WRITER AND RESEARCHER
It is often assumed that Deaf people cannot listen to, create or enjoy music, or that doing so requires a Beethoven-level genius. But Deafness is not a singular experience. For me, music is joy, abandon and a means of freedom.
Read the rest of this piece at Kill Your Darlings.
WHEN COVID-19 BEGAN to jump borders in January 2020, I was in Munich on a writing fellowship. Germany’s first few cases were sent to Schwabing Hospital, not far from where I lived and worked. I didn’t think much of it, assuming that it would be contained – but two months later I was on a plane back to Australia, my plans for nine months of prestigious fellowships in Germany, Scotland and the US in ruins. My parents have a holiday house on the northern New South Wales coast where I could quarantine; if I returned to my partner in Brisbane, I ran the risk of infecting him. I decided to stay at the beach until I was clear.
For the first week, unable to get out of bed, I slept. With a sore throat and cold, I thought at first I had the virus – but without a car I couldn’t attend a fever clinic. I phoned a local doctor, who recommended I monitor my symptoms. Over the next few days they subsided, and I realised they’d been a reaction to stress. It had been a nightmare getting home when Qantas cancelled my flight without notification. I pulled an all-nighter to find and catch another flight the next morning. The skin between my fingers cracked from too much hand-washing on the plane. It stung when I poured sanitiser onto it.
In the second week I dragged myself to the kitchen table to meet a deadline. Between paragraphs I took in my limited view. I looked out to the neighbour’s golden rain tree, yellow flowers falling over the fence. I saw a fruiting beehive ginger plant nestled in the long grass, the flower of red overlapping cones striking against its spiky leaves. Slowly, where I was became familiar: not so much the view from the table but a pattern, a way of being in this strange, quiet world. I had, after all, been in isolation for most of my life.
Read the rest of this piece online at Griffith Review. This essay was funded by the Judith Neilsen Institute.
‘K. and the NDIS’ is an essay on my frustration with negotiating access to the National Disability Insurance Scheme, a process that was so surreal it was best described by references to Kafka.
The light on Solway Firth is silver, slung low across the water. Although it’s mid-morning, within a few hours the sun will slip beneath the horizon. Accustomed to the wide blue mouth of sky in Australia, I feel as though the earth has tilted. My friends and I scramble over rocks weathered by the wash of tides. I’m wearing thermals, two jumpers, a red beanie and a coat, but the wind flies from the sea through my layers. My teeth clatter. We clamber around a corner, where we can just see Scotland on the other side of the firth. I wonder if Georgiana Molloy, who became Western Australia’s first female scientist, ever stood where I am now before she left England in 1829. Would she have smelled brine sweeping from the sea, her gaze drifting east over the salt marshes green with flat sedge, channels of water running between them? If she lifted her eyes, would she have seen a flock of starlings spiralling?
An essay on how my research on Georgiana Molloy’s life has intertwined with mine. You can read the rest of the essay at the Sydney Review of Books.
Hearing Maud is a hybrid memoir that details the author’s experiences of deafness after losing most of her hearing at age four. It charts how, as she grew up, she was estranged from people and turned to reading and writing for solace, eventually establishing a career as a writer.
Central to her narrative is the story of Maud Praed, the deaf daughter of 19th century Queensland expatriate novelist Rosa Praed. Although Maud was deaf from infancy, she was educated at a school which taught her to speak rather than sign, a mode difficult for someone with little hearing. The breakup of Maud’s family destabilised her mental health and at age twenty-eight she was admitted to an asylum, where she stayed until she died almost forty years later. It was through uncovering Maud’s story that the author began to understand her own experiences of deafness and how they contributed to her emotional landscape, relationships and career.
Hearing Maud is available in Australia in the following formats:
Book
University of Western Australia Press Booktopia Dymocks Angus and Robertson
Ebook
Kobo Dymocks Angus and Robertson
Audio book (narrated by Katherine Tonkin)
Dymocks Booktopia Angus and Robertson
Towards the end of Jessica White’s Hearing Maud – in which the author bares a great deal of herself – White explains she wants readers to understand how difficult it is being deaf, still, and how hard people with disability must work.
It seems like an act of emphatic generosity, then, for White to publish the story she offers here. “All writing, all art, is an act of faith,” Truman Capote said. “… Any work of art, provided it springs from a sincere motivation to further understanding between people, is an act of faith and therefore is an act of love.” For White, who lost most of her hearing after contracting meningitis at four, this is also a demonstration of divine empathy.
