I had a wonderful compliment yesterday. A person recognised me as the author of Cups with No Handles and came up to tell me that she thought it was a wonderfully Australian story told in the idiom with a kind of freshness and accuracy that she doesn’t come across often. Well, my buttons nearly popped because I am not a native Australian speaker.

I first came to Australia from Chicago in 1968. Although I wasn’t a backpacker for I had landed a job at a private school in Ballarat, I was on an adventure fresh out of university travelling as far away from home as I could get. When I disembarked from the BOAC aeroplane and stepped onto the tarmac at Essendon Airport, I heard myself being called a Yank for the first time in my life. So naïve was I that I wondered how the stranger speaking to me knew I was a Yankee from the North and not a Rebel from the South. (I blush to think of that now.) I was called luv and thought it was a compliment; I heard the word sheila used in such a way that I didn’t know what it was; I heard phrases: too right, bewdy mate, she’ll be right, no worries, flat out, fair dinkum, fair go – all spoken in the broadest accents; I heard the upward inflection at the end of sentences that made me think people were asking me questions at every turn; I heard strange syntactical constructions that made the English words of my own language unintelligible to me. Rather than despairing, I was excited to realise that Australian was a different language from mine and that the dynamics of this new language – the syntax, the inflections, the words and phrases – were fascinating. I set about learning it.

As much as by speaking with new friends, I learned the language by immersing myself in the literature. At first is was the books that my friends threw at a ‘new chum’: Randolph Stowe’s To the Islands, Tourmaline, Merry-Go-Round in the Sea; Henry Lawson’s short stories, especially “The Drover’s Wife;” Joseph Furphy’s Such is Life; Henry Handel Richardson’s The Getting of Wisdom; A.D. Hope’s poems, “Australia” then “Death of a Bird” and through him Judith Wright. And then I found books for myself: Manning Clark’s histories were coming out volume by volume and then came a new re-print of The Fortunes of Richard Mahoney, all three volumes in one paperback with a gold cover. I remember lugging that around for weeks so I could read it on the train going to and from work. It was when I discovered Patrick White and read The Tree of Man that I felt I was beginning to know this country and its language.  I wrote my first play using Joseph Furphy’s Such is Life to guide me. I wasn’t conscious of it at the time, but I know now that I wrote No Place for a Woman, based on a Henry Lawson short story, in order to learn the language and discover the ethnography of the original Settler Australians. By that time I wanted to know not only the language but the past so I could plant my own roots here. I knew I had begun a project that was never going to end and leaving this new place I had found to live in was not an option. Interestingly, an American woman named Lucy Frost who teaches at Tasmania University and must have come to Australia about the same I did, must have been doing the same thing I was. I discovered her book, No Place for a Nervous Lady; voices from the Australian Bush, years later.

Of course, I read many, many Australian books other than those I have named. Dame Leonie Kramer (for better or for worse) was spear heading a push for recognition of Australian literature back then and I dove in headlong. Publishers took her up on it and there have been so many great books… How can I begin to name the ones that influenced me over the years? Anything by Christina Stead or Helen Garner or Kate Jennings, Inga Clendinnen’s Dancing with Strangers or Tiger’s Eye, Kim Mahood’s Craft for a Dry Lake, Tim Winton’s Cloud Street, Rodney Hall’s Island of the Mind, Lionel Fogarty’s poetry. I have to stop; I’ll keep going forever. My favourite right now is Alexis Wright’s Carpenteria. I think, in that book, she has stretched our language, made it more Australian (Aboriginal) than ever. I love opening it on any page and reading passages out of it. It is a masterpiece.

Oh, dear, I haven’t said anything about Australian film (Peter Weir) or Australian theatre (Jack Hibbard’s Stretch of the Imagination), which was also coming into its own in the seventies. What a dynamic and expansive time it was to be learning this language.

When I moved down to the city from Ballarat, I found an evolving language that was wonderful. It had an international lilt, with clipped pronunciations and clever constructions. In St Albans, where I taught, my favourite sentence, usually spoken by boys in the back row was, “I didn’t do nuthin, yeah but, Miss.” I got along with the kids I taught and was invited to their houses to have dinner with their migrant parents. Because I was a migrant myself, I had much in common with them. My interest in their life before Australia and their reasons for leaving the old country plus their struggles with the Australian language meant that I was constantly having people tell me stories.  I became a good listener: a person will tell a story if there is a listener. I found I could write their stories if they wanted me to – say an explanation to a lawyer or a letter describing a situation – and they felt as if they had written it themselves. “How do you do that?” they asked. Well, I didn’t know. But, I reckon being tuned into the sounds of words had a lot to do with it.

