He may have won the Man Booker prize, twice! And he may now live in New York and lecture at NYU; but he still has a soft spot for the Aussie bush:
“I haven’t been to Byron since 1979, I’d forgotten all the things that happen with all the paper-barks and the casuarinas. It’s all so alive, all these things, they just, they feel very familiar and it’s very, very nice to be back around the bush.”
Carey’s one of Australia’s most celebrated writers and this weekend he’s returned to speak at the Byron Bay Writer’s Festival. He’s a prolific novelist; he has a dozen books and countless short stories under his belt, but I was most interested in his first offering, Bliss.
“We were all very paranoid back then when I was writing Bliss, my friends wouldn’t have liked me to write Brown’s creek road so I did a couple of things to throw off the cops. The road in the book was called Bog Onion Road, in reality it rolls into the back of Byron. And I put Mt Warning in here, that was to satisfy my paranoid friends.”
It was the 70’s and Carey and his friends had retreated to the bush of Yandina in Queensland. They had fled the city and were trying to live closer to nature at a time when the toxicity of city-life was starting to become apparent.
“When Bliss was published a lot was made of the cancer maps and so forth, they all thought it was total bullshit. We all know now that there are cancer maps and occupational cancers and that sort of thing. So yes I was very much aware then, but I’ve still not stopped thinking about it.”
I wanted to understand how someone with such an acute understanding of the contrast between the city and the bush could survive in a bustling metropolis like New York City;
“It doesn’t matter where you live, I could be living out the back of Northern Queensland, somewhere with no-one else… but NY would still be there, Calcutta would still be there. We’re all connected to all of these things.”
Writer’s Festivals offer a rare opportunity to hear the stories and the trials and the tribulations of many successful writers. The life of a novelist can appear blessed, but it’s reassuring to hear that they too must do the hard yards:
“If someone had told me it would take me ten years to get published, I would have said well that’s true for some people but its not true for me. But in fact of course it was true for me. Writing in the Cold: The First Ten Years was a good essay by Ted Solotaroff about how the most important thing for a writer is the question of how you survived that time before you were published.”
If you didn’t catch Carey at the festival on Friday, be sure to get yourself a ticket to the festival’s feature event, The Madness in the Method, where Carey will reveal some of the techniques behind his writing practice; Saturday afternoon, 5:30 at the Community Centre on Jonson st.