The State Library of Queensland is not a conventional, box-like building. It takes advantage of the city’s warm climate and exposes parts of itself to the elements. As I walk into the central court, covered by a roof over the fifth floor, I find a bookshop and café on my left. Outside the café is an outdoor lounge, protected from rain by the floor above. On my right is the library, its walls made of glass. In the children’s corner, papier mâché octopuses hang from the ceiling, while in the room adjacent people stand at computers or sit in wide, comfortable chairs with newspapers or their laptops. The wireless signal on each floor is strong enough to reach users wandering outside with their mobiles. This blurring of inside and outside continues in the floors above. The cements stairs and tiled walkways are open to the wind, while automatic doors to each floor open and close as patrons walk in and out.
The John Oxley library, which houses the archives, is on the fourth floor. I move from the muggy warmth into the chilly air of the building, passing a dimly-lit corridor. When I reach the reading room, sunlight floods through the glass walls, dazzling me. Once my eyes adjust, I look out to the milky brown river. The opposite bank is shaded by trees, tall office towers rising behind them. Blinking, I make my way to a desk and open my laptop. I’ve been living in London, where I’m writing my PhD on nineteenth century Queensland novelist Rosa Praed and her deaf daughter Maud, and I’ve returned to Australia for a few weeks to do research and visit my family. The unabated sunlight and the view of the river are glorious.
This is an extract from my memoir, Hearing Maud. You can read the rest of it in the current issue of Southerly, a special issue on Writing Disability.
Burl
If I sit here, tightly enough, the tree might gather me in its branches and swing me, gently, the sky soughing through its leaves. As a girl, I’d spent half my days in it, climbing, reading and daydreaming, leaping from limb to limb.
I let him cut the burl from it. Afterwards I wandered to the wound, leaking with sap, and touched the rough surface left by the saw. It was as wide as five hand spans. Tiny splinters caught in my finger pads.
Every summer evening I sat on the stone steps, watching him carefully pull the cradle from the wood. The lowering sun lit the hair of his forearms, drew out the smell of his perspiration. He chipped the bark surface away, slowly and methodically.
It was autumn when he came to set it on the lathe. He wore an old jumper, pushing up his sleeves to reveal the knotted muscles of his forearms. I folded my arms beneath my breasts for warmth. The lathe began spinning.
The burl’s cells weren’t aligned as with a normal trunk. Instead of following neat, straight lines, they caused the grain to swirl and curl in on itself. As he carved, the tension in the twisted grain was released. The wood thumped with a dull, uneven whup.
You can read the rest of this story at the Review of Australian Fiction.
Iqbal walked along the river in the fading evening light. He didn’t stand out as much, and he liked the quietness. The gum trees were in flower reminding him of the trees at home, but here they smelled sickly sweet– like drying blood.
Sometimes kids played on the banks, but their mothers – their voices pitched high with worry– called them when the sun disappeared behind the trees.
In this place called Brantley, the evenings stretched for hours. On Sundays, his mother and sisters went to church wearing the blue and red dresses donated to them by other members of the Sudanese community. There was nothing of the vibrant singing they were used to from the mud brick church in Sudan. Instead of drums, a piano corralled their voices into a staid pattern.
The church people were good people. They took the hands of Iqbal’s mother and held them. When she began to make friends, Iqbal asked if she minded him going for walks.
As long as he was back before she came home, she said, he could walk as far as he liked. “Two hours only,” she added.
EVA HAD LOVED the first slap of cold water on her face when she dived into the pool, then the bubbles peeling away from her hands like pearls. A shoal of parrotfish passed on her right, creating a golden wall that reflected the afternoon light. Ahead was a manta ray, its flanks rippling like a silk curtain, while the walrus hovered in the corner of her vision. As she pushed through a forest of kelp, it rasped against her cheeks.
Where she lived, heat stretched into the forties before summer storms and kids were taught to swim before they could walk. Eva, once tossed into the water, never wanted to get out again.
‘It’s all that fat. That’s why you can stay in so long,’ her mother used to say. ‘You’ve an extra layer of insulation.’
‘My little water baby,’ was what her father said, for her tubby body was always rolling and spinning, slick with water.
Eva didn’t care. She imagined peeling starfish from the rocks or tapping a rhythm on crabs’ shells with her nails. Then she plucked out the band holding her plait and unravelled her hair. She exhaled and sank to the pool’s plastic floor, meditating. Her long hair floated about her in a thick, writhing mass.
It’s November, 2004. I’m sitting in one of the elegant reading rooms of the British Library, gazing at rows of readers bent to their books at long wooden tables, their hair illuminated by the glow of desk lamps. The ceilings are high above my head, the woodwork panelling of the walls rich and dark. I am tired, my head groggy. I moved to London two months before with a suitcase and a scholarship to study expatriate Australian writers, but I sometimes feel like I can’t wake from a bad dream.
I stare blearily at the book before me, With Fond Regards: Private Lives Through Letters (1995), an edited selection of letters sourced from collections in the National Library of Australia by Elizabeth Riddell, a poet and journalist. It includes missives by Joseph Banks, a botanist on board James Cook’s voyage to Australia; convict woman Margaret Catchpole; Jewish internees detained in Hay internment camp during the second world war; and literary figures such as Vance and Nettie Palmer, Patrick White — and Rosa Praed.
