Author Highlights 2024

Vision Australia ID 0:02

This is a Vision Australia radio podcast. (MUSIC)

Kate Cooper 0:04

On Vision Australia Radio, welcome to Emerging Writers - on air now and also available on Vision Australia Radio podcasts. And it's our podcasts that we want to highlight in this week's program. We're going to revisit some of the works by novelists and non-fiction writers from conversations that we recorded in 2024. We'll begin with a reading by Mary Venner, author of the memoir, Where Are You This Time - making a difference in places from Kabul to Kyiv, Kosovo to Kazakhstan, and Kismayo to Qatar. Here is Mary, reading from her book.

Mary Fenner 1:03

So I'll read the Prologue, which sort of sets the scene for what I was doing all those years. And this is called zero delta Victor, and it's a story from Afghanistan in 2009.... 

Zero Delta. This is Victor 127 Whiskey Bishop, over. The man in the passenger seat in front of me in the British Embassy vehicle radios his coded message to the ops room. I presume it means... we're off. Then he turns around to look at me.... Good morning, Mary. Have you been briefed on movement procedures before at all? There's a Welsh lilt in his voice... Yes, about two times a day since I got here, a week ago, I tell him. Nevertheless, he launches into his familiar rapid-fire script... 

Well, my name is Chris, and this here in the driver's seat is Steve. You're in a B6 armoured vehicle. The doors will be locked throughout the journey. If there's an incident while we're moving around the city, you should keep your head down and follow our instructions. We're both armed. The medical pack on the back of the seat in front of you is for self administration, should it be necessary. Do you have any questions? 

We're only going a few blocks through the heavily guarded centre of Kabul to the Ministry of Education. When I first arrived in Afghanistan six years ago, I travelled to work every day in a battered old Corolla with a local driver. Now I have to take a close protection team with me every time. The car drives away from the back gate of the British Embassy, past armed Gurkha sentries and half a dozen local guards, through three successive metal boom gates and out into the streets of Kabul. A block further on, armour or no armour, we are snarled up in Kabul's perpetual traffic jam. Taxis, minibusses and pickup trucks jostle for right of way at the intersection. 

When we arrive at the ministry, another guard lifts another boom gate and we weave around concrete barriers to the main building. The last time I'd left Kabul, I'd told everyone I wouldn't be coming back. But here I am - Afghanistan seemed to have got its hooks into me. But so had most of the places where I'd worked during the previous decade. I still pined sometimes for the muddy chaos of postwar Kosovo, the sub-zero temperatures and bargain priced opera tickets in Kyiv, and the crowds and noise and traffic of Manila. These places were all very different from each other, but in other ways, they were much the same in their poverty, dysfunction and insecurity. They were also a million miles away from the comfortable life and predictable government job I'd had, before I'd accepted a six weeks' consulting assignment all those years ago. 

Since then, I'd lived in a dozen different countries - most of which I'd known nothing about before I'd arrived - started learning and promptly forgotten half a dozen languages, survived without reliable electricity or even a regular water supply, and been a bystander as history unfolded in some of the most desperately troubled places in the world. I had been delivering international aid to those countries, but I wasn't the kind of aid worker who looks after starving children or puts up tents for refugees. The help I bring is in the form of red tape and regulation, taxation and accounting, spreadsheets and computers. 

My job is to tell governments how to raise more taxes, spend them wisely, and ensure that money isn't stolen by corrupt officials or by the very politicians I'm giving advice to. Not surprisingly, officials and politicians are not always keen to accept the changes my colleagues and I recommend. On the other hand, some of our recommendations haven't always been sensible or implementable. 

Chris follows me up the stairs and along the dusty Ministry of Education corridors. He's a stocky guy wearing an armored vest under his short-sleeved shirt. He looks like Arnold Schwarzenegger with a hump. There's a curly wire coming out of one ear and a microphone pinned to the front of his shirt. He sits outside in the corridor throughout my long and rambling two hour meeting about the Afghan education budget. When I'm finally ready to go, he leans forward and talks to his well-developed left pectoral muscle... Stand by, stand by. 

