#SaveWritingNSW

The week before last, the NSW writers’ centre, Writing NSW, received the devastating news that their multi-year funding would be discontinued. The fate of the writers’ centre is now at risk, as is the ecosystem of writers, teachers and readers that the Writing NSW supports. New South Wales also risks becoming the only state without a writers’ centre.

When I was a young writer living in Sydney in the noughties, Writing NSW (then known as the NSW Writers Centre) was vital to the development of my literary career. They published a little yellow book which listed all of the journals and magazines that accepted submissions. I thumbed through that book religiously and repeatedly sent out my work (in hard copy, with stamps!). The majority of it was rejected, but without this resource, I wouldn’t have published the first few pieces that gave me a leg up into the writing world.

In 2001, I attended a day long festival on writing historical fiction at the Writers Centre with my friend Robin Barker, with whom I was studying writing at the University of Technology, Sydney. It was a clear and bright winter’s day, and at lunchtime I sat in the sun with Robin and her friend and editor, Julia Stiles (who would edit my first novel, A Curious Intimacy, with the aid of an Australian Society of Authors mentorship), and outlined the idea I had for my second novel, though I was still writing the first. I had a strong sense, that day, that I was forming my identity as a writer through the people I was meeting.

Later, in one of the sessions, Robin and I were seated with most of the audience, waiting for the speakers to come in. I sensed a disturbance in the room, and when I looked around for the source, I saw an elegant woman taking her seat on the left-hand side of the front row. ‘That’s Tara Moss,’ Robin explained to me, ‘she’s a model and a writer.’

Tara Moss and I went on to become successful authors (though Moss has written and sold truckloads more books than me!), both of us benefitting from the networks and events associated with the Writers Centre.

Another example: in 2016 I flew from Brisbane to the writers’ centre to attend Quantum Words, a one-day festival centred around writing and science. I knew very little about science writing, but I was interested in learning about how one could communicate plant science. I thought that the ecobiography I was writing could be one way of doing this and wanted to share and test my ideas. Quantum Words was one of the best festivals I’ve ever attended. It was small, which meant it was relatively easy for me to meet people, and the sessions were fantastic, with a keynote by Nobel Prize winner Peter Doherty. Four years later, I drew on a number of the ideas and contacts I made that day to put together Science Write Now, the platform which scientist & author Amanda Niehaus and I are launching this Wednesday to publish and promote creative writing inspired by science.

A writers’ centre isn’t just a place where people go to attend workshops. It’s an ecosystem that nourishes connections, helps with building a literary profile, and offers critical support for the often hard and relentless journey of writing.

One of the saddest aspects of Create NSW’s decision is that the funding Writing NSW asked for is only $175,000 a year. Given the amount that politicians waste (flying business class, for example), how hard can it be to come up with these funds? The centre isn’t a white elephant, as two-thirds of its income is derived from courses, membership and workshops.

Disturbingly, too, only 5% of ongoing funding from Create NSW was dedicated to literature. This means that the state’s future storytellers will not get the support and publication opportunities they need to develop as a writer, and that the stories of people in NSW - particularly marginalised groups who may not have the resources to persist with a writing career - will not be told. This seems to be part of a larger trend of defunding literature in Australia, which the literary scholar and historian in me cannot help but link to book burning by authoritarian regimes, because books disseminate ideas.  

If you would like to protest Create NSW’s decision, here are some actions you can take:

• Write to or phone your NSW Member of Parliament. Contact details for all state MPs are here. Customise this template letter to make your views known.

• Send a copy of your letter to the Honourable Don Harwin, Minister for the Arts: office@harwin.minister.nsw.gov.au.

• Post about the funding decision on your social media platforms tagging @writingNSW and using the hashtag #SaveWritingNSW

• Spread the news to your colleagues and friends in the writing community and ask them to make their views known

• Sign this open letter to Create NSW and the NSW Minister for the Arts from writers and active members in the literary community

• Sign this petition from Jamie Parker, MP for Balmain, to NSW Minister for the Arts, the Honourable Don Harwin.

Review of 'The Yield' by Tara June Winch

In her Barry Andrews address at the recent Association for the Study of Australian Literature conference, Wiradjuri writer and scholar Professor Anita Heiss exhorted academics who teach and write about Aboriginal literature to commit to raising awareness about Aboriginal literacy and languages in their work. She also suggested donating to or fundraising for the Indigenous Literacy Foundation which, among other things, produces and publishes books by Indigenous people for Indigenous people.

Professor Anita Heiss’s call to action.

I started reading Aboriginal literature at university. My education expanded exponentially when I started reading and reviewing for the Australian Women Writers Challenge (proving that you don’t have to go to uni to read Aboriginal peoples’ writing!). So although of late I have wondered whether it is apposite to apply the tools of literary criticism, which have a European lineage, to Aboriginal texts (particularly given the colonial baggage of those tools), I still think it’s really important for non-Aboriginal readers to engage with Aboriginal literature to educate ourselves about Australian history, Aboriginal culture and Aboriginal languages. 

Although it has been postponed this year due to Covid, this past week was due to be NAIDOC week. During this week, Lisa of ANZLitLovers encourages litbloggers to read and engage with Indigenous literature across the world. As this is an online initiative, it didn’t have to be cancelled! Over the past few years I have been too overworked and exhausted to do any reviews, but due to my Covid-19 reboot I’ve read and thought about Tara June Winch’s The Yield (which we also did in bookclub at Avid Reader).

The Yield, Winch’s third work and first novel, is a book about words, particularly Ngurambang, ‘the word for country in the old language, the first language’ (1). The book begins and ends with this word, signalling the continuation of country because, as Albert Gondiwindi, a collector of Wiradjuri words, signals, he’s writing about ‘deep time. This is a big, big story. The big stuff goes forever, time ropes and loops and is never straight, that the real story of time’ (2).

The story is made up of three narratives: Albert Gondiwindi’s first person narrative and dictionary entries in Wiradjuri and English; the third-person story of August Gondiwindi, Albert’s granddaughter, who returns to Australia from England following Albert’s death and who is haunted by the loss of her sister; and a long letter written by Reverend Ferndinand Greenleaf in 1915, describing his attempts at creating a missionary for the Gondiwindi people. These three stories knit together at the book’s close, in which the action speeds up dramatically in a protest against a tin mine to be opened on Ngurambang.

