Death of a Poet
A dirt road rises and falls alongside orchards, dams and sheep in the hilly farmland where locals wave to strangers in passing cars. This is Gruyere, a small farming community near Lilydale, where almost two decades ago a muffled shot one night punctuated the quiet, rustic setting. Read …
Slipping into overdrive
ON HIS first visit to Australia, Irish poet Seamus Heaney drove through the cane fields of Queensland in search of family ties. His father’s twin brother had migrated here in the late 1920s and worked on a farm outside Nambour. Heaney found no kin. Read…
Painting a picture of change
A YOUNG woman pauses at the table outside a small restaurant in Cape Town, South Africa, to ask a man hunched over coffee if he is “Meneer Breytenbach”. He assures her he is not. She is not fooled. Read …
Of mice and men
WAY up in a highrise city hotel room, the man in hastily donned yellow shirt smiles a weary welcome. Miroslav Holub has endured a 20-hour- flight from Prague. “Therefore I have eyes like an albino rabbit. Read …
Matron of the arts
JUDITH RODRIGUEZ edges awkwardly down the footpath, supported by a briar cane and buoyed by self-deprecating humor. Arthritis has afflicted her so severely she has found herself “hanging against walls”. “I’m going to get a new knee”, she explains over black coffee beneath the awnings of a favorite haunt in High Street, Armadale, “possibly in a few weeks”. Read …
Answering the call
IT MAY be a few words, a rhythm or what he describes as “almost sometimes a perfume”. When Kevin Hart receives signals such as these, he knows a poem is imminent and retreats to the silence of his high- ceilinged study. Read …
The story teller
Ryszard Kapuscinski has witnessed at least 27 revolutions and coups in 50 countries in Africa and Latin America. The Polish journalist and author says that he is more comfortable when he is incognito … “in places where there is no press, no electricity, no television, no radio even”. Read …
Once upon a time in Melbourne
AS if on cue, it rained the day Frank Hardy returned to the site of the old totalisator he has helped make a landmark in local lore. Elsewhere, writer and place are linked in the popular imagination. We think of Dickens’ London, Zola’s Paris, Joyce’s Dublin, Chandler’s Los Angeles. We went in search of Melbourne in Hardy and other writers. Read …
Frankly Barry
Masks removed, Barry Humphries talks to Larry Schwartz about his mother, alcoholism, the cringe and why he wrote that book. Read …
Rhymes and reasons
”Your chance to be pilloried,” Peter Porter teased someone in the class. The London-based Australian poet had chosen 11 local poets for an eight-hour coaching session. They had been given each other’s work in advance. Each had an opportunity to read a few poems before discussion. Read …
The bookshop that sold them all
“WISE men fish here,” says the sign above New York’s famous Gotham Book Mart, at 41 West 47th Street, Manhattan. Read …
Making mischief with Elizabeth Jolley
A KINDLY real estate agent once took pity on a young couple, realising they were ignorant of the flaws in a ramshackle house they seemed intent on buying. Read …
Down by the river
TWO poets were chatting in a cafe in Glebe last May – Robert Adamson warning his friend Martin Johnston that he was drinking himself to death. Johnston, the son of celebrated Australian literary figures George Johnston and Charmian Clift, replied that Adamson, of all people, should surely understand the reason. Read …
Not drowning this time – waving
In returning the wave in the title of a book that is his most experimental, Robert Adamson is ironically directing attention beyond contemporary whimsy, back to solid literary tradition and forebears such as Louis Zukovsky and Robert Duncan and, of course, Crane. Read …
Ern Malley’ speaks out
ALMOST 50 years after hoax works were written by the fictional poet “Ern Malley”, Australia’s greatest literary controversy has taken a new turn. Read …
Bye the beloved country
WHEN Eben Venter revisited the South African farming community where he grew up for the funeral of a relative, he was surprised at the response to his first novel. Read …
The verse is with him
IT was to be “Tuesday nights forever”. So Kris Hemensley thought when asked to co-ordinate poetry readings at the La Mama theatre, in Carlton, in the late ’60s. Read …
Shooting from the hip
Is Richard Neville, the author of a new book about life during the 1960s, forever doomed to live his life in the past? Read …
The heart of the matter
AFTER years of writing books that dealt with the pressing issues facing his troubled country, Avraham (A. B.) Yehoshua decided it was time to take a break. Read …
Irish Heartbeat
BEFORE settling here almost a decade ago, Louis de Paor thought he understood quite a bit about faraway Australia. Looking back, it occurs to him, he knew “nothing, absolutely nothing; everything I thought I knew was wrong”. Read …
Searching for the future in one man’s past
Abraham Biderman failed to find a publisher, so he funded his own book. Then he won a Banjo. Read …
Larry Schwartz Writer 