Deborah Adelaide

Hello, Kate.

Well, I'm very much aware that my relationship to reading and other authors is part of this conversation, which I think Belinda might have mentioned in her introduction and some of the other contributors to this book also mentioned.

It's a conversation that never ends.

It just goes on and on and it's one I dip in and out of all the time.

And I think I'm reading...

in two ways at the same time if that's possible i'm reading as a reader and my primary motivation for reading a text is just to get lost in a good story that's that's all i ever ask from it i'm never reading consciously to plunder or steal as a writer but i i probably do do that but i don't do it consciously but i'm also reading very attentively and critically and when i particularly love a text

I am also reading with this question, how did they do it?

How did that author achieve that?

How did they get away with that?

And that I find is a very productive way of reading for me.

And it's not to say that I necessarily want to go and imitate it.

It's enough to know if I can work out how they've managed to do something that excites me as a reader, that seems to be enough for me.

And I find it a very generative act to read like that.

Well, it's a fantastic teaching text.

But if I can just make a few comments about the Australian writer question.

That Nicholas was just discussing.

I think that this novel Snake by Kate Jennings is a quintessential Australian novel from the title onwards.

Because, of course, you know, snake is such a potent thing in Australian literature.

landscape and culture.

You don't get very far into a novel called Snake without thinking of that classic text, Drover's Wife.