Rocky (2015-2023)

During my last year of high school my little sister acquired a large, smiling, black shadow. He lived in a different house, further down our street, and he would wait eagerly for her to walk past him on her way home from school, because this was his cue to leap the fence and gleefully gallop alongside her until he could be safely corralled in our backyard. I used to call him Not-Our-Dog. I’d arrive home to a pair of enormous inky paws coming to land on my shoulders and I’d call out to my friends, “Oh, Not-Our-Dog is back again.” Our first dog, Tammy, had a classic herding dog habit of going off searching for her lost flock while we were at school or work and so my dad had installed six-foot fences around the front and back yards so that she could no longer worry herself into a quest. Which made our place the perfect halfway house for an enormous, bounding fellow intent on escaping his own. Sometimes I would come home from school through the back garden gate and not realise that he was in the front yard until I was startled from my homework by his big, wet nose pressing fervently against my bedroom window.

My sister doted on Not-Our-Dog. She would take him for walks and give him treats and kiss and cuddle him until his owners could finish work and collect their chronic escapee. She used to say, “I don’t know why he follows me home all the time.” But even a fool could see that she adored him and he desired the glow she could surround him with.

That was the state of affairs when I finished secondary school, moved out of home and went two hours away, to Brisbane, for university. My sister was the unofficial babysitter/dog-catcher for an enormous, snuffling void and I was learning that not wanting to get drunk while being 18 and living in university halls was to experience an almost constant, almost identical quizzical expression upon the faces of my peers and make almost no friends.

On one weekend visit, early in my first year, I came home and he was already in the house. Not just in the garden, but waiting by the front door to welcome me by putting his paws on my shoulders, like an actor playing a father at a wedding on TV. Apparently the people he belonged to had recently had a baby, were moving out of the neighbourhood and, realising that keeping a human infant alive was trying enough without wrangling a canine renegade, had asked my sister and my parents if they wanted to “just keep him.” My sister was delighted. My parents, despite being well-acquainted at this point with the universal dog distribution system our family seemed to have signed up for in some spirit realm, grumbled in the way that parents are obliged to do, but they also had him registered at our vet with our address on his microchip - lickety-split - before anybody could come back for him and Rocky moved happily into our lives.

Rocky was just a darling dog. I have no idea what kind of dog other than huge and black. Perhaps some sort of Labrador/Huntaway situation? This was a guess purely based on the observation that he was too pointy to be all Labrador. And not particularly food-focussed. We’ve never given a dog a DNA test (or subjected one to phrenology) for the same reason we wouldn’t send any other family member’s genetic material to a company with no incentive to protect the information. We can’t make it EASY for the corrupt, dystopian government to frame us for crimes. Imagine poor FiFi being strung up on falsified terrorism charges because you were curious about her cultural heritage? It won’t matter what percentage of Poodle she is when she’s hanging sanguine in the town square - as a warning to other outspoken dogs - after being executed for treason.

Rocky loved Tammy. And Tammy loved having a built-in scapegoat. She would start fights with other little dogs at the park and when their owners turned around she’d be sitting sweetly and Rocky, huge and looming, who’d only come to his sister’s defence would be profiled as a troublemaker. Tammy, who was theoretically lap-sized, much preferred to sit in the corner of the room or corridor so she could keep an eye on everything, but Rocky, who had outgrown the standard lap long before we even met him, loved so dearly to be included he would clamber up onto you and curl up as small as he could, his long tail wagging dangerously as soon as thought he was sufficiently disguised as little.

He loved my bed so much. As I was rarely home, my mum had to cover it in storage tubs and piles of books to prevent him taking up permanent residence. But this meant that she accidentally created, for him, a Pavlovian tell, because when she started taking them down off the bed to clear space for me - he knew I was on my way! I loved coming home to him, especially after Tammy died in my final year of university and he was the only furry creature left in the house. In the evening he would look at me with a conspiratorial air, as though we were children about to ask our parents to “please let us have a sleepover” and race into my bedroom. I would scrabble up onto the side of my bed against the wall and he would leap up onto the side facing the door with his head on the pillow. Often I would roll over in the middle of the night to find his huge wet nose snoring directly into my face. He took up an almost human amount of bed space and his warm heavy body pressed against me made me feel like a YA fantasy novel protagonist curled up around my oversized familiar in some kind of hayloft or cave. Safe.

