From Darra to Grange to the Gap
Did Trent Dalton's finger get cut off?
"People grab my hands and they go, 'I must know, I must know, are all your fingers there?'" he shared on Book Club.
... And?
This incredibly visceral, unbearably tense scene is a tough one to watch, and the realness of it has fans convinced it's got to be true. So many are surprised to find out it's pure fiction!
"Trent Love Story" refers to the book "Love Stories" written by Australian author Trent Dalton, who is most well-known for his bestselling novel "Boy Swallows Universe"; "Love Stories" is a collection of real-life love stories gathered from people Dalton interviewed on the streets, essentially a compilation of diverse romantic experiences told by strangers. Trent Dalton’s Love Stories – stage adaptation premieres at Brisbane Festival After the immense success of 'Boy Swallows Universe', Dalton returns to the Brisbane stage with a new theatrical adaptation.
Key points about "Love Stories":
- Author: Trent Dalton
- Inspiration: Dalton asked people from different walks of life to share their love stories with him.
- Connection to "Boy Swallows Universe":While "Boy Swallows Universe" is a fictional story about crime and family dynamics, "Love Stories" is a collection of true love stories, showcasing Dalton's interest in exploring human relationships
Boy Swallows Universe leads AACTA Industry Awards as Australian talent shines
The AACTA Industry Awards 2024 celebrated the best in Australian television and film, with Boy Swallows Universe leading the pack and Bluey adding to its growing list of accolades.
Here's what's fact and what's fiction in Boy Swallows Universe on Netflix.
If you haven't watched Boy Swallows Universeon Netflix yet, clear an eight-hour block in your calendar and sit the heck down. I'll wait. Yes, I'll wait while you watch the entire series, because we need to discuss it openly.
*Twiddles thumbs for a day*
Okay, you done? Now that you’ve finished (and if you haven't, THIS is your very official spoiler alert), you might have the same questions that I have.
Like… If this show is based on a novel (it is) that's based on author Trent Dalton's life (it… also is), how much of it really happened?
Did this kid really go around with his drug dealer stepdad wearing matching Hawaiian shirts and aviator shades?
Was he truly friends with a convicted murderer?
Did he actually break into jail to see his mum on Christmas Day?
I. HAVE. QUESTIONS.
And… also some answers?
So according to Dalton, the story is a pretty equal split of fact and fiction – which, if you're across it at all, is still pretty shocking. "It's about 50 percent real, and the other 50 per cent is wishful thinking," he shared on the Mamamia Book Club podcast.
"I created that boy, who really is me. But I needed this boy to walk into places in my own head that I was afraid to go."
For two months during the pandemic, the Australian author Trent Dalton lugged a sky blue 1960s Olivetti typewriter to a busy Brisbane street corner and invited strangers to tell him a love story. A sentimental, slightly absurd stunt – and one that could have gone very wrong. But Dalton, ever the charmer, has a way of finding the extraordinary in the everyday.
The result was Love Stories, a book brimming with intimate confessions, grand gestures and all the messy business of being human. Now, in a stage adaptation for Queensland Performing Arts Centre, adapted by Tim McGarry and directed by Sam Strong, those stories don’t just leap from the page – they explode with theatrical spectacle.
Trent Dalton’s Love Stories review – a stage adaptation that grabs you by the heart
Maybe we'd all be much more effective communicators if we all shut up more.
Dormant true love, there for everybody, just waiting to be found, erupting when the thread of existence collides with chance and the eyes of two lovers meet. Boom. From what I’ve seen of it, true love is hard. Real romance has death in it. It has midnight shakes and flecks of shit across a bedsheet. True love like this dies if it has to wait for fate. True love like this asks lovers to cast aside what is meant to be and work with what is.
I have a forgiveness weakness in me that I hate because it means I'd probably forgive the man who removed my heart with a blunt knife if he said he needed it more than me.
Do your time before it does you.
I’m a good man,’ Slim says. ‘But I’m a bad man too. And that’s like all men, kid. We all got a bit o’ good and a bit o’ bad in us. The tricky part is learnin’ how to be good all the time and bad none of the time. Some of us get that right. Most of us don’t.
The downside is life is short and has to end. The upside is it comes with bread, wine and books.
