Cirrus@Austlit

'I have a suggestion. When you start reading Reason & Lovelessness, a new collection of Barry Hill’s essays, critical writings and reviews, don’t start with the introduction. Tom Griffiths’ foreword is thoughtful, expertly written and genuinely illuminating, but there is the faint archness of the academe in the tone, and it steers perilously close to sanctifying Hill’s writing and life. In the first essay of the collection, ‘Dark Star’, an interview with Christina Stead that Hill conducted in 1982 and which he revisited and rewrote in 2017, she and Hill discuss the reception to Patrick White’s then just published autobiography, and Stead says, ‘This, the autobiography, is the last thing they should read… This is his farewell, his sorrow, and everything that people would not understand unless they had read the whole life’.' (Introduction)