He was just so big! My mum started taking him to a less central dog park, with big hills to run up and over and long winding paths to be exhausted by, and he looked just like a dog on a postcard. Up hill and down dale, like he was in an actual ode. When it would rain and my mum would wear her raincoat you could picture him beautifully as a lighthouse keeper’s dog. Dutifully checking the coastline for any irregularities and weathering the storm cosied up under a pile of oil cloths. He was the kind of dog who wanted to go everywhere, if everywhere was where you were going.

Despite the fortress of fences my dad thought that he had built, after Tammy’s death when Rocky started being left alone in the house while my parents were at work, he instinctively returned to his absconsion roots. With no one at home to entertain and reassure him, I imagine he became convinced that everybody was off on various disastrous quests; woefully lacking in loyal, black fur and began once again to vault the fence. This happened often enough that various neighbours were assigned to stay on top of his movements, in a kind of unofficial league of Rocky-Watch and he was always very happily brought home having “found” someone.

One night in 2019, my mum had left him alone in the house for only a few hours while she drove down to Brisbane to watch me perform in one of my first ever “proper” stand-up shows. It was an all-female line-up show at Heya Bar (RIP) for Bris Funny Fest (RIP) called “Am I Right Ladies?” (RIP). I actually think every single female stand-up comedian was probably, at one time in their career, a part of an all-female line-up show called “Am I Right Ladies?” or the like. It’s a milestone of sorts. Mere moments after the show ended, my mum was rushing out into Fortitude Valley and home to Toowoomba, because she’d received a phone call from a Rocky-Watch neighbour to inform her that a kind of cartoon tragedy had occurred. Rocky, in his desperation to discover where any of his people were, had tried to leap the fence and had been caught, by the literal skin of his legs, on a crooked nail and had been found, stuck and hanging like a trussed chicken.

Calamity! Horror! Beloved Dog Hoisted By His Own Petard!

I rushed up to see him the next day and when I got there he was still sitting glumly in the car after being retrieved from the vet - curled up over his poor bandaged legs, like a pitiful dragon whose only hoard was injury - until I could hop up into the backseat and cuddle him back to medium spirits.

From then on, Rocky was not to be left alone for more than a few hours at a time. Certainly no overnights. If my parents were not home, Rocky was at the kennel. No more risks! You can’t come home to a dog hanging from your front gate like some of mob warning without adjusting his arrangements. We may have met him as a wayfarer, but he was a kept dog now. Even if my mum was only spending a night away, Rocky was at the kennel. According to her reports the kennel staff adored him. Everybody loved him. He was an enormous cuddly guy, who would gnaw on his back foot when it was itchy, terrify casual park goers by appearing over the horizon like a pat-seeking missile and he could thump his tail on the living room rug so enthusiastically that plates would rattle in the kitchen cupboards. He was Our-Dog.

In August of 2023, while I was performing my first show at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, Rocky fell asleep at the kennel, while my mum was in Brisbane for one night, and he didn’t wake up again. Apparently the poor girls working that day were just beside themselves. I literally can’t imagine what I would do. Imagine you show up to work a shift on a random, normal day and you have to account for the enormous corpse of a beloved creature. It shouldn’t be allowed. Unless you’re a vet, then maybe that is a random, normal day for you. I’m so sorry for the protocols you must have to remember. What do you do with, like, the turtles? Can you cremate a turtle? Is there a turtle protocol? Don’t tell me. At least you get a salary, I mean, these girls were hourly!

I didn’t hear about their Very Bad Day until later. At almost the exact same time our cherished pet was slipping off this mortal coil, I was sitting catatonic in a props cupboard in Scotland. I’d been rendered non-verbal and basically incapacitated after attempting to participate in a kind of Thunderdome-style networking/publicity event where 400 artists who can’t afford to pay two-five grand for PR queue for three hours outside in the rain, before entering an enormous echoing room and being given thirty minutes to stand in several more queues in order to pitch your show to as many journalists (the ones who haven’t already left before you get there) as you can reach while they pretend to be interested and act as though they’ll have time in their to schedule to review it alongside all the shows who paid for PR. It was one of the most overstimulating experiences of my whole life and led to me slinking away, like I was a dying animal, to be found sitting, an hour before my show was about to start, sitting against an enormous box of clown props by my friend Lou who tried to feed me bits of bread roll like I was a a giant, ailing pigeon. When I called my mum later to describe my day, she must have examined my fragile state and decided not to break the news until I was safely back in the country.

