The Attrition of Heat

In London, the worst months of the year were January and February.  The excitement and bright lights of Christmas and New Year were over, it was bitterly cold and it was grey.  If the sun made an appearance, it was only for a few brief, shocking hours, and I was usually indoors, working at the library or studying at my desk.  There was nothing to look forward to but the long drag into spring, which happened so slowly it seemed as if the days would never become light again.  I would check the sunrise and sunset times obsessively, calculating how long it would be before I walked into the courtyard of UCL after work and found it gleaming in a weak dusk.

Strangely, it seems that the worst days of this year in Brisbane have been in the same months, again because of the weather.  At first the heat was a novelty: it necessitated the purchase of light, silky frocks because my wardrobe was still geared towards winter, the balmy evenings were gorgeous, and Christmas was back to normal, with the opening of presents with the windows down and cicadas droning, the crispy meringue of pavlovas, and fresh grapes and stone fruit.

But now I find the heat so consistently overbearing that I can neither sleep nor eat.  It’s too warm to think, which means I am imprisoned in an air conditioned room for half the day while I write, and I hate not having natural airflow.  I am irritable, losing weight, and am attacked by a plethora of mosquitoes that live beneath the house and come into my room for dinner.

It seems the only thing to do, when the day finally cools, is to escape the claustrophobia of my room and get on my bicycle.  I ride to the river, where I sit on a bench beneath a flowering wisteria vine, eat an orange and watch the sun go down.

On Deadlines

In keeping with the subject matter of this post, it is apt that I started it some six months ago and that I’m only just getting around to finishing it. If I’d had a deadline it would be written by now.

Deadlines are a good thing for a writer, in that they make one write. Hence for my current novel, I have a self-imposed deadline of the end of January, when the publisher of my previous novel returns from maternity leave and might be interested in reading a draft. For my thesis, I know there is another academic who will shortly be publishing on similar material, so I need to get it into the public domain soon. I also enter literary competitions to force myself to polish my stories and essays. If they don’t get anywhere in the competition, they should then be ready to send to literary journals.

However, there is another deadline altogether which has meant that I cannot slow down in my output any time soon: children.

At the beginning of the year, a friend referred me to The Divided Heart, by Rachel Power, a book of interviews with artists who had become mothers. Power’s cogent introduction confirmed my fears:

The psychic transformation that occurs with motherhood arrives simultaneously with the cruellest of constraints on a woman’s time and freedom to create … Art demands what a mother’s routine does not permit: a concentration of self, the liberty to make use of the artistic impulse when it arrives (p. 1, Red Dog Books, 2008).

In other words, it’s a constant war between being selfish and selfless, between being on your own, thinking, and tending to the needs, thoughts and knowledge of others. Realistically speaking, the children come first, and your time for your art suffers.

As I write this, I hear Andrew Marvell’s classic lines from ‘To his Coy Mistress’: ‘At my back I always hear/Time’s winged chariot hurrying near’. He was talking about getting a woman into bed, but I’m talking about getting my next five works (two novels, two novellas and my thesis) to a publisher before a kid comes along and eats up all my time.

The problem is, as Nikki Gemmell put it in The Bride Stripped Bare, ‘Your heart will now tighten whenever you see the imprint of a friend in her child’s face. It’s something that’s in danger of overtaking your life, the want’ (p. 38). I understood this perfectly when I saw my cousin’s daughter at Christmas. She was so like her mother in appearance and charm that it was impossible not to be moved. Your body begins to clamour, to become insistent; it melts when it holds a friend’s baby. You pay attention to children when before they were just irritants. You begin to conceptualise what it would be like to be pregnant, an idea that had previously been anathema to you.

‘Oh, you’re only 32,’ people say to me, ‘you’ve got plenty of time.’ But I haven’t. A friend with whom I was living in Sydney who, after a struggle, became pregnant at 43 told me, ‘Don’t leave it too late,’ and older women say to me, ‘Get cracking’. Also, I don’t believe in IVF; I think there are enough kiddies out there who need mothers through adoption than trying to make more through such an invasive process.

Needless to say, the problem of how to fit in the kids is one that rarely afflicts male artists, as it has usually been the woman who, cooking, cleaning and child-rearing, allows the man to get on with his work, a situation which I find highly unjust.

The many other difficulties facing the female artist were famously addressed by Linda Nochlin in her 1971 work Why Are There No Women Artists?, while in an Australian context, they are beautifully articulated by Drusilla Modjeska in Stravinsky’s Lunch. I also found a recent expression of it in The Broken Book by Susan Johnson, an Australian writer whom I admire, now living in England. Although it was a novel of broken narrative and broken dreams that never quite came together to deliver a punch, it illuminated well the quandary of the writer who is a mother:

‘You’ll never write anything if you expect perfection,’ he said.  ‘Better to have something on the page than nothing at all.’

I lost my temper: David has always written with effortless grace, words flow from him uninterrupted; I have always had to hunt down every word as if armed with a knife.  ‘That’s all right for you to say!  I can’t hold an uninterrupted conversation, let alone finish a book.’

‘Nothing stops a true artist,’ he said, ‘not war, not poverty, not the state. “The true artist will let his wife starve, his children go barefoot, his mother drudge for his living at seventy, sooner than work at anything other than his art.” George Bernard Shaw.’

I glared at him.  ‘What if the artist happens to be the mother?’

