Jo Case interviews Melbourne author and winner of the 2008 Miles Franklin award for The Time We Have Taken, Steven Carroll, about his new book - Spirit of Progress - a prequel to Steven's Glenroy trilogy.

Spirit of Progress is a kind of prequel to your much-awarded Glenroy trilogy. What gave you the idea for a prequel? And what draws you to keep revisiting these characters?

Nothing in particular. Just the feeling (very soon after finishing The Time We Have Taken) that there was more to the story – that it had not been fully told. Each book seems to generate new stories – and often new characters. Sam, Tess, Katherine and Skinner, all had to be created from scratch, and it was satisfying to watch as their stories gradually overlapped those of the established characters such as Vic and Rita. And just as each book generates new stories, these stories also take you to new places. Spirit of Progress is not set in the suburbs – although part of it is set in the farming country that will become a suburb – but very much in the city of Melbourne just after the Second World War.

A central strand of this story – a painting of an old woman living in a tent on the edge of suburbia – is inspired by Sidney Nolan’s painting Woman and Tent, of your aunt. You’ve written about this painting before in Sleepers Almanac 4. What is it about this slice of your family history that especially fascinates you?

I’d known for some time that my great aunt Katherine (whom I never met) had been painted by someone famous – and I knew that she lived in a tent (on a block of land in Nunawading, actually – I shifted location in the book), and that her photograph had appeared in The Herald along with a story about her. Much to the embarrassment of all family members, apparently. But it wasn’t until much later that the pieces of the jigsaw were fitted together and I first saw a reproduction of the painting itself: Woman and Tent. The big mystery is whether Nolan and Katherine ever met. However briefly. She did arrive at my parents’ house at the time the Herald photograph was published complaining about a cheeky young man who had been snooping about her tent asking questions. But that could easily have been the journalist – who is not named in the newspaper story. It’s probable that they did not meet, since the painting is almost a replication of the photograph – while still being a painting in its own right.

I should also say that my character is not Nolan – he is simply called Sam – and as I was not bound by biography, I could invent what I liked. So I speculate, in the novel, that they did meet. The book, in fact, is set largely during the three days that saw the photograph and story published, the possible meeting between the painter and Katherine, the painting of Woman and Tent and the exhibiting of it. I understand that Nolan actually pasted the newspaper photograph and story to the wall next to the painting itself when it was exhibited. I didn’t see the painting until this year when I flew to Canberra and went to the Canberra Museum and Gallery where it is on permanent exhibition. So the story of Aunt Katherine and Nolan was always a piece of family folklore just waiting for its moment. It took some time, but its moment eventually arrived and Spirit of Progress is it. I tend to think that books – like an idea whose time has come – arrive when they’re ready. When the moment feels right.

We know that a strand of this novel was inspired by life – that Sam’s painting is Sidney Nolan’s. Other characters feel like they could be based on or inspired by real figures – George, who will become a significant figure in journalism, and Tess, the influential gallery owner and Sam’s mentor of sorts. Did you draw inspiration from life for other characters or elements, or were they entirely invented?

I don’t think any character is entirely invented. At the same time I did very little research when writing this book – and tend to be fairly wary of research in general. A novel is a work of the imagination, and research (especially too much of it) can simply deaden things. So I know little about Nolan’s life. There are parallels (father in the tramways, cycling and so on), but I never thought of Sam as Nolan. Similarly the character of Tess has some similarities to Sunday Reid (from a rich family, etc.) but, again, Tess is her own character. George is, in many ways, a kind of parallel George Johnston. The George Johnston who stayed, rather than left. There is a pivotal scene in Clean Straw for Nothing that my novel quite deliberately echoes. The Johnston character – David Meredith – is offered a job as the editor of a new newspaper magazine (Johnston wrote for The Argus) and he refuses it – believing that the conventionality and comfort of the job is antithetical to the writer’s life. My character accepts – having decided on a life in newspapers. And, as the novel progressed, George became less of a Johnston figure and more of a Graham Perkin figure. The models, such as they were, did tend to shift and change as the novel gathered.

There is a real romance to the way George sees his job at the newspaper. He loves ‘the hammering of the typewriters, the smoke, the noise and the daily production of the words that make up the continuing conversation that goes on every day all around him’. Given the state of newspapers now, there’s also a melancholy about it. Do you feel a nostalgia for the golden days of print?

This is probably right, although I didn’t consciously go about it like that. Again, it’s probably inevitable that when you’re writing about times past it will assume a certain melancholy. But it’s worth mentioning that George is quite different from me. He is very aware of being read, very conscious of having a readership. Whereas I have never really been conscious of a readership – and I think this is because I was writing for over 12 years before I published a novel. During that time I was basically writing for myself – and a few others. And, to an extent, I still think like that. Whereas, in my time writing for The Age, I’ve met many journalists who are very conscious of an audience and write for it.

Spirit of Progress is out now.