‘The Living Sea of Waking Dreams’ - a novel by Tasmanian author Richard Flanagan tells the story of a dying mother, her children denying her a dignified death, a world of technological distraction and avoidance, where bushfires rage the East Coast of Australia and things, real things mysteriously disappear - ears, knees, arms, eyes - while no one seems to notice, or care.

It’s a confusing, unsettling read. I began reading this book while sailing down to Tasmania, and happened to meet Richard Flanagan at a community meeting in Hobart Town Hall discussing the devastating impacts of commercial Salmon Farms on the waterways around Tasmania. A story - an actual, visible, measurable ‘conspiracy’ of industry and government chasing profit at the expense of the local environment and its communities. More on that another time.

As he signed the book for me he mentioned that it was partly written in response to what he witnessed happening to the environment in southern Tasmania as the industry expanded.

These are a selection of images I took over the last couple of months whilst down in the South East of Tasmania, plus a few others that came to mind when reading the book,

Richard

‘No one took any notice. No one looked up. All were staring at their phones. It was as though the signal was weak but if they could just find the hole in the sky where one bar might be had everything would be ok, as if just out there, about to be delivered, was the message they were all waiting for.’

‘She would scroll the country would burn she would watch a video shot by firefighters inside a fire truck swallowed by fire try to escape tunnelling through a phone screen of pure flame, flame moving like water giant rolling and breaking waves of fire, firefighters dead, a politician in board shorts holidaying in Hawaii, arms around people drinking tossing a shaka, hanging loose…’

‘There was no mention of vanishings’

‘Of course, people still talked, but, in some fundamental way Anna didn’t understand, they weren’t strictly conversations at all…

‘She checked WhatsApp she checked Insta. A charred rainbow lorikeet halted her scrolling’

‘How could it be? thought Anna. That was the mystery: they knew and they knew and they did nothing. They could not talk about it and what they talked about was a way of not talking about anything at all with the confidence it actually mattered’

‘And in these small put downs of her own life it was possible to sense an aching regret so vast it was not possible to imagine it could be lived with and survived’

‘The frames that held conversation - time, logic, grammar - were all collapsing’

‘Nowhere could Anna see evidence of a world wanting to take the matter seriously. Perhaps the more the essential world vanished the more people needed to fixate on the inessential world’

‘But it seemed to her at times that not only were young people not seeing but perhaps - and it was this that struck her as more frightening than anything - they did not want to see.’

‘The more things changed the harder people stared into their screens, living elsewhere, the real world now no more than the simulacrum of the screen world, their real lives the shadow of their online lives’

‘For so long they had been searching, liking, friending, and commenting, emojiing and cancelling, unfriending and swiping and scrolling again, thinking they were no more than writing and rewriting their own worlds, while, all the time - sensation by sensation, emotion by emotion, thought by thought, fear on fear, untruth on untruth, feeling by feeling - they were themselves being slowly rewritten into a wholly new kind of human being. How could they have known that they were being erased from the beginning?’

‘It was all done out of love - nothing so cruel was possible to emerge out of hate alone - and such a love could only grow and grow, until it had created this: the most terrifying solitude of suffering’

‘After all, what was pity, if not sorrow grounded in the illusion of power?’

‘And yet all their care and their kindness were for Francie only so much more suffering.

Anna sometimes felt that to inflict such torment on a sentient creature in any other sphere of life would be considered criminally psychopathic and merit heavy punishment

And this invisible crime flourished and was only possible, Anna realised, because of a lie. And that lie was one they - children, doctors, nurses - all encouraged.

The lie was that postponing death was life. That wicked lie had now imprisoned Francie in a solitude more absolute and perfect and terrifying than any prison cell’

‘And, kneeling there, head bowed with the immense universe vibrating in and out and through him, that universe which he understood as him also, Francie’s father would each morning thank God for such beauty that there is in this world.

The idea and the image - they were to Francie one. The insignificance and the immensity. The gift and the gratitude. The power of the man in the world. The power of the world in the man.

Francie never forgot that vision, nor did she ever escape the sense that the world and God and beauty and love could also be hers, if she just fell to her knees and let each fill her. And against the cosmic power of that image the poverty of her childhood was as nothing.’

‘The church was an empty shed and the beach was an overflowing universe, and there was their true religion, in the dunes and the marram grass and the boobialla groves, in the waves and the rips and the tide, the blinding sun and the gritty washes of sea wind, the late afternoon dazzle of the glazed sand ripples as the ocean receded, the taste of salt, the exultation of bodies diving into the first wave, falling and being lifted, the restorative power of the world’

‘… and the goodness and joy and fecundity of it, the blessing of the sea, never left her’

Words from The ‘Living Sea of Waking Dreams’, by author Richard Flanagan

https://www.penguin.com.au/books/the-living-sea-of-waking-dreams-9781760899943

Images by Richard Lawless