Month: May 2013

Louis Nowra, Into that forest (Review)

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Louis Nowra, Into that forest

Courtesy: Allen & Unwin

Louis Nowra is one versatile and prolific writer, having written novels, non-fiction, plays and screenplays, essays and even libretti. Into that forest is his latest work. It was shortlisted for the Young Adult Novel prize in the 2012 Aurealis awards and the Ethel Turner Young People’s Literature prize in this year’s NSW Premier’s Literary Awards. I read this for my reading group. We don’t often do youth literature but every now and then one pops up that we think might interest us … such as a book by Nowra.

The first thing to say is that the novel is written in a unique voice. Here is its opening:

Me name be Hannah O’Brien and I be seventy-six years old. Me first thing is an apology me language is bad cos I lost it and had to learn it again. But here’s me story and I glad to tell it before I hop the twig.

And what a story it is … this novel feeds into several Australian, and wider, literary traditions. There’s the lost child and the feral child motifs (reminding me of Dog boy). There’s Tasmanian Gothic, and there’s also a bit of the fairy-tale about it. Subject-wise it covers some significant ground: environmental issues (involving both the extinct Tasmanian tiger and the whaling industry) and what we’d now call Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. This might sound rather mechanistic, but there’s no sense of “ticking off”. It’s not didactic, and it’s all logical within the framework of the book.

Set in the late 19th century, it tells the story of two young girls, Hannah (then 6) and Becky (7) who find themselves lost in the bush (oops, forest!) after their boat capsizes in a storm and Hannah’s parents drown. They are taken in by a Tasmanian Tiger pair, and live with them for four years. Meanwhile, Becky’s father, Mr Carsons, is out looking for her. Eventually they are found, but the process of re-integration is not easy. The novel has a small cast of characters, which keeps it tightly focused. Besides Hannah’s parents who die near the beginning, there’s our two young protagonists, Becky’s father, his friend Ernie, the “tiger man”, a few other minor characters – and of course, the tigers, named Dave and Corinna by Hannah.

As in Dog boy, the description of life with the tigers is pretty visceral. At first Becky resists living like a tiger – perhaps because she still has a father whom she hopes will find her – but eventually she too succumbs, if succumb is the word. It is, after all, a matter of survival. And so they shed their clothes, start to move mostly on all fours, and develop keen animal instincts (of sight, hearing and smell). They also develop a taste for raw food and become adept at hunting. The descriptions of killing and eating the prey are not for the squeamish – “I were starving and the taste of blood made me feel even more hungry” and “What were ever in that shiny pink gristle surged through me in waves of ecstasy” – but they are important to our understanding of what their lives had become. Hannah says:

God knows where me sense of survival came from. Maybe it’s natural cos humans are just animals too.

There is a bogey man here – the tiger man or bounty hunter, whom Hannah had met before, through her parents. To the girls he is more brutal than the tigers. He’s “evil”, kills tiger pups, does “stuff to himself that were rude”. But, perhaps, he’s just another survivor, albeit a not very pleasant one?

While Hannah is the narrator, Becky’s character is the more complex one. She struggles more with the change forced upon them:

She didn’t want to forget. Me? I thought it were stupid to try and remember like Becky did. I didn’t see any use for it. Me English started to shrivel up, like an old dry skin a snake gets rid of. It just lies there in the grass rotting away and then vanishes with the wind. I took to talking in grunts, coughs and hoarse barks like the tigers. This annoyed Becky no end. But it were simple – the tigers understood me. Becky warned I were making a mistake. You will forget your language. You will forget your parents. You are becoming an animal, she’d say. Why argue with her? She were right on every level.

Becky initially fights against the brutality of the hunt – there’s a horrific description of the tigers attacking seals – but then surprises Hannah by rather fearlessly exerting some dominance in the pack. She was of course desperately hungry by then, but it shows Hannah that:

she were really stubborn if she wanted something. She were brave, she were stubborn, she were smart, she were tough.

Unfortunately, Becky is not as tough – or as adaptable – as Hannah thought, and consequently precipitates the novel’s rather shocking conclusion.

