A Year Without Mirrors – by Sarah Klenbort
ISLAND | ONLINE ONLY1.
In Ngarla country on the north coast of WA, I was stepping out of the tent one evening to walk to the pit toilet, when my daughter Kaitlyn signed, ‘Stop!’
‘The ground,’ she pointed, ‘is moving’.
I looked into the pool of light from our torch and thought I was having an LSD flashback. But I hadn’t taken drugs in 20 years.
The ground was moving.
On closer observation, dozens, hundreds, thousands of shells were walking towards the ocean on the other side of our camper. I sat, rapt, half-hanging out of the tent, staring at this mass march of hermit crabs. The girls, four and eight, pointed, shouted, signed:
‘Look!’
‘That one’s tiny!’
‘There’s a million!’
Finally, we stepped out—gingerly, afraid of crushing the crabs. We tiptoed through the shells as they journeyed across the sand—large oval shells, skinny spiral shells, fat snail-like shells and mini conchs—all scurrying under the moon and the stars.
When hermit crabs grow and need a new shell, they gather in a semicircle with others who also need to size-up and take turns hopping out of their shell and trying a new one on for size, until they’ve all exchanged homes and have one that suits.
That year in the bush, the camper trailer was our shell; it was all we needed.
“That year in the bush, the camper trailer was our shell; it was all we needed.”
2.
The year before, we’d been living in a unit in Sydney, where every moment of our lives had been scheduled. When something went wrong—a sick child, my husband needing to stay late at work, or even if we just ran out of milk, a quick rage stirred in my gut, and it took all I had not to yell at one of the kids.
I was forever rushing them out the door to day care, or school, where they were yelled at all day by overworked underpaid teachers in a crowded classroom; at lunch, they were pushed outside, where they weren’t allowed to run on concrete. When not in school, the kids were hurried to soccer training, audiologist appointments, the Ear, Nose and Throat doctor.
As a casual academic at Western Sydney, I taught six tutorials of Texts and Traditions in one day. By the time I got to the sixth, my brain was mush. One evening I stood in front of a class of 22 students and blanked. What had I just told them? I stood in that cold classroom in heels and dress, staring out at the golden light of the setting sun on the oval outside, wishing I could open the window. I shivered. The aircon was centrally controlled.
‘Miss?’ someone said. ‘Miss, you OK?’
‘Yes, um, sorry.’ I somehow got through that class, checked my phone: five messages. My little one was sick again.
As I cycled towards the train in the dark on the way home, tears blew off my face. I felt I was failing on all fronts: as an academic, mother, writer. 41 years old and still no book.
That semester I was teaching the French philosopher, Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s essay, ‘Fifth Walk’, about the time he was exiled to Île de St Pierre, an island on a lake in Switzerland. How I longed to be on that island, where there was a silence unbroken by any sound other than that of the cry of eagles, occasional birdsong, and the rumbling of streams cascading down the mountains[1].
On Île de St Pierre, Rousseau rarely responded to letters from the outside world. He spent his days identifying plants and rowing his boat to the centre of the lake, where he lay back and gazed up at the clouds.
*
The next afternoon, scooting home from school with the girls in the Eastern Suburbs of Sydney, I passed a new shopfront.
‘Blow Bar’, the sign read.
‘What’s that?’ Kaitlyn asked.
I peered through the glass. There was a bar on one side, hairdresser chairs on the other, mirrors all around. My kids looked at the beautiful women sipping fluted glasses who gazed out at us as they got their hair done.
I felt suddenly shabby in my cut-offs and thrift-store t-shirt, frizzy hair pulled back in a ponytail. Then I looked at my girls the way the pretty women inside would have seen them and noticed how scruffy they were: hair unwashed, second-hand school uniforms, scuffed shoes, mismatched socks, scooters with broken handles.
‘Come on,’ I said. ‘Let’s go.’
3.
And we went. My carpenter husband and I bought a camper trailer, rented out our unit, left our jobs and took the kids out of school.
Our first stop was only an hour south: Bulli, on Dharawal land. As the sun set that evening, my husband cracked open a beer, put up the camper and the girls chased each other into the waves. They got their clothes wet. I didn’t tell them off.
The next day, as we drove and drove, Kaitlyn read novels on her Kindle. Rhiannon asked questions. The average four-year-old asks 400 questions a day; that year, my husband and I had time to answer them.
