#2 The Glenroy novels with Steven Carroll

Steven Carroll's novel The Time We Have Taken is the third book in a trilogy about a family living in an outer Melbourne suburb from the 1950s through to 1970. The Moreland suburb of Glenroy is the inspiration for his semi-autobiographical novels.

In 2008 The Time We Have Taken won the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best Book‚ South−East Asia and South Pacific region as well as the 2008 Miles Franklin Award. The other books in the trilogy, The Art of the Engine Driver and The Gift of Speed, were both shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award.

About Steven Carroll's talk

Steven reads from each of his  'Glenroy Novels' - The Time We Have Taken, The Art of the Engine Driver and The Gift of Speed.  Steven described talks about how and why he wrote about the suburb of Glenroy, where he grew up, and the theme of yearning and becoming that threads through all three novels.

The talk is 40 minutes long. It was recorded at Coburg Library on 7 November 2008.

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Transcript of the talk

Steven Carroll: I'll start by reading a section from the book that kicked off the whole trilogy and then just going back and just explaining how the whole series of books came about and how they were written. So I’ll just start reading. I won't explain anything but once I start talking I’ll explain things then. This is the engine driver in question, Vic, at his peak as an engine driver.

“Vic can visualise the scene in the cabin. The gauges are all lit up before him in the night. The speed, the steam, the air pressure. All there before him. But he never reads them. Driving is a gift. Physical. Something you’ve either got or you haven’t. Some drivers watch the needles bobbing about in front of them all night, the needles, the gauges and all the numbers. They drive by the book, but he threw the book away the first night he got in the cabin and sat in the driver’s seat.

You can stick your numbers and gauges. I don’t trust them. I never have and I never will. Oh, you can drive by the book. Take the curves and the descents at regulation speed and you’ll arrive on time and everybody will call you a good driver. But a great driver drives with his fingertips and his arms, his shoulders, his stomach, the back of his neck, his intestines, his entrails and toes. You don’t need gauges. You body is full of them. It’s telling you what you need to know all the time but only a few listen. And that’s the difference between a good driver and a great one. The great drivers listen.

When I’m out there in the night, in the rainy hills and the soaked cuttings and there’s another train coming towards me, its headlights making a yellow path through the forest and clouds, I know within seconds if I’m watching a great driver. By the speed of the controlled daring or the way a driver prepares for a sudden clean descent. The great drivers will leave their individual stamp all over the move. They won't be reading gauges. They’ll be listening to their bodies and listening to the engine. And all the time, all through the journey as they scatter the cattle and the low mist before them, the boast will be and the boast will be true, that the full metal mug of tea sitting beside the driver’s seat was never once disturbed.

Driving begins with shaving once, then twice. A good sharp razor. You can't drive without a clean face. When you come to the curves and bends, lean out of the window and turn your face to the wind, and the air on your cheek will tell you all you need to know. It will tell you the speed of the engine more accurately than any instrument. If it’s too fast or too slow. Then look down to the sleeper flying past beneath you and pay attention to what your eyes and the clean-shaven side of your face tell you.

There are times, coming down through the mountains with a train load of ballast me, when I forget the instrument panel altogether, forget the speed regulation notices by the side of the rails along the way and take all the winding curves that lead down into a waiting station by feel alone. The trees are rushing by in the night. A train is creeping and groaning behind me as the way it shifts from side to side and I can feel the wind on one cheek and the glow of the furnace on the other as the forest parts and the low clouds get out of the way. The speed regulation signs go by so fast I couldn't read them if I wanted to.

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Then when we hit the incline I always knew was there because the first thing you do in this game is learn the roads and gradients by heart. The engine hums up the hill and takes one mighty wallop. And we take that last ride down onto the plain using the wide sweeping curve of the rails to slow the train. And by the time we hit the flat that leads into the station we’re back to regulation speed again. No one knows how I do it and I am not telling. It’s my business. All I can say is it’s like dancing. We never doubted that your feet would take you where you wanted them to be. That’s driving too where you don’t do it by following the book.

I know the guard has been hanging on to seat back there in the van and the stationmaster slowly shaking his head in the light of his lamp as we ease into the platform because he heard us roaring down through the hills like we were going to take the whole station with us. From thereon in it’s flat land and level track. In a few hours the sky starts to lighten. Yellow and rose and we’re driving into the best part of the day. The part nobody sees. The city laid out before us, wide and flat. Street after street, front yard after front yard. In the distance I’ll see my own suburb, picture my house, my family asleep inside. I’ll sleep through the day then rise in the afternoon, wash and shave, fill my bag and tinned stew, tobacco, cakes of yellow soap and swathes. All in readiness for the night again, for the hills, the curves, the cuttings and the stations that will stay lit up because they know we’re out there”.

