12. Wetseason Spirits

4th October

Roser is in her bus outside, someone goes into the shower, N turns in his bed, I smell the smoke of Saturday night’s camp fire in my hair. I wake at five-thirty and by six o’clock I’m in the kitchen emptying away the dishes while the kettle boils to make a tea that’ll calm my stomach—mine and Roser’s munchies have been hard hitting. It’s warm Monday morning. There’s a soft light through the window shutters, with the ivy sitting high on the top shelf having grown to two hooks deep. Heat comes in fast. I go by the pool, watch the fairylights above the water, and regret having slept through the night. Today’s New Moon marking (another) deep desire for change. I seek a transformation I don’t dare to whisper to the dear souls that have become my family. I project a season for creating; a season for believing. Now to get through this day and come to the other side where I can share some of my soul, stare into some beautiful eyes, and eat pizza for Jamie’s birthday. First, though, I’ll take off my clothes because I’m already sweating.

11th October

There’s someone in the kitchen and the light of the kitchen comes through my curtains. The heat settles in, and I push back on my doona. A Monday. I’d drifted off to sleep with the sound of instruments by the pool; on and on they went until dreams that are clouded in smoke and spurred by the whirling of the ceiling fans creep in. ‘No more wine,’ I say, yet again.
Niang Niang is at the kitchen bench sorting paperwork for her car. The morning plays on, on and on. The veins in my legs are bursting, the condiments in the fridge are overflowing and whispers of conflict make themselves known. There is anxiety about the house, of all my flaws and the influx of questioning. So I must take hold, I must own my responsibilities, give light to my feelings and engage, because now, now I’m growing so tired with how I keep forgetting things, misplacing things, losing things. Oh to edge toward my family in the trees.
When I pack mine and Roser’s camping gear neatly into Sammy’s van I see a blue lighter. It’s that blue lighter and instantly I want to share my story with N. I go into the kitchen and fight back tears as I make a banana smoothie. I’m dressed in black with a riji around my neck. We leave town in the heat of the day, and I’m gripped by trepidation, cruelly convincing myself that I’ll never be capable of love, that I must go on searching for vulnerability.

16th October

I’ve been losing things. I keep saying I’m losing things. And I think part of the losing things is my mind losing it. This loss, it carries down into my legs, with circulation restricted and veins forming. ‘Stretch like the circus,’ I think, as I sit by the dark pool, N’s music preparation coming through the flywire windows of his room. I place the music as progressive trance and I actually like it, a little.
 Stoned, I sleep deeply, waking to footsteps over the sea of floorboards and a gentle light through the curtains. There’s the rattle of the fans on medium, there’s the routine of work, there’s the movement between the kitchen and retreating to my room.

17th October

Tomorrow is my first Monday off in the new roster. It’ll be a special Monday. And then Monday afternoon will come. Day will turn to night. I’ll love the moment. I’ll want to retreat. And as I do, remember Sarah, remember that feeling of veins hurting in your legs, of your throbbing skin, of how you keep forgetting things. Remember how you had a million lists and in that carefree Pindan photo your fists are clenched. Remember Sarah, that one day, fresh food will be your deodorant and not-so-strong will be your coffee.

18th October

Nah, it had been decided, I have no interest to engage with him after another weekend bender. This kid and me, we on different paths. And I’m ready to let whatever sensation this is, go. But then, then I’m coming from the bathroom and I’m looking down the hall to the kitchen and next thing I know someone is right there and instinct is pulling me back to avoid the inevitable collision. I turn. N’s right in my face and I’m breathing hard from shock. ‘Oh my god you scared me so much,’ I say, my hands coming up to gentle grab his shoulders. He cowers. I stumble onward, getting lost behind the translucent curtains of my room. Later, seeing him again the hall, we both hesitate, we both laugh, we both keep walking.

20th October

What a wonderful, wonderful life sounds through the vintage speakers, the hammock swings, midges nibble at me, Beth and Pippa are in the kitchen chatting about their days, the bottle bin outside the kitchen overflows. ‘There’s something there,’ Roser had told me in the crowd of Matso’s. ‘I think it would make him happy,’ she said. Really? Because there’s nothing I want more than to make him happy! Then between us, two moody people, our respective moods kick in while timing doesn’t. From this I think, maybe, maybe I must let him go. Until I see all the moths and the red-tailed black cockatoo feathers. Until I feel the leaving-date and unspoken frustrations loom over us.

22nd October

Roser’s in the hammock, surrounded by vines and fairylights. Jamie and Pippa play backgammon in the kitchen light. Sammy blows through. N’s in his sarong, freshly showered from spinning, and I remain alert to his laugh, like I always do. At Town Beach, I had seen the agility of his body, his brow furrowed in concentration, his perfect face lit by flame as he was surrounded by his macrame wearing, dreadlock bearing, backpacker buddies.
At Broomerang, Roser and I lie in the lounging area, mostly silent after deciding on the covers for our first books. Roser shows me her new song on guitar, and I show her Meet Me at the Wishing Well. N comes outside for a cigarette, staying at his perch up the kitchen end. Meet Me at the Wishing Well finishes and my music plays on random. Before the next song begins, I already know what it is: a song that reminds me of N from our acid Saturday. We’d been in the kitchen together, singing. Now, I’m stoned and I’m spinning, lying flat underneath the branch of fairylights until he leaves. My mind repeats the night: Pippa and I awkwardly playing on the play equipment at Town Beach, edging toward the spinners, and Pippa asking, ‘Why doesn’t N have babes around?’
‘He would at his doofs,’ I say.
‘For sure,’ says Pippa. ‘But why not at the house?
Because of me, I think. When I later wake in the night with bats, possums and sleeping bodies breathing outside my verandah window, another voice nags: don’t lose something, say something.

29th October

Roser and I ride through the wind, our laughter trailing down the streets to Greg’s house, where we’re like little kids playing on all his toys. At Broomerang, we edge into sleep after our nightly reflections on the pool lounge. Mangoes drop in the night, the thuds on the roof startling me. Out the front, Roser sleeps in her bus to the sound of bats in the mango trees. These moments of these days are sweet, like the mangoes—we’re on the roof with the mango picker or we’re in the kitchen chopping, eating and freezing mangoes. From waking early to the first light through the lattices, life is a mango.
Surrounded by mangos, I make coffee alone, and sort compost. I love this free life. I love how my housemates feed me and how Roser sees me. I love how we dance and we laugh and we create and we dream.

4th November

Sometimes I’ve already lost sentences/ideas before they’re even finishing forming.

I sweat at sunrise. My sweat smells sour.

We are reminded of the disparity between cultures.

‘Beauty comes from within’ and yet I judge people on their appearance and aesthetic.

Since Rèmi, have I vocalised to someone my dreams of how to share our passions? I think I might keep them too guarded. Very guarded.

9th November

Clouds hang in the sky. My mind is cloudy too, with reflections and too many people. I change with the seasons. Can’t form perfect sentences. Can’t write fast. If I do, I lose my magical thoughts. I Google ‘improve concentration.’

15th November

Out on the boat with Bruce, I make a breakthrough with only getting my hands, chin and nose sunburnt. Out on the boat with Bruce, the islands continue to move mountains within me. It’s Sunday afternoon. Beth and I return to a clean house, the Rolling Stones playing loudly through the old speakers, Nico in the shower, and every fan spinning. I move about the house, tidying, rearranging and turning the fans off. The towels and rugs by the pool are still wet and the lingering scent of backpackers represents a conflict of lifestyles. I don’t want this. I need to shift this. To surround myself with people who have active minds, hobbies and sustainable interests.

16th November

Morning in the kitchen with Beth, dissecting how people move food around the fridge, which reiterates my weariness to the general ‘backpacker’ attitude. Their impermanence. The assumption that everything is miraculously there for their taking. My story is mentioned, and I experience a visceral reaction. I walk away from our clean kitchen imploring to write once and for all.

17th November

Nico has been here, what, two and a half weeks, and it’s the third time I’m telling him to stop making the house the hangout point for all his Roey friends. When doing this, I’m fiery while he’s defensive. He doesn’t understand. Two and half weeks, man. You’ve been here two and a half weeks. Communication, man. When I’m yelling, demanding he stop treating it like a hostel, I better comprehend how great this year, with all these rich and worldly characters who take no interest in the wet t-shirt competition, has been. People have shared, people have contributed. At circus, I hang upside down and let the toxic thoughts drip away. Yet, back by the pool I remain maudlin, consumed by the house and this clash of lifestyles.

25th November

Couldn’t sleep last night. Felt proper crazed. Think it was the shitty weed I be smoking like clockwork. The habit that restricts me from my dreams. I’m tossing and I’m turning and I’m sweating. I close my eyes and I’m floating, away from sweet Beth, whom I cling to with excuses. I must go to work and look people in the eye and smile and say ‘I’m well’ when asked how I am.

26th November

It’s late November, the temperature fast rising, and I’m strung out, grossly unexcited by my surroundings, wanting to hide from my attitudes and outbursts and opinions. Goosebumps fill my arms through the long days at work. I’m unpredictable—having lost my over-politeness and acceptance months ago—and life, once again, is a long, arduous stretch before me. Without smoking tobacco or weed, what is there to look forward to? What can give me satisfaction as my days tick onward?
But here in the dark of my room, fans spinning on the pressed-tin walls, only sweet Beth and I about, here I am different. Here I will keep trying for love and authenticity. I will keep striving for a life where I don’t ridicule such concepts. To continue this striving I must be honest in my writing. Because I haven’t been honest in my encounters. ‘Good,’ I tell people. But every single night I go to sleep imploring that tomorrow will be different. Tomorrow I will be whatever I need to be to be loved.
I am loved, though, aren’t I?
But.
Do I give love?

Tuesdays with Morrie:
‘People are only mean when they’re threatened,’ he says. ‘And that’s what our culture does. That’s what our economy does.’
‘…The little things I can obey. But the big things—how we think, what we value—those you must choose yourself.’
‘The way to do it, I think, isn’t running away. You have to work at creating your own culture…the biggest defect we have as human beings is shortsightedness. We don’t see what we could be…the problem is that we don’t believe we are as much alike as we are.’
‘Invest in the human family. Invest in people. Build a little community of those you love and who love you.’

28th November

Wear makeup to the Christmas party: ‘Wow, Sarah.’

We need people through this long, arduous life. Good people. Community. Moments and memories.

I feel threatened by those I love so much.

I get fiery in giving my opinion—the rising tone and gestures like a force of nature.

With each breath you take, draw in warmth.

Trust in your heart, for it’s your greatest source of love.

Meaningless words fill in gaps during my conversations.

Learn from Pippa: she doesn’t go looking for love, yet she finds it.

The town feels ominous, smoke billowing from the horizon where Marc left just days earlier. Beth cooks in the kitchen. I am in my head. I feel tired after cigarettes. Yuck.

I’m by the pool, feet in the water that bobbles with fairy light reflections. I take a drag: replace this, this weed, with love. This going to bed every night telling myself I will change. To what? I don’t need to change. I need to stop.

29th November

I fall asleep atop my sheets, computer right next to me, and sleep through the night. Monday morning brings a body aching from a heavy load of gluten and weed the day before. I need a stretch. Pippa and Beth watch my pottering from the couches in the ballroom. The house is blissful; quiet, clean and feminine, its grand old spaces full of dust.
By Tuesday morning, I’m forever running late. There are lists everywhere. There are ideas that once began and never fully formed. I have to work through so many words. It’s been years of refining the scope of my concentration, honing in to achievable tasks and completing those tasks.

3rd December

An early morning shower (after a stoned sleep) and I’m in the kitchen with the percolator. I water my passionfruit plant by the bin. A car door slams. A young girl with blonde hair sits on the bonnet of a car as a short, Aboriginal guy with a pony tail and cap stands before her. I go back inside, making the gross assumption there’ve been out all night. I feel a disappointment in Elsa. But when she comes inside and I ask what she’s been doing, tears spring to her eyes: ‘David was drunk, he wanted $200.’ I unclench my fists. I talk of the absurdity in this life, of so much time at work that there’s no wonder we’re sick and tired of being sick and tired. But this absurdity, my perplexity, it solves nothing.

4th December, New Moon, total solar eclipse @ 3:33 WA time

Me: complain about not having enough hours in the day to do all the non-work stuff I want to achieve, cut to me spending nights smoking a joint on the pool lounge.

It is a time of intention, creativity, downloads, manifesting, attracting. Today, despite being tired and burnt out from work, I feel joyous. I am excited by the realisation of the deep love that can be created in my writing and photography and jewellery and saving for my home and smiling and laughingly drawn towards my family, living near water amongst the trees, a sociological thesis. There are thoughts to what I could achieve through the honest sharing of my mind. Tonight, I have no weed. Tonight, my first night without weed for a while.

N has been consistently appearing in my dreams. He is a solid appearance. We interact without fear. This morning, he appeared suddenly in his car. In real life, I haven’t spoken to him. I don’t pine for him, but I wonder about him and hope he’s doing really well.

There’s a lady at the EK Christmas Party who is older, with a natural sort of beautiful. ‘Do you live in Broome?’ she asks. Yes, I tell her. ‘Your skin tells another story,’ she says. Yes, I tell her. But my skin is not my spirit.

