The Emigration Playlist - 64 years of songs: #17 Yanada - The Preatures (2017)

As I get to this wonderful song - which you have probably never heard (unless you (a) are Australian or (b) spotted it on my social media about two years ago) - it's hard to write.

I am going to start this entry by spending some time on why that is, and I will then come back to this glorious, joyous piece of music.

I am leaving the UK - the whole point of this blog series. That process is underway. We are selling our house and, all being well, it should get us to Ireland by January or February next, though anyone who's ever bought or sold a house will know just how many things can go wrong, so chickens remain very much unhatched and uncounted as yet, of course.

The underlying theme of my writing in all these posts is grief.

I am grieving my country - what I thought it was at least. I am grieving an identity - British - and what I once thought that stood for. As I am a trans woman, I have already been through one deeply traumatic period of my life - divorce and transition - which drew a marker between 'before' and 'after' for me. Only today I was rewatching some old home movies. There was a man in them - he doesn't look like me, sound like me, smile like me, walk like me. Apparently, it's me. But he's become a stranger, someone I'm told I once was but with whom I increasingly cannot find connection, a body I cannot remember inhabiting. Around the man in these videos are my children. I recognise them, fully, deeply and with love. I remember who they were, and are, at every level and entirely, together with the feelings I had for them because I have them still. The man with the camera, who appears occasionally? My inner self has no recollection at all. 

That's one of the prices I paid for transitioning. Not everyone's trajectory is the same, but that was mine. The emotional imprint of my entire life beforehand feels now more or less been erased - simply a film I saw. Is this what Alzheimer's can be like? I have seen someone go through that, albeit from a distance, and of course I don't truly mean it as it's a dreadful condition...but to lose your past from your own consciousness? By contrast everything that's happened since 2008 remains crystal clear for me, vivid, real, emotionally accessible. 

All this also reminds me of an unexpectedly traumatic evening I spent a couple of years ago. The backstory to it goes like this. After leaving university I worked, for eleven years, at London advertising agencies (a time on which I reflected in my last post about Venus in Furs). The first agency, where I cut my teeth, comprised the first seven of those years. I did well, rose up the ranks and made many friends. So when I was tracked down (with some difficulty - new name, new gender) by an old colleague for a reunion I was excited. A chance to reconnect I thought. I'd kept in touch, at a distance, with a couple of people, and my story was no secret - in fact the woman who found me seemed to know all about it and I hadn't told her.

I should have thought this all through better though. When I turned up on the night, pretty nervous, no-one knew who the hell I was. If you're not trans you - with respect - have no clue just how exposing and how tiring it is to 'explain' it all, over and over. I had by then been doing that for over 15 years. It makes you feel exhausted and vulnerable because literally nothing can blindside a cisgender person and cause them to lose the capacity to even speak more than telling them the person they are looking at is the person they knew 'before', and 'hey well , you know, a lot has happened...' In that moment, you have no idea what will happen, or what their response will be. I have been demeaned to my face (once by a client), I have seen people's mouths literally fall open (in fact many times). I have seen them tilt their head up and down to appraise me from top to bottom with wide eyes. You feel like a lab specimen, a freak, in those moments. 

At the event I did find a couple of people who knew about my journey and to whom I didn't have to 'explain', and for a while I hung around with them. After a while I drifted away to stand with groups of others - some of whom I knew very well from back in the day. They had no idea who I was, and made no motion to engage me as I stood there. Well obviously, you might say (as some insensitive cisgender friends did say later), but in that moment I knew I just couldn't face going through it again. Not in public, not here, not after all this time. So I find myself standing on the edge of a group of six, two of whom I shared some good times with, the others whom I don't know at all, and my only choices are somehow interrupt the conversation and announce to my old buddies who I actually am (with all the attendant risk of taking all the oxygen out of the conversation immediately, and whilst the randoms are earwigging), or to stand there mute like a friendless stranger. I did the latter. Later I moved to another group, and then another, wondering if a quiet moment might come up when I'd find the courage. 

I didn't find the courage. I stayed for maybe an hour and left early, feeling very lonely and upset. That fondly remembered past had died and I hadn't known. I'd been unprepared. It felt like someone had handed me the death certificate.  

So, grief.

For a past that's gone - a life, a country, a set of assumptions, a set of relationships, a place in the world. 

In the last few days that grief has taken another turn too. Not an unexpected one, but it has cut deep.

