fourth floor feminism | sociable speculation

It is the classic coming of age motif, that moment when you finally see your family as a looming wardrobe with the spidery, skeletal hands of your relatives’ past wriggling the door open, scaring you witless. In my arrogance and anger when I got home, I ripped that door open and looked straight into the empty eye sockets of the hatreds and loves that drive the adults in my family. There are truly impressive currents that run below the smooth waters of anyone’s life, currents set by grandparents, swum against by parents and now reaching my cousins and I as we finally see that our ups and downs are not entirely our own, but amplified by the ripples from cruel rocks thrown many generations before. My uncles and aunts now talk to me as a fully-fledged adult, and the more they reveal about my parents and my two families (long intertwined before my parents met and married), the more I see myself as if in one of those carnival mirrors, endlessly repeated in the same form, but in different d...

… but I miss feeling like I am a moving part of the structure of the city I am in. The Tube Map was as familiar as my own limbs; I knew the limits and the arcs of the joints and muscles that propelled me along the bones of the transport system (within reason of course, goddamn delays). I particularly enjoyed absorbing the intersections between all the parts of the city, separating the layers of settlement in my mind so I could envisage the melding of the peripheral market towns into suburbs and leaving them mere tube stops and mainline stations to remember their former independent glory. Perth is a created city, not an organic one. Only five or six suburbs around the Central Business District can boast the natural feel of an area grown instead of an area planned. And even these suburbs are village-like only for those on the sidewalk, because in this city of cars, you only see your surroundings in the frame of the windscreen. As I got behind the wheel of my old car for the first tim...

My God I am glad to be back on Yallingup beach. Yallingup’s importance to me is almost inexplicable. I could spend pages explaining the habits formed over my lifetime of family holidays in Yallingup that shaped how I view holidays, my relationship with my siblings and to some extent the very way I relax and think. That stretch of beach, that headland , those waters are a core part of my ability to be happy in life, and at no time have I felt that fact like Friday night, when I stood on that beach again after two years missing it every day. I didn’t KNOW there was a weight on my heart until I stood on the ice-cold black of the sand, in the roar of the midnight surf, saw the constellations of my childhood trying to outshine the full moon laying down a silver pathway to the horizon and I was truly happy. I hadn’t REALISED there was a curb to my imagination until I stood in the freezing cold afternoon sea, squinting into the waves frosted white gold with the setting sun, diving under the...