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Feast with theatre music and dance

We arrive, we thought to lunch, but instead of tables and chairs we see just chairs in two sets of rows, facing each other in a long wide oval. We mill around, we sit, we see the musicians who wait, like us. For someone to arrive. In due course, the musicians begin, and they play with each theatrical presentation of each dish.

Two sisters speak in Arabic and English about making bread. They sit by a doorway. Talk is part of bread making for women as they form and pound the dough, talk about the kids, the neighbours, and beating harder when they complain about their husbands. “Careful, you’re beating my bread, not your husband!”

Alissar speaks of Za’atar, she paces along the centre and hands out some of the herb, then works with a mallet-sized wooden pestle to grind some. She tells us the wild herb that grows among rocks was declared “protected” by the Zionist colonialist project in the 1970s. Possession of za’atar effectively became illegal. Yes, a wild herb, verboten!

We are served small squares/rectangles of toasty folded bread with za’atar, salt and oil. Several volunteers carry large trays, and we wait as they go back and forth to the kitchen. We wait, and I think of recent TV images: groups of people in Gaza waiting for food handouts because their homes and economies have been destroyed, because aid trucks can’t get in. People who have always put their own food on their tables, now forced to hold out an empty saucepan in the jostling hungry crowd.

Waraq zanab, stuffed vine leaves. The sisters are now behind the kitchen bench, laughing about technical problems with microphones amid accusations of going off script to say things about Mum. For their cooking is all about what they learned from Mum.

Maqloubeh, Miriam speaks at length and with love and smiles in Arabic about this dish, and though we are given what seems like a very short translation, I am charmed by Miriam. The dish is baked, the baking dishes are overturned on a table placed in the centre for us to see each baked rice and eggplant dish come out cleanly. Some are vegetarian, some have chicken, they are served with yoghurt and roasted nuts. Delicious, it’s all yummy.

The violinist speaks to us about the stealing of culture by the Zionist invasion, for instance, Palestinian songs are taken, translated and sung in Hebrew, with no acknowledgement of their Palestinian origins. He plays a beautiful violin solo for us.

Two of the three sisters of the 3Tomatoes Café are back in the kitchen, this time talking of Fattoush. They tell us how their mum made them help in the kitchen, how they hated that as kids, how grateful they are now. Fattoush is a salad with tomatoes, cucumber, radish, herbs and spices and crumbed bread.

We are given a final gift, Kamouneh, a spice mix with rose petals. Everyone is given a small jar, it’s a scent for calming the nerves, for strengthening the spirit. Paula tells us that women used to go out even during military curfews to find the ingredients.

Then the musicians perform Ya Bahriyeh, a song by Lebanese oud player Marcel Khalife that, we are told, has come to represent resistance, and we dance. Some of the Palestinian women had danced earlier, but this time we dare to join them. And we sing too, as we had been given copies of the text, and we manage at least the chorus.

Riverton Press was very fortunate to attend this excellent RedSeeds and Third Space Production of food, theatre, music and dance, presented by chefs, cooks, story tellers and musicians at the Community Refugee Welcome Centre in Callan Park, Sydney.

Today, images of Gazan people trying to return to what might be left of their homes in northern Gaza impose themselves upon similar images from 1948, when they fled during the Nakba, and from 2023, when again, they were forcibly displaced.

Photo, 1948, from the Middle East Institute http://www.mei.edu/sites/default/files/2021-05/Palestinian%20refugees%20fleeing%20their%20homes%20near%20Haifa%2C%20June%201948%20Credit_%20Corbis.png

Palestinians fleeing northern Gaza walk towards the south. Photo, Reuters, November 2023. https://i.tribune.com.pk/media/images/image_2023-11-09_21_58_191699549216-0/image_2023-11-09_21_58_191699549216-0.png

And today, people who left northern Gaza after October 7, 2023, heading back there:

Photo, Reuters, 27 January 2025.

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Two book launches coming up in Sydney

Two new books from Riverton Press will be launched in mid-February: a summer Sunday afternoon. a Thursday evening.

If you’re interested in

No Way Back, Revolution and Exile: Russia and Beyond by Nathalie Apouchtine, come to the NSW Writers Centre in Callan Park on 16 February.

