"keeping Australia safe"

Moennan and Manilyan

The two Menang women, who were kidnapped and taken to the islands by the Breaksea Island sealers, did not have their names recorded by Lockyer. Like contemporary victims of sexual assault, they remained anonymous, whilst their attackers' names were recorded (although they were never charged).

Naming characters in my historical novel Exiles was a bit of a problematic beast anyway and combining that with recorded and unrecorded Aboriginal names was even more curly. There is a section in my thesis where I argue that the only logical way through the conundrum was to manifest some of the characters' names myself. If I attributed historical names to people such as the two Menang women, it would be inaccurate, mess with incontrovertible facts in fiction, and quite possibly prove offensive and distressing to descendants of those people. However it was important to me that the two women were not peripheral, accessory characters to those blokes who wronged them or saved them. A major theme of my novel (I feel) is the responses of the women and children to their captivity; how they survived and adapted in extreme circumstances. So they had to have names. Really, really tricky!

Yesterday wasn't all fun and games. I did get some work done, including searching out the original references for my section on naming Aboriginal characters in historical fiction.
So there is this, from Captain Collet Barker, who was the Commandant at King George Sound in 1830.

"Wanting to know the ideas of the blacks of the origin of mankind, I got him [Mokare] this evening after some difficulty to understand my questions, when he told me that a very long time ago the only person living was an old woman named Arregain who had a beard as large as the garden. She was delivered of a daughter & then died. The daughter called Moenang grew up in course of time to be a woman, when she had several children, (boys & girls), who were the fathers and mothers of all the black people." 1.

I named one of the Menang women Moennan after reading this story. I liked the sound of the name spoken aloud and the way you have to move your lips around it.
Mokare's information is interesting on other levels though. His ancestral story has a distinctly maternal genesis. Also, that the ancestral mother of the Menang people is called Moenang.

Manilyan, who does not feature as largely in my novel as Moennan because she was taken away to Bald Island by the sealer McGuinness quite early in the drama, was named after a star.
Again, from Collet Barker's journal:

[Mokare] "Told me this evening that Moken had commenced, which he knew by the situation of the Black Magellanic cloud near the cross (Whitepepoy). They have some story which I could not clearly make out, of its being an emu and laying eggs. The larger White Magellanic cloud he called the Chucadark & mentioned the names of several stars. One brilliant one was shortly to be seen, called Manilyen. By his description I think it must be Jupiter & if so there is a rather there is a rather singular coincidence as 'Man' in their language signifies 'father'." 2.

In other wordlists, Manilyen is simply a star, Jupiter and occasionally Venus.

Venus revealed herself. 

“Venus,” said Bailey. “The oldest whore in the world. First one out at night and the last one to leave.”

“That Captain of the Astrolabe,” Black Simon nodded his head towards where the Frenchmen were moored below Venus, “He is famous in his country for finding Venus in a field in Greece.” When Black Simon spoke he was frugal with words, meting them out like precious shot. The whole camp stopped what they were doing to listen.

“The Venus de Milo, she was six foot tall and cool, white stone, as beautiful as the inside of a seashell. Her ears were pierced and her hair was coiled around her neck and she held an apple in her hand. He pulled her out of the earth, from a tomb.”

“No wonder the officers are asking after the women,” laughed Smidmore.

“He’ll get no classic Greece in the Sound,” said Jimmy the Nail, “just mullet and muttonbirds and blackfella women smeared with fish oil and red clay, feathers in their hair.”

“Meremere, ah Meremere” sang Billhook quietly over his weaving.

“Manilyan, Manilyan, Manilyan,” chanted Weedchild, who seemed to understand which star they were talking about, and then she burst into tears.

Notes

1. Mulvaney, J., & Green, N., Commandant of Solitude. The Journals of Captain Collet Barker 1828-1831, Melbourne University Press, 1992, p. 289.

2. Ibid. p. 284. 
3. The picture by Louis de Sainson is of the Astrolabe's sail maker camp, close to the channel of Princess Royal Harbour, Albany. In the background is the Astrolabe and beyond that, Michaelmas Island (left) and Breaksea Island (right) where the sealers lived. October, 1826.

