Don’t Dream it’s Over

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

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

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

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

Odeonsplatz, usually crammed with people, was nearly empty.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘But I don’t have a car,’ I replied.

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

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

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

‘Just keep isolating and monitor your symptoms.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Dubrovnik

Our ferry from Hvar to Dubrovnik didn’t leave until late afternoon, so b/f and I breakfasted in Stari Grad at a café we’d found the day before. Yesterday’s breakfast had been awesome, but this time the tomato was a little off and poor Jess turned green and felt awful. However, I managed not to spew (it would have been better if I had), and b/f and I made our way slowly to the bus.

The trip from Stari Grad to Hvar Town was short but lovely, particularly when we were spat out at the other end into the flashiness of Hvar Town. I resented the huge cruise liners in the harbour on account of what they were doing to the marine environment, though I daresay I am as much to blame as they are for travelling at all.

I still felt crook so had to sit as still as possible for hours until we could finally board the ferry, which was late in getting in to Dubrovnik. I was anxious about our accommodation person waiting up so late for us, though I texted her several updates. When we finally arrived, caught a cab and walked up the steps to our apartment, she was waiting for us. She spoke largely to b/f, assuming he was the one who knew what was going on, which was probably just as well as I was too tired to lipread.

Dubrovnik was very hot and I still didn’t feel 100%, but there were things to distract me. When b/f and I set out the next morning, we discovered a mortar shell sitting in the alcove outside our door. We bought Dubrovnik cards, which gave us entry to places like the Franciscan monastery which had an ancient pharmacy and the most gorgeous atrium full of plants. I was also impressed with the exhibits in the Natural History Museum – little shells encased in glass baubles.

We ventured up onto the city walls, which were splendid. I don’t get vertigo, nor any kind of dizziness because meningitis did something to my inner ear, but even so I was anxious about getting too close to the edge. From the walls we looked out to the ocean, and down onto terracotta rooves. We bought some overpriced sorbet which melted into a sticky pool within minutes, and tried to count all the stray cats we could see. B/f was delighted to find a sticker on the wall which said ‘Where the hell is Burgunperry?’ After stepping down off the wall, we had drinks in a square, listening to performers and singers.

When we got back to our attic apartment, a cat followed us inside. B/f picked him up to take him out, and was bitten. There were fireworks in the city, which we watched from the window above the toilet. Very glamorous.

The next day we thought about visiting a nearby island but we were pretty much broke by then, and too wrung out. Dubronik was very expensive – we had stupidly (at my insistence), eaten breakfast within the city walls, and two croissants, one egg and four coffees had come to 60AUD. So we lay in the airconditioning and read, which was also luxurious, and had dinner in a lovely restaurant with bougainvillea. The next day we had separate flights, but met again in Singapore airport and headed home. After two months of travelling and a glorious holiday I was sad to start work again, but, as usual, soon I had no time to think of anything except the next deadline.

Jess at the end of her hols.

Stari Grad

On the ferry to Stari Grad I finally finished my bloody book and packed my laptop away. When we pulled into the harbor, b/f & I decided to walk into town rather than catching the bus, which was heaving with backpackers. En route, some young men opened their packs in the grass on the side of the track and changed their clothes.

‘What are they doing?’ I asked b/f.

‘I don’t know.’

‘What language are they speaking?’

‘French.’

‘Perhaps they just got off the plane and they’re too hot.’

I had booked the AirBnB in Stari Grad somewhat in error, not realising how far away Hvar, the main town, was. As it turned out, it was a blessing, as Stari Grad was far and away my favourite place on the trip. We located the house in which we were staying, and were greeted by our host’s Mum, who was looking out for us as we walked up. She took us to the house and showed us the air conditioning. I logged into the wifi & sent off my book to my agent.

B/f and I wandered into town, which was calm and quiet, with clean, paved streets. We had a drink to celebrate my newfound liberation from my literary albatross, then went back to the house for a siesta. That evening we ventured out again through the cobbled streets and I snapped a shot of a family in the square, the little girl dancing with abandon.

We found ourselves outside an interesting looking restaurant, and decided to venture in. Well, it was just gorgeous, with mismatched furniture, a visitation from a cat, good wine and that excellent Pag cheese. Although b/f is immune to romance, I was charmed and very happy.

The next day we wanted to explore, so b/f and I hired bicycles from a fellow with a stand near our accommodation. We went east first, and the path soon disappeared. I wrestled with my giant bike, until a strapping Mediterranean man, walking behind us with his girlfriend, lifted it up for me over the rocks. B/f walked on, oblivious; one of his habits. Eventually we could go no further and decided to swim in a cove. Except it was, we discovered, a nudist cove.

‘I think we’re overdressed,’ b/f mused. ‘Shall we put on our birthday suits?’

‘No! Well, you can, but I’m not going to.’

We watched a German woman fastidiously apply sunscreen to every inch of her skin, and those of her two boys. I snorkelled, but there was nothing to see except the algae. It made me sad; the ecosystems must have been disrupted by all the boats shunting into the harbour. The top half of a pineapple had lodged itself among the rocks and I figured the rubbish wasn’t helping either.

