Show me the money, tech bro

 It's no compliment to know your book has been used to train an AI machine. It feels dismaying, infuriating and gut wrenching.

 'My book has been dismantled, broken up for parts and sold to a wrecking yard.'

'It feels like someone has broken into my house and stolen my stuff.'

'Fucking livid!' 

'Why bother creating anything, if these guys are just gonna steal it for dollars and get away with it?'

'I wanted to vomit when I found out.' 

These are very real responses from Australian authors, as Meta scrapes our books and songs to train their AI Llama3. In January, the world was alerted to Meta's use of pirated copies of books and academic papers. Not long after, The Atlantic published a search option where you could check if your book, song, artwork or academic paper had been scraped by Meta. It's here. One of my books is in there. Fucking Facebook, just like Google, are still being evil.

So ... this week in Australia, the Productivity Commission released a report on 'unlocking the benefits of AI' and suggested that we exclude the Copyright Act for fair dealing with AI companies. 'Fair dealing' means sacrificing our books and songs to the machines. There has been an uproar from creative workers because our government is basically giving a license to mega rich AI companies to steal our books, songs and art without paying us a cent in royalties.

I've had many philosophical conversations recently with artists, writers and academics. We are entering a new age where some creatives are using AI to make really interesting work and others are being pummeled by Copilot's idiotic suggestions and bad memes, while Google's dodgey AI just makes shit up:

(I managed to track down the 'source' of this lie to a 2023 Classics conference where someone gave a paper on Jane Austen, claiming that she considered Wollstonecraft as literary parentage. So, for Google's AI it therefore follows that Wollstonecraft is actually Austen's biological mother.) When accused of lying, the chat bot will come back with the grovelling apology of a problematic drinker. Promises to do better follow.

I teach in areas of English Literature and History. Call me a Luddite but I will die on the hill of arguing that to write an essay or short story is to think through a problem. It is not about getting high distinctions for typing an elegant prompt to ChatGPT. It's about writing through a problem. Mary Wollstonecraft  thought through a problem when she wrote A Vindication for the Rights of Women. Descartes thought through a problem and came up with I think, therefore I am. Both of these thinkers did not need Meta or Copilot to nut out their argument in 2 seconds. Slow work is where great creative breakthroughs happen.

What is happening now feels like a dilution of our brains and our language and it comes at the expense of critical thinking and people who create art, music and literature.

There is hope though, at least in this nook of the woods. Maybe work written by humans will soon be worth more than AI slop. At the moment we are being fleeced by out of control tech billionaires who buy governments and dictate international policy. It's a terrible analogy ... but like free-range, hormone-free chicken, perhaps the product of careful work and thinking can win out in this situation and be worth more.

 The Australian Productivity Commission has proposed to allow big tech companies access to copyrighted Australian content to build their artificial intelligence platforms without compensating creators, like this is a good idea to sell out our national cultural canon! At the moment there are class actions by authors in the US against Meta illegally scraping their books. In Australia, there are no laws yet to prevent this kind of behaviour and the Productivity Commission appears to think it is all cool. So ... crickets.

Past tense

Years ago I wrote a story on A WineDark Sea called 'Can't kill him with an axe'. It was an account of the times I'd nearly killed Old Salt on his fishing boat. He'd previously had heart surgery ('they put a bit of pig in me!'), licked asbestos as a kid because he liked the tingling feeling on his tongue, had an affinity for battery acid and thought electrocution was a fine remedy for Ross River Virus.

Bill died on Monday. It's a weird feeling. When a close friend is dying, people ask if I want to visit them but I'm already there, somehow. Several hundreds of kilometres apart and I'm with them. I don't really know how to explain this. Despite this feeling, when Nga told me on Sunday that he was now on morphine, I'd said, 'Yeah, I'll ring him in the morning.' He sounded fine on Friday when he took of his oxygen mask to chat. Fine.

He was my mentor and teacher. He taught me everything about what it is to be on a boat, how to follow the channel markers home to port in the middle of the night. That was one of his first lessons as we motored home from Michaelmas Island. He taught me about family, about how fish think and how to tie knots (still terrible at that).

