2008 Prime Ministers Literary Awards Media
Philip Jones talks about Ochre and Rust at the National Library of Australia
February 2009
About this Publication
Philip Jones spoke at the National Library of Australia in February 2009 about his award-winning book Ochre and Rust. Watch a five-minute video of highlights (transcript below) or download the 45 minute audio or transcript of the talk in full.
Right click on the link and choose 'Save As' or 'Save Link As' to save the video or audio files below to your computer.
High quality video - Philip Jones (five minute extract) (WMV - 33.7 MB)
Download the audio
Jasmine Cameron's introduction to Philip Jones (MP3 - 2.9 MB)
Transcript of the video
Collections in cultural institutions are, I suppose, what make me tick and what lie behind Ochre and Rust. And it is this proximity to collections as a curator which has engaged me in my career. I’ve been very lucky to make connections between the objects which are on the shelves, and very often haven’t been elevated to the front rank of material which is on display, and the contextual material that lies behind these object - very often in an archive, but sometimes in someone’s attic or in one’s personal photograph album.
One of the delights of living in a colonial capital like Adelaide is that the telephone books often still contain the names of the original collectors and their descendents, and it’s possible when one reaches an impasse in one’s research to turn to the telephone book and look someone up and ring their great-great granddaughter or grandson, and suddenly the material opens up again in a new way.
I had so much material that I believed in fact that I could write the whole book as a fiction and I did write this chapter initially as fiction. And then I realised: ‘Well, there is so much in it that’s true, this is ridiculous, why if truth is stranger than fiction would you leave out the truth.’ I suppose there was always an attempt after years of working as a historian, and being a slave to the footnote, there was always an attempt to break clear of that. But initially I did attempt to do that and decided ‘No, if the facts are close enough together that one can step from one fact to another one doesn’t have to leap and crash in-between.’ If you can step across or jump lightly, that would be even better. You can attempt then to work in a literary fashion. If however you’re constrained by the distance between the facts, it then becomes an awkward and possibly risky process I think to move from writing non-fiction to fiction. And I thought ‘No, it’s possible to stay in non-fiction but to do it in a literary style.’
I didn’t have many models; there are many great non-fiction writers I admired, but essentially the formula that I’d arrived at with using objects and actually integrating the images within the text in a way that you see in the work of Seybold for example - W. Seybold the fiction writer who writes in a non-fictional way I suppose - was a model for me, but also the French archaeologist Gustav Courbet who has worked with objects and written of them on his journeys through Provence and Languedoc in France and has picked up objects of antiquity and then reflected on them and woven them into a narrative, was again another model that I tried to use.
So how has winning this award changed my life, that was one of the briefs that I had for this talk. I can’t really answer that but I'm now I suppose on the circuit in a way for the festivals that are held and the Sydney Writers festival coming up. It’s going to be very interesting to connect with other writers in Australia who write in a variety of different ways and to feel myself partly included in that community, and I’m looking forward to it very much. It’s also opening up my sense of confidence in writing to the degree that it doesn’t have to be non-fiction from now on and I’m looking at doing something a little different and that will be as experimental as this one was. Who knows, you may never hear from me again I might just sort of vanish into the ether.
So thank you very much and I’d be happy to answer a question or two if you have one.
