A Writer Afoot » Australia

World building, travel and the bush fires in Australia

Barbara Samuel — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 06:51:14 +0000

I’m thinking a lot about world building, and have been writing a blog about it which I hope to post soon. One aspect of world building is context, and I’ve been thinking about that the past two days because of the horrific fires north of Melbourne in Australia.

When I returned from Australia last fall, the thing that most stuck with me was the way Australians talked about “bush fires.” Before I visited, the worst fires I knew about were in California when the Santa Anna winds blow. They’re fast-moving, terrible fires. But not even Californians talk about fire the way Aussies do. I wrote about it in a blog when I returned:

Which is exactly what it becomes in the dreaded bush fires, which burn so fierce and hot that people really do speak the word fire in a way I’ve never heard it spoken. With respect and a bone-deep dread.

Looking at the forest floor, knee deep sometimes in those cast-off curls of long, thinly shredded bark, you can understand it. How hot and fast the fire would burn. The sap of eucalypts is prone to exploding, making it even hotter and more fierce yet.

I couldn’t stop wondering what the biological purpose of the shredding was. It nagged me through our time in Victoria and on to Tasmania, where I found a park ranger with the answer: those trees are shedding that kindling because it iskindling. Because they want the fire to burn. They can stand it. It gets rid of the competing trees and allows the sun-loving eucalypts to grow stronger.

Context.

There is often a feeling that travel is too expensive, whether ecologically (that carbon footprint!) or physically or monetarily. And it is expensive, in all those ways, but it is also important for this very reason: the value of travel is in having a context when the news comes out of Heathrow or Italy or New York City. Hearing the stories coming out of Victoria today, I had a context. I understood what made those fires so fierce that they overtook fleeing people in their cars. Those trees and the profound drought (women I met at the conference in Melbourne had not had a bath in a tub in a year–they were so excited at the chance to soak!), and then because I had been there, I noticed the news when someone said the temps had been over 40 C (about 110 F) for days in a row last week.

When the fires erupted with such devastation that they led the news on Sunday night in many markets here in the US, there were human beings I wanted to make sure were okay. There were landscapes I had met that might have been in the path. Suddenly, that far away land belonged to me in some very small way–I was vested in its thriving, in its people and patterns. The news lost its distance and become prominent because I had connections to that land, that place, those people. In truth, we are all that connected all the time. Travel simply gives us a sense of context.

The fires wiped out entire towns. The flames moved so fast that people racing away in their cars were overtaken. They are far, far worse than the fires that roar down the California coasts, chasing away inhabitants of those canyons. There was no time to be chased out of a canyon in the Victoria fires. The fire simply moved too fast, like a hurricane inferno, devouring everything in its path.

Context. I care because I know about this place. It’s something I’m going to be thinking about in my writing the next few days.

How about you? What do you know about that gave you context for a cataclysmic event? How can you apply that to writing?

Lost Recipe book of the month on W television in Australia

Barbara Samuel — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 16:16:53 +0000

Haven’t been the best blogger in the world lately. Lots of work switching over to new computer, but once the job is done, things will be so much faster I can blog a lot more. Look for upcoming posts on world building, plum jam, the Australian predilection for savory pumpkin, best breakfasts, and many others.

Now to the news of the day:

Some very nice news this morning (well, actually I’ve known for awhile, but had to wait for the official announcement to let you in in on it), The Lost Recipe For Happiness is the W Network Pick of the Month. At the end of the month, a discussion board will be opened, and you can talk about the book there.

Check it out here: http://www.wchannel.com.au/bookclub/default.aspx You will also find discussion questions for book clubs there, and information about being a discussion leader should you so desire.

Yay!

And thanks to those who’ve sent mobile photos and news tidbits! It’s shiveringly fun for me!

flickr creative commons photo by Artolog

Lost Recipe arrives today in Australia

Barbara Samuel — Sun, 01 Feb 2009 02:49:09 +0000

The Lost Recipe for Happiness debuts in Australia today (February 1). I just heard that it’s on the cover of Good Reading magazine, and I’m absolutely delighted by the wonderful reviews I’ve been getting from Down Under.

Meanwhile, the US edition is going to a 5th printing next week. (This is me falling over in a faint.) THANK you, my friends!

