Meanjin Vol 79, No 1

By Meanjin Quarterly

In this edition’s cover essay, Gomeroi poet, essayist and scholar Alison Whittaker takes on the idea of white fragility and asks ‘Has white people becoming more aware of their fragilities and biases really done anything for us; aside from finding a new way to say ‘one of the good ones’ or worse, asking us to?’. Whittaker aims squarely at a progressive white culture that sees an elevated racial conscience as a path to post-colonial innocence.

In other essays, Timmah Ball asks that most fundamental of questions: Why Write? ‘Were they looking for the next successful blak book . . . ’ while Anna Spargo-Ryan writes powerfully on the often-brutal history of abortion in women’s lives and men’s politics. Rick Morton shares his version of Australia in Three Books and Maxine Beneba Clarke considers risk and writers’ acts of courage.

New fiction from Yumna Kassab, Sue Brennan, Nick Robinson and John Kinsella, and poetry by Ouyang Yu, Sarah Holland-Batt, Marija Pericic and Andrew Sant.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Melbourne University Publishing Ltd
• Release date: Mar 17, 2020
• ISBN: 9780522876253

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contributors

EDITORIAL

Jonathan Green

THE OVERWHELMING SENSE left lingering from these months just passed of heat, fire, and political fury, is one of brooding uncertainty.

It is now obvious beyond dispute that we are living in a changing world, an environment that will challenge us, and quickly. This summer has been a foretaste; not a ‘new normal’, more the long-anticipated beginning of an altered world that will test our resilience, our political and economic structures and our ambition for change.

Towns have burned. Cities have been shrouded in smoke. The trauma of nature has become our human trauma. As writer and activist Tim Hollo put it in February on the Meanjin blog, ‘After months of breathing in the ghosts of gum trees, of koalas and cockatoos, how could we deny that we are all connected? Battered by fire, dust, floods and hail, how could we pretend we’re not completely reliant on the natural world?’

A realisation of that interconnectedness must be at the heart of what comes next, as is the sobering realisation that on the basis of recent performance, our systems of government and economy will struggle in that profound transition.

Abandoning human exceptionalism to ensure human survival will test us. Procuring a system of politics that might shelve its own craving for survival and individual aggrandisement long enough to act in the broad human interest may prove elusive. The difficulty of what lies ahead is significant, but the stakes are, well, existential.

It sounds almost flippant, but reading might help.

Eighty years ago, this magazine came into being with the slightly immodest ambition, expressed in its first editorial, of finding a way to survive ‘an age governed by the stomach-and-pocket view of life … a time of war and transition’ through an immersion in poetry.

Our challenge has shifted, but the importance of thought and literature, as means of both describing our world and finding paths to enhance it, endure. •

UP FRONT

NATIONAL ACCOUNTS

Memory, Trouble and Women Writers I Admire

Claire Collie

THE POTTER GIVES me a giant vessel. Pocked and the colour of red-gum trunks in late spring, it’s heavy like a four-year-old child. I take it home on the train in one of those tough reusable supermarket bags, straining at the handles. I cut off branches of hop bush, their seeds like pendants rusted at the tips, and place them in the vessel. Slender leaves reach out like a million small fingers. It takes a dozen jugfuls of water to fill it. I count them.

The next day he sends me a text with a paragraph taken from Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem. We never send messages. When I read it, it’s her voice, remote and impassive, that I hear. A woman’s voice, which has had too much taken from it:

I think we are well advised to keep nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind’s door at 4am of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends. We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were.

Illustration by Lee Lai

Next time we meet, the potter and I don’t talk about the meaning of the Didion text. But now the vessel sits on my kitchen bench, filled with jugs of water and native foliage, reminding me of the people we used to be. Weighted down like a tired child, carried to the car after a dinner party. It’s as though it has fused with Didion’s words, a transference of meaning. Text message to clay. I try to remember the things whispered, the things screamed. Never sure if it’s worth it. Memories, fortifying but often bitter. I realise its form, an oversized cow bell made of porcelain, is certainty.

