PETER:
Anna, we’ve known each other about 38 years and were introduced by Antigone Kefala. We collaborated on the book The Harbour Breathes¹, which was shortlisted for the Victorian Premier’s Award for Poetry. And we’ve moved in similar circles. A good interview can be a kind of unburdening, so let me kick it off. I was always a bit afraid of you, initially because you weren’t a boy. And you had opinions. When you think of those times when we both started out in this art of writing, this art and writing caper was so dominated by male-dominated cliques. Can you speak about those early years and those divisions, not only between the cliques, but also coming into that world as a woman? How did you navigate those storm waters, especially in Melbourne and Sydney?

ANNA:
Firstly, over the years, I’ve received substantial support and cooperation from men in the literary scene. I was first published by Kris Hemensley and Robert Kenny in the 70’s. They were very supportive of my work. I worked in partnership with Ken Bolton on Magic Sam magazine 1974-8. Then you and I worked on The Harbour Breathes in the 1980’s. And Ivor Indyk went out of his way to publish my work in Southerly and HEAT magazines in the 90’s.

But anyone who is my generation has been navigating male-dominated cliques all their lives. Now it’s a lot different from when I was a young woman. I started out in 1965 in the Architecture faculty at Sydney Uni, which was totally male-dominated, not just the boys, there were the lecturers, we had no female teachers. But we had people like Lloyd Rees, and Roland Wakelin, and Emmanuel Raft who were amongst our teachers in Architecture – they were like gods. Also, Guy Warren. And then I went to a painting workshop for five years run by John Ogburn, who was a former student of Desiderius Orban and a mate of John Olson. And not only was the teacher fairly dominating, but then there were male students who were like the inner circle there. And in those days, males… I’m talking about the ’60s and ’70s, and well into the ’80’s – one of the things that blokes used to like to tell female practitioners was that they were presumptuous, and ask questions like, “Why do you think you can call yourself an artist? And what makes you think that you are a writer?” And things like, “…your writing is filmic, so I don’t think you’re really a poet, you’re more of a filmmaker.” I remember being in writers’ workshops where women were reduced to tears if they were game enough to turn up.

However, out of the Poets Union circles, a group of we women formed the No Regrets Women Writers’ Workshop in 1978, and lasted for 12 years, on and off with a different composition of people, and it was a very supportive kind of group. But the very existence of that group drove a wedge between me and a number of my male contemporaries, writers, especially ones of my age and older.

The male contemporaries that I continued to relate to in Sydney were younger than me, 10 years younger. Like Kit Kelen, Mark Roberts, Les Wicks – Poets Union people who weren’t really of my generation. The older ones became estranged because of this women writers’ thing and how dare we. I managed to get some rules passed in the constitution of the Poets Union, New South Wales branch, saying that we should positively discriminate in favour of women and people from non-Anglo backgrounds. That wasn’t very popular, but I managed to get it passed – and this sounds terrible – by stacking a meeting with feminists and lesbians that I knew. And some of the blokes were just shocked and horrified that I did that.

PETER:
Did any of the writing at that point become angry?

ANNA:
No, I don’t like writing that has a personal beef. I mean, I can see in some of my writing here and there, there are pointed things, but they’re fairly subtle and I certainly wouldn’t like to use my writing as a vehicle for revenge.

PETER:
So, you’ve gone through the Architecture course, the No Regrets Workshop, early writing. Can you also talk to your early years at home? With a name like Couani, it tells us that there’s something not standard Anglo-issue here. Say something about your parents and their effect on you when you were growing up.

ANNA:
Well, my background is half-Greek and half-Polish, but both my parents were born in Australia, and their language of communication with each other obviously was English. They met as medical students at Sydney University. So, it was all very Aussie. My Mum’s mother was half Polish and half Welsh. She was also born in Australia. So, my family were different from the kind of migrants that arrived in the ’50s. My Kastellorizian Greek family arrived around the First World War, and they are some of those Kastellorizians who came to Darwin, then moved to Perth. There’s still quite a few Couanis in Perth today. And then my family moved to Sydney. I did hear Greek, and I did hear Polish because my grandfather spoke Polish when he could, so if there was somebody around who was Polish, I could hear him speaking it, and the same with my father – if there was somebody around who was Greek, I could hear him speaking Greek. But I never learnt either of those languages. I would have liked to. I did study first year Greek at university at one stage.