He seemed incombustible, unkillable. An incorrigible white man with a stout sense of right and wrong, a strong interest in his family's history of fishing the Great Southern inlets. He never gave up. So Bill, the star of Salt Story is gone. Bizarrely and so bloody banal for someone who always sailed too close to the wind, he copped covid at a funeral a few weeks ago. On Monday, we'll go to his.

 

 

 

 

Working (vulnerably) From Home

So I have the inverter, humming like a tuned-up tractor, beside me. Actually it sounds like a suburban neighbour's leaf blower on a Sunday morning, but who am I to complain about having internet at home?

Today I'd like to talk about iso injuries, that is, the injuries sustained by a planet of humanoids isolating in their homes for a sustained period. No, not really, just little ol' me confined to work from home, or the local laundromat, or Flame's back veranda. Wherever there is internet anyway. I'll list this litany of personal injuries not in chronological order but based on the fact that they are all related to my own state of mind due to lockdown.

Nora Ephram once wrote that she was raised to understand that "all painful things eventually turn into funny stories." I can't agree more with the woman who was once married to Watergate journalist Carl Bernstein and who also said "everything is copy." She went on to write a savage take-down of the end of their marriage in novel form. Like she said, everything is copy and pain, on later reflection, can be pretty bloody funny.

I was watching my dog limp. Selkie is one of those unber-healthy dogs with a glossy coat and bounces around like Tigger. Seeing her in pain was awful and it looked like she'd broken a bone in her foot. She has a round, every morning in the place that is dog heaven. Just before dawn she takes herself off for a run along the beach, heads into the bush and returns forty minutes later, panting and chuffed, often with a kangaroo bone. She is a dog without fences or roads. Imagine that life for a dog. This particular morning she returned a bit subdued and limping badly. It was in the first week or so of our Australian lockdown. I had the sniffles and decided not to travel 200km to video conference a Noongar elder for my teaching job.

Instead, after 24 hours of spinning out about my injured dog and how far we were from the nearest vet (100km), I went all Dr Quinn Medicine woman on her and administered comfrey to her foot and bound it up. By the time I got her to a vet, he took one look at her, rotated her back knee and said, 'Well I won't do that again. It's obviously causing her pain. It's her cruciate ligament. Here's some anti inflammatories. If she's not better in a week, it's surgery.' He threw my bandages and unguents aside. My brain bled, with dollar signs leaking out my ears, as I lifted the 40 kg rottweiler cross back into the car.

This is obviously not an iso injury but it made me feel really vulnerable. I sent messages to my son who by then lived across a closed border from me. 'Let me look after her, I'm closer to the vet' he replied. 'There must be a way to get a dog across the Frankland river. I'm about to kill a sheep, so I can get some chops and potatoes to you at the same time.' Blessed Stormboy.

At around the same time, some friends went picking field mushrooms and gave me a mass of them chopped and wrapped up in a happy christmas tea towel. Any of you who know me well know that I love eating mushrooms and I do know a bit about which ones to eat. So I set about making a cream of mushroom soup and that night I ate the lot. So yummy!

The next morning I woke up with a fever, I was shaky and then I started vomiting. I felt like I'd been poisoned and poisoned I was. Once again I felt terribly vulnerable. I was 100km from the nearest hospital. Could I drive there? Would I have to park my car on the highway ten km off the dirt track, put on my hazard lights and hope for a passerby to help me out? The roads were so quiet. Normally I'm quite the mountain woman but times like these make me feel inconsequential. My nearest neighbour is 25 km away.

I cured myself with red gum resin made into a tea. Worked a treat. Then I swallowed half a cup of petrol due to an unfortunate and aborted internet installation. Then I rolled an ankle wading through the water to pick up a net full of mullet. Then I sprained a thumb on the next week's mullet set. "What the fuck is that Brown Thing in the net Boo?" "It's your Croc Sarah. It seems to have come loose from your foot." "Oh ... good. Whoops!"

