AustLit

'In A Body of Water (1990), Beverley Farmer chronicles her thoughts on how to reshape her work in favour of a more personal expression. Her early writing now feels foreign to her: ‘Assuming that I want to go on writing the conventional sort of fiction that I have been. Why do I assume that?’ By that stage, she had written three collections of short stories – Snake (1982), Milk (1983), and Home Time (1985) – none ‘conventional’ in any strict sense of the word – and a novella, Alone, which she completed in the late 1960s and was published in 1980.' (Introduction)

'In her essay On Beverley Farmer, Josephine Rowe recounts a 2013 visit to Melbourne’s Heide Museum of Modern Art to see an exhibition of Louise Bourgeois’s Late Works. Among the drawings and sculptures on display was The Waiting Hours, described by Rowe as ‘a series of twelve small oceanscapes’ each of which shifts fluidly, a ‘darkening whorl around the small white axis of a singular source of light shrunk to a pinhole … at once a pivot point and a vanishing point’. The effect on Rowe of this encounter was ‘one of powerful undercurrent. I felt not much and then, abruptly, disconsolate. Swept out of depth. A plunge, a plummet: the inrush towards that oceanic sense of recognition experienced most commonly in dreams, but sometimes spilling over into waking life – encounters in art and music, in nature or, more rarely, in meeting (as though hello, again).’' (Introduction)