Top foto: Dorrigo rainforest, NSW - view from the Skywalk
Foto above: My bike having a rest at the Wehrden riverside pub and ferry crossing on the Weser River, June 2018
That same foto as the cover of Among the Germans
The terrace at the Hotel zum Weserdampfschiff, Bad Karlshafen, Germany - June 2023
THE BLURBS
The short blurb:
Michael Healy is a fake German disguised as a real Australian. He has lived in both countries.
The long blurb:
Michael Healy is an Australian writer who has lived in Alice Springs, Melbourne and Sydney in Australia, as well as Göttingen, Bonn and Berlin in Germany. He has written ten novels, a German travel book, three books of tales, a collection of poetry, and fourteen plays, five of which have been performed at various Melbourne venues, including La Mama Theatre, Northcote Town Hall, Voltaire and The Butterfly Club.
His ten novels are available as paperbacks on Amazon. Ten of his plays, which in modified form make for quickish entertaining reads, are available in two paperback collections of five tales each. These tales are between 10,000 and 20,000 words in length, ideal for plane, tram, train or a single evening's read. Lucky Boy and Other Tales deals with several types of friendship and relationship in all their intrickeries, plus an account of a heart attack, its treatment and the aftermath. The Green Wolf Plays - three plays about the life and career of a German green activist - are also now collected in one paperback. The German travel book, Among the Germans, is also available in paperback. Two Tales gathers two of the shorter novels in one book: Redmond Street & By Dint of Grace. Derision is a series of dialogs that deal with personal consequences arising from present-day identity politics, which in turn arose from post-structuralist critical theory and is now entrenched in our schools and universities as the stifling new orthodoxy. On the River Bikepath - Poems collects his poetry over a 53 year period. In all there are 18 paperbacks available, which cover all his work.
Michael has a long-standing interest in Germany and a fair amount of his work is set there. As well as being interested in the space between people, he is interested in the space between languages and national cultures – the space that makes translation from one language and culture into another very difficult, if not impossible. That the exploration of this space in a poem, novel or play has to occur within one language just adds to the ‘impossibility’. For instance, how can you do justice to German in English? And further, how can you do justice to Germany and Germans in English? Why does Michael bother with this space? Because it’s there, and it's fun to play around with.
He also has an interest in dormancy and latency in human relationships - how long ‘forgotten’ emotions can turn out to be alive and powerful despite, and because of, the passage of decades. He is now old enough to have seen how youthful states of mind, decisions and rejections can come to be re-seen as youth gets older, prompting re-evaluation and the seeking out of 'forgotten people'. Such transformations of people and their perceptions about each other can sometimes lead to unexpectedly joyful outcomes. He is not above seeing such redemption stories as fairy tales for grown-ups.
To buy his works go to www.amazon.com/author/michaelhealy
Contact Michael through michaelhealy56@outlook.com.au
PAPERBACKS of all my works are available on Amazon: www.amazon.com/author/michaelhealy
Blurbs for my books are below - after the latest news. Keep scrolling to get to them.
LATEST NEWS
8 February 2024 my latest tale SUFFICIENT UNTO THE DAY published on Amazon in an updated LUCKY BOY AND OTHER TALES, which now contains ten tales and A Note on Spelling.
SUFFICIENT UNTO THE DAY
Frank attends his cousin Tom’s funeral and finds it a bit odd. Later, he asks his aunt why. He gets the shock of his life.
27 January 2024
Published on Amazon ON THE RIVER BIKEPATH - POEMS
This collects most of the poems I wrote in my youth, more specifically during my 1977-79 sojourn in Germany, and in the months after my return. A number of them I pressed into service in my novels which incorporate poetry, namely CICADA and BAD SOODEN. I’ve left out the duddest, but haven’t been too harsh on them. Even if they aren’t the best they still served a purpose for me and they represent moments that have value to me. Poetry isn’t always about ‘excellence’ as such, but rather its significance for the writer. If a reader enjoys them as well that’s just a bonus.
150 pages
My introduction to ON THE RIVER BIKEPATH - POEMS:
This collects most of the poems I wrote in my youth, more specifically during my 1977-79 sojourn in Germany, and in the months after my return. A number of them I pressed into service in my novels which incorporate poetry, namely CICADA and BAD SOODEN. I’ve left out the duddest, but haven’t been too harsh on them. Even if they aren’t the best they still served a purpose for me and they represent moments that have value to me. Poetry isn’t always about ‘excellence’ as such, but rather its significance for the writer. If a reader enjoys them as well that’s just a bonus.
They are presented here in the chronological order in which I compiled them in a typescript I did of them in 1979 as a kind of gathering of what I’d done in my time in Germany. This is confused by the material I included in my first novel CICADA, which I’ve given again here in the order in which it appears in that book. I can’t recall the sequence of writing these excerpts. I was just grabbing stuff willy nilly as I saw fit, possibly cannibalising poems to fit the mood I was rendering in the unfolding of Harold and Helen, such as it was in CICADA. It’s 40 years ago and I don’t recall the detail of how that was written.
