Secret Life of Books

Plenty of novels entertain and move us, but only a few become cultural landmarks in their own right: capturing the state of a nation at a particular moment in time, and sparking conversations and arguments that continue long after their publication.

Christos Tsiolkas’s The Slap is one of them. When it was published in 2008 it scandalized, delighted, outraged and sent shock reverberations literally across the world. The Slap upturned lazy stereotypes about who and what Australia is as a nation. At the Sydney Writers’ Festival Homegrown program in August 2026, Sophie and Jonty interviewed Christos about writing a novel that was destined to become a touchstone for Australian identity, worldwide.

The inciting incident of the book is, of course, the slap itself. It’s delivered by Harry, a self-made businessman of Greek heritage, against a four-year-old boy, at a barbeque in suburban Melbourne. Harry’s split-second transgression changes the lives of everyone present, and exposes faultlines that divide generations, race and gender, and reveal the lie of Australian egalitarianism.

The Slap was Christos’ fourth novel. It was longlisted for the Booker Prize, shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award, won the Commonwealth Writers Prize and has been adapted for the screen twice - once by the ABC, and then by NBC in the USA. What made The Slap both iconically Australian, and a daring – erm - slap in the face to prevailing Aussie stereotypes.
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At the 2003 USA National Book Awards, the horror writer Stephen King gave an impassioned speech criticizing the assembled great and good of the literary world for its critical neglect of popular writers.

Next up a 72 year old Australian woman took to the stage to receive an award and found herself arguing with King and defending High Art. Today’s episode is about that woman - Shirley Hazzard - and her masterpiece The Transit of Venus. It’s about two Australian sisters as they navigate life and love in Britain, from the austerity years after WW2 to the 1970s.

Shirley Hazzard is something of an outlier in this Classic Australia season. She was not an egalitarian like Miles Franklin and Ruth Park, wanting to knock the stuffing out of the literary Establishment and its cultural subservience to European taste-makers. She adored the European classics and the Old World and happily turned her back on Australia. When an interviewer once asked her to describe the Sydney of her youth, she described it as ‘provincialissimo’, which is pseudo-Italian for the most provincial place on Earth.

In this episode we’re following the transit of Shirley as tracks a fiery course across the literary firmament, from humble beginnings in Sydney to a glamorous jet-setting life in-between New York and the Italian island of Capri.
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Ruth Park’s debut novel, The Harp in the South, was first serialized in the Sydney Morning Herald in 1947, provoking angry letters from outraged readers. The book was destined to become an Australian classic. The story follows an Irish Catholic immigrant family - the Darcys - living in the inner-city slum of Surry Hills, as they navigate domestic violence, child prostitution, racism, backstreet abortions, abduction, and alcoholism. Some readers objected to Park’s frank depiction of these social ills. Others claimed her story was exaggerated. And there was general outrage that an outsider - a blow-in from New Zealand, no less - should assume the right to air Sydney’s dirty laundry for all to see.

But The Harp in the South is not a judgmental or moralizing novel. Park, who was living in Surry Hills at the time, simply depicted the world around her. There is no traditional plot to the story. We simply join the Darcys for around three years of their lives and grow to love them despite their flaws. Park finds beauty in the everyday and her prose is often most beautiful when describing unbelievable squalor. Her descriptions of rubbish and dirt are second to none.

In this second episode in our Classic Australia season, we take a leap from Miles Franklin’s charming, sometimes naive, turn-of-the-century rural bildungsroman to Ruth Park’s urban, immigration story that became a template for many of the great Australian novels of the last fifty years, including Christos Tsiolkas’ The Slap (more on that in a few weeks) and Tim Winton’s Cloud Street.
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In breaking, literary-adjacent news, Hollywood is about to do the final screen tests to choose the next James Bond. They’ve narrowed it down to just four actors, according to today’s Guardian.
But what’s a tough decision for the motion picture studios is a simple decision for SLOB. We’ve cracked the Bond code.
Each of these four rumored finalists has played at least one major role in recent adaptations of literary classics. So, Sophie and Jonty have put their classics know-how to the (screen) test, to ask which of these nineteenth-century literary heroes fits the bill for our post-Daniel Craig 007.
Want a hint? The name’s Darcy. Fitzwilliam Darcy.
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In 1901, six self-governing British colonies in the Southern Hemisphere came together to form a single nation - Australia. In that same year, a 21-year-old woman from rural New South Wales published a book which gave voice to that new nation. The woman is the great Miels Franklin, and the book is My Brilliant Career. The novel’s heroine Sybylla Melvin, immortalized in the 1979 film by Judy Davis, is ebullient, clever, defiant, funny and brave. It’s a gripping story of her farming childhood, her family’s descent into poverty, her romance with a handsome jackaroo called Harry Beacham and - most of all - her determination to forge a career as an independent artist.

The story is essentially Pride and Prejudice in Blundstones, which perhaps accounts for its enduring success. Sybylla herself is a proud atheist, socialist and feminist. This was not an image Australia necessarily wanted to project at the time, with one critic denouncing Sybylla as ‘distinctly unpleasant’. But The Bulletin celebrated it as ‘a book full of sunlight’, and pronounced it ‘the very first Australian novel to be published’. Most of all, young women around Australia found - at last - an author who spoke to their experience and Franklin spent a large part of the following years replying to the many letters of gratitude and appreciation that flooded in.

This episode is the first in a series devoted to Australian classics. Today we’re asking just what it was that makes Sybylla Melvin such a compelling and evergreen heroine.
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