The Abbotsford Convent, for those unfamiliar with it, is an incredibly beautiful and atmospheric location. It had plenty of venues for the sessions and lots of open spaces for attendees to lounge around in between sessions. Large enough to accommodate bucketloads of people, but cohesive enough to foster a sense of community, it’s an ideal location for a writers festival. I loved spending the day there, and I think everyone else felt the same.
My volunteer shift was short and painless. Actually, it was frighteningly enjoyable. Even though historical fiction is not my usual literary fare, I was entertained by Jenny Pattrick, Claire Thomas and Anthony Neill’s discussion entitled Plundering the Past. The way Thomas described the evolution of a single fact — the crushed form of lapis lazuli was used in Renaissance-era Venice to create ultramarine pigment — into her novel, Fugitive Blue, put me in mind of a bloodhound’s singular focus. Her delight in the ‘perverse integrity’ of deliberate, minute research was palpable in her and the other authors’ stories. I was beginning to see how easy it would be to get sucked into chasing history around.
Jenny Pattrick’s first book, The Denniston Rose, was published when Pattrick was 60. No mean feat. It’s now a bestseller with sequels, etc, etc. The origins of her novel were quite similar to those of Thomas’, and she described the ‘accidental’ stumbling on something that fascinated her. In her case, it was a deserted coal mining town upon a plateau on the west coast of New Zealand. For Pattrick, research came first before narrative and characters could develop. That makes sense to me. I don’t think I would want to begin fantasising about potential plot points only to be cut off by cold hard facts. (Not that it stops some people. I won’t offer any examples but I’m sure we’re all thinking of the same person.)
Anthony O’Neill is a fingers-in-lots-of-historical-pies guy, who has written books set in Edinburgh in the 1860s and 9th century Baghdad, just for starters. A self-proclaimed neurotic researcher who worrited and worrited about a reader finding a flaw, O’Neill’s chat reminded me of a story Ian McEwan once told about his novel Saturday, in which he describes characters looking up at a particular constellation at a particular geographical location at a particular time of year. Well, he received a letter from a reader telling him that it was impossible for that event to have happened. Tell that one to the people at the New Yorker, McEwan.
I was stoked to be able to attend the Peter Singer on Poverty session. His new book, The Life You Can Save: Acting Now to End World Poverty is an exhortatory text that frames global poverty as a problem which can be tackled effectively through individual action. This conclusion arises from the simple premise that there is a lot of suffering in the world which doesn’t have to exist. Singer used a parable of sorts to illustrate the circumstances of generosity as the usually stand: Imagine a baby drowning in a pond. You are wearing expensive new shoes. Do you rescue the baby and forego the cost of the shoes? If so, why is visibility/immediacy so influential on our willingness to make monetary sacrifices? The talk is available to see at SlowTV.
After Peter Singer, I was off the hook volunteer-wise, so I took myself off to the Convent Bakery for a complimentary (but roof-of-the-mouth-chafing) salami and pesto baguette and pineapple juice. Mmm. Next!
Charmaine O’Brien is a name I’m familiar with, as a bit of a food tragic in food-tragic Melbourne. In her Culinary Capital session, I discovered that she is also in charge of the Red Cross’ commercial food donation distribution so I suspect she has been very busy. Her new book, Flavours of Melbourne, is a food-centric book discussing Melbourne and its changing citizens, from Melbourne’s first brewer John Mills, possibly responsible for the death of 16 people (he used water from the Yarra River, which was both the main source of water for the city but also the resting place for sewage), to African migrants bringing cuisine from that continent. Loved hearing about the “Fat for England” campaign run in Australia, in which Australians were encouraged to save the fat from their meals, convey it to depots in town from where it was aggregated and sent to England. That was probably responsible for some bad stomachs too. Lovely session, though I always feel talking about food should be accompanied by the consumption of food.
Finally, and I was admittedly nodding off in the heat by this stage, Stephan Faris’ Foreign Correspondent session at 4pm. Some technical problems and Faris’ propensity for facing away from the microphone made it a little difficult to follow. But reading Eric Campbell’s Absurdistan in 2007 and Ryszard Kapuscinski’s In the Shadow of the Sun this summer made me fascinated with the chanceful profession of the foreign correspondent. He told of receiving bribes from government officials after Ministry of Information press meetings about journalistic standards in Nigeria, reporting on the depopulation of Sudan in 2003 and the lack of support by traditional healers for antiretrovirals in Uganda. I liked his observation that he is always struck by the similarities between different countries, but that it is part of his job to draw out the differences. Faris also featured in a session about global warming.
And that’s it! Oh, and I bought a copy of Geoffrey Miller’s The Mating Mind at the Reader’s Feast festival bookshop, because I love evolutionary psychology books. I didn’t attend anything on Sunday, because my schedule took me to Barwon Heads, which was wonderful. But where was Diver Dan?