A major theme in the book is the body, with which Ngurambang is bound. As Albert  writes, ‘If you say [Ngurambang] right it hits the back of your mouth and you should taste blood in your words’ (1). He also observes that his country ‘had a plan for me, already mapped in my veins since before I was born’ (1). The blood is in the word, which is in the veins, in the body, in the land.

Thus I read August’s under-nourishment as synchronous with, and linked to, the gradual drying of the Murrumby River since colonisation. As Augustine writes in his entry for ‘river – bila’:

Now you know where the word billabong comes from. From us. Everything comes back to the bila – all life, and with it all time. Our songlines originate there, our lives fed from there and it’s where our spirits dwell in the end. Even the Reverend was drawn to the river, there he recited Isiah 44:3, For I will pour water on the thirsty land, and streams on the dry ground; I will pour my Spirit upon your offspring, an my blessing on your descendants. Can’t imagine how it hurts not to see that water come anymore. (106)

 Language is bound up with bodies, because language comes from country, and country nourishes the body. When the novel’s sequence of events are resolved, August is returned to her body. She listens to a tape made by Albert of the old language. It is ‘his recital, his private sermon, going through a list of words, trying as he did to work out or remember how they were pronounced’ (306). Hearing this language, ‘the smells, tastes and burdens left August. She ate again, too, she wasn’t ngarran anymore. English changed their tongues, the formation of their minds, August thought – she’d drifted in and out of herself all that time. The language was the poem she had looked for, communicating what English failed to say’ (306). This sustenance also comes from the sound of the words, as Aboriginal culture is an oral culture, although as Penny van Toorn has illustrated, Aboriginal people were very quick to pick up writing once that technology was available to them.

August and her cousin Joey print out the pages of the book for the local kids, and write in the Foreword: Maybe you are looking for a statue, or a bench by the banks of the Murrumby to honour the people who have lived by the river. Better, there is water returning, nudging what was dead. Better the burral-gang congregate here often. Better these words and better we are still here and that we speak them. (310)

I thought this was interesting in the context of the recent debates about statues. There are different ways to commemorate history, not just through cast iron figures. Cultures with oral histories, where memory is passed down by story, have different ways of remembering & commemorating to Westerners, who seem to like monuments (as for me, I am indifferent: the span of history is so long that humans are but a speck, and a statue memorialising a speck doesn’t mean much to me). This passage shows that Wiradjuri people have resisted colonisation and that they are still sustained by their country, by memory, and by language.

As was pointed out in our bookclub meeting, The Yield is a generous book. Many of the missionaries in Australia sure didn’t abide by their Christian principles, as Claire G. Coleman details in Terra Nullius, and many of the girls’ and boys’ homes in which Aboriginal children were institutionalised during the Stolen Generations (and, arguably, still are), ‘were much harsher in comparison to those depicted’ in the novel (Winch, 340). Winch shows a missionary who was influenced by the Gondiwindi people and wrote down their language. This doesn’t mean he was an entirely good person, as an exchange between August and her aunt Missy reveals:

‘He was kind, you think?’ [August asks].

‘No. He was bad in a long pattern of bad. I reckon he just thought he was doing right.’

‘He regretted it.’

‘Yeah, but only when it happened to him, aye.’ (250).

So I think it’s interesting that Winch includes the lines from Isiah in the definition of billabong. Perhaps she’s trying to use Christianity, which with white Australians might be familiar, to explain a concept from Aboriginal culture. It’s generous, because Aboriginal people shouldn’t have to do this work – there’s hundreds of books out there that folk can pick up and read to learn about Aboriginal culture.

At the same time, even if Winch doesn’t go into great details about massacres and rapes (although these are present in the book), she does canvas the casual racism that Aboriginal people experience. While standing in the fish n’ chips shop, August looks at a man’s tattoo of the Southern Cross, inked onto his shoulder.

       ‘You like that?’ he asked her, pointing to it, without waiting for an answer. ‘That’s the Southern Cross, lady. That means you don’t belong here.’

        She stood there dumbfounded, blank-faced. After a moment she wondered who he thought she was, or who exactly he thought he was. (237).

A subtle way of revealing ignorance.

My favourite part of this book is the dictionary: I loved the Wiradjuri words and the stories used to explain them, such as ‘flower, a kind of flower – babin, narranarrandyiran The banksia flower is my favourite, not just because it’s large and proud looking like the hibiscus, but because it reminds me of something bigger. See, the banksia is a tough-looking flower but it still protects itself with sharp, jagged leaves, study wood and roots. Its nectar feeds the bees, the birds and us people’ (206). A plant is always bigger than a human, because without sugar and oxygen from plants, humans can’t survive, so I liked this interpretation.

The writing in the dictionary section is much more alive and vibrant than that of the Reverend’s letters, which came across as flat and two-dimensional. Perhaps that was the point, but I skimmed a lot of those letters – he didn’t seem real to me.

A few other thoughts: there were bits that made me laugh. When August asks her Aunt Missy, ‘You think you’ll go to heaven, Aunty?’, Missy replies, ‘Nah! I’ll be back as a tree or something that doesn’t move. I just want to chill out and not have to go hunting for food, you know?’ (249). I agree: trees are something to aspire to. I also wondered if this book was a shout out to Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria, with the name of the towns Prosperous and Massacre Plains echoing Wright’s Desperance, and the gathering of activists at the end of The Yield also mirroring the blowing up of the mine in Carpentaria. I dunno, but I liked the use of allegory.

When Black Lives Matter exploded in America, and people marched against inaction over Deaths in Custody in Australia (437 deaths since 1991 and not a single conviction! It’s staggering), readers rushed to bookshops to buy books by Aboriginal writers. I find that really heartening, but there also needs to be concrete action - for example we should, as Anita Heiss stresses, we should amplify Aboriginal peoples’ voices. So don’t just read this (rather hamfisted) review - go out and buy the book.

Don’t Dream it’s Over

A while back a speculative fiction writer friend, in a conversation about apocalypses, told me that one of her worst fears was that a solar flare would ruin the internet and that society would have a meltdown (I went home and made a backup of my writing). She mentioned another writer friend who was deeply unsettled whenever her children weren’t on the same continent, in case Armageddon came and she was separated from them. I thought about this in passing as I prepared to go overseas, though not in any serious way. Perhaps it was just a thought, or perhaps it was prescience.

