Byron Writers Festival Member Magazine Autumn 2023
SHEHAN KARUNATILAKA INGA SIMPSON GAVIN YUAN GAO HELEN BURNS
008 Flying the nest
Inga Simpson interviewed by Rebecca Ryall.
014 Coming to terms
Nic Margan assesses the floods, a year on, through the lens of three influential books.
018 The world opens
Helen Burns on returning to India’s writers festivals post-pandemic.
024 Booker-winning fiction
An extract from The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Shehan Karunatilaka.
002 A note from the festival
003 News & Events
A Q&A with Lynda Dean, Membership Drive success, StoryBoard returns and more.
006 Feature poet Poetry from Gavin Yuan Gao.
012 From the Reading Chair
Laurel Cohn on the importance of summary when crafting fiction.
021 What YA Reading?
The latest in YA fiction reviewed by Polly Jude.
022 How good is Australia?
The Idea of Australia by Julianne Shultz reviewed by Jenny Bird.
028 Festival workshops
northerly is the quarterly magazine of Byron Writers Festival.
Byron Writers Festival is a non-profit member organisation presenting workshops and events year-round, including the annual Festival.
Held on the lands of the Arakwal Bumberbin and Minjungbal peoples of the Bundjalung Nation, we pay respect to the traditional owners of these lands and acknowledge them as the original storytellers of this region.
LOCATION/CONTACT
P: 02 6685 5115 F: 02 6685 5166
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PO Box 1846, Byron Bay NSW 2481
EDITOR Barnaby Smith, northerlyeditor@gmail.com
CONTRIBUTORS Jenny Bird, Helen Burns, Laurel Cohn, Gavin Yuan Gao, Polly Jude, Nic Margan, Rebecca Ryall, Tom Wolff
BYRON WRITERS FESTIVAL BOARD
CHAIRPERSON Adam van Kempen
TREASURER Cheryl Bourne
SECRETARY Hilarie Dunn
MEMBERS Daniel Browning, Marele Day, Lynda Dean, Lynda Hawryluk, Grace LucasPennington
LIFE MEMBERS Jean Bedford, Jeni Caffin, Gayle Cue, Robert Drewe, Jill Eddington, Russell Eldridge, Chris Hanley, John Hertzberg, Edwina Johnson, Fay Knight, Irene O’Brien, Sarah Ma, Jennifer Regan, Cherrie Sheldrick, Brenda Shero, Heather Wearne
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ISSN 2653-4061
It seems just yesterday that I sat down to write the introduction to our summer edition of northerly, yet here we are in March with the year seemingly zipping by at speed. The Byron Writers Festival office is a hive of activity, with our team already hard at work pulling together this year’s festival program. Noses are deep into books, many coffees are being sipped as we meet with new and returning partners and brows are furrowed in concentration as we work through the logistics of moving to the beautiful Bangalow Showgrounds. While we cannot share too many details just yet, there are a lot of exciting things in the works for August. By the time this edition hits your coffee table or reading device, Extra Early Bird Tickets will be on sale, with our first guests to be announced on 14 June and the full line-up on 28 June.
Until then, there are of course many books to read and this great issue of northerly, which is jam-packed with lots of thoughtful and interesting pieces, including a profile by Rebecca Ryall of Inga Simpson who joined us on the festival stage in 2022 and is one of Australia’s most gifted nature writers. Nic Margan shares a considered guide on books we might look to while navigating the aftermath of natural disasters and Helen Burns reports on the embracing of literature post-pandemic from India.
And if getting out and about is on your cards, mark Tuesday 23 May in your diary as Booker Prize winner Shehan Karunatilaka will be in conversation with Paul Barclay (ABC Radio National Big Ideas) at the Byron Theatre. If you haven’t read The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida, add it to your list. We have a little excerpt to share between these pages to whet your appetite.
I want to take this opportunity to thank our many returning members this year and welcome those who are new. It was our biggest year yet for memberships and your support makes everything we do possible. Be sure to check out our program of workshops and activities for writers if that’s of interest to you.
Finally, I am delighted to report that the highly successful and muchloved StoryBoard program has received an injection of funding from the NSW Government and is to be relaunched from term two, 2023. This will enable us to bring Masterclasses back to students in Lismore, Ballina and Byron, kick-start school visits later in the year and present StoryBoard at Byron Writers Festival – a full two days of schools programming on-site in Bangalow. This is just the beginning and we are working on ways to ensure this program can sustain itself and continue to reach children across our region to foster a love of reading and writing.
I hope you enjoy this issue of northerly, and look forward to sharing more of what’s in store very soon!
Zoë Pollock CEO & Artistic Director, Byron Writers FestivalWe sit down with long-term local, arts philanthropist and Byron Writers Festival board member Lynda Dean for a chat about her colourful history in the region and the annual festival.
husband fell in love with the area after attending the Aquarius Festival in 1973. I had grown up in innercity Sydney and was terrified of everything in the bush, especially with no phone, no electricity, and no water supply, but raised three children in a tractor shed.
could be done. It’s economically important to the tourism industry, it gives local writers professional development, plus it’s a celebration of ideas that stimulates thought and conversation long after the marquees are pulled down.
You’re a long-term local of this region, what do you think is most compelling and special about the Northern Rivers?
There are two equally compelling reasons why living in this region is great; the breathtaking natural beauty of beaches and forests, the wildlife and clean air, water and food. The other is the network of communities and connection between villages – there is a niche here for every interest group. For me, it’s dance classes, book clubs, the Northern Rivers Community Foundation and above all, Byron Writers Festival, which I had the privilege of co-founding with the original board of crazy optimists led by Chris Hanley.
When did you move to the Northern Rivers and what attracted you to this area?
I moved to Bungawalbin Creek in 1979 with my husband and baby to see if we could create a life making and selling tea tree oil – my
How did you first get involved with Byron Writers Festival? We desperately missed cultural nourishment, so when I heard through a friend that a group was forming to start the Northern Rivers Writers Centre I rushed to join the board. In 1997, we held our first writers festival to bring intellectual fun to the region and stimulate the economy in what used to be a very slow and quiet time of year. Twentysix years later it’s still a great idea.
What’s your favourite memory of the festival?
I’ll never forget the haunting videolink session with Behrouz Boochani when he was still on Manus Island, but maybe my biggest highlight was being in the tent any time Jesse Blackadder chaired a session. I was always deeply moved by her magic ability to draw the best out of the others on the stage.
Why do you think Byron Writers Festival is important?
Byron Writers Festival is the highlight of the cultural calendar in the region. Many innovative ideas we introduced have been taken up by festivals around the country – we were the first regional festival and we proved it
What role can philanthropy play for the arts? Why is it important to give to arts organisations?
Ideally everyone would be happy to pay enough taxes to provide for a thriving arts industry, but somehow that doesn’t happen. Australia is rather immature in philanthropy compared to the USA and Europe, but we need to grow up. The pandemic lockdowns showed how crucial films, books and music were to our emotional and mental health. If you have the capacity to give, the arts is a rewarding endeavour.
You give generously to many across our region. What do you think is important when considering where to donate?
I want to live in a compassionate, interesting and connected community so we support organisations that serve to create that. I feel emotionally connected to the causes we donate to – it’s up to us to make the world we want to live in.
Byron Writers Festival will be launching a new philanthropic giving program in May, with a special evening event with Lynda Dean. If you are interested in finding out more, please email partnerships@byronwritersfestival.com
A heartfelt thanks to all of our new and returning members this year – 2023 is our biggest year yet for renewing members! We can’t wait to see your friendly faces at an event or workshop soon. And extra thanks to those that also generously donated to support regional schools, we’ve raised a total of $3,177, which will allow more local children to experience StoryBoard at Byron Writers Festival this year that otherwise may not have been able to attend.
