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Notes
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Conceived, devised, and produced by Richard Kelly Tipping, Writers Talking is a series of filmed documentary portraits that began in 1984 with funding assistance from the Literature Board of Australia. The impetus for the project was Tipping's low-budget documentary about/interview with Roland Robinson, produced with funding from the Australia Council. The Literature Board, including then director Thomas Shapcott, liked the results and made further funding available for Tipping to interview Les Murray. Later that year, he interviewed David Malouf in Tuscany while taking up a Literature Board studio in Italy and, during a stay in England in 1985, interviewed and filmed Peter Porter (London) and Randolph Stow (Harwick). He shortly afterwards travelled to the United States and undertook two more interviews, with Sumner Locke Elliott (New York) and Jack Lindsay (Cambridge, Massachusetts). However, a lack of interest (and support) from the ABC saw the project collapse shortly afterwards, and the final two films were not completed.
The five completed films (Robinson, Murray, Malouf, Porter, and Stow) were eventually published by Artwrite Pictures and distributed as a video package through AFI Distributions. The negative masters of the Porter, Stow, Elliott, and Lindsay interviews are held in the National Film and Sound Archive (NFSA) in Canberra. Film rushes from an interview with A. D. Hope (along with those of Robinson, Murray, and Malouf) are held by the Library of the Australian Defence Force Academy, as are off-cuts and additional materials not accepted in the collecting policy of the NFSA.
Includes
- form y Les Murray : The Vernacular Republic 1987 Z1573364 1987 single work film/TV interview Les Murray discusses his life and poetry. The film shows Murray at his home in Sydney, at a poetry reading at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, and at his father's farm at Bunyah, and includes the recitation of several poems. 1987
- form y Roland Robinson : The Land as Voice 1987 Z1573681 1987 single work film/TV interview Filmed at Bondi in Sydney's Eastern suburbs, this short film shows Richard Tipping interviewing Roland Robinson. Tipping investigates Robinson's strong attachment to the Australian landscape and deep interest in Aboriginal lore. Robinson also performs his poetry. 1987
- form y Peter Porter : What I Have Written Richard Tipping (interviewer), 1987 Z1573853 1987 single work film/TV interview From his book-crammed London flat, Peter Porter introduces a variety of his best-known poems and reveals his accessible and humane intelligence. 1987
- form y David Malouf : An Imaginary Life 1987 Z828566 1987 single work film/TV interview Poet and novelist David Malouf was interviewed on film in Tuscany, Italy, during the coldest winter in fifty years and in Sydney during a steamy summer. 'To write,' he says, 'you must turn your back on even the most beautiful landscape.' 1987
- form y Randolph Stow : A Country of Islands 1988 Z1573343 1988 single work film/TV interview Filmed between September 1985 and January 1986 on locations in Suffolk and East Anglia, near where Randoph Stow was then living, the film shows Stow talking about his life and reading from some of his poetic and prose works. 1988