The Board of TLB Society Inc has been made aware that a number of rumours regarding TLB and its Board have been shared in recent weeks, and would like to address them here.
A subcommittee of the Board recently investigated potential misconduct relating to the past conduct of one of TLB’s workers. The allegations were taken very seriously and the subcommittee sought to interview all relevant people to the complaint. The investigation was undertaken by two Board members who had recently joined the organisation and had no personal relationship to the accused. In addition, one of those investigators practices in creative industries and employment law.
The investigation into specific misconduct related to allegations of sexual misconduct and other unprofessional conduct. The allegations did not relate to any current or recent TLB volunteers aside from the accused. They did not involve any interns. The investigation commenced on 27 January 2020 and concluded at the beginning of March. The investigation ended with two separate findings:
a. The first finding was a finding of ‘no sexual misconduct’.
b. Whilst other allegations were raised, they were general or otherwise non-specific in nature, and did not specifically relate to sexual misconduct. Without further information being available, the subcommittee was unable to fully investigate such allegations; so for the other allegations the second finding was ‘inconclusive’.
Both of these separate findings were communicated to TLB staff and volunteers after the conclusion of the investigation.
The Board would have preferred to have concluded the investigation with a conclusive finding as regards to the other allegations, and should more information come to light, the investigation may be reopened.
We understand many in TLB’s community have wanted more information about this, but multiple people's privacy is being protected and we are obliged to observe their confidentiality.
With respect to the investigation overall the Board believes that it has and will continue to act in accordance with workplace laws and its legal obligations generally.
TLB's Board recognises this is a distressing situation and is concerned about anyone affected. We also know the strength of TLB is the contributions of its volunteers and its reading community. TLB's Board is committed to listening to its volunteers and creating a safe workplace. If you are experiencing a crisis, Lifeline offers 24-hour support at 13 11 14.
Plans for a restructure have been in train since 2019, and have been expedited this year. During the pause in public operations, the Board is working with all staff towards addressing the organisation’s structure and workplace culture as a matter of urgency.
TLB has a large and diverse community who we have worked with closely over many years. If anyone has information to share with the Board about any matter concerning TLB, we encourage them to write to [email protected].
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We’ve been elbow-greasing away behind the scenes for a while now, readying this website for you. It boasts many new features, and is much easier to use. Hopefully your clicking finger is ready to do some.................. clicking.
As it has been for a long time, our website is still the online home of all things TLB – the place you should come when you want to know anything and everything about what we’re up to, and the place to come to read work that is not-quite-like any work published anywhere else.
If commentary or literary criticism is what you’re after, check out our web publishing platform TLB Online. There you’ll also find exclusive extracts from our print magazine and other extras, including interviews, poetry, and a whole bunch of music mixtapes compiled by some of our contributors.
If you want to learn a little about our history or the shadowy figures behind our operation, check out our Who We Are and Masthead pages. You can also find more information about our magazine, where our stockists are located around Australia and the rest of the world, and how you can contribute your writing or artwork. And please check out the Brow Books page, which doubles as the big reveal of our book publishing imprint’s new name and logo and totally professional things like that.
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So, without further ado: happy Brow-sing in your web Brow-ser you totally confident and definitely not Brow-beaten attractive human.
They Cannot Take the Sky is a collection of
first-hand accounts of mandatory detention. I read the stories on the way to
work, sitting on the Bankstown Line train among other city-bound commuters. One
morning, a suit who gets on at St Peters sits beside me. His musky cologne is
so strong that I can taste it in the back of my throat. From the corner of my
eye, I watch him swiping through Facebook on his iPad. Peter Dutton calling the
Lebanese-Australian refugees of the 1970s a ‘mistake’. Pauline Hanson’s
#prayformuslimban. Proposed changes to 18C. Suit taps the screen with a slender
finger and shares the final article to his Facebook page with approval.
Meanwhile, in They Cannot Take the Sky, Behrouz Boochani, a Kurdish journalist
who fled Iran in 2013, relates what it’s like for him when he tries to speak his mind in Australia:
I wrote a statement
for a rally in Australia and I wrote that the Australian government is a
fascist government. One of the advocates sent me a message: ‘Behrouz, please if
it’s possible, do you want to take out “fascist” because if we read this for
people in the rally, people will feel bad.’ I was thinking for two days, How
can I take out this concept? It was hard for me, because I deeply believe that
the Australian government is fascist. I finally sent a message to her and said,
‘Okay, take it out.’ That was very hard for me.
Boochani’s account not only sheds light
on the injustice inflicted by our government’s policies but also on that inflicted by supposed ‘refugee advocates’. This leads me back to the project
of the book itself.
Collected and edited by oral history
organisationBehind the Wire, They Cannot Take the Sky
posits itself as a crucial voice amid the catchy tweets of the right’s elite
and the armchair activism of those who kind-of-care-but-not-really. This is a
collection of stories that demands readers examine the part that they play in
the human rights crisis created by successive governments’ infamously cruel
refugee policies. Christos Tsiolkas writes in the foreword:
I am grateful to
every single one of the narrators for sharing their world with me. And of
course, there is witnessing and testament. The witness to what we have done and
the testament to what we could be. This is why this book is necessary.
The reviews printed on the press
release and on the first two pages of the book follow the same line:
that this book is necessary and the stories contained within its pages will
make you feel extremely confronted as an Australian.
With the latter I agree. I experienced
guilt, shock, and shame while reading this book. Jamila Jafari, who was
detained on Christmas Island recalls:
I think they gave us a piece of paper
and a few coloured pencils to occupy us with. And, I mean, it should have been
something enjoyable to do but what was I supposed to draw? Razor wire all
around me?
Ariobarzan, a refugee who arrived on Christmas Island after 19th
July 2013, a cut-off date imposed by the government for the resettlement in Australia, writes: “I faced worse mental torture compared to the
intelligence prisons in Iran. We have been under severe mental torture for
three years … What sort of democracy is this?” The crippling of detainees’ hope
and freedom is suffocating to read. So much so that I found myself only able
to read a maximum of three stories per day. As a writer, I cannot fathom being
able to produce work in such dehumanising and creatively debilitating
conditions. As a reviewer of the text, I find myself unable to play the part of
the cool and disinterested critic questioning structure and word play. The
urgency of the greater issue at hand is overwhelming.
But I do want to unpack why this
collection of stories has been deemed "necessary", as Tsiolkas puts it, and
whether the need for the Australian public to hear refugee stories eclipses
questions of who facilitates the publication of these stories. It is interesting
to note that an extract of Tsiolkas’s foreword to the book was published
on The Guardian’s website in March this year as a standalone
text. The Guardian has tagged the article with the following: “Nauru/Manus/Australian
politics/extracts.” A click through each tag shows other articles that have
also been tagged by these words or phrases. Under the tags “Nauru” and “Manus”, the articles are dominated by statements by Peter Dutton on the
need to exercise a “tough stance” on immigration, or the views and activities
of human rights groups advocating for refugees. Very few of the articles
contain anything from the perspective of past or current detainees. Should you
wish to search these topics under the Google News tab, this absence is
replicated across the media’s coverage of refugee issues. Why are non-refugee
voices consistently being privileged over refugee voices?
My position is as follows: I am not a
refugee. I have never been at the mercy of Australia’s current immigration and
detention policies. As an emerging writer, I am benefiting professionally from
engaging in a hot button issue. The stories from They Cannot Take the Sky still haunt me but that does not excuse
me from being implicitly involved in the current system. I point out these
uncomfortable truths because I wish to highlight the surfacing tension behind
the publication of refugee stories. RISE (Refugee Survivors and Ex-Detainees),
the first refugee and asylum seeker organisation in Australia to be run and
governed by refugees, asylum seekers and ex-detainees, posted a message from an ex-detainee and RISE member on
their website in early 2016. It read, in part:
In recent times I
have witnessed there are so many non-refugees collecting and publishing our
stories to ‘humanise’ our struggles. There are some underlying issues about
many storytelling platforms created by non-refugees and mostly white
people. One should question and
thoroughly examine these issues and question those who control and transmit our
stories … Finally – fellow ex-detainees and detainees, it is not only the
governments; the refugee sector has polarised us and damaged us. It is about
their interest rather than our lives – what have we achieved last twenty years in
Australia? Nothing – because the refugee sector is headed by non-refugees last
two decades. Stop letting others to dominate our lives and tell us ‘how we
should live and what we should do.’ We ex-detainees and detainees should build
strong solidarity within us and create our own movements and decolonise our
mind.
The whole post, which can be read here, highlights the
eerie power dynamic between non-refugee advocates and refugees themselves. It
also rightfully questions the intentions behind the non-refugee facilitators of
refugee stories. The facilitators of They Cannot Take the Sky address
the above concerns in the afterword of the book (anonymity and legal advice
were also afforded to interviewees when requested). Those who were interviewed
consented to sharing their stories and were able to withdraw this consent at
any given moment. It appears that, at the very least, the basic requirements in
the process of interviewing were satisfied.
The intentions of the facilitators of
the book are aligned with Behind the Wire’s broader objectives.
According to the organisation’s website, their aim is to create an “oral
history project” (comprising of They Cannot Take the Sky, a podcast, and
an exhibition) that will “place the voices, faces and perspectives of asylum
seekers, which are rarely represented in public debates on refugee issues, at
the centre of the discussion.” And the book clearly does situate the
lives being damaged by Australia’s immigration policies at the centre of the
discussion; however, the question that RISE poses still stands: what have we
achieved on this issue in the last twenty years in Australia? Nothing. Groups
and writers who ‘collect’ refugee stories may continue winning awards and
accruing praise for their work but the most urgent and necessary
action—shutting down detention centres immediately—remains un-actioned.
Hence whether or not They Cannot Take the Sky is a
‘necessary’ book remains debatable. I would argue that the facilitation of
refugee stories by non-refugees is not
necessary. What is truly necessary is for Australians to take action and demand
our governing bodies to listen. Contact those who represent you and demand
their immediate attention to the torturing of innocent persons in our detention
centres. Do not allow They Cannot Take
the Sky to simply be another book you have read this year.
Shirley Le is a
member of the Sweatshop Writers Collective with a degree in Media from
Macquarie University. She has worked in
radio – producing youth shows for SBS Vietnamese Radio and has curated events
for TEDxYouth. She won first prize in the ZineWest 2014 Writing Competition and
has been published in SBS Online and The Big Black Thing. She has also
performed her writing at Studio Stories, the Wollongong Writers’ Festival and
the Campbelltown Arts Centre for the 2017 Sydney Festival exhibition of Another
Day in Paradise.
Issue 34 of The Lifted Brow is here and we want to celebrate! Join us for a short but oh-so-sweet get-together in the garden of The Alderman.
When: Saturday, 10th June.
Time: 6:30-8:30pm
Where: The Alderman, 134 Lygon St, Brunswick East
More info:Facebook!
Inside TLB34, you’ll find exceptional fiction, non-fiction, comics, poetry and more, including conversations between Hayan Charara and Patricia Smith, and between Bruce Pascoe and Kim Mahood. There’s also a very special series of responses to the question ‘How Should A Person Read?’ guest-edited by the man, the legend, Khalid Warsame. Oh and did we mention the stunner of a cover from Prudence Flint? Check it out. It’s a treat for your eyeballs.
This little celebration is free to attend!
To find out more about TLB34 and to subscribe to receive this beautiful baby, simply click here.
Entries for our third annual Prize for Experimental Non-Fiction close in just a few days, on May 29th. To give you a last little push of inspiration to get your entry in, we’re running in full the winner of the second annual prize, W<J>P Newnham’s ‘Trash-Man ♥︎s Maree’. You can also read the inaugural prize winner, Oscar Schwartz’s ‘Humans Pretending to be Computers Pretending to be Human’, by clicking here.
We forget what we are capable of in our youth
We forget with age until a sudden reminder
A smell, a look, a familiar tag
Spray-painted on the back alley Dumpster that reads:
I wasn’t even sure that Maree had spoken out loud at all—it was as if the words were only in my head as I looked at her to see if her lips had moved and then around and over my shoulder as the black-clad bouncer gave us the sneering once over and then continued his patrol. We weren’t allowed inside where the old school punkahs circu- late the tepid humidity; well Trash-Man and Me were but Maree, being Larakia Mob, had to stay out on the veranda or in the public bar or risk being eighty-sixed out into the street.
We were on the lookout for a mark, tourists specifically, to run the old dip and rip on: we were short on funds and it was looking like rain. We needed shelter, and that took dollars, unless we Submitted To The Salvos and the lock-in segregated dorms where the indignant are tossed and turned in a poverty of dreams-
Trash-Man Said: “Fuck that Bro; let’s go skin a lizard.”
Maree said: “Naaaaahhhhh Weit-Im…….
Sabi That Mob? Tourist…….”
She indicated with her chin towards a group of young backpackers moving to the veranda, laden with Cheap-Happy-Hour Drinks. They looked the sort: dreadlocks, tribal tattoos, T-shirts emblazoned with reggae flags and five-pointed foliage like handprints in green. Eyes up she indicated go and we took our positions; the prey clearly identified, we stalked unseen until suddenly-
We roamed the park, a ragtag collective black white and brindle et al; Hungry Gutted Mob Too Ey? Too much goon and no food as the Salvos won’t feed you if you are drunk. The Shops in town are shut, and with no money anyway we would have only got kicked out or worse, locked up, if we hung at Uncle Sam’s3 looking to humbug a feed.
We roamed the park.
Maree [finger to lip and palm upright]
Trash-Man and I frozeStopped at the fig trees and after
Posam5: A large Northern brushtail possum laid stunned and senseless at the foot of the Fig tree. We moved in for the kill. There was a shrill call echoing in the trees as the other possums warned each other as to danger; a kittenish mewl answered:
I wasn’t even sure that Maree had spoken out loud at all—Trash-Man euthanises dinner with his blade. We transported ourselves back to Lameroo Beach where Trash- Man and I built a fire in the lee of our boulder and Maree cooked dinner, first searing and singeing the fur away before roasting the meat on a bed of embers. The meat is sweetened by the possum’s diet in the fig trees. Maree shared it amongst us according to need and kinship:
Minutes, I get it for you…Nah…just shout a brother a bud…..
Yeah I Love U 2 Man…..
See U Real Soon…..
Sure….Get U a Once For….One fidddy??????
Yeah…cool. You got to gimme. Say
Half?
Noooooo. Hour dude…yeah? Cool.
Yep. I’LL BE BACK….
Totally dude-
Terminator.
We were gone before Wak-Wak walked again:
Nice and clean and easy!
IV>the Cherry Blossom [No-Tell] Motel
In pocket now, we hit Unca-Sam’s where we ordered what we liked;
No Salvation Army rations or possum tonight!
We ordered up big: a spread of fried treats, rice seasoned and coloured with saffron
and Green peas. We bought cigarettes and for extra, some sly grog, a twenty-dollar
box of Goon.
A strong sudden easterly smelled of rain
And sporadic thundering light=shows in the sky
Spoke of a deluge coming and we hurried
To the shelter of the Cherry Blossom Motel>
Trash-Man and Maree waited outside while I booked a room for two nights and
paid cash up front: no, no thank you, no phone or minibar and here’s your keys and
up the stairs and to the end and an ice bucket… I go up the stairs. I nodded the direction of the room to the dark where Trash-Man and Maree were waiting for me to open the door. Surrounded By Penumbra and Suddenly Gone, in Light and then Dark; Disappeared and then Visible,
…………………..then Gone: Lost In Shadows…………..
Unseen They Entered the Room
We Were In Pocket
In Shelter
With Food and Grog and Cigarettes;
Flash!
The storm came and soon, in the flash bang of lightning strikes and howling rain and wind, we were suddenly powerless as an errant blast of charged ions blew the trans- former in an explosion of ozone and searing magnesium flares. We were in darkness: Posam huddled in terror. Maree had candles and matches: soon we had light and food and golden coruscations of reflected lights echoing in the Fleur-D’-Lis flocked golden wallpaper while we charged up with goon, cigarettes and pitchuri; Trash-Man and I danced in a loose-limbed parody of ceremony and Maree laughed and
They fucked in the guttering death of the candles: a new squall blew in over Darwin Harbour and with the Drum-Kettle-Symphony of lightning crash and thunder I was awakened from my dream. They fucked in a Strobe-Lit-Staccato, anthracite then silver blue, like gilding statues at play with her riding him, mounted astern as she took her pleasure. One kangaroo, then emu, then frozen silver in flash then darker than soot and always keeping time with the internal clap stick. My hand was at my groin as I too joined this debauch, riding ourselves home in the storm
We arrived simultaneously as the power suddenly returned. We were caught extasis. The very essence of my self coated my hand and Trash-Man laughed and pointed and Maree covered her-self with a sheet and grinned at me whilst telling me
Days later and with the money nearly gone and the Cherry-Tree-Motel Long-G-G-G-G-G-G-G-G-G-G-Gone and back on the Lameroo, Trash-Man yarns us an earn: Magic Mushrooms are sprouting from the bullshit at the Buffalo Domestication Program at the Berrimah CY_RO. He had seen them before whilst walking home from the Berrimah lock-up on a drunk charge and had feasted and tripped and YEPPPPPPPPP We Could Sure Sell The Shit Out Magic Mushrooms To The Tourists: Make Some Coin and Get Off The Street Before The Wet Drove Us To The Salvos Or Jail Or The Nut-House.
We set off up-town in search of a lift out to Berrimah to the Back-Way-In as Trash- Man described it:
A snaky back-road
Hidden from the coppers:
‘Proper-Back-Door-Man!’
We hit the mall and made our way Down to Crocodile Corner where we hoped to meet an Aunt or Uncle or maybe one of many motorised homeless or even some hapless tourist lured by tales of Trippin’-The-Light-Fantastic-
Then they left off the hum-bug save for one drunken old man who sneered drunkenly and then shouted at Maree who took cover behind Trash-Man as the old man railed-
Trash-Man pointed his fore-finger at the old man like a bone and, in another voice more suited to the inside world of jailhouses, he spoke soft and quiet-
You Fucking Rock-Spider-Cunt! Yeah I Know Who You Are- I told you I would kill you: is it that day today or do you want to Fuck Off Now? That’s it, old man, keep walking… yep…
The clan laughed as the old man scuttled off like a crab. We started doing the rounds and saying Hello and Noooooo Money and You Got-Im One Motor Car. Next thing, we were in a broken-down station wagon, wending all the sneaky back way to Berrimah.
<Stuart-Park>X
We make our way elliptically from a seemingly unremembered ride back into town where we, well Trash-Man and me mainly but Maree had grinned her What the Hell we made a party of the harvest. With shopping bags of product we had somehow transported back to B_Sullivan_Park, we lay in the long grass and hid and waited for the hallucinations to pass as Maree keened intermittently:
I wasn’t even sure that Maree was speaking out loud at all—I looked at her to see if her lips had moved and then around and over my shoulder as Trash-Man grimaced and warded off unseen demons, and then Maree’s voice again. This time I was looking straight at her. She spoke to my mind as I always suspected, saying:
It came in a flood of bad tidings with the sudden and all-encompassing deluge as the wet season loosed all monsoonal and, with that, certain desperation. The casualties mounted: Maree was finally cornered by Child Protective Services and returned against her will to the Mission and Trash-Man went crazy, punching out policemen and wrestling with them until finally the ambos were called in to give him tranquillisers. He was locked up again, sectioned for the public safety.
I was alone;
A change in wind direction, it backed and veered; the ozone smelled of distant lightning. It was raining again and the streets were awash; the heavy precipitation soaked newspapers and litter as it mulched and ran across the asphalt into the drain. Dirt washed down the buildings and leaden fumes from the sky. Local people hurried; people in transit in a sea of unfurled umbrellas. Soon cleaner streets only, streets that were empty: Quick, Empty and Quiet.
The streets were quick and quiet.
I was alone;
Faced with the choice
Make Some Coin and Get Off the Street
Or choose; anywhere with a roof:
The Salvos or Jail or the Nut-House……….
Shit-Hawks rode the thermals
Circling me Screaming
Falling from the sky and
Swooping as they led me-
The moon hauled up east,
Labouring across the sky:
Bearing west-ward, dropping back from
Zenith to western horizon creating;
A shining path to follow
>Stokes Hill Wharf
A kid sat waiting in the yard smoking re-rolled bumpers and taking in the morning sun. He had that look endemic to the long-grass suite at the Starlight Motel; too many nights spent sleeping rough had packed his bags and too many handout feeds of starch and shit have scarred his face. He heard there was some work going down here. &e Fleet-Master knew this look;
His armada was always
A haven for the socially maladjusted.
