When the skip arrived and a cheerful young bloke named Troy backed it into our tricky, narrow driveway with insolent ease, I knew the game was up.
Months of sporadic, amiable discussions had now reached a suddenly irrevocable conclusion. Our agenda — what to do with 'hoarded' papers and notes, drawers of never-to-be-worn-again clothes, children's picture books and abandoned Lego, decades old back copies of magazines — was called to order by a higher power and my filibustering and equivocations abruptly ended.
And so, out came boxes, drawers, long-forgotten suitcases sheltering in out-of-reach cupboards, diaries, note books and typewritten letters of lost or indeterminate relevance. Not to mention the photographs of an unrecognisably youthful couple and their several small children none of whom had given any indication of the towering height from which in later years they would look down on their parents ...
The trouble is that to decide what must go and what can stay you have to actually read documents, correspondence, notes and random marginalia lest you consign to the waiting skip some personal or domestic gem or irreplaceable apercu or forgotten but vital document (yes, yes, I know: if it's long forgotten how can it be vital? Well, it just can.)
And it was in this frame of mind that I encountered a 22 page typed blow-for-blow account of a massive split in the department in which I spent much of my working life. As Vincent Buckley memorably wrote, 'God knows, English departments are strange places ...'
It's not that I'd forgotten this long-running disaster, but the fine detail (well, using 'fine' loosely) was fascinating to recall — and amazing: how on earth did we reasonably intelligent people get ourselves into such a mess? It took me a couple of hours to study this item before deciding that it must not be thrown out.
I then salvaged some credibility as an anti-hoarder by summarily removing sheafs of venerable bank statements, overdue notices and old newspapers but was again stopped in my tracks by a remarkable find at the bottom of a box of books — a neatly bound, 35 page document entitled 'The Writers Train — 1992: Production Itinerary'.
I had often fondly recalled the couple of weeks I spent on the Writers Train, a literary adventure dreamed up and brilliantly realised by the mercurial Laurie Muller, then managing director of University of Queensland Press (UQP).
"My contribution to the skip had been, so far, minimal but my sense of the vitality, promise and energy of the Australian literary imagination was re-invigorated."
Our group of 13 writers — Thea Astley, Ross Clark, Nick Earls, Mabel Edmund, Beverley Farmer, Sue Gough, Victor Kelleher, Komninos, Hugh Lunn, Bill Scott, Mavis Scott, Rosie Scott and me — boarded the train in Rockhampton at 9am on Sunday 12 July. We were bound for Blackwater and Emerald and then Anakie, Bogantungan, Alpha, Blackall, Jericho, Barcaldine, Ilfracombe, Longreach and parts further west until we rolled eventually into Mount Isa to perform at the Civic Centre on 25 July. Preceding us at each stop was the Queensland Arts Council bus loaded with technical gear ('4 x Par 56s — Medium Beam; 1 x 4-channel dimmer; 2x Electro voice S200 full range speakers ... lecterns, books, signage ...')
We gave readings or, as Laurie called them, concerts in town halls, schools, civic centres and on station platforms; and brief performances, chats and workshops at 'whistle stops' and lonely outback sidings where the sight of our small, one-carriage train bemused even the kangaroos. We overnighted in hotels, motels, pubs and billets in homesteads like 'Kooroora', 'Redland Park', 'Milgery' and 'Strathfield'. Everywhere we went, people flocked to hear us, travelling sometimes hundreds of kilometres to intersect with the train — to hear, as Anna Funder and Richard Flanagan among others have put it, 'their own Australian stories'.
Town Halls and theatres were booked out for our arrival; schools closed so the kids could come to listen and, on occasion, perform for us in their turn. We were welcomed with hospitality and good will at every venue. When one of our group enquired about some red wine to go with dinner in a remote and pleasantly rowdy pub, the barman searched and searched till he found two bottles of Jacobs Creek shiraz, apologising that 'only one of them was cold'.
To a Blackall Memorial Hall audience, I read a story about two workmen who quietly give up and slip away when they discover that a fence post they had been asked to remove had been in place for 30 years and was seven feet down. During interval, a lined and weatherbeaten bloke told me he'd enjoyed the story but he was worried about 'that post bein' seven feet down' because at such a depth 'you couldn't get any dirt on the bloody shovel'. I assured him I'd just made that bit up and he grinned with relief.
The light was fading when, mellow with nostalgia and memories, I finished reading every page and paragraph of the Production Itinerary for the 1992 Writers Train. My contribution to the skip had been, so far, minimal but my sense of the vitality, promise and energy of the Australian literary imagination was re-invigorated. That train, with all its stories and ideas and creations, must not be diverted or derailed.
Brian Matthews is honorary professor of English at Flinders University and an award winning columnist and biographer.