Daniel Ducrou is a writer based in Melbourne, Australia.

He has published numerous short stories, poems and arts reviews in street press, anthologies and magazines. He has a BA with an English Literature major from Flinders University, which was completed on a study abroad scholarship in the UK. During university, he co-edited an anthology of short stories and poetry entitled Infusion, which was published by Wakefield Press. He also co-edited Flinders University’s Student Magazine.

He has been mentored by best selling novelists: Linda Jaivin (Eat Me and The Infernal Optimist) and Marele Day (Mrs Cook: The Real and Imagined Life of the Captain’s Wife), and has worked with Varuna’s artistic director and manuscript developer, Peter Bishop. In recent years, he has worked on collaborative projects with people from a wide range of creative backgrounds including visual artists, filmmakers, web-designers and musicians.

His first novel, The Byron Journals (formerly titled Conditions of Return), was shortlisted for the 2007 Australian / Vogel Literary Prize and the 2008 Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards for an Unpublished Manuscript.

You are cavanbah, a meeting place for all the world’s people, a town travellers come to talk about their homelands. You are a joint passed between seven nations slouched around a living room. You are a flesh-tease on a beautiful beach, a lazy congregation of sun-worshippers basking in the mindless heat. You are the quickening merry-go-round of tourist seasons & holiday weekends. You are the feeding frenzy of businesses like sharks tearing blubber from a whale’s back. You are pretty young touts on five dollars an hour offering backpacker-fliers to locals. You are locals who can no longer afford you, moving elsewhere. You are a Spanish guitarist sitting on a stool outside the bakery chopping big colourful chords into carefully portioned splashes. You are palm fronds bending outside a window, a neighbour’s music blaring in the background & dirty dishes stacked up on the sink. You are the eccentrics that flourish like wildflowers. You are Beautiful wrapped in a pink sarong near the beachfront showering passers by with compliments like flower petals. You are the Fluteman preaching to an imaginary congregation in the middle of the street, gesticulating to the empty blue sky. You are Dougie sitting on the club-house steps all day long listening to Led Zepplin, Bob Dylan and the Beatles on a battery-powered stereo. You are millionaires from the world’s big cities queuing up behind the struggling youth, drug dealers & dole-bludgers at the supermarket. You are pensioners, school kids & single mums hitching in and out of town. You are screeching lorikeets encrusted in the Norfolk pines at dusk. You are tumbling rhythms on cowhide drums beating back the ocean tide. You are the lighthouse’s pulsing glances. You are cold schooners, surf-films & lusty-eyed gazes at the Beach Hotel. You are a string of one-night stands, of slippery pounding sex; you are a town racked with orgasms and sexually transmitted diseases. You are a sprawling fight outside the Northern on a Friday night while everyone stands around eating pies & caramel slices. You are outdoor dance parties in obscure locations, three-day drug-benders fueled by ecstasy, speed, coke, ketamine, marijuana, acid & alcohol. You are Nomads Bikers with swastikas on their sleeves dancing next to Jews. You are a sensory banquet winding towards inevitable famine. You are this incredible flux of stories. You are the aboriginal dreamings – the jealous husband who threw his spear at the escaping canoe of his wife & her lover – drowning them where Julian Rocks stands today. You are a sanctuary within which the outside world is a momentous fiction; you are unread newspaper articles on coups, wars, riots, destruction & starvation. You are an all-consuming paradise. You are the ocean’s perpetual drama of winds, tides & swell. You are a mound of saltwater jacking on a sandbar at Tallow Beach , heaving into a cocoon & exploding into hedges of white-water. You are surfers running late for school, work, uni & meetings – walking home dripping wet through the streets with boards under their arms. You are endless speculation about the changing surf conditions. You are boats filled with scuba divers, negotiating the crowds at The Pass where long gentle waves are shared by first-time surfers, swimmers, body-boarders, wave-skiers, sponsored surfers & longboarders. You are the Catholic Mafia’s ownership and control of the CBD. You are illegal backpacker houses overcrowded with bunkbeds. You are the most litigious council in Australia , spending over thirteen grand in court fighting an appealed sixty-five dollar parking fine, and losing. You are Sannyasin. You are as mindless as the southerly wind resurfacing the dimpled sand. You are as forgetful as the tide sweeping away a slaughtered whale’s blood. You are the creased palm of the Jesus beggar sitting on a shop step, his vacant stare. You are the first patterings of heavy rain at the end of a long, thirsty drought. You are the first trays of mangoes for the season, handpicked by backpackers, arriving at the supermarket.

It was spring in Byron. The most pointless season of the year. Blustering northerlies, tiny surf. Bluebottles. No work. No money. Woolies was eerily quiet. Business owners whinged about lack of trade; workers whinged about lack of shifts. Old-timers shook their heads and grew misty-eyed about years past. Not like it used to be, they said.

