On walking

October 13, 2021 / Kelly Gardiner / Leave a comment

13 October, 2021

I walk most mornings and have for many years now. I didn’t always. I come from a family of walkers – I mean, serious, best-in-the-country race walkers, who think nothing of a ten kilometre stroll before breakfast. I was brought up by the side of an athletics track as my dad was in Olympic and Commonwealth Games and my grandfather was an Australian champion and lifelong walking official. So going for a walk in my family holds a slightly different meaning to most. My mum also used to walk every morning: not race walking, but more the kind of stepping out for health we’ve all been doing in our allotted exercise times during lockdown.

But I, being the family rebel, didn’t walk until relatively recently. I quite like proper hiking, and can walk all day when travelling and looking at really interesting stuff, but going for an evening stroll on a beach seemed absurd, and walking for exercise far too dull. I’d be on holiday, and friends would suggest going for a walk and I’d inevitably ask why. Pointless walking, without it being a race, or to discover some particularly excellent thing, seemed like a ridiculous thing to do when you could be lying about reading. Still, I guess it’s been ten years that I’ve walked most days, except for a long stretch last year in deep lockdown when I basically refused to leave the house.

I walk for exercise, yes, and sometimes even jog. But mostly I walk to clear my head. Actually, that’s a lie. I don’t clear my head; in fact, I’m thinking all the time. I clear it of nonsense, and it fills with better or at least more interesting things. I tried listening to podcasts but I just want everyone to shut up and stop talking at me. If I’m deep in a writing project, even – perhaps especially – on a writing retreat or residency, walking is a time to unravel knotty plots or have conversations with imaginary people. Then, I’ll carry a tiny notebook and stop and scribble as I go.

The connection between writing and walking is long and celebrated – the Romantics made it a thing and it’s a thing again now, with nature writers wandering all over the shop. Writers like Rebecca Solnit have made it a focus of some of the most beautiful prose in recent years. I confess I’m a bit more random and not nearly as intentional – normally – as one apparently should be. Even now, with the daily walks designed as writing process, I never know what will happen and usually don’t plan where I’ll go.

A few years ago, I was in a group led by writer and local legend Sophie Cunningham which walked one night following in the footsteps of Melbourne’s first elephant (Port Melbourne to the zoo) and another day the first leg of Burke and Wills’ expedition (Royal Park to Moonee Ponds, although we didn’t take a piano with us like they did). Sophie researched carefully beforehand and wrote about those walks later in her excellent essay collection, City of Trees. Intentional, writerly walking, but we never really knew what would happen, and a group of writers walking generates its own story.

In 1927, Virginia Woolf went for a stroll to buy a new pencil, and, being Virginia Woolf, wrote the most gorgeous essay about it – ‘Street Haunting’ – about walking, about London, and about how your mind slips and listens and glides as you walk:

How beautiful a street is in winter! It is at once revealed and obscured. Here vaguely one can trace symmetrical straight avenues of doors and windows; here under the lamps are floating islands of pale light through which pass quickly bright men and women, who, for all their poverty and shabbiness, wear a certain look of unreality, an air of triumph, as if they had given life the slip, so that life, deceived of her prey, blunders on without them. But, after all, we are only gliding smoothly on the surface. The eye is not a miner, not a diver, not a seeker after buried treasure. It floats us smoothly down a stream; resting, pausing, the brain sleeps perhaps as it looks.
‘Street Haunting‘, Virginia Woolf, first published 1930.

See how her prose does what she’s describing?

Genius.

Sadly, I am not Woolf, I’m just me, plodding along a muddy track beside a creek. I take the long way to Nangak Tamboree today, which takes me about half an hour each way, and longer if you stop to try to take photos of uncooperative birds with an even more uncooperative camera. There’s a stand of wattles and kangaroos apples along the Darebin Creek inhabited by a family of fairy wrens, and a flittery population of robins, honeyeaters, and little hoppy brown things (that’s the technical term) which never sit still for a moment. (On the way home, I’ll meet a group of park rangers in this spot, all pointing and gasping, thrilled at the shenanigans.)

