Award-winning author/illustrator Terry Denton had been successfully working in children’s books for over a decade already when he was first teamed with Andy Griffiths, to illustrate an educational textbook Andy had written. It was the beginning of a beautiful partnership. Terry is a prolific writer and illustrator, creator of the Splash! and Wombat and Fox series, illustrator of the Maxx Rumble series, and much more. Jo Case spoke to him about his creative partnership with Andy Griffiths (the Just series, The Bad Book, The Cat on the Mat is Flat and The Big Fat Cow That Went Kapow, What Bumosaur is That?).

How did the creative partnership with Andy Griffiths come about?

We worked on an educational book or two together and they were looking for some funny illustrations, I guess, and they came to me. And we realised that we bounced off each other pretty well. And he was writing short stories and having difficulty getting them published, so we went together as a team and approached a publisher or two, and that got them started. [The short stories would become the Just series, starting with Just Tricking.] I think that they were a bit confused about his stories to begin with but I think that when they saw the package and how we were going to approach it, they understood.

I think it was just the two of us going together. It all evolved in that process. I think they just liked the idea of the two of us working together.

You must have presented well as a team.

Yes, we do work well as a team. It’s good fun.

Andy said that the fact that you were already a known and successful illustrator was probably a part of publishers picking up the Just series as well.

Yeah, I guess that’s true, because I had been there for about 10 years before. So, I did have an established name and I’d won a few prizes, so that probably helped. But in the end what mattered was that the stories were good. I think it made to look at them more seriously if I was prepared to illustrate them. But I think that the stories were just looking for the right publisher.

I guess my thing is that even though he needed me in some ways to get that first break, he was going to get that anyway. It made no difference.

But you sped it along. And the illustrations are obviously a big part of the package, especially the Just stories.

Yeah. But I still reckon they’d survive without them, though.

The good thing really since then is that we’ve really expanded our collaboration, and that’s been really good fun.

Yes, I wondered how that happened – how you branched out to The Cat on The Mat is Flat and The Bad Book?

Well, with The Bad Book, we decided to just do something really bad, to address that whole badness thing. We probably went too bad in the end. Though a lot of kids would disagree with that. A few adults thought we went too bad, but it gave us then an insight into another way of working. And out of that came The Cat on the Mat, which was an attempt just to get that level of humour without the badness, to see if we could spread it across a book in this different kind of form. It’s quite a bit younger, really.

When you started working on the Just series, did you realise you’d end up with such a long partnership with Andy?

No, we didn’t really know what we were trying to do in the first book. It was just the idea of marginal humour, I suppose. I think I did a lot more illustration than either of us would have imagined I would do at the beginning, and then it started evolving. And I suppose it really changed at Just Crazy, it started to expand in different directions. And then at Just Disgusting, it really took off.

We did a little book called What Bumosaur is That recently, and that was a lot of fun. We went away for a week down to Wilson’s Prom and worked for an intensive week, coming up with bumosaurs. So, that was really good fun. Not only because we work together so well, but just the other things we talked about and plans we made.

The margin illustrations in the Just series must be really fun to do.

Yeah, it’s a really intense process when it happens, because Andy spends nine months doing the stories and the illustrations to do in about a month, a month and a half. They come to me as double page spreads. It’s just a matter of that six-week, wild, coming-up-with-600-drawings, process.

You must have to really closely schedule that in around your other projects.

Yeah. It’s drop everything else and do that! While it’s sort of slightly nerve-wracking and intense, it’s an exhilarating process, too. Free ideas.

Andy told me that he told you to just do whatever you like in the margin illustrations, that they didn’t need to be too tied to what was happening in the story.

Yeah, that’s probably how it started. Some of them are linked to the story and some of them aren’t. But then there’s these characters we invent. Very early on, we had this character of Mr Scribble, who was just a pile of scribble, and for me then it’s a matter of working out what a piece of scribble can do. And then in the most recent one, Just Shocking, I invented this character of Spleen Boy, who’s just this spleen without a body who runs around creating havoc. I run into kids who just love that whole idea. Both of those characters, they just love them.

Have you ever been tempted to take some of the margin characters or illustrations and spin them off into something bigger?

It’s an idea I have, that it would be fun to do. A book which is a series of visual ideas. And we have talked about that. We’re about to start another series with a working title of Foolish Fables. They’re fables. But I think after that I’d like to try something visual using those characters and seeing what you could do with them. Going from a visual point of view, just inventing characters and doing stuff with them.

I wondered if you got stung by The Bad Book controversy as well? I know that Andy copped a lot of flack...

He took all the flack.

Were you surprised by the reaction?

Not really. To be honest, I thought there would be a little more than that. There was not a huge amount of negative reaction. There were a couple of bookshops in Sydney and a few schools here and there. Quite a few people defended it. Andy spent a lot of energy defending it. But he liked it like that. Deep down, he LIKED the idea of going out and defending it. In some way, he’s a crusader. My attitude was, they can say what they like, really. I mean, the book’s out there. And kids love it.

Did you have any regrets with The Bad Book, or is that something you’d do all over again?

