A face stares out from my PC screen: a suited-up man about 30yrs old, the boyish face round, the hairline receding. I see a clean face, but for the sparing outline of a beard.  I see a thin mouth, the eyes narrowed and slightly turned, the face of a man who killed eight people by wrecking an Oslo building with a fertiliser bomb; before systematically hunting down and killing another 69 at a summer youth camp. His beaming face is here, there and everywhere, the trial lengthy.

I’m tired of the casual disregard for life.

Two young brothers explode pipe bombs among a crowd of onlookers at the finish line of the Boston Marathon, killing three people and wounding over 260. The younger of the two is captured and arrested, a handsome kid of barely 20yrs old and hardly shaving. The pale face has strong eyebrows and large brown eyes staring dreamily at the camera. There’s a Beatlish mop of brown hair and the slightest of self-conscious smiles.

I’m tired of the perversion of innocence.

This morning the newspaper lay silent on the kitchen table, the front page picture screaming out a message. Two young men, run down, stab and hack to death a solitary off-duty soldier on a busy London street; the picture of a wild face shouting out from beneath a woollen beanie, eyes and mouth wide open.

I’m tired of wars, the radicals, the crazed and the losers, the street theatre and circus; I’m tired of the macabre parade, the narcissistic, publicity-hunting of nobodies.

I’m tired of the faces, the falsified fame.

Karratha’s very own                 Alana Munro

To be perfectly honest, the only things I knew about the town of Karratha until recently, was that it was somewhere up in the northwest Australian outback, and the commercial centre of the Pilbara region; Karratha taking its name from the indigenous language meaning `good country’. How could I possibly have guessed it was also home to the now famous writing dynamo, Alana Munro?

Along with her family of 3-kids, a husband and a doting dog, Alana somehow manages to maintain her own website, while hosting a Google+ community for writers, bloggers and poets; her vibrant  `Support-a-Writer’ group offering a wide range of support and encouragement. But wait, there’s more: with her first book – `Women Behaving Badly’ – receiving excellent reviews and critical acclaim, Alana still finds time to interview willing writers, along with imbibing  the occasional glass of a cheeky Australian Shiraz.

Nevertheless, when first reading of `an interview opportunity’ conducted by a famous author, I still hesitated..… after-all, it is something `we writers’ invariably endeavour to squirm out of; preferring the lonely but noble lot of a struggling, literary loner.

Cochrane clan tartan

- Alana: “It is a pretty extensive interview.”

- Me: Mmm.

- Alana: “I want to learn about the person behind the craft. The questions are interesting! I find many interviews really boring, so I only ask questions that will get you talking. It’s really easy – I don’t see any point in over complicating things!”

- Me: Mmmm.

Now, as anyone who has had dealings with Alana will know, she is one talented dude with an infectious Scottish lilt and a sociably persuasive manner.

So….. to cut a long story short, My First Interview is here.

Thank you Alana.

Shlàinte, ic

Nyksund causeway – Vesterålen

The narrow road is a roughed-out, potholed track gouged from ragged Norwegian mountains. Winding alongside a grey Arctic Ocean, it’s graced with the occasional passing bay and kept in place against northern tempests by discarded mountain boulders.

Turning a last cliffside corner I stop the car and push open the door, buffeted by a wild wind, the dashboard map flying into my girlfriend’s face and the door slamming shut against my shoulder. Farther along is a concrete-buttressed causeway snaking its way along the final 100m; an open camping space ahead and across the way a rustic Venetian vision with a Wild West twist.

We’ve flown 1000km from Oslo to the northern city of Tromsø, well inside the Arctic Circle, hiring a car and driving west for six hours via sweeping bridges and tunnels up to 3.5km long; all the way to the Norwegian island of Vesterålen. With Norway’s jigsaw geography of bridges, tunnels and skerries – along with the fjords and ferries – it’s difficult to tell where the mainland ends and these islands begin.