It’s a pretty bold novel – but less so than, say, Lord of the flies. There’s plenty to discuss, particularly regarding the subjects I suggested at the beginning of the post. The big theme, though, the one common to feral children books, has to do with defining our nature. What separates human from animal? What would you do to survive – and what would that say about the essence of humanity? Good stuff for young adults, and a gripping read too for we older readers.

Louis Nowra
Into that forest
Crow’s Nest: Allen & Unwin, 2012
ISBN: 9781743311646 (Kindle ed.)

Monday musings on Australian literature: Notes on the Sydney Writers’ Festival from a non-attendee

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One day I swear I will get to the Sydney Writers’ Festival – properly, I mean. I have been to one session once, but that barely counts. Late May, though, tends to be one of my busiest times of the year, so the years pass and I don’t get to the Festival. I do, though, try to follow it a bit, and so today I thought I’d pass on a few, very idiosyncratic things, that I’ve picked up around the traps.

Discovering new writers

Festivals are great for discovering new writers. Although I watched Q&A last week and enjoyed the panel discussion with several writers from the Festival, my festival experience really started on Thursday with Michael Cathcart’s live interview with South African writer Lauren Beukes (broadcast on Books and Arts Daily on Radio National). Not being a big reader of psychological thrillers, I hadn’t heard of her before and wasn’t really sure I’d be interested in the interview but I would have been sorry to have missed this. Cathcart asked some pointed questions, including the implications of writing in detail about violent acts against women. Beukes, though, was up to the challenge. She spoke of how the real victims of violent crimes tend to be just names, that we don’t hear their stories, that we are never encouraged to think about the sort of deaths they faced – the terror, the pain, they go through before they die. She wrote her latest novel The shining girls from the girls’ points of view because she wanted us to know them, to empathise with them, though she recognised that titillation is also always there in the genre. She also set this novel in Chicago, not South Africa where rape and violence against women are rife, because she wanted to make it clear that there’s violence and corruption everywhere, not just South Africa.

Beukes believes that fiction has a social function. She writes, she said, because there are things we need to talk about. She doesn’t write to lecture, to specifically change people’s minds, but to encourage discussion.

For more interviews with writers from the Festival, do check out Radio National, particularly Books and Arts Daily’s page.

Dilettantish interests*

The secret River cover

Famous Chong cover (Courtesy: Text)

An important part of my Festival experience in recent years is reading John’s reports on his Musings of a Literary Dilettante blog. To date, John has written three posts on the Festival. The first was on a session called The Uncommon Reader, a panel discussion with critics James Wood, Geordie Williamson and Jane Gleeson-White, chaired by Tegan Bennett Daylight. In the session these critics named the books that they go to again and again. John’s post is interesting for this alone. Don’t all we readers love to know what books other readers love?

John’s second post was on book design. If you are interested in this topic, do read his post. He reports on what several designers had to say, including Text Publishing‘s award-winning designer, WH Chong. If you read Australian published books you are sure to have seen some Chong covers. John’s post resulted in a discussion (in the comments section) regarding design in the e-book world and the commercial function of design.

John’s third post is a moving tribute to Gillian Mears, author of Foal’s bread (my review), who, many of you will know, suffers from MS and needs to manage her energy carefully. It’s therefore a real treat to see her in public forums. John’s post provides a lovely insight into Mears now – the struggles she’s facing, the things that still interest and concern her, her love of nature and the outdoors, her change of mind concerning euthanasia, and, despite it all, her sense of humour.

Flying high … on poetry, stories and creativity*

This year, I also read another blogger’s reports, Jonathan of Me Fail? I Fly. Jonathan went to two days of the festival. In his first post Jonathan describes a few events, starting with the launch of four chapbooks of poetry by the poets, David Malouf, Robert Adamson, Martin Harrison and Adam Aitken. I loved Jonathan’s comment that “The mutual respect and affection among the five people [including poet Luke Davies who launched the books] on the dais was something wonderful: completely the opposite of the internecine strife for which poets are supposedly famous”. Jonathan then went to another poetry event, Harbour City Poets, at which five poets, Margaret Bradstock, John Carey, David Musgrave, Louise Wakeling and Les Wicks, read. His post concludes on two more events that day: Robert Green on Creativity and Stories Then and Now. This post gave me a good sense of how busy attending festivals can be – particularly since Jonathan had to rush home in the middle to feed his dog!

