This week I’m heading up the Calder to one of my favourite events, Bendigo Writers’ Festival. It’s always an excellent program and a fun bookish vibe around town.
I’ll be talking with school students as part of Word Spot on Thursday 4 May about the Blitz, mudlarking, Vikings and Romans in The Firewatcher Chronicles.
And then on Friday 5 May I’m hosting what should be a fascinating discussion on writing fiction about the colonial past (and present … and futures), with Claire G. Coleman, Jock Serong and Paul Daley.
On June 2, I’m part of the Wheeler Centre’s Telling Tales series, in which three YA authors and three teen writers each read out a new short story – in this case on the theme of Reality Bites. Alice Pung and Will Kostakis are on the bill, so it is going to be the excellent fun, I just know it. If you’re around Melbourne, I’d love to see you there.
I was delighted to be approached to help out with some research on La Maupin for this BBC4 episode of You’re Dead to Me, a terrific series hosted by Greg Jenner, which takes a different person from the past each episode, digs into their story, and combines that with bona fide comedy.
You can listen here or subscribe on your usual podcast app. It’s great fun.
Greg is joined by Dr Sara Barker and returning special guest comedian Catherine Bohart to travel back to 17th-century France and meet the notorious Julie d’Aubigny.
Having spent so many years researching her for Goddess, I love hearing people respond to her story, and I also love hearing historians engage with the materials – both dubious and as-legit-as-we-can-get when it comes to La Maupin.
Here’s the image they discuss (I think):
It’s a contemporary engraving made of La Maupin, in costume and as if on stage (published by J Mariette, rue St. Jacques aux Colonnes d’Hercule, Paris and colourised later).
Haven’t posted for ages, sorry. I think the pandemic ate my brain.
Don’t know about you, but all through our many lockdowns I found it hard to read, hard to write, and hard to focus. My teaching work has been demanding, with the sudden shift to online and everything else going on (remind me not to volunteer to write any more academic articles this year!).
But I have been chipping away at a few writing projects and right now I’m on my Creative Fellowship at Varuna, the national writer’s house, so I’m ploughing through stuff.
Gorgeous, wintry Varuna
Here’s what I’ve been working on lately:
Fine Eyes: Miss Caroline Bingley, Private Investigator
I’ve told you this before, but I’ve been collaborating (for the first time) on an Austen-inspired crime novel, with playwright and Austen expert Sharmini Kumar. We’ve had great fun testing out our Regency research and plotting mysteries, and we’re nearly done. I know a few people who write collaboratively, and it’s been such an interesting way to work – especially during lockdown.
Wildfall
Wildfall is a YA historical fantasy novel – I mean, it’s fantasy, set in an imagined world, but influenced by the history of eighteenth century Europe. Sort of. Except with giant eagles. I’m in the late stages of drafting.
Roar
What I’m working on here at Varuna is Roar, a YA novel set in the 1980s in London and then in Africa, and especially Apartheid-era South Africa. I wrote a solid draft a while ago, on a May Gibbs Trust Fellowship in Canberra, and then undertook another round of research in South Africa, but then had to put it aside when the pandemic struck – like just about everything else. But I’m enjoying revisiting it now, and hope to have a final draft by the end of my time here.
Lion – Pilanesberg National Park, 2019
They’ll be a while yet, but I can’t wait to share these novels with you.
Back at the edge of the Sports Field Lake. I’ve been coming here to Nangak Tamboree to write now for an entire month. I didn’t know, at the start, how or even if it would work out. By about day three I decided I’d made a terrible mistake. But then I settled into a rhythm.
It hasn’t always been easy. This month of writing coincided with an extremely stressful and far too busy time, so some days I’ve resented having to come here and other days my visits have been far too brief. Some days I’d think in advance about where to go (like walking the moat or visiting the Wildlife Sanctuary) and even a topic to think about (like the sculptures), but most of the time I simply wander off and see what happens.
I’ve seen and spoken to people working hard and thinking deeply about this place and how to work with it to make it more open for more people, and safer and healthier for more creatures and more local plantlife. I’ve watched the many ways people and wildlife use it already.
