Chance Delays

So the big kid and I watched Priscilla tonight, for predictable reasons. Australia ended its excruciating six-week festival of fear, pride and prejudice with a comfortable, blessedly uniform, vote in favour of same sex marriage. I read an article in Overland a couple of days later by a young man in a relationship with a man in his mid-forties. The article was discussing his paramour's reflections on growing up gay in Australia in the 1980s and 1990s, describing his world as "pre- Priscilla " and "post- Priscilla ". I remember seeing the movie once in the cinemas when it first came out. I must have been 18, and it was in the middle of a series of films that can only be described as Luhrmannesque - gaudy, camp, heartfelt and very sparkly. There was Luhrmann's Strictly Ballroom , P.J. Hogan's Muriel's Wedding , and, of course, Stephan Elliott's The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert . Priscilla, to me, was the weakest of the lot as a fi

Well yesterday I discovered that my first ever work in my name has been published in Eureka Street magazine. It's funny how a piece that is written and edited so carefully and placed in a little reed basket and sent down the literary river with pride and love can be re-read by its author a month later and found to be frighteningly overwritten. But, as Dev says, everyone thinks their work is shit. You just have to get over it. The more I write the more I discover that the boatswain I was brought up to be is fighting its way to the surface, even though I now live several kilometres from the shore. So I'm celebrating this as a launch. When I was young, whenever we had a new boat, we would smash a bottle of champagne on it. I have a fragment of memory of my father and his friend attempting to smash a large bottle, which simply bounced off the newly fibreglassed hull until Shauna collapsed, half-wetsuited, into the sea. I actually have no idea if it is true, but it could have been