Mark Dapin

ABC Book Show review

2011-10-26T10:17:00.000+11:00

Chris Flynn

Sometimes we have a tendency to forget the breadth of talented writers we have in Australia. Take Fairfax columnist Mark Dapin for example, who is one of the country's most recognisable and consistently funny journalists. Those who enjoy his column's stylistic footnote-heavy quirks will have flocked to his unconventional first novel King of the Cross which rightly won 2010's Ned Kelly First Fiction Award. In it, a cadet reporter from the Australian Jewish Times interviews Jake Mendoza, legendary Sydney crime lord. The resulting memoir is a sly wink to real world gangland figures.

Mendoza pops up again as an enigmatic bit player in Dapin's second novel Spirit House which is frankly just wonderful. Why? It's funny, truthful, upsetting, moving and sheds a whole new light on an aspect of Australian war history that I thought had been amply covered a hundred times already, namely Changi prison in Singapore and the construction of the Thai Burmese railway by Allied prisoners.

Dapin's protagonist is Jimmy Rubens, a 70 year-old Jewish veteran living in 1990 Bondi. Jimmy's 13 year-old grandson David, who loves war stories, is staying with his grandparents after an acrimonious split between his parents. His mother has packed him off so she can spend some time with her new lover, which suits David to a degree as he gets to pick his grandfather's brain. Jimmy is the definition of surly and has been having a hard time dealing with his memories of fallen comrades. He takes David under his wing as a confidant, a kind of free therapist if you like, and so a harrowing tale unfolds.

This all sounds very serious but Dapin has shrewdly steered the book away from misery memoir territory. The scenes in Changi and Thailand are amazing when they come, desperately sad and frustrating but also imbued with a sense of the Australian soldiers as whip-smart, tough as nails, irreverent men making the best of a nightmare situation. Their use of humour as a coping mechanism makes for thrilling reading. Jimmy's best friends are Townsville Jack, a defiant man of mystery and Katz, a war artist.

They do whatever it takes to survive, organising frog races as lucrative morale boosters and drawing sex pictures for the Japanese guards in exchange for eggs. As the years roll by and their penury seems never ending, they are forced to watch men die from starvation, disease and violence whilst twitchy officers hang on to misguided military discipline in the midst of chaos. They joined up to fight and spent the war in a hellhole prison.

If Spirit House was just about Jimmy relating war tales to his grandson, it would be bleak stuff indeed. Fortunately Dapin gives the modern passages real life, as Jimmy drags David to the RSL where he drinks with three other Jewish veterans Solly, Myer and his old friend Katz. The banter between these old war dogs is unbelievable. The zingers just keep coming as they tear sarcastic strips off each other. It's the funniest book I've read in a long time, which, given the serious nature of the appalling conditions in Changi and on the railway, is a little odd. But it works. We need the humour as much as they seem to. It's what keeps these men from losing their minds, although Jimmy is well on the way. He's building a spirit house in the yard, after all, to house the ghosts that plague him. Initially bemused, the local community comes around to his project as Dapin leads us to a transcendent ending. There'll be a few reviewers singing Mark Dapin's praises over this one and I'm very happy to be one of them, for this is a beautiful, hilarious, frightening novel that has leapt straight into my top three for 2011.

Courier Mail, Sunday Tasmanian

2011-10-26T10:14:00.002+11:00

Courier Mail

Saturday 15th of October 2011

SPIRIT HOUSE

Mark Dapin

Pan Macmillan, $32.99

EVERY now and then you can run across a writer who does a little magic. They take something that almost everyone thinks they know something about, re-examine it from a completely unexpected direction and present the reader with a whole new take on their expectations.

David is 13 and finds himself in an unusual situation. His parents have split up and have taken up with new partners, leaving little room for David. He is sent to live with his 70-year-old Jewish grandfather in North Bondi. This is both liberating and horrifying, as his grandfather Jimmy is possibly a quite crazy old man.

But as Jimmy takes David around with him to the RSL and other haunts, the boy meets Jimmy's cronies Solomon, Katz and Myer. All four are still living with the horrendous events which defined their lives as survivors of Changi PoW camp and the Burma Railway in World War II. David is gradually drawn into their world and he comes to understand his grandfather more as he helps him to build a spirit house to quieten the ghosts of the past that still torment him.

The idea of using Jewish ex-PoWs to retell one of the formative Australian experiences of World War II is wonderful. The abundant conversations are liberally peppered with Yiddish expressions and Jewish attitudes. None of the former is explained at all and it is left to the reader to work out by context, and many of the latter are informed by a particular sense of humour.

Mark Dapin has pulled off a deeply human, but particularly Australian, bit of magic.

Sunday Tasmanian

Sunday 16th of October 2011

Beyond the battleground

PAUL MALARSKI

Spirit House by Mark Dapin

Macmillan, $32.99

SYDNEY newspaper columnist Mark Dapin may have earned a reputation for irreverent lad-lit, but in his second novel, Spirit House, he shows he is also a terrific storyteller.

Set in Bondi in the early 1990s, Spirit House is a superb piece of reflective war fiction detailing the lifelong emotional toll exacted on a World War II prisoner trapped for three years in the brutal Changi Prison Camp and his days working on the Thai-Burma Railway.

Jimmy Ruebens is a 70-year-old cantankerous Jewish-Australian Changi survivor who has spent much of the past 45 years trying to deal with the humiliation of Australia's meek surrender in Singapore and his internment in Changi.

His life since has centred on his invaluable support base three close war mates Solomon, Katz and Myer, better known as the Three Stooges and their regular drinking sessions at the local RSL. Jimmy is a deeply troubled man who has never come to terms with his humiliation and sense of shame at Australia's capitulation to the Japanese.

He is incapable of opening up to anyone until his 13-year-old grandson David arrives to stay after being palmed off by his mother, who wants time alone with her new boyfriend.

With David around, Jimmy can finally shrug off his repressed emotions and bitterness.

Together, the unlikely partners build a traditional Thai spirit house to protect the spirits of his long-lost friends. As David earns his grandfather's trust, Jimmy is able to lay his demons to rest.

Dapin mixes an endearing tale of love, loss and courage under unthinkable conditions with a fascinating array of characters, such as Quilpie, Bathurst Billy, Diamond Tom and the prison-camp colossus Townsville Jack.

He skilfully balances the tales of horror with gunshot humour through the interaction of Solomon, Katz and Myer, whose constant barbs and wit cleverly diffuse the horrific tales of prison life.

Everything and everyone is fair game for the quartet, except the one thing that binds them.

When Jimmy finally breaks his silence on Changi, Katz retorts: ``He hasn't spoken about the war for 45 years and he wants to raise it now at the dinner table, and as far as I am concerned he's not even pissed.''

But as Jimmy is only too willing to admit: ``During the worst times there's only two things that keep you going your mates and your sense of humour.''

An event

2011-10-26T10:07:00.002+11:00

I am having an author "event" tomorrow night (Thursday 27 October) at 6pm at Dymocks Booskhop in Sydney. Details are on the homepage of my website www.markdapin.com.au.
Come along if you want. It shouldn't last more than 45 minutes.
Buy my book. Or someone else's. But not Andrew Bolt's.

Another very interesting roundabout

2011-10-17T22:36:00.000+11:00

Canberra Times

2011-09-11T10:42:00.002+10:00

Pub: Canberra Times
Pubdate: Saturday 10th of September 2011
Edition: Copyright: 2011
Ghosts of the fallen
By Mark Dapin. Macmillan. 356pp. $32.99.
Reviewer: PETER PIERCE
Every other week, it seems, a fine new Australian novel is published. Few, however, can equal the vernacular flair, the originality of treatment of matters that we had thought overly familiar and the narrative drive of Mark Dapin's Spirit House, the second volume of his projected trilogy, The Streets of Sydney. The first instalment was King of the Cross. Dapin's weekend job is as a columnist for the Fairfax broadsheets, the latest of which dealt hilariously, but no doubt appositely, with his trying to find a literary agent in the United States.
Thirteen-year-old David has been packed off by selfish and separated parents to live in Bondi with his grandparents, Isaac ''Jimmy'' Rubens and his put-upon wife, Frida. ''Mum chose the Dark Man over me,'' as David sees it, and went to live in Redfern. His father has taken up with a dental nurse whom David scornfully calls the Woman in White. All Australian Jewish families, it appears, can be unhappy in their own ways. Most afflicted of all is Jimmy, former prisoner of war on the Burma railroad cum cabinet maker. His latest project, in which he enlists the help of his grandson, is to build a spirit house in the yard to give shelter to the unaccommodated ghosts of the fallen.Jimmy is one of those who ''knew the kind of people you didn't notice, men who sat all day in booths and kiosks, or rollered the oval, or ticketed cars''. His solace away from a home that all his children have left (including Deborah Who Lives in Israel) is the company of his drinking mates and verbal sparring partners - Solomon Solomon the tailor, Myer the optician and Ernie Katz, fellow POW and one of the official war artists who had won the Archibald Prize in the 1930s. Jimmy and Sollykatzanmyer meet at the RSL Club and the Thai Dee Town restaurant in Botany Road, where their badinage is infused with melancholy remembrance of the lost.Jimmy finally begins to tell his war stories to David, his grandson, prompted by intimations of his own end. Although it is only part of the richly arrayed material in Spirit House, it is one of the finest narratives of Singapore, Changi, the railway, of near starvation and brutality inflicted by Japanese and Koreans, of mean-minded viciousness from supposed comrades. As Jimmy enlists with the man who did not live to be his brother-in-law, the authorities have to scrounge an Old Testament for their oath of allegiance. There are not many Jews with them in the Second AIF, but plenty of ''blokes who'd been on and off the swag since 1929'', ''hard men from the bush who'd been starved off the land''.There are reminiscences of Chinese Frank, organiser of the communist All Chinese Union of Rickshawmen, of arts that apparently did not flourish in prison - ''Christ, there were some shithouse poets in Changi ... And there was a yodelling cowboy''. Besides Allied prisoners, there were hundreds of thousands of Asian forced labourers on the line - ''Tamils, Burmese, Malays and Chinese - chattering like monkeys, dying like roos in a cull''. The special care of the enlisted men, as Jimmy bitterly remembers, is for their pampered officers: ''They were like our children.'' This is his grieving summary of what happened among those who effectively had been conned to work on the railway: ''Everywhere I went, men died. It was like our time on earth was ending and we were leaving one by one.''Spirit House also provides many unusual angles on the Jewish community (some of them survivors of far worse slaughter) in Australia. There is ''Mr Sin, the King of the Cross, Jake 'The Take' Mendoza''; the frummers, who believe that the return of the Messiah is at hand and who, in their processions to shule, resemble ''gangs of science teachers who've been told to dress up for the school formal''. Dapin is funny, poignant, vibrantly witty and his novel is a treat from its elegiac opening to its bitter, unexpected close.
Peter Pierce is editor of The Cambridge History of Australian Literature.

