Treasure 1 June 2013 Mervyn R. Binns Jennifer Bryce Elaine Cochrane Ditmar Bruce Gillespie Dora Levakis John Litchen Malcolm McHarg Yvonne Rousseau Casey Wolf and many others

DJ Fractal by Ditmar

Treasure No. 1 June 2013 First publication: June 2013 mailing of ANZAPA. Written and published by Bruce Gillespie, 5 Howard St., Greensborough VIC 3088. Phone: (03) 9435 7786. Email: [email protected]. Member fwa. 3 Editorial: Dive into the Treasure chest — Bruce Gillespie, plus Elaine Cochrane and Mervyn R. Binns 15 Journey to Tuva — Dora Levakis 29 Postscript: My second trip to Tuva, July 2012 — Dora Levakis 32 Good horn, good brakes, good luck: A month in India — Jennifer Bryce 48 The sound of different drums: My life and science fiction, part 5 — John Litchen 55 Letters of comment Taral Wayne :: Tim Marion :: Steve Sneyd :: Andrew Darlington :: Alan Sandercock :: Ned Brooks :: Gillian Polack :: Dora Levakis :: Jerry Kaufman :: Andy Robson :: Elaine Cochrane :: Robert Elordieta :: Tony Thomas :: Kaaron Warren :: Werner Koopmann :: Patrick McGuire :: Lloyd Penney :: Jenny Bryce :: Steve Jeffery :: Doug Barbour :: Tara Judah :: Ron Drummond :: Murray MacLachlan :: & We Also Heard From 100 Feature letters: The real story of Harry Potter and Voldemort — Yvonne Rousseau The loc that would not die — Casey Wolf ‘High Society’ and John Hammond — Malcolm McHarg Illustrations Front cover: DJ Fractal by Ditmar (Dick Jenssen). Back cover: ‘Sunset on out houseboat, Kerala’ by Jennifer Bryce. Photographs: p. 5, 82: Elaine Cochrane. Pp. 6, 8, 82: Dick Jenssen. P. 9: Irwin Hirsh. P. 10: Jeanette Gillespie. Pp. 18, 20, 21, 22, 24, 25, 27: Dora Levakis. Pp. 32, 33, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 43, 44, 45, 46, 87: Jennifer Bryce. Pp. 49, 51, 54, 66, 67, 69, 70: John Litchen. P. 85: Bruce Gillespie. Pp. 92, 93: Werner Koopmann. 2

Editorial: Dive into the Treasure chest Why change the name of this fanzine? Because it’s had three names since the late 1990s. After 22 years, good sense will prevail. First there was *brg*, my paper fanzine for ANZAPA (Australia and New Zealand Amateur Publishing Association). My fanzine under that name began in 1991, although I had been a member of ANZAPA, off and on, since 1968. In 1995 I joined the British apa Acnestis with a paper fanzine called The Great Cosmic Donut of Life. (taken from the title of a Ray Nelson short story from the 1960s). That fanzine continued until the death of Acnestis in 2005. When Bill Burns began his website eFanzines.com, which hosts a vast number of fanzines in PDF format, I took all the good bits from both paper fanzines and wrapped them up into a fanzine called Scratch Pad.

What links them all? They contain mainly material that is usually not about SF or fantasy, but otherwise may be of interest to SF/fantasy fans and other indulgent friends. It’s stuff that I treasure, so I assume everybody else will treasure it as well. Scratch Pad, *brg*, and Cosmic Donut contain all my own non-SF writing from more than two decades, plus a wealth of material from correspondents such as John Litchen and Jennifer Bryce. *brg* and Cosmic Donut have been written primarily for the apas that contain them, including mailing comments. In Scratch Pad, I have been deleting the mailing comments. What’s the problem? The problem is the confusion about numbering. Scratch Pad has always had a sequence different from that of the two fanzines it contains. It seems much easier to drop *brg* as my ANZAPAzine of general material, and restrict the title to my apazine of mailing comments. Hence: a bright new fanzine called Treasure.

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Why Treasure? Life is a treasure hunt. I’ve written that often enough. Not for money treasure, of course, but for all those precious items that furnish a mind: evidence of a life well lived. Elaine and I have a house full of books, fanzines, other types of magazines, photographs, CDs, DVDs, Blu-rays, and LPs. They pose a storage problem, but if I let them go, I would be letting go bits of my life. Often their most treasured feature has been the effort taken to find them. I spent nearly 50 years waiting to find a copy of ‘Memories of Maria’, one of only a few songs written by Roy Orbison for other people, in this case the guitarist Jerry Byrd. I didn’t buy the single in 1962 because I did not have the spare cash. I did not hear it again until about five years ago, when it turned up on a CD of Jerry Byrd’s best singles. More recently, I borrowed from Tim Train one of Brian Aldiss’s recent novels, The Cretan Teat, issued by a very

small British publisher. It’s a fine novel, which would have been Brian’s bestseller if it had been published in the 1970s just after the Horatio Stubbs books. When I tried to find it on the Internet, it had disappeared. Therefore I was very pleased when John Litchen sent me his own copy. Thanks very much, John. Every year David Russell sends, or often brings, from Warrnambool to Greensborough, gifts for my birthday. He has a telepathic ability to pick presents that I will find really interesting. A few years ago he presented me with a small coffee grinder that Elaine and I have been using ever since. If David chooses DVDs as gifts, they will be DVDs I had been meaning to buy. David offers more than gifts, I think: he elevates gifts to the status of treasure.

Dip into Treasure 1 ...

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Treasure 1 is not quite the treasure chest I intended this time around. It was going to feature my annual roundup of Favourite Books, Short Stories, CDs, Films, and Music. However, my favourites lists for 2012 have already appeared in ANZAPA, so you will have to wait for the next issue of SF Commentary. Meanwhile, sitting at the top of this issue’s treasure chest are the articles you

find here: travel articles by Dora Levakis, who usually lives in Yarraville, Victoria, but is currently teaching in the Top End of the Northern Territory; Jennifer Bryce, long-time friend, fine writer, and traveller to exotic places; and John Litchen, with the latest chapter of his life and times. The letter column is also very enjoyable.

The trouble with In-Your-Facebook is that you may be talking to your Friends, but you don’t often talk to your friends. You send a random message into the aether; it’s seen by some of your Friends, but most of your friends are not on

Facebook. They’re in ANZAPA, or on the various e-lists or the SF Commentary mailing list. So here are some matters I’ve jotted on Facebooks or in the ANZAPA-only edition of *brg*, but not yet covered elsewhere.

2012: sad notes Elaine Cochrane writes, on Saturday, 9 June 2012: A few days ago I found the receipt from the local animal shelter, dated 22 June 2006, for ‘One kitten’. That purry black kitten grew to be our huge, fluffy, beautiful, sweet Archie. In late 2007 Archie had his first bout of acute kidney disease. He spent a week on a drip at the vet’s and although he would have had some permanent kidney damage he seemed to make a complete recovery and he soon regained all the joie de vivre a young cat should have. A few weeks ago his kidneys malfunctioned again. Again a week on a drip and his blood tests seemed to indicate a return to within, or close to, normal, but this time he just didn’t bounce back. We tried everything we could to start and keep him eating but it reached the stage where it would have been cruel as well as pointless to keep trying. Yesterday I had the vet make a housecall to save him the terror of the final trip. He is buried near the bay tree.

(Top) Archie’s baby photos, 2006. (Bottom:) More recent pictures: Archie (l.) 2008 and (r.) 2011.

Give all your beasties a cuddle from me. Elaine

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Thanks to friends who sent commiserations on the death of Archie. He’s actually been missed most by Flicker, Harry, and Polly. They all became fussy about their food for months. Nobody would eat the usual beef strips, so we had to try other things, including cans of the luxury food we had bought to try to tempt Archie to eat during his final fortnight. Later, they wanted only meat bought from Safeway. Polly went on strike altogether. Was she suffering from the same problems that killed Archie? No. Her kidneys were functioning normally, but she had some kind of infection, and some kind of liver dysfunction. She had suffered from lots of bouts of cystisis of the bladder when she was very young. This seemed to have recurred. Three rounds of antiobiotics seemed to fix that, but she was still very reluctant to eat. The vet gave a diagnosis of ‘pancreatitis’, and suggested we do our best to coax her to eat! After lots of experimentation, Elaine discovered that Polly would eat small quantities of her own type of cat crunchies, plus a couple of cans per day of the most expensive varieties of Dine.

Bruno Kautzner is someone I would never have heard of if he had not bumped into Dick Jenssen on the street in Carnegie in the 1990s. Bruno had been a member of the Melbourne SF Club many years ago, but had lost contact with everybody from those days. Dick encouraged him and his wife Keren to join the monthly film group hosted by Race and Iola Mathews. We had dinners with them in Carnegie and they visited us at Greensborough. It was a great shock to find that somebody so filled with energy should have become very ill very fast, struggled to return to normal life, then have been knocked out by acute kidney failure over one weekend.

Flicker and the others went back to eating beef strips, but they demanded the superior, more expensive variety from the supermarket. And Flicker wants to eat his crunchies away from the spot where he used to eat them. Every now and again he goes searching for Archie throughout the house, and gets very grumpy with us because we haven’t brought Archie home yet. Harry sits by my chair, where Archie used to sit, and waits for a special comforting pat. Archie was a very valuable small cat. He was part of their gang. Polly isn’t, but they still get upset when we take her to the vet’s for yet another expensive examination, or if we leave her the whole day before bringing her home. Things Are Still Not Right. Death has been much on our mind this year. In a box next page, I’ve printed Merv Binns’ tribute to three old friends who have left us this year. One of them, Ian Crozier, I have never met, although I’ve been hearing his name ever since I joined fandom in 1968. Bruno Kautzner, 2004. (Photo: Dick Jenssen.) 6

Memories of Ian Crozier by Mervyn R. Binns Just about sixty years ago, I met Race Mathews, Bob McCubbin, Lee Harding, and Dick Jenssen, who I had discovered shared my love of reading science fiction. Race and Bob and maybe others had decided to form a club for SF fans and invited me to join them. As an employee of the then McGills Newsagency bookshop I was in a good spot to find more interested people. Soon after starting up, Ian Crozier joined us and finished up producing the club magazine Etherline. He did a great job putting all the information on stencil, which I printed on a Roneo duplicator that we bought. Club meeting details, book reviews, news about SF books and magazines, and more were included. Copies were sent to members and SF fans in other states and in the USA and Britain. Ian corresponded with and included information from fans such as Bob Bloch and many other fans here and overseas. Etherline was a duplicated work of art, considering the trouble Ian went to, to put a stencil together for me to then run off on the old duplicator. He had to cut and splice stencils and add illustrations and headings, which was a painstaking exercise. He edited just on one hundred issues until he decided family and work were more important, and he dropped out in the late 1950s. I remember that the MSFC held meetings in a room above Ian’s office as a customs agent, in Lennox Street, Richmond, for a year or two in the very early days. Chess and darts were our major activities, while we were planning our first convention in 1956. Etherline I think did as much as anything and anybody to put Melbourne and Australian fandom on the map, while also publicising and establishing the Melbourne SF Club (Group as it was called initially). Fandom grew, and many other fanzines were produced in Australia in the following years, but I truly

believe Ian’s efforts, and those of such as Graham Stone in Sydney, Don Tuck in Tasmania, and other early Australian fans, led to the growth of fandom in Australia and in the long run, to us holding eventually four World SF Conventions in Melbourne. It is one of those ironic moments that the movie of The Hobbit is due for release, which reminds me that when I was a dyed-in-the-wool SF reader, fantasy had little appeal, but Ian kept on insisting that I read The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. I finally gave in and read them. Thanks, Ian; anything to do with The Lord of the Rings will always remind me of you. In 1999 Helena and I spent a few days, at the invitation of Ian and his wife Judy (who passed away some time before Ian, we believe), with them when they were residing at Porepunkah, near the picturesque mountain town of Bright, soon after we got together. I had not seen them for over 40 years. I believe they moved closer to Melbourne and their family in more recent years. We have had a number of house moves since and lost contact with them. Helena (then Margaret Duce) also heard about The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings from Ian, when he visited her in the Victorian country town of Alexandra in the late 1950s, following being told of her interests in SF by Mervyn Barrett, a penfriend in New Zealand. (How she came in contact with Melbourne fandom is another long story.) Ian Crozier succumbed to lung cancer on the 27th of November this year. We also lost a very good, very special friend this last week, John Straede, to a brain tumour on the 24th of November. Another old friend, Bruno Kautzner,

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died of leukemia in April 2012. Like many other people they were friends we made because of their being SF fans and being associated with the MSFC (Bruno from the late ’50s and John from the early ’60s). The club and SF in general has given me a life and friends, many of whom I still see, for which

I can only be very grateful. — Mervyn R. Binns, 6 December 2012

John Straede was someone I met regularly at Melbourne SF conventions until he and his then wife Cheryl went to New South Wales in 1972. John became a world-class astronomer. Shortly before he retired and returned to Melbourne, Cheryl was killed in a car crash. John remarried, to Truda, and they bought a farmlet at Bunyip in eastern Victoria. We met them because John had remained a friend of Dick Jenssen during the years he had been living in New South Wales. In Bunyip, Truda’s main business haas been cat breeding, but she and John also enjoyed the life of busily retired people. John’s appetite for collectingDVDs and Blu-rays was much more voracious than mine. He developed a room in the house into a theatrette with its own very large screen. For some years Elaine and I visited John and Truda each year for Christmas celebrations. Truda has an amazing ability to cater for groups of 20 or 30 people. It was a great shock to discover that John was suffering from a brain tumour. After initial surgery, it seemed as if he would have some years of life left, but that was not to be. In mid December 2012, we visited Bunyip for a well-attended celebration of John’s life. On 3 December 2012 it was exactly 20 years since Roger Weddall died. In 1992, Elaine and I knew from May onwards that Roger’s life would be greatly shortened. However, he undertook his DUFF trip to America in August and September that year, and enjoyed himself until the last week of the trip. He made many friends for himself and for Australian fandom. He returned home in great pain, and went into hospital shortly after his return. It is still difficult to realise that Roger has disappeared. Every now and again we keep expecting him to knock on the door, come in, laugh, and say, ‘Sorry I was gone for awhile.’

John Straede, 2006. (Photo: Dick Jenssen.)

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I realise that I still have not published Roger’s DUFF report, which he left in the form of cassette tapes recorded during his trip. I had meant to publish

the report in time for this anniversary, but I had expected to be able to retire this year.

A visit to Maldon On Sunday 4 November 2012, I actually left Melbourne for a few hours. I hopped aboard a country train for Castlemaine. My sister Jeanette Gillespie picked me up and drove me to the nearby town of Maldon, holding its annual Maldon Festival, which includes the Maldon Folk Festival. We went to a little church in the town. People gathered and began singing gospel songs, usually unaccompanied. Various people waved their hands around, and encouraged people to sing and stand up and sit down again, and it was all a bit exhausting. Halfway through the event the singing stopped, and famous Australian folk singer Danny Spooner presented to my sister Jeanette the Graham Squance Award for lifetime service to the folk music community of Victoria. Translated into SF terms, Jeanette finally received her Chandler Award! Jeanette has been running folk festivals and clubs and performing for over 30 years. She also edited the folk music fanzine, Folk Vine. Her partner Duncan Browne has also received the award, as has Danny Spooner himself. She joins an illustrious group of winners. Jeanette gave a very nice speech, and we all had to start singing again. (I can’t sing, which is why I feel embarrassed when I attend Jeanette’s folk music events.) Our old friend Frances Wade, who now lives near Jeanette and Duncan, drove me back to Castlemaine to catch the train home.

Roger Weddall, early 1980s. (Photogapher: Irwin Hirsh.)

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Jeanette Gillespie receives the Graham Squance Award. Her partner Duncan Browne is in the background.

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2013: two or three days I took off Until the beginning of February 2013 I had had no paying work, or any hint of future paying work, since October 2012. At the beginning of February I received an email from a client for whom I had done nothing for four years. He asked me if I could finish a huge editing job by 22 March. I felt that technically I might not be able to do the job because I’m still working in Word 7. Indeed, working in Word 7 on Windows 98 led to the problems I faced. I did reply that a more realistic deadline would be 12 April, a week after Easter, but the client insisted on 22 March. A difficult task was attaching the Word styles to the documents. This is a designer’s/typesetter’s job, but publishers have been asking editors to do it for at least 15 years. For most of my clients, however, it has proved quicker and more economical to ask a junior editor in the office to style the manuscript before sending it out. When it took me 6 and a half hours to style the first chapter, but only 4 hours to edit it, the production editor gave in, and did the styling himself. From then on, the job was smooth sailing, except for editing the Permissions list. The client wanted this compiled in Excel, a blind spot of mine. A time-consuming and annoying job, it could be done only after I had edited the book, sent out the edited chapters to the authors for checking, and received back the chapters. I took very few days off from the beginning of February until the end of March. I had finished compiling and sending out the February ANZAPA mailing before I started the new job.

Day 1 of time off I spent one day undergoing my regular colonoscopy — or what should be my regular colonoscopy. Because my father died at the age of 69 from bowel cancer, I’ve been trying to be checked every five years since I turned

50. I was checked when I turned 55 (actually 56, since it took a full year from the GP’s appointment to the actual colonoscopy at St Vincent’s Hospital). I moved to Greensborough, and when I turned 60 my new GP put in a request to Austin Hospital to arrange the procedure. Nothing happened. I reminded my GP of this a few years later. I’ve never been able to afford private health insurance. Eventually she found a private facility in Heidelberg that can do the procedure for a flat fee. On the day before, I stopped eating solids, swallowed sachets of gloop to clean out my system, and drank liquids all day. I did not feel hungry (I suspect that the gloop itself includes appetite suppressant). I was allowed to imbibe nothing but a few sips of water on the morning of the colonoscopy. Elaine’s brother-in-law George drove me over there. I did not have to wait long. I did not actually meet the surgeon who had interviewed me a week or so before. I met only the anaesthetist and his team. He injected me, put the little mask over my face, and I disappeared. When I woke up, I was led into a nearby room, and sat there for about an hour until George picked me up. Then home — to a light meal. Result? No polyps.

Days 2 and 3 of time off During March, Casey Wolf visited from Vancouver. Elaine and I had first met her just before Aussiecon 2 in 1985. Elaine was working with Esther, whose girlfriend was Carole, who asked Esther if she could introduce her sister Casey to science fiction people while visiting Melbourne. Elaine and I, Esther, Carole, and Casey enjoyed a great Thai meal at a restaurant near us in Collingwood. At that time it was one of the two Patee Thai restaurants in the inner suburbs. (The other one is still open in Brunswick Street, Fitzroy).

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Casey attended Aussiecon 2, but she knew nobody except me and a friend of hers. I was always busy doing something, so occasionally I would find Casey and her friend wandering the corridors of the Southern Cross Hotel, looking lost. I thought she would be pissed off by the SF scene, and that we would never hear from her again. Instead, she got involved with the Vancouver fan group, began writing SF, and kept sending me letters of comment. In 2005, during the Bring Bruce Bayside trip, when I was visiting Alan and Janice Rosenthal in Seattle, Casey drove down from Vancouver, and spent an afternoon catching up. That afternoon was one of the highlights of the trip. Later, she sent me a copy of her fine book of short stories, Finding Creatures and Other Stories, published as by C. June Wolf (Wattle & Daub Books, Vancouver). Every time Casey arranged a visit to Australia to visit her sister and friends, some major event stopped the trip. She has not been in good health recently, but finally in 2013 she was able to make the trip. She brought with her one of the longest extended bouts of hot weather we’ve ever had in the south-eastern states. It was hot and humid while she was visiting the tropical areas in far northern New South Wales; then the heat really set in when she arrived in Melbourne. We talked on the phone, but she

was taken up country, then back to Melbourne. It was hot in beautiful downtown Brunswick Street, Fitzroy, on the Tuesday afternoon when I met Casey for afternoon tea and book touring, but that didn’t stop us nattering all afternoon, moving from one bookshop or cafe to another. The next night she joined a small group of us — Elaine, me, Bill Wright, and Tim Train — at the Nyala Ethiopian restaurant in Brunswick Street. Great food, great company. Casey was taken off to Tasmania for a week in (or near) the wilderness — and reasonable temperatures, while the hot spell in Melbourne just went on and on. The following Tuesday, she braved the Melbourne suburban train system and the never-ending heat, and arrived at Greensborough for an enjoyable lunch at Allan House. This is the improbable name for a stylish Vietnamese/Chinese/Thai restaurant that opened on Main Street two years ago, but which Elaine and I hadn’t tried until recently. After lunch, we walked back to 5 Howard Street to visit our House of Cats, lots more talk, then Casey set off home. I wonder if Elaine and I will ever see her (or any of our Canadian and American friends)again?

Gig regret

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Dave O’Neil is a Melbourne TV comedian I never watch on TV, and his radio voice is so garbled as to be almost incomprehensible. But he’s just been hired to write the page 2 column in The Shortlist, the EG entertainment supplement from the Melbourne Age every Friday.

to time: gig regret: ‘when you have the chance to see a band, pass on the opportunity and then regret it for the rest of your life’.

His column of 26 April 2013 put a name to an emotion I’ve felt from time

During the summer of 1974, my dad drove us to the Inverloch foreshore, where my older brother was desperate to see this ‘new’ band.

Here’s Dave’s story of his ultimate gig regret:

Dad said to me: ‘Do you want to see the band or get an ice-cream?’ I chose the latter and missed an early incarnation of AC/DC. I can’t remember the flavour of the ice-cream but my brother still goes on about how a young Angus Young stripped off his cothes and ran into the ocean. Yep, gig regrets. In sympathy, I can think of all the bands and performers I might have seen, but didn’t. Emmylou Harris, several times. Lou Reed, many times. Loudon Wainwright at the Continental Cafe, because I was suffering from my worst cold in a decade. The Rolling Stones in 1996 — because the cheapest seats, way up the back of the main stand of the Melbourne Cricket Ground, were $99 each — but thanks to Leigh and Valma, I did attend the Rolling Stones’ afternoon concert, Kooyong Tennis Court, 17 February 1973, for $5. My most tooth-achingly awful example of ‘total gig miss’ comes not from rock music but from classical music. The late 1980s, when restaurant meals and concerts were affordable. Elaine and I had both had busy days. We went out to dinner. We were halfway through a fine meal when we remembered that for the same night we already had bought tickets for the Musica Viva concert by the Beaux Arts Trio, the greatest piano trio

in the world, who would be playing an all-Beethoven concert. Yes, we did catch their Sunday afternoon concert the next weekend, but it was not the same. All we could think about was the missed concert. The Beaux Arts Trio disbanded a few years later. Dave O’Neil talks about the other type of ‘gig regret’: the concert you caught, but wished you hadn’t. I’m glad to say this has never happened to me. For the last 20 years I have been missing concerts because of the exponentially increasing ticket prices, and because of my sheer laziness in buying tickets. Some of the best concerts I’ve seen have been free, thanks to, first, Steve Smith, and then, Dave Clarke, at Reading’s in Lygon Street, Carlton. Every now and again they have offered me free tickets to hear such luminaries as Branford Marsalis, the Charlie Haden Quartet, and Angela Hewitt. The net result of my life of gig regrets is that I had not been to a huge loud rock music concert since Elaine and I went with some fans to see Neil Young and Crazy Horse in 1985 at the Festival Hall. Therefore it is appropriate that ...

My ultimate gig ... ... was seeing Neil Young and Crazy Horse, 28 years later, on 13 March 2013, at the Plenary, Melbourne Concert Centre ... and for free. Frank Weissenborn astounded me by sending me by email a ticket to see Neil Young and Crazy Horse at the Plenary. Of the roll call of recent favourite visiting performers to Melbourne, Neil Young and Crazy Horse would be top of my list, but the ticket price was out of my range. Frank has been

paying me in instalments to edit his recent works, so instead of handing me cash he rolled a few of these payments together, and bought the ticket. The Plenary in the Melbourne Convention Centre is familiar to most ANZAPAns as the hall where the main events of Aussiecon 4 took place. It’s a long walk from Spencer Street. I would have thought it too small 13

for a modern rock concert, but it has good line of sight from all seats, and a large standing-room area in front of the stage. The sound? I had forgotten to take my ear plugs, which meant that the very very loud sound was JUST TOO DISTORTED for my elderly ears. Is this deliberate distortion peculiar to this concert by Neil Young and Crazy Horse? Probably not. It’s just what everybody else in the audience expected. When I saw Neil Young and Crazy Horse at Festival Hall in 1985, the amplification had been just as loud, but quite clear. Ah well. My eardrums are shot, I suspect, but I didn’t realise it until then. To enjoy rock concerts in future, I will stick to watching them at home on DVD with the speakers turned up to 3. The Plenary event is now being touted as the best Neil Young and Crazy Horse concert for ten years. It featured most of the songs from his latest double CD, Psychedelic Pill, including the mighty ‘Walk Like a Giant’. This shows that the songs on Pill are the best Neil has written for many years. Fortunately, the band gave the audience a relief break where Neil sang four songs with guitar or piano. Those four songs were worth the price of the ticket (which I didn’t pay, but you know what I mean). They included good old ‘Heart of Gold’ from 1972’s album Harvest, just to rev up the crowd, and a delicious rendition of ‘Ramada Inn’, Neil’s most moving song from the new CD. The first half of Neil’s Loud Stuff had finished with an apocalyptic light show. After the acoustic set, the second half began with Live Rust old favourites, such as ‘Powderfinger’ and ‘Cortez the Killer’. Then Neil and the band went into hyper-phase. Neil was actually smiling! The band pulled out a medley of songs based on Neil Young’s love of rock and roll. Everything went louder. The songs included obscurities like ‘Barstool Blues’ from the mid seventies. Then came the obligatory walk-off, then the encore — a 20-minute version of ‘Like a Hurricane’, Neil’s best song.

We staggered into the night. I had wondered if the concert might have stretched a bit over the scheduled finish time of 10.30. I looked at my watch: 11.45 p.m. Could I run back to Southern Cross Station in time to catch the last train? I looked around for Frank. His seat had been in a different section. We had nattered at interval, but this time I lost him in the crowd. Bugger it! I could ring him tomorrow. Off I went, and actually reached the platform 10 minutes before the last train left. I doubt if I will ever go to a Big Concert again — unless I win Tattslotto or somebody offers me a ticket to Bruce Springsteen or the Melbourne concert of the just-announced Rolling Stones ‘50 Years Is Not Too Many’ world tour. But, adding two earplugs that I forgot to take with me on the 13th, I would repeat the Neil Young experience any time it was offered. One question remains. All the blokes on stage on 13 March are older than me and most of the audience. How can they voluntarily subject their body systems to all that racket, night after night? — Bruce Gillespie, 26 April 2013

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Dora Levakis is a visual artist, project manager, and teacher, who involves individuals and communities in what she does.

Journey to Tuva by Dora Levakis Why Tuva? Why throatsinging? Life happens. But some years provide delightful surprises when everything seems to fall into place. 1996 and 2010 were such delights. 1996 saw me pulling out shelved information on a short course regarding breathing and meditation. It was the Vibrational Breath Therapy technique, four lessons on how to A-U-M, taught in Melbourne by Sri Bala Ratnam. Also, during 1996 I became aware of Tuvan throatsinging. Access All Areas, fronted by Paul Grabowsky, an ABC TV series on the voice, had aired. One episode featured male singers atop horseback in Tuva, a place in remote Siberia, creating sounds that seemed to emanate from deep within to surround the space and yet, at the same time, to split into two, three, or more voices. I marvelled at this. Where was the sound coming from? How on earth did they do it? I played with my throat, pumping through U-U-U sounds in rapid succession, as I was now doing when checking for a relaxed throat while chanting A-U-M. (My time with Sri Bala Ratnam, incidentally, found me for some years afterwards chanting, on his advice, 81 rounds each morning with attention

to vibrating in my lower, middle, and upper lungs, feeling it in my chest, throat, and lips.) The sound and sensation of the rapid U was most pleasant. It took me somewhere but, as I was to later learn, nowhere near the technique the Tuvan people use. Now I had two sources of inspiration: on the one hand, a course that focused on both the breath and the chanting voice; and on the other hand, the culture of a people hidden in a barely known region in the Russian Federation using voice in a way I’d never before imagined to be possible. I smiled at the meanings attached to inspiration: to be motivated and to breathe. Inhalation and Exhalation. Inspiration and Aspiration. To inspire to aspire. This is what the arts can hope to do when much doesn’t seem to fall into place. By 1996 I’d worked in many schools as a visiting artist, aiming to inspire students to venture to the far reaches of their greatest wish and to go for it. I wondered how, through habit, we easily become comfortable if not trapped within the parameters of what we regard as our greatest pain and our greatest 15

pleasure, nobly declaring one must know one’s limits. On a practical level I provided means by which students could gain results quickly. For most this enabled them to become confident enough to become responsible for undertaking more involved tasks. 2010 saw me in Tuva. Fourteen years following my first encounter with the Tuvans, I was there. I was in the Republic of Tuva and had private music lessons in its capital city of Kyzyl: four with Zhenya Saryglar, a male member of the Tuvan National Orchestra, followed by ten with Choduraa Tumat, the founder of the first ever all-female throatsinging group, Tyva Kyzy (Daughters of Tuva). Before the lessons with Choduraa, I’d spent some days in the countryside with her and a handful of others, driving across the steppe, looking at yurts dotted in the far distance, staying overnight in a yurt and also camping in the taiga (forest), comfortable that I’d gotten to know her before ‘handing myself over’. The four-week period of my visit was nestled in the middle of 2010. January, I’d held an exhibition of portraits of ten women aged in the middle of a decade, from ages five to 85. The women who allowed me to paint them included Gertie Huddleston, one of the famed Joshua sisters who, incidentally, was shortly afterwards awarded the Northern Territory’s NAIDOC artist of the year; Judith Durham, singer, composer, and poet, formerly of the Seekers; my 15-year-old niece Malinda; and Marshie Perera Rajakumar, chemical engineer and owner and director of the Jhoom Bollywood Dance School. I included interview footage of the ten women, giving viewers the opportunity to see the subjects animated and to hear what they had to say.

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whether I had permission to visit Tuva. It wasn’t until the first business day of my return to Melbourne, ten weeks later, that I received my Russian visa. This was less than two weeks before my planned departure date. In Numbulwar I’d heard that the National Art Orchestra accompanied by Paul Grabowsky was in the community of Ngukkar, the former Roper River Mission, an Aboriginal community two hours south of ours. (Numbulwar is the former Rose River Mission.) Our areas had had cyclones during Easter, causing damage and longer-than-normal flooding of many roads. The National Art Orchestra’s visit to Ngukkar was part of the Crossing Roper Bar Northern Territory Tour, which began with a performance and talk at the opening of the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory’s Colour Country: Art from the Roper River exhibition in which Gertie Huddleston was represented. A visit to Numbulwar was planned at the end of May, weather and road conditions permitting. I’d put a notice on the school whiteboard heralding the possible visit. I was keen to meet Paul Grabowsky, keen to share my travel plans, keen to offload my anxiety regarding Tuva, keen to share the effect upon me of the 1996 episode of Access All Areas. A colleague told me I was brave. Brave, while in remote Australia, to plan a visit to remote Siberia? No. There are things one simply must do.

Tuva

In April, May, and early June 2010 I lived at, and taught all class levels of the primary and secondary school in the remote Aboriginal community of Numbulwar in South-east Arnhem Land. October, November, and early December I taught at the Aboriginal community of Angurugu on Groote Eylandt.

At the time I understood there to be fewer than 15 Australians reported to have ever visited the place. I wished to be within the physical space of authentic throatsingers. I wished to meet the people and to experience the land and culture from which this unique singing practice has sprung. And I wanted to see if I could include, as subjects, some of these people in my next art exhibition.