Sprained thumb.

You'll be happy to know that my lungs (from breathing in petrol), my stomache (from ingesting petrol and poisonous mushrooms) and my dog are much better now. My rolled ankle and my thumb still hurt a little bit. However I think that, while I'm normally pretty good at looking after myself, especially in the isolated areas where I often live and work alone, I've been a bit slap dash on the personal safety front lately. My next post will be about the pig hunters and their dogs who upended my zoom meeting with my boss.

Hope you are all well bloggers. Stay sexy x

The Wild West and a Writers Festival

Hi, I'm heading west next weekend to the Margaret River Readers and Writers Festival. I'm really looking forward to catching up with the sisters and other writers and everyone who comes along. Strangely, I don't feel nervous or apprehensive about public speaking this time around. One festival I appeared at, the organisers had me slotted in for two hours, talking on my own! I drove there with a pit of terror in my stomach. I lasted an hour on stage and by then the crowd, who'd been wheeled in from the local nursing home, had mostly fallen asleep. I generally have a great time at these gigs and often, after a festival session, I walk out of the room and can't remember a thing I've said.

I'm in good hands at MRRWF it seems, and there will be friendly faces in the crowd too. It's being held at the grassy, grapey expanse of Voyager Estate. Germaine Greer is speaking at the launch on Friday night and oh my god I am so bloody gonna be there.

Friday morning I'm doing a session with novelist Holden Sheppard (see the side bar for a link to Holden's blog) and poet Elizabeth Lewis about what makes a writer want to write. And more importantly, keep writing. Oh dear. That's me, stalking around my lap top like it's going to bite me if I get too close. Maybe it will bite me, or maybe I'll just produce a mediocre bit of writing. Self loathing or self doubt is both poison and fuel for writers. Then there is laziness and a house to clean or possibly even restump. We are introduced in the program as a motley mob, which is kinda funny as I gave the programmers my scruffiest but favourite author photo:

Things get salty in the afternoon when I get together with the brilliant Amanda Curtin.

Her novel Elemental begins in the early 20th century with the herring girls, girls who followed the herring fishermen as the fish ran down the coast of Ireland. Their job was to gut and clean the fish. It's a wonderful novel that ends up in Fremantle. Amanda and I have done sessions together before and both of our books are oceanic with all of those myths and superstitions attached to that way of life. Fellow inlet-dweller and fisherwoman of legend Ms Mer has my copy of Elemental and won't give it back, it's that good.

On Saturday, I get together with Liz Byrski, Jodie Moffat and Susan Sullivan to talk about the anthology we produced Women of a Certain Age:

Also at the festival will be Kim Scott, Germaine Greer, Anna Funder, Michael Leunig and Germaine Greer and heaps of others and Germaine Greer. Here's a link to the program:

                                                              https://mrrwfestival.com/

The day and the day after I flew into Broome

On Saturday afternoon I flew into Broome.

Seeing this landscape from the plane made me feel quite emotional. That startling contrast of red pindan and turquoise sea is like a memory trigger. Later my cousin drove me to the Mangrove Hotel and I caught sight of that sea again and gasped. She is used to it, yet it blasted me back to the late 1980s when I was used to it too. This is the first time I've been back.

I went to Broome for the Corrugated Lines Readers and Writers Festival, and walked straight into the welcoming arms of Kimberly family, artists and writers.

'How are you with sandflies, Sarah?' asked my cousin's partner, and I remembered when I was here as a kid getting hammered by sandflies at Streeters Jetty, and later so itchy that I was tearing strips off myself with dirty fingernails in the middle of the night. I still have the scars on my legs from the infections that followed.
'Oh, last time was pretty bad,'' I said. He pointed towards the bar. We were outside at Pearl Luggers to hear Dark Emu author Bruce Pascoe speak, and there was a communal aerosol of industrial strength insecticide at the bar. Steve Kinnane interviewed Pascoe, who spoke beautifully of the historical silence around Aboriginal agricultural methods, and also the silence as he grew up around his own family's Aboriginality. The night air was warm and silky. Across the road, the jukebox blared from the infamous Roey. The women wore fabulous dresses.