Nathalie’s book is based on a lifetime of family stories and many years of research into her family’s experiences in Russia and in exile. The cover was designed by Leonie Lane of Booyong Design.

Contact info@rivertonpress.com for more information.

If you’re interested in

The Legend of Busby, or the original Italian version, La Leggenda di Busby, by Vittoria Pasquini,

visit the webpage of the Italian Institute of Culture (in York Street, Sydney), and make your booking.

La Leggenda was translated into English by Gino Moliterno, and the cover is based on an illustration by the author’s granddaughter, Elena Palombi Luff.

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You can read these books soon

Throughout the year of 2024, Riverton Press has been thinking about Rome and Russia, migration and exile. Both our upcoming books speak of migration. Sure, people have always moved around the planet, but today we have unprecedented levels of displacement. Mostly due of course to the same four old horsemen. (Do they never tire?)

Our two new books are very different, one the result of deep family history research, the other a personal memoir that examines the self through life in a “sandstone castle”. Both books are written by women born in Europe who have migrated to Australia, one via France and Canada, one via Italy and Kenya.

No Way Back, Revolution and Exile: Russia and Beyond by Nathalie Apouchtine spans three generations, three continents and more than 100 years. Her family left Russia following the 1917 Revolution, some travelled alone, some in groups, many lived in France, very few of them ever return to Russia.

Apouchtine has written a wonderful family history, including her own stories of the research process. Based on recollections, interviews, letters and travel, the book vividly illustrates the impacts of national histories on personal lives. Much of this story of course was made in other languages, mainly in Russian and French. The book includes 16 pages of photos of her family members.

The Legend of Busby by Vittoria Pasquini is also published as La Leggenda di Busby.

Yes! Riverton Press is releasing the books in two languages, the English version has been translated from the Italian by Gino Moliterno.

Pasquini’s memoir, written in the third person, is a journey inward, a journey through the rooms of the sandstone house, a non-linear telling of life experiences. We move around Rome, Nairobi, Sydney and Canberra via the table of family and guests, an unloved laundry, a shared bathtub. It’s a generous table. As Filippo la Porta says in his introduction, “a cosmopolitan space where diversity is fraternally welcomed”.

The Busby Legend and Leggenda will be released in late November, with a launch in Bondi. No Way Back will be released soon after.

The covers of the books are stories in themselves, the illustration of the Busby house and legend was made by one of Pasquini’s young granddaughters.

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Considering the Riverina

Some months ago, Voices of Women Inc called for texts by women about the Riverina. Not just any text, but 800-word stories to be read and acted in performance, short monologues by women of the Riverina on Wiradjuri Country. Themes were to be based on personal experience with something about resilience.

Voices of Women is a not-for-profit organisation that presents new work by Australian women writers by powerful women actors, and collaborates with artists and musicians. https://voiceswomen.com/

I’m a woman from the Riverina, so I thought I’d “have a go”, but when I finished my 800 words I realised that I had not written what you would call a story. I sent it off anyway by the due date, with a note saying I realised it wasn’t on cue, and sure enough, it was not what they wanted for personal monologue performance. So I’ve decided to post the text here as a blog, as Riverton Press was born in the Riverina.

the land I love

When I sit at the rowing machine in a Sydney gym, I imagine I’m on the Murrumbidgee. As a 10-year-old, I was never in the tinnie on my own because the river is treacherous but now I forget the gym and row, willows on one side, a gumtree woodland on the other.

When I go back to Wagga at flood time, I can’t get enough of looking at the lagoons and billabongs, I know the Library is sand-bagged and soggy, the caravan park at Wagga Beach has been moved off-site, I’ve had to drive around because Eunony Bridge is closed and Oura’s under water, but I love it, the water, the birds, the reflections, the green.

I also love it when it’s dry and the colours are those of dry grass and red sand or dusty loam. This also is a time of tension, of worry about fire and wind. My mother used to fret: Why haven’t the neighbours cut their grass?

When I hear the crows in Sydney, I hear their eternal lament (what is their trouble exactly??), and I miss the accompanying voices of the sheep. I was never any good at school choir, this was the soundtrack. I didn’t know then that laughing jackasses (as my father called them) and raucous cockatoos are unique, that the rest of the word has no idea of the scandal of yellow-crested squawking birds descending on your fruit trees.