On his second day at the festival, Jonathan attended two events: Writers who blog with Mark Forsyth, Tara Moss, Lorraine Elliott and Angela Meyer, and Beyond Climate Denial on a Neoliberal Planet with Jeff Sparrow, Robert Manne and others. I was of course most interested in his report of the blogging session. Jonathan says he managed to ask the first question at the end of the session:

I asked about difficulties with comments. Mark had a ready, sensible answer: ‘Don’t start an argument on the Internet.’ Tara took the microphone: ‘My advice is, Start arguments on the Internet.’ They were both right, of course. I liked Tara’s final note: ‘When you do get into an argument, don’t say anything you wouldn’t want to see quoted in the newspaper.’

Love it … don’t you?

The Guardian doesn’t like Sydney’s rain

Yesterday’s Guardian (UK) online has an article titled “Ten thoughts to take from the Sydney Writers’ Festival”. The article is more entertaining than usefully edifying, but I did love “Five: on euphemisms” regarding “the sorts of euphemisms reviewers use to disguise their negative thoughts on books”. James Ley said that “‘Interesting’ is a usefully neutral term”, and Susan Wyndham suggested that “ambitious” is helpful, saying that “you don’t necessarily have to say whether the work achieved those ambitions or not”! I have two somewhat contradictory questions to ask you regarding this. Should reviewers disguise their negative thoughts? And, what euphemisms do you use? I must say that I try very hard not to use “interesting”!

But, what really made me laugh was the Guardian‘s parenthetical eleventh thought that “Sydney doesn’t do rain well. Know that you will not be able to buy an umbrella at the festival, anywhere, ever.”  The Guardian people clearly aren’t used to a country where drought is common! It wasn’t until we travelled to Japan that we discovered there are countries which sell umbrellas everywhere.

* I hope I haven’t stolen John and Jonathan‘s thunder. Their posts say much more than I’ve noted here. Do go read them at the links I’ve provided.

POSTSCRIPT: Podcasts are available of some talks. Go to the Sydney Writers’ Festival site and click on SWF Blog tab to find them. Thanks to DKS of Pykk for reminding me.

Delicious descriptions from Down under: Carrie Tiffany on smacking

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Actually, this Delicious Descriptions is not a commentary on smacking as the post title might suggest, but it is about a smacking situation – in Carrie Tiffany’s Mateship with birds.  It occurs when five-year-old Michael has stolen a penny from his mother and so she smacks him:

Betty doesn’t have the heart to pull his pants down so she smacks him with the wooden spoon through his shorts and shirt-tails and underpants so she isn’t really hitting him at all, just whacking at the layers of clothing and the air trapped between them. He’s never been smacked before. As soon as she releases him he turns on her. He looks about the kitchen in fury. ‘How dare you? You pan, you rug, you – you – you … spoon.’

She gasps. She covers her face with her hands. He’s right. She isn’t a bitch or a slut; she is a pan, a rug, a spoon. She is a woman without a man – a utensil inside a house.

See what I mean about her writing? It packs so much. There’s social history here about parent-child relationships and child discipline, and about women’s lives. And, there’s psychology, particularly regarding sense of self – Michael’s positively defiant one and Betty’s self-deprecatingly negative one. It has an interesting rhythm, with the introductory long sentence describing the action followed by a series of short sentences for the emotional responses. It’s funny, too, but has such a sting. It puts a very specific spin, doesn’t it, on that old adage that “This is going to hurt me more than it hurts you”!

Carrie Tiffany, Mateship with birds (Review)

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Mateship with Birds (Courtesy: Pan MacMillan)

Book Cover (Courtesy: Pan MacMillan)

Carrie Tiffany is on a roll. Last month her second novel, Mateship with birds, won the inaugural Stella Prize, and this month it won the Christina Stead Prize for Fiction at the New South Wales Premier’s Literary Awards. It has also been shortlisted for the Miles Franklin award. Many bloggers* have already read and reviewed it so, once again, I’m the last kid on the block, but I have finally got there.

