These extracts from artist John Wolseley’s journals and sketchbooks describe the five months which he spent drawing and painting in the Royal National Park in the aftermath of the Christmas 2001 bushfires.
When I met Pramoedya, whose work I had admired for fifteen years, in Jakarta in March 1998, two months before the overthrow of Soeharto’s thirty-two-year rule, he was as I had imagined: unassuming, nervous, fearless.
My whole life, I had woken in earnest and with an uncanny conceit about my place in the world. In the world, if people were distinguished by their night and morning sensibilities, I would be a ‘morning person’, by which I mean that I rarely hesitated about the importance of getting out of bed.
With so many characters and storylines and 1,085 pages that put Gravity’s Rainbow (a mere 760 pages) to shame, where to begin? Why, with the mathematicians, of course…
What John Donne Would Say / Nowhere to purchase and nothing to defend, / nothing but malls as thin as morning dew / unrolling each morning each roller door anew / and burned by the glory of Commerce without End.
Boxing is indivisible from the marketing machinery which surrounds it, just as the art world, the literary world or the world of pop music contain within themselves both the nobility of the enterprise and the crassness of its exploitation. Indeed their nobility is framed within and defined by the structure of reward and recognition bestowed by their respective milieus.
If you’ve ever gone wandering through the nooks and crannies of a large city, loitering with intent and with all the time in the world, attending to unlikely beauties and the aspects of the marvellous that are hidden in full sight right there in the ordinary – then please read on.
Many persons are fluent in more than one language, but my setting out some years ago at the age of fifty-six to teach myself Hungarian provokes comments and questions from those who get to hear of it.
standing under the ex-wife’s house concrete pillars covered in / the
hieroglyphics of grubby little hands pieces of antique chairs hang /
that we had planned to restore together arm-rests of that old coach,
I’ve arrived late to Gillian Mears. Or exactly when I ought to have: standing in the morning rain at Adelaide Writers Week for a panel on biography, two days after a car wreck, not yet able to fully open my jaw.
I am in the process of buying a thirty-year-old ambulance in 2004, sight unseen, and in the opinion of most people, I’ve gone crazy. Listening to Mr Bible from Homebush Motors in Sydney make his sales pitch on the phone, I think they might have a point.
When she and Didier had first met a few weeks ago, he had been impressed to hear that she was an Australian. ‘La sauvage,’ he had said. ‘So wi-i-ild. L’Australie, c’est la sauvage.’
It is reasonably safe to predict that the activities of reading, studying, writing and publishing literary fiction will increasingly become the preserve of a rump of ‘true believers’.
