by Shane Rowlands

Lori Lorion, Fire Alarm, 2020, photograph. Courtesy of the artist. — Lori Lorion, *Fire Alarm*, 2020, photograph. Courtesy of the artist.

How we are coded:

Inhabiting the endnotes

Shane Rowlands / Sept 2020 / Issue 1

Warning: Statistical table ahead. Kathunk! I hear hearts drop; I know we are story-telling creatures. But the nation crunches (us to) numbers. Dear reader, stay with me.

"So here is the story of our nation—a living biography we get to update once every five years.”
– Australian Bureau of Statistics heralds the release of the latest Census data

The table below appears in an article published by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) in 2008. The article is titled “How many children have women in Australia had?” Above the title is a discreet note that explains the article is being reissued in order to replace 1976 Census data with 1981 data. In 1976 the Census only asked women who had ever been married whether they had given birth. It wasn’t until 1981 that the Census began to ask all women to answer this question. Therefore, “making comparisons between the 1976 data and data from subsequent Censuses [is] misleading.” Be reassured, the ABS assert: “All of the other numbers in this article are correct.”

1. The data in this table collates responses to Q32—Number of Children Ever Born—in the ABS Censuses of Population and Housing conducted in 1986, 1996 and 2006. Apparently, making comparisons between these data sets is not misleading because, in these three Censuses, Q32 was asked of all women in exactly the same way, as follows:

On reading this question and dot-pointed instructions, I wonder whether it is misleading for the ABS to use the term female when what it really means is womb.

2. The cohort in which my Census responses are coded is called Mother born 1962–66. Note the ABS do not use the term female here. Mother is the term used, despite the fact the second column in this table collates data for females who have not given birth to babies. Given that my Census data is coded under Mother born 1962–66, one might correlate this cohort as ‘daughters’ of the women’s liberation movement. Only my mother did not burn her bra. In 1969, she was breast-feeding my six-month-old baby brother and living in a caravan in a tiny country town with me and my father, having migrated to the arse-end of nowhere for my father’s work as an exploration geologist. In 1971, when she completed the first Census for our not-yet-naturalised Australian household, her labour of cooking, cleaning and raising children was not counted. She was coded wife.

3. When the Census was conducted in 1986, I was three months off turning 20, surviving as a tree, lightning-struck. Two years earlier, I had been sexually assaulted. The sap in my cells had vaporised and I’d told no one, refused even to admit this to myself; (and though my body was felled often by panic attacks, I did not find the words or ways back to fully re-inhabit my physical being for another 15 years.) On the night of the Census, I filled in the form with my two flatmates. We were full-time students in the final year of our undergraduate degrees, juggling part-time jobs waitressing, house-cleaning, babysitting. At Q32, we each marked an ‘X’ next to None.
♟ indicates where we are coded in the majority (75%) with no children.

4. Not long before the 1991 Census (data not included in the table), about 1500 of us marched through the city streets of Brisbane for the second Pride Festival.
When we got to Victoria Bridge we lay down on the road Together
on our backs for three minutes we stared up into solidarity with sky
and ours who were dead or dying of HIV/AIDS Beneath us
a slow tide kept sucking the fat muddy river out to sea.
Come Census night, I slept in a rambling weatherboard share house, where once I’d mowed the lawn and the bees in the landlord’s hives had swarmed and stung me all over, swelling my eyes and airways to slits. By the time my breathing returned to normal, I had enrolled in postgraduate studies and come up with a title for my thesis—Cramped Spaces: A mapping of some lesbian, queer and sex-radical performance work in Australia since 1985.
I am oblivious to statistical analysis showing the highest proportion of childless women are those with bachelor or higher degrees.

