Journal
Articles
The blue room
Mum did not tell us that Sabina had tried to kill herself. She said that she was unwell, and because she was unmarried and her children lived interstate Sabina would stay with us while she convalesced. We figured it out after she arrived; she did not appear sick, but lively and plump. Nor was there any regularity to her medical appointments. Though Phoebe was irritated that she would have to share her bathroom we found the situation morbidly glamorous, the sick woman with the elegant name whose stay would end with recovery or its opposite. So many sibilant words: suicide, convalescence, Sabina. Having no knowledge of death or any conviction we would ever die, suicide seemed tinged with romance. That Sabina lived confirmed our belief that death was not serious.
The pool
Mum always says to me, you know what he’s like – your father. As if the old man is my responsibility and mine alone. Little wonder that legacy and liable have the same number of syllables. Of course I know what he’s like…so much so that I’m not even remotely surprised when one afternoon I hop off the school bus and come wandering inside with my little brother Jeremy in tow to find a big bald bloke sitting cross-legged at the dining table blabbering on about fibre glass this, solar heating that. On the table in front of Dad, a corona of shiny brochures.
‘We’re getting a pool, sons!’ Dad winks at Jeremy.
Trash and treasure
In the middle of the night he had a dream where the dirty pasta bowls he’d left out were on fire, smoking up the apartment. When he shot up in bed, he could still smell the smoke. He remembered Karim, the whole previous day and night flashing through his head. In five strides he was in the living room. Karim wasn’t on the couch. The balcony door was open and he was out there, shirtless, leaning on the balustrade smoking a cigarette. The nodules rising out of his spine pinged the moonlight over his back like a prism. Ben went out, shut the door behind him, leaned over the balcony by Karim. Their arms touched and neither of them pulled away. The forum was emptier than empty. Completely still, like they were peering into a photograph.
Sissys and bros
‘Sydneysiders woke up to a red dawn this morning due to an eerie once-in-a-century weather phenomenon.’ This was straight after school, before my shift. Channel 9’s Peter Overton was blaring from the TV. My five sisters and two brothers yelled about Mumma hogging the remote. Overton’s robot voice followed me into my room. I tugged off my Holy Fire High School blazer. Our emblem: Bible beneath a burning bush. Our motto: Souls Alight for the Lord and Learning. Fumbled through the dirty laundry basket for my dress-like work shirt that stunk of rancid onion. Our logo: a pepperoni pizza wearing a fedora and holding a Tommy gun. Our motto: Happy Mafias Pizza: Real Italians Leave the Gun and Take the Cannoli.
Load
When 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.
Mesopotamia
Their camp is on a floodplain, dirt baked dry for now, among a stand of black box trees. Close to the bank, river red gums tower and would provide better shade, but Kim had been worried about falling branches. From a rise near their tent, they can monitor the vast, slow drift of the watercourse, progress marked by its bobbing contents. Wordlessly, this is how they spend most of their time.
Bellend
‘Nice little bell, buddy,’ snipes some guy holding space in the bike lane as I nearly swipe him on my way...
Blackheath mating rituals
Clouds ripple, sunshine splashes, a white dove tests its wings. Bella and Houdini are hanging clothes on the line of the...
hearth
yes, one day, finally, it will all fall away like all dead things we will sit again by the campfire story illuminating...
Post-apocalyptic parenting
How does one balance raising children with a sense of wonder and innocence in a world that’s just waiting for them to get hot/legal/sign up to the heterodoxy? As their mother I reserve the right to irrevocably damage them. It’s my job to give them some good therapy fodder in case future them have any money to spare after buying future air and water.
Beyond Bluey
What I want to explore instead is a recurring question for Australian producers who are trying to ensure that Australian stories – like Bluey, like Fisk, like Colin – continue to be made. And that question is… What are we good at?
A fair game for all
When a disabled writing student tells me they won’t submit their work for publication because they fear being rejected for not being enough, I always find myself wishing that the publishing industry had the time and empathy to reply more thoroughly to these marginalised voices.