Today

6.20 am. Went into the bathroom. Spent half an hour hennaing my hair. Came out with my hair piled into a cone of henna mud. Selkie the pup looked at me horrified, and fled out the front door, pissing the whole way along the carpet. So I chased her. I believe I was still wearing my rubber gloves and towel cape at the time.

9.50 am. Deposited a cheque via the ATM. First time ever. Very proud of myself. Wet hair.
 
10 am. Attended an obligatory interview with the local labour hire mob. I got there fifteen minutes early, sat on the couch to read the No Idea. A man walked in who was 'having a crisis' with a labour hire mob who'd just shut down and so he wanted to be transferred to another agency or he'd be cut off his unemployment benefits.
He spoke with an Irish accent as he scanned the noticeboard and said to the receptionist, "There's a job going for a butcher here. I've had some butchering experience. Can you give me the details?"
"Have you had any experience butchering kangaroos?"
"No. But isn't any animal the same when it's dead, now? Kangaroo tails are just bigger."

10.30 am. Took this picture outside the supermarket:

10.40 am. Had a quick interactive learning session with the council gardeners about pruning the Peace roses at the war nurses memorial garden.
11 am. Moved into a table at my favourite haunt to edit my thesis.
11.30 am. Went out for a smoke. Checked my phone. A message from my best mate saying she couldn't have lunch with me today as she was having a 'procedure' at 11.45 am to check her left boob for cancer. She'd told me about that lump weeks ago. She didn't tell me it was today. That is her way, anyway.
11.45 am. Go back to the thesis. Think about lumps. Try to organise the footnotes. Try to straighten up my arguments.
11.45 - 12 pm. Try to organise my thoughts.
12.30 pm. An old friend limps up to my table. When I ask him why he is limping, I realise his words are slurred and not as precise as when I'd last talked to him, and he's always been a clever, physical sort. "I've been in hospital for a whole month," he told me. "This part of my brain [he points to the base of his skull] just broke one day." His eyes were clear, healthy and bright. I always thought he was a grumpy sort but he seemed almost obscenely happy today, after his encounter with death.

wow

1pm. Wait for academic mate. Order chips and more coffee. Ask for more aioli to eat chips with. Consume it all. Feel a bit sick. Continue editing. The woman sitting at the table next to me is wearing black jeans and stilettos. She stands and puts on her fake leopard fur coat to leave. She is fucking indomitably impressive in that moment.
1.30pm. Wait for said academic mate. Continue editing.
1.45pm. A journo who I have a lot of time for sits down at my table.
2pm. Academic mate shows up with a bandaged pruning thumb.
2pm. She sends a text message saying that according to the powers that be, her left breast looks like it has been in a massacre. I try to ring her and get to the voice mail.
2.15pm. Academic mate recounts how he saw bone and got ten stitches when he damaged his hand yesterday pruning vines. (Because that is what we do by the way, you non-academics. You may think we are posh but in the off-season when we are laid off teaching, we prune vines or clean people's gutters or pick fruit.)
2.45 pm. She sends a text message. She can't talk right now. She'll ring tonight.
2.50 pm. We talk about narrative non fiction, the journalist, the academic vine pruner and I. We talk about sharks and guns and history and culture and spark on the value of long reads. We talk about sleep deprivation, raising children and wilderness writing. The conversation gets exciting and I know I have an appointment at 4pm, so I keep looking at my phone.
3pm. There's no new messages from my best friend, so I think she must be sleeping.
3.45pm. I walk through the back blocks to my next appointment. Out the back of the Royal George Hotel they are throwing out the fittings of a disreputable establishment. Tradies have stopped for a fag. They are gutting the front bar and cleaning out the whole hotel to make it, I dunno, more respectable. I'd be happy if they owned their whaler, sealer past ... ahh stop it Sarah ... I walk up the hill to my next appointment with my therapist.

5pm. My car is covered in red flowers because I parked it under a flame tree and the birds are having a rather obscene ball with it all day. I drive five kilometres, fast, to blow their mating rituals away. When I got home the pup is so glad to see me that she literally turns somersaults.