5th December

If I tell you I’m busy, will you think I’m important?

Nostalgia and sensations forefront to my thirst for documenting moments, documenting history.

Jewellery brings symbolism into my life.

Forcing myself to write when I am tired almost gives me a headache.

Pippa and I sit on the pool couch sweating at 7am.

I’m a strong character, I know. I can intimidate easily, although unintentionally. I am innovation through imitation.

I see elements of my younger self in Beth. The boxes that she ticks to be a certain way, to make herself a certain way. She is still wearing boots in December, driving her troopy short distances, buying film cameras, learning guitar. I don’t know if she’s happy—her laziness possibly representative of fallen spirits.

6th December

The first storm of the season blows through, the curtains where I sleep billowing into my sleeping face. It’s the barking mad frogs that keep me awake through the lightning flashes and thunder cracks and rain pounding the tin roof. In the morning, Beth sits on the back verandah, a white cat perched atop the rusted tin of the shed roof overlooking the bright green garden alive with the smell of rain.

7th December

Every time I try to word the email to the Landlord my heart starts pounding with fear. ‘Lucrative,’ he described the season. But this wasn’t an intentional act. People had come out of the woodwork needing somewhere to stay and so I worked with the town’s needs. There are costs rather than rent, an emergency stash to keep the peace. This was a big job for free rent. People have commented they are glad it’s me and not them. I deal with enough rich people contesting prices, Landlord. Not you too!

Wil was in my dream. He was over the road. I went there.

Read the news, there is something creepy in the way Josh Frydenberg says the vaccine is safe for children.

The ease of living in a house where Pippa comes through my curtains and I’m unperturbed by my naked torso.

Universe, I need likeminded souls for verandah rooms.

Universe, I’ll remember my true goals: family, home, books.

Document-er. Inspire-er.

13th December, Nana’s Birthday

Romeo calls from the side of the highway. He’s hysterical at first but through several phone calls we talk it through and I have him walking through the night, surrounded by stars and space, to Pardoo. I tell him to return to Broome, that he can stay here, to not fret about money. Because people have helped me and so I help people.

Pippa comes into my room through the open door. Tears swell in her eyes, she needs to talk: driving back from Jamie’s she saw a man beating the shit out of a pregnant woman. Instinctively and courageously she stopped when many wouldn’t. The man threatened to hit Pippa with a rock. What’s the price, the lady’s life or a car window?

16th December

Of all mornings I decide to go to Little Local their coffee machine isn’t working. Plus I killed a butterfly on my way. At least, the butterfly had hit my face as I innocently raced down Herbert on Sunny.
Last night, after Byron had been for dinner, Pippa and I took our usual hold on the poolside lounge, with Pippa lucky enough to cop an earful from me about the shit we are going to see in our lifetime and how this shit is going to be ugly and feel all-consuming and dire. I’d come to be giving this impassioned speech from a premonition I’d had earlier that day: putting out the flags at work, a plane came over the town for landing and I thought it won’t be much longer that planes will be landing tourists. Such thoughts often lead to a struggle in my interactions. People, it feels, convey my true compassion as heartlessness, like I’m shrugging my shoulders and accepting the turmoil of the world. Whereas what I often feel is wow, the depth of beauty in this world. Let us saviour it and save it. Because something’s going to happen.

20th December

Last night, stoned in the hommock, I was thinking on self-love reminders that had appeared when I did a tarot reading with Abbey. I felt such an absurd sensation to be here in this body with this free mind. I’m a drop in time, a grain of sand, a revolution. The excitement of self-love through embracing creative possibilities. I love that thought: safely creating to better the world. I sing. Maybe in The Gemstones of Broomerang I do sing.
Now it’s a groggy morning on the Sunday before Christmas, in which I work for an extra $200 to cover my extravagant festive season acquiring new handmade pieces from Broome locals. Work is challenging me, though. Three times this week my lovely work ladies told me of their K-Mart shopping. First it was Nicole, who explained the beads she’d bought for Ella’s 8th birthday party before I drew in a breath of silence and showed her the excess beads I had collected from op shops. The next was Geneveive. ‘I like your skirt,’ I had said.
‘Thanks, it was $10 from K-Mart’ she replied, which had me return to a breath of silence for response.
Then came Susie and her bag. ‘I like your bag, Susie,’ I said.
‘Thanks, it was $10 from Kmart.’
‘I don’t like your bag anymore, Susie.’

The billowing curtains wake me to the house alive in a storm. Lightning flashes, thunder cracks, the poolroom door opening and closing until I get out of bed and secure it shut with a heavy object. It’s 3:30am. Out on the couch on the back verandah, I sit with Tom, inhaling my joint and relishing in the rain. I adore these quiet days in this old house.

22nd December

The Wednesday before Christmas. Nearly the whole night spent with the air-con on but not the whole night. The morning is muggy and overcast. I add heat to my body with a coffee, watering my plants while waiting on the percolator. In the cooler, dark of my middle room—the heart of the house—I play with my website, refining my offerings. I have weeks ahead to concentrate on this and it is a time that I’ve been looking forward to, having space to dance in this old, haunted house without work interfering with my flow.
Work is a conflict. In my nerves to his strong character, I mumbled something non-reflective of my truer beliefs. Hours later a lady with dark and wild hair appears in the shop. She’s looking toward the balcony and I recognise her from the photo that sits above Saint John’s desk. We don’t directly introduce ourselves until Kellie does it for us. Scanning me, I see Rina as perceptive as Saint John, noting my unkempt hair, my ripped dress, my lack of make-up and bra. I see her eyes flicker behind me. When she walks out, she takes the hideous new catalogue and summarises my thoughts like she’s entered my body and sucked them fresh for the taking. How unoriginal this catalogue is, how dull, how offensive. ‘We should do a catalogue here in Broome,’ she says. I tell her about my relief in hearing this. How much I connect with her observations. I felt so passionately about it, I tell her.
‘Good,’ she says. ‘We need passion.’
What I don’t tell her is the glimmers of shame that come when I deliver my passions in sharp tones and exclamations.

Christmas Eve

Last night was my first night in the house alone. My music played through the old speakers. I smoked a joint in the hammock and smoked a joint on the pool lounge. I read, watch and write myself into smoke that robs me off my actions and traps me in my thoughts. In the cold ballroom, laying on the couch, my body twisted towards the glass doors that lead to the back verandah where the solar fairy lights have ignited and the butterfly decoration—what do you call it, with glass bits hanging down—spins in a light breeze, the reflections are as bright as a light. As bright as my bike light. I have mental conversations with the ghost. The butterfly spins its reflections, further catching my eye. I laugh loudly, like I often do when alone, until I muster the energy to stand, and move, to lose the bright light.
I make it to bed with only slight trepidation. My doors and windows closed for the air conditioner and protection. To sleep I drift—it had been a funny old day.
At work, we made $23,000 worth of sales. But it was Brett the postman’s demanding arrival into store with eyes bursting wide with a story to be released that was the main excitement. Brett’s young daughter craved to care for a young bird you see, and finally, early that morning, as he drove to work in the dark, Brett spotted an injured blue-winged kookaburra on the side of the road. Brett did a uey, stopped, knelt down besides the blue-winged kookaburra and locked eyes with it as headlights appeared. The bird was flattened by Saint John driving over it.
But that’s only the beginning of the funny old day.
In the afternoon, Richard hand delivered a handwritten note to my work, each word a replica of a text message he had sent the night before: You have until the end of the week to return the table and remove your camper. I’d already explained the note to Genevieve, so when Richard handed her the note with instructions to ‘give it to Sarah please,’ she had her suspicions in the polite, potential assassin. When I returned from my errand, Genevieve came rushing for me, showing me the note.
The note sat next to me at my work desk. When I took glances to it, I didn’t know what to think. What was it I said, or should have said, in his mind? Who is the Sarah he despises?
Back at Broomerang, Pippa, the pillar of strength, shares with me that she also wouldn’t know how to handle the situation. Pippa’s happy to call Richard to arrange collection of Marianne. ‘Best to cease contact,’ she reckons. When Pippa calls Richard to arrange a time, he answers the phone with ‘Ohh have you been dragged into this too?’
But Richard, dragged into what exactly?
Later that night, Romeo calls and we talk on desert stars and shifting DNA.

Boxing Day

Christmas Eve sunset doesn’t happen because a storm rolls through instead. Messaging Lachie, I’d grown giddy in anticipation of a catch up. But there’s a sudden shift in messages and he’s annoyingly distant. He also didn’t come by on Christmas despite my invitation, but quality people do. At sunset Wil had appeared for cheesecake, his face hidden underneath the cowboy hat, curly hair and rich eyes hued by G&Ts, and we talked about the article in the Broome advertiser and journalism. I liked talking to Wil. He has his own opinions and doesn’t accept everything I say. ‘I’m an artist,’ he tells me, although I can’t remember what had taken us to this conversation. Had it been Jamie’s cheesecake? When Pippa and Jamie get back, he leaves straight away. And now here, boxing day, in my jocks and dirty hair high on my head, my morning cuddle is with weed. I spit out words haphazardly. In text messages and on social media. I unsubscribe to brands that give me false dreams.

27th December

Cue day after acid day. Epic acid day full of laughter and delight. It was a long trip. The longest I’ve had. There were bugs all through this house, moments so vivid, N’s string art like a vortex. Today, I read, I coffee, I create. I must create. I must be fed by people. I need these people. I need both. Because there was such genuine happiness in Pippa giggling at me and with me by the pool. We’d lost hold of perfection by this point. Everything was perfection. Acid, like DMT, brings a shift in time. A shift in breathing.

28th December

Having slept for ten hours with hot winds blowing outside, another lazing day comes with opportunities to be at home alone, stoned. Pippa goes to collect my camper after Richard hounds us, fighting for control, obsessed, the removal of my camper his prerogative. As for me, I don’t return his phone calls, we don’t need to ‘discuss’ options. Stay away from me, Richard. I want nothing to do with you ever again.
Surround yourself with loving characters, Sarah. Ones who don’t love to remind you of all your flaws.

29th December

There are maggots amongst the oysters. I pour the black coffee slowly. Stop the drinking to save the money. Stop the sugar to save my health. Stop the buying to have my homespace. Stop the weed to save my mind.

Reluctantly back to work today. While such adoration to my work colleagues helps, it remains a physical struggle to spend so much time there. Do I struggle with work because of my so-called creativity? Usually, when I see or hear someone describes themselves as an artist, I cringe. Until Wil did it. Because Wil is something. He’s an incredible artist.

“What happens when you tell someone you ‘like’ them? If they don’t positively respond you might be hurt, but you’ll move on. If they feel the same way you might have taken one of the most important lessons in your life.”

What do I want from the year? Love, Positivity, Authenticity. I want to be genuine and present in interactions. I want to do things that fulfill me. I want to dance like a desert woman, with colours and flames, scarves and jewellery, barefeet stomping, face pinched from laughter, the sincerity of touch. Don’t flinch, Sarah. Be brave, woman. Trust in the places that creating a narrative can take you.

Was it Byron who mentioned a language revolution? It had been someone in the pool and it was like they were reading my thoughts.

Jewellery to return from status to symbolism.

Because I finish work and I want family to surround me. I don’t want to be wondering what others are doing, what I should or could be doing.

Dropping things. I’m dropping everything. Slipping through my fingers without cause.

2022 word: Love.

Love for what I pour my soul into, love for who I surround myself with.

New Year’s Eve

I open the glass door to the haunted hall, and I’m hit with the woody smell of the night’s rain, whose pounding of the tin roof had woken me. Outside is wet. Romeo hadn’t come home until about 8:30 the night before, despite me having dedicated my night to him. Is the word for next year vulnerability? To not be afraid to show my love and show my hurt.

1st January 2022

New Year’s Eve was spent across the road with a genuine smile stretched across my face. I was vivacious, laughing, tantalised. And now I’m at my desk, with that feeling my computer/desk/space provides me. What will I achieve? I’m writing, regardless of being slightly hungover from champagne and acid and the swirling thoughts to why Wil didn’t want to talk about the ghost.

2022 Goals & Notions

Soul tribe. Creativity and sexuality release. Fearless love and creativity. Write everyday. Save $30,000. Limited weed, sugar and spending. Authenticity: to be myself. To align my actions with core values and beliefs. To define love, to redefine love. To be bold and be beautiful.

Love Stories, Trent Dalton, 1/1/22
“I believe we are not alone in this universe, teachers are underpaid, Harold Holt drowned, the Big Max still has a role to play on this Earth, Connery was the best Bond, there is no best Beatle, Vegemite never goes out of date, preventions and cures are equally valid, injecting rooms work, Test Cricket is not dead but Elvis is. I believe that somewhere in the world is a woman who has tattooed the true meaning of life on the upper inside of her left thigh. I believe I’ll die before I see peace in the Middle East but my daughters won’t because I believe in them. I believe in dancing badly, farting politely, kissing sloppily, hoping realistically, grieving openly, fishing silently, dreaming wildly, making up quickly, making love slowly, writing daily, whistling hourly, weeping freely, singling loudly, screaming internally, thanking everyone and failing at least once a week. I believe it’s good to whisper to plants as long as nobody gets hurt.”

