June 15th, 2010
Repetitive Strain Injury appears to be an occupational hazard for writers. Consideration must be given to where you write and how you sit when you write.
I did consider it, and then promptly forgot as I slouched, tensed, lolled, stayed at the keyboard for hours on end and did just about everything a writer shouldn’t do. And so I have RSI from my shoulder down to my wrist.
I’ll be limiting myself to important emails and very short writing sessions for now - all blogging activities have to cease until the injury heals.
Related posts
Categories: general |
Tags: creativity, culture, writing | No Comments
May 16th, 2010
In twenty words or less tell me why you write
I write because I have to. Writing really helps me to quieten the little voice in my head!
Do you have any formal training in creative writing? And how long have you been writing?
I have been writing on and off since I was a teenager, but didn’t really explore the option of getting serious about writing until about six years ago when I started writing my first book NOT LIKE MY MOTHER. I have a communications degree and worked as a journalist for ten years. I also have a Masters degree in Creative Writing.
What do you consider to be your successes as a professional writer?
I have had a number of short stories published, and have obviously been published as a journalist, but I feel my real success has been in actually completing my first novel NOT LIKE MY MOTHER which took me five years to finish (yet to be published!). It’s about something very close to my heart, the injustices of the Balkan wars. I really wanted to try to convey the horrors of what happened through fiction to try to create awareness in a non-confronting way. It tells the story of three generations of women who experience love, war, displacement and loss.
You were selected to take part in the QWC/Hachette Australia Manuscript Development Programme in 2008. What were some of the highlights? What impact did it have on your writing and professional development?
The highlight of the program really was getting to sit down one-on-one with a Hachette editor and get valuable feedback on my manuscript. Bernadette was so positive and supportive, and really made me realise that I am a good writer. While Hachette’s marketing team ended up deciding the time wasn’t right to publish my manuscript (apparently people don’t want to read about depressing things like war in the middle of a GFC!) I was really honoured that Bernadette loved my work and fought hard to try to get it across the line.
What do you really love about writing?
I feel a real sense of comfort and peace when I write, and so while I get really chuffed when people read and like what I write, it is a purely selfish past time.
Rejection comes with the job of writing, so how do you get over it and keep going?
I developed fairly thick skin back in my days as a journo, but when I got my first rejection letter for a short story I had written I was devastated. It gets easier every time you get one, and I really try to stay very humble about my writing. If it gets accepted and published then that’s a bonus, but in the meantime I take great joy in writing and nurturing my creative side.
What are you working on now?
I’m working on the first draft of my second book THIRTY SOMETHING AND SINGLE AGAIN. A chic lit novel that regales the tales of a woman who finds herself back on the single meat market, after having been married to her high school sweetheart for twenty years, and discovers it’s not quite like it used to be.
What books are you reading and where is your favoured reading spot?
I tend to have numerous books on the go. Currently I’m reading Wild Lavender by Belinda Alexandra, Commited by Elizabeth Gilbert, Ben Naparstek in Conversation – Encounters with 39 Great Writers, and Starting out in Shares – The ASX Way.
My favourite reading spot is curled up in bed under the doona on a rainy day.
Related posts
Categories: Hachette Australia/Queensland Writers Centre Manuscript Development Program, general |
Tags: creativity, imagination, publishing, writing | No Comments
March 27th, 2010
I’m currently engaged in the rewriting of a manuscript. That sentence sits lightly on the screen, but it’s weighted with a load of emotional and intellectual boulders.
After the initial ‘oh dear’ moment when you’ve been given the feedback and you realise it’s all hopeless and you should never have tried writing and may as well give up now before you become a tragic figure of fun whose attempts at a career become a byword around the publishing houses for acute and pathetic failure – after that moment, is a glorious rebound. Yes! That’s why it wasn’t working! Where’s my manuscript, let me at it!
All sorts of possibilities suddenly become possible and you feel refreshed and can see the way forward. That’s if you can distance yourself from your work. Very important that you do this. You, the writer, are not your book or manuscript and you cannot take sincere, constructive criticism as a personal attack. You want the best for your book, you want it to stand on it’s own two legs and march into that publishers office and have them gasp with delight – and you won’t get that being precious.
