4. The Time We Have Taken is told in the present tense, even as it describes the past, present and future. How does this make you view the notion of time in the story?
5. ‘That exotic tribe was us. And the time we have taken, our moment.’ Even as Michael is experiencing the present, he projects to the future, and becomes nostalgic for the moment he should be experiencing now. What are the other characters’ preoccupations with time? Can you think of times when they grasp the moment, or are there more situations where they let the moment slip away?
6. What does Mrs Webster discover as she experiments with the sensation of speed and acceleration?
7. Against the ordinary backdrop of the suburb, how and where in the story does the author convey the characters’ sense of wonder?
8. How would you describe the connection between Vic and Rita? How has time affected the way they feel about each other?
9. Mulligan, the painter commissioned to create a mural to celebrate the centenary of the suburb, produces a different perspective of the suburb and its inhabitants from the one the committee members envisaged. What do you feel the author is representing here?
10. In what ways do the characters transcend or escape the everyday?
11. What role do Bunny Rabbit and Pussy Cat play in the novel?
12. The Time We Have Taken is set in 1970, on the cusp of great change in the cultural and political life of Australia. What sorts of personal changes take place in the lives of Vic, Rita, Michael and Mrs Webster?
Read on
Find Out More
ON THE WEB:
www.pictureaustralia.org/index.html
National Library of Australia: Picture Australia archives. Search for pictures of the anti-Vietnam War movement and Australian suburban life in the 1960s and 1970s.
www.awm.gov.au/atwar/vietnam.asp
Australian War Memorial website detailing Australia’s military involvement in Vietnam.
www.abc.net.au/archives/timeline/ 1960s.htm
Year-by-year social, cultural and political milestones of the 1960s.
READ:
The novels of Marcel Proust
The philosophy of Martin Heidegger
My Brother Jack, by George Johnston, a Miles Franklin Award-winner and an Australian classic. It was made into an ABC mini-series in 1965, adapted by George Johnston’s wife Charmian Clift. A later film version was released in 2001.
Seizures of Youth : The Sixties and Australia by Robin Gerster and Jan Bassett, Hyland House, 1991
Australian Social Issues of the 70’s edited by Paul R. Wilson, Butterworths, 1972
A Decade of Dissent : Vietnam and the Conflict on the Australian Homefront by Greg Langley, Allen & Unwin, 1992
The Great Crash: The Short Life and Sudden Death of the Whitlam Government by Michael Sexton, Scribe Press, 2005
The Past and Future of the Australian Suburb by Graeme Davison, Australian National University, 1993
WATCH:
Vietnam, 1986
Kennedy Miller mini-series
The Dismissal, 1983
Kennedy Miller mini-series about the dismissal of the Whitlam Labor government in November 1975
Or Forever Hold Your Peace, 1970
A documentary compilation of events concerning the moratorium to stop the Vietnam War in 1970
VISIT:
The Australian War Memorial
Treloar Crescent (top of ANZAC Parade)
Campbell ACT 2612
AUSTRALIA
Phone: (02) 6243 4211
www.awm.gov.au
LISTEN:
www.whitlamdismissal.com/sounds/ Listen to the famous It’s Time campaign theme song and hear Gough Whitlam’s campaign speeches
Acknowledgements
Many thanks to the following for their help during the writing of this novel:
The Australia Council for a New Work Grant (Established Writers) in 2005.
Shona Martyn, Linda Funnell, Jo Butler and Denise O’Dea at HarperCollins, and my agent Sonia Land (and all the gang at Sheil Land) for their support and enthusiasm.
Finally, my special thanks to Fiona Capp for her constant help, suggestions and advice during the writing of the book. And to Leo — the lion-hearted boy.
About the Author
Steven Carroll was born in Melbourne and grew up in Glenroy. He went to La Trobe University and taught English in high schools before playing in bands in the 1970s. After leaving the music scene he began writing as a playwright and became the theatre critic for the Sunday Age. After lecturing at RMIT, Steven now writes full time and lives in Brunswick, Victoria.
His novels The Art of the Engine Driver and The Gift of Speed were both shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award. The Art of the Engine Driver was also shortlisted for France’s Prix Femina. In 2008 The Time We Have Taken won the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best Book, South-East Asia and South Pacific region, as well as the 2008 Miles Franklin Award, Australia’s most prestigious literary prize.
Praise
‘Carroll’s novel is a poised, philosophically profound exploration…a stand-alone work that is moving and indelible in its evocation of the extraordinary in ordinary lives.’
Miles Franklin Literary Award Judges, 2008
‘The result is a deeply satisfying encounter with the empty spaces that the suburb failed to fill both between people and inside them. The surface of Carroll’s writing is deceptively calm… Carroll takes time to tell an untidy story with a gentle sense of wonder. His prose whispers loud.’
Michael McGirr, The Age
‘This is the Slow Food of fictional cuisine: settle in and savour.’
The Advertiser
‘The suburb has the force of a character. It is imbued with the melancholy of loss. This, perhaps, is the most original and the most disturbing element in Carroll’s interpretation of where and how most Australians live.’
Courier Mail
‘It is the creation of a larger concept of suburban life in all its astonishing transcendent possibilities that makes this novel so special. Carroll’s revelations of these beautiful insights into our utterly ordinary world make him a writer worth cherishing. His prose is unfailingly assured, lyrical, poised.’
Debra Adelaide, The Australian
‘Each novel stands on its own, but they are more interesting considered together, making up as they do not only a history of the 20th century phenomenon the suburb, but also a slow-moving, Proustian meditation on being and time… The repetitive accretion of detail, like the brushstrokes of a pointillist, the echoes within the novel and from book to book, the use of tenses which base time in the present but refer constantly to past and future, contribute to the hypnotic effect of the whole.’
Katharine England, The Advertiser
‘The reader is both immersed in and embraced by the place, the people and the time, and while the story is so obviously set in Australia, it has a breadth of vision that lends it something universal.’
Age Book of the Year Judges, 2007
Other Books by Steven Carroll:
Remember Me, Jimmy James
Momoko
The Love Song of Lucy McBride
The Art of the Engine Driver
The Gift of Speed
Copyright
This project has been assisted by the Commonwealth Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.
Harper Perennial
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
First published in Australia in 2007
This edition published in 2012
by HarperCollinsPublishers Australia Pty Limited
ABN 36 009 913 517
www.harpercollins.com.au
Copyright © Steven Carroll 2007
The right of Steven Carroll to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him under the Copyright Amendment (Moral Rights) Act 2000.
This work is copyright. Apart from any use as permitted under the Copyrigh
t Act 1968, no part may be reproduced, copied, scanned, stored in a retrieval system, recorded, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
HarperCollinsPublishers
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National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication data:
Carroll, Steven, 1949-
The time we have taken / Steven Carroll.
ISBN: 978 0 7322 7837 3 (pbk.)
ISBN: 978 1 7430 9970 4 (epub)
Glenroy novels
Suburban life — Australia — Fiction.
A823.4
Cover design by Matt Stanton
The Time We Have Taken Page 26