I might be overthinking this. I’m trying to put myself in the mind of the person responsible for uploading images to the Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle de Paris website. I’ve been hanging about on there lately, looking at birds. I’m particularly interested in the Australian birds collected in the early 1800s by the Baudin expedition. Many of the skins and specimens from this and subsequent expeditions are in the collection of the museum in Paris.

These bird specimens have been photographed by the museum, from various angles, and the images have been uploaded to an online database. What has bemused me, maybe even obsessed me, is that the first image you encounter of these bird specimens, in many cases, is the bird with its head turned away from the camera.

Someone either thought about that decision, or didn’t. I know that’s a dumb sentence. Like I said, I might be overthinking this.

The impact of this first online encounter with these birds with their backs turned is, for me anyway, a bit of a fuck you. Fuck you for shipping me across the other side of the world. Fuck you for killing me and stuffing me. Fuck you and your collections.

I’m happy to encounter these refusals - these pisses de résistance. They bring to mind some of my other favourite fuck you photos - the suffragettes having their photos taken by the police in the early 1900s.

In fact, the suffragettes’ refusal to sit obediently and be photographed led to what was probably the first instance of surveillance photography. A van with a hidden photographer inside was stationed in the yard of Holloway prison to capture the women unawares. These photos would be distributed to museums and galleries so that suffragettes could be prevented from entering and damaging artworks as part of their campaign for women’s rights.

Back to the birds … I hate to imagine what they went through, especially the ones that were shipped alive like the King Island emus, dwarf cousins to those on the mainland. Baudin took three emus from King Island in 1802. They were force fed wine and cake on the long sea voyage and were even given sailor’s cabins in an effort to keep them alive.

They ended up alongside a whole bunch of exotic animals in the Empress Josephine’s garden at Malmaison, before living out the last of their days in the Jardin des Plantes of the Natural Museum of Natural History in Paris.

The King Island emu was eaten into extinction (locally) in 1805 by sealers and whalers, so the last King Island emu - the endling - died in Paris in 1822. The only remnants of this species in Australia are a few fossilised bones and one feather taken from the that endling specimen and sent to Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery (TMAG) in the year 2000.

There’s some chatter online about re-animating these birds in the present. Someone on Reddit commented:

I’d love for dwarf emus to be de-extinctified!

Me too buddy, me too. But I think our efforts would be better put towards preventing other birds become extinctified.

Perhaps our endangered birds can be tutored in the fine art of résistance by some of the more feisty species? I’m thinking here of one of my favourites: the Northern Fulmar.

You haven’t heard of the Northern Fulmar? check this out. Fulmar chicks look real cute, but venture too close to their nest and they will not hesitate to regurgitate the stinky oily contents of their guts and projectile vomit all over you.

Although in that case it’s not really a piss de résistance, is it?

Leave it with me.

A few years ago now, after I’d broken up from a disastrous relationship for the fourth (and final) time, I decided it was time to get a dog.

Even though I really love dogs I’ve never had/owned/cared for one. We did have a black cat when my daughter was little. His name was Lucky and he was anything but, for much of his life. When I moved into a smallish apartment the sound of his licking kept me awake at night. I loved him but I couldn’t live with him. He ended up being fostered by a couple who absolutely adored him and pampered him to the end, giving him nightly massages and gourmet treats. He finally got the Luck he’d been waiting for.

Anyway, I’d broken up from this guy who had been an appalling partner, a real headfucking bread-crumber, and it was at this moment I decided what I really needed in my life was a greyhound.

Without enough too much deliberation I found myself on the way to a greyhound rescue centre to meet a few dogs. Prior to my visit I’d explained my situation to the team there - novice dog owner, small apartment dweller, part-time worker, solo adult - so they could find my ideal greyhound match.

When I arrived at the centre I was introduced to one of two of the greyhounds they had in mind for me. They are nice, I said, but I can I just take a look around to see if there’s any other dogs here that spark something a little more on first meeting?

