Author Archives: Darryl R Dymock

Unknown's avatar

About Darryl R Dymock

Dr Darryl Dymock has had eleven jobs and counting, including HR assistant, taxi-driver, high school teacher, soldier, university lecturer and researcher, associate professor, deputy director in a government department, and writer. He didn’t like school and had mediocre results there, and it took him a while to find a career direction. Darryl says he’s fortunate in never having been unemployed for very long over his working life, but he knows how tough it is for those looking for work, at whatever age. He’s the father of four adult children whose lives have taken quite different paths, and he has seven grandchildren, and therefore has a long-developed interest in stories for children. In his experience, Darryl thinks you get to where you want to be through motivation, persistence, being realistic and having the right support. He likes helping people with all of those. After working in Queensland, Papua New Guinea, New South Wales and South Australia, he now lives in Brisbane, Queensland with his wife and laptop.

Bert Hinkler & the Italian connection – continued

Posted on by
Reply

I’ve recently been fortunate enough to make a second visit to Pratomagno, Tuscany, Italy.

That’s the mountain where pioneer Australian aviator, Bert Hinkler, lost his life when his tiny monoplane crashed in January 1933 while he was making another attempt on theBrochure cover Ital England-Australia record.

Regular readers will recall that I wrote a biography of the famous flier, Hustling Hinkler (Hachette Australia, 2013). It was a spin-off from that story which took me back to the crash site in 2018.

When I first went to the mountain two years ago, Cesare Ciabatti, the owner of an excellent restaurant, da Giocondo, which now sits close to the top of the peak, told me that he would love to be able to give visitors a booklet about Hinkler’s long connection with the area.

That connection has been fostered through an impressive display Cesare maintains on his bar wall, and also through Hinkler memorials nearby that are linked by a walking track, the Hinkler Ring, initiated by Carlo Palazzini and friends in the Club Alpino Italiano (Arezzo).

After I returned to Australia, I decided late last year that I would put together a small publication that could be translated into Italian, which Cesare might be able to provide for visitors.

After much liaison with him and with Carlo (who kindly finalised the translation) and with a Brisbane contact, Kevin Lindeberg (who has a much longer attachment to the Hinkler story and to Pratomagno that I do), we produced a foldable double-sided A3 brochure, with text, photos and maps (above).

I arranged for the typesetting and artwork to be done in Australia, and Cesare generously sponsored the printing of the brochure in Italy, in both Italian and English.

P1100424

Cesare Ciabatti and Carlo Palazzini with the new Bert Hinkler brochure September 2018

I had hoped we might have been able to organise some sort of ‘launch’ of the brochure on Pratomagno, but unfortunately my visit was planned for September, towards the end of the main tourist season, and Cesare needed the brochures several months earlier for his guests.

So I contented myself with a visit to da Giocondo to see the finished product, and a trek around most of the 8 km Hinkler Ring with family in the genial company of Carlo, where once again I was moved by seeing the Hinkler crash-site and memorial.

 

P1100439

Carlo Palazzini at 2015 Bert Hinkler Memorial, Pratomagno

 

P1100445

This tree on the slopes of Pratomagno may have been the last resting place of Australian pilot Bert Hinkler.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Afterwards I trekked to the top of the peak, which is topped by the giant Croce di Pratomagno (Cross of Pratomagno) and gives 360 degree views, which were spectacular on a warm sunny September day.

P1100466

The author on his way to the Croce di Pratomagno

We ended a memorable visit appropriately with an excellent meal at da Giocondo, and a local beer. (Yes, I know Chianti is the specialty of Tuscany, but I wanted to try the local brew – it’s called Pratomagno!) Our transport for the day was expertly provided by Andrea from Very Tuscany Tours, and we were glad to see him again after our previous visit to the region.P1100470

But wait – there’s more! There’s an intriguing aside to this story that began some months before. When we visited Pratomagno the previous time, good friends from Armidale, New South Wales, Geoff and Judy Hinch, were with us. Sometime after we had returned to Australia, to her surprise and my delight, Judy found three poems about Bert Hinkler in a collection of poems penned on the family farm by her late paternal grandmother, Marion Parsons.

One was written in 1928, when Hinkler made his record-breaking flight from England to Australia; the second was from early 1933, when he had disappeared and was still missing.

