On undoing

community + belonging + tea + cake

Featured in

  • Published 20230502
  • ISBN: 978-1-922212-83-2
  • Extent: 264pp
  • Paperback (234 x 153mm), eBook

WE SCAMPER INTO a warm room full of returned relics and donated artwork. Outside, the temperature hovers around 12 degrees – freezing for a Meanjin girl. The sky is low and grey, a fog shrouds the silhouetted gums. Sheets of rain come and go. Local Elder David King welcomes us into the space, welcomes us warmly to Gundungurra Country. We sit together and he shares stories of his mother and his aunties and uncles. His words are gentle. He tells truth about dispossession and homecomings. He talks about forming a strategy – after the government returned the gully to the rightful custodians in the early 2000s. Of sitting with family to formulate answers to bureaucratic questions. His description of the aunties’ refusal to corral these answers into settler language stirs me. Over a period of years, they formulated four key performance headings: community + belonging + cups of tea + cake. 

A thick rising tide sweeps up from deep in my guts, tightens my chest, swamping the base of my throat, threatening to spill out in groans and tears. I desperately push it down so that I don’t steal any of David’s story-­space. In these words I feel found. In this sensation of found-­ness, I realise just how lost I am. This is a language I belong in. This is a deep truth that meets a bone-­deep lack. Here, on Gundungurra Country, I remember how it feels to belong. Not in my own home Country but in the welcome and inclusion by another.

It is deep within that welcome – at Varuna, The Writers’ House – that I receive the official memo of offer to publish my first novel. I jump up, run down those iconic stairs into the dining room and announce the news to fellow emerging Blak writers. We cheer and shout with excitement, the leftovers of dinner still scattered across the tabletop, the fire burning in the hearth. Multiple belongings – Bundjalung, Wakka Wakka, Bigambul, Gamilaroi – whooping and cheering together. What a gift to celebrate in this community over cake and tea and reflect on the process of writing the novel – on how, instead of me creating it, it re-­created me.


ONE HUNDRED YEARS after the end of World War I, the globe is swathed in scarlet poppy celebrations, but I am fighting a personal battle – one that forces me to enlarge my own borders. Standing on the west coast, feet sunk deep in Yawuru Country, I reflect on my recent discovery that almost exactly a century before me, my great-­grandfather had stood on this same coastline after four years in the trenches of the Western Front. I don’t yet know his story. I have accidently uncovered his war record online, but I can barely understand the handwritten notations, the abbreviations; the script is almost indecipherable. 

I have been obsessed with World War I since childhood. I have travelled to Paris, walked through the hall of mirrors where that treaty had been signed, not knowing that my great-­grandfather – Bundjalung man William Olive – had been there while that peace was legislated. I wonder how he celebrated the end of hostilities. He must have longed for that neat, tidy peace accord, resolute in permanent ink. Can my own war end in enduring peace? 

Soon after that trip to the coast, I begin writing the words that evolve into a chapter that becomes my novel. The Great Undoing – the story of Scarlet Friday, who discovers that she isn’t who she thinks she is. A story of unbecoming in order to become. As I write, I uncover truths about my great-­grandfather and the war he fought on foreign soil, and the war he returned home to as an Aboriginal man subject to protection acts. 

Just like Scarlet, I must rework my own foundational myths as my great-­grandfather’s stories force me to re-­evaluate the lies that Australia tells. I never intended for the novel to undo me, but I am learning that the truth is powerful. It cannot be contained. Country will tell our truths, despite the lies built to hem them in. 


MY LOCAL COFFEE shop is owned by a family – Michael and his daughter Courtney. Throughout the pandemic they remain open and become our social hub. We can walk there, have a chat, meet other customers, pat a hundred doggos. Rules permitting, I often sit inside on the well-­worn comfy couch and write and cry and bang out chapters – a writing office complete with personal baristas. Hospitality breeds family. They nourish me with words + coffee + brownies + space as I navigate writing my first book. The work of creation is done here. A haphazard blueprint for a novel that evolves into a process of concatenation, or at least my definition of it. The themes are inspired by my family and how proud I am of them. I see the world through their eyes. I imagine a table loaded with our stories, with food from Punjab, Bundjalung Country, Ireland, Indigenous Caledonia. What a feast we are – yet so much remains untold. 

