The Land Waits

Deborah Biancotti (Guest Blogger)

Don’t worry about the world coming to an end today. It is already tomorrow in Australia.
~Charles M. Schulz

Deborah Biancotti is an Australian author of urban and dark fantasy. Her first published story won an Aurealis Award and her first collection, A Book of Endings, was shortlisted for the 2010 William L. Crawford Award for Best First Fantasy Book.

Deborah is now working on her first novel, working title Broken. She has new fiction coming out in time for the 2010 WorldCon in Melbourne, including a novella set in contemporary Sydney from Gilgamesh Press. She also has an upcoming essay on “No Country for Old Men” in Twenty-First Century Gothic: Great Gothic Novels since 2000.

She continues to write short stories and refer to herself as a 'tired idealist'.

Where did it begin?

I blame school. All the schools. There were too many of them, for a start. One ordinary day at an ordinary school in an ordinary series of schools, I shut down.

The world is adversarial, that’s what I was learning (age nine, stuck in a giant school assembly, one of only two kids who didn’t have school uniforms yet—the other kid being my little sister). I was learning that the world is not on my side.

The world, if you’re lucky, ignores you. And if you’re unlucky it rains down upon you. That’s the world for you, kid. Welcome aboard.

On to the next school and the next one, pitstops in an unpredictable but oddly conformist landscape. I moved from small schools to large ones, from houses that backed onto sugar cane farms, to increasingly surburban and then inner city urban space. It wasn’t until I left school that I learned to hide. It wasn’t until then I felt safe.

It wasn’t until well past school, way past school, that I admitted publicly something that will never be fashionable.

I hate the Australian landscape.

I know we're meant to find our true expression somehow in the outback and the precious 'land'. I know most Australians dream of escaping to the coast and spend holidays at the beach. And there are the few eccentrics so obsessed with hanging off the edge of the landscape that they build huts on cliffs and dare local authorities to get rid of them. These same few occasionally make the news for their full-body tattoos and their penchant for filing their teeth to look like shark teeth. (Okay, maybe that's all just one guy.)

But the older I got, the less I could play at 'let's pretend'. I stopped pretending I found the landscape anything but creepy and revolting. The sweaty, swollen rainforests that threaten, in my memory, to tip into the thin wedge of playgrounds. The vast brownness of some places, the spindly silver trees, the ungenerous scrub by the sides of roads, wild grasses that whip the edges of beaches. Strange powers control those spaces. Indifferent powers. Wind alone doesn’t describe the movement.

Fear always starts in my sternum, and that’s what the grasses feel like. They feel like fear.

On the subject of hate, I hate—oh! how I hate—that damn poem by Dorothea McKeller. “I love a sunburnt country, a land of sweeping plains”. My Country. Man. Has anyone ever written a more banal poem about a more fatal place?

“It’s always been drought here,” one daughter of a farmer told me. “I’ve never not seen drought.”

Drought. We are defined by the absence of things. Of water, for instance. The desert is our greatest definition. The red dirt and damage of the uninhabitable centre of the country.

The landscape is looking to trip you up. The landscape—mad, bad, dangerous, faking emptiness—the landscape encourages you to throw yourself at it. The landscape, though, rarely gives back.

We grow up being taught what to do with the danger of place. What to do if we’re trapped in the desert (don’t leave your car, whateveryoudo), if we’re confronted by a snake (don’t run, whateveryoudo), if we spy strangers on a deserted road (don’t stop, whateveryoudo).

Generations have tried to tame the place, dragging their foreign flora into the country, making pastoral British lawns and Mediterranean vegetable gardens and stunning Balinese-style tropical retreats tucked behind fences and swimming pools. These are inelegant compromises amidst a climate that wants us gone. Cockroaches move into our skyscrapers and dust storms coat every window and street.

Of course, I’ve drifted into talking about the city. My city, Sydney, seen here in the great dust storm of September 23, 2009.

Because of another hate: I hate the notion that to be more authentically Australian, a screenplay or a story or a poem has to be set in the ‘great’ Australian outback. As if the urban experience, being more new, is less real, less great, for chrissake. I’m a climate control kinda grrrrl. I’m a city chick, an urban aficionado. I don’t need desert and rainforest, I don’t need beaches.

Though I do like beaches, but generally I like them more during rainstorms. In fact, I like rainstorms a lot. I love the punch of a sudden Sydney downpour and the kind of drizzling shower that goes on for days.

Once, a teacher told me she’d moved to Australia to be someplace new. Italy was too old. She meant the cities were old, of course. She was looking for a place where the famous Coliseum hasn’t been butchered to supply marble to local homes for hundreds of years, where museums weren’t bloated by centuries of art and thought.

She didn’t mean the land, the stolen land, because the land has been here as long as the world has. Aboriginal habitation of Australia began maybe 40,000 years ago. You get that feel, too, if you spend time in the ‘great’ outback. You get 40,000 years of whispered voices out there, you get the genocidal white history that’s laid thinly and shamefully on top. Especially at night, especially in the remote dark of night. You find yourself wanting to say ‘I’m sorry’ like a litany, hoping that will be enough for the landscape and its burden of horror to leave you the hell alone.

