Author Archives: Tracy

My Daily Dinner

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It bothered me that they didn’t have eyes. There they were, a man and a woman sitting at a tiny table smiling at each other with no eyes. Their smiles were so big they reached almost to the temples. And their legs had no feet. They ended in sharp points, like stakes to be driven into the ground.

They sat on the cover of Mum’s slim yellow cookery book, My Daily Dinner, acquired around the time of her marriage in 1961. I read it, on and off, over the years. How to deal with an old fowl. – A quite old fowl is very nice boiled. And I’d move on to the recipes for brain rolls or stewed tripe. I read and reread it the way I read the other books that lay about the house. These included a rude one called Laughter Between the Sheets which was kept under other things in the sliding-door cabinet in the lounge room. (We found all hidden things in the house, without exception.) And there was Strange Stories, Amazing Facts from the Reader’s Digest in which the image of a dead person kept appearing in the lino on the floor, no matter how hard the cleaner tried to scrub it off.

For me, My Daily Dinner was reading material for mooching, listless afternoons. I wasn’t thinking about the act of cooking. I was thinking about the old fowl or the brains.

Leafing through it now – not Mum’s original one but an old copy I found myself – I see that its purpose was not connected to idleness but to industry and thrift. It was a how-to manual for getting something on the dining table day after day after day. And now I see the connection with the things that actually appeared on our table. There’s the bread and butter pudding. There is the hot chocolate sauce we poured over vanilla ice cream. There is all that offal: the tripe, the brains, the liver (lamb’s fry), the kidneys, the tongue (yes, I remember a large tongue with its own thick pitted skin), the lumps of corned beef boiled forever and served with a white sauce.

My Daily Dinner is big on white sauce. It’s big on flour in general. Mum was forever dredging things in seasoned flour and frying them. Everything was thickened with flour, dotted with butter. Puddings were endless variations on flour and sugar.

The apple roly poly, the star dessert of my childhood, is not in My Daily Dinner. There is a jam roly poly, but that’s not what we used to have. Our roly poly had slices of apple rolled up in a scone-like dough with water and sugar poured over it and baked to create a caramelised self-saucing sensation. Eaten out of the mustard-coloured Bessemer bowls I still remember arriving new in the box.

I don’t think Mum ever attempted to follow a complete suggested menu; she took inspiration here and there. The complete menus, building day by day, were about eking out food, making it go further; about using animals from snout to tail because that’s how you could feed a family on very little money. The menu for the Friday of the third week of the winter is this: Sheep’s head broth (made with stock from the sheep’s head you boiled for dinner yesterday) followed by scalloped fish (a small amount of fresh fish stretched out with white sauce and baked) served with potatoes (an all-white main course) finished up with half pay pudding. The half pay pudding is a concoction of flour and currants steamed in a pudding cloth for three hours. Very good results are obtained by mixing the pudding with one cup of cold tea. This makes it more economical.

My Daily Dinner was published by the magazine New Idea, which in those days was all about knitting patterns and household hints. Now New Idea is a mess of celebrity gossip in a world of criminal excess, in which, it’s estimated, Australians throw out eight billion dollars worth of food every year. But women have it better than they did then. They’re not spending the afternoon fiddling with sheep’s heads: Get two sheep’s heads or lambs’ heads, soak them well in salt and water, and rinse thoroughly. Cut the sides apart, separating the tongues, and take out the brains. Then again, some people are rediscovering such activities, as a way of combatting food waste. But tripe. Is anyone going to go back to tripe?

If you’d like to give it a try (I swear I ate this exact dish, as a child) here’s the recipe:

Stewed tripe: – Get one and a half lbs. thick, seamy tripe, wash, and cut in neat pieces, not too small. Cover with water, and add one dessertspoon salt; boil gently for two hours. After one hour place six peeled onions on top of the tripe. When cooked, pour off most of the liquor, and add one cup of milk. Bring to the boil and thicken with one tablespoon flour mixed to a paste with a little cold milk. Add a small piece of butter just before serving on a hot dish.

Things on a table

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I took this photo as soon as Judy left, struck by all the stories flowing from the things on this table. And the table itself. And the tree you can see through the window. The more I look, the greater the orgy of gratitude. That after everything, I get this table, that shaft of light, that tiny kookaburra with a hole where there was once a tinier black plastic snake.

