Peter Goldsworthy

‘Who do you think you are?’ an eminent paediatrician once thundered at me across a child’s cot during his weekly grand ward round. ‘Anton Chekhov?’

Peter Goldsworthy justly commands a seat at the big table of the Australian hall of literary achievement. This was underlined on Australia Day with his gonging as a Member of the Order of Australia for service as an author and poet. It is a prize that should glitter comfortably on the mantelpiece alongside the likes of his South Australian Premier’s Award, his Commonwealth Poetry Prize, his Bicentennial Literary Prize for Poetry, and his FAW Christina Stead Award for fiction.

For someone who has practised half-time as a writer and half-time as a GP for the past thirty-five years, his output is admirably prolific: eight novels, including one co-written with Brian Matthews, five collections of short stories, half a dozen poetry collections, two novels adapted as plays, two opera libretti, and a spot of essayistic Navel Gazing (1998). He has also done time on literature’s administrative front line, his committee stints including four and a half years as chairman of the Australia Council’s Literature Board. All of which mark him out as a littérateur of the first order.

Why do you write?

To find out what I know, to remember what I can, and to make sense of it all – but also to make nice patterns; to get less ignorant if not adequately wiser; and because, like all obsessives, I get morose if I don’t.

My son Daniel’s African wedding took place in Lancashire – where his new Zambian in-laws live – a few days after the US presidential election. Barack Obama was not on the guest list, but his presence loomed so large that he might have been an extra, virtual, best man.

In reviewing the first half of Simon Leys’s new book, The Wreck of the Batavia, I’m tempted to regurgitate my review from these pages (ABR, June–July 2002) of Mike Dash’s history of the Batavia shipwreck Batavia’s Graveyard (2002) – especially since Leys also holds that book in high regard, rendering all other histories, his own included ...

Susan Sontag has identified in contemporary fiction what she calls an ‘impatient, ardent and elliptical’ drive. These are features, above all, of the well-wrought story, and they are also adjectives that well describe its inherent paradox: the story is contained but somehow urgent, intensified but working in a system of concision, suggestive but employing referential exorbitance. Four pages might betoken an entire world.

Someone once described Clive James as ‘a great bunch of guys’, a joke worthy of James himself, although he is probably tired of hearing it. Some of those guys – the television comedian and commentator, the best-selling memoirist – are better known than others, and there’s little doubt that their fame has obscured the achievement of two of the quieter guys in the bunch.

It is difficult for non-Aboriginal novelists to deal adequately with Aboriginal experience in their work. There are many reasons for this, not the least of which is general ignorance about Aboriginal experience. But another, more insidious, reason is self-censorship. The politics of speaking in an Aboriginal voice, if you’re not Aboriginal, is at best fraught and at worst a nightmare. Thinking twice before embarking on such an ‘adventure’ is no bad thing, a counter-balance, perhaps, to the days when it was all too easy to usurp an indigenous point of view, days of racist triumphalism or paternalist do-goodism.

‘It’s the essence of Bollockshire / you’re after: its secrets, blessings and bounties.’ So Christopher Reid reads from his hilarious poem at the King’s Lynn Poetry Festival.

park and pay ...

assuming this isn’t the week

of the Billycock Fair, or Boiled Egg Day,

when they elect the Town Fool.

From here, it’s a short step

to the Bailiwick Hall Museum and Arts Centre.

As you enter, ignore the display

of tankards and manacles, the pickled head

of England’s Wisest Woman;

ask, instead, for the Bloke Stone.

Surprisingly small, round and featureless,

pumice-gray,

there it sits, dimly lit,

behind toughened glass, in a room of its own.

Peter Goldsworthy, doctor and poet, is a writer of significant style and concision. This new selection of his lyric poetry lives up to its jaunty, graffitied, lavender cover; it bespeaks lightness. And lightness is damned hard work. You don’t get there just by smiling and going to book launches ...