I discussed previously my shock at discovering that some enterprising persons were taking out-of-copyright classics and turning them into new publications on Amazon. The example I discussed was a Jack London book, but now I have found any number of classic cookbooks which are appearing on Amazon for sale, in facsimile editions without any mention of who is in fact selling these books. Some are pretty good – the facsimile of AmericanCookery, 1796, which seems to be a Dover book reprinted from a facsimile published by Oxford University Press in 1958 looks at least legible. But recently I paid for a print copy of The English and Australian Cookery Book and when it arrived it was indeed a perfect facsimile but so small it was almost impossible to read at all. Someone – but who? – is making money from these books and there is nobody to complain to about the fact that some at least are virtually useless.
One would think Amazon, who is distributing most of them, should take responsibility for the quality of the books they sell. If it is a hapless indie author who has made some mistakes about which readers complain his account is likely to be suspended. What happens to these legal pirates?
Page 53, “Puddings and Pies”, from The English and Australian Cookbook, 1864, anonymous facsimile edition.
I’ve attached myself to a number of author’s groups lately, a couple on Facebook and some semi-professional commentary services (which you pay for). To my surprise the Facebook groups have been a great source of interest and support, in a strangely tangled way. One of the groups often publishes reports by Amazon authors showing how much money they have made in the past few months while the world goes completely insane. This is amazing but also galling when you realise that what is now selling so hugely is aimed at highly specific genre audiences of which the average literary author would not have heard in a million years. My latest find is Reverse Harem Romance (RHR). Wait a bit and I will write more about it soon. What a discovery!
However this morning – a beautiful cool spring morning in the blossoming Blue Mountains, I started thinking about how the various levels of lockdown and state-mandated or recommended forms of isolation have affected the average writer and reader. Thinking of an image, I recalled Caspar David Friedrich’s famous painting, Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog, 1818, whch seemed to represent exactly the way things seem to be right now. I have used a bit of it in the banner headline above.
Over the next few weeks I thought of writing about this strange reality, the sense of being stranded before an unknown world which swirls upwards and threatens to engulf you even while you are still thinking and working and trying to ignore it.
Certainly working: I am struggling to finish the editing, organisation and fussbudgeting involved in publishing my two books of short stories and the memoir, all in the genre of semi-auto-ethno-fiction. Not to mention the putting together and final editing of two other semi-ethno-factual projects, a cookbook based on Australia history and a personal narrative/collection about the Hawkesbury River, my heartland place.
The intensity of work that has been going on as COVID-19 stretches on and bids fair to hit the twelve month mark (or more) has raised some deeply personal issues about retreat, aloneness, isolation, the loss of family, solitude in loved places, and a state of enthusiastic defiance which says: no, even now, with a horrendous potential death drowning in my own fetid lung juices clearly a possibility, even so, I won’t stop, I won’t stop writing and I won’t stop reading and I hope you won’t either.
The last time I saw my lovely granddaughter Lily Luna was in Melbourne in June 2019, when I took many photographs, none so prescient as the one below, a representation of the future which is now with us, the Melbourne Lockdown. Meanwile Lily is stranded in Thailand with her fiance Alfie and we have no idea when we will see each other again.
I read all kind of books all the time but this one was even more of an outlier than usual. I won’t go into why but I wanted to read the original text of Jack London’s The People of the Abyss, about life in the slums of East London in the early 1900s. Jack London is one of those writers who people over fifty think they might have heard of. His books were mostly published between 1903 and 1914, and are remarkable for being based on the author’s first hand research in the places he wrote about. He is an early populist anthropologist who mostly used his fact for fiction. People loved his sensationalist stories serialised in newspapers and later published as books. Probably his best known is The Call of the Wild (1903). London spent over a year living in the Yukon to research his story. Set during the 1890s Klondike gold rush its central character is a dog named Buck. Buck was stolen from his comfortable home and forced to become a sled dog in Alaska.
