On Equality (or the lack thereof)

After the excesses of the year, it's a relief to be stationed at Parental Unit's, even if, having slept off my exhaustion, said Unit are starting to drive me slightly demented. The weather resembles an English summer, being 20 degrees C and overcast, with glimpses of sun, and I've been thinking longingly of the baking heat of Brisbane. However, I'm writing again, having started my third novel, and find myself in that delicious state of being swept into another world (that of a quiet man in a small coastal town), and am relishing the insistent tug of that pad of blank paper in the front room where rain spats agains the window and the dog has to be chased out for chewing Mum's cushions. My Christmas shopping is complete and Family have been instructed to get everything on my Christmas list. When Mum asked me if there was anything else I wanted, I answered hopefully, 'Shoes?' but that was rejected, as apparently I have enough of them. There was nothing else I, then, except that which only the powers that be can bestow.

Earlier this year, my boss and I, together with six universities and a number of other stakeholders, were involved in putting together a national grant application for funding into autism. We developed three core programs which were intended to facilitate research into autism over a course of ten years, addressing (broadly) conception and genetics, education, and finding a place in society. As part of the presentation of these concepts, my boss and I put together three videos that helped to illustrate these programs through interviews with parents of children with autism, and of a young man who had autism himself. Although I knew, on an academic level, that parents of children with autism have a difficult time, it wasn't until I listened to these parents how little support I realised they were getting.

One of the reasons why such parents are stressed is because the autism sometimes manifests in their child's behaviour and, because that child doesn't appear to have any physical disability, people may criticise him/her for failing to act like a typically developing child. This was illuminated clearly by a mother we interviewed whose son had once had a meltdown in the pool during a swimming lesson. The parent ended up in tears by the side of the pool comforting her son, who was deeply distressed. She was distraught too because she didn't know what was wrong, as by this stage she still didn't have a diagnosis (it would eventually take her four years to obtain one) and hadn't understood what might have triggered his meltdown. Another parent came up to her but, instead of offering comfort, said to her, 'Will you get your son out of the pool, so my child can continue his swimming lesson?'

Sometimes, the selfishness of people is simply beyond comprehension.

Another parent whose extremely bright daughter had Asperger's was unable to continue with her child's schooling, after trying four schools, because the bullying was so ferocious that her girl became too stressed to learn. Finally, the mother had to take her daughter out of school and homeschool her, at huge financial cost to her family despite, as she pointed out, this girl being a citizen of Australia, who was entitled to an education.

These parents illustrated the difficulties for their children when they were in school, but the problems certainly didn't end when adolescents reached the end of their schooling. Often, they find it difficult to get work and their life becomes immediately, and narrowly, circumscribed. This sense of 'falling off a cliff' happened to a young man with autism who desperately wanted to become independent when he left school but, because he had a disability which he honestly disclosed, he often couldn't get to the interview stage. Although organisations existed to help people with disabilities cross this bridge from school to work, they had a high turnover of staff and his parents, on using such an organisation, found themselves constantly having to bring new employees up to date. The young man became quite disheartened, as would any person in this situation. Eventually, he did find a position and his parents noticed this was therapy in itself. His self-confidence blossomed, social skills improved and his mental health picked up again. It would make sense, then, for programs to be put in place to get people with autism into jobs that suit them because it benefits both individual and society, but this simply isn't happening.

After coming across these heartbreaking stories, from parents and young people who have tried desperately to succeed in a world that is largely impervious to them, I simply couldn't understand why there has been so little funding for autism. Perhaps it's because it isn't a sexy disability. By this I mean you can't help a person with autism to interact with their environment more effectively with a piece of technology like a cochlear implant or a red hearing aid studded with diamonds, so it doesn't attract the numbers of high-tech researchers that, for example, deafness might. This is not, of course, to discredit a number of illustrious researchers who are in this field, numbering Andrew Whitehouse among them. And of course, my boss, who I think never gets enough credit.

Yet, while I was given free hearing aids, FM systems and adjustments to my classrooms (ie carpet to help with the acoustics) more than twenty years ago, a national funding programme for autism was only introduced in 2008 through the Helping Children with Autism package. This provided funding towards early intervention (ie therapies for kids up to the age of 7), but not for help beyond this age which, obviously, is almost an entire lifetime. As for all the parents who had struggled before this point, it has been, to put it bluntly, tough luck. For anyone interested in understanding what tough luck entails, I direct you to the non-fiction account by Tony Macris of his son's diagnosis with autism, and subsequent intervention via applied behavioural analysis, in When Horse Became Saw. Incidentally, Tony was a former writing teacher of mine, although I didn't find out about his son until I read his essay of the same title, which was shortlisted for the Calibre prize.

Given these instances of grave injustice in one of the richest economies in the world, it didn't really surprise me to come across this article noting a report by PricewaterhouseCoopers which had found that almost half of people with a disability in Australia are living in or near poverty, sending Australia to the bottom of the ranks of the developed world. In addition, Australians with a disability are half as likely to be employed as those without a disability, ranking them 21st out of 29th in the developed world. Tellingly, the response of John Della Bosca, former NSW health minister and national director for the national disability scheme's Every Australian Counts campaign, was that there was no reason why Australia couldn't do something about these rankings, as 'Fairness is part of our national character'.

This is hardly a statement that inspires confidence. For what kind of 'fairness' is in place in a country that leaves refugees languishing in detention centres like criminals, and who processes a paltry number of those people who have risk their lives for their families, when thousands more pour across the borders of Europe? Or has mining companies that pay lip service to the indigenous people whose land they are butchering and doesn't give a damn about adequate recompense? Or which is permitting another coal mine which may destroy the world's chance of keeping global warming to 2 degrees?

