I Own The Night

I'm not sure if anyone will ever stumble across this blog, but if you have somehow found your way to it, you are most welcome to read as much or as little as you like. I want this to be a completely anonymous blog because I think there's something nice about sharing secrets with strangers. I also like the idea of expressing myself freely without judgment.

Although I want to remain anonymous, I will tell you a little bit of general information about myself to provide some context. I am a forty two year old woman, and I live in an Australian capital city. I went to eight schools—three public, five private, and three of those schools were all girls schools. I wasn’t a troublemaker or expelled or anything like that, but my parents weren’t happy with the first five or so schools. After that, I was largely unsettled, so I chose to move two or three times.

At 17, I moved to Alice Springs and I ended up starting a hairdressing apprenticeship. My boss was a drunk and frequently wrote herself off at work, which completely put me off the trade. I came home and, even though I’d decided not to continue with the apprenticeship, I got a job at my mum’s salon on reception and doing shampoos while I figured out my next step. It was quite funny — my mum used to go to the salon frequently for blow-dries because she worked in the city, and the hairdressers told me they considered her to be the "Jane Fonda of the salon."

While I was working at the salon, I decided that I wanted a career in secretarial or customer service type work. The best advice I was given directed me to business college, where I completed a Certificate IV in Business Administration.

I spent just over a year at business college and completed the qualification. At the end of the course, I decided I wanted to temp, so I signed up with a few agencies. I have since temped in mostly customer service, call centre, and receptionist roles in over 70 different office environments. Most have been good experiences; some have been bad, but I find it interesting how my transient days moving around schools translated into my adult life in the workforce. I sometimes refer to my career as a form of occupational anthropology.

In between temp jobs, I have started university degrees in journalism, social work, theology, visual arts, science, and creative writing. But every time I got started, I’d end up wanting to go back to work to earn money. Looking back, I didn’t really do much with that money — I honestly have no idea where it all went!

I moved to Sydney in 2010 and came back home in mid-2011, where I moved in with my parents. My dad was diagnosed with dementia in 2015, and my mother and I became his carers. At the end of 2020, Dad went into full-time care, and my mother and I moved into my brother’s house, where we are now, and we rent from him while he lives in London with his family.

Last year, I did some volunteer work as an English tutor, teaching a Chinese migrant through TAFE SA. I visited—and still visit—a Syrian refugee weekly at her home through a refugee organisation. I also volunteered with two organisations, recording the life stories of elderly residents and clients. This took up nearly four days a week.

I have a number of passions in life—two of the most important being human and animal rights. It was through my commitment to human rights that I became passionate about letter writing. I used to write letters through Amnesty International’s Urgent Actions, mainly to help free prisoners of conscience and to fight injustice around the world. I was dedicated to it, too—I would send at least four or five letters a week.

I truly believe in the power of letter writing. Not emails—physical letters, sent through the post. Amnesty International often shares their successes from letter-writing campaigns, and I believe them. I stopped writing letters for Amnesty International because my mother scared me by telling me I would be put on all these blacklists throughout the Middle East, where a lot of the letters were going. I intend to travel through the Middle East to get to places like Africa and Europe, and I had these visions of getting detained at the airport. Thinking about that now, it seems highly unlikely. 

It was through this practice—writing letters for Amnesty International—that I began to incorporate letter writing into my artistic vision. Back in 2011–2012, I wrote letters to Chief Justices around the world, asking for a copy of the oath they use in their courtrooms. From there, it branched out into letters about anything and everything—from anaesthetics to immortality.

I am in the process of starting my artistic letter writing again, and I’m currently collating the addresses for all heads of government in the world, and all chief justices in the world. It’s a massive task to get all the names and addresses, but with the help of Google and ChatGPT, I know I’ll get there. I am going to ask them all for a copy of the oath they swore when they were sworn into office, as well as the oaths used in the courtrooms of the chief justices. Then I am going to create some magical oath art with all the responses.

I love the Red Cross, Live Aid, and Bob Geldof. The Red Cross, especially, feels like it exists in every nook and cranny of the world. I like the idea that in a war zone, people are supposed to stop firing when they see the Red Cross symbol. I love how the organisation facilitates the return of hostages and prisoners of war and how it can reconnect families separated by war or migration. 

Live Aid and Bob Geldof are one singular phenomenon. No matter how hard anyone tries, I don’t think the event on July 13, 1985, can ever be replicated. It was globalisation before globalisation was a thing. It was humanity in its purest form — we were the world — and Geldof pulled off the most extraordinary display of human cooperation I think we will ever see.

I also love how Geldof announced that certain bands — like U2 and Queen — were performing at Live Aid before he’d even asked them. And when they got angry at him about it, he simply said, “Well, okay, you pull out then.” It was the perfect blend of audacity, instinct, and belief in something bigger than any one artist.

The other thing I’ll tell you about myself is that, over the years, my sleep has gotten out of whack. Basically, I go to sleep late — mostly really late — and then have to sleep in later to meet my sleep requirements. I’ve been able to work and study while having this problem, but it means I am always sleep-deprived and not functioning at my best.

I literally have a million things I am trying to do at the moment, which has been harder due to the unpredictability of my sleep. So, I made a decision to take drastic measures to make a change.

