Kate liston-mills’ the waterfowl are drunk!

Monday 22 June 2015

Pambula-based writer Kate Liston-Mills is a friend of mine and a fellow graduate from the University of Wollongong’s creative writing program, where she was a few years older but a few year groups below me. Disarming, ebullient, and universally beloved, Kate is humble to a fault, with eyes so blue they must’ve soaked up all those South Coast seas and skies. As an editor for the annual UOW Creative Writing literary magazine Tide, I remember having the chance to publish some of Kate’s outstanding poetry back in 2010, but page limitations ultimately forced the committee to bump the lowly first-year from the volume, something that never quite felt right to me. Thankfully, if unsurprisingly, Kate’s words have since appeared in publications much loftier and more widely circulated than Tide (and even later editions). But it still felt like something coming full circle when the advance copy of The Waterfowl Are Drunk! appeared in my inbox. A wrong has been righted, and in such spectacular fashion.

The gorgeous KLM.

Published electronically by Spineless Wonders as a Slinkies Under 30s collection, The Waterfowl Are Drunk! is Kate’s first major work. In seven interconnected short stories, she draws from deep wells of truth and fancy to bring to life this heartfelt tribute to town, home and family. Working in the best traditions of the tall tales and urban myths repeated and embellished in country pubs the nation over, The Waterfowl Are Drunk! is a richly rendered and skillful meditation on birth, death and disability in coastal, regional New South Wales.

Perhaps somewhat embarrassingly for a gen-y bibliophile like myself, this was actually my first experience with an ebook, so it was only after some significant fandangling and carnsarnitting with the zoom function on Apple’s iBooks that I was finally able to sink into the collection’s opening vignette, ‘Bound’, which immerses the reader in the teeming wilds of the Pambula wetlands, ‘on the fringes of what some would call a dated town’. 

But this is no Eden, if you’ll excuse the pun. ‘Think red dirt, murky water and tired trees’, the first line enjoins us. The birds swelter in the heat, the ‘stench of rot and fetid water is inescapable’, and in the bushes lurks a dangerous interloper, a red fox. For a moment here I thought I was reading an example of that rarely realised mode of environmental fiction that children’s literature scholar John Stephens calls ‘deep ecology’ – fiction that attributes an intrinsic value to the lives of animals and the environment, often decentering or showing as contingent human perspectives, or excluding them altogether. But the instance of a pen anthropomorphically assigning her cygnets names, as well as the somewhat malapropos simile of a waterfowl slurping a worm ‘as if it were a slushy’, anchors the reader in a human perspective and a roughly contemporary moment, and it soon becomes obvious that what transpires in this wilderness is deliberately symbolic of the human lives we are to encounter in coming stories. 

As with the collection on the whole, ‘Bound’ is not without its awkward lines and, at times, it struggles to maintain focus in its all-encompassing narration, moving abruptly from one group of animal subjects to another mid-paragraph. But in just two-and-a-half pages (depending, of course, on the size of your browser window), Kate achieves quite an affecting narrative in the story of the fox and his victims, cast in suitably raw, fictile language that showcases her poetic credentials and, at its best, recalls the evocative simplicity to be found in the rural poems of Seamus Heaney:

     The cygnets’ eyes, not yet open, are glued with fluid. And through the flurry of
     feathers and calls, the cygnets plop out of the eggs and sog up the earth.

In the symbology of this natural tableau, it is worth interrogating the figure of the fox: is he, as an introduced species, merely representative of a troublemaking outsider, upsetting the rightful order and earning the fear and scorn of the locals? Is he death, an agent of doom against whom the members of the community are able to rally, though never fully prevail? Perhaps, by extension, he is the reader, come to gorge himself on the lives of the town’s inhabitants in the coming pages for his own satisfaction. Or could he be the writer herself – all writers: slinking double-agents moving stealthily amongst unwitting native prey, scavenging for stories and details? The answer, of course, is up for interpretation.

What is established early and unequivocally in this opening story is that Kate’s is a vision of the world where the invisible forces that so often move and shape us, guide and animate us, are made visible, where the abstract and intangible interplay with reality in concrete ways. On occasion here and throughout the collection, this device can veer towards the overly ‘telling’ or convoluted (such as, for example, when we are told that a wind blowing through the town’s streets carries ‘the aftershock of war and soiled youth’), but at others it results in breathtaking passages of Wintonian beauty and eloquence, as when, simply, ‘Ed feels the day approach’ or, later, when the news of Ed’s demise as it travels throughout the town, mobilising everyone into sympathetic action, is characterised as

     tinkering like a mechanic, slowly tapping on each head. It’s tapping into the nuts and 

     cogs of the heart of the machine, tapping each greasy component, until the parts all 

     work together.

