text&thecity

Youve read books set in New York, London and Paris, but what about Footscray, Brighton and Box Hill? To celebrate this months writers festival, we meet five Melbourne authors whose writing has made our city come alive.

Tony Wilson
Author of books including Players and the upcoming childrens story The Minister for Traffic Lights Tony Wilson grew up in the shadows of the Holeproof factory on the notorious mean streets of Balwyn. At least thats how he painted it when he applied for the 1998 ABC documentary series Race Around the World. He figured the national broadcaster would be after battlers and the judges would be Sydney-based so he juggled the facts to play down his privileged upbringing in a house 100 metres from his alma mater, Camberwell Grammar. Theres one factory, I reckon, in Balwyn, which is the Holeproof factory, he says, so I kind of left out all the mod-grass tennis courts between me and school. Wilson won the frenetic globe-trotting competition and has since turned into something of a media renaissance man, branching out into radio, television and writing, from sporting memoirs to childrens books. After his big break, an agent pushed him to move to Sydney to further his TV career but Wilson wouldnt budge. Its very much my city, the 34-year-old former solicitor and Hawthorn reserves player says of Melbourne, where he has lived all his life except for the three-month Race and one semester of his law degree at a Montreal university in 1994. In 2005, Wilson combined his knowledge of football, media and Melbourne to write his first novel, Players, a Nick Hornby-style romp about a Botoxed footballer-turned-TV personality who fakes having cancer to redeem his popularity after headbutting a homeless man. Besides the Sam Newman facsimile, theres a thinly veiled Eddie McGuire in there as well. Gary Lyon apparently enjoyed the book but Wilson doesnt know whether McGuire has read it. Ive been told by Trevor Marmalade that Sam wouldnt have read it because he doesnt generally read, says Wilson. In Players, Wilson had media and celebrity in his comedic crosshairs and he revisits those subjects in his second novel, due out next year. This book, however, is about a famous couple in a tabloid scandal, and its set in London. It has to be, he says, because Melbourne doesnt have a true tabloid; the tricky part is that Wilson has only spent five days of his life in London which is why he has planned a research mission to that city. Wilson says Players was inspired by Frank Hardys courageous and controversial 1950 novel Power Without Glory, which skewered the establishment and gave a vivid snapshot of Melbourne in the first half of the 20th century. You really get a sense of those old factories and the gangsters running through the alleys and fights in the street and six oclock closing, says Wilson. And were near Smith Street, the very heart of that book. Just metres away from that grungy thoroughfare, overlooking Fitzroys Union Club Hotel, Wilson sits in the messy, light-filled studio space he rents from a friend. Theres a mattress covered with dog hair where his blue heeler-kelpie cross Charley sleeps and hundreds of books on his shelves: novels by Ben Elton and John Irving next to travel guides and sporting books. He comes here after his breakfast radio shift on Triple R and works until 6pm. If he stayed at home with his wife, Tamsin, and six-month-old daughter, Polly, he says, he wouldnt get anything done. Besides, the 40-minute walk from his North Fitzroy home to the office is his most creative time, when he works out where the days writing will take him. Silent time in the car isnt bad, either; Wilson was driving along Punt Road when he came up with the idea for The Minister for Traffic Lights, his upcoming childrens book about a politician who invents an extra, road-rage-curing mauve traffic light that requires people to get out of their cars and hug their fellow motorists. A twice-daily walk with his dog takes him through Fitzroys Edinburgh Gardens, which tops his list of favourite Melbourne places. It really does have a feel of the community coming together, says Wilson, who has just bought a house in Northcote. Theres picnic blankets and people boozing and fire twirlers and skateboarders and cyclists and underage football. Its the parks and trams that Wilson misses most when hes overseas: Theres just a really nice sound to the city, he says, because of trams.