Once home to 1500 residents in the fishing season, the resurrected ghost town of Nyksund, was completely deserted by the late 1970s; the small port deemed obsolete due to its shallow waters and dangerous access.

These days there are about 25 permanent residents, due to a 1986 Berlin meeting with a German professor, working with juvenile delinquents facing possible prison. A last-chance offer was mooted, a summer project for 200 boys: hands-on clean-up work culminating in a second chance for Nyksund.

Two rows of saloon like buildings straddle a dark canal, teetering precariously on grey flagstone sea walls. Crooked facades and narrow wooden wharves gather for mutual support from the raging seas and Arctic winds.

Nyksund Harbour – Vesterålen

On our first night the air is oddly still; the weather fickle here. Lights from empty upstair rooms escape from small barred windows to throw fiery reflections across the canal. High gabled facades on leaning timber piles cast shimmering shadows that stretch to reach their partners on the opposite side.

Here and there among surrounding mountains, double-storey Shipping News timber-plank cottages go it alone, away from the gaggle of wharfside Nyksund; some perch and prop against impossible rocky knolls, with tie-down cables strung from upper walls to steel pegs rammed into rocky ground.

At the ‘living museum’ guesthouse Holmvik Brygge, our accommodating hosts are Germans seeking the quiet life – Jasmin here for over six years, and Ssemjon for more than a decade.

Dinner is a shared tasting plate of smoked seafood: strips of haddock, sea trout and something darker: a cube of whale meat. The Lofoten classic of cod tongues, is lightly doused in flour and fried with flair and a dash of curry; compliments of chef Ssemjon. The crisp German Riesling has a healthy dash of fruit.

“This summer has not been so good,” Jasmin confides, “no tomatoes, and the greens so slow.” It’s been wet for campers too, with many deserting tents for the drier environs of the Brygge, where each rustic room has its own personality.

Ssemjon smiles at the mention of weather. When Jasmin first arrived, he worried he may need to lock her up to persuade her to stay. Disparaging Norwegian southerners talk of two seasons up here: the “white winter” and “green winter”. Ssemjon’s fear proved unfounded – Jasmin loves it all – but she concedes “the white” brings ice and snow to “smooth over the potholes in Ssemjon’s road”.

In the morning kittiwakes shriek and whistle from the ridges and ledges of long-deserted lofts. Waiting chicks clamber for parents that swoop and soar on their return fly-past from distant feeding grounds. The wind shuffles stacks of loose cladding boards. We breakfast on hard-boiled eggs, toast, cold meats and black coffee, and gaze out the window at Jasmin’s “Nyksund television” to ponder the day ahead.

The `Queen’s Route’ is a five-hour hike over headland rock, earth, stone and peat, walked in 1994 by Norway’s Queen Sonia, taking in the island’s postcard mountains tumbling to sea, the sites of ancient AD 750 Viking and AD 1650 Sami settlements. There are bleaker reminders of a 14^th century Norway in the ruins of towns decimated by the Black Plague; a time where two-thirds of the population were killed, leaving those remaining depleted and poor; a far cry from the Norway of today.

From Nyksund we walk the causeway, wind at our backs, scrambling up a rambling sheep track; the steep climb rewarded with a view over a Nyksund of matchbox buildings. Mountain sheep with long tails stare with bored eyes, the slippery mud imprinted with many cloven hooves.

The Queen’s Route – Vesterålen

Just below the summit of Sørkulen, we pick cloudberries at 450m; something akin to pale swollen raspberries. The ground is hard and stony underfoot, bluebells, sprays of mauve and yellow flowers sprout from sphagnum and moss-laden rock. The curled fronds of shining bright-green ferns seem too delicate for an alpine world.

Across the headland we look down on the village of Langenes, our path again steep and muddy. To the right, low black clouds hang over the tiny church steeple. Inside is a simple wooden frame to which a young girl was once desperately tied then tossed ashore by mammoth waves, the sole survivor of a terrible shipwreck.

