March 2023
The house is gone. The drive from Jenny’s place takes me past ‘the hovel’ but it’s not there. I’m alert now, for the traffic streaming at peak hour on Brisbane’s Kessels Road, for the surprise I feel to be back here, a passer-by.  I blame Siri for this hijacking into the past just when I’m trying to absorb Jenny’s news. My sister is dying. Her lips were turning blue when she was talking, crushing words together like ‘terminal’ and ‘use-by date’.  And there on the left is the site of the old beast, where Jenny said she was held captive in a haze of smoke that ruined her lungs.
          That rough-textured Seventies suburban house, rendered the colour of clay, with the slow-combustion stove that was never lit, is unforgettable. Memories of cold-water showers still chill me. The breeze block privacy partition at the front and the mango tree are also gone, like my tomboy days perched on sticky branches reading a book, absorbed in someone else’s adventure.
          I remember that last year of living at home; Sandra having sex in the shower with Brett when Mum was out, hangovers from too much red wine at poetry readings, house parties making out in a back room somewhere to Fleetwood Mac’s ‘Rumours’ while my Uni buddies were out on the street marching for the ‘right to protest’. It was 1977, and Joh Bjelke-Peterson’s constricted politics stirred civil disobedience, and the streets were alive with unrest in the CBD.  And there I was at Griffith University, a political wallflower, drowning in a dark pool with murder in my heart like a character in a Dostoyevsky novel. Now, my mother’s presence keeps coming back to me in a dream, all Stevie Nicks floating in black chiffon, ephemeral like a spectre.

Travel Journal: Provence to Fort Liberia 4th May 2008
I was on my honeymoon driving through France, an adventure of second-chance love. On the night she wafted into my dreams, we were climbing towards Andorra in the Pyrenees. Oceans of green and fields afire with poppies gave way to rock and limestone, greys, whites, and rusty reds. We stopped next to an old fort and a river in the Valley Tét. I felt the remoteness and isolation of the place billowing up to me, the stone ramparts cold and somber, the fort looking like a prison. Ancient walls seemed to close us in, trapping us in another nation’s story.
          I receded into silence in that intense pressure of rock, solitude, and abandonment. The prison walls stared through rose-framed windows, stirring memories of my mother rocking backward and forwards on the side of the bed, smoking herself to death, telling us she just wanted to die. High on a hill above the village of Villefranche-de-Conflent, that old castle, Fort Liberia, tormented me with dreams of excruciating loneliness.  

July 2023
It’s Thursday on a warm midwinter’s day on the Gold Coast, a day suffused with a milky translucent light flickering on the surface of the Tweed River like suppressed laughter. We’ve just crossed the Queensland border, leaving the roadworks behind, all that thrumming and whirring of machines digging up and remaking Yugambeh land from Burleigh Heads to Tugun. Wollumbin stretches into the sky, watching over us as we drive by, the road curving smooth on the way to Chinderah. Our sister, Linda, is camping there with David, and the clan is gathering. Wendy is next to me, not laughing, her hair hanging long and loose, but clean today.
          The official reunion was back in April, but Sandra has escaped a frosty Goulburn winter for some sunshine. She’s thinner, greyer, and talks with a slur as if she’s been drinking. But she doesn’t drink anymore; no more falling down drunk at family reunions, no more shower sex with Brett. Of course, I don’t say that. When she rang us on that day back in February after years of crickets for calls and texts, we heard what the silence was about. It was tongue cancer, and surgery slicing out the miniature mouldering monster, replacing the diseased part with skin grafts from her wrist. She didn’t want us to know.
          But Pam is missing. We wonder if she’s all right. Then suddenly, I’m stuck in a daydream, the past and present clamouring for attention, like chatter in a crowded room.

Travel Journal: San Gimignano 5th June 2012
Wendy rang from Australia. I was strolling around a park not far from Florence, immersed in the beauty and light of Tuscany. I was thinking of Michelangelo chipping away at the marble until his David was released, of the scheming Medici family and rival Borgias, of Machiavelli and his political machinations, of the Duomo and golden arches of the Ponte Vecchio.
          Pam has just been diagnosed with tonsil cancer, Wendy said.
          I cried, doubled over, rocking back and forth like Mum as I lost my hold on beauty and light. Nearby, the poppies growing outside San Gimignano’s city walls still danced in the breeze, carefree and carmine, but there she was, that troublesome ghost again.
          Later that day we walked the walled city, strategically high on a hill, fortified, reminding me of the ever-present threat of invasion; of the silent bloom once inside me, a deformed cauliflower bomb sitting in my bowel ready to explode, spreading cancer cells unless it was blasted with radiation and smothered in chemo; of sisters experiencing other kinds of cancer, Linda surviving breast cancer’s cold and poisonous touch now Pam, our oldest sister, a non-smoker all her life.

***

July 2023
Linda is sitting in her scooter attached to her portable oxygen, her hair no longer vibrant and tangy with highlights, though her spicy ginger aura remains. She’s still spirited despite a recent fall and a history of major heart/lung issues. We thought we were going to lose her last year, but here she is on her scooter-throne as David refills her Bacardi-and-coke and Sandra and Brett prepare the cheese platter. In the clash and jangle of similarity and opposition, I remember our shrivelled mother with her oxygen tube.

