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BEFORE GRIEF


Julia Flaster & Elena Tjandra | First published in Issue 01, August 2021
At the end of 2020, Julia asked me if I’d like to be part of a new literary magazine. The theme for the first issue was 'anticipated grief'. She tells me the idea through Letty—a friend whose parents’ tenacious efforts to protect her from paedophiles would instil in Letty, both fear and expectation that now in her mid-twenties, has given way to a fear of losing her dog, Fresco, to dog nappers, fast trams and mysterious fur loss. Anticipated grief, Julia explains.
          In the current moment as the world mourns the loss of countless lives in a global pandemic, grief steps in, rippling through communities, urgent and acute. For others, grief is balled up, lying in wait, released years after loss, or never at all. Julia’s hesitancy to answer phone calls after the death of a close friend in 2019, precipitated into a series of missed calls from unknown numbers, should they too announce the passing of loved ones. My own recent diagnosis of complicated grief has had a stubborn tail, tripping me over whenever I thought I’d found balance. I came on board to DEBRIS in reflection that grief abounds, but its experience comes in pieces.
          We began to look for stories exploring experiences of delayed, imagined and anticipated grief, and considered calling the first issue ‘before-grief’. In the process of commissioning contributions and reading drafts, however, we realised that we were producing a bigger project that spanned more than one edition.

Our inaugural issue presents twelve texts, a photo essay and comic strip. Across these works is prolonged longing, reinvention, acts of meaning-making, unfounded strength and strong emotion that underlie the human experience of grief. In this edition, grief was brought out in different forms—not only anticipated, not only in five stages. The so-called ‘five stages of grief ’ we often see on brochures in doctors’ waiting rooms do not do justice to the overlapping, fluid phases experienced by those who grieve.

In Nick Kilner’s posthumous homage to his brother, grief is a loss gradually unfolding, punctuated by the occasional spark of connection and the burden of mourning as his brother transforms with drug addiction.

Jennifer Philip elegises the range of reactions she witnesses, as she delivers bad news to cancer patients. She bears witness to “deep animal groans of pain” and finds quiet family resemblance that strikes at her own heart—futility in the face of sorrow. Jon-Michael Frank delivers caustic wit as they too illustrate deep pain in comic strip. In the words of guest editor, Anna Yeon, “grief is a shape shifting purgatory between life and death.”

Some simply refuse to grieve. This is true in Shokoofeh Azar’s fiction, led by characters whose denial to acknowledge death and humanity in Iran is experienced not as a ‘ stage of grief ’ but a stance of defiance. Similarly, in Julia Flaster’s review of Allison Chhorn’s docu-fiction The Plastic House, silence is key in translating between worlds and generations where memories of Cambodian genocide are too painful to be articulated. Alice Pung also reflects on unspoken intergenerational trauma made manifest in her up-bringing and the anticipation of a new baby.

Mira Asriningtyas meditates on uncertainty and risk in grief, explaining the affects and practices of living in the foothills of Mount Merapi, an active volcano. With the imminent likelihood of loss and destruction, the orchestration of a travelling community-based archive shows how the past and present of the community takes on new meaning. For Hasib Hourani, the act of packing up, putting on, squeezing off and holding on to jewellery also expresses a longing for the past to arrive at the present, to return to home and family. Together, they show how memory—and grief, can be transported and carried around: the weight of trauma-cum-expectation placed on Alice Pung during pregnancy; the baby in Shokoofeh Azar’s story is carried on the narrator’s shoulder.

Sofie Westcombe and Lur Alghurabi lift heaviness into reconstructions of time: surreal offerings of what could have been, and what has been done, left behind. They both speak to the difficulty of knowing something or someone that is no longer there.

Haunted remains are carried forward literally, through Tim Edensor’s study of remnant bluestone in Melbourne, and the ‘blackened husk’ of the Little Saigon market in Footscray, where Ngoc Tran begins her recipe for mock meat.

Meanwhile, Mahmood Fazal interviews Malyangapa, Barkindji rapper Barkaa, about her experiences of displacement and redemptive breakthrough to music. They find common appreciation for family that will back you in a fight.

Chris Taylor explores grief as reckoning unfinished business; and shows through a series of fictional and re-appropriated book covers the ways in which authenticity, truth and authority about grief might be conveyed.

We all grapple with unfinished histories, anticipation and loss, on-going. After months of working on grief, we don’t feel any closer to an answer—the kind that would offer emotional closure (is closure one of the five stages? We can’t remember). Instead of definitive answers, this issue offers reflection on how messy, wired and sometimes beautiful, grief can be.


ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTOR/S
Julia Flaster, Founder & Co-ordinatorJulia is an arts worker, film producer and hospitality worker. She holds an Honours degree in Geography and a Master of Arts and Cultural Management from the University of Melbourne. She is originally from France and is currently based there.

Elena Tjanda, Editor-in-Chief
Elena is a Melbourne-based writer and PhD student in human geography at the University of Melbourne. Her PhD research considers place and everyday life across the highway from an underground silver mine in Oaxaca, Mexico.

GOOD GRIEF


Stacey Stokes | Online Feature, 2022
I had a beautiful wife. Long black hair, olive skin and hourglass figure. I could actually see the love in her big brown eyes when she looked at me. I had beautiful children too. Every day I’d wake up to my older daughter stroking my hair. Her radiant smile was the first thing I’d see. We’d have breakfast and I’d take her and her sister to the park. They would run around, giggling, until one of them got tired. I’d carry them home and we would all have a nap, their little heads on my chest. To me, this was heaven. This was my life. Until the day I lost it—and everything was lost with it.

