Luke Davies Fan Tribute Blog

Luke Davies, Dreams and meaning

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 08 Mar 2009 14:56:00 +0000

Catching Up With Luke Davies

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 15 Feb 2009 23:44:00 +0000

Luke Davies in the "Charlie Brown" Sweater and Ball Cap (above)

There is a wonderful new post from Luke on his blog, The Daily Totem, to update everyone on what's going on with him, his new short film and directorial debut, "Air", and his much awaited new book of poetry, "Interferon Psalms". I can't wait for this book!

Check out his new post and photos here:

http://lukedavies.blogspot.com/

On Death Row With Luke Davies - Interview Transcript

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 00:19:00 +0000

Source: The Book Show - ABC National Radio

Interview Transcript - Ramona Koval and Luke Davies

Ramona Koval: What do the condemned think about while they're on death row? This is one of the questions Luke Davies wanted to ask when he spent time with two men on death row at Bali's Kerobokan Prison, Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran. They are two of the 'Bali 9' who were arrested in 2005 and charged with drug trafficking. Three of them are on death row and they have one more legal option to have their sentences reduced from death. It's currently before the Supreme Court in Indonesia.

Luke Davies has written about his time at Kerobokan Prison in the essay 'The Penalty is Death' which is in the latest Monthly magazine. This is his first foray into journalism, he's usually introduced as an Australian novelist, poet and screenwriter. Luke Davies joins me now from Los Angeles, and because these men are waiting for the determination of their final appeal, we won't be talking about any of the details of their arrest, nor about their guilt or innocence. Luke Davies, welcome to The Book Show.

Luke Davies: Hi Ramona, thanks for having me on the show.

Ramona Koval: You spent a week in Bali visiting these young men in the prison. Can you describe firstly what was involved in visiting the prison every day?

Luke Davies: It was a very slow bureaucratic process that involved several checkpoints and security stops, and that was very trying. A lot of the people who visited were family members and old women and so on, and they'd be waiting in the baking concrete yard sometimes for up to two hours before you could get in. But everybody did it with fairly good humour and patience, and eventually made it in. Sometimes the process took so long that the visiting hours were of course cut short because you'd spent so long waiting in queues and then going to the next stage and waiting yet again and taking a number and waiting yet again and being searched and frisked and so on. But it was worth it in the end, in its completely exhausting way.

Ramona Koval: The week you were there Andrew Chan's family was there too. How were they dealing with his incarceration and the looming death penalty, given that it was so physically and psychically draining being in proximity to I suppose what must be the fear around the prison?

Luke Davies: 'Physically and psychically draining' is a good description, and for me as an outsider who in a sense had nothing invested other than the desire to get to the emotional heart of the story of these men and their families, it was bad enough. I can't even begin to imagine how distressing that week must have been for Chan's family. At other times Sukumaran's family have visited. Beyond all the basic exhaustion that the visiting brings on, I think there was the deeply distressing factor of these families living in a nightmare; their loved one is there and there's a possibility that he's going to die. I think dealing with that must be beyond comprehension.

Ramona Koval: You visited Sukumaran's family in Australia, you were one of the first outsiders to speak to them. What sort of responsibility did you feel towards the family in terms of what you were going to write about them? Because their experience of the media was a difficult one.

Luke Davies: Yes, I felt nervous. Partly I felt nervous because this was really new territory for me, I don't really consider myself a journalist and yet suddenly I was asked to write this story that spread outwards to the family members. But look, I felt the responsibility to tell to the best of my ability the emotional story that I saw going on surrounding this case, and I felt very privileged and fortunate that the families opened themselves up to me and said 'we will take the risk and we will speak, even though our experience of the media is a very unhappy one'.

Ramona Koval: As you say, you're the author of Candy, and most recently God of Speed about the drug-addled Howard Hughes. What did it take to entice you into writing in this mode?

Luke Davies: I was very reluctant at first when the idea was first floated to me. I just thought I don't think I'd be good at that, I don't think I'd do that, I don't know how I would do that...

Ramona Koval: Why do you think you were asked?

Luke Davies: I think I was asked because Julian McMahon, the barrister who's in charge of the Australian end of representing these guys, and Sally Warhaft, my editor at The Monthly, thought that I was a writer who might somehow be able to capture the moment and that in fact my lack of journalistic background would be a strength, because there was a standard sort of story that probably could be told about these two of the Bali 9 and they didn't want that story.

Ramona Koval: As you portray them, they are different from the 'gangster 1' and 'gangster 2' that they've been portrayed as. How do you see the characters?

Luke Davies: Well, they've been demonised and the demonising has been extreme, and I guess myself as a person who has far from a spotless past was able to humanise and to see the human elements more clearly in what they and their families are going through...

Ramona Koval: Tell me about your far from spotless past?

Luke Davies: I just mean it's...I live with the fact now that given the success of Candy, my first thinly-veiled semiautobiographical novel, when I've been the subject of interviews about my past experience with drug addictions and coming through the other side of that and questions of redemption and so on...so in some deep background way I think all these things figured in why it might have been that they thought I'd be an interesting person to go to Bali and write this story.

Ramona Koval: The questions you asked Chan and Sukumaran were things like what did they dream about, did the clouds they see when they're in the prison yard become interesting. These are very unusual questions to be asked in this particular circumstance. What were you trying to bring out about their experience from these questions?

Luke Davies: There was no master plan, those kind of questions were...I asked a lot of questions and they happened to be questions that got extremely interesting answers. Basically I just asked the questions that came from the ways in which I tried to imagine what this would be like for me. In a sense it became an essay on the passage of time. Basically I think in all my writing all I ever write about is the passage of time and mortality and death and how we are to act now in the face of our impending death and how that would change if you were in a situation where your impending death was very impending potentially.

So questions of the passage of time fascinated me, trying to imagine what it would be like never to leave that place and yet to have these endless idle hours on your hands. It was a really disturbing thing to try and imagine and so hence those kinds of questions; dreams and daydreams and looking at the sky and what was important and so on. Because you're very hemmed in there. I hadn't had experience with visiting prisons before or being in prison, so it was a visceral sort of...I didn't have to imagine much to ask those kinds of questions.

Ramona Koval: You asked, 'How often do you think of the worst-case scenario?' What was their response?

Luke Davies: I found that really sad. In a sense they both avoid...Andrew Chan said to that question, 'I don't have a bond with negativity. If I let that grow, it will grow forever,' which I thought was an extraordinary answer, an admission of the necessity for a kind of denial in order to survive. And Myuran Sukumaran, when I asked him the same question, he said, 'I don't think about it at all. I think it's not going to happen. It can't happen. Whatever happens you can deal with, as long you have the future.'

So I guess a lot of my story is about the constant anxiety of living with an uncertain future. It's that question of, if we really think a lot about the speed of life, then death is very imminent for all of us, and the question is very important of how we live each moment. But in this kind of compressed, pressure-cooker situation it becomes deeply moving. I found the experience of being in there really moving because being in close proximity to people's anxiety and fear and uncertainty is not necessarily a pleasant experience but it's a very vivid and real one.

Ramona Koval: In your essay, Luke, you refer to many writers and how they have written about the process of the death penalty. You refer to Tolstoy's experience of watching a beheading. What did he say?

Luke Davies: Yes, Tolstoy said at the moment he saw that head separate from the body he knew without any doubt that...what did he say? 'If every man now living in the world and every man who had lived since the beginning of time were to maintain, in the name of some theory of other, that this execution was indispensable, I should still know it was not indispensable, that it was wrong.' And that was in 1857 when he saw a beheading. The background literature on this story was really, really elegant and interesting and there was a lot of it. There was a lot of it that didn't make it into the story too, but there was some great...

Ramona Koval: You talk about William Thackeray, author of Vanity Fair, who saw a hanging in 1840.

Luke Davies: Yes, and he also said something about...I can't remember the exact quote, but it was, 'I came away that day with horror and disgust, not for the murder which I saw committed...' in other words, not for the murder which the person was being hanged for. And then there was that judge Falco that Camus mentioned. He was actually one of the judges in the Nuremberg trails, but he sentenced a man to death in France, a man who killed his own daughter and threw her down a well, and decided that it was his moral duty as a sentencing judge to witness the execution, and it completely changed his opinion about the death penalty. He called it 'administrative assassination'.

Ramona Koval: So could we say that once a writer has witnessed this that they are all against it?

Luke Davies: I didn't find any literature in the great amount of research that I did and that others helped me do that showed the opposite happening. I never actually found a case of a conversion in the opposite direction where someone wrote about having been against the death penalty, seen it, and then deciding that is was a good thing. So it certainly does seem that seeing it changes things, and Camus wrote very eloquently about that.

He said; 'If society really believed its own words about the appropriateness of the death penalty, we would be shown the heads, executions would be given the same promotional campaign ordinarily reserved for government loans or a new brand of aperitif. We must either kill publicly or admit we do not feel authorised to kill. If society justifies the death penalty as a necessary example then it must justify itself by providing the publicity necessary to make an example.'

I tend to agree with that. I went into this story without a really clear personal attitude towards the death penalty. I came out of it with slightly clearer attitudes but not...I'm still not 100% about what I think in all circumstances and so on. But I like that point that he made. I think it's kind of rhetorical. I think it would be an untenable situation to revert to that kind of state; heads on spikes or whatever, from the Middle Ages or even from more recent times. But I think it's a very good point.

Ramona Koval: Yes, reading your essay made me think more and more about the families of these men and the suffering that goes on around them as well. It seems to be a terrible punishment for the people around them too.

Luke Davies: Yes, Julian McMahon spent time with Van Nguyen's mother and brother before Van Nguyen was executed in Singapore in 2005. He was a young Australian who was caught smuggling heroin through Changi airport, and he was hanged in 2005. But McMahon made that point very, very eloquently, that at the moment Van Nguyen's mother collapsed sobbing into his arms after her final visit he understood more than anything that the death penalty was wrong, not so much because of the way in which it ends the life of the accused person, but because of the senseless cutting off of that live in terms of family relationships.

Ramona Koval: Yes, and he kept a diary too, Van Nguyen. What did he write about the experience of being on death row?

Luke Davies: His writings were very surprising. I was given access to this enormous sway...he wrote a lot. He had not much else to do. It was very sad. He got to measure time in prison by the length of time that a new pen would last for, between 14 and 16 days I think was the figure before a pen ran out after constant writing. He began slightly arrogant and slightly bewildered, as you might imagine someone might be in those kinds of circumstances. But it does seem to me that he underwent a genuine transformation, a kind of genuine moral transformation, and it's hard to imagine how this can be the case but it does seem that he died a happy person, a completely selfless person, who accepted his fate as being the price he had been deemed to pay for an unacceptable transgression. At a certain point when he knew he was going to die, he stopped worrying about it and he seemed to become happy, and it seems to be reflected in his very unusual writings which were all about how he can help others from his limited circumstances in a prison cell in Singapore.

Ramona Koval: If Chan and Myuran's sentences aren't reduced, what is their fate?

Luke Davies: Well, they've been sentenced so far three times already to the death penalty in Bali, each time as a result of different complex legal manoeuvres and appeals and so on. So that fact alone means that things don't bode well for their future. There's a team of lawyers here and in Indonesia who passionately believe that the death penalty is wrong and who fight this case pro bono simply because of that belief. That's really impressive. I found all of these people who fight this cause with such a kind of purity really impressive.

But the best-case scenario is that on appeal their sentences are changed from death to life or death to a sentence 'with a number', as the guys in the prison call it, anything with an actual number of years on it as opposed to life. And the worst-case scenario is the worst-case scenario, that these appeals will fail and that they will be led out in front of a firing squad and shot.

Ramona Koval: You say there will be two live bullets for every ten rifles. So there is a sense there that it's a big thing to kill somebody in these circumstances, so there's a way of masking this for the people who are actually in the firing squad.

Luke Davies: Yes, I came across the term 'diffusion of responsibility' that is a tradition of firing squads. It gives somebody in a firing squad at least the partial illusion that they may or may not have fired one of the lethal shots. Apparently the fact is that an experienced marksman can tell the difference between a live round and a blank because of the strength of the recoil. But anyway, it's a ritual that a certain number of rifles in a firing squad contain blanks.

Ramona Koval: Is this going to change your writing in any way? Are you going to say yes to more offers like this, that you'll go into the world and report?

Luke Davies: I don't see myself as suddenly becoming a journalist. I think I still have a next novel to write and so on, but I was really, really pleased to be able to go deep into the heart of this story and it was a journey for me. I learned a lot of new things that I didn't know before. I don't mean surface-level things, I mean things...I questioned my attitudes. And I had that privilege of being put in touch with human suffering at a deeper level than usual. That's not a pleasant experience but it is somehow a good one, and more than anything I really genuinely hope now that my article might make a difference. I believe that these two guys should not be executed. As you said at the beginning of the program, I'm not here to talk about questions of guilt. One of the conditions of my being allowed access to them and their families was that I focus on the human aspect of the story and what is happening for them now and not the background aspects. But regardless of that, I have now come to believe that it would be completely wrong to execute these guys.

Ramona Koval: The essay 'The Penalty is Death' is in the latest Monthly magazine. Luke Davies, thanks for being on The Book Show today.

Luke Davies: Thanks for having me, Ramona.

Ramona Koval: And Luke Davies' latest novel is God of Speed.

NEWS! The Filming of Air, Luke's New Short Film!

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 27 Dec 2008 01:52:00 +0000

We are soooo excited. Luke Davies is in Texas filming the short film, Air. Air was not only written by Luke, but is being directed by him as well. We can't wait to see this film. Check out this link to keep up with news and progress on the film. http://blog.wearethemasses.com/2008/12/17/air/

Luke Davies Receives Grant To Aid Writing Over Next Two Years

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 16:28:00 +0000

Grants all round

Barry Hill and Luke Davies are the big winners in the latest round of Australia Council grants, each receiving a $100,000 fellowship to aid their writing over the next two years. Other grants are dished out for a specific project to writers under the categories of emerging, developing, and established. Emerging talent includes Victorian writers Gretta Beveridge ($15,000), Briohyn Doyle, Catherine Harris, Andy Jackson, Leah Kaminsky, Bruce Oakman and Eddie Paterson ($15,000) and and Jenny Sinclair ($10,000). Developing writers include Randa Abdel-Fattah, Emily Ballou ($25,000), James Bouyce, Nathan Curnow, Stuart Forsyth, Kate James, Mireille Juchau, Kim Kane, Christopher Morgan, Nam Le, Paddy O'Reilly and Carrie Tiffany. Established writers include Robert Adamson, Venero Armanno, Robyn Davidson, Jennifer Maiden, Andrew Sant, Mandy Sayer and Charlotte Wood ($60,000), Fiona Capp ($30,000) and Sean Condon and Anne Spudvilas ($20,000).

Source: The Age
Australia

The Penalty Is Death

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 16:13:00 +0000

The Penalty Is Death
Inside Bali's Kerobokan Prison
By Luke Davies

On a sweltering June day in the crowded visiting yard of Bali's Kerobokan Prison, I asked Myuran Sukumaran, a young Australian on death row for drug trafficking, about sleep, and dreams. Does he ever have dreams where he's free? Sukumaran shrugged, then grinned. "Daydreams, maybe," he said.
In Kerobokan, there are long, idle hours for activity such as that. The hours are only broken by the visiting periods, six days a week, when friends and relatives of the prisoners squeeze into a tiled courtyard about half the size of a basketball court, jostling for space and sitting on reed mats on the hard ground. Stretched over the space, a canvas awning keeps out the worst of the noonday heat. It also traps the humid air in uncirculating stillness.

Another time I asked if, out in the prisoners' yard, with the rectangle of blue sky framed so starkly by the prison buildings, clouds become interesting. Sukumaran, who goes by the name Myu, thought about this for a while, as he did with most questions, before shaking his head. "Not clouds," he said. "Not really. But planes make you think. You see one now and again. I always think of that scene from The Unit." He went on to describe a complicated balloon-and-winch system, as seen in the television program, in which commandos are evacuated, by a kind of airborne slingshot contraption, from sticky situations in foreign places. There was something surreal, and a touch forlorn, about the fantasy. Later, he joked: "I really want one of those balloons. Maybe even a hot-air balloon would be enough. You wouldn't know where I could get one, would you?"