Well, that’s just Vic reflecting on the whole business of driving. And I should add my Dad actually was a train driver and I’ll get onto it later on how, I suppose, moved all of that stuff. But what I’d like to do is just take you back to how it all started. It was the late 90s. I was about to start a book on T.S. Elliot, who visited Burnt Norton in 1934 with his Boston sweetheart of 20 years before, and I was pretty darn fired up for the book. But then pretty soon after that I woke up one morning about six and I just had this quite extraordinary dream. It’s not apparently common but no unusual for a dream to actually kick-start a book.

John Fowles, the English novelist, in his journals wrote about having a recurring dream. When he woke up and he could see this woman standing at the end of a jetty looking out to sea and with her back turned to the land and you could tell from her manner of dress that it was some time in the mid-nineteenth century, the 1860s or 70s and that that was turned on the land and the town in a kind of reproach on both the land and the time. And the dream came back again and again. And he put aside the novel he was going to write and he followed that dream and he eventually came up with a novel called the French Lieutenant’s Woman which was all about Victorian sexuality and all about that woman who was the outsider figure.

My dream was far more local. It was what we would now call virtual, I suppose. It was so clear it was cinematic. And in the dream I could see my Dad, who is now dead, and my Mum and myself, roughly around about the age of ten or 11. And it was so clear that I almost felt like I could just, sort of, walk up and just, sort of, touch my Dad’s shoulder. They were that solid. They were that real. And the dream felt urgent. The quality of it had urgency written into it. And so I thought, wow, okay. And we were dressed in our best clothes. My Mum in a dress that was, as always, just a bit too good for the street. And my Dad in his white shirt and me ... it’s funny how dreams work but I could actually ... I’d forgotten I had a favourite shirt with a button-downed collar when I was about 11 but the dream actually retrieved it and brought it back.

And I remember in the course of the dream actually thinking, yes, oh I’d forgotten that shirt. And it was the full cliché too because there was ... I handwrite when I write first of all into notebooks and then transpose to the laptop. In the dream there was writing going across the film of the image of that group of three. And I could see where we were. And by the way, some of those words actually got into the opening paragraph of the book, that came out of the dream. And I could see where we were. We were standing on a dirt road which I knew to be my old street in Glenroy. I could tell from the look of the street basically when it was. It was 1956, 1957, roughly around about then. We were dressed in our best clothes. We were standing by a vacant paddock with swaying grass and it was a kind of tableau vivant (living picture). It was like sculpture. Not unlike those sculptures you’d see in Sydney now at Tram Stop. They were like that.

And I was looking at them thinking, wow, where were we going? And I remembered that the Englishman held for his daughter’s engagement at the bottom of the street. And so I thought, well, I’ll take them to the engagement which was the original part of the novel and I’ll see what happens when I take them there and from the moment I thought that I also thought, well, why not take the whole street and the moment that thought occurred to me all these doors flew open and all the people, all the houses, the places I kicked around in, the people I knew, the friends that I had, the neighbours; they all suddenly stepped out. It was crystal clear. Stepped out from their doorways. Stepped out, walked up their driveways and just walked into my novel and it was effortless.

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I’ve got a special affection because the book became The Art of the Engine Driver eventually. And I’ve got a special affection for it because it was the book that I felt least like a writer, I suppose is the best way of putting it. All the other books I felt like a writer when I was writing them. Oh, I’m a writer. This one, of course I was a writer, and I was writing but I felt the whole ... the whole idea of artifice, of artfully creating something was less apparent to me than in any other book and I suppose that’s why I’ve got a lot of affection for it. It’s the one that came most naturally for me. 

So that became the start of the book from which I had no title for it at all at this stage. But, I suppose, already in my mind it was becoming a kind of suburban Under Milkwood you know where you actually go into the lives of people on a street. It became a street novel. And so it’s the first 180 pages of the book you’ve basically got, for those who haven’t read it, but for the first 180 pages of the book, it’s basically me and my cast of characters walking down the street to a party at the bottom of the street. And that’s it. That’s the action for the first 180 pages. And that’s why it was rejected by just about every publisher in the country. They all said, “You can't do that. You cannot have a book in which there is absolutely no action going on in the first 180 pages. It’s just not on”.

But eventually someone did take it up and I actually like to say that as often as possible just in case they’re out there. Any occasion I get, never forget. And eventually I actually brought in the whole sort of notion of the train. It eventually became called The Art of the Engine Driver but there were no trains in it until the third draft, until oddly when I went to France for about three months to write. Friends of mine say, “You mean you actually got money to go to France to write about Glenroy?” And I say, “Yeah, I actually did” you know, because I had to, sort of, bullshit a bit but, you know, I got it, you know.

Just before I went to France to write at least half the book, I was talking to a friend of mine who grew up in Glenroy as well and his father was also an engine driver. I was explaining this absolutely ridiculous subplot that I did have.

