Kate Grenville suggests we read Elizabeth Macarthur’s letters as ‘a wonderful piece of fiction, sustained over sixty years’. They were exercises in doubleness, concealment, and delicious irony.
Every part of this production - staged outdoors in a quarry - shows evidence of the highest degree of collaboration and the greatest subtlety of decision.
Australian history is already a hotly contested discipline but is it time to broaden our definitions of the canon? Might an indigenous rock painting or a novel or a poem constitute a work of history?