#8WordStory

Those on the Queensland feeds might have come across #8WordStory, a project organised by the awesome folk at the Queensland Writers Centre to put eight word stories on billboards across Brisbane.

It was October when the call first went out and I was swooning, as I do every year, over the purple bliss of Brisbane’s jacarandas.

So I penned a paean to purple & lo! it was selected to be shown across town. I did not get a lot of work done that day because I was glued to the webcams, thus:

The #8WordStory project is on for another fortnight or so. Head to the QWC website and submit, & you might see your name up in orange lights! Trust me, it’s pretty darn exciting. And here's another jacaranda pic for the heck of it.

Incubating Writers

Nearly four years ago, I answered a call out from writer Michelle Vlatkovic, via the Queensland Writers Centre, for members to form a writers group. I’d been in Brisbane for a few years but was finding it hard to meet other writers. I walked into Avid Reader to find Michelle waiting for me at a table, a copy of the story I’d sent on the table before her. As we chatted over coffee, I found that Michelle hadn’t followed the now-standard approach of going to uni to study creative writing, but had immersed herself in community radio and not-for-profit organisations. Her writing was striking in its unconventionality - abstract but full of heart at the same time.

Since that meeting the group has grown and shrunk as people come and go but we still have four core members – Michelle, myself, Pamela Greet and Rose Anderson. Pam has just finished a PhD in creative writing at the University of the Sunshine Coast and has a wry, quiet but incisive way of writing, and Rose’s tiny fiction is off-the-wall and marvelous.

The group has grown us as writers. One of the first stories Michelle and I workshopped made its way into Griffith Review. With feedback from others (including, at one point, artist and writer Julie Kearney) my story Old Honey was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers Short Story Prize and published in adda. Michelle’s work has been published in the Review of Australian Fiction, Southerly and Gargouille. Rose’s work has been read on Quart Short  and published in a fine line, The School Magazine and 4th Floor Journal.

We haven’t met much in the last year because I fell off my horse with full-time academia and Michelle and Pam have started an exciting new venture, Salon REaD.

In response to difficulty of finding publication in literary journals, which usually only have a select readership and are highly competitive, Salon REaD showcases the work of artists and writers in the Brisbane community. It’s about growing audiences and gaining exposure at a grassroots level. Michelle and Pam have hosted a couple of salons over the past year and it’s working: the audiences are expanding, artists are selling their work and writers are finding their feet. Poet Nic Addenbrooke for example, who read at the last salon, is part of this year’s Queensland Poetry Festival.

This Saturday I’ll be reading at Salon REaD5 with Pam and Stefan Jatschka. Artist Manu, whose chalk art is at the Burrow in West End, will exhibit his work. Music will be performed by Nigel Kimber Llewellyn of the Dustbin Hoffmans.

Art by Manu.

The salon will be held at 59 Ekibin Road Annerley, and entry is by a gold coin donation to community radio station 4ZZZ. Performances and readings at the salon will also be recorded for broadcast on 4ZZZ. Hope to see you there!

Sad Day, Small City

On the morning of 11th September, I got off the bus at the Mater Hospital and walked to work. Never a morning person, I was thinking of the coffees I would get for my boss and I and how good they would be, and worrying if I would get to the café in time, as it takes me forever to get out the door and onto the bus, and I was running a bit late again. As I approached the intersection of Annerley Road and Stanley Street, however, I realised something wasn’t quite right. The traffic was held up, and there was a long, curving smear on the tarmac. There was also a pair of white sandshoes, a set of A4 papers and an apple, not crushed, but driven into the road.  A little distance away, near the kerb, was a bicycle, untouched. 

I stared, transfixed, hoping that what I was looking at was the result of produce falling from a truck. However, that didn’t account for the sandshoes or the papers. It wasn’t until the policewoman in her yellow fluoro vest asked the people now collecting at the pedestrian crossing if they absolutely had to cross the road. ‘If you don’t want to see something that you can’t unsee, then I wouldn’t recommend going down there.’ It was only then that I realised there had been an awful accident, and that the smear belonged to a human being. 

