​Death is no stranger. I’ve had my own brushes with mortality. And during my fifties and sixties, several family members and friends died: Frances, Geraldine, Maureen, Maire, Lily, Lynne and Marilyn. Each person was a treasured part of my life, irreplaceable, and sorely missed. Yet the timing of their deaths allowed some graciousness and space to grieve each of them.

​A couple of years before I would attain my allotted three-score-and-ten in 2025 (I had the hubris to presume I would make it that far), I hatched a plot for some significant festivities. By the time I reached 2025 I was harrowed by the unexpected illness and recent death of my darling friend Kathleen. She was nine years younger than me, and the oncologist remarked that hers was “the thinnest medical file I’ve ever seen”. Kathleen was the queen of festivities and the patron saint of craic. I understood for the first time the nature of denial. How it becomes possible to simultaneously know the full medical truth and yet find it irreconcilable with the sheer exuberance of the woman before you. She was perhaps the most fully alive person I have ever known. And my absolute rock. Her belief in me kept me alive through many dark days.

​Kathleen died on November 17th 2024,  ten days before her 63rd birthday. A week later my lifelong friend, Dee, let me know of a cancer diagnosis. How glad I am we fulfilled a dream deferred from our youth by travelling together to Cambodia earlier that year. In early 2025 I was with her at Royal Perth, when she was told that her condition was untreatable, and palliative care was offered. Dee asked about the necessary protocols for VAD. In the end it was not required. I saw her late one afternoon and massaged her feet. The cancer had all but taken her voice, but she whispered a request for some good news, an uncharacteristic question. Dee was whip-smart and no stranger to the dark. This was not a Helen Steiner Rice moment. What could I say? It took me a moment, but then I recalled her longstanding support of the American Indian cause and had my answer. “After 49 years in prison AIM leader Leonard Peltier has at last been freed”. Early the next morning I had news of her death, four months after Kathleen’s.

I have known and loved my friend Tess since I met her in the postgraduate lounge at WAIT in 1979. It would be fair to say that Tess possessed the “fattest medical file” anybody has ever seen. Over the decades of our friendship, she defied the odds so many times it was tempting to believe she was invincible. Tess’ intellect was legendary, her strength unmatched, her creativity burned like fire. Her soul was founded on love for whoever and whatever was vulnerable. She supported me through my grieving for Kathleen and for Dee.
 
I had never seen her defeated until the day I sat with a mutual friend by her dialysis bed, after a series of catastrophic medical crises. She told us she’d ‘had enough’ and was going to refuse dialysis. She told me in particular that it was time to join Kathleen and Dee. It was a moment of truth, and yet it was typical of Tess’ extraordinary life force that she navigated beyond this, and for a golden period of five weeks had safe harbour in our home, during which time we celebrated her 71st birthday, had film festivals, practised calligraphy, wrote and talked of writing. Four months after Dee’s death, Tess died. She left behind two sons, two novels, and an unfinished memoir. Her friends are bereft.

Yet there have still been joys, fierce and cherished. The plot I hatched for my first seventieth celebration? Well, that came to pass. I spent a week in Bali with my beloved nieces in February, and it exceeded all my hopes for family bonding and fun. And in June, the day Tess came home to us from hospital, I had an early morning phone call from the editor at Fremantle Press, offering to publish my poetry collection. It was glorious news and fabulous to be able to share it with Tess. It was painful, indeed, not to be able to tell Kathleen, who was the most stalwart fan of my writing. But if Joan Didion could allow herself a year of magical thinking, then perhaps I can be forgiven a moment’s indulgence? The sharp pain of not being able to tell Kathleen was swiftly followed by a quick glance upwards and the stray thought that perhaps she was “rearranging the furniture upstairs”.
She always was a mover and a shaker.

