Gillian Polack's Blog, page 75

gillpolack @ 2014-03-19T19:05:00

First of all, I owe Siv, Anita and Luke an apology for mentioning them, and quite probably I owe Marcia Langton one too. I was trying to come to terms with something complex and I was offensive in the way I did it. I've put the post under flock so that people can see how I was wrong. From now on, my progress in understanding these matters will be pursued purely privately.

Of the various things I did wrong, two need to be pointed out in particular. First, I posted about a delicate subject when it is not something I am expert in and there are a lot of missteps I could make. And I made those missteps. Those missteps hurt people, especially when those people didn't know the particular contexts of what I was saying.

Secondly, when I was looking at my personal comfort levels, I totally didn't realise that this would look like playing the 'good Aborigine' card. In cases like this, it's not what one means that counts, it's very much how things look. And I was wrong.

I apologise unreservedly. I am deeply sorry for any hurt I've given. The fact that it was not intentional is totally immaterial, for all the reasons I've been talking about for a while. I don't know the stereotypes that Indigenous Australians have to live with, and so, in musing in public, I fell into the idiot mistake of using them without even knowing.

I'm so sorry. I will try very hard not to put my own wish to understand ahead of other peoples' real concerns.

Women's History Month - guest post by Kate Forsyth

People keep forgetting to give me biographical statements this year. I want to invent wildly, but I'm not sure that you would believe me if I told you that Kate Forsyth is an aviator by day, a vampire by night and a writer only at dusk and dawn. Or that she comes from a writing family, and her sister also publishes. Or that she's seven foot tall and has purple skin. Or that she runs writing retreats in the UK. Or that she lives in Sydney. Ignore the bio, even though some of it might well be true. Go straight to her books and read them. Instantly.

Incidentally, this piece was first written for Random House. And this introduction was brought to you by Gillian's Evil Other. Or maybe only bits of it were.

I stumbled across the story of Wilhelm Grimm and Dortchen Wild quite by accident one day.

I was busy researching the sources of Rapunzel, one of the Grimm brothers’ best-known fairytales, for my novel BITTER GREENS, which I was then writing.

I had bought a book called Clever Maids: The Secret History of the Grimm Fairy Tales by the US writer and academic, Dr Valerie Paradiž, little knowing that I had just changed the course of my own life.

Clever Maidsdebunks the myth that the Grimm brothers travelled the German countryside, collecting stories from old shepherds tending their flocks, and elderly peasant women rocking by the fire, their fingers busy with their knitting. Instead, it revealed most of the stories were told to the Grimm brothers by their friends and neighbours – young, middle-class women.

One of these young women was Dortchen Wild. She grew up next door to the Grimms in the small medieval market-square of Hessen-Cassel. She was just 19 years old when she began telling Wilhelm the stories she knew – tales that are now known the world over, tales like ‘Hansel and Gretel, Rumpelstiltskin, The Frog King, and Six Swans. They fell in love, but were forbidden to marry. It would take another thirteen years of war, death, famine and heartbreak until, at last, the two were free to marry and build a life together.

I knew as soon as I read about Dortchen Wild that I had to write a novel based on her life.

I didn’t realise what a challenge this would be!

The world knows very little about the Wild family – unlike the Grimms, who have been researched exhaustively.

We know – thanks to Dr Paradiž – that Dortchen had five sisters and one brother, and that she grew up in a rambling old house above her father’s apothecary shop. We know that her father was a stern man who had a famous garden in which he grew many plants for use in his remedies.

We also know that Dortchen had a childhood crush on Wilhelm which she confessed in a letter to Lotte Grimm, his younger sister.

We know that they met in 1805 and married in 1825.

It was not much to weave a tale with.

So began a long, arduous research process that hit setback after setback.

I wrote to Dr Paradiž asking if she had any further research that may be of use to me. She told me that she had moved house, and thrown every single bit of work she had done on Clever Maids into the garbage bin.

I hired a German translator to help me with research on the ground in Germany. He was hit by a car, and spent months in rehabilitation.

I found a German academic who specialised in Grimm research. He promised to find out what I needed to know and email me back within the week. I never heard from him again. I think he died. Or changed his email address to avoid my increasingly anxious queries.

Gradually, I began to piece together the key details of Dortchen’s life. I found mentions of her in footnotes and in academic essays. I read her birth records and realised that the official date of her birth was wrong by three years. I realised that the kingdom of Hessen-Cassel was one of the first to fall to Napoleon’s Grand Army, and – not knowing a thing about Napoleon – set about discovering everything I could about him. I identified which stories she had told Wilhelm, and when – and then I read them over and over again, wondering about the girl who could tell such beautiful and frightening tales. I puzzled over the darkness at the heart of many of her stories. I imagined her telling them to Wilhelm, these stories of thwarted desire and abandonment and silenced women. I imagined how Dortchen and Wilhelm might have begun to fall in love. I thought very deeply about what stories are really for – why do we tell them? Why do we want to hear them? What power do they hold?

One day, searching blindly through the internet for more background on the Wild family, I stumbled across a blog by a German cartoonist and artist named Irmgard Peters. With the help of Google Translate, I read a story she had posted about a small white cot that had been passed down through her family for generations. Dortchen Wild and her sisters had slept in that cot as young children, when they were first told the stories that later became the backbone of the Grimm brother’s fairy tale collection.

I wrote to Frau Peters in high excitement. She wrote back to me and confirmed that she was the descendant of Rudolf Wild, Dortchen’s older brother. Over the next few years she shared with me many snippets of family lore, sent me photos of family portraits, and translated many German texts for me, including Wilhelm’s unpublished diary.

With her help, I was able to uncover many aspects of Dortchen and Wilhelm’s romance that nobody had ever known before . . . and so was able to bring to life one of the great untold love stories of history . . .

gillpolack @ 2014-03-18T17:44:00

Sometimes I think that the writing world is a magnet for people who are so highly individual and even eccentric that they just won't fit anywhere else. I, of course, am not like that. I am benign and dull and terribly, terribly ordinary. Except when I'm not. Which is seldom. Mostly I'm benign and dull and terribly, terribly ordinary. (If I say this one more time, it will be true.)

What brought this insight is work on Chapter Four, where I was faced with a selection of writerly thought from a dozen different writers. Very respectable and successful figures totally ignoring marketability of their work as a factor in its production and saying "What bloody use is that?" Except they say it politely and with charm. A couple have pointed out, bluntly, that if they wrote primarily for a specified market, the fun would be drained out and their writing would be the lesser.

