Intimations: Six Essays | Zadie Smith #NonFiction

 

This slim volume of essays grabbed my attention thanks to it's Covid-related lockdown content. Lately, I've been reading a number of fiction titles about plagues and epidemics (see below). This was the first one, however, that considered our current Covid situation.

I've been meaning to read something by Zadie Smith, ever since 2000 and White Teeth, which almost everyone I know has read and loved and says I should read too. The most I've managed so far, though, are a few introductions that she has done in other books or passing references made by other authors who admire her work.

This was a fine start, showing her obvious intelligence and thoughtfulness. Two things I usually appreciate a lot. However, in the middle of a pandemic, I guess I was also looking for more warmth. 

I found it curious that she choose an epigraph by Marcus Aurelius to lead us in, as I also found Aurelius intelligent and thoughtful, but lacking in warmth, when I read him twenty odd years ago. At the time I put it down to a translation and passing of time thing, but perhaps it can be hard to intellectualise and emote at the same time? 

It stares you in the face. No role is so well suited to philosophy as the one you happen to be in right now.

The second epigraph was by Grace Paley, who according to wikipedia was 'a writers writer', fuelled by idealism and activism. Perhaps with this quote, Smith is saying she is prepared to look at what is happening 'in the face...right now', but that something more is needed for 'an active moral life.' Perhaps developing an excellent soul requires more rigor and virtue than most of us can summon up right now?

My vocabulary is adequate for writing notes and keeping journals but absolutely useless for an active moral life.

However, Smith realised that there were two things she could, indeed, do. In her Foreword she embraces the notion that:

1. Talking to yourself can be useful.

2. And writing means being overheard.

The following six essays went on to explore death, control, denial, resistance, restraint, vulnerability, creativity, destruction, distance and social justice. She talks; and we listen. She posits; we ponder.

Below is what I pulled out of her essays.

1. Peonies: or tulips, or how nature, real and imagined, can heal, connect and soothe our souls. 

• Walking is what got me through our lockdown in NSW. It was autumn, the weather was glorious, and I walked for hours through parks, and past gardens in their final flush of flowering. I took solace in the changing of the leaves and the shortening of the days, even in a built up inner city suburb. Splashes of geraniums and chrysanthemums would catch my eye and lift my spirits. The sun would sparkle on the harbour and reflect in the glassed sky scrapers across the bay, along with the blue skies and clouds. 

How experience 'rolls over everybody' - sometimes we resist, sometimes we submit. The creative process is about trying to create some order out of the chaos. 

writing is control...writing is all resistance...to write is to swim in an ocean of hypocrisies. 

• I was surprised by how quickly and easily I submitted to the changing circumstances. My control, my creativity found expression in photography. I captured the autumnal changes and posted them on instagram. I didn't need my tulips to be peonies. For me, any flower would do!

2. The American Exception: 'I wish we could have our old life back'. 

• Curiously, I don't. There was absolutely nothing wrong with my old life; I loved most of it, most of the time. But even back then, pre-Covid, life changed and evolved. Things shifted. Good things happened; bad things happened. And we moved onto the next thing. This is the next thing. It's a bit bigger and more drastic than is usual, but it's what we do. Life changes and we can never go back. There is only a constantly changing now.

Death absolute is the truth of our existence as a whole, of course, but America has rarely been philosophically inclined to consider existence as a whole....

• Every time I read something about the American health system, I am so grateful to live in a country that has basic free health cover for all of it's citizens. 

war transforms its participants. What was once necessary appears inessential.

• I've realised I don't need to go out as often as I did. I'm an introvert and staying home, quietly, is pretty easy for me. But I do miss art galleries. It's not necessary for me to go shopping or go out every night. I don't need hustle and bustle or endless stimulation. But I do need beauty. And I need my local community. I need to know we will have cafes and restaurants and local businesses going forward. I now only shop local; no online megastores for me.

3. Something to Do: or how we fill our lockdown days. How conflicted we feel about this new liberty and/or captivity...the only way out is through...love is not something to do, but something to be experienced, and something to go through.

• Once I got over the distraction of lockdown and all the Covid news, I rediscovered reading. I've always read, but now, I'm reading more than ever. Creating little projects for ourselves is a good thing. We do need to keep busy; it can keep the demons at bay. And if it's something you also love to do, or it helps those you love, then bonus! Bake bread, solve a puzzle, create a potted herb garden, clean out your cupboards, paint the deck. Yes, it's busy work. Yes, it's something we do, because most of us really have 'no idea what life is for', so surely it's better to being doing something, than glumly doing nothing. The older I get, the more I realise there is no meaning of life. Life is simply what we make of it. 

4. Suffering Like Mel Gibson: or how lockdown affects us all differently, depending on our circumstances. Privilege and suffering have a lot in common. They both manifest as bubbles, containing a person and distorting their vision.

• I acknowledge all the good fortune that I have experienced during Covid so far. All my family are still working. Some now work from home or have reduced hours, but they're all still working. For those with reduced hours, our government JobKeeper program has buffered any pain. Our lockdown (in NSW) was brief and moderate. Our social lives are curtailed and I miss hugging close friends (I don't miss the cheek kissing or hand shaking though). I only know one person who has had the virus, although most people I know have been tested once or twice. Our state government seems to have nailed contact tracing. Any outbreaks are quickly contained. We feel safe but quiet. The restrictions we live under now are occasionally irksome but not onerous. I am fortunate. 

5. Screengrabs (After Berger, before the virus): I assume she means John Berger and is referencing Ways of Seeing. She draws mini-word-portraits...of a man with strong hands, a character in a wheelchair in the vestibule, a woman with a little dog....you get the idea.

• I liked how this helped Smith to focus on her local community, and how different people are coping with Covid and lockdown. Covid has also concentrated my gaze onto the local. I'm doing all my grocery shopping locally, I eat takeaway from our local restaurants. I could have coffee at home, but I'm getting it from a rotating set of local baristas on my walk to work instead. I'm not the only one. Many of those new to working from home, are taking their laptops to local cafes for the company. We've lost a few businesses, but they were struggling before Covid. I see more people reading books, in cafes, in the parks, and in the doctor's surgery.

The enviable style of the young is little protection against catastrophe...their style is all they have.

• It's not easy for the young. B20 is home more than out. And when out, he and his friends cannot dance, sing or walk around. They must sit in a pub, at a designated table. They are usually home again by 1pm. B20 is mostly philosophical. It's all he knows. They have social media to keep in touch. At least he isn't heading off to war, like many previous generations of young men his age. It could be worse.

6. Intimations: acknowledgements and shout-outs, or as Smith called them 'Debts and Lessons' to her family and friends.

That my physical and moral cowardice have never really been tested, until now.

