Author - Ian
MacNeill
|
|
   
Above: part of 'Querelle of Glebe' 1993, Gary
Dunne.
Ian requested that Gary Dunne read this poem at
the funeral service.
Lana
Turner has collapsed!
I
was trotting along and suddenly
it
started raining and snowing
and
you said it was hailing
but
hailing hits you on the head
hard
so it was really snowing and
raining
and I was in such a hurry
to
meet you but the traffic
was
acting exactly like the sky
and
suddenly I see a headline
LANA
TURNER HAS COLLAPSED!
there
is no snow in Hollywood
there
is no rain in California
I
have been to lots of parties
and
acted perfectly disgraceful
but
I never actually collapsed
oh
Lana Turner we love you get up
Frank O'Hara
Biography and bibliography
Ian MacNeill, with his sharp unique style, has
been a contributor to the Australian gay lit scene for a long time.
He's appeared in a number of Australian gay anthologies including Travelling
on Love.... and Pink Ink. His published books include Red
and Silver, Libbing, and Beaches and Billabongs.
Available for download from here are pdf remakes of his chapbook TV
Tricks and the novel Red and Silver. Also available is
his novella Portraits for the Blind.
Ian's blog: ianmacneill.blogspot.com
Ian has contributed widely to
gay-ebooks publications including:
[title, publication link, date]
Haloed Perverse
Verse Feb 2006
[poetry collection] TV Tricks Feb 2006
Diary of Percival Geraint Boy's Summer Collection Nov 2006
Portraits for the Blind [novella] Portraits for the Blind Feb 2007
The Correspondent My Boyfriend's back July 2007
Le baiser de la fee Queer Hearts Dec 2007
Reconnaisance Flight Justified & Ancient Feb 2008
Barebacking Man
Overboard Nov 2008
In the Marble Bar I am a Camera Feb 2009
The Red Hat I
need some Dec 2009
Editor for Catching On
July 2010
Out of the desert and, then, he kissed me March 2011
Red and Silver (novel) Red and Silver April 2011
Queen Lear When
you're a boy Oct 2011
|
Farewell
With deep personal sadness, we record
the
passing of Ian MacNeill on 27 November 2011 from liver cancer. Queen
Lear, his story in our collection When you're a Boy, was
completed at St Vinnie's Hospice in Darlinghurst. Ian's literary output
over four decades of writing included poetry, fiction and biography as
well as journalism, reviews and commentary pieces. What is perhaps less
well known is the extent of his personal support and encouragement of
other writers, from the days of the emerging gay press in the
seventies, through the Mieli, Burn, BlackWattle and QueerLit era until
now. Ian's unique style, his personal courage and, most of all, his
abiding friendship will be greatly missed.
Tributes are welcome. Please send to gary@gay-ebooks.com.au
Ian MacNeill: a
tribute
I go to my bookshelves. (How nineties.) Ian is
there. He’s there in many of the key anthologies and journals that
formed Australian gay and lesbian writing and publishing: in Gay
Information (1984), Love and Death (1987); Cargo 1
–the opening story –
(1987); Travelling on Love in a Time of Uncertainty (1991); Pink
Ink
(1991); Fruit (1994). Together these publications mark the
years when
deaths from AIDS were rising inexorably, when BlackWattle Press took on
a central role in publishing and consolidating gay and lesbian writing
formations and the Mardi Gras festival was at its finest.
I notice what seems initially to be a gap in
Ian’s writing between 1987 and 1991. It’s not. In 1989 BlackWattle
Press published Ian’s first book: TV Tricks and other poems.
In 1990 he
published a collection of essays, Libbing. In 1990 and 1991
two of his
plays were read during Mardi Gras at the Belvoir Theatre. In 1992 there
were two novels: Red and Silver and Beaches and
Billabongs.
These two novels, as well as Libbing
and a
later third novel - Looking for Ms Warscewicz (1998) - were
published
under the imprint Miele Press. In the years after Pasolini was
murdered/assassinated, Italian gay liberationist Mario Miele was part
of a collective political and theatrical response to the social power
of heterosexual privilege. In his meditation on Miele’s suicide
‘Recalling Mario Miele’ (Pink Ink) Ian wrote, ‘He was not just
a gay
Rosa Luxemburg; he ate shit, actually’.