I have realised again - it mounts up week by week - that this country - Britain - is not mourning me, at all. In fact it wants me gone, or even dead. The particular cause of this pain? The announcement by the NHS - the UK's public health service - that for the first time in its history (and I mean that, this has nothing to do with legislation to give trans people rights in the last 20 years - now rescinded) - trans women will be housed in male wards under almost all circumstances if they need inpatient care. This is now policy, and compulsory. I have a Gender Recognition Certificate, a revised birth certificate, I have a vagina, and 20 years of oestrogen in me. I was, until the Supreme Court of the UK ruled otherwise last year, "for all purposes" a woman. I have lived that way, loved that way, worked that way, been treated that way for nearly two decades.

Now, should I be at my most vulnerable, and need medical care in a hospital, I will be deliberately degraded and humiliated. I will be treated not as a woman but as an affront to women, a threat to them, by official policy. I will have my identity denied, by official ruling, in a volte-face by British society that has no cause but prejudice and after decades in which people like me were treated as women by healthcare professionals, without complaint or the slightest issue. 

All this has been sitting with me today. I have been feeling despair, perhaps also brought on by watching those videos. There's a man in them, but I am not him. I don't know who he is. But if I look around me at the country I live in, I learn that I am not, and it is now said, never have been, a woman either.

I am told by Britain that the last two decades of my life was a lie. Yet as I look back at those videos, I reflect that my life then was a lie too (though parts of it - my love for my children chiefly - were and are deep and real and have survived). What am I left with? It feels like nothing today.

I feel like a blank space. I didn't exist before, and I don't exist after. It's like I'm living that reunion night, 24/7 now in this country. You want to know what being 'erased' feels like? This. 

Britain doesn't want me. It's making that clear more and more. 

I try to draw strength (and here comes the rather tenuous link - bear with me - with today's song) - from the emerging understanding that so much of my joy, as expressed through these 64 songs, has come from experiences I have had outside this bleak and lying island. I didn't expect this to be the case as I assembled the list, but it gives me comfort, and hope. And today I really really need both. 

Yanada is an example of that. The band behind it, The Preatures, from Sydney, were big for a while in the 2010s but didn't make an impression much outside their own country. Which is a huge shame, because this song is glorious. With a retro, jangly, 60s-influenced pop-rock vibe and their warm and charismatic singer, Izzi Manfredi, they could have slotted easily into a space made by bands like Empire of the Sun or Foster the People. Yanada, from their second album, Girlhood (soon after which the band started to fall apart) is arguably the band’s most significant song. The title is the Dharug (the Indigenous language of the Sydney region) word for 'moon' and the chorus is in that language. It was co-written with Dharug songwoman Jacinta Tobin and much emphasis was placed on getting the endorsement of tribal elders for its making, along with Tobin and Manfredi's sensitivity to particular omens that suggested whether they should or should not even record it (including the fortunate appearance of an eagle in the nick of time).

All of this I discovered after I first heard it, in 2024, and Yanada has now become welded in my mind to an extraordinary three weeks I spent in Adelaide and South Australia. Some of this time was work related - I was on a training course at a world-renowned centre for an approach in my profession. The training was superbly delivered. Whilst there I was lucky enough to spend time with participants from all over Australia and the world, including some Aussies with an Aboriginal background, mostly from the north and west.

Powerful stories were shared.

Nyumun - Noelli Roberts.    
Somehow I got this on a plane back from Sydney.

I found myself sitting in the beautiful gardens of the Adelaide centre I was attending, listening to yarns of how a community survived. How white Europeans tried systematically to exterminate it, and still are. How it hung on, kept its traditions, refound its identity, never died. I shared a little of my own experience. I brought with me the burden and the history of the white colonist, that's in me too of course, the privilege of it all, but we connected.

If they can keep going, then so can we. So can I. 

I cannot claim a great knowledge of First Nations Australian culture, but on my two encounters (the first was in 2004 when a visit to Australia saw me return with a massive canvas painted by an artist from the Northern Territory), I have found myself moved and touched. I'll always remain a tourist, I know, but Yanada brings something up for me. Longing, survival, history, endurance, friendship, female strength, all wrapped in bright vocals, hooky guitars, buckets of reverb, a driving beat and a chanting chorus that demands you somehow join in; the rhythm of a language you can't understand but somehow know. 

It makes me happy. And today I need that. 

*****

Readying myself for a forced emigration, I am putting together the soundtrack of a whole life spent in England. You can read more about why I am doing this here: https://kierkegaardslunch.blogspot.com/2026/08/mourning-england-in-song-part-1.html