Last month, Sam Carmody and I chatted to Good Reading about our respective pieces in Lines to the Horizon: Australian Surf Writing. My piece, ‘Following the Birds’, is about a nail-biting trip through some of Mexico’s most dangerous regions; Sam’s piece is an intimate and harrowing deep-dive into surfing and anxiety. This was a really great conversation and well worth a listen!
Bergmann Bio wins ASA mentorship
I’m delighted to have won a 2021 Australian Society of Authors Mentorship! I’ll be teaming up with John Zubrzycki, who’ll assist me with a structural edit of my new manuscript - Wayne Bergmann’s Biography. John is a former senior writer for The Australian and he has a long career in publishing, journalism and teaching. He’ll bring to the manuscript fresh eyes, a fresh perspective, and a wealth of experience in biography and narrative non-fiction. I was lucky to be one of only twenty authors selected for the program, out of a whopping pool of three hundred.
The first drafts of both my previous books, Troppo and Red Can Origami, were unruly, uneven and oddly paced. I learned that a critical and objective assessment is a crucial step in the process toward publication. This mentorship will allow me to receive feedback on the manuscript, and consider ways to target the book to an audience beyond Western Australia. We’re set to get started in August of this year!
I’d like to offer a huge thanks to the Australian Society of Authors and the Copyright Agency for this opportunity.
Troppo longlisted in Adaptable competition
I wrote Troppo imagining the screen. A movie the calibre of Balibo or The Babadook or The Boys. Dave Wenham playing Troppo’s villain Shane, Mark Occhilupo surfing as Wenham’s stunt double. Maybe Nashville’s Clare Bowen—a Wollongong uni graduate like myself—as the young drifter Penny.
This screen-dream might not be as far-fetched as it seems.
Troppo has just been longlisted for Queensland Writers Centre’s Adaptable, a program which seeks material from Australian and New Zealand writers for film or television adaptation. If deemed successful, I’ll be given the opportunity to pitch my work to screen industry professionals in May.
Until then, I’ll be thinking of a creative way to sell the motorbike chases, the dancing monkeys, the draining right hand barrels, the chick who grazed her boobs off on the reef, the malaria-glazed eyes, the disappeared girls, the thunderous wet season storms … Bloody hell. If Troppo was a film, I’d watch it for sure!
White Juju - Residency in Morocco 2022
Many years ago, I met a young man whose albino brother had been dismembered for black magic. His story has stuck with me ever since. The use of albino body parts for black magic is prevalent in some parts of East Africa, and it’s an issue that has made international headlines in recent years, with organisations like Amnesty International running extensive human rights awareness campaigns. I’ve been considering this as a jumping off point into a fictional novel, provisionally titled White Juju.
White Juju will focus on a young Australian couple working on a post-COVID aid project in Tanzania. The couple are distraught when their fair-skinned infant son is mistakenly swept up in a mass abduction of people with albinism. The abduction is linked to the country’s upcoming elections, where politicians occasionally use black magic charms to better their chances at the polls. Readers will follow the couple’s traumatic search for their boy from Dar es-Salaam’s smoky nightclubs, to the Chinese-owned fishing fleets off Zanzibar, and finally to Morocco, where they encounter a Kurtz-esque Frenchwoman who’ll do anything to protect her lucrative and bloody livelihood.
I’ve recently been successful in securing a residency with Green Olive Arts, in Tetouan, Morocco, for September 2022, to work on the new book. With the vaccine rollout now underway in Australia, I’m confident (and can’t wait!) for a return to international travel next year.
How thin the line
Lonely morning off the reef. Photo by Aimee Jan.
I live on the edge of a gorgeous coral reef in Western Australia, over five hundred kilometres from the closest recorded COVID case. We’re a popular spot for grey nomads, backpackers, drifters, and transients. We’re a Peter Pan town, of hedonists and narcissists and influencers. There were those of us who were oblivious. Who turned up to surf breaks with five per tinny, and said, what’s happening in Italy? There were those of us who were incredulous, who formed a vigilante group, and blocked off the road into town. Just to the south, they refused to refill the gas bottles of campers; we were more courteous, stuck to giving caravans the finger, shouting at blow-ins in the surf, and glaring at anyone with inter-state plates.
The most terrible thing we learnt, was how swiftly fear can romance violence from us.
How swiftly we can swing from civility to savagery; how thin the line.