Ian continued the honourable practice of
publishing with small presses and self- publishing, common amongst many
feminist and gay writers, sometimes out of choice, sometimes out of
necessity. He was in good company, much of it female: poets like
Margaret Bradstock, Pam Brown, Lee Cataldi, Jill Jones, Louise
Wakeling; novelists like Jan McKemmish, Finola Moorhead. Gay community
publishing launched writers like Damien Millar, Phil Scott, Christos
Tsiolkas,
Ian understood these collective practices, just
as he understood the experimental writing they supported and how they
enabled new voices and new writing. Ian was a member of the organising
collective for the 1993 QueerLit
conference and is published in the
conference proceedings, A Cold Collation. He was well versed
in various
traditions of homo posturing, and what produced them:
you turned your back and comforted yourself
with Debussy,
or everybody.
(Love and
Death)
He loved Nina Simone and knew which china he
wanted to live up to.
Put simply, Ian was there, but that compliment
says too little. It was clearly a period of both great personal
creativity and community engagement. TV Tricks is still my
favourite of
Ian’s works. The sources of the poems, he said, were ‘tawdry and
elevated’. I am fond of quoting from ‘Hyperreal Juke Box Number’:
But I swear
on a stack of bibles this high, I wouldn’t have let him fuck me If he hadn’t looked so much like Elvis.
I’m sure I heard Ian read that at the Harold
Park Hotel, but I can’t swear, at least not with his studied elegance.
In 2005, Ian wrote in Art Monthly Australia about
curator Brian Finemore who was murdered in his
Melbourne home in
1975. Finemore, he said, kicked against the needless social austerity
of the post-war world –
The wanton dullness, the mindless conservatism,
the fearful resistance to change … the resistance to pleasure and to
happiness that characterizes so much of Australian history …
homosexuals were locked up in so many ways. And as a homosexual man of
conscience Finemore must have felt obliged to rattle the bars.
It’s worth remembering that rock ‘n roll
(‘Elvis’) gave relief from dullness, celebrated pleasure and preceded
gay liberation. Ian knew this. It was part of his story. Gay Liberation
was a politics. It was also an opportunity to dance. Ian was there in
1978 at the first Mardi Gras, arrested, publicly exposed. In Libbing
he
rattled the bars, railing against various aspects of politics, literary
culture, discrimination and how some were failing to respond adequately
to AIDS. In the 1990s he wrote novels for teenagers offering those who
were different alternative ways of understanding their world.
In the
poem that follows ‘Hyperreal Juke Box’, Ian’s writing took and takes my
breath away. The poem ends:
This is Amelia Earhart
I’m coming in.
Then there’s ‘Pedophilia: The Libretto’ that
appeared in Craig Johnston and Paul Van Reyk’s collection Queer
City
(2001). The libretto was in part a response to the cheap but dangerous
sexual politics of the Wood royal commission (1995-1997). Early in the
Libretto, Ian writes: ‘A child cavorts in a restaurant. Her mother
demands to know what she thinks she is doing and who taught her to act
like that.’
Ian wrote what was possibly the first history
of the Solomon Islands, Sweet
Horizons (2000) and kept writing, editing,
publishing right
through the 2000s with www.gay.ebooks and his long time friends and
collaborators Gary Dunne and Laurin McKinnon. All of this deserves
proper documentation, a scholarly bibliography, memoir. I am paying
tribute here to Ian’s literary reach, his verbal deftness and
experimentation, his wit, his eye for the ironies and awfulness of
social life, for the tawdry, the delightful and the tender.
Just weeks ago, Ian wrote on his blog:
I espresso the coffee
and pour it into my heated coffee pot then I pour the coffee in its thick flow into my Japanese copy Viennese demi-tasses; they almost tremble on their tiny saucers.
Michael Hurley
Melbourne 30/11/2011 I met Ian when my first book 'Dangerous Desires' came out in Sydney in 1992. We became friends when I subsequently met him at the Melbourne Writers Festival. He was wearing an outrageous bright pink leopard skin suit. We staggered off to hear a mediocre one-time cultural anti-hero, the poet Yevtushenko and shrieked into our wine glasses at how hideous time was. There was something about Ian which I loved: his sly wit, his defiant almost wrought iron campness and then there was his deep seriousness about things which mattered - art, truth and the way homosexuality could inform your view of humanity.
I realised over time we came from a similar
family background: one haunted by war, and by the strictures of a
pre-war world which had to do with courtesy and a certain level of
formality in behaviour. One could call this manners.
Just through conversation - and hand written
letters on his
part - he became a mentor.
