Articles - Meanjin

Australia's Highest Court

2013-05-13T00:00:00Z

Not so long ago I was in the Victorian Supreme Court library, to retrieve some cases for work. I was meeting a friend for lunch, but I still had to find a couple more cases, so I texted her the address of the building and told her to come meet me inside. I got a call about five minutes later, and she didn’t sound particularly happy.

‘Did you mean 210 William Street?’

‘That’s the one.’

‘The big, scary building? With the security guards and the metal detector? And reporters outside? You want me to go in there?’

‘It’ll be fine. Just come inside, say that you’re looking for an old case.’

‘But they’ll know.’

‘Know what?’

‘That I’m not a law person. Alarms will go off. They’ll arrest me.’

I eventually managed to coax her inside—no alarms went off, and no-one was arrested. But her reaction isn’t an uncommon one. I’ve had friends say much the same thing upon entering the Melbourne Law School.

It appears that the physical eminence of these buildings that so reassures lawyers and judges is precisely what scares the average person away. Even as a mere law student, I found myself seduced by the romanticism of the dusty old tomes in the Supreme Court library on their ancient mahogany shelves, stacked so high that you had to use those little ladders on wheels to access them. But my friend, who ordinarily is a great lover of books and their associated paraphernalia, found the room to be more like a movie set of a court library; the architecture was so exactly what she expected that it was unnerving.

This, of course, may be the point. Describing Israel’s Supreme Court, Piyel Haldar said that ‘an admiration of these architectural achievements prepares the visitor to the court. The outsider is subjected, through admiration and astonishment, to monumental law’.¹ Subjected is exactly the right word—for whether we enter the court in judicial robes or in chains, the monumental architecture reminds us that we are subjects of the law. That thought tends to give more comfort to those who speak the language of law than those who aren’t literate, but those illiterates, though they may not be able to follow the proceedings, are left with no illusions about the nature of this place, and their own place in it.

In Year 11 my legal studies class went on a weekend field trip to Canberra. We duly visited parliament, where I was told I couldn’t wear an Amnesty International pin because ‘political messages’ weren’t allowed in the House. The security guard who made me take off the badge kept a straight face as he explained the reason, and it was some time later that I found out that Philip Ruddock had regularly worn an Amnesty badge during parliamentary sittings in those days (probably more as a provocation to human rights activists than anything else).

In retrospect, I don’t think the Question Time we saw was any rowdier than the usual, but to us it was fabulous theatre—the cat-calling, the hear-hears—we weren’t quite sure how this all matched up to the principles of legislative government we were rote learning back in school, but it was certainly entertaining.

Our next visit, to the High Court, was a stark contrast. The High Court website says rather tersely, ‘It is customary, as a matter of respect to the Court when it is in session, that you bow on entry into the courtroom and again on leaving … Inappropriate clothing may not be worn. You should be adequately and neatly dressed, including footwear.’ Our legal studies teacher and chaperone lectured us about being absolutely silent before entering the courtroom but he needn’t have bothered.

The High Court of Australia, photograph by Robert van Riel, 1993

Like entering a great cathedral, everything about the High Court’s Courtroom No. 1 tells you that this is a sacred space. The wood panelling is finished in a deep red oak, and the carpet is a lush royal purple. During an important constitutional case, the long curved bench and bar table are piled with folders and papers, and from the gallery the courtroom is cavernous, a sea of wigs and black robes dominating the floor space, the newcomer’s eyes drawn irresistibly towards the raised dais at the far end, where the justices sit beneath a huge crest of the Commonwealth. The room’s acoustics are hushed, ostensibly to allow the lone barrister’s interminable droning to be made out, but surely also to impress upon visiting Year 11 legal studies classes the gravity of the proceedings.

Conversely, Helen Garner, in her book Joe Cinque’s Consolation, felt that the ACT Supreme Court—which, despite its name, is a lower court than the High Court— ‘was so palely timbered and greenly curtained, so shallow and wide and muffled by carpet, that it could have been a suburban lounge room’.² It’s an odd paradox that spectacular murder trials take place in such mundane surroundings, while numbingly complex and dry taxation cases are held in the regal setting of the High Court. The case in progress was something of that latter sort on the day we visited, though it was impossible to follow closely. It could have been a case of high treason but we’d never have noticed from our nosebleed seats in the gallery, from where we could barely hear the poor barrister attempting to get a sentence out before being interrupted by multiple justices. It was the incongruity between the lack of soaring oratory, the interminable plodding pace of the proceedings and the sheer majesty and awe of the surroundings that has stuck with me through the years.

The original plans for the High Court were reflective of these more mundane functions. Since its infancy the High Court had been a travelling show, moving between state capitals apparently according to the best weather, Hobart in February, Brisbane in June, Perth in September and Adelaide in October—harking back to the original common law judges who travelled around England dispensing the king’s justice. The travel was extensive and arduous, their accommodation was borrowed and the High Court justices were paid less than their brethren in the Supreme Court of Victoria—at its inception the High Court was not the glamorous pinnacle of a legal career.

The High Court heard its first cases in 1903, but it took twenty-five years for someone to decide a dedicated building should be constructed for it. Even then, it was in Melbourne, at 450 Little Bourke Street, not Canberra, and it seemed tacked onto the back of the Supreme Court, more an afterthought than the nation’s final place of judgment. Even when the decision was announced in 1968 to move the court permanently to Canberra, the idea was for a relatively small building to satisfy the court’s limited operational needs.

However, there was a vocal group, led by Australia’s longest-serving chief justice, Sir Garfield Barwick, who argued that the High Court ought to have a more eminent place in Australian public life. This sentiment was related to the idea that there should be a uniquely Australian public life, separate from British influence, an idea that culminated in the passing of legislation to disallow appeals to the UK Privy Council. From then on, you could go no higher than the Australian High Court.

Barwick took this concept of ‘height’ literally. The principal proponent of moving the court to the seat of government, Barwick baulked at the idea of co-locating the court in the ACT courts and the Industrial Arbitration Commission building. The court had to stand on its own, the building had to be seen as clearly separate from the buildings around it. Not only that, the court had to be physically taller than other buildings in the vicinity. When it was proposed that the National Gallery be built between the High Court and Kings Avenue Bridge, Barwick said ‘that would be alright provided it was lower than the court—it must be very low and there is a clear break between the two buildings. So I agreed the gallery could go there.’³ By the same logic, Barwick insisted that ‘for reasons of dignity’ the level of the court’s ceremonial entry must be equal to that of the already completed National Library; that in turn determined the level of the proposed National Place, which then determined the level of the National Gallery, which finally, in 2008, determined the entrance level of the National Portrait Gallery.

This preoccupation with the building’s eminence was explicitly outlined in the competition brief to find the court’s designer in 1972–73. The brief called for ‘a monumental building that acknowledged, but was clearly independent of the Australian Parliament’. In his biography of Barwick, David Marr notes a more personal reason Barwick was so concerned about the appearance of independence: he wanted ‘to have a court shorn of petty matters, housed in a building which would manifest to all the power of the institution and the man at its head’.

Egotism aside, Barwick ‘wanted his building to dominate parliament and the buildings around it, and wanted this symbolic dominance to be clear to the public, which, he said, must see the court as somewhere to turn for protection from the “tyranny” of parliament’.⁴ This ambition made its way directly into the competition brief, which said: ‘In its sitting and in its form, the High Court building imparts a sense of strength and security. The visitor is made to feel aware of the rights, privileges and responsibilities of the Australian judicial system.’

There’s no doubt that the sheer size of the building—at forty metres in height—coupled with the bare concrete exterior, ‘imparts a sense of strength and security’. But the question is, whose security? The large doors leading to Courtroom No. 1 feature a silvered bronze grid fixed into the laminated plate glass; the design is a shield, supposedly to emphasise the court’s function as a ‘protector of the Constitution and the liberties of the citizen’. Yet the shield can also be read in entirely the opposite way, as a barrier between the citizen and justice, between the layman and the practitioner.

The word monumental crops up a lot in descriptions of the High Court building. It’s fitting, given the building is said to be a superb example of late modern Brutalist architecture. Brutalism sought to manifest the moral imperative that was thought to be fundamental to modern architecture; it has been described as more an ethic than an aesthetic. Brutalism is therefore characterised by an emphasis on the honest presentation of structure, materials, services and form; here, in the High Court building, the concrete has been subjected to ‘bush hammering’, a process carried out with a percussion instrument, which flakes the surface and exposes the aggregate within the concrete—revealing what’s inside, the essential, the core.

The result of this ‘honesty’ is a harsh, striking architectural style that works in bold geometric shapes and spaces, and often uses raw massed concrete. There is certainly something monumental about it, which explains why that word is so often associated with the movement. The first Brutalist building was the Hunstanton secondary school in Norfolk, England, the best photos of which are always in black and white; the grey boxes that make up the school are unrelenting in their starkness. In Australia, Brutalism first influenced domestic house designs, now regarded as the Late Twentieth Century Sydney Regional style, before influencing more substantial buildings such as the Menzies College student housing building at La Trobe University in Melbourne and the Masonic Centre in Sydney.

Among these, the High Court building stands supreme. The building contains 18,400 cubic metres of concrete, and its asymmetricality accentuates its height. The long, paved ceremonial entrance ramp and the yawning space of the public hall are both constructed on a monumental scale. The distances to be traversed both outside and inside the building are meant to give us time to reflect, to draw us into the legal world.⁵

For me, the most enduring image of the High Court comes from the 1997 film The Castle. Three men stare up at something behind us. Then the camera moves behind them, looking over their shoulders, up at the monumental structure before them. The men look faintly absurd, pausing there in the middle of a featureless ramp, the blustery wind whipping their lapels back and forth. The three are Darryl Kerrigan, the Australian everyman, who is being evicted from his home by a Melbourne airport extension, and his two lawyers, the hapless Dennis Denuto and retired constitutional barrister Lawrence Hammill QC. The shot is supposed to put us in Darryl’s shoes—we’re to be in awe of the majesty of the law, which in due course will deliver a just outcome for Darryl and his family.

Rob Sitch, the co-writer and director of The Castle, argued that the absence of images of the High Court in popular media contributed to the idea of its inaccessibility. He wasn’t wrong—in the High Court’s Conservation Management Plan, The Castle is the only non-educational film or TV series to be listed as showing footage of the court. And the film has done more to popularise the idea of the court as a shield against the ‘tyranny of Parliament’ than even Barwick could have hoped. But when he made the film, Sitch wasn’t given permission to film the interior courtrooms, so the only authentic shots of the court are of the Brutalist exterior. I can’t make up my mind which way to read that image, of the three men pausing before that great expanse of concrete and glass. Even though the narrative propels them inside, my imagination lingers on the outside, struggling against the rare Canberra wind, still staring upwards.

Out of Town

2013-05-10T00:00:00Z

Early one morning more than thirty years ago, I got in my car and drove out of town. The boot and back seat were packed with tools and provisions, and attached behind the car was a trailer laden with timber and galvanised iron. For an hour I followed a highway then turned onto a dirt road that dwindled, fork by fork, into a rough bush track. The open paddocks of the plains narrowed as, by increments, the track climbed a range of mountains and the forest grew closer. At last I arrived at a tiny gap among the trees where I’d already decided to build a hut. I began to unload the trailer and set out my tools.

Taking that dwindling track, I had chosen to live in a place of diminished possibilities. At that time Australia had already long been among the most urbanised of nations. In the region where I was determined to make my home—the mountains east of Canberra, near Braidwood—the population was at its lowest point in well over a hundred years. The local gold rush was long over and the golden decades of grazing sheep for wool had also waned. Even the export trade in beef had recently seen a collapse in the Japanese market. Making a living on the land had become difficult and the towns that serviced farming had suffered consequently. I knew enough to have few illusions about the rural life. My father, who had worked on his father’s farm during the Great Depression, told me how they would send a crop to market and, because the cartage cost more than the produce fetched, get back a bill. Yet I had no doubt about where I wanted to be.

As I examined the site I’d chosen for my hut and began work, I was aware of the forest around me. Tall ribbon gums with their white, new skins and long dry hanging sinews of old bark grew through an understorey of feathery-leafed, dark-trunked wattles. I speared a crowbar into the ground, began to dig the hole for the hut’s first pole then paused to listen to the uncannily clear silence broken now and again by the brilliant bell call of a crimson rosella or the farting bluster of a satin bowerbird. Perhaps I thought of the woman from England who’d taught me English almost a decade earlier and spoken of her dislike of the Australian landscape. Even then, as a teenage schoolboy, this disjunction between the sensibility of Europeans and the natural forms of this country seemed a sad little complaint. I’d spent much of my childhood mucking around on some wooded hills near our Canberra suburb, building tree houses, making bows and arrows and rambling about. But my parents had also taken me to live in South East Asia, where I’d been entranced by the scents and sounds of the jungles of Thailand and Cambodia, and most of all by the huge trees with aerial roots that strangled and shattered the temples and palaces of ancient civilisations. Returning to Australia I felt no disorientation in this landscape. The natural world was the natural world wherever it was, and equally mysterious and intriguing. That this world was independent from, and indifferent to, human existence was keenly appealing to me. The bush was my element, or one of them.

Top: The author at work on the second structure constructed on the site,
photograph by the author, 1985

Even so, when I glanced up at the forest from my digging, I was keenly aware of the overpowering presence of this place in a way that somewhat overawed me. Back then, and many times over the years since, I’d heard people expressing their fear of the bush. While this country doesn’t have prowling predatory beasts to terrify us, we do complain about poisonous snakes, about ticks and leeches, about harshness and heat and, most of all, about the distances separating the outback from civilisation. I accepted these things as more or less incidental to what attracted me to the forest, but still I knew I was taking a substantial risk. It was away from the comfort and convenience of town that I’d committed myself to this endeavour. Around me beneath the trees and among the ferns, bracken and wombat grass was a tangle of fallen timber and bark that suggested to me the wonder of nature’s uninterrupted processes but also some of the difficulties I would have to face. Merely the threat of fire in this place might overwhelm my nerve.

On that first day of building, my father followed me in another car out into the forest. He helped me mark out the dimensions of the hut and square up that little rectangle. Then we unloaded and carried from the trailer a heavy, well-worn wood-fired heating stove. At the centre of the imagined back wall of the hut we made a broad, level pile of rocks where we lifted and manoeuvred the heater into place. It stood exposed on its cairn, somewhat battered from its former suburban workload and as yet chimneyless, a quaint emblem of human intervention in the natural world. My father helped with other tasks for a while then, in his undemonstrative but sweet manner, wished me well and drove home.

And so I was alone. The forest had gone quiet, the air still. Or perhaps I only noticed these things now and an uncanny sense of impersonal timelessness that clung to the scent of leaf mould and eucalyptus. Now, without human support or distraction, I felt, at some half-admitted level, a deepened realisation of my own insignificance and puniness in this place, and how ill-considered all my dreams and intentions might be. And yet a relative peculiarity in my own disposition, and one that made at all possible my standing there with a crowbar in hand, was a strong urge to be separate. A clear distaste for conformity had long increased my enjoyment of solving problems alone. Not only was I used to working by myself (I’d built and run a pottery workshop over the previous five years), but I had a hankering for independence, to learn how to manage (and control) as many aspects of my own existence as I could. This deep tic of personality was also exaggerated by growing up through the decades of intense nuclear stand-off between the United States and the Soviet Union. It might be impossible to avoid the bomb but trying to get away from the centres of human settlement had a deep if irrational importance for me. Then, I was drawn even more deeply to the peace and beauty of the natural world. Despite the power of our urban dreams, I was in many ways immune to their attractions. For me, urban life was interesting but inadequate and held problems greater than any threat of isolation or inconvenience.

When the first footing hole was deep enough, I carried over a hardwood pole, held it upright in place and kicked in enough dirt to stop it listing out of plumb. (I’d already painted its base with creosote.) After throwing in an assortment of rocks and some more earth, I began ramming down around the pole (with the butt of the crowbar) while holding a spirit level against it with my free hand. And so it went until the hole was filled and the pole stood firm and plumb. I believe there is a sort of primeval satisfaction for the human mind (or, at least, some male human minds) in the sight of right-angles imposed on the riot of the natural landscape. Here is the beginning of shelter and, intrinsically, of order, and our craving for order is insatiable, transformative and ultimately destructive. The pole in place, I stepped back to view my work.

Bottom: The same stone building a month later,
photograph by Mark Henshaw, 1985

By planting that one pole in the ground I was taking the city to the wilderness. Manhattan was built on a swamp, Sydney on an ancient collection of bays and inlets. Perhaps I was aware, as I stood evaluating my work, of how I’d embarked on a general process that, until now, has had no real enforceable constraints. Given minor regulations, we do pretty much what we like, as far as our means allow. Out there in the forest I was only limited by the technology and money I could throw at it. Those thirty years ago I didn’t think my intrusion was unreasonable and, perhaps fortunately, I didn’t have a lot of money. Mine would be a relatively small intervention. But I was more than dimly aware of how my actions echoed a long train of similar histories on a far grander scale. Perhaps this was part of my unease that day. My deep fascination and engagement with the forest was at some point at odds with my determination to live in it. At the far end of that dirt track, I was turning into a kind of latter-day pioneer, an intrepid redneck in the making. Over the decades since, I’ve watched urban escapees with a rural dream arrive on properties closer than I am to the main road, seen them clear land unsuitable for agriculture, build sheds and dams, and then leave. In a year or five, another buyer arrives and repeats the process, bulldozing the regrowth before moving on.

Twilight came to the forest that first day with the upright poles of the hut imitating the surrounding trees, except the trees were less unwaveringly straight. This might have been the site of a paltry Stonehenge. Perhaps I would come out in the morning and carve my poles in a totemic offering to my own collection of personalised gods. No such fancy occurred to me as I hurried to make a camp fire. This was a mid-winter night, which came down crisp and sudden, enveloping the forest so that only the crowns of the trees showed as slightly darker smudges against the sky. Concentrated on the evening’s tasks, I moved about in the small circle of flickering light. At dusk I’d been nagged by the incessant hooting of what I thought was a barking owl. (This delusion persisted until many years later when I learnt that the noise was the call of the Wonga pigeon.) Cooking and eating my meal, I was attuned to every noise that reached me out of the night. Somewhere nearby hanging bark flapped loud and hollow against a tree trunk. Something—a possum?—scrambled and scratched in a tree high above me. Nearby, something—a wombat?—crashed and scurried through the forest litter. That night I slept cramped in the car.

In the morning I got back to building early, moving briskly in the cold air. Birdsong became mixed with the rasp of a handsaw, the crack of a hammer, and all those small noises that go with climbing up and down a ladder, drilling holes with a brace and bit and tapping home and tightening bolts. I learnt these basic skills from my father almost by inference. A decade and a half after the war, my parents bought a house, which my father doubled in size virtually unaided. It took him several years plugging away before and after work and on weekends. As a ten- or eleven-year-old, I noticed him only in passing as I ran around the garden playing Cowboys and Indians with my friends. There he was, hoisting a steel girder by increments with ropes and on his own. In time I helped him a little—I don’t recall him ever lecturing or criticising me as we worked, and there was never any hint that a task was too hard.

Starting to build in the forest I was trying to escape a small urban centre but later, when I was settled in the finished hut and had started a second building, I took some year-long spells from the task and went to live in New York. Here was a city where no-one swam in the harbour—it was difficult to approach the water anywhere, let alone take the risk of leaping into its murky depths. On its outer beaches oil and used syringes regularly washed up on the grey sand. Apart from Central Park, there were few stands of trees to walk beneath. But, of course, Manhattan offered all the 24-hour stimulus of the ultimate city. Between these bouts of urbanisation I returned to the forest for long periods where I laid the stone walls of that second building. The contrast in my dual life was exciting. I don’t think I’ve ever believed in absolute binary divisions. The country bumpkin and the city slicker, the simple and the urbane, the natural and the sophisticated have never been convincing as diametric opposites. At last, though, the city left me exhausted and longing for quiet. In New York I had increasing daydreams of warbling birdsong, the fresh green of uncurling fern fronds, and the scent of peppermint gums after a thunderstorm. These things were more essential to who I was.

The urban life with its close interdependence, its specialisation and removal from basic processes also confirmed my longing to build a house, plant and tend a garden, and provide for as many of my own needs as I could. In this hankering for a natural life, I’ve been far from alone. More than any other question over the last three decades, I’ve been asked, ‘Are you self-sufficient?’ A sort of excited hope lights the eyes of most of the people who ask this. They want to hear it’s possible to provide yourself with healthy, fresh food and a way of life closer to an essential simplicity. It may seem an odd longing when most of us enjoy freedom from the incessant donkeywork of producing life’s necessities. And we enjoy that freedom with good reason. I’ve learnt it takes thorough planning and long hours of toil to get anywhere near growing everything you eat. And to get really close to that goal you would have to accept a lack of variety in your diet and a peasant’s exposure to all the dire trials of crop failure caused by drought or disease. The dream of living close to the earth may be a romantic folly or it may answer an undeniable part of our animal nature, or it may embody both things at once.

When the hut was complete with a little verandah where I could sit and watch the forest of an evening, when there was a small tank attached to collect rain water from the roof and bunk beds built within, I stayed there on and off for three years as I constructed the second building, a stone studio, and began to gather a family around me. Then we lived in the studio for a couple of years while we built a house with a stand-alone solar power system. We developed a complex, self-sufficient water supply to water the vegetable gardens and orchard. The irony of the situation is self-evident; the stubborn pursuit of a relatively isolated life has been an attempt to marry what might be irreconcilable: I moved to the forest because of exactly what it is, but tried to bring a level of comfort and civilisation with me.

The attempt has worked in terms of my own longings. The terrors of the nuclear age may have receded somewhat but my pleasure in an isolated life has only grown. I’ve revelled in the creation of gardens and buildings and, most of all, in being in the forest long enough to know its seasons, changes, stresses and moods. In its terms, though, the forest would have been better off without my intrusion. Trees were felled, the track improved, dams built, all encroachments on the integrity of the land. But in a country where development overcomes most obstacles, we have, as a balance, put a binding conservation covenant on our property, a covenant that prevents further encroachment by us or any future owner. As for a living, we have never asked the land to sustain us fully, but cobbled an income however we can in a manner perhaps only possible in our age where car travel has allowed unprecedented mobility.