First edition cover of The Call of the Wild, New York, Macmillan Company, 1903. cover art by Paul Bransom (1885-1979) or possibly Charles Bull (1874-1932) –
I don’t recall reading this book as a child but it would have been right up my alley. It certainly has echoes in my own novelette Suburban Gigolo, about a cat stolen from his home in Sydney’s Inner West in order to become a Facebook model. Sadly it’s never had the popularity of TheCall of the Wild but you can order it from Amazon.
Remember if you are in Australia you need to order from the amazon.com.au site: see brief extract and link at the end of this post.
I would like to write more about Jack London but that will have to wait. This post is about what I found when I tried to locate The People of the Abyss online. Like TheCall of the Wild it is out of copyright (1923 is the current cut-off) and early editions are rare and expensive. But I thought someone might have rescued it so off to Amazon I went and there I found several editions mostly with el cheapo dodgy covers. Luckily I used the Look Inside feature and discovered that this book which seemed to be Jack London’s was a fake. I think it has been translated from some other language into English by a bot (automated translation program) and some enterprising scammer(s) have put it on sale for around $5.00. It is almost completely unreadable. Here is a sample sentence from near the beginning of the book:
“And they waved their palms vaguely inside the route where the sun on rare activities can be visible to upward thrust”.
Yes, I agree there is a certain beauty and poetic wonder to be had from reading these bot translations. It is another form of emerging literature, perhaps. But that’s not what one expects when paying $5 for a Kindle download of an English-language classic. There is no publisher credited. I then discovered the whole original text is available for free from Project Gutenberg.
I’ve already suggested to Amazon that this book should be taken down at once. It is a horrible misrepresentation of an important original text. If there is any way of checking on these republications of out-of-print works it should be implemented immediately. I imagine Amazon and other e-book publishers/distributors will be flooded by this kind of rip-off as more and more books come out of copyright. In the meanwhile, make sure to check the text before you hit the Pay button.
POSTSCRIPT: (6th June 2020) A couple of days after sending a review notice to Amazon I discovered that the offending text was no longer available there. But there were several other versions and as I started to check them it was apparent that some were also mock-ups or distorted versions of the original text, each issued under a different cover, none credited with publishers. The flood of fakes and distortions makes it almost impossible for a purchaser to know what they are buying.
Buy this version
There is one genuine reproduction of the original text with notes and wonderful photographic illustrations, for $A3.95, and it is a real bargain. Here are a couple of images from the book. Apparently Jack London himself took his own photographs. He was even more of a pioneering ethnographer than I originally imagined.
Locals of East LondonNot sure what this image refers to: needs closer reading/researchTwo drunken women fighting: I am sure this is a staged photoAn engraving – possibly used for a newspaper article based on an original Jack London photograph
As readers will know I have been grappling with several volumes of memoirs over the past few years. Most of my reading has been in the same genre and I’ve written a few reviews of books I have enjoyed (and some I haven’t). However with the current horror show I have been drawn to some other works which seem prescient of what is happening now.
Cover: Happy Land 2020
OJ Modjeska writes narrative non-fiction about horrible things. She is best know for her aircrash book Catastrophe in Paradise and the two-volume study of serial killers the Hillside Stranglers, set in the gritty LA underground. This was the decade where the contemporary horror-show really got started. Here is another gripping true crime account from this highly skilled writer.
OJ Modjeska 2020
A historian and legal scholar, with an uncanny ability to unfold a story and get right into its interstices, Modjeska opens up a more recent yet less familiar world, the bursting energetic immigrant life in the West Bronx in the 1990s. The topic is mass murder, not the familiar lone- gunmen-goes-crazy version but murder-by-arson, a deliberately lit fire aimed at just one woman which resulted in the death of 87 victims in a crowded nightclub. Julio Gonzalez’s target was his ex-girlfriend Lydia Feliciano who had rejected him. She survived, but the rest were collateral damage. This was the largest single-incident death-toll from a single perpetrator in the US up to that time. The victims were from a highly diverse local community, mostly immigrants from Puerto Rico, Honduras, Ecuador and Mexico.
