Category Archives: Diary

Sydney Writers’ Festival: My Weekend

Posted on 28 May 2013 | 2 comments

The best laid plans etc. I was going to blog about the SWF daily, but it turned out that though I only got to one event on Saturday I still had no time to write about it then or on Monday or Tuesday, so here are my days 3 and 4 all mooshed up.

Saturday returned to the cloudless sky that’s traditional for the festival. The average age of the punters dropped by about 20 years, but the crowds at Walsh Bay didn’t seem to be any worse.

My day started with the half past two session, Shami Chakrabarti: WOW at Sydney Writers’ Festival Lecture. WOW, ‘Women of the World’, is a big feminist festival held annually at London’s Southbank Centre. There were a number of WOW events at this festival, a kind of taster-festival within the festival, and a friend I met at quarter past two or thereabouts had been wowed at one of them in which a number of women spoke for ten minutes each (there’s a nice blog post about that one on Guys Read Gals).

The 2.30 session was a tepid affair. Jude Kelly, Artistic Director of the Southbank Centre and founder of WOW, gave a long and  promising introduction – introducing herself as a very senior arts administrator, WOW as a feminist festival unlike any other in the world, and Shami Chakrabarti as her friend and a foremost human rights activist in the UK. ‘Why Women of the World rather than Feminists United?’ she asked, and I honestly thought she was going to say, ‘Because Wow! is so much more attractive than Eff you!’ Sadly no: she explained that it was because the word feminist had such a bad rep and they wanted to attract as many people as possible. This explanation enraged one of my companions, who also bridled at Jude’s admittedly eccentric suggestion that the men in the audience should consider themselves to be women for the occasion. Neither of those things particularly distressed me, but I could understand.

Then Shami Chakrabarti spoke. The same friend told me later that Ms Chakrabarti is a brilliant and heroic activist, who often appears on British TV and is completely formidable, someone you are very glad to have on your side. That wasn’t evident from this speech. She started off saying that in her view gender rights is the most important human rights issue in the world today – she hadn’t always thought so, but she now does. But instead of giving the reasons for her change of mind – arguing, for example, that no other human rights abuse can be adequately addressed unless women’s issues are also addressed – she just repeated the assertion, listed off a number of appalling statistics and atrocities, gave us a timeline of the gaining of important rights by women in Australia and the UK respectively (a part of her talk that someone said afterwards sounded like notes she had taken in preparation for visiting Australia, failing to realise that a Sydney audience might already know, for example, that women had the vote here 20 something years before Britain). Towards the end, she said, ‘It’s not my place to tell you what you should be doing in this country …’, and it struck me that that may have been the problem: as a citizen of London she was trying so hard not to be condescending to us ex-colonials that she ended up not saying anything much. Or maybe she was just jet-lagged.

Whatever, I think I picked the wrong WOW event. I do wonder if at I’m a Feminist – Can I Vajazzle? Jude Kelly invited the men in the audience to consider themselves as women.

I tried to get into the 4 o’clock Marathon Poetry Reading, but if the room holds 100 people, I was 102 in line. I tried to sit in the sun and listen: the ear was willing but the bum was sore and I got a cramp. So I went and sat and read until I could meet up with my companions who had gone to hear Bob Brown on the Future of Activism, where the reciprocal passion so absent from the WOW talk was by all accounts there in spades – even though he kept pointing an accusing finger at his audience and telling them that come September they were about to vote against their own interests and the interests of their children.

Sunday was another brilliant day – I speak mainly of the weather and the way it was possible to strike up an interesting conversation with compete strangers.

We started with Sylvia Nasar: Is the West Over and What Would Keynes say? at 10 o’clock, probably my most worthily motivated event of the festival. As is often the case, the conversation bore very little relation to the title of the session. It was mainly a promotion of Sylvia Nasar’s book, Grand Pursuit: The Story of Economic Genius, which tells the history of economics through the lives of its key practitioners, and argues that economics is responsible for transforming the possibilities for human wellbeing. As one of my companions remarked afterwards, if the book is as facile as this session, it’s a good one to skip. Her responses to two questions at the end are indicative of that facileness.

A young woman, after a courteous squee about having a woman discuss economics, asked how Ms Nasar’s account of the vast benefits brought to humanity by economics related to the imminent threat from global warming. Ms Nasar said that many problems had been solved in the past and there was plenty of time so she was optimistic that economics would solve this one too. She probably didn’t mean that we should just place our faith in neoliberalism, but she could have meant that, and evidently didn’t see any need to dissociate herself from that view. Then someone asked what she saw as the importance of Amartya Sen. This question might well have been a chance to distance herself from the neoliberal world view, and perhaps come at last to the advertised theme of the session; instead she told us how she had followed ‘Amartya’ around in India for weeks when writing the book, and been struck by the way his photo appeared constantly on the front page of newspapers there – that in India economists could be treated as rockstars are in her native USA. End of reply.

