Knocklofty

Errol Flynn and the Sword of Fate is now available. At more than 130 pages with more than 130 illustrations — and a special Errol Flynn tour of Hobart, his home town — it’s the brightest book yet published about Tasmania’s most famous son.

Read about his mysterious ancestry, his colourful parents and his mischievous youth before he embarked on a life that became a legend both on and off the screen — and a family connection with the dramatic mutiny on the Bounty.

At just $A25 (plus $6.00 postage anywhere in Australia) it’s a bargain no Flynn fan will want to miss.

USA & Canada addresses: Errol Flynn and the Sword of Fate is $A25.00 plus $A15.00 for postage & packing.

UK & Europe addresses: Errol Flynn and the Sword of Fate is $A25.00 plus $A18.00 for postage & packing.

Errol Flynn is the most famous Australian in history. His name has passed into the language in a ribald phrase and almost fifty years after his death and almost a century after his birth, his fans are legion.

Always a rebel and a risk-taker, he lived life so fully that he was always surrounded by legend — some of it true, some dreamed up by Hollywood’s masters of hype and some of it little better than gross libel.

This new book, Errol Flynn and the Sword of Fate, by Errol Flynn Society founder Bob Casey, raises fascinating possibilities about Flynn’s origins, including a link with the celebrated mutiny on the Bounty and the earliest days of European exploration and settlement in Australia.

It is full of interesting and entertaining sidelights on his early life in Tasmania and his long quest in search of his own identity, which was far more complex than his screen persona — and it investigates his claim that as a child he played with Captain Bligh’s sword.

It includes a guided tour of places associated with Flynn’s early life in Hobart, Tasmania, with a map drawn by one of the city’s most experienced taxi drivers who occasionally conducts Errol Flynn tours for those who want to get in touch with the star’s origins.

It’s a must for Flynn fans old and new.

Errol Flynn and the Sword of Fate will be released in late June to coincide with the 99th anniversary of his birth in Hobart, the capital of Tasmania, Australia’s remote island state.

More at the Errol Flynn’s Sword website.

Coral Tulloch, the noted Tasmanian author and illustrator of many children’s books, is about to publish her first eBook — The Journey, a tale of a quest through stange dark places, encountering odd folk and even odder creatures in search of the perfect recipe for plum jam.

Entirely written in Coral’s fine handwriting and full of rich and quirky pictures, games, puzzles and offbeat information, The Journey will delight not only the children she wrote it for but also many an imaginative adult.

Coral is enjoying a success with Sydney of the Antarctic (ABC Books), a colourful illustrated book about a toy mouse she lost on a recent voyage to Scott’s hut.

People of all ages around Australia, New Zealand and the USA have joined in the search for Sydney Walton Mouse and Coral receives regular letters and drawings from many who claim to have seen him in places as far apart as Switzerland, South Africa and Mexico.

Her recent book Antarctica: The Heart of the World (also from ABC Books) won the Wilderness Society’s Environment Award for Children’s Literature and she is presently working on a book about Macquarie Island, a unique place far south of Australia in the great Southern Ocean.

The Journey is Coral’s first foray into electronic authorship and she has also just launched her own website, which will soon be keeping you up to date with the progress of the search for the lost Sydney and telling you all about her many other books.

Knocklofty expects to make The Journey available in June. Watch for the announcement.

At Knocklofty we have long been aware of the intimate connection between books and booze. Few good books, and no amusing books at all, have been written by ascetics or teetotalers.

That is why our writers’ suites at Knocklofty Towers all have a small adjoining room with seldom-used equipment for making tea and coffee and a rather large refrigerator which is kept stocked by the management with the writer’s preferred beer.

In some cases the room may be a small bar with a favourite keg beer on tap and there are eccentrics who use the space to make their own often highly potent and occasionally explosive brews.

Others have wine cellars stocked gratis from the firm’s vineyards; Knocklofty Fourpenny Dark, renowned for its minimal delay between cause and effect, is popular with the more robust novelists and the staff philosophers, while effete poetic types favour the Knocklofty White Infuriator, a deceptively delicate wine credited with mild hallucinatory properties.

The relationship between literature and liquor is so ancient that our scholars believe that the two probably came into existence virtually simultaneously. The arts of writing — writing, that is, for the purposes of story-telling rather than for cuneiform accountancy — and brewing are both a little more than five thousand years old but we have been unable to determine which led to which.

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Book review

Here’s Cheers: a pictorial history of hotels, taverns and inns in Hobart
by C J Dennison
272pp large format paperback. Illustrated, colour and black & white
Published by Hobart City Council. RRP $A38.50
ISBN 978-0-9750909-6-1

Hobart was once one of the toughest towns on earth. In the high days of whaling and sealing, you took your life in your hands if you strayed into many a city or waterfront pub.

