I am not Tim Winton

by Julie Holland


I’m a writer, not an author, because I’ve not been published, yet, ever.
I came at it late, you see, at sixty, and from quite the wrong direction.
I’m privileged, I suppose, and hold a secret.
I’m homesick, a migrant.
It’s hush hush, quiet, a whisper. Shameful.
If you don’t love it, leave, isn’t that what we say?
Cloak in shadow, to heal. Cold inside, in forty degrees.
The school run helps, the citizenship, eight friends barbequing.
You’re not in the A team, and you suspect you’re not in the B team either.
Years pass. There are trips back.
You become the cliched invisible, the voiceless.
That old women at number twenty-seven from wherever.
The woman at the bar no one serves, until she gets nasty, and then everyone notices.
And then Covid. There’s no trip back.
An old face in the mirror. Hardly recognizable. Fatter but diminished.
How’s that even possible?
You’re a writer, sing a song of homeland.
Of Vikings. But that won’t cut it.
They want emerging voices, young voices, marginalised, facing the struggle head on.
You’ve had your say.
No.
Cut out the romance novels and the white-women-in-bad-marriage storyline, which do not represent me, and I’m underrepresented.
So, go on, speak yourself.
Stop speaking, you’re embarrassing your children.
Old woman wearing over-bright lipstick queuing in the supermarket.
Collecting prescriptions from the doctor.
Sitting alone in a café nursing a pot of tea.
My tragedy, is me.
For living a life that is not mine.
Homesickness, clawing deeper each passing year, that has no cure, but death.
I could ask for help. Yes.
The doctor wants a hundred dollars to talk about it. Let me tell you, don’t waste your dollar.
We’re old tits with lumps to be examined, and hysterical hysterectomies, with decayed teeth.
Whilst doctors the same age, with salt and pepper hair, flirt with chatty nurses.
Go home old woman. Watch television. Cry a little.
Balling tissues and dabbing spittle at the corner of your mouth. Forgetting words.
I will speak myself.
Can’t you read? It says don’t step on the grass.
The boy hit me in the face so hard my nose cracked and blood splattered over dirt, dripping over a broderie anglaise collar.
I beat him later, in chess club.
Van Gogh was mad.
Don’t say that. My lecturer tells me about his wife. Anorexic, fighting for mental health.
I’m the drunk girl, good as a boy.
The car breaking. The thud, the fractured skull nearly ending life.
The tearing episiotomy performed by a facemask.
Eyes like surgical instruments.
Not being prepared. Motherhood. The silence, when screaming.
University. Feminism.
Lying about who I am.
Because being a wife and mother is not enough.
The voice of the Other, condemning me with easy essays.
An artist without space.
A lecturer without nepotism.
Slipping into obscurity. Grown old, hearing the voices of Others growing stronger and louder.
Then the rejections, returned, unread.
I am not Tim Winton.


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Commended in the 2022 Ethel Webb Bundell Literary Awards, Julie Holland lives and writes in Western Australia. She studied Visual Arts, received an MA, exhibited in many exhibitions, but her passion remains the written word.