For a sophisticated analysis of this concept of being a good-hearted people who are prepared to help their neighbours, but who are routinely hostile to those who are perceived as 'other' such as indigenous people, foreigners, or the disabled, I highly recommend Jennifer Rutherford's The Gauche Intruder, which uses Freud and Lacan (yes, it's a battle!) to demonstrate how aggression manifests itself at the time Australians have set out to do good. For example, as I pointed out to my students of Australian literature, how can 'mateship' be such a great thing if it's means the exclusion of women and indigenous people, who also fought in the wars but receive so little recognition in comparison to white men? In these contexts, the words fair go or mateship automatically arouse my suspicion, rather than my respect.

Yes, the government has a great deal to answer for, but so too does its populace. Australians, for all their wealth, are stingy when it comes to charity, particularly in comparison to the US which has a history of philanthropy. Although I don't agree with the Christian overtones of Christmas (which appears anyway to have been hijacked from the winter solstice celebrations), I do endorse its culture of giving. It would be nice to see, in 2013, some of our millionaires (other than Dick Smith) and average Joe Bloe who, for all his whinging does have quite a good standard of living, donating 2.5% – 15% of their pre-tax income to charity. It would also be nice to see our politicians stop fighting like dogs over scraps, and to show some humanity and leadership. But perhaps that's one present that won't fit in Santa's bag.

On Partying

I had thought that, once teaching finished for the semester, I would find myself with a plethora of time at my disposal to recover, write and read. Instead, the pendulum swung in the other direction, from WORK to PARTY.

Consequently I have no idea where the last six weeks have gone, and have been lucky to write in my journal twice a month (and here I think wistfully of my undergraduate days in Wollongong when it was once a day until, over the course of a summer, my style improved considerably and led my lecturer to ask, 'Have you been drinking?') so I can't rely upon it for recollection. However I do, thankfully, have some entries in my calendar.

These indicate that I attended salon talks at Avid Reader by Charlotte Wood and Anna Funder; dressed up as a tart for a friend's 40th birthday ('Please tell me that you're wearing more than that,' H had said when I showed him the dark red corset with cream ribbons. 'Not much more,' I replied brightly); attended a lecture at the State Library by Melissa Lucashenko organised by Griffith Review; started salsa classes, or rather, picked up where I left them 10 years ago; had a friend from Sydney to stay, whereupon we drank cocktails at Bistrot Bistro and pedalled to see Henri Cartier Bresson at the Queensland Art Gallery; watched a performance of Pygmalion, of which I heard very little as the acoustics were terrible, though I'd managed to read the script beforehand and was entertained well enough; attended a friend's baby naming ceremony on four hours' sleep, having been out on the turps the night before at a cocktail pool party; went to a samba fitness class with T and loved it; organised a bike ride over the rail trails north of Brisbane, returning sore and burnt in all the wrong places, leading to a hideously striped epidermis of brown and white; travelled to Parkes with H for a week for Dr P's nuptials; caught up with friends in Sydney and, back in Brisbane, attended a trapeze performance by some stunning gay men. Is it any wonder that I am still tired, still broke, and slightly fatter?

On the plane to Sydney I finished Anna Funder's All That I Am which was the best book I've read all year. It elucidated a period and people with which I was unfamiliar – the German resistance movement in the lead-up to World War Two – with beautiful writing, a clever plot and thorough research which the text wore very lightly. Funder was a highly articulate speaker and her intelligence was stunning.

In Parkes H and I visited the dish with a uni friend of H's who had a charming one year old, from whom I elicited some smiles. H tried to explain the physics of gravity to me but that wasn't very interesting so I wandered to the shop and found a Christmas present for Nephew. We stayed with Dr P's Parental Unit who plied us with food and booze (hence uncomely weight gain). I wrote 129 place names, had my toenails painted pink and finished another book I was in the middle of reading, Alex Miller's new novel Autumn Laing which was disappointing (more of this in another post). After this novel I read The Tiger's Wife which, though it took a while to get into, turned into a wonderful piece of magic realism with a clever blending of myth and reality. Now I'm onto Gillian Mears' Foal's Bread which is thus far quite good. An excellent piece on Mears and her writing by Susan Johnson, whose writing I enjoy, can be found here.

It rained for five days before the wedding, and on the sixth the sky bloomed with blue. Everyone was relieved. Jokes were made about the sacrifice of goats. The wedding ceremony was beautiful. I wrote a poem for L&G and read it out, and H was MC. I wore a new frock from Kitten d'Amour with dark red Nude shoes (Nude is my favourite favourite favourite fashion find of the year) that I had worn at the 40th birthday party, and in which I had blackened a toenail from dancing too much. Fortunately, this didn't happen again. By the time the party bus came to pick us up at midnight I was already on my way out. Those at the back of the bus erupted into song as I laid my cheek against the cold glass window and went to sleep. The others went to an after party in someone's hotel room and I staggered around and eventually fell onto the bed and passed out, waking pained and somewhat surly the next morning.

H and I dropped L&G off at the airport for their honeymoon before going to dinner with another friend. As usual, H was unable to talk and navigate at the same time, so for a while it looked like we would end up in Wollongong. While queuing to get back onto the right road, H, to our mutual hilarity, pointed out the man in the car behind us doing his toilette, viz. looking up his nostrils and baring his teeth in the mirror. It was worth taking the scenic route (read: getting lost) just for that.