A number of the essays tackled Black Lives Matter concerns. Racism as a virus. Class contempt. Plagued by poverty. I suspect Smith will have a lot more to say about this in the future. I look forward to it. 

Intimations felt like a beginning. A germ of an idea that hasn't quite reached fruition. It's the first reaction, a first response, by a thoughtful writer. It's a reaching out to test the waters and to connect. To see if anyone is listening. 

Judging by sales, lots of people are listening. Lots of people are looking for someone to help them make sense of what is happening to their world, to find a common cause, to stand on common ground. Together. To feel connected in our isolation. 

Royalties of my edition of Intimations are going to The Equal Justice Initiative and The Covid-19 Emergency Relief Fund for New York.

Previous Plague/Pandemic Reads:

• The Plague | Albert Camus
• The Stand | Stephen King
• Oryx and Crake | Margaret Atwood
• Year of Wonders | Geraldine Brooks
• The Pull of the Stars | Emma Donoghue
• A Journal of the Plague Year | Daniel Defoe
• Intimations | Zadie Smith (non-fiction)

Current Plague Reads:

• A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century | Barbara Tuchman (non-fiction)

Up Next:

• Pale Horse, Pale Rider | Katherine Anne Porter

Plague/Pandemic Books On My Radar:

• Station Eleven | Emily St John Mandel
• Blindness | José Saramago
• The Last Man | Mary Shelley
• The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic—and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World | Steven Johnson (non-fiction)
• Nemesis | Philip Roth
• Love in the Time of Cholera | Gabriel Garcia Marquez
• The Years of Rice and Salt | Kim Stanley Robinson
• The Dog Stars | Peter Heller
• The Children’s Hospital | Chris Adrian
• Severance | Ling Ma
• The White Plague | Frank Herbert
• The Passage | Justin Cronin

The Fire This Time | Jesmyn Ward #NonFiction

It seemed like it was the right time to finally read this book. 

The Fire This Time was first published in 2016, but my edition is a 2019 Bloomsbury publication. The collection of essays and poems is edited and introduced by Jesmyn Ward.

I like to give space to every essay or article in a anthology; to consider each one in it's own right and to take the time to check out a little more about each author. As I was reading these essays, though, it became apparent that there were quite a few US-specific cultural references and current affairs that I was not particularly familiar with. Therefore, my responses below, may include research I did to clarify what was happening or who was being referred to. 

Many of the essays also gave me pause to consider our own creation myths in Australia, and how the past is still being played out in our present day lives.

• The Fire This Times opens with a poem by Jericho Brown, The Tradition. 
• It's a sonnet that beautifully and brutally compares flowers, blooms and earth to black lives. In just 14 lines, he alludes to the tradition of slavery, the desire for belonging and the current loss of black lives. The poem finishes with three names - John Crawford. Eric Garner. Mike Brown.
• John Crawford III was a 22 yr old man, shot and killed in a Walmart in Beavercreek, Ohio, on the 5th August 2014. 
• Eric Garner was killed on the 17th July 2014 in Staten Island after being placed in a choke hold by police. 
• Mike Brown Jr was an 18 yr old young man shot by police on the 9th August 2014 in Ferguson, Missouri.
• Brown is the 2020 Pulitzer Prize winning poet and this poem can be found in his latest collection also called The Tradition.
• I was so impressed by this poem, I've ordered Brown's anthology in at work. 

• Introduction by Jesmyn Ward.
• Begins with the shooting death of 17 yr old Trayvon Martin on the 26th February 2012 in Sanford, Florida.
• Also Tamir Rice a 12 yr old boy shot & killed by police on the 22nd November 2014 in Cleveland, Ohio.
• Mike Brown (see above)
• Sandra Bland was found hanged on the 13th July, 2015, after 3 days in gaol for a traffic infringement in Waller County, Texas. Her death was declared a suicide. 
• Emmett Till was a 14 yr old boy lynched in Mississippi in 1955. His body was found floating in the Tallahatchie River three days after he went missing. According to wikipedia,

The brutality of his murder and the fact that his killers were acquitted drew attention to the long history of violent persecution of African Americans in the United States. Till posthumously became an icon of the civil rights movement.

• She turned to the writing of James Baldwin for 'kinship in this struggle'. 
• He told her that she was 'worthy of love...worth something in this world...[and]...a human being.'
• His book The Fire Next Time inspired the title of this book.
• Which led her to seek out other writers, thinkers, and voices from her generation. Only three of the submitted pieces referenced the future.
• 'It confirmed how inextricably interwoven the past is in the present, how heavily the past bears on the future.' 

• PART I - LEGACY 

• Homegoing, AD by Kima Jones

• A hybrid poem that begins with a prose section about a family funeral and ends with a free form verse about outrunning the 'gators. 
• Jones is the founder of the Jack Jones Literary Arts whose mission is to 'provide publicity services and support for writers who are unafraid. We work diligently to announce book projects to audiences who seek literary art that is unorthodox, underappreciated, and unparalleled.' 

• The Weight by Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah
• Ghansah won the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing.
• She is  know for her writing about James Baldwin and his historic home in the South of France, including this piece that discusses her first visit to his home.

'If I knew anything about being black in America it was that nothing was guaranteed, you couldn't count on a thing, and all that was certain for most of us was a black death....a black death was a slow death, the accumulation of insults, injuries, neglect, second-rate health care, high blood pressure and stress, no time for self-care, no time to sigh, and in the end, the inevitable, the erasing of memory.'

• Lonely in America by Wendy S. Walters
• 'I resist thinking about slavery because I want to avoid the overwhelming feeling that comes from trying to conceive of the terror, violence and indignity of it.' 
• New-to-me word - cathexis -  'the concentration of mental energy on one particular person, idea, or object (especially to an unhealthy degree).' 
• Discussion about slavery in the northern states, especially New Hampshire.
• Black Heritage Trail, Portsmouth.  

• Where Do We Go From Here? by Isabel Wilkerson 
• 'We seem to be in a continuing feedback loop of repeating a past that our country has yet to address.' 
• After the end of slavery, came the Reconstruction.
• Then the reversal of black advancement - the Nadir. I had heard of the Jim Crow laws but not the Nadir (1890 - 1940). 
• 'Six million African Americans fled that caste system, seeking asylum in the rest of the country during what would become the Great Migration. Denied the ballot, they voted with their bodies.'
• In the north they met with 'redlining, overpolicing, hyper-segregation, the seeds of the disparity we see today.'
• Wilkerson was the first African American woman to win a Pulitzer Prize in Journalism Feature Writing in 1994.