There were plenty of dogs following me, jumping around, barking, sidling up for a pat and a bit of attention, but the dog that caught my eye was sitting at the back of a dark kennel, curled on a bed, back turned away, not interested in me at all. Can I see that one? I asked.

(Do you see a pattern here, dear reader?)

As I approached this dog its lips quivered into something between a smile and a snarl. The lips didn’t stop quivering even when they’d found their limit. This dog was old. Bad stuff had clearly gone on in this dog’s life. Racing stuff probably. This dog needed … this dog needed… probably what this dog needed was to be left exactly where it was. That’s not what happened.

What did happen is that this dog accompanied me back home to begin a life of domestic bliss. A life of ball throwing and cuddles on the couch and long walks and dried out pig ears to chew on.

Nah. That didn’t happen either. What happened was, pretty much as soon as I got this dog inside my place, the tables turned. He looked miserable (actually that hadn’t changed). He gained dominion. I was scared of him. I felt like I’d taken an old traumatised war veteran out of a nursing home without his consent. He could pop off at any minute. No amount of pink plush toys would fix this.

Day 2: Not wanting to leave him alone, I took him to work with me. He lay on the floor in my office taking up around 70% of the floor space. When he heard someone enter, he raced across the gallery floor, almost bowling over my small colleague, then pissed on a one-off artwork (luckily wrapped in bubble-wrap) as the pièce de résistance ( I can’t resist - the piss de resistance??). I took him for a walk I tried to take him for a walk instead but he put his brakes on. Wouldn’t move. The more I dragged the deeper he dug. It was like trying to take a solid oak dining table for a stroll around the park. I gave up and we went ‘home’.

I was told not to let him on the bed or the couch. Someone should have explained this to him. He went straight to the bed. When I tried to pull him off he growled, quivering those lips again.

I rang the centre in tears. I don’t know what to do, I said. I called a local greyhound owner. I’m out of my depth, I said.

I slept on the couch.

Day 3: I called the centre again. Bring him back they said. And so I did.

Another refusal. Another relationship failure. I felt like I was letting the dog down, but I knew he was better off without me. I can’t even remember his name now.

I’m making it sound more dramatic than it was. The dog probably found a great family and landed on his feet paws, all four of those stubborn fuckers. My friends like to laugh when I tell them this story now.Tell us about that dog, they say, all dog owners themselves. Then they laugh and laugh and I laugh too, and embellish a bit to make them laugh more.

So, now I’m alone again after a much, much better relationship has gone into hibernation, and I’m thinking about dogs again. I really hope I’ve got what it takes this time.

Back when I had my last office job - pre-Covid - I felt like an alien who’d landed on a strange planet. I was working for a university, writing ‘how to’ articles for an online knowledge bank that was ultimately designed to replace the people who had the knowledge. The role involved interviewing ‘subject matter experts’ (SMEs to those in the know) and describing in step-by-step detail any idiot could follow, how to do a particular task or solve a particular problem. It was a nascent idea. Managers were working it out on the fly. Instructions could change from one day to the next.

I once wrote a 4-page article on how to make a room booking. Afterwards, at our weekly ‘stand up meeting’ I said to my manager, ‘You know no one is going to read this, right? They’ll see how long it is and call the help desk.’

My protests went unheard.

I continued writing.

I once spent three days writing articles about how to apply for each of the 10 or so different parking permits available, only for the parking tsar - the only employee who knew anything about the system and who kept a very tight grip on the ins and outs - to announce there’d be changes to the permit system starting the following year, rendering my ‘how to’ articles effectively obsolete within seconds.

Oh well, it was their money.

Offices are strange places. Here’s what I reckon you shouldn’t do in offices - especially open plan ones:

• eat lunch at your desk

• eat tuna, anything crunchy or any citrus fruit at your desk

• talk loudly about what you did on the weekend while the person next to you and almost touching your elbow with theirs is trying to write, especially if it is about how your dog went in the dog show trials on the weekend

• slurp tea or coffee

• sigh

There was a strange mix of corporate safety and dog-eat-dog survival instinct at play in this workplace. On the carpeted walls there were signs reminding employees about bullying and championing diversity, while around me the people who rose to the top were mostly white and often bullies. There were tissue boxes and industrial-sized bottles of hand sanitiser on every desk (and this was BEFORE Covid). There were staff meetings where, in front of a whole team, managers would announce the need for cutbacks to the lower ranks then call out a few names asking people to stay behind at the end while the rest of us shuffled apologetically past them.