Steve has the vehicle waiting outside the door by the time we get downstairs. At the exit gate, he turns right. I could have told him it would be better to turn left. I've been here so many times before, but they're supposed to be the experts. So now we are inextricably tangled in Kabul's evening rush hour. It's 3:30pm - knock off time for the city's civil servants, and the main streets are clogged with vintage busses taking them home. There's no alternative now but to follow them in a huge loop of one way streets through the heart of Kabul, past the new mosque shimmering in the winter sunlight around Zanagar Park and in front of the fortified five-star Serena Hotel - just to end up almost where we started.

Steve drives aggressively. He tries to push his way through the traffic, but there's not much that pumping the clutch and spinning the steering wheel and jerking the handbrake can do about the everyday chaos of Kabul city streets. We are hemmed in by Afghans on bicycles, pedestrians crossing the street without looking, handcarts of fruit for sale pushing against the traffic flow, beggars looking sadly through the tinted windows... and half a dozen other B6 armored vehicles driven by aggressive close protection teams also heading in the same direction as us - towards the diplomatic safety zone. It would definitely have been easier if we'd turned left. 

Finally, we arrive at the embassy compound, drive back through the three boom gates and wait while the guards check under the chassis for hidden bombs. Zero, Delta, Victor 127, Bishop, Lincoln, over. I guess that means we're home.

Kate Cooper 7:52

That was Mary Venner, reading from her memoir Where Are You This Time - making a difference in places from Kabul to Kyiv, Kosovo to Kazakhstan, and Kismayo to Qatar. And to listen to our conversation with Mary, go to Vision Australia Radio podcasts, Emerging Writers for 20 and 27 January, 2024. 

Another non-fiction writer we spoke with was historian Pamela Rajkowski, author of community-based historical research studies on the Afghan cameleers in regional Australia. In our conversation, Pamela and I spoke about what she'd learned from her research... Pamela in your chapter on the camel men's origins, you note that although they were all referred to as Afghans, they were not all from Afghanistan. And you make the point that even within Afghanistan, there were and still are different cultural and language groups. You go into fascinating detail in the book about the cameleers, where they actually were from, and the languages they spoke. Would you tell us about what you learnt about their origins and their languages?

Pamela Rajkowski 9:10

To travel from one colony to another within the British Empire, you had to be in a colony. So the men that were first contracted to come to South Australia, a land that they did know nothing about, had to be in... living in British Northwest India. So a lot of the cameleers were not Indian. Ethnically, they also were Afghan traders traveled with caravans coming down from the mountains of Afghanistan and coming to markets in Northwest India with their camels, and then swapping products and going back to Afghanistan. 

So some of them were Afghani tribes. Some came from Kabul, Kandahar and Herat, and some of the cameleers also came from places like the Sindh province behind the port of Karachi and Keta, which is now in Pakistan. Keta was in Balochistan, so some of the camellias were Baluch in their origin. And so around Mari there's quite a few Baluch families, but the languages that they recorded speaking were Farsi - because some of the Camelias had travelled into Persia, which was a Farsi-speaking country and is now called Iran... they spoke Dari Pushtu, Hindustani, and these were the languages of some of the people who lived with camels in Northwest India. 

So they were of diverse language groups, diverse ethnic groups. And when the ships travelled from Karachi, they would pull into ports to get fresh water and food. They pulled into the port of Ceylon, which is now in Sri Lanka, Colombo in Sri Lanka, and more camel handlers hopped onto the ship there. Thus, some of them were Indian or Singhalese speaking as well. Some of the cameleers crossed the Middle East and were from Turkey and bordered the ships to work with camels in South Australia,

Kate Cooper 11:03

And that was Pamela Rajkowski talking about one aspect of her extensive research into the history and the lives of Afghan camellias in Australia, which was published under the title In the Tracks of the Camel Men. And to listen to our full conversation with Pamela, go to Vision Australia Radio podcasts, Emerging Writers for 3rd and 10th of February 2024. (MUSIC) On Vision Australia Radio, you're listening to Emerging Writers. This week we're bringing you selected readings by non-fiction and fiction writers with whom we spoke during 2024. Next we'll hear a reading by Alina Bellchambers, author of The fantasy novel The Order of Masks.

