Australian
Screen

Teacher’s notes

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This clip shows Australian novelist Peter Carey being interviewed by the ABC’s The Book Show host Andrea Stretton on the subject of his recently published novel The Tax Collector. Filmed while sitting on the balcony of a city building, Carey appears relaxed as he responds to Stretton’s questions about the novel’s characters, his relationship with them, his research into the tax system and the way he sought feedback from various people on the draft manuscript.

Educational value points

• In this clip, Peter Carey (1943–) reveals the strong relationship that he argues must exist between writers and the characters they create. He maintains that writers must love their characters so that they can then advocate for them in their novels. This may explain how he can explore the dark aspects of human behaviour while rendering a character sympathetically as he does in The Tax Collector where he gives voice to a father who sexually abuses his son.

• The fact that authors may not always have personal experiences that relate to the central concerns of their novels is one that is remarked on and explored in the clip. Carey’s novel The Tax Collector centres on a family, the Catchprices, their family business and the close and corrupted relationships between family members through the generations. Yet Carey claims that he had no experience of such close family relationships himself to draw on for his novel.

• The book being discussed in this clip, The Tax Collector (1991), received favourable reviews in the USA and UK, but was coolly received in Australia. It was Carey’s fourth published novel, the first after the Booker Prize winning Oscar and Lucinda (1988) and a book that was less successful than his earlier novels. Set in Sydney, the novel shows an ugly side of Australian urban society and depicts a family damaged through poverty and marginalisation.

• One of the qualities of Carey’s writing that critics frequently praise and that Andrea Stretton comments on in the clip is the detail and precision in his writing. Such detailed observation is part of what Carey describes as the ‘tricky business’ of writing, creating apparent authenticity such that the reader is transported into the constructed world of the novel and believes in it.

• Carey is not always as candid about research undertaken for his novels as he is in this clip, in which he reveals that he asked former tax department workers to check details in a draft. Carey frequently sets his novels in the past and has often said when asked about the importance of research that he has little patience with the task. Instead he claims to immerse himself in the period of a novel so well that he can create the characters and their world convincingly.

• Andrea Stretton (1952–2007) shows her skills as an interviewer, acquired over many years in television broadcasting, through the knowledge she shows of Carey’s writing and in her warm yet respectful manner. Her probing and informed questions were always delivered in a manner that indicated a genuine desire for enlightenment. She was a producer and presenter of television arts programs on the ABC and SBS from 1987 to 2001.