~ a public reading of Ambergris

I'm having a reading of my play Ambergris at the Carlton Courthouse on Saturday at 2.00pm. (That's Sept 1, 349 Drummond St, Carlton, about 20 metres from the corner of Elgin.) It's late notice, I know, but... sorry... and perhaps some rough, first-draft playwrighting-in-progress is precisely your idea of how to celebrate the first day of Spring. Do come if it takes your fancy. It will be a casual, low-key affair and we may (or may not ) ask for a gold coin donation so as not to leave the actors out of pocket.

I've been working on this writhing, gargantuan word-squid for a long time. I've been distracted by the joy of child-rearing, by outrageous legal injustices, domestic misery and episodic insanity, by long winters of bewilderment and despair, not to mention the perils of serving as a pharmaceutical guinea pig – but I have at last honed the text to a point at which I'm prepared to brave the court of public opinion.

It's bit scary, to tell the truth. I think it's good, perhaps even better than good, but you simply cannot know until it comes off the page. I could have got it completely, utterly wrong. I could be facing a MacArthur Park dissolving-cake scenario. I just don't know... Though I can promise the sweet, green icing (or its equivalent).

And some esoteric characters - some who promote surreal agendas, others who nourish strange longings in the pit of their souls, still others who care naught for all but mind-numbing drugs.

Why does the mysterious stranger train a dog to bring him chunks of toxic waste? What is the disgraced researcher doing with 200 echidnas in his mobile laboratory? What is that void beneath the kitchen table? Who sells the packaged genitalia of lost marsupials to recreational fishermen? Why is the mute interested in Chux super-wipes? Why does a population with a genetic predisposition to bowel cancer claim instead to be an ancient, unknown species living among us...?

All this and more will be resolved. If you think that's impossible, let me prove you wrong. The readers are: Phil Motherwell, Richard Higgins, Lucy Cowbelle, Anthea Greco, Ben Andrews, molecular biologist Dr Nurin Veis and – owing to a late withdrawal – me. Directing is, of course, the formidable Lynne Ellis.

~ dog related cinema

Since Sunday, I’ve been doing the bare bones, eating, taking the child to school, napping, eating again, putting the child to bed. These days. even a moderate expenditure of social energy impacts on me for many days hence. Unlike, I’m sure, powerful, well-seasoned campaigners like Nurin and Emma de Clario.

Seeing Dogs in Space afresh was a surprising pleasure. It was fast moving, it didn’t sag and, strangely, it seemed a far better film today than it did at the time. Perhaps current audiences [by that I mean me] are more accustomed to films without a strong narrative spine.

The documentary We’re Livin’ on Dog Food was utterly fascinating. It returned me to the early eighties a lot more efficiently than the fictionalisation. Footage of the freshly squeezed Ollie Olsen and Rowland Howard [then of The Young Charlatans] daubed in makeup, bursting with romantic sensibilities and dreams of glory, was just wonderful. The two were to go their different ways, one to the North of the Yarra to pursue hard-edged no-quarter-given industrial mayhem, the other South to inspire a more flamboyant generation of post-punks, including my band The Ears. The film was a box of memories as complete as anything like that could ever be expected to be. Pierre, who was sitting a few seats down from me, ought to have been interviewed. He was one of the few key figures who didn’t get sufficient mention, and the film would doubtless have benefited from his wit and his bitchiness.

Sometimes, I wonder if the medications I take are disordering the functions of my amygdalae which, I am told, are the seat of emotion. There is a section of the documentary in which I describe the circumstances surrounding the death of my girlfriend Christine. My reaction was a kind of stunned fear or horror, as if some dark uniformed figure was about to enter the theatre and call me out. Over the intervening decades, the grief I felt at the time has attenuated to a keening note on the wind. What remains is a statue of sorrow rather than the sorrow itself. They say time heals all wounds, but I wish … not so completely.