Work on Murray 7 continues apace (a Samoan word meaning 'like a lobster climbing a palm tree'.
Along with the scribbling, I've been engaged in some off-base activity over recent weeks.
First up, I spent a couple of weeks in Darwin and vicinity. The NT Writers' Centre invited me to do a workshop and a reading on the weekend preceeding the "Eye of the Storm' festival in Alice Springs. I needed a bit of peace and quiet to nail down a couple of chapters , so I took the opportunity to hunker down in a 'donga' (a kind of demountable house much favoured up north) in Mandorah, across the harbour from Darwin proper. I spent my days writing and my evenings picking frogs out of the electric frypan.
The venue for the reading was a bar called Bojangles. The emcee was a Tiwi drag queen. Darwin style had me flummoxed for a moment until Leon Compton from ABC local radio came to my rescue and turned it into an entertaining onstage interview.
The Alice Springs festival was small but perfectly formed. Most of the events took place at the Olive Pink Garden - a name to conjure with, if ever there was one. The program included a preview screening of 'Sampson and Delilah'. The movie packs a real wallop and it was even more wallopsome to see it in the place where it was shot.
Warren Snowden is the local member (his electorate, Langiari, reaches from the Queensland border to the Cocos Islands) and I met some of his staff while having a drink at the RSL with ornthographer and Crickey.com blogger Bob Gosford and Andrew McMillan (An Intruders Guide to East Arnhem Land). They gave me an interesting lesson in Northern Territory Labor lore, a hitherto vast blank on my mental map. Among other things, I learned the reason for the long weekend on which the festival was being held - May Day is a public holiday in the Northern Territory ! This fact had escaped me in part because in Alice Springs, where the pastoralists historically held sway, it is known as Race Day (as in horses).
After the festival, I had a brief rush of Hemingway to the head and spent four days in the West McDonnell Ranges, hiking and sleeping in dry riverbeds with Jennifer Byrne and Linda Jaivin. Perhaps I should rephrase that. An account of our adventures appears online in the Australian edition of The Spectator. You can find it here