Speaker 1 00:02
This is a Vision Australia Radio podcast.
Speaker 2 00:19
On Vision Australia Radio, welcome to Emerging Writers, this week bringing you the second part of our recording of the Saltbush Review at the No Wave Poetry Series at the Wheatsheaf Hotel. I'm Kate Cooper.
The Saltbush Review is a digital literary journal founded in 2021 and based on Kaurna land in South Australia. The journal is affiliated with the J .M. Coetzee Centre for Creative Practice at the University of Adelaide. Last week we heard readings by Sue Hazel and Jill Jones - and this week we'll hear from Morgan Noonan and Patrick Allington. The sessions are introduced by Gemma Parker, one of the co-founders and managing editors of the Saltbush Review. Here is Gemma Parker.
Speaker 3 01:13
The next writer we're going to hear from is Morgan Noonan. Morgan is a writer based in Adelaide. His short stories, poetry and criticism have been published by a number of Australian literary journals and arts institutions, including Australian Book Review, Cordite Poetry Review, Kill Your Darlings and the Art Gallery of South Australia. He is currently working on a collection of short fiction. Please join me in welcoming Morgan.
Speaker 4 01:42
Thanks very much, Jenna, and thank you to the Saltbush Review for picking up this story. And also to No Wave, being at the Wheatsheaf tonight, I really appreciate the opportunity. This is a story called Jack's Room. It's in the current issue of The Saltbush Review. I'm just going to read the first half. Jack's Room.
You'd be taking Jack's Room. We still call it Jack's Room since our old housemate, Jack, was the last to live in there. Though as I mentioned on the phone, it's been empty for some time. Obviously, were you to move in? It would become your room, but it goes without saying, though from time to time we may out of habit unintentionally refer to the space as Jack's Room. It is nothing personal, and of course we would expect such lapses to reduce as you become more entrenched in our home. To be clear, nothing of Jack's property remains. The room is undergone, thorough clean, the carpets were twice vacuumed and shampooed. We wiped down the walls and the built-in wardrobe and Maggie, my girlfriend, used her mum's steam cleaner on the windows.
We did all this quite recently, but there was also a professional deep clean some months ago, arranged and paid for by Andy, the landlord. Nice guy. Easy enough to deal with. So in terms of cleanliness of the room, nothing to worry about there. You asked about the emphasis on youth in our advertisement. Basically, we're looking for someone under 50 years of age. I realise that kind of range stretches notions of youthfulness, so maybe I was a little defensive when you pointed this out on our call since I'm early 40s myself. Maggie is 28 and I feel that sort of evens us out. But really, the emphasis on youth was there to avoid a situation we had with our last housemate, Jack, who basically catbished us in terms of age. He was a good 40 years older than the birthday on his rental application.
Well, it mostly worked out with Jack. It was like from the age thing was a much better prospect than the other applicants. There were still some issues we'd prefer to avoid with our next housemate. At this point, I should tell you straight up that Jack died in the available room. It was basically natural causes. To be clear, Jack was very old. I've only mentioned it since we, Maggie and I, feel we should be transparent. The situation with Jack dying is the main reason the room has stayed empty for so long and why we continue to associate it so closely with his memory, i .e. Jack's room. So on our call, when I said our last housemate was in a better place, there was a double meaning which you can now appreciate. I also apologise for laughing at that point. That was rude.
Obviously, were you two moving? We wouldn't be the type of housemates who withhold crucial context required to be in on a joke. Were you two moving? You'd be in on all our jokes. We'd insist on that. Maggie was nodding as I read the preceding line aloud. Although to be clear, on this occasion, a joke was not really intended. They're not the type of people to laugh at the misfortune of others. Certainly not at something so traumatic as Jack's ghastly demise. This was more like nervous laughter that follows a slip of the tongue. I realise you probably didn't notice any laughing since at the time I had held the phone to my chest, but I thought I would address it anyway in case the muffled sounds made you think we kept unusual pets.
