Meanjin Vol 79 No 3

Jonathan Green

• Publisher: Meanjin Digital
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780522876710
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Essays
• Index: Literature

In September Meanjin, a brace of fine writing in the time of Covid 19.From Jack Latimore, 'Through a Mask, Breathing': an expansive, lyrical essay that couples a local response to the Black Lives Matter movement to ideas around gentrification, St Kilda, Sidney Nolan and the life and music of Archie Roach, all of it set against the quite menace of the pandemic. In other pieces drawn from our Covid moment, Kate Grenville charts the troubled progress and unexpected insights of days under lockdown, Fiona Wright finds space and rare pleasures as the world closes in, Krissy Kneen takes on the sudden obsession with 'iso-weight', Justin Clemenssearches for hope in the world of verse, Desmond Manderson and Lorenzo Veracini consider viruses, colonialism and other metaphors, and there's short fiction from Anson Cameron, 'The Miserable Creep of Covid'.Plus fresh short fiction, essays, memoir and poetry.

ESSAY

WALKING WURUNDJERI COUNTRY

Declan Fry

1. I am walking Wurundjeri country. Country that does not belong to me. Although the cats are nice enough.

2. The suburb is Brunswick. But it could be Fitzroy.

3. I am not familiar with the area, but am becoming so.

4. You realise you’re getting better acquainted once the small geographies begin to register.

The appearance of the houses: almost comically safe and warm. The approach of the intersections: wide, but not countrywide. The way the intersections combine to produce infinite street vistas your eye can never reach the end of. The number of trees that are introduced and the number that are native.

5. (Play this last game and you will find you have more luck barracking for the former team.)

6. You think to yourself: some parts of Brunswick are just so studiously comfortable, ay? Ivy cladding every aspect of every home.

7. An introduced species, ivy. Like cats and plane trees.

8. How many of the settlers back on Wongatha country were always complaining about the cats while accepting the plane trees?

9. I have begun reading Ellen van Neerven’s latest poetry collection, Throat.

10. Halfway through they ask me a question.

‘Are you willing to enter an agreement that is incomplete and subject to change?’¹

11. In other words: will I enter a Treaty with Ellen? An agreement of shared power between them and their readers?

I don’t share country with Ellen.

And I am reading their work and writing this essay on country that is not mine.

So I sign up.

12. Ellen has a conversational approach. Like walking in on someone talking in the next room.

in South-East Asia, my appearance

allows queers to feel comfortable

to speak to me openly

about what is not open in their country²

But appearances, as the cliché eagerly reminds us, can be deceiving.

13. Take ‘Animal Crossing’.

14. In ‘Animal Crossing’, land does not belong to anyone. (And there is irony here, given how much of my partner’s mental landscape the game is swiftly colonising.) Race and class do not exist either.

15. Only this is naive, because of course they do. ‘Animal Crossing’ is a contemporary product of a contemporary capitalist society—so of course they do.

16. One thing that is openly acknowledged in the game is linear time. A clock lies at the bottom of the screen, constantly counting down the minutes.

17. 8:54. 8:55. 8:56.

18. My Twitter feed informs me that the Hong Kong activist Joshua Wong has been building monuments to Hong Kong’s independence on the game.

19. Days later, screenshots surface on social media of Chinese government supporters erecting monuments to the status quo: one country, two systems.

20. Gramsci was right. Culture is a political battlefront.

21. In ‘Invisible Spears’, Ellen writes:

you don’t want us protecting

our land like the Maori

that means it was our land to protect

we don’t need

a haka of whitefullas

just let us resist³

22. I’ve always loved that one.

23. Even if I often wish that the final, overly permissive line, were different. Who needs a whitefulla’s blessing to resist?

We have a right.

24. But I think maybe Ellen has grown, too. Because in Throat they now say:

sovereignty was never ceded.

why do we need to reference the invasion, we

are continuing our ancestors’ talk. I can

close my eyes and you are gone—that’s

the power of Country.⁴

25. There are so many perfect poems we catch ourselves rewriting in our heads. Hoping the outcome will be different this time. Wanting, fingers crossed, for things to be otherwise.

Wishing Frost would head off down that other bloody road.

26. In ‘Questions of Love’, Ellen writes:

we speak about gender before colonisation

we speak about love before colonisation⁵

Only how do we catch up with this before? How does the future meet up with the present? Is it the ships approaching the shore? Or the people on the shore?

27. According to Ellen, ‘created communities are a ...