The Shrike and the Spring

At mid-afternoon the grey shrike-thrush sends its familiar, two-part warble. Out of habit, I whistle the tune from the forest floor where I’m watering saplings. We continue the echo for a few rounds. As I pick up the watering can to move on, I see the dark shape hopping through pine branches. It issues a variation. I repeat it. The shrike-thrush issues a second variation, this time in three parts. I put down the can and carefully rehearse the new combination.  

Something odd happened as I was finishing my last book, Monument. I had spent nearly a decade writing it, wandering the terrain of intergenerational denial and forgetting. I was obsessed by how erasure and amnesia manifest themselves when communities and families withhold knowledge of the past that they cannot bear to speak. One of the book’s narrative threads hangs on my father, whose personal deceptions reflected and perhaps reiterated this widespread colonial behaviour in Anglo-Gaelic Australia. What I didn’t know during that decade of writing was that he was developing the early stages of Alzheimer’s Disease. He was forgetting at a biological level, an annual rate.

After many attempts to recover our already damaged relationship, I hadn’t spoken to him for a year. By the time the book’s final draft was with its publisher in late 2022, my father’s cognitive impairment was hard to disentangle from all that he had chosen to deny. A dedicated fine evader, he now racked up toll charges and speeding tickets from freeways in unexpected places. While he was a terrifying driver at the best of times, his motor control was getting worse as he steered over roundabouts or parked in spots he couldn’t recall. Of his own accord, he put a stop to a lifetime of surfing because he’d become fearful of the water, or he wanted to evade family friends around the beaches in Cronulla. His typically unexplained expenses were now an exponential hazard, as Mum scrambled to keep the credit card out of his reach. When he was questioned, what had been a propensity to stonewall now turned to frustrated rage or cool dismissal. He agreed that he and Mum would sell their home – then insisted that he would stay on to live there alone.  

Over that summer I completed the final edits on the book, imagining that I would soon be posting him a copy. Mum finished packing up their house; my brother arranged for our father to move into his own rental apartment just a few blocks from the old house, with a visiting care service. We thought he might be able to live independently for a few more years with domestic support. Our father was ambivalent; he understood what was happening but didn’t or couldn’t express commitment to it. 

One night before Christmas 2022 he woke, complaining of a great pressure in his chest. My father would never return home from that visit to the hospital, where ER staff were swiftly replaced by geriatricians who advised that he was in a state of cognitive dysfunction. He was too fidgety to go into an MRI machine, but a CT scan showed reduced frontal lobe volume. From his bed he manically phoned and texted out to us. He didn’t recall how he’d ended up there. He fled three times, twice making it successfully back to the old house by train and foot, once while COVID-positive with a canula in his arm. He was moved to a secure geriatric ward, but this didn’t slow him down; he was once found piling up chairs against a courtyard wall, preparing to bust out yet again. 

When Monument came out in early 2024, I wasn’t sure what to make of my father’s body as a machine for forgetting. I had written an account of how an individual might choose to un-know something traumatic or shameful, something they can’t reconcile with others’ perceptions of them or with their own values. I had written of trauma, shame, and avoidance as forms of social pathology in White Australia, and of the erasure of true colonial history as one of its symptoms. I hadn’t meant to write of dementia. But in researching the book I had become convinced by the power of cognitive dissonance. And I’d become increasingly hung up on a private theory – that through the stress of chronic fabrication and flight my father had cultivated his disease.  

I didn’t need to become a psychology student to understand something I’d learned as a writer and reader, and as a colonial. Words can make truth, can let it pass or obstruct it. They can smother truth, too, which is very nearly the same thing as unmaking it. But as I delved into psychological science, I found that others shared my hunch. Perhaps a secret could make you sick.  

Stress – the necessary kind, known as eustress – is vital to safety and growth. Eustress empowers the nervous system into useful reactions to life’s demands and it can, as they say, be ‘completed’. When stress hormone tapers off, our nervous system, returning to homeostasis, signals to our limbic system that the source of stress is over. After sighting a snake or giving a poetry reading, we can reinforce this signalling in conscious ways – a bit of exercise, laughter or dancing, a stiff drink that relaxes vigilance.  

At the pointier end of the stress continuum are distressing and traumatic experiences. In our social worlds, these are often experiences we associate with shame and stigma. Over the long term, the cognitive and physiological efforts of inhibition and avoidance of disclosure are significant forms of stress. This chronic stress includes symptoms like immune suppression and raised blood pressure, which are some of the many risk factors for Alzheimer’s Disease, among other things. It’s long been known, however, that disclosure of distress, in any form, is healing. What about writing?  