August is one year older than me but August is one year older than everybody. August is one year older than the universe.
Slim’s always talking about this, the little movies within the movie of your own life. Life lived in multiple dimensions. Life lived from multiple vantage points. One moment in time – several people meeting at a circular dining table before taking their seats – but a moment with multiple points of view. In these moments time doesn’t just move forward, it can move sideways, expanding to accommodate infinite points of view, and if you add up all these vantage point moments you might have something close to eternity passing sideways within a single moment. Or something like that.
Every day of your life has been leading up to tomorrow. But of course every day of your life led up to today.
True love like this asks lovers to cast aside what is meant to be and work with what is.
Your end is a dead blue wren.
Don’t forget to be specific…Details. Put in all the details. The boys appreciate all that detailed daily life sh*t they don’t get anymore. If you’ve got a teacher you’re hot for, tell ‘em what her hair looks like, what her legs look like, what she eats for lunch. If she’s teaching you geometry, tell ‘em how she draws a bloody triangle on the blackboard. If you went down the shop for a bag of sweets yesterday, did you ride your pushee? Did you go by foot? Did you see a rainbow along the way? Did you buy gobstoppers or clinkers or caramels? If you had a good meat pie last week was it steak and peas or curry or mushroom and beef? You catchin’ my drift? Details.
Boy swallows past. Boy swallows himself. Boy swallows universe.
Australian shrimp barbecue, when the beers and the rums mix with the hard sun headaches and widespread Saturday night violence spreads across the country behind closed front doors. Truth is, Bich said, Australian childhoods are so idyllic and joyous, so filled with beach visits and backyard games of cricket, that Australian adulthoods can’t possibly meet our childhood expectations. Our perfect early lives in this vast island paradise doom us to melancholy because we know, in the hard honest bones beneath our dubious bronze skin, that we will never again be happier than we were once before. She said we live in the greatest country on earth but we’re actually all miserable deep down inside and the junk cures the misery and the junk industry will never die because Australian misery will never die.
The whole point of life is doing what’s right, not what’s easy.
The sun is in me now. The sun is my heart, and all the world - the fishermen in China and the corn farmers in Mexico and the fleas on the backs of the dogs in Kathmandu - relies on the rising and falling of my full heart.
Most things people say don't need to be said.
Watch my language? Watch my language? This is what really shits me, when the clandestine heroin operation truth meets the Von Trapp family values mirage we've built for ourselves.
The dads in those tv shows spend a great deal of time talking to their kids in their living rooms. Steven Keaton - the dad of my dreams - seems to do nothing but sit on his couch or at his kitchen table talking to his children about their myriad teenage calamities. He listens and listens to his kids and he pours glasses of orange juice and hands them to his kids as he listens some more. He tells his kids he loves them by telling his kids he loves them. Dad tells me he loves me when he forms a pistol out of this forefinger and thumb and points it at me as he farts. He tells us he loves us by showing us the tattoo we never knew he had on the inside of his bottom lip: Fuck you.
...hugging Dad back feels like the good thing to do and my hope is to grow into a good man, so I do it.
Maybe we’d all be much more effective communicators if we all shut up more.
Molly knows the secret to a long walk. Never think about the destination. Just think about the air in your lungs, the motion of your arms and legs. There is a rhythm to it, and once you have found it that rhythm can tick-tock through time forever.
The only cure for grief is to grieve. The only cure for hurt is to hurt. Every tear is a tribute. Every tear is a memory, every memory is a treasure.
...she knew there was hardship in this true love and endurance and reward and failure and renewal and, finally, death, but never regret.
Sometimes when he's drinking, he gets all weepy and he'll ask me to come closer to him and he'll ask me to hug him and it feels strange to hold him close to me but it feels good too, with his face hair rubbing like sandpaper against my softer cheeks and it's strange and sad the feeling of sorrow I feel because I know he might not have actually been physically touched, except by accident, by another human for about fifteen years.
It’s about the ups and downs of life. The downside is life is short and has to end. The upside is it comes with bread, wine and books.
Love is commitment,' Zak says. 'I don't just mean commitment to a person, I mean commitment to making space for someone in your life and letting them grow and change inside that space and still loving them.