"the algae bloom of everyday camouflage"

Here's a link to a piece of non fiction that I would like to have written: The Riflemaker Dreams of Africa, by Matthew Clark.

It's one of those big, fat, sprawling social history/road stories. I've had a crack at them before, in a less committed manner than Clark, through my interviews or work with old whalers, pigeon fanciers and fisher folk. This work of narrative non fiction reminds me that I can do better.

Image: Michael Doyle, The American, 2013. Courtesy Somerville Manning Gallery

Guest post: My Friend Bill

 I first met Bill in 1981. I have a vivid memory of him sitting on the sunny verandah of what was then ‘Claremont Technical College’ (later it was renamed ‘Claremont School of Art’). I was 21 and I couldn’t tell how old he was because he had pitch black hair and a white beard. That confused me and I wondered whether he dyed his hair, and then if he did, why he hadn’t dyed his beard as well. Because it was a dead give away. Now I think that was just the way he was – Bill wasn’t a deceitful sort of person so I suspect dying his hair black was probably not something he would do.

It was the 80s and there was a lot of money around for the arts. We had models everywhere – they were a fundamental part of our training. Especially as sculpture majors. Later I changed to painting but I think Bill stayed with sculpture – with his background in welding and construction he was in his element.

Yes, that white beard and black hair really had me baffled. It added to the enigma of Bill. He didn’t talk much. It wasn’t until years later I realised this was probably because he was a bit deaf from working in the steel industry. He was an anomaly at the school - sure we had mature aged students, but they were mostly rich middle aged women from Claremont and Dalkieth. They probably kept the college funded. But Bill was male and a full-time student like me and my young colleagues. So I often wondered what he was doing there – youth can be so narrow minded!

Now as a mature aged student myself I appreciate what he was doing, and also why he seemed to struggle at first. He worked very hard – much harder than I did because I didn’t really take art college seriously. Writing this I wonder what he thought of that. I assume he thought I was simply young and naive, but he was kind to me. Sometimes I feel a bit embarrassed when I think of the young me trying to engage a man like Bill in conversation – he was so much wiser than I was at the time. I was very lost and messed up and he seemed so together. That myth was busted later when he told me had been an alcoholic and a dogger – a dingo shooter - and that he had suddenly stopped when he saw 2 dingoes mating one evening. He never went dogging again. He wrote a story about it and gave it to me to read. That confused me too because I thought only the young felt angst.

And that’s the other thing I remember about Bill – he was an amazing writer – what he couldn’t speak out loud rolled eloquently from his pen when he wrote. I don’t really know why but during one summer break I wrote to him. It was typical of me to become overly attached to people – I was lost and floundering around. He seemed like the voice of reason. He wrote back to me in beautiful copperplate – I wish I had kept it but I have moved around so much that many semi-precious gems like that letter have been lost. I must have been asking for advice because the one thing I do remember is Bill saying he didn’t want to ‘offer me platitudes’. I didn’t even know what that meant so I looked it up. I really wish I had kept that letter – I’d love to read it now.

Sometimes in our drawing classes we would model for each other and I remember doing a portrait of Bill. My style then as now, is to idealise, to stylise – but in all truth – I didn’t see the wrinkles that must have been there on Bill’s face. I have carried that portrait around for more than 30 years and I think, I hope, I still have it somewhere.

Michelle Frantom 2015

The princess diaries

I finished writing the novel about the seal hunters on Australia Day. Bashing away at the laptop to strains of the national anthem and the hottest 100. (I never noticed I was a basher, a two finger basher at that, until someone mentioned it recently.) I didn't even know how it was going to end until about the last half an hour of writing. After five years I still couldn't work out how to resolve a story that never ended well in real life, into a balletic, pleasing finale. I am happy with the ending. It thrills me stupid and it bothers me a bit. These are both good things.

Anyway, despite the years and angst involved in writing this book, the text itself still wasn't very clean. There were narratorial glitches, the odd typo and point-of-view problems but I sent it off to my publisher anyway, because she wanted it and because I remembered her words from Salt Story days: 'Just get it off the desk and send it to me, Sarah.'

