Davey Dreamnation

On Thursday 6 December I’ll be giving a presentation on my nearly-completed PhD thesis, entitled ‘Bonfire of the Vanity Presses: Self-Publishing in the Field of Australian Literature’. The seminar will be held at Swinburne University of Technology (Hawthorn campus), where I am studying at the Institute for Social Research. It’ll be held from 12.30-2 pm, [...]

By the time I got back to the flat it was dark again. My reader had almost powered down. Only old cherries from the Guardian and my home mail anyway, including that missive, the Arts letter. Flicking through the softcopy as fresh wireless data chugged through the air, I remembered again that eerie sensation of [...]

At about 5pm I got the umbrella out again and went down to the shops in my rubber boots, loshing through the sudden aanwaai cascades, trying to make sense of that first day’s all-too-quick inspection, landing finally on a strip of Asian noddle joints, no Anglo menus in any of them but all equally safe [...]

After testing that the thermal had also been connected, I affixed our little coffee exploder to the burner, and very soon was sipping it while sitting before the boxes on the door-table in the loungeroom, their wooden surfaces slightly sprayed by rain dust. I’d forgotten sugar, but enjoyed the bitterness of the coffee anyway, its [...]

At 9am the crates arrived, secure and solid packed, eight of them in all, one for each room, with two more for the loungeroom. The delivery scanner nodded briefly when I opened the screen door to him, palletting the boxes without further comment. We farmed the boxes out to their rooms and they sat there, [...]

A small patio sheltered one half of the small garden space from the rain and sun, the white posts of its supports ringed by vines of an almost glowing green, the smooth concrete floor and the warm blue walls that I remembered from that first encounter, privately, that sunny day when I would have signet [...]

The street set was still dark beneath the shadow of the dike but with the glow of the eave-lights I soon reached the front door of our apartment, No. 36. Aramis you wanted to call it, Midnight, I preferred. We would see. The key turned loud in the lock and I almost stumbled as the [...]

On the platform at Footscray UG I got hit by a blast of hot air and steam as a giant intercity speed train lumbered out, bound for Geelong, and the western metropoles. There were more platform hawkers than I remembered, this being the last major intra-state stop on the Western Line. Airport interconnection, the tourist [...]

I closed the door on our empty house for the last time, leaving the detritus of rental space - the video cards and home-delivery pizza menus, the old school telephone directories in yellow and white, sensor mood lights and triple flush, raked Japanese mini-garden and opaque pond, twin bins and water-efficient compost - for its [...]

Rain fell like a scene change. I rolled over in my freelance airbed in the empty loungeroom, scaring dust motes with my whoosh. I lay there gaping at the field of that space, smelling smoke, controlling the intake of that dust through my nostrils like a green producer, knowing that I had to get up, [...]

My poem Snowy has been published in Snorkel 6 alongside untold work by Pam Brown, Todd Swift, Greg McLaren and many more!