I and another fellow backtracked and went past the accident on the other side of the road, and I didn’t look. Later that day, the news said a young female cyclist had been hit by a semi-trailer and killed. Her name was Rebekka Tine Lousdal Meyer. She was a Danish student at the University of Queensland and she was 22 years old. That apple, grazed until half of it was gone, showed how hard she had been hit.

Cycling organisations and forums have said for 15 years that this was a bad spot (1999 - http://www.ericmanners.net/blackspots.pdf; 2008 -http://helenabrahams.com/media99.html; 2012 - http://www.cbdbug.org.au/…/2012/CBD-BUG-minutes-20120530.pdf). They have agitated for a Copenhagen style bike lane, but the Brisbane city council didn’t do anything about it.

A minimum passing distance of 1-1.5 metres (depending on the traffic speed) from a bicycle was legislated by the Queensland Government on 7th April 2014, but we need bike lanes, not just more laws. I speak as someone who frequently has to ride on the footpath because it’s not safe enough on Brisbane’s roads.

At the end of that day, a friend told me a friend of hers was a co-worker whose daughter was a paramedic on the scene. ‘Sad day, small city,’ she said. When something bad happens in Brisbane, many people feel it, and on 15th October, Brisbane’s cycling community came together to pay their respects. 

Perhaps that should be qualified. Many people, but not the Brisbane City Council. Someone’s daughter won’t be coming home for Christmas because the Council had 15 years to act on this black spot, and they haven’t. If even the death of a young girl doesn’t move them, what will? 

Please take care on the roads and look out for cyclists, and not just at Christmas, but always.

The Attrition of Heat

In London, the worst months of the year were January and February.  The excitement and bright lights of Christmas and New Year were over, it was bitterly cold and it was grey.  If the sun made an appearance, it was only for a few brief, shocking hours, and I was usually indoors, working at the library or studying at my desk.  There was nothing to look forward to but the long drag into spring, which happened so slowly it seemed as if the days would never become light again.  I would check the sunrise and sunset times obsessively, calculating how long it would be before I walked into the courtyard of UCL after work and found it gleaming in a weak dusk. Strangely, it seems that the worst days of this year in Brisbane have been in the same months, again because of the weather.  At first the heat was a novelty: it necessitated the purchase of light, silky frocks because my wardrobe was still geared towards winter, the balmy evenings were gorgeous, and Christmas was back to normal, with the opening of presents with the windows down and cicadas droning, the crispy meringue of pavlovas, and fresh grapes and stone fruit.

But now I find the heat so consistently overbearing that I can neither sleep nor eat.  It’s too warm to think, which means I am imprisoned in an air conditioned room for half the day while I write, and I hate not having natural airflow.  I am irritable, losing weight, and am attacked by a plethora of mosquitoes that live beneath the house and come into my room for dinner.

It seems the only thing to do, when the day finally cools, is to escape the claustrophobia of my room and get on my bicycle.  I ride to the river, where I sit on a bench beneath a flowering wisteria vine, eat an orange and watch the sun go down.

On Carolling

Sometimes I just have to admit that there are some things the English do better. The first Christmas I had in London, I wandered down to Trafalgar Square after work. It was dark and cold. I was homesick and miserable. But there, in the square below the steps, were a group of carollers singing so beautifully I started to cry.

Not long after, H and I stayed with friends in Dorset for Christmas. There was a little church at the back of their house, and as it started to snow (I was beside myself; snow at Christmas!) we pulled on gumboots and plugged our way through the mud to the church. Although I’m not remotely religious, the Anglican service has been drummed into me from chapel every Thursday at school, and I sometimes went with my grandparents to church on Christmas Day to make them happy, and I liked the ritual of it. So when we began to sing the carols a wave of nostalgia slammed into me: I remembered the heat, and the muted colours and dryness of the bush, and I missed my family terribly.

