It's been a long time between postings for this ex-pat. Here's an extra long rave to make up for it (which may or may not be a good thing).

The dust has settled – two weeks ago for youse fullas, but only just here in Sydney, as writers wind up their extra few days holiday and head for home, and the venues are packed down. Yes, I’m on about our respective literary festivals, the Auckland and the Sydney.

I did get the Auckland brochure and it seems Sydney got the sloppy seconds in quite a few instances. I’m ashamed to say, after years of reading NZ writers almost exclusively I hardly recognized anyone on the terrifyingly huge Sydney listing, and instead yearned to be at the Auckland festival cosying up with ma homies. The only Kiwi over here was a lonely Laurence Fearnley. Nice to read Mary McCallum's highlights from the Auckland festival (scroll down here).

However, having missed out on two of the international heavyweights I a) knew of and b) would have kind of liked to see (Jeanette Winterson and Anne Enright), I rattled my dags on a glorious Friday morning after dropping the kids at school, jumped on the Manly ferry and pootled over to the festival for the day. From Circular Quay, there’s a brisk, spectacular ten-minute walk around the harbour, past the Museum of Contemporary Art and under the Bridge to get to Walsh Bay – a seething cauldron of culture at the best of times, with theatres abounding and cafes and restaurants by the truckload. I was already feeling good.

First up was a session on book design, with Reuben Crossman, ex-adman, darling of Murdoch Books, and winner of the Best Designed Book of the Year 2008 as well as Best Cookbook with Movida and Best Young Designer of the Year. Pity then that his presentation on inspiration, process and technique was really, really boring – he simply read rather nervously from pages of notes. But hey – just because you’re a great designer, doesn’t mean you have to be a public show pony, and to be even fairer, I think he may have had a short lead time to prepare. The two women with him, Olga Lavecchia (winner of Best Designed Tertiary and Further Education Book 2008 and Best Cover 2007) and Trisha Garner (Best Designed Book 2007, Best Designed Non-Fiction Book 2007) were dazzling in comparison, with full-on PowerPoint presos and lots of sparkly banter to boot.

Olga had an epiphany when she joined the design team at Thompson Learning around the fact that textbook design should not have to be grim. Her gorgeous cover design for Communicating as Professionals clearly shows this, as does Investments, Concepts and Applications. As she said, some of these books cost up to $110 so why not make them lovely?

Trisha Garner took the prize for her design of the Florence Broadhurst book by Helen O’Neill. But what a plum job; one could hardly go wrong. Nice idea to have a ‘belly band’ though – a removable light card band around the book which has the title on it and can be slipped off to reveal a pristine expanse of a Signature Prints’ glorious red and white poppies. Yum.

However, it’s all very personal and subjective stuff and the best tips I took away with me should I ever decide to start designing book covers (and it has been discussed) was from the curiously wooden Reuben: go to bookshops to see where your book is going to sit on the shelves and what it’s up against and design accordingly so it’ll stand out. And be brave.

I partook of a few delectable nibbles from the ridiculously well-run festival café, did a spot of crowd watching and skipped along to my next literary decision – fifty-something feminist Lynne Segal, chatting to Australian author Drusilla Modjeska about her autobiography Making Trouble: Life and Politics.

Lynne was the daughter of a fifties mother who was the second woman surgeon to graduate in Australia but ‘had the great misfortune to be born a woman and a Jew’. Lynne remembered how small and insignificant her mother looked in photographs of groups of (male) doctors – ‘she took up very little space’. Her father, also a doctor, had numerous affairs and her mother was bitter – ‘not uniquely embittered’ but a product of the times. Women were chattels, however qualified, and expected to know their place to maintain the status quo.

Lynne, after graduating with a very good PhD, ‘got in with a bad bunch’, was arrested for tagging ‘Whoever you vote for the Government will get in!’ in Kings Cross. She eventually found herself accidentally pregnant to a ‘gay, homophobic artist’ and fled the weirdness with her 14 month-old baby to sixties London. After a year of misery and bewilderment, she found other single, disillusioned mothers and ‘entered history’. They shared childcare and changed their ways of living, communally and politically. They’d started something new and huge, but really in some ways they were still labouring under many of the constraints and unhappiness of their mothers. Lynne said ‘it’s only in your fifties you have the power and the wisdom’ to look back and see the mistakes that were made.

