Wild Sovereign Development Site

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  • hanging weekend

    Ahhh, weekend in a hammock, swinging softly from side to side and hearing the waves crashing, the moon imperceptibly rising with its bald and honest glare, yes, you can hear it, you know it, we know it. A nearby little restaurant – the only one in this seaside town – was kind enough to deliver meals and beers, one of their staff members lives across the road. Behind us, Africa. Ahead of us, the poisoned sea riddled with plastics and emptied of all piscine life by hulking ships like the ghost ship tethered to the beach. This sea from which English, slaving ships, and gold miners came.

    I read a most wonderful book and read parts of things I’d written, to my beloved. We sat tail to tail in our hammock two days over, or my head on his chest, or his head in my arms, or in our little high netted boat of bed. A simply stone-flagged bathroom with a tap that hangs from the whitewashed stone ceiling; that’s our shower. Nothing could be nicer, nothing was. And then the quiet drive back to town chasing racing red taillights, the crowd of people at intersections selling chocolate made from Ghanaian cocoa, children’s books, necklaces of steering wheel covers, brooches of soft packs of cotton buds or giant crowns of watermelon on a tray, like Carmen Miranda.

  • waking up in Africa

    It is my birthday tomorrow and I’ve woken up in Africa! Beautiful Ghana of the glorious peoples. At the spanking new immaculate airport a man was bobbing at his keyboard and singing, in the arrivals hall, “And you’ve all arrived safely on this Wednesday night, hope you’ve had a great flight, welcome, welcome.” My flight was grumpy cos we got stuck on the runway for an hour (in, you know, air-conditioned comfort with personalised movies to watch) and I reminded the guy rolling his eyes next to me and complaining, you are in Africa. You arrived here on a million-dollar machine. A fast-disappearing luxury neither our planet nor most people working late at this airport can afford. We were fed and offered tiny bottles of wine and scented towels to wipe our hands and no one fell out of the sky on long wings of flame *just enjoy it!* Singing and bobbing in the passport queue, overjoyed to see my sweetest honey the kindest most gorgeous man in the world, whom I adore, who waited patiently outside in the crowd an hour for me and carried all my cases. I travel heavy, mostly books.

    He had brought me a malaria tablet and fed it to me in a swallow of boiled drinking water in the car park. Then we got as close to each other as we can on the back seat and drove away into Ghana. What a blessing and privilege to be here, to be with him, even to know him when we have spent our lives on separate continents, to be running a tiny business with big eyes that wants to construct a way for Europeans to offer ‘personal, partial’ reparations to Africa.

  • subway sounds

    In New York I came into 34th St subway station to hear a bunch of dudes playing a kind of washboard bluegrass. They weren’t excellent but they had vigour. Called themselves the Ebony Hillbillies: cute. O you’re from Australia & you wanna make a record? Love to!

    Later I rang them up. “We’re not lettin you put Our Sound on Your Record for less than $800.”

    I said, baffled, ‘But… it’s only one song.’

    “You know, we getten called the best black banjo band in America.”

    Sound engineer said to me, “Why are you crying? That shouldn’t hurt your feelings.” And he is right. But it does. It’s the lack of music, the tower of ego I cannot climb. The hand-to-hand combat whereby everybody has to constantly outdo everybody and every interaction is a kind of business deal. Where you have to self-promote and be the best this, the best that. It exhausts me. It chills my soul with its coldness and shrivels me. I’m not asking people to play for free but I want them to be interested, to love the originality of my project and to love the music enough to play as though they would do it for love.

    Once I played one of my songs – a homemade sample off my first website – to a man of some stature when the website was new. This was during my year-long journey to build courage to do this thing. He said, in my opinion, you are going to be one of the greatest artists this country has ever produced. I burst into tears with relief. But later I looked over his website. It was all, the greatest this, the most highly qualified that. It was a minefield of pyramids. I don’t live in that field & it doesn’t seem real to me. That’s not how life works. I live in the jungle where every tree has its flower in the elbow, every bird has its arrow-glistening feather. Where there are a multitude of voices. Somehow they make a kind of complex harmony. Sometimes it is mayhem & a shattering din. More often it is sweet & overwhelming, it seduces me.

  • damn straight

    I went on a ten-day meditation retreat & on the last day, made an appointment to see the Teacher. The capital letter was visible in the way he held himself. “I need to leave.” He inclined his head from the dais. “No, you really need to stay.” “Thank you,” I said, “but I really need to leave.”

