Anne's Scrapbook

A noticeboard-style page of information, thoughts, links, creative projects, performances, folk festivals, and other postings.

News Snippets / Upcoming Events

April

Maleny Music Weekend

After the success of last year’s inaugural Maleny Music Weekend, this excellent music festival is set to be a regular annual event and will be held again in the Maleny Showgrounds from Friday April 19 to Sunday April 21. For directions to the site, see www.malenymusicweekend.com/location/.

Maleny is in the hinterland of the Sunshine Coast, about 90 minutes drive north of Brisbane. Once again the Maleny Showgrounds will be buzzing to the sounds of fiddles, guitars, djembes, voices, ukuleles, mandolins, banjos, didgeridoos, saxophones, and all manner of other wonderful instruments; and, of course, great gospel music! There will also be food and craft stalls and for all the news of the event and the programme, go to www.malenymusicweekend.com.

See also Performances

Red Hill Folk

Red Hill Folk: This vibrant and intimate Wednesday night gathering of folk aficionados goes from strength to strength with excellent performers, special guests, featured regulars and themed evenings.

Venue: We meet every Wednesday night (excepting public holidays) at the Red Hill Community Sports Centre, 22 Fulcher Rd, Red Hill, Brisbane (next door to the Broncos Leagues Club). We’re acoustic and unplugged, and floor singers are welcome.

Time: Performances are from 7:30pm - 10:30pm. 

Special Guests and Featured Regulars: Every month we feature a 40mt ‘Special Guest’ spot as well as a 30mt set from our regulars, semi-regulars or totally lapsed regulars! These are advertised in the Folk Rag: www.folkrag.org. Click on   ‘All Folk Club News’ on the left, then the link at the top to ‘Red Hill Folk’.

Themed Evenings: We have regular themed evenings to encourage performers to stretch from their comfort zones, learn some new songs, and sing to the particular theme. Themes coming up are ‘War and Peace’ (April 24, Anzac Day Eve), ‘The Merry Month of May Music Hall’ (May 15), ‘Country Songs’ (June 5) and, because we had so much fun with our ‘Talk Like A Pirate Day’ theme last year, September 18 will be another chance to dress in our pirate gear and sing swashbuckling songs of ships, the sea ... and, of course, pirates ... for ‘Talk Like A Pirate Day Eve’.

The Supper Club: As there is no facility at our new venue for meals, we instigated the Supper Club, where each week on a roster basis one of the regulars brings in supper of the cake/scones/pikelets/biscuits/dips kind. The suppers have been creative and delicious and we take a 20 minute ‘talk and supper break’ mid-way through the evening which creates an enjoyable, party-like atmosphere.

Our Room: We meet in a side room off the main Old Bowler’s Bar. It’s intimate, with low lighting and an alcove which could have been designed for performers! The acoustics are excellent and we enjoy wondrous harmonies and choruses as the audience joins in with alacrity.

$2 Entry Fee: We contribute towards the Sports Club’s expenses with a $2 entry fee which is dropped into a tin at the door on an honour system basis and goes directly to the Sports Club to help them with their continuing refurbishment.

See also Performances

Folk Redlands

Folk Redlands is held on the first and third Sundays of the month at the beautiful bush reserve of the Indigiscapes Centre, 17 Runnymede Rd, Capalaba, Brisbane. The emphasis is on Folk and Acoustic music, Traditional, Celtic, Australian or Contemporary in a friendly relaxed environment. The format for the first Sunday is a blackboard-style afternoon with a featured act at the end, and the third Sunday usually takes the form of a ‘Music Circle’ session, where anyone can join the circle and sing a song or simply join in the chorus – or just sit and listen.  

If you are planning to eat at the café, you will need to book a table with Indigiscapes on (P) 07 3824 8611.

More at: http://www.folkredlands.com or (W) www.folkrag.org. Or contact Colin (P) 07 3829 3327 (M) 0448 142 883 (E) nightingale.colin@gmail.com.

See also Performances

Reprinting Escape from the Past: The reprint of my novel set partly on the notorious colonial prison island of St Helena in Queensland’s Moreton Bay is now available as a paperback book and also as an e-book. It was released by Zeus Publications in December 2010.

Go to www.zeus-publications.com/escape_from_the_past.htm for details  
and also www.prlog.org/11133229-can-past-and-present-fuse-to-clear-williams-name.html for a recent press release.

Escape from the Past is also available for sale on board the Cat o’ Nine Tails catamaran which takes tourists to St Helena Island and from their website – go to www.catoninetails.com.au or www.sthelenaisland.com.au.

St Helena is now a beautiful National Park, four kilometres from the mouth of the Brisbane River. For more than 60 years it was home to hundreds of colonial Queensland’s miscreants, and the prison ruins still stand in mute witness to its former role as our foremost maximum security prison for men. The island is rich in history and has a fascinating and colourful past.

Escape from the Past was launched on Thursday February 17, 2011 at the Brisbane Danish Club by the brilliantly funny Brisbane journalist and folk/jazz singer/songwriter Sue Wighton. Around sixty people gathered for the event which was MCd by Ian Clarke from the iconic Brisbane folk group the Wayfarers.  I spoke about the three specific experiences that came together to create the story of William and Sally and their struggle to clear William’s name, then gave a reading from the book. This was followed by four songs inspired by St Helena Island; Sue Wighton sang her original St Helena song, Mary Brettell sang St Helena by the late Tony Miles, Robbie Dunn sang his original The Ballad of St Helena and I finished the set with my own song The Devil’s On St Helena, which I recently recorded on my CD Women Do.

