disassociated

Sydney Writers’ Festival is teaming up with the State Library of NSW to host literary events throughout the year. This in addition, no doubt, to the main festival event held annually.

The partnership will create a dedicated literature hub in Sydney, providing a dynamic, year-round home for storytelling. It will boost participation in literary events, embed reading and writing into Sydney’s cultural identity, and deliver a diverse program of events, workshops and readings.

There could be in the order of eighty events taking place at the State Library each year. Hopefully the initiative will be a shot in the arm for Australian literature, at a time when both remuneration rates for writers, and recreational reading, are in decline.

The Australian government has decided YouTube will be made inaccessible to people under the age of sixteen. There had been thoughts the video platform might be spared, after the government decided to restrict access to the likes of TikTok, Facebook, and Instagram to younger Australians.

YouTube has recently been running a publicity campaign locally extolling their family-friendly credentials, in the hope they would not be effected.

I’m not in complete agreement with this decision. Obviously there’s all sorts of material on YouTube, but a certain amount has educational merit.

Anthony Gunderman, a mechanical engineer, and assistant professor at the University of Arkansas, in the United States, has developed a robotic hand that can harvest blackberries. What’s more, the device might be able to do the job better than people.

Picking blackberries is a precision task. Apply too much pressure while harvesting them, and they’ll get squashed. But too little will see the fruit remain on the plant. That a robot is potentially capable of the undertaking will be a blow to anyone who thought jobs such as fruit picking, which require a certain skill, were immune to automation.

I’m not in favour of people losing work to robots, but possibly a similar technology might be welcome in some fruit-growing regions of Australia. Especially for people harvesting bananas. The bunches weigh a ton, spiders and snakes are omnipresent, too say nothing of the weather conditions.

I don’t know how the fruit-pickers, often backpackers, or travellers, in Australia do such work, but their efforts are greatly appreciated.

The old caretaker’s cottage is to become home to small groups of writers for five months of the year:

The site’s caretaker’s cottage will soon be converted into a workspace and temporary residence for writers. The program will host three writers at a time, each staying for a five-month period. Accommodation will feature private rooms equipped for reading, research and drafting.

You don’t see it on every travel guide for the Sydney region, but Waverley Cemetery is worth the visit if you’re in town. Perched above a cliff, looking out onto the Tasman Ocean, the experience of walking between row after of row of gravestones is a truly contemplative. Transcendental even. This would be an amazing place to live for a few months. Are bloggers accepted?

The 1987 ballad by Australian rock act INXS claimed the number one spot in Triple J’s countdown of the Hottest 100 Australian Songs, last Saturday.

INXS rose to prominence during the 80’s and 90’s, when the late Micheal Hutchence, who died in 1997, fronted the act. The band last performed live in 2012, though they’ve not officially retired.

The top ten was not quite as old-school Australian rock as I thought it might be. Cold Chisel featured at numbers seven and eight, with Flame Trees (1984), and Khe Sanh (1978), respectively. Veteran singer Paul Kelly made it to number nine with his 1996 track How to Make Gravy.

Somebody That I Used to Know (2011) by Gotye, My Happiness (2000) by Powderfinger, Scar (2004) by Missy Higgins, Untouched (2007) by The Veronicas, and The Nosebleed Section (2003) by Hilltop Hoods, also charted in the top ten. Music recorded in the twenty-first century (which I’ll say includes 2000), ended up being well represented here.

Ghost Cities, by Australian author Siang Lu, who is based between Brisbane, and Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, was yesterday named winner of the 2025 Miles Franklin Literary Award.

The Miles Franklin is one of Australia’s most prestigious literary awards for novel writing, with the winner receiving sixty-thousand Australian dollars.

I’m yet to read Ghost Cities, but it certainly has an award-winning synopsis:

Ghost Cities — inspired by the vacant, uninhabited megacities of China — follows multiple narratives, including one in which a young man named Xiang is fired from his job as a translator at Sydney’s Chinese Consulate after it is discovered he doesn’t speak a word of Chinese and has been relying entirely on Google Translate for his work.

How is his relocation to one such ghost city connected to a parallel odyssey in which an ancient Emperor creates a thousand doubles of Himself? Or where a horny mountain gains sentience? Where a chess-playing automaton hides a deadly secret? Or a tale in which every book in the known Empire is destroyed — then re-created, page by page and book by book, all in the name of love and art?

The Miles Franklin judging panel had this to say:

Siang Lu’s Ghost Cities is at once a grand farce and a haunting meditation on diaspora. Sitting within a tradition in Australian writing that explores failed expatriation and cultural fraud, Lu’s novel is also something strikingly new. In Ghost Cities, the Sino-Australian imaginary appears as a labyrinthine film-set, where it is never quite clear who is performing and who is directing. Shimmering with satire and wisdom, and with an absurdist bravura, Ghost Cities is a genuine landmark in Australian literature.

Lu also wrote The Whitewash in 2022, which won the Glendower Award for an Emerging Queensland Writer, and was shortlisted in both the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards, and the Australian Book Industry Awards (ABIAs).

