Welcome to GR Online, a series of short-form articles that take aim at the moving target of contemporary culture as it’s whisked along the guide rails of innovations in digital media, globalisation and late-stage capitalism.
Steering upriver
At dawn I cross the bridge, Missouri to Iowa, and turn down the gravel drive. Though I’m different now, this place is the same as it always is this time of year: the sun glowing red over the paddock next door, the grass not yet green, the maple stark. I go away, come back again, and home is like a photograph where time winds back, slows into stasis; where the carpet has changed, but the dishes have not, the cookbooks have not, the piano and artwork and bath towels have not. Here, I can be a child again, my best self, briefly. I hold on to this moment for as long as I can, because too soon I’ll remember how disobedient I am, how bossy and domineering, how I slammed my door until Dad took it off its hinges, how soap tastes in my mouth, how I pushed on these walls until they subsided.
Follow the road to the yellow house
I first visited Varuna in 1994. I had just left my job as the Aboriginal Curator at the Australian National Maritime Museum, where I was involved in establishing the first gallery dedicated to addressing Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander maritime history. I remember that visit well – even then I felt at home. I grew up in the Blue Mountains. My parents bought our family home there in the early 1970s. It was built in the 1940s, which means that it has a similar interior to Varuna, with ornate cornices, creamy white bathroom tiles, a green basin and bath, Bakelite door handles and even an old black phone.
Songs of the underclasses
Before his back deteriorated for good, Diē had imagined becoming a tour guide in his retirement years. To this end, he farewelled our geriatric SUV and bought a fourteen-seater HiAce. After I got my P-plates, he pulled out the back two seats so I could drive it legally and insisted I go on long drives – though never unsupervised. Wǒ zhīdào bu lōgǐcǎl, dànshì méibànfǎ, said Diē. Nǐ shì wǒ de nǚ’ér. ‘I know it’s illogical, but you are my daughter.’
Diē was the best driver I knew. ‘When you drive, you stare at everything but see nothing. You’re inexperienced,’ he lectured. ‘When I drive, I stare at nothing – I can chat, I can sing. But I see everything. Parking spaces, jaywalkers with a death wish, doggies and kitties. And for hours at time, without breaking concentration. It’s like meditation.’
Diē’s love language included showing me footage of near-miss traffic incidents on WeChat. Each trip of ours decreased my risk of appearing in his feed. These hours became the most time we had ever spent together. ‘I write stories too,’ said Diē, during one of our drives. It was early 2024, and he was accompanying me to a writing workshop in Parramatta.
Mudth
My family has its roots in several parts of the world: the Lui branch in New Caledonia, the Mosby branch in Virginia in the US, and the Baragud branch in Mabudawan village and Old Mawatta in the Western Province of PNG. Growing up, I spent most of my childhood with my Lui family at my family home, Kantok, on Iama Island. Kantok is a name we identify with as a family – it’s not a clan, it’s a dynasty. It carries important family beliefs and values, passed down from generation to generation. At Kantok, I learnt the true value and meaning of family: love, unity, respect and togetherness. My cousins were like my brothers and sisters – we had heaps of sleepovers and would go reef fishing together, play on the beach and walk out to the saiup (mud flats). I am reminded of these words spoken by an Elder in my family: ‘Teachings blor piknini [for children] must first come from within the four corners of your house.’
One language among many
I first used speech-recognition software in 2012. I was about to begin work on my novel The Crying Place, and I wanted to get closer to oral forms of storytelling – a sitting-around-a-campfire feel to the text. Also, I was intending to draft much of it on the road from Naarm (Melbourne) to Mparntwe (Alice Springs), then later in the desert, a moving vehicle not being the easiest place to type.
The software took a bit of getting used to. I had to train it to decipher the idiosyncrasies of my voice by reading texts out loud and using it in different environments. And I had to get the hang of directly narrating the story in character – a form of oral ‘method writing’… What soon became clear was that sounds other than my voice, such as birdsong and wind passing through trees, were being picked up by the software and ‘translated’ into words. Mulga came up as ‘will will’, desert oak as ‘with with’, birds varying according to song. At first I deleted these words from the text – treated them as errors or intrusions – but gradually I recognised what they were showing me. The direction the wind was travelling. The proximity of birds and their conversations, sometimes interspecies. Other languages.
Staying faithful to Earth
It is a startlingly new discovery that there are more planets than stars in our galaxy. Even if early astronomers (like Kepler) intuited that other suns must have planets, we didn’t have definitive proof until very recently that our solar system is not unique in consisting of planets orbiting a star. The first exoplanet was confirmed in 1992; the first exoplanet around a star similar to our sun was discovered in 1995. The latest count is over 5,000 and growing. Discoveries have stacked up so fast that astronomers and astrophysicists who used to know each individual exoplanet by name now say it’s impossible to keep track of those that exist in just one small part of the Milky Way, with thousands more expected to be found in the coming years.
The power of a curse
My father was mercurial, difficult to please and often critical of his children: but he would have killed anyone who laid a hand on us. And so, knowing I was upset, he showed me what to do.
