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Farewell to Mildura

My final contribution to the Mildura Writers Residency blog is a column about making friends in a new town. A very friendly town, i discovered. :-)

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I’ve never had the courage to move to a new town. I’ve thought about it often, perused property listings in warmer places, fantasised about fresh starts. Stayed put. So I admire and envy people who take the plunge. How do they make those new friendships that are so vital for our sociable species?

This July I have been in Mildura on a four-week writing residency. I could have stayed behind closed doors, used my writing project as an excuse to be anti-social. But I was curious about this town and its folk. So I put the lead on the dog and began walking the streets.

One morning I came across an elegant older woman pacing the footpath. ‘I’ve lost my phone’, she said. ‘Dropped it out here somewhere’. I offered to call her number, but we couldn’t hear the phone ringing. ‘I’m new in town’, she told me. ‘Don’t know anyone here. I really need that phone.’

By coincidence we crossed paths again later that day, walking down by the Murray River. ‘Oh it’s you!” she smiled. ‘Thanks for your help.’ She’d found the phone inside her house - phew. Again she mentioned being new in town and asked if I walked this path regularly. ‘No, I’m just a blow-in’, I replied and we went our separate ways.

It took a few hours but eventually the penny dropped. Why hadn’t I suggested we walk together?

A few days later I searched online for Mildura singing groups. What better way to find company? The Sunraysia Community Choir invited me to their next Wednesday rehearsal. In a church hall I was given folders of music, a mug of Milo and a warm welcome.

‘Our next concert is called Sing Your Socks Off’, whispered the soprano next to me. ‘We’re going to toss rolled up pairs of socks into the audience while we’re singing.’ The choir has about fifty members, the oldest in his nineties. When the rhythms were tricky our conductor, a music teacher from Zimbabwe, danced them for us. When we sang Leonard Cohen’s ‘Hallelujah’ we raised the roof. After rehearsal some of them took me out for a vino. I drove home round midnight, humming.

If the elegant walking woman in Mildura is reading this, I’m sorry I didn’t suggest a walk. You might like to head down to the church hall next Wednesday evening. Oh, and take a spare pair of socks.

Sian Prior was Writer-in-Residence with the 2018 Mildura Writers Festival. This column was published in the Sunday Age on July 29th 2018.

Distillations

One of the best things about the Mildura Writers Festival is that there is only ever one session on at a time, so we all get to listen to all the public conversations between writers, until it begins to feel like one long rolling conversation over three days.

I took copious notes in many sessions of the 2018 Festival because I am a journalist, and because I have a poor memory, and because I wanted to be able to remember what was said.

I have taken the liberty of using actual quotes from some of the festival authors and creating an imagined conversation between them.

Robyn Davidson, essayist and memoirist – Why did I cross the desert with camels? Because I knew I had to do something big and challenging to pull myself together. In the desert I could no longer see myself as a separate thing to the landscape. In deserts I learnt there were other ways of being in the world, of thinking of the human in nature.

Jane Hirshfield, poet - I am deeply engaged with the peril that our biosphere is in. That’s why I got involved in the March for Science, and we started Poets for Science. We are direly in need of intimacy, a sense of connection, a ceremonial rather than a hostile relationship with each other. Poetry is based on interconnection – we are all in it together.

Paul Kane, poet – I teach hope.

Jane Hirshfield - Poems are distillation, not distractions. They are rituals, and ritual is about noticing your changing state of being. Are poems useful or useless? The idea of the useless is a useful thing. A poem can surprise you into the remembrance of the dimensions of existence you may have forgotten about. The role of the poem is to leave us with sharpened alertness. Art makes us better at knowing ourselves.

Cate Kennedy, poetry and prose – We carry stories around with us. Unless we can pass them on, they die. It can be a soothing relief to not have to just carry them around

Paul Kane- The great danger of grief is that it overflows and takes you with it. There is a constant need to hold together, and the writing form helps. Sentimentality is a falsification of experience.

Cate Kennedy- There is an embodied emotional surge of recognition of the universal theme or story in what you’re writing. Energy flows where attention goes.

Jane Hirshfield - Paying attention to everyday objects – thinking of the quotidian – is a doorway for poets. The momentary becomes the universe. It’s the sting of awakening.

Cate Kennedy – Yes, it’s about noticing. And you can’t help but reveal your preoccupations, your ‘bone’. You chew it, bury it, dig it up, gnaw on it again.

