The Apostate’s Tapestry
by Atul Joshi

The loss of faith traditionally marks the start of an apostate’s new life. One devoid of belief in religious or political powers. In my case, however, Faith’s death coincided with the dawning of new convictions that turned me into an activist for the post-apocalyptic.  

Faith was the last repository of complete knowledge about her daughter Alison, the subject of a biography I’ve been grappling with for over a year. She had always known Alison; from the birth of her son Michael and his teenage transition into Alison, then as witness to her new daughter’s glamorous career as a showgirl during Oxford Street’s heyday, to the moments after her death when she swooped up to the Central Coast hospice like a Fury to demand her daughter’s body back, insisting she be buried in the family plot. To my project, this was like the collapse of the internet – the loss of a store of information, the complete archive of Alison. 

I wondered what an event like this means to anyone who’s lost a loved one. A loving partner perhaps. Or, like Faith, a matriarch who held a family together. Enlarging my perspective, I reflected on what the death of an elder means to a community, or a leader to a movement. How does it feel to be left behind? I suspect the resulting grief rises not only from the emotions of loss, but of what they signified, the collapse of the web of relationships they held together, the knowledge they held. And mourning, it seemed to me, was the reverberation of the ache inside the hole they’ve left, the echoing sound of vanishing connections, the emptiness of disappearing wisdom. The fear we have about moving on is the feeling that a family might fall apart, a community its cohesion, a movement its momentum – all histories lost, archives destroyed. 

I started to map Alison’s life about the time that the first wave of COVID-19 infections hit. Back then, her life seemed to be a tattered tapestry of a transgender showgirl where, following a thread, I arrived at a loose end. There were multiple gaps in the weave, some bigger than others. The more time passed, the more holes appeared, the larger they became. In other parts of the tapestry, a frayed strand I picked at transformed the story into another weave completely. There were effects whose causes I couldn’t determine, events whose outcomes I couldn’t connect. That she lived multiple lives and died young from HIV-related illnesses added to the sketchiness of her life.  

Faith, the fierce guardian of Alison’s memories, who became her biggest fan, had been a guide through all this, despite lapses of memory in her later years. With her death, the fraying felt more significant as the tapestry’s grounding warp appeared lost.  

“Right, get your teas and coffees,” Shu Ting said, passing out marker pens and sheets of paper. “Everyone who wants to talk about the Coronavirus thing, gather around this table please. It’s a bit confronting, so if you feel uncomfortable at all, just stay on one of the other ones.” 

The weekly Crop Swap was bountiful that day in March 2020, as always at the end of summer. The cool, wet, Highland climate ensured we home gardeners always had an excess of leafy greens to share around. Their oversupply meant those vegetables usually sat limp on the swap table until a latecomer was left with no choice.  

Blake’s mushrooms were the prized items. Gigantic, juicy, mycelial flowers of the soil, delicious fried in butter with thyme from Julie’s herb garden. My exotic curry leaf plant survived winter’s frosts in the greenhouse and had shot an abundance of new leaves through summer, most of them now in Julie’s basket. 

“They’re great with scrambled eggs,” I told her as we moved the chairs around. She looked at me wide-eyed and collected another bag before we sat down. 

“Fry some mustard seeds first,” Robyn, the newcomer, called out, handling the limp kale and sniffing the jar filled with used tea bags. 

Things had taken a turn towards arts and crafts lately; macramé potholders, bath salts infused with fresh lavender or mint, stiff, crinkled homemade beeswax wraps, and used tea bags that were fuel-soaked to act as fire starters. I’d already discovered the last two items were folksier and more rustic than practical.  

A short, nuggety, round-faced Malaysian Australian who looked remarkably young but was likely in her early forties, Shu Ting wore her trademark tight denim, broad leather large-buckled belt and loose flannel shirt. As the only other Asian in our community, I was drawn to her soon after we moved to the area. She’d originally started Crop Swap off the back of a truck before the constant unpredictability of our weather forced its move into the Bowlo. It was one of the many things she did to bring us together: a Commons page on Facebook (its aim to be a notice board constantly undermined by village gossip and slander), naturopathic dietary advice, fostering kids, sharing videos about the importance of indigenous plants and soil health. Her partner, Mark, helped South Coast towns build resilience after 2020’s bush fires, holding similar roundtables to help communities confront trauma and change. She was more old school Byron, and current-day Yackandandah, than gentlewoman of the English-garden parish we lived in. She got to work, tying her shoulder length, grey-black hair into a knot, turning to the challenges of an approaching pandemic. 

“What problems do you see if things get bad?” she asked in her broad Aussie accent, Blu-Tacking a large sheet of butcher’s paper to the wall. “Let’s start with you Julie.” 

 “We have a lot of elderly people who live alone,” Julie replied, eyeballs enlarged.  

