Drawing on selected images from across the world, in this personal presentation Brisbane-based author D R (Darryl) Dymock compares the spectacular but very different life journeys and tragic endings of two remarkable Australian aviation pioneers: Harry Hawker and Bert Hinkler.
Saturday 18 June2pm -3pm, St Matthews Church Hall,
cnr Sherwood & Oxley Rds Sherwood, Brisbane, Queensland, Australia
Books for sale on the day
Can’t make it to the talk? You can still order both books through any bookshop, including Avid Reader, Brisbane and Riverbend Books, Brisbane, Queensland. Or download the e-book online through Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Booktopia, or check out ABE Books in the US.
Exclusive extract from ‘A Great and Restless Spirit’ by D R Dymock:
Unaware of the mid-ocean drama, Muriel continued to mark off the hours Harry had been in the air. As the day went on, she began to prepare to head over to Brooklands, hopeful she would soon be reunited with her husband. There was quiet anticipation among the Sopwith representatives, military officers, and government and aero club officials gathered at Brooklands that Monday afternoon, 19 May, 1919. It promised to be a momentous occasion for the future of cross-Atlantic travel and for British aviation.
Muriel and her brother, RAF Captain Laurence Peaty, had driven over from Hook in the Sunbeam. Word had come through that the American fliers were trapped in the Azores by the weather, so NC-4 had not yet been able to make the final hop. There was still a possibility that Harry and Grieve could claim the transatlantic gong.
Nevertheless there was also an undercurrent of anxiety about the two fliers. No messages had been received; no sightings reported. Based on the reported Sunday departure time from Newfoundland, by Muriel’s 22-hour timeline the Atlantic should touch down at Brooklands at around 4.30pm. Unlike some others, she wasn’t worried by the lack of contact with the plane because she knew Harry and Grieve weren’t counting on the wireless during the flight.
But as the afternoon ticked by, concern started to grow. The Royal Air Force sent planes out from its Aldergrove base in Ireland to probe along the transatlantic route, but the pilots came back with nothing to report.
When Muriel crossed off hour number 22, and there was still no sign of the plane, the tension among the waiting group must have been palpable. They all knew that by then the Sopwith’s fuel tank would be close to empty. When a full 24 hours had passed without any contact, no one had to say what that meant.
Title:A Great and Restless Spirit: The incredible true story of Harry Hawker, Australian test pilot, aircraft designer, car racing driver, speedboat racer, world-beater
High-profile mystery plane crashes have confounded and intrigued the world since flight began – but this dramatic true story was the first.
A Great And Restless Spirit by D R Dymock tells of the disappearance of record-breaking Australian pilot Harry Hawker and his navigator over the Atlantic Ocean in 1919… and of how kings and nations were captivated by the event. The book has just been released.
A transatlantic feat
In May 1919, 30-year-old Harry Hawker and his navigator attempted the first transatlantic flight, from Newfoundland to Ireland, and in a plane with no radio or radar.
Millions waited for news of their triumph – but the plane never arrived. After six days, and with no sightings or leads, almost everyone gave them up for dead. Banjo Paterson wrote a eulogy for Harry’s passing. King George V sent Harry’s English wife, Muriel Hawker, a telegram of condolence. But Muriel refused to believe her husband was dead.
If things don’t go quite right, never give up hope, Harry had told Muriel before he left. She took him at his word.
‘As there seemed to be two sides to the question whether he was alive or not, and no definite proof of either,’ Muriel said, ‘I decided I’d cling firmly to the belief that he was alive.’
An extraordinary life
Muriel Hawker’s faith in her daredevil husband had reaped rewards before. Harry’s ‘need for speed’ made him a fierce competitor in car and speedboat races around the globe and, when he wasn’t racing, Harry designed and tested WWI planes.
His boss, aviation guru Tommy Sopwith, believed Harry was a genius – but Muriel kept her husband’s feet firmly on the ground. Would this remarkable woman’s hope be rewarded this time, too?
In A Great and Restless Spirit, author D R Dymock tells the incredible true story of Harry Hawker MBE AFC and the woman who refused to give up on him.
About the author: D R (Darryl) Dymock (author site) is the Brisbane-based author of several well-received non-fiction books, including Hustling Hinkler and The Chalkies. This is his second aviation biography. He is a mentor with the Queensland Writers Centre, and an Adjunct Senior Research Fellow at Griffith University.
I’d like to introduce you to Harry Hawker, the subject of my latest book, A Great and Restless Spirit. And below you can find a link to the YouTube video.
ISBN: 978-1-925380-415
Harry Hawker was an Australian-born test pilot, aircraft designer, racing car driver, speedboat racer, and all-round world-beater.