I’m so jazzed about this Australian release. (You can read about snow and cool off. ) I’d love to hear about any sightings. New Zealand, too, of course.

Australian cover change

Barbara Samuel — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 18:52:04 +0000

The Australian cover has changed to this:

Again, quite a different take on the same book. I love how many different ways there are to interpret a story!

What do you think?

Australia Wrap Up

Barbara Samuel — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 19:05:13 +0000

I posed some expectations and questions about Australia before I left. Now that roar of travel has settled back into normal life, I can take a look from this side. How were my expectations met or not, shifted or not? With travel, there are the things you think you know, and the things you don’t even know you don’t know.

In the realm of total surprises: The Reef

In the latter category was swimming in the ocean. We took a ferry out to Green Island and walked down the white sand beach to the beach, I was stunned by how clear the water was. My experience with oceans is mainly California, where the water is muddy and often thick with seaweed, and you certainly have no idea what that…thing…might be brushing against your leg. It is also cold. Freezing cold. I don’t go into the ocean in any significant way. I like to sit on the beach. I like to watch the waves and the birds and all that. But swim in it? Not in this lifetime.

But this water was clear! As clear as a swimming pool. Jo dived right in, and said, “Come on in. It’s nice.” So, warily, I crept in. And it wasn’t exactly hot water, but it was bearable. I love to swim and it really was possible to see the entire floor of sand beneath my feet, so I gave it a shot–and ACK! I COULD FLOAT! Like do nothing, and FLOAT in that salty, salty, beautiful water. I spied something out of the corner of my eye and whirled (freaked!) to see two little tropical fish, silvery things with blue stripes, swimming nonchalantly right along with me. It was like being in an aquarium. We only had an hour, but I’m telling you, I so get it now, why everyone likes tropical waters. (Though not at Cairns for six months of the year, where there is a deadly, deadly jelly fish that fills the place. Box jellyfish.) CR said he’d go if we went to the Great Barrier Reef, and we can snorkle or even, if we’re feeling brave, scuba dive. I’m so there.

Because here’s the other thing: The Great Barrier Reef is indescribable. Incredible. We took a semisubmersible trip down and were blown away by all the life, teeming and teeming in that clear water, all the things you see so clearly.

And then, quite by accident, I saw it from the air as we flew down the coast. I never thought to ask if I could have a seat on that side of the plane. I didn’t know enough to realize it would be so magnificent. I happened to look out just as we started flying, and there was the reef, plainly visible in all the swirling turquoise and aqua and sandy patterns it makes, hundreds of miles of reef and teeming, teaming life. I could see the shape of islands emerging, and the patterns of the water, a vast, jeweled science experiment, and I was knocked right out of my head, dazzled and humbled, my brain set afire.

I didn’t know. I didn’t even known I didn’t know. Which makes me wonder what else there is to discover in the world? This giant, incredible planet!

Things you think you know

I didn’t expect Melbourne to be so cosmopolitan in spirit. I thought it would be sort like an Australian version of Chicago or Denver, slightly not as hip as the big glitzy neighbor. Not so. It has a continental, elegant feeling, a vibe all of its own. In the way the men wear such formal suits and the women in their business attire, it felt like London, and maybe that sensibility is carried through to the feeling in some of the bookstores and food shops and takeaways. I did find (to my great joy) that British tea is everywhere, but so is very, very good coffee.

It was hard to get much of a look at Sydney, of course, since the rain was pouring down like it was. My my editor was stunningly hip in red boots and cropped blonde hair and a coat I’d probably recognize if I were more fashionable.

Expectations
Things I am pretty sure of:
–that I will like the Australian sensibility. I am expecting it to be somewhere between the US and Britain, with a hefty helping of its ownself, which remains to be discovered.

Someone in the comment asked why I would expect that inbetween place. It wasn’t that I expected Australia to be a stepchild of either the US or Britain, but since I’ve traveled to Britain several times (and I’m living with a Englishman after all), and I am a native of the US, I was wondering where Australia would be on the continuum. New Zealand felt quite British to me, in so many ways, even the houses and the bakeries and certain sensibilities of entertaining. Not much like the US, or at least Colorado.