Ayyyyyyhhhhhh………..What you doin’ there Young Fella?
Ohhh I’m waiting to see the Skipper.
Why the fuck would anyone wanna see that Old Cunt?
I never saw Trash-Man again. He was gone, lost to the winds known only to God. But Maree, I would see her again—I heard raucous commotion above the squall of the blaring stripper tunes as anorexic bottle blondes fondled each other in the lunchtime bacchanal, Titties and Beers. Me and my crew had just got in and, having been sea-bound for months, we were whooping it up by the jug in rounds of Dirty Mothers and Illusions as we exhorted the dirty girls to more lascivious displays, notes raining down on them as the disport twixt each other’s nether regions.
Maree called to me again:
AYYYYYYYYYYYY YOU FUCKEN SHIT-HAWK…..
YOU BIN TOO PROPER GOOD NOW EY?
TOO PROPER GOOD TO TALK YOU AUNTY?
I said:
Where you bin Aunty?
Long-fuckin-time Ey?
Maree said:
YOU GOT ANY MONEY-
YOU BIN TAKE ME CHERRY-TREE EY
MANGU-MUNGU SAME LONG TIME EY?
For Shame Aunty
I Am Not Bunji Man
Not Proper Way!
She laughed:
Proper Shame Job That One
Proper Shame.
I asked of Trash-Man and of herself—where had she been, how had she been. Her answers were terse and ambiguous: it is bad form to speak of the dead-
Finished Up That One-
That Fucking Mission
Finish Up Me Up……
Shame Job!
I gave her all bar a fifty of the cash I had and her eyes lit up. She kissed my face and called me Shit-Hawk.
You Bin Too Good-Nephew
You Remember You Aunty-
You Do Proper Way-You =-Ay.
I noticed the bouncers taking an interest in us and, as one started to move our way, I took Maree by the arm and motioned towards the black-clad bouncer with my chin, spake Wak-Wak once, and she walked with me outside. I asked, what will she do? She laughed and said rainy one now—go back-get-im one roof…….you know… I saw her lips moving and clearly heard her voice. She said: Thank you, for the money; you were always my favourite!
We embraced each other
And parted ways.
<<<<<<<<<<<<<<Epilogue.
That Night Drunk and in A Desolation
I Staggered Lost On the Foreshore Until
Suddenly: I Was On Lamaroo Beach.
I Searched for Bearings And
In The Moonlight
A Ghostly Tag Reads On a Rock
Like A Beacon from Days Gone by:
TRASH-MAN
♥S
MAREE
W<J>P Newnham has been published in numerous national and international magazines. Three of his short stories—Merry-crack-mass, Gr-easter and El-greco—have been traditionally published (one chapbook, two ebooks). He lives in Brisbane with his partner and two Blue Heelers.
1. Waiting because of crow – Kriol-English Dictionary [KED]↩
Beth was cross-legged on one of the big red balls. Claudia was fishing Hawaiian BBQ out of a styrofoam clamshell someone had left in one of the parking lanes.
“Mom is dead,” said Beth, counting on her fingers.
Claudia held out some macaroni in her palm, offering it to Beth. Beth shook her head.
“And Mary is dead,” said Beth.
She was getting skinny. She looked a little sick.
“You need to eat,” said Claudia.
“I know,” said Beth. “Did you know we’re going to war?”
“Who with?” said Claudia.
“With ourselves,” said Beth. “I saw it in a movie.”
“I’d like to see that movie,” said Claudia.
“It was good,” said Beth.
The Target was closed. It had been for three days. It was wrapped in police tape. Claudia kept putting her face against the glass and trying to see in.
“I think I can see something,” said Claudia.
They were wearing new tops from the dumpsters out back. The shirts were tanks for plus-sized children, but they also fit the girls.
“And Dad is dying,” said Beth.
“Dead,” said Claudia. “More or less.”
“No. Brain dead,” said Beth, “and there’s a difference.”
Claudia dug a cigarette butt from the cracks between two sidewalk tiles. She lit it and coughed a handful of times before dropping it.
“You don’t smoke,” said Beth.
Claudia shrugged.
“No one smokes anymore,” said Beth.
<! data-preserve-html-node="true"-- more -->
She slid off the red ball and greased her hair back with her palms.
“We’ve got to find a way to live a little better,” said Beth.
“We live fine,” said Claudia.
“No we don’t,” said Beth.
Claudia picked up a handful of wood chips from a ground-level gutter running the length of the building. She threw them up in the air and they fell back down to the ground. She scooped another handful and threw them at Beth. Most of them arced away from her in the wind but a few flakes stuck to her lap.
“I’m having a baby,” said Beth.
“You’ve never fucked,” said Claudia.
“It is the child of God,” said Beth.
“We don’t believe in God,” said Claudia.
“But we believe in ghosts,” said Beth.
“Because someone is putting on that light in the middle of the night,” said Claudia, “and it isn’t me and it isn’t you.”
“So it is the child of a ghost then,” said Beth.
“Spooky,” said Claudia.
“Anyway, we can’t afford a baby,” said Claudia. “Not even a ghost baby.”
“Everything will work out in the end,” said Beth.
“No,” said Claudia. “Everything is already over. And this is how it worked out.”
She was squatting against the stucco, pissing into a ground-level gutter.
“Have you ever fucked?” said Beth.
“All the time,” said Claudia.
“Anyone I know?” said Beth.
“Lots of people you know,” said Claudia.
“Any ghosts?” said Beth.
“Lots of ghosts,” said Claudia.
She rose and righted herself.
A seagull approached the styrofoam clamshell smeared with teriyaki sauce. It pecked it and lifted it and shook it.
“There’s nothing for him there,” said Claudia. “Idiot bird.”
“We’re miles from any ocean,” said Beth.
“He’s lost and stupid,” said Claudia.
The seagull broke off a piece of styrofoam and choked it down.
“Uh oh,” said Claudia.
It broke off another piece and took that in too.
A van stopped in front of them and the backdoor slid open to reveal Michael.
“Can I help you?” said Beth.
“Is this place still closed?” said Michael.
“Still covered in tape, isn’t it?” said Beth.
“You can get in there if you have a shimmy,” said Claudia.
“I’m all shimmy,” said Michael.
He stepped out of the van, which stayed running. He approached the sliding doors with a green canvas bag in his right hand. He withdrew a long, thin piece of shining metal and set to work at the space between the doors.
“There’ll be an alarm or something,” said Beth.
The doors slid open about half a foot or so and Michael was able to step in sideways.
There was no alarm.
The van kept running.
There was someone else in the front seat. Beth couldn’t make him out from where she was standing. She tried to move past Claudia, toward the front of the van to get a better look, but then Michael came out, panting and carrying three plastic barrels of cheese-puffs.
“There’s no one in there,” said Michael, dropping the loot. “It’s a free-for-all.”
“It’s a crime scene,” said Claudia.
“I know what it is,” said Michael, and he vanished again.
Claudia and Beth set to work on the first plastic barrel of cheese-puffs. Beth kept checking over her shoulder to see if the person in the front seat was going to get out and either join them or get onto them for taking advantage while the other was inside.
The corner of a slim, white cardboard box broke the space between the sliding doors. It wobbled and nearly fell. It was an ultra thin TV, followed by Michael. He set the TV down, propping it against one of the big red balls, and went back in.
Beth and Claudia were eating cheese puffs by the handful and starting to feel sick.
Beth watched the van. She thought she saw a shadow, but it might have been something on the other side. A bird or a tree or whatever.
Michael kept on bringing stuff out from between the crack in the doors: appliances, electronics, baby clothes. He piled it all on the concrete in front of Target.
He went in and Beth pocketed one of the shirts from the pile.
He came out with two bundles of firewood, which he brought straight to the car.
“Help me load all of this stuff,” he said.
“No way,” said Claudia.
“You owe me,” he said, “for the cheese puffs.”
“What about your partner?” said Beth.
“I’ll give you these,” he said, “if you help me.”
He pulled a green bag of sour Skittles from his jacket pocket.
“All of them?” said Claudia.
Michael nodded.
Claudia picked up a handful of iPhone cables and animal print socks. She threw them into the van. There were no seats in it. There was a wall between the empty back and where the driver sat.
“You guys do this a lot?” said Claudia.
“Not really,” said Michael.
They loaded the van until it was nearly full. The loot was piled high. Bundles of clothes for men, women, and children. One large television. Some workout mats and synthetic cables. A car battery booster. Three HP printers. Plastic barrels of pretzel bites and cheese puffs and party mix. A bag of apples. Forty-eight rolls of toilet paper bound together.
“What’ll you two do with all this stuff?” said Beth.
“Give it to charity, probably,” said Michael. “Want to ride with us?”
“Hell no,” said Claudia.
“It’ll be fun,” said Michael.
“To where?” said Beth.
“The ocean,” said Michael.
“To do what?” said Beth.
“I don’t know,” said Michael. He looked to the road. No one was coming. A black letter was dangling from a roadside movie marquee. “Sit around and eat?”
“Okay,” said Beth.
“What?” said Claudia.
“I’m hungry,” said Beth.
“We’ve got the BBQ,” said Claudia.
Beth shook her head. “It’s all gone.”
“I’m staying put,” said Claudia.
“What’s your name?” said Beth.
“Michael,” said Michael.
“Like the angel,” said Beth.
“Not at all like that,” said Michael.
He helped her into the van. An empty cup approached, rolling on its side in the wind, and Claudia kicked it into the street.
Sharp-eyed Facebook friends of the Brow’s will have already seen a sneaky peek of TLB34’s cover, but it’s now official – here are the cover and contents of issue thirty-four of our quarterly attack journal, which we have just sent to the printers, who will soon transform it from a bunch of ones and zeros into a real, physical thing you can hold in your real, physical hands. Thanks to Prudence Flint for this wonderful cover!
Australian readers: from June 4th you can pick up one of these beauties with the muted tones (mmm, that millennial pink) from any of our 900+ stockists.
International readers: buy a copy from our online store and we’ll chuck it right in the post for you.
As always, you can subscribe to the Brow now and this issue (and three more) will be delivered straight to your door. (Plus you save thirty-five per cent by doing so!)
Issue thirty-four of The Lifted Brow features:
cover art by Prudence Flint;
nonfiction from Rebecca Harkins-Cross, Jana Perković, Hayley Singer, Nick Taras, Peter Polites, Susana Moreira Marques, Simona Castricum, Anushka Jasraj, Bastian Fox Phelan, Alice Robinson, Richard M Hanson, Nicole McKenzie, Michael Dulaney, Chloë Reeson, Stephen Pham, Anne Boyer, Caren Beilin, and Elizabeth Flux;
fiction by Shaun Prescott, Ben Walter, and Houyem Ferchichi (translated by Znaidi Ali);
poetry by Hayan Charara, Patricia Smith, and Winnie Dunn;
a conversation between Hayan Charara and Patricia Smith;
a conversation between Bruce Pascoe and Kim Mahood;
comics and artwork from Charline Bataille, Ella Sanderson, Merv Heers, Steve Tierney, Loveis Wise, Grace Rosario Perkins, Jini Maxwell, Eaten Fish, Safdar Ahmed, A. Murray, Rachel Ang, Johdi Zutt, Lizzie Nagy, Jo Waite, Tommi Parish, Tara Booth, Anna Di Mezza, Jose Quintanar, Mickey Zacchilli, Rafferty Amor, David Cragg, Felix Decombat, and Michael Hawkins;
and, as always, Benjamin Law and his mum Jenny’s sex and relationships advice column.
Image by Laurie Rojas, after ‘The Critic Sees’ by Jasper Johns. Used with permission.
After several recent blows to the journalism industry in Australia, we at TLB are feeling especially despondent about the state of this country’s arts writing. We find it difficult to fathom this form of deep analytical writing withstanding many more setbacks – particularly in a time when arts writing is continually kicked to the capitalist’s kerb, in a country where it is arguably already buried and almost dead.
After seeing a few standard news reports about the setbacks, and a bunch of tweets, we sensed and knew that there were a bunch of conversations happening between critics and between journalists and between critics and journalists that needed public airing. And so we asked a handful of our favourite arts critics and arts journalists if they would get together in a shared online document and have a chinwag. Anwen Crawford, Alison Croggon and Anders Furze agreed. Below is their conversation.
—TLB
Anwen: Well, so my first question is, how do we push past a feeling of despair? Or should we? Because I do feel despair for the future of art making and arts criticism in this country.
Alison: This is a real question. Everyone will have a different answer, but maybe the first bit is to face up to where we are, and that’s hard. Watching the Fairfax fight at the moment, I realise I have absolutely no hope that journalism can continue in the way that we have assumed it will in the past. It’s really clear that the business model is stuffed, that journalism is not an end in itself, except when, as with Murdoch, it can be used to serve a particular corporate interest. The revelations about how Fairfax finance works just confirms this: journalism is a means of distributing profitable wares, and that’s it. And this is of course why the ABC, as a competitor on many levels, has to go, why it is under constant attack. I think we should fight for public broadcasting as much as we can, in the hope that something at least can be salvaged, but in the meantime it all looks pretty bloody bleak out there. Anyway, I generate my hope from what is possible. Seeing a brilliant show by The Rabble a couple of weeks ago, for instance. This is a company that was totally done over by the Brandis cuts a couple of years ago: on the verge of getting triennial funding, after doing all the hard yards for years, and had the rug pulled out from underneath them. A company that suffers under this particular system, because they are feminist, experimental, not “popular” in the ways they are supposed to be. And after this very bruising knocking around, they turn around and make some amazing work. And because it’s amazing, everyone goes, you can’t get a ticket. If we’re banished out to the fringes now, I guess we embrace that freedom. And make our communities there and protect that space and those people. I realise I sound a bit happy-clappy, but I do know these communities are real, and that they can be powerful in surprising ways. Anyway, I guess I’m saying the only response to despair is courage, and that courage is encouraging. We have to make a virtuous circle where now we’re just seeing vicious ones.
Anwen: I don’t think you’re being happy-clappy. There is truth in the notion that we protect and nurture our artistic communities when they are under threat. But I wonder about the spaces in which we can do this, physical spaces as much as much as metaphorical ones. My pessimism is inflected by the fact that I live in Sydney, and that music is my main area as a critic and an audience member – music and film. And the spaces for sustaining those communities are vanishing. Fifteen or so years of relentless gentrification and property development in the city has had a massive impact on small, independent arts venues. And for music in particular, the lockout laws had a huge effect on what was already a struggling sector. It’s not just mid-size venues that are gone, it’s venues that would fit 150 people, or even fifty people, the real grassroots venues where new work is incubated. So now we’re in a situation where the physical spaces barely exist in which to make the work, which means that audiences can’t see the work, nor engage with it critically. The sense of banishment can feel very literal. I often feel as if everyone in Sydney who doesn’t has an income of $100,000 or more is being actively pushed out (we are), made invisible, forced to keep our heads down. I know these are separate issues, in a sense, to the crisis in arts criticism and coverage, but they’re also not separate. The whole creative ecosystem is really fragile at the moment. I’m conscious of possibly drawing the boundaries too wide at an early point in this discussion, though.
Alison: That sounds dire, Anwen! And it’s not at all a separate issue. I am talking precisely about those physical spaces, where people can meet and talk as well as share ideas: it’s a major reason I value theatre. We’re mammals, we need those warm spaces. They do exist here in Melbourne, at least at the moment, although rising rents and gentrification are issues here as well. Of course we can curate online spaces as well, and they can be important in battling isolation. But they can’t be the only spaces.
Anders: I don’t know I can even gesture towards answering that question, Anwen. Among emerging critics I speak with there is a general sense the sky has fallen in. But then I only started doing this comparatively recently so for me the sky has always been fallen in.
Seven years ago The Wheeler Centre hosted a panel asking if film criticism had died, and I distinctly remember Adrian Martin telling that panel “forget The Age. I did!”
Which is not to say that the mass media conversation around culture is not an incredibly important one. I have a lot of time for well-informed “mainstream” arts criticism. It’s how I first discovered the possibilities of cinema: when I was a teenager I read a five star capsule review of Mulholland Drive in Empire magazine, and it sparked a curiosity in me that I’m still following fifteen years later. That’s the power of this kind of cultural conversation.
To have a dedicated section of The Age devoted to the arts – alongside politics, business, sport and the rest – is a statement that it is an important element of our daily conversation about our city and ourselves.
Of course, to have that section now weighted so strongly in favour of certain subjects, to have it so near-totally subsumed under the broader entertainment umbrella, is a statement about our city and ourselves as well.
Alison, I agree with you entirely about where journalism more generally currently finds itself. The old business models have petered out and they are not coming back. It’s over.
I’m trying to see this as a liberating chance for new ways of thinking to assert themselves but I’d appreciate it if they’d assert themselves a bit more quickly and forcefully please.
One approach that I’ve found interesting is the argument around increasing publicly funding journalism. The same argument applies to criticism. In the past, funding bodies supported film criticism in the interests of developing a broader film culture. Now, as Lauren Carroll Harris has pointed out, our film policy is almost entirely geared around production to the exclusion of other aspects of film culture, like criticism or distribution.
And then there is the issue of independence. For me this is a key question concerning the collapse of journalism’s business model.
Alison: Hi Anders – back in 2004, I answered the independence question by starting Theatre Notes, which I kept up for eight years. That independence was what I most valued about my blog. When The Australian offered me a review job, I almost resigned a week after starting because the contract seemed to say that I couldn’t write on my blog about shows I had reviewed for the Oz (it didn’t say that, but it made me realise how much I valued that, above everything else). I didn’t attempt to make it pay. And back then, the blog worked, not least because back then I could afford to do a bunch of work for nothing. From my POV, in 2004 I was already seeing the collapse of institutional cultural criticism (which is a fairly recent model, only really took place in the twentieth century). Over the past year I’ve been feeling pretty depressed about the whole critical culture thing, and started talking seriously a couple of months ago about starting another critical site in 2018, a different evolution this time that focuses on community, but which of course will have reviews and essays. This time an explicit aim is to get paid, and we will be crowdfunding it, although we are also very clear that although we will be seeking certain kinds of support from performance companies; we don’t want sponsorship or advertising from them. Early signs are that it has a good chance of actually working. The plus side of this debacle is that there is a huge gap. The big loss is the broadcast model, which you get in the mainstream press: eg, almost all the arts on the ABC has been taken away from broadcasting and sent into narrowcasting (internet sites, podcasts etc.). I think that is a serious loss, because you need those random encounters.
Anders: You absolutely do. Your point about institutional criticism being a comparatively recent phenomenon is an important one. I know I once had a preconception about a “golden age” of mainstream film criticism, but then I realised that maybe what I was lamenting was in fact a kind of miraculous aberration made possible by so many improbably colliding factors for a brief moment in time: the exception proving the rule. Funnily enough I just visited abc.net.au/arts/ to see what the current situation is and was greeted with “Note: This site is an archive and no longer being updated.” I am glad to see you’re embarking on this new project – I look forward to seeing what you do with the site!
Anwen: Yeah, I’m not nostalgic for any lost golden age of journalism and/or arts criticism. I don’t think there was one. I find myself thinking of late about the notion of “indymedia”, which reared its head in activist circles in the late nineties/early 2000s, especially in relation to what was then a growing, global protest movement against corporate capitalism. This kind of citizen and/or activist journalism took advantage of what were then new tools and spaces online for the dissemination of independent media. Crucially, this happened pre-social media, pre-Google, pre-YouTube, pre–the enormous harvesting of our personal information by governments and businesses. We can’t turn back the clock, but I think the notion of a “people’s media” is due a revival, a revitalisation. It was this kind of media, and criticisms of the corporate-owned press which came out of activist circles, that taught me to be sceptical of the mainstream press when I was quite young, still in my teens. (And now I feel like something of a walking contradiction, given that I contribute my labour to some of this media.)
We often talk about the crisis in media as if it hasn’t been partly caused by the media itself, but it has. I’m not talking about individual journalists here. I am talking about the kind of financing and profit models that have shaped mainstream media, and which influence the stories that get told, and how they get told. And of course this narrowing of coverage is becoming even more narrow, now that digital metrics etc. dictate what gets published in the first place. We need to break out of this model, somehow, and (re)invent a model of media that is financially sustainable but not necessarily for profit. To go back to Alison’s earlier point about community: we need media that is a meaningful part of a community, or communities. I’ve kept one foot in the zine world since I was a teenager and that’s the kind of publishing community which is really meaningful to me, and which makes meaning among its participants. But it’s a thing unto itself, it can’t be scaled up without ruining what makes it special. We need something, though, an independent model. Jeff Sparrow made some similar points in The Guardian recently: “the only solutions are radical ones,” he wrote. I agree. But there is no reason why “radical” has to be synonymous with “exiled” or “ignored”.
