Every time I walk a labyrinth, I think this time I will fully understand its elaborate geometry, its pattern of winding paths. It’s not a maze, it’s a single curved path into the centre, and out again. I walk around it as if I’m following the curves and kinks of my brain. But in truth I never work it out. I just walk it, and am always surprised when I reach the centre, or reach the exit.
Snapped on Friday night was a cheeky shot of the full moon as I was waiting for my Uber home. I’d been at a Fleetwood Mac tribute band, soaking up the fun. Getting a Friday night lift.
I super-imposed the full-moon image on a labyrinth because it seemed fancy, then it seemed magic. Just like the labyrinth itself.
I’m guessing the very first time I read Pride and Prejudice (P&P) I was 16, when the excellent 1981 TV series first aired. I remember the copy we had in our family library. Our shelves were stuffed with classic fiction, poetry, and history. How I loved the small, navy-blue hardback copy of P&P, with its imprint of “Oxford’s World Classics” debossed on the front cover. The rice-paper thin pages and antiquated versions of some words, like shewn instead of shown, for example. How people would dress a sallad and cucumber. I raced through every book Jane Austen ever wrote, and the ones she didn’t quite get to finish.
P&P’s particular perfection soothed me, and over time I considered that navy hardback edition mine and I took it with me when I moved to Europe, aged 25. Perhaps I kept re-reading it to see how I’d changed, while the book’s perfection remained the same.
In the picture I’m 27 years old, re-reading it in the shade of a tree in the garden of Versailles. I was living in London, so that was one decade’s worth of re-reading already. But there was more to come. After a four-week teacher training course, I moved from London to Greece in 1996 to take up a position in a school. I took P&P with me, the only book I saved from my library. I knew I’d need all the comfort perfect prose could provide.
Teaching was every bit as hard as I thought it would be, and the isolation of having to schlep to the phone box to talk to anyone super-charged my isolation. One particularly trying day, I took my sacred copy of P&P with me to the phone box. (Why? Why?) Somehow, in the fug of homesickness and the miasma of unfinished conversations, I left the book at the phone box. Just three blocks later I realised, rushed back breathless – it was gone. I trudged home to my apartment. Sometimes the universe can’t resist giving you a thorough drubbing.
But leaving a well-loved 1950s edition of P&P in a phone box in Thessaloniki in 1997 really was small beer. The giant body blow of surviving a home invasion in 2002 got me thinking about Jane Austen again. I was tussling with how difficult it was to stay in the house afterwards. I wanted to stay but my body was in post-traumatic revolt. In my memoir about the incident (which I’m currently revising), I wrote:
“I thought of Jane Austen’s Anne in Persuasion, who comments ‘one does not love a place less for having suffered there.’ I realised now that only applied to emotional suffering. The kind of visceral, physical ordeal I underwent was precisely what Georgian and Victorian women of the upper classes were assiduously protected from. Perhaps this experience would finally cure me of my habit of re-reading Jane Austen novels. Perhaps that wasn’t altogether a bad thing.”
Apart from being awoken out of my Regency Classics world by reality, another reason I’ve stopped re-reading Jane Austen is that there are just too many new books to read.
Like Zadie Smith’s The Fraud. If you haven’t read it, I would recommend. It’s a complex novel which depicts the enormous suffering of the Caribbean plantation slaves through its complex and even funny plot.
As I listened to a wide-ranging interview with Zadie Smith about the book, discussing her writing and teaching life, my hair nearly stood up on end as she said,
“So if I were teaching, for example, Pride and Prejudice, nothing could be more natural or normal to me to hold multiple ideas simultaneously. I adore that book. I can teach it at a level of rhetoric, a level of character, as a history of the middle classes in England. I know exactly where Darcy’s money comes from: It comes from the Caribbean.”
I’m not ruling out ever re-reading P&P again. I now have a green hardback copy on my own shelves, just in case. It jostles with hundreds of more recent books and looks out of place in its antiquity.
When and if I do read P&P, I will always understand the social and economic context of the delightful grounds of Mr Darcy’s home, Pemberley. And that’s not altogether a bad thing. In fact, it’s a vitally important thing.