The analogy might be that love is like the sun. We cannot look directly at it, but we see our world because of it, and experience its many life-sustaining functions. Essentially, the “teleological” definitions of love point to it nurturing, healing and transforming humans (and societies) into the best versions of themselves
Do your time, before it does you
Love breeds love. Big or little, every gesture of love is as worthy and important as another. And maybe the small is actually not so small after all. Sometimes those little gestures are just as life-saving.
Trent Dalton, Love Stories
The analogy might be that love is like the sun. We cannot look directly at it, but we see our world because of it, and experience its many life-sustaining functions. Essentially, the “teleological” definitions of love point to it nurturing, healing and transforming humans (and societies) into the best versions of themselves
Love is commitment,' Zak says. 'I don't just mean commitment to a person, I mean commitment to making space for someone in your life and letting them grow and change inside that space and still loving them.
Butterfly short life, Yukio says. But butterfly live forever.... - he raises a single forefinger - in one day.
The tilapia has been drowned in a garlic and chilli and coriander sauce, so many exposed white bones in its charred and thorny dorsal fin that they look like the ivory keys in the warped piano organ the devil plays in hell.
Darren says his mum told him a secret recently about Australians. She said this secret would make him a rich man. She said the greatest secret about Australia is the nation's inherent misery. Bich Dang laughs at the ads on telly with Paul Hogan putting another shrimp on the barbie. She said foreign visitors should rightfully be advised about what happens five hours later at that Australian shrimp barbecue, when the beers and the rums mix with the hard sun headaches and widespread Saturday night violence spreads across the country behind closed front doors. Truth is, Bich said, Australian childhoods are so idyllic and joyous, so filled with beach visits and backyard games of cricket, that Australian adulthoods can’t possibly meet our childhood expectations. Our perfect early lives in this vast island paradise doom us to melancholy because we know, in the hard honest bones beneath our dubious bronze skin, that we will never again be happier than we were once before. She said we live in the greatest country on earth but we’re actually all miserable deep down inside and the junk cures the misery and the junk industry will never die because Australian misery will never die.
Ol' Bill's bein' all cagey because it's hard for blokes to admit a woman might choose death over putting up with more of their bullshit.
And what role are you playing today, Molly? Greta asks. Or are you still working on that twelve-year-old gravedigger girl who has convinced herself she's not being raised by monsters?
Remember that the best relationship is one in which your love for each other exceeds your need for each other.
The human heart's default state is actually kindness.
Time, Slim. Changes faces. Changes stories. Changes points of view.
I'm not gonna kill myself. And we love him very much, which is only half as much as he loves us.
Slim spent a total of 36 years in Boggo Road.). ..He knows what a well-written letter means to a man inside. It means connection, humanity. It means waking up. He’s been writing letters to Boggo Road inmates for years using false names on the envelopes because the screws would never pass a letter on from Arthur “Slim” Halliday, the man who knows how to escape their red brick wall fortress, better than anyone. …
Hearts don't turn to stone, Molly," Greta says. "But they do turn. One day your heart is filled with nothing but love and then something gets inside and mixes in with all that love and sometimes that something is black and sometimes it's cold and feels just like stone because it's heavy, and sometimes it gets so heavy you can't carry it inside you no more.
Don't fuckin' swear.
And I thought to myself in that moment that this remarkable interaction had only come about because I’d decided to cartwheel to H&M, because I’d decided to choose wonder. And that’s just about as close to the point of it as I can get. Do I want to walk through this life of mine? Or do I want to cartwheel through it?
No weights of gold to measure
Only scales of truth and lies
For we are living treasure
Under all our shimmering skies
Because sadness is the truest emotion,” Greta says. “Happiness isn’t to be trusted. It’s a bald-faced liar. But the truth of your sadness enriches every other thing inside you, especially your joy. You shouldn’t be afraid to go to the place that makes you sad, Molly Hook. The more you go to that dark place inside you, the lighter it gets. You go there enough times, you realize that dark place is actually your sacred place. That place is all of you and the tears you take from that place are just the darkness leaking out, precious drop by precious drop. You following me?
Sometimes it’s good to settle for the side-mirror view of life. Sometimes we don’t want to see the full picture.
What's with you and men being good?'
