Quick, droll, self-effacing and effortlessly amusing, Peter Temple delivered the goods in his hour in the sun at the Writers and Readers festival 2008. Originally hailing from South Africa and an Australian since 1980, Temple has a muted South African accent but for those who’ve read his novels he certainly knows how to capture the Australian idiom.
Temple taiked about his experience of working as a reporter and sub-editor in South Africa during the apartheid era. He said it was clear what could and couldn’t be said, the line was drawn. The options were pretty stark, either you accepted the status quo, spoke out and went to jail, or left the country. He ultimately chose to leave but recognised “the extremely brave journalists in South Africa who paid a high price for protest”, he also noted that “for people with no social conscience it was an extremely pleasant life” in South Africa.
Life as a sub-editor seems have been a pretty brutal affair, he described it as a “trade of the destruction of other people’s prose” and for a while he “gloried in the destructive process”. Once in Australia he decided to pursue an academic career as an historian and studied while also teaching journalism. He developed a reputation as a savage marker and found reducing students to tears was so time consuming he gave away any further thoughts of an academic life!
After talking for years of wanting to write a novel and being paralysed by his own lack of depth his wife issued an ultimatum “shut up about your book until you have written your book”. He says he was so offended by her remark that he wrote his first novel Bad debt in “a pale green fury”. Bad debt is the first in the Jack Irish series and features a Melbourne based lawyer of dubious repute with a love for the gee-gees, Aussie rules footie and, rather bizarrely, cabinetry.
Temple starts each novel with high expectations and aims that the book should be “Midnight’s children meets War and Peace with a few lighter moments” these lofty ambitions dwindle as he writes resulting he says in “a disappointing load of rubbish”. He is currently grappling with a sequel to The broken shore, his publishers were hoping to receive it in November 2007, tentatively titled “Truth” he says it is almost there.
This was a funny and fascinating hour, and for those who enjoy crime fiction, snappy dialogue and spare but evocatively descriptive writing Peter Temple is your man.
- Information about Peter Temple from the Festival website
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