People were poor but life was not all miserable and was certainly better than the grisly oppressions they had left behind. Modjeska summons up the powerful currents throbbing in these often undocumented and hand-to-mouth communities, with their hip-hop and reggae beats, local crafts and homestyle Latin and Carribean food. Thousands flooded into the area and filled the nightclubs where cheap alcoholic drinks were served and the fun went on long after midnight.
One such club was Happy Land, operating in cramped and definitely unsafe premises. But who cared? They were just immigrants, the landlords made plenty, why bother with stupid regulations about fire-safety and evacuation plans? And who could have imagined that a single, unhappy, traumatised Cuban man who had arrived on the Mariel boatlift in 1980 would take this terrifying course in order to kill his ex-girlfriend. Lydia was a middle-aged woman who had formed a strange love relationship with this much younger, insecure and unprepossessing man, and then discovered he was morbidly jealous, soon unemployed, and definitely no fun. Humiliated and enraged by her kicking him out, he took the only revenge that came to his mind.
As always with Modjeska’s highly skilled narrative technique the story unfolds in unexpected ways. It is never a “who-dun-it” because we know the identity of the arsonist right from the beginning. But the “why-did-he-dun-it?” becomes an unwinding of the whole framework of US urban history, of the flight of desperate people from the failed states of the South, of their uneasy occupation of decaying urban areas and the toleration afforded by the dominant powers towards their presence, as long as the only people they harm are themselves. It is an interrogation of the Two Americas, the uneasy accommodation developed between those who are marginal to the dominant narrative, the profound disconnect between everyday life in the immigrant ghettos and the dislocations that result.
Low income and marginal people are the most vulnerable. Unsafe buildings, appalling physical conditions, dangerous constructions, poor implementation of regulations: all these are the lot of the drifting immigrant populations embedded in rich urban cities especially in “free market” economies. They risk disaster because they don’t have funds, resources or civic recognition.
As is the case especially with her Hillside Strangler books, Modjeska depicts the inner life of the perp, a weak and fearful man unsure of his masculinity and desperate to keep “his woman” in a society where men’s ownership of women was no longer absolute and where women had enough power of their own to make their own complicated but definite decisions.
Modjeska’s great skill is to bring the reader into a sense of deep connection with the time and place when the crimes she discusses are committed. This is rare in popular true crime ficition. In the case of Happy Land, we learn not only what caused the murderous fire, but what happened afterwards.
Rapid gentrification has pushed more and more of the immigrant communities out of familiar spaces and into even worse conditions. Homelessness is obviously one of them. Now even the South Bronx is being bought up by wealthy white professionals, and the places left for the immigrant communities to go are dwindling.
Reading Happy Land is like being introduced to a whole era of recent American life through the desperate actions of one distraught man and his personal struggles which illuminate a far bigger whole. From scattered journalistic and some epidemiological reports it seems these are among the people being worse affected by the Virus at least in New York. The implications are really horrific.
One always learns so much from Modjeska’s books, and they open up questions about this rapidly emerging horror-show society which one day soon must surely be faced. I wrote this review a week or so ago (end of May 2020). Unbelievably and suddenly, America is facing these questions in the most terrifying way imaginable, today, now, in early June.
Uncanny Valley: a Memoir. Anna Wiener. Farrer, Straus and Giroux. New York, 2020.
I’ve been trawling through the world of memoir for several years now, with degrees of determination. I’ve written a lot about it in various posts on this blog. I have issues around “truth”, pretence and ethics. So many novels are memoirs in disguise. I love the sense of unvarnished, or at least only once coated, reality that comes with an honest-to-goodness memoir, as far as that can ever really exist. This feels like one. So unexpected, so immediate, so funny, so intelligent, so scary. Yes, sure, names have been changed … places disguised … the usual drill. But the feeling is real.