In mid-March, as the pandemic gathered speed in Germany, the Carson Center said that we could go home to our countries if we wanted to. I spent days mulling over what to do and Skyping with family to work it out. I initially decided to stay, as I had a good place to live and a safe routine (home-work-shops-English Garden), and Germany has a good healthcare system. So on Tuesday I went for the seventh time to the KVR, Munich’s administration centre, to see if my visa was ready. Approximately 20 people were on the whole train & I wore my red gloves so I didn’t pick up any bugs. Outside the KVR was a cluster of people, chains across the entrance, and security guards standing behind them. ‘Corona,’ I heard one of the guards say. That was the end of my visa, I figured. Luckily, after standing in a queue for 3 hours two weeks before, I had been able to get an interim visa.

As I had heard the shops were closing and as my main mechanism for dealing with stress and anxiety is buying nice things that make me feel better, I walked to a boutique named ‘Milk’ which a friend told me about. The lady who owned the shop said it was her last day of trading and she didn’t know if she was going to survive. I asked if the government was helping and she said she hadn’t been given any information at all. She didn’t like the heavy, top-down approach. ‘That is okay in China,’ she said, ‘but Europe, it’s a democracy!’ I too was worried about this, and wonder if the authoritarian measures will stay in place once the virus clears up. I bought two frocks and a pair of shoes, using funds I had set aside for a trip to Italy.

It was eerie in the city. The square at Marianplatz, which had been crowded at Christmas, was emptying of people, and though a handful were sitting outside drinking coffee, the air was tense. At Odeonsplatz, where I had bought Christmas greenery a few months before, a man sat on a stool playing a clarinet. The sound was mournful, the sound of things ending.

Odeonsplatz, usually crammed with people, was nearly empty.

I walked home. When I got back I found that the Australian government had advised all Australians to return home as soon as possible. I chatted with friends in Australia about the announcement. I had thought it applied to backpackers rather than people with more stable setups, but a friend told me the word was that the airlines were going to go bust, so I had to get out.

I slept on it, then on Wednesday morning I booked a ticket for 31st March. I was exhausted from anxiety. I went into work and watered the plants, but my brain wasn’t functioning. I ran into a colleague from Singapore who was packing up his office. ‘I thought you were going on April Fool’s Day?’ I said. He told me that he’d been advised to bring it forward as there might not be any flights left. I wondered aloud if I should bring mine forward. I went into the boardroom for a Zoom workshop.

I was still thinking about this during the meeting and it was hard to concentrate. When the meeting ended I changed my flight home to Monday 23rd March. I then found out that Qantas was cancelling all international flights from late March until at least May, so I was really glad I changed the flight.

I packed up my desk, gave my Madonna lily to my friend, looked at the budding tree outside my window for the last time (I was waiting to see what sort of leaves it would have) & rejoined my two colleagues in the conference room, where we drank some wine unearthed from the fridge. We took the bottles with us to the English Garden, picking up Vietnamese on the way, and sat on two park benches a metre apart while the light dimmed around us.

I checked my Qantas/Emirates flights all week to see if they were confirmed, which they were, but I was paralysed with anxiety and wouldn’t leave my apartment in case I became ill and couldn’t get home. On the morning of the 23rd I heard that Dubai was closing its airport from Wednesday 25th, but my flight left Dubai at 10.30am on the 24th. I tried to phone Qantas but figured it was a lost cause (my brother, in trying to get back from Australia to the US a few weeks before, was waiting on the phone to them for 4.5 hours), so I sent them a message on Twitter to check that all was ok, but they didn’t respond. I finished packing and cleaning my apartment, and caught a cab to the airport.

When I got there, the place was virtually empty. I found the Emirates desks. They were closed and my flight on the overhead boards read ‘Cancelled.’ My heart sank.

I found a young airport worker nearby who spoke English and he said that Emirates was closed. ‘I can’t get home,’ I told him, more to speak my distress aloud than anything else. I realised I had to sit down and work out what to do.

I contacted Qantas via Twitter again and asked them to contact me asap. A response came a few seconds later, and Chloe the sales assistant said that the cancellations were at Emirates' end & I would get a refund or voucher. I don’t see why they couldn’t have replied to my earlier tweet, instead of me having to find out at the airport.

I started heading back to my spotless apartment, for which I still had a spare key, until a friend suggested that I get a hotel. I got off the train, went back to the airport and waited for the bus and went to the hotel. Because my brain wasn’t working from stress, I missed my stop and had to stay on the bus until it circled around again.

At the hotel desk, I explained that my flight had been cancelled and that I needed a room to work out what to do. ‘Qantas aren’t being very helpful,’ I added. The man was kind and suggested I call the consulate. I think he felt sorry for me, because he gave me a room that, in ordinary circumstances, I would have loved (it had pink shag pile carpets and pink plastic flowers).

I set up Bluetooth on my phone and hearing aid so I could hear, and contacted the consulate in Berlin. The call was transferred to Canberra. The woman spoke very fast; I had to explain that I was deaf and ask her to speak more clearly. She said I needed to go back to the airline, regardless of how long it took, and get them to sort it out. I sent a series of increasingly desperate messages to Chloe, but she only replied tersely that the borders were closing everywhere and flights were being cancelled.

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With some trepidation, because I knew it would spin them out, I updated my family, then got on the internet and started looking at flights. After a few hours my brother in San Francisco finished his work and helped me as well. We were able to get a flight with Thai airways, but I realised that I needed a negative Covid-19 test to transit at the airport. I looked up English-speaking doctors and made an appointment online, but explained to my brother that it would take 4-5 days to sort out, & the Thai borders might close in that time. He looked into Canadian and Japanese airlines, and eventually we found a flight with Qatar, which was still letting passengers transit through their airport at Doha. I then needed to sort out bookings at the other end, as the flight went to Sydney and I needed to get to the Gold Coast in Queensland and I had arranged for a taxi to pick me up. After I had booked and re-booked everything I could have slept for an hour, but I was terrified that I wouldn’t be able to hear my alarm and that I would miss the flight. So I got up and went back to the airport.

Qantas eventually replied to me 12 hours later, offering 3 flights via London, but I didn’t want to risk going through the rigmarole again. Suffice to say, I’m never flying with them again unless I can help it.

When I landed at Sydney airport, they were screening passengers. We were given masks and told to line up. No one was observing the 1.5m distancing rule. When I stood back in the queue to keep my distance, a teenage girl & her father took the spot in front of me that I had created! That was annoying but I was too tired to point it out to them.

