Holly Ringland is a Joy Beacon

SUBJECT Holly Ringland

OCCUPATION Writer

INTERVIEWER Nathan Scolaro

LOCATION Yugambeh Country. Southeast Queensland

DATE July 2021

I came to know Holly Ringland through the ABC series, Back to Nature, in which she and actor Aaron Pedersen travel through vast, awe-inspiring Australian landscapes hearing the stories of the land. I was struck by Holly’s presence – at first, the butterfly broaches, gorgeous blouses and botanical tattoos decorating her arm, and then her nature – how she moved through these wild spaces with this bright, grounded curiosity.

Given she’d just spent a year exploring some of the most remote and sacred parts of this country, I knew I had to talk with Holly for this issue. But what came out of our chat was so much more than I expected. Holly spoke of treating our selves as treasured spaces – that we can create a thriving garden in the backyard, and we can create a thriving garden within. She shared her experience of actively “putting life back in” after a period of serious trauma – seeking and creating spaces of comfort and pursuing the things that fill her with pleasure and joy. One of those things has been writing. In her early thirties, Holly moved to the UK to do an MA in Creative Writing, fulfilling her childhood dream to be an author. Her first novel, The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart – about a young girl with an abusive father who is taught the language of Australian flowers by her grandmother to say the things that are too hard to speak – has become an international bestseller, and is currently being adapted into a television series produced by and starring Sigourney Weaver.

Last year, when Holly found herself unable to travel to her second home in Manchester due to the pandemic, she bought a 1968 Olympic Riviera caravan named “Frenchie,” parked it up at her folks’ place in the hinterlands of southeast Queensland, and made it her writing office. Frenchie is adorned with potted plants, art pieces and fairy lights, and lets in glorious views of the surrounding trees and paddocks on the property. Holly calls it a “joy beacon.” When I learned this, I thought, That’s Holly, too. She’s a joy beacon. In this conversation, she shares just some of her many delightful treasures.

NATHAN SCOLARO: So I have really enjoyed getting to know you and observing you and your work over the past couple of weeks. I haven’t read your book yet because you are a new discovery for me!

HOLLY RINGLAND: [Laughs].

I’m really excited to read it now! But I’ve been watching you on ABC’s Back to Nature series and I watched the Gardening Australia segment and learned a bit more about your story. You have all of these incredible connections to place. I feel like you are the hallmark of this treasured spaces theme! There are so many intersections from your upbringing in the hinterlands of southeast Queensland, travelling to all these wild places with the show, and then to discover your incredible caravan Frenchie as well! Perhaps to open the conversation I’ll ask where it lands for you, this notion of treasured spaces. What does it bring up for you?

I think treasured spaces are, to me, safe spaces. In a treasured space I am safe – in every way that safety can be perceived and felt. Maybe it’s not only physical safety, maybe it’s also emotional and psychological. Any space where I am safe to show up exactly as I am. They’re safe spaces I create for myself, like Frenchie the caravan, but they’re also the kinds of spaces that I seek out. Filming “Back to Nature” was an experience of understanding nature as a treasured space, and also about the possibility that there is treasure to be found in every space.

Where are you now? Are you in Frenchie?

 Alas my beloved stepdad is out mowing the lawn so it would be too noisy for us if I were in Frenchie. Instead, I’m propped up on my bed in our house right now. I’m in southeast Queensland, Scenic Rim area, on Yugambeh Country. Frenchie is parked in the paddock outside. There’s a day bed inside that I’ve filled with, I think at last count, about 20 cushions and pillows. I’m a ‘propper’: when I get in there and lie down it’s not just my head that gets propped with a pillow. My knees, under my feet, my lower back, all get pillow props. It’s a practice Adriene my Internet yoga teacher has taught me: find what feels good. Seek out the things that bring us comfort, like when we were kids. Sheet and pillow forts for comfort and refuge, or take favourite satin-edged blankets went with us to kindy for nap time. There’s no reason we can’t do versions of those things in adulthood: get your cushions, get a blanket and put it over your knees, purely because it feels good. There’s something incredible about being an adult in this ruthless furnace of a world, as Jack Gilbert the poet called it, and just thinking to yourself, “Do you know, I’m actually going to have like 20 cushions on my bed. Because that’s going to feel absolutely amazing.”

