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.

Grounding Story

True to form, I’m writing an update for an event months after it occurred – this time it’s the Aust & NZ chapter of the Association for the Study of Literature, Environment and Culture (ASLEC-ANZ) biennial conference, which was held at the University of New England in Armidale. This was one of the best conferences I’ve been to, rivalling another which was also held at UNE – the 2015 Association for the Study of Australian Literature on ‘The Power and the Passion: Contemporary Australian Literature and Politics’. Maybe it’s because I can stay at Parental Unit’s & therefore the anxiety of conferences is mitigated, and/or maybe it’s because the folk are UNE are really nice. Below are my notes from the conference, which come with the caveat that there might be some errors because I am never 100% sure that I can hear everything properly.

The conference was from Wednesday 13th – Friday 15th February. I caught the tiny plane down from Brisbane, which I loathe because it gives me claustrophobia and the vibrations from the engine rattle through my body, but the 1980s safety card never fails to put a smile on my dial (no Gone with the Wind! It’s outrageous).

 On Wednesday morning (and every morning thereafter) Parental Unit kindly stopped by Seesaw Coffee to service my caffeine addiction then drove me to the uni, though the organising committee also helpfully arranged car pools, bus & coffee for other participants from the Goldfish Bowl. Once I was dropped off at UNE, I located other friendly environmental folk plus my lanyard, which was the best lanyard I’ve ever had because it was compostable.

Uncle Colin Ahoy generously welcomed us to Anaiwan Country, and the Dean of HASSE, Professor Michael Whitmore, welcomed us to UNE. Then there was a brilliant plenary panel from Carolyn Briggs, Gabi Briggs & Callum Clayton-Dixon, chaired by Kate Wright, on the Reclaiming Anaiwan Language project. Here’s a vid which explains the work which the group is doing.

 As Callum pointed out, the reclamation project does not rely upon government funding to survive or progress, and nor is the group willing to use government funds, given that the government is a legacy of (and perpetuates) colonial rule, so donations are welcome. This is a really important project, as language comes from Country, as Callum explained, so the restoration of language goes some way to restoring Country. He also described how he had been out in the area a while before and it was like a dystopia, given the drought, tree clearing and the hardening of the ground from sheep’s hooves, which made me think of Claire Coleman’s Terra Nullius, which I set as a text in my Oz Lit course.

One of the great things about placing this panel first in the conference was that it acknowledged Aboriginal custodianship and set the tone for the rest of the proceedings. As one conference member noted, the Acknowledgment of Country at the beginning of each subsequent paper was like a pulse through the conference.

After that was the first trio of papers, of which I was a part. I presented an update on my 2014 article on climate fiction & referenced James Bradley’s Clade and Jennifer Mills’ Dystopia by way of example, and also mentioned the impact of climate change on non-fiction by way of Delia Falconer’s brilliant essay in the Sydney Review of Books, ‘The Opposite of Glamour’. She has also published a follow up essay, which is compelling reading. I also mentioned Austlit’s soon-to-be-released dataset on Climate Change in Australian Narratives, which is spearheaded by scholar Deborah Jordan. In this panel I was alongside Fiona Utley, a philosopher at UNE, and Ian Collinson of Macquarie University, who spoke about popular music and the environmental crisis – an element I’ve never really thought of before, so it was eye (or ear?) opening. Also, my dad took a break from his renos, changed his shirt & cycled up to the uni to listen to my paper, which was lovely of him.

After that was lunch (all vegetarian!), and then a set of papers centred around Storying with Nonhuman Beings and Concepts. Grace Moore gave a fantastic paper on Trollope’s descriptions of mining, and Kay Are of Melbourne Uni drew on Vicky Kirby’s ideas in relation to biosemiotics, raising the interesting question of whether the world wants to know itself by telling its stories through us.

The next keynote was a wonderful presentation of Dan Hikuroa from the University of Auckland on ‘Te Awaroa – the Voice of the River’, which was about granting rights to the rivers in New Zealand. Dan is an Earth Systems Scientist who incorporates mātauranga Māori (Māori knowledge) into his work, drawing together Māori science and Western science to benefit communities with whom he works. Much of his presentation was in Māori and it was such a pleasure to hear the language tumbling into the room.

