Published in 1965, The merry-go-round in the sea is a superb novel. It manages to be both simple and complicated in its themes and prose.

Rob Coram is six at the beginning of World War Two when his favourite cousin, Rick, goes off to war. The novel follows them both over the next eight years, as Rob grows in his awareness of the world and Rick comes home depressed and restless.

I’ve read few novels which have evoked the landscape so well as this one. Stow manages to describe all the smells and sounds and sights and perceptions of the Geraldton town and countryside, and reproduce them as a precocious child would sense them. His prose is both precise and poetic.

As a coming of age novel, it works well too. Stow shows how the passage of time alters Rob’s perception of the world, captured well in the title. Rob thinks that the mast of a wrecked ship out at sea is a merry-go-round and he’d like to one day swim out to and play in it. He clings onto the belief even when his mother tells him it is not so. A few years later he manages to swim there with his friend and can look back with a bittersweetness at his old innocence.

But it’s also about Rick growing up, or refusing to grow up; coming home from the war and realising that he can’t settle down into what he sees as the suffocation of the suburbs.

As well as this, it’s a novel about family, a large and extended family which has stayed close and has its own web of folklore and custom.

One thing it’s not is a page turner. The prose is so pristine and the scenes so self-contained that it didn’t have a strong narrative drive for me.

8.5/10

Press Council upholds complaint against The West Australian - ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

This news item is strange absent from The West Australian’s website.

The finding against The West illustrates for me that the paper will do anything for high circulation and doesn’t care much about journalistic standards. It seems to me that under Paul Armstrong’s editorship, the paper has become more like a tabloid, a daily Sunday Times. What do you think?

I also hate the way a popup ad which takes a few second to kill hits me everytime I open the site. I know I could easily change my settings, but I bet they’re relying that people are lazy like me and keep forgetting to.

Home Song Stories is writer-director Tony Ayres’ personal excorcism of his troubled childhood with his selfish mother, a fading nightclub singer who constantly sought out new men to admire her and excite her.  At the end of the film, the narrator says that he and his sister don’t talk about their mother; they don’t know what to say. Maybe this film will make up for that.

It seems the story is very close to real events, with some minor changes - like moving the action from Perth to Melbourne. It seems that Screenwest just didn’t have enough money to fund this film beyond scripting! They should be funding lots of feature films - it’s the major art form of our time.

I’m guessing Arts Victoria stepped in with some money, on the condition that the action be moved to Melbourne. As a Western Australian, that makes me disappointed - we lose another one of our stories.

If you visit the Metro Cemeteries Board you can see the burial records for both Tony Ayres’ mother, Sue, and his stepfather, Bill Ayres (’Uncle Bill’). Apparently she killed herself in their flat in Applecross. I think I’ll always think of her now if I’m driving along Canning Highway. What a sad story.

http://www.mcb.wa.gov.au/NameSearch/details.php?id=FC00005994

http://www.mcb.wa.gov.au/NameSearch/details.php?id=FC00004118 

Rising cost of living hits low paid - ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

In WA, average wages have gone up 5%; rental by 17% and food by 11%. This is why the mining boom is bad! It’s created two classes of people in Western Australia - those that win and those that lose. I hope all the minerals run out soon.

(Yes, I realise that would be disastrous for the economy.)

An Australian survival film, with a gentle sense of humour. A group of refugees are people-smuggled to a remote beach on the Western Australian coast. (It looks like Western Australia, but the film was actually shot in South Australia!) The Iraquis go one way; the Vietnamese another. But in the end, an Iraqui engineer and a Vietnamese youth with an Australian father are forced to journey together with one of the people smugglers, while some larrikin Army reservists chase them.

 It’s an excellent film, resisting easy classification, and Australian in a way thankfully different to most ‘Australian’ films. There are no white leads. The main characters are Middle Eastern, Asian, Aboriginal. It’s refreshing to see the Australian landscape through their eyes.

