Aussie star Nicole Kidman's move to Portugal could anger local residents

Peter Carey says he's done writing novels: ‘You have to know when it's enough'

Sydney Morning Herald

23 minutes ago

Sydney Morning Herald

Peter Carey says he's done writing novels: ‘You have to know when it's enough'

He folds it in quietly, mid-thought, somewhere between a lament about lost notes, a gentle defence of his landline, and reflections on readings. 'See … because I haven't … I've stopped writing novels,' he says, with a hint of hesitation – not quite reluctant, more aware the revelation won't go unremarked. No fuss, no fireworks. Just the quiet confirmation that there won't be another novel from Peter Carey – the only Australian to win the Booker Prize twice, and one of only a handful to win the Miles Franklin three times. 'I didn't think I'd stopped. I had a fear that I might have written all the novels I needed or should write,' Carey, 82, says. 'But I persisted, and tried various things, and threw things away … and in the end I thought, well, that's it.' The boy from Bacchus Marsh became a literary giant, showing Australians a funhouse mirror version of their own history – grotesque, funny, violent, and absurd – and carrying that vision to the world. There have been 14 novels – including Illywhacker, Oscar and Lucinda, True History of the Kelly Gang, Theft: A Love Story and The Chemistry of Tears – two volumes of short stories, and two travelogues. Books full of mythmakers and tricksters, schemers and fabulists, each one animated by Carey's unmistakable voice – sly, digressive, electric with curiosity. He emerged alongside a transformative generation of Australian writers, but carved a path all his own, refusing to conform, mixing high style with larrikinism, postmodern and postcolonial play with emotional heft. And for decades, the rhythm never faltered. Every few years, like clockwork, a new Carey novel. Then it stopped – and the silence started to feel pointed. Asking a writer how their next novel is going is like asking a magician how the trick works: awkward, disappointing, and you're probably not going to get an invitation back. Now, the question has answered itself. Carey's last novel, A Long Way from Home, was published nearly eight years ago, and he sees it as standing tall among his most meaningful books. It marked a turning point. 'There's a time when you're new to everybody – you do something like Oscar and Lucinda or Illywhacker, and you get hugely noticed. The Kelly Gang, also,' Carey says. 'But A Long Way from Home, which, I think, is as important a thing as I've done… it doesn't sit like that. No one particularly thinks of it as the best thing he's ever done or the most important thing. But I thought it was.' The novel follows a 1950s car race across Australia, but beneath the bonnet is something more volatile: an attempt to grapple with the country's foundational violence, its settler legacy. Carey has long circled Australia's history and national mythology, but in A Long Way from Home, he took it on directly. He wanted to write, as a white Australian, about imperialism and invasion. It felt risky, and he was nervous about how it would land, particularly when he returned to Australia to tour the book. But he felt he pulled it off – or, as he puts it, 'I didn't make a dick of myself.' Carey isn't expecting an orchestra of tiny violins to start playing. There appears to be a straightforward, if perhaps melancholic, acceptance: the more you publish, the less of a fuss it makes. His good friend Tom Keneally once told him that when they were new, everyone thought they were brilliant – now, they're just part of the furniture. 'I think it's true. We all know that from our reading, and from how it feels to discover a writer,' Carey says. 