Tag: writers

Art, Australia and Good Hearts

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© Bruce Pascoe 2016 At the Bundanon Festival at the weekend I was able to go through the Boyd’s house and see all the art, the walls of books, the great bowls and dishes of a wealthy family. Thinking about art and wealth I walked over the property and wondered about my country and what it values and who it celebrates. I found some cousins and sat down with them on the grass and talked family, country, politics and culture. And laughed. The great Aboriginal safety valve. When they left to perform an opening ceremony I watched them and watched…

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Cry for my Heart, Dance for my Soul

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by Bruce Pascoe I’ve been on boats and trains and plains all around the country supporting my book, Dark Emu, and the idea that Aboriginal people were not mere fauna and flora upon the plains of Australia but active agents in its care, nurture and agricultural productivity. Lyn has had to shoulder the burden while I dash about the continent, but here I was on Sunday, at it again. I flew into Hobart but, selfishly, I had added a couple of extra days to the itinerary so I could follow family and culture on the north coast. Chris Gallagher of…

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September Monthly Blogger – Bruce Pascoe!

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Many thanks to Tara June Winch for her excellent posts. This month our blogger is Bruce Pascoe. Bruce, a Bunurong man, is a member of the Wathaurong Aboriginal Co-operative of southern Victoria, and an awarding winning Australian writer, editor, and anthologist. Bruce published and edited Australian Short Stories magazine 1982-1999, was the winner of the Prime Minister’s Literature Award for Young Adult fiction (Fog, a dox) 2013, recipient of the Australian Literature Award 1999, the Radio National Short Story 1998, and the FAW Short Story 2010. Bruce’s publications include: Night Animals, Shark, Ocean, Bloke, Cape Otway, Convincing Ground, Little Red Yellow and…

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On Writers Block

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I’m meant to write this final blog, I said I would, I made a promise. I must, but, I can’t, I’ve tried for a week and nothing comes up, a blank abyss, I’m writing fiction at least – my head is engulfed in fiction right now and there is absolutely no way I can maneuver it to this promised blog post. I’ve been trying to write about Virginia Woolf’s electric, 1929 call to arms essay, A Room of One’s Own and muse on that early line that – “a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction”. But I can’t write about it because my desk is literally in the living room, the kitchen, the front door and the back door at once and I just couldn’t grab an ironic break to think this week.

Crime and, inevitably, Punishment!

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by Samuel Wagan Watson Writing is a misdemeanour of self-indulgence; therefore an escalated fit of writing could be considered blatant criminal activity. I took two words from the English dictionary before I even dressed this morning, and being an Indigenous writer its questionable as to whether or not these two words were ever my property to begin with. Suffice to say, I’m not giving these stolen items back, and I will attempt to profit from their acquired value. I was born into a family of writers and I was conceived on the lamb. Mum and Dad got hitched in 1971…

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The Simple Act of Reading

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by Fiona McFarlane It’s been a pleasure to blog for Southerly, and now I’m going to end my month with a shameless plug. On Redfern Street in Redfern, Sydney, there’s an extraordinary place called the Sydney Story Factory. I was invited to give a reading there one night. I was given the address and I knew to look out for ‘Sydney Story Factory’, but when I arrived in Redfern I couldn’t find it; I found, instead, a place calling itself the Martian Embassy. If the residents of Mars were to establish a diplomatic outpost on Earth it might look something…

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Letters From Tove

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by Fiona McFarlane There’s been a bit of heated discussion, recently, about the public role of a writer, some of it in response to an essay in the Atlantic: Meghan Tifft’s ‘An Introverted Writer’s Lament.’[1] Tifft’s piece questions the pressure writers feel to participate in writing and reading communities in order to promote their work – public readings! Festivals! Q&As! Book tours! Conferences! Social media! Interviews! And all the other, less easily classifiable commitments that arise from the very good fortune of having been published. Tifft’s essay hovers somewhere between confession and complaint, and I admire her honesty. She approaches…

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What’s my name?

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by Sunil Badami When I was younger, I was so thrilled by the idea of seeing my by-line in print, nothing else mattered. As I’ve gotten older, how I wish I’d had the foresight, like my idol, Eric Blair, to get a pen name! Why, especially in this age of celebrity, where children’s greatest ambition now seems not to be a doctor or even an actor, but just to be, like the Kardashians, simply famous, would I want a pen name? Not even actors bother with stage names now. Pseudonyms have existed as long as literature has: what other vocation…

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Who am I? My Life as a Writer

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by Sunil Badami Who am I? Reading the excellent, eloquent, engaging entries on this blog before me by much better writers and performers, you’d be forgiven for asking the question. I’m always surprised when people recognise me and my work; the most common response when I admit I’m a writer is ‘have I read anything you’ve written?’—which, I suppose, is a question that answers itself, much like asking a bouncer turfing you out of a nightclub ‘do you know who I am??’ For years, I never actually said I was a writer; given how little I actually wrote in comparison…

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The writer’s li[f]e

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by Joshua Mei-Ling Dubrau This post, and the next two or three, will be written enroute. You’ll note I haven’t specified a destination. This is a holiday; a pack the tray, jump in the ute and drive off holiday. Heading South. Being away from home and office and institution brings both blessings and curses in terms of blog-writing. There is the joy of seeing, smelling, tasting the new as kilometres unfurl beneath us and sensory experiences spark new thoughts and new connections to (or at least positions in relation to) the Australian landscape, both physical and social. On the other…

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Re/solved?

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By Joshua Mei-Ling Dubrau It was inevitable, I suppose, that the first Southerly blog post of 2014 should involve the dreaded topic of the New Year’s Resolution (and in line with most people’s resolutions, mine is being put into practice now, after I’ve, erm, had a chance to get a feel for the upcoming year). Resolutions often involve quantitative changes that we hope will lead to qualitatively attractive outcomes. Cutting down on cigarettes involves subtracting a concrete number of gaspers from the currently consumed amount, but the benefits – the increased volume of oxygen in the breath, the return to…

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Living up to Something

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by Kathryn Heyman In our culture, vice is sexier than virtue. The Seven Deadly Sins are the fun guys. Greed, lust, gluttony; who wouldn’t want to be at that party? Virtues, not so much. We somehow think of virtue as the quiet cousin, the one lurking in the corner of the party, tutting away at everything. What if, though, the holy virtues are the set of conditions which can help us really enjoy the party? Let me be clear here: when I say ‘holy’ I mean creative. For me, the nature of creativity is the nature of the divine. In…

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