are my feet in the way

Upcoming Events

2012-02-04T09:11:00.003+10:00

This month I will be making a return appearance on Richard Fidler's "Conversations" programme: the interview will be broadcast on Tuesday 14 February (10am in Brisbane, 11am AEST) and will be available via podcast here.

And on Thursday 23 February I will guest at one of Riverbend Books' "Meet the Author" events. Details and booking information are available here.

Letter from Mt Fuji, by Sam George-Allen

2012-01-10T20:50:00.000+10:00

We leave the Mizunos' house in Saitama at 4am. It's a two-hour trip to Mt. Fuji from outer Tokyo, and we are aiming to get there at dawn. It's early January, seven below zero, and packed into the car are a number of puffy jackets, blankets, snacks, four cameras, Mr. Mizuno, Mrs. Mizuno, my boyfriend James, and me. We are going to the mountain to take photos at dawn.

I am the second generation of clueless foreigners to be taken in by the Mizunos and overwhelmed by their limitless kindness. They met my parents in Sapporo in the late eighties when they both missed the bus to the top ski fields, and adopted them so thoroughly that my grandparents on both sides have met the Mizunos and their children at least once. Now, twenty five years later, they have helped me through my semester at Komazawa Daigaku, booked for me my half-thought-out trip to Hokkaido last summer, acted as guarantor at the start of the lease of my apartment, and seen my Japanese go from intolerably awful to awful. Kaori, their daughter, has a five-year-old, Kanato, and a three-year-old, Hiroto, who apparently love me and will allow me to "teach" them English (lessons usually consist of jumping on and off the bed and describing these actions: "Big jump! Little jump!"). And now they are driving me and my on-holiday, photographically-inclined boyfriend to Fuji-san at four in the morning.

To be fair, for the Mizunos, it is not an infrequently made trip. Mr. Mizuno will, with any excuse, enthusiastically show off the collage of photos he has taken of Fuji, at sunrise, sunset, and in all seasons, with his point-and-shoot. James has brought his DSLR and his baby, a 1952 Rolleiflex twin-lense reflex. It feels like a school excursion. We stayed at the Mizuno's house last night, where Mrs. Mizuno plied us with curry and rice and beer and salad and mandarins and glace chesnuts, drew us a bath in their magnificent, state-of-the-art Japanese bathtub (it reheats the water for you!), and then piled the two cot beds upstairs high with blankets and continued to fuss about whether we would be warm enough (I woke up in a pool of sweat).

There is nothing to see outside. Dawn won't break until 7:13. I fall asleep immediately, feet jammed under James's legs. When I wake up, it's ten to six, and the Prius is bumping down a gravel drive to a parking area by a lake. It's still dark outside, but I can see, as the headlights sweep over them, two rows of cars already parked here, and in front of us at the lake shore, a line of tripods, all alien-legged and silhouetted in the gloom.

It is freezing outside, and the ground is covered in frost. My feet ache instantly. Mr. Mizuno gives me thick nylon pants to put over my jeans, and I wrap myself in the blanket I was sleeping in. The sky over the lake is deep green, and we can see the shadow of the mountain, smooth-sloped and level-topped, a clear, flat shape beyond the glassy water. The lake is surrounded by hills, bare and brown punctuated by solitary evergreens, and the grey morning is crystal clear. We stump down to the water's edge to find a spot. It is a competitor's sport. There are already ten or so cameramen with tripods marking their territory, wrapping their cameras in little blankets and putting hot packs on the mechanisms to keep them from freezing up. There are films of ice stretching out from the gravel shore, and tiny little row-boats drawn up just out of the water's reach. There's still snow in some of them. The pair of photographers next to me mutter to each other; aside from that, it is absolutely quiet. Not even any birds.

Mr. Mizuno has disappeared to find a better spot. James is flitting from boat to boat, trying to find a flat platform on which he can rest his Rollei for a long-exposure. Mist rises off the lake in great wreaths near the opposite shore. It's so still, the water so calm, and as the sky lightens and the mountain's edges crisp up, so does its reflection. It is a perfect double. I begin to understand the love people here have for Fuji-san. The guy who painted those three hundred or whatever views of it, the cartoon Fujis on the maps of the shinkansen routes, the Fuji-shaped cups, hats, bakery products--it deserves its status as a national icon. This perfect cone volcano, huge and flared like a trumpet bell, its top dusted with snow year-round--as it comes into view, it doesn't seem real. It looks like a photocopy of a colour picture, pasted to the sky. I can see the rivers of snow reaching down its flanks like veins. It's strange to finally be here, after a year of plodding away at real life in Tokyo. I will be going home soon. The Mizunos would never let me leave without seeing the spiritual heart of Japan.

Behind me, James is receiving advice from two of the seasoned photographers. James doesn't speak Japanese. I go to translate. The men are baffled as I relay their advice (he should use a tripod, or his shaky hands will blur his Rollei's pictures). A white girl understanding Japanese is unusual enough; a white girl translating for someone who looks like a local is maybe a bit much to handle, at 6:30 in the morning.

The sun is due to rise over Fuji's left-hand edge, near the bottom of the slope. The birds have finally started up--crows, mainly, their ragged calls puncturing the brightening morning. I take a photo just before there is a breath of wind, and Fuji's reflection is scattered. It's beautiful, the shattering light blurring the edges, and the lake water lapping under the ice. Later, cause unseen, a series of sizeable ripples approaches, warping the reflection evenly. One of the photographers springs to catch the image before the returning waves muddle it. The mist over the lake breathes side to side, and a single tuft of cloud treks from one edge of the horizon to the other (later, Mr. Mizuno will say it was 'kirei sugiru'--too pretty, too clear; it's better with a few clouds).

I am still swaddled in my blanket like a baby. Mrs. Mizuno comes down from the car with bundles of clothes and insists on James putting on a puffy jacket under his coat. She forces me into a green fleecy and a pair of gloves, and then goes to find Mr. Mizuno. My feet have lost all sensation. I give up jumping up and down and huddle under James's arm. He points behind us: the top of the hills have flushed vividly. The top of Fuji, too, catches a shaft of red light. Faint cloud clinging to the peak like a breath glows pink. The sun is coming. The people on the shore stride back to their cameras; affirmations and warnings of readiness are exchanged. At the base of Fuji's left-hand flank, the sky is brightening.

Soon, our sixty seconds of photographic opportunity will rush up on us, and the sun will pop over the mountain side like a ball on a string. But now, hands warm in Mrs. Mizuno's gloves, surrounded by old dudes with fingers on shutter-buttons, holding their breath, I let the morning twilight seep into me. Pale-blue, clear, the sun hinted at but hidden, and Fuji-san crisp and austere before me, like watercolours on Japanese silk.

Sam George-Allen is an Honours student in Creative Writing at QUT.

2012-01-10T09:42:00.001+10:00

From Orleigh St, West End

Smoke

2012-01-03T21:11:00.005+10:00

He walked from the living room to the kitchen,
took me and a trail of cigar smoke,
past the record player,
the gap in the couches –

For in singing ‘Moon Shadow’ I had them set wide apart –
and the recliner where I lit my pyjamas
playing with his lighter,
pre-fire safety standards for pyjamas.

I extinguished myself –
you do it quickly,
panic with your hands,
aware of the closeness.

And think:
long death or quick death?
In the kitchen he draws on a sugar cube,
and the cigar darkens.

I inhaled the smoke,
we sat silently across from one another.
We took the boat,
covered the deck with fish.

There were autumn berries in the smoke,
as there was blood on the deck.

The Pirate's Business Card

2011-12-28T22:06:00.004+10:00

I found it in a leather bag that I had decided to throw out,
but setting aside some time for a final inspection --
there is always something left in such bags --
I ran a hand along crumbled lining.

A Pirate's business card:
he gave it to me in 1990,
with eighty dollars I owe him even now,
he hugged me that day,
as he had once threatened to throw me overboard.

What is twenty-two years' interest on eighty dollars,
a trip to Karoussades? --
where in the Pirate's taverna,
with merely the memory of the Pirate's mum --
she can't be going still --
along plastic table cloths,
he insists on no talk of a bill...

Mark out the debt in retraced steps?

The Heads

2011-12-27T05:49:00.002+10:00

He moves towards the rocks:
the water and the ash grey sky,
two lines punctuated there --
an isthmus drawn between the beaches,
and the bays their names on the cliffs.

Picasso and the Subject

2011-12-23T20:31:00.019+10:00

I rushed from the University of Sydney, from a meeting that ended at around 3:30, naively thinking I would have time to walk to the Art Gallery for the last hour of opening time, spend that last hour at the visiting Picasso exhibition, 'Masterpieces from the Musee National Picasso, Paris'.

I wound my way impatiently through Sydney in what you might describe as an uphill way, sort of towards Oxford Street and the Museum. I followed people who looked like they knew where they were going, for even if they weren't going to the Picasso exhibition, at least they had a purpose. I suspect they took me the long way, via a number of unnecessary public transport hubs.

So. I got to the Gallery at 4:25. That uptight, artsy lady in red glasses at the front counter looked at me. 'Most people feel they need at least an hour,' she said, 'there are quite a few rooms.'

'But this might be my only chance to see the exhibition.'

'Well, it's $25. It's your call, of course.'

She walked away, to tidy up, and I bought a ticket and rushed some more, through the front rooms of early paintings. Two idlers were my only companions.

The blue period stopped me dead, as it has ever since I first met it at school. I thought, 'That is perfect painting,' just as I do when I look at a painting from late in this period that we have in Brisbane; it's called 'La Belle Hollandaise.' When I was younger, I spent hours in front of it. I still remember the moment I first saw it, and the shock of seeing such a beautiful picture.

Then I was stopped by the beach paintings, much smaller than I imagined. They could have been Sydney studies, especially the one of the women racing.

I thought I could deal with cubism fairly quickly.

But this is where I really got my timing all wrong, and where Picasso taught me that, contrary to my earlier thoughts, he actually wasn't going anywhere with cubism, but rather had stopped -- stopped in transit. Or perhaps that cubism was as human as the blue period and the abstract portraits that came later.

I know I am stating the obvious, but cubism does turn out to be about the relationship between character and setting, namely that at its best the relationship is much closer to a dissolving, a total meeting: it is as we are, moving and stopping at the same time; your subjects are the chairs they sit in.

I went back to the front rooms and started again. For heaven's sakes, I still had fifteen minutes left.

'Good artists teach,' I thought, 'of course they do.' But the experience of learning is deflected and inflected by setting, for us as for the subject. The subject and the artist meet in transit, and we learn when we catch ourselves in the act of joining in.

Lucky we are caught.

Swimming

2011-12-20T15:26:00.002+10:00

Fall into the sea,
and look up, and make the sky a second ceiling,
the pulse against the line.
Press my feet into the sand and push,
breathe, kick my legs into the air,
to get back down again.

Rocks on the far side of the bay,
the wave at my eye line.

Sideways

2011-12-18T19:49:00.005+10:00

...It wasn't exactly the same kind of Pinot Noir experience of that wonderful film, but my piece about a recent wine trip I took to New Zealand has appeared in the Escape supplement of some of the Sunday papers. It is available online for free here.

Scott's Head Visited

2011-12-17T08:15:00.007+10:00

Firstly, my apologies to Evelyn Waugh for the malappropriation of one his titles, in fact the title of one of my favourite books. But I can claim at least one thing in common with Charles Ryder: we are both of us thirty-nine; although I don't think I have begun to feel old, or not in quite the way Charles is feeling old. He has fallen out of love with the army, what he calls his 'last love,' and at the same moment finds himself in the setting of his first. The frame is a very effective way of structuring nostalgia, because I suppose that's how nostalgia works -- we place earlier feelings in the context of a present loss.

That is also the emotional setting of a book I'm working on, and so when I visited Scott's Head for the first time last week it was with the hope of picturing it revisited. What would my main character -- his name is Ted -- have noticed about a place that he knew intimately from his childhood, that he had revisited often, but that on this occasion he revisits after the death of his father? The technical question, I suppose, is: how does this character's point of view affect his perception of the book's setting? For what is the point of framing a narrative if the frame doesn't enclose the sentiment in the same way that it frames the setting and the action?

This is the house that I found for Ted. It's on a very large block on the highly desirable Banksia Avenue, and is indeed for sale at the moment; but out of real estate mode I would add that I couldn't believe my luck when I found in the real world a house ideally situated for the fictional one I had already begun to construct. The picture is taken from a narrow, white road that you might expect to find in a French village; on the other side is the dune and the tracks through the shrubs and trees to the beach. I can see Ted scrambling over them for swims in the afternoon.

Here Main or Forster Beach. Banksia Avenue is located on the other side of the wooded dune, around the far right of this picture. This is the Brideshead of my novel, the revisited landscape, where Ted used to swim as a boy. It's such a beautiful stretch, a mini-Laguna Bay without the cafes or showiness (not that I mind cafes and showiness all that much), and you can follow it all the way to the estuary at Nambucca Heads. I went for a swim -- there were at most half a dozen others in the water, and this on a Sunday afternoon -- and then I ran some of the way to Nambucca.

All along the beach were the signs of big tides and surf, with many trees collapsed down onto the wet sand. I read somewhere that a lot of damage was done in July just gone. In more than one spot, fences and foot planks have been turned into malicious looking ladders of rusted metal and cracked timber.

A research project in a photograph. The surf club at Scott's Head seems to me an improbable structure, something I would expect to see in a Greek-dominated street in West End. I walked around it, and had thought it completely shut, but that evening I heard at the fish n' chip shop that it still opens on the weekends, but closes at three. I took this photograph in a hurry: I wanted to catch the moment the green car passes the club house -- both survivors of a very different Australia, of big cars and red-brick buildings, that holds on in places like Scott's Head.

And below the view through wooden steps that lead upstairs to what I expect is the club bar. I think it's a view of the beach you might carry with you from childhood.

I suppose all novels are about point of view: the form, after all, is powerful because it gives us a way of relating individual perception and time. What I wanted to do in Scott's Head was understand a character's perception in terms of how I imagined his childhood might have been. I left aware that wanting to meet your own characters in this way is very odd, and that narrative is quite possibly a form of madness. But now at least I can revisit Scott's Head, and come a step closer to how that might have felt for someone else.

As the highway slows

2011-12-15T13:19:00.007+10:00

...Or, as the Pacific Highway slows coming into Macksville from the north. It took me a while to find the turn-off, up to the cemetery where my grandparents' ashes are interred. I took two wrong side roads, swore at myself for forgetting where the cemetery was, and then gave up and drove on to Scott's Head, where I was staying the night. When I came back the following morning I found the right road straight away.

I took this picture. It is the view down to the highway, from a red brick wall that properly belongs at the side of a 1970s patio of plastic chairs and tables with vinyl covers, but which here is decorated with bunches of flowers the size of boutonnieres, the floral signatures of friends or relatives who visited recently; or, even not so recently, and whose flowers are browning at the edges. It was some two years since I'd been, and I came empty handed. Instead of placing flowers I passed a kiss from my hand to the plaques of Mildred and Harold Diggons, who for a few years lived with their two girls on the banks of the Nambucca River, on the opposite side from the Star Hotel, the cinema, and the milk bar. In those days, the highway ran in front of their house.

The new highway slows to 90 and then 70 and then 50, I think -- that's where you join the path of the old one as you cross the river on a narrow steel bridge built 80 years ago, during the heyday of those beautiful, industrial constructions -- just a year before the Sydney Harbour Bridge was completed. Today the bridge is actually too narrow to handle the vast numbers of trucks that pass down the highway to Sydney; in the year of its opening, only an average of 214 vehicles crossed each day.

I would say as many cars slow to cross it in the fifteen minutes that I spend with my grandparents, and that I spend once again thinking about that combination of a restless man and a hardheaded woman who didn't get on particularly well, but who perhaps got along least badly here. I am sort of writing about them in my second book, a book that will probably take me back to Yorkshire next year, where my maternal grandmother Mildred was born and raised -- she was a Doncaster girl.

For now I must say I like this moment, when I stand with them and alongside a fictional world that is both theirs and mine together, and that I have come here to help fill out with a better sense of this place, their resting place and the starting point of my book. We watch the highway as it slows and crosses the river.

(Part of an earlier visit to the area, when my grandparents' ashes were interred, is described here.)

The Pictures of Iceland

2011-12-12T15:17:00.001+10:00

One of the most gratifying things to come out of publishing my memoir has been the very positive response that readers have had to my mother's characterization. Many think of hers as the dominant story, or the conversation between her and me that the memoir implies as the work's central dialogue.

I think that's right. And, for my part, I think that the conversation we are having is about how we have gone about defining the nature of home, both individually and together. It's something we've both fought to recover from a basic family impulse that home is always off in the distance somewhere. At its core, The Promise of Iceland is an attempt to represent a lifelong journey, it is a traveller's account of discovering belonging -- or a sense of belonging that I have long been convinced was a continuation of my parents' and grandparents' journeys home.

Naturally, readers would like to know more about her, and one of the first questions I'm asked is, how does she feel about the book now that it's out? If I was altogether sure of the answer to that question, I would give it. What I can say is that she read the final draft before it was published and let me off with a couple of minor corrections. For example, I had her rate of shorthand words per minute mixed up with her typing speed.

But readers also want to know more about how she looked. Perhaps I should have said more about that in the book, but a few months on from publication I'm sure it's okay to supplement the description here, with a mini photo essay.

This picture is taken on The Esja, a ship that would circumnavigate Iceland and take on a handful of paying passengers. Thus my mother came to understand the country as it seen from the sea, and very much fell in love.

I believe this one's from August 1972, a month before I was born.

My first home, a basement apartment in Sólvallagata that my mother moved into when she first arrived in Iceland in December 1970. On the wall, line drawings that her ex-husband Ed did while he was visiting. I just love those chairs.

A couple of early portraits, one taken by a friend, the second a studio picture.

My favourite of Mum and me together, and also here Mildred, my maternal grandmother who features in one of the opening chapters of the memoir. We are on an early visit to Melbourne, I believe.

And as the sticker says, Sydney 1977, aged 5 and just moved from Reykjavík to Mosman. (Just so everyone knows I haven't changed much.)

A Neighbourly Review

2011-11-25T17:14:00.001+10:00

My colleague at QUT Lee McGowan has given a very personal review of The Promise of Iceland on his blog The Simplest Game.

Lee suffers from something akin to my own northern nostalgia, in his case for his homeland Scotland. His review is available here.

An earlier postcard from Stirling that Lee wrote for Are My Feet In The Way can be found here.

Femail review

2011-11-24T06:04:00.000+10:00

Brooke Hunter's interview with me and review of The Promise of Iceland has appeared in femail.com.au. A full version is available here.

Review from FNQ

2011-11-18T14:01:00.013+10:00

Bev Blaauw's review of The Promise of Iceland has appeared in The Cairns Post. Her review includes these comments:

Kari’s descriptions of Iceland are so beautiful that one is tempted to pack up and go there. He makes the long, dark winters sound just as enticing as the extraordinary Northern Lights. Each time Kari returns to Iceland he finds new ways of viewing life.

Finally, Kari meets his family, stops blaming his father and learns to live as an Icelander in Iceland, before returning to Brisbane to write so eloquently about his other home.

Verdict : Adventure, history, family, love and sheer bliss.

The full review is available here.

A Little More Zambia

2011-11-13T19:15:00.001+10:00

A piece I wrote about my recent journey to Zambia, a trip I've also discussed at some length on this blog, has appeared in the Escape lift-out of the Sunday News Ltd papers. It is also available on The Australian's website here.

And, further, my "Letter from Zambia" has been published in the Dec 2011 - Jan 2012 edition of WQ Magazine, a publication of the Queensland Writers Centre.

Hippos in the Morning: Postscript Zambia

2011-10-21T08:55:00.004+10:00

I flew from Ndola in the Copperbelt to Livingstone, and to what suddenly seemed the extraordinary comfort of a tourist area: the town is a short cab ride from Victoria Falls, and the wider region has become one of those places where the first thing you do is choose items off brochures listing complex ways of encountering water and near-death: white water rafting, bungy jumping, helicopter sight seeing, drinking cruises, even wading, although not swimming.

I had a small chalet room on the banks of the Zambezi river, and so I opted for watching. The river passes at an unnoticeable pace, but you know that a little further down it becomes one of the largest waterfalls in the world. This gives its slowness a deliberate, stately quality: it's just waiting for the right moment. My room's extravagant mosquito net worked, so in the mornings I lay in bed with the doors wide open listening to vervet monkeys playing and the hippos barking on the Zimbabwean side. The light was thin and crisp on the edges of the tress and jetties.

One morning, I asked reception if I was really hearing hippos in the mornings. 'Which room?' she asked blithely, and then: 'We'll send someone around.' It was as though I'd told her there weren't any towels.

'No, I mean across the other side,' I replied. 'There isn't a hippo in my room.'

'Oh, good.'

The view of the river at breakfast was tranquil in a rather Australian way: already you knew that it was going to get really hot, and that the glassy surface of the river wasn't an invitation to jump in. I sat looking at it while around me a time-lapse photography of other guests came and went with plates of eggs and bacon and more or less inedible sausages: small, beefy things that tasted of old brown pudding.

I was slower to finish my coffee and also one of the few who didn't have a safari suit and a full schedule of unnatural activities involving great danger. Naturally, I felt the difference acutely, but I had also noticed that 'safari suit' was quite an expensive item on the laundry list.

In any case, I had booked this time on the Zambezi with a view to writing about Ndola. That now struck me as more or less impossible - it was too pretty to write - so I stared at the river some more and around mid-morning booked a day trip. I was going on safari!

My companions to Chobe National Park, Botswana were a Russian Mr Bean with an enormous camera and three Texans, who I think were called Bubba, John, and Lou. Mr Bean could only communicate through his camera, but to my bemusement the Texans exchanged very technical information about the animals we encountered that day - antelopes, hogs, elephants, lechwe, elephants and giraffes, hippos, crocodiles, elephants (there really were a great many elephants), etc - and then a volley of rather low grade exclamations each repeated five or six times. For example, one would exclaim that the Boss on a wilder-beast was huge, and then another would say, 'Oh yeah, that's a big one alright,' and then Lou would say, 'Oh boy, ain't he?' and then Bubba would say, 'He sure is, Mister, he's big,' and then John would add, 'That is a big one.' It was like American golf commentary gone berserk.

It went on like this all morning, so at lunch while Mr Beanovic sat quietly beside his camera I asked the Texans how they came to know so much about the animals. Were they farmers? There was some awkwardness about my question, and then finally Bubba confessed, 'We're hunters.' Today was their last day, a rest day when they watched instead of shot.

Later we got onto the topic of work. I told them I was a writer and an academic, and they took this kindly. 'What's your line?' I asked. The same awkwardness followed. 'We're in oil,' John said at last.

'Aren't you glad I'm not from Greenpeace!' I exclaimed.

They took my joke in their stride - it had come out involuntarily and I felt a bit rude about it - and after lunch we had a lovely afternoon watching still more hundreds of wonderful elephants grazing on one of the few areas here that remains wet in September, the driest and worst time of the year for wildlife. The Texans continued to exclaim, Mr Bean's camera nearly drove me mad, and it got so hot that the lining of my shoes began to peel off. My shoe salesperson had told me they were endorsed by Bear Grills.

I played with the lining, and then got some perspective. I was on safari in Africa, for heaven's sakes. Who cares about the lining of your shoes.

And yet I hadn't come for this safari experience: in fact, all my research goals were squarely human ones. But, actually, being surrounded by such diversity of wildlife - even in the company of those who fancied it hung in their snooker rooms - altered my perspective of the days before, in Lusaka and Ndola, where the travel had been harder. It was something to do with beauty, or the way we recognise it: as in Ndola, where I had been unexpectedly moved by the local adoption of Hammarskjöld, I felt again like I was encountering a kind of beauty that was at once new to me and radically free of me. I wondered whether there was, after all, such a thing as objective beauty?

At six, I said goodbye to Sergei and my Texan companions, and got back to the chalet thirsty and over-hot. I had allowed myself two bottles of Mosi beer a night, with the idea that modest drinking would sponsor better writing. But that night I ordered a third and began to write more fluently about the days that had passed in the Copperbelt, where it was drier and less comfortable and where there were no hippos in the morning or safari suits, but where I had encountered something of great beauty as well.

Letter from Mount Kilimanjaro, by Jan Burnett

2011-10-10T14:33:00.001+10:00

Mount Kilimanjaro is 5,895 metres tall, so the peak falls into the “extreme” altitude category, but especially for those who live at sea level, the effects of altitude can manifest themselves as low as 1,500 metres. As altitude increases, while the percentage of oxygen in the air remains the same, the reduced air pressure means the number of gas molecules is lower. Therefore the amount of oxygen available to be breathed into the lungs is also less. Most people can adapt to altitudes up to 5,500 metres, but above 5,500 metres few people can adjust anymore. Acclimatisation is a way of maximising the body’s ability to cope with the decreasing air pressure.

