My Raison d'Être

[W]hen I sally forth either on foot or Horseback, I feel quite elastic in mind and Step; I feel I am quite at my own work, the real cause that enticed me out to Swan River.

Thus wrote Georgiana Molloy, amateur botanist and emigrant to Western Australia, to Captain James Molloy in England in June 1840.  I think of these words from time to time, as they signal how Georgiana, a mother of seven children (of whom two died) isolated in the Australian bush, with no-one equalling her intelligence to converse with aside from her husband, overwhelmed with homesickness and grief and what she frequently referred to as “household drudgery”, chanced upon her vocation of botany. As she sought to eke out whatever time she could to collect specimens of Australian flora in the bush, and as she wrote enthusiastically and obsessively to Mangles of her discoveries, I recognised the same tendencies in myself, with regard to writing.

“At what point did you think of yourself as a writer?” someone asked me as I presented at a tutorial for Creative Writing 2nd years at the University of Wollongong. It was a good question, I replied, and noted that it was probably when A Curious Intimacy was published. Even before this, though, I remember thinking in my own second year of my creative writing there, that if I wasn't going to make something of my degree and the support that my parents were giving me, then I should do something else. I decided then and there to get serious about it.

When I came home from England I figured that, as I had already been an impoverished student for 10 years, it wouldn't hurt to continue being an impoverished writer. So I only work part-time, and my skill for budgeting is tremendous, although, sadly, quite misdirected (ie funds for entertainment and food usually go towards expensive skin products and shoes). But even more than this, I find the choices that I make are engineered to maximise the amount of time and energy I have for writing. I don't drink much, because hangovers make me tired and then I can't write. I have a job that doesn't cause me much stress, and because of this I won't look for something with more hours or which is better paid (also I do really like working there), because if I get stressed I can't write. My choice of a partner (if I ever get that lucky) will also be guided by the degree to which they can put up with my obsession and who, again, provides calm and stability. I ignore my body's constant clamouring for a child because I have another two novels and a work of non-fiction to get out before an ankle-biter consumes all my time. And frankly, I don't even know if I will get to the point of having children, however much I want to, because writing, as the wonderful poet Dennis Brutus put it (though for him it was in relation to South Africa) “takes precedence of all my love”.

These concerns have been prompted by a promised contract and a deadline for delivering Entitlement to the publishers by the beginning of April 2011. Already I feel a thousand times better because I have direction and my aimlessness has vanished. I'm tying up loose ends — finishing short stories and preparing my thesis for publication — as I know that, once I editing the novel, I won't be able to concentrate on anything else until it is published in April 2012. This kind of all-or-nothing obsession isn't conducive to a healthy relationship and prospective family, and yet, as I remind myself, Georgiana managed it in the mid-19th Century.

And, as I also remind myself, I am perfectly happy with being broke and with the superfluity of time this brings. I have enough clothes and shoes to live out the century. I love my independence and the luxury of being selfish. And despite the boredom and loneliness that writing occasions, there is something so intoxicating about creating and being in another world that it becomes like a drug, and I get agitated when I can't write enough. So even if I can't afford a house until I'm 50, and I am constantly rebuffed by men, and the children never arrive, I know that there will always be the consolation of pen and paper, my raison d'être. For, as I said once to a friend, “I only have one life, and I need it for writing.”

My Sister

It is always a cliché that comes to mind when I think of describing my sister: she's larger than life, as tough as old boots and she can talk the leg off an iron pot. She is also, on occasion, as mad a cut snake. However, in the flesh, she is absolutely original.A natural antagonist, she was unable, while I sat quietly at the verandah table doing my homework, to walk past me without hitting me, pulling my hair, or poking me. I might have retaliated once or twice, by getting up and punching her, but it never resolved anything. In later years, as I mellowed, she found herself disappointed that she couldn't wind me up the way she used to.

As the eldest child, born three years before me, she made mistakes that I learnt from, and is possessed with an admirable practicality. She fixes everything, from replacing the putty in windows to sorting out my problems. I remember calling her in tears from a payphone one lunchtime in Wynyard when I was on a temping assignment that I didn't think I was doing well enough. She pointed out that if the company didn't think I could do it, they wouldn't have employed me. This was enough to help me get back and get on with my day. When my Mac died and the Mac Doctors were rotten at fixing it, she took the computer to a man she knew in Stones Corner, at Geekworks, who had exceptional customer service and fixed the computer free of charge to make up for The Mac Doctors leaving it inoperable. And today, when I needed to go to the doctor, I found myself distraught that she wasn't here to call on. I didn't begrudge that, as J1 helped, and she is having a wonderful time with the dogs at the Australian National Flyball Championships.