My time at Numbulwar preceded my overseas travel. I still did not know

In 1996 I hadn’t regarded myself a singer. My academic and professional life

concentrated on fine art, fiction writing, and community projects. I was not a singer, but I was free to be a nut with sound. Here and there I had been able to weave in experimental voice. Removing the carpet in my studio meant that silly voices could reverberate in the space. During full-time art studies in 1975 I created a sound sculpture exploring texture and cadences, and throwing the voice. 1983 I was allowed to include a music elective while undertaking a Bachelor of Arts degree, with a double major in Writing and Literature. The elective had an experimental music component. We created projects using voice and found objects for sounds. I remember how extraordinarily uplifting it was to orchestrate and hear my classmates sing the piece I’d created using abstract sounds and unconventional notation. I drew upon these experiences when in 2005, now formally qualified as a teacher, I began to bring abstract singing into the classroom. I reluctantly agreed, for a day, to teach four Italian classes at a primary school. I can’t speak Italian. Not to worry, I had been told: the lessons would be planned with worksheets available; and all classes would, during their final 30 minutes of their sessions, practise their Italian song for the end-of-year concert. The students began to shout their Italian songs at all directions within the four walls of their classrooms. When I gathered together their voices into abstract sounds, encouraging them to do so as one gentle yet powerful voice, the centre of both my palms warmed. I had discovered an invigorating yet relaxing activity I could juggle and build upon regularly thereafter with students over the following years. Even now, it is wonderful to always hear at least one student singing as she or he exits a class session. Even now, I don’t regard myself as a singer. I do not perform in the formal sense, but I do, and will always, thoroughly enjoy exploring breath and sound. I’d had an interlude exploring Western Harmonic Overtone Singing, enjoying its possibilities in the outdoors with likeminded people; and I delighted at, and regarded, the many, many people on YouTube who shared their demonstrations and enjoyment of both throatsinging and harmonic overtone singing, as delicious. The smiles at the completion of their generous demonstrations endeared them to me as distant friends.

Tuvans have many styles of throatsinging. Those best known to the West are: ●

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Sygyt: high flute-like singing when sounds dance freely above and around the timbral quality of a good throatsinger’s drone Khoomei: the constricted sound that rises ringing upwards from a tight belly, chest, and throat, yet does, at the same time, produce overtones Kargyraa: a very deep continuous gravelly growl that can vibrate through to hit the pit of the stomach of the listener.

The Tuvan technique of singing is physically demanding, requiring a tight belly, chest, and throat. Choduraa had arm-wrestled me during one lesson, encouraging me to bear down deeply. (This method has to be attributed to Otkun Dostay, the current manager of Tyva Kyzy.) Before leaving Tuva I considered what it now means for me to pursue this interest: to activate a tired if disused part of myself and draw up a voice from deep down there. It takes retraining, and yes, is said to be akin to learning to wiggle one’s ears. It intrigued me to consider the power of low, guttural sounds, possible only when the lower gut is engaged and the throat is strong. It has been proven that the strength in the waves of low sounds can extinguish a flame. Was the inspiration to develop such a demanding form of singing for a culture of people a spiritual one? Certainly, one has to engage physically, deeply, spiritually, and honestly. Without doubt, throatsinging is powerful both for the singer and for the listener. Attacked by a horde of Genghis Khan’s, it would not be the swords held menacingly erect and ready as they charge, but a collective kargyraa that might make victims shit themselves. Genghis’s general was said to be a Tuvan. Certainly the voice of a good throatsinger goes through me and has made me want to cry. Such encounters are both inspiring and humbling. 17

The Tuva journey 13 July 2010 At 2.00 a.m., I was waiting for the train from Beijing to Krasnoyarsk. Got chatting, as I do, to a Russian man who said he’d just spoken to an American who was also going to Tuva. To meet someone going to Tuva was rare, he said. This American guy turns out to know the guy with whom I’ve been in contact and another American who, coincidentally, visited the school at Numbulwar in the NT for one week. He is the tour manager for a Tuvan throatsinging group, Alash. He was going to Kyzyl, Tuva’s capital, to attend the wedding that Sunday between Alash’s manager, Sean Quirk (another American), and Sveta, a Tuvan woman. The couple already have three children. We flew to Krasnoyarsk on the same plane and travelled from Krasnoyarsk to Abakan in the same train carriage.

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Dora Levakis with Choduraa Tumat, founder and director of Tyva Kyzy (the Daughters of Tuva).

All trains in Russia run to Moscow time, so our train left later than was on the ticket. This meant we got into Abakan four hours later than planned. In a van was Sean, the guy about to get married, and three others ready to take us all to Kyzyl. Beautiful trip! It’s a small world that all these guys know each other and also know another throatsinging American who I had admired and e-mailed from YouTube. I was humbled by these coincidental meetings. We are invited to the wedding. Many throatsingers would be there.

Yesterday I posted some postcards but I was told it will be unlikely that people will receive them. We’ll see.

Next day I met an Australian woman who has been doing a Master’s paper on Tuvan music. I had found a blog by this person a year ago when she was asking advice on how to manage sub-zero temperatures. I’d e-mailed to tell this person I wanted to go to Tuva but was finding it difficult getting information. I had received no reply, but was yesterday told on the phone I would be introduced to some of the women musicians. This PhD student and a few of the other people might join us on our forthcoming ten-day trek through the Tuvan country. Six of the days will be on horseback. Involving more people will lead to lower costs.

Kyzyl is the capital of Tuva and is quite poor: many road repairs and old buildings. I have a room in the most expensive hotel at around $140 a night. Foreigners need to register visas for every day of our visit here, but so far no one has stopped me on street to check.

It’s quite hot here, fortunately, as there is no hot water in the whole of Kyzyl until the 18th. The water in the pipes is freezing cold: hard going at first but very refreshing after the shower. I will not go without washing! And I handwash my clothes daily.

I am openly stared at, and many people have wanted to take photos of me with them. My minimal Tuvan helps, but I wouldn’t get by in the long run without help. This place is dangerous at nightfall: the Tuvans do drink, and

can become violent at night. There are stabbings. I don’t push my luck. It doesn’t get dark until after 10 p.m. It’s a weird sensation.

19 July 2010 Yesterday I attended the 10-hour wedding of Sean and Sveta at a yurt camp about 20 km out of Kyzyl. I took footage and many photos and am very happy with these, but unfortunately the batteries for both the camera and the mobile phone ran out. This was unfortunate, because the singing on the bus ride home was extraordinary. Young and old joined in together with all forms of throatsinging (and all with perfect pitch!). One of the guys from the Tuvan group, Alash, and some of the woman, including the one next to me, sang melody of the song in a style akin to the Mongolian long song. My understanding of this style is that sung vowels are elongated and emotive. Effective, when singing across the steppe. The gorgeous woman sitting next to me motioned for me to join in but I couldn’t spoil the ambience. Instead I bemoaned the fact that I couldn’t record what they were doing and that a current companion was suddenly overtaken by the vodka etc. he had earlier enjoyed and wasn’t able to stand, let alone use his movie camera. However, I had recorded much of the singing during the wedding celebrations. One of the others from Alash, Ayan-Ool Sam, had earlier given me an informal lesson in Khoomei after I told him I’d seen him on YouTube. He was a sweetheart in the way that he kept a watchful eye over another drunken member of his group and over a tourist, making sure the tourist and I made it to our doorsteps. The wedding began formally with white dress and suit and tie before transforming into Tuvan style. The music was at first strident, interestingly Russian. The music that followed was, as you might guess, excitingly Tuvan. A few days earlier I’d met three members of a Finnish throatsinging group and was rapt to see them here. Being the bold person that I can be, I managed to get a sample of their singing. Another guy from Greece gave a demonstration also of his throatsinging and, delightfully, gave me a sample of Psarandontis, one of his favourite Greek singers. Steve Sklar and wife Johnna Morrow were also there. Johnna sang a song for Sean and Sveta, a song she’d sung at her own wedding.

So far I’ve had two formal throatsinging lessons and two lessons on the igil from Zhenya, one of the people I’d made contact with a few months ago. This morning I purchased an igil made by Aldar Tamdyn, a member of Chirgilchin, who makes the instruments for everyone here. I asked him to work his magic on my igil and filmed him. A little over a week ago he’d given me a demonstration in his workshop and, without asking, a tourist filmed him. If that was a problem, Aldar was too polite to say. Chirgilchin had been visiting Sydney in June. Obviously I couldn’t have gone as I was in the Northern Territory, but did anyone else know? I would have flown in for the concert without blinking an eye. Apparently Lori Anderson had invited them to be part of the Quiet Music Festival. Driving me to town today, Aldar told me he especially liked the wedding yesterday because it was good easy fun. He said that Tuvans nowadays often get violent. During the evening of the wedding celebrations, most male guests engaged in ‘Khuresh’, the Tuvan style of wrestling. All winners and losers were goodnatured. Every person, foreigner or local, who throatsings understands that one has to first find his or her Khoomei voice. During the lesson, Zhenya told me my kargyraa was good but that I should not go there yet. If I hear myself going into overtones, stop it. It’s easier he said, for beginners to create a kargyraa sound (a low, deep growl), but settling into this will disable one from finding a khoomei voice. To reach this voice requires engaging muscles in gut and throat. It’s quite exciting hearing all the examples given to me so far ... To get overtones over sounds that originate and emanate from the mouth is pleasurable but not what these people do. As mentioned already, the wedding was between Sean, an American guy, and Sveta, a local woman. Sean has been here for about six years and has already three children with Sveta. He is the manager for the throatsinging group Alash, is himself a member of the Tuvan National Orchestra, and has been given a medal from the president for his khoomei abilities and for his work in promoting Tuva. It was announced at the wedding that the president was gifting the couple a block of land on which they can build a house: a generous gift as most people can’t afford anything more than renting an apartment.

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(Top): The bride and groom, Sveta and Sean: the wedding at the yurt camp, 20 km out of Kyzyl. (Right): Dora being urged by a shaman to have yet another shot of vodka at the wedding.

In August 2009, immediately after sending an e-mail to a principal accepting a one-day-a-week, 13-week engagement teaching puppetry, I got onto the Tuva On Line newsletter and saw an article on Viktor Kuular, a puppetmaker here in Kyzyl. I printed the article and brought it with me, but was told he 20

wasn’t at the Centre any more and it seemed I wouldn’t find him. A few days ago I was walking around Kyzyl thinking I should really try to find this man. I charged up to the museum. Near the front stairs was a man with wooden dolls and animals spread on a cloth. I thought he was trying to sell them. When I approached he began to perform the most amazing finger puppetry. I asked his name and — it was Viktor. I pulled the article out of my bag and he confirmed it to be about him. I told him I was happy to find

Some of the wedding guests. This photo is a mere section of huge circle made from tables.

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him and he agreed to photos and a film. Our communicating was done with difficulty as he can’t speak English, and in fact very, very few people do. Russian is the formal language that all people speak. Viktor walked me down the road to the Post Office where I showed him photos of Australia and my paintings on my memory stick. He said a lot, but again, I didn’t fully understand. While crossing roads he’d courteously put his arm around me. After I showed him a photo of Lance he nodded and said, ‘Moosh’. I suspect he then understood Lance to be my boyfriend. Viktor took me to the internet cafe at Hotel Kyzyl. There I met Aldanay, a worker keen to learn English, who has good basics. After she helped me to print my photos of my paintings, I took this girl to the cafe Vostorg and helped her with English. Tomorrow we should be heading off an a 10-day tour. Five or six days will be on horseback. Will cost around $A1200.

20 July The trip into the taiga has been postponed until Thursday, so I’ve come to Hotel Kyzyl hoping to see again Aldanay, to offer her another informal English lesson over a cup of tea. She’s returning tomorrow, so I thought I’d use the internet just the same. It costs 42 rubles for the hour, which works out to be about ... $2.00. I came into town by taxi this time, as my host needed to register passports at the immigration office. It took a while moving from one building to another. First we had to alert them to our intention, then acquire photocopies, then pay the 2 ruble fee per day, then to take the lot back to the office. While waiting in each of those packed rooms I noticed young people readily giving up their seats to older people. One young boy’s face lit up when I spoke, so I asked the boy if he spoke English. This is very rare. He carefully but successfully engaged in a conversation with me.

Sveta, the bride, with her daughter Sonchalai Quirk.

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For the first eight days I stayed at the hotel I was in a good position to get my bearings, and yet far enough away from the city centre to allow for a good 30-to-40-minute walk into town. For the whole of those eight days I had to shower and handwash clothes in cold water. Icy cold water. I came to enjoy the after-effect. I am now staying for five nights at someone’s apartment, as a home stay, for 600 rubles a day. There was the option to rent the whole apartment for 3000 rubles a day between myself and another, but I decided that I wanted the Tuvan experience of being with a family. My host lives with her 24-year-old daughter. As mentioned, the two of them had just escorted us to the immigration office. After checking what they wanted to do, I told the other tourists I’d see them later. Another visitor said that music lessons here cost a lot in response to Westerners charging in their own countries a lot for throatsinging lessons they learn from the Tuvans. I had been trying for six months to get information on how to get here and what was going to be happening this year with regard to throatsinging. Because 2010 happens to be the International Year for Tourism in Tuva, information was finally posted on the Friends of Tuva website. I’d e-mailed the FoT a year ago for information but received a quick reply that they had no idea what was planned for 2010. After the ten-day tour I will most probably continue the home-stay. The home-stay is not supposed to include food, but our host has graciously cooked a couple of meals for us. I’d already had breakfast this morning, but before leaving for the day was presented with a table set with meat dumplings in a dill and spring onion soup. It was lovely but I was a little embarrassed.

21 July 2010 Last night I cancelled my participation in the tour, including the horse trek to the taiga! The departure date had changed three times, and confirmation

for the price came two nights ago. Because I’m expecting to be at my physical worst in a week’s time I decided it wasn’t going to be worth it to suffer on horseback, particularly when two of the others who would also be going had led me to feel I couldn’t rely on them if in a vulnerable situation. Yes, these two had been drinking, but enough is enough. It was a difficult decision. I was warned I was going to offend some very important people, a response that actually helped consolidate my resolve. Who was the trip going to be for anyway? Today I met with Choduraa Tumat, a leading Tuvan female singer. The women are going on a four-day trip to meet up with some other women.. I asked if I could join them. They said yes, so we should be heading out on Friday. I will pay 10,000 rubles, around $A400, and will share costs for gifts of chocolate and biscuits. I also met with C.’s manager and discussed the possibility of including the women in my next exhibition. I’ve been wanting to meet with Choduraa for over a week now. My request for portrait sittings happened after they agreed to my joining them on trip. Last night I also sat with the Greek guy, who offered to take me to other places. He told me about a festival that was staged before we arrived (why weren’t we told about this when discussing date options?) and told me how a master approached him on hearing his attempts at throatsinging and held his hand tightly while he sang the various styles to him, saying, ‘Do it like this!’ I spent some time looking at this guy’s many photos (on his camera). I learned two lessons from the discomfort of last night: to look after myself and to stand strong with my decisions. I have exhausted myself over the past 18 months doing so much at great cost. There has to be room for goodwill and to be able to give some things away — but I’ve exhausted my resources too often.

27 July I arrived back from the trip with the women today, including two of the women from Tyva Kyzy and a Russian couple and their two children (who publish some of the Tuvan CDs). We had to hire a driver. For the first leg of journey, Tyva Kyzy’s manager drove us. He delighted in saying that Dora will 23

A van we encountered upon leaving Kyzyl selling kvas, a drink made of fermented wheat; non-alcoholic and very refreshing. We first found one of these vans in Krasnoyarsk, the first place in Russia I’d visited. 24

A public toilet on the steppe.

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open the door for Tyva Kyzy to get to Australia. The driver for the rest of the trip was a typical Tuvan. We stopped at Erzin, spending the night in a five-star hotel: no running water (nowhere out in the country has running water!) and outdoor dunnies: a type of long drop that has a short drop. One has to squat and inch around a previous person’s droppings. The short drop means it stinks terribly. The temptation to move droppings away with a stick is arrested by the promise of fresh aromas (!). All country toilets, and many here in Kyzyl, are like this. You have to carry a good store of toilet paper. Early morning rain provides some relief to the smell. At this hotel we were met by a woman from the Cultural Centre who may refer to the visit in the local newspaper. Another two women came to the room, granddaughters of a famous Tuvan singer: daughters of a mother quite competent in the art of Tuvan singing at a time of strong cultural and political taboos. I asked if health issues can arise from the practice of khoomei. One of the women indicated that, while anything can be harmful when forced, it is believed that respiratory problems can develop from this practice. The opinion was expressed that to do khoomei well, one will have a god-given gift. You can either do it or you can’t. Next morning one of sisters showed us documents and photos from the past. We then drove to visit the yurt of the other sister, who gave us lunch. She was going to kill a sheep for us but we had said we’re not that important. Next day we camped near mountain mineral springs. I didn’t climb. Too heady. In the evening, when at the mountain, we all had to perform. Me too. No way would I dare to sing overtone. It would have insulted them. I sang ‘Morningtown Ride’ instead. Last night we drove to another yurt; twin yurts actually: somebody’s country dwelling. We spent the night there, toasty and warmed by the wood-fuelled stove placed in the centre of the space; its chimney protruding above the yurt’s apex. It was all you would expect from a Tuvan country home with animals and children running around and up the hills. Everyone has a winter and a summer homestead. 26

30 July This morning I took an apartment for myself and was very happy that I decided to do this. Two nights ago I’d discovered another guy was being brought into the current apartment. I didn’t want more of those beer-fuelled voices echoing through the walls in the early hours of the morning. The owner and daughter of the apartment have planned to leave today for Mongolia, so the current level of polite peace at night would fall through the window. The next morning (yesterday) I received a call from the woman whose tour I had refused saying that the price for the rooms was going up — no, not from that day, but from the beginning of our taking them. My impulse was to tell her to go jump, as we’d taken the apartment at an agreed price. The increase amounted to $7.00 a day, which is not much, but the principle annoyed me. Nonetheless the other tenant paid, so I thought I’d better keep the peace and follow suit. Anyway, I had hoped to leave. As luck once again (yet again!) found me, I managed to secure a lovely apartment all to myself for a tiny bit less than the new price for the current place. Last night I received a text from a distraught young woman wanting to talk. She was being hassled by an older Tuvan man, whom we know and is integral to the network. He had brazenly grabbed and kissed her, leaving her shocked and not knowing what to do. She was not used to saying ‘no’, and didn’t want to make trouble. I insisted she ring a Tuvan friend of ours, as two things had become clear over the past few days: he was testing her boundaries and the locals weren’t sure what her boundaries were. We chatted at length last night. Interesting how the edge of one’s comfort zone can be compromised, especially when one wants to please. I’d acquiesced to the intimidatory demand for more money, but apart from that I feel I would be doing no one a service if I patronised him or her at my expense. The singing lesson today left me feeling as if I’d done 100 or more sit-ups. I was engaging muscles that I didn’t know I had. It is hard work but good. I might have mentioned that the Finnish guy who has been heading the Finnish throatsinging society in Finland for over 10 years recommended that I have lessons with Choduraa. And, yes, she’s good. When on the country trip, one of our group, a Russian, asked if I knew

A yurt in Tuva. Note the pole: the bucket with the peg beneath needs to be depressed for so the water will flow. There is no plumbing outside of Kyzyl.

Russian. When I replied, ‘I’ve come to Tuva, not Russia’, a Tuvan told me to ‘watch what you say’. I later learned of financial reliance and of a pride in being Russian. All children learn Russian, with Tuvan being taught as a choice. Some families openly want to be identified as Russian, regarding Tuvan as a primitive option — but not so much in the country areas. My limited Tuvan is very helpful, and as its alphabet is very close to the Russian one, I’m able to decipher many shop signs (all in Russian). ‘Bank’, for example, is phonetically spelled as bank though the letters are Russian.

People often speak to me in paragraphs ... it’s funny that they don’t animate their speech; they don’t mime to help the explanation. Often we end up looking at each other and laughing. I say, ‘Bil bess men’ (‘I don’t understand’). While we were in the country the children at one yurt home sat on top rail of stockyard and laughed at my English. One of the group started to imitate my sound so I gave them all an English lesson, pointing to things and naming them. This is a delightful experience among the rolling hills of Tuva. 27

We had driven across the steppe to get to this yurt, Tuvan music playing on CD, the driver throwing in a line of throatsinging here and there ... and giving his throatsinging version of a didgeridoo.

one of the women put her traditional costume on me and another of the women attached her long hairpiece to my head. I look like a Tuvan matriarch. The Museum of Tuva is in the background.

The grandmother to these kids motioned to them and they cleared off down and up the huge hill, far away. These kids were all younger than ten. After milking the cows, an older woman mounted a horse and took off into the distance. It was suggested to one of us who would have a lengthier stay in Tuva that a month here in the country would show how hard women work; demonstrating why throatsinging isn’t traditionally women’s work.

I was right in guessing over a year ago that I needed to learn the Tuvan language to help sing in their style. Choduraa uses the Tuvan vowel sounds in each lesson. I’m pleased to say that I have now memorised all the vowels correctly.

Have I mentioned that it has been found that Tuvans share the same genes as Native Americans? You can see it. The women are exquisite beauties.

Eating out is relatively cheap here. The Lonely Planet guide refers to the cafeteria called Vostorg. It has an excellent variety of food for around $5.00. I lunched on a cabbage roll stuffed with meat and rice, a slice of layered something with pickled herring, a white root vegetable, a type of gentle mayonnaise and beetroot; a salad of carra ...

2 August Turns out I have to leave Tuva on Wednesday rather than Thursday to catch the plane out of Russia at 2 a.m. Friday. More long stretches of time waiting without adequate sleep. There will be a minibus taking me from here at 4 p.m. and arriving at Krasnoyarsk at 5 a.m. I will then have to wait until midnight that next day to board the plane out of Russia. I will then have a 10–12-hour wait at both the Beijing and Kuala Lumpur airports — longer than the train travel. I’m tired at the thought of it and my pockets ache. I’m beginning to see daylight through the bottom of both of them. Today I had a double lesson with Choduraa: an hour on igil and an hour singing; and will repeat this tomorrow and on Wednesday. Lessons cost 1000 rubles an hour, roughly $40.00. It would have been crazy to come here and not have lessons. I’d indicated earlier that the singing is physically demanding, and for me, when I have barely, if ever, accessed some of these muscles, it is safer that I learn under the guidance of someone who is a master and, by the way, a damn good teacher. Today Choduraa arm-wrestled me while I sang so I could engage my deep muscles more deeply, and I continued in the push-up position. Ha, ha. This, she said, is the method of Otkun Dostai (Tyva Kyzy’s manager). Yesterday, while photographing and interviewing the women of Tyva Kyzy, 28

shit ... the internet cut off and I lost the rest of this e-mail. So what did I say? There was quite a bit more. Oh well. In a few days I’ll be back home. I would love to be teaching again, yes, for some income; but also to ground myself with kids. But I’ll need to make good start of a couple of paintings.

2 August (extra) It seems they’ve given me an extra 12 minutes as I lost most of last e-mail. I can’t remember all that was lost ... I mentioned that a dog bit me over a week ago. It seemed to sense my vulnerablility as I was very ill. A big dog that I thought was friendly, came up to my waist, sniffed me, growled, then bit me. Luckily, I’d lost weight as I might have lost a chunk of flesh. The bite mark is only just healing now. In the Lonely Planet guide, Sean, the guy whose wedding I attended, is mentioned as a contact. Even as an American, Sean has an impressive command of both the Tuvan and Russian languages. During my first meeting with him, during those hours driving from Abakan to Kyzyl, he demonstrated an entertaining ability to impersonate others. I imagine his humour and his

ear for Tuvan have activated his ability to make others at the other end of a phone believe he is a native of Tuva. I was told today that the average wage here is around 14,000 rubles a month. This is probably why at least five different Tuvans choked when I mentioned the cost of 30,000 rubles for the trip to the taiga. I guess these people have to find the balance between a fair price to charge for one’s own services and what is a fair fee to ask of Westerners. Bye for now Dora.

Later ... In March 2012, I included Tuvan musicians as subjects in my solo art show, ‘Of Remote Place’. Portrait paintings, photographs, and audiovisual displays of interviews and observations of all subjects were on exhibition. In July 2012, I returned to Tuva for further material and as guest at the ‘Dembildei’ festival; the fiftieth birthday celebrations for Kongar-ool Ondar, Tuva’s greatest living musical treasure. With respect to the difficulty of their art, I competed on stage, alongside native Tuvans, and performed a live mood and portrait painting. Read the story of this trip below. — Dora Levakis, April 2013

Postscript: My second trip to Tuva, July 2012 5 July 2012 It has been very hard to access the internet this trip. I can have 20 minutes or so right now. I am in the room of the group Tyva Kyzy at the Tuvan cultural centre, typing this as the women practise their music. Five women are singing while one also plays the kengirge, a large frame drum — the drum standing from floor to knee. Another plays the khomus, the Tuvan jaw harp. Another plays the byzaanchy, a string instrument with a bull’s head, and two others each play, while seated, a chadagan, a stringed instrument similar to a zither that is plucked. A pity you can’t hear them ... Kyzyl is abuzz with preparations for Kongar-ool Ondar’s fiftieth birthday

celebrations ... I’ve agreed to paint live on stage (ha, ha ... do I sound nervous?). Yesterday, I gave him a gift of a dilly bag made by women in Numbulwar and a box of Aussie macadamia chocolates with koala on the box. For those who don’t know, the dilly bag features around the neck of David Gulpilil in the opening scene of the movie Australia. The dilly bag is made with tightly woven pandanus leaves and string made of currajong bark — it should be able to hold water. I returned to Kyzyl two days ago, after spending a little over a full day at Lake Chagytai with four of these women, and with Choduraa’s family. Lake Chagytai, at the foot of the northern slopes of the Tannu-Ola Range, is one of Tuva’s largest lakes. We’d intended to be there two days, but along the way, in the middle of the steppe, our hire car, with hire driver, had twice broken down. The first time we waited for over an hour for another car to 29

bring a part that would repair the vehicle’s axle. I liked the way all, young and old, played soccer to pass the time. The second time we broke down, it was for good. We were 2 kilometres from the lake and were prepared to walk with luggage, but it began to rain. A Tuvan man piled the ten of us into his old Russian jeep and drove us the rest of the way. He was delighted to hear I’m from Australia, and called me ‘kangaroo’, something about which two of the women are still laughing. (Goodness, you should hear Choduraa’s amazing singing right now .... there’s a strong chance you will be able to in near future!) I’m somewhat humbled by, yet again, the good luck that comes my way in Tuva. I have so far secured two world-famous Tuvans for my next art show, one of whom is the first Tuvan I’d heard of and whom I greatly admire. Lake Chatygai is a huge freshwater lake, but one can only drink the water by pouring some from a bottle into a hand-operated pump. It can then be used for drinking and cooking. Choduraa’s brother had caught a bagful of three varieties of fish, affording us one each. His darling five- and seven-year-old children were entertained by seeing a foreigner and took charge of my camera. The five-year-old followed me around. Here, at Lake Chatygai, I had my first Russian banya. This was a two-roomed structure made of logs, with a wood-fuelled heater heating one room and the water in another. I had first to whip my body with a bunch of aromatic twigs. I’m not sure of its name, but noted that bunches of juniper branches are often sold at markets and at roadside stalls for this use in the banya. Using a ladle, we scooped hot then cold water into a basin to pour over ourselves ... You all know the paintings of Degas of the women at bath, using a tin basin? This is what I used. I smile broadly as I type this! I have had perpetual headaches that began on the Melbourne–Hong Kong– Beijing legs of the trip, and don’t respond to pain killers. I’m fine, but if not for this I’d be a completely happy bunny hopping around the steppe ... Pardon this, as it’s a rushed email.

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9 July 2012 I had a romantic thought that it would be lovely if I received news while in Tuva that I had been successful with my recent entries into the Doug Moran Portrait Prize. This is indeed what has happened! I have received news that my portrait of Absolom, Kyle and Katrina has made it into the finals. The portrait of Gerald Murnane that I wanted to enter into the Archibald — but couldn’t as it clashed with my exhibition — made it into the semi-finals. This evening I painted live on stage while a musician from Hun Huur Tu played the igil and sang. Just before this I sat in the audience thinking I was crazy for agreeing to do this. My painting was largely gestural, as you might imagine, and I wondered from the few claps whether the audience didn’t like it. But an elderly Tuvan woman thanked me, and a Russian man, the photographer for the Cultural Centre, later sat at my table in the cafe beaming from ear to ear as he said, ‘I can tell you are a real artist.’ Isn’t that delightful? These past few days have been abuzz with activities around Kongar-ool’s fiftieth birthday. Friday night was the opening, with extraordinarily good examples of throatsinging on stage, traditional Mongolian dancing, a shaman’s dance, and a fusion of Tuvan Khoomei and beatboxing from Shodekeh, an American professional beatboxer who is here as a special guest. A film crew is following him around, planning to make a sequel to the Genghis Blues documentary that brought Kongar-ool world fame. We all piled outside for the opening dance and procession. No-one told me that, as a visitor from another country, I was supposed to be a part of this. There was an especially made poster with ‘Australia’ written in Russian. (I’m hoping I will be allowed to bring it home.) I was at one end of the crowd, with military men keeping the partitions intact. I saw the foreigners gather around the Buddhist prayer wheel in the square and thought, Oh, I might have to be there. Then the announcements came: each country was called out, and the visitor walked a guard of honour with beautiful Tuvan ladies gesturing and received a welcome scarf at the top of the stairs. I was on the crowd side at the top of the stairs as I heard ‘Australia’ repeated a few times. A Tuvan carried my poster. I inched my way to the security guard and said

‘Australia’, as I patted my chest. He motioned for me to go forward, so I walked along the edge of the crowd to the area where the others with posters had gone, and was given the Australia sign by the Tuvan lady. We then marched into the cultural centre. Kongar-ool shook my hand and kissed me. We’d already met. Two days before I gave him a dilly bag made by the women of Numbulwar; and gave him one of my cat cards. A journalist later asked me if I was the one who gave Kongar-ool the artwork for his birthday. I was a little puzzled. Perhaps someone else had given him a painting. The journalist then told me that Kongar-ool was showing everyone my cat card and saying, ‘Look at this.’ That’s delightful too; but his delight in the detail of the cat card may have been the reason he didn’t shake my hand tonight after my painting act elicited something more abstract ... The whole of yesterday was comprised of singing competitions. Wow: so many terrific Tuvans. I was reassured when a couple I’d already met two years ago when I last visited Tuva, a Norwegian man and Finnish woman, told me we are comic relief for the Tuvans; that, good or bad, we would be laughed at, but that the Tuvan people appreciate foreigners respecting their music traditions; and, with our failed attempts we show their young people how hard it is for us. So ... I went on stage and received applause for first saying, ‘Ekii’ (hello) in Tuvan. Pipa and Morton were in Tuva for their fifth and seventh times and were damn good. I’d already heard them practise in the rehearsal rooms of Tyva Kyzy. Today began with a lecture on the history of Tuvan music. Choduraa made a presentation, followed by both Morton and Pipa. Pipa spoke in English while Choduraa interpreted. Morton is quite knowledgeable on the discography of Tuvan music. Pipa spoke on the teaching of music without notation. Following this talk, a cute little Tuvan girl came on stage in traditional dress — what a darling. Kongar-ool then introduced the judging panel for yester-

day’s competitors, and so the prize giving began. Pipa and Morton both received a certificate and gifts ... and then my name was called ... Okay, so it really was a thankyou for participating and showing interest. I walked on stage and received my certificate in Russian script: surname first, followed by ‘Dope’. The ‘p’ is pronounced ‘r’, and the ‘e’ is the dative form of ‘Dora’, which is to say that the ‘e’ makes it ‘For Dora’. Yes, I immediately saw the comic side of this. I’m a dope — I tried to perform Dymchyk Khoomei! I’m sure you’ll all line up on my return to hear how I do it ... After I had received my certificate, the cute little girl handed me gifts of Kongar-ool’s latest book (in Russian), a CD of his, and a book of postcards. I then shook the hands of each of the judges, shook Konar-ool’s hand, and walked off the stage giggling to myself. As Pipa and Morton had performed twice — once each as soloists and again as a duo — they were also awarded the People’s Choice prize; the same prize that Paul Pena was awarded in Genghis Blues. (I have a copy of this DVD and can lend it to anybody who is interested.) We performed alongside the Tuvans themselves, from the beginners to the advanced. Tyva Kyzy performed, and the group was awarded a lamb. I’ve come home with Choduraa tonight and ... where was that lamb? In the boot of the taxi, the poor thing. Tomorrow her brother will slaughter the lamb, Tuvan style, as is depicted in the DVD Genghis Blues ... All the women, the family, Pipa and Morton, and I will join in the festivities. (Oh, my god.) I’m staying in the most delightful rustic environment; I love being here, living the Tuvan way, rather than in an apartment. As I promised I wouldn’t take photos, I won’t describe the environment either. A pity, but I must respect my friend’s feelings. It’s now 2.30 a.m. and there will be an early start, so I’d better go ... — Dora Levakis, July 2012, now included in the combined article, April 2013

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Jennifer Bryce has been a long-time friend of Melbourne fans without ever joining fandom. She has spent many years as a music educator and researcher, and has taken partial retirement in order to write ... and travel.

