Renate Klein

RU486 abortions approved in Australia: Regrettable and dangerous

Yesterday’s announcement by the Therapeutic Goods Administration that it has approved an application by the private company MS Health, set up by Marie Stopes International (MSI), to import the abortion drug RU486 does not come as a big surprise. It has been on the cards ever since the vote in Federal Parliament in 2006 that stripped the Health Minister of the day of their veto over a potential application by a pharmaceutical company.

What’s more, proponents of RU486 such as Professor Caroline de Costa from Cairns, have regularly announced that an application by a pharmaceutical company to import RU486 was imminent. Now it’s not a pharmaceutical company that lodged an application but a private company set up by MSI, an abortion ‘chain’ with a number of clinics in Australia (one branch in Croydon was recently closed down after dozens of women had been infected with hepatitis and a woman had died after an abortion in 2011, no details revealed).

As a feminist long-time women’s health researcher who supports women’s access to safe pregnancy terminations, this decision by the TGA begs many questions. Documentation for the safety and effectiveness which I hope MSI had to submit to the TGA to obtain approval would have to be based on overseas research since no large scale trials on RU486 have been conducted in Australia. Is this good enough for Australian women?

Also, until now, RU486 - and the second drug, a prostaglandin (PG Misoprostol, Cytotec™) which by the way has never been approved for use in abortions by its manufacturer (Pfizer, formerly Searle) - could only be used by medical practitioners after obtaining an authorized prescriber license from the TGA. Indeed, Professor de Costa who was the first to obtain such a license reported that the combination RU486/PG had strict conditions imposed: only women with life-threatening or otherwise serious health conditions such as kidney disease, high blood pressure and other heart conditions for whom a suction abortion was deemed unsafe, could be administered RU486/PG.

But these strict conditions gradually fell away, notably by MSI Australia clinics who two years ago sent a brochure to Victorian GPs suggesting they refer women who wanted pregnancy terminations to one of their clinics without any mention of restricted use or review requirements by the TGA.

When the first death of a woman in Australia from RU486/PG in 2010 was reported on 19 March this year - a two year delay -in The Australian, the TGA issued new guidelines for follow-up care to clinics using the abortion pill (http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/health/abortion-pill-death-sparked-warning/story-fn59nokw-1226303297539). We know few details about this death other than that the woman died from sepsis after the abortion. The coroner did not order an Inquiry which is most unfortunate given that this was the first reported case of a woman dying in Australia from RU486/PG abortion.

RU486/PG abortions overseas have resulted in a number of women dying where sepsis was the cause of death (the bacterium Clostridium was identified in uterus infections in the USA, UK and Sweden). Other women have died from severe blood loss when no medical facilities were available for blood transfusion.

Promoters of medical abortions led us to believe that RU486/PG abortion is more ‘natural’ than suction abortion and that it is ‘just like a miscarriage’ and safe. This is twisting the truth more than a little bit! Women who have used this method tell other stories. The vomiting, pain and nausea can be close to unbearable and as one woman who had a recent RU486/PG termination in South Australia told me she got such a high fever combined with extreme blood loss that she feared for her life. She would certainly never do it again.

The RU486/PG combination also has a lower success rate than suction abortion: depending on which figures you quote between 91% and 93%; suction abortion succeeds in 99%. (I actually prefer to call RU486/PG a ‘chemical’ rather than a ‘medical’ abortion which sounds so benign compared to ‘surgical’ abortion, a misnomer as nothing is ‘cut’ in a suction abortion.)

Importantly also, once she has swallowed the RU486 pills (and the prostaglandin 2 days later), the woman is entirely on her own. Some women have instant adverse reactions, but for others, the blood loss or pain from uterine contractions may start only days into the procedure. The point is that it is entirely unpredictable in which women the termination will happen without problems or lead to possibly fatal complications.

