Island 152 by Island

ISLAND 152

ISLAND

 Ideas. Writing. Culture.

152

WHY DO WE DREAM? READING HELEN GARNER FACING PHOBIAS PORTRAITS OF PAT BRASSINGTON UNICORNS AND ZEBRAS IN BUSINESS PRINCE OF THE HIGHWAY

Images: Phillip England, Tasmanian Tintype

VOL.152 1/2018 AUD $16.50

RIVAL DREAMINGS AND TASMANIAN WRITING

ANNA SPARGO-RYAN · LOUIS ARMAND · AMANDA DAVIES · PETER BENNET EILEEN CHONG · PETE HAY · EFFIE PRYER · ANDY KISSANE · KATHRYN LOMER ROBBIE ARNOTT · MAGGIE MACKELLAR · AND MORE

Birds bring energy from the sky. A bronzewing murmurs a low OM. She intones the OM alone, as we all must, and clatters when she takes leave. The OM attunes itself to inner ears; the unfathomable OM of the living, the dead, the light itself. James Charlton

The Tasmanian Land Conservancy (TLC) raises funds to protect irreplacable sites, endangered species’ habitats and rare ecosystems on private land. Join us in safeguarding our unique birds by donating to the TLC’s Bird Conservation Fund. The TLC’s Bird Conservation Fund combines evidence-based research with direct management actions, for effective, long-term conservation of our birds for generations to come.

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TASLAND.ORG.AU “So many throats” inspired by TLC’s Poets and Painters – Celebrating the Big Punchbowl Birds on dusk, Moulting Lagoon. Photo: Andy Townsend

During the day I stayed

dreaming

behind the blinds.

Green dreams

of the secret pulses, the unexplored places on this heart-shaped island.

Lurid orange-tinged dreams of the far-off dead red heart of the continent.

Helen Hodgman, Blue Skies (1976)

ISLAND q Ideas. Writing. Culture.

Managing Editor Vern Field Editor-at-large Geordie Williamson Fiction Editor Anica Boulanger-Mashberg Poetry Editor Sarah Holland-Batt Art Features Editor Judith Abell Proofreader Kate Harrison Photographer Grace Herbert

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152

Cover image: Effie Pryer, Marieke, 2017, oil on myrtle, 80 x 60 cm

Editorial

Art

Poetry

Geordie Williamson 6

The Complexities of the Self, and Pat Brassington 28

Flannel Flowers / The Tomb of the Unknown Artist 24

Essays Ways of Seeing: Helen Garner and her Work 8

Rediscovering Garner through a new literary biography Maggie MacKellar

Scott’s Story 20 A Chatter Matters Journey Highway in the Sun 34

The prince behind the Princes Highway Joe Koning

Amanda Davies

Andy Kissane

Momentary Actions 70 Portraits by Effie Pryer

The Road Out 26

Meanwhile, in Hobart 88

Louis Armand

Kauri Hawkins at HOBIENNALE

Fiction

White Lines on Pink 47 Luke Beesley

You Know How This Looks 14

Broken Guitars 76

Anna Spargo-Ryan

Chris Andrews

The Big Blue 40 Kathryn Lomer

A Science for Dreaming 48

Heredity 46 Anna Ryan-Punch

Infernal Topographies 77 Graeme Miles

How do we sit with Freud now? Nicola Redhouse

Breathless 66

Hunter, Burrower, Weaver 60

The Show 86

A Piano in Hobart 78

Michael Blake

Peter Bennet A journey into arachnophobia Katerina Bryant

Tasmanian Writing and the Great Tasmanian Dichotomy 80 On the great forgetting Pete Hay

Black Sun 100

Daniel Lynch

Eileen Chong

Salt 94

Wattlebird Pie 101

Robbie Arnott

Vanessa Page

A Scree of Lantana 102 Ariella Van Luyn

Unicorns and Zebras in the Boardroom 106

A new model for compassionate capitalism? Polly McGee

Image opposite: Amanda Davies, Tasmanian Pink Eyes, 2016, oil on linen, 31 x 36 cm Image p. 1: isa.bell, Close the Blinds Please, 2011 via Flickr

Editorial

Geordie Williamson, Editor-at-large

editorial

ore days than not, I drive the Channel Highway south of Hobart: kids’ afterschool obligations, stockfeed to collect, an Island meeting in town or an ‘in conversation’ to run at Fullers Bookshop. The narrow curves of the road, the insane insouciance of overtaking utes, the dazzling vistas that open towards Bruny Island have already become habitual, a matter of muscle memory. The most notable thing about Oyster Cove, which I pass between the villages of Kettering and Snug, is that the farm shop there is the best place to buy apples. It’s also a mobile phone black spot. It is the ordinariness, in other words, that defeats the historical imagination. Yet it was at Oyster Cove that forty-seven indigenous Tasmanians were delivered one hundred and seventy years ago. They had been moved from Flinders Island, where those regarded as the last remaining Aborigines, two hundred in all, had lived in exile for fifteen years. In The Companion to Tasmanian History Julie Gough notes that ‘their return was officially recorded as a budgetary measure, but could also be viewed as a means to allay guilt for what non-Aboriginal people viewed as the “last” of a distinct race dying outside their home territory to which they had continually asked to return’. And so it was that five boys, five girls, twenty-three women and fourteen men were placed in enforced residence at the damp, undeveloped site. Over years, their numbers slowly declined. By 1851, thirteen of the forty-six had passed away. By 1859 only twelve people remained. After heavy flooding in 1874, Oyster Cove was abandoned. A single surviving woman, Truganini, of the Nuenone people of Bruny Island, was moved to Hobart. Her story has been told many times – and I suspect it is threaded through a poem written by Gwen Harwood (one of several dedicated to Oyster Cove) which raises the hair on the back of my neck with every reading:

Tasmanian history, and Australian history more broadly. When Tom Keneally sat down in Sydney’s Mitchell library to write his great novel of the era of transportation, Bring Larks and Heroes, there was no history of the period in print. When Harwood gathered the poems of the Oyster Cove sequence for publication in 1980, I was a primary school student in New South Wales who was taught no Aboriginal history at all (though our class was taken to see John Honey’s Manganinnie, the first Tasmanian feature film, based on Beth Roberts’s novel about the Black Line of 1830). Pete Hay’s essay in this issue of Island makes a similar point with typical brio and cogency. Tasmania’s creative writers, he argues, ‘are the prime insisters on the inevitability of memory; they are the constructors and deconstructors of island meanings old and new’. He makes specific mention of Richard Flanagan’s extraordinary 1994 debut, Death of a River Guide, as a signal instance where fiction opens the way for others: Our Tasmanian stories, Hay imagines Flanagan saying, ‘are not boring, and though they may be sources of shame and humiliation, they should not be gathered up in an opaque communal amnesia. Flanagan turned a key and liberated a collective soul. Warts and all’. Hay continues: In its wake a cultural confidence burgeoned. In all the arts there was a flowering, and central to this flowering was a loving but forensic engagement with Tasmania’s ambiguous history and with its conflicted present. While the men of power, the repositories of the old dreaming, went on with their important business unperturbed, Tasmania’s cultural practitioners, with writers in the van, went about the place-saving task of recovering memory.

But Hay is honest about the limits of this creative efflorescence. The ‘men of power’ for whom discussion of the past is an inexplicable act of distraction from matters economic, neither care for nor understand the necessity for Tasmanian auto-examination. And they evidently represent a greater part of the state’s population. The enduring rent in the state’s society would appear to lie here, in the effective siloing of such creative work from the main current of Tasmanian politics and society. A month out from a fresh state election, this disjunction could not be starker. Whatever its result, Island magazine continues as one small part of the effort to break that barrier down. ▼

Oyster Cove Dreams drip to stone. Barracks and salt marsh blaze opal beneath a crackling glaze of frost. Boot-black, in graceless Christian rags, a lost race breathes out cold. Parting the milky haze on mudflats, seabirds, clean and separate, wade. Mother, Husband and Child: stars which forecast fine weather, all are set. The long night’s past and the long day begins. God’s creatures, made woodcutters’ whores, sick drunks, watch the sun prise their life apart: flesh, memory, language all split open, featureless, to feed the wild hunger of history. A woman lies coughing her life out. There’s still blood to fall, but all blood’s spilt that could have made a child.

Geordie Williamson is the Editor-at-large of Island and Picador, Australia. He is the Chief Literary Critic of The Australian.

Poetry and literature have often preceded strict history in recording more indigestible events in

Image p. 6: John Dower’s 1837 map of Tasmania

WAYS OF SEEING HELEN GARNER AND HER WORK

ormally on a Wednesday night I am playing tennis at the Spring Bay tennis courts in Triabunna on Tasmania’s east coast. There are five teams in our mixed-doubles comp. We play four sets – each one with a different partner. Our team captain – Damo – is the local butcher. Damo has a thirst. He has a can per set and a few between. It doesn’t matter. He’s prodigiously talented. I’m our number-one lady (but not the captain). Our number-two bloke, known as Wing (which in Tasmania is short for William and which distinguishes him from his father, Bill, and his son, Will), is a local grazier. When, on occasion, games get tight and tempers flare, some players remind other players that we’re not playing for sheep stations. Wing is known to quip that we’re all welcome to his. Our number-two lady is retired schoolteacher Mrs B. She is modest about her age, so let’s just say it’s north of 80. Last year, when our team won the grand final, Damo (who is about 6 foot 2) picked her up and flung her around him like one of those old-fashioned merry-go-round horses. She laughed like a schoolgirl rather than a great-grandmother. We worried that Damo was going to break her ribs. Tennis is not missed lightly. When I told my tennis team I couldn’t play one Wednesday because I would be in Sydney launching a book about Helen Garner, they collectively said ‘Who?’ and looked suspiciously at me as if I were ditching them for a made-up excuse. I don’t tell this story against my tennis team. They are all good people. Indeed, I suspect Garner would enjoy their company, and they hers. I tell it to show how far away I am from the world of book launches, and how books – Garner’s books, all books – are pretty much the only way I see outside my day-to-day world. With this in mind you will understand that when Bernadette Brennan asked me if I’d launch her book (A Writing Life: Helen Garner and Her Work) I messaged back, ‘Are you drunk?’ ‘Possibly,’ she said. I replied something along the lines of, ‘NO WAY’. But Bernadette is both as persuasive as a peacock and as determined as a beaver. So after a pathetic (and futile) display of resistance, I organised a replacement at tennis and flew to Sydney. When Bernadette first told me she wanted to write a literary biography of Helen Garner, I was immediately enthusiastic and could see how perfectly suited the pairing would be. Not because I know Garner well, or because I’m an expert on her work, but because I know Bernadette well and I knew that if anyone could stick to their vision and be bold enough to engage intellectually with Garner, it was Bernadette. Her plan was to take the texts themselves and chart their evolution by mapping the letters, diaries, unpublished work and many previously unavailable papers that fed into the finished texts always with the central question of understanding who is the ‘I’ at the centre of Garner’s body of work.

Asked to launch Bernadette Brennan’s literary portrait of Helen Garner, Maggie MacKellar rediscovers the power and humanity of one of Australia’s most respected writers

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Garner’s writing is not just style, it’s not just literature; it’s real. It helps people see the world and their role in it. This is what’s profound. This is what makes Garner’s writing memorable and brave.

Fast forward two years or thereabouts and in preparation for the launch I have the book on my computer. I write tiny notes in my journal. The notes are against my own set of rules: this first reading should be without notes, a reading of the heart not head, but I can’t help it. I’m swept up, carried along by Brennan’s forensic curiosity. Her voice is full of assurance and ushers me straight into the process of how one becomes one of Australia’s most important and admired writers and one of this generation’s most nuanced observers of humanity. I find myself making a reading list. It’s twenty years since I read Garner’s first novel, Monkey Grip. I was a naive undergraduate and I can absolutely guarantee I did not understand it, yet I do remember having strident opinions. When I pick it up again I’m astounded by the effortless immediacy of the story, and I have the strange sensation that I’ve never read it before. Then I re-read The Children’s Bach. This time I find myself gripped by dreams so fierce I leap out of bed yelling for three nights in a row. My partner asks what’s the matter. The matter, I say, is that I am shocked to my core at how dishonest I’ve been as a writer. The Children’s Bach is the cruellest and most brutally honest novel I’ve read. I identify with every female character. And I feel flailed with this recognition. Early in Brennan’s book, she recounts how publisher Michael Heyward asked which of Helen Garner’s books she thought most significant. Brennan’s impulse was to answer Cosmo Cosmolino. The chapter on this work is brilliant – it offers insights into Garner’s imagination and lived experience and by the end of it I understand something I’ve long feared. My writing cannot move beyond its present boundaries until I, as a person, change. I hadn’t expected a literary biography to challenge me in this way. The chapter concludes with a comment from a conversation between Brennan and Tim Winton on the importance of Cosmo Cosmolino:

At the end of my reading I draw a big circle in my notebook and write inside it all the things I want to say about Brennan’s book. I then draw lines out of the circle and list the examples from the text that illustrate my points. Inside the circle my writing is cramped and urgent and the page is crowded with a word map that looks like an octopus. I will need several thousand words to transform this into a speech. It’s then I realise that what’s in the circle is a critique of Brennan critiquing Garner. I don’t need to explain how she has done this; that would be the task of a review. What I need to do is to celebrate what is at this book’s heart, and that is a long, rambling, intelligent, intense, funny conversation between Bernadette Brennan and Helen Garner. Brennan writes that there will be other biographies, other books that will come after this one – and I’m sure there will, but it will be this one that lecturers set on university courses ranging from history to Australian studies to literature and creative writing. It will be this one students actually read, and it will be this one that Helen Garner’s legions of fans will find so fascinating and accessible. Brennan has managed to create a seam of tension that keeps pulling me through her text. At first I thought it was just the thrill of seeing a behind-the-scenes Garner, the nuts and bolts of the many drafts it took to reach the polished simplicity of her published works. But then I realised that the tension was held in Brennan’s slow reveal of Garner’s development as a writer, publication after publication. Yes, the focus was and is always on the published work but the depth of this book is achieved by the layers of conversations between Brennan and Garner. As readers we are swung between the present, the text and the archive, in an exhilarating discovery of the way Garner creates her ‘I’. Such a literary portrait would be satisfying enough and early on we have Brennan the critic waltzing with great assurance through the novels, but as the book progresses another layer of the importance of Garner’s body of work is revealed. This is summed up by Brennan’s inclusion of an email to Garner from a reader who works for a child

Winton said to me that Cosmo Cosmolino marks the point at which Helen really goes her own way, where you can see she’s not quite of her people … from here on in she’s … well, unreliable in the finest sense.

Ways of Seeing: Helen Garner and Her Work

Garner texts. I’m hoping my launch speech will leap fully formed just from the alchemy of my proximity to these books. On this day I’m in Hobart on the boundary of a cricket oval. I’m reading True Stories, a collection of Garner’s essays. My car had a flat tyre when we rushed out the door, late as usual, so I’m in the farm ute. It’s a warmish day. The car parked next to me is a ute, too. For most of the day a father sits in it watching his son play cricket. The radio is on softly. He watches with concentration each ball bowled. I read Garner’s book and make notes in my journal. At lunchtime his wife and daughters appear. The woman gets in the front seat with her arms full of Subway sandwiches and drinks. ‘This car is fucking filthy,’ she says. The girls get in the back. I cringe, but the words wash over them like air-conditioning. They open their rolls, sip their oversized drinks and play with their devices. For the next two hours the couple snipe continuously. The boys on the field are oblivious to the domestic tensions on the sideline. The father continues to watch. The mother scrolls through her phone. Her unhappiness stretches out beyond the ute. Nothing he’s done is right. I look down at the mess in our ute – bullets, drench bombs, ropes, jumper leads, earmuffs, the two-way radio, ear tags, two wrenches, a hammer, a knife and sharpening steel, keys, gold and silver coins, a puncture

protection unit. The email is in response to Garner’s book This House of Grief, a controversial account of the murder trial into the deaths of the Farquharson children: This team write review reports on as many as 80 deaths of children every year. They write about hard subjects and distressing stories, nearly all of which are set against a backdrop of poverty and disadvantage. Your writing has inspired the work of this team and I wanted you to know just how important it has been for them to have a mentor who writes with such honesty and clarity.

Without the evidence of such interactions between Garner and her readers we’d be left with the beautiful style, the effortless prose, the astonishing metaphors – but Brennan’s inclusion of this email highlights the power of Garner’s writing to shape the unsayable into something that can be shared. Brennan has written a book that celebrates Helen Garner the stylist, but she also celebrates Garner the person. Garner’s writing is not just style, it’s not just literature; it’s real. It helps people see the world and their role in it. This is what’s profound. This is what makes Garner’s writing memorable and brave. In the weeks leading up to the launch I carry my muchmarked-up copy of A Writing Life along with various 11

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This is what reading Garner does for me – her insertion of the ‘I’ gives me an insight into humanity, a jolting familiarity. As she strips herself bare to show us the ‘other’ she hands me a mirror and I find myself reflected again and again.

kit, an electric dog collar, a roll of wire, duct tape, a stubby holder around the gearstick, a school bag, dog hair, Friday’s mail, the newspaper I picked up on the way out the gate at 7 am – a microcosm of our domestic/ work muddle. I want to reach out and open the door, show the woman our mess, show her she’s not alone. I don’t, of course. When the cricket is finished, my son walks toward me dragging his cricket bag. He throws it on the back and squashes in the front with our labrador. I let the diesel engine idle before negotiating the 100-point turn I need to do to reverse out of the suburban car park. The man in the ute next to me jumps out. He stands behind me and signals, indicating with his hands the diminishing space between my trayback and the shiny bonnet of the black BMW behind me. Then he walks in front of me and guides me inch by inch out of the car park. My bull bar shaves past a silver Volvo. I give him a wave of genuine thanks and my son gives him a double thumbs up. And there it is, in this simple exchange I recognise what Garner so often describes, a moment of connection, in an otherwise ordinary day. This is what reading Garner does for me – her insertion of the ‘I’ gives me an insight into humanity, a jolting familiarity. As she strips herself bare to show us the ‘other’ she hands me a mirror and I find myself reflected again and again. It can be simple things: the way she describes the shifting light over Geelong as she drives away from the landscape of her childhood, the sprinklers on the Carlton gardens, the silver spray a benediction for Nora cycling through the morning, the closing of the biscuit jar in The First Stone signalling something more, the reverse midwifery in This House of Grief as the police diver reverentially cradles the child’s head back into the car, the child biting his fist out of rage and frustration in The Children’s Bach – all the tiny details, whether in fiction or nonfiction, add up to our joint humanity. What Bernadette Brennan has done in gathering all these images in one book is a gift to a younger generation of writers and academics and students of life.

Literary biographies can be dry but this one is not. It bubbles with emotion. The last line makes me laugh out loud, though moments before I’d found myself on the brink of tears. Where does my response come from? Is it because I’ve been given the privilege of insight into Helen Garner? Is it because Brennan has managed to capture Garner’s humanity, intellect, brokenness and, perhaps, a sort of resurrection? Is it this that gives me hope for my own journey as a woman and as a writer? It’s unusual to be moved to tears by a literary biography. I’ve met Helen Garner a handful of times, and she’s been very supportive of my work. I have friends who have the most wonderful Garner stories – stories I’d love to share, but they’re not mine – I don’t have my own ‘Helen story’. So why this identification, this surge of hope and fear? I think it’s the cost. I think what Bernadette Brennan has done is show us the cost of writing a truth, and my tears come for Helen’s pain and also for her peace on the other side of that pain: the blessing of a daughter and grandchildren is balanced beside the loss of dear friends and parents. The weight of three marriages gives rise to the freedom of finding a way through grief. The biography gathers Garner’s work – work that is heavy and important and impressive – and it places the work alongside the woman with a lightness that makes sense of both. What Bernadette Brennan has gifted Helen Garner, and therefore us, is a book that quite simply ‘gets her’. ▼

Maggie MacKellar lives on the east coast of Tasmania. She is the author of two books on the history of settlement of Australia and Canada, Core of My Heart, My Country and Strangers in a Foreign Land, and two memoirs, When it Rains and How to Get There. Photographs of Helen Garner courtesy of the Text Publishing Company

FICTION

You Know How This Looks Anna Spargo-Ryan

Les kicks the shark and a glob of jelly comes out and lands on the hand, and now the rings are distorted like they’re under water. ‘Nige,’ he says. His voice is all tight, like there’s fingers around it. ‘That’s Claire’s.’

he first thing Les Harrison catches on his new line is a shark with his wife’s hand inside. Little tiger shark, skin painted on. He doesn’t know until Nige leans over it and sticks a knife in its belly, and out comes a Coke can and a plastic bag and some fish bones and the hand. Nige goes: ‘Oh hell, Les.’ Les designed the wedding ring himself – two horses with their heads entwined, like lovers – and when each of the kids were born he’d given her an extra ring with a birthstone in it. He was thoughtful like that. All the rings slotted together to look like one, like they were meant to be together. He’d seen them on the late-night TV; his head was spinning so fast he couldn’t sleep so he ordered three. They couldn’t afford more than three. Kids, not rings. Nige is pointing at the rings now. Les can only see the others, the three little rings locked together. The last one is for Kieran, even though he’s special. ‘Mate,’ Nige says. He’s known Nige since they played in the first XI together in high school. Fifteen years ago and Nige still goes on about his record. He was talking about it when he cut the shark open. Two hundred not out. Les had never made it past the middle order but he was okay with that. He was easygoing. He even liked it there, where people were less likely to notice him.

He said it like that at the police station – ‘That’s Claire’s’ – on the day they found the cardigan. It was by the river, strung out in a tree like a web. Nige waited in the reception area, next to the vending machine. He told Les, ‘I’ll be right here, mate.’ He used to say that when he’d made a ton and Les was getting his pads on to go out seventh. Always was, too. Always right there. The cops were both big guys, which struck Les as unusual because in his experience – which was mostly speeding when he didn’t know it was a school zone, and the one time after work drinks – usually you got one big and one little, or one white and one foreigner, or one man and one lady. ‘Look, Mr Harrison,’ said one of the big cops. Black hair, crooked nose where someone’s punched him or maybe a rugby injury. ‘You know how this looks.’ Les told them again about the day Claire left. He’d told them before, after the kids reported her missing. She always called them on Sundays and when she didn’t call them two Sundays in a row, they came round. He told the cops, too, about the small brown suitcase by the front door. I’m ready to live my own life! she said. It was so 15

ISLAND

windy outside he wanted to walk her to the car, wrap his arms around her to keep the cold air away, but she was on the phone to her friend Karen and he had bandaids on his fingers and in the end he didn’t think he should. He’d told the cops – another time, that Monday night after they’d dredged the river – about Claire’s mother in Kyneton, and her flat-faced dog, and how someone had seen the white Mazda at the servo before the turnoff. They’d reported it, hadn’t they? It was on the news, numberplate and everything. ‘It’s all hearsay,’ said the other cop, who had one eye looking at Les and one looking out the window. ‘Your son said you never let her drive that car.’ ‘Nah, I did,’ Les said. But his mind was cloudy, like someone had put a coat over it.

He was on the phone. He didn’t notice he was on the phone until Nige’s voice came out of it, going, ‘Are they gonna get you back in?’ He meant the cops. ‘Prob’ly,’ Les said. ‘Guess they gotta,’ said Nige. A spider had set up in the garden at the beginning of summer. That’s how Les knew it was summer, when the spider began to hang up its curtains and the cicadas shrieked all night until he had to sleep with a pillow over his face. The outside was so much inside, in summer. The night was hotter than it’d ever been and the ground was scorched and now he saw there was an owl sitting on the powerline. Les saw it, past his own eyes and into its round and yellow ones. It turned its head all the way around. ‘Nuthin’ to eat,’ he told the bird, but when he looked harder, past his own three eyes and the owl’s yellow eyes, he saw the spider stretched wide across the patio in its cellophane web. When the kids were small they spent a weekend hunting rabbits on the plateaus outside of town. After lunch, they went swimming in the motel pool, and Kieran found a tarantula in the creepy crawly. Les was the hero, scooping it right out with the pool net. Kieran jumped on it. Everything squirted right out of it, all the yellow and green goo that kept it alive smeared across the tiles. ‘Owl!’ Les said suddenly. ‘Owl. Owl.’ ‘What’s that, mate?’ said Nige through the phone. Les made his mouth round with the sound, oWL. ‘Owl.’ The owl swooped down and picked the spider right out of its web, and then there was just the sticky cotton and a moth still in it and then just Les’s three eyes blurred together in the dark window.