He smiled.  ‘Darling, wet nurses are thick on the ground if you only care to look.’

I left the room.

(Allen and Unwin, 2004, pp. 144-145).

A nanny is always an option, of course, but only if you have money. The couple in Johnson’s book didn’t, and it was easy for the male writer to make this glib, dismissive comment, because he didn’t have to look after the kids.

What Johnson also expresses here is the difficulty of extracting yourself from your children. They interrupt, they demand attention and, of course, you feel bad for sending them away. Even I feel this when Niece and Nephew come into my room and crawl under the mosquito net, wanting to play.

‘Auntie Jess is working,’ I tell them (it has to be sternly, to make them go) and reluctantly they leave. I have to shrug off the guilt and go back to my neurotic doctor with her brooding love interest.

On that note, a female doctor friend once said to me, ‘It isn’t that I don’t want children, it’s that I have to be careful of wanting them too much, because it might not happen.’ Sadly, I feel the same: there is the danger that you might not meet the right man, or, if you do, you find you’re just too busy to make it work, or your partner isn’t prepared to put in the hard yards and help, so why get your hopes up? Although, being the most organised person on the planet, of course I have a backup plan, and intend to adopt if the first holds true. I also have a sense (possibly superstitious, possibly not) that if you give in to the craving, it takes over your life, which is a dangerous situation for a single woman to be in. As a person who values love so highly, I don’t want my choice in a man to be ruled by my ovaries.

So I find myself pushing the longing to the back of my mind, and as I write I silently beg my body not to pack it in yet, but to hold on and stay healthy for a little while longer.

And if I got up the duff and my carefully laid creative plans were thrown awry? Well, being that master of organisation, and being driven and ambitious, I would find a way to make it work. In addition, as my boss (a hard-working researcher who is not remotely creative) pointed out, the experience of having children is so amazing you would be insane not to do it. This is also what many of the women in The Divided Heart described: that, in terms of material, it changes you, and your art, fundamentally. From a creative point of view, it lends richness, depth and understanding to your craft.

Of course, to hold my own child in my arms would be the most gorgeous reward for so many years of hard work and waiting, but until then, I’m writing as fast as I can.

On Running and Avatars

After the lugubrious navel-gazing of my former post (this is what happens to writers when they spend too much time on their own; they go mad), I thought it would be nice to inject some jollity into this blog and begin with a joke. Apologies to my married, male heterosexual readers, for this is at your expense:

Q: Why are married women heavier than single women?

A: Single women come home, see what’s in the fridge and go to bed. Married women come home, see what’s in bed and go to the fridge.

O it made me laugh. I love clever jokes. I love all things and all people that make me laugh. When I’m happy (which is often, these days), I sometimes laugh myself to sleep.

Sister returned this week, with dogs but sans children. Sister can talk the leg off an iron pot, and after two weeks in solitude this was something of a shock. However, I’m relieved that she’s back as now I have someone to cook for and will eat properly again.

I was devastated to find the puppy greatly changed: he’d had all his beautiful fur cut off because it was matted with dreadlocks. His pelt was pretty much the reason why I loved him, because he was like a big, soft Persian cat that bit my ankles and escaped with pieces of underwear from my room. Proving that I am not a fickle creature, however, and compensating for fewer cuddles, I have made him my running partner. I used to run with our kelpie when we moved into town and she couldn’t chase sheep or rabbits anymore and went a bit bonkers, and I realised how much I’d missed running with a dog. I said to Sister that I didn’t know what I’d do when the puppy’s fur grew back; I’d look like an idiot running with a fluffy cocker spaniel instead of the lean, bare-faced pointer that he currently is. Anyhow, he loves it, and gallops along with his tongue hanging out, still a dumb blonde despite his manly haircut.

Running also has its uses in that AFL season has begun and the boys are training again. This, naturally, necessitates the use of the route past the oval by the fruit bat colony, which allows for the most marvellous vistas, in tandem with the anxiety of being attacked by bats gone mad from the lyssavirus.

Enjoying our child-free freedom, Sister and I went to see Avatar at Hawthorne. Not having had a 3D experience since Expo 88 when we wore cardboard glasses with blue and red cellophane lenses, we were a little unsure how the new versions worked.

‘I can’t see properly. Does yours have a black spot in it?’ I asked Sister.

‘Yes, I took mine off to clean them.’

‘I don’t think the 3D bit can have started yet.’

While we waited for the movie, Sister bailed up the manager and asked why there were no hearing facilities, as I was too tired for a fight. His contention was that, as it was a cinema that showed blockbusters which were incredibly loud, the hearing impaired didn’t need any special equipment to hear. I would have told him that this was a lazy excuse; for most hearing impaired people it isn’t loudness that helps you hear, but clarity.

As it happened, the dialogue was so bad that it didn’t bother me that I missed half of it, although trying to work out what was going on from the context was a bit difficult. I was also irritated that the subtitled translations of the Na’vi language were clichéd. Surely if you go to the effort of creating a new language, you can render its translations a little more subtly than some kind of colonial pidgin?

That aside, I loved the film. I loved that it was so visually gorgeous, that the female characters were capable and graceful, that the interaction between the Na’vi and their surroundings was evocative of Indigenous Australians. I loved the slippage between dream and reality, and that after a while you couldn’t tell which world you were in. It reminded me of Blade Runner (one of my favourite films), where Decker tells the android with whom he falls in love that she isn’t human, as she believes she is, that her memories are constructs, and that the world she’s in isn’t real to her the way it is to him (presuming that he isn’t a android himself, an enduring question).