Couldn't Ask For A Better Review - From The Australian

2011-09-10T08:44:00.003+10:00

MARK Dapin is best known as a columnist and feature writer for the Fairfax press, a role where making stuff up is called for only occasionally.
On the strength of his second novel, Spirit House, he should make the leap to full-time fiction. If this book is not on next year's literary prize lists I will be surprised.
Dapin's first novel, King of the Cross (2009) was a high-rent crime thriller: gritty, smart and funny but with a soggy patch towards the end. Some of its characters have supporting roles in Spirit House, but this is a much different and more ambitious book, one that cares about surprising things, such as love and beauty.
The story has its contemporary setting in Sydney's Bondi in the weeks around Anzac Day 1990 and is told mainly by two characters: Jimmy Reubens, a 70-year-old Jewish Australian survivor of the Changi prisoner-of-war camp and the Thai-Burma railway, and his 13-year-old grandson, David, who is sent to live with his grandparents when mum and dad split up.
Being a returned PoW is tough, especially when your captors were the Japanese, but so is being a teenager, and Dapin deftly balances what could otherwise be a one-sided relationship. It's never far from our minds that Jimmy and his mates were little more than boys when they went to war.
"This was very disappointing," David thinks of his grandfather early on. "It seemed Jimmy had spent most of the war surrendering, in prison or thinking about his [Chinese] girlfriend. No wonder he didn't like to talk about it."
But it is through David that we slowly learn Jimmy's terrible story, and even if you know your history, it is one that will make you rage and despair. Such is the power of the novelist.
As Jimmy and David hang out together, mainly at the local RSL with Jimmy's fellow survivors, Solomon, Katz and Myer, the old and troubled man begins to break a silence he has held for most of his life. And this confuses and angers his comrades.
"He hasn't spoken about the war for 45 f . . king years, and he wants to raise it now, at the dinner table . . . and, as far as I can tell, he's not even f . . king pissed," says Katz, a war artist who survived by drawing pornography for his jailers. "What exactly does Jimmy Reubens have to say that is suddenly so f . . king urgent?"
But this outburst represents the habit of a post-war lifetime for Sollykatzanmyer, as David thinks of the three old Jews. They have survived being survivors by never talking about the war, taking little seriously and endlessly ribbing each other, with sexual put-downs their stock-in-trade. As Dapin suggests at several points, this emotional retardation is rooted in the shame of surrender, of being "fighting men who've given up the fight". Their nightmares are of blood and guts and no glory.
Yet this nothingness is not what they feel, indeed it is a repression of what they feel, and when, awakened by David's innocently gung-ho questions, Jimmy decides to build the spirit house of the title, a miniature Thai temple to house the restless dead, for the first time in 45 years everyone stops pretending.
But before that, we must hear from the dead, and those who did not die but sometimes wished they had. Dapin's depictions of life in Changi and on the Thai-Burma railway are necessarily harrowing, and while he, a writer known for his humour, does allow some wisecracks and comedic set pieces such as prison camp frog races, we are never less that a dreadful distance from Hogan's Heroes.
You know by page 46 that we have moved past the Underbelly violence of King of the Cross, when Jimmy, in a confused state, punches his grandson "in the head so hard that I flew backwards off my chair. It felt like I'd been hit by a cricket bat."
The inhuman treatment of the PoWs is described in sickening detail, but it's in the quieter moments that Dapin goes to where it hurts most.
"I don't know what they did to him in there," Jimmys says of the day the "Japanese Gestapo, the Kempetai" visited a larrikin PoW in a windowless room: "I don't like to think about it. There are some things you can turn away from. It's all right not to look."
Or when Jimmy tells his grandson he didn't think things could get worse than Changi. That was "just a failure of the imagination, that's all".
Towering over the PoW sections of the book is a tall, tough prisoner called Townsville Jack, organiser of the aforementioned frog races. Townsville Jack is one of those blokes you just can't kill, or at least so any reader will hope. He is a character who could carry a book on his own.
Positive book reviews often come with minor quibbles but I want to avoid them here. I initially found the crude repartee of Sollykatzanmyer irritating, but I accept that Dapin, who is Jewish and whose grandfather was a war veteran, has known men like these.
This may not do Dapin's reputation as a newspaper humourist any favours, but Spirit House is a serious novel, and a fine one. Though they are very different personalities, there are obvious similarities between Dapin and Chris Womersley, author of The Low Road and Bereft. Both won a Ned Kelly Award for their first novel, both have written grander, emotionally complex second novels. Bereft was nominated for just about every local literary award this year, including the Miles Franklin, and I doubt the comparision will end with Spirit House.
Stephen Romei is The Australian's literary editor.

Spirit HouseBy Mark Dapin Macmillan Australia, 359pp, $32.99

An Alien Writes

2011-09-08T20:13:00.001+10:00

Here is Kerri Sackville's post about Spirit House. Judge for yourself whether she is from the planet Zog:
http://lifeandothercrises.blogspot.com/2011/09/relieved-post.html

Mere Coincidence? I don't think so

2011-08-28T08:30:00.004+10:00

This morning I woke up to find I had 92 followers, and had posted on this blog 92 times.
More importantly, on my way back from the, uh, bowling club last night, I saw my second novel, Spirit House, in the window of a bookshop. I didn't realise it was out yet.
Your task, as my 92 followers, is to rise en masse - without pausing to get dressed, do your hair, smoke a cigarette, ensure small children are looked after etc - and march to your local bookshop and buy a copy. No, buy two copies. What the hell, buy 92 copies. Now!

Questions, Questions...

2011-08-16T14:48:00.003+10:00

Here's a link to me answering some questions about some stuff for someone:
http://blog.booktopia.com.au/2011/08/16/mark-dapin-author-of-spirit-house-and-king-of-the-cross-answers-ten-terrifying-questions/

A Reader in his Underwear

2011-08-16T09:55:00.005+10:00

A reader named Jake has sent me a picture in his underwear.
He has also enclosed a little poem:
straight outta dubbo
crazy jocker named jake
i'm headin to chippendale
the audio op on menopause the musical
better win me or it might get physical!
I declare Jake the winner and the competition closed.

This Man Speaks the Truth

2011-08-14T16:56:00.002+10:00

Here's me extensively quoted on lads' magazines in today's Sunday Age, when I should probably just keep my mouth shut about these things.

http://m.theage.com.au/national/size-doesnt-matter-in-a-shrinking-market-mens-magazines-try-new-models-to-stay-on-top-20110813-1is6i.html

Is Kerri Sackville an Alien?

2011-08-14T14:05:00.002+10:00

It is a sad fact that, although my newspaper column reaches the homes of more than one million readers, the only way I can get any hits on my blog is by writing about micro-blogger Kerri Sackville.
Regular readers (of Kerri's blog; I've only got about two readers of my own) may remember Kerri's vicious slur on my heightegrity, ie her assertion that I am "short".
For some reason, the gym I go to (to "stretch" myself) has installed a tape measure, which customers can use to ascertain their actual height, rather than the height ascribed to them by Kerri Sackville.
For the record, I measure exactly 176.2 centimetres in bare feet. Since I don't understand metric, I used my iPhone Convert Units application to discover that makes me 1.862435e-16 light years. Then I changed the setting to feet and inches, and got the figure 5.78084ft.
This raises the question: if Kerri cannot accurately gauge the height of the giant of a man dining opposite her, then how much else in her blog might not be true? Does she actually have children? Is her current husband really an architect? Is she, in fact, a Syrian lesbian masquerading as suburban Australian blogger in order to write about me? Or is she an alien?
But the million-dollar* question is, of course, how tall are the Sackvilles?
*No actual million dollars will be paid for the winning answer.

Short Wars

2011-08-08T08:16:00.004+10:00

I haven't posted on this blog for a while because I have been in the US, buying an $850 shirt for $150. Although it cost twice as much as my average shirt, it came with a docket that read 'You have saved $700', which made me feel as if I'd won a daring 5-1 bet (then generously donated $50 to a homeless person).
When I got back to Australia, Claire and I went to dinner with Kerri Sackville and her current husband, Tony. Her account of the dinner features in her blog http://lifeandothercrises.blogspot.com/2011/08/friends-embarassment.html
It is reasonably accurate except for one point: Kerri, who is only slightly taller than my three-year-old daughter, describes me as "short", even though her small-but-perfectly-formed husband is several centimetres shorter than me.
In fact, I was the tallest person in our booth by some margin. I do not understand why people keep saying I am short, especially as I deliberately seek out much shorter people to have dinner with.

Readers in their underwear II

2011-07-24T21:08:00.006+10:00

In response to the generous offer from Mrs Mackenzie, and numerous readers' requests for free books, I am pleased to announce the Official 2011 Readers in their Underwear Contest. The first person to send me a photograph of themselves wearing undergarments will win a copy of King of the Cross, and the unparalleled honour of having their picture published in this blog, and viewed by all 82 of my followers. Entrants must be over the age of 18. Catheters optional. Five runners-up will get nothing. Email pictures to mdapin[at]hotmail.com
PS People I know are not permitted to enter. That would be too weird.

No Sex Please, We're Sackvilles

2011-06-22T16:50:00.000+10:00

My friend blog queen Kerri Sackville has been advising me on how to get more readers for this blog. Her most recent tip is not to include pictures of old men with catheters sticking out of the leg of their boxer shorts. It takes a true professional to spot an error like that.

Kerri and I did a radio interview last week with British radio station LBC, which I used to listen to at night smothered by the pillow when I was a kid in England, back in the days when headphones were called “earphones” and only had one plug.

LBC was using a studio in Sydney, at which we had to arrive at 5:45am. To my astonishment, Kerri actually got there early. (My surprise was mainly driven by the realisation that there is a time before than 5:45am.) It was all very cold and confusing at that hour of day, and the purpose of the exercise was a bit obscure, since neither my books nor Kerri’s are actually available in the UK.

Still, we had an hour to talk gibberish. The presenter had read and loved Kerri’s book but had never heard of me. I’d been invited onto the show on Kerri’s instigation, as a “funny man”, to pay me back for launching her book, “When My Husband Does the Dishes”. (Her title was originally supposed to be “When My Husband Does the Dishes it Means he Wants Sex”, but that was vetoed by one of the big department stores, apparently worried it might lead to customers blocking the trolley flow by copulating in the crockery aisles.)

The radio announcer seemed fixated with the concept that Kerri’s husband apparently didn’t get as much sex as he wanted. I got a feeling it might have fitted in with an idea he had about females in general.

While we were on air, he took a first glace at my novel, King of the Cross. The page at which he opened it including what he called “eight f---s”. He pointed this out on air, and I said that was more “f—s” than Kerri’s husband had all year, which was very unfair but the closest thing to a joke I was capable of making at that time of the morning.

Kerri found a pair of novelty Christmas reindeer antlers and put them on for all the radio viewers to see. I did the same, and strangely, didn’t feel anymore stupid then I feel most days at 6.30am.

Afterwards, the announcer confided that he didn’t have sex either. “Not with women, anyway.”

Kerri and I had breakfast, and she told me I should keep my blog posts to about 400 words (and I’ve already gone 50 over) but she never mentioned anything about catheters.

Readers in their Underwear

2011-06-20T11:43:00.003+10:00

It is a source of some sadness to me that only one of my readers has ever sent me a picture of themselves in their underwear.