I have left the CICADA sequence in an untitled order, barely broken up into its constituent poems. They seem to ‘run on’ pretty well, in a way that surprises me, since I’m much more used to their positions in CICADA. I’m happy enough to let them wash over me, image after image, and suggest that that’s a good way to approach the reading of those ‘indiscrete’ poems.
It has been a strange experience to re-read poems I wrote up to 50 years ago. I can hardly remember writing some of them, but others still resonate. Even the odd dedicatee I’ve forgotten – for instance, who is Martha C? Mists of time, long forgotten, a passing moment so buried I can’t recover it.
Obviously since then I’ve made the transition to fiction and drama, which are quite different orders of writing to poetry. A common enough trajectory, it means that in my case I found that the greater ‘peopling’ of dramatic and novel story writing requires a shedding of the poet’s ‘I’, which allows a greater suspension of rational inquiry and connection to allow imagery to arise, develop and make its unexpected connections in poetry. Even tho using the ‘participant first person narrater’ is how I wrote most of my novels (and which is what W.S. Maugham thinks is the best way to tell stories), the dramatic unfolding of novels and plays doesn’t allow such suspension – consequence matters more and the characters and what happens to them become much more a matter of specific personal detail and deed. This need not apply in poetry, which allows the more dreamlike mire of associations to ‘reveal themselves’ in illogical, inconsequential, imagic, chancy ways. Writing plays and novels is a ‘controlled dream’ in Sir Ralph Richardson’s pithy description of acting, which applies to all the arts – but poetry is a much less ‘controlled dream’.
Accordingly, at times I really do wonder at what I wrote 40-45 years ago. In some cases I never did understand what it was I’d written. Which bothered me at first, until I realised that’s just how it is with poetry. My heart / imagination / dreamwork just came up with the stuff and I wrote it down. I just had to accept that, and hope that it resonated with whatever readers I had. Some poems are more obvious in meaning than others, while some are a complete mystery. Hence, as I touched on earlier, I haven’t sought to select a ‘best of’ my ‘oeuvre’. I’ve merely eliminated the doggerel, which there was a bit of, as befits a young poet trying things out, getting the hang of meter, rime and scansion, enjambment and all the other tricks of the poet’s trade. But other poems, which I have some reservations about in terms of ‘quality’, I’ve left in this selection/collection, particularly if they have something numinous about them. I am struck by the jaunty humorous tone of some of them, which can make them seem ‘unpoetic’, but clearly I was onto the way in which humor can be a kind of unaccustomed juxtaposition of meanings and intentions as much as stony-faced surrealism can be. I embraced it all – now as well as then.
In re-reading my poems again, I’m struck by how many of them are long sequences, even architectonic in nature – quite different from a more straighforward single page lyric. I must have enjoyed the larger scope such structures gave me, allowing me to explore more facets of a place or fenomenon. In particular, The Cathedral gave me a good coathanger for all my religious preoccupations of the time.
Even more than fiction and drama do, poetry teaches you, forces you, to accept that you just can’t understand everything you or others do. It teaches humility in the face of overwhelming impressions and experience – in the face of life itself. It teaches negative capability, which, along with self-posession, is a pre-requisite for being a civilised person.
Of course, since I was living in Germany, a foreign country whose language, people and landscapes gave me so much to think about, my poetry was both a way into writing itself but also a way of coming to grips with the place. It was a challenging time for me, at times quite overwhelming, and my poetry was my life raft, as was indeed my copious letter writing from that time. It all helped me cope and come to terms.
I always enjoyed writing my poems, just as I thoroly enjoyed writing my plays and novels later. If you get some pleasure and enjoyment out of them then I’ll be well pleased.
24 January 2024 latest version of DERISION published on Amazon.
20 December 2023
As a way of highlighting how present-day ideologies affect people in quite personal ways, I excerpted a passage from Sgian Dubh, tweaked it a bit and came up with The Travails of a Post-Structuralist Post-Humorist Schoolmarm. It's the story of how a nurse with a wickedly black sense of humor got a bad back from nursing, went back to uni to get an Arts degree, and became a teacher. She underwent a profound personality change, losing her sense of humor in her efforts to be exemplary and 'politically correct' for her pupils. This had knock-on effects in her personal life that no one could have foreseen.
(This hasn't been included separately in say Lucky Boy And Other Tales. It's in Sgian Dubh, to be read as part of that novel. Travails I've done as a stand-alone to try to get it in a magazine or journal.)