I think, if we made a mistake with that book, it was our illustration approach. Initially, the idea was to illustrate it in almost stick figure-ish kind of way. And in the end, we chose to soften the approach to make it more palatable maybe. We decided that the text was BAD. The drawings perhaps didn’t need to be that bad. I think that now both of us think that was a mistake. We should have signalled the badness in the drawings as well. The book would have had a much more feral kind of look.

And there’s a couple ... there’s the little boy who runs across the road and gets skittled. But I talk to children about that, and that’s one of the things they mention the most. They get the joke. But it strained the sense of humour of a few people. There’s one image ... it illustrates the story of ‘There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Poo’ ... there’s a picture of a lady who looks very much like my mother sitting down at a table like my mother may have and drinking a cup of tea and eating poo off a plate. And maybe, if it were a more feral stick figure-ish kind of picture, it might have worked better.

Your poor mother!

It’s out there, now. I think what I might have changed would be to do it in a more inventive and out-there kind of drawing style.

But I guess, I bet you can look back on any project you do and there’s some things you might do differently.

Sure. That’s really true. Every project I do, I look back and think ‘I could have done that better’. You always imagine you could do it better.

But I guess you have to finish it sometime and send it off.

That’s right. Yeah. I think both of us would not, NOT do The Bad Book. In fact, we’ve often talked about doing a second one.

Really?

I still love that idea. I think we should go there. It just may take a bit of time to get there.

Would you call it The Bad Book 2 or something?

Yeah. The Badder Book. I think we both have to realise that we can do softer stuff, but we shouldn’t lose that harder edge either, and we shouldn’t be afraid of going to places like The Bad Book. Because there’s a big readership for it out there. There’s a lot of people who want that sort of thing who get something out of it.

It sounds like you guys never run out ideas of things to do together.

I suppose that’s because you keep refreshing the model. Andy’s come back to doing Just books. He was going to stop about four, I think, and I think we’re at six now.

Yes, he said that it was because kids at schools kept begging him to do another one, so he ended up doing it.

Yeah. But I think, also, he likes doing them! He’s still getting something out of that. But you keep yourself keen by pushing off into other areas as well. That’s the challenge: not to stick with one thing, really. Keep moving.

Melbourne GP Jacinta Halloran won the 2007 Victorian Premier’s Award for an Unpublished Manuscript for an earlier version of her first novel, Dissection, which is being launched this month by Helen Garner. That’s two pretty auspicious ways to kick off a writing career. Georgia Blain spoke to Jacinta for the latest in Readings series of Australian Features showcasing new and emerging writers, sponsored by the Copyright Agency Limited (CAL).

Each of us has a carefully constructed sense of self. We build it, gradually, from a young age, and try to fortress it against the inevitable small daily chips that chisel back the armour, and the larger blows that run the risk of cracking the core. In her very taut and lean first novel, Jacinta Halloran takes a female GP protagonist, Dr Anna McBride, and puts her under the microscope as she suffers one such blow. Following a case of delayed diagnosis necessitating the amputation of a young man’s leg, McBride finds herself facing a negligence suit. Despite being aware that her mistake is one any doctor easily could have made, the experience is a shattering one.

The novel is a beautifully executed dissection of a rapidly crumbling inner core. With precision and skill, Halloran lays McBride bare, examining her as she cracks and disintegrates, page by page. It is, at times, a painful read, a little like watching a car crash, as we see the effect of this one mistake running through McBride’s professional life, and then into her personal life. It is also a thought-provoking novel, because it is so much more than just a careful examination of individual self doubt and suffering. It questions – in a much broader sense – the infallibility that we expect from others and the consequences of those expectations.

Halloran, who is herself a GP, said the impetus for writing Dissection came from an article she read about a doctor facing a negligence suit. What intrigued Halloran was the woman’s discussion of the failure of her marriage, which she attributed to the stress of the impending court case. “The details of the negligence case in my novel – who did what to whom – are backgrounded, intentionally,” she said. “I wanted to focus on the emotions of my protagonist – her self-doubt, her terrible guilt about doing harm, and the loss of equilibrium and confidence that begins to infiltrate her faith in her marriage.”

Halloran believes most doctors (and particularly female doctors) worry about being sued. It’s an inevitable aspect of an occupation that has become increasingly demanding and challenging. “Doctors are required to keep up to date with an ever-expanding range of medical information; they have real time constraints (especially given the current shortage of GPs nationally); they work essentially in isolation; and as primary caregivers they are constantly required to be vigilant for the rarer, serious condition among the plethora of common, more minor complaints,” she said. “It’s perhaps unwise to generalise about the issues faced by female GPs, but I would say that there’s some evidence that women tend to spend longer with patients, especially those with mental health issues. Many female GPs have children and work part-time: in such a situation one can find oneself ‘giving’ and ‘caring’ full-time, and this can be very draining. ‘Compassion overload,’ it’s sometimes called.”

“If a doctor does become the subject of a negligence case, it’s not just the difficulty of going through the legal formalities – of speaking in a different language, that of the law,” Halloran said. “It’s the whole self-analysis that such a suit engenders. Doctors, by nature, are usually high-achieving and self-exacting people, and the concept of harming a patient is very confronting to their sense of self.” This is certainly the case with Anna McBride, who has, until her mistake, never really questioned either her profession or her role in it. Now, she doubts every action she takes and every decision she makes, and this doubt eats away at any faith she has in her work having worth or value. In the process, which is inevitably one of self-absorption, she cuts off from her husband and her children, causing further destruction to her sense of self.