Good horn, good brakes, good luck: A month in India by Jennifer Bryce

Sunset on our houseboat, Kerala.

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It’s 5.30 a.m. and golden lights are subdued by fog as my plane touches down in Delhi. The shape looming next to my window is a Spice Jet — a plane specially designed for transporting spices? Much later I learn it’s the name of a domestic airline. Soon I’m sitting in a little coffee shop waiting at International Arrivals for Anne who is coming in a few hours’ time from England. Take life one step at a time. Step One, have a Pepsi. No thanks. I sip my sweetened milky coffee — the only kind you can get — my first transaction in rupees. I can hear and smell the gentle bubbling of oil making Indian delicacies. Not ready for those just yet. One thing I hadn’t expected in India was efficiency. We see so many pictures of rusty-looking trains with people hanging out of the windows. And I recall that the Hindu conception of time is very different from the Western one. But to my surprise, everything works and is punctual. Anne’s plane lands and we meet up — exactly according to schedule. A driver from the hotel is there to meet us. As I sit in the back seat — can’t do up seat belt as the clip is covered over with towelling — I try to figure out which is the correct side of the road to drive on. Ultimately I realise it’s the left. But the only traffic rules seem to be: sound your horn and accelerate through any gap in the traffic, know the exact size of your vehicle as there will be less than a centimetre to spare on each side, bicycles kind of give way to tuk tuks, tuk tuks to motor bikes, motor bikes to cars. Through all of this buses assert their priority, tooting loudly in minor sixths. It’s best to be a cow. It’s pouring with rain the first morning when we set off to validate our rail passes. We plunge into the throbbing, hectic life that is Delhi, taking a tuk tuk. The driver knows a little English and offers us ‘a very good price’. There are things like taxi meters in the back of some tuk tuks, but none of them seem to work. We have been cautioned to confirm a price before going anywhere. The driver is friendly. After a little while he has a chat in Hindi on his mobile phone. At the station we assume that the main entrance is straight in front of us — everything milling with seemingly hundreds of tuk tuks, people, animals, food preparation. But no, an obliging man confidently leads us down to the other end of the building where another man, seemingly X-raying luggage, asks whether we want the Government Tourist Office — Street scene in Old Delhi. 33

how does he know? — ‘It has moved,’ he says. We are pretty confident that it is in the main station building. ‘No, Madam. It has moved.’ A hint of exasperation. He leads us up some stairs. ‘This is where it was.’ The area is clearly abandoned. ‘I can take you there, it is just a short taxi ride from here.’ — How can he leave that important X-raying he was doing? — A taxi driver is conveniently nearby and agrees to take us to the new office for a very low fee. What else can we do? Off we go and soon we are climbing stairs to what is clearly a tourist office, but not much sign of government.

to be taken in by a scam like that.

The gentleman appears to be looking at train timetables on his computer screen. ‘It is most unfortunate but at present the trains are very unreliable. They are getting held up by the very bad fog. There are many cancellations.’

The man we see is called Raj. He offers tea. I ask for his business card.

Fog? Trains run on lines. Fog might delay them a bit, but, cause them to be cancelled? — Why? ‘Madam, the trains come from the North. There is a lot of heavy fog in the mountains.’ ‘Most surprising. Delhi is the capital. Surely most services start in Delhi?’ ‘No Madam. You have come at an unfortunate time ... You should consider cashing in your train tickets. We can provide an excellent service with a chauffeur. He can drive you all around Rajasthan for a very good price.’ Why weren’t these cancellations headline news? we think. We had read The Hindu Times at breakfast. ‘We’ll think about it,’ we say, as we descend the stairs from the rather makeshift office.

Once again we are very grateful — and the taxi costs almost nothing. This time the words ‘Government Tourist Office’ are painted on the building. But apart from this, it looks much like the previous place.

Raj pulls open a drawer. I can’t see what’s inside it but he seems to contemplate which card to select. Certainly it says ‘Government of India’ in plain blue print. But there are no emblems. None of the usual paraphernalia you find on government stationary. He has crossed out the name Javed on it, and Javed’s mobile number and has handwritten his own name, with no phone number. The most prominent printing on the card, in red, says, ‘Perfect Holiday Travels’. Anne and I haven’t had a chance to speak privately, but it is clear that we have both smelled a rat. It is also clear that we are quite enjoying this adventure. What will they come up with next? Raj reiterates the story of the most unfortunate situation with the fog. Not only could his office provide a car to tour Rajasthan at a very good price, but he would be prepared to write to the railway office in the UK that issued our tickets and ensure that they send us a refund. For this, however, we should hand in our tickets to him by the end of the day. ‘We’ll think about it,’ we say, as we sip our tea.

‘Did that guy say he was the Government Tourist Office?’ he asks.

While we think about it, Raj is prepared to provide us with a driver for a half-day tour of Delhi at a very good price. As it is still raining and the museum we had intended to visit is closed, we accept the offer of the tour. We will make a decision, we say, by the end of the afternoon.

‘Yes — but we realise it’s not.’ We feel almost smug. Of course we’re not going

And we do have a very good tour. We puddle around the Jama Masjid

At the foot of the stairs we are met by another man who happens to have very good English.

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‘I can take you to the real Government Tourist Office,’ says the man.

barefoot. We are taken on a rickshaw ride through the Old Delhi market area — thick bunches of electricity wires drooping precariously above the shoppers. There is a silver market, a wedding market, and, incongruously it seems, a market for medical textbooks. Back in the car we leave the narrow chaotic streets for some of the British legacy — the architect Lutyens’ vision (in the 1930s) for a new India. At one end of a long avenue is India Gate and at the other, Parliament House and the President’s residence of almost Versailles-like proportions — a garden of topiary, buttresses that feature Ganesh the elephant. Then, for the first time, I experience a functioning Hindu temple — the temple to Lakshmi — Birla Mandir. We leave our shoes in a special room and walk up the marble stairs. When I first see young men jumping up and hitting a bell, I think they are being disrespectful — but it’s the opposite. That’s what you do when you enter a temple to pray. People offer garlands of fresh golden flowers to Lakshmi and Shiva. I had expected the outer walls to be bare stone, but they seem to be painted terracotta and cream — I find this aesthetically jarring; it reminds me a bit of the City Baths. But inside there is a richness; cool white marble sets off the vibrancy of the brightly coloured statues of gods and the golden floral offerings. At the end of the tour we gently decline the offer to cash in our rail tickets and this is quietly accepted. In the evening we try to go to a concert of Indian music and dancing, but for some obscure Indian reason a special pass is required to get in (no tickets for sale) — surprising, as it was advertised in the Delhi Diary. We are happy to avail ourselves of the hotel’s bar facilities (little do we know that this is to be one of the few places where we can get half decent wine). We check with the hotel’s tourism desk and all trains are running on time. As well as being struck by Indians’ efficiency I am also struck by their persistence and initiative. We will come across many drivers and other people connected with tourism who are able to converse — with a limited vocabulary relating to tourism — in English, French, Spanish, and a Chinese language, for example. To my amazement these people say that they have never been Jantar Mantar Observatory, Delhi: for tracking position of the Moon.

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Taj Mahal ethereal despite the tourists. 36

Oh no, we stride purposefully towards our carriage. ‘WS’ on our ticket stands for ‘Window Seat’ not ‘wait listed’. We have another day in Delhi — wonderful Mughal miniature paintings in the National Museum (the detail of life reminds me a bit of Breughels with the addition of glittering gods). A path, now covered with crystal, along which Indira Gandhi took her last steps before assassination by Sikh body guards. The Jantar Mantar, a 200-year-old observatory with massive structures such as a sundial and instruments to align the positions of stars, built by Maharaja Singh II — we will see a similar one in Jaipur.

Fatehpur Sikri.

to school — not even at the age of five, and they can’t read or write at all — not even in Hindi. They learned the languages from tourists. Puts us Australians to shame. There is also a persistence, however, in duping tourists at the New Delhi Central Station. When we return two days later to catch the train to Agra — having prudently decided to take the hotel car rather than a tuk tuk — we are met at the entrance (the real entrance this time) by a man seemingly checking tickets. ‘Excuse me madam, but you are wait listed,’ he points to ‘WS’ on our tickets, ‘you will have to go to the office upstairs.’

Agra is as frenzied as Delhi — until you enter the grounds of the Taj Mahal and then, even with hundreds of tourists, there is a sense of awe and serenity. We have all seen pictures of this structure, built by Shah Jahan, a mausoleum for his favourite wife who died in childbirth. Today it looms somewhat eerily out of mist; immense pure white marble yet a gentle touch of femininity with the floral designs on the arches. I like to believe the story that Shah Jahan designed his own mausoleum, a black Taj on the other side of the Yamuna River that would balance the symmetry of this monument to his wife. A couple of days later we go to the gardens where foundations of what may have been the beginnings of the black Taj lie; gardens where the trees are closely pruned to ensure that courting couples will do nothing more daring than sit and talk. It is in Agra that I first become aware of India’s self-sufficiency. You feel as though nothing is wasted. Yes, there are piles of rubbish lying around — it seems to be mainly plastic bags and rubble — evidence of a lack of infrastructure (no wheelie bins or regular rubbish collection) rather than blatant wastage. I think of this as I watch women making fuel out of cow pats. The cows graze freely on the banks of the Yumana River. The dung is gathered, dried out over several days and then shaped into disks that will burn well. We go by car to Fatehpur Sikri, some 34 kilometres from Agra. It was the capital of the Mughal empire under Akbar, but only for a short time. Now it is a solid red sandstone ghost town (or rather, palace complex) because it had to be abandoned after about 16 years mainly because of a shortage of fresh water. Around the Sikri Palace Akbar played hide and seek and other 37

about $20 a night we have an ensuite with a hot shower (that sprays all over the bathroom) and a toilet with no paper. When we ask for more blankets they are provided. There is a balcony and a leafy courtyard, lit by fairy lights in the evening, where meals and refreshments are provided, it seems, at any time of day. On the first evening we hear loud sounds rather like a brass band coming from the street. We run out. It is a wedding. People are parading and dancing down the street. The young nervous- looking groom wearing a white

games with his wives in the courtyards and gardens, but he also worked towards making India a centre where different cultures were accepted and melded together. To this end he married Hindu, Muslim, and Christian wives. Each group had its own quarters appropriate to its beliefs — the Christian quarters, for example, being in the shape of a cross. In Indian Studies I at Melbourne University more than 40 years ago we wrote essays about the ‘syncretic’ nature of Indian culture. Here is solid proof of that syncretism. Fatehpur is the religious part of the complex, with a huge temple where we are encouraged to buy lengths of material to be made into dresses for schoolgirls. The ability to syncretise cultures seems to continue today — back in Agra we have a pleasant meal at a restaurant called Zorba the Buddha. We are staying in one of the amazingly good cheap guest houses one finds in India. We are ‘upgraded’ to a room with hot water. This means that for Indian wedding band amplifiers. 38

jewelled hat sits astride a beautifully groomed horse. The music is amplified by some kind of generator contraption that is towed by a truck. The Indian efficiency falls down a little when our train to Udaipur is one and a half hours late. There is nothing much we can do but stand on the platform and wait for it; a few beggars — one crawling — rats scuttling around in the rubbish, women in saris laden with jewels, young men selling food jumping on and off moving trains, and a horrible burnt oil smell to which I am becoming accustomed. Over all this a woman’s recorded voice, with beautiful English vowels, constantly announces arrivals and departures, every-so-often inserting, ‘May I have your attention please.’ When the train does come, signs on the platform light up to indicate exactly where our carriage will stop. Passenger names are on lists at the entrances to the carriages. Our names are there. Minutes later we lie in our sleeping bunks, lulled by a gentle rhythm as the train carries us across a darkened Rajasthan.

near fountain may be slipper avoid photography by climbing on it — a literal translation from Hindi perhaps? We go to a market where we can’t resist buying some fresh vegetables to be made into our own salad that evening, then we visit Uzman’s ‘family’ — the connections are uncertain. It seems that his uncle is an artist who paints beautiful miniatures, a family tradition. His wife has her own business painting on silk. A contrast with this is the Maharaja’s vintage car museum — several 1920s Rolls Royces, a 1940s MG TC, more recently the Maharaja seems to have favoured Mercedes. A few kilometres out of Udaipur is Tiger Lake — a natural lake that is the source of Udaipur’s water supply. We pass through farmland; the workers wave to us. There are many women labourers building fences, carrying the heavy stones on their heads yet beautifully dressed in bejewelled saris. Tuk tuk travel is the way to go. You experience so much — the rural smells, the detail of street life, what is sold in the shops, the fruit on market stalls ... And on trains you meet people. We take the train to Jodhpur.

We wake up in Udaipur, the city of lakes. Many of these lakes are artificial. They were constructed in the fourteenth century — a clever system of damming, whereby one lake overflows into another and no water is lost. As recently as 2005 the lakes have been dry from lack of rainfall. But we are fortunate. Our hotel overlooks Lake Pichola, full of water. I’ve never been to Lake Como, but I suspect this is just as serene. There is a rooftop restaurant and breakfast is included in our meagre tariff. Our room has a window nook from which we can glimpse the water. It is a touristy place, and there is some pressure to buy saris or miniature paintings, but there is also a sense of freedom and it is much easier to walk around. We walk by the lake and observe women washing clothes, slapping them with blocks of wood. We walk into an evening temple service — a constantly rung piercingly loud temple bell reverberates through one’s body — forcing a physical participation although, intellectually, we are unsure of the ritual. On another evening we walk to a concert of fabulous dancing; intricate work with a marionette and a middle-aged woman performs a water dance, balancing more and more pots on her head — ultimately about ten. One evening we have an up- market Indian meal, finishing with cardamom rice pudding served on a bed of edible rose petals. When Uzman takes us on a tuk tuk tour we visit lush cool gardens: Surface 39

Udaipur. 40

The second-class compartments have bunks and many passengers choose to sleep, even if all of the travel is during the day. A rather rotund businessman joins us in our compartment. He has a succession of very loud phone conversations in Hindi. He sounds rather desperate and I imagine that he’s trying to clinch some deal. At last he takes off his pointy court shoes and goes to sleep. I expect him to snore, but he doesn’t. When he wakes up he is ready to chat. He works for the dairy industry — some kind of quality assurance. (I had him as a used car salesman.) He travels in this area once a month, checking procedures for milk distribution. India has one of the biggest dairy industries in the world. I hadn’t associated milk with India — in fact I wasn’t sure whether they milked the sacred cows. They do. After this I become very aware of the extraordinary number of milk cans carried on motor bikes. We are to change trains at Ajmer. We should have a couple of hours to see the temple there. First we must store our luggage. The train arrives on time and we look for a sign to cloak luggage. This is when we meet Mr Biswas. There is a small queue with young men milling around, in the way Indians do, trying to sell us luggage locks at grossly inflated prices. We join the queue and after a while realise that at the end is a man sitting at a desk in the luggagestoring room doing ... absolutely ... nothing. He is staring ahead. Not at us. He is just sitting there. After a few moments I ask a woman ahead of me in the queue, who looks as though she might speak English, ‘Do we go in?’ ‘He just needs a few minutes,’ she says. ‘Oh.’ So we stand and try to ward off the luggage-lock sellers. Then, for no apparent reason, it seems all right to go in. Mr Biswas has had his few minutes. We explain that we want to cloak our luggage. Mr Biswas explains that he will be taking lunch between two and three o’clock (we had intended to cloak our luggage until two o’clock, but it now seems wise to collect it at one thirty, just in case Mr Biswas needs a few minutes before he takes his lunch). Our luggage, however, is unsatisfactory. Having travelled with no problems from Melbourne and London via Singapore Airlines and Jet Air, this luggage does not meet Mr Biswas’s standards. It must have sturdy locks. We must buy locks for it otherwise he cannot take it. We really want to see the Ajmer temple, so there is nothing for it but to buy a couple of the

excessively priced locks. We do this. Mr Biswas then writes something in white chalk all over our luggage. But do we have satisfactory identification? I am not prepared leave my passport with him, but fortunately Anne has a photocopy of hers which she shows him — and we pretend it is all Anne’s luggage. We assume that he just needs to inspect the passport copy. But no, he takes it and pastes it meticulously into his scrap book. Then, after some deliberation, he selects a rubber stamp and stamps it. We ask why, but he is suddenly unable to understand. He inspects our luggage again. He doesn’t seem to like it very much. He then indicates a high shelf, where we, ‘elderly’ women who have been compared to tuk tuk drivers’ 86-year-old grandmothers, are to place it (all 30-plus kilos). Mr Biswas remains at his desk. We select a lower shelf so that we don’t have to lift it so high and this seems to meet with his approval — or at least, it doesn’t meet with his disapproval. And we are free. But it is nearly one o’clock. No time to get to the temple. We go for a short walk outside the station but can’t find anywhere to eat, so we end up eating at the station caf — we needn’t have locked or cloaked our luggage. To our enormous relief Mr Biswas is still at his desk at one thirty and receiving customers. The formalities for collecting our luggage are a little less elaborate. We continue on the train to Jodhpur — a rocky landscape with rock-crushing and brick-making industries. But the little stations are picturesque, freshly painted, and swathed in bougainvillea. Compared to Udaipur, Jodhpur seems dark and crowded. Our guest house is in the old part of Jodhpur where the streets are too narrow for cars and everyone has to stand aside when a tuk tuk goes past. But we come to like Jodhpur, perhaps best of all. Everyone gets on with their business, although most tuk tuk drivers have an uncle who sells saris at a very good price. Underlying the bustle there seems to be a sense of contentedness. Perhaps we’ve just got used to the crowds. We love our old, crumbling, narrow guest house. The steps up to our room are very steep and to get to the rooftop restaurant we have to climb several more flights. But what a treat once you are there! We look across the rooftops of the distinctive blue buildings to the Meherangarh Fort. Everything is accompanied by chanting from the nearby Hindu temple. Why are so many of the buildings blue? It is said that the Brahmins distinguished their houses by mixing indigo into the usual whitewash, but there was nothing to stop everyone else doing it too. Some say that the blue keeps away mosquitoes. The owner of our guest 41

house is a Brahmin. Everyone seems to know and like him. The streets (if you can call them that) in old Jodhpur converge upon a market in the midst of which is a distinctive clock tower. We figure that it will be easy to find our way around by using the clock tower as a base so we confidently set out to explore on our first morning. But — when it is time to return — all the streets look alike. Their names are not apparent — and even if they were, they’d be written in Hindi. This is where it is convenient that our guest-house owner is well known. Most people can give us directions and we ultimately find our way back. It is not until our third day that we find the right street independently, and then there is a violent storm and all the lights go out. We pick our way through the puddles lit by the lights of passing (very close) motor- bikes. We get there. We visit the Fort — palatial rooms and courtyards, elaborately decorated palanquins for royal elephant travel, miniature paintings of Marwar life, and superb intricately carved marble — so much is made of marble, sturdy yet ornate. On another day we go to the Umaid Bhavan Palace. This was built by a benevolent maharaja in the late 1920s to provide employment during a time of famine (I guess he benefited, too, with a pretty comfortable residence). The palace must have taken ten years to build, as a boat bringing the furniture from England was sunk by a German warship. The sunken furniture was replaced by superb Polish Art Deco. There are only photographs of the lavish bathrooms and fabulous furniture, but the maharaja’s clock collection is on display along with many photographs of the 1940s and ’50s. Also his cars, another Silver Cloud Rolls Royce. We sit in the gardens eating delicious kulfi (pistachio-flavoured creamy ice-cream). In the afternoon we go by jeep on a ‘village experience’. As we drive past vast university grounds our jeep driver, Pushpakar, tells us with great pride that his brother has been elected president of the university student union. This seems to mean a great deal to the family. Jodhpur is an important centre for the study of medicine. Although subsidised, it is still an expensive course. The fees are cheaper for girls. We visit villages of the Bishnoi people, who for centuries have protected animals. Although we go into some family compounds, it seems that our visiting is not too intrusive. First we go to a family of potters. A young man demonstrates his considerable skill. Accord42

ing to his caste, he has no choice but to be a potter. No way that he could have aspired to study medicine. Pushpakar, who, along with his brother attends university, is of the warrior caste. He is studying history, which will presumably benefit his work in tourism. Next we go to a very poor family. The woman, a widow, goes through a routine of showing us women her saris. The man, her father-in-law, performs a small opium-smoking ceremony that we are invited to join in, but decline. Then to a carpetmakers’ cooperative. They received a government subsidy, which provided them with solar panels that sit incongruously on the thatched roof. We are shown the weaving process and some beautiful mats. When Anne shows interest in purchasing a rug, payment can be made by credit card and they can arrange shipping. Driving home in the twilight we see peacocks and some rare black deer roaming wild. Another day we arrange to drive to Osian, about 60 kilometres out of Jodhpur on the edge of the Thar desert. Our particular interest is a large Jain temple and a Hindu temple complex said to date back to the eighth and nineth centuries. The Hindu temple has a lot of visitors and is very much in use — it is hard to tell which bits are really old. A very thin and enthusiastic young man provides a commentary much of which, unfortunately, we cannot understand. I try to lose him a couple of times — he darts about, up and down quite treacherous flights of stairs. I just want a bit of peace. But he’s always there waiting for us — so well intentioned. So we keep nodding our heads and looking interested as he babbles on. Families visiting the temple want to be photographed with us — why? And now we are on the train to Jaipur, sharing our compartment with a family from Jodhpur: Pavlar and his wife whose name seems to be ‘Lovely’ and their 23-year-old daughter, who is to do an exam for a life assurance job in Jaipur. Pavlar is an insurance salesman, and certainly has the gift of the gab. He doesn’t stop talking. Lovely doesn’t speak at all, but seems to understand. Pavlar tells me his life story. He is 66. The government doesn’t provide a good enough pension for him to retire, so, in an interesting twist, he just keeps on selling life insurance to others so that he need not retire. He says he is lazy. Doesn’t have hobbies, doesn’t want to travel, he might as well keep working. Onil, sitting across the corridor, joins in when he hears that I am from Melbourne. He has been there on business. He sells soy products. His

company makes some kind of nutritious soy paste that is dispensed to starving children by Médicins sans Frontières. We stay in the Shahar Palace Guest House, run by a retired colonel and his wife. Why did I spend so much time trying to photograph peacocks at the Bishnoi villages? They are strutting around the guest house grounds here, accompanied by various kinds of chooks. The colonel maintains his military presence. I expect he knows what time everyone gets up and how much hot water they use. He punctuates his very clear English with ‘bloody’. His wife reads novels in the beautiful tropical gardens and supervises the kitchen. At about $35 a night our spacious room opens onto a balcony where we can eat meals or drink the masala chai, to which I am becoming partial. In the evening, after visiting the Pink Palace with its many 1950s vice-regal photographs and excellent textile museum, we attend a Hindu temple ceremony, standing just a little apart from the worshippers. The men, in their various kinds of headgear, seem to pay close attention. Some have women at their sides, but some of the women are left on the outskirts — to gossip, it seems. Are they exchanging recipes? One woman asks another to hold her skein of wool while she winds it into a ball. Two women staying at the guest house have told us of a clothing shop called Anokhi. It sounds good. We decide to try to walk there. After all, Jaipur is an important centre for textiles. One wrong turn and we end up at ‘Lifestyle’ — a very westernised shopping complex. We have a Starbucks coffee sitting near a ‘Hog Dog’ stand. There is a shoe sale, and I buy some lovely soft leather sandals, the 50 per cent reduction making the cost about $9.60. We find Anokhi and have a bit of a splurge. Then to Albert Hall Museum, opened, not surprisingly, by Edward VII when he was still Prince of Wales. At this museum I realise how fortunate we are in Australia to have substantial funds provided for such institutions. The displays at the Albert Hall are very poorly lit and sometimes lack labels or any explanation. Many of the exhibits are dusty or in need of repair. Nevertheless, there are magnificent sculptures — Buddhas, and Hindu gods Vishnu and Shiva, fine Bikaner ware pottery, delicate metal work, and more superb miniature paintings. Jain temple, Osian. 43

shape of Lord Krishna’s crown. The women were carried (on palanquins) up ramps, striated to avoid slipping. They seem to have led a luxurious life lounging around the pools in the courtyard. Winds blew through the honeycombed recesses, creating relief during hot Jaipur summers. Having seen the Jantar Mantar observatory in Delhi, we visit a similar one here in Jaipur. It is a peaceful place, set in gardens, the impressive sundial towering over everything.

The next day, with the colonel’s assistance, we book a car to take us out of Jaipur and up the Aravalli Hills to the Amber and nearby Nahargarh and Jaigarh forts. Amber fort was the original capital of Rajasthan, and consists of many fortified apartments where the maharaja and his family lived. Some tourists ride elephants up the final steep hill, but we are happy to go by car. Once again there is intricate, finely cut marble and superb jewelled ceilings — some of the ‘jewels’ are tiny mirrors. There are formal gardens and fountains. The treasury and armory were kept at nearby Jaigarh Fort, and Nahargarh Fort seems to have been a kind of hunting lodge. The name means ‘abode of tigers’, and there are some beautiful frescoes of hunting scenes. Here and in other forts one can walk along secret passages that were built to trick invaders. On our last day in Jaipur we visit Hawa Mahal, the Palace of the Winds. It was built so that women of the court could remain secluded while watching street processions. It has a beautiful stone façade carved like honeycomb in the 44

We have loved the Indian food, although I haven’t quite managed to fully appreciate a proper Indian breakfast — a lot of us are fussy about breakfast and I can’t quite manage solid rice iddlies or even a chilli omelette. We have both missed decent coffee and — yes — I must admit that the Indian wine we’ve had is, on the whole, a bit like kerosene. So on this last day in Jaipur we look longingly at the Rambagh Palace — a palace restored as an extravagant tourist resort, the hotel where Prince Charles stayed. Surely it would serve a good glass of wine? We take a tuk tuk to the entrance, quite expecting to be turned away. The guards won’t allow the tuk tuk in, but we are okay probably because we are clearly Western tourists. We are not particularly well dressed — my sandals are pretty grotty by now and I’m not even wearing my best shirt. We walk along the drive and through some of the 47 acres of gardens, up the marble stairs to the front door. ‘We would like to eat in your restaurant,’ I say — and we are ushered along a corridor to a verandah. High tea and various other things are being served under umbrellas on an expansive lawn. We are discreetly told the cover charge and it is so high that we decide we had better have lunch, even though it’s getting on for four o’clock. I have champagne and Anne has a glass of white wine, we have various kinds of grilled fish, delightful Indian sweets and, yes, good black coffee. As we eat we speculate about the other guests — one group look like Indian businessmen accompanied by someone’s sad-looking overweight wife; all the others are European — older men, several with younger women. All better dressed than us. Do they go outside the palace walls? On our last night in Jaipur we don’t sleep much, as we have to get up at 4.30 a.m. for our flight to Kerala. In the middle of the night the colonel collects guests, maybe from the station. He shows them into the room next to ours and spends forever loudly explaining how to work the hot water. The trains toot in perfect fifths and augmented fourths.

A scene from our houseboat trip, Kerala. 45

This time we really are delayed in Delhi by fog. More understandable with planes. We have flown there from Jaipur to make a connection to Kochi via Hyderabad. Ultimately I am staring out of a window onto rocky terrain as I eat a stodgy Indian airways breakfast. It seems quite appropriate for there to be a strike in Kerala. It is left wing and has had a communist government. Something to do with the unions. No transport apart from trains. No taxis at the airport to take us the 30 kilometres to Kochi. The police have organised a special bus to take us to the railway station, then it is up to us ... Not too hard. Fortunately our hotel, in Ernakulum, is within walking distance of one of the stations and just in time we find out which one. We are met by Jo and Judy — friends of Anne’s from England who will join us on a backwaters boat tour. We are staying in Ernakulum rather than Fort Kochi because tourist guide books suggest that Ernakulum — the business centre — provides better value. The next day there is nothing much to do because everything is closed — affected by the strike. The ferry from Ernakulum across to Kochi isn’t running. The shops are closed. We spend most of the day walking along the foreshore and find one art exhibition that is open — some good contemporary paintings. The government here seems to support the arts. We are fortunate that the strike is over the following day. The streets are noisy and crowded and a driver collects us to take us to our ‘rice boat’ for four days of bliss on the back waters of Kerala. It’s just the four of us, plus a captain, his offsider and a chef. Jo and Judy are keen bird watchers and spend a lot of time glued to their binoculars. I take an occasional photograph of a distant kingfisher, or, if not quick enough, a bare branch. I don’t recall another time when I’ve been so pampered. There is no need to think ahead, because someone else has decided where the boat will go and where it will stop and when and what we will eat. You don’t want to read because the scenery is superb. We visit several churches — grand rococo affairs — a lot of Portuguese influence. The nuns sing beautifully. In one, at a well-attended service on a Saturday, there is an attempt at some sort of Indian–Christian rock music. Fusion of cultures again. The waters are bordered by banana and coconut palms. We eat fresh lobster and fish baked in banana leaves. At night we tie up in a bird sanctuary. Along the narrower waterways we get some sense of the village life. People are fishing with simple rods. Most smile and wave, 46

Our houseboat.

although a young boy, who probably doesn’t like the intrusion, dances around like a vicious tiger, roaring at us. Do some of the adults feel that way — resentful of us gliding past, staring at them as they go about their daily tasks? The idyll must finish. The boat moors for the last time. We are collected by car — drop Judy and Jo at a railway station to continue their holiday down south, and Anne and I return to Ernakulum. Schools start at 10.00 a.m. and it is just before this. As we drive through various towns, we see clusters of children decked out in their colourful school uniforms. The traffic is very heavy as we reach Kochi — offices also start work at 10.00 a.m. Everything is running. By late morning we are on the ferry from Ernakulum to Kochi, where we wander around. I am sustained by a thirst-quenching juice of lime and mint. St Francis church is said to be the oldest European church in India.

