Culture Street

Helen Brown grew up in New Zealand where she became an award-winning newspaper and magazine columnist as well as a popular scriptwriter. Helen's memoirs Cleo and After Cleo became international bestsellers and are available in a vast array of countries and languages. A New York Times bestseller, Cleo is also currently being made into a film by the producers of The Whale Rider.

Like the main character of Tumbledown Manor, Helen has ancestral ties with rural Victoria from back in the gold rush days. She lives in Melbourne with her husband Philip and temperamental cat, Jonah. She has three adult children and two granddaughters.

Heartburn by Norah Ephron

Sometimes I think the greatest thing a writer can do is to make readers feel less alone. I read Heartburn at I time when I thought I was the only woman on Earth whose life was a mess. Ephron’s wit and resilience soon shook me out of self pity.
Probably the second greatest thing a writer can do is to make readers laugh – or at least smile - in recognition of their own weaknesses being reflected back at them. Humor writing is a high art form. Norah Ephron could be very funny.

A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf

Our kitchen table still bears scars from where my two preschool sons attacked it with a hacksaw while I sat opposite trying to hammer out a newspaper column.
That was decades ago. I’d go to bed at night clutching A Room of One’s Own reciting Virginia’s mantra, that a woman writer should have a room of her own with a lock on the door and 500 pounds a year (roughly equivalent to $35,000 in modern Australia).
I’m pleased to report I now have a writing room. The door has yet to acquire a lock.

Winnie the Pooh by A.A. Milne

I adored listening to Mum read aloud from the battered edition she’d loved as a child. It was the first time I realised characters in a book could be more interesting and funny than real people.
A chubby child addicted to the local lolly shop, I identified with Pooh’s hunny obsession. Plenty of my friends had fussy Kanga mothers, and I had an aunt who was a perfect Eeyore. I loved Tigger, too. He’d probably be diagnosed with Attention Deficit Disorder these days.

Wild Geese by Mary Oliver

Is it okay to mention poetry? It’s just that my bedside table’s empty without one of the 10 or so volumes this great nature poet has produced.
Every piece she writes is a raindrop of distilled perfection.
I read her when my mind refuses to stop chattering or when my heart is tight. Sometimes I read Mary Oliver just to make sense of the day that’s been and have faith in the one ahead.
She deserves more than her Pulitzer Prize. I’d put her up for sainthood.

The Garden Party and Other Stories by Katherine Mansfield

It’s impossible for a New Zealand born writer not to be influenced by the magical work of Mansfield. Penning her stories from the safe distance of Europe, she breathed life into colonial New Zealand with all its insecurities and pretentions.
Every Kiwi author goes through stages of trying to write like KM and then trying to be her – until it sinks in no sane person would wish for such a short and tragic life.
Far better to admire her talent, and be grateful Katherine Mansfield cast her shimmering eye over the country she loved and despised.