In this month, the acacia and melaleuca bloomed and faded, tadpoles hatched, nests are full of fledglings, and the wallaby grass is throwing up seed heads. Of course, the weeds and introduced grasses are shooting up everywhere too. It’s going to take years to manage this area of Nangak Tamboree into a revegetated, welcoming space. If the work already done around the Gresswell Ponds, Fozzie’s Waterhole, and along the moat is any indication, it’s in good horticultural hands, along with the wisdom and energy of the Narrap Rangers. Other parts of the Nangak Tamboree project may not seem quite so glamorous, like digging holes in the car parks to install reed beds for storm water drainage, but it’s specialist work, and all for the greater good. Cleaner waterways make for happier turtles.
I’ve learned a great deal in this last month: how to identify different ducks (although I still can’t tell one pigeon from another); about flax lilies and fairy wrens and darters; about storm water courses and aquatic plants; and about walking and stillness. I can tell wallaby and kangaroo grass apart (I think), and all this bird-spotting has rekindled a childhood love. My camera failed early on so I’ve had to use my phone, and its inadequacy in the zoom department has spurred me on to think about the kinds of photos I want to take when we’re back out in the world (and order a new camera).
I’ve learned a little about the recent history of the area, which I’ll continue to research. I’ve learned that I have too many projects at once and need to calm the fuck down, which will come as no surprise to anyone who knows me – several of whom have been telling me that for years. On the other hand, if you teach at a university, you are meant to have a lot on. And on yet another hand, which is exactly what I need, everything is so fascinating and I have ideas bouncing around in my head all the time.
But I hope I don’t lose the slowness of walking and writing practice. And slow reading, for that matter. This month I’ve also been slowly rereading War and Peace, my favourite book, as part of #TolstoyTogether, a global shared lockdown reading project. I tried it last year and then got so carried away with the story I raced ahead. Typical. This year I am trying very hard to only read the day’s allotted chapters. (We’re up to 1812, and the war is heading towards Bald Hills – this is the real test of my commitment.)
So here we are at the end of the month and the end of lockdown. I can walk here today without a mask. Everyone says we’ll soon be back to normal. (By that, I don’t even mean the idea of ‘COVID-normal’ embraced by politicians.) But we won’t or at least we shouldn’t. Because we know and see the world differently now. Instead of getting back to normal, let’s remember the small pleasures and daily lessons of hyperlocal living.
Today, a cormorant drying its wings on one log, a darter on another. Little lorikeets hopping along a branch. The drum band at their rehearsal in the bush. An ant crawling across the page of my notebook. The water glittering in the setting sun. The breeze rippling the lake. Corella cries. Spring warmth.
A perfect, almost-still morning in Nangak Tamboree, after the wildness of the past 48 hours.
It’s the second-last day of this little writing project, and I’m revisiting a couple of favourite spots – places I will continue to visit. Today’s it’s the ‘beach’ at the top of Sports Field Lake, but there’s only one chair left here. The other one has probably been blown across to Altona, like that flying trampoline. I can hear the sounds of an actual sports team training on the other side of the water. Haven’t heard that for a while.
Oh, no – I see the missing chair. I recognise that glimpse of slender grey bar sticking out of the water. I grab a stick and retrieve it from the lake. It’s not quite Excalibur, but I feel triumphant nevertheless, and lean it up against a tree trunk, where it drips water in a channel through the dirt.
Coots duck and surface, and startle away from me. Fair enough. Across the water, my old friend the Darter is drying his feathers on a fallen tree trunk and shouting at the sky every so often.
Another Darter, a female this time, with caramel feathers, surfaces quite close by and I see now why they are also called Snakebirds. She vanishes and must move fast underwater, because her long neck and dagger-like beak emerge many metres away. She launches herself into the air while her body and wings are still submerged, becoming half-bird, half-waterfall, then drags her feet across the surface before taking flight in an elegant arc across the lake.
There are so many fallen trees and branches down across the state, and this place is no exception. But so many other things have changed in the time I’ve been coming here to write. Lockdown is over now and today is the first day we are allowed to leave the city. So soon, we’ll hit the road to (at last!) get up to my little place in the country to check on it, do some fire season preparation, and spend the night. It feels extraordinary to go somewhere that is not the same as every other night for the past many months. Again. I remember this feeling from this time last year though, and I’m not going to fall for that optimism again. Anything could still happen with this pandemic.