However, it was cosy in the small, brightly lit church. There were gravestones and snow outside. I was among a close-knit community and afterwards in the church hall we had dry mince pies and awful mulled wine, which was positively exotic. Later the next day, shivering with cold, we went in the ute to the paddocks and clipped mistletoe and red berries from the trees. It had been a warm winter, and the birds had eaten most of the berries so they were hard to find. Our friend’s father said the ground never got properly cold anymore, which seemed true: the following year I was shocked to find the trees at the Barbican blossoming pinkly in November.

This year I went along (fully of my own volition, because I like to do new things) to Brisbane’s Carols in the City with Sister et al. Sister is a bit obsessed with Christmas and carols, and had enough excitement to compensate for those who were less enthused. After finishing my Christmas shopping, I found them in the sea of humanity sitting on the dried-out lawn in the Botanical Gardens. ‘Can you stand up?’ I called her on my mobile. ‘It’s a bunfight in here.’

There was a lot of waiting. I got bored. A young lesbian couple in front of us painted each other’s toenails. The woman in front of me asked if her husband was blocking my view and winked at me. I said I was fine; there was no way I was going to get involved in marital discord.

An MC finally appeared on stage amidst purple neon lights. There were wailing songs, then a Baptist rap about Jesus. It started to rain. The children wriggled. A group of seven women dressed in wedding gowns came on and sang their bit. I was startled. Sister bemoaned the lack of carols. A group of immature boys, barely out of adolescence, took photos of the lesbians, thinking it wonderfully funny. I was unimpressed. Niece started to whinge. I remembered when Parental Unit had dragged us to a late night show at the Brisbane Expo some twenty years before. I was cold, bored and couldn’t hear the words, and I whinged too.

Finally, to avoid the crowds that would heave out, we left early. Sister said, ‘There just weren’t enough carols. Why did they have to have all those new songs?’ This, I agreed, blinking back exhaustion as we walked over the footbridge across the river, was not how it should be done.

However, in other Christmas-related activities, I attended Sister’s work Christmas party last night, held in a carpark. I drank too much champagne, resisted the urge to dance (dancing on tables was not Christmas party etiquette, F. reminded us at the start of the evening), and received a surprising award for ‘Most Supportive Other’ or, as a colleague put it, ‘Most Supportive Non-Functioning Other’ which amused Sister and I no end. Then I got fed up with trying to talk and listen to people I didn’t know well (a struggle once I’d had three glasses on champagne on an empty stomach). Heavily intoxicated, I got on my bicycle and cycled home at top speed, which was probably not a very clever thing to do, but it was exhilerating to cycle fast on a balmy night with one's silk dress billowing behind.

This morning I woke feeling very sorry for myself, staggered about for a bit, drank two coffees, put Madge on my Ipod and sat down to clean and oil my bike, which proved most therapeutic.

In which H returns to Oz (for a bit).

Once again the last few weeks have been too crammed to write, what with thesis corrections to finish and H coming back from the UK for a month (and kindly bringing a bagful of my stuff home, seeing as I leave remnants wherever I stay) and a convoy of Whites to join for Cousin V’s wedding in Bundaberg. As Cousin A had come up for the wedding and was staying a few days, we decided to make a night of it and go out on the town in Bris Vegas.  I had a lovely outfit from Review, purchased early this year but as yet unworn, and therefore needed an occasion in which to make it worn.  We glammed up and tottered (well, I did) to Cloudland, where SP joined us and then (being a Valley local), he took us to another two bars, and I, being very partial to cocktails, perused the drinks menu like a novel and licked salt and sugar off the rims of my cocktail glasses.