3rd January

Something had shifted in my dreams last night. Something was different.
A year back, I’d written in the front of a diary to what I wished lay head. “I want people around me…need people like me…nature, nurture, barefoot and salty, breathe the ocean, surrender and see.” And there was an intention to find my purpose. Did I find my purpose? Yes. It is here in these days of blues, on this soulful morning, waking early, coffee simmering on the clean stove, a mouse in the pantry, the light brightening beyond the house but still dull inside. This past year, my creativity has been given the opportunity it deserves; an opportunity to fly. Never before have I felt so whole, never before have I felt so like myself.
I peer across the road, I put away dishes, think on yoga, appreciate all the green that lies beyond the walls. In the cool of my dark-wooden room, at my grand old desk (which is causing contention with Edward who wants it returned to the Croc Park), I click into different Lonely documents and drag them between screens.
It is here, in these moments and notions of my intentions, that happiness takes hold; barefoot, in underwear, dirty hair, at a desk where I scramble with papers, computers, photos and jewellery beads. My sacred space to which I had dreamed of so vigorously, surrounded by this green, by these people who nurture, love, read books, use their minds, and challenge me.
This was always what I was fighting for without knowing what I was fighting for: these long days, in this grand old house with blossoming females engineering my creative evolution through their abundant use of our space. Creativity stabilises my soul, makes me grounded. As the year progresses, I will shine enough to share.

The cricket’s orchestra the sun’s rise into a heat trapped by clouds. Pippa and I stand in my camper retrieving a pot for clothes dying and start to sweat. At Little Local, Pippa, Beth and I workshop my blurb and see Abbey, Josie and Vadem. Vadem talks to us about replacing a bad habit with another habit. Edward comes with Lola but he doesn’t come inside to where we are to order coffee. Will I ever write whole ideas with the desperate need of an editor?

5th January

The morning is sticky, quaint. I do seven minutes of yoga on the verandah to the sounds of the garbage trucks and helicopters. I love these moods on these days. Possibilities lay big on the horizon. The sky grumbles.
It’s a random work day, with a lizard in the middle of the office and Kellie making $60,000 worth of sales helped along by Saint John delivering an epic one liner.
Plans for the South bloom and excitement blooms with it. To roll with minimal, to be open to experiences. I’m an anxious sort of excited and I don’t know why.

6th January

Outside the bathroom of work, I find a tiny feather. Inside I waltz and declare it to Jess and Kellie, who says ‘Maybe it’s a sign, an angel watching over you.’ It’s been eight years. A snake waits in the paper bin next to my desk. After yesterday’s lizard, we chuckle to the random week. John takes the snake outside and Kenny watches from the balcony. ‘Snakes represent birth and fertility,’ Kellie says.

7th January

The mandatory mask wearing at Cable Beach Club is welcome as my cheek acne is wild. I’m easing off tinted moisturiser. And just like that, I’ve quit cigarettes on account of my skin, toxins, and veins.
With work, I had begun as a respectful and considerate presence, fitting in with expected clothing and society moulds. Then time built confidence, and by today, January, I’m wearing a Pippa sewing-creation with an exposed back and no make-up, revealing my Christmas acne. Still I approach design questions to the jewellers with trepidation, aware of Saint John’s emotive reactions while admiring his rawness. When he’s delivering facts, I see the similarity of his tone to mine. I think to hypothetical conversations with John after he’d scoffed at a lady’s want for a star, a moon and a sun on a pendant. ‘Like symbolism,’ I had clarified. Because really, Saint John, we’re a little empty inside are we not?

9th January

Words! I have to write so many words to break it down to a mere few. And these few that survive hold so much more meaning than meets the eye, they hold the meaning of the words that have been lost. My writing is like a sculpture.

It’s okay to stay in my imaginary world at times. To stay in these worlds I can paint each detail in words and go on to share this joy with others. On Insta, Piero does a post on his zine. ‘Pfffffttt,’ I think. ‘If he’s still an artist then I’m definitely an artist too.’

All these new age writers, touching on issues I understand and yet conveyed in settings so far away. I want my stories to push boundaries, to show the alternatives, and to demonstrate the possibilities of a more wholesome world. Like, the fact that I am beyond caring—respectfully losing the bra and make-up I had originally been wearing to work.

Toxins into body, pimples onto skin. Why do pimples appear symmetrically on both sides of my face?

The Romans used seven day weeks to the seven celestial bodies: the sun, the moon, the five planets.

10th January

Late night! So late that the sprinklers came on as Tara was leaving. Tara and I had connected on our inner-feelings, and I have good feelings about this female friendship and the sense of mysticism and wisdom it gives. Earlier in the night, Wil was in the hammock, yarning about Malcolm Douglas, and I think I had held eye contact with him longer than I have with anyone in a while. Beth later told me that his shirt was undone, but I didn’t notice this. I was too captivated by stories.
Hungover in the morning, without concentration or motive, I read Love Stories: “What is for you will not pass you by.” Imagine to be asked, What is your Love Story. I’d scrounge for an answer—I don’t believe to have experienced my great love story yet. Although there’s been many friendship-love stories. Like Roser, who I’m so excited to see this Friday.

12th January

Three young woman in the witchen. Two make breakfast, I make a strong black coffee. It had been an early night, curled up in the darkened ballroom, and an early morning. The wind chimes sing in the morning breeze, which makes no difference to the sandflies and mosquito massacring me as I do yoga. The veg gardens are dry and full of weeds, which doesn’t stop us from lying in the hammock and on the couches and watching them.

Thursday the 13th

The day we go South. I dance in my room, steam of the coffee billowing over my Old-Croc-Park desk, excited to be escaping Broome and its resistance to rain. Oh to dance again. Last night, over the road I had ventured for the first time alone. Tara was in Perth, Wil was in his jocks. We chatted easily. I pranced back across the road barefoot to have raw sweet slice, a plum and witchen conversations for dinner.

South, The Sunday, date unknown

Perth was smooth. A night at Xana’s in Fremantle, where her housemate sat on a deckchair on the front concrete patio overlooking the dock, the late afternoon sun shimmering on his hair belly as he read a book. He was dismissive, a bong smoker. Living that city life dream.
In Freo centre, Pippa and I had hunted for food and drink, mesmerised by all the cool kids ticking boxes of appearance (like my younger self). Back in Xana’s apartment, I felt the claustrophobia of the city. I know this would never be my life again. Oh all those years of silent, undiagnosed pain.

Two days of circus festival, two days reconnecting and hugging and dancing and laughing. The Broome community gone South. The hope that filled my world last year, returned. My Gemstones of Broomerang. Merging, meshing, pushing boundaries, creating new boundaries.
One afternoon, when JaZaza played, I danced wildly with Silay and Aimee and Marc and Kamali. I twirled and I twirled and I twirled, feeling the Earth under my feet, alive from the people and music that filled my world. At the end, Sammy left his trademark note to the audience: “Be who you want to be, not what the world wants you to be. We are consciousness shifting. Don’t fear the government—they should fear us.” We howl, keep dancing, my mind twirling. Oh to shake the system from the inside, right? For to get to the people, I must remain part of the people and talk like the people.
It is all within the language.
Like with Kamali’s use of the word ‘backpackers’ to describe those who would frequent his and Marc’s community, as we stood around the bar section of the circus festival. ‘But I’m not a backpacker,’ I had said.
‘No this is true,’ he said with a look of wondering.
‘How about…explorer. I’m an explorer and we can call them the explorers?’
An explorer! Of ideas and places. And me, this wildcard who went through years of not understanding my wandering but persisting through it regardless, to be here, crossing paths with community, edging into a tribe of total acceptance and natural values.

I write from Roser’s bus by a “lake” near Margaret River. My hair washed in the water, the sound of wind through the eucalyptus. I take my black coffee and go to the rugs by the water. Amora the belly dancer is doing impromptu sound healing. I sit, cross my legs. There is a stillness in the gumtrees over the lake and paddocks beyond. Amora finishes what she’s saying to Carla and Alba in Spanish, and says, ‘Okay I do in English now.’ I place the coffee before me and close my eyes. Amora talks about transcending to our inner child, to what you would say to yourself at five years old, to see your parents and to forgive your parents: I love you I love you I love you I love you. To love yourself, to forgive yourself, to accept your flaws and to know your flaws. Love your flaws. With a partner, she notes, you are in partnership as individuals and they are not there to reassure you, carry you or fix you, but there to complement you. It is the combination of minds and bodies that create the possibilities. I love you I love you I love you I love you. ‘Now envision yourself on a beach,’ Amora says. ‘All those that you love are there.’ In my vision, when I, naked, enter the water, those whom I love follow me. When I turn back, smile to the shoreline, my parents are there telling me that I’m unique and that I’m creative. Then I imagine what I could create with my own family.

Roser’s dashboard is decorated in feathers, bones and dust. We’re driving through the trees wondering what the “up” in all the town names means. Water?
At Blackwood State Forest, the first person we see is Jamie Mac. By the clear river, we sit in the shade. Pippa appears in a break in the forest on the other side of the river and steps across rocks to join us. She’s been for a walk, admiring the endangered White Tailed Black Cockatoos. Pippa, Roser, Jamie and I pull cards and play Rummy.
I smile within.
When I’d woken that morning in Roser’s bus, there was a fairy wren with me. Had it been there all night? Something had crossed my face, but I was too deep in vivid dreams to stir. It had been a night of vivid dreams. Patchi came to Roser’s bus, fresh from a swim, and explained that her dream had created the question: What would you do if no one saw? For me, the interpretation to that is what would I do if there was no judgment. Hrm, what would I do? Tell stories of possibilities created from wholesome lives. That’s what I would do. Oh and I would do what I’m doing now, sitting in a forest with Roser, us both dressed in brown shorts and rust coloured tops, a near-full moon rising through the gumtrees, Roser playing the guitar and rapping in Spanish, translating the song to English: dancing barefoot under the moon, a society sick, I love you Mama, I love you Papa.
Roser and I close off the day by lying in bed, where at least seven colourful pillows of different patterns engulf us. We make our famous ‘tomorrow’ list that includes: eat muffins, do what we’d do when no one’s watching, swim in freshwater, buy stone fruit and avocado from the side of the road, say what comes to our mind and not take it as bible. The last point had come from an idea I had about breaking the system from within. An idea that I said as I thought it. ‘Don’t hold me to it,’ I had justified to Roser. ‘Because this is what happens to me. Thoughts come, I speak them, forgetting that people on the receiving end will interpret it as my truth. But they’re just new thoughts, they’re ideas. I never say them as truth.’

I wake before six and walk to reflections on the freshwater. Back next to Roser, I read my YA book on short love stories, noting how each story holds what proves to be unknowing mutual attractions—all it takes is saying something—and ends with ‘new beginnings.’
When Roser wakes, we drink coffee before winding back through the trees, the bus swerving like Roser’s waving, expressive hands. When other cars in turn swerve to miss her, she never notices. In Manjimup, my tense mood heightens when we come to a world of masks and I’m with Roser who is so nonchalant about her part in all this. Quickly, I become thirsty for Broome’s heat and small population. I’m tired of this vaccine conversation.
At the Pemby dam, looking out to the water, blue skies, families and Karri trees, my excitable spirit returns.

A morning at Warren River, leaves rain from the high trees and when we drive a kilometre the wrong way down a road, we quickly become talk of the river. We’re chatty, sitting on the stairs that go into the River, whose water is silky, as Hans once said one Christmas day. Old men come up behind us—telling us they’d seen us driving the fucking wrong way—and dive in, surfacing to question their conversational swearing, attributing it to another man present in their canoeing group. Out of the water, the men dry themselves and I recognise one of the men from Tony’s.
Back on the dirt road: raining leaves and tall trees, no pants or top, windows down for air conditioning, and music through a speaker. We buy fruit from the side of the road, we stop in Walpole for another swim, and when we cross the Franklin river, I see a dolphin. It’s big and grey and gliding above the brown water in the shape of a rainbow. ‘Oh wow I just saw a dolphin,’ I say to Roser with a resurgence of energy and a will to talk.
‘No way,’ Roser says with widening eyes. ‘Last night I dream of dolphin. Oh I just remember this now. Oh. It was super real. I could feel the teeth in my arm. I pat it and I put my hand in its mouth and, no way, I remember this so well this dream.’

At Kamali’s, I’m in love with the evolution of his fairyland. There are new structures, new areas and new gardens grown in the two years since I’d been there. The outdoor kitchens are now divided, while all the crockery remains handmade like Kamali, and the wooden structures that dot the land, all long and windily, wise and twisted. Kamali’s heavily wrinkled back is in the shape of a sacred triangle, the outer curtains like the shape of a rainbow, or maybe the shape of a dolphin. I feel neutral to Kamali’s nakedness and the sacred triangle of his wrinkled back. I walk through vine covered awnings, butterflies exploding around me, guinea pigs squeaking, ducks waddling across my path and into the dam, and my gaze goes from the food jungle to my dirty feet.

