In a world of the short and swift, of texts and Twitter, there’s something of special value about a carefully composed letter.

In homage to this most civilised of activities, Marieke Hardy and Michaela McGuire created the literary afternoons of Women of Letters. Some of Australia’s finest dames of stage, screen and page have delivered missives on a series of themes, collected here for the first time. Claudia Karvan sends ‘A love letter’ to love itself, Helen Garner contacts ghosts of her past in ‘The letter I wish I’d written’, Noni Hazlehurst dispatches a stinging rebuke ‘To my first boss’, and Megan Washington pays tribute to her city and community as she writes ‘To the best present I ever received’.

And some gentlemen correspondents – including Paul Kelly, Eddie Perfect and Bob Ellis – have been invited to put pen to paper in a letter ‘To the woman who changed my life’.

By turns hilarious, moving and outrageous, this is a diverse and captivating tribute to the art of letter writing.

All royalties for this book will go to Edgar’s Mission animal rescue shelter.

The Age, Epicure December 2010

CHRISTMAS lunch usually began with an acidic squirt of grapefruit juice in the eye. At least that’s how it started for me. After my grandfather had ever so slowly toasted “the Queen, absent friends and family”, we kids finally got the nod to start and we’d stab at our half-a-grapefruit each with tiny forks, unleashing a criss-cross of squirts. A constant re-sprinkling of brown sugar was mandatory.

The long Christmas lunch table was actually a hotchpotch of smaller tables disguised under a soon-to-be-ruined white tablecloth. Set with a confusing array of cutlery and glasses, we’d sit according to a seating plan devised by Grandpa, with innocent children being placed between hot-tongued adults.

But sun-kissed and starving, hair impatiently combed in broad deliberate strokes, we kids were mostly oblivious to any adult tensions. On Christmas mornings, my Dad and uncle purposely exhausted my brothers, cousin and I at the beach. Let off our leads like dogs into the waves, we armed ourselves with sticks and continued the endless search for blue-ringed octopus, whose fluorescent rings were said to glow like the fly zapper in the fish and chip shop.

Inevitably, I’d be left behind and I’d amuse myself by prying limpets off the rocks and dropping the exposed molluscs into the water to lure fish from their hiding places.

When it was lunchtime, we walked to our grandparents’ house, a white weatherboard beach shack on stilts, filled with books, wooden ships inside bottles, paintings of the bush and rock collections. But the Australiana element ended here; our lunches were traditionally British, beginning with Christmas crackers, the room filling with small bangs, bad jokes and too-large paper hats.

Then came the half grapefruit, followed by turkey, pink ham, cranberry sauce, roast vegetables, cucumber and yoghurt salad.

Our childish quirks were loosely adhered to — my oldest brother detested cooked vegetables, our cousin abhorred tomatoes, I was so obsessed with potatoes that my grandmother was convinced I was the Irish throwback of the family, while my middle brother embraced all things edible as long as the use-by-date had been checked.

We were a well-mannered bunch, politely asking for seconds, trying not to swing our legs too vigorously beneath the table. I remember the swan-like necks of the women in our family, my Mum, Grandma and aunt loping around the table, putting food on our plates and collecting the dishes.

Grandpa would pour the wine and I’d thieve tiny sips. He had a saying, Grandpa did — a little joke between him and our grandma where he’d hover his hand over his plate when she offered a final helping of food and say, “I have had an elegant sufficiency.” He’d smile gently at her, then at us benignly, before continuing “any more would be superfluous”. I had no idea what he was talking about.

By the end of lunch, the cushions placed beneath my bum so I could see above the table would be gone. I could only just see the blue flaming Christmas pudding, steamed with silver pence and shillings. Grandma later exchanged these for modern coins except for when my cousin swallowed a thruppence. He was allowed to keep it.

The dessert joke was that our Dad, predisposed to the tastier things in life, would like a little bit of pudding with his brandy butter. It was around this time that we probably became less likeable. We were well aware it was time for presents.

The evening before, “Santa” (Dad) had helpfully downed the yellow can of XXXX beer left out for him, while the real Santa (Mum) placed presents under the potted-pine Christmas tree.

