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.

Jean Hamilton 1922-2014

Not many children can say that their parents trekked around India for three months and left their kids in the care of their New Zealand grandparents. And not many can say that their grandmother took them to school for their very first day, but I remember staring up at Jean as I stood by her side and she talked to my teacher, Mrs Woodley. I was determined not to cry, and stifled my panic at the thought that she was going to leave me there. In later years, Jean fondly recalled me stumbling from the bus after those early days at school, my plaits unravelling, my school bag slipping off my shoulder, my laces undone, ‘But in your hand, you always had a book.’

Her fondness dissipated, however, when I threw my school bag against the wall of the verandah instead of hanging it up on the hook.  

‘And if you were asked to do something you didn’t want to, you gave them the dirtiest look,’ she added. Not much has changed.

John, her husband, once told me that he a lot of respect for Dad because he had never worked as hard as he did when on the farm for those three months.  One might spare a thought for Jean however, for when making H’s lunch for school one day, H spontaneously burst into tears.

‘Whatever is the matter, dear?’ she asked.

‘You cut my sandwiches the wrong way,’ he wailed.

My sister remembers the excitement of Mum and Dad coming home, and of painting a sheet with the letters ‘Welcome back.’ No doubt Jean and John were just as excited.

On other occasions, whenever they came to the farm to stay, all activity promptly ceased at 5pm, whereupon everyone would settle under the liquid ambers for G&Ts. After watching this a few times, my very young sister suddenly realised, ‘Oh, so that’s what adults do. They drink to relax.’ Unsurprisingly, she now has a great affinity with gin.

If Jean wasn’t smoking or drinking booze, she was gambling. When visiting her in Christchurch, H took her to the pokies, because this was what she and John used to do. They agreed to spend only $20 each. Jean spent hers in an eyeblink, but H had never played the pokies before and needed to work out what to do.

‘Come on dear, hurry up,’ Jean said, so H gambled large amounts to catch up. Suddenly, his machine lit up like a Christmas tree. They both looked on in amazement as he clocked up $70. 

‘Right,’ he said. ‘We're ahead, so we're quitting.’ However, Jean leaned over and said, ‘Lend your grandmother a twenty would you?’

Hadley gave her the $20 and went off to cash his winnings. When he returned, Jean’s machine was flashing, beeping and racking up bonus rounds in an endless cycle of wins. When it stopped, Jean was up to $230. 

‘Let's cash your winnings and get out of here,’ he said. ‘And I want my $20 back.’

H mentioned that Jean promptly spent all her winnings on cashmere. 

He also recounts settling Jean into her new apartment in the nursing home, after which time they headed out to do some errands. When they went downstairs, they passed a common room of old people staring blankly into space or at the TV, or sitting in their wheelchair dozing. Jean stuck her head in and gave everyone a good look. H was concerned that she must be thinking this was how she’d end up, half comatose in a chair.

Jean turned to him with a frown. ‘They’re all wearing skirts. I don’t have any skirts to wear. Come on, we’ll have to go shopping.’ And off she went.

It’s nice to know that my own penchant for shopping and luxury is purely genetic.

Jean was a mild-natured woman – she had to be, to withstand her husband’s overbearing nature — who enjoyed other people and their business. At the nursing home she was forever wandering into people’s rooms to start a conversation. Once, on the farm, when I was leaning against the flagpole (for we had one of those), staring dreamily across the paddocks to the hills that were softening with dusk, she interrupted me to say, ‘What are you contemplating, dear?’ I hadn’t heard her approach and drew myself up with an inarticulate noise of irritation, then waited for her to go away. 

Despite my occasional bouts of shittiness, she still adored me. While I was visiting Christchurch with mum as a 10 year old, she would look on with some amusement as I tried to get up in the mornings, dragging myself from the bed to the couch, the sound of the real world hurting my ears. That was the year that Christchurch was in drought, and the butter tasted peculiar because the cows weren’t getting any fresh grass.

Historically, letter writing gave rise to the form of the novel, and it’s possible that my obsessive letter writing to my grandmother jump started my career as a novelist. Our mail only came on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays on the farm, and on those days I would burst through the door after getting off the bus and ask if I had any letters, so that I would have a reason for writing another. I wrote about what we were doing on the farm, skited about my school marks, and sent her my stories, typed up on a Commodore 64 and printed out with a dox matrix printer. Jean was no intellectual, though, and it was hard to talk to her as she got older and her conversation became like thin broth. 

Unerringly cheerful however, Jean showed her sometimes saturnine granddaughter how to live happily and well in an increasingly difficult world. Her brightness will illuminate our lives for many more years to come.

A Country Sojourn

I can’t remember the last time I sat at my desk to write, which is awful, but on the plus side I’m back from hols and can face the mountain of work awaiting me with relish rather than horror, which means life is back to normal.

I went to Parental Unit’s early for Christmas, as I desperately needed some rest and there isn’t much to do in their country town other than sit around.  As usual, the trip down was beautiful, not least because the everlastings were out and the hills looked as though clouds had settled upon them. 

I slept, wrote, looked after the whippet for two days while Parental Unit went to Sydney to see the Francis Bacon exhibition, and had a book signing at the local Dymocks store.  There, to my delight, I met a girl who I went to school with and hadn’t seen for twenty years.  We had lived on neighbouring properties before mum and dad moved into town, and she was blind, and I was deaf, and we both went on to get PhDs.  Dad and I also had a look at the second hand bookshop which was co-owned by John Rooney, the doctor who had saved my life when I had meningitis, a synchronicity I always like as deafness set me on the path to writing.  Also, if we hadn’t moved to town at all, I doubt I would have learnt that one could travel to change one’s circumstances, nor would I have had the benefit of an English teacher who pushed me and treated me like an adult, which also helped me to gravitate towards writing.  

