Sydney

‘I think it is important for women of colour to know that we are not objects or tokens to be used and dispensed.’

What I do know is that, while once simply writing the west was a threat to the status quo now the real political imperative is to stand in the dark with our eyes wide open, welcoming the uncertain. It is an invitation to undo the ways ‘things are done’ and invite alternatives into the equation. Bad writing has always been about having the last word and leaving others in silence. Good writing opens up a conversation about who we are that may never end.

‘Things that I took from the city: the experiences of walking, wandering and being ensconced in communities of school and church.’

Lee is by turns satirist and survivor of the New Victorianism. On a jog through Woollahra’s Trumper Park, Tom dreams conventional dreams of a house in the bush, a place for he and a loving partner to raise ‘a number of virile and sensitive children’ with landscape needs of their own. The middle-class dream is out of reach for now, but his religious devotion to physical fitness is the means by which he dreams it. He doesn’t just display the idea that ritual exercise on an organic diet is morally good, he believes it is spiritually good. Wellness, as we now call it—or sell it—is a condition devoutly to be wished, the hard-earned product of what Coach refers to as ‘lifestyle ambitions of a more enduring nature.’

‘Non-Muslim friends often comment that the Prayer Centre looks like an RSL – a nondescript rectangular building with glass windows, flanked by a car park. ‘

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

Working Hot is a novel about dykes in Sydney, written with an experimental verve that still dazzles today. Author Mary Fallon was 38 when she published it. I was 23, writing short fiction, working in Abbey’s Bookshop to pay the rent, and unsure of my sexuality. I remember reading The Kinsey Report out the back during lunch hour and being blown away by all the gay sex in 1950s USA. If, I calculated, there was the proverbial 10 per cent back then, surely now there were that many more. Indeed, in late 1980s Sydney, it didn’t take long to find sexy dykes, for this was the beginning of an explosion of queer female performativity in bars and at parties, overtly and often abjectly sexual, that has never abated, despite myriad oppressive forces. What the wildest girls did on stage infected our entire community, making Sydney one of the dirtiest, dykiest places on earth, if not the.

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.

Many Paleozoic cockroaches could fly. Because they could fly, they could navigate prehistoric swamps. Because their bodies were thin, they could squeeze into narrow cracks where they might avoid predators and survive environmental hazards. They are built to scale any surface, even sheer ones. Young cockroaches can regenerate lost antennae and limbs. They can eat almost anything, including their own moulted shells, and dead animals, living plants, excreta, fingernails, wallpaper, boxes, envelopes.