Our presents were usually dotted with torn holes from surreptitious peeking and, awake before it was light, my brothers and I would lug bowls of soggy Weet-Bix to our parents in bed and harangue them until we were allowed to open our booty. Now there was a second round of presents to go through.

These were of vital importance. They determined what we did for the rest of the afternoon.

If it was money, we’d troop to the milk bar. If it was some kind of sporting paraphernalia, we’d try to break it or break something with it. If they were more subdued presents, we’d leave the little pile with our mothers and charge outside.

Standing in a circle, banging on a cowbell, there would be a debate over our next move. Totem tennis, teasing the neighbour’s dog, ping-pong, mixed lollies, running races, the beach or throwing rocks at the boy down the road?

The big brouhaha that was Christmas, the carols, Advent calendars, nativity plays, presents, sleepless nights and schmaltzy movies was over in a flash. We were off and running again, just a muddle of skinny brown legs causing trouble.

Frankie magazine

This is Cuba: a small alligator shaped island of freedom and ironic regulation where it’s popular to coat your fangs in gold, listen to bootleg ‘reggae-ton’ and patriotically smoke the island’s main produce – cigarettes so strong they feel like inhaling a blowtorch. An uneven economy where education and healthcare is free for all, but the media is censored; where people can’t afford shampoo, but will hot up a pushbike with subwoofers bought on the black market.

The result of various invasions has had a startling effect on the people and city of Havana. Blue Russian eyes stare out of panther-black faces and a patchwork of buildings from pastel pink Spanish Art Deco to Soviet-style prefabricated concrete crowd the streets. Soft drink cans cut into decorations are strung between balconies while children in school uniforms play hopscotch, clutching blown-up condoms on strings.

Tough guys wear pre-loved T-shirts screen-printed with western platitudes such as ‘I love Jesus’ or ‘Keep our kids off Drugs’ donated from Canada. On the coastal boulevard that faces the Straits of Florida, the Castro government erects billboards with illustrations of Cubans shaking their fists at Uncle Sam across the sea. ‘C’mon, just you try it,’ they seem to say.

And yet, despite the bad publicity, hundreds of Cubans risk their lives each year trying to escape to America and the world beyond. One family transformed their Cadillac into a boat, only to be intercepted by Cuban water police a quarter of the way across the straits. Punishment for trying to leave the island is imprisonment. “Some people die, just dreaming of the outside world,” a new friend, Perez, told us.

Cuba is a cryptic, beautiful place where people danced without inhibition, music pouring out of every crack in the wall. For an outsider, you want nothing more than for Cuba to stay the same, to not be infiltrated by McDonald’s and capitalism. But for those on the inside, this island is stuck in time and something will have to give.

Photo Essay published in Frankie magazine, October 2009

Frankie magazine, February 2008
Editor – Jo Walker

I was sixteen when I took my first tab of LSD. It was beautiful – even when the three of us stood around what we thought was an enormous wondrous slug on the footpath, not realising until I touched it that it was a dog turd. But while acid can make flowers drip colours like hot icing and inspire your school locker to talk to you, it is often book-ended by two very awful states of mind.

The superiority/inferiority complex or the aptly deemed, paranoia versus pro-noia.

One being that the world is out to get you, in particular the FBI, and the latter, the pro-noia state of mind, is that the world is working for you. It was created for you. You are the chosen one, your friends are the chosen people and all signs are messages of greatness laid out for you. And while bomb bunkers, Dictaphones and facial twitches are several indicators of the paranoid species, bad tattoos seem to stem from the Pro-noia side of things.

I have a whale on one ankle, a sun on the other, and an‘original’ design on my back (or as I now like to call it, the female mantelpiece – just above my arse). All except for the ‘original’ were done before I was eighteen with the help of a fake ID card, pawnshops, and a job at Red Rooster. I believed I was connected to the whales, more than any marine biologist could ever fathom. The whales and I had a relationship. If I were to fall overboard in the ocean with nothing but a doughnut inflatable, I was adamant the whales would save me.

Then there’s my friend Gill Tucker of the band Spider Vomit. It’s an ongoing debate, but I think she’s got worse tattoos than me. On her mantel is ‘verity’ which translates to ‘truth’ in Latin (the reason I know this, is because I once wrote a teen angst poem with the word in it after trawling through the thesaurus) but worse than putting the dead language on her back, is the font she chose. ‘I just went with the first font on the menu,’ she now says in her defence. Not wing dings, but Verity in black cartoon-like letters with gothic edges. To top it off, she’s got a Japanese symbol (Gill is positive it means ‘imagination’ but is too scared to check now that it’s on her) and a star on her foot.

