In September, I spoke at the Ballarat Writers' and Illustrators' Festival. My panel was called: Imagery in Fiction: Visualising, Imagining, Creating

The other panelists included author Penni Russon, illustrator Michelle Mackintosh, and editor Alison Arnold. Librarian Julie Bull managed to keep us more or less on track discussing the topic but somehow I came around to talking about the importance of 'place' in my writing. I talked about travelling through the far north of Australia, camping in mango orchards, travelling from Queensland into the Northern Territory and feeling the landscape as a living, breathing presence.

While I spoke about landscape, Simon Swingler drew this illustration of me, which I love because it captures exactly what it feels like to have a place enter your consciousness and take over your thoughts.

Recently, I've been dipping into Walden by Henry David Thoreau. I first heard of Thoreau when I was around 11-years-old and read My Side of the Mountain by Jean Craighead George. George's novel is about a 13-year-old boy called Sam who runs away to live alone in the Catskill Mountains partly because he is inspired by Thoreau's life at Walden Pond.

Reading My Side of the Mountain led me to track down Thoreau's classic book about living in the wild. His writing affected my life in many ways and it still has impact on the way I think about landscapes and wilderness.

As I write this post, a chorus of frogs is singing in the darkness of a Western Australian night. In a chapter on 'Solitude', Thoreau wrote: "There can be no very black melancholy to him who lives in the midst of Nature and has his senses still." This year of travel has made me fully appreciate that truth.

Kimberley Writers Festival

This is the view from my desk. But the reality is much better than the washed-out photo. The water is deep blue, the sky moves from shades of morning gold and azure through to mauve and orange at sunset.

We're camped on the banks of Kona Inlet, a peaceful stretch of water that links up to Lake Kununurra. I think this particular campsite has to rate as one of my favourites. The only drawback is the water is full of freshwater crocodiles, which puts a little bit of a pall on the idea of swimming in it.

In a little while, we'll be heading off to the official opening of the Kimberley Writers Festival, though it feels as though the festival has already been going for a couple of days. We met up with some of the other authors and the lovely library staff who are engineering the festival on Wednesday night for dinner. Last night there were pre-festival drinks and tonight it will be a little more formal with all the authors finally in town, a big crowd of readers and the festival fully underway.

Today I did three sessions with students at Kununurra High School. They were a great mob - funny, intelligent and attentive. Over the course of the weekend I'll be doing readings and sessions with adult audiences, whom hopefully will be as much fun as the kids, though perhaps not. The reason I write for younger readers is partly because I like their company. I also love the way they behave as characters within the context of a story. I'm always a little bewildered when I meet authors who write for and about kids but don't actually like them.

When the festival is over, the Professor and I will head back into the Northern Territory. I have a lot of writing to catch up on. The Kimberleys is a landscape that inspires all sorts of story. It's ancient, exquisitely beautiful and yet very complicated. I'm currently reading a Mary Durack novel set in the region, Keeping My Country, which I'm enjoying but I'd love to be reading some children's and YA fiction set in these landscapes too. A few years back I read Leonie Norrington's YA novel The Last Muster which was a great read and very under appreciated. It captured so many layers of the complex stories that belong to this landscape. I'm not sure I'll ever be able to write something set in the Kimberleys - I'd need to spend more time soaking up the place - or maybe I'm just looking for an excuse to come back.

Out of the desert

It's a deliciously warm night in Katherine, NT. I'm sitting at the desk of a friend who has kindly given us the keys to her house while she is off traveling the world. It's two months since I last wrote a blog post and six months since we drove out of the driveway of our home in Melbourne.

Last time I posted a blog, it was to announce I was starting yet another blog - this one dedicated to travelling with Punch and Judy. But the best laid plans went astray. I lost all interest in blogging. There was so much going on, so many new places, new faces and new ideas to assimilate that to regurgitate it onto a page without much reflection felt like just adding a lot more white noise to the blogsphere.