White-browed scrubwren on a tree branch — *White-browed scrubwren finally sitting still*

When I reach Nangak Tamboree, I sit on a boulder between the creek and the fenced-off revegetation area, and scribble this down, thinking about writing and walking.

There are now books galore about the creative benefits of walking, and research that indicates that Wordsworth was right – walking does enable writing. A Stanford University study claims that ‘A person’s creative output increased by an average of 60 percent when walking’ but it’s creativity of the random kind, not necessarily the problem-solving sort. That chimes with my experience.

And as Michael LePointe warns:

The more conscious writers become of its creative benefits, the more walking takes on the quality of goal-driven labor, the very thing we are meant to be marching against.
‘The Unbearable Smugness of Walking’, The Atlantic, August 2019.

Much better to wander off, and let your mind wander as well: ‘only gliding smoothly on the surface.’

A white faced heron in long grass — *White-faced heron on the hunt*

Pondage

October 8, 2021October 9, 2021 / Kelly Gardiner / Leave a comment

8 October, 2021

Day 8 of Writing Nangak Tamboree.

Today I’m in a spot I really didn’t know existed before we were locked down and unable to travel more than five kilometres from home for exercise.

I haven’t set foot here before. These are a couple of large ponds, or maybe small lakes, forming part of the Gresswell wildlife corridor at the northern end of the Nangak Tamboree waterways. They are carefully landscaped and nestled into what is now suburbia.

But it wasn’t always.

The original inhabitants were the Kurnaj-berring people of the Wurundjeri clan, and before the British invasion there were Brolgas (yes, Brolgas!) and platypus, freshwater mussels, eels and plenty of other creatures. But once the colony expanded, the land was cleared for farming, with only a few pockets of remnant bush left intact.

This specific area was once the Mont Park complex, which opened in 1912, at which time it was called the Mont Park Hospital for the Insane. It was an isolated spot then, surrounded by farmland. My great-grandfather worked there. His Army enlistment file records his occupation as ‘Warder, Lunatic Asylum.’ I hate to think what life was like in the hospital then but it was about to get a great deal worse. War broke out in 1914 and from then on the hospital had to deal with huge numbers of returned soldiers suffering from what became known as shell-shock, and other war-related traumas. My great-grandfather, after years as a stretcher-bearer in Palestine and on the Western Front, returned to work here.

After the war, in the hope of helping the patients feel that the world was not a complete horror, they built cricket grounds and tennis courts, in what is now the Nangak Tamboree Wildlife Sanctuary. The land stretching to the south, where the university campus now sits, was the Mont Park farm, growing food and grazing dairy cattle to help provision the hospital. It doesn’t sound like a great spot for a picnic:

…desolate, run-down farm in a swampy valley, devoid almost of trees or of views less depressing than the encircling panorama of mental hospitals, a cemetery, school yards, gasworks, and industrial backsides.’
Roy Simpson, Master Planner, quoted in Breen, W., Salmond, JA (1989). Building La Trobe University : Reflections on the first 25 years 1964-1989. La Trobe University Press. (p. 39)

Raven staring at the camera — *Raven going full Gothic*

There are still buildings from Mont Park and its sister institution Larundel dotted about all over here – many were derelict for years and some have now been turned into apartments or townhouses, and a few house university departments or accommodation. They are very stylish – Arts and Crafts or later 1930s brick and stucco. I wonder what stories those walls hold. I remember visiting a friend in a ward in Larundel when I was about twenty and it was pretty stark. But eventually people grew to understand mental health and illness better (and the language around it evolved too), and these hospital-based institutions were closed in favour of (in theory, if not properly supported with funding) community-based health services and supported housing.*

And this huge swathe of land was set for re-use. The Bundoora Mental Hospital became the magnificent Bundoora Homestead art centre & gallery, surrounded by spectacular parklands. The university opened in 1967, and the moat and southern waterways dug over the next decade or so. The housing estates around here are much more recent. Beyond the ponds (look, I can’t call them lakes, seriously) stretches a golf course and the Gresswell wildlife corridor and nature reserve, which I have yet to explore properly.