I swam in the local pool, which was nearly empty of people and painted a beautiful deep blue, and rode my English bicycle (too heavy for Brisbane’s hills, so it has been relocated) with Dad, and got hayfever.  And I went through some 1500 links for the 2012 Australian Women Writers challenge, in preparation for rounds ups on diversity, short stories and poetry next week.  As I worked my way through them, I marvelled at the sheer number of books that had been consumed and, as far as I could tell, largely enjoyed.    

I found out about the challenge in May, and started reviewing at that point.  Below is the list of books by Australian women writers that I read last year, with links to the books that I reviewed.  I didn’t set out to read a certain number, and I don’t think I will next year either as reading is one of the few things I don’t drive myself to do, and I’d like to keep it that way.

1. Gillian Mears, Foal’s Bread

2. Anna Funder, All That I Am

3. Sophie Cunningham, Geography

4. Sophie Cunningham, Bird

5. Kalinda Ashton, The Danger Game

6. Melissa Lucashenko, Steam Pigs

7. Janette Turner Hospital, Forecast: Turbulence

8. Carrie Tiffany, Mateship with Birds

9. Romy Ash, Floundering

10. Favel Parrett, Past the Shallows

11. Kirsten Tranter, A Common Loss

12. Kirssy Kneen, Triptych

13. Susan Johnson, My Hundred Lovers

14. Krissy Kneen, Affection

15. Eva Hornung, Dog Boy

16. Sue Woolfe, The Oldest Song in the World

17. Anita Heiss, Am I Black Enough for You?

18. Mardi McConnochie, The Voyagers

19. Tara June Winch, Swallow the Air

20. Jennifer Mills, Gone

21. Jennifer Mills, The Rest is Weight

22. Margo Lanagan, Sea Hearts

23. Susan Johnson, On Beauty

24. Chloe Hooper, The Engagement

25. Chloe Hooper, The Child’s Book of True Crime

26.Jessica Anderson, The Commandant

The challenge also asked that we read outside our genre but I largely failed at this.  I can’t get turned on by a book unless the writing is good, which is why I gravitate towards literary fiction.  I also don’t have a lot of time and prefer to read texts that will help me hone my craft.  Having said this, Margo Lanagan’s Sea Creatures (speculative fiction and young adult) was one of the best things I’ve read for ages and has prompted me to read more in this genre.

I’ve really missed reading my nineteenth century fiction, and would like to read more of that next year, so I think I’ll be reviewing more of the likes of Baynton, Praed and Dark than contemporary fiction.

Christmas was somewhat chaotic once everyone arrived home, as I was buffeted by a house full of varying personalities.  On Christmas Day we sat beneath the wisteria until the heavens opened, then dashed inside to eat dessert.  Boxing Day saw us travelling to see the rellies, which was fantastic as the cousins (many now attended by ankle biters) hadn’t been together in one place for years.  I returned to Bris Vegas to find grasshoppers had made lace of my rhubarb and the Venezualan guppy had lost his friend and was doing circle work around the tank again.  The candy striped shrimp has also disappeared so I suspect he has gone to his maker too.  There wasn’t much I could do about that, so I repacked my suitcase with three bikinis and some sun dresses, and caught the train to the Gold Coast for a New Year extravaganza which involved some innovative Rubik’s cube costume changes.  And 2013 began in the best way possible: on a beach, in a bikini, beneath a sun umbrella, reading a book.

On 'Entitlement'

I had been intending to write this post a little later, when I’d gained some distance from my novel, but given that Saturday was National Sorry Day and today is the centenary of my relative Patrick White’s birthday and ten years to the day I walked across the Sydney Harbour Bridge with H and his friends for reconciliation, I thought now would be more opportune. Entitlement is almost done, aside from the proofreading over the next couple of weeks. The last two months have nearly killed me.  My final edit, then the copy edit, went incredibly fast and the weekend before last saw me at my desk for some 30 hours, sending it off to my editor not long before dawn broke.  I didn’t go outside or check the news or any kind of social media, not wanting to break open the world I was writing.  And then, going to sleep, the characters were still interacting in my head and, for a few days afterwards, they were still walking with me to the bus stop.

I had forgotten how much these things sap you.  I haven’t been able to shake this cold and flu that has lingered for a month now.  I’ve lost weight, I’ve barely seen my friends, the pain from an old root canal flared, I haven’t been skating, although I tried to keep swimming, and some of my pet fish have died, either through negligence or because I introduced too many new ones to their tank, although they do have a history of carking it when I am phenomenally stressed.  I did, at least, put on a lovely new blue-and-red Elise frock from Birdsnest and go dancing.  Now, having finally stopped, my body is letting me know how truly bone tired I am, but I’m trying to cobble together some remnants of energy to start socialising again.

However, it was worth it.  The novel feels good which, coming from a perfectionist, means that it probably is.  The writing is polished, the plot is superb, we have a cover which I love, and it will be on the shelves in September.

Entitlement is about Cate McConville and her brother, who went missing 8 years ago.  Their parents want to sell the family property, but Cate is vehement that they can’t.  ‘What if Eliot comes back, and he doesn’t have a home?’ she asks them. An old Aboriginal friend, Mellor, whose country is owned by the McConvilles, offers Cate a solution, but it’s one that nearly tears her apart.

The idea for Entitlement came to me ten years ago when I’d just started writing A Curious Intimacy and was flatting with an historian in Sydney, in a terrace house in Paddington which features in the novel.  She asked me if I had ever considered how my life of privilege had come from the Indigenous people whose land we owned.  I was 23, and the thought had never occurred to me, which was appalling.  However, at that stage my education regarding Aborigines largely consisted of that delivered to me by Mrs Woodley in Year 2, when I had diligently copied down information on hunting tools and glued a picture of a bark humpy into my exercise book.