I also liked the theme of connections – not just between the Na’vi and the natural world but between humans and the Na’vi. The way their hair curled into a plant or animal echoed Case in William Gibson’s novel Neuromancer, ‘jacking in’ to cyberspace and into another consciousness — which is of course what happened when the humans became avatars, jacking in to another world. The way the Na’vi’s eyes widened when accessing the consciousness of other creatures also made me think of the shock of connection during sex which, in essence, was what the film seemed to be about: the fight to survive, to reproduce, to sustain a way of life.

When the lights came up Sister and I blinked rapidly, our eyes sore. Sister pointed out that the 3D screen was how her world appeared when she didn’t have her driving glasses on. I mumbled a reply, concentrating on getting out the door which is always difficult in darkness with poor balance, and brightened when I saw that the glasses could be recycled.

I was starting work the next day and it was imperative that I sleep. Of course, after my heart pounding for three hours, I didn’t. I could have done with a run to get rid of the adrenalin in my body, or a good laugh.

On Tedium

Until I reached this stretch of holidays set aside to finish the first draft of my novel, I realised I’d forgotten just how insanely boring writing can be.

I get up at about 8am, or earlier if I can (it’s hard work becoming sentient when you are most definitely not a morning person), check my emails, occasionally do some yoga, eat breakfast and make a coffee, then sit at my desk.  Sometimes, if something interesting has happened in my life (which isn’t often), I write in my journal.  Then I think of a scene and start to write.  Then I check Facebook.  I write some more.  I make another coffee and look at clothes on birdsnest.com.au.  I write a bit more and have lunch.  After lunch I usually have a nap.  Then I make a cup of tea.  I look at Facebook again.  Then I write another scene or two.  Then I look at spencerandrutherford.com.au to see what’s in the sales (I mean, what did writers do before the internet?).  Then I push myself to write the few final pages to reach my quota of ten pages of longhand.  Released from my shackles, I go for a run past the bat colony where the fruit bats are waking, squealing like stuck pigs.  Or I ride to the pool and swim laps, enjoying the sensation of the water on my skin, and the relief of having a completely empty mind.

At the moment, I have no one to talk to, which is just as well or my concentration would be completely broken.  Sister is still at Parental Unit’s with the children and dogs, so I don’t have the puppy to play with.  It is tedious.  The stuff I’m writing is crap, with too much sex and melodrama.  I worry that it won’t be good enough for my agent to read at the end of January.

But then, but then.  After days of procrastination, I hit a seam and follow it, and the writing that comes out is as sharp and delicate as opal.  At other times the pressure of doing nothing builds up and is released like a storm, so that the writing, whether good or bad, gushes onto the page.  When it’s going really well, it’s like a drug.  Social invitations (not that there tend to be many in a writer’s life) are cancelled, because it’s preferable to be with characters than friends.  I feel distressed and irritable when I’m away from it for too long.  However, it takes a long time to get to even these small highs.

There is no money in writing.  It’s boring, except for the few exciting moments writing sex and melodrama, which I usually cut out when I edit, and it’s lonely.  The process of reworking a novel and playing with the language is immensely satisfying, but that doesn’t come until later.  The launch and publicity are thrilling, but short-lived.

I’m no longer at the stage of wondering why I bother, as it’s so much a part of me that to not write would be like killing myself.  So it’s heartening to listen to writers such as Kate Grenville, speaking at the Melbourne Festival of Ideas, in which she discusses the usefulness of writers, particularly in a time of change.

Grenville, on reading up on our reactions on climate change, likened the inaction of even intelligent people to changing their lifestyles to reduce carbon, to her attitude in her youth towards smoking.  She knew and believed all the science about why smoking was bad for her, but she still couldn’t give it up.  It was only when she lit up without thinking before a man she fancied, and saw the disgust in his face, that she was compelled to throw away the cigs and start running instead.

The key to changing her behaviour was empathy.  As she said, ‘I watched myself through his eyes.  I felt myself as disgusting, because I felt his disgust as my own.’

This, Grenville explains, is why writers are important: they help to translate other people’s lives and emotions into a form that compels readers to think differently.  Referring to Kafka’s comment that ‘a book is an axe for the frozen sea within us’, she maintains that the job of an artists is ‘to break the ice pack to create a different kind of response, one that’s beyond the oppositional positions of the intellect, the “yes it is, no it isn’t kind of debate’ … Art offers a way beyond those deadlocks of the reason and the intellect.  It creates a climate, so to speak, in which things can be understood in another way.’

And this is precisely why I write.  It’s all-consuming, ambitious and fervid desire to tell stories that force readers to step into other worlds, particularly the worlds of those that might be less fortunate than their own, and to see what it would be like, and how it would feel, to be that person.  In my eyes, the measure of my success isn’t how many copies I’ve sold, but how many readers I have persuaded to stop and think about why, for example, an Aboriginal person might be forced into drunkenness and violence, or why lesbians couldn’t be seen in the nineteenth century, or how even the most well-meaning members of a community can harbour the venom of racism.

