She hopes for more time to write now her youngest child is at school.įunder’s first year in New York was spent settling her family in and travelling to promote All that I Am, which was published in 20 countries. It will be her first set here, inspired by the tumult of the 1970s, the politics, the social upheaval, the feminism. She is midway through writing a novel based in Australia. It is the social justice ethos, however imperfect, that Funder wants for her children. “Americans have to say that they’re free because they are so unfree there, and they are unfree because there are no basic guarantees of wages or healthcare.” A lot of American interaction – “have you had a great day?” – is really people in the service sector begging for tips, she says. One of her journalist friends in the US lost her job because she disparaged her boss. You get the impression she soaked up New York, with its writerly culture, but was always analysing it, too.Īnna Funder in 2003 when she was included on the Guardian’s first book award shortlist.

Funder, 48 is compelling company, polite and generous, with a relentless intellectual curiosity mingled with a kind of vulnerability.

“Those very basic things allow Australians to have a freedom that Americans, for all of their vaunting of their freedoms, do not have.” “We’re going to have a family wage that is going to be a decent wage, and there’s going to be a minimum wage, and there’s going to be an eight-hour day and then from the 70s there’s going to be a universal healthcare system that is largely free. The key difference is the “sense of a fair go that we have here, rooted in the late 1800s wages disputes where we ended up with an industrial wage setting commission and the Harvester judgment early in the 20th century where we just said ‘we are going to work out the battle between employer and employee in a civilised way so it’s not just constantly strikes and lockouts’. Like many Australians, Funder had assumed the US would feel similar, but it was strange. She noticed the local paper, the Sydney Morning Herald, has shrunk to a tabloid. And the taxi driver on the way home from the airport talked to her family like they were real people, and how he declined a tip. She has noticed with annoyance the coffee in Sydney costs $4. So far, Funder has barely had a chance to notice whether she sees Australia anew. It won Australia’s premier literary prize, the Miles Franklin, in 2012. This was where Funder wrote much of All that I Am, her astonishing first novel inspired by the true story of Jewish Germans who fled to London in the 1930s and from there tried to warn the world about Hitler. Here is inner Sydney, the endlessly busy Parramatta Road, in a cafe called Deus.

Anna funder new book