KNOT A FANZINE #2 2020 A compendium produced by Marc Ortlieb, P.O. Box 215 Forest Hill Vic 3131. [email protected]. This issue will be published in January 2021. Notes From The Spectacle Case As mentioned in the previous issue, Knot A Fanzine is a compendium of my ANZAPA contributions for the year, minus the mailing comments, which really don’t make much sense outside of ANZAPA. I published the first issue late in 2020, covering my 2019 ANZAPA contributions (plus one 2018 zine). This one will cover the strange COVID-19 ridden year of 2020. Now that I’ve caught up with this, expect the next issue in January 2021, all things being equal. ANZAPA, as you may or may not know, is the Australia New Zealand Amateur Press Association. While not having quite the pedigree of FAPA or SAPS, it’s one of the few remaining amateur press associations that has gone from strength to strength of late. The December 2020 mailing has 502 pages from 25 of its 27 members. We currently have 22 Australian members, from Victoria, New South Wales, Queensland, the Australian Capital Territory and South Australia. We don’t currently have members from Western Australia or Tasmania, though we have had in the past. Despite the name of the apa, we don’t currently have any New Zealand members. ANZAPA started off life as APA-A but became ANZAPA when it was decided that, if the U.S. had Frank Zappa, we could have ANZAPA. It then took about 38 mailings until we actually got a New Zealand member - Mervyn Barrett. Since then there have been other New Zealand members, but there are none on the current roster. Of our overseas members, we currently have two from the U.K. and three from the U.S.A. (a few of the current memberships are joint memberships.) During the COVID-19 restrictions in Victoria there were serious difficulties in continuing as a paper based apa - not the least being an issue that has dogged the apa for several years, that is the cost of posting large amounts of paper to interstate and overseas members. Added to this, the postal service became increasingly unreliable as the pandemic progressed. As an experiment, with Mailing 314, contributions were sent as pdf files to our OBE (Official Bloody Editor) Bruce Gillespie who, with the help of David Grigg, combined the pdfs to produce a mailing that was available to members via Dropbox. This has worked very well for the past five mailings. Bruce grew concerned that David was doing all the work and he felt that his own computer skills did not match the new format of the apa and so passed the reins of power over to David. It should be noted that Bruce completed an unbroken stint as OBE from August 2004 until October 2020, a total of 97 mailings. ANZAPA is bimonthly. Interestingly enough, in August 2004 Bruce took over the role of OBE from David Grigg. Some people are just suckers for punishment. I’m not sure why ANZAPA has maintained such a healthy level of activity. We do have some great writers as members and have had such for the duration of ANZAPA’s history. When you become part of conversations with Bruce Gillespie, Leigh Edmonds, Jack Herman, Claire Brialey, Christina Lake and David Grigg, then you are in wonderful company. We also have two Worldcon Chairpersons on the membership roster - David Grigg and Perry Middlemiss. Three of our members, Leigh, Bruce and Gary Mason, were founder members of APA-A though each has taken a sabbatical from ANZAPA in the past. ANZAPA allows us to interact on a level above the often trite level of commentary in places like Facebook. Not that I’m averse to haunting the pages of Facebook but ANZAPA allows more depth of conversations. Leigh Edmonds regularly contributes material related to various histories that he has been researching. But, for all that, it’s still a great place to keep in contact with fannish friends from days gone by. We’ve even done face-to-face on a major scale. The tenth anniversary of ANZAPA was celebrated with a mini-convention at the home of John Foyster and featured, apart from a massive ANZAPA collation, games of table tennis, early computer games and all sorts of fun. So, given that I no longer have the time or inclination to become involved in the fanzine production, conventions or fan writing that I used to enjoy, ANZAPA provides me with the perfect outlet for the remnants of my fannish energy. They used to say that FAPA was where old fen went to die. ANZAPA is where old fen can go to live. Photos from ANZAPACon in 1978. Top Left The late John Bangsund. Bottom Right Leanne Frahm and me. 1 KNOT WHAT IT SEEMS An ANZAPAzine produced by Marc Ortlieb of P.O. Box 215 Forest Hill, 3131. [email protected] but, in deference to a little history, this issue is being started in the City of Elizabeth South Australia, where the temperature is too bloody hot. Paine and Head are batting in a much cooler Melbourne. Half their luck. NOTES FROM THE SPECTACLE CASE The week around Christmas saw me visiting Mum in Elizabeth. The people at the Elizabeth Motor Inn are starting to recognize me. I had, as I did the previous year, dropped into Cash Converters, just next to the Elizabeth Railway Station, and bought a second-hand bicycle. This one was a minor improvement on the one I’d bought previously – it seemed to have working front and rear brakes and rear gears. The frame was sound and it had good thick tires. This time I was better prepared – I had in my rucksack my spare helmet, pump, gloves and hi-vis stripes, along with front and rear lights. I wheeled the bike over to the Motor Inn, where the proprietors greeted me by name and I settled in. As it turned out, the bike wasn’t in as good condition as I’d initially thought. The front brakes, which I thought I could adjust, required a new brake lever and the gears tended to slip. Still, for $30 I wasn’t complaining. The allen keys I had weren’t enough to adjust the brake cables and so I had to do a bit of searching around the Elizabeth Town Centre to find an adjustable wrench. It was only after using that that I discovered the problems with the front brake lever. Still, the bike got me around Elizabeth for the week I was there and, about half way through my visit, the Inn proprietors kindly offered to store the bike in their shed for my next visit – I thanked them and will take a replacement brake lever with me the next time I visit. My next visit will certainly not be over Christmas. Adelaide was going through one of its sequences of 40°C plus days and Mum wasn’t up to more than 30 minute visits, fortunately in the mornings before the heat really hit, and so I spent most of my afternoons in my air-conditioned Motel Room, watching the cricket. The bike did allow me to reacquaint myself with Elizabeth, which is very flat and so the tendency of the gears to slip was only inconvenient when I was working my way around the roundabouts, of which Elizabeth has several. I was once again reminded of how very dry Elizabeth gets. There was nowhere near the amount of greenery I associate with Melbourne. I also had another encounter with three corner jacks – the reason I was more interested in thick tires on the bike than its brakes. One must have made its way into my room on my shoe. It then transferred itself from the carpet into my heel. Elizabeth hasn’t changed all that much since I used to live there. The shopping centres have either died or increased in size. The one thing I did notice while wondering around the Elizabeth Town Centre was that I was very much out of place due to my lack of tattoos. (My brother Jon also noted that I have too many of my own teeth as well.) There has been some building but most of the houses are still the same single storey stand-alone buildings. There are plenty of ovals – one of which was occupied by a giant inflatable water slide while I was there. A couple of the schools have disappeared with my alma mater changing its name from Elizabeth High School to Playford International College. Sadly of the eight Scout Groups that were there when I was involved, there are now only two – Elizabeth Park and Edinburgh Park. The other thing that hasn’t changed much is in Adelaide. Okay, Adelaide now has a longer tram line and there do appear to be a few new buildings, plus a newish footbridge over the Torrens, but the Jerusalem, my favourite Lebanese restaurant is still there and so I did get a meal with my brothers Chris & Jon and their partners Soo and Alison. (Some of you would have met Soo, who was involved in Adelaide fandom and who was a good friend of Mandy Herriot.) The Jerusalem is something of a dive on Hindley Street with laminex-covered tables and an attempt to disguise the ceiling with a tent-like fabric. It’s not as cheap as it used to be, but the food is still good – certainly the nicest hummus I’ve ever tasted.