This doesn’t feel so much like an edgeland anymore, unlike the other end of Nangak Tamboree. There’s a pavilion for people to sit and watch the waterbirds (today, only a pair of ducks, and single pukeko, grebe, and coot eyeing each other off) and the vegetation carefully tended by the Sanctuary staff and local volunteers (I think). I walk around the pond/lake/dam/billabong and up onto the golf course, where people are playing again after months of no sport. To be honest, I preferred it when golf was not allowed in deep lockdown, and everyone could wander all over Melbourne’s fifty gazillion courses and explore them without being shooed away or hit by a ball. I bet the local wildlife liked it too.

This is a suburban open space, edged by houses and roads, with buses trundling by and kids on bikes passing, and clearly enjoyed by people out strolling, masked up, getting their allotted hours of exercise.

We have never needed these places more than in these last two years, have we? We’ve never so intimately explored our neighbourhoods, noticed the seasonal changes in gardens and parks and our own backyards, chatted over front fences (at a safe distance), counted the birds, pounded the pavements and followed the bike trails.

I wonder if we’ll keep doing it, when the pandemic is over. Or will our horizons shift outwards again?

* Note: There are still hospitals and clinics, of course – just not here, and not enough.The pandemic has laid bare the great need for responsive and accesible mental health services of all kinds.

Edges

October 7, 2021 / Kelly Gardiner / Leave a comment

7 October, 2021

Day 7 of Writing Nangak Tamboree

I walk along the edge of the lake. It’s not yet warm enough for me to startle at every rattle in the long grass, but there are creatures everywhere. I can show you photos of trees and herons and the lake, and I will. But the horizon here is speared by a mobile phone tower and sports field flood lights. Behind me is a high factory wall. And on the edges of my hearing, forklifts, a truck beeping backwards, and a Council worker with a whipper snipper.

Marion Shoard has described the ‘edgelands’ of Britain: the edges of cities, the ignored interfaces where cities meet the countryside, where factories sprawl and spill into farmland and trees are cleared for housing developments. I think the word can apply where development meets remnant bush or regenerated places. Like this one.

My first job was nearby in Bundoora, a thousand years ago on the campus that is now RMIT, before the tram reached so far out of town. I can remember that feeling of passing from established suburbs built in the 50s and 60s, with shopping strips and the odd pub, hitch-hiking from the last tram stop or trundling on the bus past Mont Park and Larundel, through more recent housing developments which clung along Plenty Road. Beyond it was countryside.

So this was once on the edge, but the city now spills well beyond this place, gobbling up Mernda and sprawling out towards Whittlesea. As Shoard writes:

Although yesterday’s interfacial zones are often swallowed up by subsequent building, sometimes they survive as edgeland within built-up areas.
‘Edgelands’, in Remaking the Landscape ed. J Jenkins, Profile Books, 2002 (p124)

I grew up in a place like that – out on the eastern edge of town, in one of those housing developments ringed by bush and old orchards and big new roads. My childhood was marked by bushfires and droughts and blackberry-picking and either mud or dust. There was a filthy creek that ran dry over summer, and horse paddocks dotted with thistles, and an old stone settler cottage where we ran wild. (It’s all beautiful now: Mullum Mullum creek is regenerated, the cottage houses the Historical Society, and like here, it is no longer the edge of the city.)

So these places feel familiar to me. They are many things at once. An edgeland can look like a rubbish dump or a forest of weeds, but it can be a refuge for wildlife and indigenous plants, an escape for people who need it, or a green or blue patch of wild. And in many places, like this, they are being brought back to beauty. Or perhaps they always have an edgy beauty (to my eyes anyway) and regeneration is more about recreating biodiversity and creating urban spaces that are truly interfaces – between people, wildlife, plantlife, aquatic life, wind, water, sky, earth. The Nangak Tamboree project calls it ‘blurring the boundaries’, and I like that idea, but it’s also informed by the Wurundjeri community’s understanding of interconnectedness.

