Vegan cake

By Tracy

How to cheer up a kid who's been home from school
not feeling too good --
but whose appetite is just fine...

Films...

By Tracy

We've watched more films this week than in a long time: one at the cinema -- a rare evening outing for our wedding anniversary -- and then another two nights ago on DVD.

The film at the Paradiso was The Savages -- watchable for the terrific performances from Philip Seymour Hoffman and Laura Linney, not to mention Philip Bosco as their father in the story -- but not exactly upbeat. (In fact, if you were depressed, you'd have to skip it.) It wasn't plot-driven; it was a mood and character piece. But the acting made it worth seeing.

The film on DVD -- This is England -- was something else. John had already seen it but I hadn't, and it has stayed with me (I dreamt about it all night after seeing it!). It's an "inside" look at early skinheads in the north of England, in the 1980s -- fictionalised but based on the filmmaker's own experiences -- and is disturbing, moving and thought-provoking. Again, intense and nuanced performances from -- I was going to say the leads, but in fact from the whole cast.

Kate Bush and Emily Bronte

By Tracy

July 30 marks 190 years since Emily Bronte's birthday, and coincidentally it's the birthday too of Kate Bush who wrote the pop song based on Bronte's Wuthering Heights. Kate's turning 50.


I stopped listening to Kate Bush in my twenties, but she was a huge influence on me in my teens. (As John Lydon/Johnny Rotten, of all people, said, she was a "true original"!)

Emily Bronte, though, has never gone away.

Left: Emily Bronte, from a portrait by her brother Branwell Bronte.

Refusal, restoration and reading

This is a posting from both of us. It's been a really difficult few weeks with illness in the house, but we're all emerging from that now.

John had to cancel a couple of visits east to deliver papers, though he was lucky enough to have friends on the other side of the country willing to act as his proxy.

One of John's papers, delivered by David Brooks at the "Trace" poetry conference at Monash University, was entitled "Half-masts", and was another in his series of activist poetics essays.

These essays might be gathered together under the rubric of a "poetics of refusal". Both of us have decided that it's essential to cut back on our plane travel, and John was in fact supposed to make this journey by Indian-Pacific (train). He still has the tickets and will use them when he has to be in Adelaide next month. It's still using the world's resources, but reducing the amount we fly is a small step. John in particular flies too much and feels the overwhelming need to lessen and eventually stop this.

Interestingly, he's just having an email conversation with someone who took part in the conference, about the notion of complicity and distancing one's "self" or "subjectivity" in discussing these matters. Anyway, he might examine this at length in a later blog entry.

We are attempting to change our way of life by eventually going "off-grid" and powering our house with a complete solar (we hope) electricity system, and of course lessening our reliance on electricity anyway.

A composting toilet... And greywater recycling. Both are also on the cards, when we can. The time has come for us to make the step as a family... We are also looking to "restore" some damaged bush area, but more of that later.

When we were each single without children, it was easier for both of us to live without being so "plugged-in". The real challenge is to be able to do it as a family.

Weeks of flu were a bit of a challenge for our usually busy family too, but at least we could use some of the "inactive" time to catch up on reading.

John couldn't read at all for the first couple of weeks, but lately he's been reading

With Love and Fury: Selected Letters of Judith Wright

Patricia Avis's Virago title, Playing the Harlot (was never published in her lifetime, and its total flatness & lack of organisation show this, though it does have some moments)

The brilliant & inspiring Stendhal's Souvenirs d'Egotisme

He has also gone back to reading Edith Södergran's Complete Poems.

Tracy's just finished Graham Kershaw's The Home Crowd, his first novel (already read his second, Dovetail Road). In fact the main character of the second novel appears fleetingly and tangentially in the first, making me (Tracy) wonder if the author planned him already as a character at that early stage (kind of the way Balzac has people reappearing across his Comédie humaine) or if it was a later idea... I liked The Home Crowd very much: it's strong on mood and contemplation, and (like Dovetail Road, though with a completely different setting) very evocative of place and the people that spring from place.

Also partway through Amélie Nothomb's Robert des noms propres -- she irritates and fascinates in almost equal measure. As is evidenced by the fact that I put it down a while ago and haven't gone back to it, though I know I will.

And Camus's La Peste. Another universe entirely.

Oak Park Reserve and Gnamma Holes

By Tracy

Yesterday we went for the first time to a place called Oak Park Reserve, just out of Goomalling.

It was late in the day but we still managed to walk around one loop of the track, which runs through a section of the reserve full of flat rock and sheoak, and leads past an area with gnamma holes. These are water-collecting holes in the rock, sometimes very deep, made or modified by Aboriginal people (in this area, Balardong-Nyungar). They occur in other parts of Western Australia too.

Because it was getting dark and shadowy I couldn't easily get a photo of the gnamma hole we saw, but I did take a snap of one of the flat granites.

Where the track begins you can also see grooves in the rock which the signs say were where Nyungar people sharpened spear and axe-heads, among other things.

Around the reserve are big lakes which are now completely salt. It's a bit like arriving at Lake Taarblin further south: utter devastation.

Dead trees in a waterless expanse. The mind tries to reconstruct how it must once have looked. Farmland surrounding Oak Park is so saline and bare that it misled us, as we travelled, into thinking we must have overshot the designated "picnic area", but this was it.
(Above: Lake Taarblin, south of Wickepin)
(Below: Edge of salt lake at Oak Park Reserve)


We saw only a small part of the reserve, and hope to go back again and learn more about the area, especially its significance to Nyungar people (which must be ongoing) within the context of respect and sensitivity for that significance.

