When your life is most real, to me you are mad; when your agony is blackest, I look at you and wonder. Friendship is good, a strong stick; but when the hour comes to lean hard, it gives. In the day of their bitterest need all souls are alone.

Olive Schreiner

Sometimes a sparrow of hope flutters in my ribcage and I can’t help that. Even here, even after everything, when all I have left is this journal they’ve asked us to keep. Still that sparrow stirs.

We can dynamite the past, or let it die slowly, one wilting breath at a time, but either way it never leaves us. By the time I was old enough to understand there were places other than home, and now, I was already longing to leave. Forever tugging to loosen the cord. Of course today, like all survivors, I’d give anything to go back. The past and the future are the same in that way, as are home and the unknown — we desperately yearn for them, unless we’re in them. And then all we want is to travel from one to the other.

Do you remember? Can you still feel it like I can?

Our bare feet planted on smooth underwater stones as the Cotter River coursed around them, cold with the memory of snow from the high Brindabellas. Water pinching at our heels and quickening away. Crushing crisp eucalyptus leaves between our fingers and letting the torrent take them. Back when you could put your ear in the streaming water and gulp, feel it flood pure down your throat. Even then the summer wind buffeted like a bushfire.

Weekdays we’d BMX bike home from school under the cobalt bowl of sky, wheeling through clouds of sweet Cootamundra wattle. Magpies swooping and gouging our scalps when we forgot to wear our Stackhats. Instead of going straight home we’d dump our bikes on the edge of the eucalyptus plantation and go walking through the crackling cast-off skin of the trees, you singing to scare away snakes while razor-edged tongues of lemongrass licked at our calves, leaving slivers of blood on our skin. Searching for the strongest walking sticks to beat the bush back. When I learnt at school that snakes don’t have ears, you said: “it’s a spell, not a song, doesn’t matter if they hear it.” I thought: my big brother is magic.

Remember how the bush was everywhere, back then? Back when there was still a place called Canberra? Before Mum passed away and everything started unravelling. Before the wildfires that burned every summer until they never went out, never took a breath from burning, just found new fuel, new forests they’d never burned before, blew hotter and hotter, going back over old ground after it regenerated with different vegetation types, vegetation that believed it could survive the new conditions. Because the land is like that, it’s like us — it wants to grow and live, against all odds, against better judgement. Gave us hope, that land instinct.

But as more and more habitat scorched blood-red to black, extinctions piled up, like driftwood and debris accumulating in a waterway, damming the tide. Until the firestorm that wiped out the last of the orphaned forests and all but a final generation of birds.

“Grace, it’s horrible, you don’t want to see it,” you said when you returned from surveying the damage, taking photographs from an army helicopter. We were drinking whisky at Dad’s old cabin on the South Coast — we’d lost him in the last heatwave and hadn’t yet brought ourselves to sell the place.

“Show me, Jacobin,” I said softly across our old pine kitchen table, and it was like we were kids again, me tugging at your sleeve, whining to be brought into your world. From above, the land was a tender, battered body. Ridges curved as a fetus, nursing wounds of blackened dried blood.

Those last birds still called out for each other, their caws striking out into pale mornings, searching out mates and protecting their chicks until there was nothing left to seek, nothing to protect. One by one, nature fell silent. (Did I write that the sparrow is hope? I fear it might only be instinct.)

[…]

When people in here ask where I’m from in Canberra, and I say Kaleen, they say “oh” and nothing else. If they haven’t already been to that quiet little suburb, and they almost certainly haven’t, they’ll never see it now.

“Kaleen means water in Wiradjuri,” I tell them, now that it is too late. I remember Dad telling us that, and: “we’re just visitors here.”

A survivor’s hindsight is a wretched, futile vantage point. “We never learned the language of this place, at least if you’re a tourist you buy a phrasebook and a map,” I said last week to one of the Watchers here — “counsellors” they call themselves, but they’re Watchers to the rest of us — and she nodded sagely, surely filing it away mentally so she could scribble it down later and report it to whoever. But I don’t care anymore. I know they record me; I know they are reading this journal even as I write it — cameras trained on the pages. But it’s impossible, this understanding. I have to get it out, to write it out of my head. Perhaps there is freedom on the other side.

[…]

After school I travelled far from this country and was awed by Europe’s galleries and architecture. I gripped a sightseeing guidebook atop a red bus in New York and felt the glory of a thousand cultural references, remembered them as if they were my own history. I gushed to you over email, there’s so much history here, Jacobin, it feels so different to home. Your response: Grace, come on. The history of this country isn’t held in maps or buildings. It’s in bones, in bodies, in land and memory. Stories. If you can’t feel it, that’s your problem. Doesn’t mean it isn’t here.

