Meanwhile, back at the ranch,

there's some new stuff over at Australian Literature Diary. Yes yes, I know Beautiful Kate is actually an Australian film adapted from an American novel, but screenplays definitely count.

Teacher's Pet

Marking can be a terrible chore, so it's always nice to have an assistant.

Worry and the alleviation of worry

You just keep looking for your glasses until you find them.

You finish the novel, and then you finish the next one.

You go to the chemist and get Strepsils and Betadine throat gargle and tickly cough medicine and two kinds of analgesics, and take/use them all one after the other.

And you ring up the little man with the chainsaw and he comes and cuts down most of the overgrown bottle-brush one of whose main branches is split from the fork and rapidly splitting further and further down the trunk as the foliage is tossed about in the wild weather, with half the tree about to come crashing down any minute on the shed and the other half on the precious fancy-pants irises, the fence, and three or four of the bloke next door's chooks.

After a consultation during which we prowl around muttering, looking at the tree from various angles, the little man with the chainsaw cuts off everything but the main trunk, which supports the branch where the orb weaver lives. In August. I ask you. Surely it can't be the same spider, though it is certainly living in the same tree.




This is what these spiders look like when holed up in the daytime, their legs all swooshed forwards to protect their heads, a bit like the crash position on those aircraft safety cards, or maybe they're just pretending to look like a chunk of tree. Are they related to squid, does anybody know?

All above is azure bright, usually*

Recent events have inspired me to have another go at reviving my dedicated Aust Lit blog, Australian Literature Diary, which has been lying dormant (or, as my mum would have said, lying doggo) since I began this one in September last year. There is a place for such a blog, and a potential readership for it, and many uses for it. So I've prettied it up a bit and cross-posted all the posts from here that belong there as well, and have several posts in mind for it over the next few days.

*I do believe that in some states the Song of Australia isn't very well known, but most South Australians would have preferred it as a national anthem to Advance Australia Fair. At coffee this morning we were trying to remember when Australia's national anthem moved on from God Save the Queen; I thought under Hawke, but D said Fraser, while M, who wasn't born till 1987, just looked bemused. I had a vague memory that what everyone really wanted was Waltzing Matilda but couldn't remember why, if that was the case, it didn't get up. I seem to remember someone pointing out that it was a song about a sheep-stealing suicide and an incompetent police force and as such a tad inappropriate for a national anthem, but I may be making that up. Does anybody know?

Who dares meddle with me?

Driving home this afternoon I saw in front of me a modest-sized white 4x4 with the classiest back-windscreen motto I've ever seen: Nemo me impune lacessit. It rang a faint and distant bell but I couldn't place it, and I've never studied Latin, so I sat there in the traffic trying to nut it out. Nemo means nobody, of course, and me is obvious, and it's a fair old bet that impune has something to do with punishment or the lack of punishment, but lacessit had me stumped. What could it all mean? 'Can't blame me for trying'? 'No jury would ever convict me'?

Five minutes later I pull into the driveway, leap out of the car, run into the house and google it before I forget it. Hooray for Wikipedia:

Nemo me impune lacessit is the Latin motto of the Order of the Thistle and of three Scottish regiments of the British Army. The motto also appears, in conjunction with the collar of the Order of the Thistle, in later versions of the Royal coat of arms of the Kingdom of Scotland and subsequently in the version of the Royal coat of arms of the United Kingdom used in Scotland. It is often translated as No one attacks me with impunity, or rendered in Scots as Wha daur meddle wi' me? ("Cha togar m'feargh gun dioladh" in Scottish Gaelic.)

Duh. Given that I'd just spent the afternoon with my father, you'd think Wha daur meddle wi' me would have been the very first thing I'd thought of.

It occurs to me later that it's really just the high-class version of that image you often see on the back of the car in front of you: Yosemite Sam twirling his six-guns and snarling 'Back off.' I love Loony Tunes, but I think I like the Latin even better.

