I can’t stop crying. A friend of mine, a musician from Berlin, just wrote to say, do I just use your online postage calculator to pay for a poetry book? I’d like to pre-order. The books themselves are sitting tidily by me as I write, in four perfect cartons, we picked them up a few hours ago from the specialist binder who opened one volume to riffle through, saying, “This paper! It’s lovely, it was lovely to bind.” I am rather surprised how many poems have found their way into the collection, it is a lovely square-edged, strong-shouldered, upright beautiful book containing all the good work I have done in verse form since round about Y2K – when the world was intact, computers were optional: way back then. My friend wrote, I have been reading your story about how the printing got done. He said he liked it, “just as I immensely appreciate every post you make.” I hadn’t realised he was reading me, it feels like a sweet subtle connecting of our souls over all the cold lonely dark miles of sea and air. He wrote, “Time to pay back – literally.” Then my partner, another Berliner, gasped from the other room. He was fixing something on the site he built for me: this one. I ran in to see. My friend had bought every book I’ve ever published plus a download of my album. He bought the lot. He paid about forty-five dollars in postage. I sat down and put my hands over my face and cried and cried. After a few minutes my lover came closer and touched my hair tenderly. “Are you sad?” he wanted to know. “Oder freust du dich, or are you rejoicing?” I nodded, could not speak. “All die Jahre der Dürre,” he said, gently: all the years of drought.
Category: taking care of the place
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wizened neighbour from the woods
I have here this neighbour whose skin is dark and seamy and white hairs sprout from him like surprise. He is beautiful, he sits quietly, often under a tree in his back yard on the besser block low wall with sometimes a friend sitting by him, sometimes a fat swollen silver bladder of wine from a box of wine lying between them quietly. They are talking and their voices rumble and I had an operation recently, quite recently, which involved a scary general anaesthetic and I remember thinking, when I woke up that morning and the light had sliced the curtains open: if I could do this procedure just lying on his chest, I would feel safe, I would be sure I would survive it.
I survived it. The man who is my neighbour downhill has survived much more, maybe forty years more than I. He likes his tree. He likes the day. He accepts it I think. I like when his eyes rest on me and he lets me rest his eyes on him and as I pass, trotting down the hill carrying my milk can or that is, my empty coffee mug with curling horns of handles, he says always the same thing every day, slowly: “You should be running down that hill!” When I come back leaning into the slope my coffee steaming in one hand and face gazing down into the asphalt of our very steep hill he says, squeezing a wheezing laugh, “It’s all very well coming down the hill…” Every time I answer him the same. “I should be somersaulting!” “Yeah, it’s the climbing that’s hard.” He said to me one morning, “Girl, what you eating there?” and I opened my hand to show him, crossing the road, holding them out pink and stainy: “Lillypilly. Would you like some?” But the little fruits are gone now, partly because season and partly because greedy girl moved in to the house on the high hill and has had a feed of them, every morning, on her way to buy caffeine.
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hark
What if the things we are most dependent on are insufficient substitutes for something else? Walking home from my first independent visit to the gym – no trainer – and feeling throughout my body how free and magnificent I felt, and noticing the autumnal leafy breezy feel of Brisbane’s deep winter and how the traffic stop-started like jazz, I saw the signs over me and around everywhere advertising the drugs I am trying to do without. Coca-Cola, takeaway coffee, chocolate and sugary fats. Seeing the slumped walk and depressive expressions of many of the world’s wealthiest people – I mean, all of us in the couch-collapsed industrialised world – and the lit contentment and adventurous joy that is so noticeable when such people visit far poorer areas, spending-money to hand, I wondered about grace and how it can be disposable. Aren’t alcohol, marijuana, anti-depressants, and heroin emotional rescuers, overlaying the pain of unhappy life, loneliness, past abuse, dissatisfaction and boredom with softer emotions, wow-wonder, contentment? Aren’t sugar and caffeine and fats just blood spikes which replace, though inaccurately, that feeling we’re all familiar with of joyous bodily movement? Within the past decade we’ve seen children strapped down and reduced to vehicles. It feels like the training regime for a lifetime of slumping on couches, travelling by road and rail, sitting in front of a screen: sitting, sitting. Glimpsed through windows the business and manufacturing life of a city reveals itself transformed from the thousand different kinds of tasks people used once to do to run a workplace to now, always someone sitting gazing out the porthole, into the wonderunderwaterland of what we call the web or the net, a tangling ocean we all seem to get stuck in. Physical exercise is a renowned antidepressant; fresh fruit and vegetables are known cancer fighters. Do we prefer the pill. Do we want to dispense with the outdoor life, random and wild and where fresh encounters happen, in order like hamsters rewarding themselves in the cage to dispense bullets of information, and intrigue, and brief entertainment, and treats: the best bits of the roasted beast (crispy, salty, fatty crinkle packets) eaten all day every day, the high points of breasting the challenging hills (chocolates, lattes, soft drinks, sugared canned foods and everything manufactured) gulpable in near-death quantities, always nearby and available twenty-four hours a day, under a dollar: life under the dollar. I’d call it the dollar-drums if I were not afraid that coining new phrases and writing about it were my own sugar high, my own adrenalin rush, my addiction to healing the pain rather than the cause.
