This is a newsletter from Galah's editor-in-chief, Annabelle Hickson, this week sent from a room that may or may not have a snake in it.
I've been on strike. Having taken such pleasure in writing a fortnightly newsletter for Galah for years, I ran out of things to say. Or rather, I lost the desire to say anything at all.
When my father died suddenly, I went quiet. The grief was physical – an aching hole in my chest. It was too big at first.
So I bunkered down with my family. I walked and weeded the garden and cooked time-consuming things. I got a puppy. I slowly started working again. I spent time with friends. I had kept up the newsletter for a while, until one day I ran out of steam. It's a mystery to me that the "writing a newsletter" part of my brain felt so close to the "aching hole of grief" part of my brain, but it did, and I didn't want to go there.
This week I watched a brown snake slither from the footpath outside my bedroom up into a crack inside the bedroom wall. My bedroom wall. I have not seen it slither out and can only assume it is still in the wall cavity or – because the wall has cracks on both its exterior and interior surfaces – in my bedroom somewhere. This would make sense. Our bedroom is the beachhead for the mice from the farm who are trying to take over our kitchen. If I was a snake, this is where I would set up shop too.
When I saw the snake slither into the bedroom wall, I first thought, "well, that's it for that room. I'll just never set foot in there again." I shut the door and slept in my son's room.
The next day, when I realised I needed lots of things from my bedroom – undies, a fresh t-shirt, all my toiletries – I tiptoed into the bedroom to relocate essentials only, before scurrying out quickly.
Today, I'm fully back in the bedroom, working at my desk here. It's my favourite place to type. I can look past my computer and yellow desk lamp, through the window and see a willie wagtail making a nest in the fig tree. There's a ceiling fan and I love its gentle whirring.
Today, although not yesterday, I'm not bothered about the idea of a snake being in here. Mysteriously there is now enough room in my head to both accept the snake might be here – like the aching hole in my chest – and want to just get on with it anyway.
Annabelle xx
Even though I haven't had the wherewithal to write a newsletter for the past few months, I have been working on other exciting Galah things, two of which I want to tell you about now.
I first fell in love with Jeremy Valentine and the way he wrote about his central Victorian garden The Stones on Instagram. Then I fell in love with him all over again, along with his partner Grant Francis, when we ran a story about The Stones in issue 6 of Galah.
Now, I am delighted to report that my love affair with all things Valentine, Francis and The Stones continues here in newsletter form.
Valentine will write about his gardening life in a new monthly newsletter for Galah called In the Weeds. It will join our other monthly newsletters – Neil Varcoe's We Bought a Hotel and Sophie Hansen's Yes, Chef! – as well as my newsletter, which will now go from fortnightly to monthly. So between the four of us, we'll drop into your inboxes on each Friday morning of the month.
To launch In the Weeds, Valentine wrote a piece in the new issue of Galah – the Pleasure issue – which is landing in subscribers' letterboxes as I type. If you haven't already bought your copy, may I suggest you do. It's so beautiful.
It's back, baby. The Galah Regional Photography Prize returns, this time in partnership with the New England Regional Art Museum – NERAM – in Armidale, NSW.
If you’re a photographer living in regional Australia (for us that means outside of the major capital cities), we want to see what you see.
Entries will open soon.
Aside from wonderful prize money ($25,000 for the winner 😎), there’ll be an eight week exhibition at NERAM, along with a big party to announce the winners. There'll be dancing and dinner and opportunities to connect with collectors and other photographers. Oh, and also a Golden Galah trophy made of bronze.
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