Alison: Okay, another question: do any of us think that the nature of arts criticism will have to change in response to this crisis?
Anwen: I think it already has, hasn’t it? And largely for the worse. In that we’ve seen a substantial decline in essay-length pieces, these have mostly been replaced by capsule reviews, recaps, and a lot of stuff repurposed from social media. Now, there is a useful place (and a certain kind of writerly discipline) in capsule reviews and recaps, if not in simply screenshotting shit from Twitter. But if that’s all we’re left with, then we’re in trouble. And we are in trouble. So, if we want to break that cycle…? Well, I think that will have a lot to do with the nature and purpose of the publications we’re writing for. And what else? I’m always interested in finding ways around the new release cycle, which is so often tied to the publicity gears of major labels, studios, etc. If there are ways of pursuing critical questions that go beyond whatever is out next week, then that interests me a great deal. I think, too, that we have to resist the tendency to oversimplify our critical responses, which is something that social media in particular tends to reward: the polarising take, the hyperbolic rave review, the takedown. It’s very rare that I think a work is all good or all bad, and I think that those kind of value judgements are among the least interesting, or useful, elements of criticism. Related to this, I’m pretty bored with the intellectual vanity that often passes now for critical discourse, where we analyse a work only in terms of whether or not it measures up to our own moral codes. I wish the word “problematic” would disappear forever. This doesn’t mean that I want to see difficult, counterintuitive, thought-provoking criticism, written from new and/or underrepresented perspectives, disappear. Quite the opposite. But I do think we need to resist the temptation to be judgemental, rather than doing the more nuanced work of making a series of judgements.
Alison: I so agree with all your points, Anwen. It’s interesting how things have changed over the past decade. I began Theatre Notes in large part because I was trying to catch up on the past fifteen years in theatre in Melbourne (long story) and realised that there was only one place that did any kind of useful criticism (i.e., criticism that told me interesting things about what happened). That was RealTime, which is still going. The dailies had their critics passing judgement, and the rest was silence. Magazines like Theatre Australia didn’t exist any more. There was no dialogue at all, even on opening nights, I mean, nobody said anything, except in private. I remember in the days when blogs took off – people all over the place were experimenting with form as responses to performance, posting Socratic dialogues or even diagrams or doing reviews as .gifs. It was kind of chaos, and it was also exciting and fun. Don’t want to be nostalgic about this (okay, I am) but quite seriously, people would look over from London at some of the conversations that were happening, which were searching and serious and fascinating, and say, WTF is going on in Melbourne?! Most of reviewing now is a consumer guide, which has its place of course. Now we’ve got a very similar situation to the early 2000s, except it’s kind of the opposite: lots of white noise, and yet it’s still hard to find thoughtfulness and also disinterestedness, which is a quality I value a lot in criticism. And most of all, theatre reviewing of all kinds has settled down to a conventional review format. And the star thing (I loathe and despise doing stars) is just standard – it’s on almost every review. I guess for me it sums up everything that’s reductive about responses to art.
…Anyway, as a P.S., I think that the only response is to get serious again.
Anders: Anwen, I wholeheartedly concur with your point about the “it’s problematic” school of writing on art and entertainment. If nothing else it’s patronising to the readership. It’s funny just how much this attitude has taken hold though. At the moment I’m watching Sex and the City for the first time and quite often when I mention this to people they say “but don’t you find the depiction of gay people so offensive?” Well, I find your question offensive! I don’t even think it is, but even if I did, so what? Sometimes it’s good to be offended by what you watch.
Anyway that’s a digression. To the question of whether arts criticism is changing: I think there are definitely some creative, unique responses to the crisis in film criticism happening online. Locally, take a website like 4:3, which makes a super human effort to comprehensively cover the festival circuit. Or there’s the .gif-centric academic journal Peephole, which publishes wonderfully creative writing about super specific, isolated moments in films. Then there’s the burgeoning podcast scene.
So things are happening and conversations are being had. How long we’ll keep having these conversations is anybody’s guess.
Against my better self I’m also a big defender of film Twitter. It’s funny how much of a frenzy it turns into during the Sydney and Melbourne film festivals. The festivals encourage this of course (witness Melbourne’s ‘tweet screen’ spotlighting tweets before every screening). When we all go into overdrive twice a year we end up making a collective statement that movies do actually matter. That they’re worth getting hyperactive and ironic and witty and tired and angry about. I’m always encountering new recommendations and moments of critical enthusiasm on film twitter and on balance I’m very grateful for it.
I guess the bigger concern for me personally is that I really love talking about cinema with people who don’t live and breathe it. But in a media world that’s increasingly favouring niche content there are so few avenues to reach that general-interest audience, and the avenues that do exist skew heavily in favour of certain approaches. One thing that has remained with me from a piece I wrote on the decline of the Australian film critic is the notion that the only time newspaper critics get massive clicks online is when they’re writing one-star reviews. It’s tragi-comic: a film critic cuts through to a broad audience only when she or he hates a film!
So what does all of that mean for my practice? I don’t like asking this question because I don’t like dwelling on its answers. So instead I just keep on chipping away, chipping away, chipping away…
Alison: It seems to me that people will keep talking about art in whatever ways they like to talk about it. But whether people will pay for it, and how they access public discussions about art, is up for grabs. Part of that is up to us, I think. We have to write about art in ways that excite not only the hardcore fans, but that also invite people less familiar, but who might be curious, into the discussion. I’m not talking about dumbing down, I mean the opposite: dumbing down is a deeply patronising way of thinking about readers.
For me it’s about finding vocabularies that don’t make people feel patronised, that make them feel comfortable about partial understanding. I remember very well the feeling that I often had when I started going to the theatre in my early twenties, when I didn’t understand or like a show, and how I felt, somewhere underneath, that that meant that I was stupid. And I think that’s underlaid a lot of how I try to write. When I first started reviewing, I tried to use basically tabloid techniques to talk about complex ideas. I wanted to make jokes while talking about serious things. I truly do think art is (or should be) for everyone, equally the person who is just encountering it for the first time and is curious and interested by whatever has happened, the person who is deeply literate in all its forms. The person who doesn’t know how to behave in a plush temple of art, but who sees a Beckett play on television and immediately thinks of their job as a sheet metal worker, and actually understands, in a profound way, what Beckett was on about. (Yes, I knew that person.) I think that sometimes people think that art response is about being part of a club, of which you have to prove your membership. None of the good artists I know think like that, though.
Not saying I necessarily live up to my ideals, but intellectual access is a constant question for me. We have to invite people into the conversation. Part of this is I think about making our own critical processes more transparent, I mean the doubt and hesitancy and ambivalence, so that encountering and responding to art becomes less about magisterial judgment and more about a dynamic way of thinking and feeling, a teasing out of thought. Cultivating the ability to be wrong, and to admit it, so that others know they can be wrong too, and it’s okay. And so on.
Anwen: I am very much in concurrence with all the comments above, regarding the issue of general readerships, audience access, etc. Writing as a critic for a general readership has always been really important to me, because the formative experiences I had in reading criticism, when I was young, came via the music press like NME (the sorry decline of the NME is its own case study in the devaluation of criticism), or in newspapers and general interest magazines. Sometimes a review or essay could open me up to a whole new world, because it was introducing me to an artist I’d never heard of, or because it was discussing a broader cultural lineage that I wasn’t familiar with, or both. And if the piece was about an artist that I liked, or liked the idea of, I would try to follow up the references as best I could: if there was mention of another musician that inspired them, or a film or book, then I would try to track those things down for myself. Which was a harder thing to do, before the internet. It gave me a cultural education though, and a better one than I got at school. The autodidact impulse that culture, and cultural criticism, can facilitate is really important to me. When I write for publications like The Monthly, which is a magazine for a general readership, I always write with the assumption that a reader might not know anything about the subject, or that they might know everything. The challenge is to try and write for both those readers at the same time, without patronising anyone.
And of course, the more informed an audience, the more complex and combative (in a good way) those discussions can become. But one of the things that creates an informed, confident audience, who might be inclined to argue back with critics, is criticism itself: we all need, as critics and readers and audiences, an evolving record of art-making and the discussion around it, so that we feel we can contribute to it. And I’m still a reader of criticism, too, not just a writer of it. I still look for those pieces that help me to illuminate my understanding of an artist or an art form, or that will introduce me to something new, but they get harder to find.
It can take me a long time to make up my mind about things – or rather, I don’t really make up my mind. One thing that really interests me as a writer is to try and examine artworks or artists that I might have lived with for a long time, trying to figure out how my relationship with the thing has changed. Like Alison says above, it’s about teasing out thoughts. This relates back to the earlier point of discussion about stepping aside from the new release cycle. Some of the pieces I’ve written that I’ve been most satisfied with have involved things that I’ve had decades to think about. It’s worrying that in so far as the working life of a critic goes, any kind of time to properly think things through is increasingly a luxury. I don’t like the pressure to have an instant opinion on something. Again, I think this kind of pressure tends to make us judgemental.
I’m also interested – and I think this is related to the above, and to Alison’s point about making the process more transparent – in how one negotiates the ‘I’ voice as a critic. It’s not always an appropriate voice for criticism, and I don’t always use it, but when I do, it’s for a reason. Nor I do think the first-person voice is necessarily contiguous or interchangeable with the writer, as a person. The ‘I’ is always a construction, a performance, which doesn’t mean that it’s fake.
I think it’s very tricky as a woman writer, because we are all trained to read a woman’s ‘I’ as confessional, as undiluted autobiography. And despite the fact that I sometimes disclose personal information in my work, the confessional mode doesn’t really interest me, or at least, I want the chance to complicate that mode. Because what’s generally denied to women, and/or those from other marginalised subject positions, is the opportunity to write as a person who has cultivated skills – and, dare I say it, expertise – in a particular field of knowledge. If you write as a subjective ‘I’, then you can’t also be an expert. I don’t see why these two things can’t go together. I don’t see why the critical voice can’t be complicated by an ‘I’, and vice-versa.
But I do think that for a critic, the ‘I’ has to be a voice that can include others. You still have to be reaching out, implicitly or explicitly, inviting other audience members to examine their own responses. If you’re not doing this, if the critical response is really only about you, then I don’t think it’s going to work very well as a piece of criticism.
Alison: FWIW, I insist on my 'I’ as “a person who has cultivated skills – and, dare I say it, expertise – in a particular field of knowledge”. I think the presence of that 'I’ makes the expertise porous and partial, which it inevitably is, and is necessary as a demonstration that I don’t speak for everyone who has experienced the work I am writing about. Which is to say, it gives me more freedom to be open and argued with. That 'I’ is always a performance, which is, as you say, and—speaking with my theatre critic hat—not at all the same a deceit. It’s difficult, nay, impossible to combat reductive autobiographical (mis)readings of anything – I used to loathe the “personal” readings of some of my poems. But sometimes I find the misreadings in general of things I’ve written confronting: it doesn’t matter how clear or specific you try to be, someone somewhere will come up with some bizarre version of what you said. But that’s another issue.
One of the things I like about writing about performance is in fact the need to respond quickly. I never much liked doing overnighters, but even those—the traditional “notice”—can be a sketch of immediate response that can be vivid and interesting. But I agree that we need to think about things for years, it’s part of the task of critique. That long view, that perspective, can be difficult to find in a lot of reviewing. Australia has always had a problem with cultural memory.
Anders: One final point I’d like to reiterate is something I’ve only fully appreciated very recently: It’s not just up to critics to fix this problem.
The film podcast I co-host was recently longlisted for the Walkley media incubator and innovation fund (we didn’t end up being shortlisted). I shared this happy news with a journalist and he was genuinely perplexed to see us on the list. His tone was along the lines of, “Absolutely not dissing what you do but is it journalism?”.
To be honest, I had the same reaction! I had so fully internalised the perceived marginal status of criticism that I was genuinely shocked and impressed that some media gatekeeper somewhere had noticed us.
Which is ridiculous. It’s exhausting to constantly fight just for your right to have a seat at the media table. And it inevitably affects your work. You start applying a certain media logic to your practice, which means that you only cover certain things – the weekly “review cycle” that was previously mentioned being one such example.
So, editors, publishers, readers: what are you doing to develop our critical culture?
Anwen: It’s probably worth mentioning as we wrap up this exchange that the Walkleys has just announced a new version of the Pascall Prize, which has long been Australia’s only award for arts criticism – indeed, Alison is a previous winner! But with the exception of a “lifetime achievement” Pascall given to Evan Williams in 2015, the Prize hasn’t been awarded since 2014.
On the one hand, it’s encouraging to see the Pascall reinstated in some form. But I think there are a few things worth noting here. Firstly, the Pascall Prize used to come with a $15,000 award, which is a substantial prize for any writer. But there is no mention of this prize money now, which I presume means it will no longer come with any.
Secondly, the Pascall used to function as the “Australian Critic of the Year” prize, i.e., it recognised achievement over time, through a critic’s body of work. Now, it’s only being awarded for a “single work” of criticism, which seems to me a not particularly useful way of assessing criticism as a writing practice.
It’s better than nothing. But I think the changed nature and format of the Pascall tells us a lot about just how marginalised criticism has become. To echo your point, Anders, criticism is generally not regarded as part of journalism, and while I think that reflects a certain truth about the nature of criticism as a practice, it also means that criticism, as I think we have seen far too often of late, is considered a 'soft’ or 'disposable’ option, unlike 'hard’ news. The Walkleys has never offered any kind of prize for arts writing before now, despite people asking for it repeatedly over the years. And again, it’s worth noting that there are two Walkley-Pascall prizes being awarded now: one for arts journalism, and one for arts criticism, as separate disciplines.
Lastly, I was extremely disappointed not to see the Cultural Capital podcast, which is the terrific film podcast that Anders is involved in making, shortlisted for the Walkleys innovation fund! Nearly everything on the shortlist was to do with technical and/or “back end” demands for journalists, and while I’m sure these projects are each worthy in their own right, it was a shame not to see a greater diversity of approaches among the shortlist, or an encouragement of new projects in cultural criticism.
A postscript on the issue of time/turnaround for reviews: I think the problem is particularly acute with popular music criticism, where more and more I’m noticing the 'first listen’ review being published, often within hours of an album being released. I think that’s next to useless as a critical response. An album isn’t really made to be listened to once, then reviewed. Live reviewing is a little different, obviously with theatre or concerts or any other live form, you’re reviewing the thing as it was in that single iteration, for that performance, and I agree that there’s an interesting energy, for both writers and readers, in this kind of criticism. But to me the 'first listen’ album review is the equivalent of live tweeting a film review as you watch the film for the first time. It’s a gimmick. It’s stunt criticism.
Alison: Thanks for pointing to the new Pascall Prize, Anwen. That’s very discouraging: it’s an entirely different prize. I’d also like to mention, in relation to the issue of cultural memory, that the original Pascall Prize website, which had an archive of all previous winners, including speeches and videos, has died a digital death and now only exists on the Wayback Machine. This lack of interest or care on those who are supposedly custodians of these things is why so much is forgotten.
And ditto to your comments on the Walkley’s Innovation shortlist: there were no cultural projects shortlisted, including our proposal for a performance criticism website, out of about ten that I counted. It’s hard to see that mainstream journalism has any commitment at all to nurturing cultural criticism. And I guess we have to face up to the truth that it doesn’t.
This week we published an online series of commentary pieces that explored women’s experience in and of sporting culture. A huge thank you to the five incredible writers who contributed to this special online series: Brunette Lenkić, Katerina Bryant, Emma Jenkins, Danielle Warby, and Holly Isemonger.
Active women can change the world. And that might be why, over the centuries, they have been strapped into corsets, bustles and stilettos, or had their feet bound, necks extended and genitals mutilated. Such physical constraints in the name of fashion or religion suggest at a deeper level that if women weren’t tethered, they might escape. It has been a continuing challenge for girls and women to be allowed to run, jump, throw, catch, hit, chase, form teams and compete freely. Some of the obstacles that constrict female roles in wider society are particularly visible in the sporting arena because sport poses the question: what are bodies for?
When we talk about emotional labour, it’s often referring to our immediate community. Our workplaces, our homes. Yet when I look at the small, but global, chess community, I see that the gendering of chess and volunteer time has had global ramifications. Considering the big names in chess, previous World Champions and rising young stars, there is a friction between how women and men use their time.
Just like in life, some people have tremendous advantages. Bigger budgets can buy better equipment, better training programs, and better cyclists. These advantages stack, and the men’s success is read as natural, innate. It’s taken as evidence that men are, simply, better cyclists. Disadvantages stack, too. Channel Nine, who have long held the exclusive rights to the Tour Down Under, didn’t even broadcast the women’s race this year, immediately deterring large sponsorships. This is structural inequality at its finest.
Image copyright Lyndall Irons. Used with permission.
There’s a sense that today people think of their identities as more than just their sexuality. For a lot of sportswomen, being an athlete is what is front and centre – more than being lesbian, and even more than being a woman. How many times have women in sport had to ask the public to focus only on their athletic achievements?
On top of this, publicly claiming a sexual identity of the LGBQ variety is still a very political thing to do and it’s tough enough for women in sport as it is, without adding extra complications to navigating what is still, at times, a hostile environment.
There are distinct differences in the way genders are marketed: men are brilliant athletes (and if they are hot, bonus!), for women the message is she is really hot, and she can surf. She becomes more desirable, not for her skill as a surfer, but as a lifestyle accessory to make her personal brand more valuable. This gendered system has its roots back in the eighteenth century. During this period middle class women were becoming more widely educated, however, this was limited to the realm of what Mary Wollstonecraft called ‘accomplishments’: music, singing, drawing, dancing and modern languages – skills that were often used to entertain but never intended for professional use. They were accessories to add to a woman’s value as a potential wife, and this was a period of time when marriage was namely an exchange of money and property. The surfing industry isn’t in the business of wives but it is in the business of money.
This is the fifth and final piece in a week-long series about women’s experiences in sporting culture.
We crowded around the TV in a sweaty demountable and watched footage of
the high-school surfing team. I saw stringy boys in black wetsuits ride wave
after wave; I was waiting for footage of me, which arrived unexpectedly spliced
into the year-ten boys’ semi-final, although I wasn’t surfing. I was emerging
from the water and onto the shore—like girls I had seen in Tracks magazine—fiddling with my bikini and slowly walking toward the camera up onto
the beach. I had no idea I was being filmed. There was no footage of me
surfing. I was thirteen years old. It was at that moment I realised who I was,
or more accurately, what I was and it had nothing to do with surfing, but was
intimately entwined with it.
In high school I was a surf rat, like Lockie Leonard, the eponymous
teen protagonist of Tim Winton’s young adult book series. We studied the books
at school and followed Lockie as he navigated his way through shredding and acquiring
a hot girlfriend. His world seemed familiar to me; shredding and hot
girlfriends were the top priorities of most boys in my life. One formative
moment occurred when these two interests collided: after school, my boyfriend
paddled out to me in the lineup and said, “You know we broke up, right?” (I
didn’t know). “Yeah,” I said. Small tears slid into the salt water on my
cheeks. He didn’t notice (thank god), because he was no longer looking at me.
He had already snaked me and had priority for the next wave. I
wasn’t his hot girlfriend, and I was not shredding.
Tim Winton has long
been the literary mascot of Australia’s surfing culture for both the urbane
literary set and surfers themselves. He has won the Miles Franklin award four
times, he’s taught in school curriculums, his novels have been adapted for film
and TV – he is basically Australia’s most beloved novelist. He has also become
something like Aus-lit’s hippie guru. You can almost see his wispy locks in the
brassy light as he drops perfect mantra quotes like, “I am at the beach looking west with the
continent behind me as the sun tracks down to the sea. I have my bearings,” or,
“Everything we do in this country is still overborne and underwritten by the
seething tumult of nature.” Despite
Winton’s ubiquity, there has been little critique of his depiction of women. Australia
hasn’t questioned the repercussions of taking this masculine nostalgia as our
most adored national narrative.
Growing up, I knew
I could surf and I did. But I also I knew I could never be the surfers that
were so carefully arranged on my school books and bedroom walls. Seeing that
video of me in year eight taught me a profound lesson that I’m still trying to
un-learn: although I couldn’t be the
surfers I idolised, I could be desired
by them (and in my home town that’s significant currency). In the narratives
that surrounded me I could see girlfriends and hot girls – I couldn’t see me.
