Author Anna Funder is best known for her award-winning novels All That I Am and Stasiland. Here, the 59-year-old talks about the important men in her life, including the night she knew her husband, Craig Allchin, was the one.
My paternal great-grandfather, Stanley Watson, was an engineer, a sapper and a colonel at Gallipoli. He was responsible for building Watson’s Pier, which the Australian and New Zealand troops escaped from. I would visit him in Adelaide. He lived to be 97 and died in 1985.
My grandfather, John Funder, worked as a pathologist. He was a great appreciator of literature – a medical man who lived for Scotch Finger biscuits, instant coffee and Peter Stuyvesant cigarettes. He used to walk around quoting Shakespeare at us when we got annoying.
My maternal grandfather, Vincent Brennan, was a beautiful man with a massive shock of white hair who was an accountant and loved French poetry. He took great pleasure in language, which I got from him.
My parents, John and Kathleen, met at Melbourne University in the late 1950s. My father used to wear a very old-fashioned Homburg hat; my mother used to say with great pride that she got him to stop wearing it immediately.
I remember kissing a boy at high school … My mother was there as one of the adults watching, and I remember it being extremely embarrassing.
My father was a psychologist. His postdoctoral work in endocrinology took us to San Francisco and Paris, where I started school. My father is the eldest of seven; his family is from Adelaide and came to Melbourne when he was five.
Dad loves to cook and feed people. I remember him coming home from the hospital, his pockets rustling with contraband like Mars Bars that we weren’t allowed to eat, but he’d sneak us some.
I am the eldest of three children. I have two brothers; one two years younger than me and the other five years younger. I was probably not the greatest playmate growing up – I used to sit and read while they did much more interesting things. I felt very lucky to grow up with them. We all travelled to Europe together when we were in our late teens and early 20s.
I remember kissing a boy at high school around the age of 13 at a blue light disco. My mother was there as one of the adults watching, and I remember it being extremely embarrassing.
I’m someone who is most comfortable with an intimate relationship and always had male friends. I wasn’t a player in any way; I wanted solid, real relationships and was lucky enough to find them.
I met my husband, Craig Allchin, at Melbourne University, and we have been together since our mid-20s. I was doing law, English and German, and he was enrolled in architecture.
Craig’s family owned a boat on Lake Eildon, and he organised a party on it for New Year’s Eve in 1990. There were way too many people on the boat. I was sitting in the corner when Craig had this quiet conversation with his brother-in-law and I heard snatches of words, like “taking on water” and “Oh, shit”. There were people dancing and a band playing; it was crazy. I watched how Craig got into the water, held his breath to swim underneath to find the hole. In that moment, it clicked: this is the guy who will quietly swim through shit to save everybody. I knew I wanted to be on his boat. This is a story I told at our wedding.
All of our friends were creatives and architects and nobody in our friendship group was getting married in the ’90s. We were one of the few to do it, and it took us a long time. We didn’t marry until 1998. A year earlier I had taken off for Berlin to write Stasiland.
I left my career as a lawyer, and Craig, and went to Berlin and put myself in a situation where I had to write my way out of it. If I didn’t do that, I would have screwed up a lot. We were living together on Russell Street, Melbourne, which at that time was heroin central. Craig stayed there and we met in Mexico and New York while I was in Berlin. That was a big thing for him to do in retrospect.
My mother was diagnosed with her illness and died a few weeks after our wedding. All those who came to the wedding also came to the funeral. Craig and I have three children together – two daughters, 24 and 21, and a son, who’s 17.
An Evening with Anna Funder is touring Australia in July and August.
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Jane Rocca is a regular contributor to Sunday Life Magazine, Executive Style, The Age EG, columnist and features writer at Domain Review, Domain Living’s Personal Space page. She is a published author of four books.Connect via X or email.