I wrestle with a burden to make those stories visible. We never see things as they are, only as we are.

I don’t know it while it’s happening, but so much of the novel is a working out of belonging. Testing it. Like when you arrive at the answer to a long equation. There is a number. But the story isn’t told by the one number. The story lives in all the scratches, scribbles and longhand working out before you get to the number. The story of how you got to it is where the magic lives. I will hold that finished object in my hand one day soon, but I will always see the sheaves of messy working out. The bits that I know are not fiction. The passages that I can’t include. The weaving together of my many-­ness into one-­some-­thing. That’s the concatenation.

After Varuna, upon my arrival back home to Meanjin, my hubby plants a finger-­lime tree to mark the moment: a gift that we can tend and nourish, as well as reap an ongoing harvest from. I imagine myself in the future, in my comfy chair in my backyard, surveying our little square of sky, toasting the published work with a G&T soaked in ‘Byron sunrise’ finger-­lime. We get caught up in the excitement of the celebration and don’t quite think it through. I do my googling after the plant arrives. It will be a long wait before we get our hands on the first fruits. I also discover that the type we purchased is a little like all things Byron Bay right now: deeply entangled in a commercial coloniser structure and a little removed from its Country-­provision. A little like me, I guess. 

I am almost from Byron Country. My Bundjalung clan is traced back to Cangai, not far from Arakwal Country. I grew up with my feet firmly planted in the rivers, creeks and seas of Byron, Broadwater, Rous, Mummulgum, Tatham, Casino and Alstonville. My spirit will always be home on that Country. I take my emptiness there as an offering and I always leave full. While I’m there I forget to be angry at the interlopers. Because when I am immersed in home Country, I am as generous of spirit as Country is. Envy, jealousy and coveting are banished by the bounty on offer. Once I’m back to city life, they intrude and I am once again furious that the interlopers have made that place colony-­country. And yet, if I’m honest, do I just pick and choose the bits that I approve of? Do I thrive on the benefits without ever shouldering the responsibilities? I am afraid that I, too, am an interloper. Soaking up her comfort yet offering what custodianship in return? I am learning that words + storytelling are my contribution. But how can I tell my story without telling stories that don’t belong to me? How can I tell you who I am without them – without an ‘us’? I cannot speak for my great-­grandfather, but I am who I am because of him and those who came after him. The literary techniques I always return to are analepsis and prolepsis – flashbacks and flash forwards. I go back to go forward.


MY EARLIEST MEMORIES are of guinea pigs and joeys and little white goats. Of a plum tree that separates our fibro house from Mr Thomson’s next door. A small garden patch between the back of our yard and the two-­storey brick house that belongs to Mr and Mrs Buchanan. Of rushing out on Easter Sundays to hunt for chocolate eggs and bunnies through the strawberries and beneath the cabbage leaves. Sneaking behind the garden to the side door of Mrs Buchanan’s and discovering a big chocolate egg on every one of the carpeted service stairs that lead up to her kitchen. My poppy moves in with us. I can’t pronounce ‘poppy’ so I call him Pawpaw. I can still see the pawpaw tree at our back door, and Poppy – my grandfather – standing there with a cigarette. 

I am seven years old and we live in a caravan, and later a garage built by my dad, on one hundred acres of Tatham land. Our vegetable garden spans an entire acre. I cannot conceive of one acre, let alone one hundred. All I know is that standing at the top of the garden and looking out at it, I can barely see the edges. There is no border between cultivated and natural. Dad tends to his own heritage seeds and has his own seed bank to this day. He has always been a responsible custodian of seed and Country. His Irish and French-­Caledonian ancestors would be proud.  

