The week of festivaling dangerously

Sophie Cunningham September 06

Meanjin had a big week at the Melbourne Writer’s Festival. Below is a bit of a round up.

I began the festival by going on a walk with Gary Presland where he talked about Melbourne’s landscape pre-white settlement, and the area’s first people: the Eastern Kulin of Melbourne, Port Philip & Central Victoria. It was a terrific couple of hours and I rushed to buy his book, published by Museum Victoria, on the subject. (It’s an updated and expanded version of a book McPhee Gribble published 20 years ago called Aboriginal Melbourne.) I never did get to Seamus O'Hanlan’s walk through docklands, but I grabbed a copy of Melbourne Remade and read it yesterday afternoon. It too is a terrific book and I recommend to anyone interested in Melbourne’s recent history. Congratulations also to Arcade, the book’s publisher, who are doing really good work.

Later that first Saturday, I gave a quick speech, at an Australian Centre Awards ceremony in the festival club. Those awards included the Peter Blazey Fellowship – established to honour the memory of journalist, author and gay activist, Peter Blazey. The Fellowship is awarded annually to writers in the non-fiction fields of biography, autobiography and life writing and is intended to further a work in progress. The winner was Robyn Davidson, for her work-in-progress ‘Self Portrait with Imaginary Mother’. Mark Mordue was highly commended for work on his Nick Cave biography – a work that originated as an essay in Meanjin 68:3. The Kate Challis RAKA Award for indigenous creative artists was also announced. The $25,000 award is offered in a five-year cycle with a different area of the arts – creative prose, drama, the visual arts, scriptwriting and poetry – being rewarded each year. In 2010 it was for poetry, and the winner was Yvette R. Holt, for the collection anonymous premonition (UQP).

On the Sunday evening I talked to colleagues Jeff Sparrow (Overland) and Lisa Greenaway (Going Down Swinging) about our magazine’s respective birthdays – sometimes those events are in danger of being self congratulatory, but in this case we ended up having an animated conversation about the pleasures and pitfalls of magazine publishing, and enjoyed an engaged and enthusiastic audience. (Thanks to Jim Lee for the photo he took of the event).

On Thursday evening Cory Doctorow spoke on Copyright versus creativity. More than 300 people attended a dense and extremely interesting talk. Jacinda Woodhead has written up what Cory said, over at Meanland.

On Friday I was honoured to be a part of a really successful session, : ‘From Woolf to Wolf ‘ with Emily Maguire and Monica Dux. I spoke about Woolf’s A Room of Her Own, Dux spoke on Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch and Maguire talked to Naomi Wolf’s The Beauty Myth. It all came together – we spoke well because we all felt so passionate about our subject, our chair, Jo Case, was just fantastic. The audience was wrapt. It was the kind of event that reminded me why I do panels, why I read books – and why feminism is so important. If you’re at all interested in the topic of feminist texts and their ongoing relevance, I can recommend Rachel Cusk’s article in the Guardian, on Woolf and De Beauvoir, which I quoted during my talk.

That evening I went to hear Noel Pearson’s John Button Oration and the awarding of the John Button prize to MUP’s The Politics of Suffering, by Peter Sutton.

On Saturday Jessica Au and I hosted a small, but enthusiastic audience in the shipping container lovingly (and sometimes not so lovingly) know as Magazine. I do suspect that if Ben O’Mara didn’t have so many fans, we would have been very lonely down there, in the rain, by the river. Belinda Rule gave a great reading of ‘The Secret of the Dark Elves’ (from our current edition), and Ruby Murray read her award-winning story ‘The Things that Lucille Did’ . We were frustrated on behalf of the talented Daren Shiau, at the midday lull, which meant his audience was tiny. We didn’t know of Daren’s micofiction before he read for us, but we won’t forget him anytime soon – and hope to publish him in Meanjin next year.

On Saturday night I headed over to Overland’s launch of its 200th issue. It was a crowded, drunken and debauched evening and reinforced all my worst fears as to what would happen if a group of literary types, some of them communists, all ran towards a bar at the same time. I won’t caption this photo of a Scribe editor who used to work at Meanjin, sculling tequila, but he knows who he is. As does the young associate editor in the background of the shot.

I was, as you can imagine, pretty stuffed by Sunday morning, when I was interviewing Hilary McPhee about the McPhee Gribble Story, a session organised by SPUNC. It was a good session, but it suffered from its timeslot – early on a rainy Sunday morning, and not many people heard what was a really good conversation between Hilary and myself on the early days of McPhee Gribble, the editorial relationships it nutured, the unique fictionalized non-fictions Australians were producing (Brian Matthews Louisa, Drusilla Modjeska’s Poppy), international rights both then, and now, and the problems for smaller presses getting adequate distribution.

Our best session was, indeed, our last one (yesterday, at 5.30 pm). ACMI’s studio 1 was full to capacity when Kate Crawford talked about white noise in a networked world for half and hour before the two of us spoke more generally about ‘noise’, creativity, and twitter. Phrases I jotted down give a sense of how varied and thought-provoking the session was: technology is neither the problem or the solution; total focus was never possible, nor desirable; society for the Suppression of Unecessary Noise; anti-symphony concert, 1919. New York in a Blizzard. And, most importantly: ‘we are at an adaptive moment’. And there I’ll leave you.

Our Friends

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