The Tasman Sea - Common Ground That Keeps Us Apart

Abstract

For a list of the kind of Australians New Zealanders know about, the title story of Lloyd Jones’s 1991 collection Swimming to Australia and Other Stories is a useful source. Warren, in a bid to gee up enthusiasm for a proposed migration to Queensland, tells his de facto partner, “‘That’s another thing, Marilyn. We would have new heroes. More of them.’ And he began to reel off the names of famous cricketers, tennis and league players.” (36) Whatever such heroes Warren may have identified, they are unlikely to have included the Australian novelist and short story writer Robert Drewe, in Wellington recently for that city’s biennial Writers and Readers Week.