Puss Moth

The third poem was a tribute to the ‘Women of Strada’, an Italian town not far from Pratomagno. Soon after Hinkler’s body had been found, the women of the town sewed together panels of cloth, cut from whatever material they could find, to create a Union Jack (Hinkler lived in England) that could be draped over his coffin.

The poem concludes:

“Oh splendid Women of Strada

Did you feel when you made that pall

The kinships of wills and mothers

That maketh us sisters all.

And to us the greatest honour

Done for our hero’s sake

Is the flag that the Women of Strada

Tore up their sheets to make.”

Hinkler 25 July 035

Australian newspaper article in 1936, three years after Hinkler’s burial outside Florence

It seemed fitting that I should read that poem in the presence of Cesare and Carlo on the slopes of Pratomagno at the time of my second visit. The poem and its discovery seem to emphasise the significant historical and perhaps emotional connection the two countries have to Bert Hinkler, and why it continues.

Until next time

Darryl Dymock

 

What writers say:

We occasionally felt that inside the book we read there was a better one – sometimes a thinner one- straining to get out.

~ Kwame Anthony Appiah, Chairperson, Man Booker Prize judging panel, 2018

He swung his stockwhip round and gave a cheer

Posted on by
Reply

Recently I stopped in the Victorian rural town of Corryong, and discovered something about a famous Australian poem, The Man from Snowy River, written in the 1890s by A. B. (Banjo) Paterson.

Man from Snowy R movie image

This stirring poem tells the story of a group of riders in pursuit of a valuable colt that had escaped and joined ‘the wild bush horses’ in rugged mountain country, and how:

When they reached the mountain’s summit, even Clancy* took a pull,

It well might make the boldest hold their breath,

The wild hop scrub grew thickly, and the hidden ground was full

Of wombat holes, and any slip was death.

But the man from Snowy River let the pony have his head,

And he swung his stockwhip round and gave a cheer,

And he raced him down the mountain like a torrent down its bed,

While the others stood and watched in very fear.

Eventually this ‘stripling on a small and weedy beast’ turned the mob of horses around and ‘alone and unassisted brought them back’.

The poem’s continued popularity is due of course to the theme of an heroic individual beating the odds in a rugged environment where the rest of his mates had given up. No wonder there was a movie spin-off.

Paterson always claimed the story was created from several stories he’d heard, but over the years a number of people have claimed to have been or to have known ‘the man from Snowy River’.

banjo-paterson-profile

A B (Banjo) Paterson

The town of Corryong sits attractively at the base of the Australian Alps, and it’s easy to see how the area and local characters might have inspired Paterson to set his poem there. (Corryong has claimed the poem as its own, as have a few other towns in the area, but Corryong also has an annual festival).

Corryong Vic

I learned in my stopover there that the poem was first published in The Bulletin magazine in 1890, but what interested me as a writer was that Paterson kept changing the original slightly, and that the one published in a collection of his poems in 1895 was probably the fourth version.

Apparently W H Auden was also known for continuing to ‘fiddle’ with the text of his poems between editions.

I don’t know whether any modern authors edit their material in this way when new editions appear, but I can’t imagine publishers are too keen on changing the text once it’s set up for printing.

Printing Press early

Nevertheless, I know that feeling of sending off the ‘final’ version of a book or short story and later thinking of ways I might have improved it.

I guess the lesson for us lesser writers is that if we can’t make changes after publication, we need to do all the rewriting beforehand. (Except of course for blogs – Caution: This version may not be the original, or the final one …)

Until next time

Darryl R Dymock

*Clancy of the Overflow was another well-known Australian bushman created by Banjo Paterson.

What writers say

‘In my racket it’s so easy to tighten up and get all stiff and wooden. Then the stuff is no good. When it’s good it comes easy. Anything you have read or heard to the contrary is a lot of mish-mash.’ ~ Character Roger Wade (a writer) in The long good-bye by Raymond Chandler.

 

New Year’s Eve: Remembering Bert Hinkler’s tragic end amid the snows of Mount Pratomagno

Posted on by
1

Puss Moth

As another year turns over on its well-oiled axis, it’s almost exactly 85 years since the Hinkler formal photo in suitAustralian pioneer aviator, Bert Hinkler, died when his plane crashed on Mount Pratomagno in Italy during an attempt on the England-Australia record.

