Nope Ropes Are Woke. Who Knew?

 It is a fact universally acknowledged that a woman in receipt of tiger snakes will be in need of a quart of petrol to burn down her house just to spite them. These have been my thoughts over the years as every January and February, the tigers laid siege to my house. I'd shut all the doors and windows as two tigers (who were very much in love) roamed around the front and back verandahs, frolicking, deadly, obviously intent on murdering me and my loved ones.

It's an emotional and psychological event for me and I find myself in this state at this time of year - rustle-jumpy and only walking where my path is clear. Plus, the trek up to the fire tower every morning is often stalled by a basking tiger or dugite, powering up for the day on the sunny north face. Last year, the hound was trotting back from her jaunt down the beach, when a tiger extended from the wood pile like a slinky toy at her. Selkie just moved around the snake and kept going. For a consumate brawler, she picks her battles. But it was enough for me to ask my boss if I could do a snake handling course - demystify my fear and learn about these creatures.

So today a disparate group of wildlife workers and others (such as one terrified firetower lady) gathered at the Business Centre where we were taught venomous snake handling and relocation skills. It began with power point slides. It always begins with power point slides. Jurassic Park? Snakes on a Plane? Indiana Jones going into that snake pit? It all began with power point slides, I'll bet my bottom dollar on that.

Then we were encouraged to engage some super friendly pythons to crawl all over us. I could see where this was going. Feeling a python's muscles is just amazing, I mean they are all muscle, and their skin is soft like a child's. Pythons are a gateway drug to tiger snakes, I know that right. Then we went outside and played with some fake rubber snakes. Who even has fake rubber snakes. We learned about how to pick up a snake with a crook and put it in a willow bin or a bag or maybe even a bin fire (not really). 

Lunch break. I had a smoke out the back of the business centre with a spiritual healer who was doing readings there.

After lunch we were split into two groups, kind of like Squid Game. J let a tiger snake out her box and said, 'Who wants to go first?' She's called Lovely Lady, according to the label on the box, though she's probably a they as sexing snakes is quite difficult. Anyway, I was already shitting myself. As the beautiful animal slithered towards me her black and yellows flaring in the courtyard, the instructor gently 'raked' her away from me with his crook and focused on the catcher. I stepped back. But when it was my turn, the instructor lifted this snake into a bush. He seemed to like challenging me. 'What do I do now?' I asked. 'Drag it out?'

'Just wait,' he said. And so I did. The tiger worked her way down to the ground and I picked her up with the crook and put her into the willow bin where she nestled safely under a towel.

The next test - J let a king brown snake out. Oh my god this snake was the colour of the Pilbara, like pindan dirt, that beautiful mix of red and orange, a sunset. It came out of the box angry and twitchy. A woman in a red shirt walked through the courtyard, looking totally freaked out. She ran into the office, shut the sliding doors and stared at us through the glass.

The king brown was flattening like a cobra. It was probably one and a half metres long, bright orange and I was thinking 'yeah, nah. I'll pass this one'. But when it was my turn to bag this snake, something happened. The instructors' language was getting through to me. This is a timid creature. Sure it's not a wild creature. It's used for snake training after all. I put the tent-shaped bag in front of the snake. 'Trust,' said the instructor. 'Trust it will go in.' First, the king brown went past the bag and headed for my legs. Shelter apparently. And then it did. The snake slid into the bag. I held up the bag and felt the weight of this mighty snake slip to the bottom. Then I kind of froze. I looked at the instructor. 'I'm blanking!' I told him. I was sweating and quite stressed. 'What do I do next again?' and he reminded me how to close off the bag and then release the snake. Shake the bag, step back, shake the bag, step back and repeat.

The woman in the red shirt was still watching us from her office, eyes wide.

When we went indoors and learned how to deal with a snake inside a house, well that changed me. Food, water, shelter - what animal doesn't need that, including ourselves? As we chased the dugite under cupboards and around the room, I began to realise that snakes are vulnerable and they want to survive and they don't want to murder me. So basically, their whole life plan is to eat, live, grow babies and not murder Sarah. As I 'played' with this dugite with my new-found crooks and tong toys, I was feeling quite ashamed of the person I was. That child whose weapon was the snake chain (an axe handle with a long length of chain to kill snakes). That adult who squirts petrol and throws shovels at snakes. That person who says 'the only good snake is a dead one.'

Today has changed me. I'm still not really into tiger snakes around my house but I don't feel under siege anymore. Also, today I learned that tigers have facial recognition, much the same as magpies and ravens. So my crimes against the local tigers are probably on their Australia's Most Wanted database and I'm working to rectify that through earnest conversation with them.