For this reason, we had chosen to summit via the Lemosho route. Normally a seven-day hike, we added an extra day to enhance our acclimatisation. The Lemosho route starts at the Londorossi Gate; at 2,250 metres, it is higher than Australia’s highest peak. Apart from being the longest route on the mountain, it offers other advantages including walking through a series of valleys resulting in frequent altitude gains and losses (important for acclimatisation) and also affording a great experience of Kili’s distinct vegetation regions.

Our hike had started 2,500 metres lower, six days, and 40 kilometres ago and now, as day seven began, we prepared to start the midnight ascent.

By three hours in Paul was suffering badly with altitude. Unable to focus on his breathing he was constantly dizzy. Heinrich was also suffering, vomiting and unsteady on his feet. In the meantime I was contending with my own demons.

As the pre-dawn hours approached the group split in two, with Rajab (the chief guide), Matthew (an assistant guide), Heinrich, Paul and I bringing up the rear. Paul and Heinrich were suffering physically, but for me the battle to stay awake was having a different effect as I had started to fall asleep on my feet. By 5.30am the situation was desperate, but perched on the side of the mountain watching the sunrise over Mawenzi, miraculously seemed to invigorate us all.

But Stella Point, only a few hundred metres above us, still seemed almost unattainable. We had left the rocky path up the side of the mountain. For the past few hundred metres we had been walking 20 paces and then stopping to bring our breathing under control.

Now we were on the infamous steep scree slopes. Our pace changed down again. Every step was a kick into the side of the mountain to try to gain some purchase on the scree and not waste a single inch of uphill effort. We developed a rhythm of step, breath, breath, step, breath, breath and it was this pace that finally saw us mount the relatively flat path at Stella.

Our hiking companions greeted us with cheers, applause, sobs and hugs. Now there remained a mere one and a half kilometre walk with a 200 metre climb. When compared to the previous three and a half kilometres, the path to Uhuru sounded innocuous and beckoned us to the summit. But the final stretch was monotonous, and in the dense cloud that enveloped us, it was a frustrating struggle. Finally, in desperation, I exclaimed, “For Christ’s sake, where is this bloody sign?”, and with that the clouds parted just enough for us to glimpse Africa’s highest point. We caught our breath and lunged into each other’s arms.

Jan Burnett is studying a Graduate Certificate in Creative Writing at QUT.

Three reviews

2011-09-30T11:46:00.000+10:00

Reviews of The Promise of Iceland have appeared in the Sydney Sun Herald, The Gold Coast Bulletin, and The Toowoomba Chronicle. Reviewers' comments include:

"There are cycles within families, patterns in the generations, and there is a definite feeling of restlessness and uncertainty within mine," says Gislason..."There is also the business of inheritance, of asking what you are comprised of, and of finding ways through the chapters and secrets of your own story."

That story begins in 1970 with an ad in London's The Times newspaper for an English-speaking secretary. Gislason's mother answered the ad, secured employment among Iceland's Army of Foreign Secretaries and soon after found the arms of her secret lover.
Gislason retraces her steps and then his own over the years, taking this moving family saga from Iceland to England, Sydney to Brisbane, as all the time the weight of his secret becomes heavier.
"People who share secrets become confederates of a kind and I suppose that's what I had with my father and my mother," he says.
"It was a bond, but it was also an absence and something of a burden which, as time progressed, was stopping me from doing other things.
"I had to face my own story to truly understand myself and my parents and I hope the book will also allow people to understand my parents from their point of view."
The Promise of Iceland does allow that understanding.
It is an honest, contemplative and heartfelt journey across generations, landscapes and, appropriately for a land such as Iceland, the truth and mythology of family.

(Michael Jacobson in The Gold Coast Bulletin, 27 August 2011, p. 18)

*

THIS is a beautifully told journey by a man who was tracing his roots and discovering himself.The author was named after a character from one of the Icelandic sagas. He has written a doctoral thesis on concepts of authorship in medieval Iceland and currently lives in Brisbane. All his worlds have converged and this is his story about the directions and influences that empowered this. ... All the characters in his life are sincerely and perceptively portrayed and you will feel you know them all personally. The geographical and cultural details are illustrative and profound and this makes it all feel familiar.

(F. J. O'Dwyer in The Toowoomba Chronicle, 20 August 2011, p. 11)

Whether home is just the place we're born or a feeling we carry no matter where we end up, the age-old question remains: once you leave, can you ever go back? What if the decision to leave was not your own? Gislason's measured yet satisfying memoir charts his lifelong search for identity after leaving behind his birthplace of Iceland.

(Meredith Tate in the 'Extra' lift-out, Sun Herald, 18 September 2011, p. 6)

Leaving Zambia

2011-09-23T20:52:00.005+10:00

I am sitting at the upstairs bar of Lusaka Airport. I flew in this morning from Livingstone, and then walked across the tarmac at the back of a cavalcade come to collect Michael Sata, who has finally won his long campaign to become president. The black Mercedes and the convoys of Land Cruisers that follow them have since been replaced: with each line-up of cars that goes, a new one arrives. I am watching the Tanzanian delegation step down from its Lear jet, the women dressed in bright orange and green; the Botswanan Lear jet is parked behind it; and now a third Lear jet arrives, unmarked. Must be the spies.

It's a day of change and thunderous car horn tooting. During the ten short days of my stay here, I have wondered at the endurance of Zambian car horns, and met only one person who openly supported the old government. For the most part the election period has been a peaceful one. I had thought that the endless calls for peace - from politicians, religious leaders, the media, and during the Dag Hammarskjöld commemoration - might in fact be a prelude to violence. Why else would everyone be going on about peace so much? But it seems not. Zambia may after all retain its reputation as the most peace-loving of African states.

When I was in Ndola for the Hammarskjöld commemoration, I got caught up in a political rally. Everyone had told me to avoid these, for fights flare up very quickly. But before I could get out of the way, I was surrounded by minibuses, all filled with young people hanging out of the windows, pretending to row with invisible oars, pretending their buses were canoes. To those like me on the street, they repeated what I later came to realise was the shorthand symbol of the campaign: they held their index fingers to their lips and went ssshhh. It means, 'don't tell them.' Don't tell the government, because we're taking their votes.

I hear that in the last couple of days, leading up to the announcement last night that Sata had won, there was unrest in the streets of Ndola - there are reports that shops and market stalls have been damaged. Apparently, the unrest was caused by perceived delays in the official vote count. Such was the suspicion that the election would be rigged, that any delays or irregularities in polling have been seen as government interference.

The locals refer to political unrest as 'noise'. It is a bit noisy in town, they will say. It was a bit noisy, too, when the minibuses surrounded me. But only noisy in a celebratory way: it was the loudness of anticipation, change. The crowd waved to me, and demanded a wave back. A day later I left Ndola, and today I leave Zambia. It may well be best to avoid political events, but in a way I wish I was going into town to join in the noise, to witness the celebration. It would be nice way to wave goodbye.

Ssshhh, says the man at the back

Road Marking #10: Ndola

2011-09-22T02:56:00.007+10:00

On Sunday 18 September, the community of Ndola commemorated the fiftieth anniversary of the plane crash that killed Dag Hammarskjöld and his UN team of 15 others in bushland some ten miles from the town.

Also present at the commemoration were the Vice-President of Zambia, the Foreign Minister of Sweden, the Swedish Ambassador in Zambia, and a distinguished array of military, civil, and community leaders. My seat was between the Generals and the District Commissioners. At least one of the local witnesses of the crash also attended, an old man who had been 25 when a friend had dragged him to the site. I spoke to him at some length, and will write more about that another time.

My favourite participant was Richard Hanguwa, site manager who was also MC for the day. Richard and I had met the day before, when he showed me around the site and let me in on the preparations. The commemoration had long been on people's minds, but in the end was something of a last-minute thing. It was to be a Zambian affair - they had taken owenership, as they say - with the Swedes and the UN in support roles.

While I was there, the tents arrived, the advance parties arrived, the police and security forces plotted out their plan for the next day, and then the hundreds of chairs arrived. At least 1000 locals would attend. Richard and I watched from the sheltered seats on top of the ant hill where Dag Hammarskjöld's body was found. The first President of Zambia used to sit here to think. Then we were joined by the UN Press Officer in Zambia, and the three of us gossiped and thought about the plan for the next day and for the future of not only the Dag Hammarskjöld memorial, but the small community of villages and farms that has come to be attached to it. After all the dignitaries had left, the 1000 locals would hold their own, informal commemoration. They would wander the site for an hour after the VIPs had gone.

The Dag Hammarskjöld Institute for Peace Studies, currently located at Copperbelt University in Kitwe, will soon be relocated to the site, and not far from here are the new campus of Northrise University and the brand new Ndola football stadium. Two schools are located next to the site. On the commemoration day, children from these schools stole the show, especially the youngest troop who, dressed in Swedish colours, sang:

For the love you showed for humanity, Daggy Hammarskjöld we love you
For the hope you gave to humanity, Daggy Hammarskjöld we love you
We want to thank you (thank you)
We want to thank you (thank you)
Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you...

They made me cry, and I found it a little hard to listen to politicians after they had finished. But the Swedish Foreign Minister was good. You felt that for the Zambians, this was in some part their crash. Yes, they did own it, in a way, and the Swedish partnership in the commemoration would always have its base in Uppsala. I must admit I too felt his presence more there than I did in Ndola.

The crash came three years before Zambian independence from Britain, and it helped Zambians frame independence in terms of Hammarskjöld's quest for peace in Africa, and in neighbouring Congo in particular. But the Foreign Minister reminded us that at the time of his death Hammarskjöld had been fighting two battles, one for peace in Congo and the other for the survival of the United Nations, at the time facing enormous pressure because of the Cold War.

I thought he could have added that there was, for Hammarskjöld, always a third battle, one witnessed by Markings. But I don't suppose this was the time to mention Hammarskjöld's silent inner conflicts. And maybe that was why the children's choir affected me so much: there was a pitch to their voices that recognised and matched that third battle, and acknowledged the contemplative side of a man who accused himself of doubts that he could never show the world.

I hope in his final moments in the bushland outside Ndola he allowed himself some peace from those doubts.

A choir from the Dag Hammarskjöld Community School

HRH Chief Mumena, Chair of the National Heritage Conservation Cmn

After the commemoration, locals inspect the memorial

Others inspect me

Steps that mark the spot where Hammarskjöld's body was found

Overheard in Lusaka

2011-09-15T00:26:00.002+10:00

In the rather partisan Times of Zambia today, news through that President Banda has agreed with traditional and religious leaders that people should pray for a peaceful election period. I think this is perfectly sensible.

But my favourite part of the story comes towards the end:

"[Secretary to the Cabintet] Dr Kanganja said the prayers should be held in the usual places of worship."

Road Marking #9: Lusaka

2011-09-14T17:10:00.007+10:00

Yesterday afternoon, after a long flight from Bangkok, I had one of those incredible first taxi rides in a new country, when you can’t quite connect yourself to the experience, or relate it to anything you’ve done before.

The airport road:

But I was lucky. I had a driver who drew me into the world. He talked me through our sights all the way into town -- pointed out the plane delivering ballot boxes and observers for the election on Tuesday, the University of Zambia, the road to the President's house. He said it wasn’t any fun to walk along the airport road, because it’s so straight. You feel like you’re never getting there. Plenty were walking along it, though.

'What if I was walking along it?' I asked.

'I would stop and tell you to get a cab,' he replied. He then instructed me on the coming election. 'You're not here to help us with it, are you?'

'No, no, I'm not here for the election.'

It was on everyone’s minds. His own concern was that the two main candidates were too old. He wanted a young man in charge, like Barack Obama. Here a very big version of one of the posters that are everywhere:

I saw this poster on Church Road, where my odd but charming hotel is also located. Everything seems to look okay if you don’t touch it, then it comes off the wall. Church Road brought me onto Cairo Road, the main street in Lusaka. My guidebook had made me a little spooked about this area, but in fact it was gorgeous, with end of day busyness mixing across small groups who were standing, talking, watching (rather intently) what seemed to be the only tourist walking among them that afternoon.

And the light, ashen gold I suppose you could call it, the dirty red of the footpaths and roads lifted into an urban sunset.

When I got back to the hotel, I adopted again what may end up being my default mode for between-walks, and as in Bangkok I made meaningful the otherwise unfulfilled life of a local by asking them to take my picture.

For the love of mopeds

2011-09-12T15:19:00.004+10:00

I am in Bangkok, where I have a day in transit on my journey to Ndola. I arranged this stop-over because the coming flight to Lusaka, the capital of Zambia, is a bit of a milk run taking in both Addis Ababa and Harare. A very long flight. All the same, on landing in Bangkok last night I wondered why I hadn't just pushed through. But not this morning.

What a sensational place this is.

The heat. And yet the men don't wear shorts -- only women and Swedish tourists do. Anyone who knows me, knows also that I am easily identifiable as not-Thai. But sweat is clearly another identifier. The locals are actually wearing cardigans today. I am not.

Cleverly camouflaged as a Swede

The girls, or rather the men who keep them. This has been less of a problem than I thought -- only a couple of street hawkers and my concierge have so far given me that dreadful wink, and in the case of the latter it was rather comically done. I was very tired, it was very late. 'What are you doing tonight?' he asked, with my backpack on his shoulder. Then he winked with both eyes, and in heavily inflected English and with a lisp no less said, 'I'll take care of anything else you need.' We both knew it was not his best pitch ever.

The powerlines. These are beautiful but deeply troubling creations. What I love is the way they are overtaking, almost as vines, the old apartment housing in the Silom area I'm staying in.

The dark, narrowing alleyways. Which aren't at all malicious, because at the end of each is an open area with a golden, illuminated Budha drawing the eye. And then you turn the corner to this:

And, of course, those mopeds. And these really are wonderful, because they tell you where to go. Simply put, anywhere you can cross the road safely is the right direction.

Sunday Mail 'Book of the Week'

2011-09-12T14:38:00.000+10:00

The Promise of Iceland is the Brisbane Sunday Mail's 'book of the week'. Paul Donoghue writes, 'What could be a study in self-indulgence is instead a deeply charming account of displacement, of not really knowing where you come from and how that makes it difficult to know where you belong.'

(from the 'U on Sunday' lift-out in Sunday Mail (Brisbane), 11/9/11, p. 41)

In Conversation with Richard Fidler and Anita Shreve

2011-09-09T12:16:00.000+10:00

On Thursday 8 September I was interviewed alongside the American novelist Anita Shreve for Richard Fidler's Conversations show on ABC radio. A podcast of the interview is available here.

With Anita Shreve (photo by Ursula Skjonnemand)

Adelaide Advertiser and Sunday Times (Perth) reviews

2011-09-06T09:56:00.005+10:00

Reviews of The Promise of Iceland have appeared in the Adelaide Advertiser and the Perth Sunday Times. The former, by Penelope Debelle, includes this comment:

Icelanders love their country so much they are homesick even when they are there. The sub-Arctic landscape exerts an almost irresistible pull on Kari Gislason, who was born in Iceland but grew up in Australia...Kari's story of repeated trips to Iceland, his career as an academic specialising in Nordic sagas, and his final meeting with his extended family of half brothers and sisters is a powerful memoir about landscape and identity.

(from the 'Weekend' lift-out in the Adelaide Advertiser, 3/9/11, p. 29)

The piece in the Perth Sunday Times (by Brisbane-based reviews editor Fran Metcalf) is in the form of an interview and extended summary of the book, and describes The Promise of Iceland as 'compelling' (see the 'Weekend' lift-out of the Sunday Times, 4/9/11, p. 19).

Great Journeys: Graham Greene in Mexico

2011-09-02T13:12:00.008+10:00

"People are made by places." (The Lawless Roads, p. 16)

The Lawless Roads (1939) by Graham Greene inspired Paul Theroux to observe that it's often the most difficult journeys that make the best travel books. Greene's journey was both of these things: an awful trip and a complex and ultimately brilliant work of non-fiction.

Greene got very ill. The means of transport was often terrible. He couldn't stand Mexico or for that matter the Mexicans whom he encountered. He got stuck with those Mexicans often. And when he finally reached the end of his trip it was to the news from his solicitor that he had been sued for libel over comments he'd made about Shirley Temple. He had every reason to grumble, and quite often in The Lawless Roads he does.

But it is a more profound type of difficulty that makes the book and the journey it represents great, and perhaps without this added dimension Greene's grumbling about the locals, their food, and the difficulties of the terrain could annoy. He had been sent to Mexico by the Vatican to report on the situation of Catholics, who had suffered under the rule of Plutarco Elisa Calles. Greene found plenty of evidence that the worst reports of killings, imprisonment, and other punishments were true. As a result, the author's depressed state as a traveller is in fact a rather light face for him to present as a social and religious commentator. His complaints about having to endure yet another terrible meal become a way of interrupting the much more dispiriting contemplation of a government that has become very cruel to its own people.

Out of that contemplation came Greene's landmark The Power and the Glory (1939), one of Time magazine's all time 100 novels. In fact, we first meet that novel's famous 'whiskey priest' of Tabasco in The Lawless Roads, and the two books share many questions, in particular how religious convictions exist and develop when there is a concerted and prolonged attempt to suppress them or replace them with new ways. The difficulties of the 'lawless road' were, in the end, illuminating ones for Greene, and his Christian convictions were much strengthened by the experience of seeing Mexicans maintaining theirs. The difficulties of travel may, in the end, have been fairly trivial. He made it back, and no doubt recovered well enough to enjoy even English food.

But the difficulties that came out of his journey were great. The worst journeys make the best travel books, because they are the ones that stay with you.

"I began to have a dim conception of the appalling mysteries of love
moving through a ravaged world." (The Lawless Road, p. 14)

The Age review

2011-08-31T07:04:00.004+10:00

The Promise of Iceland is 'pick of the week' in Fiona Capp's review section in Saturday's The Age. Fiona describes the work in this way:

Few countries are further apart than Iceland and Australia. Central to Kari Gislason's story is the secret of his paternity. His married Icelandic father insisted his British-Australian mother (with whom he had a seven-year affair) keep Gislason and the relationship a secret. Gislason spent his early years in Iceland before his mother went back to Australia. The Promise of Iceland is not only about Gislason's return to Iceland to meet his father but also about the search for, and meaning of, home. It dawns on Gislason that his father is inseparable from the stark landscape of Iceland. "The interior was only ever a feared and dangerous place - something like my father, I thought, and the mysteries of his interior life." However, it is Gislason's portrait of his mother, Susan - her restlessness, her shyness, her dreams of elsewhere and her life in Iceland - that forms the spine of the memorable, finely crafted book.

(from the "Life and Style" lift-out in The Saturday Age, 27/8/11, p. 30)

Road Marking #8

2011-08-24T12:44:00.004+10:00

August 24, 1961 is the date of Hammarskjöld's final entry in Markings, and like most of the entries for 1961 this one is a poem. Here is the second verse:

I awoke

To an ordinary morning with grey light

Reflected from the street,

But still remembered

The dark-blue night

Above the tree-line,

The open moor in moonlight,

The crest in shadow.

Remembered other dreams

Of the same mountain country:

Twice I stood on its summits,

I stayed by its remotest lake,

and followed the river

Towards its source.

The seasons have changed

And the light

And the weather

And the hour.

But it is the same land.

And I begin to know the map

And to get my bearings.

(Markings, p. 181)

Many of the themes of the collection as a whole are gathered in this verse: the night and its dreams can take you back to a landscape where you felt a greater sense of belonging, but out of that projection back comes a more acute sense of isolation and uncertainty about life as it goes on in the present moment. The country that features in your dreams 'is the same land' - it has remained in place for you - but it is also remote. In a dream, you get your 'bearings', while outside there is the 'ordinary morning with grey light / Reflected from the street'.

One hopes that the dream and the street outside are related. As Auden writes in the foreword to the collection, Markings witnesses an 'attempt by a professional man of action to unite in one life the Via Activa and the Via Contemplativa'. And perhaps after all the 'map' exists both in your dreams and when you rejoin the outside; it becomes one form taken by the road markers that lie between action and contemplation.

(This post is part of a series of "markings" made in the lead-up to a trip I am making to Zambia in September to coincide with the 50th anniversary of Dag Hammarskjöld death in a plane crash in Ndola in 1961. Other posts in the series can be found here.)

Canberra Times review

2011-08-15T14:05:00.006+10:00

Sara Dowse's review of The Promise of Iceland has appeared in the Canberra Times. Her very interesting (and, he boasts, positive) review ties the book to public discourses around parenting and privacy laws. She continues,

The Promise of Iceland is, in effect, that of Gislason's three strong formative loves. The first is his mother, an intriguingly complex and adventurous woman whom her son attempts to fathom with tremendous sensitivity and respect. Susan Reid (she was married before her liaison and kept her husband's name) had a passion for travel and, ultimately, Iceland became her dreamland. What Gislason does particularly well is make a case for the significance of place in people's lives, and indeed, his mother's love for the beauty of Iceland and the tight-knit community of its stoic, hard-drinking people is ultimately mirrored in his own. And further, Iceland's pull on him is bound up with his seemingly unrequited love for his father.

[...]

It's not usual for me to give the bones of a plot to readers--it's generally bad reviewing and spoils things for the reader. I've relented in this case because the plot is not really the meat of this narrative, which is how a young boy who's been raised in somewhat extraordinary circumstances grows into a highly perceptive and self-aware man, courageous enough to break the taboo surrounding his birth. What it illustrates clearly is the powerful need children have in most cases for the love of both their parents, and the necessity of loving them regardless of whether that love is judged by others to be undeserved. The journeys to Iceland, then, a country beautifully realised in the book's pages, are truly stations on the author's bumpy, if often amusing, road to healing and self-knowledge.

(from the "Panorama" lift-out in the Canberra Times, 13/8/11, p. 26)

Road Marking #7

2011-08-06T21:08:00.002+10:00

Hammarskjöld's entry in Markings for 6 August 1961 - the second last entry in the journal - is a poem about Poughkeepsie in New York State, where in summers he hired the house of Swedish journalist Einar Thulin.

The meadow's massive
Green wave rises
Over the rolling ridge,
Crested with the white foam
Of a thousand oxeye daisies
Which blush
As the midsummer sun
Sets scarlet
In a haze of heat
Over Poughkeepsie.

Seven weeks have gone by,
Seven kinds of blossom
Have been picked or moved,
Now the leaves of the Indian corn grow broad,
And its cobs make much of themselves,
Waxing fat and fertile.
Was it here,
Here, that paradise was revealed
For one brief moment
On a night in midsummer?

(Markings, p. 180)

It's a beautiful poem in its own right, but I am also reminded of Hammarskjöld's last essay, "Castle Hill", which he was working on in the weeks before his death. The essay is a study of the seasons in his hometown Uppsala, and the poem shares with that work the commingling of visual impressions with a sense of the fragility of time: across the summer there is but "one brief moment" when the oxeye daisies, "the seven kinds of blossom", and the Indian corn offer both a perfect presence and a sense of their transience. (See here for my earlier discussion of the essay.)

But what I like most about the poem is what it reveals about his last summer, and that on at least one day he was returned to that magical feeling, one we experience perhaps more often in youth, of paradise in the everyday.

Road Marking #6

2011-08-02T20:23:00.006+10:00

Another day and another marking on the figurative road to Ndola. Below is part of the entry in Dag Hammarskjöld's Markings for 2 August 1961, 50 years ago today:

Forgive

My doubt,
My anger,
My pride.

(Markings, p. 178)

It seems typical of inspiring figures to question themselves in this way - a person who shows such resolve, moderation and humility will accuse himself of the opposite. A truly proud person, of course, never would.

A Letter from the Tower, by Richard Carroll

2011-08-01T14:43:00.005+10:00

We caught our first glimpse of the Tower as we drove into Allevard-les-Bains, a small town nestled in a valley at the foot of the Alps in Savoie. The Tour du Treuil is an imposing medieval structure on a knoll on the western slope of the valley, from where it presides over the surrounding countryside with an unflinching eye. Originally built in the twelfth century as a fortress from which the ruling powers could observe the traffic through the valley below, the tower has had many uses over the centuries, one of which was housing Russian refugees during the Second World War. Fortunately, Rose and I weren’t refugees, we were guests of the present owners, our Australian friends, Chris and Suzanne Carroll (no relation), who bought the tower in 2010.

From our room on the third floor, reached by a lift no less (or a narrow staircase, legs permitting), we could see the Gleyzin glacier (2697 m.) and snow-covered mountains framed in the massive window. We quickly settled in, then set off to tour the premises.

To celebrate our arrival, our hosts had invited their neighbours Louis and Colette for dinner on the terrace. While drinking an aperitif, we indulged in a game of croquet, with Chris explaining the rules. I had never played and didn’t realise just how cut-throat croquet could be. We blasted each others' balls around the grass or into the bushes in our surge to the winning post. With the game over, Louis suggested a round of petanque, to be played with square balls.

“Square balls?” I enquired, not quite managing to keep a note of incredulity from my voice.

“Oui, oui, c’est vrai; des boules carrées,” (Yes, yes, it’s true; square balls) Louis assured me, a twinkle in his eye. “Because of the hills. If we play with round balls, they disappear down the slopes, never to be seen again. So, we use square ones instead and the problem is solved, no?” he added with a wink that did little to dissipate the feeling he was taking me for a ride.