Despite all my avowals to stop drinking and going out and to actually sit and do some writing, I found myself booked to see Briefs with a friend from London. It was a wonderful performance by a troupe of gay trapeze artists with a commentary from a drag queen that I couldn't entirely hear but was highly entertaining to watch. I got more than I bargained for when, as we were at a table near the front, I was the target of a half-empty can of coke, which sprayed over most of me. I didn't mind as it was still funny, and I had on my pink patent Alannah Hill pumps which were water resistant, but my lovely handbag had stains on it. Oh, these first world problems.

Now I have only two weeks or so of work before I go home to Parental Unit's, whereupon there will be nothing to do but write and exercise. What bliss.

On Trauma

The last few months have been harrowing. I've been working too hard and this, combined with barely having had a day off since Easter and training for the Bridge to Brisbane, meant that my body made an executive decision for me. While delivering my first ever lecture at uni, I fainted in front of 180 students.

Ironically, the lecture was on trauma and narrative in conjunction with Louise Doughty's Whatever you Love. I was speaking on muscle memory and how the body acts out trauma that it can't consciously articulate. As a fellow tutor said appreciatively, 'Jessica, not only did you deliver a lecture on trauma, you enacted it!'

It wasn't all bad as, when I came to, I found a very nice-looking student holding my hand. I managed to get up and the course convener fetched me a seat. To the students I joked, 'There's nothing like a bit of drama to keep you all awake!' and kept on going, though a number of them told me afterwards they were quite concerned. Or traumatised, rather. However, as a cousin pointed out (amidst a myriad of jokes on Jane Austen and swooning), I wouldn't be a White if there wasn't any drama, and least they will never forget that lecture.

Soon it transpired that I had a flu virus that confined me to the house for more than a week of enforced rest and utter boredom. A few days after toppling, I dragged my carcass into Avid Reader (J1 very kindly dropped me off after stopping by for a cup of tea) to listen to an interview between Radio National's Paul Barclay and Nigel Brennan, Nicole Bonney and Kellie Brennan, authors of The Price of Life. Nigel was an Old Boy of the school at which my parents work, and gave a talk at the valedictory speech day last year. I remembered his name when Avid sent me an invite and decided to go along.

I had to get there early so I could get a seat near the front to hear. I sat very still to conserve energy, got bored, and watched Paul Barclay, who was restless, and the sound technician fiddling with his wires. When Nigel came in there was an immediate energy in the air. He looked like the quintessential tanned Aussie with a white Bonds t-shirt and dark blue jeans. His sister, Nicole Bonney, wore an orange and red kaftan with ruffles, and his sister-in-law, Kellie Brennan, had on cute leopard print ballet flats. They were like the country people I had grown up among, but when they began to speak, the story that unfolded was completely removed from picnic races with champagne or CWA meetings on recipe books.

In 2008, Nigel, a photojournalist, travelled into Somalia with Canadian journalist Amanda Lindhout to document the Somalian refugee camps. They had been intending to stay no longer than 10 days due to the country's instability. Instead, they were captured by a gang and held for ransom, and finally got out after the heroic efforts of their families some 462 days later, following beatings, psychological torture, solitary confinement and, for Amanda, sexual assault.

The theme that resonated the most through the book was communication. Nicole and Kellie, two tough country women, battled for months with unhinged and morally dubious Africans with poor English, trying to make it clear that the family didn't have the amount of money they were asking for, and that not every Westerner was automatically wealthy. The Australian government initially came on board to try and get Nigel out, but wouldn't offer the hostage-takers more than a certain amount because this would be seen as setting a precedent for the bailing-out of future hostages. This was fair enough (and was more proactive than the Canadian government, which largely sat on its hands), but it was never made clear to the family that this was their tactic. Nicky and Kellie said in the interview that had they known this was government policy, they would have done something of their own accord sooner, particularly as incidents occured such as Nigel calling home and getting an answering machine because the Australian Federal Police weren't manning the phones 24-7 as expected.

Nigel and Amanda converted to Islam to aid their survival. When they managed to escape, they sprinted for a mosque, where they couldn't be harmed because they were Islamic. Their captors caught up with them and, after the shots of AK47s, dragged them out. The most heartbreaking part of this scene was that in the mosque Amanda was able to communicate, using sign language, to an old woman in a niqab that she was being raped. The woman began to cry. Even though she and Amanda didn't share the same language, there was an unspoken understanding of what Amanda was suffering.

When it became clear to the Australian government that their involvement was becoming too costly, they gradually extricated themselves from the situation, but covered their tracks with bureaucratic language such as that noted by Nicky: 'we have to look at where we are in regards to negotiator strategies with other government agencies' (121). The distancing effect of obscure language is one I've encountered often in academia, and I could understand her frustration. Eventually the family turned to a private agency who got the Nigel and Amanda out in a matter of months, but not before the family members were mortgaged to the hilt and were disintegrating from stress. Dick Smith also offered financial aid, and Bob Brown took out a personal loan and offered that as well. As Nigel noted in the interview, regardless of what one might think of Brown's policies, it's clear he is a good man.

I read the book almost in one sitting as, being ill, I allowed myself the rare luxury of lying in bed in the morning reading, and the story was gripping. When I reached the end, I was struck Nigel's psychological strength, which reminded me of Primo Levy's as he struggled to survive in Auschwitz. In his autobiography, If This is a Man, Levy wrote:

'Nothing belongs to us anymore; they have taken away our clothes, our shoes, even our hair; if we speak, they will not listen to us, and if they listen, they will not understand. They will even take away our name: and if we want to keep it, we will have to find in ourselves the strength to do so, to manage somehow so that behind the name something of us, of us as we were, still remains' (21).