 

 

The green leaf letters

One day early in February, at the beginning of our second summer, eucalypts began dropping their green leaves. Bright green sickles mosaiced the concrete steps to the fire tower where I work. I’d never seen this before. Normally the track is covered with dead brown leaves. Noticing the green ones was a bit different.

Two days later, I phoned my boss from the tower at the end of the day. ‘I’ve just spent the whole day with a sense of impending doom,’ I told her.

‘I don’t even go there,’ the fire officer said. ‘Every morning, the crews are organised, FDIs are finalised and then it’s like, whatever happens will happen.’

That day was the hottest ever I’ve spent on the tower. Most of the small schools in the south west shut down due to fire danger. I wish I’d taken a screenshot of the emergency site that day because looking at the school shutdowns made me think – this is the future. If this happens every year from now on, whose parents will be able to go on checkout at IGA? What happens to medical centres when doctors and nurses have to stay home?

The temperature readings in the tower blew out because I was sitting on granite, which warms faster than soil, meaning the little tower room turned into a hothouse. Sweat soaked my clothes. It was an act of endurance to stay there. I saw a smoke curdle into the sky behind Mount Lyndsey, mapped it and reported it in.

‘It’s kinda grey blue. I think it must be around the Hay River area. It’s a weird colour.’

Turns out the smoke came from silage that had spontaneously combusted in the heat, knocking out a whole season of feed for the dairy family who worked there for generations. The smoke’s colour was from all the plastics catching fire. Silage doesn’t normally self-combust, my farmer son told me. Silage is too wet. Normally.

‘How you going on the granite?’ Marty who also works on the tower was in contact throughout the day. ‘Do you have enough water? Use mine if you run out.’

There’s a code between us. We carry our own stuff up the mountain and we don’t share, especially water at one kilo a litre per trek up the hill. We may text each other when the clock battery needs replacing or maybe metho for the Trangia but never the water. Believe me. It’s a thing. We never share water.

‘I’m afraid I’ve already crossed that line,’ I messaged him back. By then I’d drunk four litres of water, poached two litres of Marty’s stash and not even had a wee.

‘Do you want me to bring some more?’ Marty replied and I thought, bless this man. The only person on Earth thinking of me today is the other fire tower guy.

Just like prior to a wind storm, the Eucalyptus trees dropped their green leaves in anticipation of the event a few days later. This time, it wasn't a wind storm but an extreme heat event. All of the trees knew this event was coming up. 

They knew what was about to happen.

Voting yes and then saying no

I've spent the last few weeks in a funk of emotions. There are several clouds of issues going on in my head and I've been trying to separate them into spheres or boxes or ... something. This morning I woke up with: "okay Sarah, there is this and then this and then there is this."

It was like my brain finally cleared. People say that when the amygdala is stimulated the frontal cortex goes offline and I've probably experienced this before but not totally cogged it. This time around it was like 'fuck, what is going on?'

Anyway, a few weeks after the nation voted against a voice to parliament, I gradually unscrambled. Someone asked me to sign a petition against inner city social housing because ... I dunno, nimbyism? No, I wrote back. Not gonna sign that one. An institution asked me to maintain my contract on a chapter about colonial experiences. No, I wrote back. I'll return that advance payment. (Damn, damn my conscience!)

I began writing this post back in October when I voted Yes to an Indigenous voice to parliament, so it's been sitting here for a while. But I'm still playing in my same brain sandpit, flicking up sand into the circle of eyes. I'm not willing to play this game anymore. I voted yes and now I'm saying no. I'm entering the Crone Zone with a kind of delicious fury. Care to join?

 

More camera trap pics

 

So this is a terrible photo but here is your little ginger pig! Her ginger stripe is on the right side of the frame. It's the only image I've been able to get of her so far. Scattered all around are the remains of her foragings: the crimson shells of bloodroot bulbs and kangaroo bones from the roadside. A few months ago, in the summer, someone hit a roo on the track. In the weeks after, the carcass was dismantled piece by piece and, by the looks of this little pig's grotto, this is where it ended up.

When I first moved to the inlet in the midst of winter, I met some pig hunters on the track. Two car loads of young men with cages on the back of their utes, filled with enormous dogs - whiskery lurchers and brindle mastiffs. 'Gidday love,' the first driver said. 

This is wild and woolly country. Marshes, peat bogs, soaring karris and ancient marri trees. 'Seen any pigs around here?' My dog leaned over my shoulder and growled at the caged dogs. All hell broke loose. I hadn't seen any pigs but thought I could send two carloads of slightly pinned men and their dogs somewhere that was not near my place. 'Yeah, saw one yesterday. About 30 Ks up Chesapeake road!'