I lived some years in Mexico City, I rode the busy subway, crowded buses, collective taxis, I attended large concerts and demonstrations. In short, I learned to be part of the masses, and while learning this I would remember the spaces where I grew up, the space many Australians take for granted. As a child I didn’t know that the Milky Way would not be with me every night, that those wide horizons and mirages on the roads would shrink in accordance with my urban choices.

My family knew of course that we weren’t the first on our patch of land, and our white fella history was brief. The old man (my grandfather) had moved there in 1927, he and his sons had planted willow trees all along the riverbanks. That’s an unfortunate choice in today’s knowledge, as the willow has proved a pest, but it made for a very pretty outlook and was enjoyed by the cows (another bad choice) who enjoyed the shade and ate all leaves within reach. We only had a few cows, milkers, our farm was defined as sheep and wheat. There was a stand of eucalypts along the river flat that suggested the original vegetation. Next door, a series of billabongs filled and emptied with the seasons. White fella had used one of these as a tip for tins and bottles (those days were pre-plastic), in a show of his feckless land and water management. There was a similar tip in a gully near the river on our farm, though we never used it. Obviously the plan of my grandfather’s generation was for the river to take their rubbish away…

Those eucalypt stands were full of the land’s past history, that of the Wiradjuri people, we commonly saw scarred trees and would hazard guesses about a canoe or shield being made there. Up on the sandhills was a spot with ash coloured soil, made I suppose, of sand and ash, my father called it a “blackfella’s oven”. I could feel the presence of the Wiradjuri, yet I wondered where they were, I was not told of invasion, massacres, discrimination and social exclusion. Yet I wondered, why is this water on the road to Narrandera called Poison Waterholes Creek? I could not understand that anyone could poison a water supply, when surely everyone of whatever colour needed that water.

My parents sold the farm in the 1970s, to a family, not a corporation, and I saw the place 30 years later. I was astonished at how it had moved to what I could only call agro-industry, with bigger machinery and irrigation installations, metallic silos.

Even when I was a child, we knew that hard-hoofed animals were bad for our soil. I could see on the farm how much land had been cleared for cropping, but at least we still had paddock trees. Today’s big farming and pivot irrigation don’t allow for trees. I have flown over the Riverina, and find it devastating to see the vast areas of cleared flat land dedicated to monocrops.

We all need food, but country will have to be very resilient indeed to survive our farming practices and the challenges of climate change. It is not improbable to imagine the Milky Way shining over an earth empty of all that which was given us.

Photos from Narrandera and Tumut, New South Wales.

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About writing, and about Nuri Mass

Don’t Kill it – it’s me!  is the title of a novel by Nuri Mass. Her introduction to the book says “it’s a funny thing about writing… It’s the most intimate experience in the world. You find yourself putting things down on paper, in black and white, that you wouldn’t dream of telling your closest friends”.

I think what Nuri is saying is, don’t kill our creative spirit, we all need it.

Nuri Mass was in her mid-seventies when she died in Sydney in 1993, she was a writer of fiction for adults and children, and studies of Australian flora. She obtained a Bachelor of Arts with first class honours and later, a Master of Arts, both from the University of Sydney, and was awarded the University Medal in 1942. Nuri also trained and practised as a chiropractor and worked as an editor and typesetter at publishing houses. She married Sydney Bertram Horwitz in 1947 and they had two children. On her husband’s death she took over the family photo-engraving business.

Illustrations for her botanical books and children’s books were done by Nuri, by her mother Celeste Mass and her daughter Tess Horwitz. A book about China was beautifully illustrated by Tess when she was just 13!

I first heard about Nuri Mass from the artist and feminist Suzanne Bellamy, who was writing about Virginia Woolf and discovered Nuri’s MA thesis on Woolf from 1943. Suzanne was introducing a speaker at one of Braidwood’s Two Fires Festivals, and the speaker, Eilean Haley, was to talk about fairies. Suzanne told us that Nuri made botanical illustrations of Australian flora and produced books like Flowers of the Australian Alps.

But Nuri didn’t just give descriptions of physical flowers in her books for children, she talked about a magic world too, about the flowers’ fairy spirits. By giving voice to the flowers, she made clear to child readers that flowers too have life (don’t kill it!).