•  •  •

We live in an unhomely time, an epoch of banishments, a moment of mis-enchantment, of Trouble. We mustn’t stop thinking, and writing, about this.

You could say, to twist historian David Lowenthal’s adage, the past is a foreign epoch. Human action, not geological force, has made it that way. And the memories we have of it, of the whispering and the screaming, of the love and betrayals, are diminishing too. The Anthropocene offers us little hope. Now, they tell us, we must be resolute in our adaptations and mitigations. Face forward, move onwards. Fight to survive. Another epoch awaits, one where the machine reigns.

Only the romantics still worry about the past. Chiding it to keep up. Adrienne Rich, in her essay ‘When We Dead Awaken’, writes about the importance of returning to the writing of the past:

Re-vision—the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction—is for women more than a chapter in cultural history: it is an act of survival. Until we can understand the assumptions in which we are drenched we cannot know ourselves.

I wonder what this could mean for thinking about the Anthropocene, about the moment we find ourselves in. What might we learn from looking back, re-visioning, understanding new critical directions as acts of survival dredged from the past? This is no longer about being woman or man. It’s about being human and more-than-human. In her poem ‘On Edges’ from 1968, Rich writes:

I’d rather

taste blood, yours or mine, flowing from a sudden slash than cut all day with blunt scissors on dotted lines like the teacher told.

We ought to think carefully about this rallying cry, this call to arms, this brisk kick at banality. This responsibility we have, to dare, to not to be patient at times. I’m not really sure what Rich means here, but I like to think she’s reminding us that our blunt, tutored thinking won’t save us anymore.

•  •  •

Sometimes things happen in the days that take me away from the news. There’s problems with the kids at school, or the machinery we rely on to power the house or to fill the tanks stops working, or my heart breaks for a moment. I spend time on these things, days, sometimes weeks. And when I lift my head again, and read the headlines, I’m certain we’ve all gone mad. There is something repulsive about the present.

Unprecedented bushfires rip through New South Wales. World’s thickest mountain glacier succumbs. Drought to become more frequent and severe. ‘Climate strike’ named 2019 word of the year. We eat the equivalent of a credit card of microplastics every week. Fatal cost of economic inequality and the rise of ‘deaths of despair’. Fake Halloween cobwebs found in birds’ nests. These headlines are delivered without irony.

•  •  •

There is a moment in Mary Oliver’s essay ‘Staying Alive’ where she writes about being left on the ice by her father who absentmindedly returns home without her. I imagine the child, ice skates on, circling listlessly, waiting for her pick-up as the afternoon grows heavy.

This is an essay scattered with daring lines that a fulfilled woman can write. A woman, she says, without bitterness who chooses to claim her life. Lines such as: ‘the world’s otherness is an antidote to confusion, that standing within this otherness … can re-dignify the worst-stung heart’. Oliver writes about ‘gathering certainty’, ‘the summoning world’ and remaining ‘steadfast about one or two things’. These are what we need in our life, she urges. Halfway through the essay, she warns, ‘you must not, ever, give anyone else the responsibility for your life’.

The father returns to collect Oliver hours later from a known house she’s taken shelter in. When he arrives, she recalls her younger self thinking, never had I seen so handsome a man; he talked, he laughed, his movements were smooth and easy, his blue eyes were clear. Her safe return, the absolution from his forgetfulness, ‘lay on him, that freedom, like an aura’. When they got in the car, and he left behind that brief respite, that tetherlessness, ‘he sat back in the awful prison of himself, the old veils covered his eyes, and he did not say another word’. Sometimes forgetting and then remembering releases us, if only for a moment.

Something that helps us endure, that keeps us with the Trouble, is the company of writers.

