I stumbled across Peter Carey's childhood homeland of Bacchus Marsh when researching for the Great Dividing Trail Association’s Lerderderg Track guidebook last year. 
 
I was leafing through the folders in the Bacchus Marsh and District Historical Society room at the back of the library, when they told me that not only two times Booker prize winner, Peter Carey, was brought up in Bacchus Marsh, but also another famous Australian writer, Frank Hardy, the author of the sensationally libellous Power Without Glory. And, extraordinarily, they grew up in the same street, Lerderderg St, 230m apart in space, with a generation in time separating them.
 
Wow, I thought, it breaches the rules of plot plausibility and went on to write a one pager for our Lerderderg Track Walk or Ride Guide titled ‘Two literary giants mine their Bacchus Marsh beginnings.’ Among the Historical Society files, I had found what I consider an apt quote from the New York Times in which a panel of authors had mused as to why contemporary novelists wrote “not from the present, but the standpoint of childhood.” Many, they argued, such as Hemingway, Faulkner, Proust, Joyce and Wolfe were shaped by a nostalgic past and were “obsessed with time long gone.” 
 
Both Hardy and Carey wrote extensively about their childhoods – their stories and novels are full of Bacchus Marsh characters and locations if you know where to look. With another writer from the GDTA, Tim Bach, we went in search of those locations and that’s how we came up with holding what we titled the Famous Authors Walks around Bacchus Marsh, first time last November and then reprised by me in June this year as part of the 10th anniversary of the Peter Carey Short Story Awards, hosted by the Bacchus Marsh Library.
 
Peter Carey attended the Awards by video link from New York. He acknowledged that until last year (i.e. post the GDTA ‘discovery’), he had never realised that every day as he had walked to and from his primary school, he had passed the childhood home of Frank Hardy. A great writer, he agreed, and declared: “Bacchus Marsh is the most literary [small] town in Australia.” A big call, especially as he left out the qualifier “small” in his speech, although the Library had the sense to add it to their promotion – see the image of the  T-shirt they produced below.
 
 We have, however, turned up more cultural icons, who have lived in, been influenced by and written about Bacchus Marsh. Joan Lindsay, author of Picnic at Hanging Rock rented a house in Main St for a year. What about Frank’s youngest sister, Mary Hardy, who won seven Logies and was more famous in her heyday than her older brother? And recently Peter Carey recounted that Sumner Locke Elliott, winner of the 1963 Miles Franklin award, holidayed across the street from the Carey family home.
 
Bacchus Marsh would seem then to contain an exceptional creative cluster. But sadly they remain largely unsung, as occurs in so many places hiding their famous authors. While country towns unfailingly revere their pioneers, soldiers and sporting heroes, they rarely raise a statue to those who have contributed to our nation’s cultural development.

Twenty years ago, Alison borrowed my Subaru Forester, driving the length and breadth of the Gariwerd, then walking with her tripod and camera  into the ranges to capture their magnificence.  
​It was on behalf  of my commission for  the large format photographic book Garwerd: Reflecting on the Grampians.

Now she's back in the new WAMA gallery, part of a 16ha art and nature precinct near Halls Gap. A world-recognised expert on fungi, with five published books on the subject, her wall-of-colour digital projections on four sides of the WAMA main gallery celebrate the endlessly bizarre forms of fungi  and their extraordinary beauty. Ali believes that taking an artistic approach in her photography of fungi aids in bringing them upfront and personal to  a wider public.

It's an aesthetic she was pursuing 20 years ago in her 100 glorious full page images throughout Gariwerd Reflecting. Copies of the book are for sale at WAMA, which is well worth a visit not only for the gallery, but also its endemic garden and scattered sculptures.