Queerstories Bundanon - A tale of sad/queer camping.
This is a story I wrote for Queerstories, a wonderful storytelling event created by Maeve Marsden. It was a big gay honour to be asked to present a story for Maeve’s Queerstories event in Bundanon at the Bundanon Trust. I was put up in a real flash room overlooking hills and rivers and fed multiple-coursed meals. A real treat. You can listen to hundreds of Queerstories at the Spotify link.
Here’s mine below.
Talofa!
Talofa is a Samoan greeting, short for “Si O Ta Alofa Atu,” which means “I am joyful and excited to give you my love.”
So, Talofa.
In Samoa, we call the sacred relational space between two people Le Vā. Le Vā understands that there is a space between us, the world we live in, the people we love/lose, the ancestors; it is integral to our existence. We must nurture that space between. It holds us when we need it most. This space between us right now will never happen again. What a treat and privilege to be here sharing stories, in communion together.
On Christmas day of 2022, I lost my father Mefiposeta Misa unexpectedly. A few weeks earlier, my dear friend Megan’s father Jamie had also passed away. Over the coming days, Megan and I would check in on each other over text—not so much a “how are you doing?” but more of a “Hey boo, reaching out to say I’m still here, wondering if anybody else in the world has felt this sore. I dunno what to say, but today [mutual friend] is really pissing me off. Anyway, love you, and maybe see you at The Bearded Tit on Sunday?”
One deliciously warm, post-Mardi Gras autumn week, myself, Megan, and our friend Diana—another friend who had recently lost her mother—decided that with summer officially over, we would do what any grieving queer does: go camping in semi-regional NSW.
The city disappeared behind us, and Diana had a fast car, a Subaru Forester, which was our ticket to anywhere. We pulled into a hole-in-the-wall type cafe in Nowra, where a gorgeous flannelette-wearing human served us coffees and insisted, “You guys gotta have a crack at Mrs. McCarthy’s famous caramel slice—best caramel slice on the South Coast.” It was a superb slice. We spent the rest of the drive dreaming of alternative possibilities where we ran away to the South Coast and into the arms of caramel slice girl or FarmGuy79, who had been sending me wholesome messages about coming over for some homebrew beer and making love through a glory hole in a barn his grandfather built in the 1920s.
We set up camp at Bendalong Caravan Park on Yuin country on the NSW South Coast. Bendalong is one of those parts of this continent where you arrive after a 3-hour drive from the heart of the inner west and immediately adopt your camping voice and persona. The shoulders drop, you don’t change your undies for 3 days, and every time you drop a Suzy Spoon vegan sausage on the ground, you respond with “nahhrr shee’lll be roighttt.”
The trip was off to a great start, swapping the club for the campfire. There are parallels between campfires and clubs. There’s a certain rhythm to a campfire: the restocking of the fire, the peaks of its burn, and the intensity of brightly charged fluorescent orange coals; the coming together around the beating heart of the campsite. My fondest memories with my dad are around a fire with him and my brothers, laughing, eating, making up raps, or in my case, dancing around the fire like I was on ecstasy—a precursor to the wild and untamed club rat I would become.
Back at Bendalong, the flames flickered light on our faces while exchanging stories of lovers past who ghosted us after we dared show them a bit of vulnerability during a post-coital chitty-chat. Over the fire, Diana passed me her copy of “Attached: The New Science of Adult Attachment.” A gentle offer for some light campground reading and a reminder that we were here to “do the work.”
The next morning, basking in the ambience of our farts (mostly Megan’s and Diana’s), we opened the tent doors wide to see our campsite had been ransacked. Small trails of BBQ shapes and sourdough bread led off into the bushes by our campsite. Noted. The wildlife in Bendalong are tame for a reason: they are all highly sugar dependent. On night 2, Megan was startled to see a family of wallabies sat around the campfire playing a game of fuck/marry/kill about the humans that had come to cleanse and release. Noted. We play by their rules.
Megan and Diana shared breakfast duties that morning, and the three of us dove face first into a slow-cooked shakshuka, fresh coffee, and conversations about our exes and the hierarchies of relationship dynamics in the queer community. We agreed that on this campsite there were no hierarchies. We would each earn our keep. Off I sludged to scrape off the remains of the slow-cooked shakshuka from the cast iron pot.
Later that day, we went for a walk along the beach and perched ourselves on the long stretch of sand, taking turns wading in the shallow waters amongst the stingrays. Bendalong is famous for its stingrays, who swim up and brush against your legs, letting you know everything is going to be okay and that right here is exactly where we need to be. I got stuck into my “Attachment Theory” book and bookmarked the part that says, “Attachment principles teach us that most people are only as needy as their unmet needs… The more effectively dependent people are on one another, the more independent and daring they become.” Hanging with stingrays and my two friends was definitely a good start.
One afternoon, we decided to go for a moderate hike among the camouflaged barked gumtrees and through the hills blooming with bright green wildgrass—a jungle compared to the manicured lawns of the city. This was what we had all hoped for. It felt like a real adventure. I don’t know about the other two, but I really felt like we were going on a bear hunt, and I was determined to catch a big one. Unfortunately, no bears were caught, but we emerged from our hike on the shore of a secluded cove with thousands of shells and pebbles scattered along the sand, holding the echoes of thousands of tiny crab and crustacean stories. We started skipping pebbles along the calm ocean surface, giggling at who could do the most skips. Realizing we all had quite a bit of stuff to release, we began throwing larger stones and then boulders. They didn’t skip but rather crashed, disrupting the ocean’s surface. At some point, we remembered we were three queers on a secluded beach grieving, so of course, it escalated to the three of us ripping all our clothes off, surrendering to the ocean, and screaming, “I forgive me” and “Today is where our book begins.”
The local seals perched up on the rocks, trying to catch the last of the autumn sun, gave us their nod of approval, shuffling along the rocks a bit closer towards us before flopping into the ocean. A sign from our dead parents, for sure. That night over the fire, Diana made a slow-cooked Balkan lentil stew with crusty bread and parmesan, a recipe her mother taught her. While she shared memories of her mother and her cooking, we all cried, knowingly aware of the feeling of yearning that can be conjured by the taste of their cooking, the smell of the fire, the glow of the same sun you wish to watch set just one more time with your precious person.
That night, we slept a little more cozy. The tent felt safe and secure, our little domed haven of understanding. Before we went to bed, we put out the fire and made sure all the food was securely locked away. In the early hours of the next morning, on my way to the toilet, I passed a new campsite. Their food was scattered amongst the campsite. I smiled, wondering what they might be running away from or towards. Fa’afetai Tele Lava, Thankyou.
