Helen Trinca

You know, she articulates them through the characters and through the dialogue and through the little stories.

And, you know, that's a real pleasure, I think, to realise that you can read the books on so many different levels, really, because they're deceptively...

simple and light.

Yeah, that's right.

And look, she wasn't a, you know, I think she would have hated the idea of ever being seen as a feminist.

And yet the book is very much a story about women, their place or their lack of place.

lack of space almost in the society.

You know, it's a coming-of-age story, of course, of Leslie, you know, the teenager who goes to work at the department store and then sort of discovers a new world and, you know, gets to university, et cetera.

So there are some big ideas in there around a changing society.

But, yes, I think, you know, they're delivered in a way that is really quite, you know, it can look like a small book, can't it?

It can feel at times like it's a little...

A little book, not a huge book, but yet it's tackled some big issues.

Yeah, well, she was part of that group at Sydney University, you know, Clive James and

Germaine Greer had turned up towards the end of the time that Madeline was at Sydney Uni, you know, Bruce Beresford and many others.

And her generation would have seen themselves as the cultivated ones at university.

She was very interested in, you know, she had literature.

She was very interested in, you know, in high literature, I guess, you know, and also, you know, the French films, you know, that were coming into Australia, et cetera.

And she saw that group, her cohort, as the cultivated ones who had to get out and go somewhere else because, you

Sydney was just not their place, you know, they were never going to expand there.

So I think that's about that and about that generation, I guess.