The trick, however, is not to proselytise, because that turns a reader off.  Virginia Woolf put it elegantly when writing about Charlotte Bronte and Jane Eyre.  Describing a scene in which Jane, standing on a rooftop and staring over the paddocks, realised she was not free, Woolf says:

if one reads [Charlotte Bronte’s words] over and marks that jerk in them, that indignation, one sees that she will never get her genius expressed whole and entire.  Her books will be deformed and twisted.  She will write in a rage where she should write calmly.  She will write foolishly where she should write wisely.  She will write of herself where she should write of her characters.  She is at war with her lot (A Room of One’s Own, p. 81, Penguin, 2004).

Charlotte Bronte has lost her audience, Woolf is saying, because anger distorts her text.  Grenville also had a sweet way of putting it: we ought to provoke our readers and discomfort them, but in a way that is ‘sugared with the pill of such beauty or narrative force that they keep on reading’.

Often working outside, or on the edges of society (after all, we rarely put on a suit and go to work, except for our day jobs), Grenville also argues that writers think and problem solve in different ways.  She refers to the example of having lost one’s car keys, and you bang around the house in increasing fury trying to find them.  Eventually, to get your blood pressure down, you do the dishes.  And as you place the plate on the rack, dripping with suds, it springs into your head that you put the keys on top of the fridge.

It’s not an analytical way of thinking.  It’s intuitive, stemming from the unconscious, and writers tend to think in this manner.  This is part of the reason why, she says, we are more receptive to changes that are happening in society, and are well-placed to articulate them.

After listening to Grenville speak, I feel a thousand times better about the tedium and loneliness of my days.  Yes, writing for me is dull, pockmarked with procrastination, and never delivers enough money for frocks, but it’s not an entirely useless profession.  Besides, it’s literally impossible for me to do anything else.

On Piglets and Capitalism

Christmas was subdued this year, as Brother and Sister were away.  Being an impoverished writer struggling to save dollars and carbon, I couldn’t fly home, but caught the bus, which entailed a 9-hour journey with a gourmet stopover at the Matilda Roadhouse, where the only offerings were fried chips, fried sausages, or fried [insert unidentifiable item].

I always have a horror of sitting next to some sweaty, smelly person on bus journeys, or of being groped (as has happened on British public transport), and thus I was relieved when an intelligent-looking woman sat next to me and turned out to be the daughter of my Year 11 Ancient History teacher.

Seeing as I had 9 hours to kill, I read Nikki Gemmell’s The Book of Rapture which wasn’t nearly as good as The Bride Stripped Bare.  This might partly be due to the fact that Bride is one of my favourite books, with its sensual expression of all that makes up a woman: the need for security in a partner; the luscious delight in good, empathetic sex; the overwhelming bounty of pregnancy and motherhood; and the callousness of your best friend’s betrayal.  Rapture followed the same format as Bride, as though hoping to capitalise on its success, but it seemed contrived.  The little platitudes in Bride on 18^th Century womanhood complemented its subject matter.  In Rapture Gemmell likewise used quotes from the Bible, the Koran, C. S. Lewis and the Dalai Lama to reflect the subject matter, religion and playing god, but they seemed overblown, and became so irritating that I skipped over most of them.  It was interesting to read her representation of how the love for one’s children and one’s parents can affect and alter events, particularly in the sterile and totalitarian world she created, but it lacked the evenness and originality of Bride.

Out the window of the bus I saw a beige coloured bra strapped to a gum tree and two men raking onions, spilled onto the side of the road, into piles.

At home I found that my mother had done most of the cooking for Christmas, and that it was predominantly the same as the year before, which annoyed me as I enjoy cooking and trying out new things.  I watched seven DVDs, had the obligatory fight with my father, drank too much of Peterson’s pink bubbly Moscato and slept badly most nights.  On Christmas Day the rellies came up from Gunnedah, which provided much liveliness and amusement.  When they’d gone, Dad and I watched Wake in Fright, a clever critique of all that is revolting (and, to a woman, often frightening) about Australian masculinity.

Sister, who arrived a few days later in a hurricane of dogs, children and noise, asked if I had weighed myself before Christmas.  I said there had been no point, as what was I going to overindulge in: fruit salad?  She also failed to adhere to my Christmas List, which worried me greatly.  She assured me it was a fantastic present, which to me indicated that she had intuited that I wanted a $500 gift voucher from Alannah Hill.  Hence my worries were confirmed when I found she had given a Vietnamese family a piglet on my behalf via Oxfam.  Reverting to her 10 year-old-self (which was unable, as I sat on the verandah doing my homework, to walk past me without poking, hitting or aggravating me in some way), Sister thought it would be amusing the plumb the depths of irony, refer to me as a capitalist pig and provoke me by seeing what would happen when I didn’t get what I wanted.  O how we laughed.  Well, one of us did.  However she and Brother-in-Law also gave me a lovely pen, which will make my book signing much more glamorous, and secretly I was quite pleased about the piglet.

And once more I have found my incompatibility between my expensive tastes and my writerly impoverishment rearing its savage head.  Heading into town today to stock up on much-needed lipgloss and foundation, I found myself inexorably drawn to Alannah Hill.  Often I stand outside this shop like a little girl at a candy store, and never venture inside unless there is a sale.  Yet somehow the sales always coincide with my birthday, and so it was I found myself selecting a beautiful, summery, white, red and pink skirt which goes perfectly with the dark pink top I bought from Alannah two birthdays before, and what could I do but hand over my credit card, especially as one of my favourite songs, Flashdance, was playing?

