Warning, The Story of Cyclone Tracy, by Sophie Cunningham

ANZ LitLovers LitBlog

I was alone in the house last Saturday when I began reading Sophie Cunningham’s Warning, The Story of Cyclone Tracy, and a windstorm was brewing.  It was gusting up to almost 60kh/h, which is 7 on the Beaufort scale, almost a gale.  I went outside and did the usual things that I do when the weather seems ominous, stacking outdoor chairs away and tucking the cast-iron table upside-down under the shrubs at the back of the house.  I was very conscious that short of evacuating the city altogether, nothing much the residents of Darwin could have done would have made any difference when in 1974 the city was hit by a cyclone packing 217 km/h before the anemometer ceased functioning.  You only have to look at this video to see the destruction.

In the prologue to Warning, the facts are presented without emotion:

These are the bare bones of it: around midnight…

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Bendigo Writers’ Festival 2014

ANZ LitLovers LitBlog

We are just back from a most enjoyable weekend at the Bendigo Writers’ festival.  Thanks to our good friend Gloreea who came to dog-sit our dear old Saffy, we set off yesterday at sunrise and arrived in Bendigo in time for our first session – Alex Miller in conversation with Raymond Gaita.  It is always a pleasure to hear Alex speak and this was no exception.

After that The Spouse and I parted company – he went off to indulge his interest in classical antiquity with a session called The Idea of Greece while I went to Hacks and Heroes, which was a silly name for an excellent session with poet and art critic Chris Wallace-Crabbe in conversation with  Sasha Grishin about his new ground-breaking new book Australian Art: A History.  What’s different about this one is that it brings together indigenous art and the rest of the Australian art tradition, instead of segregating them as…

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