We’d had a few beers at this stage and I said, “What do you think of the subplot?” And he said, “I really like it”. And then that was the end of that conversation. Then he said, “You know what you ought to do? You ought to take that whole narrative of the Southern Aurora and bring that into the book but you’ll have to play around with history with it”. And I thought, what a great idea. I couldn’t bring the Southern Aurora in because that would have changed ... the Southern Aurora crashed in about 1968. I’ve got the train crashing in 1957. But then to actually transpose the whole book to 1968 I would have lost the whole idea of a frontier suburb and the whole idea of capturing a suburb at its point of birth which was ... it came to be quite central to me as I was writing the book.

And so I actually wrote about the Spirit of Progress. One of the first things I did when I went to France was actually write the whole story of that train journey because as the people are walking down to the party on that same night the Spirit of Progress is leaving Melbourne for its overnight to Sydney at the same time and it’s diesel, at the same time as a steam driven goods train is leaving Wodonga on its overnight haul to Melbourne. In the course of the night the two trains collide and it has ramifications for most people on the street. So eventually action did enter the story. And by the way there’s a whole sort of debate at the moment about history and one’s responsibilities to history. 

I think we do owe history the nod, you know, unless you’re consciously playing around with it and you’re consciously using it in a way that is quite clear in the book. You know, I think we certainly ... I was trained as an historian. So I’ve got a certain respect for facts. I think facts exist. But I played around with facts in this one because the Spirit of Progress never crashed. I figured in the end the temptation to actually crash a train called the Spirit of Progress proved to be absolutely irresistible and so it did, in fact, happen in the book, although it never really happened in fact.

And so after about 10 months I had the first draft of a novel but then it was called The Engagement Party. I eventually, in France actually, came up with the title of The Art of the Engine Driver because amongst lots of other influences I’ve always loved that kitchen soup realism of 1950s British writing, you know, of people like Alan Sillitoe, and as well as lots of other stuff too. But I’ve always loved that unlikely lyricism of the title of one of his long short stories called The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner. It’s a wonderful story. It’s a wonderful title. And I thought I’d love to have a title like that. So I played around and eventually came up with what a hopeless, a kind of unlikely linking of two things, art and engine drivers. And that eventually became the title which I thought of in France.

But when I started writing the book I tried to write in a traditional way of a beginning, a middle and an end but it wasn’t working. It was dull to write. It was dull for me to write. It was dull to reread after I’d finished the writing and I thought, oh God if it’s dull to me no one else is going to read it. So then I made a list of about 30 different ... and I thought, no, I also thought this is ridiculous. I am really quite excited about this book, you know. You know, the dream just hummed inside me and I was thinking, God, I’ve got to get into that dream and write it. And so what I eventually did was write down a list of about 30 scenes, if you like, pictures, ideas. Wrote them all down in no particular order, the things that actually excited me in terms of writing the book. I just wrote them in any old order. And that was one of them. And I had no idea how it was going to fit in the book and by the end of about seven or eight months I had about 50,000 words of writing but I didn’t know where they were all going to go.

And the task then was to actually arrange those scenes in some sort of narrative sequence that actually made sense to the reader and the reader could actually hold on to. And that was a bit of a job. I eventually wound up at 100,000 words for The Art of the Engine Driver and chopped out 40,000 because in the end there was just too much there. There was quite a bit of, sort of, fur on the floor, if you like, when the editing process really came into play.

Being in France I got a bit ... for a lot of the book, you know, I got a bit of distance too. There was one ... in fact, there was one chapter that actually was a direct result of just being somewhere else because I had a studio at the top floor of the Town Hall in this little village called Pont-Aven in Brittany. It was a post-impressionist town. It’s where Paul Gaugin and Van Gogh and they all used to go there and just get drunk and paint and fight in the summer. It’s a French custom. And I was up the top there and I was looking down on the town one Friday night and I said, “Gee, what a pretty cool sophisticated sort of bunch” you know. And I was thinking they’re just as big a bunch of pisspots as we are, you know. They do it with style but they’re just as big of drunks as we are.

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And I started thinking about the 6 o’clock swill which was ... the regulations were still in play when the book was set. You’re familiar with the 6 o'clock swill; aren’t you? Yeah. And I started thinking about that and I thought well how do I explain that to a .Frenchman? And then I thought well do I explain this to the people in Australia? You know, the sheer barbarity of it. And so I wrote a whole chapter, which is in the book, the very next morning, and spent the whole day writing it, called The Six O'clock Swill. It was written in bits is what I’m saying. And it took a long time to actually string it all together and bring all the narrative strands together to the point where I felt like I had a novel flow from a ... had a middle and had an ending.

So it was unusual for me because the two books that came afterwards were kind of different. But it wasn’t until I actually finished, I’d say about the second draft, that I started thinking in terms of the suburbs and the suburbs as a subject for fiction because I think ... I think it’s reasonable to say that our stock in trade with Australian literature is usually the rural frontier, your hard do-it types in a desert landscape or a harsh environment being tested or either just coming through a failing but with honour and phlegmatic types to boot. But I think it’s ... and that’s fine. I think it’s fair to say we also have neglected the suburban frontier.