By this time, Lynne was really animated, sitting on the edge of her chair, waving her arms and gesticulating grandly, wild and woolly grey hair joggling, her words somewhat falling over themselves with her passion. It was rather exhilarating – she’s a great speaker and I can imagine that her classes in psychology and gender studies at the very flash Birkbeck College, University of London would be a hoot.

She famously and publicly disliked Doris Lessing, whose flat she took over in 1970. She didn’t finish The Golden Notebook (neither did Bookslut). Although Lessing provided the feminist bible for the generation after her, she feared and hated younger women, labelling them avaricious, stupid and lazy. She was convinced that they were there to take her down, and that from a biological angle younger women are always a threat to their elders, keen and more than able to blow them into the weeds. She was pathologically terrified of aging. Simone de Beauvoir (the other grandmother of feminism) on the other hand, simply carried on living her life to the full as it were – becoming even more radical as she aged, refusing to bow to sexual propriety - and ended up taking a much younger woman as a lover ‘in a very male way’.

The beginning of the end came once Thatcher hit Britain in 1979. Funding to local governments was cut, trade unions killed off and all the places and spaces they’d found for themselves were taken over and broken up. The world turned against the early feminists but, say what you will, they had built a new ideal of communities.

There were a few questions, notably from a worshipful bald man, who was aggrieved by the lack of personality in her latest book – he wanted anecdotes and humour, but Lynne very deliberately stayed away from this, and from away from labelling the book a memoir. She wanted the subjectivity and comparative freedom that a non-memoir would give. But she conceded that she just might have to do another one, since others had said the same. ‘Ooh yes please!’ he giggled.

Another woman confessed she had been a stripper in 1973 Soho to pay off an illegal abortion and, in between acts at the Pink Pussycat had read Germaine Greer with desperate recognition, but despite searching was unable to track down the many women’s groups Lynne mentioned. Where had they been? Lynne said that in Soho ‘the troublemakers she had needed were probably just around the corner’. I loved the names: Spare Rib and Red Rag were two I scribbled down. She finished with a quote from Simone de Beauvoir to rapturous applause.

The next session was the ‘The Simple Life’ with Sydney Morning Herald’s Elizabeth Farrelly, whose latest book, Blubberland works nicely with Michael Pollan’s latest work, In Defence of Food (I ended up buying his last book, The Omnivore's Dilemma, which is riveting). They were there to consider why we find it so hard to abandon habits we know to be destructive. After a rapturous intro from a nameless young lady who described Michael as a literary otter (“Wow, I’ve never rilly thard of myself as an arder, but thanks!”).

The charming Michael Pollen (pictured, top) started out talking of his early literary inspirations in the form of Thoreau and Emerson, who fired his hippy mentality and the romantic idea of Nature being the antidote to Culture. Thus he took off from New York at the weekends, to toil in his garden in north west Connecticut, taking breaks to marvel at the trees and clouds like a latter-day Fotherington-Thomas (scroll down). It wasn’t until a woodchuck moved in and laid waste to all his hard work that he realized the ideaology of his two mentors were great for conservation but useless for actual gardening. He confessed to becoming so infuriated with the varmint over weeks of fruitless woodchuck warfare that he ended up firebombing its burrow, nearly setting fire to himself and his property in the process.

Elizabeth said it was for reasons such as this she much prefers to live in an urban environment and proposed that cities should simply be seen as tools for dealing with the interface between two deeply ingrained but paradoxical ideas that most of us believe at some points, often both at the same time: one, that we are primal creatures and part of nature and two, that nature is there simply to service our requirements.

Under questioning the two moved on to the subject Michael labelled the ‘the elephant in the room’: rapidly declining fossil fuels and our continuing crazed rape of the resources left to us. With the media ranting over here about oil prices going through the roof and petrol conceivably going up to $2 a litre in the near future it’s hard to avoid. (Some guy in the audience later wondered if there was any way the media could be persuaded to put a positive spin on spiralling oil prices, pointing out that it’s probably the best thing that could happen and insisting that they should whack ‘em up to $2 asap. Short-term pain, long-term gain … the crowd applauded noisily at this, but I’ll bet they’re not applauding at the pumps.)