The double room at my house had been empty for a month when Sebastian answered our advertisement. Neither Pete nor I liked him, but we were desperate. He told us his girlfriend was due to arrive the following week and he’d move in that day if he could pay a single room rate until she arrived. We agreed.

A week passed. Then another. He stayed up all night and slept all day. He left skiddies on the toilet bowl. He never showered or washed his clothes. He walked around the house naked except for a cheap sarong that fell open whenever he sat on the couch. He stank of rotten eggs and mouldy cabbage. Food fell out of his mouth when he talked. He was consistently late with the rent. He kept us awake at night listening to classical music and having phone-sex with his imaginary girlfriend.

Pete was over it. Summer was coming, he reasoned, and Sebastian was chick repellant; he was dragging us down with his filth and his stink. We had to get rid of him. We decided to give him one more week and if his girlfriend didn’t show, he was out.

I asked him to tone down the phone-sex thing. It was killing me. But Sebastian just thought it was funny. He said that was nothing; wait till his girlfriend arrived. I reminded him that we were waiting. But he didn’t get it.

She was insatiable, he told me, a nymphomaniac. She wanted it all the time and she screamed the house down when she came. Pete and I would probably have to buy earplugs.

‘Whatever,’ I said. ‘When does she get here?’

He frowned.

‘Soon.’

The rest of the week dragged by. She didn’t come. And everything Sebastian did fingered me. Everything he said was nails down a blackboard.

On the second to last day, he changed his name by deed poll. From Sebastian to Sebastian. Then he gave me a lesson on how to pronounce it correctly.

And that’s what finally snapped me.

            I told him that Pete and I couldn’t afford to go thirds anymore. We needed a couple to move in and pay the double room rate. I told him it was nothing personal; we wished he could stay – it was just a money thing.

Sebastian moved out the next day.

As soon as he was gone, Pete and I got drunk, punched bongs, cranked up the metal and jumped around the house. We made plans to poach hot euro chicks from the hostels. And overcharge them. It was going to be madness. Debauchery. A new beginning.

The next morning, we cleaned the house and took some photos with Pete’s digi-cam. It was decided that I would do the first hunt. Pete stayed on the couch.

‘Remember,’ he said. ‘Stay firm on the price.’

I nodded, put on my sunnies and closed the door. Determined, I set out for the hostels. It was time to rebuild our lives. Convert water to wine. Replace the slime Sebastian had brought upon us with hot euro chicks and lesbian sex.

I got kicked out of the first hostel. Tried another. Fired blanks the first couple of conversations.

Then I saw her. She was unbelievable. I was love-struck; get-married-and-make-babies-love-struck. Her eyes flashed like jewels, her skin was smooth and tanned, her nipples showed hard through her singlet. I cleared my throat, dropped my voice an octave and combed my fingers through my hair. I introduced myself. Her name was Sofia . She was German. She’d just arrived in town and yes, she and her friend were looking for somewhere more permanent. I told her about the room, showed her the pictures on Pete’s digi-cam. I did the hell sales-pitch: told her how cruisey Pete and I were; how we were sponsored surfers; how we loved teaching travellers to surf.

Two hundred a week. Twin share. Cheaper than the hostel.

She seemed keen. She thought I was funny too. She laughed at everything I said – this weird high-pitched hyena laugh. It was ridiculous. I was bubbling like a can of lemonade. I was Schweppervescent.

She stopped laughing.

‘But I am a flutist and I must practise every day for two hours. This is okay?’

I pictured her nude, serenading me, rubbing a flute against herself.

‘No worries; flute’s cool. I love the flute.’

Pete would adapt.

‘Also,’ she said. ‘If I get inspired, I must sometimes play at night. I am – how do you say – impul-sive…’

She laughed her hyena-laugh.

‘Don’t worry! Sometimes Pete and I are loud too! We’re impulsive too!’

She looked confused.

‘You and Pete are gay?’

‘No… well… Pete’s gay. But I’m straight.’

She nodded.

‘And from when is the room available?’

‘Right now; today.’

‘Really! This sounds too wonderful.’

‘Yes, it’s wonderful!’

‘But…’ she wavered. ‘The price is perhaps too much.’

I was mesmerized by her breasts and struggling not to stare at them.

‘I’m flexible on price.’

I was legs-behind-my-head-yoga-master-flexible-on-price. She tilted her head to the side.

‘So… one-sixty? This is okay?’

Pete’s warning flashed through my mind but I blocked it. When Pete saw her, he was gonna drop to his knees and worship me.

‘Deal.’

We shook. I was the king. Champion of champions.

Sofia motioned to someone behind me.

‘Hey! I found a room!’

I turned. The smell of rotten eggs and mouldy cabbage hit me like a truck. He was still wearing that same fucking sarong. I heard nails down a blackboard.

‘Well,’ he said. ‘Hasn’t this just worked out perfectly?’