Essays

How can we tell the story of places where families with limited means came and went and made a living of sorts, places that act as meeting points between the old and the new, the long established and the newly arrived, where each generation is given the opportunity to understand itself as different from a previous generation and, hence, able to break away?

The lyric’s charge always catalyses new arrangements: it crackles not only through the recording, but across forms and bodies in elaborate, improvised, staged and/or filmic choreographies. Similarly, I tend to think not only of the charge of my language, but about how this charge might propel the poem into distributions across an open field, or how it might slip through the crevices between words into arrays of diacritical marks—dashes, brackets, loops, shapes, even photographs.

The me that writes the first fragment of a piece is different in significant ways from the me who decides, at some more or less arbitrary point months or years later, that the collection of scrawls and scribbles across multiple notebooks constitutes a first draft, and sets the whole thing aside to mellow and ferment in the cool of a desk drawer

Then came the day another week began, and it was a new month, and there was no end in sight. The dream, the shock, the is-this-really-happening: all of this started to wear off and at the same time started to intensify. New words and phrases emerged: hibernation, the other side, the bridge. And the old words—images of war remained top of the pops. This unseen enemy within, the frontline troops, our heroes.

At its best, the feminist manifesto is not only a weapon against patriarchy but a weapon against the worst aspects of feminist politics – it refutes liberal tendencies of moderation and incremental, slow, ‘wait and be patient’ modes of reform. It is a rebuttal to institutional practices of silencing women’s voices, and it refuses to ignore anger. It rips down the principles that underlie institutional politeness, women’s complicity in their own oppression, and authorial passivity.

‘Though few would associate one with the other, the ‘Bard of Bunyah’ and the writer once renowned for being the country’s first Aboriginal novelist lived remarkably parallel literary lives. They were born three months apart in 1938; they both lost parents early in life and endured difficult childhoods in rural towns; they led somewhat peripatetic existences in their early twenties before publishing their first books to modest acclaim in 1965; they rose in reputation through the 1970s and 80s (Murray much more quickly than Mudrooroo) and by the 1990s had become singular presences in Australian literature; they had life and career defining moments in 1996 that brought on the final phase of their literary careers. Last year, they died four months apart. In all, Murray spent 42 more days on this earth than Mudrooroo.’

I have a beard. A thick black beard, a monobrow, a shark-fin nose, and caramel skin. I look undeniably Arab. I’ve been held-up in airports in L.A, Tel Aviv and Wellington. I speak Arabic, I wear a gold chain that Mum bought me from Tripoli, I have a tattoo of Horus on one arm and a Phoenician sun symbol on the other. When people ask where I am from, I say Australia. When they ask what my ethnicity is, I say Lebanese. I look Lebanese, I sound Australian.

Between 1935 and 1939, the Federal Writers’ Project – an initiative funded by the Works Project Administration under the New Deal – provided employment for some 6000 jobless writers. Today, as stunned authors in Australia and around the world come to terms with the economic consequences of the coronavirus pandemic, that experiment deserves reconsideration.

My first response to COVID-19 was not to go back home. Home for me is in the Hunan province in the south of China, next to Hubei. It had been a difficult decision to make. The virus coincided with the Chinese New Year; it was like a bomb thrown into a mine field. But I also knew that it was the time when I was most needed at home.

A month into my summer job, I said to my mother with unusual vehemence that I never wanted to end up in a rest home. By then, I knew some of the residents better and alongside the mandated ministrations of care – the quickly learned techniques of the sponge-bath, the assertive double-fold of a hospital corner when making the beds and the fitting of a prosthetic half-leg – I had come to care for them in my own fashion.