Some of my lovely readers have been experiencing malware warnings when trying to access this little website. Since the last thing I want to do is be a conduit for spam, things will be looking a little different around here while we to try to isolate the problem. Please let me know if anything pops out at you in the next couple of weeks.
Much love. x
{ 0 comments }
We spent weeks driving through sparse winter sunscapes, in such a rush to be somewhere else, in such a rush to be in a rush, stopping only for salt pans, salt plains, salt lakes, salt rock, salt water—like some giant god cried into the centre of this continent, underscored our apathy with tears that could only sustain a desert and buried themselves underground like you can’t find me and I don’t want to be found. And everything was water and rock, water and rock, water and rock. And it’s not hard to believe that everything was ever only water and rock, water and rock, rushing through the hard veins of the earth, sandstone and silicon, salt and moonscapes, faces in the dark.
Daylight is raw and I wonder if I would rather be back there in the empty sky, on cold granite in cold sun, trying to bubble my blood like girl, you were the snake, the lizard, the three degrees of separation, it was you. I want to be all these things I was told I couldn’t just because I shouldn’t, when will you settle down? like I’m supposed to be happy with three children, a house and a man who deigns to fuck me every now and then—no, fuck you, there’s a desert calling my name, a mountain, a spit-out-sideways precipice. And it’s easy to fall back into that, into love, you are my salvation, love, but out on that rock when the thunder is all that you can hear, the sound of the world turning right-way-up—out there you remember. You’re water and rock. You’re ancient and you’re transient. You’re scraps knotted together and you are whole.
Is it funny that the loneliest I’ve ever felt is between the sheets with someone else? Friends, lovers, sisters, brothers. The same words over and over again. The water in this city tastes like salt, and I want to destroy this thing that eats at me inside but you can’t make a shell bleed, and there’s nothing that disintegrates the desire to create like that self-destructive void, that my life can be nothing, that myth that you can find permanence in hot pulses of adrenaline when everything else is burning, burning, turning to ash. Ash heart. A faultline. A crack in the crust, thunder and the tremors echoing—quick, hold me, I need to stop these rocks collapsing, wearing away, salt and sand and somewhere here, somewhere, a trembling, miasmic, volatile heart. Right now the gulf is roaring and I need to drown it out.
{ 2 comments }
I spent the last nine days in the bush with a collection of family and friends. A party of twelve. I wrote in notebooks with bugs squashed between the pages. My feet are still black from dirt and burnt spinifex, a stubbed toe, a banged-up chin, mosquito bites itched open and bleeding—hundreds of pinpricks that have swollen to welts the size of twenty-cent pieces. Bruises and blood met most days and this song is now playing on repeat in my head:
Delia, oh Delia
Delia all my life
I spent Friday night in secret hot springs, silver fish with red eyes swimming between my thighs, owls swooping low over the water, fingers swollen and scaly, nails chipped and black. My knees ached from rock-hopping. I crawled into my swag at five in the morning, discarding a couple of moonlit tears. But I was drunk and the curlews were crying.
If I hadn’ter shot poor Delia
I’d-a had her for my wife
New friends that had materialised in the last couple of weeks disappeared again, and I thought, how do you hold on to people? How does anyone ever hold on to people? I want to keep you in my pocket. The universe knocks us into each other sideways and provides only scraps of time as fuel—it’s no wonder we all feel lonely. Social niceties are hardly worth the time they swallow, surely—let’s embrace instead like long-lost lovers after five minutes of mirth-bubbled banter.
Delia’s gone, one more round
Delia’s gone
Sometimes I want to turn off these nerve endings, these synapses cracking, these red-raw impulses and sympathies, and when we got back to Darwin I squeezed my feet into my high-heeled boots to hide my mosquito-eaten and apple-bruised legs. Just to remember how to wear them. Just to remember how it felt to teeter, to be your doll. But even then my elbows itched, my eyes were tired-swollen, my face unpainted, my manners lax and my enthusiasm low. Alcohol strips me of my ability to provide a shield for myself and I’m feeling the full force of it now, poisonous drug—nausea and the need for a cocoon, even one spun from mud and sun. Even one as remote as this.
Delia’s gone, one more round
Delia’s gone
If this were a conversation, I would end it with a kiss.
{ 0 comments }
Remember the mood in 2007? Remember the Liberal Party sliding around for new policy to announce in the face of an election before a divisive Intervention that came out of nowhere politically and reeked of the same old racist paternalism? Remember WorkChoices? Remember seeing that footage of Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard talking to people in schools, in streets, in community centres across the country? Remember the rallies and the petitions and people saying how John Howard might have been desperately power-sick but he kept the economy strong—right? (You’re supposed to be rich right now, remember that when you number those boxes.) Remember how people actually thought things might change?
It was a promising start for those of the mainstream who felt sidelined by the Liberals: make a couple of important symbolic gestures, then put feelers out into the public arena. ‘Let’s see what you want.’ A national conversation. ‘How do you feel?’ An apology, Kyoto, a national thinktank. And for a little while this was okay. It was their first term after all, people were speaking up again after the Howard years, and it felt right, after such imposition and hardline paternalism that quite clearly favoured the liberties of power and the wallets in already-deep pockets over the less fortunate—or indeed, anyone outside of the commercial elite. For a government to finally appear to be asking the public—listening to the public! Well, it was only fair to give them a little bit of time to get things right, to work out how to implement the changes that the public had just told them we wanted. If the lack of immediate action wasn’t ideal then year or so’s delay for the right research to be conducted was forgivable, especially if it meant that reform would be solid and fair and happen.
All governments break promises. They break election promises, they water down reforms, they compromise idealism for big business because big business is big money. Juxtaposed with John Howard’s brand of polarising political snark, Rudd sounded like blessed reason in the face of zealotry, and the promise of change delivered a kind of momentum to his style. But after the kick of apparent progress wore off, so did any remaining shreds of charm, and after the breakdown of the ETS the Labor Government appeared not to be able to deliver much at all. Rudd’s style came to be perceived as somewhere between bland and smug. The Labor Party said a lot over the last six months but had nothing to show for it, and I think that by the end of last week, the electorate was pretty sure about what Kevin Rudd himself believed in, but not if the Labor Party could actually achieve anything. Rudd was tolerable as long as he was doing things, as long as he appeared to be doing things.*
But that’s the problem with politics. So much time needs to be spent on the appearance of doing things or the public gets this strange idea that the government does nothing all day except play games with each other. Part of good governing is the theatre of making sure the public knows you’re governing. The Labor Party had been failing at either one or both—the ads were just as boring as Rudd’s speeches, cynicism was high, the polling reflected that. Of course none of this says much at all about the internal politics of the issue. If a party leader is reviled by the majority of his or her own party then there is little point in him or her attempting to continue in the role, and out of the tumult of Labor Party division, floundering policy and low polling we now have Julia Gillard, our first female Prime Minister. And while it’s big symbolism—important symbolism—for Australian feminists, the fact that she’s female is a side-issue, however, because she’ll continue to be tough as all get-out whether we like her or not, so it’s time to stop talking about her hair.
* Part of me still wishes they had pushed for a double dissolution. They would have been returned to power (nobody was considering the Opposition a viable opposition at all at that stage, least of all under Abbott) they probably would have won the Senate (an idea I don’t like at all but I reckon it would have happened) and it might have given them the momentum they needed. But apart from anything else, it would have been exciting politics—and if you’re craving dramatic change, dramatic politics bring hope.
{ 0 comments }