A month or so later, she said yes. And then she pitched it to the board of Fremantle Press and they said yes too.
Yessss!

The yesss feeling lasted all of about twenty four hours before I observed myself fall prey to the snark again. I've long known my susceptibility to anxiety and anticipation of non existing disaster scenarios. Normally I get through them with a kind of home bake CBT or writing cringe-worthy journal entries to get the shit off my liver. But the suicide of my friend in December and the consequent fallout seems to have dismantled my coping strategies and left them as a pile of bricks in the back yard. Despite my anxieties during the previous chaotic week, that disaster scenario bloody happened anyway.

 

So in April - it was April Fools Day actually - a euphoric twenty four hours of yesss via Fremantle Press was followed up immediately with all sorts of unmediated angsting. *The novel is not as good as Salt Story * It's a difficult bitch * People will compare it unfavourably to Salt because it's the only other comparison they have * It will get terrible reviews*
And the whole time I was looking at myself and thinking 'What's with this Sarah? This is what you've always wanted. C'mon. It's like getting signed up by a record company, for a second time.'

Sometimes, putting art into the public gaze feels like an act of baring your throat, giving everyone a meat cleaver and trying to look like you don't give a fuck. Most of the time I forget that people actually read my stuff - and that's quite a nice place to write, to communicate, to tell ripping yarns. Then I meet someone in the supermarket who's been reading A WineDark Sea (Shiiit!), or the book reviews come out (Shiiit!). For a first book, Salt Story was a huge success. The first print run sold out in eight weeks and it received great reviews in national newspapers and on the street ...

... so what am I whingeing about.
It's just bloody terrifying. Sometimes. It's about ego of course and of course it's about more than ego. It's thrilling as well. It was thrilling to finish the novel, sit back and think, 'I reckon this one is alright,' PoV problems and all. And now the editor and I  have nine months to turn something that is 'alright' into something that is beautiful.
Exiles (working title), my novel about the sealers and Aboriginal women who came to Albany in 1825, will be published in September 2016.

The tyrant queen

Bee hives have individual personalities. I guess that's where the term 'hive mind' comes from.
Hives # 3 and # 4 are the hippie bees. The pine needle smoke intoxicates them, but they are cruisy anyway. I can pull out frames laden with honey - and they are always beautiful, perfectly formed frames -  and the bees float around me in a peaceable cloud ... vaguely concerned at my stealing their honey but pretty philosophical about the whole thing.

"Oh, wow. What is this strange white-clad, bear-like creature doing?"
"She's moving in peace, man and now she's reaping our blessed harvest."
"She's sort of nice. And that smoke is really nice. Dude, that smells so good."

 Then there is hive #2. (I'm gonna have to come up with some better names but #2 has always been known to me as the Tyrant Queen.) When I open the lid, the buzz rises. I can hear them get angry. They start attacking. They get me through my leather gloves and any part of clothing that is touching my body. In the past, I've driven home 300 km with a face rearranged by this hive after they'd stung me through my mask.

"Fucking kill her!"
"Let's get the bitch! Chop off her head!"
"What the fuck does she think she is doing?"

The hippie hives are about four metres away from the Tyrant Queen and it never fails to amaze me how different they are in nature. When I first get out there, the big question lurking in my mind is which hive do I rob first. The cranky one or the hippies? It's a worthy query, as the order of hive-robbing can have quite an impact upon my day.

After I'd requeened #2, (here) thus installing an aggressive, whip-cracking queen, I'd chosen to rob hers last and by then I was so tired from lugging hives around that this new regime coupled with a territorial tiger snake completely freaked me out. After swatting off her knasty knaves I gave up, walked away and left that bitch queen to her bloody honey. She could bloody keep it. I felt like one of those broken old bears in an Attenbrough show, except I had a pack of antihistamines in my pocket.

Today, we robbed the Tyrant Queen first. And that was a good idea. It's always the most productive hive because those bees are so angry, so driven, that they have fought off the night ants, the meat ants, the wax moth and even the feral bees in the tree next door.
Loads of honey.
So thank you, Your Majesty, and the hippies were beautiful.