And that’s when I really started getting excited about the idea of a trilogy of books after I’d finished The Art of the Engine Driver thinking, well, maybe this is not the end. Maybe what I’ve got here is a chronicle of a post-war suburb, something from around about mid‑1950s right through to the 1970s which was when I left the suburbs. And that was then. It was after that I actually started planning then for the second book, The Gift of Speed and then for the final one The Time We Have Taken.

The Art of the Engine Driver begins with that dream that I described. The idea, I might also emphasise was, it wasn’t a calculated decision, as you can tell, to write about the suburb and to write about the people in my old street. I was just writing about the place that I cared about and people that I remembered with care. Well, that doesn’t mean it’s rose‑tinted either because there’s a lot barbarity from brutal memories of those times too. They were tough times yet there’s a lot that was enough to make you feel great affection for it as well.

And what I wanted to do in the book and in the trilogy, and probably I took my cue from the dream, was to actually give my old street and in the people in my old street a night of immortality, if you like. Frozen, if I can phrase it like this, in the aspic of literature. So they will always have a life that readers can go through and find that life. It was there but so much of it has vanished now. And that’s why the books are written, all of them, in the present tense. The people in the books, I think it’s fair to say, are all quite deeply unhappy. I don’t think there’s a particularly happy character in the whole three novels.

And to an extent it’s because they’re all in a sort of frank and constant state of becoming. They yearn towards some state of perfect being where they imagine they’ll have happiness or they’re looking back to some state of perfect being they once occupied and which gave them happiness but all the time they miss the moment of their life, the here and now of existence, the sheer miracle of the fact that we are existing right now in this combination of us and place and time. Will never happen again. It’s mind boggling just to contemplate that the characters in the book miss it because they’re either looking forward or looking back and that’s why the books are in the present tense. And hopefully the books by pointing out and dwelling on the moment excessively, you know, pages and pages of just a moment, by dwelling on the moment, will alert the reader to the significance of the moment and the way that the characters are not alerted and hopefully the reader will actually come away from the readings of the books with some sort of sense of the significance of moments in life.

So it was to actually ... that was part and parcel ... it became a theme that was running through the books and that was mirrored in much wider themes, social themes which I’ll get onto in a tick. I’m going to just do a short reading now because the only person in the whole three books who actually ... it struck me when I’d finished them, who actually is in the moment and deeply in the moment is one of the characters in the second novel.

Now, this one is set in 1960-61. It’s called The Gift of Speed. It’s set during the West Indies cricket tour of Australia. I have seen people pick the book up, read the blurb, realise that cricket it the subject and just put it straight down again. Cricket, if I can put it this way, is the metaphor. All of these terms becoming, yearning, progress, speed, they’re all the same thing. They’re all about yearning, going towards a certain condition out there and the missing of the moment. Cricket is, in this one, the metaphor for that. Now, the only character who’s really in the moment is the Captain of the West Indies cricket team, Frank Worrell, and he’s portrayed throughout the whole book.

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In fact, I did no research for Frank Worrell whatsoever. All I did, I remember there was a Yates poem, W B Yeates poem, the Long-Legged Fly and in this poem he describes moments of inspiration. I think it’s Caesar, Helen of Troy and somebody else. There’s three of them anyway. And that moment of almost reception, of genius, is likened to a long-legged fly crossing a stream, “Like a long-legged fly upon the steam his mind moves upon silence”. And, of course, it’s the surface tension that allows the fly to walk across the stream. For some reason I made the connection between that poem and Frank Worrell because Frank Worrell was the first black captain of the West Indies. And when he toured Australia with his side he knew full well he was playing more than cricket. It was a diplomatic mission as much as anything else. He, more or less, as well as playing cricket, had to kind of walk on water. A fly can walk on water but for a man it’s a bit more difficult, only one known sighting so far.

And so he’s very alone but very much in the moment and what I’m going to read is a section of someone who is deeply in the moment and it’s set at the MCG, at the end, the final test when the Frank Worrell Trophy was first presented. It’s called “Frank Worrell sheds his loneliness”. 

“Amid the swirling hum of the arena the crackle of the loud speakers, the metallic rattle of the applause, Frank Worrell was alone. He has been alone throughout the summer but now he is at the point of shedding his loneliness. It is late in the afternoon. The match is completed, series over. The crowd, men in suits, women in floral hats and best dresses, boys and girls in school uniforms, fills the arena. In the years to come more people will claim to have been here on this afternoon at the MCG than could possibly have been but, in a sense, it is true and in a sense it would be right for everyone to say they were there the day Frank Worrell shed his loneliness.

He is alone when the metallic rattle of applause ceases. He is still alone when the slight figure of Bradman steps up to the microphone with a trophy in his hand while the Australian captain stands beside him in the shadows of the stand. The Australian captain whose eyes miss nothing and whose eyes are still on duty even though the tour is over. And even when Worrell steps to the microphone and stopped before he can speak by a chorus of song and three loud emphatic cheers that could be heard for miles outside the ground on this calm, summer afternoon, he has still not yet shed his loneliness.

