My Journal:

August 2009

I'm writing this month's journal from Perth, in Western Australia. I arrived here 2 weeks ago, from sunny, warm Queensland to wet rainy, wintery Perth.

The idea of this trip was to stay and work with a friend on our respective manuscripts, as well as reading and commenting on each other's work. We've done that most days, with the first week purely work; I think we went out once, and that was for the dog to take us for a walk. Literally. He has to have two leads attached to his collar else he pulls his walker off their feet. At one stage, Margaret dropped her lead and it was only thanks to a handy fence that I held onto that I wasn't felled!

On Saturday 22nd August, I spent a lovely morning at the Peter Cowan Writers Centre, acting as facilitator for their Saturday morning prose group. What a great variety of stories [and one poem] came out of these lines from Henry Lawson's Poem, 'Over the Ranges and into the West. "When your money is low and your luck has gone down, there's no place so lone as the streets of a town."

I travelled from Guildford to Joondalup by train, and then walked to the campus of ECU. I lived in that area for 11 years, leaving there 9 years ago, and it was exciting to see the changes that have taken place over that time. When I first moved to Joondalup, there was a small collection of houses - one of which we bought -, the Wanneroo Hospital [now Joondalup Hospital], a little shop across the road from the hospital, and a private school. A few years after we moved into our home there, things began to change;the bush that I walked through was cut down and the Arena was erected, stage one of the shopping centre was completed, the railway line was built, and the freeway extended. Houses sprang up everywhere, the courthouse was built, the police station, and then the campus of Edith Cowan University. Now, of course, Joondalup is a thriving city, with the shopping centre more than tripled in size, more houses and shops, and the Police Academy and TAFE.

The weather hasn't been kind, but that's okay; it's so long since I saw rain that it's a novelty. I would prefer it to be Queensland rain though - warm instead of cold. On Sunday 23rd a couple of friends took me to Mandurah. I'd been there many times before, but never by train, the line having been put in only recently. Of course, we picked the coldest and windiest day - 17degrees tops - and froze down by the water, but it was nice to revisit a place that holds nice memories.

Margaret organised a lunch here at her home for friends to come and catch up with me. Our first guest arrived at 11.30am and we waved them all farewell at almost 5pm - a lovely day, especially when they surprised me with a birthday cake. Two days later, I lunched with another writer friend, followed by dinner that night with another. I think it might be a good idea if I walk home, rather than fly, in order to get rid of some of the pud I've added to my middle since I arrived here!

Margaret's manuscript - a factional piece about the women of her family, her forebears, who came here during settlement days - is completed; all it needs now is its final polish and it will be ready for publication. It's a huge 200,000 word piece that I found unputdownable and I'm looking forward to seeing it in print. She's of a mind to self-publish because she doesn't want to lose control of it as she would with a publishing house. At lunch on Wednesday, we all put on our thinking caps, trying to come up with a title, but of course it was the author herself who finally realised that she had an obvious one all along - Forget-me-not. So watch for it in a bookstore near you sometimes next year.

A friend of Margaret's suggested that if I came back next year, I might consider house-sitting for her. She goes away for 10 weeks every year, teaching up in Derby for a term. I'd like to do that but only if she makes it during the warmer months, say October to early December. I do seem to get more writing done when I am away from home and all the usual distractions.

My own work has progressed and I'm now up to about 75,000 words. I figure that I'm about 2/3rds of the way through my story. This draft will be for family only but from the whole, I'm hoping to use some of the events of my life to build a fictional story around. If that works, I have enough material for many such novels. Margaret has read what I have written so far, and without me telling her my thoughts, came up with the same idea - she thinks I have a lot of 'meat' in my life story, enough to fuel a series of books around one central character, using third person pov. I know that there will be many things to take up my time when I return home, but if I can get the bare bones down before I come back here next year, I might be well on my way to a novel. Here's hoping.

My daughter, Michelle, and her husband, who has been travelling around Australia, are back in Queensland. They got as far as a central coastal town and decided that they loved the area. They are going to stay there for 6 months to see if it is where they want to settle. Shell rang me a few days ago, to say that her dog, Luke, had not been well. He'd been ill in South Australia and a vet there had diagnosed a slight infection, which was treated with antibiotics, but Shell thought he was not improved, that he was not himself, although she couldn't put her finger on what was wrong. Then he began to have trouble walking so she took him to a vet in Qld and X-rays were taken. They found a tumour alongside his spine. An appointment was made with a surgeon in Brisbane and Shelly drove down last Thursday; by that time Luke could not walk and she had to carry him to the car. A cat scan revealed that the tumour was right through the spine, wrapped around the cord. There was nothing to be done and Luke died on Friday. I can't believe how upset we all are about this, Shelly of course, my other daughter, Ilana and me. Even Michelle's husband of 3 years, who hadn't known him long, is upset. Luke was a staffy, 12 years old at the end of the year. Shelly had had him since he was six weeks old and he was like one of the family, more a person than a dog.