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fear of bunyips
It’s getting dark. The gentle end of a slow and satisfying farm day. My farm is a tiny lakeside property which belongs to an absent friend. I am alone today. Last night we walked round the lake, or dam, and I told my German visitor all about bunyips. Today he rang from a nearby mountaintop to remind me: “You know, those scary… the obokodies.” “Bunyips?” I said. “Bunyips, yes,” he agreed.
I let the chooks out to huddle in terror under a clump of some flowering ginger that sings. Its scent sings. They are frightened by the death of their fourth friend, two days ago, who was torn into heedless headlossedness by a hawk. I guarded them all day. Chased them out into the sunshine and leaned over the sagging cyclone wire to pick them up, plumply one by one, and carry them safely home. I bent my back under bushes and collected basketsful of dry kindling. I washed all the rugs and hung them out for sun’s succour. I took the landfill and all our recycling down to the council bins, near the road. In between I was supping and sipping on things that the humming ether brought me, random stories, articles and talks that lit my tiny local and deeply domesticated sky like tinsel snow shaken through a palm-sized dome. I set the axe against the tank and broke some branches over my knee. At the foot of the scored stump on which hardwood is splitted I found the dusty remains of the peeled head, eyeless and gone, of the poor chicken who wasn’t the fittest, on Wednesday, and didn’t survive. This is where my inner-city Berlin visitor had executed her a second time, after she died, so he could pluck her in hot water and rub her all over with red cooking herbs. The whole tiny house smelled of good food last night and I ate my baked potatoes and looked on, unable to stomach it, lacking the courage, picking the eyes out of a salad.
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the plastic to drown us in
Last week on the market I spoke to the girl queueing before me at the fruit stall. She had said to the cashier, Could I have a bag for that too please? which focused my attention from its dreamy perusal of the mountains of plump and glossy fruits. She had put her single lemon, her three apples, her two mandarins and her kiwi fruit each in separate plastic bags lest they contaminate one another. When the guy turned away to change her fifty dollar note I spoke.
Excuse me. I’m just so distressed by the… amount of plastic you’re consuming. Could you, I mean.
Her expression helped me. Goofy, caught out, unblaming, sprung. I gathered pace. Couldn’t you please think about bringing your own bags? I know, she said, looking down. I know I should. I said, pleadingly, They drift into the oceans. They sort of fly about. If you are a turtle or a fish they look like food, jellyfish.
I know, she said again, I should. Please, I said, please do. It’s really really time. And we smiled at each other and she walked away carrying her kilo of petroleum byproducts and once I’d paid for my bouquet of greenery and come out from under the awning into the wintry sunshine, so pleasurable, my partner was standing there opening wordlessly his canvas shoulder bag and as I fed the spinach and fennel in feet-first I was aware of the plastic bags girls passing us, seeing this transaction, maybe taking it home and owning it: we can normalise what seems a chore. However tonight standing at the checkout of a grocery store I felt unable to address the woman standing in front of me in line who had put every morsel of fruit and every mortal vegetable each into its own noxious, off-gassing solitary confinement. Bad, naughty vegetables, you suffer in there until you learn how to behave. I looked her over from her wood-heeled boots up to the leopard scarf that was slung so perfectly casually across her sleeves. I thought how I might say, Couldn’t you consider, and how she might say, It is none of your business, and how I might say, But it is my business! I have to live on the planet you are desecrating.