An author who attended said it was the best book launch she’d ever been to. We certainly all had a good time and everyone enjoyed the hospitality of our Danish hosts and their wondrous pastries.

See also http://bookszeus.wordpress.com/2011/03/14/escaping-from-the-past-with-jazz/

Here are some photos from the launch...
Julie Dendle reminds us why we are here	Book launch audience	Ian Clark, MC
Anne reads from Escape From the Past	Sue Wighton sings her song St Helena	Robbie Dunn sings The Ballad of St Helena
Anne (accompanied by Chris Euston from Stockade) sings The Devil’s On St Helena	Anne signing books	Escape from the Past launcher Sue Wighton with cover designer Mary Brettell

About Avaaz.org

Avaaz.org is a rapidly growing community of global citizens who take action on the major issues facing the world today. The aim of Avaaz.org is to ensure that the views and values of the world’s peoples shape global decisions. Avaaz.org members act for a more just and peaceful world and a globalisation with a human face. Avaaz means Voice in many Asian, Middle Eastern and Eastern European languages. In three years, the organisation has grown to over 3.6 million members in every nation of the world, and has begun to make a real impact on global politics.

In Avaaz’s own words: Avaaz.org is a new global web movement with a simple democratic mission: to close the gap between the world we have, and the world most people everywhere want. Across the world, most people want stronger protections for the environment, greater respect for human rights, and concerted efforts to end poverty, corruption and war. Yet globalization faces a huge democratic deficit as international decisions are shaped by political elites and unaccountable corporations -- not the views and values of the world’s people.

Technology and the internet have allowed citizens to connect and mobilize like never before. The rise of a new model of internet-driven, people-powered politics is changing countries from Australia to the Philippines to the United States. Avaaz takes this model global, connecting people across borders to bring people-powered politics to international decision-making.

Coming together in this way, Avaaz has become a wonderful community of people from all nations, backgrounds, and ages. Our diverse community is brought together by our care for the world, and a desire to do what we can to make it a better place.

The core of our model of organizing is our email list, operated in 14 languages. By signing up to receive our alerts, you are rapidly alerted to urgent global issues and opportunities to achieve change. Avaaz members respond by rapidly combining the small amounts of time or money they can give into a powerful collective force. In just hours we can send hundreds of thousands of messages to political leaders telling them to save a crucial summit on climate change, hold hundreds of rallies across the world calling for action to prevent genocide, or donate hundreds of thousands of euros, dollars and yen to support nonviolent protest in Burma.
The Economist writes that Avaaz is poised to deliver ‘a deafening wakeup call’ to world leaders, the Indian Express welcomes ‘the biggest web campaigner across the world’ and Nobel Prize winner Al Gore says ‘Avaaz is inspiring, and has already begun to make a difference.’

  China Wind 

From February to May 2009 I published my first online novel. This was a big stretch for me as, if I’m not the world’s worst Webophobe, I’d be a close second. However, never say never! I’d read an article Brisbane’s Weekend Courier Mail that inspired me to ‘have a go’ and to give away the end result to readers, just for the experience. I chose a novel I’d written after a holiday with my sister in Hong Kong in January 1994 – one that I was unable to place with a publisher, but that I thought deserved a wider readership than just my immediate family and friends.

I talked it over with my whizzy webmaster, Mary Brettell, and we explored the various ways I could blog the novel myself. I wanted to do it my way, and illustrate it myself. Then Mary suggested that I produce it in Word, convert it to web pages, and publish it on my website. With infinite patience she took me through the procedure; I mastered this huge and steep learning curve, designed the pages then had a great deal of pleasure illustrating each chapter with pictures that Juliette and I had taken in Hong Kong, revisiting a very happy event from the past.

Anne and Juliette in Macau		Anne on junk in Hong Kong

I very much enjoyed revising China Wind and it’s still as fresh to me as it was when I created it. It’s a tale of conspiracy and revenge in the high-rise glass towers of big business ... with a dash of corruption, secret criminal societies, a beautiful promiscuous woman ... and a twist of romance. A new chapter appeared each weekday and now all the chapters and readers comments are available at China Wind.

Mary B’s CD

With a Little Help from My Friends ...

In 2009 my whizzy webmaster Mary Brettell released her new CD With a Little Help from My Friends...  The title reflects the theme – all the songs on the album were written by local singer/songwriters, all Mary’s friends and acquaintances. Not only that; all the musicians and backing vocalists are Mary’s friends – as talented a bunch as you’d find anywhere.  After years of bewailing the fact that all her songwriter friends seem to just ‘have songs come to them’ and ‘why don’t they come to me?’ Mary wrote her first song, Danish on the Deck; a lovely tribute to her talented buddies, and as good as any of the others, and included it on the CD.  I see she’s been hiding her light under a bushel all these years.

Mary also selected one of my latest, Good Cleaning Man, a tongue-in-cheek ditty in praise of men who help around the house (take note, guys!) which gives a whole new meaning to ‘house cleaning’.

You can get this outstanding CD from Mary at www.bretell.com.au.