THE BEST AUSTRALIAN ESSAYS 2008
(edited by David Marr)
ISBN 978-1-86395-279-8

GROWING UP ASIAN IN AUSTRALIA
(edited by Alice Pung)
ISBN 978-1-86395-191-3

TOURISM
My family aren’t exactly the outdoors type. Despite being raised right on the coastline, Mum detested visits to the beach (all the sand it brought into the house), while Dad actively disapproved of wearing thongs (“It splits the toes”). We never camped. All those things involved in camping—pitching a tent; cooking on open fires; the insects; shitting in the woods; sleeping on rocks; getting murdered and raped in the middle of nowhere—they never appealed to us. Camping just seemed too involved, too much effort. “We were never camping people,” Mum says now. “You dad never wanted to camp, and insects eat me alive. See, Asians—we’re scared of dying. White people: they like to ‘live life to the full’, and ‘die happy.’” She pauses, before adding, “Asians are the opposite.”

We preferred theme parks. For parents raising five children, theme parks made so much sense. They were clean. They were safe. There were clear and set designated activities, and auditory and visual stimuli that transcended racial, language and age barriers. Also: you could buy heaps of useless shit. This seems to be an exercise in which Asians of all nationalities, ages and socio-economic backgrounds seem to naturally excel: buying shit. Venture into my childhood home, and in amongst the epic piles of suburban debris, you’ll still find a plush blue whale wearing a Seaworld cap, t-shirts emblazoned with Kenny and Belinda—the now defunct Dreamworld mascots—and a pox of hideous fridge magnets. Oh my god, the fridge magnets.

It was family tradition that once a year, our family of seven (eight, including my Ma-Ma) would cram ourselves into my grandmother’s 1990 grey five-seat automatic Honda. Five seats. We’d travel like this—faces smashed against the glass; no leg room; the two smallest children illegally wedged between various legs—for a good three hours before we reached the Gold Coast. By the time we got to the theme park, our limbs were numb, our nerve endings destroyed. On the ride home, exhausted and drained like a dead battery, we’d fall asleep in such extreme angles, our spines contorted and twisted. We’d wake up, our shirts covered with drool we weren’t even sure was ours.

On the day of the trip, we’d wake before sunrise to get there by opening time. Despite having endured three hours of vivid pain, we’d feel an overwhelming sense of awe as the Thunderbolt, Dreamworld’s fire-branded rollercoaster, emerged out of the trees that bordered the Pacific highway. It would appear so suddenly, like some strange apparition, or a mirage. Our necks would crane back trying to take in the sheer majesty of it all. For a non-religious family like ours, the experience was borderline spiritual.

Once through the gates, the kids would do our best to distinguish ourselves from the actual Asian tourists. We’d make our Australian accents more pronounced. We ended our sentences with “eh”. Our trousers were pulled further downwards, away from our navels. We refused to wear bumbags, and spoke English very loudly, with proper grammar and syntax. These hoards of Japanese and Chinese tourists would point to the most innocuous objects and proceed to take photographs like idiots. We could only imagine what they were hollering to each another as they ripped through their film. “Look, a fire hydrant!” “Over here, a drinking fountain!” “Wow, there is a toilet: a public, shared facility and receptacle for my waste. Why not take a photo of it!”

Full version of this essay available from Best Australian Stories and Growing Up Asian in Australia, both published by Black Inc.

FRANKIE #26
(Nov/Dec 2008)

THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING NUDE
Swimming lessons were compulsory at my primary school. Back in Year 4, after I’d changed into my boy-sized speedos, I’d take my usual place in Lane 6 of the pool. Lane 6 was reserved for the for the physically compromised: the girl with childhood arthritis; the rotund, androgynous blob with inverted nipples; and me. None of us could swim 25 metres without clutching the side desperately, the way drowning people hold onto the floating debris of a sinking ship.
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EMILÍANA TORRINI
Emilíana Torrini is very cute in the morning. Talking to us from her place in Brighton, UK (having relocated from her native Iceland) she apologises for not being very conscious. She’s not very good at this hour, she says. Then she admits it’s actually 10am her time. After some muttering in Icelandic, she then explains she’s just stupidly poured a whole lot of salt into her coffee, when she wanted sugar. If you didn’t know her well, you’d think she was a bit weird.
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THE THINGS I'VE SEEN: DAMIEN BROWN
While Angola is one of Africa’s richest sources of petroleum and diamonds, its people are said to be amongst the continent's poorest. Its drawn-out 27 year civil war decimated the country, leaving behind a dark legacy: a slew of civilian casualties and un-detonated land mines. By the time Melbourne doctor Damien Brown arrived in 2006 with aid organisation Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), the civil war had been over for four years, but the effects were still palpable.
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THE HARDEST THING I'VE HAD TO DO
Us homosexuals like pointing out how diverse we are. We enjoy drawing attention to the fact that we work all around you. We’re your accountants and bus-drivers, politicians and pastry-makers, school teachers and engineers. We’re as varied as the colours of that repulsive rainbow flag of ours. If we spontaneously decided to go on strike—and just watch, we will one day—society would collapse.
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LOSING IT
Waiting rooms are tense, silent places. Nervous patients in the reception areas of GPs, physiotherapists and proctologists sit quietly wondering the same thing: whether they’re worse off than the person beside them. Usually it’s hard to tell, but sometimes there are clues. If you’re at the ophthalmologist you can watch how closely someone holds a magazine to their face. At the chiropractor observe how people are slouching.

In the waiting room at hair surgeon Russell Knudsen’s clinic in inner Brisbane Spring Hill, men discreetly judge one another’s scalps in glass reflections and self-consciously run their fingers through their remaining locks. The man in the leather jacket sitting opposite me I notice has broken a golden rule of hair loss: don’t grow it long to compensate for its absence. While we don’t make eye contact, I know he’s surreptitiously examining my head too.

When I’m called into Knudsen’s office I can’t help but notice his own promiscuously wild salty mane. It’s almost botanical, growing in vine-like licks and curls. The 54-year-old has four clinics like this in Australia and one in New Zealand, and has personally performed hair transplants on more than 4000 patients. Sitting behind me he runs a small, tube-like camera across the back of my head. “These are your hairs on your scalp,” he explains, pointing towards a small monitor, “fifty times closer.” Zoomed in like this you can see how hair grows. Some roots yield single hairs; others sprout two or three from the same spot. These, Knudsen explains, are “follicular units”, what surgeons call naturally-occurring groups of one to three hairs, growing from the same spot. When he moves the camera higher, towards the top of my head, the landscape changes a little. “Here, I’d say your hair looks normal,” he says. “The odd one’s a bit wispier, but most look healthy.”
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SAVING YOURSELF
In the library classroom of Inglewood State School— a three-hour, sleep-inducing drive west out of Brisbane—Jim Lyons discusses Scarlett Johansson with Year 7 and 8 students. He shows them a laminated newspaper article featuring Johansson’s photograph. The headline is unfortunate: “Bush Bashed on Sex”. Jim paraphrases it for the students: Johansson is outraged that the Bush administration has poured millions of dollars into abstinence education throughout the US; she argues it takes women back into the dark ages; she gets tested for HIV every month; she also urges every young woman to do the same.

“What can we learn from this young lady?” Jim asks. “What does this tell you about Scarlett Johansson?” In the back row, a skinny girl with spectacles puts her hand up. “That she’s safe?” she asks. Jim raises his eyebrows. “She’s safe?” he asks skeptically. “What else?” To the side, a Year 8 boy mumbles something. “She’s sexually active,” Jim repeats so the rest of the class can hear. “Well some would say she’s very sexually active.”

Jim Lyons and his wife Faye are abstinence teachers. Together, they founded Straight Talk Australia, a Toowoomba-based travelling sex education program that teaches children to save themselves for marriage. Today, Jim and Faye might be at Inglewood, but their work isn’t limited to the regions. Since 1997, the Lyons has travelled all over Australia’s east coast, as well as New Zealand, Tonga, the Solomon Islands, Norfolk Island, Fiji, Papua New Guinea and Vanuatu. “We haven’t come to your school today to tell you what to do with your life,” Faye tells the kids. “That is not why we’re here. We care about you as young people. We care about your future.”

