Geordie Williamson

Strelow, who was the son of Lutheran missionaries who grew up in South Australia and who collected

many of the traditional song lines of the Orente people and published a work called Songs of Central Australia, which no one has read, which was published in an edition of maybe 200 copies, very much sought after now by collectors, and which Hill would argue is the most important work of comparative literature, our book of Genesis, he calls it.

And he wrote an entire book trying to understand how this white Lutheran, son of a Lutheran,

could-turned-anthropologist could have produced this remarkable book of encounter between white and black worlds.

So to spend 10 years on a book that probably no one has heard of is the sign, I think, of a genius or a madman, and he's probably a bit of both.

But this collection of essays that he's just published, and this is Monash University Press, and they've done a really lovely job.

It's a handsome book.

What's it called?

It's called Reason and Lovelessness, Essays, Encounters and Reviews, 1980 to 2017.

And why I recommend it to you, even though, you know, a collection of essays might seem like the last thing to read, is that these are all the sparks from which these giant projects came.

So if you're someone who doesn't really feel like investing 800 pages on the story of TGH's Strelow and Songs of Central Australia, you can read the foundational essay here where Hill talks about the significance for him of Strelow and the book that emerged from it.

I would also say that there is a literary glory to the way that Hill writes his essays.

And you only need to turn to the first essay in the collection, which is called Dark Star.

And it's based on a drunken...

that he had with the aging Christina Stead, one of Australia's greatest authors who lived as an exile for many decades in Europe and the US and the UK before coming home soon before her death, a diminished figure, wounded by the loss of the great love of her life.

her husband who had died some years before.

And in a sense, the success that Australia was willing to give her had come too late for her.

But she was undoubtedly a genius and a terrifying woman to encounter for all of those sort of younger generation of writers.

So

Hill describes going and sitting down with her and he describes their conversation in italics and so far so good.