It’s strange how some books seem to get a buzz right away, you don’t know where it comes from or how it has reached you but there it is, and my favourite New York literary magazine says to click if you want a special deal so you click and a very short time later in the Blue Mountains near Sydney (late ravaged with fire, flood, storm, power and phone outages – we struggle to survive as if in some archaic era) you open a parcel and there is this book, so beautifully produced in pale blue hardback, a sensational cover with raised embossing, you can’t stop touching it, title and author’s name look as if they have been stuck on with labelling tape and you open it and you CANNOT PUT IT DOWN. (Note however there is a hardback edition with a truly horrible cover, don’t bother buying that one! See below)
This is even stranger when you realize what it is about. OK, it’s a memoir about a woman living her life today, right now, she is in her twenties and young and gorgeous, she should be having it all but it turns out her world is every bit as bizarre as the neo-Jurassic which seems to be enfolding us at an ever- increasing rate. And although you would think someone like me would have nothing in common with her, in fact she conveys so wonderfully what it is like to be in a world which itself does not exist, the same fantasmagoria I and thousands, millions, of others have been experiencing for some time and suspect might be one of the main reasons why everything is so decisively ****** up.
So she starts her story as a publishing assistant in New York, a familiar territory even if you have never been there. If you watch a lot of streaming TV you will recognize it from Younger, the show about an “old woman” of forty who tries to pass herself off as a groovy literary publishing assistant in her twenties. I loved that show, at least until it got unbearably soppy, but I love this book a lot more and it would make a far better TV series. Although turns out there is a TV series called Silicon Valley, but I haven’t seen it so don’t know how the two would compare. It was released in 2014, a comedy about a bunch of young guys who go into a tech start-up. Sound familiar?
She likes her New York publishing life just fine, but the writing (“ha-ha”) is on the wall, the wheels are coming off, and the entity she refers to as an online superstore is, by the early 2010s, destroying the existing publishing industry. She avoids ever mentioning a “brand name” throughout this book. I guess that’s to avoid being sued. But we know exactly who she is talking about. Anyway, like all humanist literary types she loathes the very thought of that entity as well as the anonymous other tech giants which have taken over our lives and expresses indignation about it to all her right-on friends like everyone in Australia still does. Meanwhile many of her former friends and schoolmates were making their first millions, hiring wealth advisers and taking out time-shares in Bali.
Something happened to her, mainly being broke. So, hopeful but ignorant, she joined a new e-book start-up based in a loft in NYC. With woefully little knowledge or experience, she became a “techie”. It didn’t work out. It was 2015. Various people told her to go to San Francisco, where she had friends. She didn’t know they too were struggling with the late-capitalist hellscape, rents were spiking, dating websites were flooded with business-management guides and heterosexual digital marketers shared their existential philosophies. Strangely, she was hired by a data-analytics start-up in a customer-support position even thought she had absolutely no background in data-analytics. The main reason they hired her seems to be that she read books, which none of them ever did
This is an auto-ethnography of start-up culture through the brilliant, funny, candid, intelligent gaze of a remarkable young woman. You don’t need to hear the whole story. Well, you do, but buy the book. You can get it on Kindle and in paperback from the US but this is one book I think is really worth buying in hard-back, it just feels so nice to touch and the print is lovely too. It’s what a book used to be. Try to find it in the original cover. The other cover, all red and purple squiggles, is unredeemably naff, which is what you get from the Amazon Australia site (see below).
Check out the various offers. Book Depository seems the best. Angus and Robertson for some unknown reason wants $47.75 for it. I will never understand the logic of book pricing in Australia these days or how it is that international publishing has reverted to an almost identical version of everything the tech revolution was supposed to disrupt. [‘Disruption’ is a big thing in Anna Wiener’s book, everything is supposed to be directed toward it, including camp-ground booking arrangements in US national parks].
