Essays

By some cosmic sophomoric prank, despite my desire to become what some people call a writer, my true occupation on this earth has always been and always will be captured by the construction ‘a car-man is a car-man is a car-man is a car-man’, and if that formulation makes your skin crawl, try telling me about it, since the only escape from this fate of mine is the one Henry Lawson recommended above, and that salvation is forbidden by religion.

Recently, the spirits from my mum’s side have been particularly active. I hear them when I am scraping the frypan after dinner or watering what is left of my lavender or dreaming of scootering up and down the driveway at my family home.

The call lasted six hours. My father dipped in and out the room, took cigarette breaks between pouring bourbon and cokes and laughing with the gallery when another person’s camera froze on an unfortunate facial expression. I felt guilty for being seventeen kilometres away from my family.

As I begin to write kin and ethics a dear writing friend corresponds with me in messages about writing and love and rallying and the idea of being ‘inside the between’ when we come close how there is a ‘turning there’ how it is ‘the both of us’ and how the work of language of prepositions and prepositional thinking opens derring-do to a means of queering and transing language that becomes possible.

I learn that I have not made the interview stage for the role I had been performing for years prior. I walk to Campsie to meet with J, a former housemate, for a sauna, to sweat and swear. Like G, J has taken a ‘voluntary separation package’ from a different institution, and seems transformed since absconding from the academy. We strip off and I vent my spleen in the steam.

The reader and writer meet in a temporary place. They speak for a while. Despite the debt, despite the effect, the book is shut, the conversation ends, and like that, the reader is forever changed.

Reading Lost Haven in this particular place and time made me reflect on the nature of documentary realism (not for the first time), the intellectual traditions of the early twentieth century, and the way in which the women writers of that time constructed their position as writers, and the aesthetic decisions they made about how they went about processing their ‘material’.

Wordiness, perhaps even more than visual cultural forms, can prolong and extend the suspension of knowledge about gender identity, in ways that makes it possible to glimpse how gender identity of the binary kind is a kind of shortcut, and even a forfeiture in the face of gender’s multiple possibilities.

In a colony where blatant police brutality against Indigenous people is the norm, where we suffer the continued desecration of sacred land, live within a health and mortality gap, and a government that seeks to undermine sovereignty in all its forms, we need poets that can see all this – and still celebrate the joy, resilience and love of our community.

New knowledge in creative Writing may only be formed by rejecting established silos of identity, by being attuned to that which is embryonic, that which is pre-conscious and permeable, by reaching for floating, fluid entanglement.