Aptly, the concept first treated in this fashion, the ‘sweet nostalgia’ that ‘blends with the croaks and sits on the tilted horizon’ in ‘Bound’, is also the one that most suffuses the work as a whole, which is always romantic and wistful, but never saccharine or overly sentimental. Indeed, what could be levelled as a criticism against another writer becomes in Kate’s hands one of the work’s greatest strengths. Kate shows herself to be an adept conjurer of those moments, sometimes mundane and others extraordinary, that characterise every family history, those universally relatable and yet thoroughly idiosyncratic memories and rituals that form the fabric of a family.

The organising force of the collection is family matriarch Hazel, modelled on Kate’s own grandmother. Prominently featured also is Hazel’s daughter Lottie, a beautiful soul who has Down syndrome, inspired by Kate’s real-life aunt Nettie (to whose memory the book is dedicated). ‘Hey Porter, Hey Porter’ takes the reader to the moment in time over Christmas of 1956 when Hazel is forced to confront her daughter’s disability for the first time. The opening passage, which I count among the strongest in the book, showcases Kate’s skill in tapping into our collective nostalgia in a scene that is both quintessentially of its time and specific filial setting, and yet immediately recognisable:

     The radio is crackling and everything smells of tobacco. The news reporter’s
     carrying on, something about blood in the water at the Melbourne Olympics.
     Nobody’s listening. Hazel has it on so they don’t miss the Queen’s 3pm Christmas
     message. Everybody’s knackered from midnight mass and no one can be stuffed
     cleaning up. The aftermath of Ed’s pig trotter feast is now gelatinous on the sink.
     Flies chinwag in the corners of the trays and stick there. It’s a rotten mess for
     another day.

Later, we find this same skill in ‘I Don’t Even Like Scotch Fingers’, an everyday tragedy where we watch in knowing discomfort as narrator Georgie, distracted by the trivia of teenage existence, takes Hazel, her grandmother, entirely for granted. During one of those familiar interstices in senescent–adolescent conversation, Georgie’s mind wanders to the time they had to rush Aunt Lottie to the hospital because she was choking on a nut, but then they drove over a speed hump and the obstruction dislodged itself, sailing through the air right into her uncle’s hand: just the kind of unlikely, though all-too-real family legend all of us can lay claim to in one form or another.

Just as some stories consecrate the emotional landscape of the family, others do the same for the town of Pambula, most notably in the title story, ‘The Waterfowl are Drunk!’, in which the town reacts to the loss of Hazel’s husband Ed. ‘In Pambula,’ we are told when the death coincides with the arrival of an eccentric houseguest, ‘you have to be hospitable. You just have to.’ Littered throughout the story, attached to the ends of sentences here and there, we find the refrain, ‘as you do’: signposts in the thought processes of the grieving widow that perfectly evoke the double-edged comforting familiarity and stifling oppressiveness of small-town living. Hazel’s actions are governed by a subconscious list of preapproved Things You Do in Pambula, forcing her into the tiresome obligation of indulging the strange old bird who turns up on her doorstep (people are always birds in The Waterfowl Are Drunk!, and birds people). 

But in times of crisis, there is also comfort to be taken from such rituals and ritualised behaviours, as we see with the ceremonies surrounding tea that so pervade the book – the word itself is used some twenty-one times in seven stories (I’m getting the hang of this ebook thing). In ‘The Waterfowl Are Drunk!’ it is this beverage, so treasured by Lottie, that occupies her while the rest of the family tries to shield her from the death of her father. But she is more attuned than her family might think. The sensitive and subtle exploration of the perceptions of different forms of disability that runs throughout the collection is another element for which Kate deserves laudation, executed as it is with the confidence and integrity of a much more experienced writer.

Just as Kate endows Hazel’s family with a canon of folktales and memories, the town too is replete with its own mythology of larger-than-life tales and escapades and, given the distribution of the stories over the course of a century, we are witness to many of them – the misadventures of Ed and Tom on the night Hazel goes into labour, as they rollick around town trying to get their mate’s body to the morgue in the back of a ute and, of course, the tale that gives the collection its title: the time the town drunk disappeared temporarily, only to turn up in a freshly dug grave covered in waterfowl inebriated by the bottle of sherry in his hand. In the telling of these fables we find the blending of comedy and tragedy, that certain mix of beauty, poignancy and irreverence, that marks the best Australian fiction. Which brings me back to the most remarkable element of the collection: the incredible lyricism of Kate’s voice. 

If all literature can be plotted on a spectrum from the spare and sparse on one end to the expressive and ornate on the other, The Waterfowl Are Drunk! would have to be classified ‘hyper-lyrical’, on the far side of the latter. Fans of the Spartan, the reserved, the unadorned sentence, Hemingway devotees and Naipaul adherents alike, be warned. Each of us has our own preferences in this area, and the pendulum of taste seems to have swung back and forth since the inception of the novel, between one school of writers determined to prune back the overgrown grandiloquence and floridity of their forebears, and their own successors, who seek to rejuvenate with inventive, sensual, descriptive writing prose that has come to be seen as sterile and dull. There is a place for writing at every point on the spectrum, but I, for one, tend to prefer the latter kind: writing that gives me something. Writing that’s luscious, that astounds and inspires and tantalises me with new ways of seeing the world. Writing that pushes descriptive language to the limit, that shows me something of the author. Writing like Kate’s.