This is a gripping tale of a young woman’s adventures in employment, twenty-first century style. It’s not just her story, it’s the story of a generation, of a cultural shift, of the tentacles of invisible industries we can hardly imagine spreading out across the cyberworld and dragging everything into their maw. Of a lifestyle with no people in it, or hardly any. A world where young women earn spectacular salaries and bonuses but spend an awful lot of their time drinking tequila shots and wondering about the current Insta algorithms.
Anna Wiener is a contributing writer for The New Yorker. She has also written for n+1, my favourite magazine, as well as The Atlantic. She still lives in San Francisco. I long to know what she is doing now. I hope she is writing more books. I don’t care if they are memoirs, biographies, essays, short stories. This is a voice so worth hearing and here is a writer engaging with what books can should and ought to be as she drags us with power and humour into the rest of this zany crazy probably insane and possibly terminal century.
The new technologies of communication were supposed to open the literary landscape to everything and make all things possible, but instead the world of writing/reading has been sinking ever deeper into a bog or maybe it’s a quicksand. There needs to be a new way of reading and writing, assuming there is still time in this bizarre and quite possibly doomed century.
Not so long ago I assumed that soon writers and readers would be able to meet each other wherever they chose, around whatever books they preferred. Independent publishing seemed to open up the possibility that everyone could be an author and every reader could find a book (and author) they liked and could afford. Books would become easy and fast to produce. Gatekeepers and cultural brokers from identical backgrounds would no longer determine what was published. To some extent a bit of this vision has come true, but far less than what might have been. The infinite potential of the new technologies has been squandered and a new two-tier publishing world has emerged.
The two publishing worlds have accommodated one another. The Trad Pubs have happily regrouped and concentrated themselves into mega-corporate enterprises, swallowing up small publishers like sardines, cramming writing once again into little boxes marked by gatekeepers ever more vigilant and responsive to the needs of their local ecosystem with its critics, fashions and fame. The so-called “Indies” are dominated by rules and expectations in part set by the publishing industry itself, requiring ever-greater expenditure on processes which independent authors once expected to do themselves.
Many books are no longer even written by their authors. Professional writers do what used to be called “the writing”. Editors do the rest. The degree of uniformity is astonishing. Sentences have shrunk to the minimum. Subordinate clauses have gone to the woodshed. The semi-colon and colon have largely been outlawed. Nobody would ever publish footnotes in a fictional book, or include photos unrelated to the text. In most cases there are hardly any photos at all, even in autobiographies and biographies. Copyright law makes sure song lyrics or poems by someone else cannot be included in a book. Content editors make sure the text conforms to specific “arcs”. Everyone expects three acts and a “hero” protagonist. Writers who still want to author their own books are enjoined to go to courses and learn to write so every book in each genre is as far as possible the same as every other one, apart from title and author name. Cover art, even font-styles, converge around genre expectations.
In Trad Pub the global space is once again divided up into “territories” defined by nation-states. What should have been a free flow of ideas and exchanges across an open planet has fallen into a morass of dot com suffixes with financial consequences attached. Trad Pub still pretends to be terrified of Indie, but it shouldn’t be, because Indie has been more and more mimicking Trad Pub and Trad Pub is making good profits from selling in the online market. Court cases secured publishers’ rights to set absurdly high prices for ebooks while Indie writers continue to destroy their own viability by setting lower and lower prices and indeed give a lot of their writing away for free.
Trad Pub retains the aura of superiority in cultural value. Literary writing conforms to certain expectations about ideology and positioning. Certain themes are “big”, especially if they are to do with those who are ‘Other’ to the publishing enterprise itself. It is sustained by hordes of English majors and over-educated humanities people willing to work for miniscule wages for the privilege of serving the interests of these grossly inflated transnational companies. Some books are mired in complex moral issues, most recently the question of cultural appropriation, when mostly white members of the cultural majority try to write about the experiences of the “less fortunate”. But in truth most of these books, whether worthy or unworthy, are being supported by the publication of one or two or three blockbusters every year from famous authors. If the books can be sold into movie markets or developed for long-form TV series then their success is assured via the feedback loop between viewing and reading.
