theage(melbourne)magazıne36

Words Susan Horsburgh

Photography Rodger Cummins

text & the cityYou’ve read books set in New York, London and Paris,

but what about Footscray, Brighton and Box Hill? To celebrate

this month’s writers festival, we meet five Melbourne authors

whose writing has made our city come alive.

Tony WilsonAuthor of books including Players and the upcoming

children’s story The Minister for Traffic Lights

Tony Wilson grew up “in the shadows of the Holeproof

factory” on the notorious mean streets of Balwyn. At least

that’s how he painted it when he applied for the 1998 ABC

documentary series Race Around the World. He figured the

national broadcaster would be after battlers – and the judges

would be Sydney-based – so he juggled the facts to play down

his privileged upbringing in a house 100 metres from his alma

mater, Camberwell Grammar. “There’s one factory, I reckon, in

Balwyn, which is the Holeproof factory,” he says, “so I kind of left

out all the mod-grass tennis courts between me and school.”

Wilson won the frenetic globe-trotting competition and

has since turned into something of a media renaissance man,

branching out into radio, television and writing, from sporting

memoirs to children’s books.

After his big break, an agent pushed him to move to

Sydney to further his TV career but Wilson wouldn’t budge.

“It’s very much my city,” the 34-year-old former solicitor and

Hawthorn reserves player says of Melbourne, where he has

lived all his life except for the three-month Race and one

semester of his law degree at a Montreal university in 1994.

In 2005, Wilson combined his knowledge of football,

media and Melbourne to write his first novel, Players, a Nick

Hornby-style romp about a Botoxed footballer-turned-TV

personality who fakes having cancer to redeem his popularity

after headbutting a homeless man.

Besides the Sam Newman facsimile, there’s a thinly

veiled Eddie McGuire in there as well. Gary Lyon apparently

enjoyed the book but Wilson doesn’t know whether McGuire

has read it. “I’ve been told by Trevor Marmalade that Sam

wouldn’t have read it because he doesn’t generally read,”

says Wilson.

In Players, Wilson had media and celebrity in his comedic

crosshairs – and he revisits those subjects in his second

novel, due out next year. This book, however, is about

a famous couple in a tabloid scandal, and it’s set in London.

It has to be, he says, because Melbourne doesn’t have

a true tabloid; the tricky part is that Wilson has only spent

five days of his life in London – which is why he has

planned a research mission to that city.

Wilson says Players was inspired by Frank Hardy’s

courageous and controversial 1950 novel Power Without

Glory, which skewered the establishment and gave a vivid

snapshot of Melbourne in the first half of the 20th century.

“You really get a sense of those old factories and the

gangsters running through the alleys and fights in the street

and six o’clock closing,” says Wilson. “And we’re near Smith

Street, the very heart of that book.”

Just metres away from that grungy thoroughfare,

overlooking Fitzroy’s Union Club Hotel, Wilson sits in

the messy, light-filled studio space he rents from a friend.

There’s a mattress covered with dog hair where his blue

heeler-kelpie cross Charley sleeps and hundreds of books

on his shelves: novels by Ben Elton and John Irving next

to travel guides and sporting books. He comes here after

his breakfast radio shift on Triple R and works until 6pm. If

he stayed at home with his wife, Tamsin, and six-month-old

daughter, Polly, he says, he wouldn’t get anything done.

Besides, the 40-minute walk from his North Fitzroy home

to the office is his most creative time, when he works out

where the day’s writing will take him.

Silent time in the car isn’t bad, either; Wilson was driving

along Punt Road when he came up with the idea for

The Minister for Traffic Lights, his upcoming children’s book

about a politician who invents an extra, road-rage-curing

mauve traffic light that requires people to get out of their cars

and hug their fellow motorists.

A twice-daily walk with his dog takes him through Fitzroy’s

Edinburgh Gardens, which tops his list of favourite Melbourne

places. “It really does have a feel of the community coming

together,” says Wilson, who has just bought a house in

Northcote. “There’s picnic blankets and people boozing and

fire twirlers and skateboarders and cyclists and underage

football.” It’s the parks and trams that Wilson misses most

when he’s overseas: “There’s just a really nice sound to

the city,” he says, “because of trams.”

