I have a new book coming. It’s a memoir about my childhood. Think Angela’s Ashes meets The Castle. The Melbourne launch is Sunday June 10 at Northcote Uniting Church. I will be conducting a service in honour of my child self. All welcome. Men bring a plate.
For Book Week in 1991 the theme was ‘Book Into The Future.’ Get Up Mum is a time capsule crossed with a time machine. This is one of the first songs I wrote, ahead of its time.
I made up a hand gesture for the summer Smith Journal. (illo by Indigo O’Rourke.) My new book Get Up Mum will be released by Affirm in June.
I micro-reviewed the Australian classic for The Lifted Brow a few years back.
204 pages – feels like a short read.
Schoolteacher goes on a dark bender in an Australian desert town.
Mood: Hot, dark and claustrophobic. The hazy mash of inebriation. Trapped in a car with foul men. Face to face with a stabbed kangaroo.
Best sentence: Things half remembered and terribly feared, shrieked at him; tears of mystic terror rimmed his eyes.
Previous review: “A classic novel which became a classic film. The Outback without the sentimental bulldust. Australia without the sugar coating.” Robert Drewe
Funfact: A keen amateur lepidopterist, Cook established the first butterfly farm in Australia on the banks of Sydney’s Hawkesbury River in the 1970s.
Best Australianism: “What the blazes…”
Suggested food pairings: Overdone steak from a hot bonnet. Lashing of cold beer.
Four of my columns are featured in Frankie’s new anthology ‘Something To Say.’ I talk about graffiti, grandpas and growing down.