“I’m willing to give it a try,” I responded, not sure how this would end.

Colette scurried off to her house to fetch the said balls and arrived back carrying a bucket, which she deposited at my feet. “Voila, we can start,” she exclaimed, standing with her hands on her hips and a knowing look in her eye. I observed that the balls were indeed square, or more correctly, cubic, numbered in pairs. I plucked one from the bucket and studied it closely. “10 cm by 10 cm by 10 cm and made from pine,” Louis instructed proudly.

This is a whole new ball game, I thought.

The “ball” certainly felt different in the hand, much lighter by far than the usual steel spheres, but the game was the same. You chuck the thing and hope it lands closer to the jack than the opposition’s balls. I quickly learnt that if the “ball” landed on a corner, whether on the grass or gravel, it would invariably bounce and take off like a rocket into the nearest bush. We all got the hang of it and were soon into the fun of the game, square balls ricocheting in all directions, the tower seemingly watching all that transpired at its feet in benevolent tolerance. The pastis warmed my blood, while the verdant valley and forested hills stood as backdrops to a balmy French evening.

Richard Carroll is a doctoral student in Creative Writing at QUT. He is writing an historical novel based on the life of Tom Petrie (1831-1910).

Another view of the tower is available here.

Road Marking #5

2011-07-30T19:53:00.004+10:00

Dag Hammarskjöld's entry in his journal Markings for 30 July 1961 is a study of loneliness, one of the recurring themes of the collection.

The poet wakes to "the scream / That had woken me up", a scream that is witnessed by a man who is keeping watch and who is "floating / Like a drowned man / In the dark depths of the sea" but who can't solve the poet's central question:

Who the quarry,
Who the silent hunter
Over the sea of mist
Among the black trees,
Long before dawn?

(Markings, p. 177)

What is the object of loneliness? Who is in a position to identify one's loneliness, and so possibly take it away? It seems from this poem that, in Hammarskjöld's conception, the subject and object of loneliness are to some extent inseparable. The scream in the night comes from without, but can only be figured as the hunter and the hunted that both exist within.

Road Marking #4

2011-07-22T20:13:00.012+10:00

"So let us here resolve that Dag Hammarskjold did not live, or die, in vain."

This, the request made by John F. Kennedy to the UN General Assembly on 25 September 1961, a week after the news had come in that the Secretary-General was killed in a plane crash in Northern Rhodesia, what is now northern Zambia. Kennedy urged the Assembly to rally, for in the UN lay "the only true alternative to war". He continued,

This will require new strength and new roles for the United Nations. For disarmament without checks is but a shadow - and a community without law is but a shell. Already the United Nations has become both the measure and the vehicle of man's most generous impulses. Already it has provided - in the Middle East, in Asia, in Africa this year in the Congo - a means of holding man's violence within bounds.

It was Hammarskjold's personal intervention in Congo – then, with a break-away republic of Katanga threatening Congo’s independence and stability, at the very centre of Cold War tensions – that led indirectly to his death. UN forces operating in the southern Congolese province of Katanga (under Conor Cruise O’Brien) had engaged in military action against a Congolese break-away army serving General Tsombé and backed by Belgian interests. The military engagement expressed, albeit in an unwanted way, the increasingly interventionist nature of UN involvement in the area and the role of the UN more generally. It also necessitated Hammarskjold's presence on the ground – he was the man behind the UN’s new approach, and the situation in Congo had come to symbolise his style as Secretary-General. His purpose now was to arrange a ceasefire between UN troops and Tsombé, and he was on his way to Katanga when, a few minutes before his scheduled landing in Ndola, the UN plane clipped the tree canopy and crashed.

The events that night came at the end of what was already a long history of conflict in the Congo, a history that of course continues unabated fifty years later (the UN is still heavily involved). Here is a timeline of some of the most significant events in the area in the lead-up to Hammarskjold's decision to go to Congo in mid-September 1961.

30 June 1960: The independent Republic of Congo is declared.

11 July 1960: Katanga, a region in the southeast of Congo, declares itself an independent state.

Dec 1960: The Prime Minister of Congo, Patrice Lumumba, is captured and held prisoner in Katanga.

13 February 1961: The Katanga Minister of the Interior announces the death of President Lumumba.

14 February: The Soviet Union calls for the resignation of Dag Hammarskjold as Secretary-General.

21 February: The UN Security Council authorises the use of force in Congo as a last resort to prevent civil war. Hammarskjold sees the role of the UN in Congo as encouraging national reconciliation and eliminating foreign interference in Katanga.

April: The UN Operation in Congo intervenes to control the area between Kabalo and Albertville. Hammarskjold appoints Conor Cruise O’Brien, a member of the Irish Foreign Service and later editor of the London Observer, as the UN representative in Katanga. As Brian Urquhart later wrote, “Hammarskjold did not know O’Brien but had read and liked his Maria Cross, a series of essays on a group of French and English Catholic writers.” (Urquhart, Hammarskjold, Bodley Head, 1972, p.549 - this is my source for much of the information in this timeline)

12 May: President Kasa-Vubu of Congo announces the intention to reconvene Parliament.

30 May: Hammarskjold delivers a lecture at Oxford University - "The International Civil Servant in Law and Fact". This is his last major public address, and is read as a defence of his personal integrity and neutrality in the office of Secretary-General (in particular against attacks on him by the Soviet Union).

June: O'Brien takes up his post as the UN representative in Katanga, arriving on 14 June. O’Brien attempts to rid the area of its large number of European mercenaries.

July: Congo Parliament reopens. A new government in Belgium signals a possible weakening of Belgian antipathy towards the UN. Hammarskjold is asked by staff in Congo whether they may attempt a military takeover of Katanga. He refuses. However, he does permit O’Brien to adopt “more stringent methods” (Urquhart, p. 552) – arrests and expulsions.

August: A government is formed by Prime Minister Adoula, which the UN recognises and which paves the way for the UN to demand the expulsion of the foreign elements within Congo that are disrupting its progress towards being an independent democracy, and for a possible downscaling of the UN presence in Congo.

16 August: Hammarskjold is informed by the Congolese government that action is needed on Katanga in order to maintain stability and unity in the new Cabinet. Hammarskjold has indicated he is prepared to go to Congo if needed. He gives “instructions that all possible efforts short of the use of military force must be made to remove European officers from the mobile units in North Katanga.” (Urquhart, p. 554) He also strengthens the UN military presence in Katanga.

O’Brien, who has been attempting to get Tsombe into talks with Adoula, is quoted in the international press as saying he will undertake military action against the Katangese breakaway forces.

28 August: O’Brien succeeds in arresting 81 foreign officers.

September: Hammarskjold becomes more concerned about the position of UN people in Katanga, and the need for decisions to be made with his authorization. With tensions between O’Brien and Katangese military officers rising, it is increasingly likely that matters will play out on their own terms. It also becomes clear that Hammarskjold needs to visit Leopoldville and possibly also Katanga in order to diffuse the hostilities.

10 September: O’Brien’s assistant, Tombelaine, is arrested and then released. Hammarskjold prepares to leave for the Congo, telling “Mongi Slim that this would be his last personal effort to solve the Katanga problem and that if he failed he would be unable to remain as Secretary-General and had decided to resign.” (Urquhart, p. 565)

I will pick up this timeline in a later post. But first a link to my previous one, which was on the topic of the relation between contemplation and action. In one of his last letters, to the Swedish lyrical poet J. Erik Lindegren, Hammarskjold wrote this on what he thought was an illusory idea of "poetry in action":

We all remain free to form our personal life in accordance with standards which otherwise may find expression in poetry. But obligation to action, especially in the political field, is more of a danger than of a privilege. (Qtd in Urquhart, p. 544)

I doubt that he was concerned about the danger to himself. But on the eve of his flight to Congo he must have been very aware of the acute hazards involved in his participation: it seemed that every action now brought only more danger for those involved. In many ways, the challenge lay in convincing people to stop acting.

Road Marking #3

2011-07-19T13:45:00.008+10:00

Dag Hammarskjöld's Markings witnesses a spiritual and contemplative journey that the author began long before and then in tandem with his travels from Stockholm to New York to become UN Secretary-General, and subsequently throughout a world in conflict as a very visible "man of peace", as he is sometimes figured.

It is clear from Markings that Hammarskjöld did not separate his commitment to God from his commitment to humanity, and so it's no wonder that he died with copies of both the UN Charter and the New Testament in his hand luggage. Hammarskjöld's twin perspective - public/interventionist and spiritual/contemplative - is one of the reasons he so fascinates me. I am very interested in the relation between contemplation and action: how we come to occupy these realms at different moments in our lives, and how we move between them.

It is a relation that can also be understood as a dialogue between strength and humility. Hammarskjöld himself once touched on this through his understanding of the different qualities his parents had given him:

From generations of soldiers and government officials on my father's side I inherited a belief that no life was more satisfactory than one of selfless service to your country - or humanity. This service required a sacrifice of all personal interests, but likewise the courage to stand up unflinchingly for your convictions. From scholars and clergymen on my mother's side, I inherited a belief that, in the very radical sense of the Gospels, all men were equals as children of God, and should be met and treated by us as our masters in God.

A marking in the road: fifty years ago exactly, on 19 July 1961, Hammarskjöld wrote a prayer/poem that included these lines:

Have mercy
Upon our efforts,
That we
Before Thee
In love and in faith,
Righteousness and humility,
May follow Thee,
With self-denial, steadfastness and courage,
And meet Thee
In the silence.

Out of the steadfastness of living comes the possibility of silence, action in fact leading the way to a certain kind of inner clarity. But the spirit and the wordly self have to understand one another, they have to meet.

Road Marking #2

2011-07-14T14:32:00.005+10:00

"All real living is meeting."
- Martin Buber, I and Thou (1923)

Hammarskjöld was translating Buber's Ich und Du, a German philosophical work about relationships, in the weeks before his death. He had his translation with him, as well as an English edition of the work, during his final flight to Ndola.

I expect the English version was the 1957 Ronald Gregor Smith translation (reprinted by Continuum, 2004) that I bought this morning, and which I read over a coffee in one of the new cafes in King George Square. And although I am only just now beginning my first reading of this work, I can't help but underline the quoted sentence above as a kind of topic sentence for my coming trip to Ndola: we travel in order to meet, and in this sense travel often brings us closer to real living:

All real travel is meeting.

Road Marking #1

2011-07-06T17:38:00.004+10:00

In September I'm making a trip to Ndola in Zambia. My visit is timed to coincide with the fiftieth anniversary of Dag Hammarskjold's death in a plane crash there - or just 10km outside Ndola. I'm doing some research on the life of Hammarskjold for a book, and of course I'd like to see where he died. And, for a reason not entirely clear to myself, I'd like to visit the site on the anniversary of the crash.

In the weeks leading up to that journey, I will post some road markers on this blog, or mementos from the final weeks of his life. The first comes from his July 6, 1961 entry in Markings, his journal of reflections that was published in Swedish as Vagmarken, or Road Markers, in 1963, and later translated into English by the poet W H Auden, like Hammarskjold a hero of mine.

Here is a part of the poem that Hammarskjold wrote fifty years ago today:

Tired
And lonely,
So tired
The heart aches.
Meltwater trickles
Down the rocks
The fingers are numb,
The knees tremble.
It is now,
Now, that you must not give in.

On the path of others
Are resting places,
Places in the sun
Where they can meet.
But this
Is your path,
And it is now,
Now, that you must not fail.

(Markings, p. 175)

I suppose I am hoping to "meet" Hammarskjold in Ndola, or at least meet something that he left there. Unlike him, I am not an accomplished mountain walker, but I think I understand the metaphor in verse one about climbing, or holding on when the knees tremble. I'm sure we all do. And I very much like the idea of encountering other walkers' resting places, even if it is only for a moment, before you eventually have to make the track your own.

Letter from Crete, by Kristina Olsson

2011-07-04T19:27:00.003+10:00

The man in the hotel in Chania, the old port city of Crete, is telling me about old olive trees. I’ve heard a rumour that the oldest in the world is up the road, in a village called Kolymbari, where it rests its ancient roots - 2,000 or 4,000 years old, it depends who’s talking - and still produces olives. Yes, yes, says the man, and shrugs, and pushes out his bottom lip in the Greek way. It is very old, but there are many old trees. And then tells me the story of one that grows in a rocky field owned by the local banker.

People go to this banker for loans of money, and when they do, he dispatches his assistant to the olive tree that grows from rocks. If there are olives on that tree, the man says, they get their money. Meaning, if that tree is bearing, so will every olive tree in Greece. It will be a good year, both for olives and for loan repayments.

I wonder briefly if the Greek government has ever sought the advice of the Chania tree – or perhaps the services of its owner in these dark economic days. The week before, in Athens, we’d watched nervously as the mood on the streets grew angrier. Police and protesters began to organize around the central squares between our hotel and the Acropolis. The air was humid with anticipation. Everyone we spoke to seemed filled with a quiet fury, at the government, at themselves. All that money that disappeared. The shopkeeper shook her head. We didn’t even notice. But a Greek Australian on the bus saw it differently. No one paid tax for so long in this country. He raised black-grey eyebrows. That probably makes it easier to overlook what the government does.

We were due to fly out to the island of Kythera on the day before the general strike and marches, though in truth, we would have liked to stay, in solidarity with the beleaguered Greek people. But we’d already been robbed once on the subway, and besides, my sister had some solidarity of her own to cement on Aphrodite’s island. She’d already waited 62 years to do it, and even a revolution wasn’t going to stop her now.

She’s come to Greece looking for biology, for family, for blood. Not for love - even though this is the goddess’s island - or not love exactly. Perhaps the traces of it: resemblances, resonance, the mirror of eyes like hers. A part of her DNA is on Kythera; she wants to gauge how much. She wants to know if habit and disposition can leach from rock and sea, if geography can shape a person more surely than skin.

And I wanted to be with her as she searched, hoping for the last piece of a long family story I’ve been writing to fall into place.

Though I didn’t know it until we were teenagers, she and I have different fathers. The Swedish man we both called Dad met our mother when Sharon was four. She remembers picnics with Mum and Dad in grassy fields outside Brisbane, and a feeling of being included, being wanted. Her biological father, Minas, or Michael, one of thousands of men who had left Kythera for Australia in the first half of the 20^th century, had never acknowledged her existence, though he’d been married to our mother for eighteen months when Sharon was born.

But it’s not Minas she’s looking for here, not in flesh and blood. He died fifteen years ago in Sydney, still refusing to claim her. And besides, she has her father, he’s right here in Brisbane, she’s always said that. What she’s looking for is the Greekness that might have passed to her, survived in her, to work out who she really is. Why is she the only one amongst us who loves to fish, who loves backgammon? She’s hoping Minas’ family on Kythera can tell her, if she can find them. If she can convince them she is his.

On the island we stay in a traditional house in a traditional village propped on the side of a hill. Like many others, the village is only half-alive; many of its inhabitants live elsewhere now – Australia, America, Canada – and have for a long time. Along the twisting lanes, stone walls crumble away and arches and doorways are held together with bougainvillea vine, the remnants of abandoned lives visible through gaps and missing roofs. The houses peter out to groves of olives and oranges, to wide fields empty of everything but gorse and broom, wild figs and aniseed.

Kythera is the least developed of the islands that stud the seas around Greece. It is no Santorini, no Mykenos, with their pulsating nightlife and slick marinas. When Minas left here in 1939, many of its people were still peasants with a subsistence lifestyle, growing olives and herbs and fruit. Kythera’s chance to bloom shrank with the rolling waves of migration. But the men’s departure – many of them to Brisbane – was their only hope. They got jobs there, earned money to send back, sponsored uncles and nephews to come. But the mass leaving stilled the island’s heart.

On our first night we sit on our rooftop terrace at sunset and listen to an errant rooster crow the end of the day, rather than the beginning. But we drink to Sharon’s own brave start: next day we’ll set off to find people with a name she owns but was never given.

In a kafeneon in the high clifftop village of Mitata, an old man named Michaelis serves us strong Greek coffee and cheese and complains that no one in Greece wants to work. That’s the trouble, he says. He listens to Sharon’s story, the names, Minas Preneas, Yiannis Preneas, Adoni, Panayotis. Then: yes, this is the village of your family. But not any longer. He takes us up the road to the local priest, who goes through names and connections and directs us away to another village, Agia Pelagia, and a seaside taverna where the owner may know some more. The owner may, in fact, be her first cousin.

We take the nerve-racking drive along twisting roads barely wider than our waists. In truth they are old donkey trails smeared with asphalt, clinging to hills over vertiginous drops. The view reinforces a kind of Grecian paradox: this is an island of shocking beauty, with its beaches and cliffs and whitewashed houses, but its dry fields look hungry, hard-bitten, and a melancholy attends its scattered villages and its ruins. As I drive I think back to Athens, the forces of history held in the raised fist of the Acropolis, and anguish in the faces marching below it.

The tables of the taverna at Agia Pelagia shuffle into the sand of a picture postcard beach. The water is an astonishing blue. We ask the waiter for old Yiannis. He looks confused. Yiannis is dead, he says. A long time. It’s his son now. Adonis.

Adonis, yes. Sharon and I exchange glances. She says, if he’s the right Adonis, he’s my cousin. If he has an uncle, Minas, who went to Australia. She takes a breath. I’m Minas’ daughter. It’s the first time she’s said it.

The waiter is nonplussed. At any rate, Adonis is away tonight, in Piraeus, and his wife Marina is out. Sharon tells the man we’ll wait. We choose a table in the sand and order tzatsiki and lamb.

Twice in the next two hours, the waiter returns to us. Marina is coming, he says the first time, but she’s running late. He shrugs and turns back to his tables. We eat nervously, watching the sea darken, and feeling our early wash of optimism drain away with the tide. But perhaps the waiter senses our uncertainty, because he comes back and says in a different voice, Marina is coming. Please don’t leave.

And there she is, shortly after, a fair-haired, fifty-something woman with eyes that crinkle when she smiles. She walks towards us. My sister stands, takes several steps. I am Sharon, she says. Marina’s lifts her arms towards her and says, I am Marina. Your cousin.

Over the next few days people gather at the taverna. They’re shy at first, gently probing, trying to understand how and where this woman fits, how a part of their precious, scattered family could exist for sixty years without their knowledge. Could be lost to them. I watch as comprehension builds and connections are made, and the conversations become more clamorous. The tears and laughter as family trees are sketched, photographs handed around, phone calls made. My sister smiles shyly in the middle of it all, explaining, nodding. Showing off photos of her beautiful granddaughter. She looks like a Greek girl! the women shriek.

One afternoon, I leave them to it and wander down the esplanade, look at the souvenir cups and teatowels and fridge magnets that hardly vary from shop to shop. It’s quiet, even for June. It won’t be a good summer for Kythera, a storekeeper says. He’s been watching a television screen behind his back counter – there’s not much else to do – but Greeks everywhere are watching and listening now. They can’t help it: their capital is boiling over, fury and betrayal distort faces and speech, and they’re remembering last year’s terrible violence when death stalked the protests.

In the next shop two women pause to watch the breaking news, shuddering as tear gas clouds the screens and batons are raised. They tell me stories of life in modern Greece: hospital patients supplying their own sheets and dressings, sons unemployed for years, people bartering the extra tomatoes from their gardens for oranges, for bread. But things are worse in Athens, they say. Here at least we can grow our food.

On the day we leave the air is full of promises made and a gentle rage that Sharon is leaving, just now when they’ve found her. It’s only been three days. She clutches addresses, photographs of a grandmother she never knew, gifts. The women touch their palms to her cheeks. Old Irini says in Greek, don’t be lost again. The other women repeat it through their tears.

Three days. Time enough to be lost and found, exiled and reclaimed. We watch their faces, so fierce and tender, until they’re out of sight. Don’t be lost again. As we drive through the empty fields we know they’re talking not just about Sharon but about Greece, their Greece, because they too are lost, Greece is lost, sold off, bereft. They don’t know if and when it will ever be theirs again.

Kristina Olsson is a journalist, writer and teacher. Her most recent book The China Garden won the 2010 Barbara Jefferis Award and was shortlisted for the Nikita B. Kibble Award.

Songs of Home

2011-06-29T18:22:00.005+10:00

In my twenties I worked for a few years as a musician - nothing very glamorous, mainly just covers gigs to empty rooms or rooms of drunks. There were good moments. Once, a large gathering of soldiers who'd just lost a friend asked me to play And the band played Waltzing Matilda, and I don't think I'll ever forget how their singing almost wrenched the pub out of its foundations. On another occasion I played alongside (well, ahead of) Archie Roach, who'd been a hero of mine for years.

But generally this kind of jobbing musicianship was painful. You are incidental, and few musicians aim to be incidental. Some nights I did two shows in a row, especially on Fridays, when I'd get through an afternoon gig for the rowdy, early-finish office workers and then dash across town in a taxi for a four-hour stint at one of the Irish hotels, which at the time dominated the pub scene. It meant a well-paid night, but seven hours of singing on your own in smoky rooms was a quick way to kill your passion for music.

A quick way to get it back was listening to James Taylor on the drive home, or better still at 2am when I was trying to relax with a beer. And one song in particular, now available in several versions on Youtube, and which in one live recording comes with this introduction from Taylor: "I was homesick at the time. I didn't have a home, but that doesn't keep you from being homesick sometimes."

Just as it did in my twenties, this song makes me want to go to Carolina. Or, convinces me that Carolina is home.

And, here, another wonderful song of Carolina.

A ticket to Zambia

2011-06-24T12:47:00.010+10:00

It isn't all that long ago that tickets were printed on something like sixduplicate sheets of carbon paper. I am worried that sixduplicate is an invented word, but I'll stick with it for now.

There was a very specific moment when each of the carbon copies could be ripped out, and I remember travelling with the dim apprehension that I would accidentally rip one out and be stranded in some malicious stop-over point between London and Sydney. Changes were written with extreme care and in mysterious code over tippex dabbled (I know, not a word either) on each of the sheets.

It really isn't long ago that this was standard, and yet these printed airline tickets already seem impossibly clumsy, quaint objects. But they held such magic. You kept them for years, because they were worth keeping - in a shoe box filled with postcards, concert stubs, museum catalogues, and badly folded maps. Tickets were just as specific to each journey as these other markers.

An e-ticket is still a ticket; and in fact just as exciting, even if it arrives by email and you print it out yourself on the K-Block Level 3 printer called FAC-12.

The e-ticket still holds the same promise, the same beckoning. It says you are going somewhere you haven't been before. What a promise that is! And that you will be tired, jet-lagged, smelling of too much "Tester" aftershave, burdened with a bottle of scotch you don't normally drink and don't really like, overfed with plane food, desperate for your hotel room, and yet awake in a way that only the novelty of travel allows you to be awake.

It says you're really doing it. You're really going to Zambia.

Letter from Laos, by Khouanfa Siriphone

2011-06-13T11:01:00.004+10:00

I return smiles as I walk past a dozen quiet guests in the living room. I reach my grandma’s bedroom and pull the door open. I see her lying on her new bed. My parents, my sister, my little brother, my aunt, who arrived from Taiwan two days ago, and two uncles, whose flights from Canada just touched down this morning, fill the space around her. Everyone spares me a glance, then they turn back to observe grandma’s last moment. I move to a dark corner and stare at her pale, wrinkled and limp body. I watch her dried lips open and shut as she takes in air. Then I am lost in thought. I wonder if the stories about flashbacks before dying are true. If so, would she think of me? Memories about grandma sweep through me, a twenty-three year journey that my grandma and I share. Maybe that explains why I am the only one who sheds no tears.

*

I remember running home shoeless one day. It was Lao boys’ uniform expression of rush. We believed running barefoot could boost speed, but the stones on the unpaved path slowed me down; walking might be faster. I hoped grandpa would be asleep when I got home.

Facing the old white door, I tried to control my breathing. Once it slowed, I carried out my plan. The aim was to get to the bathroom and clean up all the evidence.

I tiptoed my way through. The door of the bathroom was in sight. It urged me to run, yet I was mindful of the noise the old wooden floor would make. Patiently, I continued. Suddenly, behind me came a sound of a stick slicing the air. I knew that sound well. I fell to the ground, crying even before my grandpa could issue his commands.

“Stop at once,” he said.

I turned and saw grandpa stood holding the stick in his right hand. At the sight of it, I found his command impossible to obey.

“Stop crying at once,” he repeated and smacked the stick at the back end of his pants, displaying its might with that awful sound.

I hid my dirty feet and hands. I looked him in the eyes, and cried for my life. Nothing helped. He raised the stick higher, and I cried louder in response. I am doomed, I thought.

From the garden, grandma came running and shouting something in Vietnamese. My grandma stepped in front of me. Motionless as a mountain, she stared at grandpa. Silence flooded the room. Then grandpa looked sideways, sighed loudly and moved away. Before he left, he turned, pointing the stick at her and said, “You spoil him!”

I looked up at grandma and started crying again.

