D'Entrecastaux

I can't believe how exquisite and sensitive this place makes me feel. Last night we (Dad, ZP, KG and a friend of Dad's) sailed from the mooring up to the DSS in Sandy Bay. The sun set electrically behind us, making the sparse clouds look like flaming blooms. I sat on the deck, eyes watering from the salty wind, and felt like it was my water, my channel, my pieces of land tree hill dry dirt. But it isn't, and I wonder how Tasmanian aboriginal people felt about this exhilarating land when it was inhabited only be them. I wonder about modern interventions like the Western ideas of self, landscape (and of course that ridiculously antiquated term, wilderness). How is it that we know where to draw the boundaries between self and land. Of course there are the physical boundaries, the feeling of pain as you connect with landscape too roughly. Consciously, how do you know where you stop, and where your place begins. I have often wished I had something spiritual available to me, to connect me to the world, and to land. The only significance I allow myself is colonial. When JE, my supervisor gave me this book (http://www.abc.net.au/rn/talks/perspective/stories/s1418604.htm) to read, I stayed up nearly all night, and cried, and felt ashamed and disgusted. I am related (and not distantly either) to people who were born at the time Trugannini died. This book was a harrowing experience for me, and I talked and thought about it incessantly for a couple of weeks. Still, I will only ever know a colonial self. I remember when JS became obsessed with being a Tasmanian aboriginal and Jewish. Hence MP inventing the term Aborijew (I wonder if AH would appreciate that term????). He even gave a conference paper about aboriginals and jews whilst growing a wild and enormous beard. And at that stage I think he was half crazed and half way to being quite insane.

And then there was Mudrooroo, who for a long time believed he was Aboriginal and then discovered he wasn't (I think this is what happened anyway).


Section 2

The Palliative Pathway Project.

My family is in chaos, and rather than feel stressed or sad, I have decided the most useful and most therapeutic thing I can do for myself and my mother is to create a Palliative Pathway Plan for my grandmother. There is of course some humour in this, but more importantly, I have decided that creating plans is a wholly useful, diversionary measure to ensure that we all survive christmas, and that my mother survives the next 6 or so months until the grandmother dies. My mother's brother is so fucking ridiculous. And he has been (or allowed himself to be) disabled by his relationship with his mother. ZP and I find it revolting, and quietly Dad and I bitch about him.

So I spent so much fucking time on the phone today trying to organise respite, daily washing, nursing home with palliative staff, centrelink, a social worker. The palliative services down here are good. I talked for a long time to a woman today who was being very gentle with me, euphemistically gentle, until eventually I said "ok, so this is how I understand it - she'll go into a nursing home with high level care until she's about to die, then she'll come in and die in the Whittle ward? Or can she die in the nursing home?" She was a slight pause, and I didn't need to tell her that this whole process wasn't especially upsetting to me, and that I just wanted to get certain things done. Bugger euphemisms unless they are funny. This evening I called the family to the table and decided to discuss the options. It was funny, because often I am not as assertive as I would like to be, and other times, fucking hell, I am so fucking assertive no one has a chance to disagree with me.

Tomorrow I have to go to see her again and help her to fill in forms. I need to make phone calls and sit the uncle down and tll him his fortune. He needs to pull himself together and try to be of some use to someone at some point in his life (so far it would seem that he has failed miserably). Enough!

Yesterday when ZP and I were there, she found it difficult to breathe and had to use a nebuliser. She looks so small, grey and withered....and monstrous with the mask over her face. I felt like an arsehole because I was amused by the fact that it was reminding me of Blue Velvet (although I suspect the grandmother is not any exciting kind of deviant). ZP looked distressed. I looked at her impassively and asked sensible questions. It was strange that I didn't feel anything much about it, beyond pitying her because she is a human being dying in agony.