The masks made lipreading impossible. I rely on reading a whole face for clues, so not only was I unable to figure out what people were saying through lipreading, but half my usual information was cut out. At the end of the queue we had our temperature checked and were gathered into groups so that a doctor could explain the rules regarding self-isolation. I told him that I was deaf and needed to lipread. He couldn’t remove his mask so instead took me aside and spoke to me loudly (which in ordinary situations is offensive, as I need clarity rather than volume, but this was no ordinary situation). At immigration, the woman behind the desk unleashed a torrent of words, so I had to put my hand up to stop her and explain again that I couldn’t lipread, and she kindly pulled her mask down.

I caught a cab to a hotel nearby, and the next morning flew to the Gold Coast, where a policeman read out the instructions for quarantine to me again. I took my re-booked cab down into New South Wales so I could go into quarantine at my parents’ holiday house (sans parents). I luckily missed the government’s directive to quarantine in a hotel for two weeks, which would have been painful. My significant other and I discussed whether I should go into a hotel in Brisbane, because I didn’t want to infect him in case I was sick, but it was expensive and I couldn’t bear the thought of being confined in so small a space. At least in my parents’ house I had space to roam around.

V grateful to a good friend who stocked up on food & boozo for me.

I was highly aware that I was very privileged to have a place to go to and that this option wasn’t available to most people (a colleague mentioned that some of the Rachel Carson Center students were living in dorms and were vulnerable to catching Covid-19). I was lucky to have a good friend not far away who could buy me some groceries so that I had food when I arrived, and that she put me in touch with another friend who could also help with my shopping while I was in quarantine. So although it was a terrible ordeal that certainly wasn’t helped by the perpetual anxiety that accompanies deafness, it could have been worse.

As it was, I did get sick with a sore throat and a cold and panicked a bit. I contacted the hotline, and the lady told me to go to a fever clinic.

‘But I don’t have a car,’ I replied.

She hummed and hawed, consulting her notes, then said, ‘You can catch a cab or ask a friend to take you, but you both have to wear masks and then they must self-isolate for two weeks.’

‘I’ll just call the local doctor,’ I said.

The doctor also told me to go to a fever clinic. I explained again that I didn’t have a car. The nurse had said to call an ambulance if I was so breathless that I needed to catch my breath between words. I certainly wasn’t at that stage, so I said to the doctor, ‘I’m not dying.’

‘Just keep isolating and monitor your symptoms.’

I had a thermometer with me and my temperature was fine, and congestion is not a COVID-19 symptom, so I figured my symptoms were the usual ones of chronic fatigue, which is not surprising given the stress I had gone through.

I had six weeks on my own, which mean some seven weeks in total without properly interacting with human beings, as I was isolating myself in Munich. It was really hard work, but not a completely foreign state of being as I have spent much of my life on my own due to my deafness.

My parents finally visited last week. They will winter here, & when they go I’ll find a way of returning to Brisbane (the bus may be running again by then). My mother has dodgy lungs, so if I want to see her I can’t risk going too far afield in case I catch something and bring it back, because the virus will kill her. I miss my significant other, although he, being an introvert, is having the time of his life. I figure that as I wasn’t going to see him until June (so much for that trip to Sicily!), another few months won’t matter so much.

I was heartbroken to leave the Rachel Carson Center, as well as my other fellowships. It looks like my academic career is in ruins as I only have 9 months left on my contract when I return in February (it was meant to be 2 years, until HR & the HoS informed me otherwise just before Christmas). Nine months is not enough time to put together and administer another research grant, and I don’t even know if my heart is in it anymore because the neoliberal university has proved to be such a pressurised place to work, particularly for staff with disabilities, to whom it is largely indifferent.

I’m trying to find silver linings. For the first time in nearly a decade I have untrammelled time to write and, importantly, to rest. I need this time desperately to write the novels have crowded my brain. I also need to get over my chronic fatigue & become fitter and I need to have a life again. Flogging myself to death for my career wasn’t worth it, because now there aren’t any jobs, and I expect the research funding will be cut back.

Despite the tragedy 2020 has already wrought for me and so many others, I remain hopeful. Deafness taught me to become a problem solver and, from past experience, if I think hard enough I can usually come up with a solution. I will find a way back to academia, although it might take me years. In the meantime there is the beach with butterflies riding the breezes to find salt; kookaburras and fruit bats in the patch of rainforest behind the house; and unspooling time in which to read and write.

2019: My Year of Writing

2019 was a much better year than 2018. I published my third book and I only got the flu once, rather than every few weeks. But geez, it was still a hectic year. Only now, in Germany, experiencing my first normal weekend in god knows how long (I can’t remember the last time I didn’t have a deadline to meet), can I see how insane my life has been for the last few years. I guess it’s akin to how you don’t realise you are depressed until you’re better. Here’s a list of what happened during the year.

Publications

The highlight of my year was the publication of Hearing Maud, my hybrid memoir, after 15 years of work (I left for London to start my research in 2004). I was in Perth when it came out, and when my copies were delivered to me at the hotel I burst into tears, because I never thought the book would be finished. It took so long to get the voice right, and to harmonise the elements of research and memoir, that it was amazing that the copy in my hands was actually real. A hectic publicity schedule followed, which I will blog about as a record, & as an exemplar of what writers need to do to get their work out these days, while trying to also hold down their day jobs (and, in my case as always, deal with a disability).

I published three academic essays: a chapter on eco-memoir, eco-austerity and Isabella Tree’s Wilding in The Poetics and Politics of Gardening in Hard Times; another chapter on deaf actor Emmanuelle Laborit’s autobiography The Cry of the Gull in Disability Experiences: Memoirs, Autobiographies, and other Personal Narratives; and an essay on literature and plant blindness in Australian Humanities Review. I also published a review (on Melissa Fagan’s What Will Be Worn in the Queensland Review) and a piece of creative nonfiction on Kafka and the NDIS, which was published in a special issue on Disability in Westerly. With my colleague at University of the Sunshine Coast, Clare Archer-Lean, I edited a special issue on the interface between science and literature for the Australian Humanities Review (hence the plant blindness essay). This was my first experience of editing, although I’ve also been working on another issue due to come out shortly in Auto/Biography Studies, on Life Writing in the Anthropocene, and was pleased to find that I am accomplished at cat herding, because there are other volumes I’d like to edit.

