“The haunting of Poe Ballantine,” by Eve Jeffrey
Ballantine is looking forward to both the country and the event but says he doesn’t know what to expect from the wide brown land.
’My knowledge of your country is shamefully scant,’ says Poe. ’I grew up reading the art critic Robert Hughes in Time Magazine and I’ve just finished for the second time The Great Australian Loneliness, one of the best books ever written. I don’t know if Ernestine Hill is still in the conversation; she’s not politically correct and it’s said that she once incited a phantom gold rush, but her hundred-thousand-mile excursion port to port through the outback and across the vast and merciless deserts with little more than a swag and a typewriter is my kind of stuff.
’Her description of Australia in the 1930s makes the settling of the American West look tame by comparison. Some of her paragraphs contain more than most contemporary novels. I’m also currently enjoying The Mary Smokes Boys, a quite good and very distinctive novel by Queenslander Patrick Holland. Reading his work I’m again left with the feeling that Australia might well be another planet.’
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