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, social psychologist James W. Pennebaker’s experimental research with expressive writing introduced new evidence that psychology couldn’t ignore – and hasn’t yet fully explored. Pennebaker had been looking into how environmental or situational factors influenced physical symptoms, when he found that the research participants who suffered from symptoms most were those who kept trauma secret. He developed a hunch that any form of chronic inhibitory effort is stressful and could produce immune and physical symptoms.  

At that time, most studies of disclosure had been done using writing, so Pennebaker built on these, measuring markers of general health in individuals before and after short stints of written disclosure. Randomly assigned groups of participants were instructed to write on prescribed topics over 3-5 consecutive days for short periods up to half an hour. The experimental group was told to write on one or more topics that related to upsetting emotional experiences from their lives. The control group wrote under the same conditions on superficial topics. All deposited their writings into a sealed box and were told the contents would remain confidential. Prior to the experiments, many of Pennebaker’s participants showed signs of what he called secretive stress, including elevated heart rates and suppressed antibody levels. He found that those in the experimental group who wrote about distress or trauma for 15 minutes over 4 days showed reduced health centre visits and improved immune markers over subsequent months. Pennebaker also found that those who showed the greatest physical improvements were the ones whose writing had developed, from poorly organised thoughts to statements of causality and insight, over the period of the study. While Pennebaker never proved his inhibitory stress theory, and he later critiqued the validity of those initial studies, what his experiments revealed was a cognitive model of expressive writing that has since become well developed and evidenced as a therapeutic treatment.  

Putting thoughts and feelings about distressing and traumatic experience into writing takes different clinical forms. Pennebaker’s expressive writing model is distinct from journalling used in cognitive-behavioural therapy, where the goal is to log and connect unwanted thoughts to emotions and behaviours. In expressive writing, the aim is for the writer to openly acknowledge and accept their emotions and memories, to give voice to avoided feelings, and to construct a meaningful story of their experiences. Expressive writing is also distinct from autobiographical therapy, which uses guided narrative structures and the full life story. In Pennebaker’s model, the frequency and timing of writing is limited and measured. The writing may or may not be read by the therapist. While the technique is often combined with talk therapy, only slightly better outcomes have been found to result from the combination in comparison to expressive writing used on its own. 

In expressive writing, the cognitive process of putting thoughts and feelings into language is key. Not everyone can or will talk about emotionally intense experiences. The contained and procedural approach of written disclosure, for example, seems to be very helpful to those for whom emotional articulation doesn’t come easily (a condition psychologists call alexithymia). The effects of written expression have been found to be comparable to oral expression, but it hasn’t yet been proven whether the degree of privacy afforded by expressive writing makes a difference to the therapeutic outcome. Perhaps imagining a sympathetic reader, a witness, is enough to deflate shame and fear of stigma. So far, it’s been found that men raised in Western cultural contexts of masculine stoicism and hostility are the greatest beneficiaries of expressive writing.  

I sit here in my Hard Yakkas drawing diagrams of the adrenal axis. From his behaviour and scan, my father was well into the early stages of Alzheimer’s before he was hospitalised. Though we’ll never know for sure, I now guess that an embolism was what rushed my father into hospital – and over the edge from early to middle-stage neural atrophy. A great pain near his heart. 

I watch with embarrassed joy as he dances pogo across the creaking floorboards. His bare feet are salt-laced from the surf, sand trailing through the house, the cryptic black skin of his wetsuit drip-drying on the washing line. It’s an early weekend morning and all the windows are open, and I am certain that nobody else on Coronation Avenue, Cronulla, is doing this in 1990. There is the turntable spinning The Sundays’ Goodbye fresh from my father’s most recent work trip. Over the years the records become CDs plastic-wrapped with content warnings; they slide out of his softshell suitcase, the stink of chewing gum and jet fuel unzipped on the living room floor. He’s barely had a shower after his most recent flight before my brother and I are emptying Suede or Siouxsie and the Banshees out of the yellow Tower Records carry bag. Our father flails with abandon. He never makes mondegreens from Cocteau Twins; he just chortles the notes, trying to sing all the harmonies at once, eyes squeezed shut and head shaking.

My father sought ways to cope with his stress; thankfully they excluded violence and alcohol. They did not, however, include sharing his secrets. His ways, I think, helped him to sustain intermittent forgetting. 

