Essays

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.

The words are imperfect, flawed approximations of the knowledges we seek to share. But on a good day, with the wind blowing in the right direction, those words might nudge someone to listen to their own gut. Those words might be sparks that help fuel other gender insurrections. I await those fires with glee. For each time someone burns their gender script, and writes a new story for themselves, we all taste a little more freedom.

It’s all very precise; a kind of manual for essay writing from the unconscious. There are no visions in the dream; the words come in blackness with just the merest slivers of red and electric blue swimming somewhere at the edges.

If this pandemic has revealed anything, it’s the fallacy of certainty: what we thought would be now might never be; what we thought could happen tomorrow probably won’t.

Maybe you already know that working minimally feels feasible when there is work, when you have, or can return to, a paid job, when you are fairly confident that, frightening though the thought might be, if you lost your paid job you could find another.

I can’t quite recall why I stepped off the path on that particular day and headed towards the rocky southern end of Newcastle Beach, where nobody goes.

‘After we returned home it felt as though the whales swam inside me, pushing outwards and creating enough volume for multiple ways of being in the world, for multiple grammars and songs, the evolution of myriad co-existing routes.’