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.

2018: My Year of Writing

2018 was a bit of a bastard, I have to say. The stress of the past seven years – it’s been accumulating since I decided to apply for a postdoctoral fellowship, & has been exacerbated by teaching – caught up with me, bowling me over with an ear infection in May. The eardrum in my good ear ruptured and for a few weeks I was left completely deaf, even with my hearing aid turned to its maximum. So last year was mostly about trying to keep it together & get better, rather than doing half marathons as I had imagined (god knows what I was thinking). I dropped to 0.7FTE in July – something that took six months to be processed, even as I got sicker and sicker with repeated colds & flu & the infection. Much of last year was also spent wondering if I could even be an academic, particularly given that most positions are teaching and research, and I’m currently research-focussed. However, reducing my load really helped; I’m seeing a specialist for chronic fatigue; and I’m trying to stop working on the weekends. And on the plus side, due to needing to rest I’ve been reading much more, which has been such a pleasure.

Publications

The big highlight of last year was getting a contract for Hearing Maud: A Journey for a Voice, which will be published by University of Western Australia press on 1st July this year. I’ll be at the Byron Bay Writers Festival and am lining up some ducks for appearances in Perth, Armidale, Tamworth & Brisbane, & hopefully also Sydney, Melbourne & Canberra. The editor for the book also edited A Curious Intimacy & she loved Hearing Maud & said that my craft had really improved, so that made me extremely happy.

In terms of scholarly publications, I published an essay on Annamaria Weldon’s ecobiography The Lake’s Apprentice in Offshoot: Contemporary Life Writing Methodologies and Practice, edited by Donna Lee Brien & Quinn Eades. This was my first publication on ecobiography & it will be part of a critical monograph that I’m writing on the form next year. I also had a piece of creative nonfiction published in one of my favourite outlets, the Sydney Review of Books, on Georgiana Molloy & my decision not to have children. This was part of their New Nature series & I was delighted to be featured among other Oz environmental writers. I worry about being typecast as a writer on disability, & while this is an issue that’s important to me, my writing life has always ranged widely across genres and subjects, & at the moment it’s my driving force to educate people about what we’re doing to the planet.

As with 2017, I didn’t publish any fiction, although that doesn’t mean I didn’t try. I wrote a 12,000 word novella for the Griffith Review novella prize on tree clearing in Queensland and the mythic salting of Carthage in the Punic Wars, & I’m now going to turn this into a book.

Teaching

Due to physical collapse last year, I didn’t take on any teaching. I wrote and presented two lectures for a third-year Australian literature course, one on Tim Winton’s Island Home (which I hope I never have to read again in my lifetime) and the other on James Bradley’s Clade. I also delivered a lecture on the Environmental Humanities to a group of advanced students at the Australian Catholic University in Banyo. This year I’m convening that third year Australian literature course & tutoring two of the four classes.

King’s Park. So gorgeous.

Conferences

2018 was the year of overkill when it came to conferences – I went to seven of them and was on the organising committee for one – never again! The first, in February in Parramatta, was on postcolonial literature and climate change. It was a small and very enjoyable conference, but I was struck forcefully by how few young people were there. It’s part of the hollowing out of the humanities, & young people thinking that the humanities won’t help them find a job (I think studying humanities is one of the best things you can do in a coming world of automation but that’s a blog for another time). In the middle of the year I headed south to Canberra for two conferences – The Literary Interface, for which I organised two panels on science and literature with Dr Clare Archer-Lean of the University of the Sunshine Coast, and the Australian Historical Association conference. The latter was only the second history conference I’d been to and it was absolutely huge. I had a ball & met some cool people. I also caught up with my good friends in Canbez which is always a bonus.

Then, although I was still not feeling great & had depleted my reserves of energy with a week of listening, I flew up to Sydney for the Deaf History International conference. I was a bit nervous about this – I never know whether Deaf people are going to accept me or not because I wasn’t raised Deaf, even though I’ve lost 75% of my hearing – but they turned out to all be lovely. And the most wonderful thing, aside from the people, was that the equipment worked beautifully. All I had to do was turn up at the conference, put my hearing aid on its T-switch to access the loop system and I heard everything so clearly. I even had the luxury of being late one day, when usually I have to panic about getting places early so that I can check that equipment is working & that I can hear. I was inspired to start learning sign again, but after I looked into it with Deaf Services Queensland I realised I have no time this year because of my exhausting job. It’s either nearly a full day of lessons or two nights a week, and the day classes were full and I’m too tired in the evenings to function. So learning sign is on hold again.

At the end of the year I flew to Perth for the Australasian Association of Writing Programs conference. This was my first ever creative writing conference and I’m always glad of a reason to go to Perth. I met some great people, caught up with others who I knew, met my publisher for coffee and went for walks in Kings Park. Gosh I love Perth! I would move over there in a heartbeat, except that I know I would miss my family terribly.