I want a bunch of editorial boards with whom I have had recent discussion to read my Chapter Four. I really do. I do not see that draining the fun out for writers is a sensible way to approach an impossibly-upside-down industry*.

I suspect this means I need to finish it sooner, rather than later.




*Someone obviously needs to write the editor/publisher book that balances these bits of my writerly book. And, to be honest, the editors are mostly cool as individuals, but feel trapped by the current market. We have some rather bad problems emerging that will lose us good writers entirely or will lose the reader/writer match you get from known publishing houses. What do I mean "Will"? It's happening right now.

gillpolack @ 2014-03-18T13:29:00

I'm running late on WHM because I've spent the morning trying to sort out othering. I didn't mean to do this, but the book came to hand and the discussions were online at the right time, and I do need to understand it better for something later this year, so it certainly wasn't wasted time.

While working, I finally determined why I am so very intimidated by Marcia Langton: she looks at the camera and tells me what I think about her and about matters Indigenous. The fact that she's wrong about me almost 100% of the time is irrelevant. I have been placed as "White Other Who Thinks These Things" and I am cowed.

I once was cowed by someone who looked as she was doing precisely the same thing, and so I tackled this directly (by asking her, for she's one of life's wonderful people). "Don't you know I don't mean you?" she asked. I couldn't know she didn't mean me, but she couldn't know that with my background I was unlikely to assume that, either. How could she know my background on such things, when I belong to a minority myself? And thus is confusion born. Also, thus is confusion unravelled, by simple asking and answering of the right questions.

These days, when I see my friend getting angry about idiot white feminists, I know she's not talking about me. It helps. It means I can see past the rhetoric to what she's actually doing, which is complex and interesting. One day I shall ask her if she would mind writing me a guest post, and then you will be able to see for yourself.

I suspect Langton has other intent to my friend. Langton manages to communicate big picture stuff and to challenge establishment. For this, she needs rock-strong views and simple explanations. And I wonder, when I listen to her, if she understands that othering is not just something that happens to people she knows. I don't know about this last - the rhetoric and the strength of what she says, however, is undeniable. Also undeniable is the need in Australia for someone who can say these things, and who can be argued with. Every time she makes me feel small, she is liberating many others from the need to explain their everyday. She's saving them from my Christmas situation at the least and from far uglier stuff at the most.

I hate being othered. It happens to me so often and I still hate it. I never get accustomed to it. In fact, I was trying (and failing) to explain to someone the other day that I get more and more sensitive - it's like picking at a wound. But there are some types of othering that are important. They challenge us to check our own assumptions. They help us define our privilege and to live in a more complex and kinder world.

Langton does this kind of othering. It's mostly good and always uncomfortable. She's not on my dinner party list, but I admire her. My personal heroes are people like Luke Pearson and Siv Parker and Anita Heiss, who help us address the same questions without diminishing anyone, but that's a much more difficult thing to do and I rather suspect that we need people like Langton as bedrock.

The equation is good - three people I'll have dinner with anytime to only one who totally intimidates me.

The second part of my morning was dealing with Philippa Gregory's approach to history. I was distracted by her fondness for witchcraft and incest, but I think I might have it sorted now. This sorting isn't for anything directly, but no doubt it will feed into my work.

My afternoon's work is all about writers and fiction again. And this evening I was thinking of dipping my toe in the waters of epic.

Contemplating the small things and their effects

The next-to-final stage in recovering from a really bad chest infection is for me to be so tired it feels like I've got glandular fever all over again. That's my body's signal to sleep things off. This is why I'm here, at my desk, and not at the march in March (this and the gammy leg). If I don't sleep it off, then I get into yet another round of inflammatory pain, you see, and I really don't need that.

What happened was this morning I thought my body was telling me to get an extra hour's sleep after the neighbour woke me up. Four hours later, my aches have finally diminished.

If today is still too tired for original work, then I'll do what I did yesterday (which is why a couple of people know I wasn't sure if I'd make it to the march today) and edit. If I'm somewhere between the two, then I'll write.

I think there's a lesson in this about finding out what is causing aches and pains. I got this virus over two weeks before the Sydney interview and assumed that I was just reacting to lack of sleep when they changed to something else. Then I assumed I was just nervous about Sydney, when I probably should have been on antibiotics already. Sometimes infections don't show the obvious symptoms and they don't do so for obvious reasons: a very deep chest infection can produce asthma attacks, but no coughing.

There's also a lesson in how much one can do when not well (lots!) and how much needs redoing when the brain returns (some, but not as much as I'd feared) and how many plates and dishes one can destroy before one realises that being perimenopausal (for it has returned) combines very excitingly with lack of breathing to cause interesting accidents. I've been telling people I needed to diminish my possessions, and this is certainly one way of doing it.

What I intend to do this afternoon is sit in my comfy chair in front of my netbook, and just dribble away at work. I will make inroads, even if it's only a few paragraphs an hour or I only clean up typing issues.

This method works, in a funny way. I used it when I was finishing that first doctorate. I developed glandular fever (mono) in my final year and my deadlines were unchangeable and my father was dying (which is one of the several reasons I ended up in Canberra rather than in the US working as a Medievalist). I did any final research in bed (for we used books almost always, back then), and my computer was on the desk less than five feet from the bed, and I dragged myself to the computer the moment I could sit up straight, and I did as much typing as my body/brain allowed and then I napped and read and napped and read some more.

I think this is why I was stupid about the virus. Once one does something, it's easier to fall into known patterns than to say "I can do something about this." I say this from the wise perspective of a morning asleep and from the wonderful vantage point of my breathing starting to properly return. It looks like yawning, but from inside it's parched lungs gulping new air.

By Wednesday, I'll have to find real excuses to complain, or maybe I'll just get back to normal life. Wednesday's going to be fun, though, so I don't mind having nothing to complain about. My students will have an excursion, and I myself will be doing the first three modules of the ANU's Educational Fellowship Scheme. I would've done this sick (for I am not infectious), but it's going to be much easier with more air and less ache inside me.

Women's History Month - guest post by Alex Isle

My name is Alex Isle. I changed it from Sue just over a year ago because I finally had the guts to explain to everyone that I didn't like my name! I am a writer of sf/fantasy, mostly short fiction, but also a short YA novel and a children's book about wolf children. My latest claim to fame is a series of stories about an abandoned Perth, called Nightsiders. My blog is at Apocalypse With Rats.