Our team manager once made a big deal about organising a ‘thank you for your hard work’ lunch. She’d booked a table at a local pub, sent us an email lettings us know we were ‘allowed’ to have one drink each then, after the meal, excused herself early and left without paying for any of it. When we found out that we had to pay, we sat there gobsmacked. One of the team didn’t actually have enough money to cover what she’d eaten. If this was meant to be a team bonding exercise, it worked. We were united in our outrage. ‘No offence’ one of the them said to the rest of us, ‘but if I’d known I was going to have to pay, I wouldn’t have said yes to having lunch with you.’ We all agreed.

Anyway, what I started off wanting to say about this workplace, was that when I needed to do a poo there I’d search out a special cubicle, which in my head I called ‘the poobicle’. Being undisturbed there wasn’t guaranteed, but it was definitely more likely than in the toilets closer to one of the ‘hot’ desks.

I thought about my poobicle lately when I read about a social media campaign being run by the Queensland Department of Health reminding people ‘It’s OK to poo at work’.

Some of the comments on Qld Health’s Instagram page are pretty funny.

One user says: Boss makes a dollar, I make a dime, that’s why I poo on company time!

Another writes: Literally seeing this while on the toilet at work!

In an article about the Queensland health initiative, Simon Robert Knowles Associate Professor and Clinical Psychologist, Swinburne University of Technology describes this shyness of bowel and the potential health impacts.

What is parcopresis?

Parcopresis, sometimes called “shy bowel”, occurs when people experience a difficulty or inability to poo in public toilets due to fear of perceived scrutiny by others.

Knowles’ research asked students to assess which cubicle they’d use in a shopping centre if they needed to take take a dump.

In each vignette participants were advised they were at a local shopping centre and they needed to have a bowel motion. In the vignettes, the bathrooms (which had been recently cleaned) had configurations of either two or three toilet stalls. Each vignette differed by the configuration of stalls available.

My mother used to bundle into the cubicle with me when I was a kid then proceed to tear strips of toilet paper off and lay them around the seat and then, in what seemed like a needless extra precaution, lift me up in the seated position so I hovered about the whole scenario anyway. So, clearly 7 & 8 above are the only viable options for me.

The world falls into two categories: the poo-shamed and the poo-freelies. This may, or may not, all be linked back to mothers.

(side note, another of my mother’s favourite habits was to ask, ‘what will the neighbours think?’ - see note re. options 7 & 8 above).

Which leads me to another poo-related and final topic. Those envelopes you receive when you turn 50.

Yeah buddy. I see that expression. It’s not screaming rainbows and dolphins, is it?

As someone whose friend found out they had bowel cancer from one of those tests. I’m keen to get the message out - and here it is.

You’re 50 now.

It’s time to get your shit together.

I haven’t had to get my shit together yet because I have regular colonoscopies. Last time I had one the anaesthetic wore off before they’d finished the procedure. I woke up on my side, being jostled around by the surgeons. I was face-to-face with my anaesthetist. I said to her, ‘Excuse me, I don’t think I’m meant to be awake,’ then, after a moment’s hesitation ‘so do I still need to do one of those tests?’.

‘No,’ she said. Then my lights went out.

And the moral of this story? Two for the price of one:

1. If you are going to do shit at work, you may as well get paid for it and,

2. get your shit together.

I’ve been thinking a lot about history lately, about how we re-create or re-present the past, and what it tells us about the present.

Perhaps that’s why I decided to take a trip to the Australian Museum on one of the last days of the mega touring exhibition Ramses & the Gold of the Pharaohs and sign up for the whole shebang, the $54 ticket, the $30 VR experience and the $11 audio tour.

