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.

#AuthorsForFireys (and a bit of science)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rebooting

At long last, I am getting back to my blog, if only because I am incapacitated from too much Christmas merriment yesterday and I have not been able to a) get out of my pjs or b) get off the couch.

I pen this from Munich, where I’ve relocated for six months to take up a fellowship at the Rachel Carson Center for Society and the Environment. I’m writing a scholarly book on the genre of ecobiography because it is, surprisingly, little-researched, despite the term being coined some two decades ago. I presented on my work at the RCC’s Lunchtime Colloquium last Thursday and a screening of this will eventually appear on YouTube. In the meantime, you can watch this video on my work which my excellent friend Prue Gibson made as part of a series on plant blindness. Prue is a plant studies expert and does loads of interesting, multidisciplinary work with plants and herbariums.

When I finish here at the end of May, I’ll move to Edinburgh for two months for another fellowship at the Environmental Humanities Network at the University of Edinburgh, then I have a month-long fellowship at Oak Spring Garden Foundation in Virginia in the US (this is an offshoot of the wonderful Hedgebrook Foundation for women writers). Over these three months I’ll be working on my ecobiography of Georgiana Molloy. I think I will need to relocate to WA for a few weeks to finish a few things off when I get back to Australia, and then the book will be done. Moving to Scotland is critical for my research as it will give me an understanding of how Georgiana perceived her environment, and how this both shaped and was altered by her translocation to Australia. And the OSGF is a centre for garden history so that will be very helpful for my research on Georgiana’s gardening.

I applied for these fellowships when my postdoc was ending and I was staring down the barrel of destitution. As it transpired, my institution also created some new appointments for people like me who are coming off Australia Research Council grants, and so I applied for one of those too, and then I was successful in all my applications. I was lucky that I’ve been able to take LWOP and do these fellowships overseas, & also have a job to come back to, although it’s only for a year (such precariousness in academia is the norm – secure jobs are few and far between these days).

As readers of this blog will know, trying to get my book done while on a postdoc was really hard. Partly it was because finishing Hearing Maud took way longer than I thought, but it was also because the expectations that I teach just about killed me because of my deafness. It was getting easier before I left, and I have some new hearing devices via the NDIS which work really well, but I have been so flattened by stress and anxiety that I really need to get away from academia & get better. I haven’t been writing creatively (this is not the same as writing academic papers) and that has also been extremely difficult as it’s integral to my mental health.

I’ve also realised that I’ll only ever be able to work part-time as an academic if I want to write, because of the expectation that I teach – it’s exhausting for most able-bodied people, but when you throw severe-to-profound deafness into the mix, it’s impossible. Which means, essentially, that my disability will curtail the amount I can earn. In this I am hardly alone. I was so pleased when a young deaf writer whom I mentored earlier this year, Fiona Murphy, won the Overland FAP Prize for her essay ‘Reasonable Adjustments,’ about the discrimination against deaf people by Australian employers. This is a beautifully written essay and Fiona articulated my despair and frustrations, using facts and statistics, in a clear and erudite way. I urge you to read it. 

The first few weeks here have been anxiety-inducing because I am a deaf person in a country where English is not the first language (although practically everyone in Munich can speak English, a source of great embarrassment to me as I only know one language & that makes me feel uncharitable). The flight over was horrendous as the plane in Armidale was broken (I flew out from Armidale because I was visiting my parents and also gave a keynote at a UNE symposium on ecopoetics). They had to fly an engineer down from Sydney, which meant I was delayed by four hours and missed all my connections, including picking up my apartment keys at the other end. On the plus side, though, when I woke up there was snow!

SNOW!!!

I also, a few days after arriving, attended a conference in nearby Augsburg on life writing in the dystopic present. It was a fantastic conference  — it was small, which meant I had the chance to meet some great people — and it was held in a hotel & conference centre which had once been a monastery, and the building retained its austere aesthetic. I applied to go to the conference with a friend who is in Aberdeen for a year and luckily we were both successful, which meant we caught up over gluhwein & the Christmas markets. However the conference also meant two days of solid listening which, together with jetlag, was pretty crushing.