For my sister is dog-mad. She has always had cocker spaniels, and the highlight of her week is taking them to flyball training, and catching up with other dog-mad people. She comes home with stories that make me sore with laughter.

She is a born communicator, hence her job in public relations, and often amuses me with the phrases she picks up, such as “pocket-rocket”, viz. a dog so small it can fit in a pocket, but which goes really fast. She understands people's motivations much better than I do, and can often see the other side of a story. She is also the loudest person I know. Sometimes I say, “I can hear you, you know,” and she replies, “I always talk like this. It's automatic, in case you're not wearing your hearing aid.”

However, when she and the family went camping, her husband commented how loud their children were. “And what excuse will they use?” he asked. “That their aunt is deaf?”

Once, on a bus travelling from Randwick to Bondi Junction where there were some red wedding shoes I wanted her to look at, she began telling me a story at great volume. A scrawny old woman sitting behind the driver turned around and snarled, “Do you have to talk so loud that the rest of the bus can hear?”

She retaliated so fast it took me a couple of seconds to work out what was going on. “Actually, yes I do,” she replied, “my sister's deaf.”

The woman retorted with something I didn't hear and my sister said, “I just told you, my sister's deaf.”

By this point I realised the bus had halted at a stop outside a petrol station, its doors open.

“I've paid for my ticket,” said the woman, “why don't you get off here?”

“And I've paid for mine,” said my sister, just as fast, “so why don't you get off?”

Realising that she was defeated, the woman turned around in a huff. The bus started up again and pulled away from the kerb.

At other times my sister's speed with speech turns to foot-and-mouth disease. In her university job at Hungry Jacks she couldn't get the cash register to work and swore at it in front of a customer. The customer complained and my sister was nearly sacked but, fittingly, she talked her way back into the job.

My sister is one of the toughest people I know. When her marriage began to fall apart she held onto it for grim life and made it work. She has a determination that I recognise in myself, but where I apply this to my writing, she uses it to protect her family.

Like my brother, she has a shocking memory, but this is her coping mechanism. She forgets the things that upset her, whereas I, hurt more easily, file them away and process them through writing. My brother, meanwhile, just forgets things as a matter-of-course (many are the times I have told him a joke he has heard before and, having forgotten it, he laughs in exactly the same places).

My sister began her PR career in the beauty industry, then in haircare and fashion. This provoked my obsession with these selfsame fields as, always a generous person, she kept giving me samples of Guinot and Ella Bache, and sent me to the hairdresser she represented. Now she keeps me supplied in frocks, which is heavenly, but the expensive tastes never went away and I find myself scrabbling to pay for SKII cleanser and my gay Vietnamese hairdresser in the 'burbs on my miserly writer's income.

When you meet my sister, it's like being hit with a hurricane of noise, colour and laughter. Eventually she calms down and you realise there's a sharp wit and astute brain at work amidst the chaos, and that she's unlike any person you've ever met before.

Happy Birthday Bec. I wouldn't exchange you for anyone else in the world.

On Stops and Starts

Life seems to have been frustratingly disparate lately, at least for a girl who likes focus, direction and deadlines.  There have been galling stops and starts, weeks interrupted by socialising and faulty hearing aids, bicycles and laptops, and battles with endless procrastination as I push myself to write. On the day we held the funeral service for my grandmother, I was made an offer for my second novel, Entitlement, but I was too depressed to even open a bottle of champagne to celebrate.  I’m still waiting for the contract and the go-ahead, which is painful because until then I have no direction on the novel, and not being able to work on it makes me feel a little unwell.  Unlike with A Curious Intimacy, which I was sick of by the time it even made it to the publishers, and which I had to edit in the middle of writing a PhD, I’m desperate to be in the midst of this one.  It feels like it will be a more successful work: the characters are more real, the plot is tighter and more dramatic, and it has more relevance to contemporary politics.  I am already in love with it in a way I never was with ACI, which was a largely academic, feminist exercise, although the emotional aspects of it were drawn from experience.