In a previous incarnation I taught drawing and painting to first year art students. Invariably a student would get to a point in the painting where they would go no further, because up until then, they had never produced anything as good. My job was to gently encourage them to go further, to take a risk and see if it could get even better. Some students wouldn’t budge. I can understand their point of view, but I’d always come back with ‘You’ve done it once, you can do it again. You didn’t fluke it, you worked for it. You can maybe never reproduce that particular painting again but the ability to get to that standard is there.’
It wasn’t the finished product so much, but the ability to let go and be fearless - to be able to see where it wasn’t working, not collapse in a heap and catastrophise, but to re-think and re-work the weaker areas. It’s not an easy thing to do. Creative work isn’t easy, it’s bloody hard, and it might be easier to take up crochet or canoe building, but would the same challenges be there?
With writing, as with painting, if you trust the individual giving the feedback and you can trust your own ability and instincts then re-working becomes a lot easier. Learning to collaborate is a vital part of creative work, although I must stress pick your collaborators carefully. And few writers are published without being thoroughly edited – structurally as well as line edits, both by professionals and test readers alike. The core of the work is yours, it’s your voice, your skills, your discipline and craft, but the bottom line is a book that is as good as it can be.
I’ve been asked to read and give feedback on people’s writing many times – not that I’m an expert, but it just seems to happen, like if you are a doctor at a party and someone wants to show you the bleeding lesion on their buttock or some other malady - and I’m always cautious about what I say. If I sense the writer is open to feedback then you – as giver of feedback – can both have a very intense and rewarding experience working together to improve the manuscript, always bearing in mind, of course, that it is their book. But if I sense the writer doesn’t want to hear anything but praise, I let it go. There’s no growth in praise alone.
Related posts
Categories: general, on writing |
Tags: creativity, writing | 4 Comments
March 27th, 2010
I’m posting these photos of directors working with actors after finding so many of them when looking for pictures to illustrate the next post. Like a lot of people I’m interested in creative processes and how individuals, or collaborators, work or don’t work together and what the outcomes are as opposed to the goals. Some of these pictures are credited others not, but all appear to use their arms during the collaborative process.
Katherine Bigelow and The Hurt Locker
Clint Eastwood and Invictus
Sydney Pollack and Tootsie
Gavin Hood and Wolverine
New Moon
The Private Life of Pippa Lee
Related posts
Categories: culture, general |
Tags: creativity, film, imagination | No Comments
March 6th, 2010
It’s not easy to take up writing and be taken seriously. Many, many people write - seven per cent of Australians according to one source - and so few are published. It’s the cruel fact that underlies the writing life. Those who know the industry understand this, they also know that what is published is largely dictated by the market and that many incredibly talented writers are passed over and never get their chance.
But it’s not really common knowledge in the non-writing world that this is the case. Unpublished writers are plagued with questions like, ‘And how’s that little book you were writing coming along?’ and ‘Got a publisher yet?’ People politely taking an interest? Yes, sometimes - but also a faint undercurrent of scorn, with the unspoken label ‘wannabee’ hanging in the air. Adding this inevitable response to the traditional self-doubt of a writer, accentuates the secrecy and isolation of the writing life. Nobody wants to be seen as a ‘wannabee’.
If you were spending your free time building a canoe or learning a language you would not receive that look, the one that says, ‘you ego driven wanker.’ One occupation is deemed a hobby, the other tainted with serious unmet ego needs pointing to a quite possibly unstable headcase who was denied the breast during a crucial window of their infantile development.
While that may indeed be the case, there is no shame in it, however, to my way of thinking. Aspirations to become an author, or an artist or an actor are nothing to hide away or apologise for. The work required to get even close to success in these areas is substantial - and anyone who works that hard for a dream has to be due some respect.
Adopting what one believes to be the ’style’ of one of these occupations, without putting in the necessary hard work, without doing the research but with an over inflated sense of self importance because you do aspire to these occupations, is possibly something of a shameful act. The writer is no different, in most respects, to the non writers in society, no better, no worse and not distinguished by the mystical hand of genius tapping on their shoulder each morning. There is one small detail that does distinguish the writer from the general population - the willingness to put in hours of toil for little financial gain, but that’s about it.