She wrote a lovely children’s book, The Little Grammar People, about English grammar, and brings that subject very much alive in a magical world of characters like Miss Noun, Madame Adjective, Baby Conjunction, who all explain their purpose in language to two visiting children. 

In Many Paths – One Heaven with drawings by Celeste and Nuri Mass, Nuri provides a summary about people’s main religions in a simple comprehensive way, and I was struck by her definition of what makes human beings different from other living creatures: it’s our ability to marvel. (Whether this is right or not, I couldn’t say…)

Her book Australian Wildflower Fairies lists the following credits: botanical illustrations by Nuri Mass, fairy illustrations by Celeste Mass. There is a fabulous photo of Nuri with her mother Celeste in the Nuri Mass photograph collection, 1922-1986 of the National Library. They are striding out together and you can see they are two women with plenty to do.

For all Celeste’s capacity in the material world so evident in the photo, it must have been Celeste who told Nuri about fairies. You can also see a photo of the child Nuri as an elegant Fairy Queen on the NLA site. Perhaps Nuri wondered whether the fairies and elves of the land of eucalypts were similar to those of the lands of her English mother and Spanish father, or whether they were different? She must have met Old Man Banksia!

I am impressed by Nuri’s life and literary output, and her family’s achievements. I would never have heard of her but for Suzanne Bellamy and Eilean Haley. I can’t help thinking: we live, we create, we die. Few of us will leave dozens of publications and boxes of our photos and correspondence (thanks, NSW State Library and NLA!) to soften the long forgetting.

And of course, in most cases, what we write is dated, we are children of our times and think within the ideologies surrounding us. In a re-edition of one of Nuri’s books, Magic Australia, her children Tess and Chris Horwitz say that Nuri’s thinking about the environment changed. Where once she thought it was a good idea “to tap nature’s bounty to enable progress”, she was later a passionate campaigner for reducing human intervention in nature and for protecting the wisdom of natural cycles.

I’ll leave the last words of this blog to Nuri. They’re from the fly leaf at the back of Don’t Kill It – It’s Me!

“Then suddenly, after you’ve written the last words, you come-to with a sense of shock … “Wait! What have I done? I wouldn’t tell my closest friends, yet I’d make a sacrificial offering of it to a whole world of strangers who might, for all I know, tear it to pieces no matter how earnestly I beseech them, Don’t kill it, it’s me!

“Another interesting thing about such writing is that when you go into retreat for it you don’t go alone. You take the world in with you. The world you sometimes love and sometimes deplore, but in any case, the only one you’ve got …  and this can be a pretty frightening thing.

“Yet in the end, it’s just because you’re frightened that you find the courage to go ahead and make your sacrificial offering, repeating the plea, while you make it, Don’t kill it – it’s me! Only now, you’re saying it not for one solitary person, but for the whole planet Earth.”

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No Way Back: Revolution and Exile – Russia and Beyond

Our next book is a family chronicle wrapped up in history: the Russian revolution and civil war, two world wars and multiple migrations. The story spans three continents and more than a hundred years, covering events that confronted three generations of the author’s family.

Nathalie Apouchtine is a print and broadcast journalist and historian. She worked as a news reporter, sub-editor and producer in radio and television for the Canadian and Australian Broadcasting Corporations and Australia’s SBS. Later Nathalie turned to history, focussing on media and immigration in the twentieth century. Her research culminated in a PhD and provided the foundation for No Way Back. Nathalie was born a refugee in France and now lives in Australia.

The book brings to life fascinating and critical events of the twentieth century. It is based on personal memories, diaries, letters, interviews, photographs and an extensive archive of official documents.

Just to read the “shortened” bibliography of the book shows a little of Nathalie’s thorough historical research, and gives a glimpse of the fascinating world of Russian émigrés. That world was with me the other day when I visited the Kandinsky exhibition at Sydney’s NSW Art Gallery, which was excellently if briefly documented, enough to give an idea of the disruption of world history on one personal artistic life. Wassily Kandinsky lived most of his life outside his native Russia, but was there during the First World War and the early years of Sovietism. Later he too lived in France, like many members of the Apouchtine family.

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A lyrebird messenger

Riverton Press will publish a book next year by Italian author Vittoria Pasquini, a text that has been translated into English by Gino Moliterni. We have discussed the merits and demerits of bilingual publications as we prepare The Legend of Busby.