So, to explain: Judy came round to drop off a stretch of the crocheted Macquarie River that a group of us have been making. We’ve been doing this since the end of 2015, when we heard a gold mine was sniffing around wanting to divert river water into its cyanide-laced belly and excrete the leavings into the water table feeding the Belubula River. We began stitching, and completely forgot to stop. The river is now about 80 metres long. The decision about whether to sell water to the gold mine is on hold, but as soon as it goes back to Council, our river will be ready to join the fray.

So Judy came to drop off a stretch. This contained a very neat green length stitched by Mum during a visit here, and some orange-bordered fish created by Judy herself. On the weekend, Vi and I will occupy the Girl Guides Hall, stitching the river in the company of local Aboriginal women making a possum-skin cloak. The possum skins for this exercise have come from New Zealand, because possums are a feral animal there.

Judy was in a hurry, had errands to do, is off to Western Australia with her husband, but I convinced her to sit down and have a cup of tea. The house is in uproar, dozens of work-in-progress projects strewn about, but the table was wonderfully bare and inviting. We soon changed that. On the way to the table, before she even got to the table, Judy spotted Gribblies. This is her name for the plastic cereal toys you used to get at the bottom of packets of Cornflakes. A long time ago. Cough. These Gribblies were lying about amongst bits of half-dead succulent and tiny stones in a dusty terrarium on the kitchen counter. She told me they were very valuable. We fished them out and while we drank our tea I lined them up in a circled wagon around the wooden vase in the middle of the table. The pokerwork vase itself (a bit like this) came from my Newtown friend David Haag, who’d found it in an op shop, the design mostly rubbed off. The dried flowers in the vase were everlastings. I told Judy that in Spring, parts of Western Australia are carpeted in these flowers, and the ones in the vase were grown in my back yard in honour of them. Judy is the sort of person who likes such details. She really liked the Gribblies. When she married, she brought her small box of Gribblies and added them to her husband’s bigger box of Gribblies. The Gribblies solemnly mingled together in holy matrimony. The marriage produced two children, and these children obliviously played with them, chewing on them, losing the tiny black snake out of the mouth of the tiny kookaburra.

Talk of collections moved on to a discussion of buttons. Judy said a button tin was one of the “sacred possessions of a woman”. I’m not willing to generalise but I will admit that this is true in my case. I ran and got out my grandmother’s button tin, which lives in the cabinet holding her treadle-powered Singer sewing machine. The round tin itself, which you can see there on the table hails from 1981, which, in the context of my grandmother’s long life, makes it quite “new”.  It celebrates the marriage of Lady Di and Prince Charles, son of the man who is, as it turns out, Not Dead.

Judy’s hands moved swiftly. These are war buttons, she said, grouping them together. I peered more closely. Gee. Yes. Buttons from army uniforms, and what looks like airforce uniforms, or are they all army? These are buttons from work shirts. Fancy buttons from coats from the 1930s. I went for the self-covered buttons. Mum was a dressmaker when I was little, and I enjoyed watching her cut a circle of fabric and use a special contraption to press them into something so neat and perfectly stretched. Judy wasn’t so into the covered buttons. Her Mum never used to do that. In all of this, my grandmother’s hands. Here are her hands at work. Here she is carefully sliding small buttons onto the shaft of a safety pin to keep them all together. Here she is wrapping a piece of wire around a finger. Here she is dropping a round plastic Tiddlywink into the collection because it is round and plastic and button-like. Here she is snipping the metal pieces out of the back of a bra because they might come in handy, later. She is here.

And there was a tiny glass jar with some white covered buttons in it and a tiny scrap of paper, hand written. A message in the bottle, written to the future. To her descendants. “Buttons from my Moroccan wedding dress”.

And then Judy and I confessed our love of picking things up out of the ground. A shard of willow pattern plate. A nice piece of green or blue glass. So I ran back to my study and brought forth the large jar labelled Blayney Road Common. I pick things up when I go walking with Bertie (and earlier with Taro, when she was still walking; her bones are now resting peacefully in the back yard). The jar had a bit of dirt in it still clinging to bits of metal and a whole bakelite light switch, so I grabbed a bit of newspaper off the pile to protect the table. Newspaper. Such an ordinary thing, but threatened. It will be quaint, in the not-too-distant future. Yellowed newspaper will be like other things of the past that nobody uses any more, like box Brownie cameras or  manual typewriters. Fairfax reporters are on strike. It’s important to fight, but we all know it’s over. Not for journalism itself, hopefully, but for newsprint. For piles of inked paper lying carelessly around houses, ubiquitous, used to wrap scraps or start fires. Still, today I have a house with a pile of newspapers in it, and I used a bit to protect the table that was passed on to us by Steve’s Mum. It’s a piece of light mid-century furniture. It pulls out to a longer version if there are more people to seat. Judy and I talked about how found bits of glass and ceramic are more interesting than gold. Gold may be beautiful but it doesn’t exercise our minds. This tiny bit of pink flower might have been a teacup that might have been used by a woman a hundred years ago. She might have taken sips of tea as she sewed buttons on her children’s coats.

