Waste to Art

Waste to Art, in the great Forbes Town Hall.

Over the weekend, I was fortunate enough to be invited to judge the final of the Waste to Art competition in Forbes.

One of my favourites: People in Glass Houses by Tracey Fitzgerald from the Blue Mountains.

I avoided seeing the Mudgee entries when they were displayed here, so I would be unbiased when it came time to compare them to their peers from around the state, but I can reveal now that a Mudgee entry won the big first prize this year – you’ll have to read the paper this week to find out what it was.

I arrived in Forbes a little late, having had my usual driving misadventures take me off on a dirt road somewhere  after Wellington. I got to the Forbes Town Hall in time for lunch with the other judges, and then stepped into an enormous room full of all sorts of transformed objects – a very well-done music player that plugs an iPod into a gramophone; scarecrows and chicken wire dogs; miniature scenes set in lightbulbs; a chook made of broken eggshells.

[To share with you my one good joke from my judge’s speech that I think is the sole reason I’ve been invited back to judge at Bourke next year: “As a painter who always just makes coloured paints into picture of things, I feel very unimaginative when I visit Waste to Art and see a hand-cranked disco light made from a bicycle, a hat made from a bedpan, a chicken made from eggs - although I understand that last one can happen automatically.”]

Another favourite: Shattered Harvest by Christine Farmilo of Dubbo.

There were things there, from a pony sculpted in copper wire to a mirror mosaic surrounded by grape leaves made from rusty cans, that could have formed the basis for an ongoing artistic career if someone were willing to limit themselves to a single medium the way a boring painter like me does (and probably take out some insurance against a rash of tetanus cases in the customer base).

I spent a day being led back and forth around the room to find each artwork on the list, never knowing what I was about to come up against, seeing new things that I could never have invented and generally don’t have the skills to produce, and then a morning giving out the awards and being able to tell these people how much I liked their work. What could be better?

If they’ll have me back again for Bourke, I’ll be there in a flash – after the inevitable detour along a back road somewhere and back to the highway.

Into the bush

Dunn's Swamp.

Brit and I both work unusual hours, and our early starts and late finishes don’t often line up neatly.

So when we both had a few days off last week, it made sense to take advantage of it and do something extraordinary: we took off into the wilds to camp at Dunn’s Swamp – or as Brit called it when suggesting the idea, “That place that sounds disgusting but isn’t?”

I hadn’t been out there since childhood, so I only half-remembered the place as a playground of boulders and water.

The boulders impressed us even as we were driving in, and gave way to even more impressive towering cliffs. The water was broad and blue, and we found a secluded camping spot close by to pitch our tent.
Our tent, it turned out, had been loaned to us without its poles, and after some consternation we suspended it from a tree, which was surprisingly effective and gave the trip a valuable element of improvised wilderness survival.

We cooked dinner on the fire and chased the possums away from our food, eventually tucking ourselves into our tent, which stood through the night and I’m glad to say wasn’t rained on.

In fact, the weather was perfect in every way. Although the first day was cool, the night was just cold enough to make us appreciate our sleeping bags, and the following day was perfect.

In the morning I stoked up the fire again and we boiled water for coffee before frying half a dozen eggs and some toast.

We sat near the water and ate breakfast, with a marsh hen racing by us at one point holding a piece of bread in its beak, as though to say, “Check me out, losers! I got your bread!” The bird was so intent on showing off its success that it dropped half the bread before getting away, but I think its mission was still a success.

We packed up our camping gear, buried our fire in ash, and set off on some serious hiking.

Brit in the bush.

The sign at the beginning of our walk explained that it was for Experienced Hikers Only, which at first seemed to mean only that it wasn’t wheelchair accessible, or that it contained such challenges as navigating between two trees reasonably close to each other.

Eventually, though, the walk began to climb higher, a sign warned of Unfenced Cliffs and depicted a child toppling off a crumbling precipice (BEWARE: Falling Children), and the hiking part of the walk gave way to rock climbing.

We reached a plateau that let us look out over the river and bushland – which Brit was getting better at calling ‘bush’ rather than ‘forest’ – with the camping area in one small corner marked by a few yellow canoes.