Stari Grad UNESCO plains

We then set off east to visit the UNESCO paddocks, which had been farmed for some 2000 years. Weirdly, this info wasn’t in the Lonely Planet; I’d found it by poking around online. B/f was anxious about making sure I didn’t get hit by a car that I couldn’t hear and I was a bit stressed too, so we pulled off down a track and discovered old structures made of stones, set among cypress trees, with some cool plants in flower. After cycling for a bit longer, we headed into Vbroska, which was such a pretty place I wish we could have stayed there. We made our way along the bay until we reached a resort, and yours truly started getting pretty shirty on account of the heat. I wanted to swim, but b/f wanted to push on through the resort. I spat the dummy and we turned back and parked our bikes, then stepped over the rocks into the water, which was gorgeous

Harmony restored, we climbed back on the bikes and b/f found a way through the paddocks that was much quieter. I was still hot, but distracted by the amazing vegetation around me.

Plant & drystone wall.

That evening there was a full moon and b/f and I ate olives and cheese and drank red wine on the verandah of our AirBnB, which was screened by a grape vine. I was marvellously happy.

Split

After the quietness of Veli Losinj, Split was a shock. There were plenty more tourists and shops selling plastic wares for them, and the heat and dusty road near the bus stop was oppressive. We walked through the Riva, a baking marble plaza fronting the water, found our accommodation and switched on the air conditioning. 

However, Split was full of history, we found the next morning, walking past the fish markets and into the warren that led to the Roman ruins of Diocletian’s Palace. After watching some Roman-clad actors doing a bit of bad theatre in the centre, then a male choir singing traditional Dalmatian songs (lovely!), we attached ourselves to a tour group and walked through the cobbled streets in the heavy sun. The ruins were spectacular, rearing against the blue sky. They dated from the 4th century, when Diocletian built the palace for his retirement home. I couldn’t hear much of what the guide said as I was too hot to concentrate, but b/f repeated some of it for me. I tend to retain information more easily by reading, anyway. One part of the area was where Cersei did her walk of shame in Game of Thrones, and the underground dungeons were where Daenerys kept her dragons. It was cooler there, at least, and I felt for the menopausal women flapping brochures and fans.

A gorgeous, golden European evening.

That evening I wanted to get away from the tourists for dinner, so we followed some steps away from the centre and up into Marjan Forest Park. The views of the city were beautiful, but even better was the soft golden dusk, falling into the cypress trees. B/f mused how he had once thought the Victorian masters had fudged this effect in their paintings, but when he came to Europe he realised that this was how it actually was. A big change from Australia’s bold sunsets. There were charming Medieval grottos fitted into the rockfaces, too.

We didn’t find any dinner on the hill and by the time we got down, b/f often pulling me out of the way of cyclists whizzing dangerously past (I couldn’t hear them coming), I was hangry. We found a good place near our accommodation, and breakfasted there the next morning as well. Over our coffees we watched the ticket inspectors booking local cars, then we set off for the ferry for Hvar Island. While waiting in the holding pen, having a cool drink outside another cafe, b/f pointed out a young man with a cochlear implant. I was so impressed that he was travelling around by himself, although I shouldn’t have been, as I was intrepid when I was younger too. I watched him talk to some nearby women, his mobile in hand. They shook their heads & I realised he wanted the wi-fi password. I explained this to b/f and asked if he would take it over to him (it was printed on the café docket), and b/f obliged, as I was too shy. The man with the cochlear nodded when b/f showed him the code, then settled down with his phone.

Split by night.

Finally we boarded the ferry for Stari Grad, and I pulled out my laptop and furiously set to finishing my book.

On Holidays! Veli Losinj

The next morning we packed up, left our friend’s father’s apartment and traipsed back to the bus station. B/f held my hand as we crossed the road because of the unpredictable traffic, even at crossings. Our friend’s father had told us to be careful of the cars because Croatians had only recently acquired cars en masse and they were poor drivers. 

At a café outside the bus station, b/f ordered a coffee.

‘Would you like one too?’ he asked me.

I shook my head. ‘My tummy’s upset.’

‘Why?’

‘Because I’m anxious.’

‘What about?’

‘Missing the bus.’

‘We’re forty minutes early!’

‘I’m still anxious.’

B/f was unable to comprehend. I settled for a lemonade.

After half an hour we queued for our bus and found our seat, but there was a lengthy delay. From what we could gather, the bus was overbooked and the woman who couldn’t find her seat set up an almighty noise. The harried bus driver called the company on his phone. Eventually it turned out the woman was on the wrong bus. The passengers sighed and smirked as she bustled off.

Outside the city, there were yet more delays, and the traffic slowed to a crawl. We looked down at a car below us and saw the driver watching a video on his phone as he drove. We wondered aloud if there was an accident or if the traffic was bad because of school holidays. A woman overhead us and said there had been an accident. Then the bus stopped altogether and a man dashed off onto the grassy verge, took a lengthy leak, then bolted back into the bus. The woman who could speak English was becoming visibly agitated and harangued the bus driver. I watched the rocky landscape out the window and charted where we were going via Googlemaps. When we reached the car ferry, the passengers cheered. We loaded, climbed out and went onto the deck. The water was incredible. I noticed that the agitated woman had found a friend, and realised she had been wanting to meet her friend on the ferry and this was why she’d harassed the driver

View from the ferry.

