Adelaide

Any place you have experienced first-hand is a museum of memory, one whose exhibits conjure up, in widening ripples of association, a whole city: a red paddle-boat, a photograph of three children on a hot day, a marble Venus fetchingly half-naked in the shade. Kerryn Goldsworthy's acclaimed Adelaide is a museum of sorts, a personal guide to the city through a collection of objects, iconic and everyday. Goldsworthy navigates her southern home, discovering its identifying curios and passing them to the reader to touch, inspect, and marvel at. These objects explore the beautiful, commonplace, dark, and contradictory history of Adelaide: the heat, the wine, the weirdness, the progressive politics, and the rigid colonial formality, the sinister horrors and the homey friendliness. They paint a lively portrait of her home city—as remembered, lived in, thought about, missed, loved, hated, laughed at, seen from afar and close up by assorted writers, citizens, and visitors—as it exists in her memory and imagination. In a new afterword, Goldsworthy ponders changes and revelations since Adelaide was first published in 2011 including, inevitably, the record-breaking heat of a 46.6-degree day.

Kerryn Goldsworthy is a writer, critic, and former university lecturer who has won two national awards for her writing. She has lived in Adelaide for a total of 36 years, she was educated at Adelaide Girls’ High School and the University of Adelaide, and has been a regular columnist for the Adelaide Review, a regular presenter at Adelaide Writers’ Week, and a soprano in the Adelaide Philharmonia Chorus.