In the Indie world, genre is King, Queen, Bishop, Knight and Deity. Editors, cover-designers, blurbists and the rest ensure that writers conform to the genre. If you write one book in that genre then woe betide you it you don’t write a series of others, with matching title livery and often the same characters. This is popular mass-market writing, everyone agrees, and there is no room for literary fancies or trans-genre mucking around. In Trad Pub they only want one book a year from their writers, if that, but in Indieland they want two, three, four or more one after the other. Mass production for a mass readership. Now readers don’t even want to read. The big thing is audiobooks so readers become listeners, mainly because the level of literacy in the general population has fallen so low.
Where is writing outside the norm? The most encouraging signs come from small local independent publishers who find all kinds of new (and old) writing worthy of publishing. It is fortunate that many writers can get back their rights to their own works from publishers who have gone out of business, or whose contracts were limited. The new publishing technologies mean these books, long unheard of and forgotten, can be republished and brought to new readers. But what about the countless writers who want to do something different but are being railroaded into the latest trends via K-Lytics and feel obliged to write shape-shifter romances featuring panthers, lions and mongoose (mongeese?) There needs to be a space where they can be published even if they aren’t going to score on the peculiar algorithms used by Amazon and the rest. Books used to appeal to small groups of readers. People didn’t expect to make $50,000 a year or more by writing pot-boilers, although now it seems to be a career path. But it’s all about money and ranking these days, whether Trad or Indie.
Meanwhile I am pushing onwards trying to find some path between the two even though I increasingly think it’s a truly thankless venture.
When I began to think about the cover for Revolutionary Baby the poster image by Nina Vatolina came to mind. I knew this image but I couldn’t recall where I had seen it. I thought it could be modified easily with title and author information inserted where the Russian text was. It was easy to find via the Big G. It is in the Tate Modern collection, under the following title:
Fascism – The Most Evil Enemy of Women. Everyone to the Struggle Against Fascism, August 1941; Nina Vatolina 1915-2002; DK0029
Nina Vatolina’s original poster: Fascism: the Most Evil Enemy of Women, 1941.
This powerful image appears all over the Internet and has already been used for the cover of one published book and I naively assumed it would be copyright free. However this was not so. The image is available for purchase from the Tate which has access to it on licence. Reproduction rights are subject to the usual requirements including payment for the use of a high quality image provided by the Tate. However, the Tate itself does not hold full copyright, only the licence to reproduce the image. The picture itself is subject to the artists own artistic copyright. The situation was investigated by Chris Suthens of the Tate and I would like to thank him for his helpful advice (below, email of July 24th 2019).
I can let you know that the reproduction fee to include the Tate photography DK0029 on the front cover of a single printed edition, plus electronic use on the cover of a parallel e-book edition, world rights, English language, available on demand up to a total combined unit run of 5,000 copies/downloads will be £229.
If you find these terms agreeable and wish to go ahead please do let me know, confirming the name and address to be included on your invoice/licence and I shall send it over as soon as possible?
I’ll then be able to supply the hi res file as soon as payment is received.
I must mention that Nina Vatolina’s work is also still subject to her artistic copyright so you would need to obtain additional permission from the artist’s estate or their representatives. Unfortunately we haven’t been able to locate any contact details available for us to pass on so Tate’s own use has been on a risk management basis. We are happy to proceed and license the reproduction of the Tate image file though must stress that it would be the responsibility of yourselves to ensure that you have made every effort to identify and contact the artistic rights holders where possible and on the understanding that the use in relation to the artistic copyright would be at your risk. In the very unlikely event of a holder coming forward you may need to be able to demonstrate that due diligence has been conducted.
So even if I paid the required fee to the Tate to reuse the image, with my own modifications, I would still be in potential breach of the artist’s own copyright. But without being able to read and write Russian, and/or go to Russia to investigate who might be the holders of her estate, it is impossible to be sure that copyright requirements have been met.
