Tag Archives: Adelaide

BEHIND THE BOOK: Valerie Volk and her search for Anna

Posted on by
Reply

In a new series on the Wakefield Press blog, we’ve asked authors to write about the background, inspiration, research and work that goes into writing a book.

This week, Valerie Volk writes about her search for her distant relative Anna Werner, who in 1889 left the German town of Lewin to search for her son in the distant colonies of Australia. This search culminated in Valerie’s novel, In Search of Anna, a story that Valerie describes as a journey book, historical fiction, a study of motherhood, a detective novel, and a romantic tale all rolled into one.

Continue reading →

BEHIND THE BOOK: Anne Black on George Isaacs

Posted on by
1

Anne Black, George Isaacs and Pendragon

In a new series on the Wakefield Press blog, we’ve asked authors to write about the background, inspiration, research and work that goes into writing a book.

This week features Anne Black, author of Pendragon: The life of George Isaacs, Colonial wordsmith. Anne writes about her first encounter with little-known literary icon George Isaacs, and the death certificate that sparked an obsession and a biography.

Continue reading →

GUEST POST: Ed Pegge on star power

Posted on by
Reply

Ed Pegge on Star Power

Hilarious, charming and self-effacing, meet Edmund Pegge, one of Australia’s most prolific supporting actors.

Travelling between England and Australia and working on stage, in film and on television for over fifty years, Ed Pegge knows all the tricks and all the trials of a working actor’s life.

In this guest post, Ed writes about the nuances of fame, and the benefits of taking a brief rest every now and again from being a star.

Continue reading →

How to Work from Home: Annette Marner’s tips

Posted on by
Reply

How to Work from Home

Welcome to the week, and to a new blog series here at Wakefield Press! Introducing How to Work From Home: Authors talk about how they stay productive.

Like many others, we’ve recently begun the transition from office work to working from home. It’s a strange transition to make, and we need some help. We’ve interviewed a collection of our favourite authors to get their best tips, tricks and truths about working from home.

Annette MarnerNext in the series is Annette Marner, is an award-winning poet, novelist, fine art nature photographer and ABC radio broadcaster from South Australia’s Southern Flinders Ranges. In 2018, she won the Arts South Australia Wakefield Press Unpublished Manuscript Award at the Adelaide Festival Awards for Literature for A New Name for the Colour Blue. Her first book, Women with Their Faces on Fire, won the Unpublished Manuscript Award for Poetry for Friendly Street/Wakefield Press and was on the reading list at Flinders University.

Annette is also an established fine art nature photographer, and has had her work featured in group and solo exhibitions, as well as having her images published internationally.

Continue reading →

Stephen Orr on growing up in suburban Adelaide

Posted on by
2

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The #tenyearchallenge has been dominating social media for the past few weeks, but today author Stephen Orr looks even further back in this 2006 article about his childhood in the suburbs of 1970s Adelaide.

Keep an eye out for Stephen’s next novel, This Excellent Machine, which will be released in April 2019.

 

Smith Street

I want to tell you about the street I grew up in. We’ll call it Smith Street, although some of you will work out where it really is.

Smith Street was asbestos homes on stumps. One family (I’ll call them the Hanrahans) had a brick home, and they were the envy of the neighbourhood. Mr Hanrahan was a policeman and often brought his work home (unless that was someone else’s paddy wagon parked in his driveway). That was the most exciting thing in Smith Street. Everyone else’s parents worked at Woolies or drove taxi trucks. The milkie left two bottles, scummy with cream, and the baker always pulled up in front of our house (something to do with finger buns).

Mrs Jolley lived next door with a dozen cats and her middle-aged son, a doctor who’d retired early and gone on to grow a Catweazle beard, spending his days writing poetry and slashing waist-high grass with a scythe. Mrs Jolley would often babysit me and my sister after school. With her yellow smoker’s fingers and teeth and a Scottish accent she was a marvel, serenading us with stories of the old country as she drank one cup of tea after another.

            The gardens of Smith Street were filled with diosmas and rampant mint, and overgrown with soursobs in winter. We had dirt footpaths, lined with cracks, carpeted with three-corner jacks. The local Ford dealership tested their cars up and down our street and the Kentucky Fried Chicken on North East Road filled our yards with the aroma of the Colonel’s luscious thighs. The smell came into our bedrooms and laundry, and even snuffed out the stench of laurel sulphate on the freshly waxed floors.