I started wondering about the Indigenous people who had walked over the property on which I’d grown up, a mixed farm of 5,500 acres, which must have been taken from them not long ago.  I also remembered a black stone my father had found which was smooth and heavy in my hand, and sat in the wooden marble-topped table on our verandah.  Later, when my sister married an Indigenous man and I began doing research for the novel, she pointed out that Native Title could never have been claimed for our property because there was no record of unbroken descent, despite the fact that that tool showed they had obviously lived off that land.  That seemed to me to be wholly unfair.

I can’t remember when I started to learn about the Stolen Generations, though it must have been while at university in Wollongong.  I don’t know why I can’t remember one defining moment, nor why the horror of it didn’t become apparent to me until I read Anna Haebich’s Broken Circles.  I think it was because I never listen to the radio or watch the news as, being deaf, it takes too much effort (and the spelling errors in teletext drive me mad), so if I learn something it’s usually through reading.

Nor can I remember how I arrived at the plot device on which the novel turns and which involves Cate, the protagonist’s brother, which frustrates me because usually my memory is very good.  I chose to write about my relationship with my own brother (although it has been largely fictionalised) because I wanted to write about our childhood and, on the farm, we were rarely ever apart.  To this day, he is my closest friend and seems as much a part of me as I am of myself.  We have the same sense of humour, complement each other and think alike, as evidenced by the fact that one year we gave each other the same Christmas present.  To lose him would mean losing much of myself, and this is tied up with our childhood on the land.

This, then, became the crux of the novel: I wanted to describe what it was like for a white person to lose their identity and their family through the loss of their land, in the hope that readers would then understand what it might be like for an Indigenous person to lose their country.  Of course, this is a very basic premise and, not being Indigenous, I can hardly begin to conceptualise the entirety of such a relationship.  There are many who will argue that I’m presumptuous to even try, given my background, which is similar to that of my forebear Patrick White’s: I come from pastoralists who made their wealth from the dispossession of the Indigenous.

My great-grandfather F.G. White descended from James White, who had arrived in Australia in 1826 from Somerset as manager of stock for the Australian Agricultural Country.  F.G. White bought ‘Mittabah’ in Exeter, NSW, and a swathe of other properties in NSW and Queensland.  He married Ivy Voss, a Queenslander, who hated the cold and was happier on her property in north west NSW, which she bequeathed to my grandparents, and which my father and his two brothers came to run.  There was an element of snobbery, pride in a blueblood heritage, and of learning to speak ‘properly’ hovering in our family.  ‘Are you from England?’ people would ask me, although my lack of a strong Australian accent has also been as a result of some speech therapy because of my deafness.  Somehow, despite this background – probably because of my paternal grandmother’s more democratic background and my own mother’s levelheadedness - my brother, sister and I have become hardened leftists.  This position manifests in my writing through a constant return to the lives of those who are on the margins: lesbians, Indigenous people, the disabled, refugees and so on, which no doubt also stems from my own marginalisation on account of my deafness.  And, while I am in no way comparing my writing to that of my illustrious forebear, it is true that discussions of his similar background, and of his literary intent and style, are often held in tandem.

In a Sydney Writers' Festival panel titled ‘Is Patrick White anti-Australian?’, consisting of Gail Jones, Ivor Indyk and Geordie Williamson and chaired by Michael Cathcart of ABC Radio National's Books and Arts Daily, the now-tedious question of Patrick White’s relevance and the inaccessibility of his work was raised.  My detestation of the term ‘anti-Australian’ must be reserved for another post as this one is already too long, but my impression of the questions delivered to this panel was that White’s background was somehow yoked with the impenetrability of his writing.  He was an irascible man, therefore his texts must be too, an insinuation which all three speakers heartily rejected.  Ivor Indyk referred to White’s identity as a homosexual which ran together with the many references to and compassion for the displaced and foreign in his work; Gail Jones, in her beautiful, delicate phrasing, noted White’s attention to physicality and how this was often rendered affectionately; while Geordie Williamson commented that, ‘To try and draw White into his social utterances and judge him by them is almost to come at it from the wrong angle’.  Gail re-iterated this, noting that White has been co-opted into cultural arguments, and she would like to see a return to his literariness, to the text themselves.

It’s true, Patrick White takes effort, but I have always found him amply rewarding, not least through the richness of his language, to which Ivor referred as ‘baroque’.  Besides, what kind of reader are you if don’t want a text to make you think a little?  There was some mention towards the end of the panel about White’s use of parody, and I was disappointed they hadn’t dwelled on this more, because above all, his writing is stuffed full of humour.  When I began Riders in the Chariot, I burst out laughing at his description of how ‘several barbs of several strands [of blackberry bushes] attached themselves to the folds of [Miss Hare’s] skirt, pulling on it tight, tight, tighter, until she was all spread out behind, part woman, part umbrella’.

Cathcart also mentioned White’s references to Australia as 'the Great Australian Emptiness, in which the mind is the least of possessions’.  This was taken by the panellists to mean a lack of cultural connection and a lack of spirituality, while I maintain it exists very strongly still in the recent actions of Queensland’s premier in scrapping the Premier’s Literary Awards and pushing this state towards a cultural wasteland.