When under the influence of alcohol, I find it difficult to lipread, as it takes quite a lot of concentration and alcohol does tend to jeopardize one’s neural pathways.  So, being unable to converse, I have the option of sitting in a corner and rocking like a vegetable, which is a little boring, or hopping up and having a little dance.  Being a spirited girl, I invariably choose the latter, particularly as Cousin A was doing his groove thang too.  There wasn’t a dance floor as such, only a little area on the way to the loos, but we still got applause from some young ladies nearby.

Come 11pm, Sister needed to get home as she had to get the sprogs up early for school, and then we had to drive to Bundy, so she ushered us out.  I danced down the aisle between the bar and the tables and gave a random man a wink, then got caught up with the jazz music and started dancing with the band.  Sister gave me a minute’s worth, until it looked like the saxophonist and I were about to duet, and bundled me out.  I was perfectly happy, and kept on dancing on the pavement while the others found a taxi and Sister, also being under the influence of alcohol and similarly uninhibited, cast aspersions on a taxi driver in a turban which I shall not repeat here.  Suffice to say the Whites cast formality to the winds when they’ve had a few.

After that we met up with a few more members of the family – Cousin C and his wife and Parental Unit, and drove in a van to Bundy.  More of this in another blog.

After Bundy, H and I caught the overnight bus to Parental Unit’s, which was so disruptive I’ve vowed only to take it during the day in future.  It’s not that bad, as I can always pass the time by reading and I like the scenery; it just unfortunately takes 8 hours.

En route to the bus depot we got stuck in a traffic jam, and H decided we should get out of the car and run.  Niece stuck her head out the window and laughed as we trailled the car, which just at that moment freed itself from the tangle.  We caught up and got back in while the car behind hooted, and Sister thought better of sticking her finger up at the driver (as she has been known to do) in case he rammed her.

Finally we got on the bus with other sweaty passengers and H told me the bus driver said we would be watching a 3-and-a-half-hour documentary.

‘What on?’ I asked.  ‘Whale watching?’

‘It’s on the life of a Greyhound driver.’

The penny dropped.  ‘Oh,’ I said, ‘he’s joking.’

‘That he is,’ H smirked.

As we set off I asked H to call the taxi company to see if they’d still be open at 3am, which they were, and then to call mum to say she needn’t get out of bed to pick us up.

On arriving in town, H called the taxi company.  It took a while for them to answer the phone.

‘Hello,’ he said politely when a woman picked up.  ‘I’m just after a taxi.’

‘Why, has something happened?’

‘No, I was told to ring this number when we got into town to get a taxi.’

‘Well I guess I’d better come and get you then.’

It was then that H figured out he was talking to his own mother – he had dialled the previous number in his phone.  Dad subsequently arrived with the car, still wearing his flouro orange earplugs and, thank God, he had put some trousers on.

Poor Parental Unit.  It was funny, but also very wrong.

While at home, I wrote an essay for the Calibre Prize and more of my novel and swam and read and wished for a dog to talk for walks.  The sky brooded over the thought of rain and eventually decided to come up with the goods, breaking the heat with a storm.  H trundled around banging and hammering at some product he’d designed.  We had barely any fights with Parental Unit and watched some excellent DVDs – the original Stepford Wives (which was sinister), Capote (after which H told me not to write a bestseller until I was 80 otherwise I’d be crippled by fame), Bangkok Hilton (Nicole Kidman’s first film, and she was very good) and a wonderful indie flick called Eagle and Shark which was about New Zealand bogans.

And now H has gone back to gloomie olde England and I am very sad.

On Finding One's Feet

The last three months, while nothing compared to the two years it took to feel even moderately happy in London, have been choppy. Within a fortnight of getting to Bris Vegas I found a part-time job as a research assistant for a not-for-profit organisation, which is enough to keep my head above water while I write. As I expected it’s been difficult to manage the disparity between my taste for luxury and the reality of being a povo writer but, as I keep telling myself, it’s only temporary. It was also a shock to come back and find my friends firmly ensconced in bourgeois coupledom. After all, there is a reason why people go to London, and it’s not to settle down and have sprogs. However, I am adjusting, even to the chaos of my sister’s house with Niece and Nephew and Dog and Puppy. I even confess to being very fond of latter (though he has been banned from my room in case he eats my shoes) because he is fluffy and fun to annoy. I don’t, however, appreciate his enthusiasm for humping soft toys.