From a young age I’d wanted to be a girl. But as I grew older, I found myself being scared away from it.

Watching Jerry Springer, I’d see a transgender lady come out, and everyone in the audience would point and laugh.

My first girlfriend, in early high school, said to me,
“Cut your hair off, you look like a girl.”
“Why is that so bad?” I asked.
“Because when I was little my dad got a sex change and left. I’ve never forgiven him for that. And you look like a girl … cut it off.”

I didn’t feel like my Catholic dad and siblings would support me. I believed they would abandon me.

Later, when I was older, I asked my wife,
“Would you leave me if I got a sex change?”
She replied with, “Hmm. Yeah, I would leave.”

Instead of talking about how I felt, I laughed it off. Too scared of rejection, I kept on going as I always had. My body feeling like a stranger’s body, everything I did feeling fake, everything I said feeling stupid. I had no idea how to be a man. Inside I was a girl. Eventually, I decided this was how I’d feel forever. I couldn’t transition or I’d lose my life. All I cared about would be gone. I’d lose everything that defined who I was.

I grew sad and resentful. I funneled my deep unhappiness to those around me, being mean and hurtful. I was toxic and even I hated me. I can’t blame them for leaving me. If I could have, I would have left myself. I guess I lost my life anyway.

After my world collapsed, I sat in my Nanna’s spare room, my childhood teddy pressed against my chest. Pictures of my children were scattered across the bed. Tears streamed down my face. Never again would I wake up to that beautiful smile or run around giggling in the park. I’d never look into those big brown eyes and see love again. Heaven was gone now and all I had left was hell.

It was my fault.

I didn’t know where to start processing the pain of all that was lost. I wanted to die, to finish the job. I tried to kill myself, but I failed at that too—suicide was too scary, and I chickened out. Dying, it seemed, wasn’t a viable option, which only left living. I tried anything I could think of. I went to therapy and group therapy. I practised mindfulness. I wrote letters that I never sent to try to articulate to myself how I felt. I threw myself into physical exercise like weightlifting and Crossfit. I got 13.5 on the beep test and got to 7% body fat. I spent nights praying to God, then tried praying to gods when God didn’t answer.

All those things helped me cope and carry on from day to day, but none of it healed me. After a year, I realised that acceptance was the only way. I had to accept the truth of it all, and move on. To understand what had happened and why. I had to adjust to the changes in my world and stop trying to reclaim or emulate the past. I had to grow from the experience.

I had to accept the truth: I was living a lie and it was poisoning my life.

I saw doctors and psych doctors and they talked to me about gender dysphoria. Just going through the assessment was healing for my soul. Talking about how I’d felt growing up and who I was inside cleansed me of a lot of the hurt of the past. Eventually, when I started hormone replacement therapy, it was like the missing part of me had been added. Looking in the mirror and seeing a girl staring back is like a miracle still, a miracle I should have embraced much sooner. But I’ll never forget what I lost along the way. Even though some people stopped talking to me and others told me I was going to hell, losing my wife and kids was by far the worst grief.

I hope that anyone reading my story takes away this: maybe it’s better to face the grief rather than ignore it. Whether it’s an abusive relationship, toxic friendships, coming out as gay or overly stressful jobs, don’t wait until a catastrophe to face the perceived and/or anticipated grief. By then it will be far, far worse.

If you have had a family breakdown, or your marriage or long-term relationship fell apart, you can get through this. One day you will be happy again. You can grow and heal. I know it’s painful and soul crushing, but one day you will be stronger for clawing your way through.

In the words of the Ancient Greek poet Aeschylus,

He who learns must suffer.
And even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget,
falls drop by drop upon the heart,
until, in our own despair,
against our will, comes wisdom
through the awful grace of god.

From Agamemnon (lines 176–183).


ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTOR/S
Stacey is a 38 year old trans woman who has been incarcerated in a men’s prison for 5 years. She enjoys writing letters, listening to and playing music, especially classical. She uses creative writing as a way to keep herself sane. As Stacey puts it “writing is a little window out of my hell of being a woman in a male prison.”
IMAGE CREDIT
Lorenzo Mattotti



INTERVIEW WITH BARKAA


Mahmood Fazal | First published in Issue 01, August 2021 
When Barkaa raps, she spits a haunting eulogy for the person she once was. On the phone, she is shy and thoughtful. On stage, her heart is full of fight. A troubled voice of resilience vibrates from her lyrics. A sobering shadow haunts her rhythm.
     Barkaa is a Malyangapa, Barkindji woman from Western New South Wales, now living in South West Sydney on Gandangara land. “You say I’m oppressed. But you oppressed in the mind. 60,000 years of bloodline. You ain’t even got spine,” rhymes Barkaa. “I got my mob on my back, Koori pride ’til the death. We’re gonna breed them all back ’til we’re the last ones left.”
     At the Sydney Opera House, before performing an ode to Nas in “I Know I Can,” Barkaa invites her eldest daughter on stage. With tears in her eyes, she explains, “I made her. But she made me.” Her daughter joins in the chorus, “I know I can. Be what I wanna be. And if I work hard at it. I’ll be where I wanna be.”
     In 2020, Barkaa won the 2020 PUMA Rookie Of The Year Award for Acclaim Magazine and was listed as one of the Top 5 female rappers in Australia by the ABC’s triple j. Last month, I spoke to Barkaa about her journey to hip-hop to try and place where the sombre tone of her sound comes from.  