It houses Vasco da Gama’s tomb. Compared to the churches we saw on the backwaters trip, this one is austere; brocade hangings that may serve as fans and some plain-coloured glass windows that are not the usual leadlight depictions of scenes from the Bible. In the evening we go to a Kathakali dance performance. Putting on make-up is a part of the act, and the audience can look into dressing rooms or sit, as we do, watching a lead dancer paint his face — a lot of green and black around the eyes, as he will be a maharaja in a scene from the Ramayana. The next day we explore the Jewish part of Kochi. There is now just one synagogue, but there used to be one for blacks and one for whites. The Jewish population is severely depleted. Our tuk tuk driver explains that he is given 100 rupees worth of petrol for taking us to particular bazaars where we are under no obligation to buy. So we help him and look at various handcrafts from all over India — these places are subsidised by the government. At the Dutch Palace (built by the Portuguese and renovated by the Dutch) we see the most amazing murals of scenes from the Ramayana. We are quite tired and return to our hotel. The kerosene-like wine improves with the addition of soda water. On our last day in India there are various things to attend to. I post back some clothes to make room in my luggage for new purchases. I am surprised that I don’t have to declare what is in the parcel — the procedure is very straightforward. When, two weeks later, the parcel arrives, the contents are quite apparent. The fairly flimsy packet has become threadbare during its travels, and Australia Post has provided a clear plastic bag for the contents.

We have a final wander around the streets of Kochi. Many of the old bungalows have become guest houses. We visit the Santa Cruz basilica — it is the beginning of Lent and everything is draped in purple. Then we sit quietly on the foreshore watching the operation of Chinese fishing nets that are said to date back about 500 years. These huge nets are operated by a series of weights. Most are lifted out of the water quite frequently, often with just a fish or two. A net-mender sits on the beach shaded by a clump of trees. Lots of schoolchildren walk along the foreshore path. It must be recorder day, as many have their wooden recorders out. Some successfully persuade their adult minders to buy them ice-creams from a nearby vendor. Back in Ernakulum, Anne wants to take me to a special restaurant for our last night. It has changed its name and is very difficult to find — we stride along the darkening streets. We almost give up, but do find it and are rewarded with a delicious meal — I have fish baked in banana leaves followed by Indian halva, made with dates. Oh, and of course some French chablis. The next day I begin my long trek home. Anne has left at 5.00 a.m. My plane leaves at a more civilised time. The taxi arrives right on time for the 30-kilometre drive to the airport, past a huge Catholic cathedral and close to it, ‘Lulu’, opening the following week, to be India’s biggest shopping mall. In all our time here, we didn’t see one food supermarket — but here is Lulu, described as a hypermarket. I am sure, however, that some aspects of India will never change as I read one final road sign: Obey traffic signals. Avoid rash driving. — Jennifer Bryce, March 2013

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The sound of different drums My life and science fiction Part 5

by John Litchen All photos supplied by John Litchen

1962 in the state of Victoria was one of the last years of the 6 o’clock swill. That was, for those who don’t remember or simply have no idea, the frantic rush to buy and down as many drinks as possible in the last 15 minutes or so before the pub (or bar) officially had to close and stop selling drinks. People would crowd with raucous joy or noisy desperation against the bar and buy four or five or even six beers, stack them in front of them, or precariously carry them supported in both hands to a nearby table, after which they would scull them one after the other before they were all ejected from the pub by 10 minutes after 6 p.m. They would stagger out into the street drunk, because coming straight from work to their favourite watering hole, without having had anything to eat, their main object was to drink as much as possible before closing time, and this inevitably resulted in drunks outside in the street jostling and often fighting each other, and more often than not, drunken abuse at home. It was not uncommon that these drunks, having filled extended guts with litres of liquid, would be forced to relieve themselves in side streets, alleyways, or people’s front gardens as they struggled to walk back

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to their parked cars. Streets surrounding the more popular pubs stank of stale piss, which even solid downpours of rain failed to wash away. My recollections of the 6 o’clock swill are of Williamstown, which has more pubs in it than any other suburban area in Melbourne; 26 the last time I was there. There were more than 100 back in its heyday, when Williamstown was the main port of entry for new arrivals (in the 1800s) who headed for the goldfields of Ballarat and Bendigo. The myriad pubs were their first stop after disembarking from the sailing clippers. Later, when the dockyards with the shipbuilding, wool packers, and other heavy industries, such as railway maintenance, were the mainstay of workers in the suburb (new arrivals having been shifted to Port Melbourne across Hobson’s Bay), the number of pubs slowly came down to 26. Even so, it seemed that there was a pub on just about every corner in Williamstown. Anyone attempting a ‘pub crawl’ never made it all the way around: 26 are too many to get through even if you only take one drink at each venue.

Not very nice, but Victoria was famous for its 6 o’clock swill: rather like the action of a bunch of huge fat pigs jostling each other to get at food dispensed in a trough. This also explained why many hotels in the city proper had restaurants and dining rooms where drinks could be served with dinner, and drinkers from the bar could migrate to the dining room where they could continue if they ordered something to eat. These customers were often entertained with a floorshow. Even though these places also had to close by a specific time after which they were not allowed to serve drinks, usually by 10 p.m., they were very popular, and many talented performers gained experience working in those floorshows. The same performers would then go on to the night clubs that opened later, where the same diners who wanted to continue drinking would smuggle spirits in under their jacket or in a flask in their back pockets so they could put some oomph into the soft drinks and coffees ordered at the night clubs. My sister Zara and I performed in some of the hotel venues, but she never went on to the night clubs, where often I went to play conga drums into the early hours of the morning. I don’t know how I managed, but on Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays I would be at Birdland playing congas and performing as an accompanist to whoever was actually doing the floorshow. I would get home at 3 or 4 in the morning, sleep a couple of hours, and then go to work at the dry cleaner, driving, picking up, and delivering clothes between the factory and the various agencies scattered across the triangle between Sunshine, Footscray, and Williamstown. The floorshows at Birdland were always a lot of fun, with exotic dancers: strippers (or girls who wore very little) dancing with snakes or some other prop designed to titillate or thrill the customers. There were singers like Johnny Summers, a great singer who died too young before his potential could be realised, Ynez Amaya, who later called herself Beryl Sellers (she was married to the house drummer Roger Sellers), and regular performances by the comedy duo Crocker and Clarke. They used their performances at Birdland to work on their act, which was constantly evolving. The outstanding one in this duo was Barry Crocker, who went on to have an amazing solo career. Musicians or singers and even dancers often turned up after their

John Litchen playing the congas during a floorshow at Birdland, 1963.

shows had finished, and on many occasions were induced by the band to do an impromptu performance. You never knew what was going to happen, so it was always an exciting place to go late at night. It was on one of these nights that a young dancer who was a lead dancer with West Side Story’s company in Melbourne turned up and asked if he could sit in and play congas. He was from New York, and had a charisma that made everyone turn and look at him the moment he walked in the door. It wasn’t just his clothes, or the way he walked, or his self-confidence, although they were obviously part of it. There was something indefinable that compelled those around to look at him; especially the women, of whom he always had 49

someone accompanying him. There were two with him that night, dancers from the West Side Story cast. Why is it dancers never stop dancing? Do they always need to be the centre of attraction? My sister at the drop of a hat would break into a dance at whatever party she found herself. Being good at it, she quickly ended up surrounded by an audience encouraging her to continue. These girls were hardly into the place when they started dancing with this young man. Their impromptu floorshow had everyone staring at them in rapture while the band of which I was a part felt compelled to play as best we could. I can’t remember what we played, other than it was Latin orientated so the congas fitted in. But with those superb dancers performing we played tighter and more precisely than we had ever played. It was just one of those things that happen sometimes; everything comes together exactly as it should and the result is outstanding.

stated. There were only two drums, so he didn’t play counterpoint but launched straight into an impressive solo that wove phrases and patterns around the tones and slaps of the tumbao. He tapped his foot on the floor (on one and three) so I had a good metronome to help keep time, because if I listened too closely to what he was doing I could lose the beat, but the tapping foot kept me on time. He looked at me as we played, and when his playing reached a crescendo he nodded once and said ‘four’, which meant four more bars, which I subconsciously counted. When we reached the end of the four bars we both hit one note on the first beat of the next bar and simultaneously stopped. The band members on the stage behind us stood up and cheered and clapped, and the applause from the audience in the club was overpowering. JoJo leaned over and gave me a hug and a slap on the back. ‘Thanks for that. I haven’t played in a long time and I needed to get that out.’

The applause lifted the roof off. Even the band members stood up to applaud the dancers. As soon as they stopped dancing the young man came over to me and introduced himself.

What could I say? The guy was a fantastic player. After that the boss of the club fawned all over him and gave him a great table, shooing a couple of other people out of the way.

‘I’m JoJo Smith.’

Events like that happened often enough to make Birdland the premier night club in Melbourne at that time.

We shook hands. That was an unusual name. ‘Do you mind if I play your congas?’ ‘Be my guest,’ I invited him as I moved aside. I had been sitting on the bandstand with the congas on the dance floor. The other musicians, of course, had chairs or stools to sit on, so they towered above me on the bandstand. ‘Stay there.’ He said. ‘You play tumbao and I’ll improvise.’ He sat beside me with the higher pitched drum between his legs. ‘It’s been awhile,’ he added. Tumbao is a bass drum pattern around which other drums in a group either play counterpoint or improvise or do both. JoJo counted one two, one two three four fairly rapidly, and I started dead on the next count of one, which wasn’t 50

That was a Friday night. When I got there Saturday night, two extra conga drums were next to mine. I hadn’t seen them before. They had scratches and scuff marks on them so they had obviously been well used, as well as having travelled a lot. Drums only get scratched and marked if they’ve been in and out of vans and dragged about from venue to venue. I tapped each one, discovering they had a very good sound with cleaner tones that sounded more melodic than my heavier drums. They were also made of lighter wood than mine so they required less effort to transport. I knew immediately that these drums belonged to JoJo. And sure enough he turned up around midnight accompanied by a different dancer, and he played all four drums in another impromptu floorshow that sent the place wild. ‘You’ve got to teach me how to do that,’ I said afterwards.

John Litchen and George Olah taking lessons from JoJo at Birdland, 1962.

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‘Me too,’ George Olah said. He hadn’t been there the night before and this was the first time he had seen and heard JoJo play. George was the other conga drummer I shared Saturday nights with. He wasn’t there on Fridays, but each alternate Saturday he played with the band. On the Saturday he wasn’t there he played with an Italian orchestra over in Carlton. I usually did all the floorshows and would then play with the band until closing time. George always left about midnight because he had an early start in the jewellery business he ran. ‘You have to learn to isolate one hand from the other,’ JoJo explained. ‘While one hand plays the bass pattern or tumbao the other is free to improvise or play a counter pattern to the other one.’ He demonstrated by playing a few repetitions of tumbao with one hand on the lowest pitched drum. By cutting the rhythm in half, only the four main notes are played with the one hand. ‘It’s called rumba abierta, or tumbao abierta,’ he said, while continuing to play it with the right hand. ‘Then we add the tones of the Repicador or the second or third drum.’ He started playing on a higher-pitched drum with his left hand while maintaining the lower-pitched right-hand drum rhythm unchanged. The counterpoint rhythm on the higher drum went across two repetitions of the tumbao to produce what sounded like two drummers playing. ‘And now we vary it by adding tones from the other drums.’ He said this while continuing to play both patterns simultaneously. With both hands he started bringing in odd tones from the two other drums, one on his left side and the other on his right, so he used both the right and the left hand to do this while maintaining the two basic patterns he had started with. If you closed your eyes and simply listened it sounded a little like two or perhaps three people playing, instead of one single person. When played very fast it was amazing. JoJo explained that the various drums in a group are given names depending on their role in the group. In Cuban rumba groups the bass drum is called tumbao; the others are called segundo, tres-golpes, and quinto, repicador. The repicador is usually the quinto, which is called that because it is five tones higher 52

in pitch than the bass drum or tumbao. Repica is the Spanish exhortation to improvise using the quinto or another higher pitched drum in the group. The names given the drums vary in each country where similar types of conga drums are used in groups. Conga is the English name given to the Cuban drums, which generically are called tumbadores. This was probably because they were first seen played in the streets during carnival with large groups of people dancing in lines and singing in unison. The dance was the conga, which in Cuba is known as a comparsa. Conga is most likely an African name, but it was one the English-speaking people latched onto. There was a time in the 1940s when the conga was a dance craze across the USA. There are many names and structured groups that relate back to Africa, with various infusions of Spanish, French, Portuguese, or English melody or singing styles throughout the Caribbean and the continent of South America. More than enough books on the subject are available for anyone interested in delving into the history of African-influenced music in the New World. What JoJo was doing was something we had never seen before. We made arrangements to meet at Birdland during the week early in the afternoon for some conga drum lessons with him. George and I arranged time off from work to do this. In the meantime I saw West Side Story — it was much better than I expected. Fifty years later we all know the story, but back then it was astonishing. It resonated on many levels with people in this country (as it did in the USA) because all of us had experienced to varying degrees the problems involving integration into a stable society of immigrant newcomers with different cultural biases: the fears that jobs would be taken and that our women would be violated resonated on both sides of the cultural barriers. That the story depicted was an updating of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet was well known, but its translation into the concrete jungle of New York suburbs, with Shakespeare’s rival feuding families becoming American and Puerto Rican gangs, was outstanding, setting new benchmarks in modern dancing and athleticism. The use of music to represent feelings of the the rival gangs was for me fantastic, as is the montage that crosscuts back and forth between the two gangs as they prepare for the rumble (a big fight between the two gangs), while Maria and Tony are anxiously determined to see each other later that night. That the whole thing ends tragically is a foregone conclusion, but

audiences watching that performance on stage were on tenterhooks waiting to see how it all unfolded. The astonishing choreography was by Jerome Robbins and the unforgettable music was by Leonard Bernstein. Stephen Sondheim created the lyrics for such wonderful songs as ‘Maria’, ‘I Feel Pretty’, ‘Tonight’, ‘I Want to Be in America (America)’, and others. This show changed the genre of musical theatre, stepping way outside of the previous lighthearted froth-and-bubble escapism of almost every other musical before it, bringing to audiences an awareness of cultural themes, racial integration, immigrants’ desires to improve the lot of themselves and their families, and the feelings of locals who, though stable for years, suddenly felt threatened at every level by these new people coming into their neighbourhood: themes that resonated with most people in every country where the show performed. That these new people would enrich their society, with new music, new ideas, and new foods never entered people’s minds at that stage. All they could perceive was the imagined threat. West Side Story emphasised it all, while presenting a classic but tragic love story and thoroughly entertaining people with its beauty and exuberance. Almost everyone who saw it went back to see the show more than once. Only much later did its deeper impact become apparent. Not long after the show’s Broadway run a musical film of it was made, with George Chakiris and Natalie Wood. For me, though, the best part was played by Rita Moreno, who played the ever-excitable character Anita. George Chakiris was forgettable, and never did much after that film, but the others, including Russ Tamblyn, who played the leader of the Jets (the American gang), went on to have outstanding film careers. The filmed version won 10 Academy Awards. I also saw the film when it came out, but didn’t think it had the same ambience as the live show, though technically it was more spectacular. Also, I met many of the people involved in the show as it was presented in Melbourne, went backstage, watched rehearsals, and saw the show many times from both in

front and from behind the stage. Cal Tjader later bought out an album with his inimitable jazz and Latin jazz styling of West Side Story’s wonderful music, which was for a long time one of my favourite recordings, probably because it featured two of my favourite drummers, Mongo Santamaria on congas and Willie Bobo on timbales. They worked with Cal Tjader for a number of years before going on to create their own groups or bands, which in their individual ways set trends in combining jazz, popular music, and light rock with Cuban musical genres. It didn’t take long for me to pick up the way of playing that allowed isolation of one hand from another. George, though, struggled to get it, and eventually he switched back to his old way of playing, which was fine because he was a good solid player. When the three of us played together, George often played tumbao and I played segundo or counterpoint. JoJo of course improvised on the drum nominated as repicador. If we played bembe, which is a combination of 6/8 rhythms in which the order of the drums is reversed, being based on bata drumming (religious drumming in both Nigeria and in Cuba, and more recently elsewhere, such as in the USA and Puerto Rico); the highest pitched drum played a simple rhythm, counterpointed by the two drums of lower pitch, with a fourth drum, the biggest and lowest in pitch, doing the improvisation. Sometimes we would spend Sunday afternoons at my place practising and recording what we played so we could listen back and hear our mistakes. A few times Albert La Guerre joined us, and he and JoJo made some wonderful recordings. On other occasions Albert, with another friend from Katherine Dunham days, Antonio Rodriguez, a dancer, would come and play drums and sing in my front bedroom. We even got Mum and my sister Zara to sing some choruses for Albert’s Haitian songs, which I recorded. I used an Akai reel-to-reel tape machine. Some years later I transferred these taped tracks to cassette and finally after losing them for many years, found them again in a box of old home movies, so I digitised them and made a CD. The quality is not good, but it is something that can never be repeated and so for me they are invaluable — a priceless reminder of a past that is now so distant it seems to have belonged to someone else.

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When West Side Story finished its season in Melbourne some of the cast stayed on. JoJo was one of them. He organised to do a series of floorshows in and around some night clubs as well as appearing on the Federal Hotel Circuit, which included the Savoy Plaza, the Menzies, and the Federal. We started at the Savoy Plaza. When our ten-minute show finished we quickly packed the drums into my yellow van and drove around to the Menzies Hotel for our second show. Again we would pack up and move on to the next hotel, after which it was close to midnight; we headed off to Birdland, where we did the show again. We did this Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights. The routine was straightforward, a mixture of JoJo dancing, playing drums, and dancing. I didn’t get paid for this, but did it for the fun of it, for the experience of working in front of a live audience, and for the practice of playing drums with different band combinations. In most places there were groups of four,

or sometimes five. It was rarely a trio, which would have made it harder. We started with a song everyone knew, one that was a major hit at the time, ‘Hit the Road Jack’ by Ray Charles. While I sat and accompanied the house band with one conga drum, JoJo came in with a cool strut and did this funky dance to the first chorus and the verse, then at the end of the second chorus he would take off his jacket and fling it to the bandstand as the musicians segued into a fast mambo guaracha called ‘Mama Guela’. This was a song Latin dancers in New York went wild over. It was a huge hit for Tito Rodriguez and his orchestra during the times he and Tito Puente competed and ruled over the dance floor at the Palladium Ballroom in New York. When ‘Mama Guela’ started I switched to two congas while JoJo went into a fairly fast streetwise salsa routine. Then he would grab the third conga drum and, swirling it around as he danced, he worked his way over to sit next to me and commence a solo as the band behind faded away, apart from the drummer who continued to play his version of a cowbell pattern for mambo. As JoJo soloed I switched from the mambo guaracha pattern to a guaguanco on the two drums. Once this was established JoJo left his drum next to me so I could incorporate it into the pattern and play on the three drums. The drummer from the band behind would fall silent so JoJo only had the conga drums to dance to. His dance this time was very Afro-Cuban in style, as if he were possessed by a spirit. He danced and gyrated as if in ecstasy, then just as we reached a crescendo he would collapse onto the floor, the band would come in with a drawn-out drum roll overlaid by a screeching trumpet, and the lights would go off. That was it. When the lights came on JoJo was gone, waiting for me behind the bandstand. As the applause died down we packed up and headed for the next venue, where we repeated the show. We did the floorshows for a couple of months, after which JoJo moved to Sydney and finally returned to New York. A year or so later I read a good review in Time magazine about him performing with his drums in New York. That was the last any of us ever heard of him.

JoJo and George playing in my backyard, Yarraville, 1963. 54

The late fifties and early sixties was a fantastic time for young readers of science fiction. Many novels covered adventures in space, intergalactic travel, and time travel with all its many paradoxes. I couldn’t get enough of them. But this was also the time of the Cold War with the Russians and the Americans trying to outdo each other with detonations of ever bigger and bigger bombs. Even the French joined in with their experiments on Mururoa atoll in the South Pacific. Britain, not to be outdone, detonated its atomic bombs in Australia. It was inevitable as the world drew closer to total destruction and atomic war that the major writers of science fiction concocted disaster stories extrapolating many possible consequences from this ridiculous and insane international concept of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD). In retrospect it seems that most of the stories I read during the late fifties and into the sixties were disaster stories: disasters brought about by nuclear war or armed conflict using biological weapons, or in keeping with the times, psychedelic drug-influenced chaos and destruction in Europe (see the stories from New Worlds and Impulse magazines during 1967 and 1968 by Brian Aldiss that later made up his mind-boggling 1969 novel Barefoot in the Head), as well as disasters brought on by massive overpopulation (Stand on Zanzibar by John Brunner in 1968 being one of the best examples, which he followed up with other ramifications of overpopulation and pollution in The Sheep Look Up and The Jagged Orbit). Degradation of the environment through some kind of rapid climate change or constant pollution and attempts by humans to change things were other common themes, and gradually the boys’ own adventures of Arthur C. Clarke and writers of his ilk faded into the background as the world-encompassing disaster stories took over. So what’s new? These themes permeate SF (science fiction, science fantasy, and speculative fiction) more so today than way back then. These days they are often crossed with horror, murder mystery, technological thrillers, and so on, but many of those novels stand up today as examples of well-thoughtout reactions to possible worldwide calamities. Of course there was a lot of rubbish written then, just as there is today, but many of the better books were more engrossing than today’s novels, which are too easily forgotten once you have read them. Today there is a sameness to them that makes each one blend into the other, repeating themes and possibilities that have already

been considered many times before. At least in the fifties and sixties those themes were new and frighteningly possible. Earth Abides (1950) was one of the best of the disaster novels. A virus is spread rapidly around the world as a result of air travel (more likely to happen today than it would have then, when air travel was relatively new). Most of the population are killed, with only a few survivors left to start again. This is possibly the only novel of this type that is upbeat: positive rather than negative. It should be more widely available so readers of today can see how well a disaster story can be written. Wilson Tucker’s The Long Loud Silence, though well written and engrossing, is very downbeat by comparison, with its implied theme of cannibalism adding a morbid touch of reality. Make Room! Make Room! by Harry Harrison (1966) is another story of overpopulation and its frightening consequences. Some years later it was made into a reasonable movie with Charlton Heston in the lead and renamed Soylent Green. I think the most notable scene in this film was when Edward G. Robinson (who should have been the star), while dying, watches a HD video presentation of how beautiful the Earth once was so he can die while remembering something nice. It was the last film this highly respected actor made, because he actually died two weeks after filming that scene. He knew he was dying when he filmed it, which adds much poignancy to the scene. This is so bleak a film that I doubt if anyone would be game enough to remake it. Other novels from the same era include The Death of Grass by John Christopher, who wrote many disaster novels, using a different premise for each, and extrapolating each into a worldwide catastrophe seen from a British viewpoint. It was 10 years or so later turned into a low-budget film, starring and directed by Cornel Wilde, called No Blade of Grass. The film is basically a motorcycle gang film, and the themes of the novel are mostly ignored, other than the part about everybody starving to death because there is no wheat, rice, corn, oats, or barley or any other grain related to grass that humans use as a staple. Cattle and sheep die, horses die, as well as any other ruminant that eats some kind of grass. You can imagine what is left for the remnants of society to eat!

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John Wyndham’s The Day of The Triffids is an outstanding book that deals with many themes, including the oil crisis, illegal genetic modifications of plants, and the Cold War with satellites battling it out in near space which turns most of the population blind. The triffids — the genetically modified plants — escape, preying on the newly blind humans. It was a creepy and frightening story for a fifteen-year-old to read. Although it published in 1951 I probably didn’t read it until 1955. It was made into an atrociously bad film starring Howard Keel, who was better known for musicals such as Annie Get your Gun and Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. He was at the end of his career and way out of depth in a dramatic role. It could have been a bad script, bad direction, or bad acting in general, but whatever it was, it finished him off. As far as I can recall he never appeared in a film again. (Recently another much better realisation of The Day of The Triffids has been made as a mini TV series.) John Wyndham wrote a series of well-written disaster novels, such as The Kraken Wakes in 1953, The Chrysalids (about mutants and the effects of widespread radiation, also a common theme of many mainstream as well as SF authors), and The Midwich Cuckoos in 1957, a scary but subtle alien invasion story where all the women in a village are impregnated and give birth within hours of each other nine months later to normal-looking but increasingly strange children. I read that just after coming back from Darwin in late 1958. It was later made into an excellent film called Village of The Damned. (The remake years later with, I think, Christopher Reeve was not much good.) And of course there was J. G. Ballard, one of New Worlds’ New Wave writers, who, along with Brian Aldiss and others, helped define a new way of seeing the world and writing about it. Ballard’s triptych of novels The Drowned World (1963), The Burning World, aka The Drought (1964), and The Crystal World (1966) set new standards in literary quality. These books, especially The Drowned World, crossed over into the mainstream and garnered a wide readership. I was particularly fond of The Drowned World. Overheating of the world is caused by continuous solar flares heating the planet until the ice caps melt and flood the rest of the world. As usual with a Ballard story the main concern is with the lead character as he negotiates a continually degrading environment. In this case a warming world is becoming more and Earth Abides: a much better story than the blurb above the title implies. 56

Cover from a special illustrated edition of The Drowned World published by Dragon’s Dream in 1981. Cover and interior watercolour paintings by Dick French. 57

more tropical, with areas along the equator already uninhabitable as jungles grow massive and ancient reptiles start to make a comeback. Kerans, the lead character, is part of a team surveying the gradual destruction of old cities. The survey turns out to be useless because the water levels continue rising. When other members of the team are ready to retreat to the polar regions Kerans does not want to go but wants to travel further into the ever-increasing jungles in search of ... who knows what? This is echoed in a much later book, The Day of Creation, in which his lead character follows an ever-increasing and broadening river into the jungles in central Africa in search of its origins. This is more a fantasy than science fiction. Ballard was not concerned with the science but with the gradual deterioration of character in situations that show environments decaying and falling apart (see also his Memoirs of the Space Age and The Day of Forever). His mini stories that made up The Atrocity Exhibition stand as the ultimate condensations of epic disasters in a format that set new standards for experimental modern fiction. I just loved those stories. Obviously they weren’t to everyone’s taste. He later abandoned that approach and again became more conventional, yet still unequalled in literary value, as he continued to map the world as we know it in various states of decay and self-destruction almost always brought on by ever increasing numbers of humans unable to deal with the complexity of the world around them (see High Rise, Crash, and Concrete Island). The fact that as a boy Ballard lived in Shanghai, where he was born, and witnessed the destruction of this city by the Japanese and was interned in prison camp until rescued by Allied forces, no doubt influenced his obsession with disintegrating societies and ways of coping with them. Ballard, like Aldiss, remains for me as one of the great British writers in the latter half of the twentieth century. He should be more appreciated than he is.

I had thrown out the fruit boxes that held my books and built proper shelves, which enabled me to store my records and tapes, as well as many more books and magazines, my turntable, tape player, amplifier, and speakers, as well as the conga drums and bongos that took up floor space. (I hadn’t added timbales yet.) There was not a lot of room for the bed, or space to move around in. Still, I was happy. It was my room, my own personal space and I 58

could while away the hours reading or listening to music while practising conga and bongo patterns, which must have driven Mum and Dad nuts as they tried to watch TV in the lounge room. Most of the books I read were British publications. It was difficult to get American books in Australia at that time. The few I did get were paperbacks in the Ballantine range of themed anthologies that Merv Binns was able to import for McGill’s Newsagency, where he worked. I missed out on many American writers simply because English editions of their books were not published. Some, however, found their way into English book publication. T. V. Boardman was a publisher of a regular series of hardcover books all sporting a lovely emblem of a rocket ship passing by Saturn with the words Science Fiction written underneath. When you saw that emblem on the spine you knew it would be a good story. Boardman published A. E. Van Vogt’s Slan and The Weapon Shops of Isher, and many others, such as Children of the Atom by Wilmar H. Shiras. The artist who illustrated their distinctive covers was Pagram. All his (or her) covers had a brooding dark look with lots of green and grey that made these books stand out on the shelf from all the others displayed there. Weidenfeld and Nicolson also published science fiction regularly. It too had an emblem — electrons spinning around an invisible centre, presumably representing a stylised atom — with the words Science above it and Fiction below. It published the British edition of Clifford D. Simak’s City, which was not a novel but a collection of shorter stories linked together to form a more-or-less continuous narrative which could be loosely called a novel. Though it was copyrighted in 1952 it was first published in England in 1954, and I bought my copy from McGill’s in Elizabeth Street, Melbourne, sometime in 1955. I was impressed, and immediately searched for more of Simak’s work. Over the years he built up a reputation for producing gentle stories that were beautifully written and almost nostalgic in nature, with many stories using a country or pastoral setting rather than the darker urban setting used by many others. City tells of Earth abandoned by humans and robots, leaving the planet to domestic dogs, which become the dominant species. The stories in this book are those told by the dogs to each other as they recount history as legendary tales of their predecessors, the humans and their robots.