“The giant screen was set into the shiny wall

of a three-storey bar located at the Swanston Street end

of the Square. The looping images that Billy had been

vaguely aware of proved to be a Things-to-Do photo

compilation for the City of Melbourne. He tuned in on

a fairy-lit still of a cruise down the unglamorously brown

Yarra River (it was not made clear that passengers

over six feet have to cruise stooped over for two hours,

because clearances on the bridges were engineered by

the smaller folk of another era). Next up was a nocturnal

view of the Arts Centre, with its colourfully lit spire

that sort of resembles the Eiffel Tower in the same way

that Mimi McPherson sort of resembles Elle. And coming

in at number three, the floral clock, the fragrant working

timepiece set in the lawns that ring the Botanic Gardens

– definitive proof perhaps that as far as blockbuster

tourist attractions go, Melbourne Victoria isn’t exactly

New York New York.” – Players

“ You really get a sense of

those old factories and the

gangsters running through the

alleys and fights in the street

and six o’clock closing.”

Aug_36-40_writers.indd 36Aug_36-40_writers.indd 36 4/7/07 2:10:39 PM4/7/07 2:10:39 PM

Alice PungAuthor of the memoir Unpolished Gem

Alice Pung knew the kind of book she didn’t want to write. She’d read her share of

Chinese migrant literature and was sick of the miserable Wild Swans-type stories starring

a stoic woman who faces struggle after struggle, only to find long-overdue redemption at

the end. “Why can’t you write a book about failure and despair and death where you try

and make it funny?” wonders the 26-year-old lawyer. “I didn’t go through adversity. The only

thing I conquered was head lice and scabies.” Australian-born Pung set out to tell her own

irreverent tale of migrant life in Melbourne’s western suburbs, tracing the adventures of her

Chinese-Cambodian clan in a marvellous new land of escalators, flashing walk signs and

social security payments. Heaven, her family discovers, is a place called Footscray.

Pung’s 2006 memoir, Unpolished Gem, opens with the author still in utero, her father

standing in pig’s blood and attempting to buy trotters at Footscray Market, “the only market

where you can peel and eat a whole mandarin before deciding whether to buy a kilo; where

you can poke and prod holes in a mango to check its sweetness”. Pung’s father, a survivor

of Cambodia’s killing fields, has owned an electrical appliance store in Footscray for more

than 20 years and his daughter conjures up the area as only a native can. In this suburb,

she writes, “grandmas with faces as blunt and brown as earthed potatoes hobble along

in their padded jackets” while dodgy neighbourhood boys “smash empty glass bottles on

the road for fun and terrorise the local senior citizens”.

When Pung left her family’s Avondale Heights home four years ago, she crossed a cultural

chasm, moving in to Parkville as a tutor at one of the University of Melbourne colleges. In her

new neighbourhood, coffee drinking seemed to be a full-time occupation. “My parents would

never go to cafes and order a cup of coffee, mainly because for $3 you can buy Nescafe in

a supermarket and make 10 million cups,” says Pung, who notes that an entire family could

be fed in Footscray for the price of three

coffees. “It’s not just the concept of buying

coffee; the act of sitting down and whiling

away three or four hours chatting to people is

something that my parents would never do.”

Pung’s western suburbs upbringing,

however, earned her instant street cred

when she left high school to study law at

Melbourne Uni. Armed with a steady supply

of dinner-party stories about her quirky

migrant childhood, Pung felt like a permanent

exchange student among her worldlier uni

friends. “It was cool (for them) to associate

with someone who was from that side of

the tracks but they don’t understand it’s not

a lifestyle choice: you weren’t born in the western suburbs as a kind of hip, bohemian thing,”

she recalls, laughing. “They were quite proud that they were living as ‘poor university students’

and sometimes I thought, ‘Well if you’d ever really been poor in your life you wouldn’t have

this sense of self-righteous pride in it; you’d be so ashamed of it!’”