But when he finally speaks his voice is fragile in a way it has not been all summer. His words are good, delivered with all the grace of a perfect stroke. One that is written into a moment and brings to the world the stepped in beauty of a perfect act but the voice is fragile. It is fragile because the loneliness is leaving him. And as he speaks to the crowd the loneliness departs word by word but it does not finally leave him until he turns to the Australian captain, his offering in hand, the captain cap which he hands to Benaud is, he says, his skull, a small white necktie that follows, his neck, his deep crimson blazer, the upper half of his body.

He does not offer the lower half of his body because his legs are too tired to be of use to anyone. Frank Worrell hands the items to the Australian captain, and this, written into the moment for all to recall for ever after, throughout all the summers that would follow, is his final gift. The gift of grace. He hands them all to the Australian captain and steps back into the shadows of the stand. With the cap, the scarf and the blazer he is also handing over the weight of the summer, that part of him that couldn't be shared until now. As the weight of the cap, the scarf and blazer leave him so to does the loneliness”.

It struck me a long time after I’d finished the book, it was possibly when I’d finished part three, he was the only one who was actually seriously in the moment and to an extent he’s captive of the moment. And remains that way right through until the end of the book.

Now, I’m going to sort of digress a little bit because obviously by stage that I’d started and was writing The Gift of Speed ... and the challenge in lots of ways too was to actually with each book I had to have a kind of ... a device, a strategy, if you like, to actually hold the books together because in most cases you’ve got about seven or eight narratives running through each of them. In the first one it came with the dream. It was, if you like, an Aristotelian narrative, like Aristotle when wrote the poetics talked about all proper drama was contained with 24 hours. Go outside the 24 hour time frame and you’re stretching people’s credibilities.

And, of course, that’s fallen by the way about 2,000 years ago or whatever. It sets this kind of cautionary tale anyone who actually wants to make up noise about what writing is about and what it’s not about.

Famous comment by Somerset Maugham, something alone the lines of the three golden rules when writing a novel – unfortunately nobody remembers what they are. And I think it’s quite true. The rules you make up yourself are the rules that matter in the end but with the The Art of the Engine Driver I used the Aristotelian framework. It’s a Saturday night – Sunday morning novel. It might sound restricting but it actually ... it gave a tremendous amount of freedom because I could go back, you know, 40 and 50 years to when the characters were born because you get into your heads or I could go, forward, forwards in 50 years, to the day that they would die that they don’t know about yet but it’s all wrapped around that sort of immortal moment of the night in the dream.

So that was my structure for The Art of the Engine Driver. The Gift of Speed it all revolved around the tour. There are five parts to the book and each one relates to a specific event in one of the tests. And they’re not huge events and sometimes it’s just Frank Worrell playing the perfect cover drive and that, sort of, became redolent of so many themes in the book that that becomes the event around which, you know, 80 pages are built. And it was kind of great because I could actually set each of the five parts throughout the summer of The Gift of Speed on a specific day and sometimes a specific afternoon because that was when the events actually took place in the Test Match.

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The third part, The Time We Have Taken ... oh, I should say The Art of the Engine Driver starts with that dream, part three goes full circle and finishes with that dream. That whole notion of time comes very strongly into play. And I had trouble doing part three because I couldn't work out just how to bring all the stories together and until I read an absolute doorstopper of a book by an Austrian writer called Robert Musil. It’s a book called The Man without Qualities and it’s all set in 1913 at the end of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and it’s all about Franz Joseph’s final year, his 50^th anniversary, and the whole society of when it actually becomes incredibly taken up, absorbed, utterly absorbed with planning the celebrations for Franz Joseph. It’s 1930 and it’s a magnificent portrait of a society backing in from the abyss of 1914. A whole society looking backwards, looking in the wrong direction of a pivotal moment in history. And I thought that’s a great idea. I’ll grab that.

And instead of having a European celebration I just manufactured this idea of someone saying, oh, let’s call the suburb a hundred years old and revolve the whole book around the centenary celebrations of the suburb and it just so happened that it was coincident with the rise of Whitlam and the whole Whitlam era. And so you’ve got ... in many ways it was a portrait of a suburb, absorbed with the past, backing into the enormous change that was about to happen. So the book is set just as the Whitlam wave is about to hit. And I got that from Musil. So, you know, you’ve got to steal things wherever you find them. You know, there’s a lot of stuff up for grabs. I think T S Eliot said something to the effect of, “the mediocre poets borrow but the great poets steal”. And I’m not claiming to be a great poet but I am a thief. 

Now, I’m going to finish up fairly shortly because I think I’ve actually been talking long enough. There’s lots of other things I could about. I suppose, the main thing I want to talk about is when I said to people eventually, look I’m actually kind of writing a chronicle of a post-war suburb, you could sort see their eyes dropping and, yeah, God, suburb. The constant challenge the whole way through is to actually reinvent the suburb. Now, usually when we deal with the suburbs it’s TV or it’s stereotype or it’s ... you know, and that’s fine. I don’t mind doing that, you know, or it’s patronising too. I mean, you know, it’s one of the things ... I’m not a great fan of Patrick White. You know, I concede he’s a pretty good writer, Nobel Prize and all that but I’ve never liked the patronising, high art modernist approach to ordinary people. I’ve always thought that was just a bit much.

