Sunday, noon: I’m sitting with friends beneath a huge old mulberry tree, its green providing us with shade. The suffocating haze of bushfire smoke which had been blanketing Sydney is mercifully absent, enabling this picturesque moment: a Christmas lunch between three couples, one with a newborn, the other with a baby only a year old lolling about on the grass, and lastly, myself and my partner. They’re all eating ham, I’m eating lamb cooked apart. My phone buzzes, and I look down at an email from a stranger titled ‘Head in the Sand’, accusing myself and all Arab Muslims of being deluded. We deserve the vitriol directed at us by conservatives, we are every bit as violent and backward as claimed. I mention it in passing to the table, shrugging it off. I feel comfortable enough to do this as four of the five other adults present are First Nations mob. Jake, a Wiradjuri man who grew up in Mt Druitt, says to reply to the stranger with ‘Ayri Feek’—an Arabic fuck you—and I crack up. A minute later, another email arrives, telling me to leave my ‘adopted’ country if I hate it so much. In this imagining, I suppose one can only be a natural son of Australia if you’re white.

Monday, early afternoon: I’m in Canberra for my last speaking event of the year, a poetry reading at ANU. My mate Emad, a thin Leb with a bushy black beard, drives me to my campus accommodation in his station wagon, and on the way we burst open, spilling fragments of family history, our struggles within white institutions, our frustrated desires. It is so terrible, and wonderful, that we can only be ourselves with ourselves. I’m only stopping to drop off my bags before we get lunch, but Emad steps into reception with me: ‘they have mad free apples here,’ he says. As I check in, he grabs a fresh apple from the fruit bowl on the reception desk and the white receptionist flashes him a look of disgust I feel even from a metre away. When I mention it to him later, he says, ‘You saw that too? Thank God. I swear I think I’m losing it sometimes, it happens so often.’