A shout-out also to our generous prize partners for supporting our Membership Drive: Bask & Stow, Brookfarm, Byron Bay Chocolate Co., Byron Bay Gifts, Byron Farmers Market, Caldera Coffee, fallenBROKENstreet, Griffith Review, Honey Hunt Style, Jewels of Byron, Merry People, Milligram, Mingalaba, Minimum Wines, Penguin Random House Australia, Pukka Herbs, Quarterly Essay, Seed & Sprout, Shemana, Stone & Wood, The Book Room Collective, Schwartz Media and The Sunseeker Byron Bay.
Extra Early Bird Passes are back and on sale from 9am, Wednesday 29 March until midnight Wednesday 5 April. Grab your festival 3-Day pass at the extra discounted price of $225 and start planning your weekend this 11-13 August.
We have been thrilled with the response to our 2023 venue, Bangalow Showgrounds, and cannot wait to share what we have in store for you all at this beautiful heritage site.
First guests are announced 14 June along with Early Bird 3-Day Passes, with the full program announced and all tickets on sale 28 June.
Byron Writers Festival invites you to a special event with author Shehan Karunatilaka (above) for his 2022 Booker Prize-winning novel, The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida – a mordantly funny satire set amid the murderous mayhem of a Sri Lanka beset by civil war. Shehan will appear live in conversation on Tuesday 23 May at Byron Theatre. Get in quick for this must-see literary event with one of Sri Lanka’s foremost authors. Details and bookings via byronwritersfestival.com/whatson. If you’re yet to read The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida you can enjoy an extract on page 24.
The Byron Writers Festival team is delighted to announce that StoryBoard, our travelling creative writing program for students, has secured an injection of funding from the NSW state government and will be relaunched from term two in 2023.
Following a pause due to funding constraints, Byron Writers Festival cannot wait to bring this muchloved and vital program back for the children and youth of the Northern Rivers region in 2023. Details around the program, including how to book Masterclasses and school visits, will be announced very soon.
There’s been some exciting movement amongst the team in recent weeks. The wonderful Shien Chee was appointed general manager in February. Shien is a senior producer and administrator with over 25 years of experience in the arts, festival and event space. In addition, the board has appointed Zoë Pollock to the expanded role of CEO & artistic director.
Emily Brugman, our program manager, has taken maternity leave as she prepares for her new role as a mother! We wish her all the best for this exciting life chapter and look forward to meeting her new bub soon. Ella Peile and Julie Ryan have joined the team to cover Emily’s maternity leave, with Ella working in a part-time capacity as program manager and Julie as event manager looking after workshops and special events.
And our delightful festival administrator Tom Wolff also recently moved on to pursue his passion for river restoration – thank
The cover artwork for this autumn issue of northerly is Alpine Mosaics, which is part of a series on the Gondwanan Rainforest by Tom Wolff. A photographer and writer based in the Northern Rivers, Wolff spends time in the remaining patches of ancient Gondwanan Rainforest that used to cover much of Bundjalung Country. This old rainforest is a continuing source of inspiration for his work to help restore our river systems and regenerate rainforest through an organisation called Revive the Northern Rivers (www.revivethenorthernrivers.com).
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culture and an ability to string a nice sentence together. The festival is now able to offer a number of perks and advantages as a ‘thank you’ for contributing in this way.
Additionally, the magazine would like to showcase the creative works and accolades of Byron Writers Festival Members. Whether you are interested in writing for northerly or just want to share some news, email: northerlyeditor@gmail.com
Our mentoring service provides support, guidance and encouragement to help you achieve your writing goals.
Are you feeling stuck? Are you struggling with the momentum and focus required to progress your manuscript?
Sometimes the best way to reach your destination is with an experienced navigator by our side.
you Tom! We will be introducing our new administrator very soon.
Series two of our festival 2022 podcasts are available to stream now. Titled Hope & Courage, the series draws from conversations that reimagine a future where creativity, activism, community empowerment and fearlessness reign supreme and features a selection of the festival’s most compelling voices, including a special recording of our keynote lecture event ‘Radical Hope’. Tune
‘I always come away from our sessions inspired and uplifted, with greater clarity and ready to make my next steps with this crazy manuscript of mine. Truly, working with you is the best decision I have made re my writing.’
Nicole Codyin via byronwritersfestival.com/ digital or follow Byron Writers Festival on your podcasts app or Spotify.
The magazine you currently hold in your hands, northerly (the official publication of Byron Writers Festival), is seeking anyone in the local community keen to contribute book reviews, literary essays, opinion pieces or author interviews. Experience not necessary, just a strong interest in books and literary
At the recent Children’s Book Fair in Bologna, Italy, local author, artist and composer Matt Ottley was recently confirmed as the Australian nominee (illustrator) for the Hans Christian Andersen Award, the highest international distinction given to authors and illustrators of children’s books, awarded by the International Board on Books for Young People (IBBY) every second year to an author and illustrator whose complete works have made an important, lasting contribution to children’s literature.
Matt’s most recent work – The Tree of Ecstasy and Unbearable Sadness – also received a Special Mention in the 2023 Bologna Ragazzi Multimedia Awards, established to ‘recognise the best publishing projects that expand their narrative universe across different media’. Inspired by his experiences of bipolar disorder, Matt created the art, wrote the words, and composed a symphony for this unique publication.
Faceless, of one mind, we have come to know the depth of our own blood—
not the luxurious blue of sirens or the lightning green of pond lilies, but brackish
as the spitting sea that will outlive us—ringing ruthless shadows as desire rings the earth’s
flesh. The heart is a long ladder, a mirrored & sleeved things. Our tongues have relished
the sweetness of this year’s magnificence, our faith lush & razor-edged. Out of the clear calm,
a shock of roots—hands of a virtuoso climb & astonish. Here, in the north, our beauty
besieges winter. Men tread trees’ memory brazenly as tyrants do, not knowing the woodland
is our birthright, where the sun is all mouths & the river writes her elegy on our limbs
tirelessly with her ink of light. Watch us toss & lurch as a leafy coliseum under sky’s
metallic sheen, each honest self burrowing deep, making a claim on what is ours to inherit.
In my body’s rain-scented cavern, night loosens its mouth’s well-oiled hinge. The man who dived deep beneath my skin & emptied out his sudden pearls now lies shipwrecked & desireless beside me, silence between our bodies a meadow I can’t bring myself to cross. O wind-twisted magnolia, who diligently paved my window with sweetness all summer, teach me how to be marked by faith without being swallowed by its light. I should confess that when he came inside me like the softest knife I’ve ever felt, all I could think of was my mother’s throat lit by the thistle moon’s white fire years ago—as she tied around her cool flesh a necklace strung with the pointed bullets she’d picked from my father’s drawer, when the field outside bristled with anticipation of autumn (though it was not yet the end of summer, no, not yet) & it was still easy to believe that the blue flame of the cicadas’ song among the high leaves would go on & on.
Born in Beijing, Gavin Yuan Gao is a genderqueer, bilingual immigrant poet who grew up in Beijing and Brisbane. They hold a BA (magna cum laude) in English Literature and Creative Writing from The University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. They live in Brisbane. At the Altar of Touch, their first book, recently won the 2023 Prize for Poetry at the Victorian Premier's Literary Awards. These poems are taken from that collection.
With achievements in both fiction and non-fiction, Inga Simpson has emerged as one of Australia’s foremost nature writers over the last decade. Rebecca Ryall spoke to her at Byron Writers Festival 2022.