The Ramses exhibition is a high production value affair, there’s dramatic lighting and staging, vast murals and numerous sound and video embellishments. The museum calls it an “all-new multisensory museum experience” providing visitors with “a window into the life and accomplishments of Ramses II, more commonly known as Ramses the Great.”

For me, it was hard to see the wood for the trees. There were some incredible artefacts for sure, but I found it hard to pay attention to them between the videos and installations… and the crowds.

The exhibition starts by introducing Ramses II, who sounds like the Donald Trump of ancient Egypt. He claimed he was a God, he propagated ‘fake news’ about himself, claiming he’d won things he actually hadn’t (the battle of Kadesh for instance - which is thought to have been a draw at best). His ‘greatness’ was matched by the size of his ego and his monuments.

The Australian Museum says “Ramses was known as a mighty warrior who secured peace with his neighbours, led an extensive building campaign that included scores of gigantic monuments to himself, and is believed to have fathered over 100 children.”

I imagined what it might look like, thousands of years from now, if crowds thronged some museum of the future to consider the achievements of Trump, his shiny towers, the golden relics of his fake tan and blonde hair, his proclamations of greatness.

Interestingly, the exhibition’s curator Dr Zahi Hawass is also something of a show pony. An article in the Guardian quotes him as saying,

“My name is well known all over the world … They’re looking at the Opera House because they need a big venue for my lecture.”

The Guardian article also quotes him as saying, “God gave me this charisma, he did not give it to anyone else,” to Smithsonian Magazine in 2013, when journalist Joshua Hammer repeated his rivals’ claims that his fame is attributable more to self-promotion and political connections than scientific clout.

So, why did I find the whole thing unedifying? It’s hard to say if it was the crowds, the exhibition design or the glorification of ego that made me feel underwhelmed.

Most of the one star reviews on Tripadvisor relate to the overcrowding or exhibition design, though a few related to the cafe.

Rameses Gold of the Pharoahs. Pathetic given the price. The Abu Simble model was laughable, with the illumination not seen when you pushed the poxy button. The exhibition was not inspiring at all, and the number of Ramses related artefacts ( ex sarcophagus) was minimal. Having been to Egypt 30 years ago, my ticket was a waste of money. I don't recommend it.

the part that upset me was the lady that worked there was screaming a everyone like we were a herd of cows telling everyone to move and go to the left when there was absolutely nowhere for us to move due to how packed it was. What should have been an enjoyable day was turned into a nightmare . Don’t even get me started on the overpriced stale cake and sandwiches.

I lasted about an hour and a half in the exhibition. I learned that women were painted a different colour (more yellow - less brown) to men in the artworks of ancient Egypt to indicate their tendency to stay inside on home duties.

I also learned that the animal mummies weren’t always about honouring the animals. Often the animal mummies were sold as sacrifices to the gods. You could pop down to your local mummifier and get yourself a couple of cats and an ibis, for instance, or bigger animals to offer up if you had the cash. In fact, animals were raised for this purpose. I hope, for the animals’ sake, that the mummifiers were gaming the system and selling ersatz ‘mummies’ rather than the real thing.

After the exhibition, I lined up for the Virtual Reality experience, ricocheting from ancient Egypt back to Sydney and the wonders of the modern world.

The ‘experience’ takes you on a guided tour through Abu Simbel temple and Nefertari’s Tomb led by Queen Nefertari herself. Nerfertari (Ramses II’s first wife) hovers in front of you leading the way and narrating the VR journey. The chairs you are sitting in swivel and shake as you travel through temples and desert, escaping spirits and dust storms.

I can’t say much about the tour of the temples because I couldn’t take my eyes off the queen’s boobs. Someone had put a lot of thought … time … inflation … into them.

World Heritage Exhibitions; GIF by Meara Isenberg/CNET

I had a lot of questions.

Were those boobs historically accurate?

They defied gravity, yet seemed to obey physics horizontally, swinging sideways and rebounding as she spun around.

Do boobs actually swing sideways?