From the small fishing hamlet of Stø, we’re returning to Nyksund by water. Olaf nods towards a small, bright-yellow inflatable boat hitched to a rickety wooden dock, straining at its rope leash and bobbing with each wave. I look at the billowing grey seas and then at my girlfriend; but it’s Olaf’s joke. My concerns are dispelled as he points a gloved finger towards a 6m state-of-the-art jetboat with twin motors and two rows of saddle-like seats.

Olaf dresses in the all-weather working gear standard here: a cross between patchwork, multi-coloured overalls and a ski suit. These days he takes tourists on whale and bird safaris and visits nearby skerries. “It has not been a good summer”, he reminds us, “lots of rain, with just some baby puffins left.” The parent birds having already migrated. “These are the weaker chicks”, he says with a resigned nod. “It is the way here; the eagles will have them.”

He whistles as we head out, his boat bouncing across choppy waves, “only 1.5m small ones today.”

Nyksund Harbour – Vesterålen

He’s happy with his lot in Stø, his father and grandfather fishermen; his grandmother once cooking for the fishermen of Nyksund. Olaf’s son, too, has chosen a life on the sea.

I flinch as cold water splashes across my face and I look up at Olaf. “Some may be 2.5 metres,” Olaf concedes with a chuckle. “Tonight, you shall not be needing salt on your dinner.” Our fluoro, sea-survival suits are snug. With an ocean temperature of 12°C, it’s a touch warmer than the air that rushes past my ears.

On our last night we’re presented with a surprise at Holmvik Brygge: a garnish of Jasmin’s first lettuce of a tough summer, and her special apple crumble – her own grandmother’s secret recipe, but with a dash of cinnamon. She looks over at Ssemjon leaning by the bar. “Sometimes a little of the new can be good,” she says, “but not too much.”

`For all those who were not forgotten’ – Lower Manhattan

Just off Broadway I’m in a side street by City Hall, the ubiquitous New York crowds somehow missing, the hum of traffic vague and distant. A lonesome monument sits silent and tucked in the shadow of City Planning offices and a 30-storey Federal skyscraper; that building’s construction leading to the 1991 discovery of the largest North American cemetery of Africans and those of African descent. This is a small corner of a much larger 17^th and 18^th Century ‘Negros Buriel Ground’, originally 2.6Ha and the resting place of 15000 men, women and children.

With New York’s voracious growth, the burial ground was long-forgotten. On this small corner alone, old buildings had been demolished, the ground re-filled and covered with the new; the remains of 419 souls found 8m below where I stand. With the discovery, all building work here stopped, with a traditional African ceremony to rebury all remains in 2003. Then began the six day `Rites of Ancestral Return’; the journey beginning at Howard University in Washington DC – where the appropriate research took place – the procession moving through several major cities and finishing back here in New York; work on this, the African Burial Ground National Monument completed in 2007.

From the street I step past green grass and seven earthen mounds, the reinterred remains; each re-buried in hand-carved mahogany coffins from Ghana, and each lined with African cloth. I stand for a moment by a giant tilted panel in dark grey granite, with the reflection of City Hall, the carved shape of a cemetery guardian, and the words – 

`For all those who were lost

 For all those who were stolen

 For all those who were left behind

 For all those who were not forgotten’

There’s another tilted panel behind, forming a roof; shelter at the entry to the libation chamber beneath. A narrow ramp gradually descends to the centre of an open circular chamber, at the depth the remains were rediscovered – the sound of trickling water follows my footsteps – at the bottom the inner circle an earthly map, darker stone on a pale granite disc; the jigsaw of worldly continents. Scribed circles radiate out from a West African epicentre. I stand in the centre reading sentences that straddle an etched circumference, strings of words strangely cold and detached; unknown men, women and children; one recording :

`BURIAL 128 – INFANT UNDER TWO AND A HALF MONTHS’

A Cemetery Guardian – Lower Manhattan

The women laboured in their masters’ homes, the men on heavier work and civil building projects, children indentured from an early age. Lives were short. There was violence. Some died of overwork and malnutrition, others from smallpox or yellow fever. But with colonial laws banning gatherings of over twelve people, funerals were in effect illegal. No ceremonial accounts exist.