How mad is this? I am sure Nina Vatolina, a sincere and committed Communist, would find it completely bizarre that nobody is now able to reproduce her art-work in any form without paying a fee to an August British art institution in the heartland of Western capitalism. I am grateful that the Tate does hold reproducible images of art works, don’t get me wrong, but I don’t think it would be in the spirit of Nina’s ideological or political thought that her work cannot be shared by others.
So I abandoned all idea of using this image and commissioned my Mexico-based illustrator Keith Johnson [Keith Draws] to create something for me. In the event, he created the cover for the second volume of stories, RadiantSands, at the same time, and many thanks to him for his great work.
Meanwhile, though, I became fascinated by the situation of Communist artists such as Nina Vatolina, and did some additional research on the subject, shortly to appear on my art-writing site https://annette-hamilton-art-writing.com
Just as a taste, here is one of her poster illustrations featuring Stalin.
Nina Vatolina: Grandpa Stalin brings Christmas gifts to the children of Mother Russia: lovely bombs and warplanes!
So I think this is the final edit. The whole manuscript is printed and I am about to get into it with a red pen. I couldn’t say how many edits it has had, that is not a meaningful question. I edit all the time as I go along, and I try to keep a version in my files periodically in case I need to go back. I can see why people employ an editor, if only because it costs so much money and you wouldn’t want to mess around with something that already has had so much expensive attention. Maybe I’ll reconsider my position on editors. But every time I have had an editor whether for creative or factual writing they make changes according to some inexplicable principles of their own. I am very aware that all of my stories in Revolutionary Baby use different narrative voices which do not convert into standard grammar, in some cases (as in the voice of one of my young hippies from the Northern Rivers) very far from it. But it is how my characters think, as far as I can write it. It is not a mistake or the product of grammatical infelicity even though grammar checkers don’t like it. Does it work? I am trying to inhabit each of my main characters in their own worlds, and each of their worlds are very different. I guess I will know more when I’ve read all of the stories together while wielding the red pen.
So after weeks of stifling heat, many days over 40 Celsius (104 F), ravaging bushfires, impenetrable smoke, unavoidable dust and ash inhalation causing nausea and headaches, constant obsessive anxiety looking at bushfire maps and a state of acute mourning for the losses, especially the wildlife, we now have buckets of rain, floods, drinking-water fears and blackouts. But there you are, dear friends, this is Australia and here we are and we love it (even though a lot of people have been talking about migrating to New Zealand).
The first sign of the Ruined Castle fire near Katoomba, 3 December 2019: it burnt out 40,000 hectares over the next seven weeks and was not put out finally until 5th February 2020. Photo A. Hamilton.
So as you might gather this was not great for the writing. In fact, I stopped writing altogether. Even my red daily diaries, which I have been assiduously adding to for over two years now, still rest untouched on the bookcase. I wanted to write about how this summer felt, but I just couldn’t. It was too awful, too terrifying yet somehow also familiar. We have been told for years now that the world will end in a conflagration, well here it was and it was right on our doorstep.
The red skies, the relentless approach, flames leaping, everything alight
You have to start asking why you would write at all. If the world is perilously close to a terminal phase, what good is writing? What good are books? If you saw that movie The Day After Tomorrow that scene in the New York Public Library will no doubt be burnished into your synapses: the brave survivors holed up inside tearing up the entire contents of the library, all the world’s books which could at least keep them warm. One old guy was trying to keep the Gutenberg Bible intact, as I recall, but the rest of it was just good for fuel.
What books are really good for … The Day After Tomrrow.
My writing associate Obelia is now completely convinced that are now only a couple of decades left. She stopped writing as well.