What would Queen Nefertari’s body actually have been that curvy?

Who decided to give her such big boobs?

The Australian Museum and the exhibition team admits to a preference for ‘entertainment value’ over historical fidelity in the VR presentation.

I’m guessing the team at NEON, the company who created the whole exhibition experience and whose management team comprises 11 men and one woman, were behind the boob decision. Someone had to sign off on it, right? Perhaps someone who used to work on video game design or has spent too much time on OnlyFans created the initial prototype and nobody thought it strange??

Or perhaps I’ve got it wrong. Perhaps boobs were big back then in ancient Egypt. After all, they featured quite proudly in Anne Baxter’s portrayal of Queen Nefertari.

Towards the end of the VR, the Queen finds Ramses II in a temple and gives him a hug. He looks more like Rambo than what I imagined Ramses might have looked like. He’s slick, hairless and bulging, like he’s come home from a workout out at the local gym.

Would a pharaoh really be that buff?

Would he do physical work, or get his slaves to?

So many questions…

After the VR experience I had to say something to someone. I needed someone to bear witness, so I turned to the woman in the chair next to me and said,

“I didn’t realise they had fake boobs in ancient Egypt.” She nodded and laughed.

All these boobs led me thinking about an ABC story I’d seen about generative AI and how it’s shaping our understanding of bodies, particularly women’s bodies.

The story centres on model agent Chelsea Bonner, who has been speaking out about the dangers of generative AI replacing real models, not only decimating an industry but creating less and less inclusive or realistic images of women.

What we do about all this pornifying?

Keep calling it out I guess.

Hands off our bodies men (unless you are invited).

The title of this piece (and the last one, which was a month ago now!) comes from a video by the artist Tacita Dean, who had a show at the Museum of Contemporary Art earlier in the year. The MCA’s website describes Dean’s artwork as capturing her ‘investigations into themes of chance, memory, entropy, history and time.’

I had a stress hangover the day of my gallery visit. The night before my car had flipped out.(see part 1) and I’d spent the morning organising to get my car towed. This didn’t set me up for watching the slow thoughtful video artworks that comprised a large part of the show. This says more about me than the artworks. I was also with two friends who, while they enjoyed the show, were also very excited about the glass of wine that would follow.

If you’re not the right person, or you’re not in the right mood, video art can range from excruciating to hilarious. I remember going to see a huge exhibition called The Passions by video and sound installation artist Bill Viola at the National Gallery of Australia. If I had wanted to be reverent, I went with the wrong person.

The NGA website says, “Since the 1970s Bill Viola’s videotapes and installations have dealt with themes of perception, memory and self-awareness. Emotions are the subject of The Passions, an ongoing series begun in 2000. In these works Viola grapples with one of the oldest problems in art: how to convey the power and complexity of emotion by depicting the faces and bodies of models – specifically, in his works, of performers.”

The videos, as I remember them, are dramatic, slow moving, larger than life depictions of people experiencing big emotions. I watched one called Observance alongside my companion. It featured a group of people approaching a camera (the audience) seeing something they didn’t want to, emoting, then turning away.

My companion leant over and whispered to me that the video should be re-named, The dog’s done a poo on the carpet. That’s all I could see from then on.

Back to Tacita in Sydney. I was having trouble sitting still enough, and stilling my mind enough, to engage with the videos. I came across one though, that has stayed with me.

One Hundred and Fifty Years of Painting is a double portrait of two artists Luchita Hurtado and Julie Mehretu.  The film features them speaking to each other about painting, motherhood, nature/ecology and more.

The elder woman, Venezuelan painter Luchita Hurtado talks about watching astronauts travel to the moon, as a young woman. What struck her the most wasn’t the moon, it was the sight of the earth seen from space. She thought to herself,

Luchita was best-known for her I am series of paintings, which were self-portraits of her naked body from her viewpoint, looking down. And in the MCA film, here she was again, looking down, shifting the focus.

Her comment made me think about how, when you venture beyond your everyday, often what you end up discovering is not the thing that is beyond: what you end up learning about (or seeing anew) is the place you came from, the thing that was always there.

