Month: November 2009

Kiwis have style!

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Kiwi silhouette

Kiwi (Courtesy: OCAL via Clker.com)

Much as I, an Aussie, hate to admit it, those New Zealanders have style! Kimbofo has just posted, on her Reading Matters blog, New Zealand Book Council’s current promo – take a look here. Beautiful isn’t it? It springboards from Maurice Gee’s novel Going west – which reminds me that I really must read the Maurice Gee in my TBR pile soon.

On its website, the Book Council says that its mission is:

to inspire more New Zealanders to read more; to promote reading in general, but particularly to represent and promote New Zealand writing and writers – our own artists, stories and points of view.

I have not read anywhere near as many New Zealand books as I should (would like to, even!), but I have read some, most memorably:

I would recommend all of these, for different reasons. Clearly though, there are some big gaps here: the first one I should rectify is the aforementioned Maurice Gee. And, while talking about New Zealand writers, I have to admit that a few writers we claim as Aussies originated in New Zealand, including much-loved author Ruth Park and the poet and editor Douglas Stewart.

Hmmm…the more I think about it, the sooner we annex New Zealand as Australia’s 7th state the better! I’m sure Lisa at ANZLitLovers would agree!

The trouble with audiobooks (for me)

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Headphones

Listening (Courtesy: OCAL on Clker.com)

Once was audiobooks were used primarily by visually impaired people and travellers, but with the rapidly increasing miniaturisation of audioplayers, audiobooks are now being “read” by people going on walks, working out in the gym, doing housework, sitting on public transport, or even working at their computers. In other words, people listen to audiobooks pretty well anywhere that they can. I am not, however, one of them. In fact, I can count on one hand (excluding snippets heard over the years on radio) the number of audiobooks I have “read” (or is that listened to?). Do you “read” an audiobook? How differently do you experience a book when you listen to it versus read it?

For me, the experience is so different that when I am in a listening situation I prefer radio and music to books. And here is why (but please, this is a purely personal thing – it is about how I like to enjoy books and is in no way intended to be prescriptive about how everyone should enjoy books):

  • I like to see the words – know how they are spelt and so on – partly, but not only, because this can be critical to my understanding (particularly with authors who engage in wordplay).
  • I like to stop and think as I read – ponder about a phrase or an idea, and even flip a few pages back sometimes to check a link that I think the author is making.
  • I like to make notes as I go and, if I own the book, I do this in the book – making notes helps me remember what I’m reading, and helps me write a blog or prepare notes for later discussion.
  • I don’t want to miss visual clues – some authors, and particularly post-modern ones, use visual clues and games to add to their text, but there are other more subtle visuals in “normal” books that you miss in an audio version.
  • I don’t particularly like it when a reader acts out the voices in a book – it distracts me from my own understanding of the text. The reader for the audiobook of Ruth Park’s Swords and crowns and rings (link here is to ANZLitLovers review), for example, irritated me intensely with her voices and dramatisation, though as she wore on I got used to her because it is a great story!
  • I like the physicality of the book (though I can probably relinquish this in the same way that I am pretty happily converting from CDs to iTunes for my music).

All this said, I have enjoyed a couple of audiobooks. The outstanding one was Roald Dahl reading his own Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Authors readings their own works can be a hit-and-miss affair, but Roald Dahl was perfect. I heard snippets of Barack Obama reading his Dreams from my father on the radio and thought he also read his own work beautifully. On another tack, I enjoyed hearing Mary Durack’s memoir Kings in grass castles when we did a long long family trip several years ago.

Audiobooks clearly have their place. They work best for me when they are memoirs or simple plot-driven books rather than literary fiction, and so on the next very long trip we do I’ll probably seek out some memoirs. I also know that I will be very glad of their existence when (or, hopefully, if) my sight fails me. But, otherwise, I will be sticking to reading rather than listening…and this means that the technology that is likely to attract me is the eBook. I can see myself trying them in the not too distant future.

Can the Coens be serious?