I have always been the type of writer that likes to think about an idea for a long time before I put the words on the page. I've also never been very interested in writing about myself. So blogging about my journey across Australia with The Professor and a trunkful of puppets as our adventures unfolded became increasingly difficult.

I've kept a journal - as usual - about day to day events but it's not something I would choose to share. I've written several short stories, some junior fiction chapter books and a non-fiction book for the National Library which will be released next year . I've also made some headway on a new novel. I spent a lot of time thinking about each of those projects as the speedometer on our car clicked over - climbing up to nearly 30,000 kilometres of travel since leaving Melbourne.

Some writers can produce self-revelatory stories at the drop of a hat. I've discovered I'm not one of them. I've discovered a lot of things about myself, about writing, about puppets, about Australia, about the things I value and the stories that I want to share.

Perhaps too much is asked of young writers when they're told to 'write a story' for an English class or an exam. Some stories can take a long time to brew.

When you can't beat 'em...

It's been a month since I last wrote a blog and I blame it all on Punch and Judy.

Since my last post, written while we were in Mudgee, I've been thinking constantly about books and writing. I've toured Tasmania, speaking at an AATE/ALEA Conference in Devonport and talking to thousands of kids from Penguin to Hobart. I've been to the Hunter Valley and talked books and babies with the lovely Alyssa Brugman. I've written grant applications, scraps of short fiction, worked on my new novel and generally got on with the business of being a writer. I've visited schools and libraries in NSW, and travelled from Newcastle to Port Macquarie to the Byron hinterland. This week, I've dined with fabulous teacher librarians on the Gold Coast and worked with students at Aquinas College. I've also read dozens of great novels. But every time I've sat down to write a blog post about any of the above and books and writing, which is what Magic Casements has always meant to be about, I've been distracted by Mr Punch.

The conflict of interest between writing about books or writing about Mr Punch has grown so intense that I've decided to start a new blog dedicated exclusively to Life with Punch. It might be a bad idea. Writing two blogs might mean less writing and less blogging gets done. But perhaps it will mean more of everything. Sometimes, when I'm working on a novel and find myself getting stuck, I start writing a completely different novel altogether. For some reason it seems to unlock the creative process.

I wrote my novels 'Vulture's Gate' and 'India Dark' across the same time period, working intensely on one and then the other and each seemed to make the other more do-able. So hopefully keeping two blogs will work the same way. I'm going to try and keep Mr Punch's long nose out of Magic Casements so if you want to find out what he's been up to, and about our lives in the 'Gas Bottle Republic' as the Professor calls the world of caravanning, then you can follow my new blog, 'Life with Punch'. Stick around on Magic Casements for updates on all things bookish and how to write in the face of intense competition from puppets. When you can't beat 'em - give 'em their own blog.

For Love and No Money - Of Poets and Puppeteers

Every year millions of words are written for money and millions more for love.

I've been earning a living from my writing for around thirteen years and with each year, more and more, I have come to admire people who craft words with precision and skill for nothing more than the pleasure of shaping a beautiful sentence. For me, poets demonstrate the essence of pure writing. Poetry is Cinderella of the literary arts. Novelists and prose writers can always imagine that at some point they might earn a living from their words but even the finest, most successful poets are unlikely to every earn more than a few dollars from their work. They labour for love alone.

Puppetry is poetry's theatrical equivalent. Artists who fall in love with puppetry are quirky souls who love the magic and drama of bringing inanimate objects to life. It's definitely the preserve of the dedicated theatre practitioner which is why I never get tired of following the Professor and his crew of puppets around the country.

Anna Ryan-Punch's poem about the poet Henry Lawson and Mr Punch brought together everything I love about poets, puppets and life on the road. Thanks, Anna. No strings attached.

Henry Lawson Country

Henry Lawson is haunting us. Everywhere we go there are references to him. Parks, streets and pubs all bear his name. It feels like every corner you walk around there's a plaque referencing him in some way or another - Henry slept here, drank here, wrote a line about this tree, creek or geranium...