You can read the rest of this essay at the Sydney Review of Books.
My laptop banged against my thigh as I wove through crowds at Waterloo station in London. It was my first time back in England since finishing my doctorate five years before and I’d forgotten how many people crammed the city. I boarded the train and slid into a window seat with relief. I’d returned because of a footnote relating to Maud Praed, the daughter of nineteenth-century Australian novelist Rosa Praed. Rosa’s biographer had attempted to find Maud’s medical records by writing to the sanatorium in which Maud was placed in 1902, but she was told that patient records were destroyed after twenty-five years. After checking the database for the National Archives (which didn’t exist when the biographer wrote her book), I found that patient records for Holloway Sanatorium still existed.
As we pulled out of the city, I looked down on strips of narrow Victorian houses, then impossibly green fields lined with golden oaks. I counselled myself, again, that I wasn’t to get my hopes up. I disembarked at Woking and caught a taxi to the Surrey History Centre, a plain, municipal building. Inside, I introduced myself and handed over my licence. I was directed to a desk in a nearby room, large and sterile with windows looking out onto a suburban street.
I was given a pair of gloves and a large, leather-bound book. My pulse picked up as I lifted it carefully onto foam supports and opened the cover. Inside were case notes for patients of the sanatorium, which was founded in 1885 by a wealthy entrepreneur, Thomas Holloway. I turned the pages until I reached ‘P’. And there it was. A small photograph of a young woman wearing a large woollen hat with a velvet flower, a well-fitted coat and a lace cravat. She looks away from the lens with her mother’s heavy-lidded eyes, her mouth open as if to speak. Behind the page was a thick letter. Carefully, I unfolded it and found Maud’s hand, running across twenty-two pages of stiff paper. Dated 27 September 1905, two years after her admission, it opens: ‘I have written to Mr Holde of Lackford Manor, asking him who should take me away from this Sanitorium [sic] as my Mother told me that she had nothing to do with me.’1
I’d been chasing this young woman for a decade and never expected to hear her adult voice. It was proof, in her own words, of how unhappy she had been. I took a breath to keep myself from shouting into the quiet, austere air.
Taken together, the three memories in my poem ‘Signs‘ denote my progression towards finding a voice as a deaf writer. The intense pain and sensory overload that I experienced on that early spring day was caused by meningitis. The doctor gave me a large dose of antibiotics to clear the infection on the lining of my brain, but this damaged the hearing in my left ear and half in my right. This was why I couldn’t hear my father’s words clearly.
I was obsessed with books such as Strawberry Shortcake when I fell ill. As I’d learned to speak by then, and I clearly loved words, my parents decided to send me to the local primary school, which meant that I was raised as an oral-deaf person (that is, a deaf person who uses her voice to communicate, rather than her hands to sign). I had speech therapy from a teacher for the deaf once a week, and now people rarely notice I’m deaf unless they see my hearing aid, or I tell them. This raises another set of problems: I pass so well as a hearing person (largely by dint of lipreading and sheer hard work), that people fail to accommodate me by speaking more clearly, or forget to include me in conversations. Consequently, it’s easier for me to read than to listen to and interact with people. Reading was a solace when I became sick, and has remained so ever since.
My deafness aside, the aura of those letters living beneath the dresser suggests that words were always going to be significant for me. Shuffling them into words presaged my decision to become a writer when I reached my late teens. I poured the stress, frustration and isolation that came with deafness into journals. Later, when I developed my literary ability, I crafted my emotion into novels, stories, poems and essays.
Read the rest of this essay at Cordite Poetry Review.
‘Much to my surprise in Dec last I received a particularly choice box of seeds, and your polite note, requesting a return of the Native seeds of Augusta’ wrote Georgiana Molloy on 21 March 1837 in her first letter to Captain James Mangles, an amateur botanist in London. Molloy had emigrated from England to south-west Western Australia with her husband John Molloy, arriving in 1830. Her phrase refers to the exchange of seeds — both English and Australian — which was to become the foundation of her relationship with Mangles. Yet her inclusion of the adjective ‘Native’ to describe these seeds signals a problematic relationship with the flora and with the Noongar people who helped to collect the seeds for her.
Molloy, born in Carlisle in England in 1805, was devout in her Presbyterian beliefs and prone to proselytising. She was accustomed to a life of leisure and numbered botany among her interests. Her husband, John Molloy delete , had fought against Napoleon, but after becoming a captain in 1824 and finding further promotion elusive, he proposed to Georgiana in 1829 and the couple set sail for the Swan River Colony. Upon their arrival, however, the Molloys found the settlement process in chaos, and, together with a handful of other emigrants, they elected to sail south to the new town of Augusta, the third British outpost in the colony regally named after the sixth son of King George III, the monarch who lost Britain’s North American colonies. A few days after they landed, the heavily pregnant Georgiana gave birth to their first child, a girl. Over the course of ten days, the baby became progressively unwell, then died.