In his day he was a celebrity before there were celebrities.
But he wasn’t looking for fame. All he wanted to do was push the boundaries.
He had a dream of speed that he pursued throughout his whole, regrettably short, life.
I wanted to write about Harry Hawker firstly because of the way he insisted on pushing the boundaries in the air, on the racetrack and on the water. But I’m also fascinated by what made him ‘a great and restless spirit’.
And how did his wife Muriel cope with that insistent restlessness, especially when it became life-threatening?
You can register for the in-store and online book launch at Avid Reader Bookshop, West End, Brisbane, at 6.30pm AEST Friday 25 March here
I hope to meet up with you if you’re in the Brisbane area. Perhaps sign a book 🙂 Otherwise I’d love to hear from you whether you’re elsewhere in Australia or in another country.
Until next time
D R (Darryl) Dymock
D R Dymock: A Great and Restless Spirit: The incredible true story of Harry Hawker Publication date: March 2022
ISBN: 978-1-925380-415
Order through all good bookshops, including Avid Reader, Brisbane: avidreader.com.au
Writers Group Convenor Darryl Dymock introduces writer John Brown, the founding Shed president
We had a great launch of the Oxley Men’s Shed anthology, Offcuts: Stories from the Shed, on Saturday 27 November in Brisbane. Nine men from the Shed contributed to the collection, and the first (modest) print run sold out! 70 to 80 people turned up to hear a brilliant launch by local Councillor Nicole Johnston, listen to music from the band Crossed Fingers, and enjoy a scrumptious morning tea.
Shed President Martin Rankine makes the welcome
This is no ordinary collection of stories. It draws on the varied experiences of nine men who have led very different lives, but whose paths have eventually crossed at Oxley Men’s Shed. In this book these mostly first-time writers have taken the opportunity to share some of their fascinating stories from the past with their families and with the wider community. Many of these are never-before-told tales, entertaining anecdotes that not only illuminate the writers’ earlier lives, but often trigger our own memories too.
In these stories we meet a former fitter and turner who as a boy decided to see what would happen when he packed gunpowder from leftover fireworks into a fruit tin and lit the fuse; a retired meat inspector who had to escape hand over hand down a rope off a high church roof when his ladder collapsed; an ex-plumber who starred in a Bollywood movie and dodged bombs and bullets while driving a tour bus in the Middle East; a former photographer who once had the ultimate hand in a boarding house poker game; and a retired insurance underwriter who relives his late-night dash home to dive under the bedclothes before the resident ghost appeared.
Crossed Fingers Band
Then there’s a Vietnamese veteran driving an Army forklift who literally backed himself into an embarrassing corner with his commanding officer; an ex-teacher who was driving his prized first car through South Brisbane when the back seat caught fire; a former electrician who turned jackaroo to help out his mate on a cattle drive in northern NSW; and a retired agronomist who as a young man led a hiking group down a mountain during a cyclone, with intriguing romantic results.
This is a heady mix of yarns from a group of writers keen to tell their often remarkable stories – sometimes humorous, occasionally hair-raising, but always from the heart.
Offcuts: Stories from the Shed, Armour Books, Brisbane.
How do you create a story involving 300 characters?
I’m not talking about that Hollywood movie where 300 brave Spartans fight to the death against a 100,000-strong Persian attack force*.
This was a writing challenge I entered in late 2020: to write ‘a succinct micro-essay’ on an aspect of Australia life which displayed ‘keen insight and depth of knowledge, rather than sentiment’.
Mrc
The ‘essay’ was limited to 300 characters, including spaces!
Yes, 300 keyboard characters, not 300 words. Or 300 protagonists.
This is the pen-picture of contemporary Australia I entered in the competition:
Feel free to make the count, but I can assure you there are exactly 300 characters including spaces.
The Small Truths competition ran for a month in late 2020, in conjunction with the better known Horne Essay Prize.
The winner of the Horne Prize itself has been announced, but I’ve yet to find any mention of the Small Truths short list or winner. And I’ve given up waiting for my congratulatory email😉. But at least I can share my entry with you here.
I like to think my micro-essay displays ‘keen insight and depth of knowledge’ about modern-day Australia. I know some of the references will mean more to Australians than most other readers across the world, so I’ve provided links to follow up if you want to.
There’s nothing like having a word limit (or a character limit) to test your ability to be succinct.
As most students know only too well from high school onwards😉.
Until next time
Darryl Dymock
* The Persian Army was led by King Xerxes, a name which seems to me to be a good Scrabble word, if it was allowed.