Again, I didn’t publish any fiction, although I did manage to write and submit some, and I was successful in my application for a Griffith Review fellowship, which means that my part of my mermaid book will be published in the journal next year. The fellowship also means that I can go to the Iceland Writers Retreat to work on the book some more, which will be very helpful as I’m struggling with the plot.

Because of my perennial exhaustion from deafness, book publicity, and teaching, I missed pretty much every single deadline last year. I also wrote an essay on disability and Katherine Susannah Prichard’s Haxby’s Circus that was rejected, because I was too tired to do a decent job (my academic work is not often rejected; my creative work is). So in 2020 I have resolved to be less tired and to hand things in on time. Thus far I have managed this with about half of my January deadlines, so, I’m getting there.

Teaching

In Semester One I convened the Australian Literature course as a stop-gap between one staff member leaving and another starting. This was the first time I had convened a third year course (and a large one at that). It was bloody exhausting and, at times, terrifying. I was extremely grateful to my two tutors, James Halford & Kirril Shields, who each gave a guest lecture and were really good at their job. The timetabling was terrible, though, so I delivered the lecture & two tutorials on the same day, and there wasn’t much left of me for students in the final tutorial, though I did my best. However, having convened a big course once makes it easier for the next time, although I swear my telomeres get shorter each time I teach.

Semester Two was a bit easier in that I was tutoring, but that meant teaching three literature classes in one day (two back-to-back) and one creative writing class the next day. That took too much out of me and I don’t know how good a teacher I was for my students – the office failed to file the forms for my teaching evaluations so I have no idea. However I just loved the creative writing class – I know the craft so well that I can teach it in my sleep, and my students were good writers and they tried hard.

I also had a revelation last week, after watching a video with my colleagues at the Rachel Carson Center on Donna Haraway. In that video, Haraway said that she found it hard to think while she was teaching, and I realised that even the exceptionally bright, able-bodied people cannot write and teach at the same time, so no wonder I’ve been finding it difficult. It isn’t just having a 75% hearing loss that’s a problem (though this is obviously a major factor), it’s my desperation to write as well, and my frustration and despair when I can’t find the time or energy to do this just compounds things.

I’ve been thinking about this a great deal, of late, now that I actually have energy for reflection. I’ve realised that, because of my deafness, I can’t physically work for more than a few days a week. I have one more year left of my contract when I return to Australia and although I can stick it out for another year, after that I think I’ll have to go back to the uncertainty of tutoring. Which means, in essence, that I will be penalised for my disability, but I can’t see any other way around it, at least not in these neoliberal times which demand their pound of flesh, even from a body that is disabled.

Outside of work I also, with my friend and fellow writer Amanda Niehaus, presented a workshop on ‘Writing to Save the Planet’ for the Queensland Writers Centre in which we discussed how to write about climate change through fiction and nonfiction. We had fun doing this and we work well together, so I hope we can present it again.

Amanda & I at our workshop for the Queensland Writers Centre.

 Conferences

I presented papers at three excellent conferences last year, and delivered a keynote at a fourth. The first conference was the bi-annual Association for the Study of Environment & Culture (Aust & NZ chapter), held at UNE around the theme of ‘Grounding Story.’ I always like going to UNE because I know their hearing systems work and there are always friendly and interesting people to meet and catch up with. I blogged about the conference here.

The second was the annual Association for the Study of Australian Literature conference in Perth in July, the theme of which was ‘Dirt.’ I presented with two other writers with disability (Amanda Tink and Kit Kavanagh-Ryan) on eco-crip, or the intersection between disability studies and the environmental humanities (I focussed on Alan Marshall’s  I Can Jump Puddles.) My paper was a usual last-minute rush job but I think I got most of my ideas across. I also launched the Writing Disability in Australia dataset, which I put together with the help of the amazing people at Austlit, and had my first launch for Hearing Maud at this conference. It was a wonderful place to start my book publicity because I’ve presented on Rosa Praed at several ASAL conferences.

Kit, Amanda and I are meeting again to present on another panel on disability at this year’s ASAL conference in Cairns, looking at the intersection of writing, literature and disability. I have to say, after so many days below 5 degrees, I am looking forward to going to the beach!

In October I was back at UNE to present on a conference on compassion (I talked about disability and empathy) & then again at the end of November to give a keynote on Judith Wright, poetry and deafness for a symposium on ecopoesis organised by my botanical colleague John Ryan.

Driving to Armidale in the middle of drought & bushfire for the conference on compassion at UNE. We had no idea of how bad the summer would get. Our pollies sure could do with some compassion, given that a billion animals and millions of trees died.

Mentoring

Early in the year I was approach to be a mentor for a young deaf writer through WestWords. This was one of the absolute highlights of my year, as I got to work with Fiona Murphy, who is a brilliant essayist – she won the Overland Fair Australia prize for her essay ‘Reasonable Adjustments’ (which I encourage everyone to read because it describes how discrimination impacts on deaf people’s employment - I related to much of it) and now has a contract to publish a collection of essays. On a personal level, it was amazing to communicate with another deaf person and to share notes on different areas – while I focus on deaf literature and history, Fiona focuses on research relating to health. I’m so glad that Fiona has found her wings & is now flying.

Service

In academic parlance, ‘service’ is what you give to your school and scholarly community to help keep things running (for eg attending meetings, reviewing articles & theses, serving on committees), but I also see it as also contributing to our literary community, particularly as there isn’t much of a division between my academic and creative writing. So as well as the obligatory reviewing of papers & theses, my job was to be the Integrity Officer, which meant having conversations with students who had plagiarised. I found it quite disruptive as there were so many of them and they usually met me during my prime writing/research time (in the morning), so I should have scheduled things a bit better. I also ran a Literature and Environment reading group, which was fun, and judged the WordPlay Microfiction competition for the Brisbane Writers Festival.

I also produced the newsletters for ASLEC-ANZ and co-ordinated a social media team for the Association for the Study of Australian Literature. Beyond this, I did my final year as diversity editor for the Australian Women Writers Challenge and have now handed the baton over, as I have been doing the role for too long (seven years!) and it needed some new energy.

A pall of smoke from the fires.