Further along Smith Street there was a basketball stadium. It had a barren car park of blue metal, gum trees and rubbish blown over from the main road. Opposite the stadium there was an old hall, hemmed in by wild oats and heliotrope. It was called Polish Hall, and as a little person I always thought this meant the floors would be extra shiny. Eventually I worked it out, looking for small people in peasant clothing whenever we went past. But it was always empty. It seemed hard to believe there were or ever had been any Poles (or Russians, or anything exotic) in Hillcrest. Sometimes the hall was used for dances on Saturday night – mostly DJs, but sometimes a band. I used to sit at my window and listen, watching the moon cast tree shadows across our freshly mowed Santa Ana.

Back in the seventies, Smith Street kids formed gangs and rode around on dragsters. But then we grew up and moved out, and our parents left, leaving those old homes to go to seed – weeds, always weeds (the only plants that flourished in that soil), homes cracking down the middle because they hadn’t been restumped, and brick cladding broken and falling off (and anyway, everyone knew it was only brick cladding – only the Hanrahans had the real thing).

            Smith Street finished at 78 (as did most of its inhabitants). Then there were just empty paddocks – Elysium fields full of Paterson’s Curse – where kids fought on the ‘mound’ after school. That always had a good turnout. And further still, Housing Trust ‘half-houses’, and our primary school, distributing free milk to every student, five cent cups of soup for winter lunch and the promise that we’d all grow up to drive Kingswoods.

And that was, or is, Smith Street. The only street to fill the only childhood I’ll ever have, for better or worse, weedier or landscaped, DJ or live. Beyond number 78 there’s nothing except the knowledge that the whole lot will soon be gone, the wreckers already beying (courtesy of a greedy government) for the hundred house plots where I learned to read and write. Homes knocked down and rebuilt – the smell of Sunday roasts and rosemary hedges, the sight of husbands coming home tanked at eleven pm, the stories of people who died of cancer or heart attacks, who were there one day and gone the next – all of this lost, our songline subsumed for units and Tuscan townhouses (their yards still heavy with eleven herbs and spices).

All gone – which isn’t as bad as it sounds. That’s the story of our city, and suburbs, and life. I think we’re all extras in a crowd scene from some film that never got great reviews. And one day, years later, we see the re-run on Gem. We watch it and say, ‘There I am, there!’ We see our face for a second or two. Then we go back and watch it again, thinking, I thought I had a bigger part than that.

 

Stephen Orr was born in Adelaide in 1967 and grew up in Hillcrest. He studied teaching and spent his early career in a range of country and metropolitan schools. One of his early plays, Attempts to Draw Jesus, became his first Australian/Vogel shortlisted novel, published in 2002. Since then he has published seven novels, a volume of short tories (Datsunland) and two books of non-fiction (The Cruel City and The Fierce Country). He has won or been nominated for awards such as the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, the Miles Franklin Award and the International Dublin Literary Award.

Stephen Orr is married and lives in Adelaide.

 

 

Antarctic Ideas: Hot Reads for Cold Nights

Posted on by
Reply

A good book is, in many ways, like a good conversation. It engages with ideas in a way that leaves you energised, knowing more than you did when you began – but still thinking and questioning. Maybe that’s why we at Wakefield feel a special affinity with the Adelaide Festival of Ideas.

In the lead-up to the full festival program announcement in a few weeks, we’re remembering an event from this time last year that shone a spotlight on the home of the blizzard: Antarctica: Past, Present and Futures. Paleontologist John Long, writer Sean Williams and director of the Royal Society of South Australia, Paul Willis, each shared their experiences in Antarctica.

 

To discover more about Antarctica for yourself, why not burrow into one of our gripping true Antarctic stories? Preferably under a blanket or by the fire!

 

Home of the Blizzard

Sir Douglas Mawson

A classic tale of discovery and adventure by a bona fide Australian hero, this has been called ‘one of the greatest accounts of polar survival in history’ by Sir Ranulph Fiennes.

This is Mawson’s own account of his years spent in sub-zero temperatures and gale-force winds, of pioneering deeds, great courage, heart-stopping rescues and heroic endurance. At its heart is the epic journey of 1912-13, during which both his companions perished.

 

Shackleton’s Boat Journey

F.A. Worsley

This is the classic account of Sir Ernest Shackleton’s ill-fated Antarctic expedition of 1914-16, told by Frank Worsley, captain of the expedition ship, Endurance.

