Beyond Selidor

This is quite possibly the longest I've gone after the result of an election in one of my countries is known before writing up a post in response. This time, it was for good reasons: I was away visiting friends over the weekend (about which more in a later post), and, after a fretfully sleepless night of anxiety about the result, I woke up on Saturday morning UK time to find that my fellow Australian citizens had done me proud.

This is the first election since I turned eighteen in which I was not eligible to vote; I lost the right due to living overseas for too long, so I contributed literally nothing to the outcome.

Non-Australians wanting further context about our electoral system can read my post from the last election in 2022, which goes into more detail about all these things, but the crucial and decisive factors to my mind are: a) mandatory voting and b) preferential (ranked choice) voting, which lead to more moderate politics, and make it impossible for a party to win by appealling to a narrow base and assuming low turnout will do the rest for them. (I can only remember a single election in my lifetime that was won on what I'd term culture war issues.) I'm happy to answer further questions about Australian democracy, political parties, etc in the comments if you're interested.

In 2022, we voted in a Labor government on a razor thin majority after a decade of centre-right conservative government. I commented at the time that our centre-right parties (they always campaign and govern as a two-party coalition, and do not field candidates in 'each other's' electorates) had a choice: do some soul-searching, work out what went wrong, and try to course-correct in three years' time, or the opposite, which I termed as follows:

'Are we out of touch? No, it's the voters who are wrong'

I'm pleased to report that they did the latter, and, after a few tense months where it appeared this might have paid off, it became apparant that Australians do not currently want culture warring right-wing populism, and responded by reelecting Labor in an absolutely massive landslide. Peter Dutton, the creepy, far-right culture-warring opposition leader made history, but not in the way he wanted: he became the first opposition leader in Australia to lose his seat in an election. (The schadenfreude on Australian politics social media was absolutely off the charts.)

The two of my sisters who are adults are what we'd term in Australia 'true believers': die-hard Labor supporters, party members who spent this election as volunteers for their local Labor candidates' campaigns. Sister #1 was even briefly asked to stand as the candidate, but ultimately ruled it out, instead throwing her efforts behind the woman who did stand, in an unwinnable electorate where it was important to have someone from Labor on the ballot to make it harder for the conservative candidate to win against the 'teal' independent who was standing. Sister #2 appears to have run the social media accounts for her own Labor MP who was facing a very tough uphill battle for reelection which was ultimately successful. Both sisters are, as you can imagine, absolutely ecstatic.

The very first piece of legislation the reelected Labor government is going to pass will reduce student debts by 20 per cent.

I can't claim to have contributed anything to this result, but I've been floating on air for the past four days as a consequence.

I'll close this post with a few commentary pieces whose analysis teases out some of the issues that were in play this election.

Annabel Crabb on Dutton's toxicity with female voters

Crabb again, on the failure of culture wars to affect the result

The Murdoch press no longer has the power to sway voters

Edited to add two articles about the lengths to which the Australian electoral commission will go to ensure all voters have their ballots, and have no difficulties voting: one and two.

And, finally, one link and another, which provide context for the title of this post, and my 2022 election post as well.

A massive round of applause for all Australian voters.

After a 36-hour journey from door to door, involving an inevitable rail replacement bus, and a train full of drunk, singing football fans, I've returned from my trip to Australia, sleepy, restored, and a little bit melancholy. It was my first time back in five years, due to the pandemic, and it was a very packed schedule, filled with family events, various bits of long-postponed life admin, and lots of communing with the ocean. I was in Sydney for the most part, staying with my mum and sister #1 (who has moved back after five years in Melbourne), apart from five days in Woodend in rural Victoria with my dad, stepmother, and all my sisters.

I felt it would be easiest to summarise the trip under various subheadings.

