Readings.com.au: Interviews

Terry Denton

2008-08-09T00:00:00Z

Terry Denton, interviewed by Jo Case, editor of Readings Monthly

Award-winning author/illustrator Terry Denton had been successfully working in children’s books for over a decade already when he was first teamed with Andy Griffiths, to illustrate an educational textbook Andy had written. It was the beginning of a beautiful partnership. Terry is a prolific writer and illustrator, creator of the Splash! and Wombat and Fox series, illustrator of the Maxx Rumble series, and much more. Jo Case spoke to him about his creative partnership with Andy Griffiths (the Just series, The Bad Book, The Cat on the Mat is Flat and The Big Fat Cow That Went Kapow, What Bumosaur is That?).

How did the creative partnership with Andy Griffiths come about?

We worked on an educational book or two together and they were looking for some funny illustrations, I guess, and they came to me. And we realised that we bounced off each other pretty well. And he was writing short stories and having difficulty getting them published, so we went together as a team and approached a publisher or two, and that got them started. [The short stories would become the Just series, starting with Just Tricking.] I think that they were a bit confused about his stories to begin with but I think that when they saw the package and how we were going to approach it, they understood.

I think it was just the two of us going together. It all evolved in that process. I think they just liked the idea of the two of us working together.

You must have presented well as a team.

Yes, we do work well as a team. It’s good fun.

Andy said that the fact that you were already a known and successful illustrator was probably a part of publishers picking up the Just series as well.

Yeah, I guess that’s true, because I had been there for about 10 years before. So, I did have an established name and I’d won a few prizes, so that probably helped. But in the end what mattered was that the stories were good. I think it made to look at them more seriously if I was prepared to illustrate them. But I think that the stories were just looking for the right publisher.

I guess my thing is that even though he needed me in some ways to get that first break, he was going to get that anyway. It made no difference.

But you sped it along. And the illustrations are obviously a big part of the package, especially the Just stories.

Yeah. But I still reckon they’d survive without them, though.

The good thing really since then is that we’ve really expanded our collaboration, and that’s been really good fun.

Yes, I wondered how that happened – how you branched out to The Cat on The Mat is Flat and The Bad Book?

Well, with The Bad Book, we decided to just do something really bad, to address that whole badness thing. We probably went too bad in the end. Though a lot of kids would disagree with that. A few adults thought we went too bad, but it gave us then an insight into another way of working. And out of that came The Cat on the Mat, which was an attempt just to get that level of humour without the badness, to see if we could spread it across a book in this different kind of form. It’s quite a bit younger, really.

When you started working on the Just series, did you realise you’d end up with such a long partnership with Andy?

No, we didn’t really know what we were trying to do in the first book. It was just the idea of marginal humour, I suppose. I think I did a lot more illustration than either of us would have imagined I would do at the beginning, and then it started evolving. And I suppose it really changed at Just Crazy, it started to expand in different directions. And then at Just Disgusting, it really took off.

We did a little book called What Bumosaur is That recently, and that was a lot of fun. We went away for a week down to Wilson’s Prom and worked for an intensive week, coming up with bumosaurs. So, that was really good fun. Not only because we work together so well, but just the other things we talked about and plans we made.

The margin illustrations in the Just series must be really fun to do.

Yeah, it’s a really intense process when it happens, because Andy spends nine months doing the stories and the illustrations to do in about a month, a month and a half. They come to me as double page spreads. It’s just a matter of that six-week, wild, coming-up-with-600-drawings, process.

You must have to really closely schedule that in around your other projects.

Yeah. It’s drop everything else and do that! While it’s sort of slightly nerve-wracking and intense, it’s an exhilarating process, too. Free ideas.

Andy told me that he told you to just do whatever you like in the margin illustrations, that they didn’t need to be too tied to what was happening in the story.

Yeah, that’s probably how it started. Some of them are linked to the story and some of them aren’t. But then there’s these characters we invent. Very early on, we had this character of Mr Scribble, who was just a pile of scribble, and for me then it’s a matter of working out what a piece of scribble can do. And then in the most recent one, Just Shocking, I invented this character of Spleen Boy, who’s just this spleen without a body who runs around creating havoc. I run into kids who just love that whole idea. Both of those characters, they just love them.

Have you ever been tempted to take some of the margin characters or illustrations and spin them off into something bigger?

It’s an idea I have, that it would be fun to do. A book which is a series of visual ideas. And we have talked about that. We’re about to start another series with a working title of Foolish Fables. They’re fables. But I think after that I’d like to try something visual using those characters and seeing what you could do with them. Going from a visual point of view, just inventing characters and doing stuff with them.

I wondered if you got stung by The Bad Book controversy as well? I know that Andy copped a lot of flack...

He took all the flack.

Were you surprised by the reaction?

Not really. To be honest, I thought there would be a little more than that. There was not a huge amount of negative reaction. There were a couple of bookshops in Sydney and a few schools here and there. Quite a few people defended it. Andy spent a lot of energy defending it. But he liked it like that. Deep down, he LIKED the idea of going out and defending it. In some way, he’s a crusader. My attitude was, they can say what they like, really. I mean, the book’s out there. And kids love it.

Did you have any regrets with The Bad Book, or is that something you’d do all over again?

I think, if we made a mistake with that book, it was our illustration approach. Initially, the idea was to illustrate it in almost stick figure-ish kind of way. And in the end, we chose to soften the approach to make it more palatable maybe. We decided that the text was BAD. The drawings perhaps didn’t need to be that bad. I think that now both of us think that was a mistake. We should have signalled the badness in the drawings as well. The book would have had a much more feral kind of look.

And there’s a couple ... there’s the little boy who runs across the road and gets skittled. But I talk to children about that, and that’s one of the things they mention the most. They get the joke. But it strained the sense of humour of a few people. There’s one image ... it illustrates the story of ‘There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Poo’ ... there’s a picture of a lady who looks very much like my mother sitting down at a table like my mother may have and drinking a cup of tea and eating poo off a plate. And maybe, if it were a more feral stick figure-ish kind of picture, it might have worked better.

Your poor mother!

It’s out there, now. I think what I might have changed would be to do it in a more inventive and out-there kind of drawing style.

But I guess, I bet you can look back on any project you do and there’s some things you might do differently.

Sure. That’s really true. Every project I do, I look back and think ‘I could have done that better’. You always imagine you could do it better.

But I guess you have to finish it sometime and send it off.

That’s right. Yeah. I think both of us would not, NOT do The Bad Book. In fact, we’ve often talked about doing a second one.

Really?

I still love that idea. I think we should go there. It just may take a bit of time to get there.

Would you call it The Bad Book 2 or something?

Yeah. The Badder Book. I think we both have to realise that we can do softer stuff, but we shouldn’t lose that harder edge either, and we shouldn’t be afraid of going to places like The Bad Book. Because there’s a big readership for it out there. There’s a lot of people who want that sort of thing who get something out of it.

It sounds like you guys never run out ideas of things to do together.

I suppose that’s because you keep refreshing the model. Andy’s come back to doing Just books. He was going to stop about four, I think, and I think we’re at six now.

Yes, he said that it was because kids at schools kept begging him to do another one, so he ended up doing it.

Yeah. But I think, also, he likes doing them! He’s still getting something out of that. But you keep yourself keen by pushing off into other areas as well. That’s the challenge: not to stick with one thing, really. Keep moving.

Jacinta Halloran

2008-08-04T00:00:00Z

Jacinta Halloran, interviewed by Georgia Blain

Melbourne GP Jacinta Halloran won the 2007 Victorian Premier’s Award for an Unpublished Manuscript for an earlier version of her first novel, Dissection, which is being launched this month by Helen Garner. That’s two pretty auspicious ways to kick off a writing career. Georgia Blain spoke to Jacinta for the latest in Readings series of Australian Features showcasing new and emerging writers, sponsored by the Copyright Agency Limited (CAL).

Each of us has a carefully constructed sense of self. We build it, gradually, from a young age, and try to fortress it against the inevitable small daily chips that chisel back the armour, and the larger blows that run the risk of cracking the core. In her very taut and lean first novel, Jacinta Halloran takes a female GP protagonist, Dr Anna McBride, and puts her under the microscope as she suffers one such blow. Following a case of delayed diagnosis necessitating the amputation of a young man’s leg, McBride finds herself facing a negligence suit. Despite being aware that her mistake is one any doctor easily could have made, the experience is a shattering one.

The novel is a beautifully executed dissection of a rapidly crumbling inner core. With precision and skill, Halloran lays McBride bare, examining her as she cracks and disintegrates, page by page. It is, at times, a painful read, a little like watching a car crash, as we see the effect of this one mistake running through McBride’s professional life, and then into her personal life. It is also a thought-provoking novel, because it is so much more than just a careful examination of individual self doubt and suffering. It questions – in a much broader sense – the infallibility that we expect from others and the consequences of those expectations.

Halloran, who is herself a GP, said the impetus for writing Dissection came from an article she read about a doctor facing a negligence suit. What intrigued Halloran was the woman’s discussion of the failure of her marriage, which she attributed to the stress of the impending court case. “The details of the negligence case in my novel – who did what to whom – are backgrounded, intentionally,” she said. “I wanted to focus on the emotions of my protagonist – her self-doubt, her terrible guilt about doing harm, and the loss of equilibrium and confidence that begins to infiltrate her faith in her marriage.”

Halloran believes most doctors (and particularly female doctors) worry about being sued. It’s an inevitable aspect of an occupation that has become increasingly demanding and challenging. “Doctors are required to keep up to date with an ever-expanding range of medical information; they have real time constraints (especially given the current shortage of GPs nationally); they work essentially in isolation; and as primary caregivers they are constantly required to be vigilant for the rarer, serious condition among the plethora of common, more minor complaints,” she said. “It’s perhaps unwise to generalise about the issues faced by female GPs, but I would say that there’s some evidence that women tend to spend longer with patients, especially those with mental health issues. Many female GPs have children and work part-time: in such a situation one can find oneself ‘giving’ and ‘caring’ full-time, and this can be very draining. ‘Compassion overload,’ it’s sometimes called.”

“If a doctor does become the subject of a negligence case, it’s not just the difficulty of going through the legal formalities – of speaking in a different language, that of the law,” Halloran said. “It’s the whole self-analysis that such a suit engenders. Doctors, by nature, are usually high-achieving and self-exacting people, and the concept of harming a patient is very confronting to their sense of self.” This is certainly the case with Anna McBride, who has, until her mistake, never really questioned either her profession or her role in it. Now, she doubts every action she takes and every decision she makes, and this doubt eats away at any faith she has in her work having worth or value. In the process, which is inevitably one of self-absorption, she cuts off from her husband and her children, causing further destruction to her sense of self.