“This place already has a name,” the Yolngu people said when the English erected their road signs. Did I read that somewhere or did you tell me?

[…]

Streets in Kaleen were named after rivers so now the old map reads like a directory for a graveyard, as if all the dead, disaster-prone rivers had been dragged to their final resting place in that unassuming suburb. I guess that’s why they’ve banned the old maps. Don’t want us memorialising what’s lost.

1. Here lies the mighty Mersey, pride of Tasmania: now disfigured and diseased, her former grandeur lost since the Great Storms broke her banks and submerged Devonport and beyond.

2. Here rests the deceased Diamantina: her veins long splintered from the Queensland Dry but we remember that her blood in the wet years, that ancient best blood, flowed all the way to Kati Thanda-Lake Eyre.

“Grace! The Diamantina runs along the indentation of an asteroid!” You phoned me one day before the story broke in the papers — a friend of yours was on the team that discovered it. “The impact is still there, buried deep beneath the surface, in the Earth’s crust. The only visible clue is the river’s circular course in this one particular spot. Three hundred million years ago! And it’s still controlling the course of a river. Isn’t that incredible?” You always had that same magnetic energy. Mum told me you had it from the moment you were born.

For me, you arrived fully formed, otherworldly, already five when I came into existence. When we were kids, I felt you must have materialised into this world from the jaws of a sphinx or a Tasmanian Tiger — some creature speaking of myth and mystery, some creature that walks from the moment it can breathe. But in fact we were both born in the same ordinary place: Royal Canberra Hospital, on the far banks of Lake Burleigh Griffin. A grand name for a brown-brick box. I always hated that I was so ordinary — I longed for a different history, a tale of adventure or strife, or at least some moments of danger where the cord was strangled around my delicate neck and everyone wondered and hoped against hope that I’d make it.

Do you remember Dynamite Day? It must have been winter (remember winters? encrusted grass like glass underfoot? the slow softening into spring?) because that day for me begins with the bleached stare of a cold sun angling around the curtain-edges of our bedroom window. We still had Mum but she didn’t come with us that day, she thought it was morbid. They were tearing down the hospital where we were born and I remember wondering if you had something to do with the whole idea — you were frenzied, all pulsing forearms and jittery fingertips. Dad was so appalled they were blowing up the hospital that he insisted we go watch.

“It’s the birthplace of most of Canberra’s residents,” he said, glad-wrapping sandwiches ready for our picnic opposite the blast site. “You can’t just tear down a building that held so many first breaths.”

The government had sold it as a spectacle and encouraged people to come watch — such strange ideas of nation-building back then. I had never seen so many people outside on a winter morning — we were all crammed up against each other, trying to get a good spot. Dad somehow got us to the edge of the water and for a moment it stretched taut and gleaming as a pane of glass — the lake that was usually ruffled by the wind and paddle boats. I leaned over the concrete edge and saw my reflection like a spectral twin iridescent before me, pressed motionless beneath the glossy surface.

As if ice, my twin shattered with the first blast — a thunderclap — and the air clanged with metal on metal. A second crack flung me backwards (was I flung? Or did I fall, terrified?) and through the blare and shouts I lost everyone. Then: a serene white ribbon of sound. The sky was a vacuum, inhaling all our breaths.

Eventually I found you, felt you fizzing near me. Tried to hold your hand but you were too jam-packed with excitement to stay still long enough for me to grab you. Cold smoke stormed up around us like we’d invoked the ghost of an ancient bushfire. Dad was lost in it. Through the haze I remember serrated shrapnel catching on the wind-peaked water in the after-minutes, skidding and splonking, some dropping into the lake and some slicing the air around us. Dad didn’t say much on the car ride back, but his low voice split the silence to say Jacobin. Keep your hands still.

Later, when I was meant to be reading, I snuck behind the timber-shutter lounge room doors and overheard the television talking about a girl born on my birthday, in the Canberra hospital, killed by shrapnel that day. A terrible tragedy, it was saying, a horrible accident — not the dynamite, that was deliberate, of course. But the death. Unforeseen. The broadcast ended with a mention of the new National Museum to be erected on the site. Dad was making the sounds I’d hear again a few years later when Mum died — a wounded animal, defeated and bone-tired and ready for it to be over.

“It could have been us,” you said, back in our bedroom. Voice softly pulsing in the dark.