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Of course they can! In fact many of their films are comic with a dark side. This is particularly so of the first film of theirs that I saw, Fargo. It is one of those films you don’t forget. I don’t blog about all the films I see, and when I do blog about them, it’s usually an Australian film. Our industry is so overlooked – in Australia, let alone the world arena – that I like to do my bit. But, it is hard to resist commenting on a Coen Brothers film – and so I’m not going to (resist that is!). The film I’m talking about is their latest, A Serious Man.

A Serious Man chronicles a couple of weeks in the life of physics professor Larry Gopnik at the point that everything starts to unravel for him. It all starts (ostensibly) when a failing Korean student attempts to bribe him and his wife asks for a divorce. It’s all downhill from there as the hapless Larry’s fortitude and attempts to be a good and “serious man” are tested again and again. If you have a biblical background you will see parallels here with the story of Job. As for me, I reckon there’s a bit of the Everyman in him. Before his story starts, however, there is a funny little sepia-tone prologue set in a Polish shetl in which a man invites home another man who had helped him on the road, except that the wife believes that the man had died years ago and that her husband had introduced a dybbuk (evil spirit) into the house. These characters are never referred to again but they set the tone, introducing the idea of bad things happening – and of those things perhaps having some supernatural origin.

Like all Coen Brothers films, this is a stylish movie – it has that sort of heightened naturalism (or is it realism!) that I tend to love (like you also find in Mad Men). The details of its midwestern 1960s setting are beautifully rendered, the characters are both larger and smaller than life (if you know what I mean), the music is apt as ever, and it mocks and it mocks and it mocks our failings as human beings. Interestingly, it does not use a named cast as many of the Coens’ recent movies have. It’s also very Jewish. It’s imbued with that Jewish sense of fatalism (“why is God doing this to us?”) and is presented with typically Jewish self-deprecating humour. Some criticise it for being stereotypical – and it is. But that’s part of its humour. If you don’t get that sort of humour – if you don’t see the humanity behind it – you won’t like the movie.

When the truth is found to be lies, and all the joy within you dies… (Rabbi Marshak)

We can’t ever really know what’s going on. (Larry)

Now, I have to warn you that my son, a very keen Coen fan, did NOT like this movie. Well-made he said, and he giggled a bit he said, but he found it mean-spirited and oppressive. He’s not the only one. It seems that this movie is splitting critics. Our very own Margaret and David are split: Margaret gave it 2 stars out of 5, while David gave it 4. Margaret, like my son, felt it was mean and unlikeable, whereas David, like me, found it funny with its own sense of warmth. How can the same film have two such opposing points of view? So, if you haven’t seen it, don’t take my word for it – you know what to do!

William Trevor, The woman of the house

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[WARNING: SPOILERS, if you think it matters]

According to Wikipedia,William Trevor’s characters “are usually marginalised members of society: children, old people, single middle-aged men and women, or the unhappily married.” This is certainly the case with Trevor’s short story, The woman of the house, which was published last year in The New Yorker. All four characters in the story are marginalised, two are middle-aged to old, and two are young, but all live on the edge of society struggling to survive in one way or another. In fact it is said of the two young men that:

Survival as they were was their immediate purpose, their hope that there might somewhere be a life that was more than they yet knew.

Pretty grim stuff. The plot is simple. Two young men of “stateless” origin  are employed to paint the house of an old disabled man whose carer/companion is his nearing 50-year-old cousin, Martina. By the end of the story the old man has disappeared from view … we have a pretty good idea of what has happened to him and it ain’t pretty.

The story is perfectly set up. The two strange men who appear to know little about painting – and who we are told are somewhat like “gypsies” – have clearly been shown where the money of the house is kept. The woman, Martina, is (to be euphemistic) taken advantage of by the local butcher and in return receives some special meats. Aha, we think, here is a case of two con-men facing some easy pickings…but, this would clearly be too cliched for Trevor. They don’t steal the money and she is not so down-trodden as it seems. Trevor makes no judgement – just tells it like it is when life is hard and people make pragmatic decisions in order to survive.

And that’s all I’m going to say about this tight little story…except of course that it has inspired me more than ever to read a Trevor novel.

Arnold Zable, Sea of many returns

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He leaps through centuries, tears apart myths, and reassembles them in his own way.

