When Lisa Walker sent her heroine out on a pilgrimage to visit all the Big Things in the Northern Rivers and Queensland for her latest novel, it added a wonderfully irreverent twist to the idea of a sacred quest writes Candida Baker.

It’s not often that you get to meet a writer who knows how to build an igloo, but Lisa Walker, the author of the recently released Arkie’s Pilgrimage to the Next Big Thing, could, if push came to shove, rustle you up an igloo in less than a day.

“A small one,” she says, recalling her days as a guide for Wilderness Expeditions in the Snowy Mountains. “We used to take people skiing to the back country and we’d teach them snow skills experience. We could build an igloo and sleep in it for a couple of nights, and of course it’s much warmer than sleeping in a tent. It’s a half-day job for two or three people.”

There’s not much need for igloos in the Northern Rivers where Walker and her husband have lived for the past sixteen years, but Walker’s love of adventure and travel has stood her in good stead for creating the delightfully quirky Arkie, who sets out on a personal pilgrimage to find Australia’s ‘Big Things’.

“Mind you,” says Lisa, “Arkie doesn’t actually like adventure and camping, and I do, but she makes these decisions which lead to a life on the road, and she learns that she has to embrace her pilgrimage in order for it to teach her anything.”

Lisa Walker: “One of the things I do myself, and my characters do a lot of, is dreaming of places where you’re not.”

Walker, who is quickly becoming a writing hit with novels such as Liar Bird and Sex, Lies and Bonsai preceding Arkie’s Pilgrimage, begins the novel with a cliffhanger. Arkie is in Byron Bay on New Year’s Eve, her marriage and her career in ruins, and she has decided to throw herself under the next train into Byron Bay. Those of us who know the town well, will immediately spot the flaw in this plan. There is no train service in and out of Byron any longer, but Arkie hasn’t checked, and is sitting, waiting on the platform. Along comes the enigmatic Haruko who talks Arkie out of the suicide she wouldn’t have been able to commit anyway, and off the two set, partners in a wonderful Australian version of the classic pilgrimage.

One of the reasons that Arkie has decided to personally view as many Big Things as she can is that until recently, she herself was a trendspotter – someone who could spot the next big thing coming along a mile off, and alert the consumer market that it’s coming.

“I got the idea when I read an article about Li Edelkoort, the Dutch trendspotter who is the oracle behind Trend Union – a company that forecasts trends for retail industries,” says Walker. “She’s known to have amazing intuition. She consistently gets it right.”

But Arkie is in trouble. Bored in her marriage, she had an affair that ended badly, and she’s convinced that she’s lost, as well as her husband and lover, her mojo. Her husband has decided to divorce her, and has hired a divorce lawyer to pursue her and force her to accept the divorce papers, and Arkie is doing her absolute best to avoid them, whilst darting all over Queensland and Northern New South Wales, ticking off our fabulously tasteless Big Things – the Big Pineapple, The Big Prawn, The Big Macadamia etc. Japanese temples they are not, but it brings a wonderfully irreverent touch to the idea of the pilgrimage as a sacred journey.

As for the presence of Haruko in the novel, she serves many purposes. “I’ve been to Japan quite a few times in the past few years,” Walker says, “and I was really surprised by how wild and crazy the Japanese girls are. We have this idea that Japanese girls are very proper, but they’re not at all like that. We – the family – went for the skiing, but I fell in love with the culture. I did a temple tour as well, and loved it, and I’ve been back three or four times since then.”

Haruko is a cheerful character – inscrutable, with a great dress sense, and apparently not only sure of herself but happy to take on the somewhat hapless Arkie and re-instill her with a sense of self-worth. It becomes obvious as the novel progresses that theirs is an almost karmic connection, and much of the novel has a sense of unfolding destiny, which gives the narrative a layer of extra meaning. It isn’t often that fiction writers manage to combine the themes of comedy, philosophy and religion successfully, but Walker pulls it off.