Thanks to the efforts of Hinkler admirers in Italy and Australia, a memorial to this extraordinary pilot was unveiled on Mount Pratomagno in August 2015 (see my earlier blog, ‘A boulder for a bold pilot’).

One of those enthusiasts, Cesare Ciabatti, who runs a highly regarded restaurant, Da Giocondo, near the top of the mountain, recently sent photos of the memorial covered in winter snow.

IMG-20171230-WA0008

Despite the beauty of the scene, the image is a reminder of the time of year Hinkler crashed, when the weather for him was not as benign. When the Australian pilot and his plane came to grief on the peak, on 7 January, 1933, there was a vicious storm raging.

Hinkler’s body and the wreckage were not discovered until three months later, when the snows had melted from the slopes. He was just 40 years old.

At other times of the year, when the temperature is not sitting at close to zero, the 2015 memorial, the brainchild of Brisbane man, Kevin Lindeberg, looks like this (below). The 1.4 ton dark basalt boulder was transported from Mon Repos Beach, Bundaberg, Queensland, where the teenage Bert Hinkler first flew, in a home-made glider he built in his backyard.

Darryl Dymock with memorial stone

In September 2016 I was fortunate to be able visit the crash site (see above) and to trek part of a new walking trail, the Hinkler Ring, which connects the various memorials erected over the years and leads hikers to the top of the mountain, where the Croce del Pratomagno sits.

P1040800

Erected by the Franciscans in 1928, the cross stretches its arms across the 360 degree views of the colourful panorama of the Tuscan countryside below.

P1040797The Hinkler Ring is an initiative of Carlo Palazzini and his colleagues in the Club Alpino Italiano, Arezzo, and it makes this wonderful area more accessible to walkers of all abilities.

Mt Pratomagno

I can highly recommend a visit to Mount Pratomagno in Tuscany, a trek around the Hinkler Ring, and a delicious meal at da Giocondo. My wife and I are planning to head back for a re-visit in September 2018.

Weather forecasts New Year’s Eve 2017 

Mount Pratomagno : Min 1° Max 3°

Mon Repos Beach, Bundaberg: Min 26° Max 29°

(Source: https://weather.com)

IMG-20171230-WA0003

I wonder what decisions Bert Hinkler would have made if he’d been able to Google the weather forecast for Mount Pratomagno ahead of his final flight in January 1933.

Further information:

D R Dymock: Hustling Hinkler: The short tumultuous life of a trailblazing aviator (published by Hachette).

Hinkler Hall of Aviation, Bundaberg: www.hinklerhallofaviation.com

http://www.news-mail.com.au/news/hinkler-memoria-unveiled/2741194/

http://www.visittuscany.com/en/attractions/pratomagno-the-mountain-range

Until next time

Darryl R Dymock

 

What writers say

The real measure of ‘truth’ in any novel is not whether the characters, places and events portrayed exist beyond the pages of the book but, rather, whether they seem authentic to us as readers. When we open the pages of a novel, we enter into a pact with it. We want to immerse ourselves in its milieu. We want to engage with the characters, to find their actions psychologically plausible.

~ Graeme Macrae Burnet, ‘Afterword’, The accident on the A35.

(As with the ‘Foreword’, Burnet plays with the reader in what he writes in the ‘Afterword’, so we have to decide if this is the ‘real’ GMB speaking in the words quoted above.)

 

What’s the catch in Catch-22?

Posted on by
Reply

The absolute simplicity of Catch-22

One of the advantages and pleasures of browsing in a library or bookshop with real books (hard copy) is that you can stumble across publications you might never find if you’re searching online.

Recently I came across a library copy of Catch-22, by Joseph Heller, a book originally published in the US in 1961, and which I later read as a young man, when its humour and cynicism appealed to me (before I matured, of course). The term ‘Catch-22’ has now become a fixture in the English language.

I borrowed the book this time mainly to check the authentic origin of the term, because I’ve found in my research that so-called quotes from famous people are sometimes misquoted and even misattributed, e.g. a quote originally by Thomas Edison may be attributed to Albert Einstein.

Shakespeare has contributed so many phrases to modern English that it’s not surprising his words have been twisted a bit in the 400 plus years since he penned them.