• The Dear Pledges of our Love: A Defense of Phillis Wheatley's Husband by Honoree Fanonne Jeffers
•  Phillis Wheatley - poet (1753-84)
• The Age of Phillis published March 2020 by Wesleyan University Press - 'imagines the life and times of Wheatley: her childhood in the Gambia, West Africa, her life with her white American owners, her friendship with Obour Tanner, and her marriage to the enigmatic John Peters.'

• White Rage by Carol Anderson
• 'white rage carries an aura of respectability and has access to the courts, police, legislatures, and governors.'  
• for every 'African American advancement, there's a reaction, a backlash.' 
• As an outsider, I'm astounded every time I read how easy it is to manipulate the US electoral system - against African Americans, against women, against the poor and disenfranchised. Our system is not perfect, but we make it easy for everyone to vote. Whether you choose to use that right is up to you. It's a right and a responsibility.   

•   Cracking the Code by Jesmyn Ward
• on the difficulty faced by most African Americans when creating their family tree. 
• and on the unsettling & discomforting information that genetic DNA testing can provide.
• is identity genetics, heritage, personal history, or how others perceive you?

• PART II - RECKONING 

• Queries of Unrest by Clint Smith (poem) 
• modelled after the work of poet Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib
• Maybe, maybe, maybe...
• Maybe I'm scared of writing another poem/that makes people roll their eyes/and say, "another black poem." 

• Blacker Than Thou by Kevin Young
• the issue of blackface, 'passing' and reverse-passing.
• I did not know that Thomas Jefferson had a black mistress, Sally Hemings, who gave him six children.
• Young is the poetry editor for the New Yorker. 

• Da Art of Storytellin' (A Prequel) by Kiese Laymon
• 'voices aren't discovered fully formed, they are built and shaped.' 
• storytelling via hip hop and rap.
• Read - Octavia Butler | Kindred

•  Black and Blue by Garnette Cadogan
•  the art of walking and the difference between walking the streets of Kingston, Jamaica, New Orleans and NYC.
• 'I could be invisible in Jamaica in a way I can't be invisible in the United States.' 
• 'walking is an act of faith...we see, we listen, we speak, and we trust...I strolled into my better self...' 
• 'walking while black restricts the experience of walking...it forces me to be in a constant relationship with others...' Understood. It's the same for most women when walking alone.

• The Condition of Black Life is One of Mourning by Claudia Rankine 
• the beginning of the Black Lives Matter movement - 'an attempt to keep mourning an open dynamic in our culture because black lives exist in a state of precariousness.'
• Just Us: An American Conversation published September 2020 by Graywolf Press.

• Know Your Rights! by Emily Raboteau 
• how to talk to your children about protecting themselves from the police.
• 'this mural struck me as an act of love for the people who would pass it by.'
• Raboteau spotted her first social justice mural and went searching for the others (below).

    

•  Composite Pops by Mitchell S. Jackson
• the importance of father figures to kids, especially boys.
• a lovely homage to the men who mentored him throughout his life. 

 PART III - JUBILEE 

Theories of Time and Space by Natasha Trethewey 

• US Poet Laureate 2012 & 2013 .

• Pulitzer Prize winner for poetry 2007.

This Far: Notes on Love and Revolution by Daniel Jose Older     

• 'unraveling all the creation myths this country has always held most sacred.'

Message to my Daughters by Edwidge Danticat

•  African Americans as internal and external refugees

• 'You think that your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.' James Baldwin

This was an eye-opening read. 

Many of the writers, though, assumed knowledge than many non-US readers may not actually have. I learnt a lot more about African American history thanks to the googling I had to do to find out the who, what, why, where and when discussed in many of the essays. 

Australian history had a brief but equally unedifying experience with slave labour from the nearby South Sea Islands. Given that many Australians are, to this day, completely unaware of this practice, we can claim no moral high ground with regard to race relations or facing the truth about our own history. 

An historical record that only takes note of one side or one version will always be divisive. Books like this, that open all our eyes to another history, another side, another version are important steps towards understanding and acceptance, and hopefully, one day, justice and equality for all.

Highly recommended, but take you time.

Update: 

• Tragically, Jesmyn Ward's 33 yr old husband died in January this year after they all contracted what they thought was the flu. She writes about her grief in a recent Vanity Fair article, On Witness and Respair.
• Respair - OED: noun and verb, meaning the return of hope after a period of despair—only citation for this dates back to 1425. Sadly, it has now fallen out of use. 

A Month in Siena | Hisham Matar #NonFiction

Sometimes you read a book, or discover an author, that opens up a new world to you. Or a world that you knew existed, but one that doesn't really intersect very often with your own every day, ordinary life.

A Month in Siena by Hisham Matar was one such book and one such author.

It's hard not to feel a little envious of someone who has allocated and prioritised their time for thinking, wondering and pondering. Someone who has made their life around really understanding art, history and sociology. I wonder what it would take to live that kind of life. What are the sacrifices? How do you earn a living? Raise a family?

The joys, to me, are obvious.
Spending hours in front of your favourite art work to really see everything there is to see. Spending a month, on your own, in Siena to facilitate your obsession with this period of art history. Then writing a book about what you've learnt.

A picture changes as you look at it and changes in ways that are unexpected. I have discovered that a painting requires time. Now it takes me several months and more often than not a year before I can move on. During that period the picture becomes a mental as well as a physical location in my life.

At a micro level I can also obsess, research and blog about certain topics (most recently Moby-Dick and Herman Melville) and over the years I have become addicted to the peace and calm that radiates out of The Sea Hath its Pearls | 1897 | William Henry Margetson on regular view at the Art Gallery of NSW. Maybe it's simply that Matar has found a way to turn this into a career, whereas for me it's something I fit in around my working life. One of the things I have taken from this book, is to make this habit of observation a more conscious act and I no longer think I'm weird for returning to the same painting every time I visit the Art Gallery.

I thoroughly enjoyed Matar's detailed, intimate descriptions of his favourite Sienese paintings. I especially loved the colour plates that were included in my hardback edition of the book, so that I, too, could spend time pouring over every detail in the painting, marvelling at Matar's observational skills and interpretative ability.

Only love and art can do this: only inside a book or in front of a painting can one truly let into another's perspective. It has always struck me as a paradox how in the solitary arts there is something intimately communal.

The Effects of Good Government in the City | Ambrogio Lorenzetti

Matar also gives us a potted history of Siena and walks around a number of the main areas, describing what he sees, including the local cemetery.

It is one thing to consider the particular intimacy of a single grave, another to glimpse death's endless appetite....how brave and heroic we are in the face of undeniable evidence that life cannot be maintained, that regardless of what armour we choose, all things must pass.