Weidenfeld & Nicolson’s first British edition of Simak’s classic ‘novel’ City, with its attractive illustration. 59

Victor Gollancz was another stalwart of British SF publishing. Their covers were atrocious and unattractive, but at least they stood out as unique on the shelves of the shops that carried them: bright yellow with red and black or blue text. Gollancz published English editions of American authors such as Theodore Sturgeon, Robert Sheckley, and many others. I still have my copy of More Than Human by Theodore Sturgeon, which cost me 15 shillings and sixpence back in 1954. It was published in 1953 in America, but the Gollancz edition arrived in Australia only towards the end of 1954. I read it early in 1955. It had a slightly different cover to the standard Gollancz design: some decorative squiggles and a blurb that stated, ‘Six minds come together and form a composite human being. Prophetic? — possibly. Unputdownable? — surely’. Who could resist that? I couldn’t, and it was unputdownable: a brilliant story by a master writer who dealt not with hard science but with the condition of the mind and its emotions and all those popular (at that time) concepts of paranormal phenomena, such as telekinesis, levitation, human gestalt, and the idea that we shouldn’t dismiss those who appear less fortunate than normal, who could well be mental giants so far beyond us that we wouldn’t be able to comprehend them. Sturgeon wrote many novellas and only a few novels. He wrote lots of short stories. Although I was heading away from reading short works that often left me disappointed because they didn’t go anywhere, I made an exception for Sturgeon (as well as Bradbury) and bought whatever collections of his stories I could find. The earlier Sturgeon were harder SF, what Sturgeon sometimes called the ‘Macho Sturgeon’, but later he wrote beautiful sensitive stories that resonated in my mind long after I had read them. Two that I will never forget are ‘The Man Who Lost the Sea’ and ‘When You Care, When you Love’. The latter is a portion of a novel about cloning that would have been a great success had it ever been finished. It never was. The former, however, as much as Sturgeon sweated over it and didn’t think it would be any good, went on to be possibly the best short story he ever wrote; and which was collected in that year’s (1959) Martha Foley Award Anthology as one of the best short stories for the year, with all the finest mainstream American stories. There was nothing macho about these. Most of them were highly developed and deeply emotional: ‘soft SF’ if you need a category. He also ventured into areas no 60

other science fiction writer of the time was willing to go, areas that dealt with sexuality and psychosis and what could be called abnormal behaviour, and for a young reader like I was this was very different reading material (see Some of Your Blood and Venus Plus X). No matter what the subject matter, he always made it seem sympathetic. If there were others writing similar stuff at that time, I don’t believe there was anyone better at it than he was. Something I recently discovered and find most astonishing is that Sturgeon never or hardly ever revised what he had written. Usually he sent off a first draft as soon as it was written. How he must have sweated and agonised over the typewriter as he poured himself onto those pages. How much better could he have been had he revised his first drafts? Perhaps we would have lost the rawness of his work, the strength of the emotion that poured out of him. He should have been as famous as his contemporary mainstream authors, but he stayed writing science fiction, apart from a few Westerns and one atrocious film tie-in. To the rest of the world today Sturgeon is almost forgotten. The magazines I bought were mostly British, with the occasional American one thrown in. I didn’t like Astounding, which later morphed into Analog, but I did sometimes read Galaxy and Worlds of If. The stories in the themed anthologies from Ballantine Books were mostly American. Even so, there was something about the ‘British voice’ that I preferred rather than the more jingoistic American sound. People raved about Robert Heinlein but I didn’t like him, and read a few of his stories and novels if nothing else was available. I never read much of his later work. I didn’t like the fact that he and many other American writers saw the future as American. But there were exceptions. Authors like Clifford D. Simak and Chad Oliver were highly respected and enjoyed a wide readership, not because they were American but simply because they were good writers and wrote very beautiful novels. Chad Oliver was a Professor of Anthropology at the University of Texas in Austin. All his stories had an anthropological base, and dealt with first human contact with aliens on strange and very different yet similar worlds to Earth. Frederick Pohl said of Chad Oliver: ‘Other science fiction writers have invented more “alien” aliens than these for us to make contact with. Few, though, have been as able as Oliver to convince us that this is the way first contact is going to be.’ I loved Chad Oliver stories, but unfortunately

he was not as prolific as other writers. I read all I could get my hands on: Mists of Dawn (1952), The Winds of Time (1957), and Unearthly Neighbors (1960), a Ballantine original paperback. I preferred novels, as well as the serials in the magazines, which I found more attractive than the shorter works. The first serial I ever read in a magazine was The Time Masters by Wilson Tucker, which was serialised in New Worlds and beautifully illustrated by Virgil Finlay. Thank you, Bruce Gillespie, for reminding me of the name of this story. The magazines were illustrated with some wonderful black-and-white drawings, sketches, and images. These were usually done on scraper board, which made them look more like etchings, and technically more difficult to produce than pen-and-ink drawings, which also were often very good but had a very different look to them. The serials were later published as books; for instance, Dune, serialised first in Analog magazine, but the accompanying John Schoenherr illustrations were not used in the book version. Most of the book versions had attractive and inviting cover illustrations — the American ones, anyway. The British Gollanz editions had plain yellow covers with black and red text on them (ugly as hell, but it was the content that was important). An exception was Dune, which appeared in 1965 with a black cover with silver white text and a couple of white squiggles across the middle representing sand dunes, a dramatic change from the usual yellow jacket. Later I had this book signed and dedicated to me by Frank Herbert himself when he visited Australia and attended a book signing at Space Age Books. I remember him telling me over dinner that his favourite book was the least popular novel he wrote, a mainstream novel called Soul Catcher. This in my view was the best book he wrote. It was billed as his first ‘major’ novel, whatever that meant. What on earth was Dune, if not a ‘major’ novel? I guess the publishers wanted to distinguish Soul Catcher as a mainstream novel. Much of the book has similar themes to Herbert’s SF novels, and he uses similar methods of telling his story as he did in his SF novels. Soul Catcher deals with death and retribution and the clash of cultures that occurred between the native Americans and those who now occupy their land, but on a personal level between the protagonist and his captured victim. It could very well have taken place with humans and aliens on a different world around a different A worthy reprint of a great story. 61

Virgil Finlay’s beautiful illustration for the opening scene of The Time Masters when it was first seralised in New Worlds. 62

star, but Herbert didn’t want that. I think he wanted to show the same clash of culture, the same inevitability of the result, and what more emotive way to do it than set it there in his own back yard, his own country? I think I managed to read almost every science fiction, or even vaguely science fiction, book that was published and made available in Australia until the mid 1960s. After that it was harder to keep up, but I made a valiant effort anyway. After 1975 I became much more selective, because it was simply impossible to read everything. Books like The Death of Iron, by S. S. Held in 1952, I would have avoided if it had been published later than 1964. The premise is silly: something which was never actually specified or even scientifically plausible affects iron, turning it into soft rubbery stuff, which means that buildings collapse because the iron reinforcing basically dissolves. Anything made from iron or steel becomes like melting rubber or soft plasticine. The cover shows a halfdissolved steam locomotive slowly collapsing over twisted railway lines, which reminds me of Salvador Dali’s melting watches. Everyone returns to the Stone Age: implements made of chipped rock and bone needles being used to repair clothes. It was an awful story that I read with ever decreasing enthusiasm. I don’t know why I remember it now, except for its name. Its only redeeming feature was its demonstration of how impossible it would be for modern people to revert to a Stone Age culture. There were a lot of stories like that which are best forgotten. This one was published between The Day of the Triffids and The Kraken Wakes, and most SF fans would have quickly forgotten it, whereas they never forget the John Wyndham books which are endlessly reprinted. There are some books that you never can read, or at least, if started, never can finish. Two of these books are the Lord of the Rings trilogy, and 20,000 Leagues under the Sea. I tried to read them on a number of occasions, but I did not even want to start Lord of The Rings. I had a look at it once in a bookshop. After a few minutes I put it back on the shelf. I was never into that kind of fantasy, and the more people insisted that I should read it — ‘It’s a classic’; ‘You have to read it’; or ‘It should be on every fan’s bookshelf’ — the more I refused even to think about reading it. Years later my wife Monica bought a copy for me as a Christmas present and I was under an obligation to make an attempt to read it. I was in my late sixties, too late in my view to start reading 63

Not the Nautilus, but a depiction of submariners hunting sharks from a submarine in the late 1880s. 64

Lord of The Rings. You have to read this book as a teenager or at the very least when you are in your early twenties. I managed to get through the first 50 pages and found it turgid and unreadable. I have never gone back to it since. It even put me off wanting to see the three films that were so extraordinarily popular and won so many Academy Awards. My son read the book, and borrowed and later bought the three films on DVD, and reckons they are fantastic. Exactly! — but not my cup of tea. I did watch some bits of the films here and there (hard to avoid in a small house when someone else is watching them and has the volume up rather loud), but not any one complete. They looked spectacular and I could see why they were so popular, but they simply didn’t interest me enough to make the effort to watch them. Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues under the Sea is another thing altogether. This is a major book and has some very interesting things in it. I was a keen snorkeller and skin diver as a teenager, having read Hans Haas and Jacques Yves Cousteau, and was experimenting with underwater photography. The edition I had was a hardcover with lots of illustrations in it. It has never been out of print in one form or another since Jules Verne wrote it in 1870. It was an instant success. Everyone knows the story of Captain Nemo, both demonic and sympathetic at the same time, taking revenge for what he perceives as society’s wrongdoings, and his incredible submarine Nautilus, supposedly run on ‘electricity’ generated by some unknown, at that time, power source. The first American nuclear submarine was named Nautilus perhaps to acknowledge that Jules Verne, although he never named his power source, came up with the idea that later generations called atomic power. This book at first is enthralling, but too much of it is repetitious and boring. I started to skip pages in search of the more interesting or exciting bits. I never actually finished reading the book, although I kept my copy for years. Before I could finish reading the book the Walt Disney film of it appeared in the cinemas in colour and Cinemascope, and I rushed off to see it. It starred the wonderful James Mason as Captain Nemo, and with equal billing as Ned was Kirk Douglas. An outstanding character played by Peter Lorre and teamed with Kirk Douglas made an unlikely comedy duo that stole the limelight. The underwater gear was good-looking: equipment you could imagine from 1870 if it functioned in the way the modern aqualung works:

almost a cross between an aqualung and the oldfashioned helmet diving suit. The submarine is beautiful in a steampunk metal fish way. It absolutely suits the book’s descriptions of the Nautilus, made of iron plates riveted together, able to power through the sea with unbelievable speed. It was one of the better films of the 1950s, and still looks good even today. This film captures the grand adventure presented in the book, with superb underwater photography and a sense of wonder at the gothic magnificence of the submarine. The great battle with the giant squid seems now to be rather tacky and artificial. However, the film did win an Academy Award for special effects among others, and stands out as a major science fiction film along with This Island Earth, Forbidden Planet, The War of the Worlds, When Worlds Collide, The Day the Earth Stood Still, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and The Creature from the Black Lagoon. A later film, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea (1961) was a ridiculous load of rubbish written and scripted by Irwin Allen which was later rewritten as a novel by Theodore Sturgeon, who must have been desperate for money to take this one on.

‘We should dive at Cape Schanck,’ George said one Saturday night at Birdland. ‘What’s it like?’ I had to ask. I had not at that stage been there. Situated along the coast between the Mornington Peninsula and Westernport Bay near Phillip Island, which I had been to, it is a spectacular spot with a series of low cliffs dropping down into the ocean with a similar terrain underwater: tall outcrops (called bommies by divers) that continue as ever-deepening rocky reefs until they are so deep they no longer affect the surface. These bommies are like volcanic plugs from which the softer material has been eroded away, leaving the hard interior jutting up like jagged chimneys. The sea swirls around them as each wave comes in and sucks back around them as it retreats. There are currents and eddies that drag huge kelp fronds down into deeper water before pushing them back up against the rocks. The bommies are surrounded by a huge variety of fish that feed on the seaweed and on each other. In the nooks and crannies, holes and small caves, there are crayfish. ‘It’s a great spot for crayfish, but it’s fairly deep. Not many people dive there, so there are lots of crayfish.’ 65

Above: The waters and rocks around Cape Schanck, southern Victoria — infamously one of the most dangerous fishing and diving spots of Australia. Next page: Waves swirling around bommies at the base of the cliffs. 66

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I could see why not many wanted to dive there when we got there the next morning. Standing on the cliff and looking down I saw the water smashing onto and flowing over the tops of the bommies before retreating and sucking back around them. It was dangerous, no question about that. The waves roared and thumped onto the rocks and sucked back with deep gurgling sounds that sent a shiver up my spine. Or was that just the cold wind blowing off the Southern Ocean up over the clifftops?

Within a couple of seconds he was halfway along the gully and already diving down.

We had decided to make a day of it as a group. George had his wife Margaret with him, and with me were my brothers and sisters, Phillip, Zara, and Christine, and Zara’s fiancé Fred, who was keen on skindiving and couldn’t wait to get into the water. We trooped off down the goat path of a dirt track that wound down first on the inside of the cliff, where a small safe bay without waves was located. The girls went for swim there but didn’t stay in long because the water was icy. (It was early summer and the ocean still retained its winter temperature.) We boys, however, worked our way around the bottom of the cliff to the ocean side where the big waves from Bass Strait hammered a series of flat rock ledges.

‘Not a problem,’ Fred said. He sat down on the ledge where George had sat.

We quickly suited up in our wetsuits and worked our way across slippery rocks to the edge of a gully. When the waves came in, the water slipped over the top of these flat ledges leaving them slimy and slippery with a fine sheen of green seaweed and sea grapes that burst and squished under foot as we stepped on them. When the wave sucked out, the water level in the gully dropped two to three feet. You could see the black surface swirling as the water sucked out. The dark brown kelp quivered as the water rapidly flowed over it. Beyond about three metres the water was deeper and clearer, with no kelp to obscure the view of the gully sides. Fred was excited and fiddled with his lead belt. George had a hessian bag, which had a long orange cord tied to it as well as to his lead belt. He sat on the edge of the rock ledge and slipped on his flippers (swim fins), spat into his mask, rinsed it out with seawater, and splashed some cold water onto his face to cool it before putting on the mask and gripping the snorkel with a firm bite. He waited a moment for the next wave to roll in up the gully. When the water level came up to the edge of the shelf he was sitting on, he slipped into the water. Almost instantly he was sucked out as the wave retreated. 68

‘That’s how it’s done,’ I told Fred. ‘Watch the waves. Every so often a bigger one comes in and floods over the edge. You sit there like George did, and then you step into it. The wave will suck you out, no problem. You’ll go right over the top of the kelp so you won’t notice it.’

‘You sure about this?’ He nodded affirmatively. He had the snorkel stuck in his mouth and couldn’t speak. ‘When you are ready to come back in, you have to sit at the opening to the gully and watch the waves. They’re not all big enough to come up to the top of the ledge. Wait until a big wave comes along and ride that one in. Swim with it and grab the rocks when you get to the ledge. The water will suck back out and when it has gone you can climb out before the next big wave comes in. If you are not out then it will suck you back out.’ ‘Okay, I’ve got it.’ He pulled the snorkel out so he could reply. ‘You don’t have to tell me again.’ ‘All right, I’ll see you out there.’ I stepped into a wave as it surged up the gully. Within a second it sucked me out and I swam along with it until I was just outside the gully opening. Further out, the waves surged over a huge bommie with greedy sucking sounds. There was no sign of George. But he was a powerful swimmer and an experienced free diver so I didn’t worry about him. I turned to watch Fred as he slipped into the water. He joined me a moment later with thumbs up to indicate he had no problem in getting in. We spent a few minutes diving along the edge of the rock wall marvelling at the fish life when Fred indicated he wanted to go back. He didn’t like the strong currents swirling around the space between the gully opening and the nearby bommie. Back on the surface and treading water he told me he was

Top: George and me on the rocks at Bermagui near where we encountered the giant stingray. Next page: My sister Christine, me (kneeling), Fred, George’s friend, and my brother Phillip at Bermagui, Easter 1963. 69

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going back in.

He nodded, gave me a thumbs up and went down again.

‘Remember to wait for a big wave to carry you up onto the ledge.’

I swam back to the gully, waited for a big surge and rode the wave in. It came up higher over the rock ledge than before so the tide was definitely coming in. I swam up onto the top of the ledge and grabbed hold of a jutting rock. The water sucked away behind me and I stood up to see Zara and Christine gesticulating wildly and pointing towards another inlet. There was a fair bit of wind gusting so I couldn’t hear what they were yelling about over that and the sound of the waves smashing and sucking at the rocks. I stood up and unlatched my leaden belt, tossing it up higher onto the dry rocks. I took off my flippers. While looking around, I realised I couldn’t see Fred anywhere. Shit! Now I knew what Zara and Christine were agitated about. I tossed my flippers up where the lead belt was and looked about for Fred.

He nodded and then started to swim back towards the gully opening. I could see Zara and Christine standing on the beach above the rock ledge watching us. One of them waved. Fred waved back as he waited for a big wave. When we first went in I think the tide must have been out. It was turning and starting to move back in. You could feel the waves were stronger and the currents had more power. I drifted towards the bommie and could see way down George swimming along the side near the bottom. It must have been at least sixty feet deep. He was a long way down. The water was exceptionally clear, as cold ocean water usually is. There was no sand or silt to reduce visibility. I tried to dive down to George but it was too far down. I hovered there a moment until I ran out of breath and had to surface. George came up beside me.

There he was in a different gully. I ran across towards it and got there just as Fred was being sucked out again, tumbling over the rocks and looking dangerously close to being tangled up in the massive kelp fronds. He looked up when he cleared the rocks and saw me standing by the edge.

‘This is a paradise,’ he said as pulled out his snorkel. ‘I’ve got half a dozen already.’ He held the hessian bag open a bit so I could see the crayfish huddled together, legs twitching and feelers waving. ‘A couple more should do it.’ I watched as he dived down again. His method was to tease a crayfish out of its hiding place by putting something there to attract it. That something was usually a clam or a mussel that he smashed with the hilt of his diving knife. Scraping up the flesh, he would use this to attract a crayfish out of its lair. They hated being out in the open. If George blocked their way back to their hiding place they would look for somewhere else to hide. He held open the hessian bag which I suppose to them looked like a cave, a safe place to hide so they would shoot into it and stay there. He didn’t even bother grabbing them. When he came back up for a breath I told him I was heading back in.

He was whiter than I had ever seen him. He tried swimming in again but the wave wasn’t big enough. He only got half way up onto the more slippery rocks before being sucked back out again, only to be tumbled over by the next wave coming in. ‘Swim out a bit further and wait for a big one,’ I yelled at him. He didn’t seem to hear me, and started swimming in with the next wave. I ran back and grabbed a spear gun that we had brought but hadn’t taken into the water. Back by the ledge I stepped down into the opening and wedged myself between some rocks and the edge of the ledge. Holding the gun by the spear point I reached out towards Fred. He saw me. As he swam in this third or fourth time he grabbed the handle of the gun and hung on with a fierce grip. I pulled him towards me as the wave sucked back past him and he scrabbled across the slippery with 71

desperate speed. I stepped back up onto the ledge and continued pulling him up until he was well out of the water, and quite safe. Once again I was reminded that a spear gun had more uses than simply being used to kill fish. We were lucky that George had decided to bring a spear gun in case there were no crayfish. The trip wouldn’t have been wasted, because he would have shot a meal of fresh fish. But with the crayfish there was no need for that. Within five minutes Fred was out of his wetsuit and soaking up some sunshine and chatting happily about what a spectacular dive spot it was. The fact that he could have drowned was already forgotten. George came in shortly with his hessian bag full of crayfish. We went back to my place in Yarraville and Mum soon filled with boiling water the gigantic pot she kept for such occasions. She cooked the crayfish, while we sat in the yard drinking beer and recounting the events of the trip. ‘You saved my life,’ Fred said afterwards. ‘I don’t know how much water I swallowed.’ ‘You should have waited for the bigger wave like I told you,’ I said, and went back inside to get another can of beer and to see how the crayfish were doing. Mum had already made a huge Greek salad with heaps of feta cheese and kalamata olives. Half the crayfish were hot, bright red, and steaming in a pile on the kitchen table while the rest were still cooking.

the guy to almost crash into us. George leapt out. When the other man got out of his car. George was yelling at him, telling him that he had cut him off and why the fuck did he do that. The guy protested and George started hitting him. Unfortunately for George he had forgotten to do up the button on his jeans and his pants started to fall down. Traffic backed up behind us. Car horns honked and tooted. George kept trying to hit the other guy with one hand while holding up his pants. He didn’t have on any underwear, otherwise he wouldn’t have bothered. Meanwhile the man’s wife and kids had gotten out of the car and were screaming at George to stop hitting the man. George’s wife Margaret had also gotten out of our car and was hitting George on the head with an umbrella to make him stop. I just sat in the car and watched it all unfold. I don’t know where Zara and Fred were. They were most likely several cars back wondering what the hell the hold-up was about. Eventually George let the man go and still holding up his pants with his left hand he got back into the car. Margaret barely had time to get in the back seat before George slammed the gear in and we shot off along Geelong Road way ahead of the mob of backed-up cars. All the way he kept berating Margaret for hitting him on the head with the umbrella. ‘You should have helped me,’ he told her. ‘You should have hit him instead of me.’

It had been a perfect day. ‘What? With his family watching you beat up their husband and father?’ There were a lot of days like that. Sometimes they ended well. Other times there was a bit of drama, such as the time when we were coming back from Barwon Heads after another successful day of catching crayfish. Geelong Road was full of traffic with everybody cutting in and out in a rush to get back to Melbourne. A guy cut George off. This pissed him off, so he sped up and passed the guy, got in front, and slammed on his brakes, forcing 72

And so it went all the way back until both of them fell silent and refused to say anything to each other. George was a wild man. As a boy he survived the Second World War in Hungary, ran away to Switzerland where he somehow got himself adopted and learnt how to be a watchmaker, qualifying by the age of thirteen, and in the process managed to acquire his second language, German. He then went

to Canada and worked in the mining industry. There he learnt to speak English. After an accident in winter when he fell down a frozen tailings dump — so he said; it was most likely the result of a fight — landing at the bottom unconscious, his scalp froze by the time the other workers climbed down to rescue him. He lost all his hair and was bald after that. In the early 1950s he ended up in New York, where he discovered the Palladium Dance Hall and the big bands of Tito Puente, Tito Rodriguez, and others. He fell in love with the salsa music they played. After a couple of years, he left for Australia, where he had an aunt and uncle living in Elwood, a suburb of Melbourne. He opened a gold and silver chain jewellery manufacturing plant in collaboration with them, using special knitting machinery he imported from Italy. (He had to sneak out of his hotel room in Rome in the middle of the night without paying his bill because he spent all his money on buying and getting those knitting machines ready for export to Australia.) He discovered Birdland in St Kilda and started playing conga drums there, and that’s where I met him. He had already been in Melbourne for two or three years when we met. He had married his girlfriend Margaret. We knocked around playing drums and skindiving at weekends for a couple of years before he sold his chain knitting business and moved to Sydney, where he eventually opened a watch repair shop somewhere near Redfern. He also started creating handmade jewellery, concentrating on expensive custom-made jewellery. He moved this business to a luxury hotel foyer in Kings Cross.

tide was out and we clambered down over the rocks and used the method of waiting for a big wave to wash up onto the rocks then, stepping into it, to be carried out into deeper water. Coming back we used the same method: wait for the bigger wave and have it carry us back up onto the rocks, where we would grab hold and hang on until the wave receded. The next several waves were always smaller so we had time to clamber higher up. The underwater terrain here consisted of huge rounded boulders scattered from the rocky edge across a sandy bottom. There were gullies and narrow splits between the boulders. You could see the water sucking back and forth through them — the sand swirled and made small eddies as the swells above came in and out. There was some kelp, but nowhere near the amount we were used to in the southern waters around Port Phillip Bay. There was also plenty of plankton scattered throughout. Light sparkled off some of it from time to time, giving a slight haziness. The water was also warmer than we expected. There was a warm current that drifted down the coast from the more subtropical areas to the north, which obviously kept the temperature higher than we were used to. There were few fish, and those we saw were very shy and quickly disappeared.

That first year after he moved up to Sydney we decided to drive up to Bermagui for a skindiving holiday over Easter long weekend. George and another friend drove down from Sydney and joined us. This may have been 1962. Bermagui is a great fishing town. Its pub’s walls have displays of lots of photos of famous people who went big game fishing out of Bermagui. In one large photo standing next to the scales where his catch was strung up and weighed was the author Zane Gray. I had read some of his western novels so I knew who he was. Until my first trip to Bermagui I had no idea he was a keen big game fisherman.

The boys had these new compressed-air spear guns and the damn things didn’t work properly. I had my16 mm Bolex in an underwater housing, and I remember filming Fred as he swam over a gigantic stingray. He looked down, and for some reason he pointed the spear gun down also. The spear slid out and fell point first on top of the stingray. It wasn’t supposed to do that! The stingray flicked its tail up and the poison barb must have been two feet long. At the same instant it flapped its giant wings and took off like a rocket, disappearing within a heartbeat into the hazy blue distance of deeper water. Fred stared at me ashen faced. The sting had missed him by only a few inches. I gave him a thumbs-up sign and pointed to the camera indicating I had shot this on film. We would laugh about this later once the film was processed and we could watch it on screen. He retrieved his spear and swam off in the direction the stingray had gone, through a gully into deeper water.

Arriving late at night after the long drive from Melbourne we set up a huge tent and promptly went to sleep. Early in the morning we found George and his mate and we all went diving in a small bay not far from the camp site. The

If anyone could find some fish to shoot, George would. He came back after Fred and Phillip and I had been out of the water for some time. He had some fish he had speared which we later had for dinner, but his mate who came 73

in perhaps ten minutes after George had trouble getting out of the water and had to climb up the short cliff face on the other side because the tide was in and waves were smashing on the rocks where we first entered. The next day was bright and sunny. We drove out of town south along the coast road until we found a beautiful beach about two miles out of town. A couple of pyramid-shaped rocks made a tiny island about half a mile off the beach. Another friend of George’s had arrived with a small aluminium dinghy. They climbed into it with all their gear and headed out towards the jagged islets offshore. Fred went with them, so there were four of them in the dinghy: George, the owner of the dinghy, the friend who had come down with him from Sydney, and Fred.

I had the camera running and I hoped that some of this could be captured. There was absolutely nothing we could do. The wind seemed to swing around the tiny island offshore. The worst of the churning white water followed it out to sea. There was a dark spot, which must have been the dinghy bouncing along with the white water. Then it was too far out to see. Someone was standing on the island and waving to us. A moment later George floundered in the choppy waves crashing onto the beach and stood up. He staggered towards us.

I stayed on the beach with the girls and Phillip, and filmed the group as they headed off towards the tiny island. The beach was clean with rich white sand. We settled down to wait for the others to finish with their diving. There was a gentle breeze and not a cloud in the sky.

‘Fred’s on the island,’ he called as he ran up the beach. ‘The other two are with the dinghy.’

About two hours later I noticed the boys were in the dinghy and starting back.

‘We’ll have to go back to town and see if we can get one of the fishing trawlers to go out and rescue them. Last I saw they were clinging to the upturned dinghy.’

‘What’s that?’ Zara asked. She was looking south, where the beach stretched in an almost straight line for several miles. There seemed to be a patch of boiling white water just off the beach. It looked like a fountain bursting out of the water. I had never seen anything like that before. It was coming towards us. Suddenly sand started to whip up around our feet, and the white water rushed towards where we were on the beach. A ferocious wind blasted us with fine sand particles that stung all over like vicious mosquito bites. ‘Those guys are going to cop it if they don’t get back in time,’ I said. The water in front of us started to whip up violently. White caps formed, and foam was ripped off by the ever-increasing wind. It looked as if the wind were trying to suck the water up out of the sea. 74

The dinghy was halfway back to the beach when the squall hit. It vanished in a swirl of white crashing waves and blasting wind.

‘At the rate they’re going they’ll be in New Zealand soon.’

George grabbed a pair of jeans as he said this, quickly pulling them on over his wet trunks. He and Phillip raced up to one of the cars and took off in a cloud of wind-swirled dust. By the time they had disappeared, the wind started to die down and the waves calmed. The beach soon gave the appearance that nothing had happened, that the sudden ferocious squall had never passed by. And as far as I could see out to sea nothing was there. The squall had completely dissipated. We packed our gear and waited. About half an hour later a fishing trawler motored up to the small island offshore and we saw Fred clamber on board. It then headed out to sea in the direction the squall had gone. We headed back into town and down to the wharf to wait for the trawler to come back. It came back a couple of hours later. Everyone had been rescued. They even

had the dinghy on board, but it was minus its outboard motor. When it flipped over everything on board had gone to the bottom including the motor. The dinghy didn’t sink because it had flotation panels built in to prevent that from happening. The boys had hung on, and were lucky the waves hadn’t washed them away. They were suffering a bit from hypothermia but a few whiskeys at the pub soon fixed that. They would certainly have a story to tell when they got home. Those were the days!

Next to the dry-cleaning shop in Douglas Parade, Williamstown was a plant nursery. It had a display of subtropical and tropical plants in our shop window, where the warmth and steam in the atmosphere from the pressing machines created an ideal micro-climate for these plants. Dad had run some extra steam pipes through the nursery glasshouse, which was located at the rear of their premises and close to our boiler. These pipes supplied enough warmth to raise the ambient temperature in the glasshouse a few degrees, which kept any winter chill away from the propagated plants growing there. The nursery owner appreciated that, and always maintained a good-looking display in our window. The chap who looked after the display was an Englishman called Walter Shaw. ‘Call me Wally,’ he said when he introduced himself, and we always did, although most others called him Walt. He and his wife and son were ‘ten pound Poms’, having migrated to Australia under that program whereby they contributed ten pounds per person and the government paid for their trip over and billeted them in a hostel until they found work and accommodation. Wally had stayed in the hostel in Kororoit Creek Road, where it bordered on North Altona. Terrible accommodation, so I was told, and it got worse later on when the Mobil Oil Refinery increased its storage capacity and built huge holding tanks that went right up to a few hundred metres from the hostel. Perhaps this is what encouraged people to find somewhere better to live. Eventually that hostel was moth-

balled. Years later it was rebuilt in the same location in spite of many protests that it was unhealthy, being so close to the storage facility of the refinery. It was used to house Vietnamese ‘boat people’ refugees. Almost immediately after arriving at the hostel Wally got a job in the control room of the Mobil Oil refinery across the road. He monitored the flow from the processing to storage in the holding tanks. Since this was shift work, he also looked for work during the days. He worked for the nursery next door, where his job was maintaining the plants the nursery leased to businesses in Melbourne’s city centre, banks, head offices of large corporations, and so on. The nursery supplied plants, maintained them, and rotated them so the ones beginning to look haggard could be rehabilitated. Wally was about fifteen years older than me: a bit scrawny, which I assumed was because he grew up in England during the harsh years leading up to the Second World War. Towards the end of the war he had been conscripted. Once he had finished his basic training, he was sent with a small unit to Germany, where he participated in the reconstruction the Allied forces were doing immediately after the war ended. He spent two years there, and learned to speak German. One day I went into the nursery and found Wally in the office reading a book. There was no one else there. As it was the middle of the afternoon it was very quiet. There was hardly anyone in the street, no customers in the nursery, and we’d finished work for the day and the pressers had gone home. The nursery always smelt fresh, almost like being out in the bush, very different from the white spirit and other chemical smells that pervaded the atmosphere in the dry-cleaning factory. It was a science fiction book that Wally was reading. That immediately made him a kindred soul. I knew there were lots of people who read SF books — especially as some sold very well, far more than could have been bought by true fans — but I had never met any SF readers other than Merv Binns and one or two people encountered at the SF section of the counter in McGill’s Newsagency. Wally was the first outsider: the first reader of SF that I had met who was not a fan. He was also the first person with whom I spent time talking about science fiction and books. Suddenly we became great friends. We discussed books and authors, what we 75

had read, and discovered we liked similar types of stories. Mostly they were adventure, escapist, and space opera. Although he was English, he was fonder of American SF than I was. We started lending each other books, which we discussed at great length, and eventually we talked about writing our own book. I had always wanted to write, but didn’t think I had enough ability. I had a typewriter and had started writing a murder mystery set in a nightclub where girls danced semi-naked in cages suspended from the ceiling — typical juvenile bullshit. Wally, it turned out, had published several stories in British magazines, stories about smuggling stuff from England to Europe or vice versa, but he hadn’t done anything else since coming to Australia. He was too busy working two jobs and paying off a mortgage on a house in Altona to find time for writing. With another baby on the way there would be even less time, so any ambitions towards further writing he had shelved. I always felt out of place working at the dry-cleaning factory. It was not something I really wanted to do, but rather it was something I fell into because it was part of the family activities. I had grown up initially in the residence at the back of the shop (until I was seven and we moved to Yarraville West). Later I worked part time in the shop and learnt the ropes of how the whole process worked; so too did my two sisters and my brother Phillip. It seemed natural or inevitable that I would be, that we all would be, working there full time. I didn’t have to like it. I was interested in books and writing, in art and painting, and in Afro-Cuban music and its various permutations in different parts of the world. Zara and Christine were interested in dancing and show business. Phillip, out of the four of us, was the only one really happy working at the dry cleaner. Working in the dry-cleaning business allowed us to have money to devote to our other interests. I guess we were lucky in that respect.

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name. She was performing in a TV broadcast at the ABC studios in Elwood. I knew those studios because I had appeared there in a dance show with Zara and the girls from her dance school. On an impulse I decided to go over to the studios and watch her performance. I was of course hoping to meet her. God only knows what I would say to her. Being young, I never gave that a thought. I simply went over and walked into the studios as if I had every right to be there. No one questioned me. One of the security men near the main entrance to the studios nodded and said ‘Hi. You’re back again.’ He remembered me from the dance show we did a few months back. I smiled at him and asked him how he was and walked by without waiting for an answer. Ynez Amaya had recently come over from South Africa, which explained her exotic appearance. She was one of these people of mixed racial heritage blended in such a way as to produce a stunningly beautiful person. In the same studio where we had performed the dance routine, she was standing by the piano and going over her movements within the allowed space. Two huge cameras shifted to position themselves for a long shot and a close-up shot. A number of people were in the studio: the floor manager, camera operators, a man holding a padded mike above the singer’s head high enough to be out of camera shot, as well as the musicians, and a jazz trio of whom only the piano player seemed familiar. I had eyes only for Ynez. There were a number of other people in the studio as well as a small audience. The recording or broadcast had not yet begun, so I slipped quietly in through the door and stood near the back of the studio close to the audience.

I never imagined for one second that I would be a dry cleaner on and off over the next forty years. But who at any given moment can imagine what his or her future will be?

A sign flashed indicating the broadcast was about to begin.

The Age’s Green Pages is its weekly section dealing with entertainment, containing a TV and radio guide, lists of theatre shows in town, showbiz gossip, and much else. One day I saw a picture of the most beautiful woman I had ever seen. The name under the photo said Ynez Amaya, a suitably exotic

The floor manager held up his right hand, fist closed. Everyone watched him. He was wearing earphones and obviously listening. ‘Ten seconds,’ he announced and started counting backwards. When he got to five he fell silent, but opened his fist finger by finger starting with his thumb to indicate the last five seconds.