Perhaps the fact he was in a different
country gave him the ideal distance. He could take the long view. But
he was also a passionate New Zealandophile, his letters arriving in the
box always delivered to the future: Aotearoa New Zealand. He guided me
through the rocky landscape of being a contemporary writer. I learnt to
interpret his eloquent silences. He always gave me confidence in the
importance of the act of writing itself.
In some ways it was like an ideal love affair
-
one without the interruptions of sex. I did love Ian very much. He came
and visited me in New Zealand and on his last visit here I took him out
to visit one of the great landed properties of Hawke's Bay. It was a
hot dry day and inside the enormous wooden mansion something seemed
amiss. A young matron in bare feet came to the door and took the money
we offered to view the garden. Then an older model in pearls, with
sculpted vowels, jumped out of the woodwork. What exactly were we
doing there? Who were we? Ian appreciated this encounter with the
redoubtable old school. (It turned out the great property itself was
changing hands that day, leaving the ownership of the original family
who had held it for 120 years. Things were mysteriously afoot.)
We sauntered off into the remains
of one-time
magnificent garden. Birds sang. Always curious, Ian inspected foliage
in detail as well as taking in the grand landscape effect. We found a
seat. So we sat there and in the great silence of a hot February day we
just sat beside each other. There was no need for words.
This was as far as we got. It was like a
Jamesian walk into
some eternal sphere. Friendship, I like to think, is like that: a
penetration into distant views, an ability to sit beside one another in
silence.
Now Ian has joined himself to some eternal
silence. But I
like to think of certain things: that thin yet defiantly jaunty smile,
his individual refusals to join in mass cults of belief - I can hear
him say, 'Oh Peter, come on!' - his nicety with detail - and
his listening aware silence which I like to think willl encompasses us
all for some time to come.
Peter Wells
For Ian
That precise pile of words computer wrangled/ scratchy pen scrawled can't be the sum of your left creations. Each poem, story, treatise each and every new one teased, mirrored and challenged us, veraciously recasting last years model 'Oh, you do what you can,' you'd say as you carefully stepped around drama mountains and summarily dismissed our unreconstructed protests. gentle man and gentleman generous and kind lover and loved hero and legend speaker of truths Missed already. Laurin McKinnon 29 Nov 2011 |
 |
Ian MacNeill - Red and Silver
ISBN 0 646 09818 7, Mieli Press, 1992, 156
pages
Re-release: April 2011 in
pdf format, 145 pages A5
Phillip joins Chrissie, Helen, Ben and Mario
at his new school. It is Year 11 and they are pleased
to have one another to face life as seniors together. The pressures take their toll: goals shift, resolutions waver, relationships intensify and dissolve. Ian MacNeill's novel addresses issues which concern them. Life is not all sex, drugs and study for high school students. They've got other things to deal with as well.
A novel for mature adolescents by Ian
MacNeill
download now
[pdf file <2mb p=""> |
 |
Ian MacNeill - Portraits for
the Blind
Released February 2007, pdf format, 72 pages
A5
Three Aussie kids on a beach in the eighties;
it may be paradise but they're not happy. And
soon they have to grow up and leave home. A story about what no-one wants to see.
A novella exclusive to gay-ebooks
download now
[pdf file <2mb p=""> |
 |
Ian MacNeill - TV Tricks
ISBN 1 875 243 00 3 June 1989, 48 pages, A5
[Released Feb 2006 as a pdf]
From the Foreword:
"These poems are offered as gay, camp, 'intensely' personal and propaganda. I would confess they are proselytising but I am not sure to what they beckon the reader."
download now
[pdf file <2mb p=""> |
|
Ian's work also appears in:
|
||||
And then he kissed me
[pdf file >2MB]
|
Audio recordings
|
Catching On
[pdf file >1.2MB]
|
I need some
[pdf file <2mb p="">
|
Justified and Ancient
[pdf file <2mb p="">
|
I am a camera
[pdf file >2MB]
|
Man Overboard
[pdf file >1.2MB]
|
Queer Hearts
[pdf file <2mb p="">
|
My boyfriend's back
[pdf file <2mb p="">
|
Boys' Summer collection
[pdf file <2mb p="">
|
|
Also Perverse Verse 2006 more info
|
||||
See also these paperback books:
Libbing, Mieli Press, ISBN 0 646 01502
8, 1990, 84 pages
Beaches and Billabongs, Mieli Press
Mieli Press PO Box 738 Potts Point 2011
Beaches and Billabongs, Mieli Press
Mieli Press PO Box 738 Potts Point 2011
No comments:
Post a Comment