I was on the organising panel for the International Association for the Study of Australian Literature conference, which was held at UQ in December. I arranged an event on sexuality and sport with writer Inga Simpson, scholar Rebecca Olive and artist Eric Bridgeman, which was prompted by the current exhibition of the UQ Art Museum, Play On. Following that conference I flew to Melbourne for a conference on colonialism and archives, which also went well, but by that stage I was pretty dead from my massive year & I just wanted to be back home again. I organised a panel on collecting with Anna Johnstone, a colleague from UQ, and Deidre Coleman from the University of Melbourne who does fabulous work on entomologists, and that worked out really well. However, fewer conferences this year are in order.

Supervision

Nearly all of my 4 students have submitted their work now. One passed with flying colours, two are being examined and one more has yet to submit. I’m always impressed with how well their work scrubs up, particularly when I consider my own paltry efforts with my PhD 10 years ago. Along the way they have done really well, with one winning a fellowship for creating digital art biographies, and another winning a Griffith Review fellowship which led to this fantastic publication.

Research

September saw me heading to Perth for the Cape to Cape trek. This gave me a fantastic sense of the environment through which Molloy moved, and the time and distance it took for Noongar people and colonists to move through the area. A blog post on this in the pipeline - I have to get my photos up at least because the environment was just extraordinary. I also made contact with some wonderful scholars working in botanical history - Alex George in Perth, and Sarah Maroske at the Herbarium in Melbourne. Sara and I will be presenting at a conference at Baltimore next year with my pin-up scholar Ann Shteir - I was pretty over teh moon when I received their invitation. Other than this, I was very much stymied in the writing of my ecobiography, which is starting to drive me quite mad.

The Year Ahead

At the end of April I’m moving onto a new contract which is teaching and research, rather than the research-focussed contract which I’m on now. This means that I won’t get much more research or writing done, although I’m certainly going to try. I’m sure able-bodied people can do both teaching and research, but the impact of teaching on my body is so severe that I need a much longer recovery time. However, my options are pretty limited at the moment so I don’t really have a choice. The rest of this year will be about writing what I can, when I can, amidst lecture preparation, tutoring, marking & publicity for Hearing Maud. My consolation is that I ever was, & will be, a tortoise rather than a hare, and I always get there in the end.

Notes from the Field (xv)

From Zadar we caught the bus to Zagreb. The University of Zadar scholars were running another tour an agricultural area that day, but I was anxious to get to Zagreb and work out the layout of the city before the environmental history conference started.

I always enjoy travelling on public transport because I can read, or look out the window. As we bussed out of the city and started climbing into the mountains, the landscape changed. The karst limestone gave way to tall pines which, with the elevation, made the environment seem more European than Mediterranean. The bus trip was only about four hours, and when we arrived we caught a tram west (a friendly local explained how the tickets worked) and then walked up a steep hill to reach the apartment in which we were staying. It belonged to a writing friend’s father, and I bowled over by his generosity in hosting us.

St Mark’s Church

Once we downed our bags, we found lunch a German beer garden then we walked up to Markova Square in Upper Town. The cobbled square houses the Croatian parliament and St Mark’s church, which has an amazing tiled roof with the Mediaeval coat of arms of Croatia, Dalmatia and Slavonia on the left side and the emblem of Zagreb on the right. We were there, however, to see the Museum of Broken Relationships, housed in a former baroque palace. Small objects lined the walls, each with a story of heartbreak. Some of them were funny (‘His dog left more traces than he did’), and some were dreadfully sad (a child never had the chance to say goodbye to their parent). As with most of my museum-going, I became saturated pretty quickly, but b/f looked at each exhibit in turn. I assumed that he found it moving because, unusually, he took my hand and held it for a while as we walked back to the apartment. 

Dolac Market

The following morning was free, as the conference didn’t begin until that afternoon. We moseyed along the streets to Dolac Market, a sea of red umbrellas shading piles of fruit and vegetables and bottles of olive oil. We snapped pics of the Cathedral of the Blessed Virgin Mary (currently undergoing renos) in Kaptol Square, then wandered down to the University of Zagreb. I left b/f to his own devices, registered at the conference and went to two sessions, then met him again for the keynote, which was on climate change and migration. Unfortunately my Roger microphone, which I use for listening, doesn’t work at long distances so I couldn’t hear anything of it, and instead studied the marvellous chandeliers hanging from the ceiling. B/f said the keynote wasn’t that great anyway.

A bunch of very cool pitcher plants.

Although I love conferences because I learn so much in a short space of time, I find them massively stressful. Listening for several hours at a time is exhausting, especially if I’m in another country and the speakers have accents. I also have to ask to complete strangers if it’s okay to put the Roger microphone on the lectern, or to wear it, and because they’ve never usually encountered a deaf person before they look at me weirdly. When, before one session, I tried to explain to the chairperson what it was, and asked if it was okay to place it on the lectern, he barked ‘What? What?’ until one of the presenters, a young English fellow, intervened and said he was fine with using it. When I complained to b/f afterward about how affronted I was, b/f pointed out that the chair wouldn’t have been communicating in his first language so he was probably finding it hard too.

