Peter Bowes

Bloodlines Peter Bowes

Publisher Marketing: Sean Doherty, author of My Brother's Keeper and MP: The Life of Michael Peterson, both published by HarperCollins, writes: "Pete Bowes was a Bondi boy who moved up to Byron Bay in 1963. Between Bondi and Byron Bay, Pete crossed tracks with a rogues' gallery - surfers, itinerants, brawlers, the lost - all of them lovingly hand-painted by Pete's pen. His short vignettes in Bloodlines are visceral, teeth rattling, funny and even true, and they stretch from then to now and this horizon to that, from the poetic to the poignant to the hilarious." From the introduction to this edition: In Jackson Pollock and the washaway dunes Peter Bowes writes: 'Pollock must have had the eyes of a housefly to see the same thing close-up as from a distance. Or the sight of an eagle drifting this way and that, three miles high in the moving air, with its fixed and magnified square of killing vision centred on a patch of tussock grass far below, and the rabbit lunching there.' This intensity of observation marks the true writer's eye as much as it does the artist's or eagle's, and to read Bowes' work is very often to focus on 'a fixed and magnified square' the minutiae of unnoticed lives; unmarked losses; small triumphs; private griefs; and unexpected joys. There are many treasures to be discovered here. Bowes' canvas is rich with life and the living of it; filled with colour and complexity, light and shade, and the interrelatedness of all things: much like the Pollock creations he so admires. 'This life, ' as Bowes observes, 'so she passes us by.' And underlying it all, woven throughout, the ineffable mystery of what it is to be human. (Please note: some of these pieces contain strong language) Contributor Bio:  Bowes, Peter Sent to boarding school aged seven/taught to box by the nuns/buggered off out of a bathroom window after two years/educated rather nicely at Waverley College/terminated early and without a ticket (a few problems with the brothers - nothing life-threatening)/continued the walk to life at Hawkesbury River and Tallangatta Outward Bound/buried five students and two instructors who drowned in the weir in winter/travelled south with the itinerant fruit pickers/travelled north to Noosa with questionable chaps who had spare seats in their cars/drove past Lennox without looking/met Bob Cooper, Bob McTavish and Russell Hughes, full of themselves even then/1963 grounded in Byron with only Queenslanders as friends/didn't buy any cheap land at Wategos/found work and the meaning of life at Walkers Slaughterhouse/bagged a seat in J Keevers' red Merc. 1964 got on a ship and sailed away forever/landed in the UK in winter/found the Poms a little moody, the girls though were a different matter completely/ challenged a Pom to put me in hospital in a street fight and never saw the bottle/did Europe in the back of a car with two Canadians who didn't talk to me/found that Portugal had a few waves/found Tangiers was full of English strange and quality kief and extremely cheap rooms and the whiff of Burroughs and Kerouac was still strong/got off a ferry at Gibraltar/stayed a year, took certain liberties/just avoided being belted by UK marines on leave from Biafra/found out that many Moroccan men are 'hands-on' friends, sweet as/got on a ship and went to the US forever/bought a wreck in NJ and went to Mexico via Florida along some very strange roads/met a black lady in Phoenix who thought Australians ate Aboriginals/found waves in Mexico/washed up in a Vancouver motel in winter with $54 and two books by Steinbeck/sat in a train for four days from Vancouver to Quebec with a chap who looked like Dylan/flew back to Gibraltar for the dark-haired girl/introduced Bob Dylan as ambient music in a couple of nightclubs/brought the dark-haired girl home to Bondi/worked in enough Sydney pubs to learn how to duck a fight and land a punch/two daughters joined us after a while and they still insist on their supremacy/washed cars/wired up old river mansions/worked in bars, nightclubs, building sites, slaughterhouses, hotels, farms, orchards, car-yards, game boats, nightclubs, river boats, offices.friend of some better side of human nature. Friend of some better side of human nature.