Under the Bridge

Early one Friday morning Alexandra Mitchell, a 32 year old anti-feminist lesbian, picks up her new girlfriend Elle and drives over eight-hundred kilometres from her one-bed one-bath one-car apartment in Newtown to Arlington Retreat, a mud-brick cottage at the end of a twenty-two kilometer dirt track situated deep in the sub-tropical rainforest of Northern NSW, Australia. It is the home of her older sister Genevieve. It is late summer 2003: floods, droughts, bushfires, humidity, insects. The sisters haven't seen each other in a long time, but the legacy that binds them is ever present and made all the more inescapable now that Alex is writing a book; their stories, her book. The girls' father as remembered, looms large. His influence is indelible and their recounting of him, a purging. In order for the sisters to heal, these stories have to be told, people remembered, the past dredged, and as facilitated by the book the there and then is awakened in the here and now. What unfolds over ...