Bushfires were raging near Tingha at this time, and as we boarded the bus to go to the community gardens, the sky was an apocalyptic orange. I sat next to a poet who had grown up not far (in Australian terms) from where I’d been raised – she was from near Coonabarabran, & I from Boggabri, & I’d met her earlier in the year at a conference on postcolonialism and climate change at the UNE campus in Parramatta. It was lovely to catch up, & also nice, I reflected, to have a year book-ended by environmental conferences. 

The event at the Armidale Aboriginal Community Gardens exhibited of a series of portraits of local Aboriginal Matriarchs by local Anaiwan woman, Gabi Briggs, honouring matriarchs who played important roles within their families, clans and wider community. The images were fantastic - bold and strong - and there were lovely people to meet, speeches and a dance performance from a young woman, but I was pretty whacked after a day of trying to hear, & I knew once the sun fell I wouldn’t hear anything as I wouldn’t be able to lipread, so I had to cut my time short & head home.

Day 2 began with a keynote from Gomeroi lawyer & poet Alison Whittaker which absolutely knocked my socks off. She described the consumption of her poems at events such as the Sydney Writers Festival (where attendees touched her on the arm for being ‘brave’) alongside the injustice of deaths in custody (out of 150 referrals relating to deaths in custody, only 11 were referred for investigation, 5 went to court, 1 was convicted & then was acquitted) and asked us: where do we locate justice-seeking literature when it doesn’t locate justice? She also called for a focus on black joy, particularly given how white people absorb & adjust (to the point of ignorance) to black suffering.

The next session I attended was a panel of writers from the University of Wollongong; Joshua Lobb, who’s just released a book, The Flight of Birds, Catherine McKinnon, who published the acclaimed Storyland, and Sue Ballard, a New Zealand curator & writer. Their process was collaborative – they had written the pieces they read out together – which to me, as a writer who works predominantly on her own, was fascinating. Their writing, which was on things nuclear, was also very good.

As it was Valentine’s Day, at lunchtime I bustled off with some other folk to declare love to a gum tree. A scientist met us near said tree and told us how last year 70 trees were removed & chipped because management were worried about them dropping branches onto people, but after some protests & a campaign they stopped chopping them down. However nearly 400 trees are listed for removal in the future. The scientist read his paean to the tree, then leapt over the ground and hugged the trunk.

Arboreal love on V-Day.

Due to tree poems, I missed a bit of the next panel, but listened to poet Kate Middleton’s musings on the ghosts of people who had been exiled because of leprosy. In the next suite of papers, Alexis Harley discussed mycelium & fungal narratives, & described how if logs with fungi spores are bashed a bit, fungi sprouts more than it otherwise would (which I thought was a perfect metaphor for the stressed out, precariously placed, and brutally productive 21st C academic), much to gourmands’ delight; Emily O’Gorman presented her research on Indigenous women who weave sedges & rushes from three particular wetlands in the Murray-Darling basin, & illuminated their ongoing connection to Country; and Kate Judith presented on storying with mangroves. The writing of those three papers wended in and out of their ecosystems in lovely ways.

That evening there was a poetry reading at the Armidale Tree Group, & then the conference dinner at the Goldfish Bowl, but I had to bypass those events as I was worn out from listening all day, even though the loop systems were great and people took care to use the microphones, which was such a boon for me (usually there is no hearing equipment or it doesn’t work).

The AGM was held the next morning at 8.30am. I’m not a good morning person, but staggered in on time with a coffee. Usually I avoid AGMs they’re too hard to follow, but this was a small group which meant I could hear, which I appreciated. And then it was time for a series of plenaries and keynotes. The first was a video conference with ecofeminist Greta Gaard on air, which was apposite given that the sky was still smoky from the fires, although by the time her presentation finished (apparently canned smog was a thing in the 60s!) I realised how lucky we are in Oz to have largely clean air. This was followed by a plenary on the Kandos School of Cultural Adaptation, which was superb in the way that it drew together artists, scientists & farmers. One of the things I loved about this conference was that it went beyond the academy & engaged with communities and organisations, which is so important in terms of getting knowledge out of the ivory tower. This was followed by a keynote from Thom van Dooren on moving & growing a population of Nihoa Millerbirds to Laysan Island in the remote Northwest Hawaiian Islands, as a way of creating an insurance population in the face of climate change, and the implications of such assisted colonisation in the context of the ongoing history of dispossession of Kānaka Maoli, the Native Hawaiian people. The final plenary was a rountable on remembering Deborah Bird Rose, who sadly passed late last year. It was very emotional and I felt for the presenters, who had been friends with Debbie. They created a moving tribute to her amazing and world-changing life and work, and it was a fitting and poignant end to the conference that was, as a fellow attendee said to me over coffee, full of people who thoughtful and well-intentioned. I agreed with that wholeheartedly, as I’ve never felt so well cared-for as a deaf person at a conference.

