The Hair Apparent single work   autobiography  
Issue Details: First known date: 2016... 2016 The Hair Apparent
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AbstractHistoryArchive Description

'My daughter has just finished school. I contest this fact most days, driving her to distraction. I keep prosecuting the point - darling, it can't be over - because I'm almost certain that in her private life, in the life she enjoys precisely because it exists outside the orbit of my benign parental suffocation, there are practical tasks she may have neglected. I also keep prosecuting the point because there is no other avenue for me to articulate my own incredulity. I'm not sure how we got here. I find rage brimming in me as I contemplate the finality of the milestone. For some reason our local preschool cops the weight of my animus. I drive past it most days, conveying my teenagers to school, driving with heart pounding to work, to get to that radio interview, to that panel I'm supposedly hosting, to get in to work before the car park at Parliament House reaches capacity, to run upstairs to be at my desk in time for a news conference; or driving in less harried fashion in the direction of Civic in times of leisure, crawling mulishly past this totem of our collective past, this prosaic suburban sacred site, which is profoundly indifferent to my current pulses of irrationality.' (Publication abstract)

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

  • Appears in:
    y separately published work icon Meanjin Telling Someone Else's Story vol. 75 no. 4 Summer 2016 10855789 2016 periodical issue

    'Stories can have a determining power, the authority of the assumed and accepted narrative.

    'We all have our own of course, and perhaps the capacity to imagine the stories of hypothetical others. In everyday life that might pass for empathy; in literature it can carry an edge of privilege and controversy. And in fact? In non-fiction?

    'In this edition, a timely exploration framed by that great Australian woman of letters Alexis Wright, a long musing on the often vexed intersections between our first peoples and the narrative that explains and explores the Indigenous position in modern Australia. Whose stories are these to tell? Who owns this continuing tale?' (Editorial introduction)

    2016
    pg. 85-88
  • Appears in:
    y separately published work icon Meanjin Online 2016 21128347 2016 periodical issue 2016
Last amended 5 Aug 2021 07:53:22
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