Page 22 - Luce 2021

B ooks a nd Authors

Days and Moments

Despite lockdowns, both our Peggy and Leslie Cranbourne Artist-in-Residence, Alice Pung, and our
Kenneth Moore Memorial Music Scholar, Anna Goldsworthy, have had busy years which included the
publication of two new novels. Anna and Alice caught up to talk about each other’s most recent books…

Alice talks to Anna about Melting Moments
(Black Inc 2020) I suppose this is a central question of the book. Ruby finds
meaning in her competence in the domestic sphere (a
Anna, you have spoken often about your beloved competence I lack) and also in ‘keeping up appearances’.
grandmother ‘Moggy’, who found love twice in her life, the She is house-proud and loves her family. Occasionally she
second time much later. Your character Ruby has experienced wonders if there’s something more, something she missed. I
more years in life than her author, yet you write about was interested in celebrating a ‘minor’ life: women’s stories
the aches and anxieties (physical, spiritual) of old age so have too often disappeared from history because they didn’t
convincingly. How did you do it? occur in public spaces, but often happened at home. At the
same time, I was not seeking to hold domesticity up as some
A personal affront of recent years is the realisation that I’m sort of higher ideal. Writing this, I was acutely conscious of
actually ageing, even though I haven’t done anything to deserve the constraints of Ruby’s circumstances, and ever mindful of
it other than hang around. So I suppose I drew partly on my my own greater freedoms only two generations later.
own encroaching decrepitude, and that of various bodies I
love. But you’re right: Moggy was a central inspiration, along I suppose meaning can take many forms, and can change
with a number of other cherished elders. I’ve had charmed throughout a life as youthful narratives of self-improvement,
relationships with all of my grandparents, including the two say, are nudged aside by other priorities. My own sense of
who are still alive (with whom my sons and I regularly play meaning has been challenged by a near two-year sabbatical
Scrabble). And when you spend a lot of time with the elderly, from my life as a musician. For some, meaning is found
there’s inevitably some level of immersion in the atmosphere in relationships or connection or creativity or giving back.
of their bodies. Others find it in buying things or winning or looking like a
winner. For many of us, lockdown has been an enforced
You have brought to life Adelaide and Melbourne of half confrontation with this question, and it will be interesting to
a century ago in such technicolour vivacity. What kind of see what answers emerge as we step back into the world.
historical research did you have to do to get the setting
just right?
Anna talks to Alice about One Hundred Days
A lot of the historical research was grounded in conversations (Black Inc, 2021)
with Moggy, who was a great storyteller, so those venues like
the Palais were already alive to me. She had a particular way of Alice, there are certain fairy tale underpinnings to One
talking – a type of generational vernacular, shared by her friends Hundred Days, but they are subverted by the ending. And
– and as I wrote I discovered it was a song I’d internalised although there’s an unreconstructed part of the reader that
(traces of it remain in some of my mother’s colloquialisms). I has been hankering for the conventional ending, the book’s
augmented this research in a number of ways: by looking at conclusion is utterly satisfying. I’m full of admiration for
photos; reading about life in Adelaide from the 1940s; trawling the way you pulled this off. Was this a template you had
through Trove and old newspapers; and digging up transcripts planned from the start or did it emerge as you wrote?
of conversations my brother had had with our late grandfather.
As One Hundred Days was conceived with the character
What I loved about Melting Moments was that the book was of Karuna, my pregnant sixteen-year-old protagonist, first, I
unapologetically about a woman who was relatively content actually wrote the ending very early on. The challenge of the
in her quiet, dignified middle-class world. She wasn›t a gung- book was then to work out how she achieves this emotional
ho feminist, but she had her own strengths. What do you growth – from a barely-out-of-childhood fourteen-year-old to
think makes for a meaningful life? this determined and independent mother.
22 LUCE Number 20 2021