Then there is the tummy tattoo. Why do females persistently get tattoos on their stomach? Are we in complete denial of our biology? Do we think the man-made womb is coming to a store near you? A lady on the Gold Coast (it would be cruel to name her but you’ll know if you see her) had the idea of getting Odie tattooed on her belly. Think back to those toilet literature days of Hagar the Horrible, Footrot Flats and yup, Garfield. Remember the dog that always got his tongue tied in knots in those Jim Davis cartoons? Yep, that’s Odie. When this certain lady fell pregnant and her belly started to inflate, Odie grew too. When the birth didn’t go to plan and she had to have a C-section, poor Odie was cut in half. The doctor couldn’t care less about sewing him back together correctly, so while mother and child were in a kind of induced euphoria, the two halves of Odies floated in opposite directions across her stomach.

Worse are the people who get good tattoos, the ‘oh look at me, I waited til my brain had fully developed and was no longer trying to establish a subculture and putty up the holes in my psyche with sentimental symbols’ people. These people have the fine outline of folding boxes on the inside of their arms, fragile powerlines drawn between their shoulder blades, Japanese waves breaking on the shore of their ankles, swallows looping thread round their arms. These people are not your friend. They are not stupid, and we folk with stupid tattoos must stick together.

My partner and I are a good example of such loyalty.

Whilst not having the same teenage lack of conscience to pawn off family heirlooms as I did, he did earn a meagre amount at his family’s restaurant when he was seventeen, but not enough it seems. When he got an armband of something resembling kelp or barbwire round his arm, the tattooist stopped halfway and wouldn’t continue until there was more money on the table. Sixteen years later it is still unfinished.

So my advice is – f you’re heading to a parlour clutching a drawing you’ve been slaving over between bongs or a page torn from National Geographic of your totem animal, I have one more story to tell you. It is about a friend of a friend of a friend.

This friend spent many nights listening to weird music and drawing black ink pictures with lots of lines and squiggles that people who’ve had too much acid tend to draw. She chose one of them to be tattooed on her back. In sobriety, and I don’t mean the next day, but years later when the green smoke receded and some kind of daylight entered her brain again, she saw in her tattoo what could only be described as a Freudian delight. Penises and vaginas lurked menacingly on her back, all carnivorously swallowing each other.

The Big Issue, November 2007

A besotted Anna Krien explains why she’s not ready to part with her old panel van – with its hand-painted exterior and wooden chandelier inside – just yet.

It was my granny’s last wish that I get rid of that car. I said, “Granny, I love my car.” I thought it was a bit manipulative to use a dying wish on my poor defenceless V8 mag-wheel bench seat 1978 Holden panel van. I tried to negotiate. “Granny, I won’t get another tattoo, or any new holes in my face and I’ll keep my hair the one colour from now on, but I’m not getting rid of the panel van. Deal?” My granny sighed and turned away from me. She closed her eyes and pretended to be asleep. When her dinner came, she wouldn’t let me help her eat it and the nurse cut the meat into little pieces instead.

I paint my panel van with house paint. Every few years, a splattered outline around the car is left on the street like the chalk outline of a dead body in a homicide. Which is interesting because a new boyfriend seems to coincide with each paint job. My Italian boyfriend’s mother says that in the seventies people used to paint everything with house paint – the car, the footpath, even the fridge. At the moment, my panel van is two-tone green and the inside, including the dash, is wallpapered. A little wooden chandelier hangs from the ceiling. But many people, not just my granny, don’t like my car.

Children love it but their parents hate it. I’m not sure why – my car is not fast and if I’ve drunk too much, I slip in the back and sleep til morning. But in St Kilda a grumpy man kept letting the tyres down, and in Fitzroy North, a neighbour tried to get the council to ban me from parking in front of her house. Unfortunately for her, my housemate was a town planner with the very same municipality. However one evening, when I was getting out of my car – she stopped me to say, “You’re rental scum aren’t you? My husband and I worked hard to buy this house.” I was speechless.

