AustLit

'Too soon the glint of lightness screams through me, the city lights paler than they're supposed to be, the roads quagmires, as if every motor vehicle in the city mobilised in a pilgrimage to my location, the people rushing by turn wonky and wooden - as scarecrows, or good old straw - until I'm afraid of their smoky, wraith-like deadness, and as I stand on the road I move my tongue along my mouth, checking to see whether the Homer Simpson has dissolved yet. I didn't take it long ago : right after work I puled the alfoil out of the communal work fridge, counted twenty grinning Homers, then took a little taste-test in the locker room. But somethings not right. It's all coming on too soon.' (Introduction)

'On its website, the Reading Australian Literature series is advertised as offering a 'unique insight into an ongoing writerly dialogue with our literary heritage,' and so it was appropriate when first thinking about this topic I began with the idea of a conversation. the second thing that came to mind was a comment by Tegan Bennett Daylight in an essay on Helen Garner, in which she quotes Holden Caulfield, the narrator of The Catcher in the Rye. Holden says what really knocks him out 'is a book that ... you wish the author who wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could cal him up on the phone whenever you felt like it.' And Bennett Daylight herself says, 'Each time a writer writes that are making that phone call, to all the writers whose work they have read' (Bennett Daylight 25). (Introduction) 

'Let's go down the drain and look for her body' Stirlo says. 

'No Point' Says Marlo.

'It's been four weeks since Angela went missing, and they'll never ever find her alive. We've been up and down the stormwater drain every day after the school, and there's nothing. We've been through all the weeds with our sticks and up into the bush, walking in a line like the police. We found a condom, but that's it. Marlo pushed her stick into it and then she chased after me. She brought it home like that, on the end of her stick and said she was going to put in my bed.' (Introduction)

As a silent rule, historians do not mess with creative writers, but it a fact that works like Umberto Eco's best selling The Name of the Rose (1980) appeal to the essence and scope of narrating the past. Likewise, a host of modern and postmodern authors like Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Jose Saramago, Doris Lessing or Patrick White have opened new frontiers in historical fiction, submerging fact with invention, often disproving official historical evidence. The advent of anti-idealism in many fields of the humanities has also downsized history from indisputable, factual eyewitness to an elaborate, time-constrained, and often reticent account. Reliability and faithfulness have ceased to be the purpose of historical fiction and, to be true, what is at stake is not only the process of fictionalising history, but also the transmission of historical events as a distinct kind of narrative.' (Introduction)

I first encountered Max Frankl during a Masterclass at the University of Sydney. He was one of three visiting writers, the only one I hadn't heard of, and to be honest, I almost didn't attend his session. He was listed on the programme as a German literary critic and philologist, a scary prospect for any member of the likely audience, still worse for those of us who needed to google 'philologist'. Also, Max was scheduled for late in the day, a 7pm start, on a Tuesday, and I knew I'd have a train to catch - in those days, I always had a train to catch. But as it happened, for the middle session I was seated  next to Maxine Sayastri, an Indonesian student I recognised from the previous semester's previous poetry workshop. Maxine and I hadn't spoken much - she was in the English Literature stream, I was in Creative Writing - but I'd liked her poems; they were pithy, in the best sense of the word, and therefore departed favourably from much else that was presented, my own work included. (Introduction)

'Yarn Spinners was first published by the University of Queensland Press in 2001 with the much shorter subtitle of ' A Story of Letters'. Coming after over a decade of increased attention to the lives and work of Austrlai's earlier women writers, thanks to the impact of femenist literary history and criticism, it was perhaps less necessary then to spell out just what the story was about. In epilogue Marilla North noted some ofthe fruits of the revival of interest in cusack work. Her play Morning Sacrifice (1943) was about to be produced by the Sydney Theatre Company and there was to be a reprint of her novel Say No to Death (1951). During the 1988 Bicentenary there had been reprints of the novels she wrote with Miles Franklin, Pioneers on Parade (1939), and Florence James, Come in Spinner (1951). Many of the letters in Yarn Spinners relate to the writing and publication of these two jointly- authored works. Today, while some of Cusack's novels can be ordered from Allen and Unwin as print on demand titles, they are not readliy available in bookshops, and she has been largley forgotten again.' (Introduction)