Alina Bellchambers 12:05

So the Order of Masks follows two fierce female main characters. So I'll read an excerpt from both. I'll do this one here from Mira for towards the end of chapter 1.... 

It was so subtle that I almost missed it the pool. It drew my gaze across the bustling crowd. At first, all I saw were the usual sights, street vendors selling their wares, people haggling over prices, and a crowd grouped around the raised stage at the far end, where the performers were still entertaining. But then my eyes fell on him, the stranger was watching me from a few tents away. His arms folded as he surveyed the spectacle. Now that I'd seen him, it seemed odd I hadn't noticed him before. 

He was older than I was, at least choosing age, and he was arresting even from a distance. With ebony hair and cut glass cheekbones, something about his Hawk like stare made me uneasy, a feeling that only intensified as he came closer. Black whorls of ink covered his face, obscuring even his dark skin from view. The details of the tattoos were impossible to make sense of. Every time I tried to focus on an image, it started to transform. Are you doing my job for me, he asked. His voice pitched low, a fortune teller, a real one. Sweat beaded across my forehead, but I met his eyes steadily. 

His eyes were the only features truly visible on his face, unobscured by the tattoos. One was so dark it was nearly black. The other was an eerie color, leached gray. You're from the order of artisans, I said, standing and facing him. He smiled. His lips were covered in ink. The upper holy black, the lower dusted in gold. The effect was beautiful and disturbing. All at once, run. I should run. I didn't move. I wasn't sure I could his gaze lowered to the card resting on top of my stalls table. The Red was very bright against the black sheeting. It gleamed like a drop of blood. I wasn't predicting anything. I said quickly. I was just, I know what you were doing. He picked up the card in his hands, turning it over, I noticed that he held it very gently, like it was something precious. 

The sorceress, he murmured, his disconcerting eyes flicking to me. I tensed, uncomfortable with the scrutiny so much fear, he said in a low voice, what do you know of fear? I knew a great deal, but I didn't answer. I didn't want him to know anything about me. His mouth twitched as if my reaction amused him. Relax. He said, I'm not going to hurt you. His teeth were startlingly white against the black of the ink. In fact, I might even tell you a secret. Would you like that? If I could, I would have declined but there was no way to politely decline anything freely offered by an artisan. What would you tell me? He considered me for a long moment. First, he said, look down and tell me what you see. 

I followed his gaze down to his hands, down to the ink that seemed to lighten and shift underneath his gaze, forming into the charcoal likeness of a person, my mother, I breathed. Apprehension crept over me as I took in the details of her face, the hollows of her cheeks, the harsh line between her brows, the pinch to her full lips. She looked scared. No, she looked terrified, even as I watched, a tear fell from her inky eyes so dark that they could have been empty sockets, her mouth opened, as if to form a name, my name and I knew with shocking certainty I was watching my mother die. 

I know what she is, the Artisan said, a million miles away. She can run from the past all she likes, but the past always leaves traces. It leaves a trail. He leant in, his lips brushing my ear, And if I can see the trail, he whispered, then so can they.... So that's chapter one from Mira's point of view, or some of chapter one, and I'll read just a very short excerpt from chapter two, which is from Scarlett's point of view.... I only remembered flickers Russ at hair and a cruel smile the sound of ice cracking terrified realisation that came a second too late after that, everything happened in a rush, a haze of panic and confusion as hands reached out - not to help me, but to push me. 