On reading Travails a Jewish friend of mine complained at how sick he was of the predominantly lefty anti-Semitism prompted by the current Hamas-Israel conflict. He has been 'cancelled' by both right and left wing ideologs who are only too keen to condemn people for being racist, sexist, transgenderist, whateverist at the drop of a hat. He said I ought to expand on Travails to make it more accessible, in order to help counteract this present-day holier-than-thou puritanism. We thought of dialogs, possibly a play, possibly...? He referred to Yehuda Halevi's Kuzari of 1140AD, which is a set of dialogs between a Jew, a Muslim and a Christian, that airs their religious concerns, commonalities and differences. It is a sophisticated example of how dialog can be used to clarify thought. (It is available on Wikisource: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Kitab_al_Khazari
It's well worth a look.)
With that in mind I filleted Sgian Dubh for the principle relationship between Fiona and Sam, in which they lived together for many years as a happily sexless couple, but in the end were undone by the effect of post-structuralist thinking on Fiona's outlook and behavior. This saw her lose her nurse's black sense of humor and become a different person once she became a school teacher - one who Sam could no longer happily live with. Done in a series of dialogs, it shows how present-day identity politics and 'politically correct' intransigence and intolerance have come to divide us in ways that used not be possible when we were more aware of what we had in common than what we didn't. Insisting on 'difference' - a favourite buzzword of the French Post-Structuralists - has come to fragment us, setting us at odds with each other, sometimes with violent and deplorable consequences.
The resulting work, completed in the past week, I've dubbed DERISION. I don’t even know what it is. Is it a play? A set of dialogs? A diatribe? A Jeremiad? A novel? A novella? A novella in dialog form? A cicada nymf come to the surface to make a loud noise after years of dormancy? A dornymcada?
Its very indeterminacy is perhaps more exemplary of deconstructionist decentered discourse than a dismisser of such nonsense like me feels comfortable with. That may indeed be a paradox of sorts - one in keeping with the project at hand. In the finest tradition of the oft-buried Dead Author, I shall let readers decide for themselves the nature of the beast.
Like my Jewish friend, I am quite dismayed by the nastiness of how people so often treat each other these days. We need to have a good think about our lack of civility, our viciousness and our bad manners, and rediscover the Golden Rule: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.
I blame Luther, Freud and Marx for this mess - as well as the French Post-structuralists who have completed our de-Christianisation. The current American mania for DEI - diversity, equity & inclusion - is American Puritanism in all its many hot-house blooms - Me Too, Black Lives Matter, Black Lesbian Whales in Wheelchairs, Bi-Cranial Goofy Foot Surfers, and the whole calamitous clamor of claims for special treatment that assail the airwaves these days. I blame Luther, Freud & Marx for this sorry state of affairs – an unholy German trinity. Luther’s solas: faith alone, scripture alone, grace alone, Christ alone (a direct, make-up-your-own mind relationship with God – bypassing priest and Church as intermediaries, bypassing those checks and balances – an infinite regression of protest and fragmentation of the common – reductio ad absurdum) gave rise to untrammelled individual conscience; Freud’s unthwarting of self to avoid neurosis (letting it all hang out so you don‘t get any hang-ups – it’s a whole hippy vocab of pop psych self-indulgence); Marx’s approval of violence in liberation (the dictatorship of the proletariat, as espoused by Lenin, Stalin and Mao)…The whole idea of personal conscience and personal liberty is now wholly at the expense of others, with violence as an approved means of getting what you want. Bring back God, I say. We’re no good at playing God. Our hubris is catching up with us and it’s ugly.
As ever, DERISION is available as an Amazon paperback on amazon.com/author/michaelhealy
I also recommend reading SGIAN DUBH as a parallel, or an echo chamber to DERISION – the other side of the coin – in case you want the full stereo experience! (perhaps to be dubhed SGIAN DERISION – now there’s a weird Scottish joke!)
95 pages 25,000 words
My latest tale, FLY, written 5-6 August 2023, was added to LUCKY BOY AND OTHER TALES on 11 August 2023.
FLY
During a coffee reverie plagued by an annoying fly, a midde-aged man recalls a couple of his colleagues from his days as a university tutor. As a young woman Sandra was continually infatuated with and then disappointed by young men, who were put off by her excessive neediness. Mark wondered what had happened to her, and looked her up.
