Growing Up Queer in Australia

by Benjamin Law

  Mum and I cross the Darling Downs, drive through towns like Karara, Oman Ama, Yelarbon, Goondiwindi and Boggabilla. These places remind me of where I grew up. Country pubs, flat plains, monocrops and livestock; the quaint, invented points of interest that country people mark with homemade signs to stake a claim on the map. We are here! As a child these things interested me; they’d been shared ground with my mother.

  We stop at a shed in the scrub with a sign on the fence that says ‘Shop’. I order coffee (Nescafé Blend 43). Mum orders tea. I know now I don’t belong in the country. How could I? But I hope these places will point back to some vestige of me – the part that still lives at The Risk, or else died when I left. Mum’s not the only one who doesn’t know where her little man went.

  On the second night we stop at Moree, a popular retiree destination where the Great Artesian Basin burbles up through the earth and tourists berth their caravans and prune in hot water. I’d visited once before on a school trip, en route to Warrumbungle National Park, and learnt that people float more easily in the mineralised water. Tonight the ‘grey nomads’, as my mother affectionately calls them, wrinkle the pool. They grip the island at its centre and let their legs float behind them, occasionally kicking. After the pool closes I break back in and paddle lonely circles in the dark. What in God’s name am I doing here?

  The next day is a bad one. It’s a long straight road between Moree and Bourke. Mum puts on country music and I jam in my earphones. I re-read Pascoe’s book. I want to be alone, to not be. The road unspools like an endless black ribbon. My phone dies and I pull out my earbuds.

  ‘Gosh, it’s so beautiful out here,’ Mum says, seizing her chance at conversation. ‘The land is so flat. You can see forever.’ She gestures at the grazing paddocks giving way to a crop. ‘What do you think that is?’

  ‘I don’t know, Mum – maybe sorghum.’ Then I charge in. ‘Can you imagine what it would have been like before the invasion?’ It’s an accusation, somewhat rhetorical. ‘It’s so fucked that it’s all been clear-felled – that’s why you can see so far.’ I open my window a crack and the wind makes that shrill noise it does when only one side is down.

  Brewarrina is the next town we come to, but the information centre’s closed. There will be no guide. We decide to wait until our return journey to see the traps.

  ‘Oh well, darling. Let’s go look at the old mission,’ Mum says, consulting a pamphlet. ‘It’s just a few kilometres out.’

  ‘Sure.’ I shove in my earphones, even though my phone’s dead, and peer through the window at the dirt road running red. I spot a mob of emus off in the mulga but say nothing. Mum struggles on alone to find the site. We come to a locked gate and she stops the car. It’s obvious we’ve gone too far. Exasperated, she breaks the silence.

  ‘What’s wrong? What have I done?’

  I take a long time to answer. ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Oh come on, Thom, it can’t be nothing. You’re ignoring me. What have I done to you?’

  ‘It’s not you, Mum. I’m just flat is all.’

  ‘No, you suddenly went like this. What have I done? Do you want to come on this trip or not? I can turn the car around—’

  ‘It doesn’t work like that, Mum. It’s not linear, causative. I’m just flat. I don’t know . . . I want to kill myself.’ The beaded seat cover squeals as I face her. ‘I’m really not sure what else to say; and if you don’t get that – that it’s not about you – I’m definitely not going to say anything else. Trust me, if I knew what the problem was I’d tell you. I’d fix it myself. I wouldn’t be here. Can you just leave me alone?’

  ‘Do you want to go back, is that it?’ She’s using her school-teacher voice.

  I don’t answer. I don’t know. It doesn’t seem to matter much either way.

  We don’t find the mission, but carry on in silence to Bourke. The hotel has a poky pool and two single beds that regard each other suspiciously across the small room. I throw my bag down and grab some beers, tell Mum I’m going for a walk.

  I’d been to Bourke a few months earlier, just before moving to Melbourne, to report on a Fred Hollows Foundation reunion. I loved the place. Utes and trucks drift down its wide streets like tumbleweed. Groups of kids ride up to you on bikes to say hello. Graffiti on the courthouse reads: ‘Shiela is a single sexy babe Brie chick’, ‘Clayton is a big sexy cunt in Bourke, he got sexy body and legs.’ At the north edge of town, the slow, brown Darling River is beautiful – you can walk among fallen limbs and flitting birds and rarely spot another person. I climb up a water-monitoring tower and cry, chain-smoking ciggies. I imagine that the half-submerged gum logs bobbing by might be crocs.

