If it weren’t for The Police, author and blogger Hariklia Heristanidis may never have met her husband. That’s the story she has provided in the new rock anthology edited by Christian Ryan, Rock Country. The book features pages and pages of stories from of Australia’s best musicians, journalists, and purveyors of Australian music.
A treasure trove of scoops: Sex lessons from Bon Scott. Scary encounter with Chrissy Amphlett. On the trail of Keith Richards’ Melbourne wife. The whirlwind genius years of Molly Meldrum. Normie Rowe’s ten months in London. Cold Chisel in LA. The Triffids in Berlin, Camden, Leederville. How Nick Cave got me through my Soviet adolescence. Around Australia in eighty days with Sherbet and the Ted Mulry Gang. The happy-sad genius of Barry Gibb. Doc Neeson smashed unconscious by traffic sign. Grant McLennan in the record racks – just to name a few.
The way Hariklia was asked to be part of this book may appear to be fate, but her stories about her life with music have been vast and varied. As part of an application for a mentorship with the Victorian Writers Centre, the author was asked to provide a history of her work to date. She talked about her book All Window’s Open, her short stories, and of course her blog, What She Said.
“I remembered I had all of these diaries that I had been keeping for years and I thought of the idea of posting a blog entry every day from one of my diaries from any year from the last 40 years,” she told Neos Kosmos about the inception of her blog. What it features are candid moments of her life throughout the years, but it was the heavy influence of music and band chasing, or stalking as she sometimes puts it, that caught the eye of her mentor, Maria Tumarkin.
Maria’s partner Christian Ryan was putting together the anthology and contacted Hariklia to see if he could include the story of the night she met her husband, which may never have happened had she not been stalking The Police, 14 years earlier.
“It was through Lee I met my husband down the track at a blues gig, so I thought If I hadn’t been stalking The Police and hadn’t met Lee then I might never have met my husband,” she says with a giggle. Her story, entitled Giant Steps, sits alongside essays written by music identities such as Stephen Cummings, Dave Graney, Mick Harvey and Tony Mott.
“I was absolutely wrapped to see my name,” says Hariklia of sharing the pages with some of the icons of Australian music.
Rock Country, edited by Christian Ryan, and published by Hardie Grant, is available at all good book stores. To read Hariklia’s blog visit http://hariklia-what-she-said.blogspot.com/