The Greyhound bus service from Adelaide to Alice Springs is an overnighter, leaving Adelaide at 7:00pm and arriving in Alice at 2:30pm the next day. I had the idea that utilising this bus service might kick-start a normal sleep pattern. If I stayed awake overnight for the bus trip and then until 10:00pm the following night, it could trigger a circadian shift.

I have stayed up all night and then the whole next day a million times before, but my idea was that the distance of the travel would really exhaust me and maybe trick my body into a normal sleep pattern.

I booked my seat on the bus a few days before my trip. I picked a seat at the front, with the thought in mind that any troublemakers might prefer to sit at the back of the bus. I arrived at the station and took my seat on board. The bus was very high up, as you can see in the photo. We left with no dramas, and as the sun set we drove toward Pt Wakefield. We stopped there for half an hour for a break and some dinner.

The next stop was Port Augusta, and a group of Aboriginal people got on the bus. There were a couple of young men, and when the bus got going again, they talked and laughed a lot, speaking in their native tongue. I wished that I could understand what they were saying and join in the conversation, but the older I get, the less I engage with strangers. I’m just happy in my own little bubble.

One thing I did think about was that maybe they were saying something about how all the white people were sitting at the front of the bus and how they probably think they are better than them. When I mentioned before that I thought the troublemakers would sit at the back of the bus, I didn’t mean Aboriginal troublemakers in any way, shape, or form. I just meant anyone who could literally do anything at the back of the bus, and the one driver could do nothing to stop them.

I also wondered whether it’s common for people to use the toilet onboard for something bad, because every time the bus made a stop, the driver kept encouraging us to use the toilets in the service station. I thought, why not promote the use of the toilet on the bus? Or do people only use it as a last resort because of criminal or anti-social behaviour that goes on there?

By around 1:00am, everybody on the bus was asleep. Everybody but me and the driver. The driver made some stops on the way at the letterboxes of some stations and in small towns. I thought about these remote communities that must rely on Greyhound to look after the administration of their postage. I had never really thought about them providing that kind of service.

The temperature was quite warm on the bus; it was almost dreamlike as we moved along to the sound of people snoring. I felt like it was a literal reenactment of my life — everybody asleep, and me awake. As sobering as that was, I liked the feeling of being around other people during a time I am usually alone. And because I was sitting close to the front of the bus, I was near the driver, who became my kindred spirit for the night.

Throughout the night, we stopped at a few pick-up and drop-off points, letting passengers on and off. Most of the stops were down these creepy little dirt roads, and I can tell you right now I would not have liked to have been waiting for the bus or getting off the bus alone at any of these places.

We made another stop at Pimba for fifteen minutes and then had a long stop of forty-five minutes at Coober Pedy, where we changed drivers. The new driver would take us all the way up to the Alice. He was a bit of a character. He gave a bit of running commentary, sharing stories about the outback and things like the history of the Stuart Highway.

One of the young Aboriginal men came to the front of the bus to ask the driver a question, and he was making a bit of noise communicating with his friends at the back of the bus. Once the driver answered him, the young man went back to his seat, and I actually can’t believe this happened, but the driver and the passenger sitting behind him started laughing. I am 100% certain they were making racist comments.

The start of the new driver’s shift marked the beginning of the new day dawning. You can see the photo of the sun rising through the window of the bus. I knew this would be my toughest time staying awake because, for the past few months, it has been my bedtime. I thought about sleeping by putting my wind cheater up against the window as a pillow, but I pushed through it and managed to stay awake.

At first, it was difficult, but with the big windows of the bus and the sunlight streaming in, I became energised, and I didn’t feel tired at all.

As well as mail deliveries, pick-ups, and drop-offs, we made two more stops along the road to Alice Springs. Both were at quirky little homesteads: Cadney Homestead, with a fake crocodile in the pool, where we stayed for 45 minutes, and Erldunda for half an hour, where there were real emus you could feed. When we finally arrived in Alice Springs, it was around 2:30pm, and I made my way to the DoubleTree by Hilton. You can see my room in the photo.

It was my challenge to stay awake until 10:00pm, and I achieved this by reading, speaking on the phone, and watching a documentary called Trophy, which is about trophy hunting. I can happily say that from 10:00pm last night until 6:30am this morning, I had the best sleep I have had in a very long time. The real test will be whether I can sleep tonight at 10:00pm, and if I can, I might be on to something.

I told my mother and my brother that I was going to Alice Springs to fix my sleep problem, and their initial reaction was that it was a bad idea due to a local crime spree gaining a lot of momentum in the media. I decided to go anyway, as I felt that the physical toll the bus ride would take on me might be enough to reset the chaos that has been my sleep disorder. The bus trip literally held a mirror up to my soul and showed me that, while everyone is sleeping, I am awake. And that is no way to live. I like being around people while they are asleep, but I like being around people even more when they are awake, and the goal has been to facilitate my ability to do this again.

As a result of tiring out on the bus, I had one of the best sleeps of my life last night, and I hope it happens again tonight. I fly home tomorrow, and my brother is flying in from London as well, so it will be nice to see him, even though it is under very sad circumstances, as he will be home for his best friend's funeral.

But to my brother and my mother, who advised me to stay away from Alice Springs due to potential dangers from a crime spree, I have spoken to a number of locals who feel the media’s characterisation of the crime spree is sensationalised and nowhere near as bad as it has been made out to be. But whatever happens with my sleep, I know I made the right decision because if it doesn’t work this time, I will find another way!