The prison nestles amid the narrow streets of Kerobokan - a bustling, ramshackle town not greatly touched by tourism - like a blank, monolithic temple, rimmed with barbed wire, all its activities turned inwards. Visitors, when finally they are granted access, receive a purple stamp on the wrist that allows them to leave. They bring food to the prison, and tissues are used as serviettes. Each day I visited, Sukumaran, who has a recurring nervous blink, would pick at these tissues as he talked, seemingly unaware of the action. He would tear them up into hundreds of tiny pieces, his fingers fidgeting methodically even as the conversation flowed gently. At the end of each visit, amid the food refuse and plastic water bottles, there would be a dense little mound of tissue confetti in a half-circle around where he had been sitting.

Sukumaran talks in a measured way, but it is clear his mind is racing. Andrew Chan, also on death row for the same offence, talks like a bag of firecrackers going off, and somehow seems more at home. Where Sukumaran is rangy, considered and thoughtful, Chan is compact, more spontaneous in his replies, something of a scrapper - quick with a cheeky smile, and always willing to offer analyses of other prisoners. "He's a puzzled individual," he said of one. "He's very puzzled. His life is a puzzle. And he doesn't know how to put the pieces together." Chan constantly riffs on themes in this manner, paraphrasing his own statements, throwing the words around, variation after variation, in a kind of comical running banter. He's something of a motor-mouth, in a larrikin way, and he has a few scars that make you wonder how often it's gotten him into trouble.

Chan and Sukumaran were arrested in April 2005, and charged with drug trafficking, along with seven other Australians. They came to be known collectively as the Bali Nine. Unlike Australia, where co-accused usually face trial together, in Indonesia the nine went through a series of separate trials and appeals in different combinations. All were found guilty and sentenced by judges of the District Court in February 2006. Sukumaran and Chan received the death penalty; the other seven, life imprisonment.

On each of Sukumaran and Chan's three appeals, that sentence has remained. For the seven others, several life sentences were reduced by the intermediate High Court to 20 years. On further appeal - by all except Renae Lawrence - to the Supreme Court, the sentences were increased to either life in prison or the death penalty. For a time in September 2006, when the Supreme Court handed down its decision, six were on death row. At that point, there was one more legal option: a final appeal to the Supreme Court, known as a Peninjauan Kembali, or PK. In their PK decided in 2007, three had their death penalties reduced to life imprisonment, leaving Sukumaran, Chan and Scott Rush on death row. Each has at least one legal option, the PK, still to be taken.

Failing that, and if all other options are unsuccessful, at some point in the future Chan and Sukumaran will be woken one morning before dawn - assuming they have slept. They will be handcuffed to prison officers and led to a van. The van will drive from the prison, through the local streets, and about five miles through the jungle to an isolated beach. Indonesia's 1964 "Penetapan Presiden No. 2" death-penalty regulations, still the current ones, state: "Once arriving at the place of their death, the condemned is blindfolded (although they can choose not to be) (s.11(4))." A white apron will be draped over each of them, with a round red target over the heart. It is generally thought that their hands will be tied or handcuffed behind their backs to a pole, although the regulations tell us, "The condemned is given the freedom to choose how they will die - standing, sitting or lying (s.12(1))": surely the saddest final life choice imaginable. There will be 20 soldiers, members of the Indonesian Mobile Brigade, who will have passed "appropriate psychological tests" - ten soldiers for Chan, ten for Sukumaran - and for each lot of ten rifles, two live bullets and eight blanks. The state delivers justice, or retribution, in executing its wrongdoers, but the blanks say something about an instinctive human resistance to the killing of a defenceless person. They allow, however flimsily, for a collective sense among the firing squad members of diffusion of responsibility. An experienced marksman can tell the difference between a blank and a live bullet, due to the strength of the recoil; nonetheless, the loophole of the blank cartridge has long been a tradition of the firing squad. In any case, the young men's hearts will burst. Death will be massively traumatic, though there is some debate about just how swift. But "Penetapan Presiden No. 2" has the contingencies covered. "If after the shooting, the condemned still shows signs they are not yet dead, the Commander immediately gives the order to the head of the firing squad to let off a tembakan pengakhir (finishing shot) by pressing the barrel of the gun against the temple of the condemned, right above their ear (s.14(4))."

*

Each morning I arrived up to an hour and a half early at the sunbaked concrete waiting area outside Kerobokan Prison. It was always already full of Indonesian families, mostly women and children. The entry procedure is laboriously slow; if you do not arrive early, you risk having much of the visiting time eaten up. After the long wait and the various security checks, I would spy Chan across the visitors' yard, his patch of ground staked out by the dimensions of a reed mat, his attention completely absorbed by an issue of Rugby League Week. (He's a Panthers fan.) Chan is a friendly host, snapping his fingers and signalling for bottled water from the vendor - capitalism thrives, even on the inside - as if we were sitting at a Parisian café and he were catching the waiter's attention. The week of my visit, his family came too: father, Ken; mother, Helen; younger sister, Mary; and her fiancé, Vin. (His older brother and sister, Michael and Frances, are back in Sydney.) Chan had gotten hold of two low plastic stools for his parents: Ken is 72, and Helen, 60.

There's a definite sense that Chan has found his way around inside, though perhaps it is just that Sukumaran is at first more reserved. If Chan is suffering from depression or anxiety - and it is hard to believe that anyone, anywhere, in this situation could not be - he's harnessed his restless energy into something ostensibly purposeful. Sukumaran's deep alarm at being a prisoner in Bali is not as well masked as Chan's. After three years, Chan speaks reasonably fluent Indonesian; Sukumaran has very little. Chan is confident, sometimes playful, even at times with the guards; but never confrontational. There's something personable and ockerish about him. His broad Australian accent came as something of a surprise - as if, along with the Asian-crime-lord image from the tabloid media, I was expecting a clichéd accent too. He hates that the media have painted him and Sukumaran as Gangster 1 and Gangster 2.

There's a furious energy, and a manic edge, to his patter. I'm not sure how easily I can imagine him as Gangster 1 (or 2, for that matter), but it's easy to picture him being relentless, fearless, punching above his weight. His running commentaries are amusing, and the anecdotes come thick and fast.

On the day of his sentencing, when a reporter called out across the yard to his holding cell, "What's the best thing that's happened to you since you've been here?" Chan shot back: "Meetin' you fellas, eh?" They are the only words he'd spoken publicly until now. Of Schapelle Corby he said, with a big wry grin, "She's like the Harbour Bridge - she's iconic, mate. She's iconic." Of fellow Bali Nine member Renae Lawrence, in the female section of the prison with mostly young Indonesian women: "If I was her and I was a lezzo, I'd be thinking, mate, you've put me in heaven. Absolute heaven." On ribbing his brother Michael about his recent wedding, back in Sydney: "I said to him, ‘If I ever have a reception, mate, I'll have it at McDonald's. One, it's cheaper. Two, everyone's happy: we get 'em all a Happy Meal. And three, everyone gets a toy to take home.'"

But gradually, over the days I visited, the conversation turned to more serious matters. I asked: How often do you think about the worst-case scenario? His face turned instantly sombre; his answer came lightning-fast. "I don't have a bond with negativity. If I let that grow, it will grow forever."

When I asked Sukumaran the same question, he said, "For me, I don't think about it at all. I think: It's not going to happen. It can't happen." He waved his hands emphatically in front of his chest, as if waving something distasteful away. "Whatever happens," he went on, "you can deal with it. As long as you have the future."

Chan gave the impression of being determined to keep things busy, and stay in the moment. At times, Sukumaran seemed so consumed with anxiety about his predicament, it was a form of deep distractedness in itself. But it struck me that, under the looming pressure of a death sentence, both of them are in their own ways striving to delineate the question of how best to be human, to actively exist, with consciousness and will, in the worst of circumstances. Chan referred to "things that you know you can't deal with: I'm not that kind of person who says, ‘I'll let time settle on it.' Or I can't say, ‘In five years' time, this is what I can look forward to.' Or any time in the future. That's just a dream. Things that I know I've got no control over, I say to myself, ‘Why am I worrying about it?' If I've got a problem, I don't want heat growing on it."

In what ways, then, I asked him, has living under the death penalty made him a different person? His answer, which was far from coherent to me, seemed to contain a pained yearning for continuity. "I see things new. I lived life freely - planned things and shit like that. Get me? But these days I live life to the fullest. I learn to live every day. I'm not saying I don't have a future. But I build things. I'm saying, if I want to become things, I need to start building now. Like" - he gestured to me - "if I wanted to become a writer in 30 years, I wouldn't think: In 30 years I'll become a writer. I'd start building something from now."

*

Julian McMahon is the barrister organising the Australian end of Chan and Sukumaran's fight against the death penalty, with a group of volunteers drawn from the highest echelons of Melbourne's legal world. (He and the QC - now Supreme Court judge - Lex Lasry took on the case just before the death penalty was handed down for the third time, in September 2006.) McMahon is a young-looking 44, with thinning sandy hair and bookish glasses. His chambers, in a gracious old building in the heart of the city where even the lifts feel as though they come from a 1940s film-noir set, is overflowing with thick case folders, towering stacks of papers and an eclectic mix of books. Nearest to hand beside his desk is a book, well-thumbed, well-marked, of the prison writings of Thomas More, awaiting beheading in the Tower of London in 1534, including his ‘Prayer Before Dying' and ‘Meditation on Detachment' ("Give me thy grace, good Lord, to set the world at nought").

McMahon calls capital punishment the "premeditated, state-sanctioned ritualised killing of a person who is defenceless"- echoing a comment from half a century earlier by the French judge Robert Falco, who condemned to death a man who had murdered his own daughter and thrown her down a well. Seeing it as a matter of duty, Falco went to the execution. The memory of the "dreadful spectacle" stayed with him, and he came, after long consideration, to call capital punishment "administrative assassination". McMahon acts for Chan and Sukumaran because he believes it is his duty as a lawyer to devote a portion of his time and energy, pro bono, to defend from execution those who cannot defend themselves. His convictions were strengthened in recent years by a very personal experience. With Lex Lasry, he had taken on the death-row case of Van Nguyen, a young Australian arrested at Singapore's Changi Airport in December 2002 with 396 grams of heroin strapped to his body, reportedly for the purpose of getting his then heroin-addicted twin brother, Khoa, out of drug-related debt. Van Nguyen was sentenced to death and, despite a number of appeals, was executed by hanging in December 2005. On the day before he was hanged, his mother and Khoa were allowed a final visit. (Lasry and McMahon applied to be present at the execution itself, but were denied permission. No outsiders may witness executions.) The lawyers waited in a corridor while that visit took place. A keening, guttural lament, a chilling animal sound like nothing McMahon had ever heard, swept down the corridor. Mrs Nguyen fell into Lasry's arms, Khoa into McMahon's; the mother and brother wept inconsolably for 15 minutes. At that moment, McMahon told me, "one of the things that clicked in my mind with a simple assuredness was that the death penalty is absolutely wrong, because of what they were going through. That final senseless, useless separation."

Tolstoy, witnessing a more brutal kind of separation at an execution in Paris in 1857, came to the same conclusion.

When I saw the head part from the body, and each of them fall separately into a box with a thud, I understood - not in my mind, but with my whole being - that no rational doctrine of progress could justify that act, and that if every man now living in the world, and every man who had lived since the beginning of time, were to maintain, in the name of some theory or other, that this execution was indispensable, I should still know it was not indispensable: that it was wrong.

History, and codified law, has generally disagreed. As long as states have existed, state killing has been carried out. But, for the first time in recorded history, we live in an era where the majority of them have outlawed the death penalty. Amnesty International figures from early 2007 show that 88 countries have abolished capital punishment for all crimes, and a further 11 have abolished it for all but "exceptional" ones, such as war crimes. In addition, 29 countries are now considered to be abolitionist in practice: the death penalty remains in law, but no executions have been carried out in ten years or more. Of that total of 128 countries, 45 had abolished the death penalty for all crimes in the years after 1990. This left, in 2007, 69 countries which still retained and used the death penalty, although the number executing prisoners in any given year is smaller than that, and as more creep past Amnesty's ten-year dividing line, they will join the abolitionist-in-practice category.

Things seldom go in the other direction: since 1985, only four abolitionist countries have reintroduced the death penalty. Of those, Nepal and the Philippines then re-abolished it, while in Gambia and Papua New Guinea there have been no executions.

About 90% of all executions take place in six countries: China, Iran, Iraq, Sudan, Pakistan and the USA. The numbers will range from more than 1000 for China (though Amnesty calls these figures the tip of the iceberg, and says they may be as high as 8000 in a given year) down to around 50 in the US, spread across a dozen states.

"We hang or electrocute A simply in order to so alarm B that he will not kill C," wrote HL Mencken in 1926. It's the principle of deterrence, though there is no convincing evidence that the death penalty acts in such a way. "The business of deterring others is no more than an afterthought," Mencken admitted. "The main thing is to destroy the concrete scoundrels whose act has alarmed everyone, and thus made everyone unhappy." It's called revenge, he said, though he preferred to "borrow a better term from the late Aristotle: katharsis" - a "salubrious discharge of emotion" for the whole society. The great irony is that capital-punishment statistics in fact only ever tell us of those - the executed and those awaiting execution - for whom the death penalty was clearly not a deterrent.

*

Myuran Sukumaran would like to have started his own business. A video shop. A café. A restaurant. An internet company. As he listed the possibilities, the words came out sounding nonchalant and casual, because the ideas sounded so plausible. It was hard to read Andrew Chan's eyes, but when I looked at Sukumaran's I was struck by the feeling that I've rarely encountered such sorrow, as if his entire life these days is a perpetual effort not to weep. He knows there's a swathe of public opinion that would merely say: You should have thought of all this before you did what you did. For Sukumaran, that thinking - you must take responsibility for your actions; it is only how you deal with what is, not what might have been, that matters; you do the crime, you do the time - is drowned out in the white noise of regret.

And yet it is precisely time that he continually ponders. "You know," he said, "if you were going to get out of here in ten, 15, 20 years, it'd be nice to think you could get yourself an education." In the chaos and heat of the yard, listening in close, I thought: Where does he get these figures from - ten, 15, 20? What fantasy is he entertaining? His case, and Chan's, rests with the PK appeal to the Supreme Court, which is currently being prepared; and if that is unsuccessful, then with clemency - with the possibility of President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono's deciding that mercy is a valid alternative to the letter of the law. If that day comes, then Death may be exchanged for Life. But there, in the crowded visitors' yard, cross-legged on the hard floor as Sukumaran mechanically picked Kleenex tissues into tiny shreds, it all seemed far away.

"If I do end up getting executed," he told me, "I'd rather it happened quick than sit around and wait. If I do go back to the world in 30 years, that's scary too. But if there's a number, at least you can count down the days." It seems an extraordinary notion, to cross days off, one at a time, for so many years. "Twenty years from now," he continued, "the friends I have, won't be." (He didn't appear to notice he'd dropped ten years off a hypothetical change of circumstances.) "I'll be 47. Technology will have changed so much. You'll probably need three degrees just to get a job." When he talked of a distant future, he seemed so genuinely lost, and wracked with quiet anxieties. Beyond his shoulder, on the window of an administrative section beside the yard, I noticed a sticker: Every day is Sunday in Bali. Especially today.

Like Chan, Sukumaran loathes the way he's been portrayed in the media: the Asian-drug-lord tag. "I'm still looking for my ‘green Mercedes' and my ‘many girlfriends'," he said, grinning. Three months before his arrest, he had taken up jujitsu classes in a local hall. When the tabloid media found out about this, Sukumaran became the martial-arts expert known as ‘The Enforcer'. Then there was the infamous media scrum, when Sukumaran and Chan were led from a police van to the courthouse. Footage from that day was replayed incessantly on TV. In it, they move forward, handcuffed together, while police push a way through the melee, as cameramen and reporters jostle around them for position. Suddenly Sukumaran lashes out. A female reporter falls over.

When I asked about this, Sukumaran said that on that morning, in February 2006, their then lawyers had contacted them at the prison and told them the mood was grim, that things were looking bad. The death penalty was suddenly likely. The two were, as Sukumaran put it, "a bit stressed". "I was shocked. I didn't have time to think. We were never prepared for the death penalty." They stepped out of the van and into chaos. "It was hard to move, hard to hear anything above the shouting. I couldn't see more than a couple of people ahead. The guard held me tight and pulled me through. Andrew was being pulled another way. We were handcuffed very tightly. I thought my elbow would break. They wouldn't give us any space. I was being pulled apart. This reporter kept screaming out questions and I couldn't understand a word she was saying. She kept jabbing this long mic in my face. It hit me two or three times and I tried to grab it away."

The clenched jaw in that footage looks a lot more like fear to me than rage, but perhaps the two are not so far apart. In any case, ‘The Enforcer' was born. "Enjoy your trip to hell," is the kind of hate mail Sukumaran receives from time to time, but he tries to not let it get to him. Prison clarifies; a death sentence, more so. "You see things a whole lot different. Like, a lot of stuff, you think it's a waste of time."