Nigel struggled to do this — to hold onto his sense of himself — through writing. When his pens died he became very distressed, and when he was kept in solitary confinement he committed his diary to memory. I asked, in the Q&A afterwards, if it had been difficult for him to get his story down once he had returned home, because often for those who had suffered trauma there are simply no words to articulate what has happened. Nigel replied that the writing process had been quite therapeutic, and that I can understand – even Chaucer was writing about this The Book of the Duchess in the 14th Century, where his narrator wrote down a dream of lost love to alleviate his insomnia.

There are also some beautiful moments in Nigel's text which spring from scenes of intense deprivation. There is the shock of touch during a haircut after months of skin hunger, the deliciousness of fresh greens, and the iridescent colours of a gecko's head.  Nigel, with Amanda's encouragement, focussed on that which was beautiful in an ugly situation, in order to keep going. There was also, of course, the family's dark humour that helped them through it, and which was evident in the interview they gave at Avid Reader.

As I staggered home on the bus after that interview, my pathetic body weak with the adrenalin that had coursed through it while listening to the interview, I figured that, even if I was overworked and as sick as a dog and had failed abysmally in my first attempt at an illustrious academic career, I had very little to complain about in the light of Nigel and Amanda's ordeal. If you ever need testimony of the courage and ingenuity of the human spirit in its fight to survive, and of the endurance that love fosters, I urge you to read The Price of Life.

As for me, I had lost too much fitness to compete in the Bridge to Brisbane, so I've decided to drag myself up a bloody great hill (Mt Coot-tha) for Movember. I think a post on the hirsute will be in order.

A Day in the Life of the Author

I was woken too early by sunlight because my eye mask was lost in the sheets, and wished for another hour of sleep. I wrapped up my framed PhD certificate and took it to the JP offices in West End. In the fragment of mirror in the lift, I observed the bags beneath my eyes from tiredness, and figured that putting on blush had been a good idea because I was colourless again. The receptionist had bright pink lips and called me darling. I was to wait in the room next door. The JP lumbered in, slow and kind with a bowed back. She was a volunteer, rostered on Mondays, she said in reply to my questions, and took her stamps out of a thin plastic bag. The receptionist burst in. Samantha Stouser had won the tennis. I vaguely registered that this was important, and remembered Serena Williams in the news that morning. 'She was playing against Williams?' I asked. The receptionist nodded. 'She just gave her acceptance speech. She was so humble.' I smiled. The receptionist was friendly, but then she began scowling at the JP, until she noticed me still watching her, puzzled. She went out again. The JP asked about my degree and told me of Robert Menzies, who wrote letters to his daughter. He'd had time to think about his policies, she said, because it took so long to get from A to B. Not like these days where people were bombarded with technology all the time. She was a nice lady, and I thanked her for her help. Desperate for a coffee, I went across the road to a cafe down an alleyway I had often walked past but never had time to stop at. It was cute, with biscuits and sweets in clear compartments before the coffee machine. I contemplated the Turkish delight and decided against it. I stared at the barista too long because I was trying to work out what he was saying. He must have thought I fancied him, and offered me free shortbread with my coffee. I said I was allergic to dairy and that I couldn't. The poor man was confused. I gave him a brilliant smile and told him, 'You have a good day' and went out, smiling, with my coffee. The blush was really working. Then I regretted the shortbread, and thought I should have at least taken it to make him feel better. At the traffic lights a well-dressed young man stared at a drain, then lay down in the gutter and stuck his hand into it. The lights changed. I was tempted to look back but that would have been bad manners. At the Cultural Centre busway I was so dazed with tiredness I missed my bus. The next came in ten minutes. I read some more of Nicholas Baker's The Anthologist which was still beside my bed and which I dip into between books, as it has no plot but is amusing. At work I scanned the certified copy the degree certificate and sent it off with a postdoctoral application and wasted far too much time. A colleague told me to get some sleep. I said I would. At the bus stop, I watched the full moon rising. In the seat before me on the bus were a young Asian couple with thick black hair, comparing their open hands. A mother, father and their daughter boarded and sat behind me, speaking in a loud foreign accent which must have been European. One of them smelled of cigarettes. I turned off my hearing aid so I could read. I felt I could tell a man I loved him. The book made me laugh in places. At home, there was no mail in my mailbox. My neighbour had removed his outside furniture too because they are oiling the decks tomorrow. I ate fresh corn, and toast with Vegemite for dinner, and figured I should probably have more but the effort was beyond me. I played some Scrabble against my mother and brother on Facebook.  In both instances, I was winning. I wrote, and stared into space.

My Frocks

This past week has been debilitating, as I've been housebound with a vile dose of the flu and am thoroughly sick of myself. Rather than writing another post of navel-gazing, however, I thought I'd write about something that cheers me up no end: my frocks.

When my advance from Penguin for A Curious Intimacy came through and I had flown back to Sydney from London for the launch and publicity, the first thing I did was go to Collette Dinnigan. In the tranquil boutique in Paddington, I settled on a pale, knee-length dress gathered at the waist with an overlay of sparkling olive-gold lace, and gold straps. As the shop assistants boxed it up for me, H told them I'd had my novel published and they looked impressed.

'I thought I wouldn't be able to afford one of these until I got married!' I added, and with that they smiled.

I then dragged H all around Melbourne to find the perfect pair of shoes to go with it. They are covered in gold petals and not quite perfect (they aren't high enough), but they were good enough for my book launch.

My cash flow as a writer, however, is rarely so luxurious, and thus I am in a constant state of torment over wanting frocks, shoes and handbags, but being able to afford none of them. Or, so I tell myself. Somehow I always find the money from somewhere. Once in London I went for a week on a reduced diet so I could afford a pair of red ankle boots. Amused, H told Dad about it.

