needles by Sieglinde. It also alludes, through images of threading and
weaving, to the process of her creation.
In the text I try to convey a number of different times and places
simultaneously, and to intertwine disparate psychological, historical and
geographical realities, without cohering them into a single overall
narrative. In order to do this I’ve invented three women, Cass, Cathy and
Casuarina, all of whom might be the same or different people. This gives
me the freedom to position them in different times and spaces. The text
itself, when published, was accompanied by some brief notes which indi-
cated the sources of some of the ideas.
In the first section a sense of place is not explicit, but in the section
beginning ‘When Casuarina was a child’ we are projecting into a fantasy
past: the world of myth. In the next section ‘Cass loves the simple things in
life’ we are in present-day Australia. There are references to Australian
current affairs, but Cass’s thoughts travel into many other spaces includ-
ing Sarajevo, Rwanda and Siberia. Different places are also superimposed
on each other: the ‘Rooms sealed with red wax’ refers to the door of the
laboratory where the ice-maiden’s body was being treated (which I read
about in an article in the Sydney Morning Herald ). But it also refers to the
red seal which was to be found, in the Stalinist era, on the doors of
the homes of purge victims who were taken away in the middle of the
night by the secret police (also in the Herald article).
In the third section we are in a casuarina grove, the site of Casuarina’s
origins in the present, and after that we move to Yuendumu, an Aborigi-
nal community in central Australia. The ‘paintings on doors at
Yuendumu’ mentioned here refers to the doors of the local school, which
were decorated with paintings of the dreaming as part of a collective
Aboriginal artists’ project in the 1980s. When I saw the doors they were
overlaid with graffiti, though parts of the original paintings were still to
be seen. Again there is a superimposition of the ‘blood red door’ of the
second section, and the Yuendumu doors, compressing different types of
historical oppression. In the penultimate section we find ourselves at
the site of a holocaust massacre (taken from a survivor story I heard on
television).
So in this text a sense of time and place is conveyed by:
- A combination of real and unreal spaces. These spaces are sometimes
determinate, sometimes indeterminate. - Superimposition of a number of different historical events and geo-
graphical spaces. Although there is some sense of linear time within
the individual narratives, the links between different sections are
not ‘spelt out’ or contained within an obvious narrative framework.
Mapping worlds, moving cities 269