Given the Covid-19 news at the moment, his reflections on the Black Death that decimated the world in the 14th century felt very relevant. The decline of civilisation as more and more people died, the growth of fear and fanaticism in the face of such chaos and the need for scapegoats to shoulder the blame that 'provoked violent sectarianism and social division.' Criminal groups and rebellions increased. Christianity viewed the plague as a form of guilt (we did something wrong and are being punished approach). Muslims saw it as something else to be endured or resisted, in a long line of God decreed acts to be endured or resisted. But out of this devastating event, came the Renaissance and the Baroque periods.

I have yet to read The Return by Hisham Matar, but I understand that A Month in Siena grew out of the time he needed after writing The Return to come to terms with not being able to find out anything about what happened to his father. Such a profound loss needs a special solace.

A Month in Siena is part of that process for Matar. It's about art and history and philosophy and sociology, but underlying every chapter, every idea, is the loss and grief for his fatherless state.

Caring For Country by Billy Griffiths

Recently I read something or saw something about the Ranger program in the Northern Territory, which led me to Billy Griffiths report in the Griffith Review Edition 56 | Millennials Strike Back | April 2017, Caring for country: The place where the Dreaming changed shape.

It's fascinating and encouraging to see the various ways that Indigenous peoples around the world are maintaining faith with their old ways as they incorporate the parts of modern life that suit them as well. The Ranger programs running in the NT are all about teaching the young how to care for country and get in touch with their culture. To make their work easier, they now use GPS, satellite imagery, aerial photography and other modern technologies. They also learn how to create new stories, art, dance and songlines that reflect their modern lives.

The other emerging story, gaining traction in the articles I'm reading, is the capacity of the Aborigines of Australia to evolve and adapt to seismic change over the 65 000 years they have lived on this continent. From the extinction of the megafauna to surviving the last ice age. White settlement is just one more thing to survive, adapt to and incorporate. The (white) story is also slowly evolving - from seeing the Aborigines as a culture doomed to die out in the face of a (superior) larger civilisation - to celebrating the longest living culture in the world surviving against all odds. Two hundred years in the context of 65 000 may seem like a mere blimp in time, but the consequences of our 200 years together impact all our daily interactions and understandings. We can marvel at the 65 000 years but it is today that we have to live in.

How does the NT ranger program figure in all of this?

Billy Griffiths takes us to Djinkarr, a small outstation in western Arnhem Land. He claims that these small, remote, poorly connected settlements are a good thing, (which flies in the face of the usual white conviction). He says there are 'overwhelming benefits to having people living on country. People sustain country, and country in turn sustains people.'

The country also gets a lot of love from Griffiths:

Small fires streak the savanna beneath me, as the land is worked and cleaned. The gentle smoke on the horizon is sign of a healthy country. In the distance, disappearing into a soft haze, lies the rugged stone country of the Arnhem Land Plateau. The plane wobbles over the mouth of the Liverpool River, where saltwater meets fresh, and descends towards a thin ribbon of grey on a cleared patch of thick, earthy red: the international airport. On one side of the airstrip, a few dozen houses cluster around a football oval; on the other, a neat grid delineates the newest suburb, called simply ‘New Sub’. Maningrida, as our destination is known, takes its name from the Kunibídji phrase Mane djang karirra: ‘the place where the Dreaming changed shape’.

This particular essay came about thanks to Griffiths involvement in a short-term, independent art and environment initiative known as The Arnhembrand Project. The aim was to tell 'healthy country' stories through paint and performance, science and oral history. The rangers play an important role in creating new stories about what is happening to their country.

The Djelk IPA is a vast estate, extending across monsoon rainforests, tropical savannas, grasslands, wetlands, sea country and stone country – ....Buffaloes, pigs, feral cats and cane toads have trampled, chewed, rubbed and wallowed their way across a delicate ecosystem, destroying habitats, spreading weeds, muddying springs, transforming the vegetation and exacerbating the eroding impact of wildfire. The effect on native species has been devastating. Their decline and extinction have deprived the Bininj of bush tucker as well as delivering a more existential loss: the displacement of totemic beings from their ancestral homes.

The rangers are using cool fires to manage the land, they are systemically clearing the land of weeds such as mimosa and they are culling the buffalo herds that are devastating the land and the local fauna.

The outstation movement and ranger programs have been evolving since the 1970's as small groups left the townships, failing due to illness and alcoholism and lack of purpose. They felt 'driven by a responsibility to return to country, to tend to sacred sites and to work the land through fire, ceremony, hunting and gathering.'

Betty Meehan, anthropologist, has spent her career working with various Aboriginal groups around Australia. In the 70's she was in the NT with the Blyth River people, where she claimed that this was not 'the end of the Dreaming', instead this was the place where the Dreaming was changing shape.

The late Lofty Bardayal Nadjamerrek (Wamud Namok), an Aboriginal elder from Manangrida said that the biggest threat to the environment is ‘empty country’: ‘not having people on country to look after it’.

The outstations, combined with the ranger services, are the key to avoiding the neglect that comes from empty country. ‘Outstations are not about the old ways, they are the birthplace of the new ways for us.’

The ranger program has not only benefited the local environment, it has also reintroduced pride and purpose into the community with kids staying at school longer to qualify for the internships. The flow on effects for health, mental health and the local economy seem self-evident.

There have been numerous articles and programs highlighting the ranger programs in the NT, Queensland and WA and even more websites devoted to sharing the news about local programs. A few are listed below.

ABC News | 25 Nov 2018 | Indigenous rangers in training.
The Conversation | 15 Jan 2018 | Indigenous ranger programs are working in Queensland.
SBS News | 14 Feb 2018 | WA gets all female Indigenous ranger teams.
Njanjma Aboriginal Corporation
Warddeken Land Management
APN Cape York
Pulu Indigenous Protected Area
Western Mulga

I'm glad I could end #AusReadingMonth with a good news story.

Image source

Facts:

• Billy Griffiths is an historian and lecturer in Cultural Heritage and Museum Studies. 
• Deep Time Dreaming: Uncovering Ancient Australia (Black Inc., 2018)
• Winner of the Ernest Scott Prize 
• The John Mulvaney Book Award
• The Douglas Stewart Prize for Non-Fiction
• 2019 Book of the Year at the NSW Premier’s History Awards.

Griffith Review 63: Writing the Country edited by Julianne Schultz & Ashley Hay

Image: James Tylor, Turralyendi Yerta (Womma) 2017 Photograph with ochre & charcoal.

Place. Land. Country. Home. These words frame the settings of our stories. Griffith Review 63: Writing the Country focuses on Australia’s vast raft of environments to investigate how these places are changing and what they might become; what is flourishing and what is at risk. 