For nature writer Inga Simpson, the Australian landscape is a lead character, whichever genre she is working with. As a non-Indigenous writer of white settler descent, whose family has eked out a living on the same patch of land since invasion, her connections to this Country run deep. Her novels feature characters relating deeply to landscape, and the non-human and the more-than-human place beings they grapple with – whether these be birds, trees or wildfires. Real-life conundrums play out in her novels: the vicissitudes of connection to stolen lands, the fears and turmoil of contested ownership. Simpson seems to use her writing as a way of working through these contemplations, examining her relationships with
and through landscapes. She tells me that she sees writing as her activism nowadays, using her skills with weaving words to voice the landscapes she is wanting to rescue from wholesale destruction.
If you’ve ever wondered what there is to know about a tree, I recommend you read one of Simpson’s books. Her oeuvre is wide and varied and offers many ways in for the reader. Her non-fiction includes memoir – told through the metaphor of the forest in Understory; botanical ethnography – beautifully composed in The Book of Australian Trees; and her fiction weaves the natural world into the lives of the human and non-human characters. Nest is a standout for its meditations on the mundanity
and beauty of sharing lives in the Australian rural context. Alongside of her evocative and generous writings, Inga is also an engaging presenter and facilitator of writing workshops and retreats with many organisations. I was privileged to sit in the audience at Byron Writers Festival 2022 as she joined panels discussing climate change and nature writing, and to interview Inga for northerly magazine.
I met Inga Simpson at Byron Writers Festival in August. We had met before virtually at a writers’ workshop, organised through Writers NSW, but never in person. Inga is an activist storyteller who uses the written word to explore her own connection to Country and inspire others to do the same.
I’ve just finished reading Nest. Thank you for writing this book, Inga. I had been pondering the dearth of literature which really unpacks the romantic imagery of living in the bush. Alongside this idyll is the mundanity and the enormous effort it takes to live in the country, especially alone. And until I read this book, I hadn’t encountered the daily realities of my life in print.
Oh, thank you! I’m happy to find a receptive reader. It is unusual to live in this way, but it is my everyday. That book is too quiet for most people. Lots of readers didn’t really get it. I’m glad you did. Books find us when we need them.
I’ve also recently read some of your non-fiction work –Understory: A Life With Trees, which is a memoir of a certain time in your life, told through the imagery of the forest, and The Book of Australian Trees, a book for young people about your favourite native trees, beautifully illustrated by Alicia Rogerson. You seem to be a prolific writer, who is unconcerned about sticking to one genre. Do you prefer to write in fiction or non-fiction, and why?
Fiction gives me the biggest kick. It’s harder, but when you pull it together and finish it you do feel like you have created something with a life of its own. But I also like writing the natural world. Writing fiction gives me the platform to express anger, despair. But there’s a new power in my nature writing, especially now, post fires, floods etc. I have a lot to say so it may as well be non-fiction.
Yes, I love the way you render the natural world on the page. I saw you on a panel yesterday with Rhianna Patrick, who said you ‘write Country like a Blackfella’. How did that comment land with you, and do you think there is any
contradiction in writing about a connection to Country as a nonIndigenous person?
Oh, that was a big moment for me! I remember Melissa Lucashenko saying on a panel, about ten years ago, that you don’t have to be Aboriginal to feel a connection to the landscape. That really freed me up to explore. I have my own connection and I’m trying to learn more, to refine my ability to describe that and my experiences. The key is to remain humble and respectful. Even though I have this connection and the capacity to describe it, that is nothing compared to 65,000 years of connection. There are things we can’t conceive of. Spiritual connection, like a genetic memory, layers of knowledge. Knowing that I don’t have that, I appreciate whatever information I get from Indigenous people. The longer I do this, the better I get at not being afraid to express my own experiences, but to do so in a way that’s still open, not too certain. Language is shifting. Even the government is changing its language. Bruce Pascoe is a mentor of mine. He would say we are in conversation – more talk and language about this being a shared conversation, shared future on this Country and on this planet in a time of crisis. Language makes it easier to contribute to shared conversation. I may be criticised, but I must contribute to move the conversation forward.
I also also heard you mention that, for your first PhD, you wrote a book – a lesbian detective novel set in Brisbane. That sounds like an interesting read! Where can I get a copy?
Oh that! I wish that could be struck off the record! It was published in the USA and is now out of print, thankfully. I went to an interview
once and the interviewer pulled out a copy of it and wanted to talk about it, in reference to my new work. She asked what had happened to change my writing? I had a tree change, moved to a cottage in the woods. My life changed, and so the writing changed.
So, fiction requires a plot. Do you start a book with plot in mind, or does the plot coalesce over time? And is plot simply a device which enables you to write about the natural world?
I like plot to come out organically. With Nest, for example, I had ideas but until the very end I didn’t know what happened to Jen’s father. I was sitting at my desk editing one day and watching a male cuckoo out the window. As I sat with it, I realised that Jen’s father was not her father. [Cuckoos throw the eggs out of other birds’ nests and supplant them with their own, leaving the other birds to raise the babies as if they were their own.] So, the birds gave the plot! I enjoy that.
I’m not actually that interested in plot. I see it as just a vehicle to do the kind of writing I enjoy doing. The Last Woman in the World was different though. Plot came first in that, as I was contracted by a UK publisher to write a thriller/horrortype novel, set in Australia and written by an Australian, who knows our landscapes and settings. I found it hard to write that plot. I tried to do it properly, planning it all out, but I just couldn’t get the voice. It was all horror and action. I found the horror aspect hard, much harder than I expected.
The publisher had a character in mind – a woman who had locked herself away from the world, and I had already given her the detail of the glass blowing, so I just did what I always do. I think it’s the connection to nature that sustains the reader
through the bleakness of the plot. But yeah, the horror aspect was hard.
I found it interesting that the horror was actually never named. I thought it could be read many ways – as the horror of a plague, such as COVID, or you could even just substitute the horror of depression or anxiety, rampant in modern life.
Yeah, the not naming allows the reader to imagine their own horror. Each person experiences the threat differently. The book is really about fear, and everyone’s fears are different. Fear and depression are on the rise, spreading, exacerbated by social media. And we internalise this idea that our value or self-worth is linked to how busy we are. COVID really gave us all space to step away from productivity, empowered everyone to chill out.
I don’t go anywhere to work now, but in my early work life I was
working long days, everyone was, and it was all about being seen to be present and keen and ambitious. But we were not very productive! It seems like the landscape changed when we all had to stay home.
What do you think about the idea that climate change is just an anthropocentric construct?
A construct? No, we did it. No doubt about it, we have wreaked havoc as humans. Changed the planet.
Northern Rivers editor and writing mentor Laurel Cohn discusses the importance of summary in structuring and pacing effective fiction.
If scenes are the building blocks of story, summary is the mortar that holds the scenes together. Yes, you can build a dry-stone wall if you are a consummate craftsperson, but a more complex structure, like a book-length work, is likely to rely on mortar for stability and strength. Some writers think of scenes as ‘showing’ and summary as ‘telling’, and in an effort to follow the premise ‘show don’t tell’, they shy away from summary; I’ve noticed a lack of summary in quite a few manuscripts in the last few years. But summary can be crucial in building a seamless and satisfying story.
In cinematic terms, a ‘scene’ is a close-up where particular details are shown, and ‘summary’ is a long shot where the wider context is visible. In writing terms, a scene is a discrete piece of the story puzzle that involves specific action: a point at which things turn, an episode of conflict, a moment of change. Summary builds a platform for scenes and provides context.
If you have too many scenes back to back, the reader may lose the bigger picture. It would be a bit like a screen story told in endless close-ups, without the camera pulling back to the wider view. The long shot also gives the viewer (and, on the page, the reader) breathing space to see the action from a different perspective, to step back from the intensity of the closeup scene.