It's the morning. I don’t flinch when Silay gets changed before me as I wash in the stone-bottomed shower in the fairy garden. I slot back in with a practiced ease. Silay plays guitar and sings in a husky, raw and heartfelt voice, her hair wet from the dam and sound reverberating through the glass walls of the shower surrounded by green. When Patrick the poet wanders in, I again don’t flinch to the exposure of my small breasts.
In the fairy garden, Silay and I sit smiling and chatting, chopping the veg for dinner. We talk of healing. I tell her it’s been nearly a year that I’ve gone without sex. It’s something I’ve only recently realised, and something I do not regret. For this has been a formative year on my own healing journey. In this year, I have found comfort within.
Stav wanders in, telling me that I was the first person she ever saw at Kamali’s two years before. I sit back and admire these exquisite girls. Us Lost Girls. And see my role as connector, inspirer and documenter. Kamali wanders through. I observe the agitation that can overcome him when people are unsure and don’t contribute. Sometimes, I think, I can seem lazy in my contributions. But, deep down, Kamali knows that I will do something great with these experiences amongst these travelling communities. These movers and shakers. We are liberation and freedom. Making no apologies, considering our regrets.
In the Hay River, Silay is voluptuous and free, while Roser and I are practically covered from the bite of the sun. The water is salty and sweet as we swim. Us Lost Girls, connected. But don’t call me bush girl, don’t call me fancy girl. No, we are the Lost Girls of Kamaliland (in which he told me he was saving $20,000 a year to pay for). We are the misfits, all holding stories of wounds and heartbreaks.

Remember this, Sarah. Remember all of this. That happiness is not brought. That even when you feel alone that there are people out there who you’ll never feel lonely with. That you have dreams and you have patience. That you can be a part of change, with friends, intelligence, strength, determination, and you can save so you can share your future.

I love blueberries straight from the bush, I love my toes curled in dirt, I love angels laughing around me, I love being surrounded by tall trees, I love driving with the window down and my hand waving with the wind, I love showers in fresh water, I love the colour of tea tree, I love turning off my phone, I love reading the stars, I love walking the smooth surfaces of fallen trees in the forest.

What if I could tell this to five-year old Sarah: that genuine happiness will come from the faraway fairyland that she once dreamed.

When you have gardens, you have butterflies and birds and the natural soundtrack to the world. Imagine a world without butterflies or birds.

Oh how imperative being in nature can be to mental health. Oh how nature can wash all our worries away. Oh how my everyday life, in hindsight, is meaningless.

When I don’t agree with something in conversation my body moves, and my chest tightens. Rarely can I immediately explain my instinctive resistance.

Thank the Lord for Pippa Kern. At Madfish Bay, we talk of the different worlds and how I feel both liberation and discomfort at Kamali’s, where I’ve observed the herd mentality in it not being ‘cool’ to have plans or ideas. ‘Just like the mainstream they ridicule, they too partake in the pack mentality,’ I say to Pippa Kern, who patiently listens as I sift my ideas in search of an understanding to why this bothers me. Then, then, then there’s all this talk of the vaccine. But the vaccine isn’t my fight.

Pippa on protests, believing in the voices of the city. Me on rallies, believing in leading the way by living your truth.

I drag a mat under the giant tree by the dam and watch the leaves cloud the sky. I read my book. When I pee, I squat close by the mat. When I start to feel irritated by not being as carefree as I’d hope, I replace the rants with love.

A memory, the young girl, a teenager, in high-waist jeans on a small waist with a cropped top and long black hair that hangs past her waist, dances on the bus balcony at circus fest. But she’s proper dancing, with a partner and learned moves. Now that’s what I define as cool.

Everyone is at the markets, making their money, and Pippa and I sit on the low couches of the sunroom. When I’m warm, I lose my t-shirt and not a single eyelash flutters. It’s incredible how I can see the beauty amongst the flies and insects and piles of shit and transforming smells.

Second Place (book): “If we treated each moment as though it were a permanent condition, a place where we might find ourselves compelled to remain forever, how differently most of us would chose the things that moment contains.”

Full moon through lace curtains. Roser and I giggling like little girls, still dressed in similar colours.

Today, Sunday, brings a basin. A remote, secluded, natural basin in the bush where red-tailed black cockatoos gather, and where forest song and nibble-y fish populate the tea coloured water. I’m in a quiet mode amongst Kamali and strangers (a mother who lost her nine-year old son when camping with Kamali and Silay back in October, and her two other sons). Not wanting to pollute the silence between us with meaningless words, I listen to the cockatoos until Kamali and the mother start talking about the vaccine. When the new mandates take effects, Kamali’s long held market career will end. ‘It’s exciting,’ the mother says. ‘We’ve spoken about all this stuff and now the opportunity is here.’ More people will homeschool their children, her and Kamali reckon. I stretch my heavily freckled legs out on the rock before me, absorbing more bite from the Southern sun. I mull; these are the minority, right here before me. Kamali obvious in his matted dreadlocked hair and nudity, with his sagging earlobes and anklets dangling above swollen feet, whereas the mother is not so obvious. She has a slim figure and slender arms like mine. They are simple silver earrings in her ears and an Akubra styled hat (donned with a red-tailed black cockatoo feather the cockatoos gifted to her for her son) upon her head. As for me, where do I sit? On a rock, before a basin. And what is my extreme? I have the gift of communication. To break the system from within. So, would I send my children to the mainstream schooling? Will I let them decide for themselves? Will I get the vaccine, continuing to defy my own roots and own family? What do I want of this world? What should I do with this meaningless life? The sun is sharp through my closed eyes. ‘Man,’ Kamali begins, ‘when I come to places like this, I question why I have land and all the responsibilities that come with it.’ I wander off into the bush to be alone with the insects and trees and cockatoos. Never have my feet been so bare, never have I walked so effortlessly through the bush, searching for a feather. I find a gentle female red-tailed black cockatoo feather, although it was never about finding the feather, it was always about the moments of search. I wonder on how I feel to stand in a place where few stand with me. This notion loses truth as I walk. It morphs. I stand united with those of us who shift between the worlds.
Back at the basin, Kamali is asleep in the swag in the back of his ute, penis and balls on full show, no fucks given from either side.

Sitting on the floor of the caravan where I had spent the six weeks writing the end of Lonely, there is youth before me in dear Aimee. She’s showing me her pottery mugs and I tell her I’m eager to buy one. She’s long last on medication, she tells me. She hasn’t felt so good in so long. Plus she’s in her tribe, happiness dowsed in the pack mentality. ‘And of course we’re against the system,’ Aimee tells me.
‘But are we totally against it?’ I debate. ‘I don’t know, I’ve come to think that my role might be bringing the system down from the inside.’
‘Yeah right interesting,’ she murmurs.
Eager to put down those who appear to be unquestionably part of the “system,” I continue the search for the point that gives me contention.

There’s classic Denmark weather on pizza night, where a lady looks at me suddenly and says, ‘Hello.’ Turns out the lady is good friends with the landlords, and Wil. ‘He’s so sensitive,’ she says of Wil. ‘He’s so rude,’ she later says, like she’s disturbed.
An impromptu jam begins, which has Kamali and Marc bouncing while I talk to Sorren the self-taught and successful goldsmith. The music shifts and draws me in. There’s didg, drums, that mouth thing, guitar, loop, everyone going around and saying something in their language: Israeli, English, Australia, Filippino, Chinese, German.

On the last morning I walk through the ducks and guinea pigs to have coffee in the lounge where flies hang off us as we fight for warmth from the morning rain. ‘Well anyone had a shower lately?’ Kamali asks, to which we all chuckle and nobody responds.
I gift Kamali and Marc cake for Kamli having me and Marc driving to the Mt Barker bus station. Marc and I talk about bodies and health and the vaccine and the good nature of last night’s music with the multiple languages edging towards universal language.
I could’ve stayed longer at the community, even two days, but to leave with encouraging spirits is something. I am happiest when people and place cost me nothing. Then when I start frivolously waving my card around, I’m filled with dread.

26th January, Invasion Day, Absurd Day, Greed Day, Selfish Day

I return to Broome to balance my body; my face is dry and itchy, my hair’s growth is stunted, I’m tired and I’m spaced. I welcome the Broometime to further focus on myself—after years of working through my imbalances, I am finding answers. As a lone gypsy finding her tribe, I will replace habits and take a holistic approach to the mental and physical.
At Elsa’s, I had been left alone with David when Elsa went to the dentist. I took up David’s offer of a pipe. We talk. Well, he talks, and I reiterate. He tells of having lost his license for 12 years. He tells of the rape. He tells of the time in prison. ‘I’m not fucking lying to you, Sarah, it’s the truth I swear,’ he keeps saying and I know he’s being serious because he calls me Sarah instead of Leprechaun.
David, Elsa and I walk down the street to Fremantle. When David hassles people, Elsa and I pull him into line. Still the people of Fremantle, the progressives and the outspoken, glance in David’s direction, the saltwater boy in the city.
David and I are on the same flight back to Broome. During the flight, David drinks. He shouts down the aisle to me ‘Fuck you’ in jest and I put my hand over my face and shake my head.
That afternoon, as I potter back at home, glad to be back in my own space, this space I once dreamed, surrounded by my clothes, cameras, photos, notebooks, guitar and computer, David calls and asks if it’s cool he swings by.
‘Sounds like you’re in party mode?’ I question.
He is.
Not now, I tell him with assertiveness and fear of being hated. Because I need a Sarah afternoon, buying lavishly at the supermarket, breathing in the quaint old house with green sprouting through the lattices, windows and doors, rain on the roof.
Petrichor! A chainsaw over the road! I have returned home to Broome.

27th January

It rained through the night as I slept through the night, the windows by my bed closed to the thundering poolside frogs. This morning, the air is cool, with the doors to the verandah room opened wide for the first time in a long time. With this, is a sensation. The happiness to be here in these moments. I drink a cold chai left over from Beth and I being cosy in the kitchen last night, I do about ten minutes of yoga (my calf muscles are tight with the return of my sore knees) and a ten minute self-love meditation. In my self-love mediation I centre around the notion of allowing flaws in myself and allowing flaws in others. It is a notion I had been speaking of in the South.

The great vaccine debate! Back at work, Kellie brings it up with me early—I won’t be able to go to the club or on boats, which is totally fine by me. Such places are not my passion. She will make it work for me as long as possible, but things could change at any moment. In these moments, I find my stance: I don’t (yet) want it, not until technological advances have it ease the spread and do something more. Who knows what this year will bring!

28th January

It's raining consistently this morning. On my yoga mat on the back verandah, I watch heavier bursts of water and my mind goes from weeding the bright-green weeds of the veg garden, to the vaccine. It’s madness, this being bullied by the government for something so rudimentary. I want time, I want science to have time. To be certain. For in this current state, it doesn’t reduce the spread but reduces the symptoms, if that. The symptoms won’t apply much to me at 33, mostly healthy (have finally cut the cigarettes) and not a burden to the health system by actively looking after herself. In this current time, it is difficult to be transparent about the effects the modern diet has on us without sounding uncompassionate. But the effects of these modern diet give us greater, long-term harm than coronavirus. Then there’s our selfish ways of keeping older people alive for as long as possible. At the end of this “pandemic” it will be interesting to see the statistics on population reduction.
I’ll stand in solidary with Mother Nature.
But this will never be seamless. For I’m here, in life, as a human, and there’s dread, something, clawing at me.
Work!
Not being able to go to Nicole’s going away dinner is the hardest part. Especially when it’s this aspect of fancy dinners and drowning in mediocre chat that I least relate. After a work dinner last year, I had heavily considered leaving the job. To handle work, I will turn my attention to wholesomeness. This year, I will give space to those who are trailblazers, creatives, healers, inspirers, those who are being rejected from mainstream society. Is all that is happening with work a curse? Perhaps not. For does my fate really lie in fancy dinners and expensive jewellery?
Still, something more claws at me.
Today, while I was at work, David had come to the house and as Bruce had sat quiet, David had spoken to Beth about being massaged and touched. Later, when I returned home from work in a window between rainfalls, Beth was out in the hammock, visibly shaken. I called Elsa. Elsa called David, who better understood that he had offended me by offending Beth through his drunk words. Through all this, I’m annoyed by Beth’s inability to stand up for herself. I don’t think Beth is as happy as she tells herself. All those hours in the hammock staring into space, ticking all those boxes on appearances. ‘She knows who she wants to be,’ Pippa had said. ‘She’s just not there yet.’
I pass the night in slight fear of a retaliation from David. For such a small guy, aggression is his driving point. I’m prepared that if he comes, to tell him to please stay away from the house when there’s the slightest drop of alcohol in his system. Leave that thug life, David. Work through the intergenerational trauma, David. Do something with your smarts, David.

 29th January

ABC news article on possible new variant: ‘the key thing is showing that it makes a difference to the vaccines, to the testing, to a clinical picture, to the hospitalisations, all of those sorts of things.’

Last night in the kitchen, Pippa commented that all those who are dying are unvaccinated. Where did you get that statistic huh?

Oh to follow the crowd, to accept all that I’m told. With writing, I will give honesty.

30th January

Wake at 5am, read, meditate on love, about seven minutes of yoga on the verandah before the overgrown grass and light rain on the rusted tin shed roof.

Love is letting Dad calling me back instead of explaining that it’s 2022 and in 2022 across country phone calls are not costly.

Mum telling me to get the vaccine: ‘everyone’s doing it.’

If only I could tell people what is to come without them thinking me crazy.