“I watch the highway go by and ponder my situation. I am on the run from my husband’s divorce lawyer, my mojo is still missing in action and my demon ex-lover is lurking . . . But, all things considered, my pilgrimage is going well …”

Walker tells me that her next novel is about a girl living in Brisbane but with an obsession about Paris, and it occurs to me that obsession is a common occurrence in her books. Characters become fixated on other characters, or on places, or on an idea, and I wonder if she is at all obsessive in her personality. She laughs. “Just a bit,” she says. “One of the things I do myself, and my characters do a lot of, is dreaming about where you’re not. I dream about places, obsess about them, read travel books…in a way it’s like the writing process, except that by the time I’ve created this full-on picture of the place I’m obsessing about I don’t want to go there anymore – I’ve lost all interest!”

Despite having three books published over the past few years, Walker says that each book is a challenge. “People have said I’m prolific, but I don’t feel prolific,” she says. “I struggle to get my 1000 words a day done.” These days her wilderness experiences are a bit more mild than igloo-building – she works across the Northern Rivers as a Community Relations Ranger with National Parks and Wildlife. She and her husband and their two boys live in Lennox Head – within, as it turned out, easy reach of Arkie’s Big Things. “I did start out with much more ambitious ideas for her ‘pilgrimage’,” Walker says, “but in the end containing the journey made the book more manageable.”

I’m not going to give away whether Arkie discovers the meaning of life, recovers her mojo and repairs her marriage – you’ll have to take your own journey with the book to find out, but you won’t be disappointed.

Arkie’s Piligrimage to the Next Big Thing published by Bantam Australia, RRP $32.99, 368pp

See more at: randomhouse.lisa-walker/arkies-pilgrimage-to-the-next-big-thing

For more information on Lisa Walker go to: lisawalker

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When Verandah Magazine’s publisher Candida Baker enrolled at university as a mature age student, she found unexpected rewards in learning the art of learning.

Almost three years ago to the day I stood in front of Adelaide University, having enrolled as student in their online Master of Arts in Art History – a degree the University runs in conjunction with the Art Gallery of South Australia.

I was so nervous I bit my nails, and I don’t even bite my nails. Three years, two certificates and a diploma later I’ve handed in my thesis: ‘An exploration of kijin 奇人 – or eccentricity – and its
tradition as an endorsed quality in Japanese art, with specific reference to the work of Yayoi Kusama and Yoko Ono.’

The odd thing about my journey towards a degree was that I had (or believed I had) no intention of doing one. I was working on something else entirely, googling away, letting my fingers do the walking, when suddenly an ad popped up, advertising this new, arts related MA, and suddenly something inside me gave a shiver of excitement. Even so I was going to ignore the ad, I almost clicked away from it – what do you want to look at that for? I thought, but almost as soon as I’d had that thought I could see the White Rabbit dancing across the screen. Follow me, he was saying. Follow me.

Now, the thing is, (as my Irish grandmother used to say), I’d left school at 17 with a few more ‘O’ Levels than Princess Diana, and fallen into a life of journalism and writing at an early age. Everything I’d learned, I’d learned on the job and there I was at the age of 57 with numerous books published, and a successful career behind me, (and I hope before me too) but there was something missing – a little piece of the jigsaw puzzle.

I’d tried once before – twenty-four years ago to be exact – I’d enrolled in a BA with the University of New South Wales. I’d enjoyed it but work and children had got in the way and I’d had to drop it. All these many years later, I had reason to be thankful I’d even done that one year, because at least I had a slight notion of how to construct an essay.

What I have come to realise over the past three years of working towards my Masters is how important continuing study is for the brain. I don’t think it matters what we’re learning – it could be bee-keeping, permaculture, engineering or, as in my case Japanese art, but something happens when we stretch our grey matter. Emotional intelligence psychologist and author Daniel Goldman wrote that: ‘People tend to become more emotionally intelligent as they age and mature.’ It would be nice to think that was true, but at the time that I enrolled for the degree I was feeling anything but emotionally intelligent, or in fact intelligent in any way, shape or form. I was coming out of some dark days, and I was fragile.