In between I visited the nut store in West End where everything is in tubs or big sacks, and you point and say, I’d like a half a kilo of those please, a wedge of that. The good-looking and ordinarily bearded man who came out from behind the counter cheerful and broad said to me, Would you like a bag for those? I said, No thanks. See I think I’ve already used up my lifetime’s…. quota of plastic bags. A laugh of surprise spurted from him. I think I probably have too, was all he said. After the grocery store lady with her terrifying scarf I walked home in a kind of fugue. The moon hung like a slim segment of moon high in the blackened and starless sky, a plastic bag drifting in a bottomless trench. How can we have come this far without catching on to ourselves, I thought. Is the water just too dark and warm? Are we asleep?
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brisbanally retentive at last
Brisbane. Took me ten years to settle here, having uprooted from sultry Jakarta and a school which had barely two students of each nation in one class. This was the first time we’d lived in the suburbs, since I was a tiny baby by the sea, a child learning to walk in the desert. I used to lie on my bed listening to lawn mowers almost frantic with the choking feeling that lives go nowhere and end in dust. Lawn clippings and agapanthus and dust. But then there was sultry West End, the village which now has devolved to a suburb at last. And then I moved away and now I am back. It has taken me months to move out of the suburbs and into a place of my own. And six months and tonight I feel the trickle of sweet familiarity at last, a trust in the landscape, a kind of security that releases a kind of intrigue it is hard to feel when you are always new, like how it’s hard to be deeply creative and free and wild with no safe home place and without a routine. I felt I belonged at last. God damn it, Brisbane.
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Jack the Hammer
Fought the good fight, and won. The battle if not the war. We came home an hour ago to the sound of jackhammers ringing up and down our street. It was 10pm. I rang the police. They said, they can do nothing, I would have to ring the Council. So I got on my ugg boots and walked down to the guys who were carving up the roadside with their gigantic hammer-carrots.
There were two of them, young and decent. Two older guys who work for a different company – the ones who take charge of blocking off the road – sort of shrugged when I spoke to them first, nothing we can do. I went and tapped Jack the Hammer on the shoulder. “Hi!” I said over his mate’s continued noise. “Do you realise this is a residential area? And it’s 10 o’clock at night?”
He pulled his earplugs out to speak to me. After a while his mate stopped work and we all chatted. I said, when my brother was doing that work, he used to wake up with his hands locked in a gripping position. Yeah, he said, feelingly. I said, you know in some practices like yoga, they suggest you do the exercise that’s the opposite, so that you undo some of the damage. Like if you hunch over a desk all day, you can lie back over a ball, to stretch it out. You could maybe stretch your hands this way… He tried it. “So that you don’t feel like you’re 75 when you’re only 28,” he said.
The other guy was calling his boss. He came back. “Boss says he’s sorry. It’s actually not in his control. You would have to ring the utilities company.” I said, “Can you please give me their number?” He wrote it down on a pink post-it note for me. He said, most probably it’s the local businesses who wanted the water to not be shut off while they’re trading. He said, You should have got a notice through the letterbox, a noise notice. He said, Usually we do this work during the day.
I went back home and called the utilities number. The guy at the other end was unhelpful and bullshitty. His smooth corporate speak annoyed me. “Yes, there’s nothing I can do,” he said several times. He tried to tell me the guys on the road would have “just said whatever to get rid of you, not meaning to be rude.” He slid the responsibility smoothly equidistant from all parties like a bead floating on an abacus so there was no sum. I kept him on the line for quite a while before giving it up. Then I heard the truck pull up stakes and park outside our door.
I told them what the call-in guy had said. “He said we should just wait til business hours and then report it.” “Hah! How does that help you?” Jack the Hammer rang his boss again, then his bigger boss. He came back to our door and stood shyly, courteously on the path, until I noticed him and came back out to ask what gave. He showed me on his iPad all the hydrants up and down the streets of Brisbane that need work done. I said, Is that all the places where you have the pleasure of jackhammering in future? He said, “He shouldn’t have said we would tell you anything and that we were just bullshitting you.” I said, “I know! I thought that was rude. He was just trying to avoid taking responsibility.” He rang his boss again. “Yeah we’re hammering in the middle of all these houses, mate. This needs to be done during the day.” He so impressed me. Courteous, friendly, warm, pragmatic, and with humour. Stood up to his boss and to his boss’s boss. No soft soap, just genuine humanness. I felt like offering them a cup of tea. My eyes felt like they were peeling. He said, “I’ve got my big boss to come out here… he’ll be about a half an hour.” I said, “Well, if he needs to talk to me, can you get him to come knock? I’m going to try and get half an hour’s sleep.” He said, kindly, “Would you prefer he rang your mobile number? That way he doesn’t have to disturb you and that.” I said, “Yeah, that’d… No, wait. I reckon it’ll be harder for him to tell me, to my face, that you’re about to start jackhammering at 2 o’clock in the morning.” “True,” he said. We shook hands with great affection. I told him, “You did a good thing. You’re very very decent and I appreciate it. Thank you.” He said, “Well, you need your sleep.” And then they went away.