•  •  •

In the collection in which Oliver’s ‘Staying Alive’ is published, there’s another essay where she writes about turtles, her ‘wild body’ and appetite. It’s called ‘Sister Turtle’. Among raptures on Shelley, Wordsworth, Blake and Basho, she writes about interrupting a snapping turtle busy with the patient work of burying her eggs in the sand. Returning in the evening to uncover the nest, Oliver pockets a dozen eggs, half of what’s there, for scrambling. She describes the large yolks, the tough shells that need to be nicked with a knife not broken on the pan, and the ‘little fertility knot’, the tight bud of the new turtle.

Aaron Billings

It reminds me of another woman writer I admire, Judith Wright, and specifically a poem published in her last volume, Phantom Dwelling. It is a collection of poetry that was never particularly well received, which reflects a different style and tone to her earlier, more celebrated works.

The title of the volume is a tribute to Basho and his prose poem written in 1690, ‘The Hut of the Phantom Dwelling’. It’s not clear why Wright borrowed this notion. It might be in reference to the husk of her then ageing body, or a more general reflection on the impermanence of one’s beliefs, of time.

The poem that Oliver’s turtle eggs reminds me of is titled ‘Memory’. Wright writes about her property, ‘drought’s changeable weather’, and the way landscape remembers the presence of her lover who camped there ‘three Decembers back’. The foursquare patch of kangaroo grass where the tent was pegged not yet sprouting back. There’s a sense of hope in this spectral presence, his phantom dwelling. It’s the unhealed place she passes on her way to swim in the river. She writes: ‘Even in mid-summer, the frogs aren’t speaking. / Their swamps are dry. In the eggs a memory lasts.’

Memory is the fertility knot.

We might interpret Didion’s urge to keep ‘nodding terms with the people we used to be’ as being about making amends, for a future, for the tight bud of new. Staying with the Trouble, as Donna Haraway implores, in this relentless moment of small and furious banishments must involve leveraging new critical directions from the past. Recuperative histories.

We ought to keep sifting through the Anthropocene’s loves and betrayals, letting the remembering release us for a moment from headlines of permanent devastation, so that we may focus on the important work we need to do. This work has to involve regaining some sense of certainty.

And even though hope has become almost too easy to write about precisely because it no longer seems credible, warranting hardly a commitment, we must continue. Because to do so, despite the at-times overwhelming repulsiveness of the present, is an act of survival. •

Claire Collie is a landscape sociologist, writing about spatial justice and the Anthropocene. She lives in central Victoria, where she gardens.

THE ART OF GOVERNANCE

Kate Larsen

AUSTRALIA’s ARTS BOARDS are broken. The very ground on which our arts organisations and institutions are built is unpredictable, unsteady and (increasingly) unsafe.

Whether it manifests in low-regulated incorporated associations, more closely monitored limited companies or statutory bodies, the essence of the sector’s governance model takes a team of volunteers with low-level, tangential or (we hope) transferable skills and experience and puts them in charge of a team of paid professionals.

At best, this is an idiosyncratic pairing: one in which free access to insights, networks and energy can act as an asset for institutions. But the conditions it creates are much more likely to be problematic, even damaging. And in a sector that is both increasingly complex and tenuous, the external pressures of politics, policies and the fight for funding have begun to shine a stage light on what this outdated governance model really looks like behind the scenes.

It’s not a pretty sight. Nightmare chairs. Boards that don’t stay in their lane. Boards that create more work than the benefits they return. Boards that can’t manage ineffective, difficult or downright dangerous CEOs, or don’t notice the damage they cause. Boards that fail in their duty of care to the people they employ. Boards that have lost our trust.

Some boards work better than others, of course. But no board gets all of it right all of the time. Instances of board dysfunction can be attributed to a range of factors—such as high-activity periods, extreme or unexpected circumstances, personality clashes and the loss of key players. But often the cause of such dysfunction can be directly traced back to the model itself.