That aside, how might someone who is ‘born of the conquerors’ (Judith Wright, ‘Two Dreamtimes’ 1973) and who may have, as Brigid Rooney writes of Wright in the marvelous Literary Activists, a similar ‘characteristic fearlessness and principles certainty of view … legible as signs of a born-to-rule patrician outlook' (UQP, 2009, p. 10) attempt to reconcile their privileged background with the effects of that background, namely the disenfranchisement of ‘the persecuted’ (Wright, 'Two Dreamtimes')? I have tried to do this through Entitlement by using empathy.  Regardless of my background, I still have the capacity to feel for those whose children and country were taken from them, and I hope that this novel communicates that to its readers and that they, too, might pause and consider how their lives have been shaped by Indigenous history.  Certainly, it’s a risk that I’ve taken, because I can be accused of speaking for Indigenous people with a white voice, and with a White surname, but I’m not the kind of person who will ever stay silent on issues about which I am passionate.

On Creative Practice

My father's first studio was the laundry, with the rifles for roo shooting hanging on the wall, an old-fashioned meat mincer clamped to the bench and his sloping desk squashed against the door to outside. Often, bored during the school holidays, I sat on the washing machine and watched him paint. Once we looked through the windows to see Mum, who had just woken from a nap, yawning as she pulled out weeds near the tankstand. I, who must have been 6 or so, asked, 'How can she be tired if she's just had a sleep?' Dad replied, 'She's still waking up.' I found this an unscientific and unsatisfactory answer, but even then I sensed my father's moods and knew when a conversation wouldn't continue.

A few years later Dad built his own studio, and H and I would often go there after dinner to draw on the discarded pieces of cardboard from which he cut his mounts. Dad played LPs and tapes from musicals as he painted. H drew cartoons which he cut out and stuck on the wall in our bedroom next to his Halley's Comet poster. As with my piano playing, I became technically proficient and was able to copy anything, but I lacked H's imagination and flair.

My sister, brother and I all studied art at school, and later Dad left the farm to teach art himself, littering the house with art books and study notes. It was because of this education — formal and informal — that I was able to recognise the community of artists featured in Alex Miller's new novel, Autumn Laing, as being loosely based upon the Modernists at Heide. As I lay on my red velvet couch reading, I thought I was in for an exciting ride. However, as I turned the pages, I became increasingly disappointed by the lack of momentum and dull writing, and found myself skimming the text, which I rarely do. There was an absence of detail grounding the work and, breaking the most fundamental rule in the writing book, far too much 'telling' over 'showing'.

The novel is the memoir of Autumn Laing, written, she says, to put Edith, the wife of her lover Pat Donlon, back into the picture, to 'give her portrait the first place in this testament' (21). While attention is paid to Edith at first, the work is overtaken by Autumn's focus on Pat Donlon, relegating Edith and her art to the margins as she had been all along.

After Miller's perfectly pitched Lovesong, with its delicate rendition of how a woman's desperation for a child eroded a relationship, the depiction of infertility in this work was a caricature. Following 'a period of aggressive and exaggerated sexual behaviour' in her late teens (178), Autumn is unable to have children. When she finds that Pat Donlon is to father a child with Edith, her reaction is to knock over her wine glass and slam the door, while 'a moment later her wail came from the deep night, “I hate men!”' (210). Continuing in this hyperbolic vein, Autumn's carers, a nurse and her biographer Adeli, have breasts like 'great melons diving about like bloated water bombs' (185) and 'trembling balloons of naked flesh' (187), an unsubtle affront to Autumn's angularity and infertility.

Each of these complaints could of course be explained by the voice and biases of Autumn, but a writer who has published his tenth novel should be capable of shaping better sentences than 'I hated him. I wanted him to make love to me. To lose himself in a wild torment of passion for me' (369). Mills and Boon territory, indeed.

Aside from allowing me to recognise the loose skeleton upon which Autumn Laing hung, my father's creative practice has been instrumental in showing me how to become, and to live, as an artist. Although he doesn't have the all-consuming passion and ambition that I do (for he would, ultimately, prefer to be renovating houses than painting), his art does seem to tug at him the same way that writing never leaves me alone.

At home for Christmas, when he was painting and I was writing, we came out for coffee (or rather, he heard me in the kitchen and came out for someone to talk to).

'It's so boring,' he complained. 'Why do we do it?'

'Because it's a vocation,' I replied.

The word comes from the Latin word vocare, meaning 'to call'. It's a voice you can't ignore. Certainly, if I don't write, I start to feel a bit shitty and ill, and other writers I have spoken to feel this way as well.

Dad also taught me the importance of a single-minded dedication to a cause. His father once said to him, 'There's no such word as can't', and he relayed this to me in turn as I was growing up, as he did the phrase, 'If at first you don't succeed, try, try again.' For a stubborn little girl who always wanted to be the best but was sometimes thwarted by a disability, these mantras helped drive me on. Even now, when I despair that my friends have houses and cars and I am walking away from the white picket fences and down the dusty road to post yet another grant application, I remind myself that I can never lose faith in my capacity to succeed. To do so would be to give up my raison d'être.

In a piece of poetic dovetailing, my father's art supports my own, for my parents help to put a roof over my head so that I can work part-time and keep writing. Likewise, my childhood on the property he worked with his brothers has given rise to almost all my themes, and the character of the artist/farmer has appeared in at least one short story, and will feature in novel #6.

Dad's paintings are available here. If you're stuck for gifts for weddings, birthdays or generally esoteric occasions, these will fit the bill. Plus Mum keeps at him to clean out his drawers, so divesting them of paintings is always helpful for household harmony.

On Equality (or the lack thereof)

After the excesses of the year, it's a relief to be stationed at Parental Unit's, even if, having slept off my exhaustion, said Unit are starting to drive me slightly demented. The weather resembles an English summer, being 20 degrees C and overcast, with glimpses of sun, and I've been thinking longingly of the baking heat of Brisbane. However, I'm writing again, having started my third novel, and find myself in that delicious state of being swept into another world (that of a quiet man in a small coastal town), and am relishing the insistent tug of that pad of blank paper in the front room where rain spats agains the window and the dog has to be chased out for chewing Mum's cushions. My Christmas shopping is complete and Family have been instructed to get everything on my Christmas list. When Mum asked me if there was anything else I wanted, I answered hopefully, 'Shoes?' but that was rejected, as apparently I have enough of them. There was nothing else I, then, except that which only the powers that be can bestow.

