June 2012 – equineocean

For outsiders, the attraction of Aussie Rules football is hard to understand. In WA it hovered at the edge of my consciousness in winter, and I chose a team as an easy way of identifying my allegiances to the north or the south of the river.

In Melbourne, football culture assaults me with the presence of loud fans in the city after games. Wide-eyed children on the tram, bedecked in team colours with a parent by their side, bring to mind memories of my mother’s stories, of going to the football as a teenager with a much-loved older cousin who has long since passed away.

Bruce Dawe’s poem ‘Life Cycle’ gave me something of an insight as a youngster into what it meant to grow up with football in Melbourne. Now, Paul D. Carter’s Eleven Seasons, which won the The Australian/Vogel’s Literary Award for 2012, has added a stirring contribution to the way I understand the culture of AFL, revealing both its problems and its power from the inside.

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The Emerging Writers’ Festival finished on Sunday, but the ideas and inspiration that it created will hopefully linger for some time to come. From the pages and pages of notes (and quite a few tweets) that I wrote during the festival, here are those points that struck me the most:

Dan Giovannoni on loneliness: “I’m not sure if I like loneliness because I’m a writer or if I’m a writer because I like loneliness.” This topic of writers as working essentially alone came up quite a bit at the festival, with some arguing that writing is a solitary pursuit, while others pointed out that writing (hopefully) involves relationships, too – with editors, publishers, other writers, readers, audiences and writing groups.

I don’t disagree that writing involves relationships – if you want to have an audience, that is – but I think that misses the point. For most writers, there is a phase of aloneness (not necessarily loneliness), that is both driven by a need to write, and is ultimately a driver of the writing process.

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