    He told me, “I can’t let you leave because we have a duty of care, it’s like a father releasing his child into the world… be terrible if you met with some kind of accident.”

    Threats? “I think I’ll be ok,” I said, “thank you but I want to go.”

    Then he tried, “Well if you leave now, it will be without my approval.” By now I was annoyed. “Well, fortunately I have my *own* approval. May I have my car keys & wallet back please.”

    “I want you to know that if you leave early, without completing the course, we cannot accept any dana (donation) from you. And that would be a shame because you have had the benefit of all these good teachings, the accommodation, all this lovely vegetarian food….”

    I stared. Vague threats and now blackmail? What kind of shonky operation was this? I tried once more to reach him, or at least make explicit what was happening. “Well,” I said, “if you won’t give me your goodwill… I give you *my* goodwill. Thank you for the teachings and the lovely food, I have learned a lot and I really appreciate it.” He inclined his head and dismissed me without a word, like a beauty queen.

    On the way home I stopped at a swanky resort and bought myself a colourful bracelet of carved wood and a five-dollar coffee. As I sat there drinking coffee off a leather coaster on a white marble table I realized from the courtesy of the cute waiter that my messy plaits and op-shop batik muumuu resembled, in fact, resort wear. On the headland as I joined the highway a huge water tower stood embracing itself like the concrete Jesus who looks down on Rio de Janeiro. The total meditation time of the retreat was around 160 hours.

  • a trans man

    Yesterday when he asked I told a trans-identified friend over coffee, No: you’re not a woman. I told him how male-privileged he sounded, to me, when he dreamily explained playing around with his prescribed hormones so as to reconstruct the experience of a menstrual cycle. He felt the reason he wasn’t experiencing it for real was to do with age – “at 54 if I had been born female my menstruation would have stopped by now, anyway.”

    He is a kind man and would never intrude himself into female change rooms or bathrooms but has appeared in local films and performances about vulvas and about womanhood. I was nearly in tears, we both were. He explained how much it hurts him that I cannot accept that his dysphoria, with which I empathise, makes him female. And I explained how much it hurts me for him to think he knows what it is to be female better than I. I told him it made me feel like to him I’m invisible.

    When he was telling me I surely don’t believe I get to define him, and I was dealing with the familiar, programmed feelings of feminine accommodation and trying to think clearly, it all of a sudden came to me: it’s not me sitting here telling you I know better than you do who you are.

    It’s you. You are telling me, telling the world, telling yourself you know better than I do what makes someone a woman. You think you, born and raised male, a man whose very skeleton if dug up a thousand years after our lifetimes, whose dental records show you to be male, get to tell me, tell all women, what we are. And that we daren’t exclude you.

    I told him all women experience dysphoria. All of us are told constantly our bodies are wrong. It was a very sad and painful conversation and I told him I admire his courage for living radically outside the masculine patriarchal role. Nevertheless he interrupted me repeatedly, grew angry when I disagreed with his pronouncements on reality, and claimed greater ownership of science. Male, male, male. And he seemed very preoccupied with the difficulties of living outside the male role and had not one thought to spare for the scorn and violence experienced by butch lesbians who eschew the performance of femininity.

  • today

    Today in Berlin I found a hand-blown wine bottle so beautiful I had to pick it up to carry home. I saw an elder descending the stairs from a sushi bar painfully and slowly. He crossed the pavement, leaning on his stick. To my surprise he came up to a bicycle and dropped his satchel in its basket. His hands must have been trembling as it took him some time to thread the walking stick diagonally through the carrier at the back. He set off walking, slowly and painfully, pushing his bike and I thought: ah. Perhaps he uses that as a kind of walker, perhaps he’s not willing to face yet that he needs support. But I was absolutely wrong. At the roadside he stepped gingerly over the crossbar and set off, turning uphill within a few yards and pedalling slowly but steadily home.

    I saw a busker on the markets who had attracted a little, attentive crowd. He sang Rocket Man and people clapped. Then he said, This next song is one of my own, and that’s when everybody began to disperse and turn away. In the crowd was a man in his seventies huge in a wheelchair who was wearing a kind of childhood dress-up box version of a Native American feathered headdress. He was tapping his scaly, swollen foot. Riding home I passed a bride, in her ivory tower of gown, sitting at a trestle table on the roadside with three blokes casually dressed in black. The four of them were laughing and opening two flat boxes of pizza. I saw a biker couple lounging over beers and she had the heel of her cuban heeled boot raked up at shoulder height on the railing.