Instead of being looked after in an abortion clinic should complications occur and having the suction abortion finished in half an hour, RU486/PG abortions can take as long as six weeks! It is absolutely crucial that women go back to doctors for a check-up to make sure the abortion is complete. If it is not, a D&C is required, the most frequently reported adverse effect (442 instances as reported by Jamie Walker in the article quoted earlier).

Surely this abortion method is not the panacea that its promoters hail it to be. We know that many women feel ambivalent about having an abortion. They make this often painful decision because they can not see a way to rear a(nother) child. Having to physically experience the consequences of their decision with ongoing pain, nausea and blood loss for weeks is surely inhumane punishment. In some instances the women find the small embryo passed out in their sanitary pads…even a person who supports a woman’s right to abortion would find this most upsetting and sad.

Promoters hail RU486/PG as a breakthrough especially for women who live in rural and isolated parts of Australia. But given the potential of life-threatening complications with no nearby hospital for emergency procedures, I consider this irresponsible and reckless. It is true that abortion facilities are hard to access but I believe that it is the medical system’s responsibility to provide safe abortions, instead of writing prescriptions for pills - to be filled in pharmacies and taken later: in my books this is the 21^st century version of backyard abortions and women deserve better.

For all of these reasons I certainly was not popping champagne yesterday. Marie Stopes’ use of RU486/PG abortion in Australia requires careful monitoring and reporting and the TGA must put these requirements in place. And as MSI’s prostaglandin registered with the TGA is Gymiso™ (used in France) rather than the usual Cytotec™, this needs attention as well.

As for considering inclusion in the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme, this is a question that should not even be asked at this point.

This is an extended version of an article published 30 August 2012 at http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/society-and-culture/should-ru486-be-available-on-the-pbs-20120830-252zg.html#ixzz254uc6xzq

Dr Renate Klein is a feminist-long term women’s health researcher and together with Janice Raymond and Lynette Dumble coauthored RU486: Misconceptions, Myths and Morals, available from Spinifex Press in print and as an eBook.   

 
Seeking Palestine: New Palestinian Writing on Exile and Home.


            

                     
                    The Unfinished Revolution              Seeking Palestine

The Unfinished Revolution, edited by Minky Worden documents the unfinished revolution for women’s human rights and asks if the aftermath of the recent uprisings will prove to be - an ‘Arab spring’ or a ‘women’s winter’. 

In her chapter ‘Letters in the Night’, Rachel Ward, a senior regional advisor on Afghanistan and Pakistan tells the story of Hossai, a twenty-two-year-old Afghan aid worker from the southern city of Kandahar. Hossai had received threatening phone calls from a man who said he was with the Taliban who told her to stop working with foreigners. But Hossai didn’t want to give up a good job with the American development company and within weeks Hossai was dead.

Since the 2003 invasion of Iraq, widespread insecurity, displacement, financial hardship and the dissolution of law have contributed to an increase in prostitution and trafficking. The trafficked women are transported internally and internationally for prostitution and also into forced marriages. In Afghanistan small girls are taken away from their families and become victims of sex trading due to their family’s inability to repay huge loans borrowed from drug traffickers in order to grow opium crops.

Photo: The Unfinished Revolution

Editor Minky Worden, Human Rights Watch’s director of Global initiatives is joined by over 30 writers among them Nobel Prize laureates, leading activists, policy makers and former victims who tackle these tough problems and offer bold new approaches to the issues that are still affecting millions of women today.

In July, Spinifex Press released Seeking Palestine: New Palestinian Writing on Exile and Home. This wonderful collection of essays by Palestinian essayists, novelists, poets and critics probe the human costs of a home no longer home and contributes greatly to our understanding of the lives of Palestinians.

 

The contributors reflect on 'What it means to be Palestinian' and come up with individual and collective experiences of seeking, waiting, living for, and being or becoming Palestinian. Words and feelings of Memory, Resilience and Revolution feature strongly throughout this fine collection.

