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'Jaivin's writing shines and burns.' (Sunday Age)

'L'écriture fout la merde à tous les niveaux... enfin et surtout à la fatuité des conversations qui feront suite à leur lecture ou à leur non-lecture.'

- Amelie Nothomb, Hygiene de l'Assasin


Linda Jaivin - Jaivin's writing shines and burns.

“Some of the scenes described actually turned me on.” Times Literary Supplement - Eat Me

'Morrison's World'

I'll be delivering the 72nd annual Morrison Lecture at the ANU on 13 July at 7 pm. It's free but it's advisable to register:

http://www.eventbrite.com/invite-friends?eid=1861213941

My topic is 'Morrison's World'. Here's a taste:

When George Morrison was born in 1862 in Geelong, the Colony of Victoria was only eleven years old and the Second Industrial Revolution twelve. Freud was five, Oscar Wilde eight. Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal had only been in print five scandalous years and Darwin’s On the Origin of Species three. Queen Victoria sat on the throne of England. Travel was arduous, slow and for the adventurous. Most people apprehended the wider world through books and journals; photography was not yet a mass or even highly portable technology.

Morrison was a toddler by the time issues of the London Illustrated News arrived at the family home by sea mail with etchings of the burning of the Yuanming Yuan by British and Allied forces in 1860. He was still a schoolboy hunting koalas and possum when the Empress Dowager Cixi took virtual control of the Chinese throne. By the time Morrison became China correspondent for the London Times in 1897, the Qing was in terminal decline. He’d live to see men in China cut off their queues and involve himself in China’s first ambitious experiment with republicanism as advisor to one of modern Chinese history’s most controversial figures, Yuan Shikai. He’d also witness a revolution in journalism – the simultaneous transmission of reports from the battlefield – and the shocking rise of the New Woman in the West, demanding the vote, the right to own property, and in the case of one Miss Mae Perkins, to have sex and boast about it like a man.

‘The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.’ The mission of the historian and the calling of the novelist converge in the desire to recreate lost worlds. The historian is a storyteller, after all – and a novelist can sometimes find herself an historian.