Hecate articles from May 1998

Hecate archives from May 1998

Living an immoral life - 'coloured' women and the paternalistic state.
May 1, 1998... There are vast populations in northern Australia who refer to themselves as 'coloured.' The inclusive category, 'coloured,' was ubiquitous in official and vernacular vocabularies until Indigenous Australians were released from the paternalistic...

Sculpture. (poem)
May 1, 1998... You stumble across her within yourself just like you do the tin sculptures outside the Craft Council and wonder whose image she was chiselled in these cows look real enough until you come up close Then you hear yourself speak - unexpectedly her...

For the Children of Detroit. (excerpt from 'The City of Detroit Is Inside Me')
May 1, 1998... The killing of children rather than the adults of Detroit makes sense. They are smaller which makes the job easier. They are killing the children in New York, London, Sydney, Paris and Toronto. In every city a child is molested by a relative...

Oceanview Budget Lodge, Western Australia. (poem)
May 1, 1998... In the echoing corridors of pay-by-week hostel afternoon television laughs loud from empty lounge, radios banter off the carpet-muffled brick old men's feet pad slow transit between bathroom, kitchen, heaven. What spirits cling to these rooms...

Post Christmas celebration. (poem)
May 1, 1998... Christmas is cancelled. No hot dinner. No presents. No joyful or triumphant feelings for either of us. Days of 40 degree celsius heat. It may be cooler at the beach. He won't come. I go with my daughter, grandson, feel guilty all afternoon....

Sempre diretto & the art of getting lost.
May 1, 1998... 'Venice is a place where you must lose yourself.' Robert Ullian and Thomas Worthen In the opening minutes of The Comfort of Strangers,(1) the lens of the camera holds for a tantalisingly long, steady moment on a map. It's been framed, this...

'Keeping their secret safe': menstrual etiquette in Australia, 1900-1960.
May 1, 1998... During the early and middle decades of the twentieth century, many Australian women were given little information about menstruation prior to or at menarche, or the first menstruation. However, if they were told nothing else, they were at least...

Sometimes a leafy waterhole. (poem)
May 1, 1998... I'll make it into a poem for you answering, why must I write? Consider me an explorer looking for an inland sea everyone hopes is there: my thirsty camels lead me on, and on - I keep a journal, mostly a history of dust and flies, though...

Harbouring fire. (poem)
May 1, 1998... water seeps through the stem of the day this dry mouth rubbed with words I must remember the tide like an anchor the stubborn set of the cliffs clambering down to peg the windbreak line up the family's towels why I still face their voices...

Song: sea moon waves. (poem)
May 1, 1998... saw some women swimming in the sea swimming timidly - hair not wet, arms not strong spoke to them in the voice of the sea - dive in, plunge, stroke powerfully swim with certainty don't hesitate you have the strength of the sea saw some...

Jobs not words. (poem)
May 1, 1998... A writer (she says she's unemployed). with a sister who's a single mum, a niece, seventeen and pregnant, a nephew who wears a winter school uniform in summer a mother working in a hospital kitchen paid 4 hours for 5. She needs dough to...

On reading the diary of Jane, Lady Franklin, 1791-1875.
May 1, 1998... I come here in search of you, Here, to the shadowlands - Box-brown readers hum with rotund, modern inefficiency. No fragrant dust falling from crumbling pages - Only your words captured on celluloid, Floating suspended in light. Flickering,...

Visite patrimoine I. (poem)
May 1, 1998... Face to face in the Jardin de Sculpture Musee des Beaux Arts in the nipping cold in an avenue of pedestals after the orangerie K.M. was so badly sculpted I didn't recognize her at all. On my way back along the seawall licking salt off my face...

'Full fathom five.' (poem)
May 1, 1998... Menton Man lies folding himself to the left in his skeleton sepulchre- 25,000 years BC he died at forty, his skull a cap of cockle-shells and stag's spit faintly apricot and cream. You can hear his words after storms tossed up onto the beach...

Palais Lutetia. (poem)
May 1, 1998... None of them quite go, clad in gay provencal shades to cheer you up - lamps in every corner. Or, all of them go, but you can read by none, without detaching shades, upgrading lightbulb watts - Madame Leila's lamps in the Menton scholar's...

Banksias. (short story)
May 1, 1998... She lived with a man who didn't notice. Didn't notice the orgy of banksias efflorescing like erect penises that her hands had caressed. Didn't notice the swollen hands, bee-stung, that were the result of her tending. Tear-bright eyes, too, went...