Paul Kane – For me, writing poetry became the catalyst for shifting. When the book of poems (A Passing Bell: Ghazals for Tina) ended, a certain phase of sorrow would be over. Grief kept me going. The process of writing the poems WAS the process of mourning.

David Malouf, poet, novelist – I don’t make a distinction between voice in poetry or fiction. If you have the tone right, a novel will write itself. I wrote my second novel An Imaginary Life thinking I was writing a prose poem.

Robyn Davidson - How do we find the right voice for memoir? It needs to be revealing yet reserved.

Marie Munkara, memoirist and novelist – I am now writing a PhD on mermaids. My totem is an indigenous mermaid, a creator being. It’s there in the rock art. She’s a femme fatale, a dangerous woman. There are mermaids everywhere in culture. Is it myth, archetype, global coincidence? I know that I know bugger all!

Cate Kennedy – You need to be able to sit with this imperfection. There is no right way of doing the writing. You go into the writing world to make those enormous blunders. As T. S. Eliot said, ‘writing is never finished, it is only abandoned’.

David Malouf - Yeats said ‘poetry is memorable speech’. The thing that holds it together is music – sound, rhythm, repetition.

Jane Hirshfield – Good poems travel in ways that are, strongly or subtly, meandering, askew, counter, extravagant, peculiar, free, and freeing. They loosen the map-lines of mental and emotional constructs, underslip narrowness, and let us see more than we could by looking at things merely directly. They are raids on reality that allow raids on hearts and minds. With a good poem you feel filled, but wanting, at the end.

(And with a good writers festival, you feel the same.)

Sian Prior

Memoir is a kind of lying

(with apologies to Jack Gilbert, via Jane Hirshfield)

Memoir is a kind of lying,

necessarily. To purge the heart

of grief. But also in

that stories hold only the present’s truth.

Those of us who, repeatedly, comb

the refuse (bones, scabs,

corks, spittle) are driven

to say too much.

Jane said (as Gilbert said that Degas said –

but did he?) – we need only pay attention

to enable us to see

the things we have to say.

mildurawritersresidency

Murray River Mash-Up

For decades I have watched the political battles over the Murray-Darling Basin from the sidelines and felt sickened by the Don Watson-style ‘weasel words’ produced in report after report, inquiry after inquiry. Walking the banks of the Murray River this week I have consciously tried to cleanse my mind of this obfuscatory bureaucratic language. Meanwhile, the pelicans keep landing gracefully on the river.

In order to allow for better social, economic and environmental outcomes than would otherwise have been achieved by the Basin Plan stakeholders will consider the pelicans, which are a symbol of empathy, nobility and goodness. Policy measures that further identify ways to deliver on agreed outcomes include an acknowledgement that, according to legend, the mother pelican, to save her babies from starving, wounds herself with her beak to feed them her blood. The sustainable diversion limit adjustment mechanism should refer to the lines of Shakespeare in Hamlet (1616), ‘To his good friend thus wide, I’ll open my arms and like the kind life-rendering pelican, repast them with my blood.’

In line with the need for progress towards meeting environmental needs, stakeholders note that fossil evidence of the pelican dates back at least 30 million years. The Salinity and Drainage Strategy (1989), the Natural Resources Management Strategy (1990), the rural water reform package (1994), and the Integrated Catchment Management Policy Statement (2000) were dwarfed by flocks of pelicans, which are gregarious birds, travelling in flocks, hunting cooperatively and breeding colonially.

In spite of chronic under-resourcing of regional water planning and water security for the irrigation industry, pelicans also have a long history of cultural significance in mythology and in Christian and heraldic iconography. Local irrigators would be forced to reduce the salinity impacts of irrigation, to assist in preserving the pelicans’ rickety grace and old world feathers like seasoned boardwalk planks.

Milestone assessment reports remind us that every woman who sees a pelican will think of Storm Boy, the motherless child in the blowing sands of the Coorong, as well as the rapid erosion of support for catchment-wide management. Environmental water will be permanently outside the consumptive pool and will provide habitat for the wonderful bird the pelican whose beak can hold more than his belly can.

There have been accusations of deliberate misuse and neglect of scientific evidence in decision-making to justify a predetermined political outcomeas twilight glides on pelican wings. It has been concluded that the promised environmental outcomes can be achieved with high degree of uncertainty, outcomes which, like the novelists, miss the mark, but not the pelican, because pelicans dip and dive, rise, shaking shocked half-dead fish from their beaks.

