Alex Miller on storytelling

My father and grandfather told stories every day of their lives, and my mother and grandmother had babies and offered a gentle resistance to the persistent story making of their men. But for my father a day without story was soup without salt, and he loved his salt lavishly. At nine years of age, when my young brother fell ill and I told him stories to save his life, I became my family's story teller. Gathered around the fire last thing in the evening, my father drew on his pipe and looked at me, 'Have you got a story for us then, Alex?' My mother touched his arm, 'It's already past their bedtime, Manny.' My father looked into the fire and drew on his pipe, 'Och, well, just a wee one then, boy.'

So I began my story, never knowing where it would take me or how it would end, nor how long it would be in the telling, my sisters and brother staring into the fire with my father, my mother pretending not to listen. 'An old man was walking down a road one day, when he came across a sack that had been thrown aside into the hedge . . . ' Who was not listening now?

When I was thirty eight, I published a story and became a story writer as well as a teller. I telephoned my father to let him know. 'You could always tell a story lad,' he said, neither his Glasgow accents nor his attitudes softened by the years. He was not impressed. Writing was not for him an advance on telling. For my father it was the company of the telling that cherished the spirit of story. But I'd slipped over onto the page and it was too late. I kept at it. And when I was fifty two I published my first novel. I'm seventy one now and still at it, closing on a draft of my ninth novel, Lovesong, and dreaming of Sophocles producing his masterpiece Oedipus at Colonus when he was eighty nine - and loving it. It's in the blood.

Alex Miller on writing Landscape of Farewell

Landscape of Farewell is a celebration of friendship between two men of my own generation. The novel speaks of the shadow of the past they have each lived with in silence for the whole of their lives. It is the story of how their friendship empowers them to penetrate that silence and to give it a voice.

I first heard the story of the Cullin-la-Ringo massacre when I was a boy of sixteen and was newly arrived in Australia from England. I was working in outback Queensland as a stockman on Goathlands Station in the beautiful valley of Coona Creek...
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Landscape of Farewell

Alex Miller

A hauntingly beautiful meditation on the land, the past, exile and friendship, Landscape of Farewell is a powerful novel (now in paperback) from acclaimed Australian author, Alex Miller.

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