But there’s dignity in the written reports on the remains found; a small child with a silver pendent around the neck; a string of beads about a woman’s waist; bodies in horizontal coffins with the faces up and looking east, in preparation for the next life; burial shrouds and coins gently placed on closed eyes.

I read of one man’s coffin, with the now familiar heart motif, this time formed with brass tacks and nails on the lid; the West African symbol urging all to learn from the lessons of the past in preparation for the future. There is strength in community, perseverance, sacrifice and respect.

The first settlers arrived in the Dutch colony in 1624 – the Indian island of Mannahatta – the first Africans arriving two years later in chains, from far-flung exotic shores now known as Cameroon, Sierra Leone, Ghana, Nigeria, Mozambique and Madagascar.

Silent witness – Lower Manhattan

By 1643, free settlers had arrived from all over the world, already a melting pot of different languages, customs and religions. A French priest claimed to have heard 18-languages on a single occasion, in a settlement of only 500. `New Amsterdam’ was granted the status of a Dutch city in 1653, with the British arriving in 1664 and promptly changing the name to `New York’.

In 1697 a law forbade any African funerals in the city public cemetery – no matter how small – with all Africans buried north of the city boundary. By the 1720s around a quarter of New York’s labour force were slaves. In 1745 the city expanded northwards; with the new city wall bisecting the existing burial ground. Final closure came in 1794, the land subsequently subdivided and sold off for development.

I hear footsteps at the top of the ramp, a stray passer-by; the outer circle a rising path up to the street pavement, with shining steel balustrade one side, low vertical wall on the outside. I run my hand along the face of the perimeter wall as I walk – shining marble – smooth, cold and black; bold African motifs mixed with eerie Manhattan reflections of modern city streetscapes.

Moeraki Harbour – South Island

We linger in the dark after coffee, among deserted café chairs of bleached wooden slats, tables and simple benches. The air smells of seaweed, salt and garlic. The night cries of wheeling gulls float across Moeraki Harbour – ‘sleepy sky’ in Maori – as little blue penguins nest between waterline rocks at our feet.

The café waitress has suggested we seek out a guide: “an odd loner who drops by every year.” So today we meet Neville; a pasty-faced, man with a confident, slow-talking manner offset by that peculiar Kiwi lilt. “You’re wondering what I’m doing down here?” We’re not, but my girlfriend nods.

With his family outside Auckland, Neville spent his early days boarding at King’s College, finally moving south to Christchurch and Canterbury University for a Masters and PhD. I exchange looks with my girlfriend; Neville doesn’t seem so odd.

It’s still unclear what Neville actually does, but he hasn’t finished. “I’m a geologist,” he offers. “Spend my time between up north and down here; wherever they find a job roaming beaches.” He laughs, picks at the brim of a battered sombrero. “Need to wear this though; otherwise my face burns something shocking.” We gaze across the harbour. “Get to some isolated places too. And then there’s the weather. Never know what it’ll do down here.” We stare up at a cloudless sky.

Neville looks around, this is the site of a 1936 whaling station where the hapless beasts were once hauled up and butchered. He tells of a more recent visit: a whale swimming within metres of where we stand; the creature “apparently the father of a respected Maori elder”.  Neville is smiling and continues with a brief history of NZ. “Well, just imagine this entire South Island as a canoe from where the Maori demigod Maui hauled the North Island from the sea like a big fish.”  I ask how he knows these stories and he matter-of-factly shrugs. “We all learn them at school.”

My girlfriend enquires about the Maori down here. Neville says there were never very many, with only seasonal visits to hunt and fish and to collect the famous NZ greenstone. The last full-blooded Maori had gone by 1900, drifting back north and intermarrying.

