Juncture

Right from its opening line: ‘The white boys stare at us from the pub’, this story brings its readers into the First Nations community of south coast of NSW and into the realm of Aboriginal protagonist Jackson on the cusp of adulthood.

One summer evening, as fires rage elsewhere in the country, three women at different stages of life are sequestered in the plush chill of the Melbourne Theatre Company watching Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days.

As A Jealous Tide continues, MacDonald abandons the apparatus of realism in favour of a more playful and elaborate approach. The contours of time and place erode. The narrator’s watery fancies of libraries turning into vessels become hard to distinguish from the hallucinations of the shipwreck survivors she’s researching . The traffic outside filtered through the windows takes on the rhythmic sound of waves; the railing, encircling the library’s upstairs gallery, becomes a ship’s deck, listing in the breeze; the ladders are knotted ropes over the sides of a sinking ship. And her desk is now a lifeboat as she ‘magicks’ herself onto a bench seat, a sole survivor adrift in open sea.

If women remain hidden, or hide themselves, how are those who follow to find the stories in which they blaze a trail through oceans, or support themselves and their family with literary success? As Clode writes, ‘Stories construct the mythologies of our history, help us to understand our present circumstances and illuminate the possibilities of the future. If we cannot see ourselves in stories, how can we imagine ourselves creating new ones?’ This is not, I expect, a conundrum that can ever be resolved, and one of the great pleasures of these books is the ways in which their authors fill in the blanks.

Ordinary matter is what we are made of – everything we can see or detect with telescopes or microscopes or our own eyes. Such a wide descriptive ambit makes it an apposite title for this second collection of fiction by Brisbane-based Laura Elvery, which ranges far and wide, across decades and geographical spaces, and occupies the nexus between arts and science, writing and innovation.

Because this is the thing, I keep thinking, about being handed the keys to the city of oneself – keys are not particularly versatile tools. They may very well open up a set of gates, but they cannot help to navigate whatever lies on the other side. There’s no street directory, or map of any kind. Perhaps this is true to some degree for everybody, but in the case of autism, its seems like such a map might even be impossible, because the systems of cartography that such a thing relies upon aren’t designed to cover this kind of terrain: my magnetic north simply points in a different direction.

Since the invasion the settler diaspora has demonstrated its fascination with and obsession for bigness – the vast, the immense, the wide. This preoccupation manifests itself on the physical landscape in all sorts of crass shapes and forms. There is the Big Banana, the Big Prawn, the Big Potato, the Big Pineapple, just to name a few. These scars of the physical environment cross the settler psyche as well through the repeated discourse of ‘nation’, the ‘national anthem’, ‘ordinary Australians’ and the ‘wide brown land’. Kwaymullina asks: ‘What is bigness other than a network of small places? What is this nation other than an interconnected network of Indigenous locales invaded and now occupied by different settler diasporas?’

These books lay bare the exhaustion occasioned by capitalism’s resource extraction, the unyielding walls of our workplaces and institutions, and the misogyny, latent or overt, of medical practice. In writing of their chronic and mental illnesses, the authors rupture the narrative that a successful body is a well body, and open a space for new and original accounts of how those bodies mediate the world.

This is an author who has long been interested in the nexus between publishing and technology; Ex Libris is the cumulative, and – arguably – the most ambitious result of all his hybrid ventures.

What becomes evident is not so much a portrait of Daylight as a reader, but her skill as a critic, her ability to distill enough detail from a work to understand – and convey something of – its essence, to trace the author’s thinking and engagement with the world.