There is a surprising softness to Sukumaran. He's the introvert to Chan's extrovert. Perhaps his version of coping is merely more pensive than that of Chan, who tends to shrug things off. Sukumaran bemoaned the lack of privacy: "If something goes wrong - with people in here or with your family or whatever - you can only internalise it. There's nowhere to go." I suggested that this may be, the way I imagine it when I try, the worst of the punishment: the constant internalisation. His eyes welled up for a brief moment, and he turned his face away.

*

In Sydney's west, I met Sukumaran's family: mother, Rajini; brother, Chinthu; and sister, Brintha. The living room of the neat townhouse was simply furnished, with white tiles that, in an odd coincidence, resembled those of the prison courtyard. It was well over an hour into my visit before my eyes took in, on the far side of the room, the large, unwieldy stack of boxes and cartons against the far wall, draped with plastic sheeting: Myuran's worldly goods, as if suspended in transit. They were moved here when the family fled their previous house, after the media attention had become too much. I kept being drawn to them, running my eyes over their bulging contours. That stack of boxes seemed as sad to me as anything that was said in the time I spent with the Sukumarans. It wasn't that the family didn't know what to do with Myuran's belongings, Rajini explained; it was that they hadn't found the time, or the energy, to deal with them yet.

I'm the first outsider the Sukumarans have spoken to, and the release of bottled-up emotion was palpable. They were nervous, but eager to talk, and Rajini perched for much of my visit on the edge of her seat. But there was a gentle warmth between them, too; their words overspilt each other, and it was endearing, the way they finished one another's sentences and stories.

Myuran was born in London in 1981, where Rajini and her husband had gone to study accountancy. At an early age he was sent back to Sri Lanka, to live with grandparents, while Rajini dropped out of her courses and worked to support her husband's studies. In 19XX they collected baby Myuran and migrated to Australia, where Chinthu and Brintha were later born. Myuran's father has been ill for many years now, and was unavailable for interview. "He's not well," Brintha said. "He cares. But he's not well."

The night after Myuran's arrest, Brintha saw her brother on the TV news. She became hysterical; when her mother arrived home, Brintha locked the front door from the inside, "because I didn't know how to tell her and I didn't know what to do." Rajini was knocking furiously - "I could see from [Brintha's] face that something had happened" - and finally Brintha managed to unlock the door. "Myu - Bali - drugs - arrested: these are the four words that I heard," Rajini told me. "Something went cold from top to bottom. My blood turned to ice. And I just fell. I just fell on the floor. And then I sort of realised that she was on top of me, that there was something happening to her. I thought she was fainting or something, so I had to quickly bring myself up, pull her up and then we both sat down."

Like the Chans, the Sukamarans were besieged by the media in those early, bewildering weeks. They could not leave their home without being followed. Rajini was ambushed at work, which is how her colleagues found out. And the media was constantly "getting it wrong". The Sukamarans saw, in various dramatic reports, a son and brother they did not recognise:

In court he was a gentle giant. Outside, he turned into a raging bull as he shouldered his way through journalists and smashed one photographer in the head.

Myuran Sukumaran, the Sydney martial arts expert sentenced to death in Denpasar along with Bali Nine ringleader Andrew Chan, maintained the stubborn silence which has infuriated judges, even when protesters arrived clamouring for his death. (Ninemsn.com, 14 February 2006)

Brintha shuddered when I asked how they felt when they saw glimpses of Myuran on TV. In the early times, she said, they watched the news obsessively. It seemed nobody slept. When they left the house, it was always furtively, or by prior arrangement, with relatives, and getaway cars. They tried to inure themselves, as if an act of will were all it would take to alleviate the pain.

*

Van Nguyen's journey towards the gallows in Singapore was one of genuine transformation: he had to lose his life to find it. Julian McMahon speaks of him as being, when McMahon first took on his case, "a typical young street punk who had not come from terrible circumstances. Young men like that, they have bravado, which of course to someone twice their age you can see straight through to be more like fear ... He was under the impression that he knew a lot about his situation, that he had it under control, that he probably didn't need too much help but thanks for coming anyway." Then it all came crashing down. Singaporean law calls for mandatory execution for anyone holding more than 15 grams of narcotics, an extraordinarily small amount, under the circumstances. Van Nguyen was sentenced to death in March 2004, his final appeal was rejected in October 2004, clemency was rejected in October 2005, and he was hanged on 2 December 2005.

"It's very hard to mature," said McMahon, "when you're in your cell 23 hours a day and you get a very occasional visit from your lawyers." But it appears that Van Nguyen did mature while on death row. It appears, if we assume that his prison writings are not merely the hysterical happy face of a person in chronic denial, that he took responsibility for his actions and his life; that he lost all thought of self-gain and cared only for how he could help others, his mother in particular; and that he died, albeit with great regrets, a man at peace. There's the irony, the absurdity in all this: under the drawn-out agony of the death-row wait, some people journey to the outer reaches of their emotional capacity and moral intelligence, becoming more fully human - and then we kill them.

After receiving his death sentence, Van Nguyen heard a nun, Sister Gerard, singing ‘Ave Maria' to another prisoner on death row. His heart melted, he said, and he reached out to her. He had no real religious background. He struggled with reading and making sense of the Bible, a vast compendium of words, of dense, baroque stories. During an earlier visit from Lasry and McMahon, Van Nguyen described his failure to make any headway with the Bible. Lasry isn't a particularly religious person; McMahon has always kept his beliefs separate from his legal practice. Nonetheless, McMahon said, "I couldn't really leave him in that state where he was deeply troubled ... and it was really the only thing outside of his legal situation that was on his mind." So the Jesuit-educated lawyer told Van Nguyen of the Ignatian technique of repetitive meditative engagement with a text: of pausing over a passage or a few words and imagining, pondering, and then perhaps coming back to the same thing the following day, and building up a picture of its meaning in the mind. When Van Nguyen asked for a starting point, McMahon suggested Psalm 23, ‘The Lord Is My Shepherd', with its promise of restoration, and bounty, and mercy. (Later, McMahon gave him some of Thomas More's sixteenth-century prison writings - the same ones I had leafed through when he left me at his desk to read through Van Nguyen's papers. "To lean unto the comfort of God," Van Nguyen would have read in More's ‘Meditation on Detachment'. "To have ever before my eye my death that is ever at hand.")

The more radical change that McMahon and Lasry and all others who had contact with Van Nguyen began to note happened some time after the ‘Ave Maria' incident, in May 2005. Van Nguyen told McMahon he was in the shower, staring out a tiny window slot at the distant sky, and was suddenly overwhelmed with the sense that he'd been wasting his time, all of his life, and didn't want to waste even a single second more before he died. By then, McMahon said, "he knew in his heart that he was going to die." From that moment, the only instructions he gave to McMahon and Lasry were to do with how to help his friends, his brother and, most of all, his mother.

Van Nguyen's private writings are a desperate attempt to chart his dwindling life: in them there is the anger and regret and fear and distractedness you might expect, but also at moments a peaceful resignation, and even a sense of humour. "Strange how the simplest of thoughts become incoherent come pen and paper," he writes. "I simply turn off as easily as they approach. Emotions have no consequence here. The motions of each day are met one subliminal step at a time ... My reprieved time inspires me as much as it frightens. Welcome to the Matrix."

Visits brought both highs and lows: "Are we not in constant search of sense? With each departure, I am humbled. And with renewed reverence, I breathe."

"I am afraid," he wrote, "to be forgotten."

Then one day he woke up, and knew it was his last. "There was no one that I am aware of," said McMahon, who was in the prison on the morning of the execution, "to whom he bore any ill will when he died. He generated a lot of love in his prison environment, which is a strange phenomenon to come across." The 15 other prisoners on death row sang ‘Amazing Grace' as Van Nguyen was taken from his cell and escorted the handful of metres to the gallows. They continued singing; that would have been the last thing he heard.

On Singaporean death certificates, the phrase "Condition leading to death" is used in place of the more familiar "Cause of death". On Van Nguyen's certificate, the condition is stark and simple: "fracture dislocation of cervical spine". A second phrase reads, "Approximate interval between onset and death"; for Van Nguyen, the interval was "INSTANTANEOUS".

*

Over the course of a week in Bali, the Chan family told me their story. One night we went to a food court in Kuta, where we ate a Chinese meal under a harsh fluorescent glare. The Chans were deeply stressed, cramming in this week of harried time with Andrew. They looked like the walking wounded, with wounds that cannot heal.

Ken Chan arrived in Australia in 1955, aged 20. He worked hard, always in the restaurant business. It was 22 years before he met and married Helen, 12 years his junior. "In the beginning," he said, "it was a strange marriage, because we didn't know each other. But now it's, what, 31 years." He paused. "I look after her." Michael, the eldest child, was born in 1978, and Frances not long after; Andrew was born in 1984, followed by Mary, the youngest. Ken and Helen ran Chinese restaurants all over Sydney, in Lindfield, Leichhardt, North Ryde. Michael and Frances often looked after the two younger ones. Andrew was a livewire, but also, by their own reckoning, the closest of the four children to their parents. "He could make friends wherever and whenever," says Mary. Speaking in the present tense of that distant childhood, Ken says of his son, "He's pretty active, the boy." It seemed to me to be the understatement of the year. "Everyone in the street knows him."

Everyone in the prison knows him, too. When the guards tried to end visiting time 15 minutes early one day, Andrew Chan was the first on his feet, giving a bit of lip in Indonesian. A tiny smile broke out on Ken's face. Myuran Sukumaran, unhappy, frustrated by the guards' inconsistencies, walked away, his face tense. He returned a few minutes later, when our time had been extended. Chan appeared to have forgotten about it; Sukumaran brooded.

Away from the prison, Ken Chan is a realist. "We can't help," he said flatly to me. What makes you the saddest, I asked - what breaks your heart? "Breaks my heart?" he replied. "Oh, breaks my heart. It breaks my heart because we worked so hard in our life, and then ..." He looked away. And this is what it comes to? After a long pause: "Yeah. I think this is the hardest part."

Do you ever feel angry? Another long pause. "It's not angry. Just upset." He struggled to express himself in English: "Very hard to forget. Still in your head all the time." Then, as if to put something else in his head, he added: "We'll go swimming in the morning. That's not so bad." (There was a small, soupy pool at their modest Kuta motel.)

Later, when I apologised to Helen Chan for causing such distress with my questions, she said, "If it helps Andrew in any way, that's good. If not, I thank you anyway." It was an ominous "if not". I asked Ken if this visit was harder than the last one. "It was easier last time," he said, and I thought he was about to speak of emotional changes. "They changed the rules. No cans of food now. And takes longer to get in each time." He was thinking of the extended delays, the waiting in a hot concrete yard, the six bureaucratic and security-screening processes to pass through. I found them trying; I can't imagine what it must have been like for a 72-year-old.

Mary Chan, Andrew's younger sister, chipped in. "The first year it was very difficult," she said. "The last two years, you go back on track." It is good to come to Bali, where at least they get to see Andrew in his own environment. "Since we've been here a couple of times, we understand he's better than what we think."

It is all about the dividing up of Time. At one point, when we first met, I asked Ken, "So you haven't seen your son for two years?" As quick as a flash, he replied: "Twenty months." During the interviews, I came across a great deal of such precision. All of those involved - Chan and Sukumaran, and their families - are obsessed with dates, numbers, lengths of time, what happened when, which event preceded which other event: as if they all contain almanacs and yearbooks inside their heads; as if all these small, concrete specifics alleviate the vast dread of some greater final truth. Andrew Chan has celebrated three birthdays in prison now; it is four for Myuran Sukumaran, who was arrested the night of his twenty-fourth birthday.

And yet, beyond the specifics of numbers, time blurs. When I asked Mary if anything stood out as being particularly awful in the past three years, she came up blank. Eventually, she said, "Seeing him the first time was overwhelming." And since - does she think about the worst-case scenario? "In the back of my head I do, but I try to keep it at the back." Have you ever discussed it with Andrew? She looked out to the yard of the apartment where we were talking, at a spindly rooster scratching in the dirt and crowing incessantly. "We've never spoken about it. It's too emotional."

*

A thread runs through the literature of capital punishment: people who see an execution often have a conversion experience. William Makepeace Thackeray went to a hanging as a curious observer in 1840. "The ginshop keepers have many of them taken their shutters down, and many persons are issuing from them pipe in hand. Down they go along the broad bright street, their blue shadows marching after them; for they are all bound the same way, and are bent like us upon seeing the hanging." There's a carnival atmosphere; 40,000 people crowd the square.

Later, the prisoner, stepping onto the gallows, "turned his head here and there, and looked about him for an instant with a wild imploring look." In that moment, Thackeray would have us understand how the condemned man's time to participate in ‘looking' at the world is diminishing so radically; how execution takes away the open-endedness of time which it is the lot of most of us to experience.

In abstract form, we understand what "blood demands blood" means. But after seeing the hanging, Thackeray was left with an "extraordinary feeling of terror and shame". "It seems to me," he wrote, "that I have been abetting an act of frightful wickedness and violence, performed by a set of men against one of their fellows; and I pray God that it may soon be out of the power of any man in England to witness such a hideous and degrading sight." Leaving the scene, he concludes: "I came away down Snow Hill that morning with a disgust for murder, but it was for the murder I saw done."

*

In Sydney's Hyde Park I met with Andrew Chan's older brother, Michael, and his wife. He's slightly thicker-set than Andrew, and clearly a deep thinker. He too speaks with a broad Australian accent; if you closed your eyes, it would be hard to tell them apart. His wife is softly spoken, and sees Michael as a pillar of strength - "he's ten feet tall in my eyes."

After the arrest, Michael Chan flew to Bali and became the shield for the rest of the family. He spent 11 of the next 12 months there, leaving when necessary to renew his visa. There was not much he could do, beyond being there for Andrew. Or he would go for four weeks, and come home for two or three days to see how his parents were coping.

From the earliest moments, he felt as if he were in a dream. "I'd just finished the grocery shopping to go home and cook dinner. I got the call from my parents saying my brother was in trouble. I got home and we had journalists there. They're the ones that told me what happened." Both Michael and his parents assumed, in their confusion, that the reporters were detectives; the reporters did nothing, for a while, to dispel that notion. "It was a big shock ... but more of a shock was that he was in Indonesia, in Bali - and there's a death penalty involved. My parents thought - I even thought, probably for the first hour - that they were police. Then it clicked, 'cos they were asking for pictures and everything. I said, ‘Excuse me, who are you?'" They told him. "And I said, ‘Well, it's time for youse to leave.'"

We were sitting on the grass as the evening traffic began to build along Elizabeth Street. Michael's wife stroked his arm. "To this day," he said, "everything is still so surreal. It's like reading a novel or watching a movie. You know, things like this don't happen to you. Until it's right in your face."

The first time visiting his brother was the hardest. "I'd never seen him so helpless," says Michael. "He was crying and crying. I gave him a hug and I said, ‘It's going to be all right; I'm not going anywhere - I'll be here, however long it takes ...'" His voice cracked in the remembering.

As in all such stories, there were copious tears. When his parents did eventually come, and saw Andrew for the first time, "Mum broke down and cried. I'm 30, and I've never seen my dad cry. My dad was pretty much a hard man. But he did. I'd never seen him such a mess. So helpless. It was almost like seeing a ghost."

I asked Michael what he did in Bali, when he wasn't dealing with prison visits and the mysteries of foreign bureaucracies. Everything was exhausting, he said: he hated the sense of being followed everywhere, in the early months, and thought even the taxi drivers were reporting on his movements. He was never really a beach person; in his spare time he went back to his hotel room and slept. "Every time my phone rang it wasn't something good," he said. "It got to a point where I just had this constant ringtone in my head. Everyone had questions. There was never really an answer."

Dusk was deepening in Hyde Park, and dark clouds began to form. He remembered the little brother now in such deep shit. "He'd always be the little stray dog that followed wherever you went. If I wanted to go for a bike ride, he'd be behind me - probably about a kilometre behind me, but he'd still be there. Whatever I did, he wanted to do. He's always had the mentality of having a go at things. Normal kid, you know.

"As long as there's one breath in him, to him that's being happy. Anything else - even though he's in the worst situation he could be in at this point - he doesn't see that as a bad thing. He'll still enjoy his life until, you know, if that day does come or whatever ..." His voice trailed off, and when it came back, he seemed to have entered the realm of platitude. "He always finds the positive out of the negative."