20 July 2023
Just back from a month in Bad Karlshafen in Germany, limited by a bone-on-bone left knee that makes walking very difficult and painful, but is okay to ride an ebike. I've done an entertaining tripalog with fotos and commentary entitled Asparagus Weeks, which I can send you by WeTransfer just for the asking if you email me.
michaelhealy56@outlook.com.au
SPARGEL WOCHEN - ASPARAGUS WEEKS
Limping in Germany, June 2023
by
Michael Healy
Write-up of a WhatsApp tripalog June 2023
One last scratch of the German itch
michaelhealy.net
ENTRÉE
CREAM OF ASPARAGUS SOUP
Asparagus is a time-honored springtime gut cleanser in Germany, regarded with almost sacred awe as a health restorative. Its fallic shape is part of its mystique too. Thru the spring, and the whole of the month of June, which is when I usually spend my time in Germany, asparagus dishes and soups are commonly featured on restaurant menus. By the end of June people have got sick of asparagus and don’t seem to mind its disappearance as the supply of the sacred vegetable runs out. Until next spring anyway…
MAIN
250G ASPARAGUS, HAM, PARSLEY POTATOES, WILD GARLIC SAUCE
Hence, as the menu boards sometimes say: Spargel Wochen – Asparagus Weeks. This is the time I’m in Germany, hence I’m calling this tripalog of my stint in Bad Karlshafen, Germany, in June 2023, Spargel Wochen - Asparagus Weeks.
SWEETS
WARM SOUR CHERRIES, VANILLA ICE CREAM & CREAM
July-August is the summer holidays in Europe. That’s when it gets busy and crowded. June is a good month to travel cos the days are at their longest but without the crowds of the main holiday season. Mind you, there are plenty of oldsters cycling round on their ebikes, but they’re not so numerous as to be a problem.
As well, spa towns like Bad Karlshafen are not visited by foreign tourists. German isn’t the only language you hear in the spas – various Eastern European and Middle-Eastern tongues are also heard - but everybody there wd be resident in Germany. Which is one reason why they tend to assume I’m one of them – a German. During my month there I heard English only once – a cuppla English bike tourists at brek at my Hotel zum Weserdampfschiff. I didn’t feel like chatting to Lionel from Leeds so I didn’t speak English for a whole month, except for the odd fonecall home. Suits me.
September 2022, 11 August 2023, 8 February 2024... it just keeps on swelling!
LUCKY BOY AND OTHER TALES
BLOOD & WATER
Tells of the friendship between Martin, a Sydney secondhand bookseller, and Charlie, one of his customers, from Charlie’s viewpoint. Charlie is an old retired lawyer who has little to do and enjoys hanging round the bookshop, chatting to Martin while Martin deals with customers. They are of different generations: Charlie served during the war and has a melancholy disposition, Martin is a generation younger and much more cheerful (which is one of his attractions for Charlie). Their life experiences are quite different, and in some respects so are their attitudes. Charlie gives a fair account of how they negotiate the difficulties and rewards of such an unlikely friendship.
TO RING OR NOT TO RING
Tom, an old friend who lives and works as a lawyer in London rings me and leaves a message, wanting to talk about the COVID-19 pandemic. It’s the first time in a decade that he has bothered to ring me. At least it’s a sign that he is still alive.
I hesitate to ring him back. I begin to wonder if I should, as old resentments arise unbidden from distant memories.
BETWEEN REHEARSALS
An amusing romp through the different attitudes to their craft of writer, director and actors in the poor-fessional world of independent theater.
ROSANNA ROSA
A mutual attraction between uni students Russell and Rosanna, a punk who paradoxically sang early music, didn’t get acted upon, for reasons she didn’t convey to him. Later in life the memory of this unfulfilled potential still rankled and intrigued him, so he looked her up. Like his initial attempts at courtship at uni, his internet search wasn’t straightforward, not least because Rosanna had become Rosa during her brief singing career, and her married name had replaced her maiden name.
Once contact was made however it was welcome. Life had imparted lessons and fresh perspectives on possibilities that youth had spurned. The youthful potential squandered was joyously fulfilled – the long dormant attraction vindicated in the end.
STENTS
A factual if jaundiced account of a heart attack, a hospital stay and operation, and the aftermath. The account tells much about what it’s like to deal with hospital: doctors, nurses, and other patients, as well as your own ever-changing mental states. ‘Bedside manner’ comes in many colors in big busy hospitals, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic.
LUCKY BOY
tells of a man's relationship with his grandparents, and the influence they had on his childhood. Tellingly, his grandfather also introduced him to the world of music and poetry. The man greatly admires his grandparents' love for each other, and compares his own loves with theirs, finding that for the most part his fall short. A tale of contrast between the emotional styles of different generations.
AN UNPLANNED TRIP
deals with Benno's trip to Hamburg to convince his partner Ingrid's siblings that he and Ingrid should move in with their mother Ulrike to ease her slide into senile dementia. Ingrid's siblings would rather that Ulrike move into assisted living care so they can sell the family house and get their hands on the family loot. An exploration of the tensions within a family brought to the surface by parental decline and greed.
WHAT ABOUT YOUR DOG?
