[...] Helen Garner, who offered a compelling account of the kind of shift that might take place in the mysterious spaces of reading, taste, and perception. Garner recalled her own early hostility to Hazzard’s novels, “back in the 80s”:

Everyone I knew was swept away by them. I tried to read them but they bored me. They made me feel cranky, bolshie and obscurely ashamed. I couldn’t hack her elegant women with their fancy, made-up names, women who were soignées, who had their hair done and wore heels and sheer stockings, who trailed their long fingers in fountains and let their bracelets jingle against the marble basin. They (and their creator) shuddered, I knew, at oafish Australians like me, and at the coarse world I came from and was content to live in. I was viscerally insulted by the way she drew her skirts aside from the daggy, rough-grained Australia that I knew I belonged in, the country outside which I already sensed I would never be able to flourish. I don’t think I spoke about these thoughts to anyone. I just thought them, resentfully and, though I didn’t admit it to myself, sadly.

When Garner returned, decades later, to Hazzard’s work, she found her view transformed. She recognised qualities she had, she felt, been “unable to appreciate at the time: the way she handles a sentence, her wit and subtlety, her deep knowledge of the world … the fine sensibility, the adult sensibility that I was not ready for…” This emphatically and thoughtfully “Australian” reading upends the sense that Hazzard’s writing is outdated, or out of place in Australia, suggesting as it does that such simple coordinates might not necessarily determine either a reader or a writer.