Before all this happened, Michael was close to landing a job as a customs officer. "Obviously, that never went ahead. I didn't go for that." He works as a storeman in Sydney's west for a large retail chain, and speaks highly of his boss, for being non-judgemental and allowing him leave to visit Bali regularly. When I asked him how his boss first noticed something was wrong, he was awkward and self-deprecating, as if it pained him to think of giving less than 100% at work. "Um ... well, just ... my care-factor was down the drain, really ..." He shrugged his shoulders.

The talk turned to Helen, their mother. "It affects her greatly," he said. "He's the youngest son. He's the baby. I don't know how to console her. You can't tell your mother not to cry. It doesn't work like that." His voice cracked again. "It's hard to tell her not to cry, and to tell her it's all right. Because it's not all right."

His face had disappeared in the dark. A thunderstorm broke, suddenly and violently, and we ran for cover. But you live your life, yes? I asked. It's not utterly consumed with Andrew? "Everything else is less important," he replied. "I can't say that I don't think about it every day. It's always in the back of my mind. And on certain days, birthdays, weddings, you'd like him to be there, but obviously the circumstances are, he can't be. There are some things you can't unravel."

*

"I know that life will never be the same again," said Rajini Sukumaran, sitting in the living room with one of her sons and her daughter - and with Myu's life, there against the opposite wall, in boxes, draped in plastic. "Even if he comes home, gets married, I'll never ever be able to go back to how I was." (For now, she finds she can never go back to the fish markets, never buy crab and squid, which she had bought that April day in preparation for Myu's return, for his birthday.) What does she miss the most, right now? "Him just being himself, in trackies and a baggy T-shirt, sitting and watching TV, or picking me up after work, or ringing me and saying, ‘What's for dinner, Mum?' or cooking when I'm working back."

In Bali, I saw how much more of an island Sukumaran is than Chan. "We tried to tell him to learn Indonesian," said Brintha, "so he'd get to know the other prisoners better, but I think for him, the idea that he's going to be there for a long time ..." She stopped short. "If he learnt Indonesian," she went on, "it would mean he would have to accept he was going to be there for a long time." (Recently, in fact, Sukumaran started more actively applying himself to learning the language.)

The Sukumaran family is an island too. "There's times when we really needed people to be there for us," Brintha said. "There's some people who really wanted to know, but just so they could tell other people. And then there's other people who do stay away from us. I know that for sure." (Similarly, Ken Chan told me, "Some people, just disappear from our lives. As soon as Helen and I are walking, they walk the other way.") "A lot of people have been there," Brintha said, "but I have to admit I felt let down. I felt Myu was let down. Because something really bad happened. And I didn't feel that net, that safety net." She shook her head, leaned back on the couch, and sighed. "In the end, you just don't care."

They are left with themselves, and with obsessive thoughts about Myuran, so far away - and what might eventuate. Small things are clung to, such as letters, or comments from lawyers, as well as the shared past. "We used to always be together," Brintha said. "It was always us three." Chinthu recounted a story of being surrounded by a bunch of menacing kids in the library, when he was seven and Myuran was nine. "This kid pulled out a Swiss Army knife, and Myu ran to the librarian - he was screaming at the librarian, ‘My brother's in trouble!' He was protective of me; he was always there for me." For Brintha, a more recent memory came to mind: Myuran would wrap the family cat in a blanket so you could only see her face, and he'd cradle her like a swaddled baby. "A couple of weeks before he got arrested, he came out holding Princess, waving her paw, saying, ‘Say bye-bye.'"

"It's sort of hard to be a family," Brintha said. Rajini admitted to no longer being able to function as a mother, so great is her distraction. "They're my children too," she said, gesturing to Chinthu and Brintha, "but it's not the same. He's my oldest son."

Everyone in this story is distracted, to greater or lesser degrees. The threat of annihilation of a loved one eats up the capacity to be present. Time stops, even as it moves forward to a date with a firing squad. "After a while," Rajini said, speaking perhaps not so much of her children, but of the wider world of relatives and friends and colleagues, "everybody else got back to their lives. I go back to the seventeenth of April, 2005. What if that day never happened?" (Later, when I spent time with the Chan family in Bali, Helen Chan, in a moment of terrible candour, had spoken out loud a darker thought: "I wish I didn't have children.")

Rajini Sukumaran had one request when I left: would I please not use the expression ‘convicted drug smuggler' when describing her son. In the grand media narrative of the Bali Nine he is, of course, just that. But I understood, hearing the desperation in her voice, that Myuran is, to Rajini, a continuity of being that came from her womb: all memory, and growth, and joy, in an unending line, to now.

*

In Kerobokan Prison, Myuran Sukumaran showed me the official ration for a 24-hour period: five slices of soft white bread, a slice of papaya, a small banana and half a cup of overcooked vegetables. Nobody survives in Kerobokan without a family or a girlfriend, or the kindness of other prisoners. Family members tend to bring food in directly. For those not living on Bali, there's a system by which girlfriends become intermediaries, with money provided by the families. Sukumaran's girlfriend is Gita, a softly spoken 27-year-old who visits with food every couple of days.

Andrew Chan's girlfriend is Farah, a shy young Javanese woman who one day was wearing a T-shirt which said, "I am not anti-social - I'm just not real friendly." Farah's mother passed away last year. She has no friends or family in Bali, and is somewhat estranged from her family in Java. They don't approve of her being Chan's girlfriend - "Because," interrupts Chan, smiling, patting her on the knee, "they think I'm going to die." In Bali, as everywhere, the girlfriends of prisoners are not held in high esteem. For Gita, too, having a boyfriend who's both a prisoner and a foreigner is controversial. "People say, ‘Why you do that?' But people don't know how I feel."

I see more of Farah than Gita the week of my visit, because every day after visiting hours Farah had the Chans back to her apartment, where they cooked the food that Farah would take to Andrew later in the afternoon. Farah lives under the shadow of the prison walls, down a rutted laneway, in a low-roofed, one-storey complex. It's as small and simple as an apartment can get: tiled floor, a bed, a small TV, no room for a couch. We all sat cross-legged on the thin ledge of patio outside and ate. It was hard to imagine what you might do with the days, in such cramped circumstances, so far from home. "It's OK," Farah said. "But I'm a bit bored. I just want to know how long he's there for." What would she do, if he ever got out? "I would want to live together. I'd like to live a long life, so I could spend it with Andrew." Does she understand what he's been accused of? "Yes, I've seen it on TV and everywhere, but I don't care. I care about the heart - who Andrew is."

In the visitor's yard, there was an easy intimacy between Farah and Chan. One day, with his family there as well, I watched the tenderness with which Farah sat on one side of him, touching his knee regularly as the conversation flowed, as if needing to know he was there; Mary was on the other side, her arm resting lightly, affectionately, on her brother's shoulder. Chan's collar was turned a little inwards, and his mother, Helen, reached down from her chair, almost absent-mindedly, and turned it the right way out. He didn't flinch, the way most grown sons might be irritated or embarrassed by such an action. He didn't, in fact, appear to notice, chatting away as was his habit. It was a simple, everyday motherly act, invisible.

It is the mothers, Helen Chan and Rajini Sukumaran, who wear their distress most overtly. For Myuran, in the chaos of April 2005, his mother was the lightning rod of his predicament. "I regretted it [my situation] from the day I got arrested. For myself. But a week later, when my mum arrived, that's when it really hit me." Later, that thought expanded. "I don't want to think of how much a strain it is for my family," Sukumaran said. Three death sentences and three years in jail - "I've already seen how bad it is. But 20 years!" And there it was again, that less-than-likely figure.

On a morning when his mother was not there, I asked Chan what he thinks she worries about the most. "Obviously - losing me," he said. "That must haunt her." Another day, Helen wandered off, perhaps to wait in line for the toilet. I saw her a minute later, near the far wall of the yard, gazing around, bewildered, like a character who has just landed in a dream and does not yet know it is a dream. Her eyes passed over the whole scene - all of us, all the other prisoners huddled with their families, the guards in their crisp uniforms - and upwards, to the middle distance, where the barbed wire runs along the high wall. She gazed about her, for perhaps a minute, unnoticed by her family. She seemed to me, from that distance of 15 metres, as she stood there washed out in the harsh sun outside the shade of the awning, to be panting, like a wounded animal, dazed and exhausted, trying to work out what next move to make. She seemed to be trying to see the scene - all these young men in blue shirts, her son one of them - with an outsider's eyes, from a distance, to make some sense of it. I saw, at that moment, a haunted woman, for whom some very precise point in the near future loomed spectrally in front of her. Near her, on the ground, lay a welcome mat.

What I found haunting, the more I visited, was the smallness of the life inside those walls. At different times I asked Chan and Sukumaran to describe a full day in detail. It felt as if they were padding, to put on a brave face; the lack of things to do took up hours, whole afternoons. What was sad was not the idea of that idle eternity, but the way they both seemed embarrassed to recount it. There's only so much Wilbur Smith you can get through in a lifetime.

*

Throughout my visit, Andrew Chan remained chipper and lively, always happy to talk on any topic. In prison, he has turned to a religion that he'd vaguely, in childhood, paid heed to. "Faith is like at Westfields," he told me, "the big shopping malls - you know, the sliding doors? If you're just going to stand there, do you think the door's just going to open? No! But if you walk towards the door, it opens. See, you've got to walk towards it for it to happen."

I wasn't sure what to make of the Chan sermons - he delivered them enthusiastically, when quizzed - so I tried to take them at face value. The young know everything; but in a prison, it's as if a spotlight had been turned, very brightly, on the absurdity and the hollowness of that knowing.

"God didn't do things to Job," Chan told me, though my own memory of that story was that God indeed did, and with malice aforethought. "He allowed things to happen to him. God didn't put me in here. He allowed me being here so I can see him. He allowed things to happen, so that I might learn how to live. How to use my gifts in the most appropriate way, rather than gain for myself. ‘Use it or lose it.' You know that saying? God says, ‘You have gifts. Use them. If you don't use them, I'll give 'em to someone else.'"

So then, I put it to him, what you're saying is, you didn't use your gifts?

"That's it," he said emphatically. "It's like Romans 8:28. Do you know that one?" (I didn't, off the top of my head.) "It's about turning a bad purpose into a good purpose." Later, when I checked, the verse was more enigmatic: "And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are called according to his purpose." Being pretty sure that the Christian purpose is to help others, I asked Chan the next day how he would change things in the prison if he could. "Give people an agenda," he replied. "Something to look forward to."

His family arrived; we waved from across the yard, and they picked their way over to us through the dense clusters of prisoners and visitors. Chan guided his mother and father to their low plastic stools. Conversation flew in all directions, and food was distributed, to Sukumaran as well. Vin, Mary's fiancé, a handsome and pensive young man, made sure that everyone was looked after. In a moment alone I asked Ken how he had felt, as the head of the family, on the night of the arrest. "He just surprised me," Ken said, sadly, and let the statement hang. "But nothing worse can happen than that. As long as he cannot be dead." And if Andrew was somehow given 20 years, how would you feel? "Oh, yeah ... that's good enough. He's still young. A lot of opportunity. But the death penalty - definitely, I don't think I can live with that."

Ken looked across to Andrew, who was deep in conversation with Mary and Vin. "Anyway, he's talking a lot more sense," he said. "When he was young, he talked a lot of stuff. Today, say this; next day, say that. But now he seems like a grown-up person." I asked: Is there anything you would get in here for Andrew if you could? Ken thought about it for a while and said, "Food. Enjoyment. More happy."

*

The death penalty says to the world: There are crimes for which society's need for justice can only be requited by the death of the wrongdoer. Yet this ritualised revenge is often kept hidden from view. We are "debased" by the death penalty, said the British politician and feminist Baroness Sumerskill, though "we manage to escape from any deep sense of shame by paying a man to break the culprit's neck behind high walls." Camus argued that if society really believed its own words about the appropriateness of the death penalty, "we would be shown the heads. Executions would be given the same promotional campaign ordinarily reserved for government loans or a new brand of apéritif." "We must either kill publicly," he wrote in his 1958 essay ‘Reflections on the Guillotine', "or admit we do not feel authorised to kill. If society justifies the death penalty as a necessary example, then it must justify itself by providing the publicity necessary to make an example."

Saudi Arabia has no qualms about this. Individual executioners develop mass followings of fans who admire and discuss their public bearing, or the elegance of their blows. Gary Keenan witnessed the deaths of three Nigerian drug traffickers in a public square in 1997, and wrote about it in the Irish Times. The beheading was carried out after the midday prayer, and Keenan describes the mad scramble for vantage points as the mosque emptied; the white marble plinth onto which the prisoners were gently led; the hubbub suddenly stopping as the executioner pulled his long curved sword from its scabbard; the prisoners kneeling, with their wrists handcuffed behind their backs and tied by a cord to their feet; the executioner's decisive one-armed swing ("a one-handed back swing of a golf club came to mind"), and his pausing only to lightly wipe the bloodstained blade on the shirt of each newly-headless torso. Afterwards, men - they are all men, of course - search Keenan's face for a reaction. "I could read what their eyes told me - 'That's how we do things here.'"

Reading Keenan's article, I kept thinking about that back swing, about such public scrutiny, about the need for technical and professional competence, and I knew without any doubt that this must be a man who practises long hours in privacy. On a trussed dummy with a detachable head? On watermelons? I tried to imagine the kind of man who would aspire to such art.

For Camus, at the moment of execution "society is reduced at one blow to that condition of primitive terror in which nothing can be judged and all equity, all dignity, have vanished ... The sense of powerlessness and solitude of the fettered prisoner, confronted by the public coalition which has willed his death, is in itself an unimaginable punishment."

*

In Farah's tiny apartment, down the laneway beside the prison, Helen Chan busied herself for hours. She and Ken cooked for us all. Then, after we cleared the dishes away, she started all over again, and cooked the food that Farah would take to Andrew. "When I see him, it all comes back," Helen said. "Just seeing him." You can read in her tired face the sleeplessness: the permanence and the presence of this suspended life. The weight.

All through the week, it was Ken and Mary and Vin who did the talking, and I had imagined that Helen didn't want to: her few answers thus far had seemed to cause her such pain. Nonetheless, I asked her, as the afternoon wore on, if there was anything she'd like to say.

She perched on a plastic chair, as if she'd been waiting for just this moment, and took a deep breath. The words came out in a torrent. Every now and again she gasped, sobbing. "For these past three years," she said, "whenever I think about Andrew, I always want to cry. Because in my eyes, he's always been the most obedient ... Maybe the reason why he has chosen this wrong pathway is because he's young and can't think straight. I feel it's my fault because I didn't have enough time to look after Andrew. I blame myself for working too much. I feel sorry to Andrew because it's my fault for not being able to look after him and give him the right path. Andrew is so young - when this happened to him he was only 21.

"All I want is anything but the death penalty. I just hope that Andrew is happy here. I've helped the best I can, financially and emotionally. I just hope he's happy and safe. All I can do now is put myself in God's hands. I can't sleep every single night. All I think about is Andrew. I feel so upset because I can't do anything more. I can only put my hands and rest my faith with God, to hope that he will find a path. That's it." She nodded her head.

The rooster scratched in the yard. The spools turned on the tape recorder. Nobody spoke. Then, after a while, she continued. "Before I came to Bali, I had a million things I wanted to say to Andrew. But once I see him, I don't know how to say it. When I come to see Andrew, I don't know how to start the conversation and I don't know what to say to him. I say, ‘Take care,' and ‘I love you.' If I talk any more, I get very depressed, and there's just not many words that will come out."

Another long pause. Could she put into words one of those million things?

Helen drew breath. Everybody I interviewed was at pains to say they are not angry; but this looked like anger. Her voice rose to a pitch. "I can only ask Andrew: ‘I've given you everything that a kid could ask for - shelter, food, everything - and why did you choose this path?"

Her shoulders sagged; she seemed expended. She stared off to the sky, where high in the distance flapped great black kites in the shapes of birds - a Balinese custom. "I've left it to fate," she said at last. "I don't care how other people look at me now; the only thing I care about is Andrew. Ever since this happened, I've never blamed Andrew. I've only blamed myself. No matter how naughty he is, he's still my son. If I leave him now, there's no one else to look after him. I just pray that however long Andrew is here, he is happy. As long as he is happy, I am happy. As long as I'm alive, I will look after him. And after I'm gone, it will be up to his brother and sisters."

*

"Grieving," wrote the American poet and undertaker Thomas Lynch, "is falling in love in reverse." Perhaps what I saw, in the mothers, in their distress, was a premature version of this. A mother falls in love afresh at the birth of each child, and wisdom says it is unnatural for the child to predecease her.