PETER:
But having those, the shadows of those languages in the house must have led to perhaps wider reading, or reading away from the mainstream?

ANNA:
My mother was great on reading. She didn’t read that much in my youth because she was a really busy GP, but she had the idea that reading was a good thing. She herself had been a star student, a study nut, and so she wanted to introduce me to reading and she also did that with my brothers. So, we all learnt to read at a young age. But she wasn’t encouraging me so much to read stuff that was in translation, she just encouraged me to read. First of all, she enrolled me in the local library at the first available opportunity. Blackheath Library. And I was borrowing books all the time and reading all the time from a young age. And I guess in those days there wasn’t much children’s literature, so I was just reading novels.

But later, as you and I have discussed before, I got into reading Biggles, and those kinds of books. Anyway, at an early age and at the same time as I was reading Biggles, my Mum introduced me to Dickens, and said, “Read this book – David Copperfield.” And I did, but I was finding it really difficult. I said, “Look, Mum, I don’t think I can read this.” And she said, “No, no, just keep going. Don’t look back, just keep going. Go, go, go, go!” And I did, and after I’d read that book, I could read anything. It broke down my resistance to difficult texts. I was only about 10 when I read it, but it enabled me to read anything.

Around that time, we’d come down to Sydney. We were living in my great grandfather’s house. He was a Polish stained-glass artist². And he had all this literary stuff in his bookshelves – strange things, like Diary of a Young Lady of Fashion 1764-1765, and also a book called Advice for Parents by some Russian bloke. These books, they weren’t just adult books, they were adult books that discussed adult issues that you didn’t normally find, like the advice-for-parents’ book was discussing problems that young people might have, like getting pregnant and having children outside of wedlock. And The Diary of a Young Lady of Fashion (a spoof written in the 1920’s) was written in the persona of a young woman and featured a lot about female desire, which is sort of odd.

PETER:
Didn’t know female desire existed then.

ANNA:
(laughs) Well, it was really odd in this particular situation because my great grandfather was born a Catholic, but he had become a devout Catholic, I think, because it was good for the stained glass business.

PETER:
Right, yep.

ANNA:
So, it was odd that he went in that direction, or that he had books of that sort. But he also had amazing things, like large format books of Gustave Doré’s illustrations of Dante’s Inferno, huge A3-sized books with engravings. I think they were actual original engravings.

PETER:
Oh, the original… It’s interesting, isn’t it? Because at some point, Kafka refers to books breaking open the frozen sea inside of us. So, David Copperfield does more?

ANNA:
That’s right.

PETER:
They’re quite the opposite, coming from opposite ends, Dickens and Kafka.

ANNA:
But if I could go on about the exposure to foreign literature: when I was at high school in Sydney, our English teacher – I was doing a subject called English Honours, which was equivalent to Advanced English today – said to us, “Now we’ve got this stuff on the curriculum, but in addition to that, although it’s not on the curriculum, I’m going to put all these books in this cupboard here, and you can read them. I advise you to read them because they’re classics.” So, I started reading everything in this cupboard. And it was Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov – all these amazing Russians and French writers as well, like Victor Hugo. As I discovered later, very much the same reading that Antigone Kefala did as a youngster. So, I got to read all that before I left high school. And I left high school when I was 16, dropped out of fourth year Architecture when I was 19. So, I started everything younger than a lot of other people.

PETER:
It’s interesting, isn’t it, how a single teacher can do that for you. There was a chap called Mr. Robinson who actually told us that there were symbols in books, themes that we should look for. But it’s interesting, too, that these classics were in a cupboard. They hadn’t quite yet found the courage to come out in Australia.

ANNA:
No, they weren’t on the curriculum, so she couldn’t really promote them as official stuff. There was a library at the school, but I don’t think the library stocked books in translation either.