This sense of nauseating stress, of being out of place in an environment, first made me empathise with Molloy in that tent on the shores of Augusta, her first child dying in her arms. She was in a tent in the driving rain, beyond which were the strange cries of birds and a landscape of towering trees that she described to her sister Elizabeth Besley in 1832 as ‘the unbounded limits of thickly clothed dark green forests where nothing can be described to feast the imagination.’ Not only was the land surrounding her inexpressible, but so was her grief.
If you'd like to read the rest of this essay, you can buy a copy of the journal from Griffith Review.
We creep through a paddock, alert for flickers and swaying blades of grass. I’m never fast enough to catch crickets before they fly, but I love the luscious uncoiling of his muscles as he springs and snaps one in his jaw. There’s the furious whirring of wings, a quiet rumble in our throats. The cricket chirrups once, twice, is silent.
I blink, and there’s a pressed-metal ceiling spooling with vines above my head. By my side is a man, his body white in the moonlight, hair dark against the pillow. No summer heat, no blue sky.
In the kitchen, I make myself a cup of tea and drink it at the sink. When the dream recedes, I rinse the cup and return to bed. My man, half-woken, pulls me into the crescent of his body. I breathe, in and out, in and out, until I have forgotten the way the world shivered with Mirram by my side.
*
We were wee things they said, but we grew fast. There was string to play with, and stretchy hair twisties that we caught mid-air. Mirram chewed my fingers and ambushed my legs. Sometimes there was a pain in our heads, but we went to sleep and then it was gone.
Words shifted between our minds. Mirram couldn’t understand them until I did, but that didn’t bother him. We napped in patches of sunlight, Mirram curled in the hollow of my back as I lay on my stomach. If he woke first, he crawled up to my shoulder and bit my ear. It tickled, and I laughed.
When people came to visit, they peered at Mirram, whose head reached my thigh.
‘Will he get much bigger?’
‘I hope so,’ I said proudly.
‘He’s growling.’
‘No, that’s purring.’
They straightened, stepping back. Mirram and I smirked.
The first time I opened my eyes and found the world was silent, I started shrieking, No sound! No sound!
My mother and father rushed to my room and sat beside me on the bed, but in my distress I couldn’t concentrate on lipreading them.
After an hour, Mirram sauntered in with wet paws, bringing sound with him.
Where were you? I shouted.
Hunting. Sorry. He leaned against my calf, rubbing his cheek below my knee. I smelled the earth in his fur and sensed his residual excitement after swiping a bird. I moved my leg away.
I have to hunt, Phyllis.
Take me with you, then.
Later, when you’re older. You need to sleep at night.
I touched his head. You promise?
I promise.
I pushed my hand down his back, over and over, until he finally purred. After that, he always came back before sunrise.
Not long afterwards, I put Mirram in a backpack and sat him in my lap in the car. He chewed shoelaces that I dangled in his face. My mother drove. When the car stopped, she said, ‘School.’
‘School,’ I repeated.
Your voice is too loud, Mirram said.
I repeated the word, softly.
My mother handed me a sachet of meat. I tore off the top and fed Mirram with my fingers, piece by piece.
Mum says you need strength, for today, I told him.
Alright, then. His rough tongue licked my skin.
At school there was so much listening, not just to learn, but because they wanted me to speak. I couldn’t do that without Mirram telling me if the shape and volume of my words was correct. Sometimes, he fell asleep on my feet and his dreams of skittering rats interfered with the teacher’s dictation. I kicked him awake, telling him, I can’t hear.
At night, he hunted less often. We slept together for longer.
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She left because the seas were getting colder and she’d heard of mermaids becoming trapped in ice and frozen over. She had never liked the cold and didn’t want to drown, so she decided to travel south, where it was warmer. Her family thought she was mad, but then, they always had. ‘Odd’ was what they called her, or ‘singular.’ They thought she spent too much time exploring and not enough time sitting on rocks brushing her hair. She was not sorry to leave them, and besides, she preferred her own company.
On her journey south there were new sea creatures to play with: she confused pods of dolphins by calling scrambled messages in sonar, brushed sea anemones so they closed in a huff, and was tickled by the fins of lionfish. She slept on white shores where the sand, unlike the prickly ice she had left behind, was cushioning. She followed frigate birds and albatross, holding fish up in her hand so the birds would swoop down, gusting her with their powerful wings.
Eventually, the sea became fickle and threw her against a pile of rocks. She was so tired she couldn’t move, and went to sleep.
