Another extract from Quiet City

With the upcoming launch of Quiet City by Carol Lefevre on Sunday at West Terrace Cemetery, we couldn’t resist sharing another extract. This one comes from the chapter “Darkness in Daylight” and the illustration is by Anthony Nocera.  


But there is, too, a long and more troubling list of activities that eventually became the focus of a government investigation. They involved the appropriation of bodies for dissection, especially from public institutions such as the gaol, the lunatic and destitute asylums, and even the Adelaide Hospital. As so often happens in life, a major event was sparked by an apparently minor one – the sudden death of a hapless fellow on a winter morning in 1903.
At Ovingham railway station north-east of Adelaide the man scribbled a few lines on a scrap of paper, then drew a revolver from his pocket, put it to his head and pulled the trigger. The note read: Cannot get work; no food or shelter. Better give up the struggle than starve. The body was removed to the city morgue, the Dead House at West Terrace Cemetery. A jury was sworn in over the remains and the coroner, Dr William Ramsay Smith, conducted an inquest. A pawnbroker with whom the deceased had dealt with in the days preceding his suicide identified the body as that of Eugene Green. To a non-medical person, what happened next is sickening, but I feel I owe it to Eugene Green, and to others who suffered a similar fate, to relate the awful details.

Anthony Nocera

 

 

 

More from Quiet City

Carol Lefevre will be launching Quiet City at the West Terrace Cemetery this Sunday May 15. To celebrate, here is another extract with an illustration by Anthony Nocera. This extract comes from the chapter “In Deep Water”.


The names of people who drowned in the River Torrens would fill a book. Many of them were children, and although few could swim they found their way towards the water. On a Sunday afternoon in November, Henry Charles Etheridge, aged nine, and his brother Edward, seven, left their home on the Parade at Norwood and went to the river near Hackney Bridge.  Neither boy could swim. The younger boy entered the water and at once sank to the bottom. His brother jumped in to save him, and he, too, disappeared.
Some small boys who were on the riverbank noticed what had happened and raised the alarm. Three lads of about eighteen rushed to assist – Charles Veitch, Clem Hill, and Herbert Leslie. They stripped off and leapt into the water, and after several dives the body of the older boy was found, soon followed by that of his brother. Charles Veitch brought them both to the surface; they had been in the water for twenty minutes. Three medical students came upon the scene, along with Dr Brummitt. Resuscitation was attempted for almost an hour, without success. The boys were the sons of Henry (Harry) Joseph Etheridge, a bootmaker, and his wife Mary Frances (Minnie).
Money to fund a headstone was collected by a Mr Blunt, and in February 1903 it was unveiled by the mayor of Norwood. The monument of white marble stood seven-and-a-half feet high and was surmounted by a cross; the grave was enclosed by an iron fence. At the unveiling ceremony much was made of the older boy’s heroism in sacrificing his life to try and save his brother. It was good to die for another, the mayor said, but he hoped everyone would remember that it was good to live for each other, hence the sympathy and goodwill evident in the memorial designed by Mr Blunt.

Anthony Nocera

An Extract from Quiet City

The following extract is taken from “Unhappy Women” in Quiet City by Carol Lefevre. Quiet City explores the extraordinary and unusual lives of the people now resting beneath the tombstones of West Terrace Cemetery. The illustration accompanying this extract is by Anthony Nocera. The launch will be taking place at West Terrace Cemetery on May 15 at 2pm. Carol will be leading a tour of the cemetery and taking us to some of her favourite grave sites.