She came to Sydney, the teacher. To that relatively clean and utterly unplanned city, springing up from a series of coincidences and ill-thought-out roadways that disallow expansion, grand ‘old’ (like, a-hundred-and-fifty-years old) homes that squat precariously on what have accidentally become major motorways. The city goes on, unplanned, reacting to new populations and cultures with benevolent indifference. Asian grocers and Indian spice shops spring up, unexpected. Belgian chocolate shops and Mexican, Thai, Vietnamese, Lebanese restaurants fight for space.

But the landscape still wins. It seeps in. With the humidity of a Sydney summer (100% humidity more than once this year) comes the seething plant life growing through cracks in the windows. Parasites of every kind thrive. The cat’s food has to be protected from ants, slugs, cockroaches, and rats. The human food is susceptible to moths. The sticky moth traps in the pantry are littered with moth dust but no carcasses.

The ants eat them even before they die, wings flapping against the glue of the trap. Spiders the size of my thumb spin webs across the entire expanse of my backyard, webs so strong you need two hands to break them.

The landscape tries to box us in. Cut our spaces up, divide-and-conquer style. There is nothing but wildness out there, waiting to get in.

It’s not a wonder to me, then, that I write so much unsettled (occasionally unsettling) fiction. The wonder is more of us don’t. The world tears people apart. The world doesn’t hate us because we don’t recycle. The world just hates us.

So I write about it. An act of revenge on the world. I write about the world breaking us with its wide spaces or its heavy, untamed wildness in stories like “Number 3 Raw Place” and “The Distance Keeper”: both stories with heroes that are isolated and, ultimately, destroyed by the worlds they fear. I write about the unsustainability of our social structures in “Coming up for Air” and “Watertight Lies”. Both these stories take the latest politics around environmental sustainability and dare the reader to wonder ‘what about the social sustainability?’

Because I suspect and I’m afraid that our attempts to partner up with the world will come to nought. The world is rearing and bucking like a stallion, and it dreams of throwing us off.

And I write about the triumphs—the relative, fragile, fleeting triumphs—of the city. In “Diamond Shell” from Book of Endings, one woman finds a way if not to exist than to succeed.

The world, gentle reader, rains down upon us.

Deborah can be found online at http://deborahb.livejournal.com and http://deborahbiancotti.net.


This cover is a portrait of me by artist Nick Stathopoulos for a Jack Dann book. No, I don't actually write as Jack Dann. He’s a completely different person, but I love the spooky look to this cover.

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The bush is old, it's ancient, and it's waiting for us to leave.
~Robert Hood, Australian speculative fiction writer

Kerry Greenwood & the Fabulous Phryne Fisher

Interviewed by Sandra Parshall

Kerry Greenwood, a major crime fiction writer in her native Australia, has also gained an enthusiastic following in the U.S. for her mysteries set in the 1920s and starring the fabulously wealthy, always fashionable Phryne Fisher. After a false start with another U.S. publisher, the Phryne (pronounced Fry-knee, rhymes with briny) novels have been published in quick succession by Poisoned Pen Press, complete with the dazzling original covers from the Allan & Unwin editions in Australia. The latest is Murder in the Dark, released this month. Next is Murder on a Midsummer Night, out this summer. PPP also publishes Kerry’s new contemporary series featuring Corinna Chapman.

Kerry was born in Footscray, a suburb of Melbourne, and lives there today. Although she had always aspired to be a writer, she earned a law degree from Melbourne University and continues to work one day a week for Victorian Legal Aid. She lives with three cats (Attilla, Belladonna, and Ashe), a collection of 7,000 books, and a registered wizard. In her spare time she has jumped out of planes in an attempt to cure her fear of heights, but only succeeded in giving herself a fear of jumping out of planes. She says she can detect bookshops from blocks away, and the size of her book collection lends credence to the claim.


Q. How did your arrangement with Poisoned Pen Press come about? Had you ever been published in the US before PPP picked up your books?

A. In the dim and distant past, i.e. 1991, Ballantine picked up the first two Phryne books, renamed Cocaine Blues [to] Death by Misadventure and they failed to sell. Then PPP contacted my Aus publisher and this time I caught the public taste, it appears. Thank you, public!

Q. Your covers are gorgeous – and so are the gowns Phryne wears. Who designs the gowns and who creates the covers?

A. My mother and I design the gowns and the amazing Beth Norling does the pictures. She sketches first then does a pastel. They are wonderful and so very actually 1928.

Q. Phryne seems ideally suited to her time. Why did you choose the 1920s? Could you write a character like Phryne in a 21st century setting?

A. Not really. Phryne is the product of the losses of the Great War, the sudden elevation of women because there were few men, and she is bold but not impossible for that period. It's not as easy as it used to be to be bold in the 21st century...

I picked 1928 initially because I did a thesis length essay on the 1928 strike for Legal History, and I over-researched it, interviewed all the old men who were on the wharf, read all the newspapers, fell in love with original research. My father was a wharfie so I could and did get into the Waterside Workers Federation archives. So when I was looking for a historical period I naturally thought of 1928.

