Review of Sideways from the Page: the Meanjin Interviews by Jim Davidson

Abstract

Sideways from the Page collects the twenty interviews published in Meanjin between 1978 and 1982. The interviewees comprise a core of Australian writers in their forties: Frank Moorhouse, John Romeril, Jack Hibberd, Thomas Shapcott, David Williamson, David Malouf, Louis Nowra, Rodney Hall, John Tranter, Les Murray and Murray Bail. This group is supplemented by some senior poets: Kath Walker, Judith Wright, Vincent Buckley and Dorothy Hewett; by one distinguished critic A. A. Phillips; a novelist Elizabeth Harrower; and by three 'outsiders' whose contributions make for some interesting perspectives: the Samoan Albert Wendt, the Canadian Margaret Atwood and the Nigerian Chinua Achebe. The book's author, Jim Davidson, in a brief introduction, makes some acute comments about the way in which the series of interviews transformed Meanjin principally by providing 'a bridge between its creative content and the nonfictional elements'.