With so many different languages being spoken, the subtitles are crucial, and they’re well handled. Instead of being added on the bottom, they appear above the head of the character speaking. I guess this is only possible because of the big strips of barren landscape or sky that the text can go over the top of.

For me, the highlight of the film comes when the Iraqui engineer gets an ancient wreck of a ute going on three wheels and driving in reverse, sitting on top of the cabin like a ship.

 The film is set in 1990; I can’t see any good reason why, except perhaps that the film starts in Vietnam 1972, with the youth’s father leaving his pregnant girlfriend. Perhaps left behind during the Vietnam War?

It’s so cliched to like Tim Winton. He’s the only Australian novelist most people have heard of. As soon as I tell people I’m a novelist, they ask if I’m going to be the next Tim Winton. I’m never sure quite how to answer that.

Well, I used to answer it by being anti-trendy - disliking Tim Winton’s work and anything else that was trendy, anything that was read comfortably in suburban bookclubs, anything that the general population liked. I enjoyed being the only person in the world who didn’t like Tim Winton’s work.

But this was based on reading The Riders when I was fourteen and Lockie Leonard when I was eighteen.

Then in 2002 I begrudgingly read Cloudstreet, and had to admit it was excellent. (I read it again two years later.) I then went on and read Dirt Music and The Turning. When I read the Turning, I had to repent completely and admit to admiring Winton immensely. It is a brilliant book, with a clean lyricism that his other work doesn’t have. (The thing I like least about Winton is what most people like most - the vernacular, slangy writing.)

I also had to change my mind a lot when I discovered that he was deeply influenced by my favourite theologian - John Howard Yoder, the Anabaptist. I’ve written two simplified versions of Yoder’s work and was amazed that another Western Australian writer admired him.

So, I’d actually really like to have a conversation with Tim. And my opportunity came when a couple swapped tickets with Nicole and I at the Australian String Quartet because the wife had a cough and wanted to be at the back. I was promoted to the second row. A couple came in just before it started and were confused by the numbering. I said to the man, ‘You’ve got the right seat.’ He said, ‘Thanks, mate.’

And then I realised it was Tim Winton.

I spent the performance rehearsing what to say to him. I didn’t want to sound like one more wanna be writer who wants to talk to Tim Winton (ie “I’m a writer too”). But neither did I want to sound conceited (ie “I’m a prize winning novelist too - not the Booker, mind.”). And I didn’t want to talk to him because he was famous - I wanted to talk to him because he was interested in Yoder and wrote good books.

I thought of how he was such a private person and seemed to hate all the publicity. I thought of all the idiots that try to introduce themselves to him.  And with my heart thumping away at the end of the performance, I kept silent and watched him walk away.

1. Patrick White - Voss

2. Gillian Mears - The mint lawn

3. Patrick White - The tree of man  

4. Tim Winton - The turning

5. Morgan Yasbincek - liv

6. Tim Winton - Cloudstreet

7. Greg Egan - Axiomatic

8. Peter Carey - Illywhacker

9. Simone Lazaroo - The world waiting to be made

10. Peter Goldsworthy - Maestro

I hate the mining boom in Western Australia.  

It’s made life much worse for me and my wife. So many mining workers flooding in from the east, driving up house prices and cost of living, while public servants like me haven’t got anything extra. (The government hasn’t even spent money on the public service in this time of prosperity!)

I can’t wait for the mining boom to end. Then maybe rent and house prices in Perth might be affordable again.

It’s union boss Joe Mcdonald that’s getting kicked out of the ALP, not Kevin Mcdonald. But both of them sum up what’s wrong with the union movement. I read an article in the Sunday Times magazine a few weeks ago photographing Reynolds at his multi-million dollar apartment. I can’t stand such hypocrisy. He adopts the language and look of the working class, and yet his life has no affinity with them. They aren’t concerned with social justice; they’re concerned with furthering their own wealth no matter if it creates injustice on the way.