Speaking lovingly of that with which we work

The inimitable Alexander McCall Smith is as we speak in the South Australian outback mining town of Coober Pedy. At this very moment -- and since he's getting a signal I guess he's come up out of his underground motel -- he's tweeting about the town and the opal miners he's meeting there:

Here in this remote mining town I met a miner who loves her job. Laconic, but amusing, she loves using dynamite. Loves opals too. ... We can all speak lovingly of that with which we work: the grain of wood, the thrill of figures; my miner: rocks and explosives. 

 

Dear Adelaide #2

This time it's not a salutation, it's just a description.

Semaphore Road, 8pm, September 8th 2011.

Hey STELLA!

Last night in Melbourne's Federation Square, the new Stella Prize for the best book of the year by an Australian woman was launched as part of the Melbourne Writers' Festival. I did something uncharacteristically frivolous and flew over for the party.

The only people in this photo I actually recognise are journalist George Megalogenis, the tall dark dude over to the left, and Scribe publisher Aviva Tuffield, who is the smiling woman with darkish shoulder-length hair tucked behind one ear, at far right.

Chris Gordon, the events manager at Readings bookshop and a fellow member of the Stella Prize steering committee (as is Aviva, above), spoke persuasively of the need for sponsors and donations, and then introduced Australian feminist legend Anne Summers, author of Damned Whores and God's Police, which if memory serves was the first, or certainly one of the first, books in Australia to look at Australian history and culture through the lens of a feminist reading.

Anne officially launched the prize, reading the notes for her speech straight off her iPad, the first (though no doubt not the last) time I'd ever seen anybody do that. One of the most arresting things she said was that things were actually better for women in 1994 and we had apparently gone backwards.

But mostly the party was about the prize: what we've done so far, what we have still to do. The large crowd included most of the steering committee, mostly Melbourne writers and publishers: Chris, Aviva, Monica Dux, Jo Case, Rebecca Starford, and Sophie Cunningham who started it all.

Sophie Cunningham (R) with Pip McGuinness from NewSouth Books, the brains behind their Capital Cities series and therefore publisher of Sophie's book Melbourne and, next month, my book Adelaide.

The other Melbourne committee members include Jenny Niven, the MWF programmer, who I don't think was there (if I were the MWF programmer I'd be home in a coma by now) and Louise Swinn, who wasn't well. Susan Johnson from Brisbane also wasn't well enough to come, though she'd planned to. Kirsten Tranter and I flew down from Sydney and Adelaide respectively. See the Stella website at the above link for more detail on all these people.

L to R: Monica Dux, Rebecca Starford, Jo Case

Others spotted in the crowd included Melbourne publishing legend Hilary McPhee; longtime literary editor of The Age Jason Steger; publishers Philippa McGuinness from NewSouth Books and Michael Heyward from Text; Adam Bandt MP, the Federal Member for Melbourne; and Mark Rubbo, Managing Director of Readings bookshop, who has been a quietly effective supporter of the Stella Prize from the beginning.

Sophie Cunningham, Adam Bandt. The person he is talking to is probably Kirsten Tranter -- I think I recognise the outfit.

It was Kirsten who wondered on Facebook the night before the party which members of the steering committee would be out in Flinders Street drunkenly shouting 'Hey STELLA!' before the night was over. The closest I got to that myself was a quiet bottle of Stella Artois back in my hotel room later that night as I read the grisly new Val McDermid. My days for this sort of thing are a very long way behind me.

Pollyanna!

I'm reading David Walker's lovely, sad, thought-provoking and very South Australian memoir Not Dark Yet and thought I'd better refresh my memory about the context of that phrase; Walker has taken his title from the Bob Dylan song. It's a frightening, terrible song (I mean terrible here in the same sense of 'awful' to mean awe-inspiring and not in a happy way). My friend R told me a few days ago that she'd seen or heard someone describing a recent performance by Dylan of this as 'operatic' and now that I've had a good look at the lyrics I can see what they meant; the first thing I thought of was Lear on the heath. Dylan will be 70 in May, after all.

Anyway, so I got to the line that goes Behind every beautiful thing there's been some kind of pain and I thought well, yes, possibly, but behind every pain there's been some kind of beautiful thing, too.

A thought closely followed by the next: that my mind had apparently been possessed by some dreadful poppet from American children's literature. 'I'm glad my legs are broken! Glad, glad, glad!'

Even so, it seems at least as true as what Dylan said, although of course it doesn't scan as well. Nothing plays quite like a masculine ending, and if it's an emotive monosyllable so much the better.

On the other hand again, I think there's a simple explanation: I'm cheerful to the point of idiocy because first (a) I finished and sent off the manuscript of the Adelaide book and then (b) it got the thumbs-up from my publisher. (a) is why it's been a bit quiet around here. Normal service will be resumed shortly, in both content and tone.