natural reckoning

climate, conchology and why i always write about the same things

The boundaries are changing, they have been for a long time. I have one specific memory in the tanbark: my friends and I are schoolchildren; young, warm and in agreement that the summers do not arrive and depart within the confines anymore. Born into the millenium drought, our normal was marred. I remember the dark intimidation of the fossilised gum trees shooting out of the dry catchments. How they rose across the riverbanks which shouldered the physical changes of time. The receding revealed the sharp sediment edges eroded by years of submersion. And the gums, spindly and sharp, felt like omens to me. We played cricket in empty river basins, swam in indoor pools, tracked the old waterlines etched into bridges, lay half naked listening to the murmur of pedestal fans and bushfire warnings and stared at the small blue sandglass shower timer that the government sent to every home. And yet, that slow shift of summer felt like something different.

A month into winter, I am cold for the first time. We plunge into it, and I realise how discomforting I had found the warmth. It was like I had been floating in some in-between. A haze slips across the city, suffocating it in an evening fog. I am easily reminded of the summer six years ago that burnt into my memories; those days of thick, acrid smog and checking the air quality index when I woke. I half expect to look up to an orange sky. Admittedly, my mind usually drifts there before it considers a simple winter fog now; trained again each summer to except something else. For just a moment, walking towards the beach, I swear I can smell the heavy smoke creep across my skin. The scent has aged into something akin to nostalgia, just slightly less sweet.

The tide is the lowest I’ve seen in a while; exposing some twenty metres of flat earth hidden for most of the day. Its ebb cements the flow into bedforms; leaving broad ridges stretched far across the wet sand. Despite not looking truly alike, the shape of them always reminds me of the human body’s neural network. Tonight the divots are mottled with small flecks of Plocamium seaweed – deep red and branching out like a lung’s bronchial tree. The low tide leaves the beach smelling pungently of decomposing seaweed. Dense swaths of the dark macroalgae border the strip between dry and wet sand: pushed up and left behind, it forms the wrack line. I walk to its left, puddling across the thin layer of water that the sand cannot sponge up.

When my eyes flick across the horizon line they catch something out of place in the sand. A metre from the wrack is the largest Muricidae shell I have ever seen. I gasp, rushing forwards and bending towards it. Its apex points upwards, the rest of its body buried – but I know what it is without having to think. Its centre spirals into the sand, the spire is bulky and crested – almost translucent, yet a deceivingly strong, thick calcium. When I pull it from the sand some guilty part of me is disappointed that the outer lip is broken. It’s damaged in the same way many of the shells along here are – after the first three whorls the lip breaks at its thinnest point. It keeps its centre arm twisting downwards, but the outer protection is lost. Though, at about four fingers tall, it still keeps its reverence. The missing layer reveals the internal design and for the first time I realise that the columella swirls out like a tornado. I am somewhere between its edge and its centre, and the eye of the storm is encased; still strong enough to exclude.

I’ve only ever found a few undamaged whelks – once, impressively; a juvenile triple murex. They lay out across the plain, hiding amongst the wrack line and in the sandflats like nothing special. And really, they aren’t. They’re common enough, not even that old. Yet I brush away the sand and carry it along for a while. I want to take it home with me, but it’s useful here – holds some part in erosion prevention, and its broken form will recycle minerals back into the tides. When I lay it down I consider tossing it back into the waves to ensure nobody else finds it. But for some reason it feels wrong – maybe too disruptive. And so I press it into the sand, do my best to bury it partly, and I go on. Because the guilt will eat me alive if I give it the chance.

I sink into this routine in the summer, walking along the coast every evening to catch the final flash of sunset. I keep coming back to this. Walking the same path. Feeling the same things in the same environment. Still finding wonder in its daily change. I am pulled here, dragged along by the salt-wind.

I never intended to write about what I do now. All my work circles back into ecology, science, technology or politics. I hilariously thought that I would chase something simpler, despite mostly always being like this. With age it has become easier to understand myself, to reject fitting a mould, to wrap myself in the same thick columella. Most good writers write to understand something – to make sense of the confounding. I do the same. I’ve realised this has always been an avenue for me to understand the world around me. I write because it’s natural, it’s some sort of genetic necessity. My body craves the work, and my mind spews out what it can’t comprehend and the two work in tandem to connect everything all together. What I know I am really doing is trying to ground it all. I tend to think in themes, drawing everything together and assigning meaning in places I’m not always sure I should. But it’s a natural function now. I worry it makes me too fragile sometimes – if considering the whelk as sacred is a weakness, if not being able to throw it hard into the water is cowardly.

When I was a teenager I saw my future spread out across decades, and now I struggle to see a year in front of me. Reality pilfers in when I don’t expect it. It pangs as I stand on the beach tonight watching the shitty murmuration of invasive starlings. They twist sparingly across the backdrop of the twilight. I scrunch my face and look to the tourists taking photos. Some part of me wants that wonder back. To just see beauty rather than the truth of it. My reconciling with nature has become a reckoning with grief.

