Featured Sydney essays
Notes from my iPhone
As I was reading The Stubborn Archivist by Yara Rodriques Fowler, I was drawn into the memories of that period when I navigated Sydney as a twenty-something bi-racial woman. I hunted down my old iPhone and read it alongside Fowler’s book, like a companion text, beginning a dialogue.
Commutare*
Run-down and on the verge of burnout, I will continue making art, imagining radically different futures during my best commutes, dancing, dog paddling upwards towards the clouds, doing breaststroke through the air, gliding. I pull into my driveway in Blacktown, the western suburbs where, as one young arts worker once said, we have the best sunsets.
Sydney
Notes from my iPhone
As I was reading The Stubborn Archivist by Yara Rodriques Fowler, I was drawn into the memories of that period when I navigated Sydney as a twenty-something bi-racial woman. I hunted down my old iPhone and read it alongside Fowler’s book, like a companion text, beginning a dialogue.
Commutare*
Run-down and on the verge of burnout, I will continue making art, imagining radically different futures during my best commutes, dancing, dog paddling upwards towards the clouds, doing breaststroke through the air, gliding. I pull into my driveway in Blacktown, the western suburbs where, as one young arts worker once said, we have the best sunsets.
Haze
And just as it is for me when I’m in a real traffic jam — that is, in a physical traffic jam — in my mental traffic jam I will always be thinking, absurdly, that if only I could push on forwards, even just a little — just the fraction of a roll — I will soon be able to prompt the car in front of me to roll forwards too, and then the car in front of that, and on and so forth, until the whole long cavalcade of cars (thoughts) can then push on past the knot, and be free.
I Will Be The Most Esoteric Person On The Bus
When I am on the road, risking it all with a rusted-off chain and creaky saddle, I want to be seen, my existence hailed into being only in relation to the cars beside me. I want to be acknowledged by these hulking machines – which, I’m sure, could crush me like a bug without a moment’s hesitation were it not for their simpering drivers inside – as something formidable, something unknowable but fearsome all the same. I present myself like a challenge. Go on then, run me over.
A Glovebox of One’s Own
By some cosmic sophomoric prank, despite my desire to become what some people call a writer, my true occupation on this earth has always been and always will be captured by the construction ‘a car-man is a car-man is a car-man is a car-man’, and if that formulation makes your skin crawl, try telling me about it, since the only escape from this fate of mine is the one Henry Lawson recommended above, and that salvation is forbidden by religion.