Good writing should be delicious. Words should roll around the tongue like ice cream, with smooth bits and bits that are harder to digest. Sentences that go straight to your bloodstream and sentences you need to unpack syllable by syllable, mash them up with your tongue and swallow with a long slow slither into the oesophagus. Feel them on your chest as they go down.

Writing should be pregnant with thoughts I haven’t thought yet and things I can barely see. In the Omnivore’s Dilemma, I like Pollan’s description of mushrooms. I see mushrooms as little brown hats on stalks nestled against the base of crinkly brown tree trunks. Pollan says they are fruit and their body is a vast hidden network, stretching for kilometres under the ground. I see hairy white tendrils, like a fishing net, holding the Earth together. Pollan’s mushrooms are steeped in death “breaking the dead down into food for the living, a process on which no one likes to dwell.” I rang the local mushroom farmer. He explained the process of colonising a block of compost and peat moss, allowing the network to grow and then triggering the production of mushroom fruit with the appropriate regime of humidity and air temperature. Each mushroom production is called a ‘flush’; I imagine mushrooms bursting out of the peat moss like brown and white fireworks: poof, poof, poof, poof.

Writing should remind me of the things I know and why I love knowing them. I am drawn to Mark Tredinnick’s descriptions of the landscape. I’m always looking at landscape. The land is stark and so large I feel small and worth fighting for. In Tredinnick’s poetry “wombats blunder back to crash their own party” and “cloud shadows” are like “aubergine krill”. The “landscape wants you for lunch” and “ants find places under my jeans my jeans are meant to keep unfound”. Landscape evokes only clichés from me—dryness and stillness and dreaminess— and I want to write better than that. “Resist all cliché,” says Hemingway. “Your writing will be second-hand; your voice will not be in it; your poem will stay stuck on the page; your story will rollover and go back to sleep, taking your reader with it.” In my head, pages are rolling over, like waves into tubes, disgusted at the way I write.

The greatest cliché mangler of all time was my Hungarian mother. We got into a “fine cattle of fish”, she would say—imagine a herd of cattle grazing the bottom of the ocean, fish swimming between their legs, cleaning barnacles from their skin. It was “a flash in the pants” and my stepfather would chortle quietly to himself, though I was too young to understand the full extent of the impact on his body.

We passed a church notice board one day. That’s a wonderful saying, my mother said. “Fear paralysis, but face paralyses fear—you’re right to fear paralysis, but if you face it, your fear is paralysed”. She chattered on about the importance of facing your fears.

“It says: ‘Fear paralyses but faith paralyses fear’,” I was gentle—she is my mother—but nevertheless, the scorn was implicit in my phrasing.

“Oh,” my mother said and stopped talking. I felt I had destroyed something beautiful. Since then, clichés are inside my brain, exciting neuron after neuron, making blood cells spin and dendrites quiver, standing ready for action, with spiky Einstein hair. Clichés are asking me to recreate their meaning. I try.

A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. The plastic wrapped chicken in my freezer is putting thought to sleep, while the bush turkey plods around my garden, daring me to shoo it away and the rosellas snack on my fruiting bottlebrush like families on a picnic or teenagers at a beach party. My tree becomes a rosella tree sprouting oblivious colourful balls, tails up and waving about, wings akimbo. Then it becomes a tree again, with scraps of red hidden among the grey-green branches. Corellas with little worms of orange at their throats, sit on telegraph wires and watch me walk down to street as if they are commenting on my dress and hairstyle. Kookaburras laugh at me from high in the trees as I leave for work at 6am. If I could just see the buggers, I would throw something at them.

I saw an emu once, standing in the middle of a red ochre road in the middle of nowhere, unconcerned about the car in which I was travelling heading towards it. “Go away,” said the driver, “I don’t want to run you over.” I wondered why he would have to, given that there was nothing but red-orange dust and dry dark green bushes for miles in any direction. At the last minute, the emu ran to join his mate in the bushes. Two in the bush, I thought, definitely worth more.