The giant screen was set into the shiny wall of a three-storey bar located at the Swanston Street end of the Square. The looping images that Billy had been vaguely aware of proved to be a Things-to-Do photo compilation for the City of Melbourne. He tuned in on a fairy-lit still of a cruise down the unglamorously brown Yarra River (it was not made clear that passengers over six feet have to cruise stooped over for two hours, because clearances on the bridges were engineered by the smaller folk of another era). Next up was a nocturnal view of the Arts Centre, with its colourfully lit spire that sort of resembles the Eiffel Tower in the same way that Mimi McPherson sort of resembles Elle. And coming in at number three, the floral clock, the fragrant working timepiece set in the lawns that ring the Botanic Gardens definitive proof perhaps that as far as blockbuster tourist attractions go, Melbourne Victoria isnt exactly New York New York. Players

You really get a sense of those old factories and the gangsters running through the alleys and fights in the street and six oclock closing.

Words Susan Horsburgh Photography Rodger Cummins

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Alice Pung
Author of the memoir Unpolished Gem Alice Pung knew the kind of book she didnt want to write. Shed read her share of Chinese migrant literature and was sick of the miserable Wild Swans-type stories starring a stoic woman who faces struggle after struggle, only to find long-overdue redemption at the end. Why cant you write a book about failure and despair and death where you try and make it funny? wonders the 26-year-old lawyer. I didnt go through adversity. The only thing I conquered was head lice and scabies. Australian-born Pung set out to tell her own irreverent tale of migrant life in Melbournes western suburbs, tracing the adventures of her Chinese-Cambodian clan in a marvellous new land of escalators, flashing walk signs and social security payments. Heaven, her family discovers, is a place called Footscray. Pungs 2006 memoir, Unpolished Gem, opens with the author still in utero, her father standing in pigs blood and attempting to buy trotters at Footscray Market, the only market where you can peel and eat a whole mandarin before deciding whether to buy a kilo; where you can poke and prod holes in a mango to check its sweetness. Pungs father, a survivor of Cambodias killing fields, has owned an electrical appliance store in Footscray for more than 20 years and his daughter conjures up the area as only a native can. In this suburb, she writes, grandmas with faces as blunt and brown as earthed potatoes hobble along in their padded jackets while dodgy neighbourhood boys smash empty glass bottles on the road for fun and terrorise the local senior citizens. When Pung left her familys Avondale Heights home four years ago, she crossed a cultural chasm, moving in to Parkville as a tutor at one of the University of Melbourne colleges. In her new neighbourhood, coffee drinking seemed to be a full-time occupation. My parents would never go to cafes and order a cup of coffee, mainly because for $3 you can buy Nescafe in a supermarket and make 10 million cups, says Pung, who notes that an entire family could be fed in Footscray for the price of three coffees. Its not just the concept of buying coffee; the act of sitting down and whiling away three or four hours chatting to people is something that my parents would never do. Pungs western suburbs upbringing, however, earned her instant street cred when she left high school to study law at Melbourne Uni. Armed with a steady supply of dinner-party stories about her quirky migrant childhood, Pung felt like a permanent exchange student among her worldlier uni friends. It was cool (for them) to associate with someone who was from that side of the tracks but they dont understand its not a lifestyle choice: you werent born in the western suburbs as a kind of hip, bohemian thing, she recalls, laughing. They were quite proud that they were living as poor university students and sometimes I thought, Well if youd ever really been poor in your life you wouldnt have this sense of self-righteous pride in it; youd be so ashamed of it! After seeing her upbringing through the fascinated eyes of her friends, she started writing short stories about her childhood and, when she was 22, had a piece published in the journal Meanjin that caught the eye of an editor from publisher Black Inc. Pung, who has kept a diary every day since she was 12, started writing the book as fiction but then the more I wrote it the more I couldnt make stuff up, she says. Armed with such anecdotes as her first perm at the age of eight, she hardly needed to. It was a chemical attempt to cure her persistent nits and she came out looking like a Chinese Ronald McDonald. She also tells of her newly arrived mother unwittingly whipping up a stir-fry with a can of dog food and her familys penchant for garish home decor, including paper chains fashioned from Target brochures. She freely admits her observations would be considered racist if they came from a writer outside her community. Its all in the tone: Ive always had to be careful because as an ethnic minority the worst thing you can do is make people laugh at you and not with you, says Pung, who took three-and-ahalf years to write the book while working full-time. Its not like Borat or anything. Meeting during her lunch hour at the Office of the Employment Advocate, Pung looks every inch the prim, dutiful Asian daughter she plays in Unpolished Gem, her 150-centimetre frame dressed in a demure polka-dot below-the-knee dress and sensible flats. Pung returns to Footscray every week to help her dad out with his business, and its still the suburb where she feels most at home. Thats where I grew up, she says, and thats where Im least self-conscious because a lot of people look like me. The bookstore at the base of the Collins Street building where Pung works has only one copy of Unpolished Gem in stock and an assistant says the book flies off the shelf as soon as they restock. No one is more astounded than Pungs dad. Hes proud of his daughter, says Pung, but that doesnt mean he understands her success: He said, I just cant believe that people want to read a book about Chinese people who live in Footscray. Whod want to read about that?