Halloran depicts McBride perfectly – a middle-aged woman who suddenly looks in the mirror and sees all her fallibilities painfully on display. There is also considerable compassion in this depiction. She is a woman we feel we know. One of the other very powerful aspects of the book is its understanding of how life and human interaction do not sit neatly within the expectations of the medical and legal professions. There are rarely definitive answers or clear rights and wrongs, but we frequently expect this from our doctors – and the law certainly demands it when it is called upon to judge their conduct. As Halloran says: “Anna McBride is not a bad person but neither is she perfect – as a doctor, wife and mother, she has made mistakes. Hasn’t everyone? I have tried to make Anna a real woman, riddled with self-doubt and negativity yet capable of love and kindness, and I have tried to make her relationships with her husband and children also real. Relationships are full of ambivalence – in general life is full of ambivalence, too, and shades of grey – and I have tried to capture this in this novel.”

Halloran came to writing – like many new authors – through a tertiary course. “After doing editing and non-fiction writing subjects I felt confident enough to start a novel. [Melbourne writer] Antoni Jach was my teacher at this time and he encouraged me to enrol in a Masters of Creative Writing at RMIT, which I did. I am due to finish this MA very soon. Both the RMIT diploma course and the MA provided wonderful and very supportive writing environments.” Halloran also reads widely, naming the Canadian short story writer, Alice Munro, experimental French writer Marie Darrieussecq and the Nobel Prize winner, J. M. Coetzee, as just some of her favourite authors. “Coetzee’s prose is always magnificent – the rhythm beautiful, the words so precise, the consciousness and self-consciousness of his characters so superbly drawn. He writes in a different way from many novelists – he is always questioning the function of language.”

With her first novel now published, Halloran is planning her second. “It’s about a mother and her two daughters who set out on a journey – a pilgrimage if you like. (I was brought up a Catholic and I find religious ideas making their way into my work!) There may be some medical themes – life-threatening illness and death will feature – but I envisage the novel to be largely concerned with the relationship between the three women.”

She is also still working as a GP. “I work in a large practice as an employee, so I don’t have the added work of running my own practice,” she said. “I try to write two days a week and can of course extend this if I want to. It’s a good balance. Writing is a very solitary occupation – not only physically but mentally – your mind turns in on itself – at least, that’s been my experience to date. It can be difficult. So it’s good to get to work and think about my patients and their lives, their stories, for a change.”

Georgia Blain’s latest book is the memoir collection Births, Deaths and Marriages.

Claire Thomas

2008-07-24T00:00:00Z

Claire Thomas, interviewed by Jo Case, editor of Readings Monthly

Claire Thomas has published short stories in various journals, including Meanjin and Overland. She has worked at a variety of jobs, including acting and bookselling, and is currently doing a PhD at the University of Melbourne. This month, she publishes her first novel, Fugitive Blue. She spoke to Jo Case for Readings.

What was the inspiration for this book?

The idea for Fugitive Blue came to me many years ago during an art history lecture about Renaissance artist materials when I first heard about lapis lazuli pigment and its immense mercantile value. I immediately thought – what if some of that got into inexperienced hands? What if a painting was created that was of substantial material value but without inherent artistic status? What if people through history still cherished that painting and maintained its longevity? It was that one little detail that triggered the whole story.

You have a background in art history. How did that influence you when writing the novel?

As a student of art history, I focused on twentieth-century art, and there is only a little bit of that in Fugitive Blue. In a way, it is a surprise to me that I have written a novel that features an artwork from fifteenth-century Venice. Still, that’s what I’ve done and I definitely grew to love that strange little panel painting. Fugitive Blue does, however, have a certain contemporary sensibility, which makes sense by the end of the novel.

In the writing of my book, I wanted to avoid traditional ideas about master painters and their masterpieces and instead highlight other ways of ascribing value to art. I wanted to look at the role of women in art, beyond that of the subservient muse. And perhaps, above all, I wanted to explore the material vulnerability of artworks that are often assumed to be objects that should last forever.

Fugitive Blue moves between modern-day Melbourne and various historical settings. How much research did you need to do to get the historical background right?

In addition to the contemporary sections, the book has four historical settings – Bonegilla Migrant Reception Centre in the 1950s, Paris in the 1870s, Venice in the 1770s and early Renaissance Italy. In each case, I had some existing interest in the period and chose it as a stage in my story for that reason. But I did a heap of research for them all and found it endlessly fascinating, whether it was reading eighteenth-century Grand Tour diaries or accounts of life in the Paris Opera, or simply driving to Albury-Wodonga to see its trees.

The process was very simple: I’d immerse myself in an era for a few months, reading and absorbing as much detail as I possibly could. Eventually, when I felt like I was overflowing and desperate to process all the information, I’d write the related section. I wanted to know as much as possible about each period so I could write the stories fluidly, placing my characters into a clear world.

In the book, your main character falls in love with her work while restoring the striking ultramarine painting: becoming engrossed in it (to the detriment of other parts of her life). Did you become similarly engrossed in your novel while writing it?

Unfortunately, the writing of Fugitive Blue took too long for me to maintain that level of completely consuming affection! I loved it at times and thought it was a pathetic folly at other times. I wrote and re-wrote my novel over many years with a definite determination but never, I hope, to the detriment of my relationships. I am not a writer who buys into the whole neglect-or-take-advantage-of-your-loved-ones-for-the-benefit-of-your-own-terribly-important-fiction thing. I write as much as I can whenever I can, but there are other things I value just as much. I suppose what I had in common with my character was the (misguided or otherwise!) belief that my ‘project’ was worth pursuing and a certain discipline to see it through to the end.

What are the books and writers that influence you?

I love the writing of Mary Gaitskill, Joan Didion, Paula Fox, A.S. Byatt and Jeffrey Eugenides. In terms of the oldies, Henry James, George Eliot, Emily Bronte, Proust and Woolf have all meant a lot to me at various times in my life, and some of them still do. Recently, I’ve particularly enjoyed reading Nicola Barker’s Darkmans and re-reading Patrick White’s The Vivisector. And I am endlessly impressed with Helen Garner and Tim Winton – their longevity and the fact that they are very much themselves. I don’t even attempt to write like any of these authors but, as a reader, they’re some of the ones I love the most.

Richard Moore, Director of MIFF 2008

2008-07-15T00:00:00Z

Richard Moore, Director of MIFF 2008, interviewed by Jo Case, editor of Readings Monthly, July 2008

Richard Moore is the Director of the Melbourne Film Festival, which begins its 2008 season on 25 July. Jo Case spoke to him on the eve of the festival’s opening about the new programming strands, this year’s focus on Australian film, the best of the political documentaries and films with a literary connection.

What are some of the main drawcards of this year’s Melbourne Film Festival?

Well, when you ask a festival director that you’re always going to open a can of worms! Can I say the lot? I guess I’d focus my attention on the new programming streams. It’s good to refresh the program, not only for the viewers, but also for ourselves. We don’t want to keep on doing the same thing. I’ll talk a bit about them all.

MIFF Premiere Fund

About a year ago, we were given money by the returned Brumby government to initiate a new film fund, which became the MIFF Premiere Fund. So, we’re a minority investor in Victorian films and documentaries. And one of the conditions of that is that the films premiere during the festival. So this year, for the first time in MIFF’s history, we’ve got our own production slate. This year, they all happen to be documentaries. Next year, they’ll all be films. We’re opening the festival with a MIFF Premiere Fund Film, Not Quite Hollywood.

Focus on Ozploitation

Another new strand, which spins off from the Not Quite Hollywood film is called Focus on Ozploitation, which we’re co-presenting with ACMI this year. For the first time in our shared histories, we’re doing a curatorial program together. And it’s a look at some of the best or worst excesses of the 1970s, early 80s, Ozploitation movies. We’re doing a small programming stream around six of those titles: Barry McKenzie Holds His Own, Dead End Drive-In, Long Weekend, Razorback, Road Games and Turkey Shoot.

I guess if you were trying to describe the films, you’d put them firmly in the B-grade division. I don’t think there is a verb ‘to ozploit’ in the Oxford English Dictionary, but if you were looking to try and define it, you’d get close if you looked at the act of chundering, or a couple of buckets of blood, engine oil and grease. A few raw prawns, maybe. They’re close, perhaps, to the spirit of Sir Les Patterson than to anything else more mainstream. They’re a nice element of the Australian films in the festival – a good addition to the ‘Homegrown’ section that we always have. There’s quite a big selection of Aussie films this year.

Free Radicals

Free Radicals is really for films that are deliberately exploring: pushing the boundaries, pushing the form, pushing the grain of the film ... pushing everything! They defy accepted narrative patterns. They seek to subvert in some way or another. They’re films that we would normally associate with a festival like Rotterdam, rather than somewhere like Cannes or Berlin, which are usually a bit more mainstream. They haven’t abandoned narrative altogether, but they’re a bit more exploratory. They’re not what you might get in your standard multiplex.

Border Patrol

Border Patrol is a spin-off from a focus we did last year on contemporary Israeli film. This year it’s the sixtieth anniversary of the birth of Israel, and we thought it would be nice to do a different version of that. There are four films, all dramas, and they’re dramas that look, in different forms and style, at the so-called ‘Israeli/Palestinian question’, from different perspectives.

To be frank, there isn’t a lot of Palestinian cinema around. One film we’re featuring this year, Salt of the Sea, is very interesting as the very early beginnings of a Palestinian cinema. There’s Waltz with Bashir, which comes from Cannes this year, an animated documentary. I’m calling it by a new phrase, ‘animentary’, and it’s about one soldier’s repressed memory of going into the Palestinian refugee camps of the 1982 war against Lebanon, where the Israelis stood back and the Lebanese Phalangist forces massacred the refugees in the camps. Obviously, anything that comes out of that area is political, but this was a good mix of the political and the personal.

Cannes Director’s Fortnight Tribute

Another one of the new strands is part of our close connection with Cannes. Every year we go to the Cannes festival – and our timing is lucky. It allows us to go to Cannes, come back, and have three weeks to get some of the best Cannes titles. This year, we have 29 titles. We also have a deeper connection with Cannes in that this year: we’re celebrating a part of their program.

Director’s Fortnight was set up as a counter to the black-tie swishery and the official awards as a champion of auteur films and a champion of new voices, new cultural zeitgeist in the late 60s. Cannes was suspended for a year in 1968, after the student riots and general unrest. And when it came back in 1969, Director’s Fortnight was set up. This year is 40 years of Director’s Fortnight. And this year, along with a lot of other festivals, we’re doing our own independent celebration of Director’s Fortnight. A kind of homage, if you like. We’re including a couple of films from Director’s Fortnight this year, and also some of the classics from among the 600 odd titles that have premiered Director’s Fortnight over the years. They’ve championed filmmakers like Jim Jarmusch, Martin Scorsese, and many others.

Retrospective on George Romero

We’re doing a big tribute to George Romero this year. It’s been 40 years since he revolutionised horror films with that film of his, Night of the Living Dead. We’re showing the Australian premiere of his new film, Diary of a Dead. And we’re doing a tribute to George as part of it. George is coming out, along with his daughter Tina, also a filmmaker, and we’re showing about nine of his films across the course of the festival. He’ll be one of our major guests. There will be a lot of focus on his commercial zombie films, but he’s also important as a somewhat neglected figure of independent American cinema, with films like Martin and Nightriders, which are not part of the series of zombie films but are still very important and interesting social allegories.