Sea of Many Returns cover

Cover image courtesy Text Publishing

These words that are said of one of the characters in Arnold Zable’s Sea of many returns could just as easily be said of Zable himself – not only of this book, but of his earlier ones such as Cafe Sheherazade. Zable loves telling stories, stories that weave between each other in an attempt to understand the impact of dislocation and exile on the human psyche – well, on his characters’ psyches but it is not hard to universalise this.

Sea of many returns is, essentially, a dual point-of-view novel:

  • the first person narrator, Xanthe, who was born in Melbourne to an Ithacan father and who tells her story; and
  • the third person story of Mentor, her paternal (also Ithacan) grandfather whose journals she is translating.

The story roams, backwards and forwards, from 1895 to present time as Xanthe and Mentor tell of the lives of their family members in Greece and Australia…about all their leavings and returnings, for work or adventure, or more terribly for war or, simply, to find a better life:

The stories I have heard, and am yet to hear, are echoes of one refrain: Is there somewhere on earth where I can find peace and prosper? Once the question is posed, the agony begins, the eternal dilemma: to stay or leave? To retreat behind fortifications, or cast our fate to the winds? (Xanthe, p. 203)

Underpinning this dilemma is the yearning for Ithaca – which translates, really, to the yearning for place, for home. Towards the end of the novel Mentor discusses the notion of “nostalgia” or “the pain of longing for the return”. Put this together with “the Ithacan phobia, the fear that I may never return” and the result is a melancholic – but not depressing – tone, since it is mostly accompanied by, if not always strength of mind, a resilience of spirit.

Not surprisingly, it’s the men who travel, at least in the earlier times of the book. As Xanthe’s aunt says, resignedly, “Let your men roam distant lands. Let them do what they must. What choice do we have? Bend your back to the mountain. Sow and reap”. And so, while Xanthe talks to some of the women in her Greek family, it is the men whose stories she seeks as she tries to understand her father, the angry Manoli, and her grandfather, Mentor. However, the book’s final section, titled “Epilogue: The resident tiller of the soil”, focuses on 90-something year old Irini who, quite paradoxically Xanthe realises, has not left Ithaca since her arrival there 90 years before and yet “is both voyager and teller, Odysseus and Homer”. This is perhaps a little elliptical but it has a certain resonance nonetheless! And Andreas does mutter in the previous section, “To know one place is to know all places”.

While the novel takes on a mythic overtone, it is “history” which provides its backbone and puts flesh on its characters: there are, for example, the way-too-many wars (to which many men go and from which some return), the 1916 anti-Greek riots in Kalgoorlie, the 1953 earthquakes in Ithaca, and the building in Melbourne of Cafe Australia and the Capitol by the Chicago architects, Walter Burley and Marion Mahoney Griffin. This last one seems a bit odd in terms of the overall thrust of the book but is interesting to one who lives in the city they planned!

I have only touched on a little of what this novel contains – there are the references to the Homeric quest and the story of Odysseus, there is the drunk but wise Niko, there is the beauty of the language in its rhythms and descriptions, and there is music – but if I go on, I might, like its storytellers, never stop. As Andreas says to Xanthe near the end

I have told you one version of the story and tomorrow I may tell it with a different slant. Each word I utter is true and false at the same time …

Paradoxical? Yes! But that is the essence of this lyrical and mesmerising but also rather mystifying – or, is that mythifying – book!

Arnold Zable
Sea of many returns
Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2008
307pp.
ISBN: 9781921351532

Jessica Anderson, The commandant

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Jessica Anderson, The commandant Book cover

Cover image for The commandant (Courtesy: Sydney University Press)

When I first read about Sydney University Press’s Australian Classics Library, the book I really wanted to read was The commandant by Jessica Anderson. It’s her only historical novel, but its subject matter doesn’t stray much from what she told Jennifer Ellison in an interview many years ago, “I was very much, and always have been, preoccupied with people who are strangers in their society” and “I am interested in families… They are interesting – you know, the tangle” (Rooms of their own). This is a clever and thoughtful novel by yet another much overlooked Australian woman writer.