Nick is thinking about Margy, a girl he didn't know well in Grade 4 at primary school. He used to come second to her in school sprints, so, without them being friends, he thought she was pretty special. On their last day at primary school, before he went off to a Jesuit boys' school for the next eight years, while all his classmates were saying goodbye to each other he suddenly realised he had an affinity with Margy that left him feeling sad and cheated by their separation into single sex schools. Over his life he'd sometimes recall her and this stillborn affinity. Forty years later he decided to look her up. The tale tells of what happens next. And yes, at a crucial stage he does ask her, 'What about your dog?' You'll have to read it to find out why.
FLY
During a coffee reverie plagued by an annoying fly, a midde-aged man recalls a couple of his colleagues from his days as a university tutor. As a young woman Sandra was continually infatuated with and then disappointed by young men, who were put off by her excessive neediness. Mark wondered what had happened to her, and looked her up.
SUFFICIENT UNTO THE DAY
Frank attends his cousin Tom’s funeral and finds it a bit odd. Later, he asks his aunt why. He gets the shock of his life.
A NOTE ON SPELLING
I have adopted a number of mild spelling reforms/standardisations, most of which were once proposed by the Macquarie Dictionary, as a compromise between my own keenness for greater spelling reform and the need not to be so outlandish as to be distracting.
261 pages 81,860 words
February 2022. To AMONG THE GERMANS - shorter version I have now added STITCHING THE WOUND - Travels in the New Germany - 1990. First published in Quadrant magazine in June 1991 (when Robert Manne was editor), STITCHING THE WOUND represents my experiences and thoughts arising from a bike trip in the newly freed East Germany just after the Communist regime collapsed. The former Deutsche Demokratische Republik was a country in turmoil and disquiet at its failure and the dizzying rapaciousness of the West German 'takeover'. The piece makes a nice bookend to my 2018 bike trip through Germany.
AMONG THE GERMANS - shorter version is available in paperback on Amazon as of 14 January 2022. Trimmed from 190 pages to 164, this version loses some of the smaller details and brings the piths and gists more to the fore. While I think the devil is in the details, some readers may prefer to feel that they are getting more protein than trace elements. And perhaps therefore this version flows better.
My latest novel is SGIAN DUBH (pronounced skee-an doo, which is Scots Gaelic for black knife. The sgian dubh is a sock knife worn with kilt and sporran.) It was written in January 2021 and published on Amazon on 31 January 2021.
SGIAN DUBH
Tells of a young man and a young woman who meet in an inner-city sharehouse in Melbourne in the 1980s. They become close without becoming boyfriend-girlfriend. They move into another house together, becoming a couple in every respect but sex. Eventually this becomes untenable and they stop living together, but stay friends. The man finds his mate but the woman stays single. A tale of a strange love that gets in the way of normal happiness but perhaps achieves a different kind of happiness of its own.
MY WORKS
The Novels:
CICADA (also includes BERLIN - HERE & THERE 1980)
FRIEDA
GREEN WOLF
OUTLAW
FLIGHT
BAD SOODEN
I SET OFF AT TEN
REDMOND STREET
BY DINT OF GRACE
SGIAN DUBH
AMONG THE GERMANS - a book about my travels in Germany in June 2018, with some regard for my 40 years of engagement with land and people. A mix of travelog, reminiscence, observation and rumination - with a good dash of grumpiness. Ends with some thoughts about the relationship between Nazism and present-day German behavior. About 64,000 words. 190 pages
AMONG THE GERMANS - shorter version & STITCHING THE WOUND 61,000 words, 177 pages.
DERISION - a series of dialogs arising from our times 103 pages, 25,000 words
The three collections of Tales are:
TALES FOR TRAIN AND PLANE: TROUBLESOME PEOPLE
Includes:
THE QUIET LIFE
MOTHERHOOD
HALFWAY HOUSE
NOTHING
WOODFORD
TALES FOR TRAIN AND PLANE: TROUBLESOME PLACES
Includes:
STEFAN IN THE SOUTH SEAS
ONE NIGHT IN BIELEFELD
LAKE AIR DREAMING
WELLS IN THE DESERT
THE YEARS BETWEEN
LUCKY BOY AND OTHER TALES
Includes:
BLOOD & WATER
TO RING OR NOT TO RING
BETWEEN REHEARSALS
ROSANNA ROSA
STENTS
LUCKY BOY
AN UNPLANNED TRIP
WHAT ABOUT YOUR DOG?
FLY
SUFFICIENT UNTO THE DAY
A NOTE ON SPELLING
THE GREEN WOLF PLAYS:
GREEN WOLF
OUTLAW
FLIGHT
are now collected in one paperback.
TWO TALES collects two shorter novels in one book: REDMOND STREET and BY DINT OF GRACE.
ON THE RIVER BIKEPATH - POEMS - gathers my poems from 53 years 155 pages
18 PAPERBACKS IN ALL. See below for summaries of all these works.
ASPARAGUS WEEKS - the 2023 Bad Karlshafen tripalog pic and commentary pdf file.