When Anny and I travelled all the way to Spain we stayed in a house overlooking a valley. At night we’d sit on the balcony and watch the moon. We’d never seen it so clearly. We’d never thought about it so much. We had new questions.

Anny went inside and googled the moon.

I hadn’t been to the Moonlight cinema for a while. But it was a nice night so we thought, ‘what the heck’? I drove there in my car. I love my car; well the back of it anyway. It’s a Volvo C30. If you don’t know what they look like, you need to see this so you can understand what I’m about to tell you.

See? Beautiful. But I don’t seem to have the knack of finding beautiful and reliable together. Anyway, to avoid going into the trials I’ve had with this car, I’ll concentrate on the evening in question.

While I was reversing into the spot I’d been guided to by the parking warden, my windscreen wipers started going like crazy. Ooops. Had I accidentally knocked the lever? No. I had not. Then the blinkers started going on. Then the dashboard told me my airbags urgently needed sorting and my brake fluid was low AND the immobiliser was now on….

There were other messages. I can’t remember them all. It was clear that my car had flipped out (again) and the electrics were at fault. I couldn’t turn the wipers off. I couldn’t turn the car off or take out the car key. I tried pulling something out from under the passenger side dash, like I’d seen my mechanic do, but that didn’t work either (though it did slow the wipers a little?). There was only one thing to do: go and watch the film.

We left the car wiping away, unlocked and unhinged, and walked up the hill with flying foxes reeling overhead .

I’m not going to lie, I was kind of rattled by the time we got to the refreshment stand near the cinema entrance. We were late by then, and the stand was going to close within minutes. There were about four people working on the stand, but you couldn’t just walk up to them and order, you needed to order via the QR code printed on a sign in front of the stand. The four people stood, heads bowed, looking at screens and receipts being printed out, waiting for new orders to come in. There was a crowd of about 5 or 6 customers waiting for their orders to be received, printed out and fulfilled. Oh wait. We were also all waiting for the text message we’d receive when our order was ready to collect. I almost forgot that bit.

WE ONLY WANTED TWO ICE CREAMS.

While we waited on our order fulfilment, other customers - with some kind of secret privilege - were able to walk right up to the counter and acquire their refreshments with the exchange with what looked like a coin-like token. WHAT SORT OF SYSTEM IS THIS? I asked the other ‘waiters’ who rolled their eyes and said nothing in reply.

*

I’m not going to say much about the film, though I think Roger Ebert hits the nail on the head in his review.

"Next Goal Wins" could have been commissioned as part of a scientific experiment to answer the question, "Is the underdog sports movie format so foolproof that it'll make people cry and cheer even if the movie is competent at best, and deeply irritating at worst?"

On the way back, we walked past people getting into their working cars. My car had worn itself out by then, but the key was still stuck. As it was getting late and we weren’t sure if the gates were all locked, we figured it was a tomorrow problem. So left the car there, found Lime bikes and rode home through the dark and deserted streets.

PS I know the title of this piece doesn’t make sense. I was going to write about the Tacita Dean show at the MCA; and about the awful tunnel tour we took in Laos; and how if you are going to visit Laos you probably don’t want to read A Small Place by Jamaica Kincaid before you go; and about how Anny googled the moon once in Spain. But that’s for later.

Photo of flying foxes by Clément Falize on Unsplash

5 days until Christmas.

I’ve just returned from visiting my friend Cath who lives in a coastal town 6 hours north of Sydney. I spent the first few days hanging at her house, with her dog Gidgee for company, while Cath went off to work.

While I’m at Cath’s by myself, Gidgee follows me around the house. If I’m at the desk, she sits behind me. If I get up to go to the kitchen, Gidgee comes too. Cath says that when there’s two people in the house, Gidgee usually places herself equidistant from them, a roving dog-shaped sentinel.

Gidgee follows Cath around too. When Cath’s elderly father John was living with her a few years ago, and starting to lose the sharpness of his beautiful mind, he’d follow her around as well. Sometimes Cath would arrive at the bathroom door to find them both hot on her heels.