I’m not here to unpack
why the Australia fell so deeply in love with Winton’s world. His skill is
obvious and his brand of wistful macho-romanticism is perfectly tailored to
Australia’s literary mythos: man vs. bush (Banjo Paterson, Henry Lawson), man
vs. farm-life (Les Murray) and Winton’s contemporary iteration – man vs. the
surf (he’s a bloke, but he’s sensitive!). Australia’s perpetual need to look
back to the sharpness of youth where the water was crisper and the girls hotter
is unsurprising. There is enough grit in the sentimentality and force in the
narratives to make Winton’s tales feel real, raw and true. And maybe for some
people they are true, but they are likely a white guy, and often they are your
dad. My aim is to draw attention to how the male-centric nature of Tim Winton’s
oeuvre perpetuates an Australian myth of surfing that, in reality, is unavailable
to at least half the population.
Winton’s takes a Werner Herzog approach to nature: the ocean is indifferent and
often brutal. “I love the sea but it does not love me.” If you dare wade into
its waters, you can experience the sublime. If you are a woman the stakes are
higher because if you are not brilliant you are the worst, if you don’t look
good you are invisible, if men can see you they drop in on you. To surf big
swell is hard – even with intense training my weedy boyfriend can pin me down, let
alone the ocean! None of this is mentioned in Winton’s narrative. When Winton
talks about surfing he talks about spirituality, contentment and a raw
connection with nature. Winton’s tales of the surf are deeply solipsistic.
Breath’s narrator Pikelet recalls the
experience of surfing as
The blur of spray. The billion shards of light … I was intoxicated. And
though I’ve lived to be an old man with my own share of happiness for all the
mess I made, I still judge every joyous moment, every victory and revelation
against those few seconds of living.
For Winton,
to be in the surf is to be one’s true self, at your most authentic and free. It
is the purest form of life.
I adore surfing. Many of my formative experiences
occurred in the ocean (my first reo, when I
did my first backhand slash, when I nearly drowned, when I spotted sharks, when my
leg-rope got caught around a lobster pot, when I grasped a piece of swaying
kelp and kissed a cute boy by a reef, etc.) Despite this, I never felt free, I
never felt authentic and surf culture constantly reinforced it.
In his Ways of Seeing, John Berger draws
on the tradition of European oil painting to illustrate the difference between
nakedness and the nude. He writes, “to be naked is to be oneself”: to be able
to express yourself openly and be recognised for who you are. Winton’s surfers are “dancing themselves across the bay with smiles on their faces and sun in
their hair”. He writes, “to see men do something beautiful. Something pointless
and elegant, as though nobody saw or cared” – in short, they are naked. Berger
elaborates on the
distinction:
to be nude is to be seen naked by others and yet not recognised
for oneself. A naked body has to be seen as an object in order to become a
nude. (The sight of it as an object stimulates the use of it as an
object.) Nakedness reveals itself.
Nudity is placed on display. To be naked is to be without disguise.
Winton
assumes that all surfers are naked, that they are the embodiment of freedom.
This assumption is why I bristle at his writing.
As I watched Ways
of Seeing, I recalled the moment I saw myself on screen in year eight. I’m
reminded of Erin Hortle’s essay in
which she describes nailing a perfect ride only to hear her fellow male surfers
say “Imagine seeing
her do that in a bikini.” (A comment
that no doubt many, many women have heard.) These are moments when we should
have been able to be ‘naked’. Hortle should have been able to express herself
with the same the unbridled delight as Winton’s surfers dancing across the bay
and seen as who she is – a surfer.
Considering how elite female surfers are
portrayed in the media, Berger’s observations are prescient. You may be world
champion, but if you’re a woman you’ll be portrayed as a ‘nude’. Berger
continues,
To be on display is to have the surface of one’s own skin, the
hairs of one’s own body, turned into a disguise, which, in that situation, can
never be discarded. The nude is condemned to never being naked.
There is
something deeply unsettling in Berger’s description: the surface of your skin,
the hairs on your body, are severed from you. They are transformed into a
disguise by something you can’t control. You are stitched into a costume that
is made from you: your face, your shape and skin, but it doesn’t belong to you.
You are alien and yet yourself.
This might seem like a plot from a body horror
movie but it’s just Steph Gilmore’s promotion for the Roxy Pro Biarritz –
and the sad reality is that it could be
any number of ad campaigns featuring female pro-surfers (e.g. Sally Fitzgibbons,
Laura Enever, Coco Ho, Lakey Peterson, Sage Erikson). For Gilmore,
the ‘disguise’ is controlled and owned by her sponsor, who will
in return will pay the costs of competing on the World Championship Tour (which is
estimated to be $40,000 a year) and more.
The Roxy Pro Biarritz promo is built from surfaces: skin in soft light with clothes
sliding over it, water glistening on it, blonde locks falling onto Steph Gilmore’s back. As
the camera documents each surface of her body, it replicates it and detaches it
from her with the purpose of making it saleable.
Alana Blanchard famously posed in a raunchy video with her boyfriend, Australian pro-surfer Jack Freestone for Stab Magazine.
On the cover of the magazine she is featured kneeling in a blow-up kiddie pool
wearing stilettos while he squirts a garden hose nonchalantly in her direction;
in the ‘short film’ that accompanies the shoot she is in the kitchen, nude,
with the exception of an apron; then she is in lingerie posing for Freestone who
is on the couch and still mysteriously nonchalant. Stab captions a still
of her in the film saying, “Ms Blanchard, the essence of beauty and
marketability.” To recall Berger, “the sight of it as an object stimulates the use
of it as an object.” Stab publishes intermittent ‘feminist’ articles
discussing the plight of female surfers, yet they are also publishing heinous
sexualised content – at a much faster frequency than their pro-women content.
Objectification of
women as a means of selling a
product is nothing new.
Where it poses an acute issue for surfing is that it uses professional surfers for selling the product. Though Blanchard
is currently ranked 195th in the World Surf League, she is sponsored by Rip Curl, Reef, SPY Optic, Sticky Bumps, GoPro, Rockstar, Channel Islands and Royal Hawaiian
Orchards and has a net worth of $2
million. Blanchard cops a lot of flak for her
sexualised persona, but it’s a cunning choice. In 2014 she was the highest paid
female surfer in the world despite her lack of competitive success. If I look
deep inside my grimy, weak, feminist soul don’t know if I would turn down a career
of getting paid to look great and surf.
There are many women
without sponsorship ranked significantly higher than Blanchard. Is she employed
as a model or a surfer? It’s a blurred line. In his Stab article titled ’The
Painful Truth of Silvana Lima’s Sponsorship Struggle’, Jed Smith talks to a “marketing heavyweight,
whose job it is to control the budget of one of the world’s biggest surf brands”
(who asked to remain anonymous to protect his job). The first thing to note is
the headline – if Smith was writing about a male surfer, would he use
the words ‘painful’ and ‘struggle’? These words are coded as feminine in this
context. The article could easily be framed instead as: ‘Lima Does Insane Aerial
Manoeuvres on the Reg; Why Isn’t She Sponsored?’ When broached with
the question of how they choose whom to sponsor, he replies, “I think it has a lot
more do with age and relevance to the young consumer than purely looks.” But let’s
unpack that statement. Surf brands are often targeted at teenagers or aim for a
teenage aesthetic, so who is relevant to this demographic? Hot. Girls. The
logic being: if you’re a girl you want to be them, and if you’re a guy you want
to root them (or vice versa).
Surf brands use pro surfers as a means of making their brand authentic. They aren’t merely a clothing brand, they don’t get
models, they get real surfers. Yet
this ignores how sexualising their female surfers challenges their authenticity
as athletes. When you see an advertisement featuring a shirtless male surfer
with a gorgeous toned torso mid-snap, his attractiveness doesn’t reduce his
skill as an athlete. This is not the case for women. In The Global Politics of Sport: The Role of
Global Institutions in Sport, Leanne Stedman
notes that audiences “simultaneously constructed and contested women and
non-white participants as ‘inauthentic’ or ‘Other’.“ She writes that, “while acknowledging that images of women in bikinis will always be
open to sexualised readings, windsurfers read images that pretended the subject
was ‘doing it’ as ‘in-authentic’.” To the public, women in bikinis are sexualised;
they are models. But what happens if you are a female pro surfer and you are
surfing in a warm location? You don’t wear a wetsuit, you wear a swimsuit
provided by your sponsor – and it’s often a bikini. What
happens when you use elite sportswomen as models? The line becomes blurred. To
the audience, the attractive female surfer is ‘pretending’, she is only there
because she looks good (which is obviously not true for all surfers on the
World Championship Tour). However, Alana Blanchard is one of the highest paid female surfers in the
world, and she got there because she looks good. It’s a self-fulfilling
prophecy that is a burden on women created by men.
There are
distinct differences in the way genders are marketed: men are brilliant athletes
(and if they are hot, bonus!), for women the message is she
is really hot, and she can surf. She becomes more desirable, not for her
skill as a surfer, but as a lifestyle accessory to make her personal brand more
valuable. This gendered system has its roots back in the eighteenth
century. During this period middle class women were becoming more widely
educated, however, this was limited to the realm of what Mary Wollstonecraft
called ‘accomplishments’: music, singing, drawing,
dancing and modern languages – skills that were often used to entertain but never intended for professional use. They were
accessories to add to a woman’s value as a potential wife, and this was a
period of time when marriage was namely an exchange of money and property. The
surfing industry isn’t in the business of wives but it is in the business of
money – the idea of Alana Blanchard being both the surfer and hot girlfriend
works similarly to an educated woman in the eighteenth century – it
increases her potential for monetary gain. The Blanchard brand says: she will
surf with the guys, she knows enough about surfing to be chill and she’s hot –
she is Gillian Flynn’s ‘cool girl’. And a
powerful marketing tool.
Female athletes are nearly always paid less than
men – this is nothing new. Australia’s female hockey players, cricketers, and Rugby
League players are all paid under the minimum wage. Female AFL players just got
a pay rise to a whopping $8,500 for two seasons – that could barely buy enough
coke to supply a footy boys’ weekend. No wonder Blanchard is willing to
capitalise on her looks. If I had to choose between a measly stipend and a real
wage I would take the Blanchard route. Sponsorship provides an important safety
net for surfers, if they suffer an injury or a losing streak, they can still
afford the cost of the tour. Or if being world champion isn’t a realistic goal,
it can just make them a shit-tonne of money. For those who don’t look like
Blanchard, there are fewer options. Former pro Rebecca Woods was dropped by
her sponsor Billabong in 2010 after slipping to tenth in the rankings. She says,
at twenty-six, I was
ninth in the world. They [Billabong] had three other women who were on the
World Tour. And my time was pretty much up. I did spend probably about $20,000
to $30,000 of my savings in the last two to three years that I was on tour. That was
really disheartening.
In 2014,
Blanchard was the highest paid female surfer in the world despite finishing dead
last in every event that year.
The surf industry creates a perpetual loop that
supports beauty and marketability over talent and achievement (which is not to
say the two can’t align, Stephanie Gilmore and Sally Fitzgibbons being examples). But this
means that many surfers who don’t fit a certain sexualised (white) aesthetic
are ignored, and those who aren’t ignored are not taken seriously because of
their image, which has been forced on them by the institution that dismisses
them. Women are locked out of the industry through a sexualized economy, and
Tim Winton’s narrow definitions of who a surfer can be lock women out of a
cultural narrative.
Sally Fitzgibbons, Lauren Camilleri and I at the 2004 Gromfest.
Young women early
in their career, often teenagers, are the ones that fall under this sexualised
gaze most frequently. At the age of nineteen Sally Fitzgibbons was featured in
a promo by her sponsor
Red Bull, and it’s shot like porn in a naughty-teen-gets-fucked kinda way. The
following year she featured in a spread for Stab, which bore the title ‘Sally Fitzgibbons is Crazy
Stupid Hot’. The interview is the
ultimate in hate-reads: he asks her about her cute accent, if she likes her tan
lines, and follows up with hard hitting questions like, “Is your stomach your
crowning glory, even though it’s not a crown? What things do you do to it?”
This is a woman who perforated her eardrum mid-heat at Fiji’s brutal Cloudbreak,
defied doctors’ orders, continued to surf and won!
The interviewer then asks her why she won’t drink alcohol, and encourages her
to do it, despite her explicitly telling him multiple times that she doesn’t
drink (she has training regime not made for us mortals). She is an athlete;
don’t get her to change her fucking diet. The interview seems like it’s written
by sleaziest guy in the dankest bar, well after 2am.
Laura Enever participated in a similar spread
for Stab, too; she was nineteen at the time, and it is particularly unsettling.
The headline reads, ‘She looked at me
with an absolute smirk on her pretty face’. She is naked in
the image below: the shadows that stretch over her body are the only thing
keeping it from being X-rated; the photo
screams ‘post-coitus’. The interview that follows is similarly patronising and worryingly
predatory. The interviewer asks, “were you specifically warned about the Stab shoot?
That we were devils? (Laughter detonates).”
Enever: I was! I was!
I heard from Alana (Blanchard) and Bruna (Schmitz) who you did the photo shoot
with last year. They told me how they were freaked out about how you, like,
tried to get them naked. I’d been warned a few times, but it’s fine, because
you guys are a men’s magazine and it’s an amazing magazine. At the shoot, I was
told my first couple of photos weren’t sexy enough and that I had to take some
clothes off, but it ended up being really cool.
When we hear rumours or accusations of men misusing
their power over younger women (usually in relation to film or photography) –
it’s not front and centre, the manipulations occur outside of the frame. One of
the most galling elements of this exchange is that it is published as entertaining
banter. Enever says that the shots came out fine, and that she wouldn’t have
let the photos run if she wasn’t happy with them. The young women are at the
beginning of their career and the older men are the gatekeepers of the surfing
industry. Stab exploit this power
dynamic for their own gain.
In the nineties, surfing
began catering to a male teen audience. Surfing grew even more hyper-masculine,
surf magazines started looking more like soft-core porn and today it’s not so
different – you can still by a kind of wax called ‘I heart boobies’. In the
1995 Ripcurl Pro, finalists Layne Beachley and Rochelle Ballard paddled out to battle for
the title. The bikini
contest started as they entered the water. Models in g-strings and high
heels began to strut up and down a makeshift runway and soon the majority of
the crowd stopped watching the surfing entirely. Some of the judges missed
scoring waves because they were leaning out of their tower to try to get a
better look at the bikini models. There has been a shift away from the classic
image of the female surfer as a cute pubescent girl or chick (think Blue Crush and Gidget). In the present day the
image of the female surfer is a strange amalgam of the women in the bikini
contest and Beachley and Ballard in the surf. Soft-core porn posing as surf
content is a staple of the culture.
Terry Richardson and American Apparel became famous in recent years for
their 1970s retro porn aesthetic, and surf culture has taken the same approach
in a bid to again regain its subversive highs. In her 1964 lecture, Susan
Sontag argued that “pornography partakes
of a necessary distance: the readers [or viewer] don’t enter into the internal
psychology or reality of the character… They are creatures of endless repition,
more machine than human.” When female surfers are sexualised they are stripped
of their character, psychology and achievements – just like Burger’s nudes they
become all surface, no interior. In a way, they do become machines: the
embodiment of male desire. Though the shoots in Stab are far from the kind of porn Sontag is talking about, the
aesthetic is there, and so is the effect. The interviewer’s refusal to engage
in any real conversation about Enever and Fitzgibbons’ careers and successes as
surfers is an example of the ‘distance’ that Sontag mentions. He doesn’t see
their interior lives or their present reality: he interviews the images from
the shoot, not the actual women in front of him.
Among others, Jonathan Fiske and Konstantin
Butz have referenced Roland Barthes’ Pleasure
of the Text as way of describing surfing. Barthes pits the readerly against the writerly. A readerly text does
not disturb the subjectivity of the reader, and conforms to traditional codes
and models of intelligibility, while writerly texts challenge convention,
literary codes and cultural positions. A readerly text is pleasurable, a
writerly text is blissful. The pleasurable text is a book you pick up at
the airport; the blissful text is literature. Fiske writes that “the wave is
that text of bliss to the surfie, escape from the signified, potential re-entry
into nature, constantly shifting, needing rereading for each loss of
subjectivity.” In contrast, the mundane rules of the beach are ‘readerly’ and
base. The blissful wave is erotic, free and sacred. The land is pornographic:
it is desire and pleasure institutionalised.
This theory bothers me and gets to the heart
of why I find Winton so frustrating. Tim Winton is by no means a misogynist,
but I’m not a girlfriend or a whore or a Madonna. I’m a mess and I surf and
sometimes it’s hard (made harder by the fact I’m a woman). But I don’t see that
story, I can’t see me anywhere. Both Winton and Fiske glide over the fact that
in the eyes of men, female surfers are always pornographic: we are part of the
social coding of the institution. When we are in the surf we carry the baggage
of the land, we are the bearers of meaning for men. Which is perhaps why many
feel it necessary to make the comment “imagine seeing her do that in a bikini,” or mutter between themselves “should we
give the girl a wave?” It’s a reminder that we are visitors – that we belong on
the beach, not in the waves. How can I find the ‘bliss’ or Winton’s profound
delight when I am constantly reminded of my subpar position in the power
structure? Winton’s career has benefited from a
mythologised image of the Australian surfer as a white bloke, and he continues
to perpetuate it. His stories ignore women, just as the surfing industry does.
I was never going to be a brilliant surfer, but
many of the women I once surfed against are. The same girls who paddled out to
a crappy beach break on the South Coast are now some of the best surfers in the
world. Where is that narrative? Writing this essay was difficult because
reliving the experience of existing a floating piece of ass is shitty to say
the least – but I wrote it. This essay isn’t
going to change the industrialised
sexism of the surf industry, but if nothing else, it’s a narrative –
one I wished I had when I was a girl.
Holly has been published in Cordite, Shabby Doll House and Voiceworks. She is the author of the chapbook Hip Shifts (If A Leaf Falls Press) and Deluxe Paperweight (Stale Objects dePress) . She can be found at http://hisemonger.tumblr.com and tweets @hisemonger .
Image copyright Lyndall Irons. Used with permission.
This essay is the fourth in a week-long series exploring women’s experiences in sporting culture.
It’s Valentine’s Day 2017. Chloe Logarzo and Jasmine Peters are celebrating their first anniversary and have joined me for a chat about their relationship over a cup of tea and under the flightpath in Sydney’s inner west.
Chloe is a footballer currently plying her trade in Norway. She’s a member of the Australian national team, the Matildas, and has recently returned from Rio an Olympian, Olympic ring tattoos and all.
Jasmine represents New South Wales in softball and has just started a stint in the national league in the Netherlands.
We’ve come together to talk about a relatively recent phenomenon I have noticed and of which they are a part – elite sportswomen are opening up about being in same-sex relationships.
For some, you need to read between the lines, or pick up on subtle and not-so-subtle cues they’re putting out there. For others, like these two, there is no ambiguity.
Unless you’re a hardcore women’s sports fan, you may not know about this, because these stories are not unfolding in the mainstream media: it’s all happening on Instagram.
Something you may well have noticed, however, is that the issue of homophobia in sport is gaining more traction. Rightly so, but a lot of the conversation so far is focused on male athletes and the desire, particularity within the queer community, to see them come out. While these are important conversations to be having, it ignores the experiences of female athletes, which are often completely different, more complicated and come with their own set of challenges. (There’s the lack of media coverage, the sexualisation of elite sportswomen, the massive pay gap – and aren’t all women who play sport lesbians anyway?)
If the goal of these conversations is a world where nobody cares about athletes’ or anyone’s sexuality, it could be argued with women’s sport, we’re already there. Almost.
CHLOE: There are still a few people scared that it is going to tarnish their image but for me, if it was going to tarnish my image then it’s not the image I want because I’m not telling the truth.
But let’s step back and take a look at coming out. What is ‘coming out’?
Well, it depends on who you ask. And the situation. I spoke to Dr. Kim Toffoletti, Senior Lecturer In Sociology from Deakin University, who tells me “coming out is the process of one claiming and identifying publicly” one’s sexuality.
KIM: Social media has the potential to make lesbian athletes more visible and that is slightly different I think to the actual process of coming out.
The academic research on how queer, lesbian or just not-straight identified female athletes represent themselves on social media is sparse. Kim is one academic now looking into it. She tells me that the current model—where coming out requires a public media statement—is in need of a reassessment.
I tend to agree.
JASMINE: I read a story about Michelle Heyman being the only gay member of the Australian team at the Olympics…
CHLOE: I was like ‘what about me?’! I laughed.