I kept my shameful, dirty writing secret hidden until very recently. I couldn’t bear the patronising curl of the lip, the snigger, the ‘oh yeah.’ So it’s a huge thrill to come out and say ‘My name is Phillipa Fioretti and I am a writer.’ I’ve met people, many people, who write and who look down and confess to me that they are unpublished. I want to say don’t apologise and don’t lose heart - what you are doing by writing stories and imagining worlds and people and places is a very human thing to do. It transcends the daily scrabble and gives you a place to dwell in, a place not confined by status, occupation, income, looks or any other social ranking. The Urban Dictionary describes a ‘wannabe’ as ‘wanting to be something you are not’. But if you ARE writing hard and in a disciplined way, you can’t technically be a ‘wannabe’, now can you …
Related posts
Categories: general, on writing |
Tags: creativity, imagination, publishing, writing | 8 Comments
February 12th, 2010
I live here in a village house without
All that racket horses and carts stir up
And you wonder how that could ever be.
Wherever the mind dwells apart is itself
A distant place. Picking chrysanthemums
At my east fence, I see South Mountain
far off: air lovely at dusk, birds in flight
returning home. All this means something,
something absolute: whenever I start
to explain it, I forget words altogether
T’ao ch’ien
Related posts
Categories: Poetry, general |
Tags: Poetry, writing | 2 Comments
December 10th, 2009
I’ve been reading the book proof of The Book of Love over the last day or so. The book proof is a review copy sent out to various reviewers and bookshops and labelled ‘uncorrected proof’.
Strictly speaking, it isn’t uncorrected. The book has had editors, proofreaders, typesetters and myself combing through it like zealous mothers looking for lice in a four year old’s hair.
So it has been corrected, many, many times, but inevitably I found an error in the book proof. I must own this error too, because it was a sentence and some word repetition that I should have picked up at the first edit. But like lice, word repetition and other minor blips of written expression, possess an eerie cunning. You can look and look and you can’t see them. Change the print format, the little blighters lose their cover and you can pick them out at will. Change the format again and you will find more that eluded the searchlights and barbed wire.
This time I am fortunate to be working with professional editors and proofreaders, but prior to now, I had to catch these devious pests on my own. I’ve laboured through submissions, and satisfied I’d dispatched all errors, I’d sign, fold, seal, kiss and post the submission. At home later, I’d pick up my copy of the submission and there in the second line would be a smirking great typo or spelling mistake or some other evil malfeasance. At that point a glass of wine is needed, as well as a chair to slump in – because the goodbye kiss of luck has suddenly become the farewell kiss of doom.
It’s common knowledge in the world of aspiring authors that a typo or spelling mistake or some other evidence of sloppiness gives the agent or publisher a reason to toss the manuscript into the gaping maw of the recycling bin. Some say this is unfair. But if these professionals want to get on with the jobs they are paid for, then they cannot afford to be suffocated by a mountain of unsolicited manuscripts. There must be a triage system put in place, and signs of sloppiness are a good enough place to draw the line. If the manuscript is good, or great, then it will rise above these small errors, but a manuscript littered with them simply shows an unprofessional approach.
As a writer you must do everything you can to rid your beautiful creation of these pests. You can’t rely on a spellchecker and you have to devise systems that will help you on your search and destroy mission. I have lists of words that must be used sparingly and I use the ‘find’ function to seek them out and rethink the whole paragraph word by word.
I print off the manuscript, list the chapter numbers on a separate piece of paper, close my eyes and with a pin choose a chapter number. Then I work through that chapter from the end back to its beginning – this is to distance me from the narrative and help me focus on the formal aspects of the text. I make the changes on screen then change the font, change the spacing – anything that lets me see the words with a fresh eye.
This is the hard part of writing, and it can be exhausting, requiring the same level of concentration as a long distance drive. I think of myself as checking a computer code on a jet auto pilot system, if I don’t get it right, jets will fall out of the sky and people will die.
Regrettably, the list of imaginary airline disasters this method has caused is a little disconcerting – but I continue to search for those infuriatingly deadly errors in the hope that one day a miracle will occur and a blemish free manuscript will emerge.