The year I turned seventy I acquired doctoral level skills in triage. I have plotted my course carefully. My activism has, for the time being, been put on hold. Having long nourished the hope that I would be dancing on the stage of the Crown Theatre as a seventy-year-old, I chose to focus what remained of my energy towards this end. It became my de facto birthday party. Bittersweet for knowing Kathleen and Tess would not be cheering me on from the audience. Yet so many friends and family members did come, many for the first time. And that gave me great delight.

​



During this shipwrecked, storm-blinded, catastrophic time I have clung to the mast of my own life as best I could. It is not possible to survive the losses I’ve sustained this year without the love and support of others. The conversations, the meals, the garden tending, the flowers have been a life line. Friendship and family are without doubt, the most important things in my life.

​Being the person most likely, I created the ceremonies, the eulogies, and delivered the funeral services for both Dee and Tess. I did this in close consultation with their respective families and friends, striving always to do as Emily Dickinson advised, “tell the truth, but tell it slant”. It took everything I had in me to do this.
 

I was not there to farewell Jude, who left us in October. But by all accounts, the ceremonies surrounding her passing were sublime, and she rests now in the ground of her cherished home in North Carolina. Already a Boddhisatva and ordained minister, she was honoured with the name of teacher, an elevated rank in her Buddhist tradition. My great good fortune was to encounter a bunch of Buddhist nuns who had alighted at Manna, as unlikely as a flock of flamingos. I spoke with them and the senior woman said she had visited Asheville and done several retreats at Black Mountain. They left me with the assurance that monasteries around the world would include Judy in their meditations for the following 49 days. 

​And now I am trusting that those who love me will understand my next course of action. On December 6th, Larry and I are attending the Crowded House concert at Sandalford Winery, a 70th birthday gift from my beloved brother Carl. We will park our van in a paddock, attend the concert, stay the night, and then on Sunday 7th, head off for a four-month road trip, destination uncertain. It’s a seventies thing. And the communication style will be similar. Very intermittent. Maybe the occasional postcard, maybe the occasional post. 
 
I am in dire need of rest, and have chosen this side quest. My grief needs ample, unhurried time; my soul craves the open road and the solace of Country. It’s hard stepping out of ordinary life for a time, but essential. It is, I hope, a temporary absence, not the permanent one that I know too well will come to us all sooner or later. I will carry your love with me, and know that my love remains with you.

Ménage à Trois  
​
Not traditional vows, ours. 
By a winter-mirrored lake   we said we’d take each other. 
  
Before our kin gathered by a bird-haunted lake we took each other, 
 and vowed to stay true in the infinite tense of the present breath.
  
Then — deep breath — we went and set up house  
with death, 
  
who proved to be a better mate than you might imagine.
  
When we exhale our exultation, 
little death comes, too .
  
Teases— then withdraws those icy feet, discreetly whispers ‘later’ .
  
We know we must obey when big death comes trailing lakewater 
to stake a claim  on this all-purpose bed and we are unwed. 
  
In the stark mercy of the absent breath birds still sing. 

My first time in San Francisco was a tale from Edgar Allan Poe. I spent the entire night trying to entice the household cats to sit on me (Poe was so poor he  tried to keep his ill wife warm using that method). It was only later I discovered Mark Twain’s wry observation that the coldest winter he’d ever known was a summer in San Francisco. Testify! This time I was more prepared. The trusty puffer jacket conveniently manifested in the middle aisle of Aldi just before my departure for the States. It was a great comfort as I waited in the icy wind  blowing up from Union Square for the tour bus that never arrived . No Muir Woods for me, then.

Fortunately, Rashida had called me out on my punk posing. Who was I kidding? I’ve always been more hippie than punk. Of course , I went to City Lights Bookstore and gloried in the cultural history I’ve loved since my undergraduate days. Oh, the poet’s room. Oh the joy of small scale, personal, funky book shops. Shoutout to Rabble Books, Crow Books, New Editions that supply the same kind of soul nourishment to writers ✍️ and readers in my hometown. 