Like her gorgeous first novel, Everyman’s rules for scientific living, Mateship with birds is set in rural Victoria in the past, this time, the early 1950s. Its central characters are the lonely, gentle dairy farmer, Harry, whose wife has left him, and his also lonely neighbour, Betty, who has brought her fatherless children to the country and who works in the local aged care home. The novel takes place over a year, a year that is paced by the life-cycle of a kookaburra family which Harry watches and documents in the spare righthand column of his old milk ledger. These notes, which are interspersed throughout the novel, are delightful and poetic, albeit brutal at times:

They work in pairs
against a fairy wren.
Dad buzzes the nest,
the wren throws herself on the ground
to draw him away.
She pluckily performs her decoy
– holding out her wing as if it is broken.
A small bird on the ground
is easy picking.
Club-Toe finishes her off.

They also provide commentary on the main story which is, as you’ve probably guessed, a love story. It is, however, no traditional romance. The boy and girl, Harry and Betty, are well past their youth and are cautious, given their previous experiences of love and relationships. They reminded me a little of Kate Grenville‘s rather dowdy protagonists in The idea of perfection. They care for each other in all sorts of practical ways: Betty cooks meals for Harry and tends his health, and Harry looks out for Betty and her children, fixing things when he can. A sexual tension underlies all their interactions – over many years – but it’s not openly expressed.  (“When he’s invited to tea he leaves immediately the meal is finished, as if unsure of what happens next”). Harry gradually takes on the role of “father figure” for Michael. However, when Michael becomes interested in a girl and Harry decides to pass on some “father-son” knowledge (“an explanation of things – of things with girls? Of … details of the workings”), including some rather specific physical advice regarding women, Betty is not impressed.

It sounds pretty straightforward, doesn’t it, but there’s something about Tiffany’s writing that makes it feel fresh, original. Part of it stems from her particular background as a scientist and agricultural journalist. Again, like her first novel, she grounds the story in her knowledge of farming life, but not in so much detail as to be boring. Rather, her descriptions give the novel its underlying rhythm – the landscape and the creatures inhabiting it (the kookaburras, owls, magpies, and so on); the milking; the driving into town; the way country neighbours help each other out; the sense of life going on regardless of the little dramas, the kindnesses and the cruelties, that occur. The writing is evocative but has a resigned and rather laconic tone that fits the rural setting.

Although a short book – a novella, really – it’s richly textured. There’s the main narrative drive which flips between Harry and Betty and includes flashbacks to their past, occasional dialogue, gorgeous descriptions (“The eucalypts’ thin leaves are painterly on the background of mauve sky – like black lace on pale skin”), and lists of plants, animals, medications, and so on. Interspersed with this main narrative are Harry’s kookaburra log, Betty’s notebook, Little Hazel’s nature diary, and Harry’s letters to Michael. And all this is layered with imagery involving mating, mateship, birds and humans. You can imagine the possibilities that Tiffany teases out from these. It’s all carefully constructed but doesn’t feel forced. It just flows.

In other words, this is a clever book, but not inaccessibly so. It’s generous, not judgemental. It’s also pretty earthy, with regular allusions to and descriptions of sex. If I have any criticism, it’s  in the persistent references to sexuality. At times, I wanted to say, “ok, I get it, sex – in its beauty, carnality, and sometimes cruelty and brutality – is integral to life” but I kept on reading because … of the writing. I love Tiffany’s writing. I mean, how can you not like writing like this description in which Harry compares Betty to Michael’s girlfriend Dora:

Not like Betty. His Betty is heavier, more complicated. Betty meanders within herself; she’s full of quiet pockets. The girl Dora might be water, but his Betty is oil. You can’t take oil lightly. It seeps into your skin. It marks you.

Australian Women Writers ChallengeI also kept reading because I wanted to know what it was all about. Why was Tiffany writing this particular story, I kept thinking. For some reviewers (see the links at the end), it is primarily about family, for others it is about the relationship between men and women, but for Tiffany it’s about desire. I can see that it is about all these things, but here’s the thing, the book starts with the description of four attacks by birds on humans followed by a description of cockatoos damaging crops. This, together with the sexual imagery, the frequent references to animal behaviour and to humans’ relationships with animals, suggests to me another theme to do with the nature of life, with the nature of our relationships with animals, and with how we accommodate the animal versus the human within ourselves. I’ll give the final word to the birds:

Mum, Dad, Club-Toe
break off their
preening,
squabbling,
loafing,
to attack.
They lose themselves in the doing.
I struggle to tell them apart.
Knife-beaked,
cruel-eyed,
vicious;
there is no question
they would die for the family
– that violence is a family act.