Sylvia Nasar wrote A Beautiful Mind, the book about economist John Nash that was made into the excellent movie with Russell Crowe, so she’s clearly done better than this. Maybe she was jet-lagged too.

I dashed to the scene of my unsuccessful queuing on Saturday, and this time I was among the last five people admitted – to stand at the back of the room for Research and Writing. This session turned out to be a lot of fun. The panel was the winner and two shortlisted authors for the 2012 Nib Waverley Library Award for Literature: Jane Gleeson-White (Double Entry: How the merchants of Venice shaped the modern world – and how their invention could make or break the planet), Robin de Crespigny (The People Smuggler: The true story of Ali Al Jenabi, the ‘Oscar Schindler of Asia’) and Fiona Harari (A Tragedy in Two Acts: Marcus Einfeld & Teresa Brennan). They were billed as talking about their approaches to research, and that’s what they did.

If there was a common thread, it is that each of their books began with the discovery of an interesting person, and none of them knew when they started what the book was going to be about. Jane Gleeson-White (who incidentally had just done a fine job as Sylvia Nasar’s amiably sceptical interlocutor) started out writing about the Viennese Monk Luca Bartolomes Pacioli, intimate of Leonardo and teacher of Dürer, and had to be told by her editor that she had actually written a history of accountancy. Robin de Crespigny set out to make a film about people smuggling, but was so captivated by Ali Al Jenabi that it had to be a book and, evidently, an enduring friendship. Fiona Harari began with questions about Marcus Einfeld, the eminent former judge who perjured himself over a speeding offence and ended up disgraced and in gaol, intending to devote just one chapter to Teresa Brennan, the deceased person he had claimed was the speeding driver, but expecting hostility from Einfeld’s friends and family she decided to write the Brennan part first, only to discover a whole rich story there. The panellists enjoyed themselves and each other, and a good time was had by all.

Fiona Harari said that Teresa Brennan was famous for telling outrageous lies for the fun of it – she had convinced Sir Gustav Nossal that she was planning to become a nun. As I’d relayed on this blog something I was told by Teresa when I met her in 1976, I used question time to ask if I’d been sold a pup: but no, it’s on record that, among many other improbabilities, she had indeed been a publicist for Barry Humphries and it was quite plausible that she had written jokes for Edna.

My final event was Karl Ove Knausgaard in conversation with Sarah Kanowski. I’d nearly finished the first book in his six volume novel My Struggle, A Death in the Family, which we’ll be discussing at my Book Group, and which I’ll write about here after the meeting. So this session was like homework. All homework should be so mesmerisingly interesting.

Sarah Kanowski seemed to have read everything Karl Ove had written, some of it at least twice. She pronounced his name as if she had been speaking Norwegian all her life, and was right up there with Ramona Koval in establishing a warm rapport with her interviewee. Karl Ove said that shame is the dominant emotion in Norwegian culture and these books set out to name things that are simply not talked about: drunkenness and incontinence, but also mistreatment of children and sexual matters. When he was writing the novel he couldn’t imagine anyone wanting to read it, and now he is alarmed to think there are more than 500 thousand people who know all about his sexual inadequacies. He claimed that when he finished speaking to us he would go off by himself and vomit with shame. Was it just me, or would everyone in the room have been willing to hold him by the shoulders while he vomited?

I hadn’t been sure I would read on past the first book, even though I was exhilarated by it. Now it looks as if I won’t be able to resist reading the whole 2000+ pages. Evidently the final book is a 400-page essay about Adolf Hitler. Can you believe I’m looking forward to it?

So that was my festival. We didn’t get to the Big Read, a highlight of previous festivals, because its new time slot was in working hours. I’ve subscribed to the podcast of  ABC Radio National’s pale shadow of the Book Show so as to hear some of the sessions I missed. I’ll happily advise people devising sessions to think in terms of readings and conversations rather than delivery of papers or rambling discourse. I recommend anyone travelling to Sydney to time it so you can attend, especially if it continues to overlap in time and location with the Vivid Festival (about which I’ll blog a little tomorrow).

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Sydney Writers’ Festival: My Day 2

Posted on 25 May 2013 | 5 comments

Friday began wet and grim but cleared up to a spectacular harbourside brilliance, only to pelt down as darkness fell. But that was only he weather.