What else is in the picture of my table? The tree through the window where our own possums – protected native animals, not allowed to surrender their skins to Aboriginal women who might like to make a cloak – spend their nights prowling for something to eat, things to do. They clatter across the roof at dusk and dawn. There are three of them. What looks to be a teenager and a mother with a joey riding on her back. I love their big eyes, their cute pink noses They are wrecking havoc in the ceiling cavity. They have to go, but that means another project on the to-do list that is already very long and doesn’t include stolen mornings over tea and a button collection. And on the wall there’s the cockroach painting created by my artist friend Karen Golland out of sequins and there are the little woven mats Steve and I bought in Peru? Bolivia? and the Country Women’s Association cookbook, a new one Mum gave me only last year, and the collection of ring-pulls from Mount Panorama telling the stories of wild weekends of beer and car races and a spider plant that I call Deb after my sister because she gave me the plant (or its ancestor) and there are more stories in that picture but this will have to do for now.

Judy and I admitted we were borderline hoarders and discussed the minimalist movement that is fighting the good fight against clutter. But I don’t see clutter. It’s only clutter if there are no stories attached. Until the stories have finally and fully leached out, I’m quite happy to live amongst these things.

On being edited

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I’m being edited. It’s as pleasurable as a massage, a long sleep-in, a sunset. It’s one of the best things ever. I sigh. I purr like a cat. I allow my bottom eyelid to slide upwards while a finger scritches the feathers behind my invisible ear. My novel, The Lucky Galah, is now in the hands of delicate and attentive editors. Do I really want that comma there? What about the repetition of the word “swirly”? Such beautiful questions. I make another cup of tea and think about them.

Editors are, like so many things I love, endangered. The Internet gives us unmediated access to audiences. Whatever brain explosion you’re having, you’re only a click away from putting it out there, complete with badly-placed commas (and worse, much worse).

I learned how to be a journalist by being “subbed” (subedited). You’d submit your work and once the paper had rolled off the press you’d grab a copy to see what headline they’d added, how they’d rearranged your paragraphs, how they’d worked out what you were trying to say and sharpened it. I had no idea at the time that subs would soon be dying out. That there would be no-one to shout your ignorance across the room, chop all your sentences in half, tell you to get on the phone and check. I had no idea that we’d be losing adult supervision, leaving everything to 20-somethings who are smart and fast but sometimes don’t know shit.

Steve Painter

Steve Painter

Last December I said goodbye to the best editor I ever had. Steve Painter was the editor of Direct Action when I went to work there in the late 1980s. I didn’t know anything. He was 15 years older than me, and he knew a lot. He seemed gruff but he was actually careful and sensitive. It was hard work and long – stupidly long – hours, because this wasn’t just a newspaper, it was cause. I’d sometimes work until 3am and then sleep under my desk for a few hours and wake at dawn. Downstairs, there was a proper Italian coffee machine – we were early adopters in terms of workplace coffee – and I’d steam up a hit and come back to finish my piece. My stories were at first almost completely reworked by Steve, but nicely. I learned a lot very quickly. He told me to read Orwell’s Politics and the English language. I did. We both lived in pre-gentrified Chippendale – me in Shepherd Street, he in Rose Street.  I went over to his place for dinner one night and didn’t go home. A couple of years later we were in Prague together reporting on the aftermath of the fall of the Berlin Wall. We broke up after we got back, and both of us moved on from that particular brand of political activity. He ended up as a sub at The Australian for 20 years. I did a lot of different things, including editing advertising features for Fairfax Community Newspapers. I was heavily in advertorial territory here, just as Steve was lurking in the belly of the beast of the Murdoch empire. By these means we were able to scrape together deposits for our respective houses. Steve got together with Rose, with whom he spent the last 25 years of his life, and I ended up with another Steve.

I was interested to hear at Steve Painter’s funeral from his colleagues at The Australian. They adored and respected him. They enjoyed the trademark giggle that would emanate from this burly man. Working on the IT section of the paper, he’d get a piece of incomprehensible technical verbiage and craft it into a sharp and readable piece. The reporter would look good.