Chloe considers herself to be out but by our current working definition, she is not. Well, once this article is published, she will be! Confused?
Incidentally, in 2014 when I asked Michelle Heyman why she hasn’t come out, her reply was: “I am out and proud”. And it was my asking her and publishing that conversation, that made her ‘officially’ out.
So there’s a gap. But should we, the media, make assumptions about an athlete’s sexuality without their express permission? Hell no.
CHLOE: I always refer to Jasmine as my girlfriend; I never say I don’t have a girlfriend. But it’s never really been something I’ve sat down and talked about.
Do we need to change the definition of what coming out is? Or what it looks like? Probably not. Working in the media, I would never ‘out’ someone. That means not talking about their sexuality unless they have already done so in previous published interviews or have given me express permission to do so.
This is the same standard that most in the media work to as well, but is it leading us to a place where the media are afraid to ask? Or is it just a ‘non-story’ that, yes, lesbians play sport? Or are our women just not getting enough media coverage? All of the above? Is being a lesbian, bisexual or queer woman in sport still the elephant in the room? With a press so nosy about all sorts of ‘sordid’ details, it seems odd that this one is not on the table. Or am I the only one asking these questions because I’m a lesbian myself?
Only an athlete can claim their sexuality; it’s not for me to infer it from their Instagram account. But I’ll always ask.
While the media tries to figure that all out, in the meantime, athletes are on Instagram being visible and in total control.
KIM: So in fact what we’re seeing is lesbian athletes in all facets of their life and we’re not waiting for the mainstream media to present them in a particular way.
Couple this with an increasing desire from a younger generation to to not to be labelled at all rather than be out, and what you have is people living their lives and being visible without expressly talking about it. It’s a non-story to them.
CHLOE: I don’t think it’s necessary [to make an ‘announcement’] because it shouldn’t be a big thing.
By using social media in this way, athletes are curating their own coming out process in a way that better mirrors everyday life and the continuing process of defining yourself and your sexuality. There’s more of a fluidity and ease to it than say, Ian Thorpe’s obviously painful and laborious coming-out, complete with prime-time television interview. Props to Thorpie, but who wants to go through all that?
There’s a sense that today people think of their identities as more than just their sexuality. For a lot of sportswomen, being an athlete is what is front and centre – more than being lesbian, and even more than being a woman. How many times have women in sport had to ask the public to focus only on their athletic achievements?
On top of this, publicly claiming a sexual identity of the LGBQ variety1 is still a very political thing to do and it’s tough enough for women in sport as it is, without adding extra complications to navigating what is still, at times, a hostile environment.
For Chloe and Jasmine, it was never a question of whether or not they were going to post images showing they’re in a relationship. They don’t consider posting as any kind of announcement. It’s just their life.
Whether to post about her relationship or not was never in question. What concerns Chloe more is being seen as a good role model and following rules set down by the her sports’ governing body, the Football Federation of Australia, like not criticising referees. And sticking to her own set of rules like not posting photos of drinking alcohol.
But that doesn’t mean she didn’t think long and hard about the consequences of being so obviously in a same-sex relationship.
JASMINE: I’m a little bit more expressive with our relationship I think. Chloe’s [Instagram] is very sport-dominated.
CHLOE: I’m more reserved with what I post. I’m not hiding our relationship but I know there’s a lot of young females looking up to me so I have to control it a little bit more. But I’m obviously not going to hide my relationship. I’m not ashamed of it in any way.
I’m in a relationship with a girl and that’s my image – and being in sport.
I always have it the back of my mind that I’ve got little twelve-year-olds following me. I went to an appearance and they were all in year six and below and they wanted to follow me on Instagram. One of the questions was, ‘Do you have a boyfriend?’ ‘No, I don’t have a boyfriend,’ and I left it. I don’t want to tell them but they can find out. It’s always in the back of my mind, but at the end of the day, you can unfollow me if you don’t want to see it.
I’ve had young girls comment on my Insta saying that we’re cute and my girlfriend and relationship is really cute but that is just as far as it goes.
JASMINE: I’m open on my Instagram account. If people follow us they’re going to know that Chloe’s my girlfriend. It doesn’t matter to me. I wish the world saw it as they do every couple. I don’t think it should be a matter of ‘They’re a gay couple,’ or ‘They’re a straight couple’. It should just be ‘They’re a couple’.
I don’t put on my Insta that I’m a lesbian or have to put a little rainbow just to make sure people know.
I think about what I’m posting to a degree. I’m not going to upload inappropriate things. I don’t really ever care about what I’m posting. You’ve gotta be careful because we’re in sport and there’s little kids that look at it. Not that I think that they would be weirded out by it. I’m hoping for the next generation that comes through that it’s just completely normal. But obviously in a sporting environment, especially with Chloe and her sport, it has a lot more media exposure, we worry about that stuff maybe a little bit. We’re not silly to post inappropriate stuff anyway.
CHLOE: Everyone has access to phones and the internet. It’s all over the internet now. Back in the day you were probably sheltered from it. Now I can go on Insta, I’m following a few gay people, I can look on my search bar and all these famous gay people come up on my insta without me looking for it.
Social media gives female athletes a choice. They don’t have to make a big coming out statement, they can just be themselves on social media, be public about who they’re in a relationship with and deal with questions from the media if and when the time comes.
CHLOE: If the media asked me, I’d be open to talking about it. If someone asked me, I would say I’m gay.
We still need to recognise that social media has created just another set of challenges that women in sport have to manage and steer through, and they often have to do this on their own.
Chloe and Jasmine have acknowledged their identities and their relationship without making it political, and in doing so they have maintained a level of control and comfort over what they chose to share.
However, the personal is still political, whether they intend it or not, and they’re doing their part to normalise queer visibility on their terms.
Scholarship on social media says that what you’re selling is community, connection and intimacy – so if an athlete can’t share themselves, what’s the purpose of social media to them, really?
CHLOE: I feel like it [LGBQ sexuality/identity] is more accepted now throughout the world. It’s more socially accepted but people are still shy about it. For me, I have a girlfriend and I don’t care who knows, because if I cared what people knew I would not be in the relationship.
The majority of female athletes don’t have a public relations or media team behind them, they’re doing this all themselves. Social media has become the most important tool in their arsenal, and they’re too busy getting on with playing their sport to be anything but authentic.
Danielle Warby is an advocate for #WomenInSport and has been working to promote women’s sport since 2006. She tweets @daniellewarby and is the former managing editor of SBS Zela.
1. Trans and intersex (the ’T’ and ‘I’ in LGBTIQ) athletes also face a range of issues in performing their public identities through social and traditional media. These issues are complex in and of themselves and, as such, are beyond the scope of this article.↩
This essay is the third in a week-long series of commentary pieces that explore women’s experience in sporting culture.
It’s 1am and I’m in bed. The lights are low. I’m watching
the rhythmic motion of his legs, the sweat on his neck, as he glances across to
the guy beside him. My hair is a mess, pulled into a frizz by tense fingers. My
heart jumps. Are they going to go for it? Is this the moment I’ve been waiting
for?
I’m watching professional cycling. Alone. Trying not to make
too much noise as my housemates sleep. The riders crest my favourite climb,
l’Alpe d’Huez. I make a note of who won points at the summit before the
coverage switches to an ad break.
A lot of people dread winter, but for me, it can’t come soon
enough. Cycling season. There’s the Giro
d’Italia in May, the Tour de France
in July, and the Vuelta a España in
August. My holy trinity, broadcast live by SBS almost every night, 10pm until
2am. For most of the season, cycling takes over my life.
As a kid, watching cycling was an incidental pastime. The
blur of lush French scenery and historic ruins, peppered by ads for family cars
and trips to Thredbo, was synonymous with sitting around the fire with my
family and my dog. Cycling meant hot chocolate and staying up past bedtime. My
favourite part was seeing the riders finish a climb and stuff newspaper down
the front of their vests to protect themselves from the icy wind on the
descent.
Then, one year, as if by osmosis, I realised I knew all the
riders’ faces and names, their teams and stats, the history of the course, the
different types of wheels and handlebars, the tactics. Cycling had transformed
from an excuse to stay up into an obsession.
It’s a little different these days. I don’t have a TV, so I
live stream the SBS coverage in bed, too many tabs open on my laptop, phone in
hand, furiously crunching numbers – kilometres raced, kilometres to go, wind speed,
altitude, incline, sprint points, mountain points, team budgets, abandons. All
this while stuffing my face with snacks and keeping up with the endless tweets
about the commentary, the cows, the idiot tifosi,
and the terrible ads for caffeine shampoo and multivitamins – before finally
passing out, delirious, as they reach the podium. This is my ritual for weeks
on end.
This is the evolution of a dedicated, life-long fan. I
mention this because what I want to write about took me years to notice. I
mention this also because, like many women, I’ve been taught to feel
preemptively defensive about proving my credentials and my enthusiasm for a
male-dominated field. I love cycling. So I want to state upfront that no matter
the doubts I have about the sport, I can’t imagine a future where I am no
longer an avid fan.
As an adult, it’s hard to consume anything uncritically,
even something as maglia rosa-tinted
as the fanfare of cycling. As my appreciation of the sport has matured, I’ve
noticed a growing divide between the way cycling is organised and broadcast,
and the message that the sport itself is championing. I have some theories on
why this divide has emerged, and they all start with Lance.
I think it’s fair to say that Lance Armstrong is the most
famous living cyclist. Perhaps the most famous cyclist ever. (Has any other
cyclist been on Oprah?) Beating cancer and going on to tremendous success in
one of the toughest endurance sports out there is a feel-good story for the
ages. I’d say cycling owes at least a little of its popularity, especially in
the United States, to Lance. He certainly had a hand in hooking me in and I
remember his races vividly.
About five years ago, he was stripped of his seven
consecutive Tour de France titles
after a malicious and public doping scandal. I was heartbroken. The
after-effects included drawn out and damning lawsuits, a total restructuring of
the International Cycling Union (Union Cycliste Internationale, UCI), and the collapse of professional
cycling’s respectability worldwide. For a sport already built on
gatekeeping—are you rich enough to afford the gear? Well-connected enough to
get sponsorship? Male enough to be allowed to participate?—it felt harder than
ever to be a fan. It threw a lot of ugly aspects of the sport into sharp
relief.
But it wasn’t about the doping, not really, not as much as
everyone claimed. Lots of the greats cheated—Eddy Merckx, Alberto Contador,
Stuart O’Grady—and commentators still shout their praise every chance they get.
Doping and cycling go hand in hand. It’s an open secret. So why was everyone so
angry?
What the Lance fiasco came down to, and why it was so protracted,
was the attempted recovery of federal funding that had been poured into his
career and his team. If Lance was getting sued by the government, then everyone who had
invested in him felt entitled to their money back.
This was when I started watching alone. The whole thing felt
vicious and cheap. Every time I tried to make cycling-based friendships, I
found myself returning, relieved, to my quiet bed, my gender-neutral online
handle, and the ‘mute’ function on Twitter.
The internet, of course, offers its own version of this
money-grabbing mentality. Most meme-pages devoted to the cycling community
repeat the same ‘joke’ in various formats: Your
wife just found out you secretly spent a lot of money on bike gear and now she
is mad, hahaha! Hilarious. Never mind the assumption that the viewer is
male. Never mind the deeply unsettling implications of this boys’ club attitude.
It’s all for a laugh. We’ve all been
there, right, fellas?
It seems zero-accountability within this community is
contagious – from the government recouping their ‘wasted’ investment, to the
riders refusing to speak out against each other, down to the fans themselves.
These deeply gendered ‘jokes’ are symptomatic of the entitled attitude Lance’s
trial ushered to the front of cycling.
The thing is, this selfish attitude is directly in violation of the positive values that cycling,
particularly road racing, supports. In case you’re unfamiliar with the
structure of the sport, I’ll give you a quick run-down of the values I’m talking
about.
Cycling isn’t quite like any other sport I know. It’s a team
sport, but there is only one overall winner. On top of this, several other
competitions are happen concurrently within each race. Different coloured
jerseys are awarded each day to the leaders of each category (yellow for the
overall leader, green for best sprinter, polka-dot for best climber), and the
person holding the jersey at the end of the tour wins that title. Some
competitions are determined by points, some by time. It is, on the surface at
least, a very complex sport, and what happens in one category impacts the
outcome of the others.
Kind of like… well… life.
What’s happening in one sphere invariably influences the spheres around it,
because we’re all just sharing the road we call ‘society’. Sure we might be on
different teams – but we’re all in this struggle together, for better or worse.
Each team has a leader. Their best rider. The one they are
all working for, sacrificing themselves for. But it’s impossible for a single rider to win without a dedicated team. Some
riders change teams every other season as coaches search for that perfect
combination. Sure, there’s a team hierarchy, but it’s flexible and changes
depending on which riders suit the terrain. It even changes mid-stage if the
weather turns, if there’s a mechanical failure, or if a particular rider is
feeling strong. But it’s never every
man for himself. Never.
There’s a fluidity to cycling’s conception of identity. It’s
not just in the way the riders swarm like fish, but in the astonishing
symbiosis of individual agency and team loyalty. Cycling shows us that a more
complex approach to identity is possible. It strikes me that cycling offers a
way through an impasse that feminism has pushed against for a long time. A
person can be both an individual and a member of a team.
There are so many chances for victory when there are so many ways to
measure success. Everyone is in
the race. Money doesn’t seem so important when you think about it like this.
This complexity, this multiplicity, this culture of absolute trust for the
peloton, and absolute sacrifice for your team is why I love cycling.
But, it’s this very same attitude of
indefatigable allegiance that saw Lance get away with cheating for so long.
This sense of impenetrable community that sticks up for its own no matter what,
but doesn’t let anyone else in. Tight-knit and tight-lipped.
There is an amazing clip of Lance, mid-stage, immediately after he has spoken with a fellow rider who
publicly accused him of doping. Lance turns to the camera, he looks right down
the barrel to everyone sitting at home, and mimes zipping his lips shut. This is between the riders, his action
says. You’re not in this race. Stay out
of it. It’s a warning.
It was one of the first signs I had of the culture of
silence around cycling. At once a symbol of deep camaraderie, and a dangerous
way to cover up wrongdoing.
On one hand, there seems to be an admirable cycling-wide
predisposition towards a kind of anti-hierarchical leaderlessness. But on the
other, there’s a complete refusal to take responsibility. If no one is seen to
be definitively ‘in charge’, then no one is to blame when the shit hits the
fan. That’s how it is on the road, and that’s how it is in the boardroom. What
I love most about this sport seems, ironically, to operate in service of what
I’ve come to hate about it.
Cycling has a doping problem, no one would argue with that.
But it also has a money problem. And, as with most things relating to money,
this has a disproportional impact on women. Let me break down how funding works
in cycling. And when I say funding, I mean advertising, because the sport is
nearly all run on the back of lucrative sponsorships. Every imaginable surface
is branded. Every dollar and cent is earned through the chance of screen time.
Companies need a return on their investment, so if Lance is banned from
cycling, well, that’s money wasted.
These companies are not nurturing talent. They’re nurturing
profit. The faster you ride, the more screen time you get. More screen time
means more time for your branded jersey, your branded bike, your branded soft
drink. The more money your team makes. The more training you get. The faster
you go next year. The more screen time you get. See any problems with this
model?
When I watch cycling now all I see is money and its absurdly
uneven distribution. While the exact figures for team budgets are kept a
tantalising secret, recent estimates put team Sky’s budget around the €35,000,000
mark, almost AU$49,000,000. The smallest team’s budget is a measly €3,500,000, less than
AU$5,000,000. Yes, this covers equipment, registration, training, and everyone’s
salaries, including the riders’ (the prize money is pitiful) – but the
difference is a factor of ten. These same figures have then been compared to
the UCI records to determine if there is any correlation between funding and
race-wins. Unsurprisingly, the answer is a resounding yes.
This is for the men’s teams.
For women’s cycling, estimates from 2013 put the total budget of a high-performing
team of twelve at under €500,000, around AU$600,000. That’s much less than the
annual salary of one male rider and, of course, a surprise to no one. For a
sport with no salary caps, discrepancies are to be expected. But to this
extent? And so clearly undervaluing female athletes?
Just like in life, some people have tremendous advantages.
Bigger budgets can buy better equipment, better training programs, and better
cyclists. These advantages stack, and the men’s success is read as natural,
innate. It’s taken as evidence that men are, simply, better cyclists.
Disadvantages stack, too. Channel Nine, who have long held the exclusive rights to
the Tour Down Under, didn’t even
broadcast the women’s race this year, immediately deterring large sponsorships.
This is structural inequality at its finest.
Even at the amateur level, these same patterns emerge. I
have a friend who does the books for a small company that imports cycling parts
to Australia. The company sponsors young riders, male and female, for national
races where they hope to get noticed for bigger teams. You can’t be competitive
without the right gear. And there’s just so
much gear. Not only is cycling an equipment-heavy sport; that equipment is
exceedingly expensive. This means it’s next to impossible to compete without
adequate sponsorship.
Add to this that a rider can’t just borrow their friend’s
bike. Your bike is an extension of your body. It would be like a basketball
player wearing their teammate’s shoes – or, more accurately, a basketball player
borrowing their teammate’s legs. Unwieldy. Erratic. Horrible to play on, and
even more horrible to watch.
We had a glimpse of just about the worst-case scenario
during the 2016 Tour when Christopher
Froome, the race leader, crashed on one of the steepest climbs of the race,
damaging his bike. His only options were to wait for his team car to navigate
the swarming crowd, or to use a generic bike carried by nearby race officials
for emergencies like this. He went with the latter. It was hilarious, then
horrifying. The bike was too small, the pedals incompatible with his shoes.
After a few rotations,Froome decided to run up the hill rather than
ride a bike that did not fit him. It very nearly got him disqualified.
Crashes happen often, so each rider needs a specially-fitted
bike in duplicate. With at least three spare wheels for punctures. And
different wheels for mountains. And for windy days. And for rain. And don’t
forget the time-trial bike. The cost blows out at an alarming rate.
This same friend revealed to me recently that they always
get a return on investment when they sponsor male amateur riders. But no matter
how many women they sponsor, a return is never guaranteed. Practically
speaking, the companies that sponsor women’s races tend to be smaller: their
demographic is smaller, the investment is smaller, and so the margin for profit
is smaller.
I’m not an economist, or a sociologist. But I can spot some
glaringly obvious reasons as to why this might be happening.
Image by Gawain78. Reproduced from the public domain.
Cycling has a money problem. And I don’t mean this
exclusively in the sense that women are being paid absurdly low amounts for
doing the same job as their male counterparts; I mean that, in cycling, you need money to be successful. That
women’s racing is undervalued isn’t just unfortunate, it’s suffocating.
Last year, at the age of twenty-six, British track cyclist Jess
Varnish was told by her coach that she was too old to be competing and that she
should “go have a baby” instead. Despite being a
member of the world-record holding sprint team. Despite the typical age of
retirement for male cyclists being well into their late thirties. Varnish sued,
pointing out that men’s teams have access to more resources, more training, and
better gear.
Her treatment underscores the vile misogyny of an industry
that brags about sponsoring women, but never reveals it’s only giving them a
fraction of what the men are given. That champions women athletes when they are
winning, but cuts their funding when they are not. That loves women – but only
for show, only when it suits.
Off the course, cycling continues to use women only as
decoration, placing them next to the podium and having them kiss each winner on
the cheek while handing him his prize. In a strange ritualistic way, their kiss
has become part of that prize. The winner then shakes up his magnum champagne
bottle and sprays the crowd from crotch-level. It’s distinctly ejaculatory. Or
like a dog peeing to claim its territory.
The new generation of SBS commentators have, increasingly
and passionately, tried to distance themselves from the sexist camera work that
the native French, Italian, and Spanish broadcasting networks supply to
international channels, which too often lingers on the breasts of spectators.
Their efforts are undercut by the ads for life insurance, hair loss, or
ludicrously expensive cars in which women only feature as housewives, sexy
neighbours, or strung-out mums next to their ex-athlete husbands. This is the
way the world sees women in relation to international, professional sport: as a
trope, a body, a prize.
At every turn, the structure of professional cycling, including
its coverage both nationally and internationally, says to women, This is not for you. So why do I still
love it? If I hate so much of it, why can’t I stop obsessing over it –
literally planning my sleeping, eating, and social schedules around it for months
at a time?