In most cases there is insufficient information or scientific modelling to assess the sustainable diversion limit adjustment projects submitted by the states, unlike the king and queen of the pelicans, we, no other birds so grand we see, none but we have feet like fins, with lovely leathery throats and chins.

Henceforth all reports regarding the future of the Murray Darling Basin shall include the terms biophilia, solastalgia, evanescence, limpidity, habitability, heartbreak and hope.

Sian Prior

mildurawritersresidency

(Please note: most of the text above has been cut’n’pasted and ‘borrowed’ from other sources)

A certain river

‘When it hurts we return to the banks of certain rivers’

from I Sleep a Lot, Czeslaw Milosz.

This line of poetry floated past me on Twitter recently. I fished it out with a quick copy-n-paste and have been thinking about it ever since. This month I have been trudging the banks of a certain river with my black dog Jazzy. She tugs on the lead until I let her free and she heads straight into the glittering water. Does she forget, each time, how cold it is? On the way home she shivers and whines in the back of the campervan. The next day she leaps in again.

I am here in Mildura to begin work on a second memoir. Writing Shy (Text Publishing) was a hard and painful process, requiring the excavation of memories I’d rather forget. Memories often attach to emotions; that’s how they remain so vivid. Shame, embarrassment, fear, loneliness – I had to copy-n-paste them all from my memory files and shape them into stories. I wanted to know how those memories and emotions had formed my identity.

Sheesh. No wonder it has taken me four years to start another one. So why do it again?

I suspect most writers don’t really understand why they choose particular stories to write about. Poet and MWF Artistic Director Paul Kane said in an interview with Cordite Poetry Review that poetry is ‘concerned with knowing, scholarship is involved in understanding.’ With knowing, he says, there is ‘some sort of transference that takes place’, something intuitive rather than analytical.

As a journalist and academic I have spent a lot of time writing as a way of understanding things – stepping back from the edge of the river to get the big picture. As a memoirist, though, I want to know, to feel, to take the plunge.

Last weekend I ran a couple of life writing workshops for the Mildura Writers Festival. We talked about the difference between describing a ‘situation’ and writing a ‘story’. Author Vivian Gornick says the situation is ‘the context, the circumstance, sometimes the plot’. The story, though, is the ‘emotional experience that preoccupies the writer; the insight, the wisdom, the thing one has come to say’.

I tried to describe for the workshoppers the ‘story’ I had come to tell in ‘Shy: a memoir’. As the words emerged from my mouth I realized you could cut’n’paste those very same words and use them to describe my planned second memoir. Different subject matter, different memories, same story.

Sheesh. Do I have to do this again?

Since arriving in Mildura I have written about six thousand words. It’s a hard and painful process, this quest for knowing. Each day I escape the computer and return to the banks of a certain river. Each day the river is the same but I am slightly different.

Sian Prior

#memoir poetry story emotions memory lifewriting shyness murrayriver mildurawritersfestival

We are delighted to welcome Sian Prior as our 2018 Writer in Resident.

Rules for an ideal city

As is well known, when the Chaffey brothers set up their ideal community in Mildura in the 1880s, one of their rules was that it would be a temperance colony - no grog was allowed. Naturally, not all the settlers agreed with this, and used to sneak across the river to get plastered. After a few years, the temperance policy was quietly dropped.

However, there are still plenty of rules in Mildura today that fit into a similar ‘No fun’ mould. This sign appears in Langtree Mall, and constitutes a pretty comprehensive ban by order of Mildura Council on many things that young people enjoy, including healthy outdoor activities that you might think are worth encouraging. Keep them away from pedestrians on special paths if you must, but why ban them totally?

During the writers’ festival I took a group of walkers around the city, looking at signage of various kinds.

I asked the group to put themselves in the position of the Chaffeys and come up with some rules for their ideal community. Interestingly, nobody seemed to think that banning cycling was a good idea. Among the things that people would like to see banned are: grey, selfies, and dickheads.

Several people suggested that the whole idea of banning was the wrong way to approach things, and that instead of saying “No ...” we should promote positive behaviours instead. Among them are lots of creative, positive ideas, ranging from public fire drums for warmth to poetry dispensing machines, buskers, live music, cooking with local produce and grapevine trellises outside shops. There was widespread support for more smiling, more kindness and more respect. If anyone from the council reads my small effort at community consultation, perhaps they might like to consider these ideas. Thank you to everyone who contributed!

