How to ‘see’ cats or what you can ‘see’ when you are not really looking. (2025)

Image: Poppy-girl wonders if fictional writing can exist without cats.

After researching cats in Australia's past, I now see cats everywhere. Even before they manifest, all purrs and furr and cuteness, I can sense their presence- they are ever so quietly stalking at the periphery as I sift through the archives and scroll online. They are there, crouched low, preening and languidly stretching, waiting to announce themselves.

I anticipate cats when I pick up a book or peruse a document. My skin prickles and my stomach tightens; they are there; I know it, I feel it. It is my catty sense, my superpower as a cat historian. But don't worry. I haven't been inducted into the Marvel Universe, at least not yet. My superpower retreats when searching online. It is not an extraordinary feat to predict cats in a digital archive, the search engines bring them to you, and you can conjure all manner of different cats via a few strokes of the keyboard- 'ships' cats, 'pet' cats, 'stray' cats, 'feral' cats, 'station' cats, 'hospital' cats, even 'boxing' cats. Yes, boxing cats. Apparently, a shop on Elizabeth Street in Sydney was home to a feline pugilist called 'Bull'. 'Bull' liked to shadowbox with his human and absolutely hated being called 'Tiddles' by the women in the neighbouring store. 'Tiddles' was not the appropriate name for a big, brave boxing man-cat. This was 1930s Sydney. What a time. What a place.

I still get all the feels when I find a cat or many cats via a digital search engine. That twinge of excitement, the warm release of dopamine. Archival research is not just about brains; it is a whole-body experience. It is visceral. Well, for me at least. Picking up a book or an archival document cold is a little different. There has been no digital online spell cast or cataloguing trick performed by a mysterious online librarian; you must search with different navigational instruments, and to find the cat, you have to use a different kind of magic. This is not dissimilar to searching for your own sweet puss, not the one in the archive, the one at the end of your bed. When my Poppy-girl decides to hide somewhere in my tiny house, no amount of calling and cajoling will bring her to me. She demands that I wait, feign indifference and perform a non-cat cajoling task, like typing on my laptop. As I commence writing, I can feel her drawing close, ever so slowly inching toward me. The magic of insouciance works every time.

You see, cats often appear in all their splendid cat-ness when you are not looking for them at all.

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I was invited to participate in the 2024 Headland Writers’ Festival in late September. The festival is an annual event hosted by Candelo Books, an independent bookseller located in Bega, and the arts and culture organisation South East Arts. Situated on the Tathra headland (hence Headland Writers Festival), the event attracts diverse Australian authors and creatives, including some fabulously talented people and literary luminaries. Since I am yet to publish a book (yet! It's coming. On April 26. Put it in your diaries), I have been invited to participate as a panel host and facilitate a conversation between two authors - Kate Kruimink and Ruby Todd. Last year, I also participated in this event, but I also asked carefully curated questions of one author. One. A panel discussion is a new and slightly terrifying gig for me. But the lovely people organising the event have the utmost faith in me, which means a lot. I will not disappoint because I am a people-pleasing perfectionist. I will over-read and over-prepare. I can't help myself.

This might sound strange, but I don't, as a rule, read much fiction. I mainly read non-fiction. For a long time, I thought that fiction was wasting my precious time. It wasn't worth reading if I wasn't learning something from the stuff I read. I wanted argument, analysis, and informed opinion. It was evidence-based facts I was after. Delicious, brain-expanding facts, not flowery prose, thank you very much. For years, I main-lined articles in academic journals and historical monographs and avoided the general fiction section. That was until I joined a book club halfway through my five-year PhD journey. It was over red wine and cheese that I fell in love with fiction. And I didn't have to leave all those facts and insights I acquired reading academic articles at the door; I could apply all this thinking to this new pastime. I could use that academic stuff to better understand these alien but very pretty words I was consuming, and I could impress all of my fellow book club members with my understanding of Derrida - 'there is no world without the word' my friends, now who ate all of the Brie.

It was later that I discovered the visceral power of fiction. I learnt that words, expertly put together on a page, could make you feel things. After becoming blissfully unemployed in 2023, I main-lined Australian small-town crime fiction. I didn't learn any new facts, but it felt good to spend many hours a day in the worlds of these novels. Reading was a way of escaping the uncertainty of my own life that was quietly spiralling somewhere unknown. And that was enough. I didn't need to know how the East India Company conquered the globe ( Sorry, Mr Dalrymple). That would have hurt my brain. Cleaved it in two. I wanted to feel tethered, grounded. I needed to feel whole. I realised that I was chasing a feeling that only fiction could provide.

