Geordie Williamson

I came to understand that these two people engaged in this dialogue about their shared dark past.

Neither was entirely straight with the reader, but I loved it.

All of it is organized around the central image of the bodies found in Vesuvius and that were later, they were cavities in the ash that were filled with plaster and you can go and visit them today.

And yet Dovey manages to take these and turn them into a metaphor for everything from South Africa's post-apartheid nature to the current Me Too moment.

I don't know how she stuffs all of these magnificent ideas into such a wicked, glorious little fictional bag, but she does it.

At our session today, she's going to show half an hour of images from the actual site at Vesuvius where these poor people were found.

And I'm excited but also frightened by the idea because she makes such a point in the novel of saying we shouldn't look at these images in the usual way.

So I'm going to have to think of clever things to say to her about them.

I think that we're all probably finding it a bit hard to find figures in our Anglosphere political classes that we really feel are visionaries and are drawn to, who guide us.

And so I've really been looking around at Australian Arts and Letters to try and find people who sound sane to me, who could point the way forward for how we might be as a nation and as a people.

And one of the most significant of those is someone who is probably not very well known to people.

And that's Barry Hill, who I first came across in his capacity of poetry editor of The Australian many years ago.

But Barry grew up in a working class household.

His father and grandfather were involved in the union movement.

And indeed, one of Barry's first books was about a sit-in, a famous sit-in that his father presided over many decades ago.

And it seems quite quaint now to read about the idea of these kind of working class Australian union movements, because as Barry Hill himself says in the essays contained in this wonderful new book of his, that world seems entirely distant from us.

So what Barry Hill has spent his life doing is moving between poetry, writing,

between essays, biography and longer form books, which elude any kind of generic boundaries.

They completely just tear down the place.

So, for instance, he spent 10 years writing an account of a man named T.G.H.