Meanjin Vol 81, No 2

By Meanjin Quarterly

'Part of the story of the decline in Australian journalism can be told with data and dollars. Part of it is about belief and culture - a crisis of faith.'

In her cover essay 'This Is Not Journalism', writer and journalism academic Margaret Simons takes a long hard look at both the history and current practice of Australian journalism, its trials, successes and many failures. Is journalism accountable? Does it feed the public conversation or poison it? Is it a craft in serious need of reinvention? Simons pulls no punches in her critique of a profession close to her heart.

In other essays: Yves Rees considers the enthusiasm for sobriety amongst younger Australians, John Kinsella writes on 'Ecojustice Poetics and the Universalism of Rights', Ben Eltham details the Morrison Government's legacy of corrupt behaviour, Michael Winkler reveals his writerly 'struggle with structure', Elizabeth Humphrys on the muddy historical remains left by the Westgate Bridge collapse, Subhash Jaireth on the tragedy of lost Indigenous languages, Amaryllis Gacioppo considers the opening virgin, a remarkable religious artefact from the fifteenth century, Elina Abou Sleiman revisits the 2002 protests at the Woomera immigration detention centre, Jenny Sinclair goes in search of nineteenth-century colour for her writing, Chloe Ward revisits Nevil Shute's On The Beach in a new moment of nuclear anxiety, and Lucy Sussex introduces us to Sir Julius Vogel and 'A Feminist, Imperialist Utopia'.

New fiction from: Karen Wyld, James Bradley, Jane O'Sullivan and Michelle See-Tho.
Poetry from: Ashleigh Synnott, Alicia Sometimes, Glenn McPherson, Ben Qin, Simeon Kronenberg, Meredi Ortega, Michael Mintrom, David Brooks, Samuel Watson and Sarah Day.
Memoir from: Madison Griffiths, Jessica L. Wilkinson, Sue Hall Pyke and Hila Shachar.
Reviews from: Alex Gerrans, Elese Dowden, Megan Cheong, Isabella Gullifer-Laurie, Reuben Mackey, and Muhib Nabulsi.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Melbourne University Publishing Ltd
• Release date: Jun 15, 2022
• ISBN: 9780522878493

Book preview

MOVING ON U.P.P.

Michael Winkler

IN ARS POETICA , written around 19 BCE, Horace postulated ‘ut pictura poesis’. This formulation, abbreviated by scholars as u.p.p., has been chewed over in the intervening two millennia. Horace’s dictum translates to ‘as is painting so is poetry’. U.p.p. was a restatement of the claim by Simonides of Ceos that poema pictura loquens, pictura poema silens (poetry is a speaking picture, painting a silent poetry), but with the order of artforms reversed.

How do you write a book? You have an idea, and it grows or strengthens and doesn’t go away. You do your research, or your imagining, and you construct fences around what will be in the book to demarcate against what will not be in the book. And then you write it, and that is when the problem of structure looms, a glass mountain that defies all attempts at climbing.

I struggle with structure, like many writers past and present. I flit and flirt. Will it be Freytag’s Pyramid? Could the Fichtean Curve save my project/life? If I add a parallel plot, could it be done in flashforward, or maybe flashback, or maybe both simultaneously in an additional, even fancier, double-helix co-extension?

In 2021 I published a book, Grimmish. It is an unruly beast. J.M. Coetzee, Nobel laureate and not averse to singular novel structure, called it ‘the strangest book you are likely to read this year’. It is not wilfully strange, but strangeness is what happened when I tried to pitchfork all the material I had assembled into the structure I selected.

Grimmish is about two things: the real-life visit to Australia in 1908–09 of Italian-American boxer/freakshow attraction Joe Grim; and thoughts about pain and endurance. I could have folded it all up into a conventional package, but there were many tangential delights I’d stumbled across and wanted to share, and I wanted the reader to see what I was doing and why and judge proceedings accordingly, and I also wanted the option of disagreeing with myself, and the let’s-pretend-together-now characters-in-a-plot trad fiction model wouldn’t accommodate all that.

