The Emerging Writer 2013

Well it's that time of year again...when the fabulous Emerging Writers Festival publishes an anthology of articles and essays by writers for emerging writers. This year's book is filled with great ideas for all kinds of writers. Learn about the bread and butter stuff like negotiating contracts and how to get paid writing gigs, to the more whimsical stuff like how to catch that wave of inspiration and how to deal with writer's block. And this year, there I am writing alongside the great and powerful likes of John Birmingham, Alice Pung,  Shaun Tan and Charlotte Wood....

I was really chuffed to be included in this year's collection and wrote a piece entitled The Memoir: Inside and Out. The editor, a fine fellow who goes by the name of Andre Dao, was kind enough to let me share this extract from my contribution....I drew on the experiences and recollections of fellow memoirists Benjamin Law and Kate Holden to bolster my argument that it is a pitfall of writing memoir that you can unwittingly become more readily identified with the character of your book (your younger more foolish self) rather than the writer, the mind behind the pen.

The book is a must have for anyone wanting to take the leap and become that elusive and often misunderstood creature - the author.


Click here for the opening snippet of my piece as a teaser.....

Here's a link to the book. Buy it. Go on.

Full of piss and bad manners.....

I am sick to the stomach this morning and the causative agent is not a meal of spoiled seafood or badly cooked chicken, but the unfolding daily horror that I am reading in the newspapers about the Coronial Inquest into the brutal murders of Lorraine Wilson and Wendy Evans that occurred nearly forty years ago. The two young  nurses went missing after setting off, hitch-hiking, from Camp Hill in Brisbane en route to Goondiwindi. Their remains were found, two years later, and showed that they had been violently battered and bound, in a lonely paddock in Murphy’s Creek at the bottom of the Dividing Range below Toowoomba.

In 1974 I was eight years old and making regular trips with my parents past that spot to the Darling Downs to visit my grandparents.  I now live in Camp Hill, the last place the girls were seen, officially alive. The scenery, if not the tale,  is all too familiar to me.

The unfolding horror-story tells of a violent misogynist culture operating as a dirty undercurrent in the region of Toowoomba in the seventies. The appalling lack of intelligence-gathering and follow-up of significant evidence during the initial investigation by the police appears to have been so shoddy that it was little more than useless.

There was a well-known group of men around Toowoomba at the time who were infamous for their weekly hunts when they would cruise about Ruthven Street looking for girls to tumble into the car or boot and then they’d drive to a paddock to give them a good ‘hiding’.  Many locals knew of this. One younger brother of the gang recalled in the Coroner’s Court, that he had sat on a log witnessing about ten blokes ‘making love’ to two women until his brother knocked him senseless during a brawl for asking what he was doing.  The younger brother was ten at the time and his own parents were present.

THE MIND BOGGLES.

The 1970’s were a bad time to be a woman in rural Australia. Unless you are a woman, you cannot begin to understand how horrifying it feels to know that  you might be considered fair game or ‘prey’. I recently watched a documentary on the endemic rape and abduction of Indigenous women by the Tasmanian sealers during the nineteenth century and was appalled at the primal, animalistic attitude those men had toward the native women and their families and culture. I am further sickened to read that men were still doing this for sport in the seventies in my own back-yard, four years after the world welcomed Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch.

Witnesses collectively saw two women ‘gang-banged’, beaten, strangled, dragged screaming into cars, begging for help and actually having their wrists bound. Some came forward with their information a day or so later, some not until the missing girls made the headlines, some not for many, many years. A few reported being too scared and others ‘didn’t want to get involved’. One witness explained that she and her husband had dismissed it as ‘a domestic’ (as if that somehow lessened the crime). There were so many witnesses it makes me hyperventilate with disbelief.

Those terrified girls were seen alive by so many in the hours before they had their skulls hammered to pieces. At someone’s back door, on a roadside, in a paddock. With raw and visceral fear, they begged for assistance. Not one person came to their aid. It seems the menace of the men and the stench of their blood-lust was too much of a threat to their own safety for the witnesses to come to the rescue or summon immediate police reinforcement.  That was forty years ago and justice delayed is justice denied.

Marauding men hunting women for sport sounds so foreign and archaic to me, an educated woman who has been brought up to believe in gender equality and mutual respect for my brothers and sisters in society, that it makes me wonder how far we have really evolved since the flesh-tearing sports of the Colosseum and the town-square entertainment of witch-burning. The idea of monsters in the dark is not just a Gothic fairytale.

The hunters are still out there, some on those same dark country roads, others at home with their families. Some dead. Some still alive.