I tried to scream, but water flooded my mouth instead, and there was nothing I could do as I dropped like a stone my heavy clothes dragging me under desperation gave me strength as I tore off the furs and kicked towards the distant surface, only when I reached it, it wasn't there. I could have cried then could have wept and raged at the thick, translucent barrier above me, at the unbearable closeness of the sky. Footsteps thudded overhead. My brother was moving, but I couldn't see him. I slapped my palms frantically against the ice, trying to break through, even though I knew it was useless, rouran clearly knew it too, because the echo of his boots grew fainter. 

My only hope was for someone to rescue me, for one of my guards to dive in and pull me from a watery grave. But there were no guards. My brother had sent them all away, I swam, frantically searching for the hole I'd fallen through. I didn't even know if I was going in the right direction, but I tried anyway, propelling myself forward with increasingly numb arms. My lungs were burning, now, begging for air, but there was no air. There was no escape. There was only cold and silence. Strangely enough, I no longer felt afraid. It was almost peaceful. The panic and fear dissolving as I sank slowly beyond their reach. How nice it would be, I thought dimly, to close my eyes and drift. 

But just as I prepared to stop fighting, I saw her. The girl was directly above me, kneeling on the other side of the eerie blue ice. She was as cold and infinite as the frozen lake that would become my tomb, and it was impossible to tell whether she was flesh and blood at all. If it hadn't been for her halo of long red hair, she would have been indistinguishable from the snow around her. Even in my delirium, I knew that what I was seeing wasn't real. In the throes of death, my mind had summoned the only comfort it could myself, except I had never looked so beautiful or terrible in life. 

It was like staring into a distorted mirror image, wrong in every way, yet achingly right was that what my drowning self looked like, lips tinged with blue and all warmth leech from my veins, my doppelganger placed a corpse white hand against the ice, as if in a dream. I raised my palm to meet hers. A Thunderous boom sounded as the surface split apart, ice cracked and rained down around me like a million shards of glass, and I breathed.

Kate Cooper 19:28

That was Alina Bellchambers, reading from her fantasy novel The Order of Masks. And to hear our conversation with Alina, go to Vision Australia Radio podcasts, Emerging Writers for 14 and 21 September, 2024. 

In December, 2024 we spoke with Nicki Marcus, who writes fiction under the names Nicki J Marcus and Asta Edonia. Here is Nicki reading from her work.

Nicki Markus 20:01

So this first extract is from for the devil a crown, which is one of my Nicki J Marcus works. It's actually the only Nicki J Marcus work that's currently available anywhere. Most of them are not available to buy anymore. This one happens to be a free-to-read story that I published online... and it's, I guess you'd call a cockpunk, a bit of steampunk, but with a mechanical bent... and historical, it's set in the 1860s. This extract comes from... pretty much the first chapter, almost the opening of the story.... 

She made it to the first of the steps. As the bell struck, she scurried up them, eyes fixed on the doors, but in her haste, her heel caught on her hoop and she plummeted. She flung out her hands, squeezed her eyes shut and braced for impact. However, she never hit the ground. Someone wound an arm about her waist and pulled her forward up the steps. They went the action so fast she could scarce register the movement. Then they stopped and her new companion released her that her saviour was a man came as no surprise - for his firm grip around her torso and his strength in lifting her had already attested as much. 

She tried to meet his gaze, and for a brief second, she thought she saw a flash of red. It was gone the instant she perceived it, though, and she attributed the sight to an overactive imagination following her fright. The broom of his top hat cast a shadow over his face, and he further obscured his features when he reached a tilted and respectful greeting, it was that polite action which belatedly reminded Clara of her manners, but thank you, sir, she said, inclining her head so clumsy of me, she adjusted her skirts, relieved to find her attire mostly in order. 

When she looked up again, her rescuer had stepped away and now stood in the shadows to her right. She could make out his tall, slim form, but little else, hardly, if I may be so bold, I would venture to surmise that any lady is liable to move without her usual grace and poise when being pursued. You saw my assailant at this reminder of the reason for her flight, her heart, which had started to slow, return to an elevated state. Who was it? Where did he go? She peered down the steps, but seeing nothing unexpected, she calmed her breathing. 

