2019: My Year of Writing

2019 was a much better year than 2018. I published my third book and I only got the flu once, rather than every few weeks. But geez, it was still a hectic year. Only now, in Germany, experiencing my first normal weekend in god knows how long (I can’t remember the last time I didn’t have a deadline to meet), can I see how insane my life has been for the last few years. I guess it’s akin to how you don’t realise you are depressed until you’re better. Here’s a list of what happened during the year.

Publications

The highlight of my year was the publication of Hearing Maud, my hybrid memoir, after 15 years of work (I left for London to start my research in 2004). I was in Perth when it came out, and when my copies were delivered to me at the hotel I burst into tears, because I never thought the book would be finished. It took so long to get the voice right, and to harmonise the elements of research and memoir, that it was amazing that the copy in my hands was actually real. A hectic publicity schedule followed, which I will blog about as a record, & as an exemplar of what writers need to do to get their work out these days, while trying to also hold down their day jobs (and, in my case as always, deal with a disability).

I published three academic essays: a chapter on eco-memoir, eco-austerity and Isabella Tree’s Wilding in The Poetics and Politics of Gardening in Hard Times; another chapter on deaf actor Emmanuelle Laborit’s autobiography The Cry of the Gull in Disability Experiences: Memoirs, Autobiographies, and other Personal Narratives; and an essay on literature and plant blindness in Australian Humanities Review. I also published a review (on Melissa Fagan’s What Will Be Worn in the Queensland Review) and a piece of creative nonfiction on Kafka and the NDIS, which was published in a special issue on Disability in Westerly. With my colleague at University of the Sunshine Coast, Clare Archer-Lean, I edited a special issue on the interface between science and literature for the Australian Humanities Review (hence the plant blindness essay). This was my first experience of editing, although I’ve also been working on another issue due to come out shortly in Auto/Biography Studies, on Life Writing in the Anthropocene, and was pleased to find that I am accomplished at cat herding, because there are other volumes I’d like to edit.

Again, I didn’t publish any fiction, although I did manage to write and submit some, and I was successful in my application for a Griffith Review fellowship, which means that my part of my mermaid book will be published in the journal next year. The fellowship also means that I can go to the Iceland Writers Retreat to work on the book some more, which will be very helpful as I’m struggling with the plot.

Because of my perennial exhaustion from deafness, book publicity, and teaching, I missed pretty much every single deadline last year. I also wrote an essay on disability and Katherine Susannah Prichard’s Haxby’s Circus that was rejected, because I was too tired to do a decent job (my academic work is not often rejected; my creative work is). So in 2020 I have resolved to be less tired and to hand things in on time. Thus far I have managed this with about half of my January deadlines, so, I’m getting there.

Teaching

In Semester One I convened the Australian Literature course as a stop-gap between one staff member leaving and another starting. This was the first time I had convened a third year course (and a large one at that). It was bloody exhausting and, at times, terrifying. I was extremely grateful to my two tutors, James Halford & Kirril Shields, who each gave a guest lecture and were really good at their job. The timetabling was terrible, though, so I delivered the lecture & two tutorials on the same day, and there wasn’t much left of me for students in the final tutorial, though I did my best. However, having convened a big course once makes it easier for the next time, although I swear my telomeres get shorter each time I teach.

Semester Two was a bit easier in that I was tutoring, but that meant teaching three literature classes in one day (two back-to-back) and one creative writing class the next day. That took too much out of me and I don’t know how good a teacher I was for my students – the office failed to file the forms for my teaching evaluations so I have no idea. However I just loved the creative writing class – I know the craft so well that I can teach it in my sleep, and my students were good writers and they tried hard.

I also had a revelation last week, after watching a video with my colleagues at the Rachel Carson Center on Donna Haraway. In that video, Haraway said that she found it hard to think while she was teaching, and I realised that even the exceptionally bright, able-bodied people cannot write and teach at the same time, so no wonder I’ve been finding it difficult. It isn’t just having a 75% hearing loss that’s a problem (though this is obviously a major factor), it’s my desperation to write as well, and my frustration and despair when I can’t find the time or energy to do this just compounds things.

