In our garden we will find exactly the plants we need. All we have to do is step outside, be present and start to look around, and see what stands out. Davyd Farrell, plant medicine healer
This story is riddled with paradox. A tree rooted in the earth took me by the hand and walked me through the underworld of my mother’s violent family history. And brought me out again, too, to a place where I could start making some kind of sense.
This tree was – is – an olive tree planted in the gardens of a military college in Canberra. That symbol of peace dwelling in a place of war. This tree of friendship, classified as ‘European’ (Olea europaea), residing in Ngunnawal Country at an institution dedicated to ‘ethical’ killing.
I was in Canberra for dead trees, to search its paper archives for stories about the 1942 Japanese invasion of Rabaul, my mother’s hometown and the capital of the former Australian Mandated Territory of New Guinea. I wanted to trace the aftermath of war, its fallout on the bodies of women and children. But really I was looking backwards, for a missing leaf on my family tree: my grandfather, who’d been massacred during that war.
On 4 February 1942, stripped of all identification, hands wired behind his back, my grandfather and some 160 other Australians were marched by Japanese soldiers into the jungle on the coast of New Britain in the former Australian Mandated Territory of New Guinea and, one by one, shot or bayoneted from behind. Some were burnt alive.
There’s a photograph of their bleached and scattered bones in the Australian War Memorial, taken by one of the Australian soldiers who found them in 1945:
Remains of Australian soldiers killed during the retreat from Rabaul on 4 February 1942. Approx. 160 soldiers were massacred by the Japanese in a series of separate incidents at the Tol Plantation in New Britain … The soldiers were retreating south, alone or in small parties, from Rabaul following the successful Japanese attack on 23 January 1942 … On 3 February, the Japanese attacked Tol, capturing a number of men as they tried to escape from the plantation.
The day I was completing this essay, I joined tens of thousands across Australia to March 4 Justice against sexual assault and gendered violence in the wake of two events that struck at the heart of our democracy: former Liberal adviser Brittany Higgins alleging she was raped inside Parliament House and the historical rape accusation against then Attorney-General Christian Porter, which he has denied. The energy of the crowd was resolute and massing. Women had had enough of silence. We were speaking our truth and making change. Suddenly a new and better world seemed possible, imminent.
Women were already outraged by the devastating impact of the COVID-19 lockdowns on our paid and unpaid work. When most of the world moved inside and ‘the economy’ halted, women took over: we were teachers, nurses, therapists, logistical managers trying to make sense of the implications of the cascading news cycle and government packages for our families and communities, while our regular unpaid work – cooking, cleaning, washing, gardening and so on – seemed to treble.
It was reading Alexis Wright’s novel Carpentaria (2006) in 2007 that introduced me to ‘country’: land as a living being with meaning, personality, will, a temper and ancient reciprocal relationships with its people governed by law. This made sense to me. I’ve felt the living presence of this land and I care deeply about how we treat it. I’m especially interested in how our thinking about land shapes our behaviour towards it. And I’ve been preoccupied by ideas of country and two new ways of conceiving it – ‘natural capital’ and ‘rights of nature’ – that seek to address the many ecological crises currently afflicting our planet.
The Other Side: A Journey into Women, Art and the Spirit World by Jennifer Higgie
I’ve been slowly reading Jennifer Higgie’s The Other Side since my sister gave it to me in April – and finished it last Friday in an ecstatic frenzy.
Initially I read slowly because, as the subtitle ‘a journey’ suggests, it meanders a little, in and out of Jennifer Higgie’s own life and encounters with the artists she discusses. Like so many of the books I’m most interested in these days, it’s a mix of memoir, biography and (art) history, which can make for an unwieldy form. Higgie opens:
In 1996, I went to a Greek island to write a novel about a nineteenth-century fairy painter. Twenty-five years later, I returned to write about women artists and the spirit world.