‘Lick your thumb,’ he said, ‘and place it on the review…’
An effective curse, he went on to explain, should be proportionate. So, for instance, declaring to the author of that book review I hope you die would be ineffective – all it would do was prove that I did not have the power of life and death. ‘Think about it for a bit if you have to.’
I licked my thumb and placed it on the review. I closed my eyes and thought of the journalist who wrote it, and I said to myself, may you never publish a first novel as successful as Crazy Paving.
Adventures in the apocalyptic style
It's easy to laugh at preppers, dismissing their ideas in the process. It’s also easy to adopt the prepper worldview wholesale, and make fun of everyone else – all those sheeple – for not seeing what a mess we’re really in. It’s harder, but ultimately more productive, to see prepping as a complex, contradictory response to the multiple crises the world is facing. Prepping is more than just a freakshow, although it is that. And prepping is more than a useful instructional manual, although it is that, too. Neither wholly reasonable nor wholly ridiculous, prepping culture is a vivid and alarming reflection of a contemporary Anglophone culture that exists in a state of perma-crisis and can find only simple answers to wicked problems.
Religion as resistance
In their youth, my parents participated in the anti-apartheid movement, attending meetings and outlawed protests. From birth their lives had been prescribed by the apartheid regime, from the suburbs they could live in to the beaches they could swim at to the benches they could sit on; there was little it saw fit to leave unregulated. Both of their families had been forcibly relocated from District Six when it had been reclassified as a whites-only area. They attended Coloured schools, where they were taught by both white and Coloured teachers. At one of these schools, my teenaged mother challenged a teacher for making a racist comment and subsequently chose to leave the school when they backed the teacher instead. My father’s father was a Shaykh, his uncle an eminent Islamic scholar known across both the Cape and wider South Africa.
Theirs was a small, tight-knit community in which everyone knew everyone else. They had in-jokes and made darkly humorous attempts to cope with the difficulties of life… They married exclusively within the community or sometimes to those classified as Asian; to have relationships with a white person would have contravened a piece of legislation called the Immorality Act. In many homes people gathered regularly, particularly on Thursday nights ahead of the holy day of Friday, to make dhikr, melodic remembrances of Allah. These Thursday night gatherings were known as gadats and were typically accompanied by a cardamom-spiced milk drink known as gadatmelk (translated literally as ‘gadat milk’). It is said that the melodies of gadats were born from slavery, disguising religious practice as mere singing to the ears of their masters.
Land, sea and sky
Foreigners who tried to anchor at Erub Island generally risked being beheaded. But Dabad told his warriors not to touch these men. ‘He’s telling them not to touch these people or he will have their head and no one wanted that so they just stopped there,’ says Pastor Gebadi. ‘Finally, the peace came about and they accepted the Bible and put their weapons aside.’
This was Zulai Wan, the Coming of the Light, or the coming of Christianity to the Torres Strait.
A cynic’s guide to unbelief
When I was a little girl, my parents would scold me with scripture. ‘Sita,’ my mother would say, ‘where there is love, nothing is too much trouble and there is always time,’ which was her way of telling me to stop whining. If my brother and I would fight, she would say: ‘So powerful is the light of unity, that it can illuminate the whole Earth,’ as though our altercation over the TV remote was the reason for ethnic tensions in Kosovo. My father was the same, always on about justice and mercy and truth. The Most Great Sin in our house was backbiting and gossip. ‘Thou shalt see with thine own eyes and not through the eyes of others,’ he would say, ‘and shalt know of thine own knowledge and not through the knowledge of thy neighbour.’ Needless to say, my breaking news – that Jessie Stevens told me Marjory Klimt was pregnant to Scotty Graft and her parents were making her drop out of school – was not welcome at our dinner table.
Feeling our way to utopia
Today democracies around the world are being voted down by electorates looking for right-wing authoritarian leaders who will fire up their grievances, insecurities and disappointments – who will gladly target the ‘elites’ and enact something like the ‘general will’ instead of prosecuting the greater good.
But it’s not only right-wing extremists who have embraced the politics of feeling, sensibility and blame. Increasingly those who consider themselves left, progressive and tolerant spend a great deal of time assigning culpability to ‘the privileged’, a conveniently vague catch-all category, when they would be better off considering pragmatic class issues and promoting practical reforms that will work for the whole of society. When the sensibility-rich slogan of ‘who’s to blame?’ outguns ‘how do we fix this together?’, society is in big trouble.
I am reminded here of the moment in Saul Bellow’s novel Herzog when the eponymous hero, surveying the wreckage of twentieth-century dictatorships, remarks: ‘Sentiment and brutality, never one without the other, like fossils and oil.’
It’s certainly hard work finding leaders who are prepared to lead by sense and not sensibility these days. In fact a quivering alertness to sensibility is very much in the minds and hearts of the men and women who run Australia. Politicians, business leaders, vice-chancellors, political parties and publishers are all too eager not only to listen to the feelings of their most emotion-led constituents but also to appease and placate whoever complains loudest.
