THESE PRECIOUS HOURS

Thoughts from the quiet.

POP CULTURE SPIRIT WOW

I have been back in New York a week, the States a little longer. I arrived in Los Angeles on the Wednesday of the fires. I could taste the smoke in the back of my throat almost from the moment I left the airport. I spent the days most huddled in the cave of my first floor hotel room, scanning Facebook, texting friends, and trying to understand where the fires were, where they were going.

Since I’ve been back my nights have taken on a pattern I’d forgotten. I go to sleep early, between 10 and 11p.m. if I can. Two hours later, I wake up, wide awake and so fully refreshed I expect to see daylight pouring in and 6 or 7 hours passed. I then spend the rest of the night up, before whatever part of me it is that insists all is well, it’s day time, we’re to stay awake finally relents—not admitting any mistake has been made, mind you, just accepting my concerns about the potential state of me later if I don’t close my eyes for a few hours—and lets me sleep.

When I tell people about this, they all say the same thing—“Oh no.” But in fact I look forward to these hours. I relish them. If anything I feel a great responsibility not to waste them.

In large part I spend the time reading from the dozens of books that I bought when I was in Australia. It’s taken me a lot of years to fully accept just how strangely important Australia is to me, to how I see myself and to how I know God. I’m still not sure I’m fully there. How can a place you only visited for the first time in your 40s feel so clearly like home? How can that be real?

But its importance to me should have been obvious from the desperation with which I roamed the aisles of bookstores at the end of my first visit, looking for titles that could serve like acorns through the winter, however long that might be, until I might come again.

So far I’ve yet to find the outer limits of the topics I’m interested when it comes to Australian writing. I haven’t bought any cookbooks as of yet, nor anything about cricket, but after watching the test match on Boxing Day that’s just a matter of time.

In general I tend toward Australian biographies and memoirs, particularly of politicians. Right now I’m making my way through a biography of the country’s second prime minister and a memoir of more recent political fixer, with intermittent bursts spent devouring an Australian journalist’s tell-all of the 2022 election, in which a baby-faced Christian zealot was turned out in favor of a long-time battler of the Labor Party. Over the course of the month I spent in Australia, you could see the engines of the party and the media slowly churning into life, preparing for a new election in the next 6 months. Having swept in 2022, the Battler’s position looked more and more fragile over the course of my time there, despite the fact that his opponent has spent his career in politics trying to convince the country to think of immigrants, refugees, and Aboriginal peoples in the most shocking ways.

A year into the Battler’s term he launched a national campaign to enable Aboriginal people to have a greater voice in the Australian political system, a move that had been in the work for many years and which he had had promised to put on the national agenda. His action involved the entire population of Australia being asked to vote yes or no on the referendum, which was known as the Voice.

For those for whom today’s American inauguration is not sufficient explanation as to why my political and personal interests lie where they do—yes, it’s true (and I know many Australians will laugh at this), paying attention to Australian politics is an act of mental health on my part, as is not writing anything about the current state of the U.S.—I point to moments like the Voice, where the possibilities of democracy are on display. In 2017 the country had a similar national vote on same-sex marriage. It was a fraught and at times ugly campaign that definitely did harm to queer people along the way (and intentionally so on the part of some of the politicians involved). But in the end, same-sex marriage became the law of the land, not because its elected representatives had agreed to it or its High Court had ruled on it, but because the Australian people said so. For me, that’s an incredible, inspiring thing.

It’s approaching 2:30 a.m. Still early in the broader scheme of my nighttime meanderings, but I’m starting to get nervous. I know I won’t have these hours forever. Suddenly at some point in the next week or so I’ll sleep through much more of the night. Then one day I’ll wake and it will actually be morning. And not long after that, days probably, I’ll have forgotten not only these sacred hours but the sadness I felt when they were over.

Put simply, the Bully who is running to defeat the Battler saw the Voice campaign as an opportunity to restore some of the shine on his own party before the next election, and turned his machine against it. In the end the referendum failed, and the Battler did lose some credibility and confidence, all of which the Bully is now exploiting as best he can, with further attacks upon First Peoples and social practices of acknowledgment of them that seem to be reinforcing the divisions and conflicts that his campaign let loose.

Everywhere I went in Australia people talked about the Voice. And whether they were in favor of it or against, its failure seems like a ghost haunting the land. The right wingers seem to think if they’re savage enough they’ll be able to silence the pain that they’ve let loose, but it doesn’t take a genius to know the opposite is the case.

