Words after a while
There are 89 named mountains or hills in the region where I live:
(Mount Strathbogie-Mount Skene-Mount Enterprise-Mount Terrible-The Paps-The Governor- Mountain Ash-Mount MacDonald-Mount Stirling-Mount Samaria-Mount Matlock-Bald Hill-Mount Clear- ProctorHill-The Bluff-Mount Timbertop-King Billy No 1-Wombat Hill-Mount No 3-Mount Thorn Mount Magdala-Bald Hill-Mount Lovick-Mount Winstanley-The Nobs-Mount Shillinglaw-Basalt Nob- High Cone-Hat Hill-Mount Victor-Whisky Nob-Corn Hill-Mount McKinty-The Monument-Big Hill-Son of a Bitch-Mount Battery-Mount Eadley-Stoney-Square Top-Crosscut Saw-Red Hill-Bald Hill-Mount Darling- Geelong Hill-Golden Mountain-The Horell Top-The Bald Hills-Rocky Point Lookout-Flourbag Hill-The Pinnacle-Johnston Hill-Matlock Hill-Tells Mountain-Chinaman Hill-Vinegar Hill-Mount Russell-Enigma Hill-School Hill-Jury Hill-Mount Singleton-Round Hill-King Billy No 2-Red Hill-R2 Spur-Scenic Viewpoint- Bald Hill-Clear Hill-Cherry Point-Mount Stander-Silver Top-The Pinnacle-Wild Dog Rocks-Mount Howitt- West Peak-Castle Rock-Square Head-Jinny Harrops Hill-Burnt Hut Knob-No 3 Mount-White Hill-Claire Hill-Glenroy Hills-Sunflower Hill)
They read like what they are, named by white men, colonists. Such names elide the native cadences of language. What might their names and shapes sound like without the interventions of white men from faraway lands? This is Taungurung Country, always was, always will be. The Taungurung speak the true languages of this landscape. I wish I could hear, feel the heartbeat of hills and mountains. A steady thrum or pulse.
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The above is from the composition fragments from my WIP, Preludes for an Ending. I’m not quite sure where it goes yet. Most of the composition fragments have been carefully mosaicked into place in the manuscript, but it’s at the point where I see what’s missing, what might be added.
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I don’t know where the time has gone, or where it goes.
I haven’t been putting words away here, or really elsewhere. I have been working hard with the rest of the volunteer committee of Mansfield Readers and Writers Festival, which is finally coming to fruition in a week and a half. You can find out more about that if you google the name.
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I spent a magical week at Varuna, The National Writers’ House, in the Blue Mountains from September 8-15 for the 2025 Climate Fellowship. If you ever get the chance, you should run, not walk, to experience the bliss of a week’s uninterrupted writing time (it was editing and finessing for me), among stellar Australian writers. We spent evenings by the fire, discussing where climate writing can be published now, especially since the very sad announcement about the closure of Meanjin Quarterly. There was also a lot of talk about how we ensure we’re fostering a sense of hopefulness in our writings, even as we christened ourselves an ‘anguish’ of climate writers. We had a roundtable talk with Jessica White and Amanda Niehaus from Science Write Now, and I had a lovely chat with Tegan Bennet Daylight. What a week it was! The staff for the Blue Mountains Writers Festival were also madly at work in their office outside the big yellow house that is Varuna, on their own upcoming festival, a huge endeavour of massive scale compared to the one I’m involved with, so if you are around at the end of October, be sure to look that up, too.
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I’m thinking about the shape of my days going forward, after the festival. I’m thinking about this book of mine, ‘Preludes for an ending,’ the second excerpt of which (it’s actually the first, but it doesn’t matter, they can be read in any order) can be read in the current, penultimate edition of Meanjin—a heads up, it seems you can read for free on the website for the moment, and perhaps until the end, and perhaps the entire archive. I can’t wait to be data-scraped, again. Speaking of which, you can read my piece, ‘Extinctions’, about AI and the lyric essay on Island Magazine for free online at the moment, too. What’s next? The North American version of my book, Vessel: The Shape of Absent Bodies is out with Assembly Press in January, so it’s exciting to have a second life for that work. The cover has been revealed; you can see it below.
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I don’t know what comes after all that. Do any of us, though?
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Sorry I have been so very quiet on here. There will be more words.