Someone standing in front of the audience said, ‘Quiet, please.’

I saw the piano player mouthing the count: one – two – one two three just loud enough for the trio and the singer to hear, but no one else. They began at the instant the floor manager finished his silent five-count. I was unfamiliar with the song but it was beautifully sung in a modern jazz style, and the playing of the trio was quietly understated to enhance and not take any attention away from the singer. All too soon it was over. The audience clapped, and the band members stood up smiling with obvious pleasure at a fine performance. Cameras moved around, and before I could take more than a tentative step towards the band, the singer and the trio vanished. The floor manager was waving his arms above his head. Through a glass partition in an adjoining studio another performance was underway as part of the live broadcast, and in the studio where I was standing cameras were being repositioned and someone else was getting ready for another performance. I slipped out of the studio into the corridor. It was empty. Not knowing what else to do, I headed back to the front entrance. I felt relieved that I hadn’t been able to approach the singer, because in that instant I realised I had no idea what I would have said to her, other than something that may have made me look like a dickhead. Outside and walking towards my van in the car park I saw her with the piano player getting into a car. They drove past me and quickly disappeared down the narrow street outside the studio. About a month later I was sitting on a Saturday night at the table reserved for the band at Birdland when someone sat beside me. I was watching George play with the band while a couple of bad dancers gyrated around the small dance floor almost in time to the music. Those lessons and various impromptu playing sessions we had had with JoJo had improved his playing. It was much better than when I had first met him. The playing was cleaner, and more precise. ‘The band sounds good, doesn’t it?’ the girl who had sat at the table beside me said. ‘They really are good,’ I agreed, turning towards her, adding ‘probably the

best in Melbourne at the moment’, and almost fell off my chair when I saw who it was beside me. ‘Ynez,’ I blurted. ‘Ynez Amaya?’ ‘The name is Beryl,’ she said. ‘That Ynez name was something the ABC dreamed up because it made me sound more exotic.’ ‘Well, for a jazz singer Beryl is probably a more appropriate name.’ ‘Thanks.’ She smiled, and up close like that I was stunned at how radiant she appeared. She was even more beautiful than I had imagined from the distant view I had seen at the studios in Elwood. Suddenly I was lost for words. I had no idea what else to say. But then the band finished and George joined us. ‘Hello, Beryl,’ he said as he sat down. She nodded at him, and by then the rest of the band was also sitting at the table for their break. The others all greeted her cheerfully. She knew everyone, even though I had never seen her at Birdland before. Roger, the band’s drummer, gave her a peck on the cheek and sat beside her on the other side. She seemed overly familiar with him. They must be a couple, was my immediate thought, and for some strange reason I felt relieved. Roger and I got on really well together as players. He was an excellent jazz drummer, but he had also learned some authentic cowbell patterns for Cuban-based music from JoJo and from some records JoJo had lent him to study. He had mastered the patterns and sounded like an authentic Latin drummer when we played together. It gave a whole different ambience to the music and to the band. Roger leaned across in front of Beryl and was about to introduce us when she told him we had just met, so instead he said, ‘John is going to do the floorshow with us.’ She immediately looked at me with a different expression in her eyes. Maybe it was curiosity. Perhaps she had been wondering what I was doing sitting at the band’s table. Maybe it was acceptance because suddenly I was one of them and not an outsider. 77

George stood up. ‘I’ve got to go,’ he said. He never stayed for the floorshow.

for us.

Everyone was drinking a soft drink with a shot of brandy in it. Quickly they downed their drinks as the lights on the bandstand dimmed and the area of the dance floor brightened. The other people crowding the tables in the club dropped their volume a little in anticipation of the show. The band members stood up and quietly made their way towards the bandstand. I followed along behind and sat behind the conga drums at the edge of the dance floor.

‘Thanks. You too.’

Johnny Summers, a brilliant singer from New Zealand, came out and acted as MC. He got the audience warmed with a joke or two and sang the popular hit of the day, ‘Moon River’. We did it as a bolero, slow and romantic, and a warm sensuous voice. I imagined half the women in the audience sitting in the dark swooning as he sang. Next was the ever-popular almost naked exotic dancer (who was actually born in Russia, but grew up in Australia) with her two pythons. Fortunately this time they behaved themselves and slithered towards the audience instead of my congas. I smiled as I heard the frantic scrambling from the darkened tables as people tried to get away from the snakes, only to have them pulled back by the dancer before anything serious happened. Crocker and Clarke weren’t there that particular night. Johnny announced Beryl and she stepped into the spotlight. She sang two songs; a standard slow jazz ballad that required soft brushes played on the snare drum, which she followed with the familiar up-tempo version of ‘I’ve Got Rhythm’ in which I played. We had not rehearsed it, but we had all played this so many times in so many different ways that it didn’t matter. We swung into it. At an appropriate moment Chuck, the pianist, indicated that Roger should do a sixteenbar solo, which he did beautifully. Chuck nodded to me just as Roger was concluding and I did another sixteen bars of conga solo. I took some of Roger’s phrases and expanded on them before Beryl came back in for the final coda and the number was over. It went very smoothly and the audience responded with sustained applause. Johnny came back into the limelight and sang another popular hit and then the show was over. ‘Nice solo,’ Roger commented as we made our way back to the table reserved 78

‘I mean it. You played a lot better than you’ve ever done before.’ I didn’t tell him I felt it was Beryl who had inspired me that night. I could see her studying me with a quizzical look. I think she suspected, but wasn’t going to say anything, certainly not to Roger. Over the next few months we chatted together while the band played. We became close and I was sure I was in love with her. I had not felt like this about anyone else before. In fact I thought I had fallen in love with her when I first saw her photo in the Green Pages. She reciprocated my feelings, and for a while she too was in love with me. Unfortunately there was no way we could take it any further because she was married to Roger. We cuddled and kissed in the dark at the back of the club but it never came to anything more than that. Our relationship remained platonic. It could be no other way. People thought we were having an affair and we didn’t disabuse them of that idea. We simply never spoke about it. I took Beryl as my partner to my sister’s wedding to her German boyfriend Fred. It was the first wedding in our family and it was a massive affair as befits a traditional Greek wedding. I discovered Beryl was interested in science fiction stories and I had found one by Ray Bradbury that I thought was profound. I took the paperback with me and read this story to her at the back of the club one night and no one noticed us at all. I can’t remember which story it was. Bradbury was a genius with words, and could take an idea that had little substance and write a beautifully poetic story around it that was so moving it could almost bring tears to your eyes. Stories by Ray Bradbury turned up in the most unexpected publications. He was one of the few who had crossed into the mainstream without compromising what he wrote, and was known to a very much wider audience than some other well-known authors within science fiction circles. One of his

stories, ‘The Fruit at the Bottom of the Bowl’, was printed in Australian Women’s Weekly when it was a weekly magazine. It must have confused regular readers expecting a story about fruit salad including a recipe. It was a story about obsessive behaviour and murder and how a compulsive habit brought the protagonist undone. After a year Beryl told me one night that I was in love with the idea of being in love with her and not really in love with her. That took me by surprise. Maybe she was annoyed that I hadn’t taken our relationship further, or perhaps realised I didn’t have the courage to pursue it beyond what it was, knowing that she was married to Roger. Maybe she actually loved me at one point and was disappointed I didn’t fully reciprocate. I really did love her — I was sure of that — but perhaps it later devolved into the idea of being in love with her rather than actually being in love. It was a strange relationship, which Roger knew all about. That he wasn’t too concerned meant that they had obviously spoken about it and he knew exactly what the situation was between us. When she became pregnant with Roger’s baby we drifted further apart. We remained friends, but the particular intimacy that we had experienced over the previous year when I had been truly infatuated with her was gone. As her pregnancy evolved she stopped singing at the club and I rarely

saw her again. I heard much later that she had split up with Roger and had moved back to living with her parents. I wondered if it had been my fault that the split-up had occurred; a delayed reaction to our platonic affair. I wasn’t going to find out, because the band members changed and I lost interest in playing at Birdland because the music changed. The ambience degenerated into a seedier, grimier feeling, and it seemed as if the owners no longer cared about how the place looked. Music was changing too; the Beatles and the Rolling Stones had appeared on the scene, and hundreds of would-be copycats gigged around town. Birdland could no longer compete with newer venues that promoted young rock and roll bands. Everything was changing. It was time to move on. — John Litchen, February 2012

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Letters of comment *brg* My article about the first two novels of Mervyn Peake’s ‘Gormenghast’ trilogy appeared in *brg* 72. I intended republishing it in Steam Engine Time, which ceased publication in early 2012, or in SF Commentary, then write material on the third novel, Titus Alone. This still has not happened.*

TARAL WAYNE 245 Dunn Avenue, Apt. 2111, Toronto, Ontario M6K IS6, Canada I found your Mervyn Peake zine informative, to the point of clearing up the attribution of Peake’s death to ‘brain cancer’. So, it was Parkinson’s instead ... who knew? It is still hard to explain why the third book in the trilogy is so much at odds with the first two. I found Titus Alone all but unreadable. Whereas the first two books were saturated in atmosphere and seemed very real, the third book seemed like floating downsteam on a river of metaphors, and not at all real. Without the drama of Steerpike’s rise and fall, it was about nothing that really compelled my interest — some abstruse point of philosophy, perhaps? I’ve been reading a two-part history of Byzantium. The parallels between imperial politics in Constantinople and ritual in Gormanghast are striking. Steerpike would have fit into Byzantine politics very well. Obscure nationals starting out as stable boys or office clerks rising to the imperial throne through ability, intrigue, and many, many murders, then being deposed in turn by the next lean and hungry would-be emperor, were a commonplace in the eighth, ninth, and tenth centuries. And ritual was just about all Byzantium was good for. Like Constantinopolis, Gormenghast was more than a palace — it was a vast warren of interconnected buildings and courtyards, 80

and a way of life. You’ll be interested in the attached covers of the three volumes of the first American paperback edition, from Ballantine. (15 December 2011) *brg* One of the biographers of Mervyn Peake complains about the lack of relevance of the Ballantine covers (the first American paperback editions) to the contents of the books. Ballantine had been hoping to ride on the 1968 success of the first American edition of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, despite the lack of similarity between the two trilogies.*

TIM MARION c/o Kleinbard, 266 East Broadway, Apt 1201B, New York, NY 10002, USA Thanks, once again, for sending me the Mervyn Peake speech. Fascinating reading. Peake’s art is great, too. I read the ‘Gormenghast’ trilogy in 1977, three years after I read Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, and I was extremely glad that the former was vastly different from the latter. I must be one of the few fantasy readers on earth who never ‘got’ LotR. To me, it was mostly boring, maudlin, etc. I enjoyed The Hobbit, however. To this day, I still don’t understand the fascination that both my peers and elders have had for the LotR trilogy. To my mind, someone who corrects me on the pronunciation of ‘Moria’ (it should not sound like Mariah Carey’s first name, apparently, despite the fact that makes it sound more exotic) has very little going for him in life. LotR was such a bore that it took me nine months to read it, off and on. Gormenghast, by comparison, I practically flew through; reading it every spare moment. I’m glad you only wrote about the first two books. You’re right to say that the third book is such a different animal that it would require a separate article. I sure hope you sent a copy of this to Ned Brooks! He’s a big Peake fan, and wrote about new Titus Awake book in the latest issue of his zine It Goes on the Shelf. I’ve just finished East of Eden by Steinbeck, and was surprised at how much I enjoyed it. It was the kind of book that made me sorry when I finished it, because I wanted to see what would happen to the characters next. Likewise, it was the kind of book that made me sad when some of the more interesting characters died. I had planned to read The Manchurian Candidate, by Richard Condon, after seeing the movie. However I have just re-watched that old 1962 movie and no longer find it all that interesting. (Until now it has been one of my favourite movies of all time.) The old paperback I have seems to be falling apart — the glue is no longer holding the first few pages. (3 January 2012)

I just pulled a mass market paperback anthology from off the shelf: Weird Shadows from Beyond, edited by John Carnell and pubished in 1965, although I almost certainly bought it 10 or more years later. It includes two Mervyn Peake stories — ‘Danse Macabre’ and ‘Same Time, Same Place’ — that I have never read Elaine, did Bruce tell you how much I admired your back cover to the latest *brg*? Beautiful! (12 January 2012) Re *brg* 73: The mark of a good writer is the ability to write entertainingly about subjects in which the reader has little or no interest. John Litchen succeeds in this aim, with stories of massive deliveries of dry-cleaning, performing on drums, various different kinds of Caribbean music, skin diving, filming underwater, Jacques Cousteau, etc. Indeed, there is almost a John Steinbeck type feel about his autobiography. I learned a lot about Jacques Cousteau here, a man who was definitely ahead of his time. I’m ashamed to admit that when I was a kid I almost always eschewed his TV specials, as all I could consider was that he was pre-empting what I would normally watch. I did not know it was his idea to create ‘scuba’ equipment or that ‘SCUBA’ was an acronym. This just put me in mind to listen to the late John Denver’s song ‘Calypso’ (about Cousteau’s ship), which I always found haunting. I also liked what Litchen said about both Jack Vance and Poul Anderson. I must disagree with him on Bradbury, however, and I know this is an unpopular opinion. Bradbury’s science fiction was too whimsical, capricious, and tricked out to even be considered good literature, much less ‘science fiction’. I have to admit I’m basing this feeling solely on R is for Rocket, however, which turned out to be a big disappointment when it was passed along to me, by my English teacher, when I was 10. I found the stories to be so poor and self-indulgent that I couldn’t even finish the book. It was Bradbury’s horror stories, however, that were genuinely chilling and I enjoyed. And Litchen says he doesn’t care for those. He does, however, admit

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Elaine pointed out to me that most correspondents praise either or both covers for *brg* 73, but even she couldn’t remember the cover of hers to which people were referring. Hence the above reminders.

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to enjoying Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes, which I regard as a dark fantasy/horror story. Litchen writes well about the movies that were based on the stories he’s read, but apparently he never saw Something Wicked, a very effective movie: well photographed and acted.

Return of Sherlock Holmes) the picture quality seems to have much less definition. (But maybe the sound is better.)

I’m sorry that Litchen didn’t like John Carpenter’s The Thing, which I felt was a much misunderstood and maligned movie. It wasn’t really that gross, as all that metamorphic stuff was obviously just sand and clay and papier mâché; I didn’t find the alien’s changing form to be all that gross. Litchen says he liked both The Thing and the previous version equally well, but it’s obvious to me that John Carpenter’s remake stood head and shoulders above the awful, ancient Thing From Another World, where the villain was a silent, menacing, ‘Flaming Carrot’ type (reference to a silly comic book character I never see anymore).

(24 January 2012)

Litchen seems, at one point, to be asking who the first ‘lead operator’ was in the Mission Impossible TV show. I believe he’s referring to Peter Graves, who was, coincidentally enough, the brother of James Arness, who played the Giant Rutabaga/Flaming Carrot mentioned above (as well as Matt Dillon on the TV show Gunsmoke). (21 January 2012) *brg* Tim Marion has also taken over from Dick Jenssen the job of picking up Gillespie’s typos. He found 25 of them in *brg* 73! I was going to print them here, plus the corrections. Elaine pointed out that, after a year a half, nobody was likely to worry too much. Well, I worry, and I’m grateful to Tim for the trouble he has taken. No doubt he will be poised at the keyboard as soon as he receives this new fanzine. Thanks, Tim, for your efforts.*

Although you don’t watch much TV, I assume you are familiar with the Sherlock Holmes series from British TV in the mid 1980s? Quite excellent: Jeremy Brett is supposed to have portrayed the definitive Holmes. They’re all on DVD. Jeff and I (who watched the episodes originally when they were repeated in the late ’80s/early ’90s) had a good time watching the first set, which is called The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, but in the second set (The

How are Merv and Helena Binns? Haven’t heard from them in ages.

*brg* Merv’s health is up and down, but he did receive a personal boost at the Continuum convention in Melbourne last year when he received the Infinity Award for lifetime (and more) achievement. We don’t see him and Helena very often, as Merv will no longer drive a car at night. Helena seemed in good health when last we met. At the beginning of 2012 they found a much more congenial house than the one they had been living in.*

Don Ashby propounds only one theory of time travel, and seems to feel that any other theory is automatically invalid: ‘Time travel stories tend to annoy me because most writers can’t seem to get their head around the notion that if someone goes back into the past that event is ipso facto part of the character’s present. You can’t change history, because if you have gone back in time you are already part of it. That is why we know it is impossible to interact with the past, because we do not record it in our history.’ Not necessarily. There is also the equally valid theory that you can have knowledge of what the past was supposed to be like, but when you go back into the past, you change the events that you know are supposed to happen. This creates what is familiarly known as a ‘divergent timeline’. And you have dual memories of both what the past was supposed to be as well as the way you just changed it, because you are at ‘the centre of the nexus’: that physical or metaphysical point at which you yourself are not changed by the timebending process, and thus you retain awareness of both pasts. I definitely agree with Don Ashby when he writes, ‘Time travel stories are fantasy, not science fiction.’ I’m not a physics professor (and, offhand, I’m guessing Don isn’t either), merely a logical-minded reader who has thought a lot about this. It seems to me that part of the burden of going back in time has to do with quantifying just what time is: it’s an artifice by which we 83

measure the movement of objects through space. If the theory that our galaxy is actually moving is true, that means that the Earth is always in a different place than it was before in the sky. If one were able to somehow transcend time, and get all the large celestial objects to move backwards to where they were, there is still the possibility that one could end up in the right time (the past) but the wrong place (empty space). Indeed, even ignoring, for the moment, the movement of the galaxy, if calculated incorrectly, the Earth could be on the other side of the sun from the time traveller if said traveller moves only backward through time and does not calculate the movement of the Earth through its orbit as well (leaving said traveller with a rather chilly welcome, to say the least). I enjoyed Jerry Kaufman’s letter, where he states: ‘Still, I sometimes think our life is like our dreams. While in the dream we usually accept it as real, but when we wake up we either remember only the highlights or forget the dream entirely. By analogy, perhaps this life we live is itself a dream and [typo correction] when we die here, we wake up elsewhere.’ Not an unfamiliar concept, but he phrases it well. There is also ‘effective dreaming’, where the dreamer becomes aware that he or she is in a dream and then starts to control and manipulate the events occurring in the dream. (Is that what it means to be God, I wonder?) (22 January 2012)

STEVE SNEYD 4 Nowell Place, Almondbury, Huddersfield, West Yorkshire HD5 8PB, England I’ve been reading *brg* 73 during the year-bottom energy slump (called by some Twixmas, between Crimble and New Year), this year deepened by the traditional winter nose-run cold and afteraches of a fall. This issue has Elaine Cochrane’s great fractal autumn leaves back cover. Dick Jenssen’s front cover is implicit with menace-to-come: in the next frame will the dirigible swoop, grapple the ‘expensive delicate ship’, then haul it into the sky to drop to it to its doom on the rocks? 84

I’d forgotten (re the Mark Bould print that Gillian Polack quotes) that H. P. Lovecraft’s Old ’Uns are part veggie. (I’ve been noticing lately that HPL is now such a mainstream cultural market that his name gets cited without journalists feeling any need to explain who he was or what he did, and that he has entered the Elvis etc. pantheon in the last few years, doubtless an irritant to those who felt him their own cultic secret.) In John Cowper Powys’s Porius (UK reprint was by Overlook Duckworth), he uses the term ‘multiverse’ back in 1951. I wondered if it was a coincidence that Moorcock also uses the term, and then saw in the 1999 edition of the Encyclopedia of SF that it is probable that Moorcock got the term from Powys, a fine example of the cliché that ‘everything is older than we think’. (27 December 2011)

ANDREW DARLINGTON Somewhere in Britain I’ve been outta circulation awhile. Foreign parts, y’know? And if ever we’ve had cause to question why exactly we flip back to Greece year after year, our trip from Lefkada down through Kefalonia to Ithaca provides stunning reasons aplenty. The shimmer of blue seas, so many small green islands, including the Onassis-family private island of Scorpios, is truly overwhelming. Glimpses of dolphins frolicking in the ship’s wake, and giant loggerhead turtles feeding in Argostoli bay. We chase Byron in reverse. He was in Vathi (Ithaca) in August 1823, hunting out Homer, then lived four months in Metaxata (Kefalonia), where his bronze bust now fronts his white house — or rather, his replica house — the original a victim of the 1953 earthquake — but there’s a tasteful Byron’s Pizza taverna in nearby Lakythra! Kefalonia itself is rugged enough to tax the leg muscles, although we took a two-hour hike around the largely tourist-free headland to the lighthouse and beyond. We were spoilt for choice when it comes to good food, too, although the girls complained of the lack of little shops. And for ouzo-fuelled evenings the copper sun disc sinks over Lixouri like the devalued euro beneath the economic horizon. Now we’re enduring re-entry to normality. (19 September 2011)

The main news from around here of late is that Jane Monahan (my wife) retired from the CDC back in early September. We then promptly took off for about seven weeks of touring in New England. Jane’s family has a house up in Northern New Hampshire, where we stayed for most of that time. I retired from working for the State of Georgia back in February of last year, which means that we are both people of leisure. Luckily we have both worked many years in government jobs, so we have pensions and don’t have to rely on the vagaries of the stock market to keep us in groceries. We also have a house and cars that are fully paid for, so basically things are not too bad. Maria was not in town during Joy’s visit. She is presently living in Seattle, which is probably where she is going to stay. She really loves that town, and I don’t blame her. She is doing two Master’s degrees at the University of Washington — one from the school of forestry in ecology and the second from the school of urban planning. I think she’s just got a lot of energy! We visited her back our spring, and also took the opportunity to spend an evening with Janice Murray, who happens to live fairly close to Maria. (8 October 2011)

This is the photo from *brg* or Scratch Pad to which several letter-writers refer. This is not a picture of the top of the cat enclosure being crushed by one big hailstone, but by accumulated hailstones that fell in a very short time while we were visiting relatives on Christmas Day, 2011.

ALAN SANDERCOCK 2010 Desmond Drive, Decatur GA 30033, USA *brg* In *brg* 73, Joy Window tells of visiting ‘America’s Deep South’, and calling in on Alan Sandercock and Jane Monahan in Decatur, Georgia. Maria is Alan’s daughter from his first marriage. I first met Joy and Alan when they were fellow fans living in Adelaide, South Australia, in the late 1960s and early 1970s.*

NED BROOKS 4817 Dean Lane, Lilburn GA 30047, USA *brg* 73 has a spectacular Ditmar cover, and a nice use of fractals by Elaine Cochrane on the back too. I once wrote the Mandelbrot set in TurboBasic, which has good color capability in DOS. Later I used one of the fancy professional software programs. Jennifer Bryce’s article includes nice photos of Bremen, about which I remember only that it had something to do with the Pied Piper legend. The town square building looks that old anyway! My mother lives quite near Emory University (which drives the property values and property taxes up, as all those professors and graduate students want a place to live). I live about 15 miles further east. Too bad I hadn’t met Joy Window and Alan Sandercock. They could have visited the skiffy museum I live in. Ken Ozanne from Sydney has been here a couple of times. A road 85

trip through the South now is probably no more hazardous than through any other part of the USA — and you are less likely to freeze to death if stranded on the road. George Locke once asked me if it was safe to ride the Greyhound intercity buses around the South — I told him I had done it as a teenager and never suffered any attacks by Red Indians, highwaymen, or the KKK. There are a lot of birds in the bushes around my house — they particularly like the evergreen photinias and tea-olives, where they are safely unseen year round. A month or so ago I saw a small dark bird flying around the top of the of the trees in the front yard — it seemed to be going ‘Bing Bong, Bing Bong’, like a car’s warning sound — perhaps a mockingbird, but I didn’t think they would sing on the wing. Joy saw more of the local sights than I have. I’ve never been to the famous Aquarium. Or seen an armadillo — I would not touch one, as they can carry leprosy. John Litchen’s bilingual poem is nice — I can read both versions. Just as well that he could do his own translation. I have a bilingual book of Neruda’s where ‘mareado’ (which means seasick, or by analogy any sort of dizziness or confusion) is translated as ‘things went swimmingly’, which to my mind is the opposite. My favourite of the books John mentions — and probably the only one I would reread — is The Martian Chronicles. (5 January 2012)

GILLIAN POLACK Chifley, ACT 2606 I’m ploughing steadily through my doctorate and will be starting looking for work lateish next year, all going well. I didn’t realise that it could actually be fun for a Medievalist to write a time travel novel. The dissertation is also fun, though I admit, less so than the novel. My time travel novel has turned out very different to most others, unsurprisingly. Van Ikin knows this, from close 86

personal experience, since he’s supervising me. He deserves much sympathy. Other news? There is none. Doctorates tend to be all encompassing. Except that the Conflux cookbook is out and available for purchase (online through the Conflux website). It’s a limited edition, and all the profits go to Conflux. Culinary history in the service of fandom! It’s a fan history written from a culinary history perspective. I’m glad it’s out — I am now retired from banquet design. (21 December 2011)

DORA LEVAKIS Numbulwar, via Groote Eylandt, Northern Territory I forgot that you may have been affected by the huge Christmas Day storm in Melbourne (as seen on the front cover of *brg* 74). Sorry to hear you had such damage to the cats’ enclosure netting and that you have the ordeal of having to join the long list of people needing to deal with an insurance company. I was later amazed to hear of what I’d escaped. I had collected my sister and brother on Christmas morning and drove along the Western Ring road out of Melbourne just before 10 a.m. I felt a couple of drops of rain when loading the car and, in the distance saw a weighty grey cloud. My sister worried that we might be driving into rain but, no, it was a beautifully gentle sunny drive. After a break, an hour from Shepparton, received a strange phone call from sister in Shepparton asking if we were still coming. Of course we were ... It wasn’t until 8 p.m. that she told us there was a heavy storm raging in Shepparton when she rang. It wasn’t until around 11 p.m., as I drove home to Yarraville after dropping my sister off in St Kilda, that I heard of the Melbourne storm on the news. (30 December 2011) The difficulty of accessing internet is driving me crazy. The days are very eventful and very, very long. Much to say but for now, let me share the good news that my painting of Absolom, Kyle, and Katrina has made it as one of the finalists in the Doug Moran Portrait Competition. The judging and opening will be Tuesday, 24 July, two days after I’m scheduled to return to

Dora Levakis (right), holding Thomas, and showing (left) her portrait of Gerald Murnane, a semi-finalist in the Doug Moran Portrait Competition.

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the Territory. The finalists are required to be there ... The 30 finalists will travel the country, so this will be good publicity. My portrait of Gerald Murnane made it as a semi-finalist. (8 July 2012)

JERRY KAUFMAN 3522 NE 123rd Street, Seattle WA 98125, USA Thanks for enjoyable reading of other people’s travels. I wonder what Jenny Bryce meant by ‘the miniature stonehenge at Avebury’. Has someone built a tiny replica of Stonehenge there? She can’t be referring to the ring of standing stones, as it covers much more ground than Stonehenge does, as least in memory. John Litchen’s new instalment of his memoirs is the best, as well as longest, reading this issue. I particularly liked the parts about his music making. I never realised how complex beating on conga drums was, nor how many flavours and styles of drumming there are. His comments on his favourite writers were also interesting, and added just the right amount of literary material that every Gillespie zine needs. (15 January 2012) We received two manila envelopes from your address a week ago — one large and one small. (When I was very young, I thought they were called ‘vanilla envelopes’.) I opened the smaller one first, and saw it was *brg* 74, flipped it over and read the advert on the back for Steam Engine Time 13. ‘Urk,’ I said to Suzle, ‘Bruce is charging $100 for the paper version of SET. I guess I’m not getting one.’ Then I opened the larger envelope. Do you actually get any takers at $100? Perhaps if you comped fewer copies you could ask less for the paper ones. I understand the process is expensive and so’s the postage. But without knowing the actual costs, I can’t judge where you decide to set the price. So this is a big thank you for sending SET

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to me for such a paltry letter of comment. And thanks, too for *brg*. * brg* The aim of the $100 price tag for a subscription — to SF Commentary, of course, since Steam Engine Time has disappeared, except for an off-in-the-never-never No 14 (index and final letters of comment) — is to encourage everybody to download the electronic version. Airmail postage has gone up again.*

‘What are we seeing?’ At first, I thought it was a smushed up dead white cat. But it was actually a mass of hail? Did it fall in a lump like that, or did a lot of smaller hailstones blow against the fence and solidify? *brg* Lots of huge hailstones, falling very fast all together, bowed down the netting and quickly formed that huge ball of hail. We were not home at the time, so we did not see this meteorological marvel.*

As usual, you and I don’t overlap on the lists very much. On the pop music scene, I’ve listened to nearly none of the albums you list, even if I like the performers. I like the McGarrigle sisters quite a bit, but haven’t heard Oddities. My favourites are their first album and their all-French album. I’ve never warmed to Greg Brown, and the Rolling Stones’ Some Girls didn’t impress me as much as others. My favourite Stones albums are Out of Our Heads, Beggars Banquet, and Their Satanic Majesties Request (a sadly underrated album). But these are all records I first heard many a year ago. *brg* The point of my listing was that the outtakes from the Rolling Stones’ Some Girls album, now that we’ve heard them at last, prove to be better songs than most of those on the original album.*

I did give some listens to Paul Simon’s So Beautiful or So What and enjoyed it. But since I often download an album now and don’t keep any record of what I’ve listened to or when, I’m never sure just when I first listened to something. I’m pretty sure I listened to The King is Dead by the Decemberists and W H O K I L L by tUnE-yArD for the first time in 2011, and loved both enough to buy the CDs. (A profile of the woman who records as tUnE-YaRd in The New Yorker led me to her music. And a couple of years ago they ran a piece on the

Mountain Goats — thanks, New Yorker.)

nonsensical plot and main idea. And a theme of belief in God and religion versus nihilism.