A couple of years back I amused myself by entitling a poem “Hiss” in a cryptic micro-homage to Ginsberg’s “Howl”. It was published in Verseville.www.verseville.org/liana-joy-christensen.html

On the way back to my eyrie, I spoke briefly with Terry Williams who was standing in the boarded-up doorway of his burned out home. I said I was so sorry and asked if it was okay to take the following pictures. He gave his permission and went back to speaking with some neighbours. 

In this city of poets, Terry Williams stood his ground with clear dignity, calling to mind Leonard Cohen’s lines

Le dejeuner sur l’herbe may appear simple enough, but hear me out. The first time I came to the States I was paralysed by the sheer range of product choices in the supermarket and at Subways. Made me long for the Soviet-style simplicity of the old Action supermarket in Hilton. And as my friend Jenny will testify, I lasted two nanoseconds in Walmart. I made it past the door greeter when something like an anti-capitalist forcefield propelled me backwards and (to quote Monty Python) I bravely turned my tail and fled. So fast forward to yesterday when our rather regimented tour guide was very particular about being on time. We were dropped at a supermarket with a strictly limited schedule and told to buy food for the day. (In fairness, it was good advice to avoid queuing in the Park.) It felt like some kind of vanilla “Hunger Games” as I grabbed a basket and bolted round the aisles. Organic greens, Kerry Gold butter, fresh berries and cottage cheese, a peach, tomatoes, non-earwax cheese, organic ginger Kombucha. A modest victory for Australian tastes. I’d like to think I made Maggie Beer proud.

My rustic ​picnic was within sight and sound of Yosemite Falls … at 1000 m  the second tallest fall in the world. So the first of my double jeopardies was the repeated refrain on loop in my brain: don’t go chasing waterfalls. Given that it is perhaps the single most important reason people travel to Yosemite, I was always going to defy the interdict. Plus, I particularly owe it to my niece Janice to enjoy them on her behalf as well as my own (she is a dedicated waterfall-chaser).

As an environmentalist I am compelled by the stories of John Muir and the Buffalo Soldiers who were the precursors of today’s National Park rangers. But I cannot allow that story to erase other people’s history. https://www.intermountainhistories.org/items/show/339
​

Given the impossibly compromised nature of everything, I found myself feeling more and more mutinous as I was herded from one photo opportunity to the next. All day I was thinking of a poem I misremembered as being by Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Turns out it was his fellow Beat poet, Gregory Corso. Although even as a starry-eyed undergraduate I would love to have possessed the power to permanently expunge the misogynistic final stanza of “Marriage”, I’ve always loved the rest of the poem, and the excerpt below captures in more exuberant tones my  growing desire to quietly defy what is expected of me.

So, in the city  of Beat poets, is it more punk to visit or refrain from visiting the City Light Bookstore?

Late in the day I ventured out in this seemingly mellow neighbourhood and walked straight by another person’s tragedy. Police, fire trucks, and the burnt hulk of a beautiful Victorian dwelling. Yellow tape. Bystanders and neighbours gathered in huddles. The juxtaposition was just as Auden (and the Old Masters) observed: incommensurable. It could have been a film set. It was not. The likelihood of it being a race-based hate crime is high. The history is ugly /missionlocal.org/2024/05/fire-chars-home-of-black-dog-walker-earlier-targeted-by-racist-threats/

Twenty minutes to the airport: something to be said for a godawful o’clock departure. I fell through space and landed in an enchanted garden. Once there were butterflies.

An old habit from the days of lessons with Tessa at World’s End Studio: my journal entries begin with the date in Spanish. Time is neither linear, nor inexhaustible. To drive this new device is painstaking. I’m alone and it’s taken me hours. Once I’m caught up in the whirl, transmissions will be intermittent. But my love is a steady pulse. You can tune in to it anytime, anywhere.

