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 childern on a hot day, a marble Venus fetchingly half-naked in the shade.

A painting, a frog cake, a landmark, a statue, a haunting newspaper photograph, a bucket of peaches, pink shorts in parliament, concert tickets, tourist maps …

Kerryn Goldsworthy’s acclaimed Adelaide is a museum of sorts, a personal guide to the city through a collection of objects, iconic and everyday. Adelaide 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, travelled to and from, seen from afar and close up by assorted writers, citizens and visitors – but mainly as it exists in her memory and imagination.

Now with a new Afterword in which Goldsworthy ponders ten years of changes and revelations since Adelaide was first published in 2011 including, inevitably, the record-breaking heat of a 46.6 degree day.A truly unique and revealing way of looking at a city – throughthe small-scale lens of individual objects and events, personal andpublicPart of the classic City Series where leading writers of fiction andnon-fiction reflect on their home cityBilled as ‘travel books where no-one leaves home’Goldsworthy is a highly respected veteran of Australian literatureand criticism; regular fortnightly review column in the SydneyMorning Herald and The AgeNew edition of a classic with a new Afterword in which Goldsworthytakes in storms, rising temperatures, more recent attempts tofind the Beaumont children, new trams, bridges, ovals and otherdevelopments since her book was first published in 2011