5. Friends decide to make a poster on safe sex and safe injecting. They ask various dykes from our network to pose for photos. Eventually, some of us agree.
To loosen up for the photoshoot, we drink a lot of cheap champagne. In the poster, I am naked on an armchair, my head thrown back. Between my spread legs is a dental dam, stretched by my housemate, who kneels and goes down on me.
When all the fizz and flashing
buzz and sticky heat of all of us
giddy with creating together
is over I vomit.
The text on the poster reflects community consultation and aims for inclusivity: we are women who fuck with women, lesbians, gay ladies, dykes, queer, bi, separatist ... and some of us inject drugs; sleep with men; smoke pot; drink; make scones; surf; drive fast cars; work 9–5: sing; dress up; tie up; wear lipstick; are butch; play pool; play netball; don’t work; go to school; have kids; like it hard; wear suits; are femme; listen to heavy metal; sleep around; play sport; are hairy ...
The poster is censored from hanging in the Special Edition exhibition at City Hall because the Council see “no reason to needlessly offend public taste".
We protested at the opening: thirty of us whistle-blowing to disrupt the official speeches before scarpering off to the alternative exhibition party we had organised in an empty shop front in Fortitude Valley.
Truth be told, I never used dams; I hardly ever had sex.
I danced.

6. When the 1996 Census comes around, I am nearly 30, in the midst of what the ABS term peak child-bearing years. The table shows 19% of my cohort have birthed one child, 31% have birthed two, and 15% have three kids. I live with a trapeze artist, who chants Om Mani Padme Hum and crosses the Census box female though they identify as boi.
Under the big top of an umbrella tree in our backyard, the rainbow lorikeets swing, upside-down and drunk on nectar. Above their raucous squawk, the fertility clinics come hawking for business: “If you must climb the ladder, ladies, best to harvest your eggs young and freeze them for later.” I am a postgraduate student and work three part-time jobs—tutoring in women’s studies; devising community legal education resources at the Women’s Legal Service; and as librarian at a Rape and Incest Survivors Support Centre. My brother gets married, so does my best friend from school.
♞ marks where my data is coded among the 29% who have not given birth.

7. For six years, I am mostly single, and enfolded within friendships’ many arms. Queer, I don’t get pressure from family to settle down and have kids. My inscrutability thickens.
Dining out for a celebration of extended family, my brother’s father-in-law passes me a bowl of butternut pumpkin biryani and asks: “Do all vegetarians hate men?” Inside chrysalis, I digest myself into imaginal cells.
My sister-in-law and brother welcome a baby girl in 1997 and another in 1999. I hatch as aunt.

8. In the lead-up to the 2001 Census, I work in the public service in rural and remote education policy and train as a yoga teacher. The Prime Minister announces he will amend Sex Discrimination legislation in order to ban lesbians and single women from accessing IVF services.
I practice Vrikshasana, draw strength from earth through the soles of my feet into legs and spine. My torso turns to xylem. I breathe into my cambium, grow bark.
The proposed amendment is defeated.
In 2001, Australia’s population records its lowest birth rate to date. The ABS calculate average number of children ever born at 1.7, which falls short of the population replacement level of 2.1 babies per woman. It seems the nation and I are on the brink of a serious decline in fertility. To stimulate the Australian rate of procreation, the Treasurer introduces a Baby Bonus Scheme. “Have one for mum, one for dad and one for the country,” he spruiks. Outside my bedroom, the smoke alarm starts to beep every few minutes, warning me the batteries are going flat. Turning 35, I let myself get picked by a puppy. He shapeshifts my shadow for thirteen years to come.

9. Life pulses with friends, dogs, work, dress-ups and dancing with four budding nieces, books, art, queer community, family. I move to a house flooded with sunlight. Each night I fall to sleep accompanied by the brawk brawk brawk of a green tree frog who lives in the drainpipe. I dream my womb is a garden plotted thick with sweet peas, snake beans and stubborn clumps of cornflowers. I meet a restoration ecologist. Her back is tattooed with a tree. We name each other after native birds, wild pollinators, endangered species.

10. By the 2006 Census, mycorrhizal fungi feather our roots, entangled with hyphae, we nose through leaf litter and humus, threading deeper past earthworms and old dogs’ bones buried beside seeds of silver leaf wattle bleeding heart quandong brown kurrajong.
All these future forest pioneers lie dormant.
The country is enduring its sixth year of drought.
Big-city-folk are slowly learning water is not an unlimited resource.
The ABS consider a woman's reproductive lifetime to begin at age 15 and end when she turns 50. Depending on conditions of soil banks—stability, structure, moisture and surrounding native vegetation—some seeds remain viable for 150 years.
The restoration ecologist ticks the Census box de facto partner of Person 1.
❦ is where my data is coded with the 16% of whose remaining eggs are less and less likely to be fertilised successfully.