Summary can be used to set up a scene in time and place, or introduce a character through routine actions and their inner world. It can cover a period of time in the story world, a character’s actions over time, or backstory. It can introduce an idea with relevance to the scenes that follow.
Summary is commonly used to orient the reader in time and place when you shift location between scenes/chapters and when a period of time has passed between scenes/chapters. This is particularly useful at the beginning of a chapter or section. Often, I see chapters open straight into a scene, and it may not be
clear to the reader until many paragraphs later where the action is taking place, or when. I think this comes from a slightly misunderstood piece of advice to writers to ‘get straight into it’. This can work if the timing and location is clear to the reader straight up, or is revealed within a few paragraphs, but if it’s not obvious, the reader can be distracted from the scene itself, trying to work out the where and when it is taking place.
Having a date and/or timestamp at the top of a chapter can be useful to help a reader track location and time passing, but it does not always serve as a replacement for summary per se. Sometimes you only need a line or two to help orient the reader. In her novel Grown Ups (Penguin, 2021), Marian Keyes has quite a large cast of characters and the story has multiple POVs. At the top of the chapters there is often a sentence or two that signals to the reader when and where the new chapter takes place, and names the POV character. For example:
One hundred and eighty kilometres away, in the Lough Lein hotel in County Kerry, Nell read from the laminated mini-bar list...
In setting up a scene in time and place, summary can also establish a character by introducing their regular routines. Here’s an example from the opening of the short story ‘The Lost Wedding’ by David Brooks (Australian Short Stories, ed. Carmel Bird, Haughton Mifflin 1991).
Miss Jennifer Cooley lives amidst tall trees on the edge of town with a dog that hoards things under the house and a cat that stays mainly on the roof, where it stalks sparrows. In her rather sequestered existence in between, Miss Cooley is hardly ever seen but for the one morning a fortnight when she does her shopping, and for one week each year when she does a kind of spring cleaning, during which time she sometimes hangs upon the line out back a faded wedding dress in the style of twenty years ago.
Summary can cover long periods of story time when not much happens, or in which transition or change takes place over time. Sometimes writers are tempted to skip over chunks of time altogether, but often it is helpful to at least acknowledge that time has passed.
This example from John le Carre’s Absolute Friends (Hodder and Stoughton, 2003), charts change over time:
For the next ten weeks Mundy sleeps on Mustafa’s sofa bed in the living room with his legs hanging over the end while Mustafa sleeps with his mother, keeping a baseball bat beside him in case Mundy tries anything on. At first Mustafa refuses to go to school, so Mundy takes him to the zoo and plays ball games with him on the moulting grass while Zara stays home and lapses gradually into a state of convalescence, which is Mundy’s hope. Bit by bit he assumes the role of secular father to a Muslim child and platonic guardian to a traumatised woman in a state of religious shame.
Summary can also be used to introduce an idea that will underpin scenes that follow, a theme that the writer wants to draw attention to. Here’s an example from Charlotte McConaghy, Once There Were Wolves (Penguin, 2021):
There are languages without words and violence is one of them.
As a teenager Aggie was already a language genius. She spoke four fluently and was
learning several more. But it was not only spoken languages that she understood; Aggie knew, too, that there were some that did not need voices. By the time we were ten there was the sign language she’d invented so we could communicate privately. She’d built a world for the two of us to live within and we would each be perfectly happy never to leave it. When we were sixteen she started learning the language of violence; she broke a boy’s nose, and she did it for me, as most of the things she did were for me.
All the examples given here occur either at the beginning of the work, top of a chapter, or start of a new section. They prepare the ground for the scenes that follow. The examples also illustrate how a writer can show the reader the characters and the setting using specific details, and tie these details to the unfolding drama in a way that complements the tone and pace of the narrative. These are not chunks of background information, they are carefully crafted paragraphs, well mixed mortar artfully laid to hold individual scenes together.
Getting the right balance of scene and summary can take multiple drafts. Keep checking your mortar mix, ensuring it isn’t too dry or too thin, but serves its function effectively. And apply it in just the right amount.
If you’d like to explore this topic further, join Laurel Cohn’s guided reading group for writers Reading to Write for a session on scene and summary, Wednesday 26 April, 6.30–8.30pm. See www.laurelcohn.com.au for details.
Over a year on, the impact of the horrendous floods of February-March 2022 remain a challenge in the daily lives of many Northern Rivers residents. Here, Nic Margan considers three books that might provide solace, knowledge and inspiration as the region continues its recovery.
As we pass the anniversary of last year’s major flooding in our region, some will now find themselves ready to reflect on what meaning we can make of the event – as well as the terrible earthquake experienced by those in Türkiye and Syria this year. Like me, you may be still replacing those sodden titles you threw out. If you’re looking for some books that might help, here are three pertinent titles – by a seismologist, a social and political theorist, and a psychologist.
This book is a social and cultural history of how our understanding of natural disasters has changed over time, with the aim of suggesting we actively shape that response to better prepare for future events. It is quite slim and easy to read but the examples chosen are fascinating and effectively sequenced.
The intensity, lethality and duration of some of the disasters described is mind-boggling. One of the most intense is the Laki eruption, in Iceland in the 1780s, which is described as follows:
The eruption… deposited a fifty-foot-thick blanket of lava over six hundred square miles… Most of the lava came in the first forty-five days,
when it was described as flowing as fast as a river in spring flood.
Terrifying.
There was so much sulphur dioxide pumped into the stratosphere by the Laki eruption that heat from the sun couldn’t reach the earth. Global temperatures dropped by several degrees over the following winter and widespread crop failures occurred throughout Europe.
Jones recounts how the interpretation of natural disasters in the past was highly religious. The Lisbon earthquake of 1755 struck in the morning of All Saints’ Day, when almost the entire Catholic population of the city were in mass. Protestants in the Netherlands saw the disaster as God punishing the Catholics for the Inquisition, while in Lisbon itself, the scapegoating of Protestants led to about thirty of them being executed.
About this, Voltaire wrote in Candide:
After the earthquake had destroyed threefourths of Lisbon, the sages of that country could think of no means more effectual to prevent utter ruin than to give the people a beautiful auto-da-fé; for it had been decided by the University of Coimbra, that the burning of a few people alive by slow fire, and with great
ceremony, is an infallible secret to hinder the earth from quaking.
In another example, from the Chinese Cultural Revolution, intellectuals of all kinds evaded persecution by finding inventive ways to contribute to earthquake research – literature professors pored over ancient books to study any reference to earthquakes, veterinarians collected citizen-reports of strange animal behaviour in a (failed) attempt to correlate it with plate movement. Earthquakes were seen from ancient times as an indictment of the ruling power, so control over them was pursued as the ultimate symbol of success by Mao. I found a poster from the era that reads: ‘Earthquakes don’t frighten us, the people will surely vanquish nature.’
The book also tells stories about how common a social response blaming the victim is, which I can relate to in the Lismore context. It wasn’t long after the flood that one D-grade politician said: ‘You’ve got people who want to live among the gum trees – what do you think is going to happen? Their house falls in the river, and they say it’s the government’s fault.’
Finally, there are some great stories about people finding a sense of purpose and community after natural disasters.
The example given in the book is in the wake of Fukushima. One person had this to say about her new sense of perspective:
Love, thank and cherish your loved ones every day of your life… It sounds like a cliché, but that is what many cannot do anymore and miss the most… My town and other disaster areas are
talked about in the sense of disaster prevention/ preparedness and reconstructions very frequently, but I think we can also be the ones to talk about ‘love’ because many of us have found our own definitions of what that is.