  I have always been filled with horror and smallness when I imagine crocodiles. Though I’ve never seen them in the wild, their spectres come for me at rivers and creeks. I’m terrified of their quiet way of secreting themselves and striking before you even know they are there; then, after the death roll, waters smooth over, more logs float by and the body decays in a cave. There are no crocs at Bourke, nor where I grew up, but to me these murky rivers look similar to the ones that I know do conceal them. Slow and gentle on the surface, there is turbulence underneath.

  I climb down to the bank and start gathering rocks. Among the vegetation the air sings with insect frenzy. The sun is dipping. I hunt for just the right rocks. Throwing rocks, which I peg down at logs from the tower’s serrated-steel platform. I remember something. I was watching for crocs one day as a child while my mother’s boyfriend Bill and I watered our horses at Grady’s Creek. We’d been working cattle in his yards, vaccinating heifers that were due to calve. In that moment, among the roiled dust, wooden fences and cowboy camaraderie, Bill seemed okay. I would cut a cow from the herd. He would open the gate and drive her into a corral that led to the crush. There, with the heifer securely wedged, he would look her over. From an old fridge in one yard I pulled out the supplies: medicine, a long pink glove. We rode to get more cattle from down by the creek.

  ‘Hey,’ Bill said. ‘Thanks for your help today. Real help. You done good. Worked like a man.’ He reefed his green mare’s mouth away from the water, making to leave. ‘Listen,’ he added slowly. ‘If you’re gay, just don’t ever tell anyone.’

  I stayed there as he rode off and let my horse drink. My body was trussed up in a cave. I went home. It was never mentioned again.

  *

  Next morning, Mum and I drive into the national park. The plains are fat with the last of the rain. The car lolls like a big red tongue into Yanda Campground, on a swollen river’s brink. It’s hot but half-submerged trees stretch into the distance. There’s no way to tell where the wildflower plains end and the river begins. We eat lunch at the picnic tables, under little roofs with swallows’ nests in the corners, before I go fishing in the sun-warmed shallows. I want some time alone, to feel the heat of the almost-desert sun. Mum reminds me about snakes and insists I wear shoes, take a first-aid kit.

  I photograph dragonflies at the water’s edge, wondering why some flooded trees survive and others die. I photograph one tree up close. Its bark looks just like cracked mud. Only one species of wildflower seems to grow on the brink of this receding tide; it’s pale blue and jumps off the red dirt and right down the lens, as if to say: take me with you.

  I return to the campground empty-handed, having caught nothing.

  ‘Let’s camp at Dry Tank,’ Mum says. ‘Too many insects here, so close to the water.’

  We sit reading that night at Dry Tank and the bugs are enormous. They wing in on the night sound and land on my brochure: a Christmas beetle, slick with oil-sheen; some armoured, pincered thing; a vampiric cicada so translucent I can read through its body. I take a photo of it, perched between Medical Services and Police. In the fluorescent glow of the camp light I spark a joint I’d picked up in Bourke. Mum doesn’t say anything. Later, before bed, she explains how mosquitoes are not, as many people think, attracted to light. Actually, she says, they’re drawn by car
bon dioxide in our exhalations.

  We break camp early to hike up Mount Gunderbooka, following the Valley of the Eagle track from Bennett’s Gorge. The path to the base is hemmed in by scrub, spindly wattle that disorientates my senses. Occasionally the bush breaks open and thin, paper-leaved flowers churn like butter across drying flats. Then the vegetation recedes as we approach the mountain, brush yielding to grass, stone and squat, genuflecting shrubs. The summit is only 500 metres high, but the surrounding plains imbue the mountain with a turbulent and brooding power. It’s as though in the beginning the syncline drew up all the energy this land had for rising. It’s abrupt, but less stern than it seems; the hard, ancient sandstone forms a horseshoe shape to funnel water into the creeks and rivers that vein the endless lowlands.