When, almost thirty years after my study of the language had begun, I was asked by his daughter to help Daryl Tonkin tell his memories of life on Jackson’s Track, I knew I could do it. I tuned in to his way of speaking very quickly. That book, Jackson’s Track, Memoirs of a Dreamtime Place, was a sensational experience for me. Cups with No Handles; Memoirs of a Grassroots Activist came next and I am getting lots of great feedback from readers; the Life of Eileen Harrison, Kurnai artist, is almost finished and a couple of new ones are on the boil.

The project I began that February day at Essendon Airport is certainly not yet finished.

As Jeff and Nam have written, and every other writer knows, procrastination is something those of us without a ‘day job’ have to face. With procrastination comes anxiety, guilt and evasive behaviour. 

I have just come back to this warm climate after freezing to death in Europe for almost six weeks. It was wonderful in Paris, but wonderful also to throw off the layers of jumpers and skivvies and singlets, hats and gloves and scarves when we stepped off the plane in Melbourne. While I was away, I took a break from my writing. I shut away the manuscript I am working on and left my SLV instructions for Summer Read blogging on top of my closed and turned-off computer. It was not easy leaving that computer behind, but I did. All the while we were away, I kept telling myself that when I got back home, I would hit the ground running, finish the last chapter of Eileen’s story, get all my blogs done at once, and prepare for the impending Summer Read gigs. 

Did I do that? 

No.

I did turn on my computer the minute I got home but only because I had felt like  part of my body had been left behind when I left it on my desk six weeks earlier and I needed to re-attach myself. I turned it on, but instead of working I read the New York Times. Then I mucked around with e-mails until my jetlagged brain couldn’t take anymore. I glanced at the blogging instructions, turned away with a moan and collapsed on the couch. I’ll get to it when I know what day it is, I thought. But… the next day was no good. We had to watch the inauguration, an important historical occasion we rationalised. We couldn’t allow ourselves to miss the moment when the helicopter flew the former president away from the seat of power so we could believe that, at last, the world was in safe hands. Then came the tennis. Down to Melbourne to sit with our friends in Hisense (I wonder how long that name will last) Arena in the blistering sun and watch Serena defeat that tiny girl with more power in her racket than seemed possible. We stayed until Tsonga won his match. Too long. Back home we caught up with country friends at the Japanese place in Inverloch and then it was imperative that we participate in urgent anti-desalination plant activities, rallying as many people as we could through the phone tree to attend yet another protest at Williamson Beach.

Now, at last I am once again before my computer. I am actually writing my first blog. I am procrastinating no more. As Jeff said, a writer has to set aside a certain time each day to work or it doesn’t work. We have to put fences around ourselves with set times and set routines because writing is difficult and it is so easy to put it off. I don’t find writing hard and agonising as Jeff says he does, but I find the intensity, the deep focus, the zone you have to get to in order to write exactly what you want to write difficult to find some days. When I get there my body tenses up, I lose track of real time and place and enter another world. In my journal, which I keep erratically, I wrote down a comment by Peter Carey way back in 1997. He said, “A certain nagging ache lies behind all but the most exhilarating moments of writing. Invention remains the difficult part. Most writers I know can’t invent for very long. They can write for a long time, but they can’t invent. After three or four hours, people have done most of the inventing they can do. Then you sit down and do the craft things. But mostly you are exhausted.”

I find quite a few exhilarating moments in writing, possibly because of the kind of work I do, unravelling other people’s lives, finding a narrative strand and shaping it to bring out meaning. There are often moments of epiphany followed by great excitement and urgent writing. In my book, Cups with No Handles, when Bette momentarily questioned her dedication to the Communist Party, wondering at her father’s grave if she had done the things she had just so he would love her best, it was an intense moment. For Bette’s daughter, Gina, that admission changed the whole story.  I was in a zone when I wrote that up and it was exhilarating. When I finished that story, I looked up, time had passed and I was exhausted. 