Later we repaired to said infamous pub for Word of Mouth, a spoken word and open mic for anyone of a poetic bent. I spent the night wandering between this event which showcased some excellent writers and slam performers, to the 'beer garden' where a bald shoemaker in an Hawaiian shirt was arguing the line-up of the Highwaymen and the Travelling Wilburys with a dark man with less teeth than me. I'd be listening to Aunty Pat's story about walking into a lap dancing club in search of fish and chips, head outside for a smoke where the shoemaker called me 'Miss Woolly' (so original), then back inside for slam poet Emilie Zoey Baker's rendition of Get a Bloody Job. Sophia's story and music made me seep tears and laugh out loud.
A most excellent night.

Early Sunday morning I wandered down to Streeters Jetty across the road from boab trees and stilted fibro houses, and rubbed fine pindan dirt into my lily-white, down-south feet. My feet are usually clad in Blundstones and thick woolen socks this time of year, or sheep skin boots. Now it was thirty two degrees and I was wearing thongs. I could smell the mangroves and the sea and the sweat of everyone who walked past me. I saw evidence of people who had walked before me ... yesterday.

 

 It was nearly time for my author session at the Kimberly Bookshop, the whole reason I'd flown here, and I was feeling a bit nervous. A good nervous, but still nervous. I met my interviewer Mohini at dinner the previous night and knew I was safe in her capable hands. But in the hour before getting miked up to talk in front of a crowd, I always need a quiet space alone to circumvent the freaking-myself-the-fuck-out scenario. Breathe Sarah. I rubbed that red dirt into my feet. Introduced myself to Country. 

That's what I did on the mud flats below Streeters Jetty.

 This year is the 30th Anniversary of Broome-based Magabala Books, one of those little publishing houses that seriously punch above their weight. I nearly didn't make it to Corrugated Lines. I was made unexpectedly redundant at the service station and wondered how I could justify the expense of travelling to the Kimberly in these straitened times. Then I read the story of Magabala a few weeks ago in the paper. AND Marie at the Kimberly Bookshop offered to chuck in some money for me. 

I just had to go.

It was a great session. The audience were super engaged. I had wondered how Kimberly folk would identify with Southern Ocean history, but of course there are so many parallels when it comes to explorers, ferals and colonist's 'contact' narrative that the locals got it and the grey nomads did too. Broome is laden (beautifully and heavily) with colonial history.

Anyway, after that I needed another quiet little sit down. Tis an energising and exhausting thing, that reader/writer interaction. After the book signing I sat down on the pavement in the shade next to the Community Resource Centre. A man walked past, stopped and asked me for two rollie papers. 'Where are you from?' he asked me. 'Walpole, down south,' I said, 'Where are you from?' 'Hedland, down south,' he told me.

I went to the library to hear an hilarious play reading by playwright Dan Lee. This play is about grey nomads doing the loop of Australia and it's really freaking funny and about to premiere in Los Angeles. Then I went up the hill with Aunty Pat to see Peter Bibby do his thing at the Mangrove Hotel. I was thinking of walking up there but Pat talked me out of it. 'It's too hot to walk up that hill,' she said. 'I've got a car, let's go.'

We were so busy talking about music, writing and art that we didn't notice the concrete curbs whilst doing a U-turn. This can be a problem, especially as 'I've just borrowed this car' as Pat explained. I got out at the Mangrove to examine the damage. 'You can pop that panel back in,' I said, looking at the plastic nudge bar and hub caps. I felt a little bit sorry for the car. Aunty Pat shrugged, 'Those scars were already there, love,' and we went into the Mangrove Hotel.

Ahem ... BWF2016

Hey! I'm at the airport, about to fly with my deep dark Southern Ocean tale The Sound, to the Brisbane Writers Festival.