In saying that, I think I did mention our cat, Perdita. I know a pet cat is not unusual, but Perdita is a rescue and our life to forewarn people about her missy leg, a birth defect, and a habit of leaving spiders at our bedroom door. She's also got this high-pitched squeal which sure is quite adorable and in any event only here when someone forgets to feed her. Usually Maggie and I need to work late. We sometimes walk Perdita in a pram across the road and around the park and you would be welcome to do so as well. The pram folds up and is stored behind the door in the laundry. Though to be clear, there would be no obligation.
You asked about meals and I should clarify that Maggie and I have tended to do our own thing because Jack didn't really eat solids. Although occasionally Maggie would blend some leftovers for Perdita. Perdita is missing most of her teeth. And if Jack was interested, we would leave spare for him. As irregular as it was, we enjoyed eating together as a household. Maggie, Perdita and I, Jack and his pet cockatoo, Ozzy. A beautiful bird Jack rescued one day from the park across the road. We think Ozzy was an escapee from the local pet shop by the north side of the park. You might have heard about the incident. Basically activists broke into the shop to free some illegally imported chinchillas hidden in the back. In the process, many birds and animals escaped into the park. Before they could be removed, a local family of foxes, as well as some cats and dogs, many of them feral, essentially had a feeding frenzy.
About a week later, Jack was sitting in the park and he came across this cockatooie which must have been domesticated because it was incredibly affectionate and I knew a lot of swear words. Probably he should have handed the bird to the RSPCA, but at least Ozzy was saved from the pet massacre, still ongoing at the time. I mention this only to tell you straight up that Ozzy also died in the available room. Unfortunately, there was some delay before we realised Jack had passed. By then, Ozzy couldn't be saved.
And I'll leave it down. It was great. It was a pleasure reading that when it was first submitted and then editing it and hearing it just now makes me laugh every time.
Speaker 2
On Vision Australia Radio, you're listening to Emerging Writers this week, coming to you from the celebration of the Saltbush Review Literary Journal as part of the No Wave poetry series recorded at the Wheat Sheaf Hotel.
Speaker 3 07:31
Our final reader is Patrick Ellington. I'm honoured to introduce Patrick this evening. Patrick Ellington's novels are Rise and Shine, published by Scribe and shortlisted for the Adelaide Festival Awards for Literature, and Figurehead, published by Black Ink and longlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award. His essays Short Fiction and Criticism are widely published and Patrick works at the University of South Australia.
Speaker 5 07:59
So thank you, so nice to be here on Kaurna land with you all, and to be on this stage in the wheaty where many, many writers have stood or sat up here and shared their work with audiences like we're doing tonight. But one of the things about literary magazines I particularly love is the way that different pieces, diverse pieces bounce off each other and I think just in the readings we've had today already that there's that fermentation happening. So anyone who hasn't read this issue and the previous issues of Saltbush Review I strongly [recommenmd?] you to do so.
So I'm just going to read a couple of short passages from this short story called Don't Be Difficult. It's quite a long story, so I won't try and labour through the whole thing. I'd like to dedicate the story to my grandma Ania and my grandma Ellington. Neither of whom have been with us for many years now, neither of whom would dare set foot in a hotel where they sell alcohol. The Nanna in this story is neither of my grandmas, but both of them [?fuelled] her through. So this is Don't Be Difficult.
I got my love of books from Nanna Amos who owned three of them. Before she was my Nana she was a young woman in perpetual motion. She loved her children dearly but severely or so dad remembers. She was generous, given her modest sometimes strained circumstances. Her forced positivity never overcame her weariness caused partly by raising, clothing, feeding and disciplining four children in quick succession. But mostly by carrying hour after hour after hour for her husband, a geologist housebound by arthritis. Loyal friends and colleagues brought my grandfather chunks of rock. He scraped and chipped away at them, muttered over them and wrote copious notes.