First trapped then crushed by ice, the Endurance drifted in an ice floe for five months before reaching the barren and inhospitable Elephant Island, leaving 22 men there while Shackleton, Worsley and four others made the 800-mile journey to get help.

Braving hurricane-force winds, fifty-foot waves and sub-zero temperatures, this is an extraordinary story of survival.

 

Body at the Melbourne Club

David Burke

This fascinating biography of the first Australian-born member of an Antarctic expedition gives a new perspective on one of the great polar expeditions.

As an expert horseman, Bertram Armytage was given charge of the ponies in Ernest Shackleton’s great 1907-1909 polar expedition, during which he narrowly escaped the jaws of killer whales. In London, he was decorated by royalty for his achievements. But then, aged just 41, back on home ground, he shot himself in his part-time residence of the Melbourne Club. This is his story.

 

South by Northwest: The Magnetic Crusade and the Contest for Antarctica

Granville Allen Mawer

The race for the South Magnetic Pole started in the fabled Northwest Passage, when rival French, American and British expeditions were sent to find it in 1840-41. At the turn of the century, it defeated their successors, Shackleton and Mawson. It wasn’t until 1986 that Australian scientists finally found it, after a marathon, multi-expedition hunt that collectively unveiled much of Greater Antarctica along the way.

Books available at www.wakefieldpress.com.au and from good bookshops everywhere.

 

The launch of SURROGATE by Tracy Crisp

Posted on by
2

 

Last week we launched Tracy Crisp’s new book Surrogate to a very full house at Imprints Booksellers. After an excellent speech by ABC Adelaide’s Deb Tribe, here is what Tracy had to say.

 

 

Thank you, Deb. For being so open to the invitation and so generous with your time to prepare for tonight and to be here this evening. And thank you for giving Surrogate such a great send-off into the world. It’s extremely nerve wracking, and I really appreciate what you’ve done to wish it bon voyage.

Thank you to Imprints, and especially Jason who has been very patient with all my Hi Jason, just double-checking emails. I remember the first time I walked into Imprints … it was down the road, and I’d just moved to Adelaide to go to uni. I was entirely overwhelmed that year, feeling completely out of place, but when I walked inside, I knew that I wanted to be part of this world. I bought the Complete Shakespeare Sonnets – because that’s how clever I was – and every year since I’ve made a new year’s resolution to learn them all by heart. 2018 will be my year.

Thank you to everyone at Wakefield Press and especially to Michael who has twice now taken a punt on my work. Wakefield is truly South Australian, making sure that local stories have a place to be told.

In coming back to Adelaide, I have experienced for the first time since I moved out of my home in Port Pirie the true joy of knowing what it means to feel grounded, to belong, to be at home. Being published by Wakefield has given my return home an extra potency.

Julia was a very caring editor. Liz designed the perfect cover. Ayesha and Maddy have answered endless emails – Hi, just double-checking – and Jonny is making sure my books can fly out of the nest and find a new home.

I don’t want to talk too much about the tortuous process of writing this, but at a time when I was completely overwhelmed with doubt Virginia Lloyd and Jacqui Lofthouse each did a brilliant job in very different ways of helping me see the way through to the end. When I did get to the end, Penelope Goodes in Melbourne and Melissa King who lives in Adelaide and I’m really pleased was able to come tonight, picked it up and did a wonderful job of saving me from embarrassing errors.

Thank you to Adrian. Those of you who know him, know that he is a good man in all of the many senses that we understand that. He not only loves me, and he not only respects my work as a writer, but he values it. He values it not only because it is good for me, but also its place in our relationship. This is not to be taken for granted in a partner. Although I’m not sure he values the production of tea towels taking over the house and the subsequent spread of inky cat prints across all our floors. As I was finishing off the printing for last week’s market, I said to him, ‘Do you think I’m ridiculous?’ And he didn’t say, ‘Yes.’ Though thinking about it now, I also realise he didn’t say, ‘No.’

Thank you to Leo and Felix. My beautiful grandfather used to like saying, ‘Leo and Felix. You had two cats.’ But they’re heaps better than cats. Their inky paw marks are bigger, but so is their love and it is more consistent too.

