Hope amid the silence

What’s on the other side of silence: darkness, or hope? Or might it be both?

Silence is golden, so the cliché goes, a cliché being a cliché because at its core it is true, or partly true. But the fact is silence can also be a shadow, more, a shifty, dark, impenetrable black mass. Of all people, it’s our fiction writers who know about silence, know it only too well.

We need silence to read, to immerse ourselves in the work of others, to learn, to admire, to be moved. But we also need silence to dream and think and plan our own stories. We need silence when we’re about to jump over the edge – what a cliff it is; will we fly or fall? – and put pen to paper, or fingers to keyboard, however it has to be done. We need silence as the words begin to flow, as the characters and their story twist here and there, sometimes everywhere. We need silence when everything starts to unravel: when characters misbehave or fade into the fog; when plots tangle like lantana; when the whiteness of a blank page or screen becomes blindness.

Somehow, miraculously, if the gods are on our side, it comes together in the end, the story is finished, and perhaps, just perhaps, someone wants it enough to make it public, to launch it out into the world.

And then – and then what exactly?

The silence changes form, that’s what, the darkness comes, the blackness. After those days and weeks and months and years of sculpting, unearthing, fossicking, erasing, reshaping, losing, winning, turning, straightening, polishing, to the point that the fictional world is now as real as the world down the street. But once the finished words are on the published page, more than likely – oh this is the terrible truth – nothing will happen. The sun still rises, the sun still sets, and in-between there’s the same old hours.

Amongst the silence – the good sort and the merciless – there has to be hope. That the story, being like a prayer or a chant or even just a simple little wish, will go and do good things. Perhaps in response someone will say a kind word, even a blunt but honest one, and this will make the writer’s day. And it just might be enough to send the writer back into the silence one more time, to dream up another story, to do it all again. Despite themselves and everything they know.

(First published in Panorama, The Canberra Times, 20 April 2013.)

Loathing the lantana

There’s something on my mind.  It’s not the Global Fine-thinking Crisis (oh, have I misunderstand that acronym?) or the hole in the ozone layer or most people having no idea about apostrophes, but – drumroll please – it’s lantana.  Yes, I’m worrying about a plant.  And this plant is worrying me because earlier this year I spent a month on a coastal stretch of the Shoalhaven River, and despite that hinterland being so spectacular when viewed from a distance, extraordinary even, there’s a problem, one caused by this feisty, feisty weed.

I was down there with a small group of artists: a print-maker, an animator, an oil painter, a composer, and a performance artist.  Whilst we all dreamily worked away on our projects, we did cross paths, and after we enquired about each other’s mental health, the conversation always turned to the lantana infestation on the river banks, in the low-lying scrubland, even up on the less accessible ridges, less accessible to us though very accessible to Lantana camara.  And in nurseries this thing goes under the hardly evil names of ‘Irene’ and ‘Dallas Red’.  And to hear that it has been ‘recognised’ as a Weed of National Significance – well, that just gives the impression that it’s in the same league as Holden utes, Akubra hats and blue singlet tops.

Did this weed detract from the feel of the landscape we were working in?  Yes.  Did we wish someone would come along and get rid of the nasty, nasty thing so we could have the beautiful landscape back?  Yes.  Were we trying to justify its existence by saying that for 160 years the Shoalhaven has been in the process of modification so this was just a part of that?  Yes.  Whose land is this anyway?  No idea.  Aren’t most of us ‘weeds’, claiming and rearranging?  Absolutely.  I even tried arguing that there’s a fantastic Australian film called Lantana, and Ray Lawrence, the film-maker, had used this particular plant as a symbol of how our lives tangle and sometimes strangle – couldn’t we be similarly inspired?  Apparently not.

I must confess that after a few days I began taking things into my own hands, literally: I wrenched out smaller plants; I madly decapitated larger bushes; and once, after I’d drunk too many cups of tea, I ran outside, found the nearest seedling and gave it a good golden dose – it felt appropriately offensive at the time.  Of course, none of this can really make a difference, but it did make me think I was doing my bit, even though for every step I made, ‘Irene’ and ‘Dallas Red’ took us a thousand steps backwards – or is that forwards? – into a weed-infested world.

But you do have to laugh.  In the last week I was down on the river a curator dropped by and asked how we were going.  When we described our concern (is ‘heartache’ a better word?) for the invasion that was going on around us, she said, ‘You must realise that lantana is just so…so… obnoxious’.  Perhaps she meant ‘noxious’, but maybe Lantana camara really is one of the most offensive plants imaginable.  Except it’s not imaginable, or imagined – it’s very real, and becoming more and more so.  And even the artists are worried.  And that’s a worry in itself.

(First published in Panorama, Canberra Times, July 18 2009)