2025

Countries visited: three

Plane flights: 12

Nights away from home: 120

Most-liked photo on social media: these ones, of me and Mike a few weeks before our wedding, taken by Oli Sansom. (All photos in this post not by me are by Oli).

Subjects taught: two

Students who never came to class but who I had to pass anyway because their submitted work was frustratingly amazing: two

New tattoos: four

Residencies complicated by institutional inability to respond adequately to a houseless person: two

Workshops run: two

New pieces of writing published: four

Most words written in one day: eight thousand

Favourite photo I took: this one, which I shot as a cover reference for ‘The Water Takes.’

Most played song: ‘Your Mum’ by Ruby Gill.

Number of books read: 36

Of which, the most enjoyable: ‘The Fires of Heaven’, by Robert Jordan.

Best films I saw: ‘Holy Motors’, ‘Sanatorium’, ‘The Silence of the Lambs.’

Best TV shows I watched: ‘Common Side Effects,’ ‘Severance,’ ‘The Pitt.’

Shows and films I booked for and then failed to attend because I was so exhausted: 22

Most fun I had at work: Shooting for Nounish’s ‘Three Artists’ series.

Best workshop I took part in: Ginklet’s ceramics workshop, where Mike and I made excellent, weird little guys.

Best exhibition I saw: Gerhard Richter at the Fondation Louis Vuitton.

Favourite image I shot for work: this still, of a roadkill wombat, in Kandos.

Submissions (including writing and art prizes, open calls, grants, calls for papers, residencies and labs): 19

Of which, successful: two

Weight fluctuation: eight kilograms

Menstrual cycle fluctuation: thirteen days

Days on which I exercised: 202

Weddings: one

Of which, my own: one

Funerals: one

Friends diagnosed with cancer: two

Dreams in which I was so overcome with anxiety, stress and despair that I woke up clenching my teeth: nineteen

Best cheap purchase: a tube of jasmine mint Marvis toothpaste. Absolutely delicious.

Highlight of the internet this year: this monkey. I cannot tell you how funny I find this image.

Number of emails in my inbox that contained the word ‘sorry’: 259

Current HECS debt: $70,284.43

Mysterious blind tasting sessions of mysterious nut milks I participated in: one

Outrageous invite-only gyms I was invited to join and toured purely so I could report back to the group chat: one

Best thing I ate: vegetable tagine with couscous and merguez sausage, at La Collective Parisienne.

Last year’s new year’s resolution:
Whenever possible, be this dog:

This year’s new year’s resolution:
Don’t schedule so many things, you bloody idiot.

Defining word for 2025: service

Moments that stand out:

January

I am playing my friend Nate’s drum kit, blindfolded, with the sticks taped to my hands. I’m filming it as part of a PhD work. Nate wanders in when I’m done. ‘You know,’ he says, ‘that sounded a lot like jazz.’

As Mike drives at 80 km an hour, a glossy black spider emerges from behind his driver’s side car mirror. It wobbles frantically on the face of the mirror for a minute or two, then is flung out on its own web, where it waterskiis on the air momentarily, then sweeps away behind us.

At Melbourne Central, a beauty brand runs a giveaway via a giant gumball machine. I pull out a ball. The staff member manning the machine yells, ‘You’ve won a facial massager! It’s worth two hundred dollars!’ He is genuinely thrilled.

In a shop, Jordan carefully rolls up the sleeves of my jacket, as though I am a toddler about to go outside to play.

A friend comes over to borrow some linen, after their breakup leaves them without bedding. I ask, ‘Would it help to hold Mike’s sword?’ They brandish the sword in the air like a Viking.

At the Buddhist centre, a man talks about his anger at his ex-wife, who is treating both him and their children badly, dangerously. He is ashamed, he says, for the anger he feels. He is trying to find equanimity. I burst out, ‘But in situations like this, anger is warranted! You should be angry! Your children are at risk!’ Everyone else in the room exchanges looks and I sit back, chastened.