I’ve been thinking about this a great deal, of late, now that I actually have energy for reflection. I’ve realised that, because of my deafness, I can’t physically work for more than a few days a week. I have one more year left of my contract when I return to Australia and although I can stick it out for another year, after that I think I’ll have to go back to the uncertainty of tutoring. Which means, in essence, that I will be penalised for my disability, but I can’t see any other way around it, at least not in these neoliberal times which demand their pound of flesh, even from a body that is disabled.

Outside of work I also, with my friend and fellow writer Amanda Niehaus, presented a workshop on ‘Writing to Save the Planet’ for the Queensland Writers Centre in which we discussed how to write about climate change through fiction and nonfiction. We had fun doing this and we work well together, so I hope we can present it again.

Amanda & I at our workshop for the Queensland Writers Centre.

 Conferences

I presented papers at three excellent conferences last year, and delivered a keynote at a fourth. The first conference was the bi-annual Association for the Study of Environment & Culture (Aust & NZ chapter), held at UNE around the theme of ‘Grounding Story.’ I always like going to UNE because I know their hearing systems work and there are always friendly and interesting people to meet and catch up with. I blogged about the conference here.

The second was the annual Association for the Study of Australian Literature conference in Perth in July, the theme of which was ‘Dirt.’ I presented with two other writers with disability (Amanda Tink and Kit Kavanagh-Ryan) on eco-crip, or the intersection between disability studies and the environmental humanities (I focussed on Alan Marshall’s  I Can Jump Puddles.) My paper was a usual last-minute rush job but I think I got most of my ideas across. I also launched the Writing Disability in Australia dataset, which I put together with the help of the amazing people at Austlit, and had my first launch for Hearing Maud at this conference. It was a wonderful place to start my book publicity because I’ve presented on Rosa Praed at several ASAL conferences.

Kit, Amanda and I are meeting again to present on another panel on disability at this year’s ASAL conference in Cairns, looking at the intersection of writing, literature and disability. I have to say, after so many days below 5 degrees, I am looking forward to going to the beach!

In October I was back at UNE to present on a conference on compassion (I talked about disability and empathy) & then again at the end of November to give a keynote on Judith Wright, poetry and deafness for a symposium on ecopoesis organised by my botanical colleague John Ryan.

Driving to Armidale in the middle of drought & bushfire for the conference on compassion at UNE. We had no idea of how bad the summer would get. Our pollies sure could do with some compassion, given that a billion animals and millions of trees died.

Mentoring

Early in the year I was approach to be a mentor for a young deaf writer through WestWords. This was one of the absolute highlights of my year, as I got to work with Fiona Murphy, who is a brilliant essayist – she won the Overland Fair Australia prize for her essay ‘Reasonable Adjustments’ (which I encourage everyone to read because it describes how discrimination impacts on deaf people’s employment - I related to much of it) and now has a contract to publish a collection of essays. On a personal level, it was amazing to communicate with another deaf person and to share notes on different areas – while I focus on deaf literature and history, Fiona focuses on research relating to health. I’m so glad that Fiona has found her wings & is now flying.

Service

In academic parlance, ‘service’ is what you give to your school and scholarly community to help keep things running (for eg attending meetings, reviewing articles & theses, serving on committees), but I also see it as also contributing to our literary community, particularly as there isn’t much of a division between my academic and creative writing. So as well as the obligatory reviewing of papers & theses, my job was to be the Integrity Officer, which meant having conversations with students who had plagiarised. I found it quite disruptive as there were so many of them and they usually met me during my prime writing/research time (in the morning), so I should have scheduled things a bit better. I also ran a Literature and Environment reading group, which was fun, and judged the WordPlay Microfiction competition for the Brisbane Writers Festival.

I also produced the newsletters for ASLEC-ANZ and co-ordinated a social media team for the Association for the Study of Australian Literature. Beyond this, I did my final year as diversity editor for the Australian Women Writers Challenge and have now handed the baton over, as I have been doing the role for too long (seven years!) and it needed some new energy.

A pall of smoke from the fires.

 The Year Ahead

2020 is about getting my life back. I’ve stopped pushing myself, I’m trying to get fit again (a very slow process), I’m resting and reading more, and I’m only doing things that I want to do rather than because I think it’s going to get me another job (because, let’s face it, there are no jobs in academia, let alone part-time jobs). I’m focussing on writing fiction again because I think that, particularly after the horrendous summer of fire, this is a more effective way of educating people about the environment than writing scholarly articles that only three people will read.

