Join Books Create Australia’s campaign to protect literary culture in Australia: our book industry, the livelihood of our authors and our unique Australian stories. Show your support today by signing Books Create Australia’s petition to The Hon. Scott Morrison, MP, to stop the parallel importation of books and save Australian literature.

https://www.facebook.com/pg/Bookscreate/about/?ref=page_internal

Quoted from Books Create Australia’s Facebook page:

“The Australian government has set an agenda to boost competition and encourage innovation by recommending changes to the way books are published that will put the local book publishing industry at risk.

Cheaper books sounds good … but at what cost to writers, culture and jobs? The unproven economic model suggested by the Productivity Commission does not guarantee cheaper books. Is the chance of getting 10% cheaper books worth it?”Key Issues:

1. Term of Copyright: recommended to change from death + 70 years, like the US and UK markets to 15 – 25 years from publication.
— This means anyone can publish a book that is pre-2001 without the person who wrote its involvement. Think Man Book Prize winners, like Peter Carey’s ‘True History of the Kelly Gang’, Tom Keneally’s ‘Schindler’s Ark’ and Stephanie Alexander’s ‘A Cooks Companion’.

2. Parallel Importation Rules: recommended to be abolished.
— Australia would no longer be playing on a level playing field. We would give away intellectual property rights without gaining any reciprocal rights with the world’s biggest book-creating nations – the USA and the UK – that maintain their own home market rights. Holding Australian rights to publish a book is the basis on which publishers invest $120M per annum in our local economy by partnering with and paying authors, hiring staff, printing and marketing books.

3. Fair use: recommend US-style fair use to enable large enterprises, including ISPs and educational institutions to use book content for free, without rewarding creators.
— Would we expect a desk and chair manufacturer to provide furniture for classrooms for free? This change has the potential to destroy Australian education publishing. How will it be viable to produce content?”

#bookscreate ideas
#bookscreate culture
#bookscreate innovation
#bookscreate jobs
#bookscreate futures
#bookscreate Australia

“Thanks, for the trouble you took from her eyes, I thought it was there for good, so I never tried.”

My daughter and I always squabble about which music to play during the drive to school. I made her suffer Jeff Buckley’s Hallelujah this morning, tired of repeats of the Hill Top Hoods’ Nosebleed Section. Waving me goodbye, I watched her move off, thinking of friends, swaying from side to side as she walked. I studied her, as I often do. How she looks at me. How she negotiates a sharp curve. Her clinging to me at the shopping centre. Two years ago, we discovered that she is losing her eyesight. She can no longer read, resorting to audio texts to get her through class lessons. To put herself to sleep at night. Like me. But her peripheral vision is still strong enough for her to navigate the familiar grounds of school.

My daughter turned twelve this week, and her enjoyment of the attention lavished upon her has been unexpected. My sisters and brother started their families at the same time, six years after my son was born. My children’s seven cousins are aged from 9 months to 3 years. For the last year or so, whenever our families gathered together, my daughter would disappear into another room or space, lost and confused, unable to speak and interact. At her birthday picnic on Sunday, one of those perfect Brisbane August days, her laughter tinkled out over the river. She lay on her stomach in the grass, eyes closed, enjoying the sun on her hair. She horsed around as her cousins climbed on her back, doing their best to squash her, toppling off.

Driving home this morning, inspired by Buckley, I played Famous Blue Raincoat, realising that, after the two most difficult years of my life, my emotions have settled enough for me to contemplate the future. I have spent so many moments at the steering wheel crying. Eagle-eyeing my daughter through the day, trying to comfort her late at night, swallowed by the immensity of her loss. I could only take it in in pieces. It’s the reflection, the acceptance and regret in Cohen’s song that gets me.

And what can I tell you my brother, my killer
What can I possibly say?
I guess that I miss you, I guess I forgive you
I’m glad you stood in my way

Cohen’s song made me order a novel from overseas, several years ago, by Samantha Harvey. Dear Thief. It was, by far, the best book of that reading year. A story of betrayal inspired by Famous Blue Raincoat.

“I suppose the world is constantly producing things of wonderment, every moment, at every scale, and one time in every million or so our minds will be such that we are open to seeing it. To see the silver effervescing of the dust was as beautiful a sight as any mountain or waterfall; but then, when I saw it, I was in love and as happy as a human being can be. Or course this helped. The world is heavily changed by the way we perceive it; in all my reticence and doubt, this is one thing even I haven’t been able to dispute.”

Samantha Harvey, Dear Thief

Each morning, directed by my psychologist, I am supposed to record my mood, to help gauge if I have to intervene with a bath, meditation, a call to a friend, a walk by the river, it’s a brace to hold me back from falling. My relationship broke down too. It was a long one, and, although I was proud that I could keep going, underneath I was deeply shocked. All I had known and thought secured, had suffered a terrible shift. My son’s home from school today, sick with a hacking cough and high temperature. He needs me. And that’s okay. I can be there for him. I haven’t been anywhere for so long that the return is extraordinary.

