Tony Birch

The point here being that everyone, again, that I knew that read it, my parents and their generation, they loved the book for a very different reason.

One is it was their turf.

Collingwood and Fitzroy was their turf.

And the great contradiction is when, whereas Hardy's critical of poor man makes good, when I was a kid, your parents would walk you through Collingwood, up Johnson Street, up the hill, look at that grand mansion and say, I want to live here.

So everyone admired Wren for the fact that he'd become very rich.

He was a great benefactor of the community.

And also the sites in that book, literally the locations.

You could go around with the book in hand and visit the SP bookmaking shop, visit the church.

So, again, it was locations that people understood.

It made the book real for them.

In other words, although it's a work of fiction, it's a place that they were invested in with their own story.

And it is a very important book politically in that it looks at issues like the important referendum campaigns of 1916 where Archbishop Daniel Mannix was opposed to...

the referendum, conscription of Australian troops in the First World War, and that tension between Mannix and other figures in the trade unions, in the Labor Party, et cetera.

So it is a very important book about what you might call Victorian politics as well.

Oh, it's a major book.

I mean, just to give a bit of context, my first tutoring job at Melbourne University was probably 1992, 1993.

And we were running a course on Aboriginal literature.

And it was very hard to get a 12-week list together of published work.

Obviously, there's a lot of Aboriginal writing that was never published.

So it was hard to get enough material.