2017: My Year of Writing

Even workaholics need to have fallow years if they are to continue functioning well. 2017 was such a year for me, as I needed to pull back after nearly killing myself in 2016 (when I hadn’t even properly recovered from 2015). I finally finished my memoir while I was on hols in Croatia, and while I might still have to do one more draft, it’s been a huge load off my shoulders. I was still unwell for most of the year, but the colds & flu weren’t as intense. And now, after a few weeks off over Xmas, I’m full of beans again. Long may it last! Below is a list of my literary doings over the past year.

Cockies on the Gold Coast

Publications

I had more academic work than creative pieces published this year, which makes sense as all my time is taken up by being an academic. If I do write fiction, it’s on the weekends, or bashed out the night before my writing group’s deadline.

At the beginning of the year, my essay on the craft of Georgiana Molloy’s writing was published in Claiming Space: Australian Women’s Writing. I started writing this essay in Rome at the end of 2014! This was followed in October by an essay on eco-memoir in Mediating Memory: Tracing the Limits of Memoir, in which I compared Kim Scott and Hazel Brown’s Kayang and Me with Tim Winton’s Island Home.

Just before Christmas, the Journal for the Association of Australian Studies published my essay on John Molloy’s (Georgiana’s husband) involvement in a massacre against Wardandi Noongars, and the subsequent papering over of this in later accounts. Writing this paper was hard work: it took hours to piece together a timeline of what had happened, as well as the debate over the events that resurfaced in later histories, and to attend to the language that was used in covering up what had happened. I was glad when it was finished.

In each of these volumes or issues, my work sat alongside that of other wonderful scholars, and I am really grateful to the editors for publishing my work.

In August I was Southerly journal’s monthly blogger, publishing four posts (one each week) about writing, deafness and environment. You can read them all via the links on this page. In October my eight-word story was featured on a billboard courtesy of the Queensland Writers Centre. That was pretty exciting!

I was pretty dismayed, once I got to the end of the year, to realise I hadn’t published any creative work (aside from said billboard), but then I remembered I’d finished my memoir. Fingers crossed that it gets somewhere this year.

UQ Ferry

Awards/Funding

I was longlisted for the Elizabeth Jolley Prize again, this time for ‘Depths Exceeded’, which is a small part of my mermaid book. I’m still trying to find a home for it; I’ll get there eventually.

I continued with my study on vernacular criticism, for which I received funding at the end of last year, and will have this written up by March. It turned out to be a much bigger project than I anticipated and is eating up a bit of time. While it’s something that engages me intellectually, it isn’t a topic I’m downright passionate about, which is problematic. I remember one of my supervisors telling me that when you choose a PhD topic, it has to be something you’re obsessed with if your interest is going to carry you over three years. The same holds, it seems, for any kind of project. Still, it’s a good short-term study, and I’m finding I’m applying some of the research methods I learnt as a research assistant at Autism Queensland, which is a boon.

Gum blossoms!

Teaching

In the second half of the year, I was course convener for Women Writers, the subject I tutored in last year. This was a very steep learning curve – a little hairy at times – but it was ultimately very rewarding. The books I set were: Ellen van Neerven’s Heat and Light, Amy Liptrot’s The Outrun, Marguerite Duras’ The Lover, Joyce Carol Oate’s Foxfire, Monique Wittig’s The Lesbian Body, Keri Hulme’s The Bone People, Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook, Gillian Mear’s Foal’s Bread, Octavia Butler’s Fledgling and Helen Oyeymi’s White is for Witching. The students responded well to all these books except for The Golden Notebook (and some were a bit mystified by The Lesbian Body). Although The Golden Notebook was revolutionary when it came out, it held little meaning for them now. I wonder how or why that matters; Jane Eyre is poles apart from the experience of women in the 21st century but readers are still enraptured by it. Perhaps it was the form of the novel, which made it hard to digest, whereas Jane Eyre is a fairly conventional romance. Aside from this it was really heartening when students told me they enjoyed the books because they were works they wouldn’t usually encounter.

I tutored a class alongside the lectures, and as with last year I loved my students – they were confident, intelligent and outspoken. But by the end of the year I was in my usual haze of fatigue because of the toll of straining to listen and to lecture (every lecture is a performance). I think most people are knackered by the end of the year anyway, and the holidays straightened me out.

As well as the lectures for Women Writers, I also delivered one on Position Doubtful for the third-year Australian studies course. This year I’ll be lecturing on James Bradley’s Clade and Tim Winton’s Island Home for this same course, but I won’t be doing any other teaching as I need to devote myself to finishing my ecobiography.

Flowers at Kew Gardens

Conferences and Supervision

In February I presented on Liptrot’s The Outrun at a conference on excess and desire at The University of Queensland. In London in June, I presented on a digital example of ecobiography, Queensland artist Pat Hoffie’s ground trothing. In retrospect this was not a great example of ecobiography but I was trying to align it with the conference’s focus on digital life writing narratives. Still, I enjoyed being back in London, thought the conference was absolutely fantastic, and met some great Aussie writers and academics, including Ellena Savage and Nicole Matthews, who presented a very memorable paper on hearing air reviews.

From England I flew to Croatia and presented at the European Society for Environmental History conference in Zagreb (preceded by a field trip to Kornati National Park near Zadar). This was the first history conference I had ever been to. I presented a similar paper to that which I’d delivered in Perth the year before, on ecotones, but my paper, I found after some rather harrowing comments from the audience, was not up to scratch (no one likes getting criticism, but having to receive it in a public forum is way worse). Once I recovered from that experience and was able to examine the comments with equanimity, I realised they were constructive. I’m intending to present at the environmental history conference in Canberra this year and to do a better job.

