dirt and bones

Note: I read this piece at Vivid x Sydney Writers Festival’s ‘Firetalk’ event on 28 May 2025. I will receive $1,500 for my appearance at this event and will be splitting that amount across a number of fundraisers made visible via Creators for Gaza.

I find it hard to think about the future. I’ve been that way for as long as I can remember – not because the present feels so alluring, but because, most days, the future seems impossible. For example, the night before my eighteenth birthday, I remember lying in my childhood bed, unable to sleep, feeling simultaneously in awe of and terrified at having made it to a point that felt eternally out of reach. Adulthood. There I was, right on the cusp of it, and it felt too good to be true. I was scared to look at it, to grasp it too closely, as if it was a skeleton undergoing diagenesis, and the pressure of my hand would be the thing to make it crack.

It would be easy to blame this inability to future-project on some sort of acute trauma, but I had a relatively ordinary childhood – the ever-looming presence of violence in my life, in both a personal and more abstract sense, did not stand out from the more severe difficulties being faced by my peers. Keen to brush over any potential suffering, my mother attributed my general melancholia to what she called an overly sensitive heart and an over-active imagination – descriptions that felt more like insults, as if she was identifying hurdles I needed to overcome in order to survive.

This same sense of melancholy hung over me today as I tried to figure out what I would do this evening – not what I would read, but whether I would be here at all. This is not due to any lack of excitement about joining these wonderful writers who have gathered here tonight, whose presence and company I was keenly anticipating, but rather the connection of this event to the genocide currently taking place in Palestine.

The organiser of this event, Vivid Sydney, is partly sponsored by AirBNB, what it calls its community partner. AirBNB is listed in the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights’s database of companies linked to illegal settlement in the West Bank due to its continued practice of offering rentals in these settlements. It is also listed as a pressure target by the international Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, which aims to challenge international support for Israeli settler-colonialism and illegal occupation of Palestinian land. In a statement on Vivid’s website, AirBNB asserts that they ‘look forward to continuing our work with governments and organisations across NSW and Australia to ensure that hosting and the economic activity it creates helps to make local communities stronger’.

And yet, as is obvious by now, I am here. I’m not comfortable with my decision – in many ways it feels like I am betraying my own principles by lending my voice and presence to an organisation that is tied up financially with the crimes against humanity being committed by Israel. But as I am here, tasked with thinking about futures, I could not do so without reflecting on the fact that so many children – and adults who were once children, who have that eternal child living in their heart, as we all do – are being persecuted and murdered for the crime of existing; for obstructing the path of those with wealth and power across the globe who will do anything they can to hold onto it.

I reject the idea that we need institutions – or rather, businesses – such as Vivid or AirBNB in order to have a strong and connected community. The fact is that institutions and businesses on this continent have continually inhibited or actively destroyed the creation and continuation of communities that would threaten their existence and ability to make profit. On this continent, that has meant the dismantling of First Nations communities wherever they stood – and if they couldn’t be destroyed, then they would be co-opted, subsumed, rendered impotent.  

Prior to tonight’s event, I was at the State Library, hoping to find a moment of peace to complete what I am reading to you now, when I turned into a hallway and was confronted with faces of men who survived Kinchela Aboriginal Boys’ Training Home. In a previous life I worked as a lawyer that supported people who survived ‘training’ or ‘children’s’ homes, alongside other state or religious institutions, to apply for a government payment as some form of redress for their experiences. These people were once young boys and girls, taken from their families, made to live in environments of intolerable and inhuman treatment, and who suffered the worst kinds of violence inflicted on them by those who were meant to care. In 2024, the NSW Government – the same government that authorised and enacted the removal of these children – engaged a specialist to explore the grounds of Kinchela Boys’ home as locations ‘consistent with clandestine human burials’ had been found. Similar searches were also slated to occur in Cootamundra and Bomaderry – locations of other houses of horror – due to reports of missing children at those institutions. In case this seems too past-focused for an event about futures, while I worked as a lawyer, I often got calls from children who were currently in or had just been released from state institutions, and who had suffered similarly horrific abuse. Because of the recent nature of their experience, I wasn’t able to help them. They’d have to wait until some future time, if they can hold on that long, when the government decides their pain is worth acknowledging and addressing.

I’m currently reading a book by Clea Koff, a forensic anthropologist who worked for the United Nations to identify victims of genocides and the causes of their deaths in Rwanda, Bosnia, Croatia, Serbia and Kosovo. Koff offers visceral descriptions of standing in mass graves, excavating the bones and bodies of humans killed and then discarded as the world turned away. Koff’s employer, the United Nations, withdrew its so-called ‘peacekeeping troops’ during the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, influenced by the US government and leaving hundreds of thousands of people without any practical international support. When I think of the future, I think of the people who will be tasked to do this same work in Palestine, likely employed or supported by the same institutions that cannot or will not assist those who are doing their best, right now, to survive. I think of the hopelessness of pulling bones out of dirt and cataloguing death and violence in the aftermath of harm, rather than honouring the flesh, the heart, the human and all their viscera while they are still mortal. 

Overly sensitive. A phrase that is no longer a hurdle or a weapon, but a sanctuary. My heart is sensitive, and it makes the present hard to bear and the future hard to hope for, particularly when the violence of the world is so entwined around our daily existences, when we are often so unaware of how the same violence we shudder at is supported by our actions. If this thought terrifies or overwhelms you, I encourage you to follow the voice of Toni Morrison: “No more apologies for a bleeding heart when the opposite is no heart at all. Danger of losing our humanity must be met with more humanity.” This, to me, is the only reasonable way to walk that path into the future.

Until next time, take care.

Ellen