Maybe it's made out of real tigers

So last night I finally found the Tiger Balm (which was not in the drawer dedicated to Protesting Crumbling Aching Bones, Joints and Muscles, so so much for a place for everything etc, which is clearly not working), and rubbed a bit into my badly stiffened and aching neck, which was suffering from the deadline overload and which has never been the same since I rolled the car.* I have no idea whether it really works or not, but am soothed and comforted and distracted by the smell.

And clearly I am not alone in this, because the next thing I knew, Madam the Bad Cat** was perched on the back of my computer chair snuffling and woofling, digging her very long sharp claws*** into my shoulder and licking my neck and hair in a frenzy. I know she has Issues already and I'm a bit worried about where this new one might be heading. Glucosamine addiction? Wrist brace fetish? Neck pillow monopolisation?****


* Never mind.

** As distinct from the sweet-hearted Poppet, who would be too shy to do such a thing.

*** The instructions that came with the claw-clippers begin 'Start with a relaxed cat', which is why I've never used them.

**** Back in the early 1990s when I was living in Melbourne and Stephanie, then my Melb U colleague, was pregnant with Joel, I was in a pharmacy one day and saw something I'd never seen before, a special Pregnancy Pillow for the lady who likes to rest or sleep lying on her side, the pillow contoured to support the baby, so of course I snaffled it and gave it to her. A week or so later a photo appeared in my workplace pigeonhole, of S's little cat Jemima sprawled lioness-wise on the pillow. On the back there was a message: 'Dear Kerryn, thank you for the special pillow. It is very comfortable.'

If you must leave, make sure you leave in the middle of a sentence

Here's a trick I learned many years ago when writing my PhD thesis: don't leave off work on a piece of writing without knowing exactly where it's going. If you're writing in sections, don't stop at the end of one; make the transition, work through the segue, write the first sentence of the next bit, or better still half of the first sentence of the next bit, and jot down a few notes or keywords to remind you where it's going next. Then you can leap up with impunity to escape out into the garden, kill a few caterpillars, pull up a few soursobs, get a little sun on your face.

Otherwise you'll just sit there staring at it for twenty minutes after you sit back down to it, as I've just been forcibly reminded. Given how long ago I learned this lesson, I can't believe that I could have forgotten it even just the once.

Even now, just occasionally, I hear my mother's voice

"If you write a thousand words today, you'll feel a thousand words less desperate and put-upon tomorrow."

Never mind the guitar, look at the guitarist (1915-2009)

I don't know why that oblivious little dog in the background is so touching. Seen it all before, obvs.

Reading the paper: depressing in every possible way

On page 5 of yesterday's Adelaide Advertiser:

A woman who stabbed her partner to death with 'excessive' force has been spared jail because of the years of domestic violence, abuse and torment she suffered at his hands.

And, on page 10:

The girlfriend of Melbourne Storm superstar Greg Inglis is standing by her man as he prepares to face court today on charges he allegedly assaulted her.

Sydney, and other stuff

Wow, a two-week hiatus. I don't think I've not-blogged for that long since I started in October 2005. For some reason this time of year, anything between August and November, always seems busier than usual. Spent a week and a half attending all-day Arts SA meetings and doing my real job at night before leaving for three days in Sydney last week for the launch of the Macquarie PEN Anthology of Australian Literature (UPDATE: Angela from Literary Minded, who I see shares my taste in images and the placement of images, went to the Melbourne launch a few days later), thus:

Thursday, June 30, 11 am: sample Adelaide Airport long-term car park. Discover walk from farthest reaches of car park to shuttle bus slightly longer than bus ride to Virgin terminal and daily rates add up to exactly two taxi fares between my place and the airport. Write experience off to experience.

1.30 pm: hear slightly panicked air crew member come on, somewhere over the Hay Plains, and ask if there is a medical practitioner on board and would the rest of us please stay in our seats. It's times like this I'm glad I'm not a doctor, and that Virgin Blue offers only Mr, Mrs and Ms as choice of honorific when booking one's flight, the old days of being asked 'Miss or Mrs?' and enjoying replying 'Dr' being mostly gone and a good thing too; 20 years ago, having habitually done this with Qantas and the dead-and-gone Ansett, I used to worry occasionally that I'd be called upon to perform an emergency tracheotomy with a biro and a coathanger at 30,000 feet and have to explain that I couldn't, but if they needed an impromptu history of the Australian short story or an emergency fisking of a Clive James poem then I was indeed their woman.