So how old does that make him in billable hours?

As writers, we are also readers. Our writing tablet can never be a tabula rasa because we are influenced by whatever we read, but literature didn’t provide a guiding star for this project. When asked what books influenced Grimmish’s construction I hem and haw and acknowledge that it must owe something to Moby-Dick because you can’t read the greatest novel and remain untouched. I love the way Melville stowed that book’s hold with skeins of the most lyrical writing, but also slabs of cetology, and odd listless abstractions, and jokes so singular they might be called private. A varied and pungent cargo.

Melville gave me some ideas about form, but the inspiration for the superstructure came from visual art. Most notably, I leaned on the gaudily brilliant mid-career paintings of Chilean-Australian painter Juan Davila—which might be characterised, with due apologies to Horace, as his Arse Poetica. All of Davila’s work fascinates, but his startling masterworks of the 1990s were my touchstone. They are profane, multivalent, dangerous, dazzling. Critic Robert Nelson described Davila’s work as

a social and historical critique of a bracing kind, because it’s folded into a carnival of symbols, erotic, comic, cruel and bitter, with lots of nudity, men with bosoms and vaginas, allusions to myth, popular culture, art history and even cartoon illustration.

Davila denies himself nothing. He references politics, aesthetics, art history and iconography from different continents and traditions. He pastes newspaper cuttings on the canvas and scars the surface with graffiti. He is a figurative painter of rare skill who surrounds pieces with tattered gingham borders, or undermines them with kitsch frames. He used to hang his paintings in galleries and then work directly on the walls, surrounding these expensive items with rough cartoons, ambiguous smears, abstruse visual jokes.

More than any writer, he showed me how I could handle my material in Grimmish. Rather than the conventional novelistic method—a synthesis of all that the author has imagined and researched and theorised, sieved and distilled—I employed a pastiche of Davila’s approach. Hence my book shoehorns in newspaper stories, cultural arcana, stupid jokes, rural horror, grandiloquent expounding on masculinity, and a fragment from a short story I wrote maybe 20 years ago that seemed to fit. I couldn’t settle on an epigraph, so I included dozens: very serious clowns tumbling from a book-sized clown car; footnotes; changes of register; blooms of staccato prose and sweeps of self-conscious legato, trying to mimic the detonations Davila embeds in areas of otherwise lyrical brushwork.

Once, when Australians could easily travel beyond their locked-down shores, I galloped the full two furlongs alongside Robert Rauschenberg’s The ¼ Mile at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. It is claimed to be the longest artwork in the world (a stunningly old-fashioned idea of art; in that city you can also stroll the half-mile mural in the Tujunga Flood Control Channel) and was completed over 17 years. It is a collage of sketches, ideas, impressions, call-backs to his previous work, found objects, a creaky soundscape. The execution felt curiously dated, but I liked the idea. Rauschenberg helped shore up the schema I boosted from Davila.

My great-great-great-great-great grandfather, Johann Georgus Winkler, was born at the same time and in the same place as Gotthold Ephraim Lessing. Johann moved to Starkenberg and lived his life as a farm labourer. Gotthold moved onto the international stage as a philosopher, dramatist and critic, and mounted a stout attack on the principle of u.p.p. He protested that poetry should not be written using the same devices and approaches as painting, and advocated for a separation of literature and the visual arts.

There are many artists who have also been writers. Think Yayoi Kusama, Salvador Dalí, Francis Picabia, Andy Warhol, Leonora Carrington, and Australians Davida Allen and Norman Lindsay. Michelangelo, Raphael and da Vinci all wrote poetry, apparently regarding it as another aspect of artmaking. If they had been around for the birth, maturation and seeming decline of the novel, they may have liked Ben Lerner’s argument that it is a ‘fundamentally curatorial form, as a genre that assimilates and arranges and dramatizes encounters with other genres’. In the same essay, Lerner concludes, ‘Instead of grounding the (often competitive) relationship of verbal and visual art in their similarity—Ut pictura poesis—I think the relationship is most fecund when writers concede the actual to artists.’ On this point at least, Lessing would have concurred.

