbane, and has ambitions to further his study at the University of Queensland as a postgraduate student in writing.

The wind crept through in the early morning, blowing a gust by the time the sky was blackened. Dust etched its way into everything including the protective goggles I was wearing. It was impossible to stay clean in the desert. Our journey had led up to this moment, darkness in the middle of the day. I wondered if the couple of thousand people around me felt the same way I did. Awe at the beauty and scope of the natural wonder, but also a sickening for humanity.

We’d left Brisbane a week earlier, and we were proud of the Queensland license plates attached to the banged-up Mazda 323 we were traveling in. Others from our state were not so keen to traverse almost 2500 kilometres to go to a festival in the middle of nowhere. After two days on the road, all three of us had our right arms blistered, burned, and tanned from hanging them out the window as we took turns driving. We had all grown up together but travelling the long distance by road gave me a sense of freedom and solitude. The roads emitted a wave of heat that reflected the sun, which became hypnotic after a time, and seemed to conjure conversation with more substance than what we had been used to. The nights were peaceful, cold, and the clear sky and stars provided a reflective end to a day’s drive.

We were on our way to a small town called Lyndhurst, part of the Flinders Ranges in South Australia. It’s home to one pub, one hotel, one house, and is surrounded by a desert so dry and unforgiving that each member of our party suffered from heatstroke. The symptoms of dizziness, fatigue, vomiting and confusion gave our travels a barbaric edge, and we developed a man versus nature attitude. We were lucky enough not to all come down with it at once, so that each time others of us could help the fallen. I must admit though that a lot of this danger was rightly avoidable. If it weren’t for the copious amounts of drugs and binge drinking, I wholeheartedly believe that we would’ve been completely fine. But don’t get me wrong, it was hot out there. Really hot.

The year was 2002. The eclipse was due on the fourth of December, and a festival had been organised. Over fifty international and Australian DJ’s were to perform. The Flinders Ranges evoked a nothingness that was both haunting and beautiful. The festival itself was a violation of this.

We arrived in the late afternoon of the second of December, and needed to scalp some tickets. Matt, my friend from high school, wandered off with five hundred bucks and returned three hours later, drunk, broke, and with three tickets that would have originally cost 75 dollars each. He spent the rest of the money on various forms of drugs that we took over the next three days.

The festival campsite was a cesspool. It consisted of gluten-free, wheat-free, overindulgent, drug-taking, fire-twirling, vegan people to the far left of any political scale, so far left it was almost to a fault. They were dirty, but that couldn’t be helped; we were all in the same situation when it came to cleanliness. I’d never before or since gone so long without a shower. There were three-pronged barbed bindies everywhere; each barb an inch long. To walk around barefoot was not to be advised. There was no safety in wearing thongs, as the barbs would go right through them. Our daily dress was solid shoes, shorts, and long-sleeved shirts. We started to soak t-shirts and wrap them around our heads like turbans for some small relief from the elements. Then, as night hit, we would put on layers upon layers. The temperature dropped incredibly quickly as the sun faded over the horizon.

I talked to an old Aboriginal man who was camping next to us. He played didgeridoo, and tried to teach me circular breathing – which I failed at comprehensively. He told us he had great knowledge of the land, although he was not from this area. He was adamant to assure us of this, which made me doubt it. He knew of the traditional owners of the land, the Adnyamathanha, which means ‘hills’ or ‘rock people’. I sat with this man, and drank beers with him under a tarp, dust floating in from the incessant wind. He became very quiet after we passed around a joint, and we listened to the thump of techno floating in and out with the direction of the breeze.

The ancestor spirits from the dreaming stories took on human form, and as they travelled the land they would create rocks, animals, lakes, rivers, plants, and all forms of life and geography. They created the relationships that groups and individuals had with the land and with each other. Once they had created the world, they took on the form of trees, rocks, stars, and other objects. The places that they now rest, in whatever form they have taken, have become sacred.

People danced, some naked except for sturdy shoes, in the marketplace at the centre of the festival. They were most obviously on drugs. They bounced around to thumping beats coming from a 10-foot-high sound system, and they worshipped a young man with long hair who would throw his arms up, and twist a knob on his DJ equipment every so often.

We walked past the marketplace on our way to the pub, stopping first at a mobile food stall to grab Chiko rolls. It was run by a smiling Greek lady, who was either that way naturally disposed, or excited by the riches coming her way. The line for her stall ran for 30 metres. We’d been lucky to get in line just before the long-haired DJ’s set had finished. As we were being served the line grew, and we overheard praise for the music in a fanatical tone. A religious experience was had. There was a swollen appreciation and joy for the thumping beats, made larger by narcotics. The faithful were now lining up for V drinks, lollipops, and hot chips.

The pub was not immune to the festival either. The festival crowd went to buy cartons over the counter, or take refuge in the one place accessible to them with air conditioning. There were locals present too. It was odd to watch so many young liberal-minded people darting between and around the small group of local barflies. All had worn skin from hard work in the desert, and from years of heavy drinking. We had walked in just as a raucous clamour went up in the pub; all eyes were on the small television above the bar. The inhabitants of the pub were on the screen being interviewed for a news piece about the festival. Their reactions to all this attention, given this isolated part of the world, was the focus of the story. I observed their surprise as they saw themselves on television; the embarrassed smiles, the jabs, the humorous remarks about having become famous, and the pride they exuded at the partisanship of being so unique in their remoteness together. To see their faces so alive in the midst of an expedition in which I was a witness rather than a participant felt fake.

We grabbed a carton and climbed up to a ledge overlooking the festival. We weren’t the first to seek out this viewpoint. There were empty bottles and refuse scattered around as evidence of that. Security patrolled the rock faces adjacent to the festival; it would be a dangerous prospect to venture out there without the proper equipment. They were there to monitor, as well as to remind us of the world we had left behind.

We settled and watched the sun set. It was the most vivid sunset I can recall. Sunsets are not things you remember. But the surrounding events forced this particular sunset to the top of my consciousness. I remember my growing disillusion, made stronger as I watched a man in black survey the land with binoculars. The temporary city bustled in front of me, to the soundtrack of my brother vomiting behind a rock. It was his turn to have heatstroke.

The next afternoon, people slowly gathered atop a long, man-made dirt wall, which acted as a barrier between the festival and the camping grounds. All were holding protective goggles for the eclipse. It became awkward on that hill. People were waiting to be awed. But such events take as long as they take, and the crowd was becoming restless. It reminded me of public transport. Then, as the eclipse slowly revealed itself, I felt anguish and a panic initiating. I wondered if the people around me felt the same as well. The pulling away from reality, the confusion of the mind, the nagging of identity. By the amount of yahooing, and the drugs being passed around, I doubted it.

***

Sharyn Belcher lives in Melbourne with her husband and three sons. She teaches piano part-time and is currently studying literature at Monash University. Her great loves are her family, nineteenth-century Realism, writing, and playing the grand piano she bought instead of replacing her worn-out car.

Mud House