This paragraph is added after the rest was written. I had no idea some of the things I commented on were about to become contentious. They are in the area of gender politics. I'm not trying to offend anyone. This is simply my take on history I have read.

I was trying to think who I could write about. Names of famous women scientists, doctors, judges and so on. Trailblazing achievements and worthy of admiration but difficult to relate to for somebody who was really bad at science/maths at school.

Then I thought of Mary Read (b.1691- d.1721). Mary was no role model. She was likely considered a really bad person in the view of the British Navy and/or judiciary of the early 1700s. She, with her friend and co-accused Anne Bonny, formed one of the very few female buddy pairs known to history. They helped to run a pirate ship.

They're usually spoken of as a team, but records show they only met a year before their luck was up. Unlike Anne, Mary had early practice at passing for a boy. This was an age where the roles of men and women were so rigidly defined that it was illegal for them to wear one another's clothing. Even so, quite a few women worked out that to pass as men was the only way to get what they wanted.

There is so much written about historical fashion that I'm not going to get heavily into that. Go read some. Clothing was more tied to social class and gender than it is now. You were what you wore. If you had the guts to break what must have been incredibly strong conditioning, then you were home free. People saw a person in trousers and coat and assumed male. They saw what they expected to see. A common thread in such stories of cross-dressing is that such women, for example females who fought in the American Civil War (1860-1856), maintained their ruse for years, sometimes their entire lives, without discovery. I do remember one story where the girl concerned was known to be female by her squad mates and did domestic tasks for them in exchange for help with the heavy lifting, but the officers had no idea.

It's certainly not this easy for pre-surgery transgender folk to pass today, where the boundaries are blurred and people are more used to seeing the smaller tells without realising that they're doing it. So was Mary transgender or merely practical, adopting male dress when it suited her and back to female when it did not?

Mary was disguised as a boy when a small child, by her mother who needed to present a son to get an inheritance. Mary's brother had died, so she took his place. When she was older, her mother asked whether she wanted to give up the pretence and become a normal girl in 1700s British society. Mary, who had grown used to the freedoms of males, refused. From that time she never looked back and had a varied and exciting life from her teenage years on. At one point she was married and ran an inn until her husband's death, after which it was back to passing as a male once more.

When Mary joined the crew of Captain Jack Rackham aboard the pirate ship Vanity, it was as a young man, but her secret became known when the captain's wife, Anne, became interested in "him." Perhaps the two had a relationship, perhaps not; it isn't known for sure, but I would love to have been a fly on the wall in the captain's cabin when the three of them worked out what the truth was!

When the pirates were at last apprehended by the British Navy, Mary escaped the gallows, with her fellow male-disguised pirate Anne by a very female means – they were both pregnant and a pregnant woman could not be hanged, by British law. I wonder whether this stuck in Mary's craw, to do this, to return to the severely limited life of a woman, in order to save her own life. Legend has it she died in prison, but actual information is very sketchy on this. Anne is supposed to have escaped or been ransomed by her father, but also, nobody now knows for sure.

Mary and Anne didn't achieve wonders in science or discovery; they simply lived their lives as fully as they wanted to do, holding their own in the violent world of 18th century piracy. They were not good or worthy people, perhaps – accounts suggest the male pirates on the Vanity were scared to death of them - and the word "hellcat" is mentioned in evidence. Even so, they were very cool.

gillpolack @ 2014-03-16T09:35:00

I've discovered the underlying pattern in my recreational reading. When I have miserable dreams about the world leaving me behind or about being forever-Cinderella, I borrow paranormal fiction (this week, Carrie Vaughn, which was my dreams chatting with WHM). When my dreams are not quite so despairing and my sleep is fractured, I borrow the books I've been meaning to read for a while (if I'm not going to sleep, then by golly, I'm going to read the new Margaret Atwood). When my dreams are troubled but not undermining (troubled last night because of a big weather shift, for instance) I go straight to the library website and order up books that fill a hole in my understanding of something. This time it's on how other people teaching writing at university level, for I'm not happy with my understanding of how some university methods operate. (My teaching update needs to be balanced at the subject level.)

I can't afford to dream now until I've reduced my library orders to a smaller size, for I've reached my limit.

So my extra book for the day is a Kitty book. My most-of-the-day is my own writing. My history-into-fiction for the day was supposed to be The White Queen, but I find I can't deal with more than 3 episodes in a sitting and I saw four episodes yesterday and, like my library card, I have reached my limit. This means I shall spend more of the day writing, to the background of whatever background DVD I have out from the library.*

The Women's History Month post will be up later today, because you've had so many posts in such a short time and I'm *such* a nice person...




*I borrow DVDs specially for this task. I grew up in a noisy family. One seldom created in sacrosanct study places, one did what one could in stray moments and noisy environments. I got to work in the caravan for part of Year 12 simply because there was so much paper involved and one cannot colonise the usual surfaces for more than an hour in a big family, but all the rest of the time I learned to deal with background noise and movement. This led, inevitably, to me doing all my tutorial reading as an undergraduate when I was travelling to and from university (6-9 hours of my week which mostly did the trick - the advantage of being a fast reader who has learned to deal with noise), which resulted in more time for university clubs, which got me into all kinds of interesting situations. I write long fiction better without background everything, but I write stuff of the kind I'm writing now better in front of television. And I write short fiction almost anywhere, but not very often.

gillpolack @ 2014-03-15T21:35:00

A very long time ago there lived a rich and powerful king. His name was Ahasuerus, but no-one could pronounce it. Even his friends found it difficult to say. They called him Harry. All his servants called him the PM - standing for Persian Monarch - acronyms were just coming into fashion around then. He ruled over 127 provinces.

Harry lived in Shushan and generally ignored the provinces, except when he wanted something from them. Mostly it was taxes. Occasionally he collected a concubine or two, but generally he preferred good solid gold. His favourite miner was a young lady called Gina – she’s a bit older now. The reason he ignored the provinces was because he was too busy spending the taxes and his newly-mined gold on feasts. He also bought rights to a house elf called Dobby.

When he’d done all this, he was hungry. Tea-breaks just weren't good enough for someone in his line of work, he decided. It was a hard job, ruling.