It’s actually been a couple of weeks since my birthday, and I didn’t properly thank everyone who posted lovely messages on my birthday. Thank you. I love all that internet love, it’s the one day of the year when Facebook makes sense to me.
The photo above is from my birthday afternoon tea last week, the simple celebrations that make life rich. The refrain of “Happy Birthday” in the air. Some of my large family, still sitting in my house, gathered around the family table. The table I’ve been lucky enough to end up with when our family home on Cobb Street was sold. So Cobb Street is gone, but love and family carry on.
But I digress. Lately I’ve become obsessed with the late Gabrielle Carey. Who, you ask? The second author of the seminal Australian novel Puberty Blues. She co-wrote (and I mean, they really co-wrote everything at that point in their lives) with Kathy Lette. Then when it became hugely popular (because, seminal) she refused to join the publicity bandwagon and sort of disappeared. She wrote several riveting non-fiction works, including her memoirs, and spent her life working in the arts. Writing, teaching writing at university, mentoring other writers. At retirement age, her superannuation was minimal and her financial precariousness crowded in on her. In May 2023, she died suddenly, with no suspicious cause identified.
My actual birthday was a couple of Mondays ago. I emerged from the wondrous creative cocoon of the Katharine Susannah Prichard Writers Centre fellowship, back to the full blast of the world. I worked very, very hard on my birthday, and most of the days in between and now. The work on my book has dried to a dribble again.
As I reflect on my 59th birthday, I’ve set a new, final line in the sand. I know this is the countdown. This is my last year of working like this. My menopausal gap years have been fun. Returning to part-time work has been positive, but it all takes up writing bandwidth. I need to work while I have a mortgage, but come 60, the game will be different.
Perhaps I have taken the coward’s way out, but I haven’t tried to make a living as an artist. As my dear friend and beloved YA author Julia Lawrinson has advised in her Substack newsletter today, and I quote;
don’t try so hard to get published. Don’t aim for a career in this industry. Enjoy the connections you develop with other people who want to create, who love stories and art and presenting to children. Enjoy the delight you feel when you share your story with kids, and get kids creating, and that connection sings. But if you want a career, go and get one that pays you, that shows its value to you through paying you.
Now, I never will have to make a living as an artist. Always, I will have the luxury to stay in love with the process of writing, and savouring connecting with creatives. And that is exactly what I plan to do.
This Reconciliation Week got me thinking about a conversation I had a few years ago.
“I’ve experienced positive discrimination.” I said to an Aboriginal colleague. Positive discrimination, the white, middle-class privileged water that I swim in, and so often forget. I was thinking about a few times when the positive treatment I received was so glaringly obvious that I noticed.
“Positive discrimination. I’ve never experienced that. What’s that like?” She was genuinely curious about my answer.
Here are several I remember.
-Arriving in London in 1990, the fumes of Heathrow still on me, visiting an Abbey National bank with my pound coin to open up a bank account. I needed it so I could get paid when I started temp work. Two young men of colour in the queue behind me, also with the fumes of Heathrow coming from their backpacks and jackets, tried the same conjuring trick. A gold coin to create a mechanism to receive a salary. Only they were declined. I said nothing and slunk away.
-Moving to Thessaloniki in Greece to teach English as a Foreign Language. We needed our passports validated at the Alien Department (that’s pretty much a direct translation from the Greek) and we were hustled to the front of the queue. Past everyone that had been waiting for hours, people from neighbouring countries such as Albania, Bulgaria, perhaps further afield. We were in and out within minutes. As a slightly more mature person, I said “sorry” to each person as I passed them.
-Becoming the victim of a serious crime in Perth and experiencing the privilege of being “the credible witness” from the moment of reporting to the police, all the way through to a significant sentence being imposed. The police officers who had been part of the investigation even went along to the sentencing (which was more than I did). Soon I was invited onto advisory committees to talk about the victim’s experience and how things could be done better.
Once I took part in a workshop activity designed to bring positive discrimination to the fore. We all lined up at the back of the room. Each of us had a piece of paper which told a few details about our lives. Where we were born, the colour of our skin, the level of poverty and trauma we experienced as children, the education level we’d attained. We were asked to take one step forward if we had graduated from high school. Or if we’d experienced a peaceful home life as children. And on and on. Some people were already at the end of the room before others could take one step forward.