Did I mention how much we endorse the gluhwein?

My partner is here for a few weeks now, which is just lovely, and we’ve partaken (arguably too much) of the gluhwein at the Christmas markets, visited Regensburg and Nuremburg, and tomorrow we’re off to Dresden. All this has been a great restorative. A few days after we get back he will return to Oz and I will throw myself into my work not only to distract myself, but because writing is like wandering from dry regions to a waterhole.

The Danube in Regensburg.

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.

Notes from the Field (xiv)

To get from Edinburgh in Zadar in Croatia, it seemed the only way I could fly (at least according to the fellow at the uni travel office booking my flights) was via Ireland, arriving in Zadar very late at night. It made for an annoyingly long trip when all I wanted was to see my b/f again, having been apart from him for 6 weeks. So at Dublin I checked in again, and the flight attendant helping me said, ‘There are a lot of youth on this plane. There’s a festival in Zadar.’ I wasn’t sure what she meant, or if I’d heard her properly, until I got to the departure lounge and found myself surrounded by fifteen year olds. As I stood behind them in the boarding queue, feeling conspicuously old, I wondered how on earth their parents could let them go to a foreign country when they were so young, unless it was like sending them from NSW to Queensland, given that the borders in Europe are so fluid.

And lo and behold, on the plane the young ‘uns became very lively indeed, and towards the end of the flight they were shouting, singing and harassing the male flight attendant. As the plane dipped into Zadar and the lights went out, they switched on the torches on their phones to make strobe lighting and continue their discotheque. I was able to turn off my hearing aid and keep reading, but the poor bloke beside me was not so lucky. The flight attendants were pretty tight-lipped as we filed out.

As I was arriving at 11pm in a foreign place, I had prebooked a taxi, and was relieved that the driver was a woman. She had short blonde hair and chatted on two mobile phones as she drove, switching between them. When she pulled up outside the city wall, I didn’t have far to walk to reach the AirBnB, but I was still anxious because it was so late. I had told b/f, who had arrived that morning from Germany, that I was concerned, but when I found the square in which the apartment block stood and texted him, there was no response. My fond feelings for him dissipated. I called, but he didn’t pick up, & I started to get angry. I sat down for a bit, waiting, & wondered if I would have to be there all night, & if it was safe. It didn’t feel safe, but this was beyond b/f’s conception as he wasn’t a woman & didn’t have to worry about being raped. Eventually I tried phoning again and to my immense relief he picked up. ‘It’s your girlfriend. I’m downstairs,’ I said tersely. Apparently he hadn’t slept on the bus from Munich & had been asleep since he checked in. I still couldn’t believe that he hadn’t stayed awake when I’d told him how worried I was, but I was too tired to argue & passed out. The next morning I was so pleased to see him & to be in a new city that I got over it.

Roman Ruins

We were in Zadar for a field trip of Kornati National Park organised by the University of Zadar, in association with the European Society of Environmental History conference in Zagreb. The field trip was on the Monday, so during the weekend b/f  & I wandered the cobbled streets of Zadar and made much of the local red wine and Pag cheese in the restaurant next door, though we were drenched at one point by an unexpected downpour (not so different to a Queensland storm). I loved the city; it was small, clean and compact, its people unhurried. We found the Sea Organ, which makes sounds when waves rush in and out of it, investigated the Roman ruins, drank lemonade by the sea, slept in the heat, then bought beer and cider from the supermarket next door and drank it on the balcony of our AirBnB.

Walking to the jetty in Zadar.

On Monday we made our way to the boat ramp for the tour of Kornati National Park, & I was very pleased to meet some Australian academics in the group. When we set off, the tour operators gave us a nip of something that tasted like pretty rough grappa. It went down with a burn, but I liked the novelty of it: shots for morning tea!