[To read the full, edited version of this article, purchase The Monthly or subscribe to The Online Monthly.]

REVIEWS: TOILET PAPER
PLANET ARK/SAFE
2-ply, 240 sheets, 105x98cm
Appearance: Some of you refuse to buy white sheets or underwear, since stains are harder to detect on non-white material. If you are such a person (i.e. disgusting), this toilet paper is for you. It has a brownish hue, like sourdough bread.
Scent: Like sourdough bread. Which is an improvement, actually. Someone at Planet Ark has clearly changed the manufacturing process in the last few years. Five years ago, I swear this stuff smelt like possums.
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REVISITING CHILDHOOD
Back in the homeland of my people—the vast, mystical moors of China—sport just isn’t the same. From what I can gather, the national pursuits there are Tai Chi, badminton and smoking opium. We’re a gentle—not gargantuan—race, so I never exactly excelled at Australian sports. I couldn’t swim or tumble turn. However, I didn’t always come last at swimming carnivals, like you’d expect. No, no. That would be weak. I was disqualified instead.
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MAN BITES DOG!
My boyfriend’s a breakfast radio producer, which sounds like a pleasant enough career path. But in reality, it’s rendered our apartment into a relentless, blaring 24-hour multimedia news hub.
Every morning, radio news and talkback wakes me up, and Kevin Rudd bleeds into my dreams. By midday, every computer is uploading an avalanche of news sites: Fairfax, News Limited, ABC, Crikey, CNN, BBC. I’ve learned that, if you so desire, you can actually watch 180 minutes of evening news bulletins, non-stop. By Saturday, the place is a disgrace. The gutted remains of weekend newspapers line our floor, as if we’re taking care of a runaway creature that’s lost control of its bowels.
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JOAN AS POLICEWOMAN
When people talk about Joan Wasser, death inevitably comes up. Like the fact she was Jeff Buckley’s girlfriend when he drowned. Or that she wrote the track ‘We Don’t Own It’ after her friend Elliott Smith committed suicide. Her music is marked by losing people. Her second album To Survive was written while her mother was dying of cancer last year. You wouldn’t blame her if she was tired of talking about it.
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DAVID SEDARIS
If they didn’t actually exist, the Sedaris family would make for great American fiction. Chain-smoking mother Sharon had such a caustic wit, it was as though Oscar Wilde had been reincarnated as a mother-of-six from North Carolina. Sister Amy, an actress, once wore fat suits to family get-togethers for shock value. Youngest brother Paul swears like a stevedore, but has a high-pitched feminine voice.
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THE COURIER MAIL
(28 June 2008)

