Sean Williams

Thanks for the best wishes, folks. Amanda and I are back from our first anniversary extravaganza, and the results of the tests are in!

Concerned readers will be glad to hear that Dr. George W. Crane considers us both "Very Superior" in our husbandly and wifely roles. There is, however, room for improvement.

Dr. Crane came down sharply on me for using alcohol and failing to properly put away my clothes. Being too much of a book worm and not giving Amanda an allowance also hurt my score. I'll clearly have to work on my manliness, as being neither handy about the house nor particularly courageous, and having no interest in athletics, were considered detrimental to my role as a parent and husband. Most serious, of course, is my utter failure to regularly attend church or to urge the kids to go to Sunday school.

Amanda, meanwhile, is reconsidering her drinking and smoking habits, not to mention squeezing the toothpaste at the top. As for walking around the house in stockinged feet, that barely ranks against not having meals on time, forgetting her seamstressing and ironing duties, and failing to belong to any women's organisations. Those who were at our wedding will be unsurprised to learn that she was docked a point for forgetting to praise marriage "before young women contemplating it." Sadly, she too has joined me in the naughty corner for neglecting her spiritual obligations to the family. Because that's what it's all about, isn’t it?

As to whether either of us "reacts with pleasure and delight to marital congress"--well, some things must remain in the bedroom.

After my surprise second-place in the now-legendary Daikaiju limerick contest, I barely dreamed the day could get any better.

Then Amanda handed me this welcome home present, and my life was complete!



I know some readers and reviewers think that phrase maddening, but I find it as inoffensive and invisible as "but", "the" and "and". For me, it's become part of the punctuation. The strong, silent part, of course.

So, anyway, I'm home now. Email appears to be working again, kinda. I'll have something to say about Writers of the Future (which was a blast) once I get my head together...

Holidays are impossible to sum up, but I'd like to give it a whirl because we had a particularly good trip and the attempt will help me remember it.*

I've tried to capture some important facets of the trip in words. No more than a sentence or two, both lowlights and highlights (considerably more of the latter, I'm pleased to say), and in no particular order:

( I may think of some more in the next day or two, as my brain gradually de-fries. )

* Since I consistently failed to bring my camera with me, anywhere, I have very few snaps to jog my failing memory. Also, tearsxintherain told me I had to blog about it, and I always do what she says. :-)

The 2006 Aurealis Awards have been announced and the news is good for some, not so good for others, but excellent for everyone involved. Hurrah!

As always, there were some raised eyebrows. Judging the Horror category kept life interesting the last few months (as the tied result might testify). No friendships were harmed in obtaining that result, I swear, and I won't tell which side of the divide I fell.

In the science fiction section, I was very pleased to walk away with the Best Short Story gong--a surprise to me, given such a strong line-up--which was collected on my behalf by the most excellent Stephanie Smith of HarperCollins.

Sadly, despite having agreed to co-host with Kim Wilkins, I was forced to pull out at the last minute (attending solely as an animated head on the big screen), so I missed out on all the excitement and merriment afterwards. If the party was anything like last year's, there'll be some sore heads today. I look forward to the photos...

( P.S. )

The wonderful Amanda Nettelbeck and colleague Rob Foster are just about to release their latest book, Writing William Willshire: Race, Nationalism and Frontier Violence in Late Colonial Australia, due out any day now from Wakefield Press. It's an account of one of Australia's most notorious colonial figures, one of only two white policemen arrested for murder of indigenous people.

Research for a related paper saw Amanda and I recently heading to and from picturesque Port Lincoln on the South Australian coast. The trip was long but entertaining, around 1500km in 48 hours. On the way back, I took the chance to visit my grandmother in Cowell, where she still lives in her own house at 94 years of age. Cowell is the first major town north of Pt Lincoln, a couple of hours' drive away. I spent a lot of time there as a young lad and remember it with great fondness and pride. The Stone Mage & the Sea is set near there. My grandfather, Harry Schiller, had a farm not far away (Mount Ghearty, now run by my uncle and cousin) where he discovered one of the world's largest deposits of nephrite jade. It's also a fine fishing area, if you go for that sort of thing; Franklin Harbour oysters are to die for.

Anyway, Cowell's other claim to fame (or infamy, perhaps) is that William Willshire was posted there for a couple of years after his arrest and trial in Alice Springs. He married a local girl called Nell Howell before moving to Adelaide.

During conversation with my grandmother, it emerged that Nell Howell was her aunt--making Willshire my great-great-uncle.

Argh!

I hope I don't offend any of WW's descendants by saying that I'm glad my relation to him is by marriage only. What a person does is more important than the genetic material tooling away in their cells, of course, but while I'm keen to be involved in my partner's work, that could be taking things a little too far...

PS. I learned today that Willshire's lawyer when he was tried for murder in Alice Springs was none other than Sir John Downer, ancestor of another infamous South Australian, Alexander Downer. Of course.