In his pithy book In Praise of Forgetting, David Rieff writes that, when the individual body is functioning, there is a ‘duty to forget’ many things. Synaptic pruning begins in infancy and exists to destroy detritus. It’s now well-known that normal forgetting occurs through the brain-bathing function of sleep. In deep sleep’s low frequency waves, the nervous system is at rest. In more active, higher frequency phases, the brain also uses dreaming to sort recent and recurrent experience into storage and waste. Dream is a machine for memory.  

As is language. Memory and language are cognitively co-dependent in humans. Neither can go on for very long without the other. We can take this a step further: health and narrative go hand in hand. Because of positive evolutionary selection for a specific amino-acid difference from other mammals, humans very recently developed parts of the left hemisphere of the brain to compose and comprehend words. It is not the only minor thing that distinguishes our biology from chimpanzees, but it is the newest thing. In the timeline that saw the development of hominin mark-making, expressive movement, vocal communication, and aural composition, the verbal gateway arrived only yesterday, and it arrived fast. As Lynne Kelly explains in The Knowledge Gene, once this amino-acid appeared in the human genome, our neurobiology – cognitive, facial, and oral – very quickly made room for it. It is a gene variant so useful for shorthand knowledge-sharing (and population growth) that it has been kept in our genome despite the risk of the profound disability that results from its mutation. 

The cognitive productions of speech and writing tend to give memories organisational logic, which makes for a coherent sense of self. Using our recent tool of verbal communication, we can use writing to engage our working memory (selecting words) and long-term memory (episodic retrieval). There is much research about the pre-verbal quality of the older knowledge tools that assist with written expression. Amongst writers I am not alone in using drawing as a vague precursor, or companion, to first-draft writing. The left frontal lobe’s capacity for abstraction and symbolism sits close to the left temporal lobe’s areas for language comprehension and construction. The former works closely with the right frontal lobe and optic nerve to process spatial perception. Pictorial expression can act as a loosening of secrets held too close for words, or a representation to which writing can respond.  

By ‘breaking down perceptions’ into considered and deliberate representative forms, writes psychiatrist Veronica O’Keane in A Sense of Self, any form of artmaking jams the ‘automatic sensory information-perceptual constancy’ of human consciousness. Used in the right context, creative expression cuts across our habitual self-narration, dissolves it a little, rearranges it. I once saw Lynne Kelly on the street, carrying what looked to be a large tray or carton. ‘Pizza!’ I exclaimed. Without speaking she turned towards me a gigantic clock.  

Language, however, is quite alone in its power over consciousness. Writing and speaking integrate our memories into our autobiographical identity. I think it is worth noting that writing, like drawing, is also a spatial and motor task. Writing is unique in that it demands the function of several specialised cognitive capabilities and one that is experienced as the very voice of autobiographical self: consciousness. As Pennebaker found, the physiological benefits occasioned by expressive writing were tied to greater organisational coherence in the writing samples; and in the case of trauma therapy, the use of first-person voice is seen as a key stage in the integration of distressing experience. In other words, when emotional experiences can be narrated relationally and contextually, they become part of a bigger story of ourselves. The daunting, looming size of secrets may shrink.  

But by the same processes, we can awaken – and feed – dragons. When Sinéad O’Connor resurfaced after years of mental illness, she spoke to the New York Times about her experience of writing a memoir: ‘I really trust the subconscious […] If it doesn’t want you to remember something, there’s a very good reason for that.’ Yet anyone who writes a song like ‘Troy’ has, I think, confronted the cost of disclosing trauma, and doing it publicly. It’s interesting to note that, while her disclosure sometimes went to dangerous lengths, they were not to be confused with confessing sin – as O’Connor made clear when staging her anti-Catholic protest on Saturday Night Live in 1992. An immensely vulnerable act, this exposed her to a re-traumatising public experience. 

In his surprising blockbuster, The Body Keeps the Score, neuroscientist and psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk describes his creative and somatic interventions into Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). As a practitioner, van der Kolk uses Eye Movement Desensitisation & Reprocessing (EMDR). He cites acupressure from Chinese medicine, which has now been incorporated into some EMDR methods. Van der Kolk also uses pictorial expression as a foundation for dramatic role-play. And while some of these techniques are still building an evidence base as PTSD treatments, what he doesn’t recommend is writing. 