Recently, a new feature has been added to the coverage. It’s
a cynical kind of salve to the sexist camera work I’m used to. Little more than
a GoPro affixed to the front of select riders’ bikes with the intent to give
audiences around the world a first-person taste of what it’s like to scream
around corners on a descent, it’s become more valued by fans for an incidental
aspect. Twitter has fondly dubbed this angle “butt
cam”. With riders moving in such a tight bunch for most of the race,
shoulder-to-shoulder, wheel-to-wheel, camera-to-butt, we’re getting a close-up
view of much more than the scenery.
For me, this feature sums up the indulgence of watching an
endurance sport from bed. You’ll never catch me standing road-side for hours
waiting for a glimpse of the peloton. I’m a spectator, and that means I want to
see it all. From the helicopter, from
the moto, and from the GoPro. As
someone who can’t ride, I want to feel in
the race (sorry, Lance). I do feel in
the race. That’s why I stick around. That’s why I’m invested.
I wonder what will happen when the women’s races get equal
television coverage. Will they get this special close up too? Will they want
it? Will it mean the same thing? Will the athletes be treated like podium
girls? Will the podium girls survive that long? These are complex issue still
on the horizon.
In addition, the fan demographic is changing. Cycling has
never had much ‘celebrity’ culture (Lance’s generation missed the social media
wave), but younger riders, particularly Peter
Sagan, are making full use of their good looks and bringing young
woman to the sport in numbers previously unseen. Given this, I wonder how much
longer this overt exclusion of certain fans can last. While I’m more of a Marcel
Kittel girl myself, Sagan’s charm and talent are undeniable. It’s
hard to ignore someone with flowing hair who routinely pops a wheelie while climbing
or crossing the finish line. The sexualisation of athletes is
a complex issue, but for the camera to acknowledge a
female audience (albeit a heterosexual one) every now and then – well, that’s something.
I loved watching Lance. He made cycling thrilling. No one
today climbs like he did. No one could
climb like Lance now without being accused of cheating. He galvanised my love
for this sport, but he also revealed it to be a sport of finger-pointing,
blame-shifting and dodging accountability. And fine, whatever. If you shift the
blame enough times, it goes away, right? I still get to watch the boys go fast.
Who cares if they cut the broadcast before the girls’ race? Who cares if the
richest teams always win? I still get to stay up late and have a hot chocolate.
Except, it’s not fine. The collective attitude I grew up
admiring is the same attitude that has allowed inequality to become deeply
embedded in the way this sport is run. It protected Lance for seven years, and
now it’s protecting the coaches, the TV executives, even the fans. It’s the
same twisted mentality of zero-accountability that says to the riders, It’s okay to cheat, because everyone else is
cheating too, that then says to the cycling community, It’s okay to be sexist, because—look!—everyone else is sexist too.
Watching cycling has shaped who I am and how I think about
identity. I have exercised a tremendous amount of will power over the years to
turn a blind eye to its many shortcomings. But turning a blind eye is exactly
the problem. It’s no longer stoic to ignore what is happening. It’s time to
pull back the covers and confront the extent of inequality in cycling – from
the top to the butt.
Emma Jenkins is a PhD candidate and television enthusiast from Sydney.
This essay is the second in a week-long series of commentary pieces that explore women’s experience in sporting culture.
The English Opening
Writing this down for the first time, it feels like a middle
class origin story. I’m five years old, sitting in the ‘library’ of my parents’
home. It’s not a large room; books overflow from the shelves. Mum sits across
from me, showing how the pieces move. A knight gallops in an L-shape; one,
two, turn-the-corner. This is not something she had expected to show her child
– the chess set in the corner of the room is ornamental but the glimmering
brass pieces on the leather board have caught my attention, and I’m fixated.
Over the next two years, I play mum
regularly. I begin to beat her. Then, it’s dad’s turn. He taught mum over the
same board I learnt on, one night soon after they were married. I would be born
in seven years. He’s a more cautious player than mum, he protects his pieces while
she jettisons them forward on a whim. Much quicker now, I begin beating dad
too. By this time, I was in year two and had joined the school chess club. I
was the only girl in early education who could play and a ‘big girl’ would
accompany me to the computer room every Friday. I was amazed by the mounds of
pieces, the sound of them crashing as girls emptied them hurriedly from plastic
boxes. I’d never had so many people to play, so many moves to make. It was
endless.
Emotional labour has been in the academic sphere for over
thirty years, since Arlie Hochschild coined the term in her book, The Managed Heart. But in the public’s
narrative of feminism, emotional labour has burst forth only recently as a tool
to help women understand their homes and workplaces.
In her 2015 essay
for The Guardian, Rose Hackman writes of the trap of ‘lean in’ feminism and how
pervasive emotional labour can be:
We listen to
our partner’s woes, forgive them the absences, the forgetfulness, the one-track
mindedness while we’re busy organizing a playdate for the kids. We applaud
success when it comes: the grant that was received, the promotion. It was their
doing, and ours in the background. Besides, if we work hard enough, we can
succeed too: all we need to do is learn to lean in.
In chess, too, emotional labour is king. The community is
firmly divided by gender, the few women in the room are paid particular notice
just for their presence. Last year, a man in his twenties challenged me to a
game after seeing a chess lecture at the Modbury Chess Club. I accepted his
offer and minutes after the opening unravelled, he told me that he wanted to
play because he believed I had beaten him as a child. Being blonde, a woman and
in the South Australian chess community was enough, in his eyes, to identify me
despite it being fifteen years later.
When I think of the chess
community, I don’t think of the worn out South Australian Chess Centre of my
childhood with cracks in the windows running like veins, but rather Diana
Labiris’ comments at the 2014 Violence Prevention Conference. Clementine Ford paraphrased
her, writing,
Consider White Ribbon Day events. How many men would
be donning their little white ribbons and speaking as leaders in the prevention
of violence movement while the logistics—the tea, the food, the planning, the
clean-up—were all being taken care of by women?
Women in the chess community often take on roles of planning and
volunteer work, spending emotional labour on tournaments for their children,
partners or sometimes, but more rarely, themselves. Going to chess tournaments throughout
Australia as a child, our team would go with the chess coach (a man), the chess
volunteer school coordinator (a woman) and our parents. Over the two or so
times we flew interstate, it was always a small group of mothers who
accompanied us. Mum came every time and not for lack of personal commitments –
she’s a full-time academic and lecturer.
I used to play in a weekly tournament every Tuesday night. My team was
the ‘Trojan Knights’ and my partner and I keenly awaited our games each week.
He was the captain and would send inspirational emails, full of humour and
advice, every Tuesday morning. Our friend, Steve, would bring dark chocolate
and we would break off meaty pieces as we went over our games to search for
improvements. Often, we would stay until it was midnight and the centre was
closing. As we walked slowly down the concrete steps after a long night of
chess, we were met with the dark thick night air of summer.
Before I write about the gender breakdown of the chess
community, I want to make it clear: these are happy memories. I would sit at
the chess centre for five hours of a Tuesday evening and the anxieties that
constantly circled through my head would fade away as I looked over the
checkered board.
Despite my love of tournaments, the fact still remains
that in a room of forty people there are
perhaps three women. One of them was the woman who is at the canteen. We’d talk
of our families, and of course, chess. She works at a newspaper factory, and at
the Chess Centre she makes coffee for players and sells bags of crisps. She is
too busy to play during tournament time.
Of course, with sports like
chess, emotional labour is performed by both men and women. This has to be true
when men outnumber women to such an extent. When considering high-level play,
one percent of Grandmasters are women. At tournaments, women account for less
than five percent of players. So of course I see men volunteering their time
and skill to the chess community, but I am still discomforted by the fact I see
women putting forward more than their share into a community that doesn’t
support them as much as it should.
The Fried Liver
Playing chess in primary school, I don’t remember many of my
games. I remember going interstate to play in national tournaments and I keenly
remember being at Mt Buller in Spring. Running down the ski slopes with no snow,
sun shining, long grass scratching at my legs underneath my white school socks.
The catering was always notoriously bad so after the afternoon round, we would
crowd around the board eating chocolate teddy biscuits from the ski shop to go
through the moves with our coach.
The next
year we stayed at a boarding school in Canberra. It was the first time I saw a
urinal and we found a picture of a busty woman in a bikini, torn out from Zoo
Magazine, in one of the bedside drawers. We thought it was funny, my teammates
and I, how this world of chess was so different from the all-girls school we
knew.
When we
came home from the tournaments, we were awarded little brass badges to pin onto
our school jumpers. They were presented at the Friday morning assembly, after
the other sports. I remember it always felt like an afterthought, not something
prestigious like lacrosse or tennis. The teachers would smile half-heartedly
and I once heard a classmate call us freaks. But I still liked chess, and having
our own room to practice in at lunchtime felt special. It was private, quiet
but alive, and away from the repetitive rounds of handball that occupied us
most lunchtimes.
At the ‘Evelyn’ tournament I took part in in 2015, I saw
more women and girls than I had ever seen before milling about at the centre. My
buzz was only dimmed by every arbiter, coach and support person being male. The
attendance numbers were equal in gender, despite only women and girls playing. When
we gathered at the beginning of the five-day tournament to discuss protocol,
the arbiters mentioned how they wouldn’t have to struggle to read the game
notation because women’s handwriting is always neat.
But picking up on all these
instances of discomfort at gender norms is a long and arduous road to go down. This
is my life, not a list.
The Lawn Mower
I stopped playing in high school. I was bored of spending my
Friday nights at the Chess Centre; I decided to focus on my studies each
weekend and spend my Friday nights wandering around in Rundle Mall with my
friends. About five years go by until I meet the person I will spend my life
with. On a Sunday morning one day, spreading a blanket out on the concrete garden
of his unit, we play together with an old set. It’s from my childhood; the
pieces are Simpsons characters. Homer the King, Marge the Queen and Maggie,
sucking on her dummy, is the pawns.
Both of us are terrible. We lose pieces frivolously and
forget whether Lisa is supposed to be a knight or bishop. But we keep playing.
I buy a new board on a trip to San Francisco and we begin to play whenever we
can, filling the quiet moments in bars, at gigs, and in parks.
When we talk about emotional labour, it’s often referring to
our immediate community. Our workplaces, our homes. Yet when I look at the
small, but global, chess community, I see that the gendering of chess and
volunteer time has had global ramifications. Considering the big names in chess,
previous World Champions and rising young stars, there is a friction between how
women and men use their time.
Susan Polgár, Grandmaster and chess advocate, has
established a non-profit that supports young girls and boys learning to play
chess. With a particular focus on young women and girls, it encourages chess as
a regular fixture in children’s lives. Susan’s sister Judit, known widely as
the most successful woman chess player in history, has also created a
foundation that sponsors research and innovation in incorporating chess into
the educational realm.
This is not to say that male
chess players have not engaged in chess or charity in as enthusiastic a way. Garry
Kasparov has founded his own foundation and has spent the years after being the
World Chess Champion as a human rights activist and one of Vladimir Putin’s
greatest critics. Previous World Champion Vishy Anand opened his own home in
2015 to feed and house people in the slums who were effected by floods in
Chennai, India. Rather, I want to show that women pursue educating children,
both girls and boys, about chess and extolling its benefits to the world at the
same rate as men despite their participation in the sport being a nineteenth of
what male participation is.
And when we look at the current World Champion,
Magnus Carlsen, we see he has chosen to build interest in chess through more
commercial ventures. He offers branded chess boards and in-app purchases for
‘Play Magnus’, an app where the user can play Magnus at any age. He is a model
for G-Star Raw. When you Google Magnus, one of the first searches you will see
is “Magnus Carlsen net worth”.
Magnus is the perfect lens through
which to view the chess community. A 26-year-old, now-wealthy man plays king. He
is idolised and as such, has become a complicit part of the gendering of chess
whether intentional or not.
He is the enigmatic male
genius, as Bobby Fischer was. Actively profiting from his genius seems only
natural, while women not only donate their emotional labour to the game, but struggle
to receive sponsorship for their own tournaments.
The Windmill
Little ones come into my classroom. I teach them how the
pieces move and they pick it up quicker than I imagine. We’re soon onto piece
development and endgame strategy. I have my favourites. Don’t all teachers? One
little girl is five and she loves to win; she doesn’t cry when she loses like
the older kids. She gets angry, fiery. Her moves are bold, if not always sound.
Her older sister doesn’t play as well; she would rather take her time promoting
all of her pawns into queens than find the checkmate. But her heart is still full
of the game. She brings snacks to share with her teammates.
My first chess
class has six girls and one boy. No-one is older than eight, so most of the
time is spent reassuring them that it’s all just a game. “We win some, we lose
some.” This is my way of begging them not to cry. Once a little boy sobbed on
my shoulder so hard that he couldn’t speak, my white shirt soaked grey with
tears. I learn to bring lollies in case someone loses two or three games in a
row.
One day we
learn about the history of chess. The kids ask me who the World Chess Champion
is. I tell them its Magnus Carlsen from Norway. Is Magnus a boy’s name? Yes, I
reply and the little boy in my room smiles and puts his fist in the air. The
girls frown, perturbed it’s not a girl in the coveted spot. I don’t tell them
that a woman hasn’t come close to being number one, or that no women have ever
played in the World Chess Championship. Instead, I try to live in their world,
where girls are king.
The longer I pay attention to the main players of the chess
world, the more I see how women use their platform to counteract the damaging things
the men around them have been spouting for so long. Bobby Fischer’s comments about women made in 1962 are
well known: “They’re all weak, all women. They’re stupid compared to men. They
shouldn’t play chess, you know. They’re like beginners. They lose every single
game against a man.” Unlike Fischer, many male chess players don’t go so far to
challenge a woman’s overall intelligence but prefer to critique the loftier but
still insidious idea of ‘instinct’. Contemporary English Grandmaster, Nigel
Short, has said that women and men are “hard-wired very differently” and this
shows on the board.
Why should they function in the same way? I don’t have the slightest problem
in acknowledging that my wife possesses a much higher degree of emotional
intelligence than I do. Likewise, she doesn’t feel embarrassed in asking me to
manoeuvre the car out of our narrow garage.
Kasparov, former World Chess Champion,
too has commented on “imperfections of the feminine psyche” and a lack of their
“killer instinct.”
These ideas ensnare the
chess world mostly, I think, because many men use the low rate of women’s
participation to support the idea that women are intellectually incapable.
These ideas, to them, go hand in hand. And this cause and effect mentality
(read: women are intellectually deficient, therefore can’t play intellectual
games) allows men in the game to escape detection. Their actions do not effect
the comfort and stability of women’s participation, so there is no need to be
concerned at our decided absence.
Over the
years, I’ve become less surprised by the sexism sprinkled through male chess
champions’ comments. Perhaps it’s like a politician and their next gaffe;
something to be expected at any moment. Many of us mistake chess players for
the world’s best thinkers, but laying out a champion’s words on the table make
the picture seem much more fractured. It’s a fallacy that someone can’t be both
informed and ignorant. But let’s not look too much at the men here, they get
enough attention – it’s the women who need to be seen.
Judit Polgár is somewhat of a chess superhero. Her
aggressive play has inspired many young women, among them Jennifer Shahade, a
US Women’s Chess Champion. In her book, Chess
Bitch, Shahade looks back at her early playing style and how she would
emulate Polgár: “I see my chess style was loaded with meaning – to be aggressive
was to renounce any stereotype of my play based on my gender.”
Polgár is
not regaled in chess because of her style, but because of her results. She has
beaten both Short and Kasparov, men who have publicly said women cannot be
champions. When interviewed by Maclean’s,
Polgár was asked about her wins and if she had ever personally received an
apology after Kasparov’s comments. She replied, “But later he accepted me,
by talking with me as another serious chess player.” To be accepted as equal,
she implies, is the greatest win. In the same interview, Polgár is asked about
the gendered division of the sport and the biological thought behind such a
division. She responds, as all women chess players have done before and will do
after her: a) the women’s league is a safe space for women to play with other
women; b) there is nothing biological about women playing less than men, it is entirely
social.
And this, perhaps more
than Kasparov’s outright sexism, is the problem. Women players are performing
this draining emotional labour again and again, they have to defend themselves
and their gender in every interview. Not only that, we have to try to educate
the person sitting across from us. We need to prove that it’s not shocking that
we’re at a tournament.
At my local tournament,
only once have I played another woman. The man next to her leant over to both
of us and said, “You know, you never see that happen. A woman playing another
woman.” He thought it so novel that he had to inform us. He didn’t realise that
when you’re one of the only people in the room that is different in some way,
you notice immediately. And week after week, it takes a toll.
Explaining and justifying
our presence and our ability to play is a never-ending performance. Most
importantly, it takes our energies away from the board in front of us and
reiterates how we are outsiders in the chess community. No matter how
supportive men are of women participants, this is a labour that is ours alone. It doesn’t
even touch them.
Zugzwang
Zugzwang is a situation in chess where one has to make a
move, and any move made will be to your serious detriment. Imagine you have two
pieces on the board; your king and a pawn. Your pawn can’t move because its
path is blocked by one of your opponent’s pieces. You have to move your king
but any square you move to would result in your immediate checkmate. The only
square that is safe is where you are at this moment. You cannot stay still. You
must move, and this is the bind of zugzwang, a word that comes from the German
‘zug’ (to move) and ‘zwang’ (compulsion).
I’ve stopped playing. I still teach chess but the only games
I play these days are in my own classes. If anything, my game is worse for it.
I’m so used to making ‘bad’ moves to construct positions from which the kids
can learn that I’m always overlooking key positions.
I can’t
pinpoint the moment I decided to stop. Maybe it wasn’t a decision; it just
became an absence. I was tired. During my time at the Chess Centre, I felt like
I was playing for my gender, not myself. I represented more than who I am, and
as a very average chess player that became exhausting. Maybe that’s why you
only hear about women at the top of male-dominated fields. The women who don’t
have the skills to back it up become strung out, exhausted by the conversations
around “you don’t see many women here” over and over again. My partner and I
don’t play much anymore, either. He won’t play in tournaments. If I’m not
comfortable being there, he isn’t either.
It’s a sad last move, a sad
ending to my chess story. I can’t bring myself to play now. The chess board my
grandfather built, one square at a time, still sits on my bookshelf. The pieces
are from the forties, classic Staunton design and I keep them tucked away in a
wooden box meant for floppy discs. Pieces of the past, sitting and waiting to
be used. One of the bishops is knocked about, green-tinged and tired.
I pass by that board and those
pieces everyday, but I haven’t yet felt the desire, burning and alive as it
once was, to reach for it and play. Beginning a chess game means being open,
willing to put every bit of yourself into the next move. It’s a contract
between me and the board, and I can’t do it anymore. Picking up my heavy,
chipped pieces remind me of what it is like to be worn down by the world of
chess. I am brittle, like that old green bishop. I’m trapped by my own zugzwang
– play another game and I might lose any lingering love of chess forever. So for
now, and perhaps always, my box of pieces stays shut.
Katerina Bryant is a writer based in Adelaide. Her
work has appeared in the Griffith Review, Kill Your Darlings and the Meanjin
Blog, amongst others. Her essay ‘A Pig in Mud’ was shortlisted for the 2016
Scribe Nonfiction Prize for Young Writers.
Michelle Baginski works with mark-making tools to
communicate visually, creating posters, murals, cartoons and drawings that
uplift, inform, connect and challenge. Fervently dedicated to drawing by
hand since circa 1983.
This essay is the first in a week-long series of commentary pieces that explore women’s experience in sporting culture.
Active women can change
the world. And that might be why, over the centuries, they have been strapped
into corsets, bustles and stilettos, or had their feet bound, necks extended
and genitals mutilated. Such physical constraints in the name of fashion or
religion suggest at a deeper level that if women weren’t tethered, they might escape.
It has been a continuing challenge for girls and women to be allowed to run,
jump, throw, catch, hit, chase, form teams and compete freely. Some of the obstacles
that constrict female roles in wider society are particularly visible in the sporting
arena because sport poses the question: what
are bodies for?
In Mussolini’s Italy of
the 1930s, the sporting woman was regarded with such suspicion that the
government supported a Vatican line and banned “unwomanly athletics.” These included
football, running races and participation in the Olympic Games. According to
Mussolini, “Fascist girls must be prepared to discharge the missions of wives
and mothers and learn how to rule a household. They may take such exercise as
will improve their figures but no more.” The ban was widely reported in
newspapers of the day, including in Australia.
Perhaps there have been times
when the child-bearing potential of girls and women needed to be maximised in
order for humans to survive. Perhaps. But it is more likely that females needed
to be coerced into living passive lives or what aviator Amelia Earhart termed being
“bred to timidity.” Mussolini’s attempts at social engineering included a Pro-Natal
Policy, where women were rewarded financially for
having large families and unmarried men paid a bachelor tax. Ironically, birth
rates in Italy fell during the period.