PETER:
I remember. If we go back to those times, Anna, do you think that despite their shortcomings, they were more suited to the arts and to writing, the ’70s and ’80s? Were they more open to experimenting and sort of spreading out rather than confined as they probably became later on?

ANNA:
You mean the practice of the arts? I don’t think they’re that confined now, but I think they were really confined in those days.

PETER:
Can you talk to that? Because the reason I asked the question is, that at some point, the Whitlam era comes in and we get Medicare and we get the Australia Council and we move out of Vietnam. And there’s a terrific kind of opening of doors at that point.

ANNA:
Oh yeah, incredibly, incredibly.

PETER:
The Green Bans.

ANNA:
There was such an amazing feeling.

PETER:
Yeah, we don’t have that now and I was just wondering whether you saw that as being reflected in the arts or in the writing.

ANNA:
I don’t know if I have sufficient grasp of everything that’s going on to be able to make a generalisation.

PETER:
But, in your case…

ANNA:
But everything is so personally conditioned by your specific circumstances. In my case, confinement came about by the fact I had to work full-time and didn’t have as much time to do my work. Also, you’re bouncing around interacting and reacting to different impulses in your life. Like, I thought of myself as an artist, as in visual artist, when I was younger. I didn’t actually think of myself as a writer until I met Ken Bolton. He was my Fine Arts tutor in 1974. I’d been thinking more along the lines of psychoanalysis and The Unconscious and all that. And art. I read a book called The Hidden Order of Art³. I was thinking about the psychology of art and the meaning of what you were doing and John Ogburn had this amazing ability to analyse images in a way like what John Berger was doing. John Ogburn wasn’t on the Left, but he had an amazing ability to analyse an image. Then when I met Ken Bolton, he basically put forward the idea that painting was dead, and that really threw me, because I thought, oh. That had been very much where I was going – I thought I was a painter. And somehow, because painting was dead, I had to, and I wanted to fit into this new milieu, which was Ken Bolton and Rae Jones. I met a crowd of writers. I started writing experimental prose… and thereby gained the approval of Ken Bolton. (laughs) He was interested in conceptual art and abstract minimalism.

PETER:
Well, I’m wondering whether painting died at the same time as God, but I’m not sure. (laughs)

ANNA:
(laughs) No, I think it was independent of that.

PETER:
Or independent of each other. God. Did you at any point make what you were making as a way of reassuring yourself and your position in the world?

ANNA:
I never thought of it like that, but looking back, I assume it was like that or is like that. You know, being a practitioner, it’s very much something that you’re totally involved with. But at the same time, Antigone Kefala and her crowd had a particular idea about being a practitioner. They would say things like, “It’s a compulsion, isn’t it? … You have no choice, you just have to write, paint, whatever.” And I found that kind of strange because personally, I thought it was a choice, not a compulsion.

PETER:
Well, given the fact that I agree with you, that it is a choice – if we take, say, W. H. Auden’s claim that “poetry makes nothing happen” and we extend it to “art makes nothing happen” – how do you respond to something like that? Because you are operating in the world.

ANNA:
I don’t know if this is what he was talking about, but when I think about my own work, when I’m doing stuff, and I’m working across different mediums, it’s the same. I think it’s the same thing. I feel like I get in The Zone, and so when you’re in the zone, definitely other things can’t happen. I can’t be making dinner and be in the zone at the same time. Once I’m in the zone, it’s full immersion – whether I’m painting or if I’m writing, or if I’m writing music. In other activities, I can multitask quite easily. I can be cooking and cleaning and can do different things. But in terms of creative work, for me, it does need a clear space, it’s a kind of stasis.

PETER:
It’s a static thing that moves.

ANNA:
Well, you’re moving in it, I guess. Like entering another world.

PETER:
Is there a way you can generate that, or does it just arrive through the front door?

ANNA:
No, you can generate it.

PETER:
Okay, good.

ANNA:
Good. (laughs)

PETER:
(laughs) I need confidence… Interior world or exterior world, in which of these two does what you make begin, do you think?