In van der Kolk’s extensive research, recovering from PTSD doesn’t require articulation of the event, but rather an imaginative capacity to place the traumatic experience where it belongs. Just as we are all surrealists when we dream, creative expression can be used therapeutically to make surprising associations in waking life. In Monument I quote the powerful essay, ‘Different Ways of Knowing: Trees Are Our Families Too’, by Palyku women Gladys and Jill Milroy, who talk about dis(re)membered stories in the context of settler disconnection from place. To be meaningful in healthy ways, say the Milroys, the stories of families need to be reconnected with their extended contexts. Almost the same image is used by van der Kolk to describe the work of trauma therapy: ‘If the problem with PTSD is dissociation, the goal of the treatment would be association: integrating the cut-off elements of the trauma into the ongoing narrative of life’. 

Retelling the narrative of the traumatic experience itself, however, challenges a ‘frozen’ brain to do something it has (usually over a long time) trained itself not to do. A frozen brain has done a great job, a too-good job, of keeping secrets from itself. As well as dissociating from memory and inhibiting some emotional processing, the frozen brain has reduced function in the left frontal and temporal lobes – those areas which process symbolic and verbal capacities. In The Birth of Pleasure feminist psychologist Carol Gilligan explains: 

My father’s habit of concealment and denial was not the same thing as traumatic dissociation – though the distinction is sometimes hard to maintain, and there may be a lot I will never know about the man. There’s some hypothesis that safe disclosure about a trauma may prepare an emotionally repressed individual for disclosing the trauma itself in a different setting. This turned out to be my experience in approaching episodes of recent family trauma in Monument. Guided by nothing but time I had talked to several counsellors and psychologists before it occurred to me that I could write those episodes into the manuscript. But writing about the traumatic experience itself is likely to return someone suffering from PTSD to avoidant, depressive, and anxious rumination – states I couldn’t fully avoid. The recovery of voice, not the recovery of memory, is the aim. To get there, exposure may not be necessary. As van der Kolk asks, ‘What good is it to talk about your trauma?’  

I visit the country of my father’s great-great grandmother, Mary Sweeney. On this trip I kneel by several holy springs in the Gaeltacht. In County Clare I park my hire car by an access road as a farmer approaches me and speaks in Gaelic. Perhaps he needs me to move the car, or maybe he wonders if I need information or directions. It’s too much for me. Tá brón orm, I repeat, my hands raised. The farmer mutters and goes on his way. 

The springs of Clare bubble regularly, rhythmically; a functioning spring is a ‘fluid fossil’ in the words of artist Polly Stanton. But sapped or contaminated, as they often are by Australia’s aquifer theft and enclosure, a spring becomes ‘a page that had once been full of story’. Its voice ebbs, its flow grinds to a halt. Visiting a drained spring is listening to a word, like a frozen whisper, and imploring it to say more.  

In Ireland I hear Gaelic spoken with robust, almost perverse glee. In the 1980s, however, Australian poet and critic Vincent Buckley wrote of his encounters in Ireland with a widespread denial of the country’s pre-colonial history and heritage. Buckley, who maintained a strong relationship with his familial homeland, was incensed by locals’ affected disinterest in the tumbledown neolithic tombs and Gaelic ráths being butted by sheep and storms on private property. In Memory Ireland he extensively records how, with an ear for echoes of Australian colonialism, his questions were met with silence:  

It seems that Buckley was witnessing a collective coping mechanism: it wasn’t that the folks he questioned were ignorant of their pre-colonial history, rather, they all denied knowledge of it. The shame of land loss and fear of ethnic stigmatisation still pervaded Ireland some sixty years after Independence. Knowledge was on the verge of amnesia. 

The Milroys talk about the sickness of intergenerational forgetting in the colonial Australian context, and surely a society has a duty to forget, too. For communities in crisis there is a ‘terror of remembering too well’: of vendetta and vengeance and bitterness and punishment. Re-telling a social history as though it is the present can become a pious, fascist type of memory, one which exists as a theory only, seeing itself, as Rieff puts it, above ‘the fullness of geological time’. 