[Laughs].

And so, if I was speaking to you in Frenchie right now, I would be in the same position, propped up on the day bed with my 20 cushions underneath every limb, surrounded by all of my plants.

So you’re a comfort seeker and a comfort creator.

Yes.

And there is no guilt here. Well there might be, but the way you just described it I had no sense of guilt in your pursuit of comfort, which I love.

Right. No such thing. I’d say the last decade has been an ongoing “no guilty pleasures” practice in my life. Ten years ago, I was very much still in a place of coming from “scarcity and shame” practices, which were caused by years of living with male perpetrated violence. It was only after I left what I swore would be the last violent relationship in my life that I started to become aware of how living in fear of male violence had shaped me. I started to notice when hyper-vigilance, fear, scarcity and shame, to name a few traits, were showing up in my behavioural patterns and responses. And the truth was, they were showing up in every waking and sleeping hour of my life. Meeting those traits in myself began when I honoured the dream I’d had since I was three years old, to become a writer: in 2009, when I was 29, I took my life savings and I moved alone to the UK to do a Master of Creative Writing. It was a privileged position to be in, to have savings, to be able to travel, to apply and be accepted for tertiary education. It was also a very shaky, raw time. I was suffering from mostly untreated post-traumatic stress; I’d had a little bit of therapy but was my well-cultivated survival self had kicked in and I thought I was ‘fine’. The power of the mind is astonishing, isn’t it? We’re so often the last to know how we really are. So, it was in that act of using my life savings to invest in following my childhood dream that my practice in breaking down guilt, scarcity and shame began. And 12 years later, well, to compare 2021 Me to 2009 Me is, like, 2009 Me did not have 20 pillows, Nathan.

Right [laughs].

2009 Me had a maximum of two pillows. Because two is all we need, right? And anything else is just a bit ridiculous and superfluous. The difference between 2021 me and 2009 me is quite sumptuous. But that doesn’t mean that I don’t still have to practice breaking down trauma, guilt and shame. It’s a lifelong practice, I think. A presence of mind. Trauma, like grief, is something will change over time, but can never be erased. Now, I might do something for myself purely because it is pleasurable and brings joy. And sometimes I might only feel like a piglet in mud about it, because I’ve worked hard to permit myself to feel joy. Other times, any one of the trauma-informed responses might pop up – guilt, fear, scarcity, anxiety, uncertainty – and I’ll whack-a-mole hit it on the head to remind myself those emotions aren’t needed. A sense of humour about it helps.

Yeah. You know I don’t want to gloss over the fact that you’ve sat in a lot of hard stuff, a lot of discomfort and trauma to arrive at the place you’re in. I’m sure the years between 2009 and now haven’t been easy, less so the years preceding. So a lot of hard work has happened to get you where you are.

Oh yeah. There’s a really short Mary Oliver poem. It’s like three lines. And it’s, “We shake with joy, we shake with grief. What a time they have, these two housed as they are in the same body.” I have so many favourite poems of hers, but that one tells me what it is to be human. The concept isn’t something that the culture I grew up in embraced, that joy and grief are the two contrasts that go hand in hand. To be alive is to accept that we don’t know the depths of one without the other.

And that the more fully we experience one the more fully experience the other. But you’re right, we’ve separated the two in our culture, and we’ve numbed out the grief, which of course dilutes the joy.

Mmm. That’s why treasured spaces and safety, and pillows and sumptuous sensory experiences, and giving ourselves joy, that’s why it’s all necessary. To cultivate our ability to feel joy, for the pure joy of it. Like buying a velvet jacket not because it’s functional or is going to necessarily provide the warmth that I need in winter but holy hell! It feels good and looks amazing in the light! [Laughs].

[Laughs]. Well that’s something I’ve loved watching in you. You know, you describe Frenchie as a joy beacon. But if I was going to describe you as a human showing up in the world it is that – a joy beacon.

Oh, thank you.

And from what I’m hearing from you now, that is a conscious act of doubling down on joy.  

