What's new?
April 2021. I wrote this piece in The Australian about the German writer Hans Fallada, his unlucky life, and what his books mean to us today.
My interest in the most unfortunate writers has led me to the kings of 20th-century angst: the Germans (to be fair, German speakers and writers). So that, as I get older, my book shelves groan under the weight of the Neue Sachlichkeit, the sanatorium-dwellers, the over-thinkers, the noosemakers of middle Europe.
My interest in the most unfortunate writers has led me to the kings of 20th-century angst: the Germans (to be fair, German speakers and writers). So that, as I get older, my book shelves groan under the weight of the Neue Sachlichkeit, the sanatorium-dwellers, the over-thinkers, the noosemakers of middle Europe.
April 2021. I wrote this piece for Meanjin. It concerns the rare night parrot, and the explorer-murderer Kenneth Brown, and what it takes to become an Australian holotype.
The night parrot (Pezoporus occidentalis) is an Australian enigma. With common names including the solitaire, or midnight cockatoo, it’s a mainly ground-dwelling bird that lives in spinifex (tunnelling into dense grass to lay eggs) in the inland parts of each state (except Victoria). This small, short-tailed parrot keeps to itself, eating green seeds, emerging at dusk to drink from pools, (attempt) to take flight to avoid predators or find water. Ironically, for a nocturnal bird, its night vision is poor. It’s not a great flyer; in fact, its awkwardness, its dumpy body, seems at odds with its more successful cousin, the budgerigar (a similar mottled, yellow-green appearance, but diurnal, less weight, narrower wings, longer tail). The ‘night parakeet’ was, and is, an evolutionary loser.
The night parrot (Pezoporus occidentalis) is an Australian enigma. With common names including the solitaire, or midnight cockatoo, it’s a mainly ground-dwelling bird that lives in spinifex (tunnelling into dense grass to lay eggs) in the inland parts of each state (except Victoria). This small, short-tailed parrot keeps to itself, eating green seeds, emerging at dusk to drink from pools, (attempt) to take flight to avoid predators or find water. Ironically, for a nocturnal bird, its night vision is poor. It’s not a great flyer; in fact, its awkwardness, its dumpy body, seems at odds with its more successful cousin, the budgerigar (a similar mottled, yellow-green appearance, but diurnal, less weight, narrower wings, longer tail). The ‘night parakeet’ was, and is, an evolutionary loser.
July 2021. I've had a crack at a Young Adult novel. Here's the cover, and something about it. Pre-order soon with MidnightSun Publishing!
1901. The slide clunks into the lantern, and Phantoms come alive on the wall. The father-and-son Magic Lantern team of Bert and Tom Eliot are masters of The Art of the Story. The only problem is that they are missing a wife and mother. Then one morning eleven-year-old Tom wakes to find his father missing, too.
The Lanternist’s apprentice is thrown out of home, forced to work for the arch-criminal Jimmy Sacks, arrested and imprisoned. Will he ever be able to escape with his new friend Max and make the long, flea-bitten, rat-infested journey to Sydney in search of his parents?
The Lanternist is a story about stories, and how they show us a way through life, despite callous landladies, corrupt
officials, criminal companions and the problems with living in incinerators. But mostly, it is about searching, and
making your own endings.
1901. The slide clunks into the lantern, and Phantoms come alive on the wall. The father-and-son Magic Lantern team of Bert and Tom Eliot are masters of The Art of the Story. The only problem is that they are missing a wife and mother. Then one morning eleven-year-old Tom wakes to find his father missing, too.
The Lanternist’s apprentice is thrown out of home, forced to work for the arch-criminal Jimmy Sacks, arrested and imprisoned. Will he ever be able to escape with his new friend Max and make the long, flea-bitten, rat-infested journey to Sydney in search of his parents?
The Lanternist is a story about stories, and how they show us a way through life, despite callous landladies, corrupt
officials, criminal companions and the problems with living in incinerators. But mostly, it is about searching, and
making your own endings.
