Johanna's BlogA. Frances Johnson
A. Frances Johnson is a writer and painter from Melbourne. She has taught creative writing at the University of Melbourne in the Department of English with Cultural Studies. She has completed her first novel, a burlesque and post-colonial retelling of the life of German migrant and colonial painter Eugen von Guerard. Chapter one of this project was published in Westerly. She spent several years retracing the painter’s wilderness journeys to civic wilderness and shopping centre sites around the country.She has previously published short fiction in Westerly, Southerly and Strange Cities/Shapes and written many reviews, curatorial and non-fictional pieces for magazines and galleries including Craft Victoria, Westspace, Dialogue, Arena Magazine and others. She is currently completing a PHD on the representation and construction of indigenous voices in contemporary historical fiction. She was the recipient of the 2001 Felix Meyer Scholarship from the Melbourne University for her writing project on the painter Eugen von Guerard, and has also travelled to Indonesia as an Asialink resident in 1998, where she ran a series of workshops on comparative colonial imaging of nature and the city. In 2003 She was awarded the Faculty of Arts Amy Gaye Cowper Tennant Memorial Fellowship to pursue her writing projects. In 2005 undertook a writing/painting residency for the Arthur Boyd Trust in Bundanon, NSW.
Eugenia Solo
Sikka, Flores, January 1999
Eugenia Solo died in 1857.
The Catholics told her:
All good girls go to heaven
Does heaven have a capital Sister?
She asked, and was soundly slapped
And told: We have given you a name
A destiny, a decent God
Some exceptional consonants and vowels
What else could you want from us?
What in God's name?
Eugenia Solo wanted the Dutch to come
And put a von in front of her name
Von Solo, from one
The place of one
This was her island she told them proudly
A betel map of Flores
Tattooed on her thigh
So they took all her rubber, and silver and coffee
A fair exchange for a von
And a child she named Von Hans
And an illness without a name or cure
Eugenia Solo's name came from a mass
Mumbled in blood and soil
At the edge of the ocean
They built the graves too close to the cliff
The water ate around them
Leaving the deceased high up
On sandstone columns
Grassy tops, waving in the wind
Like hair
The crucifixes fell down eventually
To concuss those fish nibbling at the dead
One of the dead men she had loved
Eugenia Solo forgot her Sikka name
Forgot the name of her island
Because she was a dullard
Or so she thought
And came to believe that nothing had come before
She watched the missionaries
Draw numbers on the plaster feet
Of one hundred Marys
It was her job to find one hundred grottoes
To place them in one hundred sanctuaries
This she did with alacrity
Without a bonnet
Never learning to count
