Department of the vanishing by Johanna Bell

‘Climate grief is a real thing’, ‘a perpetual loop of what’s the point?’ and ‘a mounting sense of doom’. Ava catalogues the dead. On her first day of work at the Department of the Vanishing she is given a list of 24 species of birds, all now extinct. Her job is to archive all the scientific and cultural materials relating to the extinct species, to preserve their history. It’s a soul destroying job, alleviated only by bursts of manic humour shared with her co-worker Dee as they laugh at the Chief’s mispronunciation of ‘ARCH-ivists’ or vent their anger by punching stacks of documents.

For Ava climate grief is merged with grief over a disappeared father in her childhood, and a disappearing mother succumbing to dementia in an aged care home. The doctor tells her ‘grief can make you do odd things’, ‘compulsive behaviours’ that find outlet in the heightened demands she makes of her lover, the man with the bird feathers tattooed on his arm; anything to keep feeling half alive.

Birds are important. A double-page spread presents an attempt at translating all the bird calls made by Australian species; it’s a cacophony of sounds. Research has shown that hearing birdsong leads to an improvement in the mental wellbeing of listeners. Yet those sounds are disappearing from the urban environment. Imagine the joy of hearing a lyrebird, a bird capable of reproducing the sound of so many other birds in the wild. Sadly the lyrebird becomes the next to appear on Ava’s notification of extinct species.

The novel is set a few years in the future, and takes an emotive verse form, overlain with the ephemera of the archivist’s job: lists, facts, quotes, notes, photographs … and the recorded interview statements with police, for we learn early on that she has been arrested by the NSW Police intergovernmental fraud squad. Gradually, like the archivist herself, the reader pieces together the fragments that build a story of loss and discovery, until the explosive final revelation.

Department of the Vanishing is a very different approach to storytelling, immediately obvious to the reader flicking through the pages. It is full of fascinating detail, duly referenced at the end, but an emotional story is threaded throughout, and ultimately comes together like an intriguing detective story.

Themes: Grief, Loss, Extinction, Archives, Birds, Lyrebirds.

Helen Eddy