A BLEAK MIDWINTER MONOLOGUE (a ballad of fire and ice)
I was born in the dusty Riverina; known well amongst farmers and rangers for her flat plains, relentless heat, and ample rivers leading to abundant wool and fertile lands. She is perhaps lesser known for the secrets that are concealed amongst her crops and the blood that feeds her soil. The Riverina is considered part of the Australian 'bible belt', a region in which Christianity is a fundamental belief and inhabitants tend to hold uncritical allegiance to the literal accuracy of the bible. Carnage, the primordial kind. The gap from which the earth grew. The mudcrack amidst the drought-ridden Riverina dirt is the gap from which I grew. I suppose I was doomed from the start.
I made the pilgrimage back to Australia over December, sold on sentiment and sun. My parents abandoned the sticks a long time ago for a satellite suburb more south. Whilst there was substantially less sun and probably more sentiment than promised, it was a blessing to see my sisters and not-sisters and now-strangers whom I once loved.
The Australian sun is not the only thing in my blood. Ironically, my paternal lineage descends from the great North; Norway, Germany, so far as the Scottish Isles. It’s colder up there. Darker. Days cut in half. An unshakable chill in the marrow of your bones. Snow that I, a daughter of drought, never dreamed was so full of sludge. It’s colder up here, too, as I write this from a table with a faux marble top, swinging on a chair with a broken leg that rocks back-and forth and then left-to-right each time I reach for my cup of too bitter tea, sat in my usual corner of Cafe Boheme. My beloved bistro. My beloved Soho. My beloved London, the city I’ve hailed as home for just about three years. I've always felt detached from my Australianness, eager to escape the second I'd saved enough money to buy a plane ticket up north. I could write a whole bunch of things about what it means to be a perfect little runaway, the abandonment of my home soil my perfect little crime, but musician Nick Cave said it best.
“When I’m dead and gone and they put my remains in the ground, it will more than likely be into British soil that I’ll go - because the life I have built is here […] but the essence of those dusty, mortal remains will be fully and resolutely Australian. […] What makes up the Australian character now I can’t claim to know […] but I recognise the essential Australianness that was baked into me by a brash Victorian sun in almost everything I do, everything I create.”
Everything. Always, everything. Forever. That sun in my blood that persists, despite the ice in my bones. In spite of it, probably. I fear this pas de deux of my innards is my pièce de résistance. A cruel joke. A lukewarm fate. An ancestral masterpiece.
A few days into my pilgrimage, a whiskey-warmed conversation in a little Fitzroy bar with an old friend and two strangers led to faith - as it often tends, when you’re a cradle Catholic who left the church and then returned after finding God again in that one sticky summer you had everything. Sun on your skin. Hands in your hair. Tongue on the inside of your cheek. Gin in your blood. More liquor than you knew what to do with. Oh God, take me back. Hungover and sharing marzipan cake in the monastery. Arguing about literature in the cloisters. Kissing the pretty boy in the pretty bed while the others pretended to sleep. I digress. The perfect strangers in the little Fitzroy bar were responsible for my introduction to Nick Cave (and his infamous Bad Seeds). I learned that he too was raised in an overtly religious rural Australia. I learned that he too was drip-fed literature from the greats by a parent who was also a teacher. I learned that an amalgamation of his run-ins with the wrathful God of the Old Testament and the transcendent words from his father’s books and that relentless and never-ending Australian sun stoked a fire within him so he too had no other choice than to write.
Of course, I was informed of all this after I gave the obligatory spiel on my feral roots as an Australian who chooses to articulate her vowels. Australians never believe my Australianness. Can you believe that? Always having to prove myself. What are they looking for? I can shear a sheep. I can walk over fire barefoot. I can scale a tall tree in just seconds.
A boy I used to love once told me you can smell it on me. My frozen core. The ice in the marrow of my bones. A primal kinship with the winter, despite my belligerent protests and cardinal worship of the sun. Imposter, sings both the soil and the snow.
And would you look at that. We’ve come full circle.
Here is a little playlist to help you with the cold. If you’re up here, that is, with me. If you’re down under, save it for later, or close your eyes and pretend. (You're good at pretending. I know it. We have to be.)
Anyway. I hope you’ve been keeping well, whatever the season.
An unblemished new year. What will you do with it?
Most ardently, through fire and ice,
Dakota.