Oyster Catchers – Moeraki, South Island

Next morning we rise in the weak dawn light to take advantage of the low tide. Seabirds cry unseen. We plan to walk the ruined railway cutting westwards from the village, on a path lined by rambling bushes of banana passionfruit and clumps of grass that sprout startled rabbits. Dropping down to the rubble and sand, we meet Neville by the water; then amble along a flat beach. The ring of a bellbird greets the new day from somewhere onshore, as the first sun throws shimmers of light on rolling ripples that splash at our boots. Three wary Oyster Catchers whistle and run; red stilt legs a whirr on a mirror film of water on sand.

After 30min, Neville stops and points to distant shoreline specks emerging from sea mist. Continuing on they gradually evolve into odd, but perfectly round boulders up to 2m diameter; the gargantuan marbles of playful giants. We tramp on until finally standing among half-buried spheres. They really are impossibly rounded, cold and smooth to the touch; the surface etched with hairline cracks in crazy patterns. Some boulders nestle like eggs against steep sandy cliffs that rise to rolling paddocks.

The smallest have been souvenired in years gone by. “Just picked up,” says Neville with a hint of disgust, “thrown in wheelbarrows and taken wherever.” Others lie shattered in pieces as if exploded; cracks turning to fractures in the extreme weather. Tiny bubbles lay in frothy serpentine streams and drift between shallow tidal ponds by each boulder; the strange bubble patterns a mix of saltwater impregnated with air.

Moeraki Boulders – South Island

Neville looks up from a boulder, then out to sea. “Long time past, during the great migrations, a war canoe floundered just here,” he points eastwards, “in raging seas; a giant mono-hulled craft hewn from a single tree, a hundred men drowned.” I follow Neville’s gaze to a darkening sea and picture hapless warriors flailing in ferocious waves, their canoe broken and bindings ripped; the tall decorated stern lurching at wild angles trailing flaxen pennants lashed by wild wind and water.

Neville’s brown eyes narrow. “Out there, the bones of the wrecked vessel are the reef; the sweet potato cargo now rock. These very boulders are the petrified food baskets; originally round gourds carrying Maori seeds and food.” There’s a smile on Neville’s freckled face as he seems to dismiss the legend. “Really, they’re just boulders of course; grey-coloured septarian concretions.” Neville points a finger in the direction of black sandstone cliffs. “The sea is slowly eroding those and uncovering new boulders; once the ancient sea-floor sediments of the Palaeocene period. We’re talking 60 million years ago.”

I’m impressed with the geologist’s ability to seamlessly cross from the Maori to the scientific versions, but Neville sets me straight. “They’re just a bunch of old stories,” he adds. But then we’re in for a surprise.

It seems Neville’s great-grandmother was a Maori from Auckland; his white Irish great-grandfather a `Pakeha’ in Maori speak. I find myself staring at Neville’s rusty shock of hair and freckled face; before he places a hand on my shoulder and explains. “Yes, yes, I know; most find it hard to believe.”  Neville pauses and chews the corner of his mouth. “So, these days I suppose I’m technically Maori.”  I ask what he means, and he answers that a Maori was once legally defined as half-caste or more, but by 1974 had become  `…a person of the Maori race… …any descendant of such a Maori…’ Neville stops for a moment, seemingly deep in thought.  “It’s a little contentious these days; but to me it means nothing. I know where I stand.”

Moeraki Boulders – South Island

Suddenly Neville falls silent, abruptly turning for some reason and looking away, northwards to Hampton Beach where billowing clouds now gather. There’s a speck of rain and we both follow his gaze to just below the horizon, where as if on demand, small rounded dorsal fins appear; the rarest cetaceans in the world: 1m long Hector’s dolphins, their short-snouted, milky-grey bodies splashed with distinctive black and white markings.

Neville seems pensive and not a little befuddled. “You know, I see them often here.” His voice is on the verge of a whisper as he turns to face us once more, his dark brown eyes thoughtful. “The souls of doomed Maori sailors and the prophets of bad weather.”