It goes on to be the rainiest of Sundays, the sky so hungry and the roads like rivers. I move the furniture back from the edge of the verandah, the vines in front heavy with water. Running out to move the furniture left in the rain, I’m wet in seconds, just like the movies. Pippa, Beth and I move through this grand old house. I listen to Max Ritcher and bead necklaces; starting, failing, keeping going. I eat homemade sourdough before my bread consumption comes to a halt. Because I’m sick from bread, and for years I’ve been sick from bread. I’m a bread belly.

 31st January

The kitchen floor is in a constant state of dampness. It hasn’t stopped raining for days and I’m feeling snug watching goldsmithing videos in my room. My mouth is full of ulcers. From peanut butter?
It’s the last day before unvaccinated restrictions are imposed (bars, restaurants, bottles shops, can’t remember what else), and I wake around 5am, as I have been every morning since I got back, to cracking thunder that has my hair stand on end and a desire to cling to someone. Rain pounds the roof. The house lights up from perpetual flashes of lightning, the thunder like a whip next to my ear. I’m smiling, the morning storm my music, in love with these days with all my heart (can you tell I’ve been reading a romance book), while feeling unequivocal about damage these wild storms will bring.
In bed, reading a book, a moth hovers in the corner of my press-tin walls. The moth brings an ominous feeling, not in a way to be frightened, but in a way to silently watch terror unfolding, the unleashing of motions. Mother Nature, it is her we must befriend. And yet it is hard not to get caught up in the everyday—like this vaccine thing at work—because the everyday is what I hold in common with the mass. I want to keep my job, with lovely Kellie being my unknowing mentor, and I want more time to better commit to my art.
In conclusion to this day, I can’t articulate what is to come. I just know that this vaccine stuff will be a slight smudge of history. Laughable! Lunatics! I think a part of me is curious to see what it’s like living in the minority. ‘A witch hunt for the unvaccinated,’ as Henrick had said. While still undecided to my cement stance on the vaccination, what blows me away most is how severe and discriminatory the restrictions are when the virus is faster than the vaccine. I can only hope that in the months to come science produces a vaccine effective to the production of new variants. Oh the mentality of people making up statistics to get the vaccine, because it’s what we’re told to do. Through all this, I am better understanding why it can be important to keep political stances to yourself.
From all my talk of time, here lies the time in which I must remember this profound notion of time, and trust that my enemies of today could be admirers of the future.
Have I always been a minority, desperate for acceptance?
How to articulate how absurd I see this world and my perplexity to which most are seemingly blinded?
Will be interesting to see how people uniformly shift their mentality to the unvaccinated, which is to be dictated by the government?
Time.
Focus on my art.

Books, photography, symbolic jewellery. Jewellery is communication through time.

1st February

I wake deciding I will get the vaccine in order to carry on my life and do things like continuing to learn my jewellery and go to Lucy’s wedding. But maybe I could scale back to four days a week and do market stalls instead? I’ll give it to April 30. April 30 is also the date I had told Pippa I was going to give myself to ask someone out. This was late yesterday afternoon, when Pippa brought her tea, in the Broome-made mug I had gifted her for helping take Marianne from the Croc Park, into my room. She lay on my bed while I sat on the floor beading a new necklace. It had been raining non-stop all day, and the day before. From nearly 500mm of rain, the wooden house was damp, and another storm was no longer a novelty. I can’t remember what Pippa and I were talking about specially— something to do with matters of the heart and opening myself to a relationship—when a monstrous CRACK lit up the house and sent us into darkness. The shock sent all my hair on end, gave me goosebumps the size of termite mounds, and made me gasp as I clutched my heart pounding through my chest. My breaths were so deep, like with the DMT and the loss of my car. As the light went, I had seen Pippa curl up into a ball and whispering, ‘Oh my god.’
‘Beth are you okay?’ Pippa called out into the darkness.
‘Pippa are you okay?’ I asked.
Pippa left the room. Wide eyed and stumbling, I followed Pippa’s scent down the haunted hallway to the sound of the rain pounding the roof. Everything was buzzing. Flashes of lightning lit up the kitchen. I stopped walking and gasped as Melissa turned the corner from the entrance with an owl eyed expression and her short hair all spikey like she was electrocuted.
I hadn’t heard her scream.
Melissa had been opening the glass sliding door as the lightning came down. She had turned around to see a blinding bright light, which caused her to scream, which caused Pippa to shout out to Beth, thinking it was Beth who screamed. Melissa and I stared at each other, volts pulsating through our bodies. We were hot, shocked, and fully charged. I started dribbling questions to the girls, standing in the flashes of lightning in the otherwise dark kitchen.
Beth and Pippa, the non-believers, had both been on beds, their feet not touching the ground, and weren’t experiencing the intense sensations that Melissa and I held. We all glanced through the white sheets of rain to decipher if neighbours were still with electricity. It appeared so, which seemed strange in comparison to our darkness and deep shock. I messaged Wil, who confirmed he nearly shit his pants from the strike but is still with electricity. Wil’s other responses are practical about the electricity.
As the darkened evening unfolds, my messages reflect my frazzlement, like I still have the electricity of the jarrah floorboards running through me. At 10pm, Horizon Power stomped through the house to return electricity to our life.

3rd February

Yesterday at work, still heightened by the lightning strike, Wil’s reply alerted me to 11:11. A deep calm came, absent of care to what unfolds through messages. It is the real-life person that counts. Always.
Kellie is still chatting about the vax as an email about Allure’s Valentines Promotion with a plastic surgery company comes through. Suddenly, my thoughts spread like a virus, to standing up in what I believe in.
As for the rest of the work, I am finding solace in my decision to stay and accept the offering to concentrate on the creative side of the jewellery. Although their catalogue and their preference that I’m vaccinated is not lost on me. When I look at the painfully mainstream and already dated catalogue, I know this work is not my forever.
And then there are the tensions of Jess. She is Kmart life, I am kooky. The conversation we share about the lightning strike being the second greatest shock of my life, after the DMT, and her confusion to my idea that science doesn’t explain the why, brought me to black matter. Despite my mind not thinking in scientific pathways, I do love science. But all I’m saying about science, Jess, is it’s not the conclusive answer. It’s part of the puzzle. We can take science, and still we can go further.
The day gets more twisted when I get a reply email from Liz telling of our intensive family colon history. Then there’s the relief in reading an ABC article with Christine Jenkins noting: “I do think we have a tolerance of death that we’ve been phobic about in this discussion…it is something regarded as lacking compassion if you talk about some deaths being acceptable, and so people don’t want to say it, you know, even I’m reluctant to speak about it.”
With 500-1000 flu deaths a year, covid deaths will have to be accepted amongst the elderly and those with underlying health conditions. Christine also mentions people improving on their health to combat covid, and that obesity hasn’t been mentioned enough through all this.
I doubt my place here at work.
But I’ll persevere for the experience and my savings.
I’ll do a four day working week in order to write my book.
Back at Broomerang, the Landlord messages about the future. I desperately plead our case. To see what further magic can unfold not just for myself, but for my housemates and the broader community who surround this institute.

4th February

I sleep with the windows next to my bed closed to cancel out the barking mad frogs. In the morning is a message from Roser: Open your window to let in all the love coming your way xxx

Undecided on work/vax. Bill will make the decision for me, I guess. I’d prefer to eat fresh food, live a low-stress life, be in nature, dance and smile.

I believe in standing up for what I believe in.

To not be hard on myself in hanging low and honing in. My better strength is my brain.

Pippa about Botox: ‘insecurities shown on the outside.’

Oh how blinded we are by the outside, hiding the shine that comes from within.

In one week, I get four messages about rooms. The future of Broomerang is now with the Landlord. This responsibility makes me nervous as I hope to carry the torch forward.

5th February

Where we’re at in history: sending mail in compostable bags with cheap stickers that are hard to pull off.

 I will write of femininity in action.

Clementine Ford: ‘As a writer, I live in a perpetual state of examination and memory.’

7th February

Wake to purple light through the lattices streaming across the tall grass of the backyard. I stop my small mediation halfway because of the flies and mosquitoes. Guess what? I’m growing bored.

Positive interactions reporting Broomerang problems to the Landlord, who is having a chat with his wife this week to see if they change directions. (C’mon girl, we’re a house of women and I put every good piece of me forward to allow us to carry on the good thing we got going. From one sister to another, please.)

8th February

Bill calls Kellie. He wants me to get the vaccine. He loses a little of my respect. In the car dropping me home, Kellie, so sincere and sweet, turns to me: ‘Now I don’t want it to seem like I’m bribing you…’
‘Wow-wow-wow Kellie,’ I interject. ‘I’m totally open to bribes…’
‘Okay good because I can give you four days and I can give you all the arty stuff and I can give you what you want. Even Lindsay and Bill, they both want to keep you.’
And so I’ll get the vaccine to forward my life. I’ll get my health to a good place, and I’ll do this all for the world’s future. I’ll ask for a pay rise, too.
Today, for whatever reason, I’ve lost the fear of looking someone in the eye. Because I see, I do. I see Melissa taking the kitchen scales. I see her asking what we want from the shops as a ploy. I see her leave. I go for a shower. When I step out from our stone-bottomed shower, hair mask with a fifteen-minute wait in place, the subdued light of early evening wafts in with a ‘FUCK YOU CUNT’ being shouted from Stewart and Robison street corner. The guy shouting is really mad.
In the kitchen, I take a glass of red from the bottle Lachlan had gifted us back in November (seeing I’m not allowed in bottle shops) and I walk to my room. I’m leaving Rachel a voice message when I hear a familiar voice in the kitchen. I walk down the haunted hall with pride. ‘Thought I heard shouting on the street,’ I say to David, whose skinny and short stature are overwhelmed by the glaze of his eyes, which are not as bad as I’ve seen them but altered nonetheless.
‘I’m hurt,’ David tells me.
I sit him on the front step and retrieve a first aid kit from the bathroom.
I stand before David on the front step with the first aid kit, pretending I know what I’m doing. David calls himself Silly and withholds tears to the pain from the small scratch on his elbow. Refraining from asking him too many questions, questions like What on Earth were you doing, I clean the small scratch and David whines, being serious in calling me Sarah and telling me it stings. I try put on a strip of plastic, but it doesn’t stick properly. I recount my tale of stepping from the shower and hearing the ‘FUCK YOU CUNT.’
David asks to use the bathroom, where I had left my glass of red wine—the most logical place to hide it at the time of hearing his voice from the kitchen. When I first retrieve my glass of red wine, David asks me to have the glass of red wine. I look into his glazed eyes and tell him there’s no alcohol for him here. But we’re in the kitchen and David gestures to the Pimms atop the fridge. I stare him back and offer a compromise: ‘You take this now, but you promise me you NEVER come back to this house when you’re drunk. You understand?’
We pinky promise and as I lock the sliding gate, waving David goodbye, he bangs his chest like an ape and says ‘I’m Jubby…I’m a gangster,’ and stumbles.
‘Nah,’ I reply. ‘You’re Shorty.’

—

This house, this job, everything is up in the air. I map the Gemstones of Broomerang and start reading another bloomin’ book with a protagonist as a thirty-something writer in the city using dating apps and drinking lots of wine.

A permanent wetseason sound takes hold, one I don’t know how to describe. Maybe Pippa will know how to explain it because it’s the sound of the insects and trees. A constant and persistent ringing. It’s in the pantry, it’s in the safe at work, in my room.

Last night, Melissa was cooking dinner in her knickers when we spoke about all books opening your mind, not just the spiritual stuff. ‘If ya wanna write, ya gotta read,’ I had said to her. ‘And books that open your mind aren’t limited to the so-called spiritual books. They are all books.’

9th February

This morning, I slept again until 6am (dreaming of being diplomatic in interactions with strangers).
After work, I escape the sandflies and mosquitoes with Pippa in the ballroom by watching Brittany Higgins and Grace Tame speak at the Nation Press conference. I’m compelled by Grace’s exposure to the drive of men behind our system. After, Pippa and I discuss the different avenues of change and the time this takes.
At Town Beach, drunk people wail and Pippa, Beth and I stop to talk to them out of obligation. Farther along, the man from the group has slumped into a chair and shouts to the ladies, ‘Leave the convicts alone…eye eye eye, she’s talking to every Tom, Dick and Harry…C’MON DENISE IT’S SUNSET TIME.’ But Denise wants to talk. She needs to show us photos on her phone of her year-and-a-half old granddaughter who had recently been run over and killed by a taxi. With all my might, I have my body communicate all the meaningless words of I’m so sorry and That’s so sad. Because it is, it’s absolutely tragic, a tragedy that goes beyond language. If it were a white child…all this death…all this trauma.

