Hi Friends!

A very belated Happy New Year! Once again it’s been a long time between emails. I had a manic finish to 2024, and January was entirely consumed with shooting the second block of Cooee.

And now — ten years after Toby & Sam dreamt up the original story, nine years after I sat in on a first read, eight years after we shot the proof-of-concept short with Laura & Aaron, six years after I came on board as co-writer, two years after Bec & Georgia steered us towards production, and one year after we commenced principal photography on the first block — we’ve done it. We’ve got a whole damn feature film in the can.

This has been one of the most brilliant, fulfilling and (frequently) insane things I’ve done in my life. All of the years of painstaking re-writes, late-night meetings, logistics debates, and trips to the Snowy Monaro culminated in three and a half madcap weeks of filming with some of the loveliest, most generous and most inspiring humans imaginable.

Together we scaled mountains, raced cars, hunted drones, threw bricks, faced storms, crossed rivers, shared dreams, created a strange array of clubs, and trashed at least one school (it got better).

As a writer, it is such a surreal and humbling experience to see your words — the moments, characters and images that for the longest time existed only in your imagination — brought to life before your eyes, and in the process become something richer, funnier and more profound. It’s magic. I couldn’t be more proud of what our outrageously talented cast and crew accomplished.

There’s still a long journey ahead of course; many months of work for the post-production team, and more again until we can share the film the world. I can’t wait.

But I’m sure there’ll be other opportunities to write about Cooee (if I haven’t gone on too long already). Instead, this newsletter I’m going to reach back a little further, to the books I read and loved in 2024. Thanks for sticking around!

Favourite Reads of 2024

I was a seriously erratic reader in 2024. There were months where I barely touched book, and others where I camped out in the local library for days on end, wolfing down every little tome of film criticism, slender novella or little gay graphic novel I could get my hands on, chasing a cheap literary high. I spent too many hours reading out of a self-imposed sense of obligation, ploughing through the stacks of impulse purchases, kindly gifts and loans that were piling up on my desk. The situation grew so dire that I left for my Euro trip with a suitcase loaded up with novels I was less-than-jazzed about, simply because the old read-and-swap seemed like the best way to get them out of the house.

Salvation came from an unlikely source — a 176-year old, 1,000+ page novel I picked up for €3 at a thrift store before a cross-continental train trip. It only took a few pages for me to realise that William Makepeace Thackeray’s Vanity Fair had everything I’d been craving. After slogging through meandering contemporary lit, hazy magical realism and stodgy non-fiction for months, here was a strong (and deliciously snarky) authorial voice, vivid and finely-drawn characters, savage dialogue, a crackling pace, and some genuine laughs.

Sure, the book is ridiculously long, but Thackeray packs it all in: satire, romance, tragedy, comedy, and even a dash of history (the Battle of Waterloo marks the novel’s pivot point). And despite being, as its narrator insists, “a novel without a hero”, at the centre stands an all-time great heroine: Becky Sharp, the enterprising daughter of a dancer (scandal!) who’s willing to use everything — and everyone — at her disposal to climb the social and economic ladder. She is utterly amoral, the dark inverse of a humble Lizzy Bennet or Jane Eyre — and still capable of surprising. Tellingly, while men are easily dazzled by Becky, she struggles to deceive other women for long; after all, to advance within the rigid patriarchal system of Regency England, her peers have had to play the same games of flattery, seduction and inheritance-hunting. Becky simply has fewer scruples. It’s hard to tut-tut her from the vantage point of 2025, as we watch unrepentant grifters running everything from corporations to countries. How can we begrudge her a little security?