Tribute to Edward Yang

The festival’s other tribute is to Edward Yang, a Taiwanese filmmaker who is acknowledged as one of the people who started off Taiwanese cinema. He died at the end of last year. We’re screening all seven of Edward Yang’s features, including the four-hour film A Brighter Sunday. It’s rare that you’ll get to see all those films in one place anywhere. And without going into hyperbole, it’s really one of the best collections of film that anyone’s produced in South-East Asia in the last many years.

There’s a really strong Australian presence this year. Is this something you plan to keep doing for future festivals?

It really depends. Every year you go out with certain ideas. You know, we go ‘let’s do a selection of Japanese porno movies from the 1960s’. But then, you soon realise when you go out there and try to secure these things or try to find them, that it’s not necessarily going to be easy to deliver those strands. Either the print is not available or some widow is holding onto her husband’s feature films and they’re all under her bed and she won’t let them go for various reasons. So, for some obscure reason you can’t always deliver what you think you’re going to do.

So, to go back to your question, yes, MIFF is always strong on Australian films, as most Australian film festivals are, but this year, it just all came together – with the advent of the MIFF Premiere Fund, plus the B-grade exploitation films, plus the usual Home-Grown program, we ended up having a really large contingent of Aussie movies. So, yes, we’re really happy about that.

Going back to what you were saying about the Border Patrol films on Israel/Palestine, were you aiming for that mix of the political and the personal that you’ve captured?

Yes. I think that’s something I’m personally attracted to, in films across the board. This year, we’ve got some very, very strong political documentaries in our doco section. There are three titles in particular.

One is called Terror’s Advocate, by Barbet Schroeder, and it’s a portrait of probably the most morally ambiguous character in the whole festival: French/Algerian lawyer called Jacques Vergès, who was defending the Algerian freedom fighters (the Algerian resistance movement), but then went on to defend Carlos the Jackal. He married a member of the Baider Menhof gang and made a name for himself with the Palestinians as well. It’s fascinating and he’s an absolutely fascinating character. It also becomes a history of revolutionary movements from the 1960s up to now.

Another is called It’s Hard Being Loved By Jerks, which is about the court case fought by a small left-wing Paris magazine called Charlie Hebdo. They fought against the grand mosque and Islam and various other organisations in Paris to defend their right to republish those Danish cartoons [a cartoon of a weeping Prophet Muhammad with a speech bubble saying ‘It’s hard being loved by jerks’.] And it’s set inside the magazine itself and takes place over the course of the trail.

The third political documentary I’m really excited about is called Yakasuni. It’s the name of the shrine built in honour of the Japanese war dead. If you’ve watched the news lately, you’ve probably seen the Japanese prime minister when he went to worship at the shrine he caused an absolute furore, because there are all these people in Japan and China and various places, who accuse the Japanese of being complete militarists. And the director of this documentary had to go into hiding and faced death threats by the Yakuza, etcetera, etcetera.

So, they’re three really strong documentaries. I think they are films that upset people, or make people have strong passions, or give rise to strong emotions.

There are quite a few films this year with links to books. What are some of the stand-outs in that area?

There are a few connected with literary themes. There’s a documentary on Dalton Trombo, one of Hollywood’s greatest screenwriters (Roman Holiday, Spartacus, The Brave One), who had a very strong political background. He went before the Un-American Committee and refused to name names and then was banned and blacklisted, but continued to write films for various Hollywood directors. In fact, one of his pseudonyms was Robert Rich, and he won an Oscar under that name for The Brave One. It’s an extremely comprehensive documentary about his life and career.

There’s one on the experimental playwright Kathy Acker (Who’s Afraid of Kathy Acker?). She had a real connection to the literary underground in the late 60s and early 70s in New York and a really close affiliation with the punk movement, drawing on her background as a stripper, too. She died of breast cancer in 1997, and this is about her life and work.

There is one based on a very popular vampire novel called Let the Right One in by John Lindquist. It’s about the love affair between an adolescent and a 200-year-old vampire who is still in the form of a child. It’s not a blood and guts kind of vampire movie, but much more of a psychological thriller. It’s terrific.

There’s a piece called Persepolis based on the graphic novel by Marjane Satrapi about her experiences growing up in Iran. This is the animation that makes that whole story come to life. I know this film was huge in France.

We have another documentary on the life and times of Hunter S. Thompson, Gonzo. There’s a lot of good stuff, there.

Last question ... what’s the best thing about your job?

The drink after the opening night speech. Definitely.

Dmetri Kakmi

2008-07-09T00:00:00Z

Dmetri Kakmi, interviewed by Arnold Zable

Melbourne-based writer and editor Dmetri Kakmi revisits the Turkish island of his birth and the events that drove his Greek family to migrate to Australia in his haunting first book, the memoir Mother Land. In the latest in Readings’ series spotlighting new and emerging writers (sponsored by the Copyright Agency Limited), renowned writer Arnold Zable reflects on the book and talks to Dmetri Kakmi.

Dmetri Kakmi’s Mother Land is a haunting account of the author’s childhood on an Aegean island, situated near the mouth of the Dardenelles Straits and the Gallipoli Peninsula. Renamed Bozcaada after it was annexed by Turkey in 1923, the Greek inhabitants still maintain its classical name, Tenedos.

Book-ended by the author’s return to the island in 2002, the narrative focuses on a three-year period, between 1969 and 1971, as seen through the eyes of the author as an eight- and nine-year-old boy. The period ends when his family forsakes their impoverishment and persecution for a new life in Australia. The memoir is distinguished by Kakmi’s vivid portrayal of island characters, and his seamless weaving of history, folklore and myth, ritual and daily reality, rendered with the sensuous immediacy of a young boy.

Two poisonous tensions permeate the narrator’s island life. First, there is the enduring tension between Turks and Greeks. The two communities live apart in separate quarters. For the Greek population, the threat of violence and expulsion is always imminent. One act of violence can engender a chain reaction of hatred and reprisal, acted out against a recent history of ethnic cleansing, exile, displacement and potential massacre.

The boy is also witness to his parents’ violent dynamic. His mother is strong-willed, restless, impulsive, and headstrong, the protectress of the hearth, liable to snap at those dearest to her, yet always prepared to do battle with those who bully them. She is a woman with ‘city ways’, acquired after a sojourn in Istanbul. The father, on the other hand, is a man of the sea; in the eyes of his wife, a man without refinement. It is a lethal dynamic, swinging between her constant belittling and his drunken violence.

While Kakmi does not flinch in depicting his father’s outbursts, he also portrays him with compassion. On the sea, Baba is a master of his craft. ‘He could navigate some very treacherous waters around the Dardenelles, a true skill that was not acknowledged because he was illiterate,’ Kakmi tells me, when we meet to discuss the book.

After arriving in Australia, Kakmi suppressed the past. ‘I deliberately forgot my two languages and about my Turco-Greek heritage. More than anything, I wanted to melt in and disappear. I wanted nothing to do with the past. It was too agonising and I missed Turkey more than I can say.’ He avoided anything to do with the island until the death of his mother in 1993. Her passing triggered a ‘tidal wave of memories. It was like the doors of perception had opened and I was virtually drowning in names, events, images, locales, and sounds.’

It was partly a sense of responsibility to his mother’s memory that drove him to write the book. ‘I could see that she was carrying a huge load, and was deeply frustrated and caged in her circumstances. I felt a duty to restore this woman’s life, though I am sure she wouldn’t like some of the things I reveal.’ His moving portrayal of his mother conveys her thwarted passion, her ferocious desire to better her life, and the secret she carried with her almost to the grave.

Kakmi returned to the island 28 years after he left. ‘When I set out to write the memoir,’ he says, ‘it was a hard facts and figures book, a documentation that aimed to commemorate the Greeks of the island, and their culture, especially since their presence had dwindled to 32 elderly people. But this approach proved dull, and would have appealed only to specialists.’ The second draft was written through the eyes of a middle-aged man, reflecting on the past. ‘While it was more personal,’ he tells me, ‘it was so sentimental that I could not live with it.’

Late one night, says Kakmi, he woke ‘with a couple of sentences running through my head. It was the voice of an eight-year-old boy, talking very rapidly, describing sitting under a mulberry tree, having lunch with his mother and sister.’ Kakmi wrote the sentences down, and when he reread them in the morning he knew he had found the voice for the book. He was able to finish a full draft within seven months.

Kakmi’s evocative depiction of place stems from a kind of meta-seeing. It is the vision of an animist for whom all is alive and language is influenced by landscape, a world in which trees can ‘pierce the pregnant bellies of clouds’, and where a breeze can make ‘earth music in the wild sage and thyme and oregano bushes’. Kakmi tells me that this is how he ‘sees things here and now, when I go into the Australian bush. Every moment is alive and connected to that great cathedral of nature.’

As we converse, Kakmi reveals the deeper forces that fostered this vision. In 2002, on one of his return journeys to Turkey, he went through a period when past and present, reality and fantasy, collapsed. He was deluged by sounds and images. ‘One evening in Ankara I woke up in my hotel room and saw a child standing by the window, his arms wrapped around himself, trembling, looking at me with burning eyes. It was me as an eight-year-old boy.’ Days later, while observing a service in a mosque, he heard voices screaming, “Quick, run, they’re going to kill us.”

‘Past and present were colliding in a violent way.’ His entire being was under siege, violated by a brutal ancestral past. While in the short term he experienced great psychic distress, his hallucinations enabled Kakmi to fully access the child he once was, and the raw terror and beauty of the past.

Though defined as a memoir, the book employs the techniques of a novelist in its structure, its development of character, and detailed reconstruction of key episodes. ‘Obviously it happened a long time ago,’ says Kakmi. ‘You cannot recall exactly what people said, or the specific details that build up a scene and make it real for readers. I realised that if I wanted to make this book work for an audience, and not merely be therapy for me, I had to take the characters that were so real in my head, seek their essence and make them universal. I also realised that facts were getting in the way of truth. By taking the boy and creating a literary persona out of him, I was able to pursue the emotional truth rather than the literal facts.’

The finished memoir is a book of revelations. The reader learns of the secrets that have festered for years, secrets that the author himself discovered only as he was writing the book. Kakmi records episodes of brutality and unexpected kindnesses on both sides that can only be fully understood against the reality of oppression. ‘A brutal regime creates brutalised people.’

To create a balanced picture, Kakmi felt it was important to dwell upon relationships that cut across the cultural divide. There are moving portraits of his Turkish friends: his school mate Refik, the Sufi-like fisherman, Ezet, Osil the grocer, and the middle-aged author’s companion and guide, Sinan. By accessing both the terror and beauty, as well as acknowledging the virtues that can be found in people of both cultures, Kakmi paves the way for redemption.