‘What’d you do with the fish?’ Les says, over a beer. He didn’t really want the beer but Nige told him he’d earned it, bringing in such a good haul. Even bought it for him, and Les has manners so he knew it’d be rude to reject it. The cricket’s on the TV above the bar. Both men sit on the same side of the table, watching it. Sometimes their elbows bump together. Les looks at the other men in the pub, all their eyes pointing bright towards the wicket, but none of their elbows are bumping. ‘What fish?’ Nige says. ‘The big one.’ ‘You mean the shark.’ He’s got a Keno game going and an each-way bet on the dogs, so he’s watching all three screens at once. ‘Shit,’ he says. ‘Four numbers.’ ‘The shark, Nige?’ Nige skols the peaty end of his beer. His elbow is rough against Les’s, like a cat’s tongue. ‘Chucked her back,’ he says, then, ‘HOWZAT!’ and then, ‘Too small.’ They walk together, past the post office and the Video Ezy that’s been turned into a 24-hour gym and the Salvos. The bridge rumbles underfoot with the train’s thunder. At the corner, where the street goes into Les’s cul-de-sac and then Nige’s one-way lane, there’s a little white dog with all its teeth missing. ‘I’ll come round tomorrow,’ Nige says. All three of them stand under the fig tree and it spits its fruit at the ground. Les spins his wedding ring on his finger, pushes it against the bulb of arthritis. ‘Nige,’ he says, thinking of rings, ‘what’d you do with the fish?’

Claire’s hand is on the news in the morning. A cop gives a press conference and all the camera flashes go off together. ‘New information,’ she says. ‘Strong lead.’ The kids call him on the phone, one after another. Eloise says, ‘They’re going to find the man who did this.’ Verity says, ‘Why didn’t they look in the bay in the first place?’ Kieran says, ‘When’s Mum coming back?’ and an alarm sounds in the background. Les nods and mumbles until the phone is silent, and then he sits at the breakfast bar and peels vinyl off the bench. After a while, he makes a bit of toast. He hasn’t been keeping up with the groceries since Claire left so there’s no margarine, just a couple of beers and a big fish in a plastic bag. He puts Vegemite on by itself. It tastes like putting his whole mouth in a dirty ocean. Eloise calls again. ‘Have they called yet?’ she says. ‘Why haven’t they called yet?’ Les says, ‘How d’you know it was a man who did it?’ He’s got Vegemite in the corners of his mouth but it just stays there no matter how much he licks it. ‘It’s always a man who does it,’ she says.

The night before the cardigan, Les stood in his kitchen, which was really Claire’s kitchen. He tried to look into the garden but it was so black he could just see himself looking back. In the night’s mirror he saw his eyes, their bags and the rings around the coloured parts, and he looked and looked until he had three eyes, and somehow he was looking at all of them at once. Les was wearing slippers. They were the tartan ones Claire bought him for his last birthday. He slid his feet in and out. Fuzz gathered in the sweat between his toes and he picked it out with his fingernails. 16

You Know How This Looks

He puts the phone in his pocket and her voice is muffled but he can tell she’s shouting. He thinks about the time he took them all to the snow for Claire’s birthday. It was September so the snow was mostly water, and she called him a cheapskate for buying off-peak tickets, and he said he couldn’t help it if her birthday was in September. The kids had fun though, throwing the cold water at each other. ‘Did you have fun at the snow?’ he says to the room. Eloise shouts ‘DAD?’ from his pocket. There’s a picture of his face on the television. He goes into the bedroom and pulls out the small brown suitcase. Harrison, announces the luggage tag. He packs his slacks into it, the work ones with the reflective strips, and his good chinos. He only has two pairs of shoes and he’s wearing one of them, so he puts the others in, and his grey jumper and the t-shirt with Elmer Fudd on it, and his fishing jacket and his knife, and a picture of Claire laughing at one of their kids falling over. Les met Simon at Claire’s work’s Christmas party. Bit camp, he thought, but sometimes it was hard to tell with teachers. Brown cardigans make everyone look a bit camp. Then a tray came around, meatballs on toothpicks and tiny pieces of toast, so Les didn’t think about Simon again until school went back in the new year. ‘I’m going on a conference,’ Claire said over dinner. The crumbs were coming off Les’s schnitzel. Always happened when Claire tried to go gourmet and make them herself. ‘I told you, just get the supermarket ones,’ he said. ‘It’s next month. Up to Sydney.’ She had a bit of carrot stuck to her cheek. ‘You got carrot on your face.’ She laughed a bit, in a way that wasn’t really laughter. ‘No partners allowed.’ Les put down his fork. ‘Just you by yourself?’ ‘Me, yeah, and Karen and Simon.’ She pushed the veggies around, mixed them in with the loose crumbs. ‘Do I know him?’ ‘Head of English. You met him at the Christmas party.’ Her eyes were all lit up but she wasn’t looking at Les. He tapped his foot against her leg. ‘I didn’t go to the Christmas party,’ he said. When dinner was over, Les went down the road and into Nige’s one-way lane. He stood in the doorway and kept standing there with his face screwed up until Nige’s wife said, ‘Why don’t you come in, Les?’ Their kids were everywhere, shouting about whose turn it was to play video games. Nige came into the hallway. ‘Orright, Les?’ Les pulled his voice small into his throat. ‘Claire’s gonna leave me.’ Nige took him out to the shed. They’d set it up all those summers ago, picked up the bar fridge from hard rubbish and scrubbed the graffiti off. The couch was Nige’s mum’s from the nursing home. The singing bass 17

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was a gift from Les, for Nige’s fiftieth. He pressed the button and it turned to look at him, sang Don’t worry! Be happy! but with its mouth moving out of sync. Nige took a couple of beers from the fridge. He said, ‘Start over,’ and cracked off the cap on his workbench. On the far wall, he’d hung a few new tools, drawn around them with an orange texta. Les grabbed the second beer. The streetlight caught the never-used metal in its eye: a hammer, a hacksaw, a knife.

lights, no sirens. It’s the middle of the day but they still point their high-beams at Les and his suitcase and his knife. He puts his hands in the air. His fingers brush against the ceiling of Nige’s car. The cop from the TV is standing right at the front, and she’s pointing a gun at him and for a second his heart just stops. ‘Come on then,’ Nige says. He takes the suitcase from the back seat. Three cops get around Les like he’s a streaker on a cricket pitch. One of them cops a feel when she pats him down. Another one pulls his knife from the suitcase and shouts about it. Les says, ‘What’d you do with the fish, Nige?’ But Nige’s car is winding back down the road, and the metal is cold on Les’s wrists. ▼

Right before lunch, Nige knocks on the door. He knocks the same way every time, three short ones and a long one and two more short ones. Les can leave the back way, jump over the fence and into the neighbours’ yard. His whole body wants him to do it, to go down to the creek and walk along it to the sea. ‘Coming,’ he says, but he walks to the back door. Nige is standing at it with his head poking in. Les looks to the front door, then back again. Nige is still there. ‘Off on holidays, mate?’ Nige says. The suitcase is heavy. It’s the fishing jacket. They couldn’t afford one of those fancy lightweight ones. ‘What’d you do with the fish?’ Les says. ‘Put her back, mate.’ He takes the suitcase from Les’s fist. ‘Oof. What you got in here?’ ‘Fishing gear,’ Les says. ‘Well then, let’s catch a new one. Up the lake.’ Nige drives. Les’s car is in the shop and anyway, his eyes aren’t too good on the narrow bits. They wind up through the hills. In places the trees are bent so far over the road it could be night. When they pull up, the cars are all lit under the trees and they flash in the reflection from the lake. Only the

Anna Spargo-Ryan is a Melbourne-based author of two books – The Paper House and The Gulf – and was the inaugural winner of The Horne Prize. Her short fiction has appeared in publications including Kill Your Darlings, The Lifted Brow and The Big Issue.

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A CHATTER MATTERS LITERACY JOURNEY

Scott’s Story As a child Scott (not his real name) was eager, fast-thinking and bold. Troubles and violence at home made it hard to concentrate at school. Impulsivity made it hard to regulate relationships. As an adult, he landed in prison. Many of Scott’s learning experiences were chaotic; but in others, he felt ‘seen’ and respected. Here, he tells his story in his own words ...

n my mind I know what is going on but I can’t get it out in the same way as someone else. Because I have not had the courage to speak up or haven’t known how to speak up if things weren’t going well at home, things would not go well at school. I really wanted to go to school, but my mind was on home. I watch everything – that’s how I learn. Remembering everything you see. Home was not very pleasant. Always on the edge wondering what’s going to happen next. Very scared, wanting to die, wanting everything to stop and wondering why – lots of mixed emotions. When trust is broken as a kid, trust will never be there when older. Sad but true. I’ve got so much hate. But when I think about people – say, my family – I can tell that I’ve still got love there. I hope one day there can be someone who knows, so the next generations don’t have to experience what we have experienced. When people have experienced bad stuff or have someone in their lives who they have to care for, it’s like they’re the only people who care and who try and change things for people. It should not be like that. I think everyone should help people at least one day per week – and that would make a difference, I think, because there is already people caring for people everyday, but those people who don’t, just one day would make a big difference and would make a big impact on people’s lives. Don’t just imagine it – that’s easy. Just do it. Then you will know exactly how it is and you will feel what people go through. The reason why I wanted to do education [‘doing education’ is the expression many prisoners use to refer to any kind of classes in prison] is that I need to help with the injustice. Us that can’t read or write doesn’t mean we aren’t smart. We are not smart when it comes to education but we are smart in other ways and smarter than most in other ways. What you can and can’t do I taught myself, and with some things I learned the hard way. Teaching and learning how to live. Then in prison and it all just started again. It’s so hard to do education work when jail is on my mind. It’s similar as home.

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If I don’t get something, they just put me aside. It’s easier to say that he’s too hard to teach than to help me. It’s a vicious system. No matter what people say, I still feel ashamed and that’s just how things are. Some people feel ashamed no matter what. People can say whatever to make someone feel better, but inside them, inside us, no matter what … ashamed. Being ashamed as a kid; not being able to read and write, not being able to tie my shoelaces.

physically and mentally and I wish it would end but I keep on going – because I am a survivor and survivors are winners. I have had heaps of teachers but only two have understood and been able to get through to me and teach me some reading and writing. Not just reading and writing – how to cope with things, home and in jail. Along the way making me a better person by making me feel like I am smart (there’s other words, but that one will do for now). I can do anything like everyone else and that makes a big difference so now nothing is going to stop me – only myself. I wish things was different. I wish I had no issues going on with me and this place. I then would do a lot more and try a lot harder. It’s not recognised that these teachers [in prison] have a hard job. They are just trying to teach me reading and writing, but I can see that it’s hard and frustrating at times because I have so much going on and I have trouble keeping it together. They have to do all this hard work on that, then, after that, try to get me to read and write. They are amazing. There are words to describe what they are and how much I appreciate their help but the words on their own is not enough. I am looking for a word that has 50 letters and means all nice things. That’s how much I appreciate their kindness and knowledge and time to help me – that 50 letter word.

Now I am an adult I know that if I could have had this kind of teaching when I was at school that it would have been so much easier for me at school and growing up also. I loved running around and doing anything and everything … very hyper. I hated sitting there; sitting down when you have more energy than others isn’t good. Everyone thinks I have behaviour problems, but if I could do school work moving around, maybe walking while doing school work, sports and school work at the same time somehow … When I was a kid I liked anything that was hands on. I loved soccer and cricket. I thought ‘bugger it, I might as well be like these blokes’. My school teacher was lovely. She would get us out doing activities: horseriding, swimming, sports, gymnastics. When I was at school I went horseriding and I loved it. It was like a push bike but only bigger. Also it was like the horses knew I was only a kid. The horse the riding teacher would ride was a big powerful horse and I nagged until she let me ride it. When I was on it, it was still big and powerful, but it was like it knew when I was falling off – it’s hard to explain. When I knew I was going horseriding, I was that excited I couldn’t sleep. I felt I learnt heaps from that school teacher – my best school teacher. If I did my school work I could go jump on the trampoline. We had a trampoline at that school.

I would love to tell my story. I would love for someone to write my story. I would also love when I get out of jail, I would love to do this whole program again, doing it without any distractions. I know the work and the way we are doing things works. In our heads we feel dumb – but this makes us feel smart. I will never forget that saying, ‘the pen is more powerful than the sword’. That saying really hit me. [Hearing the stories of other Chatter Matters authors in Island] I experienced all these emotions I’ve never experienced before. I’ve never had that happen before. I’ve only known hate and anger and being scared. Only a few more years to go and then I can help and teach how to help people like me. I still have a long way to go, but there’s no stopping me. ▼

At school some friends helped me. But some teachers just put me in the corner or another room. Some of the kids said ‘we are only helping him’; the teacher said ‘It’s my job to help him, not yours’. But I never got help. It got very boring doing nothing, so I did silly stuff. Then I would get sent home. At home I would find something to do. That’s where people make mistakes: kids like me have lots of energy and active minds. We get punished and it makes us confused when we are young. And now I am an adult and I have to retrain my brain. And it’s very hard because I am just thrown in the too-hard basket instead of pointing me in the right directions. That’s why people like me just give up. It’s very hard, especially when we make a mistake. Everyone gives up on us. Me, I’m not giving up. I am very determined. I also think about what it’s like for others. It makes me more determined to make change. It’s very exhausting

Scott’s story came to Island through Rosalie ‘Rosie’ Martin. Rosie is a speech pathologist at Chatter Matters Tasmania, a charitable organisation building awareness and skill in human communication, language, literacy and positive relatedness. Rosie was also the 2017 Tasmanian Australian of the Year. chattermatters.com.au Image pp. 20–21: Catherine Douglas, Freedom catherinedouglasphotography.com

Flannel Flowers Andy Kissane After Cressida Campbell So we haven’t had sex for three months— should I be worried? My friend’s husband went overseas when she was ill, without her. Unpacking his suitcase on his return, she lifted up his favourite coral sweater and these crimson packages fell out, sailing down to the floor like autumn leaves. At first she thought they were those chocolate hearts that restaurants give you. But looking closer, she realised that the packages were condoms. The background is the blue of optimism— that sensation you get when you lie on the grass and stare into a summer sky until your mind floats where it will, without objective or obligation. Backgrounds are always with us, as ordinary and as extraordinary as birth and death. I carve the flannel flowers into the woodblock with a Hangi To and the knife cleaves to my thumb and forefinger. The petals flare in the cool breeze—some drooping, some twisting back on their stems, some still closed, their green tips rising like madrigals. There are no useful models for how a relationship endures—at least none that make sense to me. What I remember about my parents was the absence of a cross voice in the house and the weary resignation of my mother listening to my father tell some stranger that the first sixty-four years of marriage are the worst. I have no room for improvement, no desire to know everything about you. Just as I ease my way into this block—slowly, slowly—each carved line a gesture I refuse to explain, how I long to feel your fingers press into my back, the flannel flowers somersaulting in riotous joy, the blue sky lifting & lifting, our breath escaping in gasps—wordless and resinous.

The Tomb of the Unknown Artist Andy Kissane After Grayson Perry Denim, leather, tinsel, ceramic buttons, polypropylene, polyurethane, glass, Norfolk pine, nails, glue, rope, silk, taffeta, diamante beads, Swarovski crystals, paper, human carcass When the time finally comes, lay me out in my painting smock and dungarees, lace up my Blundstone boots, put ceramic buttons over my eyes and weave Christmas tinsel (silver and gold) through my hair. Pack an esky of provisions—goat masala, black pudding on sourdough toast for breakfast, a bottle of sparkling shiraz to wash it all down. I might not eat during this, my last journey, but at least I won’t have to ring for takeaway when I arrive on the other side. Drive this battered sloop down to Clovelly and carry it over the concrete sandbars. Tell anyone who happens to be passing that I selected the tree by the rake of its trunk, cut the stern plank with my own hands, planed and shaped the timbers and stitched the sails from op-shop evening dresses. Gorgeous work, they’ll say, as you lay me out over the thwarts of the boat and lower it down into the sea. Take an armful of my exhibition catalogues, the ones that never attracted a single red dot, and pile them up in the bow. Strike a match. When the pyre ignites, push the vessel out into the currents. As the cormorants bob on the waves and the silver gulls swoop, say whatever you couldn’t say to my face, then get on with your own good lives. Film the whole jaunty wake and offer it to gallery directors around the country— the blazing farewell of an unknown artist.

Andy Kissane lives in Sydney and writes fiction and poetry. He has published a novel, a book of short stories, The Swarm, and four books of poetry. Radiance (Puncher & Wattmann, 2014) was shortlisted for the Victorian and Western Australian Premier’s Prizes and the Adelaide Festival Awards. He won Australian Poetry Journal’s 2015 Poem of the Year.

The Road Out Louis Armand 1. Imperial Hotel, Coonabarabran (August 2015) Smoke clears to anaesthesia – invisible particles grafted, biopsied into mosaic. The observatory’s charred perimeter – turning a frozen crow-eye at nebulous space. You made a decision to start out but never arrive – becoming the last Mogul emperor, the first proto-Elamite. Childhood is the old carpet you wrap a god’s corpse in. You’ve since learnt that periscope trick, seeing into far corners, dark stars, the tinted cosmic lens. Spectrographs of a currawong’s satiric lament. In this last sleeping place, it says, all the mattresses have come unsprung. But that a pyre burn & be not consumed, was construed miraculous. 2. Red Landscape (Fred Williams, 1981) The eyes’ traction veers off, red on red – turn the page, a promontory cuts the horizon, fence lines, a distributive graph. But the road takes you only so far – subliminal to the gibber plain, the inland sea. Many means of escape have been proposed, exhibited in museums. The vertical monotony of progress: relay stations into the next mapless beyond – some distantly observed earthrise, heading west through Martian outcountry. Barium heat & fishbowl life-support system. The percussion section throttles down to a sustained chord, a stilled furore of occasion – ticking off the intervals in seachange doppler effect – the conductor asleep in the passenger seat. 3. View of the Western World (John Olsen, 1956) The constructed travesty of a landscape flows out to embrace you. Stark, obdurate. A broken fence recounts the arrival in boats. We are, to them, a succession of winters. Antique firewood from subtle boxes. The mind in repose shakes its chains – its language translates nothing. It is neither the death of sleep nor the wild altitudes of a misplaced shoreline. Salted & stored in the lightless cave, a desert is a returning sea that doesn’t.

4. Mural (Clifton Pugh, Tibooburra, 1976) Driving at the moon, you are the wheeled fulcrum on which this red earth turns. Mineral eye, shingle-tongue, kilned in the dissolving saltpan, in the lithopone sky. First light of the ancient space mariners. A boy on a roadside, divining-rod in hand, absorbed in the full knowledge – alien as fossil footprints on the moon, as Kandinsky. The granites make black holes in the wide scrubbed brushstroke – a mask with eyes. To bury the namesakes, to invite the question without asking it. 5. The Dark Cut (Cameron Corner, SA, NSW, QLD) Its blood eye watches even around corners where there’re none. The flat of two vast intersecting planes, red & black, a gibbous lunatic twin ogling back. The dog fence whittles the wind for miles. A surveyor’s totempole declares invisible boundary lines, dust dances its funereal rites. You paint a tin shack with bowsers into the picture as proof of something – like the gate you pass through, like the dog with the stone in its mouth & red neckerchief. But the road out was always a gauntlet, between the eyes’ onrush & unyielding. Them & us. One after another.

Louis Armand has published eight novels including The Combinations (2016), Cairo (2014; longlisted for the Dublin IMPAC Award), and Breakfast at Midnight (2012). In addition, he has published ten collections of poetry – most recently, East Broadway Rundown (2015) and The Rube Goldberg Variations (2015). He has also written critical volumes including Videology (2015) and The Organ-Grinder’s Monkey: Culture after the Avantgarde (2013). He lives in Prague.

The Complexities of the Self, and Pat Brassington Amanda Davies

Pat Brassington, a friend and mentor, shares my interest in a realm of meaning that is not quite sayable. This is a realm of disquiet, characterised by experiences of not knowing. Over the past ten years I have painted numerous portraits of Pat and struggled with how to render her complexities. This is mixed up with my own peculiar phenomenology and conceptual ideas about the construction of the self. I once depicted Pat as a small pile of dropped pink shot silk slumped next to a power point. It’s absurd depicting her as a slippery, colour-changing piece of silk, but it worked. The portrait holds a beauty and sensuality that I see both in Pat and in her work. In my recent portrait of Pat she wears an op-shop wedding dress, inside out, with bra cups and seams exposed. This was not planned, occurring by chance the day she came to sit for me. Only in the process of painting did I make links to feminism, Jean-Paul Gaultier’s iconic cone bra, and the recurring wedding dress motif in her own works such as Drink Me and Akimbo. In much of Pat’s art the body morphs, boundaries dissolve and openings appear as potential sites for leakage. Echoing this, in my painting of her there is a pink smear around the mouth becoming a point of leakage where the inside is outed. In the active process of painting – where the real and the imagined, the seen and the felt entwine – I hope to have revealed a little something about the complexities of the self that is Pat Brassington. — Amanda Davies

Image p. 29: Portrait of Pat Brassington, 2017, oil on linen, 107 x 125 cm This portrait won the Portia Geach Memorial Award 2017 for portraits by Australian women artists. Image p. 31: Portrait of Pat, 2014, oil on linen, 51 x 51 cm

Amanda Davies has ample capacity to represent both the observed and imagined world in paint. She restlessly tests this capacity on a variety of mostly challenging subjects. In this series of paintings, a balloon, or balloons, conceal or decorate or perhaps advertise the intromittent male organ possessed by a person without trousers. Although this may strike one as unusual, in a free country one can ask why not? By often painting unusual situations this artist focuses our attention on the content, the subject matter. This is pertinent. Think about all those female reclining or seated nude views demonstrating a masterly representation of unblemished flesh that artists have chosen to paint down through the ages. A â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;promiseâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; of the avant garde was to investigate the world of appearances with originality and vigour, to take the viewer into the unpredictable and involve the viewer not in the risk of the quick gaze, but in a robust creative vision. For Amanda Davies creativity begins with the concept, and the concept for her is often an entirely new challenge to her considerable capacity with representational painting. â&#x20AC;&#x201D; Pat Brassington

This short essay was originally included in a publication entitled Some bleed permanently and some just on Fridays developed by Amanda Davies to accompany a body of work with the same title. Amanda Davies majored in painting at the University of Tasmania. Daviesâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s work is in numerous collections. She has won many awards including the Portia Geach Memorial Award 2017, Arts Tasmania Claudio Alcorso Residency 2017, Bruny Island Art Prize 2016, City of Albany Art Prize 2014, and a number of residencies. She lives in Tasmania and is represented by Bett Gallery, Hobart. Pat Brassington was born in Hobart and is one of Australiaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s leading contemporary artists. Influenced by surrealism, feminism and fetishism, Pat has exhibited extensively nationally and internationally. Pat was awarded the inaugural Don Macfarlane Prize in 2017 in honour of her life and artistic ambitions.

Image p. 32: untitled, 2015, oil on linen, 25.5 x 35.5 cm Image p. 33: Weeping, 2017, oil on linen, 31 x 35.5 cm All images courtesy of the artist and Bett Gallery, Hobart

Highway in the Sun A road, a prince, a country, a love story ... Joe Koning explores the Princes Highway

he Princes Highway begins in Sydney and terminates in Port Augusta. Or perhaps it is the other way around. In either case, it is a terminus in name only. There is no end to the highway network. In Port Augusta, it bifurcates into the Stuart Highway and the Eyre Highway between a Holden dealership and the cracked shoreline of Spencer Gulf. In Sydney, it intersects with Cleveland Street and continues as Broadway, pulsing veins of traffic toward the city centre. At no point at either end does the road ever cease. It seems our highway system has neared the infinite. Keep driving long enough from anywhere and you will eventually circle the nation and arrive back where you started.