'They couldn't have been worth starving herself over, could they?'

'Dad, you have no idea,' H replied.

Dad should have known. His wife had the same habit. Born in New Zealand, Mum saved her money to go travelling around the world, but got as far as Sydney and spent it all. Then she met Dad and married him. She had a very fashionable wedding, with a white Prue Acton dress and red shoes. Then Dad took her back to the farm and she couldn't shop as much, although sometimes after trips to Tamworth he would notice something and ask, 'Is that new?' and Mum would reply, 'Oh no, I've had it for ages.'

Dad could never quite tell if he was being duped. Meanwhile I, watching these exchanges, became versed in the art of deception.

My favourite frockshop is Alannah Hill, but I am only allowed to go in there on my birthday, which is also, incidentally, when the sales are still on. The year before last they were playing one of my favourite songs, Flashdance, so I was compelled to buy a white skirt patterned with pink, green and red flowers that swayed when I walked. I was utterly broke and shouldn't have bought it, and by the time I got home I was so ashamed that I cut up my credit card. That was only a band-aid solution however, as when the new one came through a few months later I was off again.

Another wonderful label is Review, because they make clothes for women with curves. After helping out with the kids one summer, B gave me some money and I bought a black and cream frock with a deep v-neck, tight beribboned waist and tulle beneath the skirt. I wore it out with B, H and Cousin A to the Bowery, and true to form drank too many cocktails (2.5) and started a little dance with Cousin A, which snowballed into dancing with the jazz band and winking at a random stranger before being shepherded out by B before I did something drastic.

B also used to work for Sacha Drake, which meant instant access to many a cheap frock, although sadly she quit and now I have to find means of accommodating a suddenly more expensive, and still undiminished, passion for SD frocks. Sacha, too, makes dresses for curvaceous women, but the size 8s are limited in number and have usually sold out before I can rummage together enough funds to pay for them.

And of course, there is internet shopping. On nights when I can't sleep and there is no one to play Scrabble with on Facebook, or when I am procrastinating on a piece of writing, I will pass the time scanning pages of clothes on frock websites, be they discount or shopfront. It's incredibly soothing, at least until I find something I like, and then the cogs begin whirring to work out how to pay for it. For this reason, I am banned from Anthropologie, because I want everything on the site.  Another beautiful frock came from this shop, when I stopped off in San Francisco on my way home as a reward for finishing my thesis.  It's of pale grey wool with a ruff and a pattern of long grass on the right hand side in red and white, which goes perfectly with my red stiletto boots.  Anthropologie is gorgeous.

'I'm no good at budgeting,' I complained to B once, after what was probably a protracted period of poverty.

'No,' she corrected me. 'You're incredibly good at budgeting when there is something that you want.'

If only the wants were less fickle than frocks … but then, what would be the fun in that?

I shall end here, for I need to return to my deathbed for yet more sleep. For those readers who love frocks, I direct you to the beautifully written and photographed Dress, Memory, by Lorelei Vashti.

My One Hundredth Post.

It's a Friday night. My printer is chugging out articles on the fin de siécle, on which I am writing an essay. I'm hoping that the print cartridge will last until I have a chance to get it refilled. I have elected not to go out because I am a) too broke b) need to get up early to go running tomorrow and c) it's too bloody cold for a Bris Vegan. How I got through four London winters with maximum 2 degrees Celcius and the light fading at 4.30pm is beyond me. Actually, I didn't really get through it, I just got depressed.

Following the standard theory that all writers need to be depressed to write well, I ought then to have been producing brilliant pieces of work. In The Anthologist, a book given to me by one of my students going back home to the States, Nicholas Baker writes:

"The rhyming of rhymes is a powerful form of self-medication. All these poets, when they feel that they are descending into one of their personal canyons of despair, use rhyme to help themselves tightrope over it. Rhyming is the avoidance of mental pain by addicting yourself to what will happen next. It's like chain-smoking – you light one line with the glowing ember of the last. You set up a call, and you want a response. You posit a pling, and you want a fring."

Yet it isn't just poetry that's a panacea. Here, Baker refers to poetry as a means of rescue from those canyons, but the canyons also give rise to creativity. The basic tenet of my thesis – which I have sunsequently worked out some two years after submission – was that loss creates stories. As Freud put it in a letter to Ludwig Binswanger, a fellow psychiatrist, in 1929:

"We will never find a substitute [after a loss]. No matter what may fill the gap, even if it be filled completely, it nevertheless remains something else. And, actually, this is how it should be, it is the only way of perpetuating that love which we do not want to relinquish."

In other words, we write to hold onto what we love. When I first moved to London, I left a boy behind, and wrote obsessively of him in order to maintain that emotion. However, that didn't result in any literary masterpieces. What did evolve was a thesis that was itself composed of loss, by interrogating how it had affected the lives of two nineteenth century women. Georgiana Molloy emigrated from Scotland to Western Australia in the 1830s and buried two children in the Australian soil, and from the deaths of her children sprung a beautiful and sensuous correspondence about botany as she collected specimens for and wrote letters to Captain James Mangles in England. Rosa Praed, who emigrated from Queensland to London, wrote persistently about the country she had left behind. When she lost her companion of thirty years, Nancy Harward, she used a medium to communicate with Nancy through automatic writing. What resulted were voluminous writings about the astral plane which certainly weren't great literature (and it's arguable if they were real at all) but which were powerful in their demonstration of Rosa's desperation to be with Nancy. And of course there has been my own loss of my hearing, which makes communicating with people difficult, and which pushed me into writing as a way of assuaging my loneliness. If I hadn't been deaf, I wouldn't have been a writer.

