Making friends with trees
Last modified on 2010-08-23 11:49:10 GMT. 3 comments. Top.
“I’ve sucked way too much cement for this year. Bad juju rising off them city sidewalks. I need to babble with a brook or two, inhale starlight, make friends with some trees.” – Tom Robbins
I took the chance to escape election fever, and went to plant some trees with my friend Joe this weekend instead (though, ahem, we tuned the radio in at every opportunity). Me, him, and the rest of the motley crew that made up the Regent Honeyeater Project planting squad managed to get 3,500 seedlings into the ground to act as native wildlife corridors for the Regent Honeyeater, a sweet, rare bird, and a slew of other beautiful Aussie bush babies.
The team was led by the sparkling, sprightly Ray Thomas, whose enthusiasm for tackling the task was infectious, a feat matched only by his grace on the dance floor at the celebratory Bush Dance that closed the first days activities. About 60 of us dug, and planted up and down hills until we had covered two tracts of land donated by local farmers with rows of trees surrounded by recycled juice cartons.
We chatted while we planted, politics came creeping back in, and occasionally unearthed a legless lizard, frog, or bad joke (though that might be Ray again). I came home bruised, sore and ingrained with dirt but grinning ear-to-ear; full up with a dose of nature, new friends, and good deeds.
With thanks to my friends, the gorgeous Sal Kimber and The Rollin’ Wheel for the tune.
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Yesterday
Last modified on 2010-07-31 05:15:45 GMT. 0 comments. Top.
Yesterday I opened my shutters and saw the most beautiful light firing on the houses across the road. Before my eyes were fully open I took these photos and stumbled, bleary and blinking, to the toilet. By the time I got back it was gloomy and gray; the kind of swift change typical of Melbourne weather. Later sunshine visited again, both from the sky and from the face of my dear old friend Tinuviel who appeared unexpectedly on the tram before me. I love that red-haired girl.
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Frustration
Last modified on 2010-07-26 07:41:50 GMT. 4 comments. Top.
Today I am tired. I am trying to pull it together because I (eternally) have a huge list of things to do, but moving my body thorough this day is like one of those dreams where you try to fly; desperate because there are ‘baddies’ on your tail, but your body is stuck, unresponsive and leaden. And its a poor excuse, tiredness. An implausible vagueness, an apathy. Even when you ramp it up and apply the labels of exhaustion or fatigue, its seems like a cop out. But this is my life, and has been for some time.
The most fist-clenchingly frustrating part is that last week, for a brief and delightful moment, I got a glimpse of my energetic self. I caught sight of the me I still see myself as, not this wasted, weary old person who is currently leasing my body (for not nearly as much as its worth). For the first time in a very long time all thought of drudgery was gone; My limbs were light, and I literally ran for miles, rejoicing in the unexpected energy. I wrote to a friend telling her how good I felt, how happy I was that I had my mojo back. And it WAS back! And then two late nights later and its gone, slunk away in the night, traitorously, with no return date confirmed.
And the most deeply, head-bangingly distressing, depressing thing? This vague and heavy fatigue is to do with food. More accurately its to do with the fact that for 30 years I blithely ate my fill of foods containing gluten and dairy. Both of which I now know I am allergic to. The cumulative effect of this happy noshing has been a slow erosion of all the goodness that keeps bodies fueled and ready to tackle life. Hence my collapse into total and utter exhaustion; a state complete with leaden limbs and low spirits. More than that it makes my brain dense and forgetful, my skin itch like the stings of a thousand buzzing mosquito’s, and my tummy perennially miserable. Sometimes it even strikes as a violent, and excruciatingly painful, cramping nausea that sees me slumped on the bathroom floor, doubled over and weeping.
It seems inconceivable to me that food, glorious food, could hurt me so badly. Particularly when in return I offer food nothing but adoration and love. I delight in its tastes, colours and textures; my mouth waters at the smell of the fresh baked bread, and the simple delight of cheese that is warmed to the perfect gooeyness. Also inconceivable is that those foods I so joyously partook of will never cross my lips again. How I am going to limp through the next 60-odd years of my life without them is slightly beyond my capacity to imagine. It seems perfectly plausible to give things up short-term, but forever seems like a big concept, more applicable to marriage than mozzarella.