In 2002, a group of fervid terrorists sent a van loaded with a crude fertiliser bomb down one of Kuta's narrow, hedonistic streets, and blasted 202 people, 88 of them Australians, to pieces. Many of them were young; their parents have outlived them. John Howard cannily judged the public mood when he said that he would not oppose the death penalty in the case of the Bali bombers. The comment didn't jar: Neither would I, I thought. Perhaps I was comparing the Bali bombers' malign intent with the Bali Nine's stupidity, and finding the former more worthy of an ultimate retribution than the latter.

For Julian McMahon, no such distinctions are tenable. While he cares very deeply for Chan and Sukumaran, he would defend, with equal passion, the Bali bombers. "I do not accept the logic," he said, "that to demonstrate my disapproval of you killing - or drug trafficking - I will order you to be killed." He simply believes that the death penalty is wrong, and that there will come a time when the world looks back on capital punishment as it does today on slavery: how did we ever think that was normal?

George Orwell understood, perhaps better than most, that life was a series of freedoms, located inside the individual consciousness and subject to the whims of the State; that is why, he believed, it is so important that we strive to get the State right. In the 1920s, serving with the Indian Imperial Police in Burma, he witnessed a hanging, about which he wrote in 1931.

Two warders marched on either side of the prisoner, with their rifles at the slope; two others marched close against him, gripping him by arm and shoulder, as though at once pushing and supporting him. The rest of us, magistrates and the like, followed behind. Suddenly, when we had gone ten yards, the procession stopped short without any order or warning. A dreadful thing had happened - a dog, come goodness knows whence, had appeared in the yard. It came bounding among us with a loud volley of barks, and leapt round us wagging its whole body, wild with glee at finding so many human beings together. It was a large woolly dog, half Airedale, half pariah. For a moment it pranced round us, and then, before anyone could stop it, it had made a dash for the prisoner, and jumping up tried to lick his face. Everyone stood aghast, too taken aback even to grab at the dog.

"Who let that bloody brute in here?" said the superintendent angrily. "Catch it, someone!"

A warder, detached from the escort, charged clumsily after the dog, but it danced and gambolled just out of his reach, taking everything as part of the game. A young Eurasian jailer picked up a handful of gravel and tried to stone the dog away, but it dodged the stones and came after us again. Its yaps echoed from the jail walls. The prisoner, in the grasp of the two warders, looked on incuriously, as though this was another formality of the hanging. ...

At each step his muscles slid neatly into place, the lock of hair on his scalp danced up and down, his feet printed themselves on the wet gravel. And once, in spite of the men who gripped him by each shoulder, he stepped slightly aside to avoid a puddle on the path.

It is curious, but till that moment I had never realized what it means to destroy a healthy, conscious man. When I saw the prisoner step aside to avoid the puddle, I saw the mystery, the unspeakable wrongness, of cutting a life short when it is in full tide ...

He and we were a party of men walking together, seeing, hearing, feeling, understanding the same world; and in two minutes, with a sudden snap, one of us would be gone - one mind less, one world less.

*

Each day in Bali, when I left the prison, the world seemed immense, and I felt suddenly less tired. Each night in my hotel, I washed from my wrist the purple stamp all visitors are marked with, and I would lie on the bed, the fan whirring gently above me, and think of the day's events. I would think about Andrew and Myuran, and their mothers and families. After a while I would switch on the TV, to try and zone out. I hoped, for Chan's and Sukumaran's sakes, that they might learn to make peace with their circumstances, and find a way of living in there.

Sorting through that stack of Van Nguyen's prison writings, I came across a sheet of paper written at 4 am on 2 December 2005, two hours before he died, on which were scrawled instructions relating to matters such as the scattering of his ashes, or which friends were to receive copies of his diary. "Julian, Lex, Joseph," reads one, "please write my eulogy for I have run out of time." The penultimate point resembles a dry one-liner: "I wanted to make a calendar but ran out of time."

Everybody wants to buy some time. In Kerobokan, Chan and Sukumaran dream of a "sentence with a number". Scott Rush, another of the Bali Nine and also on death row, spoke of this desire in an interview with the Age last year. "Every morning I wake up and I see ... what my life has become. Sometimes I'm strong towards it; sometimes it just makes me feel like a worthless human being. But if I was to be executed, I don't want to be executed ... without giving something back to the world, which I believe I haven't done."

Late one visiting hour, Myuran Sukumaran bowed his head, cross-legged on the reed mat in front of the growing pile of torn-up tissues, then looked up at me, blinking, as if in a daze. "I don't want this to be my life," he said. "I don't want this to be all there is."

Sukumaran's desires have become, like Chan's, very stark, and very elemental. Life and Death are with them always now - big abstractions, but very real. Yet they have no way of knowing, as the dog seemed to know, how things will pan out, or if that next puddle on the path is the last one.

"May all our dreams and wishes come true; be duly answered, and in due course," Van Nguyen wrote from prison, a year before he died. Andrew Chan, like many who find themselves in disastrous predicaments, wishes he could turn back the clock. Given that it only moves forward, his next best dream is the one where it moves forward for a while yet. "I'm not saying, ‘Release me today, or tomorrow, or next week, or next year,'" he said, lightly tapping his rolled-up copy of Rugby League Week in the palm of his hand to the rhythm of his words. "But I am saying, ‘Release me.'"

Published in The Monthly, September 2008, No. 38

Source: The Monthly.com (Australia)

Luke Davies Discusses "God Of Speed"

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 22:11:00 +0000

Source: Google Video/Slowtv

A Young Gifted Actor In The Place He Loves Most - By Luke Davies

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 22:07:00 +0000

Utter Play: Heath Ledger, 1979-2008
A young, gifted actor in the place he loves most
By Luke Davies
Published on January 31, 2008
In the teen comedyTen Things I Hate About You, from 1999, Heath Ledger bribes the marching band, commandeers the PA system in the school sports stadium and appears, high in the stands, belting out "I Love You, Baby" to an initially shocked, then embarrassed, then touched Julia Stiles, in her soccer gear amid all the other girls at practice. Ledger hops, skips and glides as he makes his way down towards the playing field, using the raked stadium seats as a kind of expansive stage on which to play, deftly avoiding the security guards moving in to put an end to his tomfoolery.

He's not there: Ledger as one of Todd Haynes' multiple Bob Dylans in his penultimate completed film.Jonathan Wenk/TWC

The performance is hammy, self-knowing and exuberant: There is a sense that Ledger the actor is embracing the corniness just as much as his character quite clearly is. It's one part Singin' in the Rain, one part high school talent quest, and about eight parts Heath — this gangly, beautiful surfer-looking boy, tumbling through experience, always on the brink of calamity, risking grand failure in a public setting with nonchalant generosity.

It's Ledger's playfulness that many will remember the most. I have home-movie footage of director Neil Armfield and Ledger workshopping a critical entrance scene from Candy, a film I scripted with Armfield and which was adapted from my semiautobiographical first novel. In the scene, Dan (Ledger's character) returns home after pulling off a successful bank scam, his pockets filled with cash for the first and only time in the film, a bunch of flowers in his arms. He's filled with joy at his improbable success, ready to shower Candy (Abbie Cornish) with the flowers. Armfield suggests a kind of grand unloading of the flowers, and the home movie shows Ledger beginning to mime the action, grinning at Armfield, repeating the action more exuberantly each time, as if the flowers are more than he can carry.

What's remarkable is how similar the emotional texture of this behind-the-scenes moment is to that scene six years earlier, where a 19-year-old Ledger grins so delightedly, at Julia Stiles, at the security guards, the entire universe. It's Ledger in the place he loved most — utter play — wearing the grin of someone both excited by and at ease with the unlikeliness of good fortune.

The types of characters Ledger portrayed had become a little more complex over those years. But his ability to convey a kind of inner purity — a force strong enough to dispel either the adolescent self-consciousness of singing a love song in public or the guilt and remorse of not being the junkie breadwinner — seems in Ledger to have been both consistent and innate.

Some actors, Ledger included, are natural clowns, and this inner-clown quality helps to create character sympathy where it's needed most. In Candy,the character Ledger plays acts reprehensibly for much of the film, but somehow audiences felt more empathy for him than for Candy herself, the victim of his foibles. Guarded though he may have been in his private life, Ledger had a capacity to be truly vulnerable onscreen — as are the best clowns, such as Chaplin — that gives a genuine radiance to his performances.

Candybrought Ledger back to Australia in early 2005, straight from the grueling Brokebackshoot, with his new girlfriend, Michelle Williams. He seemed, at times, quite literally beside himself with love for her, unable to contain his excitement. I remember one night during preproduction, in an almost empty nightclub in Kings Cross, watching him sweep her to her feet and swirl her around an empty dance floor, much to the relief of a bored DJ. It was a completely private moment; he wasn't doing it for the benefit of others, for those of us settling into our seats or buying a round. He just wanted to dance with Michelle. One almost felt the need to avert one's eyes, and yet it was oddly compelling: that pure joy again.

That the paparazzi hounded him remorselessly genuinely distressed Ledger. He did not see why his privacy could not be his own, to do with as he pleased. I think he felt that the set was a haven, a refuge, from all the white noise outside, and from the constant sense of lurking ambush. No wonder he came across as skittish: In another context, that's called being on your guard. Away from that public world, where the media constructed a "bad boy" that was far from how Ledger acted in reality, he was warm, down-to-earth, bighearted.

I somehow wrangled a one-line cameo as a milkman in Candy. The scene came near the end of the shoot and I had six weeks in which to cultivate my growing panic. But when the moment finally came, what I remember most from the bustle of crew, equipment, camera rehearsals, bright lights and finding your mark, from my what-the-hell-am-I-doing-here paralysis, was Ledger putting a hand on my shoulder, leaning into that private space, and saying, "Breathe, Lukey, breathe."

My own sense is of deep gratitude, to have had the warmth of that connection during those few months. Someone was going to play, not just a character that I had created, but one that was a version of me. It was a surreal experience. Someone else was going to take ownership of that. Ledger did, and created something entirely new. He imbued the character of Dan with a kind of optimistic yet damaged nobility far beyond what Armfield and I had imagined in writing the script.

He's not there: Ledger as one of Todd Haynes' multiple Bob Dylans in his penultimate completed film.Watching the film being shot at close range, watching my own words come to life in front of the cameras was my first experience of just how amazing good actors are. "This is a good script," Ledger had said to Armfield and me during the rehearsal period, "but there's way too many words in it." He would march into a scene, and do with a twitch of his face, a glance, a shift in posture, a softening in his eyes, in two seconds, what we had tried to get across in a page of script. The most notable instance of this is in the film's final scene, where most of our two pages of finely honed dialogue is nowhere to be seen, and the bewildered pain of the two lovers is played out largely in silence. It's a beautiful and powerful performance; one that I believe will stand among the best of his tragically short career.

Producer Margaret Fink constantly referred to Ledger as "our boy." "What about our boy, eh?" she would say, wide-eyed, with a faint conspiratorial grin, after viewing another batch of exciting dailies. It was not even a rhetorical question, merely a statement of marvel.

He was, in fact, not just a boy anymore. He was becoming a man. It was exciting, the very notion of the films he would do in the upcoming years. He was gifted, he was A-list, he had the power to choose the best. The tragic loss, more than anything, is in what we might imagine was still to come. The actress Bojana Novakovic was a close friend of Ledger's for 12 years, since they both acted in Blackrockas teenagers. In recent months she had been staying at his places in Los Angeles and New York. A week ago she made a little gift for him, a sheet of silver contact that she painted black, and then scraped back, to reveal the words "Fail gloriously." Novakovic said he laughed, accepting the gift with the lightness with which it was intended.

"Now it seems so different," she said to me on the phone from New York, waiting, forlornly, to sort through her stuff.

Luke Davies is the author of the novelsCandyandIsabelle the Navigator, and numerous award-winning volumes of poetry. His new novel,God of Speed(Allen & Unwin), will be released in Australia in April.

Source: LA Weekly

Love In The Time Of Poetry

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 21:50:00 +0000

August 21, 2004

Luke Davies last night won The Age Book of the Year. Jason Steger reports on a writer's poetic inspiration.

Luke Davies remembers the first poem he wrote. He was 13. It was called Mack and the Boys and was inspired by reading John Steinbeck's novel Cannery Row, the book that turned him on to reading. The poem's subject was its characters.

"It is ominously weird to think that Mack and the boys were the bums and derros and the alcoholics who are the central characters of the book, who choose to stand outside the bounds of society. It might be a worrying thing that these were the first literary role models that I was influenced by."

Worrying because not many years later Davies embarked on what he refers to as a decade of darkness and heroin addiction. It was a period that has informed and shaped almost all his writing since: his two novels, Candy and Isabelle the Navigator, his collections of poetry, Absolute Event Horizon, Running with Light, Totem, and now the film script for Candy he is writing with its director, Neal Armfield.

One constant since Mack and the Boys, however, has been poetry. For years he wrote it obsessively. By the time he was 18 he had notebooks crammed with the stuff, much of it bad. But this was his apprenticeship. And out of that has come Totem, for which he last night won The Age Book of the Year.

It consists of two parts. First, Totem Poem, an intensely celebratory paean to love, a 525-line poem that burns with a passionate lyrical intensity, relishing sensations, language and feeling.

"In the yellow time of pollen when the fields were ablaze/we were very near bewildered by beauty./ The sky was a god-bee that hummed. All the air boomed/ with that thunder. It was both for the prick/ and the nectar we drank that we gave ourselves over."

So much happened that was so dreadful. So much of that darkness you wouldn't wish on a dog. And yet everything that happened led me to where I am.

This is followed by 40 Love Poems, short and sharp in comparison, reflecting the emotional intensity and language of the longer poem but which, according to Davies, are "immediate and erotic but also extremely formal and mannered".

One of the most remarkable things is that the book came to Davies almost in a flash, a vision when he saw what the work would become in its entirety. He was doing a spell as writer in residency at the Australia Centre in Chiang Mai, in northern Thailand.

"In a two-day period I had written the first line of Totem Poem and understood immediately that it would be a very big juicy grand love poem, a kind of hymn to life. The very next day I had written the first of that sort of song cycle, the little kind of metaphysical love poems and there were lines echoing between the two things," he says. "It was a fantastic moment because it's never really happened to me before like that - the creation of a body of work and you know very clearly what it will be. And you spend the next four years trying to get there."

The other extraordinary thing was that in the writing he didn't deviate from his vision. He didn't spend four years in a sort of rhapsodic incantatory state but he did find that he had easy access every time he got to grips with the grand structure that became Totem.

He sees Totem as the most coherent, large-scale writing that he has done. "In a sense novels are more coherent by their transparency and accessibility and by their more narrative momentum. But I don't mean that. I mean at a deeper level in terms of the creative heart of the work that this was the biggest and best thing that I've done."

He pauses momentarily as if reconsidering a slightly rash statement. Perhaps he's not sure. "I'm really proud of Candy too, but now I would say Candy and Totem are two things that if I died tomorrow I would stand proud of."

He has tried in both Totem and the Love Poems to blur the divisions between the "intimate and the immense, between the intensely physical and the greatly metaphysical". Particularly in the shorter poems he recognises and embraces the influences of writers such as John Donne, Ben Jonson, George Herbert and Andrew Marvell in the creation of poems that are immediate and erotic and formal and mannered.

"Across your back
Those freckles strewn
Are every constellation
I have known -
All galaxy and godhead too -
An astronaut would weep
At such a view: as if,
After dreams, in the deep
Heart of dawn, he'd wake
To that expanse, and breathe it in.
Home! O Milky Way!
O milk-white skin!"

The shorter poems are addressed largely to a fictional lover called Sugar Lee, "my kind of white-trash muse figure" who emerged most probably from a state of yearning while he was working alone in the Spanish Pyrenees. But in Thailand when the whole sequence was dreamed up, he had a "brief and wonderful" liaison with Mille, a Danish woman he met on his travels.

"I wonder how relevant it is to talk about that but the fact of the matter is that it's a beautiful beginning to the story. That was a kind of really genuinely visceral starting point to the thing," he says. "This woman was the spark point from which it started. Now I'm deep in a relationship with my partner Victoria and most of the book is a reflection of growing with her and living with her."

The other woman who played a significant part in the outcome of Totem is Judith Beveridge whose Wolf Notes was also on the shortlist for The Age poetry award. Davies won a four-week fellowship at the Varuna Writers' Centre in the Blue Mountains that included $1000 to spend on an editor of his choice.

"Everyone's scared of poetry. Publishers aren't going to say, this is a problem, change this or change that. But the opportunity to invite a poet into your work was so fantastic," he says.