Will Self, in an essay making the case for Joyce’s Ulysses as symphony, argued that ‘there does seem to me to be an inevitable compromise—deterioration even—when an art form, rather than proceeding entirely sui generis, finds its ground in another form’s practice’. (He might have felt sympathy for Flann O’Brien’s art lover who wrote ‘more in Seurat than in Ingres’.) The music–literature bridge is well travelled. Milan Kundera has written about the influence of musical composition on his novels. Anthony Burgess attempted a cross-form incursion in Napoleon Symphony: A novel in four movements. Virginia Woolf famously observed, ‘It’s odd, for I’m not regularly musical but I always think of my books as music before I write them.’ Eight decades later, Haruki Murakami tweeted, ‘I feel that most of what I know about fiction I learned from music.’

My portal was through paintings, but every writer gets by as best they can. There is something vivifying about the idea of obligation-free borrowing, cross-pollination, taking a working holiday to a neighbouring art form. When I couldn’t work out a road-map for myself, Davila and Rauschenberg stopped to offer directions. Maybe some writers find their frameworks in the work of RZA or Asghar Farhadi or Zaha Hadid or Pearl Primus. We are desperate, and we take clues and cues wherever they are available.

I have explained my debt to Davila, but there is another, pivotal aspect to his work that Grimmish does not encompass. In that richest phase of his artmaking, Davila stalked the treacherous borderlines of offensiveness and public acceptability. Georges Bataille’s Story of the Eye, mutilated genitals, objects in anuses, politicians and the powerful depicted as transexuals, swastikas, seeming apotemnophilia—many people considered him closer to Goatse than Gorky. It brought him attention, as well as notoriety. In Christopher Allen’s waspish observation, ‘Davila had the good fortune to have one of his pictures, Stupid as a Painter, seized for obscenity by the police at the Fourth Biennale of Sydney in 1982, and thus found himself a martyr to the principle of artistic freedom.’

And this is where Australian literature cannot/will not follow. What was the last Australian book that genuinely shocked you? Not Demidenko—that was shocking, but for different reasons. Our literature is only as transgressive as the polite book-buying public will allow. Where is the Australian book that incinerates orthodoxy, tossing a lit match into a box of fireworks and god help your liberal sensitivities? I struggle to think of writing from this continent that affronts and brutalises and upends like Davila’s Arse End of the World, for example, something so provocative that it sits outside the sensibility of the cognoscenti. No publisher would take on a book with the multifarious incorrectnesses and unorthodoxies of Davila’s artworks Schreber’s Semblance or The Medical Examination. Writing marketed as on-the-edge never is. There is no place in this marketplace for the really wild stuff.

I’m thinking of books that newspapers will refuse to review, that libraries will be urged to ban, that will send scholars scurrying for records of censorship in this country. (Philip Nitschke and Fiona Stewart’s subversive The Peaceful Pill Handbook remains forbidden. They appear to be the first Australian authors to have works prohibited in this country since the middle of last century, when banned imports included Christina Stead’s Letty Fox: Her Luck and Norman Lindsay’s Redheap.)

These incendiary books will not be created by writers whose ink wells are their own sense of identity, whose imaginations extend no further than their own experiences—unless the author is from a dramatically different milieu to that known and tolerated by the liberal literati. Perhaps there will be a great Australian novel written by an alt-right incel. Perhaps dangerous and brilliant texts will be developed by militants on the fringes of the survivalist movement, or Pentecostalists, or consultants who specialise in maximising clients’ losses in casinos. Perhaps we will have to turn to bold visual artists who refuse to stay in their own lane.

Does it really matter? Inevitably, yes and no. If you privilege excellence over outrageousness, this is a happy time for local letters, with Alexis Wright and Maria Tumarkin and Michelle de Kretser simultaneously at their apotheosis. But if Australian writing needs a shake—and most writing needs a good shake, in most places and at most times—then I don’t know who our Davila will be.