“The average four-year-old asks 400 questions a day; that year, my husband and I had time to answer them.”
4.
Walpole was wet. In southern WA, where the Noongar people have been living for 47,000 years, we were the only campers among all those tall trees. The campsite was basic, with a pit toilet and a long walk to a deserted beach with a shipwreck. The girls put on their raincoats while I cooked fishcakes under the canopy. Kaitlyn hid under a tree, pretended to be a witch and sent her ‘owl’, Rhiannon, back and forth with messages.
That night, as I lay in bed listening to the patter of rain on canvas, I felt a wholeness I hadn’t known in the city. Everyone I loved and needed was right there in that tent. My husband lay reading beside me, my daughters in the next bed. Just before drifting off, Rhiannon shouted, ‘We’re all cows!’ then fell asleep.
The girls spent that year suspended in a state somewhere between imagination and reality. The ground beneath them and the trees above were their classroom, their playground, their home.
“The girls spent that year suspended in a state somewhere between imagination and reality. The ground beneath them and the trees above were their classroom, their playground, their home.”
5.
I got emails from friends in Sydney that complained of work, meetings, traffic, burnt-out teachers, kids refusing to do homework, a husband having a nervous breakdown, another husband on a Paleo diet, anxious adult children, renos gone wrong, unfinished novels, enormous mortgage payments, rejection letters, parents screaming on soccer sidelines.
I looked at their lives—the life I used to have—and saw it as a foreigner sees a new country. I didn’t know how to write back.
I knew we were extremely lucky—privileged—to be on this adventure. Renting out our unit mostly paid for the trip. And we’d not had jobs that tied us down. I’d given up on an academic career and my husband, who worked for himself, brought his tools and found jobs along the way.
That said, we’d still been scared to leave the security of work, school, the city, society. What surprised us on our trip were the number of people we met travelling who had so much less than we did: just the caravan they lived in. They travelled for a while, ran out of money and went to a city for a month or two to save up for travelling again.
6.
Our days were long and filled with awe and wonder. A young kookaburra swooped down and stole a sausage, then shook its head, and beat the ‘prey’ dead. An emu and his chick strutted through our camp kitchen.
I thought of Rousseau on his island:
But if there is a state where the soul can find a position solid enough to allow it to remain there entirely and gather together its whole being without needing to recall the past or encroach upon the future, where time is nothing to it, where the present lasts for ever . . . . Such is the state in which I often found myself on the Île de St Pierre.
Such is the state we found ourselves in during that year in the bush.
7.
In Emile, Rousseau distinguishes between two types of self-love: Amour de Soi and Amour Propre. The first is that primitive grounded love of self that is necessary.
Amour Propre, on the other hand, makes comparisons, is never satisfied and could not be because this feeling also requires that others prefer ourselves to them—which is impossible[2]. My uni students identified with this. It reminded them of Insta, of all the likes they were after, of how there were never enough.
In the bush, no one was there to see us, and we weren’t on social media. My girls had dreadlocks and Kaitlyn wore the same shirt and shorts day after day until finally I told her to put them in the wash. From then on, she changed her clothes once every four days, which worked out well because there weren’t any washing machines in the free camps.
It was a year without mirrors.
I stopped straightening my hair. No make-up. I gained weight. It didn’t matter. I was fat and happy.
8.
We camped on the beach, on Thalanyji land at Ningaloo Station. No shoes for a week. We snorkelled with sea turtles and tropical fish.
Some days, time slowed so much that an hour felt like an afternoon. We read or played cards under a boab tree in the heat of the day in Katherine, where the lands of the Jawoyn, Dagoman and Wardaman converge.
We read The Little House on the Prairie. By then it was September and we’d been in the bush for nine months. It felt like years; it was easier to imagine a cabin in the woods in the 1800s than it was to picture the city life we’d left behind.
We’d gone back to basics: boiling water on the stove for dishes, baking bread on the fire. We woke with the sun, went out for walks and swims until the heat of the day chased us under the shade for an extended siesta of reading and making up stories before going out again in late afternoon.
We jumped off waterfalls in Ngarinyin country on the Gibb River Road; the girls learned to weave pandanis fibres from the Tjanpi desert weavers in the NT. It was a year of adventures, but also a year of days where we did nothing.