*

Everyone moves closer to grandma as her breathing becomes unstable. She now struggles with every breath. Once her lungs are full, she exhales as if she is saying, “I’m tired. I can’t go on.” Now, the grievers moan louder as if wishing they could somehow share her suffering. Hopelessly, I watch as life leaks out of grandma. I almost shed tears, but not from the event before me. It is an event from seven years ago.

*

I quietly unlocked the door. I pushed my motorbike through the threshold and parked it in its place. I was glad about our newly renovated floor. My dad replaced the old and damped wooden planks with concrete. Now, I could be as sneaky as a very drunk teenager can be. And when asked, I would tell grandma that I came home just a few minutes past midnight. My friend’s birthday party had been great and exhausting.

A few hours later, I woke up remembering that I had to see a friend who was leaving for the United States. Within fifteen minutes, I was dressed and ready to ride off to the airport. On the way out, I heard grandma saying something, but the noise of my motorbike swallowed it. I assumed that she had just reminded me to be safe and stay out of trouble, as she usually did, so I shouted, “OK!”

My teenage years were always fun and unpredictable. We extended the morning at the airport into an afternoon party. Then, we all cheered when someone suggested that we should expand this into Sunday night clubbing. It was supposed to be illegal for teens under eighteen to enter night clubs; but the situation then had become somewhat tolerated. I ended up getting home at dawn again. It was only an hour earlier this time. And, as usual, I would tell grandma that I was home a few minutes past midnight.

On a weekend a few weeks later, my dad and I were alone in our shop. My parents were merchants. My dad sold electronic goods, and my mom sold garments. When Laos opened its market to China, cheap goods started to come in, and the Lao economy boomed. Laotians spent more money as goods became more affordable. My dad, a Chinese-Vietnamese descendant, took advantage of the opportunity and forged direct chains of supplies with Chinese merchants. Our living standards were raised dramatically.

“Grandma complained about you,” he said, breaking the quiet around us.

I said nothing. It was better not to say anything because I had violated a lot of house rules. I did not know which one he was referring to, so I decided to wait for more information.

“She said you came home very late on weekends. Sometimes at dawn.”

I felt sweat running down my back.

“She said that I should move you back to your old room on the third floor,” he said, referring to the flat my parents moved to after their marriage. I used to stay with them and endure their stricter rules. I did not want to go back there.

“Then, no one would stay with grandma,” I suggested.

“Your sister might do a better job. She doesn’t like going out,” he replied. “You knew why I allowed you to stay with grandma.”

I nodded. My job was to take care of grandma after grandpa passed away.

“And what if something happened to her when you are not there?”

I felt my back soaked. My head spun with a million thoughts.

“Anyway, let’s have lunch; and we can talk more about it once your mom and sister return,” he said, reaching into the lunch bag. Sometimes, my grandma prepared lunch for us. She believed that fast food in the market was unclean and unhealthy.

“She made stir-fried crab curry for you,” he said as he placed the blue-lid plastic container onto the low table. Shortly after, two boxes of rice followed.

I was very excited. My grandma cooked my favourite dish for me.

“She told me to make sure that you have it, and you don’t run off again like last time when you told her to cook it for you,” he said. “She waited until two, but you did not return; and you ran off again the next morning. You promised her that you would come back for it. She had to throw it away because she’s too old to eat it. I think you know how expensive those crabs are.”

I paused for a moment, and then I said, “I will be right back. Nature calls.”

I ignored eye contact with everyone while walking to the public toilet. I walked faster as I could not block the memory about that promise. I had forgotten about it. I broke into a run as I realised it must have cost her a fortune and a lot of energy to prepare that dish for me. I would never be able to contemplate how much I had hurt her feelings. Yet, she acted as if nothing had happened.

I reached the toilet. I stood motionless behind the locked door. And amidst the silence of the place, I imagined how cold and tired she would have been sitting there until two.
*

I find myself back in the room when my sister asked me to get a glass of warm water for grandma. I rush out and come back with a half empty glass. Everyone gives way. I zigzag my way to her left side. I then shove my right hand under the pillow and I lift her upper body. I am no stranger to this practice. In fact, I have been her night shift carer since the beginning until the very end. I watch her as she takes in water little by little. Then a thought comes to me.

*

The incident happened four months ago when grandma fell in the bathroom. After that her health declined. Within a week, she could not move by herself. We had to do every human routine for her. A nurse supported her by day. My dad visited her at dawn, and he showered her in the evening. I cared for her at night.

My bond with my dad was not as friendly as it used to be. I turned into a rebellious eldest child full of impassivity and disobedience. I did not blame him for what we had become. I could not blame him, really. I understood how stressed he was from taking care of his mother and running a business that was now struggling.

In my dad’s view, the lack of his early discipline had turned me into a couch potato that would not do anything except attend classes three hours daily, sleep by day and play video games at night. I had turned into something that he had not hoped for.

To be honest, I did not care what he thought of me. I continued my existence as best I could. I could not risk falling asleep - once, I woke up to find grandma lying cold on the marble floor again. The sight of her voicelessly groaning was the last thing I ever wanted to endure.

A week later, I asked her why she did not press the alarm when she wanted to use the toilet. She said she would prefer me to have a sound sleep so that I could perform better at college. I shook my head and smiled. We then made a deal that she would press the alarm if she needed me, and I would wake up only if she called. She also made me promise that I would not tell my dad about her falling.

Except the falling part, none of us kept our promises. I caught her time and again attempting to get up by herself. And, every time I caught her, she would grumble that I should be in bed. I just smiled and carried her to the toilet. And we repeated our broken promises several times each night ever since.

As I walk back to wash the glass, I hear frantic cries. It takes me a while to realise that grandma has passed away. I lean onto the kitchen wall, thinking how my life will be like from now on. How different it will be without her to return home to. I feel warmth in my eyes. I let out a long sigh. And in that brief moment I hear a faint memory echoes, “a good boy mustn’t cry.”

Khouanfa Siriphone studies Creative Writing at QUT.

Great Journeys: Elizabeth David wants an omelette and a glass of wine

2011-05-30T20:45:00.003+10:00

I'm not sure you can do justice to the eclecticism of Elizabeth David's food/travel writing, or its mild disdain of all manner of poor taste, without simply collecting some of her prose ingredients. The following are all taken from her collection of newspaper and magazine articles gathered under the title An Omelette and a Glass of Wine.

August rain swishes down on the leaves of the wild jungly tree which grows, rootless apparently, in the twelve inch strip of gravel outside my London kitchen. I am assured by a gardener that the plant originated in Kamchatka, but now it looks more like something transplanted from the Orinoco. Staring out at it, hunched into her bumble-bee-in-a-black-mood attitude, my cat suddenly jumps up, presses her face to the window, doesn't like what she sees, comes back, wheels around, washes her face, re-settles herself on her blanket, stares out again. I feel restless too. ("Summer Holidays", 1962)

*

Cherished in our dreams, held close to our hearts in deathless legend is the humble French restaurant, the unpretentious petit coin pas cher where one may drop in at any time and be sure always of a friendly welcome, a well-cooked omelette, a good salad, a glass of honest wine. ("Secrets", 1963)

*

What on earth comes over wine waiters when they take the orders of a woman entertaining another woman in a restaurant? ("Ladies' Haves", 1962)

*

Once upon a time there was a celebrated restaurant called the Hôtel de la Tête d'Or on the Mont-St-Michel just off the coast of Normandy. The reputation of this house was built upon one single menu which was served day in day out for year after year. It consisted of an omelette, ham, a fried sole, pré-salé lamb cutlets with potatoes, a roast chicken and salad, and a dessert. Cider and butter were put upon the table and were thrown in with the price of the meal, which was two francs fifty in pre-1914 currency.

...

As to the omelette itself, it seems to me to be a confection which demands the most straightforward approach. What one wants is the taste of fresh eggs and the fresh butter and, visually, a soft bright golden roll plump and spilling out a little at the edges. It should not be a busy, important urban dish but something gentle and pastoral, with the clean scent of the dairy, the kitchen garden, the basket of early morning mushrooms or the sharp tang of freshly picked herbs, sorrel, chives, tarragon. ("An Omelette and a Glass of Wine", 1959)

Lists, of course, are a central feature of food writing, but to work as good writing they must seem as fresh as the best ingredients. Elizabeth David's lists are, because they are intelligent and crisp, but also long enough to make you realize that this is a person who constructs the world out of its elements, out of small dishes. You sense, too, that this outlook extends to people and places.

Rose Barattero is the euphonious name of the proprietress of the Hôtel du Midi at Lamastre in the Ardèche. Slim, elegant, her pretty grey hair in tight curls all over her head, the miniscule red ribbon of the Legion of Honour on her grey dress, Madame Barattero is an impressive little figure as she stands on the terrace of her hotel welcoming her guests as they drive into the main square of the small provincial town whose name she has made famous throughout France. ("Chez Barattero", 1958)

*

When lunchtime approaches, the question is are we near a river or a lake? If so, shall we be able to reach its banks? For the ideal picnic there has to be water, and from that point of view, France is wonderful picnic country, so rich in magnificent rivers, waterfalls, reservoirs, that it is rare not to be able to find some delicious spot where you can sit by the water, watch dragonflies and listen to the birds or to the beguiling sounds of a fast-flowing stream. As you drink wine from a tumbler, sprinkle your bread with olive oil and salt, and eat it with ripe tomatoes or rough country sausage you feel better off than in even the most perfect restaurant. ("Eating out in Provincial France 1965-1977", 1980)

Notice how the features of the French landscape are played off the ingredients of the perfect Provincial picnic. I don't suppose my sentence structure will ever be as assured as David's, or that white wine and ripe tomatoes will help all that much. But of course I am willing to try.

The collection: Elizabeth David, An Omelette and a Glass of Wine (edited by Jill Norman, Penguin, 1986).

Letter from a pagan place, by Kim Wilkins

2011-05-23T16:03:00.001+10:00

One of the perks of being a writer is tax deductible field work. For the last three years, I have been working on a 140 000 word novel, the first in a series (I also published a novella in the series in 2010) that draws its inspiration from Anglo-Saxon English history, literature, and culture. The novel is historical fantasy, so as well as the facts about daily life, I have been gathering vast amounts of material about the pagan and magical beliefs of England. The story, whose working title is "The Garden of the Mad King", is set over one spring in the middle of the eighth century in an alternate version of England called Thyrsland. I've spent a lot of time in England during autumn and winter, but none at all in spring since I was a very young child. So I organised a quick research trip over Easter and May day, to soak up some of the feel of England as it bursts back to life after the long winter sleep. My goal was to seek out things that were earthy and pagan, places that were marked by what Jimmy Page once called "power, mystery, and the hammer of the gods".

My travelling companion and I drove into the Dorset village of Cerne Abbas on a warm spring afternoon. My feet were out the window of the car, sun on my soles, wind between my toes. It felt a suitably pagan way to start my research. Wildflowers bloomed everywhere. I soon learned all their names: meadowsweet and monkshood, cowslips and soapwort. The hawthorne hedges were covered in snowy flowers, and the chestnut trees were bristling with creamy catkins. The narrow B roads resembled tunnels of green: sycamore and ash and chestnut and oaks just budding. Cerne Abbas is probably best known for the giant chalk figure carved on the hillside above the village, with an enormous club and an enormous doodle at full tumescence. Some think he's a pagan fertility figure, some think he's a much more recent prank, but he certainly is impressive. I climbed to the top of the hill that he's carved on, and breathed in the incredible views of fields and woodlands. White fluffy seeds floated on the air, and bumble bees buzzed about. The next day I drove to nearby Glastonbury Tor and made the steep climb to the top.

The stories go that Glastonbury is Avalon: only a thin membrane separates the two. I lay in the sunshine for two hours seeing if I could feel the ancient hum of the magic that's supposed to be in the earth there. Another time I took a morning to make my way out to Breamore, to see the pre-conquest Saxon church there, and contemplate in awe the enormous ancient yew tree in the graveyard. I made daisy chains in the spring sunshine, walked through the woods on Beltane eve, and was woken on May day by a procession of Morris dancers that Herne the great hunter was leading down the street below my B&B window. My imagination was full of robins and blackbirds, horse gods and green men; my blood beat with the rhythm of the changing season. To be in England in spring is to understand how the numinous possibilities of magic, and the mundane realities of agriculture have always been understood together. I went through my manuscript and marked over one hundred annotations for the next draft so I can infuse it with that sweet ache of pagan woodlandsy magic. So when I'm longing to be back in the English springtime again, I can simply open up my story and be there once again. Only with swords and dragons.

Yew Tree

Kim Wilkins has published numerous novels of gothic, romance and YA fiction. She lectures at the University of Queensland.

Ideas, man

2011-05-20T19:29:00.005+10:00

Today I presented a paper at the Brisbane Ideas Festival entitled, "Returning to Iceland: Is there a geography of happiness and does it bring you home?" The presentation was filmed and is available for download here.

Presenting at the Brisbane Ideas Festival

My talk centred on the complex nature of home, and the various ways we come to define it. I spoke at length about my book The Promise of Iceland and travel, which often makes us aware of the distinctive features of the place we're from - interestingly, Australians and Icelanders, both island dwellers, seem to share the need to leave at some stage of their lives. It's as though leaving permits you to see yourself afresh, and suddenly to be freed of an established version of yourself that your friends and relatives may think of as fixed.

Another way to define home is through the process of returning after a long time away: the feeling of belonging and familiarity that hits you when you get back is a kind of definition. It's a feeling that reminds you that the pleasures of travel, and the intoxicating novelties of movement, are limited, temporary; while home, the place you come back to, has more enduring qualities.

But I think home is also defined by the tension between one's need for change and the satisfaction we draw from stability. Home pulls you back, but I think it also, in very positive ways, pushes you out.

With Rod Welford

Desert Brevity: Wilfred Thesiger in the Empty Quarter

2011-05-17T14:23:00.003+10:00

I had intended to write a long post about Wilfred Thesiger's Arabian Sands (1959), but on more than one occasion he demonstrates that brevity is often the best form of description. For example,

I crossed the border into French Somaliland and stayed with Capitaine Bernard in the fort which he commanded at Dikil. He and most of his men were to die a few months later when they were ambushed by a raiding force from Aussa. From Dikil I travelled across the lava desert to Tajura on the coast. So far it had been the tribes that had threatened us, now it was the land itself. It was without life or vegetation, a chaos of twisted riven rock, the debris of successive cataclysms, spewed forth molten to scald the surface of the earth. This dead landscape seemed to presage the final desolation of a dead world. For twelve days we struggled over the sharp rocks, across mountains, through gorges, past craters. We skirted the Assal basin four hundred feet below sea-level. The blue-black waters of the lake were surrounded by a great plain of salt, while and level as an icefield, from which the mountains rose in crowded tiers, the lava on their slopes black and rusty red. We were lucky. Some rain had fallen recently and filled the water-holes, but fourteen of my eighteen camels died of starvation before we reached Tajura.

There's enough material in this paragraph for at least a chapter: the visit to the doomed fort, Tajura and the coast, threats by local tribes, the dead world of the Assal basin, starvation. But poor Capitaine Bernard and the fourteen camels are merely brackets of a paragraph that leaves its victims behind and swirls deeper and deeper into the landscape.

It produces a striking, desert effect: the remorseless brevity that witnesses the most terrible parts of a difficult journey.

Drawing to Write: Thingvellir

2011-05-02T21:54:00.015+10:00

Thingvellir is the site of Iceland's first national assembly, and one of the most beautiful expressions of the island's constant state of rupture. The dividing line between the Continental plates is revealed in gorges and ridges that encircle the lake. Constantly divided, it may seem an unusual place for a symbol of national unity. But I like the tension of history and landscape: strangely, the very present sense of a violent geological past deepens your awareness of the unities in our lives.

You come off a high heath to the national park. This is the first glimpse of Thingvallavatn, the deepest lake in Iceland.

The national park is only 40 minutes' drive outside Reykjavík. Here a 2001 study of the waterfall that tips into the gorge.

My good friend Kári Bergsson took this photograph of me drawing at Thingvellir. It's quite an old picture, and I no longer have the long hair. It received its end when, in 2003, I celebrated submitting my PhD on the Icelandic sagas, so many of which have scenes at Thingvellir, with a drastic but overdue haircut.

Drawing to Write: Vestmannaeyjar

2011-05-01T21:42:00.009+10:00

In May 2007, I made my first trip to the Vestmannaeyjar, the collection of volcanic islands off the south coast of Iceland.

As we steamed out of Thorlákshöfn, we were kept company by this solitary trawler.

And here the view as the ferry approaches Heimaey, where the port and main settlement of the islands are located.

More drawings of Iceland can be found here and here.

Letter from Cape Town, by Kathy George

2011-04-18T19:58:00.003+10:00

In the mornings my mother hugs me as if she is pleased and a little surprised to find she has survived the night.

I am at the big toe of Africa, in the seaside village of Fish Hoek, to celebrate my parents’ 60th wedding anniversary. Their house is full of visitors and, ironically, I am sleeping downstairs in the granny flat. My parents are in their eighties and use walking sticks, and I lie in bed and listen to their sticks tok-tokking on the floor above as they move from room to room. Now my mother is in the kitchen washing the teacups, and now my father is in the bathroom, shaving. The tok-tokkie, an African beetle with a hard, polished brown shell, gets its name from the knocking sound it makes with its abdomen on the ground when calling for a mate. Lying in bed I imagine my parents are tok-tokkies calling to each other. Since they are both deaf, this does not seem so ludicrous.

Our days together are taken up by endless rituals, mostly involving tea. But in-between afternoon tea and dinner I persuade them to come for a drive, although my father says he has seen everything there is to see. My mother announces she is keen to go. We decide on the Chapman’s Peak route, a road which was hacked into the mountain between 1915 and 1922 and which falls away sharply on one near-vertical side to breathtaking views of the sea below. But before we get there we must run the gauntlet of poverty and be confronted not so much by beggars as by salesmen selling cheap gimmicks. During the soccer World Cup these salesmen hawked vuvuzelas and colourful flags the size of tablecloths, with an air of celebration; today they are sombre and it’s the dusky avocado they’re selling. Eight for twenty rand. Eight for roughly three dollars. We don’t need avocadoes, but before I can reach for my money my mother reminds that people have had their throats cut by marginally opening their windows. She stares stoically ahead through the windscreen and tells me not to talk to them, while my father shouts “Lock the doors!” from the back seat.

Visiting South Africa is a little like gaining access to a vast and beautiful prison complex, with any number of doors to be locked, bolted and unlocked. My parents’ house has four locked exits before you can emerge from the garage. And when I visit my nephew in Johannesburg I find he lives on an estate enclosed by razor wire and accessible only by boom gate and two security guards. In addition, the entire community of houses is patrolled by no less than fifty guards at any one time. My nephew tells me that when he accidentally set off the burglar alarm, a guard carrying an AK47 vaulted the wall and was on his doorstep in less than two minutes. In Johannesburg everything is exacerbated: the crime rate is higher, the poverty more confronting, the air is thinner and the driving faster and more reckless. In addition, we eat out a lot and party much harder. When staying in Johannesburg I, too, am a little surprised to find myself alive every morning.

For me, visiting South Africa is comparable to a love affair, not only with the land but with the people. Mostly the Africans are a generous people, generous with their flashing white smiles and with their laughter. They have no airs and graces and they accept their lot and make the most of it. Engage any one of them in conversation at, for instance, a checkout till and you can be assured of a warm reception and a laugh. However, long-held enmities remain. Even as I write, Julius Malema, the ANC’s Youth League president, is in court to defend the charge of singing the ANC’s struggle song, “Kill the Boer, Kill the Farmer”. I worry more than ever about the country’s future. I wonder if my father is right.

It is only when I climb the mountains that I feel liberated and, as if I am suffering this time more than ever from claustrophobia, I climb three. (My record is five.) The first is above my parents’ house. This little mountain is where my father wants his ashes to be scattered “just below the rock that looks like a chameleon so that I can keep an eye on your mother.” The other two mountains are more serious climbs: Lions Head, 669m high, to the right of Table Mountain, and Table Mountain itself which is roughly 1,100m. Because I am pressed for time, we take the route of Platteklip Gorge for the latter and ascend vertically up the mountain, not by ropes but simply by putting one foot in front of another for some three kilometres. Over one and half hours later when we reach the top my thighs are trembling and my face aglow with exertion, but the view over the city and the Atlantic Ocean as far as the eye can see thrills me to the core. For the moment I forget about locks and bolts and beggars and avocadoes. I forgot that my father told me that Platteklip Gorge was for people who have no time to smell the fynbos as he put it.

Kathy George studies Creative Writing at QUT.

Note: According to the Oxford Dictionary of Plant Sciences, fynbos is a "South African name for the sclerophyllous vegetation, physiognomically similar to chaparral, that occurs in regions such as the Cape Province."

Letter from the Blue Mountains, by Lesley Hawkes

2011-04-06T21:01:00.003+10:00

Recently, I had the great privilege of being taken on a hidden walking trail deep in the Blue Mountains in NSW. A friend of mine, Susan Carson, had asked if I wanted to accompany her on a walk down the mountains to Eleanor and Eric Dark’s own personal cave hide-away. We were at Sydney University for a Romanticism conference and it worked out that we had a free day before we had to fly home to Brisbane.

“Sure, I”ll go. Is it a difficult walk?”

“No”, she replied. And I believed her.

Eleanor Dark is one of Australia’s most critically acclaimed writers and Eric is often regarded as one of Australia’s first environmentalists. Varuna (the writing centre in the Blue Mountains) was the Darks’ family home. However, they also had another home—a cave deep in the valley of the mountains themselves. Sue had learnt about the cave from her studies on Dark and when she contacted Varuna they put her in touch with Mark O’Flynn, a talented writer and bushwalker from the area. Mark kindly agreed to be our unpaid guide (I stress unpaid to highlight that this man was under no obligation to wait for us or to show any sympathy toward our general lack of fitness).

The Blue Mountains are a spectacular sight. They surround and enclose the landscape, almost pulsing with the life they contain. People come from all over the world to experience first-hand the blue haze that radiates from the enormous structure. To view them from the top is, indeed, a majestic sight but to experience them at ground level made them take on a very different existence. These mountains had depth—true depth that buried into the skin of the Australian landscape. We often view mountains as far-away markers, identifiable boundaries between the land and the sky. To crawl down into the valleys of the mountains gave me a very different perspective. I felt as if I was entering into the veins of Australia’s very existence.

The journey down to the cave was extremely difficult. This was mainly due to the Darks’ refusal to reuse the same trail. They did not want people following them so each time they went down they devised a new track. The cave was furnished with mattresses and how they carried these down is a true mystery. The Darks had supposedly spotted the cave from an opposing mountain and it took them over a year to finally track down to it and claim it as their own. The entrance into the cave is a small crevice in the rocks. You wiggle through the opening or go over the top of a huge rock and jump down into it. And there it is: huge rock faces that form rock ceilings, rock floors and rock walls. These structures jut out over the mountains. The views over the east each morning must have provided Eleanor with endless writing material.

As I mentioned earlier, Eric Dark is credited with being one of Australia’s first environmentalist, however, it is of interest to note that he used dynamite to blow up a rock face and create a private ensuite for the family. The rock pool is still there today.

This trail is a secret, not because I feel that I am one of the elite who should know about it but rather the opposite. I do not know if I have the authority to reveal its presence. This lack of authority works on a number of levels: I do not know if the Darks would approve of people entering their natural home and, more importantly, I do not know if the landscape wants people traversing it. I do not know. I know I own the experience of travelling down to the cave but the actual physical site itself is not mine to share. I am not suggesting that the cave is a monument to a past era but more that I do not know all the stories that are alive in this cave. I do not know if it wants new chapters added to the existing chapters. It was a spectacular place but it was not my place. I knew with every step I took over every rock and every tree root—that I was a visitor. I was being allowed in but I knew I was not in charge of the narrative. I was extremely relieved when I was allowed to come out of the narrative and not remain lost in a labyrinth of stories that swirl continuously through the mountains.

Lesley Hawkes teaches in Literary Studies at QUT.

Letter from Ariege, by Sebastian Sinclair

2011-03-31T13:25:00.000+10:00

I’m often quizzed on the extravagances of France, with the same set of questions.

‘Have you been to Paris or seen the famous artworks at the Louvre?’

‘Yes,’ I say, ‘but have you heard of the southwest?’

The Ariege region nudges the border of Spain, divided only by the Pyrenees. During winter, the powdery snow litters every object and every rock, blanketing the mountains in a thick white. In summer, the snow is stripped bare revealing a plethora of rocky outcrops and sun scorched grass. The ancient and weather worn country-side is mimicked by the people who inhabit it. Unshaven shepherds in their flat caps and faded vests call out to herds whose goat-bells ring throughout the valley.

In the shade of an old elm, I sit, watching closely as my Pepe picks apples from a nearby tree. His rigid straw hat and large round glasses rest still as he struggles to free the yellow fruit. He tosses me one and tells me to take a bite.

‘Goute.’

I scrunch my face up.

He has caught me off guard.

‘Cest pas bon.’

It isn’t very nice, I tell him. But he assures me that they ripen once they have been picked.