I will be at the Rachel Carson Center for the Environment for another three months (I’m writing a book on the genre of ecobiography), then I will decamp to Edinburgh and Virginia in the US to work on my ecobiography of Georgiana Molloy. I miss my partner painfully and perennially, but this time away is critical to my work and health, so I just endure that part of it. By the time I get back to Australia, I hope to be full of beans again.

Obligatory favourite flower (peonies) shot.

Silencing: The Decision to Close UWA Publishing

This is a letter I have written to Professor Tayyeb Shah, Deputy Vice Chancellor of the University of Western Australia, regarding his decision to close University of Western Australia Publishing. If you, too, don’t wish the press to close, I urge you to sign the Change.org petition and to express your concerns to tayyeb[dot]shah[at]uwa[dot]edu[dot]au.

Dear Professor Shah,

I am writing in relation to your recent decision to close University of Western Australia publishing. I am an academic and award-wining writer (I was shortlisted, among other prizes, for the WA Premier’s award), and my third book, Hearing Maud, was recently published by UWAP. This book is a hybrid memoir about my experiences of deafness, the history of deaf education, and the life of Maud Praed, the deaf daughter of 19th century Queensland novelist Rosa Praed.

As a person who has been deaf since age 4, my life depends on watching watching how people communicate. I notice those who listen, those whose voices are amplified, and those who are muted. The decision to silence a press of 85 years standing, at the helm of which is a publisher who is innovative, committed to creating Australian literature of quality and who takes risks (which many major publishers are not nimble enough to do), signals to me that you do not value the way in which this press elevate the voices of several hundred writers (many of them Western Australian, including Noongar writers as well as Miles Franklin award winners) and their significant contributions to Australia’s literary landscape.

In 2016 I began an ARC DECRA at the University of Queensland to write an ecobiography of Western Australia's first female scientist, Georgiana Molloy. Although three biographies have been written on Molloy, they have not closely examined the role of science and writing in her life, nor the significant impact which the remarkable flora of south-west Western Australia had on her sense of self. Molloy is another example of a woman who, like my deaf research subject Maud Praed, was not allowed to speak as she wished because the culture into which she was born did not value her voice. Although she was a writer and a scientist, Molloy could not publish scientific papers because of her gender, and her literary and scientific skill was confined to her letters.

I have been researching this book for two decades and was planning, when it is completed next year, to submit my manuscript to UWA Publishing. This is a scholarly book, but is written in a way that makes it easy to be read by a general audience. If UWA Publishing is disbanded, I will be required to find an east coast-based publisher. As a writer I have heard often how difficult it is for Western Australian stories to find audiences in the east, and shutting down the press will, no doubt, marginalise these stories further.

The associations between deafness and colonisation are well-established (historically, deaf people have been discouraged from using their language, sign, and have been assimilated into hearing culture), and I cannot help but see the same pattern appearing in your decision to shut down UWA Publishing and the voices of its authors, particularly given the context of your relocation from Britain to Australia. I urge you to listen to those who have signed the recent Change.org petition (now approaching 7500 signatures), and statements from the Association for the Study of Australian Literature, the International Australian Studies Association, Westerly journal and innumerable high profile scholars and writers, and to reconsider this appalling decision.

Jessica White.

2018: My Year of Writing

2018 was a bit of a bastard, I have to say. The stress of the past seven years – it’s been accumulating since I decided to apply for a postdoctoral fellowship, & has been exacerbated by teaching – caught up with me, bowling me over with an ear infection in May. The eardrum in my good ear ruptured and for a few weeks I was left completely deaf, even with my hearing aid turned to its maximum. So last year was mostly about trying to keep it together & get better, rather than doing half marathons as I had imagined (god knows what I was thinking). I dropped to 0.7FTE in July – something that took six months to be processed, even as I got sicker and sicker with repeated colds & flu & the infection. Much of last year was also spent wondering if I could even be an academic, particularly given that most positions are teaching and research, and I’m currently research-focussed. However, reducing my load really helped; I’m seeing a specialist for chronic fatigue; and I’m trying to stop working on the weekends. And on the plus side, due to needing to rest I’ve been reading much more, which has been such a pleasure.

