The final day of the conference opened with a keynote address by Lucy Sussex, an Australian SF writer, speaking on utopias in Australian fiction. Good speaker, good sense of humor–I went right out and bought her latest collection, A Tour Guide in Utopia.

We had had a cold front move in that night, and it was raining a bit and very windy, so there was a door to the outside that kept banging and rattling. Andrew Milner, one of the conference organizers, went over to fix it–after many tries, he finally just stood there and held the door shut so it wouldn’t rattle. After about 20 minutes of that, I could see he was getting tired, so I relieved him and held it the rest of the talk. At the end, Lucy thanked us for being such good doorstops.

There was a camera crew there today and the day before, and I asked them if they were recording this for university archives, or for local TV, or what. I was told that they are making a documentary with a guy named Petty, that will be half live, half animated, on utopianism. No funding yet, though, so no idea if it will ever be made.

I went to one presentation on Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, and then another by Chris Yorke on "Utopia and the Death of Virtue"–interesting ideas floated there, about whether virtue can exist in a society with no struggle. I skipped a couple presentations after that and hit to bookstore, acquiring Lucy Sussex’s book and a couple of others. Books, by the way, are even more expensive in Australia than the imported English-language books in Japan. I have just ordered several from Amazon.com that I had decided were just too expensive to buy in Melbourne.

Then back to the conference, and Andrew Milner’s presentation on American pulp-SF utopias, followed up by a discussion of Aboriginal Dreamtime as utopia and expressions of utopia in New Zealand Maori films like The Whale Rider and Once Were Warriors. Finally, Lyman Tower Sargent gave the closing keynote, and we were done.

Brain bursting, wallet nearly emptied of my own cards and filled with other people’s cards, folder full of handouts and requested Works Cited lists, I headed back over to Mannix College. I would have to leave at the crack of dawn the next morning to get to the airport in time, so I went into the canteen to ask if I could stick a little food in my room’s fridge, since breakfast wouldn’t be open by the time I left. The woman there loaded me down with more food than I could possibly eat–I had to surreptitiously leave some of it in the canteen so it wouldn’t go to waste.

Rob Shankly came by to pick me up, and took me over to Tim Betz’s place for a BBQ. There was had good conversation, excellent beer, wonderful meat.

Tim brought me out a little cup of sunflower seeds, something I had asked about, since I can’t get them roasted in the shell here in Japan. Seems they’re not eaten in Australia to any great extent either, but Tim had managed to find some at an Indian grocer’s. I tried them and pronounced them quite tasty: much more lightly salted than the usual American ones, but that’s a good thing–since living in non-spicy, non-salty, non-sugary Japan, my taste buds have grown more sensitive and easily overwhelmed. So then Tim brought out a LOT of sunflower seeds–he said they sold them by the kilogram, so he’d bought a whole kilo of the things. He kept some of it, but what was left over would end up filling every spare space in my suitcase.

Got home, packed, called Junko in Japan for the last time, got everything ready for departure. Slept like a log until 5am, ate gobs of fruit and yogurt, left a note of thanks to the staff at Mannix, and went out to wait for Rob, who was driving me, Angela, Chris, and Hyijin to the airport, there being no buses or trains going there from the university early enough.

In the airport, picked up a few last-minute omiyage, mostly chocolate-covered macadamias, which is about the most boring souvenir ever, but whatcha gonna do, eh? I grabbed a nice Aboriginal-art necktie for myself, thus pretty much polishing off the last of my very colorful Australian cash. I did manage to keep a couple of the enormous 50-cent coins as souvenirs, though–seriously, there must be some case in which these things were used as a murder weapon. They are deadly. I can imagine ninja in bush hats using them as very heavy impact-damage shuriken.

The flight back was a lot more crowded than the flight in, but then it was a Saturday. I did my best to sleep, but it was daylight all the way, so not much luck. Watched a Korean movie about an unemployed father who gets his old college rock band back together after a member dies–not bad. Read 8 chapters of Moby-Dick to prep for Wednesday’s lecture, and Isaac Singer’s "Gimpel the Fool" for my other lit class.

At Incheon Airport outside of Seoul, there was some confusing instructions at the info desk that caused me to miss my bus to the free hotel for Korean Air’s overnighters, but I caught it about 90 minutes later. Hotel June: 2 stars on a 5-star scale. Though dinner and breakfast were free, I vowed to skip breakfast after the really terrible dinner. The room was enormous, with a single bed and a double bed, and a gorgeous bath/shower with so many nozzles that it was scary. I could only get the shower head working anyway, and the water pressure was so low it just dribbled. The traditional heated floor was nice, though, and after watching a few minutes of people playing Starcraft on what appeared to be the all-Starcraft channel, I went to sleep.