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Authors: Frank Moorhouse

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The bright light, however, defines clearly the circle of attention, everyone is defined, and it excludes the stimuli of the night, creates hard-edged conversation.

That night it rained. Sometimes it doesn't rain for ten years at Lake Eyre, but in the night a pattering soft rain began.

I roused everyone from their tents telling them that they had to ‘bare themselves' to the event. They were a complaining bunch and immediately began to fear that it would mean flooding and the trucks might not be able to make it in to collect us. They had a point. I took an inventory of our supplies and suggested that as from the next morning we all go onto half rations.

By morning, however, the rains had gone. The desert was as dry as a desert should be.

I had spent the night sponging water from the sides of the tents and squeezing it into an emergency tank. My presence around the tents during the night brought me some abuse, but as Leader I had a duty to maximise our chances of survival.

They would've been glad of that water if we'd been stuck there for ten months.

But the trucks came and I lowered the flag and struck camp. Before leaving I went to the snake hole and said farewell. Back at EJs I bemoaned to Susie that we hadn't had a proper rebirth trauma and that there
had been insufficient hardship experienced. She said that not everyone courted danger like I did. I suppose she's right.

She suggested that maybe now that I was back in the city I should give up wearing the boots, leggings, moleskins, barometer pouch, compass pouch, windchill factor gauge pouch, and stop eating in public with a bone-handled sheath knife. I told her I was having trouble re-adjusting to city ways.

Author's Note And Acknowledgements

None of these pieces have appeared together in book form and all have been revised for this book.

 

Most of the Francois Blase pieces appeared in the
Bulletin
or
Business Review Weekly
. The Oral History of Childhood pieces, ‘Mechanical Aptitude' and ‘Jealousy Tests', appeared in the
National Times
, and ‘Pledges and Vows' in
The Hard Word
. ‘The Drover's Wife' was first broadcast over the ABC as a mock item in a program called ‘The Anzacs and All That' and later published in the
Bulletin
.

‘An Incident from the Wake for Jack Kerouac' appeared in
Coast-to-Coast
, ‘The Subject of Death is now Concluded' first appeared in
Quadrant
. ‘Around the Laundromats' was a column that appeared in
Thor
and then in the
Bulletin
. ‘Convalescence' appeared in
Stand
as ‘Dirty Girl'. Some of the pieces have not been previously published.

 

Permission to reproduce the items in the article ‘The Drover's Wife' is gratefully acknowledged: the
Bulletin
, the
National Times
, and the individual sources named.

 

Frank Moorhouse was born in the coastal town of Nowra, NSW. He worked as an editor of small-town newspapers and as an administrator, and became a full-time writer in the 1970s. He has written fiction, non-fiction, screenplays and essays, and edited many collections of writing.

Forty-Seventeen
was given a laudatory full-page review by Angela Carter in
The New York Times
and was named Book of the Year by
The Age
and ‘moral winner' of the Booker Prize by the London magazine
Blitz
.
Grand Days
, the first novel in The Edith Trilogy, won the SA Premier's Award for Fiction.
Dark Palace
won the 2001 Miles Franklin Literary Award and was shortlisted for the NSW Premier's Literary Award, the Victorian Premier's Literary Award and the
Age
Book of the Year Award.

Moorhouse has undertaken numerous fellowships and his work has been translated into several languages. He was made a member of the Order of Australia for services to literature in 1985 and was awarded an honorary doctorate from Griffith University in 1997.

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

FICTION

Futility and Other Animals

The Americans, Baby

The Electrical Experience

Tales of Mystery and Romance

Conference-ville

The Everlasting Secret Family and Other Secrets

Forty-Seventeen

Grand Days

Dark Palace

Cold Light

OTHER BOOKS

Room Service

Lateshows

Loose Living

The Inspector-General of Misconception

NON-FICTION

Days of Wine and Rage

Martini: A Memoir

COLLECTED WORKS

Selected Stories (also published as The Coca-Cola Kid)

FILM AND TELEVISION SCRIPTS

Between Wars (feature film)

Coca-Cola Kid (feature film)

Everlasting Secret Family (feature film)

Conference-ville (telemovie)

Time's Raging (with Sophia Turkiewicz, telemovie)

The Disappearance of Azaria Chamberlain (docudrama)

BOOKS EDITED BY THE AUTHOR

Coast to Coast 1973

State of the Art

Fictions 88

A Steele Rudd Selection

Prime Ministers of Australia

The Best Australian Stories 2004

The Best Australian Stories 2005

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted by any person or entity, including internet search engines or retailers, in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including printing, photocopying (except under the statutory exceptions provisions of the Australian
Copyright Act 1968
), recording, scanning or by any information storage and retrieval system without the prior written permission of Random House Australia. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author's and publisher's rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

Version 1.0
Room Service
9781742746630

Copyright © Frank Moorhouse, 1985

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

A Vintage book
Published by Random House Australia Pty Ltd
Level 3, 100 Pacific Highway, North Sydney NSW 2060
www.randomhouse.com.au

Addresses for companies within the Random House Group can be found at
www.randomhouse.com.au/offices

First published by Viking in 1985
This Vintage edition published in 2009

National Library of Australia
Cataloguing-in-Publication Entry

Moorhouse, Frank, 1938–.
Room service.

ISBN 978 1 74051 141 4 (pbk.).
I. Title.

A823.3

Cover design by Gayna Murphy, Greendot Design

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