History

Aha!

Item: Radicals
Author: Kerryn Goldsworthy

Personal epiphanies from the 1960s

by Kerryn Goldsworthy •

July 2021, no. 433

Radicals: Remembering the Sixties by Meredith Burgmann and Nadia Wheatley

NewSouth, $39.99 pb, 414 pp

History

Aha!

Personal epiphanies from the 1960s

by Kerryn Goldsworthy •

July 2021, no. 433

Studying at the University of Sydney in the late 1960s, Meredith Burgmann and Nadia Wheatley were both living in Women’s College. Burgmann recalls:

Very late one night when I was sitting in my room, struggling with John Donne … I heard a clump clump clump coming along the corridor. Opening my door, I discovered Nadia – wearing a red flannel nightie and gumboots – on her nightly mission to salvage the last of the toast from the kitchenette … our friendship was forged over our protest activity and ensuing arrests.

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.