I wonder if she would be a different person if she experienced what I’ve experienced in this car. Six friends crammed in it at the Coburg Drive-in or sleeping on a pristine beach in Kangaroo Island with a mosquito net thrown over the back, a moody stereo that only plays certain AM radio stations, playing scrabble on a sandy mattress, snuggled in the bench seat next to your lover never feeling the need to get anywhere fast – meaning the panel van has never directly killed an animal (although I’m sure its carbon footprint has). So far, it has stopped for three wombats, one goanna, five echidnas, an emu and her three knock-kneed kids, a fox and too many kangaroos to count.

But if it’s the gentrified city residents that give me grief, it’s the mechanics that bend over backwards to keep the panel van going forward. They rummage through wrecking yards for rare parts and continually re-weld sheets of metal beneath the pedals where the road is revealing itself. The mechanics with their greasy rags and my insufficient funds, we know that we are gazing at the last of its kind. When I was growing up, my parents had two Leyland P76s – one green and one orange. I’m sure our childhoods took about three times longer than usual with those long Malibu-esque vehicles, especially when they overheated halfway up a mountain road. But there is something about not travelling in a vacuum-sealed modern car – when it is hot, you open the windows and when it is cold, well, you stay awake.

Last week, someone left a note on my windscreen, requesting I move the car and the handwriting was the exact same illegible scrawl that my Granny had, the kind where the person had been taught writing on tablets in 1932 and never graduated to the ball point pen. I obeyed immediately.

Uber Gallery, March 2008
Artist – Beck Wheeler

Hey, Hey, Which Way?

There is a saying that for every five bodies in a cemetery, there’s an extra one. On certain nights, so the rumour goes, the gates are left unlocked, a hole left unfilled and two spades are pronged in a mound of dirt like kebab sticks. These extra bodies make the dead jump as they are dumped on top of expensive coffins, gate-crashing the funerals of the properly buried. The only send-off said under a black cellophane sky for them is ‘good fucking riddance’ and if they’re lucky, the glowing butt of a cigarette thrown in after them – a tiny torch to take into the afterlife.

Beck Wheeler’s collection Hey Hey, Which Way? is a labyrinth journey into the afterlife. Based on a board game she used to play with her siblings, Wheeler has entwined fables, polemic, ancient beliefs with the oddly beautiful and lucid realities of the departed. If our subconscious were an ocean, then she has paddled across it and collected all the messages in bottles that have drifted between the living and the dead. “Death is like being in the womb. You can hear everyone around you, but they’re muffled, they are underwater,” says a departed father to his daughter, his message captured in a painting.

When it comes to Beck Wheeler settling on her own insurance plan for the afterlife, she has had a range of options. Growing up in Beach Haven (a small New Zealand town that ironically had no beach – only mangroves and a fish n’ chips shop), her parents followed the teachings of Sheikh Abdullah Isa Neil Dougan, a group that merged Sufi, Buddhist and Hindu traditions. However for the sake of the girls getting a good education, Wheeler and her siblings were sent to a Catholic school. “So we grew up with a mix of Sufi services that included the adults dressing in robes and lighting candles, then going to Catholic Mass where followers lined up to drink the blood of Christ. I never really understood either ceremony as a child. They both seemed like a game.”

Hence the theatrical depiction of the afterlife in Wheeler’s installation and paintings. There is the cosmic egg, magical wheat silos, the dance of a thousand virgins, banished souls burping out spores, embalmed mummies avidly reading the Book of the Dead, perilous journeys and so many tests – the afterlife is like year 12 all over again.

But are these beliefs, rituals and cemeteries more for the living, than the dead? In the same way black armbands are for those left behind, perhaps the seven layers of hell in Islam (which is very different to my housemate’s dessert named Seven Layers of Delight – think peanut brittle, condensed milk, meringue, jelly and more) is simply a convincing way to reinforce the law.

In America, it’s said that after the electrical switch has been flicked on death row – the fluorescents shuddering throughout the jail – the family of the executed will often rush to the funeral home so they can embrace the warm body before life evaporates from it, leaving a cold corpse. Then they might discuss Jesus and how forgiving he is. But for these departed souls, what then? Is it is a case of ‘Hey hey which way?’