Which is a long winded way of saying we all catalog experiences and ideas according to what we already know. It’s the way the brain works.

Given that, I found Australia to be entirely itself. Yes, there was that slight Britishness here and there, in the tea and the suits and the take-aways, and in the bookstore, in particular, I saw similarities. But I didn’t think it felt at all American, though of course there is a television bleed and music and movies. And 7-Eleven! It is both a more formal and more straightforward culture (which is a big fat generalization of both American and Australian culture, since both are such huge countries, but you can’t write a blog like this without an opinion of some kind). Americans typically take a lot of care in choosing words, trying not to offend or get to far into someone’s space. While Aussies do seem to have the same big body space needs Americans (especially Westerners) tend to really like, the straightforwardness of statements can be a little startling, just as it is in England.

–that I will not feel like the Valkyrie from some opera, as I do sometimes in France and Italy, where I am sometimes bigger than the guys, never mind the women.

I did not feel like a Valyrie. In fact, I met more than a handful of women who were well over six feet tall. Also, really sturdy men. Good looking men. I said to a woman next to me at a meal that I’d been startled, walking around Melbourne, at just how many very good looking men I saw. “Well, we are known for that,” she said.

What I want to know more about:

Australian history and the patterns of settlement. The Great Barrier Reef and the history of Cairns. The intrepid explorers who sailed all over the Indian Ocean and around the Pacific, looking for continents and new discoveries. I get that their footprint was a disaster for native people. But I’m smitten by the botanists and the scientists and geographers who were mapping the world, making connections, uncovering entire bodies of knowledge that had never been known by western man before. What must that have been like? Imagine, right now, if there was suddenly an entirely new continent discovered, with entirely different birds and animals and all manner of wondrous new things. What would that be like?

I want to read more about the Outback, too, and the people who live there and how they live and what it’s like to inhabit such a vast landscape.

I didn’t know I would fall so in love with Australia. That I would find myself so enchanted by everything about it and so hungry to know more. You think you might get a place out of your system when you visit, but I just want to return and know more, explore more, dive in more deeply.

Happily, it’s only a plane ride away, and I will be going back. Yessirree.

Thanks for going along with me.

Australian photo tour now up on Flickr

Barbara Samuel — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 03:41:44 +0000

Internet access–and time–became severely limited the final week of our long, insanely wonderful Aussie tour. Since last Sunday, I have been on six flights, covering thousands of kilometers, visited the Outback, Cairns and the Great Barrier Reef, and Sydney, and now I’m typing this from my own laptop while I await Flickr to upload the photos I’ve spent the day organizing and labeling. It is the perfect task for a jet-lagged brain, and I’ve found that I will never get it done if I don’t do it right away.

Uploading is finished. I’ll be doing some more organizing and shuffling over the next day or two, but you can get a good look at the photos here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/60255232@N00/sets/72157606862035227/

I have many thoughts to organize into categories for you. Australia turned out to be so much more than I expected, and so astonishing, and so nourishing. I feel like the girls in the basement have been on a wild shopping binge–each one rushing out every day to gather up all the things she most likes from the environment we found ourselves in, grabbing colors or culture or accents or food or characters according to her job. Every night, they all dumped their stuff in the Room of Creativity, collapsed overnight, the rushed out again at daybreak. All those bags and boxes and observations are piled up in a messy tangle in the middle of the floor and it’s going to take a little time to get them all sorted.

A couple of things I don’t want to forget, raw material from the past few days:

The Great Barrier reef knocked my eyes out of my head. Especially from the air. You think you know about something, and then you see it for real, from an angle you never expected, and entire universes open up.

I learned so much 18th century history! Again, things you sort of think you know, and there is so much more to them.

I had a very intense reaction to the Outback. I think I expected to like it, and instead, it kind of freaked me out. More on that as I sort it out.

In regard to those questions I posed at the beginning of the trip: many intriguing conclusions. The first one is: Australia is not America or Britain or Scotland or New Zealand or any other place. It is its own separate self, very unlike anywhere I’ve been. There is, undeniably, a strong British influence (though the food is better), but lots of other things, too. More on that, too, as I sort it out.