So it’s not just ... it’s not just comedy and sitcom that actually popularises the suburbs. In lots of ways literature ... high art literature has done that as well. Which is why actually when I first read George Johnston, when I first read My Brother Jack, and I pay homage to My Brother Jack and George Johnston in The Time We Have Taken. When I first read that I thought, oh wow, this is interesting. This is familiar. This is my world dumped in a way that is literary, is literary fiction. I could see how you could use the whole, sort of, world of brick veneer homes and crappy milk bars and all that sort of stuff and how it could actually become fiction. How you could use it.

Reading My Brother Jack was a really pivotal moment. There were all sorts of challenges and actually kind of reinventing the suburb, to make them into the thing that we actually don’t think they are or that make them look unfamiliar, many, many other strategies. I was lucky that I had the dream because in the dream everything had a surreal glow to it. Everything looked not quite real. Everything had a kind of a glow of eternity about it, if you like. And that became kind of my key in. A part of me had no trouble in actually reimagining the suburb as literary fiction. A part of me had to work very, very hard at it but the dream actually gave me a way in and in the end I think what I was hoping for was for the reader to actually ... the act of reading the book to be synonymous with someone like an archaeologist picking up an ancient urn and brushing the dust off it and twirling it around and reading in illustrated form, the story of this lost fantastic tribe and just wondering who this fantastic exotic tribe could have been or at some stage during the reading of the urn realising that that lost fantastic tribe was, in fact, us and that we so easily overlook the exotic in ourselves and go looking for it other places when it’s right here under our feet.

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And I’m just going to finish. Now, what I’m going to do is just finish up now by reading the final part. It’s not a thriller. I’m going to read the last three pages of The Time We Have Taken. 

“The time we have taken is no more or less than it takes for a dreamer to roll over and bed and awake from a dream. No more or less time than it takes for a suburb to be born and grow with streets and footpaths and scooped out of the paddocks of old farms and wild thistle country. No more or less time than it takes for a factory to appear, flourish and fall into decline because time has moved on. No more or less time than it takes for summer to come and go or for a comet to pass across a suburban sky looking as if it were standing still, frozen up there in the stars when, in fact, it is moving at infinite speed. The time we have taken and now it’s for no more or less than that.  

Michael is currently sleeping his room. The street below is still in dark. He has gone to sleep with Madeline on his mind but in the moment before he wakes in the first light of the summer’s morning he will once again be walking down the old street, 11 or 12. He will always be walking down the old street and wearing his best summer shirt with the buttoned-down collars that he’d forgotten all about until his dream retrieved it. His father just ahead with his ear turned to the sound of a distant engine and his mother beside him in a floral dress that is just a bit too good for the street. The sky will glow with the colour of ripe peach and they will, all three, be pausing at a vacant paddock staring at the gently swaying khaki grass.

And they will stand like this forever because the dream will hold them just so. It will take them in. No one will move or speak and there’ll be no folks to be met because nobody is going anywhere. Everybody is safe and forever as they are inside the dream. It would be so clear and true that he will enter and live it as he did when he walked the same street as a child. And while his son sleeps travelling towards the luminescent moment of that dream, Vic sits long into the night on his doorstep overlooking the town driving again. His freshly shaven cool cheek turned to the sea breeze at his most alert and alive, his most complete wanting for nothing. Let us leave him exactly as he is now, seated on his doorstep but in the cabin again of one of those dirty, filthy engines that he complained about all his life but without which he was lost. Let us leave him as he was, as he now is and will always be an engine driver, his head leaning out of the cabin window, cheek to the wind, the engine’s big wheels beneath him, turning, spinning through the night, its headlamp like the light in his eyes bright and strong enough to see clearly into the next morning.

And as Rita, unable to sleep, places the remnants of the old life into boxes. The remnants of that glorious shot at living, photographs, letters and an old cigarette lighter that still flames, all packed away. Boxes that already have the look of boxes that will never be opened again. And while Rita sees this there is also a Rita who registers the secret thrill of knowing that when the house is behind her and she steps out into the street for the last time she will also be stepping into whatever it is that lies before her as well and that very uncertainty will bring the beginning because the us that live there is now them.

When everything is settled, when everyone has gone their separate ways and finally stopped long enough one day to glance back, one day when slowness is upon us and time allows the view, the question we will ask is the question that will nag us again and again, did we hear the music of the years?  Did we see the fiddler’s hand bowing higher and higher through days emblazoned with wonder or were we looking away? The house, the yard on summer nights, the passionfruit vine where the spider indifferently spun its web. The street that started bearing fruit overnight with weatherboard box houses and gardens that bloomed while you watched. The open farmland that hovered for a few years between town and country, the dances, the songs, the tennis, the cricket, the coming and going back from school, work, school and home, throughout the years that saw a suburb born, that, that exotic tribe was us and the time we have taken, our moment”.