This is why I wholeheartedly agree with Baker when he asks, "Why would you we want to give pills to people so they don't weep?" If we give them pills, he continues, "poetry will die" (55). Sometimes I have the sense that we are being taught that it's detrimental to be sad, or to be bored. People want to be constantly happy, kids want to be constantly entertained and distracted. Yet if you never experience sadness or boredom, how can you understand what constitutes euphoria and excitement?

Of course, there are people for whom depression is utterly debilitating, and those people need the pills to function and to stay alive. An old writing friend of mine from our undergraduate days has put together an anthology of comics and short pieces about depression, from which she has suffered. You can order copies of it here for $30.00.

In one of my first lectures with my friend at uni, our teacher mused on the high prevalence of depression among writers. I initially scoffed at this – I was at that age where I was of course invincible – but having seen my friend and other people I know battle with depression and its fallout, and having brushed against it myself for such a long time in London, I am beginning to see that he's right. Yes, writers are a sombre, miserable and often lonely bunch, but they need to be to see the underside of everyday life, to give depth to their work.

They also need to be able to laugh at themselves and drink an awful lot of margaritas and write murder mystery parties, which was what I was doing the week prior to this one instead of writing my essay on the fin de siècle. Not liking any of the How to Host a Murders on the internet, and having some seventeen people in attendance, I wove together a plot that involved a supposedly virginal male in a white 70s suit, an unhinged Medieval knight, a feminist flapper, Jesus, a doll with pins pressed into it, a disco queen in her mother's hot pink post-wedding going-away outfit, a schoolgirl, a besuited secret agent, Colin Firth as Mr Darcy, a gospel singer, a marathon runner dressed as a bride and countless other characters in their various permutations.

The punk entered with a packet of chips and said, 'I brought you some dog food.' I couldn't understand a word of what the knight said until he took his visor off because I couldn't lipread him behind the metal. The secret agent had my written permission to feel up the guests, which he did admirably. The knight attempted to give Jesus some advice on how to pick up the ladies but this was countered by Jesus' admonishment that he didn't need help because, as he said, 'I know the Truth', and indeed overpowered the flapper with his religious airs.  Said flapper wasn't well versed in what feminists ought to say, so I offered to lend her the contents of my bookshelf. Mr Darcy made me many a cocktail, some of which I splashed onto my cream stiletto shoes with bows, but otherwise I managed to stay upright despite the marathon runner's insistence that I wouldn't. After all, I have only fallen over once before in stilettos and that was because the ground in front of Tate Modern was decidedly uneven. Meanwhile, I laughed and laughed at my clever, brilliant friends.

And as for that endorsement of euphoria and endorphins, tomorrow there will be a run in the brilliant Brisbane sun.

I looked up ...

and saw that somehow it was June. The time between my January post and this one had been sucked into a black hole. I can barely remember where those months went, though I know it was all English tutoring at the uni, sending Entitlement to the publishers for editing and struggling to and from my job at Autism Queensland in between classes. My stress levels shot through the roof, I went for nearly three months without a day off (except at the Easter break), my social life evaporated, I was irritable with exhaustion and felt as though I was reliving the days before I finished my thesis, only Saviour Brother wasn't around to help with the cooking and cleaning. At least my laptop didn't blow up this time.

But … it was worth it. I loved tutoring. I loved the contact with my students, trying to work out what would make them interested and trying to make them talk, which wasn't always easy, not least because they had an FM microphone shoved in their faces so I could hear them. Once I resorted to tossing sweets at them as a reward, which didn't really work, but at least it cheered them up. At first I had no idea what I was doing, but as Dad always said, “If you're chucked in the deep end, you have to learn to swim” and I learnt fast. And once I relaxed, they began to as well.

In the midst of this was the wonderful sanctuary of Coolum, where A1 had booked a house for our friends. The weather was gorgeous and I was able to wear a new bikini on the beach, and another bikini which until this point had been under-utilised (though was not seaworthy, being white and insubstantial). I was put in B1's room on account of his snoring, which kept those down the hall awake, but not yours truly. In the mornings I staggered out of bed and made a cup of tea and sat on the verandah with my book (Rose Tremain's The Road Home), soaking up the sun and listening to the wind in the palms. Then, in order to render myself fit for communication with other holiday inhabitants, I swam in the pool and woke myself up.

Having found myself without a beach frock (I had been marking up until the lunchtime before we left, then did a tutorial, then packed in haste), I bought a Wish dress on sale in a boutique which had been marked down 80%. I was so excited I was still talking to Sister about it when I returned.

“Oh my god,” she said, “we are so not related. I wore the same clothes four days straight.”

“That's disgusting,” I replied.

We also made a trip to Noosa, to which I had never been and which I found overpriced and crowded, with very unfriendly shop assistants. I also dragged my sorry arse out of bed at 5am to see the sunrise with A1. The last time I had seen the sun rise was when I was 9, camping with our friends the Coopers. I was in the habit (inconceivable to me now) of waking up before everyone else and was often bored to tears waiting for an adult to get up and give me something to do. At least then there had been the sun rising over the sea, viewed from the frame of a triangular tent flap. This time it was overcast, but it was still dramatic watching sharp gold prick the horizon line, before swelling and clinging to the bottoms of the clouds.

When I had shot enough photos, A1 suggested coffee, but I hadn't brought my wallet.

“I didn't think anything would be open at this hour.”

“You don't get up this early very often, do you?” she said.

There was no answer to that.

All that sunshine, sea, pool and friendship was enough to recharge me to get through the last month of tutoring. Now, on my first weekend off, I have run (lengthily), had my first inline skating lesson by the river (excitement extreme) with J2, attended a Getup rally in favour of climate action with Sister and the kids, and picked up a pen for the first time in months. Life, it seems, is about to begin again at last.