Publications

The big highlight of last year was getting a contract for Hearing Maud: A Journey for a Voice, which will be published by University of Western Australia press on 1st July this year. I’ll be at the Byron Bay Writers Festival and am lining up some ducks for appearances in Perth, Armidale, Tamworth & Brisbane, & hopefully also Sydney, Melbourne & Canberra. The editor for the book also edited A Curious Intimacy & she loved Hearing Maud & said that my craft had really improved, so that made me extremely happy.

In terms of scholarly publications, I published an essay on Annamaria Weldon’s ecobiography The Lake’s Apprentice in Offshoot: Contemporary Life Writing Methodologies and Practice, edited by Donna Lee Brien & Quinn Eades. This was my first publication on ecobiography & it will be part of a critical monograph that I’m writing on the form next year. I also had a piece of creative nonfiction published in one of my favourite outlets, the Sydney Review of Books, on Georgiana Molloy & my decision not to have children. This was part of their New Nature series & I was delighted to be featured among other Oz environmental writers. I worry about being typecast as a writer on disability, & while this is an issue that’s important to me, my writing life has always ranged widely across genres and subjects, & at the moment it’s my driving force to educate people about what we’re doing to the planet.

As with 2017, I didn’t publish any fiction, although that doesn’t mean I didn’t try. I wrote a 12,000 word novella for the Griffith Review novella prize on tree clearing in Queensland and the mythic salting of Carthage in the Punic Wars, & I’m now going to turn this into a book.

Teaching

Due to physical collapse last year, I didn’t take on any teaching. I wrote and presented two lectures for a third-year Australian literature course, one on Tim Winton’s Island Home (which I hope I never have to read again in my lifetime) and the other on James Bradley’s Clade. I also delivered a lecture on the Environmental Humanities to a group of advanced students at the Australian Catholic University in Banyo. This year I’m convening that third year Australian literature course & tutoring two of the four classes.

King’s Park. So gorgeous.

Conferences

2018 was the year of overkill when it came to conferences – I went to seven of them and was on the organising committee for one – never again! The first, in February in Parramatta, was on postcolonial literature and climate change. It was a small and very enjoyable conference, but I was struck forcefully by how few young people were there. It’s part of the hollowing out of the humanities, & young people thinking that the humanities won’t help them find a job (I think studying humanities is one of the best things you can do in a coming world of automation but that’s a blog for another time). In the middle of the year I headed south to Canberra for two conferences – The Literary Interface, for which I organised two panels on science and literature with Dr Clare Archer-Lean of the University of the Sunshine Coast, and the Australian Historical Association conference. The latter was only the second history conference I’d been to and it was absolutely huge. I had a ball & met some cool people. I also caught up with my good friends in Canbez which is always a bonus.

Then, although I was still not feeling great & had depleted my reserves of energy with a week of listening, I flew up to Sydney for the Deaf History International conference. I was a bit nervous about this – I never know whether Deaf people are going to accept me or not because I wasn’t raised Deaf, even though I’ve lost 75% of my hearing – but they turned out to all be lovely. And the most wonderful thing, aside from the people, was that the equipment worked beautifully. All I had to do was turn up at the conference, put my hearing aid on its T-switch to access the loop system and I heard everything so clearly. I even had the luxury of being late one day, when usually I have to panic about getting places early so that I can check that equipment is working & that I can hear. I was inspired to start learning sign again, but after I looked into it with Deaf Services Queensland I realised I have no time this year because of my exhausting job. It’s either nearly a full day of lessons or two nights a week, and the day classes were full and I’m too tired in the evenings to function. So learning sign is on hold again.

At the end of the year I flew to Perth for the Australasian Association of Writing Programs conference. This was my first ever creative writing conference and I’m always glad of a reason to go to Perth. I met some great people, caught up with others who I knew, met my publisher for coffee and went for walks in Kings Park. Gosh I love Perth! I would move over there in a heartbeat, except that I know I would miss my family terribly.