CHLOE HOOPER
By early 2005, a provocative story had been developing on Palm Island, one of Australia’s biggest Aboriginal communities. We all know it by now. Three months earlier, Cameron Doomadgee, a 36-year-old Aboriginal man, was taken into police custody. He was drunk, but upright. Doomadgee came out of custody dead, with suspicious injuries, similar to those caused by a car accident. His liver was almost cleaved in two. The Indigenous community blamed Senior Sergeant Christopher Hurley—who claimed he fell on Doomadgee—and burned the station down.
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MODERN ETIQUETTE WITH BETH DITTO
Gossip frontwoman Beth Ditto has demanded people kiss her naked arse, repeatedly exposed her naked crotch on stage, and purposefully vomited on hecklers during live shows. So it might come as a surprise that she is also one of the most polite and charming people you’ll ever talk to. As a woman of the world, she discusses modern-day etiquette with frankie.
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BALDNESS
Even though you’re a stranger, I’d like to invite you to scan over my family’s photo albums. Over here is my grandfather—a lovely old man with tortoise-shell glasses, and a cheeky smile. You will notice he is bald. Over there are my maternal uncles, all crass jokes and sunshine, most of whom wear glasses. You will notice they are also bald.
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AROUND THE WORLD IN EIGHT BEERS
Indonesia is responsible for one pungent pilsener. Like Indonesian cuisine, subtlety is not a virtue here, and neither is lightness: this is heavy, brassy liquid that will leave your guts lined and, despite its lower alcohol content, your liver feeling assaulted. Bintang is one beer toxic and powerful enough to sedate even the most prickly of diplomatic tensions.
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TRUE OR FALSE WITH GOLDFRAPP
Goldfrapp was afraid the only person who’d buy her latest album would be her mother?
True. Because this one’s so different, I thought: “One: the record company probably won’t like it. Two: all the people who were really into the dancey Goldfrapp will stick their fingers down the back of their throat when they hear this.” So I thought the only person who’d be really enthusiastic for me will be my Mum.
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WRITE CLIMATE FOR CREATIVITY
If you’re a young writer in Queensland, you’re probably familiar with the annual exodus of friends leaving for Melbourne and beyond. Usually, they never come back. But in a nice reversal of that phenomenon, young writer, poet and journalist Anna Krien moved from her hometown of Melbourne last year, for Brisbane.
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THE BLAND COMING OUT
Earlier this year, queer news website SameSame made front-page headlines by announcing the inaugural list of Australia's 25 most influential gays and lesbians.

Many were familiar names: high-profiled journalists (David Marr); politicians (Bob Brown, Penny Wong); musicians (Darren Hayes, iOTA); High Court judges (Michael Kirby); artists, directors and performers (William Yang, Neil Armfield, David Page); Olympians (Alyson Annan); and television programmers (Channel 7's Bevan Lee).

Throughout 2007, a slew of other high-profile names opened their closets and joined them. What was nice about those revelations was how refreshingly banal, and thrillingly bland, most of them were. When it came to Australian news stories about sexual orientation, the persisting lack of scandal and public care-factor was a nice development. Nobody cared.
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SHARMEEN OBAID-CHINOY
Towards the end of 2006, Pakistani film-maker Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy’s documentary Beneath the Veil was broadcast around the world. It had a provocative thesis: that despite Western intervention, and the downfall of the Taliban, Afghani women were still subject to the same social, economic and physical degradation of the old regime. “Yes, women were in parliament,” Sharmeen says, “but they weren’t allowed to speak or make laws. And in the four and a half weeks that I was there, I didn’t see a single woman behind the wheel of a car.”
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HEART OF DARFUR
Lisa French Blaker doesn’t sleep well. During her time as a Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) nurse in Sudan’s Darfur, she encountered enough instances of human abuse and suffering to induce permanent insomnia, in even the most hardened people. Actually, so many stories play in her mind, she’s lost track of whether she included them in her memoir or not.
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GOING CARBON NEUTRAL
So the world’s burning up, the ice caps are melting, and we’re all going to die screaming, our hair having burst into flames. But being a simple kind of guy, leading a simple kind of life, I can’t imagine I’m making an incredibly significant impact on the planet. Irregular access to a car renders me a public transport and bicycle kind of guy. I’ve changed my light bulbs, use green bags, switch things off at the wall, recycle, print on both sides of the paper. You know, all the shit Al Gore told me to do.
[read more] EW

BOOKS I SHOULD HAVE READ BY NOW
An admission: I have attempted all of the following books, and—after a good deal of brow-furrowing and chin-stroking—given up a the halfway point, thrown them against the wall, and redeemed them for cash: Mrs Dalloway (too boring); The Lord of the Rings (too long); The Picture of Dorian Gray (too tedious); Catch-22 (too confusing); Ulysses (too impenetrable); and anything by Patrick White (too Patrick White). It makes me feel all kinds of guilty and stupid.
[read more] E