“We also got young families,” Blake said. “If school closes, someone’s got to stay home and look after ‘em.” 

“The hospital’s over twenty minutes' drive,” Robyn added, waving a kerosene-scented hand in the direction of the nearest town. 

The feeling of shit getting real settled over the table.  

Within a fortnight, we were all in lockdown. 

Twenty-four months later the world has become a very different place. Here in Australia, we’ve been relatively lucky, able to function socially in many places after the first wave of the virus subsided and then riding out the Delta wave. We’re now grappling with Omicron and the strain is starting to show as supply chains collapse and our health system teeters. 

Overall, the news is increasingly alarming. Being in control of the disease and vaccinated has become the new privilege, perhaps an unrealisable ideal. The world is gripped by the prospect of a future with an ongoing series of unknown variants. Yet, we were warned of all this. 

The Director of the US Centers for Disease Control, Rochelle Walinsky, went off-script in a briefing in early 2021 about rising cases and hospital admissions in her country. 

"I'm going to reflect on the reoccurring feeling I have of impending doom," she said, adding, "we have so much reason for hope, but right now I'm scared".  

About the same time, Brazil’s death rate doubled with daily cases surpassing 100,000.  “People are going around saying Brazil is going to collapse,” critical care doctor Pedro Carvalho told The Guardian. His hospital added new ICU beds in the morning and had them filled by sundown. “But we’ve collapsed already – completely collapsed.”  

As Brazil now faces Omicron, the same experience looks set to be repeated. In mid-January 2022, Rio de Janeiro’s health secretary, Daniel Soranz, stated to the same newspaper, “This pandemic has been going on for almost two years. It’s exhausting. But there’s nothing to be done.” The paper noted how 20% of Rio’s health workers – about 5,000 people – had been infected since December. 

The New York Times reported on 31st March, 2021 that, “more than a half billion vaccine doses have been administered worldwide so far, and well over three-quarters of them have been used by the world’s richest countries.” 

"I need to be blunt,” Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the Director-General of the World Health Organisation, had already stated about the equity of vaccine distribution. “The world is on the brink of a catastrophic moral failure." 

Given the rapid spread of Omicron, the virus is everywhere. And without vaccine equity, it will continue to sprout new variants and we will continue the cycle of crisis response to yet more waves of the disease. 

All this news haunts me. A collapse in one part of the world has cascading effects, so whether we like it or not, any luck we may have in Australia is destined to be short lived. Brazil may yet face another crisis, but they are not alone. Major first-world economies are struggling, with the USA’s Red Cross signalling a national blood crisis and the UK’s NHS teetering on the edge of collapse, while airlines like Germany’s Lufthansa continue to fly near empty planes on hundreds of ghost flights across Europe to protect valuable airport landing and take-off slots. 

It’s worth reflecting on the kind of leadership that has contributed to this situation. Given our rapid-fire news cycles it’s easy to forget. In the first year of the pandemic, it was Trump in the USA, Modi in India and Bolsonaro in Brazil; leaders who have applied authoritarian principles around their definition of truth, reality and knowledge. Everything else is ‘fake news.’ We need to remember those words Trump spoke in February 2020, “it’s going to disappear. One day – it’s like a miracle – it will disappear.” These words continue to impact, contributing to the low rates of vaccination in the Trump voting counties of America. A few weeks later, in March 2020, Bolsonaro added, “at most, it would be a little flu or a little cold.” And in January 2021, weeks before the massive second wave in India, Modi gloated that his country had saved itself “from a big disaster by containing Corona effectively”. 

To me this reflects a command mindset rooted in a supremacist, patriarchal world view, whether that is expressed through political systems of capitalist democracy, oligarchic communism, or religious ones like Hindu nationalism or other kinds of fundamentalism. It’s a perspective that sees the general population as the bottom of a hierarchy, masses to be controlled. It creates a single locus of power to which we are answerable and which houses the central repository of knowledge and truth. Arjen Boin, Allan McConnell and Paul Hart, in their 2021 book Governing the Pandemic: The Politics of Navigating a Mega-Crisis, identified the structure that support these systems as the compartmentalization of authority, budgets and other resources which in turn sustains bureaucratic silos, and identify that overcoming such entrenched boundaries and mindsets remains a significant challenge. As a child of parents who fled a repressive military regime in a country plundered by colonialism, disillusionment with such systems is in my DNA. 

