Suzanne Falkiner
Rose: The extraordinary voyage of Rose de Freycinet, the stowaway who sailed around the world for love by Suzanne Falkiner
Outback Penguin: Richard Lane’s Barwell Diaries edited by Elizabeth Lane et al.
The port of Old Harwich can be approached by a streamlined highway through a barren industrial landscape, or via the high street through suburban Dovercourt. Either way, you keep going until you reach the sea: 'and if you get your feet wet, you've gone too far', they'll say when you ask directions. Finally, you reach an enclave of narrow streets lined by small cotta ...
Wilderness: The writer’s landscape, volume I by Suzanne Falkiner
This was an extraordinary task you set yourself. How did you decide to do it in the first place?
I was actually asked to do it. Lesley Mackay, who has a bookshop in Double Bay that I go to, was doing a bit of publishing and packaging, and it suddenly occurred to her that while there was a Writer’s France and a Writer’s Britain there hadn’t been a Writer’s Australia, so she came to me with the idea. She thought she could package the idea to a publisher and would I write it? I thought, what a wonderful idea and signed the contract, and then realised that what I was going to do was write an entire literary history of Australia, and every chapter could have been a book on its own, and probably should have been.
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