MAHMOOD FAZAL: I wanted to hear out your story, if that's cool with you. Tell me about Merrylands and what it was like growing up in that neighbourhood.

BARKAA: I grew up in Merrylands West. So, we grew up in housing commission here. I’ve lived here for 26 years now. My whole life I’ve lived in Merrylands. Dealt with a lot of racism growing up in the neighbourhood. There were a lot of other kids there from other backgrounds that kind of stuck together. I guess primary school was quite racist. Well, it was really racist. So, in high school I kind of rebelled.

M: For someone that’s never been to Merrylands, how would you describe it? Like, how would you describe Merrylands of that era to someone that's never been through there? What did it look like?

B: Yeah, it’s heaps more multicultural. But back when we were growing up, there were a lot of white families in the neighbourhood. A lot of alcohol and drugs in the neighbourhood. Where I grew up there were a few shootings [and] stuff that happened. But besides that, it was my stomping ground. A lot of people freak out when I’m like, “Oh, I’m from Merrylands.” And they’re like, “Oh, is it dangerous?” It’s like, fine. But sometimes, you know, growing up we couldn’t tell the difference between fireworks or gunshots or cars backfiring and stuff like that.

I mean, Merrylands growing up, I’ve always loved Merrylands. It’s grown a lot. I feel like back then there was [more of] a sense of community. We used to have more things for kids like the Children’s Museum. Central Gardens is still open. We had more things to do, I guess.

M: Yeah, I know. One of the biggest ills in my neighbourhood was that there wasn’t much for kids to do. And so you find yourself just hanging around. Trying to find something to do. It generally ends in doing nothing. Or nothing good.

B: Yeah, no, I felt that as well, growing up. I guess we get bored. Do knock and runs. All those things to annoy the neighbours. It was a good pastime. Fight with sticks and that. What can you do?

M: When you went to high school how did things change? Throughout your formative years, did your surroundings change much?

B: I met some new friends during the holidays and started smoking weed before I got into high school. And I guess it was like traumatising to me during primary school where I was like, outed, because I was the only Aboriginal kid in my primary school. And then when I got to high school, it was just like, I’m not gonna take shit anymore. Like I’m not gonna let anybody call me racist names without me backfiring and I guess I grew a backbone but in the wrong way. I’d smoke weed because I wanted to be the cool kid or the kid that no one fucked with. Which wasn't good. I was a smart kid and I had good grades. Looking back at my school reports, it’s
just like, ‘She’s not listening. She’s disruptive.’ And I think, I just got sick of it after a while. You can only deal with so much racism in school then you just don't want to be there. It’s not a happy place for you anymore. And then I started getting detentions, like every day. And then by Year 8, I was kicked out.

M: Did you have someone that told you, you shouldn’t be copping shit from other people? When I was growing up, we always had our older cousins that would say if any of these [White] Aussies say anything to you don’t cop it or
else don’t hang out with us. Like we don’t want anything to do with you. Did you have anyone that raised you to back yourself?

B: Yeah, my mum. She’s stuck up for me with the racist mothers in the neighbourhood. I had my older brothers in the house that would say i they give you shit just flog ‘em. They kind of instilled in me that I didn't have to take shit, or that they’d back me.

M: What was the racial makeup of your high school because you said you were the only one ‘Aboriginal kid’ in your primary school?

B:I had a few Aboriginal kids in high school, which was lovely to have. We had an Aboriginal worker there and an Aboriginal fellow who’d come in
and teach us dance and art and stuff. It was refreshing to have because, like, there were only a few black kids. But it was nice to have those elders to go to when shit was getting tense in school. And it was good to just have a yarn to them. And it felt like, it was a safe place at school. It was very multicultural in high school. I still did cop racism in the seven [Year 7] but I think it didn’t last long. Because I was just fighting kids when it happened. But it was still happening outside school.

M: When did you start to learn about your own cultural history? Was that in high school when you were with those elders? Because I know, when I was raised in this education system, I didn’t know anything about First Nations’ history and culture until university. It was really shocking. It was like finding out a family member was a mass murderer or something.

B: Yeah, it’s lacking. I learned about culture in my home. Mum taught me my culture and taught me who I was. But I guess as a kid, you still have identity issues when you’re faced with racism, because as a little kid you’re so impressionable.  And you're like, ‘Oh, I wish I wasn’t a blackfella. I wish I could fit in with these kids.’ And you tried to like, make friends with the enemies, I guess. Which is soul-destroying because they end up making black jokes about you.

I think it was conditioned in the home, so I was lucky to have you know, my culture instilled inme in my home behind life and yeah, I grew up pretty radical having a radical mother who was part of the movement. My mum was a part of the Stolen Generations and I guess, even for her it was hard to connect back to culture after being taken so far from it. Our family never let her go. They followed her everywhere she went. So, we couldn’t lose our culture. We couldn’t.

M: And you started writing raps in Year 8? In English class?

B: Ha! Yeah.

M: How did that go down?

B: We had a teacher. He was like, an English sub but he also did our woodwork classes. I think he just wanted me and my friend out of the class all the time, because we were disruptive. So, as a part of English class, he’d send us outside and then we’d write rhymes. And then we’d perform them in front of the class. So shame [laughs]. So cringe.

M: Why cringe? Well, do you remember what the raps were about or anything?

B: Yeah. Crips and Bloods [laughs].

M: That was a big thing growing up in Melbourne, too. All the Islanders brought it over from New Zealand because it was like a real thing in parts of Wellington. There were a lot of shootings and murders. In my neighbourhood, the Crips were Maori’s and the Bloods were all Samoan. Was that happening around your neighbourhood?