We’ve gone, in the past month of me walking and writing here, from an enforced five kilometre limit to ten kilometres, to 25 kilometres, to the city boundaries, to the state borders. Our horizons keep changing, like a cinematic zoom.
But let’s not forget these little local spaces we’ve explored in such detail while we’ve stayed so close to home.
I’ll be back tomorrow to say goodbye. But I guess I won’t really leave Nangak Tamboree.
Not much walking going on today, to be honest, and not much writing, because as everyone in Victoria knows, last night’s thunderstorm developed into something rather fierce over night and this morning, and it’s still pretty miserable, with lashing rain. There’s a great deal of damage all over the state – roofs off, power out, NBN down, at least one sighting of a trampoline flying through the air, and everything smashed.
Especially trees.
I went back to the Moaning Tree Forest today, after the worst of the storm had passed. Two big eucalypts were uprooted and crashed right near where I sat in my car to write yesterday, and I could see trunks snapped and tree limbs torn off all along the area and in the Sanctuary – I didn’t go in, because it was still pretty wild and teetering branches are not my favourite thing. To be honest, for the final day of lockdown, a minor apocalypse seemed appropriate, after all we’ve been through, and also a little bit freaky. The roads and lawns were covered in debris – leaves, branches, and blossom – to the great delight of a huge gang of galahs who were feeding on the gum nuts and seeds scattered everywhere. I feel very sorry for all the fledglings who were trying to stay in their nests in that wind. I’m sure there must’ve been quite a few casualties.
So let’s think of something happier. I stopped at one of my favourite pieces among the many in the huge outdoor sculpture garden that is the Bundoora campus: Karen Ward’s Hermitage (2001). Before the pandemic, when I was teaching Writing Creative Nonfiction, I’d bring my students here, or to the Sanctuary, for a walk and a few writing exercises. We’d look at things – bark, mushrooms popping up in the lawn, Hermitage, the old hospital buildings, the waterhole with frogs – and everyone would wander off to write some short pieces about place, then stand together and read them out loud. It was always my favourite class. I hope we get to do it again.
And that made me remember that I haven’t yet written about the sculpture that can be found along the waterways in Nangak Tamboree. So here are a few I have admired on previous days’ walks over the past few weeks.
I find my students often don’t realise that they’re studying in a sculpture park. But then, I didn’t realise we had all these different waterways and open spaces. I guess you take it for granted, once you’ve seen a life-sized bronze rhinoceros or an upside-down Governor La Trobe. And some of the pieces along the waterways probably don’t get noticed so often. Which is a pity, because some of them are splendid.
This is another favourite, partly because of its positioning. You can’t get to it easily – instead you glimpse it through a break in the shrubs along the banks of the moat. It’s Heather B. Swann’s Horned Night Walker (2003).
Further along the Moat are two pieces by one of Melbourne’s best loved sculptors, Inge King. (Probably her most recognisable work is the series of massive black-painted waves, Forward Surge, on the lawn between the NGV and Hamer Hall.) There are several of her pieces along here, but the most dramatic (and she was very good at drama) sits almost in the moat, at the foot of the amphitheatre, so that it forms a backdrop to performance and everyone in the audience can see it. It’s called Dialogue of Circles and was commissioned in 1976.
A hundred metres or so further on is a small group work, also by Inge King, called Group of Boulders. It’s right next to the Main Lake, on the grassy slope that I have learned is called Academic Lawn. I imagine that means that it’s a lawn where, on a warmer day than this one, academics are meant to lounge about like extras in Brideshead Revisited, and possibly roll right down and end up in the lake.
If you want to wander around the sculpture park for yourself and have a look, here’s a map. If you need a reason to go for a walk, it’s a damn good one.
This is the sound of an extremely silly person walking in the bush in a thunderstorm.
Sound of rain and thunder
Half an hour earlier, I was safely at home in my study, on a Zoom call with colleagues all over the state, and everyone watching the rain radar for the storm that was about to hit.