March 2021. I think it's finally time to unleash Ethel Malley on the world. I first started sewing the old girl together in 2016, and now she's ready (released on 1 April 2021 through Wakefield Press). You can read an extract in InReview.
In the darkest days of World War II, Ethel Malley lives a quiet life on Dalmar Street, Croydon. One day she finds a collection of poems written by her late (and secretive) brother, Ern. She sends them to Max Harris, co-editor of modernist magazine Angry Penguins. He reads them and declares Ern an undiscovered genius. Determined to help publish the poems, Ethel moves in with Max and soon becomes a presence he can’t understand, or control. He gets the feeling something’s not quite right. About Ethel. About Ern. Then two poets come forward claiming they wrote Ern’s poems.
What follows is part-truth, part-hoax, a dark mystery as surreal as any of Ern’s poems. Max wants to believe in Ern, but to do this he has to believe in Ethel, and attempt to understand her increasingly unpredictable behaviour. Then he’s charged with publishing Ern’s ‘pornographic’ poems. The questions of truth and lies, freedom of speech, and tradition versus modernism play out in a stifling Adelaide courtroom, around the nation’s wirelesses, and in Max’s head.
Based on Australia’s greatest literary hoax, Sincerely, Ethel Malley explores the nature of creativity, and human frailty. It drips with the anaemic blood of Australian literature, the gristle of a culture we’ve never really trusted.
In the darkest days of World War II, Ethel Malley lives a quiet life on Dalmar Street, Croydon. One day she finds a collection of poems written by her late (and secretive) brother, Ern. She sends them to Max Harris, co-editor of modernist magazine Angry Penguins. He reads them and declares Ern an undiscovered genius. Determined to help publish the poems, Ethel moves in with Max and soon becomes a presence he can’t understand, or control. He gets the feeling something’s not quite right. About Ethel. About Ern. Then two poets come forward claiming they wrote Ern’s poems.
What follows is part-truth, part-hoax, a dark mystery as surreal as any of Ern’s poems. Max wants to believe in Ern, but to do this he has to believe in Ethel, and attempt to understand her increasingly unpredictable behaviour. Then he’s charged with publishing Ern’s ‘pornographic’ poems. The questions of truth and lies, freedom of speech, and tradition versus modernism play out in a stifling Adelaide courtroom, around the nation’s wirelesses, and in Max’s head.
Based on Australia’s greatest literary hoax, Sincerely, Ethel Malley explores the nature of creativity, and human frailty. It drips with the anaemic blood of Australian literature, the gristle of a culture we’ve never really trusted.
December 2020. This piece in the Journal of Wild Culture talks about how we (mis)understand nature by reducing it to names, terms, facts.
As you were named you will know your world by names. People (Mum, for love), places (Woolworths, for food), ideas (spite, for Jacinta), dangers (look right before crossing), pain (greenstick fracture, aged seven), hope (Mildred Wong, aged thirteen), nature (watching ants consume a chick that’s fallen from its nest).
As you were named you will know your world by names. People (Mum, for love), places (Woolworths, for food), ideas (spite, for Jacinta), dangers (look right before crossing), pain (greenstick fracture, aged seven), hope (Mildred Wong, aged thirteen), nature (watching ants consume a chick that’s fallen from its nest).
September 2020. A piece about bus trips, Krakow, Prague and the skies of Middle Europe, here, in Griffith Review 69 The European Exchange.
June 2020. What do we owe the past? This piece in InDaily describes my thoughts and feelings after spending a day at Auschwitz Concentration Camp.
April 2020. Burning House Press and April's editor upfromsumdirt have published a story of mine called Point Nemo, about inaccessible people, and one man's search for the poles of inaccessibility.
April 2020. Adelaide's newest publisher, Glimmer Press, is set to launch its first book on 4 April. Thrill Me is a collection of suspense stories, various genres, settings and styles. They've even included two stories of mine: 'Mrs Meiners has gone to get chalk', and 'The Sooty Copper'. Details of the book and launch are here.