B: Yeah, we had a big Maori, Samoan and Tongan community at school and in the neighbourhood at the time. Everybody was walking around with
bandanas, and I guess I gravitated towards them because they were brown people. It was huge. We had a little group called ‘G’s Up’. It was cringe. It was so funny because we’d meet up at Macca’s and people would have crump battles.

M: I interviewed Onefour a year ago. They took me to this place in Mount Druitt, where gangs would meet up and have dance battles. I remember when that shit was happening when I was a kid. Like people would meet up and have hectic dance battles and shit.

B: I wish it was still the go. If you had beef with the kid, you would just out dance them.

M: There were really staunch dudes in our area just known for being mad dancers. I thought that was a sick, sensitive, creative thing that happened in the suburbs.

B: It was special. Looking back at it, you could just sort stuff out through dance.

M: Yeah, but it’s coming back with all the TikTok shit. Have you seen all that? You see these hard rappers or eshays? I even saw Hooligan Hefs and those dudes on TikTok performing their dance moves. I heard you went to Blacktown and were involved in rap battles?

B: Yeah, we’d all meet up at the back of the library. And they'd have power points on the outside. So, we put all our speakers and our phones in the power points and pump beats.

My sister girls would bet drinks with the guys saying I’d rip them. And then I’d rip them. But I can’t freestyle anymore. I think it was like when I was drunk.

I guess back at the time I was using ice at the time, so my brain kind of felt like it was quicker. Even though it was just full of shit. It was nice to have people coming and calling me a bitch. It's funny how the tables turn. We got a lot of free drinks.

M: What music were you listening to? Like Australian hip-hop?

B: I did love Sky’High when she came out. Yeah. I think, to say she was female and that she was First Nations as well—it was just a huge impact [on me as a kid]. At that time, it was more like Pac. I love listening to 2Pac and he would just get me through a lot of things.

M: I love Sky’High. She redefined Australian hip-hop. A gutter icon, for real. Were there any particular Pac tracks or albums that you played to death?

B: I love ‘I Wonder If Heaven Got a Ghetto’, ‘Thugz Mansion’, and ‘Keep Ya Head Up.’ ‘Baby Don’t Cry’ was a huge one. It helped me through a lot of stuff. My brother played it to me. Even though it was a triggering track to listen to. It [‘Baby Don’t Cry’] speaks to me. Growing up in a female household and having a single mother. I needed to listen to that. And I guess it was beautiful that my big brother would dedicate these songs
to the females in our house. It goes to show how much my brothers loved and respected women because they were raised by one. It was something nice to have in a household that was sometimes dysfunctional. We still made it out, like made it through together.

M: So at what point did high school start falling apart for you?

B: I was kicked out in Year 8. Fighting kids.

M: Yeah. It is what it is.

B: I went to Verona and I was the only female at that school. It was a bit gross. Especially with teenage boys. So, it was forever me like, challenging sexism in school. You could tell the teachers were stressed out. It was a behavioural school. I left there, fell pregnant with my daughter when I was 15 and, um, yeah, I had a really quite abusive relationship with her father. And so we didn’t, we don’t talk or nothing. So, I moved to Mildura to get away from him with my sister [and] try to start up a new life in the country. All my cousinslived there. I just wanted to be close to my family. I had my own house by the time I was 15. I wanted to come back up to Sydney for New Year’s, and then I ran into old friends there. And that’s when I was introduced to ice. And pretty much just like that everything fell to shit. It was around 2011.

M: That was about the time that I started fucking with shard. I feel like it was everywhere. Everywhere in the places we come from. It burnt my entire circle. Put a lot of good ones in prison. And it was so cheap.

B: It was so normalised. Everybody had it. And people were just like, “Do you want to smoke? Do you want to smoke?” And if you have any trauma in your life, you’re just like, “Yeah, sure. You all look really happy.” They're not.

M: They’re just distracted. I found in it a perfect distraction. For days. And then the distractions fall away, and you’re left in the shit. Horrible shit. Proper horror. Why do you think it draws those personalities to it?

B: You want to escape from reality, like you’re already at a low point in your life. You’re associating with people who are at low times in their lives as well.

As a little girl like you never dreamt of ever touching that shit. You would look down at people who were on it. I remember when my brother first got on it and I was devastated.

It broke my heart and I called him a junkie. And I never thought I’d get on it. But there I was with a pipe in my hand doing the thing that I hated the most.

M: At what point do you think it got a hold of you?

B: Straight away.

M: I know for me, it started off on a Saturday night. Then it was Friday and Saturday night. Pretty soon it was Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday. I was drowning. Losing sight of my days and stuff. What is it about people who have lost something or feel like they have got this missing piece? Those who use fear or violence or something to fill that grief or that loss? Why do you think that happens?

B: I think there’s a stigma around mental health, like just sweep it away, and don’t deal with it. I think that stigma leads to a lot of question like, how do we cope in this world? We grow up in a pretty racist country. It’s like a way to kind of assert your dominance in a society. As a black kid I’d grow up and people would say we stole it anyway. Like this isn’t your land and I’ll still fight for it. You got trauma and you’ve got issues, but you don’t want to face it so it’s just easier to put a mask on it and self-medicate. There’s this thing in our community, there’s an expectation you got to be an angry black woman, or you got to be really strong. You’re
not given a chance to be weak. I feel as a black woman, we’re not allowed to be introverts.