Yeah. I wrote an essay 2013, about inner storytelling and facing myself. I called it “Nested dolls.” At the core of the essay was this idea of putting life back in. And that’s kind of connected to what we’re talking about with scarcity versus treasured space and comfort. Finding my way into cultivating comfort, safety, and pleasure have been conscious acts of doubling down on joy as a way to embody myself again, after living for so many years in a state of being disembodied by traumatic experiences and memories. During a traumatic experience, one of the ways our brains protect us is to disconnect from what’s happening and to disembody, which creates the feeling as if we’re watching from the outside. So that we’re not in the body, so to speak, to experience what our brains can’t cope with processing. In my experience, that disembodiment has created times when it’s felt like I’ve been clinging to my sense of self so that I didn’t forget who I was, and to survive, but at the same time, I’ve also felt really disconnected and alienated from my sense of self. Both things felt true. Permitting myself to create and feel joy is how I’ve found my way back to myself. One way I’ve done this is making a ritual of adornment. And not just in an aesthetic way. But in being really particular and thoughtful about how I choose to express to myself and the world about who I am. Identity is something that was constantly undermined and diminished for me, something that was constantly reaffirmed to me was not safe for me to have. So, to come home to myself, I started adding joy to my living spaces, then my working spaces, then my physical appearance, how I dressed, and then, my body. It was how I learned to put life back in. I started with plants. Lots of plants. They are literally life! At first it was one little cactus on my desk. Then it was like, how many hundreds of pot plants can I fit in this one room? That flowed into a joy-fest over the textures and glazes and colours of the pots I was collecting. Then, oh, my ficus tree needs fairy lights! Joy grows joy. One act flows into another. Filling my living space with plants flowed into considering how I was choosing to self-decorate, and how did it make me feel? That idea flowed into who’s making my jewellery? That flowed into wearing women’s work, women’s art. That flowed into writing my first novel, which flowed into getting my first tattoos. It’s been a holistic, far-reaching, all-connected experience. I thank you so much for saying something so kind, like observing me as a joy beacon. That kind of comment really is melted gold that fills all the cracks, like the Japanese art of Kintsugi. The other thing about this idea of joy and adornment that has given me much inspiration to treat myself like I’m a treasured space, is something a beautiful friend, Jane Bradley, said to me in the UK. Jane runs a safe, inclusive open mic space called That’s What She Said, for anybody who identifies as a woman or non-binary. She’s a writer and a counsellor. A wise, empathic, supportive and magical community-builder. She came over to my house for lunch one day. We sat out in the very rare sunshine in Manchester on my back deck and ate mango salad. Sumptuous. Because I’d been so excited to see her, I put on a red dress and did my hair up in a head scarf, wore my favourite earrings, that kind of thing. I got dressed up to see Jane because being with her made me feel excited and joyful, which I wanted to revel in. So we were sitting out the back in the sunlight, and Jane looked at me and she said, “Do you know how political your self-expression is?”

Hm.

I said, “Honey, what do you mean?” And she said, “Your totally embracing, colourful, abundant, feminine expression of your joy is everything that has tried to be erased or stolen from you.”

Yes!

There are handfuls of moments in life that change the course of how you understand yourself and that moment with my beloved Jane was one such moment for me. Jane blew my mind. I had never considered my self expression that way.

To have someone you love and trust offer you such a reflection of yourself is a gift.

Yeah. Yeah. And it absolutely is.

It absolutely is, right? I haven’t ever stopped thinking about that day in the sun with Jane since. Because treating self as a treasured space and doing with myself what brings me joy and what pleases me and makes me feel more at home and more like I belong in this body, in this life, that is the most political thing we can sometimes do.

Amen.

Yeah.

Wow. Oh. I just want to draw out a couple of things. I mean so much of what you’ve just shared has made my heart stop and flutter a bit [laughs].

[Laughs].