I was informed of Rocky’s death a month later while my parents and I were on a sightseeing bus tour to Philip Island. They told me after we visited the Moonlit Sanctuary wombats, pademelons and roos (oh my!), but before the fairy penguin parade - at Seal Rock Lookout near The Nobbies. I was observing a family of Cape Barren geese at the time. I don’t know why my family’s instinct is to combine bad news with a wildlife experience. Perhaps, as we aren’t religious, it is the closest thing we have to last rites. Sure, the dog is dead, but there are geese here. And seals. And pelicans and penguins. What are we all if not eternally a part of nature’s beautiful family? Isn’t going to sleep loved and going wherever nature makes her the death you’d choose for everybody if you could? I thought about Rocky’s big paws on my shoulders and his snoring body in my bed and I remembered the way followed my sister home from school

“Well, that was lucky,” I thought. “We almost didn’t get to know him at all.”

It’s hard to cry at a lookout. The thing gives you too much damn perspective.

Traditionally, I’m not a hugely food-oriented dog. Not for any of the bad reasons, but because I have quite a limited palate and little to no internal bodily cues (“autism, autism, autism - yes, we know Grace,” I hear you say). And when I still lived in Australia and people would come from overseas and rave to me about how good the food is here, I kinda didn’t understand their passion, because I thought, “Surely food is food and it has the potential to be both good and bad wherever you are in the world?” But having lived now in the UK for almost two years and realising that much of what I took for granted is not at all standard fare in other places - I completely understand. The food is very good here.

Before my OE (overseas excursion, for non-Kiwis) when British people would tell me “they didn’t like fruit” I used to be gobsmacked and bewildered.

“Not like fruit? Like, one specific kind of fruit or just the whole genre? All of it???”

As far as I’m concerned, fruit is one of the glorious reasons to stay alive, but having now tasted the fruit available over there I understand their sentiment perfectly. They sell these little pots of pre-cut fruit in supermarkets in the UK and as a person with very sore hands and a dyspraxic demeanour that means I’m still not technically allowed to use “The Big Knife,” I’m certainly no enemy of pre-cut fruit. But it’s the mango that really blew my mind. In order for it to stay fresh between arriving from a country warm enough to grow mango and ending up on sale, they have to cut it before it completely ripens so it’s often hard and mealy, with an abundance of those stringy fibres that get caught in your teeth. Pre-cut, plastic packaged mango is just one of the most starkly symbolic metaphors for colonialism I have ever witnessed with my own two eyes. The Empire is much too formidable to adhere to the customs and protocol of mango season. Its subjects too impatient to not have mango at any time of year. But when you have mango all year round, those little yellow cubes crammed haphazardly into plastic tombs and stocked as an exotic alternative option for a meal deal that was previously unchanged since WWII (I assume) - you never have good mango. Which is a shame because if they had ever eaten good mango, if they’d ever had it smeared across their noses and cheeks after cutting a checkerboard into it, flipping its pliable skin convex so as to put one’s whole face into it and taste the sunshine deep in its flesh - I think the world might be in a better place.

Anyway, not to sing the praises of fruit too much, I don’t want it to seem like my account has been hacked by a particularly verbose bat. THIS IS AN AD FOR MY COMEDY FESTIVAL SHOW. And also, much of the Australian cuisine I have inhaled over the last few days has been processed and packaged and, it too, was incredible.

1. Mango, nectarines, strawberries, raspberries, grapes, honeydew melon etc

   Again, I’m not to be mistaken for a bat or a parrot, but Australian fruit is just so incredible. It genuinely tastes like it has magic in it. I have witnessed so much media in my lifetime where the humble honeydew melon was the punchline insert example for “bad fruit” and I’m convinced it is an entertainment industry psy-op to trick people out of eating delicious melon so the big-wigs can have it all for themselves. Or America also has bad fruit. I’m not sure and as they don’t seem to care to learn anything about our culture except that koalas carry chlamydia and that they’re “just so proud" of the Irwin kids, I’m not learning anything more about them out of protest. It’s bad enough that I know how to pronounce Arkansas.

2. Yo-Chi frozen yoghurt

   Classic tart flavour! Mango mochi bits! I literally landed in Australia and was eating Yo-Chi eight hours later. Apparently, in my absence, it has become the hottest spot for teens to hang out at 10pm. The place was packed. I always forget that some kids grow up in cities. It feels unnatural to me. Like seeing a cat up on its hind legs. As someone who grew up in the country and had to earn access to urban amenities after I turned 18 - it makes me very jealous. I see a large group of youths in a yoghurt shop and I become a very specific kind of old lady, just shaking my fist and shooing them around like, “Get in a paddock where you belong! Go learn to drive on a highway exclusively traversed by cattle truck drivers who want you dead! All this access to public transport and cinemas will make you soft!”