This book packs a punch!

* You may like to read the reviews written by Lisa (ANZLitLovers), John (Musings of a Literary Dilettante), Matt (A Novel Approach) and Kim (Reading Matters).

Carrie Tiffany
Mateship with birds
Sydney: Picador, 2012
208pp.
ISBN: 9781742610764

Monday musings on Australian literature: The History of Emotions

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I had something else planned for today’s Monday musings, but it can wait, because this afternoon a member of my Jane Austen group brought something rather interesting to my attention. It’s the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions.

Here is how it describes itself:

Emotions shape individual, community and national identities. The ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions uses Historical Knowledge from Europe, 1100-1800, to understand the long history of emotional behaviours.

How fascinating. It’s one of those joint ARC projects involving a number of universities: the University of Adelaide, the University of Melbourne, the University of Queensland, the University of Sydney, and the University of Western Australia. Given the cutbacks to tertiary studies in the humanities over recent years, I’m thrilled to see something like this being supported. The Centre was established in January 2011.

Lithograph of Cremorne Gardens in 1862

Lithograph of Cremorne Gardens in 1862 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

They divide their research areas into four programs: Meanings, Change, Performance and Shaping the modern. There’s a lot going on, but under Shaping the Modern I found an interesting current project being undertaken by Dr Katrina O’Loughlin, titled ‘A certain correspondence’: intellectual sociability and emotional community in the eighteenth century.  She’s interested in the “global early modern world” – seventeenth and eighteenth century Europe – and the explosion in trade and travel that led not only to movement of people and objects, but to “a lively exchange of ideas”. Her specific research interest is the “affective dimensions” of the “intellectual bonds” that were forged as people shared ideas – in salons, theatres, coffeehouses, pleasure gardens and so on.

I guess you know what this made me think of: how our current global communication explosion is resulting in a similar sharing of ideas – virtually – and how this too is having an affective dimension, both positive and negative. From my forays into online communities – starting with internet bookgroups operating via listservs in the mid to late 1990s – I have been thrilled by the sharing of ideas that I’ve been involved in but, just as importantly, also by the friendships that have developed as a result. I have also, as have any of us who’ve spent a lot of time online, experienced or witnessed a range of other, more negative, emotional behaviours. These emotional behaviours and patterns can clearly impact us as individuals, but the interesting thing is whether or how they impact society (or community) as a whole. For example, has (or will) our global sharing lead to improved understanding of “other” and therefore greater peace? Hmm … Anyhow, I’d love to see what conclusions O’Loughlin reaches, and how applicable they might be to the 21st century.

I suppose this post has a tenuous link to Australian literature but, looking at it broadly, the research being undertaken will add to the body of Australian academic literature, and I reckon that’s a good enough reason for writing about it in my Monday Musings series. And anyhow, isn’t emotion at the bottom of everything we read?

You can Like the Centre on Facebook to be kept informed about activities/events/research that are historically emotional or, is that, emotionally historical!

Jane Austen’s letters, 1796-1800

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Austen's desk, Chawton. (Photo: Monster @ flickr.com)

Austen’s desk, Chawton. (Photo: Monster @ flickr.com)

For the past five years my Jane Austen group has been reading Jane Austen’s letters in a rather higgledy piggdledy manner*. We have nearly finished now. We have just done her first letters, and next year we will conclude, logically at last, on her final letters. What a fascinating time we’ve been having.