I sit for a while more, soaking up the familiar surroundings. I have memories here as a young boy. This area never changes. The scent of wildflowers and freshly mowed grass. I can see cows on a nearby farm where I once met a young boy. And the sun, arrogant and persistent, reveals an array of blues, purples and yellows across the hillside.

My grandfather signals me, time to go back up to the house. I follow closely behind and watch as his Labrador comes over. Together we make our way across the grass and up to the porch where my Meme, mother and sister are playing cards. I feel at home here, things make sense. Vines grow and mate passionately, in this way and out, across the walls of my grandparents two story stone house. Large shutters wrap around the windows locking in the warmth of winter and blocking out the sun during summer’s unforgiving days. Australians prefer fans and heaters, but I find shutters to be much more practical.

Lunchtime is ready. I watch as my Meme produces dish after dish accompanying each fitting course. I pick at my food inquisitively as a conversation unfolds. At first I listen and absorb. Eventually I lose track and struggle to follow the words tumbling from the adult’s mouths. I brace myself. My Pepe slams his fist hard on the table, sending cups flying into the air.

“Non, je dis non,” he yells.

He’s angry about something.

But my mother doesn’t care.

She picks up an empty plate and slams it onto the table causing the cutlery to shake.

“You’re my father, but you don’t understand me,” she screams, flushing red.

My sister and I look at each other, cheeks full of food.

We are trying hard to not be included.

My Meme stands to stop the violence that has erupted on her back porch.

“Desert,” she says airily and sweeps off to the kitchen.

The table is silent once again. She returns moments later with a large ceramic bowl of ‘amity’ apple puré. It is her homemade recipe, using freshly picked ingredients of the tiny yellow kind.

‘C’est normal.’

To be at each other’s throats is a usual past time.

I remember once, when the mail was delivered, my Pepe strolled down the gravel driveway with his dog to play fetch. The dog returned with a roll of newspaper in his mouth while my Pepe clutched a fistful of letters. Excited by the arrival of some news, I stood patiently waiting beside my grandfather as he sat and opened the first of the letters and began reading to himself. I glanced over; big mistake. I was clipped across the head by the full force of my grandfather’s strong hands. Apparently, it is rude to read one’s letters, especially over one’s shoulder.

But how was I to know? I can’t even read French.

My Pepe showed me the tough kind of love.

*

Sebastian Sinclar is a Journalism student at QUT.

From this bookshelf to the world outside

2011-03-26T11:49:00.003+10:00

I take the title of this post from Italo Calvino's essay "Hermit in Paris", an exploration of the relationship between place and how one writes. Calvino goes from the younger man for whom "the world was there just outside the door, packed with signs, accompanying me everywhere" to a writer who only works well in a space which is entirely his, his own room "with books to hand":

Maybe it is not so much for the books themselves, but for a kind of interior space they form, as though I identified myself with my ideal library.

The world is no longer something he carries around with him, but a place he consults, and "the leap from this bookshelf to the world outside is not as great as it seems": Paris is in fact "a giant reference work, a city which you can consult like an encyclopaedia", the best illustration of which is the shops, "the most open, communicative discourse a city uses to express itself". Consquently, "in Paris you can always hope to find what you had thought lost".

"Hermit in Paris" is derived from an interview, a source that may help to explain the high energy and economical manner of some of the thoughts that are collated here around ideas of place and imagination:

Maybe to write about Paris I ought to leave, to distance myself from it, if it is true that all writing starts from a lack or an absence. Or else be more inside it, but for that I would need to have lived there from when I was young, if it is true that it is the first years of our existence, not the places of our maturity, that shape the world of our imagination. Or rather: a place has to become an inner landscape for the imagination to start to inhabit that place, to turn it into theatre.

...

...Paris could become again an inner city, and I could write about it. It would no longer be the city about which everything has already been said, but just the city in which I happen to live, a city without a name.

...

But perhaps I do not have the talent to establish personal relations with places, I always stay half in the clouds, with just one foot in the city.

...

The dream of being invisible ... When I find myself in an environment where I can enjoy the illusion of being invisible, I am really happy.

In fact, Calvino thinks the ideal condition for a writer is "close to anonymity", adding that "the more the author's figure invades the field, the more the world he portrays empties". As Calvino himself acknowledges, for most authors that is no longer an option: publishing deals are premised on visible authorship; and, after all, the essay containing these views is the outcome of a TV interview. But perhaps Paris remains a city where the author consults more and presents himself less. It's still a writer's city, promising anonymity, shops, and layer upon layer of references.

The essay is available in: Italo Calvino, Hermit in Paris (Vintage International, 2003).

An Evening with Annie Proulx

2011-03-19T12:17:00.020+10:00

On Monday 14 March, I was in conversation with Annie Proulx, best-known for her novel The Shipping News (1993) and the short story "Brokeback Mountain" (1997). Her first novel, Postcards (1992), won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, and she has since won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, both times for Fiction. She was in Brisbane to promote her book Bird Cloud (2011), a complex, episodic memoir about her 640-acre property in Wyoming.

In Conversation with Annie Proulx, Garden's Theatre, QUT

At the centre of Bird Cloud is the story of the design and building of a large house, which from the onset Proulx conceives as a library that you can live in. She needs 56 bookshelves and a volunteer librarian before she can really unpack, a reflection of her collector's personality and the eclecticism that textures her fiction: as a reader, Proulx is an historian, but the type who finds and pauses over the oddities in the records. In our discussion, she commented defiantly there were things in her library that you'd never find on Google.

I had no trouble believing that, nor in seeing her revisiting the texts that have wandered with her in numerous homes too small to house them. Bird Cloud the building offers her plenty of space to read and write, even if a well-planned writing desk (with its window placed high enough to not offer visual distractions) is, in the end, forsaken for the kitchen table, and what one presumes are all the distractions of a cook's kitchen.

The house is ultimately distraction enough in itself, a bit of a folly as it can't be occupied in the worst of the winter months, when the access road becomes too bad to use. The promised isolation of a remote Wyoming property is actually too much isolation, and for a year Bird Cloud was on the market for $3.7 million. Perhaps fortunately, it didn't sell. In our discussion, she observed that for women in particular it takes a long time to get to a point when you can be alone, and that she was ready for some of it now.

She didn't mean now now, but all the same Proulx is not really at ease on stage, and I for one quite liked that unease: it suggested to me that, despite the difficulties of building at Bird Cloud, she would always rather be back there at her own table, writing.

Questions?

Place, memoir, and writing

I collect some of her most interesting remarks here, paraphrased as accurately as I can.

On place:

Proulx commented that she always works on setting first, with a view that characters and stories ought to emerge out of the setting and out of one's research about a place.

On memoir:

Writing non-fiction is a less personal task than writing fiction. Writing the memoir was more like a 9-to-5 job that you could put down, whereas writing fiction is something that keeps you up at night, and is more "absorbing".

On writing:

She doesn't write for publication or for herself, she writes for the story. The story is an end in itself that must work on its own terms.
There is an architecture involved in writing stories, and it begins at the sentence level. You don't aim for the perfect sentence, you aim for the correct sentence for the story. And then you add one correct sentence to another one, and a correct paragraph to another correct paragraph.
She has no trouble farewelling characters. If anyone had trouble killing off their characters, they could send them round to her place.

Coming down from the clouds

Bird Cloud hasn't enjoyed the best reception, and I must admit that I share some of the concerns about the memoir that have been raised by critics (see, for example, the New York Times' review here). Over a glass of wine before we went on stage, Proulx hinted at some frustration over the reviews, and agreed with my suggestion that one is best off reading Bird Cloud as a compilation of histories which coalesce around a particular piece of land: her family history, the area's natural history, the human uses of the area and the geological past, and now her own building project. That is, unity lies in the land (the setting) and the stories that come out of it.

Probably the main reason that critics have responded negatively is that the building project (and the rather middle-class problems it throws up) dominates, and perhaps also because we're never shown how to connect the histories, the "rattling trunk of miscellanies" as The Washington Post calls it. The memoir assumes that we'll relate all its information to Bird Cloud the landscape, whereas many readers will be too irritated by Bird Cloud the building project to be able to do so sympathetically.

I suppose that, rather like books, building projects are often not so much finished as abandoned, or at least left to later or to someone else to tidy up. I like to imagine that the story of Bird Cloud will eventually find another home in Proulx's fiction, where her chief fidelity is to story rather than to reality. The memoir that we have is, in the way of buildings, something of an act of joint authorship, insomuch as Proulx doesn't fully inhabit and own the narrative for herself: this costs her the effect of unity that she achieves in her fiction. As she says, in her non-fiction she stands slightly outside of the building, looking in.

Yet, and perhaps because I am influenced by having met and discussed these things with Proulx, I find myself not minding the distant and rather broken perspective. The histories that frame the centre of this book do indeed make a frame: they are joined, even if readers are asked to do some of the joining work for themselves. Bird Cloud the memoir is, like Bird Cloud the house, an idiocyncratic structure with an unusual choice for a main room. But it stands up. (I would love a library as my main room.)

A question I have recently been trying to answer in relation to both my own memoir (The Promise of Iceland) and the work of others is, how does place function as a mode of characterization, including that of the narrator? Ultimately, and in this sense in keeping with Proulx's fiction, Bird Cloud is an attempt to demonstrate an answer to that question: we see characters through their relation to place, and in Proulx's case this means a passion for the stories that emerge from it.

With Annie Proulx

Pictures by Romney Francis are courtesy of Brisbane Better Bookshops. (The Courier Mail's photograph from the evening is here.)

Letter from Togo, by Jen Anderson

2011-03-12T09:58:00.002+10:00

Tracey, a fellow nurse and lovely new friend, and I leave the ship and walk in the early morning heat to the intersection outside the port gates of Lomé to wait for a Togolese co-worker Johnathon, and his friend, a taxi-driver Komla, to see some amazing waterfalls a few hours drive north of the city. Being white, we get many looks although the guards are used to the ship and its crew coming and going so they barely nod or say ‘Bonjour’. People are up and working at their stalls lining the roads, with many men wearing their pajama-looking outfits although plenty are in jeans and T-shirts. Most women wear the traditional sarong and head scarf. Johnathon finally arrives after ten minutes and we follow him to the battered but workable taxi driven by Komla and are introduced. Komla is a big barrel of a man, probably in his mid 40’s, with a ready smile. His belly extends all the way to the steering wheel and I can tell he is tall as his head almost touches the ceiling of the taxi. Komla is driving as Johnathon has no license. Both men wear T-shirts and jeans, with Komla’s shirt declaring, ‘Available for one night only.’

We drive through a chaotic roundabout along the bumpy and potholed beachfront road and I‘m already sweating buckets. The beach is at least 200 metres wide, and I see men hauling in nets filled with fish, people resting under the palm trees, roadside stalls and pipes which run sewage into the sand not the sea. We pass unfinished bridges and cramped markets where I would not want to get lost, and turn into a road toward the depths of the city. We pass dirty crumbling walls on which have been painted in large letters ‘Interdit d’uriner 500F’ – Prohibited to urinate 500 Franc fine. Everything is covered in a layer of dust or sand so it is all dry and filthy as if thirsting for some monsoonal rains to wash it clean.

We pass a lake fringed by the city and some very prominent signs about the wearing of condoms. HIV is very prevalent here and the signs are quite explicit; one showing a drawing of an erect penis wearing a banana flavoured condom, and another encouraging young people to abstain from sex. Twenty minutes later we hit the outer suburbs which means the potholed bitumen changes to potholed dirt and sand roads. After picking up supplies of bottled water we follow the border with Ghana, defined by an enormous barbed wire fence, and out into the country; I feel quite confident with Komla driving and find he has a good sense of humour as we converse in a mix of English, French and the local language, Ewe, which Johnathon translates.

Civilization becomes more sparse as we drive further and the dry red dust of the dirt gives way to farms lush with dense tropical vegetation. The unfinished concrete buildings change to mud-brick huts in sporadic villages, many with single room schools or churches. The roads out of town are mostly bitumen with occasional potholes; often single lane. Each side of the road has large monsoon drains, to catch the run-off from tropical downpours. Villages built on the dirt face the road, some with goats and lambs running freely. In one area the roads suddenly improve and proceed to lead us past what could be called a mansion in the middle of the bush with manicured gardens and a bitumen driveway – the President’s home.

As we travel north we stop at a roadside stall, and all the people crowd around the car to sell us what looks like rats, dried and spread-eagled on a stick frame and roasted over an open fire. I find out that they are actually squirrels. We constantly pass people – walking with loads balanced on their heads, riding bicycles with a live goat strapped to the back, standing by stalls filled with soccer uniforms or pots and pans, some with petrol sold in 2 litre bottles, cooking over open fires by the road – many holding up their wares as the car passes. There is a constant smell of smoke and petrol, dust and humid tropical forest.

We finally pass a street sign proclaiming we are entering Kpalimé (the K is silent), a small town and close to our destination. Once on the other side of town, we stop at a village to get directions and are told to follow bumpy bush tracks into the jungle. Tracey and I glance at each other when the track virtually disappears and becomes a boggy single lane path with extremely tall grass on either side that seems like it could hide a wildebeest or family of wild boar. Eventually the jungle clears and we see a small group of men casually standing around dressed in jeans and T shirts.

The taxi stops and we get out – mainly to stretch my cramped legs – and Komla greets them courteously. He is speaking to the chief of local royalty; one of many tribes of the area (all of Togo or Africa for that matter is made up of tribes whose lands are not delineated by European-imposed borders). This particular king, as soon as he sees that we are foreigners, decides he wants payment from us to visit the local waterfall. Komla proceeds to, courteously, lecture them on the fact that we are volunteering our time and expertise to be here to help the Togolese people and are not regular tourists. I can tell this by the tone of his voice, even though he is speaking Ewe. I can see them hesitate. Finally a decision is made and we all pile back into the taxi. Tracey and I look at each other questioningly, but trust Komla and Johnathon.

The taxi returns along the track and turns up another, this time to arrive at a dirt path fronted by a large gate. We are let through and climb the path for ten minutes before rounding the corner to a stunning scene. Multiple levels of rock break up the falling shafts of water into myriad smaller waterfalls; all landing on an enormous flat rock base surrounded by trees and ferns. It is at least 100 metres high and a hawk circles the updrafts.

We are told we can ‘swim’ here; not swim exactly but stand under the fat shower of water from the falls and get wet. Once Tracey and I help each other change, we carefully make our way to the waterfall over the slippery rocks. The guys are already there in their underwear. You can feel the spray on your skin from metres away and the sound is thunderous; you have to shout to be heard. We are helped over the last few rocks by strong hands and finally stand under the clear cooling water. The force is so heavy it takes my breath away and I can only stay ‘under’ for a few seconds. The water makes a loud cracking sound as it hits the rocks with force. We are told it is safe to drink and we gulp mouthfuls and revel in the freshness and chill after the cramped heat of the drive.

We stay for at least an hour, taking many photos with my camera. Komla acts as if he owns my camera, taking it upon himself to snap photos of us all in various poses; looking at the result and laughing uproariously, his big barrel belly jiggling and sticking out over the top of his black soaking wet underwear. Eventually Johnathon and Komla tell us it’s time to go. As we prepare to leave a group of four local teenage girls arrive. As they stand under the shower of water in their bikini tops and shorts they make up a song and dance and move their bodies with amazing rhythm and grace. I am rapt with admiration but Komla decides he wants a photo with them. I am puzzled because there is no way I can eventually get this photo to him. He stands with the girls under the raining water and puts his arms around one in particular, across her breasts, brazenly feeling her up while they pose. I take the photo but no, he wants another one. I take it then stop as it dawns on me that this is why he wanted the photo; the lecher. We wave goodbye and they shyly smile their dazzling white smiles.

We walk back down the track to find the king and his entourage have set up some little stalls to sell bananas and mangoes to the visiting tourists. Komla drinks some palm wine which he explains is made from fermented coconut palm. He holds some out for me to try. It is an opaque liquid in a half coconut shell. I take a sip and grimace. It tastes foul but it is very strong as I can feel the alcohol warming my insides as if I’d taken a large sip of brandy. Komla downs about four more before we leave, but the only change to his driving after that is that he drives faster, rarely going below 140 km/h. Despite Tracey glancing at me worriedly, she soon feels safe enough because she is asleep within minutes.

We bypass the same peaceful villages and I am feeling calm and refreshed when suddenly I see a baby goat run onto the road and into the path of our taxi. I shout out but Komla does not swerve or blink when I hear the gut-wrenching sound of bang followed by thump-thump as we run over the goat. I feel sick to my stomach and want to turn around to see if it’s alright knowing full well it is dead. But Komla doesn’t even slow down. I’m almost in tears from the shock and callousness. He turns to me as he drives, shrugs his shoulders and smiles a sort of ‘that’s life’ kind of smile.

It is almost dark by the time we return to the port gate. We exit the taxi and say goodbye to them both, thanking them for the day, although I am still somewhat stunned. Tracey and I climb the gangway of the ship and check in, and I get looks and smiles. I discover that my hair is plastered back from my head in an interesting wind-blown coiffure and my face is completely filthy with red dust except for a distinct sunglass outline. I thank Tracey for coming with me. I’m not sure I would have gone by myself so being with her I‘d felt very safe, in spite of the lecherous, possibly drunk, goat-killer.

Jen Anderson is a PhD student in Creative Writing at QUT.

Final Call (Letter from Chiang Mai) by Kate Cantrell

2011-03-02T13:32:00.000+10:00

On my last day in Chiang Mai, my mother calls to say that my grandma—the one with a lump of cancer in her breast—has passed away. Except she doesn’t use the euphemism, which is strange since my mother is Catholic. (When I was a girl, the boy next door had a heart attack in the park and my mother, when quizzed on his where abouts by the paramedics, said he had gone to be with God. Later she told my father he had ‘graduated’. ‘From where?’ my father asked).

‘Gran died,’ she says.

I sit down.

The station itself is close to the ground. A single track, buried under tuffs of grass and tatty flowers, runs parallel to the platform. Tucked to the side, between the bonsais, is a block of toilets and a shop that serves rice and fish balls. The King, who rode the rails as a boy, is raised on a flag pole; his cheeks just as pink, his sword still drawn for dragons. In the garden below, someone has made an offering: a bowl of baby mandarins and some turtle shells flipped and filled with oil. In the distance, the sun has fallen behind the mountains and the sky is the colour of grape juice.

‘When?’ I ask.

‘After lunch.’

‘It’s dark,’ I say. ‘Why didn’t you call?’

‘I tried,’ my mother says.

As she moves the phone from her mouth, I can see her standing in the kitchen. She has her back against the fridge; one hand on the flat of her chest and some fruit magnets in her hair. On the stove, there is a pot with eggs inside. The water is boiling over.

‘Kate,’ she says, finally, as if she is naming me again.

But this time, she has changed the weight of the word.

‘Kate?’

One by one, she takes back the letters; sending out a notice for my name, recalling the first thing she gave me. She stresses the syllables and knots the lines and twists the new sounds around her tongue.

I undo my backpack, which is also heavy, and rest it on the steady ground. It looks lighter there. As my mother sends questions over the sea, an announcement comes over the speaker. I recognise some words I have learnt of the language: sa-bai-dee, cop-koon-ka. When the words fall away, the woman in the window stands and spits her gum. From somewhere above, she pulls down a door, then pops up a sign behind the glass. The sign is printed in strange symbols I have never seen before; crop circles, forks.

‘She left you her hats,’ my mother says. ‘And an envelope. I haven’t opened it.’

‘What about Dad?’

‘Coins,’ she says. ‘He has made little piles all over the floor. He won’t stop counting them.’

I smile.

My grandma hated change.

On Lotto days, she always played the same numbers.

7, 11, 17, 23 and 37.

‘These are lonely numbers,’ she would say, crossing the boxes. ‘That’s why they’re lucky.’

She nearly won once.

‘When’s the funeral?’ I ask.

‘Friday. At St Catherine’s.’

St Catherine’s is the Church where my grandparents were married; her in a dress more yellow than white, him in a suit too big. In the year that followed, they built a house and bought a car and planted a mango tree. My grandma heard a beat in her belly and my grandfather, who was a bad listener, went to war. She kept his ashes in a vase.

‘Mum?’

‘Mmm.’

‘I’ll be in Bangkok tomorrow. There’s a midnight flight.’

My mother is quiet.

I hold the line.

While I wait, a man with no shoes crosses the track. He is carrying an open suitcase. Inside, there are gold chains in velvet pouches. In another compartment, there are packs of cards, and leather watches, and boxes of Viagra. In the centre of the case, there is a lighter with a naked woman on the front. Her thighs, white and plump, are curved against the stars and stripes of an American flag.

‘Special price,’ the man says, holding up some pearls.

I shake my head.

He swaps the necklace for the lighter.

‘For your father,’ he says.

‘No thank you,’ I mouth.

‘Where are you from?’ he asks. ‘You are very sexy.’

I smile and turn away. The man stays. Every now and then, he flicks his lighter and says, ‘I’ll give you my banana.’

I press the phone closer, listening for my mother. There is a tap running in the background. Eventually, there is a clicking sound followed by muffled conversation, and then my father is on the line.

‘Don’t change your ticket,’ he says.

‘I want to come home.’

My father, unsure what to say, doesn’t say anything at all, so I add, ‘There is a man here trying to sell me his banana.’

My father laughs.

He is the still the same.

‘I’m worried about your mother,’ he says, lowering his voice. ‘She’s talking about the ducks again.’

When my mother is unwell, she undertakes obscure tasks, usually around the house. She vacuums the pot plants, and dresses the furniture, and lets the fish swim in the bathtub. She unplugs the telephone, and colours the tablecloth, and chops up bits of bread. She bags the crusts, ties them off, and packs them in the freezer. ‘We need to get some ducks,’ she says. ‘Ducks love bread.’

‘Who was there?’ I ask. ‘When it happened. Who was with her?’

My father makes a clicking sound, like he is annoyed by the question.

‘Well, the nurse was there,’ he says. ‘You know, the one with the funny nose. But all the roads were blocked because of the floods. The hospital was closed for a week.’

There is a pause.

‘I couldn’t get there,’ he says.

I close my eyes and imagine my grandmother, flat on her back, waiting for her children to come to her. The cricket plays on a tiny screen above her bed. The sound is off. Her cross-word is half finished.

‘What’s another word for consolation?’ I asked her once.

‘Whiskey,’ she said.

‘She waited as long as she could,’ my father says. ‘You know your grandmother.’

‘Did she say anything?’

‘Yes. She asked for a radio. She said, ‘I would like something to listen to, if it’s not too much trouble.’

That was the last thing she said.

Through a break in the buses, I can see the rice fields on the horizon. They have been flattened and flooded for harvest. Near the sludge, in a square of patted grass, there is a father and son. The man uses a buffalo to plough the soil. The boy follows behind. Sometimes they stop to rest. When the rain falls and the weeds have sprouted, they will plant the grains by hand.

‘I need to write the eulogy,’ my father says now.

I understand what he means.

‘Okay,’ I say.

‘Okay,’ my father says, then he hangs up.

As the train returns from wherever it disappeared to, I notice it has changed: it is stained on the side and one of the doors is missing. Some of the ropes that connect the carriages have started to fray at the ends. A chubby woman, already on board, squeezes out the window. She has a baby in one arm and a pineapple in the other. She nurses both to her breasts.

As I near the platform, a man in a conductor’s hat, asks to see my ticket.

‘Sawadee-kup’ he says.

‘Sawadee-kaa.’

When he nods permission, I lift my bag onto the train and take a seat by the window. From there, I see the man step back to the empty station. He raises a whistle to his mouth and blows three times.

‘Krung Thep,’ he says. ‘Final call.’

I take off my shoes, one at a time, and slide them under my seat.

The woman with the pineapple has fallen asleep.

A little while later, we are gone.

Kate Cantrell teaches Creative Writing at QUT.

Children with maps

2011-02-26T19:17:00.004+10:00

Two ideas:

1. As strange as it might sound, I sometimes think that loving maps is a more certain indication of a love of travel than travelling itself.

2. A well-known explorer once said to me: "If you're an explorer, you can never get lost, only found."

I want these two ideas to make sense together, but I'm not entirely sure what connects them. But there's something in the way children handle maps that holds a clue. They use them as keys to adventures, and almost as keys to becoming lost.

In any case, maps are only as useful as their owner's ability to misread them. And maybe that is easier if you don't ever quite get to the places they represent. (It's okay, I'm not sure that makes any sense to me, either.)

Looking for New Iceland

2011-02-18T21:21:00.006+10:00

I saw two shooting stars last night,

I wished on them but they were only satellites.

Is it wrong to wish on space hardware?

- Billy Bragg, "A New England"

I turned south at Eumundi and remained on the crowded highway of utes, all bound for Vegas, until I reached the Gateway Bridge with its prison buttresses and, after an hour in the road works, the long views of the Cunningham Highway, the New England highway, and finally the dip in the plateau that brought me onto Marsh St and Cotswold Cottages, perhaps the only motel in Armidale with a copy of Hammarskjold: A Pictorial Biography by Sten Soderberg. I rested, bought a beer, and leafed through the life of my Swedish hero, ashamedly with the criminal intent forming of relieving the motel of this singular possession.