Earlier this year, my boss and I, together with six universities and a number of other stakeholders, were involved in putting together a national grant application for funding into autism. We developed three core programs which were intended to facilitate research into autism over a course of ten years, addressing (broadly) conception and genetics, education, and finding a place in society. As part of the presentation of these concepts, my boss and I put together three videos that helped to illustrate these programs through interviews with parents of children with autism, and of a young man who had autism himself. Although I knew, on an academic level, that parents of children with autism have a difficult time, it wasn't until I listened to these parents how little support I realised they were getting.

One of the reasons why such parents are stressed is because the autism sometimes manifests in their child's behaviour and, because that child doesn't appear to have any physical disability, people may criticise him/her for failing to act like a typically developing child. This was illuminated clearly by a mother we interviewed whose son had once had a meltdown in the pool during a swimming lesson. The parent ended up in tears by the side of the pool comforting her son, who was deeply distressed. She was distraught too because she didn't know what was wrong, as by this stage she still didn't have a diagnosis (it would eventually take her four years to obtain one) and hadn't understood what might have triggered his meltdown. Another parent came up to her but, instead of offering comfort, said to her, 'Will you get your son out of the pool, so my child can continue his swimming lesson?'

Sometimes, the selfishness of people is simply beyond comprehension.

Another parent whose extremely bright daughter had Asperger's was unable to continue with her child's schooling, after trying four schools, because the bullying was so ferocious that her girl became too stressed to learn. Finally, the mother had to take her daughter out of school and homeschool her, at huge financial cost to her family despite, as she pointed out, this girl being a citizen of Australia, who was entitled to an education.

These parents illustrated the difficulties for their children when they were in school, but the problems certainly didn't end when adolescents reached the end of their schooling. Often, they find it difficult to get work and their life becomes immediately, and narrowly, circumscribed. This sense of 'falling off a cliff' happened to a young man with autism who desperately wanted to become independent when he left school but, because he had a disability which he honestly disclosed, he often couldn't get to the interview stage. Although organisations existed to help people with disabilities cross this bridge from school to work, they had a high turnover of staff and his parents, on using such an organisation, found themselves constantly having to bring new employees up to date. The young man became quite disheartened, as would any person in this situation. Eventually, he did find a position and his parents noticed this was therapy in itself. His self-confidence blossomed, social skills improved and his mental health picked up again. It would make sense, then, for programs to be put in place to get people with autism into jobs that suit them because it benefits both individual and society, but this simply isn't happening.

After coming across these heartbreaking stories, from parents and young people who have tried desperately to succeed in a world that is largely impervious to them, I simply couldn't understand why there has been so little funding for autism. Perhaps it's because it isn't a sexy disability. By this I mean you can't help a person with autism to interact with their environment more effectively with a piece of technology like a cochlear implant or a red hearing aid studded with diamonds, so it doesn't attract the numbers of high-tech researchers that, for example, deafness might. This is not, of course, to discredit a number of illustrious researchers who are in this field, numbering Andrew Whitehouse among them. And of course, my boss, who I think never gets enough credit.

Yet, while I was given free hearing aids, FM systems and adjustments to my classrooms (ie carpet to help with the acoustics) more than twenty years ago, a national funding programme for autism was only introduced in 2008 through the Helping Children with Autism package. This provided funding towards early intervention (ie therapies for kids up to the age of 7), but not for help beyond this age which, obviously, is almost an entire lifetime. As for all the parents who had struggled before this point, it has been, to put it bluntly, tough luck. For anyone interested in understanding what tough luck entails, I direct you to the non-fiction account by Tony Macris of his son's diagnosis with autism, and subsequent intervention via applied behavioural analysis, in When Horse Became Saw. Incidentally, Tony was a former writing teacher of mine, although I didn't find out about his son until I read his essay of the same title, which was shortlisted for the Calibre prize.

Given these instances of grave injustice in one of the richest economies in the world, it didn't really surprise me to come across this article noting a report by PricewaterhouseCoopers which had found that almost half of people with a disability in Australia are living in or near poverty, sending Australia to the bottom of the ranks of the developed world. In addition, Australians with a disability are half as likely to be employed as those without a disability, ranking them 21st out of 29th in the developed world. Tellingly, the response of John Della Bosca, former NSW health minister and national director for the national disability scheme's Every Australian Counts campaign, was that there was no reason why Australia couldn't do something about these rankings, as 'Fairness is part of our national character'.

This is hardly a statement that inspires confidence. For what kind of 'fairness' is in place in a country that leaves refugees languishing in detention centres like criminals, and who processes a paltry number of those people who have risk their lives for their families, when thousands more pour across the borders of Europe? Or has mining companies that pay lip service to the indigenous people whose land they are butchering and doesn't give a damn about adequate recompense? Or which is permitting another coal mine which may destroy the world's chance of keeping global warming to 2 degrees?

For a sophisticated analysis of this concept of being a good-hearted people who are prepared to help their neighbours, but who are routinely hostile to those who are perceived as 'other' such as indigenous people, foreigners, or the disabled, I highly recommend Jennifer Rutherford's The Gauche Intruder, which uses Freud and Lacan (yes, it's a battle!) to demonstrate how aggression manifests itself at the time Australians have set out to do good. For example, as I pointed out to my students of Australian literature, how can 'mateship' be such a great thing if it's means the exclusion of women and indigenous people, who also fought in the wars but receive so little recognition in comparison to white men? In these contexts, the words fair go or mateship automatically arouse my suspicion, rather than my respect.

