Books
Anne-Marie Condé
The prime minister’s potato and other essays
“For someone in my line of work, this feels deliciously transgressive,” writes Anne-Marie Condé in The prime minister’s potato and other essays. A social history curator and historian, Condé admits to becoming “restless”. She is keen to investigate the “quiet mysteries” that exist “beyond the walls of museums” and, in doing so, wants to break away from “a well-established set of procedures and protocols for acquiring and interpreting objects”.
Across 17 short essays, Condé explores “things” as wide-ranging as a hidden trunk in a boarded-up fireplace; a forgotten avenue of trees that once “kept green” memories of fallen soldiers; the traces of the word “eternity” written in chalk hundreds of thousands of times on Sydney streets; a letter from a “man rearing parrots” and; of course, a potato.
Despite the desire to be transgressive, initially there is a sense of self-consciousness within the writing, a tendency to over-explain or reassure the reader that interesting facts lie ahead (“What I did next – how I acted – is explained in the next essay”, “What follows is an account of …”, “we shall see in a moment …”). Fortunately, within a few essays this kind of clunky foreshadowing falls away.
The prime minister’s potato and other essays takes on a gentle meandering quality, tracking back and forth in time. The reader follows Condé through second-hand markets and charity shops, places where she frequently fossicks for “orphaned artefacts and random associations”. A pile of postcards becomes an opportunity for deeper investigation. Condé makes the careful work of sourcing “context clues” and trawling through archives akin to a treasure hunt. It is in attempting “to restore lost connections, to weave scraps and fragments together into a narrative, to restore meaning”, Condé’s insatiable curiosity comes to the fore, bringing warmth and charisma to the page. She is not afraid to tussle with the biases within institutions – from what objects are deemed significant for safekeeping to the voices that have been carefully archived and those that haven’t.
Condé’s skill as a writer takes flight in her essay about Dame Mary Gilmore. Although Dame Mary died in 1962, Condé imagines being welcomed into her flat for scones and tea. During these passages, when two women are talking about the editorial work Dame Mary did for the Australian Workers’ Union paper (The Worker), Condé’s voice shakes off the last of its stiff restraint.
Though they are fleeting in length, Condé creates trails into the past that are a delight to tumble down.
Upswell, 200pp, $29.99
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on July 5, 2025 as "The prime minister’s potato and other essays".
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