If one Australian festival was to take over the world as the British/American Hallowe’en has this year, which one should it be? Cockroach races? Todd River Regatta, which is run on legs in a dry river bed by contestants wearing beer-can boats? The People’s Republic of Woodford, largest folk fest in the southern hemisphere? Billycart races? Surf carnivals? Barunga Festival?
Blog
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smaller than you might think, vaster than you might imagine
I’ve been using the exact same folded square of toilet paper to blot my fountain pen every time I refill it for about three or four months now. It resembles the nosebleed of some terribly well-educated, landed, gentle person. Gentle in the old sense, I am gentle in the new. My blue blooded blotter and I carouse the seaming waves, always looking out for something that can survive the dark salt water, that can breath underwater and emerge intact and stronger, softer, something that breeds new life like a manatee mistaken by desperate sailors for a comely mermaiden.
I use this pen for prose, ideas, letters, postcards: everything except writing poetry. Poetry I find can tend to purple and bruise when handled too finely. It needs plainer tools. I write it like a shopping list, unafraid of whatsoever cravings might find their way onto the page there. I know that like tormented fruit plucked over by too many hands the cliche and banal trueism will rise to the surface, overnight like cream or over many weeks like flaws on a false politician, and I can pick it over and scour it out and glean from it that which is manifest, worth its weight in oranges, weighty but not too weighty, worthy.
All writing of poetry is worthwhile, we ought never to stop ourselves in the initial act. It’s got to be good poetry, though. It’s got to be rewritten. Real and true. You have to be able to jettison those ragged phrases that wear out their welcome in the mind, the ones you tend to mumble over on the final read-through. Poetry is more infested than perhaps any other art form with pretenders who use its name to shield their cowardice, their apathetic shouting, their lame attention-seeking, their emotional lies. Overstatement, fancy language, lack of conviction, boring ideas or endless self-description buried in ornate and impenetrable prose (yes, prose) – it’s all being displayed under the name of poetry and I think that puts a lot of people off. I think if much so-called poetry were performed under the name Songwriting – a related art we mostly tend to feel far more confident in judging – people would fold their arms and tip their heads, say, “You’ve not been playing guitar that long, have you?” Or, even worse, “I don’t believe you mean that.” -
bathitudes
I was so tired. I rang my mum. We rarely speak. I said, it’s me, I just wondered, are you out tonight? Only I’m feeling so worn through, and I want to have a bath, I thought maybe I could use yours but I’m feeling antisocial, I just want to be in the water.
Mum said, We are home, your auntie’s here, but I can explain to her you don’t feel like socialising, come round and just hop in if you like.
I rolled up a towel and piled into the car. It was one of those stately nights in the sub-tropics where the clashing leaves have stilled and the screechbirds are all sleeping, only the runnels of little fresh breezes disturb the grasses as they roll across the ground. At my parents’ house the lights were on upstairs. I let myself in and turned on the taps. Ran up to say hello and give my aunt a kiss: this is the same Christian auntie who once told me when I disagreed with my mother that I was possessed by the devil. “You look so beautiful,” I told her. My mum gave me a plate and some candles in little tin bowls. She gave me a box of matches. My father was watching tv and didn’t turn, though he said goodbye to me as I left, an hour later.
The feeling of sinking into a vessel of hot water. Of being only “a vessel sunk in a much larger vessel.” The feeling of peace: at the same time blood’s horses drum like a nearing army through the passageways of my heart. The heart leads its merry crew all over my body. It leads away and it lures them back. I lean back and close my eyes, candles flare on the outside of my lids, the all but too hot water rises on my chin. The tap drips. It drip-drips. It drip-drip-drip-drips. I am the only one alive in this valley of slow heat, I am guarding the entrance to my heart, hearing the horses.
When the water got too hot I climbed out, trembling, and stood on the mat to wrap myself. Letting myself out the side door I came onto a dark cave formed by the verandah’s overhang, shelved between two rows of bushes, the house next door almost non-existent in the greenery. I lay back in an old cane chair and let the heat steam off me into the cool dark night. I thought about a song I had written long ago. Back in the bath I began to sing it to myself. One feels like a child, singing privately in the bathtub.
