Please join Alan Brough at a celebration at the State Library on Friday 20 March, 4 - 5pm when he announces the the top five books, as voted by Victorian readers in the State Library of Victoria’s Summer Read program 2008-9, and voter’s prizes.

Experimedia
State Library of Victoria
328 Swanston Street, Melbourne

RSVP by Wednesday 17 March 2009

Telephone                   8664 7555
email                          learning@slv.vic.gov.au
book online                summerreadawards.eventbrite.com

The other day, when I was being interviewed by the local paper covering the Summer Read event I will participate in at the Botanical Gardens in Cranbourne, the reporter asked me how I became interested in writing about the people I write about.

“You mean ordinary people?” I asked.

“Well, yes,” she said not having read either Cups with No Handles or Jackson’s Track.

“Because ordinary people often live extraordinary lives,” I said.

“Oh, that’s good. I’ll use that,” she said.

As a writer, I work with real people who tell me their stories. Usually, they are people I know, country people, far from the madding crowd. I consider the work I do collaboration and both my subject and I are always listed on the cover of our books. The people I work with tell me as much of their story as they think is important and then I draw them out. For instance, Daryl Tonkin, who was the storyteller in Jackson’s Track, only wanted to tell campfire yarns about the feats and skills of men at work in the bush falling trees. He didn’t think he was important enough to be part of any story. His daughter and I convinced him otherwise and I set to work asking questions that allowed him to delve deeply into his own life with the Kurnai people of Gippsland. In Cups with No Handles, the book that is one of the Summer Read books this year, the subject, Bette Boyanton, wanted to tell me a linear tale of how she became a political activist and what she achieved. The only stories she was ready to tell were those that lent themselves to her political education. But her family wanted me to find out more than just that. Her niece said to me, “She needs to say something about our grandmother. We don’t know about her. We need to find out.” Her daughter said to me in a fit of anger over a confrontation she had just had with her mother, “She’ll never talk about us [her kids]; you have no idea.” I thought, there is a story in the personal here that will make this woman’s memoirs dynamic. Feminist that I am, I thought, the personal is political. Bette didn’t really believe that, but I felt that to be true to the emerging character, she would have to learn. As she began to respond to my questions, she learned.

So, it’s my job as a writer to find the extraordinary in the ordinary. Maybe by extraordinary, I mean the truth. It is my job to find the truth in people’s lives. But, truth is a tricky business. Many people believe that memoirs are like a biography or a meticulously researched kind of history. Many people mistook Jackson’s Track for history. Bette herself in Cups… thought that it would be good if we included historical accounts of World War Two or the Great Depression or the Menzies Referendum against Communism. I told her history books were for that; ‘we will only tell the parts that you experienced, the thoughts you had about your experience, and how historical events moved your life along’. Because they are about experience and are narrative constructions based on memory, Memoirs are closer to Fiction that they are to the Record, to History. How, then, can it be that I think I am finding the Truth?  (I could go on forever about Memoirs, Biography, History, The Record, Oral Testimony, Truth. In fact, I have written a thesis about it. It’s called Jackson’s Track Revisited and can be accessed for free and downloaded in Pdf version from Monash University ePress.)

In one of John Barth’s books – I think it might have been End of the Road – there is a scene where a fellow is sitting on a park bench reading Dostoyevsky. Another fellow comes up to him and asks him what he is reading.

“Crime and Punishment.”

“What kind of a book is that?”

“It’s a novel; fiction.”

“Oh, I don’t like fiction. I only ever read the truth.”

“This is the Truth.”

It’s that kind of truth I am looking for. I am looking for a true character, the complexity and intricacy of a human being and the way she/he live her life.  It’s a universal thing. A Universal Truth. And it is endlessly fascinating.