Before I thank you for coming, I want to give a shout out to Adrian’s parents who can’t be here. Adrian’s mum has done such a wonderful job of negotiating the complexities of the mother-in-law, daughter-in-law relationship and I am very grateful to have her as one of my greatest friends. Thank you to the many members of my family who came tonight, aunties, uncles, cousins, brother, my sisters-in-law. And thank you to mum and dad’s friends.

It is of course the deepest of sadness that Mum and Dad aren’t here. Mum never knew that I was going to publish anything. Which is a pity because she was the first and the best storyteller I will ever know and she really had a way with words.

From the nuns at Henley Beach who, she insisted, were constantly trying to steal her dog, to the day we drove into Port Pirie and she pointed at the stack and said to us, ‘Do you see that? Do you know what that is? That’s the largest lead smelter in the world, and do you know what that means, that means if there’s ever a war, we’ll be the first to be bombed’; to the time that in her capacity as the Mayor’s wife she stood next to Port Pirie’s archbishop as the debs were presented and said to him, ‘You know you’re the only man in the town can get away with wearing hot pink, don’t you?’

I didn’t ever let Dad read the final draft of my first novel. I was nervous about what he would think, afraid that I wouldn’t live up to his expectations. Not because he was especially demanding, but because he had such faith, such confidence in what I would do, and I hated the thought that I had let him down. By the time I felt like I could show it to him, he was far too tired and although I had signed the contract before he died, he never did get to see the finished product. This mistake has haunted me for a long time. But from it I hope that I have learnt to be more open and more trusting, not only in the people around me but in myself.

And finally, I want to say thank you to you.

The biggest challenge that I face when I’m writing is staring down my demons. There’s the obvious, angsty ones. I’m not good enough, what have I got to say that hasn’t already been said, I’m fifty years old I’ve got six thousand dollars in super I should probably get a real job, oh, I’ve got a great idea, I’ll screen print tea towels … and then I will give them away, because I’m too embarrassed to ask for money … but there are also far deeper and much darker demons than those.

It’s a cliché of writing classes to be told, ‘write what you know.’ Okay. So, clichés ahoy, my first novel is set in a town nestled in the shadow of a lead smelte – although spoiler alert, war is never declared – but writing, creating anything, is a way of making sense of the world, of making sense of what it means to be human. So, writing what you know means that wherever you start, you always end up processing the most difficult of emotions. The losses, the pain, the anger, the mistakes. I remember when Leo was quite young and he was asking about the events of my work so far and when we got to the end, he said, ‘Have you ever thought about, instead of all the death, you have a brush with death?

But of course, we only know what it is to feel loss and pain because we know celebration and joy. Because we know friendship and we know love. So, when I say thank you for coming, thank you for helping me to celebrate, I mean it most sincerely.

Thank you for coming to the launch of my new novel, Surrogate. Thank you for reading it, and thank you in advance for sending me nice notes to tell me how much you loved it. Thank you for telling me a little white fib if you never get around to reading it, and thank you for flat out lying if you do read it but you don’t really like it.

The Wakefield Press Reader’s Guide to Open State

Posted on by
Reply

Open State festival has a packed program which kicks off on Thursday 28 September and runs through to Sunday 8 October. Publisher Michael Bollen brings you the Wakefield Press Reader’s Guide to Open State.

My, my. It’s an eye-opener and source of pride, browsing the Open State program, reminding us how books and reading interweave past, present and future. Picking through the goodies on offer, the mind thinks inevitably, Hmm, could be a book in that. And thinks too: Now, which of our existing books best fits that theme?

One session, Blast From the Past, is about getting our stories on screen. We have a host of possibles. Maybe a soapie set in Adelaide’s first gaol, feeding off Rhonnda Harris’s Ashton’s Hotel with its cast of intriguing characters. Or tales from underground, using Carol Lefevre’s beautiful book of true stories, Quiet City: Walking in West Terrace Cemetery.

Then again, perhaps Simon Butters’s YA novel, The Hounded, about alienation in Adelaide’s hinterland, is the best screen fit. Though it works also with the question that obsesses our town – Adelaide is one of the world’s most liveable cities: fact or fiction?

You can take a stroll to decide in the Future Adelaide Walking Tour. Have a browse along the way in Lance Campbell’s and Mick Bradley’s deluxe book, City Streets, which showcases the CBD in 1936 and 2011. Whither now?