This book focuses in on how natural disasters can provide the opportunity for personal and social transformation. After the San Francisco earthquake of 1908, a sign over a makeshift community kitchen read: ‘One touch of nature makes the whole world kin.’
Taken in abstract, this would gloss too easily over the hardship experienced by people and communities following a disaster. But Solnit takes great care to consistently recognise the damage that disasters do. This book is written methodically, adding evidence and taking away conjecture, indicating what is estimated and where the sum ends, and the result lies. Yet, it never lacks passion.
Solnit begins by presenting evidence that the way people respond to disasters is often to help one another and feel happy doing it. She then raises the idea that this might indicate we desire a greater sense of community identity.
It is summarised:
Disasters provide a temporary liberation from the worries, inhibitions, and anxieties associated with the past and future because they force
people to concentrate their full attention on immediate moment-to-moment, day-to-day needs within the context of the present realities.
Strangely enough, I did feel strong, purposeful and connected after our floods.
There were times that I felt the evidence was being stretched. Some of the doubts arose from the content itself. The book is overtly political and this makes it hard to always know how much fact and how much interpretation there is in any given part. But as I continued reading, my resistance weakened, and I was soon taken with the revolutionary spirit that ebbs beneath its lovely words.
The book is as much about social possibility as it is about dismantling its counterpoint: the belief that people are at their worst when the rules break down after a disaster.
The main spear of the book lands when Solnit writes about New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. It’s hard to overstate how wildly off-mark beliefs about what was happening in the city at the time were.
Maybe this sums it up best: a policeman explaining that his captain thought they needed to leave their hotel because the wild, lawless people were going to burn it down and kill everyone, and the policeman recalling: ‘At this point it’s like four days into it, and we’re trying to explain to the captain, these people are so tired and thirsty and hungry they couldn’t flip over a lawn chair if they wanted to riot.’
As is clear from the case studies in the book, human nature isn’t more often ‘fight-or-flight’ than ‘tend-and-
befriend’ in a crisis.
In the end, the point of the book is both that terrible things happen when we are afraid of each other and that wonderful things can happen when we aren’t. In almost all common people there is the latent ability to connect, participate, find purpose and be altruistic. And the disaster isn’t confined to the event – the knowledge and desire and belief that we have right now are what we will take into a disaster, and they will shape how the disaster affects us and those around us. Survival quite literally depends more on how we shape those than on how much the plates shift.
I was so glad I read it. I gave Solnit’s book a big kiss on the cover when I finished it.
A Paradise Built in Hell is published by Penguin.
After all that positivity, I felt it was important to learn about one of the major social damages that was spoken about after our flood: trauma.
I struggled at times with this book. It is long, quite technical, very heavy and the through-narrative occasionally tenuous. But I eventually decided that if it hadn’t been difficult in the way that it was, it wouldn’t have been as well written. It’s a book that has a very specific intention – that people understand the information and apply it to improve their own or others’ lives – and it needed to be methodical to ensure that information was communicated. Additionally, writing a book that may influence highly vulnerable people, that doesn’t go to lengths to support itself with the science it is based on, is irresponsible.
At the start of the book, we meet a soldier who will not take his pills because he feels he must remain a living memorial to the damages of the war, so that the deaths of his friends won’t have been in vain. This introduces
the idea that some part of traumatised people remains stuck in the past.
This idea is borne out in studies presented later, in which it is shown that the bodies of some people after a traumatic event will continue to secrete stress hormones long after any threat has passed. These emotions can make rationalising difficult, so that a small problem can be blown out of proportion because of the inability to self-regulate.
There was a lot for me to learn about basic neuroscience. Prefrontal cortex, limbic brain and brainstem were all foreign terms to me; I thought of them as obscure, but I can now say they are legitimately useful to learn about. In the same way that it’s good to know your stomach hurting probably won’t be fixed by getting more air into your lungs, it’s good to know that the overarousal of the limbic system may be out of reach of any rationalisation by the prefrontal cortex. One of the main features of what makes an event potentially traumatic is if the event endangers the person’s sense of safety around other people. This could be from experiencing the horror of what people are capable of in war, or the horror of being sent to war by a government you trusted, or abuse or neglect by a carer or loved one. Thinking back to the floods, I realised how important it was that people helped themselves and one another. I also made connections between this and what I have read about Hurricane Katrina. The physical horror would have been made so much more unbearable by the sense that the government and the population of the broader nation had turned their backs on them. There are those in our region who are still battling an unsympathetic bureaucracy for decent and stable housing.
Trauma can also affect memory. The details of events become repressed or are experienced unlike other memories (in a sequence or narrative), but in sharply exposed, jumbled and incomplete sensations. Historically, trauma has been deemed made-up or the
fault of the victim. When soldiers after World War II were treated for PTSD, doctors ‘almost invariably found the root cause in pre-war experience: the sick men were not first-grade fighting material… The military proposition is [that it is] not war which make men sick, but that sick men cannot fight wars.’
Most of the second part looks at treatment options. While talking therapy has its place, much of the thrust of the book is about the limitations of language and the possibilities for healing presented by other options. These include eye movement desensitisation and processing, yoga, internal family systems therapy, psychomotor therapy, music, dance and theatre. I appreciated that van der Kolk gave so much space to solutions.
Ultimately, though I struggled with it, the book has achieved the admirable task of identifying a set of social problems that are pervasive to such a degree that they are often regarded as normal, then giving ideas as to how we can change.
Northern Rivers author Helen Burns waited out a global pandemic to launch her novel, Andal’s Garland, in India where the book is set. And once she was able to visit the subcontinent for two key literary events, the importance of writerly connections and cultural synergy was made abundantly clear.
One bright day when the world began turning again, and after two years of cancellations, Asia Pacific Writers and Translators (APWT) confirmed their gathering for 2022 in Bengaluru, once coined India’s City of Bookworms. Bangalore Literature Festival (BLF) was the tie-in three days later. All up, it was a feast of writers from around the globe, and in particular South Asia’s incredibly diverse and multilingual literary community. I could not have imagined a better confluence to launch my debut novel Andal’s Garland, a story steeped in the landscapes and traditions of a South Indian temple town. It was in 2009 that I first encountered the songs of the eighth-century poet-goddess Andal. My fascination with the mythic story of her life eventually turned into words on the page. I had been visiting her birthplace most years, and many drafts later held the miracle of a completed manuscript and contract to publish. Returning to India for the book’s first official engagement felt like a homecoming. Zipping out from Bengaluru’s airport into peak-hour traffic my Keralan taxi driver told me he is fluent in Malayalam, English, Hindi, Kannada and Tamil. Learning that I’m a writer, he shared the name of his favourite novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude. I asked if it was
translated into Malayalam and he nodded, but said he preferred the English version. It was my first conversation after touching down and boded well for the bookish days ahead. We slowed to a crawl and lapsed into silence. Smatterings of trees broke the monotony of concrete and as we inched toward the city, occasional banyans spread blessings of shade – remnants of old Bangalore’s famed gardens. The next day I discovered a kind of forest at its heart, through a hole in a rusty corrugated gate. A secret garden –any moment a blue-skinned Krishna would appear with a bamboo flute at his lips; a visitation from the pages of my novel. But before he had the chance an Indian army officer stepped across my line of sight with a Lee-Enfield rifle over his shoulder. Our eyes locked and I backed away.
Bengaluru: on any street corner you are likely to find a collision of ancient and modern – the politics of colonial history, of gender and caste, language, displacement, religion. It was the perfect backdrop for five days of conversations between writers and readers. APWT and BLF’s programs delved into many of India’s, and the world’s, complexities through the lenses of publishing and translation, short stories and speculative fiction, writing through trauma and across
cultures. There would be lockdown dissections, laying bare the taboo of single parenting, film-talk, crickettalk, transgender folk artistry, poetry performances, and a question: who invented the samosa? Then, over lunches showcasing the marvels of diversity, through buffets of biryanis and chana chaats, palak paneer and beans poriyal, carrot halva and payasam puddings, lively discussions ensued.