I reckon I have finally found the key to the truth when my subject experiences a kind of epiphany, the kind of thing that happens when they see how history played upon their lives and made them do the things they did or see the things they saw, when they say, ‘I never knew that about myself!’ In Daryl’s case, it came when he realised how his brother’s behaviour made him think things that weren’t true; or in Bette’s case, it came when she saw how her grandmother’s rejection of her mother’s choices in life was even more of a motivator for Bette than her political beliefs. Once the storyteller gains insight, the story comes pouring out. It is my job to listen and listen well. Then everything falls into place.

What I look for is that core truth that lets the character emerge. It’s Literature. It’s Truth in the Dostoyeskian sense. That’s why my books read like novels.

Thanks Greg for your posts sharing the trials and joys of writing the biograpghy of Tom Wills, one of the greatest Australian stories ever told.

As part of the free Summer Read events across Victoria, Greg will be appearing at:

• Melbourne Cricket Ground , Betty Cuthbert Room / Atrium,  Gate 3 on Thursday 5 February 2009, 6.30 pm
 For more information phone 8664 7555 or book online at  http://summerread35.eventbrite.com
 This is a National Sports Museum Public Program in association with the State Library of  Victoria. The event includes a special viewing of interview footage from the SBS Tom Wills documentary to be screened in May 2009 to celebrate the 150th anniversary of first  rules written for Australian Football.

• Rutherglen Football Club, Barkly Park, Reid Street, Rutherglen on Tuesday 24 February 2009, 8pm �
 For more information phone 02 6032 8206 or book online at  http://summerread36.eventbrite.com
 The event includes a special viewing of interview footage from the SBS Tom Wills  documentary to be screened in May 2009 to celebrate the 150th anniversary of first  rules written for Australian Football.

Vote for Tom Wills: His Spectacular Rise and Tragic Fall or SMS WILLS to 13 46 88

Thanks to Sue and Genevieve. Yes, to answer your query, Tom Wills almost certainly did drink beer as a schoolboy at Rugby School. The alternative was tea or water. The latter was often infected and cholera regularly swept through the school. The boys lived in School Houses and each House had a family brewery attached. The boast of the brewery attached to Tom’s House was that no boy would get cholera because the ingredients were so thoroughly boiled before the beer was made!

I am fascinated by the comments of my fellow writers and readers.

You see, I don’t  come from a writing background at all.

As a boy, I played cricket, footy, ran fast and loved maths. I read, but in the manner of a lot of boys - it was very specific and repetitive. I loved reptiles - and spent hours wandering up and down the Merri Creek in search of creatures to bring home - and what little I read concentrated on animals. My mother took me to the Natural History Museum of Victoria every school holidays and I still remember my favourite exhibit in the McCoy Hall - the skeletons of two reticulated pythons entwined about one another in a kind of macabre embrace. My love of words and of writing is a recent development.

Indeed, although I briefly met two of the Summer Read authors at the launch in November, prior to that I had only met one writer - ever. That was just a week or two earlier while I sat waiting for a radio interview about the Tom Wills biography. As I waited to be interviewed, one of Australia’s best known writers of fiction came into the same room. He was to be interviewed after me. We chatted for 10 minutes before our respective interviews. After my interview, and as I was leaving the studio, my recently met writing colleague leaned over and said: ‘I guess biographers have it pretty easy. It’s a matter of just laying out the facts.’

My first impulse was to stretch over his publicist and throttle him by the neck unitl his eyes hung out to dry in the Sydney sun. This, of course, would have been poor form and deprived Australia of one of its best writers. What struck me in that moment of homicidal haste was that, while I was writing the Wills biography, I had reached the opposite conclusion. I thought fiction might be easier and had decided: ‘Right, my next book will be a novel.’

I can pinpoint the exact time this thought occurred to me - about 12 months into the research for the biography. The first 12 months, or so, of biography research is the easiest. It is a bit like the first gold miners wandering around Eaglehawk and Bendigo, nonchalantly finding clumps of gold poking through the soil. No difficulty at all. But I knew that to dig out the remaining information about my biographical subject might take years. And there was no guarantee of locating surviving archival information. I might be wasting time - better to write fiction to make up the gaps. This was the voice that kept at me.