In this, the incorporated associations of Australia’s small-to-medium arts sector are particularly at risk. As these organisations are subject to fewer rules and regulations, problems can go unnoticed (and unaddressed) for long periods of times—if addressed at all.

Yet the sector seems stuck in a loop of continual improvement—attempting to bend an unwieldy system into shape, or investing a significant proportion of its severely limited resources in training that doesn’t last longer than a board member’s maximum term.

Ours is a sector that has learnt how to bend without breaking. We’ve had to. But perhaps a break is what we really need—to throw the model out and start again. Or, more gently, to reflect, rethink and evolve. To create something that serves us, rather than something we have to serve. To envision a future with a radically different structure for our boards. Or a future without them entirely.

Ask a group of CEOs what their organisation needs from its board members. Ask a group of board members why they wanted to get involved. The areas of overlap are likely to be few.

Organisations will say: oversight, compliance and accountability, or free access to expert advice. They are likely to need ambassadors and advocates, people not only willing to activate their networks but to ask them for money (and then to ask them again).

Board members are likely to be more attracted to what the organisation does than how it does it, or to be driven by a desire to give back in ways that don’t always align with what the organisation needs. They are more likely to prioritise their own development over the organisation’s, to want to create new networks rather than sharing their own, and to be more interested in donating their time than their money (or to ask anyone else for theirs).

Fair enough, too. Board members aren’t the bad guys. Every single not-for-profit board member in Australia is expected to display an extraordinary level of altruism, not to mention the genuine passion and commitment that runs alongside. But the model fails them too: not making the most of their skills or their time, lacking focus and clarity, reinforcing poor practice, burning people out, and risking their reputations when things go terribly wrong.

The primary reason arts organisations need arts boards at all is because our legislation and constitutions say that’s what we need. But is that reason enough? Even when they’re working well, boards can be hard work. And when they’re not working well? Disaster.

We’ve all heard the stories. Boards that have too much decision-making power without enough understanding of their particular situation. Boards that don’t disclose (or ignore) conflicts of interest. Boards that don’t reflect the communities they are set up to represent, or who represent their own personal interests over and above those of the board. Boards that are inaccessible, non-inclusive or actively discriminatory. Absent boards. Toxic boards. Non-diverse monocultural boards. Way too operational boards. Micromanaging chairs who make life impossible for CEOs to lead. Board members who are bullies—overbearing, shouting, not letting others be heard. Board members who don’t do the work. Board members who damage the organisation’s relationships out in the world. Board members who don’t stay (or who stay way too long). Board members only in it for themselves.

Even some of our largest, most well-funded arts institutions seem at risk of self-combusting from within, with the Black Swan State Theatre Company’s board making headlines in 2019 with the decision to replace its executive director with one of its own members (temporarily, it turned out)—even though that person had no theatre management experience at the time.

All of this plays out in the context of Australia’s not-for-profit sector: a place that conflates high passion with low pay, and runs on the smell of an oil-painted rag. Now in our fifth consecutive year of significant funding cuts, this is also a sector that doesn’t have resources to spare. Not to mention the challenges presented by technology, climate change, a reduction in access to arts education and opportunities, and changing trends in engagement and audiences. The world isn’t changing, it’s already changed. The sector is simply not ready for the challenges it faces.

Is what we ask of these boards unreasonable in our new and changing environment? Or was the underlying governance model always unfit for purpose? Either way, we have the opportunity to use the current crisis to reform how our arts organisations operate. To change the conversation from ‘what boards do’ to ‘what we need boards to do’ (which may or may not need to be done by a board). To rebuild our trust in our arts boards or to build ourselves something else.

We already know how boards can do better in the model we have. We are well serviced by a governance industry that provides training and resources for each new generation of board members (usually for a fee). Advice ranges from addressing the (usually too high) workload boards require to service their (usually too frequent) meetings, to how present board members are in an organisation, and how they communicate with staff and with each other. Or from implementing reviews and recruitment targets to make sure boards are both representative and have the skills the organisation needs, to trusting their staff to do their jobs.

