If You Live In Canberra, Please Read This One.
Greetings, citizens of Canberra. Did you know that the Department of Home Affairs received 764 suggested names for our fine town? And that “Canberra” got twelve votes while “Austral City” received eighteen? We should be living in Austral City. How cool would that be? I’d feel like I was living in a comic book. Other potentials included “Eucalypta,” “Kangaremu,” “Eros,” “Thirstyville,” “Cookaburra,” “Paradise,” “Captain Cook,” “Shakespeare,” “Myola,” "Wheatwoolgold,” “Emu,” “Opossum,” “Gladstone,” “Cromwell,” “New London,” “Victoria Defendera Defender” and “Sydmeladperbrisho” (which, when spoken aloud, may sound a little more like a sexist slur than an appropriate name for our nation’s capital.) Another of Canberra’s would-be titles was “Olympus”. Which segues me to Round and Round.
Round and Round is, at its core, a novel about growing up in Canberra. Waratah High is Telopea Park School, Narrabundah College and Canberra Grammar. Tartarus airport is Canberra airport. The Flower Man is the guy on the side of the Cotter Road who’s now been selling flowers to Canberrans from his van for the past twenty-five years. The Poseidon Bus Service is ACTION. Unless you are a lawyer. In which case all bus services appearing in Round and Round are fictitious and any resemblance to real bus services, good or bad, is purely coincidental.
Both the writer and illustrator of Round and Round will be displaying their (our) work at RAW Canberra next Wednesday the 4th of September. (More information here.) If you buy a ticket for RAW Canberra in support of us (under the not-at-all-pretentious name of ‘The Elysian Mysteries’) then you will receive a $16.65 discount on the paperback version of Round and Round when it goes up for pre-sale in... about a week. So if you were planning to buy the novel anyway, you get a free ticket to RAW. And if you were planning on going to RAW anyway, you get a free discount on Round and Round. Bargain.
In order to sign up for this amazing offer, you’ll need to buy your ticket at some point over the next two days from here:
http://www.rawartists.org/canberra/translations/?artist=139973
And that's it! We hope to see you at RAW.