In addition to pleasing the future king, Australians would be developing an asset of infrastructure. It was practical. A piece in The Argus on 24 January 1920 voiced its support: ‘Farmers are increasingly buying cars, partly because they are anxious to be independent of horses in times of drought. Indeed, 65 per cent of the motor-cars now on order in Australia are stated to be going to county districts.’ It would be a road for everyone to enjoy and it made sense. In the same paper, the day before: ‘Old residents of Melbourne will recall the successful efforts to make the city presentable before the visit of the Duke of Edinburgh in the late sixties. The Treasury Gardens, previously a rubbish tip, were formed in anticipation of that visit. Again, before the present King came, the southern entrance to the city was converted from an eyesore into a splendid approach’. It seems we cannot resist the urge to please monarchs.

The Princes Highway is 1898 kilometres long and traverses three states: New South Wales, Victoria and South Australia. It is a coastal highway, never venturing too far from the sea. Pull out far enough and the Princes Highway becomes a segment of the ring-road Highway One, a complex network of tar that encircles Australia. To picture Highway One, imagine a child is given a thick black marker and a map of the country, and is told to draw around the outside in one motion, trying to stay as close to the edges as possible.

The highway had not been completed by the time Prince Edward arrived. There was not enough time nor enough money. At no point on his tour did Prince Edward traipse from Sydney to Melbourne, admiring the countryside. Though, he did give permission for the road to be styled in his honour.

I like to think that a great snake made of sand and crushed rock once glided out of the water, wrapped its bituminous body around the continent, lay down to rest with its tail in its mouth, and never got up again.

Had the project been completed, thousands would have rushed from their houses to meet him. He was a beloved figure. The Australian press called him the ‘Digger Prince’, as he had fought in World War I. Those who served in the military were revered by the nation. We associated diggers with the Anzac spirit. We awarded them the traits of courage, endurance and mateship.

This is what actually happened. In January 1920, an idea began to form. Edward, the Prince of Wales, had planned a royal tour of the country. One day this man would be king, and an energy began to percolate inside those who had love for the old empire. They wanted to please Edward so that he would care for them in the future. In Melbourne, newspapers espoused the idea that the Prince embark on an overland journey and feast on the sights. On 23 January, someone wrote in The Argus, ‘Nothing would give His Royal Highness a better insight into the rural life and ample spaces of Australia than a motor drive from Sydney to Melbourne, or from Melbourne to Sydney’.

In October 1920, a ceremony was held on the top of a mountain pass near Bulli, New South Wales. At this spot in the Illawarra Ranges, 283 metres above the sea, the field of vision is dominated by rainforest, escarpment, and an assortment of towns and beaches that slip into the Pacific Ocean. On this grey morning, an icy wind battered the mountain, and a fog slipped in and out of the panorama. The minister for local government who was there to officially open the Princes Highway must have struggled to see the shore.

On 10 February 1922, in the South Australian newspaper The Register: ‘Constant pushing can achieve wonders. Australian motors have in their mind’s’ eye the making of a roadway around the coast, from Adelaide to Brisbane’.

A small party gathered around interwoven ribbons of red and yellow silk that hung across the road. As the minister spoke, his wife snipped at the strands with ceremonial scissors. The minister said that he had 36

Highway in the Sun

The road was known as ‘The Prince’s Highway’ for more than twenty years. The possessive apostrophe served a purpose. It was clear to whom the highway belonged, and what sort of man owned it.

travelled the whole of New South Wales, and he knew of no road more beautiful than this one. As the material fell, a constant rain descended on the party. Despite this, the mood was good. Looking down the line of the highway from the escarpment was like looking into the future.

I was born in the Towamba Valley of southern New South Wales. I lived on a small farm there for seventeen years. We had twelve acres of dry land ringed by eucalypts. It was a half-hour drive on the Towamba Road to get to the highway. The road was more of an unpaved dirt track, corrugated from the wind and rain and the passage of cars. But in sections, where the trail clung to the side of mountains and the eucalypts grew forever out into the horizon and turned the sky an oiled blue, it was beautiful. Thirteen kilometres from my house, we took the Nullica Short Cut Road. I don’t think it was any faster. The shortcut was strewn with stones and was always flooded where it crossed Leo’s Creek at the bottom of a gully. After the creek, the topsoil was the colour of lilacs left outside to fade, and it lay on the road as a loose dust, aching to billow into the sky. A few bends later the road straightened and ran past a patch of land that had been a pine plantation but was now an open and empty field. My parents worked the land there, planting trees. They would start in the dead of morning. On winter nights, I remember them being wounded from the effort of breaking the frozen ground with shovels. Their hands had become tapestries depicting red figures that danced on blisters and calluses.

Back then, the mountain pass at Bulli was so steep that most cars could not conquer it. Many of those who had come to celebrate the highway found their vehicles breaking down as they tried to drive up the incline. To usher in a new future for Australian motorists, the federal minister for works and railways had to leave his car behind and ascend by foot. The road was known as ‘The Prince’s Highway’ for more than twenty years. The possessive apostrophe served a purpose. It was clear to whom the highway belonged, and what sort of man owned it. In 1941, the apostrophe was discarded due to convention. We no longer employ apostrophes where the idea of possession is tenuous. Until I was fifteen, I thought it was called the Princess Highway, maybe because as highways go it was young and beautiful and if you stared down it and into the distance you could dream about being just about anything. The name ‘Princess Highway’ does not connote ownership. I met a young man at university who still called it the Princess Highway. He was twenty-one years old. Things have become less clear. We have forgotten whose road it is.

Just beyond the old pine stand, the gravel gives way to the promise of smooth bitumen. That is where the Princes Highway runs. Digging in the dirt between trees, my parents would have been able to see the road. If they had been born earlier, they would have gathered here to see Prince Edward go by. In another world, I see them standing by the highway, waving their bleeding hands.

If I were a highway, I would bathe all day in the sun, and at night reflect my cosmic heat up to the stars, saying, ‘look, I can shine too’.

So, Edward became king, but it was a short reign. His father, George V, died in January 1936, and he became King Edward VIII. By December, it was over. He had thrown it all away so he could marry the woman he pined for. He is the only British monarch to have willingly relinquished the throne.

Royal titles fall uneasily from antipodean tongues. They tumble from our dry mouths and splat on the ground. The asphalt of the Princes Highway gathers so much heat you could fry eggs on it. In places, the temperature gets so high that bitumen melts and the highway becomes a river of energy that threshes the land.

Here is what King Edward VIII told his people: ‘I have found it impossible to carry the heavy burden 37

‘He’s been practically shut up for the last two years anyhow. No one has seen him except the family, and his death is the greatest relief imaginable, or what we’ve always silently prayed for.’

Highway in the Sun

of responsibility and to discharge my duties as King as I would wish to do without the help and support of the woman I love’. In his address, there was no mention of his highway, which still prospered under a temperate sun many miles away. Perhaps he had forgotten about it.

He once toured India, and called the beggars who would gather to see him the scum of the East. In the 1920s, Aboriginal Australians were forced off their land. Assimilation policies destroyed families. Children were taken from parents. Around the country, adults were killed. Children were also killed. We started stealing a generation. We were good at it.

Edward met Wallis Simpson in June 1931. She was a married American socialite, and he was the future king. They were smitten. Simpson divorced her husband and the two became lovers. The royal family looked down upon a twice-divorced woman, and so they were never allowed to marry. This would eat away at Edward like a disease of the flesh. He reigned for 326 days. Edward’s letter of abdication reads, ‘I, Edward the Eighth, of Great Britain, Ireland, and the British Dominions beyond the Seas, King, Emperor of India, do hereby declare My irrevocable determination to renounce the Throne for Myself, and for My descendants, and My desire that effect should be given to this Instrument of Abdication immediately’.

In the 1920s, the digger was an Australian icon. Returned soldiers were given prosperous loans and they built beautiful houses all around the country. Indigenous soldiers received none of those benefits. We did not love Indigenous servicemen. We loved white diggers, and we loved the Digger Prince. During his tour of Australia in 1920, Prince Edward said in a letter that he thought Australia’s Aboriginal people were ‘the most revolting form of living creatures’ that he had ever seen. He said, ‘They are the lowest known form of human being, and are the nearest thing to monkeys.’ Prince Edward hated Australia’s First People, and we gave him a highway.

Close your eyes and imagine that kind of love. Think of not being able to guide an empire because you feel you are without a segment of yourself. While you are doing it, think of every war that has ever been fought for a crown, a throne, or the chance to climb out of nothing. Bring to your mind all the blood left on the ground. There was a lot of it.

John was a sensitive child. After his grandfather died, a relative trying to elucidate death told him that the dead floated by on the wind. A few days later, someone saw him gathering leaves from the ground. He thought he was collecting pieces of his grandfather.

This is what we call one of the great love stories.

I have a vision of the Lost Prince. In it, he is a passenger in a burgundy Model T Ford that careers through the rural expanse of this land. He is here for an overland trip from Sydney to Melbourne, or from Melbourne to Sydney. He drives past green hills and eucalypt forests. He drives over water so blue that it offends the sky. Every tract of grass by the roadside is flecked with yellow flowers. The blinds of his car are open and he sees it all. ▼

On a trip to Barbados in 1920, Prince Edward recounted an experience to Wallis in a letter. ‘We are all depressed tonight as we lost a man overboard. He was apparently leaning against the rails on the side of the ship. We never saw him again. Of course, one man’s death means nothing, sweetheart, only it’s a depressing effect on everybody.’ Edward had a brother, John. John had epilepsy and was hidden away from the eyes of the public. They called him the ‘Lost Prince’. The royals kept John invisible so no-one would know that the royal blood was tainted. When John went to see doctors in London, the blinds in his car were drawn so no-one could see him in case he disgraced the family by having a seizure. John died from a seizure at the age of thirteen. Edward was not able to attend the funeral. Speaking of John, he said: ‘He’s been practically shut up for the last two years anyhow. No one has seen him except the family, and his death is the greatest relief imaginable, or what we’ve always silently prayed for.’ He noted that John had become more of an animal than anything else.

Joe Koning is a freelance writer and journalist based in Sydney with a Masters in journalism from UTS. He writes nonfiction, and writes for radio and podcasts. He has produced radio documentaries for ABC Radio National, FBi Radio, and 2SER.

Edward called the Chinese chinks, and the Maltese dagoes. He called the Prince Regent of Japan a prize monkey, and said that the Japanese bred like rabbits.

Images p. 38: Prince Edward (left) and his younger brother Prince John (right)

FICTION

THE BIG BLUE Kathryn Lomer

he house wasnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t always right on the lip of the cliff but, in the big storm after Dad left, a wall of sandstone sheered away and crumbled into the sea below, taking with it most of the yellow gravel driveway and the front steps. The steps left a dark hole in the verandah foundation like a gap from a missing tooth but no-one could see it except gulls hovering in the cliff â&#x20AC;&#x2122;s updraught. The verandah slumped its shoulders at the loss and you had to keep the peeling wooden railing firmly in your grip to peer over the edge. Down there, stone lay in segments, some in the water, some out, some already sand washing up on the beach to the south. Thick cat-onine-tails of giant kelp dried on top of the stone blocks. Seaweed pong mixed with powerful ocean smell, rising as solid as a wall of glass in front of the house. The grainy stickiness of salt lay everywhere. Waves pounded at the foot of the cliff, sending frissons up through house stumps, the noise such that everyone raised their voices slightly until it seemed natural to speak that way. If you stood in the house and looked out, sea filled windows as if it were rising up the glass in a flood. Since the driveway had plummeted with the old cliff face, everyone came to the back door, fighting their way through yellow clumps of broom whose pods popped in the sun, past mounds of agapanthus, fending off droning bees and stepping over, or on, a multitude of snails. Crunched brown shells and squished bodies layered the spiky coir doormat. For two weeks after the cliff went,

Billy’s bike leaned unused next to the flywire screen, rusting in salt-laden air, for his favourite ride had been a hurricane circuit of the house, the rush of wooden velodrome track and cheers of the crowd in his ears. No-one knew why one day he walked out the back door and jumped on the bike the way he used to, pedalled like fury and began the old familiar circuit, up the path to the clothesline, round the four apricot trees, down between the corrugated iron watertanks and the spiky xanthorrhoea at the side of the house, then hitting yellow gravel. Only centimetres of that gravel spat under his tyres before he pedalled out into that big blue salty nothingness. Sammy, the second youngest, was sitting on the front verandah and saw Billy hurtle past into air, still pedalling, then curve slowly downwards as if from the top of a steep hill for a lark. Sammy jumped to the verandah railing and saw Billy and his bike meet rock. He stood with his mouth wildly open and bottomless, as if all that blue ocean could pour into it and still not fill him up. When noise finally came out of the black hole of Sammy’s mouth and climbed above the roar of waves, his mother got there first, then Theresa, then Susie, then Daisy. Theresa, being the eldest, practical and optimistic, telephoned for an ambulance and the police. But Mum gunned their rusting old Mercedes station wagon out of the back garden and onto the truncated drive, roared down the twisting highway to the beach, scrambled along hazardous snaking rock platforms and found her boy. She was never the same after that. When they talked about it afterwards they said Billy always had his head in the clouds and he probably just forgot. There was the warning sign of one apricot tree lying on its side from the storm, but its new angle had quickly become incorporated into their image of the garden so perhaps he hadn’t noticed. Probably he was thinking about the starling nest he’d found under the eaves. Or the rabbit burrow where he planned to lie in wait for a baby bunny to emerge. It probably wasn’t that he was thinking about his absent dad who was one of the ten best cyclists in the state and who Billy missed the way he would miss his own eyes. When they’d first bought the ramshackle house, some in town had said, They could afford to lose one or two over the cliffs. Now those tongues swelled up like zucchinis and threatened to block their throats. There was no room to eat their words but they wished they could. It was why the house went cheap. No-one else with children would want a hazard like that in their front yard. That and the fact that it was so tumble-down. Otherwise it was prime real estate with an ocean view for a hundred and eighty degrees and it was big enough for five children to have a room each. Because of its drawbacks it was a house they could afford and beggars can’t be choosers. It seemed like a dream come true – a house of their own, plenty of space. That was for the month before Dad left with Mum’s second-best friend who’d come to help them settle in.

Mum took the money the government gave her and took the snubs from people in town. If she thought it unfair that she was the one to cop disapproval when he was the one who’d done the dirty, she didn’t say. If she harboured a grudge, she didn’t say. When you’ve got five children there’s not much choice but to carry on. And not much time to feel sorry for yourself. She’d hear a snigger now and then and talk of the old woman who lived in a shoe, but she tossed her head, got in the Merc, rolled out of town onto the highway. Only occasionally when she turned onto the popping yellow gravel did a tear or two slide down her face, and they were always gone by the time she got to the house. But that was before Billy. After Billy she didn’t pay any attention. She knew by then there were greater losses than that of a no-good husband. They didn’t even know where to find him to tell him. Perhaps the townspeople felt guilty. Everyone had known about the slippage. But it wasn’t a word anyone said to outsiders. And, to be fair, no-one expected slippage on such a grand scale. But then no-one expected the worst storm of the century to hit just as the century was on its way out. It had been a final lash of the tail. There was damage all down the coast so, if anyone’s conscience niggled, there were plenty of bolt-holes. No-one lent a hand. They managed, but only just. One thing after another broke down. First the television went, then a couple of hotplates on the stove. Soon the lawnmower chucked it in. And nothing got repaired. There wasn’t the money for it. Nor was there the interest. Lethargy had a good grip on Mum. It was all the same to her. They would make do with whatever they had. Nothing really mattered, did it. Nothing made much sense whether your television worked or not. And she could make a meal just as well with one hotplate. As for the lawn, let it grow. That’s what lawns did best after all. Theresa the practical was put out by her mother’s lack of interest. But she knew its origin and said nothing. The other children weren’t distressed by it. To them it was like holidays, like life’s stays had given and she was letting her belly flop. They missed television at first, sure, but after a while they couldn’t have said how they used to find time to watch. They were outside exploring neighbouring crown land or the beach, or reading in the long cool grass around the house. They weren’t hounded about chores or homework or the state of their clothes. Once in a while they thought to have a bath or clean up their rooms, and sometimes they did. But only if they felt like it. Mum lay on the lumpy brown club sofa on the flat part of the front verandah. If she turned her head to one side all she could see was blue. Sea and sky and nothing to separate them. She thought about that blue, how really it was just air, nothing to see at all, and water like they got from the tank. Where did the blue come from? She thought how our eyes deceive us, tell us one thing when another is the case. She thought how easily appearances 42

fool us. She thought how if she asked someone the colour of sky they would say blue, believing it was the truth, how we all agree to believe something and that’s how it is. Sammy stepped out of house-shade onto the verandah and looked at his mother. Mum, he said, the toaster’s just broke. I can’t make toast for breakfast. Never mind. Have bread. Bread came along before toast. Just as good. No different really. What’s toast anyway? Just bread with a bit of crisping up. We’ll light a fire in the lounge tonight and make toast the oldfashioned way. But Mum, there isn’t any firewood. There’s plenty of wood over the fence in the bush. Round up your brother and … and … Sammy’s eyes opened wide and his body stilled. Mum’s mouth went all square and looked like it hurt. She worked its separate parts – the chapped lips, the tongue, the not-very-good teeth. She got them coordinated. Round up the others and go and get some. We’ll have a fire and toast and marshmallows and roast spuds. How about that? Sammy nodded and turned away. Then he turned back and ran over and hugged his mother, at least he put his arms around the bits of her he could get at, all squashed into the sofa as she was and getting thinner by the moment. They stayed like that while at least fifty waves arrived in sets, shuddering up through the house. It was a while before Theresa thought of a boarder. It was a delicate matter. It used to be Billy’s room. But now it was spare and they needed the money. Your head’s not right, girl, she told herself. Who in their right mind would come and live in a decrepit house where nothing works but the people in it, and then with mixed success? But she thought it might be an answer, not just financially, but in other ways. She thought having someone else around might snap Mum out of it. She found a pencil and started writing an ad. She’d put it in the local free weekly newspaper. Room with a view, she wrote. One hundred and eighty degree ocean view from your bedroom in house of faded elegance plus romantically wild garden, all shared with a happy family. Theresa tapped the silver end of the pencil against her teeth then screwed up the paper and chucked it on the floor. She’d try for next week’s paper instead. The next week she tried a different tack. Need to get away from it all? Share our house by the sea. No television or radio to disturb you. Just the waves, the wind in the trees, and the laughter of children. This time she threw the scrunched ball of paper from the front verandah and it fell lazily towards the rocks. She didn’t wait to see it hit. Mum, oblivious to Theresa’s plans, wore black. Not only her dress, which was mournful enough. But her eyes wore black day and night.

ISLAND

old cliff and she ran sobbing to her own room and didn’t come out for three days. When she resurfaced, she took to the fallen apricot tree with an axe and chopped it into pieces so small they could have fuelled the stove of a doll’s house. Buck kept to himself. Theresa wondered which he was doing – recovering, lying low, reflecting or just being quiet. He took to sitting on the very edge of the old gravel drive, dangling his feet over the drop as if it was a kitchen chair. He looked out to sea. Sometimes he brought a book from his room, from one of those boxes presumably, and lay back with the book held up against the sky. Theresa watched him from the kitchen window. He never read more than a page before he lowered the book over his face and left it there for a time. Perhaps he went to sleep with those words dancing in front of his closed eyelids. Perhaps he thought. Then he’d sit up, toss the book aside and gaze over the ocean again. He sat there for hours at a time. Sometimes she thought of Billy’s body smashed up on the rocks below and she was afraid. She wondered if it would be her fault since she was the one who had brought him here. One day she screwed up her courage, and went to sit beside him. She didn’t dare look down, only out, or at him. Preferably at him. What are you doing? she asked. He smiled and she noticed his eyes wore black as well. I’m looking, he said. She waited, looking at him. At the void. At the beauty. And I’m listening. To nothing and everything. I’m letting go. Her heart beat a tad faster and louder. You’re not thinking of letting go of, of, of the cliff? He smiled gently at her. Of life, you mean? She bit her lip and nodded. No. I’m letting go of everything but life. It’s the only thing we can hold onto. We can’t hold onto other things, or even to other people. Not forever. She thought, I’d like to hold on to you forever. There is no forever, is there? she asked, then wondered what she meant. No, he said as if he knew what she meant. I mean, there’s only now, isn’t there, only the present. That’s all we’ve got. Although we’ve got our bodies and, and … She felt flustered. She didn’t know where the words were coming from. He looked at the skin on her cheeks turning the colour of crimson clover. And? he said. I don’t know. It’s just, I thought, that’s all we have. Our bodies and the present. The present of our bodies? Her heart made more noise than the old Merc’s engine. She nodded. Then she dragged her eyes up to his, leaned over and kissed him right on his used but beautiful lips. Suddenly there was another spare room in the house. Theresa moved her things into Buck’s room. She wrote another ad.

Need a place to recover? Theresa wrote on her next try. Need to lie low, be quiet, reflect? Need a room in a house where nothing works and no-one cares? A room in a house with a hole in it, a family with a hole in it? Need to stare at the ocean for days on end? We’ve got room for you. Cheap (but not that cheap or we wouldn’t bother letting it). Theresa counted the words. There were too many. She’d have to cut out a few to get the ad in for free. She took out ‘and no-one cares’. It wasn’t true anyway. She cared. She liked listening to radio plays and now she couldn’t. She couldn’t go from Cairo to the top of the Sydney tower then up in a spaceship all in fifty minutes. She couldn’t wait with anticipation to hear what world she might enter tonight. She couldn’t turn the lights out and listen in the dark for her future. With the boarder’s rent in advance, she’d get their radio fixed. When Buck turned up, Theresa thought her luck had changed. He had the kind of look she coveted in her clothes-buying. Used but beautiful. Unusual. With a past. He drove up on a motorcycle with a sidecar piled with cardboard boxes. When he got to the sudden end of the gravel driveway, he stopped and gazed out over the glinting brilliance beyond. Then he leaned forward to look over the precipice, sat back and nodded. Theresa held her breath. This is where he turns his bike around and hightails it out of here, she thought. She also thought, I’d better put a warning sign up for anyone else who comes up that drive. WRONG WAY, GO BACK, she thought. NO THROUGH ROAD, she thought. DEAD END, she thought. Like my life, she thought, but then Buck rolled his outrigger bike silently over the lawn and stopped it in front of her, smiled, and said, I’ll take it. If Mum noticed, she didn’t say. She started doing things, though there seemed to be no rhyme or reason to the things she did. For example, she dug up a part of the back lawn, the back grass, piled it up with manure and straw and planted things. There weren’t any rows, things were planted higgledy-piggledy, and the seed labels blew away in the wind. Sammy ran around trying to collect them so he’d be able to watch the garden grow and know what he was waiting for. The ones he caught before they blew over the cliff, he threaded onto metal skewers from a kitchen drawer and stuck them haphazardly into Mum’s garden. He figured he could match the photos with the plants as they came up. Mum took out an old oven biscuit tray, cut shapes out of it, and for a while could be found up a ladder in one room or another brushing paint over her homemade stencil, leaving behind what might have been roses, or butterflies, or Rorschach patterns. She never made it right around one room and when the top rung of the ladder broke she simply started leaving her patterns lower on the walls. So it’s no wonder she hardly noticed the newcomer. Except for the day she suddenly stopped outside the door of Billy’s room and held her breath. In his new room, Buck was whistling softly. Mum’s face collapsed like the 44

The Big Blue

Soon another young man turned up, looking downcast. He took to sitting with them on the lip of the cliff. There they sat like three wise monkeys, gazing into the changing panorama of waves and wind and current and sky. Every now and then the newcomer flung his hands out as if releasing something into the air. Or he merely held out his hand, palm upwards, then turned it over slowly, letting whatever it was drop away. Every day he looked happier. He asked if a friend could come and stay, someone else who needed to do this. Theresa shrugged her shoulders. Why not? But they pay rent, right, she said. She hadn’t altogether lost her practical streak, although its colours were running and blurring now and she would rather trace the whorls of Buck’s ear than twiddle the knobs of a radio that worked. Soon there were ten or twelve of them setting up tents in the overgrown garden and sitting along the cliff top as if it was a long church pew. They might have looked like lemmings. Or they might have looked like kings. The other children soon got used to them being there. They’d join in occasionally before running off for adventures. Mum noticed the row of sitters but said nothing. She was busy weaving a hammock out of twisted grasses from the back garden. When it was finished she slung it between two walnut trees behind the house, one green and bountiful, the other a skeletal print of chaos. She could be found there most of the time, swinging, thinking of something, perhaps other schemes, perhaps not. From the hammock, she wasn’t able to see the sea. One day Theresa looked along the row of statue-like figures and thought there was something familiar about the last in line. The way the back hunched, the nose beaked. She was about to go and take a closer look when she heard an almighty din and looked around in time to see Mum hurtling towards the cliff edge, legs pumping against the thin fabric of her sombre dress. Theresa screamed. The sitters turned their heads all at the same time, first towards Theresa, then to where Theresa was staring. They looked like clowns at a sideshow, swinging right, swinging left, mouths agape. It turned into slow motion, the way these things do. If they’d had time to think it, they would have thought she was putting an end to her struggle with demons. If they’d had any more time, they would have realised she wasn’t heading for a nice clear piece of cliff, but instead for the figure sitting at the end of the row. They would also have noticed that he turned slower than the rest of them. But when he saw the mad figure bearing down upon him like a train on a crossing he acted swiftly, jumping up and holding out his arms as if for an embrace. Anyone could see there was something amiss here. Her own arms were pumping by her sides. As she got closer to the man, she held them out in front of her and yelled, You killed him, You killed him. The words were lifted in the updraught and flung into sky. His arms widened and it looked certain that hers would meet in the middle of his chest and topple his body into empty air like that of an arcing diver from the highest tower.