How we speak of and to the world we live in requires us to make sense of where we are and where we’re going; it requires us to describe, interrogate and analyse our places from the smallest to the grandest of scales. In the second issue of Griffith Review, published fifteen years ago, Melissa Lucashenko wrote of ‘earthspeaking, talking about this place, my home’. All these years later, the need to hear all sorts of earthspeak has perhaps never been more urgent.

In the past, I would have gobbled up the stories, essays, poems and articles in a Griffith Review edition in one fell swoop. Leaving me with a general impression of the theme of the edition and a vague memory of some of the pieces. But this time, I decided to go slow.

Slow Reading is my new mantra. I want to read as thoughtfully, consciously and carefully as I can as often as I can. Obviously, not all books lend themselves to this approach. Some stories are lightly told, some favourite series are formulaic although lovable and comforting and some books are nothing more than a quick, easy holiday read. They all have their purpose, time and place.

But some books deserve more. And sometimes I deserve more!
Sometimes I want to devote more time to one book so that I can savour each moment, delve deeply and create a rich reading memory of my time with the book.

In recent times. Les Miserables was one such book, and I'm currently reading Moby-Dick with this slow reading approach. Back in February, when I acquired my copy of the Griffith Review 63, I decided to do the same. To slow read each essay and story. To let each one stand alone in my memory.

I confess, I didn't think I would still be reading it in November!

It also left me in a quandary about how best to record my slow reading experience. Giving each piece it's own post would be too laborious for me and rather dull for you, oh brave internet wanderer who landed on my page!

The passing of time has allowed the answer to present itself to me. Just like my Moby-Dick chapter posts, I will present each essay with a brief snapshot of the things that caught my eye or captured my imagination. Poems and stories I will leave for another time.

Introduction: On Suicide on Watch? The Enduring Power of Nature | Julianne Schultz (26th Nov 2018).

• societies and cultures evolve in response to the environment in which people find themselves.
• unforeseeable natural events have destroyed some civilisations...but others have been undone by over-exploitation. 
• Arnold J Toynbee quip - more civilisations die from suicide than murder.
• A classical historian and writer of comparative history.
• Hugely popular and influential in the 1940's and 50's.
• Now criticised for being more of a Christian moralist than an historian - ouch! (Encyclopedia Britannica).
• Schultz believes that we may be on 'suicide watch' but we can still feel optimistic with a 'sense of agency'.
• McLean Foundation and The Nature Conservancy commissioned writers for this edition.
• The McLean Foundation is a family foundation that has four areas of interest: protecting Australia’s biodiversity; supporting inter-city, rural and remote literacy programs for disadvantaged Australian children; rural tertiary education scholarships; and community development programs. 
• Their environmental funding to date has included establishing and supporting The Nature Conservancy Australia and their Nature Writing Prize. Robert McLean is the Chair of The Nature Conservancy Australia, a Senior Advisor to McKinsey & Co, and a Board Member of Philanthropy Australia.
• I love that people like Robert McLean exist. Read his 2011 bio in the SMH here.

Essay: Crossing the Line | Ashley Hay

• or the destruction of the Great Barrier Reef.
• There are mechanisms and consequences we can already see and understand (the known knowns).
• There are effects and impacts we can see happening without yet understanding why, or how they might impact each other (the known unknowns).
• And then there are the 'unknown unknowns', the layers of knowledge about our planet's natural systems, their requirements, their reactions and interactions that we don't know about yet. The Things that we cannot see coming.
• 30 yrs ago the CSIRO investigated what would happen if we doubled the concentration of carbon dioxide in the earth's atmosphere. 
• 'Most of the consequences that science then predicted would occur by 2030 we've already seen.' Griffith University's Emeritus Professor Ian Lowe.
• Including Perth's rainfall declining by about a quarter in 30 years. But what wasn't predicted was the decline by two-thirds of the run-off rate. 
• 'it's hotter and drier when it rains, which means there's a more dramatic reduction in run-off' - which means there is less water available to be collected when it does rain.
• A road trip is a kind of mediation. Time and space stretch a little and you pay different attention to the landscapes you move through.
• biophilia - love of nature
• The Permian-Triassic extinction, 252 million years ago, wiped out more than nine-tenths of all species. It took the ecosystems effected about 5-8 million years to recover.
• The unknown unknowns in all of this are each and every one of us: what we purchase, what we vote for and what we insist on, as much as how we live.
• Hay's solution - pay attention, witness this moment, imagine the unknowns, imagine what's coming next.

Essay: Lost and Found in Translation | Kim Mahood

• Books in books - Kangaroo (D H Lawrence), Voss (Patrick White), To the Islands, Tourmaline, Midnite, Visitants and The Merry-go-round in the Sea (Randolph Stow), Animal Farm (George Orwell), Tracks (Robyn Davidson), The Songlines (Bruce Chatwin), Belomor (Nicholas Rothwell)
• what is consistent in all these books is the presence of Aboriginal people in various configurations.
• Ochre and Rust (Philip Jones) songlines are a 'kind of scripture, a framework for relating people to land, and to show that their relationship is inalienable.'
• The major songlines, such as the Seven Sisters, are like arteries that carry the life force of the culture through the body of the country.
• songlines are fixed in the landscape
• but they can be performed anywhere, with permission.
• the land is as conscious as the people who live in it.

Essay: Boodjar ngan djoorla: Country, my bones | Claire G Coleman

• My bones are in the soul of Country, and Country is in my bones.
• No matter where we go Country calls out to us.
• I wept when I realised Country had not forgotten me even when I did not know Country. My old-people, my ancestors, would care for me.
• Truth escapes in the end, lies cannot live forever.

Essay: A Fragile Civilisation: Collective living on Australian soil | Stephen Muecke

• Ancient Indigenous civilisations and/or modern Western civilisations.
• I would like to define civilisation as planned, sustainable collective living.
• Yolngu as Indigenous example.
• If the Yolgnu have flourished for up to 50 000 years, while the kind of civilisation based on large cities could self-destruct after only a few hundred, perhaps it is time to recalibrate what we mean by civilisations.

Essay: The Planet is Alive: Radical histories for uncanny times | Tom Griffiths

• Amitav Ghosh - The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (2016)
• we are knowingly killing the planetary systems that support survival of our species.
• we half aware of this predicament yet also paralysed by it, caught between horror and hubris.
• Anthropocene - a new geological epoch that recognises the power of humans in changing the nature of the planet, its atmosphere, oceans, climate, biodiversity, even its rocks and stratigraphy.
• The Great Acceleration - from the 1950's when the human enterprise suddenly exploded in population and energy use.
• Or the Sixth Extinction - humans have wiped out about two-thirds of the world's wildlife in just the last half century.
• Big History - David Christian - history of the universe - global storytellers.

