Perilous Adventures
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A View of Trees

by n a bourke

I wrote my first novel on the washing machine. I didn’t have a desk, the dining table was normally littered with children’s artworks-in-progress, food, newspapers, notes about this or that excursion, bills, splay-backed books: the noisy clutter of my mothering life. The laundry was the only room nobody else wanted to hang out, so I spread an old towel out on top of the washer, and an old tablecloth on top of the towel, pulled up a stool, and wrote. It wasn’t particularly comfortable. My knees had nowhere to go, so I always sitting aside or akimbo, awkwardly leaning sideways. Sometimes I gave up and wrote in bed, or at the dining table - my journals bore the marks of poster paint, vegemite, candle-wax - but none of these places would really do; too public, too noisy (even when empty) too full of the rush and tumble of everybody else’s imagination. I always went back to the laundry.

The laundry was cool. It had a door that led out to the garden - to the washing line and the neglected ‘herb’ patch (really, a couple of scrappy bushes of rosemary and lavender, and some mint that had got away and threatened to overtake the lawn). I could see the trees at the end of the garden, and watch the birds and insects go about their business.

Over the years since then I have acquired a desk, which has been parked in various places in my various homes. In the dining room, at one house, in the living area in another, in my bedroom in yet another. Often, it was more of a place to leave my things than a place to work. I wrote in the various gardens I loved, at rickety tables beneath the trees. I have often edited my pages, once written and typed and printed, at the kitchen table. This feels a little like doing homework, with the children, who also spread out their papers and huddle earnestly over their work, their brows furrowed like newly-turned fields.
These days, however, I have a room of my own. A desk, bookcases, a piano and a lockable door. Beautiful windows that look out over a lush forest; French doors that I open in winter, when the bugs don’t get in so much. My desk is under the windows. My thesaurus, dictionary, and other reference books are behind me. I can’t bear to have them on my desk, cluttering up the space, but I know they are there if I need them. On the deep, old timber of my desk is my laptop, my notebook, a tile for my coffee (with a botanical image - “milkweed - a cure for the heart ache” it proclaims in looping, Victorian script). There’s an old green glass jar and my writing box. I like boxes. The things inside the box change, depending on what I’m writing. There’s nothing precious in there. Feathers, stones, seashells, leaves, cicada shells, ribbons, beetles, bits of card with sketches on them, or words, or phrases (stolen, borrowed, or broken and in need of repair).

I’ve had a box like this all my life. As a child it was small - an empty redhead matchbox that fit in my pocket. Mostly it contained beetles and pretty stones. Once I owned and treasured a silver medicine spoon. Once a tooth that fell out of my sister’s head. As an adult my box is much larger, less portable. It is about the size of an old-fashioned family bible, though it’s contents are no more precious or sensible.


I have a beautiful old desk, with drawers full of pens and post-its and envelopes and paints, scissors and staples and paperclips, but when I think of my writing space, of what can be taken away, of what is essential to it, there are only two things that make a space a place for writing, at least for me: a view of trees, of wildness, and my writing box.

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