Martin Edmond is a New Zealand author, poet and playwright based in Sydney. His formidable list of publications includes Luca Antara: Passages in Search of Australia (Addenda, 2006), described by Nobel prize winner J M Coetzee as 'a book lover's book, a graceful and mesmerising blend of history, autobiography, travel, and romance, and Dark Night: Walking With McCahon, published by Auckland University Press in 2011 and shortlisted for the Douglas Stewart Prize for non-fiction in the 2013 NSW Premier’s Literary Awards.
His essay, Winged Sandals, on the art and history of taxi driving (which he does to keep himself in writing time) will be published here very soon.
Oh, I probably should add that the links in Martin's answers below have been added by RMB without consulting him.
Martin, would you
say a little about writing Winged Sandals — the time, place, and any anecdotes
associated with the process?
I began writing this a while ago but I’m not exactly
sure when. I recall wanting to get clear in my mind certain aspects of the job
and my changing attitudes to it over time. There was also an impulse to find
out more about the history of the business, both here in New South Wales and in
the wider world. It proved quite difficult to research, it has always been an
obscure pursuit; much of what survives is anecdotal.
I was also thinking about the way taxi driving has
been romanticised, how cabbies appear as stock characters in films, novels and
so forth. There was a book published around that time which featured a Sydney cabbie
as the hero and, while he was a convincing character, the description of his daily routine was absurd.
So there was also a desire to testify, in a small way, to the reality of
driving for a living.
Beyond that is the plain fact that it was from the
beginning a job I wrote about; in the essay I mention the book of rides I
assembled in the early 1980s which was never published and is now lost. That
habit of writing up nights in the life revived when I began the weblog dérives which, though I’m no longer
adding to it, is still out there on the web.
Every cab driver feels the urge to debrief, maybe
because weird things happen all the time and usually you’re the only witness.
I wrote the essay in my flat in Summer Hill, where I
still live, at the desk I’m sitting at now; which was sold to me by the man
whose father was a Green Cab driver, the one who said that driving ruined his
life.
Peter, the son, was a local secondhand dealer for a
few years, he was always coming up with obscure pieces of art that he thought
might be worth something and I would often go into his shop and tell him what I
thought of his latest acquisition. He was proud to have sold a desk to a real
writer and I’ve always found it a happy place to work.
Where or
on whose work are you drawing for encouragement or inspiration?
Many years ago, in Wellington, I drove municipal
buses for a living and, in one of the issues of Spleen magazine, published a series of interviews with three other
bus drivers; this was at a time when the Tramways Union was still an active
force in the Capital and there would be hilarious, mock-furious, vociferous
stop-work meetings in the Trades Hall.
At the time I encountered the Chicago writer Louis
‘Studs’ Terkel and took inspiration from his endeavours to document the lives
of ordinary working folk. He was an oral historian and a radio broadcaster and
his 1974 book Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do is a standout.
Primo Levi has also written in an illuminating
way about the work that people do; he was an industrial chemist by profession,
working mostly with the chemistry of paint, and there’s a book called ThePeriodic Table which explores his occupation. And another, of essays, which
I think were originally published in newspapers, called Other People’s Trades.
I wasn’t necessarily thinking about Studs
Terkel or Primo Levi when I wrote this but that urge towards the documentary
has always been in my work. Along with a sense that it is always possible to
discover the miraculous within the ordinary.
What are
your current challenges?
Earning a living remains a challenge for me. I own
nothing more valuable than a fifteen-year-old Toyota and have always lived a
day to day, hand to mouth existence. I don’t complain, there are advantages to
living that way; a certain edge or alertness is one and a (relative) freedom
another. I’m not tied to anything inanimate (apart from my books) and my real
obligations, as they should be, are towards the people in my life. And to
whatever audience I can gather for my writing.
The challenge then becomes balancing the
requirements that work imposes with the need to continue writing. I become
restless and unhappy when I’m prevented from writing for any length of time, it
is an occupation that is sustaining in a way that is mysterious—some sort of
feedback loop between mind and page, or mind and screen, that seems somehow
exponential. I want to sustain that as long as I have the faculties to do so.
Current
delights?
I like swimming. It’s my version of a meditation. I have
these new, red and black, very swish Italian goggles that make me feel in the
water like an Olympian. I like spending time with my sons, who are both
teenagers now and a source of perplexity and delight in about equal measure.
I’ve been teaching a course this year in what the powers that be are pleased to
call Creative Non-fiction and have found it stimulating. I’m surprised at how
much I know about the writing process and also at how much of it can be
communicated to those who want to learn. I’m loving reading All the Days and Nights, the collected
short fiction of William Maxwell.
In a couple of weeks I’m going to Wagga Wagga for a
few days and I’m looking forward to that. Australia is inexhaustible, by any
measure it is a strange place with a peculiar, mostly unsung history; one of my
pleasures is travelling to out of the way places and seeing what happens. I
usually write up these trips, sometimes just by rehearsing the names on old
maps. Wagga is a word that turns up in one of the lists of arcana that French
poet Arthur Rimbaud used to compile. I don’t expect to find him there by I
might come across an Illumination.
What's up
ahead for your work in 2013-14?
I’m planning a book about the convict artist Joseph Lycett, who was active in Australia during the later years of the Governorship
of Lachlan Macquarie; that is, between 1814 and 1821. Two hundred years ago
now. This is a fascinating period, during which a template for the kind of
society we still could become was laid down. And then blasted by the rancour and
greed of the elites and those who serve them.
Lycett is an enigmatic figure; a considerable artist
who was also a forger (of banknotes); a man who lived so secretively that most
of what is known about him comes from court records; a silent witness whose
album of water colours of Aboriginal life is considered, at the library in Canberra
where it’s held, to be as significant and as valuable as the originals they
have of Cook’s Journals. It’s a going to be difficult to write about someone so
obscure, but I like to venture into the unknown.
After that, I want to research and write a book
about four New Zealanders, expatriates, scholars, who had in their careers a significant
impact on European thought in the twentieth century. It’ll be a chronological
account of their four overlapping lives, covering a hundred years or so. These
are fellows born in places like Eltham, Taranaki and Carterton in the Wairarapa
who had a decisive influence upon the resolution of some the great issues of
their time. It’s a big project that will require some travel, so I hope I can
find the support somewhere to enable me to do that.
Thanks, Martin. Here's to courage and surefootedness for the year ahead, then.
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