I’m currently writing a book about Australian modernists, so I’m going back into history – obviously I can’t make that up. The way I write it will probably draw on fictional things but it will have to stay in the historical non-fictional realm. This one, I was able to pull fiction and fictional characters, and to push stuff around. I’m at liberty to do that.

At liberty? Does that mean you feel less constrained, even though there are people in the story who could map onto a reality which could be identified.

Not a lot. Bits, but not a lot. As is the way with fiction, a lot of the fictional characters really are fictional, and they draw on elements from different people but really have a reality which is only fictional. The great surprise and pleasure for me, writing the book (it had begun as a collection of essays) – was when Ettie appeared, completely uninvited. She’s a wonderful character, and I adore her, and I wish she was real. I wish I could go and stay in her house in the mountains. I can see where she comes from, but there is no way you could track her to a real person. And that’s the case with a lot of these characters, more so than in Poppy. I’ve pushed further into fiction. It comes out of very deeply lived things.

What’s left of the essay then?

The essay, when it’s reclaimed from the academy, is a form which is very horizontal, and allows very philosophical aspects as the same time as anecdotal or fictional or narrative aspects. And that suits me and my kind of temperament very well. So I can move between the historical, with people such as Artemesi Gentileschi and Stella Bowen, who are real, and you can go back and read the records yourself, to the fictional characters, and to historical and theoretical questions, discursive writing to anecdotal. I find it attractive to read and fabulous to write. And it seems to form naturally for me …

Maybe we shouldn’t be worried about what the thing is to be called, and just enjoy the new forms of writing. When I was writing this, I said to Hilary McPhee, my publisher, I don’t know what I’m writing! She’d say, that’s not your problem, that’s our problem as publishers. Maybe it’s just a book. And that’s the way I’ve come to think about it.

Why is The Orchard, which comes last, the part which names the book?

It was a bit tricksy, putting it at the end, because in fact the footnote on the very last page, explains the title. ‘The Orchard’ was the original name of the story about the handless maiden, the princess who has her hands chopped off and has silver hands, and eventually grows her own hands back. It was a story I only heard about a year ago, and it greatly affected me. I thought it was wonderful, and it seemed to be a story that said a lot about the sort of things I was thinking about at this stage in life. There’s a real danger with these books that are structured around the tale if it looks as though the story is the moral of the tale. And so I couldn’t find a comfortable place for it to go earlier, so by putting it at the end, it solved that. In a sense there’s a joke to myself that the explanation for the title comes at the end.

At the same time – gardens, flowers, orchards, trees, growth. It is a wonderful symbolic entity.

I think growth, but also pruning, order, control even linearity. The opposite to something like the winterbourne.

I hadn’t thought of orchards like that. I think of it more as abundance, and fruit. Seasons. Maybe this is an English/ Australian problem because for me an orchard is a place where there is allowed to be a bit of wildness, not planted in rows, a beautiful place that allows more wildness.

It’s also a place of childhood, a place of solitude.

Yes, there’s partly that, and it’s also a place of wisdom. Ettie has an orchard, a place of fruit trees coming to maturity, producing abundance. My image is of those gnarled trees coming to maturity.

And the winterbourne? That’s not an image that would be familiar to Australian readers.

I had wanted to call the book The Winterbourne but didn’t for that reason. It is a very wonderful image and it wouldn’t be familiar to people in England unless they happened to grow up or live in the chalk country. They’re a very rare beast. Most of the year they’re a dry stream, so when they’re not running, all you see when you walk across the hills is a little groove, a trough, a ditch, but smoother. In the winter, when the watertable rises up through the chalk, it will come out in the spring at the top and flood down the winterbourne. It’s a running stream that runs over grass, with blades that can bear the water over them. It’s a startling sight, a grassy bottomed stream that runs irregularly. The other thing that is fabulous is that, in the dry, all the seeds and all the little beetles eggs and things get blown into it, and in the spring, when the water comes down and germinates them, after the water has gone, you get a river of flowers. It’s very beautiful.

There’s the sense that you have to be special, lucky, privileged to see it.

That’s what was said. But it might have been a literary pretension. I wanted it to sit fairly lightly, as a symbol. But maybe it’s about girlhood and about femininity, that out of those fairly arid periods of our lives there are still possibilities for growth and flower. It’s sort of a fecundity.

