A painting, a frog cake, a landmark, a statue, a haunting newspaper photograph, a bucket of peaches, pink shorts in parliament, concert tickets, tourist maps. Kerryn Goldsworthy’s Adelaide is a museum of sorts, a personal guide to the city through a collection of iconic objects.
Adelaide navigates her southern home, discovering its identifying curios and passing them to the reader to touch, inspect and marvel at. These objects explore the beautiful, commonplace, dark and contradictory history of Adelaide: the heat, the wine, the weirdness, the progressive politics and the rigid colonial formality, the sinister horrors and the homey friendliness. They all paint a lively portrait of her home city – as remembered, lived in, thought about, missed, loved, hated, laughed at, travelled to and from, seen from afar and close up by assorted writers, citizens and visitors – but mainly as it exists in her memory and imagination.