Geetanjali Shree, the 2022 International Booker winner, was a guest at both events. She spoke of the essential solitude of a writer in her cave, a place where she can empty herself of life’s nitty-gritty, allowing space for the subconscious to surface. Music to a writer’s ears. I especially loved her equation of writing with a quote from the artist, Ali Akbar. ‘At first it is me who plays the sarod, then it is the sarod who plays me.’ Geetanjali then read from her novel, Tomb of Sand. She made the deliberate choice to read in Hindustani first. It was a tit-for-tat conversation between two characters, and whether you understood Hindustani or not, the rhythm and musicality of her dialogue was delightful. Then she said, ‘Now I’ll read it in English and maybe you will better understand because it isn’t the language that’s been shoved down your throat.’ It was an aside that roused applause
from the crowd. Hindi, as opposed to Hindustani, the lingua franca of North India and Pakistan, is being pressed upon all Indian states as a guise for unification. Many call it imperialist, claiming it will crush cultural identity. To push the point, Geetanjali and her interviewer then chose to converse at length in Hindustani. It’s a tangled issue. But imagine if you were there and suddenly shut out. She makes her point. Points and counterpoints. There were many over the five days of conference and festival. There were celebrations too. At Alliance University, APWT’s host, we were welcomed to campus and each assigned an angel from faculty. Mine was the effervescent Dr Uma. When she guided me to the stage where I’d be launching Andal’s Garland, I had my first ever panic attack. The Grove was not the intimate room I’d visualised. Nicknamed ‘airport hangar’, it had seating for a thousand. But the kind and capable Shelley Kenigsberg, a favorite moderator at past Byron
Writers Festivals, held my hand as we walked to our chairs. We chatted and I shared a reading before the metaphorical ribbon cutting. My appreciation for the support and hospitality in Tamil Nadu, over the years it had taken to bring Andal’s story to life, was met with not just applause, but wolf-whistles and cheers. It was an overwhelming moment.
In the leafy grounds of the Lalit Ashok hotel Pico Iyer kicked off BLF’s first session with Why We Travel. ‘We are not living in a small world,’ he said, ‘of two hundred cultures divided by common references of media and Beyoncé. The world is so much more interesting than that. When we travel we turn the despair of statistics into hope through the faces we meet.’ I flashbacked fifteen years to Iran. My partner and I were sitting in the garden shrine of mystic poet Hafez when a young man invited us to his home. He played the setar and sang a mournful song, poured tea, then took down a pirated copy of Osho’s From
Darkness To Light asking, ‘Can you send me his cassettes?’
Under showers of golden cassia petals that evening, our table of slightly raucous women were raising glasses in solidarity with Iranian women protesting the hijab. We made room for two more – they had had enough of the man-talk at the table next to us – Palanimuthu Sivakami, a social activist, feminist and the first Dalit woman to write a novel; and Gita Ramaswamy, former publisher of Telegu literature, feminist and champion of land rights and fair labour for Dalits. Women with chilli powder, women at the front line.
The next day at lunch, over a bowl of rose and pistachio ice-cream, I dropped into a conversation with a laid-back Vikram Chandra. His book Mirrored Mind: My Life in Letters and Code had blown William Dalrymple away and between beers he was earnestly scrolling his tablet for one particular verse by the Tantric philosopher and poet that Chandra had quoted in his book.
He didn’t find it and Chandra was not forthcoming. I was intrigued, but knew zilch about computer programming and wondered if Mirrored Mind was for me. But the poet. For some reason his name lingered: Abhinavagupta, born in tenth-century Kashmir.
Earlier that day I had an inconversation session with the poet Mani Rao about Andal’s Garland Rao’s recent book Wave of Beauty is her sublime translation into English of a Sanskrit poem, ‘Saundarya Lahari’. Its author, the Vedic philosopher Adi Shankara, lived in Kashmir around the same period as Abhinavagupta. Not surprising then, that Rao had chosen the one passage in my book referring to Adi Shankara’s work. She read, ‘All the knowledge in the world is useless tinsel if it is not integrated into life… Knowledge and devotion are two paths but they are not different. When wisdom comes alive in your heart and flows out as action, it becomes devotion.’ These chains of coincidental thoughts and encounters persisted through to the last night of the festival.
Satiated, exhausted and still curious, I Googled Chandra’s
Mirrored Mind searching for the quote Dalrymple couldn’t find. What I found was something else, from one of Abhinavagupta’s disciples. It stopped me in my tracks: ‘Through Her own Will, Awareness unfolds the universe on the canvas that is Herself.’
For the next weeks, as I meandered my way east then south, as the paddy fields grew greener and coconut palms taller, these lines from all those centuries ago played inside my head. I was a traveller again, musing this fleeting world from windows of cars, trains and buses until my arrival at Andal’s birthplace.
Revisiting the landscape of my novel felt different. Now my book was completed there was no project tapping me on the shoulder. Had my relationship with Andal changed? Of course, just as Awareness said, it’s a continual unfolding. As I stepped into scenes from Andal’s Garland – following the temple elephant down old Brahmin streets, resting in the shade of the garden where Andal was born, listening to women chanting her Tamil songs – I felt gratitude, sweet like the sugar crystals placed in our
palms at the end of each morning’s garland offering. Stories, spoken, written and reenacted in countless languages, since the beginning of time. Sitting on the edge of the temple tank where Andal’s bath is ritualised I pondered her mythic tale to the rhythmic slap-slaps of women’s laundry echoing across the water. In a few weeks I’d be home, the draft of a new novel waiting on my desk. All those conversations had in Bengaluru. All the tinsel a writer accumulates through each of her five senses. They are fields waiting to be tilled whenever a blank page presents itself. Letting life’s nittygritty go, making way for the voices of characters. And when they arrive, a kind of devotion happens, for they become the storytellers, and the writer’s task is to pay attention.
Sam Khoo wants to make a career out of creating cool indie video games. She’s willing to do whatever it takes to get what she wants: even give up the prestigious university scholarship that has made her parents so proud of her. She’s risking everything. She’s got one last chance to make it – if she gets her hands on the last ticket to the game design workshop, the indie gaming world will be all hers.
When sneaking Jerky McJerkface, also known as Jay Chua, snatches Sam’s last chance, literally stealing the last ticket right out of her hand, Sam comes up with a cunning challenge to try to win the ticket back.
They agree to a competition to decide who will get to keep the
ticket. They both have a lot to lose. Their rivalry and Jay’s cocky bravado quickly become the highlight of Sam’s day. But they have to hide their competitions and blooming friendship from the ever-present eyes of the Australian Malaysian community. They go to extremes to hide their relationship.
Set in Brisbane, Sam and Jay walk the delicate tightrope between Australian and Malaysian cultures. Both firstborn children of Malaysian migrants, they have a lot to live up to. Struggling with the weight of parental expectations, the Asian Gossip Network and the eyes of the aunties and uncles, Sam and Jay struggle to find their place as first-generation children of immigrants; Sam and Jay have a lot in common.
Two Can Play That Game is the debut novel from gamer and escape room creator, Leanne Yong. It is a sweet, fast read that will appeal to readers who are romantics at heart
Allen and Unwin / 384pp / $18.25
Magic is illegal in Simta, where the wealthy daughters of the Great Houses are hidden by face masks and protected by lies and deceit.
