Soapbox

Guest Spot by Gil Hardwick


After so many years in Anthropology I am passionate about literature as a way to reveal and discuss pressing public issues in an entertaining and thought provoking way. I wrote my Honours dissertation on two boys growing up on colonial frontiers, in Xavier Herbert’s ‘Poor Fellow My Country’ and Mark Twain’s ‘Adventures of Huckleberry Finn’. In that I take something of a Dickensian view, though I am also considerably inspired by such writers as C.J. Cherryh, Frank Herbert, Raymond Feist, David Eddings, Ernest Hemingway and Robert Drewe, for example.


Most of my stuff is outdoors and blokey, but I do enjoy rendering capable female characters in that setting, showing the guys a thing or too. I have no problem with my male characters being sensitive, or gay perhaps, so long as they stand on their own feet and their skills, talents, and personalities are explored, but I also enjoy exploring liminal and frontier spaces where different cultures and expectations interact, not necessarily conflicting merely allowing the strength on either side to be explored in the way conflict unfolds.