The thing that shocked me the most was hearing a number of middle aged and older gay men echo the Bully’s point of view. Maybe the Voice wasn’t the right way forward, or wasn’t handled the right way, I don’t know. But to see a community that had experienced their own social injustices and then release through the same process complaining about First Peoples of Australia was disappointing in the extreme.

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It’s after 3 a.m. now and I’m restless to get another pot of tea and go back to Helen Garner, one of my other must-read Australian writers, Peter Temple, Don Watson, Robert Drewe, George Megalogenis, Tim Winton, and so many new writers I discovered in the stacks. Garner has a new book about a season spent watching her teenage grandson play footy. She’s known in Australia for producing carefully observed books about the law that provoke incredibly challenging questions about the justice system, gender, and herself. I know of no writer more willing to expose herself to attack with the attitudes and questions she reveals in herself, and in doing so forces the readers to consider their own silently-held views. Her work is a constant inspiration to me.

I’m halfway through The Season. There’s an unsettling sexual element that emerges at times, an acknowledgement of the physicality of the teenagers. I have the sense of some kind of turning point coming, that no matter what she might have wished, this will be more than the story of a gran showering love on her grandson.

I’m also rereading Peter Temple’s two volume treasure about cops in and around Melbourne, The Broken Shore and Truth. I’m in the second volume now; its pages are wrung through with the sour sweat of despair and a restless, wounded masculinity. Like Garner, Temple is truly one of the great writers of Australia. His writing also gives me occasional glimpses of Melbourne, each of them like a doorway through which I can wander back. A passing comment about the restaurant-y neighborhood of Lygon Street has me thinking back to a winter afternoon I sat there watching a thunderstorm suddenly erupt in sheets of rain, only to vanish 20 minutes later, to be replaced by birdsong that echoed in the quiet.

When I get tired of reading I’ve taken to rewatching episodes of Fisk on Netflix, a comedy set in Melbourne about an estate lawyer working in a small, The Office-like firm.

The first time through I saw the show mostly in terms of the humiliations the lead is put through. But now I’m struck more by the poignancy of it all. In the third episode her horrible ex-husband returns and asks for shared custody of her dog, which is basically her one true friend.

When she refuses he steals the dog. Her failure to get it back is an absolute punch in the gut. But then the episode ends with her case of the week, a pair of unhinged kleptomaniacs who attempt to take everything within view, showing up with the dog, along with the stool her ex-husband had tied him to. I am a puddle.

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For Christmas this year I sent a lot of my relatives books by different Australian authors—Garner for my aunts, Chloe Hooper’s true crime work for my sister. I wanted to send my brother and my brother-in-law some of Michael Leunig’s cartoons, but in the wake of his death it’s all gone before I get there. At the time I didn’t even think about why I’m forcing my family to travel down my Australian rabbit hole with me. But in retrospect maybe I’m trying to give them some window into me, to let the words of others do what my own cannot. (See: Everything I’ve written here about Australia.)

While I was in Australia my Jesuit friends told me about three different former Australian Jesuits who had each gone on to great careers as writers. I had coffee with one, Michael McGirr, a lightning-in-a-bottle of a person filled with laughter and stories. While I didn’t go to him exactly looking for advice about my own life, there was something of the kindness of an older brother about him, an understanding of my situation that perhaps exceeds my own. “You are going to be fine,” he told me, and when he said it, I knew it was true.

It’s a message a lot of people told me in different ways while I was in Australia, most especially the Jesuits with whom I stayed. I was uncertain about staying in Jesuit communities. That’s not something a guy on leave would normally do. I kept looking for cracks in the façade of the guys I stayed with, signs of irritation or disappointment at my presence. But I found amongst them only acceptance and invitation.

And sitting at simple community Masses in chapels in North Sydney or Parkville, having meals with Jesuits in Brisbane and Melbourne and Sydney whom I’ve known forever and others that I have only just met, and above all getting the chance to be in our houses once again, to sit quietly and soak all of that in was so meaningful to me that writing about it actually feels like it cheapens the experience. I find myself hoping that no one actually reads this. Given that it’s so long, perhaps my wish will be granted!

It’s after 3:30 now and Garner is still waiting, as is Deakin and Temple and the political tell-all and a book about Australia’s birds. At some point I’ll grow a bit more still, perhaps, write a few more lines in the journal I took with me and try to hold onto that world on the other side of the planet a bit longer. Or maybe better, simply look upon its shimmering presence in this time I’ve been given, in gratitude and wonder.

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I’ll be back with something new for subscribers later this week.

Thanks for coming with me on this journey. We’ll see what 2025 holds, together.