Dubious Knowledge

2011-06-17T16:06:00.002+10:00

Ben just came home with his year one school report. It said he had strengthened his "knowledge of the natural, built and heritage features of our surroundings and the interactions people, including Aboriginal people, have with the environment".
So we asked him what an "Aboriginal" person was.
"I don't know," he said, even though there is a Koori living next door.

Buy My Book II

2011-06-17T14:42:00.002+10:00

King of the Cross and Strange Country are now for sale in Kindle editions in the US, UK and Australia. Buy them for people overseas. Buy them for people who don't want them. Buy them for people who can't read English. Buy them for people who don't have Kindles. Just buy them.

Saving Ryan's Privy

2011-06-11T15:41:00.003+10:00

Reader Luke Jamieson was at a bar under the footbridge from Flinders St Station to Southbank, when he noticed a mysterious message scrawled on the toilet wall.

Who is this “Chris Ryan”? And why would he need luck?

Reprinted here, by unpopular demand, is my first ever column on the Chris Ryan Question:

I have a mate called Chris Ryan, who regularly faces the kinds of problems that don't occur to somebody called "Mark Dapin". For a start, he is not the most famous Chris Ryan in the world. This distinction is held by a British SAS-trooper-turned-thriller-writer who wrote a memoir entitled The One That Got Away, about his escape from behind enemy lines in the 1991 Gulf War.
Chris is not even the most famous Chris Ryan in Australia. That guernsey belongs to a former rugby league player who turned out for the Manly Sea Eagles and Perth's Western Reds in the 1990s.
Like most of my friends, Chris is a journalist. Despite performing stunts, such as eating a kebab while standing on his head, that have redefined the parameters of journalism to include eating a kebab while standing on your head, Chris is not the best-known Australian journalist called Chris Ryan. That byline is the property of a slightly older Chris Ryan, who writes about cricket and, to confuse matters, is often known as Christian Ryan.
As a boxer, my friend Chris had more than 100 fights, so he could reasonably expect to be the most famous Australian boxer called Chris Ryan. Sadly, however, he only entered the ring as an amateur, so his record will always be overshadowed by a Queensland light welterweight who fought twice as a professional in Brisbane in 1944. Chris had never heard of the earlier boxing Chris Ryan until I found his name on a website.
When I told him he was not the first boxing Chris Ryan, he asked me, "Who's the other one?"
Well, er, his name's Chris Ryan.
"Wherever I go in my life," said Chris, "another Chris Ryan's got there first."
Recently, Chris made his movie debut as a man who wanders past in the background of a scene in the new Australian movie Samson and Delilah. He also worked as unit manager on the film, so his name had to be entered in the Internet Movie Database website. When he found out he was at least the 23rd Chris Ryan to try to make it in the movies, he decided to be credited as "Christopher Ryan", of which there were only 11 already on the site.
As unit manager, Chris was responsible for towing the Portaloo between locations, and keeping it out of shot. He was not entirely successful at this last task, as the toilet does, apparently, make a fleeting "Hitchcock appearance" in the final cut.
Chris did not find the movie business as glamorous as he had hoped.
"I was unit manager but I had no one to manage," he said. "Maybe on the big shoots the toilets are cleaner, and I'd be in charge of a team of toilet wranglers."
Confident that I would at least enjoy the Portaloo's cameo, I went to a preview of Samson and Delilah, which did not sound like the kind of film that I would normally watch, since it was not about (a) a gang of mismatched thugs and criminals assembled by an underworld mastermind to pull off an audacious bank robbery; or (b) a professional killer lured out of retirement to do "one last job".
Instead, Samson and Delilah is the story of two young indigenous people who leave a remote desert community to live with a homeless alcoholic under a bridge in Alice Springs. Unless I missed something, the two leads never say a word to each other, although several meaningful hand gestures, and a number of significant glances, do pass between them. There is probably more petrol sniffing than in any other film in the history of cinema, but - against heavy odds - it all adds up to a compelling and beautiful movie, in which the Portaloo is, for the most part, expertly managed.
Every Chris Ryan excels at something, and Chris has finally found a place where no other Chris Ryan can touch him: on the toilet.

My Five Favourite Drinks

2011-06-07T09:36:00.005+10:00

In response to a deluge of two requests (both from the same person) I feel obliged to post the not-very-long awaited list of my Top Five Drinks. They are:

(1) Schöfferhofer Hefeweizen

(2) Peroni

(3) Toohey’s Extra Dry

(4) Diet Coke with Vanilla

(5) A nice cup of tea.

Honourable mentions must go to Guinness, all other beers, dry white wine, Diet Coke without vanilla, jasmine tea, orange juice, apple juice, red wine and brandy.

Not funny enough

2011-06-05T08:59:00.001+10:00

Here's another column rejected by my editor for being insufficiently humorous (and difficult to follow):

I flew to South Korea, where people seem to have a relaxed attitude to safety and security, considering they sit at the coccyx of evil, and have never signed a peace treaty with the eccentric dictator who rules North Korea with an iron haircut.

Breakfast on Korean Airlines came with a steel knife and fork. In Australia, you only get real cutlery at the front of the plane, which is odd, because the 9/11 hijackers all flew in business class. (Economy-class terrorists prefer to blow up their underpants.) But the Korean crew didn’t seem worried their planes might be hijacked. They were more concerned that western passengers would be unable to eat their in-flight meals. When I chose the Korean rice dish, bibimbap, for lunch, the steward presented me with a five-step, English-language, how-to-eat-bibimbap card. I laughed, but if I hadn't read it I would've assumed the red-and-white tube of pepper sauce was toothpaste, slipped it into my bag and used it in the morning.

I was given a seat in one of the emergency rows, since – in Asia if nowhere else – I sometimes have the longest legs on the plane, but I couldn’t stop the woman next to me spending the flight with her feet resting on the emergency door.

After we landed in Seoul, I caught a taxi to a Ramada hotel. There are two Ramadas in the city. I knew this, so I had the English-speaking cab-rank attendant read out the location of mine. The cabbie drove me to the other one anyway. This grindingly slow and needless journey through dense, torpid traffic lasted an hour and half. Then it took another half hour to drive back the way we'd come, to get me to the right Ramada. The driver signaled his disgust* by following a soap opera on his GPS for the last 30 minutes.

In Korea, it is apparently quite legal to watch TV while driving.

Contrary to rumour, most drivers in central Seoul will stop for pedestrians on a crossing. However, the lack of clear delineation between the functions of the road and the wider sections of pavement means that the homicidal minority who miss their targets on the highway often have a second chance to run them over on the sidewalk.

My hotel seemed the most safety conscious institution in Korea. The suite contained an emergency flashlight – which, pleasingly, came on automatically when removed from its cradle – and a small, squat fire extinguisher. It was also, apparently, equipped with a gas detector, although I couldn’t find it.

If the North Korean army had attacked in the night, I would've been able to hold them off with cutlery and retardant foam until a government commando team stormed the building. Unless they’d’ve used gas, in which case I’d be dead.

While they largely ignore the perils of driving under the influence of daytime TV, or a suffering terror attack directed by a man with a blackcurrant pavlova on his head, South Koreans are highly alert to the dangers of elevator travel. Twice, I saw a sticker on lift doors depicting an upside-down figure banging its head on the floor. This served to warn against the hazardous practice of leaning against doors, which could somehow lead to the leaner finding himself inverted and planted like a javelin in the ground on the other side.

Perhaps the illustration is allegorical, with the lift doors representing the demilitarized zone that divides the two Koreas, and the predicament of the overturned man standing for the topsy-turvy politics of the Pyongyang government, whose leader claims to have invented the hamburger.

In the airport before my flight on to London, entertainment was provided by a Traditional Korean Cultural Experience - a number of men in false beards parading around on the cleared side of the security scanners carrying real swords, spears and bows and arrows, while a large sign over the check-in desks reminded me I was forbidden to take nail-clippers onto the plane.

* This was perhaps the only signalling he did throughout the journey.

Kant's Aesthetics

2011-06-01T15:57:00.001+10:00

Just kidding.

Going back to savoury

2011-06-01T09:59:00.003+10:00

Bearing in mind the furious controversy generated by my previous post, I believe this blog has the potential to become one of the world's great sweary food blogs, a possible rival to Gordon Ramsay's own blog which, as far as I'm aware, doesn't even exist.
Although Amy has made a very interesting point below regarding the sinister possibility that an entree might ruin your appetite for the main course, I feel an even more interesting question is posed by John Shuttleworth's heartbreaking ballad "I Can't Go Back to Savoury Now".
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L8eh72REd_s
I strongly urge every one of my THIRTY EIGHT followers to check out John's performance of this unrecognised classic on Youtube, and contemplate the terrible dilemma he faced over the dinner table. In brief, his wife had cooked shepherd's pie for the family, followed by a treacle sponge dessert. His daughter found she could not finish her shepherd's pie (perhaps, like so many teenage girls, she was following an unusually restrictive diet) but, although John hated to see such good food go to waste, he didn't feel able to eat her remaining shepherd's pie because he had already started on his treacle pudding.
Have any of my readers ever dealt with this seemingly insurmountable problem?

My Five Favourite Soups

2011-05-29T20:07:00.007+10:00

I am regularly interviewed in newspapers, magazines and on the radio, but I've never been asked to name my five favourite soups. In order, they are:
(1) Pho (Vietnamese rice noodle soup)
(2) Tom yang gai
(3) Mulligatawny soup
(4) Tomato, carrot and coriander soup
(5) Pumpkin soup
However, I rarely drink soup, so the question tends not to arise.

Thought for the day

2011-05-27T13:01:00.001+10:00

“Twinkle twinkle little star, what you say is what you are,” said my six-year-old son, Ben.

Then he frowned and added, thoughtfully, “But you can’t be ‘went’, can you?”