As we climbed higher above the plateau, we finally reached the thrillingly dangerous cliffs promised by the signs below.

Even more than the previous view, we were now looking down into a patch of bush that we knew was rarely walked by humans.

We weren’t smart enough geologists to know how many centuries or millennia were represented by the visible layers in the sandstone, or how long it would have taken them to be eaten into their strange shapes, but we felt our bodies dwarfed by the magnitude of these rock forms, and our lives shrinking into a tiny tick on the clock of the millions of years that had shaped these natural sculptures.

Eventually, we tiny specks climbed back down a path scratched along this mountain of rock, back to the ground and a world built on our own scale.

Fight Night

Tonight I headed out to a great grape fight to celebrate the end of harvest at Mudgee’s wineries. A couple of young ladies, Lara and Gina, organised this event for the first time last year, gathering up an artillery of unused grapes for a wet, messy, sticky fruit fight called ‘Fight Night’. This year they made it bigger and better, and asked me to write a history of the Fight Night tradition to be read out during the evening. It’s largely invented – although the story of St Trifon is true, or at least not made up by me. Here it is:

The origins of Fight Night are shrouded in mystery. Is it true that early Fight Nights were quite unlike our modern celebrations, and more closely resembled an old woman wrestling a cat? Is it true that the world’s largest Fight Night involved ninety-five winemakers and resulted in two deaths and – nine months later – the birth of triplets?

For many years, Fight Night was a well-kept industry secret. Visitors to cellar doors at the right time of year might notice the winemaker black-eyed and lurking in the shadows of the barrel room, muttering something about walking into a door. Drycleaners in winemaking regions have been bewildered by the regular appearance of tuxedos and gowns smeared with paint, wine and perhaps blood. They have come closest to understanding the tradition, suspecting it resembled their own annual laundry powder skirmish.

The secret tradition emerged into the public spotlight following the carnage in Belp, Romania, in 1993. The near-destruction of the village caused a backlash against the local brother and sister winemakers, which only subsided when the quality of the vintage became apparent. Today, parts of Belp are kept in their ruined state as a memorial, children re-enact the winemakers’ destructive rampage each year at the end of harvest, and wine connoisseurs from around the world visit to retrace the steps of Bogdan and Anka Popescu.

Winemaker Petre Popescu died in 1992, leaving the vineyard in the hands of his adopted daughter Anka, a slim dark-eyed girl abandoned in the vineyard as a baby. Anka had a club foot, crossed eyes, and a small tail, but she toiled beside her adopted father and became a fine winemaker before her 18th birthday.

She filled the void at the winery left by Popescu’s son Bogdan, a handsome but irresponsible young man who had travelled the world at his father’s expense, driving the winery almost to bankruptcy, and now claimed to be learning the family trade at a small Australian vineyard in Bondi.

As Anka prepared the vineyard for the first vintage following the death of her adopted father, the prodigal Bogdan appeared, tanned, dressed in thongs and board shorts, and announcing he was taking over the winery.

After a brief argument culminating in Anka pinning her brother to the wall with a pitchfork, they each agreed to take over half the vineyard and produce separate wines, one of which would be sold as ‘The Real Popescu From Belp’, and the other as ‘No, This Is The Real Popescu From Belp’.

They pruned, they sprayed, they thinned, and just as the grapes on the two halves of the vineyard were beginning to ripen, the rain started.

And it didn’t stop.

As the rain poured down, the brother and sister stalked around the winery complex, erupting whenever they met into roaring arguments over who was to blame for the disastrous weather, or staring silently outside, waiting for the sun to reappear. In later years, Bogdan would claim he was the first to grab a bucket and run out into the rain. Anka would refuse to comment, only pointing out that Bogdan was an ass and ought to be eaten alive, slowly, by goats.

