Adele Dumont reviews Vessel by Dani Netherclift
Vessel
by Dani Netherclift
Reviewed by ADELE DUMONT
On its opening page, with very little in the way of preamble, Vessel establishes its central
incident:
1993. A Saturday. Thirty-eight degrees Celsius. I don’t know what time it is when I witness my father
and brother drown, minutes – perhaps only seconds – apart (11).
Vessel’s narrator writes that in these moments, time seems to have ‘turned outside itself’ (11).
The gushing water of the irrigation channel, which stems from Victoria’s Waranga Basin, is
‘turning in on itself’ (13). Structurally, Vessel likewise resists a linear, straightforward
progression. Described by author Dani Netherclift as an ‘elegiac lyric essay’, it moves in
spirals and loops, returning, always, to that key moment of witnessing.
Early on, Netherclift makes reference to various documents: coroners’ reports, police witness
statements, newspaper articles, and obituary columns. Vessel might be seen as an attempt to
write beyond the limits of this official record. This is more than a filling in of detail, or an
injection of feeling. Rather, the book’s lyric essay form is one that welcomes ambiguity and
fragmentation. It’s one with ample room for silences and white spaces, and therefore an
apposite form for writing about something as amorphous as grief.
Repeatedly, Vessel’s narrator revisits what she has already established. She questions, for
instance, how much she really ‘witnessed’ (23), given the impossibility of actually seeing her
father’s or brother’s underwater struggle. She also clarifies that at the time, she didn’t realise
what she was witnessing was a drowning per se: ‘It took a long time for that knowledge to
settle’ (20). The coroner’s report, she informs us, described her brother’s body as ‘wedged’
(21) against a pylon, but later on, she wonders whether actually the word used was ‘nestled’
(38). On page 83, she tells us that a Mickey Mouse doll was placed in her brother’s coffin,
but on page 158 reveals that she actually later found this same doll in among a bag of her
brother’s belongings. That Netherclift does not attempt to iron out these inconsistencies and
slippages is one of the book’s strengths. Vessel is not a constructed representation of an event
already wrestled with: it charts the narrator’s ongoing wrestling, and is all the more alive for
it.
Vessel accretes by fragments, gathering meaning through associative logic. A reference to
research on the foetal cells of babies remaining in the mother’s body for decades transitions,
for example, into Netherclift wondering whether her brother’s cellular traces might also
remain in the body of water where he drowned. A vignette of the author’s mother kissing her
great grandmother’s lips a final goodbye is juxtaposed with imagery of roadkill, and of
drowned refugee bodies, in turn shifting to list the various offerings placed in her brother’s
and father’s caskets. In this way, Vessel moves beyond the level of personal bereavement, and
into a richer meditation on loss.
One of Netherclift’s preoccupations is time, its strange elasticity and malleability. The three
days it takes for her brother’s body to be recovered is an ‘in-between place’ (19); the six days
between the accident and funeral ‘suspended time’ (64). The accident has cleaved time in
two: the before, and the after. From one paragraph to the next, Netherclift skips deftly
through decades past, the accident casting various memories in a new light, and lending them
new significance. Netherclift’s personal experience of grief is given especial resonance by
being tied to wider phenomena. She writes, for example, of bodies which are never
recovered, and of the living who as a result are stranded in limbo-time. In that strange,
interim time when some of her family members are yet to learn of the drownings, she
recognises what Anne Carson calls the ‘impending approach of unknown absence’ (67).
Their lives are still ‘intact’ and ‘uninterrupted’ (66).
Netherclift honours the blank spaces in her story. There are, foremost, the stark spaces left
behind by her father and brother. But there’s also the incompleteness, and shakiness of her
memories of each: at times she hardly recognises others’ versions of them. Occasionally, she
leaves several centimetres of blank space on the page, for instance when turning to her loved
ones’ last, ‘unfathomable’ (16) moments. Netherclift never actually sees her father’s or
brother’s body (the funeral director refuses her) and, in accordance with the findings of the
studies she cites, she instead conjures ‘horrible outlines of an unknown shape’ (78).
Netherclift’s own unresolved loss is tied to a more overarching, societal discomfort (in
Western cultures) around dead bodies, and damaged ones especially. Vessel writes its way
into this uncomfortable space.
As well as the two drownings, Netherclift describes various deaths among her extended
family and her ancestors. She weaves in portraits of a US couple who devote their retirement
to searching for long-lost bodies; of free diver Natalia Molchanova, whose body was never
found; of Virginia Woolf, who drowned herself. There is also reference to morgues; to
memento mori; to bodies hit by trains; to Norse bog bodies; to lynchings; and to the
Holocaust. This is undeniably heavy material, and mostly this is leavened by the delicacy of
Netherclift’s language, and the fact she handles her research with a lightness of touch.
Nevertheless, some readers may wish for more moments of reprieve. There are scanned
colour images throughout Vessel (mostly envelopes from letters written by the author’s great-
grandfather to her great-grandmother, from the trenches of WWI) and these do provide small
pockets of readerly pause. But tonally, the prose is earnest and sober, and unrelentingly so.
It’s a tricky thing, when writing about something as unremitting as grief, to know just how
much the reader can sit with. Some may find the experience of reading Vessel occasionally
wearying, while others may find it a source of great solace.
In recent times, psychologists have recognised the therapeutic value of writing in helping
individuals process grief and trauma. Netherclift states that, through the writing of Vessel, she
was able to ‘transform the bodies of [her] father and brother into bodies of text and enact a
sense of closure’ (1 ). In interleaving her own family’s narrative with the writing of others, Vessel
transcends personal elegy, and becomes something more ambitious: writing as testament; as
reclamation; as communion.
Notes
1 Interview in Brightside Story Studio: Dani Netherclift on Writing to resolve grief.
https://brightsidestorystudio.com/2024/10/28/dani-netherclift-on-writing-to-resolve-grief/
ADELE DUMONT is a writer and critic. Her latest book is The Pulling (Scribe Australia & UK).