I’ve been finding elegant ways to procrastinate this year. Several months ago, I arranged my bookshelf according to read and unread. In a particularly sociopathic gesture, I grouped the read books by colour. A surprising number of covers are bright orange, even if you discount all the popular Penguins. The unread books huddle at the top of the bookshelf, waiting to be chosen. I look around for a way to separate the two sections. The box containing my mother’s ashes fits perfectly. It marks the threshold between past and future. As the unread pile grows smaller on the shelf, the […]

I woke up in the middle of the night feeling distressed—the book I’d been reading, The White Girl by Tony Birch, lay open on the bedside table. Odette Brown, an Indigenous woman and the protagonist of the story, must try and protect her granddaughter from the welfare authorities that threaten to remove her. Odette is no stranger to the perils of living under white rule; she has lived on the fringes of society all her life. Tony Birch’s story is set in post-war Australia, when Indigenous people were treated as less than human. Were controlled by the state. Not counted […]

A Tasmanian beach in February 2018. Unprompted, a woman I barely know recites Seamus Heaney’s Postscript to me as we stand on the sand; bodies, hair wet after a swim. It is a grey day, not cold but not warm either, the wind pushing the water towards the sand. At the dinner table a week later, she cries as she reads excerpts of her dead daughter’s diary to me. The last pieces she has of her. Her grief hides from her like the spiders in her study, creeping out from behind blinds, from under paper until you can see all […]

As soon as I began to think of what I might write here, the phrase for a long time came to me. I always have numerous books on the go, ‘open’ all at once and sometimes for a long time. This is, of course, the opening of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. I imagine a thin, shimmering abstract-expressionist veil of paint between have read or reading or no longer reading or about to read. The first time I read Swann’s Way was in India in 2006, but I’ve been slowly moving through the original translation by Moncrieff and the […]

    Dave Drayton was an amateur banjo player, founding member of the Atterton Academy, and the author of E, UIO, A: a feghoot (Container), A pet per ably-faced kid (Stale Objects dePress), P(oe)Ms (Rabbit), Haiturograms (Stale Objects dePress) and Poetic Pentagons (Spacecraft Press).

‘the fact that who needs heart shapes getting in the way all the time’ —Ducks, Newburyport by Lucy Ellmann   She is lying in bed in the afternoon, reading a big thick book with lots of pages. The book prompts her to have a thought. Maybe if I have a child, I’ll make sure to take care of the both of us? When a thought is a question, is it still a thought? The book is red and blue and so hefty she used it to press down the collar on one of her shirts a week ago, because she doesn’t […]

I’m trying to find the relevance of my PhD project again. I’m sitting in the room where my editing job was made redundant over a Zoom meeting, and I’m watching the time in the corner of my screen. A million years ago, it was March. Yesterday, it was the middle of April and then somehow, somewhere, May and June happened. Finding yourself in the centre of a dystopia while concurrently trying to write a dystopia is an odd thing. The situation is both mundane and frightening. Last year, I had spent the month of November drafting an entire creative manuscript […]

Rereading Beloved Children’s Books in the Time of Coronavirus   One of the greatest joys of becoming a parent was the opportunity to share my favourite children’s books with my daughters. When my firstborn, Tiferet, was just a few days old and I was up at night nursing her by the moonlight, I read her all of my favourite childhood books in instalments—just so she could get used to the sound of my voice. By the time Tiferet was three months old, she had already ‘read’ L.M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables and Frances Hodgson Burnett’s A Little Princess and […]

THE UGLY, THE GOOD & THE BAD     THE UGLY Government forms. (Trying to keep farm operational.) How to become a tick in a box—and which fucking box??!! That said, appreciative, privileged and lucky to live somewhere that has some form of a safety net and then, disturbed, concerned and distressed as there are so many the net doesn’t catch (and doesn’t even try to). Why it would be good to have a better idea in the first place than a net in the second.   THE GOOD OK, my wont is to read quite a few actual paper […]

There are books that I’ve been avoiding lately, and others that I’ve stared down from across the room, unable to look away. There’s a compulsion to this avoidant-attached approach: I both want to be emotionally destroyed by a book and, simultaneously, want to feel nothing. These books I’ve been avoiding and courting—each details the effects of trauma, domestic abuse, and how the body holds memory. Since first reading about Carmen Maria Machado’s in-progress memoir In the Dream House a couple of years ago, I’ve been waiting. When it arrived in the post a few months ago I pushed it to […]

In the seclusion of the pandemic many of us have more time and silence to pay attention to detail, especially in books. With the natural world having a rest from all our fossil fuels, it is timely to read books written about our bond with nature, including the nature of our human selves. I always have a hefty pile of books to read and, madly, agreed to be part of a book club with my university colleagues to help us all feel some camaraderie during isolation. My contribution to our list was an early Margaret Atwood novel, The Edible Woman, […]

When I recall my past experiences, it’s unsurprising that the memories of my early-age migration come to mind. I was five years old when my family moved permanently from China to Hurstville—a predominantly Chinese suburb in the south of Sydney. In spite of how jarring it was to encounter different physical surroundings and social practices in Australia, the community here was also reminiscent of China. I was surrounded by faces like mine everywhere I went; by people speaking a variety of Chinese dialects; by a primary school population, which was majority Chinese and from a non-English speaking background. At that […]