My stuff arrived from England last week and now my room is full of girly pink crap again. It is a little cramped but it has finally dispelled the nightmarish feeling that I will have to pack up and head back to London at any moment. Better still, my beloved Pashley Princess bicycle also arrived, so now I can ride along the river and ping my bell at the tourists.

I’ve joined the local library and am catching up on the Australian literature I haven’t had time to read for the last four years. I read Gail Jones’ Dreams of Speaking on the plane on the way home, which, having left H behind, was poignant with its descriptions of brothers and sisters. I consumed Mister Pip by Lloyd Jones which was an intricate and clever book, gentle in tone until the end, which came as an unpleasant shock. I will never get used to the brutality of which men are capable.

I skim read Kate Grenville’s The Lieutenant which was very disappointing. Andrew Rimmer referred to the ‘restraint’ of her style in his review in the Sydney Morning Herald, but I think the term ‘blandness’ more accurate. While the work had some wonderful lines, such as ‘[the governor] favoured him with one of his squeezed smiles’ (p. 99), the concepts were unoriginal and it would have been richer as a short story. I expected more of Grenville; it certainly lacked the pungency of her earlier novels, although not The Secret River which I found similarly underwhelming.

I also read Karen Foxlee’s The Anatomy of Wings which was a wonderful surprise. It pipped me in the Dobbie prize for new women writers, so I was prepared to hold it at arm’s length as I read it. However, I found myself caught up with the story of a girl in a country town who wants to sleep with men because she thinks she can save them, which leads to the perception that she’s growing out of control. Needless to say a boy sleeping with as many girls as possible wouldn’t be labelled a slut. The double standard is nicely illustrated when she is expelled from school for an unclarified sexual act on school grounds and she says, “What I don’t understand … is why the boys didn’t get expelled for as long?” (p. 175).

Aside from reading, I have also been writing madly and am now two-thirds of the way through the first draft of my second novel. Unfortunately I now have to return to my thesis to attack it for the last time and then get it ready for publication, after which time I can return to the novel.

I also presented on my research at the Association for the Study of Australian Literature conference in Canberra, a painful affair because it reinforced my ambivalence about becoming an academic despite having forked out thousands of pounds and however much mental grief for a mere two letters before my name. Fortunately however, my beloved supervisor was over from England and he told me not to worry about it just yet, but to concentrate on writing. Amanda Lohrey also gave an excellent address on her novel Vertigo and I thoroughly enjoyed her intellect and biting humour. I subsequently read the book and was impressed by her skill in packing so much into a deft, compact novel, not least the drama and danger of bushfire.

Away from the conference, I caught up with some very good friends, and even sampled some excellent coffee, which was unexpected as I was of the opinion that Canberra had a good art gallery, museum and library and that was it. Coffee notwithstanding, I was pleased to get back to Bris Vegas, and to leave the surreality of Canberra behind.

On Megafauna

Having just been stung by some unidentifiable insect that crawled down my t-shirt, I have realised that no account of life in Australia would be complete without reference to the crawlies that populate our land.  However, as everything in Queensland is bigger, the nasties here approach the size of megafauna.

Taking my niece and nephew for a walk one afternoon, we passed a grasshopper sitting on a fence.  Most grasshoppers I have encountered are about 3 cm long.  This one was 10cm long. 

'Wow, look at that,' Nephew said.  'Can you make it jump?'

'No,' I said firmly.  'We're not going to touch it.'

We walked on.  A few houses down, he spied an enormous web stretched between a fence and a tree.  In the middle of it was a spider, twice the size of my hand.

'Wow, look at that Auntie Jess.'

'That,' I replied, 'is disgusting.'

