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.

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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 Jeff for your thoughts on research, writing and the Iceberg Theory. Hope your computer is working soon Jill.

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

Walking Tour departing from City Library, 253 Flinders Lane Melbourne and finishing at The State Library of Victoria, 328 Swanston Street Melbourne on Wednesday 28 January 2009, 6.00 – 7.30 pm
For more information phone 9658 9500 – EVENT BOOKED OUT

Vote for Radical Melbourne or SMS RADICAL to 13 46 88

Jeff and Jill Sparrow are the next Summer Read authors blogging from 21 – 25 January.

Brother and sister Jeff and Jill Sparrow live in Melbourne. They co-authored the books Radical Melbourne: A Secret History and Radical Melbourne 2: The Enemy Within. Jeff’s book Communism: A Love Story was shortlisted for the Colin Roderick Award in 2007. He is the editor of the literary journal Overland. Jill is co-author (with Paul Voermans) of the forthcoming novel Parliament of Sims.

Their book Radical Melbourne is one of the books on the Summer Read shortlist.

Radical Melbourne leads readers through political history via the streets and buildings of today’s inner city – turning familiar city landmarks into monuments to passionate political struggles past. Have you ever wondered why Parliament House contain gun slits, an escape passage and a dungeon? or what city block covers nine thousand corpses?

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

Walking Tour departing from City Library, 253 Flinders Lane Melbourne and finishing at The State Library of Victoria, 328 Swanston Street Melbourne on Wednesday 28 January 2009, 6.00 – 7.30 pm
For more information phone 9658 9500 – EVENT BOOKED OUT

What Jeff says about summer reading

“In the the summer, I read P. G. Wodehouse. The real world might be going to hell in a handbasket but in Wodehouse stolen cow creamers eternally return, the word ‘Eulalie’ keeps the Black Shorts of amateur dictator Sir Roderick Spode at bay, and Jeeves noiselessly appears with restoratives whenever young gentlemen feel rocky after a night at the Drones Club.”

What Jill says about summer reading

“Summer’s a good time to lie in the backyard with a radical book, enjoying (at least for a few hours!) the illusion that doing nothing will help change the world…”

Charmaine O’Brien is next Summer Read author blogging from 11 – 15 January.

A trained chef, Charmaine has worked around the world in a variety of jobs, including establishing a wholefoods café, managing a food and wine education program, and feeding firefighters. She runs the culinary communication and education business Love Food Write.

Her book Flavours of Melbourne is one of the books on the Summer Read shortlist.

Flavours of Melbourne charts the culinary history of Australia’s food capital, from before Europeans arrived, to the influence of postwar immigration and now. We are introduced to many curious characters from Melbourne’s food scene and their insights, and the journey is dotted with recipes from different periods in our city’s colourful history.

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

• Walking Tour with optional dinner commencing at the State Library of Victoria, 328 Swanston Street Melbourne on Tuesday 10 February 6.00 – 7.30 pm (optional dinner at 7.30pm $45 – payment required on booking) For more information and bookings phone 8664 7522 or email smclaine@slv.vic.gov.au

What Charmaine says about summer reading

“I can’t imagine what life would be like without reading and I don’t necessarily distinguish summer reading from any other type. What I read over summer may be determined by what I receive for Christmas (or what others around me receive). If I am going to indulge in a spot of ‘escapism’ it will be with some crime fiction: last summer I read Wilkie Collins ‘sensation’ novel The Woman in White (closely followed by several more of his books) and PD James The Lighthouse.

My most vivid recent memory of summer reading comes from the Northern Hemisphere though. I was in India last June, the peak of the summer there. The thermometer was reaching 45◦c most days: what else was there to do but laze around in the sheltered courtyard of the fort we were staying in and read. I got through Fast Food Nation and then gave up any pretension of brain function and read an entirely forgettable forensic thriller left behind by another tourist. What I would recommend you read if you found yourself in a similar situation is William Dalrymple’s wonderful White Mughal.”