When she woke, she found herself on a shore so bright she could barely see. Her hair was knotted around her body and scales flaked from her tail. Squinting, she made out stunted grass and thin, grey trees beyond. By no means did it seem a friendly country, but she was exhausted and the warmth of the water was appealing. So she stayed, swimming beside the beaches. She loved waking to the slap of a tide and birds’ cries from the bush. When the weather heated, shrubs lining the shore erupted with constellations of tiny white flowers. As the sun drew away into winter, she followed the land north and didn’t ever get cold.
Some time later, while she was teaching whale calves to leap in the ocean, she saw people with dark skin rowing in bark canoes. They sailed where the water permitted and carried their vessels where there was land to cross. When they came to the country where she lived, they travelled south. As they observed the land becoming hotter and drier instead of remaining moist with sea air, they put down their canoes and kept walking.
The mermaid didn’t mind their arrival, because a little company is always good, and soon she came to like them a great deal. They were clever people and she enjoyed the sound of their laughter as they sat by their fires at night. The men’s thin spears caught fish from the sea and the women’s fingers slipped into wet sand, drawing out shells. Their children loved water sprinkling upon their skin as they jumped through the shallows. Sometimes they saw the mermaid and waved, and she would play a trick of flicking water into their faces with her tail, then hiding herself deep in the sea. Slowly, she learnt their language, and they accepted her.
Over the thousands of years that they lived together, the mermaid noticed her skin gradually becoming darker, like theirs. She lost fat from her body because she no longer needed it for warmth, and her hair turned from gold to brown. She often wondered what her family would have thought of her if they saw her again. They would probably still call her ‘odd’ and ‘singular’.
One morning, while she was dozing on a rock, she saw a vessel like the ones the dark people had rowed in, but many times larger. It was topped with huge sheets catching the wind like wings. She swam up to investigate and found it encrusted with barnacles. It must have been travelling for a while, then. She looked up and was startled to find the figurehead was a carved, wooden mermaid, and that there were fair-skinned men upon the decks. She had become so used to seeing her dark friends that she’d forgotten about these other ones, who could have been her own people except they had legs and their language was not the same. She watched their muscles as they slung and worked the ropes and wondered if she could ask if things were still frozen in their part of the world. Then she saw him — that man at the helm with dark hair and a billowing white shirt — and her heartbeat disappeared.
She remembered her nanna, the only one who didn’t mind that she never brushed her hair. Her nanna would do it for her, with a tough comb carved out of a turtle’s back, and told stories as she brushed. One of these stories was about a mermaid who fell in love with a man and asked to have legs instead of a tail so she could walk with him. However, the old merwoman who gave her the legs took her voice in exchange, so even though the young woman with legs was very beautiful, the man couldn’t know her because she could not speak. Bereft, the young woman went back to the sea and drowned herself.
‘Never,’ warned her nanna, ‘go near a man.’
But, the mermaid thought as she followed the ship, watching as the sailor climbed the rigging and strode upon the decks with confidence, her nanna had never mentioned this desperation to be held by a man.
The ship dropped anchor and men leapt over the side, swimming to the shore. The mermaid swallowed as the man with the dark hair found his feet and strode across the tumbling waves, his shirt and trousers clinging to his body. Soon they were all fooling and tumbling in the shallows while an older man scratched on a dull, metal plate. When he was done with scratching he attached it to a plank of wood and banged it into the sand. Meanwhile, the men ran into the bush and shot wallabies for dinner.
The next morning, the mermaid swam close to the ship, hoping to see the man. There was a shout, then running, and suddenly he was beside the figurehead, raising a musket and firing at her. She was shocked. He lifted the gun again and she dived deep underwater, catching a current that carried her far away.
She headed south until the water turned chilly and froze into icebergs that edged through the sea. Occasionally they bumped into one another in a friendly way, but the din from their jostling was frightening. There were seals slipping through the water too. Sensing that the mermaid was sad, they raced her, or nipped her on the arm. The water was bitterly cold, but the mermaid bore it.
After watching the icebergs and the seals for a time, she began to feel happier and headed back to the familiar coasts of her country. She swam lazily in the bays and glided up the river with black swans. Sometimes she sat on the riverbank, her tail lost in thin green grass, casuarinas covering her with their hair while flocks of cockatoos blanketed the sun. If the dark-skinned people passed, their children would run to her, begging for a ride on her back in the river. Although she had learnt their language, she liked to speak to them in her old tongue because it made them drop to their knees with laughter.
She was dismayed to find that, in the wake of this ship came another, burdened with men and women who were haggard, their eyes dull. When they staggered from the boats that took them to shore, they tried to look cheerful. The mermaid felt sorry for them as they stared, as if stunned, at the mass of dry grass rising beyond the sand, the scraggly trees and unbearably bright sky. Then they stuck a flag into the soil and sang a dreadful song, so sombre it was like a dirge.