11. When the ABS release the 2006 Census data, we are counted under the same-sex couple indicator. But only because we reside in the same household. The Census does not ask questions on sexual orientation; and Census data collection design overlooks people (straight, bi, gay, lesbian, queer, pan, ace) who are a couple but live apart, those who are single and people living in group households.
In 2011, the ABS introduce a new classification—Relationship as reported for Couples. This extends to us the option of choosing to pick a Census box marked husband or wife rather than de facto partner. Except: we’ve grown for seven years together and do not identify as wives. Except: it will take another six years and 15 unsuccessful attempts before Australia legalises same-sex marriage. And, by then, we’ve spent nearly 30 years in the fight to reclaim the night, for women’s rights and queers’ rights as human rights, to recognise sovereignty and make reparations with First Nations people, for kinship with critters, forests, mountains, rivers and oceans, for climate justice now.

12. In the 2016 Census, the ABS revise the wording for Q32. The instruction to include live births only—which has stood for 35 years—is removed “due to the sensitivities involved for some respondents which cannot be overcome effectively in a self-report questionnaire.” (Attempted translation of non-admission: National data collection is compromised because some of us trust our bodies as a way of knowing.)
The ABS have a measure for the proportion of women who have reached the end of their child-bearing years and not had any babies. In 2016, this is where the data for me, my Beloved, many friends and almost 852,000 women in Australia is coded.
I’d be lying if I told you the name for this measure is water off my duck’s back.
Lifetime childlessness.
So many moments branching in so many lives and lifeways twisting tatting plaiting looping to deliver us and our data here in this year when atmospheric carbon dioxide surges to a new record level of 403.3 parts per million.
Lifetime childlessness.
Even now having typed
these two words I have to fight
sensations of dizziness hollowing out un-
ravelling weft threads and warp
strings slashed brocades
of intimacies disappearing with
the densely thicketed ecosystems
of all our relations.

13. In September 2019, with tinder-dry summer already in spring, 300,000 Australians join school students striking for climate action. In Meanjin I am one of 30,000 scales on crowd-serpent snaking over Victoria Bridge the head and the tail of us out of sight Our heart-song swelling in call and response.
In October, the ABS recommend that the Australian government do not include proposed new questions about sexual orientation and gender identity in the upcoming 2021 Census. Despite extensive consultation with LGBTIQ groups and government agencies who need this data to deliver services, the ABS believe these topics are too sensitive and risk “adverse public reaction”.
In November, lightning strikes ignite bushfires. All over the country. Blood-orange skies have swallowed the sun.
Late December, thick smoke chokes the east coast and flaming tornadoes spin ember helixes fifty-feet high into firestorms torching the new year and 18 million hectares to scorched. Until exhausted.
March 2020 tolls: thirty-three human deaths; 18,000 people displaced; 3000 homes and 7000 buildings destroyed. More than three billion mammals, birds and reptiles dead or displaced. Insect deaths and plant deaths inestimable.
Shut down. For a global pandemic.
In July 2020, in the midst of the continuing pandemic and fears of a second wave of transmission, the Treasurer urges Australians to participate in a post-coronavirus baby boom: “The best thing that we can do to encourage more children being born across the country is obviously to create a strong economy for them to be born into."

14.

what we are made of will make something else

what we are made of will make something else?

Shane Rowlands is a writer and collage artist who lives in Brisbane, Australia on Yugara-Turrbal country. She has published two poetry chapbooks—rear vision (Spindrift, 1997) and cicatriced histories (Metro Arts, 1995)—and has written for theatre and live performance. Recent exhibitions include fall seven times, stand up eight (PF Studio, 2013) and Royals, Angels & Assassins (WAG, 2015). She has worked as an editor and dramaturge, public policy maker, arts and cultural strategist, and as a researcher, curator and writer for exhibitions and business story-telling.

Lori Lorion earned her MFA at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Her work has been exhibited in California, Oregon, North Carolina, Georgia, Pennsylvania, New Mexico, Vermont and Skopje Macedonia. Lori's paintings are dreamlike celebrations of the human body in motion. She creates a reality where imposing, large-scale figures quietly emerge from within a mysterious world. Her brightly colored, often richly textured paintings have a musical feel to them. Unabashedly bold, yet gentle and silent, these robust figures pulsate with life. Lori lives, works, and teaches in North Carolina.