Come along to the Convent today!
The Abbotsford Convent is celebrating 20 years as an arts precinct and I've been squirrelled away in room 2.41 for eleven of them. I'll be there from 10.30-2.30 today. Come and say hello!
It’s Open Day at the Abbotsford Convent, home to Cam’s Cafe and my favourite tree.
It’s even the working home of Sophie Cunningham, a writer who has an instagram account about her favourite trees (@sophtreeofday) and has written ‘City of Trees’ and takes an interest in these sorts of things.
It’s home to so many writers of such diverse talents and stylings.
Nam Le is just up the aisle from me. He has such a nice writerly desk and indoor plants. My wife Tamsin visited last Open Day, gazed upon my stacked plastic tubs, sighed, and said, ‘why can’t you be more like Nam Le.’
The truth is that I also think that my cute studio with its gorgeous view is worthy of a desk that possesses the literary gravitas of something from which Hemingway might have rattled words out into the world, but I’m stuck with this.
Basically the desk is too heavy to carry down the four flights of stairs. I’m tempted to turn up one night with a chainsaw, cut it in half, and embark upon a new, more literary chapter of my life (maybe a Trilby or a pipe?) but in the meantime I’m stuck with the desk.
You can come and see me and my millstone from 10.30-2.30pm. Come in, have a chat, find the deck of Saddam Hussein Ace of Spades playing cards
gifted me in 2003, talk about life and creative careers, check my browsing history to see if I’m truly committed and working hard enough, fund my Puskas documentary, and hang around to see me talk at 11am, in one of the couchy corners of the second floor writers wing.I’ll have some books for sale and you can stand at the window with me, staring at the two birds who live on the sill, while they stare back, making sure I’m working. Then you can clean the windows.
It’ll be a great day, and there are more visually interesting studios than mine open. There will even be pony rides! Actually no there won’t be pony rides, but I once did get ‘horses’ onto the Convent grounds, for the launch of ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes Horse’ in 2012.
This is Polly, riding the rough terrain in front of what would one day be ‘Cam’s’.
There are details about what is actually on at the Open Day here.
Congrats Abbotsford Convent on your twenty years. It’s to the city and state’s benefit that you were saved from developers at the turn of the century (read the excellent and funny novel, Sold by Brendan Gullifer for a story set in that tumult).
I might see some of you today!