Jane Austen’s first published letter was written in January 1796, when she was just 20, and it is in this first letter that she mentions Tom Lefroy, the young man, also just 20, with whom she had a romantic attachment. Lefroy later became the Lord Chief Justice of Ireland. When asked many years after her death about his relationship with Austen, he admitted to a “boyish love”. Here is our first mention, in Letter 1:

… I am almost afraid to tell you how my Irish friend and I behaved. Imagine to yourself everything most profligate and shocking in the way of dancing and sitting down together. I can expose myself however, only once more, because he leaves the country soon after next Friday, on which day we are to have a dance at Ashe after all. He is a very gentlemanlike, good-looking, pleasant young man, I assure you. But as to our having ever met, except at the three last balls, I cannot say much; for he is so excessively laughed at about me at Ashe, that he is ashamed of coming to Steventon, and ran away when we called on Mrs. Lefroy [Tom’s aunt and a friend of the Austens] a few days ago.

In Letter 2, a few days later, she mentions a party to be held at the Lefroy home the next night:

I look forward with great impatience to it, as I rather expect to receive an offer from my friend in the course of the evening. I shall refuse him, however, unless he promises to give away his white Coat.

Is she expecting a proposal from Tom? The “great white Coat” is a tongue-in-cheek (and, perhaps, also self-preserving) reference to her comment in the previous letter about his morning coat being “a great deal too light”. Later in the letter, which she started on Thursday and finished on Friday, comes:

Friday. — At length the day is come on which I am to flirt my last with Tom Lefroy, and when you receive this it will be over. My tears flow as I write at the melancholy idea.

The only other reference to Tom Lefroy occurs well over a year later in November 1798, Letter 11:

Mrs. Lefroy did come last Wednesday, and the Harwoods came likewise, but very considerately paid their visit before Mrs. Lefroy’s arrival, with whom, in spite of interruptions both from my father and James, I was enough alone to hear all that was interesting, which you will easily credit when I tell you that of her nephew she said nothing at all, and of her friend very little. She did not once mention the name of the former to me, and I was too proud to make any enquiries [my stress]; but on my father’s afterwards asking where he was, I learnt that he was gone back to London in his way to Ireland, where he is called to the Bar and means to practise.

It’s all very tantalising – but at the very least it’s pretty clear that Jane Austen learnt something about love and loss from this experience. A brief description of the “affair” can be read here on the JASA website.

Austen, though, was not one to wallow. I loved her comment in a later letter (January 1799) that:

I had a very pleasant evening, however, though you will probably find out that there was no particular reason for it; but I do not think it worth while to wait for enjoyment until there is some real opportunity for it. (Letter 18)

A positive philosophy that she does seem to have lived by, if her letters are to be believed.

These letters, like those I’ve written about previously, provide much information about her life and times – about the dangers of childbirth, health and medical treatment, men’s careers, farming, housekeeping and fashion – often delivered in Austen’s witty, often also acerbic tongue. As before, I’ll share just a few here …

Fashion

Austen talks a lot about clothing in the letters, so much so that some readers find it boring. However, her fashion talk tells us more than simply what she and Cassandra are wearing. For example, we learn about the craze for Marmalouc caps, which reminds us of the Napoleonic Wars as the caps were inspired by Egyptian turbans after the Battle of the Nile in August 1798. We learn about Austen’s tight financial situation. Caps and gowns were re-trimmed to suit another Ball or season, items are shared (the Marmalouc cap itself was borrowed from sister-in-law Mary Austen). Best of all, though, we get her wit such as her description of the rage for wearing flowers and fruits (Letter 21) in Bath. In Letter 22, she responds to Cassandra’s request for some Bath fashion, but she’s having trouble deciding:

I cannot decide on the fruit until I hear from you again. – Besides, I cannot help thinking that it is more natural to have flowers grow out of the head than fruit. – What do you think on that subject?

Childbirth, Health and Medical Treatments

I could write a whole post just on her discussion of health-related matters. We hear of women dying in childbirth, of people taking or drinking the Waters in Bath for assorted health concerns, of her mother’s using laudanum for pain, of the use of electricity for pain relief … Again, though, there’s often a sting in the tail. It’s generally believed that Jane had a tricky relationship with her mother who was somewhat of a hypochondriac. In several of these early letters she reports on her mother’s health. Here is one (Letter 18):

She is tolerably well – better on the whole than she was some weeks ago. She would tell you herself that she has a very dreadful cold in her head at present; but I have not very much compassion for colds in the head without fever or sore throat.

