S1E6: Notes

09/10/23 • 58 min

A mixed tape of an episode that takes in The Saints and New Order at the Seaview Ballroom in 1982 Melbourne, writes a song about a closed cemetery in rainy Paris in 1989, nicks a guitar pick from the INXS stage, and reads a lot of Dick Francis.
After the last two interview episodes with special guests, this episode of Bad Diaries Podcast brings Jenny and Tracy back together, to read from our own diaries, on the theme of NOTES.
We set the same theme for a Bad Diaries Salon in Melbourne in May this year – our first Melbourne salon since 2019 – and it got us thinking (as our salon themes always do) about the different ways to interpret NOTES. We riff on notes we write, notes to ourselves and to others, musical notes on the page and on the voice and in the ear. Love notes, lists (of books read, of spaghetti marinara eaten); notes that have fallen out of place, and notes that remain where they belong.
Both of our readings, though, focus on music. Tracy reads from her travel journals, from a few days in Paris in 1989 that she later turned into song lyrics. Jenny reads from 1982 and her music-soaked Melbourne, nights catching INXS and No Nonsense, The Saints and New Order, Night Moves on the telly.
To note is to observe, to notice, and we notice the value of notes, lists, ephemera. As Jenny says, “we might be thinking this is a podcast about diaries ... all this other surrounding stuff – the notes, the scraps, the ticket stubs, the postcards ... in some ways maybe gives more detail than the diaries themselves.”

Find full show notes for this episode on the Bad Diaries Salon website baddiariessalon.com, or get in touch via Instagram or Facebook – we're @baddiariessalon everywhere.
Thanks for joining us for Bad Diaries Podcast! Don’t forget to subscribe, rate and review us, wherever you get your podcasts.
Bad Diaries Podcast is recorded and produced in Naarm Melbourne, Australia, on the lands of the Kulin Nation; and in Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand, on the iwi lands of Taranaki Whānui, and Ngāti Toa Rangatira. We pay our respects to Mana Whenua, and to Elders past, present and emerging, of these lands.

Previous Episode

S1E5: Kate Camp

In our second guest interview episode for Bad Diaries Podcast, Tracy talks with poet, essayist, reviewer and five-time Bad Diaries Salon reader Kate Camp about diaries, the slipperiness of memory, and noticing what you notice.
Kate and Tracy dig down into the experience of reading at, and returning to, Bad Diaries Salon – what that means, what it brings, and what it feels like. Kate very generously talks about and reads from the treasure that is the little red diary she kept every day in 1986, the year she turned 14, “the best possible year of your life”.
Kate Camp is one of Aotearoa New Zealand’s finest and most loved poets, with awards and plaudits and seven collections of poetry to her name, from her 1998 debut Unfamiliar Legends of the Stars to 2020’s How to Be Happy Though Human: New and Selected Poems.
Last year saw the publication of Kate’s sharp-edged and quietly magnificent memoir, a collection of disarming true stories titled You Probably Think This Song Is About You. The pieces in the memoir are familiar but unsettling, disturbing but also somehow joyful – qualities shared with Kate’s readings at five Bad Diaries Salons at Wellington’s Verb Festival since 2018.
Content warning: this episode includes brief mention of sexual assault and drug use, abortion, and negative self-talk.

Next Episode

S1E7: Emily McCulloch Childs

In this interview episode for Bad Diaries Podcast, Jenny talks with curator, writer and art historian Emily McCulloch Childs. Emily loves diaries, life writing, and writers’ journals; her own earliest diary (velveteen-covered, horse-emblazoned) dates to when she was ten years old.
Jenny and Emily talk about how they first met as anonymous bloggers in the 2010s, the freedom of not having to be ‘writery’ on their blogs, the sense of liberation that anonymity gave, and how blogging could become a kind of online diary.
They discuss diaries as a cultural snapshot, and as revealing not only the inner life of the diarist, but of the other people around us while we are writing. They ask: do we write diaries to record, or to process, or both? And they consider the act of going back to the past and reading old diaries; how does it make us feel?
Emily McCulloch Childs is a curator, writer, art historian, researcher, gallerist, publisher, fundraiser and maker, co-author & publisher of McCulloch’s Encyclopedia of Australian Art and McCulloch’s Contemporary Aboriginal Art: the complete guide, and author of New Beginnings: Classic Paintings from the Corrigan Collection of 21st century Aboriginal Art.
Since 2003 she has been co-director of art company McCulloch & McCulloch with her mother, Susan McCulloch. They began exhibiting art in 2009, and established a home gallery at their family house ‘Whistlewood’ on the Mornington Peninsula, with a focus on Aboriginal art. In 2019 they opened Everywhen Artspace in Flinders, and now work with over 40 communities, 300 artists and 25 Aboriginal owned NFP art centres.
Since 2013 Emily has been the founding curator of The Indigenous Jewellery Project, Australia’s first national contemporary jewellery project working with Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander jewellers.