Non-fiction

A Thousand Small Tragedies

Item: The Meeting Of The Waters
Author: Kerryn Goldsworthy

by Kerryn Goldsworthy •

August 2003, no. 253

The Meeting Of The Waters: The Hindmarsh Island Affair by Margaret Simons

Hodder, $39.95 pb, 528pp

Non-fiction

A Thousand Small Tragedies

by Kerryn Goldsworthy •

August 2003, no. 253

Reading this new book in the cold midwinter of 2003, I stopped one night to watch the news; the lead story was about the newly resumed dredging operations at the Murray Mouth, an hour or two south-east of Adelaide. The dredging is a temporary measure, a kind of emergency surgery to stop the river mouth silting up and closing altogether.

Kerryn Goldsworthy

Kerryn Goldsworthy won the 2013 Pascall Prize for cultural criticism, and the 2017 Horne Prize for her essay ‘The Limit of the World’. A former Editor of ABR (1986–87), she is one of Australia’s most prolific and respected literary critics. Her publications include several anthologies, a critical study of Helen Garner, and her book Adelaide, which was shortlisted for a Victorian Premier’s Literary Award. In November 2012 she was named as the inaugural ABR Ian Potter Foundation Fellow. Her Fellowship article on reviewing, ‘Everyone’s a Critic’, appeared in the May 2013 issue of ABR.