I dined out with some buddies recently and faced with the limitations of ordering from a waiter who had promised gluten-free options when there actually were none on the menu I burst into tears. And although I write about crying quite often it is something I find horrifying to perform with an audience, usually reserving my tears for private or the most special of public occasions. But I couldn’t quell them in that moment facing the enormity of being that bloody annoying person who has to be picky at every dinner table, on every dinner out and in, for the rest of my life. Talk about til death do us part!
And while its a choice to be a label-reader, a waiter-quizzer, and a fuss-pot, I just can’t choose to live instead with weary-limbed fatigue, battling the mental fogginess and excruciating nausea. I don’t want to flake at the 9pm mark on nights out with my bemused friends who have seen me rapidly fade from a up-for-anything party girl, to a tired old woman. My brief reprieve tantalized me with the promise of energy; that my nights out dancing and giggling might be replacing comfortable socks and early-to-bed’s in a future that’s not too distant to imagine. I don’t image I will ever trash my body again, or take my health for granted, even if it mean a life of limited food choices, sensible eating and explaining myself, which is arguably the worst part. Because no matter how I frame it, its one of those things that prompts the old eye-roll more often than not. They’re easy symptoms to hide, only my family know what my pale face means, and no one is in the bathroom with me when I’m writhing in agony – and no words make that sound less than melodramatic – so you just don’t share it. Besides people get bored of excuses, and explanations are so tiring its easier not to bother (though I’m sure all my close friends are heartily sick of the words celiac and gluten by now).
Most of the people you come across with food allergies feel like frauds, one way or another. There’s a stigma attached, and unless your going to go into anaphylactic shock and die on the dining table you get lumped in with those soy-mocha-decaf-goji-chino folk that are the plague of your local cafe. The labels difficult and high-maintainence become stuck. And more worryingly your relationship with food becomes rather less, straightforward. In a sense it becomes the enemy; dangerous and debilitating. So while today is frustrating, fighting with tiredness, and the flatness that comes hand-in-hand with it, I know all my small, socially boring, steps are getting me out of this doughy hole I’ve made for myself (hopefully with my relationship to food somewhat intact). Which is just as well, because if I don’t resuscitate myself soon I might find myself alone in the wilderness of bland and boring, eating at the celiac table with only my other likewise afflicted mates for company!*
*This is an overdramatic recreation of events – my friends wouldn’t ditch me because I was more boring than John Howard, a man described aptly by the lovely Bill Bryson: “… John Howard is by far the dullest man in Australia. Imagine a very committed funeral home director – someone whose burning ambition from the age of eleven was to be a funeral home director, whose proudest achievement in adulthood was to be elected president of the Queanbeyan and District Funeral Home Directors association – then halve his personality and halve it again, and you have pretty well got John Howard …” . If, in the case I do become more boring than that I would extradite myself from their presence on moral grounds – no one deserves a friend that lacklustre.
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Buttons all down her back
Last modified on 2010-07-21 05:40:33 GMT. 0 comments. Top.
Miss Mary Mack Mack Mack
All dressed in black, black, black
With silver buttons, buttons, buttons
All down her back, back, back.
She asked her mother, mother, mother
For 50 cents, cents, cents
To see the elephants, elephants, elephants
Jump over the fence, fence, fence.
They jumped so high, high, high
They reached the sky, sky, sky
And they didn’t come back, back, back
‘Til the 4th of July, ly, ly!
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Hacked
Last modified on 2010-07-16 09:54:31 GMT. 1 comment. Top.
I got interviewed by Tom Tilly on Hack today about Show Us Ya Tits vs. Facebook. Just a teeny bit of my voice but hey, who doesn’t love Hack (George that was a rhetorical question)? Oh and a new image for you Show Us followers: Monica Mayhem at Sexpo.
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Red Centre. Dementia.
Last modified on 2010-07-07 01:38:20 GMT. 10 comments. Top.
I’m sitting in my hotel room in Alice Springs in front of some crappy tween movie, running late for my bus to the airport. I don’t want to leave really, its cosy wrapped up in the doona with a pattern that looks like someone hurled and rubbed their hand in it, spreading the undigested corn in a radiating swirl. Seriously what is it with cheap hotel room decorating? Ugly. I digress. I don’t want to leave because I need, desperately, to see what will become of those charming Duff sisters in the 8:40am channel one movie. Will they fall for the poor nerds and reclaim their company? Will they learn the lesson their impoverished no-nonsense Colombian Nanny is trying to teach them?