One night more than a decade ago I stepped outdoors to look at the night sky. The forest had always seemed somehow inviolable to me but that night a depression came down on my head as though out of that beautiful, dark sky. Rumour of greater destructive forces than were controllable by any kind of local protection had become undeniable. I thought of the hut, on the other side of the creek, some distance away through the trees, and of what I’d sought to escape when I drove on that dwindling track, towing wood and tin, back in my youth. One morning when I’d been working on the hut for a few days, there came the roar of engines before two motorbikes closed on me from along the track. It was my only nearby neighbour, an older man called Harold, with a young companion. Back in the 1960s Harold had cleared his land, built a house and a sawmill, and now was established in rural comfort. The two men propped their bikes on the track and walked down to me through the trees. Harold was grinning. He began talking in his customary country drawl, a manner of speech that admitted no rush or fluster. As we chatted, he eyed the little, incomplete building, but made no comment. Perhaps he glanced at my scrawny body and back at the building once or twice. After a while he gave me another smile … an open if slightly wistful smile.

‘You know,’ he said, ‘there’s nothing I’d like more than to head off into the scrub like you’re doing here. Head off and start again from nothing, like this.’ You could see in his face that in a strange way, impossible to define and pointless to calculate, I was doing it for him.

No Laughing Matter

2013-05-07T00:00:00Z

The wall hit me,
red brick like the gable end
of an abandoned terrace,
nose close it’s all I can see,
the dirty mortar, the toughness.
Kicking against it doesn’t help,
myself smashed, I expect to feel
a bruise bloom above an eye,
the face grazed, a bloodied nostril,
but nothing happens except pain
no-one can see and the memory
of such marks on his head
whose absolute absence is the wall
I cannot shift and which presses
on me by day and night,
and so I invent a graffito for the wall
emphatic and unoriginal
in spray-can white: Damian was here,
which is the sign of his gone-ness
and doesn’t help because I want him
to come back; there are words
concerning love I would exchange
with him, but the wall is grave
and silent and no matter how much
I stare and mutter and mouth
all I should have done and spoken,
it will not give and no-one can
demolish it. Sometimes
it will be necessary to turn
my back and slump against it,
at others I will take up my can
and daub it with scenes for him
whose name was strength;
I’d like to make him laugh again
who could hardly read or write,
but know I have no art for that.

Territorial Disputes

2013-05-06T00:00:00Z

Shane Mortimer insists on parking his van not only illegally but also as provocatively as possible. So when we leave a restaurant in Civic—whose name benignly connotes drab bureaucracy, and a red-herring of a place for those seeking a city centre in Australia’s national capital—he delights at having earned yet another parking ticket. This time he has parked in a spot that is clearly reserved for the use of employees of the Commonwealth or of the Australian Capital Territory.

‘Fantastic,’ he says, employing the theatricality of one who has spent years around the stage, waving his arms in a sweeping gesture about the car park. ‘Another parking ticket. I’ll be sending this one back to them, too. Because this is all my people’s land. I can park here.’

Mortimer’s people are the Ngambri, the original indigenous inhabitants of the Limestone Plains upon which Canberra was built and continues to sprawl in great new suburbs, north and south.

He grew up oblivious to his Aboriginal heritage, attributing his slight swarthiness to mixed European–Pacific Islander ancestry. As a kid in the 1950s and 1960s he was called ‘wog’, but never ‘Abo’. Then in 1989 the stage and screen producer—while negotiating with the Office of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders Services (OATSIS) to tour John Summons’ play Massacre at Myall Creek—discovered that the Great-Aunty Vi in the family photographs was not the ‘island princess’ she’d pretended to be. No. Aunty Vi was an Aboriginal from Canberra way. OATSIS then helped him further uncover his true maternal heritage.

Vi’s story and that of her sister Adelaide McClelland—Mortimer’s maternal grandmother—form part of the vast tragic injustice that began to occur across newly federated Australia when, driven by eugenics, the authorities segregated the ‘mixed’ blood Aborigines so that their concentrated coupling might eventually dilute the colonial ‘half-caste’ stain. Vi, Adelaide and their four siblings were taken to Brungle Aboriginal Mission near Tumut, at the foot of the Snowy Mountains, and briefly resettled at the St Joseph’s & St John’s orphanage, Goulburn. Authorities later moved them to Sydney. Along the way one of the boys disappeared. Given all the ugliness that is now oozing from Australia’s fabric about the institutional abuse of children, the fatal possibilities for that little boy seem malevolently profound. He was never found.

Shane Mortimer wearing possum cloak in Canberra,
photograph by Ray Strange, 2012

The five remaining children vowed to lie about their Aboriginality so that their children might escape the same punishment for their colour. Soon after the children were stolen, their mother, Florence Ellen Lowe, died of heartbreak. There is little mention of her husband, Black Dick Lowe, who fathered some or all of the children. Aboriginal genealogists and anthropologists routinely trace ancestry through the matrilineal line because the women of the missions often had children to multiple partners, white and black. You could mostly determine your birth mother. Paternity was less predictable.

All this matters greatly to Shane Mortimer because it links him to the land that was eventually compulsorily acquired for a purpose-built capital for what Chicago landscape architect Walter Griffin (who in 1912 won an international design competition with a plan that was never built) described as ‘a nation of bold democrats’.

Australia’s democrats were nowhere near as bold as the visionary Griffin anticipated. His dream—articulated by his wife, world-leading architectural artist Marion Mahony Griffin, in a series of stunning lithographs—was crushed on the Limestone Plains by Australia’s empire-centric planners who wanted little of his ambitious European style (a Tivoli Gardens–style ‘casino’, a ‘Capitol’, medium-density terraces amid the national monuments, al-fresco dining on boulevards showcasing fine stores).

But that was long after the first white settlers came with their sheep, their grog and guns, their chained convicts and diseases. And long after the last ‘full-blood’ Ngambri man, OnYong, died about 1850 when another black, Jimmy the Rover, speared him amid internecine tribal rivalries about the right to inhabit the plains and the killing of white men’s stock. Jimmy and OnYong spoke the same language, Walgalu. But Jimmy belonged to a different tribe altogether, the Ngurmal, whose land lay south of the Ngambri’s.

White men marvelled as the blacks buried OnYong—‘Hong Kong’ they called him—sitting up with his weapons, out near Tharwa. Years later a settler dug up OnYong’s head and turned his skullcap into a sugar bowl.

Such was the fate of the last full-blood Ngambri chief.

Endless obsessive dispute about the name ‘Canberra’ has played out in newspaper letters pages since Lady Gertrude Denman, the governor-general’s wife, named the place with emphasis on Can a century ago.

There was a strong view, though never consensus, that the name had transmogrified from the indigenous Ngambri through a series of phonetic English derivations including Canbrey, Canberay, Canberry, Kamberri or Kemberri—until it became Denman’s Canberra. Frederick Robinson wrote in his Canberra’s First Hundred Years, published in 1924, that ‘Canberra is, without any doubt, a native name’.¹ Explaining how Ngambri became Canberra, Robinson said the Australian native ‘spat out his words like tobacco chews’ and ‘burred his Rs more fiercely than a Scotchman’.

But what did Ngambri mean? Some still insist it means ‘meeting place’, for that is what the plains were for the other peoples—the Ngurmal and the Woradgery, and mobs from up north such as the Wallabalooah and the Cookmai who spoke Ngunnawal. Some, like the Wallabalooah from around Booroowa, came to steal Ngambri women. Others sought permission to cross Ngambri country or to stop and hunt the kangaroo and bustard, and to catch the fatty, nutritious swarming bogong moths that migrate on autopilot across the plains to the Kosciuszko high country each spring.

But the earliest pioneers came to understand that Ngambri meant ‘cleavage’.

Griffin designed his monumental and garden city around two axes across land and water, which notionally intersect in the lake that came to bear his name—Burley Griffin. (The lake, named and opened by Sir Robert Menzies in 1964, is, incidentally, something of a misnomer. In the United States he was just Walter Griffin—a curiosity recently emphasised by the US Ambassador to Australia, Jeffrey Bleich, who said that his country usually reserved the use of second names for serial killers.)²

If I look north from the bushy, yellow box redgum–dotted heights of Red Hill where I wander among the elements with my dog most days, the land axis extends out below me from Parliament House on Capital Hill to the base of the mountain the Ngambri call Byalgee—today’s Mount Ainslie. Slightly north-west is Black Mountain, whose pinnacle has served since 1980 as base for an obtrusive communications tower. Some insist Black Mountain Tower looks like a rocket ship from The Jetsons. Others see in it a giant hypodermic, a cruel architectural reminder of the 1980s scourge when the twins of punk and heroin gripped the bored children of the city’s vast middle class.

Since the Dreamtime, however, Black Mountain and Byalgee have been a woman’s breasts. Her womb is Capital Hill. Ngambri—Canberra—refers to the space between the mountains. ‘There is no doubt that is what it means,’ says Mortimer. ‘The suggestion that it means “meeting place” is just a load of old colonial contrivance. Ngambri is the cleavage between the breasts of Black Mountain and Mount Ainslie.’

Around 1825 Byalgee was named Mount Ainslie in honour of ‘Captain’ James Ainslie, a Scot and purported Waterloo veteran employed by the colonial merchant and importer Robert Campbell. Governor Philip King commandeered at least one of Campbell’s ships in 1806 to fetch food from India for the starving penitentiary, Sydney, after flood destroyed the crops.

But Campbell’s Sydney was lost with all hands. It was probably Governor William Bligh, whom Campbell served as treasurer, who granted the merchant 710 sheep and a large parcel of land on the Limestone Plains down on the colony’s south-eastern frontier in compensation. In October 1825 Campbell dispatched Ainslie, along with a crew of convict labourers in chains, to collect the livestock and take them down to Ngambri country. Ainslie collected the ewes in Bathurst and travelled to Boorowa, where he encountered the Wallabalooah. They had not seen a white man before.

Alarmed by his white fluffy four-legged things (it was their first experience of sheep, too), they thought he and his ragged men in chains were the spirits of past Aborigines, for a black man’s spirit was white. The terrified Wallabalooah ran for the creek beds and climbed trees to escape. But how to get rid of Ainslie?

The Wallabalooah ordered a woman they had stolen from the Ngambri to take the spirits away. She led Ainslie south-east to the only place she knew— the plains of vivid yellow kangaroo grass that were segmented by bubbling streams and billabongs and punctuated, during the warmth, with button daisies and bluebells.

They stopped for shade at the lone yellow box redgum, the Ngambri’s corroboree tree, still thriving today in a park in an inner northern Canberra suburb that, like the mountain, has Ainslie’s name. They followed the shallow river and stopped. Ainslie gesticulated: ‘Where are we?’

‘Bialgi,’ (be seated) the woman said. It sounded like ‘pialligo’, and that’s what it became—Pialligo, the place close to which Ainslie built his small hut of stone and wood, Limestone Cottage—the most southern structure in the world, so it was said, with a glass window. Pialligo became the market gardens for the village that grew around Campbell’s estate, Duntroon, and it remains the city’s retail gardening supplies centre (to live in Canberra is to garden).

Ainslie seemed the perfect frontiersman: he was proficient with gun, axe and horse, unafraid of the bush and all its creatures and exotic sounds, and made an effort to communicate with the natives. He was tough as nails and idiosyncratic. Especially when he drank. Which was often.

Most early Canberra histories portray Ainslie, unquestioningly, as a veteran of the Battle of Waterloo in 1815. They had little reason to doubt Ainslie’s story that he’d lost his horse pursuing French cavalry and that the deep scar on his skull came from a French sabre. A number of other early explorers and settlers—including J.J. Moore who ran stock on land at Acton, home to today’s National Museum of Australia—had fought at Waterloo and elsewhere in the Napoleonic Wars.

In 1922 historian Henry Selkirk told a typical story about Ainslie:

Like other mortals, Ainslie had his failings, and at times was wont to indulge not wisely but too well in the real Jamaica rum of the period. On these occasions … the old soldier would seize his gun, and with the light of battle in his eyes, commence a furious fusillade directed at the trunks of the adjacent gum trees, in which he seemed to recognize his ancient enemies at Waterloo. It is not difficult to believe that at such moments his employees voted Ainslie in his cups as one whose room was better than his company.³

Ainslie’s faults were overlooked because he was apparently a war hero whose continued foolhardiness was the stuff of legend. By all early accounts Ainslie simply disappeared in about 1835. The preacher turned pioneer, newspaper editor and early historian, John Gale, recounted how Ainslie may have died while careening down his own mountain on horseback:

… one day, fuddled by drink, Ainslie accepted a bet of a bottle of rum that he would ride his horse full gallop down its most precipitous slope … Poor Ainslie essayed his self-imposed task, but never accomplished it. His horse fell with its rider, whose neck was broken. Seeing he was dead, his body was buried where he fell—but regrettably ‘no man knoweth’ the locality of his burial to this day.⁴

While I was researching my book Canberra,⁵ something—an old journalist’s instinct, perhaps—told me the early historians were, if not exactly fabricating the story of Ainslie, then certainly complicit in his myth. What convinced me was Frederick Watson’s account, in his 1927 A Brief History of Canberra, of the robbery of Ainslie’s Limestone Cottage by the early bushrangers Dublin Jack and William Tennant. The bushrangers, Watson asserted, ‘called at and robbed a hut occupied by James Ainslie, R. Campbell’s overseer, and an aboriginal’.⁶

An Aboriginal? Here Watson is struggling with his inner historian. For like most of the early chroniclers of Canberra, he chose to ignore the complex, fraught and often unsavoury relationships between the settlers and the traditional owners—the ugly stories of dispossession, the rape of the women and the murder of the men.

White women were scarce. So settlers took black women out of physical and domestic need. Ainslie set the precedent by coupling with the first native woman he met.

She was Ija Ngambri, who had led Ainslie from Boorowa down to the corroboree tree on the plains. Ainslie and Ija—‘mother’—Ngambri had a child, Ju.nin.mingo—or Nanny—in 1827. Then Ainslie vanished about 1835.

As I neared deadline for Canberra I spoke publicly about my research, and happened to mention my suspicions about Ainslie. An audience member suggested I contact Rowan Henderson, curator of social history at the Canberra Museum and Gallery. Her exhaustive research had established that Ainslie was not among the 37,000 British servicemen who received the Waterloo Medal, awarded to all soldiers who fought at the battles of Ligny or Quatre Bras (both on 16 June 1815) or at Waterloo (18 June 1815).⁷

Henderson also determined that Ainslie fell out badly with Campbell because Ainslie had been illegally selling liquor at Duntroon (later to become Australia’s Royal Military College). Far from disappearing or dying on his mountain, Ainslie had cut his losses and fled for Liverpool aboard the Edinburgh. He returned to Kelso, Scotland, and reunited with James, the son he’d left as an infant. There Ainslie became a public nuisance—drunk, abusive and often half naked on the street, he ranted about how he’d gained his serious head wound out on the Limestone Plains of New South Wales fighting natives and bushrangers. Ainslie hanged himself in prison on 11 April 1844.

I wondered what became of Ija Ngambri, her daughter Nanny and their descendants. I asked Margo Neale, the principal indigenous adviser at the National Museum of Australia. She introduced me to Mortimer, who had just begun producing a screenplay of Myall Creek in collaboration with two Hollywood scriptwriters. Mortimer explained that Florence Ellen Lowe, who died of heartache after her children were stolen from the mission, was the granddaughter of Nanny. This makes Mortimer a direct descendant of Ija Ngambri. James Ainslie is Mortimer’s great, great, great, great grandfather.

The story of white Australia’s post-federation history is sculpted into the city’s monumental landscape. The tale of Canberra’s symbolic evolution, from what it was intended to what it became, is laid out there on the vast canvas of natural amphitheatre between the hills and the mountains, but especially in the monuments about the land and water axes.

The Parliament on Capital Hill was not in Griffin’s plan. In Marion’s renderings, that’s where Griffin’s Capitol stands. The Capitol was envisaged as a sort of national clearing house, a Roman Forum–style space for debate and meeting, a house for the archives that would provide memory and conscience to the new federation.

At the other end of the land axis Marion had drawn her husband’s vision of open gardens—a Chicago-style Midway Pleasance, leading up to the casino at Mount Ainslie’s foot. The casino was not as Australians would know one; it involved a theatre, outdoor al-fresco eateries, a German-style beer garden, play areas for children and cycle paths.

Canberra’s anglophile planners, among them several colonial military commanders, cynical from the start about Griffin’s plan, had already embarked upon a path of bureaucratic obfuscation that would impede the Chicagoan at every turn. When the First World War intervened, the enlightened Griffin vision for Canberra died along with the 60,000 or so Australians who lost their lives.

The Capitol, intended to stand physically and therefore symbolically above the legislature, was scrapped, and the tip of the hill set aside for the parliament that would not open until 1988. Permanent iconography was erased or rendered makeshift to save costs: a temporary parliament house well down the hill; a poky, modest prime minister’s Lodge in the back blocks; a home for the head of state, not purpose-built but fashioned from a pioneer’s home at Yarralumla. The casino was scrapped, too—replaced with a plan for the Australian War Memorial. Canberra no longer represented Griffin’s celebratory vision of federation forged without steel and cordite. Instead it reflected a sombre and austere postwar national sentiment of endurance and nation building in the shadow of awful human loss.

Upon opening in 1941, the war memorial met its intended purpose as the place of national pilgrimage for those grieving the dead, and to which survivors—including the 150,000 who returned physically wounded and psychologically damaged—would go to remember, lament and curse those who sent them.

At one end of the axis stands the Parliament, the building that renders Canberra a euphemism for unpopular government impositions and unedifying political behaviour. At the other is Australia’s foremost secular shrine. The reviled and the revered—unless you are a black Australian, in which case you might not have much time for either building. The war memorial, for all its assiduous conflict-by-conflict commemoration of Australia’s imperial military involvement, has consistently refused to incorporate the frontier wars between pioneers and Aborigines into its interpretation of the Australian war experience. Reform is overdue, to acknowledge the enormous Aboriginal losses that ushered in colonial settlement, not least around Canberra.

Twice, meanwhile, in the past eighteen years indigenous Australians have looked to the Parliament for white acknowledgement of past wrongs, first in 1993 for the passage of the Native Title Act—a legislative response to the High Court’s 1992 Mabo ruling—and more recently for then prime minister Kevin Rudd’s apology to the stolen generations. Ironically, perhaps, Griffin’s Capitol would have been an equally appropriate forum for both.

Mabo, which overturned the notion of terra nullius, effectively granted to the Ngambri common law native title over the lands on which the Australian Capital Territory now exists. The Ngambri have not yet formally made a native title claim on any of the land, although Mortimer, as one of the people’s elders, is involved in court action to halt several suburban developments on the basis that they are inconsistent with the Ngambri’s efforts to restore or protect native grassland.

Mortimer is arguing that the process whereby the Commonwealth acquired land from New South Wales on which to establish the capital territory was invalid, because the original land grants to the likes of Campbell and Moore imposed conditions—such as that the land recipients live on them permanently—that were never met. Moore, for example, rarely visited his land at Acton. It strikes me as delightfully allegorical that the Aboriginal great, great, great, great grandson of Ainslie, a man who confected his past and stood at the vanguard of white settlement on the plains that house the national capital, is being compelled by the truth of his identity to make a native title claim over the whole of the ACT. While Mortimer’s connection to country is undeniable, it is not without complication. Some years ago the ACT Government acknowledged the territory as ‘Ngunnawal Country’, even though the most respected anthropology recognises the Ngambri as the people of the plain.

Serious rivalries exist between those who identify as Ngunnawal and others who call themselves Ngambri. Some who’ve previously called themselves Ngunnawal now identify as Ngambri. The conflict manifests in confusion and anger about which people—and which representative of them—should be invited to perform Welcome to Country ceremonies. To compound the confusion, the Commonwealth usually invites a Ngambri representative, while the Territory sticks with the Ngunnawal.

Increasingly where the Ngambri are invited, Mortimer represents them, wearing a possum-skin cape (he had to purchase his in New Zealand because Australian possums are protected) of the type with which his people warded off the Ngambri winter. So fraught has the Welcome to Country process become that the Canberra headquarters of OATSIS no longer employs the ceremony at its events.

There is a bitter irony in all of this for Mortimer. Just as his ancestor, Ainslie, has been exposed as something of a fraud, he has taken defamation action against a prominent Canberran who, Mortimer claims, publicly questioned his Aboriginality after attending one of his welcomes to the country.

Other local Aborigines, including those from the Ngunnawal Aboriginal Corporation, which has ACT Government recognition, have furiously criticised Mortimer too, questioning his Aboriginality and his association with the land around the ACT. Unfazed, he seems to court such controversy in the same way as he does the parking fines: ‘I don’t have to justify to anyone who I am. Calling me a white man is completely and utterly dishonest because I have an Aboriginal background that I can clearly demonstrate,’ he says.

Finally, it is worth pondering what might be done about the name Ainslie bequeathed to a suburb known in Canberra as ‘The People’s Republic’ due to its left-wing, politically correct preoccupations. And, of course, his mountain, from whose pinnacle Marion Griffin took her perspective for the stunning triptych of lithographs of her husband’s dream city—Canberra—without either having seen the Limestone Plains.

My friend the Age journalist Tony Wright encapsulated Ainslie the suburb superbly when Tony Abbott and Joe Hockey became the subject of a minor protest after once daring to campaign against the carbon tax at the suburb’s shops. ‘Its Immensely Concerned Citizens are likely to defend very nearly to the death any tree that is threatened by the local government with lopping; high fashion extends to sandals with socks; the suburb’s heritage-listed cottages boast organic free-range chicken runs in their back yards, and the horrors of climate change dominate earnest discussion over vegetarian dinners.’⁸

The people of Ainslie, cognisant of the great cultural significance of the corroboree tree in their midst, would surely support a name change for their suburb and mountain.

How’s Ngambri?

And Mount Byalgee?

That sounds about right.

Bronzed Aussies

2013-05-02T00:00:00Z

In Garema Place, beyond the air-brushed mall,
autumn is around: the first chill wind
shuffles the fallen leaves; there is a sense
the Place is now out-glamoured, second best,
and scattered shoppers in today’s drab garb
seem themselves autumnal, scuttling by.
It’s here, outside, perhaps most aptly so,
we find the busts, sculpted in rough bronze,
of Campbell, Hope and Wright, that blessed three,
whose voices yet resist the fade and fall.
The busts rest on three columns; these display
their poetry engraved on metal plates;
and as I read, caught in the web of words,
each draws me down towards its final line.
I don’t begrudge, or feel it out of place,
to find that as I do, I bend and bow.