On a happier note, here are some camera trap photos of some real live kangaroos. I love the infra red ones for their glowing night eyes and larking about. The last one is taken back at the ginger pig grotto. Composition, yes?

Camera Trap

Lately I've been trying to work out how to set up camera traps. This is not a creepy thing ... I live in the forest and would like to see what other critters are getting around at night around my place. A while ago, I strapped a camera trap to a tree close to my house. Tonight I put the SD card from the camera into my computer. Here's what came up.

The cameras are set up with motion sensors to take a picture. This night on the 29th, I walked around the camera to see if it would set off a flash, but it didn't. I walked away, wondering if it worked or if I'd set it up incorrectly. Turns out, I misunderstood infra red capabilities! Derr, Sarah.

Here are some rabbits:

And then, there is me in my ugg boots, today, going in to check the camera trap.

So all we got on camera was a few rabbits and my Ugg boots. But it was a pretty cool experiment. 

Onwards!

Desdemona, or how to make another version of Carver

 Recently I did a presentation on form and genre in literature. Now before you shrivel up and die on me, I'll just say, it was terribly exciting. So bear with me because I'm about to inflict it on you now - it's also a lead-in to my latest published story.

Raymond Carver's book What We Talk About When We Talk About Love is a classic in the short story collection genre. What he does is so hard and fast, mostly set in the domestic sphere. Carver's stories typically depict the cosy household and then he proceeds to smash it up with the basest instincts of humanity. His style has been largely credited to his editor, Gordon Lish who was famous for his sculpting of Carver's works. Most editors stay behind the scenes. Lish did not, as he described how he'd cut out the last paragraph of a Carver story, to give us a single line, a devastating end to a story cut short ... like a life. Questions follow any ending of a Carver story. A quick look at Carver's book covers for What We Think About illustrates the domestic weird of his work:

 

 

So his story So Much Water So Close To Home, in the above mentioned collection, depicts a wife recounting her feelings after her husband went fishing with his mates on a remote river. They drink whiskey on the first night, they play cards, they hang out. The next morning the men go fishing in the river and they find a woman, a murdered woman, in the river while they are fishing.

This is written from the wife's point of view, and I find it interesting that in Raymond Carver's muscular, masculine form of writing, he quite often does this. What the men do next has spawned several movies and songs - yeah form and genre, told ya.

They tied the dead woman's foot to a tree branch in the river and then they went on fishing. She was on ice, they thought. No point turning back now, they thought. Turns out it was the best fishing trip they'd ever had. It was like mother luck had struck them. Truly amazing. They took lots of photos of them holding up the giant trout. Giant grins. Two days later, they hiked up back to civilization and called the police. The next day, their grinning fishing photos would be on the front page of the papers. Outrage ensued.

This is not a true story, or not as far as I know. Maybe Carver read something in an obscure paper, or maybe he just made it up. But the reality of this situation cuts through to us and that's why his fiction works. We all know how it could happen. And we all know how, as a wife or normal human being, we'd be thinking what the actual fuck? And how do I even know you anymore?

Not long after the So Much Water So Close To Home writer died (1988) ,the Australian songwriter Paul Kelly brought out the song Everything's Turning to White (1989), depicting the wife and her feelings about her husband, basing it on Carver's story. Once again, it's written by a man from a woman's perspective:

 Paul Kelly also wrote the music score for the film Jindabyne, another rendition of Raymond Carver's tale. Jindabyne came out in 2006 and was directed by a man (Ray Lawrence) and narrated by a female lead. The film Jindabyne is based on So Much Water So Close To Home but dwells on unique Australian anxieties. The woman in the river is Aboriginal and there are already racial tensions in the small town. Catholic and Protestants, mental illness and class divides all play out here. It's a drowned town, where the whole town had to move to high water after the hydro scheme took over. In other words, there's so much water, so close to home.

When recently, I was asked to take part in anthology responding to Paul Kelly songs, my brain went in all sorts of strange places. Road trips when there were tape players in cars, that time I was an asshole at one of his concerts and getting naked to swim downstream before said concert in front of a lot of tourists, long conversations about his songs ...

When asked whether or not I could do this, all I could think about was Paul Kelly's song Desdemona and how I've always thought Desdemona had a bad rap and how this story connected with Shakespeare's Othello and then back to Raymond Carver again. 

So here it is, another version of an old story. In this book Minds Went Walking, I tell the story of a young woman who is married to a jealous man. It's always bothered me that Othello is portrayed as a victim of Iago and his situation. This story Desdemona is told by a woman from a woman's point of view.