Paying Attention: Fiona Murphy, El Gibbs, Fiona Wright, Hannah Diviney and Michelle Law, SWF 2022
On the last day of the Sydney Writers’ Festival 2022 I went to an afternoon session called ‘Paying Attention’. It was curated by Deaf poet and essayist Fiona Murphy, author of the acclaimed 2021 memoir The Shape of Sound.
I was there because I’m interested in the idea and practice of paying attention – and I love the writing of two of the panellists, Fiona Murphy and Fiona Wright. Beyond that I had no idea what to expect. It turned out to be a riveting, illuminating, funny and very moving conclusion to my SWF 2022.
Murphy had invited four writers with disability and chronic illness – El Gibbs (live via video), Fiona Wright, Hannah Diviney and Michelle Law – to flip the script and speak of their conditions as superpowers, as expertise they should be charging money for.
She opened by noting that we’re living in an attention economy, but it’s unevenly distributed: people with disability and chronic illness are exposed to things they have to attend even if they don’t want to.
Maxine Beneba Clarke and Omar Musa on poetry, SWF 2022
This was a thrilling session between three poets: Maxine Beneba Clarke and Omar Musa in conversation with Evelyn Araluen, who asked searching questions about their beautiful new poetry collections, Beneba Clarke’s How Decent Folk Behave and Musa’s Killernova. It was a stellar panel! Araluen’s first book of poems, Dropbear, had just won the 2022 Stella Award.
Araluen opened by asking when these books were written? Where were they at when they wrote them?
Beneba Clarke said she wrote her book in 2019 and 2020. Because most of the poems were for her weekly poetry gig at The Saturday Paper, it’s the most time-specific work she’s ever written.
Araluen said it reads like an annotation of this period – and in a sense we’re still in that moment, but also not.
On Friday 20 May 2022, the City Recital Hall at Sydney’s Angel Place was buzzing. When acclaimed, much loved New York novelist Hanya Yanagihara finally appeared, the crowd exploded.
Yanagihara and SBS journalist Anton Enus have been in conversation together before, so their talk was easy, cheeky, brilliant. First they complimented each other’s clothes: her black dress and sparkly silver slippers, his gold and red shirt. Enus reminded us that Yanagihara is not just the author of bestselling sensation A Little Life (2015) –and now To Paradise (2022) – but also has a big day job, as editor of T, the New York Times Style Magazine.
When Enus opened by asking Yanagihara about her choice to write such challenging novels, she calmly replied, Readers should be made to work. It’s a great act of vulnerability to open the book and go where the writer tells you.
At 8pm on Thursday 19 May I walked into a cavernous hall at Carriageworks to hear Brooklyn-based writer Torrey Peters talk via video from Poland to Liz Duck-Chong in Sydney.
It was an absolutely mesmerising conversation. Even via screen Peters was dazzling! She brought the house down. And Duck-Chong asked such beautifully nuanced, thoughtful and searching questions that at the end Peters praised her exceptional contribution to the evening. The questions from the audience were also excellent, including one that prompted Peters to reflect on ‘sad girl lit’ and Jean Rhys.
Peters was there to talk about her 2021 novel Detransition, Baby, her breakthrough book which became an internationally acclaimed sensation. Its three central characters are bound by the question of a child: trans woman, Reese; her former partner who’s detransitioned from Amy to Ames; and cis woman, Katrina, who suddenly finds herself pregnant with Ames’s child. Peters called Reese a trans version of Fleabag, living in Brooklyn, NYC.
Ashley Hay, Sophie Cunningham, Jazz Money + Tony Birch on eucalypts. SWF 2022
This SWF conversation took place at the Powerhouse Museum as part of its fascinating exhibition Eucalyptusdom, which traces the museum’s origins in Sydney’s ‘Garden Palace’. It runs until 28 August - and features Ashley Hay’s writing and Jazz Money’s art among many other things.
Here are some brief notes I took from this wide ranging conversation about gum trees, their knowledge and wisdom, and our ever-changing relationship with trees over thousands of years. Below that I’ve added an overview of Eucalyptusdom, including images of Jazz Money’s video projection Garrandarang and Damien Wright’s art piece that Tony Birch refers to.
