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Woorilla
2006 Journal Launch
It’s just on three years since my
partner and I moved here. It was a long journey from WA to
Victoria
and I still wonder at the good luck that made us decide on the
Dandenong
Ranges
. Thirty-three houses over 18 months before we found ‘our
place’...
Now we weren’t sure if the natives
were going to be friendly or not, but Belgrave had a village feel
about it and I saw reflections of myself in the middle aged hippies
loitering in the coffee shops.
At the time we had no idea that we
were in the midst of a community of readers and writers. The real
estate agents never used that as a selling point.
I’m not sure how we stumbled onto
Woorilla. It may have been a gathering like today's, but I do recall
the feeling… it was a comfortable feeling of being among
like-minded people. Although we may differ politically, hold
different views on any number of issues, clearly we value writing,
writers and the lost art of reading—these are values we have in
common. The Woorilla people (Marie, Louise and Michael) and the
writers we met, helped give me a sense of place, which I need for my
own writing.
A sense of
place can be a fragile thing; like a plant it either thrives or
shrivels away depending on the social climate. To writers and
artists everywhere a sense of place means a sense of identity, for
me personally it’s a place where I can exercise my irreverent
tongue; it can hold a geographical meaning as it does to the hills
people; it may come through identifying with a tribe of writers or
it comes through family
or friends, through your
own dreams and nightmares. It
makes itself felt in many ways and influences us in ways we’re not
even aware of sometimes. Our own sense of place is not a block of
land or real estate--it is something that we appropriate and make
subjectively our own. Love and acceptance can give you a sense of
place, while loss or alienation displaces you—you find yourself in
a state of perpetual exile.
In reading
through our Woorilla offerings this year I was struck by how
individual the pieces were, for it would be absurd if we all wrote
from the same backyard; everyone thinking the same, agreeing with
one another.
Someone once wrote—I think it was a
literary critic—they are often unkind—that to be a writer you
must be mentally unhealthy. I think they meant the agony of facing
the blank page, waiting for that exquisite image to come alive. But
we have to break the silences, don’t we? Isn’t that the
attraction of writing? It’s such a subversive activity.
I
know that I read to make sense of my life. Trying to make sense of a
life where my literary diet is narrow, where tomato sauce is
plastered on everything I pick up will leave me permanently hungry.
I hope that day never comes, because by then we might have forgotten
what we hunger for.
We read narratives with our ears and
our eyes, in whatever format they are delivered to us, to make sense
of our lives, to gain access to the morality plays of our times and
when we find that resonance: that line, that paragraph or passage
which helps us understand, there is a sense of relief.
And I would like to thank all of the
Woorilla writers this year for helping to bring about that sense of
relief, that feeling of recognition.
But I sometimes think that in our celebration of the
writer we often overlook the managers, the editors, the production
side of writing and so today I also want to pay tribute to the
people behind the Woorilla scenes who do the organising and take our
art into the public space.
Woorilla
is heading into the dinosaur class for its been in publication since
1989; Woorilla contributors are local, national and international;
it depends on a small group of volunteer editors who work hard at
producing a quality publication. And something we need to shout out
aloud is that Woorilla has outlived all other non-university based
literary magazines i.e. those that publish more than an annual
publication. Woorilla is well known for its annual poetry prize and
for its small press supporting writers in the Dandenongs.
So congratulations to the writers who
work magic with their words and graphics, and the magicians who
shout “ABRACADABRA!” and reveal those words in published
form. You’ve done a great job.
It gives me much pleasure to launch
the 2006 edition of the Woorilla journal.
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