2.30 pm: arrive Sydney, where the sky is a flawless blue, literally and metaphorically. Whenever the cab pulls out of that airport drive and into the sunshine made lacy through the subtropical vegetation, I can actually physically feel my heart lift. Never having managed to get a job in Sydney (applied for three, shortlisted for all of them, didn't get any of them, message in there somewhere) is the single biggest regret of my life, which is saying a great deal.

5 pm: arrive Admiralty House for the launch of the anthology by the Governor-General. Mill around on footpath in growing crowd that, by the time the uniformed dudes on the gate start ticking off our names and letting us in, includes David Malouf, Drusilla Modjeska, Peter Rose, and about twenty people I used to teach, research and/or go to conferences with, including former longtime Melbourne U colleague Prof Chris Wallace-Crabbe and the lovely Prof David Carter from U of Q, formerly a Melbourne boy, whom I haven't seen for many years.

5.30 pm: have surreptitious look around and confirm that I have dressed appropriately for the occasion. Just as well.

6 pm approx: listen to the Governor-General make her nicely personal and informal speech. Listen to David Malouf read his lovely poem Seven Last Words of the Emperor Hadrian, in which the body addresses the departing soul at the moment of death, and which begins with the Emperor Hadrian's own actual words, which are, naturally, in Latin.

Wonder how long it's been since the sound of Latin poetry being read has been heard in Admiralty House or indeed anywhere else in Australia.

Wonder what degree of mischievousness informed David's decision to choose for this occasion a poem about death.

Am flooded by a sudden awareness of the history of this spot, and wonder about past ceremonies here and their participants' private thoughts as the sun set outside with ludicrous magnificence, then as now.

Reflect that the last time Australian literature got this much attention at this level of politics must have been the 1957 occasion, of which there is a photograph in the David Marr biography (an except from which is also included in the anthology), on which Patrick White was presented with the inaugural Miles Franklin Literary Award by the then Prime Minister Sir Robert Menzies, with the Leader of the Opposition in attendance and looking on.

Wonder if current PM has been presented with a complimentary copy. Think must remember to suggest it. (Discover later that he apparently got the No. 1 copy of the signed and numbered Collectors' Edition. Hope he dips into it from time to time. Have my own collectors' copy, courtesy of Allen & Unwin, which I hardly dare take out of its box.)

7 pm approx: Mill about some more, as various sweet and discreet boys weave through the crowd bearing crystal jugs full of liquid rubies that turn out to be iced white rum with cranberry juice. Watch William Yang, whose writing is featured in the anthology, taking photos (the pic in that link will give you a good idea of what the gathering was like). Reflect that what I should really do is get out my iPhone and take a photo of William Yang taking photos. Many photos being taken, as you can see in this nice (though not by William Yang: see below) shot of SMH literary editor Susan Wyndham and me.

Photograph by Sam Begg

Note the way our drinks are colour co-ordinated with my necklace and Susan's shawl.

Friday, July 31, 9.30 am: arrive at ABC studios in Sydney, half an hour early because (a) nervous and (b) have forgotten that in Sydney if you want a cab you simply step out into the street and hold your hand up, and one will pull over. Do 40-minute live-to-air segment on anthology for Radio National Book Show, being interviewed by Ramona Koval with fellow editor Nicole Moore and Sydney U Professor of Australian Lit Robert Dixon. This goes much better than I was expecting it to.

Friday 4.30 pm: meet up in Gleebooks with the lovely Viv aka Tigtog from Hoyden About Town, whom I have not previously actually met, and add her to my ever-growing collection of bloggers I've met in person. Decide we will go next door to soi-disant 'Chocolateria' (and so it proves to be, with a vengeance) and have a hot chocolate: thick hot chocky with chili and cinnamon, oh my goodness.