Unhappy Women

Of all the unhappy women in West Terrace Cemetery, Winnie Goater stands out. At twenty-one she was already the mother of a three-year-old child and by September of 1906 she was, secretly, ‘in a certain condition’. At 2.30 on a Sunday afternoon, Winnie told her mother she was going out for a ‘walk with Will’ on the Unley Road and would be home in time for tea, and slipped out the front door of their house at 254 King William Street. It was the last time Mary Ann Goater would see her daughter alive.
At the beginning of September, Mary Ann had noticed that Winnie appeared pale and unwell and she had quizzed her about her relationship with the man she had been keeping company with for the past nine months: he was known to her as Will Cameron. Winnie had told  her mother that there was no need to worry, that she was quite all right, but Mary Ann remained suspicious.
When Winnie did not return, her mother reported her missing. Mrs Goater had spoken to Will once when he called while Winnie was out, and asked him whether he had employment. Cameron had told her he was working for the government, fixing warning bells on the railways, so in the wake of her daughter’s disappearance Mrs Goater enquired after him at all the government offices. Eventually she tracked him to a house in Pirie Street, and when he opened the door, according to Cameron, she ‘started up at a terrible rate’, demanding to know whether Winnie was inside and accusing him of having ruined her daughter. Will Cameron was adamant that Winnie was not there and that he had not seen her since 13 September, when he took her to the Show.
‘But I’ll help you look for her,’ he said, ‘because she’s a nice little thing.’
William Cameron boxed clever, but Mrs Goater was having none of it. Somehow she forced him to accompany her to the’Detective Office’, where she insisted he account for his movements on the day of her daughter’s disappearance. Once there, Cameron suddenly denied that he had even accompanied Winnie to the Show. A furious Mrs Goater accused him of lying, and ‘ran him down to the lowest’. She would never give up the search, she said, until she found her daughter, dead or alive.
How those words must have rung later in Mrs Goater’s ears, for by then her daughter was dead, and had been buried at West Terrace Cemetery under the name of Mary Elliot.

Anthony Nocera

 

Invisible Mending launch

On April 17 we were excited to host the launch of Mike Ladd’s new collection Invisible Mending right here at Wakefield Press.

Rachael Mead had the honour of launching Mike’s book. We recently hosted an exhibition of Rachael’s photography alongside the launch of Cassie Flanagan Willanski’s Here Where We Live, and it was a pleasure to have her back.

If you weren’t able to make it to the launch, don’t worry we’ve got you covered. You can read Rachael’s speech below!


Hello and thank you all so much for coming. It is my great pleasure and honour today to be launching the latest book by one Australia’s most loved and lauded writers – Mike Ladd.
I’ve just used the label “writer” and while we are here to celebrate the launch of Mike’s ninth book, to call Mike a writer is to try to squeeze him into a box that doesn’t properly contain him. Don’t get me wrong, Mike is one of Australia’s most esteemed poets and you can find his work in just about every anthology of Australian poetry in existence. Mike started his career as a poet at seventeen and by 25 he published his first collection The Crack in the Crib.
Just as he was launching his literary career, he started work for the ABC in Adelaide as a sound engineer and by 1997 he’d worked his way up to creating and producing his own Radio National program, Poetica which ran for 18 years until 2015, when it was taken off the air much to the outrage of Australia’s literary community. Mike’s current role with Radio National is in the features and documentary unit but once again the box of documentarian doesn’t contain him either.

In the 80s Mike was a musician in the new wave band The Lounge and he frequently collaborates with musicians and artists, writing poetry for the screen and live performance with groups such as The Drum Poets, newaural net, and Max Mo. He writes, films and edits video poetry and I would recommend finding Zoo After Dark, and The Eye of the Day on YouTube.

Rachael Mead and Mike Ladd
Most recently he and his partner the wonderful visual and installation artist Cathy Brooks have been running projects that put poems on street signs as public art and you can see their work in the Adelaide Bus Station and Tram Stop 6 on the line to Glenelg.

Now the reason I’ve gone on about Mike’s rich and varied creative career is that the book we are here for today, Invisible Mending, draws the many threads of his past work together. Invisible Mending is more than a poetry collection; it contains essays, creative non-fiction, personal vignettes and photographs. While on the surface this seems incredibly diverse it is a remarkably coherent mediation on themes of human impact on the natural world and how to mend the rents that grief, loss and change tear in our lives.

The book weaves together poetry and prose pieces, picking up and elaborating on themes that Mike has explored in past work; displacement and marginalization from Picture’s Edge, family and suburbia from Close to Home, and politics and social injustice in Rooms and Sequences. However, the themes of his most recent works clearly still preoccupy him. Transit explored the compounding effect of momentous life events in the construction of identity and healing after loss is a thread that weaves its way through Invisible Mending. Mike also continues to draw on his deep cultural and ecological understanding of Adelaide that was so beautifully expressed in Karrawirra Parri. Environmental devastation, particularly human impact on our natural world is another of Mike’s ongoing preoccupations. With these themes in mind we can see his choice of title is perfect. It is taken from a line in the final piece, “A Country Wedding”, where Mike notices the landscape healing itself after the devastation wrought by flood. This book is an intensely personal account healing after wreckage – both ecological and emotional.

