I Reject Your Metric

By James a Murray

I REJECT YOUR METRIC is thirty-four Creative Nonfiction essays and short stories by Australian writer James a Murray.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tellwell Talent
• Release date: Jul 30, 2020
• ISBN: 9781922440129

James a Murray

James a Murray lives in the bush(in the Northern Territory, Australia)and is happy.

Book preview

Motion Sickness

We called it ‘car sick’. We said it pre-literate, kasik, us four small children hurtling around the 1960s sprawl in the back of Mum’s or Dad’s car. This was before seatbelts, and Mum would drive one hand on the wheel, one hand swinging about hitting us. I’d vomit out the window, careful to keep it out, putting my head out in the gale of the car’s great speed and aiming backwards. Mum gave us kasik tablets, and I remember seeing them in the streams clinging to the sides of the car. It’s like seasickness: same thing. People get used to it, some quicker than others. It’s being thrown about, accelerating and decelerating, going up and down and left and right. Your body can’t handle it, and ‘packs it in’.

I lived in three houses in two states in my childhood, then ten houses over eight years in inner Brisbane whilst travelling wildly. Then I travelled wider and lived in six houses in five states over seven years before ‘settling’ (with much travelling and some living interstate) in Darwin, umpteen houses over twenty-odd years, before coming out here, seventy kilometres from town. I’ve been here almost three years, longer than anywhere I’ve been as an adult. And I’ve been here all day every day, deep in the bush, long enough for my motion sickness to quell, long enough to see how sick I was, how wildly I was thrown about.

I’ve been waiting for rain. It will rain soon, of course. The earth swings out then swings back. I see the signs: the cycads came out weeks ago, and metre-long fronds now radiate from their posts everywhere throughout the bush, and I’ve been here long enough to know they are early this year. And half the other trees (that lose all or most of their leaves in April and May) are leaving, a refreshing sign of confidence, the bush beefing up, and the cicadas have been out for weeks, and the Wet Season birds have arrived – Magpie Geese honking overhead and the Rainbirds back from Indonesia, calling, one here, one there, more each day, and yesterday the Pheasant Coucal did its first WUWUWUWU – but no rain. There’s a banyan tree here, bare, and this time last year it was a mass of vibrant green, and I worry like a parent waiting for their child to come home. I worry about a couple of ironwoods here too, though last year they didn’t show any life until mid-October. But it’s funny: the other ironwoods nearby have been pouring out greenery for a fortnight. What brings it on? Not rain – last year and this year the Dry seasons have been entirely dry. Day length? Angle of sun? Temperature? Humidity? Barometric pressure? There is a precision in each tree’s genes that sets the criteria for the switch to be flicked, the floodgates to boom open, but rain would help, surely. Rain would help us all. And I’ve been wanting rain particularly and personally because I’m worried about fire, there being far too many fires. Dark clouds have been building up in this week’s afternoons and they are rainclouds, not smoke, and there’s been the occasional shower nearby, and I heard Spencer Road got twelve mill the other day – twelve mill could snap the fire season shut. And these are my concerns: rain, fire, the banyan and the ironwoods.

I got up in the night and went back to bed but didn’t fall back asleep. After five minutes I realised I was awake for the day, so I got up. I lit the lamp and put the kettle on, and then I picked up my phone – 3:46. Too early! Normally I’m up around five o’clock. I stand for a minute, considering going back to bed, then I walk off to the toilet, fifty metres through the bush. The moon is big and bright, no need for a torch. I hear a wallaby thump away from me, a possum growl, then the curlews are crying, setting each other off in every direction, then they stop. It’s quiet. Traffic can be heard for miles but there’s nothing there. I look at the moon, a day or two passed full, high in the west. I look at the light my lamp makes, the little outline of my camp, and I walk back to it. I make coffee. I consider the radio – Big Ideas would be finishing; I could get the four o’clock news. But I’ve given up on the radio. I sit and pick up my phone. I check my emails first, and there’s something from Rose. She’s in her office all day with nothing to do, so she surfs the net, and sometimes she sends me the ‘link’ to something she thinks I’ll be interested in, and this morning there are three links. The first is a story and photos of the actress Julia Roberts on the red carpet, barefoot. The second is a story and photos of the actress Kristen Stewart, barefoot on the red carpet, holding her high heels in her hands. Rose has sent me these because I am always barefoot, and I appreciate her gesture, spending some minutes gazing at these beautiful women in their various poses, occasionally picking up my cup.

There are things that happen to a child in the back seat of a car. The kid is so small he can’t see over the front seat, he cannot see the road the car will go. He may be asleep, with no conscious­ness of the forces acting upon him, but there he is leaning to the right, his shoulder and head pressing against his brother who is also leaning starboard, his sister and the dog bearing hard his way on his left. And then there is a moment when the force directing him to the right is gone, his mother rounding the long left-hand curve, and his head and shoulders regain their place above his hips, his sister and brother with a little shudder regaining their equilibrium too, perhaps with a few seconds of being pushed back slightly. And I felt it this morning, in the quiet dark, phone in one hand, cup in the other. I closed my eyes and felt it, the long outswing finished, and the hovering, the hanging in the air, before – it’s there, unmistakable – the seeds, the germs, the incremental gather of swing back. Humankind has gone as far as it can go, and now it’s coming