Dickson Platten have helped shape the Adelaide landscape through people-centric place-making since the 1960s, and you can celebrate that 50 years of achievement at the opening of their exhibition, On Show. We have books from both Dickson and Platten: Addicted to Architecture, Hybrid Beauty and the lovely Lure of the Japanese Garden.

From one design icon to another: the beloved Jam Factory present Drink. Dine. Design. featuring finely crafted objects, ideas and applications that enhance the joy of eating and drinking. Learn more about the Jam Factory in its fortieth-anniversary book, Designing Craft / Crafting Design.

Nick Jose has written both fiction (Avenue of Eternal Peace) and non-fiction (Chinese Whispers) about China, so its no surprise to see him as one of the co-curators of Writing China, a day-long series of transcultural, transmedia events. Brian Castro is a prominent participant, likely mentioning his novel On China (and why not also add Drift and Double-Wolf to your bedside reading pile). 

Among the many events that make up Writing China is Reimagining: Panel and Readings. This panel considers how fiction can take the world you know – your city – and make it new. A full-on accompaniment might be Stephen Orr and his latest book of short stories, Datsunland. In the words of Kerryn Goldsworthy in the Sydney Morning Herald, ‘[Orr’s] work continues to have a prominent place in the literary mapping and recording of South Australia and Adelaide’.

For the last weekend of the festival, we’ll be selling our wares at the annual State History Conference. This year’s beguiling theme is Hearts and Minds: revaluing the past. There’s much of that in our new Colonialism and its Aftermath – the first comprehensive history of Aboriginal South Australia since Native Title.

We at Wakefield look forward to seeing you round this Open State as we venture from our normal habitat: gladly chained to the wheel, churning out South Australia’s tales to the world.

A great big book about a great small city

Posted on by
Reply

Last Thursday marked the celebration and re-launch of City Streets, a chronicled answer to the past 75 years of Adelaide’s architecture. As author Lance Campbell says, it’s a great big book about a great small city.

We were hosted at the beautiful Living Choice Fullarton and joined by many of our Wakefield Press authors and friends, including the event’s emcee, Keith Conlon. And to top it all off, we had some fantastic Coriole sparkling!

The new edition includes a foreword and by the SA Premier, Jay Weatherill – here we present some highlights of the Premier’s kind words and insights from his launch address.

 

This is not merely a beautiful book. In its detail and its scale, it’s also an invaluable record of the growth and evolution of our city’s “square mile”.

City Streets is the work of two gifted people. The photographs, by the late Mick Bradley, are superb – precise and expansive, capturing Adelaide’s special quality of light. Though they’re ostensibly of buildings, the images are rich with people and movement and energy – just like those taken by Baring back in the 1930s. As for the writing, who better to sneak behind the facades and tell the stories of our town than Lance Campbell. Lance is an outstanding reporter and writer. Whether the topic is sport or the arts or, from time to time, politics, his prose is elegant and insightful – revealing and describing things many of us would otherwise not have noticed

As I suggest in the foreword to the new edition, City Streets is likely to generate mixed feelings in some readers. More than most comparable cities, Adelaide has managed to retain a large number of attractive buildings from the 19th and early 20th centuries. But – along the way – we’ve probably allowed some special ones to slip through our fingers.

One of those was the gracious Grand Central Hotel – which later housed Foy’s department store – and used to sit on what we now call “Hungry Jack’s corner”. For some reason, it was decided to demolish that lovely pile in 1976. To paraphrase Joni Mitchell, we pulled down “paradise” and put up a parking lot!

As I’ve said publicly before, I think we should see cities as – first and foremost – communities, rather than just collections of buildings and houses and roads. In line with the fact, one of the prevailing and very welcome things about our current city centre that can’t be fully captured in words or pictures is its vibrancy.

The tale of this city will go on and on. And the buildings we love today and are part of our collective consciousness will – in time – go the way of the old ones featured in City Streets. I hope and suspect that, one day, others will follow in the footsteps of Mick Bradley and Lance Campbell. And the Adelaideans of, say, the 2080s or 2090s will reminisce about – who knows? – the Adelaide Convention Centre or the Federal Courts building in Victoria Square. For now, however, we have this new edition of City Streets – and we’re very happy and appreciative, indeed.

On behalf of the State Government, I commend Wakefield Press for its initiative, for continuing to tell great stories and – through this book – for helping to chart the history of our built environment.

 

Photographs by Brad Griffin.

 

Learn more about City Streets .