I only managed two events.

As a common or garden blogger and minimally published writer, I would have felt remiss if I didn’t attend Writers Who Blog. The four panellists came at blogging from quite different perspectives.

Mark Forsyth writes a short blog entry every day, always about some peculiarity of the English language (while here he met the word yakka for the first time). He admitted that he had started his blog The Inky Fool in the hope that it would lead to a book contract, and it did, to two books in fact.

Tara Moss already had a number of books published when she stumbled into blogging – she did a gig as guest blogger for the SWF a couple of years ago and wrote 21,000 words in a week. The appeal of writing and publishing without a moderator was irresistible, and as she has done more over the years, breaking all the standard rules about length, range, language level and frequency, her sense of herself as a writer has transformed.

Lorraine Elliott blogs full time at Note Quite Nigella, a blog about food. For her, blogging was a way out of the advertising world, which is ‘all about money’. I didn’t quite get how she does it full time, that is, whether it generates an income, but she told lovely stories of ow her blogging has created a bridge in her relationship with her mother.

Angela Meyer, of Literary Minded, was a participating chair who necessarily focused on chairing and made it look effortless. I would have liked to hear more about her own blogging experience, which she described in her intro as being in part about tracking her own trajectory as an emerging writer.

All four panellists seemed to count their hits in the hundreds of thousand. My biggest day scored 228. My impression is that questions at the end came mainly from bloggers on my scale. I got to ask the first question, and resisted the temptation to be one of those grey-haired gentlemen who seizes the opportunity to tell his life story. I asked about difficulties with comments. Mark had a ready, sensible answer: ‘Don’t start an argument on the Internet.’ Tara took the microphone: ‘My advice is, Start arguments on the Internet.’ They were both right, of course. I liked Tara’s final note: ‘When you do get into an argument, don’t say anything you wouldn’t want to see quoted in the newspaper.’

One key observation – I don’t remember by whom – chimed with Robert Green’s reflections on creativity the day before: blogging is still very new, and there are no hard and fast rules about how it should be done, and each of the panellists said that the rules as formulated so far as guides for beginning bloggers didn’t really apply. Come back in 50 years and we might have a set of clear rules like the ones that govern journalism now, but for the time being the field is wide open for creativity and discovery.

At half past two I had to choose among Beyond Climate Denial on a Neoliberal Planet with Jeff Sparrow, Robert Manne and others, Dermot Healy in conversation with Luke Davies , and Turning the Tide with Lionel Fogarty, Melissa Lucashenko and others. Would I opt for anxiety, pleasure or pain? It was a toss-up, and in the end I went for anxiety and climate change: I admire Jeff Sparrow’s writing and editing – I was interested to hear him and Robert Manne in conversation; I had read the article on climate change and neoliberalism in the current Overland by Philip Mirowski, Jeremy Walker and Antoinette Abboud, of whom the last two were also on the panel, and would love to hear its implications teased out in discussion.

It was probably a wrong decision. There was no conversation. Jeff Sparrow was a non-participating chair. Each of the three panellists delivered a paper, they didn’t address each other’s points except to complain that the session was too short, and as far as I could tell none of the presentations added anything substantial to what had been said in the previously published articles. ‘As far as I could tell’, because Jeremy Walker read so fast and assumed so much prior knowledge of (I think) economics that I was completely at a loss to know what he was saying. In short, Robert Manne thinks there’s little reason not to despair. Antoinette Abboud warned us not to be seduced by the neoliberal three-step strategy of denialism, carbon trading and geo-engineering. Jeremy Walker said something very complex and possibly profound.

The first person to speak in question time said we should all pay attention to Bill McKibben, and all panellists seemed to agree. ‘Why aren’t we out in the streets screaming about this?’ the same man asked when instructed by the chair to get to the question. Robert Manne had a ready answer: ‘Because we’re consuming.’

The problems of the world weren’t solved, and if Robert Manne is right they never will be. But change is never linear, and hope, the thing with feathers that perches in the breast, lives on.

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Sydney Writers’ Festival: My Day 1

Posted on 23 May 2013 | 8 comments

The Sydney Writers’ Festival has been going for days now, but my festival started yesterday, on a bleak, wet, grey Thursday.

I began with a 10 o’clock launch of four chapbooks in Vagabond Press’s Rare Objects series. Chapbooks are books of poetry so small they don’t even rate an ISBN. But where some chapbooks have a cheap and cheerful feel, the Rare Objects are beautifully crafted, a hundred numbered and signed copies of each title. The books being launched were by the stellar line-up of David Malouf, Robert Adamson, Martin Harrison and Adam Aitken.

