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nostalgia comes at you like a wave
and smells like familiarity that no longer exists
reminding you of things that have ended and things that will end

at late hours into the night
i feel like i am getting more and more messed up beyond repair

i have burnt all my bridges and thrown my mind into space
i hope you come and pull me back soon

She steps forward. ‘What I believe,’ she reads in a firm voice, like a child doing a recitation. ‘I was born in the city of Melbourne, but spent part of my childhood in rural Victoria, in a region of climatic extremes: of scorching droughts followed by torrential rains that swelled the rivers with the carcases of drowned animals. That, anyhow, is how I remember it.

‘When the waters subsided – I am speaking of the waters of one river in particular now, the Dulgannon – acres of mud were left behind. At night you would hear the belling of tens of thousands of little frogs rejoicing in the largesse of the heavens. The air would be as dense with their calls as it was at noon with the rasping of cicadas.

‘Where did they suddenly arrive from, these thousands of frogs? The answer is, they are always there. In the dry season they go underground, burrowing further and further from the heat of the sun until each has created a little tomb for itself. And in those tombs they die, so to speak. Their heartbeat slows, their breathing stops, they turn the colour of mud. Once again the nights are silent.

‘Silent until the next rains come, rapping, as it were, on thousands of tiny coffin lids. In those coffins hearts begin to beat, limbs begin to twitch that for months have been lifeless. The dead wake. As the caked mud softens, the frogs begin to dig their way out, and soon their voices resound again in joyous exultation beneath the vault of the heavens.

‘Excuse my language. I am or have been a professional writer. Usually I take care to conceal the extravagances of the imagination. But today, for this occasion, I thought I would conceal nothing, bare all. the vivifying flood, the chorus of joyous belling, followed by the subsiding of the waters and the retreat to the grave, then drought seemingly without end, then fresh rains and the resurrection of the dead – it is a story I present transparently, without disguise.

‘Why? because today I am before you not as a writer but as an old woman who was once a child, telling you what I remember of the Dulgannon mudflats of the childhood and of the frogs who live there, some as small as the tip of my little finger, creatures so insignificant and so remote from your loftier concerns that you would not hear of them otherwise. In my account, for whose many failings I beg your pardon, the life cycle of the frog may sound allegorical, but to the frogs themselves it is not allegory, it is the thing itself, the only thing.

‘What do I believe? I believe in those little frogs. Where I find myself today, in my old age and perhaps my older age, I am not sure. But the Australian continent, where I was born into the world, kicking and squalling, is real (if far away), the Dulgannon and its mudflats are real, the frogs are real. they exist whether or not I tell you about them, whether or not I believe in them.

‘It is because of the indifference of those little frogs to my belief (all they want from life is a chance to gobble down mosquitoes and sing; and the males among them, the ones who do most of the singing, sing not to fill the night air with melody but as a form of courtship, for which they hope to be rewarded with orgasm, the frog variety of orgasm, again and again and again) – it is because of their indifference to me that I believe in them. And that is why, this afternoon, in this lamentably rushed and lamentably literary presentation for which I again apologise, but I thought I would offer myself to you without forethought, ‘toute nue’ so to speak, and almost, as you can see for yourselves, without notes – that is why I speak to you of frogs. Of frogs and of my belief or beliefs and of the relation between the former and the latter. Because they exist.’