Tag: Sydney

Reading Secondhand: Susan Hampton at Sappho Books

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by Ali Jane Smith The walk from Sydney’s Central Station along Broadway to Glebe Point Road did not have a lilting, iambic rhythm. It was a prog rock experience, a march through a tunnel, a stroll along the footpath, a scurry across a road that inexplicably lacked a pedestrian crossing, more footpath, more scrambling with or against the lights until the corner is turned, and Glebe Point Road achieved. Here, the traffic ambled, no-one was trying to make time. Here, there were cafes and restaurants, the famous Gleebooks, site of many deeply pleasurable browsing hours, and Sappho Books, a secondhand…

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Reading Secondhand: Donald Horne in the post and Frank Moorhouse from The Record King

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Ali Jane Smith On the Monday morning after the election, with no party yet able to form a government, I turned on the radio. While I put the kettle on to make a cup of tea, ABC RN’s Fran Kelly was interviewing one of the winners, losers, or too-close-to-callers. I heard the candidate, whoever he was, say “I think Australia is a lucky country.” The water came to a boil, I changed the station. The Lucky Country: Australia in the Sixties, was a book Donald Horne wrote while he was working for the Packers, editing magazines. The title came from…

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Special Post: Discovering the long prospect: Elizabeth Harrower and Christina Stead

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To celebrate the Stead-Harrower symposium at the University of New South Wales this week, please enjoy this excellent piece on the literary connections between Christina Stead and Elizabeth Harrower. by Brigid Rooney and Fiona Morrison In 1969, travelling light during her first visit to Australia in forty years, Christina Stead carried very few books in her luggage. But one book she did carry, for a time, was Elizabeth Harrower’s The Long Prospect (1958). This was the first time Stead had read any of Harrower’s books. Though written in a different key, Harrower’s novel about a sensitive young girl trapped in…

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Just Make it Electric

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by Felicity Castagna A lot of space in literary circles has been given of late to trying to define what is highbrow and what is middlebrow and why those distinctions matter. I think we would be better off having a debate about literature that is ‘technically good’ but boring and literature that is ‘electric.’ That, to me, is a distinction that matters. It is a distinction that makes a text both engaging and enduring. In my mind, the electricity of literature lies in the voice of the text: it’s the hardest thing to get right and it’s also the hardest…

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The Revolution Starts on Monday: Tamar Chnorhokian and the case for subjectivity

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by Luke Carman I want to tell you about Tamar. The publication of The Diet Starts on Monday by Armenian-Australian writer Tamar Chnorhokian was the realisation of a long and collectively held dream for everyone in involved. For Tamar, it meant becoming a novelist, for us at SWEATSHOP, it was an opportunity to contribute a genuinely unique single-author work of fiction to the frustratingly narrow world of Australian literature (sceptics can order a copy here and see for themselves). Tamar’s novel is a deceptively simply young adult tale: an obese girl with a secret crush on the hottest boy at school sets…

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Revelators, Visionaries, Poets and Fools: the palimpsest of Sydney’s western suburbia

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by Luke Carman The suggestion that Australia’s literary ‘centre’ appears to be shifting – or leaning, at the least – towards Sydney’s ‘suburban frontier’ is becoming commonplace. Perhaps the first (certainly the most emphatic) recognition of this decentring to find its way into print was provided by Sam Twyford-Moore, director of the Emerging Writers’ Festival, who stated in an interview last year that ‘Western Sydney is the capital of Australian literature… if not already, then certainly it’s the future’. As someone with a sensitive ear for the minor tremors of our most aspirant and incubational writers, Twyford-Moore can reasonably be…

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The architecture of grass

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by Tom Lee In Bill Gammage’s remarkable book on the land care practices of the first Australians, The Biggest Estate on Earth,‘grass’ is among the most frequently indexed words. It’s up there with ‘Europeans’, ‘animals’, and ‘forest’. In the ‘grass’ entry in the index the reader is told to see also “clearings; fire; grass names; plains”, and the subcategories include: introduced, native, beside water, corridors (see also belts, paths), and on good soil. The word’s semantic reach includes more than half the book. Why is this word so central to Gammage’s thesis? Because the first Australians were experts at caring…

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