Halloran depicts McBride perfectly – a middle-aged woman who suddenly looks in the mirror and sees all her fallibilities painfully on display. There is also considerable compassion in this depiction. She is a woman we feel we know. One of the other very powerful aspects of the book is its understanding of how life and human interaction do not sit neatly within the expectations of the medical and legal professions. There are rarely definitive answers or clear rights and wrongs, but we frequently expect this from our doctors – and the law certainly demands it when it is called upon to judge their conduct. As Halloran says: “Anna McBride is not a bad person but neither is she perfect – as a doctor, wife and mother, she has made mistakes. Hasn’t everyone? I have tried to make Anna a real woman, riddled with self-doubt and negativity yet capable of love and kindness, and I have tried to make her relationships with her husband and children also real. Relationships are full of ambivalence – in general life is full of ambivalence, too, and shades of grey – and I have tried to capture this in this novel.”

Halloran came to writing – like many new authors – through a tertiary course. “After doing editing and non-fiction writing subjects I felt confident enough to start a novel. [Melbourne writer] Antoni Jach was my teacher at this time and he encouraged me to enrol in a Masters of Creative Writing at RMIT, which I did. I am due to finish this MA very soon. Both the RMIT diploma course and the MA provided wonderful and very supportive writing environments.” Halloran also reads widely, naming the Canadian short story writer, Alice Munro, experimental French writer Marie Darrieussecq and the Nobel Prize winner, J. M. Coetzee, as just some of her favourite authors. “Coetzee’s prose is always magnificent – the rhythm beautiful, the words so precise, the consciousness and self-consciousness of his characters so superbly drawn. He writes in a different way from many novelists – he is always questioning the function of language.”

With her first novel now published, Halloran is planning her second. “It’s about a mother and her two daughters who set out on a journey – a pilgrimage if you like. (I was brought up a Catholic and I find religious ideas making their way into my work!) There may be some medical themes – life-threatening illness and death will feature – but I envisage the novel to be largely concerned with the relationship between the three women.”

She is also still working as a GP. “I work in a large practice as an employee, so I don’t have the added work of running my own practice,” she said. “I try to write two days a week and can of course extend this if I want to. It’s a good balance. Writing is a very solitary occupation – not only physically but mentally – your mind turns in on itself – at least, that’s been my experience to date. It can be difficult. So it’s good to get to work and think about my patients and their lives, their stories, for a change.”

Georgia Blain’s latest book is the memoir collection Births, Deaths and Marriages.

Claire Thomas has published short stories in various journals, including Meanjin and Overland. She has worked at a variety of jobs, including acting and bookselling, and is currently doing a PhD at the University of Melbourne. This month, she publishes her first novel, Fugitive Blue. She spoke to Jo Case for Readings.

What was the inspiration for this book?

The idea for Fugitive Blue came to me many years ago during an art history lecture about Renaissance artist materials when I first heard about lapis lazuli pigment and its immense mercantile value. I immediately thought – what if some of that got into inexperienced hands? What if a painting was created that was of substantial material value but without inherent artistic status? What if people through history still cherished that painting and maintained its longevity? It was that one little detail that triggered the whole story.

You have a background in art history. How did that influence you when writing the novel?

As a student of art history, I focused on twentieth-century art, and there is only a little bit of that in Fugitive Blue. In a way, it is a surprise to me that I have written a novel that features an artwork from fifteenth-century Venice. Still, that’s what I’ve done and I definitely grew to love that strange little panel painting. Fugitive Blue does, however, have a certain contemporary sensibility, which makes sense by the end of the novel.

In the writing of my book, I wanted to avoid traditional ideas about master painters and their masterpieces and instead highlight other ways of ascribing value to art. I wanted to look at the role of women in art, beyond that of the subservient muse. And perhaps, above all, I wanted to explore the material vulnerability of artworks that are often assumed to be objects that should last forever.

Fugitive Blue moves between modern-day Melbourne and various historical settings. How much research did you need to do to get the historical background right?

In addition to the contemporary sections, the book has four historical settings – Bonegilla Migrant Reception Centre in the 1950s, Paris in the 1870s, Venice in the 1770s and early Renaissance Italy. In each case, I had some existing interest in the period and chose it as a stage in my story for that reason. But I did a heap of research for them all and found it endlessly fascinating, whether it was reading eighteenth-century Grand Tour diaries or accounts of life in the Paris Opera, or simply driving to Albury-Wodonga to see its trees.

The process was very simple: I’d immerse myself in an era for a few months, reading and absorbing as much detail as I possibly could. Eventually, when I felt like I was overflowing and desperate to process all the information, I’d write the related section. I wanted to know as much as possible about each period so I could write the stories fluidly, placing my characters into a clear world.

In the book, your main character falls in love with her work while restoring the striking ultramarine painting: becoming engrossed in it (to the detriment of other parts of her life). Did you become similarly engrossed in your novel while writing it?

