Meanjin Vol 82, No 1

By Meanjin Quarterly

Light, air and the autumn wind. Good drying weather. Ethics and history and peace and war and the laundry. Taking stock. Abandoned cities, lost children, political legacies emptied of all honour. 孝弟也者、其为仁之本与. How we commemorate, and what we forget. The cost of education, the cost of living, the costs of doing nothing. Insects, birds, bulls, deer, saplings, forests, the Great Barrier Reef. Ethical beekeeping, hydrogeology, the second person. Ruin porn and inspiration porn. Solar Punk and Chengyu and the Argonauts. Housing and home, love and Metta, class and compassion. Understanding where it is that we exist when we’re gathering our forces. Let’s get our house in order – and prepare for what comes next.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Melbourne University Publishing Ltd
• Release date: Mar 16, 2023
• ISBN: 9780522879711

Book preview

BEEKEEPING AS AN ACT OF RESISTANCE

Bethany Patch

RESISTING THE COMMODIFICATION of our lives can take many forms, and one that feels right to me is beekeeping.

I first became interested in beekeeping when a friend I was living with had a hive that he would gently tend to in our back yard. I was attracted to the attuned seasonality of keeping bees, the endless fascination they provided and the way bees drew me away from overwhelming life to focus on something immediate and tactile. I also appreciated that back-yard beekeeping wasn’t profit-driven like so many aspects of our lives are now, whether for our own profit or the profit of corporations.

Capitalism has created mounting pressure for our lives to be as productive and profitable as possible, and not just while we’re at work. I can feel the pressure permeating my everyday activities, pushing me to strive for ‘success’ in everything I do, manipulating my priorities and exploiting my creativity every day. Even simple hobbies—ideally intended as a break from the live-to-work grind—feel output-driven as we further succumb to what Marx would call ‘commodity fetishism’.

Other times, the product is our own attention and emotion. Take doom-scrolling, for example. Social media’s addictive architecture is creating a vacuum that harvests our attention, time, energy and emotional responses to generate profit for others while barely gratifying us. With so many aspects of our lives being manipulated in a similar way—extracting our energy for profit while offering us the bare minimum in return—it feels increasingly important to learn to resist this influence on a personal level, to reclaim a sense of connection and calm.

Jenny Odell, the artist and writer of How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy, might describe beekeeping as a form of ‘resistance-in-place’. Odell examines our relationship with the attention economy, highlighting that our attention is now a currency for corporations. ‘To resist in place,’ she writes, ‘is to make oneself into a shape that cannot so easily be appropriated by a capitalist value system. To do this means refusing the frame of reference: in this case, a frame of reference in which value is deterred by productivity, the strength of one’s career, and individual entrepreneurship.’ This has helped me understand the importance of making sure there are pieces of myself that can’t be so easily exploited.

I began to see that ‘doing nothing’ in this context doesn’t mean sitting and staring at a wall or television all day, but rather reclaiming my own attention to connect more deeply with my immediate surroundings. As Odell writes, this is ‘a refusal to believe that the present time and place, and the people who are here with us, are somehow not enough’. And so I came to see my beekeeping as an important piece of my practice of resistance-in-place—a resistance that requires constant vigilance to fight the temptation of doom-scrolling or laying on the lounge room floor watching Daria reruns, which are all the more tempting in the mental health wake of lockdowns.

Of course, beekeeping is an obvious act of resistance against ecological degradation, given that we can’t survive without bees, which was one of the main reasons I was drawn to beekeeping as a hobby. But in addition to the environmental benefits of managing a box full of happy pollinators, beekeeping is also imbued with a deepening of care, community, attention and connection to place.

The history of ethical beekeeping reflects the respect that humans have always had for bees. Humans originally carried our bees on our backs as we migrated from country to country, and we have largely nurtured this relationship that has supported our survival for thousands of years. However, the commercial and arguably less ethical beekeeping practice required to keep food on our tables, where we can’t grow it ourselves, has heavily exploited this relationship. In Australia, up to 30 per cent of our fresh food is pollinated by bees, mostly in industrial farms across the country, and this is undoubtedly traumatic for the bees that are packed and shipped over and over again to pollinate crops, while also having their honey stripped for sale.

