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Loaded , my first novel, was first published in 1995. That’s over a quarter of a century ago. There’s something daunting in that fact, a confirmation that I have aged, and that the world has moved on in dizzying, exhilarating, and frightening ways since then. Ari, the nineteen-year-old narrator, lived in a world that had just come out of the Cold War, that had just been introduced to the Internet, and which had no inkling of the revolution that was to come with the smartphone and the War on Terror. Ari’s soundtrack was grunge and hip-hop and house and JJJ was being censored for playing a track called Fuck the Police . It was a different world.
It is impossible to look back on the novel now and not wince at the clunkiness of some of the prose, and not be embarrassed by how much I did not know about the craft of writing. However—and I say this all the time to writers beginning their first novel, no matter what age they are—there is something thrilling in discovering the craft as you go, in putting all of yourself and all of your reading and all of your influences in that first work. I envy first-time novelists. You don’t know if you will have the will or the opportunity to do it again—you are unafraid and you are raw. Whatever its faults, I am grateful for the rawness of Loaded .
Ari was an alter-ego. He’s not autobiography, for one of the things I discovered in the labour of writing, was how to structure memory and longing and experience to tell a story. That was the greatest delight, finding out I could express a voice that came from me but was not me. Ari is braver than I was at nineteen. He’s more reckless and he was unafraid of saying things that I was too shy or too cowed to say out loud. He knows shame and he loves music and film. I guess that’s where he and I are closest.
I was so very lucky with Loaded . Ana Kokkinos adapted it into a fearless film, Head On , and Alex Dimitriades, who played Ari, took my character and made it his own. He too was fearless. Through that experience I met Andrew Bovell, who co-wrote the screenplay, and he introduced me to Melbourne Workers Theatre. I didn’t grow up with theatre. MWT and Andrew and Patricia Cornelius and Melissa Reeves and Irene Vela trusted me and trusted my fear and it proved to be one of the greatest experiences of my life. It opened up another world for me.
Maybe because Ari was an alter-ego, a different self, I have through the years mused on whether I could return to him. I wondered what his voice would sound like in his thirties, in his forties? What would change for him and what would remain constant? I even sketched some notes for a possible crime novel, fantasised about him being a private investigator. Nothing came of those ideas. They remained sketches, mere phantoms. Then, seven years ago now, I was approached by a young director, Stephen Nicolazzo, from Little Ones Theatre, who was interested in adapting my collection of short stories, Merciless Gods , into a play. We met for a drink in town and within five minutes I told him he could do whatever he wanted with my work. He was a northern
suburbs wog queer, and he had a sense of humour, and he was passionate and angry and smart. Of course, I wanted him to do it! The play was written by Dan Giovannoni, who understood my work but was also unafraid of having his voice and his sensibility come through in the play. I loved what Stephen and Dan and the cast and crew did with Merciless Gods —not because it was my work, but because they too were fearless, they too were in love with language and complexity and nuance. They weren’t scared of shame and they weren’t scared of tenderness. They weren’t scared of sex and they weren’t scared of risk. I knew I wanted to work with them.
So, when Stephen approached me about adapting Loaded , with Dan as co-writer, I said yes. Immediately. Then I got nervous. From our initial discussions, we knew we wanted the play to be set in the contemporary world, in the world we all live in now. But did that mean that Ari would now be in his forties? Or would we take his voice, his character, and place him in the early 2020s? I was anxious about this, wondered whether I was too much of an old fart to be able to carry that off convincingly. It was knowing that Dan had my back that convinced me to take the leap and try it. Malthouse committed to the play, and we began writing. The Ari on stage is not the Ari of the novel. This Ari is created by all of us—writers, director, and actor. That was the most exciting part of the proces, Dan and I finding the voice that Ari would have now. The Ari of the novel hasn’t disappeared. If you like, he is a ghost. We hope that the audience for Loaded will be aware of a song that is just discernible throughout the performance. That song is the call-and-response between Ari’s ghost and the Ari of 2023.
Dan and I want to thank Malthouse for supporting this play. It was initially programmed for 2020, and then the pandemic struck. Malthouse gave us the opportunity to do it as an audio recording and that kept people in work and the result is something we are all proud of. However, we wrote it for the stage, for it to be performed in front of an audience. As Ari might say, sweat and smell and sight and sound are all vital.
CHRISTOS TSIOLKAS / CO-ADAPTER OF LOADED, FROM THE NOVEL BY CHRISTOS TSIOLKASBOARD
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