Before I start, let’s make one thing clear. I would rather be run over a bus—a bus that was on fire—than marry my boyfriend. Don’t get me wrong: we’ve been together for a decade and I adore the bastard. But the prospect of a wedding—the stress, the cost, being photographed a million times and making out in front of relatives—just doesn’t appeal to me. The average Australian wedding costs $50,000 and if I had that kind of money, I’d rather buy, say, a round-the-world plane ticket. In fact, doing the math, I could buy 25 tickets. I’d bring my friends.

Still, none of this makes me anti-wedding. Because hot damn, I love me a good hitchin’. And it isn’t just the free alcohol. I love the pageantry of the whole thing: dressing up in suits and gowns, adjusting my boyfriend’s tie before we arrive and seeing my friends at their most beautiful. Weddings makes me feel grown up. I weep openly during the vows, and when I see the bride and groom’s families do the same thing, it triggers even more snot-nosed heaving. It is a beautiful thing.

I’m deeply puzzled as to why our gay and lesbian compadres should miss out on the joint horrors and ecstasy of this institution. God knows, if there’s any one segment of society who knows how to throw a shit-hot party, it’s the homos. And yet, we’re excluded from all this for reasons that—in Australia at least—are entirely baffling.

It’s an old argument, but gays pay their taxes like everyone else. As of 2009, same sex partners have been considered the same as opposite-sex partners with taxes and finances, and our partners’ incomes are taken into account to calculate Centrelink benefits—often to the couple’s financial detriment. Equality always comes at a price. But it seems unfair to pay that price without actually achieving equality.

Things are changing though. In Australia, same sex marriage is inevitable. 80 percent of young Australians between 18 and 24 want to see it happen. (Old people eventually die.) 62 to 70 percent of all Australians want it, and Labor’s vote would swing five percent in its favour if it decided to adopt it as federal policy. And it shouldn’t be a religious issue when 53 percent of Australian Christians support the move too.

With those figures, what shits me most about the “gay marriage debate” is that a debate even exists. To the naysayers, I say hold off on your faux-concern for the children. If it’s kids you really care about, you’d have read the American studies published in Time that suggests kids raised by lesbians are actually more well-adjusted than their peers. The other advantage of kids being raised in same-sex households? They’re far less likely to become homophobic bigots like you.

Worried that same-sex marriage will affect straight marriage? Unless your daughters are roaringly hungry for tang, you don’t have anything to worry about, Barnaby! Wish gays were more polite in our demands? Try being an elderly lesbian couple, told your relationship is inferior and you try being polite, Miranda! (Also, fuck you.)

Let’s make this happen, because—at the very least—gay and lesbian Australians are tired. We are tired of marching. We’re tired of writing stories like this. We don’t want to protest any more, because no protest should exist when we’ve got the majority of Australians backing us. We don’t want to sign any more petitions, because they’ve been fucking signed already. Let’s pass this bitch and move on.

And I swear to god, if this goes on for any longer, a gay strike is right around the corner. Every gay florist, gay dress designer and gay caterer (i.e. every florist, dress designer and caterer) will shut their doors on you. The only wedding services left will be the heterosexual ones, like that ghastly wedding singer who performs Bon Jovi ballads to a backing tape. And no one—gay or straight—deserves a wedding like that.

Longing for a lover can inspire beautiful art. At the start of the 1900s, it compelled Proust to write his magnum opus In Search of Lost Time. By the end of that same century, it inspired Everything But the Girl to write a lovely song about how the deserts miss the rain. In reality though, missing someone can be pretty unbearable. When you’re in a long distance relationship, you realise a desert waiting for rain would feel torturous. Your entire existence would be reduced to drought. You would die of thirst. You would shit sand.

My boyfriend and I have always spent long periods apart, on and off. When we first started dating, he embarked on a six-month exchange to Hong Kong. For the past 18 months, I’ve split time between Australia and Asia for work, leaving for months at a time. More opportunities came up this year, so we finally packed up our apartment and caught planes in opposite directions. He flew to North America; I headed back to Asia. “International power couple!” my friends said merrily. I felt the opposite of that. I felt like a kid in squeaky shoes and a helicopter cap, waving sadly goodbye to his best friend at the airport again.

Still, we’re lucky to live in an era where Skype and SMS and iMessage exists. I feel fortunate that I don’t have to wait for handwritten letters delivered via the oceans, bearing hopeful news from three months ago when my partner was actually still alive. The modern problems we face aren’t harrowing, but they are strange. Living on separate continents means constantly checking timezones. We accidentally wake each other up with ill-timed SMSes and say goodnight at lunch-time. Skype might be a modern miracle, but connections are so bad in most countries that the stop-start video is like watching your partner having a stroke.

Why do we do this to ourselves? Wouldn’t it be easier if we stayed together in one spot? Or gave up altogether and called it quits? Doesn’t pursuing long-term relationships delay the inevitable romances we’ll find overseas? In any case, I had more reason to worry. My boyfriend was headed to New York, international epicentre of the handsomely bearded and tattooed. Meanwhile, I was in places like Burma, where the men wore swastika t-shirts (such was their education level) and desperately needed dental surgery for their ruined mouths.