It’s this way of thinking that has informed Australia’s own COVID response. The Commonwealth took a unilateral approach, ‘we will successfully deliver the vaccine’ or ‘here is the roadmap to freedom’ – truths confirmed by accompanying strategic plans and the creation of mini-bureaucracies to deliver against them. The recent failures in vaccinating vulnerable populations, including people with a disability, a failure masked by recasting ‘goals’ as ‘allocation horizons’, or securing an adequate supply of Rapid Antigen Tests, points to the problem of this method. It’s become increasingly clear that a nationwide COVID strategy will not succeed with a top-down methodology. Success relies on a network of interconnected parts rooted in the ground knowledge. Apart from political structures and health and epidemiological sciences, we need expertise in logistics, transport, risk, community services, marketing and communications, and psychology, to name a few. In fact, a web of trust and interdependence, where failure in a component or part, is compensated for by another. Boin et al. see this as the need to build “integrated crisis management from the ground up by investing in boundary-spanning administrative capacity and planning repertoires. Low-politics, backstage platforms upon which epistemic expert communities can flourish” (p. 113). 

The metaphor I’m drawn to is that of the mycelium network, the fungal wood wide web that interconnects an ecological system, has its own system of repair. It’s such a decentralised tapestry that even when a large patch of its weave is destroyed, its existence isn’t threatened. As biologist and tropical fungal networks specialist Merlin Sheldrake has said on LitHub, “a fragment of mycelium can regenerate an entire network, meaning that a single mycelial individual – if you’re brave enough to use that word – is potentially immortal.” The fungal web connects everything and can literally rebuild itself. 

Through those first weeks of the 2020 lockdown, Shu Ting contributed to the baking obsession we all developed by starting a series of online sourdough workshops. She scheduled several Facebook Live sessions, posted a document with basic instructions, including an ingredients and equipment list, then over the period of a week took us through each step, broadcasting from her kitchen. 

The first problem was the need for participants to have a sourdough starter, or ‘mother’. Those who signed up early had time to grow their own. In a miracle of simplicity, I discovered all one needs is flour, water, a warm place and the bacterial network in the air. In a preliminary session, participants got to show their mothers and name them – Shu Ting wrote these down on another piece of butcher’s paper. But those joining late, like me, signed up mother-less.  

The day before the first session, I found a jar on my porch with a funky smelling, bubbling, gloopy liquid inside. It had a note stuck on top – “Here’s your mum. Give her a good name and feed her daily. Heart symbol, Shu Ting.” 

The sessions were instructive, entertaining, enlightening. They always began by ensuring everyone had a cup of tea or coffee in hand. 

“I’m just sharing what I learned from others,” Shu Ting would say. “You’ll probably work out a different way to do it and if you do, please share it with us all.” 

Or. 

“There’s no one right calculation on time or heat,” she’d add. “It depends on the temperature in your kitchen. Go with your own thinking. You’re best placed to know how the dough looks, how warm or cold it is in your home. Just test out what works for you and then tell us!” 

She’d urge us to touch, smell, look, make notes. Our goal was to get a good, domed crust and aim for that baker’s unicorn – an open crumb. 

Her process was all about collaboration, respecting the knowledge each of us brought and amassed as we progressed, urging us to collectively own the results. 

“All of you are going to get better,” she’d say, “and when I say better, more connected with the whole process. What I do or say isn’t necessarily better than yours.” 

Sometimes, while we waited for latecomers to join us, Shu Ting would sing us a Joni Mitchell song accompanied by Mark’s 12-string guitar. Often, she just yarned with people, asking us about our families, getting and giving advice, sharing news, tasting pre-made food together. 

At the end of the workshop (“Good morning!” she’d greeted us earlier, “It’s baking day!”), we reconvened on Zoom to show each other our resulting loaves. And share the all-important aural experience of listening to the sound of a knife sawing through the crust for the first time. 

For me, that first attempt at baking produced a frisbee-like loaf – a result that would be repeated through subsequent loaves until I finally produced a solid dome. When slicing that flat disc though, as the Zoom grid went quiet while everyone waited, the cut produced a hugely satisfying crunch. All assembled clapped. 

Before we left, Shu Ting brought out the list of mother names and had each of us celebrate our dough-ters. 

“Don’t worry about your frisbee,” she consoled me via direct message before we logged off. “That’s an excellent crust.” 

As we continue to yo-yo across the country with almost daily changes to rules, conflicting advice, and as the Omicron variant surges, I reflect on the words Walinsky, Carvalho and Ghebreyesus used; ‘doom’, ‘failure’ and ‘collapse.’ Strong ones in anyone’s language. They have been raised, though not widely heard, in the context of global ecology and climate change. In fact, a whole new field of inquiry, collapsology, has emerged. In their book How Everything Can Collapse, Frenchmen Pablo Servigne and Raphaël Stevens make a convincing case that given so many global systems; ecological, meteorological, financial, technological, political, healthcare, are operating at such levels of stress and are now so intertwined in our globalised world, a catastrophe in one will have devastating flow-on consequences to the rest, resulting in an inevitable and widespread collapse of everything.  