At home, my bed rests against a large west facing window that takes up almost the entire wall. A limiting 1970s floor plan necessitates horrible feng shui. I found a photo in the national archive last week of the building that used to sit on this land – an old bluestone terrace house captured in 1958. Now replaced with a brick six-pack; certainly uglier from the outside, but an architectural typology I am fond of living in. I suppose I’m grateful to be here now. Here in this building that likely only has another twenty years in it if it’s lucky. It feels wasteful. I feel like I know its secret. I worry that I’m the only one aware of the way the foundation shifts into the ground, how the plaster separates at convergence points.

The point of feng shui is to create harmony and balance between the human and their environment. Apparently a bedhead against a window exposes the sleeper to the outside energy. I think it does. I keep the curtains open year round and only close the window in winter. And at night, when I lie down to sleep, I lie flat on my back and look up at the sky. And I relish the nights when the moon lights up my room.

After over a year of living here I have, for the first time in my life, been truly tracking time. Not noticing it as a given, but living through the earthly changes. I observe our point in the seasons not by date or weather, but by the point of the sun as it sets – how far north or south it disappears as we orbit it. I see it through the leaf cycle of the deciduous tree by my window and when the birds begin to nest in it. At night it is the stars that shift. And yet, they are still more of an awe than a tool for me.

When I began writing my novel I was determined to keep my protagonist far from myself, only using her as an avenue to divulge and understand the emotions that used to consume me. I did not want to fall into the self-insert trap and so she was conceptualised as an astrophysics student that uses the universe to understand her place in it. But I failed. Through all my research and my attempts to understand this fictional woman I have absorbed her. And it leaves me wondering if all along she was just a version of myself that I buried. Write what you know, I guess.

Early in the novel I insert a sliver of my own experience and maybe it was all downhill from there. In the first chapter of my draft I wrote:

‘On mornings like these I can let the rush of air across my face transport me back into the desert. Suddenly I am sixteen again, discovering I want to be as I stare at the night sky’s wide expanse. There, the soft arm of the milky way stretches along like a tear in the fabric of the universe, twisting dazzling smudges of space dust and nebulae through the never-ending black.’

It’s odd, sometimes, to realise just how far we spin around the galaxy over a single year. Our view of the stars shifts as we do. And some nights I find something new amongst the sky – out of place amongst the map I’ve been trying to memorise. There will be some glittering orb in a new place, taking residence within a constellation I am certain I know the shape of. It throws me off course. And I try to reorient, trace the map outwards from the southern cross; failing because this newcomer is not a star. It’s a fucking satellite. And I fall for it every time.

Everything is spinning around constantly, pushing the bounds and twisting new rules. Perhaps I am too young or too curious to have ever felt that there is any real type of normal on this planet. I am hesitant to believe it ever even existed. I tend to consider normal as the bounds of stillness. And we’re always shuffling through the universe. Diverging onto trails I’m not sure we really choose for ourselves. I look back on my life and realise that the growth burrows down to small points: easily changeable, insignificant and almost missed, and yet blooming – butterflied. Sometimes I wake up and it’s like I am being driven towards one point. There is something else up there and I relinquish the reins.

I think of what George Orwell wrote in his essay, Why I Write.

‘When I sit down to write a book, I do not say to myself, ‘I am going to produce a work of art’. I write it because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing.’

In most cases of my writing process I consider a theme and message and then I build outwards. I am an agonisingly slow novel writer because I often let it come to me like a true reality – unfolding a character’s actions by understanding their setting first. But also because what Orwell says is true of me as well – my work is a self-satisfying reach out. An attempt to get someone to hear that one true thing I have to say. I want to make sure I say it well.

When I touch down here on Substack it is often because I am initially writing without that theme in mind. I am combing through the beach wrack and attempting to understand something in my experience. By the time I reach the end I either find it or I feel that question has been released and I have a piece to show for it.

At the end of Why I Write, Orwell concludes:

‘And yet it is also true that one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one’s own personality. Good prose is like a windowpane. I cannot say with certainty which of my motives are the strongest, but I know which of them deserve to be followed. And looking back through my work, I see that it is invariably where I lacked a political purpose that I wrote lifeless books and was betrayed into purple passages, sentences without meaning, decorative adjectives and humbug generally.’

It is no wonder that I write about the same things. The apex of the whelk spirals out from me: age eleven, unsupervised and learning the darkness of the world for the very first time. And it takes over, writes that desire to understand the world into my genetic code. I pick up my pencil and I scrawl six pages about it. I turn in a story the teacher begs me to cut down and get a bad mark for writing ‘to be continued’ instead of ending it. I go on and on about climate famine and disaster bunkers and hope. I am lightened by having my fervor recognised. There is justice in the fiction that only a child can believe in. Anger that doesn’t fade, politics that only strengthens, love that ebbs and flows like the tide. I write to understand, and after that day I never stop.