Life on the Edge
This essay looks at some of the themes from my PhD. It was published in the Summer 2019/20 issue of Meanjin.
Content warning: this essay deals with suicide.
When I was nineteen, my partner, who had the name of an archangel and wore silver polish on his nails, left our inner-city loft early one morning to visit his family in Leichhardt. That night, shortly after midnight, I woke to loud knocking. I thought he had lost his keys. I opened the door to see two police officers, who took their caps off in unison—such an old-fashioned gesture, I would later think—and I immediately knew. They said my archangel had jumped in front of a train.
Not long after, a friend from art school jumped from The Gap at Sydney’s South Head. I knew South Head well, had grown up close by, rode my pushbike there most afternoons after school. After her death, I was drawn to The Gap again. When I went there early one morning, in that surreal space before dawn, overwhelmed by wrenching sadness and just metres from certain death, an otherworldly intervention stopped me from jumping. An event so implausible, it would read as a magic realist story if I were to write it as it happened.
The Gap is its own universe, a kind of Gap-verse, a place of its own making. Literally a gap in the coastline with an almost unimpeded 40-metre drop to the sea, The Gap is at once Sydney’s most famous lookout and the nation’s most infamous suicide destination. The National Parks brochure refers to the track that goes along the South Head peninsula from Gap Bluff to Watsons Bay as one of Sydney’s great walks—it is also the last walk that many choose to take. Even on days that aren’t overtly wintery or ferociously windy, when the sky is endlessly blue and squinty bright, the landscape still manages to retain a sense of foreboding, a menacing undertone. It is a place that is both physically and figuratively on the edge—the coastline marks the edge of Sydney and it feels on edge due to all the suicides that have occurred there over the past 150 years.
To read the full essay, visit https://meanjin.com.au/essays/life-on-the-edge/