As soon as I arrived back in Brisbane I turned around and went down to the Gold Coast to present on Molloy and ecobiography at a conference on Literary Environments. This was not a very smart move as I was shattered from jetlag, but I couldn’t bear to miss it because Ursuala Heise gave a keynote and a workshop, both of which were amazing.

I capped off the year with a paper on Georgiana Molloy’s participation in botanical connoisseurship – the rage for exotics collected by Europeans and grown in their gardens – for a conference on the Nature and Spaces of Enlightenment. I really enjoyed this conference as well but I was completely wrung out from the year, so I couldn’t make it to all the sessions.

Throughout the year I also took on the supervision of four creative writing students, three doing MPhils and one a PhD. I found this unexpectedly rewarding, as I could chat to them about their ideas and help them with their critical essays. I also supervised a wonderful third-year student who wrote a brilliant essay on young adult novels and their representation of deafness. Aside from my research, supervision is one of the satisfying parts of my job.

Kornati National Park, Croatia

Research

I used my funding to fly to the UK and comb through the archives relating to Mangles and his contemporaries. This was a great trip but it was jam-packed and involved zig-zagging up the country from south to north. I like travelling and the distances didn’t faze me, but I could have done with a more leisurely pace. My next big task over this month and next is to collate and transcribe everything so that I’m ready to write in March, as well as writing up the rest of my trip (it's happening, but v.e.r.y s.l.o.w.l.y).

V cool plants in the UNESCO Stari Grad Plains, Croatia

The Australian Women Writers Challenge

I put the ball for AWW on the shelf last year as I had too much going on, but managed to co-ordinate guest posts from lesbian/queer authors (Kelly Gardiner; Eden S. French; Jess Davidson; and my own thoughts on the themes that have appeared in guest posts by lesbian/queer women writers), and authors with disability (Tsana Dolichva and Holly Kench, editors of Defying Doomsday; and Anna Spargo-Ryan). This year I’m picking up the baton from Marisa Wikramanayake and am going back to bi-monthly roundups, as well as the usual guest posts. This year, the theme for NAIDOC is ‘Because of her, we can!’ so I really want to feature more posts from Indigenous women writers.

BrisVegas rainforest

The Year Ahead

I have tried not to take on too much this year as I need to focus on finishing my ecobiography, but already there are quite a few pots on the stove. Aside from the two lectures which I need to write and present, and my vernacular criticism study to complete and write up, I’m co-ordinating, with Clare-Archer Lean from the University of the Sunshine Coast, two panels on the interface between science and literature at the annual literature conference in Canberra in July, as well as subsequent publication of these papers in the Australian Humanities Review. I'm also giving a workshop on Writing Animals and Their Worlds for the Queensland Writers Centre on Saturday 28th April.

On top of this I need to prepare a fellowship application for gainful employment next year, as my contract ends in January 2019. I think I had pretty much better say ‘no’ to anything else that comes into my inbox this year.

Health-wise I am determined to start running again, with the aim of doing a half-marathon in August, and of getting out of the city into bush more often. Exercise and the environment will help ameliorate my stress. I’m also casting about for some kind of hobby, instead of working all through the weekend. I think dancing, drawing and going to the movies are back on the cards. Well, time to dive into 2018!

Everything is going to be ok if there are peonies in the world.

On Close Encounters

Now that the parental unit have returned from the depths of Eastern Europe and I am back home, ostensibly safe, I can explain one of the reasons why I disliked London so intensely for so long. On 6 o’ clock on a Friday evening in early January 2006, five days after I’d returned from my first trip home after moving to London, I walked down the street from the local Costcutter with a bottle of milk.  M, with whom I was living with at the time, was out at a housewarming party of a mutual friend of ours and I, as usual, was too tired to go.  I was going to have a cup of tea, cook dinner, read a book and go to bed.

I was daydreaming as I walked, as I was in a good mood after all the sunlight in Oz, and I was actually pleased to be back in London.  As I walked, I sensed that there was someone behind me and I glanced around.  There was a man behind me.  I also looked across the road and noticed a girl walking on ahead.  Nothing seemed out of the ordinary.

I turned left into the paved area between our block of flats, which held the recycling and garbage bins.  There was a covered way between this paved area and the grassy space surrounded by the flats.  I sensed the man following me but still didn’t think much of it.  I thought, almost unconsciously, that if I could get into the grassy space, I would be fine, as it was in the open.

As I passed under the covered way the man grabbed me.  I screamed, or roared, rather, as soon as I felt his arms coming around me.  A wave of adrenalin flooded my body and it felt as though I was waking from a nightmare, except of course was real.

The man put his man over my mouth to stop me screaming and his little finger got caught between my lips.  I bit down hard, and didn’t let go.  His grip, which had been quite soft anyway, loosened further and I twisted out of his grasp, still biting.  Then he just let go and walked away.  The whole thing was over in less than a minute.

The man didn’t run away, but walked, which suggested to me that he had done something like this before.  He also smelled bad, like he hadn’t had a shower for a month, so it seemed to me that he didn’t have a home.  Also, he couldn’t have known the area as there was nowhere he could have taken me unless he had a flat there, which was unlikely.  So I think he had a screw or two loose.