This was the first time I’d been to a history conference and I confess to finding it less interesting than a literature conference (although this was definitely not the case in the recent Australian Historical Association conference in Canberra, which was amazing). I kept waiting for people to talk about language and style, and when there was nothing of that I felt a bit starved. The theme of the conference was ‘Natures In-Between’, reflecting Croatia’s role as a meeting place in Europe, and the range was enormous. I enjoyed the Australian contingent’s papers (one was on Antarctica, another on the mosquito as a non-human agent), and others on managing water in the Netherlands, or the daily weather reflections of Gilbert White, an 18th C parson who is regarded by many as England’s first ecologist. My paper, on ecotones in south-west WA, was more of a literature paper than a history paper & that didn’t go down altogether well with some listeners, but I took their comments on board and found them constructive.

Gleditsia macracantha Desf. Not your friend on a dark night.

On our final day in Zagreb it was raining, and b/f took me to the Botanical Gardens, thinking that I’d like it. I certainly did, especially as I was a bit rattled after giving my paper. I was very pleased to have him there in general as I felt so out of place, and I was exhausted from trying to listen all day. After examining lily pads and a horrifically spiky tree that you wouldn’t want to run into on a dark night (Gleditsia macracantha Desf.), we wandered through the grand part of town, with tall European buildings lining the roads. Some markets were on in Parc Zrinjevac, but they weren’t really humming because of the rain. I’ll have to go back there, because when Parental Unit visited it was spring and the air, they said, smelled of strawberries.

Lilypads after rain.

2017: My Year of Writing

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

Cockies on the Gold Coast

Publications

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

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

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

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

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

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

UQ Ferry

Awards/Funding

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

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

Gum blossoms!

Teaching

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

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

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

Flowers at Kew Gardens

Conferences and Supervision

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

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

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

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

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

Kornati National Park, Croatia

Research

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

V cool plants in the UNESCO Stari Grad Plains, Croatia

The Australian Women Writers Challenge

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

BrisVegas rainforest

The Year Ahead

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

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

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

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

2016: My Year of Writing

This past year has been like being flattened by a freight train, and I’m only just now picking myself up and straightening out my limbs. After being perpetually unwell for pretty much twelve months due to stress and working too hard, I have resolved to do something about my work-life balance this year and to stop working on weekends. That is kind of happening, which is good, but hence the lateness of this post. Anyways, here are my literary doings for 2016.

Publications

In July my short story ‘Melliodora’ was published alongside William Lane’s ‘Vivienne’s Fingers’ in the Review of Australian Fiction. I’ve always loved Bill’s writing and was very happy to be working alongside him with this issue. It was a short piece, but most of my creative work seems to be like that of late, probably because my time is so compressed.

In August, my short story ‘Unfurling’ was published in Griffith Review. I’d been working on this story for nearly two decades so I was really glad it found a home!

I also read an extract of the work at the Powerhouse at an event organised by Griffith Review, which was a wonderful evening.

In November, my short story ‘Old Honey’, which was shortlisted for the 2015Commonwealth Writers Short Story Prize, was published on adda. I worked with Grenada-born writer Jacob Ross, a fellow of the Royal Society for Literature, to edit the piece, which was illuminating.

Also in November, my essay on Rosa Praed and her deaf daughter Maud was published in the Sydney Review of Books. I love this journal – their essayists are splendid and the editor Catriona Menzies-Pike has been commissioning really interesting work – so I was delighted to be published on their pages.

My essay on Dorothy Cottrell, an artist and writer from the Queensland outback who spent her life in a wheelchair, was also published in Queensland Review. One day, when I eventually find some time, I’ll expand this research into a book.

Awards/Funding

As I have funding to write my ecobiography for another two years I haven’t been seeking any extra cash – instead, I’m trying to save what I earn so that I can write for a few years once my postdoc finishes. However I was successful in winning an internal grant at the university to do a study on gender and vernacular criticism. This will pay for a research assistant to look at stats and compare the content of written reviews with online reviews.

In terms of awards, my short story ‘Black Soil’ was also longlisted for the Elizabeth Jolley Short Story prize. I would have liked to have entered more competitions but there just wasn’t enough time.

Teaching

In the second half of last year I was a tutor for a course on women writers convened by Professor Carole Ferrier. This was one of the best classes I’ve ever taught, covering books such as Simone de Beauvoir’s She Came to Stay, Elizabeth Jolley’s The Well, Keri Hulme’s The Bone People, Toni Morrison’s Tar Baby and Monique Wittig’s The Lesbian Body. My students responded really well to the texts, as well as being motivated, politically savvy and articulate. I was hugely impressed with all of them. In the second half of this year I’ll be convening this course, though with slightly different texts.

Conferences and Presentations

In July I attended the annual conference for the Association for the Study of Australian Literature at Canberra. Usually I love these conferences but I was a bit too stressed this time around as I was moving house and, having turned into a wussy Queenslander, the cold rain really got me down.

At the end of the year I was in much sunnier climes in Sydney, where I was delighted to take part in a symposium on Nineteenth Century Australian women’s writing.

I also presented a paper on ecobiography at the bi-annual ASLEC-ANZ environmental humanities conference, then headed to Fremantle for the International Australian Studies Association conference. Where the paper I presented in Canberra was on violent clashes between Noongars and white colonists, this paper was on the positive interactions between them.

Another highlight was presenting on Georgiana Molloy at the inaugural Science Writing Festival at the NSW Writers’ Centre.

