It is a stormy day here on the Sunshine Coast at the twenty-sixth latitude in the Southern Hemisphere. It is the equivalent of a Northern Hemisphere early June with the sunrise at just before five when the grandkids got up this morning. It is a good writing day.
The roar of fifty-kilometre winds rang through the night. Lush tropical vegetation and rain lashed at the louvred glass windows – louvres that are usually open day after day allowing the sub-tropical winds to flow through the house and make the humidity and heat more bearable.
The Coral Sea is one hundred metres down the street. Yesterday we were swimming in the warm sheltered waters of Tea Tree Bay in Noosa. This morning though, the sky is grey and the sea is furrowed with fierce foaming waves that pound onto the powdery sand beach – a sand so fine that it squeaks when you walk on it. I see the solitary billowing neon orange sail of a kite surfer who is experienced enough to enjoy these conditions.
I have been travelling in Australia, most recently bike riding in Tasmania where the Dunalley oysters are the best I have ever tasted – briny firm-fleshed with a sweet finish.
I’m in a land where I have to remind myself what marsupial and monotreme mean. I’m visiting a continent where the animals have great Scrabble word names such as echidna, galah, goanna, quokka and quoll. I’m in a place where Qantas does not have a U. Qantas, the national airline name is an acronym for Queensland and New Territory Air Service. None the less, once you reach Australia, the internal flights of Qantas, Virgin or Jetstar are cheap and plentiful. Australia is like Canada with the population flung around the edges of a vast otherwise nearly empty land.
There is currently no writing routine other than intermittent journaling in the battered lavender book that gets stuffed into one of my bike panniers each morning. My reading is a sporadic listening to Australian Edwina Wren present the audio version of Geraldine Brooks’ The People of the Book, a historical fiction based on the Sarajevo Haggadah. It is a who-done-it with interesting information about the production and preservation of Medieval religious tomes woven around the plot.
On the flight here, I finished Joe Moran’s First You Write a Sentence. I recommend his book to anyone who reads or writes and I am looking everywhere for a chance to use more verbal adjectives and adverbs. Oh yes, vary sentence length.
Petrarch’s in Launceston, Tasmania is a delightful independent bookstore with a good collection of books by Tasmanian authors. I bought two children’s books, written and illustrated by Jennifer Cossins, 101 Collective Nouns and A – Z of Endangered Animals. I stumbled upon a beautiful pocket-sized edition of the Collected Poems of WB Yeats – a nice place to hide in as I wait for flights that are delayed or cancelled due to the recent weather extremes.
I desperately wanted to buy Anna Burns’ Booker Prize-winning novel Milkman but it won’t fit in my luggage allowance – maybe for the journey back to Canada. And also David Malouf has a new collection of poems, An Open Book – perhaps that would be the best souvenir of this trip to Australia.