We live off the proceeds of our garden. I remember hearing the word subsistence. At the time, I don’t know what that word means. When we live out at Theresa Creek, the four of us kids load up our bikes and head out on fishing expeditions. We know that creek intimately – all her depths and shallows, her bends and shapes. We pull in our haul, usually of catfish and eel. One day – a day that now lives in infamy – my brother Richie accidently snags a tree branch across the creek with his fishing line. As I pull it out for him, it whizzes back across the water, the hook catching deep in my leg. I see the panic on my siblings’ faces as they argue with each other about who will jump on their bike and go fetch our stepdad. Ever the martyr, I huff and make to jump on my bike, gathering the tackle still attached to my leg. It’s Richie who folds and speeds off. 

I can still hear him shouting for help, and I can still picture my stepdad cycling to me on the tiny BMX – to the rescue. 

So many of these memory vignettes are about enjoying the fruit of someone else’s labour, always of Country’s provision. Dad models responsible custodianship, tilling the soil and allowing it seasons of rest. We fish ethically, only taking what we need. Dad plants trees instead of clearing them. He puts back more than he takes out.

Decades after our fishing trips, my brother Richie comes to live with me and my husband in the city after a harrowing series of events that culminates in a diagnosis of schizophrenia. Mum just needs a break. My youngest, Sam, isn’t quite two. He, and my young nieces, will come to believe that every family home has an Uncle Richie. Richie soon develops a new habit of heading off to the creek near our house, catching catfish and filling the house with a pungent odour. 

A couple of years later we make a tough call about Richie. When we settle him into his little room in the care facility and meet the carers, despite the depth of my sadness, I know it’s right for him and that our relationship will be more likely to survive. He is thrilled to discover an even better creek near his new home. For many years he can be found by its banks with a friend or stranger, pulling in fish that nobody could fathom being found there. Richie is good at finding the unfindable.

I wrestle with these stories that don’t belong to me but continue to shape and reshape me.


AT MY BIRTH I have six grandparents (my father was adopted, so I count both his birth and adoptive parents), two great-­grandparents, one great-great-grandparent. Up until I am seven, we often walk to my maternal great-grandparents’ house. Their kitchen diner is always dark, dimly lit. Great-grandfather sits near the stove and offers me vermicelli with sultanas out of a big silver pot. By the time I’m in my late teens, only one grandparent remains. By twenty-­two I have none left earthside. 

These days I chase conversation with my Uncle Bruce – Poppy’s brother. He played footy for Newtown and NSW. He lives in Brownsville. I am in Brisbane. He welcomes our conversations even though I pepper him with questions. Sometimes he cannot remember the answers, some answers he’d rather forget, others are frustratingly vague. But there is such treasure in listening. In laughing. In reliving. He has such stories to tell and I never get over how occasionally he drops a morsel that is pure gold but does not perceive it. Like a casual reference to his favourite times around the dinner table while travelling with representative footy teams and ‘getting to know those boys’. It is later when I look up the archives that I realise ‘those boys’ are rugby league Immortals Reg Gasnier, Graeme Langlands, Johnny Raper, Norm Provan. 

I long to live around the corner, so that I can drop in and make Uncle Bruce cups of tea. So that I can share the weight of true day-­in, day-­out living and hear those priceless morsels drop from his lips. I don’t think he understands how much I treasure his stories. We reconnect over the discoveries I’m making about my great-­grandfather – his dad. Another gift that the novel has given me. Before I find the online war archive that sets me on this course, I know only one thing about William. The hazy rumour that he had hung himself in the back shed. At seventy-­seven years of age. There is no context. 

But the moment I discover that document, the context changes. One document leads to another…to another…until I can no longer look backwards without seeing that the truth has always been visible. This is another form of custodianship – to look, to see. To make visible.


