Kirsten Krauth

But I sat on the stairs there and I had heard about Nick Cave starting his career out there.

So I just sat on the stairs and the place was so evocative.

It was such an incredible place.

feeling of being elegant and sort of wasted at the same time and I thought it was really evocative and I I felt like I didn't have any choice really other than to write about it I could feel the ghosts of Nick and Roland sort of standing in the in the bar in the foyer there and it was an era that hasn't really been explored much and I went to the state library and looked at archives and there just wasn't much there and I thought it was such an important you know shaping um

cultural place for Melbourne and it feels like it's kind of been lost.

So I wanted to bring it back to life.

Well, I'm a fiction writer.

I've had a novel out before called Just a Girl.

It was interesting when I started researching and interviewing people for the book.

So I interviewed Mick Harvey and Robert Forster and Dave Graney, Scott Kahn, and I found that

Starting off as a kind of more as a journalist talking to people, they're much more reluctant to open up.

But when you say that you're writing a novel, people relax.

And so they give you beautiful memories and details and sort of physical sensations of what it was like at the time.

And...

it gave me a lot of freedom to be able to look at the scene, but not to have to represent it, you know, in factual detail.

And so it's kind of a, it's sort of a blend, I guess, of memoir and fiction in a way, you know, it's got Nick Cave as a character, it's got Roland as a character.

And initially I did try and write them more as, you know, putting words into their mouths, but I found that very challenging.

So I decided to look at it more as a,

Yes.

There were two main ones.