After seeing her upbringing through the fascinated eyes of her friends, she started writing

short stories about her childhood and, when she was 22, had a piece published in the journal

Meanjin that caught the eye of an editor from publisher Black Inc. Pung, who has kept a diary

every day since she was 12, started writing the book as fiction “but then the more I wrote it the

more I couldn’t make stuff up”, she says. Armed with such anecdotes as her first perm at the

age of eight, she hardly needed to. It was a chemical attempt to cure her persistent nits and

she came out looking like a “Chinese Ronald McDonald”. She also tells of her newly arrived

mother unwittingly whipping up a stir-fry with a can of dog food and her family’s penchant for

garish home decor, including paper chains fashioned from Target brochures. She freely admits

her observations would be considered racist if they came from a writer outside her community.

It’s all in the tone: “I’ve always had to be careful because as an ethnic minority the worst thing

you can do is make people laugh at you and not with you,” says Pung, who took three-and-a-

half years to write the book while working full-time. “It’s not like Borat or anything.”

Meeting during her lunch hour at the Office of the Employment Advocate, Pung looks

every inch the prim, dutiful Asian daughter she plays in Unpolished Gem, her 150-centimetre

frame dressed in a demure polka-dot below-the-knee dress and sensible flats. Pung returns

to Footscray every week to help her dad out with his business, and it’s still the suburb

where she feels most at home. “That’s where I grew up,” she says, “and that’s where I’m

least self-conscious because a lot of people look like me.” The bookstore at the base of the

Collins Street building where Pung works has only one copy of Unpolished Gem in stock

and an assistant says the book flies off the shelf as soon as they restock. No one is more

astounded than Pung’s dad. He’s proud of his daughter, says Pung, but that doesn’t mean he

understands her success: “He said, ‘I just can’t believe that people want to read a book about

Chinese people who live in Footscray. Who’d want to read about that?’” ➔

“This is the suburb of madcap Franco Cozzo and his polished furniture, the suburb

that made Russell Crowe rich and famous for shaving his head and beating up ethnic

minorities, so it doesn’t really matter that these footpaths are not lined with gold

but dotted with coruscating black circles where people spat out gum eons ago.

‘Don’t swallow the rubber candy,’ mothers say to their kids. ‘Spit it out. Spit it out now

– that’s right, onto the ground there.’ Ah, this wondrous new country where children are

scared of dying because they have swallowed some Spearmint Wrigley’s, not because

they stepped on a condensed-milk tin filled with ammunition!’ – Unpolished Gem

“ My parents would

never go to cafes and

order a cup of coffee,

mainly because for $3

you can buy Nescafe

in a supermarket and

make 10 million cups.”

Aug_36-40_writers.indd Sec1:37Aug_36-40_writers.indd Sec1:37 4/7/07 2:10:45 PM4/7/07 2:10:45 PM

Elliot PerlmanAuthor of Three Dollars, The Reasons I Won’t be Coming

and Seven Types of Ambiguity

In Elliot Perlman’s award-winning debut novel,

Three Dollars, the main character has a solitary piece of

paternal wisdom to hand down to his newborn daughter:

“No matter where you are or what time of day it is – avoid

Punt Road.” The problem with dispensing advice in a

bestselling book, though, is that people expect you to

follow it. Now, whenever Perlman turns onto that notorious

bottleneck, he cops it from every passenger in the car.

“They start laughing and I go, ‘Oh yeah, I know, I did it’,”

says the 43-year-old barrister-turned-author. “Everybody

teases me when I end up taking Punt Road – because

sometimes you have to. Even that advice was wrong.”

Such uniquely Melbourne references have helped make

Three Dollars an enduring favourite among local readers;

so much so that earlier this year it was voted the most

popular book set in Victoria in a State Library poll. When

the film adaptation came out in 2005, Perlman learned

first-hand just how well-loved the story was. “I did various

appearances and there was such a lovely warm feeling in

the audience,” he says. “It wasn’t so much that they’d come

to some premiere but rather they felt that this was their book.