To me, one of the most significant aspects of this book is that all these pieces are non-fiction. Mike is a documentarian and this book showcases his skill at observing subjects from different angles and digging at the surface until what lies beneath is revealed. The piece that best illustrates this is “Traffik” – a story set in Malaysia and Japan that resembles short fiction but is in fact drawn from real events. Mike produced this work of creative non-fiction from television and newspaper reports while he and Cath were in Malaysia and faced with the unavoidable evidence of deforestation and species loss as a result of the palm oil industry. But even so, the documentarian sees that not everything is black and white. At the heart of this piece is the understanding that emotional bonds can exist between species, and that as humans we do things, often inexcusable things for love and connection. While the ends don’t justify the means, those ends can be understandable, even beautiful. It is not easy, being human. Mike as documentarian observes and reports but does so with empathy and it is his ability to interweave reportage with compassion that makes this book both compelling and insightful.

Guests at the launch

I’d like to read you one of my favourite poems from the book now – “Travelling the Golden Highway, thinking of global warming”.

I read this to you not only an example of Mike’s brilliance as a poet, showing his mastery of minimalist style and his potent combination of natural and industrial imagery to powerful political effect. But to me this poem demonstrates how Mike, with so few words can embed us in an experience with him. We are there, both crammed into the backseat and crammed inside his head in that moment, thinking about the landscape and climate change. Again, Mike the documentarian is working with Mike the poet to translate his sensory experience of the world into such effective imagery that the reader is given an almost visceral understanding of being Mike Ladd at that point in time. It is this ability to transport us that also makes him a brilliant radio documentarian – in a world where sight is the prime sense he delivers stories that engage the mind by stimulating the minor senses, giving us access to experiences and situations that inspire and fascinate us, allow us to perceive the world differently, peel back layers and feel our way to understanding what lies behind the things we see.

There is so much to say and this book is so diverse yet so coherent I’m really struggling to make this concise so I’m just going to pick out one more thread from this book – a thread that runs through the whole collection – that of grief over the rents and losses that accrue throughout life and the ongoing work of mending to make oneself whole again. While the book moves geographically from Adelaide across Australian highways to the east coast then on to Malaysia, Sydney, South America, Spain and back to Australia the themes of family and loss travel with us – reinforcing that the things make us and break us in life are inescapable – love and grief.

Mike introduces us to his father and the heartbreaking progress of his dementia in the book’s first section, which is grounded in Adelaide and family. We are in Malaysia with Mike as he is researching the Malaysian roots of the pantun form when he hears of the death of his father. Like the Malaysian journey, the essay on the pantun veers into the personal as grief overwhelms all else. “The Book of Hours at Rimbun Dahan” is one of the most moving pieces on grief I have read. Please read it. Then look up the award-winning video poem Eye of the Day on YouTube. It is a gorgeous combination of a selection of tunggal pantun, sound and film and an immersive illustration of the experience grief, regret and distance.

I’m going to read for you now Winter Light.

Book Launch Guests
This book illuminates a writer’s commitment to the mending of grief, the work to close distances that gradually widen in families, the reclamation of lost histories, and the healing of land after centuries of abuse. We look at Mike and see the laid-back, generous, thoughtful man we think we know. But like all of us, this is just the coherent skin we show the world. Turn us inside out and you see all the darning, all the messy stitching holding us all together. And, to me, that’s what this book represents – these poems and stories, insights and observations – these words are all the stitches that hold Mike together. Turn him right side out and it’s Invisible Mending.

Congratulations Mike. It is truly brilliant work and I am honoured to declare Invisible Mending officially launched!

Rachael Mead

Dining Alone: Stories from the table for one


What involves Press* Food & Wine, Penny’s Hill Vineyard, the incredible Barbara Santich and a bunch of new and exciting stories?

The launch of Dining Alone next week, that’s what! Come along and get your weekend started early with a glass of good wine and a book with bundles of talent.

Dining Alone launch invitation