Journal: 115
Omar Sakr is a thirty-ish, bi-sexual poet and writer “born in Western Sydney to Lebanese and Turkish Muslim migrants” (website). The protagonist of Son of Sin (2022), Jamal, is a young queer Muslim man born in working class western Sydney to Lebanese and Turkish migrant parents.
The obvious comparison of course is with (middle class Melbournian) Christos Tsiolkas. Son of Sin, apart from being a good book in its own right, sits somewhere between Loaded and Dead Europe. Without the drug culture, but navigating Jamal coming to accept his own homosexuality without being ‘out’ to his schoolfriends and family, in Sydney, and for a while, in Turkey.
That’s about as far as I got before a trip came up, up the coast then inland to Paraburdoo. Even before I unloaded Saturday, Dragan was on the phone wanting me home to do a job for him.
Then Sunday, he was frantic. Trucks had broken down, trailers were sitting in the yard loaded. As I got nearer, I offered to drop my trailers home and run up to Geraldton where one road train had been abandoned, en route to Onslow. In the end he decided I should hook up two trailers Monday morning from the depot and take them up to Nullagine, so I got to spend Sun night at home.
Right now, it’s Tues afternoon and I’m in the (airconditioned) lounge at Capi (Capricorn Roadhouse, Newman), just short of the turn-off to Nullagine and Marble Bar. I’m due at a mine near Nullagine tomorrow morning, but what I haven’t said yet is that trucks don’t use the Newman – Marble Bar road, it is quite simply too rough. In the last few years it has been bitumened to Roy Hill – a famous cattle station, now an iron ore mine, 110 kms north, but the next 200 kms are barely driveable. Trucks coming up from Perth to Marble Bar and the mines beyond, out in the Great Sandy Desert: Telfer, Woodie Woodie, Nifty, go the long way, via Port Hedland, an extra 400 kms.
Dragan is paying me well, I just hope I can drive carefully enough, once it is light tomorrow morning, to make it worthwhile, without my newly repaired truck shaking to pieces.
In Paraburdoo waiting to be escorted in to unload, I was parked next to a very shiny truck. I hope I at least look like I’ve been through a truck wash recently (I had).
Last trip, I was happy to get done and invoiced – only the second for the year, which was why Dragan found me receptive – and the reconditioned gearbox sounds beautiful, completely silent. It’s amazing to realise how noisy it had got before it failed. I did have my problems. It’s very hot up north, constantly in the 40s, and I blew two tyres. Also, my CD player failed, mid-story (and the mouse has failed on my laptop – I hope it comes back).
I switched to Audible and listened to Stasiland, which was just ok. I get that the surveillance state was extreme, but I would like to see more acknowledgement that the welfare state was appreciated and that if socialist nations weren’t so constantly under attack from the US they would probably work very well.
At home I put some stories onto a USB stick, and so far I have listened to The Turn of the Screw and the beginning of Larissa Behrendt’s After Story.
That’s not much, I know. From Nullagine I’m going on to Port Hedland to load home, which I might reach next Saturday.
Sun. 3 Mar. I’m home. Got home Fri night to a surprise long weekend (and Milly’s flat full of multiple generations of children), so I’ll be unloading Tues, and going again Fri, touch wood. No problems on the Marble Bar road – if you don’t count the battery isolator temporarily closing down the lights and engine; and the grille falling off – the truck behind me blew a steer tyre; and I blew a trailer tyre on the highway home, hardly unexpected after constant 40 deg days and high 30 nights.
Recent audiobooks
Kathleen Alcott (F, USA), Infinite Home (2015)
Inger Ashe Wolfe (F, Can), The Taken (2009)
Amanda Bestor-Siegal (F, USA), The Caretakers (2022)
Anna Funder (F, Aust/Vic), Stasiland (2002)
Larissa Behrendt (F, Aust/NSW), After Story (2021)
Currently Reading
Charlotte Perkins Gilman (F, USA), The Yellow Wallpaper (1892)
Louisa M Alcott (F, USA), Rose in Bloom (1876)
PC Wren (M, Eng), Worth Wile (1937)
AWWC Feb 2024
| Date | Contributor | Title |
| Wed 7 | Elizabeth Lhuede | Alys Hungerford, Two simple letters (short fiction) |
| Wed 14 | Bill Holloway | Elizabeth Macarthur |
| Wed 21 | Jennifer Cameron-Smith | Eleanor Dark, Timeless Land trilogy (review) |
| Wed 28 | Whispering Gums | Kate Helen Weston, an “inky-wayfarer” |
The Australian Legend 
Glad the new gearbox has made a difference and that it survived the rough road.