 The Year Ahead

2020 is about getting my life back. I’ve stopped pushing myself, I’m trying to get fit again (a very slow process), I’m resting and reading more, and I’m only doing things that I want to do rather than because I think it’s going to get me another job (because, let’s face it, there are no jobs in academia, let alone part-time jobs). I’m focussing on writing fiction again because I think that, particularly after the horrendous summer of fire, this is a more effective way of educating people about the environment than writing scholarly articles that only three people will read.

I will be at the Rachel Carson Center for the Environment for another three months (I’m writing a book on the genre of ecobiography), then I will decamp to Edinburgh and Virginia in the US to work on my ecobiography of Georgiana Molloy. I miss my partner painfully and perennially, but this time away is critical to my work and health, so I just endure that part of it. By the time I get back to Australia, I hope to be full of beans again.

Obligatory favourite flower (peonies) shot.

2019: My Year of Reading

I was flu-ridden & fatigued for much of 2018, which meant I was resting and reading while trying to get better, so I met my target of 100 books. However, last year I spent 6 months promoting Hearing Maud in between convening and teaching, so I was 16 short, at 84 books. On the plus side, I didn’t get sick, except for a terrible virus donated by my nephew in April. I think the flu shot worked last year, and that my immune system is improving in general (yay).

My proportions remained roughly the same - 36% Australian women writers (39% last year); 14% Australian male writers (13% last year); 30% international women writers (33% last year) and 20% international male writers (15% last year).

My favourite read for the year was probably Idaho by Emily Ruskovich, as it was well-written and the plot was interesting and unexpected. Alice Hoffman’s The Marriage of Opposites was an indulgent delight, with gorgeous prose full of sensory detail and an interesting, subject - Rachel Pizzarro, the mother of impressionist artist Camille Pissaro. Lloyd Jones’ The Cage, a horrifying fable about asylum seekers, was beautifully written and tightly constructed, but nauseating in its depiction of the banality of human cruelty. By contrast Martin Edmond’s Isinglass was also a fable about refugees, but its dreamlike quality was much gentler and more rhythmic. Its prose, too, was taut and flawless. And I loved two books of non-fiction by Australian women writers: Vicki Laveau-Harvie’s The Erratics, with its sense of warding the reader away from the sharp cliffs of family life, and Julienne van Loon’s The Thinking Woman, which blends thoughts on philosophy and gender with everyday life in an accessible and engaging way.

Other books which I also thoroughly enjoyed include Claire Corbett’s Watch Over Me (tight plot, perfect encapsulation of young, female desire), Julie Keys’ The Artist’s Portrait (good writing and fantastic characters), Jock Serong’s Preservation (great plot & research), Patrick Allington’s Figurehead (an original, fictional biography), Kamil Shamsie’s Burnt Shadows (solid plot, setting and character – Shamsie is the reason why I want to go to the Iceland Writers Retreat this year), Viv Albertine’s memoir which veers from punk to middle class life to fragile and carefully-preserved solitude, Becky Chambers’ books about androids (which help to explain what it’s like to have autism), Now We Shall Be Entirely Free by Andrew Miller (a favourite author, although it’s not his best book), and The Carhullan Army by Sarah Hall, who can do no wrong. I picked up her latest book of short stories while in London, Sudden Traveller, and am waiting to knock off my last few deadlines before I read it.

I failed in my aspirations to read more 19th century literature and poetry, so I’m aiming for that again this year, plus more writing by Indigenous Australians, as I haven’t been reading much of that of late. The pace of my life has slowed considerably (thank goodness) so I’m hopeful of hitting the one hundred mark again. Much to look forward to this year!

