Having just sufficiently recovered from the first three launches of Salvage, I’m excited to be heading south for a fourth next week in nipaluna/Hobart – it’s on July 10 at Fullers Bookshop, where I’ll be in conversation with my excellent publisher and friend Geordie Williamson.
Some photos from the Naarm/Melbourne launch here, taken by the lovely Kate Larsen. A heartfelt thanks to everyone who came along to fill the bookshop on a winter’s night. Many thanks to Readings Carlton for being such good hosts, and to my dear comrade Jinghua Qian for the wonderful, insightful questions.
My ABC RN Book Show interview should be broadcast in the next week or two, but to tide you over here is host Claire Nichols saying lovely things about Salvage in a books of the month list: “an impressive addition to an emerging collection of what I like to call ‘bunker novels’ — eco-fiction that reckons with the morality of self-preservation by the world’s richest people.” I’ll take it!
Another insightful review appeared in the Age/SMH/etc from Jack Cameron Stanton, this one is paywalled. “Mills’ fiction continually returns to hauntings; her works explore how spectres from the past are eternally resurrecting in the present.”
“Mills … has created space for deeper contemplation, an examination of what it feels like to exist in this world, using the broader post-apocalypse as the catalyst for what haunts these characters: the need for escape, existential fear, the fluidity of self in volatile times… These are bold and weighty themes that Mills carries and develops over a sequence of events that, like ecological decline, occur in gradual, almost imperceptible shifts.” I’m so very grateful for this deep reading!
Of course, deadlines don’t stop for any of this. Here’s my latest piece for The Saturday Paper, on Dangerously Modern, AGSA’s moving and beautiful exhibition of women modernist painters from 1890-1940, focusing on those who left Australia. It was fascinating to get a sense of these artists forging their own paths in a difficult world, and thinking about queer lives in Belle Époque Paris made me want to set a novel there (if I ever do try my hand at historical romance, I will probably find a way to make it feel dystopian and haunted). Anyway, the exhibition is very much worth a visit, and if you miss out in Tarntanya/Adelaide, you can see it at AGNSW later this year.
I was thrilled to see Antoinette Lattouf win her court case against the ABC, a great outcome for freedom of expression in this country, and particularly for the rights of precarious workers in arts and media, in what has been a disheartening couple of years for many of us. Lattouf’s determination has been inspiring, as has the solidarity surrounding her.
Indeed, freelancers at MEAA had a historic week, with an agreement signed at Nine newspapers (Age/SMH/etc) – we won an 11% payrise in the per word rate and a signed commitment to ongoing negotiation. Lots of work still to be done to establish better conditions for freelancers, but this result is major. It’s a real demonstration of union power in action. For years, people have been saying it’s impossible for freelancers to unionise, or to agree on our demands, or to get management to negotiate with us – let alone to get them to sign any sort of agreement. But we keep going, and we win.