My bedroom back at my parents’ house is a cemetery for virtual-reality pets. Laptop, palm-top, mini-disc recording equipment, cameras, guitars—all these things that I thought years ago would help me to write ... but no, when you’re in the field all you need is a reliable pen, plenty of notepads and a good dictionary. Maybe I’m still rigging those gadgets trying to catch some whispers?
Travelling around the place, experiencing the darkness of different hemispheres, I lost my fear of night. Living on the Brisbane River, I can attest that it has its own sirens, like those in the old Greek classics, and their songs at night helped me write and showed me that night can’t sit still on the tide.
Living back in Tigerland, the only whispers I hear in the night are on the breath of my little boy when he mumbles to the spirits that playfully encroach upon his dreamtime.
When we smoke the houses that our loved ones have lived in, and say ‘Yenandi’ in the old tongue, we’re not evicting them from this plain, but in the smoke, we’re ensuring their whispers continue the journey beyond ... beyond this secular world.