The PM got rid of the tea-ladies and sacked Mr CMOT Dibbler, whose family had a long pedigree of making Persian sausages. Harry brought in banquet-management and promoted his new-found friend, Dobby, who hadn’t managed to stay bought for very long. Dobby organised the feasts, or delegated them to junior house-elves (for as a free elf, he was unionised). The unfree elves brought in contractors to do the job. Harry never remembered to invite the contractors and refused to give the unfree elves his spare socks. They weren't too happy about this, but there wasn't much they could do except grumble, or give the job to someone even further down the hierarchy the next time, or, in the case of a young contractor called Katniss Everdeen, to overthrow the establishment – but that’s another story.

Eventually a lowly branch of servants called D.o.P.E. came to exist, standing for Department of Private Entertainment. The head of the DOPE looked remarkably like Gillian’s nephew and was named Conan. Everyone thought he was a barbarian. He answered to Dobby, of course.

Harry mostly wasn't worried that he didn't pay for the feasts himself, or even organise them. After all, he was king and he had dreadful insomnia. He also poisoned lots of enemies. His most recent successful poisoning let him gloating, but didn’t help the headache. The world was a better place now that Harold, the invisible dog was dead. A small banquet here and another there was but tiny reward for the dreadful impositions of duty.

Archaeologists were never invited to the feasts either. They weren't worried by this. For one thing, they were too poor to pay taxes. For another, they had a dreadful habit of waiting till any big event had been over for a thousand years or so and then digging it all up again. Whenever Harry threw a feast, the archaeologists threw a sort of pre-university academic gathering, where they would get drunk and tell everyone else exactly how they would go about the excavation for this particular dig.

They were advised by a strange Englishman, who wasn’t at all worried that he hadn’t been born yet, for he was too busy analysing the not-yet-buried material at the pre-dig party. He predicted very precise futures from this material and swore that when he finally legally existed, he would become a superlatively brilliant detective. He would also be played by Benedict Cumberbatch.

The archaeologists were always writing letters to American universities asking for funding. Marvin the Paranoid Archaeologist (who looked strangely like Gillian’s nephew) said depressingly “This is not going to get anywhere.”

Each of these letters was carefully written on clay tablets and passed from hand to hand until it was so smudged with corrections that they had to start all over again. Each time they started over, Marvin the paranoid Archaeologist would announce how miserable it all was, that his tremendous brain was wasted on such measly matters, and that it would fail miserably. Sometimes someone got sick of all of this and they tried sending a tablet after only five or so drafts.

There was never any answer anyway. Ancient Persian archaeologists thought too much about the overall picture and forgot local chronology. Except for Marvin the Paranoid Archaeologist, who knew everything. America hadn't been discovered by Europeans. In fact, Europe had hardly been discovered by Europeans either.

When no-one answered these carefully expressed letters they got huffy and pretended they didn't really need the funding anyway.

One day Harry decided to throw a drunken orgy along with one of his banquets. Dobby disapproved. The archaeologists used this as an excuse for yet another boring academic gathering. They were discussing the possibility of grants. Marvin complained that there would never be any grants. That no-one appreciated the magnitude of his intellect. And that banquets were boring anyway.

The servants (other than the DoPEs) had a stop-work meeting to discuss work conditions, and ended up giving each other seminars on management technique. The DoPEs wished they knew how Dobby had obtained his sock – they wanted to join the stop-work meeting.

This feast was to be Harry's best yet: it made the third page of the pre-Murdoch press. It even beat the Tasmanian elections.

Vashti, Harry's queen, also gave a feast. It was much more sedate. Pottery was used so the archaeologists dismissed the midden-heap as boring. Archaeologists prefer crumpled gold to shards of pottery, even ones who look like Gillian’s nephew, though no-one has ever been able to work out why.

The king got pretty drunk at this feast. He'd killed all his enemies so there was no poison floating around. This meant he could drink lots of wine. Ancient Persian wine was pretty potent. After two glasses he sung a little song he made up for himself. He flattered himself it had a nice little melody, might have made the pop charts if someone had remembered to invent them. Auntie Jack eventually used it as inspiration for Wollongong the Brave.

After everyone had applauded him and he'd had a few more goblets of wine, and he'd been encouraged to sing his shy, lilting melody a few more times, he was very drunk indeed. He looked for his queen and couldn't find her. He looked under his throne, which was a stupid thing to do, since it was solid. He looked everywhere. He even asked Dobby (who, as Gillian’s work experience student says, “is a free elf!”) if he had seen her. Finally he thought she must have gone to sleep after her own banquet. He had forgotten she had a banquet. He wondered who she had invited. He decided to ask her. He sent the chief eunuch to wake her up. After he found out her guest list, he thought, he could get all the gentlemen of his court to tell him how lovely she was and how good he was at choosing a bride.

His chief eunuch, Hege, took about three hours to find the Queen. When he eventually crawled back into the King's presence, his face was miserable. He grovelled just as hard as he could. He grovelled into the floor, making a hole. “I need to rename you,” the king said. “Fatso. Fatso the Wombat.” The king was, of course, still drunk. No-one in Ancient Persia knew about wombats.

With his head so far into the floor his voice couldn't be heard, Hege (or Fatso) excused himself as the bringer of bad tidings. The king made him grovel in apology for mumbling. Then he got him to tell the message all over again. The eunuch was terrified and purple splotches began to cover his face. Harry was fascinated by this phenomenon. It didn't help him find the Queen, though. "She refused to come," muttered the eunuch, and he grovelled himself out of sight before the king could come to his senses and have him killed. Hege was a survivor.

The next day Vashti did come. She walked up the 953 purple and red plush steps to the gracious throne and had a private interview with the King. The King was livid. Vashti walked gracefully back down those 953 steps, a slight smile on her face.

Harry sent out decrees to all parts of his kingdom in all the languages of his realms. They stressed the need for wifely obedience. More than one hundred and seventy-five clay tablets were used for the various drafts. It went up and down the Persian hierarchy no fewer than thirty-one times in its search for perfect wording.

Wherever the decrees were understood, an awful lot of wives walked down the steps of the house with slight grins on their faces. Fortunately, the wording of the decree was obscure, obtuse and largely incomprehensible. Nineteenth century historians were very angry when they discovered this. The Persian Empire would have fallen at least 200 years earlier, Toynbee calculated, if there had been a complete breakdown of all marriages at the time. Mind you, he couldn't understand the decree. Sherlock predicted all this, of course, but he wouldn’t be born until 6 January 1854, so no-one listened to him.