But Matilde, Sayer and Aesa sell their magic to wealthy clients. When this year’s Nightbirds stumble into the middle of a political scam, their secrets and even their lives could be in danger. The truths about their magic are revealed, and they begin to see the Nightbird system with dazzling clarity.
Now it’s up to them. Expose the truth and risk everything or play the part that’s been created for them.
Nightbirds is a beautifully written fantasy where magic, luxury and revenge are blended to invite the reader into an intoxicating world. Exploring themes of magic, power and empowerment, Nightbirds will appeal to a whole generation of young women who yearn to carve out a better future for themselves. Get the TimTams ready, you’ll want to stay in bed all day to finish this one!
Allen
and Unwin / 480pp / $24.99A lot has happened in Australian politics since The Idea of Australia was published on 1 March 2022. Within three months of its launch, the Australian Labor Party won the federal election. Anthony Albanese’s new administration ended nine years of Coalition government, a chapter that political historian Dr Christine Wallace described as a ‘curdling disappointment’, a period when social transformation stalled.
Now, nearly twelve months on, I wondered if the despond that so many from the left of politics felt during those nine years had leaked into Schultz’s book, and whether the 2022 election result had made The Idea of Australia read as old news. My doubts were unfounded. In an interview with Schultz at the National Library, Dr Wallace described her as dropping ‘a compressed bomb into the Australian polity.’ At 400 pages I’m not sure I agree with the ‘compressed’ part, but a ‘bomb’ it is indeed. Are we really the lucky country? The smart country? Do we really give everyone a fair go? The answers are no, sometimes, not quite, ‘slightly better than average’, can do better.
Over the summer I read a chapter a day. My admiration for Schultz’s ambition, her research and her writing grew. The scope of the material covered in the book is staggering. Schultz has reflected that being the editor of sixty-two volumes of Griffith Review where she read thousands and thousands of essays and stories about Australia helped her paint the large canvas that is this book.
What could have been a ‘heavy read’ is not, even over summer. Schultz writes as a journalist not an academic, a self-confessed synthesiser rather than an archivist. She describes the book as a ‘braid’ of three things: the past, the present and her own personal interaction with both. She plaits the most disparate of events, ideas, debates together. She finds new and fresh patterns in things. She spares nothing in her analysis of the role of the media in Australian politics, particularly Murdoch.
The Idea of Australia frames the moribund years of the last Coalition government (tracing back to John Howard and Pauline Hanson in the 1990s) as the most recent of many ebbs and flows in Australia’s social and political history. Schultz describes recurring patterns of progressive social reform, expansion and inclusion followed quickly by periods of contraction. Peaks of nation-building possibility, captured so proudly, for example, in the opening ceremony to the 2000 Olympics (‘bold, imaginative, generous, inclusive’) rise and quickly fade away. Then we try again.
According to Schultz, we have ‘failed to fully launch as a nation’, failed to confront and heal two key foundational flaws in our nation building.
The first is the ‘incurable flaw’ described by the great nineteenth-century British political philosopher Jeremy Bentham, who argued that New South Wales was illegally founded. Schultz interrogates the structural forces that keep us from fully facing the facts and the associated shame of this core wound,
with chapters titled ‘Terra Nullius of the Mind’ and ‘Architecture of Silence’.
The second foundational flaw is the uncomfortable fact that one of the first pieces of legislation passed by Australia’s newly formed federal government was the Immigration Restriction Act (1901) (the White Australia Policy). Edmund Barton, Australia’s first prime minister, initiated the bill just nine sitting days after the new parliament was opened. He argued ‘I do not think either that the doctrine of the equality of man was really ever intended to include racial equality. There is no racial equality. There is basic inequality.’ At the time he was concerned mainly about the Chinese, but it took well into the 1970s to be fully dismantled and came to exclude anyone who wasn’t ‘white’.
As I read on, I became convinced that The Idea of Australia has a significant role to play as a primer for the referendum on the Indigenous Voice to Parliament. My fear that the book might read as tired and redundant gave way to excitement. Coincidental to my reading, the public debate over the referendum jump started over the summer. The subtitle of this book: ‘A search for the soul of a nation’ became prescient. The relevance and usefulness of the book sharpened. It helps frame the predictable battle lines that will play out during 2023 in the lead-up to the referendum.
Whilst The Idea of Australia received rapturous reviews from eminent historians, journalists and writers, one review from conservative journal Quadrant, published
in December 2022, caught my eye – ‘A Boastful Boomer’s Boring Idea of Australia’ by Michael Connor. As we will see during 2023 as the referendum debate unfolds, the culture wars are alive and well. What is an ebb and what is a flow in our nation building depends on your point of view.
Julianne has been described as an ‘ultramarathon runner of public intellectual life’ and she is no stranger to the Byron Writers Festival, so do take the chance to catch her in conversation when she next attends.
Allen & Unwin / 472pp / RRP $34.99Shehan Karunatilaka, winner of the Booker Prize 2022 for his novel The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida, will make a special appearance at Byron Theatre on 23 May to discuss his life and work. Here, we offer an extract from the Sri Lankan author’s Booker-winning work.
The memories come to you with pain. The pain has many shades. Sometimes, it arrives with sweat and itches and rashes. At other times, it comes with nausea and headaches. Perhaps like amputees feeling absent limbs, you still hold the illusion of your decaying corpse. One minute you are retching, the next you are reeling, the next you are remembering.
You met Jaki five years ago in the Casino at Hotel Leo. She was twenty, just out of school, and losing pathetically at baccarat. You were back from a torrid tour of the Vanni, unhinged by the slaughter, breaking bread with shady people, seeing the bad wherever you looked, and wearing your notorious
red bandanna. You had sold the photos to Jonny at the Associated Press and cashed a welcome six-figure cheque. Even in Lankan rupees, six figures are better than five.
You had outplayed the house at blackjack, whacked the crab at the buffet and washed it down with some free gin. A regular day at the office.
‘Don’t bet on ties, sister,’ you said to the strange girl with frizzy hair and black make-up. She looked at you and rolled her eyes, which you found strange. Women usually like the look of you, not knowing that you prefer cock to cooch. A trimmed beard, an ironed shirt and a bit of deodorant will elevate you above
a herd of sweaty Lankan hetero males.
‘I just won twenty thousand rupees,’ she said.
You noticed she was alone and that no one was hitting on her, both unusual for women in casinos in Colombo.
‘And the chances of you winning that again are nine per cent. And this house only pays out sevento-one, minus commission. Which means, follow that strategy a hundred times and you will lose, even when you win.’
‘A man who knows everything. What a surprise.’
The croupier stared you down. You
shrugged and placed her chips on the banker. She half smiled and half frowned, but let you commandeer her bet.
‘You better pay if I lose that.’
‘If you can’t think in numbers, this place will eat you up, sweetheart. The universe is all mathematics and probabilities.’
‘I come to get mellow. Not to do sums,’ she said.
When the bet came in, she let you place another, and then another. ‘It’s no fun when someone else does it for you.’
‘That’s not true at all,’ you said. You took her to the buffet and had chocolate biscuit pudding and smoked Gold Leafs while an ageing diva sang ‘Tarzan Boy’ to a Yamaha keyboard. Jaki complained in a London accent about how she hated Sri Lanka, living with her Aunty, and working mornings at the
Sri Lanka Broadcasting Corporation. How her aunt’s new husband came into her room without knocking and how it creeped her out.
Your father, absent since you were fifteen, paid for many of your failed careers. In your twenties, you studied finance for a summer and worked insurance for a winter. You left with a loathing of both games, but knowing everything you needed about the rudiments of gambling. Investment vs Yield. What you put in vs What you earn. The likelihood of something happening vs What it costs.
