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I’m blogging from sunny hobart where I’m writer-in-residence at the lovely kelly st cottage above salamanca place. Here until the 3rd march and putting the finishing touches, dare i say the piped icing and cachous, on the Piece of Cake. Really can’t wait to get it off my desk. Seriously. I have just about had it.

It’s great to be out of context for this end stretch, because it throws the voice and the landscape into sharp relief (the book, while not exactly set in the NT, is very outback-flavoured) and enables me to be more precise. It is worth asking, precise about what? Well i’m at the point where thematic insights seem to fall effortlessly into place, despite the apparent effort of the last two to three years. So now there is a lot of tidying up of distracting details and odd directions to be done. If a story is a map then this one has a few extraneous side-streets and tangential details and my job, at the moment, is to delete them. There is a malicious pleasure in this part of the work which nicely counteracts the pain of creative exhaustion. Die, redundant adjective, die!

I am also giving a couple of writing workshops while I’m down here and playing that essential part of the role of globetrotting author known as earning my keep. The workshops are already booked out, but you can see the details here.

Hobart’s pleasant and productive so far. I spent yesterday afternoon in the Maritime Museum, which is manned by dear old salts, and a good place to indulge the nautical fetish. Then the state Museum, which has an Antarctica exhibition on, which was absolutely riveting. I particularly liked the old provisions - some compressed meat powder wrapped up like soap - I didn’t take my camera in. the have lots of bits and pieces from shackleton’s trip, including a couple of his huskies.

I have noticed they seem to be inordinately fond of taxidermy here. Best not to sit still for too long in tasmania. The animal exhibits are wonderfully creepy. The stuffed devils next to the thylacine skeletons were a bit chilling, given their prospects. I remember the thylacine footage from last time I was here (over ten years ago now) and it’s heartbreaking… the neurotic pacing of a caged animal and the poignancy of the short loop of film. Really sets you thinking of all the species we have managed to boot off the planet. Interesting what it might mean to live in a state whose major icon is extinct. Probably makes you a bit morbid.

There’s an election on here, but you don’t really notice - it actually feels like a local council election. I don’t mean for that to sound patronising, since I come from an even smaller state, i mean territory. But the mood is pretty calm, here in bourgeois heaven at least.

On that note it's the markets this morning - going to hunt down some coffee now and hopefully harpoon some superthermal somethingorother to wear to Berlin - if only you could make warm coats out of redundant clauses.

PS the new issue of meanjin has some of my fiction in it - i'll be in two issues this year, so just subscribe.

Labels: hobart, residency, taxidermy, writing