When I came to write my own book, The Inland Sea, many of these women served as models and inspirations-how to write about anti-heroines, the environment, and the way it feels when everything comes undone. But they were the writers of the books who gave me a sense of myself as both an Australian woman and an Australian writer, and they were the writers who meant the most to me. They were rarely as well known as their male counterparts, on either an international or national level. Many of them were writing outside of Australia, and many of them were writing around the demands of their families and their jobs. These women were not easy to categorize outside of holding the same kind of passport. I recommended the books of Helen Garner, Shirley Hazzard, Josephine Rowe, and others, at any chance I could. Working at McNally Jackson bookstore in New York, I managed the Australian and New Zealand literature, and I knew which writers sold: Richard Flanagan, Peter Carey, Gerald Murnane, Patrick White, and Tim Winton. Our literature bears out the same preoccupation with the stories of men. Too often, Australia is depicted as a masculine place, populated by surfers and rugby players, a place that gave rise to Crocodile Dundee, the murderous psychopaths of horror films like Wolf Creek, and the bland handsomeness of the Hemsworth brothers.
Discovering writers like Christina Stead and Elizabeth Jolley rearranged my sense of who I was and helped me carve out a place for myself. It was only as I got older and began to start writing that I went in search of women who would guide me in a different direction.
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