The answers are, unsurprisingly, yes and yes, but as I’d already guessed correctly it isn’t really why I don’t want to leave. Its just so neutral here in this room, ugly but inoffensive; boring. And I’m alone, which is like breath to me. I need portions of aloneness to gather my thoughts and just be, and besides I quite like my own company. Hotel rooms are great for that, when I leave this room and its puke-like doona I’m going from red centre dementia back to the grit of St Kilda, and in between those two rocks I just need some space to filter the last week. So I’m clinging to the silence while I have it, using it to think.
Yesterday we barely made it out of the Aboriginal community where I spent the last week with my 86-year-old Grandmother, who is under the influence of some fairly mind altering dementia. The rain came, flooding the dry red clay quickly, and my Aunt and I had to leave with minutes notice. I flung my arms around Nan, robbed of our last night together in an effort to beat the swollen creek, and tried not to cry as we made hasty goodbyes. Cue a terrifying slide down the mud road; a 4WD enthusiasts idea of a good time I’m sure, but quite easily the longest 48 minutes of my life (comparable perhaps only to the frantic drive from the Gold Coast to Brisbane to a very small, very sick, nephew in an emergency room). No time for thought amidst the grim pleading salutations to the sky. Then after a three-hour drive to Alice we had to comb hotels for vacancy (note to the weary traveler, don’t just turn up, book, and book well ahead). Sleep, dreams, more goodbyes and then, blissfully, two whole hours to myself, by myself, to ponder and reflect (and, I’ll admit, jump on the bed, but that’s by-the-by).
But it wasn’t enough time so as I reluctantly swapped my ugly room to peer out the plane window at the perfect cotton-ball clouds drifting lazily over the jumble of geometric shapes, red dirt and green pasture, that littered the landscape from Alice to Adelaide, I kept at it. Turning things over in my mind as the red dirt ceded to red roofs, and the pasture became tree-lined streets. Another take-off over the sea into a bank of gray cloud, reflecting its misery into the ocean so the two met with no discernible line of separation, and then pop, the plane lifted through the clouds into sunlight and blue sky. And in that sunny moment, above the clouds, all that thinking, pondering and reflecting gave me some clarity about my tiny bird-like Grandmother. Nothing profound, just a few bits of understanding.
Norma has always been a bird, the kind of bird who needs to be free. She wastes away, miserable and defeated in a cage, but set her loose and she sings her happiest song; in the mist of the mornings, across the ocean, and deep in the forest she warbles a contented tune. Time and time again, restless and bloody-minded, she has paced the confines of circumstance and made good her escape, just for the pleasure of possession-less freedom. A perennial wander, she fled New Zealand for Australia, and a stint as a Matron on Palm Island, to leap on the backpacker trail 35 years ago, hitching through Iraq, Iran, India and the Himalayas with scarcely more than my barely teenage aunt to steer her to safety.
Eventually settling in Byron Bay she reveled in being naked in the elements, and becoming more colourful and eccentric with each passing year; her odd bright shoes and sunflower umbrella became a fixture on the list of attractions in that tourist laden town. One of the mixed up mess of stories she recounted in the last week was her pride at my young aunt declaring herself a “little non-conformist”. And non-conformist certainly sums it up; Norma is unique. And when we walked into the desert around the community, talking as we always have done, she still discussed escape, freedom. We laughed that if she tried to hitch away she wouldn’t get very far, but the desire to flee is still there.
As I gazed out the bus window into the dark cold of the Melbourne night I thought back to my favourite memories of her. When I was little, four or so, I would wrap my arms around her waist, holding on tight as we steered the shire’s streets on her scooter, singing. There are two songs that take me instantly to her, but the song we sang together on the scooter is my special song for her;
Oh, we ain’t got a barrel of money,
Maybe we’re ragged and funny
But we’ll travel along
Singing a song
Side by side.