And here’s the complete list:

No discrimination

No really loud colours for shops (like Chemist Warehouse)

No cars in city

Trees for shade

No vocal rudeness

Bountiful trees

Gentle transport

Kind conduct

No walking tours with loudspeakers

No poor people or rich people

Every person should adopt and care for a cat or kitten

More places to graze your horse

All rules should be framed in a positive way

No impatience

Free coffee, local produce and cultural inspiration to every town visitor

Buses must run all night

No abstract sculptures

Live music free daily

No parking limits

No smoking in public

No loud music on headphones

No politicians

Encourage people to smile at strangers and say hello

No guns

Everyone has to smile and say hello to everyone they meet in public places

One fish, two fish, red fish, blue fish at all times

Blue skies and sunshine from April to October

No panties, to create free flowing sexuality

No telecommunications while shopping

People must sing at every opportunity

Buskers welcome

Fire drums to sit around when cold

The mall music should be a radio station controlled by local students

Everyone smiles and greets each other

No selfies or football merchandise and definitely not the two together

Cook one full meal each day using local produce

Poetry dispensing machines

No dickheads

Smiling compulsory

Be kind to everyone you meet

No grey

No cell yell allowed

Smile at passers by

Encourage live music

Define respect, then show respect to all

No shopping trolleys in public places

Compulsory grapevine trellies outside every shop

More walking tours around the town

No reading of signs allowed.

Mildura’s ‘No parking’ signs

As in all modern cities, parking is an issue in Mildura. Much as animals in the wild mark their territory, people who have the right to park in a certain place like to reinforce that point with No Parking signs.

To the urban explorer, these signs, often home-made, are a source of interest. It would be wrong to think that they are simply functional. The ‘No Parking’ sign is an opportunity for the city-dweller to express themselves. In fact, each sign says something about the person or people who created it.

A great range of mediums can be used, from paint on walls to marker pens on wood or polystyrene. Some sign creators go to a lot of trouble to make the lettering artistic, others take a more rough and ready approach. Sometimes the simple ‘No Parking’ message is enough, while others emphasise the point with a further statement such as ‘No exceptions’ or the blunt ‘Not you’.

What does each of these No Parking signs say about its creator? And what would your No Parking sign look like?

Some Red Cliffs ghostsigns

The town of Red Cliffs (Vic), not far from Mildura, has some fine ghostsigns which I was kindly shown by members of the local historical society - thank you! Some are well preserved and very pleasing to the eye. Others have faded away almost to nothing, creating a sense of intrigue. In some cases the signs point back to familiar names from the past, like Moran & Cato department store. In others, it’s impossible to work out exactly what they were intended to advertise or promote. They are tiny mysteries on the walls of the town, pointing back to histories that are now lost (or are they?)

The Sunnyland Press, a well-known local printer, is still in business, but not at this address. Their psychedelic signage is eye-catching to say the least.

The former dairy is another well-known local landmark. In contrast to the Sunnyland Press, this signage is functional to the point of austerity. Although quite neat, the lettering and inconsistent spacing gives the sign a pleasingly home-made feel.

Mai-Belle is no longer selling fashions, but her signage survives, redolent of the era in which she was in business.

An assortment of names of previous businesses can be seen above the current occupant’s more recent signage. On the left was George & Thompson, while on the right was Smiths Laundry.

Moran & Cato was a well-known chain of grocery stores for many years - I have previously seen their signage around Melbourne. The Red Cliffs store probably dates from the early to mid-20th century (the company was taken over in 1969). Unfortunately the Moran & Cato building in Red Cliffs is likely to be redeveloped so these ghostsigns on glass may not be around much longer.

More beautiful 1930s-style lettering can be seen to the left of the door in Moran & Cato’s windows.

Red Cliffs was a soldier settlement after World War I, and the returned soldiers used to gather for social events at the hall known as ‘Diggerland’. The hall has had various uses and names since 1922, but the name is still proudly over the door in moulded cement, a popular material at the time.

You really have to strain your eyes for this one, but about half way up the wall of Diggerland it is possible to make out the words ‘Joyland Palais’. This was the site of an outdoor cinema many years ago.

The faded ghostsign below seems to read ‘Mine’s a POT’. A pot of what, exactly? Presumably a beer of some kind, but it is impossible to make out the brand name. Perhaps the name is that of a local brewery, now forgotten in the era of global brands.

At the Red Cliffs Historical Society, some great old signage has been preserved, including this old sign from the hospital. The visiting hours are stated at the bottom.