A few weeks back I posted an interview with Fiona Stager, co-owner of Avid Reader bookshop in West End, Brisbane, Australia. You might remember how strongly engaged Avid Reader is with its community, both locally and online. So I thought you might like this recent post from Fiona, from the bookshop website:
“This Saturday 3 October we celebrate Love Your Bookshop Day which was created by the Australian Booksellers Association to celebrate bookshops across the country and highlight what makes local bookshops great. There will be facebook events, online events and giveaways galore.
Here at Avid Reader we have decided this year to rename it Love Our Customers Day! This is a chance for us to thank you for your continued support of our bookshops during this very uncertain time.
We have been overwhelmed with the many acts of kindness shown to us since March. An example is customers John and Jo who acted as our free couriers to 4005 and 4006 postcodes. Many people said it was the highlight of their day to receive a parcel and have a friendly chat with them.
We had orders from across Australia from family and old friends and concerned customers. Authors and publishers have also given us so much support. Along with an understanding and supportive landlord we have survived!
We thank you for everything you have done to support us.
Happy Love Our Customers Day,
Fiona.”
I hope that message makes you feel good as we continue to stutter through extraordinary times.
When you’re writing, do you sometimes go off at a tangent? Head off in some absolutely fascinating direction, only to discover later that’s not where you wanted to go? Or perhaps you decide the tangent is the new direction, and that what you wrote before is mostly irrelevant. (Maybe life is like that too?)
In this final blog of this series, which first appeared as guest blogs for Margaret River Press, I’d like to re-introduce the three people I interviewed for the earlier blogs and let them talk about tangents in a different way.
Each of them introduces a fascinating spin-off from their main area of work, a spin-off that in its own way tells us something special about writing and publishing in Australia.
Where the Wild Things Are – Fiona Stager
How big a market is there for children’s books in Australia? Big enough to generate a spin-off specialist bookshop alongside an existing one, according to prominent independent bookseller Fiona Stager.
And what better name for a children’s bookshop than one adopted from the title of Maurice Sendak’s highly acclaimed and much-loved (and occasionally controversial) 1963 picture book, Where the wild things are?
If you’re a regular, you’ll recall that my second blog in this series was based on an audio interview with Fiona, co-owner of Avid Reader Bookshop in West End, Brisbane. In the audio extract below, she explains how a flourishing children’s ‘corner’ in that bookshop developed into a stand-alone bookshop when the property next door came up for rent.
It augurs well for the future of books and bookshops in Australia that 30% of sales are of children’s books.
Of the two passions Fiona mentions – cook books and travel books, I reckon sales of the former might have risen during the Covid-19 slowdown as locked-in citizens looked for creative in-home activities.
I’ve heard that banana bread was a hot favourite (perhaps literally), but no doubt there were some who pushed the culinary boundaries.
The sales of travel books, especially for overseas destinations, must have surely slumped this year, however, and Fiona was no doubt fortunate she expanded into children’s books instead 🙂
Ambassadors for editing – Karen Lee
If you’ve seen earlier blogs in this series, you may remember that Karen Lee, CEO of the Institute of Professional Editors (IPEd), told me that if you really want to upset an editor, then suggest to them that what they do is ‘just proofreading’.
To try to address what they see as a major misconception of their contribution to the writing process, IPEd developed an initiative to send out some of its members as ‘ambassadors’ to explain what they do.
Karen tells us the origin and purpose of this IPEd ‘spin-off’ in this video clip.
Funded by the Copyright Agency, access to IPEd ambassadors is free, and Karen encourages writing groups and classes of all kinds to contact the Institute if they are interested in hearing about how editors can help them.
Postcards from future Queensland – Kim Wilkins
In addition to being a well-published author of fantasy and historical adventure stories for women, Kim Wilkins is Associate Professor in Writing, Publishing, and 21st-Century Book Culture at the University of Queensland (UQ). You might have met her through video clips in the first blog in this series.
In April this year, Kim and a colleague, Dr Helen Marshall, launched an initiative from UQ’s School of Communication and Arts which invited senior high school students to imagine a better world, post Covid-19.
In this video clip, Kim talks about the project’s aims:
You can catch up with the progress of the postcards project and see some of the many postcards Queensland high school students have submitted on the project website.
I suggested to Kim Wilkins that asking students to use their imagination in the postcards project fitted closely with her own use of imagination in writing her fantasy and historical fiction novels.
You can see her thoughtful response to that suggestion in the video clip here:
I hope that your own imagination has been sparked by Kim’s comments and also by the insightful inputs from Karen Lee and Fiona Stager into this blog. I’m very thankful to all three of them for their willingness to take part in this series and for their stimulating responses to the questions I posed.
What impressed me overall was not only their openness but also the enthusiasm each one showed for their particular contribution to the writing and publishing world.
Through these four blogs I’ve learned a lot about writing, editing, publishing and bookselling and a little bit more about technology. I hope you enjoyed the ride.
