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“... To read​ a novel by Helen Garner is to intrude on characters living their lives with no regard for your presence. You wander into their stories with the same sense of abandon with which they wander into Melbourne flophouses, drug dens, the homes of old and new lovers. ‘In the old brown house on the corner, a mile from the middle of the city, we ate bacon for breakfast every morning of our lives,’ begins Garner’s first novel, Monkey Grip (1977), whose narrator, Nora, ushers you to the kitchen table then leaves you to pick your way through the raucous crowd gathered there in the summer of 1975 ...”

“... largesse. The recent publication in Britain of works by three such figures – Rodney Hall, Helen Garner and Frank Moorhouse – provides a convenient occasion for assessment. Rodney Hall’s career neatly exemplifies current trends. Hall began his literary life as a poet. Since 1962, the year in which he was awarded the first Creative Arts ...”

“... tend to the middlebrow and his tone hovers between spite and whimsy. Certain moments in Helen Garner, one of Australia’s finer prose writers, are described as ‘Mills and Boon for Bohemians’. ‘Put two women together in a Helen Garner story and their eyes will meet in a confederacy of loathing the ...”

“... Helen Garner’s Cosmo Cosmolino contains two short stories together with the novella that gives the book its title. There are connections between the three. Ursula, a friend of the unnamed narrator of the first story, is mother of Kim who dies in the second; and Kim’s boyfriend, Raymond, will reappear, along with his brother Alby, in the third ...”

“... almost all the stories in this book recognise it in one way or another. Most, like the examples by Helen Garner, David Brooks, Peter Carey, Joan London, Kate Grenville, are admirably achieved on this basis, the authors all born in the Forties or Fifties; and the names indicate that the newer European immigrants have not yet found a voice in their new ...”

“... author’s obvious pleasure at hunting down the last snuffer-maker in England (67-year-old William Garner of Birmingham, recorded in 1851), Charlotte Brontë’s census return for the same year (occupation: ‘none’), or the family of miners in Glamorgan who as late as 1891 spoke no language other than Welsh (39-year-old Evan James and his sons John and ...”

“... one of her less perceptive observations: she was hardly right about everything. In an obituary, Helen Thomas, a journalist Mitchell liked to ring, said: ‘She was a personal victim of the political war of Watergate, and one of its very few heroines.’ Five years after the Watergate break-in, Nixon said: ‘If it hadn’t been for Martha ...”