Kaz Cooke: ‘It’s such bullshit to say you are an expert on something’

The bestselling author and reformed cartoonist on the ‘naughty frauds’ she admires, the challenges young people face, and why women read about having sex with fairiesGet our weekend culture and lifestyle email“I brought you a present,” author Kaz Cooke tells me, handing over a book titled Elvis Presley Speaks. A browning, dog-eared mass market copy, it’s the King’s account from beyond the grave, written by the parapsychologist Hans Holzer. It’s perfect – the sort of thoughtful, thematically relevant gift Cooke would have advised you to bring along in Keep Yourself Nice, the wacky advice column she once wrote for the Age. Or even an awkward moment for Hermione the Modern Girl, the original strip cartoon that launched her career as a cartoonist in the 80s. Her distinctive cartoon style decorates the cover of her 1999 pregnancy bible, Up the Duff, which adorns the bookshelves of many Australian women of a certain age. From there, Cooke’s output covered off on Babies and Toddlers, girlhood and puberty, and then It’s the Menopause (“What the hell is happening to your hair? Why do you want to bite everyone?”). We meet at the fountain of the Royal Exhibition Building on a stunning Melbourne spring day, Cooke in a flowing black dress and long pale hair. The weather has been grim and squally, and shall shortly be again, but the sun’s confidence and the slight breeze through the giant plane trees feel almost miraculous. Spooky, even.Cooke is talking about her new book, Spooky Ladies, a historical account of women from the world of magic and the esoteric: mediums, clairvoyants, mind readers and magicians’ assistants. While she’s hardly the credulous type – “I don’t believe in mediums. I don’t believe in seances. All the evidence is in, sadly” – she became obsessed with the recondite women of history after a 2013 creative fellowship at the State Library Victoria that led eventually to her novel Ada, about a 19th-century showgirl. Continue reading...