‘Woven as finely as a spinster’s yarn, this clear-eyed, refined

examination of female solitude is poetic, profound and rich

in revelation for those who choose to live and think deeply.’
—Caroline Baum, author of Only

‘Reading She I Dare Not Name is like encountering a place of

total stillness in a world of incessant, incoherent clamour.
Disarmingly intimate, immense in its implication, intel-
lectually peripatetic, it is a remarkable, profound, even
necessary book.’ —James Bradley, author of Clade

‘She I Dare Not Name is a rollercoaster ride, like life, that

takes us deep into a woman’s experience. It enriched me,
leaving me with much to think about. Donna is frank and
generous, analytical in a way that makes her story our
story . . . ​any human will find themselves in there.’ —Susan
Wyndham, author and former literary editor at the Sydney
Morning Herald

‘This is a beautiful book. Donna Ward has weaved

her personal story of a life of solitude  with Australian
pictures, big and small, and made it relevant to all of us.’
—George Megalogenis, author of The Australian Moment

‘Donna Ward writes precisely without ever losing her

poetry, and poetically without ever losing her precision.
These essays are deeply thoughtful and beautifully crafted,
and show us that life is woven across time, rather than
drawn as a line. This book fills a space most of the world
didn’t even know was there. It will find its kindred spirits

She_TEXT.indd 1 10/3/20 9:41 am

and mean a great deal to them. For many of us, it will give
us the jolt we need to recalibrate our thinking about what
it means to be single.’ —Nick Earls, author of Zigzag Street
and The Wisdom Tree

‘Donna Ward has written a very powerful manuscript on a

lifetime of singlehood. It is intelligent, emotive, imaginative,
and contains lightness among the bravely rendered darkness
and loneliness.’ —Angela Meyer, author of Joan Smokes

‘A Spinster’s Meditations? The words are not encouraging.

But the book is a sheer delight. Wise and funny and wistful.
Donna Ward is one of those rare creatures—a writer who
can actually write.’ —Phillip Adams, journalist, broadcaster
and author

‘Something rich and brave.’ —William Yeoman, journalist

and former literary editor, The West Australian

‘With a devastatingly clear-eyed honesty, the word Ward

dares to name is “spinster”, and this meditative collection
of essays spin their own spell, making a deep dive into
the world of female solitude in all its guises. She lays it
out like a calm tarot reading: feminism, courage, silence,
loneliness, grief, recovery and the power of the generative
idea, as well as all the labels that come with carving out
your own path of self-definition and self-determination.
A book like a long quenching drink of water on the history
of a gendered concept, with a fair bit of life packed in along
the way.’ —Cate Kennedy, author of The World Beneath
 SHE
I
DARE
NOT
NAME
Donna
Wa r d
A Spinster’s
Meditations on Life
First published in 2020

Copyright © Donna Ward 2020

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in

any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying,
recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior
permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968
(the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book,
whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for
its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body
that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to the Copyright Agency
(Australia) under the Act.

Every effort has been made to trace the holders of copyright material. If you
have any information concerning copyright material in this book please
contact the publishers at the address below.

Allen & Unwin

83 Alexander Street
Crows Nest NSW 2065
Australia
Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100
Email: info@allenandunwin.com
Web: www.allenandunwin.com

A catalogue record for this

book is available from the
National Library of Australia


ISBN 978 1 76087 629 6

Set in 13/18 pt Maiola by Post Pre-press, Australia

Printed and bound in Australia by Griffin Press, part of Ovato

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

The paper in this book is FSC® certified.

FSC® promotes environmentally responsible,
socially beneficial and economically viable
C000000 management of the world’s forests.
Reader Beware: All names and identifying characteristics
have been changed. Certain events have been rearranged
and some characters and scenes are composites in order
to respect everyone’s privacy, including my own, while
maintaining the essential truth of my life.
Some will say things didn’t happen the way I remember
them, and they are right. We experience the same events
differently. These meditations include remembrances
structured to give insight into what was once a rare life.
I write about what happened, or mostly didn’t happen, in
a life that is different from the main.
The unspoken story within these pages is the estrange-
ment between my sister and me. The matter is delicate
and, while it renders me more nakedly alone than most,
the intricacies of it are not relevant to the subject at
hand—that is, what it is like to be single.
Contents

Groundwater
Winter’s Road  3
She I Dare Not Name  17

Fountainhead
Life Line  33
Becoming Peregrine  35
Tolkien Monster  55
Growing Up  77
Australia, Goddamn  79
Last Guru  99
And There Was Kissing  109