Related posts
Categories: general |
Tags: reading, self promotion, writing | 2 Comments
November 29th, 2009
This short story is by my writing pal, Heikki Hietala, lecturer in IT in Helsinki, Finland. Heikki also writes in English, stories full of a natural warmth and humanity. He chops firewood in his spare time.
It was a hot, humid, overcast August night, pretty dark even for Finland. Since it was 3am, not much was happening. I sat in the reception of the camping site I was working at for the summer, together with my co-supervisor, friend, and night shift specialist Jore. He was bouncing a golf ball against the floor and then the wall, and catching it. He counted out the throws. “Seven-forty-two… seven-forty-three… seven-forty-four…”
I was arranging the traveler identification forms that would be taken to the police in the morning, since the police had told us in no uncertain terms that they preferred them alphabetically by surname. The third slip in a stack of three copies only had a faint imprint of the information written by the travelers, and it took all the movable illumination we had in the reception to see the data. Three lamps on the desk made life hot for me.
“Eight-twenty-yy… eight-twenty-one…”
The defeatist mood of the night shift was worsened by the fact that the cashier girls had denied the supervisors access to their music cassette collection for the nights. This was because our smoothest operator had successfully courted the shapeliest of the cashiers, only to drop her at the sight of a new sport coupe model among the gardener girls. The battalion suffered from the action of a single soldier.
“Nine-forty-one… nine-forty-two… damn!” Jore said as the ball bounced off his knuckles and rolled under the sorry excuse of a fridge we had for keeping our food two degrees cooler than the ambient air. Rather than brave the ogres living under the fridge, he picked a new ball from our depleted minigolf stock.
The only cassette we had was better than nocturnal Finnish radio programming AD 1987. Still, playing the same plastic pop song every 60 minutes should be proscribed in the Geneva conventions. Jore scanned the pitiful set of channels in the sea of static, only to drop the chase in desperation. “There’s only talk available, on farming and such, and then there’s last week’s football analysis”, he said. He started bouncing his golfball.
I needed a bit of fresh air, and as it was on the hour, I went out and did the rounds of the site, checking that the saunas were locked, all boats were drawn up far enough on the beach, and the gates were locked. I loved walking the beat. The fullness of the summer was upon us but none of the melodrama of autumn had fallen yet. I knew every rock along the paths, every hole ripped into the perimeter fence by enterprising bottle collectors and all the nooks and crannies our site had for impromptu lovers and their quick snuggles.
All the locks were in place, and nothing out of the ordinary was to be found along the beat. As I wound my way back up to the reception, I saw a beat-up old Toyota Corolla parked at the far corner of the reception parking lot. It wasn’t there when I left. It was just within the tired yellow streetlight’s cone. There was one man in it, and he was watching me as I went into the reception.
“What’s with the Toyo there?” I asked.
Jore looked surprised. “What Toyota?”
“That one” I said and took him to the back room which was dark and only had a row of windows at the top of the wall. We stood on the sofa which had seen better days and peeked out.
Jore said, “Never seen that before.” He dropped down to sit on the sofa.
“Some supervisor you are too,” I said and went back to the front with Jore in tow. ”We got to check him out.”
I grabbed the gear, which meant a can of mace and a rubber truncheon, usually referred to as the youth guidance counselor, and then I glanced out of the window into the null-color neon lit front of the reception. A long shadow preceded the Toyota man as he sauntered up to our service windows. My first thought was one of relief, as he was skinny and small, but at that time, one always thinks of possible concealed weapons. Jore and I both slipped the mace cans under the desk for quick access, and opened our windows. After all, we were there to serve prospective campers.
The guy slithered up to Jore’s window and we got our first good look at him. He appeared very gaunt. A five o’clock shadow looked more like a five days’ shadow. His hair was worn in a greasy fountain directed up from the lobes and then down and back towards the neck, and a barber was sorely needed to make it look remotely human. He was in his early thirties, as far as I could tell.