A friend and colleague of Vittoria has translated the children’s book Leonard the Lyrebird, written by Jodie McLeod and illustrated by Eloise Short, and a bilingual edition exists of Leonard, l’ucello lira. The translator, Mirella Alessio, told me I could contact that author – she lives in the Blue Mountains.

Riverton Press was there recently wandering the paths near the Three Sisters and saw a sculpture of a lyrebird perched on a railing. Not 20 metres distant was a real lyrebird sitting on the same railing watching the morning and cleaning her feathers. Then she changed her balance, spread the wings of her magnificent tail and took off.

This reminded me of the book and I decided to find Leonard the Lyrebird. I went to the bookshop near the food co-op in Katoomba and asked man behind counter, who immediately took me to Leonard and her companion Lilah the Lyrebird. He didn’t know about the Italian version. Suddenly a voice from man behind door, the one I hadn’t seen. He knows Jodie, he’ll text her. And he did, right then and there. The other man took my phone number and would be in touch. I resisted buying any book as I had a bush walk ahead.

I was sitting on a wooden bench in wonder at the flowering wild waratahs at Govetts Leap and checked my phone, there was a message, not from the bookshop, but from the author herself. She gave me her address and said she’d be going out but would leave Leonard on the verandah and I could leave money under mat.

The waratahs had pleased and amazed me, this message only compounded my joy, restoring a little of my damaged faith in human kindness and trust.

The one person I know in Katoomba gave me a lift to Jodie’s place in another act of generosity. Next morning, at a different bookshop (sorry, LITTLE LOST BOOKSHOP, but we were in another town!), this driver purchased three books, the lyrebirds Leonard and Lilah, and the one I’d resisted the day before, the latest from Jodie McLeod and Eloise Short, The Black Cockatoo With One Feather Blue. I bought this last one too, for Eileen.

One thing more: on my second early morning walk around Echo Point I saw the lyrebird again. I remembered my father‘s simple response when I made a comment one day about a willy wagtail flitting from tree to fence. He lives here, he said.

And now, back to the original question, bilingual books, do they work? They certainly do for students of language and of translation, and is wonderful in the case of Leonard, l’ucello lira with its rich onomatopoeic vocabulary, as the book has a QR code link to the audio version in Italian.

Pix from around Govetts Leap and Echo Point. As you can see, the lyrebird is not balanced on a railing! This sculpture is closer to Blackheath.

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Trying to understand Mexico

We relaunched our books in Newtown last week with Penny O’Donnell as launcher-in-chief, Ruth Adler, co-editor of the Journeys anthology, as the one who remembered to give thanks to all those who helped make Journeys happen, and Jacqueline as MC.

Jeanie Lewis told us about her friend Hector Caicedo, co-star of her contribution to Journeys, and sang us a Woody Guthrie song: the Deportees. Jenny Pollak also told us the back story of her poetry in the book and read some of her magnificent work.

Penny made the point that, for the Australian women who contributed to Journeys, living in Mexico made our lives bigger, and that’s true, Mexico amplified our experience and our understanding. That latter, the understanding, may have come after months or years of not understanding how Mexico works, but the opportunity for that search was invaluable. I am reminded of Mariko, my Japanese neighbour for a time in Tepoztlán, Morelos, who used to say: “It’s not a matter of trying to understand Mexico, you just have to get it.”

Penny quoted Nelson Mandela – There is no passion to be found playing small – in settling for a life that is less than the one you are capable of living.”

She acknowledged Journeys co-editor Jenny Cooper, still in Mexico, for her work establishing the Mexico National University’s gender and economics program, under the motto: Por una economía feminista que apuesta por la sostenibilidad de la vida – For a feminist economy that is committed to the sustainability of life.

Can I read another poem, asks Jenny Pollak, is there enough time? We poets have so few opportunities to speak…

I was MC, I had no idea if the clock gave us more or less time, but all the audience knew that yes, we had time for Jenny’s next poem, the one she’d written that morning.

It turned out we didn’t have much time and Lily of the bookshop sold some books and said we had to leave. That was a pity because the room was full of people who knew each other from different parts of our lives, which made for a great atmosphere. I was the last to leave, except for Lily of Better Read than Dead, who was left alone with the books, the wine glasses, the accounts, closing the shop. King street on Friday night was buzzing, the busiest place I’ve been since I walked the streets of Madrid the year before Covid.