In The Waterfowl Are Drunk! Kate is a veritable Nigella Lawson of letters, unable to resist tiptoeing down to the fridge after midnight to indulge in one more simile, one more metaphor. And what delicacies she has crafted in this smorgasbord, what moments of descriptive brilliance, masterful details and turns of phrase slipped expertly into the narrative: Lottie picking up the phone ‘gently like a hot cup of tea’, Michael Swaney’s parents with their ‘vegetable-scraps-in-the-plughole-of-a-marriage’, a body ‘fancified’ by bruises and scratches, natal blood ‘soaking into the sugar’, all complemented by and contrasted against an enviable command of authentic, spirited dialogue: ‘‘That’s gotta be the best birth in ‘istory Haze –’ says Hazel’s neighbour, ‘rainwater on the skin, sugar-taste everywhere. Gotta be the most perfect girl I ever seen!’’ 

Of course, with a young writer working on this end of ‘the spectrum’, where so much is risked because so much is ventured, there are bound to be some misfirings. Sentences brim so full with description and simile in the book that they sometimes spill over into mixed metaphor, or rush at you so quickly you can’t appreciate them.

But some imperfection is to be expected here on the literary frontier: young writers publishing their first works in a digital-only format. Minor errors, unintentional linebreaks, occasional patches of less refined prose – these become part of the reading experience. There is a sense, during the reading, of the haste in which some parts might have been written (perhaps in one long ‘binge-writing’ session), of the smallscale, independent organisation behind the book, working on a hope and a prayer, kept going by the passion of dedicated, but underpaid and overworked employees, interns, volunteer hours and a shoestring budget, struggling nobly on in spite of the current, arts-hostile political climate. Slinkies and programs like it have been devastated by the Abbott government’s funding cuts, and now more than ever its stated mission of providing ‘a platform for young and emerging Australian writers’ is invaluable. If a few impurities are the price of having access to this kind of writing, I am more than willing to pay it. I can’t put it better than Slinkies editor Bridget Lutherborrow in an interview for the Wollongong Writers' Festival:

     When people are developing and perhaps feeling that gap between their abilities and 

     where they want their writing to be – it can be tempting to stop. Getting beyond that 

     emerging stage requires a great deal of resilience. It’s important we support writers 

     through this process if we want to have exceptional writers in our future. Also, the 

     kinds of writing and subject matter young people want to write is often invalidated, 

     because it might be a bit raw or incomplete, but I think young/new writers can have
     an incredible energy and unique perspective on what it’s like to exist at this moment
     in history.

With some variation, the collection generally grows in skill as it goes on, culminating in the two most restrained and technically accomplished stories, ‘Without Floaties’, which gives us our first outsider’s perspective of the town, and ‘Shiny Lino and a Whistling Kettle’, where an older, repentant Georgie reflects on the lives of her aunt and grandmother. Especially if the whole collection is read, as I would advise, in one or two sittings, it is difficult to imagine not being moved by this frank and effortlessly fluid final story, which resounds with the authenticity of a lived experience and functions as an exceptionally tender obituary for its two major figures. What’s hard to believe is that Kate will only become more talented with time, and undoubtedly has the skills to surpass even her best work here.

The Waterfowl are Drunk! is a brilliant and powerful fiction debut, well worth the outrageously cheap $4.99 for which it is being sold. I mean, that’s FIVE DOLLARS. Five dollars would be worth it just to help support the arts and emerging writers in this country (because Lord knows the government won’t), let alone what you’ll be getting in this artful, beautiful book. Buy it, sink into your favourite spot on the lounge, and prepare for a pleasurable few hours one afternoon. And when you do, why not pour yourself a big mug of tea, too? For Lottie.

Thanks for reading

LPL

References

Sarah Fallon's 2015 interview 'NYWM Interviews: Bridget Lutherborrow' on the Wollongong Writers' Festival website.

Kate Liston-Mills' 2015 ebook The Waterfowl Are Drunk!, published by Spineless Wonders.

Images from katelistonmills.com.

John Stephens' 2006 journal article 'From Eden to Suburbia: Perspectives on the Natural World in Children's Literature' on pages 40 to 45, issue 2, volume 16 of literary journal Papers: Explorations Into Children's Literature.

Spineless Wonders' 2015 interview 'Meet the Slinkies: Kate Liston-Mills' on the Spineless Wonders website.