Still, the oddest thing was his attire. He was dressed in a worn-out national costume, of which there are dozens of local subtypes, but I couldn’t tell where he was claiming to be from. National costumes in Finland are worn by three groups of people: the Romani minority, retired teachers when reciting the Kalevala or attending a country festival, and finally, folk dancers.
This guy looked definitely mainstream, not Romani, who take pride in the way they dress. He didn’t strike us as a dancer of any sort, and teaching was right out. Jore gave me the slanted look with the notched-up eyebrow. There was an awkward pause as both parties pondered which one should open the channel. He beat us to it with a “Hello” so muted we hardly heard it.
“Hello. What can we do for you?” Jore asked the guy. “If you’d like to come and camp for the night, we’re sorry, but the site is closed. We could let you in, if you pitch your tent right behind the reception and keep the silence”, he suggested.
The guy pivoted his head on the top of his skinny windpipe. I’d never seen a bigger Adam’s apple, and it lolled up and down as he prepared to speak. It looked like he was swallowing a yo-yo.
“I’m not here for camping.” He put his hands into his jacket pockets, deep enough to take in half the forearms.
“Well, in that case, you can stay in your car until the morning and we won’t charge you for the night. Some folks sleep on the parking lot, and we don’t mind. Just keep quiet, will you?” Jore must have thought the case was about to be closed.
The guy shot his line and caught us both by surprise. “I get impulses.”
“Come again?” I asked. For the first time he noted me. I didn’t like his eyes. The gaze didn’t come from the eyes, it started deeper than the usual retina level.
“I get im-pul-ses.”
Jore gave me a hand signal under the desk to grab the mace in case things turned sour. “What kind of impulses would that be, pal?”
“Criminal activity impulses.”
I looked at Jore and he looked at me. No one had told me of such impulses before.
“How so?” he asked.
“When there’s a crime being committed, I get impulses. They’re like electric shocks. If I’m close to the crime scene and the criminal activity, I get them real strong.The yo-yo resumed its oscillation and the guy went silent.
Under the desk, Jore motioned for me to dip in, so I did. “So, what do you do when you get these impulses?”
The guy moved towards me and took a stance halfway between our windows. “I used to call the cops. But that was too hard on me. The cops would always ask me to take them to the crime scene. But as I got close to it, the impulses got too hard to take.”
I felt sorry for the little guy. He was obviously the result of cuts in the mental health sector. Impulses… yeah right. “So what do you do these days? You don’t call the cops anymore?”
He looked straight into my eyes and said, “I have a deal with the chief of police of my home town.”
“Where’s home?” Jore asked.
“Forssa.” Jaysis, this guy was 250 kilometers from home.
“What’s the deal with your chief?”
“The chief of police told me to do this: whenever I get impulses, I don’t call them anymore to tell them there’s a crime. I just get in my car, and I drive in the opposite direction, and they’ll see me go. Then they know there’s a crime scene in the other direction and get there and take care of the trouble.”
I said, “Let me get this straight. You’ve just hopped in your car, like three or four hours ago, in the middle of the night, and drove up to Jyväskylä, just because you have these impulses in your head?”
The guy looked at me. I looked at him. This time, in the colorless light of the neon tubes, I saw into his eyes, and I saw it wasn’t my world there. It was his world. In his world, he was the telepathic crime buster, friend of the chief of police of Forssa, and I was the peon, working my way through college to reach a mediocre position in civil service, while his supernatural impulses helped solve crimes.
And in his world, he was not affected in the least by cuts in the mental health sector.
All of a sudden he put his thumbs to his head, using his palms as antennas. He rotated his head again. “Oh… I feel another impulse. And another one.” seemed to triangulate the origin of the impulses, and managed to find southwest from whence he had come. “Look guys, nice talking to you but I got to go on. I’m not far enough from the crime scene yet.” He turned and took off. Gone were the slinky toy movements, this was a man on a mission half running across the parking lot.
When he sped off northwards, we sat silent for a while. Then I said to Jore: “So… what do we write in the supervisor log?”
He looked at me and said, “I’ll think of something if you’ll do the remaining beat.”