Hers would follow with the impetus of that run across the garden. They would tumble end over end in the air, gracefully, like practised acrobats, but only for a few seconds. Instead, what actually happened was that her own arms began to spread as if to mirror the man’s stance, but she wasn’t going to be able to slow down in time for it to be an embrace instead of murder. Or murdersuicide. The outcome of this object acting on that object with that force was obvious even to sitters with the crudest understanding of physics. They collectively cried, Nooooo! And whatever it was that caused it – the angle of her hands as they widened from weapon to blessing, the way she gave her arms a sudden downward push as if to put the brakes on her rush, the new lightness of her body, or the way her dress flapped around it – whatever it was, she was suddenly up in the air with her words, only a few feet, but definitely airborne, hovering, blown backwards, then deposited neatly on her feet ten metres back from the cliff edge as if a hand had put her there. Seconds piled up like children’s blocks and no-one moved. It’s hard to know what to do in the face of such a thing. In the end the man put one foot in front of the other and walked over to her with his arms still held out like a scarecrow’s. He folded them around her as if wrapping her in a blanket and she began to shake and shudder as though his blanket made her aware of the cold. She shook so badly that he had a hard time holding her. Especially as he was weeping for all he was worth. When their faces finally rested against each other, their tears ran in together like streams into a river. Theresa noted that tears are exactly like drops of ocean, and when those tears evaporated they would, one way or another, but inevitably, wind up back in the ocean. She thought there was something to think about in that. ▼

Kathryn Lomer is a Tasmanian poet, novelist, short story and YA fiction writer with eight published books to date and numerous awards for her work. Kathryn has a BA in Literature and European Languages, as well as a Graduate Diploma in Journalism and Media Studies. She works at the Museum of Old and New Art (Mona). Image p. 41: tarotastic, One Day I’ll Fly Away, via Foter.com Image p. 43: Wouter de Bruijn, In Need of a Paintjob, via Foter.com

Heredity Anna Ryan-Punch My mother seemed to be almost constantly pregnant we surmised it was mainly to shirk the job of scooping turds from the litter tray. We older ones said she’d keep having children till she got one that liked her one that would stopper the brawling mess of mothering. When adulthood got us dug out we flung ourselves far into no gravitational orbit there was no sense of tug she never wore aprons. Eventually I daughtered and pressed myself calm vowed that the evidence of my single child would roar in glorious dissonance. So when her ‘how dare you’ surged unbidden to my lips I paused in history’s slipstream the slight vertigo of stepping onto an unmoving escalator.

Anna Ryan-Punch’s previous publications include poetry in Westerly, Antipodes, The Age, Quadrant, Island, Overland and Southerly.

White Lines on Pink Luke Beesley I arrived by the pink bark-stripped eucalyptus tree last Sunday and went straight to bed. I slept in the pink light of a eucalyptus tree. Sleeping was easy until I dreamed the bark stripped from my own pillow, owl-embroidered childhood pillow, collected in dream lichen florescent and waiting on kindling, something I could possibly trace back to a family tree, to the nomenclature of an arboristâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s labour. Apples while the sound of the river refused any softening. I sat close to its stereo. Woke up in pins and needles. To acknowledge the fireplace here and the fireplace in the sound of the second home of my childhood. Smoke flooded the house, the brickwork at poor angles, a shout ricocheting off the river as I made the bed and prepared breakfast simply and with turned eggs and the eye of the e.g. always drawing on emotion caused by repetition.

Luke Beesley has published four poetry collections. The latest is Jam Sticky Vision (Giramondo, 2015). A fifth collection, Aqua Spinach, is forthcoming. He lives in Melbourne.

A Science for Dreaming Inspired by her father’s work as a psychotherapist, Nicola Redhouse explores where we sit today with Freud’s theories of dreaming, and the eternally fascinating questions of why we dream and what our dreams could mean

he voice of my father comes to me where I sit, at his feet, under the switchboard of the Johannesburg radio station. He has a regular slot on Tuesdays, offering his psychoanalytic ear to callers, between chart toppers like Billy Ocean and Michael Jackson and ads for instant coffee and Pepsi. A guy who goes by the name of Hot Buttons mans the switchboard. Until that week, I have been more fascinated by Hot Buttons, who oozes street cool with his dreadlocks and bandana, than by anything my father talks about on air. But this night the lines are jammed with callers. The topic is dreams, and people are fighting for time with my father to talk about their nighttime theatres. I listen as my father does this interesting trick. He asks the caller to describe their dream, and also to say whatever comes to them as they remember it. He seems to turn their words over and examine them, almost like how the doctor we go to listens to my breathing and looks in my ears. You say there was a stone in your hand, and you spoke of your mother’s hard heart. The room was blue, you mentioned. And you also told me your uncle wore blue. I feel the frisson, the buzz that his words generate in the caller, as he puzzles and solves and coaxes them to make associations. Poised in exactly that thrilling space of early childhood in which language has begun to bloom and frighten, I am entranced: words might, strangely enough, be a clue to things not said.

ISLAND

Mostly, my father is at pains to explain to me that dream content has meaning only in the context of the life of the dreamer; it cannot have rigid symbolism attached to it. You can’t buy a dream dictionary to translate your inner life or your future.

It was the father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, who established the method of interpreting dreams that my father was using that night on the radio: the parsing of dream material as a way to uncover the dreamer’s unconscious thoughts, feelings and motivations. But dreams were only an accidental interest for Freud, a rich source he happened to come upon en route to establishing something broader – a scientific method for examining the mind. His evolving hypotheses for the structure of the mind rested on the idea that the mind censored feelings and thoughts that it found shocking by disguising them and placing them where they could not be easily accessed – in the unconscious, a part of the mind beyond awareness. Freud was working in an era in which talk of sexuality or bodily experience was taboo, and this, together with his observations that many of his patients seemed to find their own sexual thoughts disturbing, led him to declare the development of our sexuality as children as the most important source of our significant banished thoughts. Patients who came to him with corporeal symptoms with no biological cause he could trace – limb paralysis, coughs, headaches, neuralgia, vomiting – were experiencing those locked-away thoughts as a kind of displaced bodily energy, he believed. They seemed to be relieved of their symptoms through bringing their banished thoughts to light. Influenced by the work of his colleague Josef Breuer, Freud used hypnosis to get his patients to speak what they otherwise would not. But he soon arrived at a useful insight that led him to abandon the practice: a person in a normal state of consciousness, if encouraged to say anything she liked, or to free-associate, would eventually reveal significant material that would achieve the same recovery. Dreams were, as Freud noted in his 1914 work The History of the Psychoanalytic Movement, ‘the first fruit’ for this new technical innovation of free-association — it

turned out that most patients, when instructed to say whatever came to them, soon recounted their dreams from the night before. In dreams, Freud was most certain of the phenomena he was trying to describe and the technique he was trying to establish, and he described the dream interpretation work that he did during the early years of mastering the psychoanalytic technique as a solace: There were often patients with whom an unaccountably long time elapsed before my hypothesis, that a neurosis was bound to become intelligible through analysis, proved true; but these patients’ dreams, which might be regarded as analogues of their symptoms, almost always confirmed the hypothesis. It was only my success in this direction that enabled me to persevere.

Over time, Freud developed his hypothesis to encompass the idea that dreams have two layers of content: the dream as literally described by the dreamer (the manifest content), and the dream meaning (the latent content) to be discovered through the dreamer freely associating from the manifest content. He initially proposed that through dreams we could access our deepest inner stories and memories, and that a wish lay within their latent content – a wish that was too painful or socially unacceptable to simply know or speak. The purpose of a dream was to disguise that wish by turning it into bizarre, symbolic, often nonsensical content both to preserve sleep (if the actual wish was played out in the dream we would wake in horror) and to make the wish acceptable to the waking ego, the part of our mind, he proposed, that keeps our behaviour in line with the constraints of civil society. Nightmares or anxiety dreams were, therefore, a failure of the unconscious mind to obfuscate well enough. Later, after seeing war veterans suffering repeated nightmares, Freud amended this hypothesis 50

A Science for Dreaming

to encompass the idea that such repeated nightmares were an exception: an attempt to gain stability within the mind. Freud continued to expand and alter his dream hypothesis until his death but those early ideas defined his dream theory. Psychoanalysts from Lacan to Jung to Klein to Fairbairn have taken Freud’s thinking in different directions since, in many cases abandoning his fervent insistence on childhood sexuality as the wellspring of our most significant unconscious material, but in all cases continuing to consider dreams as material with psychological meaning. It is the way meaning is gleaned from dreams that has changed. Contemporary psychoanalysis tends to place a much weightier emphasis on understanding transference – how the patient displaces her feelings onto the analyst – and, for many analysts, dreams have become a helpful tool for elucidating that experience rather than providing a gateway to a patient’s inner world on its own terms.

thoughts and connections arose for them from the dream, and the analyst would try to interpret how the material of the dream symbolised the patient’s key emotional struggles. The analyst would pay careful attention to what the patient didn’t say, too, as the gaps, silences and omissions offered meaning as well. In my dream I am in a department store, wanting to buy a hat; the hat is salmon pink. But the sales assistant will not let me try it on. She says it is for an older woman, and I am bereft. I wake with a peculiar feeling of anxiety I cannot shake. I find it hard to remember the details of the dream; they have begun to fade and lose their emotional import. But, between vast silences, snippets of information rise. My dream memories are tiny seeds that germinate in quietness, in being listened to. The colour of the hat was the same distinct colour as a scarf hanging in my mother’s dresser. I am certain the department store was Grace Bros, but it had the signage of a shop we have not been into since we were small children living in South Africa, part of the life we have left behind. The sales assistant seemed, in that way of dreams, to have a dual identity: shopkeeper but also waitress. I was aware that I could buy milk from her, as well as the hat I so wanted. When I have told all I can, my father sits back and says: ‘Do you think the dream could be connected to being away from your mother?’ I think about this. Holidays are now always time with my father but time away from my mother. They divorced when I was a baby, and though we have all ended up emigrating to Perth, my sister and I have since relocated with my mother and her new husband to Sydney. We spend the school term with them, and holidays with my father and his partner. This particular holiday I have felt sad about being away from my mother. But I have also felt some relief. Life in our house in Sydney is tense, with a seemingly endless tangle of negotiations and upheavals between my mother and stepfather. My stepfather is charismatic, jaunty, even playful. But also brutal, nasty. The marriage is showing early signs of doom. I adore time in my father’s house, where I don’t have to hold my worry about my mother in my mind all the time. In Perth, I explore beaches and cycle along the Swan River and meet boys and see the possibility of growing up. In Sydney, I am my mother’s child, consumed by the drama of the household and anxiously focused on her wellbeing. Feeling relieved seems an act of desertion. Perhaps, my father suggests, the sadness of not being able to wear the hat – which is so closely connected to my mother’s body, to the items she wears near her breast, and to the colour of her skin – and the strange doubling of this source of both milk and clothing that could bring me into an adult world are all connected to my ambivalent feelings about being away from my mother. He leaves it at that, respectful of my privacy, but he has given me enough of a sense of the mind’s work to feel I have been shown magic: there are things I feel that

‘Tell me what you dream tomorrow, and we’ll look at it together,’ my father says to my sister and me one school holiday visit when the dry Western Australian heat has flattened us of the will to do much more than talk and read and traipse occasionally through the reticulated bore-water sprinklers near his house. We have left South Africa by now, and I am old enough at last to find the language in which to ask my father concrete questions about his work as a therapist and what dreams mean to it. He has, he explains to me, moved away from Freudian theory, but still considers its central ideas relevant: that the unconscious mind hides feelings we find difficult to face consciously, and that dreams are a product of the unconscious mind’s work. His interest now is in British psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion, who took Freudian dream theory into new areas, abandoning both Freud’s wish-fulfilment hypothesis and Freud’s overall emphasis on the patient’s childhood sexual experience. Bion believed that dreams did not conceal a wish but in fact consolidated fragmented elements of the dreamer’s thought into a central truth that, taken seriously for its interpreted meaning, could lead to self-understanding. Dreams for Freud protected the dreamer from pain by subverting meaning; in Bion’s construction, pain was essential for reaching truth, and dreams were a form of thought that could bring us closer to truth. Mostly, my father is at pains to explain to me that dream content has meaning only in the context of the life of the dreamer; it cannot have rigid symbolism attached to it. You can’t buy a dream dictionary to translate your inner life or your future. I bring him a dream the next morning, describing it as best I can recall. My father encourages me to speak whatever comes to my mind in relation to the dream. He explains that this is called free association, that patients in Freudian therapy would lie on a couch facing away from the analyst and say without reservation whatever 51

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I can’t say in words, but that my dreams string together and express for me. And, better, eventually saying them gives me relief. The anxiety lifts. I can’t get enough of this trick; it is like the invisibleink pen of my Mr Mystery Secret Agent Spy Book. The clues to myself are there all along, and the way to bring them forth, and to give myself relief, is to talk, to free-associate. I will my mind to think wildly, to play, to let words and feelings rise up and float away. Out on the sands of Cottesloe Beach I lie on my towel and watch the horizon through slitted eyes, letting the sun’s heat and the rhythmic orchestra of crashing waves place me in a trance. Once in a while a gull shrieks or a child cries, and the scent of hot chips or something rotten wafts over me. I play this game of mind-loosening, allowing a thought to bubble to a realisation and bounce off another. My dream a few nights before in which I had been overjoyed to find that a huge bloated lizard had appeared in my room. The lizard had no tail, though, so it wasn’t quite a lizard. It comes to me: Tidddelick the Frog! The Dreamtime story of the frog who got so thirsty he drank all the water in the land and could only be made to return it to the earth by laughing so hard he heaved it out. And then the memory of my father giving me that book in Johannesburg, just before we moved to Australia, and the feeling of sitting in the half-light with him reading it, in a time before we lived in different cities, before gaps of months and thousands of kilometres of red earth appeared between us. Dreams now offer me narratives to uncover that explain my often inexplicable feelings, a worm-hole into understanding my own loss and fear and even happiness.

to work. His interest in dreams was not, in itself, because he thought dreams were more significant than other modes of thinking, but because he recognised in them the slip of associative linking that produced their fantastical narratives. In his 1899 work The Interpretation of Dreams he quoted from a letter written by German poet and dramaturge Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller – whose ideas Freud had considered essential precursors to his own – in which Schiller addressed a friend’s writer’s block: It seems a bad thing and detrimental to the creative work of the mind if Reason makes too close an examination of the ideas as they come pouring in ... Looked at in isolation, a thought may seem very trivial or very fantastic; but it may be made important by another thought that comes after it, and, in conjunction with other thoughts that may seem equally absurd, it may turn out to form a most effective link.

Reason was a gatekeeper that would prevent associative thinking and dampen creativity. Schiller’s ideas enlivened Freud’s thoughts and brought forth more generative ideas from the father of psychoanalysis, who went to sleep and dreamed of Schiller in obscure ways – filtered and reflected and unlinked and then linked again as only dreams can. On waking, Freud recalled having been on a train headed to a place called Marburg, on which he came across a man who asked his sister for a book by Schiller. Marburg is similar but different to the name of the place in which Schiller was born – Marbach – but it is in the associative link provided by the literary brother and sister that Freud found meaning in the otherwise unfamiliar name.

In years to come I am thrilled, as an English student, at the way that what my father showed me through dreamwork can be applied to literature. Vital meaning, in psychoanalytic thinking, lies in how one thing gives way to a seemingly unconnected other thing in the mind; so, literary meaning may also come about in recognising that words offer up what they conceal or invert or oppose. The invisible ink begins to bring forth the picture again, this time in the poetry I read for school. I am surprised by how the magic trick brings into sharp relief the poems I have felt alienated from – for their archaic language, for their Christian foreignness to my inherently Jewish sensibility. Gerard Manly Hopkins and William Blake: I recite off by heart these strange poems of olden-day deaths and chimney sweepers and youthful harlots and Christ, and am moved by words that initially struck me as stale or other, because I have found a way to extract contemporary meaning through linguistic association, in the same way that my father could find meaning in the dream a patient brought to him. Freud saw this connection early on, between the meaning to be found in a patient’s freely associated recall of their dream and the way a poet’s mind seemed

Recently, I’ve taken to reading scientific investigations on dreams. I was never interested in science; I found the exactness of performing minor chemical experiments in high school boring. I missed the point altogether of those exercises – they were about parameters and replicability and causation, which seemed irrelevant to me at the time. But if I had listened, I would be better equipped with a language that I find I need to defend my interest in psychoanalysis and in Freud’s ideas about dreams, all of which are now considered by the majority of those outside the psychoanalytic fraternity as at best a curious and slightly eccentric intellectual pursuit and at worst a pseudoscience. Freud, who trained as a neurologist, declared that psychoanalysis was not a Weltanshauung, or world view, but a part of science. His early work in neurology was steeped in materialism, dissecting eels and studying the nervous system of lampreys. His neurological studies of patients with brain injuries used the clinico-anatomical method, in which changes to a patient’s mind were understood in relation to damage to the site of injury. But in 1891, studying aphasias – the loss of the ability to use receptive or expressive language – he began to 52

What would happen to our scientific understanding of dreaming if we accepted subjectivity as not only relevant but essential to its biological purpose?

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understand the mind as dynamic, composed of multiple parts working in fluid unison, and conceded that method was not sufficient for studying such an entity. ‘Perhaps in the end I may have to learn to content myself with the clinical explanation of the neuroses,’ he wrote to his friend Willhelm Fliess. We might never have the technology or know-how to ‘see’ the mind at work, but new tools are allowing a greater biological inquiry into the vast, dark terrain of the brain that encases our sentient, feeling, thinking selves. With these tools come seeable, recordable things: parts of the brain that turn screen pixels yellow as they flood with blood, or neurons that indicate their activity on computer monitors like sailors lighting flares. Meaning, however, remains invisible; our personal narratives pulse along, colourless and untraceable, and, in being so, directly oppose empirical science. And so, among the countless dream hypotheses under investigation in the past half-century, the meaning of dreams continues to be skirted around by scientific investigators. Meaning is not a quality that can be measured or tested; it is inherently subjective. The scientific study of dreaming has, in some sense, been forced to focus on purpose and function, moving quietly ever-further from rigorously approaching Freud’s hypotheses, which first require a scientific finding of a meaning-making mind. The vast majority of contemporary research that refers to Freud’s theories disregards the great analyst’s ideas about dream-meaning. Psychiatrists Allan Hobson and Robert McCarley had the most negative impact to date on any notion of dreaming as a substantive, qualitative human experience. Their ‘Activation-Synthesis hypothesis’ published in The American Journal of Psychiatry in 1977 offered a neurobiological explanation for dreaming, which concluded, based on research conducted on felines, that a dream is a random phenomenon that comes about through erratic chemical changes in the brain during a state of REM sleep. A dream is nothing more than the thinking, cognisant part of our brain trying to make something of the brainstem’s random chemical excretions, which switch it on. No-one, I dare say, interviewed the cats. Much of the other research underway is in the field of cognitive science, and is positioned either behaviourally or biologically. French researcher Michel Jouvet, who found that the REM state is set off from the pons, in the brainstem, and nowhere near the upper, thinking cerebral hemispheres, also hypothesised that our neuronal circuitry, which gets modified during the day, is restored each time we dream to preserve the specific genetic coding in each individual that sets out our psychological characteristics. In other words, it ensures the stability of our personalities through our lives. Vested even less in the subjective emotional experience is Barry Krakow, who focuses on nightmares in his work, which he sees as a learned behaviour that can be actively altered through rehearsing less-frightening dream scenarios during waking time. What possible

meaning these landscapes of terror that visit us at night might offer us is not Krakow’s agenda; his focus is on taming them. There is some concession to human emotional experience in G William Domhoff ’s cognitive-neuroscientific theory of dreaming. His research has led him to conclude that dreams may be psychologically meaningful, in that they are ‘coherent, relate to other psychological variables, and are continuous with waking conceptions and concerns’, but he argues that there is no current evidence to conclude that they have any purpose or function. Cognitive scientist Antti Revonsuo sees behavioural evolutionary reasons behind dreaming. Dreams have a biological function: to simulate threatening events, and to rehearse threat perception and threat avoidance. Once again, this paradigm eschews the kind of consideration of emotional narratives that Freud felt was so important to who we are. Overall, dream research by neuroscientists has either sought to dismiss psychoanalytic dream theory, or omitted reference to it, because by necessity the research focus has been on what is replicable, measurable and objective. What would happen to our scientific understanding of dreaming if we accepted subjectivity as not only relevant but essential to its biological purpose? Around two decades ago a new field of thinking began to emerge, yielding research that brought Freudian notions of dreaming back into significance. At the helm of this new academy was Professor Mark Solms, founder of the International Neuropsychoanalysis Society: scientists and psychoanalysts who wanted to work together to, among other things, bring human emotional experience into mainstream brain science. Solms is a neuropsychologist and a psychoanalyst. Over coffee one morning in 2015 at the society’s annual congress he told me that his work with brain-injured patients at the Royal London Hospital in the 1990s added to his growing feeling that psychoanalysis might ‘help us to fill the gaps in neuropsychology where there was a great neglect of the subjective, sentient, motivated agent of the mind’. Solms saw in what were regarded by the medical fraternity as bizarre, often meaningless, communications from patients, the possibility that they might be revealing unconscious material, like dreams, and that the material might be meaningful if understood through Freudian concepts like denial and wish-fulfillment; that he might unearth the emotions behind their hallucinations and delusions, and that he might be able to now revive the use of the clinico-anatomical method by correlating the anatomical injuries of his patients and their subjective communications. Solms recognised that there had been significant technological advancements in neuroscience since Freud’s time, and that the study of the mind in relation to brain injury, which Freud had abandoned, might now 54

A Science for Dreaming

What, then, could explain why dreams seem so nonsensical? Surely we cannot actually wish for the kinds of bizarre happenings that take place in them?

be able to continue in new ways. To do so, though, would mean acknowledging what Solms says neuroscience has avoided: that the brain is not like other bodily organs, that it possesses the special property of consciousness, which means it possesses subjectivity. Solms has written extensively about his conceptualisation of the mind, emphasising that we have two sources of information about it: objective observation of the brain and behaviour, and that which science has so far shunned – ‘the raw data provided by … introspective reports’, as he writes in The Feeling Brain. The subjective observations of a person concerning their current mental experiences, which are not the mind itself but perceptions of it (the mind itself, Solms proposes, is ‘the thing represented by introspective perception’). But much occurs in our minds, or our introspective experience, that we do not perceive. (What, for example, occurs to cause a long-forgotten memory to arrive in our thoughts?) According to Solms, this is why psychoanalysis offers the best scientific method for considering the mind: because it accounts for events that occur in these gaps in internal perception (or that which is unconscious). Since psychoanalysis considers such gaps to be mental as much as it considers conscious thought to be mental, says Solms, it constructs about the mind ‘a universe of natural phenomena (a complete chain of cause and effects) that can be studied scientifically like any other aspect of nature’. Neuropsychoanalysis is not only the clinicoanatomical work of discovering the causal mechanisms of emotional symptoms. It also takes up specific questions of mind–brain function, one of which is: what is the function of dreams? The answer constructed by the neuropsychoanalysts runs tantalisingly close to Freud’s. As Solms explains in his essay ‘The Interpretation of Dreams and the Neurosciences’, there has been extensive evidence of reporting dreams in non-REM sleep, of people reporting loss of dreaming with no injury to the area Hobson claimed randomly triggers dreaming, and of REM sleep still occurring in people who have experienced a loss of

dreaming after brain injury. In other words, Hobson’s conclusion that dreams are nothing more than the cognitive result of a scattershot chemical release triggered during REM sleep cannot be an adequate answer to either the mechanism behind dreaming or its purpose. Instead, Solms’s research points to a higher part of the brain, to a fibre-pathway that releases dopamine, as a more likely mechanism for dreaming, and one that has no connection to REM sleep. The basis for this is twofold: first, people who have damage to this pathway do not dream but do have REM sleep; second, stimulation of this pathway with dopamine results in more frequent and vivid dreaming, which can also be stopped by drugs that block dopamine. This fibre-pathway has an interesting function, according to the affective neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp, who was involved extensively with the neuropsychoanalytic movement until his sudden death in 2017. Panksepp, whose work revolved sometimes controversially around animal emotion, said that the dopamine pathway in the brain set off a kind of anticipatory excitement in animals and caused them to engage in motivated exploratory behaviour in anticipation of reward. In humans, this would be equivalent to a feeling of expectance, a drive towards something. According to Solms, the conclusion to be drawn from all of this evidence is that we have ‘every reason to take seriously the radical hypothesis – first set out by Freud ... – to the effect that dreams are motivated phenomena, driven by our wishes.’ In other words, that their subjectivity, their meaning, contains our desires. What, then, could explain why dreams seem so nonsensical? Surely we cannot actually wish for the kinds of bizarre happenings that take place in them? Solms believes the answer lies in two mechanisms. First, the way our brains generate images, including dream imagery, which is understood to be ‘backwards’, as though projected into the brain’s perceptual system. (This is well established in neurophysiological studies and was demonstrated to be the case in dreaming by Solms in 1997 using clinical neurological cases.) Second, 55

I need to own up here: I want to see Freud proven right. It puzzles me to hear the condemnations made of him: that he was lecherous, a charlatan. A pseudoscientist.

