WRITER AND RESEARCHER
It is often assumed that Deaf people cannot listen to, create or enjoy music, or that doing so requires a Beethoven-level genius. But Deafness is not a singular experience. For me, music is joy, abandon and a means of freedom.
Read the rest of this piece at Kill Your Darlings.
WHEN COVID-19 BEGAN to jump borders in January 2020, I was in Munich on a writing fellowship. Germany’s first few cases were sent to Schwabing Hospital, not far from where I lived and worked. I didn’t think much of it, assuming that it would be contained – but two months later I was on a plane back to Australia, my plans for nine months of prestigious fellowships in Germany, Scotland and the US in ruins. My parents have a holiday house on the northern New South Wales coast where I could quarantine; if I returned to my partner in Brisbane, I ran the risk of infecting him. I decided to stay at the beach until I was clear.
For the first week, unable to get out of bed, I slept. With a sore throat and cold, I thought at first I had the virus – but without a car I couldn’t attend a fever clinic. I phoned a local doctor, who recommended I monitor my symptoms. Over the next few days they subsided, and I realised they’d been a reaction to stress. It had been a nightmare getting home when Qantas cancelled my flight without notification. I pulled an all-nighter to find and catch another flight the next morning. The skin between my fingers cracked from too much hand-washing on the plane. It stung when I poured sanitiser onto it.
In the second week I dragged myself to the kitchen table to meet a deadline. Between paragraphs I took in my limited view. I looked out to the neighbour’s golden rain tree, yellow flowers falling over the fence. I saw a fruiting beehive ginger plant nestled in the long grass, the flower of red overlapping cones striking against its spiky leaves. Slowly, where I was became familiar: not so much the view from the table but a pattern, a way of being in this strange, quiet world. I had, after all, been in isolation for most of my life.
Read the rest of this piece online at Griffith Review. This essay was funded by the Judith Neilsen Institute.
‘K. and the NDIS’ is an essay on my frustration with negotiating access to the National Disability Insurance Scheme, a process that was so surreal it was best described by references to Kafka.
The light on Solway Firth is silver, slung low across the water. Although it’s mid-morning, within a few hours the sun will slip beneath the horizon. Accustomed to the wide blue mouth of sky in Australia, I feel as though the earth has tilted. My friends and I scramble over rocks weathered by the wash of tides. I’m wearing thermals, two jumpers, a red beanie and a coat, but the wind flies from the sea through my layers. My teeth clatter. We clamber around a corner, where we can just see Scotland on the other side of the firth. I wonder if Georgiana Molloy, who became Western Australia’s first female scientist, ever stood where I am now before she left England in 1829. Would she have smelled brine sweeping from the sea, her gaze drifting east over the salt marshes green with flat sedge, channels of water running between them? If she lifted her eyes, would she have seen a flock of starlings spiralling?
An essay on how my research on Georgiana Molloy’s life has intertwined with mine. You can read the rest of the essay at the Sydney Review of Books.
The State Library of Queensland is not a conventional, box-like building. It takes advantage of the city’s warm climate and exposes parts of itself to the elements. As I walk into the central court, covered by a roof over the fifth floor, I find a bookshop and café on my left. Outside the café is an outdoor lounge, protected from rain by the floor above. On my right is the library, its walls made of glass. In the children’s corner, papier mâché octopuses hang from the ceiling, while in the room adjacent people stand at computers or sit in wide, comfortable chairs with newspapers or their laptops. The wireless signal on each floor is strong enough to reach users wandering outside with their mobiles. This blurring of inside and outside continues in the floors above. The cements stairs and tiled walkways are open to the wind, while automatic doors to each floor open and close as patrons walk in and out.
The John Oxley library, which houses the archives, is on the fourth floor. I move from the muggy warmth into the chilly air of the building, passing a dimly-lit corridor. When I reach the reading room, sunlight floods through the glass walls, dazzling me. Once my eyes adjust, I look out to the milky brown river. The opposite bank is shaded by trees, tall office towers rising behind them. Blinking, I make my way to a desk and open my laptop. I’ve been living in London, where I’m writing my PhD on nineteenth century Queensland novelist Rosa Praed and her deaf daughter Maud, and I’ve returned to Australia for a few weeks to do research and visit my family. The unabated sunlight and the view of the river are glorious.
