Richard Aidey

It is warm and it's probably on the positive side of the needle, if you could put it that way, but I don't think it's sentimental.

But, yes, she's part of a generation that leaves and actually many of the people who left when she left or around the same time never came back.

They've lived there and people like Clive James, who is part of that group,

they went away and they stayed away.

And, of course, that's what happened with Madeleine St-Jean as well.

So she's talking about something real here, Magda.

She's talking about how... And the contrast is, of course, that many of these so-called continentals are clever, urbane, sophisticated people, but the Australians who might naturally be the same, many of them have gone to Europe or perhaps America, though we don't hear about that,

So it's a real thing and it's really happening.

The whole book, in fact, is a sort of exercise in picking apart Australia and Sydney in particular at that moment in the late 50s.

We've still got Menzies as prime minister.

It's sort of seen as a kind of white bread era.

But in fact, there was all this change happening and she just gently, it's a gentle portrait of it and a bit of skewering of it too.

Oh, it's a delight.

I mean, I wasn't aware of the book before, was aware of the film, didn't realise it was based upon a book.

And I enjoyed it from the first page.

The tone, the lovely economy of the writing...

what it became clear she was doing very early on.

And to me, one of the real achievements is, this is a story, it's about work.

It's about these women, it's about transformation.

And she gets all these three or four transformations to happen