Surely all biographers must experience this temptation. To some extent we must all succumb because there are moments in the biographical reconstruction that require a little guesswork. I would dearly love to meet biographers to hear their tales and their moments of ‘guesswork’ and reconstruction. This is the secret work of the biographer. For the Tom Wills biography I expunged anything that could not be traced back to archival evidence. To some biographers this may seem too severe. But I had my reasons. The story of Tom Wills has been laden with mythology and distortion. And so I endeavoured not to embellish a single sentence.

Greg de Moore is next Summer Read author blogging from 26 – 30 December.

His book, Tom Wills: His Spectacular Rise and Tragic Fall is one of the books on the Summer Read shortlist.

Greg de Moore is a consultant psychiatrist at Sydney’s Westmead Hospital and his study of Wills’ life stems from his interest in male suicide. His ten years of research has unearthed original medical records, letters, text books and notes, previously believed to have been lost or destroyed.

Tom Wills: His Spectacular Rise and Tragic Fall is the definitive biography of Tom Wills – flawed genius, sporting libertine, fearless leader and agitator, and the man most often credited with creating the game we now know as Australian Rules football. His contribution to Australian history has endured for more than 150 years and is perhaps the greatest Australian sports story of all.

As part of the free Summer Read events across Victoria, Greg will be appearing at:

• Melbourne Cricket Ground , Betty Cuthbert Room / Atrium,  Gate 3 on Thursday 5 February 2009, 6.30 pm
 For more information phone 8664 7555 or book online at  http://summerread35.eventbrite.com
 This is a National Sports Museum Public Program in association with the State Library of  Victoria. The event includes a special viewing of interview footage from the SBS Tom  Wills documentary to be screened in May 2009 to celebrate the 150th anniversary of first  rules written for Australian Football.

• Rutherglen Football Club, Barkly Park, Reid Street, Rutherglen on Tuesday 24 February 2009, 8pm �
 For more information phone 02 6032 8206 or book online at  http://summerread36.eventbrite.com
 The event includes a special viewing of interview footage from the SBS Tom  Wills  documentary to be screened in May 2009 to celebrate the 150th anniversary of first  rules written for Australian Football.

What Greg says about summer reading

‘My first Summer Read was Black Beauty. I was about 7. Dad was batting
in a cricket match; I sat on the boundary reading. A missed bumper saw
Dad unconscious and carried back to the pavilion. I walked over, book
held open, to see Dad as he was carried off. He recovered in the
pavilion; I returned to reading on the boundary line. Summer in
Melbourne.’

I’m writing to you from a ship near Torres Strait. My husband Geoffrey is the ship’s lecturer, and I’m his “accompanying person”. We are sailing through a sea scattered with tiny islands that look like poached eggs - the ring of sand is the egg white and the vegetation in the middle is the yoke. Some are just a speck, others are miles across. It’s a dream-like seascape - like something out of the happier parts of “Ancient Mariner”. I’ve sailed in the Mediterranean, but I’ve never seen anything as magical as this.

We have just visited Thursday Island, locally known as T. I. I love Thursday Island. So far it has resisted touristic progress. Back in the nineteenth century, its fishing trawlers went after beche de mer - those grim looking sea slugs that the Oriental gourmets prize as a delicacy and an aphrodisiac. Later the trawlers fished for pearls and mother of pearl shells; now it’s prawns and  crayfish. The coral shoals make fishing and sailing a hazardous exercise, particularly  at night. One of the worst disasters in Australian maritime history occurred  near T. I. in February 1890, when the mail steamer the “Quetta”, sailing in the dark, struck a coral reef. A hundred and thirty three people drowned. The tall wooden Anglican Cathedral in the centre of town is dedicated to those lost souls.