On Friday I'll be at the Mt Ommaney for BWF in the 'Burbs, a program where the festival goes to libraries in outlying suburbs. And on Sunday I will be In Conversation with writer come mermaid Megan McGrath, and then later on, a panel discussing the can of worms that is historical fiction with writers Kate Forsyth and David Dyer. I've put their books on my sidebar. They are both excellent and it will be a lovely diverse trio of stories we are talking about.
Here is the complete program.

Then next week I'll be at the State Library of Western Australia, helping Emily Paul present the inaugural session of the new and improved Bookcaffe Book Club. That's at five thirty on Thursday and you can book here with this linky thing.

(As you can see Nic Duncan's pictures have come in rather handy. Bless her wet photographer's socks.)

Salt on the water

Broke to Burswood

Oh, it is so tempting. The line I went straight from Broke to the Casino is just gagging for it. But that really is what happened. I drove from this:

to this. 

I’ve never been to the casino before but it was easy to find, rising over the skyline like a top-heavy cruise liner. Maybe a live sheep ship would be a more appropriate description, though it smelled a bit better.

The contrast in habitats that bookended my day was extraordinary.

A smoking fire, several dogs, a riffling wind on the skin of the inlet, peppermint tree flowers dropping onto black earth like snow. Five black swans in a line on the water, the air spackling as they shattered the silence taking off, their strobe flash of white and black wings.

A car park patrolled by casino security and a man in hi-vis, shorts and joggers carrying a plastic bag, looking for cigarette butts. Then marble stairs and escalators and psychedelic carpets and lights and bouncers and pokies and high heels. A constant heart throb of music.

I was lured to this fresh heterotopia as a story teller for the opening of the national seafood industry conference. That was the cool bit about being in the casino, because just about everyone at the conference were fisher folk and as I read from my book, I could almost hear their nods and smiles. They totally got what I was saying. Later I met Tasmanian lobster men (who complained about the seals), American and Indian delegates checking out the Australian commercial fishing scene, women-in-fishing advocates (who complained about the seals), South Australian crabbers, a vet nurse (husband to a fisherman who complained about the seals but wanted to protect them herself) and industry groups including the government fisheries mob (who complained, tinged with a grudging respect, about my old boss).

“They get a bit rowdy,” said K, who’d spent twelve months organising the event, “because they haven’t seen each other for ages. This is about the only time they get together.” And she was right. It was raucous, warm and collegial. After all that I drove to my daughter’s new house. Well, that’s a detour around the truth because I did get lost in the boondocks for an hour or so. Then I fell into a mattress on the floor and woke up the next morning to Pearlie and Gracie.

Gracie, ahh Gracie, grown so robust and talkative … I feel that generational heart skip when I look at my granddaughter. This child is of my own ilk, I think. She knows me. I know her. She is nearly three. I understand her moments of fury and cackling hilarity, her curiousity, aloofness and generosity.

“Nanna Sairwa,” she said, pointing to my tree necklace. “Can I put it on me?” 

Big Skies, Islands and Shipwrecks

Now here are some meanderings about shipwrecks and books and adventures on islands ...

Last week I flew up to Geraldton as a guest of the Big Sky Writers and Readers Festival, which is one of the choicer small festivals in Australia. I mean, despite missing my plane, I came home completely buzzed. I'd hung out with a Doug Anthony Allstar, kissed a knight in shining armour, ate copious amounts of beautiful food, bought way too many books, extracted a 'I was a wild female deckie' confession from a rather dignified old lady, sold every copy of Salt Story in Geraldton, bought an antique fox stole, stayed in a luxurious hotel and generally had a ball.

An authority of writers: Dawn Barker 'Fractured', Annamaria Weldon 'The Lake's Apprentice', Tim Ferguson 'Cheeky Monkey', Craig Sherbourne 'Hoi Polloi', Liz Byrski 'Family Secrets, Agatha and Christine from WritingWA.

A Doug Anthony Allstars' self portrait, just for me!