The king was pretty pleased with himself after this, and he threw a party. The archaeologists waited anxiously in the rubbish dump along with the king’s close friend Gina, ready to examine the tailings. The tailings never arrived.

What had happened was the king had looked around for Vashti and found she wasn't there. The PM, being a King and no ordinary mortal, got sick of his 861 concubines fairly quickly. Then it dawned on him, he needed a replacement. He set up a Royal Commission to investigate the matter. The Royal Commission acted with extraordinary speed for a Royal Commission due to the king's uncertain temper. They were too slow.

After their untimely demise, the PM was forced to try other measures. He got in touch with his Chief of Protocol, who referred him to Tony who was Minister for Women, who referred him to Tony who was Minister for Indigenous Affairs who referred him to Tony who was in charge of the Office of Best Practice for Regulation, who referred him to the Taxation Branch. The Taxation Branch could not be found. So the PM asked Dobby (who was a free elf, but who now also served as the PM’s personal assistant), who referred him to the advertising manager. The King did not know he had an advertising manager, and felt safe when he discovered it was Lord Sandilands.

His Lordship decided to set up a complete list of all applicants, and then to hold a beauty parade. The PM was to choose his own bride.

The plan was modest. To gather together the largest array of beautiful virgins ever seen, and to sell the leftovers as slaves. The list was entitled Virgins and Maidens of Persian Satrapies, or VAMPS, for short. The advertising manager sent for his favourite consultants, whose normal work was in the Ancient Persian equivalent of King's Cross. The list of VAMPS was considerably shorter by the time the King discovered that they couldn't be trusted.

Dobby and Fatso the Wombat between them found a florid young man who had migrated to Persia from the ancient equivalent of California. He had degrees in pre-Keynesian macro-economics, technology transfer and advanced sandwich making, so it was decided that wife-hunting was the perfect thing for him. He was massively enthusiastic about it and set up a huge media-campaign. It worked so well, this campaign, that, over two thousand years later, the Australian Government was to consider using carrier pigeons, runners, and clay tablets to advertise the NBN. Unfortunately carrier pigeons were nearly extinct by then, and the climate wasn't suitable for clay tablets. The NBN fizzled. However, Lord Sandilands and the florid young man managed to amass a huge number of Ancient Persian virgins for the king to consider.

To cope with the sudden mass of information, the archaeologists set up a research group to keep American academics informed of the King's affairs. This was known as TIMEWARP, or Transatlantic Information on the Monarchical Eastern Women's Affairs Research Program. The Americans took 2,500 years to find out about it.

The shyest and most demure girl in Shushan at this time was the niece of a man called Mordechai, who was Minister for Security, or Persio, as it was known. Mordechai had taken care of his timid relative since the death of her parents, many years before. Now that she was adult, he had great plans for her. Hollywood! Either that or Home and Away. Lasting fame and glory, and her virtuous modesty untouched.

His first worry had been her taste in clothes. She was demure and quiet, but she dressed, to put it bluntly, like a bogan. She wore trakkydaks with Ugg boots when she went to the theatre, and her midriff was always, always bare. Her hair was teased peroxide blonde and her lipstick matched her handbag and her fingernails with killer precision. Each part was fine, but the complete effect only said one thing. Hard to have a career, even on Home and Away, if you look as if you belong on Kath and Kim.

All Mordechai’s fond dreams were rudely shattered when Esther became a VAMP.

Hege (who really didn’t look nearly as much like Fatso the Wombat as the king thought) rather liked Esther. He had a weakness for bogans. He didn't know she was related to Mordechai. Mordechai couldn't tell him of the link, or stop Esther from being rounded up with the other virgins, because he had a dreadful sore throat. It was thought that his secretary had put something in his mid-morning cup of wine. As everyone knows, all Ancient Persians sang at every opportunity. What not many people are aware of is that Mordechai sang rather like a dying chain-saw, and that was on a good day. So the hero of this tale was sulking in his office when Esther was taken to the palace. He couldn't sing, so he was teaching himself how to mutter. A useful and pleasant past-time.

During the preparations for the parade of beauties, Hege would often stop and chat a little with Esther because she never made jokes about his weight. He gave her good advice, and told her useful things. He persuaded her to leave the Ugg boots at home, for instance, along with the Crocs and socks that were her second favourite footwear.

Hege's most useful piece of advice to Esther was simple: to have a bath before the presentation. It was traditional that the king walked down the line of beauties as quickly as possible, you see, just to get away from the smell. All the beauties spent far too long in the traditional baths of frankincense and myrrh and other incenses and the combined smell was impossibly intense.

On the day of the parade, Esther adorned herself simply, as befits a young maid. The king admired Princess Leia and looked approvingly at Aunt Beast. He thought the Ugly Duckling had promise, but the smell of incense was just too much and he moved on before he got dizzy. When the king stopped in front of her as Hege had predicted, demure little Esther shyly raised her long lashed eyes and Harry was enchanted.

Factionalism was particularly rife in the Persian government. Hege was Centre-Left, and very powerful. Mordechai's power was mostly personal.

This was a shame, because very few people really got on with him. Though he had an older brother with a great deal of charm, and a young sister who was as sweet as they came, he couldn't sing, and, when they'd taken care of that, the man insisted on muttering. It was absolutely impossible to like him under these conditions.

But he was clever, and had managed to find out about a plot against the PM's life. Mordechai and his intrepid band of Persio men foiled it, of course. The matter was written up in a Departmental Minute and it was sent to the King. It unfortunately went to the Taxation Department instead, and was filed under Shushan region 15, section 9501, subsection 33.56392 by mistake. Life went on as usual.

Haman, who was of the extreme right, found great favour with Harry at this time. He was a notable person in many ways. Even before he entered the Megillat Esther, he was responsible for a variety of noxious conditions. They included Twitter addiction, indigestion, job outsourcing, curling, and tourists who persist in telling you how to find your way home. He also invented Facebook, Days of our Lives, and paperclips. He was promoted to chief minister.

Haman used his newfound power constructively. First he ground people's faces into the dust. Then he laughed at them for having dusty faces. Also, he offered people flat rate taxes. When they enthusiastically agreed to it, he raised all taxes to 99% of income.