Unfortunately, the writing of Fugitive Blue took too long for me to maintain that level of completely consuming affection! I loved it at times and thought it was a pathetic folly at other times. I wrote and re-wrote my novel over many years with a definite determination but never, I hope, to the detriment of my relationships. I am not a writer who buys into the whole neglect-or-take-advantage-of-your-loved-ones-for-the-benefit-of-your-own-terribly-important-fiction thing. I write as much as I can whenever I can, but there are other things I value just as much. I suppose what I had in common with my character was the (misguided or otherwise!) belief that my ‘project’ was worth pursuing and a certain discipline to see it through to the end.

What are the books and writers that influence you?

I love the writing of Mary Gaitskill, Joan Didion, Paula Fox, A.S. Byatt and Jeffrey Eugenides. In terms of the oldies, Henry James, George Eliot, Emily Bronte, Proust and Woolf have all meant a lot to me at various times in my life, and some of them still do. Recently, I’ve particularly enjoyed reading Nicola Barker’s Darkmans and re-reading Patrick White’s The Vivisector. And I am endlessly impressed with Helen Garner and Tim Winton – their longevity and the fact that they are very much themselves. I don’t even attempt to write like any of these authors but, as a reader, they’re some of the ones I love the most.

Richard Moore is the Director of the Melbourne Film Festival, which begins its 2008 season on 25 July. Jo Case spoke to him on the eve of the festival’s opening about the new programming strands, this year’s focus on Australian film, the best of the political documentaries and films with a literary connection.

What are some of the main drawcards of this year’s Melbourne Film Festival?

Well, when you ask a festival director that you’re always going to open a can of worms! Can I say the lot? I guess I’d focus my attention on the new programming streams. It’s good to refresh the program, not only for the viewers, but also for ourselves. We don’t want to keep on doing the same thing. I’ll talk a bit about them all.

MIFF Premiere Fund

About a year ago, we were given money by the returned Brumby government to initiate a new film fund, which became the MIFF Premiere Fund. So, we’re a minority investor in Victorian films and documentaries. And one of the conditions of that is that the films premiere during the festival. So this year, for the first time in MIFF’s history, we’ve got our own production slate. This year, they all happen to be documentaries. Next year, they’ll all be films. We’re opening the festival with a MIFF Premiere Fund Film, Not Quite Hollywood.

Focus on Ozploitation

Another new strand, which spins off from the Not Quite Hollywood film is called Focus on Ozploitation, which we’re co-presenting with ACMI this year. For the first time in our shared histories, we’re doing a curatorial program together. And it’s a look at some of the best or worst excesses of the 1970s, early 80s, Ozploitation movies. We’re doing a small programming stream around six of those titles: Barry McKenzie Holds His Own, Dead End Drive-In, Long Weekend, Razorback, Road Games and Turkey Shoot.

I guess if you were trying to describe the films, you’d put them firmly in the B-grade division. I don’t think there is a verb ‘to ozploit’ in the Oxford English Dictionary, but if you were looking to try and define it, you’d get close if you looked at the act of chundering, or a couple of buckets of blood, engine oil and grease. A few raw prawns, maybe. They’re close, perhaps, to the spirit of Sir Les Patterson than to anything else more mainstream. They’re a nice element of the Australian films in the festival – a good addition to the ‘Homegrown’ section that we always have. There’s quite a big selection of Aussie films this year.

Free Radicals

Free Radicals is really for films that are deliberately exploring: pushing the boundaries, pushing the form, pushing the grain of the film ... pushing everything! They defy accepted narrative patterns. They seek to subvert in some way or another. They’re films that we would normally associate with a festival like Rotterdam, rather than somewhere like Cannes or Berlin, which are usually a bit more mainstream. They haven’t abandoned narrative altogether, but they’re a bit more exploratory. They’re not what you might get in your standard multiplex.

Border Patrol

Border Patrol is a spin-off from a focus we did last year on contemporary Israeli film. This year it’s the sixtieth anniversary of the birth of Israel, and we thought it would be nice to do a different version of that. There are four films, all dramas, and they’re dramas that look, in different forms and style, at the so-called ‘Israeli/Palestinian question’, from different perspectives.

To be frank, there isn’t a lot of Palestinian cinema around. One film we’re featuring this year, Salt of the Sea, is very interesting as the very early beginnings of a Palestinian cinema. There’s Waltz with Bashir, which comes from Cannes this year, an animated documentary. I’m calling it by a new phrase, ‘animentary’, and it’s about one soldier’s repressed memory of going into the Palestinian refugee camps of the 1982 war against Lebanon, where the Israelis stood back and the Lebanese Phalangist forces massacred the refugees in the camps. Obviously, anything that comes out of that area is political, but this was a good mix of the political and the personal.

Cannes Director’s Fortnight Tribute

Another one of the new strands is part of our close connection with Cannes. Every year we go to the Cannes festival – and our timing is lucky. It allows us to go to Cannes, come back, and have three weeks to get some of the best Cannes titles. This year, we have 29 titles. We also have a deeper connection with Cannes in that this year: we’re celebrating a part of their program.