The pair raced into their separate halves of the vineyard with buckets, salvaging the best of their grapes by hand, and racing inside to empty their bucket into a vat and turn again into the driving rain and the slapping mud. They sank up to their knees in the liquid earth and raced again and again up the hill to the winery and back, slowly raising the shallow level of the grapes in their two separate vats. Finally, exhausted and cold, refusing to look at each other, having taken what they could from their vines, they showered side by side and returned to the winery. Glaring at each other over the edges of the vats, they crushed the grapes under their bare feet, squeezing out a shallow wading pool of juice.

Outside, eventually, the rain slowed and stopped, and the sun rolled out through a split in the clouds. The villagers meekly trekked up to the winery, as they did each year, to be hired as pickers, but found the place eerily silent. They shrugged and set off through the vines, taking the split and swollen fruit and piling it up at the winery door. When the work was done, still having seen neither of the siblings, they took a few bucketloads each for their payment and trudged back to the village.

Anka and Bogdan opened the door and looked at the pile of dark worthless grapes, their juice mingling with the puddles underneath. Anka lifted a bunch and picked through it for something she could use – but even she couldn’t tell whether the grapes were hers or her brother’s. She weighed up the fruit in her hand, turned to Bogdan, and hurled it at his head.

Bogdan reached down for a bunch of fruit and splattered it in his adopted sister’s face.

She threw another so roughly it knocked him off his feet, and as he lay stunned in a puddle, she dumped an armload of grapes on his head.

The war spread around the winery, brother and sister hurling fruit at each other and seeking shelter among the barrels, boxes and bottles. They raced through the vineyard, firing fruit at each other across the rows, and eventually emerged into the village.

This time witnesses from the village can confirm that Bogdan was the first to see a bucket of grapes on a villager’s windowsill and take it up as ammunition. Anka kicked in a door across the road and grabbed the grapes from the table to fire back at her brother, and they continued through Belp, wreaking havoc, breaking windows, knocking over lampposts, hurling fruit and leaving the village sticky and splattered in their wake. They raced into the church, toppling a statue of St Trifon – patron saint of viticulturists, forced to cut off his nose with pruning shears after laughing at a passing vision of the Virgin Mary.

Back through the village and up to the winery, they attacked each other with any fruit they found. When the last of it was destroyed, a peace seemed to come over them, as though St Trifon himself had cut off their tempers with his holy shears.

They looked around the grape-soaked winery, looked at their own juicy, dripping bodies, and for the first time came together and hugged like brother and sister. Or brother and adopted sister, which was perhaps a little more intimate.

They squeezed the juice from each other like sponges, then went to their vats and mixed their two juices into one. Side by side, they finished the wine and donated the first bottles to the villagers of Belp, who were still rebuilding and accepted the wine with grunts and a few hints that a little help would also be welcome.

However, when the villagers tasted the wine, they saw what connoisseurs around the world would soon realise – the Popescu siblings had produced the finest wine seen in the village for many years.

The small quantity of wine produced in Belp that year became so valued that it was enough to revive the winery’s ailing finances. The brother and sister continued their remarkable collaboration, its violent fights, and its occasional destructive forays into the village – always paying for the damage with bottles of wine.

The story is now well-known, and we are able to gather here to continue the tradition with a night of passion, violence, wine and mess at Havilah. As Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt begin work on the film version of Anka and Bogdan’s story, let us raise a glass, say a brief prayer to St Trifon to protect us in the brawl ahead – and throw our wine in a friend’s face.

Happy Fight Night!

Week-long birthday marathon

Birthday presents: A glowing rock that you can lick and a monkey!

I had my birthday last week, starting on Monday and wrapping up in the early hours of Friday morning.

The official birthday, the point at which the planet returned to roughly the position relative to the sun that it held on the day I was born, was Thursday.

My former editor wrote an early happy birthday message on my Facebook wall on Monday morning, and either confused or inspired a few other people who added similar messages.

I use Facebook constantly as an unrivalled conduit for disseminating nonsense, but it’s also had an explosive impact on the acknowledgement of birthdays.

No longer is this practice exclusively the domain of relatives, close friends and motherly types with comprehensive diaries – now any acquaintance can be inspired by a Facebook alert saying ‘so and so’s birthday is coming up’ and think, “Yes, I like my acquaintance, I will acknowledge his or her existence by congratulating him/her on the anniversary of its beginning”.

