In which timid Australian dweeby personage travels to New York City and meets scary Famous People, but also gets to eat yummy kosher foods in fancy kosher restaurants. And amazingly, that last is not an oxymoron but quite true. One may sit in comfort in aesthetic surroundings, with a cool Brooklyn breeze blowing through open doors, and eat something as spectacular as fetta-white asparagus pizza. One feels like a normal human being.

One also discovers what it is like to have a subway train scream past ones window every minute throughout the night, without curtains to screen one from the eyes of passersby.
One discovers that the large police presence in the nearby subway station is both necessary and helpful.
One discovers that smart and Famous People can be fun to hang out with.
One discovers that hundreds of folks might come out to support a LGBT reading in a Jewish space.
One discovers that one’s friend is even more lovely than previously suspected.

So, phone calls this week mentioning not knowing my slang have reminded me to add some more Australian words here:

retreads: tires that have had rubber put back on them…old women wearing tight spandex…old men who play at being boy soldiers

ringbarking: cutting or eating the bark in a strip all the way around the outside of a tree, thereby killing it.

king snake: king brown, dugite, bloody dangerous snake that can make you really sick or kill you if it bites you. Fortunately not fond of people.

“our native friends”: indigenous Australians, aboriginals.

gidji: a kind of sharpened wooden spear for stabbing at stuff. My Mum used to scream at us for chasing each other with gidjis. She’d yell”You’ll take out an eye with that!” Eye, nothing…we wanted to take out brains.

salmon gums:

jarrah:

golden wattle:

ironbark: Just because I love it so, here’s a poem about ironbark. Gilded youth. Oh I love it.

mallee:

Very exciting. My story “You Lose These” is included in this new anthology. Congratulations to Miryam for bringing this project to completion!

buy the book (at www.randomhouse.com) »

This morning, at Liz Ellis’s, she mentioned how fun it would be to have a dictionary where you could look up Australian words and flora and fauna in my novel that you’ve been wondering about. I was excited. True enough, I think that would be fun. My only concern is not exactly knowing which words are Australian. That happens to me all the time. Like, “Open the boot please”, which, I am still not sure what the word is for the thing in the back of the car where you put your luggage, but I DO know that this word is Australian. I didn’t, in the past. Twenty years after coming here I still don’t know what I don’t know. Ha! Mostly that’s because I’m a curmudgeon and don’t chat with lots of folks on a regular basis. Partly that’s because I love the sound of Australian language so much that maybe I don’t hear the American words…

Well, anyway, I wanted to start at the beginning of the book and add a couple of words a day, or maybe some pictures of tress or bushes or birds or whatever comes up next.

Here goes:

FOGEY: Um, is this Australian? It means an old conservative person, the kind who might gossip about you if you got your hair dyed blue.
BLOKE: a man. A good enough sort. Rough around the edges, like a kettle made out of a kerosene tin.
COCKIE: a cockatoo. or a land owner. They both make a lot of noise.
PODDY: an animal that has been abandoned by its mother. A poddy lamb is the little stinker who walks around after you, butting your bum, trying to get you to give it more milk. Leaves droppings all over the verandah.

It’s like a birth, this book thing. You’re not sure what’s going to happen, or how the baby is going to look, or even if it’s going to be a healthy baby or a sickly one. Folks cluster around, cooing in front of you, possibly saying “MY G-d! Did you see the pink hair on that one? The squashed nose??” when they have gone home. Like a parent, you say it’s the perfect baby for you, but secretly, silently, you wonder if your baby is average enough. If you have the courage to be a good parent and learn from your mistakes, and not be one of those Mums at the park who smile as their child flings sand in the two year old’s eyes.

My novel, for better or for worse, is coming out in the US tomorrow. It scares me and excites me. I want to hold the book in my hands, a weight, what many years of work feels like. I want to walk past a bookshop and see it in the window and get a little jolt of recognition: That’s my work. That’s what I spend the day (and night!) doing. I want to think that those words between the covers might touch someone far away. I want to gloat and do a war dance…see…I wasn’t slacking off all that time! I was doing SOMETHING.

Mostly, I want to lie in my hot bath and be still and thankful for all the fine twists of fate and kindness that have brought me to this place, because I know, really know, that there are many much finer writers than me who have not had the same good fortune that I have.