Room Service (16 page)

The bright light, however, defines clearly the circle of attention, everyone is defined, and it excludes the stimuli of the night, creates hard-edged conversation.

That night it rained. Sometimes it doesn't rain for ten years at Lake Eyre, but in the night a pattering soft rain began.

I roused everyone from their tents telling them that they had to ‘bare themselves' to the event. They were a complaining bunch and immediately began to fear that it would mean flooding and the trucks might not be able to make it in to collect us. They had a point. I took an inventory of our supplies and suggested that as from the next morning we all go onto half rations.

By morning, however, the rains had gone. The desert was as dry as a desert should be.

I had spent the night sponging water from the sides of the tents and squeezing it into an emergency tank. My presence around the tents during the night brought me some abuse, but as Leader I had a duty to maximise our chances of survival.

They would've been glad of that water if we'd been stuck there for ten months.

But the trucks came and I lowered the flag and struck camp. Before leaving I went to the snake hole and said farewell. Back at EJs I bemoaned to Susie that we hadn't had a proper rebirth trauma and that there
had been insufficient hardship experienced. She said that not everyone courted danger like I did. I suppose she's right.

She suggested that maybe now that I was back in the city I should give up wearing the boots, leggings, moleskins, barometer pouch, compass pouch, windchill factor gauge pouch, and stop eating in public with a bone-handled sheath knife. I told her I was having trouble re-adjusting to city ways.

None of these pieces have appeared together in book form and all have been revised for this book.

 

Most of the Francois Blase pieces appeared in the
Bulletin
or
Business Review Weekly
. The Oral History of Childhood pieces, ‘Mechanical Aptitude' and ‘Jealousy Tests', appeared in the
National Times
, and ‘Pledges and Vows' in
The Hard Word
. ‘The Drover's Wife' was first broadcast over the ABC as a mock item in a program called ‘The Anzacs and All That' and later published in the
Bulletin
.

‘An Incident from the Wake for Jack Kerouac' appeared in
Coast-to-Coast
, ‘The Subject of Death is now Concluded' first appeared in
Quadrant
. ‘Around the Laundromats' was a column that appeared in
Thor
and then in the
Bulletin
. ‘Convalescence' appeared in
Stand
as ‘Dirty Girl'. Some of the pieces have not been previously published.

 

Permission to reproduce the items in the article ‘The Drover's Wife' is gratefully acknowledged: the
Bulletin
, the
National Times
, and the individual sources named.

Frank Moorhouse was born in the coastal town of Nowra, NSW. He worked as an editor of small-town newspapers and as an administrator, and became a full-time writer in the 1970s. He has written fiction, non-fiction, screenplays and essays, and edited many collections of writing.

Forty-Seventeen
was given a laudatory full-page review by Angela Carter in
The New York Times
and was named Book of the Year by
The Age
and ‘moral winner' of the Booker Prize by the London magazine
Blitz
.
Grand Days
, the first novel in The Edith Trilogy, won the SA Premier's Award for Fiction.
Dark Palace
won the 2001 Miles Franklin Literary Award and was shortlisted for the NSW Premier's Literary Award, the Victorian Premier's Literary Award and the
Age
Book of the Year Award.

Moorhouse has undertaken numerous fellowships and his work has been translated into several languages. He was made a member of the Order of Australia for services to literature in 1985 and was awarded an honorary doctorate from Griffith University in 1997.