A GOOD MAN IS HARD TO FIND
My boyfriend and I didn’t have to look particularly hard to find one another. We went to the same high school. I found him between first period and recess. Since getting together, we’ve since decided—in an admittedly repulsive and slovenly fashion—that the prospect of dating new people would be taxing. Going to the effort of impressing and deluding a whole new person to sleep with me? It just sounds exhausting.
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MY WORST ENVIRONMENTAL CRIME
Did anyone see Channel Nine’s recent reality television show The Lost Tribes? The premise: three suburban Australian families are forced to live with tribal cultures in Africa and South East Asia. No one? I can’t blame you if you missed it. What started as a great Discovery Channel-type concept quickly descended into a Gods Must Be Crazy meets Kath & Kim farce—but nowhere near as funny and a lot more racist. And violently tedious. No Australian seemed to learn anything, except that tribal people were gross and backwards.
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MIRANDA JULY
Already a renowned performance artist, and the award-winning filmmaker of Me and You and Everyone We Know, Miranda July has just also published a book of her short stories. Now that she’s a bone-fide writer, she talks about common preconceptions about the writer’s life.
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BAT FOR LASHES
She might be turning 28 this year, but UK singer-songwriter Natasha Khan still believes in fairytales and ghost stories. Under the monicker Bat for Lashes, she carries a shaman stick on stage, finds alternative universes in her videos, and sings of horses, quests, wizards and bats in her songs. Blame her childhood.
[read more] EW RANDA JULY

TORI AMOS
Over the span of her 15 year career, the brazenly eccentric Tori Amos has written songs about zebras, cornflake girls, voodoo and bee-keepers. But with her most recent album American Doll Posse, Amos’s lyrics have probably never been so direct, or overtly political. Just to make things interesting, shameless, die-hard nerd Benjamin Law recently chatted with Tori by asking her a series of random questions, lifted from the lyrics of her back catalogue.
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BRING IT BACK: NOT HAVING TO ORGANISE BIRTHDAYS
There are a couple of celebrations I detest. At the risk of sounding like an unpatriotic scarf-wearing pinko, Australia Day is one of them. In my mind, January 26 should be this epic tribute to our beautifully delinquent nation, a festival of our shared heritage. But in my experience, it usually just means a lot of empty flag worship, and fat, hairy men across the road hollering, bare-chested and drunk. The next morning, I inevitably find broken glass and regurgitated pizza in and around my apartment’s pool. Great holiday there.
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PODDY McPODCAST
As my luddite mother often complains, it’s a digital world nowadays. Goodbye, 35mm film. Adios, mix-tapes. Sayonara, VHS. But just as we thought we were about to say goodbye to analogue radio too—hark! Along comes podcasting, and with it, an unexpected renaissance of the medium. While having an MP3 player makes your on-demand radio experience nice and portable, all you really need is your computer and a healthy internet connection. Like the best things in life, all of these podcasts are lovely and free.
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MAVIS STAPLES
Half a century might have passed, but singer Mavis Staples clearly remembers the segregation she endured as a young African-American woman. The worst of it, she says, was when she travelled the country with her family band. “Naturally, after driving 200 miles, you need to stop for gas,” she says. “We needed to go to the washroom, but we’d have to use that ‘colored only’ washroom. Nine times out of ten, it would be filthy. Just filthy. It hurt so bad that we were treated like we were nothing. Like we weren’t human beings.”

Consisting of her father, her three siblings and herself, the Staple Singers would travel through the States in the ‘60s, singing protest and gospel songs like ‘We Shall Not Be Moved’ and ‘On My Way.’ Roebuck ‘Pops’ Staples was a good friend and ally of Martin Luther King Junior’s, and the Staple Singers would often open his addresses and sermons.

Nowadays, those very same civil rights era protest songs provides Staples with ammunition against the poor state of race relations today. Her latest album We’ll Never Turn Back is a vigorous and urgent collection of those songs, reinterpreted for a new generation. “My record is a history lesson,” she says. “It’s taking you on a journey, letting you know what we went through, and what we survived. It’s showing how strong we are, as people.”
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THE WORST THING I EVER DID AS A KID
Young people are awful. Well they were at my school anyway. In highschool, pupils made local headlines when neighbours found a congealed mess of human faeces in their pool, after a particularly festive party. In primary s