In the interim I’ve been working on short stories, some of which have lain in my drawers for more than a decade.  Again, because of the nature of the work, this means more stopping and starting.  The worlds I’m writing about are smaller, the action briefer, and as it’s harder to get into the swing of it, I am easily distracted.  I’ve also dug out my thesis to rewrite it for publication, as once I begin work on Entitlement again it will take over my life and I won’t be able to concentrate on anything else.  However I’m struggling with one of the links between the chapters and so I keep walking away from it.  Things just don’t seem to be resolving themselves.

After the funeral I stayed at Parental Unit’s for a week, during which time their 7 month old whippet chewed up my hearing aid.  I had stupidly left it on the couch, having taken it out because the television was so loud (Parental Unit are also going deaf) and the subtitles were on.  When I saw the little bits of hearing aid scattered at my feet, my heart fell through the floor.  I extracted a final piece of the casing from the dog’s mouth and added it to the sorry collection of wire and microchip.  It’s still too horrifying to be funny yet, as the new hearing aid cost more than two grand, a rather expensive learning curve.

Then both my computer and bicycle decided to die on me, the former needing a new hard drive which, due to a total lack of communication by the IT nerds who replaced it (never use The Mac Doctors, people), wiped out my operating system and my applications.  It takes a lot to make me cry, but when I couldn’t get my laptop to go after several trips to Annerley, I burst into tears.  Not in front of said nerds, unfortunately, which might have helped them to register their incompetence and lack of clarity.  Meanwhile my bicycle, being an English brand little known in Australia, needs a new hub, which will be expensive.  However, as with my very pretty but largely uncomfortable and unwalkable shoes, I will endure whatever pain it takes to be able to keep on using it.

Despite all these literary and technological frustrations, summer is slowly creeping into being.  I have put away my boots and taken out my stiletto sandals; the flowering jacarandas make for a gorgeous ferry ride to the uni; H is coming home for good in two months and there is beach and holiday action scheduled for January.  And this weekend, the guilt and procrastination paid off as I belted out a wonderful and peculiar short story in two days, inspired by P1 and his mention of the aquatic ape theory.  When a story comes together this quickly, you know it’s working.  If only the rest of my life could do that.

A Letter to My Grandmother

When I think of you, the clearest image that comes to mind is that of a tall, lean woman laughing while your eight grandchildren cluster on the front steps, shouting at the ninth, who silently acts out their charade.  It’s a summer night and mosquitoes bite my ankles and moths cluster in the cone of light from the outside lamp.  A quiet girl born into a noisy and boisterous family, I hate charades, but I suffer through it because of your laugh. At seven, I am the image of you when you were my age.

On winter nights, when we’re all there, we delve into the dress-up box which stretches the width of one room, adorning ourselves as kings, toads and cross-dressers.  There is raucous laughter and shouting.  We parade before you and our grandfather, amused and bemused in his armchair with a pipe, and enact our dramas.  Every time we get together, now, we act them still.

On quieter evenings, it’s just my brother and I sitting by the fire eating Vegemite and cheese on toast while the dachshund, stretched out on the rug, snores and farts.  Later, in one of our explorations of the creek, we found that dog — by then missing for several days — dead and bloated in the soft, grey gravel.

At night I crawl into my uncle’s old bed, my brother into the one opposite, and close my eyes.  You stroke your thumb between my eyebrows until I am almost asleep.

There were times you couldn’t understand the direction our lives had taken.  “All I ever wanted was a good mate,” you told me once, chiding me for workaholism and a seeming disinterest in men; and, on my brother’s sexuality: “Oh, is he one of those?”  You couldn’t traverse the generations, but instead gifted us with the best of yours: propriety, good manners, generosity and kindness.

One afternoon, no doubt to distract me from the boredom of an endless summer, you taught me to embroider on a piece of white linen.  Ever the perfectionist, I carefully copied your stem stitch in pale green thread.  Later, you gave me a sewing kit you made, with short, shiny scissors, a pouch in which to put one’s bauble of thread, and a booklet of felt through which to fasten one’s needles.  When I took it out ten years later, embroidering still, your delight was palpable.