Director’s Fortnight was set up as a counter to the black-tie swishery and the official awards as a champion of auteur films and a champion of new voices, new cultural zeitgeist in the late 60s. Cannes was suspended for a year in 1968, after the student riots and general unrest. And when it came back in 1969, Director’s Fortnight was set up. This year is 40 years of Director’s Fortnight. And this year, along with a lot of other festivals, we’re doing our own independent celebration of Director’s Fortnight. A kind of homage, if you like. We’re including a couple of films from Director’s Fortnight this year, and also some of the classics from among the 600 odd titles that have premiered Director’s Fortnight over the years. They’ve championed filmmakers like Jim Jarmusch, Martin Scorsese, and many others.

Retrospective on George Romero

We’re doing a big tribute to George Romero this year. It’s been 40 years since he revolutionised horror films with that film of his, Night of the Living Dead. We’re showing the Australian premiere of his new film, Diary of a Dead. And we’re doing a tribute to George as part of it. George is coming out, along with his daughter Tina, also a filmmaker, and we’re showing about nine of his films across the course of the festival. He’ll be one of our major guests. There will be a lot of focus on his commercial zombie films, but he’s also important as a somewhat neglected figure of independent American cinema, with films like Martin and Nightriders, which are not part of the series of zombie films but are still very important and interesting social allegories.

Tribute to Edward Yang

The festival’s other tribute is to Edward Yang, a Taiwanese filmmaker who is acknowledged as one of the people who started off Taiwanese cinema. He died at the end of last year. We’re screening all seven of Edward Yang’s features, including the four-hour film A Brighter Sunday. It’s rare that you’ll get to see all those films in one place anywhere. And without going into hyperbole, it’s really one of the best collections of film that anyone’s produced in South-East Asia in the last many years.

There’s a really strong Australian presence this year. Is this something you plan to keep doing for future festivals?

It really depends. Every year you go out with certain ideas. You know, we go ‘let’s do a selection of Japanese porno movies from the 1960s’. But then, you soon realise when you go out there and try to secure these things or try to find them, that it’s not necessarily going to be easy to deliver those strands. Either the print is not available or some widow is holding onto her husband’s feature films and they’re all under her bed and she won’t let them go for various reasons. So, for some obscure reason you can’t always deliver what you think you’re going to do.

So, to go back to your question, yes, MIFF is always strong on Australian films, as most Australian film festivals are, but this year, it just all came together – with the advent of the MIFF Premiere Fund, plus the B-grade exploitation films, plus the usual Home-Grown program, we ended up having a really large contingent of Aussie movies. So, yes, we’re really happy about that.

Going back to what you were saying about the Border Patrol films on Israel/Palestine, were you aiming for that mix of the political and the personal that you’ve captured?

Yes. I think that’s something I’m personally attracted to, in films across the board. This year, we’ve got some very, very strong political documentaries in our doco section. There are three titles in particular.

One is called Terror’s Advocate, by Barbet Schroeder, and it’s a portrait of probably the most morally ambiguous character in the whole festival: French/Algerian lawyer called Jacques Vergès, who was defending the Algerian freedom fighters (the Algerian resistance movement), but then went on to defend Carlos the Jackal. He married a member of the Baider Menhof gang and made a name for himself with the Palestinians as well. It’s fascinating and he’s an absolutely fascinating character. It also becomes a history of revolutionary movements from the 1960s up to now.

Another is called It’s Hard Being Loved By Jerks, which is about the court case fought by a small left-wing Paris magazine called Charlie Hebdo. They fought against the grand mosque and Islam and various other organisations in Paris to defend their right to republish those Danish cartoons [a cartoon of a weeping Prophet Muhammad with a speech bubble saying ‘It’s hard being loved by jerks’.] And it’s set inside the magazine itself and takes place over the course of the trail.

The third political documentary I’m really excited about is called Yakasuni. It’s the name of the shrine built in honour of the Japanese war dead. If you’ve watched the news lately, you’ve probably seen the Japanese prime minister when he went to worship at the shrine he caused an absolute furore, because there are all these people in Japan and China and various places, who accuse the Japanese of being complete militarists. And the director of this documentary had to go into hiding and faced death threats by the Yakuza, etcetera, etcetera.

So, they’re three really strong documentaries. I think they are films that upset people, or make people have strong passions, or give rise to strong emotions.

There are quite a few films this year with links to books. What are some of the stand-outs in that area?

There are a few connected with literary themes. There’s a documentary on Dalton Trombo, one of Hollywood’s greatest screenwriters (Roman Holiday, Spartacus, The Brave One), who had a very strong political background. He went before the Un-American Committee and refused to name names and then was banned and blacklisted, but continued to write films for various Hollywood directors. In fact, one of his pseudonyms was Robert Rich, and he won an Oscar under that name for The Brave One. It’s an extremely comprehensive documentary about his life and career.

There’s one on the experimental playwright Kathy Acker (Who’s Afraid of Kathy Acker?). She had a real connection to the literary underground in the late 60s and early 70s in New York and a really close affiliation with the punk movement, drawing on her background as a stripper, too. She died of breast cancer in 1997, and this is about her life and work.

There is one based on a very popular vampire novel called Let the Right One in by John Lindquist. It’s about the love affair between an adolescent and a 200-year-old vampire who is still in the form of a child. It’s not a blood and guts kind of vampire movie, but much more of a psychological thriller. It’s terrific.

There’s a piece called Persepolis based on the graphic novel by Marjane Satrapi about her experiences growing up in Iran. This is the animation that makes that whole story come to life. I know this film was huge in France.