Little garie and the hidden shack communities of sydney's royal national park

Tuesday 22 April 2014

For someone whose entire life can be characterised by migration back and forth between Wollongong and the Sutherland Shire, the obstacle that separates these two places, Sydney's vast Royal National Park, is a constant presence. In my nearly twenty-five years I've made the move on no less than five occasions, each time leaving behind friends and family who needed visiting, so I must've taken the hour-long journey around and through the park, by car or by train, thousands of times.

In the original sense of the word, then, the park has been geographically pivotal for me: the central point around which my whole life has swung. So in the spirit of 'writing what you know', this 16,000-hectare conservation area seemed the perfect space in which to hide the hermit protagonist of my inchoate novel 'The Innocuous Death of Irving Crabbe'. It wasn't until I was voicing this idea to my nan, though, that I was informed of the extraordinary fact that the world's second-oldest national park already secretes within its depths a handful of isolated shack communities.

But apparently I wasn't alone. Surprisingly few locals, whether Shirefolk or Wollongongers, seem to be aware of the four micro-communities of Little Garie, Era, Burning Palms and Bulgo, each accessible only by walking track, which have been established in the park now for over a century. It only took a little investigation to reach the conclusion that I needed to incorporate these idiosyncratic little colonies into my book in some way. I was sold.

And so it is that at 10am on an inclement Sunday, just over a year after that initial discovery, I find myself on the wind-blown grass of Garie Beach in the heart of the National Park, accompanied by a fittingly representative mix of friends and family from both its Sydney and Wollongong ends. My nan brings three other family members from the south, while high school friends and fellow Sydneysiders Charlene and Alexandra (who accompanied me on my first excursion to the communities a year earlier) drive in with me from the north. They have all kindly agreed to join me for the annual National Heritage Trust Festival walking tour of Little Garie (the most accessible of the four communities and therefore the only tour not to have been cancelled due to the weather), where I'm hoping to learn more about the lives and history of the shackdwellers.

The glorious view from Garie Beach on our previous (much more temperate) visit.

We huddle against the wind and I make my introductions as my filial and social worlds collide, milling about a picnic table while we wait for all the attendees to arrive. We are surprised by how many people show up, perhaps a couple dozen: active middle-aged couples in hiking gear, a young migrant family with an adorable baby, and the various other pleasant, solitary grey-haired oddballs you find at such events, enthusing politely and asking earnest questions like garrulous mature-age students at uni. My friends and I are conspicuously the youngest adults there, later earning us the moniker of 'the young ones' from the event coordinator Kerry, who soon makes herself known and leads us on a narrow path towards Little Garie nestled between the cliffs on one side and the beach on the other.

Family: Nan, Eddie, and great aunt and uncle Christine and Stewart bringing up the rear. The 'most accessible' though it is, all the materials that comprise and fill the shacks of Little Garie would have to have been carried along this narrow path, including the heavy old kerosene fridges and cast-iron fireplaces.

The view from the track, with the rocky plateau where the shackholders meet for elevensies in the foreground and some of the Little Garie shacks beyond.

Warm and quick to laugh, Kerry strikes me over the course of the day as the most socially conscious of the guides, trying visibly to keep speeches from her fellow guides on track, forewarning us of the more notoriously loquacious shackholders and hurrying along any groups that linger too long in any one dwelling. She guides us up a steep hill, which she assures us is the only one we will need to contend with, to the characterful Little Garie community hall and chapel, where we are to meet the rest of the guides and residents: Tim, Peter, James, Gary, Tony and more. I didn't take any photos on this occasion, but I did take some during the 2013 visit:

Kids playing with a kart outside the hall.

In the hall we learn that the first shacks in the area were holiday cabins built from 1910 onwards on land rented from the owners, forty years before its incorporation into the National Park. Later during the Depression, the communities swelled as unemployed miners from nearby Helensburgh moved into the area. Once the land was resumed in 1950 after lobbying from the shackowners to protect it from property developers, no new shacks were permitted to be built. The existing shacks could, however, still be bought and sold until the mid-1960s when the land came under the governance of the newly formed National Parks and Wildlife Service (NPWS), whose policy was to remove the shacks once their owners died. This led many families to just continue paying rent under the pretense that their deceased relative was now a decagenarian. Nevertheless, the NPWS succeeded in demolishing around 50 shacks during this time. Apparently the removal of the shacks ranked in the top two things former NSW premier Bob Carr wanted to get rid of during his time in office, during the same time heritage authorities were clamouring to protect them.