Transcript of audience question and answers

Audience member: That’s very Buddhist. Top of page

Steven Carroll: It’s interesting ... I’ve actually had people say, oh look, you know, you must be a Buddhist or something, you know. You must have read Buddhism or something like that but, no, I’ve never ready anything about Buddhism and I’ve never read any of ... see I actually regard it as a deeper existentialist novel on the materialist novel. I emphasise the moment but not in a spiritual sense, in a purely existentialist sense and that’s why engine driving is so important to Vic.

You know, it’s an existentialist exercise. If you’re one of those like me that believes there’s nothing up there, that we live in a different universe and that the only way to meaning of your life is to actually pit something against it that says this is me, this is my life, this has significance and aesthetic pleasure. If you wanted those then you can see in Vic an existentialist at work and I am an old-fashioned existentialist. So what he does in engine driving is actually ... it’s his job. It’s his job in the end but it gives his life meaning because it also gives an aesthetic pleasure and it allows him to dwell in the moment with both meaning and satisfaction.

Now, I know what you’re getting at but actually the person who actually alerted me to the whole kind of business of the moment was a German philosopher called Martin Heidegger. I always wanted to study philosophy but when I went to uni the English Lit clashed with philosophy. So I went back to uni on a community program and I studied Heidegger and I found him quite fascinating. His whole enterprise is to take philosophy back to the pre-Socratic phase, restore wonder to everything.

Audience member: Sorry, can I thank you. I’m a bit teary now because you’ve brought the past back, which has gone, and that suburb with the mud, which anyone that lived there would remember, and the railway line and all of that. From the first page of the first book I was hooked. I thought it tremendous that somebody has actually written about Glenroy and the surrounding area and it wasn’t ordinary in that sense that, yes, it was but it was extraordinary. And you capture that very well.

Steven: Oh, look, I still dream about Glenroy, it just doesn’t seem to go away.

Audience member: Just firstly I wanted to say I love the novels, really. Now, when you’ve talked today you’ve said quite a lot about the novelist’s responsibility to history and playing around with history and the relationship between fact and fiction in a novel. Have you written any essays or even published on that theme that I could get my hands on and use?

Steven: No, I haven’t. No, sorry, I haven’t. I’d like to get around to it one day but I’ve only just ... by the way I’ve just finished that novel that I put aside then years ago about T S Eliot to Burnt Norton. I suppose you could say I was interrupted by a trilogy but I eventually got back to it. That comes out in April next year.

I think ultimately primacy of place is the novel but at the same time, you know, I was trained as an historian. You know, I’ve got a certain respect for facts.

Audience member: I was really surprised when you said you’d done no research on Worrell. 

Steven: No, I did none at all. I fitted ... what happened there with Worrell was that once I connected him with the Yeates poem I had my Frank Worrell. And I think ... all of the book dwells inside the mind of Frank Worrell and I don’t think anyone can tell me I got the mind of Frank Worrell wrong because only Frank Worrell could tell me.

Audience member: Just another small thing, I know they’re your characters, the people in the street, but how real are they?

Steven: (Laughing) Look, people have said, “Look, this character ...” My Dad was an engine driver and there’s a lot of my Dad in the book, you know, and possibly that’s ... he’s the one who’s closest of that. My Mum ... you can't get away from the models. There is autobiography in it.

Audience member: But there were fictional characters as well?

Steven: Oh, heaps of them, you know, yeah. But see even the main characters by the end were inventions as well. I mean, the character of Michael, you know ... See I’ve got two brothers and I was like, no way, no, I’m not going to put them in a book. They’d kill me for a start, you know. But sometimes I’ve actually got me doing things that my brother John did or my brother Peter.

In some ways it’s a sort of compression of people and in lots of ways it’s just not me at all, you know. I mean, there’s a very cool and deliberated, deliberate sort of calm, collected character, whereas I’m not. You know, I’m a sort of Basil Fawlty. You know, I can create disaster out of absolute calm, you know. So, no, he is very much an invention. I’d say seven-eighths of the characters in the books are inventions.

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Audience member: What about Bunny Rabbit and Pussycat?

Steven: Bunny Rabbit and Pussycat, they’re characters in part three.

Audience member:I could really relate to some of those characters.

Steven: Well, actually I did meet them for ten seconds in 1970. I was living in a student house.

Audience member: I think I’ve met them too.

Steve: (Laughing) I think we all did. And I just jogged in from Clifton Hill where I was living and I went to a student house where my friends were. As I walked in there was this guy who looked just so cool, like something out of Creedence Clearwater Revival. The droopy moustache and the hair and he’d obviously been having a few trick cigarettes. And he was hanging the line up and having difficulty doing it. He had clothes on the line. And then this vision appeared. She looked Olivia Hussey to me and I thought, my God, who’s that? And then they disappeared. And then I went inside and spoke to my friend and said, “Who were they?” And he said, “Oh, that’s Pussycat and Bunny Rabbit”. That was the house’s term for them. And I never met him again but I must admit it was somehow significant.