In the nursing home you held my hands so tightly, and smiled at me with such ardent affection that, as I pulled away, it was impossible not to feel like a criminal.

There was prescience: a few days ago a friend called me by accident and I returned his call, joking that I was concerned it was an emergency, that his gran had died.  In those early hours that you lay dying I dreamed I was walking through the soft green grass of the farm, alone.  An hour before she knew of your death, my sister, unthinking, put on your engagement ring.

It was a trail, like drops of spilled water, to the knowledge of your death.  Then there was a gush of relief that your suffering and loneliness, and the grief of loss upon loss of your husband and friend after friend, was finally over.

As a girl who was never openly demonstrative, I could never tell you that I loved you, but I like to think that the letters I wrote you from Armidale, Wollongong, Sydney, Berkeley and London would have held some measure of my feeling for you.  And that in this, my last, you may understand that that rich childhood which you gave me will spill forever through my writing, and that I will always remember how hard you held me, how frail your shoulders were and how soft your cheek, as I hugged and kissed you goodbye.

On Rejection

On those days when you find your stamped, self-addressed envelope in the mailbox, with your address written on it in your own graceful, cursive, you will find your heart suddenly beating faster.  You slide the envelope open roughly with your thumb and pull out the slip of paper, holding your breath as you wait to see if it’s a cheque or a rejection note.  Usually it’s the latter and you'll sigh, trudging up the verandah steps, telling yourself that it’s part of the standard fare of a write to be rejected, even though this never dispels the rather strong feeling of having been dumped. And thus it was that I received the news (albeit in an electronic mailbox, this time) that my application to the Australia Council for a grant was rejected for the third year running.

When the adrenalin rush subsided and I took my head out of my hands, I pushed away the story I was working on, closed my laptop and ferreted ingredients for friands from the cupboard.  As I whisked almond meal and egg whites together, and measured out flour and melted butter, I reminded myself that no on had asked me to be a writer, that I had been happy before I was delivered this news and should have remained so after, and that nothing — neither poverty nor critics — was ever going to keep me from writing.

Nonetheless, I wailed to a friend, ‘I can’t work out what I’m doing wrong.  I don’t know if it’s my style, or if my ideas aren’t original, or if it’s not literary enough,’ as if I might have complained that a bloke didn’t find me appealing for x or for y.  She could have pointed me to the postcard pinned to my corkboard (along with other feminine ephemera and notices for writing competitions and cartoons that make me laugh and lists of things to do), which shows a young 1920s woman in a white silk dress having a cigarette, captioned: ‘She could hardly wait to get back in the saddle again.’

I bought it in London when I was feeling gloomy after some failed attempt at chasing a boy.  As the friands baked in the oven I glanced at once it more, furious with rejection, and picked up my pen.  I got back on the horse and started writing again, this time at a gallop.

On Charity

For those of you who follow these posts and understand that I am not a morning person, you will appreciate the dedication it took to get out of bed at 4.45am, clothe myself and run in the darkness to the train station to catch the 5.45am to Murrarie to partake in the Bridge to Brisbane.  I sat very still and quietly in the carriage and was grateful that there were no loud noises.  However, as we passed more and more stops, and more and more eye candy got on, I perked up considerably. I couldn’t believe the number of people at Murrarie.  Another train pulled in but a minute after the first drew away and the platforms were crammed.  Again at the starting line there were thousands and thousands more.  I couldn’t hear what the loudspeakers were saying so I had no idea what to do, and neither did lots of other lost folk milling around (who presumably did have their hearing).  However I found a queue, shuffled along to the starting line, and finally there was space to run.

The atmosphere was fantastic and I was so delighted to be surrounded by so many healthy people in a country with some of the worst obesity statistics in the world.  The sun came up, showing smokestacks against the dawn.  A man dressed as a dragon passed, holding his disintegrating, green plastic suit.  A truckie honked at us and a pack of girls cheered us on.  There was a tall man in only his multicoloured briefs and sneakers, his Facebook name texta-ed onto his bare back.  Various bands were stationed along the way, playing motivational music. I have a lot of respect for someone who can belt out an 80s tune at 7am in the morning.