Today, I watch a simply enormous turtle warm itself on the far bank, right next to a football field. A heron struts along the bike path, refusing to pose for a photo.

Later I hear the heron shouting at something and silently salute Lian Hearn for naming her novel The Harsh Cry of the Heron, because it sounds like it’s being strangled. Such elegant legs and such a honk.

It’s one of those days that my mother would call ‘brisk’ and I would call bloody freezing. A bloke rides by and asks me the name of the lake and he, like me, considers ‘Sports Field Lake’ to be somewhat inadequate. Two handsome wood ducks preen and graze in the grass right in front of me, not in the least worried when I move closer.

They’re not listed in my Gould League series handy pocket guide to birds. It has let me down. But I do see that I have misidentified that fantail the other day. It’s actually a Jacky Winter, which I find thrilling for some reason, perhaps because Jacky Winter sounds like a saxophonist in a jazz band and not a tiny flittery thing.

Here we all are – me, the odd jogger and cyclist, a heron, a turtle, blokes on smoko from the factories, and who knows who else is going about their business in the treetops or under the water or in the long grass. Exploring edges.

Familiar & unfamiliar places

October 5, 2021October 5, 2021 / Kelly Gardiner / Leave a comment

5 October 2021

Day 5 of Writing Nangak Tamboree

What does it mean to know a place?

Are there places you really know?

And what does that knowing feel like?

At the weekend, I rode my bike around Port Melbourne. That’s where I was born, where I lived – all of us together in my grandparents’ house – for the first part of my life. Everyone we knew lived within a couple of hundred yards and we were related to half of them. All our family stories revolved around Port. I knew it better than I’ve ever known any place. It’s still lovely, but I don’t know it anymore. Our old house is done up and fancy and worth millions. They all are. The factories where my grandparents once worked have been turned into apartments where I couldn’t afford to live. But they knew that place, deep in their souls. Never lived anywhere else. It was part of them. It’s part of me, too, but in memory.

So maybe knowing places is about memory as well as about now.

I’ve lived in lots of places, different cities, different landscapes, even different countries. I’ve felt at home in places and homesick, unsettled and excited. There are different types of knowing.

One of the great nature writers, Nan Shepherd, lived most of her life in the Cairngorm mountains in Scotland, walked out on the mountain in all weathers, and watched them season on season, from the highest peak to the smallest insect. She felt, walked, listened her way into the mountains. And she wrote them, and in the writing was her knowing – or a way into knowing. And in the writing, she made one of the best books about a place: The Living Mountain.

On the other hand, I’ve read plenty of travel books by people who feel they know a place well enough after a few days or weeks to write a whole book about it (spoiler: they don’t).

Here, I walk on colonised land and the idea of knowing places is complex and conflicted. Indigenous and non-Indigenous people have different traditions of knowing and being with country and in the past the way that has been privileged has been the European tradition – seeing country as landscape, or more often as resource. That’s changing. It has to.

I’ll write more about that another time. For now, what I’m trying to do is slow down and really look – for moments, for telling details – and feel my way into this place that I don’t know at all: Nangak Tamboree.

Wondering

October 4, 2021 / Kelly Gardiner / Leave a comment

4 October 2021

Day 4 of Writing Nangak Tamboree

I walked quite a long way today: from home, meandering along the Darebin Creek to the Sports Field Lake, then almost completely around a huge section of grassland that’s fenced off for plant regeneration. work. I thought I could circumnavigate it, but there’s been so much rain I couldn’t get through the watery sections closest to the sports grounds. These are, after all, wetlands. And it is very wet.

But one advantage of that – more frogs! (This time featuring the distant roar and rattle of the Plenty Road tram for a touch of authentic Melbourne.)

