Dark Paradise

You know how some ideas haunt you? Well, this photograph haunted me from the moment I first I came across it several years ago. I knew that at some point I would write about it—and now I have.

Jō and Ichiko Takasuka, Victoria 1914/5

DARK PARADISE is a radio piece, the story of Japanese immigrant, Jō Takasuka, who grew Australia’s first commercial rice crop in 1914/15—as told by a benshi or silent film narrator. From the moment the Takasuka family arrive in Melbourne in 1905, they have to battle not only a harsh physical environment, but also a hostile political climate, thanks to the notorious ‘White Australia’ policy. DARK PARADISE is a fictionalised account of such a time and place.

DARK PARADISE
Written by Noëlle Janaczewska
Produced by Jane Ulman
Music: Chis Abrahams & Jim Denley

Sound engineer: Andrei Shabunov

Performed by: Kuni Hashimoto, Linda Cropper, Asako Izawa

Ivar Kants, Felix Gentle, Gerard Carroll, Ian Scott, Gary Bryson, Hamish Daniel,

Andy Scott, Barbara Smith, Garry Hogan, Nicholas Field & Yuki Matsuura

ABC Radio National: Airplay
Sunday 9 August, 3:00 pm, repeated Thursday 13 August, 7:00 pm, and available online for 4 weeks from first broadcast at www.abc.net.au/rn/airplay

And I haven’t finished with this material—neither the story of the Takasukas, nor the figure of the benshi. Over the coming year, I’ll be continuing to work with it for new projects in print, poetry and performance.

Noëlle on Another Lost Shark

As part of the run-up to next month's Queensland Poetry Festival (where I'm reading), I did an online interview about my writing process, and the performance/poetry nexus, with Queensland-based poet Graham Nunn. You can read it, and my poem Local Customs: Tips for Refugees on Graham's Another Lost Shark site.

Minnie Mouse Redraws the Line

Listen to my short piece Minnie Mouse Redraws the Line on ABC Radio National's Airplay. Thursday 16 July at 7:00 pm or on-line for 4 weeks from Sunday 12 July.


The piece is a playful speculation on the relationship between Mickey and Minnie Mouse of Walt Disney fame. Minnie finds herself under house arrest in a rundown hotel in Sydney. The studio suits at Disney want her to lie low for a while. Mickey is at the peak of his fame and the knowledge Minnie has of the 'real Mickey' risks a cartoon catastrophe.

Performed by Lucia Mastrantone. Produced by Libby Douglas.

The Need for Imaginative Space

The last month has been one of workshops and deadlines and struggling with questions of structure. It's been a crowded, busy, scheduled month, so these words from Doris Lessing's 2007 Nobel lecture about the space you need to think and write seemed particularly apt.

‘Writers are often asked, How do you write? With a wordprocessor? an electric typewriter? a quill? longhand? But the essential question is, “Have you found a space, that empty space, which should surround you when you write?” Into that space, which is like a form of listening, of attention, will come the words, the words your characters will speak, ideas—inspiration.

If a writer cannot find this space, then poems and stories may be stillborn.’

Read the rest of her lecture here.

Cluster

There’s a new interactive blog for playwrights—to discuss, debate critique, create, inspire and connect—and it’s called Cluster. It’s the brainchild of Joanna Erskine, an enterprising Sydney-based ‘emerging playwright’. The ‘emerging’ bit is her term not mine, and she explains it as: ‘This means I am in a kind of artistic limbo. I am on my way to where I want to be, but have not made it “there” yet.’

Joanne, that probably describes how a lot of us feel—new, emerging, established, whatever …

The City Lorikeets

My essay The City Lorikeets was one of the 2 runners-up in the 2009 WILDCARE Tasmania Nature Writing Prize. Publication details to follow.

Savage Minds

A long time since I studied it, but I try to keep up with what's hot and what's not in anthropology.

It's not in any way about 'keeping my hand in', but it is more than idle curiosity, because anthropologists and anthropology-related themes have featured in a few of my radio scripts and plays, most notably Songket. And quite a few years ago I also wrote a couple of drafts of a novel in which 2 of the central characters were anthropologists. Very wisely, I binned that manuscript; decided to let it become ‘compost’ for other writings. 

Anyway, this link has nothing to do with writing. It's a group blog on matters anthropological, it’s called Savage Minds, and I find it interesting reading.