But all of these strategies address the symptoms that these boards create, rather than the question of what our arts institutions need from those boards. What would we create if we had the opportunity to start again from scratch? What would we do differently if unconstrained by legal or constitutional ties?

We could look to the governance models of different sectors or different countries, which have seen the value in installing multiple boards or committees for different tasks. Advisory boards for program ideas, for example. Fundraising boards that focus on sustainability and development. More diverse and representative boards that address the institutional biases of the past. We could look at the sector’s own predilection for hub and shared-resource models, in order to avoid duplication across similar organisations. Or we could redirect our governance budget lines to outsource our compliance and oversight to external, trained professionals.

The arts are transformational. We need to transform our arts organisations too—in order to survive and thrive. And rebuild them on more solid ground. •

Kate Larsen is a non-profit and cultural consultant, arts manager and writer with more than 20 years experience across Australia, Asia and Britain. Find her @katelarsenkeys. Her website is <larsenkeys.com.au>.

MEN FEELING IMPORTANT

Peter Polites

PARKING IS EASY when I go to the Morning Owl Café because it’s in the middle of an industrial area. As I walk to the café from my car, I see an overgrown grassy strip between two warehouses. There is nothing in the fenced-off space and it can’t be accessed.

At the counter I order knafeh French toast and a cold-brew coffee. I see my co-workers outside and sit down on the picnic bench with them. I greet them with a ‘What’s up, fuckos?’ They cover their mouths to laugh. Of the five of us, three have had controlling, abusive patriarchs in our lives. When I pay close attention, I can see it when they interact with customers. Now I know why we all clicked. As a young man I didn’t understand why I got on with these kinds of people, why I seemed to be drawn to their scent, energy or the way they communicated. Now all I have to do is dig into their past.

We all sit around a wooden picnic table with a giant umbrella that covers us, blocking out the sunlight. My cold-drip coffee comes in a stemless wine glass, the bouquet of the coffee has citrus and floral notes. My eyes skim the rim of the glass as I watch a woman in a niqab walk into the café. At first glance, the woman is a wall of black. When I look closer, I can see the material around her waist is cinched and the shoes she wears are satinblack ballet flats that tie around her ankle. She glides through the café and the niqab becomes a floating cape trailing behind her.

One of my co-workers has mixed Mediterranean heritage so I call her Mezze after the plate of mixed appetisers. Mezze is as short as Smurfette. Mezze is slight but puffs up because she has harmful bacteria in her stomach. Yesterday a customer at work who could have been her father yelled at her. He stood over her, his hands reaching for molecules, grabbing at invisible air. But her posture didn’t collapse, her voice remained firm. I stood out of sight a few metres away, ready to jump in, but I wasn’t needed. The man had come in for a fight. He kept slapping the last-bet button too hard and was repeatedly told to cease. Some men just look for a fight—the only thing they know is the fight. Mezze told him to leave; I watched him smile on the way out. He was fully satisfied at the outcome.

•  •  •

I was kneeling over a chain of dandelions when I heard Mama’s voice from the top of the steps. Just as my thumbnail sliced the stem of a stalk, she called me in. The sun was setting late and we were having dinner early. My older sister was in high school and I was still in primary school. My sister’s hair was getting shorter. When she started wearing blue jeans in public my father became upset, he yelled that blue jeans were only for workers. When we lived in Greece on the farm, I couldn’t pronounce her name. Anastasia became Sitsa and I changed it to Tsi Tsa: the Greek colloquial for pee. I called her Pee because of my own inability to speak. As a teen in Australia she accented her pale skin and short hair with maroon lips. It was the 1990s. She moved into a black phase. She wore black jeans and a black tank. Sometimes, there was a choker. At the dinner table she drank water from a tumbler and fought with my father. On the table there were always four bowls of faki, sliced carrots, a tub of tarama and Vienna bread.