We have another documentary on the life and times of Hunter S. Thompson, Gonzo. There’s a lot of good stuff, there.

Last question ... what’s the best thing about your job?

The drink after the opening night speech. Definitely.

Melbourne-based writer and editor Dmetri Kakmi revisits the Turkish island of his birth and the events that drove his Greek family to migrate to Australia in his haunting first book, the memoir Mother Land. In the latest in Readings’ series spotlighting new and emerging writers (sponsored by the Copyright Agency Limited), renowned writer Arnold Zable reflects on the book and talks to Dmetri Kakmi.

Dmetri Kakmi’s Mother Land is a haunting account of the author’s childhood on an Aegean island, situated near the mouth of the Dardenelles Straits and the Gallipoli Peninsula. Renamed Bozcaada after it was annexed by Turkey in 1923, the Greek inhabitants still maintain its classical name, Tenedos.

Book-ended by the author’s return to the island in 2002, the narrative focuses on a three-year period, between 1969 and 1971, as seen through the eyes of the author as an eight- and nine-year-old boy. The period ends when his family forsakes their impoverishment and persecution for a new life in Australia. The memoir is distinguished by Kakmi’s vivid portrayal of island characters, and his seamless weaving of history, folklore and myth, ritual and daily reality, rendered with the sensuous immediacy of a young boy.

Two poisonous tensions permeate the narrator’s island life. First, there is the enduring tension between Turks and Greeks. The two communities live apart in separate quarters. For the Greek population, the threat of violence and expulsion is always imminent. One act of violence can engender a chain reaction of hatred and reprisal, acted out against a recent history of ethnic cleansing, exile, displacement and potential massacre.

The boy is also witness to his parents’ violent dynamic. His mother is strong-willed, restless, impulsive, and headstrong, the protectress of the hearth, liable to snap at those dearest to her, yet always prepared to do battle with those who bully them. She is a woman with ‘city ways’, acquired after a sojourn in Istanbul. The father, on the other hand, is a man of the sea; in the eyes of his wife, a man without refinement. It is a lethal dynamic, swinging between her constant belittling and his drunken violence.

While Kakmi does not flinch in depicting his father’s outbursts, he also portrays him with compassion. On the sea, Baba is a master of his craft. ‘He could navigate some very treacherous waters around the Dardenelles, a true skill that was not acknowledged because he was illiterate,’ Kakmi tells me, when we meet to discuss the book.

After arriving in Australia, Kakmi suppressed the past. ‘I deliberately forgot my two languages and about my Turco-Greek heritage. More than anything, I wanted to melt in and disappear. I wanted nothing to do with the past. It was too agonising and I missed Turkey more than I can say.’ He avoided anything to do with the island until the death of his mother in 1993. Her passing triggered a ‘tidal wave of memories. It was like the doors of perception had opened and I was virtually drowning in names, events, images, locales, and sounds.’

It was partly a sense of responsibility to his mother’s memory that drove him to write the book. ‘I could see that she was carrying a huge load, and was deeply frustrated and caged in her circumstances. I felt a duty to restore this woman’s life, though I am sure she wouldn’t like some of the things I reveal.’ His moving portrayal of his mother conveys her thwarted passion, her ferocious desire to better her life, and the secret she carried with her almost to the grave.

Kakmi returned to the island 28 years after he left. ‘When I set out to write the memoir,’ he says, ‘it was a hard facts and figures book, a documentation that aimed to commemorate the Greeks of the island, and their culture, especially since their presence had dwindled to 32 elderly people. But this approach proved dull, and would have appealed only to specialists.’ The second draft was written through the eyes of a middle-aged man, reflecting on the past. ‘While it was more personal,’ he tells me, ‘it was so sentimental that I could not live with it.’

Late one night, says Kakmi, he woke ‘with a couple of sentences running through my head. It was the voice of an eight-year-old boy, talking very rapidly, describing sitting under a mulberry tree, having lunch with his mother and sister.’ Kakmi wrote the sentences down, and when he reread them in the morning he knew he had found the voice for the book. He was able to finish a full draft within seven months.

Kakmi’s evocative depiction of place stems from a kind of meta-seeing. It is the vision of an animist for whom all is alive and language is influenced by landscape, a world in which trees can ‘pierce the pregnant bellies of clouds’, and where a breeze can make ‘earth music in the wild sage and thyme and oregano bushes’. Kakmi tells me that this is how he ‘sees things here and now, when I go into the Australian bush. Every moment is alive and connected to that great cathedral of nature.’

As we converse, Kakmi reveals the deeper forces that fostered this vision. In 2002, on one of his return journeys to Turkey, he went through a period when past and present, reality and fantasy, collapsed. He was deluged by sounds and images. ‘One evening in Ankara I woke up in my hotel room and saw a child standing by the window, his arms wrapped around himself, trembling, looking at me with burning eyes. It was me as an eight-year-old boy.’ Days later, while observing a service in a mosque, he heard voices screaming, “Quick, run, they’re going to kill us.”

‘Past and present were colliding in a violent way.’ His entire being was under siege, violated by a brutal ancestral past. While in the short term he experienced great psychic distress, his hallucinations enabled Kakmi to fully access the child he once was, and the raw terror and beauty of the past.