ANNA:
Well, for me, interior. But, I like doing things that are figurative, and in writing, I prefer to do things that are kind of realistic as well. I do like abstract stuff too.

PETER:
When we made The Harbour Breathes, we were both teaching. I was at a secondary school, and you were teaching art in an Intensive English Centre. What light did teaching throw onto the work that you make?

ANNA:
Good question. I don’t know if it did. I guess it must have, but I didn’t think it was so much related to my own creative work. I was fully immersed in teaching and I was totally focused on different things, like I really liked collaborative work with students and between students. Being in an Intensive English Centre meant that we didn’t have to follow a curriculum except the one that we wrote ourselves. There weren’t any intensive English curricula written down at that time, certainly not for art teaching, which was lucky. So, I was able to initiate projects where my students would collaborate with students in other subject areas to create things. We did visual art collages, like yours actually. I got the students to make photomontages and we took them to the English department in the high school, and those kids wrote poems to go with them… And then we published them in book form, I reproduced them as books – the texts and the photo montages together.

In another project we took artworks to the music teacher, and the music students wrote tunes, and melodies to go with them. And then we played the results in a performance at an end-of-term event.

PETER:
We’ve talked about how important books were in your formative years. What sort of role did they assume at the stage of your life when you were with Ken Bolton (1974-8)? Is there some sort of value that you place on the books you’ve made as well? Where do books stand in your hierarchy of things that you make?

ANNA:
Yeah, they’re so much a part of my life. I’ve always been making publications with students. For the 20 years I was in Intensive English centres, I was oriented towards creating publications with students – collecting their work, putting it in book form, reproducing them and giving them back to the students as a collection, little anthologies. Just photocopied books.

I saw teaching itself as a creative enterprise and during my studies for an MA(TESOL) in the 90’s, I was introduced to the idea of a ‘curriculum genre’ – where you think of the process of teaching a unit of work as a staged process, like a text that has parts that relate to a whole and to its context and purpose. I was lucky to be exposed to the Systemic Linguists, and exciting ideas like The Mode Continuum where you can think of text types graduating from concrete to abstract, from personal to objective, spoken to written. At that time, I wrote a book called Writing in the Visual Arts that was a collection of staged texts and tasks for students to learn how to write essays about visual art objects. It was published within the Intensive English Centre network.

But I’ve also had a lot to do with book editing with other people, producing anthologies of anti-war poetry, experimental prose, and women’s writing. I worked with Ken Bolton on Magic Sam magazine, had my own imprint Sea Cruise Books publishing books by Ken Bolton, Kerry Leves, Kris Hemensley, Robert Kenny, Denis Gallagher, Joanne Burns, Carmel Kelly, Moya Costello and Barbara Brooks. I worked on anthologies with Damian White & Tom Thompson, the No Regrets group, Sneja Gunew, Kit Kelen, Mark Roberts & Carmel Kelly, Kit Kelen, Dael Allison & Les Wicks.

I like the whole idea of book production and since I’ve been involved with printmaking, I’ve been making artist books of my own, so that’s just the book as a physical object.

PETER:
I’ll interrupt you here – going back to that question about teaching, do you remember those Fordigraphs that smelt of methylated spirits? I remember making books for my students too, with a Fordigraph. They used to smell. It always smelled like knowledge.

Any number of people in our circle or those that we brushed up against, by now have thrown up their arms and given it all away. Why do you keep at it?

ANNA:
Given all what away?

PETER:
Their art making.

ANNA:
Oh, have they? They’ve stopped making stuff. Oh, my attitude is the opposite. Whilst I was full time teaching for 36 years, with the department – I mean, I taught part time before that as well – I didn’t have a lot of time to do my own work, so retirement has been fantastic for me because I now have my own studio and in my studio I can produce artwork, I can do my writing, I can make my music. I’ve got painting and printmaking and it’s just full on. What’s worrying me is that I can’t get enough done. My time might be limited. It’s a pity I didn’t retire earlier, so I could have done more. I just like doing it.