But time passes and in spite of doubts and fears I really have to produce the books I have been working on for so long now. In the next couple of months I have plans to see at least two or maybe three of the front-runners hit the deck. The two volumes of short stories and the memoir are pretty much ready to go. So stand by for some more advance notice: covers are done and all that remains is the playing with Vellum which I hope will allow me to pull them all together very quickly.
Another thing I have done over this horror summer is read a number of very interesting memoirs (loosely identified) and I am going to write a little about them, not so much reviews as reflections on the thoughts and feelings they created as I read them in this heightened state of alarm and anxiety, pushing me once again up against the complex questions about what memoir writing really is and can do, and where is the Real in writing.
I posted this on my site for my children’s book The Priceless Princess (thepricelesspricess.com) which is about the need for protection for wild creatures and their natural homes. Although the Kingdom of Hullabaloo is an imaginary place, the creatures who live there are Australian – snakes, owls, bilbies, crocodiles and others. Because the present situation is so dire I want to write more about habitat and wildlife protection and thought I would start a thread of posts here about it, since it has been such an important part of my life and writing.
The horrifying bushfires across many parts of Australia in 2019 (and it’s hardly even summer yet) are a dreadful reminder of how vulnerable our amazing wildlife is to the changes happening all over the continent. We must never forget how extraordinary Australia is. Isolated from evolutionary pressures which created the creatures of Europe and Asia (and much of the Americas) life here was able to sustain itself in so many unique and wonderful forms, which do not exist anywhere else in the known universe. Yet uncontrolled population growth, land clearing, forest destruction and “development” have affected all but the most remote parts of the country. Now climate change is creating wildfires which are ripping through what used to be wet rainforests and across national parks, annihilating whole populations of animals, birds and plants in its path.
After the bushfires, people reported hearing the utterly horrendous sounds of burnt creatures, crying out, abandoned to their agony. Great efforts are being made to find and save burnt koalas from their rare bushland habitats, and people have given generously to the Koala Hospital. You can visit their website here. Donations are still being received by the Hospital, which hopes to use the funds for a long-term survival and support program. If you can help, go to the donation page.
Photograph from News.com.au
But it is a drop in the bucket. As the heat increases, the land and plants dry out, and fires are uncontainable. What is worse is that some are deliberately lit. It is awful that people lose their homes and possessions, some even lose their lives, but consider the fate of the animals and birds abandoned in the midst of raging fires which nobody even tries to contain, since all their efforts are directed at helping the human victims. Steps must be taken to develop better fire retardants, and to be able to deliver them in bushland areas as soon as any fire is detected, instead of waiting until the fires are completely out of control and approaching “inhabited” areas. The bushland is inhabited too! Please help raise awareness of the impact of climate change on our wildlife, and try to find ways to help in whatever way you can.
Governments and industry are in some places trying to work towards helping avoid the apocalyptic scenarios we are so rightly afraid of. Anyone caught anywhere near the bushfires in Eastern Australia recently will know just how totally terrifying these fires are, beyond anything people have lived through in the past. There are so many reasons for this, but the main one has to be the reliance on fossil fuels and the entire economic system with its remorseless demand for “growth” and ever-greater levels of consumption. It may well be too late to avoid some pretty catastrophic outcomes in the next twenty or so years, but every effort should be made to do whatever we can to change things. But some governments appear completely unable to even see the problem. Some prominent people simply deny there IS a problem! While I care about people, I care as much (sometimes more) about the wild creatures we share this planet with, rare and amazing survivors through countless aeons. How dare we paltry humans, who have only been around for 200,000 years or so, threaten the existence of life forms already millions of years old!
If you care about the survival of wild creatures under this threatened planetary catastrophe, find ways to let people know and do something about it. Write letters, join with others, help rescue and care for injured wildlife, leave water out for animals and birds in the horribly hot weather, consider what you are doing and how you are living, and ask whether you are entitled to exist at the expense of all other forms of natural life on the planet. Get ready for change, which is coming, and try to find ways to sustain the life of the dear creatures we share our existence with.
Annette Hamilton - Writer 