I was only too happy to oblige. The site was calm, even the last night fever people had passed out in their tent or close to it anyway. At the boat beach I saw a pair of proud ducks with ten battery-operated hatchlings in tow, on their way to the reeds for a morning meal. I was delayed by a talkative retired policeman who often appeared very early at the site gate, eager for a chat, so by the time I got back to the reception, Jore had left.
In the evening I reported in for another night, not with Jore this time but another guy. It always was a busy time, that seven o’clock switch. Campers came and went, people hired minigolf gear and asked whether canoes are safe for beginners, and the cashier girls flirted with a busload of Dutch volleyball players.
At some point in the middle of the hustle I had a look at the supervisor log. Jore had written a Spartan entry:
“August 8-9th. Calm night. The police chief of Forssa is a GENIUS.”
Related posts
Categories: general, short stories |
Tags: short stories, writing | 4 Comments
November 17th, 2009
It’s been a rejection kind of day for some friends of mine. A day where the why-am-I-doing-this-when-I-don’t-have-to succubus sits on your shoulder cooing softly. That’s true, noxious harpy, you say as you brush her onto the ground. But it’s also true that I am resilient, and stamp on this maggot of malevolence – silencing her – but only for the moment, because like some hideous science fiction creation, she will be back.
To persist in the face of constant rejection does take resilience, (or a delusional personality). It is part of the writer’s job specification – the resilience that is. It goes with the territory, as does verbal abuse if you operate phones in a call centre, or untimely death if you are a pirate in the South China Sea. But when does persistence tip over into delusion? When do you hang up your keyboard and acknowledge that you gave it your best and it just wasn’t your time?
To succeed at anything, a little encouragement is essential. A little reward that affirms you are on the right path. This is why writers pore over every rejection letter and analyse every word, as a seer examines chicken entrails, looking for a tiny scrap of encouragement. Look, you say triumphantly, they say there is no room on their lists at the moment. At the moment! Which must mean that one day they will have room and I should submit again! Or, the full stop is after ‘ridiculous’, which must mean that they like ‘ridiculous’ – just not at the moment.
These rejections are easier to take when one has good travelling companions. A camaraderie among writers, born of empathy, can ease the worst of pains. Your pals say the agent is a ‘c**t’ who has the sensibility of a shopping mall designer because anyone can see that your work is brilliant, original and grammatically perfect. Or everyone gets out the cheap plonk and shreds the whole modern publishing industry, accusing them of dumbing down the population at large at the behest of Big Capital who just want a bunch of mindless consumers to buy Dan Brown at the checkout for $9.99.
But one day that letter will come and you’ll know. I live on a large block of land. The subsoil has a depth of around one centimetre; it’s lashed by winds straight off the hot Australian interior and baked by an unforgiving sun. When I moved here I had the urge to grow vegetables, a strong urge powered by some primal force within. I had heritage seeds that I nursed along. I bucketed water to my vegetable garden during summer water restrictions when using hoses was banned. I composted everything that wasn’t nailed down. Bags and bags and bags of manure, sheep poo, mushroom compost, water saving crystals, chook poo and home made soups of all of the above were lavished on my vegetable garden. I built tomato trellises, bamboo tepee’s for runner beans and spread straw mulch around everything.
After ten years of failure I now buy all my vegetables from the shop. The idea of vegetable gardening produces spasms of nausea - and a harsh cackle occasionally when others wax lyrical about their vegetal triumphs. Every year, EVERY YEAR, birds and insects would take their cut from my garden. Weather extremes extorted another major cut. Plants failed to flower, or there was not enough water to plump up the vegetables, and then some sort of mildew would move in and do its thing and I’d be left with two zucchini and a handful of silver beet to show for a whole seasons work.
It was a crushing, soul destroying experience and I’m still astonished I persisted for so long. I had resilience, optimism and the knowledge gleaned from a thousand Gardening Australia’s. Now I just eat vegetables, I don’t want to know where they come from – because it hurts too much.
One day I may feel that way about writing. I hope not.