I think I'm going to have to crack and go and pick up a copy of some Lawson ballads for weekend reading. Lawson was born in Grenfell but spent some of his childhood in Gulgong. Both Grenfell and Gulgong stage Henry Lawson Festivals in June. Lawson's work references towns all across this region - Central Western Tablelands of NSW.

Last week, I ran an all-day writing workshop with senior students at Gulgong High School. At one point, when we were working on character development, I asked the young writers to create a character that they might bump into on the main street of Gulgong. Some of them groaned. The familiar is so often less inspiring than the exotic. In defense of the premise, I suggested that if one of the students in the workshop - for example Jessica McLennan (who wrote beautifully) - spent the rest of her life writing about Gulgong and NSW, then eventually Gulgong would stage a "Jessica McLennan Festival" and Henry Lawson could wind up being completely overshadowed by her. Lawson is such an icon in Gulgong that all the kids fell about laughing, though Jessica looked rather chuffed at the notion.

I'm sure if you'd told Henry Lawson, as a young man living in Gulgong, that the town would lionise him one day he would have laughed too. Lawson led a tragic life and died impoverished and pretty much destitute. But he made these country towns and the people who inhabited them live on the page. I wonder what he'd make of it all now? As an alcoholic, I suspect he'd be pretty pleased to discover the area that he thirstily tramped through in his youth is now a fabulous wine growing region.

Shouters, Chargers & the Life of Punch

Last Sunday, the Professor performed two shows of "The Terrible Story of Mr Punch" at Orange Regional Gallery.

The booth looked both spooky and elegant set up in one of the galleries that featured the work of the artist David Fairburn. From certain angles, it looked as though the portraits were watching the show as well.

I didn't have to do much in the way of 'bottling' in Orange. The gallery handled all the front of house so I actually had a chance to take a few photos.

It felt very relaxed and the Professor came out and chatted to the early arrivals which included quite a few dads with their sons. Audiences are different from one town to the next and it's always interesting to watch their responses. It's often the little girls who are the loudest, particularly four to six-year-olds. I'm usually too busy watching the kids to take pictures - or if I do manage a few, they're often blurry as the kids are often wriggling and shouting. I've taken to sitting down the front at most shows in case a very excited child leaps up and charges the booth. There was only one 'charger' at the Orange show but in Nowra, two little five year old girls were so keen to make Mr Punch take notice of their shouted instruction that they made a dash for the booth and started jumping up and down. Parents are often so surprised to see their little princesses shouting with excitement and lecturing a puppet that they don't quite know what to do. I quietly usher the kids back to their seats, agreeing with them that Mr Punch is very naughty and that if they wait until the end of the show, they can have a one-to-one chat and tell him off. They're always very obliging.

In Nowra, Lauren, the little girl in the blue t-shirt on the right, was one of the loudest kids at any of the Punch shows so far. She had a fantastic, shrill whistle and she was determined that Mr Punch was going to hear her and take her advice. "Behind you! Behind you! I told you there was a crocodile behind you!" She led a charge of several small kids on the booth. Just after I took the photo of the girls I had to make a dash down the front to lure them back to their seats. I don't think Lauren's dad had ever seen his daughter in a full blown argument with a puppet.



Tomorrow Mr Punch will be up to his usual tricks at the Pipe Band Hall at Victoria Park in Darling Street.

The shows in Nowra and Orange were terrific with lovely audiences but I'm a little nervous about tomorrow's shows. Dubbo has been a tricky town to get to know. That might be because I've spent the last three days in outlying areas, giving talks to kids at the shire libraries and running a writing class with secondary students at Gulgong High School. Every town has its own personality that impacts on the mood of the audiences. The Professor did a radio interview this morning and Duboo is plastered with posters of Punch and Judy. Fingers crossed, a good range of Dubbo shouters and chargers, mums, dads, grannies and totally feral toddlers will turn up at the Pipe Band Hall tomorrow morning.