British colonists were noted for their formidable capacity for grog, both sly and legitimate, and at one time the town boasted one pub for every 16 houses — there was a drinking establishment on just about every corner.

Part of this can be explained by a large transitory population of sailors, whalers and adventurers in a port that, despite its remotest, was one of the world’s busiest for many decades. Scores of hard-headed and necessarily hard-fisted publicans were always ready to help a sailor part himself from months — and sometimes years — of wages hard-earned before the mast.

But the real reason for the proliferation of pubs was social. Housing was primitive and often overcrowded; home offered little in the way of amusement or space to relax and so the pub functioned as the people’s loungeroom, providing warmth, cheer, free entertainment and a respite from cramped living quarters, noisy children and nagging spouses.
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Since we stopped using quills, fountain pens and manual typewriters, the act of writing has become more abstract—symbols on a screen whose existence is mainly virtual.

It’s a blessing. Henry James handwrote himself into carpal tunnel syndrome and had to resort to an amanuensis. George Orwell complained of the exhausting physical work of writing: drafting, editing, re-typing, rearranging, the frustration of having to abandon large lumps of painfully constructed text when a work takes a wrong direction and, finally, the huge task of producing a clean final copy of a manuscript.

Some lucky individuals loved the process of writing: Arnold Bennett took pride in the beauty of his finished handwritten manuscripts: obviously he was robust enough to resist writer’s cramp and he achieved a prodigious output.

But separation from the physical act of writing can have its disadvantages. However much the computer has eased the writer’s task, it’s not much help when the flow of creativity comes to a stop, as it inevitably will for all but the most compulsively prolific. Often, too, wandering about the web in search of inspiration can be little more than a mildly guilty displacement activity.

One way out of this is to learn or to regain the pleasures of the act of writing. Ballpoint pens and cheap scratchpads won’t do: buy yourself a fountain pen (yes, they’re still being made) and make it the best you can afford. Then look for an old-fashioned notebook, one with smooth creamy paper and faint grey lines, preferably leather-bound with a ribbon to keep your place. They come in various sizes and you might want a small one for pocket or purse and a bigger one for your desk.

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If I had to give young writers advice I would say don’t listen to writers talking about writing or themselves.
— Lillian Hellman

‘I do want you to meet Mrs Leighton-Buzzard,’ said Mrs Bovey-Tracey, asking me to dinner the other day. ‘She’s such an interesting woman, and most unusual. She doesn’t write, you know.’
— William Plomer, Electric Delights

All human activity to me is a way of avoiding writing. Thus, I sleep as much as possible or spend a hard day lying on the sofa.
— Fran Lebowitz

The endless eBook debate grinds on and on and we do not propose to rehearse it yet again here: a host of sites are already doing that and the best illustration of the confusion and despair it provokes we have yet seen is this from Maria Langer.

Knocklofty sees two obstacles to the progress of the eBook which need to be overcome if it is to begin to fulfil its promise. The first is the need for a reader device which will do for books what the iPod did for music.

A number of devices, all with more than a degree of clunkiness, are beginning to contend for a share of an embryonic market bedevilled by incompatible formats and anachronistic business ideas. The device we would most like to see is this suggestion to Apple and we hope Steve Jobs’ wisecrack about nobody reading any more is, as is widely speculated, a ruse to conceal what may be going on in the back room.

The problem of the reader will eventually be solved. But the second obstacle is in the minds of publishers. One large Australian bookshop chain is offering a proprietary reader and a range of eBooks to go with it, but the eBooks themselves are priced at only a little less—about $5 less—than their printed equivalent. On top of that, the eBooks are subject to a digital rights management system which is as absurd as that promoted by the dinosaurs of the music industry.

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William F Buckley is dead—at last.

Writing cannot be done in a loud café or in a house chaotic with children and the plaints of a neglected spouse. Too frequently it is done in stolen moments under the pressure of avoided duty or furtively at an office desk while a supervisor is distracted.

The legends of Grub Street, a lane in Augustan London now vanished beneath the Barbican and the last resort for writers down on their luck or insufficiently talented or well-connected to do any better, are replete with tales of starving hacks, hung over from too much cheap port, scribbling frantically in a squalid garret for a grudging publisher’s guinea, surrounded by hungry brats, a wife at the end of her tether and creditors pounding on the door.

Writers need time, space and—ideally—some degree of freedom from the necessity of a disagreeable job to support themselves, as well as the willpower (or the obstinacy) to induce others to take writing seriously. The trouble with writing is that it doesn’t look like work and family and friends have no compunction in interrupting it.

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