Past Programs
Books - Autobiography - 2006
Alex Miller: Truth in Fiction and History Read Transcript
30/11/2006
Today on The Book Show we're going to hear an edited version of a lecture called Written In Our Hearts: Thinking About Truth in Fiction and History, by writer Alex Miller. He was speaking at a Victorian Writers' Centre lecture at the State Library of Victoria earlier this week.
Alex Miller was born in London in 1936, his father was from Glasgow and his Mother was Irish and he emigrated alone to Australia at the age of 16. After working as an itinerant stockman on cattle stations in Central Queensland and the Gulf Country - evidence that, for a writer, everything is research, even if you don't know you're doing it at the time.
After travelling around for a while, he graduated from the University of Melbourne in English and History in 1965. He was co-founder of the Anthill Theatre and a founding member of the Melbourne Writers' Theatre. So he has had a life with a capital 'L', and had many chances to listen to stories beyond the confines of the writer's study. He's won the Miles Franklin Award twice: with his 1993 novel The Ancestor Game and then again in 2003 for his novel Journey To The Stone Country, and he was short-listed in two other years. So by any measure Alex Miller is one of Australia's outstanding novelists.
First we'll hear an edited version of his lecture Written In Our Hearts: Thinking About Truth in Fiction and History. When I spoke to Alex after the lecture, I said I was struck by that image of his great-grandfather's thumbprint on his grandfather's birth certificate, and I asked him if the knowledge that he came from people who were not readers and whose history wasn't written, was at the forefront of his mind when he was studying history?
Alice Pung's Unpolished Gem
12/09/2006
Alice Pung's memoir, Unpolished Gem, tells the story of an East Asian family making a go of it in Australia after Cambodia's Pol Pot years.
Conceived in a Thai refugee camp to Chinese-Cambodian parents, Alice Pung was born just after her parents and her paternal grandmother arrived in Melbourne in the 1970s. Set in the streets of Footscray, hers is a story of a migrant child coming to grips with two cultures.
Tony Birch: Shadowboxing (transcript available)
12/03/2006
Tony Birch was last in this studio when we spoke last year on Books and Writing about teaching creative writing. That's what he does as a day job at the University of Melbourne. He is a poet and a writer of short fiction and creative non-fiction. He is here today on the publication of a collection of stories called Shadowboxing.
Tony Birch: Shadowboxing
07/03/2006
Tony Birch was last in this studio when we spoke last year on Books and Writing about teaching creative writing. That's what he does as a day job at the University of Melbourne. He is a poet and a writer of short fiction and creative non-fiction. He is here today on the publication of a collection of stories called Shadowboxing.
Shadowboxing is an autobiographical walk through the life of young Michael and his family – a family of battlers living in the mean streets of Fitzroy in the Melbourne of the 1960s. These are stories told simply, but with great power. There is the drink and the beltings given to wives and children and the slow crumbling of the suburb as the old houses give way to bulldozers and the commission flats. But there is also the wonder of childhood and the first blossomings of boyhood and the kind of redemption possible with the coming of manhood and understanding.