"It was that final home stretch that tightened the screws and got rid of the flab. I said please get specific and she was incredibly specific. It was like, 'this line stinks, this line is weak compared with the lines that surround it, or this is really unclear what you are trying to say here'. Judith is really great with eliminating tonal glitches and fluctuations that seem like repetition."

Davies says that from his point of view there is an unbroken continuum between all his different works. If Candy is some kind of analysis of the trauma of addiction and Isabelle the Navigator an examination of the experience of grief, of the loss of all that is both so dark and so good, "the celebratory nature that you're recognising in Totem comes out of the experience of immense gratitude of being alive and having survived".

He makes no bones about his addiction: he wouldn't be the person nor the writer he is today without it. There's the paradox. "So much happened that was so dreadful. So much of that darkness you wouldn't wish on a dog. And yet everything that happened led me to where I am. It's that sense that I regret nothing. But a poem like Totem is also an appropriate obeisance to the gods for me. Because it's still that sense that I wake up and pinch myself; still that sense of gratitude for being alive."

Davies grew up in West Pymble on Sydney's North Shore, a middle-class Catholic boy who went to a private school and on to Sydney University for an arts degree. Somehow he managed to stagger through it, publishing his first collection, Four Plots for Magnets, in his third year, in 1982. After that "things went wrong". His habit developed and it was not until 1990 that he got clean.

But he was always writing, the deciding activity of those dread years. He says it wasn't much good but there were sparks of good things and he squirrelled it all away. He was completely isolated and disconnected from the literary community and putting a stamp on an envelope to send out his writing was beyond him.

But here he is today, fresh from receiving the Philip Hodgins Memorial Medal at this year's Mildura festival, about to spend 12 weeks in a German castle where he hopes to complete the "backwards and forwards" of the editorial work on a new novel about Howard Hughes that he describes as a sort of demented interior monologue in which Hughes goes back over all the events of the century he was involved in: glamour, Hollywood, women, speed, power, flight, war, corruption and capitalism. "The guy was this incredible emblem for everything that is weird, wacky and wrong with the modern era."

He is due to deliver the manuscript in a week or two and is "deep in the zone". It's an idea that he has lived with for 10 years. He started writing it in 1994, then wrote Candy instead and then Isabelle, deciding that because the Hughes book was so big and ambitious he should get one more novel out of the way.

He has done loads of research and when I say I remember Hughes taking over a floor of a London hotel in the mid-1970s he's there in a trice. Names the hotel immediately and in fact has set much of the last part of the book in London when Hughes flies there for the first time in many years. "Those four flights in the summer of '73 were the last thing that he did to try and reclaim his greatness or whatever. The book's a tragedy."

In January the adaptation of Candy is due to go into production starring Heath Ledger, Abbie Cornish - "she's a great Candy" - and Geoffrey Rush. And there's still his poetry, the work in which he says he is most autonomous.

He talks of the past few years as something akin to a slow turning point in which he has been getting a public profile for his novels or film work. But he is always bemused that people don't know him as a poet "because this is the most important thing that defines me".

And it all started when he was in year eight. When he read Cannery Row, when "everything changed, the whole universe changed", when his response to Steinbeck prompted that first poem. Davies says he is such an anally retentive collector of his work that he has everything he has ever written. The one thing he is missing, however, is Mack and the Boys.

Source: The Age

Live - Luke Davies

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 21:40:00 +0000

I really loved this article and am excited to be sharing it with you. I thought the writer did a really terrific job and I loved reading it.

Admin

Live - Luke Davies - Sydney Writers' Festival
Reviews, By Joal, 26th May, 2008

Apparently Luke Davies’ mother thinks he’s just like Britney Spears. And Luke agrees, except these days he wears underwear.

Davies is the author of three novels, the most well known being Candy, adapted into a film starring Heath Ledger. He also collaborated on the film’s screenplay. In addition to this, Davies has published five books of poetry, the latest of which is Totem. It’s a collection of 40 love poems and one extended aria and it won The Age Book of the Year in 2004.

Appearing at the recent Sydney Writers’ Festival, Davies does resemble our beloved Britney. Although, as he sits on stage in what looks like a 60s style sailor-collar denim jacket with a cheeky grin, it’s definitely more of the innocent ‘hit me baby one more time’ pop diva he’s exuding these days.

But Davies admits that it’s the substance abusing, off-the-rails Britney that seems to make his writing so fascinating, and it’s this ‘old’ Luke that his mother complains about resurfacing every time an article is written about him and his work.

Candy is said to be a “thinly veiled” autobiographic account of Davies’ own experience with heroin addiction, “a horrible nightmare, life defining moment”, but an experience he appreciates, as it brought him to where he is now. A sold-out Writers’ Festival session on Saturday called Under The Influence, saw Davies delve once again into how his creativity is linked to and fascinated by the feeling of addiction.

“I can’t let [drug addiction] be the white elephant in the room,” says Davies. “I’m happy to talk about it. I hope in 10 years time I’m not still being asked about it… but if one person reads about me and finds their way out of a dark place, that’s what I associate myself with.” Even if that means his mum’s co-workers bring in an embarrassing article about Davies being a ‘junkie’ every now and again.

And the relevance and importance of writing about drug abuse and addiction seems to have ironically been validated. With the death of Heath Ledger, who played Davies – his autobiographic-self in Candy, passing-away from a suspected drug overdose earlier this year, Davies’ themes seem as pertinent as ever.

And although Davies promises his mother his next book won’t have any drugs or sex or bad stuff, his most recent release God Of Speed, details the life of Howard Hughes, the 1930s film producer, aviator and philanthropist. Davies said he was attracted to the neurotic character, his self-medication, and the contrasting power and fragility of a man who was admirable, but by the end of his life completely unlikable and fundamentally an ugly character.

The most poignant moment in Davies Writers’ Festival appearance was in reflecting on the difference between himself and his characters. “Love is listening, the ability to be there with someone, to connect. Addiction is an autistic lock-down…” where things can be taken in, but nothing given. “The tragedy of Howard Hughes was that he never escaped that blackhole, but I did.”

Source: samesame.com.au

Inside Out Australia Reviews

God of Speed - Review By Annie Grossman

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 21:31:00 +0000

Luke Davies writes on Howard Hughes
January 23 , 2008

After a great break over the festive season, our Book Club is back on the go!
There are plenty exciting plans for the year ahead, plenty great books on the way and plenty fantastic authors we’ll be introducing you to over the next few months.

To kick off 2008, please welcome our guest reviewer - Annie Grossman of Written Dimension Book Shop, Noosa Junction - who has been fortunate enough to get her hands on a copy of The God of Speed by Australian author, Luke Davies.

The God of Speed

Luke Davies penned the award-winning modern day classic "Candy", which sold over 35,000 copies and was made into a brilliant and confronting film.

He also wrote the extremely underrated "Isabelle The Navigator" and the verse novel, "Totem".
I was very excited to receive an advance copy of Luke's new book "God of Speed" which is due for release in April this year."God of Speed" is again confronting, but beautifully written.
It is the story of Howard Hughes, and the final day or so of his life where he is laying in a bed, hopelessly addicted to drugs and protected from all visitors, but more importantly, the germs they carry.

As his power ebbs, he contemplates his life, a rollercoaster of drugs, oil, money, power, fame, women, aircraft, Hollywood and a lot more!

Luke has gathered information from Hughes' life, and I must say I wasn't aware that he had slept with so many of the most famous screen stars in cinematic history!

Luke doesn't spare the details of these encounters, so if you are easily unsettled by sexual detail, you may wish to avoid this one!

I personally found the details very much in context with the novel, not thrown in to titillate.Luke Davies is one of Australia's secret treasures.

His writing, despite his tough subject matter, is lyrical and compelling.

I think Howard Hughes himself would have been pretty happy with this one!

Source: The Daily - Sunshine Coast Daily - Between The Covers Blog

Paul Landymore Reviews "God of Speed"

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 21:25:00 +0000

Luke Davies: God of Speed

Review by Paul Landymore, Manager Readings Malvern

The book opens in 1973 with Howard Hughes, enigma and twentieth-century icon, hidden from the world in a London hotel room, where he sits in bed waiting for the dawn and a meeting with an old friend. Now tended to by Mormon carers, this rare intrusion into Hughes’s secluded, strictly controlled and drug subdued life causes him to reflect on his past; from his childhood, struggling against the bonds imposed by his over-protective mother, his early inheritance of the family empire, through to the decades of his breakneck charge to notoriety.

As history now records, Hughes’s life was increasingly troubled by obsessive compulsive disorder, and it was this that drove him to extraordinary lengths to be master of all he saw. Hughes is a man who lives very much in the world: every sight, sound and smell is keenly felt and requires attention, his life a barely controlled maelstrom of experience. No aspect is without minute attention, whether it be perfecting his planes, designing a bra for a well-endowed film star or being a leader of men. And of course, there were the women –dozens of them – who Hughes relentlessly pursued, no less a part of his condition than any other of his habits. Davies’ novel is a fascinating and intimate insight into the mind of a great and deeply disturbed man, told with a thoroughly convincing voice.

Readings
Melborne AU

Luke Davies Discusses His Books That Inspire Him At Sydney Writer's Festival (Transcript)

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 21:15:00 +0000

At the recent Sydney Writers' Festival a number of prominent Australian authors talked about what they read and the books that have inspired them.

Luke Davies was himself an addict 20 years ago and in this talk he guides us through the books that penetrated his drug induced haze and re-introduced him to the world of emotions and feeling.

Ramona Koval: On The Book Show we often talk to authors about what they've written, but what about what they like to read to nourish their own writing and for enjoyment? At the recent Sydney Writers' Festival a number of prominent Australian authors talked about what they read and the books that have inspired them in their work.

Luke Davies is a novelist, poet and screenwriter currently trying his luck in LA. He's the author of the recently published God of Speed and his book Candy was made into a film. It focuses on young lovers who are in a spiral of heroin addiction. Luke Davies was himself an addict 20 years ago, and in this talk he guides us through the books that penetrated his drug induced haze and re-introduced him to the world of emotions and feeling. John Steinbeck's Cannery Row opened the door to literature for him as a teenager.

Luke Davies: This is the opening paragraph of Cannery Row:

Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream. Cannery Row is the gathered and the scattered, tin and iron and rust and splintered wood, chipped pavement and weedy lots and junk heaps, sardine canneries of corrugated iron, honky tonks, restaurants and whore houses, and little crowded groceries, and laboratories and flophouses. Its inhabitants are, as the man once said, 'whores, pimps, gamblers, and sons of bitches,' by which he meant Everybody. Had the man looked through another peephole he might have said, 'Saints and angels and martyrs and holy men,' and he would have meant the same thing.

There's something that I now recognise as being intrinsically corny and a bit twee about that. I was a precocious little kid; within a few months I had moved on to Faulkner, which kind of blew my mind, and I understood then and I understand now that Faulkner and Steinbeck...we're talking about completely different things, but my emotional contact with that moment of feeling like an adult and an autonomous person who discovered a new world, the same world that Christos talked about with the Bergman films, that feeling has never gone away. It was kind of like Steinbeck was the door and then three months later, down the corridor, Faulkner was when it opened out into the palace and I've been roaming around in that palace ever since.
So I jump forward many, many years, I'm a heroin addict and things have been very bad for very, very many years. I was a pathetic criminal in many ways. All of my criminal endeavours ended in disaster basically, but an area that I was comfortable with was books, and so back in the days before they had those electronic things on the fronts of bookshops I just used to steal a lot of books and sell them the next day, and I'd steal the best books possible, the brand new books that were in the most demand that second-hand bookshops in Carlton would love to buy off you and turn a blind eye.

So, books very rarely lasted more than 24 hours. The books I was reading were second-hand books that weren't really sellable. But this book Arctic Dreams by Barry Lopez in the middle of that horrendous misery touched something inside me that was to be the thing that reconnected me with the idea of the capacity for becoming human again after I had become so dehumanised for so many years. I started reading this book, this passage that I'm about to read to you:
[reading from One summer evening I was camped... to ...she stared back resolute as iron.]
In that instant in reading that book I burst into tears for the first time in so many years, because as a heroin addict tears are a luxury and you become really cold and really hard, so something in this writing cut through, something in this remote region that I was living in, some kind of possibility of hope reconnected me with my life. And what I was reading in this literature, in this very brilliant book, was the sense of presence, of how to be present here and now in this body at this moment in these extraordinary circumstances of being rather than not being, the more likely alternative.

This is a real 'writer's writer' book. It's very popular amongst writers. It's a really great book, and I got it...and I wrote in the movie that I co-wrote, Candy, there's a scene where the Heath Ledger character is reading the book, and I convinced the director Neil Armfield to have a close-up shot of the book, so it gets in there, and you see that beside the alarm clock on the bedside table.

I'm going to totally bypass the stuff that I wanted to say, apart from the fact that I'm going to say it, about how great Roberto Calasso is. If you check him out you will be rewarded. The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony is a wonderful book that sort of reaches down into the fundamental mythic meanings of this question of what it means to be alive. And the book Ka by Calasso. The first one is retellings of the Greek myths and legends, the second one is retellings of the great Hindu and Sanskrit myths and legends. You go backwards through these books it's kind of like getting a really vivid glimpse of the history of our Western consciousness.

So we're running out of time and I'm going to move on to poetry, stuff that is about presence. This is Yeats:

My fiftieth year had come and gone,I sat, a solitary man,In a crowded London shop,An open book and empty cup on the marble table-top.While on the shop and street I gazed my body of a sudden blazed;And twenty minutes more or less it seemed, so great my happiness,That I was blessed and could bless.

It's just a poem that I love, I guess, because...the theme of this thing that I'm talking about is the journey from...the gap between the life you are leading and the life you ought to be leading being immense and on the journey towards death trying to narrow that gap by becoming a better person.

I was in Auckland last week at the writers' festival and I heard Junot Diaz talk about...he's just a great guy, the Pulitzer Prize-winner guy, and he talked about how talent is not enough. It doesn't make us write better books the next time around, you've got to strive to become a better person, and to me that means just always making an effort to become more present.

So I really love...I have investigated, I guess, in God of Speed the questions of people whose lives are really lost and who don't come out the other side of that thing. I guess John Berryman is one such person, and in recent years, the last five or so years, John Berryman has been my great discovery as someone who is exceedingly difficult and dense but the rewards are immense, and he has become bedside reading. Well, I dip in and out anyway. I've moving through the collected now, but The Dream Songs is a great book and this is a poem called 'Op. posth. no.13', and I assume that the Randall that is mentioned in this poem is Randall Jarrell, I'm not sure.
In the night-reaches dreamed he of better graces,of liberations, and beloved faces,such as now ere dawn he sings.It would not be easy, accustomed to these things,to give up the old world, but he could try;let it all rest, have a good cry.

Let Randall rest, whom your self-torturing cannot restore one instant's good to, rest:he's left us now.The panic died and in the panic's dying so did my old friend. I am headed west also, also, somehow.

In the chambers of the end we'll meet again I will say Randall, he'll say Pussycat and all will be as before when as we sought, among the beloved faces,eminence and were dissatisfied with that and needed more.

I wanted to rave on a bit about the Australian poet Vivian Smith because that journey was about...I was 13 years old and the door opened, in the middle of that the glimpse into the Barry Lopez thing was about finding the turning point that made things change, and then this is kind of like about presence again by a senior Australian poet who is one of my favourite poets, and this is a mature poem. I guess emotionally it's a place that I love, because it's certainly not a place that I live in emotionally but it's a one that I think would be nice, to be an old guy like Vivian Smith and experiencing a reality like this and writing a poem this beautiful, which I will finish on. It's called 'Happiness'.

They tell me that the novelist next door is working on a new book full of fight with all the characters named after colours:Rose and Pink and Black and Brown and White.He's the kind of guy who knows the ropes.He is so at home in his own skin.(Of course it could turn out a load of shite).

And I, today, have reached a small peak of cloudless unconcern,With no demands, and no calls on my time.

I'm standing at the window with a coffee,the first flush of spring on view.I know that in an hour you will return and I will have this greeting ready for you.

Thanks

Ramona Koval: Luke Davies at the recent Sydney Writers' Festival talking about writing that's influenced him. Thanks to Slow TV for making that audio available.

Source: ABC Radio National Australia

"God of Speed" Review From Malcolm Knox Sydney Morning Herald

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 21:10:00 +0000

God Of Speed
Malcolm Knox, reviewer
April 18, 2008

Luke Davies climbs up a notch by stepping into the shoes of one of the 20th-century's most intriguing characters.