M: When did things start heating up for you because you found yourself in lockup? I had the same issues. I was committing desperate crimes to make a living.

B: Yeah. We would do break-ins just to get ice and stuff. We’d be like stealing from shops or creeping in shops and going in the back and stuff. Even breaking into people’s homes and you feel at the time you don’t have any remorse.

All you had in your head was, “I want drugs.” The boys would send me in to rob chicks and they’d rob the blokes. There’s things that like flashback in my head like I wish I could just give back these people their stuff now. You feel an immense amount of guilt.

So, yeah, I think like my last stint I went on the run for a bit. It was an assault police charge.  It was pretty heavy. When you’re on drugs, you just don't think straight like you think that you can make all these crazy plans. But in the back of my mind, my reality would say like, I can’t run off with my kid, like, I gotta face the music, they’re gonna find me. It’s just going to end up worse. So, I ended up going home to my mum’s house, and I was like really starving. I was homeless at the time. My mum wouldn’t deal with mewhen I was on drugs, because she had my two other kids there. I don’t think anybody wants to be around people who are on ice especially because they got to keep the household safe.
But yeah, I came home. She cooked me a feed. And then we contacted my old juvenile justice. Me and my mum, we called him up. And I’m like, “Can you take me in? Like, can youcome and hand me in?” And he’s like, “Alright, we’ll go to the pub. We’ll have the Last Supper.” He shouted me steak and I went with him to hand myself into the police. I think that was like my rock bottom. When they took me to the cell, it was the rock bottom I needed to hit. How can I keep doing this to my children? I’m pregnant with my third life. I want better. I want to be better. I want my kids to have somebody. Even if I couldn’t have been the role model to them or their life, I want to set the example. You can. You can make it back.

MAHMOOD FAZAL: When did you start rapping seriously? When did music become your way out?

BARKAA: I was always writing. In jail I was writing music. I’d rap in front of these two sister girls there. We would have a Koori meeting and we’d all sit in a circle. Afterwards, I’d be like, “I wanna rap sis.” So, I’d spit a rap and it brought the jail closer. I felt like I had something there. I could draw them in with what I was saying. When I got out of prison, I started doing my community services course because I wanted to do youth work. It was a huge adjustment for me to read again. I started rapping freestyle, recording videos in my bedroom when my kids were asleep and putting them up on Facebook. I wanted to do something I loved. But now that I’m doing it as a career, I’ve realised it’s so technical. It’s all emails. I love doing it. I get to give back to my community and inspire young kids. I get to tell my story through music.

ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTOR/S
Mahmood Fazal is a Walkley award-winning writer. After abandoning his role as the sergeant-at-arms of the Mongols Motorcycle Club, Mahmood has devoted his life to bare-knuckle stories that challenge our views on crime, violence, imprisonment and radicalisation. Mahmood is currently writing a memoir, due to be published by HarperCollins in 2022.



LITTLE BROTHER


Nick Kilner | First published in Issue 01, August 2021
For years I was on the sideline. I watched my older brother Harry struggle with heroin addiction. I watched him go from someone I admired, an attractive masculine figure that I longed to be like, into someone who slowly lost their life skills and descended into someone I could not recognise.

Throughout his adult life, Harry longed to be an artist. In his twenties, he dabbled in prose and poems, wrote film scripts, and made short films. Harry longed to represent a gritty and romanticised version of his counter-cultural experiences of doing drugs like ecstasy, GHB, speed, and cannabis—his escapades of being lost to the moment, to the night, to the city. Looking to find that spark that penetrates through the clutter of just living, as it was put in his writing. Also influenced by his country town upbringing in South Grafton NSW, he wrote a film script based on his experiences in the small town of Lismore where he went to university. It centered around him and his friends labouring over scoring drugs from an eccentric gay alcoholic drug dealer, who had a plaster cast of his erection in a fish tank as the centerpiece of his house. If you bought from this dealer, the condition was that you weren’t allowed to leave straight away. You had to stay and have a drink or smoke, as it was deemed suspicious to have people coming and going. As a result, they all got to know the characters who floated in and out of the dwelling.

Harry was eight years older than me, and as the younger brother, I thought he was just the coolest guy; always surrounded by friends and pretty girlfriends who were kind to me. I tagged along with them to social gatherings, to the pub where we played pool while they drank beers and I nursed lemonade. Harry was traditionally a sporty guy, excelling in basketball till a repeat shoulder injury curtailed his hopes and dreams. He had a jockish vibe, attractive and fit. I think he liked presenting with a typical Australian masculine identity: someone who only drank VB, kicked back at the TAB, and followed Rugby League—but in his spare time, wrote poems and was interested in art. In my teenage years, Harry seemed to have it worked out, pursuing creativity, working as a nurse, and having fun with mates. I was timid, shy, suffering from eczema, and was the definition of a late bloomer. Harry was there coaching me through my tribulations and pushing me to grow into myself. In year twelve, Harry physically threw me off the computer and took over an MSN conversation I was having with my high school crush. Next thing, I had my first ever date, a trip to the movies, orchestrated through Harry’s words. He was generous with the art that he was drawn to as well. Through Harry I was introduced into a wide culture of books, music and film. Art, with him, was a place where an inner life was cultivated—words, pictures, sounds—that enrich life and deepen experience.

Harry’s descent into heroin started around his mid-twenties. Initially I didn’t have too many thoughts on his drug use. He was the same, more distant perhaps, but he hid it well. I thought of it as an extension of his creative pursuits. He loved the Beats, Charles Bukowski, and Nick Cave—art made by heroin users and working-class underdogs. I thought of him as uncovering the depths and secrets to euphoric spaces, like the artists before him.