Then the guilt was so overwhelming that as soon as I got home I cut up my credit card into 15 pieces.  I don’t believe in New Year’s resolutions because you can make them on any day of the year, but I suppose now might be a useful time to dictate to myself that there is to be no more shopping until I am a fiscally responsible adult, and that I might think to myself, now and then, of those poor villagers who need piglets, and who could never dream of walking into a shop of such delicate, frothy clothes.

On Carolling

Sometimes I just have to admit that there are some things the English do better. The first Christmas I had in London, I wandered down to Trafalgar Square after work. It was dark and cold. I was homesick and miserable. But there, in the square below the steps, were a group of carollers singing so beautifully I started to cry.

Not long after, H and I stayed with friends in Dorset for Christmas. There was a little church at the back of their house, and as it started to snow (I was beside myself; snow at Christmas!) we pulled on gumboots and plugged our way through the mud to the church. Although I’m not remotely religious, the Anglican service has been drummed into me from chapel every Thursday at school, and I sometimes went with my grandparents to church on Christmas Day to make them happy, and I liked the ritual of it. So when we began to sing the carols a wave of nostalgia slammed into me: I remembered the heat, and the muted colours and dryness of the bush, and I missed my family terribly.

However, it was cosy in the small, brightly lit church. There were gravestones and snow outside. I was among a close-knit community and afterwards in the church hall we had dry mince pies and awful mulled wine, which was positively exotic. Later the next day, shivering with cold, we went in the ute to the paddocks and clipped mistletoe and red berries from the trees. It had been a warm winter, and the birds had eaten most of the berries so they were hard to find. Our friend’s father said the ground never got properly cold anymore, which seemed true: the following year I was shocked to find the trees at the Barbican blossoming pinkly in November.

This year I went along (fully of my own volition, because I like to do new things) to Brisbane’s Carols in the City with Sister et al. Sister is a bit obsessed with Christmas and carols, and had enough excitement to compensate for those who were less enthused. After finishing my Christmas shopping, I found them in the sea of humanity sitting on the dried-out lawn in the Botanical Gardens. ‘Can you stand up?’ I called her on my mobile. ‘It’s a bunfight in here.’

There was a lot of waiting. I got bored. A young lesbian couple in front of us painted each other’s toenails. The woman in front of me asked if her husband was blocking my view and winked at me. I said I was fine; there was no way I was going to get involved in marital discord.

An MC finally appeared on stage amidst purple neon lights. There were wailing songs, then a Baptist rap about Jesus. It started to rain. The children wriggled. A group of seven women dressed in wedding gowns came on and sang their bit. I was startled. Sister bemoaned the lack of carols. A group of immature boys, barely out of adolescence, took photos of the lesbians, thinking it wonderfully funny. I was unimpressed. Niece started to whinge. I remembered when Parental Unit had dragged us to a late night show at the Brisbane Expo some twenty years before. I was cold, bored and couldn’t hear the words, and I whinged too.

Finally, to avoid the crowds that would heave out, we left early. Sister said, ‘There just weren’t enough carols. Why did they have to have all those new songs?’ This, I agreed, blinking back exhaustion as we walked over the footbridge across the river, was not how it should be done.

However, in other Christmas-related activities, I attended Sister’s work Christmas party last night, held in a carpark. I drank too much champagne, resisted the urge to dance (dancing on tables was not Christmas party etiquette, F. reminded us at the start of the evening), and received a surprising award for ‘Most Supportive Other’ or, as a colleague put it, ‘Most Supportive Non-Functioning Other’ which amused Sister and I no end. Then I got fed up with trying to talk and listen to people I didn’t know well (a struggle once I’d had three glasses on champagne on an empty stomach). Heavily intoxicated, I got on my bicycle and cycled home at top speed, which was probably not a very clever thing to do, but it was exhilerating to cycle fast on a balmy night with one’s silk dress billowing behind.

This morning I woke feeling very sorry for myself, staggered about for a bit, drank two coffees, put Madge on my Ipod and sat down to clean and oil my bike, which proved most therapeutic.

On Everyday Ecology

There are many reasons that I’m glad I’m home: my family (close and extended), old friends, the abundant sunshine, friendly people who make eye contact, fresh fruit, my favourite boutiques (Alannah Hill, Spencer and Rutherford, and Review), geckos clacking in the evening, open air pools in which one can swim without freezing one’s tits off, beaches with real sand and clean sea, eye candy in the form of healthy men who don’t run a mile at the sight of a capable woman, the bush, the marvellous Queensland State Library with views of the river, good coffee in non-multinational cafes, excellent cheap Asian food, my hilarious camp hairdresser in the ‘burbs, places where I can ride my bicycle safely and prettily, and of course the endless blue sky and the space.

However, after watching the Liberal party chew off its legs like a fox in a trap, I have begun to despair of Australian politics.  Although the isolation of this country is one of its appealing characteristics, it also means there is less exposure to the politics and policies of other countries.  Over the four years that I lived in England, the question of the environment and of climate change went from an issue that could be easily dismissed (there was no recycling in the residential college in which I lived for the first year, nor in the housing commission area for the second year) to something urgent and pressing.  Although England was initially fairly backward in terms of environmental policies, change and consumer awareness happened rapidly because of the proximity to Europe, where recycling and alternative energy usage were already mainstream.  There were also, of course, more people, which meant that groundswell movements could take off more quickly.