“Sailing by/with colours high/and feathers to the knee,” went the song. After a long time I got out and dried myself, gathered my pen and the densely-scribbled Vietnamese restaurant receipt off the closed toilet lid, blew the candles out all at once. I put my clothes back on. Hot, hot. Calling up the stairs, “Bye! Thank you! Good night!” I escaped the house. Escaped all houses. My little truck was a vessel for mountainous voyaging, a bark that fears no storm. We drove home. We crossed the bridge, where my grandfather died. On my windscreen I carried all the lights, each one by one briefly flared and weightless, and then gone. The cliffs above the city were sentinels still, peopled by large rigid flowers of the porcupine bushes that shoot up into the cloud, by a late-night climber carrying his pack, by people desultorily talking. The pool of night left no tone untuned and no thought furrow fallow, no mere impossibility implausible. Back at home at my own house I parked out front under the long palms. I was weak with the water and with the depth of the night. Now I can sleep for a thousand years, now.
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engagement fest
We went to a party and everyone got drunk. This came treading the heels of some very sad news that had dissolved me and my partner into tears, sad family news, we sat on the couch and both cried together. That was 3.30pm, reflexively and pointlessly I looked at the clock. A long while later he said, what time was that party starting? Oh, but it was miles away, right out into the suburbs in a place I’d never heard of. The start time was listed as five, it was half past four. We’d be late, they’d be all sat down in one long intimidating row along the side of a formal, white-swagged dinner table, heads would look up with blank smiles, like those hollow clowns, in unison. We looked at each other and my bold companion stood up. He held out his long hand to drag me off the couch. “I’ll make the icing,” I said, “you do the grooms.”
I had spent time on the phone that morning trying to find a cake decorator that sold those little plastic brides and grooms you see on the top of wedding cakes. This was an engagement party for two men, I wanted to buy two sets of plastic brides and grooms and break them apart and re-pair them. Turns out, they’re called cake toppers. Turns out they’re out of fashion. “Oh, we used to have those,” decorators said. I hauled myself into the shower to clear my brain and when I came out the kitchen table had been turned into a workstation. He had pulled out a reef of fresh cardboard and some watercolours and begun to draw. I mixed a batch of thick lemon icing, bridal white, and prodded the sticky gingerbread I’d made days earlier, to see if it was still fresh. With a bread knife I cut a crumbling diamond, slicing away the rinds, and iced it plumply on a big flat wooden plate.
To have sorrowing behind you and ahead and to carry on your lap a cute, white, festive cake, having turned out of the shower fresh as a pair of cupcakes, to pull on fresh, glittering clothes and drive out into the dark streets… there are worse ways to launch an evening. The party was way out on the Northside, at the far end of a twenty-minute drive, down a looping long steep street that ended in bush. By the time we arrived there we were two hours late. Another carload of people pulled up, honking and gesticulating: thankfully, these were the only other people we knew at this party. “Are you leaving? or just arriving?” “Depends. What does the party look like when we get there?” We all spilled down the hill together in our finery.
To a shy person, walking into a party full of strangers feels like going into a cave filled with dancing bears. Sometimes I sit outside in my car for half an hour, thumping the steering wheel intermittently, urging myself, “Come on, come on!” Then the long drive back home and the sick dark feeling of having been bested again. It felt good to walk in on the crest of a wave of sunny people. We thrust our cake at the happy couple. We took photos, were hugged, stood smiling bashfully as the cake with its giant grooms in top hats – cake toppers in toppers! – was shown off. The house was gigantic and cavernous, raw beams thrust up into the roof, a living room like a stage which had at its end an actual bar, mirrored and framed in polished wood, hung with gleaming glasses.
In the commotion no one noticed a man in his sixties slide down the outer edge of the huge polished staircase and eel round the back of the big couch to turn down the volume knob on the stereo. He did it with such a furtive air that I burst out laughing, and bailed him up as he snuck past: “I swear, no one even saw that you did that, I promise.” He laid a finger to his nose, willing to laugh about it. “Reckon they’ll notice?” “They’ll never know the difference,” I said. I stuck out my hand. “Are you Pete’s Dad?” He was too generous to say, “stepdad.” I discovered that later, in his sweet snuffling speech about this “young man” who had “come into my life” and how at first they hadn’t understood each other but now they were “thick as thieves.”