I was on the organising panel for the International Association for the Study of Australian Literature conference, which was held at UQ in December. I arranged an event on sexuality and sport with writer Inga Simpson, scholar Rebecca Olive and artist Eric Bridgeman, which was prompted by the current exhibition of the UQ Art Museum, Play On. Following that conference I flew to Melbourne for a conference on colonialism and archives, which also went well, but by that stage I was pretty dead from my massive year & I just wanted to be back home again. I organised a panel on collecting with Anna Johnstone, a colleague from UQ, and Deidre Coleman from the University of Melbourne who does fabulous work on entomologists, and that worked out really well. However, fewer conferences this year are in order.

Supervision

Nearly all of my 4 students have submitted their work now. One passed with flying colours, two are being examined and one more has yet to submit. I’m always impressed with how well their work scrubs up, particularly when I consider my own paltry efforts with my PhD 10 years ago. Along the way they have done really well, with one winning a fellowship for creating digital art biographies, and another winning a Griffith Review fellowship which led to this fantastic publication.

Research

September saw me heading to Perth for the Cape to Cape trek. This gave me a fantastic sense of the environment through which Molloy moved, and the time and distance it took for Noongar people and colonists to move through the area. A blog post on this in the pipeline - I have to get my photos up at least because the environment was just extraordinary. I also made contact with some wonderful scholars working in botanical history - Alex George in Perth, and Sarah Maroske at the Herbarium in Melbourne. Sara and I will be presenting at a conference at Baltimore next year with my pin-up scholar Ann Shteir - I was pretty over teh moon when I received their invitation. Other than this, I was very much stymied in the writing of my ecobiography, which is starting to drive me quite mad.

The Year Ahead

At the end of April I’m moving onto a new contract which is teaching and research, rather than the research-focussed contract which I’m on now. This means that I won’t get much more research or writing done, although I’m certainly going to try. I’m sure able-bodied people can do both teaching and research, but the impact of teaching on my body is so severe that I need a much longer recovery time. However, my options are pretty limited at the moment so I don’t really have a choice. The rest of this year will be about writing what I can, when I can, amidst lecture preparation, tutoring, marking & publicity for Hearing Maud. My consolation is that I ever was, & will be, a tortoise rather than a hare, and I always get there in the end.

2016: My Year of Writing

This past year has been like being flattened by a freight train, and I’m only just now picking myself up and straightening out my limbs. After being perpetually unwell for pretty much twelve months due to stress and working too hard, I have resolved to do something about my work-life balance this year and to stop working on weekends. That is kind of happening, which is good, but hence the lateness of this post. Anyways, here are my literary doings for 2016.

Publications

In July my short story ‘Melliodora’ was published alongside William Lane’s ‘Vivienne’s Fingers’ in the Review of Australian Fiction. I’ve always loved Bill’s writing and was very happy to be working alongside him with this issue. It was a short piece, but most of my creative work seems to be like that of late, probably because my time is so compressed.

In August, my short story ‘Unfurling’ was published in Griffith Review. I’d been working on this story for nearly two decades so I was really glad it found a home!

I also read an extract of the work at the Powerhouse at an event organised by Griffith Review, which was a wonderful evening.

In November, my short story ‘Old Honey’, which was shortlisted for the 2015Commonwealth Writers Short Story Prize, was published on adda. I worked with Grenada-born writer Jacob Ross, a fellow of the Royal Society for Literature, to edit the piece, which was illuminating.

Also in November, my essay on Rosa Praed and her deaf daughter Maud was published in the Sydney Review of Books. I love this journal – their essayists are splendid and the editor Catriona Menzies-Pike has been commissioning really interesting work – so I was delighted to be published on their pages.

My essay on Dorothy Cottrell, an artist and writer from the Queensland outback who spent her life in a wheelchair, was also published in Queensland Review. One day, when I eventually find some time, I’ll expand this research into a book.

Awards/Funding

As I have funding to write my ecobiography for another two years I haven’t been seeking any extra cash – instead, I’m trying to save what I earn so that I can write for a few years once my postdoc finishes. However I was successful in winning an internal grant at the university to do a study on gender and vernacular criticism. This will pay for a research assistant to look at stats and compare the content of written reviews with online reviews.