Luke Davies gave one of the best launch speeches I’ve heard. He paid tribute to Michael Brennan of Vagabond Press and to the four poets in warmly personal terms, as people and as creators. The mutual respect and affection among the five people on the dais was something wonderful: completely the opposite of the internecine strife for which poets are supposedly famous. Each of the four launchees read: Adam Aitken from November Already, Robert Adamson from Empty your Eyes, Martin Harrison from Living Things)and David Malouf from Sky News (which my deafness heard Luke Davies announce, improbably, as Sky Nudist, but that would be a different chapbook). We the audience were very restrained, applauding politely after each reader – my guess is that we were too busy processing the complex pleasures we were being given to be too demonstrative. It really was a brilliant reading: a stunning prose poem from Adamson, crisp imagery from Malouf, Aitken taking the New York School to a tiny French village (not really, but that’s a mangled form of his own joke), Harrison in fine rhapsodic form. I loved Martin Harrison’s account of the genesis of his ‘Wallabies’: witnessing two young Australians in full xenophobic flight in a Parisian Internet cafe (and he described them to us with great relish), he took notes intending to write a satirical poem, but realised when he sat to write that what he really wanted to do was to celebrate the part is Australia they came from.

I couldn’t have asked for a better start. I bought all four of the Rare Objects, found a spot out of the rain and sat and read, did email things on my iPad, and chatted. (One of the striking things about the SWF is how easy it is to strike up a conversation with complete strangers.) Then it was time for the 1 o’clock session:Harbour City Poets: Some People You May Know, my first event in the Bangarra Mezzanine, which I think of as the poets’ space at the Festival. Again it was a pleasure to be read to, this time by a quintet of poets – Margaret Bradstock, John Carey, David Musgrave, Louise Wakeling and Les Wicks. The poems were about people, real, and imagined. Margaret Bradstock’s pieces about colonial characters made me want more. And there was some witty and elegant light satire. It may be because someone had told me just before the session about the man being hacked to death in London, but I found myself thinking that light satire, especially when performed giving broad Austealian accents to its objects, is a dangerous mode in which the satirist can all too easily come off as smug, class-bound, narrow-minded, bien-pensant and otherwise unappealing.

I rushed home (bus–train–bus), walked and fed the dog and was back, just a few minutes late for Robert Green: On Creativity at 4 oclock. This session wasn’t on my schedule, but a friend had a ticket she couldn’t use, and the Festival program promised ‘exercises to help rid [me] of blocks and unleash thinking that is more fluid and creative’. Given that I’m feeling out of my depth with a writing project just now, it was a case of what the hell archie, and I’d taken the tickets off her hands. It was turned out to be pretty much a motivational talk. The ‘exercises’ were three broadbrush strategies: embrace the blank page; think like an outsider; subvert your patterns of thinking. I enjoyed the talk, not least for the wealth of anecdote and Robert Green’s manifest passion for his message that every human brain is capable of brilliance, that mastery is possible. I especially liked the first question and response at the end. In summary, a white-bearded man suggested that next time a journalist asks him if he can seriously believe the stuff he says, he should try thinking like a mushroom; this was evidently meant as a witticism, but Green was completely nonplussed; after a bit of back and forth in which the point of excuse tin remained obscure, he agreed that he would give it a try.

More bus, more train, dinner at a pub in Chippendale then to the Carriageworks for Stories Then & Now. I’m a big fan of William Yang’s slide-show story telling, especially his exploration of his Chinese and north Queensland heritages over the years. For this show, along with Annette Shum Wah, he has mentored six mainly younger Asian-heritage people to tell the stories of their families (‘then’) and their personal stories (‘now’). Each story-teller had two turns alone on stage with a microphone in front of hem and two screens showing a series of photographs behind them. Ien Ang, Jenevieve Chang, Michael C. S. Park, Sheila Pham, Paul van Reyk and Willa Zheng were each completely engaging, and the combined effect of heir six presentations was extraordinarily rich. The Cultural Revolution, the Korean War, the American War in Vietnam, Indonesian independence, the White Australia Policy; a hilariously failed attempt at an arranged marriage, a weirdly romantic tale of serial fatherhood by sperm donation, a successful Internet match, intergenerational tension and conflict fled, faced and reconciled. We came out into the night exhilarated.