Research

My research was huge this year, consisting of background reading on environment, literature and Aboriginal relationships to Country, as well as archival research. I made two trips to Western Australia. For the first I was based in Perth, copying archives about the colonisation of the south west by Europeans. For the second I was travelling around the south west of Western Australia to get an idea of the country through which Molloy moved. This year I’m travelling to England to look at the archives of the men to whom her specimens were distributed, and I’ll also head up to Scotland as Georgiana spent time there with her friends and I want to get a sense of the environment which formed her impressions of landscape. In all this I have been aided by Bernice Barry’s comprehensive biography The Mind That Shines, which is a fantastic resource.

The Australian Women Writers Challenge

Sadly, after five years, this was my last year as editor of diversity for the AWW Challenge. I’ve been too pressed for time and am trying to cut back on the amount of work that I’m doing. I coordinated a focus on Australian women writers with disability, and another one on Australian women writers of migrant background, and also arranged an interview with Indigenous author Melissa Lucashenko. I came to know some lovely writers through this, including poet Eileen Chong and fiction writer Michelle Cahill. I was already familiar with Melissa Lucashenko, Lee Kofman, Gaele Sobott and Amanda Tink and it was great to talk to them further as I coordinated the posts. I also penned my thoughts on fiction for young readers with disability.

The Year Ahead

Gosh, well, we’re already into February! After feedback from my brother and writer friends in November, I realised that my draft of Hearing Maud was dull & still too academic, and that I had to rewrite it (for the fifth time). I spent all of Christmas & New Year working on it, and now I only need another week to edit it. Then I’m going to let it fallow for a bit so that I can return to it with fresh eyes and do one final draft. As my time was so constrained this year, trying to get this book across the finishing line has been ridiculous.

The two books for which I won OzCo grants, The Sea Creatures and When the World Shivered, are going to have to wait until I’m done with the postdoc. I didn’t get to my poems, as I had wanted to, but I'm still planning on writing a novella based on my experiences in Rome. Often, I wish there were two of me as there’s so much I want to write and no time to get to it, and sometimes I feel like I’m going mad. In the meantime, though, there is my ecobiography, which is going well and which is a delight to research and write.

And hopefully I'll get some time to relax, as my writing companion Hudson demonstrates admirably.

Notes from the Field (iii)

The last few months of this year were unbelievably hectic, being filled with conferences and travel. Despite the exhaustion occasioned by running around the country, I met plenty of great people and listened to some wonderful papers.

At the beginning of November I flew to Sydney to listen to and present at the Australian Women’s Writing Symposium, which I wrote about here. I returned to Brisbane to do my marking, then came back to Sydney to speak at Quantum Words, a science writing festival organised by the NSW Writers Centre – a post about this is in the pipeline.

I’d booked a week of annual leave to try to finish my Praed book at my brother’s place in the Blue Mountains, but as it was the first time I’d stopped properly for a while, I got sick. I also ended up having to finish my marking and write conference papers, so that was a bit of a disaster.

Passed this fellow when out for fresh air & caffeine.

Then it was back to Sydney for the ASLEC-ANZ environmental humanities conference, where I presented on two ecobiographies, Dick Roughsey’s Moon and Rainbow and Margaret Somerville’s Body/Landscape Journals. There were wonderful keynotes at this conference, including Alice Te Punga Somerville, Elspeth Probyn and the wonderful artist John Woolsley, pictured here with his taped-together notes. Alice stressed the importance of included Indigenous scholars in one's work. 'Who's in your ecology?' she asked. 'And does it include Indigenous academics?' It's a point worth remembering & acting upon.

Alas I could only spend a day at this conference, as the next day I headed down to Wollongong for the Colonial Formations conference, which was just fantastic. I wish it hadn’t been on at the same time and that I could have stayed there for longer. In a keynote, Jane Lydon discussed how anti-slavery contexts were applied to Australia, for example the second fleet to Australia was contracted by slave owners, and the 1830s saw the height of anti-slavery discussions but it was also when colonial violence was endemic in the south west. She referred to the limits of empathy, in that we might feel but not act and a representation of suffering might obscure a slave's subjectivity. Coldness and compassion are two sides of a coin, which I thought was an interesting idea. There was also the secrecy of massacres - the frontier violence of Myall Creek was obscured for decades. Even Rosa Praed, writing about the Hornet Bank massacre decades afterwards, distorted her narrative.

Then there was an absolutely brilliant panel on collectors. Deidre Coleman of The University of Melbourne spoke about Henry Smeathman (1742-1786) an entomologist about whom she is writing a biography. In 1781 he wrote an essay 'Some account of the termites, which are found in hot Countries', and Deidre looked at how he used the termitary and the way in which termites colonised as a metaphor for human colonisation. She also described how insects helped him to communicate with a range of classes, including wealthy collectors and the people of Sierra Leone, where he collected. He sent natives to collect for him but their curiosity and bartering was overwhelming and drove him nuts. Ann Coote of UNE then spoke about Indigenous guides and collectors in a very clear and well laid-out presentation on why Indigenous people agreed to collect for Europeans. Reasons included obtaining useful goods and information, personal prestige, communal stability and the protection of Country by controlling the movements of collectors. Jude Philp, senior curator at The University of Sydney, then talked about collectors in Papua New Guinea in the 19th Century, and how some of these made their way into Aberdeen University so that people in Scotland could know something of Papua New Guinea. And Simon Ville, a professor of economics and business history at Wollongong, ended the session with a discussion of how the commerce of collecting - how prices were negotiated, for example, or the reputation signalling of naming.