Still, having been together for a decade though, we’ve figured we could probably weather anything. Maybe it’s a part of getting older, or maybe it’s the distance, but staying together isn’t something that frightens us anymore. It feels like something we want to protect. (Wow. As a free-thinking homosexual, I never thought I’d say that. Perhaps I should consider running as a Family First candidate in the Senate next year.)

There are benefits too. As my friend Kim recently wrote, “The best thing about a long-distance relationship is the passionate reunion.” It’s hard to disagree with that. Without getting too graphic, the force with which couples reunite after months apart is like a wrecking ball smashing into the side of a building, except your skull is the wrecking ball and the wall is your partner’s face.

And if Aung San Suu Kyi can spend years in house arrest in Burma, only to be temporarly released, find out her husband was dying of cancer in the UK and remain in Burma anyway for the sake of her people, surely Scott and I can hack a few months apart. We remind each other we’re only ever a flight away. We keep saying we’ll have the rest of our lives together.

So we live apart and bear it. There isn’t any other option anyway. And until we meet again, we do what all couples in long distance relationships do: we sleep with our phones by our sides, ask about the weather on the other side of the world and look at every calendar like it’s a countdown.

There’s a particularly gruesome horror movie out there called Hostel. Some of you may have seen it already. Like most movies featuring gratutious torture, I refuse to watch it (severed achilles heels—sounds like a lark!). But from what IMDB tells me, it’s about a small group of backpackers travelling throughout a Slovakian city “with no idea of the hell that awaits them”. Needless to say, the film deeply upset the Slovekian tourism department.

Besides the senseless violence—severed fingers, brutalised corpses—my main gripe with the film’s premise is this: Aren’t backpackers’ hostels horrifying enough already? Do we really need to imagine guests being cut up and left to bleed, when most of us find giant bloodstains on our sheets upon arrival anyway? Do we need to see someone disembowelled in a hostel, when Balinese food poisoning does the same thing? Is there not enough horror already in backpackers hostels without making it worse?

Whether we’re in South East Asia or South Africa, it’s every young traveller’s rite of passage to stay in these godforsaken hellholes modest budget accommodation options. We book them while we’re still brave, young and poor, reminding ourselves that every cent we save on beds means more money for day-trips and booze. Plus, if you’re really travelling properly, we tell ourselves, you don’t need anything fancy. Just somewhere to shit, shower and shave at the end of the day. That’s it.

We take the good with the bad. In the heritage-listed Malaysian city of Melaka, I stayed in one hostel that smelled like damp cats upon entry. (Bad.) The next day, while working in the open-air common room that overlooked a canal (good), I met the little guy responsible for the smell. He was the cutest kitten I’d ever seen and proceeded to stick his head over my laptop nervously as if to say, “Hew-wo?” (Good!) Adorable. You just don’t get this shit in hotels.

That said, you don’t have a say in what sentinent lifeform you end up sleeping with either. All manners of things manage to find their way into hostel rooms, from virus-infected rats to syphilitic Frenchmen. In one hostel in Kuala Lumpur, I turned on the dingy shower only to have startled baby roaches crawl out of the walls. The room’s floor was so dirty, my bare feet turned black. There was hair everywhere. Some of it may have even been human.

Because when things get bad at hostels, they get really bad. You don’t have to wake up in a tub of ice with half your organs hanging out to know you’ve hit a new low. There is one notorious hotel in South East Asia that has been described as “an absolutely disgusting experience”. Online reviews describe other people’s cigarette butts floating out of the shower because of blocked drains and toilets that required “manual flushing with your hand in the tank to drain your waste”. Sweet Jesus.

It’s all trial and error. But all the errors are worth it when you finally luck on a good place with decent hot water, clean rooms, helpful staff and a location impossible to beat. It’s in these places that we meet our new best friends from countries we’ve never visited, and isn’t that what travel is all about?

On one of my last nights in Malaysia, I shared a roadside market dinner with a Pakistani guy from Lahore who hadn’t slept in 48 hours. He worked horrible hours for little pay in a remote shipping dock and was only in Kuala Lumpur to get his working visa renewed. The process was taking longer than he thought and he couldn’t afford a bed. For five Australian dollars, I scored him a spare bunk and a shower where I was staying.

Moments like that remind me hostels can actually be some of the best places in the world. They’re reminders that all any of us need is a clean bed, a shower and a lockable door, and everything else is truly a bonus. We meet strangers change our lives, and though we eventually go our separate ways, we carry them—as well as their tinea and plantar warts—with us forever.

Keep It Tight

No less than five members, no more than 10. Too few people and you may as well be lighting candles, laying out yoga mats and passing around hand mirrors. Too many, and it ceases being a bookclub and officially becomes a party. Unless, of course, that is exactly what you planned all along, you diabolical scamp.

Talk To Your Local Bookshop

Bookshops run their own clubs, but they’re also invaluable if you’re starting your own. Smaller independent bookshops will often have staff members who specialise in clubs. It’s worth making an appointment with them to see what they can offer you. Depending on the bookshop, some can even host your book club in their café, or hold mini presentations of new releases that might suit you for next month’s title. Some shops can organise discounts if your members buy a minimum number of books too. Just ask.

Same Bat-Time, Same Bat-Channel

Find a day of the week that suits everyone’s schedules and doesn’t conflict with classes, jobs or band practice. First Wednesday night of every month; last Sunday evening—that sort of thing. Then stick with it.