There was a final event, a screening of Terror Nullius at the Belgrave Twin Cinema. The movie looked really good but I had pretty much used up all my powers of concentration and, from past experience, the loop system at the Belgrave doesn’t work. So I said my farewells, went home & drank wine in front of the TV with Parental Unit & their dogs.

April.

On Science Communication

A few weeks back I presented at a symposium at UQ hosted by the Translational Research in Creative Practice group, which explores how creative practice can translate complex research in the humanities into the public realm. It borrows this idea from the medical sciences, which translates knowledge created in the lab to everyday environments – the phrase used to describe this is ‘bench-to beside’, which I like. I signed up to present on writing an ecobiography, because I’m interested in how writers can use their craft to convey science, and I think it's imperative to transmit knowledge from the academy to the public.

Last year I presented at the inaugural Quantum Words Science Writing festival hosted by the NSW Writers’ Centre, where I met plenty of wonderful writers, including poet Carol Jenkins who wrote the marvellous Fishing in the Devonian, and Indigenous writer Tony Birch, who is doing interesting and important work on colonialism and climate change, looking at how the resilience of Indigenous communities surviving colonialism might educate people on how to negotiate the increasing instability which climate change brings. I also caught up with my pal Cat Sparks, a spec fic writer who has just published Lotus Blue and who makes every occasion entertaining, even when she’s talking about the coming environmental Armageddon (which really is on its way, although Cat maintains we’ll be killed by robots first).

At this festival, Nobel Prize winner Peter Doherty gave a marvelous keynote. He expressed his ideas clearly and had a very good sense of humour, which was a balm for everyone’s depression about the US election and the implications of this for our climate. He mentioned how one of the difficulties about communicating science is that science is about quantifying uncertainty and is therefore conservative in its analysis, whereas journalism, which relies on headlines on to sell its news (at least in these days of clickbaiting), is more interested in dramatisation (these are not his exact words, but the gist of them - I had to consult ecologist-philospher-b/f for clarification).

Another part of the difficulty in communicating science is confirmation bias: the more emotionally charged an issue is, the more people will interpret information (especially ambiguous information) in favour of their beliefs.

So, what to do?

Jamie Freestone, a literature PhD student at UQ, talks about the need for making science fun, and points to the success of the World Science Festival in Brisbane. He also mentions films such as Interstellar, and I would also add that docos such as David Attenborough’s Earth II can raise awareness, although Attenborough was criticised for creating an ‘escapist wildlife fantasy’ in which‘worldwide mass extinction is simply not happening’.

I’m a bit disappointed that Freestone didn’t mention literature, however, especially as this is his field of focus.

And mine too. While entertainment has its place, I also believe in seduction, in pulling the reader into a text through imagery, language, plot and character. And this is what I’m trying to do in my ecobiography, as I explained in my presentation. The impetus for writing the book is to raise awareness of the South West Australian Floristic Region (SWAFR) which is one of 25 biodiversity hotspots around the world (and the only one in Australia), by rendering the lives of the plants Georgiana Molloy collected. I’m following them from the south-west at the time she collected them in the 1830s, to England, where they were distributed by James Mangles, a plant middleman, and then back to the south-west to see how they’re faring now. This forms the book’s plot. The characters are Georgiana and the Noongars with whom she interacted, the botanist Mangles to whom she sent his specimens, and his acquaintances, among whom he distributed Georgiana's’s specimens.

The plants, too, are characters, with different colours and textures, and ways of trapping and acquiring food, and responding to air and light. Through rendering them, I’m trying to explain that they are as just as important as humans. In a traditional biography, a human is the focus of the work, but in an eco-biography, the non-human is of equal significance. My premise is that, if we want to have a life, we need to write the lives that support us. And language is of the utmost importance in this respect - through it, I show readers the beauty and vitality of plants.

I’m nearly halfway through the project, and soon I’m heading to England to do research on Mangles and his botanical buddies, which will require much trawling through archives. Hopefully I’ll have time to post as I go, but if not, I’ll be updating my Instagram and Facebook author pages fairly often, in case you want to see what I uncover of 19th century science!