By the 5km mark my thighs were starting to hurt but I remained pleasantly distracted by all the fit men.  By 7km even they couldn’t take my mind off my legs.  I stopped for a drink, worried by the waste of the plastic cups littering the ground, which sounded like ice crackling underfoot.  By 8km I was consumed with pain and by 9km I wished I had trained more.  But then we reached the showgrounds and I sprinted the rest of the way.  I found my t-shirt, delivered to me by a friend from work, and limped to the bus stop.  There were no buses from the Gabba for another half an hour so I had to walk home, feeling sorry for myself, but also elated that I had achieved a goal, however mediocre it had been.

There was also, of course, the fuzzy glow of doing something for something else, which is one of the reasons why I work for Autism Queensland.  Yet, since undertaking this venture and pestering people for donations, it has startled me how little people are willing to do to help others.  Last week I bought a Big Issue from a man sitting on his milk crate outside the post office.  I have never bothered with buying a Big Issue before, but he looked so pinched and pale with lack of nourishment that I gave him what was left in my wallet.  As I did so, I realised that even that small amount I gave him would have improved his life, however meagrely.

This post is a final, blatant request for donations to help Autism Queensland with their work in early intervention (fundraising closes tomorrow night).  For those of you who have all your faculties, are able to work, have a roof to live under and enough food and loose change to buy beer or coffee or a bunch of flowers, please spare a few dollars for kids who have a difficult life.  Trust me, you’ll feel better.

On Camping

It was with some consternation that Family received the news that I would be camping at Girraween National Park in the middle of winter, without a shower, and would have to carry my own pack and provisions up a hill.  Though I had been a rambunctious little girl who explored creeks, slashed my way through thistles higher than my head and chased sheep on our property, I was now a woman obsessed with frocks, handbags and skin products.  I hated dirt and couldn’t even kill a cockroach, though I had plenty of shoes with which to do so.

‘I like a challenge,’ I said to them all.

‘Maybe this is the new Jessica,’ they muttered.

I presented myself at J2 and P1’s apartment, and the latter drove us through the night to the national park.  It was black and disorientating when we arrived and set up the tents with some thirteen other people.  I couldn’t see their faces and, as having a conversation was impossible because I couldn’t lipread, I went to bed early.

There was a great deal of yelling.

‘Oh, that won’t wake Jess up,’ they told one another, ‘she can’t hear.’

Jess did hear.  The yelling kept her awake.  And then I was woken again by S groping above my head, his fingers following the seam of the tent fabric.  He was trying to get out for a wee, and in his inebriation had the wrong end of the tent.

Despite the lack of sleep, I was relatively alert the next morning, or perhaps it was just my good manners coming to the fore in unfamiliar company.  We scrambled up the granite pyramids.  There were swathes of eucalypts below us, the monochromatic landscape blasted by yellow wattle.  I had missed the wattle.  Although in London it flowered in our neighbour’s garden, it was out of place among the dank Victorian terraces of Stepney.

M found a hole in a rock and disappeared into it.  Everyone else followed, a la Picnic at Dripping Rock.  Being claustrophobic, I edged around the outside.  The boys climbed up another outcrop, the brilliant sunlight silhouetting them against the sky.

We went down again.  At the bottom of the hill we had lunch.  A kookaburra swooped and snatched J2’s baguette as he lifted it to his mouth.  I offered more home-baked banana loaf to compensate.

Then we shouldered our packs and set up a huge effing great hill, stopping en route to look at Castle Rock.

‘Not another fucking hill,’ I complained to P1, who had done the route before.  ‘How many more are there?’

‘Uhm,’ he equivocated, ‘I can’t really remember.’

How diplomatic, I thought to myself an hour-and-a-half later as I dragged myself up a near-vertical incline.

(Ahem.  I exaggerate.  But it felt vertical).

‘Jess!’ said S brightly, bouncing along beside me.  ‘Have you heard about how the rock formation was made?’

‘Did I sign up for a geography lesson as well?’ I returned a little sourly, not a happy camper by this stage.

However, when I made it to the rockfall at Mt Norman, I was jubilant, not least because I had done something new.  For while, academically, life is a breeze, with my bad balance and coordination I am never sure of my athletic capabilities.  I was relieved to find they were good enough to get me up a hill.

