BOOKPATHS

Melbourne, Australia

Tony Wheeler offers a look at literary Melbourne, “the second city to be named ‘City of Literature’ by UNESCO."

Melbourne has booksellers as well as publishers, authors and libraries. John Pascoe Fawkner, one of the pioneering settlers, opened the city's first hotel, published its first newspaper and was probably its first bookseller, since he sold books from his hotel room. His statue crouches – he appears to be mapping out Melbourne with a stick – on Collins Street near Queen Street. – from “The Melbourne Identity: the Former Hub of Australia’s Gold Rush is Now a City of Literature,” by Tony Wheeler, The Independent

United States; Australia

Charles McGrath talks with Peter Carey, whose new book, Parrot and Olivier in America, was released last week.

Mr. Carey’s new book is his first to be set in America. 'Parrot and Olivier' takes place in 1830 and is an “improvisation,” as Mr. Carey calls it, on the history of Alexis de Tocqueville, who appears here as the asthmatic, myopic, nosebleed-prone Olivier-Jean-Baptiste de Clarel de Barfleur de Garmont. – from “Peter Carey: at Home in Australia, New York and Writing,” by Charles McGrath, The New York Times

Australia

David Vann visits the Australian outback, where Aborigines have “walked for 40,000 years.”

Imagine a beginning, when man and woman first named the world. A 'Songline' or 'Dreaming Track' in the Australian outback can still be walked, perhaps by the Arrernte or Pintupi or other Aboriginal peoples, and for them, it is nothing less than creation, the world sung into existence by naming all plants and animals and the landscape itself. Reaching back at least 40,000 years, a singer can find his or her way along the ancient path of one of the 'Ancestors' retracing a Lizard Dreaming, or a Kangaroo Dreaming, or a Rain-Maker Dreaming, refreshing existence and ‘singing up the land’. – from “The Aborigines Who’ve Walked for 40,000 Years,” by David Vann, The Guardian

Australia

The Guardian invites you to read Thomas Keneally’s foreword for The Literature of Australia: an Anthology.

So within this book one encounters a literary community unexpectedly diverse, one influenced internally by the nature of the continent, and externally by the reality of its position on the globe: an English-language literature arising as far as you could get from European wellsprings of language and sensibility, and at the terminus of Asia to the north, and with the breath of Antarctica on it from the south.  It was always a place designed to produce a voice like no other. – from “Foreword,” The Literature of Australia: an Anthology, by Thomas Keneally

Writers Walk on Circular Quay, Sydney, Australia

Writers Walk consists of the names of 50 authors and quotes on bronze plaques “embedded along the walkway from the Sydney Opera House on the eastern side of Circular Quay to the Museum of  Contemporary Art on the western side of Circular Quay.”   Those honored include “distinguished writers from Australia,” including Nevil Shute, Patrick White, Christina Stead, and Miles Franklin, “and oversees,” including Mark Twain, Jack London, and Rudyard Kipling, “who in some way identified with Sydney or New South Wales.”

Writers Walk is free, open, and accessible at all times.

Australia

Alison Flood talks with Steve Toltz, whose Booker Prize contender, A Fraction of the Whole, “takes a close look at his native Australia.”

“Chair of the Booker judges Michael Portillo described it as a ‘very Australian book, wonderfully irreverent’, and Toltz will admit that it is concerned with two very Australian preoccupations – sport and criminals. ‘Look, a lot of these things are things I just noticed about Australia and nobody seemed to be really talking about them. You know when you see something on television and look around the room and think 'is nobody else hearing this?' So a lot of it is about Australia, about their obsession with sport, obsession with criminals - I just thought I'd fuse the two together.’ Hence the character Terry Dean, who wins national treasure status for a killing spree attempting to stamp out corruption in sport.” – from “World Travel with Steve Toltz,” by Alison Flood, The Guardian

Melbourne, Australia

Boyd Tonkin talks with Michelle de Kretser, whose new novel, The Last Dog, “brings the troubled past of trendy Melbourne to life.”