Related posts
Categories: general, on writing |
Tags: myths, writing | 5 Comments
October 6th, 2009
When I was a child, sometimes my mother would drive us to Mosman where we’d catch the ferry to the city from Mosman Wharf. I remember watching the ferry approaching through the scattered sail boats – the ferry master would cut the engines, drift toward the wharf and then thrust the engines into reverse, the water boiled and churned, the smell of diesel filling the air, and as the ferry slammed into the wooden pylons the whole wharf shuddered. The wharfies’ jumped from ferry to wharf, sometimes two or three feet, depending on how many admiring girls were watching. They’d have fags in their mouths and looks of studied nonchalance as they hooked ropes thick as my leg over the metal hooks welded to the wharf.
The barnacle crusted wooden pylons continued to groan and the wharfies’ slapped down the gangplank, and got on with looking distant and muscular. The gangplank was maybe two feet wide with a flimsy metal rail on one side. My mother would take my arm and steer me across as I dallied and stared in fascination down into the churning, oily water.
My cousin - who could chew gum and laugh at the same time, which was very cool - once told me of a woman who’d jumped from the ferry to the wharf, before the gangplank went down, with a baby in her arms. She missed the wharf and fell in the water. She held the baby up and begged horrified onlookers to take it – just before she was crushed between the ferry and the pylon. Guts everywhere, my cousin assured me.
The Manly ferry to the city is a longer journey than the Mosman ferry and can get quite exciting for children, or anxiety prone adults. The ferry has to pass the opening of the harbour to the Pacific Ocean between North and South Heads. The ocean swell can sometimes be so large the ferry is thrown from side to side and everyone screams and the ferry master has to tack into the waves and you think he’s gone mad and is heading toward the rocks and we’ll all have to jump and swim for it and there are sharks in Sydney harbour because my cousin said there was and we’ll be dashed to pieces on the rocks anyway so who cares?
These days the new ferries have electronically controlled gangplanks, very few wharfies and are designed to cope with the odd spot of foul weather. So where’s the fun?
Those memories of the harbour crossings, the fogs and the buoys bobbing, the gulls and the white bow waves, the salt and diesel lodge in my mind, never to be erased. So when our high school English teacher introduced us to the poetry of Kenneth Slessor, in particular his poem Five Bells, I remember being entranced by it.
It was my ferry he was writing about. The one I caught. He saw the same water, the same gulls flying along behind, the same white bow water and he must have sat on the deck, like me, as the ferry rounded Bradley’s Head and suddenly the Harbour Bridge is there and you have to decide which side of the ferry you want to sit on. Do you watch the city or the zoo side?
Slessor’s poem is about a lost friend who fell off the Manly ferry one night and drowned in the harbour. The drowned man was a writer and journalist, and on his way to a party he had stuck a bottle of beer in each coat pocket and must have been sucked down very quickly. How many bones lie at the bottom of the harbour, I wondered as I read the poem? Does that now grown baby wonder about his/her mother’s fate beneath the oily waters? Can they bear to go back to that wharf? That’s if it was true. My cousin also told me about a man in her street who captured children and kept them in cages in his back yard.
The poem has travelled with me over the years. I still love it. I love these following lines so much that if I ever had the urge to tattoo myself it would be with those words.
I looked out my window in the dark
At waves with diamond quills and combs of light
That arched their mackerel-backs and smacked the sand
In the moon’s drench, that straight enormous glaze,
The poem conjures up smells and emotions and images from my childhood experiences of the harbour. It binds me to that place and that time and it lives in me.
Cremorne Ferry
This phenomenon may not be a marketable commodity, it does nothing to lower or raise prices, it contributes nothing to the national economy, but it enriches me as a human to have my experiences reflected like that. I wonder if the Honourable Minister for Competition Policy and Consumer Affairs has ever had a similar experience. If he could dwell on it for a while it may slow him down in his campaign to lift PIR’s. One of the consequences of doing this would be to flood the small Australian market with cheap copies of American and British books, making Australian books uncompetitive in terms of sales.
If it goes ahead, who will write our stories and our poems? More to the point who will publish them? Will we experience our everyday lives and make sense of them through stories that have nothing to do with us? It’s like the fake snow at Christmas, take it away and get rid of it, it has nothing to do with the Australian experience.
The Manly Ferry
Related posts
Categories: culture, general, on reading |
Tags: Australia, culture, memory, reading | No Comments
Hazardous Activity
for a good feed ...