In terms of awards, my short story ‘Black Soil’ was also longlisted for the Elizabeth Jolley Short Story prize. I would have liked to have entered more competitions but there just wasn’t enough time.

Teaching

In the second half of last year I was a tutor for a course on women writers convened by Professor Carole Ferrier. This was one of the best classes I’ve ever taught, covering books such as Simone de Beauvoir’s She Came to Stay, Elizabeth Jolley’s The Well, Keri Hulme’s The Bone People, Toni Morrison’s Tar Baby and Monique Wittig’s The Lesbian Body. My students responded really well to the texts, as well as being motivated, politically savvy and articulate. I was hugely impressed with all of them. In the second half of this year I’ll be convening this course, though with slightly different texts.

Conferences and Presentations

In July I attended the annual conference for the Association for the Study of Australian Literature at Canberra. Usually I love these conferences but I was a bit too stressed this time around as I was moving house and, having turned into a wussy Queenslander, the cold rain really got me down.

At the end of the year I was in much sunnier climes in Sydney, where I was delighted to take part in a symposium on Nineteenth Century Australian women’s writing.

I also presented a paper on ecobiography at the bi-annual ASLEC-ANZ environmental humanities conference, then headed to Fremantle for the International Australian Studies Association conference. Where the paper I presented in Canberra was on violent clashes between Noongars and white colonists, this paper was on the positive interactions between them.

Another highlight was presenting on Georgiana Molloy at the inaugural Science Writing Festival at the NSW Writers’ Centre.

Research

My research was huge this year, consisting of background reading on environment, literature and Aboriginal relationships to Country, as well as archival research. I made two trips to Western Australia. For the first I was based in Perth, copying archives about the colonisation of the south west by Europeans. For the second I was travelling around the south west of Western Australia to get an idea of the country through which Molloy moved. This year I’m travelling to England to look at the archives of the men to whom her specimens were distributed, and I’ll also head up to Scotland as Georgiana spent time there with her friends and I want to get a sense of the environment which formed her impressions of landscape. In all this I have been aided by Bernice Barry’s comprehensive biography The Mind That Shines, which is a fantastic resource.

The Australian Women Writers Challenge

Sadly, after five years, this was my last year as editor of diversity for the AWW Challenge. I’ve been too pressed for time and am trying to cut back on the amount of work that I’m doing. I coordinated a focus on Australian women writers with disability, and another one on Australian women writers of migrant background, and also arranged an interview with Indigenous author Melissa Lucashenko. I came to know some lovely writers through this, including poet Eileen Chong and fiction writer Michelle Cahill. I was already familiar with Melissa Lucashenko, Lee Kofman, Gaele Sobott and Amanda Tink and it was great to talk to them further as I coordinated the posts. I also penned my thoughts on fiction for young readers with disability.

The Year Ahead

Gosh, well, we’re already into February! After feedback from my brother and writer friends in November, I realised that my draft of Hearing Maud was dull & still too academic, and that I had to rewrite it (for the fifth time). I spent all of Christmas & New Year working on it, and now I only need another week to edit it. Then I’m going to let it fallow for a bit so that I can return to it with fresh eyes and do one final draft. As my time was so constrained this year, trying to get this book across the finishing line has been ridiculous.

The two books for which I won OzCo grants, The Sea Creatures and When the World Shivered, are going to have to wait until I’m done with the postdoc. I didn’t get to my poems, as I had wanted to, but I'm still planning on writing a novella based on my experiences in Rome. Often, I wish there were two of me as there’s so much I want to write and no time to get to it, and sometimes I feel like I’m going mad. In the meantime, though, there is my ecobiography, which is going well and which is a delight to research and write.

And hopefully I'll get some time to relax, as my writing companion Hudson demonstrates admirably.

Notes from the Field (iv)

I headed to WA again in late November for conferences & research, and took my boyfriend with me so I wouldn’t have to drive & bushwalk on my own. We stayed in Fremantle and I left him to his own devices while I went to the Ecological Society of Australia conference to listen to a symposium on Indigenous Biocultural Knowledge. There were plenty of interesting presentations, such as the investigation of dieback in culturally significant Melaleucas in the Laynhapuy Indigenous Protected Area in northern Australia. The results of Western scientific methods of investigating dieback corresponded with the information derived from interviews with senior traditional owners ie both methods indicated that 70% of the problems were caused by salinity and erosion from pigs and buffalo. Another team monitored bilby populations by drawing on Indigenous ecological knowledge on where bilbies were distributed an how they liked to live, and combined this with their data on population levels. I was dismayed to see that these bilbies had once lived in the eastern states too but now their last stronghold is in Indigenous land that covers the deserts of WA and the NT. Their populations had also shrunk in quite a small space of time.