Call the Shots

It’s slightly painful to say this, but democracy doesn’t always work. (See: most high school councils; Australian parliament circa 2011). Many book clubs roster members to nominate their Favourite Book of All Time each month, but this approach inevitably ends in heartache and horror. I’ve seen people bring in their sentimental favourites, all Disney-eyed and bushy tailed, then come out of the book club looking like Bambi after his mother got shot. Members will tear books to shreds, and everyone will leave, silently weeping and judging each other, thinking, “I thought you were my friend.” Favourite books will come up in conversation anyway, so don’t subject them to an intensive public flogging (unless you get off on that sort of thing). As the organiser, encourage everyone to use your mailing list to exchange book reviews and make suggestions, but call the shots and determine the reading list month by month.

Be Diverse

Over 12 months, there’s plenty of room for both fiction and non-fiction. Choose books by Australian and overseas writers. Go for something completely different every time: new releases, classics, fantasy, memoir, science fiction, crime, travel, graphic novels, young adult, chick-lit and at least one book everyone was supposed to read in high school. (Revisiting these as adults is ridiculously good fun.) Change gears every month. Move from John Steinbeck to Tina Fey to Chloe Hooper to Virginia Woolf to Philip K. Dick to Jon Ronson to Anais Nin to Bill Bryson to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Aim for authors from different countries; include the living and the dead. And for the love of god, make sure you have an equal mix of female and male authors. No one wants a cock-forest or a period party.

Cast for Conflict

You’ll never please all your book club members, so don’t aim to. Don’t aim to please yourself either. Choose books for people to fight over, and ones you wouldn’t necessarily read otherwise. Divisive books like Helen Garner’s The First Stone, Christos Tsiolkas’s The Slap or Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho—where a prostitute is killed by having her skull drilled open, before the protagonist has sex with the wound!—are divisive and great for book clubs. And they certainly get conversation going.

Everyone Has to Speak, Then All Bet Are Off

To kick things off, ask everyone to offer their brief assessment of the book, accompanied by a thumbs-up or thumbs-down. Make sure everyone has their go, then let the wild rumpus begin.

Get drunk.

This is book club, not a university tutorial. Good book clubs involve food and wine and swearing and perhaps even a festive fistfight or make-out session. Go to a restaurant or bar that isn’t rowdy, and get comfortable in your regular corner so you can laugh and spar without disturbing the other patrons. If you’re hosting the bookclub at someone’s house, make everyone bring a plate of food to share. Better yet, bring food inspired by the book’s location. (Unless, of course, the book is set in an Indian prison.) The sign of a good book club is when everyone goes home, equally intoxicated by literature and liquor.

Even now, my father tells me there is no point in regretting things. “If you’ve done something bad,” he says, “what can you do about it now? You can’t undo it, so learn from whatever you did and move on. There’s no use dwelling, is there?” It’s good advice, but Dad never made it clear how far this philosophy should extend, like whether it should include things like murder, bestiality or joining the Young Liberals.

Either way, it didn’t work: I’ve grown up to become an expert dweller and professional regretter. Most of my regrets are about offending people. I don’t mind grossing people out (everyone is so uptight nowadays, you’d think they’d never seen their own anus), but making people legitimately upset or causing emotional distress when they don’t deserve it? Well that’s an entirely different thing altogether.

What’s especially repugnant is if I’ve upset people while trying to get attention. In Grade 9, my party trick—besides showing people my retractable belly button—was to act like a complete retard. (I say “complete retard”, because that’s what I would have called people with mental disabilities then.) “AHM RE-TAAAAR-HEHD,” I’d groan, my face contorted like I’d been punched, my hands frozen into Stephen Hawking’s chicken wing shapes. Everyone thought it was pretty funny, especially when I drooled.

In the middle of all this, Fiona, an athletic girl I’d always liked, sidled over to me. “My brother is retarded you know, Ben.” She said it quietly enough to be kind, but loud enough for everyone to hear. No one gasped. Instead, there was just a sudden absence of noise as everyone turned away in horror. Quietly, my drool his the cement. With my cheeks still screwed up and half my tongue hanging out, I stared at Fiona, too burning with mortification to even apologise properly.

Fast forward 15 years later, and I’m still making hideous illness/disability/death-related faux pas, except now, they are via wonderfully public forums like Twitter where thousands of people can see you being a douche and retweet them like a virus! The worst thing about Twitter is that you cannot delete things. Even if you trash what you said, several people would have already loaded it into their timelines, and it simply stays there like an incriminating turd in a backpackers’ shared toilet facility. IT DOES NOT GO AWAY.

My offending tweet was about Lord Christopher Monckton, a conservative Brit and one of the world’s most aggressive climate change deniers. A smarmy, condescending bully of Disney villain proportions, Monckton was in Australia to continue his tour of anti-environmental rage. Listening to him speak on radio or television induced fits of rage in me that made me want to grab of a fistfuls of my own pubes and rip them out, roaring like the Nutri-Grain iron man.