Follow-up
If you haven’t yet seen the three earlier blogs in this series, you can find them on my Writesite blog: drdymock.wordpress.com
Author, editor and journalist Gary Kamiya said an editor is responsible for making a piece of writing ‘more like a Stradivarius and less like a woodchip’. He intriguingly suggested that the primary responsibility of an editor is not to the writer but to the reader.
Karen Lee, CEO of the Institute of Professional Editors Limited (IPEd) sent me Kamiya’s short piece on editing when I first made contact with her about contributing to a guest blog series for Margaret River Press in August 2020.
So as part of that series I was interested to follow this up with Karen, and explore with her the purpose of IPEd and the role of editors in the writing process.
This is an edited version of a recent Zoom interview with Karen. The short video clip below will serve to introduce her and give you some idea of her passion for what editors do.
I asked Karen how IPEd had come about. If I wasan editor, I said, why would I want to join IPEd?
Karen said that the majority of IPEd’s members are freelancers, sole traders, mostly working independently from home, and therefore potentially professionally isolated. She said the association came about when a number of smaller societies came together because they saw the need to network, to talk about professional standards and to consider professional development. Last year the Australian-based IPEd extended its reach to New Zealand, and is also seeking to better serve those working in-house in business and government.
Editors join IPEd for reasons similar to those of authors who join writing workshops and go to writers’ festivals, Karen said – to improve and hone their skills, and also to network, to get to know other writers. IPEd provides an opportunity for editors to get to know each other, she said, to form some connections. And sometimes there’s an additional spin-off – new business.
As a result of the various constraints and working-from-home requirements over the past few months, many organisations have moved to a new reliance on technology to keep staff in touch. It seems IPEd was already ahead of the game, as Karen explains in the video clip here:
While IPEd’s use of technology and its paperless office have helped the organisation cope smoothly with recent external changes, I asked Karen how members were faring under the Covid-19 slowdown. After all, editors, particularly freelancers, normally have a bit of ebb and flow in their work because they’re reliant on writers who also have ebb and flow. How had it been for them in recent times?
Karen said that they had undertaken a survey early in the closedown period, and from more than 200 responses, about half said it was too early to tell if there would be any effect on their business, and about the same number were already experiencing some downturn, with advance bookings dropping and workflows slowing. ‘But we’ve heard of some others,’ she said, ‘who say they’re going gangbusters.’ It seems that some authors were dusting off their manuscripts now that they had time to work on them again. At the time of this interview, Karen said IPEd planned to regularly monitor how members were going.
I also asked Karen about the impact the pandemic might have on IPEd’s future operations. You can see her reply here:
In reply to my question about how a writer might find an editor that’s just right for them, Karen assured me that the Editors Directory on the IPEd website is the way to go.
The next question a writer might of course ask is how much is having a manuscript edited likely to cost. It seems that there is no standard fee, and that IPEd members may use different criteria for a quote, as Karen explains in this video clip:
A major question for writers is, of course, whatever the basis for the fee, is it worth paying an editor to edit your manuscript. Is there likely to be sufficient value added to justify the cost and effort? Should we expect a Stradivarius? Karen Lee said that if you want to really incense an editor, suggest to them that what they do is ‘just proofreading’.
As a professional association, IPEd has to look inwards to serve the needs of its members. But at the same time, it extends its influence outwards into the community of writers through the activities of those members.
I asked Karen Lee the rather large question of what contribution she thinks the body of editors as a whole makes to the publication process. You can see her response here:
In that video clip, Karen Lee mentions that she is also a writer. I finished the interview by asking her whether she has a favourite author.
Karen said that of the authors she admires and who inspire her, Amy Tan is right at the top of her list. Also, recently she’d been introduced to the writing of Elif Shafak, a Turkish author who writes about religion in Turkey and the status of women in that country. Karen said that Elif Shafak’s writing reminded her of that of Isabel Allende, in that she writes very lyrically and very passionately, but also that she writes about issues that pick up on her country’s political nuances .
Another favourite is Yangsze Choo, a Malaysian author in America. ‘It was such a delight to read stories that were based in Malaysia with Malaysian-Chinese culture,’ Karen said, ‘and that had been well received at an international level.’
You will have seen even from her responses in this blog that Karen Lee is passionate about the role of editors and the purpose of IPEd.
In the short piece she sent me from Gary Kamiya, he admonished editors to ‘make it light and tight and strong so that it sings’. Writers and publishers alike would be glad to hear such a song.
Still to come
In the final blog for the Margaret River Press series, each of the three people I’ve interviewed adds another fascinating dimension to the writing and publishing process.
Darryl Dymock's Writesite 