I stared after him, to try and get a description of him that I could give to the police, but all I could see that he was tall and black.  I remember the pinkness the inside of his hand as it closed around my mouth.  His bad smell was on my skin and his blood was in my mouth.  I spat it out in the sink once I got home, which in retrospect was a stupid thing to do because even if I had spat into a hanky they would have been able to get it analysed.

Then I dialled emergency services and they sent the police around, but they took more than an hour to arrive.  I was desperate to have a shower to get the smell off my skin but I couldn’t risk not hearing the police arrive.  As I sat on the stairs waiting for them, I decided that I wouldn’t allow myself be defeated by what had happened.  I wasn’t going to let some mad fucker ruin my life.

When the police finally arrived they apologised for being late, and said they hadn’t been able to find the flat.  They’d looked for CCTV footage but the camera didn’t reach under the covered way.  They asked if the man had said anything to me and I said that I was deaf but I didn’t think so.  Then they asked if he’d tried to grab my bag and I said no, his grip had been quite soft.  The only unusual thing I could remember was that his hands smelled of sex, but perhaps it was just that they hadn’t been washed for a while.    I asked about the possibility of AIDS because his blood had gone down my throat and the policeman said it was unlikely because it would just pass through my digestive system, where as there needed to be a cut for the virus to get into my bloodstream.  I had an AIDS test anyway and it all came up fine.  Then the policemen said it would be better if I was with someone than on my own, and offered to drive me to the party that M was at, but it was too far away.  When they left I had a very long shower, called my brother who, to his credit, didn’t freak out too much, and got a taxi to the party.  M and Wtk gave me a bit hug when I arrived.  I was wearing a new perfume, by Nina Ricci, and ever since that night I haven’t been able to wear it without qualms.  Recently, however, I gave it to my mother as I’ve since found ones I like more (Prada and Agent Provacateur, of course) and now that she wears it the unsettling associations it brings up have gone.

For the whole time the attack was going on I acted purely on instinct – there was no space in my head  for any thought at all.  I have my brother to thank for that: the many occasions on which I beat him up gave me a chance to practice my fighting spirit.  And as my father pointed out, when I told him, such was my nature that I would never allow anyone to get the better hand.  I would always fight back, every time.

However, the actual incident wasn’t what upset me most.  The reason why I came to hate London so much lay in the two men unloading a van, four metres away, who would have heard me scream but didn’t come to help.  Nor did anyone in the surrounding flats come out.

The police rang me up sporadically in the weeks that followed that to say they hadn’t found anything.  They sent me a victims’ compensation pack but it was too much bother to follow it up and I figured some poor bastard would need it more than me.  I didn’t expect much of the coppers (it’s London, they’re all overworked), though I didn’t appreciate being patronisingly told to calm down on one occasion when I wasn’t even agitated, I just couldn’t hear what I was being told.

It took about a year to get over it and to feel relatively safe walking on my own again, though I rarely went out after dark.  It is to my mother’s credit that I didn’t turn into a racist bitch.  She always said to me, ‘Never use the word “hate”, and never hate other people.’  I remained suspicious of black men, and physically they intimidated me because they’re so big and I’m so small, but every time there was a negative thought I tried to reason it away.  It gave me some insight, however, into hatred, and visceral it is, and how easily it wipes away academic arguments for peace and fairness.  A friend, to whom I described what had happened, said he couldn’t help but note that I had referred to the man as black, and that poverty and discrimination had a lot to contribute to the high incidence of violence among black men.  I replied that I was aware of that, but under no circumstances should a man have the licence to hit or attack a woman, no matter how bad their life is.  He conceded pretty quickly that this was true.

H also paid for me to do a self-defence course (as I was too povo to afford it myself), which I highly recommend, by Debi of Premier Self-Defence. It also, I was delighted to find, had the added bonus of the self-defence moves being demonstrated by one of the hottest Asian men I have ever seen.  I also bought a Weeble from them, a tube of hard plastic in which you can keep your emergency numbers and a pound coin for a phone call, and which can be used to take a urine sample if you think your drink had been spiked, and also to bash someone over the head if they attack you.  As I chose one in pink, M began affectionately referring to it as my ‘personal device’, much to my amusement.

It was indicative of the emotional maturity of the man with whom we were living (ie. 40-going-on-4) that the first thing he said to me, when I told him I had been attacked was, ‘Well, nothing like that’s ever happened to me.’  I thought, Of course it hasn’t you fuckwit, you’re a man and you’re twice as wide and twice as tall as I am.  I moved out after a year, as H was moving to London and I moved in with him, and it was with a sense of relief that I walked about in Stepney, which was a predominantly Muslim area.  Although I have a lot of difficulties with the way Muslims treat women, the atmosphere in the area was far less aggressive than in Hackney.

Ultimately, if I had been able to hear how close the man was behind me, I would have been more alert than I was.  I was immensely annoyed that I could no longer have the luxury of daydreaming, but had to be alert at all times.  However, I was also extremely lucky that nothing worse had happened to me.  It was a wake-up call, and I always tried to be very aware of my surroundings from that point on.  I am still nervous when people are behind me and I can’t hear them, which explains my overreaction in this incident (which also demonstrates I am very far from being a lady at times).

Suffice to say, one of the nicer things about Brisbane is that I don’t have to be so neurotic and nervous whenever I walk about, not least because the abundant sunshine means I can see what’s going on around me, unlike in the dark where I’m at an added disadvantage. The place is just generally less threatening than London – there isn’t that dystopian sense of pent-up anger and hatred, and the brooding, overcast sky, and the buildings stained by acid rain.