The highlight of my week with her was reliving that memory, at her instigation. It made my heart beam with happiness that she remembered as fondly as I did. I remembered many things as the city lights passed; copper in the fire throwing green sparks for us, her breasts floating, huge, floppy and fascinating in the bath, bushwalking endlessly (I even remember her teaching us to stomp on cane toadlets – and she did it barefoot, urgh). I remembered her putting us in the sink in her caravan kitchen to bath us when we were small enough for her to lift us there. And then later when I was older I remember lying on her couch talking about boys, sex, love, God and many other things – no topic was taboo.
Mostly I remember looking up at her adoringly, wrapping my arms around her. Norma wasn’t, isn’t, perfect. She was strict with Melody and I, she thought we were overindulged, spoiled by Mum (and we were, though it wasn’t Mum’s fault, she just loved us so much she could never quite formulate the word no). But when I reminisce about her I do it with the rose-coloured glasses that are specific only to the relationship between a Grandchild and their Grandparent, adoration and complete oblivion to flaws. And as adults, even though the flaws are more apparent, that adoration is no less, for either of us. Melody was on the phone as soon as I was back in range, her small voice desperate for my update about her beloved Nanny.
So when our plane flew through the clouds to the sunshine I realised two things. Firstly that the little bird lady must be allowed to see out her days in as much freedom as possible. Because as annoying as I found the chaos her flailing brain causes now, her stubbornness, and even though putting her in a home would be easier I feel like we owe her that. Because she gave me my wandering feet, my bloody minded independence, and my fascination for people watching. Because she is the woman who gave Melody her sense of social justice (dragging her cute three-year-old curliness around the Mullum pub, extorting money from the sentimental drunks, stirred by the sweet-cheeked kid to support the cause du jour). Because, essentially, she gave us our lives. She is trapped by the strange changes in her brain, scared and confused by them, so if we can, we need to let her wander as long as she can, if only because it makes her happy.
And the second thing? Well that was more about me. I’ve been a bit ambivalent about having children. Not sure that I want the drudge of the first years, gestating and feeding. An endless cycle of sleep deprivation, vomit, nappies and really weird hormones. I like kids a lot, I love my nephews and nieces endlessly, but I’ve been pretty sure they were enough for me. And to be honest that scary dash to my sick nephew in the emergency room of a Brisbane hospital scared the crap out of me, I didn’t think I could take that worry with my own child. But when I took those slow walks in the bush with Nanny this week, scraggle of camp dogs at our feet, I was no more or less than her trusted, loved grandchild. Even though she is losing her mind, and although we will eventually slip through the ever-widening cracks in her cognition, her constant has been her love for me and Melody. And I want that someday, I want to walk with my grandchild when my brain is fading and small freedoms are all I have left. I want to have someone who will fight to let me be independent as long as I am able.
Many hours after leaving that hotel room I’m in my own bed, wrapped in my floral doona, thinking about babies (yikes, babies!). And its because of those moments with Norma, but also because in the jumble of memories her brain throws up I noticed that its us she thinks about, her family. We are the ones she recounts tales of, 86 years of stories about her family. It makes all of the other stuff seem less important somehow, all the striving and career pales next to being a part of a family. Because at the end of it, when life is slipping away it seems to be the last thing to go – the connections to the people we love. And as we all know family comes in many shapes, sizes and formulations but I know this week has left me less certain about where I stand with making my own mini-me’s to be there when my brain is decrepit.
And the other song that is Norma’s? Well this one is my and Melody’s song for her. I know it will make me think of her until the day I’m 86 and telling my grandchildren about her, the free bird who taught me so much, even in her last forgetful days.
The other night dear, as I lay sleeping
I dreamed I held you in my arms
But when I awoke, dear, I was mistaken
So I hung my head and I cried.
You are my sunshine, my only sunshine
You make me happy when skies are gray
You’ll never know dear, how much I love you
Please don’t take my sunshine away…
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Wedding Waltz and Tears
Last modified on 2010-07-02 08:18:59 GMT. 5 comments. Top.
I met Samala when I was 19. I was having an early morning sleep on a friends couch. I’d been very sick and could never make it all the way home after doing my token laps at the pool so having a restorative nap on the sharehouse lounge (which was halfway home) had become something of a tradition. As I dozed I vaguely heard a giggle. A high-pitched, wild giggle. “Who is that snoring?!” the voice laughed me awake. And that was it. Samala had tee-hee’d her way into my life. I hauled myself off the couch and came face-to-face with a woman who barely seemed able to contain her effusiveness, spilling out in the colour of her clothes, smile and wild brown curls.