Jean Said Makdisi in her chapter “Becoming Palestinian”, laments the lack of Memory for her native Jerusalem although it continues to be her ideal model of a home where past, present and future meet in her mind to create the one place on earth where she can imagine herself resting, laying down at last the burden of anger and sorrow created in her by the loss. 

In ‘Exiled from Revolution’, Karma Nabulsi regrets ‘the fragmentation of the body politic’ where Palestinian leadership no longer involves itself in the ideas and practice of liberation, but in business deals. While the former representative of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation pens this chapter ‘the awesome West watches mesmerised’ ‘as masses of Arabs’ ‘ create and celebrate their revolutions’. Nabulsi hopes the recent Arab uprisings will result in a return to Palestinian organizing and a revolutionary present.

Seeking  Palestine is also about Resilience – that of those who have ‘remained in place’, as novelist and poet Mourid Barghouti discovered when he hired a driver to take him to Jericho. Barghouti has been living away from his fellow passengers, his countrymen and women, and finds their light approach to the plans of the ‘terrifying individual such as Sharon’ incomprehensible. 

When Mahmoud announces that the anticipated attack will come tonight his fellow passengers are not particularly upset. ‘Everyday they kill us retail, and once in a while they get the urge to kill us wholesale’ says one of the passengers. Barghouti says that for the inhabitants of these Palestinian cities, ‘everything has become food for jokes’. The poet regards his taxi driver Mahmoud as a hero. “We are his nation: an old man and two women (one of whom doesn’t cover her hair and face, while the other wears a full veil); a man who’s short and another who’s fat; a university student; and a poet who is amazed by everything he sees." He asks himself if he would be able to lead such a trip. But as he says: ‘I am a writer-that is, I don’t do anything.

But that is not his job: The poet and the writer's task is to write- they teach, inform, enlighten and entertain and this applies to the work of the contributors to this fine collection of new Palestinian writing on exile and home-Seeking Palestine.

Alex Nissen, a teacher working within the TAFE sector spoke of her enlightenment from a Jewish girl growing up with the usual expectations of patriarchal society - to marry and become a mother. However Alex had other ideas - evolving and becoming a radical lesbian feminist, a peace activist and part of the Israeli women’s peace movement for over 20 years. For many years the articulate and energetic activist taught women’s studies and now mourns the extinction of feminist thought within academia. 

       Alex Nissen

Samah Sabawi is a writer, political analyst, commentator, author and playwright and a policy advisor to the Palestinian policy network. Samah was born in Gaza and escaped the Israeli occupation by seeking refuge in neighbouring Jordan before immigrating to Australia. For Samah, the essays written by the women contributors to Seeking Palestine were particularly moving: Susan Abulhawa and her chapter ‘Memories of an Un-Palestinian Story’ where she relays a ‘searing account of her childhood’, and Rana Bakarat who suggests that ‘Palestine-in exile’, ‘is an idea, a love, a goal, a movement, a massacre, a march, a parade, a poem, a thesis, a novel and yes, a commodity, as well as a people scattered, displaced, dispossessed and determined.’

Palestinian writer and activist Samah Sabawi wonders aloud if it is possible for non - Palestinians to understand the passion found in Seeking Palestine. For those who are lucky enough to thoughtfully take the time and read this anthology, the answer is YES.

 
 
Samah Sabawi, Gula Bezhan, Helen Lobato, Onnie Wilson, Alex Nissen 

Onnie Wilson, an activist for women’s human rights, spoke of the need for males to change their behaviour.  In The Unfinished Revolution and included in a chapter called ‘Girls not Brides’, Archbishop Desmond Tutu points out that child marriage is rooted in a way of thinking which men have endorsed for far too long. 'Child marriage occurs because men allow it,' he said. ‘Women’s needs must be recognised as having equal social priority in areas such as reproduction, health, education, economic independence,’ says Wilson, who stressed the importance of women across the globe needing to connect so the push for women’s human rights can have a tsunami groundswell effect.