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The Saturday Paper
Bought The Saturday Paper, the one not owned by a misanthrope sadist. Carried it into my favourite weekend cafe and sat down. They were playing the Rolling Stones: bloke music. The first sentence that caught my eye was: “Trying to explain why fiction matters, novelist Ian McEwan put it simply. ‘Cruelty,’ he said, ‘is a failure of imagination.’”
Common-sense headlines followed: “The real budget emergencies: households around the nation face genuine hardship, with terrible consequences.” “European austerity breeds far-Right support.”
The article titled Failure of Imagination was by Sean Kelly. He explored the reaction to Hockey’s budget and said, what he is hearing is not only individuals lamenting their own losses in this new deal, but a nation of people who worry about the impact on their fellow citizens, “imagining,” for example, “the everyday obstacle course imposed by disability.” He said, “There is harder work ahead, work many of us have still largely failed to do because what we are being asked to imagine is too far removed from our own experiences.”
A whole album of Mick Jagger’s plaintive lope later, paying for breakfast I joyfully brandished the new enterprise to the cafe owner, standing at his till. “Finally you can buy this locally!” I said. “What is it?” he said. He had not heard it’s happened. I showed him. Staff clustered round. “Can I take a photo of that?” “Can I too?” Careful pictures of the back-page subscription form disappeared into several phone cameras. They jostled behind him to leaf over pages, pointing, reading. The guy in the cap covered in little Lionel Ritchies levelled his finger at me, the bearer of better bad tidings. “This is genius!” he said. The owner said, it hurts to buy five copies of The Courier-Mail and five copies of The Australian every Saturday. I said, you will love this. It’s full of interesting points of view. Over his shoulder the tall barista said, “There’s no Sports!” The cafe owner flicked the paper open at the back. “Yes there is,” I told him. “You just didn’t recognise it because it has a photo of a woman athlete.”
Reading the paper had left me filled with an unholy rage, but without the sick feeling I get from Murdoch’s certainties, a deep fury empowered rather than overwhelmed. “This isn’t us,” I felt, “this isn’t right.” The cafe owner and I talked it over in a few despairing sentences. “Every morning this week it’s been all about the State of Origin,” he said. “Yeah,” I said, “cos nothing else is happening in the world. Nobody’s struggling, nobody’s suffering…” “People read it,” he said, “people buy it, but I can’t believe they like it.”
I said, “I just read this from end to end. Not one photo of an Indigenous person saying how their low income and premature death rate are really their own fault. They should work harder.” We both had tears in our eyes. “It’s really good to see you,” he said, “really good.” “Thanks for your halloumi,” I said. “Thanks for your hospitality.” Afterwards I cried all the way home. My Berlin companion, who his first weeks in Brisbane had worried he would not be able to live in a country where every morning this kind of crackling cruelty unfolded over the breakfast table and whispered from every headline its slimy innuendo, asked, What is it. I said, bursting, People don’t want this! This is not us! I can’t believe in their real hearts Australians are so racist and greedy and selfish and cruel. “Our country has fallen into the hands of thieves.” I remembered pelting across Berlin on my bicycle to vote at the Australian embassy, the sense of resolution and purpose in the room, mostly young people, filling the forms in, voting. I remembered keeping an appointment the next week with a shiatsu masseuse I had fallen in like with, who said when I showed up, “You look pale. What’s the matter, are you ok?” And I said, “Something terrible has happened in my c~, in my country,” my voice broke and I sat on her futon and sobbed. Who could have guessed then how terrible it was. The vengeance on anyone vulnerable and poor. The vindication of everyone landed and privileged. The silencing of anyone who is not white, in a country built on burnt rich black and red soil. My belief in life is that people are kind, it is only our damage and pain that makes us take out more damage and pain on each other. Tony Abbott’s government feeds to that a small, poison doubt, telling and insidious: Maybe not all people are only cruel because hurting. Maybe there are some, walking amongst us but psychopaths, who seem functional and believe in themselves but who gain satisfaction from inflicting suffering. Satisfaction, pleasure, and release.