Though defined as a memoir, the book employs the techniques of a novelist in its structure, its development of character, and detailed reconstruction of key episodes. ‘Obviously it happened a long time ago,’ says Kakmi. ‘You cannot recall exactly what people said, or the specific details that build up a scene and make it real for readers. I realised that if I wanted to make this book work for an audience, and not merely be therapy for me, I had to take the characters that were so real in my head, seek their essence and make them universal. I also realised that facts were getting in the way of truth. By taking the boy and creating a literary persona out of him, I was able to pursue the emotional truth rather than the literal facts.’

The finished memoir is a book of revelations. The reader learns of the secrets that have festered for years, secrets that the author himself discovered only as he was writing the book. Kakmi records episodes of brutality and unexpected kindnesses on both sides that can only be fully understood against the reality of oppression. ‘A brutal regime creates brutalised people.’

To create a balanced picture, Kakmi felt it was important to dwell upon relationships that cut across the cultural divide. There are moving portraits of his Turkish friends: his school mate Refik, the Sufi-like fisherman, Ezet, Osil the grocer, and the middle-aged author’s companion and guide, Sinan. By accessing both the terror and beauty, as well as acknowledging the virtues that can be found in people of both cultures, Kakmi paves the way for redemption.

Arnold Zable’s latest novel is Sea of Many Returns, a meditation on displacement, nostalgia and exile, set on the Greek island of Ithaca.

This article proudly supported by Copyright Agency Ltd

Chloe Hooper won a Walkley (2006) for her writing on Palm Island – and in particular, the death in custody of Cameron Doomadgee and its charged aftermath. Her first non-fiction book, The Tall Man is an extended meditation on the case – and a stunning work of reportage, reminiscent of Helen Garner and Truman Capote.

You describe feeling ‘incandescently white’ when you first arrive on Palm Island. Did that feeling recede with time, or was it always with you? How did your awareness of your outsider status affect the way you approached your work?

I was an outsider to Palm Island, but also to the police force, and to the law. The advantage of that was not coming to the story with a set of defined moral or political positions. But I was invited “inside” and I hope the book takes readers there too.

How did you get involved with the Palm Island case in the first place? Had you worked much (or at all) with Aboriginal communities before that?

I’d moved home from overseas a year or so earlier and was keen to know more about Aboriginal Australia. By chance, I met a lawyer, Andrew Boe, who was working pro bono for the Palm Island community. He asked me to come and document the inquest into Cameron’s death. He said it would take two weeks … that was three-and-a-half years ago.

Palm Island is home to one of Australia’s largest Aboriginal communities, and this case seems to incorporate some of the big problems facing Aboriginal Australia: deaths in custody, police attitudes to Aboriginal communities, the underlying tensions of a violent history. What do you see as the most significant issues in this case?

The case definitely highlights all the headlining problems, but actually I wanted to avoid writing about ‘issues.’ I feel strongly that this is a book about people. It’s about the Doomadgee family struggling for justice; and about Hurley, a forceful, complicated policeman. ‘Death in custody’ are three dread words in Australia, but they don’t really penetrate our consciousness. I wanted to write a book about a confronting subject which people would pick up and keep reading, not because they feel they should but because this is a fascinating story.

Queensland’s Fitzgerald Inquiry identified a pervasive code within the police force that required ‘police not enforce the law against other police, nor cooperate in any attempt to do so, and perhaps even obstruct any such attempt’. Do you think this culture influenced the investigation of Chris Hurley?

Well, Hurley was ‘investigated’ by two of his friends, one of whom cooked dinner for the other detectives at Hurley’s house the night Cameron died ... Even before Hurley’s trial, police witnesses were threatening members of the prosecution legal team, so you do wonder.

Perspective is a huge factor in the case at the centre of the book – and the book itself. What different people see in the same situation, and how you tease out a ‘truth’ from that. (For example: ‘One man had seen a black drunk, the other a white demon.’) How did you wrestle with this issue in writing the book and observing the case?

I tried as hard as I could to see things from both points of view. Ironically, my last book had been a satire of a true crime novel. Here I was now trying to write one, but the story resisted the genre’s conventions. This book, in some ways, is more like a dot painting: it’s in the little details of people’s lives that the truth lies.

Is it true that you’re interested in true crime as a genre?

True crime is fascinating, because suddenly people’s passions are completely exposed. I think this diverges from the genre, though. The true crime question is ‘did he do it?’. In the end, I hope the reader might ask ‘could I have done it?’

You write that Cameron Doomadgee’s world remained closed to you, as a woman. What kind of challenge did this present in writing the book, to which his story is so integral?

Cameron’s world was closed to the extent that the male world in Aboriginal society is closed off by cultural norms. I got to know Cameron’s loved ones well and I feel I understand to some extent who he was. If you spend a lot of time thinking about someone’s death, you do in a strange way become close to them.

Hurley seems a kind of semi-benevolent Kurtz figure (a parallel you draw) – isolated from higher authority, grown heady with his own power, mistaking the community as his personal fiefdom. How do you think this affected his behaviour on the morning of Cameron Doomadgee’s arrest?