 Nephew is always transfixed on seeing these creatures and so, coming back from the corner store with the dog one morning while he was at daycare, I saw a stag beetle (6cm long) in the middle of the footpath.  After I had ascertained that it was dead, I gingerly picked it up in the dog's (unused) droppings bag and conveyed it home, then shook it out onto the kitchen bench without touching it.  It lost a leg, but Nephew was still so pleased that he took it to day care for show-and-tell the next day.   

Aside from grasshoppers, spiders and beetles, I have also seen enormous cockroaches that fly around the kitchen while I cringe and cover my head, and last night Nephew emerged from the bathroom proudly holding the biggest mosquito I have ever seen (3cm long), which his mother had killed. 

'That's revolting,' I told him. 

Much nicer are the white Indonesian geckos that skitter across the ceiling in the evenings.  Nephew found a tiny baby gecko climbing the wall the other day and pulled off its tail in his enthusiasm to catch it.  Having shown it to all interested parties, he put it back on the wall, and poked it to make it move.

'You've frightened it,' I explained.  'It's in shock, and you need to leave it alone if you want it to move.' 

He didn't, and it died.  

Otherwise my life of relaxation and procrastination continues apace.  I swim, run, cook, read, attempt to write, and stagger out of bed at some Godforsaken hour to walk my niece to school in the mornings.  I don't miss London much, although I do miss my brother, and my Pashley Princess, and the drama of snow.

On How Not to Tan

You know you've turned into a Pom when you fail completely and utterly at your attempts to render yourself a sophisticated, svelte golden young woman, instead burning yourself horribly in strips so that you become, initially, like a piece of red-and-white striped candy cane and then, when you brown and flake, like a cicada crawling out of its skin.  Yeah, it's bewdiful.

Or perhaps I was always a Pom in terms of sun-sense.  Last year in Thailand, having spent two weeks rigorously applying sunscreen, I was just as white near the end of the holiday as I was when I stepped off the plane, so at Railay I decided to dispense with sunscreen and sit on the beach for an hour.  Bad move.  By that afternoon I was burning up and had to go to bed draped in wet towels, and by the time I got back to London I was, once again, shedding my epidermis.  A few years before that I sat on the beach in Oz at midday for two hours, also sunscreenless, read Harry Potter, and got so burnt I couldn't sit down.  You'd think one would learn, wouldn't you?

This time I have.  The ignominy of being a peeling piebald, together with the horrifying melanoma ads currently on TV, have ensured that I will 'embrace the whiteness' as my sister suggests.  My only consolation is that Brother H has been pretty much as useless as I.  This year he also baked himself, but instead of having strips created by the failure to apply a second layer of sunscreen, he missed an egg-shaped section between his pecs.  He also roasted himself in Thailand: I have photographic evidence of him standing in the sea kitted out in snorkling gear, as red as a brick.  I'm keeping it for his future husband.

So, aside from undertaking radical dermabrasion, I have removed myself to my sister's in Brisbane.  It is very hot, to the point of being debilitating so that I am required to take post-lunch naps to remain sentient, but I am the happiest I've been in a long time because I can write. 

My sister's kids are also a constant source of entertainment, not least because they can be teased, confused, and thrown about a room.  My niece begins school next week but already has her aunt's perspicacity (and good taste, having appropriated auntie's Prada sunglasses), for she asked me at dinner last night, 'Auntie Jess, why do you need another pair of shoes when you already have so many?'

I was briefly flummoxed, then replied, 'Well, a girl can never have too many pretty things, and besides, the shoes under my bed are only a small selection of the shoes I own.'

Her brother, meanwhile, is a charming little fellow, and shares his mother's delight in watching me stagger out of the bedroom in the mornings and struggle to raise my consciousness to a functioning level.

'Mummy, Auntie Jess is AWAKE!' he broadcasts to the world.  I grimace and make myself a cup of tea while he prattles on, and it's at times like these that I'm truly glad I'm deaf.