Belinda Castles

So don't think of those sort of lovely galleries in Toorak and Wallara.

Think of someone who has to kind of scrounge around the auctions and figure out what the good stuff is that she might be able to buy cheaply and sell up the chain for a reasonable profit.

I think I wanted to have normal people and I wanted to have people that wouldn't give readers a preconceived idea of what they were dealing with.

I think people tend to think of artists often in a certain way.

And I also particularly wanted for Alex the idea that what she does for a living is very much looking at the small details and perhaps seeing things that other people don't see.

So by making her a dealer rather than an artist, she's already sort of pre-programmed

to be looking for things that perhaps aren't quite right about what's in front of her.

Hogarth the wolfhound.

Well, Hogarth is an Irish wolfhound.

So that's one of the tallest breeds of dog.

So he's a very tall dog.

I think sort of hip height is about where his shoulder is.

But they're very laid back dogs.

So he's sort of like the brooding security guy in the background.

He doesn't really have to do much except stand up and look slightly menacing for people to know that they need to back down a little bit.

I think for the 1930s, very much so.

I did a lot of reading about what Melbourne was like at the time and what society was like.

And I did a lot of just reading magazines from the period as well to really get that social feeling.

I think the books that tell us about the 1930s

tell us about one aspect, but it's once you sort of get down into reading the gossip columns and the advertising, and even to a certain extent the sort of the David Jones, Foy and Gibson's, Buckley's and Nunn catalogues to see what people were wearing and the way they use words to describe the clothes even, that's what really kind of got me into the period for the 1930s.