NB: there's more than one Michael Healy up on amazon, so be careful! This Michael Healy has not written 'Pubs of Ireland', 'Ireland Mosaic' or 'Day of the Mermaid and Other Poems'. Nor should I be confused with michaelhealy.com, a Rhode Island maker of bespoke brass doorknockers, some of which are quite marvellous. (Buy a doorknocker from him and a book from me? Ding dong!)
NOVELS
SGIAN DUBH
(pronounced SKEE-AN DOO)
Tells of a young man and a young woman who meet in an inner-city sharehouse in Melbourne in the 1980s. They become close without becoming boyfriend-girlfriend. They move into another house together, becoming a couple in every respect but remain chaste for a decade. Eventually this becomes untenable and they stop living together, but stay friends. The man finds his mate but the woman stays unmated. A tale of a strange love that gets in the way of normal happiness but perhaps achieves a different kind of happiness of its own. 43,000 words. Written January 2021.
BY DINT OF GRACE
Rowena grew up in a strict Puritan sect and as a result had trouble finding her way in the world. Ross felt for her and tried to smooth her way.
A chronicle of the times of togetherness in the lives of a man and a woman who knew each other all their adult lives. Episodes & scenes, transitions and transformations, resistances and realisations. Their mismatch and their common ground. Their attraction and their repulsion. And what happened to them in the end. 27,000 words. Written in 2019.
REDMOND STREET - a tale of redemption
An older man recalls a youthful misadventure with a young woman he'd fancied and thirty years later seeks to make good his rebuffed advance. He is surprised at the response he gets. It triggers off a series of events that changes his life and that of the woman who'd been at the back of his mind for all his adult life. A late-life echo of a failed youthful moment sees it redeemed. 30,000 words. Written in 2017.
I SET OFF AT TEN
Graham Watson is fifty-five year old man who is trying to re-find his places in the world after his wife's death from a prolonged illness. Released at last from his servitude to that illness, he starts to take up options hitherto not possible to him. He restructures his life and finds his earthly paradises: one in Australia and the other in Germany, a land he has known all his adult life. In so doing he finds himself reviewing his youth, its people and its lost opportunities, while establishing himself in the land of his dreams. In so doing he finds himself living in his own afterlife, redeeming himself and some of the people from his youth who he has lived apart from for most of his life. In this makeshift heaven on earth he finds joy and beauty in land and people beyond his hopes.
I SET OFF AT TEN is an older man's Bildungsroman. 65,000 words. Written in 2016-17.
BAD SOODEN (SOODEN SPA)
('Bad' is pronounced 'bud'; 'Sooden' is pronounced a bit like a non-rhotic 'Sorden': Bud Sorden, as a Londoner or an Australian would say it, not like an Irishman or most Americans who roll their 'r's.)
A young Australian living in Germany with his girlfriend is seduced by an older woman on a train. A story of how raw lust becomes long-lasting love. It also shows how a young man comes to terms with a foreign country - how his attraction to it is shaped by its history and culture, its towns and countryside, its language and people. It shows how his youth is changed by this immersive encounter, sharpened by his falling in love with the older woman who fills needs he never knew he had. She finds too that he engages her in ways that her own countrymen hitherto haven't. Hence they find they complement each other in unexpected ways. Having found each other, they find they are infinitely better off than they were before they met. Low expectations of love, borne of disappointing experience, become inarticulate longings fulfilled and hopes exceeded. About 49,000 words. Written in 2015.
NB: some feedback reckons that the title 'Bad Sooden' doesn't say much to readers with no German. If this is Bad Sooden, what's Good Sooden? 'Bad Sooden' literally means 'Bath Sooden', i.e. 'Sooden Spa'. I can't get past Bad Sooden - it's something I know and I can't undo that knowledge. It has symbolism for me, but I realise that's no use to others unless they speak German. Mind you, as one canny person said to me, there's nothing wrong with a bit of mystery, e.g. L'Annee derniere a Marienbad/Last Year in Marienbad. After all, who says you have to understand everything you read or see? The best books leave a residue of incomprehension and mystery anyway.
THE GREEN WOLF TRILOGY
Green Wolf deals with three stages in the life and career of a German green activist.
Part 1 GREEN WOLF centers on a young German couple, Tilman and Gudrun, both of whom are environmental activists living in the university town of Göttingen. With a history of activity together in Green Wolf, a radical but peaceful green group, they now find their paths diverging. Tilman has moved on to Greenfriends, a more conventional lobby group with a higher national and international profile, but Gudrun has become increasingly frustrated by the 'lack of results' of conventional protests and is drawn to terrorism instead. The story concerns the way this tension plays out between them and how the state responds. It shows how a well-intentioned impulse can unleash unforeseen consequences. It also deals with the differences between the generations in post-WW2 Germany and how various notions of political responsibility collide. About 80,000 words. Written in 1998-1999.
