The Godfather: Peter Corris on meeting prime ministers
I’ve met three prime ministers: one serving and two ex. I nearly met another one and I’ve also met a couldabeen – probably a shouldabeen. The first was Gough Whitlam when he launched a 1978 edition of Frank Hardy’s The Unlucky Australians to which he had contributed...
The Godfather: Peter Corris on being reviewed
The worst review I ever got was back in my academic days. My MA thesis, Aborigines and Europeans in Western Victoria from First Contact to 1860, a typically cumbersome title, was published in 1967 by the Institute of Aboriginal Studies in Canberra as an occasional...
The Godfather: Peter Corris on reviewing
I must have written hundreds of book reviews. I cut my teeth at the business when I was an academic, reviewing books in the fields of my own research – race relations in Australia and the Pacific. I was lucky; these were popular areas of research and published writing...
The Godfather: Peter Corris on The Grapes of Wrath
I’ve written before about how audio books have enabled me to enjoy works I found too ponderous when I tried in recent years to re-read them – books by Hardy, Trollope, Galsworthy and others. So far, two authors regarded as classic have defeated me – Melville and...
The Godfather: Peter Corris on whales
I have nothing against whales. As far as I am concerned all the whales presently in the oceans can live out their lives in peace. I approve of marine parks to protect them. When I heard that the plan to explore for oil by drilling in a pristine part of the Great...
The Godfather: Peter Corris on Earlwood
Jean and I are now living in Earlwood. Over the years, when in Sydney, we have lived in the inner west – Glebe, Annandale, Petersham, Marrickville, Newtown. Earlwood is often referred to as being in the inner west but this is technically incorrect. The boundary of the...
The Godfather: Peter Corris on reading
I was a precocious reader. As I’ve written elsewhere, the family story is that I learned to read when I was four years old from having the roadside billboards spelled out to me on the long drive from Stawell, in the Wimmera district of Victoria, to Melbourne....
The Godfather: Peter Corris rounds up the 2016 AFL season
See the Bombers fly up, up … (Essendon Football Club song) It may seem perverse to begin a comment on the past season with a reference to the team that finished on the bottom of the ladder but, when you have supported a team for 69 years as I have Essendon, it remains...
The Godfather: Peter Corris on H Rider Haggard
If your name were Henry Rider Haggard, what would you select as a professional name if you aspired to be a popular novelist? Not Henry Haggard, obviously; what else but H Rider Haggard, with its suggestion of dash and painfully acquired experience? Rider Haggard was a...
The Godfather: Peter Corris on meetings
I’ve always disliked meetings. At school I was fidgety and resentful at assemblies and gatherings to commemorate notable events like the death of King George VI and the Battle of the Coral Sea (when did that particular anniversary slip off the school calendar – or has...
The Godfather: Peter Corris on asking for more
I went to the RTA Centre in Marrickville to renew the photo ID card issued to non-drivers and accepted by all and sundry. The very pleasant female clerk asked whether I wanted it to extend for five or 10 years. My first impulse was to opt for five, which is what I...
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