Here, by contrast, farmers in the country work the land the same way their fathers did, and their fathers before that, despite that the fact that we are running out of water and the land was never meant to be farmed with European methods, if at all.  There is a desalination plant either in place or being planned in every city.  Not only do these kill off the oceans’ ecosystems, they’re also energy-intensive, which means more carbon output, which contributes to global warming, which in turn means less water.  And a drier continent means we are more partial to bushfires.

And while Australia burns, Abbott, Minchin and Hockey fiddle their laborious tunes and play the game of My Dick is Bigger Than Yours Therefore I Should be in Power.  Who cares about our children, or our grandchildren, or even the country itself which, at the rate we’re going, won’t have enough fertile soil or water to support its population?

It’s clear that we can’t rely on politicians stumping around on bloodied legs, and that change can and must be done on an individual level, even at the risk of our efforts being cancelled out by the permits being handed to industry.  Because what we need is the shift of a national mindset, and that will happen more effectively if it’s viral rather than imposed by above.  This doesn’t mean you have to become a greasy-haired hippy (I, for one, will not give up my shoe/handbag/frock addiction), but to think sideways, and to make changes where you can: ride, walk or catch public transport instead of driving, uses buses and trains instead of planes (where possible; it’s a big country), use aluminium water bottles instead of plastic, get a worm farm if you have a garden, re-use as much as you can, pester your council member to increase recycling and make cycling easier and safer, especially for deaf cyclists who like to wear stilettos.

Counting carbon is like counting calories, but it’s far more beneficial than anorexia.  Brother-in-law scoffed at me for wanting to ride to Avid Reader to get a book for a friend rather than having them post it to the PO box, but posting would have meant creating carbon through making the packaging and driving the parcel to the post office, when on my bike it would have cost nothing.  Maybe it’s addictive personalities that take up the cause like this …

Or maybe it’s just that I love Australia, and want my children to have the quality of life that I have, and the stupidity and selfishness of the naysayers means the likelihood of this is becoming increasingly dim; obscured, no doubt, by the smoke from fires.

In which H returns to Oz (for a bit).

Once again the last few weeks have been too crammed to write, what with thesis corrections to finish and H coming back from the UK for a month (and kindly bringing a bagful of my stuff home, seeing as I leave remnants wherever I stay) and a convoy of Whites to join for Cousin V’s wedding in Bundaberg.

As Cousin A had come up for the wedding and was staying a few days, we decided to make a night of it and go out on the town in Bris Vegas.  I had a lovely outfit from Review, purchased early this year but as yet unworn, and therefore needed an occasion in which to make it worn.  We glammed up and tottered (well, I did) to Cloudland, where SP joined us and then (being a Valley local), he took us to another two bars, and I, being very partial to cocktails, perused the drinks menu like a novel and licked salt and sugar off the rims of my cocktail glasses.

When under the influence of alcohol, I find it difficult to lipread, as it takes quite a lot of concentration and alcohol does tend to jeopardize one’s neural pathways.  So, being unable to converse, I have the option of sitting in a corner and rocking like a vegetable, which is a little boring, or hopping up and having a little dance.  Being a spirited girl, I invariably choose the latter, particularly as Cousin A was doing his groove thang too.  There wasn’t a dance floor as such, only a little area on the way to the loos, but we still got applause from some young ladies nearby.

Come 11pm, Sister needed to get home as she had to get the sprogs up early for school, and then we had to drive to Bundy, so she ushered us out.  I danced down the aisle between the bar and the tables and gave a random man a wink, then got caught up with the jazz music and started dancing with the band.  Sister gave me a minute’s worth, until it looked like the saxophonist and I were about to duet, and bundled me out.  I was perfectly happy, and kept on dancing on the pavement while the others found a taxi and Sister, also being under the influence of alcohol and similarly uninhibited, cast aspersions on a taxi driver in a turban which I shall not repeat here.  Suffice to say the Whites cast formality to the winds when they’ve had a few.

After that we met up with a few more members of the family – Cousin C and his wife and Parental Unit, and drove in a van to Bundy.  More of this in another blog.

After Bundy, H and I caught the overnight bus to Parental Unit’s, which was so disruptive I’ve vowed only to take it during the day in future.  It’s not that bad, as I can always pass the time by reading and I like the scenery; it just unfortunately takes 8 hours.

En route to the bus depot we got stuck in a traffic jam, and H decided we should get out of the car and run.  Niece stuck her head out the window and laughed as we trailled the car, which just at that moment freed itself from the tangle.  We caught up and got back in while the car behind hooted, and Sister thought better of sticking her finger up at the driver (as she has been known to do) in case he rammed her.

Finally we got on the bus with other sweaty passengers and H told me the bus driver said we would be watching a 3-and-a-half-hour documentary.

‘What on?’ I asked.  ‘Whale watching?’

‘It’s on the life of a Greyhound driver.’

The penny dropped.  ‘Oh,’ I said, ‘he’s joking.’

‘That he is,’ H smirked.

As we set off I asked H to call the taxi company to see if they’d still be open at 3am, which they were, and then to call mum to say she needn’t get out of bed to pick us up.

On arriving in town, H called the taxi company.  It took a while for them to answer the phone.

‘Hello,’ he said politely when a woman picked up.  ‘I’m just after a taxi.’

‘Why, has something happened?’