On to other lists: I have Marta Argerich’s Solos and Duos, enjoy the music, but wonder how one can tell which pianist is which in a duo. I have Paul Lewis’s Beethoven sonatas, but not his version of the concertos. I bought the sonatas as they were issued in smaller sets of one, two, and three CDs per set. I remember buying the first one in Paris at a Harmonia Mundi shop a few blocks from our hotel. (I have no idea if they had several shops in Paris or only the one.) I have some of Angela Hewitt’s Bach, but not the 15-CD set you have — I need to listen to her more. The only novel I’ve read from your list is The Curious Incident ..., which had a nice sense of the alien about it. There’s now a television series about an autistic boy who never talks and is a maths wizard, called Touch — but it never uses the words ‘autistic’ or ‘autism’. (It’s called Touch because the boy doesn’t like to be touched, and when he holds his father’s hand we smile at the breakthrough. But the wider meaning is that we all touch one another’s lives in mysterious yet patterned ways, as demonstrated each episode by a new set of numbers the boy fixates on and which leads his father to help strangers from around the world help each other.) I have Alex Ross’s earlier book on music in the twentieth century, but not this newer one, because I’ve read all the contents in the aforementioned New Yorker. (2 July 2012) During the summer, life here consists of going to the Clarion West Friday night parties and other social events. This week things are even busier, as George R. R. Martin is the teacher at CW, and tomorrow night’s reading will be a big event at the Town Hall (I think it’s a 600-seat venue) instead of at University Book Store (seating about 40). Suzle and I will be ushering, and she will also be troubleshooting. Right now we’re doing weekly visits to the hospital that Stu Shiffman is in after his stroke — seeing Stu and talking to Andi Shechter. And we went to see Prometheus over the weekend as well. Great visuals, good acting, possibly

(3 July 2012) *brg* I met Stu Shiffman when I was in Seattle, and he seemed a lot younger than I am. And now, thanks to Andi’s messages on Facebook, we’ve been reading about his struggle to recover from a serious stroke. Glad you’ve been able to visit him.*

ANDY ROBSON 63 Dixon Lane, Leeds LS12 4RR, England John Litchen’s cabaret days sound interesting. ‘Cabaret’ has always been a rumour to me, as by the time I was old enough they’d disappeared from everywhere but the odd holiday resort. I suppose you could blame the Beatles for that, as everyone wanted to play rock and roll. But ‘cabaret’ was for after-midnight drinkers and quiet cool jazz and other sounds that wouldn’t permeate into the streets in the early hours. A telling bit of TV footage from the sixties shows an audience of screaming females and few bemused straightfaced guys clearly showing one guy turning to his mates and saying, ‘Maybe we could do that!’ (3 March 2012)

ELAINE COCHRANE Same address as that of the editor Elaine’s Favourite Books of 2011 Fiction Equ. 1

Priest: A Dream of Wessex

Equ. 1

Disch: The Puppies of Terra

3

Kuttner: Robots Have No Tails

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Non-fiction

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Darkness, Be My Friend by John Marsden

1

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Burning for Revenge by John Marsden

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The Night is for Hunting by John Marsden

Smoot: Wrinkles in Time

Others ●

Thorne: Black Holes and Time Warps

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The Other Side of Dawn by John Marsden

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Carrington: Down Below

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The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini

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Waten: Alien Son

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Batavia by Peter Fitzsimons

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Durham: High Albania

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The Lost City of Z by David Grann

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Delany: Heavenly Breakfast

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Conversations with Painters by Noel Barber

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Gribbin & Gribbin: Richard Feynman: A Life in Science

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Sinister Twilight: The Fall of Singapore by Noel Barber

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The Magician’s Apprentice by Trudi Canavan

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Book One: The Black Magician Trilogy: The Magicians’ Guild by Trudi Canavan

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Book Two: The Black Magician Trilogy: The Novice by Trudi Canavan

(7 January 2012)

ROBERT ELIORDETA Unit 4, 15 High Street, Traralgon VIC 3844

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I loved the front and back covers of *brg* 73. All of the articles were interesting.

I’m currently reading Book Three: The Black Magician Trilogy: The High Lord by Trudi Canavan. I haven’t finished it yet, as I have only just started it. (19 December 2011)

In my previous letter I forgot to mention the author of the Ranger’s Apprentice series. He is an Aussie author. His name is John Flanagan. Other books that I have read in 2011 are:

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Book 1: The Rain Wild Chronicles: The Dragon Keeper by Robin Hobb

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Book 2: The Rain Wild Chronicles: Dragon Haven by Robin Hobb

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Pavane by Keith Roberts

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The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring by J. R. R. Tolkien

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Tomorrow, When the War Began by John Marsden

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The Dead of the Night by John Marsden

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The Third Day, the Forest by John Marsden

It has been busy for me lately. K-mart now has me working from Tuesday to Saturday. Sunday and Monday is my weekend now. I work from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., Tuesday to Friday, and I work from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. on Saturday. I worked all the way up to Christmas Eve. As you can imagine, it was very busy on Christmas Eve. I had three days off for Christmas, starting with Christmas Day. I needed the rest. Now K-mart is featuring ‘back to school’ stuff. It’s not as busy now. We are back to skeleton staff levels now that Christmas is over. It puts pressure on us at the cash registers because there are not enough cash registers open. It’s hard to do price checks, because there are not enough staff members on the floor-selling area. During the Christmas break I caught up with my parents and my two married sisters. My sisters, with their husbands and kids, visited my parents, so that

was how I was able to catch up with them. Mum did all the cooking and it was very tasty. We had Spanish potato salad, Spanish seafood rice, Australian roast chicken, cheese cake and apple pie. On New Year’s Eve I visited my parents in the evening. It was a quiet one for us all. (17 January 2012)

TONY THOMAS 486 Scoresby Road, Ferntree Gully VIC 3156 Yes I agree with you about The Artist. Good, but not the best film of the year, as Stratton Rigg et al. were telling us. I liked Hugo, too, and thought the visuals were fantastic, but wasn’t overwhelmed by this either. Thought BaronCohen’s role, though very funny, almost belonged to a different film — and there was just a bit too much sentimentality for me — a common failing, for me, of lauded American films. I like the cool European model better. But I liked Clint Eastwood’s J. Edgar more than most of the critics, mostly for what I thought was superlative story-telling. *brg* For those of us in the know, Tony is one of Melbourne’s smoothest radio announcers. He works as a volunteer for 3MBS. His program Contemporary Visions is on Tuesday nights at 8 p.m. I had forgotten until he reminded me that he also reads books on Vision, which used to be 3RPH (i.e. Radio for the Print Handicapped).*

Mungo MacCallum in his new book is very fluffy, as you say — and says hardly anything new — but just right for reading very quickly for a Vision audience. Will finish in under 12 hours, contrasted with the eight weeks or so it took me to read the World War 2 history — but this was very good, with lots of personal diaries quoted, otherwise hardly available — or only in difficult-toaccess places. Plus plenty of interesting politics — Menzies, Churchill, Stalin, et al. — and Hirohito’s surrender document quoted in full. I had never read this before, and it encapsulates the other world that the Japanese lived in (still live in?). They were not surrendering unconditionally; they stopped fighting so that peace (always their objective) could prevail.

Books I enjoyed recently include Baxter’s biography of J. G. Ballard, even if it is as untrustworthy as they say. I realise that my Ballard reading virtually stopped decades ago, but from Baxter’s summaries I’m not sure that I’m missing a lot. Also just read Lucy Sussex’s collection Thief of Lives, which I liked a lot, except the title story. Dark fantasy largely remains a mystery to me — that is, a mystery as to why anybody thinks it’s any good. And I’m currently reading Jeffrey Sachs’s The Price of Civilization — what’s wrong with America (corporatocracy, advertising, obsession, addiction, etc. etc.) and what Americans can do about it — a great summary of lots of data from a lot of fields, centring on economics, but economics as it always should have been, not as it was taught to me and all of us for the last several decades. Am just up to his solutions — am hopeful but doubtful whether anything can work now. (8 February 2012)

KAARON WARREN Downer, ACT 2602 *brg (February 2012)* Great news about the success of Slights — I hope its reputation just keeps growing. Sorry to ruin your day by not being as enthusiastic about Mistification as I should be — I loved all the bits, but it seems the central novel doesn’t work as well as it should. Meanwhile, however, I’ve greatly enjoyed the Dead Sea Fruit collection. I still like the major early stories slightly better than the later stories, but I enjoy greatly many of the new stories. The Fiji insights were particularly interesting.*

I love an honest, thoughtful review, I really do. It means a lot to me that the book is considered and read in that way. Mistification is a very, very strange book, and one I really love myself, but it does break all the rules of novel writing! I’m really glad it’s out there. I was just thinking this morning I should do a mail out to the magicians of the world. It might be something they would enjoy! (Continued on page 94)I 91

WERNER KOOPMANN 202c Reiherstieg, 21244 Buchholz, Germany *brg* Since Werner and I rediscovered each other via the internet, Werner has been sending me lots of things, including an interesting set of SF critical books from the early days before the advent of such academic journals as Science Fiction Studies and Foundation. He has been interested in photos of our garden that have appeared in *brg*, so he sent some photos of his garden, which is a bit more spectacular than ours.*

Here are some pictures of our garden.

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It’s curious to track the stories over the years, isn’t it? I’m glad that I’m not writing the same thing over and over again, in the same way. And I can only write the way I can write; not the way anyone decrees. I’ve been having discussions with my agent, who, I think, would like me to be more ‘mainstream’. I simply can’t do it, I told her. These are my passions; this is how the story presents itself to me. I have to trust in that, and believe in myself. It was fantastic to have the Fiji influence. And now, having come back, the Australian influence strong again. You haven’t ruined my day at all, Bruce! You’re such an intelligent commentator, and an honest supporter. (29 February 2012) Thanks for my copy of *brg*! Love to see Mistification on your list! So very proud. I had a wonderful comment on my blog about Walking the Tree. I’m hoping that the publisher will take note and try to get it into the schools! (4 July 2012)

PATRICK McGUIRE 7541-D Weather Worn Way, Columbia MD 21046, USA When I first glanced at Scratch Pad 80 (e-version of *brg* 74) upon downloading it at the library on their high-speed connection, I saw mention of your 65th birthday, and I wondered if that would make you eligible for a retirement income, since that is when Social Security normally kicks in in the US. (However, the age of eligibility is being gradually nudged upward, and there are financial incentives for waiting before taking a pension even if you are eligible.) Now that I’ve actually read the issue, it seems that I’m half-right, in that you are now possibly eligible for some sort of OAP, but you have to jump through bureaucratic hoops to qualify. I won’t ever receive Social Security myself, since until recently the civil service plan was entirely separate and I don’t have enough ‘quarters’ of private-sector work to qualify, but I gather that Social Security is more automatic than the OAP process you’ve been

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going through. Is this an area where the US has more of a social safety net than Australia? I hope things work out for you eventually. You mention having recently seen the restored Metropolis. So did I, on DVD. I gather that it’s true that this is the first film version with the plot restored, but I’m less certain that the original film plot was actually unknown. I can’t remember whether Thea von Harbou’s book version is a novelisation, or if it was written first and independently, so that the film is the adaptation. In any case the novel has always been available, even in English translation. I read it some years ago. I don’t remember it well enough to be sure how well it tracks with the restored film plot, but I do remember that, as in the restored version and in contrast to previously available recut version, the memory of Hel figures prominently. And of course, Fritz Lang himself was still alive when restoration efforts were seriously underway. So I think it has been more a matter of finding enough bits of film to put it together so as to tell a plot that was already known to serious students of Metropolis. You also recently again saw They Might Be Giants. When the January NYRSF gets to you, you will see that I made a brief mention there of that film. I haven’t seen it for a while, and then only on television. I really should see about ordering a DVD: I already looked, and the local public library (my main source of DVD viewing) does not have it. I have not been making much recent progress on further semi-scholarly sf writing, partly because of conflicting demands on my time and partly because I have been feeling a bit under the weather, although not definably ill. On the other hand, I have been reading a lot, and that may serve as grist for the writing mill eventually. I’m glad the hailstorm was no worse than it was at your place, and my sympathies both to you and to those who were harder hit. In the past, there have been similar summer hailstorms in my general vicinity, although no serious ones that actually hit my home or car. I do remember fairly large hailstones coming down on the morning of a day when I was to leave on a long trip (possibly my 1999 one to Oz), and my hoping that there would not be damage that would upset my travel plans (I escaped). (5 March 2012)

LLOYD PENNEY 1706-24 Eva Rd., Etobicoke, Ontario M9C2B2, Canada

and Bach — her touch is almost bell-like. I used to be one of those who preferred Bach on a harpsichord (or indeed clavichord). But she has converted me.

Reaching 65 years of age is an achievement, one I shan’t reach for another 12 years and a bit. Happy belated birthday, and we wish you happiness, health and more steady work.

One of the comforting things is that one will never run out of things to read. This is perhaps exemplified by the fact that I haven’t read any of the novels that were your favourites in 2011 — not even Nicholas Nickleby! I did read Hard Times recently when I acquired a beautiful old set of Dickens that belonged to my grandmother — leather-bound Thomas Nelson and Sons editions. She won them as golf prizes around 1909.

Many like Facebook, and some don’t, but for me, it’s been good at reuniting me with lost cousins, old high school friends, and friends from my earliest forays into fandom. I have written no essays to put on my Facebook page; so many others forward links to check, or come see, and buy what I’ve written, etc. If I checked every link recommended to me, I’d have no time for incidentals like eating and sleeping. Facebook is good for a social visit, but my writing is for the zines. Zines have a limited enough audience as it is, but on my FB page, it’s quite possible that no one will ever see what I might write. Our weather channel here, The Weather Network, has been showing extensive flooding in Australia, plus a cyclone in the northwestern area. Is that around Broome or South Hedland? Add to that droughts and bushfires, and I can’t think of a part of Oz that hasn’t been affected. Hope the general Melbourne area has been safe. I’ve always liked the music of Harry Nilsson, but didn’t know about the biographical film. I liked his work in the animated film The Point. (19 March 2012)

JENNY BRYCE PO Box 1215, Elwood, VIC 3184 We escaped much of the Christmas Day storm in Elwood but I remember that my mother came home from Christmas dinner at my place to find all the back of her place (in North Fitzroy) flooded. I can’t comment on your popular music listening — but very useful to know about the classical boxed sets. I agree with you absolutely about Angela Hewitt

Beware — because I tend to forget what I’ve read (or seen, or heard) this year I have been keeping a kind of journal of books read, films seen, plays and concerts attended. So maybe I’ll share some of this at the end of the year. (21 June 2012) *brg* Jenny came good with her promised article about her favourites of 2012 — and it will appear in the next issue of SF Commentary, along with my favourites of 2012, and Elaine’s guide to recent science books.*

STEVE JEFFERY 44 White Way, Kidlington, Oxon OX5 2XA, England Ninety per cent of my reading time is now spent on the bus journeys to and from work. During weekdays I rarely bother to turn my home PC on: I don’t do Facebook, Myspace, or Twitter, and my inbox just seems to filled with special offers from Amazon or eBay or insurance companies. And having spent 9 to 10 hours in front of a monitor at work, I can’t face spending the few hours I get in the evenings staring at another computer screen. Perhaps a tablet would be the answer. Light, portable, nice screen, expensive. There are lots of clone tablets around and they almost seem designed for reading on the move. Vikki bought me a Kindle a couple of years ago, but I couldn’t get on with it and returned it in the end. I think that still rankles with her, even though she bought it in a fit a desperation at my refusal to say

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what I wanted for my birthday that year. In truth I wasn’t trying to be difficult or contrary; I just couldn’t think of anything I really wanted. The books I wanted weren’t due to be published until after my birthday, and I was acutely conscious I had a house full of stuff already, much of which I rarely found time to do anything with. Perhaps what I really needed was a course on time management. Apart from the Yamaha MIDI keyboard a few years ago, we’ve not had entirely successful track record with buying home electronics. Vikki bought a flat screen TV for my last birthday, and in the end we had to return it because half the time we couldn’t get the damn thing to turn itself on. It would just sit there with the standby LED flashing unless we unplugged it and waited 10 minutes before plugging it back on and turning it on and off a few times. After missing most of a Grand Prix, a couple of episodes of Homecoming, and a football match we gave in and exchanged it. The new one started playing the same trick, but we discovered we could get round it by unplugging the Freeview box SCART cable from the back of the TV before turning it on. I still can’t believe it’s supposed to do that, but it works. We’ve had a couple of hailstorms here, one a month or so back that came, almost literally, out of the blue, where we watched golfball-sized hailstones bounce several feet back in the air off the road and the roofs of the cars parked outside. I was strange to see the garden turn from green to white in a few minutes. But nothing would have prepared us for a metre-sized chunk of ice such as the one in your picture. It looks more like a small comet has destroyed your cat enclosure. Scary. Even more so that one of your friend’s daughters was hurt by another hailstone. Hope she was OK. Were your cats in the enclosure at the time? No wonder they were terrified. *brg* As I’ve explained elsewhere, the collective hailstones formed the mini-comet. In that photo, you are not looking at one big hailstone. The cats were not in the enclosure because at the time we were having Christmas dinner with Elaine’s relatives, so the cats were inside. I’m not sure if they would have been safe if the skylight had failed and rainwater had poured in from the roof.*

Vikki is officially a pensioner. She discovered around the end of last year that a company pension from a place she worked 25–30 years ago was now due 96

to be paid out. After the usual faffing around with people who had taken over the scheme, Aviva, the payments started this year. She’s still working, but with only two more years to go at the NHS is seriously looking at the option of early retirement before she either goes down with an stress-related illness or kills her boss. We are currently car-less, which has worked out for a while now (we both travel to and from work by bus), but it does constrain us for visiting or just deciding to go somewhere that isn’t in Oxford. We’ll probably look at this again later in the year. We went to Merton College Chapel a couple of weeks back to see Commotio again. This is the contemporary choral group who recorded James Whitbourn’s Luminosity. This performance had an African theme in the second half, and featured Bob Chilcott’s The Making of the Drum (the choir supported by marimba, drum, and gong) and Peter Klatzow’s Two Songs from the Xam. But a lot of comment in the audience (most of it as uninformed as it was predictable) was reserved for the appearance on the program of John Cage’s Four2. To be fair, it’s not Cage’s most inspired idea, a sequence of layered notes held as long as possible, based on the letters of his home town Oregon. I listened to another version later on YouTube with Cage conducting, and it seems to make more sense. But I suspect it’s another of those pieces where Cage is more interested in the idea than the actual sound of the piece. (This is a criticism I’ve read recently in Gabriel Josipovici’s Infinity: The Story of a Moment, a curious book structured as a halting and largely one-sided interview with the manservant of a recently deceased composer where he talks about his former employer’s views and (mostly outrageous and controversial) opinions on life, art, and music. Unlike Cage, Josipovici’s fictional composer is more interested in sound rather than method: one of his pieces, 666, involves striking the same note on the piano that many times. Audience reaction is understandably mixed.) Commotio now have four CDs out on Naxos. As well as Luminosity, I also have In the Heart of Things: Choral Music of Francis Pott, which they’ve featured several times in recent concerts. Running a Google search on contemporary choral music recently I also came

across Eric Whiteacre’s Cloudburst and YouTube links to several more pieces, including Sleep, in which he conducts Polyphony. Worth checking out, I think.

DOUG BARBOUR 11655-72nd Avenue, Edmonton, Alberta T6G 0B9, Canada

This year — or last — we have also discovered the Civil Wars, a US country folk duo (there’s a free live set download on their website, worth it for the between-song banter between Joy Williams, John Paul White, and the audience), and the strange and fey Laura Marling. And Noah and the Whale, a group I’ve heard a few times guesting on radio slots, but Vikki bought me their CDs Last Night on Earth and The First Day of Spring.

I’ve just been reading about 200 young adult and adult novels for the Sunburst award (you can check out the shortlists if you want). Also the latest collection of short fiction by Geoff Ryman, Paradise Tales, is a masterful collection, with many changes of pace, style, and power. All the books are by Canadians.

Charity shop/car boot music finds have been unusually few and far between this year. However, yesterday I did come home with a Scott Walker compilation (an artist unforgivably absent from my collection so far) and a live CD from Welsh rockers Man, who I don’t think I’ve heard since the ’70s. (I have a vinyl album of theirs with one of the most complex origami fold-out inner sleeves I’ve ever seen. This was back in the days when people could afford to do strange things with record covers, like peel off banana stickers, zips, and rotating discs.) Before that, the gleaning include Arvo Part’s Te Deum, Messian’s Turangalila Symphony, Joni Mitchell’s Misses, Rikki Lee Jones’ Traffic from Paradise, Muse’s Hullaballo (can’t believe I didn’t have that one already), P. J. Harvey’s Rid of Me, the Cocteau Twins’ Four Calendar Cafe, and June Tabor and the Oyster Band’s Freedom and Rain. (This has an unusually bouncy version of Richard Thompson’s ‘Night Comes In’, and a equally unusual, though more successful, version of ‘All Tomorrow’s Parties’, and which Tabor wisely elects not to sing with a German accent (as I do in my head, and it ends warping into Marlene Dietrich — ‘vat costume shall ze poor girl vair ...’). At this point my brain did one of those unsettling sideways shifts and I wondered what a Chas and Dave cockney knees-up version of this done by Bill Bailey would sound like. Or more scarily, if he already has done it. (24 June 2012)

I am always impressed b y your CD lists. I listen to classical music but without the emphasis you place the best versions, although I usually end up with some of the better ones. I’ll get some names and titles for you later. I’ve been getting out some interesting groups and individuals in the roots/blues/etc. categories from the library. Did I mention the Deep Dark Woods, a Canadian group, or the Waifs (Australian group)? Both strong, bluesy. And the Punch Brothers: bluegrass with an edge. My nephews had Enigma, from awhile ago. I like the 2 CDs I have by them ... And Kathleen Edwards’ new Voyageur rocks solidly. I finally took out a Best Of by Jann Arden, whom I’d only listened to on radio. She’s very good at her best too ... We watch too much TV but not many movies: I do well remember seeing Red Beard many years ago. (5 July 2012)

TARA JUDAH Personal Assistant to the Proprietor, The Astor Theatre, St Kilda VIC Thank you for your emails and for your kind comments. We are so pleased to see that yes, sometimes the collective voice of the public is loud and clear enough to be heard.

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The sale of the building that houses the Astor is certainly a positive step in ensuring the long term future of the Astor Theatre and we are very pleased with the outcome. (25 August 2012) *brg* A year ago, Melbourne’s last great movie palace, the Astor, faced a crisis. The owner, a local private school, wanted to make substantial changes to the building and its uses. A protest campaign was begun by George Florence and his staff from the Astor, which led to the unexpected result that the school put the building on the market. It was bought by a local St Kilda businessman who has been interested in cinema for many years. He may need deep pockets, as the 80-year-old building needs urgent repairs. Until they take place, however, the Astor is roaring ahead with an exciting repertory program of movies. The only trouble is that, because I rely on public transport, I cannot see films at the Astor at any time other than Sunday afternoons. If I visited on an ordinary evening (two films, which, plus intermission, usually finish after midnight) I could not get home without hailing a taxi (at $60 per ride). I sent an email about this problem to the Astor, and it has been Tarah Judah who has been swapping emails with me. The Astor still does not find it possible to run daytime sessions on both Saturdays and Sundays, or on public holidays, but I did get to see such recent shows as the 70 mm print of The Master and the new 4K digital print of Lawrence of Arabia. Thanks, Tara and the Astor.*

RON DRUMMOND Somewhere in America I’m listening to the opening movement of Havergal Brian’s Gothic Symphony on YouTube as I write. Rather rousing start! No way I’ll get through all of it tonight, but I’ll try to make my way through it over the next few days. YouTube has several of his symphonies. A friend of mine in Seattle, Gary D. Cannon, is a busy choral conductor and maven of British twentieth-century composers, 98

and one of the foremost experts on William Walton. I’ll ask him for his thoughts on Brian. I’d heard of Brian long since, but am not sure I’ve heard his music before now — presently listening to the opening of the slow second movement, which is quite lovely. I love the huge open spaces that unfold inside of so many early twentieth-century symphonies! I’ve only dipped my toes into twentieth-century Brits, but enjoy Britten’s string quartets and am a huge fan of the Scottish composer John Blackwood McEwen, whose quartets are superb, idiosyncratic crosses between Debussy and late Beethoven. He also has a tone poem for cello and orchestra, Hills o’ Heather, which is pure delight. I’m getting into the twentieth-century Scandinavian composers as well — Sibelius and Nielsen, of course, but Van Holmboe too, who deserves to be much better known. As a symphony lover you might really enjoy Kurt Atterberg. The relatively cheap set of all nine of his symphonies on CPO is superb. Not sure if you sent me fanzines in ’05 or not; I moved from Seattle to upstate New York soon after we met, under fairly chaotic conditions. Would welcome a chance to read your Brian essay. (6 January 2013)

MURRAY MacLACHLAN 35 Laird Drive, Altona Meadows VIC 3042 Here’s recent music purchases in the household. I’m still learning about music, which explains the somewhat haphazard look. Add to the mix a bargain bin bonanza in New Zealand in January ... ●

Ben Harper and the Innocent Criminals: Live From Mars

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Ben Harper and the Innocent Criminals: The Will to Live

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Bic Runga: Birds

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Black Crowes: Freak’n’roll: Live at the Fillmore

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Bob Dylan: Planet Waves

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Brunettes: Holding Hands, Feeding Ducks

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Buddy Holly & the Crickets: Collected Albums, Singles & Sessions

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Richard Ashcroft: Alone With Everybody

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Camille: Music Hole

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Julian Cope: Jehovakill

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Cardigans: Life

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Robert Plant: Manic Nirvana

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Corrs: Forgiven Not Forgotten

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Ryan Adams and the Cardinals: Cardinology

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Corrs: Talk on Corners

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Seekers: As, Bs and EPs

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Crash Test Dummies: God Shuffled His Feet

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Sheryl Crow: Globe Sessions (Tour Edition)

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Dave Dobbyn: The Islander

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Split Enz: Frenzy

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Dinah Washington: Ultimate Collection (3 CDs)

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Split Enz: Mental Notes

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Dusty Springfield: Where Am I Going

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Straw People: Vicarious

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Earlies: The Enemy Chorus

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Van Morrison: The Philosopher’s Stone

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Echo and the Bunnymen: Get In the Car (CD Single)

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Various: The Atlantic Story: Tell Me What’d I Say

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Ed Harcourt: Here Be Monsters

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Various: The Hal David & Burt Bacharach Songbook

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Eric Clapton: From the Cradle

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Walkmen: A Hundred Miles Off

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Feelers: Supersystem

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Waterboys: A Rock in a Weary Land

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Fleetwood Mac: Original Album Series (5 CDs)

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Waterboys: Too Close To Heaven

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Gitbox Rebellion: Pesky Digits

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Zwan: Mary Star of the Sea.

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Gomez: Album Set (5 CDs)

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Great Big Sea: Rant and Roar

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Hank Williams: Anthology (3 CDs)

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Lemonheads: Laughing All The Way to the Cleaners: Best Of (2 CDs)

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No Doubt: Return of Saturn

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Opshop: Second Hand Planet

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Pali-Chaning/Asokananda: Thus I Have Heard: Meditations in Babylon

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Queens of the Stone Age: Lullabies to Paralyze

(31 January 2013) *brg* Those 5-CD really cheap sets of a performer’s early albums (often his or her first five albums) have proved very useful in filling out the collection. In some cases, such as the Dr John set, I had never heard his early albums. In the case of the Neil Young set, I had the first two albums only on LP. In the case of a recent set by John McLaughlin and the Mahavishnu Orchestra, I had most of the albums only on tattered-cover LPs, cutouts that were sold cheaply in Melbourne in the early 1970s. Of your list of new purchases, I own only four of them, but

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I’ve noticed quite a few I might buy if I saw them around. I suspect you would say the same of my list of CDs bought since the beginning of 2013. My favourite CD from 2013’s purchases is Terry Allen’s Bottom of the World.*

We also heard from ... Frank Weissenborn (Melbourne) wrote: ‘Good to see you, Bruce, at your Peake in *brg* 73. I’m looking forward to reading the continuing John Litchen saga.’; Michael Ward (San Jose, California) tells me not to send ‘big beautiful zines like *brg* as the cost is unreasonable. Instead I can happily read the PDF version. I’m planning to find some samples of a number of the

popular CDs you mention. In re Ian Covell’s answer to “How did you read and listen and watch so much?” I can only say I try to get outside of the house a lot.’; Barbara Roden (Ashcroft, British Columbia) intended to give Scratch Pad (the electronic version of *brg*) a quick read, but ‘I wound up savouring every bit, nodding in agreement at your Favourites of 2011 plus tasting notes, and staying up way too long into the night. This struck a chord with me: “Heaven in life is a Beethoven piano sonata played by the one of the great pianists ...”’; and William Breiding (Dellslow, West Virginia) thanks me for printing and sending hard copies for him. He has already sent me some fine articles, and, rather embarrassingly for me, still has an article sitting there from 1998 in the Metaphysical Review never-quite-published file. — Bruce Gillespie, 24 April 2013

Feature letter

The real story of Harry Potter and Voldemort Yvonne Rousseau YVONNE ROUSSEAU PO Box 3086, Rundle Street Mall, Adelaide SA 5000 I’ll mention here that I am not a great admirer of the Harry Potter films (in contrast with Sally Yeoland, who seems to have liked all of them). In particular, I loathed the first two — where, for example, Harry’s bad treatment by 100

the Dursleys is not conveyed, and where Hermione is not the big bucktoothed loudmouth represented in the novels. I realise that it would be frowned upon if Daniel Radcliffe were starved to make him as skinny as he ought to be initially, and that the heights of the actors can’t be adjusted in order for the boys to become taller than Hermione

finest moments when Malfoy’s ‘Densaugeo’ charm misses Harry and instead causes Hermione’s teeth to grow down past her collar. I greatly appreciated Snape’s cold observation: ‘I see no difference.’ In the novel, it is important that Hermione then arranges for Hogwarts’ magical first aid to reduce the size of her teeth to what pleases her. Later, in The Goblet of Fire, the appearance of the actor playing ‘Mad-Eye’ Moody (or, rather, playing Barty Crouch Jr disguised as Alastor Moody) is a very bad choice: completely alien to the original character — although in the novel itself I wondered how someone of Barty Crouch Jr’s character contrived to imitate Alastor Moody’s eccentric and imaginative and generous-minded manners. On the other hand, Alan Rickman was a wonderful choice for Severus Snape. I’m totally in love with his performance. Nevertheless, I didn’t actually like any of the Harry Potter films until I saw Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. After loathing the first three films, I disliked The Goblet of Fire so much that I decided to stop watching the series. The Half-Blood Prince was surprisingly good, however — and when I tracked back to The Order of the Phoenix, I was pleased to find that it, too, was better than the first four. Later, I enjoyed the first part of The Deathly Hallows, but disliked the second part, which I found noisy and boring. Soon, I trust, I shall hear of the questions raised by your own marathon viewing of all of the Potter films — although I doubt I’ll be able to answer them satisfactorily. only when their adolescent growth hormones get going. Nevertheless, I’m ready to believe that Warner Brothers was merely being conventional when it chose as Hermione the then 10-year-old Emma Watson: shorter and slighter and more winsomely smiling than the 11-year-old Daniel Radcliffe chosen for Harry. Indeed, the 11-year-old Rupert Grint who played Ron also looked shorter than Hero Harry. The changed appearance meant leaving out the cruelty of one of Snape’s

(7 January 2012) *brg* My main reaction to the last two (stretched to three) movies in the Harry Potter series, without having read any of the novels beyond the first, was utter confusion. By the end of the filmed series I still had very few answers to all the questions that had been raised in the first novel. So I asked Yvonne whether these questions were answered by the end of the last gigantic volume. In the following letters, she is responding to my various confused questions.* 101

I wasn’t utterly sure which parents you regarded as being hated by which character. Although Voldemort kills Harry’s parents, it isn’t because he hates them, but because he intends to kill the infant Harry, after a prophecy has led him to believe that the boy will otherwise be his downfall. Little does he know that with this act — under the mystical influence of the maternal love of Harry’s mother Lily (whose life Voldemort took only because she insisted on trying to shield Harry) — he has made the body of Harry himself into a horcrux in which part of Voldemort himself resides (including the ability to speak Parseltongue). This part (miserably whimpering) is finally expelled when Harry allows Voldemort to direct a killing curse at him, without attempting to defend himself. Severus Snape was a student at Hogwarts at the same time as James Potter (Harry’s father) and Lily. As Harry is shocked to discover, James behaved towards Severus in an unpleasantly bullying way, causing Severus to hate him. Already (and always), he loves Lily (who grew to love James although at first she was repelled by his showing off). Snape’s feelings towards Harry are therefore very painful: he sees in Harry the likeness of the hated James Potter — yet Harry’s green eyes are identical with the beloved Lily’s. Severus Snape used to be a Death Eater (a follower of Voldemort) but rejoined the other side before Voldemort’s downfall (indeed, ever after Lily’s death) and acted as spy at great personal risk. Voldemort had no idea that Snape was disloyal when he killed him. He merely supposed that it was necessary to get rid of him before the wand-hallow would place its full powers at Voldemort’s disposal. In their youth, Dumbledore and Grindelwald were both hoping to achieve mastery of death, by means not of horcruxes but of hallows. Harry was the final descendant of the legendary Peverell who owned the hallow which was a cloak of invisibility. Another of the hallows, the resurrection stone, was incorporated in the ring which Voldemort (who failed to recognise the hallows, although he coveted and obtained the elder wand) had used as one of his horcruxes. In their final battle (after Harry returns from seeming death), Harry informs Voldemort that it was Draco Malfoy, not Snape, who removed the elder wand 102

from Dumbledore, and that Harry is now in possession of Draco’s hawthorn wand (and, indeed, when their curses collide, the elder wand leaves Voldemort and goes to Harry’s hand, while Voldemort is killed by his own curse rebounding on him). Snape’s feelings for Lily are revealed (although Harry does not realise this) by the form his patronus charm takes in the forest, as it leads Harry to the Sword of Gryffindor: And then the source of the light stepped out from behind an oak. It was a silver-white doe, moon-bright and dazzling, picking her way over the ground, still silent, and leaving no hoof prints in the fine powdering of snow. She stepped toward him, her beautiful head with its wide, longlashed eyes held high. Harry stared at the creature, filled with wonder, not at her strangeness, but at her inexplicable familiarity. He felt that he had been waiting for her to come, but that he had forgotten, until this moment, that they had arranged to meet. [...] He knew, he would have staked his life on it, that she had come for him, and him alone. They gazed at each other for several long moments and then she turned and walked away. ‘No,’ he said, and his voice was cracked with lack of use. ‘Come back!’ She continued to step deliberately through the trees, and soon her brightness was striped by their thick, black trunks. For one trembling second he hesitated. Caution murmured: it could be a trick, a lure, a trap. But instinct, overwhelming instinct, told him that this was not Dark Magic. He set off in pursuit. Snow crunched beneath his feet, but the doe made no noise as she passed through the trees, for she was nothing but light. [...] At last, she came to a halt. She turned her beautiful head towards him once more, and he broke into a run, a question burning in him, but as he opened his lips to ask it, she vanished. Though the darkness had swallowed her whole, her burnished image was

still imprinted on his retinas; it obscured his vision, brightening when he lowered his eyelids, disorientating him. Now fear came: her presence had meant safety. When Snape is dying (killed by Voldemort not as a traitor but as a necessary sacrifice), he asks Harry to take the silvery blue thoughts spilling out of Snape’s mouth, ears, and eyes (Hermione provides a flask). Snape then slackens his grip on Harry’s robes: ‘Look ... at ... me ...’ he whispered. The green eyes found the black, but after a second something in the depths of the dark pair seemed to vanish, leaving them fixed, blank and empty. The hand holding Harry thudded to the floor, and Snape moved no more. Harry afterwards participates in these memories, using the Pensieve in the Hogwarts head’s office. He finds that Dumbledore (in his portrait, after death) instructed Snape to get the sword to Harry without himself knowing why, and without letting Harry know that Snape was the one delivering it. Before this, when Dumbledore was persuading Snape to kill him in due course, he told Snape about the fragment of Voldemort’s soul that is attached to and protected by Harry. Dumbledore conveys that he has kept Harry alive because he must die at the right moment to defeat Voldemort. Snape is indignant: ‘But this is touching, Severus,’ said Dumbledore seriously. ‘Have you grown to care for the boy, after all?’