The most amazing thing the Big Sky organisers do for their writerly guests is to fly them to the Abrolhos Islands for a night before the festival kicks off. These islands are soaked in a history of 17th Century shipwrecks, castaways and mutinies - plus a massacre led by a drug-addicted psychopath. There's more info on the Batavia mutiny over here at Antipodean Nemo. On Rat Island part of the Wallaby Group of the Abrolhos, festival guests were able to swap yarns and get to know each other. It was a special time, I heard a splendid saga of a love affair spanning decades and continents, and we even had fresh dhufish for dinner.

Okay, though it is hard, I'll stop rolling about in how wonderful it all was. The other shipwrecks that I want to mention here are those of the long-lost ships from Sir John Franklin's doomed expedition to find the North West Passage in 1846. As I was travelling north to Geraldton, news came through that the Canadians have found one of the ships. They released this amazing sonar image of the wreck resting on the sea floor.

The Erebus and Terror were the two ships that became trapped in ice. Apparently the sailors were stranded for eighteen months and all of then died eventually, with rumours that some men had resorted to cannibalism to survive. Until the other day, the Erebus and Terror have remained missing for more than a century - one of the enduring mysteries of colonial exploration.

Whether or not the find of the Erebus or the Terror (they are not yet sure which one it is yet) is connected to Canadian nationalism and claims to extra territories, was an aside to me as I read this news. It is a thrilling story but what got me really excited was the ships' connection to my book Salt Story.

On the cover and throughout the book are illustrations of fish and other marine critters. They were drawn during Sir James Clarke Ross's zoological expedition to the Southern Ocean and Antarctica.
The images can be found online via Google books as The Zoology of the Voyage of HMS Erebus & Terror: under the command of Captain Sir James Ross, during the years 1839 to 1843. After this journey the ships, already fitted with plated hulls for Arctic conditions, went off to find the Northwest Passage.

The Fear and the Gong

Before I wandered off into promiscuity (no, not like that), I was thinking about anxiety during Saturday's tree planting ceremony. As we sat and watched others work and magpies build their nest, Ursli's pup wandered down to the footpath. She was sniffing around where the magpies had been picking up twigs and gradually she moved closer to the busy road. Ursli called her back and the pup ignored her.

Ursli walked down the hill to call her up again. As she got closer to the road, the little dog gave her a look, like "so make me" and ran off. She ran straight onto the road and was immediately crushed to a furry bloodied pulp, in front of everyone, by a cavalcade of Hell's Angels on Harley Davidsons. After the roar of the bikies faded away, the screams and sobs of horrified onlookers rang through the valley.

Okay, so that didn't really happen. But it did in my mind. I had played out the whole scenario and was going into a state of fight, flight or freeze. My guts were churning, I was dizzy and later I realised I'd stopped breathing. While Ursli picked up the pup and walked back up the hill, put her on a leash, I was still scraping the carcass off the road.

What interested me was tracking my propensity for inventing worst case scenarios. The scene on the hill with Ursli's dog also made me realise how easily I can be towed around by my own fear. I mean, things have been going really well. Mine is never a very safe life, but it is exciting, loving, challenging and occasionally quite successful. An example of all this good juice is my gorgeous grand daughter Matilda Grace. (gratuitous grand child picture coming up)

There is another good thing that happened recently. I've been shortlisted for the Premier's Book Awards.

“From emerging writer Sally-Ann Jones’s book Stella’s Sea set at Cottesloe beach, David Whish-Wilson’s book Perth describing life by the Swan River and Sarah Drummond’s Salt Story about life as a fisherwoman in Western Australia, the Western Australian Premier’s Book Awards continue to attract the finest literary works created in Australia today.” (Margaret Allen, State Library of Western Australia CEO.)

Wowee. Although the award is a West Australian one, entries are open to all Australian writers and there are only four shortlisted in my Emerging Writers section. The winners are announced on September 22nd ... something else to get anxious about ... but there are no worst case scenarios in this one.

Better to have been listed and lost than ...

So Salt Story didn't make it to the shortlist of the Dobbie Literary Prize. I thought I should breathe this small sigh of information somewhere - seeing as the national broadsheets aren't clogging up my phone with requests for interviews about not being shortlisted.

