Helen Trinca

But that was a journey of discovery to find her friends, many of whom, of course, were Australians.

and talk to them about her.

So she emerges as a very difficult person indeed.

She's very kind, generous, smart, intelligent, savvy, and yet so complex.

And so internally, I think, divided within herself so that at times she could behave in a very cruel way.

She would pull people into her very closely and then just let them go without many explanations.

She was, I guess in some ways we would call in modern sort of language, fairly damaged psychologically, I suppose, and yet an incredible survivor.

You know, she had suffered depression and she suffered, I suppose, a trauma of her mother, suicide, but she emerged from that as a,

as a very interesting and ultimately highly successful writer in the sense that her books are very good.

You know, she didn't have a lot of, she didn't have major success when she was alive, but since her death and since the republication of them by text publishing, you know, she has received much more acclaim.

It was very odd.

To be honest, she was quite a snob about Australia.

She had grown up here and she wasn't, I don't think, necessarily that unhappy about Australia as a nation.

But by the time she married and went to, first to America with her then husband and then to the UK, she decided that the new world, the real world, you know, the true world was Europe, France, Australia.

preferably, but London was very much good enough for someone who couldn't really speak French.

So she sat herself down in London and stayed there from about 1968 until her death.

So her relationship to Australia was, like many expats of that time,

a sense that Australia was a cultural dead hole.

She came back a couple of times, but I don't know that she really got Australia or really understood Australia.

So, yeah, she was pretty much a snob about Australia and reasonably dismissive of it.