Cirrus@Austlit

Funded by the State Library of Queensland's (SLQ) Queensland ANZAC Centenary Grants program and supported by the State Library of Queensland’s QANZAC 100: Memories for a New Generation project, this series of five podcasts was produced by Elaine Acworth when she was the SLQ Q ANZAC 100 Fellow in 2015 and 2016. They explore her father's experience of World War I.

'Gloria Clare has led an extraordinary life. With a searing intellect and boundless talent, she ran from small-town Australia to Europe in her reckless youth, became a diva and found love. She’s been chanteuse and composer, rebel and romantic. But these things are dim and distant for her. In her fifties and having recently suffered a stroke, Gloria’s memories are slipping away.

'Now, Gloria uses the language of her heart to remember things – she sings. Music is the sextant by which she navigates her stormy memory. Singing helps her recall the painful episode in her past when, as a young unmarried mother in ’70s Australia, she was shamed, cowed and harassed into giving up her child for adoption.

'Before Gloria’s mind deserts her completely, she has one mission: reconnect with Ned, the boy she lost so long ago, get to know his family, and make some kind of amends. But as you’d expect from such a strong-willed, independent woman, she’s going to do it her way, by her rules.' (Publication summary)

'"Water Wars" is a timely and darkly funny exploration of what happens between neighbours as our country gallops between climatic extremes and we must adapt to both flood and drought. How do we sustain our communities under this pressure? What new ways of understanding our environment and ourselves do we need to develop to live in this changing landscape?

Set in a time of water scarcity, but referencing a past time of flood, Water Wars charts the bumpy road of neighbourliness as people decide that their way is the only water way, and tempers fray, then explode. It plots the descent into madness of the occupants of a regular street, in any suburb or small town - the very people who saved each other in the floods years before. In the middle of all this is a young boy, Cal, and his dog, Freddo. Cal is trying to understand his world - the nightly news of drought refugees, the ever-present dust, the attack on his friend, Janey, by water thieves. And now Cal's nightmares are coming alive.

"Water Wars" looks at the ever-present tension between two competing human instincts - the instinct to survive, to save yourself and bugger the rest of them. And the instinct to protect a stranger - the instinct that brought out the mud Army, the instinct to save the herd, the community - to self-sacrifice. How do we balance the two? And what happens to an imaginative 7 year old as we do?' Source: www.laboite.com.au/ (Sighted 20/07/2011).

'Elaine Acworth's 'Above' is a quirky play about shedding the shackles of the modern world. It tells us that the true souls and selves of women have been drowned in a tidal wave of technology, mundane role playing and an absence of spirituality. There is only one chance, one life, and to truly live it, you must be a friend to yourself.'

Source:

'Women in Shorts', Tharunka, 20 May 1997, p.32.

Set in the northern Queensland town of Charters Towers the action takes place over one day in 1957 - the day on which the world's first artificial satellite (the Sputnik) and a symbol of the possibilities of the future is to be seen in the sky over the town. It is also the day during which most of the characters will have to deal with significant and sometimes painful change. The main character, Clivvy, is thirty seven years old and is battling with the past and her inability to leave the town. Having won a sponsorship to go overseas to study piano at age nineteen the war intervened. In the following years many other occurrences deny her a life of her own. It is, however, her sense of being a composer - with her music coming 'out of the underbrush' which gives her the strength she needs.