'We tend to be less excited about the third or fourth book, but we were absolutely stunned by the first. That's the way it goes … You have to know when it's enough, too.' As we talk, a bookshelf packed with Carey's novels watches over us. This year marks 35 years since he left Australia for New York – much longer than he ever planned to stay away. He moved there with his second wife, Alison Summers, a theatre-maker and editor, and they had two sons. The marriage ended, but he stayed. Carey says Australians tend to get anxious or angry about those who leave, but he says his thinking and writing have always looked back to home. For years, his old novels were scattered around the Manhattan apartment he shares with his wife, Frances Coady, a book editor and publisher turned agent. After returning from the A Long Way from Home tour, he finally corralled them onto shelves. In front of them, Carey made several attempts at a new novel – two, maybe three, different starts, each hundreds of pages long – but nothing stuck. There was no urgency behind them, no force demanding the work into being. After A Long Way from Home, the compulsion just wasn't there. 'After a while, you develop a lot of skills – you can make things work. But the last thing you want to do is bullshit yourself,' he says. 'You have to ask, do you need to write this? Why are you rewriting and rewriting and rewriting? Because you're trying to find something that isn't there. And that's OK. I mean, I'm 82 years old, for f---'s sake.' There was no ceremonial uncapping of the pen, no dramatic farewell to fiction. Certainly no relief, he says he didn't feel happy about it. It's been about five years now, he guesses, since he called it a day. 'I'm one of those people – this is what I do. And when you can't do that any more… who are you?' he says. 'I mean, I can't even play golf. I'm certainly not going sailing. In the end, you're someone who could do one trick – and that's write.' And that one trick hasn't disappeared. Carey's now working on a non-fiction project – 'enough to keep me off the street,' as he puts it – and while it's a different muscle from fiction, it still scratches an itch. 'I'm engaged in making something and it's a little risky, and it's beyond what I think I know how to do, and that's exciting, right?' The past few years have brought other big changes, too. For nearly two decades, Carey was a distinguished professor and the executive director of the creative writing MFA at public university Hunter College, a program he helped build into one of the country's best, and most competitive courses. Former alumni include Susan Choi, Jennifer Egan, Paul Beatty and Adam Haslett. He left a few years ago. He laughs about the creeping signs of age: forgetting book titles when talking to students, stretching sentences to give himself time to remember. He won't be drawn on the details, but it doesn't sound as though it was the fondest farewell. 'There were ... let's call them administrative issues, shall we? That went on for a couple of years. I resolved them. But I didn't want to deal with any of that ever again,' he says. Those professional shifts come amid a milestone year for Carey: the 25th anniversary of True History of the Kelly Gang, the swaggering Booker-winning novel written in the unpunctuated voice of Australia's most infamous outlaw. Carey is one of five Australian artists commissioned by the State Library of Victoria to contribute to Creative Acts, a new exhibition showcasing 600 artefacts from the library's collection, all exploring the theme of creativity. His piece – a reflection on the 1000 days he spent writing True History of the Kelly Gang – draws on the personal archive he's contributed over the years, including 4000 pages of drafts, marked-up manuscripts, and the chunky 1990s Apple computer he used to write the novel. He's been selling archival material for some time – 'every time I need to pay the school fees,' he jokes. Some of it won't be unsealed until after his death. Asked if there's anything particularly juicy in there, he shoots back: 'Oh, I mean, if I was going to pay back somebody, I'd rather do it while I was alive.' The origin story of True History of the Kelly Gang is almost mythic in itself. Carey, whose parents ran a car dealership in Ballarat and scraped together the funds to send him to Geelong Grammar, flunked his first-year science exams at Monash University. He'd once imagined himself a chemist or a zoologist – until a car crash and some existential drift nudged him into advertising. There, among copywriters who harboured secret literary ambitions, he was introduced to James Joyce, Graham Greene, Jack Kerouac and William Faulkner. One