B/f cracked open a beer and appeared to be enjoying himself and the scenery. I sat on a bench nearby & laughed everytime the nearby door to the cabin opened & fell off its hinges.

Finally we reached Veli Losinj, which my parents had recommended to us. We were very late and our AirBnB host was concerned, but I managed to text and find him. The AirBnB place was gorgeous; a little nook overlooking the square and the harbour. B/f & I had a lovely dinner by the water but belatedly realised we had been fleeced with tourist prices. Oh well, it was a gorgeous view and the harbour was so tranquil.

I was still working on my bloody book; I wanted to send it off so I could have a holiday. During my breaks, b/f and I swam and snorkeled (nothing to see but algae and a handful of silvery fish; the water was too degraded), sunbaked on the cement like the locals, drank coffee and wrote on postcards, bought wine and cheese from the supermarket and partook of it. Then we discovered that we needed to stay an extra day (such hard luck!) as the ferry didn’t run until the following day, so we moved into a hotel around the corner. B/f then lost the key while we were swimming. I was furious but diverted myself with my pal Inga Simpson’s new memoir, Understorey, a good read.

 As we were negotiating to pay for a replacement key, the owner brought in the one we’d lost – some kind person had found it & placed it on the bar while we were out. My equilibrium was restored.

The next morning we caught a taxi to Mali Losinj and sat in another café watching the water, the lorries going up and down the harbor and sunburnt Europeans with big bellies on their yachts.

‘I don’t feel well,’ I said to b/f.

‘Why not?’

‘I’m anxious.’

‘We’re an hour early. We couldn’t have got here any earlier, unless we camped.’

I laughed, and my nerves subsided.

Notes from the Field (xv)

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

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

St Mark’s Church

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

Dolac Market

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

A bunch of very cool pitcher plants.

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

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

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

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

Lilypads after rain.

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.

2017: My Year of Writing

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

Cockies on the Gold Coast

Publications

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

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

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

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

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

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

UQ Ferry

Awards/Funding

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

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

Gum blossoms!

Teaching

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

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

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

Flowers at Kew Gardens

Conferences and Supervision

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

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

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

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

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

Kornati National Park, Croatia

Research

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

V cool plants in the UNESCO Stari Grad Plains, Croatia

The Australian Women Writers Challenge

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

BrisVegas rainforest

The Year Ahead

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

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

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

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

Notes from the Field (viii)

It was with some trepidation that I went about London over the next few days, but the friends I was staying with said it was just a fact of life in the city. She had lived through the IRA bombings of the seventies, and a bomb had gone off a block away from where she lived, making the whole apartment block shake.

I was only in the city for a few days, at a conference on Life Writing at Kings College London. It was an excellent conference, much of it centred around memory, digital media and writing lives. I presented on a digital version of ecobiography, artist Pat Hoffie’s ‘ground truthing’ and met some great people.

After the conference I caught the train to Cambridge, where I’d arranged to look at the Cambridge University Herbarium. It holds a number Georgiana’s specimens, as well as those of other Australian collectors such as Allan Cunningham, and several collected by Charles Darwin on his voyage on the Beagle. This was a new herbarium, part of the Sainsbury Laboratory (the plants were moved there in 2011), with the same compactors I’d seen at Kew and an air filtration system. This was important because many of the specimens had been dipped in a solution containing mercury to preserve them (before collectors worked out that mercury was dangerous), and each time the compactors were opened, mercury wafted out. The technician who worked at the herbarium and who showed me around needed to have her mercury levels tested regularly. Meanwhile John Lindley, first Professor of Botany at University College London, developed dementia towards the end of his life, and it is thought that mercury might have contributed to this.

The technician had kindly laid out Georgiana’s specimens for me to look at and photograph. There were 25 of these, but potentially hundreds more are in the collection, which houses one million specimens altogether. I was struck by the art in the arrangement of the dried specimen on the page, which testifies to her sense of craft and elegance.

The technician also directed me to the letters of John Lindley, which had been transcribed, catalogued and bound into a volume. There were a handful to Mangles, although they didn’t contain much  of substance. Others discussed rates of payment to collectors, which I thought significant as Georgiana was paid nothing, although Mangles sent her and her husband gifts. Some were to Miss Drake, the illustrator I mentioned in my previous post. It was becoming clear to me that Mangles, if he wasn’t completely enmeshed in botanical networks at the time, was at the least very aware of who the important players were: Lindley, Hooker, the Loudons and Loddiges.

When I finished at the herbarium I wandered around the town, which was very pretty (aside from the hideous shopping centre which was under renovation). Students had just finished their exams and gathered in clumps among the tourists, clutching bottles of champagne. Beside the river, people lay in the long, sun-warmed grass, and there were bicycles galore. To my delight, on a bar outside some railings designed to stop people locking up their bikes, there was the wrong end of a pineapple.