Hiatus

I am overworked, overtired and unable to write at the moment.  However I hope to post before the month is out.

The River

The Brisbane River, looping and curving through suburbs and high rises, drifting beneath bridges and nudging alongside parks, is Brisbane's defining feature. It draws cyclists, dog walkers, coffee devotees, runners and lovers to its edges, and what it lacks in sparkle, as with Sydney's harbours, it makes up for with its breadth and breeziness. Running over the Storey Bridge and along the floating walkway, I was one of many who believed that the riverside symbolised the city's laidback tenor. It was partly this insouciance, combined with a decade of drought that erased the memory of earlier flooding, that made the deluge of water such a shock. Even as flash floods in Toowoomba left people clinging to telephone poles and cars stacked against one another, crowds were gathering along the Brisbane River with their cameras and umbrellas (for it was raining still) to watch water swell against its banks.

With only the increasingly sensationalised media reports and a fevered imagination for company, and not wanting to be cut off from my sister by a creek that would definitely flood, I packed my favourite frocks, boots, handbags, novels and journals into a backpack and decamped to her place.

'Did you seriously bring all that shit?' she commented, seeing it spill over the floor as I unpacked.

'As if I would leave my Collette Dinnigan dress behind!' I returned. 'And my Spencer and Rutherford handbags, and my red stiletto boots from London!'

I was told I was an idiot.

The power was cut off at 3pm, so we went for a walk to look at the flooded creek. I had gone for a run that morning, and the paths upon which I had pounded were now covered in water. It crept insidiously over the foothpaths and road, while ants ran along drainpipes to find dry land.  A father rode his bike through through the water, followed by his small son who clearly struggled as the water came up to his knees.  The father didn't lift a finger to help.  Men in 4WDs and Range Rovers drove their vehicles through the water to shore up their brawn.  Sister and I sniggered.  The sun came out for what seemed like the first time in weeks, and burnt me in a hour.

Evening fell and, tired from adrenalin caused by said overheated mind and a general apprehension of the unknown, and having no light by which to read, I went to bed early.

My brother-in-law, being ex-army, was thrilled by all the drama, and on Thursday he was disappointed to find that the river wouldn't approach the same levels as the 1974 flood. Sister and I wandered off for a coffee at the local cafe, which was heaving and had run out of soy milk. A lady before us who also wanted soy went off to the shops, and came back with more, and I was a happy bunny again. I was even happier to get back home to power, a hot shower and internet.

My inconveniences were tiny compared to those whose homes had filled with muddy water and sewerage.  I went for a cycle on Friday around Docklands and New Farm and was dismayed and saddened by the streets piled with stained couches, chairs and general detritus. Volunteers were shovelling mud from the streets, New Farm Park was silted up and attended to by waterbirds, Sydney Street ferry had crumpled and a boat had mounted the boardwalk at Docklands. A marshy smell lingered in the air, reminding me of floods on our property when I was child.

Subsequent reportage has indicated the folly of allowing houses to be built on what are flood plains.  In addition, Antony Funnell points out how gentrification and greater urban density has meant that traditional Queenslanders, built on stilts, are now being renovated and closed in. The stilts were to allow houses to be built into Brisbane's hills, and to keep the upper levels dry during floods. After a decade without Dorothea Mackellar's “steady, soaking rain”, people had forgotten to build for Brisbane' climate.

Then there is the controversy relating to the management of Wivenhoe Dam, which is facing questions of whether more water should have been released prior to the flooding, and if the failure to do this in a timely way was in fact the cause of Brisbane's floods. While the dam management was undertaken in a complex and increasingly stressful situation, there were also several warnings from the Bureau of Meterology in the previous months about flooding. By the same token, having come out of this decade of drought, the decision to release precious drinking water would have had to be undertaken by someone 'with very large balls'. However, the lack of foresight extends beyond this, to a national level. As Germaine Greer writes in a surprisingly lucid article, the pattern of drought and flooding, of the interchange of El Nino and La Nina, has been well documented in Australian history. Given this, she notes, 'the rest of the world might well be scratching its head' as to why more wasn't done, why boats remains moored as the Brisbane River rose, why we have so readily relinquished our precious topsoil. It seems to be, as one person wrote in the comments, that we are 'living in a disaster prone country with mediocre approach to problem solving'.

Thus the blame game begins to gather momentum. Should home owners be held responsible for their lack of foresight in buying near the river, creeks or on the floodplains? Or should developers (such as Mirvac, who built the flooded Tennyson Reach and misinformed buyers of the risks from flooding) be held accountable? Or should we hold local government to task, for rushing to accommodate Brisbane's growing population with poor town-planning? Or should the management of Wivenhoe Dam be culpable? What is clear is that there needs to be more awareness of Brisbane's environment, as demonstrated on an intimate level by the original inhabitants of the area, the Jagera and Turrbal people, who were supported by the river's abundance of fish, shellfish, crabs and shrimps, and who lived with the environment rather than attempting to control it. Although such symbiosis is largely impractical in contemporary society, it does flag a more responsive relationship to the land which might have been useful in avoiding the floods.

While politicians squabble over funding for rebuilding, and Tony Abbott feebly attempts to hijack the floods to derail the NBN, the community has responded overwhelmingly. Queues for volunteers stretched around the blocks and were eventually turned away, clothing companies are donating 20% of profits and Queensland's writers are banding together to donate books, workshops and manuscript assessments. If any readers are after a copy of A Curious Intimacy, and would like to donate at the same time, visit here.  Also up for bids are manuscript assessments, performances, and a plethora of wonderful books. Please give freely and generously to add to your library and to help those who have been affected by the floods. Bidding closes at 11pm Brisbane time on Monday 24th January.

