Journal: 047
I love writing, the way words appear almost unbidden on the page making phrases I didn’t know I was thinking. Sometimes when the words are flowing I amaze myself. I had an editor friend who said to me one day when I had written something prosaic, why don’t you write that other way, and the answer is because I don’t know when it is going to happen, it just happens.
The reason I write Journals is so I can keep writing without the discipline of waiting till I’ve researched a review. I write letters. I enjoy schoolwork. And yet I have never considered writing a book. Well not until now. I’m twenty words in, I wonder how far I will get. If I get serious it will impact on my blogging. Or my driving. And driving pays the bills. Even now, I have to stop sometimes to get stuff written down, I wonder if it will get worse.
As you can see above, while I was away in Darwin the family got a new addition, no not Psyche, her op followed a cancer scare, was routine, planned, but a few hours before I drove her in to Royal Darwin, Gee her younger sister back in Perth, had her fourth, a boy a couple of weeks early and unmentioned in these pages for reasons of superstition (don’t jinx it!). And two or three days prior to that, without a word to her mother or father, she up and eloped! Married her boyfriend Oak in these days of plague without ceremony and with the celebrations held over till next year on Rottnest Island.
Oak already had a couple of his own, so our young Dingo pup has five siblings. Welcome to the family all of you!
Lou, in almost constant demand for babysitting and home schooling, is rapidly learning to appreciate the advantages of bachelorhood. I’m not sure what he’s getting from the government here, though I understand reports of the dole being “doubled” are if not exaggerated, at least premature. This is how I write letters, moving through the family and giving an account of each. Milly is hunkering down with her sister, repurposing her garden for herbs and vegetables.
Did I say Psyche is fine. I feel guilty because a road train job came up, had me on my way out of Darwin less than 24 hours after getting her out of hospital, back in to WA through border control – remember the line in our constitution that says Trade between States shall be Absolutely Free (S. 92) – and down to Halls Creek to load for Perth. So thank you Lluna and Melissa for keeping an eye on her while I scoot off home.
Darwin, like every other city right now no doubt, is very, very quiet. Psyche lives only a few hundred yards (metres) outside the CBD. Her local Woolies is in the middle of town with parking out the front. I went in quite often, sometimes there would be a greeter to spray my hands with sanitiser and sometimes not. I found the local bookshop – BookshopDarwin, I suppose one is all they need – open but empty. I bought Patrick White’s Cockatoos and went back on Saturday to buy Marie Munkara for Psyche’s friends but it had closed early. There seemed to be no restrictions on where we could drive. I would drive most days the four or five ks to Truck City where my truck was parked, to check on it or get some work done at Volvo’s next door. To get it started one time when I found I’d left the park lights on.
Royal Darwin is out on the edge of town, past the airport, so I got to know that drive pretty well too, twice a day at 10.00 and 5.00. Psyche spent a couple of days resting under observation and we would go for a walk to stretch her scars. A very nice young doctor came in the first morning and drew a picture of what they’d done and why it might be sore. Between him and Psyche and Mum I learnt altogether too much.
I use the lists at the end of each journal to total up my reads for the year, but I’ve forgotten to write down the audiobooks I’ve left in the truck. Coming down I listened to Jane Eyre with which I thought I was familiar but maybe not. Milly who does remember what is in the book has said she will help me write a review. All I recall is a young Elizabeth Taylor dying in the Orson Welles movie.
It seems to be a day for good news. Our friend and fellow blogger Nathan Hobby (here) has a publisher for his biography of Katharine Susannah Prichard and not any old publisher, but Melbourne University Press (they must have deemed it sufficiently academic). Release is scheduled for the first half of 2021.
Currently reading
Dymphna Cusack, Jungfrau
Ada Cambridge, Sisters
Virginia Woolf, The Voyage Out
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Wizard of the Crow
Melissa Lucashenko, Too Much Lip
Willa Cather, O Pioneers!
Willa Cather, The Song of the Lark
Willa Cather, My Ántonia
Miles Franklin, Bring the Monkey
Patrick White, The Cockatoos