There’s a sense in ‘The Winterbourne’, which is about young girls, in which the image is of desire, and the potential is random and seems to come to them as a blessing, or an occasional thing, something they have no control over. It’s mysterious and not yet lived. I rather like the scene in ‘The Winterbourne’ when at the very end, before the narrator leaves, she goes with the other girl to the winterbourne, and there is a sense that there are many things that are possible in their lives, and they’ve just put their toe in. It’s frightening and dangerous. It’s exciting and it’s tempting and powerful.

The reminiscences in ‘The Winterbourne’ do come, then, from your own experiences?

Yes, I went to a school very like that, and I’ve wanted for a very long time to settle accounts with it, I suppose. It was a less than pleasant experience. I went back to the school, and it was a very strange experience. I saw, this time, that it was a place of enormous privilege that I hadn’t been able to see at all at the time – but at a tremendous cost or repression and control.

Is that privilege still being maintained?

Well I thought, oddly enough, it’s being maintained more for the girls than for the boys. The ruling class of masculinity in England is in a state of crisis. But the girls seem to have no sense of crisis at all. In fact when we were there there was much more of a contradiction that we were being mothers and wives, but we also had to be clever, and basically we were to be the wives of diplomats and cabinet ministers. Now, I was amazed, these wretched toothy girls with big red knees were telling me they would be going into the foreign office. There was no doubt. They would say, well of course, I’ll be going to the Bar. This extraordinary level of confidence. And you think, where do the babies and marriages fit into this scheme of things?

And the good girls?

There was a lot going on with the prefects about who would go to the balls and things, and which boys they would invite, but they didn’t want to be seen to be inviting them individually, so they would invite them as a house. And the bit that really amused me was that they said they invited a few extras in case some of them turned out to be duds. This was in front of the house mistress. However many years ago – I was there thirty years ago – it was unimaginable, impossible conversation to have anywhere, let alone under the housemistress’s nose. What sort of a dud, I say. Ah well, the ones who aren’t sexy, or are boring, or only talk about themselves.

So certainly some things had changed, and these girls were more confident, but it had still changed within a fixed form?

Terrifically, it was quite unnerving how much it hadn’t changed and how these girls were still living within a very narrow concept of the world, a very narrow class-based world. So when they talk about boys, they mean boys from the Public School not State School boys.

I didn’t want to over-dramatise the medical. I never lost my sight; things were a bit blurry for a while but I never couldn’t see. Having put my toe into that one has made me deeply respectful of people who do live with blindness and I wouldn’t want for a minute to claim that I’ve come anywhere nearer than the very edges of that territory. Yet I’ve come close enough to glimpse, if you like, what it would be like. As it happened at the time when I began to work on early modernism in Australian painting, it seemed to me an extraordinary irony that at the time I was wanting to see, the question was – would I be able to see.

And that conjuncture forced me into thinking about what is it to see, and how do we see. And things that I’ve always taken absolutely for granted, like breathing, was suddenly became not granted.

And in a weird way, it was a blessing, because it made me think a lot about seeing and being seen, which I think, both in terms of what art might be and the images artists produce, and the sorts of ways of seeing that might be reproduced when thinking about writers and writing, but also in terms of femininity and the feminine, because I think so much of our experience as women is about seeing and being seen and that unstable oscillation about how we are being seen and see is actually very complicated.

Maybe one of the points all these things connects is about being able to take on our desires as something we are agents of, rather than as the recipients of other people’s agencies, particularly men’s. That has certainly been a very long struggle in my mind – how women might come to be the subject of their own desires, and the subject of their seeing, and the subject of their being seen. I was trying to write about as a rather difficult set of manoeuvres.

Everything in this book is centred but there is no centre. You could say the centre is sight, or desire, or growth.

It’s actually quite logical. It goes in many different connections but there is quite a logical way in which it all links up. It’s not just random, and it’s not only one thing, I didn’t want it to be just one thing. I wanted to find a writing that would express the complexity and the multiplicity of the issues involved, lots of different stories, and lots of different ways of looking at it. So there wasn’t one truth, so it wasn’t logical in a linear sense.

The frame is the story of the maiden with the silver hands.

‘The Winterbourne’ story is about the girl having her hands cut off, the way this culture, clearly does cut off the hands of our young girls. The adultery story seemed to me a silver hands story, the way we cope with culture, having had our hands cut off, with the hands that are given to us by men, basically and the enormous importance we put on being loved, being desired, being seen, being the wife of, the mistress of … the way we live through that set of experiences, and what I finish up saying there is, whether you’re wife or whether you’re mistress, you’ve got silver hands. And the question is to be seen as woman.