“It was a year of adventures, but also a year of days where we did nothing.”
9.
It was the year my children learned how this vast and varied country was stolen.
I told them about the massacres.
‘Why?’ they asked again and again.
We learned some of the 500 languages and customs of the First Nations.
We sang ‘Waltzing Matilda’ in Kriol.
My kids played with Larrakia kids in the free waterpark in Darwin and then learned first-hand about injustice when they saw First Nations people getting arrested for public drinking in the CBD while we camped illegally in a scrap yard right beside them.
10.
We swam in the cascades in Boodjamulla in central Queensland, where the Waanyi people are traditional owners. Lying on a blanket under that vast sky, Kaitlyn saw her first shooting star.
We climbed to the top of Kunama Namadgi (Mount Kosciusko) and the kids saw snow for the first time. They touched it, smelled it, tasted it, moulded it into snowballs and threw them at Dad.
There were problems outside of our ‘island’—a brother in rehab, Brexit, Trump gaining ground in his presidential bid—but we were mostly out of range in 2016.
11.
As we neared Sydney, school and work, I felt repelled by the city and all our stuff in storage. Over the course of the year, we’d shed belongings. When they ran out of paper, the kids painted dried cuttlefish that they found on the beach. We borrowed books from libraries when we could or got them on the Kindle.
I didn’t want to put my children in a uniform and send them to sit at a desk all day to look at endless PowerPoints and learn how to fill in bubbles on a NAPLAN test. I didn’t want to go back to rushing them out the door. We’d met a family who’d been on the road for seven years, stopping every few months to pick up a bit of work before moving on to the next adventure. Their kids were encyclopedias of knowledge, and completely relaxed, like my own. They’d all spent a morning playing in a large puddle together on Lunawanna-allonah (Bruny Island, Tasmania).
“I didn’t want to put my children in a uniform and send them to sit at a desk all day to look at endless PowerPoints and learn how to fill in bubbles on a NAPLAN test.”
12.
These days, every chance we get, we leave the city. Last summer we were lucky to travel back to Tasmania, where we took long walks to waterfalls and swam in freezing alpine lakes. We saw echidnas and tiger snakes and a dozen different wallabies.
On one of these walks, Kaitlyn, then thirteen, posed a question. All the way up the mountain she’d been quiet, and I’d assumed she was annoyed at me for dragging her on yet another hike. On the way down, she said, ‘What bothers me is what’s beyond infinity. I mean everything has to end.’
I stopped.
‘And,’ she said, ‘the other thing that really gets me: why are we here?’
I stopped, signed, ‘As individuals or humans?’
‘Both.’
‘That’s the big question.’
At home in the city there are assessments to study for and essays to mark, but there’s little time or energy to talk about the deeper questions. They don’t teach philosophy in school. When we’re in the bush, with eucalypts all around and a cool blue sea below, there’s space to ponder.
‘Why do you think we’re here?’ I asked.
She thought for a moment and said, ‘To do some good in the world.’
‘Um.’
‘But,’ she went on as we walked under a group of swift parrots that Kaitlyn could see but not hear, ‘the problem with that is that everyone’s idea of what’s good depends on what time period they were raised in and what beliefs they have and how your experiences shaped you.’
She went on. ‘One person’s idea of good is bad for someone else. There’s no real good.’
And so we discussed a possible universal good as we stumbled down the mountain over stolen land, careful not to step on the lizards sunning themselves on the rocks in the path.
13.
Rousseau spent his childhood on the side of a mountain with his governess—a privileged life for sure, and one that gave him space to ponder, to imagine. He thought children shouldn’t start school until the age of 12.
None of us know how to raise a child, though most of us pretend we do. There are new studies published every day. Books and articles litter the internet, but all I really know is that when my kids are walking up a mountain or glimpsing a bright blue Ulysses butterfly, they’re different—we all are. When we’re climbing up a rock face, or jumping off a waterfall, or swimming in the ice-cold sea off the south coast of Tasmania we escape, if only for a short time, the desire to be ‘liked’, or published, or given an ‘A’. In nature we get away from the need for external gratification, and we can just be. ▼
[1] Translation by Russell Goulbourne
[2] Translation by William F. Payne
Image: GAWN AUSTRALIA
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