Yes, the government has a great deal to answer for, but so too does its populace. Australians, for all their wealth, are stingy when it comes to charity, particularly in comparison to the US which has a history of philanthropy. Although I don't agree with the Christian overtones of Christmas (which appears anyway to have been hijacked from the winter solstice celebrations), I do endorse its culture of giving. It would be nice to see, in 2013, some of our millionaires (other than Dick Smith) and average Joe Bloe who, for all his whinging does have quite a good standard of living, donating 2.5% – 15% of their pre-tax income to charity. It would also be nice to see our politicians stop fighting like dogs over scraps, and to show some humanity and leadership. But perhaps that's one present that won't fit in Santa's bag.

On Partying

I had thought that, once teaching finished for the semester, I would find myself with a plethora of time at my disposal to recover, write and read. Instead, the pendulum swung in the other direction, from WORK to PARTY.

Consequently I have no idea where the last six weeks have gone, and have been lucky to write in my journal twice a month (and here I think wistfully of my undergraduate days in Wollongong when it was once a day until, over the course of a summer, my style improved considerably and led my lecturer to ask, 'Have you been drinking?') so I can't rely upon it for recollection. However I do, thankfully, have some entries in my calendar.

These indicate that I attended salon talks at Avid Reader by Charlotte Wood and Anna Funder; dressed up as a tart for a friend's 40th birthday ('Please tell me that you're wearing more than that,' H had said when I showed him the dark red corset with cream ribbons. 'Not much more,' I replied brightly); attended a lecture at the State Library by Melissa Lucashenko organised by Griffith Review; started salsa classes, or rather, picked up where I left them 10 years ago; had a friend from Sydney to stay, whereupon we drank cocktails at Bistrot Bistro and pedalled to see Henri Cartier Bresson at the Queensland Art Gallery; watched a performance of Pygmalion, of which I heard very little as the acoustics were terrible, though I'd managed to read the script beforehand and was entertained well enough; attended a friend's baby naming ceremony on four hours' sleep, having been out on the turps the night before at a cocktail pool party; went to a samba fitness class with T and loved it; organised a bike ride over the rail trails north of Brisbane, returning sore and burnt in all the wrong places, leading to a hideously striped epidermis of brown and white; travelled to Parkes with H for a week for Dr P's nuptials; caught up with friends in Sydney and, back in Brisbane, attended a trapeze performance by some stunning gay men. Is it any wonder that I am still tired, still broke, and slightly fatter?

On the plane to Sydney I finished Anna Funder's All That I Am which was the best book I've read all year. It elucidated a period and people with which I was unfamiliar – the German resistance movement in the lead-up to World War Two – with beautiful writing, a clever plot and thorough research which the text wore very lightly. Funder was a highly articulate speaker and her intelligence was stunning.

In Parkes H and I visited the dish with a uni friend of H's who had a charming one year old, from whom I elicited some smiles. H tried to explain the physics of gravity to me but that wasn't very interesting so I wandered to the shop and found a Christmas present for Nephew. We stayed with Dr P's Parental Unit who plied us with food and booze (hence uncomely weight gain). I wrote 129 place names, had my toenails painted pink and finished another book I was in the middle of reading, Alex Miller's new novel Autumn Laing which was disappointing (more of this in another post). After this novel I read The Tiger's Wife which, though it took a while to get into, turned into a wonderful piece of magic realism with a clever blending of myth and reality. Now I'm onto Gillian Mears' Foal's Bread which is thus far quite good. An excellent piece on Mears and her writing by Susan Johnson, whose writing I enjoy, can be found here.

It rained for five days before the wedding, and on the sixth the sky bloomed with blue. Everyone was relieved. Jokes were made about the sacrifice of goats. The wedding ceremony was beautiful. I wrote a poem for L&G and read it out, and H was MC. I wore a new frock from Kitten d'Amour with dark red Nude shoes (Nude is my favourite favourite favourite fashion find of the year) that I had worn at the 40th birthday party, and in which I had blackened a toenail from dancing too much. Fortunately, this didn't happen again. By the time the party bus came to pick us up at midnight I was already on my way out. Those at the back of the bus erupted into song as I laid my cheek against the cold glass window and went to sleep. The others went to an after party in someone's hotel room and I staggered around and eventually fell onto the bed and passed out, waking pained and somewhat surly the next morning.

H and I dropped L&G off at the airport for their honeymoon before going to dinner with another friend. As usual, H was unable to talk and navigate at the same time, so for a while it looked like we would end up in Wollongong. While queuing to get back onto the right road, H, to our mutual hilarity, pointed out the man in the car behind us doing his toilette, viz. looking up his nostrils and baring his teeth in the mirror. It was worth taking the scenic route (read: getting lost) just for that.

Despite all my avowals to stop drinking and going out and to actually sit and do some writing, I found myself booked to see Briefs with a friend from London. It was a wonderful performance by a troupe of gay trapeze artists with a commentary from a drag queen that I couldn't entirely hear but was highly entertaining to watch. I got more than I bargained for when, as we were at a table near the front, I was the target of a half-empty can of coke, which sprayed over most of me. I didn't mind as it was still funny, and I had on my pink patent Alannah Hill pumps which were water resistant, but my lovely handbag had stains on it. Oh, these first world problems.

Now I have only two weeks or so of work before I go home to Parental Unit's, whereupon there will be nothing to do but write and exercise. What bliss.

My Frocks

This past week has been debilitating, as I've been housebound with a vile dose of the flu and am thoroughly sick of myself. Rather than writing another post of navel-gazing, however, I thought I'd write about something that cheers me up no end: my frocks.

