Aug 08, 2025
Caroline Bobby had a beautiful party for her book full of daring and memoir and fragments from her life at a gallery in Queen’s Park. She even gifted us the musicians Sean Taylor and Mark Seal. I did a little something….a kind of speech… a tribute to the book and Caroline. Oh and I ended with a kind of found poem from Caroline’s recurring words…
Here it is -
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Welcome, welcome to the Caroline Book launch. The launch of Postcards from this Little Life.
And as I say those words, everyone here – because I know you are all from what Caroline calls her heartlands – everyone here knows that this is so much more than a book launch. It is literally the-inside-out-of- Caroline launch. One of Caroline’s favourite words is intimacy and we are being invited into Caroline’s intimate, sometimes dark, sometimes sad, sometimes soft, sometimes taboo, world.
When Caroline says I have made myself into book, never were six words truer. Caroline is the ink, the weight of the paper, the colour of the cover as well as the words. The words are like juicy almost overripe figs that seduce us and we bite into in order to go on a voyage into Caroline’s world, and Caroline’s world is often the underworld. We, the people of the heartlands may have thought that we knew Caroline but I am guessing that some of these word fragments, some of these little maps, some of these dazzling bullets and some of these erotic bombs are new to us. And that is a big part of the pleasure of this non-linear voyage from Sydney to Kilburn and so much more.
I am Rose, I am mentioned in Postcards from this Little Life as not just the nudger but the prodder. I was chief prodder for several articles by Caroline on death and dying for the Advantages of Age website and now Substack. I am glad to hear she welcomes the prods because they really did start the production of her pieces. They were devastating on one hand, and daring on the other. Mostly Caroline dared to go where other writers did not go. The darklands, the fields of kindness, the hard won places she’s found inside. And by revealing them to us, she gives us the readers the gift of being able to visit these taboo internal locations too. We too can touch our grief, our fears around dying, our potent secret places.
And I guess through the process of this irregular, regular writing of pieces/essays/articles, Caroline realised she had a rhythm and that the beat could go on, that the words could keep coming. Being Caroline, nothing was easy. But it was fruitful on this edgy edge. And along this ledge, something happened, the knowledge that these pieces could become a book. And they have. And of course, that is a story in itself.
And the book is Caroline. And I am so glad that I am here and Asanga is here to welcome it, to witness it as it goes on its own trajectory out here. And that she trusted me with her words as her editor.
As I was re-reading her marks on the page, her laments, her elegies, her wounds along the way – I found myself collecting Caroline words so I thought I’d make a kind of incantatory found poem and it goes like this
Caroline
Breath
Home address
Heart
Broken
Leonard
Fragment
Gratitude
Fields of Kindness
Heartland
Human
Leonard
Vulnerable
Grace
Breath
Deep
Dark
Death
Exquisite
Thread
Blood
Community
Bones
Breath
Leonard
Bones
Blessing
Fierce
Non-Linear
Ravaged
Soft
Raw
Longing
Gratitude
Naked
Naked
Naked
Leonard
Breath
I’m sure that’s something you can all do too. Make your own poems from Caroline’s poems.
The cycle of making, the cycle of death and re-birth, the cycle.
I’ll finish with a quote from the book where Caroline honours Leonard – “I was discovering the taproot of my own tenderness and, you, as ever, were helping me.’
And now Caroline is helping us….
You can order from your own local independent book shop.
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