The Kornati archipelago is made up of 89 islands and was declared a national park in 1980. No one lives on the islands now, but during the war, the guide told us, children were sent there because it was safer than in the cities. There’s very little water and vegetation, due to deforestation. The rocks were of karst limestone, which settled in striking curved ridges upon the water. They were stark white against the astonishingly blue water.

I had asked b/f to bring my snorkel & mask over from Australia, but in the bay in which we swam, there was disappointingly little to see, aside from some sea slugs and a few schools of fish. There was plenty of algae, so the ecosystem was obviously unhappy. Beyond a chain slung across the bay were yachts; evidently an attempt to try to rehabilitate the bay by keeping them out. As we headed back to a café to rehydrate, b/f mentioned that we had disturbed a nudist when the group of us walked onto the rocky shore, & that she hadn’t look too impressed about having her morning disrupted. I hadn’t noticed any nudists, being too excited about getting into the water for my first swim since summer. We sailed on to Nature Park Telašćica where we watched some archaeologists from the university carrying out a dig. We climbed a rocky hill and explored a church, and admired the long stone fences that curved over the hills like a spine.

After the tour, as the sun went down, b/f & I returned to the Sea Organ to check out the nearby Greeting to the Sun, a large flat disc that lit up with neon colours. The place was crammed with families and was very cool. We walked back through the markets and the air was still mild. I’ve always loved those European summer nights.

Notes from the Field (xi)

From Newcastle I took the train to Carlisle to look at Georigana’s letters, which are held in the Carlisle Archive Centre. I needed to get to Helensburgh by the weekend, so I could only spend a day here, before returning the following week. I’ll write about Carlisle in the next post.

When Georgiana’s mother and sister became intolerable, she stayed with her friends the Dunlops at Keppoch House, and later with Helen Storey, who married the minister at Roseneath. I needed to get a sense of the environment through she moved, so as to compare it to her experiences in Australia. I also wanted to look at Keppoch House.

I’d only been to Scotland once before, when H & I went to Edinburgh to see his pal Guy Hollingworth perform at the Fringe Festival. So I was delighted when we crossed the border and the train driver, in his Scottish accent, called over the P.A. ‘Welcome to Scotland!’ and he told us he’d grown up in a town nearby. I had to change very quickly at Glasgow, without having a clear idea of where I was going, but still took two seconds in the square to listen to a man playing bagpipes.

From Glasgow the second train travelled west through the suburbs, then parallel to the River Clyde until it reached Helensburgh. I dragged my suitcase up to the AirBnB place where I was staying. The town was very quiet, with streets sloping down to the sea, and the sky was so close it seemed I could touch it.

In the afternoon I walked along the water to look at Roseneath Bay, on which a number of boats bobbed. When Georgiana lived there, boats were the main way of getting about as the roads were pretty rudimentary.

Rosneath Bay

I’d arranged to have a look around Keppoch House, and after some discussion with the bus driver we worked out where I was to get off. The owner of the house was a smart and jovial man who had worked as a commodities trader, and he offered me coffee in his kitchen. Outside, the sunshine was brilliant and very warm. ‘This weather,’ he pronounced, ‘is a lie.’ After our chat, I walked through the trees surrounding the house, which had views sloping down to the water, and saw a fox slipping into the greenery. I also wandered through the walled garden, but I wasn’t one hundred percent sure if it was the same garden as when Georgiana had stayed there. I had met the gatekeeper’s wife as I walked up the drive and I thought she said it had been in a different place, but being deaf I wasn’t entirely sure. If I get back to Scotland I'll try to see if there are any plans in the archives.

View from the trees at Keppoch House.