Our final speaker for the night was Dr Gula Bezhan, a community leader of Afghans living in Melbourne. Gula related a harrowing tale of how she was forced to leave Afghanistan where she had lived and worked as a gynaecologist. In 1995 when the Northern Alliance took control of Afghanistan they instigated a rampage of targeting and killing professional people. Gula and her family fled to Pakistan, from where she immigrated to Australia. A community leader, she established the Afghan Woman’s Association of Victoria and has since completed a Bachelor of Social Science. Her employment is in settlement of newly arrived asylum seekers and she has no regrets about not being able to practice medicine.

These books are not yet bestsellers although there has been recent acclaim for Seeking Palestine: New Palestinian Writing on Exile and Home, -  The Age, Non-Fiction 'Pick of the Week' - August 11.

In these gritty poetic stories, Palestinian writers imaginatively reclaim what has been lost. —Fiona Capp 

Talk for launch of Australian Poetry Journal, Issue 2, Technology, June 2012.

By Patricia Sykes

I’ve titled this preamble From Neanderthal to app and I begin idiosyncratically, with a question to myself: is interactive technology capable of functioning as muse? The nine classical muses, said to collaborate in the ordering of the world, were celebrated by the disciples of Pythagoras as “keepers of the knowledge of harmony and the principles of the universe”, which allowed humans “access to the everlasting gods”. This is a statement of faith as well as a claim of privilege and it seems to me that some futurists would like to claim the same for technology. I’m not a Luddite but I am something of a refusenik: I want to maintain a distance between creator and tool. If our era were to define a world order, along the lines of the Elizabethan World Order, ie God, Angels, Humanity and so on down to the insects, where would technology be placed?

Every generation of course uses the tools specific to its discoveries and aspirations, and we’ve been inscribing the planet in one way or another  ─ and more recently our solar system ─ since Neanderthal times. When I began school life the permitted tool was a slate pencil. It was tied to a piece of string which was tied to a corner of the slate. The slate had only a small surface so it needed to be erased frequently. Erasure was by organic method. You spat onto a cloth and then wiped the slate clean.

My next tool was a pencil. When you had mastered printing you were permitted to progress to cursive writing. When you could write perfectly between the lines, at the designated height, you were permitted to write with a pen, which consisted of a tapered handle, wider at the top. Inside the top was a metal slot into which a nib was inserted. The ink (black, blue or red) was contained in an inkwell into which you dipped the nib: the most poetic aspect of ink wells was how the ink seeped up to striate the petals of the jonquils we stuck in them during winter. This was also an era of much blotting paper: write, blot, write, blot.

Then came the fountain pen. Then the biro, which only became widely accepted in schools in the 1950s. Until then it had been considered injurious to the quality of writing. Then came typewriter, then word processor, then computer and its enhanced facility for memorising and storage. In the time of the slate with its frequent erasures, brain memory was essential. Rote learning too. During and immediately after the end of WWii there was simply not enough paper for school children to write on. Now memory is becoming more a matter of technological storage and retrieval and I’m very aware of this in my own practice.

And so to neuro plasticity: is the tool taking over from its human creator, shaping and attuning the human as it were, and if so what implications might this have for the writing, reading and appreciating of poetry? Susan Greenfield, the neuroscientist, argues that the rise in IQ ascribed to the visual era of the VDU, or visual display unit, indicates a greater facility with process but not with content. In her view the human brain is being changed by the technological dominance of the visual.

While in Canberra recently I came across four pages in The Canberra Times celebrating Italian National Day. One of the features, Science, technology and innovation, included a description of the iCub, developed at the Instituto Italiano di Technologica in Genoa, as an “open source platform for research into humanoid robotics, brain and cognitive sciences” and which has the capacity “to learn to have natural interactions and to learn from humans”. It’s perhaps no accident that the iCub is shaped like a child “with hands for manipulating objects and…sensors for seeing, hearing and touching”. Therefore cute and non-threatening, on the surface at least. Thus far the iCub is a responder rather than an initiator. But what if further development turns it into an initiator? What if it begins using humans as amanuenses, even apps?