During the three years of studying for my degree ‘stuff’ happened. One of our dogs killed the neighbour’s cat, and had to live life for a year as a dangerous dog, the same dog was almost killed twice by the neighbour’s Ridgeback and my neighbour had to put his dog down; my step-mother died, my father died, a year later our beloved Shetland pony died of a brain tumour. There were health issues in the family that affected my everyday life, a sister on the other side of the world was diagnosed with breast cancer, a relationship suddenly ended, there was (and still is) the ongoing vexed question of living in the county and actually making a living – working, it seems to me sometimes, twice as hard for half as little gain as our city counterparts. There was the joys and frustrations of starting Verandah Magazine, in which you are reading these words.  All in all I learned the meaning of the words anxiety and depression in a way I had never understood them before.

But once a week, no matter what, I had to get myself ready for my online tutorial. I had to read the papers and the books, research my essays, be ready for questions, or to give a presentation. I had to focus, in other words, on the task at hand, and on something beyond ‘me’.

When I enrolled in Art History, a lot of people asked me why – assuming that I would do something connected with writing. But in a way it was exactly because of the fact that I write most days of my life, that I chose to do something else. Not that it made the writing component less, but it meant that rather than thinking about writers and writing I was thinking about art and artists. I’d also been offered (in years gone by) honorary BA’s so I could go straight into an MA in Creative Writing, but somehow it had never seemed right to me to not learn the craft of academic writing properly. I realised that I found – and find – thinking about art and artists intriguing, inspirational and even somehow soothing.

Yoko Ono, Doors and Sky Puddles, MCA Sydney, 2011.

I was also convinced, right from the beginning, that my thesis would be something to do with Indigenous art, which just goes to show that there are no absolutes, because somewhat to my chagrin at the time, that was not my best semester. My best semester, to my astonishment, was in Japanese art, a subject about which I knew nothing, or even less than nothing. However, I’d written an essay on the work of Yayoi Kusama, and Kusama I did love, although at the time I really did not think of her as a Japanese artist. To my mind she was a contemporary and conceptual artist, and a Japanese artist only slightly, if at all. It was my tutor, and later supervisor, Dr Jennifer Harris, who introduced me to the notion of kijin, the rich vein of eccentricity in Japanese art, which embraces all those Japanese artists who have chosen the Way of the Artist above all else. When I’d been studying for my essay on Kusama, I’d also researched some of Yoko Ono’s installations and conceptual art; I realised that she too, fitted the kijin notion. And of course, as soon as I delved into the research I discovered that both these artists’ work contain, in their different ways, a rich vein of Japanese tradition. Their works and careers have not come out of a Western-based art practice, however well-known they both maybe in the West, at its core their work has an Eastern sensibility.

Yayoi Kusama, Wanderlust Pumpkin on Naoshima Island.

If anybody had told me before I started that a) the process would be as enjoyable as it has been and b) that I would follow the White Rabbit down into a burrow of Japanese art history, overlain with an intensely complex conceptual and contemporary layer, I would have been taken aback.

Something happened to me during the three years of study. I realised that I wasn’t stupid, that I could embrace academic writing and enjoy it, and that learning was almost literally giving me back my love and enthusiasm for life. So if you have a desire to learn – here’s my advice, give into it. You never know where it might take you.

Mysterious are the ways of the White Rabbit, but long may he lead us on our quests for enlightenment, for learning and for enrichment.

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 Local writer, teacher and coach Tim Edwards discovers that there are many reasons for a Northern Rivers family  to choose a Japanese ski holiday over an Australian one.

I knew when I booked our family holiday that the scenery and mountains at Furano were going to be magnificent, and the fantastic powder snow has an average snowfall of over nine meters. I also thought that it would be great for us as a family to experience exotic food and culture as part of a ski holiday, and on top of all that there was great quality ski rental gear, minimal lift queues, ultra-modern lift system, good prices for accommodation, food and skiing (board/ski rental, lift tickets, ski clothing rental) that are at worst comparable to (and probably cheaper) than our own resorts here in Australia. But all of that aside, the thing that makes a Furano mountain holiday something to treasure forever are the people.