‘I’d better go,’ I said with a carefree laugh, ‘or I’ll be walking in the rain.’
Hilarious. I head to campus to walk through yet another area of bush that I drive past often and never visit. We have so many areas like this – stretches of thick bush that aren’t on the way to anywhere in particular. Some appear almost like glorified nature strips, until you stop to look, and wander through, and then you realise how expansive, how diverse, how precious they are.
Which is how I come to be walking through the North Bushland Reserve, which also comes under the same Trust for Nature conservation covenant as the Wildlife Sanctuary. It adjoins the Sanctuary but my previous reading of the Nangak Tamboree map had me thinking that it was inside the fence – not this familiar forest I drive by so often.
View from the campus ring road
I know, I get my terms confused at times, but Nangak Tamboree doesn’t mean the whole campus, just the waterways and the wildlife corridors. So I imagined this area was out of my scope, as it were, until yesterday. Sitting behind it are the Terraces, formerly part of the Mont Park complex and now among our more elegant buildings – and doubling as a COVID-19 vaccination centre. There’s a great potted history of some of these buildings here. If you want to read more about the Mont Park complex, you’ll have to wait, as I have borrowed every book I can find from the university library.
The terraces
Yesterday I realised I’d missed this bit, so here I am in the bush. Forest. Copse? If the pond up the road can be a lake, this can be a forest. If it was in France or England it’d be a wood. Anyway, it’s thickly forested, and wooded, and bushy, so you can take your pick. And it seems to me to be slightly different vegetation from other areas. It’s relatively higher ground here and perhaps drier, with lots of acacia, younger eucalypts, maybe melaleuca and hakea.
And a great many fallen trees. Acacias don’t live long, and they do have a habit of falling over. Eucalypts have a habit of dropping branches – widow makers – as anyone who is still living with the emotional scars of reading Seven Little Australians knows only too well.
So I’m tripping gaily along a narrow path, when the heavens open. That’s fine – I’ve brought my rain jacket. Then thunder starts pounding overhead, close. Too close. Lightning glitters against bruised clouds.
And the trees start moaning.
They can do that, you know.
Don’t worry. I survived. Clearly.
Now I’m sitting in my car in good old car park 6, in damp clothes and boots, scribbling this. It has to be the least scenic writing place so far in the 28 days of writing Nangak Tamboree.
But that was a truly excellent storm and I’m not all that sorry I got caught in it. And we have at least solved one question: the area will now forever be known as Moaning Tree Forest.
Like most of Melbourne, the Nangak Tamboree Wildlife Sanctuary has been closed for weeks – months. But as an outdoor space, with no contact required of visitors, it has been able to re-open this week.
The Sanctuary is as old as the university, which just tells you everyone had their priorities straight from the beginning. It spreads over 30 hectares and is now protected by a Trust for Nature conservation covenant. The land was once a farm, then part of Mont Park, and includes areas that were once recreation facilities for the patients, like a croquet lawn and cricket oval. That means that while the vegetation now looks substantial, much of it has been reintroduced.
But there are some truly magnificent and very old trees.
River Red Gum, estimated to be 450 years old
The older trees are mostly River Reds, but there are also stands of Ironbarks, Manna Gums and what might be Red Box – many of which, I imagine, are around fifty years old and were planted in the early years of the sanctuary. The regeneration work goes on – there are quite a few areas fenced off to protect the flora inside.
When you visit a wildlife sanctuary, you are on the lookout for creatures, right? And I guess I am, but I don’t seem able to concentrate on peering into bushes or focusing binoculars. There are all the usual avian suspects of course, croaking and squeaking and quacking, and I do spot a brushtail possum’s brushtail poking out the hole of a nesting box that is possibly not intended for someone their size.
But it’s actually the trees that are the show-stoppers here, even the younger, possibly self-sown, eucalypts and maleleucas, underlined by local grasses and swathes of goodenia, everlasting daisies, and pomaderris in bloom.
