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Christina Hill
Christina Hill is a Melbourne-based writer.
In True Pleasures, Lucinda Holdforth gives an account of her own life refracted through vignettes of the lives of famous women that have lived in Paris. Some of her subjects are writers, some courtesans and some ‘salonnières’. Holdforth went to Paris on holiday to recover from a sense of stalemate in her life. She candidly admits to abject disasters in her love life and to a failure to feel a ... (read more)
John Clanchy’s fictional concerns are with the large things: desire, pain, guilt, innocence, infidelity, sexuality, madness and the cost of making great art. In various guises, the spectre of Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh haunts many of the stories: he appears in a biographical portrait, in the recurring echoes of his first name, in a discussion of the use of colour in his pictures and in sever ... (read more)
Katherine Summers’ memoir of her childhood and Kris Olsson’s biography of Debbie Kilroy have in common histories of violence and abuse against women and children. Summers writes of her early childhood of desperate poverty in London’s East End in the 1960s and of her subsequent time in private boarding schools in a way that emphasises the powerlessness of the child in an inscrutable adult wor ... (read more)
These two first novels are based upon events and people from Australian history. Noni Durack recasts the story of the pastoralists of the north-west of Australia in terms of an enlightened awareness of land degradation, but the narrative remains oddly captive to the legend of heroic conquest that she is trying to critique. Wendy James, on the other hand, has written an elegant feminist account of ... (read more)
In reading a biography of Frank Hardy, it is almost impossible to separate the man, as subject, from the work for which he is famous, the novel Power Without Glory (1950) based on the life of John Wren. If I did not want to reach for my gun every time I hear the word ‘icon’ these days, I would say that this novel still has iconic status in Australian culture. The title is a pithy reworking of ... (read more)
Helga Griffin (née Girschik), conscious that memories differ and that her own is not infallible, is careful to respect the other people implicated in her story. Aware of her responsibility to them, she is nonetheless committed to breaking what she calls the Schweigen, the long silence. Sing Me That Lovely Song Again is highly apposite in its account of the damaging experience of internment. Durin ... (read more)
This novel by New Zealand-born Martin Edmond is difficult to pin down. As I read it, I wondered which genre it belongs to. The narrative moves among various genres, blurring memoir, travelogue, conventional history, reflections upon the internal journeys offered by personal reading, anthropological record, meta-textual fiction as postmodern mystery, even hoax. The unnamed narrator is a professiona ... (read more)
Why are there so many books about death and dying appearing at the moment? Is it about the baby boomers facing up to their mortality? It is certainly a subject that interests me, and Debra Adelaide’s novel should be compelling. Unfortunately, I found its determined flippancy laboured and grating. The first-person narrator, Delia, a writer of household guides, is not yet forty. Given a bad progno ... (read more)
The Barton family of Susan Johnson’s Life in Seven Mistakes is ‘unhappy after its own fashion’, to quote Tolstoy’s famous dictum. Elizabeth Barton’s perspective dominates the narrative. A 49-year-old ceramicist who lives in Melbourne and is preparing for her first exhibition in New York, Elizabeth is under pressure to complete some pieces needed for her opening. With her third husband, N ... (read more)