We like to travel on B and C roads when we can on holidays – Tasmania has lots of them, but only some of the C roads are sealed the whole way (which they never tell you about and it’s not marked on the maps!) so our little hire car has had a good work out this month!
One of my colleagues is a huge fan of Sakr, so I hope you get to finish it.
LikeLike
I finished the book, I just didn’t finish the review. I probably even had time but I couldn’t think of much to say about it – Muslim, working class coming of age; interesting use of Arabic phrases, often without explanation; not poetic; gay sex (too much explicit gay sex); I really like non-Anglo Australian stories and this one is well done.
Newman-Marble Bar is definitely a D road. It took me four hours to do 130 km and by some miracle the load didn’t fall off; I didn’t lose a tyre (I’ve just had a message to say my mate did a steer tyre); something fell against my battery isolator and shut the truck down, engine and lights, just before dawn, but that was soon fixed.
LikeLiked by 1 person
I know how that is!!
LikeLike
Do hope everything is moving steadily away from chao toward calm and that the pay makes it all worthwhile. Thankfully you have some backup reading to make up for the equipment failure. (But better have your listening interrupted than truck problems of course.)
Son of Sin sounds interesting. Also sounds like a perfume/cologne name, somehow!
LikeLike
I hope you tell me how Infinite Home ends, I was finding it quite interesting – pleasant, quiet interactions (Please: no one else tell me in case Marcie hasn’t got to the end yet).
Son of Sin is a transliteration of a phrase from the Qur’an I think. I think it would be a very sweaty boy perfume.
LikeLike
If you can resume listening when your player is fixed, you’ll finish before I begin. It’s in the Toronto system but, from here, I will have to ILL (which is a slow process just now). Thanks for the preemptive spoiler-warning though. 🙂
Oh, yes, def. Quite a market for those I’m guessing. lol
LikeLike
For as much as your stuff broke down, I would think your truck was haunted. It is interesting how we become accustomed to loud noises. It’s sort of like when you’re happily listening to your favorite band in the car. You get out, go into the store, get back in, turn the car back on, and nearly brown you pants for how loud the music is, which is still exactly where you left it when you got out of the car.
LikeLike
Thats always a shock, to hop back in the car when you’ve had the radio up loud. For some reason, I only do it late at night, with the window open – which is noisy enough on its own.
The truck’s not haunted, not yet. I’ve had a very good run on average over the last six years
LikeLike
Yep, see, in horror movies 7 is always a bad number. You didn’t get a phone call from a little Japanese girl saying, “Seven days,” did you?
LikeLike
I get unsolicited sales calls, from unlisted numbers, from women who are more likely Chinese or SE Asian than Japanese. I always try and hang up before they get to ‘7’.
LikeLike
You clearly updated this after you posted it? Anyhow, sorry for the delay in replying. I had this post open on my laptop to read a few days ago, and then somehow got distracted and thought I’d already commented. I hadn’t.
I believe I have eaten at that Newman Roadhouse – for a change of scenery when I was going to Newman to work around 2008-2010.
Love your GGD – what big alert eyes.
Do you really think “that if socialist nations weren’t so constantly under attack from the US they would probably work very well”. I would like to think so but I am too cynical about human nature now – unlike in my teens and twenties – to believe it could ever work.
Oh, but this novel sounds interesting. I really need to read more Western Sydney writing. I have bought Kassab’s Politica but when will I read it?
LikeLike
I thought I would get something out on Tues while I had a couple of hours up my sleeve, and the end of the month could wait till I got home.
Now it’s our labour day weekend, all my family are at Milly’s as am I, so still only minimal blogging.
GGD is very peaceful and lies and gurgles on me whenever I am given a turn.
I do really think … The US has been desperately ‘proving’ socialism doesn’t work since 1917, and it has been one of the greatest shames of our time. Look at Cuba, Iran, Nicaragua, Chile, the Whitlam govt, the list goes on and on and on.
West Sydney is an entirely different city to the much smaller (and richer) Sydney (NJ to Manhattan maybe) and we should discuss it that way.
LikeLike
I’ll have to analyse history a bit more – but right now, I’m still sceptical albeit the US clearly has a huge fear of socialism (and its apparent rejection of the individual that they revere).
Fair point re Western Sydney.
LikeLike