Michael had a sobering angle however – that cars were the least of our troubles and that finding a new way around industrial agriculture was the biggest challenge we will have to face. Sodium nitrates – the main component of fertiliser for crops – is created through use of natural gas, and pesticides are petroleum based. At present usage, one calorie of food produced in the US requires 10 calories of fossil fuels – before industrial agriculture the figure was 1 to 2. Holy crap.

However, he was quick to point out that he has personally seen methods of farming in action which use zero fossil fuels, leave the soil in better shape than it was to start with, encourage biodiversity, and are actually more productive than industrial agriculture. ‘The sun,’ he said, ‘is the free lunch here.’ But how to make the leap of faith? The global food crisis is making genetic modification something that previously sane people are now considering.

But companies like Monsanto with their Roundup Ready soybeans are selling a promise – they don’t really know what will happen with them and if it all goes tits-up the vague premise they’re working on is that we’ll know how to fix it by then. We may not. As Elizabeth said, living on a promise is tempting, but dangerous, whether it’s nuclear waste or carbon trading. As any parent knows, we want, need and have to have some concrete hope for our children and grandchildren.

Industrial agriculture is not feeding the world. It could right now – we’d have more than enough grain to go round if such huge proportions of it didn’t go down the throats of cattle and towards making bio fuel. But we have not tried sustainable agriculture on a large scale and we must.

Elizabeth reckons the only way to go is changing our mindsets as individuals, and make it our own responsibility rather than others’ – the time is past for us sit about thinking we have politicians for politics and environmentalists for the environment. We all have to take part in our future, there’s no option. Michael had a couple of other ideas to toss around – do what a bunch of Eastern Europeans did and exercise the ‘as if’ option. Simply begin to behave ‘as if’ we no are longer able to shop for pointless items, as if we have only ever eaten organic, as if we have always walked places instead of driving. Corporate marketing could also be the friend of a shifting mindset – put it to good use for once.

Michael said that in the States, the government funding budget for sending out healthy eating messages for a year is roughly the same as the advertising launch budget for just one high-visibility snack product. Scary, huh? He advocates simply staying away from supermarkets, or if you can’t, just stick to the edges where all the fresh produce is, that way you’ll avoid the chemical corn-derived crap that’ll kill you in the end. Also, Pay More, Eat Less is a good mantra.

An interesting point made was that we are constantly encouraged to keep our identities as consumers and our identities as shoppers separate. Retail giants would be terrified if we let them merge. But if we do we may have a chance of making informed decisions and not buying for the sake of it. ‘Vote with your fork!’ he trumpeted. ‘Say no to rampant consumerism!’ There was a funny aside here about the way we say no: mouth clamped, shaking his bald head emphatically from side to side to demonstrate, he said a friend of his reckons the way we shake our heads came about by trying to avoid the spoon as babies when our parents were trying to feed us something we didn’t like. ‘Your first political act, therefore, is avoiding the spoon!’ This is something we need to tap in to now, when bad spoons are constantly being forced into our mouth.

The final question was nothing less than is there a future for human beings and if so, how? Elizabeth said that again, as a parent, you simply have to have hope. She has huge faith in our creativity but the way ahead has to be a whole new mindset. As to ways of achieving this – she rather squeamishly had attended a 'Happiness Seminar' the previous weekend, where research conclusively showed that the happiest people are the most altruistic. There are levels of happiness – new shoes that you don’t actually need for example, is a high-GI happiness, intense but short-lived, like eating chocolate; but getting involved in your community to change something for the better tends to give measurably longer term and more ‘nourishing’ levels of happiness. This may be the way forward for the human race – to find one’s best self and put it out into the world in a meaningful way is good for you and good for the race as a whole, and what we lose as consumers we can gain as communities. A thought struck me – perhaps the loss of community ideals forged by the feminists may yet be re-forged by our new necessity.

Michael had the last, positive, word – he lives near Silicon Valley and he knows for sure that most of the capital from huge companies like Google and Amazon is now being ploughed back into research for clean energy. So if mere money can do it, there’s a lot of it out there. And he agreed – humans are endlessly adaptable. So come on people. Let’s adapt.