The season of baked earth and butterflies.
We are sitting around a huge slab of cedar milled across the road by my hot neighbour, the smell of the tree still a living thing. Between the knots in the wood and the red veins of rings no longer expanding, mismatched tea cups are nestled among beeswax candles and piles of books. The apricot tree throws some shade (and occasional fruit) our way. Poetry tea time is one of our favourite rhythms and rituals at our beautiful permaculture farm. My three young children choose a book each. An op shop table cloth becomes a cape, a stick is now a sword, and words dance out of pages.
A droplet falls from the sky into a mug. The books escape under the table. Summer rain: fun! Someone starts twirling until we are all swept up onto the grass, disembodied giggles swirling around the apricot tree attempting to keep up with frantic bodies. We all collapse in a pile on the wet grass. A crack of thunder sends us hurtling towards the house, a line of hands gripped, the little one trails so the biggest one slips her up onto her back.
We rush down the driveway into the home nestled in the tiny womb of the property, the little valley where all the tree roots lead.
Inside, raindrops fall to the large white tiles from my skin. I notice my phone discarded on the bench, a notification lighting up the screen.
Moderate rain arriving in one minute, then heavy rain and severe winds. My brow crinkles into a frown. It’s Summer! I pout, still playful.
The rain on the tin roof gets heavier, no longer a lullaby. Laughter makes way for nervous glances towards Mumma. I light the fire – another grounding ritual – little hands snap sticks and the busyness calms hearts.
It’s just a little rain.
My phone pings. Severe Weather Warning involving damaging hail has been detected in your region.
Within seconds hail is smashing through the skylights, water floods through the roof. It’s rushing down the driveway and creeping up through the bottom of the doors.
As soon as the hail eases I bundle up the children and we head across to my hot neighbours’, water still rising into our low set home. The little valley of our property sloping down to the vine covered wrap-around veranda, once a magical secret home bursting at the seams with the bundles and bundles of things collected by four autistic folks. Each thing holding a memory or a personality of its own, like the rock Ngalu found and named Rocky and took to bed every night.
The storm lays waste to all of our precious knick-knacks, our mundane things, the pearl earrings from Grandma. The many felt play mats that I’d painstakingly crafted and placed out before each child blazed into their next sun trip, stardust trailing as they ran through the cozy lounge room adorned with their art. Another ring around a tree, their eyes would light up at the handmade treasures all over the room. Gumnut people stuck into lavender-scented play dough. A book with my name in it mum? Wow! Did you draw this yourself? Wow. Whole nights spent awake were alive with creativity and excitement for me. The doorframe of the pantry was notched with their initials and heights. Oh, little Nalliandrah was smaller than Milai at the same age! Oh, how sweet. The smell of apricot bread I had baked from five-year-old sourdough starter and fruit from our trees, tugged at our noses.
The valley became the bowels of our living breathing place.
Ten minutes is all it takes for us to lose it all.
This is not my first adventure in losing a house. I bought my first home with an ex. Domestic violence knocked. When I ended the relationship he locked me in the house for a start and after weeks of being his prisoner he locked me out of it. I escaped with a bag and lived out of the back of my car for months. Years later he would drip feed me some of my belongings, trying to lure me back.
It’s just a house and some things.
After the freak storm my babies and I move into a tent on river Palwarra, a special cultural place for them as Dhauwurd Wurrung language folk of the Gunditjmara Nation. Little Aboriginal warriors, displaced again. It was winter and we lost a bell tent with a cosy fire (again to the weather) and then suffered the chill in multiple two-man tents that continued to rip in the 100 km winds and fill with rain. My morning ritual involved (yarning with Piri, the swamp wallaby on my way to the drop dunny and) scooping out the water from our shelter, standing the sleeping mats up to dry for the day. If it was raining, sometimes the mats were still damp so we layered op shop towels over the top.