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Enter the Duck

Posted on 5 Jan 2013 | Leave a comment

Whatever the ghost of Rembrandt might think about the state of Dutch art in the early 21st century the arrival of Florentijn Hofman’s magnum opus in Darling Harbour today was a hit, even after the seeming endless and mostly lame concert and tumbling act that preceded it. The figures beneath the yellow banners up on the Pyrmont Bridge are taiko drummers. They were splendid.

ducky

And so the 2013 Festival of Sydney begins. No first night celebration in which the city becomes a giant concert venue, but a giant rubber ducky isn’t too poor a substitute.

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Enter the Duck

Posted on 5 Jan 2013 | 2 comments

Whatever the ghost of Rembrandt might think about the state of Dutch art in the early 21st century the arrival of Florentijn Hofman’s magnum opus in Darling Harbour today was a hit, even after the seeming endless and mostly lame concert and tumbling act that preceded it. The figures beneath the yellow banners up on the Pyrmont Bridge are taiko drummers. They were splendid.

ducky

And so the 2013 Festival of Sydney begins. No first night celebration in which the city becomes a giant concert venue, but a giant rubber ducky isn’t too poor a substitute.

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NSWPLA and NSWPHA Dinner

Posted on 1 Dec 2012 | 5 comments

I didn’t expect to attend a NSW Premier’s Literary Awards Dinner this year. For a while back there it looked as if the awards might go the way of the Queensland equivalent, but the Liberal Party-approved panel’s unpublished report must have come down in favour of continuation, because here they were again last night, six months late, run by the State Library rather than the Arts NSW, charging $200 [but see Judith Ridge’s comment] for a book to be considered, and sharing the evening with the History Awards, but alive and kicking. And pretty special for me, because I got to go as my niece’s date, my niece being Edwina Shaw, whose novel Thrill Seekers was shortlisted for the UTS Glenda Adams Award for New Writing.

The dinner was held in the magnificent reading room of the Mitchell Library. Not everyone approved of the venue – I was in the Research Library in the morning when a woman complained very loudly that she had driven the four hours from Ulladulla only to find the Mitchell’s doors were closed for the day so it could be converted into a banquet hall. She must have been placated somehow because she stopped yelling, but there were other problems. None of the shortlisted books were on sale – Gleebooks had a table at this event for years [but see Judith Ridge’s comment], as the Library has its own shop, which wasn’t about to stay open late just for us. And library acoustics aren’t designed for such carryings-on: the reverberation in the vast, high-ceilinged room made a lot of what was said at the mike unintelligible at the back of the room. But those are quibbles. It’s a great room with happy memories for a good proportion of the guests.

Aunty Norma Ingram welcomed us to country, inviting us all to become custodians of the land.

Peter Berner was the MC. He did OK, but organisers please note: the MC of an event like this needs to be literate enough to pronounce Christina Stead’s surname correctly.

The Premier didn’t show up. Perhaps he was put off by the chance of unpleasantness in response to his current attack on arts education. The awards were presented by a trio of Ministers, one of whom read out a message from the Premier saying, among other things, that art in all its forms is essential to our society’s wellbeing. But this was a night for celebrating the bits that aren’t under threat, not for rudely calling on people to put their money where their mouths are.

The Special Award, sometimes known as the kiss of death because of the fate met by many of its recipients soon after the award, went to Clive James – whose elegant acceptance speech read to us by Stephen Romei necessarily referred to his possibly imminent death. He spoke of his affection for New South Wales, of his young sense that Kogarah was the Paris of South Sydney, and his regret that he is very unlikely ever to visit here again. He also said some modest things about what he hoped he had contributed.

After a starter of oyster, scampi tail and ocean trout, the history awards:

NSW Community and Regional History Award: Deborah Beck, Set in Stone: A History of the Cellblock Theatre
The writer told us that the book started life as a Master’s thesis, and paid brief homage to the hundreds of women who were incarcerated in early colonial times in the Cellblock Theatre, now part of the National Art School.

Multimedia History Prize: Catherine Freyne and Phillip Ulman,  Tit for Tat: The Story of Sandra Willson
This was an ABC Radio National Hindsight program about a woman who killed her abusive husband and received  lot of media – and wall art – attention some decades back. Phillip Ulman stood silently beside Catherine Freyne, who urged those of us who enjoyed programs like Hindsight to write objecting to the recent cuts.

Young People’s History Prize: Stephanie Owen Reeder, Amazing Grace: An Adventure at Sea
This book won against much publicised Ahn Do on being a refugee (The Little Refugee) and much revered Nadia Wheatley on more than a hundred Indigenous childhoods (Playground). It not only tells the story of young Grace Bussell’s heroic rescue of shipwreck survivors but, according to the evening’s program, it introduces young readers to the ‘basic precepts of historical scholarship’. It also looks like fun.