Thanks to Elspeth and Conrad for taking the photos. Thanks to Ruth and the bookshop for helping organise the event, to our speakers Ruth, Penny, Jenny and Jeanie, to Raewyn Connell and Manon Saur, who contributed to the Journeys anthology and were there that night. Thanks to all the contributors who gave us their insights into their time in Mexico, and to you, our readers!

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See you on the last Friday of August 2023!

Riverton Press will be celebrating a re-launch night on Friday 25 August at the Better Read Than Dead bookshop in King Street, Newtown, Sydney.

Dr. Penny O’Donnell, senior lecturer in international media and journalism at Sydney University, will launch the travel anthology Journeys, Australian Women in Mexico and the poetry book, sprinting on quicksand.

Penny will be accompanied by Journeys contributors, singer Jeanie Lewis and poet Jenny Pollak, along with editors and contributors Ruth Adler and Jacqueline Buswell.

Jacqueline’s second book of poetry, sprinting on quicksand, was launched beautifully by Eileen Haley during the Covid lockdowns to a restricted public, yet deserves a chance before a bigger audience. The book Journeys, on the other hand, has been launched in Mexico, Canberra, Melbourne and on zoom, though never in Sydney, hometown of several of its contributors.

Penny O’Donnell, winner of the Anne Dunn Scholar Award in 2020, taught radio journalism in Nicaragua and completed her MA in Communications at the University Iberoamericana in Mexico City. While she was present during the early planning stages of Journeys, her contribution to a Riverton Press anthology is still in the making. That’s because she’s very busy teaching Media and Communications at Sydney University.

Journeys, Australian Women in Mexico is a collection of prose, poetry and correspondence by 13 Australians about their days or years in Mexico. Their stories range from the early 1970s to the present day. Contributors include academics and poets, a diplomat, a singer, a model, and women who went to Mexico to accompany or meet a partner. One set up a business, another established a children’s refuge and surfing project in the southern state of Chiapas.

Other contributors to the volume will also be present, although our third editor, Jenny Cooper, has lived in Mexico since the late 1960s. And yes, we edited the book thanks to modern communications possibilities!

sprinting on quicksand is Jacqueline Buswell’s second volume of poetry. Her themes include biography, social commentary, a Japanese travelogue and reflections on art.

Jacqueline is a poet with a strong Irish background, a nomadic mind and sharp eyes and ears. This collection is written in a wide range of tones and forms, offered to the reader in precise language and dynamic cinematic narratives. A very sincere desire for a world of love and justice runs through her poems.

As we’ll be meeting in Newtown, the graphics today are from Sydney’s inner west.

We hope you can join us at the Better Read Than Dead bookshop, 265 King St Newtown, NSW, on Friday 25 August 2023 at 6.30 pm.

https://www.betterreadevents.com/

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News from Lyn McGettigan

I was a bit productive during the lockdown time and started writing my father’s book. Jack Bewes had written a memoir “Lucky to Be Here” about his experiences as a bomb aimer on Lancasters in WW2. I was lucky enough to have his combat and personal diaries as well as training diaries, newspaper clippings, letters between airmen and social letters.

With such a treasure trove of primary material I set about writing the memoir. My aim was to show war from a personal perspective, definitely not a textbook version. I wanted to show the black humour, the mateship, the acceptance of a life that you were only sure you had today. The reality of being in a cold metal plane for eight hours as you flew to a target that consciously or sub-consciously you knew you may not come home from. It might be your letter sitting on your bunk that would be posted to your family, the last missive they would receive from you.

I am writing to invite you to the launch of this book.

Date: Tuesday 9 May, 2023

Where: The Rag and Famish Hotel, 199 Miller St, North Sydney

Time: 6pm – 8pm.

What to expect:  WW2. A drink. Fish and chips. Vera Lynn. Benny Goodman.

The Lyn and Jan show (Lyn with writer, singer, actor Jan Cornall) as we recount some of the hilarious stories from these young men – their humour that saw them through. The book, LUCKY TO BE HERE.

I know we will have as much fun as we had at the launch of Behind the Bar Room Door.

Lyn