3. Australian Gold brie/Mersey Valley Crumbly Cheddar

   Two completely perfect cheeses. The absolute greatest.

4. Peckish salt & vinegar rice crackers

   With the cheese? Oh, you better believe there’s a backyard dinner party from my childhood popping off in my mouth.

5. Bundaberg Brewed Lemon, Lime & Bitters

   I was never really a regular consumer of fizzy drinks, mostly because we never had them in the house growing up except for parties, so I never really thought of it as a day-to-day option. But I’m certainly not a fizzy drink girl in the United Kingdom where every single beverage has become sugar-free - seemingly without our consent! It honestly makes me furious that the nutritional smear campaign that was waged against salt in the 90s has redirected its ire towards sugar. I like sugar! I trust sugar! It’s a plant that I know! I’m from Queensland, that’s sugar cane country, I’m familiar with its roots (so to speak). I don’t have whatever eating disorder everybody has now, artificial sweeteners taste bad and are laxatives! There are enough problems as it is. So now when I’m back in Australia I consume huge amounts of lemon, lime & bitters and Pasito so that I can remember what actual pleasure tastes like and abandon puritan shit-yourself-juice to the North.

6. Woolworth’s cooked chook

   There is literally no better Australian activity than walking to the shops with a friend, walking home with a Bachelor’s Handbag swinging on your arm and then tearing a rotisserie chicken apart with your hands because you forgot to buy bread rolls and it’s too hot to walk back there again.

7. Tamar Valley Greek Yoghurt

   On the first day of the Melbourne Comedy Festival last year (quick reminder that this post is supposed to be me telling you that this year’s show starts on Thursday and I NEED to see you there) I was having a meltdown over the fact that I didn’t have a show and what show I did have clearly terrible. Friends have reminded me that this is actually what I say every year and that it’s never true, but I have also been told that I’m actually not capable of assessing the quality of my own work and therefore banned from doing it. Seeing me in my state of grave distress Chloe Petts (excellent comedian, go and see their show also) told me to come up to their hotel room and run the show through at them, so they could tell me if I needed to fake my own death and run off into the bush before my first preview. Chloe is much better at remembering to feed themself than I am and so halfway through the frantic recital of my own jokes they stopped me and insisted that we have something to eat before we discovered whether it was possible for a mammal to implode from negative self talk. They offered me some of everything that they had in their fridge, none of which was food I liked because as established, I don’t like a lot of foods and before I could once again apologise for being made the way that I am they pulled out a tub of Tamar Valley greek yoghurt, put some in a bowl with raspberries, blueberries, drizzled the whole thing with squeezy honey and put it in front of me. And that exact combination has been one of my safe foods ever since. It’s also just really fucking good yoghurt, those Tasmanians really know what they’re doing.

8. Coles Ultimate 40% Chocolate Chip biscuits

   The chocolate chip to biscuit ratio honestly feels illegal, but there’s a lot of stuff that’s both illegal and a good time so I say let the band play on!

9. Always Fresh pitted kalamata olives

   According to the jar, these things are made in Greece. You’d think, what with Greece actually being closer to England than to Australia, I would be able to access them but no! Apparently, there’s an exclusive trade deal afoot and it has led to my mum mailing me several jars of these olives in the last two years. I’m getting olives smuggled into the country wrapped in inconspicuous tea towels and oven mitts like it’s Russia in the 50s and my mum is pressing Elvis albums onto x-ray film. They’re that good.

10. Mint Slice biscuits

    As I have been writing this, I have eaten nearly a whole packet of these and I have absolutely no regrets. Food of the Gods.

I will be in Melbourne performing comedy and eating these foods and others from the 26th of March until the 19th of April (no Mondays) at 7:40pm at Town Hall (6:40pm on Sundays).

Also, my first attempt at a non-stand up comedy show is happening at Comedy Republic on the 17th of April at 10:30pm. It’s called Comedians Perform (But Do Not Rehearse) Rocky Horror and I am scared and excited! But I’ve got some of the funniest people I know lined up to wear fishnets and get weird including David Correos (Taskmaster NZ), Christopher Macarthur-Boyd (Chortle’s Next Big Thing and my actual boyfriend), Sam Nicoresti (Edinburgh Comedy Award’s Best Show Winner 2026), Scout Boxall (MICF Most Outstanding Show Nominee 2025), Hot Department, Gabbi Bolt, Cass Paige, Jack Knight and others!

I will be in Sydney performing comedy and probably running from shady tree to shady tree so I don’t fry my poor, fair skin at 7:50pm on the 23rd & 24th of April at the Enmore Theatre.

