Condition: BRAND NEW
ISBN: 9781742237060
Year: 2020
Publisher: NewSouth Publishing


Description:


Any place you have experienced first-hand is a museum of memory, one whose exhibits conjure up, in widening ripples of association, a whole city: a red paddle-boat, a photograph of three children on a hot day, a marble Venus fetchingly half-naked in the shade.

Kerryn Goldsworthy's acclaimed Adelaide is a museum of sorts, a personal guide to the city through a collection of objects, iconic and everyday. Goldsworthy navigates her southern home, discovering its identifying curios and passing them to the reader to touch, inspect and marvel at. These objects explore the beautiful, commonplace, dark and contradictory history of Adelaide: the heat, the wine, the weirdness, the progressive politics and the rigid colonial formality, the sinister horrors and the homey friendliness. They paint a lively portrait of her home city – as remembered, lived in, thought about, missed, loved, hated, laughed at, seen from afar and close up by assorted writers, citizens and visitors – as it exists in her memory and imagination.

In a new afterword, Goldsworthy ponders changes and revelations since Adelaide was first published in 2011 including, inevitably, the record-breaking heat of a 46.6-degree day.

'For in many ways, Goldsworthy's impressively subtle and even-handed book is both a product of and a tribute to those same contradictions, demanding readers look beyond Adelaide's often deceptive surfaces and understand the hidden currents that have shaped its deeply idiosyncratic culture. Like its predecessors in NewSouth's cities series, Goldsworthy's book is as much personal essay as public document, a refl