Review of Anchor Point

I grew up on a property in northwest NSW. When I was thirteen or fourteen, I remember my grandmother, who had raised her sons on that piece of land, saying, ‘We use to have such gentle rain. None of these mad storms that we have now.’ This would have been 1990 or 1991. In primary school my brother and I did projects on the greenhouse effect, and I remember the publication date of the book we pored over: 1982. And yet here we are, 25 years later, still squabbling over climate change in Paris.

We live on one of the driest continents on earth, and climate change is already increasing the intensity of droughts and bushfires. Alice Robinson’s debut novel, Anchor Point, which spans from 1984 to 2018, reflects this.

After negotiating some confusion at the opening, which was crowded with people, I was pulled into the work by Robinson’s characters, particularly the protagonist, Laura. When her mother disappears, Laura and her sister are forced to help their father run the farm, which means permanent exhaustion. Laura’s father is a hard man, probably from necessity. When her sister, debilitated by hayfever, pleads for a break from fencing, his face is ‘horribly devoid of warmth’ and he refers to her as a ‘precious invalid’ (58). Vik escapes when she finishes school, but Laura, without ambition, adjusts to the hard life and works beside her father. I recognised in her the women I’d grown up around, so strong that when her estranged husband Luc returns and tries to hold her, she ‘yanked free. Too strong for a woman, she thought later’ (219). But only if you believe in censoring our lives along the line of gender.

As Laura works, she develops a deep love for the country. At one stage she follows in her sisters footsteps and tries to live in the city, with some access to the natural world through managing her husband’s nursery. However her longing to be back on the land eventually draws her away, even though it breaks her heart and she is later ‘maddened by the brutal sum of what she had lost’ (219).

Different attitudes to land management is one of the core themes of the work. Laura’s father clears all the trees on their property so they can run sheep. Laura, attentive to the changes this creates, ‘sensed the land growing quiet. There were fewer birds’ (52). When out walking with her Aboriginal friend Joseph, they pass a group of Aboriginal women, one of whom is laughing, ‘the mirth on her face … so absolute that Laura came to a stop. How long it had been since she’d seen a smile that big’ (53). After prodding Joseph, however, she finds that they are laughing at her father’s venture.

Soon enough, the country is no joke. After a bushfire comes a drought, one made relentless by climate change. The treeless land creates erosion: ‘Without roots to sew soil, the fabric of the earth had torn’ (180). The house becomes a raft ‘they clung to in the midst of a big, dead sea’ (178).

These threads are tied in a poignant moment in which Luc, Laura’s husband from the city, recognises a canoe tree next to the house on the farm. Earlier in the novel, Laura and Joseph had bonded over this tree, which Aborigines once used to make their canoes.

When Luc recognises the tree, Laura, rattled by its association with Joseph, snaps, “Where on earth would anyone canoe ‘round here?” to which Luc replies, “Didn’t you say something about a lake? … A dam?”

The dam had dried, and so did the river which took Laura’s mother. In the bushfires that razed the country, the tree had survived, but Laura muses, “What else had burned up?” (200).

The unspoken answer is the bond and knowledge Aboriginal people have for the land. At the end of the novel, Joseph asks to buy part of Laura’s land so his people can have access to it. The implication, I thought, was that he could only have the land once it was no longer useful to white people.

Professor Stephen Hopper, a former director of Kew Gardens now at the University of Western Australia, has written about how ‘attempts to shoehorn understanding into mainstream Northern Hemisphere thinking and world view remains the starting point for concepts of environmental management, only reluctantly giving way to a truly antipodean perspective when all else seems to fail.’ This is also apparent in Margaret Merilees’ novel The First Week, which opens with the protagonist contemplating the salt-ridden soil which has been returned to Noongars, the Indigenous people of south west Western Australia. We need, as Ellen van Neerven writes in her fantastic essay on climate change, a ‘multi-nation’ approach to climate, one that uses Indigenous knowledge instead of turning to it as a last resort. After all, as Alexis Wright writes in Carpentaria, ‘Can someone who did not grow up in a place that is sometimes under water, sometimes bone-dry, know when the trade winds blowing off the southern and northern hemispheres will merge in summer? Know the moment of climactic change better than they know themselves? (3).