Leave-taking, loss and the fragile gifts of memory propel de Kretser's third novel. In The Lost Dog (Chatto & Windus, £15.99), the Anglo-Indian academic Tom Loxley – who himself left Asia for Australia at 14, and now writes on Henry James – spends eight days searching for a beloved mongrel who goes missing in the bush. Day by anxious day, we learn of his insecure childhood in the 'aromatic streets' of south India; of his delphic, seductive artist friend Nelly Zhang, the queen of a bohemian tribe; and of the unburied secrets that return to 'ghost' his life and hers. Behind their troubled affections lies the 'ghost story' of Australia itself, 'this country with a haunted past, which we don't want to think about too much. Yet it comes and visits us when we're least expecting it.' – from "Michelle de Kretser: the Urban Jungle," by Boyd Tonkin, The Independent

Australia

Tracks: a Woman’s Solo Trek Across 1700 Miles of Australian Outback, by Robyn Davidson (New York: Vintage, 1995; first published 1980)

Having “never changed a light-bulb, sewn a dress, mended a sock, changed a tyre, or used a screwdriver,” Robyn Davidson embarks on her journey, recalled in Tracks. Leaving Alice Springs with four camels and a  dog, Davidson confronts physical and emotional challenges on her 1700-mile walk across the Australian desert.

I arrived in the Alice at five a.m. with a dog, six dollars and a small suitcase full of inappropriate clothes. 'Bring a cardigan for the evenings,' the brochure said. A freezing wind whipped grit down the platform and I stood shivering, holding warm dog flesh, and wondering what foolishness had brought me to this eerie, empty train-station in the centre of nowhere. I turned against the wind, and saw the line of mountains at the edge of town.

There are some moments in life that are like pivots around which your existence turns-small intuitive flashes, when you know you have done something correct for a change, when you think you are on the right track. I watched a pale dawn streak the cliffs with Day-glo and realized this was one of them. It was a moment of pure, uncomplicated confidence-and lasted about ten seconds.

Diggity wriggled out of my arms and looked at me, head cocked, piglet ears flying. I experienced that sinking feeling you get when you know you have conned yourself into doing something difficult and there's no going back. It's all very well, to set off on a train with no money telling yourself that you're really quite a brave and adventurous person, and you'll deal capably with things as they happen, but when you actually arrive at the other end with no one to meet and nowhere to go and nothing to sustain you but a lunatic idea that even you have no real faith in, it suddenly appears much more attractive to be at home on the kindly Queensland coast, discussing plans and sipping gins on the verandah with friends, and making unending lists of lists which get thrown away, and reading books about camels.

The lunatic idea was, basically, to get myself the requisite number of wild camels from the bush and train them to carry my gear, then walk into and about the central desert area…. – from Tracks, by Robyn Davidson

Publisher’s Website

Australia

Stephen Moss talks with “award-winning aboriginal writer” Alexis Wright.

“Wright seeks no plaudits for what she has achieved. 'I've never seen myself as a spokesperson,' she says. ‘I've always seen myself as a worker, and am very grateful for the trust that my own people have given me over the years.’ But her personal history suggests that her battle to get an education, a political role and now a place at publishing's top table must have been a prodigious one. ‘As an indigenous author, I have to work terribly hard to get my work done and understood,’ she says. ‘We meet white resistance all the way. I work hard and use the resources that are available to me. I come from a hunter-gatherer society.’" – from “Dream Warrior,” by Stephen Moss, The Guardian

Australia

Kathy Marks visits with Thomas Keneally at his home “on a hillside overlooking Bilgola Beach” near Sydney.

“Keneally considers himself a poor specimen of an Australian male, but he is nevertheless engrossed by the "heroic impulse" which he believes is a driving force for most men. Heroism, and women's bewilderment in the face of it, are the subject of his latest novel, The Widow and her Hero.” -- from “Thomas Keneally: Lust for Life and Death,” by Kathy Marks, The Independent