It wasn’t the only classic that seemed to speak to today’s precarious climate. E.M. Forster’s Howard’s End unsettled me all the way from 1910 with an all-too-familiar cast of ineffectual champagne socialists, rapacious capitalists, and lower-middle-class workers teetering on the cusp of poverty and seething with resentment. The issues Forster circles around class, gender and wealth are still with us, but his conclusions aren’t; I had the strange sensation of looking through a glass darkly. A desperate yearning for connection runs through every page, alongside a tremendous fear that the forward march of society could snuff out our capacity for empathy — something that spoke to my own anxieties, and the world we were creating in Cooee:

The opposing forces of connection and alienation are also at the core of Pachinko by Min Jin Lee. I know I’m a few years late to this one, but it is just as compelling and affecting as everyone says. The multi-generational saga of a Korean family in Japan forgoes flashbacks and split timelines, and instead plunges relentlessly forward, year by year, from early-1900s Korea to 1980s Osaka, with an intensity and momentum that sometimes shocked me, but beautifully mirrors the hard-charging ethos of its characters. I’ve also heard excellent things about the TV adaptation, which has a real banger of an opening titles sequence.

Sticking with Japan, I picked up Thousand Cranes by Yasunari Kawabata (trans. Edward G. Seidensticker) at random in the local library, and decided to give it a try because it was a) very short and b) about tea. Centring on an aimless young man navigating complicated relationships with both his dead father’s tea sets and his aging mistresses, the novella is a tragedy of illicit desire and remorseless social codes told via some of the most aching, subtle prose I’ve ever encountered. Delicate and brutal all at once; a miniature masterpiece. I cannot wait to read more of Kawabata’s work.

On the cheerier side of things, I finally read Little Women by Louisa May Alcott. Oh boy, I get it. I raged at Amy; I fell for Laurie; I tore my hair out at Professor Bhaer; I cried (a few times). A thousand little tales and gorgeous details; it has the texture of life, and the comforts of a fable. And then there’s Jo. Impulsive, independent, indomitable Jo. I know if I’d read this book when I was 10 years old — as I really should have — Jo March would have become my entire personality. Perhaps she already is; that’s what happens when Katharine Hepburn and Saoirse Ronan play you in film adaptations.

Nervous Conditions by Tsitsi Dangarembga seems to have sprung from the same sub-genre: the quasi-autobiographical coming-of-age novel centred on a whip-smart teenage girl with a habit for bulldozing social norms. But Dangarembga, looking back on a childhood in 1960s Rhodesia (before it was Zimbabwe), denies her heroine Tambu any easy victories or lasting comforts. From the bracing first sentence — “I was not sorry when my brother died” — a rolling discomfort permeates the novel, as Tambu’s hard-fought path to education and independence bring her closer to the (often unseen) forces of colonialism warping the society around her. The women in Tambu’s life — her cousin, mother and aunts — are her exemplars and counterpoints, each finding their own compromise between competing desires for freedom, assimilation, resistance and security. What can a person, and a culture, afford to give away for the nebulous promise of a better future?

There is a passage in Rachel Cusk’s Transit (I am verrry slowly making my way through the Outline Trilogy) that has stuck with me. It’s a shard of a conversation between Cusk’s narrator and the Chair of a literary festival, who is proudly describing how he avoids any fetters on his individual freedom and expresses relief that the niece he occasionally babysits is “returnable”. She retorts:

It’s a good question. I often struggle with Cusk; her work is the inverse of a dense yarn like Vanity Fair. I never know quite what to make of her lilting style, her indifference to plot, and her characters who can only be known by their exteriors. But I inevitably return to her work, intrigued to see what challenge to modern life she will pose next.

A Swim in a Pond in the Rain by George Saunders is entirely concerned with how stories work. This collection is both a repository of great short fiction by 19th Century Russian masters (Chekhov, Tolstoy, Gogol and Turgenev), and a masterclass on the craft of writing, based on Saunders’ legendary course at Syracuse University. Saunders puts into words so many principles that I’d only guessed at before, and painstakingly demonstrates via his beloved Russians how a story transforms its possibilities, ideas and idiosyncrasies into something meaningful. He also makes a compelling argument as to why racism, sexism or classism aren’t merely bad for their own sake, but constitute a technical flaw: inequitable storytelling tend to imbalance and weaken the work as a whole, undermining the compassion that is key to so much great literature. An absolute treasure.