The sky was herding disappointments

2013-05-01T00:00:00Z

It was Nathan who first took her bushwalking. Eve was renting a single-room bungalow at the back of a house in Acton. It was advertised as a granny flat, but it was just a room with flimsy French doors that opened to the garden. She wore gloves and a beanie to bed. The bathroom and the kitchen were in the house, which her housemates called the mainland; the bungalow was Tasmania.

When she first arrived Eve stayed in a motel. It was on one of the ring roads that poured traffic around the city, as though Canberra was just too dense to drive straight into. The motel room’s palette was exhaustingly flat; pastel colours unsatisfied with their faded selves. Salmon bedspread, light apricot tiles in the bathroom. Laminate wardrobe doors undecided between beige and taupe. The first night Eve was kept awake by three boys next door. They turned up late in the evening, muddy and loud, mountain bikes strapped to the back of their car. She watched them from her front window, door locked and lights off, as they clanked beer bottles and recounted their day to each other through shouts and bravado. Eventually she ran the bath, pulling the curtain closed and turning on the shower, very gently. Closing her eyes, she pretended she was underneath a waterfall. In a cave, a place where the rock walls were steep and slimy with moss and there was no way of getting out—so she didn’t even have to try. Crumbling divots of dirt outside their door were the only sign of the boys in the morning.

Eve stayed in the motel for two weeks while she looked for somewhere more permanent. The Do not disturb sign on her door every night, even though she did not know anyone to disturb her. She bought bath bombs from the bargain bin of a chemist. She had wanted them as a child, chalky balls of soap and scent, but her father had ripped out the bath in a fit of renovation activity and never replaced it. The bombs would fizz and explode, turning the water vivid shades of purple, green and pink and streaking the side of the tub. Flowers embedded in the chalk of the bomb floated to the surface and unfurled. One of the balls was blue and laced with silver glitter that stubbornly clung to her skin; all her efforts to dislodge the tiny pieces only seemed to make them burrow deeper. The blue gathered around her nails; for days afterwards her fingers and toes looked chilled and she would find little square pieces of glitter on her clothes and inside her ears.

In the evenings the reception desk was manned by a boy who wore Dunlop Volleys. He would be sitting with his feet on the desk, chair balanced on two legs, and his whole body tense with performing the role of the nonchalant night man. ‘Skittles or M&Ms?’ she would ask, gesturing at the basket on the desk. ‘Snickers or Mars?’ She would already have decided before she came padding barefoot down the hall, but she liked to let him feel he had a say. He always called her ‘Miss’ and asked her if there was anything else she needed assistance with.

Aerial photograph of Aranda, ACT, 1980,
Photographer unknown, Archives ACT

At the student admin block, Eve signed her papers, put her name to tutorials. She was disappointed at the deadened sound of the classes she would be taking. Torts. Contracts. Constitutional law. She saw other first-year students, looking so much more sure of themselves than she was, even the ones who were from the country, parents in tow as they ferried belongings from the car park to dorm rooms. The student housing officer advised her to move to one of the halls of residence.

‘It’s the most usual course of action for first-year students,’ he assured her. ‘The best way to meet people, especially if you’re new to the city.’

Everyone in Canberra was new to the city. Eve visited one of the halls, a low-slung brick building that crawled across manicured lawns. The dean walked her along dark corridors that smelled warm despite being cool, as though someone had just poured a bucket of creek water onto woollen carpets.

‘It’s much nicer when its full of students,’ the dean said. ‘Everyone moves in this weekend but we still have a few rooms available.’ He unlocked one of the doors. A stripped single bed huddled against the wall, apologising for its slim nakedness. She thought of the faux-satin bedspread on the queen-size bed in her motel room, knowledgeable in its hideousness yet still brazen enough to invite her to lie down.

The nun-like austerity of the student room—everything in it: the single chair, single hook for the single bath towel, the single bedside lamp, everything striving towards independence—brokered no attraction. Eve could not imagine falling asleep in that bed each night, the footsteps of fellow students running up and down the corridors, the muffled shouts and slamming doors. Sleeping on her back, unable to turn or stretch. Waking in the morning and taking two steps to her desk chair. She knew that the alliances struck up in the first few weeks of semester would endure, and that by the time she emerged from the solace of her room there would be no space for her.

The room in Acton was advertised on a noticeboard in the student union building. Two couples lived in the house; they all seemed much older than Eve, though she knows now that it was probably only a matter of years. After all, three of them were students, though she rarely saw them studying. Instead they all made art—a potter, a painter, a sound artist and a sculptor. There were unfinished projects in various states in every room of the house; in the living room a clothes horse covered in woollen tassels looked like an overgrown highland cow had crawled through the window and given birth to a fall of painted terracotta tiles. Slabs of clay were stacked in buckets in the bathroom; they had to be swung out of the shower whenever you wanted to use it. When Eve went to her housemates’ art exhibitions she always expected their work to be transformed by the white-walled gallery, but each piece still looked like a child’s homemade art project. It was only after living in the house a few months that she realised the artworks at home weren’t even ‘in progress’—they were all finished pieces, lugged home and dumped where they landed, growing dusty winter coats.

Nathan, the sound artist, was the only one with a proper job. He worked in information technology, and he always said this apologetically, as though the others might laugh him down, smug in their creative superiority. He showed her how to set up an email account, said she could use his computer any time to check it. She would sit at his desk, ignoring the Hotmail screen prompting her to log in, and look about the room he shared with his wife Katie, the painter. The walls were covered with postcards and posters, a red petticoat trimmed with lace was used as a lampshade. She didn’t know anyone to email and soon forgot her password.

Nathan only took her bushwalking because Katie was pregnant. They had just found out and the morning sickness propped Katie woozily at the kitchen table each day as she smeared avocado onto Saladas. Nathan would make her cups of tea, which Katie would let go cold, before snapping at him that he had made the tea too early. He never snapped back at her. He would just look at her and laugh until she joined in, swallowing up the kitchen and everyone else in it with their mirth until Katie started dry retching and had to run for the toilet.

‘Take Eve,’ Katie said that morning, professing to being unable to bear the idea of tramping through the bush in the still heat. Nathan was making a series of recordings and he wanted the sounds of the bush—now, before the summer fled. He wanted to record the dryness, the snapping of the leaves, the wheezing of the branches as they stood brittle against the air, waiting for the huge gusts of wind that would appear when the weather changed.

They drove in Katie’s Corolla to the national park and as they walked Nathan told Eve the names of plants, explaining how they all worked together and the way smaller plants huddled for protection against the trunks of the gum trees. She hated the way he just kept telling her things, as though she didn’t have any knowledge. She hated it even though she didn’t know anything about what he was talking about. The bush was alive with electricity and it felt like her step might set off a spark that would morph into a raging fire within seconds. As though he was reading her mind, Nathan pointed out the size of the trees that had survived the last fire in this area, the way their growth was stunted but still assured, as though they knew they had seen the worst.

As Nathan walked ahead, Eve looked at the tightly spiralled hairs on the back of his legs and wondered how Katie found him attractive. A man of bulk with wide shoulders and squat legs, everything about his appearance was heavy, from the dark brows crawling across his face to his limbs that tethered him to the ground like ballast. ‘Built like a brick shithouse,’ he would tell people. His T-shirt rode up beneath his backpack and soft rolls of skin squeezed over the waistband of his shorts. Eve found herself wanting to touch them, and she walked a little faster. She told him that, later: it made him laugh. When they stopped, Nathan laid out an MP3 recorder and a microphone. He set the microphone on a small tripod, pointed its head at the sky. Eve recalled watching Rage early on a Saturday morning, placing her tape player by the speaker and leaping up when a new favourite song came on. *Record. Play. ‘Everybody Hurts’, ‘Accidentally Kelly Street’, ‘Creep’. How her friend Amy had laughed when Eve’s dad’s voice—too high-pitched for a man, it came from within his nose and sputtered out in expletive-ridden bursts—cut through the end of ‘Dreamlover’. ‘What the fuck are you doing?’ Then blank noise, as the tape spooled out to the end.

With Nathan there were no such outbursts. Eve listened in on the landscape, tried to pick out individual sounds and hear in them something unfamiliar. Later, Nathan would invite her into his bedroom to play back some of the sounds he had recorded and then spliced, getting her to guess their genesis. He would close the door, for better listening, even though he played his soundscapes through large padded headphones that made her ears smart and grow itchily damp. Eve knelt at his desk, legs woven about the legs of an ergonomic stool as though she was about to be launched somewhere, and Nathan crouched over her. He lifted the right earpiece after each sample was played, whispering into her ear ‘Can you guess it?’, triumphant every time she was unable to.

Eve joined the university mountain biking club, and on the weekends they all cycled out to Majura Pines, their bikes sluggish on the paved roads, but becoming slick over the pine needles. The first time she headed downhill it felt as though her rigid arms would pop from their sockets. She gripped the handles, clenched the brakes and released them in jolts. It wasn’t a rock that upended her but a slide of gravel. Her front wheel swooped aside, the back followed and Eve went the other way. When she hit the ground it didn’t hurt, it was like a massive release, and she got straight back on the bike. This time she let her arms and knees sit loose, absorbed the bumps and let the bike buck beneath her without upsetting her centre of gravity. She got to the bottom of the hill without further incident and let the bike drop to the ground. She had never felt so alive. She bought a bike second-hand from a guy called Stu, all bandanna and skinny legs. She rode with him sometimes, their shouts grabbing at the trees as they ripped by, stop-starting over the rocks. She found her vocabulary whittled down to nothing but swear words, low down and drawn out or screeched to the sky. Found herself thinking of her parents, their relentless assault on each other that claimed first one and then the other.

‘You’ve a mouth on you like a fuckin’ dunny,’ said Stu, picking at a scab on his knee.

‘You fuckin’ ought to know,’ she retorted, laughing.

Her mother had left when Eve was fifteen, interrupting her parents’ seemingly endless argument. ‘It’s a fucking discussion,’ one of them would say to Eve, when she asked them to go five minutes without attacking each other. Her father’s face seemed to sink into itself, fading in the silence, and she had finally believed them. Now it was swear words that brought them back to her, reminded her of the laughing way they would taunt each other. ‘You silly bitch’; ‘You old bastard.’ She relished the familiar words, grunting them as she urged her bike up the hill, shouting them as she skipped it downhill.

Eve invited Nathan to come mountain biking and he turned her down. ‘This? On a bike?’ he had laughed, gesturing at his body. As was so often the way with men of his size, his manner was gentle. He was forever placing a reassuring hand on her arm, her back, her shoulder, before rushing off out the door. Nathan was all rhyme and no reason. His enthusiasm shot out in every direction at once, a radar signal of possibility and goodwill; he just sat back and waited to see what it would bounce off. He was always making plans and carrying them out: inviting disparate people on his adventures to plaster Civic with posters calling shame on the government for refusing to apologise to the stolen generations, or building a raft to paddle the length of Lake Burley Griffin. A fervent vegetarian, Nathan cooked the household curries and stir-fries: when Eve asked for the recipes it was Katie who wrote them into a lined notebook, adding helpful hints denoted by a string of asterisks. When the couple went back to Brisbane to visit Nathan’s family, Eve tried to re-create his flavours but she never managed to. Her carrot went brown and limp, the capsicum was leached of its flavour. One night she cooked a steak but even that was tough and rubbery. She ate it doused in tomato sauce and threw away the frying pan afterwards, fearful he would smell the burnt beef engrained in the pan’s patina.

They went walking most weekends throughout Katie’s pregnancy. Eve always carried the food, sandwiches that Katie made for them, and Nathan carried his sound equipment. One day when they parked the Corolla, the sky was herding disappointments; clouds had been replaced by the kind of grey resentment that signalled the beginning of winter.

‘We won’t walk too far today,’ Nathan said over his shoulder. ‘Just far enough to be sure the mike won’t pick up any of the four-wheel drives.’

By the time they stopped, the rain had set in and Eve’s trousers were soaked through. She wiggled her toes in her new hiking boots, could feel how dry they were in the woollen socks. Nathan set up his microphone in an open space, wrapping the unit in cling wrap.

‘We’ll see how it goes,’ he said. Eve didn’t answer, she knew he was talking to himself. ‘I don’t want to get the sound of raindrops hitting the plastic, but we’ll see.’

She watched the rain gather on his jacket, the creases forming rivulets that rushed to his wrists. When the equipment was set up, they crouched against a tree and listened.

After ten minutes Eve noticed she could feel Nathan’s thigh against her own. She glanced across at him; he was staring at the microphone with a confused look, as though worried it might run away. She shifted her weight a little, but didn’t want to topple onto the soft ground. He was just cold, she reasoned, knowing that this wasn’t really possible. She wasn’t cold. He wasn’t just touching her leg, he was pressing against it; if she moved away, he would unbalance. She rocked forward a little, tried to judge where his weight lay, giving him a chance to move away. When he didn’t, she leaned away from him then let herself go. He fell against her, and for a moment they lay on their sides, Eve buried beneath Nathan, their arms pinned and useless.

‘Sorry, I lost my balance, I …’ Nathan fumbled, tried to lift himself from her. Eve managed to get her arm out from underneath herself, haul herself back to her knees. When she kissed him, she was surprised by how thin his lips were; his face went from skin to teeth; there seemed to be nothing in between. She could hear her pulse swirling in her ears, amplified by the hood of her rain jacket. He kissed her back, his tongue pushing her teeth apart as he let her pull him down on top of her. Small rocks poked at her back, she could feel the rain seeping through her trousers to her underwear. She found it difficult to breathe with the weight of him, the way his nose squished hers against her face, first one way and then the other. It wasn’t like kissing the boy from the motel, he with the gentle lips, both of them on their tiptoes and reaching over the reception desk.

They had sex with their trousers around their knees, their hiking boots still laced up. Their raincoats as bed sheets, a smell of wet hair, wet dirt, wetness in the air. It was like Eve imagined it would be, uncomfortable and a relief all at once, and when he was inside her she knew she had never felt as far away from someone as she did just then. She clutched at his shoulder and his hair, she could see the dandruff; she would like to wash his hair in the bathtub, massaging the shampoo into his scalp while he recorded all the sloshing sounds. He pushed inside her as though there was further to go, and she squirmed, trying to tell him that there was not. He pulled out from her and when he came he let out a little yelp in her ear, the hot air sending a shiver down her neck. It was only then that she remembered all of this would be on the tapes. She wondered whether he knew this, whether that was what he wanted.

He moved off her, pulled his trousers up as she struggled with her own. He gave her a wry smile and then his hand, as he pulled her to her feet. ‘All right then?’ he asked, and she nodded. He held her face in both his hands for a moment, then brought his thumbs to her eyebrows and smoothed them out. He kissed her on the nose, and it was the only time she had felt silly in his presence. There was no other word for it. She felt foolish, but without any accompanying shame. Just silly.

Nathan packed the sound equipment away. Eve thought he was humming, but she couldn’t be sure because the wind whipped the notes away as fast as it brought them to her. She did up the fly on her trousers, straightened out her jumper. Her legs were covered in mud, her new hiking boots smeared with it. She could feel the mud drying and tightening on the skin of her lower back. She had not had sex with anyone before. She was twenty years old and she did not expect it to be with someone like this. Eve wondered how she would feel when she saw Katie. Should she be embarrassed? Had she done something wrong? Surely not, it all felt so small. As though it could have happened or not, and it made little difference that it had. They hadn’t eaten the sandwiches.

‘Ready?’ Nathan hoisted his backpack onto his shoulders, and she did the same with her own. He hesitated, as though he was about to ask her something, and it was that hesitation that made her stride out. Eve took the lead, it was him following her, and she knew that he would be looking at her the whole way back. Looking at the mud smudged down the back of her legs, and thinking whatever it was he thought. As she walked along, she listened to the forest in the way that he had taught her, and above it all she listened to her breathing. She felt as though her lungs were larger, they were reaching a little further into the world, drawing more in.

Eve wonders what Nathan is doing now. It was only a few years since she’d last seen him, neither of them the good people they had wanted to be. One day of short hours, each more disappointing than the last, unable to make up for the years of silence between them. She had let him drive that last day, amazed as always at the way his bulk filled the driver’s seat, his hands, knees, shoulders settling against his torso. She had wanted to feel that initial joy again, holiday free as they zigzagged down through the Otways and along the Great Ocean Road, Eve feeling like she would be flung out across the ocean except for the weight of him tethering them to road. Being with Nathan was like being swung in circles by the kind of father who played games: hands gripped around wrists and body flying weightless and smooth above the lawn as he pivoted. Not wanting it to end because surely hitting the ground would hurt this time, gravity would take hold and demand grazed knees and hips. Is that what she was trying to recapture, coming back here?

Canberra LAB—a mythical biography; or, the art of showing up

2013-04-29T00:00:00Z

We were thinking about the future of our city …

It was the middle of the great financial crisis, but we were still busy at work. Everyone was making at least a little money. Everyone I knew, anyway. Most of us spent our days drafting less-than-ideal buildings, working for one of the three big cats in town. If we had one thing up on our interstate peers, it was full-time employment. But you know how young architects are; they operate on the perennial cocktail of excess enthusiasm, mixed with a lack of opportunity. It was inevitable that we would start to get restless. We were like kids whose parents had dosed them up with sweets to keep them quiet, only then to strap them into a stroller.

Ronny was the first to fidget. He was a natural-born leader and didn’t have to work too hard to sculpt a few of us together into a loose collective. Pro bono, of course. We weren’t sure what we were doing at the time, nor why we were doing it. It was as much about making a noise as anything else. We started writing letters to the newspaper (how archaic) and went to community council meetings, but soon got bored with that. We needed a more appropriate environment in which to communicate, and when everyone around you has a mobility aid, you have probably picked the wrong scene. We worked to our graphical strengths and pasted up some ‘art’ in the laneway downstairs. The Canberra Times came to photograph it. We pasted up a few more pieces in the city, and some TV reporters came to film us. I guess it was a slow news day. Various stunts and festivals followed as did the establishment of the requisite website, <www.canberralab.com>. Conceived over lunchtime coffee, and then executed under the cover of night, our work was last-minute, high impact and largely ill considered.

Looking back at it, I guess what we were doing was a form of sonar. We would throw ideas out into the city and, depending on how they bounced back, they gave us an indication of what to do next. It was a good way to get to know the city and its people.

The Dear Marion project appears around Canberra,
Photograph by Ronan Moss, 2012

It was a young city (I think it turns 100 this year), and there were a lot of young folks about town. The young population, product of numerous universities and a constant influx of graduates working for the government, seemed mismatched to those well-known charms of Canberra: its suitability for raising children, the ease of parking and access to cultural institutions. The city was young in years; young in demography; young at heart? Maybe not …

It seemed that for many people Canberra was just a required professional or educational pit stop on the way to somewhere else. Needless to say there weren’t many young people investing in the city, and with a transient population, it is probably not surprising.

Those who stayed were all taught from a young age about the masterpiece that we had decided to call home; the extraordinary unity of the natural landscape and the urban geometry, framing the perfect hierarchy of civic and institutional buildings. Indeed, one would have been forgiven for thinking that the plan was all there was to Canberra. But the ideal plan, beautiful as it is, was so successful it had become a straightjacket. We always found it somewhat ironic that the ‘plan’, essentially a tool for conceiving a future, had so quickly been claimed as a piece of heritage, and condemned to sterile preservation.

The architects would wander around town and mouth Walter Burley Griffin’s famous words under their breath, gently repeated, and synchronised to their nodding heads like a solemn prayer: ‘I have designed a city like no other, an ideal city.’ But was it ideal? I guess as a group we weren’t convinced.

We were postmodern kids, raised on a healthy diet of multiculturalism and latent pluralist thought. We were sceptical of any notion of the ‘ideal’. And while any belief in the quasi-utopian concept of an ‘ideal city’ as a symbol of federal unity and ambition may have held political traction some time ago, we were savvy enough to realise that that particular argument was no longer in vogue. Physical cities as beacons of collective identity seemed old hat, as demonstrated by the most significant investment in nation building at the time, the national broadband network, which was both digital and buried. More than anything else though, what really sustained our doubt was that Canberra remained an unfinished project. The city was more absence than presence; and we had lived with it for so long that the absence had become part of its identity, somehow part of the plan, and duly defended. One has to understand that Canberra is a dream. It doesn’t exist. It is an ideal unrealised. A half-finished work on the way to becoming a masterpiece.

Not that it was Griffin’s fault. He did the best he could in the circumstances. Blame the bureaucracy at the time; blame capitalism; blame the advent of the motor car. In the end, it doesn’t really matter. All that we knew was that dream of his, that faint, mirrored, watercoloured squeak of a dream … has been holding everyone back since.

So we decided to resurrect Walt (Marion came later). He was the ghost that we chose to inhabit; and Canberra was the skeleton we chose to flesh out … He was the perfect alibi. A straightlaced, handsome young architect, married to the quirky, left-of-centre Marion; they were the quintessential visionary architect couple. They were young, like us; they were dreamers, like us; they were talented, like we thought we were.

They were one of the first power couples in modern architecture. A lot of people take that the wrong way, but their relationship wasn’t just professional. They really loved each other too. Spend a little bit of time with them and you realise pretty quickly that they loved each other, passionately. You can tell from the photos. And like most passionate people, they were easy to love.

Photograph by James Park, 2012

Even after they left, they managed to maintain a strange mystical presence of their own (they say that Marion was into the dark arts), a strange authority over the city. It was their authority that everyone took advantage of. Ever since Walt got kicked out of town, every architect and her draftsman have been justifying their projects under the authority of ‘Griffin’: ‘If you look at the 1913 plan, Griffin was showing that we can …’; ‘Griffin aligned the roads to create it, just like we did …’; ‘Before he left town, Griffin told me …’

I guess we were guilty of exactly the same thing. But where they knew the man as Griffin, we knew him as Walt. He was one of us and we carried him with us wherever we went. At first it was a shock for him to return to the city that he gave life to, but he soon settled down. He was particularly taken with the lake and its reflections at dusk. All the different colours, he said, reminded him of Marion’s dresses.