For example, the witches’ line in Macbeth, ‘Double, double toil and trouble’ has often become ‘Bubble, bubble, toil and trouble’, and in Hamlet, the eponymous lead character is often quoted as saying, ‘Alas, poor Yorick. I knew him well’, whereas what Shakespeare wrotehamlet skull was ‘Alas, poor Yorick. I knew him, Horatio – a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy.’

So I’ve found it advisable to check back carefully before using a quote that I’ve found on the Internet.

Hence my interest in the origin of the term, ‘Catch-22’, which I found first mentioned on page 52 of this Vintage Books edition (1994).

The story is set in a frontline US Air Force squadron in World War II, and Captain John Yossarian is the chief protagonist:

‘Sure there’s a catch,’ Doc Daneeka replied. ‘Catch-22. Anyone who wants to get out of combat duty isn’t really crazy.’

There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one’s own safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind. Orr was crazy and could be grounded. All he had to do was ask; and as soon Catch 22 coveras he did, he would no longer be crazy and would have to fly more missions. Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn’t, but if he was sane he had to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn’t have to; but if he didn’t want to he was sane and had to. Yossarian was moved very deeply by the absolute simplicity of this clause of Catch-22 and let out a respectful whistle.

‘That’s some catch, that Catch-22,’ he observed.

‘It’s the best there is,’ Doc Daneeka agreed.

So there it is, in the original. I don’t think ‘Catch-22’ needs any further explanation, but (as Yossarian said) Heller’s invention of the term and its meaning deserves our admiration.

 

If you want to be a writer, then get on and write!

During 2017 I’ve been privileged to be a member of the writers’ panel for the Queensland Writers Centre’s Writer’s Surgery, a support service for aspiring and emerging writers.

QWC LOGO

What has impressed me about the writers I’ve been working with is the dedication and passion they bring to the task, and their eagerness to make sure their book is as good as it can be.

There’s a well-known adage in writing: if you want to be a writer, then get on and write! It’s been encouraging to see newcomers taking on that challenge and developing very readable work.

Until next time

Darryl R Dymock

 

What writers say

He knew everything there was to know about literature, except how to enjoy it.

From Catch-22, Joseph Heller

 

 

 

On handwriting and Hemingway

Posted on by
Reply

Power of the pen

I have written in an earlier blog about how I occasionally resort to writing parts of a story by hand when it starts to become bogged down. Not so much writer’s block as uncreativity. In other words, it sounds boring.

Modern-ftn-pen-cursive

So I was interested to see the results of a survey of 2000 people undertaken by a Deakin University (Australia) researcher in conjunction with the retail firm Officeworks, which found that those who handwrite their thoughts and feelings were two and half times more likely to experience relief from anxiety, fear and worry than those who use a keyboard for the same purpose.

I don’t know that I’ve noticed any improved emotional level in myself, but I do think that the kinaesthetics involved in writing by hand do help to stimulate my creativity (eventually anyway!).

I often find that, when handwriting, I cross out bits, put arrows up and down to show where text might best belong, and write notes or queries to myself in the margin to help guide my second effort when I go back to the keyboard. It can look pretty messy.

keyboard 2

I know that technically I could do the same things on my laptop or my tablet, but the scribbling and scrawling by hand seems to free up my thinking.

That second effort, at the keyboard, then becomes an editing process because I invariably change what I handwrote, hopefully for the better.

rowling handwritingI understand J K Rowling writes her novels by hand first. I wonder if she feels relief from anxiety, fear and worry when she’s finished? Richer in some way, at any rate 🙂

 

Papa Hemingway on writing

ernest-hemingway-typewriterThe American novelist Ernest Hemingway (often called ‘Papa’ by those who knew him) once said he wrote thirty different endings to A farewell to arms. He told this to a distinguished Australian journalist and war correspondent, Alan Moorehead, when the two met in Italy in 1949.

In a biography of Moorehead by Thornton McCamish (Black Inc, 2016), the Australian writer says: ‘I do not know how [Hemingway] talked to other people, but with me he talked books, always of writing, and with the humility and doubt of a writer who reads for five hours or so every day, and who writes and rewrites for as long as his brain will work, knowing that it is only by a miracle that he will ever achieve a phrase, even  a word, that will correspond to the vision in his mind.’

our-man-elsewhere

Fellow writers will know the feeling about getting it right. But how many of us read for five hours a day? And produce 30 different endings?