‘No, I was told to ring this number when we got into town to get a taxi.’

‘Well I guess I’d better come and get you then.’

It was then that H figured out he was talking to his own mother – he had dialled the previous number in his phone.  Dad subsequently arrived with the car, still wearing his flouro orange earplugs and, thank God, he had put some trousers on.

Poor Parental Unit.  It was funny, but also very wrong.

While at home, I wrote an essay for the Calibre Prize and more of my novel and swam and read and wished for a dog to talk for walks.  The sky brooded over the thought of rain and eventually decided to come up with the goods, breaking the heat with a storm.  H trundled around banging and hammering at some product he’d designed.  We had barely any fights with Parental Unit and watched some excellent DVDs – the original Stepford Wives (which was sinister), Capote (after which H told me not to write a bestseller until I was 80 otherwise I’d be crippled by fame), Bangkok Hilton (Nicole Kidman’s first film, and she was very good) and a wonderful indie flick called Eagle and Shark which was about New Zealand bogans.

And now H has gone back to gloomie olde England and I am very sad.

On Close Encounters

Now that the parental unit have returned from the depths of Eastern Europe and I am back home, ostensibly safe, I can explain one of the reasons why I disliked London so intensely for so long.

On 6 o’ clock on a Friday evening in early January 2006, five days after I’d returned from my first trip home after moving to London, I walked down the street from the local Costcutter with a bottle of milk.  M, with whom I was living with at the time, was out at a housewarming party of a mutual friend of ours and I, as usual, was too tired to go.  I was going to have a cup of tea, cook dinner, read a book and go to bed.

I was daydreaming as I walked, as I was in a good mood after all the sunlight in Oz, and I was actually pleased to be back in London.  As I walked, I sensed that there was someone behind me and I glanced around.  There was a man behind me.  I also looked across the road and noticed a girl walking on ahead.  Nothing seemed out of the ordinary.

I turned left into the paved area between our block of flats, which held the recycling and garbage bins.  There was a covered way between this paved area and the grassy space surrounded by the flats.  I sensed the man following me but still didn’t think much of it.  I thought, almost unconsciously, that if I could get into the grassy space, I would be fine, as it was in the open.

As I passed under the covered way the man grabbed me.  I screamed, or roared, rather, as soon as I felt his arms coming around me.  A wave of adrenalin flooded my body and it felt as though I was waking from a nightmare, except of course was real.

The man put his man over my mouth to stop me screaming and his little finger got caught between my lips.  I bit down hard, and didn’t let go.  His grip, which had been quite soft anyway, loosened further and I twisted out of his grasp, still biting.  Then he just let go and walked away.  The whole thing was over in less than a minute.

The man didn’t run away, but walked, which suggested to me that he had done something like this before.  He also smelled bad, like he hadn’t had a shower for a month, so it seemed to me that he didn’t have a home.  Also, he couldn’t have known the area as there was nowhere he could have taken me unless he had a flat there, which was unlikely.  So I think he had a screw or two loose.

I stared after him, to try and get a description of him that I could give to the police, but all I could see that he was tall and black.  I remember the pinkness the inside of his hand as it closed around my mouth.  His bad smell was on my skin and his blood was in my mouth.  I spat it out in the sink once I got home, which in retrospect was a stupid thing to do because even if I had spat into a hanky they would have been able to get it analysed.

Then I dialled emergency services and they sent the police around, but they took more than an hour to arrive.  I was desperate to have a shower to get the smell off my skin but I couldn’t risk not hearing the police arrive.  As I sat on the stairs waiting for them, I decided that I wouldn’t allow myself be defeated by what had happened.  I wasn’t going to let some mad fucker ruin my life.

When the police finally arrived they apologised for being late, and said they hadn’t been able to find the flat.  They’d looked for CCTV footage but the camera didn’t reach under the covered way.  They asked if the man had said anything to me and I said that I was deaf but I didn’t think so.  Then they asked if he’d tried to grab my bag and I said no, his grip had been quite soft.  The only unusual thing I could remember was that his hands smelled of sex, but perhaps it was just that they hadn’t been washed for a while.    I asked about the possibility of AIDS because his blood had gone down my throat and the policeman said it was unlikely because it would just pass through my digestive system, where as there needed to be a cut for the virus to get into my bloodstream.  I had an AIDS test anyway and it all came up fine.  Then the policemen said it would be better if I was with someone than on my own, and offered to drive me to the party that M was at, but it was too far away.  When they left I had a very long shower, called my brother who, to his credit, didn’t freak out too much, and got a taxi to the party.  M and Wtk gave me a bit hug when I arrived.  I was wearing a new perfume, by Nina Ricci, and ever since that night I haven’t been able to wear it without qualms.  Recently, however, I gave it to my mother as I’ve since found ones I like more (Prada and Agent Provacateur, of course) and now that she wears it the unsettling associations it brings up have gone.

For the whole time the attack was going on I acted purely on instinct – there was no space in my head  for any thought at all.  I have my brother to thank for that: the many occasions on which I beat him up gave me a chance to practice my fighting spirit.  And as my father pointed out, when I told him, such was my nature that I would never allow anyone to get the better hand.  I would always fight back, every time.

However, the actual incident wasn’t what upset me most.  The reason why I came to hate London so much lay in the two men unloading a van, four metres away, who would have heard me scream but didn’t come to help.  Nor did anyone in the surrounding flats come out.