Reportage: A Change in the Political Weather? Forecasting the future of climate policy | Paul Daley

• Carl Feilberg - late 1800's Queensland - human rights activist & environmentalist.
• Bio coming soon by Robert Ørsted-Jensen.
• Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)
• Daley wrote this piece Nov 2018 and talked about politicians being out of step with public opinion about climate change and that this would be evident in the federal election in 2019. Instead it showed that journalists were out of step with the broader public opinion about climate change. They were (I am) living in an inner city bubble and we all made the mistake in thinking that the rest of Australia (rural, suburban and city fringes) felt the same as us or had the same priorities and concerns.

Essay: We All Took a Stand: Margaret River versus the coal industry | David Ritter

• Loved this piece.
• I had no idea that this even happened - there is power in our stories if we choose to tell them.
• The community of the Margaret River took on the coal industry and won.
• Australia's approval systems for fossil fuel mining are antiquated and loaded towards the interests of developers.
•  In this case, the political and business elite decided, emphatically, that some things are more important than the extraction of fossil fuels.

Essay: Life and Death on Dyarubbin: Reports from the Hawkesbury River | Grace Karskens

• The Real Secret River: Dyarubbin | 2017

Essay: Rebuilding Reefs, Restoring Memory: At work in the waters of history | Anna Clark

• Clifton Springs shellfish reef restoration project, near Geelong.
• R H Tawney - doing history well meant contemplating the processes of how (and where) the past relates to people in the present.
• over 95% of native flat oyster & blue mussel reefs have disappeared across southern Australia.
• each generation remembers what fisheries were like at the beginning of their own lifetimes, so that the baseline of that ecosystem subtly changes over time...an ever-lower bar is set as the 'new normal'.

Reportage: The Butterfly Effect: Stalking a giant in PNG | Jo Chandler

• 1906 | Albert Stewart Meek
• Ornithoptera alexandrae | Queen Alexandra's birdwing - largest butterfly in the world.
• rural people do not always understand the outsider notion of 'conservation', and outsiders do not always understand what villagers think of when they imagine 'development'.

Memoir: The Suburbsm the 60's: What use a scrap of bush? | Kate Veitch

• Growing up in Vermont and Nunawading.
• An outdoor life, playing in the nearby bush.
• Naturally, we never talked about our adventures to our parents. Nor did they ask. This was an era when parents had better things to do than hover over their children, monitoring their every move.
• Healesville Freeway Reserve | 2012
• The importance of place & childhood spaces.

Reportage: Eating Turtle: Changing narratives of the normal | Suzy Freeman-Greene

• Heron Island
• the heroes of the story are scientists.

Memoir: It's Scary but Nobody Cares: Challenging Australia's reputation for deadliness | Ashley Kalagian Blunt

• A Canadian view of Australia, drop bears and other deadly creatures.

Essay: Valuing Country: Let me count three ways | Jane Gleeson-White

• In 2008, Ecuador became the first country to recognise the rights of nature.
• Rights-of-nature laws also now in Bolivia, New Zealand, India and Colombia.
• three ways of thinking about the natural world - country, natural capital, rights of nature.
• 2016 Fitzroy River Declaration recognises the river as a living ancestral being with its own life force.
• 2017 Yarra River Protection (Wilip-gin Birrarung murron).
• 2018 petition to protect the legal rights of the Great Barrier Reef.
• Capitalism is fundamentally opposed to preserving nature.
• ecological economics.
• protecting the environment is a good thing for humanity | Carl Obst

Reportage: Ghost Species and Shadow Places: Seabirds and plastic pollution on Lord Howe Island | Cameron Muir

• Runner-Up Bragg UNSW Press Prize for Science Writing 2019
• Shortlisted for the Eureka Prize for Science Communication
• flesh-footed shearwaters | mutton birds
• they vomit plastic. The parent shearwaters here are slowly feeding their chicks to death with plastic.
• the plastic blocks their digestive tracts and can pierce internal organs.
• A torrent of plastic is coming. More plastic was produced in the last fifteen years than in the previous fifty. 

Essay: The Cost of Consumption: Dispatches from a planet in decline | James Bradley

•  2018 Living Planet Report
• The sheer scale of the problem makes it difficult to think about.
• As creatures disappear, we forget them, as baselines shift we adjust, and the world as it was is lost.
• The Great Acceleration
• For while population growth has played a part, the rise in GDP and energy far outstrips the rise in population. In fact it is humanity's booming middle classes...who are the problem. The ecological footprint of an average Australian or American is three times that of a Costa Rican, and almost eight or nine times that of the average Indian or African. It is also, significantly, double that of many Europeans.
• The real problem is the insatiable consumption of the world's wealthy.
• We already possess the technologies to deal with the problem - renewable energy, sustainable farming practices...better education and literacy, especially for women...basic income...progressive taxation and economic reform...better governance....
• Environmental justice is also social justice and intergenerational justice. But it is also interspecies justice.

Essay: Climate Change, Science and Country: A never-ending story | Brendan Mackey

• the climate norm will be there is no norm.
• scientists are not catastrophists - they project rather than predict.
• Climate change may be a scientific discovery, but it is the humanities and creative arts that speak to what this means.

Reportage: Remaking Nature: Novel strategies in modified landscapes | Andrew Stafford

• Bitterns in Rice project
• Yandina Creek Wetlands

Image Source

Essay: Transforming Landscapes: Regenerating country in the Anthropocene | Charles Massey

• regenerative farming
• Many of the world's desertifying environments are the result of human activity. In Australia - as in the Middle East...
• in mismanaged landscapes the small water cycles are destroyed.
• capitalist market economy believes in continual growth. Nature is viewed as a raw material for wealth and property creation.
• to become landscape literate.
• Paul Hawken | human brain is not wired to deal with future existential threats.
• Project Drawdown
• This is not a liberal agenda, nor is it a conservative agenda...this is a human agenda.

Essay: Encounters with Amnesia: Confronting the ghosts of Australian landscape | Inga Simpson

• Judith Wright | The love of the land we have invaded, and the guilt of invasion - have become a part of me. It is a haunted country.
• Louisa Atkinson | 1853 | The Illustrated Sydney News | Nature Notes

• Eric Rolls | A Million Wild Acres | 1981
• Mark Tredinnick | The Blue Plateau | 2009
• One of the most obvious characteristics of Australian nature writingnis the tension, for non-Indigenous Australians, around how to write about our connection to the places we love, knowing that those places were stolen from others, and possibly sites of violence.
• Although thinking of ourselves as a bush nation, we are, in fact, urban and suburban - and increasingly illiterate in nature.
• Nature writing...is...about wanting to belong, a yearning for connection with the natural world and the places in which we live. To be at home....Instead of trying to write ourselves all over the landscape, it is time to hear what it is saying and write it deeper into our selves.