In the
over-crowded world of the 21st century, there is no biological
imperative for the human race to ‘populate or perish’. As well, women have
greater financial independence and can, therefore, free up time for their own pursuits
including sport. They can reclaim a body that serves their need to move for the
joy of action and exploration of physical potential rather than simply
procreate. While there is growing acceptance of this change, historical
patterns of criticism are still used today to oppose girls and women playing sport,
playing particular sports or playing sport at elite level. Opponents have been
especially strident about boxing and the football codes. In her 1994 book, The Stronger Women Get the More Men Love
Football, Mariah Burton-Nelson summarises the dilemma:
Football is male, masculinity,
manliness. So when women demand the right to play, control, judge, report on,
or change football—and other manly sports—their struggle is not just about
equal access to fitness and fatlessness. It’s about redefining men and women.
It’s about power.
Women’s
Australian Rules football began with workplace teams in Perth, Western
Australia, in 1915. Historians speculate that, aside from being a morale
booster and a way of raising money, the move was also calculated to shame men
into enlisting for the war. It was an unspoken, pointed reproach: ‘If your
women are playing football for the war effort and drawing crowds, what are you
doing?’ The female game expanded to country WA, and eventually spread to the
eastern states. To begin with, players wore silk dresses, hats, stockings and
walking out shoes on the field. The evolution towards more suitable playing gear
took several years.
Female players of the 1917 Foy & Gibson’s football team, pictured in their playing gear. Source: The State Library of Western Australia, 004998D.
The
charge of football being ‘unfeminine’ has often been made or inferred and
spiced with sly insinuations about the sexuality of female athletes. A 1921
match report on footballers in Perth described the captain of one of the teams as
“an athletic girl” with a “deep contralto voice.” Those associated with the
Victorian women’s league in the early 1980s remember journalists hanging around
after matches, trying to find out which players were gay. Keyboard cowards
today still sneer about “dykes” in sport.
‘Follower’s’
letter to a Perth newspaper in 1950 (see lead image) was written by someone
oblivious to the earlier history of the women’s game. The writer encapsulated the
main objections to women’s involvement: they were not welcome on male turf;
correct ‘feminine’ apparel was a skirt, not a football uniform; their primary
role at a football game was as a supporter; their standard of play was poor;
they could get hurt.
Australian journalist
and writer Roy Connolly had covered similar themes in a feature he wrote
deriding sportswomen in a Queensland
newspaper in 1934. He suggested that he would be
attacked by thousands of women for daring “to tell them the truth about
themselves.” These ‘truths’ included that the “growing
absorption of women in strenuous games arises from their sense of inferiority.”
Athletes, he said, would be unsuitable wives due to a loss of femininity and their
developed “competitive sense” that would “wreck any marriage.” Connolly’s
readers were probably unaware that his own marriage had ended in divorce
several months earlier, on the grounds of his wife’s adultery. Whether she had
been a sportswoman is unknown but he certainly hadn’t been able to keep her hitched.
At least Connolly had
conceded that women clamoured to be physically active. In a 1921 report of a
women’s rugby match in Sydney, it was stated the 30,000-strong crowd had
expected “a travesty of the game, with hysteria, fainting fits, fluttering
fans, and free use of smelling salts…” but the match had resulted in a “readjustment
of opinion.” Opposition remained, however, because the game “tends to the
destruction of the graces and charms of femininity.”
The sense that females were
charming because they were innately fragile had been a social fixation. The
grace demanded of ‘ladies’ during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries meant they wore tight corsets, described later by fashion historians as
“rib crackers and liver crushers.” Corsets pushed up women’s breasts and squeezed
in their waists, redistributing the position of internal organs and making it
difficult to breathe. Women of the era were often portrayed as susceptible to
hysteria and fainting spells. It is not at all surprising that some collapsed
but astonishing that any of them remained upright. Exercise in corsets, coupled
with the blood loss and cramping of menstruation, created extreme duress. Physical
pastimes for gentlewomen were largely restricted to walking or dancing, though
many also took up horse riding. Normal equestrian hazards were heightened by
the fact a woman was required
to ride sidesaddle to preserve modesty. This position meant that if her mount
fell, she was likely to be trapped under the horse (rather than thrown) and if
it bolted, she had virtually no control. And yet women continued to ride.
That the myth of the weak woman has persisted must
also suggest that some women have been complicit in perpetuating it,
comfortable with the idea of being seen as meek, helpless, delicate or
decorative. Yet countless women have confounded such descriptors, perhaps none
more so in the past century than the
first woman in space, Russian Valentina Tereshkova, who spent seventy-one hours orbiting
the earth forty-eight times in 1963. This was more than all the (male) US astronauts
combined at that point.
The early American space
program had only considered men when selecting astronauts, despite a group of
women known as the ‘Mercury 13’ testing favourably both physically and psychologically
against the tough NASA standards. Chief among them was Geraldyn ‘Jerrie’ Cobb, a commercial jet pilot who had logged more than 10,000
flying hours and shown outstanding ability to withstand induced vertigo,
cramped spaces and long periods of sensory deprivation. The outer limit for male
candidates to remain immersed in a soundproof tank of cold water was six hours;
scientists stopped the experiment with Cobb when she passed nine. One of the
testers explained succinctly why American women were, nevertheless, excluded
from pioneering space travel. “Ovaries,” said Dr Donald Kilgore. “The world
wasn’t ready at that time.”
There is growing evidence that the world is
ready now for a makeover of its attitude. The rise of sports such as mixed
martial arts and popular support for Ronda Rousey, Holly Holm and other
proponents, has signified a shift in what activities are considered acceptable
for women. Campaigns such as Britain’s ‘This Girl Can’
and the photography project and book ‘Strong
Is the New Pretty’ by Kate T. Parker are helping
to rewrite female roles.
The intensity of the play
in the new Australian Football League Women’s (AFLW)
competition, which started in February 2017, has excited plenty of comment. Hard
hits and players crashing to the ground but rebounding have stymied those who
had expected to use the “crying over a broken fingernail” line. During the eight
weeks of the AFLW season, injuries included snapped ACLs (anterior cruciate
ligaments) and meniscus tears to knees, severe ankle damage, a torn Achilles
tendon, a broken collarbone and dislocated shoulders. Melbourne player Meg
Downie, who was knocked unconscious during one game had, moments earlier,
ruptured her hamstring. The roll-call of serious injuries should raise concerns
about training methods, match preparation and scheduling, as well as the fact
of playing a winter sport in summer on hard-baked grounds. There should be an investigation
into whether these are contributing factors and, if so, how to mitigate them.
Although critics raise the risk of injury as a reason against women playing collision sports, the players themselves are seldom risk averse. One example is three-time All-Australian Louise Knitter. Before retiring in 2014, she sustained many injuries during her 306-game career, the most serious being a ruptured pancreas. Surgeons removed one-third of the organ and she was advised not to play Australian Rules football again. However, the talented West Australian eventually returned to the game, saying she missed the physicality. Post-surgery photo courtesy Louise Knitter / Glenda Jenkins.
However, the injuries sustained have also called
out different public concerns about the rigours of the sport, including from ‘John’,
commenting on an online
story in The Australian inFebruary,
who suggested: “…if there is an activity that girls excel in,
fitness and beauty wise, and from a very young age it is Ballet [sic].” Although
dancers have enviable core strength, female dancers have traditionally been
directed to look as if they are wafting – that is, to disguise the physicality,
strength and difficulty of their pursuit. Arthritis and chronic hip and back
pain are among dancers’ long-term legacies. For spectators who bemoan the sight
of an occasional woman being carried off a sporting field on a stretcher,
perhaps they should acquaint themselves with the sight of any ballet dancer’s naked
feet.
In the same forum that
John made his remarks, ‘David’ asked, “How many claims will the AFL
face in a few years from women who suffered one too many chest bumps and now
can’t nurse a baby [?].” His bizarre observation raises recurring spectres in
historical criticisms of sporting women: infertility
and unfitness for motherhood. In his long article in 1934, Roy Connolly quoted
a doctor who said that the energy needed for strenuous sports came at the
expense of the “creative organs”. A female doctor quizzed in
Adelaide ahead of a proposed female boxing bout the previous decade, had said
that a blow could lead to “incurable disease.” Trying to sideline women from
vigorous activity by suggesting they would get injured overlooks the fact that
domestic violence has long been a leading cause of significant
physical injury to females. And logic alone
dictates that men, with their reproductive organs on the outside, would be more
at risk of infertility through sporting injury than women, whose reproductive
system is encased within a sturdy pelvic structure.
Another feature ignored by those concerned about
injuries is that many women are drawn to sports like football because of the physicality. When Netball
Australia tried, in 2015, to shrug off its ‘girly’ tag with a short-lived advertisement
that ended on the image of a player with a bloodshot and blackened eye, it was
making the point that netball was no longer non-contact. Australian Rules football
has always been a collision sport and coaches acknowledge that female players
love tackling. Many sportswomen want to pit themselves physically against
opponents, to use their bodies to shield teammates and to explore the
boundaries of what their bodies can do. Football administrator Debbie Lee, who
played more than 300 games of senior football, told a recent documentary, League of Her Own,
that football gave women “a licence to be physical.”
Side-by-side: photographer Phil Barnes superimposed a 2014 photo of Renee Forth (left) and Kara Donnellan fighting for the ball – both became AFLW marquee players – into an historic action shot of women’s football taken in Perth, 1921 to show how the endeavour of competitive women has remained constant.
Where arguments about physicality and risk have
failed to deter participation, a traditional standby has been to demean women’s
sport through ridicule and novelty. Pop
culture references, such as in Futurama, nail the trend. In one
episode, a main character is signed up as the first woman to play ‘bernsball’ (a
futuristic version of baseball) by an unscrupulous agent. Leela’s excitement is
qualified by the agent, who tells her: “basically you’d just be a publicity
stunt. I figured a one-eyed lady skull buster might bring out the freakshow
crowd.”
As
early as 1895, the emergence of female soccer players was reported in the West Australian newspaper as “an
interesting, if it be an absurd, development.” Relying on a witness to a game
in Melbourne, the writer suggested players “sometimes … kicked the ball … stood
round and giggled at it, but usually they fell over it.” When setting up the
West Australian Women’s Football League in 1987, founder Joanne Huggins
recalled a television crew visiting a training session, purportedly to help
promote the fledgling competition. Instead, the segment that aired used circus
music as the backing for a blooper reel. Belittling sportswomen happens even at
the Olympic level, such as in 2012, when swimmer Leisel Jones attended her
fourth Games and 110m hurdler Sally Pearson won gold. Sports reporters from
Sydney’s Daily Telegraph, however,
named champion mare Black Caviar the ‘sportswoman’ of the year. Their claim
that it was tongue-in-cheek was undercut by their naming Test cricket captain
Michael Clarke the year’s leading sportsman.
It
is unlikely that mainstream media would publish such a piece today—less than
five years later—because the backlash would be loud and sustained. Tellingly, some
of it would come from sponsors, who see women’s sport as a new frontier and are
rethinking their traditional approaches of appealing to female consumers. What
female footballers of all codes, along with cricketers, netballers and other
sportswomen are now doing is forcing a redefinition of femininity. Appearance may
remain a preoccupation with some critics but their objections are increasingly pushed
to the fringes. Australian Rules forward Moana Hope was berated as a “tattooed
feral” in comments following an online article about her in Melbourne’s
Herald Sun on Christmas Day, 2016. However,
her distinctive style is the focus of a new series of advertisements for Holden.
Cereal giant Kellogg’s has also reappraised how to capture women’s attention through television ads that
emphasise female strength and body
confidence.
Alongside
fickle commercial imperatives is a reality as old as humanity. Childbirth is an
act of physical courage. A woman pushes, grunts, screams, strains
and sweats, her flesh tearing as her blood stains the bedding while she delivers
a new child to the world. This is what a female body can do that a male’s
cannot. So, perhaps, traditionally masculine quests such as warfare,
gladiatorial contests and arduous sporting endeavours are not a show of gender superiority
but signs that men have always felt the need to prove themselves as equals. For
if, as many have insisted for so long, a woman’s primary role is to bear
children, then her triumphant physicality must be the ultimate expression of
femininity.
Brunette Lenkić is
co-author of Play On! The Hidden History
of Women’s Australian Rules Football (Echo Publishing, 2016).
if you like someone you want to try to touch their genitals
before that though you have to try and figure out a way to
interact with them in such a way that involves lingering for
a bit too long
then they know
and you know
sexual attraction can make you want to have sex with
people that you would be absolutely horrified to produce a
baby with.
remember: finding somebody attractive is just your body’s
way of tricking you into breeding and reproducing more
humans
but it’s still good I think
love thing
i imagined you as an intricate sparkling diamond
surrounded by tendrils of gold threads, infinitesimally
fragmented and glittering
you emerged from a thin golden thread from my chest
and hovered above me
i want to run the tips of my fingers down the entire length
of your back faintly, so you can barely register the sensation
maybe send a gold shiver through your entire body
park
i am sitting in a park and there are businessmen walking past me in black suits, some grey
seems good that all these people walking around in suits doing business meetings like to lick some people’s
genitals also sometimes
i spent at least 20 seconds visualising making out with a crow while staring at a crow
imagine if you could make birds explode if you stared at them for long enough
there should be a Counting Crows song called: ‘there are five crows’
what if a giant asteroid was on track to completely obliterate the earth but at the last moment it just came up and kissed it a bit and left
seems weird that people evolved to have to wear clothes
billions of people
a cool thing about being human is feeling like a parasitic cancer upon the earth
most of the time i feel like a guy who has won $598 million dollars in the lottery and is complaining about not getting $600 million dollars
i also feel like a guy who wins an award like an Oscar or a Grammy and goes up on stage to accept it and trips and breaks his neck, instantly dying
when i am rich i’m just gonna smash plates when i’m done eating
buying diamonds seems completely insane though
if you put your ear to the ground and listen carefully you can hear the Earth whispering “Get off me”
when i think about the amount of planes flying around every hour every day it makes me feel overwhelmed and afraid and want to go back to bed
listening to heavy rain in bed
i like lying in bed in the morning and listening to heavy rain outside
the inside of my cat’s ear is very weird looking, like an alien cave
i wish you could kick cats and they would break off into smaller versions of themselves like in the game Asteroids
imagine if instead of drinking and socialising in bars people got together in large groups and took acid and listened to Liszt in silence and stared at the ceiling for 5 hours
i think being able to compose music for contemporary dance would put me on the low priority list if there was an apocalyptic situation in which society broke down and people were chosen to be saved or fed to other people or left to die
James Brown is a man who lives in Sydney, Australia. He works as a freelance composer and artist and also sometimes writes poetry.
Heard you
hurtin’
Got you
this
Sparse
shit
poem
Helpless
mewling
at the sting.
Offered you
as a salve.
Offered us
as bad salvation.
Offered back
as stand-in
turbine. heartbeat
‘lectrons for y’nation.
don’t @ me
curated tweets
Blak women are
powerful, overworked and under-praised
Bilingual and trilingual
Oh
I’m getting roots in
Sustain me, sustain me
No suspicious circumstances
Significant overrepresentation
What’s native title worth
In a compromised position to sovereignty?
Significant underrepresentation?
No contact with the family?
BREAKING
Individual pathology
Inquest into the death of
2 in every 25
Yesssssss
This hurts
When kids are locked up
Taught through brutality
How disposable they are
Threat to private property
Counternarrative:
Joyous precious worthy. I’m not
crying – you’re crying
I’m not booking flights at my hotdesk
I’m not calling mum at my hotdesk
Love this country or leave it so
Free domestic flights for First Nations?
A whole plane full of terrified people in plaid
staring ever forward
Their model of shame on ours
Oh and wildflowers on the train
My hot take?
Blak women have not been silent
Huge if true.
Alison Whittaker is a Gomeroi poet living and writing on Gadigal and Wangal lands. Her debut collection Lemons in the Chicken Wire was shortlisted for the Scanlon Prize and was awarded the 2015 State Library of Queensland’s black&write! fellowship.
We know tragic women. The well-loved trope of doomed women, fictional or historical, is both overused and comforting in literature; immediately recognisable, somehow soothing. In Nicola Maye Goldberg’s debut novel Other Women the unnamed narrator nods to the “pantheon of dead girls: Ophelia, Sylvia Plath, Emma Bovary, Laura Palmer, Joan of Arc, Marie Antoinette.” The girls lost to men and violence and history. A long line of women who deserved better. A group of bitter ghosts.
Initially it seems Other Women’s fraught, depressed narrator might join them, but instead, “Sometime shortly after I dropped out,” she explains, “I gave up on being a Sad Girl and got used to being a Sick Girl instead.”
Goldberg’s conception of the ‘Sick Girl’ is one of the most triumphant fuck-yous to the Sad Girl trope I’ve read in years: Fuck you, I’m not sad like a beautiful accessory; Fuck you, it’s not just in my head; Fuck you, it is in my head and that’s a medical issue. Goldberg’s Sick Girl is depressed, anxious, unwell. She practices self-harm. She fantasises about suicide. She goes to see a useless psychiatrist and returns home to practice new forms of self-destruction. Her sickness is undeniably a medical issue, fitting for a heroine interested in anatomy and biology; one interested, particularly, in blood. It wells up again and again, usually as a surprise to the reader but always, in hindsight, obvious, as though blood and its spectre are thrumming along under the narrative.
Julia Kristeva proposed the theory of the abject: the fear of the Other that threatens our own self, that breaks down the carefully constructed identities and systems we live by. Hints of our bodies’ inevitable decay—blood, faeces, pus—distort our view of ourselves as alive. It’s no surprise that horror fiction continues to dwell on blood, from Carrie to the Saw franchise. But Goldberg dwells on blood with lingering pleasure and interest, like a child picking at scabs. It always appears in soft focus. It is usually still warm.
Other Women isn’t by necessity a bloody story: it’s about a young college dropout and her infatuation with a boy who already has a girlfriend (he is unnamed too, just a ‘you’ who haunts the text). In the short novel she has an affair with the boy, then leaves New York for Berlin as a nanny to the rich Herzfeld family. It sounds more like standard millennial uncertainty than horror movie. But I kept idle count of blood as it shows up in Other Women, lost count, picked it up again. The narrator falls down the stairs, skins her knee; donates blood for the way nurses touch her; is bitten by fleas and scratches until she bleeds: “So I guess you could say I bled for you,” she tells her love interest dryly. And, perhaps inevitably, the narrator makes herself bleed, and relives the experience when she stumbles upon the Herzfelds’ teenage daughter Sophie also committing self-harm. They discuss it in a conversation explicitly made girlish: “‘Have you ever done it?’ Sophie asked, her voice sweet and quiet, like she was asking about my first kiss.”
It’s a sneering rejoinder to the idea of girls talking about boys at sleepovers, unveiling a secret, morbid world in a fancy bathroom. And the idea of pain that’s self-inflicted takes on a sense of control and ritual for Goldberg’s characters, obliterating psychological pain. American theorist Elaine Scarry talks about religious self-flagellation: an act of “so emphasizing the body that the contents of the world are cancelled and the path is clear for the entry of an unworldly, contentless force.” I spent much of Other Women uneasily waiting for that force to descend.
“I liked working for the Herzfelds for the same reason you liked watching horror movies,” the narrator says. “It was both terrible and immensely satisfying to watch a beautiful thing rot from the inside out.” In fact, the whole book unfolds as a tiny, perfect, feminine horror story. The continual threat of violence is Other Women’s most omnipresent danger. It lingers like a storm cloud or jagged violins in a low-budget slasher flick, with the slow decay of the Herzfelds’ marriage and the narrator’s growing misery closing in around the reader.
By the end, you’re almost hoping for pain to wipe it clear, and sure enough, when pain descends it does so in soft, romantic lighting, as the narrator lies “mesmerized for almost an hour, feeling lightheaded and warm.” The safety after the jumpscare.
Stories about obsession are easy to write and difficult to read. It’s hard to convince an outsider the object of your obsession is worthy. The obsessee is often curiously flat: unappealing, unattractive. The author can dissect them in an attempt to show them off, but usually all that’s left is a heap of parts. Obsession isn’t contagious.