It has resonated in a way I couldn’t have expected.”

Shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award and

named The Age Book of the Year in 1998, Three Dollars tells

of a Melbourne man, Eddie Harnovey, doing it tough and

trying to retain his integrity in an age of economic rationalism.

The character finds himself on William Street wondering

how he’ll meet his next mortgage repayment, and later goes

through rubbish bins in the Bourke Street Mall. In Flagstaff

Gardens, Eddie feels the wintry blast off Port Phillip Bay.

“Alone, I stood shivering in my shirt sleeves,” writes Perlman,

“at the edge of the central business district of the biggest

small town in all the world.”

Perlman’s work has always had a strong sense of place,

with Melbourne also featuring in his 1999 collection of short

stories, The Reasons I Won’t Be Coming, and his 2003 opus,

Seven Types of Ambiguity. In Seven Types, he mentions

Chapel Street cafes and Toorak mansions, the St Kilda Pier

and Esplanade Hotel, as well as “wealthy Catholics at the

end of the line in Kew”. Perlman grew up in East Brighton

and recently bought a house in the south-eastern suburbs,

so it’s not surprising that locations in that area often make

their way into his writing. He knows his Melbourne readers

will enjoy the buzz of recognition; he remembers first

experiencing it when he read My Brother Jack as a kid.

After growing up reading books and seeing films that

were all set in other places, Perlman says he came to realise

that Melbourne was as legitimate a backdrop as any for his

stories. “There’s nothing to say that the conundrums and

dilemmas and uncertainties, fears, hopes and predicaments

that are quintessential to being human could not exist in

Melbourne,” he says. His local settings don’t seem to have

alienated foreign readers – Seven Types reached number

nine on the French bestseller list within 10 days of publication

– which makes Perlman wonder why more writers don’t set

their contemporary stories in Australian cities. “A lot of our art,

particularly our narrative art, is historical, and it’s almost as

though as a culture … we’re afraid of setting contemporary

stories firmly in urban Australia,” he says. “I think it might

be a sign of cultural immaturity.” It may also be a case of

unconscious self-editing: “You’re allowed to tell contemporary

stories set in New York or London or Paris, but not Melbourne,

and there’s no reason for that.”

Perlman returned home in January after spending four

years in New York – which might explain his lunch order of

“two fried eggs over easy” during this interview at an East

St Kilda cafe. Still weary from working on a newspaper piece

until 3am the night before, the longtime insomniac orders

a strong latte. On the table in front of him is an envelope

of documents to renew his practising certificate; although

he hasn’t taken a case in more than five years, he is still

technically a barrister and he made sure he kept up the rent

on his city chambers while he was overseas. “I’ve fortunately

got myself into a position where I think I can have the best of

both worlds if I stay in Melbourne,” he says. “I can get work

if I want to as a lawyer but also I have the freedom to write

whatever I want: screenplays and short stories and novels.”

Perlman is currently working on his fourth book, which

notably isn’t set in Melbourne, but rather America and

Europe. Living in New York, he says, gave him the confidence

to write about somewhere other than Melbourne, although

he did suffer the odd pang of homesickness while he was

there – specifically for quality coffee (“they’re drinking coffee

you wouldn’t wash your shoes in”), football (he’s a Carlton

supporter) and a decent spaghetti bolognese (he reckons

Maria Trattoria in North Melbourne does one of the best).

As expats often do, Perlman had romanticised his hometown

and it wasn’t until he moved back that he discovered the gap

between rich and poor had only widened during his absence.

Just weeks after Perlman’s return, the remains of a homeless

man were found six months after his death under a Windsor

railway bridge, dispelling the writer’s image of Melbourne as

a “kinder gentler place” than New York. “Unfortunately the

politics of Three Dollars is more relevant than ever.”

Still, despite those reservations, Perlman remains one

of Melbourne’s greatest fans. “Sydney is perhaps more

immediately, aesthetically attractive, but Melbourne has

a soul that will sustain you and nourish you, perhaps

indefinitely,” he explains. “It can be good for you to taste other

places but there’s definitely something about Melbourne that

gets its hooks into you and won’t let you go.”