Q. Does Phryne have qualities, or attitudes, that you consider distinctly Australian? Or would she be equally at home in 1920s America or Britain?

A. That is a really good question. I suppose her Aus qualities are a certain contempt for authority and perhaps her appetite for a good time. But she would fit in wherever she was - or rather, stand out. In England at the time she would be a Bright Young Thing and considered outrageous enough not to be invited to certain events - she would not get to meet the King, for example. In the USA at the time she would be overbold - and no one then would accept a Chinese lover, though it would have been worse if Lin was black. In fact, it would be illegal.

Q. Like many mystery heroines, Phryne is larger than life, an idealized woman. Is she someone you’d like to have as a friend? Other than lots of money, does she have anything that you wish you had?

A. Oh, that total uninterest in what anyone else thinks - I would love to have that. Her style. Her taste. Her hats! I would be delighted if she was my friend. In fact, she is. She sits on the corner of my desk and tells me stories.

Q. Tell us about the life of a writer in Australia. Are literary agents vital there, as they are in the US? Is it possible to find a publisher and have a writing career without an agent? I also wonder if you feel the same pressure American writers feel to get out in public, do bookstore signings, interviews, everything you possibly can to sell books. How much promotion do you do for your books?

A. I had an agent when I began, and I think an agent is a good thing, but not essential, in Australia. I used to do a great deal of publicity, tours, signings, radio and TV etc. When I was younger I thought it was great fun. Then I got older and menopause ran over me like a big black truck and I got too sick and exhausted to do any but the main interviews. My publisher does not press me to do more than I think is wise, because they want me to continue to write books...

Q. What attracted you to the mystery genre? What can you do in a mystery that you couldn’t do in mainstream fiction?

A. You can provide a story which everyone wants to read right through to the end. The trouble with lit fiction is that post-modernism has disjuncted (is that a word? It ought to be) or perhaps I mean dislocated the narrative, so you can't read it in bed. Mysteries are one of the few forms of fiction left that demand a story, and I am a story teller. I am in good company. Dickens, for a start.

Q. Have you ever studied writing, or have you learned on the job, so to speak? Do you believe formal instruction in writing gives an author an advantage?

A. Never studied writing, just wrote a lot of books, and when I was a child I used to read dictionaries and cornflakes packets and everything I could get my hands on. I did do a university degree in arts, though, including English, which sharpens the mind and broadens the horizons. I read, for example, Mrs. Gaskell, whom otherwise I might not have met. A writing class can teach grammar and spelling and sentence construction and they are all good things, because without them the story is not told in its most effective form. Depends on the person...

Q. You’re incredibly prolific. How long does it take you to write a book? Are you already thinking about the next one as you write? Do you take a break between books or just dive into a new one right away? Do you write every day?

A. I can only think of one book at a time and I think and research for about three months and then I write the book when it demands to be written. In its extreme form, a novel takes three weeks with no time out for sleep and a staggering intake of coffee. Now that I am supervised firmly by my cat Belladonna, who hits the caps lock when I have been typing for more than three hours, a novel takes a couple of months. And what you see is what you get. I have no drafts. I just describe what I can see in front of my eyes, like a film. Insane, I know, but it works and now, after fifty novels, I trust it.

Q. Would you tell us a bit about your new series? This doesn’t mean the end of Phryne, does it?

A. No, Phryne continues. The new series is a cosy set in the present about Corinna Chapman, who is the same size as me (fat) and is a baker in the city of Melbourne. She has several cats, a lover called Daniel, and she lives in an eccentric apartment house called Insula. Unlike Phyrne, Corinna is not a hero. She makes mistakes. She gets things wrong. She's refreshing to write about...

Q. What current crime fiction writers do you admire?

A. Love that Janet Ivanovich. Read Kathy Reichs (though I prefer the character in Bones, perhaps because she gets to work with David Boreanz). Admire Susan Wittig Albert, Donna Leon, Tony Hillerman.

Q. I read somewhere that you have a collection of more than 7,000 books. I’m unspeakably envious, but at the same time I want to ask the same question people asked the woman who gave birth to octuplets: Did you plan this, or did it just happen? What’s in your collection? Have you read all of them? If you wanted a particular book, could you find it easily?

A. They accreted, like a coral reef. Gradually. I haven't moved house for a long time, which may explain it. I know where everything is because the poetry is all in one place, as is the history, the male and female biogs, the detective stories, the science fiction, the research books. I have certainly read all of them, the collection is the books I read and decided I wanted to read again. Every now and again I have a huge purge, give away armloads, and when I look back I still have just as many books and no space in the shelves... there may be something magical in this.

Q. You have many fans in the United States. Do you think you’ll ever come over for a visit and meet some of them?

A. At the moment I have an affliction of the middle ear which makes it impossible for me to fly long distances. If this gets better or someone offers me a cruise, I would love to come to America.

Visit the author's website at www.phrynefisher.com