Incidentally, Monckton is also—on a purely objective level—quite an ugly man. But he’s best known for his trademark, strangely bulgy eyes that look like they’re going to pop right out of his face. And so, in my anti-Monckton fury, I tweeted about how every time I saw Mockton, I was also reminded of this particular image of a character from Total Recall, whose face was about to explode, his eyes bulging past the point of no return. I linked to the image, thinking it was pretty funny.

Before long, people started tweeting back saying that what Mockton had was an incurable thyroid condition called Grave’s Disease, which was serious and often debilitating. That’s why his eyes were like that, they said, and HAD I NO SHAME. I felt the blood drain out of me and immediately issued an apology. I’m not going to pretend Monckton would have even seen or cared about any of this, but saying sorry was important to me. I might have disagreed with his politics/views/general existence, but I wanted to think I was better than pulling cheap shots. And sure, that doesn’t explain why I continue to tweet unspeakable things involving Alan Jones, amyl nitrate and young male football players—but hey, as my Dad says, life’s too short to regret every single thing.

Conducting interviews in the nude can be difficult. For starters, you need a pen, notepad and dictaphone but, when you’re naked, you don’t have pockets for any of these things. It’s also hard presenting yourself as a hard-hitting professional when your interviewee has just seen your butt and can now see everything else. And on a day like today – white-hot sunshine; barely any clouds – it can be hard to concentrate. Soon enough, you are overwhelmed with a paranoia that you haven’t applied enough sunscreen to parts of your body that don’t usually see natural daylight, and are therefore – you now realise – susceptible to burning.

Reports of the typewriter’s death have been greatly exaggerated. Newspapers all over the world might run headlines of their extinction (“Last Typewriter Factory Left in the World Closes Its Doors!”), but hey: newspaper editors love stories about extinction, as long as they’re not about newspapers. Even now, small office supply companies quietly manufacture typewriters, and boutique businesses now devote themselves to restoring the old beasts like prized antiques. As recently as 2009, the New York City Police Department spent close to $1 million on typewriters (though this is more evidence of gross inefficiency, probably), and “type-ins”—special evenings where people gather to tap out hand-typed letters—are becoming big amongst hipsters. 

Using typewriters remind us of an era where gentlemen still remembered how to write: in full words, and not just emoticons and shortcuts. With a typewriter, there is no room for CTRL+X or CTRL+V, and less chance to regret what you wrote. Every word, every sentence and every paragraph has to be considered, typed slowly and in logical, sequential order. No room for typos. As Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer Robert A. Caro once said: “One reason I type is it simply makes me feel closer to my words. It’s like being a cabinetmaker. It’s like laying down the planks. This is the way it’s supposed to feel.” Here are some other gentlemen of letters, fond of the hand-typed manuscript.

J.R.R. Tolkien (1892–1973)
Notable works: The Hobbit; The Lord of the Rings
Models: Tolkien’s instrument of choice was the Hammond: a huge, heavy son-of-a-bitch and not at all portable. One benefit: it had interchangable fonts, including italics. Later in life, Tolkien would use portable machines on the advice of his colleagues and secretary.
Love/Hate? Tolkien was a prolific letter-writer, but lived in an age where typing letters to people was sometimes seen as a social faux pas. However, Tolkien suffered from rheumatism in his right arm and would apologise for not handwriting in his correspondence. “I usually type,” he wrote in one letter, “since my ‘hand’ tends to start fair and rapidly fall into picturesque inscrutability.”
Trivia: Tolkien often wrote his encyclopaedic notes about Middle Earth with pen, in longhand, before switching over to the typewriter. He used a typewriter almost solely for The Hobbit, and typed the entire manuscript of The Lord of the Rings twice on his bed in an attic. In a 1964 letter, he wrote to a friend: “I like typewriters; and my dream is of suddenly finding myself rich enough to have an electric typewriter built to my specifications, to type the Fëanorian script.” (For non-Tolkien aficionados, Fëanorian script is written Elvish. What a loveable nerd.)

Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961)
Notable works: The Old Man and the Sea; A Farewell to Arms
Models: It was said that Hemingway was as promiscuous with his typewriters as he was with women. Over his lifetime, Hemingway used a wide range of typewriters: Royal QDL portables; an Underwood Noiseless Portable; Coronas No. 3 and 4; and a Halda Portable.
Love/Hate? Like a lot of writers, Hemingway had a love/hate relationship with the tool of his trade. “There is nothing to writing,” he was once reported to say. “All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”
Trivia: In 1921, Hemingway’s future wife Hadley gave him a Corona No. 3. Hemingway immortalised both Hadley and the Corona in a poem called Mitrailliatrice: “The mills of the gods grind slowly / But this mill / Chatters in mechanical staccato. / Ugly short infantry of the mind, / Advancing over difficult terrain, / Make this Corona / Their mitrailleuse.” (Mitrailleuse is a French word, referring to any automatic weapon.) Hemingway often wrote on his typewriters standing up, and kept a typewriter or two in his homes between Florida, Key West, Idaho and Cuba.

