The Time We Have Taken (26 page)

ON THE WEB:

www.pictureaustralia.org/index.html

National Library of Australia: Picture Australia archives. Search for pictures of the anti-Vietnam War movement and Australian suburban life in the 1960s and 1970s.

www.awm.gov.au/atwar/vietnam.asp

Australian War Memorial website detailing Australia’s military involvement in Vietnam.

www.abc.net.au/archives/timeline/ 1960s.htm

Year-by-year social, cultural and political milestones of the 1960s.

READ:

The novels of Marcel Proust

The philosophy of Martin Heidegger

My Brother Jack
, by George Johnston, a Miles Franklin Award-winner and an Australian classic. It was made into an ABC mini-series in 1965, adapted by George Johnston’s wife Charmian Clift. A later film version was released in 2001.

Seizures of Youth : The Sixties and Australia
by Robin Gerster and Jan Bassett, Hyland House, 1991

Australian Social Issues of the 70’s
edited by Paul R. Wilson, Butterworths, 1972

A Decade of Dissent : Vietnam and the Conflict on the Australian Homefront
by Greg Langley, Allen & Unwin, 1992

The Great Crash: The Short Life and Sudden Death of the Whitlam Government
by Michael Sexton, Scribe Press, 2005

The Past and Future of the Australian Suburb
by Graeme Davison, Australian National University, 1993

WATCH
:

Vietnam
, 1986

Kennedy Miller mini-series

The Dismissal
, 1983

Kennedy Miller mini-series about the dismissal of the Whitlam Labor government in November 1975

Or Forever Hold Your Peace
, 1970

A documentary compilation of events concerning the moratorium to stop the Vietnam War in 1970

VISIT
:

The Australian War Memorial

Treloar Crescent (top of ANZAC Parade)

Campbell ACT 2612

AUSTRALIA

Phone: (02) 6243 4211

www.awm.gov.au

LISTEN
:

www.whitlamdismissal.com/sounds/ Listen to the famous It’s Time campaign theme song and hear Gough Whitlam’s campaign speeches

Many thanks to the following for their help during the writing of this novel:

The Australia Council for a New Work Grant (Established Writers) in 2005.

Shona Martyn, Linda Funnell, Jo Butler and Denise O’Dea at HarperCollins, and my agent Sonia Land (and all the gang at Sheil Land) for their support and enthusiasm.

Finally, my special thanks to Fiona Capp for her constant help, suggestions and advice during the writing of the book. And to Leo — the lion-hearted boy.

Steven Carroll was born in Melbourne and grew up in Glenroy. He went to La Trobe University and taught English in high schools before playing in bands in the 1970s. After leaving the music scene he began writing as a playwright and became the theatre critic for the
Sunday Age
. After lecturing at RMIT, Steven now writes full time and lives in Brunswick, Victoria.

His novels
The Art of the Engine Driver
and
The Gift of Speed
were both shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award.
The Art of the Engine Driver
was also shortlisted for France’s Prix Femina. In 2008
The Time We Have Taken
won the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best Book, South-East Asia and South Pacific region, as well as the 2008 Miles Franklin Award, Australia’s most prestigious literary prize.

‘Carroll’s novel is a poised, philosophically profound exploration…a stand-alone work that is moving and indelible in its evocation of the extraordinary in ordinary lives.’

Miles Franklin Literary Award Judges, 2008

‘The result is a deeply satisfying encounter with the empty spaces that the suburb failed to fill both between people and inside them. The surface of Carroll’s writing is deceptively calm… Carroll takes time to tell an untidy story with a gentle sense of wonder. His prose whispers loud.’

Michael McGirr,
The Age

‘This is the Slow Food of fictional cuisine: settle in and savour.’

The Advertiser

‘The suburb has the force of a character. It is imbued with the melancholy of loss. This, perhaps, is the most original and the most disturbing element in Carroll’s interpretation of where and how most Australians live.’

Courier Mail

‘It is the creation of a larger concept of suburban life in all its astonishing transcendent possibilities that makes this novel so special. Carroll’s revelations of these beautiful insights into our utterly ordinary world make him a writer worth cherishing. His prose is unfailingly assured, lyrical, poised.’

Debra Adelaide,
The Australian

‘Each novel stands on its own, but they are more interesting considered together, making up as they do not only a history of the 20th century phenomenon the suburb, but also a slow-moving, Proustian meditation on being and time… The repetitive accretion of detail, like the brushstrokes of a pointillist, the echoes within the novel and from book to book, the use of tenses which base time in the present but refer constantly to past and future, contribute to the hypnotic effect of the whole.’

Katharine England,
The Advertiser

‘The reader is both immersed in and embraced by the place, the people and the time, and while the story is so obviously set in Australia, it has a breadth of vision that lends it something universal.’

Age
Book of the Year Judges, 2007

Remember Me, Jimmy James
Momoko

The Love Song of Lucy McBride

The Art of the Engine Driver

The Gift of Speed

Harper Perennial

An imprint of HarperCollins
Publishers

First published in Australia in 2007

This edition published in 2012

by HarperCollins
Publishers
Australia Pty Limited

ABN 36 009 913 517

www.harpercollins.com.au

Copyright © Steven Carroll 2007

The right of Steven Carroll to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him under the
Copyright Amendment (Moral Rights) Act 2000
.

This work is copyright. Apart from any use as permitted under the
Copyright Act 1968
, no part may be reproduced, copied, scanned, stored in a retrieval system, recorded, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

HarperCollins
Publishers

Level 13, 201 Elizabeth Street, Sydney NSW 2000, Australia

31 View Road, Glenfield, Auckland 10, New Zealand

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77–85 Fulham Palace Road, London, W6 8JB, United Kingdom

2 Bloor Street East, 20th floor, Toronto, Ontario M4W 1A8, Canada

10 East 53rd Street, New York NY 10022, USA

National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication data:

Carroll, Steven, 1949-

The time we have taken / Steven Carroll.

ISBN: 978 0 7322 7837 3 (pbk.)

ISBN: 978 1 7430 9970 4 (epub)

Glenroy novels

Suburban life — Australia — Fiction.

A823.4

Cover design by Matt Stanton