To see in the New Year, I’ve been reading the marvellous and thought-provoking memoir by Tim Winton: The boy behind the curtain. Am particularly enjoying his muscular descriptive passages that bring the Aussie landscape to life, such as driving across the Nullarbor Plain:
‘That morning I drove past salt pans and vast eucalyptus woodlands into monochrome treelessness. The overcast sky spilled to earth, its blotchy greys hard to distinguish from the cloudy puffs of knee-high scrub stretching windblown and insubstantial to the horizon. The gunmetal two-lane ribboned out changeless until the afternoon surprise of Madura Pass when there was a sudden decline as the Hampton Tableland gave way to the hypnotic Roe Plains. Down on the flats it was all sky. It was like travelling across the seabed, which is more or less what that land is. Everything looked scoured, as if one giant swell had just receded and another was about to come surging in. The only thing separating me from Elsewhere, it felt, was this low, dun-coloured shelf I was pelting across. I drove until I ran out of daylight and when I climbed down onto the dirt I felt stoned.’
door. I am deep in the machinery of my wits. Reluctantly I rise, I answer the phone or I open the door. And the thought which I had in hand, or almost in hand, is gone. Creative work needs solitude. It needs concentration, without interruptions. It needs the whole sky to fly in, and no eye watching until it comes to that certainty which it aspires to, but does not necessarily have at once. Privacy, then. A place apart — to pace, to chew pencils, to scribble and erase and scribble again.
open in terms of ideas. She is grieving the sudden death of her father, and weaves this into her journey with the hawk, so it’s not just a nature story, and it’s more than a grief memoir. I would highly recommend anybody who is interested in writing about their own life to read it, and see how Macdonald has used language and anecdote to tell her story.
nd organic forms, viruses, birds and so on, usually benign – and the other type, such as triangles and diamonds, is geometrical and decorative … I don’t have to wonder what on earth I will use as the starting point for a painting I lay out my stored-up fund of doodles and select the one my Old Brain is in the mood to commune with.”
not just to do the creating, but to learn the craft.”
why I’m me, I don’t know why I do the things I do. I don’t even know whether my writing is a way of figuring it out. I think that it’s inevitable, you learn more about yourself the more you write, but that’s not the purpose of writing. I don’t write to find out more about myself. I write because it amuses me.”