Night River
Turning to Crone  131
A Magritte Sky  137
Ma’at’s Passenger  145
A Short History of Solitude  163
Into the Silence  183
Conflux
Facing the Fire  187
The Long History of the Rat  197
The Dinner Party  221
Pivotal 225
My Taxes at Work  235
The Weight of a Child  243
A Slip of Eternity  253
Women and Children First  257
Learning Directly  267
Wolf Moon  271
Happiness 289
Nine Hours  295

Fluviatile
Laying Down Fossils  305

Acknowledgements 315
Select Bibliography  317
About the Author  321
Groundwater
Winter’s Road
For Jamie

I went to the woods because I wish to live deliberately,

to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I
could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I
came to die, discover that I had not lived.
—Henry David Thoreau,
Walden; or Life in the Woods, 1854

It is an ice-split of a winter. 1992. A Sunday afternoon in the

middle of it. I am in Brunswick Street, Fitzroy, Melbourne.
I am with friends. The sun shines obliquely through the
windows of the Turquoise Cafe. Clustered around wooden
tables, we sit on roughly painted old school chairs. Red,
blue, green. My friends and I laugh, drink coffee. I order
a cappuccino and an escargot. Some of us have whisky to
keep the cold from our veins. We meet here on Sundays.
We have been meeting here for years. It is so good to be in
company. I haven’t spoken since Friday afternoon.

3
 She I Dare Not Name

I expect some of us will carry on afterward. We usually

do. Go to a movie, a play, a flamenco bar. As we chat, each
person says they won’t meet up for the next couple of
weeks. School holidays. Even those without children are
going away. Up north. To escape the cold. I order a whisky.
In time my friends peel away into the evening. Fondly,
they take their leave. We will reconvene in three weeks’
time. Each says they will look forward to it. Each says it is
good to have such a group of friends. See you on the flip
side, the last friend says as he departs.
I sit with my whisky for a while. Deliberately take
in the incontrovertible truth of my life. My landscape
has changed. Now everything stops during the school
holidays. Choir. Dream group. Yoga. Even I pause my
psychotherapy practice, since most people want the break.
I am thirty-eight, a similar age to my friends. We laugh
the same, have work that inspires us the same, but I am no
longer the same. They have partners, some have children,
I have neither. My friends haven’t noticed the change.
They are in the river’s flow. Now, Sunday gather­ings stop
during school holidays. Soon they will stop altogether,
when family life takes off in earnest.
I open the door into my bluestone cottage, into solid
cold. The paint is frozen smooth on the plaster. My shoe
leather is hard, it leaks heat from my socks, from my
feet. The carpet almost crackles beneath my shoes. The
light switch tinkles like icicles on a wire. I turn on the
oil heater, pour another whisky. Warm my blood. I ring

She_TEXT.indd 4 10/3/20 9:41 am

 Winter’s Road

Mum. She’s back in Western Australia, where I grew up.

No answer. Probably out with her new partner. Here, in
the middle of winter, silence, as ever, has the last word.
I turn on the television, slip into slippers, curl on
the satin couch, drape the throw rug over myself and
the oil heater to get warm. Everything in my world is in
order. I have had an uninterrupted weekend to make it
so. Two weeks of unplanned solitude stretch before me
to the horizon. Everyone I know and love is engaged in a
continuing narrative of domesticity, responsibilities and
obligations. The foundational paragraphs of the life I,
too, set out to get. I watch an American sitcom to kindle
my spirit. I weep. That is the last family sitcom I watch
for decades.
The gates have closed. I am beyond the balance of
intimacy and solitude and deep, deep in the territory
of she I dare not name. I am spinster. I stand in grief and
loneliness, the fractured paragraphs of a discontinued
narrative. Grief over what was and is now gone, over
what I was convinced would come, for me. Wrapped in
the isolation of a foreigner, the enormity of my solitude is
incomprehensible to others. As far beyond their imagina-
tion as it was beyond mine only hours ago. My words are
the same, but my language wholly different. When I speak
of my life, my words are translated as ingratitude for the
solitude everyone desires. I am not ungrateful. I am ill
equipped and want to talk about it, find a way through
it. When I speak of the new landscape of my friendships

5
 She I Dare Not Name

to others, to my therapist, my friends are labelled inad­

equate, unfaithful, uncommitted to the friendship. Some
say I should get better friends. But my friends are not
unfaithful or uncommitted. We love each other. They are
simply, and appropriately, otherwise engaged.
If I had chosen this life I would be better prepared,
I assume. I am not sure. I have never heard from another
who has lived this urban solitude. It would be different if
I was a desert anchorite, or a cross-legged sadhu sitting
with his trident by the mouth of Mother Ganga. There
would be rules and rituals to guide me, a scholarship and
a community to hold my thread. But the religious life is
not my calling. Nor can I say I am called to urban soli-
tude. But here it is, and here I am, progressing through
it without a map or a community of understanding.
Walking darkly, one step after the other.