Don Wilson’s scrapyard

To those in the know, Don Wilson’s scrapyard is one of the must-visits of Mildura.

Don’s been collecting scrap since the 1950s. He and his wife, Iris, run the yard and have a house on the property, where they raised and home-schooled their family. They still share the property with kids and grand-kids.

Don’s not just a successful scrap dealer - he’s a historian, archivist, and curator of a remarkable and eclectic collection. He has a particular fondness for cranes, cars, trucks, and cinema equipment. But you’re likely to find almost anything in his yard. One of the first things you see when you arrive is a giant chook.

Don travels all over Australia picking up stuff. Often, when a place is being demolished, people will get on the phone to let him know. Other items in Don’s collection include boats, bits of bridges, level crossing gates, water wheels, Sunshine harvesters, piles of stuff called ‘Bentonite’ (used in kitty litters, apparently), a lock-keeper’s box, the entrance to a shopping plaza, and a big dinosaur from a fun park. Better than a guard dog.

Don is obviously a good businessman. He buys the stuff that no one else wants, then sells it for a decent profit when people realise its value. Customers come and go all the time, and his phone is always ringing (old American trucks are particularly popular these days, Don says).

Even so, many things have been in his yard for decades. I get the feeling Don doesn’t mind too much. He’s not just a second-hand dealer, but a historian and archivist of sorts. Among his collection of old cars is a Morris Eight from the 1940s that he and Iris drove all over Australia for many years.

Don thinks people don’t have enough respect for the past. “I always say, in Mildura we burn or bury our history. It makes me wild.”He has detailed knowledge of everything in his yard, from pre-war delivery vans to World War II cranes.

Don doesn’t know how many cranes he has, but it’s a lot.

I found this old Sydney bus particularly poignant. Imagine the journeys taken on a bus like this, the stories ingrained in it. You could use an old bus as the starting point for a novel. Has it reached its last stop at Don’s yard, or will it ever take to the road again?

Naturally, Don has a lot of stuff from the fruit industry which has been such a big part of Sunraysia life. He’s got ‘sweat boxes’ marked with company names, fruit-drying racks and more. These days a lot of dried fruit gets imported rather than produced locally, so articles like this won’t be around much longer.

I was particularly excited when Don told me that these ‘paste trucks’ came from the old explosives factory in Maribyrnong. I researched the history of the factory and wrote a piece about it a year or so ago (’Explosives on the Maribyrnong’). The land is fenced off now so I haven’t seen any of the equipment before. These items were probably used in the production of explosives during World War II.

At some point when the Melbourne suburban train network was overhauled, Don got his hands on a load of old station signage. Unfortunately someone has already snapped up Yarraville.

Another of Don’s interests is old railway track. Each bit of track tells its own story. Every piece is stamped with its manufacturer - Krupp Steel, for example - and the date. Many go back to the late 19th century.

This vehicle is known as an ‘amphibious duck’, a military vehicle designed to go off roads and through water - like a jeep crossed with a boat. Don bought it when he was 16 and it has been his pride and joy ever since, kept in a special garage of its own. He and Iris went on their honeymoon in it. It may get another outing when they celebrate their 60th wedding anniversary in a few years.

Shack, Wentworth

You’re bony as the ribcage of a whale,

askew like a rhombus. You’re a game

of pick-up-sticks, brittle as dry spaghetti,

your roof a grid for air hopscotch,

your posts aslant like drunks.

You’ve walls where floors should be,

sky where the ceiling isn’t

and who needs windows anyway?

You dressed in a hurry in old wire fishnets

then did a half striptease, and vomited

your insides up: bricks, sinks, planks, corro, boards.

You’re a punchdrunk boxer back for one last fight

just on your feet after a count of nine,

‘Come on ya bastard, do your worst!’

‘You’re not worth it, mate,’ the wind replies

though one good blow would flatten you like a carpet.

You’d outbalance a tightrope walker

outlean the tower of Pisa

and outwobble jelly.

The eucalypts around are hardly wilder

or more crooked. Birds can’t tell the difference.

You’re going back to nature. Shoots are sprouting

from your floorboards. Creepers, mice and ants

infiltrate like spies. Your sighing timbers

rot and remember they were living trees.

- Nick Gadd

Thinking about talking about writing

The Mildura Writers Festival 2016 is over, and I’ve had a few days to think about what I learned. Unlike most festivals, Mildura is small enough for you to attend every session, if you choose, as I and many others did. And because only ten or so writers are on the bill, you can get to know each other, share ideas and laughs. The traditional barrier between writers and readers breaks down here, and everyone mingles freely - there isn’t even a ‘green room’ for writers to hide in, which I didn’t miss at all. In fact everyone involved in the festival pretty much spent three days thinking, listening, and talking about writing.

