Essays

Fryer Library at the University of Queensland is one of my favourite places. Compared with the cathedral-like reading rooms of the British Library or Sydney’s Mitchell Library, the scale of Fryer is much more welcoming, with portraits of writers from the collection gracing the walls: Peter Carey in a Hawaiian shirt perhaps – or a pugnacious Xavier Herbert glaring at the artist.

A Glossary of Water: Music and Sounds for rīvus, the 23rd Biennale of Sydney I produced my first cassette mixtape…

This part of the Parramatta River where I walk is the western end, the part where it turns shallow and serpentine. This is not the river of historical islands and weekend sailing and houses with water views; that exists where the river breaks into the harbour further east. This is the river of narrow channels and mudflats and mangroves; of sex clubs and factories and unmarked burial grounds; of lunatics and God and disappearing buildings.

If the narrating consciousness of my non-fiction is a ‘what’ not a ‘who’ then I am not worried about the voice sounding clever nor the ‘narrator’ being ‘interesting’ and worthy of ‘story / opinion’.

And just as it is for me when I’m in a real traffic jam — that is, in a physical traffic jam — in my mental traffic jam I will always be thinking, absurdly, that if only I could push on forwards, even just a little — just the fraction of a roll — I will soon be able to prompt the car in front of me to roll forwards too, and then the car in front of that, and on and so forth, until the whole long cavalcade of cars (thoughts) can then push on past the knot, and be free.

When the regulars spoke of it, they agreed that Three Ropes was like a set. A character struts in, speaks a few lines over coffee and then leaves at their appointed time, as summed up by Macbeth.

When I am on the road, risking it all with a rusted-off chain and creaky saddle, I want to be seen, my existence hailed into being only in relation to the cars beside me. I want to be acknowledged by these hulking machines – which, I’m sure, could crush me like a bug without a moment’s hesitation were it not for their simpering drivers inside – as something formidable, something unknowable but fearsome all the same. I present myself like a challenge. Go on then, run me over.

While few literary translators are truly ‘anonymous’ these days, many still move like ghosts through the world of publishing, their names omitted not only from the covers of their books but also the reviews and promotional materials that sprout around them.

It was at that moment that I knew the newsletter had crossed over from a curious experiment into a practice that was integral to who I was as a writer.

‘Coiled loops of time.’ (Tim, part two of an undated letter, possibly begun before xmas 2019, part three finished 4…