“Amid the buskers, the jugglers, the lost children and

the even more lost mothers, the bored skateboarders

devastated by the realisation that their lives were not

on television, neither in a Twisties commercial nor in

a Generation X love story with Winona Ryder nor even

in the heart-warming Disney story of teenage runaways

screening at the special family time of seven-thirty,

the spruikers, Japanese tourists, truant school children,

truant office workers, tarot card readers, quasi-Gypsy

violinists, quasi-South American nylon string guitarists,

fire eaters and evangelical critics of the Family Court –

amid all of this I kept an eye out for an unwanted plastic

bag from one of the two major department stores.”

– Three Dollars

Photography Rebecca Hallas

theage(melbourne)magazıne38

Aug_36-40_writers.indd Sec1:38Aug_36-40_writers.indd Sec1:38 4/7/07 2:10:56 PM4/7/07 2:10:56 PM

Sonya HartnettAuthor of novels including Of a Boy, Trouble All the Way and Thursday’s Child

Sonya Hartnett’s stories tend to be bleak, brooding rides through violence and

depression, with the odd detour into incest, insanity and abduction – which makes eerie

suburban Melbourne, says the author, the perfect place for them. Growing up in Box Hill in

the 1970s, Hartnett used to wander the empty streets on still summer afternoons, imagining

she was the sole survivor in a post-apocalyptic world. “You’d hear a game of football being

played 10 miles away because it was so quiet,” recalls Hartnett. “Those afternoons really

coloured the way I write because they gave me an appreciation of a kind of end-of-the-world

outlook, which is what my books have when it boils down to it.”

Back then she wanted to read books about ordinary Australian kids like herself but had

to settle for imported teen fiction about US places and lifestyles she didn’t understand.

At 13, she assumed her hometown wasn’t good enough to write about – until she read Ivan

Southall’s book about a Melbourne boy, Josh, and decided to give writing a go. The result,

Trouble All the Way, was published two years later, but she insists she had no ambition to

become a writer: “As a kid growing up in Box Hill, especially a Catholic kid growing up in

Box Hill, you had no bloody right to think that you would be successful at anything like that,”

says 39-year-old Hartnett, the second of six children. “I just wrote to amuse myself because

as a kid in a big family it gave me a bit of peace and quiet and private time. I wasn’t a very

outgoing sort of kid. I just liked sitting there, creating this little world.”

Sitting on the floor of her living room, her husky-German shepherd cross, Shilo, sprawled

out beside her, Hartnett hands over a hokey-looking novel with a picture of her 15-year-old

self in school uniform on the back. Almost 25 years on, she has 17 books to her credit and

has been hailed by critic Peter Craven as “the finest Australian writer of her generation”.

Her honours include the 2002 Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize for Thursday’s Child as well

as The Age Book of the Year in 2003 for her adult novel, Of a Boy. Hartnett has lived off her

writing since she quit her part-time bookshop job four years ago; her self-discipline, however,

is waning with each passing year. She admits, rather sheepishly, that she writes in bed – “like

Elizabeth Barrett Browning” – for four hours a day at most, in between walks to Merri Creek

with Shilo, internet surfing sessions and

afternoon naps. And yet she’s prolific.

“I’m relatively fast,” she explains, “because

I don’t start until I know exactly what I’m

doing.” After marinating in her mind for

a year, her 2004 children’s story The Silver

Donkey – inspired by a statue she found

in a Ballarat antique shop – took just two

weeks to write. Usually, she can bang out

a book in two months.

After school, she earned a

communications degree from RMIT

with a view to working in television, but

discovered she didn’t care for teamwork.

“I sort of thought in the background, ‘If I

fail to find something I want to do I guess I can always write’ and that, in a way, is exactly what

happened,” she says. “It’s not that I don’t appreciate it, but I guess I don’t have a sense of real

achievement because I didn’t set out to be a writer.”

