Krate The Fool
Baudin's Last Breath
Paris Studio (ed)
Rétours Sur Tanger
The Truth Of Everything
The Tangier Script
Inside The Reef
(Snug House 2005)
(Halstead Press 2001)
(Editions Fédérop 2000)
(Simon & Schuster 1993)
(Simon & Schuster 1991)
(Lansdowne 1968)
"A literary citizen of the world"
"Fascinating"
"Mesmerising"
"Wry humour"
- The Australian
- Australian Bookseller
- Times Literary Supplement
International Red Cross, Government of Fiji, Government of South Africa and numerous international corporate organizations such as Shell, Schweppes and General Motors.
Multimedia
Scripts for painting exhibitions by John Douglas and George Wagner in Australia. Words for photographic exhibitions by Nathalie Latham in London and Paris. Words and voice for Endorphin CD. Poetry and reading with music at the French Festival d'Oh 2003,2002.
Contributor
International publications including those of the National Library of Australia, The Australian Society of Authors and the book pages of The Australian.
Speaker
Speaker at writers' festivals and workshops, and at universities and seminars in Paris, Hamburg, London, Sydney, Canberra, Adelaide and Brisbane. Tutor for the Australian Open College of the Arts, the Sydney Community College and the Queensland Arts Council.
KRATE THE FOOL (Snug House Publishing 2006)
Working in a home with intellectually handicapped people, a carer is drawn into the timeless realities of one of the residents - Krate, an idiot savant.With Krate and his carer, we are taken through time and space to merrie England where Krate is kidnapped from a forest abbey and taken to be court jester to King Henry II. Then to ancient Greece, where Krate is working with the Delphic oracle; then as shaman on a jungle volcano in the South Pacific.Krate not only moves through time and space but also changes gender and appears as the Magdalene figure entrusted with the Christian secrets. In the Spain of the Middle Ages we find Krate practising as a Sufi alchemist; then we find him in London's Soho working as a music hall comedian.Finally we are back in the twenty-first century world of psychiatrists and comparative realities. It is Krate who is our guide and who wants to share his wisdom with us.This confronting novel forces us to reconsider our whole understanding of what constitutes reality.
BAUDIN'S LAST BREATH (Snug House Publishing 2005)
It's a novel with three heroes - the ancient mariner, the contemporary deckhand, and the mighty and unforgiving ocean. A missing skull, a chest of secret papers - and a swashbuckling French sea captain. These are the ingredients from which ex-seaman Victor Barker constructs the story of Nicolas Baudin - the man Napoléon Bonaparte personally chose to explore the unknown coasts of Australia. Seaports and sailor's loves become inextricably entwined as the author finds himself face to face with the long dead French captain and taking part in his storm-tossed travels, joining a re-creation of the Paris Opera in the jungles of Timor, seeing the theft from the Aborigines' sacred site in Tasmania, and hearing Captain Baudin's secret confessions. Insight is at last given into the traumatic events that took place in Mauritius and changed this ex slave-runner into a man of principle who forbade the use of firearms against the Aborigines and told the British to respect the native owners' rights. This is the French captain who had a surprise encounter with England's Captain Matthew Flinders, wining and dining whilst their countries were making war.This seagoing narrative starts and finishes in the heart of Paris, taking in South Africa, Mauritius, Timor and Australia en route. Not to mention a startling exchange between poets Samuel Coleridge and William Wordsworth.
PARIS STUDIO (Halstead Press 2001)
(editor and contributor)
Stories, essays and poetry by fourteen contemporary writers who lived in a Paris studio over the past forty years. They include Victor Barker, Brian Castro, Bernard Cohen, Gillian Mears, Marion Halligan, Justin Fleming, Jean Kent and Tony Maniaty.
THE TRUTH OF EVERYTHING (Simon & Schuster 1993)
Young English film director Henry Clarke sets out to make a documentary to tell the truth of everything about Xavier and his highly successful international spiritual movement. Henry follows Xavier from Johannesburg shanty town to English country abbey to Calcutta ashram and Hollywood film set. En route Henry unearths Xavier's gun-running activities and sexual exploits. In a remote cult headquarters in northern Australia, a shocking discovery pushes Henry to the bring of discovering the truth of everything about himself.