In the sequel Another End of the World is Possible, they move past that inevitability to map out a post-collapse world. Interestingly, they argue that what is needed to move life successfully beyond the breakdown of current structures is to weave and strengthen connections. They write of the need for a living archive, a human network, that shares different knowledges from node to decentralised node, helping in mutual aid. Their model is that of colony-based living organisms such as insects or fungi, organisms that “rely on both local and interconnected intelligence, making for resilience and cooperation”.  

My brain starts to connect it all together: the fungal, political, ecological, viral, apocalyptic, with Crop Swap, sourdough baking, my writing and the methodology of my own research into Alison’s biography. The concept of the mycelium network urges me to adopt another perspective as both apostate and biographer, one that is not rooted in a singular faith, or hierarchy, or life as a chronological narrative from birth to death. It makes me ask questions of how I want to live and what I want to write. It urges me to build trust and cooperation and create dialogue. It resists confinement to a single paradigm, a single archival source or a single authorial truth. 

After Faith’s funeral, I start to map out how I will reconnect with her family and organise to meet each of them again after the mourning has passed. I plan to take a home baked sourdough loaf to Faith’s children, share a cup of tea and hear their stories.  

While her mother was a major figure in her life, Alison lived other lives. I start to trace the web of relationships she had in the showgirl and drag scene of the 1980s, her experience being treated for HIV in its darkest days. I think of taking her surviving friends on walks along Oxford Street, past the now empty night clubs they used to perform in, or to any other place they still value. And hear what they have to say. 

I decide to sit and listen to those who have and are going through the transgender experience. Learn from them if dead-ends, interruptions, walls, gaps are also a feature of their lives. And if so, what would help to make their personal tapestry whole and what it might say about how Alison’s life unfolded. Of asking a young Michael or Alison, “Will you trust me enough to share your story with me and amplify it with those of others?”  

Above all, I ask myself what wisdom I might transmit from Alison to those who are alive now and to coming generations. I realise that even if Faith’s passing destroyed one node in Alison’s web and frayed it further, the remaining parts of it can help rebuild the whole, make her immortal. Piece by piece, I start rebuilding my own faith as part of that weave. 

At that last pre-COVID Crop Swap, the results of Shu Ting’s brainstorming and consultation session were ideas that we as a community would come to implement. On that day, and in the subsequent sourdough workshops, she mapped out the pathway I was to arrive at two years later. She was teaching us the art of having conversations that matter, constructing the loom, where with our weft and warp we were to weave our community’s tapestry, our living archive. It’s what Shu Ting and Mark had been doing all along, helping face communal trauma. 

“There’s already a run-on dunny paper if you hadn’t noticed,” Blake had chuckled. “What if everyone donated one from their hoard to set up a toilet roll bank at the post office?” 

“How about putting together a list of our elderly residents and assign buddies to check in on them?” Julie suggested. 

“It might be a good idea to break it down into neighbourhoods,” Shu Ting added. 

Afterwards, we divided our village into zoned blocks and distributed contact lists within each, including lists of things we could do if someone needed help: shopping, a run to the chemist, a chat on the phone. 

“I used to be an industrial chemist before I retired here,” a neighbour told me when I went to get her details. “We need hand sanitisers with more than 60% alcohol to be compliant. I can make them.” 

She produced a series of locally made sanitisers and surface cleaners which she stocked at the local grocer. 

Shu Ting had been agisting land on other people’s farms, growing her own produce, gathering her own seed bank. Her heritage corn with the jewel-like kernels would always score the greatest number of Facebook ‘likes’. After the first lockdown restrictions lifted, she decided it was time to do this on her own piece of land with better control of soil conditions and farming practices. And as Mark was increasingly spending days away for his work down the coast, they decided it was time to move there. 

Almost two years after they left, my grief at losing them from our community has started to surface. While I know they have sown the seeds for us to nurture, created the skeleton for a community archive, there’s still so much I want to ask them. I want to capture their collected wisdom, so that it can be archived and transmitted as a node in our network. I want to sit in a warm kitchen with Shu Ting and as Mark strums his 12-string guitar, and the scent of baking fills the air, sing Joni Mitchell with them. Relinquish my apostasy and work towards a new faith based on this other way. Echoing the collapsologists, turn into an ardent proselytiser for a mycelial vision of life, post the apocalypse we seem to be edging increasingly closer to. 

Because there is so little time. Before another elder passes, healers and leaders move on. Before all is forgotten, before doom, failure and collapse erases the knowledge people like them have gathered into an archive for the living.  

Atul Joshi has had short fiction published in The Big Issue’s 2018 Fiction Edition, Seizure Online Australia and Ricepaper Magazine Canada, as well as non-fiction in Benjamin Law’s Growing up Queer in Australia. Born in Myanmar of Indian parents, Atul migrated to Australia as a child in 1971. A former classical musician, he lives in NSW’s Southern Highlands and works in arts management, while finishing his Master of Arts in Creative Writing at UTS.