10th February

The beginning of the monster mosquitoes and their neverending sound. Tonight, the rest of my work go to farewell Nicole. Me, of course, am not allowed to such public pleasures. ‘Your choice,’ people could, would and do say.
This, I don’t understand.
This is the government’s choice. 
The government, predominantly men, are an array of bullies. I, unlike my colleagues, am not a puppet. We, in this time, are lost. And in this time, of course I don’t have the answer. It’s a collaboration of people, through generations, who might have the answer. One thing I know for certain is that this is not the answer. So as my work go to their fancy dinner, accepting the botox partnership, accepting the director’s refusal to partake in Mardi Gras, I will dine in my grand old sharehouse, with conversations that err on the mundane. Conversations of which many who I love engage in. Conversations that, with a couple of glasses of wine, I lose my tone and somewhat my temper. So, how can I write in a way to point out, what is to me, the blatantly obvious! This false life.
The more I go on aging, and writing, the less I want to be part of that wider world. That world we know. I don’t want launches, interviews, marketing. I want to write and document and share love (with jewellery) and be in nature. Far from my phone, I will have a healthy grasp of the internet.

If the Earth were ending in six weeks, what would you do?

11th February

A Stewart Street dinner. Seated outside because of the heat, the faulty kitchen lights flicker—one off, the other on, and vice versa.
Wil’s in the hammock, dictating conversation, while I’m perched on a stool, watching the banter he shares with Melissa. I’m moodier than I’d anticipated myself to be. It’s hard to get the real Sarah in these multi-person scenarios.
I’m handed joints and, stoned, take myself to bed, seeing a dragonfly is in the kitchen, rats in the vines, a moth in the hall, geckos chasing bugs around the ceiling. The house is alive.
Melissa says dragonflies mark the end of the wet season, but I think it stands for something else.
I wake at 4:30am feeling really low. Lower than I’ve felt to my inabilities, or should I say hindrances, before. The vivaciousness of Wil, the spirit of Melissa, the comfortable explanations of Tara, my half-sentences giving nothing of meaning. This connection I speak, this connection I seek! But here I am, waking alone with all my flaws, with Pippa going on a date tonight while Sarah hides Sarah—Sarah’s always hiding Sarah. Today might be a treat day. Because it’s been a while, because it feels I have nothing going for me. There is nothing, no one, to look forward to.
Beth’s sitting and drinking her smoothie, watching the tall grasses, blue skies, mosquitoes and insects. The emotional hangover carries on. I’d stretched a little, feeling grounded, but I’m sad. Having to talk to Melissa, Beth blindly driving into the outback, Pippa on another date, as for me, I have work, I guess. But I crave an older friend to talk with about all of this. This time, however, I won’t feel sorry for myself in such discussions. I will give chances, seeing positives in myself and others.

—

Wet season boredom and repetitiveness. Smashing through books. So many books of 30-soething old writers living in cities, getting drunk, struggling with men.

What holds me back? What am I afraid of when it comes to guys? This feeling to out-wit, out-smart, to escape my beating heart and escape my irrational thoughts.

Riddled by a bad mood. The sort that could rival the almond factory. Equally disgusted by and in awe of myself.

These moments where thunder consumes corners of the sky, lighting strikes guide me home from Cable, a sharp yellowing light painting pockets of town, the immense fire of strength raging within me. Loneliness and determination.

I need space (and I have nowhere else but here). I need my freedom. I need to branch out to new friends. Or just one friend. A friend like me. No, a friend different enough to hold my curiosity. So I’ll take my bad mood out of my bedroom and into the empty house to cook barramundi and forget this world that I’ll spend the rest of my life fighting against.

A healthy dinner. Lightning. A song from the 90s. Hips moving. Dancing. Moving to freedom. Meeting whoever’s coming to meet me halfway.

The noticeboard blows my mind. People so engrossed in this society that they believe it’s the only way. I must step away from this. Things like the new newspaper editor saying how they’ll cover ‘youth crime.’ Youth crime is not the heart of the matter. Although I guess you could discuss that objectively.

C’mon, we’re still trying to enforce a flawed ideal to ‘make a living.’ How about living?

I walk the beach and see everyone taking photos. Have we lost presence with photography?

Write like it’s urgent, Sarah. THIS YEAR.

A door in the house slams, a storm blows. People refer to the anti-vax as ‘misinformation.’

Sunday 13th

My dreams this morning! Mildura, leaving school, walking toward Rowse Court, spewing shit (yes) and talking openly on the phone to Tom about the heartache of Dad. The pain and grief and hurt it caused.
To make my own jewellery business would require a commitment to the marketing, the need for people to consume. A lot. I accept this isn’t within me.
And I still don’t feel like talking to housemates.
But I’m waiting for my coffee when Pippa comes into the kitchen to make breakfast. She asks me questions. ‘I’m feeling insular,’ I explain.
Going to my room, I Google the correct meaning of insular—an island, detached, isolated, standing alone. These opportunities, in these moods, is when to capture my productive creativity.
It goes on to be the laziest of Sundays.
Tinkering, near final read of story (finally, wow), some watching of Beatles doc, mood on the up, family more talkative than normal. Dear Pippa perseveres with me, checks on mood. When she goes to a BBQ at Edward of the Croc Park, I carry on my life, chatting to Emma, walking to town beach, realising I hate Richard. I hate how he was to me, what he did to me, I just fucking hate him. As a result, I hate how I feel about all this stuff. How I care that people seem more social than me (an old problem) and that I’m not nice or special or cool enough. Whereas I’m all those things.
Waiting for the kettle to boil to make my herbal vaccine tea, I think: share Sarah. Share the beautiful and the soft and the loving body I’ve been given. Here at 33, the age Jesus Christ himself died, I am at a prime. My legs are lean from walking around this house and from stretching out. So stop worrying on the trivial, on someone like Richard, and carry on my personal healing journey, edging toward family I’d prefer to spend my time with.

Kiss your friends faces more
Destroy the belief that intimacy must be reserved for monogamous relationships ‘
Be more loving
Embrace platonic intimacy
Embrace vulnerability
Use emotionality as a radical tactic against a society which teaches that emotions are a sign of weakness
Tell more people you care about them
Hold their hands
Tell others you are proud of them
Offer support readily
Take care of the people around you

Monday 14 Feb 21

Oh wow. A rich old lady is to move into this sprawling old space that can house so many free and spirited souls while filling in so many of the blank jobs of town. Given the climate of Broome this is disappointing for a plethora of people.

Melissa and I are standing in the kitchen, I’m saying horrible things about the situation and realise the oven has gone off. This time, it’s fully dead. The switch won’t come back on. What’s the house telling us?

A band of girls, creative, young, struggling, in resistance to the classically rich world lived in by the likes of the old, rich lady. This lady who, with no regard for broader the community she is affecting, summarises the problem of Broome right here right now. In a sense, this very interesting ending is the perfect ending—we leave cursing the house and this system that brings us down, with a fuck the establishment party, perhaps?

How quickly visions change. How fascinating another year at Broomerang would have been. The extended community, the creativity I harp on about. I could never have predicted the rage I feel to how unjust this situation is. At a time when Broome faces crisis in rental shortages, (backpacker) workers and ‘youth crime,’ the rich old lady perfectly summarises the continued battle. For we may not have the money, we may not have the power, but we have spirit and sincerity, and we will not be stopped.

I’d had a feeling to not be certain about this next year here—felt too good to be true—but to predict this. Seriously, an old lady in this seven bedroom house while people are leaving jobs empty by having to leave town due to accommodation.

It feels somewhat creepy to say, but she really will be sorry. As for me? I take this story, I take this fire, and I will float (while my job anchors me here). For now, I don’t feel for another rental. I have Marianne. I have nature. I have my writing. I can shower in the ocean. I can continue to love. Oh I will love. Oh how I will write. This is only the beginning, truly.

All this stuff! The vaccine, work’s principles, the house. And yet I need to push through, remain against it to bring it down.

I’m lost. What to do!

Hello I am Lonely 100% complete by the move out.

Shit my emotions can be fierce.

100% commitment to work, writing and…GUESS.

Big pimples have formed on my cheeks. All the peanut butter and half the muffins are gone. It will be okay, though.

Everything shifts. Each purposeful step, feeling this house in a different way. We go through our grief in our own way.

Without house/lease, I’ll no longer be tied to responsibilities and expectations. I return to myself with living proof of the love and care I can give to others, to bring people together, to inspire and transform lives.

Alica tells of an epic acid trip and seeing the DNA—the codes in everyone and everything. We are all from the root of 1. We are one.

I repose the question I’d asked Pippa as we walked Cable sunset: if there were six weeks until certain and total destruction of the Earth, what would you do? Now, we have six weeks. What should we do?

15th.

First wake at 3:30am, enjoying the comfort of my bed, my space, the cool air of the air conditioner. I think of S.B, of her Facebook comment on last year’s cars lost to the tides of Cable Beach. ‘Get the idiots out of town,’ she had written, to a post that included Melissa’s car. Now, she is doing a good job of that.
It continues to be a heightened time.
This year is now unknown. I like having ideas on the future. I like my sanctuary, like my home space. I could also write in the bush. Spend the year in Marianne part-time and part-time in town.
Pippa and I are north of the rocks at sunset. We walk to what I think are newly awash rocks, but they have an ancient feel and Pippa proposes the sand has instead washed away. We turn back toward Gantheaume, clouds bunched together on the horizon, like a fire on the ocean, propelled into different parts of the sky. A thick crack of lightning slices down the dark clouds spotted by white fluffy clouds before us. The sky has never felt so tall and I’ve never felt so small. The pinks and yellows, washed like watercolour, the white and greys light together. Fork lightning, sheet lightning, gasps of astonishment. ‘So…what would you do with your six weeks?’ Pippa asks.
I swing around, the stormy, colourful air has me happy. ‘I would be more affectionate,’ I declare. ‘Like, I would be more open and honest in how I feel.’
‘And it takes for the world to end for you to do this?’
I laugh, unoffended, glad to this knowledge. ‘I guess I would lose the fear of rejection or shame. I wouldn’t be scared what people think.’
I realise I can’t leave this Earth without experiencing and sharing love. Up on the lawn, we walk to the circle of drummers. They aren’t our tribe, but my smiling cheeks and moving hips excites me for dry season. I see nature, the natural.

16th February, Vaccine Day, Notes from Earth, from Somewhere, by Sarah

There was something that made it all feel so ridiculous. The masks, the starkness of the office. Or was it my matching scrunchie, pants and top? An outfit worn as a subtle Fuck you to S.B.
Nancy the nurse was incredibly lovely, and I was thankful to her response of not believing in giving the kids lollipops when I’d asked for one for the bravery of obliging to be a number. At injection, my mind had been in focus. I felt fierce to surviving all the obstacles being thrown at me.
Obstacles give ideas for my mind to solve.
Then, the needle was a pinprick. There was no pain. There are slight drops of blood on the tissue, and I breathe deeply as I feel to whatever it is rushing through my body. Breathe, breathe, breathe, be happy and be healthy. Fight through this, find a new space and purpose. Keep going, remembering these bittersweet days when governments assume everyone to have a smartphone.
When I go to leave the building, I was told to wait 15 minutes. Well, I was happy for this time of thought during work hours.
I still don’t agree with the force of this vaccine when we still fail to care for ourselves, as a whole, with what constitutes healthy and the ability (the education?) to listen to our bodies to reduce possible burdens to the system (said without evidence and with only assumption, naturally).

They, whoever they are, assume this to be the life everyone wants. The focus on economic growth and the pursuit for the monopoly of power distracting us from questioning the norm.

If you resist the norm, then you are difficult.

Oh yes but a revolution is coming. It’ll be silent and it’ll be strong.

The road was never going to be endlessly easy. Proof of this is in the house.

There’s something about her. Her righteousness, lack of empathy and for me what seems to lack of understanding. S.B, my dear lady, I believe that hierarchy should be better dictated by intention (which leads us back to the debate on objective morality we had in the kitchen last year). Although I do respect her for being a powerful woman and the ability to achieve, but no matter one’s gender I detest the hierarchy of wealth, earnt grazing the Kimberley. Meanwhile I question her morals, I question her drive, and I question her self-consumption in the capitalist web of greed. As for her comment on the Cable Beach cars, wasn’t she young once? It’s like she fights against modernisation, not listening to the young, disregarding those who are to inherit the world.
We must rebel.
Against the ‘traditional’ social hierarchy.
It’s only the beginning.

*OMG ON FB NOTICEBOARD KIDS ARE CALLED CUNTS AND PEOPLE ARE ASKING TO LOCK THEM UP AS A RESULT. WHAT’S THEIR PROBLEM? THEY WONDER. I INCREASINGLY NEED TO STEP AWAY FROM THIS. LIKE THE GUARDIAN WRITING ATTENTION SEEKING HEADLINES ABOUT SEXUAL ASSULT AUSTRALIAN OF THE YEAR SURVIVOR GRACE TAMES. WE ARE AT A CRUCIAL POINT. I WANT TO GO BUSH AND FOCUS ON THE POSITIVE, NOT “LOW LIVES.”

17th February

I’m sitting in Bill’s office, stranding. ‘How’d you go?’ the postman asks me.
‘Arm’s a little sore but fine otherwise…I mean that’s the whole thing; I am fine otherwise. I’m a healthy 33 year old who looks after herself.’
‘Well you know you can’t go to the doctors anymore unless you’re double vaxxed,’ the postman tells me. ‘The unanimously decided this for the clinics in town on Monday night.’
The postman, he’ll be part of the revolution too. Because he’s aware of personal responsibilities and he’s not part of the herd. Listen to our bodies! When did we lose this! Have we become dulled so quickly, so distracted by our phones. Then there’s Jess is in the background, making her simple comments read from the newspaper. There’ll be a revolution, I’m sure; I have a rich life ahead.