When my advance from Penguin for A Curious Intimacy came through and I had flown back to Sydney from London for the launch and publicity, the first thing I did was go to Collette Dinnigan. In the tranquil boutique in Paddington, I settled on a pale, knee-length dress gathered at the waist with an overlay of sparkling olive-gold lace, and gold straps. As the shop assistants boxed it up for me, H told them I'd had my novel published and they looked impressed.

'I thought I wouldn't be able to afford one of these until I got married!' I added, and with that they smiled.

I then dragged H all around Melbourne to find the perfect pair of shoes to go with it. They are covered in gold petals and not quite perfect (they aren't high enough), but they were good enough for my book launch.

My cash flow as a writer, however, is rarely so luxurious, and thus I am in a constant state of torment over wanting frocks, shoes and handbags, but being able to afford none of them. Or, so I tell myself. Somehow I always find the money from somewhere. Once in London I went for a week on a reduced diet so I could afford a pair of red ankle boots. Amused, H told Dad about it.

'They couldn't have been worth starving herself over, could they?'

'Dad, you have no idea,' H replied.

Dad should have known. His wife had the same habit. Born in New Zealand, Mum saved her money to go travelling around the world, but got as far as Sydney and spent it all. Then she met Dad and married him. She had a very fashionable wedding, with a white Prue Acton dress and red shoes. Then Dad took her back to the farm and she couldn't shop as much, although sometimes after trips to Tamworth he would notice something and ask, 'Is that new?' and Mum would reply, 'Oh no, I've had it for ages.'

Dad could never quite tell if he was being duped. Meanwhile I, watching these exchanges, became versed in the art of deception.

My favourite frockshop is Alannah Hill, but I am only allowed to go in there on my birthday, which is also, incidentally, when the sales are still on. The year before last they were playing one of my favourite songs, Flashdance, so I was compelled to buy a white skirt patterned with pink, green and red flowers that swayed when I walked. I was utterly broke and shouldn't have bought it, and by the time I got home I was so ashamed that I cut up my credit card. That was only a band-aid solution however, as when the new one came through a few months later I was off again.

Another wonderful label is Review, because they make clothes for women with curves. After helping out with the kids one summer, B gave me some money and I bought a black and cream frock with a deep v-neck, tight beribboned waist and tulle beneath the skirt. I wore it out with B, H and Cousin A to the Bowery, and true to form drank too many cocktails (2.5) and started a little dance with Cousin A, which snowballed into dancing with the jazz band and winking at a random stranger before being shepherded out by B before I did something drastic.

B also used to work for Sacha Drake, which meant instant access to many a cheap frock, although sadly she quit and now I have to find means of accommodating a suddenly more expensive, and still undiminished, passion for SD frocks. Sacha, too, makes dresses for curvaceous women, but the size 8s are limited in number and have usually sold out before I can rummage together enough funds to pay for them.

And of course, there is internet shopping. On nights when I can't sleep and there is no one to play Scrabble with on Facebook, or when I am procrastinating on a piece of writing, I will pass the time scanning pages of clothes on frock websites, be they discount or shopfront. It's incredibly soothing, at least until I find something I like, and then the cogs begin whirring to work out how to pay for it. For this reason, I am banned from Anthropologie, because I want everything on the site.  Another beautiful frock came from this shop, when I stopped off in San Francisco on my way home as a reward for finishing my thesis.  It's of pale grey wool with a ruff and a pattern of long grass on the right hand side in red and white, which goes perfectly with my red stiletto boots.  Anthropologie is gorgeous.

'I'm no good at budgeting,' I complained to B once, after what was probably a protracted period of poverty.

'No,' she corrected me. 'You're incredibly good at budgeting when there is something that you want.'

If only the wants were less fickle than frocks … but then, what would be the fun in that?

I shall end here, for I need to return to my deathbed for yet more sleep. For those readers who love frocks, I direct you to the beautifully written and photographed Dress, Memory, by Lorelei Vashti.

My Sister

It is always a cliché that comes to mind when I think of describing my sister: she's larger than life, as tough as old boots and she can talk the leg off an iron pot. She is also, on occasion, as mad a cut snake. However, in the flesh, she is absolutely original.A natural antagonist, she was unable, while I sat quietly at the verandah table doing my homework, to walk past me without hitting me, pulling my hair, or poking me. I might have retaliated once or twice, by getting up and punching her, but it never resolved anything. In later years, as I mellowed, she found herself disappointed that she couldn't wind me up the way she used to.

As the eldest child, born three years before me, she made mistakes that I learnt from, and is possessed with an admirable practicality. She fixes everything, from replacing the putty in windows to sorting out my problems. I remember calling her in tears from a payphone one lunchtime in Wynyard when I was on a temping assignment that I didn't think I was doing well enough. She pointed out that if the company didn't think I could do it, they wouldn't have employed me. This was enough to help me get back and get on with my day. When my Mac died and the Mac Doctors were rotten at fixing it, she took the computer to a man she knew in Stones Corner, at Geekworks, who had exceptional customer service and fixed the computer free of charge to make up for The Mac Doctors leaving it inoperable. And today, when I needed to go to the doctor, I found myself distraught that she wasn't here to call on. I didn't begrudge that, as J1 helped, and she is having a wonderful time with the dogs at the Australian National Flyball Championships.

For my sister is dog-mad. She has always had cocker spaniels, and the highlight of her week is taking them to flyball training, and catching up with other dog-mad people. She comes home with stories that make me sore with laughter.

She is a born communicator, hence her job in public relations, and often amuses me with the phrases she picks up, such as “pocket-rocket”, viz. a dog so small it can fit in a pocket, but which goes really fast. She understands people's motivations much better than I do, and can often see the other side of a story. She is also the loudest person I know. Sometimes I say, “I can hear you, you know,” and she replies, “I always talk like this. It's automatic, in case you're not wearing your hearing aid.”