And I will be in Brisbane performing comedy and attending the Queensland Transport Authority office to beg them to give me proof that I passed my driving test in a manual car when I was 17 at 7pm on the 27th of April at Good Chat Comedy Club.

Growing up I was given the kind of education that made getting lost feel like a perfectly escapable state of being. I was in the Scouts from ages 6 to 16. My dad is an army veteran who was also in the Scouts as a child. I was essentially nurtured by a cult obsessed with survival skills which didn’t even have the decency to give me a prophesied apocalyptic end-of-days to prepare for. I was taught to plot a route on a map, to use a compass, to make shelters and alerts and makeshift stretchers and stoves. I was taught how to treat snake bites, how to splint a knee with duct tape and what to do if someone got a screwdriver embedded into them. I was taught to Be Prepared. Which is, in theory, good advice but on the other hand it is also an intangible, spooky commandment with no assigned end goal.

No wonder I’m constantly vibrating with the intense levels of anxiety that would kill a small animal. And I don’t just mean a little mouse or a shrew or one of those pocked-sized tit birds. I don’t think a flamingo could survive this. Nor a corgi.

One of the annual Scout camps I attended was literally called Standards. And the theme of that camp was, you guessed it: Standards. We would prepare for weeks in advance. We had to practice putting up a specific kind of tent (a Queenslander) to a specific degree of stability and safety so that the Standards inspectors could come along and measure the distance between our tent pegs as well as their distance from the tent and the tautness of our storm guys and the neatness of our clove hitches on our lashing ropes. They would establish whether our latrine was a safe distance from our mess tent and how creative we had been with our camp entryway and we would cook and serve a three course meal cooked in a cast iron pot in a fire that also needed to be assessed by Standards. And was usually at least 30% ash.

Looking back, it sounds insane. The trouble with the Scouts as an organisation (apart from the obvious) is that it really only attracts upright autistic kids who need organised social outings and kids with behavioural issues who like to start fires. And I guess adults who like teaching children outdoor skills without those children knowing their real names. It was truly a cultural exchange.

This rigorous worship of preparedness was not only instilled into me by the Scouts, but by my military father and incredibly talented and organised mother. Packing was a life skill impressed upon me with the same vigour and relevance as reading and writing. Packing, much like reading and writing, is simply a matter of following the rules. You need a certain number of each item of clothing and a pair of walking shoes and a raincoat and, no matter where you’re going; togs, because you never know when an opportunity to swim or be submerged in water may come along. Scrapbook layouts of family holidays from my childhood include photos of everything that was to go into my suitcase laid out neatly on the floor of my bedroom before it went into the suitcase. For posterity.

Now all of these things are perfectly sensible to teach a child who will one day become an adult so that they aren’t the person at airport security acting like it’s their first day being alive. The problem with a black-and-white, rules-conscious brain though is that to me it seems that if something can be done “right,” naturally that makes it possible to do wrong.

My first time performing at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2023, my friend Bronwyn had organised to pick me up from my house and drop me at the airport and I was so unbelievably terrified that I could barely speak to her. I felt like I had a bomb strapped to my chest. My heart was racing at a speed that would have made sense if I was climbing a cliff face without ropes.

I had spent the night before staring in catatonic terror at my empty suitcase. Filling it for a six week trip to the other side of the world felt like such an insurmountable task that instead of even attempting it, my animal brain decided these were the levels of fear in my body that required it to play dead. Eventually, it was just so close to the last minute that I threw a bunch of random stuff into the case and told myself I would repack it in the morning.

But Bronwyn, diligent and kind friend that she is, arrived early and put my suitcase into her car and then put me into her car, still catatonic. When I got to the airport, before I could check-in, I dropped to the ground and flung my suitcase open and began to sob like a crazy person. “I packed wrong!” I said, as tears fell onto my assortment of jumbled possessions. A startled woman who worked for QANTAS came over to ask if she could do anything to help and I gestured frantically at my open suitcase on the floor and said, “How could you help?! I packed wrong!” Like a maniac. I had, to be fair, packed wrong. I had two sets of medieval-style stays, a blowdryer, a silk hair bow, many dresses and no cardigan or jumper or raincoat or umbrella. For a trip to Scotland. No togs either, but that was probably a fair call.

Weeping, I called my dad to tell him that I had packed wrong and I genuinely expected him to be disappointed and upset with me. He wasn’t, of course, because I’m an adult and I wasn’t going to the woods for a Bear Grylls -style survival hike, I was going to Edinburgh where they have shops. “It’s okay,” he said. “Whatever you’ve forgotten you can buy when you get there.”