She was incredibly patient and kind with John, and right up to the end he was gardening, singing, cracking bad jokes and being pretty damn jolly for a 96 year old. The last time I visited while John was alive, we picked him up from the nursing home so he could come to Cath’s house for a singing lesson. Rather than join in, I sat nearby working on something and listening to the choir teacher lead them in singing The Seekers’ Five Hundred Miles.

If you miss the train I'm on, you will know that I am gone.
You will hear the whistle blow a hundred miles.

John spent what would become his last day with Cath doing some gardening outside his nursing home. When he went inside for dinner, Cath somehow got stuck outside. She tried to get the attention of one of the staff to let her in, but couldn’t raise them, so she stood outside in the garden, watching through the window as her dad eagerly took his place at the table and tucked into a meal, surrounded by the nursing home community. He looked happy, so she decided to leave him to it. He died peacefully, early the next morning.

*

While Cath’s been at work I have been delving into the journal kept by Ralph Clark, a lieutenant on one of first fleet vessels, the Friendship. The transcribers of his journal describe him as possibly ‘the original whinging pom’. He’s certainly an interesting guy to spend time with - from a distance at least. The journal was probably never meant for public consumption, at least not in its current form. It’s a catalogue of ailments and weather updates, of loathing the female convicts and longing for his wife. He records his many dreams and documents the many deaths.

On August 9, 1787 he wrote:

Sunday the 9

dreamt of being in holland and I thought that Mrs. Hanse and I wair eating Greaps

and that She order me to take a hors and Ride Exspress to Some place

perhaps She is dead and has left me some thing Worth

I hope She has then how happy will my Betsey be

very happy I know indeed

Day after day during the long boat trip there’s records of bad weather and bird sightings, of yearning for apples or punishing the convicts for being dirty and disorderly. He particularly hated the women convicts - who he called ‘damned whores’ and who, according to him, deserved every suffering they endured. His attitude to them couldn’t have been further from his thoughts of his wife. Each Sunday Clark took a painted portrait of his wife Betsey Alicia out of a little bag and kissed it thousands of times and much of the journal is addressed to his wife or about his longing to be with her.

Clark ended up on Norfolk Island in 1789. The Sirius, on which he travelled, was wrecked on the reef shortly after he disembarked. The supplies that had been on board the Sirius were lost. The 500 or so inhabitants of Norfolk island then faced the prospect of starving, but for the arrival of Mount Pitt birds a few days later, to nest.

In his journal Clark meticulously documents the number of birds killed each night, usually around 4 or 5 thousand. As keeper of the stores, he must have felt it his duty. On Tuesday 25 May 1790 he wrote:

Tuesday 25th.

Much the Same weather as Yesterday and Still a very great Surf —— the people that were at Mount Pit last Evening Say that the Birds there were thicker than the[y] ever Saw them —— it is a great Blessing that the Birds last So long for god knows what would become of use, if it was not for them being So plenty as the[y] are —— for these two days past the Boat has not been able to goe out a fishing on Account of the great Surf and to all appearence She will not for these Several days to come —— Birds last night 1839.

Other days there was simply a tally of the birds killed by Convicts, Marines and Sailors plus an running total.

June Tuesday 1st.

Birds

87502

913

1101

2743

92259

Around a million of the Mount Pitt birds (which were also called Providence petrels - for the great ‘blessing’ they provided) were killed between 1789-91. The species of animals - the cats, rats, dogs and goats - introduced by the colonists to Norfolk and left behind once the island was temporaily abandoned, meant that the petrels were extirpated from Norfolk and have never returned there to breed. There are two small colonies still in existence, one of Lord Howe Island and one on Phillip Island (near Norfolk). There’s about 3 weeks of birds left, converted to Clark’s time.

*

There’s some elaborate Christmas displays here, yards flash with multi-coloured lights and festive effigies. Coming from a built-up area, where front yards aren’t really a thing, it’s easy to forget how much peoples’ yards become the outward expressions of the souls inside. Cath’s is full of native flowers, bees and birds.