Arnold Zable’s latest novel is Sea of Many Returns, a meditation on displacement, nostalgia and exile, set on the Greek island of Ithaca.

This article proudly supported by Copyright Agency Ltd

Chloe Hooper

2008-07-01T00:00:00Z

Chloe Hooper, interviewed by Jo Case, editor of Readings Monthly, July 2008

Chloe Hooper won a Walkley (2006) for her writing on Palm Island – and in particular, the death in custody of Cameron Doomadgee and its charged aftermath. Her first non-fiction book, The Tall Man is an extended meditation on the case – and a stunning work of reportage, reminiscent of Helen Garner and Truman Capote.

You describe feeling ‘incandescently white’ when you first arrive on Palm Island. Did that feeling recede with time, or was it always with you? How did your awareness of your outsider status affect the way you approached your work?

I was an outsider to Palm Island, but also to the police force, and to the law. The advantage of that was not coming to the story with a set of defined moral or political positions. But I was invited “inside” and I hope the book takes readers there too.

How did you get involved with the Palm Island case in the first place? Had you worked much (or at all) with Aboriginal communities before that?

I’d moved home from overseas a year or so earlier and was keen to know more about Aboriginal Australia. By chance, I met a lawyer, Andrew Boe, who was working pro bono for the Palm Island community. He asked me to come and document the inquest into Cameron’s death. He said it would take two weeks … that was three-and-a-half years ago.

Palm Island is home to one of Australia’s largest Aboriginal communities, and this case seems to incorporate some of the big problems facing Aboriginal Australia: deaths in custody, police attitudes to Aboriginal communities, the underlying tensions of a violent history. What do you see as the most significant issues in this case?

The case definitely highlights all the headlining problems, but actually I wanted to avoid writing about ‘issues.’ I feel strongly that this is a book about people. It’s about the Doomadgee family struggling for justice; and about Hurley, a forceful, complicated policeman. ‘Death in custody’ are three dread words in Australia, but they don’t really penetrate our consciousness. I wanted to write a book about a confronting subject which people would pick up and keep reading, not because they feel they should but because this is a fascinating story.

Queensland’s Fitzgerald Inquiry identified a pervasive code within the police force that required ‘police not enforce the law against other police, nor cooperate in any attempt to do so, and perhaps even obstruct any such attempt’. Do you think this culture influenced the investigation of Chris Hurley?

Well, Hurley was ‘investigated’ by two of his friends, one of whom cooked dinner for the other detectives at Hurley’s house the night Cameron died ... Even before Hurley’s trial, police witnesses were threatening members of the prosecution legal team, so you do wonder.

Perspective is a huge factor in the case at the centre of the book – and the book itself. What different people see in the same situation, and how you tease out a ‘truth’ from that. (For example: ‘One man had seen a black drunk, the other a white demon.’) How did you wrestle with this issue in writing the book and observing the case?

I tried as hard as I could to see things from both points of view. Ironically, my last book had been a satire of a true crime novel. Here I was now trying to write one, but the story resisted the genre’s conventions. This book, in some ways, is more like a dot painting: it’s in the little details of people’s lives that the truth lies.

Is it true that you’re interested in true crime as a genre?

True crime is fascinating, because suddenly people’s passions are completely exposed. I think this diverges from the genre, though. The true crime question is ‘did he do it?’. In the end, I hope the reader might ask ‘could I have done it?’

You write that Cameron Doomadgee’s world remained closed to you, as a woman. What kind of challenge did this present in writing the book, to which his story is so integral?

Cameron’s world was closed to the extent that the male world in Aboriginal society is closed off by cultural norms. I got to know Cameron’s loved ones well and I feel I understand to some extent who he was. If you spend a lot of time thinking about someone’s death, you do in a strange way become close to them.

Hurley seems a kind of semi-benevolent Kurtz figure (a parallel you draw) – isolated from higher authority, grown heady with his own power, mistaking the community as his personal fiefdom. How do you think this affected his behaviour on the morning of Cameron Doomadgee’s arrest?

The key question of Keating’s Redfern address is ‘how would I feel if this were done to me?’ I decided if I asked that of the Palm Islanders’ experience, I also had to ask it of Hurley. He was someone who had spent most of his adult life in remote Aboriginal communities and frontier towns—and why he chose to work exclusively there is another issue. But as time went on, I looked at what police in these places regularly deal with, and I did start to wonder how a normal person could not crack up.

Chris Hurley was the first policeman in Australia ever to be charged over the death of a prisoner in custody. Despite the fact that he was not convicted, do you think this represents a significant milestone for Australia’s treatment of Aboriginal people?

Initially Cameron Doomadgee was just another statistic to the powers that be. A lot of hard work by a lot of people has changed that. I am hopeful about the future: I think most Australians want to know about our past and move forward with the business of reconciliation.

Debra Adelaide

2008-06-03T00:00:00Z

Debra Adelaide, interviewed by Jo Case, editor of Readings Monthly

Australian writer Debra Adelaide landed a whopping $1 million advance for her much-anticipated novel, The Household Guide to Dying. Jo Case spoke to her for Readings on the eve of its publication.

This has been touted as your ‘breakthrough novel’. With ten books behind you, including two novels, does this feel strange?

Not really. I wrote this novel for myself, so while on the one hand it’s a great surprise to see so much fuss, on the other I feel content. Perhaps at the moment I don’t know what it means to have a so-called breakthrough novel. But if that’s the case, I guess I’ll find out soon enough.

‘The mother dying was a disgraceful breaking of every rule.’ It’s also a slightly risky situation for an author – to write a book where the reader knows its sympathetic heroine, a mother of small children, will die at the end. What made you decide to write this story?

I didn’t decide, as such. It chose me, which is what I think many authors would say. But I have been interested in the topic of dying generally for quite some time, and I wanted to explore the possibility of writing about dying in a frank and comic way.

The running thread of Delia’s job – a ‘witty, ironic’ advice columnist and writer of a bestselling series of books on household advice – provides some wonderfully funny moments, and a welcome leavening humour to the very emotional main narrative. Did you have fun with this aspect of the book?

Yes. In fact in my dreams I am really an agony aunt disguised as a domestic advice columnist. And what was particularly satisfying was to make these extracts from Delia’s advice column another little narrative in the novel, one in which, in the end, the story surprises her as much as it does the reader.

As a mother, reading about a mother farewelling her children, reading this book made me cry more than once. Did you ever find yourself emotionally overwhelmed when writing it?

I think it’s more appropriate to say that intense emotions shaped parts of it, but that I was never overwhelmed, otherwise I doubt I would have been able to write a fictional story.

Delia’s response to her impending death proves some very bizarre moments: posing in her own coffin holding a martini glass for her book cover, making and freezing blood sausages (made with her own blood) for her family to eat when she is gone. ‘Why can’t just you deal with this like any normal person?’ says her mother. Do you think there is a ‘normal’ response? What is behind Delia’s (almost manic) activities?

I have no idea what a normal response is to imminent death, especially as I’ve not yet faced it. Delia is certainly manic at times, and what is behind that is her intense desire to shape, control and direct the little amount of time left to her. And then at some point, she realises how futile that is.

The book – and Delia’s advice books – is curiously old-fashioned in the way that it treats the domestic arts (cooking, laundry, cleaning) with reverence and affection, as arts that one could be proud of mastering. What was the inspiration for that? And are you, in your parlance, a ‘goddess’, a ‘domestic whore’, or something in between?

I wish! Goddess or whore, either would do me. But Delia is especially interested in elevating the domestic arts, since to her they are so fundamental. And so overlooked. My position, for what it’s worth, is that domestic work is strangely compelling. If only it were valued more ...

This book seemed, to me, to be a kind of love letter to motherhood, in all its small joys and ongoing imperfections. Did you set out to do that?

No, quite the opposite, as it’s a theme I’ve already explored in earlier books. But clearly it’s an ongoing preoccupation of mine, and I’m very happy that readers would have this reaction.

Delia says her advice column is ‘a version of me, a slightly feral one’. Obviously you are not your character, but it seems there must be aspects of you in there – like her, you keep chickens, you work with words, and I suspect the Jane Austen ruminations are as much yours as hers. How much of yourself did you put into Delia?

Lots. Inevitably. It’s one way of investing a character with some sort of credibility. It’s true that I do keep chickens and I am a writer, but Delia’s views and prejudices and obsessions are all hers, as is her story. Her life, which has been full of trauma, regret and guilt, barely resembles mine.

Delia reflects ‘I was always pathetically grateful for email, since it let you attend to inquiries or make ones of your own while your children wailed and fought and called out from the bathroom ... without the embarrassment of all that drifting over the phone’. That sentence is so very apt, I wondered: does that describe your working life?

Not at all. I’m answering these questions in total quiet and privacy. Not. But even though my children are much older now than Delia’s, and more independent, my working life is still hectic. I think we forget too easily that just running a home can be a full time job.

Delia’s editor, Nancy, is initially sceptical about Delia’s final ‘how-to’ book, The Household Guide to Dying. ‘Who on earth would pick up a book with that title?’ As the author of a book with that title, who do you imagine will pick it up and what do you hope readers will take away from it?

All I can hope is that readers will take away from the book the pleasure of having read a good story, by which I mean a story that will take them out of their worlds and make them think about mortality and other things in a new way. And in my dreams I imagine that George Clooney will pick this novel up.

Chris Turner

2008-06-02T00:00:00Z

Canadian journalist Chris Turner, author of The Geography of Hope: A Tour of the World We Need, is in Melbourne for the 2008 Alfred Deakin Lecture Series, ‘From DNA to Deep Space’. He will give a lecture based on his innovative new book – a positive look at solving the problems of climate change – on Wednesday 4 June at 6pm. Jo Case spoke to him in Melbourne for Readings.

How can the power of the market be harnessed to combat climate change? Why do you think it will be effective?

Not only can it be harnessed, it already has been. A random example: in response to Germany’s feed-in tariff law of a few years back, which rejigged market conditions to favour renewable sources, the world’s largest solar cell manufacturer is now a company called Q-Cells which employs nearly 4000 (up from 19, circa 2001) in the previously stagnant and brutalised industrial towns of the former GDR and is growing as fast as humanly possible.

Given the right parameters – where climate-damaging actions are discouraged and climate-improving ones rewarded – the global capital market is the most powerful tool yet devised for the rapid allocation of scarce resources toward productive ends. No centrally planned economy or government agency can organise something like the technological advancement and global-scale deployment of solar power installations as quickly and efficiently as the market can. It is far from perfect, but it is the best tool we have at hand, and there is simply not enough time (even if it were possible and desirable) to replace it with something else.

Tackling climate change is often equated with doing the need to do without, to shed power-guzzling new technologies in favour of more energy efficient ways of doing things. (For example, there is apparently a high profile push for a return to drying clothes on a washing line in the US.) However, you also see opportunities for climate change to drive the adoption of new technologies that will help us to do things better and smarter. What kind of changes are you talking about here?