These people didn’t sail on, but stayed. The mermaid thought they would come to love the place as she had done and to live with it like the dark people. Instead they pulled down trees and built roads and huts, then houses of mud that they painted white. They released animals with fur that she recognised from her old home in the north. Some of them bred beyond control and upset the animals that lived among the grey trees. When the dark people became angry at the fair people’s deeds, they were killed. It was a sorry thing to do, the mermaid thought, hovering by the shore and flinching at gunshots in the bush. At length she swam away, disgusted that she could have admired one of the fair people at all.
She remained out in the ocean for a while, but it was lonely, with no one to speak to except an occasional passing whale and odd creatures near the ocean floor that grunted in monosyllables. She missed the company of the dark people and there were no children to play with. Eventually she visited some reefs, for the clownfish darting among the bright coral always cheered her, and she liked the quiet glow of phosphorescence and the haziness of haloclines. Sometimes she fell asleep on a rock and woke to find a turtle sunning himself beside her. She placed a hand on his shell, the warmth seeping through her fingers, and remembered her nanna brushing her hair.
Her body grew leaner still as she travelled, her tail a powerful wedge of muscle, her arms stringy with sinew, while her breasts became small and compact. She didn’t know where she was going, although she often felt as though she were swimming in circles, for she began to recognise the outlines of the coasts. It was at this time that she noticed the boats.
Some of them were large, rusting old hulks, and as she swam alongside them she heard people inside, rustling, talking and hushing their babies. Others were sloops with people huddled against one another, cold from the seawater that thrust itself at them spitefully. The mermaid watched their faces. Some were taut with fear, but in others she could see the blood beneath their skin glowing with hope, so they carried a red haze.
She stayed in that part of the ocean, trying to understand what they were doing. The people in the boats usually had dark skin, like hers, but where her hair was a gnarled rope, theirs was a black river. She wished, then, for her own comb to make her hair sleek.
Sometimes the bigger boats intercepted the smaller boats, and men standing rigidly on the decks barked at the dark-skinned people. They gathered up their sorry bundles and climbed onto the bigger ships and were taken away. At other times the dark people reached the shores of her country and collapsed, laying their cheek against the hot sand. Often, they cried.
One day, as the mermaid followed a creaking, clanking ship, a storm punched the vessel and it fell apart, scattering sheets of tin and people. The mermaid held her hands to her ears against the screaming. The waves were in such a strop they pushed everyone underwater to silence them.
Then the mermaid saw, amidst the maelstrom of thrashing arms and legs, a woman holding aloft a tiny baby. His skull was slick with dark hair and his caramel-coloured skin was tinged with blue. The woman snatched mouthfuls of air, but it wasn’t enough to keep them afloat.
The mermaid swam towards them and took the baby, clasping him awkwardly. His mother slipped below the surface and the mermaid grabbed her, but it was too late.
The baby’s heart fluttered as though a bird were trapped beneath his ribs. If she carried him to the nearest shore, he wouldn’t survive. The next best thing was a ship.
The mermaid moved out into the ocean and listened, turning until she could hear a motor. She swam towards it.
‘Over here!’ She shouted as the rusting freighter came into view. She spoke in the language of the white-skinned boat people, of which she had learned a little before she left.
‘Here!’ She was at the side of the ship. She lifted the boy above her head.
There was shouting, men peering over the deck. Someone fired a harpoon. It narrowly missed her, the rope thudding against her waist. She held the child higher.
‘Help!’ She tried again.
They pointed to a metal ladder attached to the side of a ship. She showed them her tail and their voices rose. Finally, they threw down a rope. She wrapped it around her powerful arms and they hauled her up. She fell onto the deck with a slap and they stood over her in a circle. The man with the harpoon touched her breasts and she bit his hand. He howled louder than the baby.
After that something stung her flank and she fell back, the boy sliding away.
The men who captured her handed her to the army, who passed her onto the scientists. When the scientists finished snipping at her hair, scales and skin, she was put in a glass tank and placed in the middle of a busy mall.
Eyes and camera lenses peered at her. She was talked about ceaselessly and many people would have climbed into the water with her, had security guards not been present. The only joyful part was when children squashed their faces up against the glass and the mermaid made faces back at them.
At first, the people who gaped at her said, ‘Oh, she isn’t real. It’s just some computer-generated model. Everyone knows there’s no such thing as mermaids.’
This made the mermaid sad, for she realised her nanna could no longer be alive.
To prove the people wrong, she decided to speak. She told them of her swim from the north to the south of the world, of watching the dark people come, and then the fair people, and how the country had never been the same from the time a man stuck a plate on a stick.
The listening crowd filled up the mall and the surrounding streets. The mermaid was watched on screens all around the country — in homes, shopping centres, bars and schools. As she spoke, the people’s eyes rounded with absorption, and then they began to frown with dismay, anger and, finally, shame.
