Rohan riding a rickshaw with Liza and Ksenya
It’s a bit of a cliché to say I’ve always written but I have.
It wasn’t so much the act of writing that seduced me. I enjoyed writing but what really seduced me was realising the power of writing.
I became aware of this power when I was in year 7 or 8 I think. A student wrote a letter to the local newspaper (which I delivered) questioning the Australian/American military alliance. The editor, in a condescending manner, responded.
Incensed, I wrote a letter, also condemning the alliance, the editor’s response and Australia’s general involvement in foreign wars. It was published. Soon after I got an angry letter delivered to my home from woman condemning me, and all my beliefs to hell. As a twelve or thirteen year old I was shocked but chuffed that I’d managed to elicit such a response. That’s when I realised the power of writing and was seduced into the fold.
In the early eighties I became a squatter and got highly involved in the Squatters Union of Victoria (SUV). I also found punk where my literary sensibilities found a cultural home.
The SUV produced a magazine Squat-It, a litany of angry thoughts and criminal advice. It was a great place to hone my writing skills. It was here that, in some ways, I produced my most successful written piece, a poem extolling the Russell St bombing and the death of PC Angela Taylor.
The day after it was slipped under an MP’s door it was front page of the Herald-Sun newspaper, was all over the news where the police commissioner said it ‘was the end of the world’. News hounds camped outside of the SUV and called constantly. The cops arrested anyone who walked out the door of our squat and conducted numerous raided squats all over Melbourne. All because of a poem, all because of something I’d written. It was scary but exhilarating to feel that power again, to see it work.
There were other times where I exercised that power but none had quite the same impact, none had quite the same buzz.
My writing has changed. I’m not always looking for that instant hit.
I’m a member of DAGS (Darwin Authors Group), which has provided me with a great support group to write with. I still like to trot out a dirty realist or dirty surrealist story that shocks and confronts to give me that hit.
I do find it difficult to get these stories published or acknowledged in anything other than small journals. I don’t know whether there’s resistance to such writing in the Australian mainstream publishing world and if I should change my writing if I want go beyond being a hobbyist, or maybe I’m not the writer I think I am.
There’s a selection of my writing here, a collection of short stories-Dys-Funk-tional, a YAF novel, Free Radicals, some other pieces I’m working on and a blog I write for Overland Literary Journal http://web.overland.org.au/
Please feel free to read and comment. If you want to read more (as some pieces are excerpts) e-mail and I’ll send you full manuscripts.