[first published 17.10.2025 Substack]
I’d started to lose faith in coincidences. I was afraid that it was all just algorithms from here on: every moment of delightful correspondence tarnished by a dirty tech trick. But today there was a real one and I started to believe again (fuck you algorithm-peddlers!).
This morning I was sitting very still on the rickety old wicker seat on the veranda, reading a book (No Road (bitumen all the way) by Stephen Muecke, Australian writer and academic) while also keeping an eye on what the lizards and small birds were doing in the slowly warming morning. The birds – finches, wrens, spinebills, honeyeaters – were flipping leaves over to check for hiding critters, nipping off long strands of grass to take away to nestbuilding endeavours, sticking their beaks into grevillea flowers for a nectar snip, dabbling briefly in the big dish of water placed there for their use. The two lizards – Eastern water skinks – seemed to be in some kind of slow courtship/stand-off. Yesterday I’d seen the sleeker of the two chase the other one and grab it by the tail with a big chomping bite. Stump-tail (instead of a smooth, shiny tapered tail, it has a weathered looking lump that points out to one side), the recipient of the bit, has been here every summer for several years and after seeing what happened to it yesterday, I’m wondering if the misshapen regrowth is a result of too much of this kind of shenanigans.
So I’m reading Muecke and up comes Todorov; I don’t know who Todorov is but remind myself to look the name up later. And I’m side-watching the lizards/skinks sidle up to each other and do some head-nodding and occasionally, when I sniffle or shift my position, they tilt their heads my direction and turn their black eyes on me. But mostly I’m quiet and still.
I think it might be Elmore Leonard, or maybe Stephen King, who advises writers to never use ‘suddenly’ to introduce an event. But, suddenly, a white hawk – about the size of a muscular, feathered chihuahua – lands, with a soft whoosh, at my feet. As we look at each other, I hear the sleek skink make a getaway and drop over the edge of the veranda, rustling off into the garden. The hawk and I say ‘oh my god’ – except I say it aloud – and then it’s gone.
This photo is from my dad’s Reader’s Digest Complete Book of Australian Birds, which I’ve been meaning to write about as a kind of retort to the mess that AI-infused/confused search engines have become. But really what I want to say about that can be summed up by my dodgy photo of the Acknowledgements pages at the back of the book:
Yep, that’s right – over 600 bird photos and acknowledgements for every photo! And for every diagram and every bit of information included in the foreword, the introductory chapters, the different editions. The book thanks everyone! Yes, that does make it a big heavy book and no, it would not be easy to pop into my back pocket while out bushwalking (but fortunately my brain is easy to carry around while bushwalking and I can store things that I notice in there pretty easily and look at the book when I get home to check those things noticed, if I so choose). Okay, my tone is getting cranky and there are many, many better commentators on how shit generative AI is and how glum and miserable it has made research and fact-checking and finding out new interesting stuff (eg. Brian Merchant, Paris Marx, Karen Hao, Mark Hurst, Cory Doctorow). But the volume of thankyous in this book, the weight of acknowledgments, the attention given to the work others have done – is what makes generative AI so… heartbreaking.
About the Grey (aka White) Goshawk, the book says: “A bold and persistent hunter, this goshawk flies directly in pursuit of prey, striking suddenly at speed … The birds attack their victims in the air and on the ground, and will even chase them into dense undergrowth to capture them in their talons.” Lucky for you skink, the bird and I locked eyes.
Later today, after the heat had built big high clumping towers of white and grey cloud, and the southerly blew in, cooling everything with a fine veiling drizzle, I read a lovely interview here, by Lincoln Michel with Dan Chaon, on Chaon’s new book One of Us. Chaon mentions the influence of Disney films Pinnochio and Dumbo – the dark, sad or sinister moments in them – and just those titles conjure in me that terrible thrill of ‘oh no!’ Hoping that the victim – the kid, the baby elephant – will get away. The fawn, the bunny, the bluebird. The skink!
Michel also asks Chaon about the ambiguity, in the book, between what’s real and what is unreal, or supernatural. I’m at the early, early draft stage of writing an essay about realism in Australian writing and Country as an animate presence so I’m thinking about this too. Here’s what Michel says about how Chaon gives the reader “reasons to believe and to doubt”: “It reminded me of Tzvetan Todorov’s theory of ‘the fantastic,’ which is a type of story defined by ‘hesitation’ between realistic and supernatural explanations for the magical.”
You guessed it: the coincidence is Todorov (plus two books, an Eastern water skink and a moment of hesitation with a bright white bird).