Meanjin Vol 71, No 4

By Meanjin Quarterly

In December we have writing from Guy Rundle, Lorin Clarke, David Mence, Margo Lanagan, Kevin Brophy and many more.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Melbourne University Publishing Ltd
• Release date: Dec 3, 2012
• ISBN: 9780522862065

Book preview

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Contents

No. 4, 2012

Editorial by Sally Heath

Perspectives

Game over for Space Junk? by Nicolas Paulin

International Writing Program, Iowa City by Josephine Rowe

Cooking for Edward Albee by David Mence

Leaving by Michelle Law

Meanjin Papers 

Beg by Suzy Freeman-Greene

Essays

Debbie Mortimer and the Forensic Fight by Lorin Clarke

Twitter>The Novel? @tejucole>Teju Cole? by Sam Twyford-Moore

Germaine Greer: A Portrait by Ben Quilty

Letter to Tom Collins by Anna Heyward

Share Houses by Lyndal Walker

Another Year, Another Engrossing Crop by Martin Langford

The Bartender and the Archive by Chad Parkhill

Fiction

Keilor Cranium by Wayne Macauley

Titty Anne and the Very, Very Hairy Man by Margo Lanagan

The Late Visit by Antonia Pont

The Googly by Kevin Brophy

Eat. Shit. Die. by Helen Gildfind

My Last Birthday by Mark Dapin

I should be so lucky by Sam Cooney

Memoir

In Search of García Márquez by Judith White

Dinosaurs of the Croatian Wild by Ronnie Scott

There is no hereafter by Paul Williams

Childhood among Strangers by Linda Judge

Poetry

Borroloola Blue by Phillip Hall

A World that Could Be Read; A Winter’s Tale by Diana Bridge

Translating a ‘Prolog’ by Jean Kent

The Great Poet’s Gene by Alan Gould

Farmstay by Sue Ogle

Larvatus Prodeo by Shane McCauley

Grace Notes by Ron Pretty

Plato by Jakob Ziguras

Second Chance by Marian Waller

An Overcast Day in Another Part of the World by Stuart Cooke

Report from Blue Mountains by David Brooks

Catching Fire; or, The Art of Sitting by Mark Tredinnick

Questions for the Dead by Ross Donlon

Contributors

Index

Information about subscriptions

Editorial

Sally Heath

That journalism ‘must shine a light into dark places’ is an overworked and unhelpful cliché. Sometimes the work of journalists does not produce a floodlit exposition of good or evil; instead, it often fixes on the more intellectually and morally intriguing questions found in the shadows.

At the Melbourne Writers Festival this year, the incomparable David Grann spoke of this often-overlooked aspect of the work of investigative writers. The award-winning New Yorker staff writer and author said whenever he begins a story he doesn’t know what he will find. Nothing is simple or uni-dimensional, even the ‘facts’ he uncovers are complex, nuanced and ‘theory laden’.

Exposing this deeper truth is the heart of his journalism. ‘Transparency is important. Readers must know where the information came from. And where there is doubt, the doubt must remain in the story.’ This, he said, ‘is more truthful reporting’.

It was timely to hear this from such a brilliant practitioner at a moment when the Meanjin Papers was struggling with the same issues in a piece you will find in this issue titled ‘Beg’.

Journalist Suzy Freeman-Greene spent twelve months observing, investigating and thinking about begging in one of Australia’s large capital cities. It forced her to observe herself and her city as much as it did her nominal subjects, the people asking for money. Her language changed when she spoke to beggars. She found she had no consistent reaction. Their sex, their supplicant signs, their personal stories influenced her response, as did the weather, what she was doing and the company she was in. Her uncertainty and inconsistency—her doubts—are a strength of her story.

As Freeman-Greene writes, her anxieties are not unique or particularly novel. But her year-long project did make her look anew at the people holding out a cap, cup or hand; they may be in desperate straits or shysters, but now, to her, they are no longer invisible. And despite the rational argument that poverty might best be tackled through other means, Freeman-Greene found that sometimes, in the more awkward shadows of hard reality, it is good to give a little.