But this notion of putting the life back in. I really want to just meditate on that for a long time. And something you mentioned earlier about life savings, which is always associated with financial capital. But how beautiful to think about life saving as much more expansive than that. My partner is an incredible gardener. His name’s Greg. And I moved into his home and his garden four years ago. And so just as an aside, with this issue of Dumbo Feather we didn’t want it to be about design. But I was thinking before about minimalism and what were we thinking with this whole design style. Minimalism is obviously reflective of the culture. And the absence of life. So now we have to put it back in! And you’re really inviting us to reclaim that. Anyway, sorry I’m moving between thoughts. But when I moved here into Greg’s garden, he’s someone who has plants everywhere, pots everywhere, more is more is more. And it’s very harmonious actually. But still my initial kind of inner-city Melbourne, somewhat “minimalist” school of thought was like, “Oh it’s a bit much isn’t it?” And these four years of me have really been about surrendering and softening to this absolute abundance and appreciating it and as such it becomes this generative thing. Like you were saying, the more life, the more abundance there is in a place, the bigger you become. There is more abundance in you and how you express and show up in the world. And so to look at that in your story, in terms of what you’ve gone on to create recently with “Back to Nature,” it’s really very clear how the circles widen.

Yes. That’s so beautiful. I think it has something to do with the sensory joy we instinctively have as children that is hammered out of us by adulthood and our society and our culture. That art and creativity and sensory indulgence is childish and it should be put away with our playthings and our baby clothes and our toys. That idea of too much is really interesting isn’t it? Because it spreads into so many areas of our psyches, our fears. Particularly for anybody that has felt silenced or judged by the world which, I mean, who hasn’t?

Yeah. Right?

Right. That fear of being seen as too much is so real. It robs and denies us of so much, of what makes each of us uniquely who we are. I’m familiar with second-guessing myself to the point of paralysis, for fear of not wanting to be too much. Which all stems from shame. When those old patterns start circling now, I think about Iris Apfel, and remind myself, there’s no such thing as too much. And, however it feels safe to me, I put that idea into practice. For example, if I notice that my reason for saying no to something is because it’s coming from a place of shame, which creates guilt and scarcity and small-making, that’s when I will apply a massive dollop of, “No such thing as too much!”

And so it is precisely that which brings you to the experience you’ve had over the past two years, travelling to the far corners of this beautiful country and listening to the stories of the land. Most of the country was in lockdown I’m imagining when you were creating this?

Yes.

There’s something around that polarity right? Of contraction and then the grandeur of being in those spaces.

Oh my gosh. I mean we were talking about grief and contrasts before. And making “Back to Nature” was just so many of those big life experience contrasts pushed up against each other. It’s the first time I’ve ever been in front of a camera. Taking that step, literally and figuratively into frame was, in every single possible way imaginable, absolutely terrifying for me. Like, make-me-sick-terrifying. Being seen and being exposed are historically not safe to my mind. For so long, I spent time being small as a safety measure to protect myself. So not only was it daunting to say yes and be on camera, but it was just terrifying to consider exposure and being seen because my body constantly had those fire alarms going off saying, “This is not safe! What are you doing?” Then, on top of the experience of making a TV show for the very first time and being a complete newborn to how any of that happens, there was also the often painful, uncomfortable and very rewarding experience of laying new pathways for myself so that I could have a new experience of something that had very rarely been safe for me before. Then add working around a pandemic!. Everything was very scary. Being in airports was scary, being around people was scary. Making a production with COVID measures in place was scary. We were constantly working around border closures and lockdowns. On paper the show was meant to take us ten weeks to film. It ended up happening over a ten-month period from March to December. In contrast, where we were filming, out on rivers or in forests or on the sea or in the desert, we were in the more-than-human world, where the pandemic didn’t exist. Because COVID wasn’t in the gum trees or the sea. We hoped Back To Nature would offer audiences the solace that comes when we reconnect ourselves to the natural world that we are a part of. The irony was that we felt and experienced that very sense of solace in a huge way as we made the show. We would have our phones turned off while we were shooting then we would break and turn our phones on and our news alerts exploded. So this bubble that our tiny crew was in was living the very message and heart of what “Back to Nature” is all about. It was really extraordinary.