I put it back. An hour later, my fellow-presenters and I, and the 220 female delegates stood to attention as the Earle Page College of the University of New England was acceeded to a government too broke to colonize even its dining halls. For the next three days, we were told, the Icelandic flag would fly above the cream walls of the college. The country women of NSW would voice their allegiance with a small, blue badge that declared them to be "inspired by Iceland". The Country Women's Association (NSW) Country of Study School (Iceland) had begun.

It was a warm night in the dining hall, although I was fortunate on my corner of the "VIP" table in being close to a tall, thin window that whispered faint echoes of a breeze that had done a little to ruffle the Icelandic flag. There were no ceiling fans, a sign that we were in a customarily cool town. But it was hot. The delegates, mostly grey-haired and certainly enjoying the chicken and the trout, fanned themselves with whatever came to hand. But, as someone close to me whispered, only the invited speakers mentioned the heat. And we didn't have to listen to us. The Deputy Mayor of Armidale spoke (the full Mayor was unwell and sent apologies), the Honorary Consul General of Iceland spoke, and the Vice-Chancellor of the University spoke.

Others gave shorter speeches, each commenting on the difficulty of pronouncing Icelandic names, all in pleasant ways getting the Honorary Consul General's name wrong. At the start of the School, the speakers were asked if they would all please begin their presentations with the word Eyjafjallajökull. Sigrún, the first speaker, did so, and as I was the second, with the topic "Sagas of Iceland", I added a translation (Island Mountain Glacier) and a picture of the glacier/volcano taken from Hlídarendi, a famous farm in Njáls saga. The volcano, I said, had erupted in a part of Iceland densely populated with stories of the past, violent stories about remote farms and the rivalries between them.

My case studies were Gísla saga and Njáls saga, and I concentrated in particular on Gísli's murder of Thorgrímur in Gísla saga and two decisions in Njáls saga: Gunnar's not to leave Iceland and Hallgerdur's not to help her husband in his final moments. I said I hoped the audience would understand the domestic tensions represented in these moments, bad family situations that made good literature. I also joked that mine was perhaps a more noble-minded audience than the original, medieval one, but at the end a retired teacher tapped me on the shoulder and said, "Don't worry about us. We understand infidelity and betrayal well enough."

I liked the women there very much, because they were interested in a way I had forgotten students could be interested. Many approached me during scones and tea to comment on my presentation or to ask questions. I had focussed for some of my time on the layers of composition and history that we find in the sagas, and this fairly technical consideration received as sympathetic a reception as my retelling of the family feuds.

Perhaps that reflected a common point across the two islands: as in Iceland, historical consciousness here was layered, and each layer in the national story could never quite colonise the others. The awkwardly stated acknowledgment of the traditional owners of the land; the farm histories and the remoteness that grows despite the crowding in of technology, of social networking sites; the domestic history of the women who will return to the small towns of NSW and present their notes on Iceland; the men they'd left for the weekend; the younger women who couldn't come; the small group of migrants who held the stage for two days.

On Sunday I drove back to Brisbane via Bellingen. This allowed me to stop at the lookout at New England National Park, which I had to myself. The lookout, in this picture clipped by white gums and the shadows of mid-morning, presented an illusion, a scenery too vast to accept, and so I concentrated on the small birds that followed me down the paths and then danced across the view.

Craft: Clive James Study #8: In Munich

2011-01-31T21:38:00.004+10:00

The movement of Clive James' "Postcard from Munich" (available for free here) involves a brilliant series of transitions, from James’ sensory perceptions of the city, to illustrations of two of its histories (the Nazi history and the influence of the Wittelbachs), to the authors’ personal response to Munich (as a culture-conscious Australian, and as an Australian, recall, who travels with a keen sense of history as series of debt-creating relationships). Running gags about Wagner, opera, Ludwig II, bad hats, and beer, and sustained visual allegories based on the presence of light and water in the city further help to unify what might otherwise be a piece straining under the density of its content.

A list of quotes from the piece helps to illustrate what I mean, and also, I think, something of the point that Clive James makes about style and content in Robert Hughes' The Fatal Shore, mentioned in the last post before this one. Like Hughes, James doesn't put content ahead of form. The two must go hand-in-hand, because their combination creates the basis for James' particular mode of analysis:

“Narrowly personal though it might sound to say so, the Nazis have always got on my nerves."
“Ludwig II, as well as his demented castles in the environs, built a winter garden on the roof of the Residenz and in full regalia looked like Oliver Hardy wearing a Gobelins tapestry topped off with a dead polar bear.”
Of Nymphenburg: “The landscape flows through the main building like a lake, lakes glitter in the landscape like mirrored floors, and there are pavilions full of mirrors like frozen waterfalls.”

The last of these three quotes reminds us that, for James, landscape and history are almost the same thing:

“In the winter sunlight the lakes around the city shone like silver paint. Ludwig II of Bavaria drowned himself in one of them, impelled by a potent cocktail of schizophrenia and undiluted Wagner.”
“I left Nymphenburg walking on air, which was bad training for where I was going next. The Amalienburg epitomises 1,000 years of Munich’s history. The concentration camp at Dachau does the same for the Thousand Year Reich, which luckily didn’t last the advertised distance, although it contrived to express itself memorably during the short time available. Dachau is a whole district, so the answer to the question why they didn’t change the name is that it would be like changing the name of Clapham. But Clapham never had a concentration camp in it.”
After visiting Dachau: “Hitler’s sole lasting positive achievement was to cure the old Right of its opposition to democracy.”

And that reading landscape as history is one way of better understanding culture:

“What haunts Munich, as it haunts all Germany, is the presence of an absence. There is continual talk of Kultur."
“The Allied air raids reduced it to a sea of rubble, but much of it has been rebuilt with the special care lavished on the past by those who have been injured by the present.”
“The strange feeling that you’ve seen it all before is not quite accurate, since even the Tsarist summer palaces outside Leningrad aren’t as exuberant as this. You haven’t seen it all before, you’ve heard it all later – in the music of Mozart, two of whose operas were premièred in Munich, one of them in the Cuvilliés theatre attached to the Residenz.”
At a portrait gallery: “Carolina Countess von Holstein aus Bayern, we may now note, had a waist the size of a wedding ring and shoulders like a Green Bay Packers linebacker, but her breakfast television pout still rings bells.” [Here, James showing off that, culturally, he knows how to slum it.]

As I discussed in my post about James' poem "Occupation: Housewife", he travels as the indebted Australian, and I think one of the reasons his travel writing is so densely packed with history and culture is that he is always accumulating, his learning and breadth of experience a part-payment for his parents' sacrifice:

“Having worked out which of the Führerbau’s windows must belong to Hitler’s corner office, I tried to look like a music student, walked confidently up the monumental interior staircase, and pushed open the door of room 105, in which the Munich treaty was signed. There was nobody in there except a Canadian girl called Monica practising the piano. Once the room had contained Mussolini along with Goering: a tight fit. Born in 1959 (‘that’s the year when all the stars were right’), Monica was ready to suspend her studies while I fossicked in the distant past. I stood on the balcony and reviewed a big parade of strutting spooks all wearing the same sort of hat. The door to the left must lead to Hitler’s office. I eased it open and found a string quartet playing Schubert.”
“But the important lesson has already been learned: once power has been seized, it is too late to protest, even for the heroic – and most people are not that. Most people are not imaginative either, and can’t be blamed for it. How much atonement is enough?”

Craft: Clive James Study #7 - The Metropolitan Critic

2011-01-31T14:14:00.006+10:00

My seventh study of Clive James' writing takes me to his criticism and to his (early) self-identification as a "metropolitan critic", a job description that he used for the well-known American literary critic Edmund Wilson (in an essay published anonymously in the Times Literary Supplement), but which was also a role in which he "fancied himself", as he later put it.

Before I look at one of James' essays, I want to acknowledge James Shapiro's somewhat negative review (in the New York Times) of James' The Essential Essays, 1968-2002. Shapiro makes the important point that James' criticism will probably not stand the test of time, because James, like his hero Wilson, has not contributed a theoretical concept that can be useful to readers in future contexts.

We need to decide whether critical work which has plainly done so much to influence its time vanishes with its time or continues. To continue, it must have done something beyond maintaining or correcting taste, important as these functions are: it must have embodied, not just recommended, a permanent literary value. (James, "The Metropolitan Critic", 1974)

Shapiro suggests that it is just this "permanent literary value" that is missing in James' criticism, and that James is too concerned with the business of "correcting taste" to be able to develop a lasting (or essential) collection of essays. James' correction of taste seems often rather harsh, expressed in a style of sarcasm that buys laughs but not necessarily permanence.

I think Shapiro is right. While James' prose is faultless and his taste is often very good, he is too much at pains to prove himself as the critic at large. Thus, while his responses are generally the workings out of a sensitive, intelligent reader with a finer turn of phrase than most of us could manage, they are seldom the workings of a person with a lifelong commitment to challenging his first understandings of culture and and its meaning. But while this critical stance leaves the essays feeling transient - trapped in the moment when James got it, or got himself - it is a stance that doesn't necessarily detract from James' travel writing.

More on that in a post to come. Let's turn first to the James reviewing style, which if "against interpretation" is also intelligent, fast-paced, and driven by a commitment to his style. Take this passage:

Now, in The Fatal Shore, Robert Hughes, an Australian-born critical writer of pronounced literary gifts, has summed up all previous efforts, exceeded them in force of expression, and brought the whole deadly business back to life. The result is hard to bear — or would be, if it were not so clearly one of those rare achievements in the writing of history by which the unimaginably inhumane is brought to book without making us give up on humanity. Such redemptive work can’t be done without artistry: there are degrees of anguish which only style can make us contemplate, since merely to recount them would leave us cold. ("A Death in Life", 1987)

What is the point of this paragraph? I suppose merely that good writing is humane, sympathetic, well-crafted - hardly a new or particularly insightful idea. But James has put a lot of work into getting the precise expression of that point right, especially in the note, the unimaginably inhumane is brought to book without making us give up on humanity. It is true, though, as James writes, that there are degrees of anguish which only style can make us contemplate, and so he is careful to show us his style credentials. Essentially, James is being a wit again, dazzling us not so much with the force of analysis as with the way its phrased. And this, he is adding in his comments about The Fatal Shore, is just as important.

Having now read much of James' non-fiction, I suspect he writes to lines, good sentences that he perfects in his mind and then builds paragraphs around. I don't think there's much wrong with this - from a pacing viewpoint, there is much right about it - but I have found myself becoming practiced at waiting for the beautiful phrase or thought, the one that James got right first and then built out from. Here are some from his 1986 review of Bob Geldof's autobiography:

Bob Geldof's autobiography could not be more personal if he had written it himself.

Geldof's sense of humour lacks the calculation to make you laugh.

When a pop act becomes successful there are only two kinds of money it can earn - not as much as you might think and more than you can believe.

Being such modern young people they had a baby to find out whether they wanted to get married.

He was precocious in a society where precocity was antisocial.

These are all great lines, but also perhaps a little too good: clever writing that reveals such a lot about the writing process. So what? Merely that James has it in mind to entertain his reader, and believes, like Robert Hughes, that good style is a precondition of a proper understanding. Perhaps one other thing: that good style matters if you're correcting others.

And so, I think, does openness, and the fact that Clive James likes books by Robert Hughes and Bob Geldof reminds us that one of the features of his critical oeuvre has been a willingness to move across the borders between popular and elite culture that constrain many critics. That wall came down early in James' writing, and, as we will see in his writing about Germany, helps him greatly when it comes to writing postcards.

Craft: Clive James Study #6 - TV Diarist

2011-01-20T13:48:00.009+10:00

Not once did he lapse into a repetition of the unforgettable moment when he predicted that an athlete would shortly pull out the big one. He left that to Alan Weeks, who on the evening of the pairs figure-skating final duly delivered himself of a classic. ‘This might well be the night,’ mused Alan, ‘when Rodnina pulls everything out.’ Thereby confirming our suspicions about Russian female athletes. ("Unintelligibühl", 1976)

Early on in his career, Clive James attracted attention because of his sharp and very funny television criticism, typically presented as a diary column of his recent watching. The form allowed him to jump across stations and programmes with great freedom, and also to centre his criticism in terms of his own (however eratic) viewing patterns, crucial for James' comic style - a mix of light sarcasm and wit (classically, humour that comments as much as it produces laughter). The form of the diary permits James to make what are, after all, rather cursory and summary judgments of what he sees, just as tends to be the case when we watch television. (I know that, for this very reason, it is infuriating to watch TV with me.)

The big deal of the week was nude bathing at Brighton. The sky was the colour of washing-up water, the sea was the colour of what floats on top of washing-up water...

He was about a mile and half from the camera, but you could tell he had no pants on, unless some manufacturer has recently come up with a line of trunks in subdued shades of potato juice blotched with purple.

Somewhere in the middle of a marathon Agatha Christie mystery called Why Didn’t They Ask Evans? (LWT) I had to go to Paris. Arriving in my hotel room just in time to switch on the American Grand Prix live from Long Beach, I watched the cars fall apart while the French equivalent of Murray Walker did his chose. But all the time a question was nagging me: Why didn’t they ask Evans?

("Nude Bathing in Britain", 1980)

Whatever Olivier had done to his front teeth left his long top lip curving downwards in a fulsome volute on each side, producing a ducky look to go with his quacky sound, since for reasons unknown he had chosen to use a speeded-up version of his Duke of Wellington voice. ("A Pound of Flash", 1974)

The last quote comes from James' viewing of Jonathan Miller's Merchant, which is perhaps given a firmer pounding than other shows because of its own underlying assumptions about being good. And, like good-for-you art, good-for-you politics is set for ridicule.

One of the leading characteristics of the not-quite-bright is their disastrous over-estimation of the role of intellect in political reality. This stricture applies full force to Women's Lib, which seems intent on supposing that unintelligent behaviour is an aberration, and that naught but a male chauvinist conspiracy stops Miss Australia realising the desirability of being Germaine Greer. ("Liberating Miss World", 1972)

And, in fact, I like James' television writing best when he is, despite himself, liking something that isn't very good, perhaps because that's when I'm most happy in front of the TV.

A monarch operating within understood limits, Hadleigh (Yorkshire) is the perfect squire, paternalistically careful of his tenantry’s welfare, beloved in the village, respected in the council, savage with the stupid, gentle with the helpless, gorgeous in his hand-made threads. In the current series, which in my house is watched with a pretence of scornful detachment somewhat nullified by the size of the bribes offered our elder child to hit the sack before it starts. Hadleigh has taken to himself a wife, played by Hilary Dwyer – one of those leggy jobs with Botticelli shoulders and no bra. ("Squire Hadleigh", 1973)

At some point, no matter how smart you were, it became okay to like television, and not merely in an ironic way. But TV remains a site of scorn, maybe because, at the same time as it seduces and hypnotises, it also presents a total institution (to borrow Foucault) of absurdity.

Gallantly providing David with the appropriate provocation to eloquence, a condom-clad competitor got his skis crossed at 100 m.p.h. and rammed the snow with his helmet. ("Quite Slim Indeed", 1979)

Sex changes and organ transplants dominated the week. I gave the sex changes a miss, on the grounds that what’s right for some of us leaves others of us crossing and uncrossing our legs while whistling nervously. Organ transplants, however, are of vital interest to all. ("Donor Kebab", 1980)

The Nine O’Clock News (BBC1) featured a gung-ho American officer talking of ‘the capability to project Marines ashore in a hostile environment as the case may be.’ His name was Colonel Looney. On Nationwide (BBC1), Frank Bough interviewed the man who pulls the ugliest faces in Britain. His name was Ron Looney. I merely present these facts, without comment. ("Snow Job", 1981)

Sometimes, television criticism is just television description, and there's a skill in not commenting too much. James understood this when he made his own television show, predictably enough about television. But it's an understanding that also comes through in his travel writing, which is where I began these studies and where I eventually hope to return. Description is often comment enough, especially if your default mode is a rather sharp one.

Craft: Clive James study #5 - The Sentimental Son

2011-01-19T14:31:00.012+10:00

Of course, there is more than one kind of travel, and I suppose one of the reasons we like to travel physically is because it enables a more ambitious journey of the mind to take place: our thoughts, which shouldn't really be hostage to stillness, are nevertheless liberated by physical movement and by encounters with the new, or, more relevant for this post, new encounters with the old.

James' poem "Occupation: Housewife" (available for free here) relates the poet's return to Sydney, the town of his upbringing and, in a way, the source of the debt that made it necessary for him to leave his hometown and make a name for himself as a writer living abroad - the "books, degrees, the money" that proclaimed his success. Now he is returning to visit his mother, to wait with her, "to what end we know". But, before the end (termed at the close of the poem as her going "out of this world"), James and his mother recall the Sydney of World War 2, when his father was serving abroad and his mother was "waiting for when / The Man Himself came back from Overseas".

For personal reasons, I find this poem a moving one - as for James, my father was absent from my life, and I think I understand something of the debt to that absence that James describes. But perhaps what is more interesting than me being able to relate to this work is the broader question of how James evokes a sense of nostalgia and time travel: it is not, after all, possible to rely on the readership consisting of those with absent fathers.

Instead, he begins the poem with two symbolic images that he will return to at the end. The first is the "Toni", a cheap perm that in the poem's first temporal setting (the War) is being advertised in "paragraphs of technical baloney" as an alternative to the "Expensive Perm". (Throughout, James uses capitals to signal the higher, unquestionable status attached in the mindset of the day to certain objects.) The "Toni" fails, and within two hours the perm is as "limp as the spear-points of household germs". The second symbol of the age is home brewing, "another false economy" but also a source of humour - we get the story of "one mum" whose "copper blew its lid / Like Krakatoa". The resulting foam "murdered her hydrangeas at a stroke".

Relating these two symbols are the twin War concerns of going without and waiting. You went without real perms and real booze, and made do with the "Toni" and the home brew kit, no matter the consequences, in part because you were fortifying yourself to go without "The Man Himself", with "only the Yanks to offer luxuries / At a price no decent woman thought of then".

"She who had kept / Herself for him for so long" is the one whom James now visits, and together they trade "stories of the way things were" - the "Toni" and the explosion in the backyard. And the reason that this poem can be emotionally meaningful for all readers is that the moment of James' return to Sydney is laden with the symbols of the past - the material markers of time passing establish the sense of loss. We understand now that there is more than one journey being made, most significantly for James the one that relates all of his travels to his mother's staying home, her waiting.

I have recently learnt, from reading Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking (2005), that a common characteristic of grief is expecting the lost one to return. This, of course, is not altogether the same as waiting. But grief, going without, and waiting are linked. In the case of "Occupation: Housewife", they are linked by the journey back.

Deep & Deeper: A Letter from Brisbane

2011-01-13T20:52:00.011+10:00

We’re drawing to the close of a day when, thankfully, the water level has peaked lower than earlier forecasts had predicted. There is some reprieve for at least those who are on the margins of the floodwaters, where it is still lapping against front doors. In the most extreme emergencies, homes have been picked up and washed away. Today, one hopes, marks the end of such disasters and so the end of the first climax of the crisis as a whole, the flood peak. But immediately another story begins about the extent of the damage and its future impact on Brisbane life. The climax of that story is a long way off.

I went down to Rosalie and Milton today, well-known parts of the inner suburbs of Brisbane. From the University of Queensland campus at St Lucia through to Toowong, Auchenflower and Lang Park, a large football stadium, homes and business have been inundated. Like everyone, I’ve followed this on the ABC’s 24-hour coverage, but more urgently on Facebook, where my friends and colleagues regularly post pictures and videos of lost University streets, the parks and cafés of my student life, and most depressingly their own homes under the watermark. There’s a grim sequence to the status updates: losing power; the water is close; being told to evacuate; staying with friends; have heard my street is going under.

Common to a great many of the accounts that I’ve heard is the feeling that this is too surreal for words. I wasn’t entirely sure what people meant by this until today at Rosalie village, one of the worst-hit areas in my part of town. I go there all the time: my two young sons love the playground at Milton State School and the other parents there are easy to chat to—recently, I bumped into Matt Condon, the author of Brisbane, a memoir about the city that suddenly needs another chapter. There are two ice cream shops close by, and after ice cream you cross the road and pick up a loaf of bread at the bakery and a hot beef panang at Sing’s. It’s a rather too-fashionable area, yes, but in an Australian way: I’ve seen Darren Lockyer, a footballer, and news reader Andrew Lofthouse picking up their lattés there, but nothing more than that.

We lived there for six months after we first got back from Iceland. Finnur, my older son, had just had his first birthday. Each morning, we walked through the shops, at the bakery bought a biscuit for Finnur and a sausage roll for me, and then spent an hour in the playground before returning to our apartment, the sun normally becoming too strong by nine or ten.

And here, pictured left, is what we found this afternoon. A pond formed in among the shops, fitting perfectly and seemingly turning the village into props, water features.

Unheimlich, I thought, is what people mean when they say it feels surreal. Or at least that is the feeling that I experienced down at Rosalie village this afternoon: the uncanny sense of seeing a world as familiar as this one turned into a different world, with all the qualities of its former incarnation still present.

And the uncomfortable strangeness of it was very present in the small groups of sightseers that gathered at the police parameters. It was carnival, certainly, if without the sense of celebration or abandonment then with all its bemusement and upsidedowness. And it was this spirit of good-willed, quiet bemusement that suddenly, for me, made true the ceaseless media claims that have inevitably followed the flood, that tell us that the flood will make us stronger, draw the community together, help us to re-asses what really matters in our lives. Actually, the flood has brought out the quiet irony and good will of Brisbane people, to me ever-present qualities.

Paddlers outside F Gate at Lang Park Stadium

The pool hall next to Lang Park

What is the deeper meaning of a flood? My first impulse over the last three days has been to answer that there is no deeper meaning. A flood is a body of water that disrupts our lives, while a body of water that doesn't disrupt our lives is merely a river, a lake, an ocean. But this evening I'm not so sure. The erasure is incomplete, and the familiar remains alongside the foreign. It's disquieting, uncomfortable, but it also brings a strange sense of recognition.

Visitors and Waterways

2011-01-11T20:31:00.008+10:00

A little while ago, my mother, who babysits for us a couple of days a week, noticed that we had a visitor. In the afternoons, when the light on the tall grass behind our townhouse in Brisbane begins to brown and soften, a small wallaby with auburn fur appears and makes a snack of something that lies about ten feet from our clothes line. What is that Robert Frost line? – something there is that doesn’t love a wall; in this case, let’s say that something there is that loves our clothes line.

And we love him (I call it a him, although I don't really know). My young sons, of course, are completely entranced, but dare I say that they don’t appreciate the magic quite as much as us adults, who’ve become accustomed to not seeing wildlife in such close proximity and with such confidence about us. I suppose he has been checking us out for months, because now that we have finally noticed him, his body language expresses a kind of about time attitude.

And suddenly the same hill that we back onto is the source of a seemingly endless torrent of rain water, which swells at the base of our townhouse and eventually makes its way into the garage: something there is that doesn't love a wall. Water does not like my garage wall.

Perhaps predictably the papers have called the last weeks of flood biblical, and it doesn’t help that we know that the worst (for Brisbane) is to come on Thursday, when the flood waters will exceed the records set in 1974, when the city had its last great flood - it is coming, predicted. Are the papers asking whether we are somehow at fault? Or is it just that there isn't another way of describing a really, really big flood.

And, anyway, Noah probably had more to worry about than God’s judgments. He also had a boat full of animals, who, if not entirely spared the condemnation, were at least permitted coupling survivors. I have been wondering whether our visiting wallaby has a mate in the hill behind us, and whether they have heard me digging out the clay detritus behind my garage wall, the sludge that comes down the hill and raises the water levels.

The story of the arc is, I suppose, the story of how human and animal pathways meet. I am waiting for the wallaby to reappear after the floods have subsided and the grass is again faded by the harsh Brisbane sun.

A flooded sign: "Please do not feed the animals"

Great Journeys: Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead

2010-12-27T23:04:00.003+10:00

Here at the age of thirty-nine I began to be old. I felt stiff and weary in the evenings and reluctant to go out of camp; I developed proprietary claims to certain chairs and newspapers; I regularly drank three glasses of gin before dinner, never more or less, and went to bed immediately after the nine o'clock news. I was always awake and fretful an hour before reveille.
Here my last love died. There was nothing remarkable in the manner of its death. One day, not long before this last day in camp, as I lay awake before reveille, in the Nissen hut, gazing into the complete blackness, amid the deep breathing and muttering of the four other occupants, turning over in my mind what I had to do that day - had I put in the names of two corporals for the weapon-training course? Should I again have the largest number of men overstaying their leave in the batch due back that day? Could I trust Hooper to take the candidates class out map-reading? - as I lay in that dark hour, I was aghast to realize that something within me, long sickening, had quietly died, and felt as a husband might feel, who, in the fourth year of his marriage, suddenly knew that he had no longer any desire, or tenderness, or esteem, for a once-beloved wife; no pleasure in her company, no wish to please, no curiosity about anything she might ever do or say or think; no hope of setting things right, no self-reproach for the disaster. (p. 14)

This is Charles Ryder, out of love with the army, and about to revisit Brideshead, the home of his first love:

'What's this place called?'
He told me and, on the instant, it was as though someone had switched off the wireless, and a voice that had been bawling in my ears, incessantly, fatuously, for days beyond number, had been suddenly cut short; an immense silence followed, empty at first, but gradually, as my outraged sense regained authority, full of a multitude of sweet and natural and long forgotten sounds: for he had spoken a name that was so familiar to me, a conjuror's name of such ancient power, that, at its mere sound, the phantoms of those haunted late years began to take flight. (p. 24-25)

I know am probably stretching the category of great journeys here, as Brideshead Revisited (1945) is of course a work of fiction, and Charles Ryder a rather more sympathetic traveller than Waugh himself, who in his travel writing was not well-known for concealing his prejudices. But this book traces as great a journey as any other.

