Work

The fires that are burning across Australia are changing this place, quite possibly forever, and with it our natural, social, cultural, and political narratives. The fires are writing new stories into the very rocks and soil of our land, this land that has always had stories engraved in rocks and soil, this always-was-always-will-be Aboriginal land. Our newest story is pyrogenic. Born of fire, it will throw green shoots out from blackness. It must.

The gym is seen as antithetical to writing and intellect. The body doesn’t write, or if it does, it does so in another language. I don’t relate. I do most of my good writing at the gym, feeding off the extremities and horniness that gym contains.

Keep working! At all cost keep on working! — the mantra of the modern university, the ethic under-writing all folkloric myths of progressivism.

Fires, although not ones that flared into storms due to climate change and land mismanagement, have burned through this area before. The story of fire and country, of loss and regrowth is not, at all, my own.

In the process of writing, clutter accumulates. A writer’s clutter can be physical, like the bundles of papers, notes, and books on my desk. It can be processual: the swarm of edits on the marked-up page of a draft, or the ‘offcuts’ file of this essay which is longer than the essay itself. It can be digital – a cluttered computer desktop, hundreds of browser bookmarks, accumulations of draft files – or mental, in the psychic turbulence of the process, in the ideas never followed through, in digressions and tangents and distractions.

I was not a writer when I lived in Singapore. I do not know if I would have become a writer if I had stayed. I do not know if I would still be a writer if I returned.

Congratulations, our teacher said on the last day of school. You’ve all won the lottery. I’ve been with the railway for 47 years, and I’ve never worked a day in my life.

I cannot help but consider—from my privileged vantage in a picnic hut overlooking Bronte beach—that the modern office is an artefact from a time when work needed to be conducted in a different manner and atmosphere, and that now, unlocked from the brightly-lit, uncomfortable, stifling, energy-intensive, disease spreading, anxiety-inducing structures in which work commonly took place over the last century, we ought to start thinking very differently about what a place of work might be.

The act of writing allows us to draw language through the physicality of the body. For us, this digesting takes form through writing and the subsequent maneuvering of this physical language through publishing, that is, the act of making public.

During the first weeks that Francesca was in hospital, whenever I sat beside her bed, all I could do was cry. Again and again I told myself to pull it together; she didn’t need someone behaving as if she was about to die. But whenever I saw her in that gown, in that ward, all I could think about was losing the woman I loved.