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Last day in September, and theoretically we're well and truly into Spring. So where's the sunshine? Instead we've had the worst week of massive typhoon-like storms, lightning strikes, flooded rivers and torrential downpours, with so much damage done that it makes a mockery of Spring as a season and adds further warning about a future with global warming.

So once again I'm cowering over a radiator, and it's a chance to update this infrequent 'latest news' page. So what is the news? Best bit, perhaps, that Ginninderra Press have accepted my South American poems for publication either end of this year or early 2017 - and with black and white photographs to match the poems. Our own domestic production one-off book has colour photos, thanks to David's production skills and Photobook Club, but that would make a publisher version prohibitively expensive. I'm just happy that there will be graphics with the text. Their request, for 'a more enticing title', led  me to some hard thinking, and we're all happy with the final result - the book will be called Of llamas and piranhas - and I've written a name poem to go with that title. Watch this space for when it will become available ...

Other good news has included some successes with poems; some published in The Mozzie and in Tamba, also in the Ginninderra Press publication of social justice poems that marked their twenty year celebrations, First Refuge. I was really happy to be included in this, and also to be short-listed for both the Polestar Writers' Journal competitions, poetry and prose, though I wasn't to win either.

However, a very pleasing email to tell me that mine had been the winning entry in a West Australian photography association's contest for this year, where twenty winning photographs were offered to writers throughout Australia to try their hands at a poem or prose piece to match each photo. It's the sort of writing I really enjoy, and I've now learned that the term for this is ekphrasis - writing that grows out of and responds to a graphic artist's visual creation.  My poem, Ambiguous White, will be published next month together with a reproduction of the painting that inspired it, in what promises to be a super-spendid luxury limited edition book, In my View. Unfortunately I can't get to Perth for the book launch, but WA friends will attend for me and pick up my copy.

And outside it's still raining - I keep coming back to that very famous line by a very famous writer: "And the rain, it raineth every day."   Too true.

What a packed two months it's been! When I last updated this page, the trip to South America was still ahead of us, and suddenly now it's all over, and we're back to normal life at home. Well, in so far as life here is ever normal ...

It was indeed a magnificent four and a half weeks away. Real 'much have I travelled in the realms of gold' stuff, and it's hard to pick out highlights. Chile - and at last eating (and loving) Fish Cevice, which I'm now planning to add to my cuisine, and the colourful heritage city of Valparaiso; in Argentina learning to dance the tango, in spite of my two left feet, and wandering in the famous La Recoleta cemetery, that city of the dead in which Eva Peron is now a resident, or browsing in what has been called the most beautiful bookshop in the world 'El Atineo'. Peru and watching fascinated the expert horsemen, as gauchos put on a spectacular Peruvian Paso at the Hacienda Mamacona, and learning to drink Pisco Sours. The wonders of Machu Picchu and watching herds of alpacas and llamas in the high grasslands of the Andes (worth suffering altitude sickness for this - and I did!)  Rio de Janeiro, and the tour of the infamous favelas, with their tiers on tiers of slum housing and tangles of stolen electricity wires. Can this city really be ready for the Olympic games within the next few months? But worth the almost embarrassing luxury of the Hotel Copacabana to also find in nearly Ipamema the cafe, the Garota de Ipanema, where Jobin wrote the famous song about the girl who turned all heads on the beach front there.  The spectacular Iguassu Falls, seen from both the Brazilian and the Argentinian sides - which better? Impossible to decide.

So many highlights. Four days on the Amazon, with jungle walks, visits to small villages, piranha fishing at dusk (yes, caught two and ate them at dinner that night - a neat reversal of the status quo, I felt.) Lake Titicata, highest freshwater lake with its famous reed islands and a whole population living, often in family groups, on these man-made islands. And, of course, the Galapagos Islands, where we battled our way up dried creek river beds to heights that meant leaping from boulder to boulder to reach the top with magnificent views over this Darwinian wonderland. Coming face to face on a pathway with an enormous turtle, built like an armoured tank, and learning swiftly that I didn't have right of way.

So much to remember. I'm glad that I kept not only the daily journal, but also stuck to my resolve to write a poem a day - I've brought back the 34 poems in the set, and now have to decide what to do with them ... But writing these was, as always, one of the real joys of travelling, even on nights when I was dead tired and just craved sleep.

However, it was good to get home and discover some publishing pleasures on return: poems in the new book from Poetica Christi Press, Imagine, and in Polestar and The Mozzie, as well as the special pleasure of a lovely review of Bystanders in the May Polestar Writers' Journal, and finding that I had made it to the short list for the Stringybark Stories competition, where i received a 'highly commended' and publication in their coming book Standing By. Enough encouragement to keep me at my computer and still writing ...

Once again the weeks have slipped away, and an update on this web site is long overdue. It's been a period of bits and pieces: some writing - mainly poetry; some good news - a number of poems accepted for various journals and magazines, such as Polestar, The Write Angle, Poetry Monash, and Poetry Matters, etc; some bad news - poems rejected (enough of these to prevent hubris, just as there are enough accepted to keep me sending them out!); some guest speaking at Probus Clubs and other organisations ...  And two big agenda items: our coming trip to South America, which will be a wonderful breaking of new ground for both of us, and the beginnings of research towards a new novel. But that's on the back burner for the moment, and I'll report progress on that when it's more firmly in place.

So once again the Easter season is almost with us, and last Sunday the palms were firmly in place beside the altar with their reminder that Holy Week has begun. The weather is looking good and the garden is calling. This year we're having Easter at home, with the usual Easter egg hunt for the smaller children on Sunday morning, and maybe this year I'll once again plant bulbs for the spring.