day, his colleague Barry Oakley – a former schoolteacher and writer – took him to George's Art Gallery to see Sidney Nolan's Ned Kelly paintings. Carey was entranced. He sought out Ned Kelly: Australian Son by Max Brown, and became fixated on the Jerilderie letter, Kelly's 'manifesto', dictated as a defence against what he saw as the relentless persecution from the colonial establishment. Carey transcribed the letter by hand and carried it around 'like the relic of a martyred saint', certain he would one day do something with it. Years passed. There were false starts and failed novels, then critical successes. The letter was lost somewhere along the way. But in 1994, at the age of 51, Carey wandered into the Met in New York and stumbled across Nolan's full suite of 27 Kelly paintings. The vision returned – and this time, he started writing. 'It feels like yesterday really. Well, not quite, but 25 years is sort of shocking. I mean, shit,' he says. The novel was a critical and commercial success, winning the Booker Prize and the Commonwealth Writers' Prize and inspiring film adaptations. Yet Carey thinks the final product was very different from what the young man who first dreamt it expected. That writer wanted to go off the deep end of the avant-garde. 'That writer would have thought I was a total sellout. That writer was ridiculous, but charming in his way. But the Kelly Gang was not what he had in mind, and that came slowly over time.' Carey worked closely with high-profile American editor Gary Fisketjon, whom he's long credited for his passion about – and dedication to – the book. Looking back, though, there are a few decisions Carey says he might have made differently. Fisketjon had a view that all the abbreviations and contractions in the novel should follow a consistent pattern. Carey now thinks it should've been messier. Finding Kelly's voice was never difficult for Carey, and he says he could still slip into it now (but he politely declines giving a performance). 'He wanted there to be a rule for things and I agreed with him at the time, but I think it should have been more untidy,' Carey says. 'I mean, I don't think there's anything really many people are going to notice. You would have to be as mad as we were.' Loading Mad is how he thinks about his long history, the books behind him. 'When I think about the books and no I don't sit there pouring over the pages. I think, my god you did that. You were a mad person. You know what I mean? It's sort of like, if you're going to write, you have to move beyond yourself, and you really do have to build a ladder for yourself,' Carey says. 'And that's why writers are always so disappointing to me because when you meet the person, it's the person standing on the floor, not the person who lives up the ladder because the writer got up the ladder one step at a time and got to a place beyond who they are, in a way.' Loading Carey has twice been due to visit Australia recently – including for this year's Sydney Writers' Festival – but has had to cancel both trips. I ask him what a typical day looks like now – innocently, perhaps – and get the kind of answer that suggests I should've known better. 'Well, I clean my teeth. And I take my time with it. My dentist said, you know, don't be in a rush. So I clean my teeth properly. And I have some breakfast, and then I go to my desk and then I do what I'm not telling you about – despite my valiant attempts.' So, there will be another book. Just not a novel. And for those who might feel the absence of one, he offers a kind of gentle redirection. Go back, he says. Reopen what's already on the shelf. 'If you've read a book 10 years ago, when you go back to it, it's a different book. So I'd suggest it's time for them to go on that journey of discovery. I mean I know I'm being glib, on the one hand, but on the other hand, it is really true,' he says. 'And also, it's a real test because some of the things we thought we loved so much, we go back to, and they're not so great any more. And that's disappointing and we realise we've changed. The book hasn't changed – we've changed. And we hope, I would hope to have written a few books that when you go back to them are better than you thought, or at least as good.'