Steve P. is no longer with us, and editors in general are a dying breed. I was reading Meanjin the other day, and saw the word “breech” used instead of “breach”. As in, “he breeched the apprehended violence order”. There’s Meanjin, publisher of Donald Horne and Judith Wright,  letting a malapropism  slip through the breach.

But there are still editors at Picador, and I’m in their careful hands. Nobody’s perfect; mistakes will slip through. But at least there’s a process, and I’m grateful that it still exists. I was worried that by the time I got here, novels would no longer be printed on paper and editors would no longer exist. I was worried I’d have to just lob my digital offerings at Amazon, riddled with mistakes and problems I was unaware of. But I did get here. And I’ve heard that people are going back to books, real printed dead-tree books, and maybe people will go back to editors, too, because we need them.

Who’s afraid of the working class?

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Where do they go, when the factories close? A few years ago I heard a podcast from Planet Money about what middle-aged American men did once they were laid off from their jobs. A large number, it seems, went on disability support.

As manufacturing moved out of the United States, its workers moved on to disability. They had back pain, high blood pressure, diabetes. They had enough misery in their lives to qualify for disability pensions. Which was fortunate, in a way, because they had precious little chance of ever finding work again.

Maybe a higher percentage than usual of these guys set down their remote controls the other day and hoisted themselves out of the house for the trip down to the local polling booth.

The revolt of the cast-offs of globalisation isn’t the only explanation for Trump – I think it was part of a perfect storm of other factors, which I’ll get into further down – but it’s the factor that so few pundits took into account prior to election day. This is strange, because Brexit should surely have been a warning.

I was in the UK as Brexit unfolded. I was hanging around inside my own echo chamber, visiting certain parts of London then Oxford and Cheltenham. There were Remain signs in windows. It seemed a foregone conclusion that the UK wouldn’t be so silly as to dump the EU. And then the morning after. What the hell happened? The thing that happened was well out sight – for us. The thing that happened was that people who were not doing so well out of globalised capitalism – people not so visible in public life – went out and voted. In the case of Brexit and Trump, it was a generalised flipping of the bird. It was an emotional reaction, a final had-enough-and-not-taking-it-any-more. Turkeys voting for Christmas? Perhaps. But these are people who feel that Christmas has already been and gone. Their gnawed bones are being scraped into the garbage bin. (Note: Feelings are not the same as facts; they might or might not be justified.)

And then the racism on the streets. People who had lived in the UK for decades or even generations being told to go “home”. All because the demagogues, given oxygen by Murdoch and other scurrilous press, held up a scapegoat for discontent: The Other.

So when my partner Steve said on Wednesday morning that Clinton would probably win, I said I’m not too sure. Remember Brexit. He said she was ahead in most of the polls. Still, I wasn’t too sure.

As Wednesday afternoon wore on, I kept taking a moment out of my video editing job (a weekend of celebrations for the 150th anniversary of the birth of Grenfell) to look at the latest news on ABC News 24. I saw a weird dial that said it was 80 per cent likely that Trump would win the presidency. And even I, who only that morning had said it was possible, was shocked. Here’s a candidate off the edge of the scale. Here’s a genuine fascist, no exaggeration necessary. What were the German fascists all about? Creating a simple scapegoat for complex problems. Promising to restore the country to former greatness. It was about a word I first learned in Mr Corson’s History class: autarky. Autarky means self-sufficiency. It means you don’t rely on the rest of the world for your essentials; you make them yourself. I remember learning by heart for my final exams a whole table showing the increase in pig iron production prior to the second world war. Trump has been telling people he’d stop free trade, support home-grown manufacturing, revive those rusting, weed-infested factories. Build a wall against Mexicans. Put women back where they belong. Laugh at climate change. Make America a man again.

How could people be so stupid?

I mean, how could we be stupid as to think that you can make people feel so miserable, insecure, powerless and overwhelmed by change without consequence? Why should they keep voting for business as usual? (And Hilary Clinton, despite being a woman, was clearly seen as business as usual.) The documentary maker Michael Moore has been trying to tell us about this for a long time. He was one of the few in public life that predicted Trump’s win.

So. I’m writing this from Bathurst, New South Wales, where we have a yearly celebration of working class culture in the V8 car races. We have a manufacturing industry but it’s in decline. This used to be a railway town. Until just a few years ago we even made our own bogies at Downer EDI. The last one rolled off the production line in 2013. Our friend Glen, who used to work in the EDI factory had seen it coming. For years he painstakingly worked through a teaching degree by distance education, working on essays into the night, bundying on at the factory early the next morning. After the factory closed, he was eventually able to find a job as tech teacher at the local high school. Glen managed to make the transition, but he had unusual foresight and adaptability. Where are his fellow workers, now? I would not be surprised to find a few on the disability pension.

