 | | I create the same distractions for myselfvisits to friends, consultations with publishers, TV producers and so onas I create before embarking on a new novel or play. Some writers classify the delaying process as research, and get advances from publishers and grants from Arts Councils to do it but I (I like to think) know it for what it is, an uneasy mixture of terror, idleness and a paralysing reverence for the Muse which, descending, prevents the writer from putting pen to paper for an intolerable time; till something happensa change in the weather, an alteration to the pattern of dreamswhich makes it possible to begin.
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| | North Queensland lives by its wits and its physiqueit gives no credence to writers, especially women; what use imagination when a crocodile advances or the locusts get the sugarcane? You need a flame thrower and a helicopter, not a novel. Down in Canberra things are very different. It is a city of astonishing artifice and astonishing beauty. Once it was a barren plain, an indentation in the dusty desert: now it is striped by tree-lined avenuesthe trees imported by the hundred thousand from Europe, over the yearsin pretty, idiosyncratic suburbs where house prices define the status of the occupants, and when you change houses you change your friends, willy-nillyand dotted by swimming pools, and graced by tranquil man-made lakes. It is a place of final and ultimate compromise: it exists only because Sydney and Melbourne could not agree where the seat of Australia's government was to be, and so invented this place, somewhere in betweenbut rather nearer Sydney. It has handsome new buildings; a High Court where the courts are like theatres and judges and criminals play to an audience; the prettiest, leafiest, and most savagely, suicidally conspiratorial university in the world, the ANUand it has
readers
.
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| | I talked to them last night. I read to them. I read from
Puffball
or rather I read
all Puffball,
leaving out the bits difficult to précis. A potted novel: a Reader's Digest version. Once I was too horrified to open my mouth in publicmy heart raced and my voice came out in a pitiful mouse-squeakbut now I enjoy haranguing hundreds.
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| | It is practice, only practice, and learning to despise and put up with your own fear that works the transformationwhich I tell you, Alice, just in case you suffer yourself from that terror of public speaking which renders so many women dumb at times when they would do better to be noisy. And if you are in a Committee meeting or at a Board meeting or a protest meeting, speak first. It doesn't matter what you
say,
you will learn that soon enough, simply
speak
. As for the windows to be opened, or closed, or cigarette smokers to leave, or no-smoking notices to be taken downanything. The second thing, you say, later, will be sensible: your voice will have the proper pitch, and you will be listened to. And eventually, even, enjoy your captive audience.
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| | Here in Canberra, this fictitious place, this practical, physical, busy, restless monument to invention, they love books and they love writers. Different cities call out different audiences. In Melbourne the audience is middle-aged and serious; in Sydney middle-aged and frivolous; here in Canberra they are young, excitable, impressionable and love to laugh. They want to know: they ask questions. They nourish you, the writer, with their inquiries, and you fill them with answers; right or wrong, it hardly matters. It's always wonderful to find out that there is a view of the world, not just the world: a pattern to experience,
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