Cirrus@Austlit

'‘I won’t live to see it, but you will!’

'If spoken now, these words might be addressed by a baby boomer to a millenial. In fact they were said to me some thirty years ago. The speaker was the Australian novelist and critic George Turner. He was a small, wiry, olive-skinned man, his eyes merry behind square bifocals. Despite the warning, his tone was light and ironic. There was nothing nasty about the remark, rather a commitment to telling the truth. For some novelists, the stance could seem unbearably pretentious, or self-aggrandising. For Turner it was neither. He was a kind man in person, and gentlemanly in his manners, although he could also be ferocious, particularly when attacked.' (Introduction)

'A long time ago, after the publicity had finished for my first memoir When It Rains and while I was still brimming with writing confidence and no real direction I dreamed what my next book was to be. Woken by a willie wagtail calling outside my window I reached for the notebook on the bedside table. With eyes still sticky with sleep I scrawled down the details of the extraordinary walk I had just taken with Miles Franklin.' (Introduction)

'I was reluctant to try share house living again; being thrown out of the Abercrombie Street house had affected me more deeply than I thought. My room in the Harold Park Hotel wasn’t a viable option either. It wasn’t the quality of the room that was the problem. When I first went to check the place out I’d braced myself for pub squalor, but to my surprise the room had been recently refurbished, in cheap synthetic everything, it was true, but at least it was clean and new. But apart from the bed there was hardly any furniture, not even a bar fridge, and even though the weather was mild, the milk I bought for my cereal – which I was just about living on – curdled overnight. Also, the pub was next to one of Sydney’s major racetracks, and it was impossible to study over the booming PA. I’d sit at the floor at the end of the single bed, surrounded by piles of library books on topics ranging from the cinema of Luis Buñuel to intermediate French grammar, unable to block out the voices of the race commentators. These delivered near stream-of-consciousness monologues that built to frenzied climaxes made up of the winning horses’ names – Sea Peony, Rusted Sunset, Achilles – manically repeated over and over again.' (Introduction)

'When she began publishing fiction in the 1980s, Beverley Farmer was part of a rising generation of women writers adding their voices to the record of Australian life. She was seen as a woman of modern multicultural Australia who had married one of the new Greek immigrants and experienced the contrast of cultures between Old Europe and modern Australia.' (Introduction)