Mildura attracts writers you really want to see and hear. The most eminent this year were David Malouf and Les Murray. Others on the bill were my former teacher, the fiction writer, poet, historian and much-shortlisted-for-awards Tony Birch; the fine South Australian poet Jan Owen, who won the prestigious Philip Hodgins Memorial Medal; the very entertaining economist (which I know sounds like a contradiction in terms) Richard Denniss; Stella Award winner Emily Bitto, author of The Strays; breakout American novelist Sunil Yapa, with his remarkable many-voiced novel about the Seattle protests of 1999, Your Heart Is a Muscle the Size of a Fist; poet Judith Beveridge, and novelist Olga Lorenzo. I was there to fly the flag for psychogeography, ghostsigns and kebab shops.

I count myself lucky to have met these writers and read their work. What this diverse group has in common, I realise (after hearing them speak at the festival, and after conversations over meals and late-night red wine in the cellars of Stefano’s) is a fundamental seriousness about writing. I know words like ‘commitment’ get thrown round far too much these days - every world-fucking corporation claims a ‘commitment to social justice’ - but you know what the word means when you hear, for example, that Sunil Yapa spent years writing his 600-page novel on a laptop, which was then stolen, and not having backed it up he then had to write it again from memory. Serious writers go on doing their thing for year after year, regardless of whether they happen to be famous or fashionable or completely unknown: we do it because we love it, and we feel depressed and out of sorts when we are not engaged in this strange act of putting words on a page.

I could go on for days, but better to pick out a highlight. The words I found most compelling were those of David Malouf speaking about the importance of a writer’s individual body of work. Malouf said that when he wrote his first novel, Johnno, it received lukewarm and condescending reviews. Free from the pressure of having to follow it up, he wrote a completely different novel, An Imaginary Life, a reconstruction of the Roman poet Ovid’s years in exile. Malouf considered that Johnno, ‘a young man’s book’ was his first book, and An Imaginary Life, ‘an old man’s book’, though actually his second, was in a sense his last book. The rest of his career, he decided, would consist of filling in the gaps between the two. Over his long and acclaimed career, that is what he has done - every piece he writes, in whatever genre (Malouf is a poet and essayist as well as a novelist) is an essential part of that coherent body of work.

Malouf’s point, which he made again at a public lecture on Sunday morning, was that serious writers must resist the pressure to write in fashionable genres, instead committing themselves to building a body of work based on their all-consuming interests. The work then goes out into the world, where it will find its readers. Doing this does require strength of character and faith in your own judgement: how many writers have fallen foul of bad advice, even if well-intentioned, from publishers, agents and others? ‘Write another historical novel, that’s what you’re known for.’ ‘Put more sex in it, that’s what the public wants.’ ‘Make it a psychological thriller - Gone Girl is hot right now.’ Yet if the writer tries to write something when their heart is not in it, the end result is likely to be a bad book - or at least not a necessary book, not something created to satisfy some inner compulsion, which is where the best writing comes from.

However, that raises the question for every writer: what is that thing that it is essential for me to write? There’s no GPS for writers to plot your course and set you on the right road. The only way to find out is by starting to write and seeing where it takes you. It can take years and probably will. There will be false trails and dead ends along the way - I have certainly had my share of them, usually when I’ve followed someone else’s advice, and ended up like a baffled driver in a vacant lot after misdirection from Google Maps. This is where patience and dedication is so important: if you give up because you’re sick of it, or you think your work is rubbish, or someone tells you you should write something else (or get another job altogether), then you may never get to the point of finding out what it is that you really need to be writing. But once you do reach that point, then there is clarity. You know, after that, what fits into your body of work and what doesn’t. You can afford to smile at that person who tells you, blithely: ‘Fifty Shades of Scandinavian Vampires is hot, why don’t you write something like that?’

Have I reached that point? Perhaps. I am clearer now about where I am going, and what I want to achieve. Maybe that will change, as more time passes, as I go on writing, and make more discoveries. But right now it seems to me that this weekend in Mildura has enabled me to sweep some of the rubbish off my desk, and left me a specific set of projects to work on. Whether I can pull them off or not, these projects just feel right. And I’ll always be grateful to Mildura for that.

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