Bernadette Brennan
speaker
419 appearances
3 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2018
last heard 29 May
Bernadette Brennan’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.
Appearances
child in rangoon who was born of a scottish father and a burmese mother privileged childhood who had to escape to india when the japanese invaded and he wrote a memoir it is the most extraordinary story you will read and they did publish it in 2002 and it's been republished since then i think with university of new south wales or new south wales books
That story blew my mind open about the atrocities of the war, about the suffering of the Burmese people, not the Karen people because he was a Burman.
But that kind of memoir had a power and an authenticity which has never left me.
the novel, this novel, doesn't have that same kind of power.
There has to be some of that missing because of the form shift, because there has to be artistic licence and creative licence in the novel.
I think also perhaps because we have a novelist here writing about her mother and her mother's parents and her mother's parents' lovers and other people in the community.
So that sort of distance...
How much did those parents tell this child?
How much does she actually know?
Therefore, how much does she have to recreate to make it a story?
So you can see why she may well have gone for the novel form, but it doesn't have the overarching power, I think, of a memoir.
Reading it, writing it.
Actually, what I'm doing is, at the moment, I'm fairly deeply immersed in Gillian's enormous archive at the State Library of New South Wales.
She kept a diary every day almost from the age of about 16 to I don't know how far it's going to get yet.
I'm currently up to the point where she's 24.
She collected all letters, cards, everything from the time she was a child, from the age of five, photographs, recordings.
She had a huge life in her 51 years and I think she's a magnificent writer.
So I'm very privileged at the moment to be getting to know Gillian and getting to know the people that she knew and loved.
And that's a real honour.
Oh, the difficult question.
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