'Never met a good one, that's all,' he says. 'Adult men, Tink. Most fucked-up creatures on the planet. Don't ever trust 'em'.
because I listen and I remember what I listen to.
Sometimes true love is not saying a single word. Just being there. Sometimes that's the greatest love we can bring someone. Just be quite. Just shut the fuck up and be there.
He said so many things, and I reckon all those things put together wouldn't say as much as he said when he'd wrap his arm around my shoulder.
Stay sweet, Eli Bell.
Molly nods, thinks for a moment. "Do you think Ophelia deserved a Christian burial if she took her own life?"
Greta shrugs. "Poor girl wasn't thinkin' straight," she says. "That's what men can do to ya, Molly. Drive a girl bonkers; make her wanna go sleep forever in the nearest brook.
See, kid, there's all kinds of bad inside", he says. "Blokes who start good and turn bad; blokes who seem bad but aren't bad at all; and then there's the blokes who are bad in blood and bone because they're born that way. That about describes half of those screws in Boggo. They took those jobs inside because they were drawn to their own kind, all those rapists and killers and psychopaths they were pretending to help rehabilitate when all they were doing was feeding their own evil beasts that lay dormant inside the cells of their own fucked-up heads.
And time is up. Time is undoing. Time is undone.
Love is knowing when you've come home.
Should have told you then that it's nothing but a choice. There's no past in it, there's no mums and dads and no where you came froms. It's just a choice. Good. Bad. That's all there is.
It’ll get good, mate. It’ll get so good you’ll forget it was even bad.
Trent Dalton, Boy Swallows Universe
He turns to us at the window. ‘I always told my mum that’s the worst part about this country,’ he says, shaking his head. ‘All the fuckin’ bullies.
timing, planning, luck, belief. I reckon that’s like life.
Love is the privilege of being with someone long enough that you’re gradually refining the truths that you tell each other. You feel safe enough to keep showing more and more of yourself to each other.
See, that's called perspective, Eli. A bee sting smarts like a bitch until someone clubs you with a cricket bat.
To burn this house down or set the world on fire. Up to you, Eli.
You're on the low side of love but that's still love all the same. Maybe you're lucky to have held a kind of love that makes you feel so low. Some folks feel no side of love at all.
Molly nods, thinks for a moment. "Do you think Ophelia deserved a Christian burial if she took her own life?"
Greta shrugs. "Poor girl wasn't thinkin' straight," she says. "That's what men can do to ya, Molly. Drive a girl bonkers; make her wanna go sleep forever in the nearest brook.
And time is up. Time is undoing. Time is undone.
Love is knowing when you've come home.
She's beautiful, Graeme,' I say.
'I know,' he says, warmly and softly, gently nodding his head, more tears welling in his broken eyes. 'I don't have to see her to know that.
Sometimes you don’t have to say anything, you can just feel,
But isn't there a little white lie in all acts of forgiveness?
It’ll get good, mate. It’ll get so good you’ll forget it was even bad.
I believe in dancing badly, farting politely, kissing sloppily, hoping realistically, grieving openly, fishing silently, dreaming wildly, making up quickly, making love slowly, writing daily, whistling hourly, weeping freely, singing loudly, screaming internally, thanking everybody and failing at least once a week. I believe it is good to whisper to plants as long as nobody gets hurt.
No, your marrow, boy. You are weak-boned. Your bones are hard but your bones are not full. He nodded at August. 'Marcel Marceau's bones are hard and they are also full. Your brother possesses a strength that you will never have.' August shot a smug and knowing smile at me. 'But I've got great finger bone strength,' I said, flipping August the bird.
Love is helping others,’ he says. ‘You see someone sad, you lift them up. Buy ’em a cup of coffee. That’s what I do. Don’t leave someone at square one.
Stay sweet, Eli Bell.
I was overjoyed two weeks later when I received 6 letter pages back from Alex. Three of which were devoted to memories of the times in Alex’s childhood when he’d been intimidated by boys in sewage tunnels and of the violence that ensued. After the passage in which Alex detailed the anatomy of the human nose and how weak it is in comparison to a swiftly butted forehead, I asked him just exactly who I had become pen pals with….