This is an extract from my memoir, Hearing Maud. You can read the rest of it in the current issue of Southerly, a special issue on Writing Disability.
It’s November, 2004. I’m sitting in one of the elegant reading rooms of the British Library, gazing at rows of readers bent to their books at long wooden tables, their hair illuminated by the glow of desk lamps. The ceilings are high above my head, the woodwork panelling of the walls rich and dark. I am tired, my head groggy. I moved to London two months before with a suitcase and a scholarship to study expatriate Australian writers, but I sometimes feel like I can’t wake from a bad dream.
I stare blearily at the book before me, With Fond Regards: Private Lives Through Letters (1995), an edited selection of letters sourced from collections in the National Library of Australia by Elizabeth Riddell, a poet and journalist. It includes missives by Joseph Banks, a botanist on board James Cook’s voyage to Australia; convict woman Margaret Catchpole; Jewish internees detained in Hay internment camp during the second world war; and literary figures such as Vance and Nettie Palmer, Patrick White — and Rosa Praed.
You can read the rest of this essay at the Sydney Review of Books.
My laptop banged against my thigh as I wove through crowds at Waterloo station in London. It was my first time back in England since finishing my doctorate five years before and I’d forgotten how many people crammed the city. I boarded the train and slid into a window seat with relief. I’d returned because of a footnote relating to Maud Praed, the daughter of nineteenth-century Australian novelist Rosa Praed. Rosa’s biographer had attempted to find Maud’s medical records by writing to the sanatorium in which Maud was placed in 1902, but she was told that patient records were destroyed after twenty-five years. After checking the database for the National Archives (which didn’t exist when the biographer wrote her book), I found that patient records for Holloway Sanatorium still existed.
As we pulled out of the city, I looked down on strips of narrow Victorian houses, then impossibly green fields lined with golden oaks. I counselled myself, again, that I wasn’t to get my hopes up. I disembarked at Woking and caught a taxi to the Surrey History Centre, a plain, municipal building. Inside, I introduced myself and handed over my licence. I was directed to a desk in a nearby room, large and sterile with windows looking out onto a suburban street.
I was given a pair of gloves and a large, leather-bound book. My pulse picked up as I lifted it carefully onto foam supports and opened the cover. Inside were case notes for patients of the sanatorium, which was founded in 1885 by a wealthy entrepreneur, Thomas Holloway. I turned the pages until I reached ‘P’. And there it was. A small photograph of a young woman wearing a large woollen hat with a velvet flower, a well-fitted coat and a lace cravat. She looks away from the lens with her mother’s heavy-lidded eyes, her mouth open as if to speak. Behind the page was a thick letter. Carefully, I unfolded it and found Maud’s hand, running across twenty-two pages of stiff paper. Dated 27 September 1905, two years after her admission, it opens: ‘I have written to Mr Holde of Lackford Manor, asking him who should take me away from this Sanitorium [sic] as my Mother told me that she had nothing to do with me.’1
I’d been chasing this young woman for a decade and never expected to hear her adult voice. It was proof, in her own words, of how unhappy she had been. I took a breath to keep myself from shouting into the quiet, austere air.
Taken together, the three memories in my poem ‘Signs‘ denote my progression towards finding a voice as a deaf writer. The intense pain and sensory overload that I experienced on that early spring day was caused by meningitis. The doctor gave me a large dose of antibiotics to clear the infection on the lining of my brain, but this damaged the hearing in my left ear and half in my right. This was why I couldn’t hear my father’s words clearly.
I was obsessed with books such as Strawberry Shortcake when I fell ill. As I’d learned to speak by then, and I clearly loved words, my parents decided to send me to the local primary school, which meant that I was raised as an oral-deaf person (that is, a deaf person who uses her voice to communicate, rather than her hands to sign). I had speech therapy from a teacher for the deaf once a week, and now people rarely notice I’m deaf unless they see my hearing aid, or I tell them. This raises another set of problems: I pass so well as a hearing person (largely by dint of lipreading and sheer hard work), that people fail to accommodate me by speaking more clearly, or forget to include me in conversations. Consequently, it’s easier for me to read than to listen to and interact with people. Reading was a solace when I became sick, and has remained so ever since.