I felt that. I felt that watching these episodes, as I shared with you. That first episode I was in tears. And I’m not a big crier. I think the timing of when it dropped, especially for us as viewers in Victoria and New South Wales who were in lockdown, carrying the heaviness of that while watching these vast open spaces. Watching you have a very real encounter with a world we can’t access. I think we feel what you felt in that moment, and longed for it. The day it launched was also the day that we got the IPCC report with its very dire and terrifying climate forecasting. There was so much that culminated on that day. And to just have that half hour of you out in these majestic spaces was an unbelievable feeling.

Yeah. Aaron and I aren’t scripted in the series. So we didn’t have lines to learn. I mean we might have had to memorise a few facts here and there so that we didn’t bugger that up and really annoy the scientists! Or the nature lovers! But Aaron and I aren’t scripted. It was like, “Okay Holly and Aaron, just walk into a space now and tell us what you’re feeling.” [Laughs]. And I love all those ad-libbing party games. Where you start telling a story and someone builds on it. Like there was a like great scene in Schitt’s Creek where Moira’s trying to get Stevie to limber up for cabaret. And Stevie is like, “This is killing me.” Well I am all for those exercises, but this was was levelled up. So it was really an interesting experience because in that first episode when Aaron and I are walking towards the Antarctic beech trees, Jane Manning, the director of that episode, she had this beautiful habit of not letting me walk into a space until it was time to roll the camera. So those Antarctic beech trees have been a part of my life, ’cause we were filming in the area that I grew up. And I hadn’t seen those trees since the last time I was home in Australia and took the time to visit them, which was probably four years ago. So in the first episode the scene you get when Aaron and I walk towards the trees and I kind of double over with my hand on my diaphragm over my belly, that is my natural reaction to seeing them again. It’s just our emotion. The most astonishing gift is the way that we felt is I think now being felt by some beautiful osmosis by viewers. I know it in books how there’s some sort of almost indescribable exchange between a writer and a reader. How it travels between the two. But I’m not as familiar with it when it comes to television.

So remarkable isn't it? That through a screen I can also encounter a deep human connection and experience of the natural world. Not the real thing, obviously, but still something powerful. So that has been a reprieve. What I also want to explore a little with you is something that’s come through both episodes and that’s the resounding understanding and acknowledgement that we are in constant conversation with the natural spaces that we inhabit. I think that’s part of the emotional response that we have to this series, and it’s something that we’re longing for, obviously. Many of us. Earlier you were talking about putting the life back in and making that a constant conscious decision to be alive to the aliveness. That conversation with the natural world emerges with that particular mindset and it starts to become less cerebral. I think it must have to start cerebral and then eventually it becomes embodied.

Yes. That’s a beautiful way of putting it. I just kept on saying to the crew the whole time we were filming that every day, without realising it, wherever we filmed brought me out of my head and into my body. I wondered if I didn’t notice the shift because it’s a hardwired response in us to being in nature. I seek out that feeling quite often when I’m at home here. My partner Sam and I will go up to the mountain that’s a 25-minute drive away and go for a hike. And at the beginning of the hike, I will be anxious and stressed and unconvinced anything can soothe my mind. Every time. Then we walk slowly. We stop and point things out to each other. The way a fern frond curls. The colour of a gum trees bark. Even midway through a hike, I will think to myself, “I don’t know if this is going to work this time.” Still so caught up in my head. But then. I stop overthinking and don’t know it. I’m too busy noticing a lizard on the path or a bright purple berry that’s fallen between gum leaves. Or listening to the wind in the tree canopy. And all of a sudden, I realise I’m out of my head and I’m in my body. My body’s talking to me, Country’s talking to me. I can hear myself breathe. My breathing is part of the sound of being on Country because it’s all connected. I’m not separate to landscape and landscape isn’t separate to me. That happened every single day that we filmed Back To Nature. Which blew me away, because we were working long hours, early starts, and, as I said, we were outrunning border closures and lockdowns to get things made. There were endless obstacles and different challenges and everybody operating at a levelled up level of stress. So sometimes I’d think, “Oh, it’s not going to happen today. Today it’s just a workday.” And every time I was wrong. There would be at least five minutes where I came out of my head and I was just in my body. I can remember that for every location we filmed. There’s no place we went that is a blur to me. I find that things become blurs when our minds are too fully, too noisy, and too fast. But when we’re in our bodies, savouring the natural space around us, we’re present. We remember. That really blows me away. What else can it be than the instinctual relationship between my being and Country’s being, both being alive?

