 Merino: a work-in-progress
Six chapters of a new novel by Merrill Findlay as published in Eucalypt
No. 2, Australian
Studies Centre, 1st Universitat de Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain
Bo's in her studio. It's morning and the long, dull boom of a fog horn is signalling the approach of another ship. A towering hulk nudges the sill of her far window and begins its slow passage across her view, the rusty bow and 'midship stacked with brightly coloured containers followed by the lazy stern. The vessel fills her nineteenth-century window frames one by one, and slowly disappears, but the traces of its passing, the oily ripples and opalescing bow-waves, linger in the estuary, this City of Melbourne's port. Read on >> [pdf 130kb]
This novel has been put on hold while I complete more pressing literary projects, including a 'narrative meditation' on Australia's 2001 'Tampa Affair'.
Field research for Merino was undertaken in Spain in 2000 after my sojourn as a guest writer at the Australian Studies Centre, Departament de Filologia Anglesa i Alemanya, 1st Universitat de Barcelona, Catalonia, for the Changing Geographies: Australia and the millennium conference.
My research on Spanish merinos in Estramadura for this novel was facilitated through the Australian Association of Stud Merino Breeders and its Spanish equivalent, the Associacion Nacional de Criadores de Ganado Merino. I would like to particularly thank Carol-Ann Malouf in Australia and Florencio Barajas Vazquez in Spain for helping me with this.
Please note that the characters in my fiction bear no relationship to the people I met in Spain. The characters are entirely fictional and it is presumptuous to assume otherwise.
Related content
Read my article, Merinos as cultural heritage, written for the Stud Merino Breeders journal, Top Sire, on my return from Spain:
It
looked so familiar at first. Ewes grazing contentedly on the
early spring grass, snowy lambs cavorting beneath the sheltering
trees ... but even to me, a bush-born and bred city-based writer... More >>
Read my 'non-paper', Literature as a tourist asset, presented at the 2000 Barcelona conference before I set out for Estramadura to look at sheep:
The first dawn of what we in the 'West' now call the Year 2000 began far too early for me, at 3.15 a.m. to be precise, with an adolescent rooster testing his testosterone in the chook yard and the much-too-close nocturnal emissions of a warbling willie wagtail. A pause just long enough for this new century to emerge from darkness into half-light, and then a screeching, screaming helicopter gun ship squadron of sulphur crested cockatoos, and a pair of delinquent kookaburras giggling hysterically at me from the nearest gum tree. More >>
Other fiction by Merrill Findlay >>
Merrill's non-fiction >>
Page created 18 January 2008. |