Magic Roundabouts

2011-05-24T12:32:00.001+10:00

As promised, here's the first column I wrote about roundabouts, in 2005. It may put things into perspective for readers who came along later…

I used to think my brother had the best hobby in the world. He filled long hours on dreary weekends in provincial England playing "Baldhead, Beard and Glasses". The game involved spotting a man with all three attributes in a public place, shouting "Baldhead, beard and glasses!" and taking his photograph.
My brother acquired hundreds of pictures of short-sighted blokes whose hair grew - inexplicably, it seemed at the time - at the wrong end of their heads. They looked surprised, they looked guilty, they looked annoyed, but - most of all - they looked exactly the same.
When I found the book Roundabouts of Great Britain, I realised my brother's fantastic hobby had been eclipsed by the evitable and exorable rise of the virtually nonexistent craze of roundabout spotting.
When I was a kid, I wanted to live on a roundabout. In the first of several unpublished novels (the lead character is always me, but tougher, cooler and somewhat more hirsute; he often extracts spectacular revenge on his step-parents; he always saves the world from resurgent fascism), I wrote a character who made his home on a traffic island. I certainly understand the fascination these wondrous flightless saucers can provoke.
The cover of Roundabouts of Great Britain shows the roundabout in Slough that appears in the opening credits of The Office, but most of the images inside feature unassuming, working-class roundabouts, going about their daily business of being circular at busy intersections.
The author, Kevin Beresford, identifies several varieties of traffic island, including the mini-roundabout, the "double ringer" and the raised-brickwork roundabout. He draws attention to interesting features such
as directional arrows, bollards, grassy slopes and helpful signage. Context is important, too. A seemingly ordinary roundabout can be elevated to the sublime by a background featuring a typical English church, pub or stolen car.
Obviously, the whole thing started out as a joke. Equally obviously, he developed a real affection for roundabouts. This is a lot easier than you might think.
I took photographs of my local roundabouts, with the vague idea I'd send them to the author to get his expert opinion on Australia's own gyratories (as they were originally known). I thought it'd be a dull slog
in search of a cheap laugh, but our sunburned country has some marvellous roundabouts. No, honestly, it does. They're everywhere - platforms for palm trees, for public sculpture, for well-kept municipal gardens - and, unlike men with bald heads, beards and glasses, each one is an individual.
Near Medowie, NSW, I found a magnificent roundabout that looks out onto the bush fire brigade's area HQ, a sign detailing how many koalas have been killed on the road, and a makeshift car yard where locals display their battered Holdens. It seemed to epitomise everything great about Australia: the volunteer spirit, concern for our unique wildlife, a talent for improvisation, and an easygoing tolerance of illegal car yards.
Outside Fremantle Markets, WA, I came upon a roundabout (pictured) whose proud centrepiece was a ship's anchor. It was a stirring tribute to the city's maritime heritage, a nod from one mighty facilitator of commerce and travel (the sealed road) to another (the boundless ocean). Also, it stank.
I dipped my finger into the earth around the anchor, to find the surface was coated
in pungent fertiliser. I had discovered the scratch-and-sniff roundabout, an Australian "first" to rival that other great gyratory innovation, the Hills hoist.
I saw there was no need to contact the author of the Roundabouts book.
No man is a traffic island. The beauty of this exciting new field of investigation is that anyone can be an expert.
However, if any reader has a picture of a particularly interesting or unusual roundabout in their area, can they please keep it to themselves?* Thanks.

* Blog-readers! This no longer applies. Please send it by email and I’ll put it on the website.

Lonely Planet Fiji

2011-05-24T12:14:00.003+10:00

Sharp-eyed blog-readers may have noticed I did not, in fact, post anything over the weekend. This is because I was drunk. I hope to make up for it today. Here is another side to the researching-a-Lonely-Planet-Guide-with-a-kid story, this time concentrating on the researching rather than the kid. I can't vouch for the accuracy of the details at the end anymore, as it's nearly six years since we were in the islands...

You never forget the place where you failed your first driving test. It lives on forever in your heart, like the exact spot where you did not steal your first kiss. I planned my driving debut in Fiji’s capital, Suva, and my name lives on in infamy as the only foreigner on record to have left the test centre without a licence.

It is 13 years since I was last in Suva, and I never thought I would come back, but here I am, walking down Victoria Parade with a six-to-six on my arm, trying to find my way to Traps Bar. A “six-to-six” is a prostitute, named after the hours she works. I’m trying to gently shake her off my arm, while she presses her breast into my biceps. I stayed once in hotel-brothel in Suva, and all the girls had her face. She reminds me of the smell of bleach and antiseptic, of doors banging and small cries in the night.

I’ve just been drinking in a much more salubrious hotel, the Holiday Inn Suva. I’ve got about half an hour’s nightlife left in me, and I want to say hi to a daughter of a friend in Traps. I’d also like to drink one more jug of Fiji Bitter in Traps, for the sake of old times, barely remembered. But I made the mistake of asking a prostitute for directions.

The first time I came to Fiji, I was a backpacker, a reader of the Lonely Planet Fiji guidebook. This time, I’m one of the team of Lonely Planet writers. It is not the job I thought it would be, because I am not the person I used to be. I am older and more comfortable, and I like my hotels newer and more comfortable. But I still can’t drive.

Lonely Planet writers have to amass a fantastic amount of detail in a fantastically small amount of time. I am given four areas of Fiji - Lomaiviti, Vanua Levu, Taveuni and the Mamanucas - and three weeks to cover them. I am advised to set aside a few extra days, since this is my first Lonely Planet job. In fact, the fieldwork takes the best part of six weeks, and writing my 56 pages takes as much time again. I am given a fee from which I have to deduct my expenses. I come out about $150 ahead.

This is partly because, as I have mentioned before, I am an idiot. I decide it would be easier and more enjoyable to do the job with my girlfriend and baby in tow. It would actually have been easier and more enjoyable to eat an exploding helicopter. Babies do not like travelling. They express their feelings through screaming. My baby screamed all day and all night, and after three weeks, he and my girlfriend fly home. I finish the job on my own, but we have already spent almost all the fee.

When I leave Fiji for the second time in my life, I swear I will never go back. It’s a beautiful country, but I have seen enough of it. Four weeks later, I go back.

They say the islands run on “Fiji Time”, and move at about half the pace of the rest of the world. One of the first places I visit is Levuka, Ovalau, which, a resident proudly tells me, runs on “Levuka Time”, about half the pace of Fiji Time.

Lonely Planet’s authors are supposed to remain anonymous. While an anonymous stranger in Levuka will be welcomed with wide smiles and effusive curiosity, they are unlikely to be able to organise anything quickly. Many Lonely Planet writers develop cover stories. They say they work for travel agents, or are planning their wedding. As a rule, if you are a hotelier approached by a stranger with an elaborate alibi for wanting to look at every room in the house, you can be assured he is working for either Lonely Planet or Osama bin Laden.

I quickly begin telling people I am a journalist, which automatically speeds up the pace of their responses from what a scientist might describe as “almost inert” to a dizzying “very slow indeed”. Surprisingly, word of my mission travels faster than a racing crab on an island party nite. I am in the village of Silana, 40 minutes’ drive from Levuka, when I reveal to my host, Seru, that I'm a journalist. We walk across the village - which takes about five minutes - and meet an old man selling kava to an Indo-Fijian from Suva.

"Is the kava good here?" I ask, as if I were a simple traveller.

"It's good," he says. "You are a reporter from Australia."

The next night, I'm drinking in the empty Levuka Club, when a 76-year-old Hawaiian guy shuffles in for a beer. When I ask to interview him, he tells me I was in Silana yesterday, and when I take out my digital voice recorder, he says, "Yes, I've heard all about that recorder."

Although I escape from Ovalau undetected as Lonely Planet writer, I am sprung almost as soon as I arrive on Fiji’s second largest island, Vanua Levu. I have asked the rates for each of the rooms in Savusavu Budget Lodge, and I’m taking the sun on the bench outside, when the manager sits beside me, squints out to sea and asks, "What book are you writing?"

I'm not. I work for a newspaper.

"But you're writing a book?"

No, I'm writing an article on Savusavu.

“What it says about me in the Lonely Planet book is wrong,” he says. “Who writes the Lonely Planet books?”

I think a team of people write them.

"My entry is wrong. It says this place is called Savusavu Bay Accommodation. Now it's the Savusavu Budget Lodge."

I think it is between editions.

"They haven't been here yet."

Uh-huh.

"The name has changed in [Lonely Planet’s main South Pacific competitor] the Moon Guide."

Yeah?

"When will it change in Lonely Planet?"

Okay. I'm from Lonely Planet. We'll make the fucking change.

When I first came to Savusavu 12 years ago, there was nothing much apart from some dismal hot springs and a beautiful harbour. There has since been a land boom and a yachtie invasion. The street (there is only one to speak of) is full of Americans and Europeans, whose presence has raised the once unexciting local bar-and-restaurant scene to curiously un-Fijian heights. Savusavu is the only place in Fiji with a choice of three lovely places to drink - two yacht clubs and the Planter’s Club - all with heartbreaking views and very cheap, very cold beer. We plan to spend a day there, and end up staying a week. This kind of happy-go-lucky, impulse travelling is great when you’re on holiday, but not much use if you’re trying to write a guidebook. And when we finally do move on, we only go about seven kilometres up the road, to the five-star Jean Michel Cousteau Fiji Islands Resort, where we spend a quarter of my entire fee in four days.

The only place that does not let me in is Namale Fiji Islands Resort and Spa, which is owned by big-chinned Anthony Robbins, motivational speaker and author of "Unleash the Giant Within”, a manual for women giving birth to oversized babies. Nobody can get into Namale - which, I repeat, is a holiday resort - without an appointment. The manager eventually decides it is not worth making an appointment with somebody from Lonely Planet because we do not really service his market.

Which is fine. Except when I get home and search through all the correspondence on my laptop, there is an email from Namale's US representive in San Diego complaining the guide needed updating and the resort's description "is not only inaccurate it is very poor". Really?

The best part of the job is the people I meet, most of whom are eager to help me understand the Fijian way of life. Ronna Goldstein of the lovely Coconut Grove Beachfront Cottages, Taveuni, tells the story of some two German guests who were going out to a waterfall. She told them to catch the 9:30 bus. They came back to their cottage at 9:32, thinking they had missed it.

“9:30 is just an expression,” she told them. “It can come at any time from 9:30 to 10 o’clock.”

“So why don’t they call it the 10 o’clock bus?” asked the possibly apocryphal Germans.

“Because then it would come at 10:30.”

In the bathroom of a cottage in a village at the heart of an island I cannot name, I find a newspaper clipping entitled “Love is... life in a hut”. It tells the story of a British woman who, in 2002, sold up her £250,000 home in England to go and live in a one-room hut on a Pacific Island beach with the son of a tribal chief, “on an island with no tea bags... brushing her teeth with twigs”.

The British woman still lives in the cottage, which is about as far from a beach as you can possibly get in Fiji. She has never owned a house in England, her husband is not the son of a chief, you can buy tea bags anywhere, and she brushes her teeth with a toothbrush. The picture accompanying the story, showing the woman in the doorway of a beach bure, was taken on holiday in a backpacker resort in the Mamanucas. She asks me not to give away her location, because she does not want any more journalists coming looking for her. A film company was interested in making a documentary about her non-existent primitive way of life, and the Sydney Sun-Herald picked up the original piece from the UK tabloids, and ran it in Australia complete with her holiday photo.

There are thousands of stories in Fiji and, when I get home, I realise I have missed most of them. I simply don’t have enough information to write my section of the book. I do, however, have 55,000 Frequent Flyer points, so I use them to return to Suva. As I must fly out to Ovalau early the next morning, I only get to see the city at night. I eat in a restaurant I used to visit every day, 13 years ago, although I think it has been burned down in a coup and changed its name since then. I’ve been through a lot, too. I cross the road where I used to take my driving lessons, and duck into Traps, where once I drank with friends and strangers. I know the place, but I don’t know it any more. It is so hard to remember specifics. I am not sure if I have blanked them out deliberately. Opposite my hotel is Albert Park, and I look out over the playing field as if I’m looking into the past. I’m trying to feel something, but there’s nothing there. I got married in that park, 13 years ago, to a woman who now lives with my brother.

I hate to leave you hanging with a cliche, but that’s another story.

