Environment and climate

‘Perhaps a place is a mind one can learn to share. Perhaps a place is a body one can inhabit and care for as if it were one’s family, one’s lover. One’s self.’

This quiet dying is all around us. In my childhood summer nights were punctuated by the yips and barks of geckoes, their soft bodies moving across walls, pale in the half-light. I have not seen a gecko in a decade, maybe more.

A track is memory. A track is relief. A track is company. A track is faith.

My activism has been a way of protecting my creativity; it is a way of nourishing and reviving what withers, interiorly, when we are silenced by ideologies, or when we become centred ourselves within cultural frames.

Is it possible to provide a spatial character of outscape? It will be enough to say now that I have found, at least, three principle geometries that pattern the poetry of outscape: panels, discs, beans.

The more I read, the more I came to adore the cockroach – the gleaming beauty of its ancient form, its zest for life despite its utter filth.

What did I expect? Epiphany, an interior? Eldorado. Another colonial myth. Growing up here you wouldn’t think thing were even as old as they are.

Gropers are generally placid creatures, ambling slowly around the rocks in search of sea urchins.

Cook appears, in Namatjira’s paintings, a reminder, remainder, corpse, trace, or ghost: a symbol of the repeated and the repeatable, the rule of law, and the law of the father. He signifies the continuity of settler sovereignty in the body of the current Queen, and the continuity of invasion in the form of a constant companion.

I visited the Sydney Markets at Flemington, and the Vegan Market in Marrickville on the same weekend late last year, and expected to write a study in contrasts.