Journal
Articles
End of another era
WHEN THOUSANDS OF unemployed miners, steel, clothing and textile workers, their friends, families and organisers pushed through the glass...
Suite: FA
Practising penmanshipscribbling infinityzero available balancewearing spectaclesdrawing hand-held mirrorstransaction declinedcollecting duck eggsnetting tennis ballsaccount overdrawnstacking platesflying saucersnil employment opportunitiessewing buttonsexciting...
After the afterword
THIS IS AN ending to my latest novel, The Book of Rapture, that was eventually abandoned – creating a very different...
Fact and fiction
SO THERE I was, an outsider at the global epicentre of men with bushy beards and cardigans. They were...
Notes on unbelonging
‘HE HAD THE sagacity to realise that, once he was out of Australia, the colours would gradually bleed from...
On the strangeness of fiction
FELLINI'S COMMENT THAT ‘everything and nothing in my work is autobiographical' is a neat way of describing the mysterious...
On the same page, right?
Yes, Dear Reader, we're messing with your minds. When Paul Kelly sings, ‘Gather round people, I'll tell you a story,' he may as well be singing, ‘Gather round people, I'll rewire your cortex.' But as well as messing with your minds, we're messing with your – and our – societies.
Learning to write
A FEW MONTHS ago an article by the distinguished American author and academic Louis Menand appeared in the New Yorker, asking whether...
Writing from the past
I SPEND A lot of time in graveyards these days. On mornings when it's too blustery to walk my...
Writing Lessons: Settings
away from a place to write about a place I BEGIN THE first draft of my new book, a memoir...
Pretence, sincerity, convention
RECENTLY I HAD an eyelash transplant. Hairs were taken from the back of my neck and placed across the...
East of the sun and west of the moon
THE NEW GIRLS is a 1979 novel by Beth Gutcheon. It relates the lives of five teenage girls, students of an...