The Canberra we knew, and the one we saw around us, was not the one he had envisaged. Ideal as his plan might once have been, it no longer was. He was surprisingly pragmatic about it. He would criticise a lot of things in the beginning, but that quickly transformed into an almost constant outpouring of creative energy. Restless with talent, the ideas, schemes and projects poured out of him (we were merely facilitating the process). The stream of ideas for mass transit systems, housing, energy production, furniture and telecommunications seemed unending. He called these schemes his ‘little ideals’. It was curious to watch a man so in tune with the city at work. He had an extraordinary capacity for synthetic thought. Everything was an opportunity. Everything was connected and beautiful. He showed us that Canberra had an incredible capacity to absorb ideas and influences. His creative output bore testament to the integrity of his plan, if not its idealism.

I suspect the thought of Marion kept him going through the tough moments. Maybe she had become his new ideal, that utopia, unattainable by definition, but longed for nonetheless. But that is his story for the telling.

When we met Walt we were much like everyone else: bored, fidgety with itchy feet and our eyes on the horizon. But it was Walt’s revelation of Canberra’s capacity to absorb and to accommodate ‘little ideals’ that to some degree has kept us here. It is true that Canberra is a half-finished canvas, waiting to be completed. You just have to bring your own paint. Or paste, as it turns out.

Note CanberraLAB is the actualisation of a latent desire of a group of young architects and designers to establish a discourse within Canberra’s design community. Through building a platform to critique/discuss/discover Canberra’s built environment, canberralab will foster and encourage an exoteric dialogue between architecture, design and art. canberralab is about understanding Canberra—investigating what it is that works for Canberra, why the city is the way it is, what works, what doesn’t.

Very Happy to Be Here

2013-04-26T00:00:00Z

In times of energy, passion or too much coffee I can tell you why I love Canberra. The rest of the time, I am tired of talking about this place.

I’m asked about it so often: ‘Have you always been here?’ ‘When did you first come?’ ‘How long will you stay?’—questions thrown about as if this weren’t a city at all but a platform on a train line to somewhere else. ‘What is it like,’ they continue, ‘is there a scene?’

Each time I trip up at the implication that Canberra is somehow different or inherently deprived. I struggle not to be defensive, yet the questions are never posed the way you might ask about somewhere you intend to visit, but rather with a scientific curiosity or a concern bordering on pity. I prickle with a mixture of boredom and annoyance, but I give my standard response, explaining, at the risk of disappointing my audience, that I’m not sure Canberra strays that greatly from the mould of any other Australian city.

Treading carefully, without bringing up bike paths, hot-air balloons or lack of traffic, I’m able to assure people that we have all the things here you’d expect to find, everything is in its right place. Of course there is art here, a scene if you like; the same structures, organisations and buildings where they should be, brave things happening behind closed doors. There are galleries and art spaces, big institutions, festivals and DIY. There are professional practitioners, longstanding local favourites, colourful personalities, emerging artists and weekend hobbyists. There are those who see Canberra as a city that had a more exciting past and many who dream of it having a more exciting future. Everybody has ideas, schemes, plans, projects and in a town like this they can probably pull them off. In a town like this, where they say nothing happens, there’s no excuse not to.

But here my enthusiasm begins to flag, because I know that the arts, their communities and various entertainments aren’t what people are really asking about. Their real preoccupation is with the fact that people would choose to live here at all. Certainly, I’ve never heard anyone ask seriously why someone might live in Sydney, or Melbourne, New York, or any other city that meets a vague yet widely accepted standard of cultural prestige. The true question, veiled politely, is why would you remain in Canberra, when you could be living anywhere you liked?

Sometimes people living here are the ones asking these questions most often, as if, although they are physically present, their hearts and minds have already departed for elsewhere. Among Canberrans there is a desire to be acknowledged, a constant need for reassurance, for validation, even from one another. We need to know that here is ‘as good as’, that here is good enough and by association we are too.

Waiting for the sun to set on Mount Stromlo,
photograph by the author, 2011.

But we do okay. I know on the outside it can be ugly here, and I admit that things are hard to find. The city is in a constant state of flux and reinvention while its surface remains ostensibly the same: clean, neat, inoffensive and forever new. The population swells in tides, pulled by promises of employment or study—coming in, going out, coming in again. Great things are done and then forgotten, and the Canberra of old becomes virtually unknown to us here today. The city’s history is rich and strange but rarely spoken of, memories are hard to find and we seem ashamed of growing old. Sometimes this is a blessing, sometimes a curse, starting fresh every time means we relive the same joys but make the same mistakes.

These days I doubt I even have the ability to see the city as it really is. Everything I find so apparent—the beauty, energy and taut promise—is a hologram of experience, slices of picture memories, getting thicker every year so that eventually I won’t be able to recall my first impressions of this place, or what it must be like to a newcomer’s eyes.

I was sixteen when we moved here and those early memories are soft, but I know I thought of it then as I do now: a sort of concrete playground with wide empty roads and too many stars. I had come from Sydney, where everything was on loan, but this was a world I could make my own. A network of hidey-holes for hazy nights, buzzing brains and loose legs weaving through the streets, many sunstruck dull days of suburban youth.

Of course there is art, of course there is music; beer-soaked carpets and graffiti-scrawled walls. There are drinks, dinners, parties. There are weekends up the coast, in the mountains. It’s undeniable; we are happy, and young, with good teeth. Some of us are wondering if it has been better before, in another age. Some of us are saying the best is yet to come. But for now the lights are bright, the years are seamless. The summers are warm and the winters are brilliant. Our lives are crystalline and doubtless. Here I am finally myself. I am inspired, motivated. I am exhausted.

But when I talk about Canberra I don’t want to talk about art and scenes and communities. The things I want to talk about, the reasons I stay and the things that seem to matter are the hardest to explain. I get the strongest sense of this place when life is at its most mundane, when standing at the clothes line hanging out washing in the near dark, searching for stars, slapping mosquitos. When the air is layered pink, blue and orange, smudged with the smoke of fireplaces in the cold and bushfires in the heat; when the grass is dampening rapidly in the breeze, and from all sides the slowing pulse of nightfall in the suburbs can be heard. Dishes clatter, lawnmowers drone, dogs bark at back doors for their dinner. A garage door shuts, a baby howls and boys slap barefoot along the asphalt. The moon slides into the sky—a huge silver dollar shining back at itself from the surface of an artificial lake.

I can’t describe the baking summer wind, sharp with smoke, that peaks the anxiety of all those who remember why that smell matters. A wall of screaming cockatoos, glinting white against an apocalyptic storm front or the high lazy thrum of aircraft drifting above, eyes squinting upwards and wishing to be somewhere else. New buildings rising higher and higher still, playing at being big cities.

It feels irrelevant to talk about currawongs calling before rain. About the moan of trucks’ air-compression breaks bypassing in a still night. The rumble and chunk of bulldozers as another house is put down, the houses we’ve lived in for decades. They’ve all been here longer than anyone intended, weary but disappearing quickly now. It’s hard to imagine what we’ll do without their cold floors, their water-marked ceilings, without Hills hoists tall and alone in back-yard fields of waist-high grass.

I could say that the people here are beautiful and unaffected. Often they come from towns and cities that are smaller still. They get here and stretch out, do great things with eager minds, making the city flush, before being pulled away by the annual tide. Their places are filled by the next young things, more eager and harder working, and so it goes, never stagnating.

The Brindabella ranges surround us like a fortress, a backdrop to the other hills and mountains that hold court above our heads, always watching. Their solemn silhouette framed me and the man who became my husband, as we sat at the lakeside, nestled on the bank with bottles of quickly warming cider in hand. They watched us go walking up Black Mountain in the middle of the night, to the concrete block etched with the names of lovers under the huge groaning tower above, and get lost as we wove our way down, crashing through the bush, laughing and sweating and laughing.

I’ve waited for many mornings on top of this little city, looking down through the fog at the pulsing shimmer of treasured lights below, as if into a teacup held in the palm of a hand. It’s all so perfect, so familiar and beautiful, I can’t imagine it could be any other way. I can’t see how it could be better. And if it is, someplace else, in other cities, I don’t know that I could bear it. This place and every other is only what we’ve made it, the product of all we’ve done, a collection of well-worn trails surrounded by greener grass and more of the same with different names.

From time to time I arrive, in Sydney or in Melbourne, leave the cold neutrality of the airport or bus terminal and step into streets that are dirtier and more humid than I am used to. The crumbling walkways are older than I can imagine. I am very much the stranger, I am sure it shows. I skim over these cities, their bars, clubs, cafés and galleries, taking them in as if through the surface of a very deep, cool lake. I have a good time. I want to go home.

I’m introduced, and among the pleasantries: ‘She’s from Canberra.’ The return expression varies, but most people, out of obligation or true interest, enquire: ‘Oh yeah? What’s it like there?’ before pausing. ‘Is there much happening?’

Every time it’s as though I’m caught out. ‘Oh! It’s really great,’ I rush, then falter. ‘Yeah. I mean … I really love it there. It’s … uh … it’s a city that’s been really good to me …’ trailing off.

‘Oh. Nice.’ And a frown somewhere between disbelief and pity, all interest gone. The conversation moves on. I want to tell them everything. But even if they had the patience, would they believe me? I say something nice about the city we are in, to make them feel good. To make them trust me.

Homeward and flying over, the landscape is patched, warm and dry like an old felt blanket. Great stretches of nothing, skimmed by the shadows of the clouds. Here and there are tiny pockets of activity, slight movement and vibration. I look for my house, the light playing sharply on the tiny cars below.

The Ward is New

2013-04-23T00:00:00Z

A signature and so
I’m through two doors and in
this freshly opened smallish airport

terminal of light
which slants in through clerestories,
a view out to the mountains.

The whole thing’s done with courtyards,
a scattering of smokers,
thoughtful mostly, sometimes talking

softly to themselves.
Mainly it’s communal,
a wary sort of wit.

A Psychiatric Treatment Order
is what my friend has got:
medications, calibrations,

side effects to be withstood,
a restoration, mil by mil.
The rooms are pleasantly en suite,

a motel minus cars.
The staff are friendly, well intentioned,
gentle with their skills

and on the other side of glass.
The patients wave to catch their eye,
dance perhaps or shout a little.

The afternoon is turning drowsy.
The brain’s electro-chemical,
sparking its connections.

What are we but its tuning really?
In three weeks time, or maybe months,
his friends and he will reacquire

a tightrope-walker’s balance.
They’ll be a present to themselves.
It’s all approximate, they know:

the tentative nomenclatures,
the rescue wrought by measurement,
the let’s try this, the let’s try that.

The talking cure is later on
and soft around the edges,
the childhoods now too far away

and slipping into fiction—
or narrowed to the past few weeks:
the shoebox of a family;

the square dance of addiction.
Broken bones or melanoma
would be a lot more simple.

The afternoon is hard to treat
and has no diagnosis.
The architects have done their bit though.

The ward is new and wide with light.

… ployment / Inemploymnt / Unumploymnt

2013-04-18T00:00:00Z

1. Um … um … ployment

(concerning the original ground of the world as the sum total of all objects of experience)

Tattooed from skull to shin, but blank-faced
a man walks, love-hate knuckles tightening
to the retreating sea of secretarial staff
behind the counter, where they try smiling.

He will probably not quite add up, at Employment Plus
the Salvation Army’s drop in / be dropped out
of a country where employment is voluntary,
nor I, three degrees in, ideas all over my face

and none too easy to excise. You can change
your nose more easily than your personality
and I surmise from Liz’s ‘workshop’ that
observant is the wrong one. She is teaching us

networking and how employers value honesty
over skills. She’s already cut the benefits off
two students for speaking
out of their minds.

But not Tattoo Head! I’m not very honest the words roll out of his mouth.
Liz goes blank, he looks scary.
The skill, the only skill,
is to cover up, quite honestly.

So Liz chooses not to hear it
and for that they get paid. Bonuses!
at CEO level, just for wearing purdah
and imposing it.

2. Inemployment

Four people now produce
the food that in the 1930s ate up the labours of seventy-eight
and those four are still paid the same way:
by the day.

Freud never wrote about ‘the ego’ except
through another’s hand and it didn’t fit
his concept at all.

The ego in German is das Ich.
That is simply the I.
I’m going to the shop now
is not my ego is …

The way I mark myself
grammatically
and when we brush past:
The I is first and foremost a bodily I.

Your sense of your own body.
You can get it shopping
which includes buying money with your labour.

Taxpayers are not citizens
but a category
entry into a zombie ledger
(too fucking lazy).
We pay people regardless
of the desirability of their product.
It can only get worse.

This Connected Life

2013-04-15T00:00:00Z

I’m sitting in a room, looking out a perfectly round window. In the distance, there’s Red Hill with its restaurant perched on top. The sky is a gun-metal grey, and the clouds hang low. It could be cold, or it could be humid—it depends how close the rain is. This has been a strange December. The weather can’t make up its mind.

It’s incredibly quiet, just me and my MacBook, curled up on the couch. My thoughts haven’t been this uninterrupted for twelve months. The silence, because I am listening to it, feels loud. I lean into it, mentally, needing it, craving an emphatic absence of stimulus.

For several days I’ve been trying to gather my thoughts for this essay on my year of living connectedly. But the year of living connectedly has taken its toll. I find my mind hard to still. It darts off chasing new stimuli. I’m like one of our cats, the younger one, who is a bit mad. She’s obsessed with chasing light. She darts around chasing reflections, or small insects, but mainly light. If the light doesn’t present itself she’ll sit and yowl for it. The children are now experts at catching the sun with their fork at dinner, or sometimes we get the torch. She’ll leap right up the wall chasing the light. After a while she seems ashamed of the futility of chasing a phantom, and sulks.

It’s very hard to stop and think. I have many plausible excuses for distraction. Must complete those last-minute writing commissions for my newspaper; the columns I still need to file. Preparations I need to make for the federal election next year, which will make the professional demands of this year look miniscule. A trip to Charters Towers chasing Bob Katter. End-of-school. Award nights. Last basketball game for the ten-year-old. Report cards. Shopping. The annual December rush.

But that’s not the primary problem. The fact is I’m burned out, overstimulated. A mind fuse has blown. Yet I’m still chasing the inputs. I keep glancing at my smartphone, even when it’s switched to silent. I can see the subtle vibration each time a new piece of correspondence arrives. Its constancy is implacable. I’m on a travelator and I can’t get off.

Technology is pitching us all headlong into the crowd. An invisible throng mills around us all the time. If you’ve got the devices to plug you into the grid, then connectedness is now the default. Being constantly linked in is now an expectation, not an exception—a profound occupational, social and cultural shift. A social media conversation rolls 24/7. The emails roll 24/7. The news cycle thunders 24/7. Friends, followers, networks.

It’s happened very fast, and I sense there is no going back. This wasn’t something we chose. We didn’t have a conversation about this as a culture and reflect on the pros and cons. The shift has been iterative, we’ve upgraded and experimented and early adopted our way to crowd-dwelling.

We are boiling frogs, chained to our devices, socialised to see relentlessness as the norm. And there’s no turning back.

My year of living connectedly began in my imagination long before it began in practice. My profession, journalism, is in the middle of a profound revolution. Aron Pilhofer, who runs the New York Times Interactive, a collaboration between computer coders and journalists that produces some of the richest data journalism in the world, observed recently this could be a golden age, or end times—none of us really know.¹

That uncertainty is stressful self-evidently, but it is also galvanising. It’s prompted many of us to fight for our craft and to think deeply about ways of renewing it and sustaining it. I thought for much of 2011 about these questions, and about what I could do in my own small way in terms of productive experimentation.

Towards the end of the year I resolved to transit out of daily newspaper journalism to digital. Given I’m a sentimental type, and not a natural geek, this decision was quite emotional. (I’m not a gadget type. I drive a ten-year-old car. I still haven’t bought an iPad. I point-blank refuse to read a book on a Kindle.) But my view was I wanted to reinvent my journalism and do a live blog.²

This was a values-driven decision. I wanted a vehicle that would enable me to have a rolling conversation with an audience. I wanted to experiment with building a digital community. I wanted to wade out into the crowd, because that’s where journalism will renew its mandate: being of the community. I’m absolutely convinced of that. The days when journalists could lecture audiences are over. Technology has smashed the fantasy that one profession can in effect own the national affairs discourse. For me, this is a welcome development.

We need a new interaction with the audience. That doesn’t mean we don’t assert our knowledge, our views, our observations reporting events from the scene. This is a rich bounty we can give readers and viewers: being there first and foremost, and being authoritative—piercing the fog and the clutter.

Journalism, though it be deeply unfashionable, has never been more important, in my view. We shouldn’t wilt when a crowd gathers and concludes we paper tigers of the mainstream media are wrong. Sometimes we are wrong. Sometimes we are not wrong, we just aren’t popular. In any case, digital done well adds lustre and depth to journalism and storytelling.

I knew the live blog project would be intense. Politics moves at warp speed, particularly in this slightly unhinged forty-third parliament, the first minority government at the federal level since the Second World War. Everything is a sprint and a cacophony. Intensity was inevitable. I went out hard right from the start, posting updates on The Pulse Live every ten minutes or so.

‘Pulse very prolific,’ my husband chided gently in my inbox. (Damn straight it’s prolific, I concurred. That’s the point.) I ignored his implicit query about sustainability. There was a safety valve. I would only fire up the blog when parliament sat and on big political days. At that pace I thought it was manageable.

Covering events as they happen requires, I’ve discovered, fierce concentration. You have to be in the moment from start to finish. It’s a whole different way of working for a newspaper journalist, even a newspaper journalist used to filing online throughout the day.

Watch, listen, file. Watch, listen, file. Gather. Listen. Move in and out of the news cycle. Constant input, constant noise. But the hyper-attentiveness requires a stillness that’s possibly a bit like the silence in the eye of a hurricane.

My colleagues in Canberra watched on with bemusement. They laughed at my careening sprints to the bathroom between events. (Bathroom and coffee logistics became a significant preoccupation.) I’m sure they found me and my permanently preoccupied state a pain in the bum. But they also encouraged, aided and abetted—inside my own organisation and out. The community building wasn’t only online; colleagues in Canberra watched, sometimes participated, helped, critiqued. It was an experiment around which a number of us could rally.

It wasn’t only my work habits that were transformed. I moved desks twice in order to give myself the best ergonomic set-up. And there were the screens. Just one at the outset, then two. Then two plus a flat-screen TV. Then the MacBook came out on big days. Then Andrew—my photographer friend and Pulse Live co-conspirator—moved in. Another computer, another laptop, a video camera, all his stills cameras, an iPad mini better to transmit his pictures. Like Cape bloody Canaveral. Or the Starship Enterprise.

The project was gradually finding a house style and a rhythm. We found we could play around with time. We could pause in the moment and do some analysis. We could cut away and cover something that wasn’t main game. We could create on video.

It was always a battle to see who would drive whom, whether I would drive the blog or it me. I think the scorecard was about even. The audience came, particularly on big days, and bought in on the discussion. We fired up the conversation through social media, and created our own hashtag. It felt like we were winning. Journalistically speaking, if this was a battle between living and dying, then maybe we could bugger the doomsayers, and live.

Last year was a torrid year for Australian journalism. Newspaper redundancies took some of our best people. Cost-cutting ripped through commercial television as well. The long year of goodbye broke hearts. We went from writing, sometimes with cavalier brutality, about economic transformation and structural adjustment, to living it. And we just had to keep running, producing, despite the depletion.

Hyper-connectivity delivered me the great gift of Rupert Murdoch on Twitter. Rupert unplugged in 140 characters was magnificent: defiant, crotchety, idiosyncratic. Everything you’d hope for.

Except to me, he sounded lonely: sound bites from a throne room above a landscape of destruction. Staccato orders, breaking up on the wind. That phone hacking disaster in the United Kingdom. The cursed internet ripping into his hegemony. Rupert’s year of being lonely.

Perhaps we are all lonely. Perhaps that’s why we are steadily losing the art of being alone, of being disconnected, because it’s too frightening a concept to let go, to fall back into silence, to fall off the grid.

Rupert might be just periodically wondering where the old certainties went. For the rest of us, we are not only chasing the newest, snazziest technology, the latest upgrade, getting all factional about iPhone versus Android, setting up our personal YouTube channels, playing with the filters on Instagram—or shouting about Instagram selling our personal details—we are creating new ways to live.

Digital connectedness is an interesting type of community: a virtual one; one that condones, and in fact champions, multi-tasking. We can text each other while doing something else. We can tweet while buying a salad bowl from Ikea. A lot of my readers talked to me on the blog while pretending very convincingly to work. The environment tolerates ambivalence and non-commitment.

Digital connectedness is seductive because we have the comfort of the crowd and the knowledge we can keep the crowd at a distance. We are in control of those relationships. We can choose to be anonymous online if we want to. We can construct an identity different from our lived reality. We can throw rocks through windows in the form of abuse, we can reach out to others in community and solidarity, we can campaign against things we don’t approve of with a click of a button. And if we want to, we don’t have to meet anyone, talk to anyone, engage with anyone, empathise with anyone.

We are in the swim and at a distance, both practically and emotionally. It’s a fascinating thing, this connectedness and distance. Coexistent divided realities.

I met William Powers in the winter of 2011. Bill was a friend of my friend Matthew. He came to Canberra promoting his excellent book Hamlet’s BlackBerry. Of course I hadn’t read it when I met him. Who has the time to read a highly accessible piece of scholarship on the downsides of unchecked digital maximalism? Not me, anyway. No doubt I was too busy checking my emails, or tweeting from Ikea.

We had dinner with a couple of political friends I dragged out from their offices, because I thought they could use a turn in the fresh air. It was fresh all right—the air glittered with cold as it does on Canberra winter nights, with the blanket of stars high above and the mist beginning to peel off the frozen earth.

Bill, an American, once fell out of his boat into the ocean off Cape Cod. In the process he drowned his mobile phone. He tells the story in his book—the shock of abrupt disconnection:

Minutes later, heading back across the cove, I noticed something funny. It’s not anything I can see or hear. It’s an inner sensation, a subtle awareness. I’m completely unreachable.

Friends and family can’t reach me. Colleagues and contacts from my work life can’t reach me. Nobody anywhere on the planet can reach me right now, nor can I reach them. They’re out there in the great beyond, and short of Jedi-like telepathy, there’s no way of bridging the distance between us. Just minutes ago, I was embarrassed and angry at myself for drowning my phone.

Now it’s gone and connecting is no longer an option, I like what is happening.