This is the very first Griffith Review I have read from cover to cover. 

Previously I have enjoyed the occasional essay or story when an online prompt led me to the one free monthly read I am allowed as a non-subscriber. I was, however, particularly drawn to the topic of this edition. I figured it would have lots to say about the environment, climate change, Indigenous perspectives and landscape. It did. 

My Goodreads wishlist has exploded as I pour over the individual the bibliographies and I have found new authors to explore. I have discovered new-to-me websites and environmental projects that not only provide the scientific facts about climate but also give us all hope that we can really look after this planet we live on, if we really want to.

I won't be able to devote as much time as I have for this edition to all future editions, or even to catching up on the back list editions. It will be a case of cherry-picking the topics and authors that interest me or challenge me the most.

The various essays, stories and poems in this edition, helped me to complete several squares on my AusReadingMonth Bingo card - NSW, VIC, QLD, TAS and WA. As a bonus, I also ticked off a few nearby islands - Heron Island, Lord Howe Island and PNG.

#AusReadingMonth
#NonFictionNovember

Trace Fossils by Alice Gorman

I plan to read Alice Gorman's Dr Space Junk vs the Universe (2019) in the very near future. Knowing I wouldn't have time to feature it during this year's #AusReadingMonth, I decided to search for any other examples of her essay writing instead, to give us all a taste of what's to come.

Trace Fossils: The Silence of Ediacara, the shadow of uranium popped in the Griffith Review 55: State of Hope | Jan 2017 - an edition dedicated entirely to South Australia. It also appeared on The Conversation: Friday essay | 3 Feb 2017.

I'm rather fascinated by the whole idea of space archaeology (the archaeology of orbital debris, terrestrial launch sites, and satellite tracking stations), which is the field that Gorman lectures in at Flinders University. However, she began her career working on Indigenous stone tool analysis and the Aboriginal use of bottle glass after European settlement, which is where this essay is coming from.

My first question was what are trace fossils? Gorman describes them as - the preserved impressions left by the passage of a living body through sediment.

Wikipedia expanded this by saying that they are impressions or other preserved signs of activity left by animals, plants, protists, and bacteria. These can be tubes, lines, scratches, or other features, like dinosaur footprints or shrimp burrows. They are created in soft sediments and have been found in rocks as far back as the Late Precambrian (2 billion to half a billion years ago).

Apparently South Australia, around the remote areas of Woomera and the Nullarbor Plain, have plenty of trace fossils on offer. This area was once covered by glaciers during various ice ages followed by seas as the glaciers retreated and the earth warmed up. Storm surges caused an influx of sediment that embedded fern fronds and other sea creatures. Segmented worms were squashed, curled up on the bottom of the sea bed.

As Gondwanaland was created these old sea beds were pushed up into mountain ranges.

Which brings us to the Ediacaran Period, a geological period I had never heard of before. It began 635 million years ago and ended 542 million years ago with the Cambrian explosion of animal life. It's a relatively 'new' period, only receiving official status in 2004. Ediacaran fossils were first discovered by Reg Sprigg in 1946 in the Ediacaran Hills, Flinders Ranges. They indicate the earliest forms of complex life on earth.

Now you know!

Gorman provides a very readable, easy to follow potted history of the area to current times. From giant megafauna and Aboriginal life, the arrival of colonists and cattle, the hunt for uranium, a rocket testing range to nuclear bomb testing.

Aboriginal people became a trace fossil in the land deemed empty – hidden in plain sight. Kokatha, Pitjantjatjara, Adnyamathanha and Barngarla people lived on missions around the state, and gathered in coastal towns that offered them the employment that the rocket range had promised but didn’t deliver. 

At this time, white Australians thought Aboriginal occupation had been a few thousand years at most, and many believed Aboriginal people were dying out – the inevitable result of the “stone age” being superseded by the “space age”.

Visiting these areas devastated by livestock and human intervention is a sobering experience, yet Gorman is constantly fascinated by the small details, the junk, if you like, that is left behind. Whether it's a crushed fern fossil from a billion years ago, a twisted coke can in the sand or twisty ties left tied to a fence around a nuclear test site. They all tell a story.

Modern uses for this remote area of SA now include detention centres, farms for giant wind turbines and tourism.

the same apparent “emptiness” that brought rockets, nuclear tests and detention centres now attracts commercial interest in storing nuclear waste from other nations. It’s the end of a cycle that starts with the mining and export of Australian uranium. The redistribution of uranium is a very Anthropocene process, part of the dismantling and reassembling of the planet.

As a long-time fanatic of geology, archaeology, anthropology and evolutionary studies, this tantalising but brief glimpse into the life and times of the desert of South Australia has stirred some dormant microbes of excitement and intellectual stimulation within me.

It's funny (peculiar) how only last week I was considering my collection of fossil books as a possibility for the Non-fiction November | Be the Expert week. Ever since, I've had these vague stirrings of longing to reread the Leakey family bio and the various books on Pompeii, Troy, Charles Darwin, fossils and evolution that I have tucked away somewhere.

Curiously my current fiction read, The Garden of Fugitives by Ceridwen Dovey also has a Pompeian archaeology story strand. Finding Gorman's Trace Fossil essay was obviously meant to be.

If you can recommend any other books about archaeological digs, fossils or evolution, I would love to hear about them in the comments below.

Image source

Favourite Quote: deep time is always waiting to burst through the crusts of the surface.

Facts:

• To find out how Gorman became a space archaeologist, you can read about it on her Dr Space Junk blog.
• Trace Fossils was the winner of the the Bragg UNSW Press Prize for Science Writing 2017

AusReadingMonth Bingo

It's that time of year again.
Time to start thinking about how many Australian books we can read before the end of November.

Given how many of my favourite reading events now seem to be congregating around this time of year, I will make joining in AusReadingMonth as easy as possible.

So let's pack our bags and travel this big, beautiful land by book.

Fiction, non-fiction, poetry, plays, travel guides, short stories, audio and children's book can transport us to every state, city and major town in Australia.

Our AusReadingMonth BINGO card will help us plan our journey around Australia. You can use the card throughout November or apply it retrospectively to your reading year. Whatever works best for you.

Flyby Night

If time is of the essence, one book from the BINGO card may be the prefect option for you.

A quick getaway is better than none!

Backpacker

With their compact swags, backpackers need to travel light.

If this is you, simply select one line (horizontal, vertical of even diagonal) on the BINGO card and read three books about our country.

Grey Nomad

If you have more time up your sleeve join the grey nomads in their self-contained campervans as you travel around this big, brown land of ours. 

With every crossroad on the map, there's a choice to be made; you cannot do it all, so select two lines on the BINGO card to be eligible for Grey Nomad status.