PETER:
Yes. So, perhaps we’ve focused a bit too much on the writing to start with. Let’s have a look at some of the other stuff that you make. The music and the sound component, the printmaking, and painting. How do you think it all fits together? If I can tell a story at this point: there’s a concert, I think, in 1969, where Neil Young is playing with Crazy Horse and in the middle of the concert, there’s an audience member who gets up and says, “They all sound the same!” And Neil Young says, “Yeah, that’s because they’re all part of the same song.” And I thought for a rock and roll guy, that was a pretty smart move to come up with that on his feet. So, I’d like to ask how you see the painting, printmaking, sound work, all fitting into your world?

ANNA:
Yeah, interesting. I can’t say I know how it’s all connected. I don’t know. Except that, as far as I’m concerned, the creative process is part of being able to dive into the well, W-e-l-l, with a capital W. Somehow you can access this area although I’m not suggesting that what I’m doing looks like a personal thing when you see the end product, because I don’t do confessional stuff. The funny thing I’ve noticed with music, one of the difficult things about it, and I suppose it’s the same with visual art, it’s really quite difficult to get away from conventional, automatic forms. You find yourself slipping into conventional ways when you write music, it’s difficult not to write something you’ve already heard. But there’s the collaborative nature of these things – it’s difficult to work in a vacuum, and what I do is: attend workshops and I have a workshop in my own studio with other people. I do workshops with printmakers, not as a teacher but as a fellow practitioner. And that’s important because it stops you from getting too self-engrossed. And also with music, I’ve had two different music teachers for the last 10 years. The first one, Andy Campbell, pushed me into composition. I wasn’t intending to head in that direction, but he pushed it because he’s a composer, a composer in the popular music sense. And the second one, James Fuller, is a person who did a degree in music composition. So, he’s incredibly helpful when it comes to talking about music and making music, recording music.

PETER:
When you mention The Well with the capital W…. Does this tell me that there’s a source that you draw from, or are there different sources you draw from? And if there are, what are they?
Can they be named?

ANNA:
When I say The Well, I do mean the source. It is a source, but the source must obviously consist of everything you know, and it’s got a lot to do with our collective memory as well. It’s not just an individual thing. I think the well is the unconscious…. Which is pretty big. It’s a big thing.

PETER:
It’s a big thing. (laughs)

ANNA:
I don’t see it as entirely individual, you know what I mean?

PETER:
There’s an interesting link here, because earlier on, you said you were thinking that perhaps, as a younger woman, you’d go into psychology, and now we’re talking about these kind of sources.

ANNA:
No, it’s not that I was thinking of going into psychology. I participated in psychoanalysis. I was in psychoanalysis with a psychoanalyst, Prof Reginald Martin⁴, for 18 months. I went three times a week and we did fairly traditional psychoanalytic stuff. Most of it was free association, and I had already initiated my career as a painter. So free association was already on the table, I didn’t find it that hard. And that, as a tool, is really helpful in creative work.

PETER:
And it stayed with you. If I was to ask you, what your favourite colour was at this point, it’d seem a bit stupid, but if I was to ask you… We tend to think that we get a better or clearer view of ourselves and the world we operate in by standing on the shoulders of giants and I’m wondering, if I had to ask you – who were the people that you’ve drawn on?

ANNA:
You mean, visual artists or writers or musicians?

PETER:
Well, because we’ve decided it’s all one song, you make up your own mind. Who are the people whose shoulders you’ve stood on and felt have given you the most?

ANNA:
It’s so multitudinous, but I remember as a small child, one of my most vivid impressions was when I first saw, in a newsagent’s, a tiny art book of Post-Impressionists, and instead of just being all about drawing, like a lot of art was in those days, it was colourful, it was incredibly colourful. And that colourfulness really affected me, and I’ve been, in the visual art sense, really into working with colour more than any other single thing. And that for me, crosses figuration and abstraction, too. The whole idea of which visual artist might be important to you, I find it really difficult because I’m familiar with so many of them, and especially now as well, having been running this gallery for 10 years and having shows, changing every week. My life is so saturated in art, and it was saturated in art because I was an art teacher. I can’t narrow it down like that. And there’s so many brilliant practitioners around. It’s incredible…

PETER:
The way that it works for me, I think, is that at certain times, you need to know that there are certain ghosts out there that you can draw on.