Irvine Welsh, the author of Trainspotting, said that heroin use is always synonymous with the identity that comes along with taking the drug. It’s as if one almost adopts a persona, a lifestyle, one imbued with rebellion, a sense of subversive dissent, where the world blissfully fades away. Harry embraced this identity as well, I saw at times he almost flaunted his use, he was the misunderstood junky, influenced from grunge art and a cultural milieu where heroin was the way to be cool. Until this of course wore off and the banality, routine, and difficulty of maintaining a heroin habit every day took over.

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I grew up in Newcastle NSW with my mother and other brother William. William and I were only two years apart, yet he presented as older—not a late bloomer like me. William hung out with Harry’s mates just as I did and witnessed Harry writing and filmmaking when Harry moved to Newcastle after university. But their relationship had a different dynamic, one that was often marred with clashes, rivalry, and judgments towards each other. William, on his own journey to find himself, dropped out of high school when I was fifteen and traveled to Katherine, Northern Territory, seemingly as far away and remote as he could muster.

At nineteen years old my childhood was over. Friends were going off to university, acquiring jobs and embracing the formative period of young adulthood. I was lost and lacking direction, still living in the unhappy home of my childhood. Mum was addicted with a level of vision impairment that left her categorised as legally blind. She was deeply caring and the most resilient person I have ever known, but was hardened from years of violence and abuse. Her rage lingered through our home and PTSD left her temperament anxious and prone to depression—her source of comfort: Christianity.

Harry had been eking out a living in Sydney for a few years, using heroin on and off among a small inner circle of users. I was longing for a guiding figure and in my directionless state I asked Harry if I could move in with him. Harry had said he wasn’t sure about it. His use was still obscured at this point, but I knew what he meant. Harry defined his heroin use as chipping: something flirted with, but ultimately you had to want to have a habit to be an addict. Maybe true in the beginning, it was clear he was in denial. When I insisted, Harry said that he was off it, that he was getting off it, and he agreed to let me move into his vacant room. I moved to Sydney and was ushered into his fold with an edict—do as I say, not as I do. Harry lived with his girlfriend, who also used. A few close friends floated around the house as well—funny, sometimes loveable characters, all incongruously matched. During my first night, they retreated to their room to use, afterwards they came out sleepy and on the nod. It was always this way, never in front of me.

Our unit was just across from Coogee beach and the busy city was full of activity. In the first couple weeks I explored a little, but I mostly spent my time playing Pokémon in my bedroom. After work one day Harry came in to chat, sitting on my bed, taking an interest and having a turn of my Game Boy, changing the name of my Bulbasaur to ‘ Binky ’. There was an understanding without speaking. With a calmness in his voice he told me to not be so hard on myself, coaxing me to get out there and have a go. “We’re sensitive depressive types,” he said. “We need to be around people and prioritise positive outlets, outlets like playing basketball.” There were often moments like these in our relationship: Harry offering advice, reflecting it back on himself, showing a sensitivity. He told me he wished he hadn’t hit recreational drugs like ecstasy so hard when he was young. “The drugs were never that good. It was always about being around your friends, feeling a belonging that made it worthwhile,” he said.

For a time there was something rebellious and communal about living amongst addicts and coming of age alongside them. I landed a minimum wage job. We went out for drinks, and had friends over. Harry and his girlfriend had their work routine. It didn’t feel that abnormal. We were always poor though. Close to payday Harry always asked me for money and I struggled to say no.

The first time Harry asked for the remainder of my account, he said, “Don’t worry, you just have to learn to steal.” Stealing became essential, a safety net to fall back on. I think it was the age, and something could be said of youth and their desire to take risks and test themselves, because when I started thieving, I found it thrilling. Quiet and innocent, not long ago I was still attending church every Sunday with my mother. It was uncharacteristic of me, but I enthusiastically took to it, forging my place among them. The risk and reward, like a chemical rush. In a little metro supermarket, we must have stolen thousands of dollars’ worth of food. The workers there looked unappreciated and complacent. As a result we could spend our last dollar on a chocolate bar and come out with our backpacks full of everything else.

After some time, Harry and his friends’ tolerance grew and their habits became too expensive. It was chaos when heroin’s soothing quality was not there to ease their anxieties—when they couldn’t use. A sinister quality surfaced from their depths, and it brought out the worst in them. I tried to voice my concern to Harry on occasion, but what did I know? I was like a puppy barking and Harry merely told me to get thicker skin. Eventually they stopped paying the rent and our mother, distressed to the point of madness and mania, had to come salvage the situation.

Harry, unwilling to look towards a path out of his situation moved to a derelict unit minutes from Kings Cross. His living space was a tiny bedroom, with festering toilets shared with an assortment of addicts, sex workers, and dealers. I moved back to my mother’s house. I had already turned to the dole at this point, retreating from work into safety, unable to handle the sharp edges of the workplace—the normalised exploitation, the unnatural hierarchy of mean-spirited bosses. Maybe Harry was right about getting thicker skin, but I don’t think the buffer that opiates offered was the path to resilience.