This is the suburb of madcap Franco Cozzo and his polished furniture, the suburb that made Russell Crowe rich and famous for shaving his head and beating up ethnic minorities, so it doesnt really matter that these footpaths are not lined with gold but dotted with coruscating black circles where people spat out gum eons ago. Dont swallow the rubber candy, mothers say to their kids. Spit it out. Spit it out now thats right, onto the ground there. Ah, this wondrous new country where children are scared of dying because they have swallowed some Spearmint Wrigleys, not because they stepped on a condensed-milk tin filled with ammunition! Unpolished Gem

My parents would never go to cafes and order a cup of coffee, mainly because for $3 you can buy Nescafe in a supermarket and make 10 million cups.

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Photography Rebecca Hallas

Elliot Perlman
Author of Three Dollars, The Reasons I Wont be Coming and Seven Types of Ambiguity In Elliot Perlmans award-winning debut novel, Three Dollars, the main character has a solitary piece of paternal wisdom to hand down to his newborn daughter: No matter where you are or what time of day it is avoid Punt Road. The problem with dispensing advice in a bestselling book, though, is that people expect you to follow it. Now, whenever Perlman turns onto that notorious bottleneck, he cops it from every passenger in the car. They start laughing and I go, Oh yeah, I know, I did it, says the 43-year-old barrister-turned-author. Everybody teases me when I end up taking Punt Road because sometimes you have to. Even that advice was wrong. Such uniquely Melbourne references have helped make Three Dollars an enduring favourite among local readers; so much so that earlier this year it was voted the most popular book set in Victoria in a State Library poll. When the film adaptation came out in 2005, Perlman learned first-hand just how well-loved the story was. I did various appearances and there was such a lovely warm feeling in the audience, he says. It wasnt so much that theyd come to some premiere but rather they felt that this was their book. It has resonated in a way I couldnt have expected. Shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award and named The Age Book of the Year in 1998, Three Dollars tells of a Melbourne man, Eddie Harnovey, doing it tough and trying to retain his integrity in an age of economic rationalism. The character finds himself on William Street wondering how hell meet his next mortgage repayment, and later goes through rubbish bins in the Bourke Street Mall. In Flagstaff Gardens, Eddie feels the wintry blast off Port Phillip Bay. Alone, I stood shivering in my shirt sleeves, writes Perlman, at the edge of the central business district of the biggest small town in all the world. Perlmans work has always had a strong sense of place, with Melbourne also featuring in his 1999 collection of short stories, The Reasons I Wont Be Coming, and his 2003 opus, Seven Types of Ambiguity. In Seven Types, he mentions Chapel Street cafes and Toorak mansions, the St Kilda Pier and Esplanade Hotel, as well as wealthy Catholics at the end of the line in Kew. Perlman grew up in East Brighton and recently bought a house in the south-eastern suburbs, so its not surprising that locations in that area often make their way into his writing. He knows his Melbourne readers will enjoy the buzz of recognition; he remembers first experiencing it when he read My Brother Jack as a kid. After growing up reading books and seeing films that were all set in other places, Perlman says he came to realise that Melbourne was as legitimate a backdrop as any for his stories. Theres nothing to say that the conundrums and dilemmas and uncertainties, fears, hopes and predicaments that are quintessential to being human could not exist in