What struck me most was the proximity of the water and the size of the house. Georgiana wrote in her diary about being very cold in winter, and I wondered if the house was hard to heat (I had turned the heaters on in my accommodation in the summer evenings! But I am a thin-skinned Queenslander). And the water was everywhere – to me it suggested promise and a sense of possibility, for Georgiana would eventually sail on that sea to Australia, where her life changed dramatically.

The next day I caught a bus to Kilcreggran, passing Rosneath, where Georgiana had stayed with her friend Helen Story, who had married the minister there (alas the original church had been replaced). From Kilcreggan I caught a ferry to Greenoch. The sunlight was absolutely dazzling and the vistas were incredible, at least for someone who had grown up in inland Australia. The space between sea and sky seemed very small, the land rising abruptly from the ocean.

I got talking to a young fellow on the boat. Perhaps he heard my accent when I spoke to the man selling tickets, or perhaps he was just friendly, and he asked, ‘Where are you from?’

‘Australia.’

‘Australia! What are you doing here?’

‘I’m researching a woman who used to live here.’ I explained about her life, but he was incredulous that I’d given up the weather in Australia to come to Scotland. When we got off the boat he pointed me in the direction of the main street, which was helpful as it wasn’t immediately apparent to me where I should go.

On the boat from Kilcreggan to Gourock.

I had a coffee in a café and read a newspaper, watching a film crew busying themselves across the road, then wandered along West Bay. Here, the afternoon sunlight was absolutely dazzling, and I wished I could have stayed there for longer but I was getting pretty tired. Being deaf means I have to be very alert in new places to take in information, & I had to strain to hear the Scottish accents, so I was a bit worn out. After a wander I caught the ferry back. It was about 5pm and people were finishing up work, and I wondered about their lives, if they were happy in a small place, boating back and forth the way Alexander Dunlop had nearly two hundred years before.

At the Kilcreggan jetty where the boat docked, the boat master’s dog was sitting on a post. He was so pretty I patted him as I went past, & wished I could have a dog like him. And then it was back to my accommodation on the bus, passing the Garelochhead Military Training Camp and the Faslane Peace Camp which protests against nuclear weapons. The lady at the AirBnB told me that the lochs were so deep that submarines docked in them, which to me – again used to the arid inland – was incredible.

I regretted that I didn’t have the time or energy to see the lochs. I was still working on the latest iteration of my memoir and that took up my spare time. But I’m pretty sure another visit will be on the cards at some stage, as the scenery was just stunning, and it would be good to see what it’s like when the sun isn’t shining as strongly, as Georgiana’s experience of the weather influenced her moods, and vice versa. It would be impossible for it not to, given its grandeur and presence.

#8WordStory

Those on the Queensland feeds might have come across #8WordStory, a project organised by the awesome folk at the Queensland Writers Centre to put eight word stories on billboards across Brisbane.

It was October when the call first went out and I was swooning, as I do every year, over the purple bliss of Brisbane’s jacarandas.

So I penned a paean to purple & lo! it was selected to be shown across town. I did not get a lot of work done that day because I was glued to the webcams, thus:

The #8WordStory project is on for another fortnight or so. Head to the QWC website and submit, & you might see your name up in orange lights! Trust me, it’s pretty darn exciting. And here's another jacaranda pic for the heck of it.

Notes from the Field (vi)

I’m finally getting back to my beleaguered blogging of my research trip, having been waylaid by teaching. After the May Bank Holiday weekend, I made my way to the Royal Horticultural Society Lindley Library, not far from Victoria Station and Westminster Cathedral. This library contains early printed books on gardening, botanical art and photographs. Importantly, it also contains the original journals in which the first details and images of Australian flora appeared in British publications.

The staff at the Lindley Library were amazing. They provided me with a list of their publications relating to James Mangles beforehand, then worked tirelessly throughout the day to help me locate them.