Part 2 OUTLAW
Tilman is firmly established in Berlin as a professional environmental lobbyist with a national profile. He experiences frustration in keeping up his public persona. Provoked by a road rage incident he embarks on an anonymous car tireslashing campaign that antagonises the whole city. The city-wide hysteria triggered off by his night-time activities takes everybody by surprise, himself included. About 54,000 words. Written in 1999-2000
Part 3 FLIGHT
Tilman increasingly finds his national notoriety encroaching on his privacy, freedom and anonymity. This becomes intolerable - so much so, that after a serious illness and much soul-searching, and key encounters with friends and strangers, he flees his life and his country. On the one hand it is a story of how someone becomes a ‘missing person’. On the other it shows how important decisions can take a long time to be made, and unwittingly involve all kinds of people and thinking. It is also a picaresque novel about Germany. About 92,000 words. Written in 2000-2001.
FRIEDA
concerns two Berliners who meet in India and see aspects of each other they wouldn’t see at home. These unaccustomed recognitions cause each other great difficulty, with tragic consequences. About 30,000 words.
Written in 1986.
CICADA - A Psychogeographical Fantasia
deals with a miscellany of people who live on communes and in share houses in the 1980s. A mix of poetry and prose, it seeks to show how lives move through each other in relation to place. There are two sections. The first is set in Melbourne and South Eastern Australia. The second is set in Germany several years before. There is no story as such, though there are many stories within the 'no story'. There is much to do with how people are affected by distance and strangeness, and personal and cultural misunderstanding. About 72,000 words. Written in the early 1980s.
TALES
BERLIN - HERE & THERE (1980)
BERLIN - HERE & THERE (1980) is a political reverie linking Berlin and Melbourne in the Cold War, when Berlin was divided between the Western powers and the Soviet Union. It explores some of the similarities and differences between East and West, communism and capitalism, and the blurring of the distinction between ‘here’ and ‘there’. Even in the nuclear heat of imperial black and white thinking, certainties were clung to, insisted upon, ignored, not applicable, dissolved... the navigation of notions was easier said than done, all with the threat of annihilation hanging over all certainties and confusions. They were difficult times and circumstances, and people lived as best they could, giving in to tyranny, subverting it, opposing it, all apparent opponents having more in common with each other than they were prepared to see or concede. All were living with ideologies they had no choice but to respond to, even if the resultant convictions and personae were less convincing than they were wished to be. (We were all paper tigers back then. Maybe we still are. Maybe we always are.) Lives were ruined and lived somehow, all testament to the power of ideologies to frame worlds that oppress us all, no matter if we oppose or agree. (Our individualistic Christian consciences prepare us ill for such eventualities, or for analysing them before, during and after their reign - which is why moralistic analyses of Nazism and communism are blind nonsense. Institutionalised totalitarian ideologies leave no room for the play of individual conscience - all defiance happens at risk of death. Individual conscience derives from a time when another all-encompassing ideology, Christianity, dominated lives within the framework of sin - where all sin happened at risk of hell in the after life for the individual sinner - a different kind of death, but death nonetheless.) And if Melbourne seems remote from Berlin, a periphery to a center, the outer is only outer in relation to an inner, hence both are part of the same whole: Pax Americana. In such times and terms, all is not what it seems, wherever and whoever you might think you are. About 6,000 words.
In different forms, Berlin - Here & There won the Melbourne University Student Union Writing Prize in 1980 and 1981. It was published in Meanjin, issue 2, 1990. It is now included at the end of CICADA.
THE QUIET LIFE
Robert is an expat Australian lawyer long resident in London. His old Australian friend Colin is coming to visit. Robert's wife Janet is unwilling to give up their backyard studio as a guest room because she has got used to having it as a room of her own. Colin's visit intensifies existing faultlines in the family, giving rise to serious tension. Robert’s daughter Emma's response to her parents' unhappy marriage also takes a disturbing turn. As well the visit tests Colin and Robert's long but unsatisfactory friendship, contrasting its youthful beginnings with its middle-aged reality. Robert seeks refuge in the company of his Chinese masseuse May. About 20,000 words. Written 2009.
HALFWAY HOUSE
Ken has long put up with his unhappy marriage to his alcoholic wife for the sake of the kids (despite involvements with other women). Now the kids are grown up he thinks he is at last free to escape his awful marriage. His friend Neil tries to match Ken to his old friend Ann who has been single all her life and craves a mate. Ken and Ann hit it off and soon after Ken moves into Ann's. However they find their ingrained domestic habits irritate each other - they are too set in their ways, with Ann in particular unable to adjust to living with someone else. Endless petty conflict ensues. Neil regrets playing the matchmaker and the worsening of his old friendships with Ken and Ann. In the end Ken and Ann separate. Ken quickly moves on to new female friends, Ann goes back to her loneliness to lick her wounds and feel sorry for herself, while Neil welcomes the restoration of his friendships - changed though they be - and reflects on the unforeseen consequences of his good intentions. About 19,000 words. Written 2010.