It is written in flawless high prose, and while Waugh felt compelled to apologise for just how high that prose got, what he referred to as "a kind of gluttony...for rhetorical and ornamental language" (p. 10), the "souvenir of the Second World War" that he produced is, to me, as seductive as this style of writing can be. Have a look, for example, at the structure of the third sentence of the second paragraph I have quoted - the sentence beginning One day, not long before. Would you dare punctuate this way?

It is nostalgic, and however much it may be the case that nostalgia takes more than it gives, I think nostalgia - the search for something that is gone - is such an elemental part of travel writing (and perhaps all writing) that when it is done well, most of us will set aside our high-minded forward momentum and indulge the author in his reclamation of the past.

And, in this case, the nostalgia works because of the complexity of Ryder's point of view: he has not journeyed to Brideshead on purpose; rather his is a forced revisiting that is in turn part of a much larger project, the War, that goes far beyond him. He is taken back to Brideshead, and in being re-introduced to his younger self he is offered the chance to do much more than revisit: he is being made to re-evaluate. Fate survives, even if love doesn't.

Brideshead Revisited is a book that I revisit at least once a year, and seemingly always for different reasons. In 2009, it was because I had been drinking with Bob Ellis, who in a pub in West End pulled a copy out of a black overnight bag, a well-worn copy he said he takes with him everywhere he goes. I don't have such a direct cause today, but perhaps in part it is because I have been reading The Year of Magical Thinking (2005) by Joan Didion. This memoir has much of the Brideshead effect: in a stunning opening, Didion captures not only the ordinariness of death, but also the sense that it is out of its ordinariness that the full shock is felt. Here my last love died. There was nothing remarkable in the manner of its death - these are Ryder's thoughts. The reason, of course, is because we know it is coming, and we live with it all the time. Life changes in the instant. The ordinary instant - these are Didion's.

Letter from Moreton Bay, by Stuart Glover

2010-12-23T12:19:00.002+10:00

The idea of an island is simple enough: a piece of land completely surrounded by water. Unlike the continent whose extremities are sometimes arbitrary, or the nation whose boundaries are as much political as geographic, the island is a binary idea. There is water, and there is land. The island is land, and the clarity of it gives rise to an island’s very identity and story. But at the southern end of Moreton Bay, 30 kilometres south east of Brisbane, where more than a dozen small low-lying, mosquito-blighted locks of land guard the mouth of the Logan River, there are four larger islands whose stories are not at all clear. Instead, their status as “land” at all has often been under a mark. Their history reminds us that the word “island” is a verb as well as a noun. Islands come and go, and are forever being made and unmade.

The islands of Russell, Macleay, Lamb, and Karragarra are home to 5000 or so people—and many hundreds of often empty weekender-houses besides. They nestle together, further east than Coochiemudlo, but in the lee of the more glamorous North Stradbroke Island. And while “Straddie”, with its surf beaches, its Aboriginal and convict lore, and its shark attacks, is a fixture in the Brisbane imagination, the four Southern Moreton Bay islands are only sometimes remembered. They, like all islands, have been made and remade in local minds many times.

Scandal

I have two waterfront beach houses on Macleay Island. Two beach houses is excessive, but the early 2000s real estate boom encouraged me, like many on the island, to excess. This boom was an echo of Macleay’s history. Until the mid-1970s the islands had never been included under any local government area. Developers were free to do what they wished. A real-estate frenzy was whipped up in the press in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and hundreds of blocks on the neighbouring Russell Island were sold off the plan to foreign and interstate investors. But unforgivably, many blocks were underwater at high tide, or good blocks were swapped for bad after buyers had signed up. The scandal gave rise to the longest trial in Australian legal history—but one that eventually fell apart in 1983 after two years when a juror fell ill. No one was punished.

The names of the islands, particularly Russell’s, were sullied. The very geography of the islands, their mix of marsh and terra firma, was at issue. Were these even islands at all? What is land? What is sea? What will a house sink on or in? How many bedrooms and bathrooms can a piece of stripped littoral rainforest on an island’s foreshore support? Some of the small beaches on Macleay island feature houses nestled too low in the dunes and are subject to flooding. On a still day, the waters around Coochiemudlo have a plume of bacteria. Over time, the Redland Council, which took over the islands after the scandal, reluctantly coughed up the cash to buy back many of the low-lying blocks.

Ipswich by the Sea

Yet, when the real estate frenzy came again at the very end of the 1990s, the buyers and the speculators—both the canny and the deluded—came once more. The Sunday Mail promoted that the islands had the cheapest land in South East Queensland: bush blocks for $10,000; waterfront blocks for $60,000. On the day I first visited a small house sold for $49,000. Some days, they still sell for $200,000. Mortgages and rents are low—only the car ferry, fuel, and the groceries shipped from the mainland are expensive.

While Noosa to the north and Gold Coast to the south attracted rich sea-changers, the islands attracted the poor. While there is a ring of expensive houses around the 15km or so of foreshore on Macleay, the island’s centre is filled with kit homes, ham-fisted two-bedders by owner-builders, and glorified sheds. It often seems like the last ungentrified waterfront development—a haven for pensioned retirees, the working poor, and single mothers. The twenty-minute ferry to and from the mainland is often filled with men in fluorescent road-crew work wear. Since the GFC, house prices have begun to fall. Those surviving on welfare leave when the pressure from Centrelink to find work gets too much. The small primary school tanked on the Federal Government’s My School web-site. Too many kids from vulnerable backgrounds come and go too often. It may be an island, but the escape to the mainland is always close.

The Bridge Fantasy

If the mainland is always close, it is never close enough. If one thing unites island folk it is the dream of a bridge. For now, people travel back and forth on a slow and expensive car barge, or a fast passenger ferry. The passenger ferry means the need for two cars and means incurring parking costs on the mainland. If the community is made up in a large part of people escaping from the pressures of mainland life, transport and its costs is the one issue to draw them together into political action. Local flyers and presses are filled with schemes for a new ferry and pontoons, but always a bridge: it is only a kilometre or so from Rocky Point on the mainland to southern tip of Russell.

If only this expanse of water could be bridged the inconveniences of island life—the islandness of it—could be bridged also. The waterfront residents would be instant millionaires. But the cost—the estimate is often around the $300 million mark—and, for some, the insistence on being an island stand in the way. Developers to the south have turned Sovereign Island into a luxury enclave with the help of a series of short bridges, but Russell and Macleay remain adrift.

Hope among the Mangroves

If much of Macleay’s history has been shaped by the idea of being unknown, unchartered, unreachable, and unloved, there is hope. While the developers have been marginalised, the islands have been declared part of the Moreton Bay Marine Park. A large conservation area has been fashioned on Russell. Wetlands reserves have been protected on Macleay. When the convict Tim O’Shea became the first white settler on the island when escaped to there from Stradbroke in 1837, he hid in these wetlands. He was isolated enough to never learn that he had been pardoned. Now both the story and the beauty of these places have been preserved.

In what is perhaps the last reminder of the process of islanding, the islands continue to grow. In the late 1800s the mangroves on Macleay were often cleared to make life easier for the oystermen who were in search of stocks of lime. Now, the protected mangroves trap the sands, and the islands swell an extra inch or two every year. They creep ever closer to the shore. They resist the rising tides of global warming. They insist upon themselves. They declare themselves as islands once more.

Note: This letter appeared first as “Islanding in Moreton Bay” in the latest issue of LiNQ Journal (Literature in North Queensland) Vol 37, 2010.

Stuart Glover teaches writing at the University of Queensland. He lives, sometimes, on Macleay Island in Southern Moreton Bay.

Great Journeys: William Least Heat-Moon in America

2010-12-21T09:22:00.007+10:00

I am adding William Least Heat-Moon's Blue Highways (1982) to my collection of great journeys, but my notes on this enchanting book are, I'm afraid, drawn entirely from memory, as I long ago lent my copy to a friend or colleague, and unsurprisingly it hasn't come back. If I were lent Blue Highways, I would steal it, too.

Blue Highways is a great journey because it is a book about looking and listening first, and commenting second. The opening premise, too, is perfect (in literary terms) if a bit shitty in terms of the author's actual life: Least Heat-Moon loses his university job, his wife leaves him, and, with the few hundred dollars he has left to his name, he decides to buy a van and take to the "blue highways", or the quieter roads that were once printed in blue on American road maps. He has nothing left to lose, and can really only gain by travelling.

As well as keeping off the big roads, he does his best to avoid cities, and sleeps in his van. His main food source is road-side diners, at the time a fading institution of road travel for which he develops a rating system based on the number of calendars hanging up on the walls: the fewer the calendars, the less likely it is that you're in for a good meal. He is seldom hastled, in fact only twice, and on both occasions it is by the police. Otherwise, he is left alone to do what he does best, which is to move slowly enough to be able to strike up conversations with the people who live by the blue roads he follows - that is, he is by no means a solitary traveller, even though he moves through America on his own.

Thus, the structure of the book reflects Least Heat-Moon's most important quality as a traveller, which is his willingness to stop and talk to strangers. Blue Highways records dozens of stories, patiently transcribed (one assumes during quiet nights in the van) and allowed, for the most part, to stand on their own right. Taken together, the conversations and potted autobiographies that they contain form an odds-and-ends collection of American stories from the late 1970s. And while Least Heat-Moon forms an obvious link between these stories, he allows us to listen and to make the connections between the stories for ourselves, as though they have merely been collected from the roadside and stored in the back of the van.

The book, when first published in 1982, was a stunning, unexpected commercial success, and still sells thousands of copies every year. It's probably time I got my second copy.

Great Journeys: Eric Newby in the Hindu Kush

2010-12-20T09:26:00.013+10:00

Eric Newby's A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush (1958) is a great journey because it announced Newby's arrival as one of the most constant and approachable travel writers of the twentieth century. The story tells of his decision to leave his post-War career in the rag trade and team up with a British Foreign Office friend to climb Mir Samir, a peak in Afghanistan's Hindu Kush, then as now one of the most alluring and difficult places in the world to visit.

At first, there seems something ho-hum about Newby's prose style, and the dialogue in particular strains to be jolly in that 1950s way where quick sarcasm is used a veil of pain and tiredness. A survival device left over from the War, perhaps. But now and then the reality of Newby's situation pierces through, especially when the two travellers learn about the troubles faced by the locals. The first horrifying event is a road accident, the second a robbery, the third an accidental shooting. In each case, Newby is merely a witness - although in the first incident is blamed for the fatality - but the intrusion of these deaths in the narrative lifts the bumbling tone from seeming too jolly English to rather tragic: the young travellers really are out of their depth. That the sarcasm fails to hide that fact makes the story better.

For the rest of his writing career, Newby managed a delicate balance of silliness, sarcasm and glimpses of awkwardness and uncertainty, and as a result his writing is always approachable. He has a distinctive, generational humour which he couples with a willingness to be exposed on the page, a fact that relates his writing to travellers like Bill Bryson who are prepared to seem as faulty as the countries and cultures featured in their books.

My personal favourite is On the Shores of the Mediterranean (1984), when Newby and his wife Wanda trace the whole of the Med - there's a particularly wonderful scene of them driving through the rain to Cetinje in Montenegro, a route that I re-traced with my wife Olanda in 2005. Newby had gone looking for the famous Hotel Grand to find only foundations and ruins, a disappointing result that came at the end of a terrifying climb along what really is one of the most confronting roads in Europe. Twenty years later, Olanda and I found a Hotel Grand of Soviet proportions: hundreds of rooms, mostly empty, a resident basketball team, and more waiting staff in the restaurant than customers. I doubted that Newby would have been impressed with the reconstruction, but I toasted him all the same.

Slowly Down the Ganges (1966) is another highlight for me, and also A Small Place in Italy (1994), which I suppose was taking part in that wave of expat memoirs that appeared in the 80s and 90s, but which in this case is much better for Newby's long connection with Italy - it was there that he met his wife Wanda, when as an escaped prisoner of war he tried to find a way out of enemy territory by walking the Apennines.

Walking to escape is part of the thematic geography of A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush, too, and remains at the core of most of Newby's writing: you can laugh, but you also need to get away, and getting away means being unsettled, exposed, and ultimately more open. You might even find a wife.

Craft: Jokes, jokes, jokes: Clive James #4 - travel memoir

2010-11-30T10:39:00.009+10:00

"As an Australian expatriate I had grown used to the fabled English sense of humour but preferred to steer clear of it when possible, for fear of laughing too hard." (16)

This uncharacteristically blunt sarcasm comes at the close of paragraph 2 of May Week Was In June, the last in Clives James' memoir trilogy. By the same point in the story, James has established in very thorough fashion that, on the day he arrived in Cambridge, it was foggy:

"I could see nothing except a cold white October mist."
"For all I knew, Cambridge was receiving me with open arms."
"The white opacity came all the way to my eyeballs."
"I couldn't see the station and I could barely see the suitcase."
"I had to climb the memorial to find out what the direction was."
"At first she snarled at me, perhaps because I had located her partly by touch."

That is, roughly three gags about the fog per paragraph. And it continues in paragraph three:

"I found, by stepping into it, a gutter the size of a small canal."
"...to check the texture of the building with my carefully extended right hand."

The travel memoir, or at least the travel memoir in which the memoir bit dominates, relies less on exposition and description than on personality and personal impressions, with all the irony you can throw at them: the genre presents a narrative first and culture in slow second, with the first person point of view not only carrying your character but the character of the work as a whole.

The second set of jokes centres on Abramovitz, James' neighbour in college, who:

"...appeared suddenly beside me with a silence made possible by monogrammed leather slippers."
"At least five years younger than I, Abramovitz carried on as if he were fifty years older."
"I asked him if he was going to be Prime Minister."

Then, dinner:

"The [food] proved only useful as a discussion point. The entrée wasn't tender enough to be a paving stone and the gravy couldn't have been primordial soup because morphogenesis had already taken place."

The students/social gatherings:

"Five minutes after shaking hands with [the Tutor] I found myself left alone with an Iranian biochemist whose name sounded like a fly trapped against a window."
"It struck me on the spot that if the English had spent their lives preparing to fit into one of these places, then the only smart thing to do was not to bother about fitting in at all, and I can honestly say that from that moment on I never wasted any time trying."
Of Delmer Dynamo: "His pear-shaped head, I could now see, was situated on top of a pear-shaped body, which his black gown caused him to resembles a piece of fruit going to a funeral."

And on it goes. (We are only up to the fifth page of the memoir.)

Of course it works, but if you can write like this - that is, with wit/a pen dipped in vitriol - note also that it works in memoir in a way that won't necessarily work in travel writing. Even in memoir, you have to be able to keep it up, and pace it evenly. (The moment sharp wit loses its energy, the personality behind it loses its hold on the reader, because we glimpse the hands that are holding the jokes together. And, at that point, we stop laughing and start pointing back.) But in James' travel writing, the wit comes as part of a broader range of interests, and his narrative and point of view are used in ways that often merely enliven rather than structure the content.

Clive James study #3: Back to Italy

2010-11-25T19:48:00.013+10:00

Back to Italy, in a way. But more accurately, perhaps, to Italian film. My next Clive James study takes me first to Florence in 1963, when Clive James is sitting next to his future wife, watching Fellini's film 8½ for the first time. "Long before the lights went up on the stunned audience, everyone in it knew that this was a work to grow old with" (131). James, now writing in 1994 for the New Yorker, is bringing us up-to-date with the ageing process (reference below).

More specifically, though, he is revisiting the film's central theme of marital fidelity, and, at the end of the fifth of seven introductory paragraphs, ends with this: "Whether 8½ is really about Fellini is a question raised by the film itself - a question answered, in part, by the uncomfortable certitude of any married man who watches it that it is really about him. Men, we're all in this together. Fellini had us figured out."

1) The introduction closes with two paragraphs explaining Fellini's initial desire to make a film not about a film director but rather about l'homme moyen sensuel and the process by which the setting became the mondo del cinema "right up front working its charm" (133). A section break (a classic New Yorker section break) announces that we are about to learn more about the world of Italian cinema.

2) The world of Italian cinema in five paragraphs: Italy as the centre of film-making in the fifties and sixties; Italian cinema as being as important as Italian masters; the close world of collaboration; the comedies, which gave us "an education in just how comprehensive and satisfying a popular art form could be without ceasing to be either popular or artistic" (135); the postwar neo-realist cinema.

James ends the second introductory section with this observation: "In short, the Italian cinema of those years was a lush field for someone to stand out from. Fellini did, head and shoulders." (135)
I love the phrase "childishly hipped on their own anger", which to me stands out (head and shoulders).
Note that by the end of the tenth paragraph we have two strands established: firstly, that Fellini's concerns about affairs are universal; secondly, that Fellini stood out, and did so in a period of intense artistic activity.

3) The film: 8½ as being at the core of Fellini's output; Fellini's use of the camera; improvisation and the use of amateur actors; Fellini's childhood and Saraghina; the "primitive" imagination - "The mind is the house of the Lord, and in the house of the Lord there are many mansions, and one of them is a honky-tonk" (139).

Note how the fourth paragraph in this section, beginning with "In a TV interview", marks a transition from film form to the content of the film, with James' observations about about Sandra Milo (who plays the mistress) leading to this: "If it was just the story of a man caught between wife and mistress and satisfied with neither, it would be La Dolce Vita. But 8½ isn't about the melodrama in the life of its protagonist; it's about the psychodrama in his mind." (137)
It is this development towards psychodrama that allows James to relate the movie to the early impressions on Fellini's mind, and a light psychological analysis of the movie itself. (In terms of the last part of the essay, establishing the inner subject of the film will be used as evidence of the film's enduring importance.)

4) The film (part 2): the "interior imbroglio" is the real subject of 8½: all that Guido wants is "all the women in the world" (139), including Claudia Cardinale, who "triggers Guido's mixed vision of carnal purity" (140); Guido's poor-taste mind.

More memorable phrases. Of Cardinale: "Dante's Beatrice on the cover of Vogue. Petrarch's Laura with an agent" (140).
The section ends with Guido being recast as a monster: "It is a clear confession, on Guido's part, that his sexual imagination is an unrealizable, incurably adolescent fantasy of banal variety and impotent control." (141) This is a central sentence in developing the point made by the essay as a whole, and a key transition point in its shift from film to film-maker (and from film-maker to audience).

5) I.e., "Just as clearly, it is Fellini's confession too" (141): Fellini's marriage to Giulietta Masina; Fellini and feminism; feminism in Italy; Fellini "was saying that men should be held responsible for what they did, not for how they felt" (143), as actions can be given their proper name; the role of Guido's wife, Luisa, in 8½.

By now, the transition points between film and the world "around" the film are so well established that James can move back and forward between without much sign-posting: he can write about Luisa/Masina and Guido/Fellini as thought they are all real and all part of the same textual universe, one which we as viewers are able to join.

6) Fellini's oeuvre and standing as a director: in the order that James discusses them, Juliet of the Spirits, Satyricon, Roma, La Dolce Vita, Amarcord, Casanova, La Città delle Donne, E la Nave Va, and Ginger and Fred.

It seems an unusual move to put this fairly long exposition at the end of the essay, and one could debate whether it really carries the theme of the essay or merely allows James to enjoy his (admittedly very analytical) viewing history in detail. In favour of the section is the fact that it brings us closer to James, which in this case is important given James' arguments about the universality (or, male universality) of the inner drama of 8½ and what that means for the standing of the film.

7) The relative lack of depth in Hollywood, and the problem in forgetting about the directors of the fifties and sixties: "Fellini's is the tragic view of life, the gift of the old countries to the new ones where people think their life is over if they are not happy." (150)

Again, I'm not sure the essay doesn't become a little too wide-ranging at this point. I first read the essay in 2003, and it's the link that James established between Fellini, Guido, and himself that has remained in my memory. Re-reading, I am surprised to find that discussion "hipped" on a slight grumpiness about modern films.

But this, after all, is an essay called "Mondo Fellini" and not "Fellini, Fidelity, and Fantasy", and my doubts about the structure of the closing sections probably misses the point, which is that a New Yorker article is always more than a study: it is an angle. In this case, the angle has been widened because of the time that has passed between the essay and its subject matter. Perhaps essays, like girths, stretch with the years.

Source:

James, Clive. "Mondo Fellini." In Even As We Speak: New Essays 1993-2001. London: Picador, 2003. 130-151. (First published in The New Yorker 21 March 1994, 154 - available here.)

Wonder is culturally relative

2010-11-22T20:03:00.007+10:00

Or, rather, I am full of wonder at Carolyne Larrington's essay, "'Undruðusk þá, sem fyrir var': Wonder, Vínland and Medieval Travel Narratives" (available here).

It looks at medieval Icelandic saga accounts of voyages to Vínland, the sagas' term for Northern America, in light of H. R. Jauss' reception theory and le Goff's and Grenblatt's work on the marvellous (references below). While the essay is in itself a study of medieval Icelandic literature and a number of relatable, early modern texts, it opens up a range of ideas and issues applicable to much travel literature, modern and medieval. The article, though:

An opening premise, drawn from Jauss: in reading medieval travel narratives, we are able to map an "horizon of expectation of the addressees for whom the text was originally composed" (92).
One of the curious aspects of medieval Icelandic accounts of the New World is the absence of what we might think of as a sense of wonder. The sagas, in typical style, prefer to create a sense of the real (even, the realism of the extraordinary) over the miraculous.
Perhaps this is because realistic representations of new encounters are more useful, in a material and mental mapping sense, than representations that are quoting pre-existing tropes.
It may also be down to the sagas' narrative point of view, which is almost always a third-person, objective one.
And, after all, "[w]onder...is culturally relative" (97) - medieval Scandinavians recognize that skis might seem extraordinary to those who are new to Scandinavia. But the New World is, to an extent, an extension of their own.
And as important as wonder, in fact, is curiosity.

In the context of the saga accounts of the European discoveries of 1000, these are factors in an audience demand for the real as it is represented through a strongly communal history, but which, as part of a "[r]evelling in the sheer variousness of the world", produces an "openness to the marvellously unexpected." (114)

The important point for all travel writers is that realism and objectivity are always to some extent the products of how the audience reads, and that an "openness to the marvellously unexpected" is not at odds with a commitment to the real. The best audiences often want both.

In order of appearance:

Larrington, Carolyne. "'Undruðusk þá, sem fyrir var': Wonder, Vínland and Medieval Travel Narratives." Mediaeval Scandinavia 14 (2004): 91-114.

Jauss, H. R. Toward an Aesthetic of Reception. Translated by Timothy Bahti. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982.

Le Goff, Jacques. "Le merveilleux dans l'Occident medieval." In L'Imaginaire Médiéval: Essais. Paris: Gallimard, 1985.

Greenblatt, Stephen. Marvellous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991.

Letter from San Francisco, by Rob Adams

2010-11-22T10:27:00.005+10:00

Land’s End, Golden Gate National Recreation Area

The city has turned into an amusement park, or perhaps it always was. I’ve been stalking the remains of the Sutro Baths, as I walk these Land’s End sea cliffs trails. But now you can rent a two person, side by side, yellow scooter pod with an electronic guidance system that will tell you when to turn right and all about the sixties.

Is this place all about the money? What about Silver Barron Sutro, underwriting a civic train, cutting the line into the cliffs, so people could see his grand house and have public baths – grandiose for the people.

The wind is howling east with the four o’clock fog, pushing over the rock grabbing cypress for centuries, and the city seems just out of reach, overshadowed by nature’s wonder. I can see the yellow of Angel Island, the red of the G.G. Bridge, and the Marion green of the fogged over pacific pallet before me. The city seems to hide in the hills behind, full of magazine cream, and top popping key punchers. From this vantage, I can see a lot of the surrounding area - the urban takes over the vast bay’s shores and hills. How many stops to segregated San Francisco from the Black East Bay? No cheap transport to the insular peninsula.

San Francisco, stuff of myth and lore, carved out of an image of a Saint who talked to animals, the underground and overground interface, and the over scroll marketplace. Is there a universal over-soul besides the internet?

We don’t make anything. I am looking for a job as a writer.

San Carlos, California

Combat-duty pay, in combination with lower house prices have brought more tattoos to selective satellite city pools and tennis courts.