[WARNING: SPOILERS, if you don’t know the history on which this is based]

The plot is pretty simple. It is set in Queensland’s penal settlement of Moreton Bay in 1830. It draws from the real story of the commandant there, Patrick Logan, who was noted for his harsh methods and who was murdered while out on an expedition. In the novel, Logan’s family is joined by his wife’s young sister (“the stranger”), Frances, who, on her way up to the settlement via Sydney, has been introduced to “radical” ideas critical of Logan’s regime. The scene is therefore set for potential conflict either between Patrick and Frances, or within Frances herself, or both.  In the end, it is a bit of both as Patrick finds his practices questioned and Frances confronts the realities of living in a penal settlement.

Except for Frances’s boat trip up to Moreton Bay with some of the settlement’s residents, the novel is set entirely in Moreton Bay. The characters include Logan’s household (family and servants), his wife Letty’s two women friends, officers of the settlement including two medical officers and the man sent to replace Logan, and of course some prisoners. There are also some characters in Sydney – Frances’ would-be beau and the sisters of a newspaper editor jailed for his criticism of the regime and against whom Logan is bringing libel action. The characters are well-drawn, with the significant ones nicely complex. You get a good feel for life in the settlement.

I would love to write about many of the characters as there are some wonderfully meaty ones, but I’ll just focus on Frances, the only character, really, who changes during the course of the novel. At the beginning, she “was seventeen; she was not stupid, but was often absurd”. She is also sympathetic to the idea of reform, which she says she developed through seeing servant life and poverty first-hand in Ireland and which puts her at odds with many in the settlement. She has a lovely ability to question herself, to see her failings, and it is this which enables her to learn from her several painful experiences. By the end, she is wiser in the ways of the world and has learnt to live with “incurable knowledge”, but has not lost her commitment to the cause of humanity.

Much of the story is told in dialogue – in fact, it wouldn’t be hard to turn it into a play/screenplay. Anderson handles this dialogue well, nicely differentiating the characters, from Letty’s lisp to officer Collison’s uneducated speech patterns. Letty’s lisp is an ironic touch – it lulls us into thinking she is one of those superficial flirtatious women but we soon discover that she is more complex than just a pretty little wife. Characters are nuanced by their reactions to each other  as well as by what they say, rather than by a lot of specific authorial comment, though there is that too.

There is also description, including some particularly beautiful ones of the bush during the search expedition for Logan, such as:

…a few clumps of trees, their rough bark the colour of iron, and their foliage a dun green, stood with the junction of trunk and root shrouded (my emphasis) by tall pale grass; and although at his left the river marked out a fissure of brighter greens, none among them were the sappy (again my emphasis) greens of England and Ireland or the dense fleshy greens of the coast … Among and behind this scrub stood big trees with foliage in similar colours, and with trunks of grey, or silvery grey, or of mauve shading to grey or rust, or of the beautiful colour of pink clay. It was as if everything here inclined not to the sun’s bright spectrum, but to those of the mineral earth and the ghostly daytime moon.

This is not an entirely benign landscape she is decribing – but neither does it hang heavily on her tale: her main focus after all is people. Here is an evocative description of Letty:

She fragmented the worry with her laugh, and waved it away with her hands, but it always seemed to reassemble, out there in the air, and float back to resettle on her.

One of the things that intrigued me most about the novel as I was reading it was the narrative form. It is a pretty straight chronology, but with many small flashbacks that help illuminate the characters. Most interesting though are a couple of slight but meaningful foreshadowings which, before the novel’s end, give us a sense of the sisters’ futures. This makes us realise that the novel is not really about them…it is about humanity, about how we treat each other – and, about that special word, mercy. You will have to read it for yourselves to know what I mean.

Jessica Anderson
The commandant
Sydney: Sydney University Press, 2009
326pp.
ISBN: 9781920898946

(Review copy supplied by the Sydney University Press)

Markus Zusak, The book thief

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In one moment, there was great kindness and great cruelty, and I saw it as the perfect story of our humans are. (Zusak on the Random House website)

Zusak could hardly have chosen, for The book thief, a better setting to explore the best and worst of humanity than Germany during the Holocaust. The book reminds me a little of Ursula Hegi’s Stones from the river which also deals with a small German town during the war and the hiding of Jews, though Hegi’s book has a much wider canvas, covering a few decades.