But in the context of my back-yard beekeeping, I live in a gentle kind of co-dependency with additional space to be filled the bees. With wild bee with honey and baby numbers across Australia bees, moderate potential declining each year due to swarming activity and to climate change, disease and make sure the queen bee pesticides, I feel honoured is healthy. But winter, when with the privilege of tending to even one hive at my city rental. Their existence doesn’t depend on me, but I can be here to provide safe shelter for them in the hope of increasing their chances of survival without interfering too much with their needs. In return, I am increasing the rates of pollination in my neighbourhood and am given the opportunity to harvest free honey if there is excess available. This honey doesn’t exist for profit either. I never sell it, only trading a jar here or there for things like a fresh homegrown zucchini or a box set of Seinfeld DVDs for my mum. I become a passive custodian of the bees, our needs intersecting non-competitively instead of through demand or exchange for profit.

For many back-yard beekeepers, opening the hive to work with the bees is a solitary exercise that calls for more care than many other routine activities. Bees can sense a beekeeper’s agitation, so the act of checking the hive requires a deep calm that I have struggled to find through other avenues. I move slowly and with intention, moving smoothly around the bees, listening to how they’re reacting, removing frames for inspection, surveying them with mindful visual notetaking, before returning each frame to the hive. The process is all-consuming, drawing me so fully out of myself that it feels like tunnel vision.

Beekeeping also requires different kinds of care at different times of year, which deepens and diversifies the caregiving experience in ways that I think the commodified world struggles to do for us. For example, summer is by far the busiest beekeeping period, when regular checks are encouraged to monitor for disease, provide I can’t open the hive due to the cold weather, becomes a season of mindful observation and preparation for the coming warmer months. This rhythmic cycle provides a chance to reflect and improve my practice over time, which is something that feels rare in innovation-driven working environments, or on social media where you’re prompted to react immediately or lose the opportunity.

While the tending is often solitary, beekeepers are anything but isolated, and there is an incredible camaraderie in the local beekeeping community. There are several online groups that are usually very supportive, but it’s the ‘offline’ groups that are especially enjoyable. When I started out, ten other beginners and I learnt the basics of beekeeping at a bee school, of sorts, through a local community centre. It was through this group that I eventually bought my first small box of bees to support. When I told the group that I wouldn’t be able to catch up as often because I was moving to Flemington, a suburb further away, they were excited that I would live near the roses growing at Flemington’s famous racecourses and told me to keep a tastebud out for rose-tinted flavours in the honey. I still call this group’s teacher whenever I need beekeeping advice.

In a refreshing shift from the alienation that comes with living and working in an over-capitalised world, where it’s each for their own, these beekeeping groups act as a rare, lateral support network. Beekeepers are often charitable and generous with their time, always very happy to share their experiences with me and learn from my mistakes or lessons in kind. Stanislava Pinchuk, a Ukrainian-Australian artist, spoke eloquently in a 2020 episode of Australian podcast Mont Icons of the mutual, charitable friendship that beekeepers around the world feel towards each other. ‘There’s just such a curiosity about how you do it, what your bees are like, the nuances of your place and your seasons,’ she said. ‘You just learn by talking and doing. So beekeepers have this really amazing kind of charity wherever you go. And this real understanding of the care of what you do.’

Counter to my more mindless hobbies is the attention that tending to bees inspires in me—attention that varies in its depth of focus, ranging from passive observation to meditative focus, unlike the homogenous, habitual energy I give Instagram. Whereas a walk or housework might be accompanied by a podcast, there is no attention spared for multitasking while the hive is open. Through a growing admiration of these tiny creatures and a fascination with the never-ending complexity of a bee’s world, I spend more spare time quietly watching the front of the hive: alert to any unusual movement, listening to the gentle hum of worker bees and the slightly louder buzz of drone bees, smelling the sweet wafts of new honey, and admiring the rhythmic order that rules their lives.

I find myself connecting more intimately to the environment around me as well—not to the buildings, roads or other industrial structures that usually define a suburb, but to the Wurundjeri bioregion that surrounds me yet often escapes my notice. When I watch bees coming and going from the hive with endlessly changing coloured pollen on their legs—often soft yellow or white, sometimes bright pink—I can’t help but wonder where they’ve collected it from.