Some of the presentations also described different models of working with scientists. Some maintained their autonomy and slowly built up relationships with stakeholders, others are employed via the federal government, but worryingly funding for this is not secure. The Country Needs People campaign is raising awareness about this – you can head to their page to read about the work rangers do and sign a petition to support them. Speakers also stressed the importance of collaboration, rather than appropriating information, or coming in and doing a project and leaving again, rather than forming continuing relationships.

As a literary scholar at a conference for scientists, I was worried I wouldn’t be able to understand anything, but the presentations were all clear and straightforward.

Then we headed down to the south west, stopping on the way at Lake Clifton, which houses thrombolites (our ancestors!). Annamaria Weldon writes about this lake in The Lake’s Apprentice and the area was beautiful – the light silvered, the lake choppy and foamy with wind. The b/f, whose first degree is in ecology, looked around for bugs while I took photos.

We headed on to Margaret River, through which I’d travelled when researching A Curious Intimacy, but never stayed at. We were a little way out of town in a lovely house among the eucalypts. Nearby was an abandoned vineyard through which wallabies hopped.

I needed to get to know the area, so I’d arranged a tour with Sean Blocksidge, who was informative, funny and very personable. I couldn’t get over how blue the sea and sky were. A few wildflowers were still out; it had been an incredible season because there’d been quite a bit of rain, but generally the rainfall is decreasing. The wineries also use a lot of water so it’s uncertain what will happen to them as climate change affects the area. Sean took us canoeing on the Margaret River, which was still and tranquil, and showed us a part of the Three Capes Track. I also just about turned inside out when I saw the Nuytsia floribunda was in flower - botanists in England were desperate for this plant but they could never get it to grow, because they didn't realise it was a parasite. I hadn't seen it on previous trips because it only flowers at Christmas (and is known as the Christmas tree, although the Noongar names for it are moojar, moojerool, munjah and mutyal).

We did another tour with Josh Koomal Whiteland which was fantastic. Josh is a Wadandi man, and he's now based in Dunsborough. With a stick he drew a map in the dirt of the different groups which lived in the south west, and explained about the six seasons, and how eating different plants and animals is contingent on their breeding or flowering times. I wished I could have learnt more about this, as it made my brain explode, I but figured he needed a tour that interests a wide range of people (it also included a look around Ngigli Cave where he played his didge, which was wonderful). Josh had a great sense of humour and a gentle disposition. A snake lived near the drain, so he got out his stick in case he needed to move it on. ‘It’s their place, too,’ he explained.

Another highlight of the trip was having a cuppa with Bernice Barry, who has published a very detailed and extensively-researched biography on Georgiana Molloy, The Mind That Shines. There were plenty of parallels between her own life and Georgiana’s, and after researching Rosa and Maud Praed for so long, I wondered if, as researchers, we’re drawn to those whom we have synchronicities because we understand their motivations and actions. At any rate, that sense of connection is important when you’re working on a project that takes a long time, otherwise you’d get bored and walk away.

We were heading to Augusta the next day to have a look around, and Bernice suggested we check out the granite rock where Georgiana sometimes collected (and would have had to get there by boat). She also recommended Castle Rock, to which Georgiana dreamed of moving, and when we got there I could see why – the water was exquisite. I was bitterly disappointed that I hadn’t packed my swimmers, but the b/f said we could come back – I hope so!

Thence it was back to Fremantle for the bi-annual InASA conference, the theme of which was ‘Encountering Australia’. I presented my research on ecotones and caught up with some fab folk who I hadn’t seen for a while, and listened to a splendid keynote by Kim Scott on the importance of listening to and growing Noongar language.

