History

Aha!

Personal epiphanies from the 1960s

by Kerryn Goldsworthy •

July 2021, no. 433

Radicals: Remembering the Sixties by Meredith Burgmann and Nadia Wheatley

NewSouth, $39.99 pb, 414 pp

History

Aha!

Personal epiphanies from the 1960s

by Kerryn Goldsworthy •

July 2021, no. 433

Studying at the University of Sydney in the late 1960s, Meredith Burgmann and Nadia Wheatley were both living in Women’s College. Burgmann recalls:

Very late one night when I was sitting in my room, struggling with John Donne … I heard a clump clump clump coming along the corridor. Opening my door, I discovered Nadia – wearing a red flannel nightie and gumboots – on her nightly mission to salvage the last of the toast from the kitchenette … our friendship was forged over our protest activity and ensuing arrests.

Kerryn Goldsworthy

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Kerryn Goldsworthy won the 2013 Pascall Prize for cultural criticism, and the 2017 Horne Prize for her essay ‘The Limit of the World’. A former Editor of ABR (1986–87), she is one of Australia’s most prolific and respected literary critics. Her publications include several anthologies, a critical study of Helen Garner, and her book Adelaide, which was shortlisted for a Victorian Premier’s Literary Award. In November 2012 she was named as the inaugural ABR Ian Potter Foundation Fellow. Her Fellowship article on reviewing, ‘Everyone’s a Critic’, appeared in the May 2013 issue of ABR.