The key question of Keating’s Redfern address is ‘how would I feel if this were done to me?’ I decided if I asked that of the Palm Islanders’ experience, I also had to ask it of Hurley. He was someone who had spent most of his adult life in remote Aboriginal communities and frontier towns—and why he chose to work exclusively there is another issue. But as time went on, I looked at what police in these places regularly deal with, and I did start to wonder how a normal person could not crack up.

Chris Hurley was the first policeman in Australia ever to be charged over the death of a prisoner in custody. Despite the fact that he was not convicted, do you think this represents a significant milestone for Australia’s treatment of Aboriginal people?

Initially Cameron Doomadgee was just another statistic to the powers that be. A lot of hard work by a lot of people has changed that. I am hopeful about the future: I think most Australians want to know about our past and move forward with the business of reconciliation.

Australian writer Debra Adelaide landed a whopping $1 million advance for her much-anticipated novel, The Household Guide to Dying. Jo Case spoke to her for Readings on the eve of its publication.

This has been touted as your ‘breakthrough novel’. With ten books behind you, including two novels, does this feel strange?

Not really. I wrote this novel for myself, so while on the one hand it’s a great surprise to see so much fuss, on the other I feel content. Perhaps at the moment I don’t know what it means to have a so-called breakthrough novel. But if that’s the case, I guess I’ll find out soon enough.

‘The mother dying was a disgraceful breaking of every rule.’ It’s also a slightly risky situation for an author – to write a book where the reader knows its sympathetic heroine, a mother of small children, will die at the end. What made you decide to write this story?

I didn’t decide, as such. It chose me, which is what I think many authors would say. But I have been interested in the topic of dying generally for quite some time, and I wanted to explore the possibility of writing about dying in a frank and comic way.

The running thread of Delia’s job – a ‘witty, ironic’ advice columnist and writer of a bestselling series of books on household advice – provides some wonderfully funny moments, and a welcome leavening humour to the very emotional main narrative. Did you have fun with this aspect of the book?

Yes. In fact in my dreams I am really an agony aunt disguised as a domestic advice columnist. And what was particularly satisfying was to make these extracts from Delia’s advice column another little narrative in the novel, one in which, in the end, the story surprises her as much as it does the reader.

As a mother, reading about a mother farewelling her children, reading this book made me cry more than once. Did you ever find yourself emotionally overwhelmed when writing it?

I think it’s more appropriate to say that intense emotions shaped parts of it, but that I was never overwhelmed, otherwise I doubt I would have been able to write a fictional story.

Delia’s response to her impending death proves some very bizarre moments: posing in her own coffin holding a martini glass for her book cover, making and freezing blood sausages (made with her own blood) for her family to eat when she is gone. ‘Why can’t just you deal with this like any normal person?’ says her mother. Do you think there is a ‘normal’ response? What is behind Delia’s (almost manic) activities?

I have no idea what a normal response is to imminent death, especially as I’ve not yet faced it. Delia is certainly manic at times, and what is behind that is her intense desire to shape, control and direct the little amount of time left to her. And then at some point, she realises how futile that is.

The book – and Delia’s advice books – is curiously old-fashioned in the way that it treats the domestic arts (cooking, laundry, cleaning) with reverence and affection, as arts that one could be proud of mastering. What was the inspiration for that? And are you, in your parlance, a ‘goddess’, a ‘domestic whore’, or something in between?

I wish! Goddess or whore, either would do me. But Delia is especially interested in elevating the domestic arts, since to her they are so fundamental. And so overlooked. My position, for what it’s worth, is that domestic work is strangely compelling. If only it were valued more ...

This book seemed, to me, to be a kind of love letter to motherhood, in all its small joys and ongoing imperfections. Did you set out to do that?

No, quite the opposite, as it’s a theme I’ve already explored in earlier books. But clearly it’s an ongoing preoccupation of mine, and I’m very happy that readers would have this reaction.

Delia says her advice column is ‘a version of me, a slightly feral one’. Obviously you are not your character, but it seems there must be aspects of you in there – like her, you keep chickens, you work with words, and I suspect the Jane Austen ruminations are as much yours as hers. How much of yourself did you put into Delia?

Lots. Inevitably. It’s one way of investing a character with some sort of credibility. It’s true that I do keep chickens and I am a writer, but Delia’s views and prejudices and obsessions are all hers, as is her story. Her life, which has been full of trauma, regret and guilt, barely resembles mine.

Delia reflects ‘I was always pathetically grateful for email, since it let you attend to inquiries or make ones of your own while your children wailed and fought and called out from the bathroom ... without the embarrassment of all that drifting over the phone’. That sentence is so very apt, I wondered: does that describe your working life?

Not at all. I’m answering these questions in total quiet and privacy. Not. But even though my children are much older now than Delia’s, and more independent, my working life is still hectic. I think we forget too easily that just running a home can be a full time job.

Delia’s editor, Nancy, is initially sceptical about Delia’s final ‘how-to’ book, The Household Guide to Dying. ‘Who on earth would pick up a book with that title?’ As the author of a book with that title, who do you imagine will pick it up and what do you hope readers will take away from it?

All I can hope is that readers will take away from the book the pleasure of having read a good story, by which I mean a story that will take them out of their worlds and make them think about mortality and other things in a new way. And in my dreams I imagine that George Clooney will pick this novel up.