Her real passion is real estate. “I really only write books now,” she says, “so I can continue

to buy houses and do them up.” Home has ranged from Bulleen to Camberwell to Northcote,

but Hartnett has vowed never to live south of the river again. She still nurses a grudge against

South Yarra, where she was robbed while in the shower and her whippet was kicked by

a passer-by. “I guess it could happen anywhere but I found it a constantly stressful place

to live because there was no friendliness about the place,” she says. “There was just a kind

of tension and desire to impress.”

A life-long Melbourne resident, Hartnett suspects that Of a Boy was successful because

she knew its setting so intimately: although she doesn’t spell it out, she pictured the main

character, nine-year-old Adrian, living in her grandmother’s house in Balwyn. Landscape

with Animals, Hartnett’s 2006 foray into erotica under the pseudonym Cameron S. Redfern,

also made use of Melbourne locales such as Como House, Albert Park beach and the

North Fitzroy Star Hotel. Most of her books are set in Victoria, but Hartnett doesn’t mention

place names.

“I have nothing against other writers doing it – in fact, I really enjoy books specifically

set in a city now, whether or not I’ve been there – but for myself I kind of like that universal

feel.” Instead, she alludes to an Australian setting by mentioning native trees and animals, for

example, or Christmas in the heat. Some overseas publishers have even tried to excise those

details, but Hartnett is defiant. “I guess it’s a kind of revenge,” she says. “I think, ‘No way. If

I ploughed my way as a teenager through your America, your teenagers will plough their way

through my Australia.’” ➔

“The park is as empty as ever. He wonders about its perpetual state of desertedness –

it feels like a forsaken place, a rejected one. He wonders if everybody knows a terrible

truth about this land which he alone has not been told. Other times he fancies he is

the only person who’s ever realised the park lies here, that he is a boy who knows

where there’s hidden treasure. The park is enclosed by the backsides of houses, by

the dead-ended stump of road, by the fence of the local swimming pool. It is thickly

planted with trees around the edges, while the centre is a broad grassy field. The wind

sweeps the grass into rippling waves. The sunshine of the previous weekend had made

the grass long and garish lime, and yesterday or the day before the council man has

come to cut it. In summer, when the grass is dry, Adrian builds fragrant huts from

armfuls of mown clippings; now, soggy with the beginnings of winter, the flecks of

green stick to his jeans and clag in wads to the soles of his desert boots.”

– Of a Boy

“ I found it a constantly

stressful place to live

because there was

no friendliness about

the place. There was just

a kind of tension and a

desire to impress.”

Aug_36-40_writers.indd Sec1:39Aug_36-40_writers.indd Sec1:39 4/7/07 2:11:00 PM4/7/07 2:11:00 PM

theage(melbourne)magazıne40

Kate HoldenAuthor of the memoir In My Skin

When Kate Holden last lived in St Kilda, she mutated from a middle-class arts

graduate into a heroin-addicted hooker – an ordeal she documented in her 2005 bestseller,

In My Skin – so it’s curious that she’s moved back to a place with so many dark memories.

She thinks it’s probably nostalgia: “Maybe,” she muses, “I wanted to recover some of the

good things that I liked about the scene and myself.”

These days she’s a full-time writer and can’t afford to live near the water; instead she’s

in a two-bedroom apartment on the other side of St Kilda Road, the drag where she started

as a street prostitute in the 1990s. Holden doesn’t go to Acland Street much, but when she

does, it’s not the St Kilda she recalls. “I always have this really strange sense that I’m totally

an intruder in St Kilda these days, I’m just another tourist, but on the other hand I’m like,

‘I totally owned these streets! I’m the most famous ex-hooker in St Kilda; I expect to be

recognised on the street!’” she says, laughing. “I feel totally anonymous. It’s like going back to

visit an old friend who’s forgotten who you are.”

The first time she went back to her old beat – the block bordered by St Kilda Road and

Inkerman, Carlisle and Barkly streets – she found she couldn’t walk straight. It was daytime

but she was somehow transported back to the smack-addled nights a decade ago when

she was sick and exhausted. “My whole balance was gone and I was just kind of stumbling

down the street,” she says. “It was this total disorientation about ‘Is it now or was it then?’

