Thanks Jeff for your thoughts on research, writing and the Iceberg Theory. Hope your computer is working soon Jill.

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

Walking Tour departing from City Library, 253 Flinders Lane Melbourne and finishing at The State Library of Victoria, 328 Swanston Street Melbourne on Wednesday 28 January 2009, 6.00 – 7.30 pm
For more information phone 9658 9500 – EVENT BOOKED OUT

Vote for Radical Melbourne or SMS RADICAL to 13 46 88

Jeff and Jill Sparrow are the next Summer Read authors blogging from 21 – 25 January.

Brother and sister Jeff and Jill Sparrow live in Melbourne. They co-authored the books Radical Melbourne: A Secret History and Radical Melbourne 2: The Enemy Within. Jeff’s book Communism: A Love Story was shortlisted for the Colin Roderick Award in 2007. He is the editor of the literary journal Overland. Jill is co-author (with Paul Voermans) of the forthcoming novel Parliament of Sims.

Their book Radical Melbourne is one of the books on the Summer Read shortlist.

Radical Melbourne leads readers through political history via the streets and buildings of today’s inner city – turning familiar city landmarks into monuments to passionate political struggles past. Have you ever wondered why Parliament House contain gun slits, an escape passage and a dungeon? or what city block covers nine thousand corpses?

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

Walking Tour departing from City Library, 253 Flinders Lane Melbourne and finishing at The State Library of Victoria, 328 Swanston Street Melbourne on Wednesday 28 January 2009, 6.00 – 7.30 pm
For more information phone 9658 9500 – EVENT BOOKED OUT

What Jeff says about summer reading

“In the the summer, I read P. G. Wodehouse. The real world might be going to hell in a handbasket but in Wodehouse stolen cow creamers eternally return, the word ‘Eulalie’ keeps the Black Shorts of amateur dictator Sir Roderick Spode at bay, and Jeeves noiselessly appears with restoratives whenever young gentlemen feel rocky after a night at the Drones Club.”

What Jill says about summer reading

“Summer’s a good time to lie in the backyard with a radical book, enjoying (at least for a few hours!) the illusion that doing nothing will help change the world…”

I’m writing to you from a ship near Torres Strait. My husband Geoffrey is the ship’s lecturer, and I’m his “accompanying person”. We are sailing through a sea scattered with tiny islands that look like poached eggs - the ring of sand is the egg white and the vegetation in the middle is the yoke. Some are just a speck, others are miles across. It’s a dream-like seascape - like something out of the happier parts of “Ancient Mariner”. I’ve sailed in the Mediterranean, but I’ve never seen anything as magical as this.

We have just visited Thursday Island, locally known as T. I. I love Thursday Island. So far it has resisted touristic progress. Back in the nineteenth century, its fishing trawlers went after beche de mer - those grim looking sea slugs that the Oriental gourmets prize as a delicacy and an aphrodisiac. Later the trawlers fished for pearls and mother of pearl shells; now it’s prawns and  crayfish. The coral shoals make fishing and sailing a hazardous exercise, particularly  at night. One of the worst disasters in Australian maritime history occurred  near T. I. in February 1890, when the mail steamer the “Quetta”, sailing in the dark, struck a coral reef. A hundred and thirty three people drowned. The tall wooden Anglican Cathedral in the centre of town is dedicated to those lost souls.

I’m especially interested in shipwrecks in Torres Strait because someone from long ago -  someone I’ve come to know well - was mortally injured on a coral reef off T. I. It happened on 27 December 1913. The Dutch mail ship the ‘Tasman” hit a reef  at eleven o’clock at night and it was New Year’s Day before anyone could be rescued. For much of that time the unfortunate passengers huddled on deck, exposed to the howling winds and pouring rain of a cyclone. Among those passengers was Lillan Nordica, one of the operatic superstars of the early twentieth century, on her way home from a concert tour of Australia. I came across her when I was writing my biography of the famous Melbourne soprano Nellie Melba. It’s usually said that those towering divas of the golden age of opera hated one another, but she and Melba were firm friends.  Though born on different continents - Nordica was American, Melba of course was Australian- - they had much in common. Both came from down-to-earth immigrant stock, both valued good sense and both spoke their mind.

Nordica was taken to the hospital at T.I.  There she lingered for months in the tropical heat. Exposure and pneumonia had weakened her heart. At the end of March she was placed on a ship for Jakarta, but she barely survived the voyage, dying in Jakarta early in May.  Melba was travelling in her personal train in the far west of America when she heard the news.  She was due to sing that night, but she wept so hard for Nordica that her manager thought he would have to cancel the concert. That her dear friend had died so close to Australia, seems to have made Melba’s sense of loss the worse.

I would love to receive your comments and perhaps questions.  However internet time on the ship is limited. I will be communicating with you again tomorrow, but please forgive me if I don’t reply to your questions and comments until the day after.