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...

The image of the sun and the sky flashing through trees, light and shade alternating as you travelled, is familiar visual shorthand for travel and change. I am a passenger a lot these days in cars, buses and trains, and as the sunlight gets harsher with the passing weeks, my thoughts on my new life in Perth flicker from dark to light in time with the trees and buildings casting their shade momentarily on my sunglasses. These journeys around Perth give me a lot of time to think as I gaze out into the long awaited and shatteringly bright light, my headphones feeding me the music I think particularly well to, the more accomplished coastal punk that is the oeuvre of Perth’s best bands. The old songs scroll memories across my mind, the new songs attach themselves to the welter of new feelings that I handle every week and I stare into the blue, just trying to sort it all out. There is a very long piece of writing sitting in my drafts folder that was supposed to have been posted about Jan...

When I was a secretary at ADI, spending my days: a) writing up tutorials for my Uni course, b) having countless running email conversations with workmates and Kristen in Canberra, and c) not really doing anything I had a vast word file of all the jokes I had ever received. I am sure I have it SOMEWHERE in my box of important papers, but this one, recently sent to me again, was one of my all time favourites. I use the phrase ‘full contact origami’ all the time, usually during my ‘torment a barfly’ routine during which I tell sozzled Lotharios that I am a retired World Bootscooting champion who is looking to move into acting in karaoke video clips and was born on Ayers rock because my mum wanted me to channel Azaria Chamberlain’s spirit. Blessed are the jokers, because they will get mates rates at the bar in heaven. The following was published in The New York Times. This is a NYU college admissions application essay question, and an actual answer written by an applicant: Qu...

The smell of Australian summer is toasted grass and sand pounded by the sun so it is only moments from turning to glass. A proper white sand and Indian Ocean beach at midday is a coruscant mirror of blue and white, shards of it splintering off to impale your eyes and flay the soles off your feet. The heat slams you down whilst it compels you to levitate in your haste to make the shade. In the bush the heat crawls into your ears with the low hum of the land choking and the insects and animals panting and it pushes out your energy until you can feel your strength running in silver, salty floods down your skin. I walked to the lunch bar today and while yesterday I was able to cope without sunglasses, today I needed their blessed shade. As I passed over freshly mown cooch grass my nostrils flared and I could smell that unique smell of singed grass being baked into a slice of grey-brown summer lawn, leaven with the fried sandy soil of the Perth coastal plain. It is hot over here, it i...

Last night I went to see one of Australia’s favourite popular scientific writers give a talk at UWA. Tim Flannery is an interesting character and if you want to get a bit of a background, here are some good links – Tim’s statement on Perth’s possibility of surviving the global warming and what his critics think of him. Flannery did indeed change Australia’s way of thinking about its impact on the environment with The Future Eaters, and he is a constant voice in the media reminding us that we can have both positive and negative impacts on the environment. His talk was fascinating, very Bill Bryson in that he gave you the figures, then broke them down into manageable sound bytes of data that were compared to quantities we understand from daily life. Regarding global warming for example he told us that the last significant rise in global temperature was a rise of 7 degrees over 7,000 years about 15,000 years ago. It is predicted that the global temperature will rise 3.4 degrees ove...

insanely sociable is no longer really useful to anyone now. It has been six weeks now since I came home and I still have nothing to put up, so I am folding up this little venture until my next adventure. I figure you can safely come back, oh, about March 2007 and you will be reading about either Paris or Dublin, depending on how I am feeling when I apply for my next visa! There will be some gradual changes to the blog, some articles that were in draft and will be finished, but don't hold your breath. It has been great writing for you readers, and I hope you have enjoyed it as well. I'll be back ...

When I was seventeen I saw Les Miserables and was introduced to one of my favourite theories on life – the concept that there are only a limited number of narratives in life, and everyone in the past, present and future can only live by one of these finite number of arcs. A little time ago I was so appalled with a book I had been reading that as a calming exercise I mapped out the frustratingly small selection of romantic arcs literature allows female protagonists to follow and tried to create a believable subversion of each. Now I find myself writing about my daily life along a similarly limited and well-known track. As a returning traveller writing about the familiar as the unfamiliar, I am beginning to realise I need to subvert this well worn path just to remain interested in writing anything at all. At the moment the restraints on my writing are rigid and profoundly limiting. All my descriptve devices and observational habits were formed when I was in a completely different cou...