  We turn a bend and can see, suddenly, across a ravine. It’s so wild; we pause to take it in. Rock folds in on itself in layers of time. Tenacious trees with roots sunk between eons add to the palette of yellows and browns. There are eagles, too, little metal ones marking our track, and giant ones above, coasting on the currents of hot air that circulate the gorges. We’re almost at the top, the rocks loose and sliding underfoot.

  ‘I can’t go all the way,’ Mum says, doubled over. ‘I’m fine walking uphill but, with my knee, I’m worried I won’t be able to come back down.’ She takes a long slug of water. ‘You go up, if you want to.’

  ‘Come on, Mum,’ I say. ‘I’ll go slow with you.’

  She shakes her head.

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Yes. I’ll wait for you here.’

  *

  Space is never neutral; cartographies of power and memory are always at play. In telling this story I’ve remembered so many little details, events, things that were said; a childhood of moments caught in my throat. That feeling of wanting the earth to swallow me up – I pushed it into my stomach, trying, always, to forget who I am. And it hurts to remember, because I feel the keening again in my guts; memories like oesophageal cancer, spreading and hard to control; the rawness of words, misshapen and wailing, that were never said. They belong to a child the world told to be mute. My throat caught on the soccer field – that joke about a loose anus. I think someone else farted, not me. I don’t remember. But I can still feel the terror that I’d been found out, the panic he’d seen something in my gaze while he slept on the couch and I thought it was safe. He was my best friend at the Kyogle soccer club, for which I played every primary-school season. So many trivial moments, like that, refusing to pass. They count their own time. Repression has its own style of reason; does not follow the logic of our conscious minds. It’s an adult’s work, handling bile.

  Without a shared experience of place, it’s easy for queers to forget we’re not alone. My experience is that country people fill up the vast spaces with silence. As a child I learnt to do likewise and that has robbed me of so many stories. Mum’s now sold her place at The Risk. I can never go back to the verandah where we ate in the summers, overlooking the Wilsons’ paddocks and the Lions Road; it snakes past The Risk Hall, where our school put on plays, into the Border Ranges and Queensland. I shared that place with my sisters, Jess and Holly, and Mum; share with Jess the memory of when Holly peed on our heads, from above in a tree she’d climbed up to escape, after we’d induced one of the laughing fits that made veins in her neck bulge. We just circled the tree, chanting: ‘Now who’s laughing! Now who’s laughing?’

  Those are the stories I’ve shared. I’ve never shared how Bill advised me to hide. I’d forgotten it until that day in Bourke, but in retrospect, it was the first moment in which I knew for sure someone else understood I was queer. Did Bill see something revolting? Or was he trying, perversely, to help, knowing there were more brutal silencers than him in the paddocks and pubs, and that if I made myself visible they’d do me a violence I would not forget? Because the truth is silence can offer protection. Invisibility can offer safety, and sometimes hiding is wise.

  I am non-binary, as well as gay, and every day when I wake up, get dressed and do my face, I evaluate the risks of being seen. I am bold and I am loud, but some mornings I try on every skirt and dress and pass judgement on each: absurd, laughable, just a bit off. I stand back to appraise myself in the mirror’s full length. Its face rests on hinges that creak to reveal a compartment concealing earrings and make-up. These hinges are busted. Unless I hold the thing up when it’s open, it will fall down and shatter. It’s often easier just to wear pants, a shroud for the body, to shelter the brain.

  My body and brain are non-compliant – deviant, as I’m reminded daily by forms and toilets and slips of the tongue. This morning, I was reminded by an old woman. As I boarded the bus to Footscray, she reached for her rosary, muttering, glaring, beginning to count. I was wearing a skirt of thick, sweatpant fabric, white skivvy, eye shadow and chunky hoops. Well, Glory Be. To hell with you, lady.

  Invisibility can offer safety, but at costs of healing and growth. Silence can protect, but also disempower. I saw a eulogy for Roy, my childhood mentor, on Facebook a while ago. At least that’s what it looked like, saying something about him having loved a jamboree. I didn’t click through. In fact, I scrolled even faster. I felt a shock of recognition. It wasn’t only that Roy had died – I hadn’t spoken to him for over a decade, although I’d felt guilty about that often enough – it was realising I’d now never know how he would have received me. The hurt and rejection I’d feared as a child will live on – indeterminate, spectral – and he will never see me in power, as an unafraid adult. I used to think vulnerability was power’s antithesis. Now I see silence is. I’m still growing up as a queer person, still unlearning things I absorbed as a child.