It’s very warming to have a constant stream of ‘happy birthday’ messages pouring in all day from all corners of the world, particularly on a day when many may be feeling the pressure of another year added to the heap on their shoulders.

So I was deeply moved to have my festival of acknowledgement make a false start three days early, continuing when Brit and I visited my parents for dinner that night and I was presented with a weighty stone statue for my garden as a birthday present.

I heaved it into my arms for a photo, and sweated under its weight while my mother attempted to convince her camera to take a picture.

“Happy birthday!” said Brit.

“Happy birthday to you too,” I said.

“It’s not my birthday,” she said.

“Well, it’s not mine either!”

Returning to Facebook that night, I wrote a message saying it had been a fantastic birthday that could only have been improved by falling on the anniversary of the day I was born.

This led several more people to wish me happy birthday, and led Brit to point out that I was scared of aging and had spent the whole day reminding everyone that it wasn’t my birthday.

“But it’s not my birthday!”

Anyway, the dreaded event nonetheless came round later in the week, on one of the newspaper’s busiest recent days, as we prepared for the incoming behemoth of the Country vs City rugby league match.

There wasn’t time for the usual celebratory sugarfest, and when our editor suggested pizza instead – just as I was about to run out of the office for a quick stomach-filler or begin eating my own body – we had a quick pizza break instead.

By the time Brit and I had finished running a karaoke evening – that’s another story – we made it home to find a card in the letterbox from my cousin and a present on my desk from Brit – a lamp made from a large salt rock.

(Yes, I licked it as soon as I was told what it was – “I knew you would lick it!” said Brit – and encouraged Brit to lick it right away, before I had forced everyone else who ever visits us to lick it.)

And so, finally, at about 12.30 on Friday morning, my birthday was over, I entered a new age – 28 – and I licked a lamp.

 

Noisy nights with Cinderella

I spent the weekend operating lights for the Cinderella pantomime, a smash hit that played three sold-out shows over Friday and Saturday. The only disappointment anyone could have taken away from the performance was that it couldn’t continue for a second weekend.

The arrangement of the lighting facilities in the Club Mudgee auditorium meant my little lighting desk was established on the floor just off the edge of the stage – giving me a front-row view of the audience.

One audience member told me during interval that I was laughing so much it was as though I hadn’t seen the show before, and it was only later that I realised it was probably the constantly improvised performance by the audience that was really keeping me amused.

The play started off with a few directions for the people seated in the auditorium – telling them to boo and hiss when they heard the stepmother’s sinister theme music, and a subtle hint or two that if you felt like yelling at someone on stage, you should go for it.

Pantomime has experienced such a hearty revival in Mudgee since Little Red Riding Hood a few years ago that children must be accustomed to theatre being interactive and chaotic and a little messy.

One little boy was so swept up with the idea of roaring his disapproval when he heard a bar of keyboard music that a few romantic notes when the Prince met Cinderella had him booing and hissing – leaving the poor Prince feeling as though he wasn’t the people’s choice to marry his fair heroine.
A small girl at one performance, though, found some of the interaction a little daunting – when the ugly stepsisters ventured into the audience to attack with waterguns and glitter, she was not so much thrilled and amused as terrified and hysterically crying, although she seemed to enjoy the rest of the show – even the sisters, as long as they stayed on stage.

And when it came time to shout “Behind you” as a few characters were shadowed by enormous red-backed spiders, the uproar from the crowd simply had to replace any attempt at speaking the written lines.

A pantomime’s success is probably best measured in decibels.

Working it out

I didn’t write a column for the Guardian this week, so I’m taking the opportunity to write a blog post that can get away with being less entertaining.

Having postponed the production date of my play, I took a bit of a break from working on its script, because I’d been wearing myself out by staying up late with it, then putting in a long day at the office, then repeating.

I was also stressing as I realised I had a lot more to write and the date was closing in, and that made me haggard and sleepless too.

A few people mentioned that I was looking tired and unwell.

So when someone finally said to me, “Look, can you really do this?” it broke the surface beneath which had been swimming the idea that, “No, we need to postpone it.”

