another interesting thing...

as I said in response to a "what's next" question Angela put to all the panellists on Sunday: That's what the Internet is for.

in my case, it's for not only bits that didn't make the book for reasons of space rather than quality (pending: some stuff about weather and extra references), but also for the endless stream of space-and-place-and-map/representation material about Melbourne.

eg: App My State, a shameless bid by the Vic Government to get cool ideas for location-specific applications for free. a typical idea (not actual application)

Submitted By:Peter Macpherson
Date of original idea: 9th March 2010
Imagine a website that has stylised fence, where each paling represents a calendar day. On that fence there are little icons attached that expand to display a pdf, jpeg, avi, doc or other file type. Members of the public email their "graffitti" and it gets stored in this fashion (by the date and time of their email). I think this would appeal to many sections of the community - from poets to artists to youth who may see it as a better way to "make their mark". Add a few competitions for fun, and a good search engine and it could form the basis of a wonderful cultural archive.

almost makes me want to get an iPhone...

and in a not unrelated way, the new Australian Tourism campaign uses photos taken by the public on a map of the country, so you can zoom in and out, Google-style. I liked the use of the term "your fellow Australians"...the whole thing is so tongue in check, particularly as it's really aimed at non-Australians, generally known as tourists (unless they are in a small boat coming from Indonesia).

ewf @ mth

EWF report: the session was chaired by the lovely Angela Meyer, who said nice things about us all to the 100 or so people who attended...I was on first, which was both nerve-racking and good, because it freed me up to listen to what the others had to say: there was Patrick Cullen, who talked about how his characters' inner journeys correspond to landscape in his book What Came Between, set around the time of the Newcastle earthquake; there was playwright Sean Reilly, who was very funny and yet horrifying with his descriptions of growing up as a sensitive child in the remains of the Tasmanian convict/massacre landscapes - and said that playwrights in Australia these days don't bother with setting because directors cut it out, which I find quite mindboggling - and Leanne Hall, who read from her very clever book This is Shyness, and made me feel clever because I recognised one of her streets, Grey Street, which is the border of her imaginary suburb Shyness, as Smith St, which is the border between Fitzroy and Collingwood.

all in all it was a session I'd quite like to have attended myself. and I hope I got away with my trick of some general chat about the nature of place in writing, followed by readings from some of the better books set in Melbourne: Peter Carey, Helen Garner, that kind of thing - plus a little of my book. and it was in the amazing Yarra Room at the Town Hall, with lots of curlicles on the walls, a lovely high decorative skylight and big oil paintings of dead white males in gilt frames all around us.

appropriating the real

...finishing my notes for my talk this afternoon at the EWF, I came across some quotes I'd jotted down.

Jonathon Lethem, speaking on The Book Show on Feb 10 this year said something like - to use a city for your writing requires a lot of ego. it's like scribbling your name all over it - a very rough paraphrase.

and James Wood, in How Fiction Works, said simply: "Art selects and shapes."

words about Melbourne

so I'm on at the emerging writers festival on Sunday. talking about place with a coupla other writers. 3pm, Melbourne town hall.

also, there's this, from some Melbourne uni students: Open Book Melbourne; bookshop review and other Melbourne bookish stuff.

Melbourne cliche alert: I love this time of year. Autumn, when the mornings turn crisp and the nights warrant a really comfy doona pulled up around the ears. When the mornings are pale blue, streaked with white, and the dark green of the trees around the Brunswick Street Oval take on a reddish tone.
In the mornings, the Yarra and even the Merri Creek steam gently. Falling leaves start to pile up in the gardens along the streets near my house and the air has a rich, faint tone of organic decomposition. I can imagine the flowering bulbs settling in under the layer of natural compost, dreaming of spring already. there's something about the closing of the summer season that lets the city look inwards again, to its warm fireplaces and sunny corners of the room; and something about the fierce brevity of the midday warmth that makes it all the more precious. we let go of the summer; we know when enough is enough, and we lean into the rising, biting wind with a kind of determined relish; it's familiar and exhilarating and exactly what we expect from our place this time of year.

in the change room at the pool today, a woman who I see from time to time said to me: "Don't you love Melbourne. It's snowing about 1700 metres."

well yes I do. I love: the cold when it blasts in so suddenly from the south. and I love that half-naked half-strangers feel strongly enough about it to bring it up in unexpected conversation.

the art show

...so we - my husband, the kid, and a couple of friends - wandered along to the Affordable Art Fair on Saturday afternoon. There was an extraordinary photographer, some on-the-verge-of-kitsch pieces made with swirling crystalline effects in coloured perspex "canvases" that I don't have a site for, and a surprising number of sketches and paintings of fanciful and/or hybrid animals.

but the photograph I actually bought was of the Esplanade Hotel. the fact that the photograph - about 60 by 45 centimetres - really was affordable at $150 instead of $1500 or $15,000 - helped. (I can't find the image online: the photographer is here.) I liked its combination of washed out buildings and hyper-coloured sky, I guess. but most of all, I liked it because it was the Esplanade Hotel on a sunny afternoon, packed with happy drinking Melbourne people; because it was yet another photo of possibly Melbourne's most photographed hotel; because it wasn't a photo from the days of parasols and horsedrawn carriages, but from my time, the time of branded market umbrellas and blokes in singlets milling around the crowded tables. I bought it because it was a photography of something I knew to be real. In the days when I worked on the local paper down there, I must have covered two or three "battles for the Espy", from dodgy licensees to attempts to gut the building. the locals always rallied and the Espy always won.

in the upper right corner, the massive apartment block that sits behind the Espy is just visible, and strangely, I like that too, because it forms a kind of modern background that adds a layer to the scene, that underlines the survival of the Espy; it dates the scene to now, and yet the big white Victorian Esplanade Hotel yields nothing. it just sits there, looking out across the bay in a pleasant haze of beer and distant music.