Forgive me for another German example: in Freiburg in southwest Germany, a visionary architect named Rolf Disch has built a community of 58 middle-class townhouses. They have all modern conveniences, are priced near standard market rates, are quite pretty and situated in a wonderfully vibrant neighbourhood. Each one also, over the course of a year, produces more energy than it consumes. These are houses as power plants, and I’d argue going without power and heating bills is the kind of going without that just about anyone would agree is a marked improvement on our current system, whether the climate were compelling us to change our ways or not.

You believe that frightening and guilt-tripping people about climate change is counterproductive when it comes to creating behaviour change. How does that work?

I’d say in a handful of distinct, but related, ways. First off, fear is a poor motivator for thoroughgoing long-term change. Fear provokes conservative responses; we’re hardwired, when afraid, to want to bunker down and protect whatever we’ve got against the anticipated onslaught. The last thing someone worried about the collapse of everything they hold dear wants to contemplate is switching their water heater to solar.

And the doomsday scenarios around climate change have been so convincing that you now hear the argument that the problem’s too big to be tackled from the same quarters that just a few years ago argued there was nothing to worry about.

Finally, I’d argue the finger-pointing and shaming approaches endemic to the environmental movement are far too divisive to be effective. When the goal was, for example, the protection of a single animal species, perhaps it was effective to demonise those whose actions directly caused that animal’s demise (through hunting, say, or habitat destruction). But climate change affects everyone, and there is not one of us – least of all in prosperous industrialised nations like Canada and Australia – without blame. The scope of the problem obliges us to create the largest, widest, most diverse and multivalent movement for social, political and economic change in human history, and we will not get there by stratifying ourselves by degrees of guilt. We’ll get there – if we get there – by creating an enticing vision of a world people will fight to be part of.

Halfway through writing this book, you changed from an observer, in your role as writer and journalist, to a ‘committed participant and activist’. What influenced this change?

Several influences, but most of all it was the realisation that I’d never been so fully engaged by a subject as a journalist, never so fully convinced that the story I was trying to tell was the most vital story I could possibly be covering, and ironclad in my certainty that the story’s outcome would provide a definitive statement on the success or failure of the whole durned human comedy (to quote my beloved Big Lebowski).

The sort of audible click moment of all this came around a campfire at a conference in rural Germany, an intimate affair focussed on the mutually reinforcing catastrophes of climate change and peak oil. This was, on its surface, a sort of business conference, but here we were around a bonfire on this German manor that had been turned into a conference facility, late into the night: a dozen conversations still circulating at fever pitch between journalists, activists, scientists and business executives. Not because it was our job – though it was, in every case – but because this was the most worthy life’s work any of us had found and we knew it. Or in any case, I now did. To use a Texas Hold ‘Em poker term, I went all-in on the climate crisis that night, and I’ve written about almost nothing else since.

You have observed the way that various communities around the world are addressing climate change with new technologies and solutions to reduce our reliance on fossil fuels. What are some of the innovative solutions you’ve uncovered?

I certainly don’t have space here to enumerate them all, so instead I’ll mention just one, which is dead simple and cheap and isn’t even a direct response to climate change. In 1962, the city of Copenhagen became the first Western city to close its main street to motor vehicle traffic. In the years since, it has expanded its downtown pedestrian network to include a half-dozen streets and a dozen squares, transforming itself into Europe’s most pedestrian-friendly metropolis and a model to the world that has been imitated by cities from Oslo to Barcelona, including, most impressively, downtown Melbourne. In recent years, the encouragement of commuting by bicycle has been particularly successful in Copenhagen, where 36 per cent of downtown workers now get to their offices by bike – not in order to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions to zero, which they have, but mainly because it’s such a pleasant city to bike around and because the social and health benefits of biking a lot are so convincing.

The architects of this transformation – particularly the visionary urban theorist Jan Gehl – call their work ‘reconquest’. They began not to beat climate change, but to improve the quality of life in a dreary, car-choked city. This is one of the most vital battles in the sustainability revolution – reorganising human systems for people instead of their cars – and its success in Copenhagen and everywhere else Gehl has worked demonstrates that reducing emissions also augments the quality of life in a community in substantial measure.

Are you optimistic about the future, given the immense challenges that lay ahead?

Absolutely, yes. I began my book in 2005 as a kind of dare – could I find solutions? How hard would I have to squint to make them look viable? Would anyone pay any attention? I’ve watched marginal, drawing-board stuff vault rapidly into the centre of the mainstream in the past three years at a pace I never in my wildest dreams would’ve predicted. Last year, Wal-Mart and GE partnered to sell 100 million energy-saving compact flourescent lightbulbs in the United States. This doesn’t make them perfect, but never in a million years would I have predicted, back in 2005, that I’d be saying ‘Wal-Mart’ and ‘sustainability’ in the same breath and meaning it. We’re turning the corner on this thing very quickly, and the only thing I find frustrating nowadays is when I’m told that something I’ve touched with my own hands is impossible or that the cost is too great. If you think we don’t have the tools, you aren’t looking closely enough, and if you think the project is too great, I’m disappointed at your lack of faith in humanity. When John F. Kennedy pledged to put a man on the moon in 1961, there were engineers at NASA who suspected it was impossible; by comparison, I’ve now slept in too many rooms heated by the sun and powered by the wind to count.

And finally, not acting is not an option. You know where I heard that most recently? In the conference room of a multinational oil company.

Chris Turner will be speaking at the Deakin Lecture Series this Wednesday June 4th in Ballarat and this Thurs June 5th at BMW Edge, Federation Square.

Arnold Zable

2008-05-30T00:00:00Z

Arnold Zable, interviewed by Mark Rubbo, Managing Director of Readings

Arnold Zable is one of Australia’s most accomplished storytellers. His lyrical novels explore the experience of migration, and his latest, Sea of Many Returns, is set between the island of Ithaca and his home city of Melbourne. Mark Rubbo spoke to him for Readings.

Sea of Many Returns is mainly set in the island of Ithaca, geographically, quite a departure for you, how did this come about?

Ithaca is where my partner Dora’s family comes from, and I have been a regular visitor since 1987. I first travelled in Greece in 1973 and felt an immediate affinity with the land, its people, its culture and history.

The images you create of the locations are incredibly vivid. To what extent are they a product of your imagination?

Having spent much time on the island, many of the Ithacan images are based on what I have observed over the years. The Carrum scenes are derived from many walks in the area. My descriptions of locations such as Kalgoorlie, the Black Sea, the Danube River, are based on research, but at some point the research ends and the imagination takes over.

The structure of the book is different to your earlier books. Apart from the prologue, the novel is written in the form of the journals of Mentor, who emigrated to Australia in the early twentieth century, and his granddaughter, Xanthe, who was born in Australia and is returning to visit with her daughter Martina. What was the intention behind this structure?

The structure enabled me to imagine two related, but quite different, points of view formed in two different eras, extending into four generations of one Ithacan family. It also enabled me to cover over a century in time, right up until 2002, and to recreate tales I have heard of, for example, the late nineteenth century Ithacan voyages to the Black Sea, and the creative partnership between the architect Walter Burley Griffin and Melbourne coffee palace maestro, Antonios Lekatsas.

The Diaspora, European, Jewish, and now Greek, has been a central feature of your work. Is that because you are the child of immigrants?

That has a lot to do with it. I grew up in an immigrant community which included many Greeks, Italians and Jews, and observed first hand the severe disruption to people’s lives caused by migration.

You have been, and continue to be, an indefatigable champion of the rights of refugees and asylum seekers – does that inform your work or vice versa...or neither?

It does inform my work. The current generation of refugees are experiencing the intense challenges faced by previous generations. We tend to forget, or fail to imagine, how difficult it is to start life anew far from the homeland. We forget also that nostalgia, the longing for the return to homeland, is a deep and enduring aspect of the refugee experience.

Reading the book, I got the sense that the islanders that came to Australia are never really part of the society. In one particularly powerful passage you describe the anti-Greek riots in Kalgoorlie during World War I. It's an incident that seems to destroy the two characters’ emerging sense of belonging.

These riots are among our hidden narratives, darker episodes in Australian history that have been overlooked or conveniently forgotten. The riots, related incidents, and general distrust towards ‘foreigners’ did alienate many immigrants and it took a long time to build a sense of trust and belonging.

As with all your books, Sea of Many Returns is full of wonderful stories and characters. I particularly liked Mentor, the frustrated magician, who hires a hall to make his dream come alive. He describes his performance as a ‘farce interspersed with rare moments of competence’. Where did that come from?

Dora did have a maternal grandfather who became a magician and hypnotist. I have long wanted to imagine what led to that. This is what fiction enables one to do. The performance acts by the way, are partly based on a rare program of one of his shows that I came across in my research.

Although ostensibly Christian, the lives of the islanders are permeated by the myths of the past and your characters constantly refer to these. One character says, ‘life is a hole in the water’. Another says that in life you need only know, ‘Christ and Marx and perhaps Odysseus’. How did you find these?

By listening. In some ways the novel is the result of hundreds of conversations with Ithacans, on the island, and in Melbourne. I am drawn to the quirky sayings and observations that define a person or a culture. Ithaca is inevitably associated with Homer’s Odyssey, and the tales I have heard on modern-day Ithaca have affirmed the enduring resonance of the ancient archetype for voyagers of all times.

After finishing a book by Zable, one always wants more. What's next?

I have a number of projects I am working on. One will emerge as the leading contender. I have a lot to learn about the writing craft, and I am enjoying a chance to read other writers, and playing with new ideas.

Anya Ulinich

2008-05-29T00:00:00Z

Anya Ulinich, interviewed by Jo Case, editor of Readings Monthly

Brooklyn-based, Russian born Anya Ulinich takes a sharp, blackly comic look at post-Cold War Siberia and twenty-first century America in her first novel, Petropolis, exploring migration, motherhood and identity along the way. Jo Case spoke to her for Readings.

Sasha is, in some ways, an unlikely heroine: chubby, awkward, not especially good at anything. What was the inspiration for her character?

Sasha is maybe an unlikely heroine, but she is a typical human being – aren’t most of us not particularly beautiful and of average abilities? I wasn’t particularly interested in creating a larger-than-life character: an undiscovered genius lingering in Siberia; or an “ugly-duckling” story about misperceived beauty. That would be too easy – the story would reach its climax in a predictable way. Sasha fumbles through life the way most people do (maybe more so, because she is an illegal immigrant in the U.S., so she exists on the margins of society for much of the book). She is, basically, surviving. The world owes nothing to Sasha Goldberg, and throughout her journey, she finds happiness, fulfilment, and love in unexpected places.

The fortunes of your characters – Sasha, Katia, Victor, Nadia – are remarkably fluid. They plunge from good to ill fortune and back with great frequency. Do you think we all live on fortune’s knife-edge, or is it particular to these characters and their circumstances?