View from train window.

It also happened to be the last day at the university for my good friend and former poetry teacher, Alan Wearne. At lunch we had a coffee and Alan printed out his latest poem for me. Then I caught the train back to Sydney, a trip which is simultaneously too long and invested with my ambivalent memories of Wollongong, but also very pretty.

2015: My Year of Writing

Last year was pretty tiring, but thankfully much less hectic than the year before. As soon as I came home from Rome, I hit the ground running and put together an application for a Discovery Early Career Research Award through the University of Queensland, a process that just about killed me. Happily, the hard work paid off and in a few weeks I’ll begin writing and researching an ecobiography of 19th Century botanist Georgiana Molloy.

For the rest of the year, I was teaching and writing. Below is a list of my literary happenings.

Publications

In February, my short story ‘When the World Shivered’ was published in the Review of Australian Fiction, together with Nike Sulway’s ‘The Nature of Things’. I loved doing this collaboration with Nike, especially as I was moving into a new genre and was a bit uncertain of myself. You can buy both stories for less than the price of a cup of coffee!

In March my essay on Georgiana Molloy was published in the ‘Looking West’ edition of Griffith Review. This was the first time my writing had appeared in this Queensland journal and I was very proud, and even more so when I did a reading from my essay at Avid Reader for the Griffith Review Christmas party at the end of the year.

In May, my essay ‘“Can I Do My Words?” On the Poetics of Deafness’ was published in Cordite Poetry Review. This essay was about how deafness lends itself to creativity. It was a new area for me and one that I liked exploring. I was also grateful that the editor published one of my poems, as I’m slowly moving back into this field and feel a bit rusty as a poet.

I also had two more academic papers published, one on Rosa Pread in the Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature titled ‘“I actually hear you think of me”: Voices, Mediums and Deafness in the Writing of Rosa Praed’. This looks at Praed’s use of sound in her novels, and how her attitudes towards listening and deafness influenced the trajectory of her daughter Maud’s life.

An essay on Georgiana Molloy and the implications of the naming system she used for the plants she collected appeared in the Australasian Journal of Ecocriticism and Cultural Ecology. This was for an issue titled ‘Encountering Australia, Confronting Catastrophe’ which came out of the conference at Prato, Italy in 2014 (you might have to create a login if you want to read the essay).

‘Hearing Maud’, a piece on how I found Maud Praed’s’s medical records and a letter she wrote to her doctor, and the implications of writing as a deaf person, was published online at Meanjin in December.

In January, Arts Queensland used me as a case study to show how I had used their funding for this research on Maud.

I also penned an article for Writing Queensland, the magazine for the Queensland Writers’ Centre, on opening lines and chapters. I also recently had one on endings published in the same outlet. It’s cheating a bit to include it in this summary but I like how they go together!

Awards/Funding

I taught creative writing at the University of Queensland for the first six months of last year, and just when I thought I would have to take my begging bowl back to the beleaguered coordinators for more work, I received a grant from the Australia Council for the Arts. Hooray! This bought me six months of writing time to write a young adult novel based on my short story ‘When the World Shivered’.

That process was both a blessing and a curse. While it was heavenly to have time to write, I realised that the project wasn’t going to be just one book, but three, as it was too complex to be contained in just the one book. So now I have added these books to my pipeline of novels to be written.

Getting these grants has absolutely saved my bacon financially and allowed me to progress and evolve as a writer. I was absolutely horrified when George Brandis butchered the Australia Council by taking away $104.8 million to create a new program, the National Program for Excellence in the Arts. Due to an outcry and a senate inquiry, this program never got off the ground (and Brandis was removed when Turnbull became PM). A third of the money has been returned and the rest siphoned off for a new program (still similar to the NPEA) retitled Catalyst. The money taken from the Australia Council to establish the Book Council of Australia has not been returned and there has still not been any word of what's happening with this council. Needless to say, my disgust with politics is complete, but at least Tony Abbott is no longer with us. You can read my submission to the senate inquiry here.

In April, I found out that my story ‘Old Honey’, which was longlisted for the Elizabeth Jolley prize last year, was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize. This totally knocked my socks off as there were 22 shortlistees out of 4000 entries. Although I didn’t make it to the regional shortlisting, the story that won the Asia/Pacific region was published in Granta and I thought it was absolutely lovely (you can read it here).

Conferences

My conference circuit was not quite as hectic as last year’s, thankfully. In February, shortly after I stepped off the plane from Rome, I headed to Armidale and presented a paper on writing about the Great Barrier Reef at the University of New England. The conference theme was ‘The Power and the Passion: Contemporary Australian Literature and Politics’. This was one of the best conferences I’ve ever been to – it was intimate, the weather was gorgeous, we travelled to Judith Wright’s homestead and I met Helen Garner. It was also good because I got to catch up with Parental Unit & their fur children.