This year’s Meanjin Dorothy Porter Poetry Award goes to ‘An Overcast Day in Another Part of the World’ by Stuart Cooke (Meanjin, no. 4, p. 165). Our thanks to judges Andrea Goldsmith and Kristin Henry. Please go to the Meanjin website to read the judges’ comments and a list of the three commended poets.

And the newly published Meanjin Anthology can be purchased in bookstores or via the MUP website, <www.meanjin.com.au>.

Perspectives

Game over for Space Junk?

Nicolas Paulin

In 1997 an Oklahoma woman famously reported being hit by a piece of falling space junk—that random collection of leftover parts from old spacecraft, satellites, rockets and missiles. She emerged unharmed, but the incident focused public attention on the dangers of what might lie beyond clear blue skies. While this particular variety of pollution might be invisible to the naked eye, thousands of tonnes of junk (known technically as space debris or orbital debris) now bob around above our heads. All of it is destined to fall back into the Earth’s atmosphere. While some of the larger components fall into the sea or onto land, the vast majority of debris will burn up harmlessly in the atmosphere and disintegrate, meaning that the likelihood of space junk ever causing bodily harm to human beings remains remote. ¹ But for the space industry the risk of collision between space junk and useful objects is all too real, threatening the satellite technologies on which we depend and endangering space missions. When even a small particle of junk hits a working spacecraft, it can cause extensive damage and even compromise an entire mission. The problem is fast turning into a crisis. ²

Over the past half-century of space exploration, scientists have imagined a number of solutions to clean up the mess—from giant nets to space sticky tape and purpose-built garbage collection vessels. None is operational today, due in large part to doubts about effectiveness and value for money. But in 2011 a consortium of scientists and engineers based at Mount Stromlo Observatory in Canberra embarked on a game-changer using new high-power laser and optics technology. If successful, the work would improve the accuracy of space debris tracking and clean up the most harmful layers of space debris within a decade.

Laser removal of space litter is not a new idea, but transforming theory into a marketable technology is a significant challenge for the space industry. In the 1990s US scientists developed the first theories for removal of space debris using ground-based lasers. However, the US project lacked the key technological advances required in lasers, telescopes, electronics and adaptive optics (a key technology used to overcome the effects of atmospheric air turbulence on laser beams and thus improve their focus on a particular target).

Today that technology is ready. Building on its experience with large-scale international projects including the Giant Magellan Telescope, the Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics (RSAA) at the Australian National University has established a specialty in adaptive optics and has been busy attracting key international specialists in the process. In early 2011 the RSAA teamed with a commercial telescope and satellite tracking company, Electro Optic Systems (EOS), which was keen to develop a commercially viable and cost-effective industrial prototype for tracking and removing space debris. Using this new-generation technology, the consortium is building an instrument that will locate space junk with a high level of accuracy. The second phase of development will test whether high-power lasers are capable of nudging debris out of its orbit and back into the Earth’s atmosphere to combust.

A test model is now in construction at the Mount Stromlo Observatory, housed in one of EOS’s large telescopes. Operational testing on real space junk is expected to begin by the end of 2013. If the tests are successful, Australia could become the first country to develop a commercially viable system for space junk removal.

It is no coincidence that the project targets space junk removal at low Earth orbit (LEO) and where the most harmful mass of space junk is concentrated. Five decades of space exploration and an unfortunate series of missile tests and space accidents in recent years³ have created a chain reaction of collisions, creating an escalating number of components. The North American Defence Command, which maintains the oldest database of space debris, estimates that there are now 25,000 components of space junk more than 10 centimetres wide (the threshold for tracking). Of these, it is able to track only 8000 components, leaving a high potential for unpredictable collision. For working spacecraft obliged to orbit in LEO—such as the International Space Station, Earth observation and communication satellites—damage from small-scale projectiles is a constant risk, while the possibility of collision with any debris more than 10 centimetres wide calls for full alert and a change of course.