ANNA:
Absolutely. I’m often firing off and stimulated by other people’s work. I think the idea of an artist doing solo stuff is just really… not many people can do that. And certainly I don’t want to do that. I think we’re all swimming in this sea of each other’s work. In both writing, music, visual art, especially so now, when the internet makes everything so incredibly accessible. You can see everything, you can hear everything, you can read anything.

PETER:
But it’s interesting again, that when I asked the previous question, that it came back to a book that you picked up, a book of Post-Impressionist art, and this seems to be the constant. Do you think this is a constant in your life? In the arts? If it was going to be measured by anything, is the book the true measurement?

ANNA:
I don’t think so. Not in my case. I think it would be in your case. (laughs)

PETER:
(laughs) That I’m a compulsive book person.

ANNA:
But in your case, you haven’t been swept off into the virtual realm at all, whereas I live in the virtual realm a lot. I have something like six hours screen time a day. I do all my admin online, I read online. I don’t buy books anymore. Books keep coming into the house in an annoying manner because people give you stuff, or you have to buy them at a book launch. But generally, if I’m reading stuff, I’m not reading it in book form, I’m only reading online or virtually.

PETER:
I will come to that in a minute. I’ll just go back a bit. One of the questions I had here that you’ve just touched on anyway, but I think we need more detail about is – you’ve been running the gallery now for a decade. What prompted you to launch into running a gallery, and then what effect has the gallery had on what you make?

ANNA:
Yeah, we didn’t intend to run a gallery originally. We intended to acquire studio space. It’s just that the studio spaces that we acquired had a shopfront attached to them, and we thought, “What are we going to do with that?” In order to have a studio with a shopfront, you’ve got to then obscure the shopfront, you know what I mean? It’s a waste. So, we thought, well, we’ll have a gallery, and we’ll just make it so that artists run their own thing and we don’t have to have too much to do with it. Except that I do quite a lot of admin for it. I do a bit of promotion. And it’s had a big effect on me, in a similar way that workshops have an effect on me, because in visual art, the thing that most fascinates me is technique. Techniques – how to do things, and printmaking, you know, is such a huge field of highly varied techniques. It’s just endless. And then when we have artists coming into our gallery, they are often using different techniques to make things. And so, I get to talk to them and find out what they’re doing. And learning by being with other people and finding out other people’s processes has a big effect on me. I often make work that responds to those discoveries.

PETER:
It sounds like a partnership.

ANNA:
Yeah, well, especially with my printmaking friends. My printmaking friends do interesting things, and I think, wow, I’m going to try that. But I’m talking about technique, not subject matter.

PETER:
Yeah. I’ve got a close friend, Theo Strasser and he’s basically a painter, but we made a book together and I saw him using cardboard as a method of printing, inking up cardboard, using that kind of corrugated surface. And I thought, “Why didn’t I think of that?”

ANNA:
He’s monoprinting off cardboard?

PETER:
Yeah. Which came as a surprise to me.

ANNA:
Well, you know, there are a million YouTube videos about monoprinting.

PETER:
Don’t tell me that. You’ve got me. You’ve probably understood by listening to these questions that I’ve used the word “make”, things that you “make”, in preference to words such as “creativity” or “inspiration” … or “informational”. Do you see yourself as a maker or as an inspired creative or is it just a bit of both? And are we down that “Well” again?

ANNA:
No, I don’t like to use those distinctions between art and craft. I think that anyone who makes things is an artisan, and that’s the great thing about it. Making things and being an artisan is great. There’s the conventional social thing that’s hierarchical, puts the various arts in a hierarchy.

PETER:
Yeah, good. Can you keep going on that?

