Well, it’s been a while, rudely interrupted, etc. But life goes on, and so does Julia Gillard, and her story has changed again and keeps changing. She used to make me think of Cate Blanchett at the end of the movie Elizabeth, the scene where she methodically puts white chalk all over her face, hiding her real self behind it: having to turn into someone else for the sake of power. We’ve seen that Gillard mask slip in the last few months, with genuine anger bursting through. And many voters have approved.
Will there be an update on the biography? Maybe, who knows? It may depend how the ALP travel in the next twelve months. Nobody’s predicting anything, but … anyway, we’ll see.
I have been busy on another book. This one is a combination of memoir and literary history, for want of a better description. It’s basically an account of my marriage to Kenneth Cook, best known as the author of Wake in Fright (novel, not film) though it covers other bases besides, I hope. It’s been a tough book to write, not only because of the emotional content, but because more than any other book I’ve written the quality of the writing has had to transcend the information and its treatment (though that’s important too, of course). So the last eighteen months has been an exercise in trying to get that right. It’s been frustrating and rewarding and I’ve learned a lot. Have sent it back and forth to Penguin and gained very useful and sympathetic feedback. Right now the manuscript is with them again. So. We await developments. Maybe that’s what I should have called this post!