On the Lack of a Stamp

I’m back in London, working through three months of mail (largely cashmere catalogues and bank statements: a delightful incongruity), drinking cup after cup of coffee to stay awake until the evening (mandatory for overcoming jetlag) and contemplating my cankles.  The house is empty, as H has flounced off to the West Country and I don’t know where the other two boys are. Almost all Holiday Objectives have been achieved (you know you’re a workaholic when even your vacations have agendas), as I am tanned, lithe, reasonably fit and dying to get back to work, however dull my job is.

I had intended to stay in the UK until December, but this was on the condition of getting a working holiday visa, or Youth Mobility Visa as they are now termed.  It shouldn’t have been difficult: I had a reliable job, enough money in the bank and I hadn’t yet turned 31.  However, the application was rejected because the bank statement I sent in, which mum had printed out for me at the bank, lacked an official stamp.  You’d think the embassy could have contacted me – after all they had emailed me about my student visa four years before, and it takes two minutes to pick up a phone – but no, they sent it back, and kept their 250AUD application fee for the pleasure of it.

Under ordinary circumstances I would have reapplied, even if this meant forking out an additional $250.00.  However, because I turned 31 while they had the application, reapplying was impossible.  Instead, I had the statement stamped at the bank, indicating that, at the time I sent it in, the funds were in my account, and appealed the decision.  I was also tempted to say that I could probably kickstart the English economy with my shoe, cashmere and handbag proclivities, but instead I argued that the stamp didn’t constitute additional evidence (which wasn’t allowed).  Rather, it was a verification of what had been an accurate statement.  They didn’t allow this, and maintained that the tiny red stamp, 10mm in diameter, represented additional evidence.

On finding that my application had been rejected, I burst into tears, but then M said that given I was the most relaxed I’d ever been in the last four years, and that I wanted to get my life underway, what was the sense in coming back to London?  I recognised she had a point, but it wasn’t until I began working out options and calculating how long I could afford to stay on a holiday visa that I threw down my pen and gave up.  I’m sick of being in penury, and of constantly scraping and budgeting, all for so little reward.  I’ll be broke back in Australia too, but at least I’ll have sunshine, my family and friends and the outdoors to compensate.  I’m tired, too, of constantly saying goodbye, and packing up my things, and never having enough room in my suitcase for all the shoes and frocks I want to wear.  I’m fed up with the dreariness of London and its unhappy people; I’m just not designed to flourish there.  I need sunlight and space, and as if in evidence of this, most of the poems I’ve written since being back home have been about light.

Also, my detestation of British bureaucracy is reaching hitherto unimaginable proportions, particularly as, when I came through Immigration today, the rejected visa was like a red flag to the Immigration Officer and I was grilled in detail about my intentions in the UK.  It seemed that he was trying to trip me up and wasn’t really listening to what I was saying.  I didn’t get flustered because my student visa doesn’t expire until the end of April, but it was an unpleasant experience all the same.

More and more it seems to me that England is becoming a dystopia from an Atwood or Ishiguro novel, and although, when I stepped out of the Tube at Tower Hill and waited for the bus, I felt a sense of satisfaction of coming back to a home and a routine, I’m uneasy about staying in a place that treats its inhabitants with such suspicion.  I have never felt safe or relaxed in London, and I’m tired of being on my guard, and being so oppressed.  So I think that, after four years of unremitting, intellectual and emotional hard work, it’s finally time to go home.

Part the XVI: On the Hazards of Being a Deaf Woman

This afternoon, at the recommendation of a friend, I went to see Susan Hiller’s ‘The Last Silent Movie,’ a recording of extinct languages, because I’m writing about conversations with the dead and the gallery wasn’t far from where I live.  As it's summer at last, I put on one of my lovely floaty silk dresses that I bought in Thailand and haven’t yet worn, a pair of Muji thongs, a black sunhat and my don’t-fuck-with-me Prada sunglasses. The exhibition was interesting.  The audience sat in a dark room in front of a movie screen, but it remained blank except for white, written translations of the languages.  The translation was screened as the voices were broadcast.  My sister, to whom I’d spoken that morning, said there would be Aboriginal languages and sure enough there were two of them, although I recognised them from the context (the form of their stories and the talk of spears) rather than the sounds of the words.  My friend had said it was eerie to hear dead people speaking but it didn’t have much effect on me; it just seemed like any other recording.

Afterwards I read some of Hiller’s catalogues from old exhibitions, and she talked about Freud’s The Uncanny and Cixous’ "The Laugh of the Medusa" and pointed out that the unconscious, the unknown, was like the feminine and/or that which is repressed and undefined, although this didn’t mean that it was confined to women.  I liked that idea, and decided to incorporate it into my thesis.  I didn’t hang around because I a lot of work to do, and sauntered back out into the sunshine.

The route back home was through a largely Muslim community, and I run through it most weekends so I’ve never felt threatened.  In fact one of the things I like about where we live is that I feel much safer than I did in Hackney.  When I saw the group of young boys, about 11 or 12 years old, clustered at the top of a street I was, to use Johnny Howard’s fridge magnet phrase (which he thought would save us from the terrorists), ‘Alert, but not alarmed.’  Some of them were smoking and trying to look adult in the way that stupid boys do; as if anyone can’t see through the pretence.  I ignored them as I went by.