The Birdman’s Wife

Affirm Press, October 2016

ISBN 9781925344998

Pre-order at Simon & Schuster

John Gould created the most magnificent works on birds the world as ever seen. But the celebrated ‘birdman’ had a secret weapon – his artist wife, Elizabeth. Inspired by a diary found tucked inside her famous husband’s papers, The Birdman’s Wife imagines the fascinating inner life of Elizabeth Gould, who was so much more than just the woman behind the man.

Elizabeth Gould was a woman ahead of her time, juggling the demands of her artistic life with her roles as wife, lover and helpmate to a passionate and demanding genius, and as a devoted mother who gave birth to eight children. In a society obsessed with natural history and the discovery of new species, Elizabeth Gould was at its glittering epicentre. Her artistry breathed life into hundreds of exotic finds, from her husband’s celebrated discoveries to Charles Darwin’s famous Galapagos Finches.

Fired by Darwin’s discoveries, in 1838 Eliza defied convention and her own grave misgivings about leaving all but one of her children behind in London in the care of her mother by joining John on a trailblazing expedition to the untamed wilderness of Van Diemen’s  Land and New South Wales to collect and illustrate Australia’s ‘curious’ birdlife.

From a naive and uncertain young girl to a bold adventurer determined to find her own voice and place in the world, The Birdman’s Wife offers an indelible portrait of an extraordinary woman overlooked by history, until now.

“Beak gamboge yellow; head covered with long filamentous plumes forming a rounded crest; from the shoulders spring a number of lance-shaped feathers, which hang gracefully over the wings; from the rump are thrown off several pairs of narrow flowing plumes, the longest of which, in fine adults, measure from three feet to three feet four inches; the others gradually diminishing in length towards the rump, where they again assume the form of the feathers of the back ; these plumes, together with the whole of the upper surface, throat and chest, are of a most resplendent golden green; the breast, belly and vent are of a rich crimson scarlet ; the middle feathers of the tail black ; the six outer ones white for nearly the whole length, their bases being black, feet brown.”

This is John Gould’s description of the resplendent quetzal, taken from the letterpress accompanying his illustration of the species in his Monograph of the Trogons, (1858-1875. second edition). The resplendent quetzal, Pharomachrus mocinno, is a Central American trogon that resides in the region’s remote cloud forests. One of the world’s most stunning birds, it features prominently in Mayan mythology and not only is it Guatemala’s national bird, the country’s local currency also bears its name. The resplendent quetzal’s long tail feathers were a Mayan status symbol, worn only by chiefs and high ranked warriors. Killing or harming a quetzal was said to bring bad luck and for this reason, after special hunters removed its tail feathers, the bird was released back into the wild. Legend has it that the male resplendent quetzal’s breast feathers turned scarlet keeping vigil at the side of a Mayan chief as he bled to death from the attack of a Conquistador.

On Thursday I had the pleasure of paying a visit to the Queensland Museum to photograph the resplendent quetzal with my sister, Vikki Lambert, for some of the artwork for The Birdman’s Wife. In 1836 Elizabeth and John Gould created a hand-coloured lithograph of the male and female resplendent quetzal, one of their most stunning plates. The print was highly unusual in that the Goulds joined two folio sheets together in order to fully render the male’s magnificent tail plumage; in a mature adult the tail plumes are three times the length of its body. Elizabeth’s hand-coloured lithograph does full justice to the quetzal’s bizarre, unforgettable form, which of course, is only fitting.

In writing The Birdman’s Wife, I tried to portray the exhilaration Elizabeth Gould must have felt after the plate’s completion. How impatient, how excited she must have been to share her masterpiece with the bird aficionados who subscribed to the folios she produced with her husband. The lithograph was a landmark achievement, unsurpassed in its day – the aesthetic and scientific potential of lithography only really came into its own in 1830, with the publication of Edward Lear’s (of limerick fame) monograph of the parrot family. Elizabeth used a technique of applying powdered metallic dust to the completed watercolour, to capture the iridescence of the quetzal’s plumage when held under light.

Very generously, The Queensland Museum library granted me permission to photograph an original plate, from the Goulds’ Monograph of the Trogonidae, or Family of Trogons  (1835-1838). The monograph, superseded by a second edition in 1858, is extremely rare, with only two copies held in Australian libraries. The resplendent quetzal, notoriously difficult to encounter in its natural habitat, proved a challenge to photograph, requiring many adjustments of position and lighting to adequately render its brilliance. With the patience and assistance of librarian Meg Lloyd, and the the perseverance of my photographer, Vikki, after several hours, we finally succeeded.

The curator of the museum’s zoology collections, Heather Janetski, retrieved a precious study skin of the resplendent quetzal from the museum’s holdings for us to photograph as well. The specimen was collected in the 1870s, its faded field tag penned in a careful, flowing script. To prevent insect infestation, 19th century ‘stuffers’ used a lethal combination of arsenic and lead; thus in handling the skin, I had to wear gloves. I had the oddest sensation cradling the resplendent quetzal specimen, keeping still for the perfect shot; it felt as if I where nursing a days-old infant. Which relates in a lovely way to John Gould’s observation in the text accompanying Elizabeth Gould’s wonderful plate – male and female quetzals are said to mewl across their forest canopies during mating season, making a sound like a newborn child.