•  •  •

The island my parents came from was occupied by the Viennese, so my family calls any ordinary unsliced loaf Vienna bread. During dinner Dad liked to talk about his time in the air force. He would point a finger in the air, point at each molecule floating around as he made pronouncements. He said that women weren’t in the air force because they have small brains like mangos, but men have brains like a watermelon. Some men want to talk and feel important even if they are wrong. Pee would arc up. What are you even talking about? What’s even the point of you? She scooped up some of the faki into her mouth, put the spoon on her plate and told him he was wrong and to go fuck himself. She stood up, pushing the chair back, swearing as she went to her room to study.

As I sit with my four colleagues around a picnic table, there is an umbrella stopping the sun from finding us with light. One of my co-workers is half Anglo and half Mediterranean. We Greeks categorise Anglos as white Australian, white British or white American. The kind of people who drink alcohol without eating food and call it culture. I try to translate things from Greek into English like the sun bringing us light, but I know that a different sun falls on my ancestral island than the one in Australia. I don’t burn under the light the Greek sun brings. Everyone says that there is a hole in the ozone layer and it hovers over Australia. My sister Pee told me this at the dinner table when I was eight, so I used SPF until my skin became allergic to it and blemishes started to appear on my thigh. There was nothing that could protect me from what the sun brought and I imagine the translation of this thought into Greek, then back into English. It makes me think of my Anglo-Mediterranean co-worker who sits opposite me at the Morning Owl Café. I wonder, can she think in the language of her Mediterranean ancestry and does it transmute into English? If we think in experiences and make sense of them through our language, how does each different language redefine the telling of the experience?

Maternal women are drawn to my Anglo-Mediterranean colleague. Her head is like an Easter Island statue made of panna cotta. Once I saw an older woman try to wipe a coffee stain off my colleague’s shirt. She stood back, asked if she could take the rag and wipe herself down. People gathered around to see the brown coffee stain. The elder women tried to paw at her while she turned to face the spirit bottles, cleaning the mess on her own. ‘I can do it on my own,’ she said to everyone, to herself, to her mother when she called her at work to bring her food. Her skin doesn’t burn under this Australian sun. It’s not the 1990s but my co-worker wears choker necklaces, just like my sister did. Fashion is cyclical, like memories.

Pee was sporty and she faced off bravely against her adversaries, but only shared her tears with me. She played basketball and I went to watch and be proud of my big sister until she kneed someone in the thigh and got sent off. Her teammates called her Killer.

At 16 I spent six weeks in Greece with Mum. Dad and my sister picked us up from the airport. When we were both in the backseat of the Kingswood I asked Pee how it had been with Dad and she started crying. We bent our heads together and she said that she never wanted to be alone with him again. He tried painting the house when we were gone. He did it over the whole six-week duration, using oil-based paints with chemicals that lingered, causing headaches the whole time. Most nights she studied in the library, but needed to come home to eat and sleep.

His need was to talk, for ears, for an audience. She would cut him off every time he pointed a finger to the sky and started a story with ‘In my experience at the air force’ and she would walk away midsentence. When he realised this, he changed tactics. He burst into her room, finding reasons to make her listen. She hung the bathroom towel wrong! She left a shoe out of place! So she stood up to match his yelling, stepping towards him until he left the room. While I was in Greece the girl became industrial strength.

At the Morning Owl Café, the food is placed on our table by a young man who wears a magnetic band on his wrist. Four symbols of religion are tattooed on his knuckles. The cross, the Star of David, the crescent moon, the aum. One of my colleagues has a sharp brown nose. As I start to complain about my family, she discusses reading my first novel, Down the Hume. She says that it seemed like the father character was frustrated, like something in his life was missing. She is just past her fifties but looks a decade younger. Men and women alike are drawn to her confidence and perfect curls. Married men confide to her that they are unhappy with their wives.

