Suneeta Peres da Costa

I am supposed to be writing this essay, ostensibly on technology, but the rooms of the house become a labyrinth, a game of snakes and ladders, a ten thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle in which I am apt to forget my task or purpose.

Changing what one sees is particularly relevant in the arts where the representation of reality is core business. Unconscious bias in statements from decision-makers to which I have been both privy and at the receiving end that – to take just a few examples – CALD Australian artists do not ‘bring in a crowd’ or that any success we may enjoy is due to a prevaling ‘ethnic commodity fetishism/favouritism’ is no less offensive or ghettoising for being contradictory.

In these Annandale terraces we share more than walls; we share the sight of the jacaranda flowering in November and the yellow wattle flowering in July. Between the roar of planes on the flight path and the speedy SUVs, we hear the warbling and shrieks of currawongs, native mynahs and rainbow lorikeets. We share conversation: of what we are cooking for dinner, how tired we are from our work-a-day lives, and speculation of which uncouth residents dumped their rubbish, or let their pampered dogs crap, on our nature’s strip. One neighbour who has lived here over thirty years tells me how her children once played, unsupervised, on the street till nightfall; I remember it because it was also the time of my own childhood in another suburb further to Sydney’s west…

‘Re-reading Wide Sargasso Sea now in this, the fiftieth anniversary year of its first publication in 1966, I can’t help feeling that the novel remains just as groundbreaking and heartbreaking. Perhaps we are finally catching up with Jean Rhys and celebrating – with her, despite her – the unequivocal achievement of Wide Sargasso Sea.’