Perhaps the most exciting publication was John Lindley’s Botanical Register, which included accounts of many of the plants grown from seeds which Molloy and James Drummond collected, and which Mangles cultivated. In 1839 Lindley, Chair of Botany at University College, London, published ‘A Sketch of the Vegetation of the Swan River Colony’, a systematic account of the flora from south west Western Australia. He states that the information was derived from a handful of preceding publications, as well as the herbaria of James Drummond, James Mangles and Robert Mangles, among others. Molloy is not acknowledged, although Mangles prized her collections, which were more carefully crafted than Drummond’s. Molloy didn’t complain about this lack of acknowledgement – she would have been conditioned not to – instead, she was thrilled that her work would appear at all. She wrote to Mangles:

The notices of the Swan River “Floral Botanical Register”, has [sic] quite inflamed my ardour; and instigated me to greater exertion, to think how small an aid I have lent to your cause —  The Colour of the Patersonia is too Blue, the natural colour is more of a violet or Amethystine colour — it really is the colour of an Amethyst and there is a yellow species at Augusta No 99, Large Hortus Siccus, with which Mr Preiss was not acquainted; but the seeds are widely different, so they may not both be Patersonias [emphasis comes from underscoring in Mangles’ letterbooks].

Often, Molloy’s passion for collecting spilled over into her admiration for Mangles. I have no doubt that this was genuine, but I also expect, given her skill with writing and the necessity for women to rely upon their femininity to achieve results, that she was creating a character that would appeal to him. Her use of the words ‘small and aid’ suggests the diminutive, an amelioration of her self, before she declares her detailed knowledge of the plants. This accords with another stylistic pattern in a passage written when she sent off her first box of seeds to Mangles:

I have no hesitation in declaring that were I to accompany the box of Seeds to England, knowing as I do, their situation, time of flowering, soil and degree of moisture required with the fresh powers of fructification they each possess — I should have a very extensive conservatory or conservatories of none but plants from Augusta, I do not say this vauntingly, but to inspire you with that ardour and interest with which the collection leaves me, and to cordially thank you for being the cause of my more immediate acquaintance with the nature and varieties of those plants that we exchanged for the productions of our own Country, and which will also benefit my Children.

Here, Molloy tempers her detailed knowledge of the plants with an explanation of how useful the collecting project is to her and her family. Her phrase ‘I do not say this vauntingly’ is telling, a deflection of the work she has put into collecting, and the knowledge she has gained of the species. To be a woman who knew too much was undesirable.

I had read a copy of the ‘Botanical Register’ online, but to see it in its original form was astonishing – the colours of the plates were still extraordinarily bright.

What was also interesting were the accounts in other volumes of the Botanical Register of the plants named after Mangles, and his attempts to grow them. Rhondanthe manglesii, for example, was described as ‘A charming greenhouse annual, introduced from the Swan River Colony in New Holland by Captain Mangles, R.N. after whom we have named it. It first flowered in the beautiful collection of Robert Mangles, Esp. of Sunning Hill, where our drawing was obtained in 1833, and whence it has since been liberally distributed. In token of its beauty it received the distinction of a medal at one of the great exhibitions in the Garden of the Horticultural Society.’

Rhodanthe manglesii

This points to the currency of flora circulating among horticultural circles in England. On one hand there was genuine excitement about new plants emerging from the soil, but on the other there was prestige to be gained through naming. George Wailes, one of Mangles’ correspondents, made repeated efforts to have a plant named after Molloy but these were ignored. More of this in a later post.

Many of the drawings in the Botanical Register were made by Sarah Drake, who went to school with Lindley’s sister Anne. Her story has parallels with that of Elizabeth Gould, who did many drawings for her husband John Gould but received little recognition. Melissa Ashley describes Gould’s life beautifully in The Birdman’s Wife.