John Steinbeck (1902–1968)
Notable works: Of Mice and Men; The Grapes of Wrath; East of Eden; Cannery Row
Model: Before the 1930s, portable typewriters didn’t widely exist, and writers like Steinbeck yearned for something that would be light, and easy to transport and lug around. Upon its 1940s release, the Swiss-designed, ultra lightweight Hermes Baby typewriter became an immediate favourite of Steinbeck’s, and was also adopted by Hemingway.
Love/Hate? In 1948, Steinbeck had already won the Pulitzer Prize and was working on East of Eden. A young reporter who visited him noted what lay on Steinbeck’s desk: cigarettes; a sea-shell ashtray; a cigarette lighter; unopened letters; a pencil; a fountain pen; and Steinbeck’s spiral notebook. Steinbeck’s typewriter didn’t take centre stage on his desk: it was the very last tool Steinbeck pulled out in the writing process. Instead, Steinbeck said that composed everything using a fountain pen first, and then typed and edited his manuscripts for his publishers only later.
Trivia: Even now, the authentic “Steinbeck Typewriter” can be found at the Martha Cox Center for Steinbeck Studies in San Jose University.

George Orwell (1903–1950)
Notable works: Animal Farm; Nineteen Eighty-Four
Models: A prolific journalist, essayist, critic and—of course—dystopian novelist, Orwell’s weapon of choice was a 1930s Remington Home Portable model. Amongst typewriter aficionados, they’re well known for their black compact bodies and trademark gold branding. It’s also the typewriter on which he wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Love/Hate? Anyone who encountered Orwell always took away two details about him: the pungent smell of his hand-rolled cigarettes, and the constant clicking of his typewriter that could be heard night and day. Disciplined and dedicated, Orwell also typed on his Remington to the point of exhaustion. After filing Nineteen Eighty-Four to his publishers, Orwell collapsed and wasn’t able to get up, let alone write or type. After a brief recovery, he fell ill again and was admitted into a tuberculosis sanatorium near London. He took his typewriter with him.
Trivia: Even when Orwell was deathly ill with tuberculosis—which would eventually kill him—a junior doctor who administered Orwell’s medication remembered the noise of Orwell’s typewriter in the clinics, gently but constantly tapping right into the evening.

Ian Fleming (1908–1964)
Notable works: Chitty Chitty Bang Bang; the James Bond novels
Models: A former Naval Intelligence Officer, Fleming said he wrote the first James Bond novel Casino Royale to simply take his mind off his upcoming wedding. As he would put it later, the novel was written “as a counterirritant or antibody to my hysterical alarm at getting married at the age of 43”. After Casino Royale became a smash hit and his old Imperial typewriter conked out, Fleming rewarded himself by ordering a custom-made Royal QDL (Quiet De Luxe) typewriter from New York, plated in gold.
Love/Hate? Fleming only used his famous golden typewriter to punch out one James Bond book: Live and Let Die. The rest of the time, he used unremarkable portable typewriters that he carried back and forth between England and Jamaica. Fleming would be sometimes mocked for the excess of the gold typewriter’s excess, but having been born into a poor background, it was a source of pride for him.
Trivia: After Fleming’s death, UK auction house Christie’s sold off Fleming’s typewriter for the record price of £56,250 (equivalent to US$89,229 at the time). It made the Guinness World Book of Records for being the World’s Most Valuable Typewriter.

Jack Kerouac (1922–1969)
Notable works: On the Road
Models: A pioneer of the Beat generation, Kerouac could apparently type a whip-speed 120 words per minute and needed a typewriter that could keep up with the pace. He usually swore by sturdy Underwood Portables, but his last typewriter—used from 1966 until he died, coughing up blood from an alcoholism-induced haemorrhage—was a Hermes 3000.
Love/Hate? Kerouac loved the typewriter for its speed but hated having to constantly reload new sheets of paper. Instead, he’d manually tape pages together to form giant uninterrupted scrolls, emulating how old American newspaper newsrooms worked. For all the inconvenience, he loved the by-products of typewriters, saying that one of the fundamental necessities in a writer’s life was “scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy”.
Trivia: On the Road was famously typed up on a single, continuous 120-foot long scroll, during a sustained writing intensive that lasted three weeks in 1951. In that time, Kerouac basically survive on pea soup, coffee and Benzedrine (a brand name amphetamine), typing the entire manuscript free-form and without formatting: single-spaced, no paragraphs. Even now, the scroll—or at least 36 feet of it—is displayed in museums all over the word. The final section of the scroll was literally chewed off by a friend’s dog.

Cormac McCarthy (1933– )
Notable works: Blood Meridian, No Country for Old Men, The Road
Model: Cormac McCarthy used the same typewriter for 46 years—a scuffed, metallic blue Olivetti Lettera 32—and he didn’t even buy it new. McCarthy was about to go to Europe, and wanted to find the smallest, most portable typewriter available. He found the Olivetti in a Tennessee second-hand shop in 1963, where he paid a sweet $50.
Love/Hate? After four decades with the same model, and typing every book manuscript on the same machine, it’s probably safe to say McCarthy was slightly attached.
Trivia: In 2009, McCarthy said it was time to finally put the Olivetti to rest. He put the typewriter up for auction and decided to donate the proceeds to the Santa Fe Institute, a non-profit multidisciplinary research centre. For the typewriter’s authentication letter, McCarthy typed out one of his last messages with the machine: “It has never been serviced or cleaned other than blowing out the dust with a service station hose. I have typed on this typewriter every book I have written including three not published. Including all drafts and correspondence I would put this at about five million words over a period of 50 years.” Auction house Christie’s expected the typewriter to go for between $15,000 to $20,000. It sold for $254,000.

