Home is where the haunt is

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Staying faithful to Earth

Non-fictionIt 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.

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FictionWhen I wake up from being a dishwasher, curled on the floor of my apartment, it’s like I have woken from the perfect slumber. I don’t think I have felt like this since the womb. Imagine being able to temporarily kill yourself. The world, the body, weighs heavy. Being a dishwasher is the closest I have ever felt to bliss. Before this, the closest I got to bliss, true bliss, was getting high with my dad and eating a cream corn and cheddar toastie at the Murchison Tea Rooms.

Follow the road to the yellow house

Non-fictionI 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.

No secret passageway

Non-fictionIn 2001 I read an article in The Guardian newspaper about a man who fell from the sky, landing in a superstore car park not far from where I live in London. The article, by journalists Esther Addley and Rory McCarthy, detailed how the Metropolitan Police discovered the dead man’s identity through a combination of luck, Interpol and British-Pakistani community workers. Muhammad Ayaz had managed to slip through security at Bahrain airport, run across the tarmac and, according to witnesses on the plane, disappear beneath the wing of the British Airways Boeing 777. The article quotes a spokesman from the International Air Transport Association: a myth circulates that there is a ‘secret hatch from the wheel bay into the cargo bay, and then into the passenger cabin, as if it were a castle with a dungeon and a series of secret passageways’. No such passageway exists and Muhammad would have found himself trapped in the wheel bay with no oxygen, no heating and no air pressure as well as no way out. If he wasn’t crushed or burned by the retracting wheels, he may have frozen to death once the flight reached 30,000 feet, finally falling out hours later when the plane lowered its landing gear as it prepared to touch down at Heathrow.