fourth floor feminism | sociable speculation

Introduction : Know Thyself When I first got to London I read all four broadsheets and all four tabloids each day for the EA's media cuttings service. This threw me into the deep end of commentators and ideologies, as I saw the same stories rendered differently for each spectrum of the British newspaper reading public, from the retired Army officers who read the Daily Telegraph to the artists that read The Guardian to the *cough* less educated who read The Sun. I developed a fondness for The Times that remains today, despite the fact that most people would assume that my natural home would be The Guardian. I found, in the midst of all that newsprint, that I have an intellectual habit that was obviously formed at home from reading The West Australian, The Australian and The Bulletin and informed my adaptation to the newspapers of Britain. I only ever take my reviews of popular culture from the journals that align themselves with my ideology because I am a fan of popular culture...

Around my birthday sometime I sold out to The Man. My boss was required for four weeks on one of our regional projects and I was left to commence the busiest and most crucial part of 2006 without his guidance, input and ability to approve my purchases. My job quickly took over my life, eating up 10 hours a day, my weekends, my dreams and my every waking hour. I was a bore to talk to because all the topics that I talked about covered my work - fascinating and challenging as it was for me, it was shop talk, and most of my listeners were not interested. The most alarming result of this bout of workaholicism is that I stopped reading, stopped watching movies, stopped going out, stopped my hobbies and my mind was caught in a treadmill of work, work, work. It was different and I loved it, but I missed my hobbies and my relaxation time. My boss is back, and because I can now hand the hard work over to him, my life is my own again! Hopefully next time I will learn to compartmentalise my ...

Thank you to Jacinta for the photos and the excellent Australia Day on her boat! This is Jacinta and I channelling our English selves with a jug of Pimms and lemonade - get an eyeful of those cucumber bits! Jen, myself and Louella in front of the Kings Park skyline. Yours truly, Jacinta and Jen with a little bit of South Perth over our shoulders.

It was The Turbanator's evening off, so the Daughter of the British Raj, The Prince of Port-of-Spain and the Captain of the Dubai International Cricket team decided to create the Cottesloe Beach Two Over Evening Beach Cricket Series. Play started at 6.50pm in front of the elegant limestone facade of the Indiana Teahouse on Cottesloe Beach, with a thin crowd of dinner time bathers watching languidly from the lawn. The bowling was consistent, the batting erratic and The Prince got The Turbanator out on her first bowl (yay me), the red tennis ball hitting the milk crate with a sound altogether different to the sound of leather on willow. The Turbanator ended up taking the series however with four overs of excellent batting, including a six dropped right into the surf. The Daughter of the British Raj came second with some steady batting leaving The Prince and The Captain in a tie for third due to flashy batting that lead to the only two catches of the game. While The Daughter of...

Some photos from my stay in Yallingup ... Look at that smile! Daphne and Jodie doing the 'beach run' thing. Daphne and I playing chasey.

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...