We look to the stars. Backs on the grass. Danny rolls on his side. Props his head up with his left hand. ‘Hey, you still wanna know why I was crying on the bridge?’ he asks. ‘Yeah.’ He sits up. He’s breaking fragments of a twig between his fingers. ‘It’s a bit messed up.’ ‘It is?’ I sit up now, too. ‘Well, now I really wanna know.’ He tosses a bit of a twig over his feet. ‘Sometimes I go to the middle of that bridge and I look over the edge and I think about jumping off,’ he says. ‘Right,’ I say, wondering where he’s going with this. ‘But I’m not doing that in a sad, death way,’ he says. ‘I’m doing that in an alive way.’ ‘An alive way?’ I nod, trying my best to keep up. ‘I don’t think I’d ever jump, but sometimes I really think hard about it, and it terrifies me,’ he says. ‘And then it makes me feel alive. It makes me feel grateful. Because in that instant I feel like I’ve saved myself from certain death. I don’t know what part of me wants to jump, I can’t explain where it comes from, but it’s like some weird part of me always wants to die. I think that’s why I’m scared of heights. Like, have you ever been on one of those balconies in one of those high-rise apartments on the Gold Coast?’ ‘No,’ I say. ‘I live in a van.’ ‘Right,’ he says. ‘Sorry. Entitled dick.’ ‘You’re entitled to be.’ ‘Those Gold Coast apartments have balconies as high as the clouds, but the railings on the balconies don’t even go up past your belly button. You could trip over and that’d be it. Splat. I think some people get scared on those balconies because they are scared of the part of themselves that wants to die. For most of us it’s among the few times in our lives when we come so close to so easily being able to end it all, and we’re terrified by that voice in our heads screaming, “Don’t jump, arsehole,” and it’s like, what sort of crazy fuck has to even say that to themselves? So, sometimes when I’m on that bridge I think all that stuff, and then those thoughts are like reminders of how fucking beautiful it all is. The thought of dying reminds me why I love it all so much. I look at the river and the buildings and the lights and the moon and the stars and the people going past and I say these same words: “You’re so fucking lucky.
Should have told you then that it's nothing but a choice. There's no past in it, there's no mums and dads and no where you came froms. It's just a choice. Good. Bad. That's all there is.
See, kid, there's all kinds of bad inside", he says. "Blokes who start good and turn bad; blokes who seem bad but aren't bad at all; and then there's the blokes who are bad in blood and bone because they're born that way. That about describes half of those screws in Boggo. They took those jobs inside because they were drawn to their own kind, all those rapists and killers and psychopaths they were pretending to help rehabilitate when all they were doing was feeding their own evil beasts that lay dormant inside the cells of their own fucked-up heads.
Do I want to walk through this life of mine? Or do I want to cartwheel through it?
how the universe stole her boy and replaced him with the enigmatic A-grade alien loop
Then she says, "Let me get this straight. We just survived an aerial bombing from the Japs, right?"
"That's right," Molly says.
"Then we set off in search of buried treasure?"
"That's correct."
"Then we got attacked by a bunch of wild water buffalo?"
"I wouldn't say 'attacked'," Molly says. "But definitely fair to say we were charged by about ten water buffalo."
"What now?" Greta asks."
"Now we walk.
I beam at her. See, Mum. See. After all this, after all these mad moments, after Lyle, after Slim, after you getting put away, it's still the same old me. Nothing changes, Mum. Nothing changes me. Nothing changes you. I love you more, Mum. You think I love you less but I love you more because of it all. I love you. See. See that on my face.
We humans like to operate in three-second bursts of emotion. A three-second greeting, a three-second wave goodbye. Infants rambling sentences and gesturing wildly: three seconds. More primally, we breath deep in three-second bursts, we chew food in three-second bursts. Same in the animal kingdom. A giraffe chews a leaf, a panda has a scratch, a kangaroo takes a dump. Three seconds. A whole world turning in three-second life-units that builds upon themselves to form a truly wondrous twenty-four-hour miracle . . .
The heart is warmed by warming the hearts of others. You only had a stone heart to give, she thinks, but she took it anyway.
Gal mes visi kur kas geriau susikalbėtume, jei dažniau prikąstume liežuvį.
But the best gig he ever landed through acting was a lifetime loving Julia McCulley.