My deafness aside, the aura of those letters living beneath the dresser suggests that words were always going to be significant for me. Shuffling them into words presaged my decision to become a writer when I reached my late teens. I poured the stress, frustration and isolation that came with deafness into journals. Later, when I developed my literary ability, I crafted my emotion into novels, stories, poems and essays.
Read the rest of this essay at Cordite Poetry Review.
‘Much to my surprise in Dec last I received a particularly choice box of seeds, and your polite note, requesting a return of the Native seeds of Augusta’ wrote Georgiana Molloy on 21 March 1837 in her first letter to Captain James Mangles, an amateur botanist in London. Molloy had emigrated from England to south-west Western Australia with her husband John Molloy, arriving in 1830. Her phrase refers to the exchange of seeds — both English and Australian — which was to become the foundation of her relationship with Mangles. Yet her inclusion of the adjective ‘Native’ to describe these seeds signals a problematic relationship with the flora and with the Noongar people who helped to collect the seeds for her.
Molloy, born in Carlisle in England in 1805, was devout in her Presbyterian beliefs and prone to proselytising. She was accustomed to a life of leisure and numbered botany among her interests. Her husband, John Molloy delete , had fought against Napoleon, but after becoming a captain in 1824 and finding further promotion elusive, he proposed to Georgiana in 1829 and the couple set sail for the Swan River Colony. Upon their arrival, however, the Molloys found the settlement process in chaos, and, together with a handful of other emigrants, they elected to sail south to the new town of Augusta, the third British outpost in the colony regally named after the sixth son of King George III, the monarch who lost Britain’s North American colonies. A few days after they landed, the heavily pregnant Georgiana gave birth to their first child, a girl. Over the course of ten days, the baby became progressively unwell, then died.
This sense of nauseating stress, of being out of place in an environment, first made me empathise with Molloy in that tent on the shores of Augusta, her first child dying in her arms. She was in a tent in the driving rain, beyond which were the strange cries of birds and a landscape of towering trees that she described to her sister Elizabeth Besley in 1832 as ‘the unbounded limits of thickly clothed dark green forests where nothing can be described to feast the imagination.’ Not only was the land surrounding her inexpressible, but so was her grief.
If you'd like to read the rest of this essay, you can buy a copy of the journal from Griffith Review.
Upstairs in the Battye Library in Perth in 2007, I sat in a darkened room squinting at a microfilm of the sloping copperplate in Captain James Mangles’ letter books, which consisted of letters written to him on matters of botany between 1835 and 1845. Mangles was an amateur botanist who had retired from the British navy and lived near Regent’s Park, London. One of his correspondents was Georgiana Molloy, who emigrated from Carlisle, England, to Augusta in south-west Western Australia, arriving in 1830. In 1836, Molloy, who knew Mangles’ cousin Ellen Stirling, wife of the governor of Perth, received a letter and box of English seeds from Mangles, with the request that she return it to him filled with Australian seeds. Molloy protested, ‘I fear you have bestowed your liberality on one whose chief pleasure is her Garden but who does not enter the lists as a florist, much less a Botanist’, however she agreed to collect specimens when she had time. I had read extracts of Molloy’s letters in a biography written by Alexandra Hasluck, Portrait with Background (1955), but this was the first time I had seen them in their entirety.
Although the air was chilly with air conditioning in the archives, my skin was burning. As a broke writer, I’d been staying at a youth hostel, and a bed bug had bitten me on the toe as I slept. In an allergic reaction, red itchy welts the size of my palm stretched up my ankles, calves and neck. As I read the microfilms, I sat on my fingers to stop myself from scratching.
Once I reached the last letter, I requested access to the original letter books, and went up another floor to read them. When the books arrived in their cardboard box, I marvelled at their smallness. It seemed remarkable that the reams I had written on passion, grief and the history of botany were inspired by the careful cursive of these two books, only twice the size of my hand.
This essay was written for the 2013 Ridgeline Residency, a collaboration between Ridgeline Pottery and Island magazine in Tasmania. If you'd like to read it in full, you can buy a copy of the issue or (even better!) subscribe to the magazine to read it.