Furano is a rural village in central Hokkaido (the most northerly and by far the wildest and most sparsely populated island in Japan) that supports a local farming community as well as a beautiful ski mountain. The village itself is not particularly pretty but given that it is surrounded by its own drop dead gorgeous ski mountains on one side and nestles near the foot of the amazing Daisetzusan National Park (Japan’s largest and wildest mountain park) on the other side, less than startling architecture is not really a problem.  And if snow is not your thing, in the summer the entire valley is covered in wildflowers, including the commercially grown lavender.  It’s a major summer destination for the Japanese looking to escape the southern humidity.

Summer views of lavender and wildflowers from the Tokachi Peak Mountain Range.

While getting to Furano proved somewhat of a mission, given that it provided us with our first examples of Hokkaido hospitality, friendliness and helpfulness the journey was still deeply satisfying. Our Coolangatta flight took us to Narita Airport (on Honshu) where we connected with a flight to New Chitose Airport in Hokkaido. From New Chitose we took a fast train to Sapporo (the capital of the Hokkaido province) where we connected with a bus that finally brought us to the resort. Given that I had not pre-planned any of these connections my seventeen-year-old son (who incidentally spoke a little Japanese) had been quite worried that journeying would prove difficult in a place where very few people spoke conversational English. Levi didn’t have to worry. The local people demonstrated to us with a great a deal of pointing, gesturing, good grace and sense of humour – as well as a much better grasp of our language than we had of theirs. We were able to find our connections with a minimum of fuss as well as have a lot of fun with our helpers along the way!

The people at the Sapporo Railway Station Tourist Office were a great example of this. The tourist information officer managed to inform us that we needed to catch a Chuo bus from a nearby terminal that would take us to Furano but that we only had ten minutes to find the terminal, buy a ticket and get on board. Before I freaked out the lady had found an elderly volunteer tourist helper who was appointed with the task of getting us to our bus on time. The old man, breaking into a trot, led us back out into the crowded station, through a tunnel, down a corridor, into another tunnel, up some stairs and into a huge underground plaza where thousands of people were rushing purposefully in different directions. He then looked up at a huge glowing instructional sign, scratched his head and frowned.

“Oh my god,” I thought (or words to that effect.) “The old man’s lost. Well, we’ll miss that bus now for sure.”

I suddenly noticed Chuo Bus written in English on one corner of the sign with an arrow pointing up some stairs. I nudged our puzzled helper and pointed to the sign. He slapped himself on the head, broke into a huge grin, laughed out loud then sprinted up the stairs with us in tow. Within a minute we had purchased our tickets, exchanged bows with our helper and saviour, climbed on board the bus and settled into our seats with less than one minute to spare.

A typical log cabin for holiday rental in the Hokkaido region of Japan.

There were many other Hokkaido characters that made our stay special and Mr and Mrs Ebine (always accompanied by their furry sausage dog named Hino), the owners of the log cabin we rented for our holiday were particularly kind. Within twenty minutes of meeting Mr Ebine he had made up his mind that I was a fan of the local Hokkaido brown bear. On deciding this he scurried off to his storeroom and after several minutes of rummaging around he emerged with a beautiful forty centimetre carving of just such a bear which he presented to me with a deep bow. Mr and Mrs Ebine were attentive in every aspect of our stay, treating me to free glasses of sake, doing our washing, pointing out local wild life, recommending budget restaurants with great food and in the politest way possible pointing out cultural faux pas such as stomping shoes all over their tatami mats… something that only the most uneducated and uncultured of foreigners would do!

My daughter had decided early on that she wanted to buy an instamatic camera. Being Japan, we assumed that the town would have an ultra-modern, hi-tech photographic store. But this is Furano, a rural Hokkaido village…not Tokyo. We did find a little family-run camera store that was staffed by a middle-aged man, a middle-aged woman (we assumed to be his wife), another middle-aged woman (we assumed to be the next door neighbour), an elderly lady (we assumed to be grandma) and a collection of elderly cats (one of which was totally blind). None of them spoke English…especially not the cats.