A year later Harry was caught shoplifting too many times and sentenced to go to either jail or rehab. In rehab, friends and family rallied around him, visiting him often, getting behind his plans and positive energy towards a renewed life. I spent a whole day at rehab, having lunch and chatting, playing volleyball and ping pong. The air was light. It seemed like the past few years were just a blip on the road, an experiment, and Harry, an intelligent uni graduate, was back on his way. He stayed for 10 months, longer than he was mandated for, only leaving to join a family reunion and our Nana’s seventieth in the Philippines. He used the first day out of rehab. William found him on the toilet drooped over, going blue with a needle hanging out of his arm. After some slaps to the face—“I just wanted a taste,” he said. “It doesn’t mean I have a habit.”

In the Philippines we toured the provincial town of our mother. The landscape was full of sugar cane farms and Spanish architecture. Our great uncle showed us fighting roosters and the ring where locals would gather to gamble. The town lit up the stories that I had heard over the years. This was the place where Nana gave Mum to a mean aunt at four years old when she was unable to care for her. The place wherein her teenage years, Mum took over the role of raising her younger siblings as her father drank and abused his wife.

Harry made big declarations at Nana’s birthday about how he was going to get his life on track, doing it for Nana who wanted to see him succeed.  Shortly after, he met a girl at a mestizo bar—a trendy place that mixed-race Filipinos had designated as a place to gather. The girl, an artist who also liked her drugs, took to Harry and he was off into the night again. Again, justified by the fact that he was on holiday and it was a last hurrah. I was with him on one of these nights, as he was coming down off amphetamines, the night winding down, dawn surfacing, but he couldn’t stop. Our phones dead, lost in Metro Manila, a city so large it intimidated. Harry was inconsolable in his pursuit for an endless night. I tailed after him not knowing what to do, sad and frustrated, not able to understand why Harry was seeking oblivion.

After the Philippines Harry moved to South Grafton in northern NSW, where he grew up, to work and live alongside our father. Dad was affectionate and loving when it suited him. But he was a bitter man, didactic and hyper-critical, with a ferocious temper, not dissimilar to his father before him. Dad had a makeshift one-bedroom shack, with outdoor kitchen and toilet, thrown together next to the horse stables on a small plot of land in the centre of South Grafton. When we were children, William and I would visit Dad and Harry for school holidays here. We would all bunk in the small room like little army men.
Dad was a racehorse trainer by trade but had also spent time shearing and droving cattle on horseback. He was a man etched from the mythos of ‘Australia’. An Australia that built up the battler, the bushranger, the pioneering patriarch. An Australia that functionally denied its violent past, the same way Dad functionally denied his violence and abuse perpetrated in his marriage. Functionable, because to admit is to stop—to admit and be honest about what has been done is to change the idea of oneself.

Before Harry arrived, after our trip to the Philippines, I had already been living in South Grafton. I was there under the guise of working at the stables but was really trying to build a relationship with my father. I was twenty-two and had been forever retreating, my idle days filled with unemployment, video games, and reading about eastern philosophy. I was yearning for my own spark, one that would penetrate through my feeling that the world was broken and jolt me out of the malaise I felt. My mother had yelled at me till I left, telling me to go work and be a nuisance at Dad’s place—her only markers for wellbeing were employment or enrolling in a business course.

Everyone encouraged Harry to go to Brisbane where he had a lot of friends. He said he owed it to Dad to come work, but maybe deep down he knew it was a place where he could hide, where he would be unchallenged. He began using heroin straight away.

The stables were a place where work and drinking meshed. Characters came to pick up manure, and take horses for walks, pay in dribs and drabs and endless beer. I’ve often thought there was a documentary to be made, but death due to alcoholism and old age has left their stories mute. Harry reflected on his upbringing here, when he was young, he thought the men had it all figured out, jolly and carefree, drinking every day among mates.

Within close walking distance to Dad’s property there is a small row of pubs, each one with its own culture. At nine am, people gather out the front of the Post Office Hotel, waiting for it to open, ready to begin drinking for the day. When I first arrived, I walked down the main street, taking in the places of my childhood. The corner shop, the Great Northern where we played pool, darts, and drank post-mix, and the second-hand bookshop where I would buy two-dollar Goosebumps. As I continued on towards the nearby river where I swam as a child, screams and shouts echoed from the end of the street just across from the Walkers Hotel. Drawn to the incident, I watched from a distance trying to uncover the story between deafening wails and screeches: a teenage daughter raped by a friend. Later on, back at the stables, amongst the gossip, I heard the rapist was stabbed.

I left South Grafton after a year to study at Lismore uni, where I dropped out after a couple years and my first serious relationship came to a difficult end—not mature and equipped enough to handle the complexity of intimacy, despite my overwhelming desire for it. I left for Melbourne, heartbroken, but determined to start afresh and to begin something new for me, therapy. The word trauma was not in my vocabulary before Melbourne and in therapy a story began to form.

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In Melbourne I remained connected to Harry. We would catch up over the phone—sometimes he would call to give me a horse tip and I would talk about recent art that I liked. We never talked about his substance use. I think he appreciated respite from the interminable judgement and shame that addicts are accustomed to. After two years, Harry and our mother came to visit my vacant share-house for Christmas. Harry had been grinding out the gruelling stable work and using drugs continuously. Heroin, the popular drug of the last few decades, was now superseded by methamphetamine. Heroin is pain relief, calming, and doesn’t rip through the brain. Ice is ego, aggressive confidence, the user feeling ten feet tall. Its toll showed and there was a change. A sour belligerence similar to our father’s seemed to protrude from him. I wanted to show him around Melbourne, to have quality time, to share my growth. But he was drinking constantly and the days seemed to get away.

It was a simple thing really.
He knocked over my plant.

