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Kill your darlings

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KILL YOUR DARLINGS

Editor: Rebecca Starford

Deputy Editor: Hannah Kent

Online Editor: Imogen Kandel

Online Marketing Assistant: Emily Laidlaw

Online Assistant: Stephanie Van Schilt

Editorial Assistants: Brigid Mullane, Christopher Fieldus

PO Box 166, Parkville 3052, Victoria, Australia

Email: info@killyourdarlingsjournal.com

Web: www.killyourdarlingsjournal.com

Published by Kill Your Darlings Pty Ltd

This collection © Kill Your Darlings 2013

Kill Your Darlings 12, 2013

ISBN 978-0-9873406-6-5, ISSN 1837-638X

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted

in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise

without the prior permission of Kill Your Darlings.

The views and opinions expressed by individual authors are not necessarily those of

the editors.

Cover illustration: Guy Shield

Design and layout: © Kill Your Darlings

Kill Your Darlings accepts unsolicited submissions. Please visit the website for all

guidelines.

This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.

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CONTENTS

5 Editorial

COMMENTARY

9 Unquiet Graves: Returning to East Timor

Jill Jolliffe travels to East Timor after a long absence. She remembers

27 Randolph Stow: An Ambivalent Australian

Gabrielle Carey writers.

38 Into the Crater: Public Nudity on a Japanese Volcano

Robbie Arnott travels to Japan where he is unexpectedly propositioned.

46 Staying Away: A Memoir of Wisconsin

Amy Espeseth on faith, visiting her hometown, and the death of her dear friend.

56 Of Monsters and Monogamists: In Search of Love

Lee Kofman on trying to live and love non-monogamously.

69 Sampling Steinbeck: A Re-encounter with The Log from

the Sea of Cortez

Paul Humphries work.

77 Flags of My Father: The Question of National Identity

Sheila Pham

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FICTION

89 At Rotko Patrick Allington

104 An Illusion Caused by the World

Spinning Around Helen Dinmore

INTERVIEW

125 Kill Your Darlings in conversation with David Vann

REVIEWS

149 We Are The World: The Dave Eggers Phenomenon

Caroline Hamilton on the 'one-man zeitgeist': novelist, publisher and philanthropist Dave Eggers.

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EDITORIAL

How much do you know about East Timor, our nearest neighbour, just an hour’s flight from Darwin? Having

gained independence after a bloody struggle with Indonesia in 1999, East Timor is now carving an autonomous identity, which is no easy task. One of the poorest countries in the world, close to 50 per cent of East Timor’s adult population is illiterate. Basic services and systems that we take for granted – such as hospitals, schools, public transport and roads – are still lacking. And with the United Nations pulling out in August 2012 and violence rumbling in the streets, more civil and ethnic unrest threatens to resurge.

Jill Jolliffe is one of Australia’s most respected journalists and foreign correspondents, and she has spent a large part of her career toiling in the complex machinations of East Timor’s political system and social fabric. Her acclaimed 2001 book, Cover-Up: The Inside Story of the Balibo Five, recounts the infamous murder of her journalist colleagues in 1975.

Jill recently returned to East Timor for the first time in over a decade, visiting sites made notorious after the deaths of ‘the Five’. She encounters the excavation of mass graves and the enduring holes in the murder investigation, and finds herself increasingly troubled by China’s ever-growing influence in the region.

In other commentary, Gabrielle Carey writes about the mercurial Australian novelist Randolph Stow, and his ambivalent relationship to his homeland. In a chapter

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from her memoir-in-progress, Lee Kofman describes with candour and honesty her experiences searching for non-monogamous relationships, and the challenges and prejudice she’s encountered on her quest to live according to these principles. Elsewhere, Robbie Arnott bares all, literally, on the summit of a Japanese volcano, after an unexpected encounter with a French photographer.

In Fiction, Miles Franklin long-listed novelist Patrick Allington’s story ‘At Rothko’ is a comical account of family dynamics, while Helen Dinmore’s ‘An Illusion Caused by the World Spinning Around’ is a lyrical coming-of-age story set in a commune.

Kill Your Darlings is in conversation with US novelist David Vann, whose critically-acclaimed cycle of stories set in Alaska, Legend of a Suicide, cast him onto the world stage, while in Reviews KYD regular Caroline Hamilton writes about the enduring charm of US writer and publisher Dave Eggers, a ‘one-man zeitgeist’.

We’re massive fans of Eggers’ work – particularly his advocacy of literacy. Caroline’s insightful piece is an inspiring account of what innovation in publishing can achieve, and highlights the challenges of writing non-fiction with the force of celebrity seeping into the stories.

Happy reading!

Rebecca Starford, Editor

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COMMENTARY

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UNQUIET GRAVES

Returning to East Timor

Jill Jolliffe

After a long absence I’m back in East Timor on a hit-and-run reporting raid to probe new issues and

grapple with memories: Balibó, corpses, East Timor’s so-called China syndrome and its relations with Australia are on the agenda.

I set off first for Balibó with my young friend, Elvis Sarmento Guterres, in a car rented from Sebastião and Sandra da Silva’s car yard in Dili’s west. Sebastião is a fine Timorese artist whose car rentals bankroll his painting. I needed to hire a car with a driver and he recommended Roberto, a cheery, cheeky chappie in cargo pants and a back-to-front baseball cap. He and Elvis size each other up slowly, sideways, like dogs cautiously circling and sniffing, then bond instantly. For the duration of the 140km drive to the border they talk incessantly in Tetûm, cracking jokes, most of which are about East Timor’s prime minister Xanana Gusmão. I’m not sure whether they’re derogatory or admiring – they certainly seem hilarious.

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Travelling westward along the coast we come to the old prison at Aipelo, used by the Portuguese in colonial times to disembark deportados – political dissidents also known as ‘red legionnaires’ – who were transported from Lisbon to exile in this most distant of colonies. Rebellious local chiefs (liurais) were also imprisoned, some dying here. By the time of the Indonesian withdrawal, the historic building was falling down and overgrown with weeds. In a prime example of opportunism the Indonesian administration signposted the site as evidence of Portuguese cruelty, which it was, but it paled into insignificance compared to Indonesia’s torture record in East Timor.

I ask Roberto to stop because I can see that a restoration is underway – the building has been cleaned and partly repaired and the weeds have gone. Some Timorese youths seated outside tell me it was initiated by the Secretariat of Culture, responsible for heritage buildings. Although the old Indonesian sign remains (perhaps overlooked), there are some new signs outside with histories of the liurais who perished: Dom Felix Damião Ribeiro of Aileu, Dom Feliciano Pires of Laleia and Dom Caetano of Balibó, as well as a commoner called Manu Hada who fought in the nationalist revolt quashed in 1912.

The seaward view from the Aipelo prison is of the Ombai–Wetar Straits, a deep seawater channel key to international complicity in Indonesia’s 1975 invasion. Michael Richardson of the Age published a story in August 1976 on talks in Washington where senior United States officials warned Australian prime minister Malcolm Fraser and foreign minister Andrew Peacock of American interest

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