Salem Edwards with her board.

Given the limited stock on display we were not surprised when the man, through pointing and sign language, informed to us that he only had display stock of instamatic cameras left and that they were not for sale. Seeing Salem’s disappointment, the man disappeared into a back room and started making phone calls. After a few minutes he re-emerged and indicated to us that he would like us to stick around for ten minutes. He then ran out the door and just when we were starting to wonder whether we really should be hanging around the man arrived back toting a new baby blue instamatic camera…just the type Salem was after. The next small block of time was spent with the whole family wrapping, bowing, smiling, accepting money, offering other small items as gifts and laughing with delight at our attempts to communicate with their Japanese speaking cats. The top end retail experience in Furano involves being treated as one of the family!

We also found a great bakery. I initially walked into this place expecting to buy a simple loaf of bread. Instead I walked out with around 20,000 yen worth of exquisite delicacies. When I first entered the immaculately dressed baker emerged from behind his counter, shook my hand then escorted me around the shop describing in broken English the inner secrets of each of the items that were lovingly displayed. I selected honey-glazed croissants, brioche with whole eggs baked into them and the crispiest of whole meal loaves to take home for lunch. The baker hand wrapped each item in beautiful paper, emerged again from behind his counter, bowed deeply as he presented my purchases to me then escorted to me to his front door. It seems ludicrous to describe buying bread as a deeply pleasurable experience but that’s what it was!

‘Exquisite’ delicacies from the Furano Bakery.

Even the McDonalds people were fantastic in Furano. Of course I’ve been howled down by my Byron Bayster friends for being so crass as to have breakfast in McDonalds while in Japan. Well, let me tell you, they have not been to the Furano Maccas. Locally grown organic eggs and avocado on a crispy bun served by middle-aged women who clearly honour and love their jobs (so much so that they arrange the food on the tray into artistic shapes both honouring the products and their customers) and eaten in a spotless dining room with spectacular views of snow covered mountains is hard not to enjoy. As we opened the front door to leave all the staff (counter attendants, drive-thru attendants, cooks and cleaners) all momentarily stopped their work to bow and wave goodbye.

The town of Funaro, nestled at the bottom of the mountains.

The mountain crew were also wonderful. A huge bloke (ex pro-rugby player) named Take who managed the ski shop took care of our rental equipment every night making sure that skis and boards were waxed and serviced and ready to go each day. At the end of a week he gave me an amber necklace as a gift in exchange for a ratty old pair of Vans sunglasses. His boss didn’t do a lot of work but she was sure entertaining. This woman, seemingly in her fifties, was always on the mountain either skiing or boarding. One morning she boarded up to me and explained that she had seen Salem zipping down one run and commented that Salem was boarding very well. She also added that she had not seen Levi on the slopes that morning. I responded that I had not seen him either. She told me he’d probably been eaten by a bear! (Oh, I thought, ok then…no problem.)

On another occasion an attractive female stranger skied up to us at the base of a run and greeted us warmly. It turned out to be the woman from the tourist office I had been emailing over the previous few weeks to organize our Furano accommodation. I stupidly asked how she recognized us on the mountain and she shyly explained that since I was just about the only non-Japanese person in town with two teenage kids in tow picking me out on the mountain was not exactly rocket science.

Our favourite of all the Furano characters was the owner, manager, head chef and front of house person at a curry restaurant we liked so much that we returned to three times. Another Furanoan with only a smattering of English this woman provide us with wonderful home-cooked food (at ridiculously inexpensive prices), fantastic service and a kindness and attention to detail that is rarely found in our home town. When it comes to a ski holiday Furano has it all, even on a tight budget and the kindness and warmth of the local people will leave you on a high for months.

Tim Edwards

For more information go to:furanoholidays

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