In the middle of the year I was invited to present at a workshop on Amateur Knowledges at the University of Wollongong. This was prior to the annual Association for the Study of Australian Literature conference, which was combined with two other literary organisations to make a Literary Studies Convention. I presented on vernacular criticism in the context of online blogging and the Australian Women Writers Challenge.

I did my undergraduate degree in English and Creative Writing at Wollongong and it was odd to be back on campus again. I also stayed with a wonderful writer, Cat Sparks, who with her partner took me out to dinner with Richard Harland, who had been one of my lecturers for Forms of the Imagination (and whose delivery I still vividly remember!).

In September I travelled to Sydney for the National Writers Congress, which was a wonderful opportunity to meet other writers and see what's happening in the industry. I wrote up my observations of the congress in this post.

Later in the year I made a jaunt to Noosa to present on Rosa Praed and mourning at a one-day Death Studies conference organised by the University of the Sunshine Coast. I loved all of the papers that I heard and wished that I’d been able to stay to hear all of them, but I had to leave early to get home to finish some work.

Research

My research this year revolved mostly around my young adult novel (well, now series) When the World Shivered. As I moved into a new genre – young adult – I needed to read up on young adult fiction. I realised how important plot and action are, and when I read Veronica Roth’s Divergent series I also realised that I wanted a strong female protagonist – not just mentally strong, but also physically strong. I want to show that people with disabilities are physically capable, but not necessarily in the ways we expect them to be.

Teaching and Workshops

The course that I taught at the University of Queensland was on Narrative. I really enjoyed teaching and my students were great. In classes I showed them how to take apart texts to see how the author had created particular effects with character or language, and facilitated workshopping that was (I hope!) sensitive and constructive.

I also presented a workshop for the Queensland Writers Centre at Goondiwindi on Writing Historical Fiction, which went very well. I was surprised though that there weren’t more participants, and I realised that I could have helped the QWC with their marketing, which I will do in future. The life of a writer is always a learning curve.

The Australian Women Writers Challenge

I continued with my rewarding role as contributing editor in the area of diversity for the Australian Women Writers Challenge, which was established in 2012 to redress the bias in gender reviewing and raise awareness of Australian women’s writing.

I organised a spotlight on Australian women writers of ethnic heritage in May, which featured guest posts by author and graphic novelist Queenie Chan, Marisa Wikramanayake and Maxine Beneba Clarke.

Then in October I arranged a focus on lesbian/queer women writers, with posts by Francesca Rendle-Short, Lee Winter, Tricia Dearborn and Inga Simpson.

I was also pleased to feature a guest post by Gayle Kennedy, author of the wonderful and funny Me, Antman and Fleabag.

This year I’m planning to arrange a spotlight on writers with disability, as well as more posts by Indigenous writers.

The Year Ahead

My creative writing will probably slow down dramatically this year, as I’ll only be working on that for one day a week, on Sundays. However, from experience I’ll be a more efficient writer, as the less time I have, the more I do (which is why I like to keep myself under pressure!).

I’m planning to get back to my poems and to write a novella based on my experiences in Rome. I’m currently rewriting my memoir on Rosa and Maud Praed (it wasn’t working as it was too academic). That will be finished by Easter, and then I’ll return to The Sea Creatures. Frankly I can’t wait; I’ve missed that novel terribly. The draft for that should be finished by the end of 2016, and in 2017 I’ll return to When the World Shivered.

2016 is going to be busy and fabulous!

To Florence and Prato

It’s a measure of how busy and tired I’ve been this past year that I’m only just now writing up the trips that I took last year, to Prato, England and Rome. Fortunately, Christmas has given me a breathing space and I’m catching up on my belated posts.

Last year, after doing more research on Rosa and Maud Praed, I realised I needed to go back to England to look for Maud’s medical records. The European Association for the Study of Australia was holding a conference in Prato, Italy, in September. I had wanted to go to the association’s conference in France two years before but I was too broke. This time I had a bit of cash in reserve and decided to stop off on the way to England.

I caught a straightforward flight to Rome and checked into a hotel. When I woke the next morning I walked down to the Colosseum and attendant ruins. If someone had told me I’d be there again two months later, I would have laughed.

In the afternoon I wandered into Termini to catch a train to Florence. As I stood watching people using the ticket machines, trying to work out what to do, I was approached by a neatly-dressed, slightly cross-eyed young woman with blonde hair, who asked if I wanted help. ‘I need to go to Florence,’ I told her. She took me to a ticket machine and showed me how to use it. I wasn’t quite sure that what she was doing was orthodox, but she turned away when I slid my card in and put in the pin. When the machine spat out the tickets and she showed me the platform number on the screen, she said, ‘Ten euros, please.’ I felt like an idiot, I later emailed my boyfriend, who reassured me that it was par for the course to be fleeced at least once when travelling.

The last time I was at Florence train station was in 1999, when I was backpacking with friends around Europe. We’d just missed the train to Pizzo in Calabria, and it was too late to find a hotel, so we spent the night on the station’s cold floor. When we finally boarded our train the next morning, we went south through a gorgeous Tuscan sunrise of pink, layered with mist and shot through with gold. I tried to keep my eyes open to watch it, but I’d only had a few hours sleep. This time I was alert, and the view was of gorgeous, green rolling hills. I was ecstatic to be overseas again and realised how much I’d missed travelling.