At the end of the Walk for Reconciliation held in Boorloo (Perth) on Friday, we gathered around a stage where the facilitator spoke to the crowds. She asked the children, who were all sitting cross-legged on the mat in front of the stage, to stand up. She asked them to turn around and look at us. Several dozen faces looked at us — Aboriginal and Wadjella (non-Aboriginal) children. In their gaze, I felt the punch to my heart, the tears push at my eyes.
There was so much hope and power as the children gazed at us. Our children have been educated about the horrors of colonisation in Australia. They won’t, like me, be young adults before they first start to grapple with our history.
In the horrid ashes of the Yes vote debacle, when Australia slapped away the Indigenous hand of friendship, this Reconciliation Week march was a balm to my soul. Now, more than ever.
After a couple of false starts, I find the right café to have breakfast before I visit Mum. It’s a charming old-style café in Guildford, and unusually I am the only woman. Perhaps it’s the early hour. I set up the laptop and order breakfast, toggling my need for writing with my hunger. I have to keep shoving around the elements—coffee, laptop, breakfast, but eventually I can re-focus my attention on the writing.
Two men are in almost identical polo shirts and appear to be having a business meeting. They move off and another pair with almost identical polos soon arrives. I have to look carefully to make sure they’re not the same people.
An odd male couple, friends, sit in another corner, one dressed casually in jeans and striped polo shirt, the other in a sharp suit, clean cut and shaved. Clearly, they’re regulars—more regular than the owners who have recently bought the café. The odd couple talk loudly, especially the one in the sharp suit, but I’ve tuned them out. I like a noisy café to write.
Next to me, I’m joined by another man on his laptop. Perhaps he knows the odd couple. He comments on their increasingly loud discussion on whose turn it is to pay. A male pantomime reminiscent of Father Ted is emerging (google Mrs Doyle, I’ll pay) They appeal to the new owner, who confirms that last week, the polo shirted man paid. It’s sharp suit’s turn today. They laugh about how old they’re getting and how hard it is to remember whose turn it is at their age (late 50s, early 60s I’m guessing.)
“One day, we won’t even remember who each other is!” sharp suit wisecracks. There is a bravado of guffawing.
Right in mid-air, a vivid recent memory re-plays in my mind. I see my mother’s hand stroking Roma’s face at the dinner table at the residential aged care facility they both now live at. Roma, the doctor, a woman medical graduate in the 1950s. Thumbing her nose at the deeply sexist times. Roma the inveterate traveller. She doesn’t know my mother, or their friendship of seven decades. She doesn’t even know Roma any more.
The men in the café laugh and laugh with the brutal, untrue certainty that this will never happen to them. They are above ageing, above dementia, above death.
But they’re not, are they? None of us is. We don’t know which one of us will be wheeled into the dayroom to sit in front of a jigsaw puzzle. I see Roma picking at the jigsaw pieces some days. Her hands which once ran over surgical instruments with a practiced touch. She turns the jigsaw pieces this way and that, puzzling at what they are.
It got me to wondering. Why do we call it “aged care?” But imagine if we called it “elder care?” If we saw through to Roma the doctor, and through even further to ourselves? Because it’s all ourselves.
We call it elder abuse. Why can’t we collectively imagine elder care?
I’ve got one more glorious week ahead of me at KSP Writers’ Centre, after an entire week immersed in this beautiful place. For those of you who don’t know what I’m talking about, Katharine Susannah Prichard (KSP) was an Australian writer and co-founder of the Australian Communist Party. Born in 1883, she mainly lived in this house in Greenmount in the Perth hills from the 1920s until her death in 1969.
The KSP Writers’ Centre was established in 1985 and dedicated volunteers have lovingly restored, maintained and improved it. Three writers’ cabins were constructed which mimic the one she had built in 1930. Trying to write in her house with a busy family and activism schedule was impossible, so she had a cabin built just for her. Our cabins are very like hers but bigger to include our own bathroom and toilet. Two other writers and I are staying here for a fortnight on a Fellowship. We look out over the twinkling lights of the Perth skyline from our writing desk, bump into each other in the kitchen, share progress and talk book structure. Right down to every cell, I feel my luck.