AuthorLuke Davies
GenreFiction
Publisher Allen & Unwin

When I read this fever-dream of a book, I was laid up in a darkened room, my sweats and aches salved by codeine, my stubble growing into an unkempt beard, my fingernails long, my mind on germs - where I had caught this thing, how I could avoid it next time?

There, and precisely there, my assonance with Howard Hughes stops. I have greater concerns about Luke Davies, that is, if a successful Australian writer's attuning to the moods, memories, habits and intimacies of America's strangest and most corrosive 20th-century plutocrat is a matter for concern.

Davies, born in 1962, is the author of several volumes of poetry and two previous novels. Candy is one of the best novels of the past 15 years and Isabelle The Navigator one of the most underrated.

Why Davies would be so compelled by Hughes, the oil-money heir who built an empire in film, aviation, electronics, media and hotels, who set records on land and in air, is a question that will be raised and I mention it only in order to get it out of the way. Firstly, there are no passport controls on art. Secondly, Davies reinvents Hughes with a sure artistry that quickly puts such questions in the shade.

Davies's Hughes narrates from a hotel in London, one of his temporary tax shelters, in 1973. He is 68, three years from death, cared for by his retinue of Mormons, in the full grip of his addictions to drugs and obsessive behaviour. The time is momentous because he has decided to pilot an aeroplane again.

Hughes has summoned Jack Real, an old flyer and friend, to come from America and assist him. God Of Speed is narrated over a single night while Hughes waits for Real to wake up. A single bow of tension holds up the novel - will Hughes be able to take the controls? Between those two points it warps in short chapters back and forth over Hughes's life. These episodes, often disordered and rambling, are threaded together with the story of Hughes's record-setting round-the-world flight in 1938.

Davies is not attempting an act of perfect ventriloquism. As much is clear from Hughes's real memos, spliced through the text. The real Hughes, on the page, is a stranger and colder creature than Davies's Hughes. A faithful re-creation of the real Hughes would be, I suspect, wild and unreadable, if "Memo, 1959: On retrieving my hearing-aid cord from the cabinet" is any guide: "The door to the cabinet is to be opened using a minimum of fifteen Kleenexes" and so on.

Davies's Hughes, on the other hand, is warmer-blooded and poetic, and most importantly is talking to someone other than himself. By carrying Hughes's story out to Jack Real, Davies is engineering its carriage to us. His Hughes has some of the weirdness of his disorder, repeating himself, losing his way, obsessing over "setting the controls" as if every moment is like flying a plane, mistaking Jane Greer's "softness" for her "sadness" but then deciding that the mistake is as apt as the intended word. Yet he is self-aware: 'You see, Jack, there was a loop, and it was hard to get out of ..."

His rhythms are more fluent and accessible than those of the real Hughes, and they prise open this self-awareness about his inner life, and his regrets, in a way that the real Hughes probably never articulated, certainly not in his memos.

Those regrets circle around the women. From Carole Lombard to Ava Gardner, Hughes bedded a full quorum of Hollywood beauty from the 1920s to the 1950s. In God Of Speed, their intimacies are rendered with the juiced-up lushness of erotic art, Hughes projecting each memory onto his mental screen, a voyeur of his own past. His final epiphany, that he didn't take enough account of the separate existence of his sexual partners, escapes triteness because of the surreal sexual heights at which Hughes flew. If anyone was entitled to monstrous flaws, it was a man who bridged the gap between the metaphoric American dream and its realisation. It is in exploring the outer limits of this consummation that Davies reaches his own heights.

The sexual avidity and cruelty are far from the worst of it. When filming Hell's Angels, Hughes would search the sky for "f---able clouds". The shot he wanted was a zeppelin plunging into a fat cumulus breast. How Davies translates this - from yearning for a woman, to yearning for many women, to yearning for some spirit that captures all those female essences, to yearning itself, involuted and arid - is one of this novel's triumphs.

God Of Speed is one of those memorable novels that is more strange than perfect. It has its patchiness. A late chapter on Hughes's financial manipulation of Richard Nixon is, while amusing, more an assemblage of facts than the strangulated outburst that the rest of the narrative has become by that point. The short-chapter structure is mostly satisfying but in the early stages there were times when I wanted it to slow down, allow its weirdness to unravel at a slower pace. Like a beautiful yet over-modest person, it didn't seem to want the attention it merited. But to let his Hughes ramble too weirdly would be a risk, as would letting his Hughes wander off and enjoy the sexual favours of men, as the real Hughes did. These untaken paths don't detract from the novel but pose interesting speculations.

"I was everything, Jack, I was everywhere, for a while." And Hughes was. God Of Speed is a novel that left me dizzy and a little altitude-sick - more codeine, nurse! But Davies strains for, and I think captures, the subjective essence, the anxiety and megalomania, of being - and knowing he was - an avatar of a whole century. Others will decide whether God Of Speed cements Davies where he deserves to be, among the very top echelon of our novelists. For those readers who are tuned in to what he is doing, it certainly will.

Australia Council For The Arts Bio

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 18:09:00 +0000

Luke Davies

Sydney-based Luke Davies is a poet and novelist, whose work has been widely published both in Australia and overseas.

Luke Davies is the author of two novels, including the cult bestseller Candy (Allen & Unwin, Australia, 1997), which was shortlisted for the NSW Premier's Literary Awards in 1998 and has since been published in Britain, the United States and translated into German, Spanish, Hebrew and French. A film starring Heath Ledger was released in 2006 and won Davies the (AFI) Awards, Best Adapted Screenplay, 2006. Davies' other novel is Isabelle the Navigator (Allen & Unwin, Australia, 2000).

Originally a poet though, Davies was awarded the Philip Hodgins Memorial Medal for Poetry in 2004. He has published five books of poetry, including Running With Light (Allen & Unwin, Australia, 1999), winner of the Judith Wright Poetry Prize 2000, and Totem (Allen & Unwin, Australia, 2004), the 2004 Age Book of the Year winner.

Davies has completed several residencies around the world, including at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre for the Arts, Ireland 1998, the Australia Centre, Chiang Mai, Thailand, December 1998-March 1999, Centre d'Art I Natura, Farrera de Pallars, Spain, June 1999, and Schloss Wiepersdorf, Germany 2004.

Davies was awarded the Dorothy Hewett Memorial Fellowship (Writer-in-Residence) in 2003, Philip Hodgins Memorial Medal for Poetry (2004) and in 2004 won the Age Poetry Book of the Year and Book of the Year.

His works have been translated into German, Spanish, Thai, French, and Hebrew.

Source: Australian Government - Australia Council For The Arts

2008 Auckland Writers & Readers Festival 2008 - Luke Davies Bio

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 18:04:00 +0000

Luke Davies is the Australian author of three novels, the cult bestseller Candy, Isabelle the Navigator and his recent novel, The God of Speed. He has also written numerous books of poetry. Of these, Running With Light won the 2000 Judith Wright ‘Calanthe’ Poetry Prize at the Queensland Premier’s Literary Awards, and Totem won the Grace Leven Poetry Prize, the Age Poetry Book of the Year and overall Age Book of the Year in 2004. The same year Davies was awarded the Philip Hodgkins Memorial Medal for Poetry.

He adapted Candy for screen, with director Neil Armfield. The film version stars the late Heath Ledger, Abbie Cornish and Geoffrey Rush, and was released to critical acclaim in 2006.

The God of Speed takes the reader on a fictional journey through the internal life of Howard Hughes and is due for release in April 2008.

Luke Davies On Writing "God Of Speed"

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 18:02:00 +0000

Around 1987 I'd written a poem, "The Lucky Women of the Lady Shore", which came out of an anecdote in Robert Hughes' The Fatal Shore, about an all-female convict ship bound for Botany Bay on which the crew mutinied "in the name of France" and sailed instead to Montevideo, where the convict women eventually became serving-women for wealthy Uruguayan families.
I was interested in the notion of one's destiny being so fundamentally changed by a single act. That's something that happens all the time, of course, every instant of every day; but Hughes had touched on a particularly vivid instance.

At the beginning of the poem I placed an epigraph by the French philosopher Paul Virilio that I'd jotted down in a notebook some years earlier, and that seemed apt. It read: "An aesthetic of disappearance that is probably all of history."

Jump forward six years: in 1993 my book of poetry Absolute Event Horizon (1994) was soon to be published, and my publishers were asking for more Virilio details so that they could get copyright clearance. At this point I no longer had any idea where I had found the Virilio quote that I had noted down years earlier; thus began a trawl through all his works, looking for that single line, quite a needle-in-a-haystack task. Virilio had even written a book called The Aesthetics of Disappearance, in 1991, but since my quote came from the eighties, that couldn't have been it.

I never found the line, and in the end the publishers didn't include it in the published book. (Many years later, going through a box of old stuff, I found it, in a small piece by Virilio published in an obscure and long-defunct magazine that came out of Sydney University, circa 1983, called Frogger.)

But through all the 1993 trawling for the quote I came across Virilio's writing about Howard Hughes. Virilio was interested in the speed of light, global communications, power, speed, and what he saw as Hughes' "polar inertia". All of this somehow struck a chord with me. I knew the basics about Hughes, the broad brush-stroke stuff about the eccentric billionaire. But until I read Virilio in my search for a missing quote for another book, I hadn't realized Hughes was a drug addict. It was something of a light-bulb moment. My own experience of addiction made me understand, at some profound level, that Hughes' obsessive and compulsive neuroses were not after all so strange when viewed through the prism of his addiction.

Thus began a decade of obsessive research. I immediately knew I had a novel. I wrote a couple of chapters in '94: Hughes breaking (or rather, creating) the round-the-world record in 1938; his spectacular plane crash in the streets of Beverly Hills in 1946, and an imagined piece of what went through Hughes' mind another time, as he switched off the engines and masturbated in the cockpit, hurtling towards the ocean. (Fourteen years later these embryonic pieces found their way, in different forms, into the finished novel.)

I also knew immediately that this was a "big" book. Coming out of poetry, I had a very vivid sense of being on my "L" plates as a novelist. And Candy was the L-plates book that was looming by 1994, that was demanding it be written. I consciously put Howard Hughes on hold. I told myself I'd write it after Candy. Then Isabelle the Navigator pushed into the queue; it seemed the proper book to write as the "P" plates novel.

These delays, operating largely at subconscious levels, were the best thing I could have done. God of Speed was always going to need the "full" rather than the Learner's or Provisional license, novelistically speaking; as well as, ultimately, the permit to operate heavy machinery.
I needed to write Candy and Isabelle before I could make sense of Howard. I wrote more books of poetry, and the whole Candy film process took up a few years, and all the while I learnt more and more about Hughes.

Around 2003 I experienced a clear sense of "now is the time", and I plunged deeper than ever before. I had a messy draft by 2004; then Candy shot in 2005 and I had time to get some selective feedback on just how messy "messy" was. Hughes' mind was chaotic; I had to somehow convey that, without the narrative itself being genuinely chaotic. ("Controlled chaos" became my motto.) 2006 and 2007 were fairly obsessively about reworking and redrafting, trusting my instincts about what was and wasn't working, and trusting also the relentlessly perfectionist feedback and criticism of the wonderful editor I was working with, Alice Truax in New York.
During this couple of years I learnt not to listen to that inner voice that says, "Close enough. That will do." This voice comes from exhaustion, and expresses the sincere desire to rest, or move on. But it is the voice of sabotage, creatively speaking. It's important to tune in to a voice happening at a deeper level that says, however wearily, "Miles to go before I sleep."

I always knew what the book would feel like, in an overall sense. But you have to write it to know what it should look like and be like. I don't expect that any other book I ever write will have a fourteen-year history from gestation to completion. But when I look back at the whole process now, every step taken seems one of absolute necessity: not an event out of place. "Impatience is the only sin," the Buddha said, or so I've heard.

God of Speed
Luke Davies
I will fly at last. I will unfold my wings. I will unpack my head. I will step back outside. One day I may even make love again. But one thing at a time. Let's not get ahead of ourselves.The new novel from one of Australia's most exciting literary talents is a vividly imagined and riveting portrait of one of the twentieth century's most extraordinary characters - aviator, film-maker, and billionaire, Howard Hughes.

Source: Allen & Unwin

Candyman: An Author's Journey From Page To Screen

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 17:59:00 +0000

Luke Davies tells Garry Maddox about life on the set of his first film.

TWO young lovers, played by Heath Ledger and Abbie Cornish, whirl on a Luna Park ride. In the early days of a relationship, they are giddy with passion and possibility. But when she shares his taste for heroin, the lovers take a darker and more confronting ride.

For the poet, novelist and now screenwriter Luke Davies, watching the new Australian film Candy has inspired extraordinary emotions.

"I love watching it," he says.

"I have moments of being distressed, in tears, traumatised but nonetheless totally gripped. And almost side by side are these moments of exquisite joy at the actual sense of achievement - 'Oh my God, I wrote this novel and it got published and it got adapted and the film got made'."

Davies has a unique relationship to the film. It is based on his brilliantly evocative and tender novel that fictionalises his experiences on heroin over the best part of a decade. The worst years were from age 22 to 28.

"But to get to things being bad by 22, you're starting to wind up at 19, 20, 21 into messy territory," he says.

Davies collaborated with the famed theatre director Neil Armfield on the screenplay, has a cameo on screen as a cheerful milkman and was on set filming a "making of" documentary that has been boiled down from 45 hours of footage to five so far. It centres on the writer's anxiety at letting go and the odd-couple relationship between writer and director.

After first showing at the Berlin Film Festival, Candy premiered in Sydney this week before its release later this month. It also stars Geoffrey Rush as a gay junkie chemist and Noni Hazlehurst and Tony Martin as the distressed parents of Cornish's character, Candy.

Speaking in a Newtown cafe - all lounge chairs, groovy decor and thumping music - Davies says he is "bemused, bewildered and thrilled that this thing has grown out of a couple of fragments of prose that I wrote 10 years ago".

The collaboration on the screenplay started in 1999. Davies often typed while Armfield talked and acted through his vision for the film.

"He was like the Queen of Sheba," says Davies. "He was so often horizontal. He's got this little place at Patonga, this little holiday shack, and he'd lie there and I was like the amanuensis."

The big challenge was expanding a first-person novel, a passionate and confronting romance that centres on the daily struggle to make a dollar, shoot up and intermittently kick the habit, into a film.

"The book is essentially a completely claustrophobic interior monologue in which, in a sense, even the title is ironic and the character Candy is a two-dimensional approximation of the narrator's desires, obsessions and his inability to see the truth at any deep level," says Davies. "The focus had to shift around from inside his eyes to the two of them."

That meant including Candy's parents, expanding a minor character when Rush joined the cast and allowing one scene to represent each stage - drying out, for example - rather than repeating events from the novel.

Davies says he learnt how amazing actors are during filming.

"We spent years fretting about really important lines of dialogue that carried information that got you from one place to another. It was, 'We've got to find a way of expressing this, there's no way we can lose that', and we lost that because Heath Ledger would do something with a twist of his face or a glance of his eye.

"That's why actors are so great and why they earn so much money. They take away the anxious necessity to find the right words."

While working on the screenplay, Davies anxiously watched every new film dealing with addiction.

"Every one that came along was like, 'Oh my God, we're never going to get our film made because no one will finance it'. Leaving Las Vegas shits me - it's just a really bad cliched prostitute-with-a-heart-of-gold film. Requiem for a Dream shits me even more - it's all fireworks and no substance.

"Trainspotting I loved, but it doesn't impinge on our territory. But Jesus' Son is the film that I really like. As an ex-user, it came the closest to any film I've seen, perhaps with the exception of Panic in Needle Park, the early '70s Al Pacino one, that actually gets the relationship [between the couple] right to some extent."

Davies is convinced viewers will be knocked out by the film despite its dark and troubling content.

"I'm the kind of cinema-goer who doesn't mind distressing cinema. What I care about is good cinema. I don't care if it's light comedy, dark or whatever. The experience of watching great cinema - great art - is life enriching and spiritually uplifting no matter whether it's about as difficult as it gets, like Breaking the Waves, or as light as it gets, like Jerry Maguire, Election or Toy Story."

Having had a taste of film-making, Davies wants to resume his teenage ambition to write and direct.

"At about 15 years old, I got my dad to give me an AFI [Australian Film Institute] membership for my birthday. I was a weird kid. It wasn't until I saw Aguirre: The Wrath of God at 16 that my whole world changed. The obsession with that was equal to the obsession with writing."

He is making a short film as a precursor to a low-budget thriller.

"Being the writer is merely control freak level two. You've got to get to control freak level one."

