A local history launch



This week it feels as if I should change the name of this blog to 'Envelopes', as in turning up for the opening of, so long as there's free orange juice. Last night we went to Leichhardt Library again for the launch of a book of local history, Place Is People: Annandale 1907/2007 by Mary Haire. As indicated by the slash in the title where there should be a dash, this is a publication that has come into being without the intervention of an editor. A quick look at the book, of which only 250 copies were published, indicates that it has no ISBN, and no publisher neither, though it 'is supported by Leichhardt Council's History Grants Scheme'. So it's an under-the-radar local history, a samizdat produced not so much in the spirit of subversiveness as in blithe disregard for how things are supposed to be done.

But those are all things I discovered when I got the book home. The launch itself was great fun. After the Council's heritage officer acknowledged the traditional owners and read a few words of introduction to the audience of well over a hundred people (median age perhaps 62), he handed over to the book's ebullient author, who rejected the microphone cheerfully, saying, 'We old thesps don't need microphones.' She then entertained us with a paean to her home state Western Australia, justified by the fact that just as Western Australians had voted by a huge majority in 1933 to secede from Australia (and been told to pull their heads in by the British government), so Annandale had seceded from Leichhardt Municipality in 1907. Most of her talk was taken up with listing porominent Western Australians, from 'Twiggy Forrest and that swimmer who broke a fellow swimmer's jaw and still expects to be sent to the B*****g Olympics by the public purse, to Dorothy Hewett and Tim Winton. She did of course give us a few tantalising bits from the book -- Esther Abrahams, Jewish convict made good and then declared insane by her son because she drove her horses too fast and got angry a lot, featured in our history; John Young, developer, bought the whole place for a song when the deeds of sale were sent to his lawyer by accident. Then she introduced her old friend, Judy Nunn, also a thespian and writer of Western Australian derivation, who launched the book. Judy's voice had even less need of artificial amplification than Mary's. She was also overflowing with theatrical charm, as she sang her friend's praises (Mary not only conducts walking tours for the Historic Houses trust, and performs in what gigs she can get as a woman approaching a certain age she has also translated Lorca and in her younger years was a fairly sizzling Mina in a production of Dracula) and commended the book to us.

After the talks/performances there was an undignified scramble for food and books. Penny and I came home with our copy, having had a very good time. Of course it wasn't necessary to take a lesson away from this, but I took one anyhow: when you're launching a book, make it fun and bring plenty of energy to the business, and then it doesn't matter much what else you do.

But I wish they'd got an ISBN.

Later addition: What I said about the slash in the title where there should be a dash? That was me leaping arrogantly to conclusions. The punctuation mark in question signifies not a passage from one year to another, as I thought, but an oscillation back and forth between the two. The book isn't the story of Annandale from 1907 to 2007, but a flickering slide show of Annandale and its people as they were in 1907 and as in 2007.

Posted: Thu - April 10, 2008 at 10:03 AM           |

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