Family and friends

Lots, and lots, and lots of family dinners in Sydney with various combinations of aunts — at Mum's place, at my aunt's place down the road, at cocktail bars and restaurants in the CBD, etc

A daytrip to have lunch with my dad's two sisters and their partners and one of my cousins in Thirroul, which is about an hour away on the train

Visiting anya_1984 and meeting her younger son, who had not been born the last time I was in Sydney

Easter weekend in Woodend — the first time all five of us sisters have ever been in the one place at the one time, in freezing temperatures, with the fire going nearly constantly, various dogs and cats slumbering on our laps, catching up with one of my cousins, meeting his new partner (who gamely came along to an Easter Sunday dinner hosted by one of my stepmother's brothers, with about forty people there, mainly her relatives, but also random people that my stepmother's mother had met at the pub and invited along, etc), chatting chaotically around firepits, eating too much food and drinking way too much wine

Cocktails and dinner with anya_1984, who has known me since we were twelve years old, plus a gang of people with whom we went to uni, which ended up being an oddly intense experience due to the passage of time, and everyone's various private griefs and struggles being aired

Getting the unexpected chance to see all of my cousins apart from the one who lives way out in Sydney's west and works irregular hours and the one who lives in South Korea and the one who had just gone on a trip to Spain the week before I arrived

Life admin

Sorting out various banking and superannuation stuff that inevitably accumulate if one is a migrant who has spent half her working life in one country and half in another

Going through all the books, documents, paper diaries, old high school report cards, boxes of photos, primary school artworks etc which I had been storing in my mum's flat since I left Australia in 2008, and finally throwing away the stuff that had survived five purge attempts since 2002. The remainder is in the process of being shipped over to the UK, now that we finally own our own house and live somewhere with an adequate amount of storage

Food

Just generally revelling in the fact that Australia is really, really, really good at food. I always say that the UK has improved massively in this regard since I first moved here, and that's true, but Australia really is in another league, and my mum lives in a part of Sydney that is particularly good in terms of cafes, bars and restaurants (and within easy reach of other parts of the city), so we ate very well

I ate a lot of fish and other seafood. The UK has good seafood, but it's generally different types of fish, and prepared differently, so it was good to sample all the stuff I can't easily eat in the northern hemisphere

Australia also generally has better East and Southeast Asian food, so I was keen to eat that at every opportunity — of which there were several

Two tasting menu dinners at high end restaurants — this one with Matthias, and this one with sister #1 as a birthday present for the past five years of birthdays

Cafe breakfasts. Just Sydney cafe breakfasts

All that land and all that water

Various walks and swims with Matthias around different bits of Sydney Harbour — catching the ferry to Manly and then walking from Shelly Beach up North Head, and returning to swim, walking from my mum's place to Barangaroo, walking from Nielsen Park along the harbour all the way home, with a swim midway, and shorter walks to any available body of water I could reach

Lots and lots of swimming at andrewboycharltonsydney with my mum, and sometimes one of my aunts, with the smell of the cut grass on one side and the harbour on the other, watching the naval ships drift by, under the broad sweep of the sky

I read a lot of books during the plane trips there and back, but while I was in Australia I stuck to rereading my old childhood paperbacks, including Rain Stones and The Secret Beach by Jackie French (a short story collection and standalone novel collection respectively, both with French's usual focus on family history, memory, and the Australian landscape), Hannah's Winter by Kierin Meehan (preteen girl spends three months in rural Japan with an eccentric host family and — together with a couple of other kids — must solve a supernatural mystery quest), and Shadowdancers by Sally Odgers (a portal fantasy in which people from our world have doppelgangers in another, with whom traumatic experiences can force them to trade places — one of my very favourite books when I was a teenager, absolutely read to death, to the point that the paperback is extremely battered and had been dropped in the bath at least once).

The trip itself was wonderful, but emotionally wrenching in weird and unexpected ways due to the passage of time, and the near constant reminder that migration and building a life overseas causes the space you occupy to close up behind you. I made that choice, and I don't regret it, but it is confronting to be reminded that life goes on without you in places and among people that once felt like home. It was my own choice, but it was a choice that was not without weight, and consequences.

