Helen Garner

my memory of all of the Aussie literature that I've read.

I have to admit most of them on there that I have read, and there'd be a good 20 or 25 or so that I will have read, I can't kind of remember the details, but I do remember the details of Joe Chinquay's Consolation, which is a Helen Garner book.

It's really stuck with me and I reckon I read that 25 years ago.

And it's on the list.

But to keep it brief here, the short stuff is the hardest.

And I just have this sort of confidence now, for example, that we can get into some of these Julia topics without the need for what Helen Garner would describe as a bullshit preamble.

So let's just sort of get into it.

And I'm really excited to see what people vote on.

[laughs]

And finally, I just wanna say I feel like, uh, Melbourne's own Helen Garner got a little bit ripped off here.

Her highest ranked book, Monkey Grip, came in at 31.

Ooh.

That was beaten by both Trent Dalton novels.

So I feel like that's a bit brutal.

But maybe, maybe it shows that the voters of this survey hate women less than Helen Garner does.

You know? That's possible.

And those are, you're right, recency bias.

I'd probably put some Helen Garner in there too.

I was glad to see that.

She made the list.

What's your next selection, Stuart Coupe?

My next selection, when we talk about being taken into a particular place, is the first novel by Helen Garner, which is Monkey Grip, which came out in 1977.

And... is such an evocative book about Melbourne in that era.

And it just, you know, right from the opening couple of paragraphs, which set this scene of share households and people dropping in and there never been enough tables at the chair and someone's perched there, you know, they got their dinner on a plate on their knee on a couch, all of those sort of things, you know, you're immediately... taken into the Fitzroy Carlton world of the 1970s.

You know, this was another level of kind of lifestyle and something that I very much, you know, I kind of aspired to.

And it captured that feeling.

You know, I always, whenever I'm in Melbourne and it's summer and the streets are hot and there's not too many people walking the streets, I always go back and think of Monkey Grip and that world that Helen Garner, you know, so successfully conjured up.

It just reeks of that, you know, those flat inner city Melbourne suburbs and those very distinctive terrace houses.

I was-

The other part that happens when you get to your 50s is you think, okay, I think it was Helen Garner who described it as, "The shadow of memory is longer than the sunlight of future." Is, is that thing that I think starts to come into your thinking.

What does Bobby want to do in the time that she's blessed with on this earth?

So I, um, I want to firstly continue building MentorWalks and the Male business, and all the things I'm currently doing.