Then, halfway down the street, one of them suddenly grabbed my arse, and I shouted, ‘You fucking cunt!’  I whirled around and saw two of them running away.  I was enraged, and I was fucked if I was going to let them get away with that.  I put my foot back in my thong (I had lost it in my surprise) and strode back after them.  Seeing this, they began to run away.

‘So you’re fucking scared now?’ I jeered.  Then I raised my voice another decibel.  ‘Why don’t you learn to treat women nicely?’ To his credit, there was one small boy who stayed, and to him I delivered the brunt of my anger. ‘And you know what?’ I shouted, pointing at my ear.  ‘I’m fucking deaf!  I’m wearing a hearing aid.  I couldn’t hear them come up behind me.’ (This was a slight fabrication; I heard something but I couldn't tell how close they were).  The boy glanced at my hearing aid, looking worried now. Then another of them, taller and thinner, began to come back.  I couldn’t hear what he was saying but he gestured to the ones that had run off, and I assumed he was saying it was their fault. ‘Yeah?  They’re your mates!’ I said scornfully. There was no response to this, so I began to walk off.  I heard voices behind me and I turned again.  I wasn’t sure if they were talking amongst themselves or to me, so I shouted, ‘And don’t fucking talk to me because I can’t fucking hear you.’

By the time I got home I was shaking, but jubilant.  H said he was very impressed by my use of the C word, and I replied that they’d probably never heard it before.  Nor had they probably ever had a woman shout and swear at them, being used to submission.  He thought they might go home and say, ‘Mummy, what does cunt mean?’

So, not an entirely pleasant way of ending a Sunday afternoon.  But I’m not going to stop running through that area; I refuse to be intimidated, not least by a pack of 12-year-old twerps.

Part the XV: In which I fall flat on my face outside Tate Modern

Friday evening last week saw me slipping into my red velvet Sacha Drake dress patterned with roses and my brocaded Red or Dead stilettos, to attend an alumni function for the London Consortium at Tate Modern. I don’t get out much these days and the dress, which my sister gave me, was too beautiful to leave in the cupboard, so I wore it despite my qualms of being overdressed. The shoes were precarious to say the least, but I negotiated the stairs on the bus and the cracks in the Millennium Bridge with delicacy, then took the lift in Tate Modern to the East Room. I love this room – it’s the one in the top left corner of the building as you look at it from the bridge. The walls are all glass and as the sun went down on the longest day of the year, the sky burned with pink and deepened to a royal purple, setting off St Paul’s and the silhouetted London skyline, criss-crossed by cranes.

The food was surprisingly good and the chardonnay from Malborough in New Zealand, and I love Malborough whites. I caught up with people I hadn’t seen for a long time, resisted half my cheesecake because I am weaning myself off dairy products, and smiled at the waiter as he brought me a cup of peppermint tea. He took this as licence to stare at my cleavage which, admittedly, was on display.

We were ushered out at eleven and I walked out to the courtyard with M and Wtk. They were going a little fast however, as both of them were wearing sensible shoes, and I, in a struggle to keep up that was somewhat hampered by the chardonnay, somehow tripped and landed hard on my knees and elbows from a height that was 7cm higher than it needed to be. A kind man stopped to see if I needed help but M and Wtk ushered him on. The pain went away fairly quickly but when I lifted the hem of my dress I was horrified to find that I had gouged a large hole in my knee. It looked messy, and it was bleeding fast.

Never have I been so angry with myself, not least because it was my own fault for wearing stupid shoes, and because I wouldn’t be able to wear short skirts for the rest of summer. ‘What am I gonna do?’ I wailed. ‘I’ve got to go to Ascot tomorrow.’ ‘Uhm, wear tights,’ M said quickly. They led me to a bench, offered tissues and told me to catch a cab home. I insisted that it wasn’t that bad and I could catch the bus, having had much more serious wounds – the worst being when my piano teacher’s son ran into my calf with his bicycle and split the flesh open. That was nasty. However, I could see that the cuts would start bleeding again as soon as I moved, and this was problematic, I conceded to the cab and, swearing at myself, followed them to the taxi rank. ‘Well, it could have been worse,’ M consoled me. ‘It could have happened on your date.’ She had a point.

Fortunately, the dress I had chosen for Ascot covered my knee, and I stuck several bandaids over the hole and got through the day alright.

Have I learnt my lesson? Of course not. In a spot of retail therapy I went to Dune and purchased a pair of absurdly high courts in delicious chocolate and cream, with a black patent rim and a sweet bow. It matters not that they are difficult to walk it – what are shoes for, after all?

Cousinly Affairs

It is a Wednesday night and suddenly I find myself with time on my hands.  Having written all day on botany and femininity, then gone for a swim in the decrepit local pool, and not feeling like reading, nor having a TV with which to spongify my brain, I am left with my blog. So now it’s time to write about our jaunt to hear CousinA play in his band, which I intended to get down a few weeks ago.  CousinA used to live south of the river, and whenever we went to visit I would always feel conspicuously overdressed.  So this time, hearing that the rugby club where he was playing was in the middle of a paddock south of the river (according to H), and having visions of sinking into the grass in my stilettos, I elected to dress down.  I was colour coordinated (in green) but I wore sneakers (the only pair of flat shoes I own).  You can imagine my horror then, to get inside and find the men in shirts and trousers, and the girls in spangly tops and high heels.  I couldn’t work it out – it was a rugby club in the middle of nowhere – and on expressing my consternation to CousinA, he explained that this was a big night out for the girls, that they only went into the city for big occasions, and they were here to find a husband.

