Journal
Articles
Girls to the front
If there are no women in leadership in a synagogue, many of us don’t bother to come. Or if we do come, we know there’s no real point joining a board or committee – our opinions count for less. And this means that Orthodox Judaism risks losing a new generation of Orthodox women – women like me, who would never accept equivalent lack of opportunity and education in our professional and personal lives.
Mustard seed
There are others like me, those who have, in faintly euphemistic terms, left the church, what we might otherwise call the spiritually unmoored, though we’ve invented specific words for them: lapsed – adjective, mildly noncommittal, perhaps only temporary; apostate – noun, sharper, less impassive. But whatever you call us, no matter the nomenclature, we’re now foreigners, I believe, in one place or another, still too much of this to be that, betrayed by something like a subtle accent, a vowel bent out of shape, if you watch or listen for it closely enough.
Dominion
My disquiet over the influence of the religious right in Australian politics is entirely a product of my upbringing. My parents, for reasons of circumstance and naivety mostly, found themselves enmeshed in a religio-political group called Logos Foundation in the 1980s. Logos has the dubious honour of trying, but failing, to bring Christian reconstructionism into mainstream politics. The Foundation was ‘the political arm’ of the Covenant Evangelical Church (CEC) – ‘the spiritual arm’ that subsumed the Pentecostal church my parents attended on Sydney’s upper north shore.
Under a spell
We’re in Creswell to see the anti-witch marks. Known more formally as apotropaic marks, they are shapes, symbols and letters carved into caverns and stables and homes and churches. It is widely accepted that they were believed to protect against not only witches but anything supernatural and nefarious. The marks date most often from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, coinciding with the height of the witch-hunts that saw thousands of people, mostly women, executed throughout Europe.
Apotropaic marks consist of curving lines known as daisy wheels and hexafoils. Their mechanism of protection works to trap demons in the stone by tricking them into following the lines, around and around, for eternity. Sometimes they are Marian symbols, made up of ‘M’ or ‘V’ or ‘A’, to invoke the Virgin Mary. Other apotropaic marks are even more basic. They can be in the form of a burn mark to prevent a fire taking hold. They can be found above the stall of a prized horse, in cellars, on lintels, mantels, doorways, windows.
Apotropaic marks are a sort of magic that lingers. Entwined so closely with domestic spaces, they are frequently overlooked.
Auburn Falls
Auburn Falls is important; it hums a harmony that resonates within your body. Being here today, feeling the vibration of the racing water up through the rock into my body, feels like a pilgrimage. My eyes track my five niblings and I wince. A whisper inside me: it should be six. Another first. First Christmas without Akel. First New Year. First time at Auburn Falls. Wait, did he ever get to see this place? His sick little body may not have made the walk. Surely someone carried him here just once? Or is it one more thing our baby will never get to do?
Five million years on the right side of history
Whether ‘Anthropocene’ is confirmed as the title of our present remains to be seen. And yet, while few agree on what defines our epoch, there is a general sense that it should be defined; that correct periodisation will help us fix the mess we’re in; that even if those with power aren’t listening to the scientists and the critics, someone else is.
On the contrary
I think it’s just [about] really trying to put yourself in the pain of the person you disagree with most. I think that’s the trick. If you put yourself in that place where you really understand why they think the way they think and why they behave the way they behave, that it comes from this pain they have – once you put yourself there and you start writing jokes, you have a different kind of freedom, and I think that comes from compassion.
Through the looking glass
My research and practice centres on the home as an ideological, political and economic contradiction. Images and screens and consumer, decorative and utilitarian objects all function in the home with a level of deceitfulness. Aside from their utility or aesthetic pleasure, these images and objects enter the home with ulterior motives, as they are key to the dissemination of the neoliberal agenda…
Up for debate
Debate emphasises different ideals. You are forced to argue for positions you don’t believe and, regardless of your stance, you learn always to consider the opposing perspective. That is quite literal: after preparing your case, you turn to a different sheet and write the four best arguments for the other side or mark up your argument for its flaws and inconsistencies. Paper and pen. That is countercultural at a time when we expect a tight nexus between speech and identity, and I think there is something to be gained from such role-play.
The work
The contours of Abe’s move were becoming apparent, though I still wasn’t too concerned. ‘We,’ I said, evenly. Abe had never parented in his life. He wasn’t going to start now. He’d sacrificed six children on the altar of his art – and unlike the mothers of those children, I understood why: a self couldn’t be divided. It couldn’t be poured into anything but the work.
Abe watched me with greedy expectation. I was surprised that he’d chosen this tactic to wound me. The guilt of refusing a needy four-year-old would hurt a little: I wasn’t heartless. It would probably feel much the same as witnessing Isabelle’s pain. But it wasn’t going to hurt a lot.
Tawny child
Carefully, Morgan loosened the fabric. The crying increased in volume. Eventually, the small dark head of a bawling, tawny child emerged into the clear light. Morgan looked at the child with her eyes narrowed and her lips pursed, as if she were considering an heirloom of unknown value. Hans took the envelope from the fingers of the man in the blue suit and tore the gold seal. Inside were five crisp, dry banknotes. The man in the blue suit told them that such payments would be forthcoming every month, and that the child’s name was Many-gift in the local dialect, but they were to refer to him as Albert and raise him as their own.
The window
One dinner, in the midst of playing with Seb in the reflection, Rudi laughing and squealing away, there came the distinct burst of a sob. We stopped in our tracks, looking around at each other in confusion until we located the downturned whimpering in Tim’s eyes and mouth. What is it? I asked, putting my hand on his shoulder. He turned and buried his face into my neck. What is it? I repeated. I don’t like them, he moaned, his hand pointing towards the window.