While bees use their foraged pollen to feed themselves in the short term, they are also carrying nectar that is used to make honey: a blend of nectar collected between one and six kilometres from the hive. Knowing this means that I naturally pay much closer attention to the blossoms in my local area each week, to see if I might be able to notice what the bees bring home. The colour of pollen and the flavour of honey of course changes with the time of year. From my own neighbourhood, bees forage from sweet-scented daphne flowers during winter and bright lemon or pittosporum flowers during autumn and spring. I am more inclined to notice autumn lavender and summer rosemary flowers bursting out of my neighbours’ front yards, ready to be foraged from.

Council-planted peppermint or lemon-scented gum trees are dotted across the parks and streets, while silver banksia and river red gums line the local creek beds, keeping the bees busy and my attention pleasantly occupied all year round. Before beekeeping I would have walked to the tram stop with headphones blaring, face in my phone, but now I have the awareness to look for flowers in bloom and wonder whether I’ll be able to notice their flavours in my bees’ honey. Practising this level of sensory attention is not only a meditative reprieve from the daily grind, it also deepens my understanding and knowledge of my own spatial context and offers the salve of an enriched locality—a kind of therapy in my post-COVID mental health recovery.

This return of attention to the meaningful detail of everyday life and how it intersects with commodity fetishism is captured in resistance poet Elena Gomez’s collection Admit the Joyous Passion of Revolt:

I’ll forget to pay attention. The vines in my

own backyard.

Can someone recall what we named them?

I’m always distracted.

I’ve got Chelsea Blue jeans.

But I remember. The vine that was

ready to escape my backyard was called

Electrolyte. I remembered because I

would wrap it up around me when I woke

hungover many mornings.

Through the bees and the practice of keeping them, I can feel the status quo of ruthless competition, profit hunger and hyper-productivity briefly punctuated. Their passive power draws my attention away from the forces that commodify it, directing it towards something that feels slower and more meaningful: the gift of calm connection. •

Bethany Patch is a writer and socialist living in Naarm and working as a science communicator. She has written for Jacobin, the Guardian and Overland.

ON LIVED EXPERIENCE

Danijel Malbasa

IN 2008 I was invited to travel to the United Nations in New York as part of a delegation of law students from South Australia. I remember getting a phone call from the organiser of the UN trip, and after he patiently listened to my litany of reasons why I could not go—my casual work, upcoming exams, other commitments—he interrupted and asked: ‘Is it because you can’t afford the flights?’ I denied it and said that was not the reason, but he persisted. He offered to fundraise for me so I could go. I was too proud to accept his offer. At that stage I was still ‘closeted’ about my refugee identity. I didn’t feel it was my burden to carry. Besides, I didn’t have the language with which to describe it.

But somehow the organiser of the trip (one of the other law students) had found out where I came from. He knew because when our professor projected dead bodies from the Yugoslav Wars so the class could understand what crimes against humanity look like, I would walk out of the lecture theatre discreetly in case I recognised neighbours exhumed from the mass graves. He said he wanted me to go and speak at the United Nations as a survivor of multiple wars who had lived through the refugee experience multiple times, and as someone who had used the UN’s mechanisms to find safety here in Australia. He felt I had something to say from the ‘coalface’ to those who make decisions that so often create refugees.

Yet I was the only one who didn’t go. Somehow the idea of a working-class kid from the northern suburbs of Adelaide travelling to New York to speak at the United Nations seemed like a laughable pipe dream. I didn’t even bother asking family for support because that was never an option. Besides, during my time at university they continually urged me to leave and ‘get a real job’. These sorts of experiences you shoulder alone.

I am reluctant to use the language of class to describe this experience. It seems too sharp. I liked the students in my class. They didn’t choose to be born into wealth. I didn’t choose to be born into war. They were worldly, spoke fluent French—the result of attending schools named after saints and princes. They didn’t believe that Balkan people are predisposed to violence and throw their hands up in resignation. They took a genuine interest in the root causes of my war. Several of them could afford to work as interns in the trial for my country in The Hague to put into practice what we had learned in our law class.

