‘I am constantly resisting other people’s attempts to reduce the Pacific to one thing—I want to disturb all of that.’ —Teresia Teaiwa, E-Tangata, October 2015 ‘Professional sports have constituted an alternative work arena for many black men. In that world the black male body once used and abused in a world of labor based on brute force could be transformed; elegance and grace could become the identifying signifiers of one’s labor.’ —bell hooks, ‘Gangsta Culture’, We Real Cool, 2003, p.21 I am the first person in my family to attend university. On my first day, Dad dropped me off […]
The Longing to Move Away
I have longed to move away but am afraid; Some life, yet unspent, might explode Out of the old lie burning on the ground, And, crackling into the air, leave me half-blind. – Dylan Thomas, I have longed to move away I read Thomas’ poem when I was twenty-one, squandering a life in my comfortable childhood home in Sydney. As the youngest of four in a traditional, severely conservative migrant family, I felt for the first time reading this line as though the poet had grabbed my ribs and bent it to expose my throbbing, nervous heart. The yearning […]
What I’m Reading
I must admit, I usually avoid answering queries about what I’m reading. It seems a question so embroiled in judgement. Is what I read a judgment of what I do not? Will my taste as a writer be judged by my choice—is it too populist, too literary, too genre? Part of me knows that this is absurd, a fear brought on by imposter syndrome or some other unnamed paranoid condition that infects those who write. Even so, the self-consciousness is there and hard to shake. The reality is that I rarely choose my own list anymore—especially where fiction is concerned. […]
Goldfish
Every day after the final school bell rang, I sat on the paved brick of a stranger’s front yard under an old tree. My schoolmates and I wrote our names in the dirt, picked flowers and played handball until our parents arrived, one by one. Every day our big white Tarago would arrive, my mother at the wheel. One afternoon, the car didn’t come. The company dwindled until only I was left. Finally, the teacher on duty took me to after-school care to sit inside and wait. While other children drew and read, I sat quietly at a desk. I […]
My Junot Díaz Problem
At the time Zinzi Clemmons was confronting Junot Díaz at the Sydney Writers’ Festival about his past mistreatment of her, I was elsewhere in the same building attending a writing workshop on literary nonfiction. At that exact moment we were engaged in a vigorous discussion of one of the chief concerns of writing in any genre: ethics. Writing literary nonfiction involves high stakes, said our workshop facilitator Maria Tumarkin. Otherwise, it’s probably not worth writing about. Prior to the workshop she’d asked us to send in our burning questions for her to address. One of mine was how to write […]
What I’m Reading
I’ve been reading the face of the woman on her knees on Platform Four with her shopping bags spilled around her like a sandcastle ruined by the tide. I’ve been reading the uncertain angle of her head as she gazes into space, blonde hair spilling loose, mouth slack and smeared red. I’ve been reading her enormously vacant eyes: some small madness at the gates. Or perhaps she can see some larger madness approaching that we can’t. Perhaps it’s the rising sea. I’ve been reading a draft of a musical novel by Kirsten Krauth which pulses and roars with the sound […]
Heart of Lightness: Simon Baker’s Breath
Joseph Conrad’s 1899 novella, Heart of Darkness, appears as an oblique talisman in Breath, Simon Baker’s adaptation of Tim Winton’s award-winning 2008 novel. We see it first when thirteen-year-old Bruce ‘Pikelet’ Pike (Samson Coulter) sits quietly reading in his high school library. Some months pass and the book reappears: Pikelet pictured clutching the battered Penguin paperback as he walks through the schoolyard. Conrad’s story of a journey into the African jungle is an exploration of fear—Marlow’s journey out into the world becomes a journey into the bleakest corners of his heart and soul. Set in the late 1970s, Breath offers […]
Fig Wasp
I was a wasp before. I can remember hatching inside a fig. I was a bulbous, gelatinous thing. There were others, and we grew together and hardened and became long and spindly. After a while the others began to leave the fig, and I followed. We smelled the outside and moved towards it, tunnelling through pink tendrils and rough green skin. Everything was green outside. All around were green leaves and fruits and the sun shone through the leaves and warmed our bodies, which were a deep metallic pine colour. We stretched our limbs and our wings. We crawled together […]
Living and Dying after the Apology
Larissa Behrendt’s After the Apology—released in all major centres nationally this week—is one of the most important social justice films this country has produced. Its most powerful distillation is that the systematic high-rate removal of Indigenous Australian children from their families is not over—children are actually being removed at a much higher rate since Kevin Rudd’s 2007 Apology that formally acknowledged the Stolen Generations. This is not in our past, it is in our present and future. ‘Sorry means you don’t do it again’. The film tells the stories of grandmothers who have had their grandchildren taken from them by […]
What I’m Reading
There are three digital prints that hang in my house that I am particularly attached to. I commissioned them from a talented friend of mine when I got a promotion a few years ago, and they are the first pieces of art I spent any real money on. Each is a quote about or from literature that I love, designed in lush, swirling typeface, with beautiful colours surrounding the words. There is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind, from Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, is one. I chose […]
What I’m Reading
There’s a fairly high chance you’ve never heard of the Public Record Office Victoria, the State Government of Victoria’s archives. In keeping with its location in the industrial, unfashionable end of North Melbourne, it’s the poor cousin of Victoria’s major arts institutions. And though lacking in trendy allure, skilfully channelled for instance by the recent Triennial Extra night festival held at National Gallery of Victoria or the studious splendour of the dome of the State Library, there’s reason enough to become better acquainted with the archives’ rich collection. At least in size it’s no shirking violet; the collection extends to […]
Silence: a Living Death—On Peach and Lullaby
I erupt into high-pitched, terse laughter when I see chaos unfolding. It’s an uncontrollable reaction, a faltering, and it results from a disbelief that things are falling apart. It’s ugly, nervous laughter, and it puts no one at ease. But I will admit that a tiny part of it is voyeurism: I like seeing people in power become uncomfortable when their world no longer resembles the one they are used to. But, then again, this situation of late, this Reckoning, isn’t really putting anyone at ease. For its survival, power requires a structure strong enough to withstand the weight of […]
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