FIVE GREAT FIJI EXPERIENCES

Sail the Tui Tai

The “adventure cruise ship” Tui Tai sails around north-western Fiji’s less visited atolls. It is the only way tourists can reach the isolated Ringgold Islands, where you can kayak in the flooded crater of a submerged volcano. We saw whales and dolphins, and it was spectacular. Guests on the Tui Tai can snorkel, dive, mountain bike, trek or get up to go to the bathroom in the middle of night and pull a door so hard that it breaks and locks everybody in their cabins and out of the bathroom for several bladder-bursting hours. (If you chose the last activity, I recommend you do not admit it at the time, and only come clean in a magazine article in Australia several months later.)

www.tuitai.com; +679 885 3032

Drink kava

The mildly narcotic Fijian drink kava has a bit of an image problem. “Looks like dishwater, tastes like dishwater” is a common comment, perhaps because it is usually mixed in a washing-up bowl. However, if you have ever actually scooped a cup of greasy dishwater out of a stagnant sink and shared it around your friends, you will know it tastes much better than kava.

But a good batch of “grog” can turn you into a Fijian after three or four cups. You will become unworried, happy and friendly, lose track of time and feel a cheerfully insistent urge to stop whatever you’re doing and go and find some more kava.

You will be offered kava wherever you go, and kava-drinking Fijians will often produce guitars or - more mysteriously - ukuleles (I mean, where do you buy a ukulele?) and sing bluesy, harmonic folk songs.

Monday night is music night at Levuka Homestay, Levuka. The singers are local, and the kava is free.

www.levukahomestay.com; +679 344 0777

Island Hop the Mamanucas

The Mamanucas is a string of lovely islands with silly names - Beachcomber, Bounty, Treasure, Pleasure (oh, sorry, that one’s a porn shop) - and wondrous white-sand beaches. Bounty Island is great for backpackers. Musket Cove Resort, on Malololailai, is more peaceful and restrained; its neighbour, Lomani Island Resort, offers a quiet, adults-only boutique getaway. Funky Fish Beach Resort, Malolo, has good surfing and is managed by a genial former All Blacks coach. Navini Island Resort is pretty and intimate and run by a couple from Geelong. Beachcomber Island Resort is the place to party.

South Sea Cruises offers day cruises and transfers from Nadi to many of these islands. Just jump off the catamaran at that one you like the best. Almost every resort is linked with a dive operation, but Reef Safari (www.reefsafari.com.fj ;+679 675 0950), which services Mana Island’s backpacker resorts, is particularly impressive.

www.ssc.com.fj;+679 675 0500

Dive! Dive! Dive!

Or snorkel! Snorkel! Snorkel! The Jean-Michel Cousteau Fiji Island Resorts is associated with the son of Jean Jacques Cousteau, the first person ever to speak French underwater. Old man Cousteau brought the undersea world into more homes than Hurricane Katrina, and his son is also an expert diver and marine biologist. Jean-Michel only visits the Vanua Levu resort a couple of times a year, but there is great diving and snorkelling here all year round. www.fijiresort.com; +679 885 0188

Dolphin Bay Divers Retreat, also in Vanua Levu, is an excellent no-frills dive camp. www.dolphinbaydivers.com; +679 888 0531

Eat! Eat! Eat!

Food in the South Pacific used to be so bad the locals turned to cannibalism. Then the Indians arrived in Fiji, bringing with them ginger, chilli, cloves and those funny little dots Hindus wear on their foreheads. Fiji Indian food is the best in the region, combining Indian home cooking with Fijian ingredients. Vegetarian hare krishna dishes are the best of all. Try them the Hare Krishna Restaurant in Suva (+679 331 4154). Carnivores should grab some deliciously spicy chicken from Ashiyana (+679 331 3000) in Suva. Apparently, the meat tastes just like human beings.

Tomorrow the World

2011-05-21T13:08:00.003+10:00

Um, it seems a lot of comments posted on the day Blogger went down have suddenly appeared in various spots below the relevant postings. Forgive me if I don't reply, because I can't find them all.
Tomorrow, I'm going to post some stuff to clear the air about roundabouts. Also, I'll put up a piece about feature writing, since that's all I ever get asked about in real life.
Gotta go now and present the session on Bromance. (I take great care not to ask myself, "Why me?")

Satisifed Customer

2011-05-19T11:37:00.002+10:00

Well, somebody liked my feature writing workshop, which I forgot to advertise on my website...

http://www.sydneywriterscentre.com.au/_blog/swf_2011

I'm doing another one this afternoon, but it's a bit late to sign up now.

Amazing World First

2011-05-18T20:35:00.003+10:00

Fascinatingly, this is the first time I have ever posted my blog from a location other than my home. I'm in the Qantas Club lounge at Sydney Airport, waiting for a flight to the very interesting city of Canberra, where there are many roundabouts. Last night, I attended the opening party for the Sydney Writers Festival. I saw many people who are more famous than me, such as Howard Jacobson and Brendan Cowell, and a gratifying number less well-known than me, including most of the bar staff and the bloke who was directing smokers to the outdoor smoking area.
I ended up at Jacksons on George at 2am, when it closed. I didn't realise Jacksons on George ever closed. But, on balance, it's a good thing it does.

Thirty-two Followers

2011-05-15T08:46:00.001+10:00

Must be the roundabout pics.

2011-05-14T10:09:00.001+10:00

A very interesting picture of a roadsign.
(Thanks to Jon Gill)

2011-05-12T10:19:00.000+10:00

Another very interesting roundabout in Saudi Arabia.
(Thanks to Kate Ferguson)

2011-05-12T10:17:00.000+10:00

A very interesting roundabout in Saudi Arabia.
(Thanks to Kate Ferguson)

2011-05-11T21:21:00.000+10:00

In happier times...

Cover boy

2011-05-11T14:33:00.001+10:00

I dunno. I'm on the cover of my local free newspaper this week. If you wonder what that must feel like, it feels exactly the same as if YOU were on the cover of YOUR local free newspaper (unless, of course, you happen to be a supermodel, or a somehow sentient piece of typography). I think I probably did crave this type of public exposure when I was about 16 years old, and had hair instead of a hat, and still thought I might become a rock star even though I couldn't play an instrument or sing a note, but now I'm 47 it's just really, really odd.
My friend told me I should finish all my blog posts with a question. Does anyone agree with her?

Fiji with a six-month old

2011-05-05T16:45:00.002+10:00

This is an old piece that hasn't been collected in any of my books. It's about taking my son Ben to Fiji when we were researching a Lonely Planet guide. I'm posting it for all the family bloggers who might've come in from Kerri's site...

At six months old, my son Ben has his first passport. He gazes out from his photograph with startled gravity. On the plane flying into Fiji, his mother and I have to fill out his arrival card. For "usual occupation", we write "baby".
I am updating the Lonely Planet guidebook to Fiji. (For many years, every Lonely Planet guide declared itself as having been written for "the traveller who knows how to get [their] luggage off the baggage carousel". I often wondered exactly what kind of simpleton that remit excluded.) It's Ben's first time overseas, and we will be changing hotel rooms every couple of nights. To give him some continuity, we carry an ingenious device made of lightweight fabric and aluminium poles, which can be broken down into a bundle the size of a sleeping bag and reassembled into a travelling cot. It can also be reassembled into something that looks like a canvas awning hit by a hurricane; a tent crushed by scaffolding; or a hang-glider that has crashed into an electricity pylon. But only when I try to do it.
When we arrive in the capital, Suva, I unzip our big black Samsonite bag to find Ben's cot is not inside. It has been replaced by a stack of holiday clothes and a hair dryer. And the bag is not Samsonite any more. In fact, as the tag unmistakably states, it is not our bag at all. It belongs to somebody named "Goundar". I have left my luggage on the baggage carousel.
Air Pacific sorts out the problem with courtesy, humour and an efficiency not entirely characteristic of businesses in Fiji, and the next morning we take a small boat to Naigani Island Resort. There is no baby lifejacket on board, no real safety equipment at all. I do not feel like a responsible parent. The prow of the craft slaps hard on the waves and Ben bounces in my lap, sea spray washing over his eyes. As we step off the boat, Ben is snatched from my arms by a woman who asks his name, then introduces herself. "I am Ben's granny," she says, and runs off with him. Broad-nosed and black-skinned, she does not look like anybody on my side of the family.
His new granny quickly loses him to a younger Fijian woman, who thrills him with a shower of kisses. When Ben cries at dinner in the resort's restaurant, she carries him out to the kitchen. From the corner of my eye, I catch her waltzing with him. Ben glows with glee.
At first, I am determined to maintain my anonymity as Lonely Planet Guy, but I ask an inexplicable number of questions, and always want to see every room in the hotel, from the honeymoon suite to the family bure to the dorm. It is as if I'm travelling with my bride, her parents and an under-12s football team. Some hotel staff clearly think I have flown across the world to waste their time, so I begin to say I am a journalist.
In Savusavu, on Vanua Levu island, I leave Ben and his mother alone in an apartment and march up the main street with a notebook folded open and a pen poised over a clipboard. I feel like a time- and-motion guy, although that would be a particularly thankless job in Fiji, where there is so much of the first and so little of the second. I scribble down opening hours and timetables, many of which are at least partly fictitious.
When I tell them I'm a journalist, most Fijian hoteliers do not seem unduly interested. On three occasions the people I am talking to simply wander off. I have dozens of hotels to visit and scores of restaurants to sample. I have to go everywhere, do everything, talk to everyone I meet. It often feels as though I'm the only person in Fiji in a hurry.
Outside the big towns, Fijians greet everyone they pass with a "bula" and
a smile. The act of saying "bula" and smiling can, in fact, take up most of the average Fijian's day. Respite from this gruelling routine arrives whenever they see a baby, at which point they "bula", smile, grab the baby's foot and wiggle it. They then attempt to remove the baby from its restraints and take it somewhere.
They do this even if the baby is asleep - which, in Fiji, is hardly ever, because of the number of people who stop to "bula", smile and wiggle its feet.
One morning, Ben wakes up with three mosquito bites on his head. They boil soft in the steamy air and quickly turn septic. Ben cries in the night, and I wish I could take his pain away and feel it for him. At the same time, I have an attack of gout, and I wish somebody could take my pain away and feel it for me. The person I have in mind is Alexander Downer.
At an isolated resort far from Savusavu, I figure there is no point in pretending to be passing trade, since there is nowhere further to go. For the first time, I introduce myself as the Lonely Planet Guy. I brace myself for the bribe the manager will inevitably offer.
"The last girl from Lonely Planet who came here, I'd like to cut her head off and shoot her," he says. He is angry because, (a) he is unusually short; and (b) he believes the guidebook gives his resort a bad review, which it does not. When I show him the write-up, which describes the place as "a true labour of love", he says I am carrying the updated edition.
No, I'm writing the updated edition.
He then says he would like to hang the woman who used to run the nearby diving resort.
He is not sure what his rates will be next year, so I ask if he will email them to me. "Of course I'll email them," he said. "It's marketing. You've got to get it when you can."
After I have seen a dozen resorts, I realise the bathroom is the measure of a hotel. If the shower is clean, bright and modern, the food will be delicious, the beer chilled crisp, and the beds like silky marshmallow clouds. If it is rusty, leaky or dark, there will be broccoli in the curry, cockroaches in the kava, and the band will play Hotel California all night. Actually, even in the best places, the band will play Hotel California all night.
I take visual notes with my digital camera, snapping every sink, toilet, fridge and pool. At the Jean-Michel Cousteau Fiji Islands Resort on Vanua Levu, the suspicious woman showing me around eventually asks outright if I am planning to build a similar resort somewhere else.
Ben stays at home for the big site inspections, because ever since we listed his occupation as "baby", he has been on strike. Actually, it's not so much a strike, since he still turns up for babyhood each morning - if anything, he clocks on earlier - it's more of a work-to-rule. He has withdrawn his goodwill. He will perform only those tasks strictly in his job description, such as filling nappies and crying. Anything outside those parameters - such as sleeping - is out.
The constant attention in Fiji unsettles him, our continual moving confounds him. He wakes up four or five times a night, sometimes screaming just for reassurance. During the day, my tired conversations become increasingly odd. "We have been waiting a long time for somebody from your Planet to come," says one hopeful guesthouse owner.
After two sleepless weeks, we are tired of being on the road. I have been to almost every resort on Vanua Levu, and I'm ready for a holiday.
We book into the Cousteau. It's a questionable move financially - Lonely Planet pays authors a set fee; it's up to you how much you choose to spend on accommodation - but there is a free nanny service from 8am to 9pm. Ben is assigned to a Fijian woman whose entire job is to feed him, play with him and rock him to sleep. The night after his first day in with the nanny, Ben only wakes twice. After his fourth day, he only wakes once.
But we have to keep moving. The flight from Savusavu to Taveuni offers scrumptious views of islands of rainforest in sparkling, azure seas, and reefs like clusters of pearls. Ben is humbled and awed by the airline safety card. He loves the slippery, crackly laminate that prevents him from eating the drawings of expressionless figures indifferently inflating their life jackets.
We find a restaurant in Taveuni with a laminated menu, and he plays with it for half an hour. When he tires of this, he gazes at the women working in the kitchen, his brown eyes dark pools of innocent lust. He watches them seductively until one finally leaves the ovens to pick him up, cuddle him, grope him, snog him and walk him around the restaurant while we eat curry.
To say Ben likes Fijians is a hyperbolic understatement, like saying "babies are not much help at writing travel guides". He can climb Fijians like ladders; he can nuzzle them like blankets; when he tweaks their noses, they make a satisfying, high-pitched noise. If only they were laminated, he would be the happiest baby in the world.
In Taveuni, however, Ben reverts to his former (non-)sleeping patterns. He suffers from diarrhoea, and insects again ravage his little head. One morning, he wakes up with his right eyelid shaped like half a ping-pong ball. It is not fair to take him further. Three weeks into a month-long job, Ben and his mother fly back home, where babies can go about their blameless business unhindered.
I imagined I'd find out a lot about Fijian culture through researching a guidebook, but what I really learn is a mass of information about the hospitality industry. I fall for its argot, and end up talking like a travel agent.
I ask somebody about a "transfer" when I mean a boat ride, and they look at me as if I have walked into Starbucks and asked for a hamster. Elsewhere, I inquire about the "walk-in" rate. "We don't get walk-ins," I'm told. "We're an island."
With Ben gone, the job is easier but hollow. I miss watching him perform his morning callisthenics - get into push-up position, arch back, stretch arms, roll over, place foot in mouth - more than I could have imagined. But on the cruise ship Tui Tai, I have breakfast cruising alongside a whale in the Somosomo Strait. It teases and flirts, submerges and surfaces, then suddenly turns tail and dives, three-quarters of its magnificent body thrusting above the waves. It reminds me why it is that people travel - to chance upon the sublime, rather than to use a better bathroom - and it is the only thing I see in Fiji that is as perfect as a six-month-old baby boy.