But writing books isn’t Lu’s only claim to fame, he’s also created SillyBookstagram (Instagram page). I know all about Bookstagram (Instagram’s book readers’ community), but SillyBookstagram is a new one on me. It looks like a fun offshoot of Bookstagram though.

New from photo-sharing app Foto, Foto Walk:

A Foto Walk is a casual, inclusive gathering of photographers who meet up to walk, shoot, and connect in real life. There are no rules, no competitions, and no pressure — just people who love photography coming together to explore their local area with fresh eyes.

Walks can be small or large, quiet or social, digital or analog — everyone is welcome. Whether you’re shooting film, phone, or digital, Foto Walks are about slowing down, being present, and building community through shared creative energy.

Imagine that, a socials app facilitating in person socialising, instead of binding members to screens and algorithms. Otherwise, what a great idea.

Anyone who wishes to can register to become a walk host in their area, organise gatherings, then get together for a few hours of photo-taking with local Foto members.

I joined Foto a few weeks ago, and this news arrived by newsletter on Monday. They have a quite a bit in the pipeline at the moment, and are certainly positioning themselves as a serious alternative to certain of the other photo-sharing apps around.

This according to Bloomberg writer, Mark Gurman, that is. The proposed devices resemble a small iPad or tablet when opened out.

It’s often said Apple might not do things first, but they do them best (usually). Doubtless they will apply their know-how to the region of the device where the fold crease is, since this where a lot of foldables see problems.

And while we’re at it, can we use the term foldable in the same way as wearable?

Ava, writing at Ava’s blog:

It’s a bit of a meh look that one of the biggest Indieweb personalities (that I think does an amazing job!) with her own Bearblog and website is not sharing this discussion on them, but on social media instead, limiting its reach to those users. At least POSSE was an option. And that leads me back to what I said above — what’s the point of going here if people are also resorting to Twitter but with different look, but without the numbers and archive built up over years?

Ava’s post is in response to a question posed by xandra, asking what the Indie Web needs the most now. But the matter of hosting discussions with blog posts is something I’ve been grappling with.

It doesn’t seem right that anyone reading one of my website posts has to go elsewhere to make a comment, when that should be happening right here. Because I was thinking, why do I need multiple social media pages, so that all bases are covered should someone not be on this social, but on that social? And what if a person wishing to comment on a post doesn’t have any Fediverse presence?

After years of having post comments switched off, I recently re-enabled them. The reply-guys and spammers arrived within minutes of course, but my CMS has tools to help filter a lot of this junk out. Plus, I still approve all comments before they go public. Bringing comments back achieved two aims, in theory. For one, all discussion is centralised (mostly) on my website, and not spread across multiple social media platforms.

Two: people who don’t have social media presences can still take part in any discussion, because all they have to do is type out a comment. No membership of anything, expect an email address, is needed. Yes, that sets the bar low for junk, but in filters I trust.

One of the things I enjoy about leaving a comment on other people’s posts — though I’m hardly a prolific commenter, because overworked introvert — is including my website on the reply form, where the option is available.

To my mind, it’s always been about the website, not some “outpost” page on a social media platform. I’m not saying everyone should shun social media, because it’s a great place for chit-chat, and having conversations that are only hosted on someone’s socials page.

Of course, to somewhat contradict my argument, I recently federated disassociated, meaning posts go out to the likes of Mastodon, and people can reply there if they want. But then again, those comments ping back to the post in question, so any discussion would be seen in full here.

POSSE is great, but when it comes to discussion on blog posts, let’s also remember KISS: Keep It Simple Sayang. Yes, sayang, because I don’t like calling smart people stupid.

Cure, the fourth novel by Melbourne based Australia author Katherine Brabon, was published this month. As with most of Brabon’s novels so far, Cure is set outside of Australia, in Italy:

Vera and Thea are mother and daughter. Vera writes for the internet: she constructs identities and scenarios for brands to cater to the ideal consumer. Yet she also consumes the offerings of the online world herself: the addictive pursuit of a cure, the narratives she craves in which mother and daughter find a way out of the shared experience of chronic illness. She becomes preoccupied with a blog written by a woman named Claudia, a mother whose daughter also has a chronic illness.

While on holiday in Italy, Thea writes in her journal. She is also constructing a character: an image of herself as she grapples with having the same illness as her mother, Vera. But gradually another person emerges in her journal, through her imaginings of her mother in the same house, the same city, at the same age. They have come to Italy to see where Vera’s family originates, but also to chase a promised cure in the form of a man said to be able to heal Thea’s illness.

I read Brabon’s second novel, The Shut Ins, which was published in 2021, and explored the Japanese phenomenon of hikikomori, where people shut themselves away from society, as in never leave their room, for sometimes years on end.

I was particularly intrigued by a character known only as M, and wrote a longer piece in 2021, trying to figure out who she was. Some people felt certain they knew who she was, but I wasn’t so sure. It’s not too often a novel piques my curiosity thusly…