Clive JamesIn a recent critique of Hemingway’s writing (Yale University Press, 2015), the Australian-born author and literary critic, Clive James, praised the American’s early novels but suggested that Hemingway’s later work was ‘ruined’.  James said that Hemingway, ‘having noticed how the narrative charm of a seemingly objective style would put a gloss on reality automatically, he habitually stood on the accelerator instead of the brake. … He overstated even the understatements.’

Lesson: Don’t overdo it.

 

Until next time

Darryl Dymock

 

What writers say:

Finally you get to an age when a book’s power to make you think becomes the first thing you notice about it. You can practically sense that power when you pick it up.

~ Clive James, Latest readings.

 

Plotter or pantser? The debate continues

Posted on by
Reply

Are you a plotter or a pantser? I start off as a not very systematic plotter and end up as a pantser.

In case you’ve no idea what I’m talking about, these are categories of writers – plotters develop their story plan or plot in advance and then begin to write; pantsers write by the ‘seat of their pants’, making the plot up as they go along. There’s ongoing debate about which is best.

I’ve been thinking about these two approaches recently because I’ve been writing short stories to enter in competitions, and finding that the story develops as I write it, even when I have a ‘sort of plot’ in my head.

I first came across ‘plotters’ and ‘pantsers’ when I did the ‘Year of the Novel’ course with Kim Wilkins angel of ruinauthor Kim Wilkins at the Queensland Writers Centre about ten years ago. Kim is a keen plotter, and showed us her planning journal, in which she’d detailed information about plot and characters for every chapter of a book already published.

I was pretty impressed at the time, and I’ve tried to follow that example, but have discovered that my fiction stories seem to develop as I write.

If you’re a writer, the question of course is: does it matter which approach you take? Will being more structured initially mean a better book, a better chance of publication?

If you look at well-published writers, you’ll find there’s no easy answer to that question.

J K Rowling, probably the most well-known and most-published author in recent years, is basically a plotter. She’s been quoted as saying ‘I always have a basic plot outline, but I like to leave some things to be decided while I write.’

This suggests she’s neither one nor the other, but a look at some of her planning for Harry Potter books suggests she’s well and truly in the plotter’s camp, as in the example below.

J K Rowling planner

Rowling is joined by thriller writer John Grisham, who said, ‘I don’t start a novel until I have lived with the story for a while to the point of actually writing an outline and after a number of books I’ve learned that the more time I spend on the outline the easier the book is to write. And if I cheat on the outline I get in trouble with the book.’

Stephen King, on the other hand, said, ‘Outlines are the last resource of bad fiction writers who wish to God they were writing masters’ theses.’

And he’s also sold a few books in his time J

Siding with King is Margaret Atwood: ‘When I’m writing a novel, what comes first is anMargaret-Atwood-2 image, scene, or voice. Something fairly small. Sometimes that seed is contained in a poem I’ve already written. The structure or design gets worked out in the course of the writing. I couldn’t write the other way round, with structure first. It would be too much like paint-by-numbers.’

So, it seems, there is no agreement, even among our most published writers, about planning ahead or developing the story as they go.

I’ve discovered that I’m essentially I’m a pantser, when it comes to fiction. I now know what writers mean when they say that a character ‘takes over’ during the writing process.

Perhaps I’m a hybrid, what’s been called a plantser.

As for non-fiction, well, that’s another story…

If you’re a writer, which category do you fit into?

Until next time

Darryl Dymock

[Some quotes above are taken from a blog post on Goodreads by Hayley Igarashi.]

 For my blog about returning to the workforce, please see: confident4work.wordpress.com

What writers say

Jane Graves‘I’m cursed with not being able to see the good twists and turns of character and plot until I’m in the middle of writing the book. I can have a sense where it’s going, but absolutely nothing comes alive until the words start going down on the page. ~ Romance author Jane Graves.

 

Dying to be well-read

Posted on by
Reply

Did you know that the more you read the less likely you are to die? That’s the claim made by a writer in a recent issue of Wellbeing magazine.

heart-monitor-blips

An item headed ‘Better read than dead’ reported a study of the reading habits of 3635 men and women aged 50 and older over a 12-year period. With such a large sample and a longitudinal study, the results promised to be interesting for both readers and writers.