  *

  On the last night of my road trip with Mum, we talked for the first time about why she kicked me out. It went like the last light of the sun, all in a blaze. Neither of us was able to offer more than raw sides of pain, but at least those cuts gave some things form; it felt cathartic to name wounds left undressed for so long. We talked, of course, about much more than my queerness: a whole childhood.

  Next day in the car, on the way back to the airport, I told Mum the story about Bill.

  ‘That’s got nothing to do with me,’ she said.

  I didn’t reply. Shame welled inside. Mum only wanted to show me the last of the wildflowers, and I’d made things so hard. We returned to the city in silence. We were running early, but I told her just to drop me at the airport.

  I made my way through security, scrubbing my eyes. A middle-aged woman with a brunette bob and sun-weathered skin watched as I waited for my bag to roll under the scanner. Walking through the security archway I pulled it together. I grabbed my akubra, mustered a weak smile.

  ‘Are you okay, honey?’ asked the woman when my bag reappeared.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘But my mother is dead.’

  I just wanted to be left alone, in silence.

  *

  Adjusting my skirt, I wave goodbye to a friend at Konjo Cafe and rush for the bus. Hot skin clasps the skirt’s heavy fabric. I’m late, but happy. A small Melbourne publisher has just emailed to say they’ll take me on as an intern. After my interview a few days earlier, I’d stood at the top of a flight of stairs outside the State Library, looking – my friend told me – like a young, camp Bon Jovi. ‘Whatever,’ I’d said. ‘I’m a zany publisher now.’ Cocking my head, I wafted my wine glass over the city and made a retaliatory threat to my friend’s future career.

  Back in Footscray, I read the publisher’s offer another two times. Do a little dance at the bus stop in front of Sunny’s. The 216 must almost be here. There’s a bunch of people about. It’s a nice day and I’m feeling cute, despite the coffee stain on my white skivvy.

  I hear muttering before spotting the guy. His red face is hen-pecked, grey hoodie mottled with some darker lint. He shuffles along. Bit rough, maybe wired; getting louder. A few metres off now, he’s shooting me spasmodic glances. I keep one eye on him, sly peeps
so as not to provoke. It’s fine. He passes. Then, ten metres or so up the street, he halts and hurls back over his shoulder: ‘Fuck you up the arse with a baseball bat, cunt!’

  I laugh, loudly, for others to hear, and then affect an extravagant curtsy. Looking around at those waiting with me, nobody seems able to meet my eyes.

  When Worlds Collide, Words Fail

  Thinesh Thillainadarajah

  On a September morning three years ago, Appa called me, crying on the phone.

  Two weeks earlier, I had dropped off a letter at the mailbox around the corner, unsure of when it would reach Appa’s tender hands on the other side of the world. Hands that swiped the metro card at four in the morning, wading through Canadian avalanches to make ends meet. Hands that had hung a canvas print of Mufasa and Simba on the wall above the bed he and I used to share, symbolic of just a morsel of the love that only children of immigrant parents know. The same hands that used to hold me on Saturday mornings as I split open chocolate eggs to reveal the plastic magic contained inside, magic that Appa revelled in as much as I.

  When I saw ‘Appa calling’ on the screen of my phone, my heart sank, anticipating the disappointment of my parents, the breaking of a chain that stretched across the globe, holding them and me together. My white boyfriend, our relationship just shy of three years, stood in the doorway to our bedroom speaking to his own parents, as he had for years, in a kind honesty and openness I had never known.

  Appa sobbed. He asked why I was choosing this. Through his wails, he asked why I had not told him earlier, said that he would have had another child to be my keeper. I wanted to comfort him, but in that moment I failed to do so, unable to articulate my thoughts the way my letter had, the way six months of writing and rewriting had allowed me to do. I never hated myself more – for speaking Tamil, if you can even call it that, with a childish cadence and a Western intonation, unable to bridge a canyon’s worth of vocabulary between us. I wanted Appa to hear past my inarticulate sentences. I wanted my words to convey precision and conviction. I was desperately grasping at all the Tamil I could, but I could only muster up ‘alavendaam’ (‘do not cry’), removed from the poetic world of Surya and Jyothika – reminiscent of a lilt you’d hear in children’s programming.