There are two layers to my return to Perth and, like my feelings about leaving London, both are so powerful that my life seems to be lived in stark black and white, yet strangely muffled, as if they are cancelling each other out. The culture of Perth leaves me cool and bored at the moment, the mentality of blending in at all costs has already rendered the strangers on the street faceless grey extras, nowhere near the endlessly fascinating tapestry that Londoners were for me. The weather may be beautiful, but the physical man-made environment is unadventurous and too familiar to intrigue me and the natural wonders of the outback and bush are only mine when I have money and a car. So the pubs and the clubs issued their siren call of alcohol and dancing, sexy bodies and frantic posing and on Saturday night I went out to Subiaco, the upper end of the nightspots in Perth. There was a long line for the club, a strict dress code of ‘fabulous or forget it’, tall AFL footballers swaggering st...

It was fifteen minutes to landing in Perth, eleven minutes, nine minutes and still we were flying over bush, only the fact that you could see more than one road in a glance at the landscape indicating that there was a city coming up. At eight minutes to touchdown Perth arrived in my view, and it was as big as a postage stamp. I was alarmed at how VERY small it was. Certainly I had known it would be small, but the reality emphasised how large Perth had seemed to be when I left, and how my sense of size had adjusted to a London measure. I was painfully astounded by the fact that the city became farmland on three visible horizons. I winced as I realised I could see both Midland (the end of the Perth Metro Area) and Rottnest Island (kilometres off the coast) in the width of the plane window while I was flying low enough to see cars on the street. A hot, flushed feeling of reluctant isolation swept through me again, as it had regularly throughout the flight. I had been perfectly fine ...

On Thursday Jacinta and I had lunch in her backyard in Wimbledon to enjoy my last sunny and warm day on England’s shores. We sat in the sun, trying to say everything we needed to, not saying enough. As we sat back, I glanced at the sky and remarked that it was the closest to Perth-blue that I had ever seen it. I couldn't have been more wrong if I had tried. On Saturday I had a window seat on the flight from Kuala Lumpur to Perth and as we left the Malaysian landmass we flew out of cloud cover and out over the Indian Ocean. We flew into a sapphire, blue sea and blue sky shimmering around us, my eyes, used to more subdued colours, draining all the blood from the rest of me in an effort to drink it all in. We followed the Western Australian coast, so vast and sprawling and monochrome in its subdued khaki that although you knew that you were travelling at a good speed, the ground seemed not to move. I watched hundreds of kilometres of beach inch past below me and I was shaking from...

I have been catching the bus into work for two weeks and getting in at times that fluctuate even more than the normal Tube times. Today I was asked especially to be on time and so I conquered my fear and I got on the Tube for a long journey. When we were out in the open I was fine, reading the Metro, even finally being able to read the articles on July 7th without wanting to cry and throw up simultaneously. Once we hit the tunnels though I started getting tense. Not even as bad physically as I was my other two three-stop Tube trips, just mentally tense. First I tried to work out if I had everything in order if I were to die that day - all my things were already packed so they could be sent home to Mum and Dad, all my London friends had been thanked. Then I started watching people in the carriages, wondering what they would be like in an ‘incident’, wondering if I would have to provide eyewitness accounts for them, or would they have to provide ones for me. And then, in a shamef...

After you leave the first time, you are always leaving somewhere, someone, something. At the moment I truly don’t know what is more painful for me, seeing London slipping, day by day, friend by friend, out of my fingers or the anticipation of beloved faces as I return home to family and friends. Last night I was watching the trailer to Ice Age 2 and I was suddenly cold with the excitement of seeing Louise again. We had gone to see Ice Age together at the Astor and the thought that very soon I will be once again holding that beautiful girl with her race-horse legs and expansive ways made my breath stop. Today, at my going away party, the only time I was close to crying was seeing off Fi and Kris. These two women I hold in very high esteem, and I met because we are all members of the Broken Drummers, a group of Terry Pratchett fans. Tim is the real Terry Pratchett fan in our family, and each time I spent an evening laughing with the Broken Drummers, I knew I was there because Tim lov...

