Postcard from Adelaide

Adelaide showing off

I’m staring out the window of a plane, writing you a postcard in exactly the time it takes to get from Adelaide to Hobart. We are heading south, moving so fast the plains beneath shift and blur, the details flattened, the space vast. I’ve been in Adelaide for five days at the writers festival¹. It’s a really wonderful festival held in the Pioneer Women’s Memorial Garden under huge shady trees. Anyone can come. You just wander in, choose a session and listen!²

On my first night, I walked along the river and then through the parklands until I came to a small church, which is now a theatre. We were ushered inside and there, under a spotlight, I watched Rob Carlton deliver an 8000 word monologue in four stories about grief, belief, growth, loss, delight, shame and redemption. It was a triumph. He used a single chair, every muscle in his face, and the lithe grace of his body to tell these stories. They were pared back, no word not working hard and we gasped and cried and laughed³.

*

Now the view has changed again. We’ve left behind the patterned plains and out the window is the blue of Bass Strait. On the horizon is my real life, the one filled with cleaning and cooking, with weather apps and shrinking water holes, with tough decisions and hungry animals.

Last night, as the corellas wheeled and screeched over the river, I listened to the judges of the Stella Prize announce the 2024 long list. But it was more than a longlist announcement, it was a rallying cry about the power of literature to change cultures. Poet and Stella judge, Eleanor Jackson summed up the long list of books as containing the power to dream our culture forward. And, in career defining moment for me, Graft is on the long list. Critic, festival director and chair of the Stella judges, Beejay Silcox, declared it to be setting a new benchmark in nature writing and I was glad I had my sunglasses on.

*

My view has changed again and we are flying up the east coast of Tasmania. It’s brown and bare. We will fly over home in a moment and I’ll see the familiar line of the creek winding toward the sea, the dark green of the bush pressing into the paddocks. and I can imagine the cool of the house, the dogs pressing their black noses into my palms in greeting. The bare earth is still waiting for rain.

I’m conscious of holding the sacred moments of the festival close, of not losing them in ordinariness of home. So I’ll put one down here. It was delivered by poet Evelyn Araluen. She read a new poem from the screen of her phone, hunched over the microphone raw and defiant. She punched out the words, let them spill and spiral and rage and mourn in a great tangle above our heads. When she finished, the words returned to the earth and settled on all of us listening. They made a mark as they fell out of the sky, and when I come to my desk again I hope they will rise to the surface and make me write hard.

MM

Reading

Keeping it short this week because the plane is circling (literally and metaphorically!) For you writers, Catri Menzies-Pike has a new substack, Infra Dig, which will be meta, just like her brain. In other reading news, am going to slowly work my way through the other long listed books on the Stella Prize. I’ve only read Kate Mildenhall’s The Hummingbird Effect (which I loved) and congrats KM, so good to share this list with you. After listening to her talk, I picked up Charlotte Wood’s, Stone Yard Devotional, and hopefully next week will hold some reading time. Also read this profile essay on Isabella Rossellini on how to grow old. Loved it (thanks BH). There’s more but it will all have to wait until next week.

Doing

Picking up all the dropped balls (that is washing and cleaning), oh and I’m going to be talking with Meg Bignell and Alice Bennett about their new book Tasmanian Gardens at Fullers on Thursday, which is the day after tomorrow! Tickets here.

Have a great week sitters.

1. So lovely to meet some of you in person, thank you for coming to say hello!

2. I listened to Mary Beard, Alexis Wright, Ali Cobby Eckermann, Anne Enright, Peter Frankopan, Jane Smiley, Elizabeth Strout and Charlotte Wood.

3. The show is called Willing Participant and I hope he tours it to other states.