The novel, which is narrated by Death, tells the story of a young girl Liesel (the book thief) who is left with a foster family in a small German town in the lead up to and during World War II. Liesel is treated well by her foster parents, Hans and Rosa Hubermann, and makes friends with people in the neighbourhood including Rudy Steiner, a boy her own age. Not long into the novel, the Hubermann household is also joined by Max, a 24 year old Jewish man whom they hide. From here we follow the family and the neighbourhood as they live through the war. The characters – and there are many of them – are well drawn.

It’s a clever, memorable book. The use of Death as a narrator and its structure, which seems both old world (the chapter titles ‘featuring….’) and post-modern (the inclusion of the illustrated stories, the little bold-type assertions like ‘A small threat from Viktor Chemmel to Rudy Steiner’, ‘He survived like this’), give it a fresh tone which impel the reader on. This tone has a veneer of whimsy while at the same time being deadly serious.

There is a bit of foreshadowing but it’s handled well. It tells us our narrator is omnipotent and warns us that bad things are going to happen (and we know they will anyhow). I don’t usually mind foreshadowing – and agree with Death who says:

Of course, I’m being rude. I’m spoiling the ending, not only of the entire book, but of this particular piece of it. I have given you two events in advance, because I don’t have much interest in building mystery. Mystery bores me. It chores me.

The star of the book for me is its language. It’s superficially simplistic but is really quite sophisticated. There are some wonderful images – ‘pimples were gathered in peer groups on his face’; ‘they were going to Dachau to concentrate’; ‘rumour of sunshine’; ‘the sky began to charcoal towards light’ – but these are not overdone.

Zusak effectively handles the fact that the characters are German and would be speaking German through the occasional use of German words and phrases. And he lightly translates most of this German for us,  such as ‘”Keine Ahnung’, Rudy said, clinging to the ladder. He had no idea.'” Again, there isn’t too much of this but just enough.

The repetition of the curses – “Saumensch”, “Saukerl”, “Jesus Mary and Joseph” – give it a light touch, as do things like the “Keine Ahnung … He had no idea” above and the gruesome humour of “they were going to Dachau to concentrate”. Again, none of this is overdone. Not too funny, but definite touches of humour. There are those who say you can’t “do” humour and the Holocaust, but I don’t agree: this book is a perfect example of why I don’t.

There is also poetry to the language – with this poetry coming as much through the rhythm, as through imagery:

In the morning he would return to the basement.
A voiceless human.
The Jewish rat, back to his hole.

[and]

She didn’t need an answer.
Everything was good.
But it was awful, too.

[and]

Why him?
Why Hans Huberman and not Alex Steiner.
He had a point.

[and]

Their drivers were Hitlers, and Hubermanns, and Maxes, killers, Dillers and Steiners.

And then there is the frequency of ‘3s’. For example:

  • The Hubermanns lived at 33 Himmel Street (and 33 was the age Jesus Christ was when he died – relevant?);
  • the common curse was ‘Jesus, Mary and Joseph’;
  • a lot of the rhythms (such as the examples above) come in threes.
  • it is third time unlucky for Hans Hubermann
  • “The Word Shaker” written by Max story starts with “three important details about his life”.

The threes just keep coming. Three is a pretty magical number: the trinity; mind, body and spirit; past, present and future. The concept of “three” is found in most religions and represents, at its simplest, unity.

The novel seems to have two main themes. One is the power of words – to help and to hinder. I loved this, describing Leisel’s surviving the bombing: “the words WHO had saved her life”. The personification of words here, at the end of the novel, is really effective. Words sustain her through most of the book, but there was a point when she nearly gave up on them, as when she tears up a book in the mayor’s house after having seen Max in the Dachau march:

Soon there was nothing but scraps of words littered between her legs and all around her. The words. Why did they have to exist? Without them, there wouldn’t be any of this. Without words, the Führer was nothing. There would be no limping prisoners, no need for consolation or worldly tricks to make us feel better.

What good were the words.

BUT the other theme is the one that ends the book: what it means to be human. Death says:

I wanted to explain that I am constantly overestimating and underestimating the human race – that rarely do I ever estimate it. I wanted to ask her how the same thing could be so ugly and so glorious, its words so damning and brilliant … tell her the only truth I truly know … I am haunted by humans.