"The book is essentially a completely claustrophobic interior monologue in which, in a sense, even the title is ironic and the character Candy is a two-dimensional approximation of the narrator's desires, obsessions and his inability to see the truth at any deep level," says Davies. "The focus had to shift around from inside his eyes to the two of them."

That meant including Candy's parents, expanding a minor character when Rush joined the cast and allowing one scene to represent each stage - drying out, for example - rather than repeating events from the novel.

Davies says he learnt how amazing actors are during filming.

"We spent years fretting about really important lines of dialogue that carried information that got you from one place to another. It was, 'We've got to find a way of expressing this, there's no way we can lose that', and we lost that because Heath Ledger would do something with a twist of his face or a glance of his eye.

"That's why actors are so great and why they earn so much money. They take away the anxious necessity to find the right words."

While working on the screenplay, Davies anxiously watched every new film dealing with addiction.

"Every one that came along was like, 'Oh my God, we're never going to get our film made because no one will finance it'. Leaving Las Vegas shits me - it's just a really bad cliched prostitute-with-a-heart-of-gold film. Requiem for a Dream shits me even more - it's all fireworks and no substance.

"Trainspotting I loved, but it doesn't impinge on our territory. But Jesus' Son is the film that I really like. As an ex-user, it came the closest to any film I've seen, perhaps with the exception of Panic in Needle Park, the early '70s Al Pacino one, that actually gets the relationship [between the couple] right to some extent."

Davies is convinced viewers will be knocked out by the film despite its dark and troubling content.

"I'm the kind of cinema-goer who doesn't mind distressing cinema. What I care about is good cinema. I don't care if it's light comedy, dark or whatever. The experience of watching great cinema - great art - is life enriching and spiritually uplifting no matter whether it's about as difficult as it gets, like Breaking the Waves, or as light as it gets, like Jerry Maguire, Election or Toy Story."

Having had a taste of film-making, Davies wants to resume his teenage ambition to write and direct.

"At about 15 years old, I got my dad to give me an AFI [Australian Film Institute] membership for my birthday. I was a weird kid. It wasn't until I saw Aguirre: The Wrath of God at 16 that my whole world changed. The obsession with that was equal to the obsession with writing."

He is making a short film as a precursor to a low-budget thriller.

"Being the writer is merely control freak level two. You've got to get to control freak level one."

Source: smh.com.au

Sydney Morning Herald

Random Luke Info Tidbit

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 17:39:00 +0000

Luke Davies was born in Sydney in 1962. He has worked variously as a teacher, journalist and script editor. Luke Davies' collection of poetry Absolute Event Horizon was shortlisted for the 1995 Turnbull Fox Phillips poetry prize

Magdalena Ball's Review Of "God of Speed", Luke's New Novel

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 17:21:00 +0000

God of Speed

By Luke Davies

Allen & Unwin

April 2008, Paperback, 286pp

Though Davies’ Hughes isn’t exactly a likable character, the intimacy is so striking and the intensity of the portrait so great that Hughes becomes someone entirely familiar. Not so much the grand aviator with all the superlatives of his status: richest, fastest, most inventive, but instead, a man like any other, pursued by demons and running hard to find a way to live through them.

Luke Davies is the sort of writer that skips past the surface of his subjects, moving deeper into that underlying subconscious place of pain and fear. His latest novel takes on the over-wrought subject of Howard Hughes. In his heyday, Hughes was America’s biggest 20th century icon, still believed by many to be one of the greatest geniuses that America ever had.

His impact on the world was huge and varied, touching on the movie industry and Hollywood, aviation, engineering, biomedical research, and even espionage and warfare. His life has been the subject of numerous films, books, and studies, not only for his accomplishments, but also because of the extraordinary split between his early life when he is visible everywhere, and his later life, when his is almost entirely invisible.

Taking on Hughes’ life is no small task for a novelist, especially for a writer so used to working in the micro sphere of poetry. Davies is up to it. His portrait remains something entirely new – a fiction that takes on the contours of Hughes’ life, but which goes deeper into the heart of this invented man to find everyman.

The book opens just prior to the “final decline.” It’s June 1973, where a 68-year-old Hughes prepares to fly again after 13 years of reclusive dormancy. The book stays at that point, tracking Hughes’ sleepless, drug-ridden thoughts through the night as he lies, waiting for his friend, confidante and ultimately biographer, Jack Real, to wake and accompany him on his flights.

After those flights, Hughes fractured his hip and remained bedridden from that point until his death three years later. In his thoughts — feverish and strange — he flies through his life reflecting, refracting, and moving through those moments in such an intimate, personal way that the reader almost comes to understand him.

It’s not all warm. Davies' Hughes is self-centred, moving through sex and drugs with a hunger that is as ugly as it is damaging. The name dropping is almost irritating from the intensity of his relationship with Katherine Hepburn, through Ava Gardner, Billie Dove, Ginger Rogers, Bette Davis, Lana Turner, Faith Domergue, and Susan Hayward - all treated with a hungry misogyny that ended up being a kind of laundry list of famous legs, vaginas, and skin, devoid of the person within the body parts.

Hughes' hunger can’t be satisfied by these women, who he catalogues by the type of sex he could have with them, anymore than it could by the drugs he later used in the same way. Instead of Ginger, Bette, and Lana, there was Emperin, Valium, and Ritalin replacing that hot, fast hit of success, of a blockbuster completed, the roar of an engine beneath the legs, of making huge amounts of money:

You get the thing you want, but hardly. Hardly have you breathed your way into the next thought than the last thought fills you with yearning and is gone. To say nothing of all this constriction. (87)

Placed in the uncomfortable role of Hughes’ confidante, the reader is made to understand this fictional Hughes, from his earliest memories of his mother’s germ fears, to his latest ones of infirmary and addiction. There is an honesty here that is painful, horrible at times, but also, and mainly because of Davies’ poetic skill, beautiful:

Now, so many decades later, I like the flooding again, that sense of being liquid inside all this dryness, which is only apparent dryness, of course. The way Emperin glides, and flows. The way at times, after an injection, I could swear not that I am in but that I have in face become a stream, rippling over the pebbles as I flow. Or the way Valium dulls the roaring of the sky, and makes the vultures pigeons.(26)

The grand scale of Hughes’ life is all on the outside. On the inside, where the reader sits at a nightmare ridden bedside, Hughes is still that little boy, afraid of germs, and unable to breathe in, but we can still hear the outside world. Despite the small-scale scene, Davies manages to provide the big picture of Hughes’ world. We have his real neurotic memos that give us a sense of how he might be presenting to those around him.

These are disturbing instructions on how many Kleenexes should be used to open the door of his cabinet, or how to “prevent the backflow of germs” in sending flowers on the death of Bob Gross, who ran Lockheed. The way in which Davies handles the relationship between inner world and outer; between Hughes’ schemes and his obsessive-compulsive implosion without ever leaving his setting of a single night, and single bed, is masterful.

Though Davies’ Hughes isn’t exactly a likable character, the intimacy is so striking and the intensity of the portrait so great that Hughes becomes someone entirely familiar. Not so much the grand aviator with all the superlatives of his status: richest, fastest, most inventive, but instead, a man like any other, pursued by demons and running hard to find a way to live through them. He succeeds and he fails, as indeed, we all do on one level or another. This is a remarkable fusion of prose and poetry, well worth reading, regardless of whether or not the subject matter is of interest to you.

About the reviewer: Magdalena Ball is the author of Sleep Before Evening, The Art of Assessment, and Quark Soup.

Luke Davies

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 17:16:00 +0000

Luke Davies
(Australia, 1962)

Luke Davies is a critically acclaimed poet, novelist, and screenplay writer, with something of a popular groundswell of readers and fans uncommon in Australian poetry. His second volume, Absolute Event Horizon, was shortlisted for the National Book Council Poetry Prize, while Running With Light won the 2000 Judith Wright Poetry Prize at the Queensland Premier's Literary Awards. Davies’ most recent poetry collection, Totem, won the 2005 South Australian Premier’s Literary Award for Poetry, the Grace Leven Poetry Prize 2004, the Age’s Poetry Book of the Year Award and the overall Age Book of the Year Award, firmly establishing him as one contemporary Australian poetry’s most acclaimed new voices. In 2004 Davies was also awarded the Philip Hodgins Memorial Medal for Poetry. Along with his poetry, Davies has published two novels, the bestselling novel Candy and Isabelle the Navigator, while a third novel titled The Book of Howard H is forthcoming through Allen & Unwin in 2007. Davies’ play Stag was performed as part of the 2006 Sydney Theatre Company’s Wharf 2 Loud Program, and along with co-writing the screenplay for Candy with Neil Armfield, Davies has written two other screenplays, Division 7 and Merlo, as well as making his first forays in front of and behind the camera with a one line role as a milkman in Armfield’s film version of Candy and as director of a documentary titled The Diary of a Milkman.

Davies is an unusual phenomenon in Australian poetry: a popular and commercially successful writer whose work has moved far beyond the small but passionate readership of Australian poetry. Some part of this success is no doubt due to his work as a novelist. Published in 1997, his first novel Candy was shortlisted for the 1998 NSW Premier’s Awards and was a commercial success. It has since been translated into various languages and published in France, Spain, Germany, Israel, Greece, the UK and US. More recently, Davies adapted Candy into a screenplay with the acclaimed director Neil Armfield, winning the 2006 AWGIE for Best Adapted Screenplay. Premiering at the Berlin Film Festival in February 2006, and starring Heath Ledger, Abbie Cornish and Geoffrey Rush, this latest departure for Davies will no doubt bring new readers to his novels and poetry alike.

Since his first little chapbook of poetry, Four Plots for Magnets, was published in 1982, Davies has maintained and developed an engaging poetic voice consistent for its clarity, humour and ability to put into play popular culture, an abiding interest in cosmology, quantum mechanics and chaos theory, and personal experiences of addiction, love and the recognition of the world’s infinite playfulness and variation. By recognition I mean to suggest that Davies’ poetry is most often a conscious return to the moment, a re-cognition or re-visioning of the subject’s experience through the prism and near infinite trajectories and vectors the convergence of language, memory, being and experience afford.

Some part postmodern Troubadour with a penchant for entropy and the odd neutrino, Davies might yet be seen as a religious poet. There are resonances in his work with Christian mystics such as Eckhart and Pseudo-Dionysius, as well as Blake and Hopkins. For that though, drawing a line of dependence and influence, or making a claim for the religious, would be reductive of a poet whose sensibilities and concerns hinge upon a visceral — at times lugubrious, at times concupiscent — evocation of the physicality of experience. Every line is a curve, every reference point a string, and more often than not for Davies, the religious light is a refraction of the more immediate and profane light of this world set to its infinite confines:

There is more blue up here. This is good. There is
more light careening in the air. The haloes are in form.
Light floods the cerebral cortex all day long; the
toughest wildest physicists acknowledge this, agree with this.
And certainly the angels know and watch the light flood into
certain minds. This is something they do when they tire
of aetherial tag and aerial dogfights and general angel
larrikinism. They take their cortex watching seriously.

Davies also takes his cortex watching seriously. He shares the same larrikin spirit of the angels, a generosity of spirit that is in some strange way ruthless for its generosity, for its ability not to shy away from a lust for life (pace Richard Dawkins as much as Iggy Pop). There is an irrepresible sense of mischief, a playfulness engendered by a very conscious realization of the contingencies of knowing experience or gainsaying its truths. A knowledge that experience is multiple, if not infinite, subject as it is to interpretation and re-interpretation, the faults of memory and the difficulties of expression, all of which finally resting somewhere near the absences of godhead or a privileged referent, meaning or truth. Davies’ poetry embraces this unknowing or kenosis, the dark matter of experience or being, without losing touch with the contemporary, the popular or the readable. As in ‘Poetry and Flowers’ the most complex idea, such as the moment of knowing and naming, can be simply stated, the humour, allusion and ambiguities left open and clear to the reader’s own resources:

Lark and rose go mad, even with winter
coming on, the garden beneath the verandah blooms,
the park is dense with sun and soccer balls.
By lark I mean generic bird, God knows
the names for all these things with wings. Ditto
the rose: the garden drooling colour and bloom.

For this, mixing as it does with Davies’ dominating themes of love and the cosmos, his poetry offers an endlessly engaging depth of thought enlightened by an agile spirit. His work tends to draw quantum physics and chaos theory through peripatetic imaginings and love-struck songs towards a mysticism not far removed from the sort of a/theology Mark C. Taylor describes in Erring, so that he is first and foremost a poet of the here and now, of the infinite moment.

The title poem of his most recent collection Totem, shows Davies at his most profuse in all of this, and in one of the most successful long Australian poems of the last thirty years, Davies can be seen to have moved his work centre stage of the contemporary Australian poetry. In Totem, Davies has opened up a path for Australian poetry in much the way that Beaver’s Letters to Live Poets, Porter’s The Monkey’s Mask, or Kinsella’s Syzygy showed poets there were other ways to plunder a muse. It is also, more simply, one of the most triumphant imaginings of the ever-so physical metaphysics of love and desire, approaching the sort of translucent and masterful evocation of love’s transcendence found in Malouf’s The Crab Feast.

There is a street-smart guilelessness to Davies’ work that is fascinating, an openness that for its acute playfulness is not simple-minded belly-fluff sniffing lyricism, but a penetrative engagement with the foibles of self and language, deception, self-deception and the chimera of truths, that presses beyond simple constructs of self or its experience. Davies’ playfulness, ranges through any number of possible referents from the ‘Song of Songs’ to James Gleick, from Rumi to Patti Smith, or Stevens back to Lucretius and off again through popular culture to popular science, from literary theory to a long and passionate reading in poetry. Davies’ poetry does not seek the illusory protection of irony’s detachment of self from subject, but rather does seek to express personal closely felt experience. His irony is most finely wrought through his capriciousness, in his ability to mix and shift registers, some part whimsy, some part wisdom, and play the profound off the profane to immediate effect, to riddle rhetoric with the force of the living, experiencing human voice. Take for example the swift discourse of Totem’s opening lines:

In the yellow time of pollen, in the blue time of lilacs,
in the green that would balance on the wide green world,
air filled with flux, world-in-a-belly
in the blue lilac weather, she had written a letter:
You came into my life really fast and I liked it.

Beguiling for its unabashed rush of rhetorical lushness as much as the last line’s flat, almost rock-lyric, directness. Nor, though aware of the various contesting language theories and poetics of contemporary literature, and at times drawing from or parodying them, does Davies ever lose sight, or allow language to obscure, the central conundrum of experience and expression, of the physical impact and wonder of being in the world on the thinking and sometimes purely instinctual self. Davies’ poetry is unabashed without a blithering gush. It is well-considered without being sterilized or over-cooked. Finely balanced, there is an apparent care for the reader, for the need of poetry to communicate beyond the self, along with a provocative assertion of the speaking self not limited or embarrassed by the reader’s presence, by the reader’s approach to the most intimate and most wholly felt.

One of Davies’ central strengths is that he is not afraid to allow his poetry to be sentimental, to express emotion richly and cogently and unguardedly. While there is a burden of sorrow to much of Davies’ early work, this sorrow rises into a robust and rhapsodic exhortation of the abundance and vertiginous beauty of being not simply in the world but in relation to it and to others. It is perhaps for this that Davies is remarkable among his contemporaries, with his irrepressible, near irrevocable burgeoning of desire, lust and love that leaves a large part of the rest of the Australian poetic landscape gray and doleful in the least. Davies’ poetry offers a coherent evocation of the evolution of primal fears — of death, loss and loneliness, of the meaninglessness of matter and existence, of the recurrent needs that can save or destroy us — into something as simple and infinitely complex as each moment shared and given, each moment recounted and experienced in its quantum of possibilities. Never abandoning ‘the awkwardness/ of being alive, the unshakeable awareness/ of self as intrusion, and the ridiculousness/ of consciousness’ (Nature poem), Davies’ genius is to find through this doubt and uncertainty a transforming spirit, a passion, that senses and celebrates its part in a greater knowing and unknowing. His poetry dances in a haphazard and joyful place in the convergence of the worlds and bodies, forms and ideas, places and displacements that the human embodies and inhabits. It is a poetry that remains attentive to a greater symmetry, a cosmology, ineffable but for the saving and failing graces of the body, the spirit and of love:

A shining isomorphousness rings out —

the deep peal of bells and how the heart would hold the day.
We have tumbled through the years to meet it. You say laughing
Taste it Taste it. Static crackles in your hair, lightning
in your breast. Stop we will hold each other here.
I am listening, I am listening.

Michael Brennan
Australia – Poetry International Web