She was a few years older than me, and exuded an effortless sense of self worth, that fit perfectly with her leopard print skirts. I quickly fell in love with her – it would have been impossible not to – and as her boyfriend was living in the rabbit warren of a sharehouse whose couch I slept on intermittently I got to see her often. Eventually I wrangled her to move in with us when I leased a house across the road from the Paris Street share, so I saw her all the time. Just as quickly my best friend Blythe and my sister Melody, who shared our little house, fell in love with her too and we danced our way through months together. We were happy. Sam left us to travel around India but the spell she had woven around us was never broken and the four of us met as often as we could, traversing Lismore, Clunes, Byron and Brisbane to drink tea and dance together.
We saw each other through our 20’s – a time of study, boys, travel, careers, parties, more boys and moving, interspersed with heartbreak and even more cups of tea – witnessing each others lives. Samala was that rare bird of friendship, free spirited and far away yet constant and present. We took turns at being neighbours again; Blythe in Clunes and me in Lismore. Blythe was our emissary when she met Scott, filtering reports back to us of his overwhelming niceness, and general suitability for our beloved friend. When she was considering babies it was my turn to send reports to the other girls. I was there for the teary 30th when she cuddled her friend’s son longingly, and for the bon voyage dinner before I traveled to China when she confided her despair of ever of getting pregnant. I was certainly there happily soaking a tissue when she emailed me in China to tell me she was pregnant, and for the text to tell me it was twin girls. Then there was that phone call to tell me, in an eerily calm voice, that she had gone into labour at 28 weeks pregnant.
Cue months of grimness. Grim praying to please, please make it okay – make those tiny babies be okay. But the grimness was interspersed with Samala’s joy at being a Mum, at our joy at being ‘Aunties’ to the tiny brave girls, whose hands were so small they barely wrapped around the tip of their Mum’s little finger. But most of all there was an intense, fierce love. Sent through the ether, from every single person who loved Samala and Scott, focused on Apple and Sunshine. We loved them because it was going to take all of our love for them to thrive. And as the milestones passed, we all got used to disinfecting ourselves to protect them from our germs, and eventually got to hold their sweet baby bodies, that love paid off. They grew bright, strong and sparkling, just like their Mum. They were big and gorgeous and we loved them more by the day.
Then when the girls were so big and gorgeous that the grimness of their beginning, and the demands of their everyday, was starting to cede, Samala and Scott made good on their promise to marry and started to plan a wedding. And whether it was just because I read all her Bride magazines back-to-front, or because she could count on me to get as excited about every small detail of the day as she did, she asked me to be the water element bridesmaid (to join fire, air and earth). I felt like I would be standing at her side on behalf of us girls, who had grown into women together, just as the other elemental bridesmaids were standing on behalf of other facets of Samala’s life.
The day of the wedding dawned and I warned Samala I was going to cry. I sent her a message telling her that as the water element it was totally appropriate for me to shed some tears. But while I leaked intermittently through the day it was the wedding dance that undid me. The wedding dance that this photographer couldn’t bring herself to photograph. So picture this if you will: A radiantly beautiful bride – and when I say radiant I mean it in the shiniest, most sparkling sense of the word – a bride who shone, glowed and beamed so brightly it made you want to binge drink her vision in. This beautiful bride, is waltzing with the man she loves. The man she has just married. They sing the lyrics of their sweet wedding song to each other and the crowd wells up. But then their three-year-old twins appear, and Mum and Dad separate to hold one each and they all dance together in front of us, perfect.
It was at this point that I lost my shit. There are no elegant words to describe the tsunami of emotion running up my throat from deep within my belly, reducing me to a shaking, heaving mess. I turned and my fellow bridesmaids were similarly sobbing. So we clung together while they danced to their beautiful song and we cried. It wasn’t pretty or polite; sobs wracked my whole body, sobs echoed by the women I held on to, sobs we tried to stifle in our huddle. And it wasn’t just us, on the other side of the hall my sister sat with her best friend and wept, as too did countless other guests. We cried quietly so as not to disturb their magic moment, but the water element bridesmaid wasn’t the only teary one in that moment.