​Just for now, I want to write of Ms Bun Roeung’s Ancient House. I’d been struck by the style of Cambodian houses. The local equivalent of McMansions were two or three stories and featured long windows in a range of Monet shades. Chandeliers were in favour. Ostentatious, but not unattractive. Far more appealing, though, were the traditional houses built on simple lines usually on stilts. The older ones tended to be weathered timber, the newer ones in a delicious array of colours that were an antidote to the greige plague of my hometown. Like little jewel boxes. I was curious: was the stilt design protection against flooding or a form of air conditioning?

​In a country whose crown jewel in Angkor Wat, the proud centre of the Khmer Empire which lasted for six centuries, the term ancient raises certain expectations. The tree-surrounded house I was delivered to was of human dimension – a pleasing timber construction that would meet the tenets of the Arts and Crafts ideal. Leaving my shoes at the bottom of a flight of concrete stairs I went up and was greeted by Ms Bun Roeung herself. A set of miniature models on a veranda table displayed the variants of classic Cambodian architecture. She answered my unspoken query by announcing that the design could serve as flood protection, temperature regulation, as well as protection from poisonous animals (I hadn’t thought of that!).

Moving inside to the large main room I was struck with the silkiness of the wide timber floorboards and the uncluttered placement of furniture. Again, it recalled the William Morris maxim “Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful”. The beauty was unquestionable. The usefulness both immediately evident and more subtle. My attention was drawn to two mirrors: one large and one small. “Notice,” said Ms Roeung, “how they are placed so that you can observe who approaches the house, while remaining unobserved yourself”.  Noted.
 

“The house was built in 1920,” she remarked. I was startled. The Ancient House was eight years younger than my own home in Fremantle. Time dilated. The Theory of Relativity 101. Three generations lived in Ms Roeung’s house, three in my own. I sometimes give a mock house tour for our guests, as three generations is time enough to accrue some interesting tales. And ghosts. It is my infinite, unearned good fortune that my ghosts are benign. 

​“The house belonged to my aunt, a Professor of Literature” (a calling not very distant from my own). So much relational information. She went on, “More than a hundred members of my family were killed by the Khmer Rouge. My aunt survived and chose to come back.” Time stopped. Viewed across the gulf of rupture, the term “ancient” took on a new meaning. There was the time before and the time after and an immeasurable gap between.
 

She left me alone, then, in that room. I don’t know what groups of visitors do at this point. Whisper? Look at the furniture or out the window? I looked at the family portraits hanging on one wall and did the only thing that I could think to do: brought my hands together in sampeah, the Cambodian gesture of greeting and respect.

​When I left the original part of the house, I was shown the kitchen, which was the only section that was new. It had been commandeered by the Khmer Rouge and used to supply local troops. A more compelling reason for remodelling than the hunger for novelty, tear-down-and-replace that plagues my street.
 
Downstairs, Ms Roeung seemed a little less remote (had I been observed, unobserved?) She asked me where I was from. When I answered “Australia” she replied “Queensland?” I hadn’t mentioned it, but I guess I wasn’t the first person to observe the similarities between the stilt design and the traditional Queenslander. Motes of commonality floating in the vast space-time continuum that separates her history and culture from my own. Occasionally, they catch the light.

There’s no tangible reason I should happen to be in a hotel less than a stone’s throw from a dance academy that warmly welcomed me. What are the odds?
 
Similarly, there was no particular reason to breakfast at Sister Srey’s (Sister Girl’s) Café ​beside the river in Siem Reap. Not the first time at any rate. Once having tasted the quality of the food and coffee returning several times was quite explicable. But there was something deeper that drew me back. On the first morning I noticed on one wall a painting detailing the major landmine sites across the world. A map of buried terror. On the wall directly opposite a poster with the image of a masked and caped animal: HeroRAT.

​I discovered that the café supported a project called Apopo. This non-profit was set up with the extremely ambitious, but not impossible, task of removing all landmines in Cambodia. Given that Cambodia has the dolorous distinction of being the most heavily land mined country in the world, even the thought of trying moved me to tears. A small postcard on the noticeboard alerted me to the possibility of visiting the project centre and I resolved to do so.