Late afternoon I meet Candelaria at a café on the slopes of the Albaicin – the old Moorish quarter – and sip peppermint tea from petite porcelain cups. She orders almond cookies and apologises for her Spanish. The courtyard is open, with large paved flagstones, the tables squarish, small and scattered. Surrounding high walls on three sides are alive with masses of espaliered red roses.

Alhambra citadel (from the Albaicin) – Granada

We sit soaking up the last of the sun, gazing eastward over receding terra cotta rooves as they disappear from view down to the winding river realm of the Darro. Across the river lay slopes cloaked in the green of lush gardens, up to the rising knoll and already russet-tinged walls of the Alhambra citadel; once home to 13^th and 14^th century Moorish rulers.

Candelaria, a mosaic artist, suggested this café to watch the sun set over the Alhambra. She has shining eyes to match her name, dark olive skin a startling contrast to the white of a simple linen blouse; a bright embroidered mantoncillo casually draped over her shoulders. We’re chatting of Washington Irving’s `Tales of the Alhambra’; Irving an American writer `spellbound in the old enchanted pile’ of a dilapidated Alhambra when living there in 1829. Her eyes widen as she flicks the pages. “Ah, yes; a wonderful read. My son knows all these stories.” She gently rests my book on the table and looks up. Like Irving, Candelaria is captivated by Andalusia, its exotic mix of the Moorish and Gothic. But she tells me, it’s this place – the Albaicin – where the magic truly lay. “And to be finally actually living here is a dream come true…like coming home in some strange way.” Candelaria looks wistful, eyes half-closed in thought.

But wait, there’s more

Thanks so much to Melanie (motherofnine9) for thinking of my humble blog for this award, being one of the 1st BC members to touch base with me on  joining this great community.

Melanie is well respected in blogging circles, a warm human being, a prolific writer and a great contributor. Please drop by for her humorous, heartwarming and thought provoking take on things.

So, firstly, to select several blogs I’ve recently discovered and follow regularly. (Followed by 7-things about myself…sorry!)

But wait, there’s more

I met Becky in the supermarket dairy aisle; a vivacious 40-something, born and raised locally. I’d seen her around, but we’d never met before Ed reappeared. I asked how my old friend was. “Not so good,” she said. “Still can’t sleep. And he really struggles with ANZAC Day. He won’t see a doctor. I’m hoping he’ll finally talk to other Vets.” Becky stared blankly at the shelves of milk. “What else can I do? I love that man.” A self-conscious smile and she turns away. I head home thinking of Ed and the upcoming reunions across Australia and New Zealand.

Gallipoli – `Anzac Cove and New Zealand Point, looking north, 1915-1918′ by Frank Hurley

Ed’s an old school friend, us both from the other side of town. With the coming of conscription, I missed `The Draft’ by one day, gravitating toward anti-war rallies and well-stacked, skinny girls in tight jeans and tees. Ed had wandered up north, picking fruit at first, then somehow ending up in Sydney. Next thing I heard, he’d joined the army and gone to Viet Nam. Becky is Ed’s wife number 3; of 4yrs now.

That night I readied my clothes for an early morning start, Ed having asked me to join him for the annual ANZAC Dawn Remembrance Service at the Melbourne Shrine. I settle at the computer, and with the bills paid, surf the web searching the ANZAC legend.

But wait, there’s more

Flinders St. Station – Melbourne

Straight from a long lunch, I raised my umbrella and headed for the pedestrian bridge. Crossing the river, I turned onto the station path; Melbourne cold and soaked after 6-days rain. I recall the soulful sounds of an upright 2-string Vietnamese fiddle commingling with the distant strains of bagpipes that echo from under the bluestone bridge. There’s the flash of a tram – all green and gold – the city-bound clatter and the clang of a bell.

Looking at my watch, I’ve shaken the umbrella and turned to drop down the steps, I scan my ticket after dodging smokers engrossed in that final cigarette; the bang of the rotating barricade rebounding on tunnel walls, me passing busy office workers pushing in the opposite direction. At the foot of my platform up-ramp something stirred; a dark shadowed mound, commuters bypassing in the gloom.

But wait, there’s more