Forgetting may be collective, but what about the physiological effects of inhibitory effort? Is it possible for the secretive stress of denial to be carried en masse? As one person cannot represent a culture, any direct comparison of individual and collective pathology can be tenuous. Alzheimer’s certainly evades such extrapolation. As Maurice Halbwachs writes in On Collective Memory, linguistic aphasia, a symptom of the early stages of the disease, severs a crucial medium for collective memory. It is unlikely, however, ‘that an aphasic forgets that he is a member of society’ whatever form that concept may take – family, home, workplace. His distress comes from being attentive to this society without being able to speak into it. He may be able to relive and recount long-term memories, which have moved into the brain’s cortex for storage. An individual’s long-term memory allows them to ‘[keep] contact with the collective memory’ because older events have had a greater chance of being verbally shared with other people. Partly attached to some common experience, my father at his hospitalisation was, in Halbwachs’ words, ‘like a man in a foreign country who does not speak the language but knows the history of this country and has not forgotten his own history’. Like Vincent Buckley, perhaps, remembering Australia as he learned Ireland. Like me looking for Mary’s holy spring, losing something I never had. But only like, and only for a moment. 

The remedies for sustained individual concealment and collective forgetting, therefore, must be distinct. Or must they? As I noted when writing Monument, Paul Ricoeur, in Memory, History, Forgetting, suggests that ‘to return to the past, one must forget the present, as in states of possession’, while: 

This passage seemed to offer a way to bring together social and behavioural theory insofar as Ricoeur’s images of social ritual bear a resemblance to processes of trauma therapy. Exposure, for example, offers a temporary state of possession by returning one to the emotional reality of a traumatic experience. During and after one’s exposure to the oral or written memory, trauma therapies typically focus on somatic and perceptual skills which return body and mind to the present. While its content needn’t be traumatic, expressive writing follows this temporal logic: when time’s up or the document is put away, cognitive ties with whatever inhibited thoughts or feelings have been recorded can be suspended. Indeed, an individual’s integration of avoided thoughts and feelings into their conscious present life might be thought of, paradoxically, as being initiated by a process of healthy forgetting.  

Whether historical or personal, disclosure may stimulate the same cognitive and physiological functions in the one or the many: release of inhibitory stress; cognitive defusion from a limiting story; approaching avoided situations or emotions. In interpersonal relationships, one outcome from disclosure is forgiveness. What could disclosure achieve in communities beyond kith and kin? Examples can seem few and far between in the hostile and stoical White settler patriarchy I call home. Rieff explores some global cases, though his book was written before the First People’s Assembly of Victoria undertook the Yoorrook Justice Commission. Its truth-telling hearings, concerning the long-concealed violence, harms, and impacts of colonisation in Victoria, were a fundamental stage of preparation for the Treaty signed in late 2025. Writing of historical violence in Amnesia Road, Luke Stegemann says, ‘commitment to a better future demands a reformational turning away from the previously traumatised, unproductive, or wrong-thinking self’. Without revelation of secrets and truths, this path would be merely (self-)righteous. But gained through a process of guided expression and thoughtful rebeginning, it might be remedial.  

Later in the disease, the Alzheimer’s sufferer loses his theory of mind. He enters a long phase of semi-sociopathy, or disinhibition, as the mirror neurons snuff out. He returns to the amoral nature of a toddler. He propositions his daughter. He speaks the truth. The brambles of his words are a scaffold of overgrowth, and collapse. I watch him afloat, very far away from me, in the shallows. 

Alzheimer’s Disease is not a curable episode or a normal part of ageing; it is a terminal illness with known causes. The causes, however, are not moral failure or feebleness of character. I am not relieved that my father cannot read what I have written about him. When I write about my perceptions of his dementia, I mean it as an act of respect and love. I do not write about him with a sense of reckless freedom. There are many loved ones who can read my words, and for whom I also feel a serious ethic of care. The easiest way for me to know this – because I do ask myself all the time – is to write out all the things I have not shared, and do not wish to share, about him or my relationship with him, or about others’ relationships with him. They don’t need to be secrets, and they don’t need to be literary. This list is an ocean of feeling and fact compared to the little pond of reflection I have published.  

Watering done, I’m working at the worm café, churning through the compost with a small shovel. The humus is black, pocked all over like a low-tide beach, and the worms themselves are visible at work. I dump the compost into a wheelbarrow and roll it down to the vegetable beds near the house. Part of a book is still decomposing amongst the fine black soil. I know which book it is from a fragment of the cover image, a shred of sky. 

Even from here I can see the shape still moving along the shadowy pine branches. Now it puts out a completely new melody with a trill. Okay. I whistle back a harsh and low-pitched version, nowhere near an echo. But the shrike hops forward. A beat. Then another new melody, in five parts, including none of the original motifs. I panic, dart inside the house and close the door on the tree.