Pippa’s Birthday

The morning before Pippa’s birthday the electrician comes. He’s an older dude in a maroon Landcruiser ute. A real chatty guy. When I tell him that we need the oven working just a while, as we’re soon moving out, he connects the B name and, well, that sets him off.
I state my disappointment to becoming a victim to the wealth hierarchy.
I’m told the oven is working fine.
What, but, but on Monday, when it went out, it couldn’t have been more, more, dead.
Then there’s the lights in the kitchen, which are now also working fine the sneaky devils.
As the electrician leaves, he shouts out, ‘Next time call me direct. Not him.’
The electrician doesn’t care to work for the B, and I wonder what blame I’ll get in this future communication.
At work, the Landlord messages me saying the oven is fine and that the cost of the lightning strike is around $1K.
Huh? You think I want all this mess around cooking on a camp stove and having to deal with you, Landlord?
Back at Broomerang I stand in the dining room, with Melissa at the table, a sarong wrapped around her lower half, cutting and pasting, and Pippa beside me. I tell them the story of the morning, and about how I want to have as little possible contact with the Landlord because I don’t want to end all this about money and with blame for small details after putting so much love into the bigger picture of the space. As fiery as I feel on the inside, I want to continue my gestures from a sincere place and finish on positive terms. But what the house thinks of all of it, I can’t control.
The projector in the ballroom randomly turns itself on.
I notice it but keep talking. A few minutes later, Pippa notices it too.

20th February

Cake fest ‘22. Eight cakes on display, another chilled vibe in contrast to the number of cars outside. For most of the afternoon and night I was stoned in the hammock, where Carles, tree lopper, told me that his boss (another tradie) doesn’t like dealing with the Landlord because he’s a tightarse. Yikes! Won’t be sad to leave it all behind.
Now it’s another lazy Sunday with a sugar hangover, a Colm Tóibín book, and a sugar rash on my right cheek that has me consider cancelling meeting up with mine and Beth’s mutual Tinder man. But not going into it with romantic expectations, guess it doesn’t matter, just more that my cheek is so sore!

21st

Waiting on S in a house that is quiet and tidy but not sparkling clean. The rash of pimples on my right cheek persists. As does my uninspired mood. Some flies bother me but they seem rare in my life lately and so I remind myself of this. Now sure what to do with myself, I bounce about.
There are moths all through the house.
S came through with the cordial correspondence you’d expect from someone dressed in white like it was 1910. I let us sweat it out in the big table room, not turning the fans above us on as I spoke her language as best I could. She produces a fan that she ferociously slashes the air before her face with. I see her eyes move to my underarm hair. S wants to ‘pick my brain,’ have me draw a map, have me tell her what to do with the place.
‘I’ll get back to you,’ I replied. ‘I need to see what my mind comes up with.’
S takes me for a walk around the house, noting how great the space is for us ‘young’ while turning her nose up to all the furniture that, she believes, needs to be put into a skip or sold. When she asks me to work prices of the furniture, in my head I already know this is not my role and that most of this furniture will not be worth much. Walking on the ocean floorboard, I form genuine concerns for her mobility in this space. She is not in good health, and I hold grave doubts for her wellbeing here, despite having accepted our move.
At the end of our tour, we’re in the kitchen when I mention the disappointment for the community around the house. ‘Yes well such is the nature of Broome,’ she replies. In this moment, it is evident that S did not consider as at all, nor the rental situation in Broome.
I curse this place, just for her.
By the end of the day, moving about the house my calf muscles are strained and my knees weak.

Day After 22/2/22, talking about 22/2/22

Days are full and at nights, I must be grinding my teeth for I’ve been waking with a sore jaw and when I turn in bed, I’ve been understanding how hasty my movements can be, like a chicken whose head dashes between the air. Words come in short and sharp bursts. My mind feels as tired as my legs, which since Monday have been increasingly worse to the point of strained muscles. Like shin splints, if I knew shin splints were.
I continue obsessive thoughts on S. My concern for her mobility growing only deeper. As does the house’s games.
Now it’s the cold water tap that has seized. Closed tightly without movement. Meanwhile a kitchen lights turns on with Pippa, Bruce and I eating curry beneath.
For a few nights, Bruce has slept in the most haunted room in the house. Bruce has one eye covered, healing. His eye surgery is to give him the ability to see through people, we joke. When Bruce goes strange from thinking Melissa and I said he smelled (we were talking about the French guy reeking of cologne on Saturday night), he goes to the haunted room and reappears with streaks of deodorant on him. I understand the depth of our friendship, the honesty between us, as I forcefully stand my ground, stirring the curry I’m cooking for us, offended he thought I would say such a thing. Later, I will wash his clothes streaked with cologne.
These are the funny days.
The jaw and the heels.
The stress.
There’s so much going on! The list of things to give the Landlord! And the nervousness I feel to communicate it all in a friendly and clear manner.
Moths light up the sun shadowed hallways. They’re on the leaves of the ivy, on the kitchen walls.

24th February

Another sore morning, muscles in calves strained, ankles and knees sore. I lay on my bed, under the fans, and compose a draft to the Landlord. I want this stuff in writing. Sending this email makes me nervous, but I’ll lace it with positivity and feel into it all. I can only hope the Landlord reads it as coming from a place of well wishes. But how do you explain it all, the way the house feels more alive than ever, the connection I feel, the telling from Bruce that the people/spirits here are trying to keep her away. They like it being looked after by us. They like the free spirits.
There are no moths in the kitchen this morning. The ones on the ivy last night, having spent the whole day sleeping there, are gone. The others, they’re gone too. The clock tells me 22:22, although this isn’t the actual time I smile because the sun beams from the corner of the verandah, the mango branch struck by lightning (pointed out by Bruce) pulsating. There’s something in the air today.
Bruce comes out and tells me he dreamt of me getting married at ‘that beach we saw them fellas yesterday.’
Entrance Point.
I marry a whitefella. Bruce is really happy for me.
‘What do dreams mean for you?’ I ask.
He covers his eyes with his hands. ‘They come true yeah,’ he says with his signature blink and dipping of the head.
Whereas my dreams have been as mysterious as the wavering halls of the house. From Mildura Mall, Dan Nathan being dismissive—me telling him in a jovial manner that if I see people, then I like to say hello—and going into darkness unperturbed by not directly knowing people but being known. Then this morning, a dream of being in a river with two others, but one disappears and so we take their wooden blocks and I’m happy because I had wanted those wooden blocks. In the dream we had turned down the river, away from the village, and in learning the distance back downstream to the village, I became concerned about underestimating the task.
What is it about Broome that gives me dreams that linger through the next day? It’s everyday things that remind me of the sensation the dreams had given me, but not telling me what happened in the dream. It’d happened the first time I lived here too.

25th February

Awake since, what, 3:30am. Stoned sleep had come early, having broken my new year’s resolution by asking Melissa for a joint.
After work yesterday, a naked Pippa and a topless myself had been in the pool as Melissa sat on the deck up the end cutting and pasting her drug collage, reciting to us the dream that had come to her on the night of 22/2/22. In her dreams, we had been in the house. Her, me, and whoever, standing in the kitchen when the message came through from the Landlord about having the house for another year.
Lying in the hammock, after a few drags of Melissa’s joint and telling her about the time I touched death, I went deep into my mind. When Melissa left, it was the first night for the week (felt like forever) I’d had to myself. I hadn’t been sure whether to close my mind off or let the words tumble to form a surer way forward. Stoned, I come to the conclusion that I must fight for this house. Not for myself but for those who live here, those that dwell here, those beyond the walls and for the preservation of S.B. Her son says, ‘favourable terms.’ Her son calls a busy year in Broome, in which the young and spirited struggle for rentals, ‘lucrative.’ Her son haggles with with maintenance men and builders. Her son tells me room prices that will never serve those who struggle to get ahead. Her son who questions me, a sales assistant, a writer, someone who loves this house and gives herself to the space, on money. Her son who means well but is a by-product of the rich mother. Their relationship is jaded. I endeavour to keep all interactions genuine. To remind myself to not play his game, to remind him of my financial position, and that the situation being presented is about his mother’s health. Life and death. And unfortunately if she perseveres with her stubbornness to move in, then her scary movie would trump our own mockumentary.
Overnight the picture of N in the hallway went crooked again. I’m composing my email, making a coffee, I’m drawn to the falling mango leaves, the cold breeze, the dark house at a time when it’s usually light. I compose, I communicate: confusion.

26th February

There have been moths and dragonflies and spirits and a Bardi Jawi man and lightning strikes surrounding me. Yesterday my aching legs were okay, today they’re tired and needing to be stretched again. When I woke in the night, twice came crashes from the house moments later. Mice in the kitchen? I wake constantly, trying to turn from side to side slowly. I am in limbo, having planned to message S this morning, asking if she would be comfortable to come by today, but with her then messaging me last night, asking to come by today with your goddaughter for measurements.
I will give her my honest thoughts.
What is a hobbling older woman doing moving into a haunted house alone? These floors are oceans, they hurt.
And it may look all charming and old and full of character, but it can be heavy and it can be unkind—constant reminders to feel it, to know the past is within us all.
Though, who am I? Why do these thoughts matter?
To lose the responsibility here and my need to take it seriously, to be free again. To lose the unharboured frustrations to innocent housemates.
Pippa won’t be here for the last month of the lease and while I understand her need for family, it disheartens me. I will retreat a while. Be a fairy with Melissa. But there’s no need to hypothesis. Instead I ask the spirits to allow what is needed (for all of us) and for the delivery of thoughts to S.B to be sincere.

Kellie says her thought process of her life coming to walking around in a mask. To this, I gently explode in reaction: ‘C’MON LOOK AT THE WHOLE HISTORY OF HUMAN LIFE AND YOU’RE TELLING ME THIS IS WEIRD? MY MY MY HOW SOFT WE’VE BECOME SO QUICKLY…AT LEAST WE DON’T CHOP OFF EACH OTHER’S HEADS ANYMORE OR THAT WE LIVE IN A WORLD OF CONSTANT COMMUNICATION AND GLOBALISATION TO REDUCE THE DEADLY FIRE OF DISEASE RIPPING THORUGH THE WORLD…’

27th February

I feel undecided on what I truly want and need. Niggly frustrations to innocent people continued, making it clear that my time at this house is coming to an end. To lose this responsibility, accept the bush/camper solitude and space, and that my current work here is done. I need to blow my fairy dust to the power of time and actions that stem from the heart.
S came around for her afternoon tea, goddaughter and goddaughter’s daughter in tow. Now I must tell you about the S show, for what a show that was. The electrician was right, she thinks and acts like she’s the Queen of the Kimberley. It was in the way she waltzed in with her wicker basket and colonial clothing, her face made up and teeth prominent.
The difference between me and S.B is my intentions come from a genuine care for positive progress where we are all as equal as human.
Me, I’m a modern day Queen.

Now to summarise the visit entails more than I have the energy for. Here I will give dot points to comedy gold:

• Her yelling Pippa’s name through the house

• Goddaughter all serious, running after and around Susan’s barking orders for measurements

• The intrusion realised by the younger girl

• Goddaughter comments on size but S fixated on furniture, showing me photos, where simply must things go, S?

• Ballroom will be the ‘sitting room’

• Their questions about if rooms are used starts to fire me up – ‘of course everything is used in busy times’

• Talking about bathroom tap and putting some WD40. I say that the house is going mad. With hands behind her back, she walks, coming close to my face and widening her eyes to say, ‘Well maybe they’re telling you it’s time to go.’
  I scoff and reply, ‘Or maybe they’re mad we’re going…’
  Walking toward the kitchen, S rolls her eyes, as Melissa later tells me.
  I spin around towards the corner and continue, ‘No, this house has been good to us’

• Start saying how it’s hard to find places in Broome. That it’s sad to leave, there’s a community beyond the walls, but she still only cares for the furniture

• Goddaughter’s daughter starts asking to leave, saying ‘Leave Sarah alone’

• S keeps talking, pointing to all our cars ‘oh these cars won’t be here so I can put my tables there.’ Ah, exactly what Broome busy time needs—furniture, a sitting room, an office

• She’s straight from Colonial times, which includes this social hierarchy and her attitude she is deserving, that this is her place. The whole time it was about everything at the surface level, with total disregard for what I say on feeling

• You mustn’t underestimate the poor or the underdogs or the artists or the nomads, S. We are a gentle uprising. For the hierarchal nature of English royalty has fast become dated in the modern world.