Today the shackholders are council workers, medicos, PhDs, engineers, sugarcane farmers, coal miners and all manner of other professions. Indeed, one of the most distinctive shacks we would see, brimming full of fantasy novels and half built of stones that leak when it rains, is cared for by a kindly Woolooware High School science teacher/archaeologist/Egyptologist. Each shackholder pays circa $3,000 a year in rent, and they are entitled to have up to four names on their leases. Very few of them live in the shacks fulltime, but they visit frequently on weekends and stay for long periods over summer and during winter holidays. The custodians of such a prized coastal idyll might be expected to guard their closed community jealously against outsiders, but the open day shows their attitudes to be the opposite. In fact, it is due to their efforts to the contrary, largely exercised through the Royal National Park Coastal Cabins Protection League (RNPCCPL), that the NPWS' policy of shack removal has latterly been overturned. The communities' demonstration and celebration of their unique cultural heritage has led to its recognition by several various heritage authorities, and the open day itself, we are told by bright, eloquent RNPCCPL president Helen Voysey, commemorates the listing of the communities on the State Heritage Register in 2012.

The promulgation of the shack communities' culture being one of the goals of the day, the shackholders are eager to impress upon us the importance of the shacks in their lives. 'We're very heartfelt. These aren't just some place we come and have fun, stresses Kerry. 'These are a part of our structure, our DNA.' She also emphasises the intimacy of the Little Garie community, noted among the four for its closeness, citing how quickly secrets spread among the shackholders, and their daily ritual of elevensies. Another community member adds that there are regularly five generations in a shack, and Helen concludes that 'Heritage is not just your big stone buildings and your government houses; it's your little shacks where people survived the Great Depression and where people carry on a kind of holiday recreation life.'

Another point to which the shackholders continually return is the effort involved in maintaining their seaside escapes. Possessed perhaps of an ingrained sensitivity from the parlous state in which the shacks existed for such a long time, they seem to want to prove that it's not all just the bucolic retreat and pleasant weekends surfing and fishing in the sun that visitors might think, that it's not only through the luck of birth or marriage that they come to enjoy their shacks, but that they have earned the privilege through their hard work preserving and maintaining them. Peter characterises the task as a fulltime job, battling the wind, storms, and vandalism. Their $3,000 a year is the price for the location alone; it doesn't buy them the amenities, roads, pathways, infrastructure the ordinary taxpayer expects, nor the community services ratepayers enjoy, nor the upkeep on which ordinary renters can depend. The shackholders seem to do most of this themselves. They constructed the stairway we trudged up to reach the hall, Kerry told us, when the NPWS wouldn't pay for it and visitors kept injuring themselves. My friends and I happened to be there that day on our previous trip as the men sweated, heaving rocks up from the river to sink into the earth as platforms to stand on. I even recognise some of the shackholders in the hall as the smiling faces of people who greeted us and wished us well as we passed through that day, giggling in their swimmers with champagne glasses in their hands.

One of the shackholders carries a stone up the hill to use in the construction of the stairs.

Throughout the day we would be regaled with such tales of the shackholders' diligent ingenuity and resilience, from the construction of the stone shack from boulders rolled down from the hills above to its more recent repair when the roof blew off in one piece. Fences have been erected to prevent rockfalls and protect and hold back plant species. Days have been spent clearing the brush of the decades worth of shattered glass from the beer bottles of the shackholders' antecedents. An agreement was made for the community to take over the upkeep of any shack whose owner grew too old to maintain it themselves. And then there is the shacks' most persistent enemy: whiteants.

Some of the shackowners of years past were more creative in their bottle disposal methods. Each of these show their brewing year on their base, some dating back to the forties and fifties.

We are informed the floor we are standing on in the hall has just been replaced for fear that it wouldn't hold up underneath us after whiteants (or termites) had been at it. The first shack we are led to in our smaller group, in fact, is a thoroughly comfortable and modern-looking, caravan-style dwelling which owes its contemporary feel to its previous degradation by the voracious little insects. The shack belongs to Tony, a friendly bloke jokingly referred to as a 'blow-in' for his measly two decades in the community who was invited in when the former owner of his shack was no longer able to care for it and had no willing heir to take up the responsibility. Tony restored the shack and, in the process, added a few mod-cons. The internal bathroom is tiled, the walls are smooth and a TV plays a DVD about shack life in the background.

Tony speaking to us in his 'beach shack'. Many of the shacks feature these little signs, which in another context might be considered tacky – cheap, mass-produced knick-knacks hawked by imitation-high end homeware stores to ironically adorn the holiday homes and beachside investment properties of affluent city-dwelling bourgeoisie. But somehow I think the shackholders are more entitled to make use of them than these usual purchasers.

The contemporary style of Tony's shack represents another theme that permeated the day. Kerry has encouraged us to ask questions of our guides, saying, 'They're passionate about their shacks and their ideas'. In the way of so many people who lead eccentric lifestyles, who harbour some desire to retreat from ordinary life, whether innate or bred into them by a lifetime of shack holidays, many of the shackholders seem to have eccentric or strongly held views. Of course, I only had a few hours contact with them, but even in that time I feel I was able to detect a few of these unguarded opinions, which seeped into the conversation at any opportunity, the way we vegetarians wait for any vague allusion to meat-consumption to pounce on. Kerry and the others hint laughingly a few times at the strife that arises between community members occasionally, as with any family, saying she thinks it's what makes them so close. One of the divisions I pick up on is between those who have updated their shacks and the purists who 'don't like the modernisation of the shacks' and prefer 'to keep them as humble as what they were when our parents had them', in Kerry's words.