Before I went overboard, I was alone in the boat, in the classic sense of being alone—there was no-one physically with me. But because I had a connective device in my pocket, in another sense I wasn’t alone at all. Everyone in my life was just a few button taps away.

Now I’m alone in a whole new way.³

Hamlet’s BlackBerry is all about setting healthy boundaries around connectedness. As we ate, Bill explained that his family disconnects from the web every weekend in order to prioritise being together. Otherwise how do you nurture your relationships—how do you buy yourself time to think?

I think we were all a little dumbfounded by this, our little party with our BlackBerrys unfurled unapologetically on the table. Particularly my political friends who never switch off, because switching off is not an option. My boss is calling one of them, in the middle of this dinner. They are always on the clock.

Bill is not the type of person who wants to talk endlessly about himself, so we segued off into other shared interests: politics, architecture, the future of journalism.

I read his book a year after our first meeting, around the time he and I met again—of course, on a Google+ Hangout. We laughed about meeting in this way, Bill in his Cape Cod study, me in my office in Canberra. Reunion via that wicked interwebz. (I suspect but don’t know that we might have breached the Powers family weekend disconnect—a true act of friendship for a fellow traveller.)

Bill, a former journalist, was by this point studying the impact of Twitter on the American presidential election campaign, and I wanted his insight for a special edition of the live blog we were doing for Obama versus Romney. So we talked about that, and his Crowdwire project.

Meanwhile, I was discovering wisdom in his published words, mentally rounding off the conversation from a year ago. I realised how far he’d been ahead of me in grasping our present realities. How I had in essence come to much the same view, and would channel it in an essay for Meanjin.

The goal is no longer to be in touch, but to erase the possibility of ever being out of touch. To merge, to live simultaneously with everyone, sharing every moment, every perception, thought, and action via our screens.

Even the places where we used to go to get away from the crowd and the burdens it imposes on us are now connected. The simple act of going out for a walk is completely different today from what it was fifteen years ago. Whether you are walking down a big city street or in the woods outside a country town, if you are carrying a mobile device with you, the global crowd comes along. A walk can still be a very pleasant experience, but it’s a qualitatively different experience, simply because it’s busier.

The air is full of people.⁴

I’m reading this sentence of Bill’s again, locked away, buying myself time to write this essay. Insisting I will write this essay, even though I must prepare to be a guest on a radio show wrapping up the year in politics.

What on earth can I say of this year? (Yes, I’m straying, chasing the moving light again.) The air is full of people. It certainly is.

My best friend in politics hates the live blog, hates social media, thinks hyper-connectivity is just a wind tunnel. This person is like a disembodied conscience, and does not spare me: ‘When are you going to do some actual journalism again?’ (The opening gambit of most of our conversations.) ‘You think you are building an audience. You think they love you? You are all just talking to each other. Have you noticed yet? When are you going to stop, and notice?’

Connectedness is different for different people. Self-evidently, it’s hell for people who crave quiet and stillness. Like thousands of people peering in your window constantly. An abject nightmare of noise and intrusion. No fun for those who find multi-tasking difficult either.

Our children are growing up in this culture of constant connectivity.

At one level, the desire to be constantly connected to one’s peer group is not new. I remember well lobbing home from school, throwing down my school bag and making straight for the telephone. Hours of prattle ensued. What can you possibly have to talk about, my mother wondered, you’ve been with your friends all day. One friend’s mother used to set the oven timer so we didn’t rave on with our self-conscious adolescent emotional dramas all night.

But now technology gives many more options. Now my daughter swings through the door already facedown in her iPod, monitoring Facebook or catching up on a fashion blog she loves. Her phone is bleeping with texts in her other pocket.

This is the distinctive gait of our moment in history—this facedown walk, intent on the palm-sized device. I’ve perfected face down in the device as I sprint through the corridors of Parliament House. It’s a wonder we don’t crash into each other or fall over more often. Perhaps we will in time develop sonar, like bats. (Look around you as you amble today on your lunch break. At least half the people you see are communicating as they walk.)

My son swings through the door, sweaty from his bike ride, and makes a beeline for the computer and the iPad. He fires up Skype and one of his online games, Roblox or Minecraft, jams on his gaming headphones with the built-in microphone, and reconvenes the playground in our family room.

Pulling them away from their screens is hard work. It’s a point of friction. But my kids still read books, like going outside, crave adventures of various sorts. What Bill Powers would call ‘digital maximalism’ is their world. We’ve created it for them. We can hardly blame them when they race to adapt to its language and strictures.

The costs? We don’t know. Not yet. One of my worries about my own professional hyper-connectivity was the impact on my writing. The long-form writing, not the blog posts. Some reporters love reporting. I do too obviously, but what I love most is writing. Writing is who and what I am. I was concerned the frequency of blog posts would addle my writing style—ruin the tempo of a weekly newspaper column I still file for the Age and the Sydney Morning Herald.

The column I wrote for the first weekend after I started the blog was terrible. Like a machine gun. Indiscriminate ratter-tat-tat. I looked at the words on the screen in abject despair. So I’ve had to create distinct segments in my head for writing. One part of the brain for the long-form stuff, another for the live. Two tempos, two different styles.

Perhaps many women do well in digital because they are used to multi-tasking. (There, I’ve said it. I’ve played the gender card, consistent with the soundtrack to national politics in this year.) Women with children run about five different schedules in their heads all the time while seemingly being 100 per cent absorbed in the task at hand. That’s our thing. We are either wired that way or it’s learned behaviour. I don’t pretend to know which.

I also love people. I love conversation. I love bouncing along where I discover one thing after another and don’t worry if sometimes that means I’ve lost where I started. The connected world unfurls like a treasure trove for the curious.

The crowd is a comforting place for me, even if I’m at odds with it, even if it buffets me uncomfortably. The crowd is my milieu. It’s not my source of wisdom. It’s not my raison d’être, it’s not my essential nourishment, but it is where my personality defaults.

Except, of course, when it doesn’t. The thing about saturation living and working and creating is managing it. I think Bill Powers’ thesis of perspective and balance is right more or less—digital maximalism has to be kept in proportion somehow.

It must work for you, not you for it. When I’m not ‘on’ these days, I’m right off. I have news blackouts. I avoid political chat shows (which are mostly macabre anyway). I might skim the weekend newspapers but I rarely read them comprehensively—which is a bit of a sacrifice, because I used to enjoy it. When I’m home alone, I prioritise quiet. If I don’t need the radio, it’s off. I don’t even have on incidental background music any more—I either listen with intent and purpose or I don’t. I prioritise reading, fiction and nonfiction, because it’s immersion requiring sustained concentration. I listen to silence for leisure. You’d be surprised how loud silence is, and how varied and meaningful, if you listen—because in silence you will hear your best thoughts.

I find it intriguing that people are shunning wi-fi connections on aeroplanes. I read somewhere recently that Qantas is canning its in-flight internet service because the passengers don’t want it. That tells you something. Plane rides are natural downtimes where work can get done. But when you get on a plane, you tend to see a lot of people just craving a time to switch off, a time to think and read and regroup and sleep. A time to retreat to the serenity of private thoughts. Planes aren’t social places. They are quiet places. Interesting that we want them to remain thus.

The London nurse who apparently committed suicide after a banal radio prank in December was like a wake-up call for the excesses of our connectedness. That tragedy exposed that gap between being ‘connected’ and being nourished in the sense that humanism nourishes. It exposed the costs of being on the grid—the distortions and dangers and unpredictable consequences associated with modern communication.

It was a human tragedy, and a profound cultural moment. But rather than marking it and learning from it—maybe calling an armistice out of respect—the hyper-connected universe turned it into a circus, with a lynch mob roaming on social media, saturation coverage by the conventional press, a phalanx of talking heads analysing facts that were far from clear.

At moments like that you worry. You wonder if we are losing all proportion; if this is a careening bus driving us all to an extinction of sorts, to that nadir my friend worries about. A place without brain, heart or reason; a place where there is noise and spectacle and no meaning.

Crowds can be purposeful, and they can be brutal.

But ultimately I’m optimistic. I don’t know why, but I am. The connected world is a place of richness and abundance. So much knowledge at our fingertips, filtered and unfiltered. So much potential. There are reasons to doubt, and to worry—but there is also unprecedented opportunity for engagement, for conversation, for community, for enhancement and connection. A golden age or end times. Or both. Or neither.

I think the philosophy I take away from my year of living connectedly is this: reach out, genuinely, and seek rich conversations. They are there. Community is there, knowledge is there, and it’s life affirming.

And when it all gets too much, go for a walk, look up at the stars. Go out into the garden and sit in the sunshine. Entice your kids away from their screens and revel in the kinship and the connection that is not ambivalent, or divided, or contradictory, or capricious. Prioritise the connections that are our essential fabric, our heart and soul, and our reason for being—don’t let them get lost in the crowd.

But before you do that, turn off the phone and pull your cable out of the wall.

From Three Canberra Eclogues

2013-04-11T00:00:00Z

3. Weereewa (aka George)

The lake called George
(or Weereewa, in its native Ngunnawal)
hardly makes a lake at all:
any more than a shaken snow-dome
constitutes a real snowstorm.

And though today the skies are grey,
and the parched soil of the lakebed taunts,
still, through no fault of its own,
no water falls onto the lake
(called Weereewa, or George) at all.

And more than likely none will fall
tomorrow, or this week, or year,
and possibly for five years more.
(It’s El Niño’s or La Niña’s call.)

Meanwhile I will content myself
each time I pass this pleasant space
to take it as the season comes,
and play this landscape as it falls.

Accepting it with gratitude, and grace.
And, whether a sheep-keeping place,
or grass-floored reservoir,
nonetheless by name it will remain:
Lake Weereewa (or George).

And as I roll past the place today
it is scattered sheep on wind-soughed grass.
And no water lies within this space—
this lake or meta-lake,
called George (or Weereewa)—at all.

The Canberra Correspondent

2013-04-10T00:00:00Z

The Hawke–Keating government was on the eve of its historic fourth election victory when I landed in the national capital one airless, hot morning in February 1990, to join the Canberra bureau of the Age. I had applied for and got the position over a couple of other ambitious colleagues, having sharpened my political reporting skills in Brisbane the previous year. I was to cover health, social security, industrial relations and Aboriginal affairs.

In the taxi queue at the airport I met and shared a ride with Bruce Haigh, the Australian diplomat who had instigated Australian embassy contact with the black South African resistance movement while serving there in the late 1970s. We talked about Winnie Mandela. He knew her personally. This early brush with the world of power and global politics offered a thrilling sign of the career excitement ahead. Haigh showed me the lake, the Press Club and Old Parliament House as we whizzed past them in our taxi. At the ride’s end, he gave me his card. Journalists usually milk these chance meetings for all the professional gain they can and I fully intended to. In Canberra the first rule is to make an art form of it. There, more than anywhere else I’d worked, relationships seemed almost completely transactional. People pretended otherwise and it helped if you liked your contacts. But it wasn’t essential. I knew I would have liked getting to know Haigh. But foreign affairs wasn’t my beat and other priorities, less exotic topics, quickly consumed me.

On my first day at work in Canberra, an old Herald and Weekly Times colleague, Gervase Greene, showed me around Parliament House. ‘You’ll cover a few ks in here a day,’ he said as he walked me down the long wide corridors, showing me the ministerial wing and the Senate and Reps chambers. As Laurie Oakes walked towards us, the familiar sideways wobble to his gait, Greene greeted him. When Oakes was out of earshot, Greene said, ‘It’ll take a year before he says hello to you.’ It did. It was nothing personal. Oakes had seen so many young journos come and go it took that long to get on his radar. Oakes was one of ‘the Gods’, as they were called, a small group of the most senior Canberra journalists that also included my new boss, Michelle Grattan, the Australian’s Paul Kelly and the Sydney Morning Herald’s Alan Ramsey.

Members of the Canberra Press Gallery (including the author, front, second on left) departing Cairns on an RAAF Falcon after visiting Aboriginal communities with Labor government minister Robert Tickner,
photographer unknown, 1990

The Age had booked me into an Oakford apartment in Kingston, one of those eighties blocks with a swimming pool the size of a teacup and pastel colours everywhere. I’d stayed there two nights when bureau chief Grattan suggested I move into the spare room at her place in the almost unbelievably named Investigator Street, Red Hill. We’d save the Age money and I—not known then for my love of dogs—could keep hers company while she was away on the election campaign trail on the days when I wasn’t travelling myself. The logician’s stare through her Coke-bottle glasses made it hard to say no, although I did at first, as I mumbled something about not wanting to inconvenience her. Privacy (mine) seemed no excuse. My new friend, Margo Kingston, who worked for the Sydney Morning Herald in the nearby press gallery office, told me I was mad to say no.

‘Are you kidding? Who’d give up the chance to stay with Michelle Grattan? It’ll be fascinating,’ she said. Or words to that effect. On reflection I decided it was a good career move and carted my suitcases over to Grattan’s house soon after. It was a decision I regretted when Grattan woke me up (from a restless, lumpy-single-bed sleep) on Sunday morning to watch the political interview on Nine’s Sunday program. Laurie Oakes was talking to National Party leader Charles Blunt, whose campaign I was to cover. I could have just picked up the transcript later. But Grattan was driven and expected everyone else to be too. The earlier I knew what Blunt had said, the better, in her view. She had a point. There was an election on. But ambitious though I was, I had a personal life. Or wanted one. Grattan’s dogs eyed me with suspicion.

Within days I was flying around the country on an RAAF Falcon with other journos and Blunt on what’s known as ‘The Wombat Trail’—a whistle-stop election campaign tour of rural and regional electorates so named because a wombat ‘eats, roots and leaves’. One day we’d be in Longreach, the next Toowoomba, Maitland, Merimbula or Coolongatta visiting marginal electorates. Fuelled by the National Party’s recent scandal-induced state election rout in Queensland, the press pack was keen to catch Blunt out as a social policy bigot.

‘What would you do if your son was homosexual?’ Margo Kingston asked. Blunt offered little more than to concede he would be disappointed. Being a relative moderate among his more nutty National Party peers, he just wasn’t that interesting. At least not until, even as party leader, he managed to lose his seat at the election.

At night after we’d filed our stories and had dinner, the more gregarious journos would gather in someone’s cheap motel room to drink and smoke joints ahead of a punishing early morning start. People in those days joked about the 100 kilometre rule: the distance you needed to be from home in order to cheat on your partner. Everybody called each other mate. Sometimes mates became bedfellows.

After the election I moved in with the Sydney Morning Herald journalist Pilita Clark, to her rented apartment in Barton, one of a block of units behind the Press Club. A newer wing set between two Tudor-style blocks, it had bright orange laminex in the kitchen, white bagged-brick walls, pale carpet and floor-to-ceiling glass doors that opened on to a balcony. It hadn’t been renovated since it was built in the seventies, something I thought pleasingly unpretentious in a city where even teenagers talked like tertiary graduates and where ambition, it seemed to me, was the only currency that mattered. Clark, who for some reason had a Fairfax company car, drove me out to Freedom to buy cheap furniture, which I learned was standard issue for members of Canberra’s itinerant population of professionals who were rarely home and whose sparse households shared the careless, thrown-together atmosphere of student houses—sunken couches, dirty dishes and unmade beds—except these renters wore shabby suits, carried briefcases and ate expense-account-funded restaurant meals with contacts at 10 pm, their yellow Parliament House ID tags slung around their computer-strained necks. Everyone, journalists and politicians alike, believed in the importance of what they were doing. I wasn’t so sure, although I thrilled to the high-octane company of some of the brightest, most intellectually aggressive women I’d ever met. The press gallery at that time was characterised by its number of talented, unmarried, twenty- and thirty-something women whose energy, ambition and professional talent easily equalled and frequently outpaced those of many of their male colleagues despite the fact that the plum posts were still mostly won by men.

I soon learned that living in Canberra was like being in a fishbowl where everyone observed your personal and professional highs and lows, how disconnected it was from real life and how incestuous it was. And how lonely it could be. Sometimes I’d finish work really late, be buzzing off my brain, having raced to finish several stories before deadline, charged up with the idea of being on page one or three the next day. All I’d want to do was work off that energy before I could go to sleep. And that made me—and a fair few other journos and political staffers—do stuff in those days that people who led so-called normal lives wouldn’t do: stay up late on a Monday night, drink, smoke and maybe even spend the night with someone I’d just met who might or might not be wearing a wedding ring. I was twenty-nine years old. I missed my family.

Canberra was like an expat community, a nice place to bring up the kids with its good schools, wide open spaces and high proportion of professionals. But for those who were not (happily) married with kids, it was a place where people could go off the rails in big and small ways. Parliament House was—still is—full of high-energy, ambitious people thrown together for twelve or fourteen hours a day, sometimes longer. In 1990, these were fertile conditions for the development of practices such as ‘ottering’, a late-night tradition involving drunk journalists throwing themselves face-down from the stairs of a bar.

There are varying accounts on how much of this behaviour still goes on today, especially since they closed the Non-Members bar at Parliament House. I’ve heard people say Canberra’s media population is more stable than it used to be. But in the same breath, they can’t resist telling you the latest gossip. There’s always someone within desk range having an illicit affair.

During my year in Brisbane, I’d broken up with my live-in boyfriend of four years, who was an arts journalist working on another newspaper. In 1989, when I left Melbourne, we’d vowed to maintain our relationship long distance. A few weeks later, when he flew to Brisbane to see me, he said a Melbourne theatre director he’d just interviewed observed Brisbane was ‘a long way to go for a fuck’. We laughed. But it was true. Expensive visits became fewer, phone calls more awkward, our lives more different. Things crumbled. Single and away from home, I embarked on a time of playing as hard as I worked. In the world of politics this was a life shared by many who had the alibis of working hours as long as a piece of string. An unruly colleague was once taken out to lunch by her married boss for an alleged ‘talking to’. It ended with them spending a night in a hotel near Parliament House.

By the time I left Canberra, my extra-curricular close encounters included a prime ministerial adviser; a big-spending, bottom-spanking senior newspaper correspondent; a high-profile, drink-driving, cop-hating barrister; and an Aboriginal rights activist whose macho anger first attracted me but then felt freaky away from work in the middle of the night. I gave little thought to these men’s marital status, which on reflection seems callow. The way I saw it, they were the betrayers. And plenty of others in Canberra were doing it.

My late friend the bon vivant and journalist Robert Haupt—whose sudden death in 1996 at a New York restaurant inspired the mock headline ‘Lunch kills legend’—used to say the best place to cover Canberra is outside it. Canberra is a bubble in which journalists can end up being participants in the political process rather than critical observers of it. The name of ABC television’s Insiders says it all. Gallery journalists, who spend more time on the ground in Canberra than the politicians themselves, can lose touch with the real world and the messiness of daily life as they drive to Parliament House and from it twelve or more hours later each day. And the endless polls—snapshots of public opinion at given moments—influence and distort public opinion more than they reflect it.

These days, my friends and I sometimes lament what we see as the dearth of conviction politicians—people such as Hawke and Keating, Carmen Lawrence, Joan Kirner and John Button, to name a few on the Labor side; and Tim Fischer, Ian Macphee, John Howard and Malcolm Fraser, to name fewer on the conservative side. This is not my list of favourites, although there are some I admire here for their intellect and vision. But these people, to me, stood out because they were more than mere power technocrats obsessed with perpetuating their upward career trajectories and power as an end in itself. Robert Tickner, the Minister for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Affairs in 1990–96, was another. An interview with Tickner getting stuck into mining companies over Aboriginal land rights soon after he became minister was my first big page-one story in Canberra. So I remember him with affection. He remains one of the few politicians I’ve met who appeared to me to have pursued a political career for overwhelmingly altruistic or civic-minded reasons. Some saw him as soft because of it.

In 1990 I flew up to Cape York with Tickner, for an Aboriginal land handback celebration. A couple of journos on the same trip had stayed up drinking all night rather than get up early for the five o’clock departure. I watched them with fascination. Drunk and garrulous on the flight there, they were train-wrecks by midday. This was extreme behaviour, even by my standards. These were the days of the (later banned) corridor parties outside ministerial offices in Parliament House, a rolling cycle of work and play camaraderie that fed into every aspect of journalistic life in Canberra. The Cape York trip was among the more memorable stories I covered during my time in the press gallery. As barefoot Aboriginal kids squealed and jumped in waterholes, we witnessed the ceremonial return of a vast pastoral property to its indigenous owners and later lunched on meat cooked in the ground.

The world of Australian political reporting had already changed a lot by the time I got to Canberra in 1990. Journo mates with longer memories than mine remember their years working from the Old Parliament House, where in 1985 I’d done a brief stint myself in the Age’s shoebox office, which was groaning with old newspapers, files, books and notebooks. Old Parliament House was the home of federal politics in Australia from 1927 until 1988. It’s now the Museum of Australian Democracy, whose mission is to ‘bring the journey of Australian democracy to life—presenting its past, present and possible futures’. There are those who say Australian democracy changed for the worse when it moved house. I think they mean it became more clinical, less ‘of the people’. But new homes always need to be settled into. And these days when I visit, Parliament House doesn’t feel so new any more.

Friends who covered federal politics from the old place say you could smell it when something big was on. The pollies would dart in and out of each other’s offices, staffers would huddle in rabbit-warren corridors that always seemed to be on a slant. And always the journos were somewhere in amongst it, privy to history being made, searching out and frequently getting leaks, which they’d recite down phone lines to copytakers in Melbourne or Sydney or Brisbane or Hobart, in the days before email, internet and mobile phones. People met and exchanged gossip in the Non-Members bar. And, in 1975, the sacked Gough Whitlam famously addressed the Australian people from the steps of Old Parliament House.

The new version, with its beautiful native hardwoods, shiny marble surfaces, perfect lines and ‘democratic’, albeit now security-restricted, grass walkover, is certainly grand and atmospheric. Just walking down its corridors, which echo your every footstep, makes you feel part of something important. The doors to the inside are so heavy there are signs that warn visitors to take care when opening. You’re surrounded every day by security checkpoints, famous artworks, stately oil paintings of former prime ministers, comfortable cushioned seating, ceilings that seem to go on forever capturing every beam of sunlight that shines down. The passing parade inside is of faces you know from television footage, but here they are in the flesh. The outside views are of the Brindabella ranges in the distance, the grass and the curves in the road that encircles Capital Hill, the war memorial. Tourists come from around the world to visit this place. You notice these things when you first come to work in the press gallery. But after a while you cease to.

