Essays

‘Across all its sectors, book culture remains a game that is stacked against women.’

‘Are notions of literary value – of excellence – of prize winning and canons – so deeply associated with masculinity that we should try not to use them at all?’ 

‘Consider the progressive loss of the liberties of pseudonymity and anonymity so valuable, historically, to women writing literary fiction…’

‘Nothing I had written seemed progressive or ‘Feminist’ enough. Was I meant to open with a sexist incident from a male superior (the whiter the better)?’

In 2017, I found myself back where I began, in Parramatta. I was excited to make a difference in my community through my new job: as a producer for a local literature organisation. The work felt like it was going to be important, and I felt like it had to be me who did it. All my life I had been a chubby, crooked-toothed, glasses-wearing nerd – not a self-declared nerd, either, and therefore the bad kind. I had been fortunate to discover literature at an early age, and spent most of my formative years at Max Webber Library or the Angus & Robertson in Blacktown Westpoint, accumulating a tiny empire of books which I buried myself into, to make up for my dearth of friends or much else.

As daughters of migrant women we inherit these stories and all the work that comes with them. We carry, keep, care-take, preserve and interpret, sometimes reinvent this inheritance

Do the fish really still care about us as human or post-human? As the oceans fall to our pollution, as the rivers dry up contaminated, will they answer our plea for knowledge? A sun shower evokes a shared moment of renewal, it offers communion and connects us to water as bathed in light, on skin…. Indigenous culture and knowledge is a key to sensing our part in the interrelational cosmology, the multiverse, the inner and outer worlds of perception and action.

‘The plastics factory is hot with primordial breaths, its softness shaping an enormous abyss.’

Given my ambivalent relationship to literary journals, why on earth would I want to start one?

There’s ghosts in the reserve. There’s a rusted windmill and water tank, old concrete feeding troughs and burnt out cars that crawl with the living – goannas, stray dogs, panthers. Every life I have knows this reserve and the liminal scrub it spills through the suburbs, which swallows the correctional complex to the west and edges up to the cattle station on the east.