In my dream this Sunday morning there had been a few boys vying for my attention, to which I had been open to giving and receiving until I was hassled by too much attention and went to hide. There it had been Wil I had seen who told me to message him if I needed anything. I sit up and Google the symbolism of spiders: patience, persistence, artistry, manifestations, the feminine power. Yesterday morning I walked through three spider webs: in the table room, outside, and putting my scooter away. This morning, where the haunted hall meets the kitchen, I walked through a big one, it’s web wrapping around my face.
Last night had been O’s housewarming, where Broome had felt so small and I’d struggled to find my people and I again saw how maybe I could leave Broome at the end of the season (to not get caught in this web of particular locals), and when Melissa and I returned home she pointed out the spider web to me as she stood in the hall and I in the kitchen. I can’t see it. She pointed to the spider again, her still standing in the hall and me facing her with my back to the kitchen, but I can’t see it.
A young girl’s voice echoes from behind me.
I turn around, thinking I’m hearing things.
Melissa asks, ‘Did you hear a young girl’s voice or something?’
‘Oh you heard that to?’
We frown at each other, eyes wide like the lightning strike.
It was another heightened night. O had been drunk and high, declaring to the world with waving arms, a moving body and a raucous laugh, that I’d been on his mind as he spent time alone in the Kimberley, which was where his spiritual journey took flight, with all the comments I had once made to him making sense. He was repeating this to me, declaring it, ‘YOU WERE RIGHT SARAH!’
Thing is, I don’t know what I said.
I can’t remember.
My ego gently inflates nonetheless, thinking that whatever I say may hold power with time.
O carries onward in his liberated rambling, mentioning his friend Greg, who he had confided in after all those pizza nights as to ‘What the hell Sarah was talking about.’ Greg and O would laugh together about this. I truly believe that he believes he knows more because he is a man. But how can you connect with spirits when you can’t connect with humans?
Broome world is tiring me, these particular men tiring. For at the housewarming had been Richard, too. As the night progressed, he came to weigh me with melancholic looks from across the room. He wanted to speak. I didn’t like his gaze upon me.
Later on this Sunday afternoon is pizza night. There’s a lightning show in the sky, Carles’s oven fire raging, joints being passed around, Edward’s unexpected appearance making me freeze and hide. Pippa’s empathy sees her ask if I’m okay, as does Melissa. But I’m stoned, losing conversations, seeing those people are not my people. There is covid and a small cyclone on the way. Maura’s dog keeps going back and forth to the corner, coming back to me, to the corner, back to me.
After a Sunday at home, I’m desperate to go to bed to rest my aching heels and calves.

Houses falling into place for housemates while I remain the wildcard. How far do challenges go? I know I can face them, float and wait, do I need it again? For Broomerang I lost my car, my money, driving arrogance. Now to keep my desk!

Rain makes me comfy.

I watch Tom’s Disney+ account and look to early civilisations for how to change, create, form.

The wisest man knows that he doesn’t know anything. No! The wisest person knows they know nothing.

I wake from a dream I can’t decipher to curtains blowing into my face and the sound of the wind through the yard and through the open louvres and lattices of our home.

Annoyed I have to go to work.

I have growing visions. The search on community, creativity and love continues. How will this story go? What will I learn and how can I share it? Rural. Nature. Tribe—my kind of tribe. Peace and tranquillity. Working from home, anywhere. Writing my next novel, recycled jewellery, photo exhibit, family. I believe what is needed will come.

Let’s go to that place inside.

1st March

Cyclones and ghosts and no future home and no worries. It’s a rainy day. Motivated and uninspired at work. Having something to do gets me through but I continue to question my longevity here. The talk of trash TV, Kellie spraying flies, Jess saying how fourteen people dying a day is ‘so many’ and me questioning that it depends on who’s speaking. I’ll last as long as I can, but I know this isn’t my place in the world.

I envision productivity in the bush. And jewellery. My creative space.

In the comfort of my room at Broomerang, a spider comes down to my desk from below the dream catcher, it hovers above my computer, before my photos. These past few days I’ve had moments when I feel a drop of water from the roof. It has been in dry moments. Now, it keeps raining. I must let go of judgment. Accept the varying stages of a journey.

S’s contact doesn’t reply. Don’t know why, I can’t know why, I can try.

2nd March

More vivid and twisted and indecipherable dreams in the night drum to the slight noises of ex-tropical cyclone Anika. I wake to the rain on the old tin roof. When I go to the toilet in the night, a little frightened…realising I don’t want to live in the bush alone, my period is there. Back in bed I entered a dream where I was in a ute, being collected by someone who asked where I lived and through stunted breath I said ‘Denmark.’
At my desk, the spider remains hanging right before me. It’s caught the fly that had been annoying me in the night. It’s the morning of my ultrasound and I get my period. I imagine that from the ultrasound I’m told I can’t have children, and how this could lessen my yearning.
Walking to and from my ultrasound in a light drizzle and staring at the white hospital roof that reminds me of my first dream I ever remembered as a young girl, life feels slow. Absurd, I want to say absurd. I search for how to describe this bigger picture I see.
I’ve been watching a doco on Tom’s Disney+ account. It’s on the Greeks, who ruled 4000 years ago. It furthers my understanding on past civilisations, and further shifts how I perceive time. For here, now, 2022, the days are long, so much clicking and checking of time, news, information, and the false perceptions of social media. There is so much information at our fingertips, so many distractions brainwashing us into meaningless priorities, which is a world where we love stuff more than nature and people and the future.
The afternoon brings a rainy Wednesday completing a beaded necklace, ordering my passport, listening to music and manifesting. I see a space with my desk and tables, my creating space. It’s becoming clear. Sarah space: The Gemstones of Broomerang. The shift of weed to medicine. Once, I used it to numb, now I use it when sorting thoughts. I have nothing to numb.

3/3/22

Outside is a maze of spiderwebs. My strides are long around the moving house. I watch the light on the corner wall, that funny corner, where it looks like it ends but really it twists to the front verandah.

Could my hesitation to properly manifest, be so sure, come from the scam?

Pippa posts in Broome rentals page and I don’t know why I feel a tinge of annoyance. Because I know how much I’ve done and part of me still believes that everything, for me, will be a miserable failure?

Me, the conversationalist, I will plant seeds through personal connections and the one in the right conditions will grow.

To break away from social beings and the inferiority it gives.

To know my truth, this writing and jewellery space, but also the opening to believing. In Love.

Last night in the shower, gently stoned, clutching my heart, experiencing the returned gaze to eyes. The relief and happiness it’d bring. I’ll solider on alone. 

It’s a competitive game in the Broome rental market, and once I find my security I will return to my beliefs, my abilities, my understandings of having us work together.

Backpacking is letting go of expectations. The Gemstones of Broomerang is about finding your own.

“Kill them with kindness.”

5th March

And suddenly, just like that, it feels like dry season. Cable carpark is full with tourists—borders now open although Mardi Gras cancelled—who live out their most cherished moments through a phone screen. The tide is low and the sky a reliable show of purple-to-blue-to-yellow pastels. On my scooter, the light is sharp, the sky big, and I’m smiling. At home, Melissa has make-up on like face paint. She’s ready to party. While I choose my Sunday.

6th March

Corellas cloud the wires and the light posts and the tree branches as my scooter glides underneath. This morning is an organising morning, a notion to which I am familiar. With each move I remind myself to simplify. For when I leave this Earth it’s my spirit left behind that is most important. As nostalgic as I am, our things are meaningless.
This move is becoming so refreshing.
And while I’ve no clue (beyond my deep desire for a soul connection to breath with me as we concentrate on our own products, and my place in nature with my space for writing and dreaming) what’s to come, this is moving me forward. And I must trust that what will come will be what I need.
I could divide time between photography, jewellery and writing.

7th March

Middle of the day, standing in the kitchen, Melissa, Beth and I sweat. After a taste of dry season, it’s hot again. I jump in the pool and swim under water to the other end. The water is warm, exposed to the March sun after the shade sail was taken down for the possible-cyclone.
What will become of me?
Working through years of wavering uncertainty and risks to come to this, packing up for another move. I’m organised, edging closer to the minimal. Even with paperwork. For a millennial, I have an awful lot of paper when I could so easily work with the computer. Now, I think of housesitting, I think of life at bush camp with Marc—stable and grounded company that I crave as I embark on the willing solitude required. At Bush Camp, there is no rent but there is much to be taken from how to deepen my connection to Earth and life off the land.
I consolidate.
Time.
What comes will decide my fate to how long I will stay in Broome. Years more, or the end of the year?
My knees and legs hurt from sitting on the floor. I go to the kitchen.
‘Manifest your reality,’ Beth says to me when I share the relief of leaving behind the house’s responsibilities while predicting that I’ll miss the pool. My body shudders with the resistance that comes when people tell me what to do.
To a degree I manifest, and to a degree I leave it to the You-niverse.

8/3/22

Asleep at night, I love the comfort of the comfortable bed in my own room. Do I really want to lose it? I wake to unexpected rain and jump out of bed to retrieve my scooter charger and zip up my camper. The rain sets in and a lightning crack through my opened verandah window has my head snap towards it.
Memories. This rainy morning, just like the first rainy morning of my ultrasound. The spider is back. It’s spun a great web from my dried flowers and feathers to my dream catcher.
Last night in bed, watching Isabel Paige on YouTube and a doco on Paul McCartney, I see their hard work. The Gemstones of Broomerang will be written with urgency and for publication. Because the world is in turmoil and I because I want to share lessons of deep thought. I need to write because I don’t want to forget. There’s a story coming out of me, and I have no more writing to give Hello I am Lonely.
Finishing work, I thought I wanted to come home to ‘organise’ myself—classic Sarah—but I’m bored, wanting to eat, caught in limbo, having visions of myself as a writer, a proper writer, a woman of the world, with a solid base in WA. To have that base, I must sacrifice, save. Work hard, sweet woman. Work hard to be a writer. But there’s already so many jewellers and writers and photographers in this world! Why me! Plus the fear. Even sharing something so simple with Aunt Liz frightens me.
Am I too much in my head, thinking I have something extra.
I want to run away, but how much further can I go?
This is a hard time. A time when my heart physically hurts and I hate life. So how do I honestly feel? Instead of telling people I’m good, so they don’t think I’m weak, I should tell them truth. That I’m exhausted. And I feel to be out on my own with nobody to lean on. I thought I had given good intentions and efforts, but then I got nothing in return. No, wait. I got a story. And space.
More honest thoughts? That I must be a bad person, hence why I’m here without anywhere to go, why boyfriends abandon me, why I’ve been single for so fucking long. Too much in my head. So get it out, Sarah! Get me out.
Maybe part of my peace is accepting myself as a writer. Yes, I’m a writer. Even if I fail I’m a writer. I can make money from my art. Money to survive and think. I travel the world, slowly and sustainably. Returning to my base amongst the trees, giving stories of real life and real adventures. The turmoil will be gone. Because I’m a writer, right? I write.

10th March

It was the lightning strike that felt to have set things mad. The walls talk to me although the walls cannot talk. They tell me that the house has heard, it has watched, and has retreated. I wake to the verandah window beside me, my feet to the right of the door to the haunted hall—I still sleep up the other end of my bed. My desk is to my left, spread long and wide with my half-formed thoughts, and my jewellery area is behind me. The space is dark. A space I had doubted when I moved in from the upstairs room, but I’ve grown to love it.
My calves are tight.
Embarking on another gorgeous morning at my desk, I drink my black coffee from my Castlemaine mug that I always drink coffee from. Fierce, I feel fierce, with determination for hard work for I will be a famous (and private) storyteller. I would love to do movies too. Shows. Damn, my coffee’s finished, alerting me to my serious bowel issues, my inflamed intestines (possibly from hard food).
On my return to work, I’m jubilant from working the day with Gemma and Genevieve. We laughed a lot. We sold the gold pearl strand bracelet I recently created. On days like today I love work. I love that the jewellers told me not to care, just smile. I love that I’m growing my skill set.
On my scooter home, I report to myself: create your own narrative. I can get through this time, which may be rough for a while, but I will be fine. I am the Queen of believing. A Queen in knowing that deep down, beyond my doubts, I know a truth.
Coming into Broomerang my mood shifts despite my mental repetition of positivity. In reality, I feel hostility to those I had only recently loved with all my heart. Then Beth tells me, told to her by her boss, who is friends with Susan Bradley, that Broomerang is to become an AirBnB.
Fuck. Them.
I know it’s time to go.
While it may be the end of my story with this house, it is also the end of this current chapter. I have got what I’ve needed, and with an openness and acceptance I will continue to get what I need as my next step unfolds. Steps to simplify my life and my mind. Rewriting my narrative, abiding by my own priorities, surrounded by my kind of people, doused in love.
Love.
My word for this year, mostly forgotten.
Love, Sarah. Do it. Now’s the time. To take whatever’s coming with an exuberant acceptance and a hearty laugh.

In the night, deep in my dreams, I wake to a blood curdling scream and heavy running on the verandah. I come from a scene of daylight, greenery and mountains, of me driving in a car, to being woken in a haunted house to a woman screaming. The house remains in darkness. I switch on my light, fling from my bed, and scratch my head: there was a woman screaming, wasn’t there? I’m too scared to venture into the haunted hall alone—despite not being afraid of ghosts. I go into the ballroom, the central room that had the air conditioner running into Beth and my room, but Beth’s door is closed. I pace my bedroom, still too scared. I go back. Beth’s door is still closed. Why won’t she wake? I stand before the curtains that lead to the hallway and breathe deeply: It’s okay, Sarah, you can do this.
I open the glass door and enter the haunted verandah. Beth runs through the dark kitchen, the house illuminated only by my bedroom lamp’s light, and we meet near the bottom of the stairs.
She had woken to two people in her room.
From the seconds it took to come from peace in my dreams, to unknown fear in a haunted house, I’m now afraid of the dark.