It is six months earlier and, unbeknown to me, possibly

on a Sunday afternoon, a man is out on the Antarctic
ice. Erling Kagge is walking to the South Pole. In Oslo
his family gather for lunch, as they do on Sundays.
Undoubtedly they think of him, down under, on the
snow. Perhaps they smile and say something about him,
something about how he loves his silence. He is probably
thinking of them, too. They hold each other in his silence,
they hold his thread until he returns.

6
 Winter’s Road

The wind stops. Kagge stops. The silence cleaves to

him. He has been in search of this moment all his life.
This moment is nothing but Erling and the landscape.
Only him and the white, white snow, flat to the horizon.
Erling feels the seven million cubic miles of ice beneath
him, the earth beneath that. His thoughts rush into
the silence and, to his surprise, it is as if the landscape
hears. The snow, the horizon, the layers of ice and earth
beneath, respond to his thoughts. Then he sees the
place in which he stands. Truly sees it. An undulating
landscape of shapes and shades of white tinged with
blue and red and pink he never saw before. He thinks
the landscape changed, but it is he who changed. In this
silence the landscape communicated something of itself
to him, something of the nuance of snow, something of
the permanence of silence.
Twenty-six years after my ice-split winter I read Kagge’s
snow message, Silence: In the Age of Noise. That’s how long
it took for him to write it. It took me twenty-seven years
to know the words to convey it. Kagge wrote about how
the landscape came back at him with ideas. At last, a note
from someone who speaks my language. Almost. He has,
as many do, conflated solitude with silence, being alone
with living life alone.
These days I live in a Hawthorn brick cottage I call
the Bookcase House. It is a little north of the Turquoise
Cafe, and the Turquoise Cafe is a Greek restaurant now.
Everything changes on the surface, but beneath remains

7
 She I Dare Not Name

constant. This place is mud on weathered siltstone

spread over basalt. Here we call the basalt ‘bluestone’.
On its surface this place is rows of worker’s cottages and
two-storey shopfronts decorated with arches and wrought
iron. There are tram tracks and plane trees. A Catholic
cathedral at the north end, a Protestant church at the
south. The sun arcs over us every day. Some days it rains.
Rain turns the sky a multiplicity of grey and pink and
burnished copper. These days it rains less than before.
This place comes back at me with ideas all the time.
Communing with the world is the gift of solitude, not
of silence. Communing occurs when a person enters into
silence. And one enters silence through the terrain of soli-
tude. If one is well disposed to solitude, if one is born to it,
the road to silence is easier. Even then, silence is elusive,
always beneath another sound. If a person is uncomfortable
with solitude the road is rugged. Especially if they embark
without a thread to the outside world—a family thinking
of their loved one on the snow, for example. Solitude can
befall a person in an avalanche of anguish, littered with
grief and loss and wishes for a different life. Such a road to
silence is abysmal, deadly. Kagge’s windless silence is only
encountered with a smoothness of mind and heart and
body, a smoothness one is born into, or a smoothness born
of wandering the feral wilderness in solitude.
I did not need to retreat into the utter silence of a
monochrome desert to commune with the world around
me. I began the road through solitude from my icy lounge

8
 Winter’s Road

room. The road was more than twenty years long, hard
and deep and winter sharp. Denuded of grief and loss
and anguish, stripped of longing and of my envy of
those ensconced in families all around me, I arrived in
Kagge’s windless silence, and found myself witnessed,
communing with the world in which I had always lived.
My urban solitude sometimes involves conversations
with people, but mainly I am in conversation with my
home. Curiously, idiosyncratically, I mostly address the
ceiling. No matter the actual feature, it is as if the house,
my house, is both a reflection of who I am and a respondent
to my thoughts. I am not talking about yelling at the tele-
vision, or uttering grievances to the dishes on the sink, or
muttering my way through the process of cooking dinner.
I am talking about a companionship of sorts. A compan-
ionship that carries the narrative of my life.
This companionship is not confined to the house.
It includes the lorikeets and ravens, wattlebirds and
butcherbirds, the blackbirds, pigeons and magpies as
they raucously conduct their territorial business outside.
It includes the daily hum of trams, the cyclists yelling at
each other at peak hour on the bike path in the park across
the road. It includes the elm out the front, and all the tall
trees swaying in the wind, the sky behind the trees and the
clouds travelling across the sky. All of us are in constant
conversation. The bluestone houses, the bitumen under-
foot, the Edwardian gazebo in the gardens a few blocks
away. The powerlines and tramlines that mitigate the sky,

9
 She I Dare Not Name

the spires that mark out my landscape. We are a part of

each other. We come at each other with ideas.
And, beneath all this, lives the windless silence.
A silence that immerses me in a belonging as constant as
the bedrock beneath the weathered siltstone.