Being a KSP Fellow means I can go into the actual house, so I do. I open it up every day. Let the breezes through, sit in the spaces she sat, write in the places she wrote. I’ve even done yoga in the library.
In my ideal world, I would have cleared my calendar in time for this fellowship. In the real world, however, the day job demands continue. But in the blessed synchronicity that life can sometimes offer, my two writing companions also have life demands that can’t be completely turned off for two weeks. It’s helped me come to peace about my reality, something I’m not good at. So I’ve followed James Clear’s advice to set small, achievable goals. I write for one hour each day, then I can do whatever else I want/need to do. No beating myself up for having to put the pen down and join an online meeting or even leave this haven to do things that must be done. I’ve just written for an hour every day, and it’s been magic.
Today was Mum’s first Mother’s Day since she moved into a residential aged care facility. How we had wanted to keep her in her own home, but it was not to be. So we did what we could to create a home-like morning tea. “I wish I could see it,” Mum said, so we described the egg sandwiches, the special teacups and saucers, the pink iced cakes.
Morning tea merged into lunch, then Mum and I napped in her room. I roused myself and left to get on with my Sunday Blog, found myself a beautiful spot by the river. And then I saw the empty battery on the laptop with me. It declined my power bank’s kind invitation to charge it. Handwriting is fine but I need to get an image right before I can blog, so I ended up writing random notes about passing people. I was then a bit late getting to the Mother Nurture Activate Saplings event where my daughter was playing. Ah, my beautiful daughter who made me a mum. What a sweet joy to listen and sing and dance along to her music. Mother Nurture was the name of a long-ago volunteer group I joined when she was two, and then I recycled the name for a post-natal depression group for new mums struggling to bond with their babies (now called Mother Baby Nurture). I took a picture of the sign, tucked it away into my Mother’s Day.
At the end of the gig, I raced back home to plug in the laptop and get going with the Sunday Blog already. My eye fell on the picture of us I’ve had on my desk for several months—my daughter and I, when she was just three. We’d been displaced from our home and we were making the best of it in our new home, a secure apartment block. 22 years ago on 10th May 2002, just before Mother’s Day, someone invaded our little home and changed it forever. It never truly felt like home again. But I remember that photo being taken by my sister, who had come to visit us in our new digs. I can still feel my daughter’s body against me, my hands resting on her little shins.
Fancy morning tea in an aged care facility, a photo taken in the sunshine. These disjointed moments can still be sewn back together – by the incredible luck of just having loved ones together, moving forward, always moving forward.
As someone who listens to Tara Brach regularly, the first time I heard her quote Trappist monk Thomas Merton about the violence of activism and over-work, I was shocked. Like she’d thrown a bucket of cold water over me in her comforting voice. Surely this could not be right?
If you are familiar with Tara Brach’s podcasts, they are recordings of her talks and tend to be repetitive—the same jokes and anecdotes, but in endless different combinations. I just love listening to her, and over time the shock of this quote gave way to little tiny green shoots of “maybe this is right.”
Then this week I’ve been listening to a We Can Do Hard Things podcast episode entitled “Laziness does not exist.” I’ve been marinading in this slowly growing insight that doing too much is, well, innately violent.
So I’ve decided I’m going to do Sunday bites—short posts each Sunday, more like an image with a caption, and a longer Sunday Blog on the last Sunday of the month, to dig in a bit more deeply but also go more gently.
While I’ve got you, I’m excited to be a 2024 Katharine Susannah Prichard Fellow. I get to stay at the KSP Writers Centre from 13th to 25th May, inclusive.
I’m hosting a Shut Up and Write on Friday 24th May (for writers in any genre), followed by a Sundowner. Cheese, soup and cake will be on offer – BYO other goodies. There is a $5 entry fee, which will be donated to the KSP Writers Centre.
The picture shows Katharine Susannah Prichard looking out from the window, much like I will be from my cabin over the two weeks Fellowship. In between furious morning writing, of course.
