Well, isn’t this nice?

I was in the midst of a personal crisis/freelance-work juggling/insomniac week when the lovely Nadia King messaged me. It was early in the morning, my eyes were bleary (see above) and all I could make out was a picture of a screen shot followed by ‘JUUUUUULIA!!!’ ‘What?’ I messaged back. ‘I can’t see anything.’

What she was talking about was this:

It has taken me a week to collect myself enough (see above) to say BLIMEY!

And what an honour. And how bloody awesome is it not only that I know most of the people on most of the shortlists in the 2022 WA Premier’s Book Awards, but that these are also the people I would most want to be in a shortlisting with, them being all creators of integrity and passion. I am lucky to be a Western Australian creator in such a fabulous and warm creative community. Thank you, David Templeman, the Government of Western Australia, and the State Library. And Fremantle Press, of course.

A bit later Nadia messaged me and said, ‘Hey, you’re from Gosnells, aren’t you?’ And I said, ‘Gosvegas? My mother lived there, but I am an 80s Kemmy girl from the bottom of my DBs.’ (Okay, I might not have said exactly that, but you get the idea). Also, if you’re reading this from outside WA, Kelmscott (some of it anyway) was your working class/Pommie immigrant/bogan/chav/ghetto kind of a place (it’s a bit more gentrified now), and people from Kelmscott not as likely to be on a shortlist of any kind compared with people from, say, Dalkeith or Nedlands. Then she said, ‘I know a guy.’ Next thing – see below.

So. What a time. And thank you to everyone who has been cheering.

I might have to change the title of the memoir.