So can Australia claim a world first in cleaning up the universe? Perhaps not yet, but watch this space …

Notes

1 When an old US satellite fell to Earth in 2011, NASA put the chances of it falling on a human at 1 in 3200, while a specific individual’s odds came out at 1 in 22 trillion. NASA estimates that one catalogued piece of space junk falls to Earth every day, mostly into the oceans or sparsely populated regions such as northern Canada, outback Australia or Siberia.

2 In 2010 President Barack Obama released the United States’ new national space policy, calling for better international cooperation on space junk tracking and removal. In addition to the need for more innovative technology, national security pressures and country-based ownership laws for space junk are among the biggest hurdles to space junk removal.

3 These events include a 2007 Chinese anti-satellite missile test, US destruction in 2008 of a defective spy satellite and a 2009 collision between a defunct Russian satellite and a working US satellite.

International Writing Program, Iowa City

Josephine Rowe

I arrive to languid late summer, the Hollywood promise of tall cornfields, weathered red barns. Harvest time. Within two hours of touching down I’m tramping jet-lagged around the woodlands of Redbird Farms with my fellow writers: a kind of get-to-know-you hike, which precedes the get-to-know-you dinners and the get-to-know-you parties. We introduce ourselves with full names and nationalities: Hi, I’m Bina Shah from Pakistan; I’m Hind Shoufani from Palestine.

I’m discussing various definitions of the word ‘tame’ with Moshe Sakal (from Israel) when I accidentally tread on a snake. It’s gone almost before I realise, and I take a baffled little breath as it disappears.

She didn’t even scream, says Moshe, as the others catch up. Well, she’s Australian, someone answers. The program’s director clinches it with a story about Gail Jones, who purportedly spent her childhood lifting snakes by their tails and whacking their heads against tree trunks. I don’t know whether the story is true, but it doesn’t matter, the die is cast. Australia: a nation of nonchalant snake killers.

There are thirty-seven of us, from thirty-five countries. I am the youngest. Lynley Hood, from New Zealand, is the oldest. Zhang Yueran, from China, is the best selling. But it’s China, she says dismissively. There are so many people. Jeremy Tiang, from Singapore, is the most patient and the most sharply dressed, always.

We are split between two hotels. There is the Sheraton, which is like Sheratons the world over, and there is Iowa House. Iowa House is dated, dorm-like. There is a lot of wood-grain veneer. But my room has a bath, a desk and a picturesque view of the Iowa River, a view that becomes more so as summer ambles into spectacular Midwestern fall. More importantly, Iowa House is where Raymond Carver lived in 1973, the year he and John Cheever taught at the Writers’ Workshop and drank mercilessly in Cheever’s room, up on the fourth floor. Carver lived on the second floor (our floor) but Cheever never came down because he was, apparently, afraid of being mugged in the hallway. The second-floor hallway has soft carpet and cream walls decorated with framed prints of non-challenging art works. It’s difficult to imagine it feeling threatening; to me it feels share-housey, raucous. Somebody is always awake. Something is always happening, or about to happen. Urgent calls on the room to room: Can you come take a look at my neck? Can you tell me what I did last night? I’m okay, I just can’t stand up.

One night X falls asleep in the bath and floods her hotel room. It isn’t until the water trickles through to the first floor that reception rushes up to unlock the door and lift her from the overflowing bath. For weeks afterwards the hallway is lined with industrial fans, drawing moisture from air and carpet. Every now and again someone opens their door and yells at the fans: I’m trying to fucking work! Somehow the work gets done despite the fans. Books are researched and translated. Lectures are written and delivered. YouTube links to literal video versions of Tears for Fears songs are widely dispersed, and untranslatable concepts are collectively stewed over.

