Tag: guest

Got a shovel?

SoutherlyBlog

Chris Raja There is nothing I like more than shovelling pooh. I remember the first time I did it. I was with my friend Ben and we went to Marcus’s place on Ilparpa Road to get some manure for my raised vegetable garden. Ben took his ute and together we drove out to see Marcus. Marcus’s place is past through the Gap and fifteen minutes out of Alice Springs. We arrive unannounced and knock on the camel man’s door. Marcus is in his forties and he is a little gruff. His face is unshaven and stubbly and he isn’t one…

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Running with the ball

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Chris Raja On a recent visit to Melbourne my three year old daughter and I visited Ann Mancini whom I have always loved for, among other things, her ability to combine affection with frankness. Over tea and biscuits we talked about family, art and then football. I told her about living in Alice Springs and playing a game of Aussie Rules for The Yuendumu Magpies, Liam Jurrah’s old team. I said I enjoyed watching Australian Rules Football and writing about it as much as I enjoyed going to art exhibitions and writing about art. For me both were the same.…

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Stick-nest rat

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Chris Raja We are nestled in a valley deep in spinifex country underneath breakaway rock looking for the nest of an extinct rat. Roger, Ben and I are on a rocky track not far from Ewaninga some forty minutes South of Alice Springs off the old South Road that runs to Maryvale and then all the way to Adelaide. This road once connected the centre of Australia with the rest of the country. Along here the telegraph line was built. Even though I’ve been living in Alice for some time it is not normal for me or many other people…

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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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New Monthly Blogger: Chris Raja!

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First off, we’d like to thank Sam Cooney for his excellent, stimluating posts. Next up we have Chris Raja, who was recently published in our 70.3 India India edition. His bio Chris Raja migrated to Melbourne from Calcutta in 1986, and almost twenty years later he moved again, further inland, living and working in Alice Springs since 2004. Chris is a teacher and a regular contributor to numerous magazines including Art Monthly Australia (for whom he is the NT Art Correspondent). The First Garden, a play by Chris Raja and his wife Natasha Raja, brings to life the extraordinary woman, that was, Miss Olive Muriel Pink. This season…

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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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June Monthly Blogger: Sam Cooney!

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We had a wonderful month of thought-provoking posts from Phillip Ellis – thank you, Phillip. Next up, we have writer Sam Cooney, blogging for us all the way from Berlin. Here’s his bio: Sam Cooney is a freelance (underworking) writer and editor. Suckled and reared in Melbourne, he right now lives in Berlin, where he pretty much stands all day staring at the city like it’s one of those Magic Eye images from the 90s. Some recent-ish writings can be found in The Lifted Brow, Newswrite, The Rumpus and aroundabout the internet. He has recently edited fiction portfolios for The Lifted Brow and Overland, and has close (sexy)…

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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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