Keynote
3 – Rosemary McLeod - Why write?
Talking about her personal journey – what
made her write. An only child. She begins with a studio portrait photo of
herself aged 4. The dress with the
little puffed sleeves reminds me of a photo of me presenting flowers to the Governor-General
at Sunday School. Both dresses were blue
and both of us look angelic…
McLeod talks about the ‘deceptive face’ we present to the world.
She talks about her dad’s books, he was
fascinated with reading about the war from the ‘other side’ – The Cruise of the Raider Wolf (WWI) and I Flew for the Fuhrer, and his other
favourite book was All Quiet on the
Western Front. Her father usually communicated via books he had read. She
describes both her parents as ‘contrary thinkers’.
Her family were ‘religious’ from different
denominations – Methodist and Presbyterian, and her grandmother was what McLeod
now sees as a paradox: a devout Anglican. [Big laugh, probably from those of us
who are Anglicans in the audience!] She says boarding school ‘cured’ her of
religion but she doesn’t like to take cheap shots at it.
The first book she read which made her
think she could write one herself was by Charlotte Bingham - Coronet
Among the Weeds. What appealed to her was the conversational tone and the
way the author dared to say what she really thought. She remarks that when she
wrote her first book her father was disappointed – he had hoped she would get a
nice job in a bank.
Other influences – poetry of the beat
generation. William Carlos Williams, and then Tom Wolfe, The New Journalism.
Tip to young columnists – don’t write about
your own family – will cause too many arguments at the dinner table, possibly
divorce, more likely you will stop writing the column.
So why write? She writes to make a living
and “because I didn’t have the good sense to train for anything else.”
She fears for the future – the fragmentation
of society. We’ll all have our own kind of TV channel – the more access we have
to these types of technology, paradoxically, the more limited we become.
