Australian Writers Group

Helen Garner

In June, the interest group met to discuss the award winning Australian author Helen Garner.

She was born in Geelong, Victoria in 1942 and is a novelist, short-story writer, screenwriter and journalist. Her biographical details, list of books and awards can be found at:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helen_Garner

She was one of the first of the Australian authors who did not seek to describe and explain Australia as a distinct new country to the rest of the world as had authors before her:

“I understand Australia. I fit in here. My work has never, until recently, gone outside Australia. My publishers used to mind that a lot more than I did. I felt I was writing for people here. I never wanted to write about Australia as a spectacle for people elsewhere. I think a lot of writers here wrote about Australia as if it were a phenomenon. I never felt the urge or ability to do that.” (Wikipedia webpage)

The books that the group collectively read were:

The Monkey Grip (1977)
Joe Cinque’s Consolation (2004)
House of Grief (2014)
Regions of Thick Ribbed Ice (2015)
Stories (2017)
The Spare Room (2008)
Everywhere I Look (2015)
Cosmos Cosmolino (1992)

The discussion of these books included the amount of autobiographical that Helen includes in both her fiction and non-fiction work and the ethics of including details of her own family in her work. The feelings that her writing evokes in her readers was discussed often, especially the grim and gritty details of living.