Melbourne, he says. His local settings dont seem to have alienated foreign readers Seven Types reached number nine on the French bestseller list within 10 days of publication which makes Perlman wonder why more writers dont set their contemporary stories in Australian cities. A lot of our art, particularly our narrative art, is historical, and its almost as though as a culture were afraid of setting contemporary stories firmly in urban Australia, he says. I think it might be a sign of cultural immaturity. It may also be a case of unconscious self-editing: Youre allowed to tell contemporary stories set in New York or London or Paris, but not Melbourne, and theres no reason for that. Perlman returned home in January after spending four years in New York which might explain his lunch order of two fried eggs over easy during this interview at an East St Kilda cafe. Still weary from working on a newspaper piece until 3am the night before, the longtime insomniac orders a strong latte. On the table in front of him is an envelope of documents to renew his practising certificate; although he hasnt taken a case in more than five years, he is still technically a barrister and he made sure he kept up the rent on his city chambers while he was overseas. Ive fortunately got myself into a position where I think I can have the best of both worlds if I stay in Melbourne, he says. I can get work if I want to as a lawyer but also I have the freedom to write whatever I want: screenplays and short stories and novels. Perlman is currently working on his fourth book, which notably isnt set in Melbourne, but rather America and Europe. Living in New York, he says, gave him the confidence to write about somewhere other than Melbourne, although he did suffer the odd pang of homesickness while he was there specifically for quality coffee (theyre drinking coffee you wouldnt wash your shoes in), football (hes a Carlton supporter) and a decent spaghetti bolognese (he reckons Maria Trattoria in North Melbourne does one of the best). As expats often do, Perlman had romanticised his hometown and it wasnt until he moved back that he discovered the gap between rich and poor had only widened during his absence. Just weeks after Perlmans return, the remains of a homeless man were found six months after his death under a Windsor railway bridge, dispelling the writers image of Melbourne as a kinder gentler place than New York. Unfortunately the politics of Three Dollars is more relevant than ever. Still, despite those reservations, Perlman remains one of Melbournes greatest fans. Sydney is perhaps more immediately, aesthetically attractive, but Melbourne has a soul that will sustain you and nourish you, perhaps indefinitely, he explains. It can be good for you to taste other places but theres definitely something about Melbourne that gets its hooks into you and wont let you go.

Amid the buskers, the jugglers, the lost children and the even more lost mothers, the bored skateboarders devastated by the realisation that their lives were not on television, neither in a Twisties commercial nor in a Generation X love story with Winona Ryder nor even in the heart-warming Disney story of teenage runaways screening at the special family time of seven-thirty, the spruikers, Japanese tourists, truant school children, truant office workers, tarot card readers, quasi-Gypsy violinists, quasi-South American nylon string guitarists, fire eaters and evangelical critics of the Family Court amid all of this I kept an eye out for an unwanted plastic bag from one of the two major department stores. Three Dollars