Travel Journal: Amalfi Coast 17th June 2012
On a ruby rose morning in Praiano, the light so intense it hurt my eyes, I sat at a café overlooking the Marina di Praia and ordered bruschetta. That was the moment my life raced backward to a glimmering, the ghost of my mother refracted inside the prism of Amalfi’s flushed and full-bodied light. There in that ruddy Amalfi, where the Mediterranean flashed azure and bathers sat on rocks for sand, she was everywhere, hovering. As the bruschetta came out, all red, rosy and ripe, smothered in oil, salacious and succulent, there she was, winter sun wan before this rubicund deliciousness.
          No doubt it was the humble Bowen tomato she served back home in Queensland, sliced and pinkish, pallid and pubescent in an obscene under-ripe preference, that had ruined me for tomatoes. I never saw or tasted the rich ripeness of a real tomato until that day in Amalfi. Tears came to me as I saw her, wandering around the house at night like a wraith; living but not alive, not sleeping, not talking, not tantalised by life, smoking, always smoking. And there, in the summer sun, an ocean away decades later, a ruby red tomato spoke to me about a life worth living, about savouring every bite, letting the oil drip down chin and through fingers, licking the lusciousness with lusty abandon.

*

July 2023
My mother’s ghostly self is stubborn. She won’t stay in an iridescent prism, no matter how beautiful and distant I construct it. When she escapes, the comfortable version of myself unravels, silencing that erudite writer, that world traveller and adventurer I imagine myself to be.
This is how the avalanche happens.
It begins quietly with a flooding of memory washing away my props, the way a trickle of water can surge into a torrent when it collides with other bodies of water heading in the same direction.
First, Pam is absent, then Linda mirrors Mum in her last days, then Sandra says she doesn’t agree with my description of that dreary three-bedroom house.
‘It was home, not a hovel.’
Wendy asks Jenny if she remembers chasing the cockroaches away, but she doesn’t. And when I ask them to call me Kate instead of Kaye, they laugh and refuse.
Jenny teases me though, and her laughter warms me, as always. She’s not a woman who dissolves into hopelessness.
‘Kayzee the daisy,’ she says, tossing me a moonbeam memory of Mum’s old nickname for me, a once-upon-a-time kind of mother’s love.
When Sandra asks how everyone is going to vote in the upcoming ‘Voice to Parliament’ referendum, I am the only ‘yes’ vote.
Speaking up has always been hard for me. Echoes of Mum calling me stupid reverberate within, scrambling my thoughts. There she is again, walking around the house like a distraught being caught at Hell’s gate, ranting about our failings, calling us ‘sluts’, me, Sandra, and Wendy when we were young teenagers. I interpreted her words as blame for what happened. It wasn’t our fault, I wanted to say, but never did. We were just little kids, six or seven, sitting ducks for predators at the edge of our family.
What happened to you Mum when you were a child? What are the things we don’t know about you, all the things you would not speak of, all the things you cocooned that slowly grew into bitterness?
Now, the flight response, that tricky elision into panic triggered by the sympathetic system screaming danger, run, is so intense I’m clenching my teeth and trying to breathe. I stand and gather my bags. I wish I was somewhere far away. But I’m here, in Bundjalung Country, on a site with a buried shameful colonial history of blackbirding.
David asks, ‘What have the Aboriginals done in the “supposedly” sixty thousand years before Captain Cook?’
I point out that a surviving continuous culture had managed Country without any major wars between language regions and border tribes using diplomatic and cultural skills before the landing. My voice is trembling, and I’m shaking.
I forget to contrast this kind of culture with the history of Western civilisation. I’m remembering all those monuments, Roman aqueducts, bridges, roads, walled villages, and forts built on high ground in Europe. I’m visualising empires and columns of soldiers leaving their mark on the landscape, other nations, and peoples. Like the tomato, stolen by Cortez from the Aztecs. I’m thinking of the roadworks for the M1 upgrade, an army of machines and cranes building roads and bridges after chopping down trees, smothering swamps, and destroying complete ecosystems for ‘progress’.
Somehow, the conversation keeps diverting to land ownership instead of a Constitutional recognition of Australia’s First Peoples with an advisory Voice about concerns in Indigenous communities. I can hear my heart yammering away in my chest.
I talk about the difference between Western and Indigenous thinking regarding land as a resource, something to be possessed versus custodial commitment. My words seem to drop into the space between the stars, unheard.
Sandra, Brett, and Wendy see me struggling and start packing up my camp chairs.
I end up sobbing in Sandra’s arms, feeling ineffectual, helpless in all this difference in memory and worldview, this reality of impending death, and memories of our unknowable mother eaten up from the inside.
          As we leave, Linda calls out that she loves us.
On the way home, cockatoos screech across a coral sunset, pearlesque in their larrikin flyby, waking the silence. I envy their aerial perspective. Clouds puff across the sky, changing shape and colour, wafting like smokey illusions, reminding me of Mum and her essence still in the stratosphere of our lives.
          Wendy says she’s a bit overwhelmed too.