David Lynch dies. Mike and I sit on the sofa and have a little cry. A few days later, we join a global meditation in his honour. What a beautiful way to mark a life, a death.

At the William Basinksi gig at the Substation, the music is underscored by the sounds of shoes squeaking on the floor as people try to get comfortable, sitting crammed together in the hot room.

February

I film in the middle of the road, late at night. Two separate cars come and run me off the road, just to be dicks. I find it difficult, at such moments, to believe in the fundamental goodness of humans.

The rowdy audience at the Old Bar Toots reunion gig becomes pindrop silent as Giuls sings the first verses of ‘in My Defence’, acapella, arms lifted to the sky.

I run in 35 degree heat at the local track. The sprinklers are on, and I join a family in running into the water’s path to drench ourselves.

After reading a reference in a Douglas Gordon catalogue, I watch the 1903 video of Topsy the elephant being electrocuted and spend the rest of the afternoon swamped with despair.

I wake up at 5 am to catch a flight to Sydney. Mike is meant to be driving me, but he has a terrible cold. I say I’ll get an Uber.
‘Don’t go,’ he says.
‘I have to,’ I say.
‘Marry me,’ he says.
‘Okay,’ I say.
‘Good,’ he says.
‘I really will,’ I say. ‘I really will marry you.’
His eyes shine, mouth open. He feels so much better that he drives me to the airport.

The wombat that lives under the house at Bundanon hides behind one of the house stumps, then peeks out at me, hides again, peeks. The frog in the shower launches itself from the shower head to a bug on the wall with perfect, lip-smacking precision.

March

I kiss Mike on Gertrude Street. ‘Thank you for reminding me that life keeps happening out here,’ he says, and points to his head, ‘even when I’m stuck in here.’

By the end of the Nounish shoot, I am shaking with adrenaline. It is a good feeling, this whole-body immersion, creating something enjoyable to a deadline, just for its own sake.

We drag our tiny table into the middle of the living room to play Magic: The Gathering with friends. At some point amidst the general banter, Josh claims to ‘hate the moon’. This is such a ridiculous statement that it becomes the evening’s central theme.

A Monday night trade: I let Mia inject my Ozempic to help with her fear of needles; she gives me her wedding dress, which fits perfectly.

We go to Reptile Encounters for Mike’s birthday. An enormous python slowly, slowly tightens around his neck. We meet a golden possum who smells like caramel. Jess is so overwhelmed with joy while holding a green tree frog that she nearly cries.

April

A gallery sends out a press release. I read my bio, and think, ‘that’s weird. That’s not the themes of my work.’ I contact the gallery. ‘Did you by any chance use AI to write the artist bios for this?’, I ask. ‘Oh, yes,’ she says. ‘I thought it did such a great job of describing everyone’s work so succinctly.’ ‘But,’ I say, ‘the person my bio is describing doesn’t exist.’

I arrive at a residency, desperately relieved, ready to work. There is a homeless man who has been sleeping in one of the unused cottages. He is acting erratically. I ask for clarification, for a plan. The next day, we are all sent home. The residency is never rescheduled.

At ACCA, Will and Tina talk about non-financial reciprocity, how without it, art dies.

On the morning of my birthday, Mike, knowing that I don’t want any gifts but love opening presents, wraps a few little things – chocolate, a book, an avocado, the latter entirely so I have the chance to emulate this video.

Ian looks at the back of my camera, at the slow-motion footage of an ecstatic middle-aged woman on the giant swing he has created. He tears up. ‘This is what it’s about’, he says.

Ollie, in his comedy show: ‘The theatre is full of landlords watching their tenants dance for them.’

On a beautiful boat off the coast of Tasmania for Jason’s 60th. Annie, one of the crew members, emerges naked from the sea. Blood from a haemorrhoid is running down her leg, leaving a bright trail on the wooden deck. The next day, a humpback whale swims right under us, emerging to spurt air. We marvel at the black, rubbery density of its body in the steely light.