In keeping with my year heavy on classics, even my favourite contemporary novel (i.e. one that was actually released in 2024) had one foot firmly in the past. Henry Henry by Allen Bratton is a queer reworking of Shakespeare’s Henry IV plays, which recasts battlefield nemeses Prince Hal and Hotspur as college-age enemies-to-lovers. Yes, it sounds like something that would be at home on the YA shelf, or nestled in a particularly horny/nerdy sub-category on AO3, and I was okay with that. Then about 40 pages in Bratton dropped a nasty bombshell, and my stomach cratered; this wasn’t going to be the sexy, escapist fare that the cover had promised. Nope, we’re dealing with abuse, Catholic guilt, and the terrible drive to self-annihilation. I’m rarely a fan of grim-dark reimaginings of Shakespeare (learn from the Bard and get some tonal range dammit!), but Bratton makes the wise decision to largely jettison the original plot, and lets his displaced characters carve out new paths for themselves in a century where rich scions join think-tanks rather than lead armies. And so Bratton’s Hal is left to face a question that his wily ancestor dodged; if this damaged nepo-baby weren’t a King, could he become a good man?

Kings and Emperors abound in my top non-fiction pick, Judith Herrin’s sweeping history Ravenna: Capital of Empire, Crucible of Europe. By charting the rise and fall of this one-time capital of the Western Roman Empire, Herrin crafts a compelling portrait of Europe’s bumpy transition from late antiquity to the medieval era, populated with powerful Empresses, schism-prone Churches, and the finest mosaics ever made. If I hadn’t had this book on my shelf, I’d have never thought to made the trek to sleepy modern Ravenna in August, and I would have missed out on some of the most gorgeous art I’ve ever seen.

I also loved Claire Keegan’s short story collection So Late in the Day, revisiting Sidney Lumet’s Making Movies (still the best book I’ve read on filmmaking), and Emily Wilson’s superb translation of Homer’s epic poem The Iliad, subject of my very first newsletter. I was lax on poetry; a few older pieces by Elizabeth Bishop (Questions of Travel) and new ones by Ocean Vuong (Time is a Mother) brought joy, but I was most moved by ‘The Mustangs’ from Natalie Diaz’s Postcolonial Love Poem. It swims in the memory of a high school basketball game, a stolen glimpse when a family was whole and full of promise…

And that’s my round-up of books for 2024! I’m hoping to do a little better with Aussie fiction this year — I’ve got the latest novels by Melissa Lucashenko, Charlotte Wood & Michelle de Kretser ready and waiting — as well as re-reading some old favourites (George Eliot and Ursula K. Le Guin, always and forever). And if you’ve got any recommendations, I’d love to hear them!

Odds & Ends

• I returned from Jindabyne to discover that one of my favourite Newtown brunch spots, the Palestinian cafe Khamsa, had closed a week earlier. The reason was predictable: a surprise 50% rent increase from the landlord. This price gouging is happening everywhere, and the only result is to make a few devils richer, and the wider community poorer. Faced with a similar threat, the Prince Charles Cinema in London has gone on the offensive. It’s heart-warming to see locals & film fans rise up to defend the iconic independent cinema, but that’s no guarantee of victory — particularly against an property owner with a track record of tearing down community spaces and replacing them with tourist dollars stores and budget hotels. Hardly the biggest crisis facing the world right now, but still a fight worth having.

• It’s hasn’t taken our jobs yet, but the internet sure is drowning in mediorce A.I. slop, and I learnt a lot from this NY Magazine investigation into where it’s coming from — often regular ol’ humans who are hoping to game the system and spam their way to a quick payday.

• Highly recommend this delicate, thoughtful piece tracing a conservative evangelical pastor’s slow change of heart following the his teenage son’s coming out, told via years of private journal entries. I was genuinely moved by the father’s earnest interrogation of his faith, gradually moving from a place of fear and denial to one of love, and transforming his ministry in the process.

That’s it for this week, thanks for reading! Next time I’ll be back to (belatedly) write about my favourite film of 2024, and the never-ending awards season.