Australian Women Writers

1.     Otherland, Maria Tumarkin

2.     My People, Oodgeroo Noonuccal

3.     Paris Savages, Katherine Johnson

4.     Pescador’s Wake, Katherine Johnson

5.     Meet Me at Lennon's, Melanie Myers

6.     Stone Girl, Eleni Hale

7.     The Girls, Chloe Higgins

8.     Watch Over Me, Claire Corbett

9.     The Artist’s Portrait, Julie Keys

10.  Lenny’s Book of Everything, Karen Foxlee

11.  Wolfe Island, Lucy Treloar

12.  Hive, A.J. Betts

13.  The Breeding Season, Amanda Niehaus

14.  The Heart of the Grass Tree, Molly Murn

15.  Zebra and other Stories, Debra Adelaide

16.  Diving into Glass, Caro Llewellyn

17.  Room for a Stranger, Melanie Cheng

18.  This Taste for Silence, Amanda O' Callaghan

19.  The Island Will Sink, Briohny Doyle

20.  The Erratics, Vicki Laveau-Harvie

21.  Imperfect, Lee Kofman

22.  The Thinking Woman, Julienne van Loon

23.  Say Hello, Carly Findlay

24.  Madame Izan, Rosa Praed

25.  Sister Sorrow, Rosa Praed

26.  The Fragments, Toni Jordan

27.  Beyond Words: A Year With Kenneth Cook, Jacqueline Kent

28.  Fusion, Kate Richards

29.  Haxby’s Circus, Katharine Susannah Prichard

30.  The Trauma Cleaner, Sarah Krasnostein

Australian Male Writers

31.  The Honeyman and the Hunter, Neil Grant

32.  Preservation, Jock Serong

33.  Finding My Way, Graeme Innes

34.  You Belong Here, Laurie Steed

35.  Isinglass, Martin Edmond

36.  Writers on Writers: Nam Le on David Malouf, Nam Le

37.  Last Drinks, Andrew McGahan

38.  Figurehead, Patrick Allington

39.  Fever of Animals, Miles Allinson

40.  David Malouf, An Imaginary Life

41.  The Sea and Summer, George Turner

42.  This is the Grass, Alan Marshall

International Women Writers

43.  Outline, Rachel Cust

44.  M-Train, Patti Smith

45.  Burnt Shadows, Kamila Shamsie

46.  The Lowlands, Jhumpa Lahiri

47.  The Bees, Laline Paull

48.  The Elegance of the Hedgehog, Muriel Barbery

49.  Fever Dream, Samanta Schweblin

50.  The Living Mounain, Nan Shepherd

51.  The Marriage of Opposites, Alice Hoffman

52.  The Water Cure, Sophie Mackintosh

53.  Bright, Duanwad Pimwana

54.  A Tale for the Time Being, Ruth Ozeki

55.  Idaho, Emily Ruskovich

56.  Swimming with Seals, Victoria Whitworth

57.  Miss Ogilvy Finds Herself, Radclyff Hall

58.  Hope in the Dark, Rebecca Solnit

59.  The Mermaid's Three Wisdoms, Jane Yolen

60.  A Closed and Common Orbit, Becky Chambers

61.  The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet, Becky Chambers

62.  Gingerbread, Helen Oyeyemi

63.  Clothes, Clothes, Clothes, Music, Music, Music, Boys, Boys, Boys, Viv Albertine

64.  Madame Zero, Sarah Hall

65.  Black Water, Louise Doughty

66.  The Turning, A Swimming Memoir

67.  The Carhullan Army, Sarah Hall

International Male Writers

68.  The Marches, Rory Stewart

69.  Slaughterhouse Five, Kurt Vonnegut

70.  Coraline, Neil Gamain

71.  Now We Shall Be Entirely Free, Andrew Miller

72.  A Monster Calls, Patrick Ness

73.  Blackfish City, Sam J Miller

74.  Wintering: A Season with Geese, Stephen Rutt

75.  Undying, Michael Faber

76.  The Cage, Lloyd Jones

77.  The Water Knife, Paolo Bacigalupi

78.  The Windup Girl, Paolo Bacigalupi

79.  The Blackwater Lightship, Colm Toibin

80.  Jurassic Park, Michael Crichton

81.  The Book of M, Peng  Shepherd

82.  The Castle, Franz Kafka

83.  Feral, George Monbiot

84.  The Maze Runner, James Dashner

Review of 'The Mysterious Box' by Dorothy Cottrell

Over at The Australian Legend, my blogging pal and sometimes-correspondent and yet-to-be caffeinating acquaintance Bill is running his annual spotlight on Australian women writers. This year he is up to Generation 3, which consists of women who wrote between 1919-1960. Dorothy Cottrell featured on one of his lists, and as I’m planning to write a book about her one day, I thought I would revisit her writing.

Cottrell was born in Picton, NSW in 1905 and contracted polio five years later. She spent the rest of her life in a wheelchair. This didn’t stop her from attending art school, moving to her uncle’s farm and becoming a crack shot with a rifle, eloping with her uncle’s bookkeeper to Dunk Island, moving back to Sydney to make money from her drawings, and then to American to escape the tax office because she was so successful. In America, she and her husband sailed around the Caribbean in a yacht and she continued to publish stories in newspapers and magazines. A couple of films were also based upon her work (for eg Wilderness Orphan based on a pet kangaroo).

With the encouragement of Mary Gilmore (herself a writer whose style shifted from Victorian to the more experimental Modernism), Cottrell published her first novel The Singing Gold in 1928. In an essay in a special issue on Modernism published in Queensland Review a few years ago, I argue that this heavily autobiographical novel is an example of Modernism (which has traditionally been considered in the context of urban life) transposed to the regions. It’s a very visual novel, which is not surprising as Cottrell trained as an artist in Sydney with Datillo Rubbo, and her sketches and paintings show the broad brushstrokes and geometric planes of Modernism. In The Singing Gold, a scene of droving in the dry and dusty outback, attended by flocks of tiny larks that hover over the sheep, is transformed through long, lyrical sentences into a vision of lustrous, shimmering gold (see here for the passage that knocked my socks off). This novel also focusses on the quotidian, another feature of Modernist writers, particularly female Modernist writers and artists (think of Margaret Preston’s paintings of native flower arrangements).

The Cottrells’ move to America coincided with the Depression, so Dorothy abandoned Modernism and began to write more commercial work to bring in money. Her plot-driven stories were serialised in the Ladies Home Journal, among others, and feature romances and life on the high seas, drawing on her love of sailing - the wheelchair didn’t stop her there, either – the Australian Dictionary of Biography states that ‘with an adventurous spirit and 'resolute recklessness', she would board any boat that would take her wheelchair—she once returned to Florida in a 24 ft (7.3 m) ketch.’

In this sense Cottrell broke free of the throttling post-war conservatism that, as scholar Susan Sheridan discusses in her 2001 Dorothy Green Lecture, shoehorned women into femininity and domesticity. As Sheridan points out, women were actively making art during this period, but were described as creating ‘in their spare time’ so as not to rock the boat. Thea Astley, Sheridan writes, ‘tells a horror story of how she felt she had to “neuter” herself, to take on a masculine narrative stance, in order to be taken seriously as a writer.’ Female poets such as Judith Wright fared a bit better, possibly because of male mentors such as Douglas Stewart, poetry editor of the Bulletin, and because poetry tended to escape the censor’s pen.

Cottrell, sailing in the clear seas of the Caribbean rather than the hotbed of anti-communist and nationalistic fervour of post-war Australia, was motivated by a different set of concerns. The most obvious of these, as mentioned above, was the need to make money; another was her wanderlust (she said that if she had travelled less, she might have written more) and a third was her love of the natural world. This latter is what I enjoy most about her work, particularly her descriptions of its sensory profusion and its force (hurricanes feature often in her stories). However her depictions of Caribbean people grate on me (there is usually a white saviour), even as I recognise that Cottrell was of her time.

Being in Munich rather that Brisbane, where I could have gone to the State Library of Queensland to look up Earth Battle, Cottrell’s second novel which I’ve been meaning to read for years, I’ve selected one of her stories saved in my folders, ‘The Mysterious Box,’ published in The Saturday Evening Post on 26th June 1954. The story opens with a Caribbean man, Daniel, on his way towards his boat on the shore. He stops to part the ‘heart-leaved trees’ to see a dilapidated cottage on which he has his heart set to make his home (complete with a pearl-grey cat). However, he feels (and must have felt before) a terrible sense of loss ‘for the non-existent cat, for the brilliance and perfection of the cottage as it could be and was not.’

I thought this was going to be another tedious story along the lines of ‘Hurricane, North Atlantic’ published in The Saturday Evening Post in 1947, in which the white doctor and his wife struggle to save an island’s inhabitants during a hurricane (and the wife, who has told her husband she is leaving because she’s sick of island life, suddenly realises how much she loves him and decides to stay, blergh), but the next few lines of the story diverted me. Cottrell continues Daniel’s story: ‘Threading through the final stunted mangroves bordering the sound, [Daniel] considered the three things that put the cottage beyond his reach: the poorness of the islands, the fact that he was black, and the fact that he was “simple”.’ I was interested because of the mention of disability, race and poverty, and read on to see how Cottrell treated these subjects.

