Meniscus

By Emme Rummery

My family can be traced back to Ireland on my dad’s side and England on my mother’s. I loved England when we lived there but it never evoked the pull on my bones that Australia has. It was claimed already. Every part had been discovered and rebuilt and plowed and explored. We barely spent any time in Ireland. All I remember is an ancient, dark tree tied all over with fragile, slender ribbons that pulsed in the wind like seaweed. Wishes, my parents said.

Maybe that’s why I love the ocean. Which holds and possesses and reassures, rocks and cradles and belongs fiercely to itself. Humankind can live on its borders, balance on top, float and explore its darkness with pieces of sky strapped to their backs, oxygen hissing in their ears, but it can’t ever be theirs. Maybe that’s what I am. When my relatives left Europe centuries ago, they became citizens of the ocean. On their never ending voyage across the sea they became a nomadic people, forever floating and seeking and taking.

Apparently there’s Irish nobility on Dad’s side. A book in Grandfather Pete’s house has a shield, a family crest and a brief history (it might not be our history) that details us being driven out by another clan. Before that perhaps we were Vikings. Maybe we were Celts, covered over with blue tattoos, a trace work of veins made visible, a story printed on the skin. Before that the continents were merged, so does it even matter? These stories inform me, shape me and make me.

The past is a series of knots, a sprawling family tree, the passage of boats across the ocean, planes across the sky, blood spilled in hospital wards. Mysteries, truths embroidered with the verdigris of time. It’s an Irish lord with silver plates, a Viking girl singing to her baby, a strawberry blonde child who’s going to become a soldier. It’s my grandfather, standing at the front of a minesweeper in the Pacific on a pitch black, freezing night. It’s my grandmother, letting the Australian sun turn her golden, listening to the crash of waves. Australia is where I took my first breath and maybe it’ll be where I draw my last. The land doesn’t care what labels we give to it, the borders we impose on it. Maybe it’s all just semantics, words to cover the yearning. We were born on it, will live on it, will die on it. We belong to the earth. Outside, there’s zero gravity. The critical and the creative merge and blend on our maps. The archaic here be dragons. Both have meanings, inform our selves. The child in the geography class, the primitive fear of movement in the dark.

I’m multilingual, just not in a literal sense. I can read what my brother is feeling based on the objects he’s left strewn around the house. The pace of my friend’s speaking, the jumbled spelling and punctuation in a Facebook message, the minute shifts in faces, fingers, folds of arms and legs, reveal nuances decipherable only by blood or close friendship. Everyone is multilingual within their own homes, amongst their own families. Each enclosed human being is their own country with their own alienations, secret histories and legends of invasion, conquests and defeat.

I have a picture of my great-grandfather looking like a handsome gangster, dressed up in an impeccably tailored suit, smoking a cigarette, with the black hair that runs on Mum’s side of the family and the square jaw that my mother, grandfather and brothers have. He’s walking, relaxed and languid, on a broad, cobbled Sydney street. There are elaborate shop fronts behind him. It’s the 1920’s. There’s also a worn print of my grandmother’s mother, carefully posed in a long, Victorian-era gown. She has dark shining hair and is petite with my Nana’s delicate features, widow’s peak and bird-black eyes.

These are facts, but infused with my fictions, the stories I’ve read, the people I’ve met. Like my grandmother, I love watercolours. A touch of pigment which blossoms through the water like fog or flowers. It was clear. It becomes cloudy. The colours are surprisingly vibrant. The tracery of brightness on a blank page. The water takes it where it wants to go. It’s a history, a message.

With my pale colouring, long fingers and protruding collarbones, as though the skeleton is too big for the skin, I look German. It’s tempting to think of myself as a descendant of those sparse, thorny Nordic fairytales of white snow, tangled woods and cragged mountains. A drift of fantasy, uncertainty, mythology.

The past is undoubtedly written by the victors. Whilst researching my family tree, unwinding it like spool of thread, both my grandfathers’ lineages uncoiled seamlessly back to the eighteenth century. The matriarchal line was nearly impossible to decipher. It wasn’t a length of thread; it was branches that spiked into the air leaving nothing. Their names dissolved into marriage, their histories merged with their husbands. History is far from certain. Personal history is even more complex, as thick as blood and thrumming with emotion, defensiveness and untold moments. I listen to the stories of the ancestress with too many children, a knitting needle and a bottle of gin, secret adoptions, runaways, the great aunts and uncles who disappeared from the census aged one, six, ten, thanks to influenza, polio, pneumonia.

Looking back is like exploring a hall of mirrors, deciphering dreams. I take from it what I want, I ignore what I don’t. I romanticize and fantasize. My family tree is an anchoring web that I’ve woven and interpreted myself. Collective identity helps us find our places within the universe, providing history, ancestry and homelands. I am at its centre, plucking the threads that resonate, making my own song and seeing my predecessors, ghostlike, in my own reflection.

Emme Rummery trekked up to Mount Everest Base Camp on her gap year and is still writing about it. In 2013 she began a Bachelor of Arts at UNSW, was shortlisted for the Monash Undergraduate Prize for Creative Writing and had a piece published in Kill Your Darlings Journal.