A Science for Dreaming

the role of another part of the brain which, if damaged, causes dreaming to cease – the occipito-temporo-parietal junction, which is understood to convert concrete perception into abstract thought. Solms reasons that the oddness of dreams might then be explained as the result of a reversal of the ‘normal sequence of events in perceptual processing ... in dreams, abstract thoughts and memories are converted into concrete perceptions’. Why, then, should dreams happen at all? Do they have a purpose? Solms believes they do, that dreaming is a mental state that uses our limbic system (the system that regulates emotion), but that when we dream the executive controls of the brain (the parts that regulate our bodies according to reality) are deactivated. He proposes that dreams function to delude the major dopamine pathway in the brain into thinking we are doing things so that we can not do things, so that we rest (sleep) yet still keep necessary biological functions ticking over to stay alive. In other words, dreams are an alternative to real action in the external world, where the things we are dreaming of doing represent our instinctual drives. Dreams, then, much as Freud proposed, preserve our sleep while enacting our drives. Early results from an experimental study testing this hypothesis are yielding promising results. Solms is also investigating whether dreams play a part in encoding memories from the day in connection with existing memory material – much like Freud’s idea of memory, which was that dream images were day-residue images superimposed on stored long-term memories. Part of this hypothesis is that emotionally salient experiences are encoded into dreaming. When I asked Mark Solms if the motivation for his work is to prove Freud right, he told me: ‘My aim wasn’t to do anything for psychoanalysis, but rather to do something for neuropsychology with psychoanalysis. But in the process of acquainting myself with what Freud was all about I realised that a great disservice had been done to him by people like Hobson.’ Certainly, Solms’s hypothesis offers some solace to those of us still lying on couches free-associating. I need to own up here: I want to see Freud proven right. It puzzles me to hear the condemnations made of him: that he was lecherous, a charlatan. A pseudoscientist. His own writings reveal to me a neurologist attempting to navigate the best scientific path he could, armed with the language of materialism and the influence of Darwin, among others, through the thickets of the invisible mind. The scientific method was never going to cut it for feelings in 18th-century Europe. And of course sex was at the fore of his thinking: survival of the species was at the fore of Darwin’s, too. Psychoanalysis feels to me like an urgent flagbearer for looking beneath in a world that wants the increasingly superficial, the obvious. As for science, it is easy to slip into metaphor: it is a non-humanoid, a robot banging its metal head against bruising, feeling flesh. 57

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I think of the Vachel Lindsay poem ‘The Horrid Voice of Science’:

It satisfies me, considering my spark of joy in discovering my father’s work with them, to think of dreams as images personal to the dreamer – biological purpose unknown – that can be turned into something else in conscious, waking life to create meaning. As communications from one part of one’s self to another which, in order to have meaning, must be endowed with meaning, as Rycroft put it – an endeavour that the analyst and the patient embark on together in their dream-work. Dreams might not be ready-made poems but, as Adam Phillips wrote in his treatise on poetry and psychoanalysis, for Freud poetry was a synonym for dreamwork: ‘Psychoanalysis becomes the science of poetry; or rather the attempt to render the poetry of the human in the language of science.’

“There’s machinery in the butterfly; There’s a mainspring to the bee; There’s hydraulics to a daisy, And contraptions to a tree. “If we could see the birdie That makes the chirping sound With x-ray, scientific eyes, We could see the wheels go round.” And I hope all men Who think like this Will soon lie Underground.

My father still has a box of old cassette-tape recordings of his weekly radio show. I dig out the tape marked ‘Dreaming: 7 July 1985’. I listen as caller after caller rings in, fragile, hopeful, offering their dreams to my father like torn-up notes that, once sticky-taped together, will deliver a reply to something long-ago asked. My father’s voice carries out confidently over the airwaves, reminding his listeners that a radio call-in is not an adequate replica of the kind of long-term analytic relating that dream-work needs. The best he can do is to offer them a model of how dream interpretation works in psychotherapy. Nonetheless, they ring and they give over their midnight narratives: a woman in her sixties who dreams every few nights of one of either of the two husbands she has lost. A younger woman who describes, with a nervous laugh, how she dreams each night that a man takes her into a field to seduce her. Then a young man who holds back tears as he details the persecutory, terrifying nightmare he has most nights about a ghoulish sandman who chases him across a beach. And on it goes. In each case, my father asks the caller to tell him whatever they can about the dream, to speak of anything that comes to mind. He asks them to tell him about their lives, key formative events. He listens and coaxes out their stories, and turns their dreams over, and patterns together with them a kind of narrative through linking and associating and making anew. There is no measure or weight to it at all but each caller seems increasingly hopeful as their dream transforms into a device to understand their waking feelings, ending their moment on those airwaves with the words, almost cried, ‘Thank you, doctor.’ ▼

But science is not a unitary being, a thing, or an ideology. Science does not have motivations or desires or repressed wishes. Science, while it may become aligned with ideology or politics, does not seek to be right but to know. Solms and Panksepp offer us a way to know that meets the rigours of the scientific method. But what if, like a book written, dreams might be put to a useful purpose once brought out into the conscious, spoken world, regardless of whether Freud was right or wrong about their origins? Talking about whether a dream is biologically intended to have meaning is as irrelevant to the practice of psychoanalysis as litmus paper is to a poem. A dream, once had, is a collection of images born from a person’s mind, and we might be able to learn a lot about that person if we attend to what kind of narrative they make with those images when they speak them and remember them – even more if they are spoken and remembered to a listener who is invested in helping us make creative links and who has a knowledge of our personal history. Dreams once spoken could be understood as poems that have not yet found a reader or a language; involuntary and also incomplete, as psychoanalyst Charles Rycroft put it: ‘They more often resemble someone who is groping for the appropriate metaphor than someone who has found it.’ They are not yet poems, not yet able to have meaning to any reader. Indeed, when writers attempt to turn their dreams into poetry without any interpretive mediation the results are mostly amusingly lacking, both in beauty and in meaning. American writer Edmund Wilson observed this in a 1937 New Yorker article in which he surveyed the appeal of what he called ‘dream poetry’ – poems written as though dreams, or in fact from dreams. He takes as a case in point a set of verses titled ‘Dominus Illuminatio Mea’, which was said to have been composed in a dream by the novelist RD Blackmore, and decides: ‘interesting as it is as a specimen of what can be done by the sleeping mind, it has always seemed to me rather repellent as a poem.’

Nicola Redhouse’s work appears in Best Australian Stories 2014 and 2015, Meanjin, Kill Your Darlings, Cordite, Review of Australian Fiction, The Big Issue and the anthology Rebellious Daughters. She recently completed a manuscript funded by Creative Victoria and the Australia Council: a memoir in which she tackles the mind–brain paradigm and asks where science can take us in our understanding of ourselves.

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Hunter, Burrower, Weaver Katerina Bryant stares down

her long-term arachnophobia

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Just about every animal – not just mammals and birds – can learn, recognize individuals, and respond to empathy. Scott Dowd, quoted by Sy Montgomery, in The Soul of an Octopus: A Surprising Exploration into the Wonder of Consciousness

s Mum and I walk into the exhibit, spiders are scuttling across the floor. When our feet touch them, they dart away as if we are the ones to be feared. Perhaps out of hope that this will be the worst it gets, I start jumping from one end of the room to another. ‘Look at them go!’ I laugh. Mum smiles at me, relieved that I’m calm, and maybe a little concerned at how much diazepam I have downed in preparation. We walk away from the projection and through to the next room. In here, birds are whistling in the gum trees. I could be on my partner’s family farm or lying on the trampoline in my parents’ back garden, looking up at the eucalypt and the mellow blue sky. I stand a body length away from a table with spiders pinned behind the glass. Their names are printed neatly next to them: Atrax robustus (Sydney funnel-web), Nephila pumipes (golden orb-weaving spider). It takes me a couple of minutes to inch closer. Like pressing play on a horror movie, I’m equally drawn in and repulsed. Mum’s expression eventually pulls me over. She is transfixed, her index finger pressed against the glass. I step closer, leaning on her shoulder. I wonder how we appear to passers-by. We are noticeably mother and daughter, I think. Mum is short and fiery, dark glossy hair and olive skin. Even she has come to admit she looks more Greek as she moves into her fifties. I’m taller, taking after my tower of a father. Mum’s head only reaches my shoulder. Despite my height and blonde hair, we do look alike. It’s our noses and eyes. Mum wishes she wasn’t so loud, so quick to burst into laughter that echoes across rooms. I wish I was more like her, less likely to retreat into myself in company. I look down at the still bodies outstretched under the glass. The smallest is pure white and the size of a grain of quinoa. The one beside it stretches long, the length of my index finger. Its abdomen is a glistening white, like a huge pearl. It’s beautiful. In death, it has a luxurious quality. The stuff of brooches, not nightmares. As I move around the table, the spiders become more grotesque. Thicker legs, hairier, and much less delicate. Their hair is how they sense the outside world, how they touch. I look at the thick brown flecks covering their bodies. It reminds me of plucking my eyebrows, the way

the hairs settle haphazardly on my cheeks as they fall from the tweezer’s grip. Dad taught me to be tough. As a toddler, he would pick me up when I fell, his hands under my armpits. He’d say, ‘You’re fine,’ and that was that. No tears or screams. A couple of years later, in the school playground I watched other kids cry, unsettled, knowing they felt pain more keenly than I did. I don’t cry when I see a spider but I move with a speed that is reserved for terror. I run, leap, dart. The phobia got bad around the time I was eleven. I had read in one of those ‘41 Crazy Facts’ books, which adults love to buy and kids like to read, that humans swallow up to eight spiders in our sleep during our lifetime. I remember it being written in Comic Sans. This idea paralysed me for years, looping over in my mind. If there was a croak or scratch in my throat when I woke, I was certain that it had happened. Thoughts haunted me of spiders’ legs folded up and travelling down my oesophagus. I took to keeping large cans of bug spray in my bedside drawer. Routinely, I would spray down my entire room, focusing on spraying the white mist on the doorway and my bed, and painting the ground, over and over. My bedroom always smelled of sickly lemon-lime chemicals. The carpet would squelch as I stepped onto it, barefoot. As we move to the next room, it gets dark. Spiders find bright lights uncomfortable. That’s why they lurk in the corners and crevices of your home, spinning their webs at night. Diagrams of spider anatomy are spread out on walls. Their lungs look like closed books. The hearts are thin and curved, nestled in the abdomen. I fix on the specimens trapped in amber. They’re the only things I can stare at outright. Small flecks in the orange glow. Mum peers into the tanks, trying to spot the live spiders among the brown rocks and leaves. I linger behind her, asking questions. Eyes firmly on my sneakers. Some of the tanks you step right into. Mum bends down through an arch and then rises, looking through 62

Hunter, Burrower, Weaver

the glass around her. However artificial it is, it’s as if she is inside their world. I hear her comments through the glass; they come out hollow in the tight space. Her hand beckons me forward, small and insistent. ‘You can’t see them in this one, just their webs.’ I step in as well, too tall not to be awkward. I look up and the webs spin out around me. Much thinner and more delicate than the cobwebs in my home, these are pure white and wisp around me as if I were in an elaborate chandelier. They remind me of the webbed eggs in Sy Montgomery’s The Soul of an Octopus. The octopus Sy writes of, Athena, tends to her eggs methodically and lovingly. Spiders don’t create webs out of love, though; webs are a survival instinct. Most spiders wind their webs in busy areas, hoping to snag, paralyse and consume insects. The outer rim of the web is soft, smooth, so they can travel along it with ease. The inside spindle, which curves like the line of a shell, is sticky to trap prey. If the hunt is unsuccessful, the spider consumes its silk and recycles it into new webs. The protein in the silk keeps the spider alive, and it continues to work while hungry, making the old new again. Looking up, I can see that the web is beautiful. I know, at least intellectually, that the geometric structure is to be admired. This should be similar to my awe of a bee’s hive. But I can’t focus on the wonder. I’m too alert; the crushed leaves, the dimness in this dark constructed cave. I can’t forget that they’re nearby, just out of sight.

I’ve found anxiety can be beautiful as well as sad. It takes me out of the world and places me in a stranger’s skin.

We move to the lab area as time ticks over to 1.30 pm. I know I have to see the live venom milking if I want to test the boundaries of my fear. Nothing could be more repulsive to me, so much so that I couldn’t even tell my partner about what I would be seeing before I left for the museum. The lab itself is yellow with perspex walls. Bright lights illuminate it in the dim room. Hanging above me is a web of white rope and a spider hangs from the wall nearby. It’s a human-sized construction with an abdomen furry and brown like a coconut husk. The ‘Now Milking’ sign is illuminated, red like an ‘applause’ sign on a late-night TV show. The scientist explains to the crowd that venom can be important in medical research. I watch from the edge of the room, my eyes on the screen above the lab showing a close-up of the scientist’s latex-gloved hands combing through the earth, feeling for her. Funnel-web spiders hide in the soil, lining their burrow with thick papery layers of silk. This is her home. This is where she keeps herself safe. It takes the scientist a while. I let the meds wash over me. He explains that venom is so valuable because it naturally travels to the human pain centres. As pain relief, it could make a difference to our lives. He is still struggling to find her and becoming flustered, so he pours the soil out into a glass tray. They hide no more than 20 centimetres deep, he says. I’m looking into my lap when I hear him. ‘Gotcha,’ he says. I look up to the screen and he is holding her in his latex-gloved fingers. She doesn’t move, frozen before the person who has taken her from her home. And then, he drops her. ‘Slippery!’ the scientist says as he snaps off his gloves and picks her up barehanded. I shudder, but she is as still as before. The light is bright, fluorescent, illuminating the detail of her body. She’s thick-limbed and hairy. I’m surprised that I can look so fixedly at her yet I’m not scared. Maybe it is because she is so still. The spiders in my nightmares move quickly. They scuttle and twitch. As I notice her two large wet eyes, the scientist addresses the crowd: ‘It’s going to be good today.’ He moves her over to a test tube, the top covered by a thin stretch of latex.

Mum once said to me, ‘Anxiety is just fear. What are you scared of?’ I’d never thought of the buzzing inside me as fear. It had been called so many other things – ambition, empathy, perceptiveness – that I hadn’t been able to tell what was me and what was the terror. A therapist once asked me to write down all the things I was scared of. If I could name them, I could conquer them. It didn’t work, of course. Seeing it all written neatly, ‘driving by myself, making phone calls, failing …’ made it seem all the more pathetic, my quiet and sad fears being put into the world. When I’m at my worst, I can’t be outside. I can’t be touched. My skin tingles. I feel, oddly, that I’m made of spiders and every leg is twitching. I have to move and rock, and my brain circles around thoughts that don’t feel palpable. It’s like being placed in a dark can, sealed in, shaken until you can’t breathe, tin walls towering above while everyone around you acts like it’s just another day. I’ve found anxiety can be beautiful as well as sad. It takes me out of the world and places me in a stranger’s skin. Hands that shake seem different to the ones I use every day; the skinny fingers take on a new meaning, an intimacy. Life becomes more immediate. I notice the colour of the walls, the glowing yellows, as they close in around me. I see the slump of strangers as they walk and understand that they, too, can feel this way. 63

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Phobias, some people think, are our way of managing the terror of our own flimsy mortality.

To receive her venom, the scientist explains that he has to stimulate her to bite. He blows on her. Her fangs, small and thorn-like, grasp onto the latex. She is trying to defend herself. My body feels loose from the sedatives. I feel light as I watch the screen, thinking it is nearly over and I’ve survived. He continues talking. ‘We need to trigger it to release venom.’ The word ‘it’ braces me. In my own narrative, ‘it’ is a she. Maybe it is misplaced for me to identify with her, but her fear, her stillness in the fluorescent lights, make me see her as more than the ‘other’. Naturally, funnel-webs don’t want to release their venom. To expel venom is to use up precious energy. The scientist explains that he will send a twelve-volt shock to her venom gland, forcing her muscles to contract and the venom to spill into the test tube. He does it without ceremony. When the shock hits her, her front legs jerk upwards. A tiny amount of venom ekes into the test tube. ‘I’m done with her,’ the scientist says and he places her into a large beaker. The camera focuses on her. She is curled in the corner, unmoving. He taps the beaker, feeding off the crowd’s energy, their keenness to see more, and she rears. Her front legs reach up in defence. She is trying to make herself look bigger, warding off danger. He drops her back into her soil and she retreats, immersing herself in the dirt and leaves.

When I was a kid, Mum moved out for three days. She had seen a rat, not that she could say the word, so great was her disgust. We sealed the room. Dad set up the trap while I rolled towels to place under the door. Mum drove away, across town, to move in with Yia Yia. Each evening, we talked on the phone, the rounded coil of cord hitting my neck as I reminded myself not to say the word: rats. She came back when she was sure it was okay, that it was safe for her. The towels stayed rolled for a little while, but I was happy to have her home. I was eight and those nights without her felt like a lifetime. I circle around the lab. On the other side is a wall of bright lights and hundreds of ordered jars. Each has a spider inside, limp, legs suspended in fluid. They are on display for the public, each jar labelled and tagged. I think about the funnel-web I just saw. Will she end up here one day, too? When I first walked into the exhibit, I thought the colourful spiders were best. With abdomens like pearls and jewels, they were not grounded in my reality. They didn’t trigger my fear. You don’t find them in horror movies. But after the milking, I’m no longer sure what I think. I float out through the doors with my head full of thoughts. I’ve had enough. I’m not sure how to find my way through this experience. Mum is by my side. We walk through the gift shop. Preserved spiders are suspended in plastic on key chains and paperweights. ‘Buy a tarantula.’ $84.95, including GST. ▼

Phobias, some people think, are our way of managing the terror of our own flimsy mortality. Focusing our terror on manageable threats, like spiders or heights, takes our focus from ending up in the ground. Spiders, like snakes or germs, risk our personal safety – especially in Australia, where we are inundated with news of death and serious injury from our native animals and insects. But, like everything humans touch, we risk taking this too far. Our anxieties flourish until unmanageable.

Katerina Bryant is based in Adelaide. Her work has appeared in Griffith Review, The Lifted Brow and Kill Your Darlings, amongst others. Her writing was shortlisted for the 2016 Scribe Nonfiction Prize for Young Writers. Image pp. 60-61: Andrew Black, Spiders in Jars, 2010

Buy our stuff. www.contemporaryarttasmania.org press-ganging artists into designing merchandise since 2017

Artists: Ewan atkinson, DaniEl BoyD, CharlEs CampBEll, marEE Clark, Fiona FolEy, JuliE GouGh, hEw loCkE, kEnt monkman, JamEs nEwitt, GEoFF parr, yvonnE rEEs-paGh, lisa rEihana, Joan ross, Christian thompson Curator: sarah thomas A Salamanca Arts Centre exhibition toured by Contemporary Art Tasmania

image: Contemporary art tasmania X pat Brassington, Ceramic Dish*, 2018. handmade by studio Zona. photo: lou Conboy. *yes, it's an ashtray but you can use it for other things. smoking is bad.

FICTION

Breathless Michael Blake

see a guy on the train sometimes. He has a coat that doesn’t seem to fit. It looks like it should, but it doesn’t. It sits high on his shoulders, and that throws out the waistline, which throws out the flare at the bottom. It should be a really nice coat – it’s wool and stylish and well cut – but it’s not. Because he’s wearing it. Which is a real shame, you know? It’s not like he’s doing anything wrong. If I had that coat I’d wear the shit out of it. It might not suit me, being a men’s coat, but it’s feminine enough, and I’d be needing elbow patches within six months. On him, though, it just looks wrong. Maybe I should tell him.

Today it was a big raincoat. It was green and it made him look like a person who watches other people have sex in parks. Pretty sure I wasn’t alone in thinking this. That coat looked like it had the pockets cut out. Like if you dropped a dollar in there it’d just sail on through and hit the floor of the train with a real guilty clang. I did not like that coat, but he seems to be rotating his outfit so hopefully we won’t see it again. If he wears it again I’ll say something. I said something to him once so I think people might view me as a sort of spokesperson. I feel like it’s a bit of a responsibility of mine. The big raincoat hasn’t made another appearance, thankfully. He wore a light jacket with a zipper today. It looked pretty trendy on him, but still a bit bad in that indefinable way that the nice coat did. I think he looks okay in stupid things because you don’t notice that they’re sitting kind of funny. I wonder how old he is.

I told him. I said Hey. Hey, yep. You. Your coat. It doesn’t fit you properly, does it? I had to add the little does it? on the end because I realised I might have sounded pretty confrontational but he just shook his head and smiled. And something in me nearly broke – I mean it was just a guy on the train, but the look he gave me, that little smile, it was like he knew the joke behind everything and he was just letting me in on it for a bit, and I even choked up a bit but managed to avoid making a scene, just choked it back and managed a smile. Just thought you should know, I said. Some people gave me disapproving looks, but there were a few regulars there, and I saw a couple of people nodding too, like this guy and his coat was something they’d been thinking about too. I felt okay about it.

Drama today. He was wearing a similar thing to yesterday, but this one was woollen-looking, more like a cardigan, with no hood, like you see those young guys with horn-rimmed glasses and chinos wearing with their loafers and their typewriters, and for once something nice looked kind of nice on him, and he was sitting really nicely and the whole carriage pretty much felt good, we’re a bit of a regular crew now and I think we all like to see what he’s wearing and so everyone was feeling good and then the train stopped and started again and a bit later this hobo came in, and he had all his bags but no dog thankfully and he smelt of ditchwater and cabbage and grain alcohol and there was nowhere for him to sit. So he just stood there, and seemed fine with it, but he was just wearing a singlet and it seemed to be bothering the guy – the other guy who stuff doesn’t fit – and that feeling kind of seeped from him out into the rest of the carriage until the whole feeling was actually pretty negative after having been so good. I didn’t blame the hobo, but I couldn’t help but wonder whether maybe the coat guy might have maybe said something to everyone today like You all have a great day today when we got to his stop, it felt like that might have been a day where something like that might happen, and then it did, but it wasn’t that.

