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Clunes was the site of Victoria's first gold strike. It is located in a hidden valley surrounded by rounded hills which are actually extinct volcanoes (they can best be seen 3 km south along the road to Ballarat).

What the press says about Back to Booktown, 2010

 

The Age A2 Saturday May 8, 2010, p26

 

Browsing the People of the Books

By Jane Sullivan

 

The only problem with the Back to Booktown festival at Clunes is that you can’t do everything. There are two attractions this beautiful little goldmining town lays on once a year for bookish visitors: dozens of stalls selling thousands of antique, secondhand and recent books at discount prices; and guest writers talking about their work.

When I first went to Booktown a couple of years ago, I concentrated on the book stalls, had a wonderful time browsing, and bought a couple of little treasures. This year, the fourth, it’s grown like anything, and developed the speaking program, so last Saturday I thought I’d drop in on a couple of sessions. Then it was time for coffee, lunch, socialising… oh no, where did my browsing time go?

At least I picked up a few gems at the writers’ tent. Margaret Simons, Malcolm Fraser’s biographer, told us she’d had bigger fights with Fraser’s wife Tamie than with the former PM. Tamie, “one tough lady”, was a ferocious guard of the couples’ private life, and when they began to argue about how to present the Fraser courtship, Malcolm ducked out and left them to it.

At one point, Tamie accused Simons of writing like Barbara Cartland. Stung, Simons replied that at least the famous romance writer had many readers. “One has a right not to be a Barbara Cartland character,” Tamie shot back.

Nigel Krauth told us that when he was working on Matilda My Darling, his novel featuring Banjo Paterson, he ended up being sued by Paterson’s granddaughters. Although he thought his research had led him to a more authentic version of the poet, the descendants and guardians of his estate didn’t agree. “They said I wasn’t allowed to say such things because they’d been told the official story of his life when they were aged 12 and 14.”

Apart from writers’ perils, we also heard about writers’ inspiration, and books that changed lives. For Toni Jordan, it was Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s work, in particular One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, and Ivan’s joy in the middle of his miserable life in jail when he gets two whole bowls of soup: “I fell in love with the minutiae of life, the small things.”

For Anthony Lawrence, it was John Irving’s novel The World According to Garp, which he read when he was 16. What an incredible life Irving must have had, he thought. It was a total revelation to discover that Irving had made up his story. 

For Arnold Zable, it was the Yiddish stories of Sholem Aleichem and Jack Kerouac’s On The Road which lured him into a nomadic writing life. One day he was sitting in a café in Ithaca, writing that if you stayed here long enough, everything would come to you. “Then a guy came out and said ‘West Coast Eagles by one point’.”

Meanwhile, thousands of books beckoned. And Kerry Bolton’s Books Roadshow, offering to assess your special books. And the Creswick Brass Band, and performance cartooning by Sheila Hollingworth, and Ann James demonstrating children’s book illustrations, and a Punch and Judy show. And lots of helpful volunteers in big red aprons.

Booktown now even has its own book: The Clunes Little Book of the Book, a collector’s limited edition with reflections and signatures by five writers.

Alas, I didn’t have time to look at it. I made a quick dive into a marquee and bagged  myself a few discounted books, but in a few hours I couldn’t do Booktown justice. Maybe next time I’ll come for the whole weekend.