So we put it off until the script was done, and I took a break.

In my break, I’ve been catching up on things I’ve promised people and haven’t had time to touch while I’ve been devoted to the script – one last newsletter for the local arts organisation, some backdrops for a pantomime, a life-sized cut-out figure for a museum, an entry for the art section of a small town show.

Brit’s pointed out that I need a break from my break now, because if anything it’s involved more than the usual amount of running around and digging out tools and disappearing for two days to work on something in someone else’s shed.

But it’s also involved sitting down with Brit to watch TV over dinner, which has been well-timed, and not only because there are finally new episodes of Community, but because we both needed to sit down with someone now and just watch some TV.

It’s even involved wandering out on Saturday morning to the markets, talking, enjoying the sun, all those things that I know are actually the secret to happiness and which I shun for the sake of twenty-four hours of work every day.

But those little creative jobs are what I like to do to relax – you can’t top the feeling of making something good and sending it out into the world, and they provide the simple joy of creation untempered by concerns about perfection and worthiness.

It’s been good to finish these small things, to take on a project like the pantomime backdrops, which involved using two colours of paint to make five boards into a tumbledown manor and some trees and hills, and which were done in two afternoons, ten hours – much less time than it would have taken me to paint one tiny little pen and wash.

Ordinarily, I get tied up in details. I come to hate the big projects I’m working on when they’re not perfect, and just barely tolerate them when painstaking care and hours of time have ensured that they actually are perfect.

I wear myself out.

It’s also not easy to do while I’m working full time. Since going back to work, this is the second time I’ve had to accept that I can’t finish a major project because the deadline is too close.

That was a painful thing to realise, because I’ve only attempted two major projects in that time.

I can’t blame the office entirely, because I’ve always pushed deadlines too far and often missed them, and it’s something I need to overcome for myself.

But it’s painful to see that I’m not overcoming it. I’m not managing to work at the level I want to be.

In my break, it’s been good to see that I can finish things, I can be happy producing good work.

I needed to rediscover what I like about it to remind myself why it’s worth pushing harder and putting real work into the thing you love to make it bigger and better.

It’s all about balancing the joy of art and the work of it, as well as deadlines, as well as the rest of life – it’s a delicate cocktail, and I haven’t quite got the recipe figured out yet.

Stopping to smell the pizza

Journalists spend a lot of time racing around, trying to fit a huge number of phone calls and visits into every day before hurrying back to write it all down before deadline.

Every now and then, we do get to stop and smell the roses at the flower show, or be stuffed with slices and sandwiches at a CWA meeting.

Every now and then we let a pleasant job take perhaps a few minutes more than it needs – one of my best journalistic experiences of the last year involved an entire morning spent with the girls from Mudgee Made, following the process of macaron-making from beginning to end (the end being me eating numerous macarons and being the star of the office when I returned with boxes of them).

But sometimes there’s no chance for anything like that.

On Thursday last week I had to race from one lunch to another – from an International Women’s Day celebration to a feast at Lowe Wines – so I could photograph and chat with people eating, but had no time to join them, even though they both offered me a plate – even the women, who had every right to see me as an intruder and a natural enemy. In the office before I left, it was assumed they would mistake me for the stripper, but it turned out not to be that kind of function.

(I’m not actually as food-obsessed as these stories make me sound; not all my best memories revolve around accepting food from kindly strangers.)

I came back to the office, saved my photos, typed up the details of the day’s events, and as my stomach started to eat itself out of desperation, I lurched out of the office and bought myself a mini-pizza for a late four o’clock lunch.

As I was taking my pizza back across Byron Place to cram it whole into my mouth with one hand while typing up a story with the other, I heard a voice call my name.

Sitting on a bench in the middle of Byron Place was a young man called Steve, the BEC’s famously patient teacher of essential computer skills, who readers may have watched jealously as he pedals his motorised trike-bike around town.

Steve started telling me about progress on the upcoming pantomime, so I sat down and gave him a piece of pizza.