General History Prize: Tim Bonyhady, Good Living Street: The Fortunes of My Viennese Family
A member my book group rhapsodised about this book recently, comparing it favourably to The Hare with Amber Eyes. It’s a family history, and in accepting the award Bonyhady told us it had been a big week for his family because the lives of his two young relatives with disabilities would be greatly improved by the National Disability Insurance Scheme introduced by the Gillard government.

Australian History Prize: Russell McGregor, Indifferent Inclusion: Aboriginal People and the Australian Nation
This looks like another one for the To Be Read pile. Russell McGregor acknowledged Henry Reynolds and Tim Rowse as mentors.

After a break for the entrée, a creation in watermelon, bocconcini and tapenade, it was on to the literary awards:

The Community Relations Commission Award: Tim Bonyhady was called to the podium again for Good Living Street, but he’d given his speech, and just thanked everyone, looking slightly stunned.

The newly named Nick Enright Prize for Drama was shared between Vanessa Bates for Porn.Cake. and Joanna Murray-Smith for The Gift. Perhaps this made up to some extent for the prize not having been given two years ago.
Joanna Murray-Smith said she learned her sense of structure from the Henry Lawson stories her father read to her at bedtime. As her father was Stephen Murray-Smith, founding editor of Overland, she thereby managed to accept the government’s money while politely distancing herself from its politics. She lamented that her play hadn’t been seen in Sydney and struck an odd note by suggesting that the Mitchell Library and a similarly impressive building in Melbourne may have been the beginning of the Sydney–Melbourne rivalry: I wonder if any Sydney writers accepting awards in Melbourne feel similarly compelled to compete. Vanessa Bates couldn’t be here, so her husband accepted her award, with his smart phone videoing everything, perhaps sending it all to her live.

The also newly named Betty Roland Prize for Scriptwriting (and I pause to applaud this conservative government for honouring an old Communist in this way): Peter Duncan, Rake (Episode 1): R v Murray
Peter Duncan gets my Speech of the Night Award. He began by telling the junior minister who gave him the award that he was disappointed not to be receiving it from Barry O’Farrell himself, because he had wanted to congratulate Barry on the way his haircut had improved since winning the election. At that point we all became aware that Peter Duncan’s haircut bears a strong resemblance to the Premier’s as it once was. He then moved on to congratulate the Premier for instituting a careful reassessment of the Literary Awards and deciding to persevere with them. He expressed his deep appreciation of this support for the arts. (No one shouted anything about TAFE art education from the floor. See note above about this being an evening to celebrate the bits that aren’t under threat.)

The Patricia Wrightson Prize for Children’s Literature: Kate Constable, Crow Country (Allen & Unwin)
I hadn’t read anything on this shortlist, I’m embarrassed to confess. It looks like a good book, a time-slip exploration of Australian history.

The Ethel Turner Prize for Young People’s Literature: Penni Russon, Only Ever Always (Allen & Unwin)
Again, I hadn’t read any of the shortlist. But Bill Condon and Ursula Dubosarsky were on it, so this must be pretty good! Penni Russon’s brief speech referred to the famous esprit de corps of Young Adult writers: ‘You guys are my people.’

There was break for the main course to be served, and for about half the audience go wander and schmooze. I had the duck, the two vegetarians on our table were served a very fancy looking construction, only a little late. Then onward ever onward.

The Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry: Gig Ryan, New and Selected Poems
Again, I hadn’t read any of the shortlisted books, but wasn’t surprised that Gig Ryan won, as this is something of a retrospective collection. She speaks rapidly and her speech was completely unintelligible from where I was  sitting (like some of her poetry). However, someone tweeted a comment that got laughs from the front of the room:
tweet

The Douglas Stewart Prize for Non-fiction: Mark McKenna, An Eye for Eternity: The Life of Manning Clark
Another lefty takes the government’s money, and a good thing too.

The UTS Glenda Adams Award for New Writing: Rohan Wilson, The Roving Party (Allen & Unwin)
I know nothing about this book. Rohan Wilson is in Japan just now. His agent told us that when she asked him for an acceptance speech ‘just in case’, he emailed back, ‘No way I’ll win – look at the calibre of the others.’ The three writers on my table who were in competition with him seemed to think it was a fine that it had won:

Favel Parrett and Edwina Shaw respond to not winning the UTS Glenda Adams Award for New Writing

Favel Parrett and Edwina Shaw respond to not winning the UTS Glenda Adams Award for New Writing

The Christina Stead Prize for Fiction was almost an anti-climax. It went to Kim Scott for That Deadman Dance. We had a small bet going on my table, and I won hundred of cents. Kim Scott’s agent accepted on his behalf.

