The Cailleach Diaries

Why are they called The Cailleach Diaries?

In Scottish Gaelic, of which my great-grandmother Isabella Douglas spoke just a few words, Cailleach (pronounced "kar-lee-ack") means old woman. Cailleach derives from the Latin pallium, for woollen cloak, which became the Gaelic adjective caille, veilled. Cailleach carries the sense of an 'old-woman-alone-in-herself', or 'old-woman-healer'.

I've been writing all my life. This is not just professional writing, such as my research papers or Possums/NDC programs or The Discontented Little Baby Book. In 2009 I was proud to receive a Queensland Premier's Literary Award for an Emerging Manuscript (Fiction), and here I share from this and other more personal and literary work – including from my PhD in Creative Writing and Women's Studies and the as yet unpublished Bone Mother: A memoir in milk .

I'd like to share my personal writing, lift back that cloak. Here, I'd like to share thoughts and quotes which inspire courage, which speak to my values, which nourish the life of the soul. I'm keen to share reflections on my attempts as a generalist doctor to make a contribution toward health system change, in the hope that this might encourage you as you make your own unique contribution to a better world. We all have to pull hard together now in our little rowboat of human life, since the planet herself is crying out for our help.

In more recent years, I lay my hands quietly, with her consent, on a patient's tender flesh, and see that somehow my hands have turned into a Cailleach's. So these are a Cailleach’s diary entries. I hope you find they add a deeper layer to my work, as together we reflect on what it is to mother, to parent, to care about other humans and the Earth in these most extraordinary times of planetary crisis.