Further west, in Cowra, there used to be a fruit and vegetable processing factory. I filmed it for a client-based video called What Employers Want. At that factory there were toolmakers who knew how to create the machines and tweak the production lines that filled and sealed the cans of peas and asparagus. It was an old factory, with parts of it looking like something out of a 1950s film set, but there was also a shiny new addition glinting in the sun, the result of a life-saving government grant. But it died anyway. Where are those blokes, now, the ones who knew how to tweak the machines? What about the young apprentice in the video? Has he been able to find other work?

I’m not saying this is the only explanation for Trump. No doubt misogyny and racism are real and powerful all by themselves. With the collapse of traditional media people are retreating to their own silos, occupying parallel universes in the same geographical spaces. Reality television means people can get to know and like provocateurs like Trump (and Pauline Hanson over here), giving them 100 per cent brand recognition that can be easily parlayed into electoral success.  And the chickens are coming in to roost on dog whistle politics, to mix my farmyard metaphors.

It’s been a perfect storm, but not one that hasn’t been brewing for a long time. It’s a storm made of a backlash against feminism, LBQTI rights and rainbow politics, the rise of the evangelical Christian right (which mobilised for Trump), a domineering foreign policy answered by terrorism followed by war followed by body bags and a disinclination to support Clinton’s promise of continued hawkishness, a backlash against the bankers who caused and then were bailed out of the global financial crisis,  the decline of the old colonial powers of the English speaking world and Europe and the rise of Asia, a preference for a Norman Rockwell past over an apocalyptic, climate-changed future and, perhaps most of all,  simple refusal. Half of eligible voters didn’t vote. They didn’t have the heart. They didn’t think it was worth it.

I’m writing this partly because the US is inherently interesting to me – we’re permanently saturated in American culture so it’s hard not to get interested  –  but also because the parallels with our own situation here are obvious. Whatever storms are brewing there are brewing here, too.

How do we deal with it?

On Thursday morning, once it was definite that Trump was the Leader of the Free World, I was struck by a thorough-going ennui. I’ve been politically active, one way or another, for most of my adult life. But on Thursday I toyed with not bothering any more. I’ve been ill. I could retire to my PhD and spring garden. But I also had to write this week’s BCCAN column and in writing it, I wrote myself back into my tiny bit-part in political life. People have fought fascism before; they’ll do it again. By the afternoon, anti-Trump high school students in California had taken to the streets.

So I will continue on as President of BCCAN, a thing I can do on my own territory that is at odds with all Trump stands for. In campaigning for action on climate change, I’m ever-conscious of the Lithgow coal miners (and ex-coal miners) just half an hour down the road. Many hate “greenies” with a passion, blaming us for the winding down of coal and the loss not just of their livelihoods but of the story of who they are. I don’t know quite what to do about these miners, but I do know they’re important. They can’t be left out of account. Somehow we need to form an alliance, or try to at least. We need to try to do what alliances have always done, which is: accept that we don’t agree on everything. Accept that perhaps we don’t agree on much at all. But if we agree on something, and that something is important enough to fight for (jobs in renewables?), then let’s see what we can do together.

It’s not easy, though. I recall a movie I saw recently. Actually I saw it with my friend Larissa in Newtown after getting back from the UK (yup, burned carbon all the way there and back). It was Pride (2014) about the alliance between striking Welsh coal miners and lesbian and gay activists (the BTQI part wasn’t such a thing in the early 1980s) from the time when Thatcher tried to close down the pits (climate change wasn’t such a thing then, either). The gay and lesbian activists insisted on supporting the striking miners, despite comical differences in lifestyles and attitudes. The last scene depicts a historic  gay pride march held in London in the early days of the AIDS epidemic. Impossibly, incredibly, it was led by a band of Welsh coalminers: they were supporting their allies at a time of need.

It’s a beautiful piece of history. It shows what can be done. But then I thought about the thirty years since then. There is still hatred for LBGTI people. But marriage equality exists in the UK, and LBGTI people have made many gains over the past three decades. The Welsh miners? They lost. And they voted Brexit.