Excerpt:
He drew up a chair to watch Calcutta's late-night street theatre outside his window. The entrance to the Roxy Cinema, in the little street alongside the hotel, was now blocked with bodies preparing for the night. Flattened cardboard cartons were being positioned as mattresses, nameless bundles placed under heads, parcels of food opened. There was not an inch of the porch that was not being put to good use.Opposite the cinema one large tree spread its leafless branches across the narrow street. At its base was a concrete building like a machine-gun post. Wooden shutters dangled from openings on two sides. In one of these openings a man sat crossed-legged selling empty bottles, single cigarettes, bits of paper and doth. On the wall space next to him another shopkeeper had four shelves heavy with glass jars containing nuts and seeds, and a picture of the elephant-headed god Ganesh.On the remaining piece of blockhouse wall somebody had built a semi-circular mud oven that a small boy fanned with a piece of cardboard. On a plank were cans to use as cooking utensils. A barber sat in the gutter on an upturned box, cut-throat razor and a piece of broken mirror in hand, waiting for a customer. A young man stopped and borrowed the piece of broken mirror and combed his long black hair.Wedged between the tree and the steps of the Roxy, another man had strung up a small piece of plastic and under this roof he repaired shoes. His tools he kept in an Air India travel bag. From the plastic awning hung a piece of smouldering rope, and people stopped from time to time to light their cigarettes from it. A pool of greenish-brown liquid seeped up from cracks in the cement at the bottom of the cinema's steps. A man squatted at the edge of it, scooped water with his fingersinto his mouth and meticulously cleaned his teeth. The figures on the steps subsided into sleep, cloths pulled over their heads. Extra people wandered into the street and laid themselves down against walls and each other.
THE TANGIER SCRIPT(Simon & Schuster 1991)
The Tangier Script is a work of fiction and Miriam-Ann, Antony and their contemporaries live only in our imaginations. But also in the exciting narrative are the all too true characters of Samuel Pepys, Hercules, the spies of World War II and Cleopatra's daughter. The action moves from the film and music industry of Wardour and Old Compton Streets to the centuries-old back alleys of Tangier and Fez..One-time leading actress and film star Miriam-Ann Dunne is in Morocco with her younger lover, cinema verité director Antony. They stay in William Burroughs' old hotel room and stir the ghosts of wartime spies Burgess and MacLean. Samuel Pepys walks the same alleys and Antony succumbs to the local narcotics. Truth and dream mix together. William Burroughs said of the ancient city 'Tangier seems to exist on several dimensions...Here fact merges into dream, and dreams erupt into the real world'. And the old English diarist Samuel Pepys said 'Nothing but vice in the whole place'. Anthony Burgess described a Tangier hotel where 'thrown about all over the floor were local goatskins of different degrees of; off-whiteness; there were cheap ornaments from the bazaar - a hand of Fatima, a cobra...a Rif saddle, a hubble-bubble, scimitars and daggers on the walls'. Paul Bowles, author of The Sheltering Sky, said Tangier had been designed by Dr. Caligarri, with the classical dream equipment of tunnels, ramparts,ruins, dungeons and cliffs.From this colourful and violent material Antony is trying fashion his movie.
Excerpt:
Her glass of mint tea is to the right. Her sunglasses lie to the left. The table is tight against the green iron railings at the front of the cafe. The sun shines on the blue formica table tops across the square at the Café Central. Above her head the green-and-white striped awning of the Café Tingis keeps the worst of the heat and the glare from her. The blue, red and gold ink on the Tarot card fragments is faded. She wonders if she should ever have picked them up when they fell, confetti-like, onto her shoulders. She was walking, idling through the narrower streets and alleyways, thinking she knew where she was and then finding herself in some square where she had not expected to be. She'd been walking toward the port compound, hoping there was a way up to the Rue de la Marine. She'd stopped when she saw only the dock gates ahead. At that very moment the fragments of card had descended on her, together with a sweep of assorted dust and dirt from the street above. A sprinkle of minor arcana. Nothing unusual in this enigmatic space in time. Ever since she has arrived she has been aware that it is not only the spoken language that she doesn't understand. The whole place vibrates with messages, present past and future, in a thousand and one unspoken languages. Some times she can literally hear them all at once, translated into a vast rumbling in her head. It happens when she walks too long in the sun on her own, or when she lets herself get caught up with one of Antony's experiments with majoun. The majoun is okay if that's where Antony is at. She knows she has given in completely to whatever it is that he is attempting. She no longer worries. Only now and then, when her head is clear of kif and she is freshly showered. Then she worries. He's an extremist. Always playing around with the camera, continually re-assembling the past or positing the future. Street theatre carried to extremes. Room nine at the El Muniria was a case in point. Why the somewhat shabby little room, she didn't query. She is used to shabby little hotel rooms, particularly with Antony. Though he's just as likely to book them a suite at The Ritz. So they lay around in room nine and munched majoun fudge and played some weird music on the cassette player. Best kif in the Rif, Antony said.It was the kind of flippant remark that really irritated her, an indication of some parallel and less likeable personality at work. But later, in the bar of the El Muniria, Abdul told her that Room Nine was a popular request. Of course it was Naked Lunch that Burroughs had been writing there.She drops a few dhirams onto the table, slides them out from among the fragments of cards towards the waiter's lethargic fingers where they tap at the edge of the marble, thin and brown and wrinkled like prune skins. She watches as the waiter's fingers walk slowly across the moist surface, the pink pads of his fingertips exerting just enough pressure to drag the coins silently across the marble to drop off the edge and into his tray with a tiny metallic sound.
INSIDE THE REEF(Landsdowne Press 1968)
Non-fiction. The hidden stories and people of Fiji in the late twentieth century. A companion book to the film The Three Legged Stool.