It was sudden and overwhelming, but not entirely unexpected. Because when those darling girls took over our hearts the extended circle of friends and family sent them all of our love. But we left Scott and Samala to look after their own love. We left them to limp through however they could. And they made it, which is almost as miraculous as their children making it. Because, as my Dad pointed out, not everyone makes it through that sort of life altering experience. Not everyone emerges, not unscathed but still in love, on the other side. And Samala and Scott did. And they did it all by themselves. Watching them dance together it seemed no-one was more deserving of happiness than those two, those four, who had to fight for their family, and in some great stroke of fate, won. Our tears were a joyous, albeit snotty, celebration of them making it.
And this? This is for Blythe, because in the tradition of our friendship we take turns at being the couriers of news about each others lives, and today it’s my turn. Someday, as I sit as Blythe does now, in a faraway land, it will be her turn to update me on all of the magnificent and terrible bits to come. Because somehow in that little orange sharehouse, a long time ago, we made a promise to each other. Not a spoken promise, but a vow nonetheless, that we would be there. That we would care. And that vow, while not as romantic nor as touching as the ones Scott and Samala made to each other under the full moon, is just as binding. Its an obligation to sob at each others weddings, celebrate milestones, change nappies, call, write, pack, move, dance, reminisce, and drink many, many cups of tea together. Till death do us part.
p.s. I had to Photoshop Blythe in to this picture because she is a Nanna and went home too early to actually be in it. I did a shocking job but I still love it.
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lumen agency
Last modified on 2010-04-23 08:46:06 GMT. 3 comments. Top.
Some photo buddies and I are starting up a collective. A group of diverse but like-minded photographers called lumen agency . This is a little body of work I did for the collective. You can view our interim website here if you want to see what else we have going for us. It will soon look far more awesome.
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Miles to go before I sleep
Last modified on 2010-04-17 02:14:11 GMT. 3 comments. Top.
The woods are lovely, dark, and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.
Robert Frost, Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening
The last month has been a whirlwind of goodbyes, hellos, with dashes of controversy and a sense of disorientation. I have felt upside down, round-a-bout, and back to front. I haven’t even been taking photos*. Its been unfamiliar, and familiar all at once.
I walked along the St Kilda esplanade one evening and watched the sun set over the water, trying to re orientate myself to my new home. Brilliant tangerine, it lit up the wisps of clouds that gathered above the bay, gently feathering the sky. I watched a legion of people point their cameras towards the last gasping rays. Like zombies they stood and recorded the hues of tangerine fade into a colour I liken to fluorescent watermelon. The sun sucked into the horizon by some hidden vaccuum cleaner, teasing it in like a stray marble lost under a bed.
I realised as I walked amoung the rollerbladers, backpackers, dogs, families, prams, runners, seagulls, pensioners and cyclists enjoying the fading warmth of the day that I grew up with sunrise rather than sunset over the ocean. That while the beauty of the sun setting made me twinge with regret for not grabbing my camera for my walk so I could join the legion of zombie photographers it also made me feel like I wasn’t quite at home. Funny that a simple thing like the setting sun can disorientate you so much.
I feel at home now in this new city. Not at home like seeing Mt Warning appear over the horizon on the return to Murwillumbah, and not at home like lying on my sisters couch, or being in West End. But I’m home. My new home, where the sun sets over the ocean. The tiny waves ripple, pitching seagulls from their perch, the sun disappears below the horizon and I walk in the cool blue light as people pack up their beach day. I walk home.
* These are some of the very few photos I have actually taken in the last month. The poor camera’s are gathering dust.
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Hateful, threatening or obscene?
Last modified on 2010-04-07 23:00:56 GMT. 24 comments. Top.
Are these terms you would usually associate with breasts? When I think of breasts I think of many words but those are not them. Breasts are soft, squishy, round, pointy, perky, plump, enticing, sexy, comforting, nurturing, useful (hello, breastfeeding!) but not to Facebook. This morning Facebook told me that my fan page dedicated to sharing information about a) my long term photographic project Show Us Ya Tits and b) about breasts, was those things. And I quote; “Among other things, pages that are hateful, threatening or obscene are not allowed”.