I shape my writing day around the power plant whistle, which is as much a part of the ambience as the industrial fans and the badly wired fire alarm. But I have a soft spot for the power plant whistle. It makes a lonesome, sorrowful noise, like Bradbury’s fog horn, like a great mournful whale drifting up the Iowa River. It blasts several times a day: morning, lunchtime and end of shift. At the end-of-shift whistle I close my laptop and go out to meet the others at the Mill or Martini’s or the Fox Head. The bartenders at the Fox Head are mostly PhD candidates in philosophy, with impressive facial hair and loose elbows that make for generous pours. When I ask for a glass of tequila and soda I get a glass of tequila, soda sprinkled over it like bitters. The jukebox has a great Sam Cooke selection, and Kevin Bloom, the gruff South African journalist, spends a good portion of his per diem feeding it quarters, playing ‘A Change Is Gonna Come’. And in this dimly lit, wood-panelled microcosm, it’s easy to believe that perhaps it will. Israel and Palestine are deep in conversation that steers deftly away from settlements and two-state solutions. A blind man at the bar is asking Kevin about apartheid, listening intently before saying, ‘You’ll have to tell me, because I can’t tell from your voice. Are you white or are you black?’

I turn twenty-seven here, dance around the pool table to Songs: Ohia. Then everything speeds up. November comes as a kind of ground rush. Each morning I stalk up the west lawn towards the Old Capitol building, my hair rustling a susurrus in the cold, as though the trees are shaking their branches in my ears. Each morning I wear more layers, watch the squirrels gather their winter stores with greater urgency. I should be closing my account and returning all those library books.

The Israelis get married on the first of November. Tel Aviv, gay-friendly as it is, doesn’t allow same-sex marriages. Remarkably, Iowa does. Few of us know the words to ‘Hava Nagila’, but everybody knows when to shout Hey! and we do so with verve, raising Moshe and Dory up on white dining chairs, Hind contributing impressive ululations. In a few weeks Moshe will be excluded from a literary panel at a festival in Marseilles, at the request of a Palestinian poet. We will read news of this, back in our respective home countries, and it will affirm what we knew all along: our little world was not representative of the larger one.

What did we say to each other, that last night in the Fox Head, raising our glasses in moments we won’t remember? The untranslatable concepts remain untranslatable. But we worked at it during those three months. We got as close as we could.

Cooking for Edward Albee

David Mence

In 2011, as the lucky recipient of Inscription’s Edward F. Albee Scholarship, I got to spend a month researching and writing my play Entanglement (about the Large Hadron Collider and the hunt for the so-called God particle) in Montauk, New York.

Montauk is roughly three and a half hours from New York City via the Long Island Rail Road (familiar to fans of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind). A sleepy little fishing town perched at the tip of Long Island, Montauk is home to the William Flanagan Memorial Creative Persons Center (‘the Barn’), which Edward Albee established in 1967 with the proceeds from his play Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? The Barn is, as its name suggests, a big New England–style whitewashed barn that once served as a stable for the nearby Montauk Manor (brainchild of the Gatsbyesque millionaire Carl Fisher, it opened in 1927 and is still going strong). These days, the Barn stables writers and visual artists and provides them with time and splendid isolation. Albee generally keeps a low profile and makes a few brief, mysterious appearances that the fellows are left to decipher. Albee has a droopy snow-white moustache, a cheeky boyish grin and penetrating blue eyes and is as sharp as a whip at eighty-three. He also has a way of peering down his nose at you as he listens, which makes you feel small even though he is, in all probability, far shorter than you are.