He’s started wearing other things. At first I didn’t recognise him, because I was so used to seeing The Guy In The Coat That Doesn’t Fit, but then I looked again because he has a pretty distinctive haircut (kinda bowly, I don’t really know how to describe it, it matches his non-fitting coat, if you can imagine that, if that helps) and it was him alright, and he was wearing a puff jacket, like a down jacket that you’d wear hiking or if you went to the gym really regularly or you were rich. It looked okay, and I saw some other people noticing it too, and I think he noticed us noticing him a bit as well, because he had this little look on his face that was happier than when I told him his coat didn’t fit. 67

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All of a sudden he just got up out of his seat, and said to the hobo Hey you want to sit down, man, and it was weird hearing him talk after all this time (well a couple of weeks but it feels like a long time) and the hobo just kinda looked at him like nobody had ever been nice to him like this before although I’m sure they have, and then the hobo just shrugged, and the guy said Well if you do there’s a seat right there. Then there was a bit of a pause and everyone was feeling pretty awkward with these two guys being the only ones standing in the carriage but the coat guy seemed fine with it, in fact he looked happy – normally he’s pretty neutral when I watch him – and then out of nowhere, like just straight out of the blue as if he hadn’t done enough for this hobo he just took off his cardigan thing and gave it to the hobo who just took it seeming grateful and he had the look in his eyes I reckon I had when I spoke to the coat guy, like sad and happy and like he might cry, and he just put this cardigan on and it fit him like a fucking glove and I don’t curse much but by god it fit him well. Then the coat guy just sat down and let me tell you there were a few loaded glances getting thrown around the carriage just then. And the weirdest thing, I only noticed once the excitement had worn down a bit, was that the coat guy was wearing another cardigan underneath. Exactly the same. Couldn’t even tell he’d had the other one on. And that was that.

every so often she’d just smile to herself and you knew it was because she was with the guy, and he was wearing the original coat, and let me tell you not many people would have been noticing that because of this girl and her cheekbones. Like a queen. Well she was gone today, I guess like we’d all figured, she couldn’t just be there every day. The seat next to him was empty, and I sat in it. I’d never sat next to him before – the time I told him his coat didn’t fit I was probably three rows away and I think the distance helped, because up close he seems different. Sitting there I understood why that girl was smiling to herself, even though he looks pretty average I knew why she had that look on her face and then I got to wondering why his coat doesn’t fit, and maybe what he looks like under it, how he might look with nothing on at all, and I got a bit flushed maybe and then I noticed that people were looking at me a bit, not badly or staring or anything, but a bit like they’d been looking at the girl yesterday and I wondered what I looked like and then really got to wondering about how he looked with nothing on at all and that’s probably how this whole thing got started I guess. Because now I’m in his kitchen in this pretty nice apartment block near the park, and he is making a pot of coffee because I said Yes when he asked me if I wanted one and I should probably be worried but I’m not, this place is nice and something about him in his coat that doesn’t fit is okay, if anything the whole not-fitting thing is better here, he looks comfortable in his kitchen so I stand, unsure of what I am going to say and it turns out I don’t say anything, just find my hand on his shoulder and the coat is smooth from wear and just like that it is gone, like the cardigan on the train but this time there is nothing under it, no perfect replica of the coat just the now-obvious reason that his clothes don’t fit – all white and warm and diaphanous, wings catching the sun glorious like the sheets of a bed from a long-forgotten childhood summer and he says nothing, doesn’t even turn his head, but I know that the coat not fitting probably doesn’t matter. ▼

I think today everyone was maybe expecting things to ramp up again after the hobo incident, but it was pretty dull. He was wearing a white cable-knit sweater and it fit okay. I got to wondering today what he does, what job he can work where he gets to wear whatever he wants. Is he in advertising or something? I thought maybe he might not have a job but then that wouldn’t make sense with him riding the train in and out every day. A library maybe. There was a girl with him today. She was something. They didn’t talk, but you could tell that she was with him, just the way they sat, not holding hands or anything but you just knew and there was some pretty extensive looking done, what with him being pretty interesting anyway and then this girl with him, and her being really something. I saw a number of young guys looking damn jealous, let me tell you that. She looked like a young professional in a commercial, had this copper-brown hair all done up in a bun, but loose, like she didn’t care, and there were these little wisps that had escaped but they looked like they were meant to be there, and really neat glasses with these thoughtful eyes behind them and a real jawline, not like you could crack walnuts on it but you sure knew it was there, and this mouth that was just like a cherry on top of this face, just a hint of pout in the bottom lip and

Michael Blake is a Tasmanian writer. He was recently shortlisted (again) for the Young Writer’s Fellowship in the Tasmanian Premier’s Literary Prizes. Image p. 66: Renata Fraga, 2017

Momentary Actions Portraits by Effie Pryer

oth an art conservator and artist, Effie Pryer uses traditional oil painting techniques on wooden panels, experimenting with the special qualities of Tasmanian timbers. Her classical style reflects the grand mythological paintings that first inspired her as she pored over illustrated books of legendary tales as a child. Her figurative work explores the miscellany of local and imported mythologies that have found an unlikely home together in Tasmania. She creates unreal scenes with layers of narrative, reflecting this patchwork of cultural influences with distinctly Tasmanian characteristics. Her portraits are honest revelations of character, prompted by a constructed context. She encourages the model to unconsciously contribute to their portrait by capturing their momentary actions and reactions, giving more weight to the â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;outtakesâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; than the deliberate pose.

Image p. 71: Marieke, 2017, oil on myrtle, 80 x 60 cm This painting was Highly Commended in the 2017 Portia Geach Memorial Award for portraits by Australian women artists.

Effie Pryer has exhibited in Tasmania and Melbourne for a number of years and has been a finalist in several national prizes. In 2017 her works received high commendations in both the Portia Geach Memorial Award and The Black Swan Prize for Portraiture. Her work has been featured online by international publications Hi-Fructose and Beautiful Bizarre. She lives and works in Tasmania. Image p. 72: Till Death Us, 2017, oil on panel, 60 x 50 cm Image p. 73: Saint Sebastian, 2016, oil on blackwood veneer panel, 100 x 68 cm Image p. 74: Curringa Farm Tree, Hamilton, 2015, oil on panel, 76 x 56 cm Image p. 75: Antipodean Ophelia and the Ugly Day, 2017, oil on panel, 50 x 50 cm

Broken Guitars Chris Andrews Where are we in the years of living at the place of the monkey-slip trees? The answer is there is no answer or for now it’s kindly vague. Between the dreamwarp and the cybercapsule there is a time and a space for us. The reassuring ritual swish of a neighbour’s broom before the gate flicks the bad dust back into the night. Tenure supplies the leisure required to theorise the precariat but the mighty bouncer says, Between in and out there’s only room for me. Humans built every part of this trap. A pink flush all over the ceiling of saggy cloud, or a wasted moon. What will have fallen off the back end of culture onto the nature strip? After the outgrown art folio and the herniated punching bag, three methodically broken guitars. Here we are then living in the years of dead man’s fingers, parasol pine and sky-climbing Gymea lily, between a flash of underlit wings and a concert of splashes and drips in the world of dark falls underfoot.

Chris Andrews teaches at Western Sydney University. He has published two books of poems: Cut Lunch (Indigo, 2002) and Lime Green Chair (Waywiser, 2012). He has also translated books of Latin American fiction, including César Aira’s Ema, the Captive (New Directions, 2016).

Infernal Topographies Graeme Miles For a while I joined the club for people who like to be close to great white sharks but they’d get on your nerves with their ecstasies, their mock-humble willingness to be devoured. I moved to an island called Earthly Paradise by estate agents, as cover for a name famous for brutality. When it got busier bookshops came where you could buy poems and a newspaper called Conquest Times. I wondered whether it could really be called that but thought I might be living a memory from some period of unselfconscious empire. Was about to buy some living poets until someone pointed to a new Berryman, big and crisp and blue, since if there’s one thing certain from infernal topographies it’s the neighbourly feelings between deaths and dreams.

Graeme Miles has published two collections of poems: Recurrence (John Leonard Press, 2012) and Phosphorescence (Fremantle Press, 2006). After completing a PhD in classics at the University of Western Australia, he spent six months as an Asialink writer in residence at the University of Madras, then a year in Belgium as a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Ghent. He teaches ancient Greek language and literature at the University of Tasmania.

A Piano in Hobart Peter Bennet for Michael and François If tuning turns out to be difficult the fault most often lies in weaknesses and instabilities. Lest we forget, now we begin to walk and talk, the thin memorial flame becomes more visible as sunlit dazzle yields to spats of rain. The grass has recently been mown. Sometimes the soundboard’s curvature together with the angle of a string become exaggerated and display crucial points most under pressure from struggles with the tension of the steel towards best pitch. The estuary is broadening beyond the cenotaph in order to become the sea. Each string bears eighty kilograms of stress. That’s twenty tonnes. The metal frame is made to stiffen the harmonic structure but not constrict the breath of sound. Mount Wellington pulls down the cloud. Up there Spring weather has not yet arrived. Two world wars are commemorated here together with Korea and Malaya, Indonesia and Vietnam and lives mislaid away from home. The layered wood and metal of the wrestplank is also subject to intense and searing pressure. Birdsong for a moment is drawing out a wine cork squeakily unlike the wood grain of the resonator which is compressed so pulsing qualities, in step with melody and harmony and their affinities, are amplified before transmission to the ear. This morning we’re at the birthplace of Van Diemen’s Land. Brass studs set in the pavement mark the route the causeway took like an umbilicus.

Mother ships moored off the isthmus nourished trade and settlement. Here is the School of Art. In time a wrestplank can succumb to bending and tip forward. Its pin housings, affected by repeated chords, becoming oval in severest cases. The pins themselves may fail, worn out and rusted. And here’s the Institute of Engineering in Tudor style but with a roof of corrugated iron and a pole to fly a flag which strains the rope. Rotations repeated frequently make screw threads dull. It’s pleasanter to listen to ourselves in cities we may never see again although we hope. This ambling chat revives young aspirations. Fully loaded, strings must hold at their required tension without detachment of the soundboard ribs. The Drunken Admiral is closed to thirsty brawlers, disembarked two hundred years ago. Piano wire, rail tracks and corrugated came ashore from Hunter Island on the strength of sailors and convicted men. Remember that all adjustment has an influence, even when meticulous and limited to one part only, on the entire thing. The Quarantine Shed stood where a building site promises residential luxury but there or anywhere disintegration will come at last to a pianoforte or any many-layered construction be it an instrument of art and pleasure, of comprehension, or of memory, and also make an end of who we are dans cette vie. Merci, François. Thank you, Michael. Fountain water breezes sideways to kiss our faces as we turn toward Salamanca one last time. Old tuners dread the snap of tarnished strings grown stiff with age, and old geographers intuited the southern continents because they knew without them that the world would topple over becoming music we will never hear.

Peter Bennet is a British poet. He has published seven books of poetry and seven pamphlet collections including two collaborations with the artist Birtley Aris. He has won prizes in the National and the Arvon International poetry competitions and the Basil Bunting Awards. He was a Poetry Book Society Choice and was shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize in 2008. His next book is forthcoming from Bloodaxe Books.

Tasmanian Writing and the Great Tasmanian Dichotomy Pete Hay on colonial and

industrial dreaming, and the obliteration – and inevitability – of memory

hen transportation of British convicts to Van Diemen’s Land ended in 1853, a fierce backlash set in, a backlash against remembrance, and against history itself. In symbolic burial of what was deemed a shameful past the island was renamed Tasmania, and the convict past was ignored – even denied. So, too, was the destruction of Aboriginal society and the attempted annihilation of the first people. By 1880 it was possible to write boosterist accounts of Tasmania with minimal reference to its still-recent convict past – and the first post-convict generation pursued a priggish respectability with the sort of determination that a subject people might evince in pursuit of liberation. It achieved a narrow-minded gentility that perseveres today. The 1860s to 1890s thus saw the appalling unremarked tragedy of aging ex-convict couples shunned, ostracised by the families they had nurtured, their very

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existence hidden by their children from their grandchildren. Denied access to social approbation, the key to attaining respectability was to erase all traces connecting one to the past. ‘Let the dead’, it was often said, ‘bury the dead’, and elaborate fake genealogies were constructed to this end. As for the people now deemed to have been eradicated, who were here when Europeans arrived, the occasional reference to their putative disappearance was made neutrally, with only the occasional vague hint of regret, and certainly no acceptance of culpability on the part of the British invaders. What this amounts to is an expunging of memory. In 1996, an apparently angelic young man drove to the site of the key penal station, Port Arthur, by now a major tourist attraction, and went on a shooting spree, massacring 35 people in what was, at the time, the largest single-gunman massacre in peacetime history. In the outpouring of communal grief that ensued, the dominant note struck was one of loss of innocence, perpetrated moreover ‘at such an idyllic spot’. That the central institution of a system as brutal as convictism could ever be described as ‘innocent’ and ‘idyllic’ beggars belief. It emblemises the strength of the island’s communal forgetting, a forgetting that was already in full swing in the later years of the nineteenth century, when there was a powerful sentiment in favour of completely demolishing the Port Arthur complex. It’s much easier to forget when there are no tangible reminders of what you would prefer to forget. The focus of this comprehensive act of denial was, of course, the convict past, but it suited, too, the flaccid collective morality that also enabled European Tasmania to avoid engaging with the enormity of the obliteration and near genocide of a stable and functional resident Aboriginal society, and, in the first decades of the twentieth century, the deliberate extermination of the world’s largest marsupial carnivore, the thylacine. The challenge posed by our need to engage constructively with a dire recent past was our first test as an island people – and we failed it then, as we have been failing it since.

achievement the past is deemed irrelevant. Thus, from the first decades of the twentieth century the dominant Tasmanian dreaming has been one in which the island at the end of the earth would become a throbbing, roaring engine of heavy industry, an island of clamour and smokestacks, the Ruhr Valley of the southern seas. And the vague and murky past could be ignored. For such a hegemonic dreaming two perceptual conditions needed to be in place. One is the aforementioned determined rejection of memory. The second is a view of the island’s material fabric that denies intrinsic worth to its living components, and to the complexity of processes that bind that livingness together. There is minimal understanding, beyond certain professional and enthusiastic but amateur cohorts, of the details of the island’s flora and fauna (almost no-one in the Tasmanian Parliament holds this knowledge, for instance), and the conservation status of particular species. The health of the island’s varied ecologies runs a distant second in official priorities to the ephemeral health of economic indicators. This given, the living fabric of the island could be treated as nothing more than a storehouse of resources to fuel that aspirant industrial economy, and as containing no meaning or value beyond its reduction to the raw material needed to realise the dreams of industry. This hegemonic industrial aspiration was eventually implemented only in part, and, when the irresistible tides of globalisation arrived on the island, most Tasmanians were unprepared. The island’s dreaming was shown to be misconceived – most spectacularly in the 2010 closure of the enterprise that most emphatically embodied the industrial dreaming, the Burnie pulp mill – and this has compromised the strength of the narrative’s hold on the hearts and minds of Tasmanians, though only slightly, and large numbers of Tasmanians adhere to it still. Of the two axes of ignorance needed for the construction and maintenance of Tasmania’s grand industrial dreaming, memory and ecology, it is the latter that has most penetrated the civic and political realms, primarily though the tumultuous impact of environmental protest movements, and the electoral successes of the Greens. Even so, the reaction to the coming of the Greens has largely been one of uncomprehending bewilderment shading into blind anger, the aspirational values base that the Greens represent being spectacularly misunderstood. The Greens are understood to stand for a valuing of life and living over the narrowly economic, though why they should hold to such a values base is, for most people, thoroughly mystifying. ‘For most people …’ Yes, because here we have the most fundamental faultline within Tasmanian society. This is not capital vs labour. It is old ways of seeing versus new. The island has descended into two rival dreamings. The dominant one is adhered to by the mainstream of politics, business, bureaucracy, and the displaced industrial labour that is the principal victim of the wrecking ball of globalisation. The oppositional dreaming insists on the relevance of memory, on the

None of this is particularly original. The point I’d make, though, is this: as familiar as this case is to most readers of Island, there are many social groups for whom this would be an astounding revelation, one so apparently bizarre that it could not be deemed credible. To such people history is an arcane intellectual pursuit, the province of a bounded circle of people with a strange and unworldly obsession – because the world is what is unfolding around us on a daily basis, and all that matters is the future. All this notwithstanding, it is almost impossible to comprehend how such a full-blown exercise in memory obliteration could possibly be achieved. It is only attainable if the social focus is firmly on the future, this being seen to be full of material promise, while to its 82

The challenge posed by our need to engage constructively with a dire recent past was our first test as an island people â&#x20AC;&#x201C; and we failed it then, as we have been failing it since.

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need to look a dire history square in the face and not flinch from its moral consequences. And it insists on the primacy of ecological relationships over the narrowly economic. Those belonging to this oppositional dreaming are fewer, roughly comprising the 12 to 19 per cent who vote Green, but including, too, a substantial number of people who adhere to old voting behaviours out of loyalty to what I would argue is misplaced partisan identity. A smaller cohort, then – but dominant within the island’s intellectual and creative elites.

important business unperturbed, Tasmania’s cultural practitioners, with writers in the van, went about the place-saving task of recovering memory. In the huge shadow cast by Flanagan, writing flourished, and poetry in particular. I have called Tasmania ‘an island of poets’ so often that it has become a cliché. The island’s poets so intensively engage with the natural world and are so determinedly set on recovering and interrogating its past, that Australian cultural discourse, looking in upon Tasmania, is frankly puzzled. This is not what contemporary Australian literature, determinedly urban and internationalist, is supposed to be about. I don’t care. It is our journey – our process of discovery. And when you throw in poetic engagement with such island tropes as remoteness, the pervasiveness of the sea and the edge, the distilled experience that comes from living within bounds, all infused by an awareness that the island’s bounds frame a startling and unique past, you get an equally unique poetics. Not all our poets are aware of their participation in this project. Most, though, can articulate such a memory-recovering project – they write of Tasmania, for Tasmanians, and trawl the past to bring it into the present. But this is a project to which the men of power are blithely oblivious. I wish I could plot a strategy for change, but I can’t. The literary community is another of those Tasmanian silos, its practitioners largely writing for a minority of enthusiasts. I’d give plenty to know how to change this. ▼

It is against this backdrop that Tasmanian writers write. Tasmania’s writers are the prime insisters on the inevitability of memory; they are the constructors and deconstructors of island meanings old and new. Foremost in this regard is Richard Flanagan, winner of the 2014 Man Booker award for The Narrow Road to the Deep North. His Booker prize winner is set mostly in occupied Thailand during World War II, and though this, too, is a Tasmanian story, more germane to my purpose is Flanagan’s first novel, Death of a River Guide. This is the great book of the Tasmanian soul, a brash and passionate assertion of the extraordinary Tasmanian story – indeed, a project for its recovery, in all its intricate particulars. It is also a sorrowful and sorrowing book – it looks the darkness in the Tasmanian soul full in the face, and it does so with a great love for the land itself, and with a great human tenderness. The river guide in question is a young man of mixed ethnicity who shepherds parties of rafting tourists down the wild, rushing cauldron of the famed wilderness river, the Franklin. Struggling to make sense of his own sorry life, the guide is trapped in the river and is drowning. What he sees is not only a replay of his own life, but the life of the island. The stories the drowning river guide dreams are the stories Tasmanians grew up with, heard almost furtively in this place of no-memory, stories taken to be of no account in the larger scheme of things, those exciting worlds being far away on the other side of the planet. In our remote exile, we poor descendants of bog Irish peasants and the runts of the London slums, lived, we thought, lives of utter irrelevance. When he published Death of a River Guide in 1994, to critical silence but to an avid, word-of-mouthgenerated readership, Flanagan told us, as he told the rest of Australia, that the island at the end of the earth is a repository of extraordinary stories, of doings dark and wondrous, of passion and marvellous folly and heroic enterprise. Our stories, he said, are not boring, and though they may be sources of shame and humiliation, they should not be gathered up in an opaque communal amnesia. Flanagan turned a key and liberated a collective soul. Warts and all. In its wake a cultural confidence burgeoned. In all the arts there was a flowering, and central to this flowering was a loving but forensic engagement with Tasmania’s ambiguous history and with its conflicted present. While the men of power, the repositories of the old dreaming, went on with their

This is a very much revised version of ‘Memory in a Fractured Island: An Introduction to the Literature of the Island at the End of the Earth’, presented at The Tower at the End of the World, a conference on islands and literature at Torshavn, Faroe Islands, May 2017. Pete Hay is the author of academic works, collections of poetry, collaborative works, and a collection of personal essays. He has particular interests in islands and environmental activism. His most recent publication is Physick (Shoestring Press, 2016). He lives in Hobart, Tasmania. Image p. 80: Patrick Hall, woodcut (used on original edition of Death of a River Guide) Image p. 83: photo of Pete Hay by Peter Lord (with gallows artwork by Lindsay Broughton)

Bright Thinking* discussion series Free entry 7-9 pm Bar BYO food The Founders Room, Salamanca Arts Centre www.meetup.com/Bright-Thinking

Thursday March 15: ‘Luck’ Thursday April 12: ‘Freedom’ Thursday May 10: ‘Work’

*Warning: thinking is dangerous

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FICTION

THE SHOW

stairs at the other end of the building when she saw me. ‘Hey,’ she said. ‘Um,’ I said. ‘My parents don’t want me going out with any boys.’ ‘Oh, okay.’ ‘But I’ll just lie to them. They wouldn’t like me going out with a butcher’s son anyway. They’re vegetarians.’ ‘Are you–’ ‘At home,’ she said. ‘I like meat though.’

Daniel Lynch

he was taller than me. The way she walked, I could tell she felt awkward about it. ‘What rides do you like?’ I asked. It was a dumb question. It made my backpack feel heavy. ‘The fast ones,’ she said. She had to tilt her head down when she said it. The place smelled like livestock. We were kicking up dust as we walked. The crowd was making it hard to have a conversation and the sun was wrong. Its yellow was a shade past romantic and I felt too young. I was fourteen, same age as her. ‘I heard a kid died on the Exterminator last year,’ I said. ‘The safety bar was busted, and the kid was thrown out. Landed in the middle of the dodgems.’ ‘I don’t think that happened,’ she said. She wore her jacket with the sleeves tied around her waist. She’d told me one time that her grandmother had made it. I’d never seen her wear it like a jacket.

This is what I told her when she asked if I was going to do something romantic: ‘I got you something, and I think it’s the most romantic thing you’ll ever get.’ ‘What is it?’ I put my backpack on the grass, sat down next to it and pulled out a package a little bigger than a loaf of bread. It was a cold thing, wrapped in butcher’s paper. ‘This is for you,’ I said. It was heavy, and she had to put it on the ground when she unwrapped it. ‘Is it a pig’s?’ she asked. ‘Nah,’ I said. ‘A pig’s heart is a lot smaller. That’s a cow heart.’ The note I wrote was stuck to the side of it. I used a texta instead of a pencil this time. Good thing too, because the cow’s heart had made the paper a little damp and pink. She peeled it off, and read it. Her lips didn’t move, and I liked that. ‘You’re weird,’ she said. ‘If you don’t like that one, I’ve got a few others,’ I said. ‘Really?’ I pulled the flaps of my bag open so she could look into it. ‘How many are there?’ ‘A sheep’s,’ I said. ‘And a pig’s. A chicken’s, a rabbit’s, a kangaroo’s.’ ‘Do they all have different notes?’ she asked. ‘They all say the same thing,’ I said. She wasn’t taller than me when we were sitting. The way she kissed me, I could tell she didn’t feel awkward about it. ▼

The way I asked her out was I wrote the question on a small piece of paper. I had to borrow a sharpener because my pencil was too blunt to write small enough. I unwrapped a Mintie and rolled the lolly up in the note, then re-wrapped it. It was lunchtime when I gave it to her. She was sitting with her friends near the toilets. I didn’t really give it to her; I threw it at her and walked away. Casual-like. She didn’t open it right away. I know because I watched through the window of the science lab. Her friends were all talking, probably asking about it. She waited. When the bell went, she went into the bathroom and I think that’s where she read it. ‘Will you try to kiss me at the end of the night?’ she asked, when we were walking past the food trucks. It still smelled like livestock, but there was a little grass to sit on. I didn’t know what to say. ‘Would you kiss me back?’ I asked. ‘Maybe,’ she said. ‘Are you romantic?’ ‘I think so.’ ‘Are you going to do something romantic?’