Then the girls perched, like budgies on a branch, on the top of the benches running about the room so they could see the band and of course, have their assets viewed by the blokes.  But the blokes stood with their backs to the girls, watching the singers, and ignored them.  I couldn’t understand that either; if you like a girl/boy you go and talk to them.

Anyway, CousinA sang his stuff, and was very good and got everyone in the mood for a dance, and once he was done we went off home with his guitar so he could carry on partying.  On the DLR, a man with many piercings and a small woman with bottle blonde hair and huge black boots asked us whether the DLR went to Lewisham.  H explained that it wasn’t going all the way and they would have to get off at Mudchute and catch a bus.  We also had to get off at Mudchute and catch a bus.  So at Mudchute we trundled to the bus stop, following the couple.

Then H, being like the friendly Labrador that he is, decided to strike up a conversation (one of these days he’s going to get stabbed, but that’s his choice).  It transpired that they were cousins and were going to the White Swan, a trashy gay pub which is apparently an East End institution, and they don’t allow women in to the amateur strip nights on Wednesdays.  H once took my supervisor and his boyfriend there after our house party (on a Saturday, I hasten to add) and thus corrupted him (well, I’m sure my supervisor is already corrupt but I don’t want to think about that).  The man began a discussion with H about the kind of men he liked, which H kindly repeated for me afterwards (‘I like big, muscly men, y’know?’) Then the man noticed my hearing aid and said, ‘Oi, we’re both deaf too.’  He proceeded to elaborate on how he and his cousin had each lost their hearing but, ironically, I couldn't hear what he was saying.

Then a bus went by and suddenly H shouted, ‘Jess, we’re on the wrong side of the road!”  This was my fault because I had looked at the bus timetable but not the bus map.  We ran after the bus, swinging the guitar, the small woman clomping in her built up heels, but it was too fast.  In despair, I agreed that we should walk to the main road and find a taxi.  The cousins went ahead of us and proceeded to have an argument.

On the main road, we flagged a cab and bundled in.   The woman must have been on E because she was talking so fast.  She had kids, and this was a rare night out for her, I gathered.  We pulled up at Limehouse, and H said, ‘Don’t worry, I’ll pay for it,’ and the woman, who was getting out her wallet, said, ‘Oi, orright,’ and put her wallet away and got out of the cab.  The cousin followed her and they took off immediately without saying thank you.  I would have been disgusted if they hadn’t been so entertaining, and I admit I had the bad grace to start laughing while they were within hearing.  One always seems to get more than one bargains for when one goes to visit CousinA, but that’s one of the reasons why we love him.

Here Comes the Sun

I began this blog entry last week when the sunlight was pouring down. Unsurprisingly, it is now raining again. I noted an article in G2 a few days ago nervously headed, ‘Will there be Summer this year?’ and confess to having asked the same thing myself, as the weather pattern is similar to last year’s. The forecasters, however, assured us that it would be a normal summer with above average temperatures. I hope to god that they are right.

Seeing as it seems to be the done thing to sit outside in the sun to blog and drink cardonnay* these days, I have set myself up in the garden to write. I’ve just baked a batch of Russian Tea Cakes while listening to Alanis Morrisette and shall be opening the vino shortly. Given that my alcohol tolerance is pretty much nil these days on account of having neither money nor a social life, it is wise to pace oneself in these situations. Should this post suddenly end with 1p39847qieuh;agakjda1298h9fgngsdkjfh[qwerq, I will have fallen off my chair onto the paving, my head gently wedged between the pots of rhododendron and thyme, thence to shall remain until BrotherH comes home to rescue me.

There have been many reasons to be happy of late, at least as happy as is possible in my state of incarceration, the discomfort of which increases as the days warm and I remain shackled to my desk writing about displacement, haunting and bodies in the text. Firstly, I was shortlisted for the Dobbie, an encouragement award for first time female novelists funded by Perpetual. Naturally I had been hoping to win (what writer doesn’t?), not least so I could buy a new Spencer and Rutherford handbag and ticket back to Oz, but Karen Foxlee’s The Anatomy of Wings scooped the prize, as I’d expected. I haven’t read it but it’s had lots of good reviews so will add it to my list of books to buy when I go home at Xmas.

Just after my agent emailed me the results, the postman dropped off the new edition of my book, which is just gorgeous, as possibly even more ‘me’ than the first edition, though I’ll always love it (the first) the best. Here is a picture of it:

Then my publisher told me that I am one of four winners of the Sydney Morning Herald Best Young Novelist for 2008, hurrah! I don’t get any money, although I do have my picture in the paper. To this end the London photographer for the SMH came to work and snapped pictures of me for nearly two hours with one of those fancy umbrellas for the flash and all. Having the White gene that is addicted to showing-offness, I lapped up the attention. However, by the end I was quite tired from smiling, and I was starving, so I was glad to see the photographer on his way. The article is to appear in the Spectrum on May 24th.

And while the weather has been gorgeous, it does has its downsides, in that it reminds me of Oz and I’ve been aching with homesickness. I wish I could sit on the patio in mum’s garden, drinking tea, reading and burning my shins in the sun, or lie on the beach at Coogee, or walk through Centennial Park, the heat gently clinging to my skin. Well, it’s only seven months until I go home again, and I guess I can bear it, unless it’s another wet summer. I shall be very unhappy indeed if my frocks languish, unworn, in my cupboard for yet another season.

