Helen Trinca

Yeah, I mean, that is one of the most interesting things she said to friends at the time before she died.

launched into novel writing in her 50s and that she didn't want to – there were too many sad books and she didn't need to add to the sort of sad books.

So she was very interested in, you know, in providing us, I guess, with at one level a comic novel.

But, of course, it's deeply serious as well about Australia at a certain time.

So I think it's an amazing capacity of her to sort of, in a sense, see some of the –

some of the broader issues about Australia.

And she, of course, in the book, if you really look at it, she's very much more sympathetic to the European refos, you know, the inverted commas, new Australians, you know.

They are the ones who come from the old world of Europe with all of the, you know, great food, the sophistication, you know, the sort of knowledge that will take Australia along a different path.

And I guess in some ways she was not completely wrong about that.

but the sort of Aussie Australians.

She's not cruel to them, but she is at times a little less... They're a little less perfect than the Europeans.

And so that reflects, I think, her own background, her own childhood.

Her mother was French, a French-Romanian background.

She began to idealise and idolise her mother, I think, particularly, I guess, after her death.

And so that world of, you know, a European...

sensibility sort of really came to be seen by Madeleine, I think, as the sort of sensibility that we should be after.

But I think one of the great things about the book is that she tackles some of these big, big questions around, you know, really immigration and, you know, what Australia should be in the next, you know, in the second part of the 20th century in a way that's quite light and with a very light touch.

None of her

and in any of her books ever delivered with any heavy-handedness.

You know, you feel, you stumble through them in some ways.