We set up the tents beneath the slab of rock and I pulled on thermals, jumpers and tights and my red possum fur beanie and gloves from New Zealand.  The boys got a roaring fire happening, then we messed around making dinner, and P1 produced a packet of marshmallows and became very popular indeed.

I slept unbelievably well.  It wasn’t as cold as I’d expected and I peeled off layer after layer during the night.  When I stuck my head out the tent the next morning I was positively cheery, which, as Family will testify, is almost unheard of.

‘Good morning,’ I said sunnily to P1.

‘Good morning,’ he replied, his face creased with sleep.

As I hadn’t been able to bring a hairdryer, nor found a sucker to carry one for me (as per Princess Vespa) with attendant generator, I hastily wrapped a silk scarf around my head and made myself presentable, then investigated breakfast.

We climbed further up Mt Norman and found an exercise book and some pens shoved into a tube under a rock.  I scribbled something for posterity.  We took photos.  I admired the wattle.  Then we picked up our packs and set off again.  Going down again was almost as hard as going up, according to my knees.  However, I gradually entered a state of pleasant dissociation due to lack of food (we skipped lunch), mild dehydration and exhaustion, and by the time we mounted the Sphinx and Turtle Rock I was not really present at all.  So I was very glad to get to the bottom, and as soon as we bundled into P1’s car to go home I curled up and went to sleep.

At work the next day my calves and knees were aching, and I suffered the ignominy of having to wear flat shoes for once.  A colleague was so amused she wanted to take a photo.  At lunch, the girls asked how everyone’s weekend had gone, and my boss piped up, ‘Jessica can hardly walk.’

‘Oooh,’ they whistled, ‘did you have a dirty weekend?’

‘No,’ I protested.  ‘I went camping.  In a cave.’

‘So you did have a dirty weekend—’

‘Can this cave be booked?’

‘It was all perfectly respectable!’ I insisted, but all the same I began blushing violently and hid my face in my hair.

Who would have thought that camping could be so exciting?

On Running

I began this entry after an hour and a half of running along the Brisbane River in the sunshine.  Though I’ve been running for nearly twenty years, I haven’t exerted myself in this way since I first began, when I was 13.  Then, I was prompted by a body-image disorder and an obliterating crush on a boy, but this time the reasons are much healthier: raising money for my employer, Autism Queensland, in this year’s Bridge to Brisbane. I’ve never been good in team sports as meningitis buggered my balance and coordination, so the exercise that I do is always solitary.  Swimming I love for the feel of water on my skin, cycling I enjoy because I am besotted with my bicycle, and running is great because it’s the only time I ever stop thinking.  Instead of trying make connections in stories, or linking up concepts, I concentrate on the pain in my lungs and my knees, the rhythm of my feet hitting concrete and grass, and of pacing myself so I don’t hit the wall too quickly.

I’m by no means a natural athlete.  When I did athletics training after school I was often amazed by the ease with which the girls sprinted around the track while I had to push myself hard to cover the same distance.  However, what I lacked in ability, I made up for with stamina and sheer bloody-mindedness.

It was also while running that I fell in love with Australia.  Every afternoon, after school, I would run the perimeter of the paddocks of our property.  In winter, this meant running in the cold and the dark, but the air was dense and rich from the settling dew.  On the weekend I would take to the hills.  On summer afternoons the sun would pound on my shoulders and pull sweat from my skin, but it also drew out the scent of eucalyptus and the cloying smell of gum blossoms.  There were wild goats, and magpies that divebombed, and the solid block of sound from the cicadas.  To a lonely 13 year old with a disability who was having difficulty adjusting to adolescence, it was a haven.

I still have the drive that girl used to learn social skills, get herself a career and live overseas, and I’m using it again to run for charity.

‘Why don’t you just walk?’ Sister asked.

‘Oh no,’ I replied.  ‘You don’t understand.  If there’s a challenge, I have to rise to it.’

And of course, running 10ks is nothing compared to the struggle kids with autism endure just to get through life.  Autism is a social impairment, which makes it difficult for kids with the disability to read social cues and facial expressions.  They are often isolated, lonely and subject to bullying, which leads to depression and mental distress.  They sometimes have sensory issues which means they can’t, for example, filter sound in a classroom, so they are overwhelmed by hearing every sound around them and can’t concentrate on the teacher’s voice, so their education suffers.  If they can’t learn social skills, nor acquire a decent education, their options in life are drastically reduced.