He died when my father was 12 years old. Nanna outlived him through various eras and changes she did not care for. The Nana I knew was wrinkled, proper, tight curled. Twice widowed, these days she'd just as likely have been twice divorced and with a growing list of dead friends she must have been lonely. Not that this occurred to me at the time. After all she had meat. What else could a Nanna possibly need? As she aged Nanna's sternness turned benign. She would kneel forward in her rocking chair, arms outstretched to nab me for a hug, her knitting or a crossword perched on her lap. The rocking chair, which had one thin red cushion on the seat and the other tied with bows to the chair's bony ribs, creaked and groaned. So did Nanna. I ache all over to my very bones, she'd say. I ache here, I ache there, I ache everywhere.
Although Nanna was a pious teetotaler, she had a weakness for any government approved drug she could get her hands on. Her supplier was Dr Rice, her tall, stooped, hairless GP. Our family called him Doc Sweet and Sour Paul, although never to Nanna's face. He had been the family doctor since Dad was born. Dad claimed, but could never prove, that Doc Sweet and Sour Paul had proposed marriage to Nanna in the months after her second husband died. Once for the sport of it, I asked Nanna if it was true. Don't be difficult, dear, she said. And then she changed the subject, which as any politician will tell you, isn't a denial.
Perhaps she could have done the crossword every morning with Doc Sweet and Sour Paul. Perhaps they could have sat together at church, their knees touching. Perhaps they could have gone on a cruise to Fiji together. It wasn't to be. The main thing Nanna needed from Doc Sweet and Sour Paul was prescriptions. He kept scribbling notes for her long after he retired. She was a take two pills if you can't remember if you've taken one type of person. If nothing else, the drugs filled her up and kept her trim. One time, I kept count across a 24 -hour period. Two white rounds. Two types of white oblongs, reds, light blues, dark blues, twice daily morning and night, opaque browns, the ones I loved holding up to the light and occasionally, if Nanna was distracted, chewing and swallowing, and straight before bed, pale greens, which she crushed under a teaspoon and mixed with creaming soda.
I have no idea what any of them were for. Neither did Nanna. In the glory days of me visiting Nanna, when I was 10, 11, 12, it was just me and her. My sisters had already started doing their own thing. Mum or dad, or sometimes both, would drop me off, maybe stay for a cup of milky tea and an arrowroot biscuit, and then leave me for the day and often for the night. On fine afternoons, the sun streamed through the kitchen's long, thin window. As Nanna cooked or washed the dishes, she looked out the window down a grassy slope that flattened out to a communal clothesline before hitting the back doors of a circle of other units, each one identical to Nanna's, bar minor differences in the choice of potplants.
Nanna spent what seemed to be, to me, an extraordinary amount of time pottering in the kitchen, not because she cooked elaborate recipes, but because the kitchen was the doing room. She favoured busyness, regardless of the utility of the task. Without children to get to school or an invalid husband to haul about, she fussed over meal preparation. Her favourite dinner was lamb chops with boiled to pulp, but pumpkin, peas and potatoes, Tuesdays and Thursdays. It would take her the best part of an afternoon to cook that for her and me, punctuated by breaks where we'd sip flat Woody's lemonade and, if I'd been a good boy, eat stale licorice all sorts.
Nanna's favourite part of her favourite dinner was the ear of fat on a lamb chop. She preferred her meat cooked to leather, but she liked the fat to be soft, glistening, half raw. It took a certain skill to achieve both effects on a single chop. On Wednesdays, she had thin beef sausages with potatoes and pumpkin boiled and then mashed with four to five tablespoons of butter, a splotch of cream and half the contents of the salt shaker. Monday was beef goulash day, mints with a tin of Rosella condensed tomato soup, peas and cubes of carrot. Fridays, two pieces of battered butterfish and minimum chips. Saturdays, riserieso, usually with cut up pieces of leftover fish from the night before.
