Paper carnival scenes.

{Thanks to the beauty of instagram, I'm taking you with me to the fair.}

Winter knows its cue and misses no trick. The first Sunday of June, it gave us a sprinkle of rain and the predicted ten and four degrees. Not perhaps the most glorious of days to set up stall within the atrium at Federation Square, but we are undercover and many in number. This was our fourth time at Page Parlour, part of the Emerging Writers’ Festival’s line-up of all things bookish, and we enjoyed being able to unfurl our paper things recently made on those uniform black tablecloths once more. A tiny sea of black vessels moored on a fresh Sunday afternoon, all looking hopefully, expectantly at the punters who strolled by. Manning a stall is not a natural fit for me, and it is hard to stand behind or beside the things one has laboured over and for them to go unseen or to be dismissed. A certain amount of bravado is needed, but this is something I found and wore at art school and shook off afterwards with little chance of it reappearing once more as cloak or armour.

Of day’s delicious highlight was having scientist, explorer and conservationist Tim Flannery, and author Kate Holden (whose column in The Age I used to so enjoy) pass our stall by chance, en route to the Fred Williams exhibition at the NGV Australia. The excitement of them both liking our cards and zines, and the giddy joy of Louise in particular who gushed in unexpectedly high voice to Mr Flannery, “I’m your biggest fan”, are for me equal. “I’ve read all your books”, too, Louise may have said, but neither of us can be sure in the spin of it all. The compliments paid to us by Tim Flannery and Kate Holden left us both beaming. Thank-you for purchasing our paper things.
 
Thank-you to everyone who stopped by our stall and said hello. Thank-you to Philip Thiel, too, for stocking up on things winged for his collage wall. Thank-you to the fellow Morran Book Project contributor who came up and said hi at one point in the afternoon too. Thank-you dear Emerging Writers’ Festival for organising such a fairground and for having us along. And to the gentleman in search of wombats, I hope you found them somewhere somehow.
 
+ 2011, 2010, 2009