Autism Queensland desperately needs resources to help people with autism in Queensland, so I ask all my readers to donate generously to this cause here.  I will write an update on how my knees and calves are faring in a few weeks.

On Holidays

In the midst of the stresses of the former part of this year, I booked myself a holiday to visit L in Darwin.  She was on a placement, her boyfriend was away and she was going a bit mental, so our pleasure on seeing one another was mutual.

L and I go back to 2000 whereupon, on returning from Berkeley and not wanting to live in the ‘burbs of the ‘gong for my final year, I flatted in Surry Hills with her and B, both of whom I met through my brother.  I commuted to uni, which, combined with Double Honours and part time work, nearly killed me.  I subsequently adopted a further three of H’s friends and to this day all seven of us remain bound by a shared history of immoderate alcohol consumption, shenanigans canvassing Kingsford, Kensington, Surry Hills and Randwick, and the neuroticism particular to over-achievers.

The house party for the Surry Hills flat was one of the best.  I came up with the theme ‘Come as your deepest, darkest desire’, B designed a wonderfully witty invite requesting attendees to join us in holy flatrimony and L, social butterfly that she is, flounced around inviting every man and his dog from her med course.

I dressed as a tart, as I do with varying degrees of sophistication for every fancy dress party (barring one of L’s where I went as a bridesmaid dressed head to toe in pleated chiffon), B (now working on the reduction of railway noise and vibrations) came as a punk with attendant chain and L (now a nephrologist) was Britney Spears.  SP (now working in energy efficiency) came as a Morman and submitted to having his backside whacked by L with his Bible.  R (now designing microchips for Cochlear) came as Michael Jackson, only his nose of blue-tak fell off halfway through the night and he was reduced to groping his crotch to identify who he was.  Two friends of Bs, fellow mechanical engineers, came as women wearing bras with lights behind them.  When they pressed the lights, their breasts lit up.  It was fantastic.

H, who had a proclivity for spray painting himself and his clothes with gold, came as God.

I digress.

The plane trip to Darwin was surprisingly short.  As always, I love views of the country from a plane, especially when the sun is setting and it lights up the seas and rivers like sheets of gold.  At one stage it was impossible to tell where the sea ended and the sky began, especially as they were obscured by smoke from burning-off fires.

I sat next to a young Asian man who read the inflight magazine from cover-to-cover and, when he had finished that, asked if he could borrow my Country Style, which he perused with careful attention while I hid my smile.  As we circled to land, he was reading the flight safety card.

My visions of sitting on a beach in my new bikini with a margarita to hand while breezes waved the palms were, unfortunately, quickly dispelled.  One couldn’t swim in the sea, it transpired, because of the salties.  If one sat in a public place in a bikini, one would be launched upon by the redneck chauvinists who attended the topless girls bar.  When went out for dinner one night, I dressed very neatly in a black top, knee-length skirt and black heels and I still felt uncomfortable.  There was a very strong sense of it still being a raw, frontier town.

However, the surrounding national parks were gorgeous.  With L and her parents, we went to Litchfield National Park and, after a trek through scrubby bush growing out of red soil, dipped down into the rainforest and waterholes.

I love swimming and playing in water, especially pools and dams because, having grown up inland, an eight hour drive from the coast, this was all there was.  So when I dived into the clear waterhole and swam under the waterfall, I got a little breathless with excitement and had to remind myself of Mrs Woodley’s swimming classes, viz. that one must stay calm in water or one will run out of air and drown.

L had brought goggles so we could see the big, blue-grey fish swimming with us.  She had also, a few weeks prior, fallen into a hole at night while walking her dog and still had a scab on her knee.  The fish liked this and nibbled at the scab, twice.

On another trip we went to the Darwin Wildlife Park and watched an amazing display of birds from prey, which had been trained to fly to and from the rangers in an open area.  There was a barking owl, which sounded like a dog barking softly when it called, a big black cockatoo and a jabiru with glossy blue-green feathers and orange stilts for legs, stepping delicately through the reeds.