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housewarbling
I cannot describe what a privilege it is to have a home of my own after two years of house-guesting, couch-surfing, and six-week sublets. A friend who is also deeply introverted said, You must feel like a tortoise with no shell. I do! I did. But we’ve found a tiny high house with a tree-shadowed back deck, crowded between the new high-rises that despoil old Brisbane and at the same time bring her to life. Hemmed in by light industry, free from lawn mowers as nobody has the space, roaring with traffic all night and all day, wonderful. Within four days of first seeing the place we’d moved in.
Winter in Brisbane is beautiful. It’s not cold, but it’s cold. In a month’s time my beloved goes back to Berlin and my throat shrivels at the thought. But for now, a branch to rest on. Our first place together. An afternoon in the sun. A soft prong of furry grey ears that rises from the doona as I go in to collect my jacket off the hook.
At first it was like camping: a spacious, luxurious, first-world camping, serene in serendipity. We had cold showers and tea-light candles, newspaper for toilet roll. The flickering space so golden at night embraced us from the start. We moved our stuff in. I could feel, or felt I could feel, the kindliness of whoever lived here before, three exotic names in the letterbox, and the shallow tree resting out back with its branches never inactive, the artist who lives next door and who when we were chasing our cat spread his hands saying, “My yard is your yard,” the piercing weird tropical birds at night which that first night were louder than traffic, let me feel at last I was at home at last. Oh, at last, at last.
In the mornings I take a pair of double-handled mugs and scuttle down to the hole-in-the-wall cafe which spills with office workers. I take away two coffees and carry them uphill home. The neighbour who spends his days smoking behind a frangipani tree waves and I call back. From inside the house I can hear the morning mewling of my cat, who is back after two years lodging on the soft laps of my parents, who thus enabled me to travel and delay coming home. That’s if this is home: funny Brisbane, which doubles in size every time you turn your back, where we moved from Jakarta when I was twelve and which I left so many times, forever leaving, last heading south in 2003.
After four days’ flicker the power came on and I carried the stinking kerosene lamp outdoors. We had hunted down the kerosene in the local midnight convenience, in its ribbed bottle that in ribbing says poison; on the lowest shelf, but with child-proof cap. It stood next to a bottle of clear methylated spirits. The corner shop when I lived in West End used to sell meths cold, from the fridge. I remembered that, and the painter friends in a rickety place in Paddington who agonised over the old man who liked to take refuge under their high house on a steep slope to drink his meths and milk. This was years ago. He was rotting himself. They were relieved he didn’t smoke. These houses are like matchboxes on stilts and it’s a revelation to a Berliner how it can be colder inside the house than it is outside in the mid-morning winter sun. The whole place would go up in a giant torch, the house itself is tinder.
I set fire to my house once, late one night. I set a pan of oil on to heat and then sat down to write. Maybe that’s a story for another occasion. The firemen came clanging down our narrow street and couldn’t get through, they had to leave the vehicle and leap out, they rushed in and stomped through, after I’d put the fire out, in their giant boots and yellow rubber overalls. The guy in charge swept a glance up and down my walls, which were floor-to-ceiling books, and said, “This House…. is a Fire Trap. You have got to get rid of some paper.” I was glad, then, to be rid of the flammable kero, its brilliant, electric, improbable blue. Carrying it to the checkout I realised something, and said to the plump fellow staffing the till, “Hey! They probably added this colour because it looks toxic – to show that it’s poison. There’s nothing like it in nature. But, now… we actually have energy drinks that are exactly this colour!”
“Yeah,” he said, incurious, bagging my groceries though I’d said, “No bag,” standing unmoved as I fetched them back out again and piled them under my arms. Sometimes it seems the whole world is an artificial blue whose dire warning passes unheeded. Sirens are not lovely temptresses on wet rocks, combing and combing themselves, calling us off-course to pleasure, but flashing kerosene-coloured lights that revolve with a wet sound that’s unbearable and which we tune out and ignore. I wonder how deep have we poisoned our minds. Are we lit inside like the material world, carpeted in concrete and no longer allowed to grow dark (its dearest crop). The hoop of day revolves around and round earth’s hub and the thousand flights track the near cloud like lit flies, the native, believable blue and green of the world’s watery and earthly chores lying at ease, overridden, injected a billion times with a million kinds of toxic compounds of our own fevered invention: carrying home plastic instead of water, dining off plastic instead of wood; is this why a home of one’s own, until the water rises, is the kind of refuge that it is… nowadays.