Illustration by 'Miss Drake'

Mangles’ brother Robert, who grew many specimens in the grounds of Whitmore Lodge, is amusingly described in an essay on Mangles by Alice Coats as ‘a very large man with a very small voice’ but I haven’t yet traced the original source for this quote. There are a number of entries on the Mangles brothers in John Claudius Loudon’s Gardener’s Magazine. Loudon’s wife Jane corresponded with James Mangles a few times. She was the author of The Mummy and a pioneer of science fiction, and met her husband when he wrote a review of the book. He asked to meet her, expected to find a man, but instead found Jane. Later, Jane became important in botanical history for writing books about botany that educated girls, as many of the texts about botany at this point were inaccessible and difficult to read.

So the Lindley Library was a marvellous stop on my trip. Following this I went to the herbarium at Kew Gardens and saw some of Molloy’s specimens, which was one of the absolute highlights of my research. Again, this will have to wait for a later post.

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 Comfort Food

When Ellen van Neerven’s first book Heat and Light came out a few years ago, I fell in love with its gorgeous writing, sensuality, and interesting structure. I was pleased, then, to see that she’d put out a book of poems, Comfort Food, and used my Avid Reader points to buy a copy. I felt like I should have read the poems over a nicely-prepared curry, but I was interstate on a train (thin books and e-readers are good for travelling) and shovelled chilli-and-lime soy twists into my mouth. For someone who rarely lets herself eat junk food, they were good.

And the poems were good too: sometimes rich and chewable, sometimes dainty morsels, sometimes strange in one’s mouth, sometimes nourishing, and always delightful.

In ‘Pasta’, the warmth of a bowl of pasta is conveyed through the narrator’s consideration: ‘When my parents come to stay/I sneak out across the road/to the bathroom at McDonald’s/so I don’t wake them’; for a mother’s kindness for her daughter: ‘Mum hems my jeans/while I’m at work’; for the familiarity of family: ‘we read to each other in the car/condensation at our feet’. It’s a simple, heartening poem.

Food and sensuality go hand-in-hand, in life and poetry. In ‘Smoking Chutney’ the narrator is on the dance floor ‘just to get a closer look. Those/hips, yes. That flank. Her hair fragrant and viral. The band/also her. The beat mortar and pestle. She’s pushing down,/grinding those spices in the air’. Body, music, smell and taste become one.

But food and sex are not all comfort in a racist country. In ‘Chips’ the narrator is ‘tired with what’s unmentioned/idling in surf club bathrooms’, while that which is unspoken can be just as harmful as what is spoken: ‘what is happening with the dialogue of this country/they are killing people with words’ (21). In ‘Invisible Spears’ I was glad to read the lines ‘the tiddling fear/of invisible spears’ because I was pissed off with the overreaction to Adam Goode’s war cry: we put up with aggression from white men all the time, but can’t cope with it in black men? Jesus.

My favourite story in Heat and Light was ‘Water’, about a narrator who falls in love with a plant person. One of the things I liked about the story were its oceanic elements, and these watery associations were what I loved in ‘Meteorite’ too. This poem describes our lack of care for the environment:

The planet

is built for sea-living

but we do not pay

these creatures due respect

the porpoises

            are merely pig fish

the reef

            is a public art gallery

People mourn the passing of the reef because it’s beautiful and they don’t think their kids will be able to see it (and at the rate we’re going, it’s unlikely they will), but it’s also an incredible ecosystem that supports a vast number of animals. If we recognised that rather than seeing it as a place for visual consumption, perhaps more would be concerned for its welfare.

The sea is linked with the image of a meteorite, plunging into the poem in the opening line: ‘Your name changes when you land/on earth. What you were is now/your past.’ and it returns to the meteor at the end:

sometimes you stare

at the sky

and wish to be

what you were:

a meteor

The play with tenses suggests that we have no recourse but to exist as we are in the present, although it’s not always a nice place to be. However we carry the memory of what we were: something otherworldly, burning bright, crashing and transforming.

This is my first review for the Australian Women Writers Challenge. Due to starting a new job, travelling and moving house, it’s an even later start than last year – but better that than never!