I kept thinking about all the babies born in that brown box, our first breaths now pressed beneath all that rubble. And that girl’s last breath too. A breath just like mine.

Dynamite Day tore like a twister through our lives. To me it was causal, but I suppose that was just the magical thinking of a child: to believe that one’s life is at the centre of some cosmic maelstrom. Still, once the cold smoke cleared, everything that survived was damaged. Tilted off axis. Soon after, we found out Mum was sick, and she was dead within a year. Then you left for a scholarship at Oxford — my brilliant brother as Dad always said: “destined to save the world or die trying.”

[…]

But I’m a woman of many millions of breaths now. The distorted window-glass shows me a refracted image — a separated, liminal sort of being, a creature of the past and of the future, waiting to pass over. Sometimes she looks like a child. The window handle sits slightly askew, as if long-ago hands fussed at its difficult catch and gave up, moved on. I’ve never been able to budge it. Old paint flecks along the edges of the window panels, remnants from the time this was a university, when we had universities. Remember the student protests we went to before they were outlawed? Hand-painted signs teeming down Northbourne Avenue, feet crowding the steaming bitumen — there were so many of us then, shouting down the vaulted sky. Before we were made outlaw, declared mad.

No one will paint this window again. Not since the netting went on, enclosing all these reluctant souls, waiting for our ends to arrive and usher us along. The black web is a grid against the world: I feel I am looking through a camera viewfinder, imagining the lives beyond this place. I can see the drones buzzing in and out of low-slung clouds. Is anyone still living in the wild? Are you, Jacobin? Rarely, a wing-like shadow catches the edge of my vision but I can’t say if it’s a bird.

The netting is for our protection, we are told, and certainly it keeps us from escaping the spectres watching from within the moulded glass.

[…]

“What language do you speak there … Australian?” someone once said to me — I was somewhere (where?) soon after finishing university, travelling, those days when we could simply book our own flights, follow our own desires. I can’t remember where this happened because the memory is cosmopolitan, perhaps a hostel — one of those anywhere, everywhere places from the old world.

“There’s no such language as Australian,” I laughed. “Our language is English.”

Years later I realised I didn’t say: if any language can be said to be Australian it’s not one but hundreds of languages and I speak none of them. In fact, they’re not mine at all.

My only language is an imported tongue better suited to describing the soggy grey-green mornings of a foreign place than the decanted daybreak over Kaleen, over water in Canberra, that meeting place in the bush: the way the light falls filtered through the sky, yellow and dewy, a morning that sounds and feels as much as it looks, sounds like crisp dry scrub underfoot and feels like the finest veil on skin.

It’s a question that haunts me: what was lost first, the language or the land?

[…]

They keep telling me to write about you so here it is, because what difference can it make now: you were one of the last of the scientists to lose your job, and I could understand why you needed to leave, as the death threats got worse and you lost friends. After the final flooding of Jakarta I never heard from you again. I like to imagine you would have known that storm was coming and found somewhere safe to live out your days, but maybe you were sick of running from the inevitable, and perhaps there was peace in that for you: sinking slowly with the city.

They asked us to keep these journals to remember the old world and let it go. To name and release our demons. But now I’m coming to the end of my notebook and I can’t let it go. Or perhaps this is my act of letting go: I know they will read this and make of it what they will.

When we were kids, you would read my stories and tell me what you thought of them. If you were to read this notebook, you would say: this story feels incomplete. Does she find her brother, is he still alive? Is it he who is missing, or she? Does the world find its way again? If this was just a story and not the sad circular way of life, you would demand I write an ending, something to resolve this unfinished, unfixable feeling that could be the beginning or could be the end. But what if there is no grand finale? No explosion to plunge us into a last spangled darkness? What if it’s just us, gradually flagging, seeking someone to lean against as the light leaks away? Perhaps there’s something in that — something solid. Perhaps that’s how it ends, with that hopeful instinct, yes instinct: a tender seeking.

I can’t travel to the world beyond this window; I must imagine. The near-night air is like the old mornings: silver, loosening like gauze curtains being slowly drawn apart — someone offstage is pulling the cord, face upturned, hand over hand, drawing the night open. From above, the dead waterways are dark veins on old skin but in my mind they light up like a heatmap in the darkening, warm blood unseen but surging from the heart. If the drones were to capture my image through this window, they would record my grey hair and withering skin. A woman nearing her last breath sitting alone, lungs deflating gradually with age. But they can’t capture this: something stirring within, a restless wingbeat. A bird growing more insistent as its cage closes in.