One of them worked on Ratko Mladic’s defence team. Mladic wrote her a letter. She brought this letter, written by a war criminal who had committed one of the biggest genocides of the twentieth century, all the way back to Adelaide. It was like getting a personal letter from Göring, Goebbels or Eichmann. She asked me to read it. It was written in elegant Cyrillic blue ink on lined paper in the same handwriting that issued the order sending all those men and boys to their deaths. It was titled ‘To the Beautiful Girl from Australia’. It gave me the chills. Some of it I decided not to translate.

But these students had the means with which to realise their potential by participating in extracurricular activities in those formative years. I didn’t. This is how your identity and your class intersect and are experienced simultaneously. By going to the UN, they went to a place where you learn how to move motions, attend plenaries, build networks, present well, write and talk nicely. Such an experience is alien to and out of reach for working-class kids of Salisbury East.

But the irony, of course, was almost too much to contemplate. Here I was the only one in the entire institution with all this lived experience at the core of the UN’s mandate, unable to participate because of my socioeconomic circumstances. Fifteen years on, I still remember that phone call. I remember how the humiliation burned my face. Now I never miss an opportunity to speak about the plight of refugees because I know how it feels to be voiceless because of where you come from. I recently spoke in the Blue Mountains at a weekend-long conference organised by that awesome group of humans Rural and Regional Australians for Refugees (RRAR). I was greeted in true country hospitality: picked up at the train station, driven to a cosy cottage, handed a wicker basket full of food, the fire already roaring and crackling in the fireplace. It was a warm way to welcome a refugee. •

Danijel Malbasa is a Melbourne-based union lawyer. He writes on multiple refugee experience and identity. His writing can be found in the Guardian, the Balkanist, the Canberra Times, on SBS and the ABC.

Messaging

π.o.

      A spider caught 17 flies. (Gave

8 away). 18 blackbirds, landed on the clothes line.

All spiders, have got 12 eyes. There are 41

cakes in the cake shop. A bloke came by, and

bought 8. There are 38 mice in the cupboard. (7 more

arrive). Think of a number … ÷ it by 5. There are

16 frogs in the freezer. Who wants to die?

A tall green bottle fell out of the sky. (8 monkeys

nearby, went ape). The distance between

2 given points, is |←a →|! Subtract the time

it takes 7 people to walk around the block. (There are

35 people all looking up at the clock). You need

to know whether you can do something in

15 minutes, or 8. Every digit in the Food Court, is

8, 8, 8, 8, 8, … What kind of a number is that? [Add in

a line]. I’m the sum of an Answer, ÷ by 5.

11 kids on the shore line are all splashing ✓✓✓✓✓✓ about.

12 sharks—)))) ) ) ) ) in the water, are all

circling around. There are 136 flowers in

the garden, Gary picked 8; (put 3 in a vase) (one

night) (and ate late). There are 36 butterflies

in the greenhouse … Which one is mine? 4 snails

come into the garden; Who wants to die! 96.6% of

everything i come up with is Mickey Mouse.

There are 3 basic styles of singing, alto, contralto,

soprano, and double bass. How many 1’s are there in

a decimal place? A quarter of my tongue—is

sticking out of my face; Em-i-C, Kay, Ee,

Why … Es,-Ee. That’s what we all look

like now, t/e/x/t/i/n/g behind,

      2 thumbs.

MEMOIR

LIFE OF A FOLK DEVIL

Michael Mohammed Ahmad

Illustrated by Matt Chun

‘There’s just one kind of folks. Folks.’

—Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

1986

The midwives are horrified when they see the size of my head on my way out of the birth canal. I am born with a bright olive complexion and a big nose in the public birthing unit of Royal Prince Alfred Hospital. Mum, a rug-rider who’s been here for the past sixteen years, tells the nurse I am to be named after the prophet, ‘Mohammed’. The nurse, a convict who’s been here for one-hundredand-ninety-eight years, snorts and replies, ‘That’s no good. Call him Michael.’