This is the area I barely knew was here before a few weeks ago – I certainly didn’t register how enormous it is. It runs from the Darebin Creek bike path turn-off and pedestrian bridge through to Plenty Road. The majority of it is grassy Eucalypt woodland, spreading over undulating hills from lake to creek.

It’s not untouched, by any means. It seems to me there’s an old house site at the top of the hill – perhaps a farmhouse – as there are old pine and fruit trees circling. Further down near the creek, you can see fragments of rusted metal sticking out of the mud – perhaps where cars were dumped decades ago. I skirted around what must be a huge pile of landfill, perhaps dug out for the lake or sports grounds years ago.

There was nobody at all around, besides the usual feathered suspects (rainbow lorikeets, magpies), a galah nesting in a high hollow, dusky woodswallows, and some kind of thornbill in the paperbarks by the creek. I had to remind myself to stop and write instead of wandering about staring at things and wondering.

But I am wondering, so now I’m off to absorb a bit more history of these places.

First steps

October 1, 2021 / Kelly Gardiner / 2 Comments

1 October 2021

Day one of a new project: writing Nangak Tamboree.

As it happens today is also about Walking the Land’s Watermark project, an international collaboration about walking and making art. So I’ve joined in, to be part of a (sort of) synchronised walking and making moment, this month on the theme of flow.

Today is about starting, about walking, and about flow.

I walk the long way around. No short-cuts today. In fact, I squelch my way along the creek bank. It rained yesterday and overnight, so the creek is way up, flowing fast, and my feet slip on muddy gum leaves. There’s nobody else here. I spot a Noisy Miner tucked into a nest, a lone currawong, and red wattle birds sweeping. Frogs fall silent when they hear my footsteps.

On the far bank, someone stands alone in the bush practising on their trumpet, the notes long and low over running water.

It’s spring here – tadpole season, or Poorneet in the Wurundjeri calendar, as I have only recently learned. The wattle blossom is finishing – even the Prickly Moses is browning off – and the leaf tips show bright new growth.

It takes me a while to reach the corner where Nangak Tamboree meets the Banyule North grasslands. I wander along the creek a little further and then uphill to the Sports Field Lake (which really needs a more glamourous name). And there, in spite of the mud and the little black ants, I sit at the water’s edge and watch and listen and write.

There’s no flow in me right now, but that’s fine. There’s flow in the water, the reeds, the swooping swallows, and the wind flicking at the eucalyptus leaves. I listen.

A pukeko (or Purple Swamp Hen) flies ungainly as a freight plane across the lake and crash lands in the reeds. Welcome Swallows dip and arc. Gulls croak high up and gather on the footy ground, before someone startles them and they scatter, screeching.

Things I don’t know today:

What is the roaring overflow thing in the middle of the lake?
How old is the lake and is it man-made?
What did it look like before?
Where are my binoculars?
How will I write this place? Can I?

There is a flock of fairy wrens skittering about me as if I’m not here. I stay still, and I’m so busy watching them I’m not looking at the lake when an enormous fucking fish leaps out of the water and splashes back down – I see a glimpse of white belly and white water. That’s all. The water subsides until its skin is still unless rippled by light.

This is the edge of the place I’ve chosen to write. From today on, I’m going to come and write around here somewhere every day for a month. But don’t worry: sitting and staring and cataloguing birds is going to get very dull very fast, for all concerned. Every day will be different. I don’t know how yet. I’m trying not to plan it, or not to do too much research beforehand. I think of all the other people walking and creating today, finding watery edges and flows, capturing sensation and space. I wonder what they’ll make, where they are. I’m not sure, given the time zones, whether I’m ahead or behind. I’m on the other side of the world. I’m here, always here, in the same place – five kilometres from home, masked up – that I’ve been all through this lockdown, and the many lockdowns before that. But it’s still new to me, this place.

I walk some more, skirting around a section of grassland that is fenced off as part of the regeneration project, and climb up on to a tussock. This is not a wild place. It is edged by busy roads – I can hear the traffic murmur to the north – and factories – someone’s hammering somewhere – sports fields, schools and my own university. There’s a flash of red as someone ride by on the bike path. If you look in one direction you see only eucalypts and grasslands and the water. Turn your head, and there are gulls scattered across carefully mown fields, goal posts and floodlights and the silvery new stadium.