Later we met Ernie the dingo, who waited for food, and continued to stare when he realised we had none.  We saw some whiprays which I thought were thrilling because I love sea creatures, though I don’t like to be in the water with them.  Later, in the aquarium, we watched the saltwater crocodile do absolutely nothing.  After ten minutes of waiting we went onto the next exhibit of brightly coloured reef fish, then there was a commotion.  The crocodile was moving!  We hurried back and watched it rise for air, then sink again, unblinking.

Although we couldn’t get beach action, I tried out my new bikini by the pool of L’s parents’ apartment.  It seemed to hold everything in place satisfactorily, though I wouldn’t vouch for it in rough seas.  I also started and, over the next two days, finished the third book of Stieg Larsson’s trilogy which wasn’t as tight as his former two, but at least it didn’t contain the same detailed descriptions of violence against women which I found deeply disturbing.

I couldn't keep up my coffee habit because the restuarants either didn't have, or had run out of, soy milk.  Seeing my devastation, poor L took me to the only decent café in town and, after the consumption of a relatively decent soy latte, I was greatly soothed.  By the time I boarded the flight to Bris Vegas however (after a chat with a taxi driver who restored old radios), I was getting antsy again, so I was very pleased to arrive back in civilisation and to have my caffeine hit the next morning.

On Disability

Congratties are due to the two winners of this year’s Calibre Prize, Lorna Hallahan and David Hansen.  I had the good fortune to be shortlisted with these writers and subsequently to read their excellent essays in the Australian Book Review, which presents the prize in association with Copyright Agency Limited’s Cultural Fund. I started Lorna’s piece, ‘On Being Odd’ on the bus to work and had to leave it when I switched on my computer.  I itched all day to get back to it.  Weaving in a history of spectacle and deformity, it discusses ways of seeing, or of not-seeing, by those who are presented by the visage of a human who looks ‘odd’.

What impressed me most of all was her refusal to outline for the reader the nature of her deformity.  We only see her through her descriptions of other’s reactions to her, and we know her only through her voice, as she turns to philosophy and literature for guidance on how to feel and to act in this sea of stares.    She holds, like watermarks to the light, excerpts from PG Wodehouse, Charlotte Bronte and Montaigne, comparing the literature to her own personal experiences of disability, whether abhorrent or graceful.  From her writing – and I like that we can only perceive her through her writing – she comes across as a person stuck in an extraordinary situation who seeks to remain positive and generous, when she could so easily have been crippled by bitterness.

At times I read it as a palliative piece, perhaps because I have written these myself.  I’ve just completed an essay for an upcoming issue on deafness in M/C Journal, articulating how my deafness has led me to become far more imaginative and creative than I might otherwise have been.  Had I not been deaf and found communication such a struggle, I would never have turned to books, and then to writing (in fact I hate to contemplate what I would have been like had I all my hearing; having a disability has at least taught me humility, a useful quality for someone with an over-abundance of confidence).  Disability, it may be argued, brings with it a wealth of possibility.

As I write:

Theorists of disability consistently point out that, if more effort and energy were directed towards the philosophical implications of the disabled body, a wealth of new material and ideas would emerge that would shatter existing presumptions about the corporeal.  For example, there are still immense possibilities thrown up by theorising a jouissance, or pleasure, in the disabled body.  As Susan Wendell points out, “paraplegics and quadriplegics have revolutionary things to teach us about the possibilities of sexuality which contradict patriarchal culture’s obsessions with the genitals”¹.  Thus if there were more of a focus on the positive aspects of disability and on promoting the understanding that disability is not about lack, people could see how it fosters creativity and imagination.

I don’t think this stance is merely a case of making the best of a bad situation.  A number of the essays that have been listed for and/or have won the Calibre Prize have been prompted by experiences of difference and disability – there is Rachel Robertson’s ‘On Reaching One Thousand’ about the temptation to diagnose a child as autistic rather than appreciating him as a talented individual; there is Tony Macris’ essay, also on his autistic child and on the events that led to the diagnosis; and there is my own essay on Rosa Praed’s daughter Maud, who was deaf.

While I think it is necessary, as someone with a disability, to find the positive aspects of your existence (because frankly, if you didn’t, you would want to top yourself), it is also clear that there is a certain richness to living differently.  And, as Lorna’s essay indicates, there is also a dignity to be had in responding well to those who are confronted by disability.

¹ “Towards a Feminist Theory of Disability.” Hypatia. 4 (1989): 104–124, p. 120.