Category: Blog

King Car

29 September 201323 February 2015 SoutherlyBlog

by Rebecca Giggs As a fan of the Nigerian-American writer and critic Teju Cole, I found myself last month loitering around the side entrance of the Ian Potter Centre, hoping to hustle a security guard into letting me eavesdrop on an interview Cole was giving for the Melbourne Writers’ Festival. The automatic doors shuddered—switched on, but still locked. It was early. In fact, I wasn’t sure I had the right day. Inside docents and at least one festival organiser patrolled with earpieces and clipboards, too far away to notice me tapping on the glass. So I skulked around; wound…

Revelation Hunger (After Charles Baxter)

21 September 201323 February 2015 SoutherlyBlog3 Comments

by Rebecca Giggs How then, she had asked herself, did one know one thing or another thing about people, sealed as they were? Only like a bee, drawn by some sweetness or sharpness in the air intangible to touch or taste, one haunted the dome-shaped hive, … the hives, which were people. —Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (1927). The cloche comes off. The veil drops. A dawning recognition. Bingo. In our age of multi-track information — when official narratives are profligately revised, and zealous fact-checkers snowball inexhaustible detail online — is it any wonder this device, the literary ‘revelation,’ has…

Invincible Summer

13 September 201323 February 2015 SoutherlyBlog2 Comments

by Rebecca Giggs Ah, better the thud of the deadly gun, and the crash of the bursting shell, Than the terrible silence where drought is fought out there in the western hell; And better the rattle of rifles near, or the thunder on deck at sea, Than the sound — most hellish of all to hear — of a fire where it should not be. — Henry Lawson, The Bush Fire (1906). On Tuesday fires on the north-western edge of Sydney festooned the city with strange atmosphere. Smoke, covert as a cat, let itself into the house. I rushed downstairs…

Elective Despair

6 September 201323 February 2015 SoutherlyBlog4 Comments

by Rebecca Giggs “The work of this emotion [hope] requires people who throw themselves actively into what is becoming, to which they themselves belong” —Enoch Bloch, The Principle of Hope, 1938. As we slalom into Saturday’s Federal election, I’ve been thinking and talking a lot about objectionable despair. Whether at Sydney’s ‘Green-Ups’, around the Melbourne Writers’ Festival, or in the café at the top of our street, I’m encountering an inordinate number of people on the Left—many of them are writers—who are preparing to walk into a cardboard booth on the weekend and vote informally. They will declare “Boundless Plains”…

September monthly blogger – Rebecca Giggs!

3 September 201323 February 2015 SoutherlyBlog

Many thanks to Mark Tredinnick for his fabulous posts. This month our blogger is Rebecca Giggs. Her bio is below: Sydney-based Rebecca Giggs is the author of After the Whales, out with Scribe in 2014. Her essays and reviews have appeared in such publications as Aeon (UK), Overland, Meanjin, Australian Book Review and The Guardian, while her fictions have been widely published and anthologised in collections including Best Australian Stories (Black Inc.) and The Best of the Lifted Brow (Penguin Books). Rebecca writes about ecology and environmental imagination, animals, landscape, politics and memory. Originally from Western Australia, Rebecca completed…

A Wrap: “as if we were just out of reach of ourselves”

31 August 201323 February 2015 SoutherlyBlog11 Comments

by Mark Tredinnick 1. Just as I was posting this, the news came through. And it changes everything. Just another death. But what a death! What a life ended. Half the words in the world seem suddenly to have gone. I can’t write a word on poetry without lighting a candle first and walking some kind of a vigil into the midnight. Seamus Heaney, who can never possibly die, has died. His leaving leaves us poorer, rich though his life was in beauty and wisdom, grace and humour, kindness and accomplishment. What will we do without him? Remember him. Read…

Three Days in Late August: some thoughts about bluewrens and everyday immanence

28 August 201323 February 2015 SoutherlyBlog3 Comments

by Mark Tredinnick Sunday. The bluewren is back. 6:27 this morning, she woke me, her knocking as deft as needlepoint. Wake, she spelled. And I did (if not for long). The birds have this way with me of telling me they’re here and who they are, before they’re here, before they are. She woke me (the pocket beloved) from a dream of Montreal (hello, Asa); she woke Lucy (my young girl) from a dream—a dream as intricate and endless as a life—of Peter Rabbit, Timmy Tiptoes, the whole Potter crew, bouncing on the bed. The rabbits Mrs. McGregor had put…

Speaking of love

23 August 201323 February 2015 SoutherlyBlog4 Comments

by Mark Tredinnick It’s true I don’t wake in my own bed as often as I might; I have been elsewhere, this past fortnight, as much as I’ve been here. But every morning at seven, since August began, a bluewren has come to the window and rapped it like a stenographer on a contraband Remington. A couple of deft swoops each visit, bill drilling the pane, a memo about some urgent thing or another, tapped out in rapid arpeggio. There’s no explaining this. All one can do is witness—which may be most of the work we’re here for. But it…

Driving yourself out of your mind; walking yourself out of your head

16 August 201323 February 2015 SoutherlyBlog6 Comments

By Mark Tredinnick When Tessa rang me to ask me to blog this month, I was wrangling my dog into the back of a (two-door) car. And then I was starting the car and backing it and turning it onto a public road in the State of New South Wales. We talked, Tessa and I, fairly fast, and hands free (earpiece in, I promise), as I drove to school to pick up the children, running, as ever, just a little bit late. And now I’m writing this—my first blog—in a cab. Last night we launched Australian Love Poems 2013 at…

August monthly blogger – Mark Tredinnick!

9 August 201323 February 2015 SoutherlyBlog

A huge thanks to Fiona Wright for her excellent and insightful posts. This month, our guest blogger is Mark Tredinnick. His bio is below: Mark Tredinnick is a celebrated poet, nature writer, essayist, and writing teacher. The winner in 2011 of the Montreal Poetry Prize and in 2012 of the Cardiff Poetry Prize, Mark is the author of Fire Diary, The Blue Plateau, The Little Red Writing Book, The Road South, and eight other works of poetry and prose. His other honours include two premier’s literary awards, the Blake and the Newcastle Poetry Prizes, and the Calibre Essay Prize. Mark…

By Hope

30 July 201323 February 2015 SoutherlyBlog2 Comments

by Fiona Wright I want to start with a digression. On election night in 2007 – the night of the Ruddslide – I went to three different parties in the back streets of Newtown. I started in a somewhat unsound sharehouse, where the finishing touches were being made on a piñata shaped like Howard’s head as I arrived. I moved on to a poet’s house, where there was a 1969 ‘Don’s Party’ theme, changing into a second-hand, high-necked, purple paisley nylon dress from Madame Scrag’s along the way. At the third party, I mentioned that I was going to re-hem…

Seeing Angels

24 July 201323 February 2015 SoutherlyBlog

by Fiona Wright I saw ‘Angels in America’ over two evenings at the Belvoir St Theatre last week. I have a long history with Belvoir – when I first moved out of the suburbs, one of the advantages of my new proximity to the city that I was determined to make best use of was my sudden accessibility to theatres, and I corralled two of my three housemates (the other one was a train driver) into taking out youth subscriptions, which in those days included a free drink with each show, namely a ‘Sierra Slammer’ pre-mix, made of ‘tequila flavour’,…

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