In Florence, the station was crowded. I’d forgotten how many people there were in Europe. I queued in the taxi rank, and a middle-aged, balding man before asked me, ‘You are a local?’

‘No,’ I replied. ‘I’m from Australia.’

When the cab pulled up, he gestured for me to get in, and I shook my head and made for the cab coming after me. What was it with these arrogant, European men, I thought crossly, did they try it on with anyone?

My irritation subsided when I reached Ape Rosa, an 18th century villa that was located away from the centre. It was absolutely gorgeous, with high-ceilinged, airy rooms, ornate furniture and a lovely green garden.

As I signed in and was given my key, one of the owners dropped by.

‘I’m from Australia,’ I introduced myself.

‘You are the famous person?’

‘Noooo! I’m not famous. No.’

‘You have the website?’

‘Yes, I’m a writer, but I'm not famous!’

Still, she made me feel like a star. Later, she told me that Napoleon’s brother had stayed at villa, and what with the excellent coffee that was served with breakfast, I was pretty much in heaven.

There was a bus that I caught into town, which was very straightforward. My friend from England had intended to join me, but she was unwell and had to cancel. It was easy to get around the city, although in my jetlag I’d booked the wrong time slot to the Academia, where Michaelangelo’sDavid was housed. They let me in anyway, and as I stood in the queue, I watched a couple of Asian girls giggling at a nearby stall over the aprons and boxer shorts that featured David’s manhood. It was hard not to smile. I also chatted to some ladies waiting ahead of me, who were speech therapists from America.

David was quite good, but art doesn’t do a whole lot for me, despite growing up with an artist for a father. The next day I visited the Uffizi, which was also good, although these days, looking at Boticelli’s Venus doesn’t seem to be much different to looking at it on the internet. I was more impressed with frescoes stretching across the high ceilings. After that I took myself off along the river to the gardens surrounding Piazzale Michaelangelo, which had exceptional views of the city.

No overseas trip is complete without a spot of shopping if one has an addiction to frocks and the like, and the next day I caught a bus through the green hills to The Mall, a shopping outlet of designer labels which Mum had read about in the travel section of the Sydney Morning Herald. I was a bit disappointed – it was a sanitised, soulless and boxy place, but that didn’t stop me from buying some cashmere from Prada. When in Italy, after all, one must do as the Italians do.

In between my peregrinations in and around Florence, I sat before the window of my room at Ape Rosa, finishing an essay on Rosa Praed that I wasn’t able to get done before I left. I didn’t mind too much; there are worse places in which to write. That essay was published a few months ago in the Journal for the Association of Australian Studies. I also sat in the lovely, tousled gardens and read Annabel Smith’s new book, The Ark.

Then it was time for the conference, which was organised by Monash University, as it has a centre in Prato. I caught a train to the town, which was only half an hour away and checked into a hotel beside the river, just outside the city walls. The theme of the conference was ‘Encountering Australia: Transcultural Conversations’ and I spoke about the interactions between Georgiana Molloy and Noongars in south west Western Australia, as Molloy went about collecting plants. My paper has just been published in the Australasian Journal of Ecocriticism and Cultural Ecology (you may have to create a login to read it).

The conference dinner was at the Conservatorio San Niccolò Private Catholic School, which used to be an orphanage. I sat next to a lovely Australian woman who was doing her postdoc at Cambridge on Judith Wright and a few other poets. The next evening we did a spot of shopping and drank cocktails in the piazza, which was bliss! I think this photo sums up pretty well what I thought of Florence and Prato:

2015 National Writers' Congress

After two weeks of frantic socialising and travelling, I’m very happy to be back at my desk, and I’m not budging until Christmas. I travelled to Armidale for a school reunion (20 years! jeepers), then caught the train (instead of the plane, to save carbon emissions) to Sydney. I met up with a billion friends and attended the second National Writers’ Congress organised by the Australian Society of Authors. I went to the first congress two years ago at the Maritime Museum and loved it, so I figured that as I was in the same state for the reunion, I should go again.

Continuing with things nautical, the venue this year was at Luna Park, beneath the Sydney Harbour Bridge. The views were spectacular, and in his opening address David Marr (whom I had followed into the mouth of the clown with a coffee), urged us to preserve the ludic spirit. We were out and about and talking to real people, after all, instead of cramping over our desks with our characters. His entertaining delivery certainly set the tone for the two days, and we needed our humour when George Brandis walked into our midst.

The first session was my favourite, with a panel made up of writer Michael Mohammed Ahmed, Aboriginal artist Bronwyn Bancroft, writer and veteran reviewer Kerryn Goldsworthy and Australian literature afficiondo Brigitta Olubus, whom I often run into at conferences and who is lovely. Michael pointed out that conversations about whiteness centre around the relation of Aboriginal, Indian, Arab, Asian people to white people, which is ridiculous, especially when whiteness is something that’s completely arbitrary. He exhorted the gatekeepers of Australian literature – publishers, editors, assessors and judging panels - to have more transparency and diversity. This is something Maxine Beneba Clarke wrote about recently in an essay for Overland. At the Q&A at the end of the conference, I added that I'd like to see more writers with disability, as well as writers of colour, also recognised and represented by the ASA.

