We’re at the State Library of Queensland and she has just delivered the opening address of the Brisbane Writers Festival. This country is a crime scene. She’s here to promote her book Edenglassie. I hope slowness, politeness, reciprocity, respect may one day return to this place.

I applaud. Then, with amnesic abandon I jump her with my camera.

“Can I take your photo?”

Where’s my slowness, my politeness? She has a head cold. She’s adjusting the keffiyeh she’s wearing so it shields her shoulders from the mid-winter breeze. I find out later she borrowed the garment from her daughter-in-law’s mother. 

“Alright,” she says, flatly.

With her permission, I lift my camera to my eye, but her tone has shaken me. Someone told me she has no time for fawning. And she hates having her photo taken. Those are the likely frustrations behind her blunt “alright”, but paranoia tells me that I have displeased her personally. Still, I creep in, and she backs into the perfect light. 

The lens I use is a beautiful thing. But around my neck its weight is an albatross with all the glass inside—seven hand-ground elements in six groups. The camera it’s attached to is a fancy decoy. A stand-in for personality. I’m not smooth enough to enter a conversation without it. Charmless, I ask to take her picture. 

I do it throughout the festival to other authors too, lying about my motive. My unasked questions preserved in the smokehouse of my head. 

How can a writer be like this? Unable to communicate in person. It’s not uncommon. But it’s counterproductive to be shy in the arts world.

Melissa Lucashenko called her novel Edenglassie, the colonists’ renaming of Meanjin, before Edenglassie was then renamed Brisbane. In the novel, there’s a statue of the Yuggera warrior Dundalli in South Bank. I went looking for it but all I found were a couple of statues leftover from Expo 88. I could have told Melissa Lucashenko that wry anecdote instead of hiding behind my camera.

Melissa Lucashenko is in my rangefinder and there’s a moment between us. She stares through the lens directly into my eye. My finger spasms and I click the shutter. 

“What’s your name?” she asks, almost making me want to reach for my ID.

I tell her, then add, “I’m a writer too.” 

Stupid. You’re not a ‘too’ to Melissa Lucashenko.

“My debut comes out next year,” I blurt, hoping to position myself more respectfully, but I position myself instead as hapless. She squeezes my arm and then she’s gone.

The next day, I post the photograph. Melissa Lucashenko is not on social media, so I can’t tag her. Instead, I tag the festival and her publisher who is also my publisher—UQP. They share the photo to their followers. The digital world does its thing. My notifications are filled with likes that dilute some of the embarrassment I feel at my failure to just talk to her. 

Where’s my reciprocity and respect? I could argue that I’m promoting her book. That I’m contributing to her fame. But that’s all bullshit. I’m borrowing interest in her. I should have just said hello.

Is this what we do to our artists? Rather than see them as a person to converse with, we turn them into a goal to converse with. Their elevation, a construct of our reverence, mangles our ease with them. They make us nervous with their talent and so we treat them differently. They must feel excluded by that. 

A good portrait has the subject’s eyes in focus. But when I look into Melissa Lucashenko’s eyes, I see something troubling. Is it wariness? Or weariness at just another person taking something, not giving something. Those eyes of hers are telling it like it is.