* After watching Kath and Kim, I am now incapable of saying chardonnay. It must be pronounced, as Kim vehemently protests, without the 'h': 'It's cardonnay, cardonnay, ya pack of shunts!'

London and I

I will never love London – the city’s streets harbour too much of my unhappiness for that - but recently we have been jostling into a ... slightly less aggressive relationship. I blame Tim Burton and the way his cobbles glistened in Sweeney Todd with the London damp and how, on an evening a few weeks ago, the fog rolled along the streets, reminding me of lamp posts and frock coats. I marvelled that our dingy East End suburb, which is Victorian if you approach it from one end, but perfectly depressing if you come through the council flats at the opposite end, could be so evocative.

This sentience has been augmented by a book of poetry I found on the shelves at the library – Sean Borodale’s Notes for an Atlas, an account of his walks through London. I am very particular about my poetry - well, I am about most things – and this work passes the bar. It’s a very visual piece of work (unsurprisingly, as Borodale is also an artist), grounded by wonderful detail and an interesting technique, whereby the writer puts his reader into his shoes, yet he rarely relies upon the sometimes clunking ‘you.’ For example:

‘Pass black railings and flowers
of iron set within the railings at intervals. See a
bed in a basement room. Read GIVE WAY. A
man with a snooker cue under his right arm,
walking, looks into a bag he carries and there is
a sparkle once. Pass men kissing in a room.
Over the window of the room in blue letters
read TAVERNA. Hear, “God some of the
blokes can’t hold the beer ... and language I
can’t understand.” Car. Hear the steps of a
woman. Crying horn of a siren. And hear, “I’ve
never seen you smile so much.”
(Isinglass, 2003, p. 126)

What delighted me most about the work was these snippets of overheard conversation. I once read in an autobiography of a deaf man that what he missed most was not being able to hear, but not being able to overhear. I would agree with this only up to a point – if I could hear the madwoman I work with wittering on all day (to herself, if not to some poor bastard unlucky to be caught in conversation with her), I’d be dragged down into her depths of derangement. However, it is true that there’s something almost exotic about banalities when you can’t hear them.

The poet relies heavily upon the upon the senses of sound and sight, and the effect of this is a certain detachment. The flaneur isn’t overcome or invaded by smells, and he certainly doesn’t touch anything – his body is sealed off and impregnable. This seems to be characteristic of Londoners in general – they huddle not only against the cold but against possible eye contact and – God forbid it – a friendly smile.

The work isn’t difficult to read, but it’s dense, so I only dip into it now and then. There isn’t a driving narrative, only my interest in where he walks and whether his language will change according to the socioeconomics of the areas he’s in. So far I haven’t read enough to tell.

I’ve also been reading Nabakov’s short stories, which make my own efforts at short story writing seem paltry. However some of the endings are far too enigmatic, and though I have guilty of doing this myself, I think it’s lazy on the part of the writer to let the reader try and make meaning of some abrupt, surrealist series of events. This might appeal to some, but I don’t like being left completely mystified.

Nabakov also uses second person sometimes. This style can be quite didactic, but when he uses it as a love letter, as in ‘Sounds’, it becomes touchingly intimate. I’m tempted to go back to Lolita, but I find it a disturbing work, not least because it’s so beautifully crafted that the subject matter is rendered less insidious than it seems, but I’ll leave all this for another day.

Spring and Dreams

My supervisor has given me the licence to write my thesis as a novel and thus made me a very, very happy girl indeed. I had been using fragments of fiction in it before (or, more accurately, instances of autobiography), but he said that there needed to be more fiction, and that I wasn’t embracing the concept of fictocriticism. So, in order to be true to the style, he suggested I write the entire thing as fiction. I was exhilarated, and worked out how to write it while on the bus going home. Now I am more relaxed, more in control of my material and completely in command of the style. Which is useful, as now I have to rewrite everything that I have done, and produce 80 000 words in four months. How hard can it be?

And I seem to be happier in general, not least because spring is on its way and the trees are bristling and boisterous with blossoms, while daffodils and jonquils have sprung up in the parks, grinning insanely. It’s light when I drag myself out of bed in the mornings and today I went out to get my coffee wearing a cashmere cardi instead of a coat. As I wrote to an Australian friend, only when you have experienced the (comparative) horror of an English winter can you appreciate Spring like this.

My psyche is clearly undergoing some sort of shift as well, because I have had not one, but two, positive dreams in the last month. It is the norm for me to have disturbing dreams. Where H dreams about having sex in spaceships, or helping Flash Gordon fight enemies in the bush, I dream about people being killed, dismembered or lost. I once woke up crying from a dream in which my mother died of cancer; another time I was stuck on an exploded volcano in Australia, surrounded by blackened shrubbery and pools of lava (this dream is explained by there being an extinct volcano at the back of our property in Oz), and I have fought off men trying to rape or attack me more times than I can remember. However a few weeks back I dreamed of being in a car in a prehistoric landscape, with pterodactyls flying above (I am very fond of pterodactyls). It did end rather suddenly with me being crushed by an overly large bird but I still woke up excited because I never have fantastical dreams. And then, just recently, after dreaming of being in a house which was haunted, and after an attempted murder by a ghost (its hand rammed repeatedly into the side of my neck), I found myself outside with H. We were children again and we leaned over a fence, looking at the water which had overflowed from the creek into the paddocks and formed streams. There were about seven little platypuses wriggling through the streams, which was utterly charming. It’s rare to see platypuses – they come out in the evening and they don’t like noise – so to see seven small ones all bundled together and slipping through the water was delightful. I woke up feeling positively pleased.

