Last time I talked about bigness and I hadn’t even seen Uluṟu yet. Felt silly and humbled thinking I’d made a big thing then seeing Uluṟu, which is, of course, really properly big. I still have no idea about bigness. I think this is the same with death and grief. We can have ideas about it, but the thing itself, bigger and older and longer and wider than we can fathom in one moment, takes walking around, walking around in different directions, seeing in different light, by sunset, by sunrise, by day, by night, many times, for a long time.
This time has gone quickly but it’s been a big time. It’s been a big time of processing grief in a way I both could have and couldn’t have predicted. It feels awkward to be having my own private grief journey here in this place that is so obviously the centre of the essential crisis of this country, the essential grief and trauma. But of course all of these things are connected. I wouldn’t be here if not for Katharine who I’m grieving and who is somehow everywhere here, in strange ways, for a place she never physically visited in her life. But she’s here in people, in protest, in the landscape, walking around with her long legs, flying around with the birds. I show Ness my big thing in progress and the picture of the thing I’m trying to make. She says, “you’ve made it taller,” and I realise I’ve made Katharine.
I keep thinking about how death isn’t an end but a transformation. I think about the transformations that clay undertakes, from rock to soft earth to hard rock again, and the way working with clay seems to be a real thing here, and what that’s about (ideas ranging from the landscape itself to it simply being trendy). I think about the spirits in everything that don’t die, that transform and hold on and change shape for hundreds of thousands of millions of years and about how trends and empires rise and fall and crumble and what remains is the spirit of the land, the spirit of people, in things like the earth, in things we make and do in their honour.
Leonie Brialey is a cartoonist and musician from Boorloo Perth where she’s recently returned after living in Naarm Melbourne.