Before we caught the plane back, we ducked into the art gallery to see the ‘Unknown Land’ exhibition, about Europeans’ first views of Western Australia. I’d seen a few of these in books, but I hadn’t known that Louisa Clifton, who came to Australia as part of the ill-fated Australind settlement in the 1840s, was also an artist. Her lithograph of Koombana Bay was intricate, its muted, melancholy blues very unlike the bright seas we'd seen, although that could just be my interpretation as I know she wasn’thappy about having to leave England. Women didn’t get much of a say in those days.

I was a bit sad to fly back east – I loved Freo and the south west is a marvelous and overlooked part of Australia – but after a month of living out of a suitcase I was also desperate to wake up in my own bed, tend to my beleaguered plants, and get a coffee from the café on the corner.

Notes from the Field (ii)

This year has turned out to be such a rollercoaster that the best I could do was hold onto my hair, rather than pen any blog posts about my research. However, it’s the post-Christmas lull and, in between sleeping off an exhausting year and swimming off the excesses of the festive season, I’m catching up on my posts.

In July I headed to Canberra to present on my research at the annual Association for the Study of Australian Literature association. This was a really good conference hosted by the ADFA branch of UNSW, and fittingly the theme was ‘Capital-Empire-Print-Dissent’. Also fittingly, the first speaker (for the Barry Andrews Lecture at the National Library) was Indigenous author Melissa Lucashenko, the first keynote was American Indian scholar Chadwick Allen from the University of Washington, and the first panel consisted of three excellent Indigenous scholars: Alice te Punga Somerville, Jeanine Leane and Evelyn Araluen Corr. I also went to a masterclass held by Chadwick on Allison Hedge Coke's Blood Run, about the Blood Run earthworks site and Indigenous mathematics, which totally knocked my socks off. I also ducked off to the National Gallery of Australia to look at Fiona Hall's latest exhibition. I've always loved her work because she plays around with plants.

National Gallery of Australia.

When I returned to Brisbane I had to move house, which was stressful and exhausting, then I turned around and flew to Perth for some more research in the archives and also for a tour of the wheatbelt hosted by the literary journal Westerly. I was keen to expand my knowledge of things literary in WA in general, but what really compelled me to sign up was that our guide was Tony Hughes-d’Aeth, who has been doing some excellent ecocritical work.

The tour was fabulous. We began at the Katharine Susannah Prichard Writers Centre and were given a guided tour of the house and gardens by an Irish woman who had lived there after the Prichards sold it. She became interested in Prichard when random people such as literary devotees or Russians (Prichard was a committed Communist) turned up on her doorstep. Her talk was entertaining and interesting and I liked listening to the sway of her voice.

Labelled shelf in Katharine Susannah Prichard's writing shack.

We were then bussed off to York, where we had morning tea in the Flour Mill Cafe. The orange soil of this area was striking against the blue sky. In fact all of teh sky in WA is incredible.

Flour Mill Cafe, York.

Thence we went up to Mt Brown lookout, which had excellent views. On the way I chatted to UWA publisher Terri-Ann White about books on water (or the increasing lack thereof) and firestick farming in WA. After a potter around the York Wildflower Garden and some lunch, we headed to St Saviour’s Church at Katrine, where poet John Kinsella and his partner Tracy Ryan read out some of their work over a cuppa.

York Wildflower Garden

I also did a guided walk with volunteers at the Kings Park Botanical Gardens. These free tours are fantastic – the guides are extremely knowledgeable and tell really good stories about the plants in the park. For someone who finds reading science papers quite difficult, it’s a great way to learn about botany.

Kings Park.

Back in Brisbane I led a couple of classes in poetics for a tutor who was away, and also began tutoring fora Women Writers course. I gave lectures on Keri Hulme’s The Bone People for this course, and also The Timeless Land for the Australian literature course. Teaching was pretty time consuming, although my students were the best I’ve ever taught – they were intelligent, motivated and politically savvy – and gave me much hope for our future, which we desperately need in these times of Brexit, Trump and the stale, unimaginative and faint-hearted politicians who currently lead Australia, although that verb might be generous.

I also helped the graduate students put together their Work in Progress conference, the theme of which was 'On the Edge', and organised an evening of creative writing alongside this, which went really well. And then it was time to head to Sydney, Wollongong and Fremantle for conferences and research, but more of this in another post.