Buy my book

2011-05-02T17:26:00.001+10:00

Would anybody who has not already done so buy my novel "King of the Cross", please. Thank you very much.

In Vietnam it was 19

2011-05-01T19:51:00.003+10:00

I just (obsessively and more than a little weirdly) checked my number of Followers, and found there were now 18. Less than a minute later, when I went back to the previous screen to try to get of the blog (instead of, er, hitting "sign out") I had 19!
Together, we can conquer the undersea world.

Now people are reading the blog, I'll have to post stuff. Damn

2011-04-30T17:23:00.003+10:00

Here's a column from a couple of years ago that didn't get published because it wasn't funny enough..

I went away for a boys’ weekend with Ben, but it wasn’t all strippers, cocaine and casino chips*, because Ben is only four-years-old. It was the first time my son and I had travelled without his mum, Claire – who was interstate for a baby shower – and I decided we’d go to Canberra, to visit friends.
For Ben, the adventure of the trip was boarding a jet plane, and he was concerned I should get as much out of the flight as possible. Ben’s advice was often couched in verse, as he has learned all he knows about flying from the rhyming book, Amazing Aeroplanes. He got me through security and to the gate without much trouble, but was flustered by the question of luggage. He wasn’t sure whether to place our cabin bags in the overhead lockers, or commit them to the hold, for the fun of retrieving them from the baggage carousel.
I told him we were going to take everything on board and, once we found our seat, Ben correctly indentified the overhead lockers and watched with delight as I stored away his backpack and my case.
The plane took off, and soon we were above the clouds. Ben was highly dubious about this proposition. In fact, he said it was impossible. Then, for a few magical moments, the Boeing 737 was encased in snowy white vapour.
“We’re inside a cloud!” I told Ben.
“Inside a cloud…” he repeated, like a carer humouring a demented patient.
He looked, briefly and contemptuously, at the inexplicable fluffy mass outside, then simply pulled down the porthole cover, and the question, like the porthole, was closed.
When we landed, Ben refused to believe the air bridge would connect with the plane, and demanded I give him his rain coat, but we arrived in Canberra airport warm and dry, even without his precautions.
Back at their home, our hosts, Chris** and Jenny, greeted Ben warmly.
“How was the flight?” they asked.
Ben was almost too awestruck to speak. He had experienced something he would never forget. He struggled to put his wonder into words, but eventually managed to stammer a description of the mind-bending marvel he had observed. “We put our bags in the overhead locker!” he squealed.
He was soon sharing a bath with Chris and Jenny’s little son, Sam, and they fell into excited conversation.
“Poo poo!” said Ben.
“He-he!” laughed Ben and Sam.
“Wee wee!” said Sam.
“Ha-ha!” laughed Ben and Sam.
It was like listening to an episode of *Little Britain*.
We visited the War Memorial, saw a mob of kangaroos, and took the kids to Cockington Green Gardens, a model village and railway. Ben was very polite, and always said please and thank-you. His behaviour would’ve been beyond reproach, if not for the fact that he addressed every Canberran as “Bum-head”.
We got back home a day earlier than Claire, and Ben gave me a detailed debriefing about trains, planes, overhead lockers etc. I felt like a pretty competent dad, having taken him away to the Land of the Bum-heads, and brought him back in one piece. It just goes to show, boys can do anything.
The next morning, I got him dressed and ready for kindy.
“What do you want for breakfast?” I asked, thinking he would say “Cheerios”, as he does every day.
“Pancakes!” he said, excitedly.
“But I don’t know how to make pancakes,” I admitted.
Ben looked at me wearily, with exasperated pity.
“*When* is mummy coming home?” he demanded.

*although there was some nude bathing, Coca-Cola and potato chips
**not Chris Ryan

The Best thing that's Happened in the UK since Transportation

2011-04-17T18:55:00.004+10:00

Fantastic news for the thousands of overseas readers of this blog: King of the Cross is now available from amazon.co.uk at the I-lose-about-ten-dollars price of £4.99. It's being sold as "used-like new" from Oswaldley Bookstore, but all copies are actually new and Oswaldley is my mate Roger. Other dealers stock it, but only Roger's are new. Buy it for your friends and family in the UK for Easter (it's more traditional than a chocolate egg) or pesach (it tastes better than a burnt offering). It's the ideal gift for birthdays, weddings, funerals, Anzac Day, Liberation Day (Italy) and the May Day holiday.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/King-Cross-Mark-Dapin/dp/1405039620/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1303030550&sr=8-3
And if you are a young adult, or used to be a young adult, or know somebody who's a young adult, you should also buy Roger's own book, Echo McCook, Outlaw Through Time.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Echo-McCool-Outlaw-Through-Time/dp/1908105267/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1303030961&sr=1-1
Imagine the thrill of owning two books by people who used to live in the same house. You can't buy that sort of experience.
Well, obviously, you can. But you couldn't until last week.

The changing role of pelicans in my life

2011-03-29T08:37:00.004+11:00

When I was a kid, I used to play Space Invaders with my mates in the Pelican Cafe in Aldershot. When I was a student, I used to drink cheap beer with my comrades in the Pelican Bar at Warwick University. Now I'm wanker, I eat Basque-influenced French food with my agent and publisher at Le Pelican in Darlinghurst.

Very popular guy, mystifyingly few followers

2011-03-14T14:32:00.003+11:00

Doubters and naysayers (ie me), be damned!
Thirty-five people have signed up for my talk at Balmain Library, and they're thinking of moving it to Balmain Meeting Room - which, I presume, is next door or something.
Surely I am the most popular idiot in all of history.

One over the Eight

2011-03-14T09:30:00.001+11:00

I think I'm gonna put in an appeal for more followers in my column. Eight feels a bit lonely. Do you have to have your own blog to become a follower, or do you just register with Blogger?

Table for Eight

2011-03-13T10:24:00.002+11:00

I quite often do events but I usually forget to put them on the Events section of my website because, uh, it's boring and I'm slack.
That said, I don't give many library talks, because only 10 people booked in for the last one so it had to be cancelled, but I've got a couple coming up in the next month. The first is at Balmain Library, NSW, on Tuesday 15 March.
See: www.leichhardt.nsw.gov.au/SPContent.aspx?PageID=34&ItemID=691
(I don't know why that link didn't paste with a line under it.)
I've only had four months to think about the Balmain gig*, so I haven't yet decided what I'm going to say. It's supposed to be about King of the Cross, but I inevitably end up talking about my column, roundabouts, Chris Ryan etc.
Maybe one of my eight followers could turn up and ask me something, to help me along. You'll be rewarded with a blank look and puzzled half-smile.