Some people live more on fortune’s cutting edge than others. For example, a person born upper-middle class in the U.S. could live a life with no upheavals, unless they are self-inflicted. But the poor, and people who live in rapidly changing societies, like the characters you mention above, have much less stable lives.

Sasha, is focused on becoming an artist (though she’s not particularly talented). You have also studied and practiced art. Was it a conscious decision to work this into the novel, or was it simply the way the character of Sasha evolved?

Partly it was the way the character of Sasha evolved. But I also had to give Sasha something besides her stifling home life and the abuse she suffers at her general education school. No matter how outdated and outlandish an education her Asbestos 2 art teachers give her, the art studio becomes a refuge for Sasha, a safe environment where she can be herself. The art is less important than the community. This is partly autobiographical.

Petropolis deftly combines wry humour with darker social observation and bleak surroundings and characters. Was this a conscious balance of light and dark?

Yes, it was conscious, but I think it’s also natural for me to write this way. This kind of satirical writing is typical of Russian literature (I’m thinking of Gogol and Bulgakov in particular). Russians, in general, have a pretty dark sense of humor.

Sasha’s newly created (meticulously bland) American identity (with her new name, ‘Allie’) is demolished with the sound of Marina’s voice, her Russian words and accent. How important is language to identity?

Hugely important, for me. Maybe not for everyone. When I visit Europe, I’m amazed at how easily multilingual many people are. For someone who grows up in a monolingual environment there is a huge difference between the native language, that is deeply rooted in the subconscious, and the language one learns as an adult. When I don’t speak Russian for long stretches, I miss it, almost the way one might miss an essential nutrient in a diet, or the way a child misses her mother – it’s a kind of a physical feeling.

That’s what happens to Sasha. For Sasha, the language switch is a sort of mental suicide, as is her entire life with Neal. She is trying to forget, almost obliterate her former self. Of course, meeting Marina reminds her that this can’t be done.

For me, the switch was voluntary. I embraced the English language and the American culture voluntarily, in the spirit of discovery. I was very interested in the English language. I really sort of fell in love with it and wanted to write in it. But what also helps me write in English is a kind of emotional remove I feel from it, and a sense of control that comes from having this kind of a distance.

How heavily did your experiences in migrating from Russia to America influence Petropolis?

Well, Petropolis is obviously informed by my experience. It’s also fuelled by a certain sense of political outrage one feels when one lives the life of a poor immigrant in the U.S. Like Sasha Goldberg, when I came to America, I was, essentially, a Soviet person (this was before Russia changed into what it is now). So the U.S. was the first place where I experienced extreme class disparity, for example. I grew up in an Anti-Soviet family in Moscow – we worshipped freedom and the market economy. Coming to the U.S. nearly made me into an angry little Marxist. So the scene where Sasha reconsiders Nabokov from a domestic servant’s point of view is informed by my own feelings when I was in a similar position.

Many ordinary aspects of American life seem exotic and often ridiculous through Sasha’s eyes (for example, Heidi’s parenting style, living in air-conditioned comfort in the desert, the American proclivity for hugging and kissing strangers). Did you have a similar response when you first arrived in America?

Yes. I wrote this book with an American audience in mind. Not to engage in stereotypes, but still, Americans are very self-referential. They don’t like to contemplate history, and they don’t pay much attention to the rest of the world, or even to other parts of America. Even (or especially) the people who live in the surreal and ecologically unsustainable Arizona suburbs, think that their way of life is the way of life. So I had a lot of fun showing how strange the things that Americans take for granted look through the eyes of an outsider.

The mother-child relationships in this book are often bittersweet, and reflect a range of experiences of motherhood – from Mrs Goldberg’s fiercely autocratic devotion to Heidi’s very American, quite indulgent, parenting. How important is this aspect of the novel for you?

Very important. Motherhood is one of the central themes of this novel. I began to write it when my older daughter was first born, and I was amazed at how much in love I was with this tiny baby. I wondered: what would it be like if she were taken away from me? Could I go on? So this is how the story of Sasha, and Nadia, began.

I’m raising my children in, essentially, Heidi’s world. And I found what among the American middle and upper-middle class, motherhood is very political – friendships can break up when two friends disagree with each others’ parenting methods. The minutiae of childbirth arrangements and feeding choices (drugs/no drugs; organic vs. non; breast vs. bottle) become class markers and judgement points. It was interesting to see this obsessive mothering through Sasha’s eyes.

Nam Le

2008-05-29T00:00:00Z

Nam Le, interviewed by Cate Kennedy, June 2008

Melbourne-born writer Nam Le is causing an international sensation with his first book, The Boat, attracting a rave review from The New York Times star reviewer Michikio Kakutani, using words like ‘astonishing’, ‘powerful and remarkable’. In the latest of Readings’ series of features spotlighting new and emerging Australian writers (sponsored by the Copyright Agency Limited), fellow short story writer Cate Kennedy talks to Nam Le.

Nam Le’s ambitious debut collection, The Boat, is made up of seven stories that illustrate such a dazzling virtuosity with narrative voice, you start to wonder just how many lives this barely 30-year-old Vietnamese-Australian author has had. An ex-corporate lawyer, he been recognised in the US with several awards and fellowships, including the coveted Pushcart Prize, so this collection has been eagerly awaited, with writers like Charles D’Ambrosio unreservedly praising the collection as ‘tremendous, challenging and ambitious … this book nails our collective now with an urgency and relevance that feels visionary.’

It’s the scope and versatility of these stories that have garnered him this kind of critical praise. Longer than the average Australian short story by several thousand words, each one differs so markedly from the others in style, voice and setting that you are left shaking your head in admiration that they could all have been written by the same author.

That’s because Le is an author who can take you anywhere – Hiroshima in the day before the atomic bomb, nervy, present-day Tehran, a dead-end Australian coastal town – and bring it to life with extraordinary accuracy. Not only are the stories’ locales widely dissimilar, but their various protagonists emerge as entirely credible; no mean feat when you consider that they range in scope from a teenage drug runner for a Colombian drug cartel to an anguished, dying New York painter desperate to reconnect with his estranged daughter.

‘Looking back now,’ Le says of the stories, ‘I will say that by switching from place to place … I was in some way formalising the idea that there’s no place that’s not strange to us. Fiction makes strange even the places we think we know.’ But how did he achieve such a richly-detailed authenticity in creating these fictional places and voices? He concedes that it probably has a lot to do with an innate wanderlust, which has led him to travel widely. ‘I was born in Vietnam, raised in Australia, currently live in the US, and have mucked around through chunks of Europe, South America and Asia. It’s not a stretch to say that the reasons why I travel and why I write or read are similar; to see other things, other places, situations and people, through other eyes.’

He agrees that the stories, in their ambitious scope, ‘are all over the map in more than just the geographical sense’. But he’s quick to point out that he didn’t write the collection merely to set the bar challengingly high for himself. ‘I never imagined, when I was writing the stories, that they belonged to anything more than themselves,’ he explains. ‘I didn’t test them for their fit within a collection, let alone any theme or scheme. I was trying to write what interested me, what moved me, in a way that tried to be interesting and moving. As for setting the bar high – I think just writing a story that works is setting the bar almost impossibly high. Sometimes it helps me to think of it this way: a story isn’t so much written as governed, and just keeping your eye on everything, having your hands on the hot, heavy levers, is all you can hope to do.’

The hot, heavy levers that Le seems to handle so effortlessly keep all kinds of subtle narrative machinery moving smoothly in his stories. He says ruefully that he’s learned the hard way: through writing an earlier novel which he considers ‘a spectacular multi-dimensional failure’, but which gave him a sense of what to expect in terms of the hard slog of writing. ‘I think it also freed me in a sort of pillar-of-salt way – there came a point I knew I’d be doomed if I turned back toward it. Short stories provided a great escape – I’d never written them, and frankly, hadn’t read too many, so I felt I had nothing to lose.’

It also gave him the chance to weave into the stories some of what has been clearly absorbed through the osmosis of travel and careful, compassionate, astute observation. Le is a writer with an uncanny knack for getting the details right, and rendering them in unforced, poetic prose. Through Sarah, the central character in ‘Tehran Calling’, he describes the appearance of the Persian written language as ‘half-open fish hooks, sickle blades, pregnant letters with dots in their bellies. An alphabet refracted in water.’ Henry, the irascible and brilliant Manhattan artist in ‘Meeting Elise’, recalls the last moment he fleetingly touched his daughter, when she was a sick baby: ‘the only thing that can make my hands feel graceless.’ Le is familiar, too, with the nuances of Australian adolescent awkwardness in ‘Halflead Bay’– so much so that he even names the deodorants the teenage boys use – and gives us a sensory world that echoes the exactitude of Tim Winton: ‘All along the walkway were canvas chairs, eskies, straight-backed rods thick as spear grass. A mob of fluoro jigs hopping on the water … Someone had a portable radio and music streamed in the air in clean, bright colours. The bay a basin of light.’

‘Details are hard,’ Le says of the process of finessing his stories. ‘You can err on every side: too many, not enough, too precise, too oblique, too suggestive, too showy, too subtle … I charge myself not with getting something right but with doing it justice. Capturing not the essence but an essence.’

He acknowledges, very modestly, that he did ‘a fair bit of research’ to find the right details (and that research must be fantastically meticulous, since he admits he’s never been to most of the places described in the stories), but it’s worn lightly and invisibly. Le comments on the delicate business of striving to create the sort of ringing authenticity that enables ‘that true empathy, that deep, clear, close inhabitation by the reader of another consciousness in another context. That’s the key, the gold in the ore – where imagination and understanding meet, recognising familiarity in strangeness, truth in otherness, and yourself, in a tricksy mess of words.’

Le’s work is never tricksy, though, and it’s clear that he’s spent a long time thinking about creating the precision and impact he wants. When we talk about the all-important connection between writer and reader, he laughingly describes the suspension of disbelief involved as a kind of seduction. ‘It’s a courtship, isn’t it? The writer sets the scene, starts the music, lights the candles, carelessly strews the right objects around – and the reader allows him/herself to be seduced. Or doesn’t. The end goal – the ultimate high – converges, if you’ll allow me to stretch the metaphor, when the writer’s and reader’s energies converge. That’s where the action is: the meeting point between “believe me” and “I believe you”.’

Allow yourself to be seduced – this is a terrific collection; intelligent, exhilarating and moving. Just as readers will find themselves immersed in the mysterious power of these stories, Nam Le himself is the first to admit that the instincts that work to breathe the visceral, sensory life into his fiction are sometimes just as mysterious to him.

‘No matter how many ways you slice it,’ he remarks, ‘no matter how ingeniously you deconstruct or reverse engineer a given story, you never know what it is that gives it life. Not in a way that’s redeemable or transferable. So what do you do? You stumble onwards. You follow your leads.’

Cate Kennedy is the author of Dark Roots and is working on her first novel.

This article proudly supported by Copyright Agency Ltd

Tim Winton

2008-05-05T00:00:00Z

Tim Winton, interviewed by Mark Rubbo, Managing Director of Readings

Tim Winton is one of Australia’s best-loved writers, both in Australia and overseas. His new novel is Breath. Mark Rubbo spoke to him about the book for Readings.

