Without a doubt, the oddest-looking entry in my professional writing CV involves an American venture called Eye International in 1986. It was a magazine devoted to the arts and popular culture, but it didn’t get terribly far: the only issue that ever emerged was a pilot, prominently numbered ‘Volume Zero, Number Zero’ on its cover. I was once asked, in a job interview, whether this phantom publication constituted a hoax on my part.
The art world, as it turns out, is a completely different ball game to the cinema world. I was able to begin a late 90s piece on Moffatt for the up-market, German/English magazine Parkett with the frank statement that ‘Australia is a strange place … uncanny, disturbed, traumatic’ – and no editor advised me to tone that down.