The gallery is now a fair way from the offices where decisions are made. In the beginning, at the new place, the politicians used to visit the media offices. Paul Keating’s strolls through, as treasurer, were always an event. There’s less of that now. A few of those in opposition might make the effort. But it’s rare for a minister to venture up to the gallery, which gives you an idea of the power dynamics but also of how communications have changed in the last two decades. Who needs to stroll when you can email, text or phone on the run?

Politicians identify certain journalists as onside and call them ‘friendlies’. In the days before mobiles, when everyone used to answer the phones in the newsroom, it was common for political figures and their journo contacts to give each other code names to prevent the relationship being exposed. Now it’s private-number mobile to private-number mobile.

These days people talk of the death of the all-in press conference when anyone bold or brave or bright enough could yell out a question and be reasonably assured of some kind of answer, even if it ended in humiliation for one side or another. Now there are more journalists and fewer all-ins. A distinct breed of ‘celebrity’ political journo has emerged in the last decade or so—talented, camera-conscious, multipurpose media things with careful hair, edgy quips and studied smiles for when the panel-show cameras roll. The press gallery was a more ramshackle lot in my day.

The 24-hour news cycle has led to information overload. Journos are so busy keeping up with every marginal piece of information, transcript or report, there’s less time to sniff out things the powerful would prefer to keep hidden. But even if they did, the public servants in these days of electronic surveillance are too terrified to talk. Calls to individual public servants are pinged straight to ministers’ offices to be answered by gruff, defensive minders and press secretaries.

I had some great highs in Canberra, covered some big stories and broke a few, though never enough. I joined Christmas drinks for the media at the Lodge when Hawke was PM and lived there with Hazel, his daughter and the grandkids. I was at the famous Press Club Christmas dinner on 7 December 1990 where Keating—speaking off the record—famously declared himself the Placido Domingo of Australian politics, whose performances were ‘sometimes great and sometimes not great, but always good’. It was a brilliantly provocative act, given the audience were journos but supposedly bound not to report it. We did, which I sometimes suspect is what Keating intended, although he insisted, still insists, otherwise with flamboyant outrage. The atmosphere that night, and in the days that followed, was electric as his bid to seize the leadership from Hawke gained momentum. Keating’s former speechwriter, Don Watson, wrote of that night in Recollections of a Bleeding Heart, ‘As an impromptu political address it has few equals in Australian history, not only for what it precipitated … but for the pungency of its messages about Australia.’ In what Hawke took as the ultimate insult, Keating said Australia had never had a great political leader. I ran into Grattan in the Press Club toilets after Keating’s bombshell.

‘What did you think?’ she asked.

‘Wild,’ was all I could say.

There were some bloody funny moments during my time there too. Keating once turned up at Ozzie’s café in Parliament House with one of his young daughters, who had a broken arm. ‘Did your father do that?’ asked the (late) veteran Sydney Morning Herald journalist Peter Bowers.

Despite all the excitement, I found it hard to settle into the routine of working in Canberra. An interesting place to spend some time but, for me, it lacked soul, contrasts, layers, age, despite what some see as its resemblance to Washington, DC. Outside Parliament House, the day-to-day living in houses no older than the 1930s smacked of a suburbia I’d always dreaded. I found it suffocating and claustrophobic, both physically and socially. Conversation was inevitably about work. I felt landlocked, isolated and out of my own skin. The architect Walter Burley Griffin’s eponymous lake was designed to give atmospheric relief from the sheep-paddock, desert-like feeling of this most artificial of national capitals. But it only served to depress me, dirty, shallow and unswimmable as it was—my unease heightened when I saw a bloated dead dog floating down it one day.

Whereas Queensland, with its lush subtropical landscape, rambling wooden houses and hilly suburbs, had inspired me as a journalist and enabled me to roam free and run my own race in a one-person bureau, Canberra, with its freezing cold winters, oppressive summers and grinding, sweat-shop parliamentary sittings, depleted me physically and emotionally. I stayed there fifteen months before recurrences of the severe tonsillitis that had landed me in hospital nine years earlier led a doctor to advise me to get out of the place.

‘Go to the Gold Coast and lie in the sun for a while,’ was his advice. At the beginning of 1991, as the NSW state political scene was hotting up, I applied for and got the job heading up the Age’s Sydney bureau. I couldn’t wait to leave Canberra. When Bernard Lagan, a state political reporter for the Sydney Morning Herald, told me he was heading down to Canberra to work, I told him it would take Laurie Oakes a year to say hello to him. It did.

I would have loved to have been in Canberra to cover the rise to power of Australia’s first female prime minister. But I would have had to wait twenty years for that story to break.

Rinse and Repeat

2013-04-05T00:00:00Z

‘Wooah!’ Harriet, tiny, wrinkly, pink, boomed to Gary from the bath. ‘Woaaahhh. Help me. I’m Grandpa Harold. I’m very old and I’m nearly dead.’ Little pruney fingers stretched out towards him, imploring.

‘I need to wash your hair,’ he said. ‘You are not going another day without washed hair.’

‘Noooo!’ Harriet said, reverting to her own voice, and thrusting her head beneath the surface as if she could hide in fifteen centimetres of water. But it was only a matter of time before Grandpa Harold emerged again in her shining limbs, complaining through puckered lips and squinting eyes that his knees were giving him ‘gyp’, whatever that was. Were kids supposed to be so fascinated by old people?

‘Okay,’ Gary said, telegraphing his actions as if approaching a wild animal, ‘I’m reaching for the shampoo. I’m popping the cap thing. I’m pouring it into my hand.’

‘Nooo!’ Harriet screamed again, flapping and splashing. But there was another sound too, the phone ringing. Gary briefly contemplated his wet, shampoo-cupping hands and let it ring. His ex-wife, Kate. used to say that their phone was psychically linked to dripping or dirty hands, whereas Gary had said it was simply programmed to ring all the time.

But Gary’s phone hardly ever rang. Who would be ringing at seven o’clock? Telemarketers? Maybe. His mind went blank for a second and then a name popped up. Hannah? Or maybe his mother calling with another haemorrhoid anecdote from the real Grandpa Harold? He let it ring for a moment.

‘Aren’t you going to answer the phone, Daddy?’ Harriet said, sitting up, water running off and back into the tub.

‘I’ll let it go to the machine,’ he said, unsure whether or not the machine was on.

‘What if it’s Mummy?’

‘It’s not your mother,’ he said, picturing Kate sharing a kayak with her new husband, Tom, both laughing unnaturally, as they crested wave after wave off a beach in far north Queensland. He and Kate had spoken two days ago and she told him she’d be out of contact for a few days as they machete-hacked their way through the Daintree.

‘What if she’s hurt?’ Harriet wheedled, and Gary saw them again, now laughing unnaturally from the jaws of a four-metre crocodile.

‘It’s not your mother,’ he said again, rubbing at a greasy spot on the brown tiles.

‘Aunty Hannah?’

Gary took a sudden step back and almost slipped on the bathroom tiles. How had Harriet got to Hannah so fast? He grabbed at the towel rail and he almost fell again when his hand slid down its length, leaving a snail trail of opalescent shampoo.

‘I doubt it,’ he said, heart skittering. ‘I doubt it very much.’

Gary and Hannah met when they were five years old. Their fathers worked together and Hannah’s family was invited over for tea.

Gary hid in the rumpus room downstairs, in his Star Wars T-shirt and filthy shorts, toes scrunching in the new shag-pile carpet, staring up at the pressed straw ceiling, wondering where on the floor above these new monsters might be treading at any given moment.

Hannah found him, tipped off no doubt. She came skipping down the pine stairs and through the door, fearless, swishing the cotton hems of her yellow polka-dot sun dress.

‘What’s that?’ she said, pointing to the piece of shelving that Gary had suspended between two chairs. On it sat a lone plastic bath turtle.

‘It’s my shop,’ he said, from the other side of the counter.

‘It’s only got one thing in it. You can’t have a shop with just one thing in it.’ She ran upstairs and came back with a small orange purse. Hannah opened it and pulled out a troll doll, all wild hair and scowls, and a white and green wrapped minty. She put these on the shelf on either side of the turtle and stepped back. Gary stared at his new wares in amazement.

Hannah opened her purse again and pulled out a twenty cent piece, stroking the shining platypus with her index finger. ‘Can I buy something?’ she asked.

‘I like Aunty Hannah,’ Harriet said. Gary perched on the edge of the bath, two fingers swishing back and forth in the warm water.

‘She’s cooool,’ Harriet said, and Gary smiled.

‘You like her because she sends enormous expensive presents for your birthday and Christmas.’

And she loves you, Gary thought. She was always insisting he put his daughter on the phone, even back when Harriet could only gurgle or silently nod to Hannah’s questions.

Harriet grinned and clapped her hands underwater.

‘She’s not really your aunty, you know.’ Hannah had insisted on the title over the phone last Christmas Eve and Harriet had agreed when she saw the size of the reindeer-wrapped package that came in the mail.

‘I know she’s not like Aunty Jacquie. Mum said she’s an old fire.’

‘Flame, old flame. And your mother is wrong. And why is your mother even talking about Hannah?’ But he knew why. Hannah was well up on the official list of things that had gone wrong in their marriage: you love her more than me.

‘You were friends at school?’ Harriet asked, holding the flannel over her top lip like a moustache.

‘No. We never went to the same school.’

Gary’s and Hannah’s parents saw each other often enough to enable them to become friends. Neither child could predict when they would meet next: when Gary would be bundled into his parents’ green Toyota and taken to Hannah’s house or when Harriet would be strapped into her parents’ second-hand white Volvo and taken to where Gary’s parents had built their new home. Between meetings their friendship was suspended, too young at first for telephone calls or letters, but taken up again immediately each time, as if without pause.

He would spring from the car and run to where she stood on the verandah and without stopping they would skip to the back garden where she would show him the new goldfish or her initials carved into a maple tree or a hole she had half-filled with colourful stones.

They remained friends as teenagers, at different high schools, in different quadrants of Adelaide, still dependent on parents to meet but now having some influence on the social schedule. Around this time, Gary began to yearn for Hannah. Nightly he pictured her, in every one of her outfits, the faded jeans, the tartan skirt, the red dress that he knew had some kind of long name but that he knew only as the red dress.

He tried to imagine her removing those outfits, to expose more of her browning skin and swelling curves but somehow his imagination let him down, supplying flat pictures that fell well short of the intoxicating original.

She talked of other boys sometimes when they met, now walking together to the local shops or sitting somewhere, far from their parents, chatting and pretending to like coffee. She never seemed to see him in that light, as a boy, only as Gary, a class all by himself, so he was never sure how to lean in for that closed-eye kiss he often dreamed of.

‘Ooooh, maybe I should marry Hannah,’ boomed Harriet as ancient Harold. ‘Pretty young thing like that.’ She slumped back in the bath and began to groan again. ‘His’ tummy was giving him gyp. The phrase ‘pretty young thing’ had arrived courtesy of Kate’s husband Tom, apparently. Harriet said he often said it to both her and Kate. Gary wondered if he could insinuate that Tom was creepy, with tendencies that would have to be watched. It would be a fearsome shot across Kate’s bow. Or it would be until she rolled her eyes and shook her head and told him to stop being a dick.

‘Did you ever marry Hannah?’ Harriet was back as herself, sitting up and peering at him intently.

The phone rang again. Christ. He ran down the hallway and switched the answering machine on but the caller rang off. A minute later, from somewhere in his bedroom, his mobile phone chirruped. He hunted for it, grabbed it and held its glass face against his stomach and came back to his spot on the edge of the bath.

‘Did you ever marry Hannah?’ Harriet asked again.

They did sleep together at university. Once. They were drunk, though he was not as drunk as he pretended. He had reached for her the next morning, hoping that a new intimacy had been established that would endure in the daylight. She sprang out of bed to throw up. She said the throwing up and his touch were not in any way related but he wasn’t so sure.

It was awkward when she stood up from the flushing toilet, dabbing at her lips, red-eyed and weeping. Gary feared that there would be nothing but awkwardness now, that it would swell and occupy every space between them. But it too passed, in a month or so.

‘I just don’t see you in that way, Gary,’ she said. ‘What we have is better than that.’

He nodded, withering inside. He could imagine nothing better than that.

After he graduated, a year after her, they spoke excitedly of the amazing things they would do as grown-ups: acting, writing, painting, combating injustice, setting the world on fire with their talent and their determination.

He got a job first as she drifted from place to place, trying things out. A cushy gig in a university library, the same one he had floated in and out of for four years. Good money, decent boss, duties if not actually enjoyable then at least not taxing. A good place to start while he waited to do something remarkable.

‘You’re so lucky,’ she said. ‘I can’t seem to find anything.’

‘You’ll find a job soon,’ Gary said, meaning every word. ‘Who wouldn’t employ you? You’re terrific.’

‘I’m unemployable,’ she said, but she was wrong.

‘Bloomin’ mobile phones,’ Harriet yelled, frowning and pointing at the small black shape which Gary clutched to his chest. ‘Ruin everything with their bloomin’ noise. What’s wrong with a proper phone?’ Her one day a week with her grandparents seemed to have equipped Harriet with an age-inappropriate view on every conceivable subject.

‘I still haven’t washed your hair,’ Gary said, sending her back beneath the surface again. ‘Come on! We don’t have all night.’

He grabbed her wrist and pulled her up. ‘Hair, now!’ She wailed and began to cry. Gary let go and closed his eyes briefly, feeling the tiny bulk of the phone against his ribs.

‘Please,’ he said, ‘please.’

She shook her head. ‘Is there a message from Hannah?’ she said.

Gary flashed his eyes across the small screen, long enough to take in a name starting and ending in H and that the message was about two lines long.

‘Yes, it’s from Hannah.’

‘What does it say?’ Harriet said, beaming. Slowly, Gary lifted the screen to his eyes, feeling his chest rattle around his heart.

‘Um. It goes: “Gary. Where are you. Was hoping this was one of your nights with Harriet. Call me. Have fabulous news.” ’

Harriet’s face opened like a flower. ‘Call her! What’s the news? Maybe she’s coming here? Maybe she’ll bring something for me.’

Gary tried to work out what time it was in Chicago. Either very late or very early. An hour reserved for sleeping or big news.

‘I can’t,’ he said, ‘it’s too late. The message will go through to voicemail or something. She’ll already be off doing something else. She’s very busy.’

Gary had spent whole days pushing his reshelving cart, pondering the bizarre cosmic pinball that had seen Hannah pinged from place to place, from success to success, each time the bell ringing more loudly, the points racking up and up. She had finally left Adelaide, ‘desperate’ for work and landed in Melbourne. There she’d gone from a fancy café in Carlton that had seemingly hired her for her good looks to a small publishing firm to part ownership of an artisanal bakery—paid for how?—to an anti–sexual trafficking charity in Bangkok to Elle magazine in Paris. Stints working at the London Futures Exchange and the United Nations in New York had followed before she settled in Chicago with the merchant-banking love of her life and a more steady career as a part-time conceptual artist, part-time restaurant critic and part-time something else. He wasn’t sure.

He once asked her how she did it, like a glittering golden frog hopping from lilypad to shining lilypad, and she laughed and said she didn’t know, she just grabbed opportunities. Gary didn’t know either.

She still phoned him regularly, still thrilled him when he picked up the phone and she shouted ‘Gary!’, though his ex-wife had liked it less. He had tried phoning Hannah a few times, but he never managed to find her and he felt small leaving a message, imagining the height of the Chicago skyline.

Only once had he persevered, when Kate’s belly had begun to swell and they could be sure it was really happening. He had called four times, each time ringing off when the answering machine kicked in. The fifth time he had caught her, a distracted hello as she talked to other people in the room.

‘Hannah?’ he said quickly, afraid that she would tell him she would need to call him back, ‘I’ve got news.’

‘Gary,’ she said, before he heard her muffled voice again, saying something with the receiver covered.

‘We’re having a baby! Kate and I are pregnant,’ he said, cutting off his desire to keep talking, to ramble: well, Kate is pregnant, I’m just …

‘That’s such fantastic news, such great news! I’m so happy,’ she said, then she had shouted to the room, ‘Gary’s having a baby.’ He had no idea who was there and what interest they might have in his reproducing but then she had taken the phone to a quieter room and told him again and again how happy she was for him, envious even.

He couldn’t stop smiling when he hung the phone up forty-five minutes later, having been the one to wind up a call to Hannah for the first time he could remember. Kate had wandered by, hefting a load of washing.

‘Told her, did you?’

‘No. No. I don’t want it. I don’t want it!’ Harriet shouted as Gary stood over her with the jug of water. ‘It hurts my eyes. I’ll do it myself. In the bath. See.’

She flopped backwards in the water and, screwing up her face tightly, lowered her head until the bath water washed gently at her crown. He could see little refugee bubbles clinging to strands of her hair. He sighed.

‘You don’t get your head all the way under. There’s still soap in your hair. Anyway, the bath water is full of soap. It needs to be rinsed with clean water.’

‘But the water in the bath is clean. It’s all soapy. How can it be dirty when it’s all soapy?’ Harriet began to cry. Gary chewed his lip, still holding the jug suspended over her.

‘Not dirty but not … clean.’ Should he distract her and then just dump it on her head and deal with an angry girl with clean hair later?

The phone rang. ‘Bloody hell.’ Gary shouted and stomped down the hallway. ‘Bloody phone.’

‘Bloomin’ phone,’ Harriet shouted behind him. Gary stopped and stared at it, beige plastic unmoving as it shrilled at him. His hand reached for it, wavered, paused. The answering machine clicked on.

‘Oh God, Gary, I’m just bursting, bursting with the good news. I’m so bursting I’m going to have to tell your answering machine. Where are you? I wanted so much to talk to you but I can’t find you. I thought you’d be there. All right, here it is. Call me as soon as you get this. Okay, here it is. Paul and I are having a baby. And not just one baby. Three! Can you believe it. We’re having triplets! That’s IVF for you, like buses, you wait and you wait and then three come all at one. I’m sorry. I’ve been telling that joke all day. Triplets! Imagine all the joy and wonder and beauty of Harriet times three. Unbelievable. Okay, I’ve got to go. Paul is gesturing violently from a lift he’s holding open for me. Gotta go. Call me on my mobile, I’ll be in Vancouver. Bye. Love you. Love to Harriet. Bye.’

Gary listened to the machine beep and click and whirr and heard a sound behind him. He spun around. Harriet stood on the carpet, looking up at him, a towel clutched around her like a flannel toga, water dripping off her legs and pooling in the carpet. Behind her, a line of dark footprints tracked her progress down the hallway.

‘What’s wrong, Daddy, what’s wrong?’

Combat Ready Mother

2013-04-02T00:00:00Z

His clothes had that look
of a wool-rich bulletproof-vest weave
his eyes seemed flexible
and glanced off surfaces
to rest within themselves.

As he walked his clothes
radiated fibre chemistry,
nanotechnology and performance textiles.

He was a classic modern man
built, buffed and clothed
to perfection

His mobile message said Hi,
You’ve reached Ben Johnston,
Australian Federal Police,
Close Personal Protection.
Please leave a message.

At times his grandmother rang it
To hear his voice and because
She liked the message.

Off duty, visiting his mother
For Floriade, he pushed the stroller
With his two-year-old
And enjoyed the sun on his face
But remained observant.

When his mother started
To step off the kerb
He pulled back from the traffic,
A thing he had done with ease
Since he was five years old,
‘Combat ready, mother,’ he said.

Me and My Country, Where to Now?

2013-03-28T00:00:00Z

Heather Taylor Johnson: When the mini-series based on your novel The Slap was screening, it seemed that everywhere I went people were talking about it. If it was so pervasive in my life it must have been almost intrusive in yours. How did you react to an interpretation of your work produced in a completely different medium?

Christos Tsiolkas: I think it helps that cinema is one of my great loves, by which I mean that I have a distinct sense of how different the medium of the moving image is to written fiction. Though of course cinema and television allow for a sense of intimacy, it isn’t analogous to the reading experience. A reader, in the main, reads alone. You may then discuss shared experiences of a book with other readers. But in the cinema, in front of the television, we are not always alone and that sense of a shared real-time experience means that a film, a television series, is owned culturally and immediately in a way that is different to a book. It means the work enters the popular culture immediately. Having a sense of that allowed me to prepare for the screenings.

I would be dishonest if I didn’t admit to a great sense of trepidation before the screening of the series. Of course, intellectually I knew that it was not my work, that it belonged to the writers, directors, actors, filmmakers and technicians who had translated and transformed the story for another medium, but as the originator of the story I felt that I too would be scrutinised. That is an inevitable part of the writing process (and one of the hardest): the catching of breath and allowing a work to be analysed, criticised and taken apart by critics, readers, viewers. So, as in any critical reception, I have to deal with the unsettling and not always admirable tension of ego, paranoia and narcissism.

I felt a certain responsibility with the screening of the series, a hope that whatever criticism people had of it, that it would be understood as an authentic voice of contemporary, multicultural urban Australia. I share the frustration of so many people of immigrant heritage in this country who have rarely seen their lives portrayed with any complexity or realism on the Australian screen. I also know that there would be people of that experience and that heritage who either don’t read fiction or can’t read fiction in English and for whom the moving-image media are the only source for story and representation. I wanted people to be angry, frustrated, enraged by The Slap, but I also wanted their arguments with it to be based on an appreciation that the representations were neither patronising nor sentimental. My own view is that the series succeeded in doing that.

The first two episodes were screened at the Melbourne International Film Festival and I attended that screening. I was so bloody nervous! But it meant that I saw how engaged and responsive the audience were to the material. People couldn’t stop coming up to me afterwards, telling me how excited they were to see ‘real life’—their lives—on screen. It meant that when the series eventually screened I could relax a little, enjoy the responses.

But I did take my partner up to far north Queensland that first fortnight that it screened on television; I wanted to disappear a little. And in part that is because I don’t want to take any undue credit. I mean that sincerely. I can’t believe my fortune at the talented, intelligent and committed people involved in translating the book into a series. When it works, when an adaptation is successful, you have to accept that the work can no longer cleanly belong to you. I think that is in part due to how certain actors come to possess a part, how their charisma works. The Slap adaptation was so full of great performances that I feel no regret or ambivalence about this. Anouk belongs to Essie Davies now as much as she belongs to me, Harry belongs to Alex Dimitriades. Envy is the most dangerous and insidious sin for any artist. It is such a pleasure to be able to look at those actors and not feel any envy, just joy in the fire they breathed into those characters.