According to the Wellbeing writer, the results showed that ‘adults who read books for up to 3.5 hours a week were 17 per cent less likely to die than those who did not read books…’.

Wow! That’s awesome. Reading books means you’re less likely to die?

Let me work out the implications of such a finding: If reading books for 3.5 hours a week, gives you a 17% chance of not dying, then reading books for around 18 hours a week should guarantee you immortality!

When people hear about this, there’ll be a rush for books. What a boost that’ll be for booksellers and libraries.

Later in the article, we discover what the Wellbeing writer meant to say: ‘In all, book readers survived almost two years longer than non-book readers [i.e within the 12-year period].’

In other words, this particular bit of research indicates that if you’re over 50, reading books is one way that may help you live a couple of years longer. But no amount of reading is going to make you ‘less likely to die’.

Of course, there may factors other than reading at play in promoting longevity. For example, book-reading and lifestyle might be linked.

bearded-old-man-book

By the way, the researchers also concluded that reading newspapers and magazines is also linked to longer life, but not nearly as much as book reading. Perhaps reading magazines and newspapers is linked to increased coffee intake …?

The ultimate message from the research is: if you want to live a bit longer, reading might help you do so. See you at the library.

Until next time

Darryl Dymock

 

What writers say:

In the best stories, the odyssey from complication to resolution changes the character profoundly. In fact, the resolution often results not directly from the action but from a growing enlightenment – often a sudden flash of inspiration – as the character finally realizes what he [or she] has to do to solve his [or her] problem. ~ Jon Franklin, Writing for story.

The ups and downs of publishing

Posted on by
4

Digital decline? 

Towards the end of 2016, two of my recent publishers, Hachette Australia and Xoum, sent me their annual updates on their publishing experience in the previous 12 months.

Both reported the same trend: a decline or plateauing in e-book sales. Rod Morrison at Xoum said that the global digital market ‘retreated’ to 20-25% of total sales.

Not all that long ago, there were predictions that e-book sales would swamp sales of print books, but it seems that there has actually been a very small increase in purchases of print books world-wide.

Publishers seem to be struggling to predict the trends. On the demand side I know some independent bookshops in Australia had a tough year in 2016.

Another interesting piece of news was that, after a burst of enthusiasm in 2015, and a brief bonanza for publishers, sales of adult colouring books fell away in 2016.

I’m neither surprised nor sorry to see the demise of that particular fad. It would be interesting to know how many colouring books purchased were actually coloured in by adults.

Books on the move

Whenever I travel, I’m always on the lookout for examples of writing and literature in local communities. In 2016, I came across two quite different examples:

Book crossing

In Italy, boarding a train in the small mountainside village of Santa Maria Maggiore in the north-west, I saw a collection of ‘swap’ books at the station, using the English term, ‘Book crossing’, and an explanation (I assume) in Italian below.

I know there’s are organisations (e. g. http://www.booksontherail.com/) that promotes the idea of leaving books behind on trains and buses for someone else to read, and exchanges pop up in communal rooms in hostels etc, but this was the first time I’d seen one at a railway station. Later I discovered there’s an organisation called ‘Book Crossing‘, that promotes this idea.

Blind date with a book

In Fremantle, Western Australia, Elizabeth’s, a second-hand bookshop (also in Newtown, Sydney) is selling ‘blind dates with a book’. Books are wrapped in brown paper (which was once the sign of a certain sort of book, but no longer), with just a few words on the wrapping to indicate the kind of book it is.

The idea apparently started with some libraries in Australia to celebrate Valentine’s Day. It’s a sophisticated version of a lucky dip for people who like surprises in what they read, but with a few clues in advance. You can find them online here.

Until next time

Darryl Dymock

 

What writers say

Imagery for me is of paramount importance in a text, not complex imagery that jumps up and down and demands to have its hand shaken, but a more subtle web that weaves its way throughout, often enigmatically, and knits everything together.~ Kate Atkinson

 

 

Roly Sussex Short Story Award Success

Posted on by
Reply

Less than two weeks after the launch of my book, The Chalkies: Educating an army for independence, I received a phone call to tell me that I had won first prize in the Roly Sussex Short Story Award for 2016. What’s more if I turned up at Government House, Brisbane, the following Tuesday, the State Governor would present me with the award. And so he did. Paul de Jersey AC shook my hand at an impressive ceremony on 18 October and congratulated me as he presented me with the trophy and a cheque.