A well bred young lady such as yourself should think twice before walking the streets alone, especially when evening approaches, dark things lurking dark places. She sensed his close scrutiny when he paused for now, however you're safe, your attacker will not return. Her fear was gone, for indeed, she no longer sensed the strange malevolence that had set her running. In its place was a burgeoning curiosity. Her rescuer appeared to know many things, and she had ever possessed an inquisitive mind. The thought occurred to her that he may have been her pursuer, but she dismissed it at once. It seemed unlikely, and he'd done nothing to arouse her suspicions. Doubtless, he only intended to comfort her. Nevertheless, how can you know that I have some experience in these matters? 

There was a faint touch of humor in his tone, along with something else she couldn't name. Now, if you'll excuse me, I must be on my way. He bowed and turned his decision to leave without offering to escort her home or even hail her a carriage seemed in marked contrast to his otherwise gentlemanly behaviour, and it made her all the more determined to learn his identity. Wait! she called after him, a little louder than would be deemed proper. He halted and glanced back over his shoulder, but remained silent. 

I don't yet know your name. He shook his head and turned to face her once more, that's unimportant. It matters to me. She stepped toward him, you helped me, sir, at the very least, let me thank you properly by name. There was a moment's hesitation before he said, Finch who treated backward into the darkness. Mr. Eldon Finch, at your service.

Kate Cooper 23:39

So Nicki, you've also got some readings from your work under the name Asta Idonia. Would you read from those now?

Nicki Markus 23:47

Of course. So I bought an extract from Super for you, Bad for Me. Now, this is a superhero fantasy, and our hero, Oswald, utter rich, has acquired superpowers. I won't tell you how. Won't ruin the story.... 

What a day. Thank God I'd caught Cain in time from the sound of things, I probably saved his life. In a way I was just like a superhero. I sat up and ruminated on that a superhero me, was it true? Did I want it to be? Although I'd considered my telekinetic abilities to be super powers, I'd not taken the next logical step to think of myself as a superhero. Superhero such as those Cain played in this new film didn't exist outside the realms of movies, video games and comic books. 

There was no one actually out there patrolling the city, keeping the citizens safe and defeating bad guys, not least because there were no such things as super villains, either yet here I was with these powers, using my new skills for my own amusement or to carry out mundane tasks like fetching my drink from across the room, suddenly felt frivolous. Was it not a waste, a sacrilege even? Who was I to employ these talents solely for selfish trivialities when I could use them to do good? It wasn't as if I had a busy schedule. Oh, in my free time, I should be helping people. I'd rescued Cain, so surely I could save others too. 

This decision had an aura of one of those turning points in life. I found myself filled with a sense of purpose, the likes of which I'd never experienced in that moment, it truly felt as if I'd uncovered my calling. Acting wasn't my raison d'etre. This was what I was born to do, and I only needed to address three things before I embarked on this new venture. First up, I had to find a way to methodically test the limits of my powers to know what I could and couldn't accomplish. Secondly, I required a suitable costume to conceal my identity. And finally, I ought to choose a pseudonym for the same reasons. 

This latter task looked set to prove the hardest, since the name needed to be both memorable and heroic sounding, I racked my brains, but I soon realized that comic book creators had already snagged all the best monikers, and I didn't want to commence my crime fighting career with a copyright lawsuit hanging over my head. At last, I hit upon it, something noble, something awe inspiring, something to strike fear into the heart of London's criminals. I would be Telekineticus Rex.

Kate Cooper 26:07

You've been listening to readings from Nicki Markus - to hear more of Nicki's work and our conversation with her, go to Vision Australia Radio podcasts, Emerging Writers for 14 and 21 December, 2024. And that completes our selected readings of works by non-fiction and fiction writers with whom we recorded conversations in 2024. Emerging writers is produced in our Adelaide studios, and can be heard at the same time each week here on Vision Australia radio, VA radio, on digital, online at varadio.org - and also on Vision Australia Radio podcasts, where you can catch up on all our earlier episodes.

Vision Australia ID 27:00

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