HTJ: Like The Slap, Loaded was also adapted for the screen, and made into a feature film. I imagine that getting an offer to turn your first novel into a film was significant for you. How did that recognition affect you as a young writer, and how did that experience differ with The Slap, written more than a decade later?

CT: What the screen adaptation of Loaded gave me was a practical knowledge of how the film industry worked. I have been immersed in film all my life, first as a fan, then as a critic and always as a cinephile. I don’t want to take any undue credit: the film, Head On, belongs to writer–director Ana Kokkinos, to writer Andrew Bovell and to everyone involved in the making of it. It doesn’t belong to me. But everyone was very generous in allowing me to have input and to observe from the sidelines how a feature film is made. That knowledge is invaluable. But in some ways it is also a bittersweet knowledge. I had dreamt for a long time of being a film director but I don’t know if I have the acumen and required skills to be an effective director. I remember watching Fellini’s 8½ again after Head On. The first time I had seen the film in my youth I didn’t quite understand it, and I certainly did not understand the metaphor of the circus ringleader that is at the heart of Fellini’s film.

After Head On it made complete sense. So in many ways that experience confirmed for me that my vocation, my work, was as a writer. I think filmmaking requires a certain ruthlessness that I don’t think I have. I can be ruthless with myself as a writer but I don’t know if I would have the requisite energy to be ruthless with the thousand and one collaborators involved in making a feature film.

The second and most important thing that came out of the experience of Head On was meeting Andrew Bovell, the scriptwriter, and meeting the actor Eugenia Fragos. Andrew and Eugenia introduced me to theatre and it was through Andrew that I was invited to work on my first play, the collaboration Who’s Afraid of the Working Class? that was produced by the Melbourne Workers Theatre in the late 1990s. It remains one of the most treasured working experiences in my life and I have continued to work with Andrew, Eugenia, Patricia Cornelius, Melissa Reeves, composer Irine Vela and director Julian Meyrick. I came late to theatre and drama and I still feel a novice in that world, theatre writing does not come naturally to me. But what I discovered in working for theatre was the transformative power of performance: I fall easily in love with actors.

While Head On was being filmed I had already begun work on my second novel, The Jesus Man. It was a difficult novel to write. I was still finding my way, still discovering, exploring, confronting the craft of writing. That meant that I could separate myself a little from the media attention that is an inevitable part of releasing and promoting a film. At that time my partner, Wayne van der Stelt, who had been unemployed for many years during that difficult period of economic recession in the early and mid 1990s, was employed in Canberra and we went up there to live. I think I will always feel a certain gratitude to that city because even though it is the nation’s capital, it is distant from both Sydney and Melbourne and allows one to ‘disappear’ in a way that is not possible in the metropolis.

This is not a criticism of the experience of Head On. I think it is a bold, terrific film and I am proud of it. But film is a much more popular medium than fiction, and the glare of the spotlight is something that creates much anxiety for me. I felt dishonest taking credit for the film given that it belonged to the filmmakers, not to myself. Canberra gave me that space to concentrate on what was most important for me: my relationship and my writing. That is where the sense of gratitude to that city comes from. It also gave me the opportunity to collaborate in theatre with some terrific individuals, such as Roland Manderson and David Branson—one of the most inspiring collaborators I have ever worked with, a huge joyous, generous personality who died far too young.

From Head On right through to the adaptation of The Slap I have realised how important it is to find a space that secludes you from the white noise, the din of public scrutiny. Though it didn’t seem so at the time, the commercial failure and mixed critical reception of The Jesus Man proved to be, I think, the making of me as a writer. Having had success with Loaded, having it made into a film, I think my ego had started to believe the hype. That is a dangerous position for anyone to be in. There was a very dark period where I wanted to give up writing but of course that was part of licking my wounds, understanding that failure is an inevitable part of the vocation I had chosen. What I did instead was start work immediately on Dead Europe, a novel that took me seven years to write. And what I discovered was that through the very process of writing I was exorcising my demons and my ghosts. I realised that I would be writing for the rest of my life, regardless of whether or not I ever experienced another ‘success’.

There are two other points I need to make regarding Head On. I learnt from that experience how film, the moving image, is the truly popular art, that many people who could not or would never read Loaded could engage with the film. That was true for my very family. I think the film is important for being one of the first works to place the second-generation migrant experience at the very centre of its narrative and its aesthetics. That is so very important. As a fan of film, Head On was the film I was waiting to see on screen.

And my next point is about performance again. Just as Harry from The Slap belongs to Alex Dimitriades as much as he belongs to me, the same goes for Loaded’s Ari. He is Alex’s now, and Johnny/Toula belongs to Paul Capsis. And once again there is no envy there, there are no misgivings or regrets. I love those two men and their performances remain some of the best work ever committed to the Australian screen.

HTJ: Sex is excessive and greedy in much of your writing—not just something that happens to your characters, but something that shapes them. Can you talk about the decisions you’ve made in creating characters so dependent upon sex?

CT: I lived my adolescence and my youth at the twilight of a period in Western culture where the homosexual/lesbian/trannie/queer was ceasing to be a ‘sexual outlaw’ and was becoming a ‘minority’, a subject of democratic citizenship. Also, as a child of Balkan peasants who had migrated to the other end of the world after the tragic upheavals of the mid-twentieth century—in my parents’ case, the Second World War, the Greek Civil War—I grew up in a patriarchal order where sexual difference was only defined as abject and ‘other’. This only confirmed that I was an outsider. So from a very young age I was drawn to fiction, film and art that spoke from the position of the outsider. That work did not necessarily need to be queer, though much of it was: Pier Paolo Pasolini, Jean Genet, John Rechy, André Gide. It included work from the United States, those mid-twentieth-century writers like Norman Mailer, Philip Roth, Carson McCullers, Ralph Ellison and Jack Kerouac; European writers such as Albert Camus, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Heinrich Böll, Monique Wittig; the Japanese writer Mishima. The outsider, the existential struggle of self-transformation, is central to the work of all these writers. Often this struggle is expressed through the body and through sexuality. I could not help but be influenced by such work; I still write in their shadows.

I also entered my youth influenced by the politics of feminism, of racial civil rights and of sexual liberation. Just as important, if not more so, was my discovery of communist politics. From the outset I was confronted by the contradictions between all these forms of politics. At first I wanted to reconcile Marxism with the liberationist politics of feminism, sexual politics and what I guess is post-colonial politics. I failed in that project, in that feminism and queer are underpinned by bourgeois understandings of selfhood and identity. That doesn’t undermine the importance of feminism and queer in my life and in my work; I think that one of the drives I have in my writing is to express the complexity and violence of this tension. It means that though gender and sexuality are among the themes and ideas I explore in all my work, I can’t give myself over to a liberationist idea that the transformation of the individual can resolve these tensions and contradictions. Ari in Loaded is a direct expression of this. Tommy in The Jesus Man is for me an exploration of how class, economics and money undermine the utopias of feminism and queer.

Why have I chosen sex as the arena for this exploration? It is a good question and I am not sure that I can give you a straightforward answer. Part of it is because I believe that sexuality and the body constantly undermine our attempts at mastery and transformation. I think it one of the great mistakes of all identity politics that they can sometimes forbid or censor contradiction, that is, what the right-wing critics call ‘political correctness’. If misogyny, racism and homophobia are real—and I believe they are—we cannot pretend that they are forms of hatred or violence that don’t inform each and every one of us. The repression of this understanding becomes manifest in our masochism, in our sadism, in our intolerance, and in our desire to punish and to silence. It is in sex that we play out and reveal the extent of our immersion in such hatreds.

But it is not only sex. The other subject that I keep returning to in my work is the family. And that too is a subject that haunts progressive and identity politics. I was always a bad feminist, a bad queer, a bad Marxist because I retained a faith in family—not necessarily the traditional, biological family, but the idea of family nevertheless.

Loaded, The Jesus Man and Dead Europe: I see them as a trilogy in hindsight, three works that map out my attempt to come to grips with the failure I spoke of above, the failure of reconciling liberation and the body, of reconciling the individual and class. The three novels are also linked because I wrote them in the wake of the collapse of communism. With that collapse came a collapse of the very idea of liberation. I know that this is not a popular view at all but it is something I believe animates my writing. I think that the entitled, narcissistic bourgeois subject at the heart of the neo-liberal globalised world is an infection, a virus. It is a subject and a politics that wants to force everyone to become a mirror of itself, to force everyone to be the ‘same’, to desire the ‘same’, to live the ‘same’, to believe the ‘same’.

The politics of antiracism is not exactly analogous to feminism and queer. That is because class and race, through the history of imperialism and neo-colonialism, are intertwined in a way that is not true for other forms of liberationist politics. What I am about to say is a generalisation and so like all other generalisations of course there are exceptions, but that is why I believe that so much Anglophone and European contemporary literature is moribund and lifeless at the moment. The writing that animates, that is electric and alive, tends to come from outside the Anglo-European centre. How can anyone bear to read yet another book where the central character is an academic working in some US or European university? What more have we got to learn from such people?

HTJ: Were you surprised that Dead Europe won the Age fiction award?

CT: Every award is a surprise, every nomination is unsettling because it stirs those dangerous and ungenerous emotions of envy, of jealousy and narcissism. It is a constant challenge to see clearly one’s own gloating or spite and to swallow it, to not give oneself over to the pleasure of unkindness or cruelty. Of course, it is wonderful to win, and of course, it is gutting to lose.

So, yes, I was surprised at Dead Europe winning the award but not because of the novel it is. It is possible that Australians are less frightened/appalled by that novel than are Europeans, for example, because growing up in a country built on violent and unconscionable dispossession, in a country whose very constitution was as a ‘white Australia’, any of us who are thinking, engaged beings have to deal with that legacy and reality of racism. The racism at the heart of the book is possibly less confronting because we know it as the real of our day-to-day lives, of our very constitution as Australian subjects.

It was interesting to be in Europe just recently. The economic crisis has resulted in a crisis in the very understanding of what it means to be European. It is obvious in a place such as Greece but also in the ‘successful’ Europe of Germany and Britain. What bemuses me is how in all the questioning of what it means to be ‘European’ there seemed to be a blind spot to the legacy of colonial and imperial history, as if the ledger has been settled and that history is dead. It infuriated me. Wayne said to me, I think you have to write another book and call it ‘Even Deader Europe’. I think I should just call it ‘Brain-dead Europe’.

HTJ: Critics loved to use the word ‘controversial’ in describing The Slap (though in my opinion the level of controversy in it, compared to your other books, feels most controlled). Do you have a sense of yourself as a controversial writer?

CT: May I cheekily suggest that I read, view and experience more widely than most critics?

[Tsiolkas returned to this question after a two-month interval.] Looking back at that answer I think it comes across as more arrogant than cheeky. I don’t believe I have the right to claim a wider reading or experience than ‘most critics’. My initial response arose from a certain frustration I have about the use of terms such as ‘controversial’. Maybe a more productive answer would be to differentiate between an authentic controversy and one that is artificial, such as controversy generated by celebrity culture. Real controversy, a work of the imagination that creates mixed emotions, generates conflicted reception from an audience, is important. I’d like to defend such a notion of controversy, claim for it an important role in cultural production as it keeps us both as writers and as readers on our toes, makes us work. I think such authentic controversy is worth defending. Such work can’t be neatly summarised and critical reception of it can’t be slotted easily into a ‘one to five star’ ranking.

I am thinking of books such as American Psycho, Lars Von Trier’s film Breaking the Waves, works that upset a reader, confront a reader, pose questions. Our responses to such work can be visceral and, initially, highly antagonistic. I remember the first time I saw Breaking the Waves and having a discussion with my friends afterwards that lasted for hours. Was it misogynist or a devastatingly honest account of masochism? Is the final religiously transcendent image from that film something to honour or something to question? I want to be unsettled by a work of art, I want my certainties challenged.

Do I set out to be controversial? I don’t think of it as a question during the writing process but to some extent I am aware that I want to pose questions that are unsettling or troubling. The risk you run in being deliberately controversial is indulgence: the danger of creating destructive or obscene or nihilistic characters and situations that are more prurient than they are insightful. I sometimes fear wallowing in the abject. You have to be intellectually rigorous with such work and sometimes I worry I might not have been as intelligent as I’d like to believe I am. Nevertheless, I’d rather risk controversy than tameness.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently, I think because I am an artist who identifies as left and who is committed to a left-wing progressive politics. But I am becoming more and more aware how a certain language arising from identity and sexual politics, one emerging from a history of civil rights and human rights struggles, is in danger of becoming censorship and self-surveillance. It is a language of moral absolutes and I think it may be having a pernicious effect on much of contemporary writing. I am struggling with these ideas so I can’t pretend any great insights and certainly no conclusions, but much of the contemporary literature I am reading annoys me with its smug certainty. The writers are not the only ones at fault here, so are the readers. It could be that the digital age has accelerated this tendency or at least made it more obvious. I have given up reading blogs because so many people are dismissing work because they ‘don’t like the characters’ or because the resolution of a book is not neat, is not easy. We are reading for confirmation of ourselves rather than to challenge ourselves and I think that is a real danger.

HTJ: You’ve written from the point of view of many adolescents in the genre of literary fiction. Have you ever thought about writing a young adult book?

CT: I want to believe that if a work is strong enough to communicate something authentic and challenging and true to a reader, notions of niche and marketing become unimportant. When I was an adolescent the works that spoke most urgently to me were not ‘young adult’, they were just literature. I am thinking of the Dostoevsky of The Possessed and of Crime and Punishment, Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye and his short stories, McCullers’ The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint and Gide’s The Counterfeiters. These works inspired me in part because they mapped a consciousness of adolescence and youth that spoke so strongly of my own experience, but they also showed me how to read beyond my own experience, to begin that great lifelong activity of empathy and understanding that I still believe is one of the most important gifts of art.

Yet I am very aware that I am now a writer in his middle age. I believe that there are emotions, experiences and desires that are universal. But I also believe in history, and an eighteen-year-old in 2013 is not identical to the eighteen-year-old I was in 1983. There are young voices and artists emerging now who speak to a truth of the world that I am not privy to. Every time I speak publicly now I am aware that there will be young people who want to shout, For fuck’s sake, Tsiolkas, just shut up! I won’t, that’s my right, but it is also their right to want to express their dissatisfaction with the world of imagination that my generation has created.

I am surprised by how solitary the experience of ‘middle age’ is. I don’t yet have the confidence to believe that I have honed my craft, that I can answer adequately the question of why I write. That exploration is still ahead of me but it does seem at this moment that the most important thing to do is block my ears from the siren call of ‘relevance’. For the first time I understand the desire to go to my shed and tinker, to shut out the noise of the computer and the television. I hope an adolescent reader finds something to admire or respect in my writing. But if they do find it irrelevant to their world I have to cop that criticism. Just grant me the shed to tinker away in.

HTJ: What makes you angry about Australia’s political agenda, and are we doing anything right?

CT: It is sometimes useful for us Australians to remind ourselves that this country is both an island and a continent. It is easy to forget the former as the landscape and terrain of this nation is so vast, and the small size of our population obscures the significance of the latter. I want to make sure that in answering your question I don’t confuse what frustrates me about my country with what angers me about the nation. I get frustrated with our parochialism, for example, but I do wonder if the lack of physical borders with other countries isolates us from the frictions and tensions that arise from being ‘neighbours’. Australia’s political apathy also frustrates me, but again, I wonder if geography doesn’t play a part in that as well.

It may sound like an outmoded observation in the digital age but I think geography still matters. I have been very aware recently, with illness in the family, of how I don’t want to stray away from this continent, especially to Europe, which increasingly seems the other end of the world. My partner, Wayne, observed recently after we returned from a trip to South East Asia how the world is vertical not horizontal. He meant by that, one of the joys of travelling to east Asia for an Australian is we don’t experience jetlag. The older my body gets the more distance impacts on me physically. And so there you have it: age, illness, the organic decay of the body, it all reveals the lie of the cosmopolitan digital future.

So it frustrates me that Australia is isolated but I think it suspect to build a political judgement on frustration. Anger is a different matter. The things I think are worth getting angry about with my country are not accidents of geography but political choices we have made as a people and as a nation.

Racism angers me. And this is where understanding ourselves as a continent is important, that Australia is a land with a history that predates colonial conquest. I am angry—and disappointed—that we are not yet a republic. I am angry that we have not yet found a way to reconciliation between settler Australians and indigenous Australians. I see both these things as related, that until we can acknowledge our colonial history as something that can be transformed and overcome, we will not be able to transform and overcome the history of racism in this country. Too often the legacy of Australia’s racist history gets confused with the question of the Australian character. Racism isn’t a particularly Australian trait and too often—I have been guilty of this myself—we reduce it a question of character and psychology that means that we can’t do the hard work of transformation. I happen to like Australian multiculturalism, for example, but I think the question of New World diverse national identity can be separated from the ongoing injustice of Aboriginal dispossession. We are scared of our history and we run away from it; that also angers me.

We are a continent, not only a nation, and I wonder too if we don’t have a role to play in the international crisis of so many people on this globe who are stateless. I think over the last two decades a regressive isolationist politics has come to dominate Australian public life. That comes from being an island but it doesn’t befit being a continent. And it is not only the usual suspects at fault here, that it is only conservatives and right-wingers who are advocating this politics of isolation. I think that parts of the environmental movement are also responsible. I believe in the urgency of battling climate change, but it is truly a global struggle and part of that struggle involves assuming responsibility as a continent in the politics of population. I think we have too much space and that we can culturally, productively and environmentally invite more people into our citizenry. It makes me angry that we are so indulged that we believe it is our right to have so much space. We’ll have to wait and see whether Australia’s participation on the UN Security Council acts as a counterweight to any trend towards isolationism.

The other thing that makes me angry is the devaluation of education in Australia. I know through my own lived experience, and through being a child of people who were denied education, how important it is, how essential it is in creating the possibility of a future. This is where I feel the betrayal of the Labor Party most acutely, in their acquiescing in allowing neo-liberal economics to infect their educational commitments. Anti-intellectualism is pernicious and dangerous, a poison to a culture. I think the fact that Australian egalitarianism has been eroded over the last quarter-century is a result of not taking public education seriously and this explains the resultant poverty of our media, the bankruptcy of our political institutions and the increased inequality of our society. Allowing the education system to deteriorate to the extent it has is a national disgrace. We are a dumber country, a more myopic, more selfish country for it.

A Walk

2013-03-25T00:00:00Z

Going out, late afternoon,
onto the dusty road. We stand at the gate
and talk about direction,
deciding north. Stalling under the stringy-barks,
their trunks as white as bone
in the low-slung light—
huddled roadside,
a wombat. It could be granite
except that the breeze lifts its fur,
small chips of its fur. We approach it in silence
but it’s dead, and recently,
even the flies haven’t got to it.
Closer, it looks like a child’s soft toy,
a toy bigger than a child.
There’s a slice of fur gone from its shoulder,
showing the bone
where the car must have clipped it.
And, further on, the dead baby
that crawled out from under its mother’s trunk,
its skin dark, and as hard as bone,
its mouth burred with flies.
We finish the walk, and don’t talk any more.

Contamination of the Sterile Field

2013-03-25T00:00:00Z

The moment I walked into the Canberra Playhouse I fell in love with its wood panels and perfect size. Located in the CBD, a term used ironically by some well-known critics of our city, the Playhouse seats around 600 people and has three levels that manage to create an intimate yet open space. I have had three of the rare transcendent moments of my life in this theatre. Two have been Bell Shakespeare: the end of the first act of As You Like It, the finale of Twelfth Night and the last ten minutes of When the Rain Stops Falling by Andrew Bovell. It has also been the place where I have had the privilege of wrecking the transcendence of others.

It was the opening night of Joan Didion’s Year of Magical Thinking and Robyn Nevin had the audience sitting gently on the palm of her hand. About thirty minutes into the performance I noticed that the person in the seat immediately in front of me was slowly falling in the direction of the man on his right. This neighbour immediately adopted the body language of simultaneous helplessness and disgust that Sophie Mirabella had shown when the head of GetUp! collapsed beside her on national television. In a moment, though, he escaped from the inertia of crisis and started tapping his slumped companion on the shoulder. I leaned forward to asked if everything was all right but the look of terror on the conscious patron was enough to tell me that it wasn’t. Before I could stop to think, I had jumped over the seat in front and was facing the man who had collapsed. (For God’s sake, I’m an infectious diseases doctor, I thought. Why don’t they collapse in front of the emergency doctors?) Now that I had the stage lights behind me and not in my face, I could see that he was about thirty years old. He was unresponsive to my questions and his arms and legs were starting to jerk but, on the basis of probability, I concluded that this was most likely to be a faint and not a cardiac arrest. When you faint but don’t slip down into a horizontal position so that the blood supply to your brain is restored, an epileptic seizure can follow. This is always very frightening for observers—and dangerous for the patient—so I had to get him off his seat and onto the floor with a degree of haste.

Up to this point the disturbance had been contained to the few seats around us, but now that I was asking people to move and help me get the man onto the floor, it was hard to be inconspicuous. It is extraordinary how powerful the convention of silence in a theatre is—I was trying to do this as quietly as I could, as though the play mattered more than the man’s wellbeing. As I managed to slide him down from his seat I could hear Robyn Nevin hesitating in the delivery of her lines. She moved from the back of the stage to the footlights.

‘There seems to be something happening in the audience. Is everything okay?’ she asked. And so I got to say the words that had been going through my head since I first heard the Beatles sing them forty-five years ago: ‘I don’t really want to stop the show …’ but I had to.

At that, the houselights came up and it started to become a Canberra thing in earnest. My horizontal patient was quickly waking up. He opened his eyes and slowly focused on my face.

‘Hello, Frank,’ he said, surprising both of us. With colour in his face I recognised him as a worker from one of the local non-government organisations. ‘What happened?’ he asked. I told him that he had fainted. I could feel a crowd forming around us.

‘Do you need my help?’ asked a voice behind me. It was an anaesthetist from the hospital. I said that I thought we would be fine in a few minutes. The manager of the theatre had pushed through the people milling around to introduce herself.

‘I have a general practitioner with me and,’ she paused for effect, ‘the director of the Canberra Hospital Intensive Care Unit.’ I looked up at two faces, one wearing a sardonic grin.