Not me. I’m just one more writer who will scramble for any structural life raft, most of which turns out to be made of concrete, granite, bricks, lead. I leaned heavily on Davila to find a way to build my book, and I’m grateful that he showed me a way to make it happen. But I don’t have enough courage or willingness to transgress. The true literary heir to his coruscating artistic vision is still to emerge. •

Michael Winkler is a writer and reviewer. His most recent book is Grimmish. See <michaelwinkler.com.au>.

HOW MY BLACK AND INDIGENOUS GRANDPARENTS REMIND ME OF MY WHITE PRIVILEGE

Natalia Figueroa Barroso

As a light-skinned Uruguayan of African and Charrúa descent, I’ve always felt unsure whether I could claim my Blackness, because I’m well aware that my Whiteness gives me the privilege that my abuelos could never have.

‘O NCE YOU SEE the cemetery, you get off the bus,’ my tío abuelo (great-uncle) Lucio said in Spanish with his Portuguese twang, his foggy eyes blinded by cataracts looking over my shoulder as he spoke to me, between his fingers a cigarette burning. ‘Then you go to any local and ask for a Figueroa. All the Figueroas in Rivera are your relatives and we come in all shades and shapes.’ Exhaling smoke, he flicked ash over the balcony, took another puff and continued, ‘We’re Black, Brown, White. Light eyes, dark eyes. Short, tall. Blonde, brunettes. With afros, curls, waves or straight hair like yours.’ He cleared his throat, stubbed the butt into an ashtray then added sarcastically, ‘But we’re all Figueroas and you can thank colonisation for that. Those conquistadores couldn’t keep their hands off our women or our land.’ He belly-laughed as he pulled his blue comb out of his white shirt’s front pocket and repositioned his storm-cloud-coloured afro behind his ears. I breathed in the past trauma, imagining the women who came before me, because of whom I am here, women of my blood being forced to submit to White supremacy and the patriarchy, their bodies capitalised.

This conversation that I had in 2008 in Uruguay with my tío abuelo Lucio, when I went over to his place to ask for directions to our ancestral lands, has stayed with me. I can replay his deep, husky voice in my head whenever I want. His words echoed my sense of identity, my sense of belonging to a tribe. They also reminded me that my family’s history was smeared with pain, sexism and racism.

From a young age I was made aware of my paternal side’s phenotypical diversity because I spent my childhood living with my papá’s parents, the Figueroas. The nosy, mostly White Uruguayan neighbours always made my younger sister and me feel like outsiders through their blatant racist remarks such as, ‘You beautiful girls must be the milkman’s granddaughters.’ Or, ‘Where did you steal these dolls from? From Russia?’ And the worst one I can remember was, ‘Be careful with the sun, girls, you may turn out looking like your grandparents.’ Their bigotry wasn’t directed at my sister and me, it was indirectly and sometimes directly targeted at my abuelo Napo and my abuela Gladys.

My abuelo Napo looked like your typical Afro-Uruguayan: he was dark-skinned and had an afro and brown eyes, although like me he carried various continents in his veins—Europe, Africa and Abya Yala (the Americas). But no-one ever noticed his Whiteness, just like no-one ever noticed my Blackness. The first time one of our neighbours made me feel that I wasn’t of my abuelo’s blood was at the local kiosk. My hands were around my abuelo’s neck as he held me proudly in his arms and asked me which alfajor I wanted, a chocolate one or a merengue one. I wanted a chocolate one but asked to get a merengue one for my baby sister since I knew those were her favourite. When my abuelo went to pay, the thin-lipped woman at the cash register asked my abuelo who I was and of course he replied, ‘My granddaughter.’

Aaron Billings

Without even thinking, the woman said, ‘Luckily she’s got those beautiful blue eyes and that gorgeous blonde hair.’ Immediately, I hated her and hugged my abuelo tighter. The words sounded like a compliment directed at me but even as a three-year-old I knew what her caramelised admiration meant. Underneath her sugar-coated flattery lurked a ‘Luckily you’re White and beautiful, unlike your Black and ugly grandfather’. I could feel the sting of her casual racism upon my abuelo’s skin. Instead of calling the cashier out on her hurtful comment, my abuelo narrowed his eyes and said in a satirical voice, ‘What do you mean? Can’t you see she looks just like me?’ She chuckled as if it were the funniest joke she’d ever heard. When she handed me the merengue alfajor, I wanted to part her nasty thin lips and shove the sweet in her mouth in an attempt to shut her up forever.