1987

Kes emak. Your mum’s cunt. First words. Don’t judge. I learn them from my mother. She is at Coles in Redfern, and I am nestled in her arms like a koala, and this barefoot man with flaky white skin is calling her a towel head and refusing to let us through the doorway. ‘Kes-em-ak!’ my mum spits, punctuating each syllable at him like three ballistic bullets. Immediately, the man pounces sideways, like he knows Arabic, and my mother struts through the passageway. My gape clamps onto a bloodshot pair of bulging eyeballs, and I’m all, ‘ke-ke-ke’ and ‘es-es-es’ and ‘em-em-em’ and ‘ak-ak-ak’.

1988

One aunt and one uncle on my father’s side die of measles in Tripoli. Australian prime minister Malcolm Fraser agreed to resettle my grandparents and their remaining eight children in the inner-west slums of Erskineville. Sixteen years of go-back-to-where-you-came-from later, my second-oldest uncle, Ibrahim, arrives home with a black eye and a bloodied right hand. My grandmother, Yocheved, whose arms are like plastic bags filled with warm water, and my dad, Jaffar, whose arms are chiselled like concrete, and youngest aunt, Mariam, whose arms are bronzed and thin like a stick insect, are all screaming in Ibrahim’s face, ‘Shu saur?’ which means ‘What happened?’ Ibrahim grinds down on his cracked teeth and screeches ‘scrumble’ as my mum places a bundle of ice wrapped in a chequered tablecloth over his throbbing eye. ‘Abos and Wogs versus Aussies!’ he declares, rising his battered red knuckles into the air as though he’s a Black Panther. Waking up and wandering through the living room in the middle of the night, I stick my eye through the keyhole of the door that leads to the back yard. Uncle Ibrahim is standing under a florescent light-bulb, shoulder against the brick wall of the small enclosure, trying to steady his hands as he sucks a spoon of white powder into a syringe. Then he bends over, drops his Adidas tracksuit pants, and injects the needle into his hairy butt-cheek.

1989

Scimitar swinging above his head, Bluto is riding through the desert on a horse, only his skin tone is darker than usual and he calls himself ‘Abu Hassan’. Forty thieves ride behind him: starched flesh, spaghetti limbs, bloated torsos, tiny black beards and turbans around their penises and heads like nappies. They mutter in gibberish, but with all the ‘khs’ it sounds like Arabic, and they kidnap Olive Oil, who shrieks in English, ‘Saaaave meeee, Pop-eyeeeee.’ Abu Hassan and his forty thieves take her to their cave, where they make her wash their clothes in a barrel full of soap and water, and they call her ‘yashi’, which means nothing, but sounds like ‘jahshi’, which means ‘donkey’, and so I think, donkey. Popeye arrives at the entrance to the cave, and commands it to open, not with ‘Open Sesame’ but with ‘Open Says Me’. Abu Hassan and his forty thieves are knocked around as bowling pins against Popeye’s can of spinach and bulging forearms. I am so starved for representation; it slaps a broad dim-witted smile across my copper-ridden cheeks.

1990

Arab parents tell me that like all Aussies, Chuck is scum. One night he’s roaring ‘slut fuck shit’ in the street. He has about five of his big Aussie friends with him and his fifteen-year-old daughter Rachel. My third-oldest uncle, Amar, has gone to get Kentucky Fried Chicken for his baby girls and is pulling in to park his car when we hear Chuck walk over and give one of the doors a kick. There’s muffled screaming so we run out of our tight inner-west house and see Uncle Amar holding Chuck down and swinging at him with a club lock. Dad, Uncle Ibrahim and their youngest sibling, Uncle Ali, grab on to their short wiry brother and drag him away. Chuck’s friends fill the streets of Erskineville and Alexandria and Newtown with drunken laughter, and Rachel, whose shorts are so short I can see the bottom lines of her arse, is shouting that her father was just mucking around after a drink like he always does and us sand people should piss off back to Islamabad. ‘We’re from the Middle East,’ Uncle Ali says as they tug Amar into the house. Rachel pulls down on her shorts and pokes out her flipper-shaped tongue. ‘Same shit!’