I AM FORTY before I visit Europe, still ignorant of the fact that a century before me my great-­grandfather had walked those same cobblestones. That he had fought in a war that did not reward him with any meaningful welcome on his return home. Now that I know, I yearn to go back and breathe that air, knowing that William was there. I want to taste those flavours again and form new memories. I’ll stroll the Rue des Martyrs and scoff tiny straw­berries. I’ll eat fat, misshapen tomatoes and feel six again, sitting at a plate of fried zucchini, fresh from my father’s garden, sprinkled with salt and pepper. A feast for my tastebuds. How had flavour diluted so much in the years since? When had I stopped noticing? 

In 2008 our little family of five is living in Texas. A land of terrible coffee, concealed-­carry permits, forests of front-­yard flag poles…and chicken fried steak. What is chicken fried steak? Is it chicken, masquerading as steak? Is it beef, fried up like chicken for the steak eater? What am I agreeing to eat? Is it some hybrid of chicken and beef together on the same plate? We are invited to eat at many tables by hospitable, generous Texans. But I am overwhelmed with unbelonging. I covet the unity I see in their rampant patriotism – the perceived simplicity of their narrow lens. I yearn to be an uncritical patriot. It is a myth I can no longer swallow.

Later, we live in Singapore and I am overwhelmed by a sense of belonging that I do not expect. Living out in the Heartlands, our lives are embedded in many languages, nationalities, ethnicities, foods, religions, human beings. Difference is natural, celebrated. I am not speaking for every expat’s experience – only ours – but the telling moment for me is upon our arrival back home. My daughter, thirteen, returns to her previous school after two years of Singapore. She goes to a party and comes home deflated. The crux of the problem summarised by a statement to the effect of…they all look the same. They all act the same. Sameness is strived for. Difference punished. The news is an explosion of hateful rhetoric applied to asylum seekers and boat arrivals. What changed while we were gone? It takes a long time to realise that nothing has changed. 

I know what Dad would say. Protect the seeds. Tell the truth. 


BACK ON GUNDUNGURRA Country, we leave that room warm with welcome and heat. We zip up our raincoats and begin to walk The Gully. The air is cold and crisp. The fog reveals the way ahead in small segments. David tells us of the regeneration they have nourished here. The way it was, and the collective choices they made, to get it here. As we walk beneath gums – the soundtrack of galahs and bush twitch – my chest tightens again. I lag behind the others as we walk in the fruit of a reckoning. Two hundred years of destruction and dispossession, and in the space of a couple of decades we see the harvest of responsible, loving custodianship. I think of my brother Richie. His deep connection to Country – the flora and fauna that he loves passionately. What would his life look like if he had the opportunity to care for Country like this? This time the emotion is grief for what has been stolen, for futures that cannot be restored. 

I am conscious that my short time in The Gully does not deliver the fullness of the story. My brief, sentimental moment reeks of shallow connection – seeing the joy of this ‘now’ without the weight and the work of responsible custodianship. There is a weight that our Elders carry that a nation shrugs off. How can I reap this bounty without sharing in custodianship? This is a question worthy of the wrestle. But it cannot remain a question. It must be reckoned with. 


BACK AT VARUNA, as we sit around the table, there is a quietness at work between us. We struggle to form the words to share, so we allow silence to hold us. I sit late into the night thinking about my father and his seed bank. I cannot let go of the visual. The gardens that he has spent a lifetime nurturing. The way he contributes more than he takes. How he shares his bounty freely, barters vegetables for meat and fish. I wonder how my words could be a part of the reckoning. How might my words form custodianship? I long to sow them like seeds, see them tilled and blossom – spilling out from arbitrary borders. Navigating my great-­grandfather’s story has spilled into my novel, as I time-travel back to childhood and the nourishment of food and Country: my own version of community + belonging + tea + cake. For now, I plan to follow his footsteps through that Western Front. To sink my feet into soil that still holds his footprints, his spilled blood, his stories. Because that country will speak and I will listen. 


This piece was commissioned by Grace Lucas-­Pennington as part of ‘Unsettling the Status Quo’, thanks to support from the Copyright Agency Cultural Fund.

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