My short story, The space between, is a fictionalised account of a woman waiting for her husband when he fails to return from an attempt to be first to fly across the Atlantic, and is based on actual events, as they say in the movies. The title comes from a Celtic belief that there is only three feet between heaven and earth, and that in ‘thin places’, the distance is even less.

The national competition is run by the Queensland Branch of the English Speaking Union, and the award is named after a well-known Professor of Linguistics at Queensland University, Roly Sussex. I am honoured to have won the award.

Unfortunately, no photography was permitted inside Government House, but the photo below shows me with Ann Garms, the ESU (Qld) President, on the steps of this impressive building, after the ceremony. (The sight of me in a suit may come as a shock to family and friends, but that is indeed me.)

It was good to meet with other writers who were runners up or had been highly commended in the competition, which has both adult and school student categories.

The English Speaking Union said it intended to publish the selected stories in an anthology sometime next year.

Meanwhile, The Chalkies made the bestseller list at Avid Reader Bookshop, where it was launched, and also featured on the back page of their Summer Reading Guide (next to the butterfly!)

 

All writers live in hope of being published and then well received, so for a couple of months this author was doing okay in that regard. As all writers also know, however, this is no guarantee that the next piece of writing will be successful. We just keep beavering away, and keep on hoping …

Until next time

Darryl Dymock

 

What writers say:

‘You cannot hope to sweep someone else away by the force of your writing until it has been done to you.’ ~ Stephen King

 

Chalkies book launched

Posted on by
Reply

A sizeable and enthusiastic crowd gathered at Avid Reader Bookshop, Brisbane, on 8 October, 2016 to hear Colonel Katrina Schildberger launch my book, The Chalkies: Educating an army for independence.

It’s amazing how many will turn up when free wine and nibbles are on offer 🙂 Everyone I’ve spoken to said they had a good time, and lots of books were sold.

Colonel Schildberger is Head of the Royal Australian Army Educational Corps, and travelled from Sydney for the occasion. She gave a great speech to launch the book.

The Chalkies tells the little-known story of some 300 teachers who were conscripted into the Australian Army between 1996 and 1972 and quietly sent to the then Territory of Papua New Guinea while Australian troops were fighting in Vietnam. It is published by Australian Scholarly Press, Melbourne.

The conscripted teachers, colloquially known as ‘Chalkies’, were posted to the Royal Australian Army Educational Corps, and their task was to upgrade the educational levels of indigenous troops of the Pacific Islands Regiment in what turned out to be critical years leading up to the country’s independence. For many it was their first year of teaching and their first time out of Australia.

The Director of Army Education at the time, Brigadier Ernest Gould, described the initiative as ‘an educational scheme which for magnitude, scope, intensity and enlightenment is without parallel in military history’.

Yet most Australians have never heard about it.

With the aid of an Army History Research Grant, I drew on the recollections of more than 70 former Chalkies and archival sources to tell the story of how these conscripted teachers (one of whom was me) responded to the challenges of a life most of them never wanted or imagined for themselves. A small go group of ex-Chalkies gave me feedback on my research to help keep me on track.

It was very appropriate that Colonel Schildberger launched the book, because not only is 1966 the 50th anniversary of the scheme’s beginnings in PNG, it is also the 75th anniversary of the establishment of Army Education in World War II.

The jacket blurb says The Chalkies is ‘a unique tale of the good, the bad and the unexpected, told against the background of military and political developments of the day’.

A former Australian Governor-General, Major General the Honourable Michael Jeffery, who served two terms in PNG, wrote the foreword.

If you’re interested in reading The Chalkies, in Australia you can order a copy through your local bookstore, or direct from Avid Reader Bookshop in Brisbane. Alternatively, you could ask your local library to buy a copy. The ISBN is 978-1-925333-77-0.

Till next time

Darryl Dymock

 

What writers say

By the time you have perfected any style of writing, you have always outgrown it.                                                                                                                 ~George Orwell