My Instagram — ronnidolorosa offers a rather incomplete record of the trip, heavy on the sea and sky, since those were — apart from the people — the thing I missed most, and which are so, so different to the sea, and the sky in these northern parts of the world to which I transplanted myself.

Everything's been a bit of a low energy, foggy blur recently. I've barely felt capable of reading, and watching TV shows has at times felt like a trudge, even if I enjoyed the material. At times all I felt capable of was lying around with the Olympics on in the background, and to a great extent the only thing about which I felt normal levels of enthusiasm was the gymnastics (and endless gymnastics documentaries that I found down the Youtube rabbit hole).

However, there has been nice stuff, too:

My mum is fully vaccinated (joining my father, stepmother, various step-relatives, and sister #2), my maternal aunts all have their second doses booked and happening in the next couple of weeks, and sister #1 had her first dose of AZ today (she's in her thirties, but elected to request AZ from her doctor rather than waiting around indefinitely for Pfizer which is arriving at some unspecified future point in time).

Matthias and I basically walked and ate our way through London, and I didn't realise until I got there how much I had desperately missed proper cities.

Fresh summer fruit, and gelato.

My beautiful garden ruin.

There's light enough, I guess.

Today is another January talking meme post, this time brought to you by montfelisky, who asked for a significant childhood memory.

Me being who I am, I couldn't narrow it down to one.

( When I was a child the world seemed so wide )

I could go on, but that's probably enough. I have a dreadful short-term memory, but my memories of distant childhood experiences are clear and vivid, and extensive.

Welcome, new people who have subscribed as a result of the friending meme. It's great to see so much activity here on Dreamwidth, and I'm really looking forward to getting to know you all.

Due to this flurry of activity, I thought it best to do an updated intro post. People who've had me in their circles for a while, please feel free to read or skip as you please. And both new and old people, please feel free to ask me any questions!

( Those things they see in me I cannot see myself )

I went straight back to work on Tuesday, and was thrown straight into it: a lot of teaching, a lot of students back and studying, and a period of downtime as we switch from one library management system to another. This latter meant that we had access to neither the old system nor the new, but were still expected to issue, return and renew books, and register new users -- quite hard to do when you can't access the required program, but we found workarounds.

This weekend has been slightly busier than I would have liked, given the work week I had (and given how busy January is shaping up to be), but I still found time to snatch a bit of reading. I'm just over one hundred pages into The Will to Battle, the third in Ada Palmer's extraordinary Terra Ignota series, and I'm as awed by this third book as I was by the first and second. My husband sent me a link to great article by Palmer about her use of social science (as opposed to 'hard' sciences) in her science fiction, and it's reminded me all over again how intricate and clever her books are. naye, you might be interested in reading the article; it's here if anyone wants to read it.

Two of my four sisters (Kitty and Nell, sisters #2 and #3) are about midway through a trip around Europe with their grandparents (for new readers of my Dreamwidth, the reason I say their and not our grandparents is that my three youngest sisters only share a father, not a mother, with me and my other younger sister -- and thus only one set of grandparents; these are their maternal grandparents). This past week they were in London, and I organised for the four of them to take the train up to Cambridge and visit me and Matthias. I hadn't seen these sisters since 2015, and although we stay vaguely in touch via social media, they are quite young (Kitty is fifteen, and Nell ten), and it's been harder to stay a part of their lives than it has been with relatives and friends who are adults. In any case, I showed them and their grandparents around Cambridge, and we all had lunch together, and it was easy to pick up where I left off. I was struck once again by what wonderful people the two girls are: so thoughtful and clever and kind. Obviously I'm a bit biased -- I think all my sisters are amazing -- but my heart sang to see what good people they were.

Other than reading and hanging out with my family, it's mostly been a weekend of cooking and chores. I've got this slow-cooked pork recipe roasting away in the oven, and it's filling the whole house with the smell of apple, redcurrant and rosemary.