1991

The first day of kindergarten, there is an assembly on the school quadrangle in which I am introduced to the principal, Mr Whitehead, an old man with a nose like a rotten piece of cauliflower. The sun is strong this morning, but the branches from the trees surrounding the concrete floor provide just enough shade for me to keep my eyes open. ‘I am the Arthur Phillip of Alexandria Public School,’ Mr Whitehead declares. Then he talks about being kind to the new kids, especially the five-year-olds; respecting your teachers, especially Mrs Lionheart, who’s serving her thirty-ninth year; the importance of honouring our national anthem, especially the ‘young and free’ part; and loving ‘aborigines’, especially the Year 6 boy named Dizzy, because he plays the didgeridoo and can throw and catch a boomerang. Finally, as the bell goes for class, Whitehead says, ‘We are particularly proud of our multiculturals. If you speak a language other than English, stand up.’ I spring to my feet like zamzam water, along with my brother, who is in Year 1, and this girl from Year 3 who is skinny and has straight black hair like Bruce Lee in Enter the Dragon. From the front of the assembly, I stare back upon a sea of dull pink faces. Mr Whitehead instructs all two hundred of them to applaud for us, and the Aussies put their hands together like a bunch of circus seals. ‘Harder,’ demands Whitehead, ‘clap harder!’ Directly above my black curls there is a scuffle in the leaves, and I cock my head to see a white pigeon on the edge of a branch. Flying off, it discharges a thick blotch of bleached shit that spirals straight down towards me and splatters between my eyebrows.

1992

Ya gotta keep rewinding and pausing the VHS tape at the exact right moment, while Van Damme is pulling up his maroon undies, in order to get a good look at his perfectly moulded arse. He plays Frank Dux, an American martial artist who competes against the world’s best fighters in the underground full-contact tournament called the Kumite. On the opening day of the Kumite, Frank Dux’s first fight is against a sun-kissed man in a traditional Saudi headdress named Hossein. As soon as the bell rings, Frank takes Hossein down with a few quick punches, breaking the world record for the fastest Kumite knockout in history. But shifty Hossein does not concede defeat, and after Frank is declared victorious, the Arab pounces up and attempts to take a cheap shot at him from behind. Frank pre-empts the attack and delivers a reverse elbow-punch combination that permanently sends Hossein to the canvas. The next time I have a fistfight at school, I will embody the spirit of Frank Dux, especially now that Mum has bought me a pair of maroon undies from K-mart. I’m wearing them—and only them—when I practise on my bed, throwing three straight punches, one roundhouse kick and one helicopter fly-kick, which is sure to concuss any foe I’m up against in a few seconds. Tomorrow at lunchtime, an older boy from Year 3 named Thomas Pearce, who has splitting blue eyes, calls me a ‘Lebanese shit’. As the other kids in his grade look on, I pick the maroon wedgy from my butt crack, and then I charge, throwing a succession of punches and kicks, each of which misses Thomas by a foot. He stands back, watching me tire myself out, and then he steps in towards me, gives me one hard push, and I am down like a sack of horse manure. Lying on the ground while Thomas and the other kids laugh at me and chant ‘Lebanese shit, Lebanese shit’, I finally understand: I’m not Frank Dux. I am Hossein.

1993

The talent quest ends with a chubby boy named Gary Forbes attempting a stand-up routine. His first joke is, ‘What did the big chimney say to the little chimney? You’re too young to smoke.’ The students in the school hall are a plague of cannedcorned-beef-fed faces, laughing the way only children do, ‘aha aha aha aha’, not knowing if they genuinely find it funny or if we’re just pretending to find it funny because jokes are supposed to be funny. Gary’s second joke goes: ‘Why do cows wear bells? Because their horns don’t work.’ Again, the students laugh the way only children do, ‘aha aha aha aha’, but this time the teachers join in too, including the principal Mr Whitehead, who chuckles out loud like a genie, ‘haaaaaahaaaa!’ Two for two, Gary is beaming through an empty mouth of missing baby teeth as he proceeds to tell his third joke: ‘Why do Chinese people have sharp eyes? Because when they go to the toilet, they do this …’ and then he uses his two index fingers to pull his eyes to the side, squats in the middle of the stage, and goes, ‘eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeegh!’ The students begin to laugh out of control, and this time it really does sound for realz, with the exception of that one student who looks like Bruce Lee (only her hair is much longer now), sitting two seats down from me. She has karate-sprung onto her feet and sprinted out of the hall like a fat kid with a free Big Mac voucher. Above the laughter, Mr Whitehead screams out, ‘No, no, that’s racist, stop, that’s racist!’ As the school watches on in a silent combination of amusement and confusion, Gary ejects from his squat, hardening into a pillar of granite as his broad translucent cheeks turn bright red. Then there is nothing but the sound of a girl weeping from the corridor outside. That same afternoon, while we are eating vine leaves for dinner, I ask my dad, ‘Do you know what racism is?’ He swallows hard, Adam’s apple convulsing as a mouthful of meat and rice trudges down his throat. ‘It’s making fun of Chinks,’ he explains. ‘Speaking of which—do you know why Chinese people have sharp eyes?’