ANNA:
Well in Sydney anyway, I think it’s probably the same in Melbourne. There seems to be two art worlds, you know, there’s the art world of the big-time galleries, where they seem to –
I mean, they do have some object stuff – but they’re often veering towards the kind of stuff that has not much to it. Like something small, blown up very large or some idea that doesn’t seem that significant. Whereas the world that I’m operating in always does and the gallery is a part of, is different because we have people coming to us who want to do their own thing. They’re self-directed, they want to be independent and they don’t like participating in the mainstream arts scene. To me, they seem so much more substantial, strangely. You know, they’re producing things on a smaller scale usually, but they’re so dedicated and so expert at what they do and they’re so admirable. Whereas I feel that what’s being promoted by the mainstream art scene is, you know, arbitrary, nepotistic and not very substantial, a lot of the time.

Sometimes there are interesting things. Sometimes, there’ll be a fabulous painting. There are some really skillful people around, and there’ll be some fabulous artwork that we show in our gallery that’s about A3 size, but down in one of the big shows, there’ll be a thing that’s not as skillfully done as the image I’ve seen, except it’s the size of a house.

PETER:
No, there was a time too, I recall, when I got sick and tired of seeing an accumulation of a single thing, like 2000 red balloons or 5,000 bikes, and they’re all assembled, and they’re meant to say something… Just going back to the craft and technique issues that you raised, I’ve always admired those people who can do several things. And I think I took my cue from Gutenberg, the printer. Could he have printed what he printed if he wasn’t already trained as a jeweller? I like that duality, because it gives you access to all sorts of things that those single-directed makers of huge things don’t have any notion of.

We’ve often discussed in our conversations, and I understand now that you are part of that digital world. It’s the acceleration of that world that’s interested me, and I’ve done my best to avoid it, but you’ve done exactly the opposite. So how has living under this digital constellation affected the work that you make?

ANNA:
I’m still using traditional techniques, like etching techniques that were created in the 15th century. But I also use software like Photoshop to manipulate an image. I might get an image or make an image and then manipulate it in Photoshop to make it conform to something that’s more suitable for the technique I’m using. It gives you a lot of versatility to be able to use those skills. And also in music, for example, these days I’ve got a vocalist friend, Elizabeth Slottje⁵ (a musicologist) who lives in North Queensland and I’ll send her a transcript and MP3 of a song and she’ll make a vocal track. Then I’ll drop her track into the Logic Pro software on my computer. I might use computerised drums in a song and then either I or my teacher might record a guitar track or piano track for the song. So, without participating in performed music, you can create songs that are multi-instrumental. That wasn’t as possible or as easy a few years ago. It’s incredible. The digital world gives you so much. Also, I use the internet as an archive. I’ve got blogs and social media sites like Instagram to record my work and the activities of the gallery.

So, to some extent, it frees you from the need to get published or get exhibited. And I think a lot of people have taken that opportunity, to bypass the mainstream gatekeepers.

PETER:
Maybe that’s what I was thinking about before when I asked you if you’re unlike a lot of the practitioners that I knew 10 years ago, because they’ve thrown up their hands and said, “Well, I can’t do this anymore. I can’t be going to the commercial galleries, hoping for an exhibition.” So maybe the internet is a circuit breaker in that sense.

ANNA:
Yeah, it is. Well, I never attempted to go to any commercial galleries in the first place, but…

PETER:
And as far as distributing your work or making your work known, how do you know that it’s been received or looked at or understood if it’s not in the newspaper the next morning?

ANNA:
(laughs) Yeah. Well, as far as writing is concerned, I really don’t know because I avoid sending my work anywhere unless I’m asked for it. But I was just looking at my visual art blog⁶ this morning and I suppose I’ve been running that for about 10 years. And I’ve found that I’ve had 20,000 views of it which is alright. A point of interest – when I Google my name, I get about 4,000 responses. When I Google your name, I get 17,000 responses. Through searches and on Instagram, there are masses of entries that reference you and your work including your fabulous retrospective of artist books, Silence is no refuge⁷ that is on now at Monash Uni library. So even though you might avoid direct contact with the virtual world, it is not avoiding you!

