Category: Blog

Olive Pink and The First Garden

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Chris Raja In the 1920s, almost forty years before Amnesty International first raised the awareness of human rights, Olive Pink was deeply distressed by what she read and heard about the massacres and brutal treatment of the Warlpiri and Aranda people who live in Central Australia. She sought to carry into reality her own idea of true equality for the tribal Aborigines of central Australia, a fairness firmly underpinned by full human rights and by cultural and economic independence. From the 1920s until her death in 1975 she scrutinised the actions of governments, civil servants, missionaries, academics, pastoralists, the courts…

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What, me worry?

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Sam Cooney I have a friend in Melbourne who is a paste-up artist. Under the guise of the moniker ‘Drab’ he creates small and large scale pieces of art, prints them onto jumbo sheets of paper and—normally in the quiet post-midnight hours—sticks them onto surfaces in and around the city and its suburbs. For as long as I have known him and followed his work (we used to live in an old weatherboard together with a few other sharehouse denizens and so I was able to watch him from go to whoa) I have been jealous. Not because I want…

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Hans Fallada and being outside when everyone else is inside

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Sam Cooney It was my birthday recently—it’s okay, you weren’t to know—and as a gift my girlfriend’s parents sent me a copy of Alone in Berlin by Hans Fallada. I had never heard of Fallada before reading this novel, and I found it quite a curious read in every meaning of the word curious (intriguing, strange, etc.). Published in 1947, the story opens in 1940s Berlin, in a Germany in the throes of National Socialism. Revolving around a couple’s humble resistance to the Nazis as they write and drop anti-Nazi postcards around the city, the narrative quickly spirals—either up or…

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the gap between ability and ambition

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Sam Cooney On the 22nd of February of this year I saw a man on fire. He had doused himself head to toe in a couple of litres of petrol and had set himself alight. He flailed about and he ran straight, a human comet hurtling, looking like someone drowning in a private ocean of flames. It was like the movies and it was very much not like the movies. It happened on a wide busy street in Paris, France, in front of the main courthouse that sits next to the La Sainte-Chapelle, a tourist attraction with its beautiful stained-glass…

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male and female and masculine and feminine

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Sam Cooney When I was young and getting really stuck in to reading, I thought Enid Blyton was a man. I’m not sure why, I just did. Sure, now I know Enid is a girl’s name, but to eight-or-nine-year-old me it wasn’t. I just never bore it in mind; it wasn’t important in relation to the enjoyment of the words. It’s not like the child me ever thought to take his nose out of the pages in order to dissect characters like Moon-Face and The Saucepan Man in respect of the accuracy of the representations of their sex, nor did…

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Freunde und Liebhaber, ich bin (k)ein Berliner

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Sam Cooney Chances are the wizardry of your web browser automatically deciphered into English the title of this blog post, but in case not, it translates roughly as Friends and lovers, I am (not) a Berliner. I’m a Melbourne lad, a writer and editor of sorts, born and raised by windy Bayside beaches, and right now I live in Berlin, Germany. There are several explanations I give to people who ask me why, and some of them are even true some of the time. But this here Southerly blog is not the place to muck about, so I’ll tell you…

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Some Online Byways

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Phillip Ellis I have, since my late teens, held a so soft spot for the 1890s in my reading heart. Dowson, Lionel Johnson, Arthur Machen, Brennan and others, all have a place in that heart, and I want to use one of them, Arthur Machen, to illustrate some places online for those who love books and reading. The first place that I want to stop by is among the most obvious: the Friends of Arthur Machen website. The internet is a great resource for hunting up literary societies, especially those dedicated to particular authors. In this case, the Friends is…

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H.P. Lovecraft’s Slim Purpose

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Phillip Ellis  Winfield Townley Scott once made the following remark about H. P. Lovecraft’s verse: “To scare is a slim purpose in poetry.” This is true; there is more to weird verse, poetry of fantasy and horror, than shudder-mongering, and there is more to the genre of horror than refining the evocation of physical disgust and revulsion. Part of the problem is that so much of the Lovecraft’s weird verse feels stylistically deriviative of both Swinburne and Poe. It is only relatively rarely that Lovecraft achieves his own style, his own voice technically. One key example of this latter point is…

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Autumn

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Phillip Ellis I won’t say that this thought has always struck me as evident, or even possible, but, for a long while, it seems to me that Brennan’s focus on the European seasons in his XXI Poems: Towards the Source and his Poems reflects a focus so intense on the absent beloved that all his terms of reference are to her and her world. This is a complicated way of saying that the lover is thinking solely of the beloved. She is his world, his point of departure, his Eden, and his point of return. Which makes the following all the more…

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Form and Content

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Phillip Ellis Part of my poetic practice involves mastering as many poetic forms as I can. By being able to write as many as possible, without explicitly needing to concentrate on their demands, I find that my ability to write effective poetry is enhanced: I need not lose energy concentrating on the rules of a form, and can concentrate, instead, on the poem’s content. Part of this process involves the creation of new poetic forms, usually out of pre-existing elements. A case in point is one that I use for a series of pieces, each titled “Image”. The basis of…

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Worldplay and the Writer

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Tracy Ryan What are you able to build with your blocks? Castles and palaces, temples and docks. Rain may keep raining, and others go roam, But I can be happy and building at home. (Robert Louis Stevenson, “Block City”) The imaginative nature of the writer’s life suggests intuitively that it’s linked to earlier play in childhood, and of course Freud makes this connection explicit in his famous if inevitably limited essay/speech, “The Creative Writer and Daydreaming” (1907). I say limited because Freud does not develop in it all the ideas he raises, and many of his points are arguable. Nevertheless,…

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Novels about Writers: Lost Illusions

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Tracy Ryan Novels about writers are sometimes decried as running the risk of being boring, self-indulgent, or failing in imagination, as if their author was doing nothing more than lazily transcribing from his or her own life. And perhaps to some degree that risk is quite real, since the main activity of a writer is often solitary, quiet, assiduous, and looks dull from the outside… Planning, note-taking, researching, thinking, revising, scrapping and starting again – hardly the stuff of high drama. Maybe that’s why popular films about real-life, historic writers almost never show them actually writing – how static would…

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