*Hip muso's term, not wholly appropriate to library events

Cult of Sex

2011-03-09T18:44:00.003+11:00

The Cult of Sex now has eight followers, and is looking for a new name. Today, I ate meatballs twice: for lunch, in a sort of burger, and for dinner, with a jacket potato. I also found an extremely perceptive and balanced review of King of the Cross that I'd somehow missed, perhaps because it came out six months after the book, in the Sunday Tasmanian 7/3/2010:
Turbulent time in Kings Cross
DEBI MARSHALL
I STARTED reading Mark Dapin's crime fiction novel King of the Cross on a recent flight home from New Zealand. By the time the aircraft broke through the clouds, I was snorting with laughter so loudly that the gentleman sitting next to me grinned, pointed at the book and said, ``I'll have whatever you're having!''
Good idea. This wickedly irreverent yarn, written by a former editor-in-chief of ACP magazines and liberally sprinkled with filthy language, is not for the pious or faint-hearted but the plot, despite Dapin's rider that it is ``inspired by an untrue story'', appears so authentic and the drugs, thugs and whores so real that fiction seems to morph into truth. Set against that gaudy strip of sleaze, Kings Cross, it is howlingly funny and truly shocking.
At 81, Jacob Mendoza -- Jew, liar, philanthropist and criminal boss of the Cross for four decades -- knows his end is in sight and is in need of someone to write his memoirs. Enter the hapless Anthony Klein, a journalist for the Australian Jewish Times who incurs Mendoza's wrath by digging too closely into his past during an interview about his philanthropic largesse. When Mendoza does admit the truth about the source of his wealth and power (``The money is from brothels, blackmail and bashings, Anthony''), he forces Klein to eat the tape. It's a taste of what is to come.
In need of a job after he is fired, Klein, whose own past unravels as the book progresses, unwillingly takes on the task of recording Mendoza's life story. The real one this time, tracing his life from pubescent pornographer to reigning Godfather whose empire in this place of ``trash and hope and mechanical sex'' is crumbling as hungry new blood circles.
Dapin draws the characters that inhabit the dodgy shadows of the Cross -- the commercially acquired wife, Cecilia Preciosa Bong Bong, tattooed henchman Natural Science who is all ``fists and feet and teeth'', and ``trannies with taped-up testicles'' -- with a pencil dipped in grit. In his orbit is a shambolic ensemble of dense stand-over men, pole-dancing molls, shady pimps and crooked cops, all beautifully wrought in Dapin's descriptive writing.
It may not be kosher, but even midgets aren't spared. ``I feel sorry for midgets these days,'' Mendoza tells his biographer. ``They used to have all kinds of opportunities: midget wrestling, Santa's elves, strippers' little helpers, dwarf bowling.''
And in the end, after Mendoza takes Klein under his wing, telling him that ``You're a failure, Anthony, at school, with women, as a soldier and a drug dealer. I'm not going to let you fail again'', he and Mendoza come to an understanding. ``In this world of maggots and dogs,'' the old man tells his young protege, ``a bloke who's staunch is more valuable than pearls.''
King of the Cross is not to everyone's taste. But if you are tickled to snorting by this hilarious and sometimes poignant read, take my advice: don't read it on a crowded aircraft.

Six Followers

2011-02-25T20:07:00.002+11:00

SIX followers!

Man eating burger

2011-02-05T14:03:00.004+11:00

Jesus, now I've got five followers.
I'd better write something.
Uh, well, I, er, just ate a chicken burger.
You can see why I don't do Twitter, can't you?
I think I'll make a pot of tea.

I am watching: In Treatment Season Two
I am reading: Green Armour by Osmar White
I am listening: incessantly to Frank Turner

Excessive violations

2010-12-04T17:49:00.001+11:00

My wikipedia entry is now protected until January 4 by wikipedia's "Excessive violations of the biographies of living persons policy". Therefore I must declare this competition closed.

My Life as a Droid

2010-12-02T08:26:00.005+11:00

I may have to expand the scope of this vandalise-wikipedia thing. This morning, I am listed as having played R2D2 in the original Star Wars movie. Although the vandal has provided a link to R2D2's entry, readers who follow that trail will discover the Droid was actually played by actor Kenny Baker. So if you alter my entry, you also have to alter R2D2's. In turn, Kenny Baker's page needs to be vandalised, in order to ensure no confusion remains in the minds of Star Wars fans as to who was the real R2D2. And I need to be added to the category "Actors with dwarfism". (Although, to be fair, my vandal had me lose the role in the sequels due to a growth spurt.)

Wikipedia vandalism

2010-12-01T18:36:00.002+11:00

A tip for people vandalising my wikipedia page: the vandalised versions don't stay up for long, but I think they might have more chance of remaining if they look as if they could be properly referenced or cross-referenced. At time of posting, my entry has uncovered the little-known fact that I was a burlesque dancer in an earlier career, but "living burlesque dancers" has not been added as "category" at the foot of the page, along with "1963 births", "Australian journalists" etc.

Wikipedia

2010-11-28T07:26:00.002+11:00

Wikipedia has locked my entry until November 30, due to "excessive vandalism". Please resume the vandalism on December 1. Entries to the Vandalise My Wikipedia Entry competition remain open.

My appearance

2010-11-22T13:26:00.002+11:00

Like everyone else, I have a personal appearance. Unlike most other people, I have a personal appearance at Abbeys Bookshop in Sydney on Wednesday 24 November, 6pm-8pm. I will be signing books and talking to people, I think. I will try to get the details onto my "Events" page.

Bigger than God

2010-11-21T20:33:00.000+11:00

I've now got three followers! I only need another nine, and I'll have caught up with Jesus.

Pictures of me in a suit

2010-11-17T15:29:00.001+11:00

Here are some pictures of me in the suit, at the Ned Kelly Awards Night when my award-winning novel won an award:
nedkellyawards.com/index.php/photo-gallery

A desperate attempt to please followers

2010-11-14T14:30:00.001+11:00

How come four people have answered but I only have two followers?
There was a story in the Sydney Sun-Herald this morning about a man who was swimming in a saltwater pool when a council worker opened the outflow pipe, which sucked the swimmer out into the ocean. The victim was described as an "award-winning author". It's got me worried that award-winning authors might be especially vulnerable to this type of freak accident.

Follow the leader

2010-11-12T08:53:00.002+11:00

I notice this blog has two followers. What on earth do you follow? I never post anything.

Award-winning cancellation

2010-09-21T13:36:00.001+10:00

Despite my award-winning performance, I don't seem to have quite broken into the big time. I just had a bookshop appearance canceled because only 10 people booked in, and the shop wouldn't put on anything for less than 20. It's a good job I forgot to promote it on the website really.

No errors of judgement

2010-09-15T08:54:00.004+10:00

They gave out a booklet including some of the judges' notes at the Ned Kelly Awards. Here are the comments about Kings of the Cross:
R. Healy: "A bobby dazzler of a read. Utterly politically incorrect and closer to the truth than most crime journalism. Funny as buggery and should be compulsory reading in the Gaza Strip-clubs. First-time novel?! Stick it up your clacker. Too good."
So I, er, liked that one.
CB: "A rollicking street smart read with laugh, a cynical eye, and an original manner of storytelling that keeps the reader on edge with the tension between factual representation and an unreliable memoir. As someone who works in a prison and so is immersed in the sounds and stories of the underworld, its language, characters and scenarios ring terrifyingly true!"
Another nice piece of judging, I thought.
Stuart Coupe: "King of the Cross is VERY strong - and very clever melding of the Safron biography with the fictional story that's rather gripping. Great language, convincing twist, excellent characters."
Can't argue with that, either.
Surely these judges should be appointed to the Supreme Court.

Award-winning author wins award

2010-09-14T12:52:00.000+10:00

The funny thing is, when I earlier thought I was shortlisted for the Ned Kelly Awards for crime writing, I was actually only nominated. Then, when I really was shortlisted, I didn’t bother to report it, because I’d already done so when it wasn’t true. Now I have won. At least, I won the award for Best First Crime Fiction, which is a statuette, a certificate and a cheque.
It is truly excellent to win an award, because it shows I was right all along and all the (two) critics who didn’t like King of the Cross can get fucked.
Sadly, I have decided to forget all the little people who helped me out on my way to the top, and only consort with fellow award-winners and wanker critics like the ones who dissed the book.
I feel bad, but not as bad as the people who didn’t win the award.

Word Tour

2010-07-20T20:39:00.005+10:00

If, for some strange reason, you have always wanted to see me in the flesh, and listen to me talk about myself and respond to really odd questions from old bearded men, August is the month your dreams might come true. I'm appearing at the Byron Bay Writers Festival, the MEAA media conference and the Sydney Jewish Writers Festival. Times and dates should be on the website in the next couple of days.
Then I'm in Victoria for the Melbourne Writers Festival (although my dates for that event seem a bit confused at the moment) then Geraldton for the Big Sky Festival. And if you happen to live in Rouse Hill NSW, apparently I'm doing a wine and cheese night in your area, but I'm not yet sure when.
Feel free to come up and say a cheery "g'day", and I'll look at you quizzically and ask, "Do I know you?"

The Only Thing to Understand about Magazines

2010-06-05T17:24:00.003+10:00

If you've never felt like this about a publication, you should get the fuck out of publishing:
"My New Musical Express [is] a miracle which drops through the letter-box once a week. I'm always surprised it doesn't set the carpet on fire, like it does my brain. There are few minor beauties more inspiring than a magazine whose time has come and by the mid-Seventies the NME was riding the quest of the perfect wave...
"It seems implausible and somewhat risible now, but in the period between 1972 and 1980 the NME was a lifeline - the World Service of Hip - for the scattered tribe of Neurotic Boy Outsiders of all three sexes isolated far and wide throughout the British Isles and beyond. Years later, I was to meet an NBO from New Zealand, of all places, who described that sensation as well as any of us: 'Can you imagine being fifteen and just sitting on this rock at the end of the world ... and then suddenly every week this paper starts to arrive telling you what the New York Dolls are doing. And for an hour you actually feel as though you're all on the same planet!'...
"These people whom I will never meet writing about this music I will never hear makes me feel not alone ... They make me feel less lonely."
Julie Burchill, "I Knew I Was Right"

No more sex or money

2010-06-05T13:09:00.001+10:00

Well, Ralph magazine, of which I was once editor then editor-in-chief, closed down yesterday. I had an email from a guy who used to work there saying he felt angry that "they" had taken a perfectly good car and driven it over a cliff. I'm not sure who "they" are, really, but somebody fucked up, and the press release attributing the collapse of the magazine to the normal historical process is one of the funniest examples of publishers covering their backs I've ever seen. And I've seen a few, as they say.

Short one award

2010-05-20T11:21:00.000+10:00

King of the Cross has been shortlisted for a Ned Kelly Award for Best First Fiction. If you happen to know a judge of the Ned Kelly Awards, please shout them a drink and let them know it's from me. I'll reimburse you when I next see you.

