Essays

To the panicked masses running through the street, soot on their faces, smouldering koalas clawing feebly at depleted human breasts, embers hanging in the air like a jury’s verdict, we say ‘It’s going to be ok. We’ve brought criticism with us, some literature.’ The koalas miraculously stop smoking. One of the huddled masses looks at you and wells up: ‘Oh thank god you’re here.’

I am writing this essay out of frustration that few people understand the daily working lives of artists and writers and persist in dreamily thinking that our jobs are all dreamy thinking.

It’s definitely possible never to notice the wondrous activity of plants beneath bark, beneath soil. Maybe the same could be said for turning a blind eye to images of plants, right under our noses.

Perec had a succession of pet cats, all of which went by the name Duchat. The Duchats had an essential quality by which one could transform into another.

Today, Indigenous people are asserting their rights to their cultural inheritances, and are reclaiming their cultures. They have continued to practise culture, and the fact that they have had their land stolen makes it even more of a treasure – a gift, a legacy, a heritage that is precious and passed on to the next generations.

There was a reason, I came to understand, why the company’s marketing staff hadn’t been assigned the Great Places to Work submission; everyone needs skilled writers, but nobody wants to pay properly for them.

The work of homemaking in which the filmmaker is engaged is thus not only about the creation of a continuity between past and present. It is also about the future – how we remember the person that we will become.

Instead of approaching the stage I approach Australia Post on Blacktown’s Main Street, and instead of thanking the Vice-Chancellor I thank the woman at the counter as she hands me an envelope with the certificate inside. I head out the door as the first in my family to graduate, and the first to graduate during a pandemic.

That summer seems long ago now. At the time I couldn’t write it down. I read accounts by people who experienced the fires and those in cities affected by poor air quality and had a writer’s guilt that I should be part of the conversation.

Every technology offers gain and loss. This is my accounting, a personal arithmetic of screens and apps engaged with over one, exceptional year.