The very pleasant upside of being asked to participate in a writers’ festival is that I get to chase this feeling once more and fall in love with fiction all over again. I also get free books. Two free books: Kate Kruimink's Heartsease and Ruby Todd's Bright Objects. I approach this task as I do the other non-cat history-related tasks that I perform; I isolate the task before I get to work on it. I allocate a day to focus on it, separate from my cat history research or teaching; I make a separate room for it in my brain. After a lifetime of juggling a thousand oddly shaped balls, I now find it easier to immobilise all the different balls in their individual cognitive containers. If my frantic hands are not moving them around, I can see and negotiate them a lot better. My life is no longer a blur of oddly shaped juggling balls.

So on a Monday morning in late September, my non-cat history day, I cleared cats from my mind and cracked the spine of my first book. With a mind free of cats, I let Ruby Todd's words gush in, a pleasant flood ever so slowly and purposefully forming a narrative. It was by page 20 that I could sense something lurking. Slowly emerging with every word and sentence, I could feel its presence. Something warm and familiar, something cat-shaped. On page 28, he appeared, and his name was Lionel. We are introduced to Lionel in the home of Slyvia Knight, a recent widow and our novel's protagonist. Before then, in the book's 'divination', we are introduced to the novel's main character, the Comet St John and the facts of Sylvia's death, twice - once in a 'crumbled Toyota' and for a second time, 'inside the floral bedroom of a country house'. This foretelling illuminates the corners of the novel's rich tapestry. From here, the reader must move inward from the narrative's outer limits - its beginnings and endings - to reveal the complexity of Sylvia and comet St John's interlocking stories, their warps and wefts. The novel's timescales also unfurl from here. We get a sense of deep time and big planetary events that occur alongside the relative smallness of individual existence.

Slyvia and the townsfolk of the small regional town of Jericho are eagerly awaiting the passage of comet St John, last seen four thousand, two hundred and seven years ago. The comet's arrival in town elicits strong emotions. Sylvia ruminates on the emotional register of the town, 'the comet seemed to be revealing us all to ourselves and to each other, in our various registers of fear, hope and hubris, like clusters of divergent cells within the same host'. Slyvia experiences these communal emotions while grappling with the pain of losing her beloved Christopher, the anger and frustration of her husband's cold case, and the stirrings of a new romantic relationship with the comet's founder, American astronomer Theo St John.

Lionel appears as Sylvia is forced to grapple with the weekend. For Sylvia, reeling with the grief and loss of her husband, ‘weekends are a treacherous gulf that had to be crossed'. Sylvia attempts to fill her weekend with quotidian tasks - laundry, library, grocery shopping - but inside her home, time slows, and she is forced to move from room to room as if wading through a 'thick fog'. At home and feeling the slow pull of glacial time, she pulls Lionel close, 'feeling’ his 'warm body' against her chest. Todd's novel plays with big themes of the metaphysical and the otherworldly, as well as the cellular existence of flesh and blood human beings. At home, with time moving at a glacial pace, Sylvia can 'hear the sound of her own shallow breathing'. As the comet drew near and the 'atmosphere in the town grew taut', Sylvia could feel 'the hum of a new frequency just out of range'. Sylvia works at a Funeral home where the physicality of death butts up against the ethereal longing for eternal life.

And then there is Lionel. Lionel is a steady presence, 'serene as a sphinx', a critical observer of Sylivia's world, as she states, 'he could see through my games'. Lionel is part of the minute of domestic life, being fed and cared for. When Sylvia contemplates and plans for her departure, Lionel's care is considered alongside the boxing up of her personal belongings. Lionel also performs his thorough catness, springing onto beds and kitchen chairs. He meows and paws at his cat door. Lionel's catness produces visceral clarity. The 'vibrations' of his 'purring' create a 'terrible sharpness'. Lionel's catness is also, paradoxically, not of this world. Feeling the hopelessness and enormity of grief, Sylvia ‘stroked Lionel as he kneaded' her lap and 'fixed her' with his 'otherworldly green eyes'. Who among us cat parents have not thought, at times, that they were living with a furry alien.

Cats perfectly encapsulate the ethereal and the visceral. Over time, cats have symbolised both a benevolent and a malevolent spirituality. Cats have been worshipped as gods and venerated as portends of good luck. Cats have also been shunned as bearers of ominous tidings. Cats have been co-opted as symbols of a sleepy, gentle domesticity but have also been employed to convey the wildness and ferality that lurks at the edges of domestic life. Cats are of the home but can also perform acts of unhoming - homes can be a site of nurturance but also unerring violence. Stephen King deploys a resurrected cat in his 1983 novel Pet Sematary, an apposite example of the domestic/feral trope and our lingering fear of home manifest in a cat's body - 'There is more than one way to skin a cat', and cats' bodies have been used across time and space as literary symbols but also as physical commodities. We have sought out the warm bodies of cats alongside the quest for their non-existence. The macabre image of a dead cat has been used in Australia to symbolise the triumph of a Foucauldian form of environmentalism that chooses what will live and what will die. The bodies of cats have been used to further the project of colonisation for many years.