Australia has been ranked third-last in terms of the climate change performance of 58 countries. With mostly white, male politicians setting the agenda in Paris and Australia, it makes me despair. We need to listen to the voices of Aboriginal people if we are to make any headway in staving off the more catastrophic effects of climate change.

Laura’s mention of what is lost through fire is a segue into the final section of the novel, set in 2018, in which Laura tries to redress her father’s damage to the land by replanting the trees. This was the saddest part of the book for me, probably because Laura, too, was sad. Her mother was a disappointment, and the land, for which Laura had given up her life and her relationship, never flourished with her father’s ill-suited European farming practices. Nor does she find romantic fulfilment with Joseph, who had adored her since they were young. ‘If only they had kept in touch, Laura thought, things might now be different. But what might have been seemed long gone, with the rain’ (247). Is this a metaphor for what’s happening with our environment, and with black and white relations in Australia?

This, and the ending, with bushfire closing in on Melbourne and Vik’s apartment block threatening to overheat like a greenhouse, is a warning that we must redress things now, before it’s too late. Politicians may not listen – Australia’s certainly don’t – but writers do, and they reflect the quiet hum of anxiety among us.

This is my 6th review for the Australian Women Writers Challenge.

The River

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

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

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

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

I was told I was an idiot.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On Everyday Ecology

There are many reasons that I’m glad I’m home: my family (close and extended), old friends, the abundant sunshine, friendly people who make eye contact, fresh fruit, my favourite boutiques (Alannah Hill, Spencer and Rutherford, and Review), geckos clacking in the evening, open air pools in which one can swim without freezing one’s tits off, beaches with real sand and clean sea, eye candy in the form of healthy men who don’t run a mile at the sight of a capable woman, the bush, the marvellous Queensland State Library with views of the river, good coffee in non-multinational cafes, excellent cheap Asian food, my hilarious camp hairdresser in the ‘burbs, places where I can ride my bicycle safely and prettily, and of course the endless blue sky and the space. However, after watching the Liberal party chew off its legs like a fox in a trap, I have begun to despair of Australian politics.  Although the isolation of this country is one of its appealing characteristics, it also means there is less exposure to the politics and policies of other countries.  Over the four years that I lived in England, the question of the environment and of climate change went from an issue that could be easily dismissed (there was no recycling in the residential college in which I lived for the first year, nor in the housing commission area for the second year) to something urgent and pressing.  Although England was initially fairly backward in terms of environmental policies, change and consumer awareness happened rapidly because of the proximity to Europe, where recycling and alternative energy usage were already mainstream.  There were also, of course, more people, which meant that groundswell movements could take off more quickly.

Here, by contrast, farmers in the country work the land the same way their fathers did, and their fathers before that, despite that the fact that we are running out of water and the land was never meant to be farmed with European methods, if at all.  There is a desalination plant either in place or being planned in every city.  Not only do these kill off the oceans’ ecosystems, they’re also energy-intensive, which means more carbon output, which contributes to global warming, which in turn means less water.  And a drier continent means we are more partial to bushfires.

And while Australia burns, Abbott, Minchin and Hockey fiddle their laborious tunes and play the game of My Dick is Bigger Than Yours Therefore I Should be in Power.  Who cares about our children, or our grandchildren, or even the country itself which, at the rate we’re going, won’t have enough fertile soil or water to support its population?

It’s clear that we can’t rely on politicians stumping around on bloodied legs, and that change can and must be done on an individual level, even at the risk of our efforts being cancelled out by the permits being handed to industry.  Because what we need is the shift of a national mindset, and that will happen more effectively if it’s viral rather than imposed by above.  This doesn’t mean you have to become a greasy-haired hippy (I, for one, will not give up my shoe/handbag/frock addiction), but to think sideways, and to make changes where you can: ride, walk or catch public transport instead of driving, uses buses and trains instead of planes (where possible; it’s a big country), use aluminium water bottles instead of plastic, get a worm farm if you have a garden, re-use as much as you can, pester your council member to increase recycling and make cycling easier and safer, especially for deaf cyclists who like to wear stilettos.

Counting carbon is like counting calories, but it’s far more beneficial than anorexia.  Brother-in-law scoffed at me for wanting to ride to Avid Reader to get a book for a friend rather than having them post it to the PO box, but posting would have meant creating carbon through making the packaging and driving the parcel to the post office, when on my bike it would have cost nothing.  Maybe it’s addictive personalities that take up the cause like this …

Or maybe it’s just that I love Australia, and want my children to have the quality of life that I have, and the stupidity and selfishness of the naysayers means the likelihood of this is becoming increasingly dim; obscured, no doubt, by the smoke from fires.