How have everyone else's first weekends of 2018 been?

Hello to all the new people now following me as a result of the friending meme (and for those of you who haven't seen the meme yet, it's here).

I thought I'd introduce myself to all of you. Feel free to ask me questions about anything.

( Feel free to skip if you've had me in your circle/flist for a while )

It's not every day you get a PhD. It's not every day you get a new sister. I was lucky and got both on the one day. 19th July is certainly going to be this year's most memorable day!

My dad had been making vague noises all year about coming to Cambridge for my graduation, but I knew that his and my stepmother's new baby was due on 29th July and it was probably not a good idea for him to be on the other side of the world. In any case, I was proved right - I was woken up by a text from my dad at about 1am on Saturday, informing me that the baby had been born early. Her name is Maud, and she is the youngest of five sisters, joining me, Miriam (who has the same mother and father as me), Kitty and Nell (who have a different mother to me and Miriam). People were joking on Facebook that my father is like a modern-day Mr Bennet (from Pride and Prejudice) or Tevye. I'm just glad his economic future doesn't depend on marrying us all off! There is a range of twenty-nine years in our ages, and we're all at such different stages of life: I've just finished a PhD, Miriam finished an MA last year and is working for the public service, Kitty is going into high school next year, Nell is in the early stages of primary school and Maud is a newborn baby.

Anyway, I managed to get back to sleep after being woken by Dad's text, I woke up and it was my graduation day. My mother and Miriam had come to the UK specially to be here for this, and they and Matthias were my guests. Graduation in Cambridge is a rather strange affair: students all have to wear black and white clothing (suits, black skirts and white blouses, or black dresses)* and a combination of hood and gown which varies depending on the degree they are to receive, any Cambridge degrees they already hold, and their age. As I already held a Cambridge MPhil, I had to wear an MPhil gown and hood. Graduating students have to process from their colleges to the Senate House through the centre of town. I'm lucky - my college is a two-minute walk from the Senate House - but it was a swelteringly hot day, and also kept threatening to rain. The woman next to me in the procession was someone I knew vaguely - she was also an Australian, and we'd both been wheeled out at the same event a while back to talk to a bunch of Indigenous people who were interested in coming to Cambridge (neither of us are Indigenous, but they just wanted Australians to give their impressions).

The ceremony itself is always very brief. Students are led forward four at a time by their college's Praelector, presented to the Vice Chancellor in Latin, and kneel down one by one before him (when I received my MPhil, the Vice Chancellor was a woman, but she has since retired). He mumbles a bit more Latin over the student, and that's it. I was concentrating so much on not tripping over my gown when I stood up that the whole thing was a bit of a blur, but Matthias said he felt a bit weepy.

Then we milled around outside the Senate House for ages, and took photos. I only have one so far, but once my mum's emailed me hers, I will upload them too.



Graduation was followed by a buffet lunch in my college's formal hall. We were lucky to be seated next to a really nice Irish family, who became extremely chatty when they discovered what I had studied. I've never met an unfriendly Irish person, nor one who was uncomfortable talking to complete strangers. I'm sure they exist, but I've never met them.

After lunch, we met up with some friends for drinks in a nearby pub. People came and went, but the group included Former Housemate H, Former Sort-of Housemate J2, V, P, R, Matthias, Miriam, Mum and me.

So all in all, a wonderful day, filled with celebrations. I'm very relieved to be closing a door on the PhD side of my life. The PhD years were good years, growing years, learning years, changing years, but also very challenging years. I'm grateful to have been able to learn what I learnt about medieval Irish literature. The stories I studied were beautiful and will stay with me forever. And there really are no people like a really enthusiastic bunch of medievalists to have as friends. But once was enough! And a PhD is as far as I'd like to go in terms of academia (although I'm not ruling out some kind of taught MA at some point in the future).

I am Dr Dolorosa, and that's enough for now.
__________
*Those in the military are allowed to wear military uniform, and students are also allowed to wear 'national dress', although this is very vaguely defined. I've seen some women graduate in saris or kimono, and that's about it.