One night, someone dressed in dark clothes placed a sign on the side of her tank. In the morning, office workers stopped with their coffees and read the sign. The mermaid watched their mouths.
‘Detention Centre,’ they said.
She could not understand this, but even more cameras appeared. She heard the scientists talking about moving her.
Another night, when the security guards were having a smoko, three more people in the dark clothes appeared.
‘We’re getting you out,’ a woman said as they lifted the lid of her tank.
The mermaid gripped the sides and, to her dismay, found her arms had become flaccid.
‘I want to go back to the sea,’ she said hoarsely.
‘That’s where we’re taking you.’
The mermaid wept and the woman touched her cheek.
In the truck, they wrapped her in wet towels and poured jugs of water over her. When they pulled off their hats she found they had the same sleek hair, oval eyes and dark skin as the mother of the child she had rescued. That made her feel better.
As soon as they lowered her into the water she swam away. She was alarmed by how quickly she ran out of breath and how soon her tail began to ache, but she pushed on until she reached the icebergs. There she was so lonely and unassailable she might as well have been frozen, but the seals remembered her.
Felton sat on the bench against the wall of the pub, watching evening darken through the gauze windows. He’d just returned from a month in the city for work and the quietness of the country town was a relief. Back in his empty house, however, it would become oppressive.
A young woman pulled up outside on her motorbike, her black cattle dog leaping from the seat behind her. Felton straightened. It was the girl who’d moved in next door to take care of Maxwell’s farm while he battled with his liver disease. The checkout chick at the grocery store said she’d been there for a couple of weeks.
The dog jumped onto the verandah and drank from a plastic icecream bucket of water, then flopped beside it. The woman strode into the pub, a newspaper beneath her arm, and nodded to the bartender. She was tall and thin, with honey-coloured hair bundled into a rough knot at the nape of her neck. Her shoulders, broad and angular, strained against her khaki shirt, which was rolled up at the sleeves to show freckled forearms. She straddled a stool at the end of the counter and unfolded the newspaper.
The bartender placed a tall glass of beer before her and said loudly, ‘No trouble tonight, orright Ellis?’
She gazed at him, but didn’t reply. The barman gave her a long look and resumed his conversation with a pair of farmers at the other end of the bar.
Felton wondered if he should introduce himself. The girl’s jeans gripped her hips and stretched tightly over her round arse. Jake, a pig farmer from the north side of town, was also watching her. Felton drained his beer and went to the bar for another.
‘Heard from that wife of yours, eh Felton?’ Jake called. ‘We’re still waiting to bank our money!’
Felton ignored him and slid a five dollar note across the bar. The girl frowned over the crossword in the newspaper, her shirt open far enough to show the slope of her breasts. She had chewed her pen, staining her lips with ink.
‘Need any help?’ Felton asked, but she didn’t look up.
The bartender broke away from his conversation and poured him a drink. ‘She can’t hear you, mate, she’s deaf,’ he said. ‘You’ve gotta get her attention first.’
Felton, feeling awkward, instead took his drink to his seat by the wall.
An hour later, the pub was filled with people, cigarette smoke and Jake Robertson’s loud, grating laugh. Felton decided it was time to go. As he reached for his hat, Jake made a beeline for the girl and wedged himself onto a stool beside her.
‘Nice arse,’ he said, in a voice too low for her to hear. Then he shouted in her ear, ‘Are you deaf or something, Ellis?’
He laughed uproariously, but she didn’t respond.
'Didja hear what I said? I know youse can hear some things.’
Ellis didn’t move, and Jake’s leer faltered.
'Ah, fuck you,’ he spat.
Ellis turned and rammed her fist into Jake’s pudgy jaw. He reeled, but quickly recovered, his swing connecting with Ellis’ cheek. She stumbled, then found her balance and landed a hook in his pudgy side. As he staggered, she kicked him in the crotch.
There was whistling and calling, the men spraying beer as they laughed.
The bartender pulled Jake away and shoved Ellis out the door to the dusty carpark. ‘Christ, I told you no trouble, young lady.’
There were low guffaws from inside. ‘Young lady, huh!’
Ellis stumbled down the verandah steps and fell to her knees, lowering her bruised cheek to the ground.
Felton followed her out and stood over her prone form, wondering if he should take her home. He’d never seen so much excitement in a pub since the slug-eating competition up north three years before, after which two of the participants had been rushed to hospital with rat lungworm disease.
‘Don’t worry about her, mate,’ said a grazier named Campbell, clapping Felton on the shoulder. ‘She’ll be right. Happens every week. It’s that bugger in there you should be worried about.’
Felton smiled faintly, listening to Jake’s groans.
Ellis’s dog had taken up sentry near her body. Felton let the dog lick his hand, stroked its head, then headed for his ute.