Daniel Lynch lives in Brisbane, Queensland. His short fiction can be found in Scum Mag, Tincture Journal, The London Journal of Fiction and elsewhere. His novel Melodica Shuffle was longlisted for the 2016 Richell Prize. Daniel has a PhD in literature, and researches transmedia narratives at QUT.

Kids were lining up outside the science lab when she came out of the bathroom. I had Maths in the classroom next door. I pushed out into the other kids, and found a place at the back of the line. She was heading to the

Image p. 86: modified from Hannah Morgan, Amusement Park at Cleveland in Summer, 2016

Meanwhile, in Hobart Kauri Hawkins at HOBIENNALE

rtist-run initiatives (ARIs) form a crucial yet often under-appreciated sphere of the contemporary art landscape. They are grassroots organisations led by volunteers who are, often, not necessarily artists. These groups of different people come together to support the arts, giving local artists, writers and performers platforms to experiment, enriching their local arts scene. A new festival, HOBIENNALE, took place in Tasmania in November 2017, bringing together 18 ARIs from Australia and New Zealand, each curating an exhibition. HOBIENNALE provided an opportunity for ARIs to come together, cultivating collaboration and dialogue amongst participants as well as the wider festival audience. The format and scale of the festival was unprecedented, sharing the work of more than 100 artists across 12 somewhat unorthodox sites. As the ‘biennale’ in its name suggests, HOBIENNALE will continue every second year. In its first iteration, HOBIENNALE did not have a specific curatorial rationale; instead, the festival asked each participating ARI to consider current political, social and cultural issues relating to or affecting their organisation, their broader community and contemporary arts practice. Within the spectrum of projects evolving from this approach were several clear threads demonstrating shared thinking about pressing issues. In particular, artists and ARIs tackled themes of colonisation, migration, identity and the effects of capitalism – the outcomes sometimes poetic and ambiguous, sometimes direct and honest, and always moving. That ARIs develop out of existing communities might go some way towards explaining the powerful, personal and, at times, political discourses that wove throughout each exhibition, performance or happening in greater Hobart during HOBIENNALE. Festival artworks offered experiences taking us briefly out of our own place and into others. Wellington-based ARI MEANWHILE, presented Te Ara o Te ao Hauāuru by Kauri Hawkins. MEANWHILE provides Wellington artists with a studio space to produce work and offers early-career artists a space to exhibit. Te Ara o Te ao Hauāuru was facilitated by two of MEANWHILE’s founders, Jordana Bragg and Jesse Bowling.

Kauri Hawkins is a Wellington-based artist and recent graduate of Massey University. Kauri’s practice channels the social history of found objects, altering the sculptural ‘ready-made’ to allow new narratives to emerge. Māori visual art and European art concepts collide in Kauri’s works, which tend to sit uncomfortably between worlds, speaking to contemporary issues surrounding Māori. Te Ara o Te ao Hauāuru (The Pathway to the Western World) at the Glenorchy Art and Sculpture Park (GASP) began with a performance by Kauri, dressed in hi-vis, installing a large-scale aluminium road sign. With specific regard to the tensions between Australian and New Zealand colonial histories, this sign was assembled as a maihi (barge-board) at the front of a Wharenui (meeting space). The sign was covered in contemporary vinyl kowhaiwhai (Māori painting), signalling a gateway, a welcome. Te Ara o Te ao Hauāuru references the continuing process of Māori leaving New Zealand, Te Ao Māori (the Māori world), in search of labour and a ‘better life’ in Australia. Tasmania has a dark history not dissimilar to that of New Zealand’s colonial period. Complementing the road sign, Kauri presented a short film connecting these histories. The film details the journey of five Māori men captured in New Zealand’s Hutt Valley and subsequently imprisoned in 1847 on Maria Island (off the coast of Tasmania) after an altercation with colonial troops and kupapa Maor (Māori who fought on the British side). Te Ara o Te ao Hauāuru itself existed between places, from Aotearoa to lutruwita (Tasmania), and the greater Hobart districts of Glenorchy and Clarence, a familiar discourse of landscape and people echoing across history. ▼

Text co-authored by Jordana Bragg, Priscilla Beck, Jesse Bowling, Kauri Hawkins and Grace Herbert. Images pp. 88â&#x20AC;&#x201C;91: Artwork by Kauri Hawkins as installed during HOBIENNALE at Glenorchy Art and Sculpture Park (GASP) and at Rosny Farm. Photos by Lucy Parakhina Image p. 93: Artist Kauri Hawkins and Tess Campbell moving his work. Photo by Jordana Bragg

FICTION

were kept. Each hunter formed a bond in their youth with a pup they would seek out from the rocky colonies offshore. Here, past the narrow heads that sheltered Hawley and its neighbouring towns from the wider strait, the seals hauled out on the narrow ledges of a few rock spires that rose from the sea, jostling for space amid gull guano and mussels. In spring the young northmen would row out to them, leaving their soft beaches and dappled bluegums to seek out a hunting companion; or more than that, if they believed their own myths: to find the half of themselves they had been born without. Karl’s seal was a New Zealand fur pup he’d locked eyes with while swaying in the slimy touch of a kelp forest. Their connection had been sharp and sudden: Karl diving from his dinghy, stroking across a reef to the kelp, then stopped by a head that emerged a metre in front of him. Two black orbs glowed out of the smooth brown dome with a heaviness that Karl had never known, and he had reached, without thinking, offering his hand for the pup to sniff or lick or maul. After what had felt like a whole season the pup leaned in to his grip and rested a slippery cheek and a comb of wiry whiskers against the lines of Karl’s palm. Their staring continued. The pup grunted. Karl, now exhausted by furious water-treading, reached out with his free hand to cup the pup’s other cheek. The ocean rolled into his mouth as he sucked upwards at the low sky. The seal rested, the waves chopped, and the true meaning of salt and water and air wobbled inside Karl’s mind. And just as a blinding curtain of sting-water bobbed over his eyes the seal barked, jumped and flashed away into the underwater forest. Karl flopped back to his dinghy, drowned-rat wet and sore and numb, with no idea if it had worked, if he would ever see the pup again, if he’d done anything at all. But two days later he moored his dinghy on a buoy out near the gushing current of the strait, lifted his grandfather’s spear and looked out over the big-blown waves to see the pup, flippers in the air, eyes boring once again into his own. Karl sucked air and dived headfirst into the swell, kicked his flippers hard and headed for the tuna grounds—and with each double-kick of his skinny legs he followed the twirling, back-and-forthing figure of his fur seal. In their first year together they learned little and caught nothing. They were too young, small and inexperienced to take down a Oneblood—which weigh, on average, around four hundred and fifty kilograms. The most they could do was swim to where the fish congregated and watch them feed on kingfish and salmon, their huge barrelled bodies torpedoing through the water, scales shining, jaws lunging. To behold a Oneblood is to gaze upon a manifestation of strength and purpose that no human, no matter how gifted or determined, will ever even approach. A creature this large, this heavy, this wrapped in bulging muscle, should be sluggish; yet a Oneblood can fly through saltwater at over one hundred kilometres an hour. A fish this strong should hunt by force; but no, a Oneblood would rather sneak and

Salt Robbie Arnott

An extract from the forthcoming novel Flames

he sand was hard and sharp and blowing up into Karl’s shins, whipped cruel by the dead northerly coming in over the whitechopped sea. He increased his pace, trotting across the beach, juggling his bucket and tackle box and rod, heading for the boatsheds and the trail that lay between them, the one that curled through the boobialla and up to the smoky heat of his house and lounge and family. His haul: two blackbacks and three lizards, dragged from the water near the salt-pocked pylons of the old jetty, the one that rotted around the turn of the Hawley headland. Each fish killed by a smack of Karl’s knifepoint between the eyes. Some people nicked the gills and left them to bleed out in a bucket of seawater. Others filleted them alive, sliding fillets off wriggling spines. And some left them to drown in the air, gills pumping, scales darkening. But a well-aimed strike to the brain is the fastest way to render a fish dead, and this was how Karl did it, with speed and precision and an absence of feeling. Yet this—this standing on a rock, casting, waiting; slow breathing, glum patience, big stillness—this wasn’t fishing. Not really. This was angling. Fishing, as far as Karl was concerned, happened out over the break of the waves and in the rolling navy, bobbing high and steady with a spear in one hand and the slick scruff of a seal in the other, waiting for the run of a beast more weapon than fish: the Oneblood tuna. A man couldn’t hunt it alone, and neither could a seal, but together they could kill a beast twice as heavy as the two of them combined. Men from the north coast of this southern island— muttering men, salt-rinsed men, men like Karl—had been hunting this way since before records of the coast 95

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pounce than rip and roar. A beast this mighty should be impossible to miss; but a Oneblood is camouflaged by the murk of the ocean, only appearing when it cares to be witnessed. Hanging in the ocean, Karl saw the Onebloods appear from the depths as if through a portal: dark blueness one second, a missile of muscle and scales the next, rising up after its prey at a speed so fast the water boiled around its body. And then, with its quarry captured, it was gone—zipped back into the darker depths. Seeing one hunt was tricky enough; to Karl, killing one seemed impossible. But he knew it could be done—he had seen them brought back on Hawley boats since he was a child, mountains of ruby flesh with a long spear protruding from the thick, purple-red artery that ran from their throat to their dorsal and gave the species its name. His seal seemed to have no doubt they could do it. In that first year he joined Karl on every expedition, flicking his fast, sleek body around Karl’s bobbing limbs as they watched the Onebloods feed. Sometimes he chased a tuna for twenty or thirty metres, but always broke off and returned to Karl, a doggish smile hanging from his whiskers. With no tuna meat to hand he fed on squid and salmon, slowly growing in weight and girth and strength. Karl kept himself alive by working as a decky on a fishing charter, helping smooth-gripped tourists drag in snapper, couta and some of the smaller tuna varieties, such as bluefin or albacore—beasts that were to Onebloods as house cats are to jaguars. It was after one of these trips, while depositing some lawyers back on the docks at Hawley, that Karl saw the McAllister matriarch rising from the tide, reborn, bedecked with cowries, sand-skin and a large abalone sticking to her neck. Karl didn’t take much notice; McAllister women, he’d always been told, were trouble, whether they breathed with lungs or gills or not at all. After work, after helping his parents around the house, Karl was always back out in the water with his seal. In their second year together they began making half-hearted chases after juvenile Onebloods. His seal now weighed eighty kilograms, and would feint and slip after the tuna in a twitchy dance that their supposed prey would largely ignore. Karl ignored him too, for the most part, until the day his seal flipped back to him with a single, glimmering scale clenched in his mouth. Three weeks later he drew blood; a mid-sized Oneblood shot away from them leaking a thin trail of irony redness, and the seal could barely move his jaws for days after nipping at such a ferocious force of movement. In their third year they began choreographing the moves that every tuna team must master. First, the seal must pick up the flashing premonition of the Oneblood as it surges from the depths. Then he must dive below the great fish and begin to harass it, through a series of turns, nips, circles and feints. A Oneblood is faster than any seal over a straight line, but in short angles its massive bulk can’t keep up. Corralled in this way the Oneblood will seek to catch the seal and rip the

irritating mammal into hot pieces. When it can’t, its next move will be to escape, and it is then that the seal must really get to work. As the fish looks for an easy exit the seal must herd it upwards, gradually, patiently, towards the stabs of sunlight and the wind-cut surface and the waiting spear of his partner. By now the Oneblood is uncomfortable, furious and, probably for the first time in its life, afraid. Since the seal has begun its corral the fish has not been in control of its movements, and it does not like this: not at all. Most of all it hates the seal—in the same way a human will hate the whine of a mosquito that fizzes past their ear just as they are tumbling into sleep—so it does not even notice the dangling legs of its other hunter, nor the gleaming barb of its weapon. When fish and seal have come within three metres of the sea’s lid it is time for the human to act. And it is not hard, really, not when compared to what the seal has done, but it takes precision, and speed, and a certain calmness. As the Oneblood reaches striking distance the paddling hunter must dive beneath the surface, ready his aim, wait for the flash of the fish’s white underbelly and, most importantly, the purple seam of life that threads through its body. When the artery is visible he must strike. He cannot miss, not even by an inch, because a spear plunged into scales and muscle will no more annoy the tuna than the nips of the seal, and it will escape. The point and barb of the spear must cannon into the glowing artery, where the scales are thin and the life is beating. Blood will cloud the sea, and the eyes and mouth of the Oneblood will yank wide. Now arrives the hardest part of the hunter’s job: holding on. As its life-juice leaks away the tuna begins to thrash with all the strength and panic stored up in its mighty body, and the hunter must not let go of his spear; he must remain connected to his prey, even as he is torqued and whipped through the water like a kite in a storm, even as the air is shaken out of his lungs in big, rush-rising bubbles. It is only when this wild thrashing slows down—which could take one, three, five minutes—that the watching seal flies in to clamp a hard mouth onto the spine at the back of the Oneblood’s head, crunching down on the brain stem; and finally, out of blood, out of mind, the great fish dies, and the exhausted seal and drowning hunter must drag it to the boat, where it is gaffed and winched aboard before sharks sniff the blood and bring more, unwanted death. This process is easy to describe, much harder to carry out. During that third year Karl and his seal attempted it dozens of times, never getting close to making a kill, usually coming much closer to being killed themselves by their harried, huge prey. More happened in this year—Karl’s parents gave up on coastal life and moved to a unit down south in the capital, leaving the family cottage to Karl with the proviso that he occasionally visited them; his seal swelled to one hundred kilos and began to grow a thick mane around his scruff; a storm smashed up the fishing boat Karl worked on, robbing 96

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him of three months’ wages; and when it was repaired, on their first charter with a group of tourism-industry bigwigs, he met Louise. Early on there was talk that he’d move across to Devonport, where she ran her holiday-booking business, but that idea never caught on (Karl only went along with it out of manners; he knew that Hawley had hooked her). When Louise realised there was no uprooting Karl she moved herself into the cottage, bringing her business with her and turning the spare room into an office. Karl, by now in his late twenties, felt an itch beneath the salt on his skin when he started seeing her on his shabby deck every evening as he trudged home, and knew, even though he had never spoken to anyone about women or courting or even the reddening notion of love, that he needed to do something permanent about her. He knew it as surely as he knew the Hawley tides—but it wasn’t all up to him. For the final approval he goaded Louise into his dinghy, muttering not much at all in response to her questions, and chugged out to the spires beyond the heads. Here he raised his spear, as he always did, and within a minute his seal joined them. He splashed Karl with both fore-flippers, eager to hunt, but stopped when he saw Louise. A heavy stare. A long blink. A slow, submerged circumnavigation of the boat. A reemergence and a querulous bark. Louise baulked. Reach for him, Karl asked. Please. After a few moments of hesitation she did, looking back and forth between Karl and the seal, not panicked, but certainly not comfortable. The seal splashed, barked louder, and moved in. The heat of its breath stank across her knuckles. The seal’s mouth opened, revealing small, bright-white daggers. Its head dipped, rolled, twisted … and then it was butting her hand, turning it over, revealing the thin, vulnerable skin of her wrist and the blue veins shining through it. Her eyes shot circular and she nearly yanked back her arm, but Karl said: Wait, wait. Let him come. Against all her instincts she did, with her eyes closed, so she didn’t see the seal swim an inch closer and lean his face against her palm; she only felt it. At his touch her eyes opened, and she looked down to see the resting, watery face throwing a heavy stare up at her. Now your other hand, said Karl. Use both. And just as he had done years earlier, she moved in and cupped the seal’s head, now far larger than when Karl had first held it. The moment lingered. A contented bark leapt from his hot mouth, and then, with a diving flip, he was gone, leaving Louise to shriek with relief and wonder and turn to Karl and see two trails of hot water running down his cheeks, mixing salt with salt. Three months later a sharp-cut diamond was bouncing light off her finger, paid for by the first Oneblood that Karl and his seal caught. After the kill Karl had lain prone in the boat, sucking in gulps of air, rubbing the ruff of his seal as it dozed against his leg. The hunt had gone more or less the way it was meant to: a smooth shepherd, a tight breath, a true

strike. Steel met blood in a jagged rupture, and Karl had just held on to the shaft as his bones were jiggled by their writhing, dying prey. When the seal had crunched into the spine and the fish went limp Karl was so surprised he almost forgot what they were meant to do next. Pushing, heaving and winching the Oneblood into the boat had drained all the strength they had left. Now he floated under a pale sun. The sky was half wiped with the fluff and cream of clouds, but enough yolky heat was leaking down onto his tired limbs to keep him from shivering. His other half lay sleeping beside him. Their victim lay glassy-eyed and still-gilled. Thoughts were flicking through Karl’s mind, not holding, running away from him before coherence caught up. He dropped one hand into his partner’s ruff and lifted the other upwards. A warm breeze brushed against this risen hand, a breeze carrying tang and salt and the clearing scent of eucalyptus as he clenched his fingers around wet, warm fur. He sold the Oneblood meat to a Japanese wholesaler named Oshikawa for an amount of money that made his head swim in ways that no fish or seal ever could. Oshikawa had wanted the whole animal, guts and head and all, but Karl had laughed—those parts belonged to the seal, and everyone in the fish industry knew it (including the seal, who wolfed down his share on the dock in front of a troop of delighted schoolchildren). With the money he bought Louise’s ring; and a month later they caught another Oneblood, selling it to the same wholesaler for an even higher price. After their third catch he quit his job on the charter boat and dedicated every working day of the season to the tuna grounds. In the next year they caught four fish, and the season after they brought in six. This proved to be their average number over the next decade: six fat, fierce, fighting Oneblood tuna, sometimes as few as three, occasionally as many as ten. The seal stopped growing at one hundred and sixty kilograms, but he didn’t lose any of his zip, and at his full weight and strength he could herd up the largest Onebloods going around, giving Karl—whose spear arm had become reliably accurate—the unenviable task of holding on to the violent death throes of a furious six-hundred kilo fish. Their victories in the water were matched by Louise’s success on land. The tourism industry around the north coast thrived, and after a couple of years she was able to rent an office in town, allowing them to turn her home office into a nursery, which was soon occupied by their first daughter. A year later another daughter appeared, and amid all this swimming and spearing, earning and child-rearing, Karl noticed that they were getting older, all of them, and he didn’t mind anywhere near as much as he thought he would have. Eventually he retired—much sooner than he had planned to. But he retired, nonetheless; why else would he now be trudging along a windy beach, carrying tiny, line-caught fish that a Oneblood wouldn’t even bother 97

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to nibble? It wasn’t his choice; it wasn’t his idea; but the salt and waves held other plans for him. It came about on a clear day, with a hard blue smear of sky shining above his boat, a perfect day for being in the water. A normal start: half an hour of floating until the tuna began to bullet upwards after the pilchard swarms, then a few false chases before his seal ran a ring around a big male. The corral was seamless, and Karl’s spear had shot true. The shake and bite and blood cloud had all been uncomplicated, and the kill was completed in a routine manner. It was only as they were hauling the fish towards the moored dinghy that Karl felt something go wrong. It was not a mental feeling, no gut twinge or rumbly sense of fear—it was physical, a feeling of something huge and powerful bumping into his hip as it slid past him through the water. His first thought: shark. But he knew, even before he turned around, that this wasn’t a shark; the bumping weight had been wrapped in smooth, rubbery skin, not the rasping cartilage of shark hide. Swivelling in the water, still not seeing the creature, his ears were filled with a rapid rhythm of clicks and high-pitched squeaks. And finally, after a full three-hundred-and-sixty-degree turn, he saw it, in all its fins and flukes and black-andwhite immensity: an orca. The seal had swum to his side and was watching the whale double back. Karl wasn’t worried, not initially. Orcas don’t attack humans, and a single one won’t go after a full-grown fur seal—the twisting agility and sharp teeth make it too risky a meal. It probably just wanted their tuna. Karl pushed the dead fish towards it and started back-paddling towards the boat. But the orca ignored the carcass, pushing it aside with nudge of its tail—and then a second clicking song thrummed through the water. The seal flipped around faster than Karl could move, as a second orca wafted past them on the left. A third approached them from the right and a fourth—dark, fast, its click song a jittering swarm of sound—swam directly beneath them. They peeled off to join the circling movements of their pod mates. Now the orcas were whirlpooling around them, and the seal was spinning around Karl even faster, trying to keep eyes on them all. Karl clutched his spear. His pulse tripped staccato. And then: relentless and inevitable, it began. Each orca took turns barrelling towards the seal from a different direction, breaking off its charge at the last minute as the seal turned and showed its teeth. Karl followed the orcas with the point of his spear, keeping it outstretched towards them, but they started charging in weaves; he couldn’t keep up. The seal couldn’t run— they would catch it over a straight line—but it wasn’t trying to escape. With each aborted charge it moved closer to Karl, spinning around him, and Karl realised he was being protected, even though the orcas were not hunting him. And then, in his right periphery, he saw the rushing gape of a glossy pink maw. He lurched in the cold wet

and aimed his spear forward, as his seal bobbed in front of him, lips bared, muscles coiled. He thrust the spear and missed by metres, miles, oceans, as the orca baulked, and the tiny bounce of relief that hung in his stomach was overtaken by a vast swell that rushed him backwards, followed by an even bigger thwack of rubber and muscle. He was tossing now, overturning and disoriented, only just seeing the fluke of a different orca that had risen beneath him and sent him somersaulting through the water. After two full revolutions his body stopped flipping. He regained his bearing and cracked his head through the surface, sucking in air before diving back below. He couldn’t see his seal. He couldn’t see the orcas either, but he could still hear their clicking songs. He swivelled and spun and swam in every direction, left right up down north south, but there was nothing but bubbles and navy and clicks. But then another noise intruded—a harsh slap that sounded like it had come from above the water, not through it. Karl surfaced. First he saw nothing; but from behind his head he heard the slap again, so he turned, and there he saw it. He saw it happening through his waterlogged, salt-reddened, too-wide eyes. He saw it sped up and slowed down. He saw his seal’s body being slammed against the water by the orcas. They took turns gripping its tail in their teeth and flinging their necks left to right, over and over again, using the hard lid of the ocean to break Karl’s seal into ragged chunks of brownred meat. ▼

This is an extract from Robbie Arnott’s forthcoming first novel Flames which will be published by The Text Publishing Company on 1 May 2018. Robbie is a Tasmanian writer whose fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Kill Your Darlings, The Lifted Brow, Seizure, Review of Australian Fiction, Island, The Third Script (Transportation Press, 2016) and Seven Stories (Inscrutable Press, 2017). Image p. 94: Jacob Walti, 2014

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Black Sun Eileen Chong In the face of fear, we are all starlings … Helen MacDonald, ‘The Human Flock’ I am driving into the night. Cars across the motorway pass in silence. Farmers’ fields host skeletal pylons straddling scattered cattle. Earlier, I saw a murmuration of starlings: first an arrow, now a boomerang. In Danish, they call this sort sol, ‘black sun’ – a blotting out of the twilit sky. I look in the mirror and see nothing: no road, no headlights, just darkness. Ahead lies the horizon. I wind down the window: a susurration of warm air in my hair and ears. Where do the birds go? Do they roost in trees, restless fruit on branches, a reflex of claws? Last week, on a city pavement: a dead pigeon, crashed into glass. Gravel beneath my turning wheels. The engine propels me forward. White-and-yellow boundaries of road. I drive on, searching for my flock.

Eileen Chong is a Sydney poet. Her publications include Burning Rice (Australian Poetry, 2012), Peony (Pitt Street Poetry, 2014), Painting Red Orchids (Pitt Street Poetry, 2016), Another Language (Braziller, 2017), The Uncommon Feast (Recent Work Press, 2018), and Rainforest (Pitt Street Poetry, 2018). She has been shortlisted for the Anne Elder Award, the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award, and twice for the Prime Minister’s Literary Award.