The betrothed couple held hands and nuzzled each other as they were toasted. Like the darker-haired groom, speeches were short and cute. There was a feeling of being welcomed under the roof of a family, who wanted us to share in their good fortune. A long table was laid out with splendid food. Girls picked at the salads with immaculate fingernails. My partner said, “Do you realise you are the only woman here not wearing make-up?” I looked at him, expressionless.
In the far corner a tall guy was looking at his phone every time I glanced up. After a few glasses of punch I went over and slid my hand between his device and his eyes. He looked up. “Every time I see you you are gazing at this. Don’tcha wanna join the party, and be here amongst us?”
He was gracious, startled, cuter than I’d noticed. “I know,” he said. He laughed and shrugged. “It’s just I don’t know anybody here.”
“Neither do I,” I said, “except… those people.” Pointing back at the group I had abruptly levered off from, who had their heads together and were all weeping with laughter. He asked me what did I do and I asked what did he. He said, “I’m an accountant, but I hate it.” I said, “What would you be doing if you were really loving it?” So we talked about languages and which ones he liked. He had stayed as a student in Montreal. I tried to say something in French, something like “Zat ees where St Leonard of Cohen lives, non?” His girlfriend squeezed him on her way past, not looking at me. I said, “Wow, your girlfriend’s gorgeous!” “Yes,” he said, looking as proud as though he’d built her.
When I went back to my friends it was time to go home, almost. The next morning I woke horribly tainted with the poison Aunt Ethyl leaves to bless her favourite children. My thoughts hurt. Over breakfast we sat a long time sighing and staring. All of a sudden I remembered, “Hey? What were you laughing about, last night when I was talking to that guy who couldn’t get off his phone.” Oh, he said, laughing some more: nothing. Tell me, I said, tell.
It is easy to goad a person suffering hangover: by prodding, by putting your face too close and blinking into them. “It’s just that when you were talking to him he kept showing you his crotch,” he said.
“What?”
“Yeah.” He laughed. “He wanted you to notice him. He was standing at an angle… like… this… and had his hand in his pocket, pointing to himself… like this… and I was pointing that out to them and that’s why we were laughing.”
The day passed in a fog, we gathered our green veges on the markets. At bedtime, he said, in his funny mix of excellent and slangy and over-formal German English, “There was no sexier woman on that party last night than you.” I purred, pretended to suspect him. “So ~ you were looking?” “Oh yes,” he said earnestly, “I looked and looked. But there was no one.”
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gardening clothes
We went out to a swanky bar without getting out of our gardening clothes. It was quiet til a busload of people staggered in in some serious clobber. One of them came up to us and said, “How cool is it possible for two people to look as they drink their beers?” She was drunk. She looked me up and down and then told my companion, “Only five people in the world can wear dungarees – and she’s one of them.” I said, “Did you all just get off a bus or something? Did the cinema empty? Where did you all come from?” She pointed with her handbag. “Her – and her – they’re twins – it’s their 33rd birthday, we’ve been drinking in the park.” “66!” I said, because I am mathematical like that.
Afterwards we watched them taking turns to take selfies of each other. Can you take a selfie of someone else, can you even take a selfie at all when you’re not actually in it? Turns out you can. You just point any device at a group of made-up people and then watch as they instantly assemble themselves into sunny, close-headed groups. Everyone has a smile they can keep for ten minutes at a time. All the girls have long, straight glossy hair. They fall into varying heights, so that every face is seen, and it doesn’t matter how long the papparassist has to fiddle with his device, they’ll wait unmoving. “Australian women,” said my companion, dourly. “Somehow they all look like Jennifer Aniston.”
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bella Africa
Beautiful African woman, standing with her back to the street in a luscious canary-yellow dress. She is facing the vast windows of a display of swank cars, why? The windows rise away into the night above her head like an airport. Ah, I see. Beautiful African man, whom I didn’t see until he moved, in the dark, standing with his back to the car he has chosen for dreams, she has her phone up, he is posing. They are built like gods and light the night. I walk past with my head down, my hands full of posies of stolen plants roots and all gleaned from the gardens outside the shopping centre which I plan to propagate rather than just steal, beautiful in my way.