On Sundays, she had a bells and whistles lunch, roast lamb, gravy, potatoes, carrots, peas and occasionally a turnip or even a choco. She skipped Sunday dinners unless I was with her, in which case we had a cold lamb and cheddar cheese sandwich or sometimes just bread with butter and apricot jam. During the Wednesdays of summer, when her tidy air conditioner wailed and failed, she replaced the vegetables with sliced cucumber and tomato. I never saw her eat chicken. Dinner was never just about the food. It was a lesson. Third, Nana would make me say grace. I would squirm my way through for what we're about to receive. May the Lord make us truly grateful for Christ's sake. Amen. She would nod approval, even though she could surely see that I doubted that the Lord resided in my soul, whatever a soul was.
And then as the food started to cool, as for example, the mashed potato pumpkin slap formed a crust that needed cracking, she would tell me to put my hands in my lap. Before we eat, who do we think about? She would ask. The starving children in Africa? And why are they starving? I don't know. That's right, dear. You don't know. I don't know. Because there's no reason for it. No reason at all. And what can we do about it? Eat everything on our plates? Yes, that, of course. And? And? Even the vegetables? Good, yes. What else can we do? Pray? Of course, pray to God. What else? Be sad? Yes. Be sad. Is that all?
Speaker 2 18:11
That was Patrick Ellington. Next, we'll hear from Claire Charlesworth, a member of the editorial team of the Saltbush Review. Claire is part of the team hosting the next No Wave Poetry event in the monthly Poetry Reading Series. And for those listeners who will be in or around Adelaide at the time, this event will be held on the 6th of November, 7 for 7 .30pm at the Weachief Hotel in Theberton. Claire tells us about the event and also thanks the team that organised the celebration of the Saltbush Review Digital Literary Journal that we've been hearing from this week and last in our program.
Speaker 6 19:00
Thank you so much Patrick for reading your work, so wonderful to sort of hear, to hear it performed live. Thank you. I'm here to say two things. The first thing is about the next No Wave, which is Night School All Stars Showcase. Night School is a lecture series, it's curated by Theo and Jacob and myself. It is a space for intellectual play and playful intellectualism, so playful that we have giant banners that we run through like at the footy and we're serious and we're thinking we could put one there and there but we're open to a discussion like a fire hazard or something.
It's run by the postgraduate cohort, it involves them in the English creative writing and film department. Some examples of past night schools involve Best Cultural Pig, a sort of competition style, why Paddington 2 is the best cinematic experience of the 21st century, Sincerity Now, a reckoning for that, and others too. So we're going to have a bit of a showcase and then we're going to offer a proposition to you all for discussion, so that's what you can expect in terms of a structure of the next No Wave. I'll do this as well just now before I move to the second thing.
Thanks to the Wheaty for hosting tonight and for all No Waves. This is what I'm sort of maybe most excited to say because I think Gemma did a really wonderful job of acknowledging the writers that submit to Saltbush and I wanted to make sure that Gemma and Lynn got the proper sort of shout out from us too, so I just wanted to read something. So I wanted to take this opportunity to celebrate the work and leadership that Lynn Dickens and Gemma Parker offer our journal.
Gemma and Lynn are our co-founders, managing editors and superstars at the Saltbush Review. They are wonderful leaders, they are bold editors, they are sensitive editors and with ease they support me and Theo and Melanie as we edit selected works. They worked tirelessly to secure funding for the third and fourth issues of this special journal. They have made and continued to build out a joyous inclusive literary community. I want to propose a toast to Lynn Dickens and to Gemma Parker and these four issues of Saltbush that have been published under their vision and through their generous creativity. To Gemma and to Lynn. That be real, be true.
Speaker 2 21:51
That was Claire Charlesworth from the editorial team of the Saltbush Review. As we mentioned earlier in the program, the Saltbush Review is a digital literary journal that was founded in 2021 and is based on Gunnerland in South Australia. The journal is affiliated with the J .M. Coetzee Centre for Creative Practice at the University of Adelaide. The Review's mission statement explains that the name is taken from the Saltbush Plant, which is a native shrub flourishing in Australia's arid salty soil and around the country's coastal landscapes.