I didn’t have any of this in mind, nor even the theme of technology, when I wrote A flight of leftovers, nor when I submitted it to the journal as part of a small unrelated batch of poems. Which brings me to the process I used in the creation of the poem. I frequently use a voice recorder when I’m driving. No sooner am I behind the steering wheel than a line or an image will slip into my mind and by the time I reach the next set of traffic lights it can have vanished. The recorder is simple technology, relying on batteries and reel-to-reel recording and playback. A year after I began using the device I started to wonder what I was going to do with the accumulating material. The fact that I had a lot of it didn’t matter because I had transcribed it and stored it in computer memory and hey presto retrieval does the rest.

So I was at my desk, having typed out final versions of two poems I’d written by hand and planned to submit, when my eyes alighted on a folder of transcribed recordings. I opened it, reading at random, noting a recurrence of themes, and decided to see what eventuated if I selected a few entries and got them talking to each other in a poem. In the process I discarded some images and lines, in full or in part, wrote new ones, rearranged, re-wrote, and finally arrived at a final draft. I could not have done this without the aid of recorder, computer and printer. Nor could they have fulfilled their functions if I had not fed them.

I wonder what Homer’s response would have been to such tools. I recently heard a Radio National discussion on The Iliad’s first print run, which would have amounted to roughly six painstakingly handwritten copies. Subsequent reprints would have been the of the same order: how different literary history would be without the printing press. I can’t quite imagine reading The Iliad on a Kindle or similar device. To hold the entire book in your hand is to hold the journey. It’s the tactility of a book that I’d find difficult to give up. I find it interesting that the iCub has been designed to include sensory capacity, as if the developers knew that such a capacity would make it more acceptable to its human inter-actors.

I think one of the ways technology spoils and deludes us is through the dubious reward of immediacy, things at the fingertips, quick, quick, quick. Perhaps it’s because I was born in an era when it was still the practice that I value the organic aspects of writing poetry, the writing by hand, the musings and interactions between hand and mind. I’ve long been fascinated by the Chinese perception of calligraphy, how they named it the greatest art because there is no first draft, no erasure, no editing, only finished object: the idea or form travelling into the mind, down the arm into the hand onto the page in one fluid movement: breathless! In contrast my poem is a worked and re-worked thing, laboured over.  

Patricia Sykes is an award-winning poet, and a librettist, whose work has been described as ‘leaping over boundaries’. Her most recent work is 'The Abbotsford Mysteries' published by Spinifex Press.

* Losing Language, Losing Knowledge

By: Susan Hawthorne

PICTURE: Goddess of Smiss, Gotland. Image taken from the wonderful Suppressed Histories Archives Facebook page.

•

This talk was prepared for a session at the 2011 Brisbane Writers Festival. It forms the basis of what I talked about in that session.

Session description: Of the 7,000 languages in the world today, 50% are likely to disappear in our lifetime. Preserving and appreciating cultural and linguistic diversity is among the central challenges of our times.

The river sings, bubbling

words into speech

from speech comes lyric poetry

sung by young women

in the service of Sappho

sister to Saraswati

who wrote her world

into existence, memory

inscribed on stone, on palm leaf

and she carried fire

underwater, underground

where she flows invisibly

more sacred than the things

that can be seen

lapis -> halapis -> salapis ->sarapis ->

sarapphis -> sarappha -> sappha  -> psappha

sarappha -> sarapfa -> sarapva -> sarapwa ->

sarahapwa-> saraswa -> saraswati -> savoir (The Butterfly Effect p. 171)

I wrote this poem after hearing about the River Sarasvati, a mythical underground river in India that is known by the name of the goddess of language. It seems an apt metaphor for the loss of language and the loss of memory which surrounds us. In this poem, I have imagined a connection between the precious stone lapis, the lyric poems of Sappho, the goddess of knowledge and language, Sarasvati and the French word for knowledge, savoir.