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the pickling palace
The people across the road are drunk and two of them are planning to have sex together tonight for the first time. That’s at this stage, it’s not even dark yet, we’ve still got the Fight that Blows Up Out of Nowhere and Falling Asleep in the Pizza up our sleeves. Their voices carry and then the Friday afternoon traffic will surge up the hill again to carry them away. He says something and she says, “You are fucking kidding me.” “No,” he says, something something. “You’re just making that up!” Her incredulity is a dare. Climb this tree for me and bring that fruit. He says, “No, I’m deadset serious. Anything you like.” One of the other blokes says something and then the girl begins to sing, or chant, like she was at a football game: “Je-sus, Je-sus, Je-sus, Je-sus.” The positive guy sings something over the top of her, harmonizing. He’s making it up. He’s fucking-kidding her. Their verandah falls apart in a seething heap of laughs just as a truck roars down the road. When the noise clears he is saying, aggrieved, “…been doing it all my life.” I know that feeling, I have too. I have just got home from a delicate day of negotiations in my unconscious and as we swept over the bridge with its hanging-lantern streetlights and banners I felt a song unbrew in me. I sang it out the window in handfuls of confetti and as we pulled away from under the biggest fig tree, that the road goes around (the greatest kind of road), I said, to my long-legged companion who was driving, “Did you see that girl on the corner, the beautiful girl, with the guy who’s just so in love with her?” “Yes,” he said, his voice warm as if fond of them. “How she was just standing there in her little purple dress,” I said, “holding the orange flowers he brought her. He’s looking at her so carefully, he’s in love with her every little gesture. She’s not even noticing, telling him something, he’s in love with the way that she says it.” “So is she in love?” he wanted to know. I said, “Could be. But she’s not thinking about it, she is remembering something that happened and telling him. So it was hard to tell.”
We drove round a sweeping corner prickly with pedestrians. We had watched a giant ibis as it took off from a street sign and flew the length of Charlotte Street, its white wings insignia. The prosperous tropical colonialism and sandstone and big bunches of trees made me feel at home. I wound my seat back and propped my foot out the side window. I said, sentimentally, “Both of them standing there with their bicycles.”
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exactly right like Goldilocks
I was working in a cafe today for the first time in a while and the woman behind me had an extremely carrying voice. I had sought out a quiet corner by the fountain to write and she came along borne on her throaty rolling laugh, which she brought out every time the good-looking, shaven-headed maitre d’ came past, and sat down to wait for her friend. The friend arrived. The coffees were brought by a Japanese waitress who spoke in a very high, girlish voice, anxious to please. The throaty lady responded to this waitress in her own high pitch, the kind of friendliness that lacks warmth and is in fact sharply dismissive, “Ok great! Thank you!” Then they settled down to conversation and I was reaching the end of my narrative by now and her voice interrupted my thoughts, lazy me, I couldn’t help it.
Her favourite word was “Exactly!” She used it twenty-three times. With emphasis, and pronounced “Igg-ZAK-ly.” I pronounce it rather that way too, more of an “egg.” Exactly, she would say when her friend finally got to talk, exactly. ExACTly. Her second-favourite was “Ab…so….LUTEly,” drawn out in a way that seems sexy in a tired way to me, almost mechanical. So much affirmation, so much praise. She was like the world’s best world-champion good listener, only louder. Her voice was still ringing in my ears as I walked away. Under a fig tree I ducked into a shoe shop to turn over some suede pair of green things for men, and the sales guy came up and we chatted. We were telling each other how hot it’s been. I told him how the Berliner I brought with me couldn’t grasp it, how he said, I’ll just wear my jeans. “We arrived in December.” “Oh, no.” “I told him, you will NOT want to wear denim, in Brisbane in the summer.”
He told me his bedroom has no windows. “Wow,” I said, “that’s hardcore.” “I know,” he said. “But then – you couldn’t open a window anyway! Because of the mosquitoes.” “Iggsackly,” I told him, “iggsackly.”
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his scarlet-helmeted warrior
I had a pen name, once, after I wrote two excruciatingly awful romance novels thinking this would for sure be my road to steady income. Submitted them with great condescension to Mills & Boon and they wrote back, saying (and I paraphrase) “We wouldn’t publish this shite even if you paid us.” I was so disappointed cos I had this great name all worked out: Kenya Madresson.
However I am proud that one of those trite novels was written in a week. I had flu and was down and couldn’t get anything done. Said to myself, I bet I can write a book in a week. So I did. Three terrible chapters every terrible day. This was when I was 26.