I’m not as good as Michael Palin.
August 31st, 2008
Today I attended a session of the Melbourne Writers Festival at Federation Square. I was a ’speaker’ at the past two Melbourne Writers Festivals, but this was the first time I’ve actually been in the audience. I saw Don Watson talk about his book American Journeys. With 300 authors and almost as many events, this was the only session in the festival that was about ‘travel writing’. [Excuse me while I put my gripe hat on for a second, but travel narrative is very popular so you'd think there would be more than one session devoted to the genre.] Anyway, the session was good (click here for a video of a session he did with David Sedaris and David Rakoff), but even then only about 10 minutes of it was about his travels. The rest was about politics. He was certainly popular, though (see pic above). The 500 seat venue was sold out and the audience gave him an ovation at the end. And, he didn’t have any hecklers.
A heckler is not something you’d expect at a writer’s festival, but I had one at the Brisbane Writers Festival a couple of years ago. The topic of the panel I was in (with Phil Brown and Ken Haley) was ‘When things go wrong: Worst travel stories’ and I’d asked if I could speak first. I did that was because I thought my ‘worst travel stories’ would seem lame compared to Ken Hayley’s stories and I wanted to get in before him. Just briefly, Ken went mad while travelling in Kuwait and ended up in an asylum then when he finally got back to Melbourne he jumped from a four storey building and became a paraplegic. He then thought, well things can’t get any worse, so he travelled to places like Afghanistan and Iraq in his wheelchair and wrote a book about it. Going first turned out to be a bad move. I’d just begun speaking when a rather inebriated old fellow in the crowd (the session was in a bar) started abusing me. Maybe he thought Michael Palin was appearing because he kept shouting out things like ‘Where’s Michael Palin?’ and ’You’re not as good as Michael Palin’ (which may be true, but that’s not the point). I have to admit that it totally threw me (and my talk). I tried to ignore him, but he just became more vocal and more abusive. In the end, Alison Cotes (the chair of our panel) had to butt in and ask him to leave. When we finished Ken told me what I should have said to the heckler: ‘Dad, I told you not to come to my sessions. When mum finds out she won’t be happy and there will be no bingo for you this week.’