This is your first novel for seven years, when did you start working on it?

It was probably about a year after The Turning was published. I was working on another novel altogether but got a little side-tracked. Breath was a bit of an accident, I suppose.

Breath starts off when ambulance man Bruce Pike is called to an apparent suicide of an adolescent boy. The incident triggers his memories of growing up in a small coastal town.

Yeah, the manner of the boy's death is pretty close to the bone for Pike and it sets him to recalling his own numerous flirtations with oblivion as a kid in the 70s. A lot of risk-taking, some of which has left him a damaged man.

*Breath is set mainly in the coastal town of Sawyer and the regional centre of Angelus. You've used these fictitious places in earlier books. Is there a reason you return to them?

I suppose I've been writing this fictional landscape for nearly 30 years. Many of the stories and novels are set in or about Angelus on the south coast or White Point on the central west. I don't know why I return to the place and the particular milieu. After all this time it's almost my own place and the stories become part of a broader whole, a thing of its own. I tend to view the separate pieces as parts of that landscape rather than discrete entities and the only conscious part of this has been to recognise the pattern and surrender to it. As much as I admire writers like Hardy and Faulkner and so on, this approach wasn't really intentional.

But looking back, especially considering the way a lot of Australian writers have felt the need to rescue literature from the specificity of place or region in recent years, maybe in an effort to be or seem cosmopolitan, I can't say that I regret having worked my own patch. It does relieve you of the calisthenics involved in the art of constant surprise, having to reinvent the wheel, so to speak, year after year. It's a bit old-fashioned, I guess, but there is a tyranny of novelty that I don't mind side-stepping.

Bruce's nickname is Pikelet; he and his family keep to themselves, but Pikelet forms an unlikely friendship with the publican's son Loonie – a reckless competitive risk-taker. Loonie eggs Pikelet on by example; it's this recklessness that seems to give their lives purpose. You describe this almost lovingly, approvingly? Am I right?

Well, I think it's worth remembering that it's the narrator we're hearing from, not me. But, yes, there is something bittersweet in his memory of those experiences. He's recalling a youth in which he and his mate essentially invent personae and rituals for themselves in the absence of any formal rites of passage or codes of belonging. Their friendship is a weird competitive dance wherein they push each other to do mad, risky things for the buzz of it. I don't think this is something I approve of necessarily, but I do understand the impulse. Particularly in a culture like ours which is, for all its liberality, a fairly domesticated, insured and anxious affair. I guess beneath all that there is a yearning for wildness, a hunger for vivid feeling. Which often produces some pretty perverse outcomes. Egging Pikelet on … that's a bit culinary isn't it?

Surfing becomes the mutual passion and obsession of Loonie and Pikelet, the playing field they battle over. For Pikelet, watching his first surfers, it was the first time he'd seen men do something beautiful; you describe it as ‘dancing on water’; it's a feeling Pikelet can't discuss with Loonie. Do you see this as typical of male friendships?

Maybe not typical, but hardly uncommon. Despite the fact that these kids are making themselves up as they go along, they're at the mercy of those around them for role models. Pikelet naturally responds to beauty but he sublimates this in order to compete in this masculine arena of physical courage. During the story, he's lured from the meditative, aesthetic part of surfing into a gladiatorial realm. I think he's looking back and seeing this as a pivotal point where he goes awry, when later he chooses danger over beauty. There's a kind of love-dance with death that he and Loonie get into with the guidance of their guru.

The two boys meet Sando, an ex-champion surfer, who become a teacher and mentor for them. You endow Sando with dignity, grace, courage and wisdom but by pushing the boys to the limits of their skills and endurance, he exposes them to great physical danger. It almost appears as though you approve?

Not at all. But I am interested in the relationship between them. This weird mentor thing, the youthful susceptibility to gurus. Sports coaches being a prime example. It's quite common for troubled kids in particular to find meaning in sports which offer them a subculture, a codified experience, rites of passage, measurable progress. They feel nurtured and they bathe in the approval of the coach. They join a cult, in a way, one that scares their parents a little less than having them run away to join the Moonies. They join a gang or the army. They respond to structure, maybe, and their idealism and naivete can be exploited. There are sub-cultural or even cultic elements to all of them, a sense of being special, chosen, part of a misunderstood elite. Many of these groups foster a kind of Gnosticism, or even a tendency toward a kind of fascist impulse which certainly occurs with Loonie and Pikelet. This yearning for the extraordinary can, though of course it doesn't have to, lead to notions of unter and ubermenschen.

Perhaps all this says something about how arid and open our culture can be for many kids in the wake of our modernist rejection of traditions of most sorts. No, I think the reader understands how Pikelet feels by the end, that Sando is a pretty deluded character and a kind of malign influence. But even a rejected guru deserves his due.

The pressure on the boys to take on bigger and bigger challenges develops through the book; your descriptions of their surfing challenges are compellingly vivid and engrossing. Have you surfed?

Yeah, I've surfed all my life. In fact I'm more passionate about it now than I was at 10 or 16. I've always found it a kind of sensual and meditative thing. As a kid and as a grown-up I've found it enormously pleasurable, consuming and therapeutic. I can't imagine a life without it. I think, rather unlike Pikelet, that surfing and the sea saved me from self-destructive behaviours when I was young. I'm grateful for having had it as a non-verbal means of expression. Pikelet's experience is almost diametrically opposed to mine. And yes, I approve of that.

Pikelet's friendship with Loonie and then with Sando stifles his relationship with his more cautious father; is this something you see an inevitable part of growing up?

Forsaking your own, you mean? Well, it's common enough, but I don't know that it's inevitable. There's a difference between becoming your own person and betraying your own. And Pikelet finds a secret life lived long enough does put you into a kind of self-imposed exile from which it's hard to return. Pikelet doesn't get a chance to reveal himself to his father and later he feels unable to be honest and intimate with his mother. I think he feels a kind of shame he can't overcome. As a man he's massively conflicted, divided from himself in many ways, and cut off from all intimacy. He lives a managed life, monitoring himself and his impulses. A lot of this seems to be a legacy of his time with Loonie and Sando and Eva.

The boys discover that Sando has been a champion surfer and that his partner Eva was freestyle skier who injured herself so badly that can no longer compete. For Eva the risk taking has an erotic element to it – is this true?

Yes, though I think it's true for all the main characters. Perhaps with the exception of Loonie, who has a kind of buried sexuality. He's all action and no feeling, in a way. But yeah, these people want vivid sensation. They need to feel their hearts hammering; they're addicted to the rush of adrenaline, to the proximity of danger. Eva's outlook is intensified by being thwarted, of course. She's unable to do what she loves to do most and that brings a different kind of pressure.

The boys are constantly trying to prove themselves to Sando. And he encourages them. It seems in the end that Loonie is the chosen one – is Pikelet's infatuation and affair with Sando's partner Eva part of the risk-taking or some oedipal revenge?

Oh, I don't know. At one level she's simply entertaining herself. She's left behind a lot and she's bored out of her mind, getting stoned all day in this big pole house in the bush. She's in pain a lot, she's miserable. And here's this lonely kid coming by now and then on his bike. Anybody's susceptible to the kind of vanity involved in a relationship with a much younger person. Maybe she doesn't even recognize the kind of revenge she's exacting on Sando – or on Loonie or Pikelet for that matter. Once Pikelet falls for her she has a kind of power again after having been pretty powerless for quite some time. I doubt she sets out to do it. She's just a lonely, narcissistic, sporty woman with not much occupying her mind. You wonder if Sando would any different in her place. Pikelet is a victim to Sando's vanity, too.

Eva is 25 and Pikelet only 15; you describe their relationship quite explicitly. In one passage Pikelet refers to himself as jailbait, are you concerned how people will react?

Well, I assume people will be pretty uncomfortable. Well, I mean, I hope so. What she's doing with this kid is illegal and unequal and pretty damaging. He's a child. Sando's reckless with him in one way and she's reckless with him in another. And Pikelet thinks these people are grown-ups. These are the folks he thinks are cool and sophisticated. He doesn't yet see how flaky they are. He doesn't understand how fickle and self-absorbed and deluded people can be. He spends the rest of his life trying to chew on that bit of gristle, to overcome his sense of aggrieved victimhood.

Pikelet's life doesn't turn out all that well; he still hankers after the vicarious thrill. Are you implying that the ordinary, the ordered safe life is the best?

As compared to disorder and early sorrow, you mean? Not completely. There's no thesis here; this is a novel and I'm just reflecting on it after the fact like another reader. But from Pikelet's experience he probably sees virtue in the safe and ordinary, even though, rather perversely, it's more something he's had to aspire to rather than achieve. But what's safety without the proper apprehension of danger? Isn't that smugness, numbness, self-delusion? There is a kind of papering-over of chaos, danger, wildness, which fails to acknowledge the wildness and even viciousness of existence. Personally I'm a bit of a coward. But I'm also easily bored and a bored person can be a ticking bomb.

For better or worse, writers nowadays are quite public figures, you make very few public appearances; I'm sure it's not for want of invitations and I'm sure you have much to contribute – is this a conscious decision or something you've drifted into?

I don't think it's any secret that I don't much like the public stuff. I find being in front of people a bit well … corrosive. It doesn't give me anything good. Good luck to writers who like the performative side of things, in a way I probably envy them their ease. But I'm happier on the page. I've done a fair bit of public advocacy in the past decade, mostly environmental work and I don't regret it, but it does create an appetite and an expectation that can't be met. I have to remind people that I write stories. That's my area of expertise. Why should anyone need to hear my sound-bite opinion on every ephemeral political and social issue?

Breath is a wonderful book, rewarding on so many levels, are you pleased with it? If so what do you think works best?

Well, thanks Mark. I don't know what to make of it, to be honest, and if I did I'd probably keep my opinions to myself, curmudgeon that I am. I am glad it's done, though. Too late for a re-write now. We're all stuck with it.

Bob Carr

2008-05-02T00:00:00Z

Bob Carr, interviewed by Jo Case, editor of Readings Monthly, May 2008

Bob Carr is best known as a former Premier of NSW – but it’s also well known that he’s an avid reader and a bit of a history buff. In his new book, My Reading Life, he takes us on an idiosyncratic, hugely enjoyable tour of his favourite books. Jo Case spoke to him for Readings.

What was the first book you really loved?

A small novelised treatment of Peter Pan, a present when I was five or six. I loved the monochrome art nouveau illustrations— Wendy and Peter above the chimney tops, Captain Hook and the crocodile. Around the same age I received a child’s history of Australia, The Australia Book, by Eve Pownall, published by the House of Sands. It was the size of a broadsheet newspaper with beguiling illustrations by Margaret Senior. Australian history as a pageant. I remember the opening words: “The first Australians had been in the land so long that no man, not even the oldest, could say how they first came here.” At least I think that’s right.