WOODFORD
Kate’s grandmother June refused to spend the night with her fiancé Ted during the war, wanting instead to wait till they were married. Shortly afterwards he was killed in action. June regretted her refusal for the rest of her life. Her bitterness affected her subsequent marriage and motherhood of Kate’s mother Sue. Through Kate, June sees a chance at redemption. The play traces the consequences of that fateful decision through three generations of women in the same family. About 12,000 words. Written 2011.
ONE NIGHT IN BIELEFELD
Mark accompanies Helen on a trip to Detmold, a north German town with a British Army base she lived on as a little girl. She is curious to see the country she knew as a girl but now has little memory of. They end up spending the night in Bielefeld, a provincial city, on the way. Since the youth hostel is closed for Christmas and Mark has little money, they decide to wait the night at the station for their next train the following morning. Hans, a local, sees them and persuades them to come with him to a night club to while away the time. In the course of the night Hans becomes besotted with Helen and makes plans to live with her in Australia. Since neither speaks each other’s language, Mark has to interpret for them, and is amazed that Helen goes along with Hans’s sudden infatuation. Unwillingly Mark becomes a bemused bystander in a night-long romance that seems to offer Hans the prospect of a new life. However at dawn Helen changes her mind. About 10,000 words. Written 2012.
MOTHERHOOD
On the strength of her newspaper columns, Nora, a single mother at odds with her ex husband over her right to have primary custody of her child, is commissioned by a major publisher to write a book about her situation. Most of her family and friends disagree with the publisher's idea of making this a factual book, revealing real identities. Competing claims of betrayal as against truth telling get an airing. The book backfires on Nora, leaving her friendless and in danger of losing primary custody of her child. About 18,000 words. Written 2009.
NOTHING
Alice, 60, and Andrew, 40 have recently met and enjoy each other’s company. However Alice has a past that threatens to cut the friendship short. Ruth, who helped Alice out years ago when she was leaving her cruel husband, still claims Alice as hers alone and won’t tolerate any new friends Alice might have. Alice is in her thrall and doesn’t know how to escape. She appeals to Andrew to find a way out so they can get on with their lives in peace. About 11,000 words. Written 2012.
LAKE AIR DREAMING
Ian, a professional photographer, heads off to his favorite salt lake to try to get a magic shot to suit the global advertising campaign of Infiniti, a major Russian vodka company. He has the usual difficulty getting exactly what he needs – the exceptional is not the normal out in the sunblasted desert. With nature refusing to oblige him, his patience and resilience are tried, particularly since his wife, his agent and his friend all have different views about the wisdom of his enterprise. Under deadline pressure from the upcoming Superbowl, he waits till a hurricane is upon him to get the shot he wants – but the nature he needs to make his living is also the nature that endangers his life. About 16,000 words. Written 2013.
STEFAN IN THE SOUTH SEAS
Stefan is a fifty year old accountant in a sizable German firm. He has been saving to fulfil his dream of sailing to the South Seas and living there for the rest of his life with his partner Marion. They make their preparations and Stefan makes his announcements and farewells to his friends, with various views of the venture emerging. Once ensconced in Tahiti, chartering their yacht to tourists to make a living, they find there is more down than up in paradise. With outgoings outstripping income and eroding savings, Stefan's dream turns sour. After ten years away they sell their yacht and return to Germany. Stefan finds life back in Germany hard to get used to. His qualifications and experience now ten years out of date, he has no luck finding a job. He spends much of his time chasing bargains in the supermarkets to eke out his dole payments. His friends are shocked at his plight and misunderstandings arise. Marion helps him begin to see where he has gone wrong. About 15,000 words. Written 2009.
WELLS IN THE DESERT
In the middle of the desert a farmer digs wells for bore water to irrigate fodder crops to feed a herd of dairy cattle - and the town of Stuart Springs gets a taste of fresh milk for the first time. At first the farm goes well - it rains anyway and the dairy herd thrives. The government minister gets enthusiastic and appears to back the scheme ‘to green the desert’. But when a long drought starts the wells dry up, the farmer goes broke and the minister loses interest. The farmer asks for the compensation he thought the minister would give him in the event of failure, but the minister refuses to help out. To the realities of financial hardship and a worthless farm are added disillusionment and disappointment. What then becomes of the farmer and his family? About 15,000 words. Written 2011.
THE YEARS BETWEEN
A middle-aged man recalls a childhood love that could’ve made a great difference to his life, had it not been cut short in tragic circumstances. About 3,600 words. Written 2011.
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