Burning Shame, Decolonizing (His)tory, and Writing Illness and DisabilityThe Year in Australia Kylie Cardell (bio) Burning Shame: Helen Garner, One Day I'll Remember This: Diaries II 1987–1995 In November 2020, I am on my couch in Adelaide while Helen Garner, from an airy study in her home city of Melbourne, adjusts her camera. In the Adelaide Hills, from Matilda Bookshop, Molly Murn leans in and asks, "Can you hear me, Helen?" This is 2020. This is how we book launch. The Victorian capital is at the tail end of six weeks of "stay at home" orders, a lockdown designed to eliminate a COVID-19 cluster that would eventually be traced to a breach in a hotel quarantine. Victorians are allowed out for an hour to exercise, to buy essential groceries, or for medical reasons. The state premier has held a press conference every day for 120 days. "If he wore his North Face," a friend told me, referring to the brand of outdoor adventure jacket, "we knew it was good news." Garner hasn't minded the lockdown. She feels "lucky, guilty" about it, in fact. She has used the time to finish editing the book that will launch tonight: One Day I'll Remember This: Diaries II 1987–1995. It's her second volume of diaries; the first, Yellow Notebook: Diaries I 1978–1987, was published last year. Two volumes in two years, two decades in 600 pages. Garner has spoken variously about her intentions for her diaries, and she has published an essay on method: she prunes voraciously but does not rewrite, does not "improve" ("My Early Diaries"). Garner has also excised names—often using pseudonyms instead—along with most of the dates, ordering the content by year. This second volume of Diaries charts the mid-1980s to the 1990s, during which time Garner is working on a film script, a new novel, and becoming more interested in true crime writing. In 1987, she writes: "Lindy Chamberlain [End Page 13] interviewed on TV. We sat forward […] striking eyes—very elegantly made up—and out of this chic and elegant face issues an Australian woman's voice, flat-vowelled, nasal, harsh, with oddly self-dramatizing inflections and aggressive intonations. At times she wept and this moved me. I admired her courage in continuing but it also frightened me" (42). Chamberlain's trial for murder, her defense that a dingo took her baby, and her eventual pardon gripped the Australian media for years, but Garner just as often records obscure news items. It is almost always crime that trips her curiosity in this volume. And by the end of 1994, Garner is writing nonfiction in earnest, reading Janet Malcolm, and dealing with defamation lawyers ahead of her first nonfiction publication, an account of endemic sexual harassment at a Melbourne university residential college, The First Stone. The book's publication will be a watershed in Garner's career, a tumultuous time that is still on the horizon here, even as Garner begins to document a certain tone among some readers—mostly university students, equipped with "a lot of women's studies jargon"—who have been writing to her: The huffy ones are sort of sweet—sanctimonious and very young. They're going to get rid of all my books off their shelves. They aren't going to buy my book, they don't want me to get their money, it really shits them that it's on the bestseller lists, it's not my story, I've stolen it, I'm making money out of other people's troubles, anyway they haven't read it and they aren't planning to, but they know EXACTLY what the book says and they're outraged. (292) On the next page, Garner recounts that she has been "ambushed" on a radio interview by an academic who "was on the warpath. The sleazy, story-stealing book she was deploring did not sound like the one I had written." The phone interview draws to a halting close: "'the host of the show spoke softly to me from Melbourne. 'Are you still there?' 'Yes.' 'Are you all right?' 'No'" (293). Garner is a very...