Audience member: I’m interested in the French connection and you winning a French literary prize?

Steve: Yeah, it didn’t win it. I actually ... I got pipped at the post by some American writer called Joyce Carol Oates. (Laughing) Yeah, it was a drag. I can't really understand it myself, you know. (Laughing) I can't see it.

Audience member:  Were the books all in French?

Steven: Oh, yeah, they’ve all been translated. It was the Prix Femina Étranger (for foreign novels). It got shortlisted. It was in the final six, which actually I was pretty proud of really because there were about 280 entries or something like that.

So it got through to that final six. And the French was the ... the French ... Someone actually said to me, look, you know, I know it’s Australian, it’s set in Australia and I never think about Australia and “that’s true Australian writing”, I think it’s just all bollocks, you know. Look, the critics think about that. I don’t want to think about that. You just write and the fact that you’re an Australian will simply come out your writing. Like murder, it will out. There will be evidence.

But lots of my influences are really European especially French. You know, one of the books in the background is by a fellow called Alain Fournier. He wrote one novel called Le Grand Meaulnes. It’s hard to pronounce it. It’s all set in Le Cher, the Southern District of France in about 1909 or something. He got blown away on the western front in 1914. He was gone very early. But what I loved about that was just an intense sense of a region. Just you felt like you’d actually walked those streets, touched the stones and it sort of reaffirmed that belief that there are few things more universal than the intensely regional. And that absolutely rang true for me when I was writing these books, you know. I thought, “I’ll go for it”. I’ll go for making my old street and my whole suburb ... and the whole three books are all set in a rectangle of land about a mile and a half long and a half a mile wide.

You go out ... by the end you go outside but most of it is inside that rectangle of land. And, you know, it was pretty kind of cool when people like the French went for it. It’s in German as well. Comes out in the UK next year, the whole three. 

Audience member: I’d like to agree with what you just said about being Australian or not. I’ve only just started The Engine Driver, I’m halfway through it, and I’m really taken in by the people and what’s happening. I obviously grew up in about the next street from you because, I’m there! The golf course is the right orientation, and the school and the church is at the very top of the street. I’m seven years old and I’m living in that same street.

Steven: Glenroy is amazing. No, Glenroy is just frigging amazing. I was in Broome about three months ago and I thought, okay, I could just bang about Glenroy. No one is going to know anything about it. There were three people from Glenroy in an audience of about 35.

Audience member: Absolutely, they’re everywhere.

Steven: Yeah, I don’t think I’ve done a talk where someone from Glenroy was not there.

Audience member: Everything you write in that is exactly my childhood memory and years ago I had this idea that it’s worth writing about, because I live in Glenroy even now. It’s with me all the time.

Steven: I think there was something very, very intense about being ... see, it’s not just Glenroy, is it? Look, it’s the whole frontier suburban experience.

Audience member: For me it’s so personal because it’s so ... it’s the peppercorn tree.

Steven: Oh, that, yeah. Well, you’d know the schoolyard pines and all the rest of it, yeah.

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Audience member: Oh, absolutely.

Steven: It’s funny, I mean, I thought I actually covered it when you were asking about autobiography and characters and who’s who and all the rest of it. I thought I actually covered my tracks pretty well (laughter from audience) but someone ... but someone was in the local ... in Glenroy Road in the doctor’s surgery there and ...

Audience member: At Smithy’s?

Steven: No, not Smithy’s.. it’s a fairly new surgery.

Audience member: Yeah, I know.

Steve: Yeah, and whoever ... the secretary behind the desk was actually reading The Art of the Engine Driver and someone came in, a patient, looked at it, slapped her hand down on the book and said, “I’ve read it. I grew up with him. And I picked everybody in the book”. What can you do? (Steven and audience laughing)

Audience member: I was very interested in what you had to say about “the exotic tribe”. Actually I was born around the corner here in Coburg and then we moved to Broadmeadows. This is in 1960. But I would never use “exotic” has a way to describe Broadmeadows. It was just interesting ...

Steve: Yeah, when a Coke bottle goes over your head it’s hard to actually… ”Oh, that’s an exotic moment!”… Yeah.

Audience member: And I mean, it’s just ... I mean, I haven’t read the book.

Steve: That’s all right. 

Audience member: Well, I just heard about this talk this afternoon. So I’m now going to read the book, apologies, but anyway I want to get it to read it because Glenroy is an area that was my childhood as well because we used to all sit on Glenroy Station and all that stuff. I was thinking about the area ... when we were growing up Glenroy was always the kind of more gentile suburb than Broadmeadows.

Steve: Yeah. We always thought we were better too. (Steven and audience laughing) Top of page

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