Tony, I think, may be omitted from this mild resentment because his was a restoration of necessity, but when she takes us through her shack, passed down from her husband Gary's parents, Kerry remarks that some shacks even have Foxtel, adding, 'We ain't going down that path!' Later in the last shack we'll see we are astounded by the decorations. Books line every ledge and splay over every surface (I'm impressed by the presence of Winton and Dawkins). Entire walls are covered in patterns formed from wine corks, which seems a local fashion, while others are plastered with photos depicting festive evenings on the grog with not a few bared breasts and bottoms. Snake skins and cicada shells dangle from the rafters, dead sea animals hang in the windows, along with paraphernalia of every other kind scattered everywhere: a Navy sailor's hat that washed up on shore, artwork by the grandkids, ancient photo albums, a telescope. Awed as we enter, the owner says pointedly, 'Yeah. This is a shack. A real fisherman's shack', as if in distinction from the less authentic modern shacks that surround it.

This shack was the most exciting to me because my hermit protagonist's shack is similarly brimming with the objects he collects, and ideas were rich for the harvesting here.

All this conjures the image of a secret Little Garie cabin elite who behind closed doors thumb their noses at the unenlightened shackholders turning their abodes into the holiday-home equivalent of McMansions, and I tend to sympathise. Certainly the most unchanged old shacks are the most fascinating, both for my friends and me as a window into the past and as nostalgia for those of the older generation in attendance. Nan lights up when we enter one old shack with a hand-wound laundry wringer out front, still furnished in the old style within. Other people seem more interested in these older-style shacks as well – this shackholder proudly shows us the magazine article in which he featured, and Kerry tells me a Tropfest film was shot there last year.

Another strong and not-so-hidden view that pervades the community is a lingering contempt for the NPWS, understandable given the historical animosity between them. Helen describes the history as a pendulum swinging, and expresses a hope that one day it will eventually stop somewhere in the middle. At first the authorities liked the shacks, she says, because they wanted the revenue. Then the pendulum swung and the idea that national parks would be without people rose to prominence, before it swung back to recognise the value of human heritage. (It occurs to me that this is much more elegant and obvious metaphor for my 'stratigraphy of argumentation', which I later learned was an unconscious permutation of the Hegelian dialectic). Ever the PR liaison, Kerry speaks frankly about the rift but ends on a decidedly hopeful note, saying 'we're starting to get on an even footing now', only to be undercut by a more embittered community member who adds, 'Well, some of us are' in what is just one many veiled and unveiled digs at the (older) rangers and the NPWS throughout the day, and not without reason. In the hall after thanking us for our interest in the valley Kerry tells us it is 'important for us to get out our history, as in, the truth, let's say, not a skewed version.' We are told about one ranger who still works at the park who allegedly sunk an axe into a kerosene tank and, when asked why, reportedly answered 'So you bastards can't use it.' When bushfires swept through the region and the community evacuated, they came back to find the words 'Burn you bastards, burn' scrawled on their blackboard, supposedly by the same ranger.

The other strongly held beliefs of the community appear to be environmental. Kerry points out that the community has been forced to abandon their kerosene fridges for high-tech solar ones due to the unavailability of parts. We are introduced to at least one 'solar nut' and his solar-powered shack, as well as Peter, an affable 65-year veteran of the environmental movement, whose shack was one of the last legally bought Little Garie shacks . An engineering consultant by trade as well as a Landcare volunteer, Peter seems to be the resident historian of the community, claiming to have spent a lot of time researching to determine that the Royal National Park shacks are absolutely unique in Australia as non-road accessible coastal cabins built legally on freehold land. He distributes flyers about the communities entitled 'Living Heritage'. 

Peter's experience of the environmental movement is fascinating. It must be bizarre to have been in a movement from its inception as a fringe concern and watch it ascend to mainstream acceptance. 'I can assure you it was not very popular,' he says in the hall. 'You were considered to be a Grade-A screaming nutter'. This is a pertinent example of our tendency to underestimate how much things can change in one lifetime, and a reminder not to measure the worth of ideas by their extremity in relation to the current norm, but on their own merits. In sixty-five years there will likely be an entirely new norm that may embrace what once seemed radical. 

Peter's shack.

Peter.

Before Peter speaks in the hall we are jokingly warned not to ask him about climate change. He goes on to say that the environmental movement has been 'hijacked by radical nutters who really don't understand the issues'. He may have a point and his example of the protests against hazard reduction burning is hard to argue with, but I found myself hoping this friendly and knowledgeable figure wasn't a denier of anthropogenic climate change, although the warning not to ask him about it could be interpreted either way.

