By Jane Sullivan
These days, writers festivals are on all the time all over the place, but Clunes Booktown, now in its 11th year and growing, is still special in the way it combines celebrating the book, the town and the writers. With 60 booksellers displaying their wares up and down the streets, 26 guest authors and up to 18,000 visitors, books take over the weekend and put the laid-back little goldfields heritage town on the map.
You can go for all sorts of reasons. If you're a serious collector, you get there early on Saturday to check out the rare and antiquarian books. If you're a family, you roll up later to enjoy the food, the brass bands, the kids' entertainment – and maybe buy a few books. If you're an emerging writer, you can work with others to create a digital magazine from scratch in one weekend. And if you just like to listen to people who write the books you love, there they are.
Author Kate Grenville.Credit: Darren James
This year women writers dominated, and in the majestic 1870s Town Hall there were sellout sessions for Kate Grenville, Hannah Kent, Clementine Ford and a panel, Women Writing Women. With her new baby on her lap, Ford said that men who considered themselves allies of feminists had told her they were shocked by her book Fight Like a Girl. "They said 'I was aware and open, and I still didn't realise how bad it was for women'."
Hannah Kent talked about the highs and lows of researching Irish history and folklore for her novel The Good People. She spent ages scrolling through microfiche newspaper records in the National Library in Dublin, only to discover that the edition with the vital report of the trial she was after was missing. She went to have "a little weep in the loo", decided she'd just check out another newspaper from the same time, and there was the syndicated article she was looking for.
Port Fairy author Jock Serong.Credit: Rob Gunstone
Another popular panel was It's Black and White, on the challenges of who gets to write Indigenous stories. Playwright Jane Harrison, descended from the Muruwari people, made use of spoken records: "There are still oral histories about walking to Tasmania, even though Bass Strait flooded 13,000 years ago."
Kate Grenville discovered how the culture had changed when she read Eleanor Dark's 1941 novel The Timeless Land, with chapters told from the Aborigines' point of view. "It now reads horrendously, I had a feeling of revulsion," she said. "Something that was once radically progressive now seems radically unprogressive. We can only stumble towards what seems most honourable, and how we think will soon be left behind."
Her own approach to Aboriginal peoples' history in her novels The Secret River and The Lieutenant was to write from the settlers' perspective, but "I tried to make an Indigenous-shaped vacuum in my story to make it obvious there was another story to be told, but it was not mine to tell".
It wasn't all women; politician turned author Tim Fischer was among the blokes, and there was a panel on Masculine Landscapes. For research for his novel about cricket-playing brothers, Jock Serong talked to cricket legend Dean Jones, who told him that in 1988 the Australian team were pelted all over their bodies with balls from the West Indies fast bowlers. They were risking their lives for $1800 a test: they did it for the love, not the money, Jones said.
"At the end I shook his hand and I saw him climb into the biggest Mercedes I'd ever seen," Serong said. "I can only assume post-cricket has been good to him."
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