Kerryn Goldsworthy

Berggasse 19, the address at which Sigmund Freud and his family lived for almost fifty years, is now Vienna’s Freud Museum. It is the other Freud Museum, the one in London, that houses the extensive collection of antiquities which is Janine Burke’s main focus in The Gods of Freud, but the Berggasse museum contains a number of Freud’s other personal possessions, including some little bottles, pots and brushes that are the remnants of an old-fashioned gentleman’s dressing-case. Of high quality, these well-used tools of personal attention to a body now long dead are scratched and dented from use.

Deep under the streets of Paris, the tunnels, chambers and galleries of the catacombs run in all directions, some of them filled with the skeletons of the dead who were displaced in the eighteenth century from the overflowing cemeteries of Paris and moved here, their bones stacked six feet high and six feet deep along the walls. During World War II, the chambers and tunnels were used by the French Resistance and also by the Nazis. These days, tourists queue peacefully to totter down the delicate, steep, spindly steps into the underworld darkness, nervously following the guides through what feels like miles of tunnels. The mystery of the dripping noise is solved when you come back up into the sunlight to find your clothes streaked with the dissolving lime of the underworld.

If you can say immediately what you think a novel is ‘about’, then the chances are that it may not be a very good novel. Fiction as a genre gives writers and readers imaginative room to move, to work on a vertical axis of layers of meaning as well as along the horizontal forward movement of narrative development ...

Kate Grenville is a brave woman. For some years now, the representation of Aboriginal people by white writers has been hedged about by a thicket of post­colonial anxieties, profoundly problematic and important but too often manifested as hostile, holier-than-thou critique, indulging, at its most inept ..

In 1964 the Australian television show Bandstand set up an annual talent contest called Bandstand Starflight International. In its first year, one of the national finalists was a sixteen-year-old schoolgirl called Robyn Smith, who later changed her surname to Archer. The following year, the contest was won by a 24-year-old professional singer called Helen Reddy.

The first book of fiction is a little sub-genre with a number of readily recognisable features. It’s loosely structured and tends to be episodic, without much of a plot. It’s at least partly about love and sex, preferably of an obsessive or otherwise significant kind. And it’s at least partly autobiographical. If it’s already a bad book, then these things do tend to make it worse, but if it isn’t, then they don’t necessarily detract; it’s not a value judgement, just an observation.

At Adelaide Writer’s Week in 2002, Drusilla Modjeska spoke about the prevalence in contemporary Australian fiction of historical subjects and distant eras; she exhorted Australian writers to consider instead the importance of addressing our own times. Much of this speech subsequently found its way into the essay ‘The Present in Fiction’, published in Modjeska’s Timepieces later the same year.

Then, last March, David Marr took up this baton and ran with it in his address to the Australian Society of Authors, ‘The Role of the Writer in John Howard’s Australia’. Contemporary Australian writers, he argued, are in the same predicament as Patrick White was in the 1950s,

As the old philistine culture of Australian politics reasserts itself. And the same way out is available to those of us who want to take it – to explore this new old Australia through writing [and] start focusing on what is happening in this country, looking Australia in the face, not flinching ... So few Australian novels – now I take my life in my hands – address in worldly, adult ways the country and the times in which we live.

Something like a double helix of dialectical thinking winds its graceful way through these ‘eight lessons’. Ideas and theories about the nature of human (and other) life and how to live it, about the workings and the relative merits of logic, reason, belief, and faith, are sketched, rehearsed, debated, and set in ...