The Age

23 minutes ago

The Age

Peter Carey says he's done writing novels: ‘You have to know when it's enough'

He folds it in quietly, mid-thought, somewhere between a lament about lost notes, a gentle defence of his landline, and reflections on readings. 'See … because I haven't … I've stopped writing novels,' he says, with a hint of hesitation – not quite reluctant, more aware the revelation won't go unremarked. No fuss, no fireworks. Just the quiet confirmation that there won't be another novel from Peter Carey – the only Australian to win the Booker Prize twice, and one of only a handful to win the Miles Franklin three times. 'I didn't think I'd stopped. I had a fear that I might have written all the novels I needed or should write,' Carey, 82, says. 'But I persisted, and tried various things, and threw things away … and in the end I thought, well, that's it.' The boy from Bacchus Marsh became a literary giant, showing Australians a funhouse mirror version of their own history – grotesque, funny, violent, and absurd – and carrying that vision to the world. There have been 14 novels – including Illywhacker, Oscar and Lucinda, True History of the Kelly Gang, Theft: A Love Story and The Chemistry of Tears – two volumes of short stories, and two travelogues. Books full of mythmakers and tricksters, schemers and fabulists, each one animated by Carey's unmistakable voice – sly, digressive, electric with curiosity. He emerged alongside a transformative generation of Australian writers, but carved a path all his own, refusing to conform, mixing high style with larrikinism, postmodern and postcolonial play with emotional heft. And for decades, the rhythm never faltered. Every few years, like clockwork, a new Carey novel. Then it stopped – and the silence started to feel pointed. Asking a writer how their next novel is going is like asking a magician how the trick works: awkward, disappointing, and you're probably not going to get an invitation back. Now, the question has answered itself. Carey's last novel, A Long Way from Home, was published nearly eight years ago, and he sees it as standing tall among his most meaningful books. It marked a turning point. 'There's a time when you're new to everybody – you do something like Oscar and Lucinda or Illywhacker, and you get hugely noticed. The Kelly Gang, also,' Carey says. 'But A Long Way from Home, which, I think, is as important a thing as I've done… it doesn't sit like that. No one particularly thinks of it as the best thing he's ever done or the most important thing. But I thought it was.' The novel follows a 1950s car race across Australia, but beneath the bonnet is something more volatile: an attempt to grapple with the country's foundational violence, its settler legacy. Carey has long circled Australia's history and national mythology, but in A Long Way from Home, he took it on directly. He wanted to write, as a white Australian, about imperialism and invasion. It felt risky, and he was nervous about how it would land, particularly when he returned to Australia to tour the book. But he felt he pulled it off – or, as he puts it, 'I didn't make a dick of myself.' Carey isn't expecting an orchestra of tiny violins to start playing. There appears to be a straightforward, if perhaps melancholic, acceptance: the more you publish, the less of a fuss it makes. His good friend Tom Keneally once told him that when they were new, everyone thought they were brilliant – now, they're just part of the furniture. 'I think it's true. We all know that from our reading, and from how it feels to discover a writer,' Carey says. 'We tend to be less excited about the third or fourth book, but we were absolutely stunned by the first. That's the way it goes … You have to know when it's enough, too.' As we talk, a bookshelf packed with Carey's novels watches over us. This year marks 35 years since he left Australia for New York – much longer than he ever planned to stay away. He moved there with his second wife, Alison Summers, a theatre-maker and editor, and they had two sons. The marriage ended, but he stayed. Carey says Australians tend to get anxious or angry about those who leave, but he says his thinking and writing have always looked back to home. For years, his old novels were scattered around the Manhattan apartment he shares with his wife, Frances Coady, a book editor and publisher turned agent. After returning from the A Long Way from Home tour, he finally corralled them onto shelves. In front of them, Carey made several attempts at a new novel – two, maybe three, different starts, each hundreds of pages long – but nothing stuck. There was no urgency behind them, no force demanding the work into being. After A Long Way from Home, the compulsion just wasn't there. 'After a while, you develop a lot of skills – you can make things work. But the last thing you want to do is bullshit yourself,' he says. 'You have to ask, do you need to write this? Why are you rewriting and rewriting and rewriting? Because you're trying to find something that isn't there. And that's OK. I mean, I'm 82 years old, for f---'s sake.' There was no ceremonial uncapping of the pen, no dramatic farewell to fiction. Certainly no relief, he says he didn't feel happy about it. It's been about five years now, he guesses, since he called it a day. 'I'm one of those people – this is what I do. And when you can't do that any more… who are you?' he says. 'I mean, I can't even play golf. I'm certainly not going sailing. In the end, you're someone who could do one trick – and that's write.' And that one trick hasn't disappeared. Carey's now working on a non-fiction project – 'enough to keep me off the street,' as he puts it – and while it's a different muscle from fiction, it still scratches an itch. 'I'm engaged in making something and it's a little risky, and it's beyond what I think I know how to do, and that's exciting, right?' The past few years have brought other big changes, too. For nearly two decades, Carey was a distinguished professor and the executive director of the creative writing MFA at public university Hunter College, a program he helped build into one of the country's best, and most competitive courses. Former alumni include Susan Choi, Jennifer Egan, Paul Beatty and Adam Haslett. He left a few years ago. He laughs about the creeping signs of age: forgetting book titles when talking to students, stretching sentences to give himself time to remember. He won't be drawn on the details, but it doesn't sound as though it was the fondest farewell. 