My Whiteness wasn’t pointed out only when I was with my abuelo Napo, it also happened in the presence of my abuela Gladys, who is also a Figueroa and not just by marriage: she’s my abuelo Napo’s and my tío abuelo Lucio’s third cousin (these things happen in small towns like Rivera). My abuela Gladys is what most Australians would consider to be your stereotypical-looking Latinx, with black straight hair, brown eyes, olive complexion; she kind of looks like a much older version of J.Lo. Although my abuela Gladys never wore her natural hair, she always had a new hairdo. Every morning my abuela prepared extra portions of breakfast for the poor families of the barrio, not because she was rich but because she was kind.

One by one, the families would gather around our front gate and clap their hands (in Uruguay we clap, we don’t knock) and waited for my abuela to hand them a coffee and torta fritas. One morning my abuela asked me to help her. I must have been four at the time and as I carried a tray of freshly fried torta fritas, a young teenage boy with clothes that looked as though they had never been washed asked who I was and my abuela obviously replied, ‘My granddaughter’, and without considering our feelings, he explained to us that I was too White to be her granddaughter. Instead of educating this dirty-clothed teen about mixed-race families, my abuela decided on the spot to misinform him with a harmless lie and replied, ‘You see my granddaughter was born in Australia, so that’s why she’s so pale.’ He laughed.

I was too young to understand that what my abuela said was a joke and untrue, so for a long time I blamed my birth country for the colour of my skin. Years later in my adolescence, while watching a Mexican telenovela with my abuela Gladys in her housing commission townhouse in south-west Sydney, I recounted that day and finally corrected her, telling her that Australia was a Black country, always was, always will be. My abuela Gladys laughed and said, ‘I was just kidding around to shut that boy up. I can’t believe you still remember that!’ But that’s the thing when it comes to my identity, the blueprint that builds me, moments that question my very ego seem to scar doubt in the folds and wrinkles of my mind.

In my early teenage years I lived with my abuelos again but this time in Fairfield West. Even though Fairfield City Council’s motto is ‘Celebrating Diversity’, my family’s diversity didn’t seem to assimilate too well. One morning my abuelos decided that they wanted to drop me off at my high school instead of my papá; they said they needed the exercise. By the school’s front gate they kissed me goodbye and before I walked in, my abuela licked her thumb and rubbed off with her saliva the red lipstick mark she had left on my cheek. I felt the eyes of my fellow students watching me; I was gonna be teased for sure. When my abuela was satisfied with my appearance, I was able to walk in.

A couple of steps into the school grounds I heard a girl’s voice behind me say, ‘Hey N### White!’ Dumbfounded by the N-word, I stood still. My heart thumped in my throat. The air seemed thinner, my tongue heavier. Then the voice behind me confronted me. The girl had freckles on her nose. I recognised her as she was in my ESL class; she was a Latinx too. As our eyes met she said, ‘I didn’t know you were a N### White,’ smirked and walked off, her blue backpack slapping the back of her navy pleated skirt. I can’t recall anything else but every time I relive this moment, I’m reminded of my White privilege because the only time I’ve experienced racism was in the company of my abuelos, whereas racism was an everyday occurrence for them.

I never saw my tío abuelo Lucio again. All I know is that he took that bus he had instructed me to board on our last conversation and he made it home to die where he, my abuelos and all my Figueroa ancestors were born. My abuelo Napo died of cancer in Braeside Hospital in Fairfield when I was 19 years old and his ashes were later flown home to Rivera, whereas my abuela Gladys has been trapped in her body with advanced dementia, bounded by the walls of the nursing home in Bossley Park where she has resided for nearly a decade. From the moment they departed from my life, so too did part of my identity. It was as if the invisible umbilical cord that clamped me to my Black and Indigenous diaspora had been cut off.