 

Goodbye Sue

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afternoon_tealColours. Some of my life is in pink and grey, the colours of the galah; some of it is in the red of outback earth and some of it is in teal, the colour of the awareness ribbons for ovarian cancer. I have an ambivalent relationship with teal. Sometimes I’m happy to be part of Team Teal, hosting fundraising afternoon teas for cancer research. Sometimes it’s a colour I don’t want to see. When I was in London in June, a woman in a striking teal sari walked past in a sudden shaft of summer light that broke out from behind a cloud. I don’t want a fucking omen. Fuck off. I was miserable for a while, convinced I was in for it all over again.

But I wasn’t. Back in Sydney, my routine checkup was all clear; the specialist shifted my checkup intervals from three months to six months. After that, yearly, and after that… you’re back out in the world with everyone else.

That teal sari wasn’t for me.

sue_2010It must have been for Sue, my cancer buddy. We were diagnosed at around the same time, and compared notes. We were friends before we got sick; she was a long-time colleague of my partner Steve. Not long after Steve and I got together, we popped in to see Sue in her house in the Blue Mountains. She had three gorgeous little boys, triplets that were everywhere at once. Steve threw them on to the sofa, one after the other. They ran back, wanting to be thrown again. Sue struck me as amazingly calm in the midst of the whirlwind.

We were in overlapping environmental circles. She came to Bathurst to give a talk about the Transition Towns movement. We chit-chatted on Facebook about climate change and wind farms.

When I was diagnosed with primary peritoneal cancer, a variation on ovarian cancer, she sent a message:

Hi Tracy. Wanted to let you know I’m thinking about you & Steve and hoping for the best. Also, you wouldn’t believe it but I’ve just had a pelvic scan myself this week – I have a “complex ovarian cyst” which my doctor seems slightly (but not overly) concerned about. Having a CT scan next week and seeing a surgeon at Westmead the week after. I’m trying not to feel worried – no history of cancer in my family, but surgery is never fun.

I wrote back:

The teal brigade is a wonderful club but we don’t want any new members! Fingers crossed and we’ll both be thinking of you. Tracy xxx

Reluctantly, though, I had to admit her to the club. Our CA125 levels were “through the roof”. We started chemo, both trekking from our homes to Sydney for treatment (she at the Chris O’Brien Lifehouse at RPA; me at Westmead). We lost our hair, started wearing beanies. Got our dates for “debulking” surgery. Looked at the stats on ovarian cancer. Not good. Very not good. I kept thinking about her children, the three boys (Kalang, Milo and Tallai) and their older sister Kittani.

After surgery, our stories began to diverge. When I woke up – complete with colostomy bag and half my guts out – I heard the magic words: “We got all of it.” Wow. But for Sue, the news wasn’t so good. They’d had to leave some behind – to take more tumour would have killed her on the spot.

We both went back on the chemo treadmill, me for “mopping up”, Sue for holding the beast at bay.

She came to my Afternoon Teal fundraising event in February 2015, and I went to hers at the gorgeous old Paragon Cafe in Katoomba. I went back to teaching. For Sue, being ill became more-or-less her full-time job. It was wearing.

I’m in pain most days and every dose increase of painkillers just means more sleepiness and fatigue (not to mention nightmares & nausea!). I can’t drive and I struggle to do basic household tasks.

But she was still keeping a hand in as an active citizen. From her hospital bed at the O’Brien centre, she held a spontaneous working bee for The Colong Foundation for Wilderness. She urged us all to support her boys’ team (the Migrating Wombats) in the Trek for Timor. And she celebrated an enormous achievement: seeing her boys through to their 18th birthday.

When she announced on Facebook that she was back in Katoomba for “palliative care”, it was still shocking, despite all I knew.

I messaged her:

I’m hoping that you can feel as well as you possibly can for as long as you possibly can. And enjoy whatever there is to enjoy and be as comfy as possible.

And she replied:

Thanks Tracy. I know you will carry on the awareness raising for us Tealers. I’m okay now that I’m back in Katoomba. Love to you and Steve. I know he will update old work colleagues where appropriate. Look out for the published research on BGB-A317 down the track. ????????

She was signing off. But I still thought there was perhaps a little bit more time. I was going to reply – at least with a “hugs” emoticon – but got distracted and the next thing I knew, there was a message from Sue’s phone, but it wasn’t Sue’s voice in the recording. It was her ex-partner Wyn, the children’s father, who had been at her side through all of this, asking me to call him back.

Goodbye Sue. Thank you for all you gave the world while you were here sharing this little blue planet with all of us – human, plant, animal, rock, sea and sky. Go well Kittani, Tallai, Kalang and Milo and their extended family. And go the Teal!