'There were ... let's call them administrative issues, shall we? That went on for a couple of years. I resolved them. But I didn't want to deal with any of that ever again,' he says. Those professional shifts come amid a milestone year for Carey: the 25th anniversary of True History of the Kelly Gang, the swaggering Booker-winning novel written in the unpunctuated voice of Australia's most infamous outlaw. Carey is one of five Australian artists commissioned by the State Library of Victoria to contribute to Creative Acts, a new exhibition showcasing 600 artefacts from the library's collection, all exploring the theme of creativity. His piece – a reflection on the 1000 days he spent writing True History of the Kelly Gang – draws on the personal archive he's contributed over the years, including 4000 pages of drafts, marked-up manuscripts, and the chunky 1990s Apple computer he used to write the novel. He's been selling archival material for some time – 'every time I need to pay the school fees,' he jokes. Some of it won't be unsealed until after his death. Asked if there's anything particularly juicy in there, he shoots back: 'Oh, I mean, if I was going to pay back somebody, I'd rather do it while I was alive.' The origin story of True History of the Kelly Gang is almost mythic in itself. Carey, whose parents ran a car dealership in Ballarat and scraped together the funds to send him to Geelong Grammar, flunked his first-year science exams at Monash University. He'd once imagined himself a chemist or a zoologist – until a car crash and some existential drift nudged him into advertising. There, among copywriters who harboured secret literary ambitions, he was introduced to James Joyce, Graham Greene, Jack Kerouac and William Faulkner. One day, his colleague Barry Oakley – a former schoolteacher and writer – took him to George's Art Gallery to see Sidney Nolan's Ned Kelly paintings. Carey was entranced. He sought out Ned Kelly: Australian Son by Max Brown, and became fixated on the Jerilderie letter, Kelly's 'manifesto', dictated as a defence against what he saw as the relentless persecution from the colonial establishment. Carey transcribed the letter by hand and carried it around 'like the relic of a martyred saint', certain he would one day do something with it. Years passed. There were false starts and failed novels, then critical successes. The letter was lost somewhere along the way. But in 1994, at the age of 51, Carey wandered into the Met in New York and stumbled across Nolan's full suite of 27 Kelly paintings. The vision returned – and this time, he started writing. 'It feels like yesterday really. Well, not quite, but 25 years is sort of shocking. I mean, shit,' he says. The novel was a critical and commercial success, winning the Booker Prize and the Commonwealth Writers' Prize and inspiring film adaptations. Yet Carey thinks the final product was very different from what the young man who first dreamt it expected. That writer wanted to go off the deep end of the avant-garde. 'That writer would have thought I was a total sellout. That writer was ridiculous, but charming in his way. But the Kelly Gang was not what he had in mind, and that came slowly over time.' Carey worked closely with high-profile American editor Gary Fisketjon, whom he's long credited for his passion about – and dedication to – the book. Looking back, though, there are a few decisions Carey says he might have made differently. Fisketjon had a view that all the abbreviations and contractions in the novel should follow a consistent pattern. Carey now thinks it should've been messier. Finding Kelly's voice was never difficult for Carey, and he says he could still slip into it now (but he politely declines giving a performance). 'He wanted there to be a rule for things and I agreed with him at the time, but I think it should have been more untidy,' Carey says. 'I mean, I don't think there's anything really many people are going to notice. You would have to be as mad as we were.' Loading Mad is how he thinks about his long history, the books behind him. 'When I think about the books and no I don't sit there pouring over the pages. I think, my god you did that. You were a mad person. You know what I mean? It's sort of like, if you're going to write, you have to move beyond yourself, and you really do have to build a ladder for yourself,' Carey says. 'And that's why writers are always so disappointing to me because when you meet the person, it's the person standing on the floor, not the person who lives up the ladder because the writer got up the ladder one step at a time and got to a place beyond who they are, in a way.' Loading Carey has twice been due to visit Australia recently – including for this year's Sydney Writers' Festival – but has had to cancel both trips. I ask him what a typical day looks like now – innocently, perhaps – and get the kind of answer that suggests I should've known better. 'Well, I clean my teeth. And I take my time with it. My dentist said, you know, don't be in a rush. So I clean my teeth properly. And I have some breakfast, and then I go to my desk and then I do what I'm not telling you about – despite my valiant attempts.' So, there will be another book. Just not a novel. And for those who might feel the absence of one, he offers a kind of gentle redirection. Go back, he says. Reopen what's already on the shelf. 'If you've read a book 10 years ago, when you go back to it, it's a different book. So I'd suggest it's time for them to go on that journey of discovery. I mean I know I'm being glib, on the one hand, but on the other hand, it is really true,' he says. 'And also, it's a real test because some of the things we thought we loved so much, we go back to, and they're not so great any more. And that's disappointing and we realise we've changed. The book hasn't changed – we've changed. And we hope, I would hope to have written a few books that when you go back to them are better than you thought, or at least as good.'