She posits that her impression of the father character was one of absence, that he was enacting an anger towards his son because he was unhappy with his sex life. I smell, then sip my cold brew. She suggests that maybe he had unresolved sexuality. She thinks that there may be jealousy towards the son. My French toast with knafeh arrives. The clotted cream is in the middle and there is a drizzle of rose water syrup over the fried bread. She clarifies that she meant this about the characters in the book. I get ready to say something, point my finger to the air molecules around me, before I answer her, but I know that some men just want to talk, to feel important. •

Peter Polites is a writer who lives in western Sydney. He has published two novels with Hachette, Down the Hume (2017) and The Pillars (2019).

BORDER CONTROL

Shannon Burns

MY MOTHER WAS the Greek tragedy comedy epic that I grew up with. She would sit in front of a mirror for an eternity each morning, applying thick makeup and arranging her hair. Then she’d put on a very short skirt—black or brightly coloured, sometimes without underwear—before selecting items from her treasure chest of jewellery. When she took me to the shops, cars honked their horns and men whistled. When she picked me up at school, the other mothers glared. She dealt with these attentions as though they were natural, taking pride in being noticed and what she regarded as the jealousy of other women.

At night, if she was short on cash, she would go to a nearby pub (often with me in tow) and reel men in. When desperate, she approached parishioners at the local church and pleaded for money or food vouchers. At night, she called home-visit doctors and coaxed them into supplying the pain relief that she was addicted to; several of them disappeared into her room for a long while—far longer, I suspect, than it takes to prepare an injection.

I can bring to mind her most conspicuous physical features: thick lips, blue eyeshadow, brown eyes, a shortsighted squint. The two samples of her speech that I can readily conjure are from late in my boyhood, between the ages of eight and ten, when I was in and out of her care and moving from house to house, school to school, from near-strangers to grandparents to well-meaning (Mormon!) churchgoers to foster care. I recall her warning: ‘Don’t condescend to me, young man,’ which offers some insight into my temperament as a boy, as well as her pretensions; and a shrill, squawking, ‘You bastards!’ that she called out repeatedly, along with other obscenities, after her mother and younger male siblings forced us out of their home one evening.

I understood why they decided to kick us out: she had taken one too many liberties and thrown their world into chaos. But my sympathy was soured by the realisation that she was now my problem to deal with alone. I was only ten, but I’d come to wish that I could be rid of her as well.

We walked the streets of Smithfield for what seemed like hours (it probably wasn’t). My mother called whoever she could think of from a payphone near a playground, while I sat dully on a swing. I had already been sent to live with the family members, friends, neighbours and acquaintances who were generous or foolish enough to take me in, and none were willing to fall into that trap again—the trap of caring for a child indefinitely, until his mother reappeared.

Eventually, a bearded man with unfriendly eyes came and took us to his house, which resembled a compound. It had a fence as high as the roof, and other men came and went at all hours of the night. I recall their lower bodies moving around in the yard and in the house, but nothing of their faces. I may have been too frightened to look up.

I stayed there long enough to attend yet another school, and to take ownership of a stray kitten and a broken watch. Early one morning, the man with the unfriendly eyes instructed us to collect our clothes and sleeping bags. The house wasn’t safe anymore, he said, so we packed a car while the two dogs that guarded the yard were driven away by the men. One of the dogs came back and was promptly kicked in the guts. It ran off again, but as we drove away I saw it sniffing near the back fence. The kitten was left to fend for itself.

We were out of options. Yiayia wasn’t pleased to see us, but Mum pleaded shamelessly, and we were permitted to stay for the night. The following morning she announced that it was time for me to go back to my father, but he wanted to speak to me over the phone first, so I should tell him that I was eager to be with him.

I thought I’d be compelled to live with my father, but that was a fantasy. I quickly learned that he and my stepmother were only entertaining the prospect of allowing me into their home at my stepsister’s insistence. She liked the idea of having a brother to share her wretchedness with,