At my feet, wallaby grass but also dock and wild fennel. Nearby, in an area that looks like it’s been burned, blackberries are shooting up from the earth. The regeneration of this place is going to take a while.

I hope I get to see it.

I hope I can show you.

Coming up: Historical Novel extravaganza

September 16, 2021 / Kelly Gardiner / Leave a comment

One of my favourite events is on the horizon: the conference of the Historical Novel Society of Australasia. Very sensibly, it’s entirely online this year – an excellent bit of foresight on the part of the organisers since Sydney, Auckland and Melbourne are now all in lockdown and borders are closed.

It’s always a terrific event, for writers and for readers. This year it’s spread over two weekends – 16 & 17 October, and 22-24 October. Here are all the details and the full program.

And I’m going to be rather busy throughout. Here’s what I’m doing.

Bootcamp

On 16 October, I’m running a full day Bootcamp for writers, focused on the processes of drafting and revising, and crafting the key elements of good historical fiction, with lots of exercises, tips and tools.

Details and bookings here.

Scrivener for beginners

My Scrivener workshops appear now to be part of the fabric of these conferences, and this year it’s on again. We’ll learn the basics of this software program created especially for writing: what it does, and how to get the best out of it. October 22.

Details here.

Biofiction panel

On October 23, I’m chairing a panel with Sienna Brown, Kelly Rimmer and Sue Williams, on one of my favourite topics: Biofiction, or the biographical novel.

Details here.

LGBTIQ characters panel

Also on October 23, I’m part of a panel with Nigel Featherstone and James Worner, chaired by Greg Johnston, discussing representations of queer characters from the past.

Details here.

There are lots of great panels for people who love reading historical fiction, and terrific guests (including Geraldine Brooks!); and for writers – especially emerging and aspiring writers, there are workshops, online manuscript assessments, masterclasses and bootcamps run by some of my favourite people.

And the good thing is you can attend from anywhere, and in your pyjamas if you want.

The bad thing is you have to do your own catering.

But we’re so used to that now, aren’t we? Let’s hope by the conference after this one, we can all gather again in person.

In the meantime, hope to see you there.

The writing life: On retreat

November 13, 2018 / Kelly Gardiner / Leave a comment

Right now I’m in Canberra, writing my little fingers to the bone, on a May Gibbs Children’s Literature Trust retreat fellowship. More on that soon, although not much happens. I just sit in a room and write. There are crimson rosellas picking at the grass outside my window, and every so often a roo bounces past on its way somewhere very important.

Unlike some Australians, who get a bit snarky about it, I’ve always loved our national capital: the architecture, the lake, the national arts institutions, and the surrounding country.

It’s Ngunnawal/Ngunawal, Ngambri and Ngarigu country around here and I acknowledge and celebrate the traditional custodians of this place.

On the road

November 30, 2016December 4, 2016 / Kelly Gardiner / Leave a comment

A couple of days ago I was back at Hampton Court Palace, the last of many castles and palaces I’ve visited in the last few weeks, on the interwoven trails of Queen Elizabeth 1 and the Irish pirate and rebel, Grace O’Malley.

I’ll post more photos in a bit, but right now my main thought is that the politics of both the Tudor court and early modern Ireland, and the moments when the two intersect, are so complex that this book is going to take a lot longer to write than I imagined.

It’s daunting. But it’s OK.

In other news, 1917 goes to press this week – that freaky moment where you have to accept you can’t change a thing.

The ‘R’ word

April 9, 2016 / Kelly Gardiner / Leave a comment

She’s not the first to say it, but she says it well: an interesting take on romance fiction as a feminist genre, from Trisha Brown:

Romance is one of the most feminist sectors you can find in all of art and entertainment. That statement defies all of the stereotypes, but it’s true.

You can read the whole article here.