As the city struggles to restore itself, we are forced to revise our impressions of the Brisbane River. No longer does it seem a benign and beautiful feature of a carefree city. Rather, it is a force of which, having the capacity to wipe out life and livelihood, we should be wary. We would do well to remember its dormant power.

When it Rains

As I write, most of Queensland is underwater, hundreds of people have been dispossessed, kangaroos are being ferried to land in tinnies and still the rain slashes onto my corrugated iron roof. Two years ago we had dreadful bushfires in Victoria, and we are just emerging from a decade of drought. Australia truly is, as Dorothea Mackellar wrote in 'My Country', her iconic (if saccharine) poem, 'a sunburnt country … Of droughts and flooding rains', although climate change increasingly has much to answer for on that front.

One cold morning in London a few years ago, I sat in the British Library with a copy of Core of my Heart, my Country, a book I had ordered from the stacks purely because of its title, which hails from Mackellar's poem and which encapsulates my own bond with Australia. The book, by Maggie MacKellar, examines the relationships between women's bodies and the lands to which they emigrated (in this instance Canada and Australia), and how their confrontation with that land altered their sense of self.

However, before I even began reading, I was arrested by the acknowledgements. MacKeller paid tribute to her partner in a way that suggested he was no longer there. Something dreadful had happened, I sensed.

A year after I returned home I found MacKellar had published another book, When it Rains. My intuition was confirmed: the book detailed how she had lost her husband to mental illness and suicide, and then, shortly after, she lost her mother to cancer. By page 20, I was in tears.

Finding herself on the verge of a breakdown, MacKellar took her two kids and left her life in Sydney and the academic position which defined her, to live with her aunt and uncle on their property.

Like Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking, the book is an account of loss in an attempt to make sense of it. Early on, MacKellar refers to Anne Carson's introduction to the plays of Euripides, in which Carson meditates on “why tragedy is so vital an art form. For [Carson], the tragedy becomes a frame that can be put around our grief. Inside the safety of that frame the violent expression of grief and rage can be played out without 'you or your kin having to die'” (p. 29). However, MacKellar found herself not as a character who acted out loss, but an actual person who had to deal with it.  Trapped within that frame of tragedy, she used writing as a means of stepping out of it:

For me it is the act of writing that unlocks the frame. I pin my tragedy onto the paper and with the precision of an anatomist take a scalpel to separate memory from bone. Perhaps if I can peel the layers of skin from its torso, it will stop having the power of a dark shape in the night. By writing, I risk sacrificing my deepest intimacies, but by writing, I control the shape they become (p. 29).

Interestingly, this evokes Darian Leader's The New Black, which details how we frame loss in order to let it go. Leader describes how in the dreams of the bereaved ‘a special motif frequently emerges: doorways, arches, stages and the many other features that serve to frame a space’ (p. 100). These dreams indicate how the mental images of those who are lost are becoming framed, and representational: they are entering the symbolic realm. ‘Mourning’, Leader continues, ‘involves a certain making artificial’ (p. 105). Given this, a writer’s grappling with loss naturally involves transmuting it into a literary form.

There are some writers, however, who wish to remain trapped within that frame. As I wrote in a recent article published in Southerly, Rosa Praed, the 19thC spiritualist and prolific novelist, longed to be haunted by her dead companion Nancy, for it signified that Nancy was still present.  In a similar way, Edgar Allen Poe longed to be troubled by his dead mother, with whose corpse he had been left alone at age 2, until they were found in the morning. When he became a writer, his work was littered with ‘the blank stare of the dead’ (p. 31), with cadavers, spectres and blood, as the memory of his mother’s corpse in all its permutations infiltrated his writing. Darian Leader argues that ‘Poe’s literary efforts to describe this encounter from every possible angle suggests that the work of mourning could not be completed. Rather than laying his mother to rest, her presence became increasingly real’ (p.31). Perhaps however the emphasis should not be laid on could not be completed, but rather on would not. For if the mourning process ended, so too would the dead (or whatever semblance he had of them) disappear forever from his life.

As I read When it Rains, I could feel the muscles of the book were tight with grief and anger, but gradually they loosened with happiness as MacKellar's children settled and her husband ceased to haunt her at night. MacKellar's descriptions of this haunting made it seem eerie and extreme – it wasn't just that her husband was in her dreams but that her body couldn't lose the physical memory of him; something which anyone who has lost a lover can identify with, but made more visceral by his complete, abrupt absence.

Indeed the intense physicality of the writing – which was present too in Core of my Heart — the descriptions of the sounds and sensations of the country – made me nostalgic and I thought, for a few seconds, about my friends' (disturbingly, only half-joking) suggestions that I go on “Farmer Wants a Wife” in order to shack up with a farmer and move to the country. However I'm sure I would end up like the woman in “The Yellow Wallpaper” if I tried country living: root-bound, neurotic, and angling into madness. Give me boutiques, cafés and the anonymity of cities any day.

But the difficulty with city living is that you lose – or indeed, never know – the experiences of our rural compatriots. It's too easy to turn off the television and close the newspaper, to worry about rain dripping through the hole in the roof rather than the river than pushed itself through someone's living room, or, if we go inland further still, to ignore the poverty of Indigenous Australians. For those of us whose lives are uncomplicated, whose bindings to those they love haven't unravelled, whose worst experience of all this rain is a sodden skirt or an umbrella bent backwards, it's important to remember that we have it easy.

Donations to the Queensland Flood Relief Appeal can be made here.