Right. And that even if we are numb to it, the land is always there with open arms, inviting us in, awaiting the conversation. Which a lot of First Nations people talk about.

It was the honour of a lifetime to have this opportunity to be welcomed onto Country and meet First Nations elders and guests who so generously offered the sense and wisdom of the land being a living being. A being that we can all speak and listen to and that we’re in a relationship with. This idea of kinship goes through the whole series.

Beautiful. I want to know how it’s changed you. But I don’t want to ask that question ’cause it’s too big and it’s changed you probably in so many ways. But maybe through the lens of gratitude and appreciation for country. I’m reminded when I’m in a good place that with gratitude for something, the care factor swells. So the more I’m connected with my surroundings and in love with them, the more I want to take care of them.

A simple and current example is that I talk to magpies very consciously and deliberately now. They’re kin. Of this Earth as I am. It’s not just, “Oh look, listen, the magpies are beautiful.” I speak to each of them. I notice their families. I notice their relationship with each other. I notice them noticing me. It’s a recognition.

Was there something that sparked that?

Yeah, a couple of months ago I was down in Frenchie, in her paddock, writing at my desk, and noticed their song. Then saw them, a dozen or more gathered in the trees around me. I write listening to classical music, so I switched it off to listen. The maggies sang all day. I sat there at my desk listening and writing to the warble and tune of their songs. To their wisdom and survival and existence in the more-than-human world. It moved me to tears. That was the beginning of my awareness. I thought, oh my god, “Back to Nature” has really changed me! I can’t recall ever being moved to tears by magpie song before. But when you consider everything living in the natural world is kin, it creates new meaning. New possibilities. New drive to do as much as I can to have a softer ecological footprint on the earth. Not to be perfect. To be better. Do more, make extra effort. I was raised with an environmental focus. My mum has always been that way. It wasn’t like I didn’t know and I’ve come into a greener headspace. It was like you say, when that care swells it’s really considering Country as a being. What that means to me is giving Country the same attention and love I would give a person I love. That’s been a revelation, attending to country the same way I attend to the people I love the most in my life. How can that show up in my life more? So, yeah, making Back To Nature has changed me. I’ll never be the same as I was before we filmed.

How amazing. So I haven’t got through any of the questions I had written down. But just as we come to a close here, you know we’ve been talking about spaces both that we create and that are there for us that we enable us, make us feel safe as you say. That put us in quite similar places, which is really quite beautiful to me. That we can create the environment that helps us to deepen that connection with self and nature. And then they’re out there for us to explore and be amazed and wondrous at. And I want to frame that within the context of you as writer, which is such an enormous part of who you are. And the role that space plays in your writing. Maybe I’ll just leave it at that and what that relationship is, the alchemy that happens between space and writing for you.

That’s such a beautiful question. I mentioned before that I’ve wanted to be a writer since I was three. I really did. That’s how old I was when Mum taught me to read. And that’s when I said to her, “I’m going to be an author.” That knowing never went away. A number of years ago, when I was studying my Creative Writing MA in the UK, I had lunch one day with a psychologist friend. He was asking me a few things about my studies. As I answered he listened really deeply and said, “So writing is the one thing about you that’s never been broken. The one thing in your identity that’s stayed true.” That was another light bulb moment for me around identity. At every high or low point in my life, the truest, deepest thing I knew about myself, and what I wanted to do with my life is that I wanted to write. When it comes to writing, space, and putting life back in, giving myself a dedicated place to write is how I honour that lifelong knowing. And it’s how I assert to myself that my writing dreams are worth investing in. That’s been one of my biggest scarcity and shame breakers. Not shrinking from the assertion that my hopes and dreams are sacred. So are yours. And when we invest in them, we’re saying they matter. We’re saying that our interior landscapes and all they are yet to yield are worthy of taking up exterior space in the world. And not space that doubles up as a pantry or a bathroom storage cabinet. A space all their own. With 20 cushions.

Exactly! [laughs]. That’s exquisite. That’s so exquisite. Holly, thank you.