The Age

Tomorrow I'm going to New Zealand for a week and day. This is one of the places I hope to visit.

Yesterday I drove out to Leppington to pick up a queen-sized mattress. There are complexities concealed in that simple sentence but for various reasons I can't unpack them now. Would that I could. Another time perhaps. The post that I imagined making might have attempted to but this one won't. All I remember now is the pomegranate tree. It was a small tree, not quite as tall as I am. Round. Laden with ripening fruit that looked luscious enough to make six months below ground worth it. So long as you had the other six months above. Pomegranates. How do you eat them? You eat the seeds. Or the pulp around the seeds. All of the longing for the Europe from which its planters came was in that tree. And all of the hope for the Australia to which they came was too. It was the middle of the day, cloudy, muggy, a not much happening sort of a day. The glow of the fruit behind the barbed wire fence in the overgrown orchard. The unquenchable hope, the forbidden longing. The birds that will come to eat the fruit as it splits and falls. I can't forget it. I won't. Pomegranates.


All I have been able to find out about the image is that it comes from 'a Middle Age Armenian Medical Manuscript'.

What seest thou else/ In the dark backward and abysm of time?

supply ...

This is the poster for my book, which I think I can now say is published ... without a launch it's a bit difficult to say. I heard ten days ago that my copies were in the post and spent all of last week waiting for them to arrive. It wasn't until Friday that I learned they had in fact been sent to my agents, so I made a quick trip over to Paddington to pick them, and the posters (I have three) up. Book looks good I think, I was mostly concerned as to how the reproductions would have come out - while they're perhaps a little down on colour, a bit muted, that somehow seems appropriate to both their provenance and the story the text tells. For those who are interested, I've posted the introduction to The Supply Party here.