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Yaroomba, Sunshine Coast, Queensland January 2017, from the back deck To look out from here, especially from the vantage of a softly rocking hammock—drowsy toddler copilots optional—is to inhale green. To bathe in blue. Or, if it’s inclement, to be secure, dry, nestled amid a wet semitropical jungle. The leaves up close to the sky are of that particular Australian blue-green that’s not the sole dominion of eucalypts. The truffula tree pandanus, which was pretty much the only plant in the back yard when we moved here a little over 11 years ago, thrusts like a cut-out against the cotton […]

1 There’s a Paul Klee sketch hanging in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art titled A Guardian Angel Serves a Small Breakfast. The figure hovers just above the ground, its wings spread. It holds a tray upon which breakfast items, including a kettle, are intertwined with one another, a tangle of gentle lines. Liquid pours from the kettle’s spout, even though it isn’t tilted. Emerging from the angel’s chest is a small love heart in red watercolour. There are many lessons to take from this sketch, one being that it’s good to serve someone a small breakfast.   2 ‘This […]

A recipe is a thing to come back to, again and again. Like a home, like a feeling. A favourite poem. The last time I was suffocated by everything, I put myself to work memorising ‘Sonnet for Christmas’ by Judith Wright. It was a rainy day in the summer heaviness, I looked out the circle window of the Bargoonga Nganjin library on Brunswick Street. We are winter-caught, and we must fail, said the dark dream, and time is … and time is … (looking back to the page) … overcast. Mum cooks quinces forever. They turn from wood to a […]

Many years ago—back in the nineties—my agent rang me to say that a multimillionaire was throwing himself a birthday party and wanted me to perform at it. The party was to be held over a weekend on his private island and I was to be flown there in a private plane. It all sounded very intriguing and the fee was enormous. Apparently whoever it was had seen me on my ABC show and liked it; the only problem though was that I couldn’t find out who the multimillionaire was until I agreed to do the gig and signed a confidentiality […]

Melbourne, postmodernism and how today’s politics were born in the 1980s   One winter evening at the very end of the 1980s, we gathered in the main room of the old Arena building in Melbourne’s Fitzroy, a triangular wedge at the point where Brunswick Street became St Georges Road. It had once been a funeral parlour, with a huge front door wide enough to bear out the bereaved—and for us to take in printing equipment—and Arena’s output was sufficiently heavy at the time for there to be unkind comparisons from some of our detractors. ‘Arena, you live in a funeral parlour’, […]

Narratives can haunt. What haunts our memories is more than images and words, but the actual world of experience behind them. —Arthur Kleinman I am looking at a film of an old man sitting in an armchair being interviewed by a disembodied male voice with an Australian accent. The old man is in his seventies and has receding white hair. He has an unmistakeably Semitic nose and his name is Szymon, which the viewer cannot miss since the interviewer keeps falling over the pronunciation. Szymon was my father and the video is the recording of an interview for a documentary that, […]

I like to see life with its teeth out. —Janet Frame My mother kept the baby teeth of her four children, my two sisters, my brother and me, in four small glass jars. She called the teeth ‘milky denticles’ and she had them tucked behind the large Turkish džezva, a long-necked coffee pot made of brass. This pot, together with small demitasse coffee cups, was a centrepiece of the vitrine, a glass cabinet in the living room on the top floor of our house. The teeth jars sat there from the mid 1970s until early June 1992 when a mortar […]

Trauma is a strange bedfellow. In its company you binge on adrenaline and will anyone to have a go. Don’t push in front of me. Don’t mess with me. Go on, mess with me.

Content warning: sexual assault A response to Shannon Burns on childhood sexual assault In the late 1980s, around the age of 11, I hit puberty with the force of an 80-tonne road train. I became the third-tallest child in my primary school and grew exquisitely painful adult-sized breasts whose entire surface was livid purple scar tissue. When I started high school, at 11 going on 12, I looked old enough to be allowed to buy cigarettes at the milk bar down the street for the year-ten boys who were old enough (the smoking age was then 16) but didn’t look […]

I am learning the piano, more than half a century after I last played. I would like to be able to play Erik Satie. My father was a piano teacher and we even had two pianos in the house for a time when I was a child—one stood in my bedroom. In a London music shop in the 1970s I found a book of sheet music by Satie and, with fond memories of his music enhancing the mood of European films such as Carlos Saura’s Elisa, Vida Mia, I brought the book back to Melbourne and presented it to Dad. He was […]

In the heart of the sleepy Tasmanian town of New Norfolk, half an hour’s drive out of Hobart, lies the Willow Court Precinct. As you wander down the tree-lined streets of the township, the crumbling buildings of Willow Court come slowly into view. On the banks of the Lachlan River, right next door to the new supermarket complex with its perfectly rendered frontage, shiny signs and sparkling clean windows, sit three of the saddest, loneliest-looking buildings you’re ever likely to see. Not a single shard of glass can be found in any of the windows of the multistorey structures. The tallest […]