Like canyons and Cancer, Lesley is a border-crosser. In tracing canyons, their waterways, their ecosystems, animals, plants and people, Lesley crosses borders unnamed by her guide, over-named by a one-time President. Lesley weaves worlds with words and words with waterways, arts, artists, Cancer, time, living-dying, composting and becoming other than territorial to many specific places. Lesley is of the place where she gardens and cultivates friendships and plants and chicken kinships – Australia, Zimbabwe, California. Specific places unbounded by her vibrant storying and intimate relations with people, their arts, land, and interspecies ethics, a terralinguist of each place, making worlding possible.

Did you know humans of 2020 didn't know how to speak whale, let alone chicken or spider? Spiders build homes in corners of windows and weave webs around outside lights. Over time, these webs become thick and filter the morning light. Webs close to outdoor lighting are successful bug catchers, ridding the airways of annoying flying insects. Annoying to whom though? They too are part of our multi species household. Sustaining life requires nourishment and killing. Spiders kill bugs and humans kill all sorts of things: death, murder, male chickens. What has to die in order to be composted anew?

We write together, comfortable academic friends feeling like uninvited guests as we list our connections to Lesley’s work. From locked down Victoria, Australia comes up as a starting point. It’s rife with colonialism but generative in discussions of speaking from country and cultivating kin. Taking boundaries for a walk, following the tangential discussions that come up as we stay with the trouble, discussing not what is in “Diary of a Detour” but of “Diary of a Detour.” Realising that we are not guests in Lesley’s world but of the intellectual home she has helped create, a world which lives on.

100s for Leslie by Play Tank Collective
(Alli Edwards, Sarah Healy and Alicia Flynn, Australia)