And of course the waterways. Again, these were dug as part of the creation of the university, and creeks are channelled between them, but I imagine these were planned following natural water courses or seasonal creek beds. So this is the core of Nangak Tamboree, the connected waterways running down from the high ground in Gresswell Nature Reserve and Gresswell Hill, into the alleged lakes at the bottom of the Wildlife Corridor, gathering run-off from the lower slopes on the old hospital site, through the Sanctuary, into the campus moat, where it combines with a creek running underground (now) from Bundoora park, into the campus lake system, and down to the Darebin Creek.
If you can’t visualise it as a system, here’s my little Google map of writing sites.
The sanctuary has its own system of waterways: two waterholes out the front, the reddish pond I admired through the fence yesterday, expansive swampland, and a series of lakes and connecting creeks, with – you won’t believe it – names like Main Lake and Eastern Swamp. (Seriously, someone has to get onto naming all of these waterways properly. That makes two Main Lakes at one university. And name them after trees or creatures, not former Deans. Or maybe ask the Wurundjeri Elders if they would like to put words to them.)
Eastern Swamp
The names may be prosaic, but the waterways are lovely to look at, and are home to endangered Dwarf Galaxia and other fish and eels, a gazillion frogs, and many waterbirds, as well as of course providing water to everyone else who lives here or passes through the bio-corridor, from bats and flying foxes to wallabies and pardalotes. (All I see are a few ducks and a pair of coots diving in the reeds.) In one spot, I walk along an ‘isthmus’ (I definitely approve of that name) with Main Lake on one side, and on the other, a waterhole filled with Water Ribbons (Cycnogeton procerum) while on its banks a line of Manna Gums shed their own ribbons of bark.
It’s the last few days of my time walking and writing here, so I headed off with a plan to walk along a neglected stretch of the waterway. But:
A) I failed.
B) Of course, it isn’t neglected, it’s only me who has neglected it.
This is the water that curls like an offshoot of the campus moat, around the back of the Sports Centre, flows under the circle road and ends up in a pond in the Wildlife Sanctuary (which, oh joy, oh rapture, has re-opened so I’ll be visiting in the next few days). It begins with the Infamous Overflowing Lake. I expect it is linked below ground with the moat, as there are suspicious mounds leading from one to the other. They could be Viking burial mounds, or drains. Hard to tell.
Infamous Overflowing Lake
The plan was to walk around the north of the lake/pond/billabong, because I know the way is blocked on the other bank by Sports Centre fences. But no. It’s blocked on both sides now, because the car park next to it hosts a COVID-19 testing station. It’s not busy yet, but there’s usually a long queue of cars – I’ve been in that queue several times myself. (The car park on the other side is now used for the COVID-19 vaccination clinic; both good uses of public property in a crisis.)
It turns out, though, that this is a very pleasant place in which to be prevented from walking any further. There are picnic tables and, like the rest of the campus, it’s beautifully landscaped – here with grasses and great patches of Brachyscome multifida, or the purple cut-leaf daisy, with its almost permanent happy wee flowers. On the bank, a cormorant stretches its wings in the early morning sun, and lorikeets, as usual, sweep low overhead. All these spaces I never use or even stop to admire. I vow to come back often when we return to campus.
I’m thinking about this cultural walk I did a few years ago in the middle of the Melbourne CBD, along the river bank. It was led by Dean Stewart, to introduce people to the Indigenous history of Birrarung, or the Yarra River. I learned a great deal from Dean, but today I reflect on one thing he said: he shows people old drawings of the south bank of the river, before it was filled in and built over, and asks them to describe it. Older people say it looks like a swamp. Kids say it’s wetland. How our perceptions change over a generation.
And in a country often suffering through extended drought, you’d think we’d be more careful with wetland. As we are here.
Anyway, no luck walking this way. I retrace my steps past the Sports Centre (empty but soon to re-open, when hopefully my fencing club starts training again – nature is healing!) and cut down a driveway I’ve passed a million times, past the tennis courts and a stunning row of callistemon in full scarlet glory. To my right are some nondescript buildings I never knew existed until COVID meant our mail didn’t get delivered to the office any more and we had to find it ourselves, somewhere over here. I climb over a bank, which I suspect doubles as a levee. On the left, the rock climbing wall. All those people who were inspired by the Olympic rock climbing will be hitting that hard in the weeks to come.