Weather forecast HOT! (it has been hot about ten days this summer). Event My first wedding to attend since I was five, and on top of that, it was an English wedding. London Being bombed by terrorists. Solution Spend the weekend in Devon and Cornwall on a weekend mini-break. Preparations I persuaded fellow guest and good friend Kate to travel with me down to the Saturday wedding in Devon and then around Cornwall for the rest of the weekend for our last adventure before I leave for Perth. I then decided what I really had to see in Cornwall and planned a breakneck itinerary for the Sunday after the wedding. [Please note that due to the mixture of lifts and one-way train journeys the itinerary contained, our best priced expected trip home was going to be seven hours, with three hours of that spent waiting for connecting trains.] Friday Caught the bus to Paddington since I will only travel on the tube again if that is the only way you can get my coffin to Heathrow! C...

Well, this post title was supposed to be used for my huge farewell love letter to London. It was going to contain all my sadness and reluctance to leave, all the things I love about London, all the things that I hated about London. At 8.52 this morning I got off what must have been the last tube running into the city, three minutes after four explosions threw limbs across Underground lines and London streets. I spent the day reading the newswires in a deserted and siren-haunted city that is still dazed and paralyzed by terrorist attacks. The black horror of this coming after the euphoria in the streets of London winning the Olympics is almost too much to encompass. I am just thankful someone did not have to pick my cold, dead hands off the ground in London today.

Kim When it comes to fast, hard and complicated friendships, it doesn’t get much bigger than Kim and I. We became very close very fast, we went through the brilliant side of London partying hard, we went through the hard side of London together and then apart, and we have arrived at the complicated return to Australia that means a very different life for both of us. I met Kim, like I met Jacinta, in completely abnormal surroundings. We were two of a grand total of six women at an Aussie Rules function in North London somewhere with almost a hundred guys, in a venue like a sauna and with me drinking two pints of beer for the first time in my life. I watched this pretty and perky blonde start up a friendship with me in jealous disbelief that she was not wilting in the cripplingly uncomfortable conditions, but our great partnership was cemented when I met her Perth boyfriend a week later and ended up, to be perfectly honest, in an entertaining situation with his two friends. Kim, Ja...

Susan Without Sue I would never have come to London at all and for that alone I owe her absolutely everything that was great about the last two years. Jen facilitated the idea too, but it was Sue’s six weeks in Australia during which she offered me the chance to look after her house in London that got me out of Perth in nine weeks flat. Sue is one of the handful of friends I have over here that makes a truly profound impression on all who meet her, each person who talks to her comes to me with a hushed ‘oh my god, Sue is so cool …’ I hesitate to try and sum up her character in one sentence, but I think it is because Sue is entirely awake to herself that she is so admired. Sue will always epitomise for me awe inspiring cooking, asides that make your eyes bug out and (and I use the word advisedly) an earthiness that makes you feel like you have found someone who really knows where her towel is. Jacinta I actually cemented my friendship with Jacinta under entirely false pretences. O...

Last July, when I mentioned that my first year in London was drawing to a close to Matt, he reminded me that I had not done the last year by myself. He was too right - housemates, drinking(!) buddies, travelling companions, old friends from home, new friends from home, new friends from London, visitors from home – each person that entered my life over here formed a memory that ties my heart that little more to this land and I am eternally grateful that they provided for me that cocoon of a great group of friends. Last year I got a few people a small token of my appreciation for their part in making my first year in London bearable. My personal debt to my friends over here has increased quite a bit in the past year, however, and I want to officially give my heartfelt thanks to the people that have BEEN London for me. Friendships when you are travelling are a truly wonderful experience. Firstly you have the Perthites, people with whom you can swap that special currency of ‘Perth hey?...

I have only six more weeks to go in London and I really should be starting and ending each day with wailing and the gnashing of teeth. Instead I am having night after night of brilliant conversations with friends who are already becoming a wrench to leave behind, and it is entirely because I am leaving that I am having such a good time. I was afraid that my moment of fear, which inspired the entry below of the same name, was going to be a permanent state. That my fear of the known would hamper my ability to settle my affairs over here. Yet the limits of my time here and finality of my imminent departure from my real life has woken something unusual in me.I have become a grinning martyr to my love of Britain. Instead of wallowing, I am barefacedly declaring that I am leaving a fulfilling life behind to be buried in a cultural backwater. I am declaiming right, left and center my ambitious plans for my stay in Perth, the writing and the reviewing and the wonderfulness that I will br...