If you’d like to read what happens next, you can buy the story for $2.99 from the Review of Australian Fiction.
Upstairs in the Battye Library in Perth in 2007, I sat in a darkened room squinting at a microfilm of the sloping copperplate in Captain James Mangles’ letter books, which consisted of letters written to him on matters of botany between 1835 and 1845. Mangles was an amateur botanist who had retired from the British navy and lived near Regent’s Park, London. One of his correspondents was Georgiana Molloy, who emigrated from Carlisle, England, to Augusta in south-west Western Australia, arriving in 1830. In 1836, Molloy, who knew Mangles’ cousin Ellen Stirling, wife of the governor of Perth, received a letter and box of English seeds from Mangles, with the request that she return it to him filled with Australian seeds. Molloy protested, ‘I fear you have bestowed your liberality on one whose chief pleasure is her Garden but who does not enter the lists as a florist, much less a Botanist’, however she agreed to collect specimens when she had time. I had read extracts of Molloy’s letters in a biography written by Alexandra Hasluck, Portrait with Background (1955), but this was the first time I had seen them in their entirety.
Although the air was chilly with air conditioning in the archives, my skin was burning. As a broke writer, I’d been staying at a youth hostel, and a bed bug had bitten me on the toe as I slept. In an allergic reaction, red itchy welts the size of my palm stretched up my ankles, calves and neck. As I read the microfilms, I sat on my fingers to stop myself from scratching.
Once I reached the last letter, I requested access to the original letter books, and went up another floor to read them. When the books arrived in their cardboard box, I marvelled at their smallness. It seemed remarkable that the reams I had written on passion, grief and the history of botany were inspired by the careful cursive of these two books, only twice the size of my hand.
This essay was written for the 2013 Ridgeline Residency, a collaboration between Ridgeline Pottery and Island magazine in Tasmania. If you'd like to read it in full, you can buy a copy of the issue or (even better!) subscribe to the magazine to read it.
In the 1870s two remarkable women meet in a remote country town in Western Australia. Ingrid is hundreds of miles from home, trying to distance herself from a broken heart after her lover was forced to marry. Ellyn is a young woman living in stark isolation and driven close to madness by the death of her baby daughter. Ellyn's husband is away indefinitely, and she's had no word from him. When the two women meet, they forge a bond that grows ever deeper. But can their intimacy find acceptance in their conventional world?
A Curious Intimacy is available as an ebook from Booktopia, Dymocks, Kobo and Google Play.
“White ventriloquises 19th-century English with precocious sureness and, at its best, her descriptive prose is rhythmic, vivid, sensuous.”
“What does set the book apart from your average romance novel ... is the crisp precision of White’s language, especially her pinpoint descriptions of the flora.”
Eight years after the mysterious disappearance of her much-loved brother Eliot, Cate McConville finally returns to her family farm – only to discover that her ageing parents want to sell up and sever her only remaining link to him.
Torn between her childhood memories and the present, Cate reconnects with an Indigenous employee of her father's, Mellor, who becomes crucial to the resolution of her dilemma.
Entitlement is a compelling story about loss, the heart, and the meaning of home for Indigenous and white Australians.
Entitlement is available as an ebook from ReadCloud, Google Play, Kobo and Amazon.
“White achieves a sensitive and nuanced story, granting non-indigenous readers access to some of the complex issues surrounding the loss of identity and home that, unfortunately, is an overly familiar experience for Indigenous Australians.”
I thought it might have been the mercury that sent our father mad, but Luke, his grimy finger pointing to the entry in the encyclopaedia, insisted that it couldn't have been.
“Symptoms of mercury poisoning include sensory impairment, disturbed sensation and a lack of coordination,” he read in his clear, loud voice. “He couldn't have hit mum if he was uncoordinated.”
There were other words we had to look up to check their meaning, such as parasthesia and desquamation, but he didn't seem to have those either, or Luke would have heard about it. Because I was deaf, Luke told me everything he overheard from Mum and Dad.
“So it can't have been the mercury,” he concluded.
I kept reading. “It says it comes from cinnabar, which is the source of vermillion.”
“So?”
“He might use vermillion.”
We stared at the image of the pigment next to the text, ground into a poisonous red pile.
“Let's go and check,” Luke said.
We ran across the grass, warm already from the morning sun, to Dad's studio. On his desk was a painting of a man riding through the main street of a deserted town at sunset. This must have been the fourth time Dad had painted that picture.
We poked among the tubes of paint in the worn cardboard shoebox.
“Here.” I held up the wrinkled tube with a band of red across the top. “Vermillion.”
Luke looked worried.
To read the rest of this story, you can buy the issue from Island magazine. Or, if you subscribe, you’ll have a wealth of interesting stories, essays and reviews in your mailbox four times a year. On top of that, you’ll get that glow from supporting Australian writers.