The police rang me up sporadically in the weeks that followed that to say they hadn’t found anything.  They sent me a victims’ compensation pack but it was too much bother to follow it up and I figured some poor bastard would need it more than me.  I didn’t expect much of the coppers (it’s London, they’re all overworked), though I didn’t appreciate being patronisingly told to calm down on one occasion when I wasn’t even agitated, I just couldn’t hear what I was being told.

It took about a year to get over it and to feel relatively safe walking on my own again, though I rarely went out after dark.  It is to my mother’s credit that I didn’t turn into a racist bitch.  She always said to me, ‘Never use the word “hate”, and never hate other people.’  I remained suspicious of black men, and physically they intimidated me because they’re so big and I’m so small, but every time there was a negative thought I tried to reason it away.  It gave me some insight, however, into hatred, and visceral it is, and how easily it wipes away academic arguments for peace and fairness.  A friend, to whom I described what had happened, said he couldn’t help but note that I had referred to the man as black, and that poverty and discrimination had a lot to contribute to the high incidence of violence among black men.  I replied that I was aware of that, but under no circumstances should a man have the licence to hit or attack a woman, no matter how bad their life is.  He conceded pretty quickly that this was true.

H also paid for me to do a self-defence course (as I was too povo to afford it myself), which I highly recommend, by Debi of Premier Self-Defence. It also, I was delighted to find, had the added bonus of the self-defence moves being demonstrated by one of the hottest Asian men I have ever seen.  I also bought a Weeble from them, a tube of hard plastic in which you can keep your emergency numbers and a pound coin for a phone call, and which can be used to take a urine sample if you think your drink had been spiked, and also to bash someone over the head if they attack you.  As I chose one in pink, M began affectionately referring to it as my ‘personal device’, much to my amusement.

It was indicative of the emotional maturity of the man with whom we were living (ie. 40-going-on-4) that the first thing he said to me, when I told him I had been attacked was, ‘Well, nothing like that’s ever happened to me.’  I thought, Of course it hasn’t you fuckwit, you’re a man and you’re twice as wide and twice as tall as I am.  I moved out after a year, as H was moving to London and I moved in with him, and it was with a sense of relief that I walked about in Stepney, which was a predominantly Muslim area.  Although I have a lot of difficulties with the way Muslims treat women, the atmosphere in the area was far less aggressive than in Hackney.

Ultimately, if I had been able to hear how close the man was behind me, I would have been more alert than I was.  I was immensely annoyed that I could no longer have the luxury of daydreaming, but had to be alert at all times.  However, I was also extremely lucky that nothing worse had happened to me.  It was a wake-up call, and I always tried to be very aware of my surroundings from that point on.  I am still nervous when people are behind me and I can’t hear them, which explains my overreaction in this incident (which also demonstrates I am very far from being a lady at times).

Suffice to say, one of the nicer things about Brisbane is that I don’t have to be so neurotic and nervous whenever I walk about, not least because the abundant sunshine means I can see what’s going on around me, unlike in the dark where I’m at an added disadvantage. The place is just generally less threatening than London – there isn’t that dystopian sense of pent-up anger and hatred, and the brooding, overcast sky, and the buildings stained by acid rain.

On Cycling

Often when I am cycling on my Pashley Princess, albeit under a baking Brisbane sun rather than the dappled shade of an English laneway, a phrase from ‘The Windhover’, Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poem, comes to mind: ‘the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!’  Hopkins was writing about a bird (in a marvellously onomatopoetic and slightly incomprehensible way) but the sensation of wind blowing past my cheeks and the freedom of wheeling along the paths seems the same.

Riding in Brisbane is bliss compared to London.  There are bike paths that aren’t too busy, I can ride on the footpath when the traffic is threatening, the sun shines and there are lovely parks and rivers for scenery.  The broody magpies have been something of a problem, as are the testosterone-driven men who barge into pedestrians and never say thank you when I give them right of way (and nothing infuriates me more than a want of manners), but on the whole it is altogether very pleasant.  I especially like putting my and the children’s library books in my basket and cycling to the local library, and pinging my bell to make people jump out of the way and make the bush turkeys run like mad.  It is a very satisfying bell.

Cycling attire has been something of a problem however.  Naturally I abide by the laws of the Copenhagen Cycle Chic Manifesto:

So, when looking at the ugly helmets in the bicycle shop I said to the man, ‘Don’t you have anything remotely feminine?’ and he handed me a pink version of the helmet he was holding.  This wasn’t very helpful.  I solved this by asking H to get me a Bern helmet from cyclechic.co.uk for Xmas.  I also wanted to wear my kitten stilettos, but after losing one of them in the middle of the road in one instance (fortunately, there was no traffic, and I daintily retrieved it), and tangling them in the pedal and nearly falling off in another, I had to abandon this idea.  I found some more practical shoes from childrenoftherevolution.com.au but they don’t go with many of my outfits, which of course is an excellent excuse to purchase some additions to my wardrobe.  And then there is the difficulty of one’s dress flying into one’s face, as I found when I set off in a silk frock.  I had to dash back home to put on a pair of bike shorts underneath so as to avoid flashing my knickers to the world.

Unfortunately, I fail on the point ‘I will endeavour to ensure that the total value of my clothes always exceeds that of my bicycle.’  To remedy this, I shall need to find a string of pearls to wear as I ride.