Then this car pulled up and said, ‘Hey baby’. I was like, ‘Oh my God’; I just kept walking.”

Now her evenings are more likely to be spent rubbing shoulders with literary types

– like the recent second birthday party for The Monthly magazine, where she ran into two

ex-boyfriends. “There were a lot of people wearing heavy-framed glasses and smart black

jackets and they were very pleased with themselves,” she says, her black fingernails wrapped

around a rollie cigarette at St Kilda’s Galleon cafe. “It was awful, actually.”

Blame second-book syndrome, a recent 35th birthday or the ghastly media party

the night before, but Holden is cranky. Entertaining, but cranky. She has just submitted

the manuscript of her first novel – a ghost story set in contemporary England – and is

suffering some performance anxiety about the switch from memoir to fiction: “I wish I’d

never mentioned to anyone I was writing a goddamn novel, it’s terrible.” Nevertheless, she is

already kicking around another book idea, this one about expat artists living in 18th-century

Rome contrasted with a modern woman’s romantic disillusionment.

Besides her memoir, she has only ever written one short story set in Melbourne. “I think

it’s too close,” says Holden, who left in late 2001 to live overseas for a year, in Rome and

Shanghai. “I just don’t feel like I have any perspective or authority to describe Melbourne

life.” Now that she has settled in the city and stopped plotting a move overseas, though,

the idea is more appealing. In fact, she wishes she’d been more specific about locations

in In My Skin, but at the time she was intensely aware that her book was exposing a secret

side of Melbourne that relied on anonymity. She also avoided place names for the sake of

non-Melbourne readers. Not that she dared to hope for international success: “You’re there

in your bedroom in a corner of your parents’ house on Austudy on a fifth-hand laptop going,

‘Well, this’ll be hilarious if anyone actually ever reads it.’”

More than 40,000 did, and she now has a fortnightly column in The Age. The constant

hunt for ideas has thrown her into “a semi-permanent state of terror”, she says, but it has also

made her cast a more observational eye over Melbourne. Take Caulfield, for example, where

her parents are about to sell her childhood home. “When I was a kid, it wasn’t cheap but it

was friendly and there were lots of very happy Greek families with goats tethered in the front

garden,” says Holden, who is doing a master’s degree in creative writing. “Now it’s just full of

a lot of anxious, middle-aged yuppies with heritage colours on their houses.”

St Kilda, she says, has also lost some of its diversity: “I know there are still lots of crazy,

interesting people around, but they just seem to be eclipsed by the hordes in gigantic

sunglasses.” Holden is happy to be one of the suburb’s best-known residents, even

an unofficial spokeswoman for the Melbourne sex industry, but she’s ready to explore

other territory in her work as well. “I would like to end up being like, a writer,” she says,

“rather than the girl who wrote the hook book.” (m)

The Age Melbourne Writers Festival starts on August 24. See www.mwf.com.au

“St Kilda was famous for its art deco flats and glossy cafes and bars, its well-loved

old pubs; the foreshore, the craft market, the seaside kiosks; the ferals and the

beautiful people; the strange characters and the bland crowds of tourists. At that time

it was still cheap enough for students to live there, in tattered but elegant old flats in

leafy streets, around the corner from the main street and the beach and the parks and

each other. On weekends people came in from all over town; at night the place had

certain streets where girls wore very little, even in winter, and there were cars going

around and around. St Kilda was full of artists, bohemians, rich people, music,

sex and drugs. Suddenly I was in the middle of things. There were late nights

staggering home from the pub, days of bumping into my friends in the street and going

off for long afternoons of coffee and pool. Parties where I knew everyone. I was kissed

up against walls, missed classes because I was in bed with a lanky, dreadlocked

boy. We all had our noses pierced.” – In My Skin

Photography Darren James

Aug_36-40_writers.indd 40Aug_36-40_writers.indd 40 4/7/07 2:11:16 PM4/7/07 2:11:16 PM