There was dessert, layered chocolate and coffee cake, then:

The People’s Choice Award, for which voting finished the night before, went to Gail Jones for Five Bells. She was astonished, genuinely I think, and touched that her book about Sydney as an outsider should be acknowledged like this. I haven’t read the book yet, but I’m also a bit astonished, because what I have read of her prose is not an easy read.

Book of the Year: Kim Scott, That Deadman Dance. No surprise there!

No surprise, either, that the award to Clive James overshadowed all the others in the newspaper reports.

I believe that the judging panel for next years literary awards has had its first meeting. The dinner will move back to the Monday of the week of the Writers’ Festival, where it belongs.

Added later: Edwina has blogged about the evening.

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Busy busy busy

Posted on 17 Aug 2012 | Leave a comment

It’s all go chez Me Fail just now. Here’s a brief despatch from the fronts.

Shooting the movie soon to be known as the movie previously known as Scar finished yesterday. I managed to visit the location on Wednesday for a couple of hours. Contrary to all the stuff I’ve read about writers being without honour in the film industry, I found I was very welcome on set. More than one person congratulated me. This was a sweet reminder: because I’d been out of the country for a month during the pre-production period, I’d come to think of myself as Interested Party, Supportive Parent, and Believer in the Project, and effectively forgotten I was Part of It All. This in spite of the FM’s having scrupulously consulted me over proposed changes.

What I saw of the movie looks great, the wrap party is today, and I may have a chance to drop in – in spite of being roughly twice the average age of crew and cast (more than 30 of them, not counting the cow), I’m told I’ll be welcome.

Meanwhile the Art Student is up to pussy’s bow in Hungry for Art – a festival that centres on The Gallery School (as the art department of Meadowbank TAFE is known). Last night there was a pop-up art event at the Top Ryde City mall: people were invited to break out of the lockstep shopping experience to take in a huge video screening of Todd Fuller’s Summer’s End and three pieces of Will Coles‘s street-friendly sculpture (familiar to Newtown but new to Ryde), and many did. There was also a little theatre, some beatbox and an oil painting created before shoppers’ very eyes. The big events – DrawFest and Open Day at the Gallery School tomorrow and an Art Trail through the Ryde suburbs on Sunday – are yet to come. And the Art Student is in the thick of it – organising volunteers, making signs, standing guard over sculptures under threat from sugar-high young people. I’m off elsewhere for the weekend, but if you’re in the neighbourhood, drop in. There’s more, but time is short.

PS: When I went looking for links, I realised that I have a photo of one of Will Coles’s works, taken a couple of months back. The work, ‘Laissez-faire‘, had been overwritten by graffiti, to extraordinary effect. No wonder he was so calm last night when the speedy children were doing their best to damage his ‘Finite’.

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Masculinities at Penrith

Posted on 13 Aug 2012 | Leave a comment

We drove out to Emu Plains yesterday to visit the Penrith Regional Gallery – the Art Student had had a lecture on Gerald Lewers and Margo Lewers, the sculptor and painter whose bequest formed the basis of the gallery, and as our friend Steven Vella was part of a show there, we decided to make the trek (all of 53 minutes, it turned out).

Curiouser & Curiouser, which includes work by James Blackwell and Peter Williamson as well as Steven Vella, is on display in the gallery that was the Lewers’ home. These three artists may not constitute a movement, but their work sits beautifully together. They all take objects from the natural world – feathers, seeds, leaves, twigs, bird bones, inflorescences – and make art from them. Peter Williamson has raised basket weaving to a high art. James Blackwell’s delicate, fragile lattices seem completely artificial until you look closely. And Steven Vella’s headdresses and bowls suggest ritual uses, and even though some have a funereal edge, they’re extraordinarily exuberant. The catalogue describes the work collectively as ‘detailed organic assemblages of remarkable beauty’.

That would have been worth the trip. But there was more. A Lego corner for young patrons featured a substantial mural created by students from a nearby public school, a version of a photograph in the main gallery (both pics taken on my phone – but you get some idea):

 

 

 

 

 

 

The fabulous image on the right is William Booth’s photograph of Manu Vatuvei, a New Zealand Rugby League player, dressed as a traditional warrior from his native Tonga. It’s part of Body on the Line, photographs of 13 League players of Pacific Island heritage as cultural warriors. This, and Heads Up in the next room, ten huge close-ups of Penrith Panthers players and fans taken by Craig Walsh and Josh Raymond within minutes of losing a major match, bruised and gutted, gave me a new respect for the qualities of elite sportsmen.