Autumn 2000. Late October. A woman sits at a table in

a stone cottage. The cottage is in the centre of the Isle
of Skye. Earlier today Sara Maitland took a long walk,
cooked a good meal. Now she is surrounded by books
and writing feverishly. She has been reading the works
of the Desert Fathers, those wise old men of solitude and
how to live it. She is hunting down silence.
Maitland doesn’t know it yet, but she is writing to
me. I won’t read her island message for another twelve
years. But this is how it goes with writing—every book
ever published is a silent message someone doesn’t know
they need. By 2012, when I read A Book of Silence, there is
little I don’t know about urban solitude, but Maitland’s
book is like Kagge’s windless silence. Her world comes
back at me in words, in language, I understand. Almost.
Maitland also interchanges solitude and silence, being
alone with living life alone, so it is I who make the
distinction here.
Maitland discovers solitude is full. The more she has of
it the more she finds in it. The world is vibrant, sensations

10
 Winter’s Road

more intense, food more delicious. She is acutely aware of

her body and an inexplicable tiredness she says the Desert
Fathers call desert lassitude. I have had that tiredness and
thought it was my body relaxing into the absence of the
million micro interactions of relating to others. I thought
it was the overwhelming lightness of being.
Maitland experienced emotions moving through her
like monumental waves. I have been beset by emotions,
fought their tides, and thought I was tripping over and
into myself. It was simply solitude having its way with
me. Contrary to what most believe, solitude is a direct
path into a relentless intimacy with oneself. I have learnt
to be kind.
When one is out there in the middle of the moor, or
walking to the South Pole—even when one is huddled
at an inner-city desk—every sound becomes a separate
discernible syllable in the ongoing conversation of the
day. In solitude a person becomes so attuned to sound
that when the wind stops they hear the silence beneath
everything. As Kagge did. As I have. But Maitland finds
true silence elusive. She will find it later, when she goes to
the desert, but in her cottage she hears only the cacophony
of wind and water and life.
Solitude unskins her. She is unconcerned about social
norms, washing, dressing and maintaining her home.
A lethargy sets in, which the Desert Fathers call accidie.
This must be contained with ritual and exercise. A good
walk will do it. A routine of housework and meals, after all,

11
 She I Dare Not Name

will do it. Simple work focuses the mind on the simplicity

of our life.
Eventually Maitland loses track of time. She wonders
if she did what she thinks she did, or if she imagined it.
She is one and the same with everything roundabout.
Then her unskinned-ness goes deeper. A human left in
wordless solitude will hear voices. The brain can’t help
itself. It translates sounds into speech. Sometimes the
voices sing. Sometimes our thoughts come at us in loud
words. Sometimes friendly words, sometimes monstrous.
It depends on whether the solitude is benign or malicious,
and that depends on whether one enters it willingly or not.
Maitland hears singing. In Latin. I used to hear
burglars on the roof, drug dealers in the back lane. Now
I hear possums on the roof and the hydronic heater
singing to me. Sometimes there are people in the back
lane. Mostly they are opening their back gate. Location
is not the difference. Attitude is the difference. A person
unaware that sound inhabits silence can be terrified to
the point of insanity. It is as simple and as awful as that.
In that ice-split winter twenty years before I received
Maitland’s silent message, twenty-six before Kagge’s,
I developed the habit of going into the world daily. Even
now I want it to rush about me yelling words on street signs,
saying hello here and there. If I lose my connection to the
landscape, if I plummet from the windless silence into the
tunnel of invisibility, I touch my skin. Deliberately. Feel it
enclosing my flesh and bones. I listen to my vital organs

12
 Winter’s Road

doing what they always do, keeping me in this world,

walking this path as far as it will go, one step at a time.