As a 25 year old captain, Daniel, who was preparing dynamite to blast a pathway through the reef (I’ve read of this happening a few times in Cottrell’s stories, it must have been a common technique), accidentally sets off the dynamite, killing his young wife and damaging his head. Cottrell describes Daniel’s disability thus: ‘It took him longer to think of things than it took other men; longer to make a reply. But he was also much closer to the birds and the animals and the insects than were normal people.’ 

Daniel’s perspective offers Cottrell an opportunity to pen her detailed descriptions of the living world: ‘he noted now that the sound was full from the east wind and that where the salt water lapped in round the little mangroves it was very clear; part sky reflections, part glimpses of submerged roots and rock, part shadow patterns of the little trees. And on the exposed rock were segmented ice plants and the brighter green of purslane – that had made new leaves since yesterday – while the lappety, floppety slap of the sea was a whisper and a running tune.’ It’s lovely writing.

Here, too, is evidence of Cottrell’s plotting: create a character, create enough sympathy for that character to enable the reader to root for them, and then put something in the character’s way to make the reader read on to see if the character gets what they want. Daniel creates beautiful quilts and embroideries, and ‘each year he sold one quilt locally to pay for materials and for the postage on the rest, which were sent to delight children who would never walk again.’ That engendered my sympathy for Daniel, perhaps also because it’s clear that Cottrell is drawing on her own experience here.

However, I didn’t buy her depiction of Daniel as someone who is intellectually impaired. Daniel’s close observation of the natural world leads him to contemplate the crabs on the beach that collect pieces of jewellery in their claws. After searching the area for six months, he unearths some treasure (the ‘mysterious box’ of the title) while diving in a storm. The only way that Daniel seems different to anyone else is his need to ask an elderly fellow inhabitant, Granny Fich (who seems to have seizures, if I interpreted ‘fits’ correctly) what he should do with his heavy spoils. Daniel muses that he wishes the island’s commissioner, who had once been kind to him and commented favourably on his quilts, would tell him what to do. Granny Fich recommends that Daniel hide the box in a watermelon in a crate and take it to the commissioner.

Daniel sets sail for the commissioner’s residence, but the watermelon begins to suppurate in the heat and the captain threatens to throw it overboard. Daniel is adamant about holding onto the melon and an interesting switch occurs: it is thought that because Daniel is intellectually impaired, he shouldn’t be parted from his attachment. He is allowed to keep the melon, and when he docks he takes it to the commissioner, benefits from his spoils and buys his house with the pearl-grey cat and some proper black tea for Granny Fich. Cottrell, although she positions Daniel as subordinate to white people, at least recognises and seeks to convey the inequality created by structures of capitalism, colonialism and ablelism.

I don’t know how well this story fits into Bill’s discussion of the defining features of Gen 3 – Modernism and social realism – because the story isn’t Modernist and I think it’s romantic rather than realist. However Cottrell has largely been forgotten in analyses of Australian literature, which seems remiss when her time on her uncle’s station at Ularunda and on Dunk Island indelibly shaped her writing and her adventurous spirit. If these spotlights are about drawing attention to (still overlooked) women writers in Australian literature, Cottrell should be on the stage.

#AuthorsForFireys (and a bit of science)

When I was in primary school, my mother bought an illustrated book on the greenhouse effect. I read it avidly from cover-to-cover (perhaps indicative of my early environmental consciousness) while my brother used it in a school project for which he received top marks (although that was nothing unusual). The book was published in 1984, which means that information about global heating, accessible to 8 and 9 year olds, was available NEARLY FORTY YEARS AGO.

In 1988, Dr Tom Beer published the first study in the world on the impact of the greenhouse effect on bushfires, predicting the catastrophic conditions that have burned through 12 million acres, killed 23 people and affected half a billion animals, with many populations expected to become extinct (I would add that plant populations are likely to be severely affected too).

The Garnaut Climate Change Review, published ten years later in 2008, indicated that ‘fire seasons will start earlier, end slightly later, and generally be more intense.’ These effects would be ‘directly observable by 2020.’ Well, that’s a bit of an understatement.

Over the last decade, when we should have been acting on this science, public sentiment was instead swayed by lobbying and the Coalition (those two things are linked). For evidence on the ways in which the Coalition has contributed to the terrible situation in which we find ourselves, read this thread.

The Liberals’ obsession with the surplus, together with their indifference to the ecosystems upon which they rely, have reached their apothesois in Scotty from Marketing, who tries to sell his belated response to the emergency with an ad featuring the ADF (who aren’t trained in firefighting) to the dinky tune of Tropical Beats. No wonder he was fired from his Tourism Australia job. No wonder a comedian has donated more money to the climate emergency than he has.

The ABC has been valiant in its reporting (and of course the government wants to cut their funding again next year), and have produced a page listing ways in which you can help. Writers across Australia are also mobilising through #AuthorsforFireys on Twitter. As of today, for six days, you can bid on Twitter for awesome literary goodies such as packs of books, signed copies, mentoring and manuscript assessments, a visitation from Trent Dalton to your bookclub (he will bring French champagne), artworks and prints (I have donated a copy of Hearing Maud). The proceeds will be donated to the Country Fire Authority.

I am hoping that this terrible disaster will mean change. People are pissed off – even beyond the echo chambers of my social media channels – and I hope this means that they will vote for the ecosystems that keep them alive. As scientist Dr Joëlle Gergis writes, ‘There genuinely is no more time to waste. We must act as though our home is on fire – because it is.’

11,000 scientists have called for urgent, necessary action, and in this article there are also some suggestions for what individuals can also do (it’s not radical stuff). I would hasten to add, however, that we must privilege Aboriginal people’s voices in discussions about Australia’s environment. They have worked with fire on this continent for thousands of years, & while colonisers have buggered a lot of things up, it doesn’t mean Aboriginal knowledge is redundant, and as it’s not as if the current policies are working very well.

Bid on a book. Sew a pouch for a possum. Donate to firies and wildlife groups. Read about cultural burning and support the groups that do it. Vote to protect our precious ecosystems, not only for humans (who are, aside from dickwads like oil moguls & Scotty from marketing, largely good and kind) but for the myriad non-humans that don’t deserve to burn at our hands. They keep us alive; we should protect them in turn.