Bye bye summer

A trip back home to Australia

Hello again friends,

Hope that you are enjoying the final days of summer (or winter, if you are on the other side of the world from me).

I’ve been doing a bit of both holidays and work, with some new book reviews out and other news (more on that below) but also, I got to go home to Sydney in July for the first time in two and a half years. The last time I was home was when my mother got diagnosed with cancer and died, during the time when the pandemic was in full swing.

This visit I stayed three weeks, and as always when I go home it is a mix of being both very challenging and connecting/nourishing. When I go back home, it really does feel sometimes as if the years haven’t made that much of a difference and I’m the same person I was growing up.

I wanted to share with you one way that my father has been dealing with his grief over the loss of his life partner. Simply because I think it’s amazing.

In the garden of our family home, he recycled about ten car tyres to make different art projects, mostly around memorialising my mother and our family history.

This is a photo of the tyre my dad made of my mother. They both went swimming everyday at the Sydney Olympic pool, so those are her goggles and swimming cap. The boat she is paddling in is a reference to a poster he made when she was first diagnosed, a drawing of her in a boat paddling, with the family on the bank of the river telling her ‘You can do it’.

This tyre is in reference to the ‘boat people’ who fled Vietnam in 1975. My family were not one of these people, but my Dad feels close to this history for several reasons.

These tyres have the Australian flag and the First Nations flag painted on them. The bottom tyre is a clock, and painted on top of it which you can’t see in the photo is the date of my parent’s marriage and the date of my mother’s passing, as well as the number ‘42’ because that is how many years they were together in this life.

These tyres commemorate the Sydney Olympics in 2000. My dad paid for tickets for all of us in the family to attend the opening ceremony, at about $1,000 each. He said it was a once in a lifetime chance, and we even have photos of us holding the Olympic torch as it made its way to the stadium.

A close-up of the Sydney Opera House tyre, the attention to detail and how he managed to recreate this is incredible.

A snapshot of our garden.

In other news:

I’ve had some recent publications, two short book reviews:

Root and Branch: Essays on Inheritance, by Eda Gunaydin in Meanjin

Our Members Be Unlimited, by Sam Wallman in Meanjin

And, I’m tentatively starting a new project: the Prague Writers Workshop. I’d like to start teaching classes and workshops, as well as bringing people in to teach. I’m going to start with a writing audio drama taster session, more on that soon.

https://praguewritersworkshop.cz/

That’s all for now!

Warmly,

May