Category: Blog

On Smokeflowers and Hawaiian Pizza

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by David Musgrave   A little while ago I returned from three months living in Beijing and found my world subtly changed. I’d gone there with the intention of continuing my study of Mandarin, but in a more intensive fashion than hitherto, and succeeded in that aim to the extent that maybe for one whole month I didn’t have a conversation in English with anyone at all, apart from writing emails. This of course does not mean that interesting conversations in English were replaced with interesting conversations in Mandarin: on the contrary, most of the time I felt like a…

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July Monthly Blogger – David Musgrave!

SoutherlyBlog, News

A huge thanks to Marija Peričić for her excellent posts. Our blogger this month is David Musgrave. You can read all about him below: David Musgrave has published six collections of poetry, the most recent being Anatomy of Voice (GloriaSMH, 2016) and a novel, Glissando (Sleepers, 2010) and was co-editor and publisher of the anthology Contemporary Australian Poetry, published by Puncher & Wattmann, which he founded in 2005. He teaches creative writing at the University of Newcastle.  

Hearing Voices

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by Marija Peričić In my ideal world, I’d live alone in my own apartment, which would be in a small block, filled with books and houseplants and perhaps a cat. The apartment would have large windows, be on the first floor, and look out over a lovely garden. This pretty much describes my current apartment, minus the cat and plus a partner,[i] so I am very lucky to be so close to my ideal. I am by nature an apartment-dweller. I am an introvert (89% so according to Myers-Briggs); read and write a lot, for which I prefer silence; and…

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Why is a literary hoax?

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by Marija Peričić   A middle-aged woman poses as a transgender teenage boy; an Anglo-Australian man pretends to be an Indigenous woman; an Anglo-Australian woman assumes a Ukrainian immigrant identity. On the surface, the idea of a literary hoax seems straightforward enough: someone writes a book and pretends to be someone else. But when you consider it more closely, it is not quite that simple. All fiction is someone writing a book and pretending to be someone else, so one might say all fiction is fundamentally a kind of hoax. Or, as Cynthia Ozick puts it, “in the compact between…

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Why read novels?

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by Marija Peričić   “There’s more to life than books you know, but not much more.”                                                 – The Smiths   As an emerging author, and as a reader, every few years I get a small chill of horror as a spate of articles appears heralding the death, or at least the demise, of the novel. This is appalling to me not only because I have just written a novel, and hope to write others, but because so much of what I know about the world I know through novels. My world is built out of them. Obviously, I have…

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Stories of stories.

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by Marija Peričić “The Universe is made of stories, not of atoms.” – Muriel Rukeyser, “The Speed of Darkness”, 1968.       All we are is stories, and the telling of them, the hearing and writing of them. Stories fill the whole world, and all of our existences. They overlap and jostle each other, pushing in and out of our view. They are like clouds of moths flying around a light in the darkness. Only a few are illuminated at a time, and those that are are wondrous, we think, and fascinating, but we don’t know that a more…

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A Short History Of My Sentimental Education

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By Moreno Giovannoni A Sentimental Education My father who died a few weeks ago left me a legacy. He left me the Italian language and Italy and he left me a book. Working backwards through that list of three, the book he left buried inside me and I had to work hard to make it come out. The Italian language he left all around me although over time it became tarnished. But that’s OK. You can’t live in a foreign country like Australia all your life and not start to lose the pristine first language of your youth. Italy itself has…

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A Short History Of Writing (or I Am Not A Writer)

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by Moreno Giovannoni Dear Reader   There is a lot of writing about “the Writer’s Life”. This is not an example, except in  passing.   First of all, you must understand, I am not a writer.   Why I Wrote A Book   I just wanted to tell the story of the village in Italy where my mother and father were born, the village they left to come to Australia in the 1950s. The writing is fictional but some people tell me it reads like memoir. The working title for the book has been Tales From San Ginese, but may become…

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A Short History Of Reading

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by Moreno Giovannoni   John Clarke, who died a month ago, said it:   Our minds were on fire at that age.   He was talking about the creativity he discovered in himself when he went to university. In my late teens and early twenties which is more or less the age he was referring to, my mind was “on fire” too, except that I became hungry to absorb knowledge and ideas and if anything create a world view for myself.   When it came to reading fiction (and non) for me it had an unusual beginning and then continued…

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A Short History Of The Italian language

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by Moreno Giovannoni   Morè.   Morè.   Only an Italian can say that properly and there’s only one person left who calls me that. The rest are dead.   The first words I ever heard were Italian ones. The first word I ever spoke was an Italian word – papà. This was according to my poor mum who stopped speaking Italian when her vocal cords froze, together with the rest of her, in a nursing home bed, a few weeks before she died. We sat with her and exchanged the occasional Italian word. We spoke Italian words to her even…

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Projecting Decolonial Love

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by Natalie Harkin In 2013 Leanne Simpson, Nishnaabeg writer and activist-educator, wrote a book Islands of Decolonial Love – a collection of short fictionalised gems including prose, poetry and songs imbued with characters who, as described by ARP Books, confront the often heartbreaking challenge of pairing the desire to live loving and observant lives with a constant struggle to simply survive the historical and ongoing injustices of racism and colonialism.  This book is accompanied by a stunning online soundtrack of instrumentals and spoken word poetry; poignant, cutting and astute, and surrounded by oceans that connect and beckon us to dive deep…

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This is not a time to be silent…

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by Natalie Harkin – Zero Tolerance, Dirty Words When our Premier Jay Weatherill announced the Nuclear Fuel Cycle Royal Commission in February 2015, I wrote a letter – a poetic narrative tracing radioactive and colonising currents from French, American and British bomb tests on Pacific atolls, to Fukushima’s nuclear power plant disaster, and a potted-history of uranium mining, nuclear power and atomic testing in South Australia.  This controversial tale of epic proportions with direct impacts on Aboriginal lands and people, includes: national and international nuclear waste dump proposals; illegal waste dumping, leaks, seeps and spills; Acid In-Situ Leaching (ASL) methods contaminating…

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