May

I lie in bed, trying desperately to collect the motivation to get up, to work, to be in the world.

We have dinner with John and Georgia. They have a fidget spinner, and we spend a full hour finding different surfaces to put it on to produce different sonic effects, cackling with laughter, and then tilting our heads seriously to judge the results.

I ask my agent what she’s reading. She bashfully admits that she’s currently reading a high fantasy series, ‘The Wheel of Time.’ ‘Oh, I’m reading it too!’ I say. ‘So is Mike!’ ‘Oh, thank god,’ she laughs.

I work on ‘Glug Glug’, a new performance lecture, with Marcus, Ros, Lewis, Tam, each person adding finesse, rigour, precision. I do a showing. I have missed performing, missed the laughter and resonant hums and sub-vocalisations that emerge from an engaged audience, held in one’s palm.

We have dinner with my brother and his wife. We watch an episode of the pottery show ‘The Greatest Showdown.’ The judge weeps whenever he sees a particularly beautiful pot. What a gorgeous quality to have, to allow.

An old lover texts to say they’ve found a love letter they once wrote to me but never sent. Would I like to read it? I say thank you, but no. This is how I know I am growing up.

June

I put together the presentation text for my third PhD milestone, surprised, somehow, at the work I have done, at the thinking, the rigour. I have worked hard.

The day after my milestone, I sit down to watch a presentation and realise that everyone’s faces look like Picasso paintings. I stagger out and one of the other PhD students lies me down in a dark gallery, gets me water and painkillers for the migraine. ‘We’re a community,’ she says. ‘We have to look after each other.’

Jess and Eve come over, ostensibly to do yoga in the living room, but we mostly lie on the floor and talk and laugh. What a relief this is.

I crash my bike on the tram tracks opposite Edinburgh Gardens. A woman stops her car and gets out to make sure that I’m okay. She is wearing the most magnificent furry white boots, which make her look like a English Sheepdog from the knees down.
‘Are you alright?’, she asks.
‘YOUR BOOTS!’ I cry.
‘Oh, thanks. But are you okay?’
‘Yes, but your BOOTS!’
I am fairly sure she thinks I have a head injury. I do not have a head injury. She just has great boots.

I join my brother for the last 6 km of a 60 km run, and stay with him as he pushes through his body’s attempts to shut down. When he takes off his shoes at the end, he has a blister so large that it looks like a sixth toe.

July

In DnD, we play for four hours and manage to open one whole door.

My neighbour backs into my car and totals it. I test-drive a replacement car, only to find out that it has a leak in the back, water damage, probable mould. I fret over whether to buy it. Mike finally convinces me to buy a 2017 version of the same model. I have never had a vehicle that wasn’t at least twenty years old. I feel like a king.

Lewis, Sarah and I launch the first edition of Hidden Door Journal. Strangers come, buy copies and records, stay and listen to the reading, to the music. What a marvel, this community.

On Southbank Boulevard, I drive past three teen boys, all packed onto one bike. One of the boys lifts his hand and points an extremely realistic toy gun at a mother and her child; mimes shooting it. Bang, bang.

At the end of the first class of the semester, Dash comes up, eyes bright. ‘You blew my mind!’ he exclaims. ‘All this has already blown my mind!’

I use lubricant on my face to emulate sweat for a shoot. It isn’t until I’m washing it off that I realise how painful it is, how red and swollen my face is. As though I’m wearing a mask made of red jelly.

Tam and Pete and I sit around the lunch table, all quietly crying over the story of Tam’s mum’s death. Mike looks around, bemused. ‘Why does this always happen with you?’, he asks me.

Emilie pulls her PhD bonnet down over her head for a photoshoot and then discovers that she can’t get out. Xanthe and I descend with scissors, carefully trying to cut her loose.

August

A dinner party discussion: ‘How many people with whom you haven’t been intimate do you think have masturbated while thinking about you?’ We decide that the ideal number is ten.