As Steve talked slowly and placidly, I slowed down too, and we sat in the sun and I crammed the rest of the pizza into my mouth and the sun beamed down and people wandered by and everything became peaceful and warm.

I finished my late lunch, said goodbye to Steve, and went back to the office calm and ready to finish the day.

I don’t know, it’s probably true – all my stories are about eating.

Spam scam

I have four email addresses for various reasons, and one of them has recently been targeted by spam robots and become a repository for barely comprehensible pharmaceutical advice. It’s a mess, and I get about twenty spam emails for every real email, meaning my real emails are hardly worth the effort it takes to dig them out.

Until now, I’ve enjoyed spam, especially when it has a creative absurdist streak or is an especially well done invitation to click on some inevitably infected hyperlink.

In the play that I’m currently working on (which I’ve realised I’m still going to be working on for some time, so we‘ve prudently postponed the production until after the script is complete – watch this space for further details), I decided to use a common email scam as a plot point, although I’ve transposed it to the 1930s and attached it to a more traditional grifter.

The scam is as follows: somebody emails you to tell you that a wealthy man has died without an heir and the emailer has access to the great man’s brimming bank account. He has somehow selected you to share it with him, gentle reader, and he doesn’t say how but perhaps he saw your honest face in your facebook pictures, or the poem you posted on your poetry journal, and he just wanted to do you a good deed.

Not long after I decided to use this plot in my play, two of these emails popped into my inbox one day and I decided to reply to one (before you startthinking this is how my email address ended up being flooded with pharmaceutical spam, let me assure you I used a false name and false email and the two events are unconnected).

I wrote back to Mr Victor Cheng, who wanted to share with me the fortune of Amer Ali Nayef. Cleverly, Amer Ali Nayef is a real person, and Mr Victor Cheng was able to point me to a BBC article on his death in Iraq. Victor Cheng is actually the CEO of a major Chinese bank, and my emailer said I could call him to assure myself he was real, but that I should hang up after his receptionist put me through, because the bank’s lines were bugged. If I reached him, he would deny any knowledge of our plan to divide up Amer Ali Nayef’s riches. Naturally!

We were reaching the point where he would tell me that he needed a small amount of money for bank fees before he transferred this astounding unnamed sum to me, when Mr Victor Cheng emailed me a huge wad of fake paperwork to sign and I decided this was too much work for a throwaway joke in a play.

I stopped replying, and after a few concerned emails, Mr Victor Cheng stopped writing.

Last night, though, in one final attempt to sway me, Mr Victor Cheng sent me more fake paperwork to sign to give up my part in this lucrative operation.

I was confused at first and wondered whether he was just an innocent paperwork fetishist whom I had misunderstood. But when I read his passive aggressive clause “this is as a result of my inability to meet up with the requirement fee” and the alluring long-awaited exact figure of “twenty two million five hundred thousand United State dollars”, I realised this was meant to be the moment I realised what I was missing and jumped at my chance again.

I didn’t.

Take A Camera Along

I have a cunning secret technique that allows me to be paid to do anything I want, and I call it Take A Camera Along.

The camera technique also allows me to go to events and places that intrigue me, but where I have no sensible reason to be.

I used both aspects of the Take A Camera Along technique on Saturday afternoon, when I went straight from the launch of John Broadley’s book Historic Houses of Mudgee to the most controversially named reunion barbecue in local history, the Wollar Wake.

I’m proud to have had a tiny involvement in Historic Houses of Mudgee, with two of my paintings being featured on the book’s front and back covers.

The pictures, of local historic homesteads Havilah and Binnawee, were some of my earliest commissions – and probably helped to turn my paintings in the direction they’ve taken.

So I would have been at the launch whether or not I’d taken my camera, but I went armed with pen and pad, and our photographer Sandy (known around town as “that lady with the camera”) was also there – so watch the paper for the full report this week, this time without making it all about my paintings on the cover.

The book launch at Putta Bucca House was a mammoth event – I guess after working on it for 20 years, John had built up a lot of expectation. The book itself is very impressive, and I’m not even saying that because of the cover – if anything, the contents are even better.