One of the elements rarely discussed when there is public speech about languages is the role that women play in language acquisition and maintenance. While there are exceptions, by and large it is women who are the first teachers of language. They sing, they burble with their babies, they interact with toddlers with encouragement and as they get older by correcting or by displaying correct usage.

In recent years there has been a greater recognition of women as the social glue, as the keepers of knowledge, as the maintainers of traditions. In Indigenous societies this is often accompanied by knowledge of plants and medicinal usage, in ‘modern’ societies it is the passing down of family histories, of stories that span several generations, of songs sung by grandmothers, aunts and mothers.

In spite of this reluctant recognition, there is little public acclamation. In part this is due to our economic system which simply does not recognise work done in the domestic sphere (compare the budgets of home remedies with medicine; of history with genealogy; of classical music with traditional songs).

In 1969, I enrolled in a PhD in Philosophy on the structure of belief systems in ancient societies. Unfortunately, I only lasted a year mostly due to my inability to explain what it was I wanted to write. This project, however, took me to studying Ancient Greek and by a rather circuitous route almost 30 years later, to studying Sanskrit. While I did not go on to complete the research, it has nevertheless informed much of what I have done since (so instead of one PhD, I have a novel, a very different PhD in Political Science and several collections of poetry).

In my novel, The Falling Woman, I wrote:

Each carries within her the seed of future generations, and in her mind the seed of future actions, future realities, dreams that will burst into flower. The germination of a thought may mean the creation of a whole new world, or the loss of an old one.

Each is a creatrix in her own right. (The Falling Woman p. 64)

This novel takes the reader on a journey to the centre: an external geographical centre as well as an internal centre, exploring the mythic in the everyday.

In Sanskrit there is the word Prakṛti. It combines all the following: MW 654.1: in mythology Prakṛtī is a goddess; the original producer of the material world; in grammar it is the elementary form of the word: the root. It also means cause, original source, nature, model, matter, matrix, seed.

And in keeping with the connection between matter, matrix, mother, German Mutter, and perhaps mutter and mud in English and German, Prākṛt means low, vulgar, unrefined, original and any provincial or vernacular dialect cognate with Sanskrit. Prākṛt is the language spoken by women and ‘inferior characters’.

If, as linguist and novelist, Suzette Haden Elgin argues, language structures the way we see the world, it is likely that the speakers of Sanskrit (men of the upper caste, Brahmins) and speakers of Prākṛt (women and lower castes) saw the world rather differently. Interestingly, while Prākṛt has to do with creation and matter, Sanskrit (from the word saṃskṛta) is constructed, perfected, highly ornamented, finished, cooked, refined. Looks like the women are in the linguistic kitchen!

In her novel, Native Tongue, Suzette Haden Elgin creates a non-patriarchal language in which the experiences of women are reflected in language. Here is one of her words:

radíidin: non-holiday, a time allegedly a holiday but actually so much a burden because of the work and preparations that it is a dreaded occasion; especially when there are too many guests and none of them help. [think Christmas]

With my latest book Cow, I wanted to enter the mythic zone and the best way for me to do so was to write from the perspective of an animal, as so many mythic stories are. I have a character Queenie: she is a woman, she is a cow. Like Prakṛti, she creates the world, think of the Milky Way, she carries language and knowledge in her dilly bag (the word queen in English comes from Sanskrit gau, to Greek gune, to Norse kvinna, to English queen). I chose Queenie and cows as my vehicle for this book because the cow is the default among bovines, on the one hand she is worshipped, on the other she is meat, she is a herbivore and brings much to the community. In many societies the cow holds a special place (she may be a bovine, a whale, a dugong, a camel or an elephant). She produces milk, which is magically transformed into curd or butter or cheese; she produces dung for building, making fires or improving soil quality, her hide is used for garments or shelter. It’s not surprising that rock art in Europe, the Middle East, Asia, Africa and North America includes many images of cows.