Harry and protect him from the Dementors as he approaches Voldemort: instead, James, Sirius, Lupin, and Lily accompany Harry to the scene where he allows Voldemort to use the elder wand against him. Later, in their final confrontation, Harry tells Voldemort that Dumbledore chose to be killed by Snape, and arranged it months before he died: ’Severus Snape wasn’t yours,’ said Harry. ‘Snape was Dumbledore’s, Dumbledore’s from the moment you started hunting down my mother. And you never realised it, because of the thing you can’t understand. You never saw Snape cast a Patronus, did you, Riddle?’ Voldemort did not answer. They continued to circle each other like wolves about to tear each other apart. ’Snape’s Patronus was a doe,’ said Harry, ‘the same as my mother’s, because he loved her for nearly all of his life, from the time when they were children. You should have realised,’ he said, as he saw Voldemort’s nostrils flare, ‘he asked you to spare her life, didn’t he?’ ’He desired her, that was all,’ sneered Voldemort, ‘but when she had gone, he agreed that there were other women, and of purer blood, worthier of him —’ ’Of course he told you that,’ said Harry, ‘but he was Dumbledore’s spy from the moment you threatened her, and he’s been working against you ever since! Dumbledore was already dying when Snape finished him!’ Thus, Snape is a villainous teacher but a brave and selfless hero.

‘For him?’ shouted Snape. ‘Expecto patronum!’ From the tip of his wand burst the silver doe: she landed on the office floor, bounded once across the office and soared out of the window. Dumbledore watched her fly away, and as her silvery glow faded he turned back to Snape, and his eyes were full of tears. ‘After all this time?’ ‘Always,’ said Snape.’ Snape is not among the revenants from the resurrection stone who surround

Happy Twelfth Night! (7 January 2012) Voldemort does indeed impinge on the world outside Hogwarts (and the Ministry of Magic is therefore obliged to be unusually frank with the Muggle Ministry about the causes of recent disintegrating bridges and other catastrophes). Voldemort detests Mudbloods (although — or perhaps because — he has a portion of Mudblood ancestry himself) and, even before his official return, Death-Eaters at the Quidditch final are tormenting some

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Muggles, floating them in the air and thus revealing the knickers of a mortified Muggle mother). After Voldemort’s return, we see people brought into the Ministry of Magic to be checked for Muggle genes and then to be dealt with in a sinister manner. Anyway — I’m glad to have been of assistance in hinting at how much is left out of the films, and sorry about the mixed tenses of my hurried replies.

Dead Sea Fruit (2010). Although I haven’t read Kate Atkinson, Vida and I saw the title you mention, When Will There Be Good News?, briefly discussed by Jennifer Byrne on the ABC-TV First Tuesday Bookclub of 4 November 2008, which we were watching because Vida was interested to see one of the guests, Sophie Cunningham, whose recent book, Melbourne, we have been reading.

Thank you for your lists! I’ve looked through the lists of novels and books, and note that the collection of Kaaron Warren’s stories that I’ve obtained is

(7 January 2012)

Feature letter

The loc that would not die by Casey Wolf CASEY WOLF 14–2320 Woodland Drive, Vancouver, British Columbia V5N 3P2, Canada I enjoyed the Peake experience. I have been curious about the Gormenghast books, but have never picked one up. Have to say I now know I won’t. I suspect they are not my thing at all. Still, did like reading your thoughts on them. I felt like the needle scratched to the end of the track pretty abruptly, though. I want to know about book three! Wah!

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(22 November 2011) Four days ago Fran Skene, Janet Wilson, and I trundled from Vancouver to Seattle at the prompting of Jean Weber, who was briefly in town on her whirlwind tour through the USA. Fran, Janet, and Jean holed up at the Days Inn on Aurora and I stayed with Janice Murray and her two white and black felines, Ruthie and Tina. They live in a 1963 motel that has been converted to apartments. (An era of outdoor walkways, wood panels, ceramic tiles in the bathroom, and abundant windows. A lovely home, indeed.) Elinor Busby and Lin Simpson met up with us — Elinor on both Monday and Tuesday,

Lin, who had to ferry over from Vachon Island, on Tuesday only. I like Aurora. It’s on the old highway running the apparent length of Seattle and it is far more charming than the interstate highway that has replaced it. Charming not in the meandering countrified way you may be picturing but in the broad straight no-nonsense thoroughfare of yesteryear sense. Unlike Vancouver, which is insatiable in its self-renewal, ripping down perfectly good and often precious buildings in order to block out endless malls and leakyto-be condos, Aurora and environs still feature houses, commercial buildings, and even towering neon signs, from the 1950s and ’60s. The commercial section has lots of elbow room, and the bungalows are tiny and bursting with character. They may be mouldy and overgrown in places but to my eye they are beautiful. However. I did not go down there to ogle architecture or pursue the past. I was there to hang with the womenfen. Knowing fans, I was a little nervous I might not get much sleep: late nights with bottles and munchies, you know, witty conversation and no thought of tomorrow. Popcorn rolling across the floor. It may have something to do with the fact that at 55 I was probably the youngest there (I won’t guess at Elinor’s age, but let’s say there was a considerable span between us), but no one seemed inclined to party much past 8 o’clock. Janice, though, was awake into the wee hours (you know, 10:30, 11:00), when I was drifting off. This was my first hurrah after months of focusing on my health, and I really enjoyed it. Basically, we had a relaxacon. No agenda other than eating and talking and enjoying each other’s company. All of the others are current members of AWA (A Woman’s APA), and I was a member briefly in the ’80s, so at Elinor’s prompting we put together a one-shot for the APA while gathered at her wonderfully bookish (and artish) home. One at a time we closeted ourselves in a bedroom and typed a few paragraphs into the computer while the others rattled away in the living room. Jean had a craving for ice cream so Elinor broke out some very dubious-looking fare from, she said, years ago: frostedover vanilla and rubbery chocolate, if I remember rightly. I stayed well clear

of them but Jean forged bravely ahead, eating the rubbery stuff with chocolate sauce. (She survived.) (Though there was a prolonged lie-down on the living room floor ...) While this was going on I was making my way through the first couple of Elinor’s bookshelves. I am still smacking my lips over the variety of tempting morsels there, most particularly over a very old copy of Castle Rackrent and a detailed Historical Guide to Dublin from the mid 1800s. I would have loved to have time to look through all of the shelves. Somewhere in there I had the idea of us writing a renga to go into the zine. Rengas consist of alternating long and short lines, written by successive authors. The lines are independent in theme. The idea isn’t to create a narrative, but to riff off the previous line at some peculiar angle. So, say, Jean says she is ready to take a nap, the next person may say something about carpets (which have a different sort of nap) — that kind of thing. Anyway, we forged ahead with our poor, harmless renga, though lord knows if it ended up resembling any sort of a poem at all. When we see the final product, we’ll have to make our own judgments. It was all very fannish and fun. One pleasant outcome of the whole thing, besides having an enjoyable time visiting with everyone, was that I acquired a copy of Phyllis Gottlieb’s first book, Sunburst (1964), which I’ve been meaning to read. It is a little surprising to me that only the Canadians know who Gottlieb was. She was contributing to the American SF magazines before any other Canadians were, and continued to publish SF and poetry until a few short years ago: a grand old lady of Canadian SF. A humbling reminder. I happily consumed the book over the next couple of evenings. I wasn’t hoping for much, because it was her first book, but I enjoyed it. There were all sorts of things I liked, from the genre — young people with ‘psi’ powers — to the way she approached her characters, to the writing itself, and also her assumption of a certain level of education and brightness in her readers. And it was a good story. There was a bit of sociological speculation that made me cringe, but in the context of the times the book was fairly enlightened. I’m particularly pleased to have at last read Sunburst because Canadian 105

Speculative Fiction, which has long had the fan-voted Aurora Awards, a few years ago got the juried Sunburst Awards, named after this novel. At last I can nod sagely and say, ‘Hrm, yes. Gottlieb’s 1964 novel, first serialised in Amazing, also in ’64. Not a bad little book. Hrm. Yes.’ Wish I’d been at the Nova Mob for your Gormenghast talk. Speaking of which (being there, not Gormenghast) I’m going to try again this year to come out for a visit. Resistance is futile. I’ll be at your door. Hope to see you soon. (26 July 2012) How odd. There are actual people in the backyard and one of them is strumming a guitar and singing. This is a first. We have a wonderful long enclosed yard abutting the railway cut and lined with trees. Amazingly, in the twenty-odd years I’ve lived here no one has had parties there but me, and only a couple of people have even stretched out on the grass to read a book. So it is great but weird to have other people enjoying the yard. (I just wish he was singing something I wanted to listen to.) Though I occasionally receive or download digital versions of fanzines, I find I don’t read them. If you go fully electronic I’ll have to try. For me lounging about reading a zine is a luxury activity, something I do to relax, and there’s nothing relaxing about the weight of the computer and the blare of its light. Reading Wm Breiding’s loc, I found myself fantasising about wrenching free from the internet entirely, as I used to fantasise about going to live in the wilds. Ah, the blissful freedom! But I don’t know if I’ll ever do it. There are many people and groups with whom I can only connect effectively by being online — even some in Vancouver. No one organises anything using telephones anymore, so if you are not on email, you don’t know what is going on. After finishing Sunburst I launched into a couple of books I borrowed from Janice Murray while in Seattle. Janice is a huge fan of the Vorkosigan Saga by Lois McMaster Bujold. She has her For Keeps copies and a box full of loaners and giveaways. I resisted for years, but in 2011 I came home with a copy of Cordelia’s Honor, which contains the first two books in the series. She assured me the later ones were even better, but it was important to start there.

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I liked them. They are intelligent, adventure filled, sometimes surprising; basically good reads. So last week I brought back The Warrior’s Apprentice and Vor Games (bad pun). I liked TWA a lot — many unexpected and pleasurable turns in character and plot, a very likable protagonist, and again, well written. VG didn’t grab me as much, but it was still good. If I hadn’t been fresh from TWA I’d have had no dissatisfaction — it was a perfectly good novel; it just wasn’t as, well, novel as its predecessor. Anyway, I’m hooked, so I guess I will be visiting her again soon. It is good to have light but good reads to go between things like Northanger Abbey and Nuala O’Faolain’s My Dream of You. This is a mainstream novel that I found a real page-turner, brilliantly written, and very affecting. Weeks after reading it I still find myself pondering the book. O’Faolain was an Irish journalist. This was her first novel, published in 2005 when she was in her fifties. It is written from the perspective of an Irish travel writer who left Ireland in distress when quite young and has spent her somewhat dissipated life in England, sabotaging romantic relationships, avoiding family, connecting most with her boss and co-workers. She goes back to Ireland to research a story she read in a law tract from the Famine times, of a plantation wife accused of having an affair with her Irish groom. So we have the present-time life of the character, first in England, then in Ireland, her young life, what she is unearthing about the Famine times, and her imaginings about this supposed affair. I found the whole thing fascinating, and very human. O’Faolain doesn’t flinch from difficult topics, but she also doesn’t despair over them. I think it is often the author, more than the subject matter, that makes it so painful to read about people’s struggles, or devastating times in history. Somehow O’Faolain is able to look at the whole picture, and allow the reader to look with her, and to be glad in the end that she did. Lots in there. And did I say enough times how beautifully she writes? (In case you are wondering, as I did, she is not the daughter of Sean O’Faolain, but of another writer, Tomas O’Faolain, whom I haven’t read.) I normally don’t like watching concert films. I’d rather be there or listen to a CD. But a friend, knowing I had been a Bowie fan many years ago, handed me his DVDs of the final Ziggy Stardust concert (1973) and A Reality Tour (2003). I decided to take a polite look and ended up watching them back to back, then spending a lot of time in the next weeks catching up (via that

cursed internet) on what Bowie had been doing in the decades since I wandered off, especially by tracking down interviews of him that spanned his career. Eventually I had stuffed so much information into my head about him, and dragged up so many memories of those times, that I decided to make use of it in a story. That was gratifying. I feel a bit doomed packaging it up for the auction block, though. It isn’t fantasy, and it isn’t mainstream. (Eileen Kernaghan tells me it is Magical Realism.) This throws readers off, who either want it to be set up like a normal fantasy or dismiss the odd bits and rationalise it in various ways. This doesn’t bode well for editorial acceptance. But you never know. Room Magazine took a couple of my weirder ones, so maybe this will sell, too. Speaking of publishing, I’ve noticed a trend in the last few anthologies I’ve had stories in. There seems to be a shift to desegregate the various streams of speculative fiction and put them together in one book. I can live with this when we are talking about science fiction and fantasy, but I am very disturbed by horror and cruel stories generally, and I avoid reading them. I can no longer do this if I want to check out the other offerings in the books my stories are in. Is this just my random experience, or do you think horror and excessive brutality are working their way into ‘mainstream’ speculative fiction? Or is the genre itself simply becoming more vicious? In April 2011 I was telling you about how tired I was. There is apparently something invigorating about getting cancer. It really lights a candle under you. I am still tired all the time — I think it’s part of the fibromyalgia — but I feel quite stimulated in other ways. I just have to pace myself. I’ve rejoined the Vancouver Paleontological Society, signed up for a course on Roman Britain at SFU, signed up once again for Eileen Kernaghan’s writing group in the fall, and have a lot of small projects going on. There are of course ups and downs, but I am so thrilled getting to do things that have nothing to do with my health, I feel like I’m on summer vacation. I’m looking forward to the Pallahaxi Players Readers Theatre, which I started last year at VCon. It is an homage to Mike Coney in a couple of ways — both in borrowing the name ‘Pallahaxi’, and in that it emulates the Lonely Cry

readers theatre he spearheaded for several years at the con. Last year I wrote the play, but this year Matt Hughes has done us the honour, which is great. He has written radio theatre before, so this will be more professional than my seat-of-the-pants foolishness, but if his short stories are anything to go by it should be quite humorous as well. (I’m about to find out; I have the play open in another tab.) (3 August 2012) The LoC That Would Not Die: I was unwilling to go to bed last night. After finishing my letter to you I ended up reading the whole of *brg* 74. I was pleased to read your praise of Nicholas Nickleby. I recently picked up a wonderful old hardcover edition for $5 at Spartacus Books (along with a pocketbook of Northanger Abbey, by Jane Austen — a bizarre and in the end very satisfying read, for $2 — rare bargoons in Vancouver, I assure you). It is from the Charles Dickens Works series from A. L. Burt, New York, and of course mentions no publication year. Early last century, anyway. But I have never read a book by Dickens and I have to admit I worried I might find it a slog. So I am happy to hear that It Lives, for you. I was reading about the Curragh Wrens of Ireland, lost women who were treated so terribly there, worse than camp followers in England or India. Dickens sent a reporter to write in great detail about their living conditions (among the gorse bushes), to be published in his newspaper, the Pall Mall Gazette. That he cared to intervene on their behalf is two-thirds of the reason I want to read his book. I think you read more books, listen to more music, and watch more DVDs in a year than I do in ten. Maybe I do more yoga than you. I’m reminded to tell you of a favourite movie, which I have not seen in several years but would love to watch again. Its Korean name is Jibeuro; in English it is called The Way Home; the director is Lee Jeong-hyang. There are two main actors in the film. One is a boy who, if I remember correctly, is around eight years old (he won an award for his performance), and the other is a woman who is as old as the hills. She is a tiny, bent thing who apparently had never even seen a movie when recruited to act in this film. She plays a mute, but 107

not deaf, grandmother to a boy whose mother has brought him from Seoul and left him in the mountains for the summer. He is angry and bored, his only playmate is his video game, and he takes it out on his grandmother. She, on the other hand, simply loves him. This sounds cheesy but it is not. Watching this woman and the patience and kindness in her face when he is freaking out, I was very moved. Remember that she is mute, too, so there is not a lot of dialogue. I have never seen anything like Jibeuro. A quiet, beautiful movie which I highly recommend. I did see two movies this year, though, that really stayed with me, as well as a few others I enjoyed. I read My Brilliant Career for the first time, and liked it a lot, so awhile later I watched the movie. I was happy with it, too, as it was pretty faithful to the original, and the actors were quite engaging. The next night I watched an unknown movie trawled from the library, Dean Spanley. It took my mum (who was in town taking care of me after the surgery) about three minutes to realise the dean was the young suitor from the night before (Sam Neill), nearly 30 years later. If you have never seen this movie, get it. It’s a New Zealand production, I believe, set in England at the turn of the last century, maybe as late as 1920, and is based (quite loosely) on a Lord Dunsany story in which a man recalls his previous life as a dog. I have now watched it maybe four times and it gets better with each viewing. Australians may be pleased to see Bryan Brown alongside Sam Neill, Jeremy Northam, Judy Parfitt, and a wonderfully old Peter O’Toole. *brg* If you go back to *brg* 63, you’ll find that Dean Spanley was my favourite movie of 2009, and that I wrote about it at length there. This led other readers to discover the movie, and write about it in later issues of *brg*. Dean Spanley is one of those great movies that continues to discover its own audience.*

A movie I caught online (CBC videos) a few months earlier was a BBC production, The Road to Coronation Street, about Tony Warren and the struggle to represent working-class Manchester on television at a time when that class and that accent were considered taboo. Every time I see this one I get a lump in my throat, but it is also funny and fast-moving and, again, very well scripted. That photo shows a very impressive hailball. (Something a storm coughs out, 108

I guess.) I’m glad you think so highly of the McGarrigle Sisters. I spent many a happy hour in the olden days listening to their superlative duets and was very engaged by the stories they wove with their lyrics. I think ‘NaCl’ is one of the greatest love songs, not to mention science songs, of all time. The name Bernice Rubens (Mr Wakefield’s Crusade) sounds awfully familiar. I think she may have written a strange book I picked up on the discard rack

at Pulp Fiction, The Ponsonby Post. (Yes, I’ve just found it. Same author.) It takes place largely in the ex-pat community in Indonesia. There is death, there are droll observations—a very interesting though not in always satisfying book.

Dogs, which takes place in Laos among aging revolutionaries a couple of years into the new regime. It isn’t the first in the series, but it’s the one I read. I found it fascinating, human, and sometimes gut-wrenchingly funny. Not often communists get to be ordinary people and their regimes not evil.

A better one in a related genre, though, is Colin Cotterell’s Anarchy and Old

(6 August 2012)

Feature letter

‘High Society’ and John Hammond by Malcolm McHarg MALCOLM McHARG 85 Ridge Road, Kilaben Bay, NSW 2283 This year I’ve written on my thoughts and feelings after the recent screening of a favourite film from 1956, High Society, and its linkages to some of my passions and interests. Movie and music nostalgia for High Society are perhaps best summed up by quoting Montgomery Clift admitting his love for Elizabeth Taylor in George Steven’s A Place in the Sun: ‘I love you. I’ve loved you from the first moment I saw you. I guess maybe I even loved you before I saw you.’ I can’t do better than that. In the years when I swam regularly at the Beaurepaire Swimming Pool (at Melbourne University) I would frequently see the late Zelman Cowen in the change rooms. We would say ‘hello’ to one another; he was always person-

able, even friendly. As of Thursday, I’ve been reflecting on the vicissitudes of life. I can fall from a 12-foot ladder, knock myself out on a brick wall, then collapse on a compost heap and almost spontaneously recover, as a consequence, from a chronic disabling back impairment (in 2003). Ian ‘Molly’ Meldrum, putting up Christmas decorations, falls from a tall ladder fracturing skull, breaking ribs and puncturing his lung. Similar circumstance but two very different outcomes. How lucky am I? I trust the two of you are well (Bruce, you look trim in your Facebook photo) and in good spirits given the circumstances we share, the uncertainties of aging. (19 December 2011)

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I’ve been hooked on movies from the starting of school (1943): films such as Bambi (1943, my first ‘going to the movies ’ experience), The Big Sleep (probably 1946, the first adult film to overwhelm me) and The Third Man (1949) are exceptional memories from the period of kid to early days of adolescence. These three movies, today, still rank highly as favourites. With each decade, ‘going to the movies’ experiences became richer and deeper. Leaving New Zealand for Melbourne was a life-augmenting experience in unforeseen ways. Melbourne, from 1957 onwards, brought new Hollywood insights — Busby Berkeley for example — along with exposures to Asian auteurs such as Kurosawa and Ray, along with French ‘new wave’ films, Italian cinema, and Russian cinema. With the ubiquitous media digitalisation, the quality movies canon formated in HD is now abundantly accessible: on DVD and Blu-ray; TV; TV on demand; and streaming/ downloading of movies direct to laptop, tablet or PC. The best film outcomes, of course, are the social experiences of movie going: meeting friends, conversation over coffee or a glass of wine; as a patron, eyeballs in the dark assimilating video images on a large screen. In the highly competitive cinema-going market, exhibitors of quality films are diversifying the moviegoing experience with HD films from past eras. By way of example, SBS over the last three weeks has screened two Kurosawa movies (The Seven Samurai, 1956, and Ran, 1985), and one Itami movie (Tampopo, 1985). The (Mel Gibson-owned) quality cinema chain Dendy, in the same period, has been screening High Society (1956). My high school years mark the transition from kid to adult, as I began making decisions on important personal interests and passions largely independent from parents and teachers. ABC broadcasts out of Sydney — probably via Radio Australia —were significant influences for musical appreciation beyond mainstream classical. Over the period from 1950 to 1955, I explored the landscape of jazz, and also came to love popular music of the type now known as ‘The American Songbook’. I would listen to jazz programs most weeks.

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Another ‘out of the blue’ jazz influence was John Wilson, teddy boy extra- ordinaire and older brother of Stephanie, my first serious girlfriend. John lived a block away. He was the only person I knew with a systematically collected set of jazz records. He became a mentor, probably without realising it, for my understanding of the true significance of performers such as Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald, Louis Armstrong, Billie Holiday, Miles Davis, and even Frank Sinatra. Here, as with movies, going to Melbourne would prove to be a life-augmenting experience.

One of the good things about today’s life, living on the shores of Lake Macquarie, is membership of the Watagan Mountain Film Society: films of quality for discerning viewers. Helen and I were fortunate to be admitted as members, perhaps because we’re also members of the Lake Macquarie U3A choir. Several of my favourite couples are members of both. The Society’s December screening was the 1956 musical romance, High Society. Look up a review for this film and, chances are, you’ll read that it’s a remake of The Philadelphia Story (1940). Those of you who have seen both films, however, will discern this is not quite the case. Both draw their script from the same Broadway play — The Philadelphia Story — a romantic comedy about high society, marriage, and remarriage. As Scott Fitzgerald wrote: ‘Let

me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me.’ The play’s female lead, Tracey Samantha Lord Haven, is based on a Philadelphia socialite married to a friend of the playwright. The male lead, C. K. Dexter Haven, when married to Tracy, had a vulnerability to excessive alcohol consumption. Katharine Hepburn, with help from Howard Hughes, purchased the film rights for The Philadelphia Story. The film — starring Katharine Hepburn, Cary Grant, and James Stewart, and directed by George Cukor — was highly successful with the critics, the box office, and Academy awards. High Society is different from the Cukor film at two levels. While it ’s still about the interpersonal dynamics of marriage and remarriage, you know up front to expect more than a romantic comedy. A six-minute overture precedes the commencement of the story. Secondly, HS is set in a resort famous for high society mansions — colloquially known as ‘summer cottages’ — in the town of Newport, Rhode Island. In 1954, a local socialite founded, and with her husband financed, the First American Annual Jazz Festival, what we know as the Newport Jazz Festival. Dexter, in HS, a jazz musician and songwriter, has links to a highly significant Newport resident, John Hammond. As a musical, HS is modelled, in part, on the golden age of the American songbook. Three all-time great popular performers — Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, and Louis Armstrong — sing an original score from Cole Porter, one of America’s great songwriters. Porter, like Hammond, belonged to the tribe of very rich; his grandfather had been the richest man in Indiana. HS’s musical backing comes from Armstrong (playing himself) and his All Stars band, along with orchestrations from Nelson Riddle and Conrad Salinger. We who saw HS on first release in 1956 reminisce over songs that, for some of us, are markers of our courtship years. Sinatra is at his peak singing ‘You’re Sensational’; Crosby and Sinatra in a first-time collaboration sing ‘Well, Did you Evah!’; Sinatra and Celeste Holm sing ‘Who Wants to be a Millionaire?’; and Crosby and Grace Kelly sing ‘True Love’. If you listen carefully to the HS dialogue, you will hear occasional reference to the name ‘Hammond’. The Bing Crosby representation of C. K. Dexter, in part, is a depiction of John Hammond. John and his sister Alice are to be

seen in a film of the same year as HS, The Benny Goodman Story (Benny and Alice married). Recently, there have been numerous references to, and in some circumstances footage of, John Hammond in The Blues, the Martin Scorsese seven-part documentary series on the history of blues music. I have to thank the ABC (again) for what I know about John Hammond. About 20 years ago, early in January, a jazz-loving fellow traveller in Melbourne rang me at work in Sydney and said words to the effect, ‘Malcolm, switch on ABC radio’ (Margaret Throsby’s interview program on national ABC Classic FM). The broadcast was already into the first of five (I think) 50-minute programs on John Hammond. If I can use the term ‘fabulous’ in its pre-cliché meaning of ‘legendary’, then I can tell you that John Hammond was born, in 1910, into fabulous wealth, specifically Vanderbilt wealth. ‘Fabulous wealth’ is perhaps an understatement. Wikipedia’s Vanderbilt family entry states, ‘The Vanderbilts remain the seventh wealthiest family in history.’ In 1892–95, Cornelius Vanderbilt II built ‘The Breakers’, the largest (70 rooms) and most opulent mansion in Newport, today the most visited attraction in Rhode Island. Vanderbilt wealth includes building the splendour of Grand Central Terminal, New York City. John Hammond was more than a jazz-loving socialite. From the 1930s to the early ’80s, he was much more noteworthy as a musician, music critic, and record producer. ‘In his service as a talent scout, Hammond became one of the most influential figures in 20th century popular music’ (Wikipedia entry). John Hammond is further distinguished (in the US) for one of his overarching social justice philosophies: ‘I heard no colour line in music. To bring recognition to the negro’s supremacy in jazz was the most effective and constructive form of social protest that I could think of.’ His piano studies commenced at four years of age, the violin at eight. John, in his teens, became ‘interested in the music sung and played by the servants, many of whom were black’. During high school years he would visit Harlem on non-school days and listen to what was then called ‘black music’. Attentive audiences for black music at that time were limited largely to blacks (of course), musos, and music aficionados. Through these Harlem visits, John came to know, personally, many musicians and performers. Hammond 111

would later say that hearing Bessie Smith, when he was 17, changed his life. At the age of 21, John Hammond left college to establish a career in the music industry. He was the first to record Bessie Smith. Another early breakthrough accomplishment was help in organising a racially integrated band for Benny Goodman: white band leader, mixed race band, across-the-board white pay rates. At age 23, Hammond in Harlem heard the 17-year-old Billie Holliday. Her recording debut with the Benny Goodman Band followed shortly after. Also around this time John entered Yale, studying violin and then viola. At age 27, he brought the Count Basie Band to New York from Kansas, giving it national exposure. The upmarket Society Restaurant in New York City became an element of Hammond ’s strategy to make African-American music part of mainstream popular music. Every musical act at the Society, over a decade, was supplied under the Hammond auspice. Restaurant patrons who liked what they heard became champions for African-American music. At 31, Hammond became a co-founder of the Council of African Affairs; Paul Robeson served as CAA chairman for most of its existence.

further reinforced Hammond’s policy of racially integrated bands, equal pay and, for Grantz as impresario, only racially integrated accommodation. Grantz became wealthy in the process. Music lovers will be familiar with at least two of Grantz’ record labels: Verve (founded in 1956) and Pablo. The Newport Jazz Festival precedes High Society by two years. Billie Holiday was a standout performer in the festival ’s first year. 1955 and 1956 were noted for two outstanding performances: Miles Davis with ‘Round Midnight’ (1955) and Duke Ellington’s Orchestra for, among other things, ‘Diminuendo’ and ‘Crescendo in Blue’ (1956). As a talent scout, in 1960, John Hammond discovered the 18-year-old gospel singer Aretha Franklin, and was responsible for her debut recording. The following year, at the insistence of his wife and over the objections of Columbia label record executives, he signed Bob Dylan, initially referred to by the record executives as ‘Hammond’s folly’. Thank you, ABC, for the introduction to John Hammond. Forgive me if my memory has failed me in some respects. And thank you, Watagan Mountain Film Society, for screening High Society. A discerning choice. Look up Frank Sinatra on YouTube singing ‘You’re sensational. That’s all. That’s all. That’s all.’ — Malcolm McHarg, 1 January 2012

Norman Grantz, the famous jazz impresario and producer from the late ’40s,

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Treasure 1 June 2013 Mervyn R. Binns Jennifer Bryce Elaine Cochrane Ditmar Bruce Gillespie Dora Levakis John Litchen Malcolm McHarg Yvonne Rousseau Casey Wolf and many others

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Jennifer Bryce: ‘Sunset on our houseboat, Kerala’.