“Baggage”  is, in brief — in Gillian’s words — a speculative fiction anthology that examines the stories and other cultural baggage that migrants have brought with us to Australia over the last 200 odd years. She also says: “If you think Australian culture is all about neighbours and mateship, you may find Baggage distressing.”

My migrants came to Australia between 120 and 150-odd years ago — recently enough that we’re still in contact with cousins in Scotland on my father’s side, but long enough ago that we can’t claim to be anything other than Australian. And we’re white Anglo-Celts, as invisibly, pervasively mainstream as you can get. So I had to think about what kind of cultural baggage we might have, and settled for what I knew or thought I knew we had, since I wasn’t able to go back to Oz and do any research on things I didn’t know about.

This was without doubt the hardest writing job I’ve ever had. If I hadn’t agreed to do it, and if I hadn’t been so dead keen to be part of a project that dares to be about a big and complex and sensitive topic, I would have given up. I’m very happy that I didn’t give up. I’m proud to be in this anthology and I can’t praise Gillian enough for her great patience with me as I repeatedly stressed out. Hecatombs to you, Gillian.

And I’m still nervous, perhaps because I’ve been told what to think about cultural baggage by academia and the media, so that it was difficult to put a whole bunch of very educated people’s opinions aside and tell the story I wanted to tell; and there was always the terror of clumsily saying something I shouldn’t, or not saying something I should, and that terror is now echoing on, probably quite irrationally, now that I can’t make any more changes.

This story became very important to me as I was writing it; it’s by far the most personal story I’ve ever published, and there’s a fair bit of true material in it. It preserves a couple of our family tales, and I’m glad about that. And looking at the list of who’s on board (below), I can’t wait to have my own copy of what I think is going to be a great book.

Here’s the table of contents (note that Tessa is in it too!):

Vision Splendid — K.J. Bishop
Telescope — Jack Dann
Hive of Glass — Kaaron Warren
Kunmanara – Somebody Somebody — Yaritji Green
Manifest Destiny — Janeen Webb
Albert & Victoria/Slow Dreams — Lucy Sussex
Macreadie v The Love Machine — Jennifer Fallon
A Pearling Tale — Maxine McArthur
Acception — Tessa Kum
An Ear for Home — Laura E. Goodin
Home Turf — Deborah Biancotti
Archives, space, shame, love — Monica Carroll
Welcome, farewell — Simon Brown

There are now electronic uncorrected proof copies of Baggage available for review. For more info, please visit Gillian’s blog here.

So that communications minister Stephen Conroy announces legislation to Censor The Internet And Keep Australia Pure will be introduced….just before next year’s election. Bearing in mind that opposition leader Tony Abbott is an outspoken wowser with a support base of religious nutjobs, it isn’t a huge stretch to see the strategy behind the move.

Putting aside the possibility of the legislation getting through both houses of parliament and actually going into effect, which is scary enough, what worries me more than the possibility of a national-level internet (really World Wide Web) filter  is the opportunity the Rudd government has just handed “Mad Monk” Tony Abbott.

They must be assuming that Abbott and the Liberal Party will support the legislation. Which they might. But if they do, will the antediluvians and troglodytes have any reason to change their vote to Labor, who after all still support the right to abortion, birth control, schooling for girls, etc?

And they also might not support it. Abbott’s response to minister Conroy’s announcement was notably guarded. There are certainly Liberal MPs who don’t want it. And Abbott, well, what he wants is to be Prime Minister. Very, very much. If he can learn to subdue his personal agendas to the demands of his ambition, learn patience and mature in guile, he could recast himself. Be seen to put his own extreme views aside in the name of supporting the views of the majority. Be a bloke of the folk, just like John Howard. And get elected, just like John Howard. And then gradually, when the door of opportunity opens, shove his own agenda through it onto the country, just like John Howard.

If Abbott plays his cards right, he could conceivably pick up a fair few swinging or simply furious voters.  If those voters are in marginal seats, there’s your election. The Exclusive Brethren will be happy, and the rest of Australia will be wondering what they’ve gone and done.

Or am I wrong? I’ve been away from home for four years now, and haven’t spent long enough on visits to pick up the pulse of the zeitgeist. Has the place really changed that much? Has a tide of wowserism swept in, and a tide of stupidity too? Because censorship will not make the internet a nice place for children to play, and filtering the web will not stop the electronic circulation of child pornography and other criminal material. Errors are inevitable (a leaked list of “planned” sites to ban included a dentist’s web page) and the scope for abuse enormous. It really isn’t too hard to understand this. And it’s easy to be either appalled that our federal government doesn’t understand, or offended that they think we don’t, however you interpret their actions.