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Sonya Hartnett
Author of novels including Of a Boy, Trouble All the Way and Thursdays Child Sonya Hartnetts stories tend to be bleak, brooding rides through violence and depression, with the odd detour into incest, insanity and abduction which makes eerie suburban Melbourne, says the author, the perfect place for them. Growing up in Box Hill in the 1970s, Hartnett used to wander the empty streets on still summer afternoons, imagining she was the sole survivor in a post-apocalyptic world. Youd hear a game of football being played 10 miles away because it was so quiet, recalls Hartnett. Those afternoons really coloured the way I write because they gave me an appreciation of a kind of end-of-the-world outlook, which is what my books have when it boils down to it. Back then she wanted to read books about ordinary Australian kids like herself but had to settle for imported teen fiction about US places and lifestyles she didnt understand. At 13, she assumed her hometown wasnt good enough to write about until she read Ivan Southalls book about a Melbourne boy, Josh, and decided to give writing a go. The result, Trouble All the Way, was published two years later, but she insists she had no ambition to become a writer: As a kid growing up in Box Hill, especially a Catholic kid growing up in Box Hill, you had no bloody right to think that you would be successful at anything like that, says 39-year-old Hartnett, the second of six children. I just wrote to amuse myself because as a kid in a big family it gave me a bit of peace and quiet and private time. I wasnt a very outgoing sort of kid. I just liked sitting there, creating this little world. Sitting on the floor of her living room, her husky-German shepherd cross, Shilo, sprawled out beside her, Hartnett hands over a hokey-looking novel with a picture of her 15-year-old self in school uniform on the back. Almost 25 years on, she has 17 books to her credit and has been hailed by critic Peter Craven as the finest Australian writer of her generation. Her honours include the 2002 Guardian Childrens Fiction Prize for Thursdays Child as well as The Age Book of the Year in 2003 for her adult novel, Of a Boy. Hartnett has lived off her writing since she quit her part-time bookshop job four years ago; her self-discipline, however, is waning with each passing year. She admits, rather sheepishly, that she writes in bed like Elizabeth Barrett Browning for four hours a day at most, in between walks to Merri Creek with Shilo, internet surfing sessions and afternoon naps. And yet shes prolific. Im relatively fast, she explains, because I dont start until I know exactly what Im doing. After marinating in her mind for a year, her 2004 childrens story The Silver Donkey inspired by a statue she found in a Ballarat antique shop took just two weeks to write. Usually, she can bang out a book in two months. After school, she earned a communications degree from RMIT with a view to working in television, but discovered she didnt care for teamwork. I sort of thought in the background, If I fail to find something I want to do I guess I can always write and that, in a way, is exactly what happened, she says. Its not that I dont appreciate it, but I guess I dont have a sense of real achievement because I didnt set out to be a writer. Her real passion is real estate. I really only write books now, she says, so I can continue to buy houses and do them up. Home has ranged from Bulleen to Camberwell to Northcote, but Hartnett has vowed never to live south of the river again. She still nurses a grudge against South Yarra, where she was robbed while in the shower and her whippet was kicked by a passer-by. I guess it could happen anywhere but I found it a constantly stressful place to live because there was no friendliness about the place, she says. There was just a kind of tension and desire to impress. A life-long Melbourne resident, Hartnett suspects that Of a Boy was successful because she knew its setting so intimately: although she doesnt spell it out, she pictured the main character, nine-year-old Adrian, living in her grandmothers house in Balwyn. Landscape with Animals, Hartnetts 2006 foray into erotica under the pseudonym Cameron S. Redfern, also made use of Melbourne locales such as Como House, Albert Park beach and the North Fitzroy Star Hotel. Most of her books are set in Victoria, but Hartnett doesnt mention place names. I have nothing against other writers doing it in fact, I really enjoy books specifically set in a city now, whether or not Ive been there but for myself I kind of like that universal feel. Instead, she alludes to an Australian setting by mentioning native trees and animals, for example, or Christmas in the heat. Some overseas publishers have even tried to excise those details, but Hartnett is defiant. I guess its a kind of revenge, she says. I think, No way. If I ploughed my way as a teenager through your America, your teenagers will plough their way through my Australia.

The park is as empty as ever. He wonders about its perpetual state of desertedness it feels like a forsaken place, a rejected one. He wonders if everybody knows a terrible truth about this land which he alone has not been told. Other times he fancies he is the only person whos ever realised the park lies here, that he is a boy who knows where theres hidden treasure. The park is enclosed by the backsides of houses, by the dead-ended stump of road, by the fence of the local swimming pool. It is thickly planted with trees around the edges, while the centre is a broad grassy field. The wind sweeps the grass into rippling waves. The sunshine of the previous weekend had made the grass long and garish lime, and yesterday or the day before the council man has come to cut it. In summer, when the grass is dry, Adrian builds fragrant huts from armfuls of mown clippings; now, soggy with the beginnings of winter, the flecks of green stick to his jeans and clag in wads to the soles of his desert boots. Of a Boy

I found it a constantly stressful place to live because there was no friendliness about the place. There was just a kind of tension and a desire to impress.