With writing, publication for me can occur when I do public readings. Otherwise, if I produce an actual physical book, I’ve got no idea what happens to it except when I sell or give away copies myself. The readership for poetry in Australia is minimal. In terms of the music, I’ve put 14 pieces of my music on Bandcamp⁸ and that makes it accessible in theory. But, I’m happy with the amount of exposure that I can access.

PETER:
Right. I know that the trudge of time leaves most of us with hip replacements, sectioned intestines, and sore knees, heart transplants. So, it’s only a small step to seeing everything around us as a collision of uncertainties. Yet in what I’ve seen of your work and what I’ve read of your work, it comes from a place of some optimism or some hope. Am I wrong?

ANNA:
No, that’s correct. I do feel hopeful. One of the problems I’ve had recently, though, as far as writing is concerned, writing that’s not song lyrics, is that I find it hard at the moment to situate myself, if I’m going to write fiction to situate myself as an author persona. Poetry doesn’t seem to have quite the same problem, but with fiction, which is more based in reality… I’ve been trying to write this thing which is a mirror of my serial novel, the serial novel which was written in the ’90s called The Western Horizon. It explores identity politics to some extent, and Left wing stuff, current affairs. Now to try and write about today, in today’s equivalent of an alternative view, I find it very difficult. I find it really hard to situate myself at the moment, with Trumpism and the blatant war-mongering and all that. I don’t know where I’m coming from, in that sense.

PETER:
Well, that’s probably their aim. (laughs) Let’s go back to The Western Horizon for a minute.
Am I right in thinking that the first iteration of that appeared in HEAT magazine⁹?

ANNA:
Yeah, that’s right.

PETER:
OK, can you speak about the role that things like HEAT and Meanjin or Overland, those small magazines, had in your work?

ANNA:
Well, they’re the only places that I’ve ever been published. I’ve occasionally been published in a few mainstream anthologies. But, for me, even somewhere like HEAT or Giramondo is more mainstream than I’ve been accustomed to, because the publications that I’ve been published in are so small press, underground type of thing, they’re almost invisible.

PETER:
No, invisible’s good. (laughs) Now that you’re at this stage of your life, Anna, are you feeling content, smarter, more patient, more productive, than you were previously? Perhaps not in such a rush. Or have you always been a measured kind of art maker?

ANNA:
No, I think I’m in more of a rush now than I was before. But, I’ve always been an active kind of person and either active as a teacher or whatever. I’m always busy. I just don’t have the energy level that I used to have. My only regret.

PETER:
I know. The last question I’ve got for you: has living with Hilik¹⁰, who’s a terrific wood sculptor, modified or extended your own version of what art can do? Can you talk to that?

ANNA:
Well, it’s fantastic to have a partnership with somebody who is doing stuff. I mean, creative things, but as well as that Hilik is very much out in the world, in his job as a knife sharpener. And that’s also a really interesting thing about him. He has so many experiences and he’s so involved in life on the street. And then I love his work. So, it’s a really enriching type of thing.

PETER:
Ah good, because I know that when I was in his workshop the last time that we met, I saw some wonderful stuff there, and it got to the point, I think, where he and I exchanged work. I think maybe the reason I asked the question is that it doesn’t seem to me that your methods are that different, your approach to art is that different. How do you see that?

ANNA:
Well, his work requires so much physical effort. Mine’s much more mental. You know, to make one of his wooden sculptures, it takes a huge amount of physical work, whereas the most work I ever do is carving lino or drawing or something like that, it’s not comparable. It’s great that we operate in different areas. But the other great thing about living with Hilik is that we have very similar views about things and about people and about politics and the art world. So, we’re not holding each other back in that sense.

PETER:
I think when I walked into his studio, what appealed to me was a reflection of what I do.
There’s a plank of wood over here. There’s a bit of rope over there, there’s a bit of wire over here. And it can all come together and it works as a piece, which is, I guess, what collage or montage is.
And I saw that relationship with your work, picking up a bit of text, some sound maybe, some colour here, and we’re all down that same world, we’re putting bits and pieces together, trying to form a whole.

ANNA:
When I first set up my studio 10 years ago, I designed it like an Art Room from a school in the sense that it contains a multitude of things and so many things are possible.