Brigitta reiterated that the study of Australian literature is far from dead, with AustLit, the Australian literature database, showing that it was taught in 199 courses in 2014 (and many of these courses are taught to teachers, who go on to talk about what they learn to their students). However, writers are readers as well. Debra Adelaide said that she always began her writing courses with two questions: 1) Who wants to be an author? 2) Who has bought a book by an Australian author in the past month? The same question is pertinent to those who’d like to be published in literary journals, as Matt Lamb, the editor of Island, has written.

Debra also mentioned that there was only one Australian book featured on the ABC book show last year, and that it was heavily criticised. Could we imagine, she posited, the US book show only ever discussing David Malouf and not Jonathon Franzen?

Jackie French (to whom I have bequeathed a small fortune, as I buy Diary of a Wombat for each of my friends’ children – and there are many) remarked that if your work is good enough, it will find a market overseas, and it will sell better than in Oz. I and a few others had some qualms about this, however. Perhaps it’s because we’re younger, and have seen just how damn hard it is to get anywhere in the industry.

On things international, Elizabeth Weiss, publisher at Allen and Unwin, said that many of the publishers operating in Australia are multi-national, and consequently there’s a lack of recognition of Indigenous authors. And while ebooks and digital publishing have enabled the distribution of Australian literature in unprecedented ways, there’s a smorgasboard of literature for readers and it’s becoming increasingly difficult to be heard.

And then came Brandis, brandishing his doom and gloom. In the panel prior we’d had the shadow minister for the arts, Mark Dreyfus, citing that 87% of Australians had read some form of literature, making it the most favoured art form in Australia. He mentioned that at the Labor conference in July the party had reaffirmed its commitment to Creative Australia, and pointed out that the senate inquiry into Brandis’s snatch of $105 million from the Australia Council to create a National Program for Excellence in the Arts (which offers no funding whatsoever to writers) had one of the highest number of submissions for any inquiry (the average number is 50-100 but this inquiry had 2,500).

Brandis tried to make some jokes about his bookshelves and his poetry reading in parliament, but as he’d taken our livelihood, they fell pretty flat. And then came a fifteen minute litany (or liturgy) on his admired (mostly dead) writers, and politicians who were writers, not one of whom, it seemed, were women (although when chatting to some writers afterwards, I was told that one had been the daughter of a politician). He re-announced the Book Council of Australia, offered a tiny bit more detail on its make up, & then finished. He left no time for questions, though I had one prepared, but afterwards I noticed he was mobbed by angry authors. David Marr had joked that Brandis was always pursued by a long line of suitors beseeching him for money, and so it came to pass. I was very glad that David Day, the Chair of the Australian Society of Authors, had the balls to say that he had grave reservations about Brandis’s announcement, even if he was admonished for it by Louise Adler, chair of the Book Council.

It was altogether a dispiriting moment in an otherwise energetic programme. Even Kate Forsyth, ever positive and graceful (we had a lovely chat about Leona Edmiston frocks and her suitcase of Leonas that she takes travelling), was upset enough to pen a post on what she’d say to Brandis, while Jessica Friedman, in another plea for diversity (are people hearing this, yet??), has written on the Book Council’s make-up: ‘Where is the representation for disabled or non-neurotypical writers; writers of colour; writers whose first language is other than English, or the young or disadvantaged or experimental? It is a remarkably staid collection of voices, one that does not represent Australian letters in their diverse and exciting entirety.'

There is a letter that writers can sign if they would like a fairer representation in the Book Council. And let’s hope that Brandis’s successor (hooray!) will reverse the insane cuts to Oz Co.

I was also delighted to meet up with a fellow writer, Annabel Smith, whom I’d met on social media. Annabel was on a panel about opportunities for creators in the digital space, and was discussing the creation of her ebook The Ark, which sounded like a terrifyingly steep learning curve. I also caught up with feminist, writer and fellow Uni of Wollongong graduate Van Badham, who was on her deathbed with illness but still soldiering on. Kudos to brave women!

I haven’t covered all of the sessions here, but I would like to nod to the last one, on reviewing. Kerryn Goldsworthy spoke alongside literary agent Benython Oldfield and blogger Kat Mayo. Kat pointed out that readers speak to other readers, and offered advice on how to connect with readers, including through newsletters (by authors and booksellers), and providing excerpts and giveaways to core readers. She also, interestingly, added that iBooks is a great platform for blind readers because they can adjust the pace, something that hadn’t occurred to me before. Benython noted that a good professional review can take a book far, including overseas. When I raised the issue that this might create some problems for women writers given that there’s still a gender disparity in mainstream media reviews, Kerryn replied that as editor of the Australian Book Review she had made sure that the gender of the reviewed authors was 50-50, but since she has left, it’s gone backwards. Geez, it’s the 21st century! Distressing stuff.

On the whole it was a great two days but I was relieved, as I always am, to get back to warmer climes in Brisbane. After two weeks of hard socialising with real people, I’m now very happily going back into my writing cave.