November 2019. I'm hugely grateful to Australia's Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) for awarding me the 2020 Author Fellowship. For the first time in two decades(+) I can spend a year writing, not having to get up at 4am to get some work done, giving up endless hours I should be spending with family. CAL is a major support (and income stream) for so many Australian authors and artists.
October 2019. I wrote this piece about the arterial road, North East Road, that forms much of the setting of This Excellent Machine. This is a landscape of payday lenders, grog shops, and car detailers.
Speaking of closing schools, here’s my primary school, Gilles Plains, taking a last gasp before it’s forever shuttered, sold off to developers. Luckily, there’s a White Lady Funerals next door. What was once a Savings Bank of South Australia, a visiting teller who told us it was great, wasn’t it, kids, how you could save five cents a week and before you knew it have a bike, then a car, then a house. She never mentioned the billions they’d make screwing us for the next 50 years.
Speaking of closing schools, here’s my primary school, Gilles Plains, taking a last gasp before it’s forever shuttered, sold off to developers. Luckily, there’s a White Lady Funerals next door. What was once a Savings Bank of South Australia, a visiting teller who told us it was great, wasn’t it, kids, how you could save five cents a week and before you knew it have a bike, then a car, then a house. She never mentioned the billions they’d make screwing us for the next 50 years.
September 2019. First Thought describes the last minutes of a wheel-well stowaway, over London, as I try to imagine the thoughts, the hopes, that led him (in his Dreamliner) to the West. Published in the excellent Burning House Press, and September's guest editor, Yanina Spizzirri.
September 2019. Anne Cawrse's wonderfully evocative piano piece Time's Long Ruin.
September 2019. The Pimm's is getting pricey. This piece asks what festivals (Edinburgh, Adelaide) are really about. Cultural samplers, propaganda, networking, corporate smooches?
What if the Festival is for the few? What if it’s now part of some leftover cultural cringe where locals, assuming anything familiar is shit, save all their money for a sneak peek at Kosky’s latest? What if the AF actually detracts from our understanding of ourselves, our aspirations, our dreams, our imaginings? What if all the government money thrown at the top end might be better used at the low-to-middle creative end?
What if the Festival is for the few? What if it’s now part of some leftover cultural cringe where locals, assuming anything familiar is shit, save all their money for a sneak peek at Kosky’s latest? What if the AF actually detracts from our understanding of ourselves, our aspirations, our dreams, our imaginings? What if all the government money thrown at the top end might be better used at the low-to-middle creative end?
July 2019. I chatted to Samela Harris about her father, Max, the Ern Malley years, the obscenity trial, and what all of this might have meant about Australia's literary coming-of-age. Published in The Advertiser.
July 2019. The very excellent Burning House Press have published one of my short, short stories: From where the birch takes the sun. It's set in a small German town in early 1945, and introduces 12 year old Peter Maier.
July 2019. My take on Surveillance Capitalism, why we need to get angrier about lost privacy, and the problem I have with my Glaswegian genes. In Indaily. Also in Indaily, a column about anger, and the art of ranting.
February 2019. Another Adelaide Review piece I wrote about the death of the social contract. Or, in other words, how much your government doesn't really love you.
January 2019. Here are four short features I wrote about a few of my favourite books. All were published in Indaily.
1. Under the Volcano
2. Wise Blood
3. Blutsbruder
4. Pedro Paramo
1. Under the Volcano
2. Wise Blood
3. Blutsbruder
4. Pedro Paramo
2018. A chat with Philip Adams on Late Night Live about The Fierce Country.
The door opens and two men, one wearing a balaclava and holding a rifle, the other a floppy hat and dark glasses, enter the room. One says, “School’s over for today, kids.” Christine thinks it’s some sort of joke, someone’s dad or brother trying to scare them, but soon realises, from the look on her teacher’s face, that this is the real thing.
The door opens and two men, one wearing a balaclava and holding a rifle, the other a floppy hat and dark glasses, enter the room. One says, “School’s over for today, kids.” Christine thinks it’s some sort of joke, someone’s dad or brother trying to scare them, but soon realises, from the look on her teacher’s face, that this is the real thing.