Along with the elaborate Christmas decorations here, there’s some less elaborate ones. One of my favourites is a brick house I walk past on the way to the local shops. Whoever lives there has got themselves a bucket of red and a bucket of blue paint and transformed the generic stone statues of girls holding baskets and bowls, balancing of bits of rock into to ruby haired, red lipped beauties, in a sea of green grass looking blithely towards the shops. One holds a bright blue pot as if she’s wondering where to put it.

There’s another house closer to Cath’s where, for the past few days, the residents have been transforming what was a tree into cubes of wood. Each time I’ve passed there’s been a shirtless man or two, covered in sweat, trying to wedge a human sized block of wood into the boot of a Holden. I want to ask them why they are slicing up the tree that way, but I don’t find the courage.

This being Christmas and all, the season of trinkets and tinsel and fairy lights, I’ve been trying to get into the spirit, so it probably wasn’t the best time to detour down another rabbit hole into the Adrift Lab a group group focused on seabirds and marine plastics research. They have documented the amount of plastic they are finding in sea birds from Lord Howe Island. The capture and band birds, flushing out their stomachs and counting the pieces of plastic they find there. It’s truly devastating. Their bodies are being slowly colonised by plastic, one krill covered piece at a time.

The scientists there have also been looking at the intersection between seabird migration and occurrence of marine plastics, to investigate the risks and the opportunities for mitigation. Their efforts have cast a different light on every trinket and plastic-wrapped Christmas knick-knack for me. I look at the elaborately twinkling houses and wonder where they will put it once Christmas is done.

What is it? December 6. That makes it 19 more days of carols and tinsel and overpriced pine trees in yuletide bondage. Then, we just have to get through the week after that, so we can get back to getting on with things.

Don’t get me wrong. I want to be good at Christmas ( I don’t mean that I want to be good, just that I want to be good at doing Christmas), but I’m not.

I blame my parents for dying too young and I blame the Rum Runner Restaurant at Birkenhead Point where I endured the first Christmas lunch after Mum died, paying what amounted to around $70 for a turkey sandwich and half a glass of wine. I would have drunk more wine but the person at the next table knocked the bottle over and, rather than offering to do something Christmassy about it, said that it was a stupid place to leave a bottle anyway.

After the wine incident the restaurant’s sad pianist started playing ‘I’m dreaming of a white Christmas’ to a room of people yoyo-ing back and forth between buffet and table. It was too sad. I went to the toilet and cried in the cubicle because I couldn’t hold it together any longer and because I missed my mum.

So, you see, I have a little history with Christmas.

Cut to yesterday - December 6. I was with a friend in the waiting room of a doctor’s surgery. We were waiting for her biospy results. The waiting room and reception desk already had tinsel growing over every non-functional surface. Behind the receptionists there was a television mounted on the wall that was showing nature documentaries. The tv was on mute, so the office soundtrack consisted of stock recordings of Christmas carols on a loop plus the lowered voices of the staff explaining how to use PicoPrep or asking for private health fund details and printing out invoices.

As my friend and I chatted I watched what was happening on the screen. Monkey tongues licked hairy things in close up. Hyenas feasted on the innards of a dead zebra, emerging with bloody beards. Baby elephants waved their little trunks around in a way that made the trunks look too much like colons. If you ask me, nature docos and doctors waiting rooms aren’t a good combo. Too visceral, too much of a reminder that we are animals as well, made of the flesh and blood we like to forget, or at least put aside while we wait in a doctor’s surgery for biopsy results. Add to that the Christmas soundtrack and well …

When it was our turn, the doctor came out and called my friend’s name. We had agreed I’d go in with her to hear the results. Turns out she has cancer. It’s early stages though, and the doctor seemed confident that he’ll be able to cut it out and be done with it. What did he say? Something about operating for recovery? I tried to imprint every word, in case it helped. I wish I had a better memory. Her operation is scheduled for early January, once we get through this festive season.

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