The hills are alive…

Up to Mt Buffalo at the weekend, to enjoy the last weekend away for some months as the festival really starts to take a grip on all our lives. A sparkling weekend, and the Alps were looking fantastic though it was very sad to see the old chalet in such disrepair.

Spent the night in Myrtleford after a truly luxurious dinner in the award winning restaurant there – what a glorious treat! – and woke on Sunday to a typical Alpine sky. Sparkling, crispy and clear as a bell.  Mt Buffalo was crowned with snow, so we did long snowy walks around the national park. exulting in the views to the valleys below. There is a ramp at 1700 metres for hang gliders. It’s pretty confronting as it simply runs off the edge of the mountain into oblivion. Hopefully no hang glider has met their oblivion there!

Had a bit of a Great Gatsby moment in the tennis court up there, which has obviously been neglected for some time. Echoes of time past. Great fun skipping around the pristine snow.

We stopped off at Powers Lookout. where a lyrebird was in full throat trying to impress a female with his range of other bird calls, mobile phone tones and car alarms. I don’t know if she was impressed, but we certainly were!

Funny how there is always a dog barking in the valley below!

Helenka
Festival Manager

One more calendar page

Eeek, we’ve turned another page on the calendar. That means there is only one more page turn until the box office goes on stream, and the website goes live. That’s pretty scarey.  (Where did May go?).

I’m looking forward to the irrepresible Steve Joyce coming on board as box office manager next week. Especially looking forward to handing all the ticketing preparation to him!  The schools program will be on the festival website, by the end of this week, and the schools program box office opens on Tuesday 9 June (for the schools program, not the main program).

Then once the main program is finalised, later this month, it’s full tilt getting the website built, the ticketing built and the box office installed.  We have about a fortnight to do this, so it’s intense.

But all the other things I’m organising are panning out well and I’m feeling slightly optimistic that everything will be done in good time this year.

Just wish those calendar pages would linger a little longer.

Helenka
Festival Manager

Book Piles

I took a couple of books away from the book pile at the office to read while I was having a weekend in Hobart. (Is  the Salamanca market the best in Australia?  Bellingen is pretty good but I think Salamanca might be better.)

One was Fergus Hume’s The Mystery Of A Hansom Cab, published in 1886 to great acclaim, including those who believed the book superior to Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes books. Whether or not that is the case, the book sold over 750,000 copies, a best seller by the standards of the day. Not bad today either, come to think of it! It’s a curious read, and is now re-published by Text Publishing. I did enjoy it, a perfect read for a short holiday in misty Hobart.

The other book I picked up for the weekend was Geraldine Brooks’ People of the Book. This is a fictionalised version of the true story of the Sarajevo Haggadah.  I found the book mostly engrossing, and it certainly made me research the Sarajevo Haggadah further, I had never heard of it.

Fictionalised versions of true stories  do tend to make me a bit nervous.  It’s like watching movies of historical events.  You certainly aren’t watching them to get an educational lesson; you know it’s not a documentary.  But you still want to be able to believe that the core facts are real.  Something that Hollywood often skirts round.  Well, in the case of Braveheart, they not only skirted round the facts, they kilted round them!

The Sarajevo Haggadah has a story that almost defies fictionalising. However Geraldine Brooks has managed to add meat to its substantial bones and her suppositions and fictionalising gives the story even more resonance.

I’ve been re-reading Bill Bryson’s Mother Tongue, one of the Popular Penguin Series selling for $10.  (Love those Popular Penguins!)  It’s a fantastic resource and something I’ll read again and again I know.  Other books in my pile beside my bed are Dave Eggers, Peter Ackroyd and Niall Ferguson. It’s ironic that working for the writers festival makes time for reading fairly limited at this time of year!  Peter Ackroyd is one of my favourite authors and it’s a great shame that his inclination to travel to writers festivals has diminished making him a highly unlikely guest.  Dave Eggers was of course here in 2007 to my great personal joy.  We’re having some Dave Egger-ish authors here in 2009; some with close ties to him, so stay in touch through our e-bulletin for more information.

Helenka
Festival Manager

Explosive start to the week

After a long relaxing weekend in Hobart, this week started loudly!  5am and apparently that’s the best time to start detonating small explosions on the Williamstown railway line at 20 minute intervals!  Sigh. So I staggered to work a little less relaxed than I’d hoped!  However, the day improved with the arrival of our new production manager to take over the reins of production from me.  Excellent! What a relief. 

Plus I had a successful visit to one of our international consulates with the promise of a possible partnership with us.  It’s always pleasant when consulates and overseas arts bodies want to be part of the festival.

The ticketing and box office process has started in earnest now, and already there’s a hiccup technologically.  I wonder how much time we humans use up trying to sort out technology?  The big things like hiring people, or installing the box office cabins are relatively easy.  It’s when you start talking VOIPs and dsls and so on, that things get tricky.

Our first deadline is to get the ticketing up ready for the publication of the schools program, beginning of June, so there’s a fair bit of work to be done in that time.  Our box office manager starts then too, so it’ll be a full office, even more so than now.  It will be a great relief to have him on board to take over the ticketing.

And I’m looking forward to seeing the new 2009 branding for the festival this week.  Once approved that means we can get started on all the signage, flags and banners and a myriad of other marketing and production material.

All systems go.  Just hope Connex has pity on Yarraville residents tomorrow morning.

Helenka King
Festival Manager