He liked giving banquets in honour of himself. Only the archaeologists and the DoPEs were pleased. He made everyone bow to him, including Dobby, but Mordechai wouldn't. He muttered to himself and claimed that his sore throat and a stiff neck had given him a very rigid spinal column.

Haman didn't do things by half. When he planned his revenge on Mordechai for his disrespect, he didn't just plan to unstiffen his neck. First, Mordechai's mother would die, Haman decided. Then his brother was added to the list. He tried to poison them with a cunningly ethnic food fair. When this didn't work, his ambitions grew. He added Mordechai's sisters and his cousins and his aunts and even his mother-in-law to the list for slaughter. Then he went around trying to find a tune for the words, "If sometime it must happen that a victim must be found; I've got a little list, I've got a little list, of Mordechai's relations who should all be underground. They never will be missed, no never will be missed..."

Haman looked at this list for a couple of days and decided it was very unsatisfying. Mordechai was Jewish, so Haman decided to kill the whole race. It was much easier to include everyone than to risk offending someone by leaving them off. He invented a couple of useful acronyms to cope with the problem. Both of them later became very popular. The first acronym was YIDs, standing for Yucky and Irreverent Dissidents, and the other was SDI, or Sudden Death Initiative. This latter was Haman's name for his special technique of ridding the world of his enemies. It went at the top of every list he made. It used the latest technology - the drawing of lots and the sending of fast couriers - enabling him to co-ordinate his effort in a way previously unheard of. Because the couriers reached every corner of the immense Persian realm, it was also called Far Wars. His advisors wrote SDI on their lists, as Haman told them to, but in their minds it stood for Some Damn Idiocy. At the bottom of every list Haman wrote in the biggest, boldest letters he could get his scribe to muster up, "NB gallows for Mordechai to be particularly high." Then he went to bed, perfectly happy.

Next day he cast lots, or Purim, and settled on the 13th of Adar as a suitable day. Then he told Ahasuerus that all the Jews were breaking the laws and ought to be punished. Just like refugees. It was necessary, Haman claimed, to make sure the bringer of justice was a disinterested and upright man, such as himself, for example. He brought in a representative from a lobby group founded the day before by himself, to argue the case. It was a very talkative lobby group, and was known as JAWS or, Jewish Abolition: Women's Society.

The King, deceived, handed over Haman his ring, which meant Haman could do what he liked in the matter.

On the thirteenth day of the twelfth month, ran the decrees, all Jews in the realm were to be killed, and their possessions were to be given to Haman. It was a very tidy, simple little decree.

The scribe who worked on it was a Persio agent. Mordechai was not very happy to get the news. He suggested that it would be a good idea for the Jews to stage a protest. The Society Contrary to the Abolition of Residents of Eastern Demesnes, or SCARED, had a meeting to discuss the matter. They contemplated a stop-work, a strike, a street-march, and a sit in, but eventually settled for sackcloth and ashes and wandering through the streets of Shushan, groaning loudly.

Esther was very embarrassed to hear that her uncle was roaming the streets, looking like a fool. It was bad enough that he was a Public Servant, but to wear such stupid clothes! She sent him linen and silk and cloth of gold. He sent back a message saying he'd rather die than wear such things. It took Esther a while to penetrate this deep and meaningful statement. In fact, it took a leak from the Taxation Office, which asked if she wanted any of the loot.

Esther was tempted by the gold, of course, but nobly put her life above such wordly considerations as money. In fact, for the first time in her life, she stopped to think. Her maids were very worried by this aberration, and sent for five psychologists. She had stopped thinking before they arrived. Esther washed herself very clean, and put on a lovely gown. She looked her very best - modest, timid and demure. Harry was so impressed that he granted her a favour. Vashti hadn't even been able to get him to pay the food bills. Esther knew the PM very well. So did the archaeologists. They held their collective breaths. You guessed it, she invited the King and Haman to a banquet. Conan (who was a barbarian and who looked just like Gillian’s nephew, organised it, of course).

Banquets don't just happen overnight, even when you are the Queen of Persia and have a whole army of DoPEs to do the work for you.

The weather was hot and sticky. Summer seemed to go on forever. The king's insomnia was getting worse and worse. He began to get bad headaches from all the filing he had to do. He'd have to invent a new government department to cope with it all, he thought. In the meantime, he spent long, sleepless nights dreaming of filing cabinets. Finally, at three o'clock in the morning, he sent for someone to read to him. Harry was torn between having something read to him that was interesting, or something that was so boring that it would put him to sleep. He compromised. One of his secretaries started reading him the tax returns for Susa region 15, section 9501, subsection 33.56392.

It wasn't what he thought it would be. When he found out that no-one had bothered to reward Mordechai for saving his life, he waxed exceeding wrath. In fact, he called Haman out of bed. Haman was puzzled, but hopeful.

The PM led into his subject indirectly. The filing cabinets walking beside his bed when he had dozed off three nights before, had inspired him. He commanded Haman to spend 50,000 sheckels of the enormous bribe which had got him the use of the signet ring, to set up a bureau to take care of the filing. He called it the Cabinet Office. Then he tackled the more important issue.

"What would you give someone deserving of the highest honour, if you were the King of Persia?" Harry asked. This looked promising. Haman listened for the sounds of the gallows-builders doing overtime and rubbed his hands with glee. He listed everything he could think of, but the centrepiece of the honour was to have "this worthy individual" astride the king's mount, adorned with cloth of gold, and wearing a crown.

Haman was not at all pleased to find himself, the next day, leading the King's horse. On it was Mordechai. On Mordechai's head was the king's own crown. To add insult to injury, Mordechai muttered the whole time and Haman had to pretend he was listening. The only good thing in Haman's whole day was the sight of the gallows, reaching higher and higher. He consoled himself with the thought of a private banquet with their Majesties, that evening.

The banquet wasn't really worthy of the name. It had only forty courses, and so few guests that Haman was able to monopolise the conversation. However, even the garbage bags were made of cloth of gold. The archaeologist wept tears of joy. Haman, while he was chatting away, managed to put a couple in his pocket to spend later.

Esther was in despair as the evening progressed. She had planned to reveal Haman's plot and the threat to her own life, and to allow the PM to see the villain's guilt written all over his face. If only that villain would stop talking long enough to let her get a word in edgewise! Mordechai stood behind the curtain in agony. He was tempted to try to sing a little something, to get the King's attention, but, after a woeful attempt, his voice faded entirely. Esther dismissed the noise as a male Australian prime minister catching sight of a feminist. The King relaxed again.