It was over a week before any of us encountered our host. One of the writers, hunched over a bowl of porridge, looked up to see Albee depositing a handful of mail on the kitchen bench. ‘Nothing for you,’ he drawled, ‘better luck next time.’ We puzzled over this cryptic utterance: was he referring to the mail, our creative fortunes, or life in general? Such simplicity, we decided, from one of the world’s great masters of dialogue, must belie hidden depths. We looked for guidance in Albee’s vast library (we re-read a number of his plays) and his formidable collection of classical LPs (complete recordings of von Karajan, Rubinstein, Gould) and yet, rather like a crack squad of biographers tasked with the life of Shakespeare, we were merely filling an evidentiary vacuum with ideas, fabrications and conspiracies of our own making. This palpable absence soon gave rise to a mild paranoia: it was absurd, but at times we felt as though we were being watched (or watched over), as if America’s greatest living playwright could give a damn what we did with our time.

Then came our second encounter. One of the visual artists was sitting out the front of the Barn reading a book when Albee’s moustachioed face materialised above his page and said something like, ‘Keep working.’ This again raised a problem for interpretation: had he meant ‘keep up the good work’ or more ominously ‘get back to work’? In the face of such hermeneutic fear and trembling, all we could do was redouble our artistic efforts; the visual artist in question even began to work through the night. Yet even this was no match for the sixteen-hour days that, according to local legend, the Soviet exile Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn had worked when he first arrived in New England. Let alone Albee himself, who informed us that he was making good progress on his new play, while some of us, less than a third his age, were floundering beneath a sea of false starts, incoherent storyboards and poorly executed ideas.

All which may help to explain why I felt such an overwhelming desire to cast myself into the Atlantic Ocean when informed that Albee had decided to come over for dinner … and I had been nominated head chef. After hyperventilating into a bag for a few minutes, I jumped on the pushbike with the broken pedal and rushed down to the docks to catch the fishmonger before close. He had two bags of mussels left, which was a stroke of good luck, because mussels are one of the few things I know how to cook. Back at the Barn, the mussels stewed happily in tomato, white wine, chilli and herbs. There were an awful lot of them—enough to feed ten people—so they had to be steamed in a giant pot. Meanwhile, two sous-chefs prepared such essential items as roast potato gratin, sautéed kale, avocado salad and, for dessert, apple pie and vanilla ice cream.

Albee arrived at around 7 pm. Given what a warm, balmy night it was, he decided we ought to dine al fresco at the big wooden table. Luckily, he likes mussels, and took great pleasure in cracking them and sucking the gravy out of their shells. Everything was going according to plan. But then Albee turned to me and growled, ‘This one’s not open.’ He popped the offending mussel on the edge of my plate. Grinning like an idiot, I picked up the shiny little shellfish and proceeded to bash it on the side of the table. ‘No, no,’ he said, ‘don’t do that!’ I sheepishly put it back and smiled, and he smiled, and said, ‘Some of them want to stay closed.’

Leaving

Michelle Law

Mum pulls the ancient songbook from one of the rubbish bags, rests a heavy palm on its faded cover and sighs. The book’s spine is shot, the pages yellowed. Mum handles this book with care, periodically taping and gluing it together. This is done chiefly to preserve the memory of its original owner, Jimmy, my youngest uncle, who killed himself after being deported from Australia.

We had arrived at Mum’s that day wearing our grubbiest clothes, clutching buckets and bags overflowing with cleaning gear. My sister Candy had stocked up on gloves and masks, and my brother Ben had brought his vacuum cleaner to inhale the cockroach corpses lying beneath the couch. Mum had been living in our childhood home for more than twenty years, but with the five of us children long gone, she’d decided to move.

We knew that the process was going to be arduous because Mum never threw anything out. Everything was significant to her; everything had value—from a rusty pair of gardening shears (‘They still cut, don’t they?’) to an unopened calendar from 1999 (‘Some child can make craft out of it’). If it once had monetary or sentimental worth, it stayed.

As everyone set to work trashing outdated newspapers and lobbing VHS tapes into the skip bag stationed in the yard, I sat with Mum in the kitchen, nursing a glass of water. ‘Only you understand how I feel, Mic,’ she said, the book between us on the dining table.

Living alone with Mum for seventeen years,