Sarah Konoski

They'll learn.

They'll realise.

And before too long it's going to be your face on those tourism stickers.

Bernie, Justin Hazelwood's hometown.

People will flock there.

Thank you, Justin, for sharing your story on Conversations.

Oh, thanks.

Justin Hazelwood's new book is Dream Bernie and his memoir is Get Up Mum.

This conversation was produced by Nicola Harrison and recorded on the lands of the Wurundjeri, Turrbal and Yagera peoples.

I'm Sarah Konoski.

Thanks for listening.

I'm Sarah Konoski from Conversations and just before the lockdown came into force I was at the library and picked up by chance really Daniel Deronda by George Eliot.

It's not the same kind of perfect thing that her great novel Middlemarch is but she's such an astonishingly good writer.

These great rolling magisterial sentences even

When I don't understand every word or every allusion, it's like I can feel them stretching out my brain, unspooling it from the language of Twitter and news reports.

And I'm really appreciating getting immersed in a world totally other than the historical moment we're in now, one that of course had its own dramas and anxieties and longings.

And one of the things that Eliot's really interested in in this novel is Jewish history and religion.

She'd broken with Christianity as a young woman.

And, you know, inevitably from our vantage point, there are mistakes or prejudices with that aspect of the novel.

But still, I think that whatever George Eliot writes is propelled by this enormous moral sympathy and her capacious intelligence.