Beck Wheeler’s work has a haunting poignancy and comic sadness. Her creations make faux pas, they ask the wrong questions and then awkwardly hang around for the answer. Struggling with the big questions and life’s mundane certainties (for some creatures, it’s merely gravity they grapple with, their saggy green bosoms hanging painfully to the ground), one sad character reveals to another “While I was dreaming of death, you were dreaming of dinner”.

Wheeler’s work is unafraid to relate to ordinary chores, everyday habits, and imperfect people. When travelling in Cuba, I came across the work of Os Gemeos, identical twin brothers who paint together. In their Brazilian hometown of Sao Paulo, Os Gemeos have transformed the landscape with their characters that hiss at passer-bys on the street like a pimp trying to show off his lovely ladies. Their odd characters engage with one another, often revealing small truths about themselves in the process. To me, Beck Wheeler’s work promises a similar resonance, spooking passer-bys and offering a carnival engagement to its viewers.

It has been documented that people who have returned from the dead will often describe a sensation of hovering above their body, their souls getting a birds-eye view of the situation. In fact, this ‘reporting back’ from the dead has happened so often, that one UK hospital decided to place a LED screen in their emergency surgery, placing it in a position that only the recently dead could see it if looking down from the ceiling. The test was to see if those who reported back from the dead, could recall the message flashing on its screen. So far no one has been able to.

But perhaps we’re being too literal. Maybe a hovering sensation doesn’t actually physically mean we’re rising. It is not fully understood how brain cells generate thoughts. In England, one research team is has produced significant evidence to suggest the mind or consciousness is independent of the brain. The lead researcher, Dr Parnia says “… The brain is definitely needed to manifest the mind, a bit like how a television set can take what essentially are waves in the air and translate them into picture and sound.”

So if our bodies are the equivalent of televisions, when we die we lose that expression – but perhaps the signal sticks around. I get the sense in this exhibition, in Beck Wheeler’s take on the afterlife, we will all be hovering for before us are the dreams, the memories and the messages that have drifted between the living and the dead. Whether we see an LED screen or not, I don’t think it matters.

Beck Wheeler creates installations that combine drawing, sculpture and toy making. Her work explores narrative and reflects an interest in comic book art, contemporary illustration, medieval cartography and children’s toys. She has exhibited in New Zealand, Australia, Spain and the USA, seeing her work reviewed in The Age, IdN, Creative magazine, Australian Art Review, Urbis Magazine and Make Magazine.

West Space Gallery, August 2008
Artist – Tai Snaith

Flight or Fight

The irukandji jellyfish, found in the northeast waters of Australia, is tinier than the head of a matchstick. It is almost impossible to see but its effects on the human nervous system are as horrifying as say, a great white shark were circling us. Likened to a bad LSD trip, unsuspecting victims of the irukandji will experience not only searing pain but also an overwhelming sense of fear and doom.

Victims have been known to sprint down the beach screaming as if death itself were chasing them, their exertion thereby rushing the poison to their heart and killing them. Once, a stung lifesaver was discovered in the public toilet block, his arms wrapped around the toilet and bawling – ambulance officers had to pry him away from the toilet bowl.

Most of our fear is believed to have stemmed from an experience, whilst Freudian psychoanalytical thought views our irrational fears as a result of something repressed – be it a memory or a desire. But does the chemical fear triggered by the irukandji jellyfish mean the same experience for every person? Or is everyone’s experience of impending doom different?

Fight or Flight is a series of new works on paper and vintage book covers by Melbourne artist Tai Snaith. Combining collage and drawing in a makeshift bomb shelter, these detailed works explore ideas of survival, animal instinct and an impending doom. Snaith considers the possibility of harboring old books as if it this dugout shelter were to be a futuristic study retreat for a bored survivor to mess with the intelligentsia of an old and long-gone world.

Yet, despite the morose finality of most ‘end of world’ scenarios, there is a comic sense of play and the absurd as Tai Snaith’s mind seems to wander (as one’s mind would inside a bomb shelter when the novelty of impending doom wears off). Like a child infuriates their parents by scribbling over the faces of politicians in today’s newspaper – turning the prime minister into a drag queen or drawing boobs on a footballer, if I remember correctly, she boldly etches her own vision onto the old and reinvents the past whilst waiting for the doom to unlock the latch to her hidey-hole.