Woody Allen (1935– )
Notable works: Screenplays (Annie Hall; The Purple Rose of Cairo; Hannah and her Sisters; Vicky Cristina Barcelona), short stories, plays.
Models: When he was still a teenager known as Allen Stewart Konigsberg, Woody Allen bought an Olympia SM3 for $40. Later in life he’d tell a Swiss journalist, “At the time I asked the seller whether this machine would last. He only said that this machine would outlive me by far. And as a matter of fact, it works as perfectly as on Day One, and never needed any repair.” True to the seller’s words, Allen still uses the same typewriter to this day, with the only maintenance involved being a ribbon change from time to time.
Love/Hate? One of the most famous typewriter-related quotes comes courtesy of Woody Allen: “How can I believe in God when just last week I got my tongue caught in the roller of an electric typewriter?” He’s only joking, though. Typing is part of Allen’s daily routine. “I just sit down at the typewriter and think funny,” he says.
Trivia: Even now, Allen tends to write most of his work in longhand, before transcribing it on the Olympia. Everything he’s written has passed through the Olympia’s keys. He doesn’t own a computer, but he’s not a total luddite: Woody Allen owns an iPhone. 

Hunter S Thompson (1937–2005)
Notable works: Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
Models: Thompson was devoted to his red IBM Selectric, a nifty semi-electronic model.
Love/Hate? Though Thompson used nothing but typewriters for his work, there is one infamous photo of him aiming a rifle at a typewriter, cigarette dangling out the side of his mouth, about to shoot it to smithereens.
Trivia: When he was young, Thompson worked for Time magazine and used a typewriter to copy The Great Gatsby and A Farewell to Arms, word for word, to try to unlock the secret to writing literature. Though he would acquire a Macintosh computer in later life for email, Thompson said he only used a typewriter for work. “There is too much temptation to go over the copy and rewrite,” he said. “I guess I’ve never grown accustomed to the silent, non-clacking of the keys and the temporary words put up on the screen. I like to think that when I type something on [my typewriter], when I’m finished with it, it’s good. Never go back and rewrite while you’re working. Keep on it as if it were final.” In 2005, Thompson was found dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound, in front of a typewriter. Cryptically, there was one word in the centre of the page: ‘counselor’. 

Bob Dylan (1941–)
Notable works: Albums (Highway 61 Revisited; Blonde on Blonde; Blood on the Tracks), poetry, memoirs.
Models: Throughout his career, Bob Dylan has been promiscuous with typewriters, having been photographed with countless models and makes. He’s spend time with a Royal Safari, stroked the keys of an Olivetti Lexikon 80 and borrowed an Olympia SG1 on tour with Joan Baez.  (In the 1967 documentary Don’t Look Back, you’ll see him tapping away on the Olympia as Joan Baez belts out a number.) Call the man versatile.
Love/Hate? Biographers and friends have often said that Dylan could be lodged in spartan accommodation, as long as his room contained three fundamentals: a bed, a table and a typewriter. When he wasn’t swinging a guitar, he could be found hunched over a typewriter and often carried a portable model on tour.
Trivia: Dylan would always set up the typewriter in the corner of the room, placing it in the middle of the desk, with either an ashtray or a bottle of Coke sitting next to it. In the evenings, he’d drink red wine, smoke and type for hours. Friends would say that in the middle of the night, it was common to see Dylan wake up, grunt, light a cigarette and stumble over to the typewriter again.

Lock your doors, my fellow Australians! Shut your blinds, crawl into your bomb shelters and sandbag your daughters. For there is a collective menace lurking our island shores, and they come to ravage our country, take our jobs and plague our communities with crime, disease, headscarves and delicious ethnic food. Their transport of choice? Loathsome ocean-faring vessels of sophisticated design—‘boats’, they’re called—and when our federal politicians’ highest priority is to stop them no matter what, you know we have a problem. God help us all.

The worse thing is how these people arrive here illegally, because I think we all agree that illegal things are bad. And sure, if you do some research, you’ll discover seeking asylum in Australia without a valid visa isn’t actually “illegal” (you’re ruining everything, Article 31 of the 1951 Refugee Convention and Australia’s 1958 Migration Act), but still: these people are jumping a queue.

And it’s so rude to jump queues. Like that fat fuck at the school tuckshop, or those people at theme parks who have physical disabilities, queue-jumping is reprehensible! Especially when the queue is so obvious and visible (you guys can see the queue, right?), there really is no excuse. It’s not like asylum seekers are escaping war-ravaged countries or political persecution or anything. The way they harp on about it, you’d think it was a matter of life and death.

Okay: I just did some reading and it turns out there’s no such thing as a “refugee queue”. But arriving here by boat still seems sneaky and suspicious to me. Something tells me—maybe it’s all their designer labels and platinum AMEX cards—that these “refugees” probably could have afforded to take a P&O Fairstar cruise over. But in an admittedly genius move, they instead come on leaky boats that can potentially kill them, just to score sympathy points with the public. Diabolical.

Well, I refuse to fall for that trick. They are not getting sympathy from me. “Data” might show that the overwhelming majority of boat arrivals are found to be genuine refugees, but we all know those refugee advocates have insidious, hidden agendas. You can always tell they’re twisting and distorting the debate when they’re using things like “facts”.