We couch surfed after our fourth tent collapsed and I with it. The only folks who put us up were those that had almost as little as we did. My mother in law, Gunditjmara Excellence, put us in her bungalow, but her house was already overcrowded from the continued disruption of black families under colonisation. We had a whole bedroom to ourselves with an actual bed in it at my dear friend Teah’s but there were six neurodivergent children and two neurodivergent adults. We all lost the ability to tell where our feelings ended and someone else’s begun. My best friend in Naarm housed us despite needing community care just as much as we did. Our spirits faded in the city and we found our feet seeking the path of the rivers back to Nyamat Mirring (Sea Country).
Another dear friend, a proud Dharawal woman, paid for us to stay at a Big4 cabin. We took a breath. Management kicked us out because we had our little dog with us. My friend emailed them – to appeal to their kindness – about the displacement of these little disabled Aboriginal people and their (undocumented as per the colony) therapy dog / family member. She was ignored. We were moved along.
I am a qualified psychologist, a massage therapist, a writer. I have all of the degrees I was told would make me a successful, thriving person. None of the capacity I need to survive formed any part of my formal education. We were drowning in the floods of individuality and one hundred percent of it was my responsibility. At least I was equipped to yarn to babies about the trauma of it all, right?
Somehow we got our heads a little above water; found a rental on Wadawurrung Country…the house was uninhabitable. We inhabited it. We moved into the backyard in another tent, decorated with LED candles and fairy lights to inject some whimsy into the children’s lives. Camping is fun! Sewer water seeped into the grass around us. The council refused to attend.
We got ill, the list of our ailments long and getting longer. One of us was no longer able to walk.
We got a van. Five of us piled in. Headed to Djarra Country. But we needed to move it around each night so it didn’t look like we were “camping”, or worse and somehow less acceptable…homeless. Council moved us along and along; gave us a map of the free camps in the area. I looked down at the piece of paper, droplets of rain pooling in the corners of my eyes… was it salty rain? I hurriedly wiped it away. “Who will give us the petrol to get half an hour to the free camp to sleep and then back in by morning to pick up our food hamper?” When I looked up from the little dotted map depicting our confines, the worker was driving away.
On the streets, the nights are long. The van does an upstanding job of holding out the chill but we still wrap our faces in scarves and watch our breath leave our body in visible puffs. I lay awake listening for any noise that might mean my little family could come to some harm – or that we might be moved on from our spot. When the sun sneaks a peak over the horizon I sometimes drift off in relief, only to be brutally woken by a garbage truck shuddering down the street. A knock on our window. “You can’t sleep here.” Well sir, insomnia says I can’t sleep anywhere. My oldest child and I walk the streets in the mornings, beanies pulled low, our breath visible, the smell of baking bread tugging at our hearts.
Moderate disability arriving in one minute, followed by severe disability and chronic pain.
Disability doesn’t discriminate. Family violence doesn’t discriminate. Freak summer storms don’t give a damn who you are. Chronic illness does attack the more vulnerable and minority populations but it’s still a gamble. Community care is essential for humanity to thrive and those that understand Indigenous models of community care are the ones that get it. These models are about giving to community without expectation of immediate return. They hold the wisdom that any of us could be the next to need community care. At any minute.
Moderate rain arriving in one minute, followed by severe winds and heavy rain.
The cycle continues…
Laura Louise Ó Duibhir (Lou) is a queer, autistic writer, and qualified psychologist, with an expertise in childhood development. She is raising three disabled Gunditjmara/Wamba Wamba children, who all contribute art and words to the family’s many books and projects. She runs a bush school using Yunkaporta’s 8 ways pedagogy of Indigenous learning. She tiptoes a tightrope of disability advocacy balancing scientific exploration of neurobiology with creative expression. In wild extremes, she has presented at the Queer Lit Fest and the International Society for Autism Research’s annual meeting, has a queer fiction novel due to be published this year and has published multiple scientific research papers with the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute and Royal Melbourne Hospital while working in Melbourne’s leading autism clinics. Lou is a graduate with first class honours from the University of Melbourne with a major in Psychology and a minor in Creative Writing. She is published in Neurokin magazine and presents at the Neurokin Arts Festival and is the Founder of the very first Breathwork Modality for Divergent Folks.
Read more in Lou’s Substack.
And indulge in her gifts/join her community here.