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Wattlebird Pie Vanessa Page Stands of stringy-bark and blue gum at dawn – the smell of blood-iron, close on the air’s cold quiet. Boy-marksman moving with intent: a bag of hessian slung across his body – the warm death of wattlebirds hanging like comfort at his back. Half-a-dozen, and plump-enough – five or six birds to dignify a meal. The old man’s rifle: a job for both hands; 12-shot to keep each carcass intact – gun-cracks spiking, then spreading slow above the bush around Nine Mile Springs. Daydreaming when the hammer fell, surprised him: the guttural call of the wattlebird – a mimic for his own desperate voice. The fine, floating substance of his breath; blood leaching, warm and thick into damp leaflitter; the sudden mutilation of eye socket, cheek, lip. His mother, back at the hut, fisting flour and mutton fat on a board: the butcher’s hook swinging empty. A thin fowl appears at the door, scratching out of habit. Further distant, the sound of an axe rings out. There’s talk in the camp of sinking a new shaft soon. The knuckles of hunger pull through all of them, like beads on a rosary.

Vanessa Page is a Cashmere-based poet who hails from Toowoomba in Queensland. She has published three collections of poetry including Confessional Box (Walleah Press, 2013), the winner of the 2013 Anne Elder Award.

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He wondered what she’d do with that rock, out in the middle of nothing. She walked up the hill a bit, with the stone held low in front of her, and tumbled it out of her arms. He saw that she was adding to a pile of rocks half-hidden by scrub. He knew of three cairns around the place. They’d always been there, rough pyramids of stone that the settlers piled up as they cleared the land for stock, and fenced in paddocks. One was at the top of Mount Ma Ma, a post wedged into the top and four generations of Walkers’ names carved into it. The names of some of the hang-gliders too, who leapt off the edge and caught the wind current tunnelling off the slopes. But Murray had never seen this cairn, although he’d been along the boundaries here before. It was small enough that the girl could have made it herself from scratch, if she’d worked all morning. The girl wedged the rock in with the toe of her sandshoe, looked around for another. She disappeared behind a dip, came back a minute or two later with a chunk of sandstone marbled with rose. She flung it after the other one and he heard the cluck of it whacking the others, the wind in her favour. He sat up and rubbed his chest, itchy from the grass. His elbows were pock-marked where the stones pressed into them. With just his bare eyes, he could barely make out the girl. She dropped down below the scrub. He brought the gun back up to his chest and looked through the scope. When he sighted her again, she was down on her knees in front of the cairn, her head bowed. He couldn’t make sense of the gesture. The sun burnt the colour from the hair on the top of her head, and the nameless hills – washed to bare-bone rock and held by the roots of twisted scrubs – rose up on either side of her, leaving her exposed. He thought her hands shook slightly with the effort of lifting the rock, though the tremor in his vision could be his own hands tiring. Murray pulled the rifle away from his face with a grunt, broke the barrel and hung it over the crook of his arm. He’d had enough of watching her screw around on his property, whatever the hell she was doing. The best way to reach her was from the orchard track. He’d come up west of her, and behind. In the dip of the gully, he lost sight of her, distracted by a set of paw prints pressed into the muddied cattle trail, wondering if they belonged to Ginge, the half-feral cat he threw meat to in the purple mornings, the thawed roo stiff still, his fingers raw with the cold. He hadn’t seen Ginge in weeks, had gotten out of the habit – his dad’s really – of asking for off-cuts at Schulte’s. When he came back up again, pushing through the strip of crow’s-ash clinging to a waterline all but dried up, the girl was gone. Murray prodded the cairn with his boot and some of the stones shifted and scuttered. The pile was smaller than he imagined, the way the girl was carrying on, hauling those rocks and panting. He kicked at the uppermost stone and it tottered, tumbled down the edge. He

A Scree of Lantana Ariella Van Luyn

urray heard the sharp, dry crack of the undergrowth, and he was down on his stomach with the rifle pressed into the hollow of his shoulder, thinking of wild pigs. His hands shook with the suddenness of it, and he couldn’t adjust the sight. It swung outwards; he saw the sky framed by the black half-circle of the top of the scope, and a tree looping wildly with the white daytime moon caught in its branches. He brought his other hand up to steady the barrel, trained the sight on the scree of lantana where he thought the sound came from and scanned the scrub. He saw a girl, maybe fifteen, her jumper tangled up in the furred branches of lantana. She kicked around the edges of a rock wedged in the ground, then stooped and wrapped her arms around it, wriggling it out. The girl was big, with the hips and thighs of the Amazon from Diablo II, an avatar he used to look at but never played with. His mum would have said she was meant for the stage, with a face you could read from the back of the theatre, no need for lipstick that spills over the borders of the lips. She unloosed the rock and almost fell over with the effort. Her jumper caught up in the scree stopped her. She stood up, pink at the forehead, with the sandstone chunk in her hands. Murray didn’t recognise her, but guessed she must have been one of the Barber girls. All the property on the other side of the fence was Barber’s – the wide eroded slope cut with bulldozer tracks, the narrow valley still crusted with frost where the sun hadn’t reached, right up to the dam ringed by she-oaks on the summit of the other side. Murray was pretty sure she was standing on his land, and he felt a ping of resentment at the overturned earth. He called out to her, but his voice was carried away even from himself – the valley channelled sound so that some days he could hear the conversations of his neighbours kilometres away, and the rip-roar of their chainsaws; other days, he’d watch a herd of cattle surge towards him and their hooves and bellowings were blown away. 103

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climbed to the top and looked out with his hand bridged over his eyes. Couldn’t work out where she’d gone. When he came down he took some stones with him. They skittered past his ankles, following him downhill.

picked these from the scrub around them, but Murray recognised the bright faces of zinnias and nasturtiums too, which must have come from someone’s garden. He imagined her picking them furtively and carrying them with her across the creek, careful not to crush the petals. She’d tucked the stems into the cracks between the rocks. Other animals had been at it – scat and burrows peppered the base, and the smaller stones were scattered around. Murray wondered why they and the boar took an interest. He kicked away the stones with his feet, and then with his hands, hauling them out and tumbling them down the slope. The cairn dissolved easily beneath him. Once the momentum was up, the rocks carried others with them and they went, spinning, towards the gully. They clunked together as they rolled, the sound calling up his dad’s story of the Gondwana volcano that had ringed the valley, the lava that bubbled up and spilled down the mountain, gathering up the quartz and shale in its wake, tumbling over the already hardened sand of the inland sea, before cooling and solidifying with fists of stone and shell caught up in it to form pocked granite. Murray moved mechanically, not looking at his feet. He almost missed the cat’s body – though by now he was almost expecting it – caught up in the slew of stones at the bottom of the cairn, the animal’s fur flattened and rotting away in patches, the skull shrunken and eye sockets exposed. He was pretty sure it was Ginge: the tawny patterning the same, even if death had leached the colour out. He pulled up abruptly and turned away, holding his hips. The cat had never warmed to Murray, even after his dad died and Murray was the only one left to feed him. Still, the bloody thing – probably ate baited meat. He looked back to where he’d toppled the cairn, the flowers lost under the stones. He felt hemmed in, the mountains on his left, a barbed-wire fence cutting through the sky behind. He recalled his dad’s polished plaque notched into the browning grass at the cemetery, surrounded by dozens like it, and the cat’s body now exposed, so its bones would be scattered by dingoes and boars. He wondered about that girl too, building something out here for the spirits that had never spoken to him. ▼

Later, back home in the low-slung brick place his dad had made, the girl’s gesture returned to Murray. He remembered his grandma taking him to church, pushing his head down to bend like the girl’s when he was supposed to pray. He’d kept his eyes open anyway. Down there in front of the rocks, her head had bowed of its own accord. He swept the memory away, couldn’t make sense of it. Anyway, he didn’t give a fuck what she was doing – she shouldn’t be there. He finished off a big job Monday arvo, so he didn’t get up to look at the cairn for a bit. The back of the hill was hidden from him at the house, although he kept a look out for her at sunset. The cat he didn’t see. He imagined it off screwing some poor house cat accidently locked out after dark. Murray was supposed to go pigging with Nathan, but Nathan rang to say he had the flu. He took Nathan’s share of the grog up with him, drank it all shook up from the back of the four-wheeler, the .44 leaning against his leg. It was a pure fluke he saw the boar, black, with mud caked on its legs and snout. It came trotting up the hill from the creek. He skolled the tinnie, tossed it down, brought the .44 up to his shoulder, jiggered the safety, tilted his head and pressed his cheek against the stock. He would pull his head away before he shot, knew it was a bad habit. The recoil would take out his eyes one of these days. His dad told him often enough. The boar was at the cairn, rooting around the base with its snout. It had its trotter up, getting its shoulder into it, knocking the rocks down. With the gun up to his shoulder and his sight on it, Murray thought of himself the other day, with his boots in the rocks, tumbling them around him, and he put two bullets in the beast, one too low down and the other right in behind the ear. He straddled the four-wheeler and churned down the hill. The boar was still by the time he reached it. When he got near enough, he got a smell off the body, mud and something else, its own stink. He’d learnt to push his recoil away, knowing he got 70 cents a kilo for the carcass. He hauled it by its trotters up to the bike. He lifted it fast, before its weight hit him, his two arms under like a forklift. The boar looked awkward slung over the back of the four-wheeler, its legs out at odd angles, its mouth open and tusks exposed. Blue, bloated ticks clustered on the exposed skin of its eyes, open, bending the blue sky in the convex lens. Murray felt his body return to him in pops of energy, his hands buzzing. He was aware of the intense hum of cicadas. He turned back to the cairn. It was higher than when he’d been there last. The girl had decorated it with flowers, yellow brushes of wattle and the clustered heads of lantana, their sharp smell released from the broken stems. She could have

Ariella Van Luyn lectures in writing at the University of New England, Armidale. She is the author of a novel, Treading Air, and her short stories have appeared in publications including Overland, Southerly and The Lifted Brow.

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Designing for iconic Tasmanian brands. Supporter & design partner of Island since 2015. futago.com.au Clockwise: Lady Gowrie signage, photo: Nina Hamilton. Wine Tasmaniaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Wine Trails & identity, photo: Sam Shelley. Pagan Cider identity, packaging & website, photo: Peter Whyte. Poltergeist packaging, photo: Brad Harris. Fat Pig Farm identity & website, photo: Alan Benson. Lark packaging, photo: Sam Shelley. Alfred Gough identity, packaging & website, photo: Sam Shelley. The Agrarian Kitchen identity, photo: Jared Fowler

Unicorns and Zebras in the Boardroom Polly McGee shows her stripes as she challenges

the corporate world of big profits to consider a more compassionate and people-centred business model

Airbnb. At the elite level of company valuation, it’s fair to say there isn’t a lot of sharing going on. Clever marketing sold us the dream of opening our vehicles and homes to our fellow humans, collectively harnessing underutilised domestic assets to share the love. Reality delivered us a rental spike that has locked the poorest and most vulnerable out of some of the most liveable cities in the world, along with some despicable behaviours in boardrooms which have travelled down the company line. Like our inexplicable love of unicorns, we love these new business models which seemed initially to shift the dominant paradigm of big corporate, with clever young disruptors at the helm. We want to believe the hype. Like unicorns, they don’t exist in reality. Most share the same old model of scalable, investible, exitable businesses driven by creating dividends and shareholder value at the expense of everything and everyone. No-one is sharing that except the community of interest of the mega-wealthy.

nicorns. The mythical horned creature has dominated everything from body scrub to birthday cakes in a remarkable reification of fantasy creatures and their hypercoloured emissions. Unicorns are a consumer symbol of freedom, self-belief, the magichappening of bumper stickers and other positivity slogans. Unicorns also signify a number of elite, fastgrowth start-up companies known for stratospheric wealth – those with a market value exceeding a billion dollars. Australia has a handful of unicorn companies. The leader of the free world of unicorns has more than one hundred, with a smaller subset of super-unicorns reaching valuation of ten billion or more. Facebook is one of the best-known super-unicorns. From its capacity to connect us through social networking, it spawned a whole new generation of tech businesses based on niche products or service platforms. Two of those high-profile next-gen super-unicorns were born from the so-called sharing economy – Uber and 107

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The zebra’s superpower is that it is real. Zebras support people of all stripes. (A group of zebras is known as a ‘dazzle’ – more sparkly than a unicorn.)

Unicorn creatures and unicorn companies have quite a lot in common. Let’s start with colour. They are comprehensively white. Unicorn company founders are almost unilaterally white, educated and male. But don’t be worried: all of those companies have strong policies on values, diversity and commitment to gender equity. Or is that rainbow dust? Having policies about gender and racial diversity, pay equity and corporate social responsibility may seem the same as actually actioning those ideals through demonstrable behaviour – but it is way cheaper and you don’t actually have to give up any privilege. Phew. The truth about unicorns is that they represent, on the whole, a combination of the odds of winning a million dollars on the lottery and what we fondly know as capitalism – in other words, they are elite businesses which hold a vast percentage of the wealth (and power) within a tiny percentage of the population. That has some very specific implications for representation of the interests and experiences of anyone not part of that pantheon. The ironically named and epically large ‘minorities’ don’t feature in the business and political landscape in which big business is inevitably enmeshed. This vacuum of diversity has tangible impacts for consumers and communities. If you are not a white male who went to Stanford, Harvard, MIT or Yale, the closest you are likely to get to a billion-dollar valuation or even to venture-capital funding is reading this article. The perpetuation of the unicorn as a utopian business ideal is a function of visibility. As the string of high-profile, successful young men are held up as the goal, and a slew of others keen towards their light, those who are never seen are rarely emulated. But being a unicorn is sexy. Every start-up founder dreams of a meteoric scale-up where investors flock to their initial public offering, and the bells of Wall Street chime. Yet this model is fundamentally unsustainable. Aside from the broader inequity and diversity issue (the pay disparity is most significant in tech businesses), the scale-and-exit model rewards those businesses and

investors for growth for its own sake, rather than building sustainable businesses that thoughtfully develop their staff, investors and communities for the long term. Enter the zebra movement: what may well be a moment of true disruption to a toxic business environment for which the day of reckoning has come. The concept of the zebra to replace the unicorn was the brainchild of entrepreneurs Jennifer Brandel, Mara Zepeda, Astrid Scholz and Aniyia Williams. Like many other founders who were repulsed by the consequences of the unicorn fraternity, they asked what the alternative business model could be. How could a zebra fix what the unicorns broke? And how does a zebra face off a unicorn in the fight for a civil society that is both kind and corporate? The zebra’s superpower is that it is real. Zebras support people of all stripes. (A group of zebras is known as a ‘dazzle’ – more sparkly than a unicorn.) In the zebra business model, zebra companies solve real problems, generate real and sustainable revenue, and focus on fixing social problems, not merely returning profits at all costs. The zebra company has an inclusive regenerative loop. Instead of pushing at all costs to be a supernova (which for many companies results in being destroyed by their own unrealistic growth trajectory), zebra companies aren’t looking for massive exits. Their returns on investment are continued growth through capital investment to assist with scale and actual revenue to keep the doors open and lights on. Imagine that. Let’s talk about revenue and unicorns. One part of the unicorn mythology, and the money game more broadly, is that much of the actual value of companies is based on nonexistent profit. It’s based on future value, which is an estimate with more than fifty shades of grey areas. Many companies jockeying to be unicorns are pre-revenue with significant venture-capital funding or negative gross-margin models to validate their wildly projected future value (and get more early-stage investment). This makes it almost impossible to turn actual profit. Increasing investment becomes a kind of venture philanthropy. 108

Unicorns and Zebras in the Boardroom

It walks and talks like a well-dressed Ponzi scheme. The only problem being solved is creating quick turnaround returns for investors, not creating value. Like most things in life, fast ain’t good, and good ain’t fast. Really solid, sustainable, profitable businesses take a lot of time to grow and a lot of money to get there. Solving significant problems with mission-driven businesses needs investment that is there for the long haul, and the long haul has with it a strong component of culture, which in and of itself creates value. The problem is that cultural value doesn’t feature in the measurement of future business value (it’s too intangible, like respect). When the business model is based on slow, sustainable growth with the welfare of people and the community at heart, that peg doesn’t fit neatly in a unicornshaped hole. For compassionate businesses seeking sustainability and longevity to become the new normal, change is needed in each element of the ecosystem: those who make the investments, those who found and run the businesses, the consumers who choose what products to purchase, and the supporting infrastructure of firms, laws, regulations and policymakers enabling businesses to operate. Change at this holistic level isn’t about tweaking what already exists – the foundation of that philosophy is broken, and operating inside it brings contamination. To achieve real change, investors and venture capitalists need to work in funds set up to value businesses based on social return on investment and the demonstration of cultural value, not just the rhetoric. They have to invest for the long term, and strongly insist on diversity at every level, including boards and advisers. Founders need to start firms with a commitment to culture, to solving long-term problems, to deeply caring for those whom they serve and who work on the coalface with them – firms where all of this is hard-baked into the business model. These businesses need to employ aggressively for diversity, and understand how diversity ultimately leads to the productivity buzzwords of flexible and agile and contributes to business success. But who ultimately is responsible for driving change? There is an aphorism in business that when everyone is responsible, no one is responsible. The way to approach this is to eat the elephant in small portions. Customers need to take responsibility for supporting businesses, funders and founders who practice what they preach. We all have agency over how and where we spend our money. We have the unprecedented ability to collectively express our like or disdain on myriad social channels, so when admirable behaviour is demonstrated by a firm, we need to reward that business with our custom. There is no point talking about shopping local and supporting small business if ultimately you only purchase based on the lowest cost, not on the actual value of the product. Food is an excellent example, where most of us are driven by the perceived saving in the moment,

There is no point talking about shopping local and supporting small business if ultimately you only purchase based on the lowest cost, not on the actual value of the product. rather than by calculating the opportunity cost of the ethics behind the company, its impacts on the environment and on the community. While we love the idea of the triple or quadruple bottom line as a business compliance measure, our own bottom line is the only one we generally measure. Collectivism plays a part in this, and is also stitched into the zebra manifesto – when we work together, we all benefit. Aside from the economies of scale that clusters of businesses can achieve, there are strong benefits to be gained by sharing information, problem-solving together, and pooling underutilised resources. This doesn’t happen when business is a race to the top with all comers to be smashed. Looping back to the sharing economy as an example, there is explicit evidence of the housing cost, shortage and neighbourhood problems that Airbnb has caused in many of the regions in which it operates. Those impacts are a measure of the uptake required for a major scale-up of the business, and they could and should have been measured and mitigated as part of the feasibility assessment of the company at its inception. Disruption to the travel accommodation paradigm created a unicorn business and it also created homelessness and despair. Many would argue that this trade is unconscionable, and that when the impacts were modelled no zebra investor would have seen it as a compelling proposition. The zebra approach shifts the way in which market gaps or business problems are conceptualised and solved. The questions become broader than simply the market size and how it can be exploited, but extend to impacts and to the reason for the very existence of the problem. A lack of diverse tourism accommodation is more likely to be the result of planning and regulatory issues constraining the market. Finding a technology solution to get around those constraints didn’t fix the problem, it merely offset it. Now there are the same issues with planning, compliance and regulation, as well as a distorted rental market and a whole bag of social issues to boot. 109

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Change is happening, and there are unicorns and solid global businesses alike that are quietly and sustainably refusing to play hardball. Australian unicorn Atlassian is a fiscal and social success story of bootstrapped growth, sustainable funding, and founders who doggedly pursue culture and mission. Its initial public offering was legendary as a downunder-underdog making good globally. Less well documented is its quiet, excessive generosity, giving back to the community and the place that supported it. Founders Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar have spearheaded a not-for-profit foundation called Pledge 1% which challenges all businesses to donate one per cent of company profit, product or time where it can make a difference. It shows what can be done. Massive global business Salesforce has recently launched a $50 million impact fund to invest in social-change start-ups. Again, this is a great good, although it doesn’t (and one would argue isn’t designed to) tackle deeper discursive inequities that lurk within the very construction of language, law, politics and power, if you believe what Foucault tell us. The problem with using terms like capitalism along with collectivism and compassion in a business discussion is that these ideas are instantly in combat, part of a struggle in the binary of good and bad, capitalist and socialist. All are loaded with a discourse of history and politics which imbues them with the intractable weight of past failures and violent conflicts. To criticise capitalism sets up a binary with progress and profit. I believe in both, but not at the expense of people and community – especially not when the outcome is that many brilliant people and opportunities are systematically erased from view. If our businesses and their models of operation, funding and culture start with the question of who the company is ‘in service’ to, it shifts the focus to serving the needs of another. By being ‘in service’ – pointedly giving and constantly iterating to improve the experience of another person and ultimately a community of people and their communities – all points of decision and motivation within the business in its inception, growth, investment and exit are subtly directed from profit to people. If a new feature is unaligned to that model of service, even if it could make money, profit can’t trump mission. If the values of a company are about people being ‘in service’ to each other, rather than meeting aggressive bonuses and growth targets, we breed a connected culture that is respectful, compassionate, productive, open, sharing and ultimately enables diversity to thrive. This type of culture still needs strong leadership, but that leadership isn’t top-down; it is policed by all parties who will not tolerate violations that discriminate, marginalise or silence. Pay parity is solved as people are paid what they are worth, and money is not the sole metric of value in a remuneration package. Considerations such as time, creativity, health care, volunteering, education and child care become part of the rewards for work, and

individuals can choose what is meaningful for them and what allows the time and space for them to be ‘in service’ to their families and communities. Making this type of company culture and this type of business model in the zebra world order is hard. It takes time, and it needs an openness to trying and trying again, and acceptance of the possibility of failure. There are no quick fixes and there will be many hard conversations as people challenge everything they know. Relinquishing the grip on power and privilege, accepting what is enough, and realising that amassing wealth in and of itself has little end-game – these defy what success is perceived to resemble. Many well-run, sustainable, small- and mediumsized local companies are good, and are investible without having to pursue endless growth. Scalable, exitable companies are also good and can equally thrive if service is at their core. When the unicorn lays down its horn, we can create companies worth their stripes. ▼

Polly McGee is an author, entrepreneur educator, digital strategist and yogi. As co-founder of Start-up Tasmania, she was voted one of the most influential people in Australian start-ups, and continues to coach and advise entrepreneurs globally. Her books include Dogs of India and The Good Hustle. Image p. 106: by meg’s my name via Foter.com

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MARCH ISLAND The Writing Cave 6, 13, 27 March, 5.30pm–8.30pm Island Office 91–93 Macquarie St, Hobart Silent Reading Party Co-hosted by Transportation Press 7 March, 6.30pm–8pm Quartermasters Arms 134 Elizabeth St, Hobart Bright Thinking: Luck Co-hosted by New Philosopher, Poet, Womankind, Salamanca Arts Centre 8 March, 7pm–9pm Founders Room, SAC 77 Salamanca Pl, Battery Point

Essence Andy Vagg 8–31 March Opening Thursday 8 March, 6pm 23–27 Albert Rd, Moonah

Black Matter Symposium Tasmanian / Chilean exchange Thursday 8 March 27 Tasma St, North Hobart

SALAMANCA ARTS CENTRE

SAWTOOTH Drawing From Earth Linda Crispin, Jill Catto, Nikala Bourke Self-Dissolved Dexter Rosengrave Invisible Depth Susan Quinn 2–24 March Opening Friday 2 March, 6pm 2/160 Cimitiere St, Launceston

CONTEMPORARY ART TASMANIA Curatorial Mentorship Exhibition Curated by Linda Crispin 5 May – 3 June Opening Friday 4 May, 6pm 27 Tasma St, North Hobart

Bright Thinking: Freedom 12 April, 7pm–9pm Founders Room, SAC

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Lost In Tasmania Hannah Blackmore 2–31 March 77 Salamanca Pl, Battery Pt

Bright Thinking: Work 10 May, 7pm–9pm Founders Room, SAC

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Quiet Breathing Pirrin Frances 31 March – 8 April Opening Friday 30 April, 6pm Location TBA

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A Tasmanian Requiem A redemptive journey the loss of innocence, the power of truth and spirit.

World Premiere of a groundbreaking collaboration. Theatre Royal, Hobart 13â&#x20AC;&#x201C;14 April 2018

Presented by:

tasmanianrequiem.com

Supported by:

Images: Phillip England, Tasmanian Tintype

Tickets: theatreroyal.com.au