Midwinter 1930. I haven’t been born yet. There is a man

in a tent. The tent is on the Greenland ice cap. It’s slightly
more than a tent. It’s one of three domed structures. The
main one, the one the man is in, is nine feet in diameter
and six feet at the apex. A two-inch brass tube juts from
the apex. Ventilation. The entrance is a snow tunnel
that comes up through the floor. There are no windows.
A primus pressure stove gives heat. There are candles
and a paraffin lamp. There is no radio. The severe Arctic
weather renders radio transmission useless. An igloo has
been built over the tent. There are two small igloos either
side connected by short tunnels. A snow wall surrounds
all three and a Union Jack flies on the snow wall.
The man is Augustine Courtauld. He is documenting
the weather to ascertain if planes can fly between Europe
and America over the North Pole. He has been in the tent
since 3 December. He should have been there earlier but the
weather delayed his party. In fact, he and his party arrived
so late that the remaining provisions would not be enough
for two. Either they all returned to expedition headquar-
ters, or one stayed. Courtauld volunteered to stay.
Each day he wiggles through the tunnels to measure
the weather. Each day the tunnels narrow from snowdrift.

13
 She I Dare Not Name

Eventually frostbite stops his digging. On 4 January a gale

closes the entrance. By March he is sealed off from the
world. He begins eating his food raw. He burns ski wax
for light, but the wax runs out. Mainly he lies in the dark.
Above him, a de Havilland Moth circles. But the winds
are strong and the pilot can’t see the domes or the tattered
Union Jack.
By 1 May there is no food. On 5 May the stove dies.
Courtauld hears an appalling noise. He thinks the tent
is collapsing, but it is human voices calling down the
ventilation pipe. He is so accustomed to silence they
sound foreign. His rescuers pull him through the roof. He
rides back to headquarters happily reading The Count of
Monte Cristo in the sun. I read Courtauld’s snow message
in Maitland’s book.
There is a photograph of Courtauld. His dark hair is
long, ruffled, unkempt. His beard rough. The psycho­
analyst C.G. Jung says it is the face of a man ‘stripped of
his persona, his public self stolen, leaving his true self
naked before the world’. Jung is right. Solitude steals one’s
public self. The face I wear at home is the face I wear in
the world. My true unmitigated self. It took me time and
faith to relax into the social acceptability of my private
self. I can be fierce.
Within a day of his return, Courtauld wrote:

One can not be bored living an entirely novel life under

such interesting conditions. My physical and mental

14
 Winter’s Road

condition, the weather, speculation about the work of

the expedition and the doings of friends at home were
subjects that fully occupied my mind. I never had the
slightest doubt with regard to my relief, though I fully
realized that it might be delayed.

Courtauld’s solitude was contained, not open-ended

like mine. He knew he was held in the thoughts and hearts
of others. But I agree. I am not bored living an entirely
novel life. Attending to my health, my work, the doings
of my friends, the failings of our pitiful government fully
occupy my mind. But as more choose or are abandoned
to urban solitude, we need to speak more of it. Hence my
inner-city message to you.
I’m getting on now. Sixty-five this October. I would like
to tell you I am happy as an anchorite, and most days I am.
But I still find it difficult to speak about my life, for the
truth remains, most people know little of the solitude they
crave, or the life they imagine I live, and they are given to
telling me how my life goes. They like to tell me I should
be grateful, that I should ditch my friends, that our health
system is spectacular, that I can always call an ambulance.
And it is a lovely fantasy, but this is not the way any life goes.
Tonight I am in a restaurant on the Great Ocean Road.
The maître d’ is an old mate of mine. He once owned a cafe
a slow walk down the bike path past the yellow box and
river red gum near my house. He has moved here to the
coast. I dropped in to say hello. It was the best surprise.

15
 She I Dare Not Name

So here I am, keeping company with myself, in public.

As I often do. Tonight my mind is vibrant. I have been
writing all day. This essay, in fact. I sit and think and
drink a pinot noir called Anti-Hero. Unwittingly, I move
my hands as I think. I had no idea. I caught myself in
the window. Occasionally, when a thought is particularly
good, when my words about urban solitude sing, I clap
my hands, quietly, excitedly.
The man at the adjacent table notices. He is with his
wife who has a child at her breast. He thinks me odd. I can
tell by his slight surprise. But I am simply alone enjoying
my company. Perhaps that is odd.
If I were home no one would notice me enjoying
my novel life. If I were Courtauld encased in snow on
the edge of civilisation, a pilot in a de Havilland Moth
would search for me. Instead I live in the heart of the city.
Unlike Courtauld, I am no hero in a snow tent. I am a
quiet anti-heroine stripped of her persona, who, when
she does something that renders her socially visible, is
considered odd.
My mate is in the kitchen preparing final dishes for the
night. I sit with my pinot noir and take in another incon-
trovertible truth. I suspect, when the time comes and
I am encased in my inner-city home, unable to get out,
there will be no Moth of any kind in search of me. I must
prepare. For I have lived deliberately, fronted the essential
facts of how this urban solitude goes. When I come to die,
I will know that I lived this novel life entirely.

16