Perhaps we shouldn’t be so scared, though. What helps me sleep at night is knowing our Federal leaders—on both sides of politics—can stop the boats. It’s heartening to know both Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott are both, apparently, some variety of wizard who is able to control world conflicts to the point where no one, anywhere, will ever need to seek refuge in another country, ever again.

By ensuring Australia’s refugee policies are tough—and, you know, wonderfully inhumane—our politicians can assure us asylum seekers will be deterred from ever coming here. For a second, let’s forget that the highest percentages of the world’s refugees—2.3% and 1.9%—actually came to Australian during the John Howard era. And let’s ignore the fact Australia is directly involved in wars that destabilise and displace people, making them seek asylum. Because I think we can all agree that taking responsibility for the consequences of our actions does seem a little weird.

Whatever happens, it’s important that we refrain from treating these people like, well, people. We must avoid listening to their stories of rape and famine, murdered siblings and starved children, because then we might actually feel something, and feelings and emotions are for the weak. Avoid that SBS series Go Back to Where You Came From at all costs (reality is so manipulative!), because none of us want to see asylum seekers as simply desperate family members trying to keep each other alive. To make it easier, let’s palm them off to Malaysia! At least we won’t have to look at them there.

Sure, some of our most beloved Australians originally came to the country as refugees: actor Henri Szeps; businessman Frank Lowy; comedian and writer Anh Do; sports commentator Les Murray; adored scientist Dr Karl. But they were the good ones. Nowadays, there are no nice or potentially talented refugees. Oh come on, don’t be such a bleeding heart! That’s exactly what the refugees want, and then, when your heart is bleeding all over the floor, they will drink that blood because, you know, they’re basically animals. And whatever you do, don’t change your mind about anything, especially asylum seekers. Changing your mind is a bad, bad thing. No good will come of it. In fact, they should make it illegal.

We were part of a gang who all knew there was a world out there. Only a tiny pocket of it was in Sydney. Sydney had been pretty boring. I’d been at East Sydney Tech doing dress design, and it was a very old-fashioned type of design school where they wanted you to make little shirts, and it wasn’t at all inspired. It’s an inspirational place now, but it really wasn’t in the early 60s.

Me and my girlfriends knew what we wanted was in London. It was a need to express ourselves and we just wanted action. Heading to London was just the thing. You didn’t fly then, so you had to get a boat—six weeks to London—and sailed on the high seas. There was no stopping us.

I got onto British soil in the beginning of December. We docked in Southampton, and the very next moment I could, I got on the train. All I wanted to do was to get to the first Biba, the amazing shop, the very latest boutique, in Abingdon Road, Kensington. That tiny corner store was full of rust and plum and mulberry and blueberry, and the walls were painted navy blue. The windows were adorned with long sumptuous William Morris print curtains and mini smocks and stripey t-shirt dresses, trouser suits, red-dyed football scarves and socks hung on brass hat-racks. Amazing.

I went to work at Biba soon after, and then into working at the Chelsea Antique Market. I went from stripey jersey dresses, which was the coolest thing—everyone from Marianne Faithful to Princess Anne wanted to wear them—and straight into chiffon and velvets and paisleys and Indian and 1967 hippy. It was the very beginning of wearing retro.

Every day was like a party. We were going into work at 10 o’clock and Yul Brynner and Tony Curtis and Bob Dylan would walk up little crickety stairs to these amazing little Aladdin caves, where I worked. All this exquisite clothing, hanging from chains in this tiny little room: cut velvet and embroideries and Moroccan and Rajistani Indian and South American and African, mixed up with these amazing label dresses from the 30s and 40s. There were no changing rooms. Everyone had to just drop their clothes and try on what they needed, right there.

Around this time, I met my partner, then husband: a beautiful artist called Michael Ramsden. I’d been in London from the ages of 18 to 25, and the fun was going out of London. Punk was starting and it was sort of getting dark: think Johnny Rotten.

We really had this big desire to go back to Australia. Whitlam had just gotten in, and the creative country was starting up. I wanted to create things in Australia no one had ever seen. It began with koala bears on hand-knitted jumpers, because that was the closest thing I could get to something that could be purely Australian: merino wool, hand-knitted and Australian imagery.

Coming back to Sydney just did it again. I opened my Flamingo Park frock salon in the Strange Arcade in 1973, and I was 26 years old. And I didn’t think twice about it: I just knew I had to have this beautiful little room in an unusual place. At that time, there wasn’t one fashion shop there. It was full of cobblers and workshops, so I was the first one.

I like to impress on young people that there never will be another time like that again. It’s the time when the world did change, in terms of ideas and style and fashion and music and art. Music changed. That’s why young people—15-year-olds—still listen to Jimi Hendrix.

If you’re on a creative path, go for it. Don’t try and build an empire. Do things with integrity, in a small, meaningful way. If you’re really creative, create little businesses, so there’s lovely choice with original talents. One can make a living doing that.