THE LOST RECIPE FOR HAPPINESS will be out in an Australian edition in February, so I hope you Australians will look for it on your shores. I had dinner with my publisher and sales force on Friday night, and I’m excited to let you know that I’ll post cover art as soon as I have it. I also came home to the news that Lost Recipe has now sold to Denmark. Yay! May there be many more. I love the books to go around the world.

Enough for tonight. Check back as I sort out the stuff the Girls brought back from Australia. (Oh, I am both happy and sad to be back home!)

Tasmanian Devils

Barbara Samuel — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 05:24:40 +0000

P1000710

Originally uploaded by A writer afoot

Since I can’t figure out any other way to do it, and I’m stuck waiting for a plane out of Ayers Rock, here’s the photo that should go with the Devils post.

Darling little devils

Barbara Samuel — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 10:35:28 +0000

One more note on Tassie: we saw the famed Tasmanian Devils. Check out these adorable little faces:

They were waiting for lunch, which was hunks of wallabee (fur still attached) and furry little baby chickens. Watching them eat, you suddenly understand the Walt Disney Tasmanian Devil, swirling around in that whirlwind, all flying spit and no brain to speak of. Savage and not all that bright.

But still. Really cute. And endangered, thanks to a virus that has infected 90% of the population. They’re working on keeping one section of population uninfected, and will repopulate when the infected Devils die out.

Tall, tall trees

Barbara Samuel — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 10:31:32 +0000

It occurs to me that I still have not posted anything about trees. It is well known that i have a bit of a tree fetish, given that I was raised in place where we have three varieties. Pines, aspens, and cottonwoods. Very nice trees, of course, but still only three. (Okay, there are elms, too, but they are not the most sturdy of trees in such a climate. More power lines are downed in Pueblo over tree branches felled by snowfall than you can imagine.)

Anyway, there don’t seem to be that many species of trees in most areas of Australia, either. This is also a demanding climate. Many of them are thin, feathery things, with water-preserving leathery leaves. There are the lovely tree ferns of course, elegant ancient things–in the Dandenongs, I saw a line of them, all in a neat little row, as if planted by a settler’s wife to line a driveway. In Tasmania, the guide said the aborigines there ate the center of the trees, but only very rarely, because removing the tender center kills the tree.

Which might be three hundred years old. Give or take a few decades.

There are wattles, too, the tree of Australia, which is coming into delicate yellow bloom through out Victoria just now. Also a pleasant variety of trees. In the mountains, I saw mountain ash trees that were over 250 years old and some were 30 meters high (I am sorry not to translate for you into feet, but my brain is kind of tired of the constant conversions–why haven’t we made this transition yet again? It’s really confusing to figure out temperatures, especially). That would be around 90 feet, I think. Very, very tall.

But most of the trees here are forms of eucalyptus, or gum trees, and there are many varieties. They are wonderful trees! The trunks are so artful, some of them smooth and white, shining in the bright light. Others mottled in a dozen shades of spotted gray and white and black. Some of them cast off their outer bark into great piles of shredded curls and tangles, all lying in piles like kindling.

Which is exactly what it becomes in the dreaded bush fires, which burn so fierce and hot that people really do speak the word fire in a way I’ve never heard it spoken. With respect and a bone-deep dread.

Looking at the forest floor, knee deep sometimes in those cast-off curls of long, thinly shredded bark, you can understand it. How hot and fast the fire would burn. The sap of eucalypts is prone to exploding, making it even hotter and more fierce yet.

I couldn’t stop wondering what the biological purpose of the shredding was. It nagged me through our time in Victoria and on to Tasmania, where I found a park ranger with the answer: those trees are shedding that kindling because it is kindling. Because they want the fire to burn. They can stand it. It gets rid of the competing trees and allows the sun-loving eucalypts to grow stronger.

Nature is a miracle.

The other thing about these trees is the ancient hugeness of them. There are no doubt thousands of ancient, enormous trees all over Australia, since the species can live so long, but I didn’t take pictures of all of them. Just these two in Port Arthur, in Tassie, so you can see what I mean.

Red boat

Barbara Samuel — Sat, 30 Aug 2008 06:51:15 +0000

Back from the hike, and I think I might finally have figured out how to upload photos, though not how to edit the size. So here is one I took last evening:

Most of the photos are still on my camera, but I’ll be adding them to Flickr as we go.