All the water a body can hold

All the water a body can hold is a work of hybrid memoir, a series of vignettes connected by thematic threads. It encompasses the voices of six women across almost two centuries, the layers of an archive situated in many places but centred in one – Newcastle / Mulubinba, on the banks of the Hunter River / Coquun, on Awabakal country. Its themes of cocooning, decay, transformation and emergence reflect a process of metamorphosis like that of the butterfly or moth. That process is, in turn, a metaphor for the industrial town of Newcastle, surrounded by ocean but also mired in the mud of the river mangroves, and the silt that constantly encroaches. The accompanying exegesis situates All the water a body can hold, and its fragmentary structure, within literary traditions of women’s non-fiction writing, from the commonplace books of the nineteenth century to environmental poetics of place, to contemporary trauma writing. Both the creative and exegetical elements of All the water a body can hold are a process of putting the pieces of the self (back) together, within the streetscapes and topography of Newcastle / Mulubinba, in the space between decay and/ or transformation.