Alison Booth

because I think that's so much the case.

And I'd like to just mention cultural histories.

And one of the very interesting things I found of Tira Lira by the River was that this was pre-feminist, really.

It was essentially pre-feminist.

If you were to write a book like that now, it wouldn't come out the same.

And I think when we think about cultural histories...

we think of how history is written.

I'm talking about real history, so to speak, at the moment, and it's written by the victors.

But what this has given novelists is a wonderful opportunity to rewrite history from another point of view.

A novel that I read recently that I really love is Kate Grenville's A Room Made of Leaves.

That was stimulated by the history of John MacArthur's

But the way Kate revisited that was from the perspective of his wife.

And that completely changes our perspective, our viewpoint of John MacArthur and of early white Australian history.

So I really like the idea of the unreliable historian.

I think we're going to see quite a lot about the possibly unreliable narrator when we shift on to The Beautiful Fall.

Thank you.

We need to know that Robert suffers from recurring amnesia.

And what this means is that he loses his memory every six months with remarkable regularity.

When the novel begins, we start off with a letter from the previous version of him.

I mean, when you lose your memory and you keep on being alive, the body has a number of different versions of you with