The Glade Within The Grove
By (Author) David Foster
Random House Australia
Vintage (Australia)
20th June 1997
Australia
General
Fiction
823
Winner of Miles Franklin Literary Award 1997
Paperback
456
Width 132mm, Height 198mm, Spine 31mm
444g
Two of David Foster's previous books, Dog Rock and The Pale Blue Crochet Coathanger, feature the eccentric postman D'Arcy D'Olivieres, a great and memorable creation, and one who makes a welcome return to Foster's fiction in The Glade Within the Grove. Now the retired postman of Dog Rock, D'Arcy recalls a time when he was a fill-in postman at a small town called Obligna Creek. There he discovers an unpublished manuscript in an old mailbag - The Ballad of Erinungarah, written by 'Orion'. As D'Arcy himself says, 'Weird piece of work. Back then, 1990, I'm not sure I understood the implications. But I have thought about little else since.' D'Arcy becomes obsessed by the Ballad and the events it describes, and writes The Glade Within The Grove as a gloss on the Ballad, and investigation of events that happened nearly thirty years ago- namely the establishment of a commune in the late 60s, deep in the forest country of the Far South Coast, somewhere near the NSW/Victorian border. The valley is a paradise, populated sparsely by isolated logging and rural families. It is literally stumbled upon by a famous 60s rock guitarist, Michael Ginnsy, who loses his dog in th
David Foster was born in 1944 and spent his early childhood in the Blue Mountains of NSW. He trained as a scientist at Sydney University and the ANU and spent 1970 in the United States as a Fellow of the National Institutes of Health, and 1978 in Europe as a recipient of the Marten Bequest for Prose. His novel The Pure Land shared the first Age award for the best Australian book of the year, and his novel Moonlite won the National Book Council Award for Australian Literature.