AustLit

'Helen Garner talks with Peter Craven about uncertainty, truth, guilt, justice and facing the music

'There’s something preposterous about Helen Garner being 75. The woman who became famous for Monkey Grip — the novel (was it?) about being with a junkie — and who a decade or so later produced that elegant novella The Children’s Bach, which compelled the admir­ation of Raymond Carver, has for the longest time been writing riveting nonfiction focused in practice on courtroom dramas and controversies. They range from The First Stone, about the Ormond­ College affair, in which a master was accused­ of abusing the girls; then to Joe Cinque’s Consol­ation, about the degree of responsibility a young woman might bear for killing her boyfriend; and more recently This House of Grief, about Robert Farquharson, found guilty of deliberately drowning his three children in his car.' (Introduction)

'In her 1996 essay 'The Art of the Dumb Question', Helen Garner recalls bragging to friend Tim Winton that she had written a 200-word 'syntact­ically perfect sentence'. 'He scorched me with a surfer’s stare,' she writes, 'and said, ‘I couldn’t care less about that sort of shit’.' It’s an illuminating anecdote about the differ­ent approaches taken by two of our great writers.' (Introduction)

'Ten years ago, Bruce Beresford published a gem of a memoir titled Josh Hartnett Definitely Wants to Do This. Written in diary form, the book chronicled a year or two of Beresford’s life in the trenches of the modern film industry­. Ideally, of course, Beresford’s job is to direct movies. And his CV is thick with garlanded pictures­: Breaker Morant, Driving Miss Daisy, Mao’s Last Dancer. But, as his first book gorily demonstrated, even a filmmaker as successful as he is must spend an ungodly proportion of his time developing projects that go nowhere slowly­.' (Introduction)