  • story about an artist

    In my twenties I worked at the front desk of the Queensland Art Gallery for a while. It is huge and immaculate and rather hushed. One day an old man came in, wizened and bent. He approached the island of our desk across the marble floor.

    “This the art gallery?”

    Yes, I said. His hands were trembling and his fingers seamed with dirt.

    He had come down from the country on the bus: twelve hours. He set a bag down on the counter and began to open it very slowly. He said, “Got a painting for youse.”

    He unrolled a canvas and showed it to me. The painting seemed to me pretty awful but his courage and his straightforward, honest presumption moved me to tears. He’s a Queenslander, this is his art, this is the Queensland Art Gallery – why shouldn’t he bring it in here and offer to hang it? It made sense.

    I was too gauche to know how to deal with him and his imminent and crushing disappointment. I thought he might never have shown his work to anyone before. He had come all the way down here to make a fool out of himself – a noble, exemplary fool – and in doing so, he exposed the far greater foolishness of our urbanity, our conformity, our stupid ladders and pretentious mores. I saw all of this in an instant and it filled my sore heart with heat. I picked up the phone and called a kindly woman who worked in acquisitions, who had sometimes chatted with me in the lifts. I asked her to come down and see him. I hope she may have taken him out for coffee and talked with him about his work. I hope she encouraged him to paint more. I have often thought about this man and his simple human courage, his artist’s heart. He might be dead now and it’s possible his paintings may all have been thrown away.

  • parcel in cloth

    One thing I love in Ghana is people seem so good and kind. Not all of them, I guess, but daily life seems to me founded in a beautiful mutual respect and helpfulness. I watched the ‘mate’ in a grinding and crowded trotro (a tiny bus) jump down and help the man who was slowly climbing out, he lifted the man’s parcel wrapped in stained cloth – perhaps his stall – from the front passenger seat and set it down on the pavement. Then the two of them lifted it without a word, one side each, and settled it on the man’s head so he could carry it home.

    I saw a little boy tapping my Ghanaian boyfriend on the hip, offering a coin. “Boss – you dropped this.”

    Sometimes I think about Australian cities where these days people barely say hello. I think about New York, where I first visited in 2011 and New Yorkers were always saying to me, “You Australians are so friendly. In New York we hate each other.” Then I wonder how much of my experience of being in Ghana is filtered through the privilege of being a relatively well-off visitor, a white woman, someone from whom everybody can potentially benefit.

  • mansplanity

    I went on a date with a guy who for nearly a month had been pestering me to meet. Then he literally did not let me finish a sentence. I pointed this out and he said, grandly, “That’s because I already know what you are going to say.”

    I explained to him how self-perpetuating this fallacy is. He would never hear all the stuff he’s not learning from other people. I said, you’ve been at me to spend time with you for a month. Now here it is. Your big chance to get to know this woman. Tell me one thing you know about me that you didn’t already know at the beginning of the evening.

    Sulkily he said, “Well I can tell you’re a bit of a feminist.”

    Poor guy. I was trying not to laugh with pity. So I continued to interrupt his interruptions until finally he stopped and said, Right then. What is it? That’s so important that you’ve just got to say?

    I explained to him the deteriorated version of my original thought that had now survived the eight interruptions and side-swipes.

    He sat with his arms folded. Then he said, “Are you done?”

    And I said, “Yes. I’m done. Thanks for the drink!” and picked up my bag and walked away.

  • happy birthday from afar

    Tomorrow is my Mum’s birthday, she’s eighty. Tomorrow is already today in Brisbane because Australia is tomorrowland. I rang her on the videophone we used to so dread in my youth. She looks pretty in her top and skirt. I had a red ‘H’ and a purple ‘B’ from the cafe table where I sat in the rare sun last week, where the cups had not been cleared and someone else had opened presents and left the wrapping and these lettered candles behind. The two letters fit in the bright orange persimmon I had halved and set on a blue plate. I lit the candles and sang her happy birthday. Then she blew and I blew the candles out. I opened the tiny bottle of champagne I have saved in my fridge ever since summer. That special occasion had arrived. Mum had to rush off to meet her two sons and I have not yet told her about the deep massage I plan to enact by long-distance, now she’s had two hips and both knees replaced and requires some tender and gentle loving care. Imagine to be 80 and to have outlived your husband. That’s something hard and good, I think.