The term ‘Fight or Flight’ has become a somewhat commonplace and flippant piece of information amongst humans. What was once a seminal theory is repeatedly referenced – often without a true understanding of Walter Cannon’s discovery or the adaptations he later made to his thesis. Most of us know that ‘fight or flight’ is the response in an animal’s brain when faced with a threat, but what we may forget is that when we are faced with danger, many of us neither fight or runaway – rather, like chameleons, many of us try to disappear. You may have experienced this on the train, when a man, psyched and leering for a fight, scans the carriage trying to catch someone’s eye. Those keen on self-preservation will studiously avoid meeting his eyes. We will try not to stand out.

Charles Darwin once wrote that “… fear is the most depressing of all emotions” as he described scared animals literally depressing themselves by flattening their ears and crouching close to the ground. But while some wild animals may react this way to conserve energy, neither wanting to ‘fight or flight’ unless it is absolutely necessary, often humans will stay still due to social restraint. The bushfires in Victoria early this year is an example of just how dulled our survival instincts have become.

Journalists wrote of how people in the direct line of fire on Black Saturday were paralysed not by fear, but by complacency. Tourists took photos of the black furls of smoke coming toward them before returning poolside. Drinks were still being poured at a wedding banquet even when the staff outside were throwing buckets of water onto the reception centre. And while many of us appear to ignore very real threats (think climate change), there is a constant increase of social phobias in the Western world. People experience survival responses such as adrenaline saturation and blushing on a crowded tram or in a supermarket queue. Panicking like birds trapped inside a house – we bang ourselves against the windows of our very own society. For humans, it seems there are other influences on our fear beyond that of experience and instinct. We have the unfortunate gift of anticipation and imagination. We dread things that might happen. Things that are less likely to happen to us such as snakebite or drink spiking or a plane crash than say an ordinary car accident or a fatal melanoma. But because we have read about it, seen it on TV or been told about it, we can’t help but dread it.

It is strange how little we contemplate the remnants of animal instinct we retain under our own skins, we tend to either dress up this intuition as human intelligence or disguise it with medical technology. Some of us seem so intent on disconnecting ourselves from these primal instincts that modern doctors can conduct surgery – such as clipping a small segment of involuntary nerves – to stop surges of intense blushing. Unique to humans, blushing is a response from part of our nervous system that prepares the body for action in a ‘fight or flight’ situation.

But the question remains – why do our bodies undermine us?

Red-faced, we inform others that we may be feeling vulnerable, deceiving ourselves or lying, often despite our wishes to do so. Perhaps our bodies – our so-called human intelligence – are trying to tell us that there is more than simply ‘fight or flight’? Which returns us to Tai Snaith’s apocalyptic shelter. For while the den is an icon of doom, there is a sense of resilience in Snaith’s accompanying artwork. Her creations refuse to be spooked. She is unable to fully retreat from the world, regardless of whether it still exists or has been turned into a wasteland. Rather she seeks to recreate the world by decorating this underground den with signs of life.

At the beginning of this century, American psychologist Shelley Taylor introduced an alternative response model to danger. Not disproving ‘Fight or Flight’ response, Taylor suggested that it was not the only response available to us. She coined the Tend and Befriend response, wherein animals (including humans) may manage threats and stressful encounters by seeking social support and tending to their offspring. Taylor recounts situations where the females of the species, in particular among primates whose offspring are typically helpless, cannot attack a predator for fear of being wounded and therefore unable to care for their offspring, but nor can they run away without leaving their offspring behind. Instead, Taylor suggests, they tend to their offspring and befriend a community in which they can be protected by the sheer volume of numbers.

There is a sense of Tend and Befriend in Tai Snaith’s shelter. To begin with, she has invited us inside it. And while many us may think bomb shelters belong in the future, we are wrong. There are thousands of individuals already inside their secret hidey-holes, scared people bunkering down for the apocalypse. Army disposal shops are inundated with people getting ready for the end of the world. The difference between the shelter we find ourselves in right now and the many others dug out in suburban backyards, ancient cities and abandoned old towns, is that the inhabitant of this abode hasn’t given up. Instead of destruction and stasis, the resident of this den, Tai Snaith, seems hell-bent on creation.