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Now that all the hoo ha is over – the excitement of holding my first book in my hands, the launch, the celebratory drinks, congrats, feedback from my first excited readers telling me they couldn’t put it down, there’s a strange feeling somewhat akin to when my daughter left home to study acting. My book (my child) is out there in the world without me. Gone from my making, shaping, nurturing, polishing. Since the launch, I’ve been in a whirlwind of work that is not yet creative for me – learning how to use social media, creating a website. But today, TODAY my son and grandson set me up on Spotify with the Bluetooth speaker I was given for Christmas. Music. My saviour. With all the unaccustomed technology I have been learning to use, my work environment has been still. For most of my life, a day without music has been rare. Today, after weeks of silence, it is back. What more organic inspiration than Bob Dylan (my forever hero), Django Reinhardt, Billie Holiday etc. Incongruous perhaps, my love of the big silent Outback coupled with this music brought from my earliest days. Scattered throughout the book are examples of this quirky disparity.
To follow is an excerpt from SO BIG THE LAND – from the time when, during the early seventies, we were living on an Aboriginal settlement – an isolated, remote place three hundred kilometres north west of Alice Springs, in the Tanami Desert.
‘Prior to our leaving home, we’d bought a small tape recorder – a new concept in music listening. Before this there’d been only vinyl records. My brother had lovingly and painstakingly made us a tape of all our favourite music – Dylan, Hendrix, James Taylor, Janis Joplin and more. As Yuendumu had no radio or television reception, music was king – from our cassette tapes or records. Most of the thirty or so Europeans running the settlement were under forty, and there was a party at some-one’s house nearly every Saturday night. Although we were unable to go to many of them because of our two small children, to hear Creedence Clearwater, The Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin et al blaring into the cosmos until the wee hours was as comforting to me as a mother’s lullaby.’
Music stirs my creative juices. Perhaps one of the purposes of art is to inspire more art. A voluptuous ever-widening circle.
SO BIG THE LAND e-books coming soon. I will let you know.
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