Teachers of Sanskrit tell you that learning language is like the four feet of the cow: the first is the teacher, the second foot is the student; the third are fellow students, and the fourth is time. So whether it is Sanskrit or Prākrit, Gaelic or English, Djiru or Yaggera the learning of language is what makes it possible for us to live in social units.

what the linguist says about Queenie

she was dancing over India

and out fell the languages

thousands of them written

in hundreds of alphabets

a dancer and linguist

Queenie steps out the letters

in the sands of Phoenicia

aleph alpha alif ox and cow

travelling east and west

her hooves have split

the letters morph through

Tocharian and Gandhari

Prakrit Sanskrit Tamil and Pali

there are many trade routes

many tales in the passage

of these letters finding the

edge of sound and shape

she traces vowels in the cave

of her mouth the consonants

travel from larynx to lips

she teaches them the sound of the universe (Cow, p. 79)

(The letters Hebrew aleph, Greek alpha and Arabic alif are all derived from the Phoenician word for ox or cow.)

And if we ignore the speakers of other languages, or half the speakers of the dominant language, we are losing a great deal. Linguistic and cultural diversity are as important as biodiversity. We know that when biodiversity is reduced an ecosystem goes out of balance. Likewise, linguistic and cultural diversity are essential in maintaining the knowledge of many generations of peoples. Sadly, in a period in Europe referred to as the Renaissance, millions of women died, burnt at the stake as witches. These women carried the old knowledge, particularly targeted were those who understood the medicinal use of plants, or who carried on old traditions of rituals that had become a threat to the church. It shares a great deal with colonisation which involves rooting out language use, disconnecting people from their land and the seasonal round of responsibilities.

It is heartening to hear how learning language through song is a useful way of learning one’s culture as Borooloola descendant, Shellie Morris recently discovered working in her grandmother’s language with Borooloola songwoman Amy Friday (Andrew Bock, New chapter for ancient songbook, Age, 29 August)

In the globalised world of the 21^st century it involves microcolonialism in the form of the Human Genome Diversity Project, or the bioprospecting (really biopiracy) of plants and Indigenous knowledge. I see it in my own community of far north Queensland where attempts have been made to recolonise the rainforest and use the cassowary as an excuse for that. We need a world in which multiversity (knowledge that draws on diverse cultures) is respected in which so-called development is not used as yet another means of displacing people from their homes, from the places where they have lived for many generations.

I argue in my book, Wild Politics, for a society in which we have, as Murri thinker and artist Lilla Watson said back in 1984, a 40,000-year plan. She said that for Aboriginal people the future extends as far forward as the past and that means at least a 40,000-year plan.

If we are to take on this idea seriously, and I believe we must, then we need all kinds of layers of sustainability:

•          we need a world inspired by biodiversity not profit – therefore a no-growth economy, or as Wade puts it in his book: instead of economic models that are projections and arrows, they should be circles (Wayfinders p. 217)

•          in order for this to happen, languages must not only survive but thrive (and I do not mean that the languages should then be colonised and prospected for answers)

•          in order for languages to thrive, cultural knowledge – what Queenie carries around in her dilly bag – needs to be respected. The multilayered world of poetry with its cross resonances and metaphors and conceptual forms is based on linguistic knowledge and understanding of the world from inside the culture

•          along with poetry comes the mythic world, the world of ritual, dance, music, art and memory

•          with memory comes understanding of the ecology of place, of sustainable living in an environment

•          for those who can’t trust their memories, we need bibliodiversity, books that are to publishing what biodiversity is to ecology; we need the stories of those who have not been heard; that means feminists, Indigenous people, any group who has been outcast

•          we need an alternative to a world which is corporatised, homogenised and privatised