Nowhere does the gallery try to draw a connection between the meticulous, fine-tuned contemplative aesthetic in the old house and the heroic muscularity of the main gallery, but I’d love to see the various makers and their subjects chatting over canapes at a joint opening.

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My trip to Turkey PS: Rome

Posted on 16 Jul 2012 | 1 comment

We had slightly less than 48 hours in Rome on our way home from Turkey, just long enough to catch up with our dear friend Anny, visit the Maxii gallery and catch the exhibition from the Papal archives that’s on at the Capitoline Museums.

Anny had come down from her home in Florence to have dinner with us on Friday (our plane landed at 7.30 but it was nine o’clock by the time we met her at our hotel, and one in the morning by the time we said goodnight. We met up again to stroll along Via Cola Di Rienzo on Saturday morning, she had to catch the train back north for a Nora Jones concert that night. It was, as Anny said to an Italian friend on her mobile, ‘come si dice, Memory Lane‘. It was also a chance to hear her beautiful, lilting Italian as she did the honours with waiters, bus ticket sellers, and shop assistants.

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Later in the afternoon, on our own again, we made our way to Maxii, a contemporary art museum, where there this wonderful creation loomed outside the main entrance.

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Inside, the building was intriguingly maze-like with ramps and mezzanines and bridgeways, but I was unmoved and/or mystified by most of what I saw, the main exception being an exhibition of photographs by Paola de Pietri. These were gorgeous images of landscapes along a European border, of places – according to the curatorial statement – where there had been bitter fighting in the First World War: trenches worn smooth and partly filled with snow, others like scars near the crest of a hill, bunkers that could have been the remains of ancient shepherds’ huts, stony terrain, peaceful meadows. The impact was huge.

There was a beautiful presentation about a competition for young designers to make use of an area at the front of the museum. Each set of finalists discussed their project in larger than life video, while a written account of it scrolled down the wall, and a model and drawings could be perished at leisure. An even larger video showed the massive works involved in constructing the winning project. We ventured out to experience the finished thing. There were many seats made from slotted ply and cement, made to accommodate the human form in a variety of postures indicated by tiny ideograms. Sadly, whichever posture you chose, the seats were intolerably uncomfortable. I gather it’s not the first time a design competition has been won by something totally impractical.

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This being Rome, we passed the odd antiquity and renaissance grandiosity on the way home.

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At dinner time we walked to a little trattoria around the corner by way of St Peter’s square.

Sunday morning we walked – by way of Piazzo Navona, the statue of Pasquino, Campo Dei Fiori with its looming statue of Giordano Bruno who was burned there, and a caffe where no one could tell us how to get to the Musei Capitolini (‘Non lo so! Sono di San Giovanni, io) – to the Vatican archives exhibition.

Bernadette Soubirous wrote to one pope in a tiny neat handwriting, wishing him a holy life. Voltaire wrote to another congratulating him on his excellent Latin. A couple of popes wrote decrees establishing themselves as the supreme power on earth. A community of Native American Catholics wrote to the pope of their time. A Moroccan ruler wrote asking the pope to appoint a decent man to replace a recently deceased archbishop. More than one decree was issued ending the schism between the Roman Church and the Greek Orthodox Church. All of these documents were filed away in the Vatican archives, and all are among the hundreds of items on display.

There is a huge scroll, of which about four meters are exposed, containing the evidence taken against the Knights Templar. There’s a sizeable piece of paper beseeching the pope of the time to allow Henry VIII’s marriage to his first wife to be annulled, and hanging from the paper on leather thongs are the seals of the members of the House of Lords, at least fifty of them and every one elaborate. Photography was forbidden and there were no postcards. I gnash my teeth.

We had a quick look down on the forum below the Capitoline hill, a quick pasta lunch, a quick moment of respite from the heat at our hotel, then we were off to the airport. I’m typing this on the plane from Frankfurt to Singapore. The holiday is all but over.

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Tourist fashion in Istanbul

Posted on 14 Jul 2012 | 6 comments

One last post on Turkey. My companion, known here as the Art Student, was fascinated, even obsessed with the many women tourists in Istanbul who were dressed in black from head to toe, faces veiled and even sometimes hands concealed by black gloves. She was indignant that their male companions were very often wearing shorts. Far too hot for a man to wear long pants, they seemed to say, while the women simply sweltered. Paradoxically, many of these women carried cameras. We did see some lowering the veils to below their chins so as to be photographed, but mainly they took snaps and remained themselves unsnappable. Traditional Turkish attire for women involving garments resembling trench coats of varying lengths and colours, didn’t look much cooler, but at least the women showed their faces in public,

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