I was proud again to be mentioned as the author recalled teaching me in high school and scolding me for drawing in class and not paying attention – before adding, “Now I’m glad he didn’t pay attention.”

With the crowd gathered there to celebrate what I guess is a book’s equivalent of a christening, I was able to talk to a huge number of my favourite people and it took me an hour to walk from one end of the garden to the other and back again.

From there I headed out to the Wollar Wake, a big overnight party open to anyone who had lived in Wollar during the town’s 127 years of history.

I turned down the wrong street coming into the little town, but assumed I would notice the gathering as I got closer. Then I started to see the children in the streets, the tents, the rows of vehicles… I had to nose the car through flocks of pedestrians to even get close to the hall where it was all happening.

If the book launch was mammoth, the Wollar Wake was gargantuan.

I’m told organisers of the Glen Willow community open day were happy to see that they had 800 people come through the turnstiles. The Wollar Wake organisers coincidentally prepared 800 name tags and ran out in the middle of the afternoon while people were still streaming in. Expect to see that detail somehow slipped into this week’s newspaper coverage!

The Wake itself was never meant to be a controversial event – to the disappointment of the major tabloids who swooped on it looking for a tale of Battlers in Despair. It was meant to be a party.

There was music in the hall, there were old folks telling stories, there were young folks I knew at school returning to the land of their forefathers. There were children running rings round the crowd, and balloons bobbing up to meet the clouds.

I hardly even want to tell you the people I met there,  because they’re going to make another thrilling stack of stories for this week’s newspaper, but I was very glad that my pen, pad and camera gave me an excuse to drive out to Wollar and enjoy some of the festivities.

Making theatre out of stars and strife

Brit was watching a piece of video from 1987, in which a man mentioned a musical he’d been working on for 11 years, featuring the planets of the solar system as his characters. My immediate reaction was “I’m going to steal that guy’s idea.”

Assuming he’s been working on this piece since 1976 and we still haven’t seen it, I think it’s safe to assume it’s never going to be finished and the idea is up for grabs.

I can see the solar system as a family, characterised by both their planetary and Olympian natures.

Picture Pluto – probably already a mopey melancholic, having borrowed his name from the god of the underworld – judged to be no longer a planet and thrown out of the family.

Cranky Mars, lusty Venus, the whole family calling it a year every time they make a full circuit of the dinner table.

Then there’s old familiar planet Earth with his little friend, the Moon – and Jupiter, the patriarch, perhaps surrounded at all times by a swarm of 66 moons, or just keeping an eye on them out the window as they play in the backyard: “Io, leave Ganymede alone!”

I have an eye out for theatrical concepts at the moment, as I’m in the middle of writing a new play to stage in the next couple of months.

It’s going to be a 1930s-style screwball comedy, if I can just keep talking planets from breaking through and turning it into an outer space musical.

This is also the reason I don’t mind throwing around all these stellar (get it?) ideas like so much space junk – because honestly, I’m busy, and I’d be relieved if someone stole this idea from me the way I stole it from Mr 1987, so I could just go see the show when it’s finished.

I have a lot of theatrical friends in Sydney, and for a couple of years everyone would take an annual road trip up to Mudgee, we’d storm the costume shop, and we’d put on a show.

We haven’t done it for a few years – I’ve had enough to do in Mudgee without pulling anything in from out of town – but a few people got together in the city and decided it was time.

This isn’t meant to be an ad, so I won’t say when and where it will be staged – although that’s all arranged – and I won’t urge you to come out for a thrilling night of entertainment.

But I’ll tell you I’ve been working on the script, and I’ve been fighting off the temptation of brilliant ideas for interplanetary musicals being delivered to me from the late 1980s.

I’ve been procrastinating, I’ve been rolling scenes around in my mind, I’ve been taking long evening walks to break through writer’s block – and I can tell you, that works. I’ve been marching around the house searching for jokes. I’ve been shuffling scenes around on the computer. I’ve been pulling out books from my bookshelf that I know make passing references to the stuff of which my script is made.

It should be finished and into rehearsal in a matter of days – if I can stay focused. Does anyone want a good idea from 1987?