A new, larger than life teaspoon sculpture lands on Sydney Harbour

Sydney Morning Herald

6 hours ago

Sydney Morning Herald

A new, larger than life teaspoon sculpture lands on Sydney Harbour

Spoon-bending 'feats' of telekinesis and illusion are the inspiration for a new commission at the Museum of Contemporary Art as the gallery heroes contemporary sculpture on the harbour and tackles a multi-million dollar operating deficit. Los Angeles-based Australian artist Ricky Swallow was fascinated by Uri Geller's so-called mind tricks as a young boy growing up in the pre-internet Melbourne, and has created four warped large-scale stainless-steel spoon sculptures for the MCA's terrace which appear to have been put through the same mind wash. 'I felt like Uri Geller was on an endless world tour with that trick,' Swallow notes. 'I remember trying to bend spoons having seen it demonstrated by Uri Geller on TV. ' Swallow's Bent Forms #1–#4, scaled-up wax prints of actual teaspoons, are the first in a series of prominent sculptural commissions to be installed at the MCA over the next six months, the biggest being the inaugural Neil Balnaves Tallawoladah Lawn Commission to be unveiled late September in honour of the late arts philanthropist. A work by British contemporary sculptor Thomas J. Price will be the first of three to be showcased over three years on the museum's prominent harbour-side verge. The details come as the MCA revealed a $2 million operating deficit for 2024. The loss, which it says is covered by cash reserves, has been attributed to the ongoing impact of the global economic downturn and rising costs of wages, energy, exhibition freight and construction. In January, it introduced admission fees for the first time in 25 years. According to its latest financial results, the MCA is now self-generating about 85 per cent of its revenue from corporate partners, patrons and commercial activities including a new-look gala fundraiser, the MCA Artists Ball, which raised more than $1.1 million. Cost-cutting would continue throughout this year, its chair, Lorraine Tarabay said, its revenue measures moving the gallery closer to a balanced budget by end of the year with the benefit of full impact felt in 2026.

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Peter Carey says he's done writing novels: ‘You have to know when it's enough'

Peter Carey says he's done writing novels: ‘You have to know when it's enough'

A new, larger than life teaspoon sculpture lands on Sydney Harbour

Aussie star Nicole Kidman's move to Portugal could anger local residents

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Peter Carey says he's done writing novels: ‘You have to know when it's enough'

Peter Carey says he's done writing novels: ‘You have to know when it's enough'

A new, larger than life teaspoon sculpture lands on Sydney Harbour

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