I found this image on Nathan Hobby’s website – in case you haven’t read his excellent KSP Biography, the WA Premier’s Book of the Year 2023 The Red Witch, I highly recommend you get hold of it and read it!
In readiness for the forthcoming Health Consumers’ Council Book Club event with Susannah Fox, I’ve been reading Rebel Health, a Field Guide to Patient-led Revolution in Medical Care. My biggest take away so far is the importance of this distinction as a patient advocate – I am not anti-science—I am pro-social. What this means to me is that I believe in the vital importance of patients, family members & carers and lived experience advocates to be decision makers in all aspects of how our health system works. I believe the way we care for each other in our communities helps us to stay healthy. I also believe that there are many incredible treatments and passionate, caring clinicians who are keen to help us with our health issues. We need to work in partnership where we can, but rebel when the door is locked against us.
It all starts with us as patients giving informed consent. But how do we manage the yawning gap of medical knowledge between our surgeons and ourselves? How can we ask the right questions when we don’t know what we don’t know?
Do we understand what we are hoping to get out of the surgery, about what’s important to us? Are we eager to buy a “quick-fix” solution to our problem? Will we be able to stop and think? Will the expensive fifteen-minute appointment with our specialist, that perhaps we’ve waited months for, be enough time to fill in all the gaps?
Everyone’s circumstances are unique, and yet five questions can be all that’s needed to guide us towards the right solution.
Do I really need this test, treatment or procedure?
What are the risks?
Are there simpler, safer options? (e.g. physiotherapy, lifestyle changes)
What happens if I don’t do anything?
What are the costs?
I would add to this:
Take someone along to the appointment so they can take notes or record conversation on the phone to reflect on afterwards.
Get a second opinion—this may not please your surgeon. Don’t worry about that. You have to live with the consequences for the rest of your life. They may never see you again after the surgery is done. (I did a whole blog on second opinions you may want to dip into)
It would seem that I’m leaning towards Ghandi’s misquoted wisdom of being the change you want to see in the world. Actually, he didn’t exactly say that. The full quote is as below, but I’ve edited it so it includes women:
“We but mirror the world. All the tendencies present in the outer world are to be found in the world of our body. If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change. As we change our own nature, so does the attitude of the world change towards us. This is the divine mystery supreme. A wonderful thing it is and the source of our happiness. We need not wait to see what others do.”
Mahatma Ghandi
But whatever the origin of the quote, I’ve been tackling both sleep hygiene and sober curiosity, in one fell swoop. The sleep hygiene has come in leaps and bounds since I banned tech from the bedroom. As well as getting several unbroken night’s sleeps in a row, there is another magnificent side-effect. Reading more. The rules of my bedroom digital detox allow me to read books before I go to sleep, and if I wake in the middle of the night. I’ve read so many books in the last month that I’m actually starting to make a dent it my To Be Read pile. I felt quite justified in buying three more books this weekend. Also, I now don’t enjoy the feeling I get when I start scrolling mindlessly during the day and I seem to have vastly reduced this time suck. More reading, less scrolling. Win, win, win.
The sober curiosity journey is three weeks long as of today. Luckily, the curiosity survived the week-long trip to Singapore, and even up the top of the Marina Bay Sands hotel. It also survived my attendance at a fiftieth birthday party last night. To be fair, I did leave rather early once the bottle of Nosecco was drained. Progress, not perfection, as they say.
Both self-improvement kicks were inspired by listening to episodes of the Feel Better, Live More podcast by Dr Chatterjee from the UK. Long episodes, but they’ve been good while I’ve been driving about, marinading in all that positivity.
What about all this self-improvement? There’s a newness, like freshly sanded wood. My feelings are closer to the surface, jumbling and vying for attention. The discomfort in my consciousness of the (obscene) privilege of being able to travel, the unconscionable flying about hither and thither as the planet gets hotter and hotter. The wonder of rain in Singapore, and the endless greenery that comforts after the barrenness of a rainless Perth. The nurture of joining in a Friday night of mantra singing, returning to my Saturday yoga class after my away-from-home practice. Perhaps this miscellany has been cloaked in wine and choked by mindless scrolling.
