Intimacies, intricacies, cadences

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Learning the local language

Essay IT WAS IN a Melbourne museum that I realised I didn’t know the traditional name for the area in South Australia where I’d grown...

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Non-fictionI’ve now watched quite a few doctors sketch my thyroid on office pads, something they all seem to love to do, relishing that butterfly shape, the two spreading wings. They do shade-hatching on the left or right lobe, colour in a dark circle to represent the tumour and draw four little dots for the parathyroid glands. I have started to look forward to this moment when a medical specialist transforms suddenly into an artist, taking pride in their drawing, picking up a special pen with a thin black nib, concentrating on making this invisible organ real to me. They are maybe unaware that through their own idiosyncratic drawing styles, they become instantly more interesting as people. They hand over the piece of paper and explain the next steps, and I take their drawings home, magnet them to the fridge beside the more exuberant pictures done by my kids, start making the necessary calls, and turn up on time to the next appointment, curious as a child in kindergarten. Which is how I first learnt that there is an octopus within.

It’s only natural

Non-fictionI often feel that we have landed in the worst of all possible worlds for women when it comes to breastfeeding. We are subject to an ideology that argues for its singular efficacy in generating infant attachment to the mother, making an inviolable and exclusive bond. We are also expected to breastfeed to repudiate the maternal industrial complex that fills our supermarkets with formula in shiny tins.

The Orcanauts

FictionAs admiral, my rank is Navarch. Below me serve three Plotarchs, or strike-team leaders. The rest, including the calves, are rank and file Orcanauts. Thus far, we have operated as a guerrilla force, mounting unexpected assaults on the enemy fleet, causing maximum disruption to their supply channels and leisure activities before fleeing for the safety of deep, open water. It has been a highly effective strategy, but too piecemeal. The drylanders have dispatched scientists to study our behaviour and offer explanations, rather than send divers and submarines to face us in battle. Their media have portrayed me as a rampaging fish, driven mad by some traumatic encounter with one of their boats.