The thing that struck me most upon my return was not the weather so much as the silence. My mother lives in the most densely-populated postcode in Australia. It is a suburb full of backpackers, nightclubs and bars, and is also the red light district. It is, as Matthias noted, the only place where it seems perfectly natural for a sourdough bakery to be open 24 hours a day. It's so vibrant and full of life. It seems so odd to be at home and hear nothing.

When I think back on the trip, the word that describes it best is 'whirlwind'. Not just in terms of time (we were only there for three weeks) but in terms of emotions. I felt as if the space that I had occupied there had closed up behind me, and while it wasn't too much work to make a space for myself again, it was work. It is, of course, entirely natural that people's lives move on when you go away, but I think the internet gives me an illusion of being up to date about all the changes people have gone through, and conversely keeps them entirely informed of who I've become.

I was really happy with how welcoming my family and friends were of Matthias. The trip was filled with events where I was able to catch up with everyone and where he was able to get to know people. Melbourne with my dad, stepmother and sisters was the usual chaotic fun, and we managed to see two of my friends there as well. In Sydney, I organised drinks and dinner on the roof of my apartment block (it has views of Sydney Harbour) with my Sydney Uni friends and K (who I've known since primary school through gymnastics). There were several other events with that group, so we managed to see everyone amid the comings and goings of the Christmas holidays. We also had lunch with angel_cc and catpuccino and dinner with two of Matthias' friends who live in Sydney. lucubratae came up for a daytrip and had lunch with us, which was great (and very generous). We also saw all my relatives on both sides of the family. But after two weeks, I found it all too much - I am an introvert at heart - and tried to slow down a bit. In the final week in Sydney, we mostly just did stuff on our own - lots of beach trips, a day exploring recommended bars and seeing The Hobbit (which I will write about later), and a day at the cricket, which was my birthday and Christmas present to Matthias.

The trip was a bit of a mixed bag, although on the whole it was positive. But I find it difficult to be confronted with the past, with my history, with the weight of people's memories. You cannot ever go back, and although I have no doubt that I would have a wonderful life if I moved back to Australia, the recent trip has convinced me that Britain is where I want to be for the moment.

Someone on Tumblr posted this video about the Cirque du Soleil audition process. It sparked way too many memories.



For those who didn't know, I am, shall we say, rather obsessed with Cirque. We share a birth year, if not a birthday (Cirque came into this world about six months before I did), and I saw my first show, a performance of their original North American production, Le Cirque Réinventé during a holiday in New York when I was three. All I remember about that show is that I was terrified of clowns, and my mother reassured me that Cirque 'wasn't the kind of circus to have clowns', only to be greeted by a group of clowns who were doing the now-standard Cirque thing of wandering around as the audience was seated. I also remember that they got some ridiculous number of people on a bicycle. But I was hooked.

They didn't tour Australia during my early childhood, so the next time I saw a Cirque production was when their show Saltimbanco toured in 1997, when I was twelve. We were living in Canberra at the time, and they didn't include Canberra in the tour, so my father, sister and I made the trip to Sydney. I was awestruck. I loved the Russian swing act, the Chinese pole act, and above all, the adagio. I was a gymnast at the time, and my sister and I took a circus skills class as part of a music summer camp, and we came away from that show starry-eyed and absolutely convinced that we would audition for Cirque as an adagio flyer and base. Our plans, of course, came to nothing, although we spent a lot of time that summer choreographing an adagio act that we would supposedly use in an audition. Considering the most difficult adagio pose we could do was 'flag' (where the flyer stands with one foot on the base's legs and the other wrapped around the base's neck, and then leans outwards, holding one of the base's hands, if you can imagine that), we wouldn't have had a snowflake's chance in hell of getting in, but it was fun to practice.