She sat back and listened to Haman talking for another hour or two or three. Then, for the second time in her life, Esther had a thought. She slipped quietly over to her lyre and sang a little song bewailing her sad lot. The King's face paled and he demanded an explanation. Esther told the King that she was Jewish, and that the crimes Haman had accused her people of were pure fabrication. She petitioned her husband for her very life.

Harry was bewildered. He went into the garden to think. What to do? His chief advisor, a murderer? Finally, the King knew what to do. Esther was more interesting than Haman, after all.

While the PM was in the moonlit garden, Haman had tried to get out of his dilemma. He had seen his life was threatened, and had come close to where the Queen was sitting, meaning to throw himself upon her mercy. The King re-entered and didn't realise that it was upon her mercy that Haman was advancing to throw himself. He vaguely remembered seeing a nice new gallows, fifty cubits high, in the central part of town. Haman was sent to these gallows at once. He said nothing, for he was gagged until he was out of the King's presence. It was Purim. Haman died bitter, but, being Ancient Persian, he couldn't resist writing his own funeral dirge. Very original, he thought, as he waited for the hangman.

I was a crooked man
I walked a crooked mile
I made some crooked sixpence
Into a crooked pile
And with my crooked dough
I led my crooked life
Which now must finish
Due to Kingy's crooked wife.

Women's History Month - special Purim guest post by Vashti Farrer

Vashti Farrer is an award-winning Australian writer, who has kindly allowed me to draw attention to her given name and who is therefore is my special Purim Women’s History Month guest. You can find more about her here: http://www.vashtifarrer.com/pages/about_author.htm

Ellen Thomson was the only woman ever executed in Queensland. Other women were sentenced to death but had their sentences commuted; she alone faced the gallows. I first heard of Ellen in Port Douglas, in 1993, more than a hundred years since she’d been executed (1887) and the image of this tiny woman, four feet nine inches in height, standing in the dock, stayed with me.

The murder of William Thomson, a farmer aged 66, in Mossman, by a labourer, John Harrison, aged 27 and the farmer’s wife, Ellen Thomson, aged 44, had all the hallmarks of a crime of passion which didn’t bear closer scrutiny. William was paranoid, probably alcoholic and extremely racist. Harrison was a young man with a price on his head, a deserter from the Royal Navy, someone out for what he could get and prepared to make the most of every opportunity. Ellen was the illiterate mother of six, who’d seen one child die, was forced to have another adopted, and who struggled to support the rest. Gradually over time, all her children except the youngest were driven away by William.

Initially, I planned to write an historical novel, even though I knew living in Sydney and researching in Queensland would be difficult. I started by reading newspaper reports of the trial on microfilm, then looked at census records, birth, death, marriage and execution certificates. I wrote to the Archives of Sisters of Mercy, who had visited Ellen in prison in her final weeks, and I employed a researcher, another fiction writer, to look at archival material for me in Brisbane.

Over the years I wrote several novel drafts, from an omniscient viewpoint, from those of the three protagonists and from Ellen’s. Publishers were interested, but as a novel it didn’t quite gel. Finally, when I thought it was ready I showed it to a freelance editor whose advice was, "Throw away the history and just write the story!" and I was horrified. I remember thinking, "This woman was hanged!" It didn’t seem fair to fiddle with history for the sake of a good yarn, to me she deserved a “voice”. But to do her justice, I realised I’d have to discard the novel and write a non-fiction book placing her in her social context - the times and community in which she lived, which meant starting all over again.

I contacted Queensland State Archives to see if they had anything else on Ellen Thomson and they had a 300 plus page file on her, which had been digitally copied. They could email it to me at $1 a page so I agreed and slowly worked my way through the documents. Some pages were duplicated, but others had extra information which proved useful.

Then when I’d finished, I had an unexpected call from Queensland State Archives saying they’d found another 300 page file which hadn’t been digitally copied, and I agreed to have it photocopied at $1 a page and waded my way through that.

Having read both files, it seemed clear that the trial was unfair, with a biased judge, 197 Crown depositions and an inadequate country solicitor to defend them, but such is life, as Ned Kelly might say. Not much can be done about a trial that took place 127 years ago, but I hope at least that my book Ellen Thomson: Beyond a Reasonable Doubt? has at last given her a voice.

Women's History Month - guest post by Jason Franks

Celia Franca

Celia Franks was born in London on the 25th of June, 1921, the daughter of Jewish-Polish immigrants Solomon and Gertie. She won a piano scholarship to the Guildhall School of Music, but quickly established that she preferred to dance. Celia made her professional debut in 1935, at the age of 14, on the chorus line of the West End musical Spread It Abroad. In 1936 she joined the Ballet Rambert. At the time, many English dancers believed that adopting a Continental name would improve their prospects, so Celia changed her surname to Franca.

War in Europe saw Celia's brother Vincent--my grandfather--dispatched to North Africa. Celia toured the UK with the homeless Sadler's Wells Ballet Company, whose theatre had been destroyed in the Blitz. At the age of 19 she married Leo Kersley--a conscientious objector and a fellow Sadler's Wells dancer. When I asked Celia what it was like, Celia told me "we were looked upon as little better than whores."

Celia soon established herself as one of Sadler's Wells' best dramatic ballerinas. In 1946 she began to work as a choreographer, in which capacity she created the ballets Khadra and Ballemos. In 1946 Celia joined the Metropolitan Ballet, where she created the first ballets ever commissioned for television by the BBC: Eve of St Agnes and The Dance of Salome. Celia had an eidetic memory for choreography and continued to consult in the area long after she declared herself retired. (This happened on at least three occasions that I recall.)

In 1950, after Celia had quit the ballet company--she was "tired of putting on Nutcracker and Swan Lake over and over"--a group of balletomanes from Toronto persuaded her to immigrate to Canada to help them form a professional company. While officially working as a clerk at Eaton's Department Store, Celia built the Canadian National Ballet from the ground up. The company staged their first performance in November of 1951, just 10 months later.

Celia retired as a principal artist in 1959, although she would continue to perform on and off for years following. She particularly relished playing villain roles: Ladies MacBeth and Capulet and the Black Queen. I suppose the poison apple doesn't fall far from the tree: as a writer, I have always been more interested in villains than heroes.

