It flashed in my mind, in that place. All blistering heat and screaming children running about ankles and that incessant service bell; another order up. It was some tacky Italian pop hits playlist underscored by wine-drunk women in Louboutin heels. Plates which marred my hands ugly and red. The men in that restaurant – your boyfriend, co-worked, your grandfather – liked to wink as they made a crass, yet socially acceptable joke, eyes lingering as I walked away, who liked to ask:

“Where are you from, love?”

always liked to imagine the look on their faces as I retorted, smugly, “Just up the road.”

Forced them to ask with flushed cheeks or a creased brow “No really. Where are you from?”

Or maybe, just maybe, for once I wouldn’t dignify them with an answer.

But of course, behind my well-practiced smile, my good manners, I would simply suck it up and rationalise that they were just well meaning. Curious even. Perhaps they wondered why my skin wasn’t exactly white or brown, why I didn’t have an accent, how I challenged their cookie cutter perceptions of race?

The answers to their questions were…complicated.

Low tide at the marsh was all muddied feet, the sulphurous rotten-egg stench of peat that lingered even after a wash and a mess of soggy cigarette butts and fishing wire and other utilitarian waste briefly uncovered by the shallows. It was angry fin fish darting around ankles, a few eels or sand white out wonder if you were lucky. Few were these days. The outsiders, tourists with their wide brimmed hats and dollar-store sunglasses exclaimed it was the kind of serenity plastered on a tacky postcard. Albeit slightly blurry at the edges.

The young fisherman, Killian Buchanan – Kil they called him – thought otherwise. Ever the disappointment, Kil’s temperament did not match his namesake and his Pa had uttered more times than he could count on his fingers “Quit daydreaming son, trout ain’t catching themselves.”

It was quite the sight this father and son descending the pier before sunup. Boone: snacking on turnips and grits, Kil dragging along the fishing gear behind him. All scruffy and sharp edges; Boone Buchanan was a hefty man, the kind you would cross the path or avoid prolonged eye-contact with on the boardwalk. Rumour said the marsh had corroded any of the softness left inside of him. But that boy was all green, not natural, not like the marsh.

Curiously tall and scrawny like a string bean, with beady, celery-green eyes that always wandered too much and lingered too long. Always slightly greenish, from seasickness or envy of the life he didn’t lead he was yet to tell.

When my mother was just a girl, she was gifted three precious chicken eggs by the old village storekeeper. They all, miraculously, died.

“I didn’t know you weren’t supposed to keep them in the sun,” she said.

“The damned things. They didn’t crack or break, I was careful and propped them in a small basket along the kitchen window ledge; but still they spoiled and festered. Thus is the nature of love.

Cooped inside the carriage wagon, I watched the countryside, all familiarity and juvenescence recede into the distance. My slow and deliberate breaths; in, out through the mouth, did little to quell my rising nausea. The vehicle reeked of male opulence, with the faint after stench of wives gone by. I wondered if my sisters could be included in the latter. Had Fitcher, in this very wagon, murmured marital promises of tomorrow and tomorrow? Were my sisters, like the damned eggs slowly, but surely rotting away?

This is a philistine desert.

Palm trees and freeways and California dreaming. It’s the tidying, the entertaining, the full belly laughs and sunshine and smoking by the patio. Dinner parties like these last right through Sunday to Monday. No amount of canapes: devilled eggs served on shiny platters can quench their thirst for glasses of Manhattan, Whiskey Sour or whatever it is those people keep drinking. They make empty promises they know they won’t keep - introductions to friends-of-friends, trips to this-or-that restaurant, “we have to do this again!” - it’s all accompanied by vigorous head nodding and more inconsequential lies. I stand. My feet ache. I wander to the back studio to the futon by the lime-green geometric wallpaper bathed in mid-afternoon warmth and plan to take a nap. And life changes in an instant.

The husband liked his cherry crostatas on Thursday evenings. So, the wife started baking at midday.

In the red oak kitchen filled with bottles of jam, pickled radish and sugo prepared in January from when the days were warmer – she donned a twee floral apron and switched on Rai Radio to muffle the breathing of the child in the other room. Her swollen, sun-blotched hands worked floured ingredients into a yellow pastry, buttery and dense.

It would’ve been easier if he was young. Small, naïve, maybe slightly deranged; but you could always call her an imaginary friend. Chalk it up to childhood fantasies.

Perhaps, even throughout adulthood this thing – for he still wasn’t quite sure what this twisted joke was – could at best be an eclectic hobby, niche interest, an alternative worldview. At worst he was a freak, or this was some blasted midlife crisis. Gus could live with the latter. But he wasn’t sure if he could survive this.

The Australian media’s problematic and inimical coverage of Operation Protective Edge has undermined the salience of conflict on public agenda – simultaneously legitimising pro-Israeli discourse and denying Palestinians permission to narrate. Regarded as one of the most complex and long-lasting warfare’s in modern history, Israeli-Palestinian tensions along the Gaza strip in 2014 destroyed 18,000 homes; rendering 100,000 civilians homeless and killed 2,202 Palestinians.

The continued “ethical failure” (Bacon, 2015, p. 17) of mainstream media to scrutinise grossly over-represented First Nation deaths in custody and report with “impartiality and diversity of perspective” (Australian Broadcasting Corporation, 2021) – has relegated “Aboriginal people to the fringes of society” (p. 18).

Older peoples’ civic participation in Australia is simultaneously characterised by a tumultuous democratic climate of socially exclusionary and ageist political policy – while non-governmental organisations promote a new paradigm in gerontology (del Barrio et al., 2018). Considering active citizenship is “an exercise that is sustained by action” (Arendt, 1993, as cited in del Barrio et al., 2018, p. 10) Australia must maintain meaningful and ongoing conferral elderly rights, beyond political participation.

Katherine Mansfield’s Modern narrative tradition developed from the conjunction of outward experience and inner necessity – distinguishing her radical characterisation and phenomenological aesthetics. Reactionary to tumultuous cultural forces including industrialisation, urbanisation and the Great War, Ezra Pound’s imperative “Make it new” (1934, as cited in Stanton, 2022) attempted to challenge the successes prophesised for Modernity in the late-Victorian era.

First, I thought of my Father. Just a boy in that Palestinian refugee camp, building a guitar from “garbage dump” (Winch, 2018, p. 280) timber and scraps of bicycle wire; learning the music by heart and hearing. Perhaps it is self-centred “as listener or reader, [to] organise, interpret and evaluate” (Hyland, 2005, p. 21) Tara June Winch’s non-fiction story through “a speak/listen trade” (Simpson, 2015, para. 3). But, as a hybrid Palestinian slash white Australian, I too learnt “early on that I…didn’t belong everywhere” (Winch, 2018, p. 281).