Cirque came back two years later with Alegria, and we again made the trip from Canberra to Sydney, to fall in love all over again. This seems to have been the year when they really cracked Australia, because I remember seeing screenings of their shows on TV a lot after that. My favourites swiftly became Quidam (whose story spoke to my teenage angst and whose banquine act remains my favourite thing seen on a stage, ever) and Dralion, which has the most amazing music, costuming and choreography. I managed to see both of those shows live in Sydney. My sister and I were absolutely obnoxious throughout both performances, whispering literary analyses of the storylines and commentating on the acts with our (supposedly awesome) circus insider knowledge ('you can tell that that particular flyer is calling the act, watch his mouth, he's the one controlling the whole thing'; 'they've made it look like that dude is just dancing around, but watch him - he's spotting everyone - see how his eyes never leave the acrobats above him?'). I was absolutely ridiculous about this, utterly convinced that no one understood Cirque like we did. I thought everyone besides us was bandwagon-jumpers. (We were the One - or Two - True Fans, you know?) I would mutter scathingly to my sister whenever the audience applauded something that I considered not applause-worthy ('*I*, a fairly average gymnast, can do that, why the hell are those ignorant idiots applauding?'), or, even more unforgivably, when they didn't applaud something that was clearly awesome. I spent most of the performance of Dralion in tears because I had wanted to see it live for so long. I sobbed my eyes out when I saw the Quidam banquine act, like a Beatles fan at a show in the '60s. My sister and I had this elaborate plan whereby we'd go to the US and stay three nights in Vegas in order to see the permanent shows that Cirque had there. I had absolutely no desire to go to Vegas, but in order to see O, in particular, I would make such sacrifices!

By the time Varekai rolled around in 2006-7, my sister no longer wanted to play that game, and I'd grown up sufficiently to at least put a sock in it during the show. We were living in Sydney by that point, and saw a production in 2006. I loved Varekai but didn't realise how much a part of my life it would become. In 2007, I moved back to Canberra to work as a newspaper subeditor. Initially, that job was only two days a week, so I took on other work. Including working for Varekai during the two months they were in Canberra. I worked in the food stalls, selling popcorn, ice-creams, hotdogs and overpriced drinks to the audience. It was tough work - most importantly, the stalls had to be spotless when the audience could see them, which meant frantic cleaning during the two acts - but I loved it. We got to see the show once for free. But most importantly, when I worked, I felt like I was dancing. They set up a TV feed of the show so that we could gauge how long we would have before the audience was out, and to this day, certain songs from the soundtrack prompt a sense of anxiety and desire to scrub popcorn machines. I felt like a performer, a cog in a delicate and elaborate machine. Sure, I was just selling junk food to the masses, but the entire time I was working there, my brain would go into this kind of blissed-out state, interspersed with random rushes of adrenaline. The only thing that feels similar is the moment when I've been jogging for a long time, and my body ceases to hurt, my breathing comes easily and it's almost as if I am flying. There were people with Varekai who had been working there in other cities, and would be following the show on when it left Canberra. I still wouldn't mind doing something similar.

That was the last Cirque show that I saw. I can't afford the tickets now that I'm back at uni and living overseas. I miss it so much. Every so often I binge on Youtube clips, but it's not the same thing. Because it went beyond the shows themselves, wondrous as they were. It was something that I associated with my family, like going to see Bell Shakespeare Company productions (something that we did every year from 1996 until 2007, and which I miss almost as fiercely). I associate Cirque so strongly with my mother and sister that it would feel wrong to see a show with anyone else. And so it's become one of those things that I associate with childhood, something that is forever out of reach. Now that I think about it, Cirque was the first thing that I truly felt fannish about. I'm glad I wasn't aware of fandom then, because I would've been one of those horror-fans who winds being mocked on Encyclopædia Dramatica or Fandom Wank. I still love Cirque in much the same way (but without the snobby attitude towards other members of the audience, because that was just ridiculous, although in keeping with the pomposity I had at that age) and I long for the day when I can make it a part of my life again.