​Just outside Sister Srey’s was a tiny stall where my travel companion and I purchased several carefully wrapped used books. Tok Vanna, the proprietor, had no hands. With the books came a photocopied leaflet that told Mr Vanna’s story, based on an interview with BBC journalist Kate McGeown. (I use the name from the leaflet not the interview.) When the landmine took his hands, the outlook was bleak. Suicide seemed the most viable option . . .  yet the man I met was  lively and cheerful. He sustained a livelihood and a family. It was a long way from the days of despair when a landmine exploded all hope of a good future.

​Another whim of fate. The day I visited Angkor Wat, we drove via a different route back to Siem Reap. On a long stretch of country road I saw the sign for the Apopo Visitor Centre, and we stopped. Seeing firsthand how these African pouched rats are used in clearing landmines and returning land and peace to the communities was extraordinary. As was the respect and care verging on reverence the carers had for the animals. No rat has ever died in this work. Land that would otherwise take three days to clear can be declared safe in thirty minutes. The prospect of clearing Cambodia of landmines by 2025 suddenly seemed realistic. I wept.

How do you come back from hell? If Apopo shows the path writ large, Mr Vanna’s story is a map in miniature of the possibility of restoration. Without intangible guides, who amongst us could navigate the narrow and perilous  path back to hope?  

​What does it mean to be a tourist in a land with a heritage of colonialism, riven with the aftereffects of genocide? Each person picks their own path, I guess. The hedonists might head for Pub Street in Siem Reap where the bass thumps and the alcohol flows. Innocent enough compared with the sex tourists seeking girls younger than their granddaughters, shamelessly cruising the redlight streets of Phnom Penh that run down to the Mekong.
 
Others with stronger nerves or perhaps greater indifference might tour the killing fields and the ordinary schoolhouse (S-21) that for four years was a central site of interrogation, torture, and murder during the time of the Khmer Rouge. Now renamed the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, it warehouses skulls and bones and images and infinite suffering. These are regular points of call for those who can face them. I could not.
 
I was not indifferent. Everywhere the legacy of colonialism and the ghosts of genocide and civil war were as ubiquitous as the broken pavement. So, too, was the strength and resilience of Khmer culture, springing up in the cracks left by painful history. History is too big, too overwhelming. I can only deal with specific encounters and what they reveal of suffering and of redemption.
 
My first evening in Cambodia I ate with friends at the ominously named Titanic, a restaurant on the banks of the river. The food was good, the cats wandered at will, and I was mesmerised by the dancer and musician who performed for the patrons. Such precise and elegant gestures: only achievable with genetic gifts and years of training. Dance calls to me, always, and I wondered if it might be possible to attend a workshop. Because . . . why not?
 
Some strange sprite of fate was at work. Back in my hotel room I did a little research. Directly across the narrow alley way in front of the hotel was an even tinier alley leading directly to the Champey Academy of Arts.

Many decades later, my niece Isobel discovered a blog about Eliza Elder Brightwen  in  the Her Story series "exploring the stories of fascinating women in the University of Cambridge collections".  The work of Rosanna Evans, this account was indeed fascinating to us.

I've often thought my Great, Great Aunt would make a good subject for a PhD on the somewhat subservient position of women naturalists in the Victorian era. Imagine my delight, then, to find that she has not been relegated wholesale to the dustbin of history, but in fact has an album of her work residing in the Whipple Museum of the History of Science at Cambridge. An album that inspired Evans' blog post and related work. I contacted Rosanna Evans to share the family connection and thank her for her work.  A short email correspondence ensued, in which she told me:

She was also kind enough to share three of the images that accompanied her talk (two above, one below), the work of Eliza Elder Brightwen, courtesy of Rosanna Evans.
​

Naturally, there will never be a conclusive answer to the "nature vs nurture", nor the "recycled souls" debates. That's what makes it so much fun to continue speculating. I've never been tempted to explore my ancestry via DNA sampling. But following the threads of a life spent devoted to writing and natural history? That's another story!