Beyond the bank is the other end of the Infamous Overflowing Lake, and the sounds of very happy frogs. I walk to the end and discover a very impressive-looking something-or-other. I have no idea, but I’m going to say it’s a local version of the Thames Barrier. Or at least Eildon Weir. Here, I assume, because I’m not volunteering to dive in and check, the water flows under the Thames Barrier and the road and into the billabong on the other side, which is in the Wildlife Sanctuary.
Once, a few years ago, I saw an echidna waddling across the road right here.
It’s too early to go in, so I just stare through the fence into the sanctuary. It’s shady by the banks and the normal muddiness of the water is accentuated by some kind of red algae or other growth. It’s quite pretty, for algae.
The pale headless blur on the log is a Darter
Nowadays, I always glance at the water here as I drive past, after a few trips to South Africa where every waterhole is a wildlife-viewing adventure. As if I’m going to see elephants bathing or at least roos drinking, but there’s never anything.
Or so I think. I walk along the fence and disturb a Darter. She flaps across the top of the water and settles on a tree branch, away from the pesky walking creature trying to take photos through cyclone wire. And who can blame her?
I think this sign, which is very small and surrounded by long grass, tells us we are not allowed to fish, swim, paddle canoes, or … I don’t know, maybe waterski? surf ski? on the university lake system. Maybe it’s diving, which frankly I wouldn’t recommend either, because I’m sure the water is filled with dead tree trunks and I have no idea how deep it is.
Needless to say, I’ve seen people doing most of those things, although not until recently, and they can’t be blamed given the state of the signage. When I visited Nangak Tamboree a few weeks ago, on a lovely spring day, a family was paddling happily along the banks of the Sports Field Lake in an inflatable canoe, and three people were fishing (one coarse fishing, which you don’t see often here). I’ve certainly noticed a few kids swimming here over summer, and some just the other week. I’ve written about the uses we make of open spaces, but we also make use of open waterways. Even little lakes like these.
I have seen a couple of whopper fish leap here, but just out of the corner of my eye. I suspect they might be carp. Vermin fish for most of us, but apparently fine if you know how to cook them properly. I’ve seen plenty of tadpoles and in a sign of deep maturity resisted catching them and carrying them around in a jar. I bet there are eels and yabbies in the system too. I could ask someone, but if they answered with really intriguing information, like, ‘Oh yes, we’ve been stocking the lakes with golden perch as an aquaculture experiment,’ I might be tempted to get out my fishing rod, and unfortunately I can’t pretend I haven’t seen the sign.
There’s another No Fishing sign, and it’s my favourite, because it’s right out in the middle of the lake on an island where nobody would ever see it. (I took this with my zoom camera.)
So really, you’d have to be swimming or paddling your canoe in an unauthorised manner already to know that you weren’t allowed to go fishing.
Luckily, staring at the water for hours is permitted, and indeed encouraged.
Apparently they used to have raft races and all sorts of shenanigans on the campus moat. In spite of the lack of warning signs, nobody seems to be tempted nowadays, though who knows what students in the residences get up to after hours. But since there’s a perfectly lovely pool in the sports centre, I guess the brownish duck-infested moat is not as alluring as it might once have been. Or students are not as daring.
But this is the sign that first caught my attention, tied to two star pickets hammered in to the earth by the side of the bike path. It explains what Nangak Tamboree is and means, what it’s for, and also about the cultural burning carried out by the Narrap Rangers.
I am very fond of an information panel (especially in a cute little kiosk with a map), labels in museums, interpretative signs (there are some further down the creek telling you which birds to look for), and hokey little panels remembering people or events. Apparently the Nangak Tamboree project will eventually involve a great many interpretive panels and I am totally here for it. My favourites are those along the Yarra River, in Heidelberg and out in Eltham and Warrandyte, featuring the Heidelberg School and other artists and the scenes they painted right where they painted. (Actually, my favourite in the world are along the site of the old Berlin Wall, but that’s another story.)
I am not as fond of signs ordering you about, but I do appreciate how the signs around here are a bit half-hearted, like maybe we’d rather you didn’t fish or paddle your canoe, but we don’t really mind that much, and certainly not enough to put up new signs all the time if they get tagged.
Kelly Gardiner 