As a light-skinned Uruguayan of African and Charrúa descent, I’ve always felt unsure whether I could claim my Blackness because I’m well aware that my Whiteness opens doors to places my abuelos could never access. For example, White people have never wondered if I speak English in Australia, based solely on my appearance. Nor have I ever been followed around in a supermarket because a security guard assumed I was going to steal from the moment they saw me. And I see people who look like me on billboards, in magazines and on TV.

On the other hand, my not-too-distant ancestors were enslaved, raped and renamed. Our surname is not entirely ours. We inherited Figueroa from our White masters. The intergenerational trauma is carried from womb to womb. Therefore, being a mixed-race woman with fair skin and blue eyes comes with mixed identity issues. I float between two worlds, since who I am isn’t reflected in other people’s perception of me. I’m often seen as and grouped with the kind of people who oppressed my ancestors. Once during my pregnancy, before a blood test I had to fill in a form and tick boxes that indicated my ethnicity. This is complex for me, but I filled it out honestly. The pathologist queried what I had selected, scrunching his spitfire caterpillar–looking eyebrows at me as he read my responses.

I explained the colonisation of Latin America to him and he left it at that. When I went to retrieve my results, spitfire-eyebrows said in an amused tone, ‘Turns out you have North African, West African, Mesoamerican and Amerindian blood, as well as European.’ I already knew that. Whether other people see it or not, one thing that I’m certain about is that I’m as Figueroa as they come, a mixture by colonial force and interracial marriages before they were legal, with blood that survived unfathomable adversities. But most importantly, I’m my abuelos’ grand-daughter and to be fully me is to always stand in solidarity with BIPOC communities everywhere and to fight to decolonise every land that I call home. •

Natalia Figueroa Barroso is a Uruguayan-Australian poet and storyteller of Charrúa, African and European origins who was raised on the unceded lands of Charrúa Nation and Dharug Country.

GULP, SWALLOW

Brooke Boland

I’ M SITTING ON the verandah with my father, not looking at the view. He’s sick, with the kind of advanced condition you don’t know you’ll come back from. One end of a line runs directly to his heart, the other end dangles from under his arm. His distinguishing feature—a moustache—is gone. What’s left of his hair is thin and shaved short against his skull. His head is back, his eyes are closed against the sun.

We sit this way for a while in companionable silence, something I’ve come to recognise as a disposition—genetics, or something else—that I’ve inherited from him, a need for company without the talking. We all know what will happen next week: he’ll get a call to go back to hospital for a second round of chemo; I’ll self-consciously slip socks and shoes on his knotted feet and tie up his laces; noticing his ankles, one replaced years earlier and still swollen, the other surgically fused to stop the pain of bone rubbing bone. For three weeks or maybe longer, he’ll be confined to four hospital-grey walls with a window that won’t open, and no visitors allowed.

If we did speak in this moment, if we said what we were feeling, it would be too much. We would crack open, and nothing could stop the outpouring of love and fear and grief once it started. Afterwards, we’d never forgive ourselves. Just to sit for a while in the sun with each other nearby was enough.

‘Did you hear about the new dinosaur they’ve discovered in the UK?’ Dad asks. His eyes are open. Pendraig milnerae. Found in a limestone quarry in the 1950s, the four perfectly preserved 200-million-year-old fossils were mistaken for crocodilian remains and filed away, waiting in the wrong drawer for years. This is a conversation we can have.

My son, a three-year-old palaeontologist, is inside lining dinosaurs up in pairs. His arrangement mimics family relationships—mother and child, sister and brother. I survey the Cretaceous period re-created in miniature across my parents’ living room floor and tell Joey to pack up his toys: Triceratops, Pachycephalosaurus, Ankylosaurus. We are on the Gondwana coast. Sea levels rise quickly, leaving an 80-kilometre stretch of Wandrawandian siltstone behind, from Gerroa to Kangaroo Valley to Ulladulla, while we go further underwater. In a few million years, an asteroid the size of Mars will slam into Earth, pushing it further off its axis and bringing darkness to the planet while volcanic eruptions—the stuff of nightmares—will release dangerous levels of carbon dioxide, enough to kill 80 per cent of what’s left on the planet. But back in the Anthropocene, I can see Dad is getting tired and it’s time to go home.