The tour over, the various smaller groups reconverge on the hall for the sausage sizzle the shackholders are putting on. Alexandra and I duck back to the car to retrieve our Eski full of a vegetarian feast and sit in the grass a short distance away, attracting gratifying comments from various passersby that they're jealous of our lunch. A Little Garien hawking raffle tickets offers me the 'lucky ticket' 69 (appropriately the one from the shack featuring the lewd photographs) and I purchase some giftcards featuring paintings, photographs and drawings by a local artist to add to the nascent wall collage next to my desk to inspire me. Meanwhile, Charlene prompts my nan to buy me a 'Shacks Forever' shirt by pretending I told her I really wanted one.

I thought myself lucky to find the two paintings of the swamp wallaby, as one significant section of my novel revolves around one such wallaby who lives in the park.

After that the weather finally gives out and the rain drives everyone back inside the community hall. Fearing that the locals would take issue with an outsider coming in to tell their story for them, I was hesitant to mention the novel to anyone. My nan, however, fearlessly informed both Kerry and Helen, who thankfully responded with nothing but polite enthusiasm, obligatory though that may. But I'm glad, because it got me both some tantalising traces of stories to follow up on, some regarding the real hermits who inhabit the national park, as well as some great contacts, especially Helen, who welcomed me to contact her when I needed more information, something I will definitely be doing when the time comes. I'll also, I'm sure, be making many more journeys to the National Park to continue learning about the extraordinary communities to be found in this place which is so central to the geography of my life. And maybe when I do, at Charlene's suggestion, I'll be wearing the shirt Nan got me. 

Shacks forever!

Thanks for reading

LPL

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Moleskinoisseurs, markerholics and penophiles

First written Tuesday 29 December 2009

Tweaked and added to Tuesday  29 November 2011

When I go to Miranda Fair on my own, I go into survival mode. My stride lengthens and my pace quickens. If I get in on the quarter-to train, then by god I'm getting out on the quarter-past. But go with a girl, and I can bet at some point I'm going to get forced, by whatever means she finds necessary, into a stationery store. The thing with stationery though, as opposed to clothes or jewellery, is that I might just enjoy myself.

The near-universal appeal of stationery is a curious phenomenon. It's something to which, I suspect, we can all relate in some way – an infatuation that transcends age, race and gender. But why? Why is it that a virgin notepad, or an electric pencil sharpener, or an eraser in the shape of a bunny rabbit that smells like chocolate (I daresay the office-supply addicted amongst you are exhaling lustily just reading that list) is so appealing?

Well, I've taken it upon myself to find the answer. How, you ask? Through rigorous sociological research and countless surveys? Um, no. That would be a lot of work. I thought, instead, I'd harness the extraordinary power of the internet to solve this great mystery – and from the comfort of my own spinny chair, no less.

I wanted to start at the beginning, and it's a well-known fact that the internet begins with Google.* Once I got past the disturbing fact that 'stationary obsession' returns about thirty thousand more results than 'stationery obsession' (I chose not to waste time on the results of the former search – how obsessed with anything can someone really be if they can't even spell it correctly?), I began my descent into the odd and strangely alluring world of the writing-implement enthusiast. 

*As opposed to the way it ends, according to Irish musical comedian David O'Doherty, the only person I know of who alleges to have 'finished' the internet. Apparently, a smiling Bill Gates appears and you get to enter your initials, although this claim is unsubstantiated.

What I discovered was, I have to say, not actually that surprising, considering the types of people that froth over letterheads and liquid paper – a veritable buttload of blogs and websites that act as 'support groups' for the stationerily addicted. I trawled through what must have been a good ... three or four of them looking for answers. 

My first port-of-call, Stationery Fetish, was decidedly unhelpful, if amusing. 'My love of office supplies', writes blogger Cinderberry in her 'Stationery Fetishist's Manifesto', 'is irrational, but it is pure. Don't ask me to explain it, just hand over the multi-coloured index cards.'

The writers of Heymiki's blog and ich Kalliope, however, do suggest causes as the roots of stationery obsession. '[I]sn't this compulsion just another guise of my incessant procrastination?' asks Miki in 'My Stationery Obsession':

     Can there be any justification for this oft[-]repeated ritual: 

     deciding what colour Uniball Signo DX 0.38 would be 

     most fitting to capture the thought currently scuttling 

     through my head?' 

Kalliope seems to prefer stationery for its distraction value, saying in 'I heart New Notebooks' that it takes her 'mind off the actual thought of going "back to school".'