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Photography Darren James

Kate Holden
Author of the memoir In My Skin When Kate Holden last lived in St Kilda, she mutated from a middle-class arts graduate into a heroin-addicted hooker an ordeal she documented in her 2005 bestseller, In My Skin so its curious that shes moved back to a place with so many dark memories. She thinks its probably nostalgia: Maybe, she muses, I wanted to recover some of the good things that I liked about the scene and myself. These days shes a full-time writer and cant afford to live near the water; instead shes in a two-bedroom apartment on the other side of St Kilda Road, the drag where she started as a street prostitute in the 1990s. Holden doesnt go to Acland Street much, but when she does, its not the St Kilda she recalls. I always have this really strange sense that Im totally an intruder in St Kilda these days, Im just another tourist, but on the other hand Im like, I totally owned these streets! Im the most famous ex-hooker in St Kilda; I expect to be recognised on the street! she says, laughing. I feel totally anonymous. Its like going back to visit an old friend whos forgotten who you are. The first time she went back to her old beat the block bordered by St Kilda Road and Inkerman, Carlisle and Barkly streets she found she couldnt walk straight. It was daytime but she was somehow transported back to the smack-addled nights a decade ago when she was sick and exhausted. My whole balance was gone and I was just kind of stumbling down the street, she says. It was this total disorientation about Is it now or was it then? Then this car pulled up and said, Hey baby. I was like, Oh my God; I just kept walking. Now her evenings are more likely to be spent rubbing shoulders with literary types like the recent second birthday party for The Monthly magazine, where she ran into two ex-boyfriends. There were a lot of people wearing heavy-framed glasses and smart black jackets and they were very pleased with themselves, she says, her black fingernails wrapped around a rollie cigarette at St Kildas Galleon cafe. It was awful, actually. Blame second-book syndrome, a recent 35th birthday or the ghastly media party the night before, but Holden is cranky. Entertaining, but cranky. She has just submitted the manuscript of her first novel a ghost story set in contemporary England and is suffering some performance anxiety about the switch from memoir to fiction: I wish Id never mentioned to anyone I was writing a goddamn novel, its terrible. Nevertheless, she is already kicking around another book idea, this one about expat artists living in 18th-century Rome contrasted with a modern womans romantic disillusionment. Besides her memoir, she has only ever written one short story set in Melbourne. I think its too close, says Holden, who left in late 2001 to live overseas for a year, in Rome and Shanghai. I just dont feel like I have any perspective or authority to describe Melbourne life. Now that she has settled in the city and stopped plotting a move overseas, though, the idea is more appealing. In fact, she wishes shed been more specific about locations in In My Skin, but at the time she was intensely aware that her book was exposing a secret side of Melbourne that relied on anonymity. She also avoided place names for the sake of non-Melbourne readers. Not that she dared to hope for international success: Youre there in your bedroom in a corner of your parents house on Austudy on a fifth-hand laptop going, Well, thisll be hilarious if anyone actually ever reads it. More than 40,000 did, and she now has a fortnightly column in The Age. The constant hunt for ideas has thrown her into a semi-permanent state of terror, she says, but it has also made her cast a more observational eye over Melbourne. Take Caulfield, for example, where her parents are about to sell her childhood home. When I was a kid, it wasnt cheap but it was friendly and there were lots of very happy Greek families with goats tethered in the front garden, says Holden, who is doing a masters degree in creative writing. Now its just full of a lot of anxious, middle-aged yuppies with heritage colours on their houses. St Kilda, she says, has also lost some of its diversity: I know there are still lots of crazy, interesting people around, but they just seem to be eclipsed by the hordes in gigantic sunglasses. Holden is happy to be one of the suburbs best-known residents, even an unofficial spokeswoman for the Melbourne sex industry, but shes ready to explore other territory in her work as well. I would like to end up being like, a writer, she says, rather than the girl who wrote the hook book. (m) The Age Melbourne Writers Festival starts on August 24. See www.mwf.com.au

St Kilda was famous for its art deco flats and glossy cafes and bars, its well-loved old pubs; the foreshore, the craft market, the seaside kiosks; the ferals and the beautiful people; the strange characters and the bland crowds of tourists. At that time it was still cheap enough for students to live there, in tattered but elegant old flats in leafy streets, around the corner from the main street and the beach and the parks and each other. On weekends people came in from all over town; at night the place had certain streets where girls wore very little, even in winter, and there were cars going around and around. St Kilda was full of artists, bohemians, rich people, music, sex and drugs. Suddenly I was in the middle of things. There were late nights staggering home from the pub, days of bumping into my friends in the street and going off for long afternoons of coffee and pool. Parties where I knew everyone. I was kissed up against walls, missed classes because I was in bed with a lanky, dreadlocked boy. We all had our noses pierced. In My Skin

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