Mostly, writing takes tenacity, perseverance and patience. All those things are hard; they are why we procrastinate. But, you know, all the while we are procrastinating, we are thinking. I heard John Clark say at a party here on Phillip Island that he is always working, “twenty-four seven.” Me too. Once you start on a project you never stop until you write the last word. 

And, how do you get to the last word? You keep going forward day after day until you have finished.

Then you re-write.

It’s hot. Just made a dash down from the Blue Mountains to drop my mother at the airport for a flight to Melbourne. That got me thinking of how much time I spent on planes in writing the Tom Wills biography. Most of those trips were to Victoria. I stayed at my parents’ home in Merlynston, wedged between Pentridge Gaol and Fawkner Cemetery. I spent weeks at a time in Melbourne taking a train into the city and then sitting myself down in the SLV and working. Typically I was there until the library closed (I think around 10 pm) - usually in the newspaper section meticulously going over every newspaper or periodical I thought might yield information. And as the last lights of the library went out I’d collect my luggage from the locker, walk down the steps past St. George and his Dragon and into the train station. Winter was the worst. But somehow, now, as I ponder those nights there is a certain romance. Or at least a sense that it was worth it.

Nothing could be more different from where I sit now. December in Sydney. I’ve popped back to my hospital to write this before I head back to the Blue Mountains. The room I sit in is long with the adornments of the nineteenth century. Indeed, I sit in the midst of a classic nineteenth century psychiatric asylum - Cumberland Hospital.

This room has writing memories for me.

Looking out the window I see sandstone buildings - some of the first convict constructions in the colony of NSW. Straight ahead is a clock tower and around me the buildings that made up the Old Female Factory.

I spent time here writing the Tom Wills biography. This room was my sanctuary, my asylum. I like writing in rooms that are the size of boardrooms - which is the official function of the room I sit in. On those hot afternoons, writing my drafts, I’d spread my old manuscripts about on this table, and during moments of impasse, flop my head and arms on the long table’s cooling wooden surface.

The other thing I love about this room is its proximity to where Tom’s parents spent time in the 1830s. Within a short walk is the site of the Female Orphan Asylum where Tom’s mother lived for several years of her childhood. You can still walk around the sandstone Orphan Asylum and down to the Parramatta River where the girls on Sunday boarded a boat to attend church. And even closer is Parramatta Park where Tom Wills brought the aboriginal cricket team to play in 1867. I am sure most Sydneysiders have little idea of this marvellous team and even less of Tom Wills.

Before I forget, I was asked a question by Sue which I didn’t answer. Yes, Tom’s exposure to alcohol at Rugby School probably shaped his central nervous system to some extent for his later alcoholism. This, of course, cannot be the entire reason for his alcoholism because every second boy might have developed alcohol abuse. What is not commonly known is that cricketers drank alcohol before, during and after matches. I found a delightful Cambridge Guide for the gentleman cricketer published in the nineteenth century. The Guide gave advice on drinking during a match. The suggested drink of choice was claret which under an Australian sun was iced.

Alice Pung is our first Summer Read author to blog from 22-25 November.

Alice was born in Footscray and grew up in Braybrook. She is a writer and lawyer, whose work has appeared in The Monthly, Good Weekend, The Australian, Meanjin, The Age, The Best Australian Stories 2007 and Etchings.

Her book Unpolished Gem won the 2007 Australian Newcomer of the Year award. Alice is editor of Growing Up Asian in Australia, one of the books on the Summer Read shortlist.

In this anthology, new and well-known Asian-Australian authors share their courageous and often humorous stories of leaving home and finding their feet. With authors spanning several generations, these stories show what it is really like to grow up both Asian and Australian.

As part of the free Summer Read events across Victoria, Alice will be appearing at:

• Footscray Library on Wednesday 11 February 2009 at 7pm
  For more information and bookings phone 9688 0289
• Mill Park Library on Monday 23 February 2009 at 6.30pm
  At this event Alice will launch the Mill Park Writers Group
  For more information and bookings phone 9437 8189

What Alice says about summer reading

 ”I spent most of my adolescent summers in dark corners of the Footscray Library reading MAD magazine. I especially loved folding the back-page cryptic artwork (which could only be done in dark corners, as librarians don’t like their books origamied). At the end of every summer I emerged anaemic, but filled with blissful fits of hilarity.”