Unsurprisingly, then, Goldberg’s love interest is by far the least interesting aspect of the novel. Even the infatuated narrator seems to know this on some level—the boy is generic, “dress[es] the same as any other vaguely hip white guy”—and the only appeal she can give him is some undefinable freshness, betterness. To the reader-outsider, the mystery that clings to him is just vapidness; the act of cheating on his girlfriend not something intriguing but rather repellent. Unlike the narrator, the reader can see him for what he probably is: an arsehole.
What is left, what is interesting, is the obsession itself. Away from the boy, the narrator eats herself up in a way that is both painfully particular and very familiar. Obsession isn’t contagious but it’s easy to live inside, easy to relate to. And as the narrator of Other Women peels herself apart to examine any trace left by the affair, there’s a sense that what’s real here is the obsession itself. “[Y]ou had followed me, pulling at my hair, whispering in my ear,” Goldberg writes. “Even worse, I had followed myself.”
In the five months I’ve been in Berlin, I’ve read Other Women three times. It’s discomforting and delightful to read a novel while encircled by the territory it describes. Each read made me feel as though the city I was walking around in belonged to that narrator, and not me – which is fine. Berlin’s hellish supermarkets, the nauseating misery of not being able to speak enough German, the flowers and whitewashed walls and dirty streets. Goldberg picks up the undercurrents of the city, the way it beguiles and bewilders its new arrivals, leaving us dazed and childlike.
The unnamed narrators’ inability to escape her cities reinforces Other Women as a horror story. It owes a debt to Gothic novels of the nineteenth century, heroines trapped alone, heroines surrounded on all sides, men both enticing and terrifying. But it is also unavoidably linked to twentieth- and 21st-century horror cinema, most clearly in the threat of violence, which in isolation is sufficient. We know everything that has been and can be done to women, have watched it bored on Friday nights, have been shocked and frightened and tired of it for most of our lives. This miasma hangs over Other Women, blurring the distinction between violence and threat, diving deep into a horror movie’s atmosphere of dread without ever fulfilling it.
Goldberg demands bodily responses from her readers: the slow roll of revulsion, the giddy flush of a thwarted crush, the creeping dread of something bad about to happen. Lacking one particular villain, all the men in Other Women fall under unnamed suspicion. Domesticity and sexuality is flipped, eyed with an unnerving new perspective. A boy taking a coat in a “slow, careful way … made me feel as if you were … preparing me for a ritual sacrifice.” When she falls in love, the narrator “felt something inside of me flicker and go dark.” Meeting the Herzfeld family “felt like being in a dollhouse or the set of a television show; unreal and kind of invasive,” and we have already seen two girls discuss self-harm with the same tenderness and shy gossip we imagine to be the territory of first kisses.
But it’s in Goldberg’s talent for provoking visceral emotional responses with quiet, understated imagery that her horror aesthetic is most clear. Each page unfolds cinematically, like a new scene with something waiting to jump out. The lack of names gets to you: the reader is implicated and framed by both the unnamed narrator and the ‘you’ of her love interest. By the end, the reader is the monster and the last girl left alive both.
“In New York I was always tired,” the narrator tells us. “In Berlin I was always hungry.” Like answering a call, my stomach rumbles.
Mikaella Clements is an Australian writer currently living in Berlin. Previously her work has appeared in Buzzfeed, Voiceworks, Overland, Catapult, and more. She is currently editing her first novel, a literary thriller about women, violence, and a ghost.
Have you ever seen out in the country at midday an electric bulb aglow? I have seen one. It is one of life’s bad memories.
—Juan Emar, Miltín 1934
There was a time when I often gazed at the factory chimneys. Each morning they were the same height and their colour resembled zinzolin, a kind of purple that, lacklustre as it is, blended with the red of daybreak. Those details were important to me: they let me know that between night and day nothing had changed. The rain, for example, had not made one chimney grow taller than the other or effaced or discoloured the enamel. It soothed me to note that the black clouds that rose from the chimneys, though unrelenting, would never darken the rest of the sky; the smoke billowed and it seemed to me that I was watching a giant’s fingers as he twirled his hair.
On those occasions I spent hours waiting for the blind man to wake. Between the white eyes of sleep and the white eyes of waking I learned to distinguish a rift: the sun hastened the contours of the chimneys and shortly after his hands began to shake as if they were drowning in the light; after this, now with his whole body shaking and his eyes rolled back, he groped his way towards where I was watching him and, with a couple of blows to my head, cried:
“Open your eyes, Lázaro! With no energy there’s no voice, and with no voice there’s no appetite…”
And when that happened, the streets were already teeming with the same diligence. The blind man gave the order to go outside and not long after he was crying out, “Have a story told, any story!” He left out nothing that the other traffickers in stories thought to say. People passed by, avoiding his voice; the women, especially, sidestepped him and wrinkled their noses as if they were afraid of getting them wet. But there was always someone who, lured by the words cast by that hoarse and almost violent voice, dropped a coin into our little tin and inclined his or her head to listen more closely. Perhaps owing to his blindness, if the blind man said he remembered, the people believed; and if officials overlooked the fact that he dared spout the lies that came out his mouth, it was because in those times, when stories were forbidden, his were ensconced in the impunity of his useless eyes, which were never taken for anything but harmless and devoid of all authority.
This was how we lived: a little here and a little there. When we amassed enough water, we moved south, never north. There, the factories sprouted; the dogs snarled and problems piled up. In the south, by contrast, there was still space enough for solitude. But because the blind man migrated often and we had to return regularly, we secured a basement where we could shelter while we took turns to stock up on more ampoules. All I had to do was shake the tin whenever I noted interest on the face of someone who had heard “Forty-millilitre coins; forty-millilitre coins…” And, as I said earlier, if, with a little good fortune, someone dropped us a coin, the blind man rolled his eyes back and remembered the years when there was plenty of water and mankind reproduced; when factories had not been invented and all the things that people say used to happen did indeed come to pass as naturally as nowadays they do not.
Sometimes, however, someone would arrive wanting to buy another kind of story.
Thereupon the blind man would lower his voice and squeeze my arm.
The man seemed nervous and bit his lip. A longing to be injected with one of our story-filled ampoules had brought him here. I was used to recognising such customers because, since I had been living with the blind man, I had seen that they came in several shapes and sizes. Some, such as this one, peered at us from behind a pair of glasses with transparent frames; these were almost always shy and had sallow skin. Others wore blue tracksuits and dyed their hair white. Their preferences may have often coincided, but they were usually strict in terms of the stories they wanted to experience and the time they had to spare. This was why we went down to the basement. There, next to a small makeshift pallet, the blind man opened the case and exhibited the titles of the ampoules, which were often numerous and came in many sizes. Along the length of the ampoule plastic you could read the name of the story and, if it was selected, I moistened a little cotton ball with disinfectant and rubbed the nape of the person’s neck before guiding the blind man’s hand, and he sunk the needle into the flesh and injected the colours.
When we reached the basement alongside the shy young man with the glasses, the blind man said what he always did:
“A one-hour ampoule of story costs half a litre; a two-hour ampoule costs one.”
You could see the man had been through this before because his mouth tightened and he replied:
“I’ll give you a litre and a half if you get me what I want.”
Once more I felt the blind man grab my arm, and the scraping of his shoes on the steps turned protracted and rough.
“Indeed, indeed,” the blind man chewed the offer over. “A litre and a half is a fair amount. Tell me what story.”
“What I’m after isn’t exactly a story,” the shy young man lowered his voice so much that for a moment I thought he had begun to swallow his words, “but a name: Felisberto Hernández.”
“Felisberto,” murmured the blind man while picking at his mole-specked head; “a strange harvest, no doubt about it, but the distiller will know how to get hold of it if we give him some time.”
“But it’s vital that I experience it today!”
“That makes it tricky.” The blind man hastened to feel out the space before him with his crutch until the edge of the wood caught me in the ribs. “You heard, nephew,” he let three coins drop into my hand, “be precise with what you stipulate and make sure it’s top notch.”
He made me repeat the name three times and then I ran to the distillery. I often went in there with the blind man; beforehand, we had to cross a little room with walls covered in labelled vials that were full of cloudy water; inside them floated objects that I could not always identify. All of it was under the care of a fat woman who picked at her fingernails and had a decisive character. Yet she would get nervous whenever anyone asked after the distiller, even though such a thing was not out of the ordinary; she would shake her head and make strange faces, as if she were putting up a struggle against words that refused to come out her mouth. If this kept up a long time, she would press a blue button; if a short time, a red one. At that moment the distiller would appear. He was a man with a beautiful moustache who often made apologies, which you could see was because he held the blind man in high esteem. He would take us to a small room where there were two couches, and the pair would sit down to drink a bottle full of the liquid on the walls while they waited for the operator to arrive with a selection of ampoules. The blind man would take a whiff and rejoice; later, sniffing the sample of ampoules, he would say yes to one story, no to another, and one by one the distiller would fill our case, which we would then hide in the basement.
Now I was knocking at the distillery door with both hands; I banged at it until one of the operators stuck his face out the window:
“What do you want?” He was a wide man pitted with smallpox scars and visibly in a hurry.
“The blind man sent me,” I replied; “with an emergency.”
Clearly the blind man was important to them because they let me in right away. The fat woman looked me head to toe and, after listening patiently, pressed the red button. I stood there, unsure of what to say. Her jaw wiggled a good while but, finally, words managed to escape her:
“Wait for him in the other room.”
I ducked under a curtain; it was the first time I had been in there. Behind the curtain there were several alembics dripping stories, and almost at once it occurred to me that it was like watching a group of obese people sweating in a gymnasium. Every now and then an operator with rubber gloves inspected the alembics; he sniffed the filter and later went out of the room carrying a little tray of vials filled with different colours. I heard his heels pecking at the roof. Several iron pipes descended from the ceiling, and the noise that travelled down them went around in a spiral that was like a sluggish digestion tract.
Soon I sensed that someone brushed against the curtain. The folds of the red fabric softened. I saw the bristles of a moustache.
“This will take some time,” said the distiller. “In the first place, it is a tricky item of fermentation. Add to that the whole matter of the tank. We have to search the storehouse, process the dyes, etcetera.”
I suspected the fat woman had munched on my thoughts while I was in that room; if not, I was at a loss as to explain how the distiller knew I had come for such a rare ampoule. I lamented thinking unkind things about her and being found out, but above all I was distressed to think our sale would not proceed and the distiller was saying rushed things as if he wanted me gone. The coins were bulky in my hand and damp; I clenched them and, as if in affinity, my eyes caught their dampness. It was two days since I had eaten and I had got my hopes up.
“The blind man knows these things take days,” said the distiller, convinced he was making a fair statement.
I couldn’t contain myself any longer: my hands found my face and I started to sob.
“Don’t cry, boy,” he said in pity, “there are always alternatives when you’re young.”
My tears were salty and without thinking I licked them from my hands. I realised I was doing something depraved and hurried to tell him:
“I’ll end up eating myself.”
I immediately dried my eyes with the sleeve of my shirt and realised my words would free me from my predicament, as if in saying them I had slyly tugged on a small girl’s plaits.
“Look,” said the distiller, “here’s your alternative: you just have to take another story to the blind man. It wouldn’t be so hard.”
I cleaned my face.
“Might you have a similar story?” I asked, slurping my snot and coming back to my senses.
The distiller stroked his moustache:
“Take another Uruguayan,” he said after a while. “I have several.”
It was the first time I had heard that word.
Together we went to the ampoule draw that said ‘Uruguay’. There were many stories there but I, thinking about the profit I stood to make, turned my gaze to where the remainders were piled and took the first I saw.
The Uruguayan story I chose had a solid sea-green colour. I switched the original label for another that said something very different. Now, along the length of the ampoule it read, ‘Unknown’. I felt fortunate to have found a way to proceed with the sale and keep, for myself, a couple of coins of such large denomination. I was so elated by my windfall—by my skulduggery, as much as anything—that I started to realise my enthusiasm may have spread to the blind man. Perhaps he had not expected me to return with good news or perhaps he was simply happy for the interruption to the long talk I had left them to.
“If times were different, I would have been a musician, too,” the shy young man with the glasses was saying as I went down to the basement.
“And I a spy!” the blind man retorted.
I pulled on the sleeve of his lab coat and he turned his head, searching me out in the air as if he were following a scent.
“Uncle,” I said.
“Ah,” the blind man was swift to interrupt, “the ampoule…”
We lay down a pillow with a clean slip for our customer. I rubbed the nape of his neck with bunched fabric soaked in antiseptic until his skin went red from the heat, and after a while the blind man jabbed him with the syringe. I watched as the level of injectable liquid, which the blind man had drawn from the broken ampoule, lowered until the barrel was dry. Not even a drop was left; then the shy young man crinkled his forehead and rested the left side of his face against the fabric.
That’s how he fell asleep.
This piece was translated from the Spanish by Elizabeth Bryer. It appears in full in The Lifted Brow #33. Get your copy here.
Carlos Yushimito has published, among others, the story collections Lessons for a Boy Who Arrived Late (2011) and Forests Have Their Own Doors (2013). Included in anthologies across nine countries, several of his stories have been translated into English, Portuguese, Italian, and French.
Elizabeth Bryer’sfirst full-length translation, Claudia Salazar Jiménez’s Americas Prize–winning debut Blood of the Dawn, is out with Deep Vellum (North America). In 2017 she is the recipient of a PEN/Heim grant to translate Aleksandra Lun’s The Palimpsests.
This event is geared towards writers of all levels of experience who are seeking to engage more deeply with the form. It will be led by long-time Brow contributor Rebecca Harkins-Cross.
The event will take place in Melbourne for writers to attend in person.
We will also record the audio of the event – if you are interested in receiving this audio after the event with a PDF of any presentation materials, do email us so we can put you on the list. There will be a small fee for this (waived for subscribers and RMIT students).
The lecture and discussion will give an introductory historical overview of the genre, and will look closely at the work of several contemporary practitioners and how they interpret the form.
We are enthusiastic to meet those already working in this genre, to assist new writers to harness experimental techniques and ideas within their practice, and we welcome those who are simply curious.
DETAILS
When: Sunday May 21, 2017
9:30am-12:30pm
Where: RMIT University, Melbourne City Campus
Building 9, Level 2, Room 10A
(Building 9 is on the corner Franklin and Bowen Streets.)
Cost: Free for The Lifted Brow subscribers and for RMIT students, $15 otherwise. (You can subscribe here.)
Bookings: Please email [email protected] to reserve your spot. Include in your email your name, a mobile phone number, and know whether you are a subscriber or if you will be paying. (We will let you know how to transfer us the money if you are paying.)
Places are limited, so please book early.
We particularly encourage people who are queer and/or trans, and/or of any race, colour, religion, gender, age, and/or have a disability, to attend — and to that end, we have reserved some free places in the workshop for writers with diverse identities. Please just let us know. Additionally, if you are experiencing any kind of hardship, financial or otherwise, contact us and we’ll do what we can to accommodate you.
An introduction to experimental non-fiction as genre and practice. Topics include the divide between fiction/nonfiction, the relational nature of experimentation, the intervention of the writer as body and subject, and the impact of disciplines other than literature on contemporary non-fiction practices.
Close readings of several writers working within the genre, including Maggie Nelson, Anne Carson, Sophie Calle, Hilton Als, and John D’Agata.
Questions and discussion
Small writing exercises integrated throughout
PRESENTER
Rebecca Harkins-Cross is a Melbourne-based writer and critic. She is currently the film editor for The Big Issue, film columnist for The Lifted Brow, and a PhD candidate in Creative Writing at Monash University; she is a former theatre critic at The Age. Her work focuses on arts and culture, and has appeared widely in newspapers, magazines and journals across Australia. She has conducted writing workshops, hosted panels and appeared as a guest speaker at writers centres, universities, high schools and writers festivals including Ubud Writers and Readers Festival, Melbourne Writers Festival, Emerging Writers Festival and National Young Writers Festival. In 2015 she took part in the Disquiet International Literary Conference under the mentorship of US essayist Leslie Jamison and was named one of 30 Writers Under 30 by the Melbourne Writers’ Festival; in 2014 she was a finalist for the Scribe Prize and a Wheeler Centre Hot Desk Fellow. Her work has been awarded several times by the Australian Film Critics Association.
These poems originally appeared in The Lifted Brow #6.
Pettah
Packets of men’s underwear thrust in my face,
the happy plastic
of inflatable penguins, fat-cheeked dolls.
Spined fish dry on grey tarpaulins,
and piled red leather thongs
grow stiff and stringy in the sun
like the glutinous fried syrup
children chew
on long-haul buses.
The crannied streets
stitch together stagnant roadblocks,
and tall and terraced houses
lean backwards from the throng.
A sudden temple flexes.
Its sculpted walls
a mad and teeming mirroring of streets,
the coloured gods bloody and riotous,
vengeful as memory.
Fruit sellers hang their washing, disembowelled
from razor wire
and dice pineapple
for hungry students.
I can smell war in this city.
The khaki jeeps creep through the bus queues.
A thin-fingered soldier
invites me to hold his rifle,
and calls me beautiful.
Albino
At a food stall,
eating beetroot curry with pink fingers
he saw his first albino,
a small child,
eyebrows like the down
in the centre of a coconut.
She hid her face
from the sunburnt soldiers,
buried deep in her father’s dark knees.
At a bus stop, I see albino skin
prickling pinker in the heat,
the sun griddling through earlobes;
fingertips in a lacery of veins.
In the pulse and spill of people
women clutch thick-skinned umbrellas
And his pale limbs arrest my eyes.
He startles when he sees me,
then his grin thins, and turns away.
Pink eyes.
We both are skinless
in these streets.
Galle Rd
Ribboning between the rail line
and the sea,
we head south.
The city frays along these edges.
Old men carve driftwood
into curled awnings,
or bedheads coiled and knotted as their knucklebones.
Stacked, the sturdy dreams beneath them
latent, not yet thought.
A tin boat, bluely moored
in a tree’s branches.
Whole walls are missing, carved out
from concrete homes.
A boy runs, waving, on a beachhead,
and a whole village gathers in;
a silvered, sinewed net
is waded into shore,
The fishermen pluck muscled legs
like reedy birds,
their sarongs
dipping on their thighs.
Street vendors lay stilled fish
on wooden slabs
and under naked light bulbs.
The air tastes scaly and their skin
is petrol-coloured, sweating
flies like tiny gemstones.
We head south, ribboning,
as cows and goats gnaw
on coconut shells
thrown roadside from car windows.
The late rain prickles on my flesh,
and it grows dark so suddenly
the headlights pick out lone stars
through the sharp lines of palms.
Fruit Stories
Banana.
Their Army wages were riper
than all they’d known before.
This soft, misshapen weaponry–
bananas, broad and muscled cartridges
on heavy stems,
spined pineapples,
thick-shelled mangosteen,
pomegranate, papaya, pellet-ridden as grenades.
The round juice of new words
upon their tongues,
they sliced them thick in washing tubs,
a sticky sauce
of condensed milk.
In the suburbs,
families ate rice,
and curried Spam.
Mango.
Even here, it smelt of Christmas mornings, caravans.
Its cardiac curve, cool skin.
I fetch the boy the thin man said, his rickety grin
propping up his lottery stall:
You are wanting mango, no? You wait, I fetch the boy.
The boy: a bare, strutted chest and boned machete,
and skin creased as minutely
as a letter from home.
(And in these swollen afternoons,
it is his own spine that is curling,
his bony skull protrudes.
He masticates the ending, often threefold.
As though the boy
grows older still, each time.)
Coconut.
That year Mrs lived through a London winter,
worked double-shifts to stand nearer the industrial ovens,
won a street-side contest
scraping overpriced coconuts.
The white flesh
fell away; flaked snow.
The barbed arm of her coconut-scraping chair
uninvited and lecherous
beside my leg.
My small hands on a hirsute shell,
the curve too globular and perfect
to hold unfumblingly:
I will make a no-use wife.
That afternoon,
my flesh flakes under the buses’ practised and hazarding gazes.
Earth
Motorcycles slow to match my tread;
there are no footpaths
in this city.
My feet grow dessicant
on the mild toxicity of insect spray,
the scuffed polish of road dust.
These liquid mornings bend
on battered buses, plucked chickens
soften by the bus route.
My knees bruise
with the prints of male frustration.
I bring their shadows home, yellowing
in sickly gradients;
the dark dirt collapses
down my shower drain,
embanking somewhere else
as foreign soil.
Fiona Wright is a writer, editor and critic from Sydney. Her book of essays Small Acts of Disappearance won the 2016 Kibble Award and the Queensland Literary Award for non-fiction, and her poetry collection Knuckled won the 2012 Dame Mary Gilmore Award. She has recently completed a PhD at Western Sydney University’s Writing & Society Research Centre.
