‘You may find me chained to a tree’: Geraldine Brooks reveals her next act

April 26, 2026 — 5:00am

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Geraldine Brooks is a former Herald journalist who won the Pulitzer Prize for her novel March.

Fitz: Geraldine, congratulations. In this week of the Herald’s 195th anniversary, you have been identified by our editor-in-chief as our most distinguished literary alumna and – short of someone getting the Nobel Prize for Literature – are likely to remain so for some time. What I most love, however, and I’ve been telling people the story for years, is that you trace your literary beginnings to the Herald sports department in the late ’70s, where you were a junior racing writer!

GB: [Laughing.] That’s overstating it. I was merely a humble clerk to the actual writers. I’d graduated from Bethlehem Ladies’ College at Ashfield in the mid-’70s, and was desperate to be a journalist from the age of eight. So I’d gone to Sydney Uni where I did a double major in the subjects I thought might be useful – government and fine arts. I pestered the Herald so much to give me a cadetship that I drove the poor guy who was in charge of recruiting completely spare. And so when I arrived there – the full bottle on the uses of tempera in quattrocento Italian wall painting and classical political theory from Plato to Hobbes – of course I was sent to the Herald sports department, to assist the racing writers.

Fitz: Of course! Rrrrracing now at Randwick! Did you actually get to report on who won the fifth race on a heavy track?

GB: I didn’t get to write anything. I would have loved to have written Damon Runyon-esque character profiles of people at the track and whatnot, but it wasn’t to be. All I did was take down details for the actual racing writers. I had to note down the position of every horse at every turn, the odds they started at, what they went out to, and then the results, of course. Every race in Sydney, including the trots and the dogs.

Fitz: Being a racing writer is of course, a fine thing. Some of my best friends … etc. But did you have some sense while doing it, “I’m destined for bigger things”?

GB: I have to tell you, I could not get out of that assignment fast enough. It was the longest four months of my life. But finally I was plucked from the sports department and sent over to learn at the knee of Lenore Nicklin, who was the leading feature writer in Australia. And it couldn’t have been a better place to be. I got to write features, which was wonderful.

Fitz: The Herald must have realised pretty early, “Jesus wept, she can write”?

GB: I don’t remember anything like that. You just did your story and got on with the next one. But the ones that stuck with me, of course, were the most emotional stories, like going down to Appin to cover the mine disaster. That was my first experience of having to do a “death-knock” on somebody who’s just lost the love of their life in a terrible catastrophe. And I remember another one about a young firefighter who was tragically killed, trying to save lives and the property of other people.

Fitz: So how did we at the Herald let you slip through our fingers?

GB: I was lucky enough to get the scholarship that........

© Brisbane Times