'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.' (Publisher's blurb)