Britain's last line of defence: Miss Moneypenny and the desperations of filmic feminism.
May 1, 1998... I'm a bitch I'm a lover I'm a child I'm a mother I'm a sinner I'm a saint I do not feel ashamed I'm your hell I'm your dream I'm nothing in between You know you wouldn't want it any other way.(1) Meredith Brooks, Bitch Good old Moneypenny....

The language of silence. (short story)
May 1, 1998... Strains of Mahler permeated the air, the childish, yet slenderly thin fingers waved in time to the music with awkward elegance. A child, stunningly fair, with blazing blue eyes, rocked in ecstatic contemplation of the music. Slowly, slowly, the...

Like a heron, fishing. (poem)
May 1, 1998... The old man, tanned mahogany by sun, hunched like a heron fishing, waits for hours on end at the rim of a deep rock pool and gazes in where at high tide slim grey mullet swim. The pool reflects a mask of age, a weather-stained and lined...

Cicadas. (poem)
May 1, 1998... Cicadas in heat-torpid orchards thrum a membrane of pure sound, absorbing ultra-violet, infra-red and gamma rays like sponge, transforming energy to piercing, pulsing unison. I pause for breath beneath a tree the eddies of intensity are like...

Like the first morning. (poem)
May 1, 1998... All we can conceive of immortality is such a morning when the horizon and the sea shimmer half-illusory, limpid as infinity air, water coalesce, and having passed through labyrinths of nightmare we arise refreshed, like wise children with clear...

Farewelling Penni, rude dog and the van. (poem)
May 1, 1998... Rude her journeydog lounges, newly collared on a purple, heart-shaped pillow Choc-chip biscuits, mini Snickers bars and a map cram the glove box A cupboard spills underpants there's no room for worn she intends a Hansel and Gretel trail of tossed...

The witch's daughter. (poem)
May 1, 1998... You grew up in the blizzard of broken plates she never threw, but they smashed anyway on the heads of the undeserving until in time you formed yourself a helmet, a carapace of bone, that glinted like steel and made you seem taller than you were....

Aurora. (poem)
May 1, 1998... Is this your happy ever after, this scentless place, this boring equilibrium? Where I have been the terrors I found made mice of your dragons. Nothing frightens me here. Good Prince, you have killed me with your kiss. I slept for a...

Girl meets boy. (poem)
May 1, 1998... When I saw him that day down on the wharf his muscles informing his shirt as he worked the sun on his neck the wet on his back I fell into love and was happy Mind you I'd have loved almost any man who could handle a boat and a good piece of...

The university hotel. (poem)
May 1, 1998... Stepping the narrow sparrow-lit alleyways wash-slopped cobblestones a steeling sky brick walls hopscotched with stale ivy vines and out on to Lygon to find us some cold Carlton cash Tilley's takes rammies so we hock Norm's suit pocket the profit...

Going back. (short story)
May 1, 1998... My mother always loved the colour blue. It suited her, and reflected the blue of her eyes. She told me once she hoped I would not 'end up like her,' with nothing to look forward to, nothing made of her life. A life, she felt, that was wasted....

Forms of resistance: South African women's writing during apartheid.
May 1, 1998... Every household in the fine suburb had several black servants - trusted cooks . . . faithful gardeners . . . a shifting population of pretty young housemaids whose long red nails and pertness not only asserted the indignity of being undiscovered...

Less. (short story)
May 1, 1998... They stood about uncomfortably. None of them would meet my eye. Mum and Dad were in front of the desk, Dad with a hand on the back of the chair, Mum stooped over her shoulder bag. My husband stood slightly apart, in front of the kindergarten...

Reclaiming a legacy: the dialectic of race, class, and gender in Jessie Fauset, Zora Neale Hurston, and Dorothy West. (female writers)
May 1, 1998... Many significant happenings had those cloisters looked down on, but surely on none more significant than on this group of men and women of African descent, so different in rearing and tradition and yet so similar in purpose. The rod of the common...

Kevy and me. (short story)
May 1, 1998... When I was twenty, and Kevy was twenty three, I had been an inmate in the mental asylum on and off on many occasions since I was fourteen. By this time, no member of my family wanted to have me around anymore, because of my drunkenness. This...

The abortion. (short story)
May 1, 1998... It was 1952. The abortion was one of the most frightening and soul destroying episodes of my life. Not only because of the abortion alone, but because of the two year time span between the abortion and the actual burial of the aborted child....

Visite patrimoine II. (poem)
May 1, 1998... It's on account of her I'm here looking at the signpost Avenue K.M., bending from Villa Favourite on the Boulevard Garavan down to the foreshore road, where she spanked along in Harold's motor, hands on the kneerug. It's THAT villa she lived...