I once asked Celia if she missed being on the stage. "Only the flowers," she said.

Celia remarried twice after moving to Canada, first to Bert Anderson and later to musician Jay Morton. She outlived both of them. Leo is the only one of Celia’s former husbands I had the privilege of meeting.

In 1959 Celia and Betty Oliphant founded the National Ballet School in Toronto. When Celia retired from this role in 1974 she was invited to China to teach ballet. I believe she had a wonderful time during her two expeditions there: she was proud of the work she did and I think she was relieved to be away from the establishment she had helped create, and all of its politics.

In 1979 Celia founded the School of Dance in Ottawa with Joyce Shietze and Merilee Hodgkins. Her work there was the most important part of her life for the next 25 years.

Celia came to visit my family in South Africa in the early eighties. Her brother Vincent had passed on, but her father Solly was still hale and hearty. I had no real idea who Celia was--I just knew her as a lovely and exotic relative. She brought us figurines of the Canadian Mounted Police as gifts. They were a similar scale to the Superman and Batman dolls my brother Gavin and I had and I insisted that they were toys we should play with. I'm certain we broke all them almost immediately.

Late in 1995 I travelled to North America with my father. We visited his sister in New York and then we went to see Celia in Ottawa. Celia was still very busy at 74: there were TV cameras in and out of her apartment and there were a number of meetings and functions that required her attention. I had a nasty flu and I carried a box of tissues with me everywhere. During a quiet moment, apropos of nothing, my father said "Did you know Jason wants to be a writer?"

I was twenty years old. I was at University, studying for a degree in Cognitive Science. I wasn't writing anything, much less submitting. It was my big secret.

Celia just looked at me and said. "Oh, well. That's settled, then." Celia spoke with authority. It felt as if she had given me permission.

Celia accompanied us to the airport when we left a couple of days later. I remember she surprised us after we said goodbye by appearing in the international gate lounge to wait for the plane with us. I don't know how she did it, but she certainly didn’t negotiate passport control with my father and I. I doubt she was carrying any identification documents with her at all.

A year or so later, Celia visited us in Australia---a side trip on a business jaunt. I visited again in 1998. We maintained frequent correspondence by FAX through those years. I still have most of my letters, but alas Celia's hand-written replies are long lost.

In 2001 I decided to move to America. Celia let me have the run of her apartment while I was looking for a job. I was there when I sold my first short story.

That year the Ballet Company put on a gala concert to celebrate Celia's 80th birthday. Leo Kersley flew out for the event--I don't think Celia had seen him in many, many years. At the reception after the show I knew only a handful of people. A couple of of people recognized me as Celia's nephew, and I think I disappointed them by not knowing who they were in return, since I was not Canadian and knew absolutely nothing about ballet. I spent most of the evening hanging out with Celia's masseuse; a Canadian Sikh named Siri. I could see immediately why Celia liked her: Siri was kind and unpretentious and blunt.

Although she was very controlling of her public appearances, at home Celia was very straightforward, and had little interest in self-aggrandisement. The only celebrity story she ever told me unprompted was that Rudolf Nureyev had once insulted her hair. On one occasion, when she found me listening to a movie soundtrack on a portable CD player, she said “That sounds like Leonard Cohen.” It was indeed Leonard Cohen. I was surprised that she knew who he was. "Oh, I was in a short film with him. That was before he went into the monastery." I didn't even know that Cohen was Canadian.

During the five years I lived in the US, I visited Celia several times in Ottawa and in Naples, Florida, where she would sometimes rent an apartment for a few weeks during the winter. Naples was driving distance from my place in Tampa.

In December 2005, I received a phone call from the School of Dance. Celia had slipped and broken one of her vertebrae. She was suddenly in care and in poor spirits--would I go up and visit her? Nobody from the school was available. I was angry, and I refused their offer to pay my airfare. It did not occur to me that it Christmas time. When I arrived in Ottawa, Celia seemed her usual self. She was too proud to be seen in a wheelchair and refused to leave her room. I took meals in the dining room with the other residents.

In Ottawa in October 2006, on my way home to Australia, I visited Ottawa for the last time. I stayed in the rest home with Celia for two weeks--the staff dragged a trundle bed into the sitting room for me. I carved Halloween pumpkins for the residents and went running by the canal, where the leaves had turned red. I’d never seen a proper Northern Hemisphere autumn before. The documentary Celia Franca: Tour de Force--by Veronica Tenant, a former ballerina turned director--seemed to be constantly on the TV.

"I don't want a funeral," Celia told me. "When I die I want my body to be burned. I want my ashes to be thrown in the bin."

On the weekends I saw a procession of Celia's former students and colleagues coming to visit. Many of them were visibly terrified of "Miss Franca". I had only been on the receiving end of her temper a couple of times, myself, but I could understand exactly why,

The first time I suffered Celia’s ire was at dinner with the film critic Jacob Siskind. We were at the Light of India restaurant in the Glebe and the food was incredible. Jacob and Celia did not have big appetites, but I did, and so I finished off their meals as well as my own--and made myself quite ill. Celia said only a few words to me after that, and very quietly, but I felt chastised for days.

The second time I experienced the wrath of Miss Franca was a grocery expedition. I went out on foot, in heavy snow, to procure some supplies one winter’s afternoon. I. was gone for more than an hour, but I failed to find the shop and I came back empty handed. "Oh, you're just useless, aren't you?" She barely raised her voice. I suppose she was worried about me. Also, I had promised to bring back some vodka, and we had run out.

I'd been home in Australia for a couple of months when I received an email from Celia's close friend Viki Prystawski. Celia had been diagnosed with acute Leukemia. Viki told me that she was aware but unable to communicate, and that she was not in any pain. Celia died two days later, on the 19th of February, 2007.

No funeral was held for Celia. Her ashes were scattered at sea.

In her lifetime, Celia was honoured with the Companion of the Order of Canada, the Order of Ontario, and twice with Woman of the Year. She received many other minor accolades: keys to various cities, honorary doctorates, a species of flower was named after her.

In 2012 I dedicated my first novel, Bloody Waters, to her. I wrote most of the first draft at her dining room table in 2001. It features a driven female protagonist who would probably be considered a villain in a different context. 2012 also saw the publication of The Pursuit of Perfection: A Life of Celia Franca, by Carol Bishop-Gwynn. Viki and I have no intention of ever reading it.