When they first took down my images from the fan page I thought it was a shame Facebook was buying into that boring rhetoric that any body that falls outside the accepted norm of youth and sexuality is not to be showed. The week progressed and my little status update spawned some sort of viral infamy, I had over 4,000 people log on a read my previous blog. I did interviews with three radio stations, and two newspapers, who between them managed to get me syndicated all over the world – the original ABC article was even translated into Indonesian. Over 200 new people joined my fan page. So yes, the people seemed to agree, Facebook was being hypocritical.
As the week progressed Facebook continued to take down my images, and whether it was because I kicked up a stink or not I was quite pleased that at least they were being evenhanded with their no nudity policy; taking down the sexy Sexpo Showgirls as well as my nan. I posted an image of Bebe (see below) as my profile because her nipples were covered and I thought that would fall in line with their no nudity policy, which incidentally I never set out to challenge. I actually think it is dangerous territory for them to have anything but a no nudity policy, because where do you draw the line? All I was arguing for was that they apply that policy fairly, and not remove an image of breastfeeding and leave one of sexy breasts.
But this morning Facebook has taken down my whole page because the content was hateful, threatening or obscene. Since when were breasts any of those things? What kind of message are we sending to girls when we decree that breasts are obscene? Or when we tell them that their bodies are hateful? Or that sharing information about normal, natural bodily functions is threatening? What we are telling young women who are developing, and women who have troubled relationships with their bodies is that they are not okay if they don’t fall in line with the images media feeds us on a daily basis. We are telling women, and for that matter men, that bodies have to be standardized to be accepted. What we are failing to tell when we censor diversity is that bodies come in the most delightful rainbow of shapes, sizes and colours. And more simply, what we are failing to do when we decree bodies obscene is that we are all different. Each and every one of us is different and that is a good thing.
I’m going to put myself on the line here and tell my story. Ironically given how much time I have invested into researching other people’s breasts over the last five years I have never told it to anyone. I still feel a bit saddened by it I guess, but anyway here goes; I developed early, BAM, breasts appeared on my chest overnight. It was a shock not only to me, my peers but also to my parents. Because, like it or not, when an 11-year-old has breasts all of a sudden, you have a child on your hands who is instantly sexualised. Scary.
To be honest it took me a while to realise my classmates weren’t going to catch up on my early development, that I hadn’t just grown them earlier than anyone else. It took me a while to realise that I was going to end up with bigger breasts than everyone else. And the way I realised? Well that’s the sad bit I guess. I realised when I went to the school toilets one day and someone had drawn some graffiti on the wall. I sat there as I did my wee and read it. There were two silhouettes drawn next to each other, side views of a girls body. One was fairly average, and the other had huge breasts. One had an arrow pointing to it and said ‘Normal’ and the other had an arrow pointing to it that said ‘Gemma’.
I was a fairly naive kid. I read it and it took a few moments to realise that the ‘Gemma’ was me. The hot flush of embarrassment covered my cheeks and I felt sick. It was mortifying. In an instant someone told me that I wasn’t normal at an age where all you want is to be the same as everyone else. Unfortunately it was something I believed for a very long time. Because that’s the thing; When we as a community tell someone that differences are not normal, are not okay, we are dictating how they feel about themselves and that is massive power to wield.
So I ended up with huge breasts, I’m a 12F, and for all of my high school life, and a good chunk of time after then I felt ashamed of them, and intimidated by them. Although I have strong muscly body and great coordination I never played sport because I didn’t want people looking at me. I spent a lot of time looking at the ground so I wouldn’t see people looking at my breasts, because I was just a kid and the sexuality that is bundled up with breasts was far to overwhelming for me to deal with. I grew pretty cynical of any male attention because of my ‘abnormally’ large breasts, believing that the gimmick value was the only thing attracting them.
My breasts, and that one little picture some silly kid drew on the toilet wall 17 years ago (yes 17 and I still remember it clearly), have shaped my experiences and identity for a very long time. I am fully aware of the power of media to manipulate and that is why I started photographing this project. Because if I have the power to stop one little girl from feeling as shit about her body as I did then I will. If I have the power to show women and men of all ages that bodies are amazing because of their vast differences then I will. What I will not do is let fucking Facebook tell me that having open dialogue about breasts is hateful, threatening or obscene. That is not only abhorrent but given how large an audience it reaches, really dangerous.
