Trip to Melbourne
May 29th, 2011
So last week I went to Melbourne, which has always been one of my favourite cities.
Sunrise over Melbourne
Went to visit my Australian publishers Allen &Unwin in their cute little terrace house, and had lunch with Eva Mills and Susannah Chambers, my two exceptionally talented and nice editors.
Eva gave me my Aurealis Award, which some kind A&U person had collected for me in Sydney. And an elegant beastie it is too. I’m not sure what I was expecting. Maybe one of those little golf trophies, but with a pencil instead of a golf club. 🙂 But this is much much nicer.
I also saw the illustration and the proposed design for the Australian cover of City of Lies, and it is gorgeous gorgeous gorgeous.
Aurealis Award for Children's Fiction
I went to the wonderful Readings Bookshop in Lygon Street and met Leanne Hall who gave Museum such a good review in the Readings newsletter – and she turned out to be the same Leanne Hall who wrote the YA novel This is Shyness, winner of the 2009 Text Prize for YA and Children’s Writing. I’m halfway through the book and really liking it. There’s a cute interview with Leanne here.
In between doing vaguely author-ish stuff I went to the Botanical Gardens and the Melbourne Museum (of course), and ate a lot. Melbourne is so nice for food. Contemporary Spanish, South American, Cambodian, Vietnamese, modern-Australian-with-Aboriginal-flavours, home-cooked – it’s surprising how much eating you can fit in if you really work at it. And on my second-last day I had yum cha with fellow author Wendy Orr and her husband Tom.
Ballooning over the city
It was only on my last morning that I realised there was something really important that I HAD NOT DONE. So I promised myself I would do it next time. A balloon trip over the city at dawn. With food.
4 thoughts on “Trip to Melbourne”
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About Lian
Lian Tanner has been dynamited while scuba diving and arrested while busking. She once spent a week in the jungles of Papua New Guinea, hunting for a Japanese soldier left over from the Second World War. Nowadays she lives by the beach in southern Tasmania.
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Oh I’d never be able to do a hot air balloon trip… I’d be sick! I just hate hights!!! For me, Icky! HAve you done it before…?
No, I’ve never done it, but have wanted to for years, even though I’m dreadful at heights too. It looks so beautiful. Of course I might well be sick too, as I nearly was when I tried to learn to fly a small plane. It all made a lot of sense until I was actually up in the clouds – at which point it became utterly terrifying. I kept flying higher and higher, convinced that if I let the nose of the plane point downwards I’d fall out of the sky. 🙂 Had to land in the end before I was sick – which would not be nice in such a small space. But I have a feeling balloons might be different.
( : I hate planes.
And boats.
And most forms to travel.
That’s why I’m not going to learn to drive or get a car… sadly I’ll have to take both plane and boat to Corfu when I move there.
🙂