I watch ‘Sanatorium’ at MIFF. Next to me sits a man and his elderly Ukrainian parents. When the country’s flag is shown on screen, the mother cries out, ‘Slava Ukraini!’ When I talk to the son after the screening, he whispers the same words to me, hand over his heart.

Jacko has to have several teeth removed. He is absolutely zooted from the pain medication. He can’t sit still, seems to have forgotten how to lie down. All night, he paces, crying quietly. It is agony, to not be able to help this poor confused dog.

In Pen and Jason’s hot tub at the farm, Pratyay leans back, absolutely entranced by the stars overhead. Over dinner, when we ask for his moment of the day, he yells out ‘HOTTUB!’ so quickly that we all burst out laughing.

September

In recovery from a gastroscopy, a nurse gives me a glass of water. I take a sip and go to put it on what I think is a shelf, but is actually just air. It clatters to the floor, spilling its contents. The nurse sighs heavily. I slur apologies through the anaesthetic.  

I go bouldering with Luc and Jess, and manage to get stuck halfway up a wall, too high to jump, unable to move in any direction. A staff member comes to rescue me. ‘Huh,’ she says. ‘I have no idea how you’ve ended up in this situation.’ She guides me down, foot by foot.

Mike holds my feet in his hands in the corridor of a four million dollar house as Oli leaps around, snapping photos.

Mike’s eyes tearing up during our vows at our legal wedding. We tell bartenders that we’ve just gotten married, and they give us free champagne, beam at us. Three days later, Jason marries us again, and our friends speak so beautifully that everyone weeps. I grasp the faces of people I love, tell them I can’t believe they’re in our lives. On the dancefloor, as LCD Soundsystem’s ‘All My Friends’ plays, we all clasp hands in a giant circle, then run together into the centre of the hall. It is a perfect moment.

October

In Kandos, Anna and I film footage of roadkill at night, running phone light over the bodies so that they become abstractions of shapes and colour. Bugs move in mouths and eye sockets like they’re dancing. There is a crashed Jeep on the way into town, thrown up on the metal fencing on the side of the asphalt. When I shoot it on the last day, a woman pulls over. ‘Are you okay, love?’, she asks. ‘Yes!’, I shout. ‘It’s not my car!’ Her relief is palpable.

A Greek man stands next to me at the meat fridge at the supermarket, fretting. ‘My wife, she sends me to find the three star beef mince. But I cannot see the star!’ I hand him a packet, show him the rating. He beams his thanks.

During ‘Handle With Care’ at the Fringe, the two rows of young students behind me burst into an entirely uncynical karaoke rendition of ‘Seasons of Love’ from ‘Rent.’ I slump down in my seat, feeling a thousand years old, a grumpy motherfucker.

On the plane to Bali for our honeymoon, we give a box of chocolates to the flight attendant. She thanks us profusely, gives us free champagne, free food. She comes and talks to us. Her abusive boyfriend, who was using her to get a visa, has just left her. She really needed this kindness, she says.

Ketut, the man who picks us up from the airport, tells us about his family, his home, his cows. ‘Can we come and meet your cows?’, I ask. A few days later, we meet his cows, his wife, his parents, his children. Two days later, we are in traditional dress, playing gamelan at a funeral in his village.

We scuba dive, eleven metres below the surface, floating in the glimmering water. Our guide points out coral and fish to avoid, raking his finger across his neck to demonstrate the danger. I look up at the surface of the water and think, ‘what are we doing down here?’

We get massages. As I lie there, I think about how I have no new writing ideas. As the woman rubs oil into my back, and mosquitoes bite my feet, a teenage boy pops into my head. By the end of the massage, I have the first strands of a new book.

At Government House, the aides are trying to hustle everyone out, until I ask if the place is haunted, at which point one of the staff grabs me. ‘YES,’ she says, and pulls me back inside.

At the pub, our friends walk in as Danny is explaining to me the subtle differences between various types of beers. Seeing their faces, Danny cries, ‘She asked me! I swear, she asked me!’