The aim of the journal is to celebrate the local space of South Australia from which it has grown and to foster interconnectedness with the country's creative and literary communities. The Saltbush Review team writes, Like the grey saltbush which blooms by the coast, the journal embraces the liminal, the marginal and the fluid. Looking out beyond the literal zone, the journal seeks to open its connections across the oceans to other parts of the world. The journal provides a space for new literary work by both emerging writers and established ones and is open to all voices from around the world. The editorial team tells us that they love works that convey diverse relationships to place and identity and that are not afraid to experiment with boundaries. They acknowledge the challenges that all writers face, especially writers from marginalised communities, and they encourage writers from all backgrounds to submit work to the journal.
We mentioned also earlier in the program that Gemma Parker is one of the co-founders and managing editors of the Saltbush Review. The other managing editor and co-founder is Lynne Dickens. And here at Emerging Writers, we were delighted with the news that Lynne was recently awarded the Arts South Australia Wakefield Press Unpublished Manuscript Award as part of the South Australian Literary Awards. During our two recordings of the celebration of the Saltbush Review at No Wave, we heard from Gemma Parker. Gemma was a guest on this programme in February 2024 and you can hear our conversation with Gemma about her work on Vision Australia radio podcasts.
There have now been four editions of the Saltbush Review. Each edition has a theme. The inaugural issue in 2021 had the theme of water, which the editorial team described as exemplifying both the traversing of boundaries and a deep connection to place, with all the complexities that are attendant to these actions and affinities. Contributors to the first edition include other past guests on this programme, Jane Turner Goldsmith and Jose Nascari.
The theme for the second issue of the Saltbush Review was land and writing in the first half of 2022, the editorial team observed that our lives are increasingly shaped by the tensions wrought by human assumptions about the natural world, particularly the land, what we think it can give us and what we believe it represents. They go on to say, in the midst of several crises around food security, energy supplies, wars and border disputes, the creative work in the Saltbush Review finds both the ability to critique our tangled relationship with the land and how we exploit it and to explore its beauty, uniqueness and power, both in relation to and beyond the human.
The third issue of the Saltbush Review, which came out in April 2023, had the theme of intersections. The editorial team noted that they were publishing that issue as we were all emerging into a post-pandemic world and finding ourselves re-navigating our relationships with those around us. They write, these include the intersections of culture, nation and identity, urban spaces and the environment, gender and sexuality and the relationships between the past and present. Writing in that issue was drawn from South Australia and across the world. The works included fiction, non-fiction, poetry and reviews tackle a broad range of themes such as dislocation and resilience, historic trauma and its ramifications on the present, the interconnectivity of the human and natural world and the intersections of family life.
The editorial for Issue 3 also notes that the works included are both powerfully political and affective, referencing the intersections of broader injustices and the emotional realities and intimacies of everyday life. They note that the writing itself is characterised by powerful voices, a strength of spirit and a creative and intellectual resilience that speaks to the hardiness of literature and writing communities in the face of many challenges. They add, humour and celebration also find their place, as does hope and the sense that all of our horizons are expanded by honouring intersections.
As we mentioned in last week's program, the theme of the current issue, number 4, is Fracture. The work in this issue, writes the editorial team, tackles their theme of fracture in myriad ways as well as its shadow themes of cohesion, connection and community. This issue includes meditations on family, on loss, on travel, on hurt, on art and on love. You can find all of the Saltbush Review issues at saltbushreview.com. The review contains an incredible wealth of accessible, creative writing.
You've been listening to Emerging Writers. This program 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, as we've said during the program, on earlier episodes. Thanks for listening to this Vision Australia Radio podcast. Don't forget to subscribe on your preferred podcast platform. Visit vairadio .org for more.
Speaker 1 29:12 (THEME)
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