I’m especially interested in shipwrecks in Torres Strait because someone from long ago -  someone I’ve come to know well - was mortally injured on a coral reef off T. I. It happened on 27 December 1913. The Dutch mail ship the ‘Tasman” hit a reef  at eleven o’clock at night and it was New Year’s Day before anyone could be rescued. For much of that time the unfortunate passengers huddled on deck, exposed to the howling winds and pouring rain of a cyclone. Among those passengers was Lillan Nordica, one of the operatic superstars of the early twentieth century, on her way home from a concert tour of Australia. I came across her when I was writing my biography of the famous Melbourne soprano Nellie Melba. It’s usually said that those towering divas of the golden age of opera hated one another, but she and Melba were firm friends.  Though born on different continents - Nordica was American, Melba of course was Australian- - they had much in common. Both came from down-to-earth immigrant stock, both valued good sense and both spoke their mind.

Nordica was taken to the hospital at T.I.  There she lingered for months in the tropical heat. Exposure and pneumonia had weakened her heart. At the end of March she was placed on a ship for Jakarta, but she barely survived the voyage, dying in Jakarta early in May.  Melba was travelling in her personal train in the far west of America when she heard the news.  She was due to sing that night, but she wept so hard for Nordica that her manager thought he would have to cancel the concert. That her dear friend had died so close to Australia, seems to have made Melba’s sense of loss the worse.

I would love to receive your comments and perhaps questions.  However internet time on the ship is limited. I will be communicating with you again tomorrow, but please forgive me if I don’t reply to your questions and comments until the day after.

Ann Blainey is next Summer Read author blogging from  21 - 24 December.

Ann Blainey has written five biographies. She has served on the council of two Australian opera companies and the Percy Grainger Museum in Melbourne. Her previous book was Fanny and Adelaide: The Lives of the Remarkable Kemble Sisters, one sister was a famous opera singer and the other a famous actress.

Her book I am Melba is one of the books on the Summer Read shortlist.

I am Melba tells the story of Melbourne’s Dame Nellie Melba, Australia’s first international superstar. Melba performed to overflowing concert halls within a few short years of travelling to London and Paris, and became a singing phenomenon and was the subject of much controversy. This biography captures the glamour, energy and excitement of this legendary Melburnian export.

As part of the free Summer Read events across Victoria, Ann will be appearing at:

• Miller’s Homestead - historic house owned by The City of Knox at the of Cnr Dorrigo Road and Melrose Crt, Boronia on Friday 6 February 2009, from 7.00 pm
   A celtic harp will play in the beautiful garden prior to and following Anne Blainey’s talk.
   For further information phone Ferntree Gully Library 9294 8140 or book online at  http://summerread12.eventbrite.com

• Wangaratta Library, 21 Docker Street, Wangaratta on Wednesday 11 February 2009, 7.00 – 8.00 pm
   Students from the Northern Rivers Academy of Music, will accompany Ann Blainey on a  journey through the life and times of Dame Nellie Melba.
   Join in and evening of All Things Melba starting with Melba champagne on arrival.
   For further information phone Wangaratta Library 5721 2366 or book online at  http://summerread18.eventbrite.com

• Collingwood Library, 11 Stanton Street, Abbotsford on Sunday 15 February 2009, 3.00 – 4.30 pm
   A choral recital will precede Anne Blainey’s talk and Melba Champagne, Peach Melba  and Melba Toast will be served
   For further information phone Collingwood Library on 1300 695 427 or book online at  http://summerread13.eventbrite.com

What Ann says about summer reading

“My happiest memory of summer reading is lying in the hayloft of my grandparent’s farm poring over old copies of The Australian Women’s Mirror. I was ten years old; and though I did not know it then, I was embarking on my first historical research. The magazines dated from the mid nineteen thirties, and I was fascinated by the unfamiliar world that their pages revealed. Even today, when I recall those summer afternoons, I can smell warm hay – and see The Phantom comic strip, which appeared weekly in those Mirrors. My summer reading is still historical. Last summer I read Ouida’s Moths. I gain the greatest pleasure from nineteenth century fiction.”