My early memories of him are more like sensations: his teeth a curiosity that sat on the bedside table at night; the overwhelming smell of spilt coffee and beer in his work ute; his moustache always prickly and tickling; and the way he made me hold a small hand over his eyes to block the light as he dozed on the lounge of an evening. ‘I’m just resting my eyes,’ he’d say, and my brother and I would wait for his heavy snoring to start, immediately changing the channel to the cartoons that were banned in our house.

Dad would stand out the front of the pub at Catherine Hill Bay with his pet goat, singing the theme song to Davy Crockett for a free soft drink, his father somewhere inside. He was about four years old. This is a story I heard from Mum. The truth is Dad rarely speaks about these things. On the few occasions I’ve asked, his answers are brief, arriving in short staccato.

His mother, who hated the sound of the waves at night, led the family’s move to Blacktown, where they built a house on Flushcombe Street with the help of a war service loan. His father, who had terrible arthritis in his hands and died young from kidney failure, was a police officer. During the school holidays Dad would work at Riverstone Meatworks for £5 a day. Later he became a builder, then a glazier, spending the rest of his life working on the high rise now dominating Sydney’s skyline. I remember standing on the footpath in the city as a small girl, holding Mum’s hand while we craned our necks trying to find him, staring up at the men suspended 12 storeys in the air on the side of a building, small specks moving in the distance. Strangers joined us on the ground, glaring up into the sun, wondering what we were pointing at.

A builder by trade and habit, he was always making something, and built our family home, an oversized four-bedroom brick house in south-west Sydney, over the course of my childhood. When I was instructed to take a glass of ice water out to him or call him in for lunch, I’d find him near the shed with a builder’s pencil or screw held in one corner of his mouth. He’d scull the water as if he were dying of thirst and ignore me the rest of the time. At the end of the day, he’d stand with a foot perched above his knee, in blue KingGee shorts, balancing on one leg and leaning against the kitchen bench. The only time I ever saw him sit down was when the cricket or football was on. When I look in the mirror, I see his dark hair and skin and eyes, his frown.

He built this house too, where my parents now live: a monolith of glass and concrete sitting at the point where the mouth of Currambene Creek opens into the bay. This is the place to watch an unfolding comedy of errors at the whim of its perennial tide. Boats are regularly trapped on the sandbank. Tourists attempting a reflective paddle downstream on a board or in a kayak are held in place, as if on a treadmill, not moving an inch no matter how fast they work their arms. The likelihood of reaching the shoreline opposite disappears quickly. Predictably, the water returns with bream and flathead and white trevally. Boats are saved, people float home.

Today it’s the welcome swallows that catch our attention. They cartwheel nearby, feathered acrobats twisting in the air, dramatically close to the fence. These red-throated, delicate birds appear at the beginning of spring, a sign of warming weather and changing seasons. In their circular and graceful theatrics, full pelt chasing down midges, they are collectively known as a gulp (of swallows) and their light bodies can reach speeds up to 65km per hour. Helped along by evolutionary design, their tails are deeply forked to create the kind of drag needed to bank sharply.

I hear a dull thuck as the first swallow hits the glass, making my father look. Thuck—a second bird lies motionless on the hot timber deck. In the middle of their acrobatics, two swerved headfirst into the glass sliding door. The humans on the verandah spring into action; we open all the doors and line up chairs in a row outside, a hopeful deterrent. Mum moves the small bodies into the shade and we wait to see if they are simply stunned. My son can’t take his eyes off them. Will they come back to life? One swallow moves a little and sits up. A moment later it rejoins the others in the air and we all cheer. The second swallow is still and quiet, his neck clearly broken. The gulp continues its spin.