We have barely sat down when in come a couple of literary types I know, closely followed by two young women whom Viv knows and introduces to me as Wildly Parenthetical and Zero at the Bone. I thought this sort of thing only happened in Adelaide but clearly not.

Friday 6.30 pm: second and more informal, though still very structured, launch of anthology upstairs at Gleebooks. This includes wonderful readings by featured authors, and as Michael Gow reads a speech from Away and Michelle de Kretser a passage from The Hamilton Case, I remember very clearly why I chose those passages to put into the book.

Friday 8.30 pm: arrive at a most lovely restaurant in Rose Bay with my dear friend L who has come up to attend the one-day symposium the following day that has been arranged around the anthology launch. We have a quiet mates' catchup while we savour our duck and spinach, and look out at the festively-lit ferries crossing the harbour and the white birds swooping through the pools of light outside.

Saturday, August 1, 10 am: start of all-day symposium at the beautiful State Library of NSW, where I look around and regret for the millionth time my ongoing failure to score a job in Sydney. The symposium is programmed around the anthology and titled 'Australian Literary Futures'. My session is the one after morning tea, where the editorial team lines up on one side and, on the other, the country's two Professors of Australian literature, Robert Dixon and Philip Mead, plus co-editor of Southerly and immediate past president of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature, Elizabeth McMahon. They ask us questions and we do our best to answer them. This session also goes much better than I was expecting it to, and everybody on the panel and in the audience seems to enjoy it.

Saturday 2 pm: Professor Ivor Indyk of UWS, holder of the Whitlam Chair in Writing and Society and a living national treasure to all who value Aust Lit, which makes this moment worse, gets up to speak in the session on 'Australian literature on the international stage' and shatters the good feeling that has prevailed in the room thus far by getting quite emotional about his view that there are not enough migrant writers represented in the anthology. For some reason I am reminded of the sight of Our Gough fifteen years ago as he launched the Oxford Companion to Australian Literature by making a speech in which he pointed out all the errors he'd found in it so far.

Given how conscious I was of this 'migrant writing' issue in my role as section editor, and how hard I and the other section editors worked to do it justice among the many other claims on tight space in the book, this accusation makes me cross -- cross enough to count a few stats, later after I get home, and ascertain that just in my own section (fiction and drama since 1950), ten writers out of 48 (ie more than 20%) were not born in Australia; eleven came from partly or wholly non-anglophone backgrounds; and thirteen of these stories or extracts specifically and directly address (and were carefully and deliberately chosen so to do) some aspect of the migrant experience.

In his address to the symposium Ivor acknowledges some of these, but argues item by item that each is somehow not legitimate, or not good enough. Or something. Can't quite follow his reasoning here. His real beef appears to be that none of his particular five favourite migrant writers -- two fiction writers who would have been my responsibility, and three poets who would have been that of my fellow-editor David McCooey, between us responsible for the period 1950 to the present -- are in the anthology.

All five are European. The many included writers with their roots in Asian countries, including a number of first-generation immigrants, have scarcely been mentioned; nor is there any acknowledgement of the entries by Elizabeth Jolley and J. M. Coetzee, both brought up in bilingual households in other countries and both adult emigrants to Australia. Can't help thinking Ivor has a few blind spots of his own. One of the poets he names as an 'omission' is someone David simply thinks isn't very good. One of the novelists he names is someone whose one novel available in English, a translation from her original Italian, I found unpleasantly hysterical and practically unreadable.

Saturday 4 pm: David McCooey and I have an extremely lively conversation in the cab we share to the airport.

Saturday 8 pm: Arrive home where am greeted ecstatically by cats behaving like dogs. This is quite new; usually they punish me for going away by doing that cat ignoring thing.

Saturday 8.05 pm Crack spine of first of four books that must be read and reviewed by Wednesday. Thank God and my editor that a couple of them are very short. Unlike this post.