“What’s this really about?”

What this was really about was a genuine terror that if I could do this thing that I had been taught how to do my whole life wrong. Then it was entirely possible that I could do the Fringe “wrong.” Or have written my show “wrong.” I genuinely managed to whip myself into a frenzy out of, not simply fear of failure (although that was very prominent), but that I could “do art wrong.” Which is an oxymoron really. You can’t “do art wrong,” just like you can’t “do life wrong.” Unless you drink drive or picket abortion clinics or watch videos out loud on your phone on public transport or whatever.

And yet every day, my internal monologue becomes foggy with a desperate barrage of the phrase “Am I doing this right?” As though that’s even a real question with a real answer. To my Scouts-addled mind: I’m lost, so I must have done something wrong. There must be a map that I put down and went on my expedition without and if I can only get back to where I put that map - I’ll know where I am. I’ll know what I’ve done wrong and how I can fix it.

I saw this video of some women, who got trapped offshore when the tide came in and cut them off from the mainland, being rescued. The first thing one of these shaken women said to their rescuer was, “We’ve been stupid” and he was so quick to absolve her of any fault or guilt. “No, no, we don’t do ‘stupid’ - don’t worry about that.”

“No, it’s no problem at all, it’s one of the biggest tides of the year”.

@rnliOur kindness highlight of the year is the RNLI West Kirby rescue from #SavingLivesAtSea 💙 Chris and the rest of the volunteer crew came to the aid of three women and two dogs who had been cut off by the tide. Although shaken, they were soon back at the lifeboat station in good spirits, warming up with tea and biscuits - a small comfort after a big scare. This footage of Chris is a powerful reminder of the calm kindness our rescue crews show, even in the toughest moments. [Visual description: Rescue footage from the point of view of an RNLI volunteer crew member who goes ashore to assist three women and two dogs who are cut off by the tide. They are then helped aboard the D class lifeboat.] #EmergencyServices #Rescue #Lifeboats #Kindness

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I also feel stupid for getting lost. I have this weird individualist sense of self-flagellation that seems to think that anywhere I have gotten myself lost or stuck is my own failure. But nobody who knows that to err is to be human thinks that. Nobody who knows that community is not just why we stay alive, but how we stay alive thinks that. This man from the West Kirby branch of the Royal National Lifeboat Institution wouldn’t tell me I was stupid for being lost or stuck. He would say that it came in fast, that it’s the biggest tide of the year, that he’s glad I’m okay.

Another of my more memorable Scout activities was the four day canoe hike that I planned and executed during the Easter holidays when I was 15. I must stress that I did not have to do this. I went on a days long canoe hike completely of my own volition in order to earn my Green Cord which I had to earn before I could earn my Scout Medallion (the highest award in the Scouts). I’m telling you, not only was I in a cult, I was successful in my cult. Before I set out on this hike, I had to plan my route and ration supplies and seal our tents and sleeping bags into waterproof drums and meal plan and notify authorities and carry emergency beacons and put a radio into a sealed plastic box and practice securely tying several canoes to a trailer and organise for someone to come and get us when we had reached the end of our (completely voluntary) canoe hike. I had binders worth of information and proof of preparation and less than a day into the journey it became apparent that the water levels of the river were slowly declining. I later learned that the farms that bordered the river had chosen that weekend to dredge industrial quantities of water for their crops and left me and my fellow Scouts floating atop a body of water that became so limited we had to get out and push our canoes in an ankle deep slosh parade. I simply could not have planned for the river not being there. It had always been there before! It is my first time being alive.

As much as I may feel as though there is some form of metaphysical path to follow and I’m stupid for not being able to see it or for getting lost, nobody else actually knows what awaits us in the fog. Sure, you’re a smart, observant person who mapped your route and told someone where you were going and who knows not to fall into holes, but if the hole you’ve fallen into literally didn’t exist until after you’d started your walk - who could blame you for falling in? Me apparently! Or not that I’d blame you, but certainly I’d berate myself for not being mythologically clairvoyant enough to avoid falling into a sinkhole that just this second opened underneath me.

If you fell into a hole, I’d get down on my belly at the edge and rig up some kind of pulley situation, because “being in a hole” while potentially contagious, is not a moral failing. Nor is “getting lost,” “being lost,” “feeling lost” or requiring rescue by the West Kirby branch of the Royal National Lifeboat Institution.

Plus, it’d finally give me an opportunity to utlitise some of these godforsaken Scout skills.