How did you select which books to include? Did you have a set of criteria for inclusion or was it more about your personal affinity to the books?

Personal affinity. For example I nominate Primo Levi’s If This Is A Man because, to me, it is the purest of all the books in the literature of testimony, that is, the books testifying to the genocides and other cruelties of our last 100 years. I think the book is very special. It’s personal affinity that made me nominate Tolstoy’s War and Peace and Gore Vidal’s Lincoln and spend a lot of space analysing them for people who have never tackled them. Of course, the mere fact of nominating a book and advising readers how to approach it has driven me deeper into the essence of the writer. I found this happening with Dostoyevsky’s The Brother’s Karamazov which I return to in three of my chapters… and which I look forward to re-reading myself. It has worked itself into my imagination.

You write about meeting some of the literary icons you admire, even ‘hero worship’, like Patrick White and Norman Mailer. Who are the writers you would most like to meet now, and why?

I’m looking forward to interviewing Simon Sebag Montefiore on May 22 at Sydney Writers’ Festival. He’s the author of two volumes on Stalin and of a study of Catherine the Great’s Prince Potemkin. You admire a writer’s scholarship and style and you want to meet him or her. I like polymaths, like Mailer and Vidal who I have been privileged to meet. I would have loved dinners with Anthony Burgess. The ultimate time travel experience … knowing James Joyce. Shakespeare, another fantasy.

You like historical fiction because ‘these novels are about big events and famous names, the world of power’. That seems to be a common thread running throughout your selection, from Gore Vidal and Norman Mailer to Colleen McCullough. What is it that you get from historical fiction that you don’t get from reading history?

Historical fiction enables a writer to fill in the gaps. With Colleen McCullough, to imagine what Caesar, Pompey and Crassus said when they sat down in an inn on the Campus Martius outside the Servian Walls to plan the First Triumvirate. Or what a nerve-wracked Lincoln said in the bedroom of the White House to his wife Mary after another fearful battlefield catastrophe.

You write that no novel is capable of capturing ‘the scale, sprawl and drama of the [American] story, perhaps the most important in human history’. This book includes many American books, especially in the genres of history and politics. Do you think your affinity for America was born partly from your extensive reading about that American story?

I loved America – note the past tense – because of its history. I hope I capture this in two chapters – one devoted to American fiction and one to American history. Here I try to recommend the unusual books – the quirkiest, the funniest, the most insightful. The American novels I recommend are those that are anchored in its history: the trauma of race relations and of the Civil War, the migrant experience, the United States of the Cold War. In this last category I strongly commend Norman Mailer’s Harlot’s Ghost (1991) in which the author describes the CIA as ‘the mind of America’ as he delineates a young careerist’s rise in the Agency’s ranks.

It took you a while to embrace Shakespeare – and it certainly didn’t happen at school! Now, you rate him among ‘the things that make life worthwhile’. What do you think the ideal introduction to Shakespeare is, and is there any way that can happen at school?

It’s easier to teach Shakespeare at school now than it was when I was at school because of performances on DVD that enable students to see Shakespeare acted and enable them to compare different performances. This is incalculably richer. I would ban amateur productions of Shakespeare. Should have made them an offence under the Crimes Act when I was Premier.

Is there a book (or books) that really changed your way of thinking about a political issue or matter of public policy? If so, what were they?

The literature of environmentalism—to which I devote a chapter— especially Paul Ehrlich, author of The Population Bomb (1968) and Bill McKibben, author of The End of Nature (1990), one of the first books to describe global warming. I hope also that My Reading Life revives respect for the literature of anti-totalitarianism. I analyse Robert Conquest’s The Great Terror (1968) which laid bare the scale of Stalin’s mass murder. I also provide a practical guide for readers who want to venture inside the three volumes of Alexandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago, which appeared in English in 1973. These books refined in me a fierce hatred for totalitarianism. At the very start of this genre—which as been over the decades a fundamental shaping force in my thinking—lies George Orwell, the foremost political thinker (and literary critic) of our time. I took pleasure in including a guide to Orwell’s works.

You recommend that we challenge ourselves in our reading, tackle ‘great’ books like Proust and Joyce. ‘You may even be persuaded that you are a different person because you have read so-and-so.’ Are there any books that have made you a different person?

I think a single chapter of Tolstoy’s War and Peace outweighs all the bestsellers in the front window of any bookshop today. If you know Flaubert and Joyce and Homer deeply and affectionately you are different from someone who lives in celebrity culture, current affairs and the sporting pages. Susan Sontag said she was a different person because she had read Dostoyevsky. Of course different does not mean better. We know from Montefiore that Stalin was astonishingly well read. Work that one out. We live in a world of contradictions. I found plenty in writing My Reading Life.

Kathleen Stewart

2008-05-02T00:00:00Z

Kathleen Stewart, interviewed by Kate Holden

Kathleen Stewart has been writing and publishing, both novels and poetry, since she was 21. Her memoir, The After Life, has already gained rapturous accolades from fellow writers Luke Davies (Candy) and Susan Johnson (The Broken Book). Acclaimed writer Kate Holden, author of the bestselling memoir In My Skin, spoke to Kathleen Stewart for Readings’ series celebrating Australian writing (sponsored by the Copyright Agency Limited) about the process of laying herself bare – and the freedom it gives her.

Publishing any memoir is a delicate and intimidating experience. Memoir, is, after all, one of the most fragile and intimate literary forms: the best of such works shed their clothes and find the courage to turn nakedness to the light, make poetry from the private. The voice of a memoirist is a husky whisper laid close to the ear. And whispering the very personal is almost always nerve wracking. Especially when you’re whispering out into the great echo-chamber of public readership.

Kathleen Stewart has chosen, after writing seven novels (one, Spilt Milk, shortlisted for the 1995 NSW Premier’s Literary Awards) and two collections of poetry, to finally bare the skin and bones of the most terrible year of her life. As she awaits the release of the resulting book, The After Life, she’s feeling a little nervous. It’s one thing to write a memoir, she says softly, from her Blue Mountains home, but another thing altogether to publish it. Both her parents are now deceased; she admits she could never have released the book in her mother’s lifetime. Doing so now, Stewart says, is a way of declaring, ‘here I am as a soul, here is what I made of my life, here’s what my life has made of me’. It is an act of catharsis and self-possession after a youth in which it seems she rarely felt such entitlement – instead, she was made to feel shame for most of her feelings. She has written an exposure of suburban family life that, though it reads as darkly as one of her beloved fairy tales, is uncompromising in its dissection of a tragic adolescence and the people who formed it.

There are two stories of anguish in The After Life: one of family bonds drawn tight (far beyond the point of comfort) even as the family splinters apart; and of a hopeless romantic infatuation by the teenage Kathleen for a ‘devil’ she calls Martin.

In 1975 the cat went mad. Our mother left. Our father sat in his lounge chair every night and drank bottles of red wine and wept. It wasn’t a good year. And things got worse from there.

The young Kathleen grew up in a white-bread Sydney family: a mother, apparently the perfect model of a beautiful young wife, a moustachioed father who believed in discipline and a brother. Kathleen was clever, pretty and sensitive. But she was regularly beaten for such infractions as laughing; her father would sit at the kitchen table and scream threats of murder; the house was full of guns and knives. Brother retreated to his room; mother froze within her own preoccupations before leaving; Kathleen grew into a silenced daughter, caught between fear and devotion, soon to eclipse herself further in a rebellious love affair. In language rich and urgent, spilling over with similes and images, she tells the story of what happened next.

‘What was it I learnt in 1976, and why is it I never can unlearn it? That love – romantic and transcendent – isn’t. That no man can be trusted. That all there is to look forward to is pretence and pain, and then more pain.’ Stewart’s account, which has taken several years to write, is dramatic as she traces her history of submission, yearning and quiet resistance. In the crucible year of 1976 the teenage Stewart alternates between cooking an endless series of meals of mashed potato and meat for her father and brother in a rictus of apprehensive duty, trying to be a sympathetic audience to a self-obsessed mother she describes as a ‘spider’, and sneaking out to have rapturous sex with Martin, a malign character who, like her parents, veers between apparent love and cruel torture. During that year she takes up heroin, drifts in a sleep-deprived haze through days of wagging school, and eventually, numbed by years of pain and trauma, wanders, belly full of sleeping pills, into a park to die – prompting a stay in the haven of a psychiatric institution. The memory of a violent rape is just one of the wounds she bears, alongside those of profound loneliness and psychic abuse. Within those terrible 12 months she tried to kill herself – and her father did kill himself. ‘It was a year of silences and strangenesses, that sent me to a place more deeply submerged than any I had ever dwelt in.’

‘My feeling,’ she says, ‘was that I needed to come to terms with these things. As a writer this is how one owns one’s life. It seemed a very necessary thing to do for my own survival. I feel I have a better chance of living my next 50 years more comfortably in myself.’ She mentions that although she has written an entire book about that year of her life, she spent many months working on ‘pre-writing’ notes, and perhaps hasn’t yet finished with the material. She plans, she says, to keep writing until ‘they put me in the box’.

Writing the memoir was itself painful (recalling her early self ‘turned me green,’ she says), but also freeing. ‘I was able to like that girl [I was then], rather than having the sense of shame I had at the time – and until recently. Writing the book I felt compassion.’ Compassion, she insists, lies throughout The After Life, although she unflinchingly lays her parents open to the reader’s condemnation, as well as pity. Stewart’s father appears as an ogre, literally threatening murder, and as a pitiful abandoned husband, weeping night after night to his silently consoling, neglected daughter – and, finally, as a tragically uncertain man. Her mother, ‘such an engaging, enigmatic character’, seems less sympathetic somehow, endlessly weaving her daughter’s vulnerability into the opera of her own indomitable life. For all her mother’s fixations with control, Stewart believes that the book-loving and biography-writing woman would have wanted, after all, to be included in the story.

‘Societal voices said I shouldn’t be ungrateful [for the upbringing I had],’ says Stewart, ‘and that to tell my story is a rank ingratitude to those people I dearly love, despite the difficulties’. She disagrees. ‘I don’t know if it’s come through in the book but I feel tremendous love and happiness about knowing those people who were my parents.’

Writing any memoir involves devising an economy: what will be tactfully omitted, poetically smoothed over, or fearlessly laid bare. Stewart says she followed her instinct, believing that she had a story she needed to tell and that she has every right to tell her version. Once she found the language in which to write it – her own lushly poetic, burning style – she knew she could complete the task. ‘Once I recognised my voice on the page I thought, That’s it, here comes a book and a story that wants to be told. I must tell it.’

She was inspired by reading other memoirs, such as Lucky by Alice Sebold and Unchain My Heart by Andiee Paviour. ‘I admire them for having the courage, and I appreciate the generosity of it. It’s a marvellous time in history when people are telling their stories. There seems to be a level of honesty that I find tremendously human. It’s not,’ she says quietly, ‘a very soft-edged world.’

The After Life is out now.

Kate Holden's memoir is In My Skin.