What to Wear?

I’m slowly beginning to realise that there is such a thing as having too many clothes. Last Friday was V’s party and after wrestling with my velvet Fanchulla dress for ages (moving buttons, sewing and unpicking illegal seams, swearing a great deal) I finally had to concede that it was obviously made for someone with a much longer torso than mine and would never do grace to my curves in the way that I wanted. And so, feeling bereft (for it would have gone splendidly with my red boots), I pulled everything else out of my cupboard and tried to find something else. Several hours later I decided on my bottle green top, asymmetrical black skirt and the boots, and then I reflected how appalling it was that, even though I my mind was slow with exhaustion and I’d been cooking hors d’ouevres in between, one could waste so much time trying to work out what to wear.

I know that I have too much stuff because the only recurring dream I have is of being late for something because it takes me hours and hours to pack everything, or hours and hours to find something before I can go somewhere. I think I have only ever once successfully got to where I wanted to be before I woke up. But this won’t stop me from buying more clothes; there are just too many pretty things in this world that must be possessed.

And speaking of not reaching one’s destination, it seems that every time I try to get to the Orangery in Hyde Park, I am late. Last time it was daylight saving: as was my wont, I wound my watch back instead of forward and left H to read the paper for two hours until my arrival; however that was the last time I ever get it wrong, because a friend has since taught me the very useful maxim ‘Spring forward, fall back’. This time I left my bus pass at home, and being an impoverished student (in theory, at least) I can’t afford to travel without my Oyster card. I was already cutting it fine, having taken too long to get out of bed, which then left less time for the crucial activities of applying one’s makeup and doing one’s hair to one’s satisfaction. Then of course, the Tube was fucked, and it stopped, as it often does, in the middle of a dark tunnel. This is why I tend not to take the Tube. When it stops in dark tunnels, my heartbeat vaults and I start hyperventilating with claustrophobia. I marvelled, this time, that the woman next to me could read so calmly, and take out a packet of rice cakes and munch on them.

On recounting this to H and R over coffee and cake (‘This one is low-calorie,’ said the waiter as he placed a berry tart in front of us.’ After he’d gone, I took a bite and said, ‘Low calorie my arse.’ But I appreciated his efforts to make me eat it, which I did, as calories tend not to bother me), H said that if I ever do have a panic attack, I should go all-out, and scream, ‘I’m going to DIE!’ and that would set off everyone else in the Tube who was on tenterhooks. A bit like the kid who vomits on a bus, and sets all the other kids off barfing.

And just like the last time I was late to the Orangery, there were gale-force winds to contend with and the ground was soft with rain so my stilettos insisted on aerating the soil and the wind blew my hair into my face so that it got stuck to my lip gloss, and I was in a right strop by the time I got there, esp as H and R had not arrived after I walked so fast to make up (however slightly) for my lateness. But in the five minutes it took them to arrive, I calmed down, found a bench, combed my hair and tried not to squint against the light, as one needs to get as much light in winter as possible, to regulate one’s circadian rhythms.

The next day as we walked along the canal, we told B about the swans clustered around the man feeding the birds by the pond, and how they came up to his waist, and B in turn told us of some trashy newspaper like the Sun that had the headline ‘Asylum Seekers Eat Swans’ and I thought how interesting that was (regardless of whether it was true, which I doubt it was) – it would be like someone coming to Australia and eating all the koalas. The asylum seekers were eating the swans that were protected by the queen – they were eating the heart of the empire, so to speak. Though I doubt the Sun shone that particular light on it, except subliminally.

At work, a wall overlooking over the quadrangle is covered with leaves that are slowly turning red. But they’ve started turning on the outer edges of the wall, for what reason I can’t understand. So the centre is greenish, but the rest of it is red. In summer, when all the leaves are fresh, the breeze makes them ripple like a green ocean.

Mum said that yesterday it snowed at home – in mid-November! And also in Ballarat and other parts of Victoria. The weather is seriously fucked. I’m not complaining that it’s warm here – I loathe the British winters – but it’s disturbing when you see blossoms coming out on the trees at the Barbican in Autumn. What will they do now when Spring comes, and they’ve already flowered?