Tube Strikes and Celeb Spotting

Having been swallowed up by a wave of work and socialising, and only recently been spat out, and coughed myself into consciousness, I am just now getting around to writing my first entry for the month. However, many more waves are looming on the horizon and I am frantically digging holes in the sand into which I can place my pate and the water keeps filling up the hole and the sides of sand are slipping in and soon I will be drowning.

Think happy thoughts.
Many happy thoughts.
Think about all the boots you’ll buy when you’re next in Bath.

So, getting a grip. Just when I was commending myself on going for so long without a rant, the London Tube went on strike. Now, my commute has only just become bearable, since the bus route has been extended and I don’t have to walk quite as far to get to the bus stop, and I am reading far more than I ever used to, because somehow one has to fill in the hour it takes to wend through London’s indigested innards. So to finish work at 7pm after doing overtime, and to get to Aldwych and be passed by three buses, all with Londoners breathing against the windows like fish, or spilling out the doors like a catch released on a ship’s deck, made me feel very, very tired indeed. Too tired, in fact, to be particularly angry.

The following afternoon I tried a different tack and caught the bus from Euston. Unfortunately, in my sheeplike rush to get to the door, I failed to see where the bus terminated: just down the road at King’s Cross. Lovely. At King’s Cross I poured out the door with many other unhappy passengers. The next bus that turned up was also terminating there and I thought, fuck it, I’ll just get on the next one that turns up. By this stage I was nearly crying with tiredness and harassment. So the next bus rolled up and I queued, patiently, in the manner for which the English are supposedly famed, but the bus driver wouldn’t open the front doors. He was having an altercation with a man halfway down the bus. I couldn’t hear what was going on, but I assumed the man had got in the back door without a ticket and the bus driver was telling him to get off. I could just see the man’s face, and it said, ‘I’m not going to do what you tell me.’ People in the queue started shifting their weight, and I hung onto the railing, ready to droop, when suddenly a big, burly old fellow sitting beside his elderly wife got up and rushed down the aisle with surprising speed, and barked, ‘Get off the fucking bus!’ The man was so startled he scuttled off immediately - almost with a hop and a skip - and everyone in the bus began laughing, cheering and clapping, and I got the giggles.

Seeing as it took two hours to get home, I only had an hour in which to cleanse and beautify myself for the GQ Man of the Year Awards party. That was irritating, but on the plus side I was too exhausted and busy to be nervous. H and I had dinner with his boss and lovely girlfriend at a fish restaurant near the Opera House, which was very pleasant but I’m not used to eating fish (having grown up 8 hours’ drive from the sea, pretty much the only fish we knew was that in fish fingers) and found it a bit rich.

After dinner we tottered up to the Opera House and found the paparazzi clustered around the red carpet like blowflies drawn to blood, and Jamelia walking out with a bloke on her arm. Then it transpired there was a queue, which annoyed H’s boss, although I wasn’t bothered by it, since the whole thing was all so novel. On the corner were some acquaintances of H’s boss, whom he and his girlfriend didn’t like much, and I could see why. ‘Oh, we don’t do queuing,’ one of the acquaintances said. What a twit.

I was glad I couldn’t hear the conversations of the people around us, because they were inane (H repeated one of them to me later: ‘Oh you know, now she’s going out with Mark, who’s the guy who went out with, you know, Shelly, you know.’). An annoying boy kept asking H’s boss for his lighter, and when I commented on this to H, he said very loudly (as is his wont), ‘Tell him that in exchange for the lighter, he can have some sex.’ I said discreetly that the boy had probably overhead this and H shrugged and replied, ‘Oh well.’

Inside, H and his boss’ lamps were lining the walkway leading into the bar area. Unfortunately, the overhead lights were on which meant that you couldn’t really see the way the lamp diffused light as it moved up and down. However, there was another lamp in the dark bar where Godiva chocolate was being dispensed, and there it worked beautifully.

So in we walked, and there was Lily Allen barking on her mobile phone in a floor-length bright red gown which I thought was rather boring, but H liked it because it stood out. As we sank into the crowd, we saw Elle Macpherson, Helena Christiansan and the beanied Edge, whom I knew nothing of, until H explained he was the drummer from U2. Later, I saw him again and said to H, ‘There’s that man in the hat who’s in that band,’ thus revealing my complete and utter want of knowledge regarding popular culture (thus I will be attending H-‘s trivia night for the Literature questions only). Then I glimpsed Orlando Bloom’s cheek (and my heart fluttered, even though he’s a brainless boy and has nothing on Tony Leung), and H saw Jude Law, although I sadly missed him. But perhaps the most exciting part of the evening was when I was waiting with H at the bar for another free cocktail and I made eye contact with Elle Macpherson. Oh, sad creature that I am, I was happy to be noticed by not only a star, but someone I respect and admire because she’s a brilliant businesswoman.

For the most part the eye candy was disappointingly dull. The men were good looking and well dressed, but they all looked like clones. Likewise the women were young and anorexic and dressed in the latest fashions, but no-one really had an individual style. Which made me think that money isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be. It was a fascinating evening, but I would hate to live among such superficial people; one would die of boredom.