In her post 'Stationery Heaven' on Style Treaty, blogger Marion proposes nostalgia as the force behind statio-mania, writing longingly of the days of 'smelly paper' and 'fancy pens', adding that she 

     used to love those pencils where there were all different

     colours within the same pencil and you would remove

     the colour from the bottom and stick it into the top, 

     and if you wanted one of the colours that was at the

     top you'd have to keep pulling them out from the 

     bottom and stuffing them into the top

Okay, Marion, calm down ...

I wasn't too far into my stationery wanderings (Geddit? Hardee har har) when I came across an interview with Kristina Karlsson, wanky stationery name: Kikki K. I was beginning to think all statio-maniacs had to come up with funky alternative names for themselves. I mean really, if Kikki K translates to Kristina Karlsson, then what the hell are Marion, Miki, Kalliope and Cinderberry? But surely the Kikki K would have some answers! Well, yes. Yes she did. 'There is something about a freshly sharpened pencil or a new clean pencil case and notebook that signals a fresh start to the year', she says. And this was a recurring theme in the blogs of my specimens. Cinderberry, if that is her real name, says 

     spiral notebooks whisper to me about the promise of a

     new term at school, new things to learn, new things to 

     write. With a spiral pad, with a pen clipped inside the 

     coil, I'm ready to take on the world

which, correct me if I'm wrong, is just a little creepy. But so-called Kalliope says she loves 'the promise of staying organised' that comes with new stationery, which I have to say, I totally get.

At this point, I was starting to feel a bit weird stalking all these chicks' blogs, so I decided to turn to my own friends in the real world (through the medium of Facebook), ahem. I like the way my friend Sonja put it: 'new stationery makes me feel like things will be different that year. Productivity will increase, and I'll be so epic at everything I do. Just 'cause of all my flash new stationery ... It's all lies, though.'

The only other response I got (out of 391 Facebook friends; is that sad?) was actually from a friend, Melanie, who works at kikki.K and, unsurprisingly, hates it. I say unsurprisingly because any reasonable person opposed to conspicuous consumerism of an insane level would hate it – I once got dragged in there by a friend and the only way I could get her to leave was by exclaiming, loudly enough that the cashier could hear, that no A6 notepad was worth $49.95, no matter how Swedish. I shit you not. A6 notepad. $49.95. Anyway, I thought Mel's insights were poignant: 'lots of people now use stationery as a fashion accessory', she said, 'and they like to spend their money on something with the excuse that it is functional.' Agreed.

As for myself, I think I come into contact with more statio-mania than the average person, being an aspiring writer. We are more prone to that sort of thing, and it has been noted by myself and others that an excessive concern with the trappings of being a writer is often the sign of a poor one. It was while I was interning for Hachette Children's Books, I think, that an industry insider told me about a writer whose manuscript wasn't even considered because of the ridiculous letterhead he'd fashioned for his cover letter. 'Anyone who spends that much time on their letterhead isn't spending enough time writing,' they told me. 

So you can imagine my panic in my first Creative Writing class during my exchange semester at the University of East Anglia, eager to meet people and make a good first impression, when I unpacked my bag and realised that sitting in front of me was a Moleskine and a Parker pen. I'd bought the Moleskine ten minutes earlier from the bookshop on campus when I realised on my way to class that I didn't have anything to write in, and the pen, engraved with my writing pseudonym, had been given to me as a twenty-first birthday present by my friends back in Australia just before I left. Luckily I was able to pre-empt any judgement I might've garnered (I think) by declaring when we did the obligatory first-class-of-semester 'go around the room and say one thing about yourself' thing that I was not, despite my try-hard accoutrements, a wanker.

But maybe after that slightly cynical rant, I should end on a nicer, more philosophical note. I do like stationery, after all. I mean, it's not like I'm going to change my name to Lukokobelle and start a new blog about binders whispering to me, but I do like it. I don't think writers, or anyone else for that matter, should be ashamed of their love of leather-bound books and quills and papyrus, they just should be careful not to turn up to their writing classes and announce that they only write using typewriters on brown paper bags (something one of our lecturers told us actually happened once).

A writer's paradise: best friend Gilly and girlfriend Tilly in an Oxford stationery shop.

And don't fool yourself, you like it too. What's not to like? The distraction, the potential for procrastination, the fresh feeling of a new start, the comfort of knowing you're writing on a pad that cost half your week's pay ... In the words of our old friend Miki (Michaela? Maxine? ... Jane?), 

     It has been said that "language is a tool of thought".

     Thus stationery, in enabling us to record and 

     communicate our words, is a conduit of thought! 

     The journey of ideas from the brain to the page is

     no easy task. Thoughts flit and fly. They are 

     ephemeral. Only the best conduit will do. My 

     obsession is not mere indulgence. It is a necessity!

 This article as it originally appeared in Canvas, the 'zine Matilda Grogan, Kaitlyn Carlia (who now has a business crafting greeting cards with Dani Yannoulis) and I put together as an assessment for WRIT216: Introduction to Editing for Practising Writers.