Here is how you cook a pig’s uterus. First, visit your local abattoir’s Vietnamese section, where they will happily take requests for ‘special offal’ – which includes intestines, gall bladders, warm blood and reproductive organs. Sows’ uteri come blanched, with a similar colour and texture to tripe: creamy and soft but with a cartilagey bite. Braise them in pork stock, along with smoked ham bones, onions, garlic and wine. Simmer on low heat for two-and-a-half hours, add peas and butter, and serve with jus. The uteri should now have the texture of squid, with a slight crunch.

Chef Adrian Richardson goes over the recipe for me in the upstairs dining room of his 13-year-old Melbourne bistro La Luna. Richardson is recalling an evening last year when his business served a one-off menu devoted entirely to offal. A whole array of animal gizzards was provided over 14 courses. Bulls’ testicles arrived in vol-au-vents and were christened “Cowboy Shooters”. But it was the pigs’ uteri with which diners became really smitten. “They just hooked into it,” Richardson says.

Richardson has carved out a reputation as a gourmet purveyor of guts and marrow, blood and trotters. His cookbook is simply titled Meat. La Luna has always specialised in whole animal butchery; the entire beast – nose to tail, spine to hoof – is used, not just to prevent waste but to showcase what you can do with lesser cuts. It’s a trend now, a brand of thoughtful carnivorism that combines – perhaps uneasily – an ethical meditation on how we eat animals with an enthusiasm for the primal bloodlust of eating them.

Over in South Melbourne, Katherine de Niese and Andrew Lockyear – partners in business and life – prepare a goat’s carcass at their cafe, Montague Park Foodstore. The goat arrived in the kitchen yesterday, headless, skinned and gutted, since all animals have to be disembowelled at the abattoir by law. (For whatever reason, pigs arrive with heads intact but the goats come in decapitated.) Andrew uses a cleaver with easy precision to divide the animal into cutlets, legs, saddle, backstraps. One 10 kilogram goat yields between 30 and 35 meals.

Montague Park has just a modest three-door fridge, so only one beast can be used at a time and the menu changes according to the animal. De Niese writes it out on butcher’s paper in thick marker pen, and hangs it facing out of the window for passers-by to see: “Goat curry with lentil dhal (made with belly); braised goat with dill, white wine and soft polenta (shoulder); shredded goat ragu with homemade tagliatelle pasta (leg); braised goat shank.” “This week’s whole beast is goat!” says an accompanying sign. “Specials consist of different sections of the goat to ensure minimal waste from nose to tail.”

When de Niese and Lockyear worked in restaurants, they were both constantly appalled by the amount of waste in kitchens, especially of meat. It also bothered them that consumers detach themselves from the idea of meat as being part of a dead animal – not just in restaurants but at grocery shops too. “Visually, supermarkets make meat so easy to look at,” Katherine says, “so people don’t associate it with animals. But it deserves that respect.”

Jess Jenkins, manager of Collingwood’s new nose-to-tail restaurant, Josie Bones, echoes the sentiment: “An animal is dying for you to have this meal.” However, she adds, “We’re not here to scare people.” She might be joking, because Josie Bones is provocative from the start: its doorknobs are cast iron pigs’ trotters. To enter the restaurant you must first reach out and shake hands with the dead, as if making a pact. Glued above the bar is a giant photograph of a skinned rabbit, the white, webby streaks of fat making it resemble an oily, gruesome Caravaggio. The cookbook of the restaurant’s co-founder, Chris Badenoch, is also on display; the cover shows him leering over a giant roasted pig’s head, with a giant knife. If there is a unifying aesthetic to the restaurant, it’s slaughter.

“Some of them don’t like it, obviously,” Jenkins says of the skinned rabbit. “A lot of meat-eaters aren’t used to seeing what they’re actually eating. They don’t want an actual pig’s head coming through, but they love pork.” Because it’s a Wednesday night – the restaurant’s weekly whole animal roast night – there is a freshly slaughtered baby pig in the fridge. It is both very dead and very cute. I almost expect the piglet to turn its head to me and break out into song,Babe-like. It’s not every day you look into the face of something you will later eat. (The pig is delicious.)

As at La Luna, a substantial part of the Josie Bones menu is focused on offal. Roasted skin is served as “crackling of the day” in tiny white bowls. Elsewhere on the menu are tongues, heads, ears and blood. “We use offal for two reasons,” head chef Robert Taylor says. “No one else is doing it much, and also offal is very, very cheap. We can devote our magic to making offal taste really good and present it in a way that changes people’s preconceptions about what offal is.” Plus, he notes, there is a fundamental ethical obligation for carnivores to eat this stuff. “If you eat the belly,” Jenkins adds, “why wouldn’t you eat the tongue?”

Still, for all the talk about revering animals, there is another impulse at work here: the brute macho appeal of tearing an animal apart. Richardson says it’s common for groups of men to come to La Luna with one squeamish guy whom they try to provoke into eating the weirdest thing available. “They eat it, and it’s something they can cross off their list,” he says. Every time Richardson serves a roasted pig’s face, for instance, people go nuts. “They either rip off the ears and crunch on them, or they’ll cut the cheeks out,” Richardson says. When I ask Jenkins and Taylor how they go about eating pigs’ heads, Jenkins doesn’t say a thing. Instead, she closes her eyes, childlike and beatific, grins widely and makes wild, tearing motions with her hands, scooping them into her mouth. There’s nothing dignified about it. You tear the goddamn thing apart – which is to say, you eat it like an animal.