The Whole Hog

If you're feeling a little touched by the sun, then the Whole Hog may be for you.

Read NINE books this November from all of the 8 states and territories plus one freebie.

The FREEBIE can be any book by an Australian author or a book written by an overseas author but set entirely in Australia.

Uluru, Nov 2010

Time is of the essence for most of us, yet how many times do we find ourselves combining multiple reading events! If this is you, perhaps the following AusReadingMonth reading suggestions will help.

Many of the books below are essay collections or memoirs, perfect for your Non-Fiction November or Novellas in November lists.

Short Story Collections 

• Ellen Van Neerven (Heat and Light) Indigenous author
• Robert Dessaix (Twilight of Love, (and so forth), As I Was Saying) has some fabulous short stories collections featuring fiction, essays and articles. He has also studied and taught Russian Studies throughout his career. Some of his work could help you complete AusReadingMonth, Non Fiction November and Russian Lit Month.
• Helen Garner (Stories: The Collected Short Fiction, Everywhere I Look, True Stories: The Collected Short Non-Fiction)
• Robert Drewe (The Bodysurfers, The Bay of Contented Men, The Rip, The True Colour of the Sea)
• Cate Kennedy (Like A House on Fire)
• Tim Winton (Island Home, The Boy Behind the Curtain)
• Henry Lawson
• Lily Brett
• David Malouf
• Tara June Winch (After the Carnage)
• Bruce Pascoe (Salt: Selected Stories and Essays)
• The Best Australian Science Writing 2019
• Quarterly Essay
• Griffith Review
• Meanjin
• Overland
• The Monthly

Poetry

• Omar Sakr
• Alison Whitaker
• Les Murray
• Judith Wright
• John Kinsella
• Dorothy Porter
• David Malouf
• Oodgeroo Noonuccal (aka as Kath Walker)
• Clive James
• Kate Lilley
• Omar Musa
• Australian Poetry Since 1788 edited by Geoffrey Lehmann & Robert Gray
• Australian Poetry Review
• Australian Poetry Journal

There are OODLES more to chose from, but I've focused on the authors and/or journals I've read, for now. For my fellow Aussie bloggers - can you recommend any other collections of essays, short stories or poets for our overseas friends?

What will you be reading during this year's AusReading Month?

City of Trees by Sophie Cunningham

City of Trees: Essays on Life, Death and the Need for a Forest by Sophie Cunningham was one of the books I took on holidays a couple of months ago (along with Richard Powers, The Overstory) to Far North Queensland on the edge of the Daintree Rainforest. Both books seemed very appropriate for the occasion. And except for the last two chapters, I had all but finished City of Trees whilst surrounded by all those beautiful tall stands of trees.

I finished those last two chapters during the week.

The two books complemented each other perfectly. As I finished each of the nine origin stories in The Overstory, I needed a break to absorb their content. It was constantly amazed how often the next chapter or two of City of Trees reflected or enhanced the individual experiences that I had just read about in the novel. It came as no surprise to me that Cunningham had read (and loved) The Overstory as well and referenced it in some of her essays.

Cunningham has included line drawings of trees and some of their inhabitants throughout the chapters. Each essay is also littered with family stories and personal memories. Her reflections on grief and loss were particularly moving. However, it's her love of trees and the knowledge she has gained about them over the years that is the centre piece of this work.

As you would expect, the environmental messages in this book are active and strong. They colour Cunningham's view of the world. Since I share similar sensibilities with her, I found her essays to be beautiful, heartfelt and undeniable.

And endlessly quotable:

• A tree is never just a tree. It speaks of the history of the place where it has grown or been planted.

• There are individual giant sequoia (Sequoiadendron giganteum) still living that are older than Buddhism, Islam, Christianity, Judaism.  

• Walking provides an excellent opportunity to argue with people in your head.

• For reasons that include increases in both temperatures and fuel loads, fires are burning hotter and becoming more dangerous....When forests do burn, old-growth forests don;t do so as intensely as younger forests.

•  James Bradley - Grief teaches us that time is plastic. A lifetime is an ocean and an instant. It does not matter whether something happened a week ago, a year ago, a decade ago: all loss is now. Grief does not stop, or disappear. It suffuses, inhabits us. The dead are both gone and never gone, living absences we bear with us.  

• Logging advocates exaggerate both the market for old-growth timber and the quality of the timber....In what universe would a reasonable person think it is okay to cut down an 800-year-old tree and reduce it a few hundred dollars' worth of woodchips? 

You can follow Sophie on Instagram with her #treeoftheday hashtag.

Book 18 of 20 Books of Summer Winter

Sydney 15℃

Dublin 20℃

The World Was Whole by Fiona Wright

The World Was Whole by Fiona Wright is a difficult book to review. It's a personal collection of Wright's essays, anecdotes and snippets. They are revealing and specific, almost like reading someone's private journal. Yet, all these sketches are written with such emotional intelligence and compassion that they become universal, finding their own connection with each reader.

I underlined so many sections and googled so many poems so that I could read the whole after being tempted by the snippet (one example being Aubade by Louise Gluck) which is always a sign that a book has affected me or moved me deeply. Wright has a lot to say, from her perspective as someone who has anorexia nervosa, about our bodies, how we perceive ourselves, space, environments, nature, food, habits and rituals.

We only half notice the truly extraordinary landscapes, places and situations that we move through. 

I learnt a lot about the complex nature of anorexia. As someone who derives as much pleasure from food and eating out as I do, it was challenging to hear of how complicated all this gets when you have an eating disorder.

Our days are consumed by making choices about food, by worrying over the things that we might eat or have just eaten.

Yet, most of the women I know have had body issues at varying points in their life. It is hard to escape societal expectation, (false) media images that become the norm and all the conflicting guidelines about how much, how little, what, when and where.

Behaviour, despite what fiction would have us believe, cannot tell us everything, or even very much, about a person.

I enjoyed her observations about the changing face of Sydney suburbs and found a lot to compare about her time in China, where it's 'hard to feel significant' amongst the overwhelming crowds, with my own time there 20 years ago.

But there were also times when I felt incredibly old and maternal towards Wright. I wanted to bundle her into my now, much older arms, (along with my younger self), and plead with them not to be so hard on themselves, to let go the angst and conflict and insecurities that absorb(ed) their days. This time feels like it crawls by at a painfully slow pace, yet it's gone in the blink of an eye. And suddenly you find yourself in your 50's, calmer, at peace, comfortable and secure, in a way that your (my) younger self would have scorned and envied at the same time.

It is complicated, but most of the time we make it more complicated than we need to. It's a journey we all have to go on, at our pace in our own way. I believe it's possible for everyone to eventually feel a sense of belonging and acceptance. You just have to give it time. And be kind to yourself along the way.