Tammy (Tamworth) 2006 - 2018

When I was nine, the army posted my dad from Canberra, where we had been living for four whole years (a record at the time), to Tamworth - Australia’s Country Music Capital, home of the big Golden Guitar and my first traditional, non-Montessori school that also happened to be Catholic. A lot of new stuff. Prior to this move our familial experience with pets had been limited to a posse of guinea pigs that we deployed as a kind of haphazard lawn mowing crew by moving their hutch around the back lawn in increments. My sister and I took possession of two each. Hers - Ginger & Beer were named as a kind of vaudeville comedy double act and mine - Velvet & Silky - were named as though I had asked a visually impaired person to touch and describe them. They were all boys. It was actually miraculous that we still had a team of four by the time we drove them across state lines because, while still hutched in Canberra, Velvet had developed some combination of illnesses that led to him losing huge patches of fur on his lower half and also the use of his back legs. Now you may think, that while sad, a paraplegic guinea pig is mostly an opportunity for teaching children about the permanence of death and the value of mercy. The vet certainly thought so. He seemed very confused by my stoic, military father’s insistence on Velvet’s rehabilitation. But my dad, having just returned from a posting to the Middle East with an injury that meant he was also struggling to move his back legs had understandably complicated feelings about having a family member put to death for his disability. And so we naturally became guinea pig physical and occupational therapists, moving Velvet’s little legs back and forth in bicycle kick motions while he lay on his back assumedly very confused at being the first ever guinea pig deemed qualified for physio. We built him little runs to test his strength and gave him little sessions of hydrotherapy in a plastic tub full of warm water and soon enough, miracle of miracles, Velvet the guinea pig walked once more. A four legged triumph over paralysis.

My dad recovered from his injury also and so the whole crew was fighting fit by the time we set off to the land of Lee Kernaghan et al. My Kiwi parents were very committed to helping my sister and I assimilate. They bought us a large quantity of Australian country music CDs, I suppose assuming that we might be left out of any Slim Dusty sing-a-longs on the school playground and commenced the traditional army family reccy of Tamworth and its surrounds.

In the town of Nundle, about 50 or so kilometres southeast of Tamworth and 10 kilometres north of Hanging Rock (in case you’re ever lost in the area with a compass), the community holds the “Great Annual Nundle Dog Race,” a weekend of dog related activities, which I imagine is the sort of free event parents jump at when you have many hours of a childhood to fill in. It was there, sitting on a grassy hill watching cattle dogs be coaxed into leaping over sheep dip troughs and high jump bars, that I met my first true love.

My sister and I were approached by a small farm girl wearing almost no clothes. She looked how I imagine the Australian equivalent of a Dickensian street urchin would; spruiking her wares to passers-by. Generally dusty and hollering her spiel in a matter-of-fact, uninterested tone: “Does anybody want a free puppy? Our dog jumped the fence and got pregnant and my dad’s gonna drown them after today.” A fluffy grey and white lump was promptly dropped unceremoniously into my nine-year-old lap and I looked down into the big brown eyes of a creature who, in that moment, I knew I would refuse to leave that hill without.

We took her home in a cardboard box that we got from one of those spiral fried potato stands and when we got her home, we coaxed her to sleep inside a large plastic storage tub put on its side and made soft by the sheep skin my parents had laid my sister and I on as babies. We called her Tammy, short for Tamworth, because Nundle is a bad name for anything. I loved her so much. She was some combination of cattle dog and something smaller than a cattle dog. In the following year and a half we stayed in Tamworth, she broke free of the backyard and followed me to the school bus stop on multiple occasions, forcing me to run back and attempt to contain her before I missed the bus. She always had a glint in her big, brown eyes that said, “Where are we going?” She was my fluffy little shadow. I realised recently that my habit of keeping my bedroom door perpetually open, something remarked upon as odd by multiple flatmates, exists because of Tammy and her desire to go in and out of my room all through the night.

You could tell she was a working dog, because she needed to keep tabs on everybody all the time. She had to make sure all members of her herd were in for the night and safe, before she would curl up in the soft pillows underneath my bookcase. When my sister and I would scooter or cycle ahead of our parents on the footpath she would tear along beside us and then gallop back to where my mum and dad were walking and try to urge us back into formation. A constant looping circle of blurry grey fur keeping eyes on every member of her family at all times.