I hope that at next year’s election KRudd & co do get back in, because the alternative is dismal.  But I hope their majority is so thin that their arrogance won’t be able to squeeze through it.

This is the calendar -

And here is the company that made it -

Art Vivant
- but I can’t find either this or a 2010 calendar, though I’ll check back from time to time.

The Amano section of their site has a gallery of small pictures. To see more works (on the right), click on the link below the pictures with the numeral 10 in it. There are also some small prints (or just postcards, I’m not sure, but they seem to be limited editions) of D and other subjects — some of the links show you extra pictures — but I can’t see any price or ordering information. And if you’re a diehard fan with time to kill, clicking on the top link here will open a navigable advertisement with even more pictures.

On the subject of art, on a recent look-in at Who Killed Bambi I was taken with Al Farrow’s reliquaries made of firearms and ammunition, Claire Morgan’s bird falling through a roof (or planar field) of strawberries, and Shi Jinsong’s nasty nursery furniture.

Well, I’ve basically tidied up We the Enclosed, and I’ve been through all the surreal stuff like Maldoror Abroad and other bits and bobs, including some poems that I want to include, and there isn’t much left to do on all of those. Heart of a Mouse and Saving the Gleeful Horse are too new for me to see what might need doing to them, ditto the story for Baggage, Vision Splendid. I’ll probably wait for an editor’s opinion on those three.

Which means I have four stories to really work on: The Art of Dying, The Love of Beauty, Beach Rubble, and Between the Covers. I want to get them fixed by the end of the year. Yeah, I know that’s a lot of time for four stories, but I know my own sluglike pace, and Preston and I are still working on Book#2, which, I can now reveal, is called The Floating World.

I’d also like to get a couple more new stories down. I’ve only got 73k words, which doesn’t leave much room to cut material, and I think a couple of fresh, not-published-elsewhere stories would be very good to have in the mix. So I could fiddle with them this year and work properly on them next year, and hopefully have 80-90k by mid-year.

In other news, I have plants! Someone was moving house, and I acquired a whole lotta greenery at a bargain-basement 1000 baht the lot, plus ceramic pots. Some of the greenery is rather large; the biggest, a golden cane palm, reaches the ceiling and bends down to overhang the coffee table. We’ve put little paper-lantern party lights in it, which gives a bit of a tiki bar effect at night. There’s also a giant spider lily and an exuberant lady palm, and sundry smaller plants, including a badly sunburnt bird’s nest plant that I’ve put in the bathroom to convalesce (apparently it likes moisture much).

Mum is none too pleased and has hired an outside carer with ninja superpowers to keep an eye on my aunt. However, in fights between Jedi and ninja, the Jedi usually wins.

*Speaking of Adelaide, South Australia has passed a new law allowing the cloning of human embryos for research, and the mixing of human and animal genetic material. No longer will Adelaide be known as the City of Churches, but as the City of Flying Dog-Men. And you can grow your own dope there. For Baphomet’s sake, does that sound like the kind of place that should be shut down…?

“Over the next five months, the group will draft a voluntary code of conduct to look at making magazines and media outlets use a wider range of body shapes and sizes, tell readers when they have retouched photos, and set industry age limits on models.”

Willfully leaving aside the question of how much a “voluntary code of conduct” can “make” anyone do anything, this sounds like a good idea. It would be great if a wide range of figure types were given a positive image. I can’t help thinking, though, that behind this worthy project there is a blind eye turned to the greater problem of our culture’s obsession with beauty, particularly the beauty of young women. The fact that this advisory group has been formed tells me that we think it is terribly important — a matter of national significance, in fact — that young women be able to feel beautiful. And it is that important, because we have made it so. Beauty and the body were mental health issues for some women before the 20th century, but in our image-saturated age so many of us are afflicted with disorders related to perception of the body that the need for public and government action is obvious.

Shining a positive light on different shapes and sizes sounds like one good tactic to employ in the necessary fight. But what if we could also somehow distract the focus of attention away from looks entirely and find ways to praise and glamourise accomplishments, intellect and good character? What if, in other words, we could convince ourselves to stop caring so much about whether we make the grade as sex objects and start caring more about the entirety of our being?

I’m closing my eyes and imagining a world where our natures and deeds, not our looks, would be the bedrock of our self esteem. Where, for those of us who are peacocky, style and flair in personal presentation would be more important than the figure and features that nature’s lottery gave us. Where we would understand that every moment we spend obsessing over the flesh is a moment we steal from the nourishment of the mind and soul.

Opening my eyes, I go back to wishing I had longer legs, a prettier hairline and better teeth…