In other words, Zusak, in this book, encapsulates humanity – its best and its worst – and does it through using ordinary people living in/coping with extraordinary times. His message is simply that humans are capable of wondrous things and of heinous things. No astonishing truth really – we all know it – but he shows how closely these can co-exist and how fine the line often is.

Markus Zusak
The book thief
Sydney: Picador, 2005
584pp.
ISBN:033036426X

The magnificent River Red Gums

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River Red Gum

River Red Gum, Valley of the Winds Walk, Kata-Tjuta

River Red Gums, or Eucalyptus Camaldulensis, are among our most ubiquitous of gum trees, but that doesn’t mean they’re a boring tree. As their name implies they grow along watercourses – including ones that are very very dry such as those you find in Central Australia. They are also a significant part of what makes the Murray River such a gorgeous old river. Apparently, though, they are not found in Tasmania.

One of the well-known places to see these gums is the beautiful Barmah Forest of the Murray-Darling Basin. It boasts trees that are over 500 years old. Sadly, though, there are concerns that due to the extended drought that area has been experiencing, many trees are threatened, if not already dying. I’ve been to this forest and it is a treasure – it would be tragic to lose it.

Being ubiquitous – and beautiful – they feature regularly in Australian arts (in poetry, song, fiction, and art). Of course, they feature in Murray Bail’s captivating novella Eucalyptus:

River Red Gum

Warty River Red Gum, Jessie Gap, East MacDonnells

Over time the River Red Gum (e. camaldulensis) has become barnacled with legends… there’s always a bulky Red Gum here or somewhere else in the wide world, muscling into the eye, as it were: and by following the course of rivers in our particular continent they don’t merely imprint their fuzzy shape but actually worm their way greenly into the mind, giving some hope against the collective crow-croaking dryness. And if that’s not enough the massive individual squatness of these trees, ancient, stained and warty, has a grandfatherly aspect; that is, a long life of incidents, seasons, stories.

River Red Gum

River Red Gum, Bond Gap, West MacDonnell Range

Too many poets to mention have written about this gum. I thought I’d choose just two. First is David Campbell, who addresses the threat to their continuation. Here are some lines from his poem “The Last Red Gum”:

So we stand, me and my brothers, just the bones of ancient trees
that have lined the riverbank since time began.
In a bare and barren landscape, fed by red dust on the breeze,
we’ve been ravaged by the careless hand of man.

Second is Lisa Bellear, an indigenous poet who, in her poem “Beautiful Yuroke Red River Gum”, uses the Gum to symbolise the post-colonial history of Aboriginal Australians. The poem starts:

Sometimes the red river gums
rustled
in the beginning of colonisation
when
Wurundjeri
Bunnerong
and other Kulin nations
sang and danced
and
laughed
aloud

Not too long and there are
fewer red river gums, the
Yarra Tribe’s blood
becomes
the river’s rich red clay

If this isn’t poignant enough, the poem concludes with:

Red river gums are replaced
by plane trees from England
and still
the survivors
watch.

What more can I say?

The boys are back

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Fleurieu Peninsula

Southern end of the Fleurieu Peninsula, taken 2007

I would like to say that the real star of Scott Hicks’ latest movie, The Boys are Back, is the Fleurieu Peninsula because it is absolutely stunning. The rolling hills, the waving golden grasses, the glimpses of blue sea, not to mention wonderful stands of gums are enough to entertain even if the rest of the movie fails to. However, this is not the case. This is an enjoyable movie – not a perfect one, not a particularly innovative one – but an interesting story, well told.

The basic plot, for those who haven’t heard, is that sports journalist, Joe Warr (Clive Owen) becomes a single parent when his wife dies rather suddenly of bowel cancer. Having been a fairly absent father, and now grief-stricken, he is not well-equipped to parent his 6-year old son who is coping with his own grief and inability to fully understand the situation. Throw into the mix the sudden arrival of his 14-year old son from a previous marriage and you have the makings of chaos. And chaos is what ensues. Joe decides that the way to manage the all-male household is to have no rules – or very few anyhow – but as the movie progresses this does not prove to be a winning formula.