However, when she and the family went camping, her husband commented how loud their children were. “And what excuse will they use?” he asked. “That their aunt is deaf?”

Once, on a bus travelling from Randwick to Bondi Junction where there were some red wedding shoes I wanted her to look at, she began telling me a story at great volume. A scrawny old woman sitting behind the driver turned around and snarled, “Do you have to talk so loud that the rest of the bus can hear?”

She retaliated so fast it took me a couple of seconds to work out what was going on. “Actually, yes I do,” she replied, “my sister's deaf.”

The woman retorted with something I didn't hear and my sister said, “I just told you, my sister's deaf.”

By this point I realised the bus had halted at a stop outside a petrol station, its doors open.

“I've paid for my ticket,” said the woman, “why don't you get off here?”

“And I've paid for mine,” said my sister, just as fast, “so why don't you get off?”

Realising that she was defeated, the woman turned around in a huff. The bus started up again and pulled away from the kerb.

At other times my sister's speed with speech turns to foot-and-mouth disease. In her university job at Hungry Jacks she couldn't get the cash register to work and swore at it in front of a customer. The customer complained and my sister was nearly sacked but, fittingly, she talked her way back into the job.

My sister is one of the toughest people I know. When her marriage began to fall apart she held onto it for grim life and made it work. She has a determination that I recognise in myself, but where I apply this to my writing, she uses it to protect her family.

Like my brother, she has a shocking memory, but this is her coping mechanism. She forgets the things that upset her, whereas I, hurt more easily, file them away and process them through writing. My brother, meanwhile, just forgets things as a matter-of-course (many are the times I have told him a joke he has heard before and, having forgotten it, he laughs in exactly the same places).

My sister began her PR career in the beauty industry, then in haircare and fashion. This provoked my obsession with these selfsame fields as, always a generous person, she kept giving me samples of Guinot and Ella Bache, and sent me to the hairdresser she represented. Now she keeps me supplied in frocks, which is heavenly, but the expensive tastes never went away and I find myself scrabbling to pay for SKII cleanser and my gay Vietnamese hairdresser in the 'burbs on my miserly writer's income.

When you meet my sister, it's like being hit with a hurricane of noise, colour and laughter. Eventually she calms down and you realise there's a sharp wit and astute brain at work amidst the chaos, and that she's unlike any person you've ever met before.

Happy Birthday Bec. I wouldn't exchange you for anyone else in the world.

On Stops and Starts

Life seems to have been frustratingly disparate lately, at least for a girl who likes focus, direction and deadlines.  There have been galling stops and starts, weeks interrupted by socialising and faulty hearing aids, bicycles and laptops, and battles with endless procrastination as I push myself to write. On the day we held the funeral service for my grandmother, I was made an offer for my second novel, Entitlement, but I was too depressed to even open a bottle of champagne to celebrate.  I’m still waiting for the contract and the go-ahead, which is painful because until then I have no direction on the novel, and not being able to work on it makes me feel a little unwell.  Unlike with A Curious Intimacy, which I was sick of by the time it even made it to the publishers, and which I had to edit in the middle of writing a PhD, I’m desperate to be in the midst of this one.  It feels like it will be a more successful work: the characters are more real, the plot is tighter and more dramatic, and it has more relevance to contemporary politics.  I am already in love with it in a way I never was with ACI, which was a largely academic, feminist exercise, although the emotional aspects of it were drawn from experience.

In the interim I’ve been working on short stories, some of which have lain in my drawers for more than a decade.  Again, because of the nature of the work, this means more stopping and starting.  The worlds I’m writing about are smaller, the action briefer, and as it’s harder to get into the swing of it, I am easily distracted.  I’ve also dug out my thesis to rewrite it for publication, as once I begin work on Entitlement again it will take over my life and I won’t be able to concentrate on anything else.  However I’m struggling with one of the links between the chapters and so I keep walking away from it.  Things just don’t seem to be resolving themselves.

After the funeral I stayed at Parental Unit’s for a week, during which time their 7 month old whippet chewed up my hearing aid.  I had stupidly left it on the couch, having taken it out because the television was so loud (Parental Unit are also going deaf) and the subtitles were on.  When I saw the little bits of hearing aid scattered at my feet, my heart fell through the floor.  I extracted a final piece of the casing from the dog’s mouth and added it to the sorry collection of wire and microchip.  It’s still too horrifying to be funny yet, as the new hearing aid cost more than two grand, a rather expensive learning curve.

Then both my computer and bicycle decided to die on me, the former needing a new hard drive which, due to a total lack of communication by the IT nerds who replaced it (never use The Mac Doctors, people), wiped out my operating system and my applications.  It takes a lot to make me cry, but when I couldn’t get my laptop to go after several trips to Annerley, I burst into tears.  Not in front of said nerds, unfortunately, which might have helped them to register their incompetence and lack of clarity.  Meanwhile my bicycle, being an English brand little known in Australia, needs a new hub, which will be expensive.  However, as with my very pretty but largely uncomfortable and unwalkable shoes, I will endure whatever pain it takes to be able to keep on using it.

Despite all these literary and technological frustrations, summer is slowly creeping into being.  I have put away my boots and taken out my stiletto sandals; the flowering jacarandas make for a gorgeous ferry ride to the uni; H is coming home for good in two months and there is beach and holiday action scheduled for January.  And this weekend, the guilt and procrastination paid off as I belted out a wonderful and peculiar short story in two days, inspired by P1 and his mention of the aquatic ape theory.  When a story comes together this quickly, you know it’s working.  If only the rest of my life could do that.