The man who would be the man who would be king

2010-05-07T19:44:00.001+10:00

Here’s a column that never ran, probably because it was Crap…
I was once a crap Colonel Tom Parker. Svengali-like, I manipulated the career of my charge, Crap Elvis, as he rose from humble beginnings to a humble end. Crap Elvis would have been a nobody without me – just as he was, in fact, a nobody with me.
Crap Elvis was one of the characters I co-created when I was the editor of Ralph magazine, a literary journal that did not publish, among others, the poetry of Les Murray or the early short stories of Christos Tsiolkas.
We did, however, publish freelance writer Owen Thomson, who attended the Parkes Elvis Festival in 1999 as Crap Elvis, the worst Elvis impersonator of all time. He did not look like Elvis, could not sing, did not know any Elvis songs and could not dance.
In 2002, Owen hung up his sideburns and returned his poorly fitting jumpsuit to a costume-hire shop in Wollongong, NSW. I thought that was the last anyone would hear of Crap Elvis. But in an infinite universe there are infinite possibilities and, out of a black hole near Alpha Centauri* crawled the galaxy’s first Crap Elvis impersonator.
Last year, Perth Radio announcer Matt Hale founded the website www.crapelvis.com, to chronicle his trip around the world in a $29.99 Elvis jumpsuit. Matt claims never to have heard of Owen, and told me he bought his jumpsuit when shopping for a wig to wear at his farewell “wig party” (They do things differently in WA). “I took the suit home,” he said, “and that’s when I realised it was absolutely shit.”
His girlfriend berated him for wasting $29.99 when they had both just quit their jobs, but he argued that it would not be a waste if he took the suit around the world. Curiously, Matt decided to begin his trans-global odyssey in Parkes, NSW, where he turned up at the 2008 Elvis Festival with the traditional Crap Elvis ambition of coming last in every competition. Disastrously, he *won* the Worst-Dressed Elvis award on the specially chartered Elvis Express train from Sydney – a victory he describes as “kind of bittersweet” – but managed to secure last place in both the lookalike and sound-alike contests.
For the sound-alike round, he re-wrote ‘(Let Me Be Your) Teddy Bear’, as ‘(Let Me Be) Your Terrorist’. He said the organisers only had “themselves to blame” for his crap performances, since “they actually didn’t have any vetting procedure. They just let anybody go into it.”
Matt travelled the world as Crap Elvis, getting thrown out of as institutions as varied as the Louvre in Paris and La Recoleta Cemetery in Buenos Aires, for violating widely unpublicised regulations against sightseeing while dressed as a woefully poor imitation of the king of the rock’n’roll.
Matt was surprised to be invited back to Parkes for the 2009 festival, to perform a 30-minute set on the main stage. People asked if he planned to go into the lookalike and sound-alike events. “I kind of really did want to defend the last position,” he said, “but I like to think I’ve influenced some of their rules, because they actually charge you now: $10 for the lookalike and $20 for the soundalike. My suit was $29.99, so there’s no way I was paying more to enter than the suit cost.
“Against all the odds,” he said, “it was actually a triumphant return.” Fifteen minutes into his performance, he had 2000 people waving imaginary toast in the air to ‘Burning Toast’, his re-write of the Elvis standard, ‘Burning Love’.
He thinks he will go back again in 2010 “just as a money making exercise”. “Everyone was asking for CDs,” he said, so he thought he might record one.
At the mention of a Crap Elvis recording deal, my antennae sprang to attention. Surely there was an opening here for the only man in Australia with experience as a Crap Colonel Tom Parker. But I soon calmed down. You only get one Elvis in a lifetime – crap or otherwise – and I have already had mine.

*Technically known as “Western Australia”.

Weird shit

2010-04-30T19:26:00.002+10:00

This is something that happened to me while I was researching King of the Cross. It is not a funny story, just faintly horrible and strange.
I had made one of my regular pledges to give up alcohol for a month, which left me with time on my hands in the long, warm evenings. My then three-year old son, Ben, did not want to go to bed, so I offered to take him out for a walk while darkness fell. I knew I was making memories for him, that the strongest, most affectionate images I have of my father are those nights we went out to buy freshly baked bagels, or drove back from my grandparents’ house down quiet roads at dusk.
I had been pushing Ben in the pram for about half an hour when he noticed a surfwear-style wallet lying on the pavement. I picked it up, parted the Velcro fastenings, and looked inside. It was fat with cards, including bank cards, business cards and a transport concession card made out to an address about 30 kilometres away. It also contained the owner’s – let’s call him “Mick” – front and back door keys.
I shuffled his cards looking for one that included a contact number. He belonged to a club of some kind but it had already closed for the night. He was a member of squash courts, but they could not give out their patrons’ personal details. One business card carried the name somebody at the Department of Corrective Services, but only a daytime phone number. Another belonged to a brothel on the other side of the road. The card was generic, but it was signed in biro, with a heart, by a woman – let’s call her “Sinead”.
I thought about taking the wallet to the brothel – where Mick had obviously just been – but figured that a prostitute probably would not have contact details for her client. There was also a photo in the wallet, of a wife or girlfriend, who might not be overjoyed to have her partner’s wallet returned from a parlour.
I wondered if I should take the wallet to a police station in the morning, then I thought to check that there were no drugs hidden behind the photograph. There were not, but the picture was signed on the back, with a mobile phone number. It was, in fact, a photo of Sinead from the brothel, and she had the same surname as Mick, an unusual spelling of a fairly common name – let’s call it “Sandersz”.
I phoned Sinead and told her I had found her husband’s wallet, and arranged to meet her at the pub at the top of my road. She was waiting with Mick, a solid, shabby, middle-aged bloke with a flattened face, who explained he had lost it because he was drunk, and had been so angry he had punched something. He showed me his fist, large and undamaged. Sinead and Mick wanted to buy me a beer, but I told them I was not drinking, and went home feeling like I had done a good deed for a couple who were clearly down on their luck.
Because I was working on King of the Cross, I was reading everything I could find about gang crime. The next morning – the very next morning – I picked up a library book that had sat unopened at my bedside for a week. It told the story of a savage gang of bashing murderers in the city in the 1980s. One of the killers was Mick Sanderz. He had served 12 years in jail. I looked him up on the internet, to see if I could find a picture of him. There were no images, but I did come across a newspaper story dated two years previously, in which he and his probation officer had been caught stealing from a sex shop. The probation officer had left her husband and two kids to move in with Sanderz. Her name was Sinead.

Rest In Pants

2010-04-25T17:13:00.000+10:00

Alistair Hulett, socialist folk-punk and sound of the Sando, died on 28 January this year. He was a great man, and he once lent me his trousers. In return, I misspelled his name in my memoir, Sex & Money. Here’s the bit that mentioned him. I would’ve posted it earlier, except I still couldn’t work out how to paste from Word into Blogger.

I was intestinally uncomfortable with Penthouse. I did not have anyone I could talk to about this. Everyone I knew from typesetting had worked on porn, and all my politically inclined friends had gone back to the UK, so I took the desperate step of consulting socialist folk singer Alistair Hullet, the former singer of local Pogues cousins, Roaring Jack. On Sunday afternoons, Hullet and his acoustic guitar played revolutionary ballads at the Sandringham Hotel in Newtown. I used to take a seat at the bar sometimes, and soak in the socialism and smoke. I contacted Hullet through his record company and arranged an interview. He was happy to talk to Penthouse. He rarely got any attention from the media. In fact, he often had to fight for the attention of the dozen or so drinkers at the Sando.
Before I met him, I went for a run around Redfern Park, and dropped my house keys. I searched for them in the grass, but it was like trying to find house keys in a park. I turned up for the interview in running gear, and I looked more like a desperate, sweating junkie than a journalist. Hullet, a generous, trusting person, lent me a pair of trousers and a long-sleeved shirt for my next appointment, and listened impassively as I begged special dispensation to work on Penthouse. He seemed puzzled as to why I should think he possessed spiritual authority on behalf of the international working class. From the tone of his songs, I had assumed he was a member of the Australian political equivalent of the SWP. It turned out he was not. He was just this bloke who sang ‘The Internationale’ once a week in the pub.
In the end, he handed down a judgment. He said it was probably alright to work for the magazine, provided you did not take the photographs. I was ready for that. ‘But,’ I said, ‘I write the captions for the photographs.’ Nothing I could say would make Alistair Hullet damn me to hell, or ask for his trousers back. I did not know if I should be relieved that I had not committed a mortal sin, or disappointed that I had not debased myself sufficiently. I did not know what I was doing at all.

Books alive, book dead

2010-04-25T16:37:00.003+10:00

Yeah, I know. I haven't written anything in this blog for ages, and what's the point of having a blog when you never actually post. Well, I've got a diary too and I hardly ever write anything in that. Hmmm, reading back, that doesn't sound like such a good argument.
I was supposed to complete my second novel, Spirit House, by the end of March, for release in September. I submitted a first draft, and my publisher said (a) I was trying to tell two stories at once, which is what he said about my first novel; (b) I had to beef up the subsidiary narrative, which is what he said about my first novel; (c) I had to link the stories more closely, which is what he said about my first novel. He was right about my first novel, and he was right about this one too. So I gave him a second draft, which was about 20,000 words longer, and he didn't like it much, and I didn't either. I had about ten days to produce a third draft, and halfway through I just gave up. So my second novel will now come out in 2011.
However, King of the Cross has been chosen as one of the books you must read by the Australia Council's Books Alive campaign. So buy it. You must read it. The government says so. The campaign will be supported by a book called something like "Ten Short Stories You Must Read". I will have a piece in there, and you must read that as well. Or face prosecution.

Gratuitous depravity

2010-02-03T17:16:00.006+11:00

A few months after a book of mine is published, my publisher sends me a folder of reviews collected by Media Monitors. I've usually seen the notices that appear in the big metropolitan papers, but the MM file gives me a chance to find out what they think of me in Ballarat (not much), Launceston (I'm a god) and Tweed Heads (they just reproduced the cover blurb).
The reviews were overwhelmingly brilliant, and I wish I'd've seen them all at the time, instead of getting hung up on the one bad review in a literary supplement. In a couple of days, my publisher will post all the good ones on this website, with three little dots [...] to replace any critical passages.
I was particularly impressed by Rick Molinsky's review for the Melbourne Times, Melbourne Weekly and Berwick & District Journal. Rick wrote, "As great a feature writer as he is, as a novelist he's amazing." And he was talking about me! Surely Rick will vie with Belinda Jackson for the highest accolades in journalism at the Walkleys this year.
The funniest notice appeared in the Australian Financial Review Magazine. If a reviewer wants to hint that (unlike them) I can't really write, they always point out I used to work on men's magazines. "Certainly, the sex is overdone," wrote the AFR Mag's reviewer, as if someone had asked them whether or not the sex was overdone, "but what do you expect from a former Penthouse associate?" Interestingly, as its founding chief subeditor, I was also an "associate" of the Australian Financial Review Magazine, which goes to show that if you only know one thing, you should probably keep your mouth shut. And if I were still a sub at Fairfax, I wouldn't've let a single one of their hamfisted sentences through the editorial process.
As for the Ballarat Courier, I seem to have upset reviewer Frank Nolan, who wrote, "Many readers will find the gratuitous details of crime and depravity in the Cross offensive." That's as good a cover blurb as any, I guess.

Hitting the bottom

2010-01-07T22:41:00.001+11:00

Surely I have reached the peak of my Z-list fame. This week, I was asked to pose nude for a women's magazine.

Belinda Jackson - the future of journalism

2010-01-05T16:44:00.004+11:00

There was a story in last weekend's Sun Herald travel section in which writer Belinda Jackson nominated "10 great reads for the armchair traveller ... that might not tell you where to find a laundromat but are signposts for the country's soul."
Australia was represented by Strange Country, of which she said, "Dapin's description of the Parkes Elvis Festival is a priceless piece of writing. What's amazing about Dapin is he meets such characters as the Feral Ute King at the Caboolture Urban Muster and cockroach racers but he might - just - like them."
What a magnificent piece of journalism. Is it too early to nominate Belinda Jackson for a Walkley?

The self-referential life

2010-01-03T14:35:00.003+11:00

This morning I did a radio interview then decided to write a column about doing radio interviews and post the news of my decision on this blog.

Lost for Words

2010-01-01T15:50:00.000+11:00

Er, today I did some writing...