Authors share stories at Writers’ Week

Writers Week in Adelaide was once more a smorgasbord of talented writers and I indulged in the unique atmosphere and being inspired by some of the world’s best authors. It now unfolds annually in the Pioneer Women’s Memorial Garden, a glorious treed space behind Government House – and the whole magnificent event is free.

Celebrated UK biographer Anne de Courcy spoke at the Booklovers’ Breakfast at Government House on an idyllic Sunday about her book The Fishing Fleet: Husband Hunting in the Raj, a fascinating account of the young women sent out from England to India to find a husband. It was quite a trade of mainly English girls from the 1600s to 1890s to overcome a surplus of women, who sailed with the instruction “find yourself a husband’’.

“It was terribly important in Victorian times for women who had very very few opportunities for careers that they were expected to get married and have children,’’ said Anne.

“As late as the 1930s Australian girls were also fishing girls who travelled from Adelaide to India to seek out a husband in the Raj.”

Another British writer, wearing centuries of upper class breeding, was an extraordinary writer Edward St Aubyn, the author of a five-book series triggered by an horrific event in his young life.

When I took my place under the blue shadecloth attractively strung between huge shady trees, I knew nothing about him, but the blurb which stated that his series (written over 20 years) chronicled the life of fictional Patrick Melrose, scion to a wealthy English family. What unfolded in conversation with Michael Cathcart, was the fact that Edward’s stories, although fictional, were triggered by the real life horrific fact that his father raped him as a young teenager. The series began with Never Mind and at Writers Week, he spoke of his last book, to bring it all to a close – At Last – his fifth.

UK author Edward St Aubyn shares his own childhood experiences.

In between entwined in Patrick’s story is the harrowing tale of Edward’s own heroin addiction, his recovery and closure fictionalised in the three middle books.

On Tuesday, I was up with the kookaburras to see my dear friend and renowned journalist, Samela Harris chair the session with Australian biographer Brenda Niall, whose biography True North: The Story of Mary and Elizabeth Durack, is the latest in some renowned biographies.

It was fascinating – sitting in the glorious Pioneer Women’s Garden – to hear an unknown story of two Australian women. Niall had access to many letters and Durack family papers to create intimate portraits of Perth in the 1920s, the Kimberley and the two sisters’ lives as artist and mothers.

Brenda, an older woman, is best known for her work on the Boyd family of artists and writers, including the biography Martin Boyd.

Of course, in our foodie culture, Writers Week would not be complete without a foodie writer..and I hung on every word of Steven Poole, a UK writer whose book You Aren’t What You Eat scotched our food society, slated food fads, took the Mickey out of food celebrities and decried what he called “too much gastroporn’’.

“Jamie Oliver calls just about every ingredient “this is sexy’,”, says Steven.”

“We have fantasised tothe point where it is more porn than eroticism.” (More on Steven Poole in my Foods blog.)

Be Sociable, Share!