Ashley opened by asking Jazz Money what inspired her kinetic light poem Garrandarang.
Jazz said the first book she read to prepare for her installation was Ashley’s Gum … and here she was in conversation with Ashley, meeting her for the first time.
Sydney Writers’ Festival 2022: opening address - and Marcia Langton + Julianne Schultz on ‘Australia’
It’s been a while! - nine months to be precise - since I last blogged here. I spent the summer working on my essay My mother’s silence, my nation’s shame, which was published in Griffith Review 76: Acts of Reckoning last month. The first bookish thing I did after that was head straight to the Sydney Writers’ Festival. It was the first time I’d been able to go since 2018.
The opening night address in the Town Hall with its wildly applauding crowd and standing ovation set the tone for this excellent festival. That night three acclaimed First Nations artists - Ali Cobby Eckermann, Jackie Huggins and Nardi Simpson - spoke to the festival’s theme ‘change my mind’, reflecting on the changed, changing and changeable nature of their minds.
It was dark in the Town Hall, I didn’t have a notebook and pen, and I was so stunned and excited to be at the SWF for the first time since 2018, it didn’t occur to me to take notes. But here’s my recollection of the opening night, followed by the notes I took from a brilliant conversation two days later between Professor Marcia Langton and Professor Julianne Schultz, chaired by acclaimed historian Clare Wright.
Ocean Vuong’s first book, the poetry collection Night Sky with Exit Wounds (2016), circles obsessively around fathers. (Vuong’s violent father left soon after the family – grandmother, mother, father, son – arrived in Hartford, Connecticut, from Saigon via a refugee camp in the Philippines when Vuong was two years old.)
In its middle is a four-page poem called ‘On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous’, which opens like this:
Tell me it was for the hunger & nothing less. For hunger is to give the body what it knows
it cannot keep. That this amber light whittled down by another war is all that pins my hand to your chest.
After war, with violence and trauma in our bodies, what happens to love? How do we connect, body to body?
Jess Hill’s See What You Made Me Do: Power, Control and Domestic Abuse (2019) is a wide-ranging examination of love, power, the perpetrators of domestic abuse and the systems that enable them. It won the 2020 Stella Prize, was made into a 3-part SBS documentary and is essential reading. Domestic abuse is a national emergency:
‘In Australia, a country of almost 25 million people, one woman a week is killed by a man she’s been intimate with. These statistics tell us something that’s almost impossible to grapple with: it’s not the monster lurking in the dark women should fear, but the men they fall in love with.’
Hill’s book is beautifully written, forensically researched, comprehensive and excellent. It puts domestic abuse in its historical context and canvasses a vast, complicated and ever changing terrain …
‘You can be lonely anywhere, but there is a particular flavour to the loneliness that comes from living in a city, surrounded by millions of people.’
So writes Olivia Laing at the opening of The Lonely City, which I came to at a particularly lonely moment in my own life: 2020, when all the casual dates, spontaneous beers, snap decisions to eat at my corner bar vanished, all suddenly forbidden by Sydney’s Covid-19 lockdown regulations.
Laing’s opening pages, where she introduces her subject and her own uncomfortable immersion in it, reverberate with such raw pain and fathomless need I found them almost too distressing to read. But I was soon swallowed by her mesmerising prose and fluid meditations on being shockingly alone in the streets and sublets of New York City.
With its themes of climate change in the immediate present and the mostly thankless emotional labour of women, Jenny Offill’s Weather feels uncomfortably close to home in 2020, a year when the domestic realm has become newly prominent – and Covid 19 has thrown the most urgent issue of our time, climate change, into the background of the news cycle and conversation.
Weather quietly animates these questions – the ungraspable heft of climate change, the weight of caring for others – through the daily round of its narrator, Lizzie Benson, in her demanding roles as university librarian, mother, wife, daughter, sister, friend, neighbour and paid email correspondent for her former professor turned futurologist. Her only release from the pressure of these many competing demands is the prospect of an affair.