The most telling and tragic thing that struck me from this latest, belated and long overdue inquest into the murder of the eighteen and twenty year old girls, was that the ‘persons of interest’,  were known to drive their Holdens up and down the streets of Toowoomba and the surrounds picking off girls to give a ‘hiding to.’  Everyone knew -  that’s just what those men did. Regularly. Routinely. One has already admitted this behaviour during the inquest, while strenuously denying any guilt in the double murder. Where were the police in this lawless Wild West nightmare? Really! Where were they?

When Wayne Hilton (now deceased)  allegedly confessed his part in the murders to his boss decades ago, his only excuse had been that they’d just been lads ‘too full of piss and bad manners.’ He boasted so often of his involvement while downing beer at the pub that it had become local folklore. Just piss and bad manners.

Not saying please and thank-you is bad manners. Slobbering down the phone to an old friend is being too full of piss. Hunting women, bashing women, tying women to trees and raping women, strangling women, abducting women, torturing women, slaughtering women. These are the actions of vile animals not blokes with too much beer in their bellies who ain’t been taught proper manners like….

If you’d stumbled across those horrific scenes on the side a dark road in 1974 or now– what would you have done? Is fear for our own safety or the discomfort of involvement actually a form of complacency which makes us morally complicit?

The inquest continues.

Vote ME for Prime Minister

Today’s essay task, boys and girls, is to tell us why you would make a good Prime Minister of Australia. As you may have noticed, the grown-ups are making a mess of it.

I’ve always toyed with the idea of going into politics. It’s not because I want to be the change I want to see in the world; it’s not because I’m overly concerned with human rights or environmental issues, it’s mainly because I’m an egocentric attention seeker and I like the idea of wielding a little power. It’s a feminist version of wanting to be a princess.

This would work well because I would be comfortable in the spotlight and Prime Ministers are always on the front page for one thing or another.

I have a law degree in my bottom drawer but have never practiced law, so I have the knowledge but also the intact integrity to understand the gobbledegook that goes on in parliament without trying to corrupt it.  

I’ve got a sense of humour and can laugh at myself. Ruddy and Hawke are the only ones that spring to mind here and the people loved that. A good Prime Minister should be a little bit of a stand-up comedian too. Tony Abbott is of course very funny, but he doesn’t mean to be which makes our laughter feel just a little bit cruel.

I don’t wear high heels. All flats. No danger of face planting in front of the media…(unless I’ve had a long lunch with Hawkey.)

I know what it’s like to be poor. I have lived in the housing commission house, I have eaten dry rice bubbles for days. I’ve had my electricity, gas and phone disconnected. I’m in touch with the battlers. I was also a housekeeper at Kerry Packer’s mansion so I can relate to people across the spectrum.

I’m a control freak who likes to talk.

I have already aired all my dirty laundry in a kiss-and-tell memoir so there’s no point looking for skeletons in my closet because I wear them unashamedly.

My husband is a school teacher so I’ve got my finger on the pulse of the public education system.

I have been a drug addict and can confidently say that prohibition and criminalization of addiction is counterproductive and just plain wrong.

 I’ve been a struggling single mum and know how deeply the recent welfare cuts are affecting the backbone of our society so I’d not only reinstate the single parent pension as it was, I’ll throw in a few more bonuses.

I’m not homophobic and support gay marriage. Some of my best friends….you know how it goes.

I do believe that every time someone says they don’t believe in global warming, a gorgeous little hippy dies. I lived in Nimbin for a while. I like hippies and global warming gives me nightmares.

I would put up a family of boat people in the guest wing of The Lodge. I’d treat them like human beings. Give them a hug, a blanket and a cup of tea. I would close the Auschwitz refugee camps, dismantle them and build memorial gardens instead to commemorate all the beautiful souls that got stomped on there.

I’d clean up the violent, bullying, raping, murdering police force. (And that cop who severed Domadgee’s liver by accidentally falling on him….I’d see you get something for that…you know who you are.)

I’d tell the fat cat miners to play nice and put something back into this country instead of just bleeding her dry.

I’d make Clive Palmer’s Titanic my preferred method of visiting coastal towns and cities and have a camel caravan for interior tours. Kind of like Gaddafi without all the murdering.

I’d appoint Kylie Minogue as my foreign minister, James Packer as my Treasurer….NOT! perhaps Gina…she knows how to turn a buck,  Dot.com could be my Minister for Broadband and all things internet, Minister for Families etc could be Steve Biddulph because he seems to know all about that sort of thing. Minister for Education – my husband….and the rest are open to the highest bidder.

I’d stop giving money to Private schools and pour it into the public system. I’d make free breakfasts a compulsory part of every school in Australia.

I’d sack the Royal Family. I’ll be the Queen of this country (symbolically speaking of course).

I’d make politics a bit more exciting. More party in the party. Spice it up. Take a leaf out of the old Roman Emperor’s books. Toga parties, feasts and banquets, some gladiatorial good fun. First spectacular spectacular could be ‘Abbott and the Lions’.

I’m already having so much fun…pick me, pick me!