A cat also appears in Kate Kruimink's very excellent Heartsease and is doing not dissimilar narrative work. Sisters Charlotte (Lot) and Ellen (Nelly) reunite at a silent retreat tucked away in the Tasmanian countryside. Nelly is the first to arrive. She 'shoulders her way into the Lobby'. It was 'empty of people' but filled with the accoutrements of a ‘well-preserved homestead museum, the kind that skates over the various atrocities of the local area'. Again, we are met with the spectre of violence that nips at the edges of a porous and Janus-faced form of Western domesticity. Violence also lurks within the tourist precincts of the doggedly colonial city. Kruimink's writing lands like a gut punch. 'There is brine, coffee, red wine, whiskey, bread, soup, the yellow of old books, and an array of sensible jumpers. Only the merest traces of attempted genocide in the air, the soil'. The world outside is equally affecting with the cold 'poking its fingers' into clothing and 'tickling' the inside of your throat.

Lot finds her room and navigates the 'busy carpet', 'russet and cream', 'looping and scrolling', and the laminated signs 'giving kindly reminders'. She also navigates the slow stream of retreat patrons - a woman with the face of a 'sealed bank vault'; a man with 'leaf-red hair…potted fern.. the ghost of a speech bubble floating from his face'. From inside the orange carpet, the cat emerges, 'All at once, a florid orange loop rose, and it stretched and strode confidently toward me. It was a cat'. Lot 'feels an appreciative flutter', not uncommon when you have been chosen by a cat. The cat 'is the best' cat Lot has ever seen with 'a spherical ginger body teetering above stiletto-fine white paws'.

Like Bright Objects, Heartsease lingers in the metaphysical and earthly worlds. Ghosts return to haunt the sisters. Nelly sees her dead mother as she looks out the window. She sees 'a wispier tendril of a woman, pinned at the head in the reflection… her image distilling into me, or out of me'. She imagines her dead mother crawling into bed with her. Nelly misremembers her mother's botanical gift-giving, 'she was planting them and asked me to come and look and I wouldn't, and she told me that my rudeness was probably appropriate given that it was a prickly wild rose'. We are told that this gift still stings, that the 'prickly wild rose' has been digging into Nelly's 'viscera' for many years. Lot's ghosts are not of the woo-hoo kind but are instead the ghosts of her alleged failings as a sister and surrogate mother to Nelly. The novel pitches you backwards and forward. Memories are recalled and distilled. The spectre of death is omnipresent, it looms large, silently retreats, and remerges like the new buds of spring. Kruimink teases out the interrelationship between life and death via the kaleidoscope of Lot and Nelly's memories, dreams and desires.

The cat, 'a basketball with a face', appears then disappears. Yet it is a vital part of the leering absurdity of the Silent Retreat, the absurdity of signs and forms that ask if you have 'come open-hearted', the absurdity of choosing one 'item of beauty and special significance', of seeking meaning in the meaningless, and of being silent in the face of big messy grief, when you are being haunted by very noisy ghosts. The feline emerges like Carroll's Cheshire Cat; it materialises and grows large. When Nelly pokes the 'spherical cat' with her foot, it 'seems only to grow more comfortable'. Discomfort inflates the cat; it does not retreat. The absurdity of a visually noisy, non-retreating cat at a silent retreat. Brilliant.

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The moral of this tale is that you should always trust your catty senses and expect that cats will always be there, lurking, ready to pounce or purr. I knew Lionel and Ms Spherical-cat were there; I just had to feign indifference for them to emerge in all their brilliance and literary significance. As the formidable Kath Day-Knight says, 'I could feel it in me waters'.

Moreover, cats will always come, but sometimes, when you least expect it or if they choose to, because they are cats and they will do what they like, thanks very much.

And, hey. I will be chatting with Ruby Todd and Kate Kruimink on Sunday October 20 at the Headland Writers Festival between 3pm and 4pm at the Tathra Hotel. This is a free event!!! Yes, that's right, free! You can also book tickets for the other sessions here. The festival runs from the 18th to the 20th of October.

I hope to see you there

Yours,

Cat Historian