•          we need a world in which women are not subjected to pornography, prostitution and violence (the poorest of the world’s poor are women and poor – including Indigenous – women are the most likely to suffer these shameful exploitations). If the body is an ecology then none of them is ecologically sound

•          our public voices need to be heard: listen to what the women have to say, listen to the unheard or those who have been prevented from speaking their language, their world, but beware the pretenders

•          we are living in a world on the brink of environmental catastrophe

In 2006, I sat through Category-5 Cyclone Larry and again this year through Category-5 Cyclone Yasi. Previously, cyclones of this size have been around 20 years apart. I wrote this poem after finding the word yugantameghaha in the dictionary: meghaha means clouds, anta: the end and yuga: an epoch: a gathering of clouds at the end of an epoch, and there is a reference in here to the moth in the Bhagavad Gita which flies into the flame.

Yugantameghaha

At the end of every cosmic cycle

at the end of a generation―yuganta-

meghaha―clouds congregate

gathering souls for the next yuga

cloud breath, soul mist

rasping winds, rattling bones

here come the galloping horses

humans astride their flanks

here come the thundering clouds

breaking the world apart

the Hercules moth climbs every building

rising upwards through 110 floors

scaling the earth to find the moon

that light in the sky through which

he might escape earth’s pull

and melt into the inferno of light. (p. 67 Earth’s Breath)

As I said at the beginning, for the last 30 years, I have been looking for ways to tell the story of the power of ancient knowledge systems. It has taken me to languages and to places I never imagined I would go to. Much of it lies right here, in knowledge of our selves, in our knowledge of the people and places who give us meaning.

* Prompted to post this, thanks to an extraordinary July 2012 National Geographic piece entitled 'Vanishing Languages', by Russ Rymer that expands on the question "What is lost when a language goes silent?"

It is magic when the river flows: when it springs from some startling depth or height that, by chance, you’ve tapped into; when it surges into the imaginary, which turns tidal through your flesh and bones; when it sneaks into other bodies to form new tributaries of kinship, in lived stories.

This is how I experienced my recent performance of River, River, my one-woman play adaptation of Fish-Hair Woman, at the University of Toronto’s international workshop on ‘Violence in a Far Country: Women Scholars of Colour Theorize Terror’ (18-19 May 2012). I have done performances of this play at various venues, but this show was special. Jet-lagged and all, I gave my paper in the morning and, in the afternoon, rehearsed in the theatre for the first time. Mapped out light and sound with the Romanian-Canadian technical director Teo and the stage manager Mandy, whose family hails from Trinidad. Both amazing, given such a tight schedule. Then a very quick rehearsal. We did all these in less than three hours. By 5:00 pm, the show was on! The tightest schedule that I’ve ever experienced. I was terrified I wouldn’t be able to deliver. But magic: the river flowed.

I am primarily a writer-performer. While I venture into scholarly discussions on creative production, I have doubts about calling myself ‘a scholar’. Thus, the impressive line-up of scholars and the spectacular theorising in the workshop awed and intimidated me. I gave a paper (‘“Weeping is Singing”: After Militarism’) on the politics, aesthetics, and ethics of the production of both the play and the novel. But I always felt that my ‘real paper’ is the show (and the novel): the body makes its own argument. And as it enacts the horrors of war and its consequent mourning, this ‘argumentative body’ is always desiring, affirmative. Affirming itself, the dead, and the living bodies in the audience also affirming this story from a far country, and ‘weeping-singing’ with me.

The river flowed in our remembering together: my story was completed because others listened. We made new water tributaries, new wellsprings of story together. Indeed storytelling is not lonely.

And the flow does not stop; there are ripples. The overwhelmingly moving responses of the audience after the show, including the wonderful thank-you emails that I received now that I’m back in Australia remind me this is why I tell a story with the body. As one of the scholars wrote, the powerful performance brought them ‘to a different integrity space’. And humbly, I respond: I simply brought you to the river.