After Tamworth, the army sent us interstate again to Toowoomba, Queensland where from the moment of her arrival Tammy maintained a permanent red dirt glow around her mouth and paws, lying in the corner of the hallway all our bedrooms were on so she could be sure she knew where all of her people were. My school uniform was navy blue wool and there was not a single moment, from enrolment to graduation, where her fur was not felted into the fibres of that thing. I would come home from school and drop to the floor for her to leap and wriggle in my arms and paint my face with her tongue.

Towards the end of high school I got very ill and spent months barely able to leave my bed. Tammy changed her watch position from the hallway corner to stand sentinel by my sick bed. She would spend hours curled up, looking worried, in the corner of my bedroom or patrolling the doorway and yelling at anybody who wanted to come near me. My mum says that when she would come in to administer me food and meds, Tammy would be there guarding me like a statue of Anubis by an Egyptian tomb, looking up with reproachful eyes that said, “Fix her! Fix my girl.”

I had a blue sleeping bag that I took camping with me my whole life. It had been my dad’s when he was a scout and I loved it because the feathers were old and squished which made it incredibly easy to shove back into its packing bag, compared with more modern sleeping bags whose repacking experiences feel more like an attempt at repacking Pandora’s box. It went with me to ten years of my own scout camps and sometimes I would wiggle into it underneath my regular blankets on my bed before our house had central heating. I liked feeling comfortably contained. It made the world feel as though it had edges and didn’t just stretch out into vast swathes of the unknown.

I left home to go to university in Brisbane in 2016 and on one trip home my parents greeted me with a sombre attitude that insisted I prepare my spirit for mourning. My bedroom door swung open to reveal a blizzard of feathers. Tammy had chewed up my beloved sleeping bag in the frenzy of a worried cattle dog missing one of her calves. I saw her sad, guilty brown eyes gazing up at me as though she was squinting through a snowstorm and no part of me was even upset that something I loved so much had been destroyed because I could see so clearly that she had only been searching for me. Following her nose to the thing that smelt like me the most and hoping wretchedly that I might still be somewhere inside that sleeping bag, with the edges of the world pulled over my head. I just got down on my knees amidst the fervour of down she had created and let her wriggle in my arms and paint her face with my tongue and apologised for leaving the herd. My lone sentinel made frantic by my sudden disappearance. My statue of Anubis. My first true love.

By the time Tammy left us, I had learned about the permanence of death and the value of mercy. Our team of guinea pigs had been long buried in the backyard of a Defence house on Minimbah Close in Tamworth. They all died together, mere weeks before the family was preparing to once again drive them across state lines. Just laid down in a huddle and went to sleep as a team. As I was poking my fingers through the bars of the cage to stroke their lifeless little bodies, my mum said idly, “It looks like a fuzzy Jonestown” to which I replied, “What’s Jonestown?” whereupon I learned about the concept of suicide, followed by the concept of mass suicide.

The medication the vet injected to put her to sleep was a brilliant, emerald green. I remember it so vividly. It was such a beautiful colour for such a devastating medication. I assume they colour it that way so that no one could ever mistake it for something else, the same way surgeons use sharpie to label the correct leg for amputation while the patient is still awake to confirm. Tammy’s organs were failing and there was pink fluid leaking out of her skin and she still wagged her tail when my mum and my sister and I arrived, already sobbing, at her bedside. Her eyes looked searchingly over our shoulders for my dad, who was unfortunately across the country for work. A herd dog to the very end. She died in my arms. I was holding her and I felt her leave.

When they took her from me, I felt a swell of irrational anger at my mum for continuing to stroke the ears of her corpse. “She’s not in there anymore,” I thought and didn’t say. “That’s not her, that’s just her shape.” And then I felt more rational anger as 3/4 of my family staggered out of the back room of that animal hospital, so grief-stricken we could barely stand and my mum was presented with the now redundant collar of an animal who had been in my life longer than she hadn’t been, a run down of medical bills and a card machine. Obviously, medical care had been provided that needed to be paid for. I don’t suggest that veterinary science apply a no win/no fee approach like one of those “Have you been injured at work?” lawyers you see billboards for along the highway. But surely this is the kind of situation you invoice for! You know, “Sorry for your loss! We’ll email you our bank details! The cremation is on us, we have a big pile of horses that need doing we can toss her in with!” I found myself quite consumed with brooding on the tactless nature of requesting payment for killing a family member on the whole drive back to Brisbane. Where I dragged myself into my bedroom, looked up at the picture of Tammy and I on the wall and recommenced my wailing grief. She died three weeks before I finished university. My mum would say that all she knew in her life, right up until the moment it ended, was that we loved her so much. Because we told her all the time and she told us the same. Isn’t that special?