1994

Three frosty-fleshed women with short hair, colourful cotton drape pants and tattoos with Chinese writing on their arms are moving into the yellow-brick house next door—transporting a bundle of cardboard boxes from the boot of a Ghostbusters-style station wagon to the concrete patio of the terrace. The lankiest among them says to the other two, ‘Let’s do dumb shit tonight.’ Sitting outside our house on a milk crate, crushing olives on an upside-down silver trash can, my grandmother takes one extended look at all three and whispers a sequence of bismillahs. Then she turns down to me—the twenty-fifth of her thirty-six grandchildren sitting by her swollen brown calves playing with an armless Ninja Turtle—and she says in Arabic: ‘This suburb is too expensive for us to live here anymore …’

1995

Whitey, please accept our deepest condolences: my entire generation, including my grandparents, parents, aunts, uncles, all their husbands and wives, my siblings and all my cousins, relocate to a suburb in south-western Sydney named Lakemba. My sister says, ‘Pretend we’re rich and call it Lake Amber.’ My brother says, ‘Pretend we’re poor and call it Leb-kemba.’ On my street alone, there is a Lebanese family in every house except for one, which is occupied by an old skip who owns a pink-nosed pit bull. Each morning my siblings and I walk past his orange terrace on our way to Lakemba Public School, speaking passionately to each other in a mixture of English, Pig Latin and Arabic: ‘Wallah um-cay ear-hay you snot!’ The old skip is always sitting on his verandah, massaging his dog’s chin as he barks across his lawn, ‘I remember when the young fellas around ’ere used to speak Australian!’ He dies before he ever sees his suburb return to the days of the Weet-Bix Kids. A Lebanese family buys his house, tears it down, and builds a duplex in its place. The entire street belongs to us now.

1996

The red-haired woman who talks like she has a broomstick up her hole is on prime-time news, her porcelain skin and cold blue eyes stabbing my retinas as she declares that Australia will soon be facing a civil war. My father and his brothers, Ali, Amar, Ibrahim and the oldest among them, Ehud, are huddled around our small flickering television, which has a steel clothes hanger plugged in the back as an antenna. These five Lebanese men all look concerned, their dark rustic jawlines and large Bedouin noses casting a long shadow over our entire living room. Finally, Uncle Ali contracts his broad shoulders, takes in a deep breath and bellows, ‘Tha fuck does that bitch know about civil war!’ All at once I am running through the concrete alleyways of Tripoli, beige paint on the walls of the buildings decomposing around me, shrapnel clipping my cheekbones, plasma bursting from my fingertips, bullets puncturing the back of my skull. Phuck. Phuck. Phuck.

1997

Shovelling down a halal cheeseburger at Punchbowl Macca’s, Dad sits in front of me with a sad smile across his scorched face—his face, which always looked like it was made of stone; his face, which just now reveals itself to be made of sand, and is withering before me. He says, ‘If anyone asks, tell them you’re the kind that crosses-yourheart-and-hopes-to-die.’ A moment later, we’re back on Canterbury Road. There must be a car accident further down because we have been stuck in traffic and moving slowly since we got on from Willeroo Street; right in front of the Halal Red Rooster. After five minutes of us sitting silently in his van, a 1989 Toyota HiAce that has no radio, my father slants his dagger-shaped nose towards me, and then beyond me.