When I found it, he had half-heartedly put it back into the pot, but dirt littered my floor. When confronted if it was my fault for resting it on the windowsill which he tried to open, a flight brewed. Having grown up with parents whose petty arguments escalated to a point of winning at all costs, we both knew what to say to hurt, where to dig it in. Anger enveloped us and back and forth we went, escalating till my loaded words formed a tipping point. “What the fuck are you doing? Get your shit together. You’re too much of a coward to get off the drugs. You’re not who you used to be!” Harry exploded in rage. I saw a beast, I saw desperation, I saw a deep pain. I saw that he was acutely aware of what was happening, what was overtaking him, and didn’t need his little brother pointing it out.

Strong from his stable work, he grabbed me by the neck, smashing me hard against the stovetop multiple times. Then he disappeared. I cried and cried lying on my bedroom floor like a child, the energy of my words lingering through me. Harry was missing for 24 hours in Melbourne, a city where he knew no one. He surfaced just hours before his flight with our mother, looking frazzled and high, the hurt still showing on his face. We hugged and never spoke of the incident.

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I was distant after Harry’s visit to Melbourne. I didn’t visit South Grafton for four years and only saw him a handful of times. We didn’t speak on the phone like we used to. At this point his addiction was like an ouroboros. His polydrug use was now a mainstay and the updates from my mother were too much at times. Just as Harry seemed to be at his lowest point, he kept spiralling. Harry pawned his friend’s bike and our TV at home. Harry had Hep C. Harry was breaking in a horse and was trampled. Harry is in hospital, he was assaulted. Harry was attacked with a hammer by a burglar. Harry crying, he thought he was going to kill the man when he overpowered him. Harry was in the prison psych ward, there was a bad batch of ice going around and he went into psychosis. Harry tormented the streets screaming at people and in the psych unit he was eating his bed sheets.

I wanted to look away.
I wanted to look away from my whole family.

It wasn’t until I became an uncle at thirty, when Harry had a child with Erin, another lost soul, that I travelled back to the stables, back to South Grafton, in the temporary solace and sanctuary that a newborn offered. I’m thankful for that time. Harry and I went to the movies; I shared a poem I had written; we led the horses to the river again. Grafton felt distant, but family is family and the love and influence, no matter how hard, can’t be forgotten, only appreciated. I looked over Harry’s bookshelf pointing to a copy of Hot Water Music by Charles Bukowski. “Can I borrow this?” I asked Harry.

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When Harry visited me in Melbourne, it was at a time when I was assertively trying to overcome the past. I came from a naïve place, a place where I thought that healing was to be rid of, to purge and remove. To form a new self and feel like the past never existed in the first place. I pushed that idea onto Harry when I challenged him. I wanted him to heal. I wanted him to start that journey. I was naïve. No one can erase the past, only accept it, accept themselves and their place—a difficult reckoning. Early in 2018 I received a phone call from my mother. Harry and Erin had a drug-fuelled fight and she left for her sister’s house in anger. On the back roads to the town of Casino she crashed into a guard rail and was killed instantly. Harry was destroyed after Erin’s death, he blamed himself. Their child, Iggy, was already living in kinship care with our mother. He joined them and existed in a limbo state, using heavily, ruminating the whole thing, having a nervous breakdown. He sought respite in rehab. But it wasn’t like the first time, people didn’t rally behind him. After five months he left despite his worker saying he wasn’t ready. I only got around to calling him the day he exited. He sounded lonely, but surprisingly clear and articulate. There was an old familiarity to him. It was the first time no drugs were in his body for nine years. A few days later he caught up with an old Sydney friend. His tolerance low, Harry overdosed on an injection of heroin, cocaine, ice and seroquel, it was too much for his heart and he died.

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When I heard the news, all I could see was an image. Closing my eyes full of tears, I kept seeing Harry in his final moment. Like a dream, there he was, immersed in soft light, everything else dark and obscure, sprawling back on a couch, the drugs kicking in. When did life stop, where did he go, where does anyone go? The image stayed with me for days. It wasn’t till I saw his cold body, with my mother wailing, that it finally felt real.

The word trauma often falls short when describing the complex interplay of psycho-social forces. Despite this I have found the word comforting, helping me to develop compassion for the struggles running through my family. Trauma often feels as if it moves between the spaces of real and unreal, existing as dream. Vivid, faint, and forgotten dreams. Dreams that sit in limbs and veins, that find their way into cracks and crevices of the body and into the cells that form the inner voice.

I’m often surprised by what people can endure and what defeats them. Cataclysmic events, violence, abuse, people find a way to survive, to keep going. It’s in the day-to-day: a sad injustice, a disparaging remark, a derisive judgement, the weight of other people’s eyes, a long day grinding nowhere. These will be the moments that get a person, that burrow under skin, when it feels like there is no love to be found—when the dreams feel all too real. This is when a person falls to their vice, when they reach for the powder, retreating and hiding from the world and themselves.

In my last conversation with Harry he talked of studying child psychology. He wanted to understand, he wanted a way forward, a way out. He wanted healing. Harry tread the path unbeknownst, navigating the best he could through a sea of hurt. My own inner work, my own way forward, was made on the same path Harry had tread, as I walked behind him, as I witnessed and learnt from his struggles, and as I gravitated to all that I admired. Memories and qualities that I now hold close.


Love and thanks, from your little brother.


ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTOR/S
Nick Kilner is a youth worker living in Narrm  (Melbourne). An excerpt of Little Brother commissioned for Issue 01 ‘Grief’, was recently featured in Sydney Herald Morning Herald ︎︎︎
Saturday May 28 2022