AustLit

'On my job application to the ABC in 1983 I mentioned that I was a poet, even though the job advertised was for a purely technical position as a trainee sound engineer. Positions for technicians were all that were on offer at that time in Adelaide. Landing a job as a sound engineer was a way into the monolith.' (Introduction)

'I first met Gillian in 2004 on a sparkling November day. She was staying at a cabin at the Brown Hill Creek Caravan Park in the Adelaide foothills. I’d suggested the location because I knew she’d prefer it to a city hotel room. In the caravan park she would have birds, a creek, fresh air, and rates an artistic writer could afford. Gillian had come over to plan her move to South Australia to write her novel Foal’s Bread. There were several reasons behind the move: she wanted the peace and obscurity of the Adelaide hills and she found the cool winters and dry summers less aggravating to her multiple sclerosis than the steamy warmth of her native Grafton. There was also a guru she was attracted to here – someone who promised an alternative way to treat her disease, or even cure it. With Gillian, there was often a guru in the picture somewhere.'  (Introduction)

'Stella Bowen’s self-portrait in the Art Gallery of South Australia has long haunted me. Something in the intensity of her stare always makes me seek it out. Bowen grew up in middle class comfort in North Adelaide before the First World War. She sailed for England in 1914 and never came back. Studying painting and meeting the novelist Ford Madox Ford, she lived with him in poverty in England and France. They had a daughter and settled in Paris where Bowen found herself in the epicentre of modernism; Ezra Pound, James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, Pablo Picasso, T.S. Eliot ate at her table.' (Introduction)