Molotov’s, Lower Haight, San Francisco

There is a loud drunk guy talking. It’s afternoon and the whole bar is painted black. The bartendress is a punk rock girl better than Joan Jett.

The drunk’s talking her ear off, and the rest of us. “That was the climax of my fucking story --!” the drunk says, “A Toast!”

“Are you happy?” the drunk says. He’s kind of a bald blond yuppie. “Are You happy?”

The punkers murmur. I’m sitting at a table by the window, not at the bar, so I don’t have to answer.

“I don’t have a job,” says the drunk. “But yeah, I’m telling you, I have an idea…I had it all. I had it all set up, because I speak French and I used to be employed. I’ve been sitting around Smoking Pot! – watching French movies because I speak French but I forgot a word!…Intellectual Property! Year of the Fucking Tiger! Kick some fucking ass! But basically I’d be licensing intellectual property to a market five times as big… but here’s to clean sperm and no condoms and my heavily employed wife, a Chinese sector narcissistic explosion – so here’s to making babies.”

The Wu-Tang Clan is on the jukebox, simple piano and the cut-count rhythm of the ODB. The drunk starts up again: “Here’s what I’m trying to tell you…”

The jukebox changes to Johnny Cash, and the drunk sings along to the guitar solo. The drunk’s tolerant new bar mates scatter. He starts flirting with the bartendress. There are professional borders on the TV with the sound down, another corner screen with the original Bad Lieutenant, sound down plus subtitles. There is also a red felt pool table near the back. The drunk mumbles, “Marriage…ha ha ha. When do you say yes – when do you say yes to That?”

There used to be peanut shells on the floor in here, and black plastic baskets of peanuts on the bar – and before that, you could smoke in here and the pool felt was purple. But it is 2010 now, nobody knows me in here anymore and it’s afternoon.

My wife and child arrive tomorrow. I thought I might have a job by now.

The 4600 Block of 12th Street, Oakland,
Has Only One Sidewalk...

… and one abandoned railroad line.
The cement of the sidewalk is stamped with the mark: WPA 1940

And surrounded by the sparkle of broken glass, and white dog faeces,
     there is a yellow
plastic package of black meat on the sidewalk.

It seems to have been cooking there for years.
A criminologist would be able to tell better.

The plastic wrap has burst into strips and mini-flags,
but the yellow polystyrene tray remains intact.

What used to be the meat, looks like melted dung or mud (which perhaps
     it is).
Gently quivering in the breeze, the tentacles of clear plastic seem to
     beckon, advertising.

The longer you look the more you want to gag – though it is hard to tell
     the smell from all
the others, and it’s nothing you’d notice from a car.

There was a dead dog in a plastic box, and that got picked up after a
     phone call and a
couple days. But the old yellow Styrofoam remains, even after the recent
     rains.

And a small puddle of rainwater has sort of eroded a crater,
leaving a small pool of meat tea.

The author: Rob Adams recently completed an MCI in Creative Writing at QUT. His major project was the novella Day-Glo Noir: C'est une Faux Memoir.

Letter from Mexico, by Donna Hancox

2010-11-20T07:46:00.003+10:00

Mexico City sits 2,240 metres above sea level and is one of the most polluted cities in the world. There are days when the pollution is so bad residents are advised to stay at home. Standing outside the airport I tried to fill my lungs with oxygen but the air was thin and gritty, with a chill that dug into my bones and made me ache. I had waited, tears beginning to burn in my nose and at the back of my throat, for three hours for my bag to arrive via a San Francisco flight, although I flew from LA. I’d grabbed it off the carousel, my knees buckling slightly with relief. This, this is my bag, I murmured.

Finally I made it to my hotel in the city centre. All tawdry glamour, peeling paint and colonial architecture. When I lay on the bed after a lukewarm shower I started to cry great heaving jet lagged sobs. Doubting my ability to stay in this city for even a couple of days before I made my way down to Chiapas. The southern-most state of Mexico, and an area still shuddering with civil unrest. It was the beginning of the Millennium and I was in search of the Zapatistas: a Marxist grass roots revolutionary group that posted manifestos and missives via the internet, and were led by a balaclava wearing, pipe smoking philosophy professor. In that dank hotel room I suddenly saw myself through Subcomandate Marco’s eyes: self-indulgent and pretentious.

I was convinced I would feel differently in San Cristobel, the small town in Chiapas I was heading to. As though Mexico City was the problem. The bus trip took eighteen hours and we arrived in San Cristobel at dawn. I stepped off the bus and gulped in the crisp mountain air. After days enveloped in the chaos of Mexico City the silence of San Cristobel was jarring. A small line of taxis waited next to the bus stop, and I watched as Mexican families filled them until there was only one taxi left and I was the last person. The driver smiled at me and beckoned like I was a stray animal. I thrust a piece of paper with the address of the posada into his hand and said,

‘Porfavor.’

Trees ringed the town square and the municipal building stood at one end of the park. It was the building the Zapatistas had briefly taken control of five years earlier. Later that day I would run my fingers over the bullet holes.

The posada was pale blue and bright yellow. In my room was a vase of lilies next to the bed. I wasted the first two days lying in the sun at the town square reading books, torn between crippling self-consciousness and the desire to follow my plans. In the make shift office at the posada I noticed some Zapatista posters and asked Luisa the owner if she could help me find a way to visit one of their communities.

‘I suppose,’ she said in stilted English. ‘There is one that allows visitors. But why?’

‘Because that is why I came here. They are famous. And revolutionary.’

‘They just want their land,’ she replied, looking at me hard for a moment before adding, ‘I have a friend. I will speak with him and see if he can take you next time he goes.’

‘Muchas gracias.’

The next day she gave me the address of a street corner towards the edge of town. I was to meet Guillermo at 7am on Sunday morning. As I walked in the stark morning light I worried about meeting a strange man and going into the mountains with him. Life, I thought, is made up of a series of small choices and this is one of them. A very short, wizened man holding the reigns of two donkeys greeted me cheerfully.

‘Hola.’

My fear subsided as I patted one of the donkey’s heads. Its ears were so soft and silky I wanted to throw my arms around its neck. Then I saw the saddle. Wooden. Just to be sure I touched the saddle. Definitely wooden.

‘Up, up,’ Guillermo urged me.

We rode out of town, and down a dirt track. The countryside reminded me initially of South West Queensland where I grew up. Scrubby and tough, with huge birds flying above circling unsuspecting prey. We left the dirt track, the donkeys marching up the mountain dodging trees and loose stones. Guillermo spoke almost no English but smiled a lot. When he did speak I did not understand, but I felt safe. We arrived at a small village, which was really just a white church surrounded by tables. It seemed to be the meeting place for the Indigenous families living in the mountains. The donkeys stopped by themselves, and Guillermo got off saying to me,

‘Comer,’ and putting his hand near his mouth in case I didn’t know that it meant to eat. He walked me over to one of the tables and I pointed to a plate with beans and rice and corn. An old woman held up three fingers. I pulled out a five Peso note and waved away the offer of change. After lunch we kept riding and the air kept getting thinner, but not like Mexico City. It was thin and sweet. We came to a clearing with huts and tents and a school house in the middle. Men and women stood around in colourful clothing with carved wooden guns slung over their shoulders. They smiled to Guillermo but looked away from me. He went to talk to a group of men, and spread his arms out as if to say, I brought you here the rest is up to you.

It seemed so absurd, so stupid that I would be standing on there on the edge of a community fighting for their lives without anything to contribute and no way to communicate. So I sat down and waited for Guillermo.

A young girl walked over and sat next to me.

‘Rosa,’ she said.

‘Donna,’ I answered. ‘Australia.’

‘Australia,’ she repeated. Turning the word over like a stone in her mouth.

The author: Donna Hancox lectures in Creative Writing at Queensland University of Technology.

Letter from a Small Room in Berlin, by Stuart Glover

2010-11-18T07:15:00.001+10:00

A week in Berlin has underlined the boundaries of travel. Not quite in the way that Laika, the space dog, might have experienced in the launch of Sputnik 2—perishing from overheating in a tiny craft at the very limits of transportation—but in a more mundane way that helps remind us of the different reasons we might be on the move. Berlin makes clear again that tourism, travel, and expatriatism are different things. It is clear after a week that this city serves each of these impulses differently well. Berlin accommodates the tourist in a perfunctory way, but it returns the embrace of the traveller and the émigré.

My own imagination about Berlin has always been jejune. I have read about the bunker; I have read about the bombings; and I have read about the spy swaps on Glienicke Bridge between West Berlin and Potsdam. My contemporary sense of the city is even less informed, but here my ignorance is coloured by paranoid fear rather than by wartime romance. Contemporary Berlin seems to suggest avantgard art and artists. I am not sure what I mean by this but it involves Nick Cave and a coal-eyed woman called Petra pointing out that I am just not cool. As though in Berlin you can be anything: rich, poor, German, Turkish, a sex-worker from Moldova—but you must be cool.

As a tourist, I am easily satisfied by old things. Not so much museums, although there are plenty to enjoy in Berlin, more so streetscapes that crowd you with a sense of history. But Berlin, so wretchedly bombed in the war, has had much of its past erased. I came to Berlin from the Swiss World Heritage-listed town of St Gallen with its intact 15th century townhouses and its startling Abbey Library. By contrast, Berlin in a gloomy moist Autumn is not pretty. Like, say, Exeter in Britain, Berlin has a long history but the war truncated its physical connections to it.

This erasure turns sight-seeing into a task of sight-seeking. You must travel to Postdamer Platz to see the cold, but striking, contemporary architecture that marks the re-unification of the city. You must travel to Postdam on the city’s outskirts to see the Kaisers’ castles and summerhouses. But the city itself is plain, ugly even, dominated by post-war apartments—few of them higher than five stories—which sprawl outwards for many kilometres to house more than three million people. As a local explained it to me, Berlin is a trick for the tourist because despite its fame and romance, “there is no there, there”.

The city seems to deliver much more to the traveller, intent on staying somewhere for a month or more, or the émigré looking for somewhere to live. Berlin is easier and more rewarding to inhabit than to visit. It is cosmopolitan in two senses of the word. On one hand, it is touched by the exotic, sitting as it does between Western and Eastern Europe and home as it is to waves of migrants since its establishment in the 1300s. And on the other, it is welcoming, tolerant, and curious about things from elsewhere. It is the budget World City.

And cost seems to be much of the reason that young westerners are here in large numbers from the UK, the US, Australia and elsewhere in Europe. In my home town of Brisbane—which is hardly a world centre—the inner city rents, the food prices and transport costs make the life of a moocher or the life of an artist more and more difficult. But Berlin with its eight-dollar meals, its two-dollar glasses of wine, and its $1000 a month apartments supports a large population of musicians, writers, gap-year students, and art-scene poseurs who eek out a life through part-time work in bars or suchlike.

And the city is enlivened by this wash of the young and the adventurous. Since unification, suburb after suburb has been gentrified, often marked by the arrival of cheap restaurants, idiosyncratic bars, street buskers, and tiny cafes that welcome everyone, even smokers. Late on, just as the train system shuts down and the night buses start up, the city comes alive with clubbers and drinkers.

I am awkward in the face of this kind of self-propelled fun at the best of times, so I am not sure how as the lone tourist, adrift, to enjoy Berlin on its own terms. I am just here for a week and I have nothing to offer but tourist cash. But alone in my pension room, late on a rainy and cold Wednesday night, overdue on a conference paper deadline, I can still tell it is out there: Berlin, a real city.

The author: Stuart Glover lectures in Creative Writing at the University of Queensland.

Craft: A second Clive James study

2010-11-15T11:25:00.007+10:00

My second analysis of Clive James' travel writing is, like the first, based on a piece in his Flying Visits collection, now out of print but included for free on James' website. "Postcard from Biarritz" (available here), begins, as is often the case in his travel writing, by indulging James' knowledge of aircraft and flight schedules.

1) Then, he gets the reader there (2 paragraphs), that is, to "the mini-golf course that Biarritz calls an airport". And some background: what was/is Biarritz, the author's previous visit (2 paragraphs).

As with the Rome piece, James includes himself in a way that adds a humorous/personal element, and that also begins to hint at theme. His friend and compatriot Michael Blakemore has bought a house in Biarritz: "The purchase cleaned him out, but the climate, cliffs and waves reminded him of home. They did the same to me. We spent two weeks not writing a film. This year we planned to spend another two weeks not writing a play."

2) A history of the rise of the town as a summer destination for the European nobility (5 paragraphs): the broad sweep of the town's rise and fall; a twelfth-century fishing village; the arrival of Napolean III; the resort town of kings and queens; a last resort of the exclusive/anti-democratic culture of old Europe.

In typical James style, the history lesson is kept fresh through pacing (James skips through a big history by keeping it close to a central theme of the rise and fall of the town) and through his humorous turn of phrase: the whales "sensibly moved away"; during the town's high point, there was "a commingling of crowns, a tangling of tiaras"; the then Prince of Wales "acquired much of his girth in the Biarritz pastry shops".

3) A narrowing of the historical perspective (6 paragraphs): the public works and architecture of the nobility; swimming in the sea ("Previously the idea had not occurred to anyone"); "the ritualised fuss and elaborate machinery" of going for a swim in the nineteenth century.

The piece becomes a little frivolous at this point: James enjoys himself in the precise terminology associated with a nineteenth-century swim: the terms peignoir, guide-baigneur, la cabine, and trottoir roulant are not there so much for historical precision as the precise impression of absurdity they create. It's all a bit silly, so James can be a bit silly, too: "What went on beneath the waves must remain forever unknown, but one trusts that class barriers were suitably eroded. Ankles must have touched. Knees must have collided. Surely the occasional rendezvous was made, as it is today in the winter resorts, where fine ladies sometimes invite their ski instructors to bed, although never to dinner."

4) Finishing off the history lesson (3 paragraphs): the town's fall from favour; the beginning of a period when Biarritz "was preserved by neglect": "Biarritz still served the turn as a plush funk-hoe, but as a display case it was past tense." The young rich now went to St Tropez, "where the waves were very flat but there was a chance of seeing Brigitte Bardot's behind".

The last sentence of these paragraphs signals the move back to the theme that is hinted at the beginning of the piece: "Nobody thought of the big waves at Biarritz with any special fondness until 1956, when Richard Zanuck and Peter Viertel arrived on the coast to scout locations for The Run Also Rises." With the surf rising, we are a little closer to Sydney...

5) Back to the personal (3 paragraphs): Zanuck and Viertel surfing instead of movie-making brings us back to James and Blakemore not writing their film.

The return to the opening idea of surfing instead of working brings the historical sketch up to the present point in the town's history and in James' encounters with the place. It also helps to develop a second, related idea, which is that leisure and indulgence are not necessarily wasteful things: sometimes it is best not to do anything - Biarritz, after all, has in the past been saved by neglect. Renewed interest in the town is not necessarily a blessing.

6) Biarritz today, home to a "new, penniless royalty" of surfers, including Australians "with John Newcombe moustaches and countersunk eyes like tacks in a carpet" (5 paragraphs): increasingly popular with surfers and families, Biarritz is no longer able to crumble quietly into the sea - but how can it afford the redevelopment costs, and the broader costs of redevelopment?

This section ends with James attending a public meeting that erupts into disagreement, allowing the author to make the last transition in the piece, towards some thought about the Basques and their famous temper.

7) Final thoughts (3 paragraphs): the local game pelote as a symbol of the local temperament; the time to visit is now, when "those elegantly turned-out gentlemen" of the nineteenth century have been replaced with "some of the most heartbreakingly pretty girls in the world springing around with hardly anything on at all."

The final final thought is that, "as a place in which not to do something, Biarritz is unbeatable." The sentence pretty much does what James hopes it will, which is to bring the elements of this piece (which are, in the main, historical) together around the more broadly social theme of leisure and its consequences. Surfing, doing nothing, watching girls: they suit James the Sydneysider, and James the artist, even if we really know that he has been busy writing all along.

The first day of summer

2010-11-12T12:38:00.003+10:00

Summer has confirmed its arrival with a sudden wall of morning humidity. By the time it arrives each year, I've somehow forgotten it will be coming. It's a cloak around your skin, impossible to take off, even when you go inside. It releases the smells of summer: tarmac, wet grass, the mulch that is always heavy from afternoon storms, clay under the rocks, the heady stickiness of the pollens, wood that is beginning to bend. In the early evenings, it stops: the humidity becomes a kind of lazy heat that can't quite be bothered leaving. And then, when the sun sets at around seven, it begins again: both nocturnal and a creature at home in the blinding mornings.

Enter, the internet.

My sister Frída is commenting (via Facebook) on pictures I took last February in Iceland. She says she's only just seen them - they must have come up on that new Facebook application that shows you people's old photos. Right now, I can't imagine what it's like to be that cold, but posting some pictures from the day feels like putting an ice bucket in front of the fan.

The ice had frozen about twenty metres out into the lake, Thingvallavatn, 40 minutes' drive from Reykjavík.

I'm not sure how the water had frozen in this way, but it seemed as though each stage of the freezing process was documented in the layers and shadows of the ice.

My friend and I photographed the lake for about half an hour. I was only using a little Canon Ixus, but it took the most gorgeous photographs of the slow winter sunset being refracted in the surface ice and in the waves that had formed at the edge of the lake.

In this last one, the light is not as distinct and sharp as in the others, but I love the way the ice seems to be reaching for the mountains in the far distance, almost like an army flag bearer.

(A piece that I wrote about this trip for M/C Journal can be found here.)

Remembrance Day

2010-11-11T12:37:00.004+10:00

My grandfather on my mother's side, Harold Diggons, was serving in the British Navy in the D-Day Landing of 6 June 1944. His war experience affected him profoundly. He was never really able to settle down afterwards: he would be looking for the intensity of those years for the rest of his life. This was a restlessness that, after the war, brought him to Australia, that five years later took him back to England, and that a year after that brought him and the family back to Australia again. And it was a restlessness that my mother inherited, and so has shaped much of my own life.

I can't say I'm not grateful. I like the feeling of restlessness, insomuch as I like to feel that there is always another trip to take, albeit less dramatic than the D-Day one that Harold took 65 years ago.

Harold's photograph of his vessel approaching the French coast (I still can't quite believe that they were allowed to take photos).

My grandfather is pictured here, in Brighton for training in May 1944, second from the right.

And, here, the before and after of D-Day: his vessel waiting to be loaded for the invasion (above) and in Bordeaux on his last day of active service (below, first on the left).

The Benefits of Content

2010-11-10T14:32:00.002+10:00

The first part of An African Journey with Jonathan Dimbleby was screened on ABC television last night, and comes as a second television travel story to delight (Stephen Fry and Mark Carwardine's Last Chance to See has also been screening recently, and also on the ABC). What the programmes share is actual content: interviews, background information, research, and insights into local cultures and environments.

I know I sound old-fashioned when I say that content seems an increasingly rare element in television. But sometimes, when a show delivers more than personality (although this is not missing in either show), you really notice what we normally go without.

And, in the context of travel writing, I think we have to be told about what's going on. Without exposition and analysis, we remain on the surface of the images that we're being shown, a surface that quickly becomes unreliable if it isn't contextualized.

Journeys to Envy: The Saga Steads of Iceland

2010-11-06T12:21:00.007+10:00

One or two of my colleagues in Australia will make fun of me for this (as I am more or less always going on about Iceland), but I am deeply jealous of my friend Emily Lethbridge, who soon begins a year-long pilgrimage of the saga steads of Iceland, that is, the sites from Iceland's medieval saga literature. It's a journey I have often dreamed of making, and which I suppose over the years I have been collating in parts.

Good luck to Emily! Her blog about the coming travels can be found here, and a conference paper that I have written about literary tourism in Iceland is available here.

Drawing to Write

2010-10-30T10:42:00.014+10:00

Sometimes you need to draw or take photographs before you see a building or landscape properly. Here are some of my sketches, all but one of them from trips to Iceland.

Stofnun Sigurdar Nordals (The Sigurdur Nordal Institute) in an old part of Reykjavík. This house, like many in the style, was imported from Norway during the nineteenth century. I lived and worked here on and off for six months in 2001.

Norwich Cathedral in East Anglia. In 1999, I visited it with some close friends, Shane and Fiona - Shane was doing his PhD in England. Their apartment was just down the road from the Cathedral, which is surrounded by cricket pitches and parks.

Gullfoss in the south-west highlands, a waterfall that is a bit of survivor - proposed developments that would have ruined the area were in part blocked by a local woman, Sigrídur, a statute of whom now stands near the falls.

Fríkirkja - the Icelandic Free Church - near the downtown pond. The vast majority of Icelanders are members of the State Lutheran church, but the small Free Church is perhaps the most beautiful church building in Iceland. It's tucked in next to the Art Gallery.

Here, what I suspect was the last small fishing boat to be tied up at along Aegisída, a long, thin park that runs the southern shore of Reykjavík. A left-over from the days when Reykjavík still had small, independent fishermen, the boat reminds me of an old fisherman in Laxness' The Fish Can Sing who, despite the change in Icelandic society, refuses to raise his prices to make a profit from his life.

Almannagjá in Thingvellir, the site of Iceland's old Assembly, established in 930. The ring road used to travel down it, but now, of course, it's mainly bus loads of tourists and the odd returning Icelander.

(More drawings of Iceland can be found here and here.)

Why write about travel?

2010-10-27T15:14:00.017+10:00

Or, why write at all?

I recently finished writing a chapter on travel writing for the Cambridge Companion to Creative Writing (due for release next year). The chapter argues that much of the pleasure of travel writing lies in its combinations of forms: of all types of writing, it relies most on incorporating at least some aspects of exposition, description, narration, analysis and argument, and humour. It is a genre of mixes.

For example, someone like Bill Bryson uses a mix of narration and exposition to create both a sense of lived experience and a sense of place - for Bryson, the link is formed by tone, or his attitude (witty, loving, silly) to the subject matter. Robert Byron has less of the Bryson-type personal narration, but greater amounts of description - the unity of Byron's The Road to Oxiana lies in his style, which varies considerably but which is always sharp and very fine. But the liberating thing about travel writing for the writer is that it allows them great freedom in how they manage the combination of forms.

What I didn't address in the chapter was the broader question of why we write about our travels in the first place. I doubt there is an answer for everyone. One way of re-phrasing this question is to ask, what does writing give us that travelling, on its own, does not? And the answer to that must vary greatly.

For me, writing is almost always multi-directional and, at its best, a cheating of time. Unlike real-time travel, which is at some level always hostage to a sense of destination and the limits of time, travel writing is completely open-ended and timeless. The ultimate destination of a real destination could lie in the past, in a dream that you had as a child, in an ambition, or in a moment that you've never fully resolved. Or the trip may in fact be taking you ahead, towards a book that you're yet to read, but which when you read it will make sense of your journey.

Because it exists in language and not in budgets or train timetables, travel writing is unbounded in a way that actual travel never will be. In the case of travel, which is so often constrained by practical matters, language enables a second, endless journey to be anchored onto the first.

Jumping in Puddles

2010-10-16T09:16:00.018+10:00

Or, moments of nostalgia.

Today, it's the turn of Sigur Ros' "Hoppípolla", which comes with one of my favourite video clips, and with a narrative I recognise from my childhood in Iceland and which I hope, as in the clip, I will return to in old age.

Brosandi / Smiling
Hendumst í hringi / Spinning round
Höldumst í hendur / Holding hands
Allur heimurinn óskýr / The whole world a blur
Nema þú stendur / But you are standing

Rennblautur / Soaked
Allur rennvotur / Completely drenched
Engin gúmmístígvél / No rubber boots
Hlaupandi inni í okkur / Running inside us
Vill springa út úr skel / Want to erupt from a shell

Vindurinn / The Wind
Og útilykt af hárinu þínu / And the outdoor smell of your hair
Ég anda eins fast og ég get / I breathe as hard as I can
með nefinu mínu / With my nose

Hoppípolla / Jump into puddles
Í engum stígvélum / With no boots on
Allur rennvotur / Completely drenched
Í engum stígvélum / With no boots on

Og ég fæ blóðnasir / And I get a nosebleed
En ég stend alltaf upp / But I always stand up

Og ég fæ blóðnasir / And I get a nosebleed
En ég stend alltaf upp / But I always stand up

It's a gorgeous song, with a wonderful conceit: keep coming back to what delighted you as a child. I use the song in one of my introductory creative writing units, honestly one of only two or three occasions that I bring up Iceland. The line, for me, that holds it all together is "og útilykt af hárinu þínu" - the outside smell of your hair.

There is no other description for that smell, is there, than simply that it comes from outside.
(And, while I am putting the case for Sigur Rós, I might as well add another favourite: "Ára Bátur", or Row Boat, available as a live in the studio recording here.)

Cook's Tribulation

2010-10-13T20:01:00.007+10:00

My thanks to Richard Carroll, who has provided me with the answer to a question I posed in my last post, about the naming of Cape Tribulation. Richard tells me that it was named by Captain James Cook when his ship, the Endeavour, ran into a reef nearby.

My own extensive research - well, Wikipedia - confirms that this is right. It gives Cook's words as: "...the north point [was named] Cape Tribulation because here began all our troubles".