But you know? Salt Story: of sea-dogs and fisherwomen was long-listed.
Listed.
Yessss :~)

Writing on Salt Story

Salt Story had a really good book review in the UWA mag Uniview recently. It's in the back pages where the trajectories of university graduates come to rest, for the moment. As someone wrote to the magazine, it's also the first place where other graduates go to see who is doing what. I agree.
So here it is ... or bits of it:

Reviewers are unanimous that UWA graduate Sarah Drummond has produced a heart-felt book that sweeps readers into a community of professional South West fishermen who battle storms - natural and political - and struggle to make a living in changing times.

"It's a lovely read," concluded The West Australian. "There are times you can almost feel the small boat bumping against waves and taste the salt spray as they lurch about in storms, navigate netting politics and haul in their catch."

Salt Story: of sea-dogs and fisherwomen (Fremantle Press) is Sarah's first book and it's a tribute to the inshore and estuarine commercial fishing industry and a fading way of life that, as one reviewer put it, "is under threat, dying of a thousand government cuts."

The author admits that as a wayward teen she was drawn to the jetties and beaches and to the lot of fishermen, yachties and truckies whose 'purposeful shiftlessness and nomadism raised a middle finger to the myth of the Great Australian Suburban Dream.'

Interesting that bit ... the author admits. Of course any Australian teenage girl looking for mayhem, meaning and adventure will be beckoned by seafarers and artists, roadhouses and jetties.
I'm leery of the words 'admits' or 'admission' in this context, because it reminds me that society demands that women rescind or regret their earlier wild child experiences, and at the same time it strives to censure those brave, girly new worlders of the next gen - to make sure they behave themselves.

Anyhoo, that is another thesis or book. In the meantime, this is one of the nicest reviews of Salt Story that I've read, and particularly because it comes from my peers, from the uni where I found my feet as an academic and a writer. Plus the reviewer mentioned that Salt Story had sold out in two months and that a reprint is already in the bookstores. Which was very cool.

Fremantle Press release!

Fisherwoman memoir longlisted for Dobbie Literary Award

10th April 2014

Albany author and fisherwoman Sarah Drummond was having lunch with her current boss, a landscaper, when she got the call to say she was longlisted for the Dobbie Literary Award.
‘We’d had a difficult morning working out levels and angles on some sleeper stairs. Everything seemed to go wrong, including the angles we’d decided upon – and then cut,’ said Drummond.
‘After lunch the mood was quite different. As soon as either of us got annoyed with our self-created debacle, the other would lean in and whisper “Nita May Dobbie.”’
It’s a typical story from the down-to-earth writer whose debut book Salt Story has been described by reviewers as ‘lyrical and utterly absorbing’ and ‘thoroughly original’.
Drummond said that while the longlisting came as a shock, award recognition was important to writers who feel they need to have a conversation with others in the world.
‘To me, awards can be signposts to a reader – here is a writer who wants to talk with them,’ said Drummond.
The Dobbie is one of two prizes awarded by the Nita B Kibble Literary Awards for Women Writers: awards which aim to encourage Australian women writers to improve and advance literature for the benefit of the community.
Drummond said she saw Salt Story as a love story for her region and the fishing culture that had stayed strong throughout the decades.
‘ Salt Story both examines and busts up the gender tropes in Australian culture. I’ve always liked doing this – in writing – and in my other life where work is often physically demanding. I think the link is the poetry, the beguiling tales, an ear for “voice” and an antenna for provincial narratives,’ said Drummond.
The Dobbie Literary Award (currently valued at $5,000) recognises a first published Australian author. Fiona McFarlane, Margaret Merrilees, Kate Richards, Inga Simpson and Jill Stark also made the list. More information about the award is at http://www.perpetual.com.au/kibble/
Salt Story was Fremantle Press’ fastest selling new release of 2013 and is now in its second print run. It is available from all good bookstores and online.

http://www.fremantlepress.com.au/news