November

I arrive in Paris, at the Cité des Arts. I wander in the dark, jetlagged and misty-brained. Messages come in from Australia. Deaths, pregnancy loss, diagnoses. Heavy, heavy. I feel very far away.

The French teacher makes the beginner’s class rap in French. We, inevitably, fail at this task, and she can’t hide her irritation with us.

I make friends the way children do: based on saying hello, on waving in the corridor, on sitting next to each other. We go to gallery openings, drink free champagne, eat and smoke and weave through dark streets. I sleep for twelve, fourteen hours, and then I work and work out and nap and then sleep again. I am exhausted all the way to my atoms. I drink wine with a Norwegian woman. A mouse runs across the bar floor. I buy Vitamin D and Vitamin B and iron. I sleep.

I find a woman huddled in the corridor outside my studio. I give her a blanket, some food, a cup of hot tea. She rings the doorbell twenty minutes later, demanding more food. I give her the only thing I have: an apple. She takes one bite and throws it to the floor. It is possible to track her movements through the Cité by what is left behind: cigarette butts, food wrappers, puddles of piss.

I go to the hamman at the Grand Mosque, and sit topless, surrounded by half-nude women, rubbing black soap into their skin. In the hottest sauna, there is a pool of icy cold water, and the women lounge around it, dipping a leg or an arm in. It is dimly lit, erotic, transcendent, like an oil painting, a dream.

I go to a Laure Provost talk. As she enters, she makes eye contact with me and smiles.

I research dementia, and alcohol, and flood myths. I read reams of coronial reports. I attend an online Al-Anon meeting, and feel the fluttering, frightened hearts of the women who populate it through the screen. I write, and collate, and edit. I re-read the essay I wrote, which has just co-won the KYD Creative Non-Fiction Essay Prize. I re-read the script for ‘Glug Glug.’ I read a book about a woman whose mother has died, and I think, ‘Nobody cares about your dead mum.’ And then I re-read my writing and think, ‘Maybe nobody cares about your dead mum either.’ This feels suddenly, joyously freeing.

Mike arrives, and my exhaustion melts away.

December

I do the final edits for ‘The Water Takes.’ I have read this book so many times since its first draft and yet, somehow, I am still surprised by my own writing, every time.

I allow myself to start something new. I take out the notes I made in Bali and sit down to write. This first day, I write 4500 words. A week or so later, I think, ‘I can’t wait to go back to that book I was reading,’ and then realise that the world I’m longing to spend time in is actually the one I’m writing. It is a remarkable feeling. By the end of the month, I have written 50,000 words.

Mike and I go to a Christmas market, drink vin chaud, order waffles. The man making churros hears me ordering, and gives us free churros, as prizes for my practising French.  

Mike and I travel to London, for a screening of a new project he’s been working on. We meet up with old friends, drink in pubs with new ones. The threads of possible lives, possible futures. At the screening, Mike is delighted by how many horrified groans the work elicits. One night, as we walk down the street, a fox leaps over a fence onto the pavement. It turns and fixes us in its gaze, then dashes away into the dark.

Marcus comes to stay. He and I walk circles around the Marais at night, talking, talking.

A man at the Cité posts in the group chat about having a piano in his studio. I suggest we organise a Christmas Carols event, and by the end of the day, more than thirty people have signed up. The piano-owner and I meet for coffee. He tells me about moving to Berlin, about being cursed by a witch. We run the Christmas carols, with tea lights all over the grand piano, people crammed in, drinking wine. We sing all the carols we know, and then we shift to popular songs. People from dozens of countries all sing ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ at the tops of their lungs.

Mike walks me to Notre Dame at 10:45 pm on Christmas Eve. I am hoping to get in for the choir vigil, but by 11:30, we’re still outside and the music has stopped, so we turn to head home. Mike looks up, and blinks, and gasps. ‘It’s snowing,’ he says. We hold each other and kiss in the small flurry, faces cold, laughing, delighted.

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