When Joey and I return a few hours later, Dad is sitting up in bed wearing a red woollen beanie and winter coat on a 20-degree afternoon, watching TV. He changes the channel—cartoons—and Joey climbs in with his grandfather. ‘We still need to bury that swallow,’ I say to no-one in particular, looking out the window. A single magpie sits on the roof, waiting for Mum to throw small lumps of mince onto the grass.

Birds are one of the last surviving signs of dinosaurs. Their smaller avian form descended from carnivorous theropods such as the velociraptor and tyrannosaurus rex. If you ever look a caged brahma rooster in the eye, his feet as big as your fist, you’ll see the family resemblance. Propped up impossibly on two legs with talons, it is small-brained and feathered, aggressive. When some dinosaur species started shrinking at incredible rates and refining wing design, it sparked a sudden evolutionary change that led to the modern bird. Sudden, in evolutionary time, meaning millions of years. Only it hasn’t stopped there. Swallows, some say, are getting smaller, shortening their wingspan to protect themselves from cars, of all things. I wonder if they ever think about avoiding windows.

‘This one is dead,’ I explain to Joey, who is now crouched over the bird, still waiting for it to spring back to life. When I look at my son, I see the same dark hair, same frown. But he has his father’s eyes. ‘We need to dig a hole and bury it in the ground.’

I don’t go with them as Mum takes his hand and heads downstairs to the garden. While she digs a shallow grave, I stay upstairs with Dad. It’s Joey who is left gently holding the soft dead body in both hands, contemplating its feathered form, trying to understand the ritual of a burial. After a short funeral, he stares at the dirt for a good minute. ‘It will jump up out of the ground and fly off with the others,’ he insists.

When Mum recounts this story later, my mind immediately reaches for a touchstone I can offer his young mind. ‘You know how dinosaurs were hit by an asteroid and turned to bone? The bird you buried will stay in the ground and become bones. It won’t come back to life.’ Joey just shrugs and gets on with things. Timelessness is the free-ranging territory of young children, unhindered as they are by adult concerns. Almost a week later, I overhear a conversation between Joey and his dad about a bird that’s in the ground, like a dinosaur, that won’t come back to life. ‘It’s very sad,’ Joey says, leaning against the chair, a foot perched above his knee, balancing on one leg. •

Brooke Boland works on Wodi Wodi, Jerrinja, and Yuin Country as a freelance writer and researcher. She has a PhD in literature from the University of NSW.

MUD

Elizabeth Humphrys

MY COLLABORATOR SARAH and I arrive early at the Public Records Office in North Melbourne. No pens allowed, no water, no bags, put everything in the lockers over there, security tells us firmly. We are here to examine state records about the West Gate Bridge, which partially collapsed during construction in 1970, killing 35 workers.

Materials are wheeled to us on trolleys. Sarah, with the speed of a seasoned historian, is quickly into the first of transcript volumes from the royal commission. I start by looking at body cards. The size of two palms, folded over, they systematically record who the deceased person was, and parts of their final journey—the doctor who pronounced them dead, the police officer who ferried the body to the coroner, the relative or friend who came to identify them, and the funeral parlour that took them away.

In a box from the coronial inquest there are 15 booklets of photos, the covers yellow from age. Fourteen are of the collapse site, which is on the water’s edge in Spotswood a few kilometres west of where we are. The title of the final booklet says, ‘Photographs of Persons Killed in Collapse of West Gate Bridge’. I set it to one side. You want to be thorough. You want to examine everything that can help you understand an event. But I’m apprehensive. Do I want these images in my mind? Is it voyeuristic? It is an intimate thing to look at someone’s body without their permission.

•     •     •

On the morning of 15 October 1970, engineers and workers were attempting to persuade bulky elevated bridge sections into place on the West Gate construction site. There was a problem on the western side, and the steel girders were 4.5 inches apart. Large concrete blocks were placed on the higher girder to cantilever and pressure it into place. A buckle formed, and workers were asked by the engineers to remove bolts to smooth it out.

At 11.50 am site shop steward Bernie Buttars implemented the instructions. The bridge groaned, the metal turned