The cast is strong, with Clive Owen and Julia Blake (playing his mother-in-law) being the best-known names. The boys, played by young newcomer Nicholas McAnulty and George MacKay, are engaging but realistic. The music, by Hal Lindes, once a member of Dire Straits, is understated with just a bit of an edge, and effectively underscores the emotions without over-sentimentalising them. The cinematography is traditional but lovely – with an obvious but nice contrast made between golden sunny Australia and blue damp England.

The story is adapted from a memoir titled The boys are back in town by British columnist Simon Carr. It is sad and funny and, at times – perhaps particularly for women (says she being sexist) – infuriating as Joe misses clues from his sons regarding what they need. Housekeeping is not my forte but even I wanted to get stuck into the kitchen to bring it back to some level of organisation and hygiene, and as for silly boy stunts involving cars and the non-use at times of proper restraints – well, let us just say that I’m a mum!

There are some cliched moments, but overall the script is good and Hicks holds it all together to create a warm and tender but not simple movie about grief, parental and sibling love, and, really, just getting on with life when things don’t go your way. I’d recommend it. After all, if you find the story not to your liking, there is always the scenery!

Were you an Argonaut?

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Before the sun and the night and the blue sea, I vow to stand faithfully by all that is brave and beautiful; to seek adventure, and having discovered aught of wonder, or delight; of merriment or loveliness, to share it freely with my comrades, the Band of Happy Rowers. (from The ABC Weekly, 28 Dec 1940)

Once an Argonaut always an argonaut!  Erato 30 (aka Cat Politics) has blogged a couple of times about the Argonauts Club , which was a hugely-popular-in-its-day children’s club broadcast on Australia’s ABC radio from 1941 to 1972. You had to be between 7 and 17 to join, and you were given a Ship Name and Number – that is you became one of the 50 rowers on one of Jason’s ships. (Jason and the Argonauts – get it!) Hence Cat Politics was Erato 30 and I, Whisperinggums, was Athos 26. As Cat Politics (or is it Erato 30?) says, avatars existed a long time before the Internet!

The Argonauts Club had a long history, which I won’t go into here. For a good rundown, check my link above to the Wikipedia article. Suffice it to say that members were encouraged to submit contributions – poems, stories, art works, musical compositions – as well as questions to experts such as Mr Melody Man (Lindley Evans). In addition stories were heard, and information imparted on everything from writing to sports, music to nature, all in the spirit of fun, adventure and creativity.

Now, the thing is that we Argonauts are starting to grow old and, while some histories have been written, such as Rob Johnson’s The age of the Argonauts, the ABC apparently does not have a complete list of ship names, let alone of the 100,000 or so members. The Friends of the National Film and Sound Archive would like to rectify this and so have set up an Argonauts Register. If you were an Argonaut and would like to register, here is the form. Please do – our cultural history needs you!

That was one reason for writing this post. My other reason was to comment on the number of significant Australian writers, artists and musicians who passed through the Argonauts Club, either as presenters or writers for the show, or as members. Presenters included poets A.D. Hope and Dame Mary Gilmore, artist Jeffrey Smart, actors John Ewart and Peter Finch, the photographer Frank Hurley, to name a very few. One of the most well-known writers for the the Children’s Session was Ruth Park whose serial, The muddle-headed wombat, is one of the first things mentioned whenever two or more Argonauts get together.

Famous Australians who were Argonauts include comedian Barry Humphries, novelist Christopher Koch, composer Peter Sculthorpe, writer Robert Dessaix, musician Rolf Harris and television writer Tony Morphett, again to name a very few. Morphett is reported as saying that the Argonauts inspired him to see writing as a career: “This is a valid thing to be doing – it’s okay to be a writer.”

As for me, I was not one of those keenly contributing Argonauts who aimed for the Dragon’s Tooth award let alone the ultimate Golden Fleece and Bar, but I loved the show. It was an important part of my childhood. There has, I think, been nothing quite like it since, on radio or TV, that has inspired such a wide age-group for so long. What a shame that is.

Rob Johnson
The golden age of the Argonauts
Rydalmere: Hodder & Stoughton, 1997
270pp
ISBN: 0733605281