‘Hello, Frank. Everything under control?’ asked the director.

‘Hello, Imogen. All under control,’ I lied. My wife had rung the ambulance a few minutes before and while we were waiting I suggested that we get our patient out of the theatre and into the foyer. An usher appeared with a wheelchair.

‘Hi, Prof. Need any help?’ she asked. It was one of my final-year medical students. ‘Looks like a vaso-vagal to me,’ she said as we helped the adequately oxygenated but increasingly embarrassed young man into the wheelchair. The show restarted twenty minutes later without me. I sat in the foyer and waited for the ambulance, which had been sent to the wrong theatre. Afterwards my wife said it was the best play she had ever seen.

Canberra is the smartest city in Australia: 40 per cent of adults have a bachelor’s degree or above, nearly twice the national average. Government business and education make up the largest portion of the workforce. The Australian National University is placed number one or two in the country, depending on the ranking system that you choose, and is in the top twenty-five (or forty) in the world. There is very little industry but there is steady population growth, so builders live like kings. There are thousands of very comfortable citizens and several multimillionaires, but the mega-rich like to see the sea so they are elsewhere. Most Canberra money clusters in the centre, giving us, on average, the highest per household income in the country (a status we share, perhaps unexpectedly, with Darwin). My brother-in-law often teases me that I treat only the middle class and the worried well. And I could do just that if I wasn’t concentrating—there are plenty to choose from. One of the commonest responses to a question about occupation is ‘just a public servant’. If they don’t volunteer which department and you press them for more detail, the spies usually say ‘Attorney General’s’. You quickly learn to stop there. The private health system is well developed and most doctors have grateful patients who bring them bottles of single malt whisky or French champagne at Christmas and write kind letters of thanks for the care they have received.

But if you work in the public hospitals and GP practices, especially the ones that bulk bill, then you come to understand that Canberra, like Darwin, is a real city and the average income data is a nationally convenient distraction. The poor, the drunk, the addicted, the addled, the psychotic, the sad, the bad, the displaced and the homeless are all alive and unwell in our town. (‘Times are changing, now the poor get fat …’ sang a very rich and rather porky Elton John at a recent Canberra concert. Our poor sit out the front of the hospital, puffing on cigarettes and eating chips and gravy under the No Smoking signs.)

Nearly a quarter of our patients come from the surrounding areas of New South Wales. They can be the rural poor from coastal towns, or the rugged farm folk who endure until they can’t get off their bed, or the surprised sea- and tree-changed who forgot that they would need tertiary health care when they got really old. Aboriginal people are overrepresented in our patient mix—their identity usually unrecognised by naive medical staff.

The primary care needs of these sometimes rowdy, but usually voiceless, people can be ignored as we are distracted by the genteel politicking of those with time on their hands. The highly educated know how to advocate and they often strive for perfection in the services they would like to receive. Retirement is an opportunity for the academics, professionals and senior public servants (the latter now a bit more dried apricot than mandarin) to push a social barrow. In most cities these influential individuals are diluted by the proletariat—in Canberra they are the proletariat. Overall this is a good thing, but it is tempting to create a health system in your own image. It can be hard to introduce health services that less sophisticated and underrepresented people need while skilled lobbyists are making cogent arguments for things that they want. It is only in the past ten years that we have had a free ophthalmology and dermatology clinic, and public obstetric and gynaecology services are not much older. Although better than it was, we still have the lowest rate of bulk-billing general practices in Australia.

In the early 1970s the Whitlam government radically changed the way hospitals were staffed by creating paid positions for specialists. Prior to this, apart from the junior resident staff, almost all senior doctors in hospitals were known as ‘honoraries’, who made their money in their private practice and gave a few hours of service gratis to the hospital each week. The altruism of public service was one motivation, but an appointment in a teaching hospital was prestigious and professionally useful. The introduction of salaried staff specialists was a necessary part of the Medibank reforms but it literally split the profession. The hostile response of the Australian Medical Association was not bullish enough to satisfy some members of the profession, who took an even tougher anti-socialist stance. It is part of folklore that the group of doctors who came to Canberra to be in the vanguard of the Whitlam reforms were ostracised by the honoraries at the Royal Canberra Hospital. Several members of the caring profession were said to have slashed the tyres of the new staff specialists’ cars and to have inserted bananas up exhaust pipes. The political solution to the stand-off was to pay the honoraries as well, a very attractive option, and soon many of the class-traitor staff specialists found relevant ideological reasons to jump ship to the more lucrative world of what became the visiting medical officer.

For eighty-three years the Royal Canberra Hospital had operated on the site of what is now the Museum of Australia, but a health services review sealed its fate. In 1997 it was meant to be blown in, but a botched job meant that it blew up and out and killed a teenage girl who was watching the event on the other side of Lake Burley Griffin, at what her parents and the rest of Canberra assumed was a safe distance. Witnesses to this event remember being invited to the lake in one of the most ill-judged pieces of public relations in Canberra’s history. Come and watch us blow up a piece of loved health infrastructure in a festive atmosphere—a tragedy almost too sad to relate.

By then the Royal Canberra Hospital had already merged with the institution some twelve kilometres away in the next valley to the south. The Woden Valley Hospital was built by the Commonwealth government in 1973 to the same plan that was used for the Royal Darwin Hospital. (When I moved to Canberra from Darwin in 1999 the uncanny replication of my previous workplace was at once comforting and disorienting.) Doctors resent authority at the best of times but for Royal Canberra people to be under the direction of Woden Valley doctors—or vice versa—was at times too much to bear and many services suffered as a result. Following the shotgun marriage that created the Canberra Hospital in 1996, the relocated staff were expected to behave like stepchildren in a blended family—they did, but many modelled themselves on the Manson family rather than the Brady bunch. In my early days there I often felt more like a palaeontologist than a physician, but the second decade of the twenty-first century heralds our post-Cretaceous period. After fifty years of failed attempts, the ANU finally created a medical school in 2002, building on the foundation laid by the University of Sydney’s Canberra Clinical School, which had commenced six years earlier. We are now self-sufficient in junior staff for the first time in Canberra’s history and the hospital is a progressively confident, tertiary teaching institution—the sounds of clashing dinosaurs are becoming increasingly distant echoes.

When I tell interstate people what I do they are often a little suspicious that there aren’t really any infectious diseases in Canberra. Perhaps they have swallowed the sterile urban dormitory stereotype. Yet on any day our infectious diseases ward can offer up a microbiological smorgasbord: it might be a middle-aged woman with a life-threatening bloodstream infection caused by golden staph that started as a scratch while she was gardening, or a man with E. coli in his blood after a prostate biopsy that he probably didn’t need in the first place; it might be an injecting drug user with a heart valve that is being eaten away by a staph that she unwittingly injected into her vein, or a diplomat with malaria acquired on a repatriation visit to PNG; perhaps a fireman with fungal meningitis acquired from river red gum trees while camping; possibly a PhD student with a lung abscess acquired in a cave in Thailand, or a middle-aged man with pneumonia caused by a previously undiagnosed HIV infection. Infection is the hidden risk of the modern miracles of joint replacement, organ transplants and the new biological agents for rheumatoid arthritis and other autoimmune diseases, so the infectious diseases team never has to spruik for business.

Our rural patients sometimes present with interesting conditions known as zoonoses—infections that principally affect animals but can occasionally spread to humans. (‘Interesting’ is a very ‘doctor’ thing to say, of course. One of my wise mentors heard me say that about a patient when I was a young registrar. ‘No patient has ever gained comfort being told that they are suffering from a “rare” or “interesting” disease,’ he gently chided me.)

Several years ago I looked after two brothers-in-law who had presented with pneumonia at precisely the same time to separate doctors. They had contracted Q fever after they had assisted at the delivery of a calf on a property just a few kilometres from the CBD. The ‘Q’ stands for ‘query’ because the cause of the illness was unknown when it was first described in Queensland by an Australian microbiologist, Edward Derrick, in 1937. The causative organism was discovered by one of Australia’s most famous medical scientists, the Nobel laureate Macfarlane Burnet, and was subsequently named Coxiella burnetti in his honour. Q fever occurs throughout the world—in Australia it mainly affects farmers and abattoir workers who contract it from close contact with livestock or carcases. Even so, I have seen a case in a young boy and his grandfather whose only exposure was briefly patting the same sheep dog.

Canberra is also a hotspot for hydatid disease—a disturbing condition caused by a tapeworm that infects domestic dogs and dingoes. Humans, cattle and sheep are known as ‘accidental hosts’ who acquire the infection from dog faeces. Humans who ingest the eggs can then develop cysts in their liver, lungs, brain and bones. Most people don’t know they have been infected and the diagnosis is sometimes made later in life when a CT scan or ultrasound is performed for an unrelated reason. The prevalence of the disease was significantly reduced following an intensive education program in the 1960s and 1970s that taught farmers not to feed their dogs raw offal from sheep and cattle that may have contained live worms. But people who acquired the infection decades ago can still present with complications today and we see several cases each year. Occasionally a cyst grows so large that it bursts out of the liver or lungs, which can be lethal. These patients require delicate surgery. It is quite a nerve-wracking operation: if the worm-laden cyst ruptures while it is being removed, the hydatids can contaminate the patient’s entire abdominal cavity. (I advise my students not to watch the movie Alien if they are contemplating assisting at the surgery and intend to stay upright throughout.)

Living in a city state with only 360,000 citizens lets you experience true democracy—a mixed blessing, of course. If you work in health you are always very close to local government. (But not to the federal variety, whose politicians are just interstate visitors, reluctant journeymen and women who stay in undecorated share houses and apartments, eating out every night and leaving no trace of themselves behind.) Canberrans know that they might bump into their health minister while she is jogging on the path around the lake or shopping at the supermarket. The opposition leader’s children might go to your own child’s school. The attorney-general might sing in your choir and the minister for education may be at your parent–teacher night with her own child. The downside is that a citizen who suffers a three-hour wait in the emergency department or who is unhappy with the waiting-room decor in outpatients only has to write a letter to the Canberra Times or make a complaint by email to the chief minister to generate a ministerial request that will consume many hours of the local health bureaucracy’s time.

Since there are only two public hospitals in town, if anything medical goes wrong (as it inevitably must) it has to happen in one of them. Hospitals in other cities can ‘share the wear’ with each other. Things heat up around election time, when oppositions look for any failure they can attach to the government of the day. Instead of concentrating on an alternative health policy or seeking more efficient and effective ways to deliver care, oppositions of all political persuasions jump on medical errors, waiting times and the size of elective surgery lists (that most unrepresentative measure of the quality of a health service). They seem to ignore the fact that health is one of the biggest employers in town and that if you continually use this tactic you end up alienating your own voter base. Sadly, the hothouse of local politics can make you start to believe the rhetoric about ‘how bad the hospital is’, which can be disheartening and, worse, self-fulfilling. Nevertheless, there are hundreds of health-care workers who are proud of the public system and will fiercely defend it, especially against criticism from non-Territorians.

One morning during the Howard years a political minder rang to ask me (insisted really) to see a member of the federal government in my outpatients clinic as a matter of urgency. It is rare to see VIPs there—almost all are managed in the private system. It turned out that the MP in question had a wound on her arm that needed attention. After I had completed my examination I asked the head nurse of the outpatients to help with the dressing and to provide the patient with a few spares to take home. I left them to see another patient but when I was finished I saw the MP putting the dressings in her handbag, along with her purse.

‘You didn’t make her pay for the dressings, did you?’ I asked the nurse. I knew that they were usually provided free to our patients. She gave me the matter-of-fact look of the experienced charge nurse. ‘That lot have been taking money out of public hospitals since they came into government.’ Then she smiled, ‘So I thought it was my duty to get some of it back.’

The Fifth Parallel

2013-03-21T00:00:00Z

Four parallels: Molonglo’s powered flow;
her riverside-shading poplars tossing
back the sun; then the sun-struck

narrow path I chanced to choose,
and on my left the wall
of classic blackberry.

A bush childhood decades lost,
eyes reeling in summer brilliance,
I watch my shoes’ neat heel-to-toe

on fresh-mown grass, the edging
river bank I skirt, its cool dark line
whose sheen waves purple

beautiful in light,
the pure sun this shadow-line
chanced to choose—for sunning

sleep. I breathe. My raised foot
holds, poises, lowers soft as
withheld breath,

each muscle nerved quick
as childhood. My skilled
feet endure his lethal metres

and I’m fast away,
catching his startle,
my subtly vanishing fellow

in the grass—

whose life is beautiful,
whose rest is silence.

The Poetic Experience

2013-03-20T00:00:00Z

These were heady times for poetry and Henry advised me it would do us no harm to attend a poetry conference. ‘It’s the beauty-parade part of the business,’ he said as he gave me an apologetic smile.
We contrived to attend ‘Raw Directions ’74’ at Dunmore University in Sydney where, sitting high in the back row of an auditorium, we listened to the dispute of experts who were arrayed behind a bench in the well-lit pit of the chamber. Some speakers were poets, some were junior academics, and the ‘New Surge’ view of the art of poetry—Go on your nerve, man—was well represented. One seat was vacant where a poet called Dennis Vaigh had failed to show.
The alternating vehemence and derision that forked upwards from their light into our dark had affirmed for me just how sectarian and storm-lit was the poetry scene.
Suddenly the discourse became very operatic indeed, for a mousy fellow had leapt onto the bench with the agility of a chimp, and he appeared to be very upset.
‘Kill me, then,’ he yelped.
It seems there had been a severe question from someone in approximately the middle of the auditorium.
‘I’d rather not, Peter,’ the voice from this midpoint demurred.
‘Kill me now! Do the business in a one-off! Finish me here!’ Peter had produced a small penknife from his pocket.
‘I decline.’
‘Better with this, than the slow poison-drip of the reviews you write about my work.’
‘I have the law to respect, Peter, if not the masquerade of art you call your poems.’
‘Gutless bastard!’ Peter spat back at him. ‘When it’s face to face, you’re gutless, like all them professors.’
‘I am not a professor, Peter, and you are not a poet. You are a hysteric.’
This audience voice appeared impressively equable. Whatever his original provocation, he seemed to court rather than deflect the dangerous emotion he had unleashed. I looked at the chairperson, who was using her hands in ineffectual flattening motions, and whose expression suggested this contretemps was too predictable for words.
‘Finish me!’
‘I will not.’
‘Rub me out,’ insisted the agile Peter who, in his progress, had knocked over the carafe of water set for his fellow panellists. The water emergency was a useful distraction from the human crisis for the chairperson and she set about mopping up the water with paper from her notepad.
So this was the ‘beauty parade’ part of the business. I watched fascinated. Was the common interest here really poetry, that same uncertain substance I could share with Henry but must hide from Pa, Mudda and the Sibs? It was indeed. And yet the scene seemed more like a cockfight from the era of Jonathan Swift than a symposium on modern poetics. Should we have been provided with a set of spurs and a wad of betting slips at the door? Outlandish! Yet also delicious. I turned to Henry, making eyes at how preposterous was the drama.
‘Do it! Wipe me! Think of the typewriter ribbons you’ll save!’
‘Take a sedative, Peter.’
With unnerving speed, Peter leapt from the bench and, penknife in hand, proceeded up the aisle towards the row where sat his critic. It was clear he wished to present the fellow with the clasped knife and there offer his life. Peter had magnetised the attention of the audience as nothing in the combative chatter of the symposium had so far done. Was this not a poetic experience?
I tried to match what I observed here with what I had read about the present poetry scene. There had been a paperback called Poetry and Edge. Suicide had been discussed, along with larceny, drug use, systematic derangement of the senses and other measures for ‘going on one’s nerve’. Was this present extremity part of what had been meant? Did authenticity in the life of poetry require some actual slashing and stabbing, here and now, in this auditorium where, more usually, Dunmore University’s chemistry students came for their instruction?
I heard Henry sigh. ‘Confusion of the life with the art. This whole “Go on your nerve” distraction starts with Villon.’
Bravo Henry, to place the unfolding drama securely in a literary context. Villon had been mentioned in that Edge book, though the Peter person resembled more the lean horror that Auden’s Alonzo in The Sea and the Mirror perceives flapping and hopping towards him with inhuman swiftness …
… because now Peter had attained the mid row of seats and commenced to push past people’s knees towards where his serene critic awaited him. The row was a long one, with many protruding knees to negotiate, though the audience participation in stopping this lean horror’s progress had so far been (to invoke the literary term) powerfully restrained.
‘Maybe the confrontation is a good thing.’ I leaned across to Henry with this suggestion. For were they not more honest, these direct challenges to personal safety between poet and critic, rather than the remote violence of the weekend review columns? From my days as a big man on campus I recalled we had more often gone on our nerve than our reasoning powers. So be it, spirit of the age, the ‘rawness’ being sought for in our conference theme.
I could now identify the critic, a fellow in crumpled silvery suit and red bow tie who continued to sit back, his legs crossed, for all that Peter was now within twenty knees of reaching him.
Ah, but now a defusion. Very Konrad Lorenzian.
For a man with beard and bald forehead had stood up to bar Peter’s progress. With his free hand, Peter had pulled undone the buttons of his shirt in readiness to offer his flesh, uttering noises not entirely comprehensible. Now he tried to render himself visible around the intervening presence. This person made soothing noises in a North American accent and his long face suggested the prophet Moses. Twenty knees down the line the red bow tie sat on, interested, entirely passive.
‘Your request is that I commit an offence, Peter,’ he said reasonably. ‘Not on!’
The American’s soothing was like the tone used to quiet a startled horse. Difficult to follow exactly, but his vowels appeared to abate Peter’s fury; strange how, during this epoch, our superpower friends could have this effect on us. The penknife was peacefully taken, folded and returned to Peter’s pocket, the buttons of the poet’s shirt refastened, and the indomitable fellow escorted back to the bench with a gentle hand on his elbow. Here he subsided into his swivel chair, much as the energetic waters of a geyser subside to their crater. Most impressive to me throughout had been the serenity of the critic. Go on your nerve.
When the symposium resumed, I glanced across at Henry’s notepad and saw there a single heroic couplet in the emphatic Henry Luck scrawl.

Of arms and tears we’ll sing, and poets who
Invite an audience to run them through …

Henry’s pen was poised like a kestrel above a field of charred stubble. I returned my attention to the pit where the subsequent speakers glanced nervously at Peter, who, in turn, sat eyeing the audience with a crooked smile. I believe we had disappointed him. Perhaps twenty minutes elapsed before I looked back at my companion’s notepad to see the page had become further blackened with couplets and crossings-out. In their density, the writing seemed coiled with energy and this was infectious. I meditated for some moments, then put some lines down on my own pad.

… His Chainsaw Angels rode into the church
Where, high in rafters, P—r took his perch.
A thousand chrome machines were made to roar.
They thundered through that church and out its door,
Neutered the nation’s poetry for evermore.

I passed this across to Henry, who read it, nodded vigorously, and co-opted the lines into the body of what he had written. I believe I observed him bounce with excitement. The session ended shortly thereafter so we repaired to the bar, where we conferred animatedly on how our storyline might proceed, at the same time as we jotted further scribbles. We would depict a Poetry Armageddon, Chainsaw Angels versus our approved poets, whom we dubbed the Choir. We would scour New Surge and restore proper poetic values. As we took the train back to Canberra, our morale could only be described as fabulous.
In the ensuing weeks, gleefully we wrote and showed and amalgamated until some six hundred lines had accrued. These we sent to a weekly journal, notorious for its provocations, where they were published. At this time Henry and I had begun to have our ‘earnest’ poems appear in annual anthologies, so the beauty-parade part of our Dunmore adventure had been worthwhile. Our success made us boastful as we recited our satire here and there. In the Arden Union Bar one evening Eva Swart got to hear it and somehow missed the humour.
‘Name one poem that has ever helped a woman in a sweatshop.’
‘You would need to ask the woman,’ replied Henry.
‘I don’t need to. The point is not to describe the world, but to change it.’
‘I disagree.’
‘What then?’
‘The point is to recognise the poetic experience.’
‘Fa-ark off!’ she said. Eva’s countenance was mobile, laughter followed frown. Derision followed sudden suffusions of sympathy. Now in her honours year, she shared some philosophy tutorials with Henry, and it was a case, I gathered, of two precocious intellects being unsympathetic. While I could see in her response to Henry’s proposition that she thought it preposterous, her attitude was not without curiosity.
‘The point is to recognise the poetic experience.’
‘That’s just foolish.’
‘Nonetheless it is the case.’
I should have endorsed this for him, but had one eye on a woman opposite who finessed a cartoon on her sketchpad, absorbed by this activity.
‘What does it mean, the poetic experience?’ Eva sneered.
Instead of ‘going aloof’, Henry pleased me by rising to her challenge in plain terms.
‘When a green apple on a white table, an old lady reading a book in a chair and your own awareness that one day you will be dead present themselves to you as simultaneously and intimately being the one event in reality, while also casting light upon substance beyond their moment, then the poetic experience has touched you.’
‘But what if I choose not to be touched?’ Eva lobbed at him.
The lines around Henry’s mouth took a downward turn. ‘Then you are lost.’
‘Why should I be?’ Instantly the angel of justice was in the ascendant.
‘Because you wilfully turn your back on the very thing that allows you an enhancement of self into a greater fullness of being.’
‘You’re not fuckin’ real,’ she concluded from this.
‘True,’ Henry agreed with a superior smile. ‘But I do have a better idea than you as to how I might aspire to reality.’
Eva turned away from him. Gone was her derision, replaced by affront at such haughty dismissal of the downtrodden. And just as I had seen in Peter’s histrionics a slim gleam of virtue in his impulse to face down his reviewer with actual human contact, so I could see this in Eva’s indignation at what Henry had put to her. How could ‘the poetic experience’ be a superior consideration to that of human need? And yet.
I went to buy more drinks, returned laden. The woman was adding a last touch to her cartoon that I saw now displayed a fellow with curly hair, bare torso, caught in mid sneeze, the caption being ‘Nietzsche! Nietzsche’.
‘That’s me!’ I yelped.
‘Surely not,’ she slipped me a triumphant look and snapped shut her folder. Was it possible I might occupy space in her affection?
At the other end of the table Eva had decamped, and Henry sat unhappily.
‘Ding-dong over?’ I put a drink down before him.
‘L’âme de boue,’ he dismissed his antagonist. ‘Soul-of-mud.’
‘It’s not black and white, I reckon,’ was how I chose to protest.