You’ve never placed a bet you couldn’t win. Which is not the same as not losing. You went in eyes open, knowing all the angles and most of the odds. The odds of winning the lottery are one in eight million. The odds of dying in a car are one in four thousand. And, according to Mr Kinsey, the odds of being born homo are one in ten.
What are the odds of being born in a war-torn shithole? Considering most of the planet lives on nothing, and considering there’s never been an era of peace in all of recorded history, you’d say pretty high.
You told Jaki to stop thinking red vs black, and to start thinking odds. What are the chances the guy next to you has a Jack or that the dealer will draw a Five or that everyone believes your hand is better than theirs?
She got drunk and passed out at the roulette table. When you volunteered to put her in a taxi, the bouncers gave you a wink. She couldn’t tell you her address so you took her home. When she woke on your couch, you gave her a lecture about going out alone and getting drunk. She was too busy staring at your photographs to listen.
‘These photographs could get you killed,’ she said.
‘So could getting drunk at casinos,’ you replied.
She went home with you for many nights after. While your Amma snored down the hallway, you sat up drinking wine, listening to Top of the Pops on your shortwave and talking ends and odds. What are the chances that the slaughter will end, that you’d be caught in a bomb, that the voices in your head can survive your death? What are the chances that a woman could walk down a Colombo street without being called ‘nangi’, ‘darling’ or ‘slut’? What are the chances that Colombo would get a nightclub that opened past 2 a.m.?
Usually, when you brought women home, which was about as frequent as a free and fair election, the women – usually drunk – expected you to paw them and rub lips against them and got offended when you didn’t. This one didn’t seem to care.
‘You have a girlfriend?’ she asked, her eyes giving you a squint. ‘No one that matters,’ you said. ‘But plenty that don’t?’ She did a strange laugh.
There was something brazen about her, something odd.
Something beyond the make-up and the hair and the ill-fitting dress. She spoke with the squeak of a child but with the authority of a tyrant.
‘If you want me to come back, you need to stop calling me ‘girl’ or ‘sister’ or ‘sweetheart’.’
‘You have a boyfriend?’
‘I’m saving myself for my wedding night. So don’t get any ideas.’
‘That’s fine with me, girl.’
First, you became her gambling buddy, then her agony aunt, then her clubbing partner. You told her how to handle the creeps at work and the aunts at home and her new uncle visiting her room without knocking.
‘Always be cheerful. But never put up with shit. And put a lock on that door.’
In exchange, she kept you from thinking of the things you’d photographed in the war zone. She got you into parties at embassies and hotels thrown by rich Colombo International School classmates, among whom were confused boys
with perfect skin. Jaki didn’t mind that you disappeared from parties, Jaki didn’t mind if you talked to boys, though she hated you talking to girls. And Jaki didn’t care if you didn’t touch her.
On some evenings, Jaki would inflict her music on you, off-key singers mewling over tedious rhythms. She’d drown you in Chardonnay and suggest zany schemes like moving to a hippie colony in Arugam Bay or staging an exhibition of all the photos under your bed. It was she who came up with the genius plan of becoming flatmates.
The beauty of studying odds is knowing which cards are worth betting on. And knowing that freak occurrences happen every day while no one watches. You can shuffle a pack this minute and deal a sequence that has never occurred in the history of all humanity. By your estimation, you have more chance of dying in a bomb blast in cosmopolitan Colombo than in deepest darkest Jaffna. Because, at least in the war zone, you knew which direction the bombs were flying and who was dropping them. There was surprisingly little scandal
for an unwed twenty- two-year-old sharing a flat with two unwed males in their thirties. Her aunties were happy to relinquish the burden, and your own Amma, as usual, did not give a flying toss. As far as Jaki’s parents in London were concerned, she was sharing with her cousin and his friend, and Uncle Stanley would overlook proceedings. Her friends thought you and Jaki were dating, a rumour that neither wished to confirm nor quell. Being a couple gave you a chaperone and a shield, whichever room you chose to enter.
‘You may not like my cousin,’ she said. ‘The guy’s super-posh.’
‘Is he fun?’
‘We don’t talk,’ she said. ‘You don’t have to talk to him. He’s a lawyer who plays rugby and dates bimbettes. He’s shallow and dull. Will make a great politician.’
For the first month, you were hardly at home. You were photographing captured arsenals for Major Raja Udugampola, covering the Anuradhapura bomb blast with Andy McGowan from Newsweek, and beating your losing streak at Pegasus Casino.
You didn’t meet the cousin until
your second month and when you did there was little more than small talk. You recognised him from school, though he had no idea who you were. Then you noticed how he smelled after returning from a swim, the rhythm of his walk, how his shorts clung to his hips and how he looked at you from the corner of his eye. You sat in the lounge with windows that overlooked Galle Face Green, watched crows and daydreamed of the landlord’s son.
The flat belonged to Stanley Dharmendran, Minister for Youth Affairs, MP for Kalkuda, lone Tamil in Cabinet, ower of numerous favours. His son, of course, was Dilan Dharmendran, former swimmer, athlete and ruggerite, old boy of St Joseph’s College, and love of your short sad life.
Shehan Karunatilaka is the multi-awardwinning author of Chinaman: The Legend of Pradeep Mathew. The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida is his second novel. Born in Colombo, he studied in New Zealand and has lived and worked in London, Amsterdam and Singapore.
Byron Writers Festival is thrilled to present Shehan Karunatilaka, live at Byron Theatre on Tuesday 23 May. Event details and tickets via byronwritersfestival.com/whats-on
The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Shehan Karunatilaka is published by Sort Of Books.
SATURDAY 6 MAY — SOLD OUT
Waitlist open for second workshop TBC
10.00AM — 4.00PM
In person at the Byron Writers Festival office
$180 /140 Members & Students
Writing has long been recognised as a way of processing profound moments, deep trauma and grief. Does it have the power to heal? After eight years living with stage 4 cancer, Tim Baker would like to believe it does. Personal writing has formed an important part of his own holistic self-care, long before he imagined there might be a book in it. Can we become authors of our own life story and write our way out of the existential corners we might sometimes feel hemmed in by? Find out in this single day workshop with author Tim Baker.
Tim Baker is an award-winning author, journalist and storyteller specialising in surfing history and culture, working across a wide variety of media, from books and magazines to video, theatre and digital. Tim is the bestselling author of numerous books on surfing, including The Rip Curl Story, Occy, High Surf, Bustin’ Down the Door, Surf For Your Life, Century of Surf and Surfari. His latest book Patting the Shark documents his journey managing a stage 4 prostate cancer diagnosis.
FOUR FRIDAYS: 13 OCT, 17 OCT, 10 NOV, 1 DEC
10.00AM — 1.00PM (1st & 2nd session)
10.00AM — 4.00PM (3rd & 4th session)
In person at the Byron Writers Festival office
$520 / $450 Members & Students
Have you got a finished manuscript? Are you bogged down in the revision process? Are you resisting approaching the next draft because it all feels too hard and you don’t know how to go about it? This course helps you understand the role of redrafting in the development phase of a manuscript, how to go about it, and how to survive it.
Laurel Cohn is a developmental book editor passionate about communication and the power of stories in our lives. She has been helping writers prepare their work for publication since the mid 1980s, and is a popular workshop presenter. Laurel has a PhD in literary and cultural studies. www.laurelcohn.com.au
Please note we are still in the process of curating our 2023 workshops program. For more information on upcoming workshops please visit www.byronwritersfestival.com/whats-on/
Tues 23 May
Byron Theatre
Don't miss this special event with Shehan Karunatilaka, author of 2022 Booker Prizewinning novel The Seven Moons of Maali Almeidaa mordantly funny satire set amid the murderous mayhem of a Sri Lanka beset by civil war.