Pink Flowering Gum

By Tracy

Here's a photo John took in our back garden today.























And here's a poem from me...

Pink Flowering Gum

This frustration at imprecision
I must refuse, using only the general name,
could search and press for taxonomic clarity: yes
to this feature, no to that, and whittle
back to Latin exactitude but what
would it prove, only restate an apparent
lack of purchase on the world

how can you be a poet
and not know that?

said as I wandered a coastal heath
long ago in youth, lost in the vast
profusion of instances
just as today I hover bee-light, birdlike
around this mass, a bursting presence
outside language in which all states
make themselves felt at once, from newgreen nub
through slick huddle of thread like wet feathers at
egg-chink on to this pink, each flung fist or flourish that rings
its single stigma frail as snail horn that would wince
should I presume to touch.

Poets and “their" Words?

By John

Another fine day in the central wheatbelt. Winter. Further north, farmers are direct-drilling into dust. Hoping the rains will come. Wrote a piece on drought today. Thinking about land and ownership, I came across an incredible poem by Norman Cameron, entitled “The Invader”. The last stanza goes:

Invader-outcast of all lands,
He lives condemned to gorge and crave,
To foul his feast with his own hands:
At once the oppressor and the slave.

Born in 1905, Cameron was a propagandist for the British military during the Second World War. Prior to and after the war he worked in advertising and this poem is (ironically to me) so effective because of the neat lines that accumulate, compile, like advertising slogans. What I like about it is its universality: could equally apply to the British and others invading Terra Australis and dispossessing the indigenous peoples, or to an invasion in, say, wartime Europe. There’s also the resistance of the invaded, that no matter how hard the invader tries, they can’t access the identity, the spirit of those robbed. This brings to mind issues of hybridity and, I admit a little obscurely, copyright.

As an anarchist, I see copyright as a defensive reaction of the State. To own and control words, no matter whose those words are, is to control reception and usage. As a writer, I make my living in part, and sometimes entirely, from selling my words. This is complicit with the state and capitalism in a variety of ways, though one always argues that it’s better than other ways of feeding the State-capitalist system. I guess, depending on what your words are intending to do, and what they are actually doing (impossible to say, really). In terms of “umbrella” anarchism, you can turn this process against the capitalist State – writing against it, and at the same time managing to feed yourself and your dependants. It becomes a subversion of the means of production. As I said to a correspondent today, referring to a portal where people might access poetry free unless they wish to download it for anthologising, academic and similar purposes:

“i am not one for copyright as an absolute (or as such), but i am one for poets making a living! so, on that level, i think it's very positive that poets get some reward for their efforts. textual piracy doesn't bother me, but i do like the idea of poets being fed!! ... i particularly like the fact that people can access free - then, if they wish to profit from the work, the poet gets something back - that seems ethical to me.“

Intellectual property seems like another way of staking claims when all the land has been stolen, “used up”, staked and demarcated. But in the end, what’s being discussed in the case referred to above is the issue of “work”. For me, work not property is the vital variable. Work doesn’t mean one should have more rights than any other to something (an object, a space, an idea), but that appreciation and respect should be given for that work. “Work” is not merely labour in the obvious sense; it is not only value-adding, sustaining at best and fetishising at worst, but a sense of belonging and participation. This can be cultural work. This can be spiritual work. It can be preparing the meal, or growing food, or seeking to “protect” a piece of vulnerable bushland against the profiteers of the capitalist State, or of the State in general (communist states are just hyper-controlled and cartelled versions of capitalist states — the corporation is the Party, rather than the oligarchy of business interests).

Which brings me to think of land owners in the nineteenth century around here. One prominent family, the Slades, owned a property known as Glen Avon out near Toodyay on the Avon River. We often drive out that way, and visit a small church off an elbow of the river where the Slades are buried. I have written a number of poems about the place. The Slades interest me, as they were the parents of a very great Western Australian poet, Elizabeth Deborah Brockman (for some of her poems, see this online anthology I edited). There is an essay on Brockman’s poetry and life in my book that’s launched next week — Contrary Rhetoric: Lectures on Landscape and Language. I have been fascinated by Brockman's slim oeuvre for many years and would go so far as to say that she is one of the greatest poets in English of the nineteenth century. She is basically unknown, even in Western Australia.

For the last few years I have been preparing a book of Deborah Brockman’s work (I am told by a family member met at a literary function in Perth that she preferred to be called just “Deborah”, and not Elizabeth Deborah), with help from my mother Wendy Kinsella, and more help to come from Tracy. It’s a major task. I feel there are many undiscovered poems, and trying to track them is not easy. Almost everything we have of hers is from her book of poems published posthumously by her uncle in Scotland, Poems (1915). Those poems were collated from Western Australian newspapers and journals, especially the Church of England Magazine. What makes it more complex is that Brockman often published under the name “E”, and quite a number of poets did just that throughout the colonies. I believe some of the pseudonymous poems carried by other colonial newspapers in Australia may have been her work. I know she corresponded at least once with Henry Kendall, and swapped poems. Anyway, Tracy is going to do a few days' research soon in various archives and hopefully we can unearth a few more pieces to include in the book.