In other letters, though, she does show more tenderness!

Writing and novels

Her own writing is rarely mentioned in these early letters, but the first version of Pride and prejudice, then titled First impressions, is referred to a couple of times. Here is a tongue-in-cheek reference to her friend and future sister-in-law Martha Lloyd reading it:

I would not let Martha read “First Impressions” again upon any account, and am very glad that I did not leave it in your power. She is very cunning, but I saw through her design; she means to publish it from memory, and one more perusal must enable her to do it.

But, my favourite comment on writing in this group of letters relates to her assessment of the novel, Fitz-Albini, that she and her father were reading (Letter 12):

We have got “Fitz-Albini;” my father has bought it against my private wishes, for it does not quite satisfy my feelings that we should purchase the only one of Egerton’s works of which his family are ashamed. That these scruples, however, do not at all interfere with my reading it, you will easily believe. We have neither of us yet finished the first volume. My father is disappointed – I am not, for I expected nothing better. Never did any book carry more internal evidence of its author. Every sentiment is completely Egerton’s. There is very little story, and what there is told in a strange, unconnected way. There are many characters introduced, apparently merely to be delineated. We have not been able to recognise any of them hitherto, except Dr. and Mrs. Hey and Mr. Oxenden, who is not very tenderly treated.

The novel was apparently highly autobiographical and in it, according to the Gentleman’s Magazine (1837), Egerton “depicted with the utmost freedom the foibles not only of his neighbours and acquaintances, but even [my stress] those of his own family and relations”.  What I most like about Austen’s comment though is the insight it gives into her views on what makes a good novel. It shouldn’t be so transparently the author’s opinions; it should have a clear storyline; and the characters should have some substance. Ah Jane, she knew how to write …

* Past posts discussing the letters: The first covered her letters from 1814 to 1816, the second from 1811 to 1813, the third from 1807 to 1809, and the fourth from 1801-1806.

Michael Sala’s The last thread is 2013’s Pacific Region Winner of the Commonwealth Book Prize

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Michael Sala The last thread bookcover

The last thread (Courtesy: Affirm Press)

I don’t know about you but I find blogging a challenge when I’m travelling, as I have been for much of May. I love my iPad for staying in touch, but I don’t find it easy to write blog posts on it – either via the WordPress app or the browser. And, our old PC laptop that we share for travelling just isn’t the same as my MacBook Pro. Consequently, I decided to delay posting on Michael Sala’s win, announced yesterday, until I got back today.

It’s an exciting win – of course, what win isn’t! – and means that Sala is now in the running for the overall Commonwealth Book Prize which will be announced on 31 May. I am particularly thrilled because it was published by a small, not yet well-known publisher, Affirm Press, which has published some lovely books over the last couple of years.

I reviewed Sala’s novel last year. It’s autobiographical, and has clearly been a challenge for him and his family*. I closed my review with:

In the very last pages of the book, Michael’s mother says that “words and stories can be dangerous” (echoing Francesca Rendle-Short’s “to think, to write, is dangerous”). They can indeed, but sometimes that danger can have positive outcomes. I hope that, for Sala, the dangers of putting his story, his truths, on the page will be restorative. There’s no guarantee though that such bravery will have its just rewards … in life or in fiction.

It’s exciting for Sala that his bravery has brought him recognition. He has also been shortlisted for the UTS Glenda Adams New Writing Award in the New South Wales Premier’s Literary Prize. I wish him well in both awards – and congratulate him and Affirm Press on their achievements to date.

* As comments from his family on my original post show.

Monday musings on Australian literature: City, bush and outback

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If today weren’t Monday, this would probably be a literary road post but it is Monday which means of course that it’s a Monday Musings instead! See how flexible I am?

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I know I talk a lot here about the bush and the outback but they are topics that keep cropping up in my reading and thinking. They cropped up again yesterday during a performance we attended at the Ballarat Heritage Festival. It was Bernard Caleo of the Museum of Melbourne reciting Banjo Paterson‘s “Mulga Bill’s Bicycle” and “The Man from Ironbark“. He performed them beautifully, but even better he provided some background to Paterson and his times. He spoke of the rivalry between Paterson and Henry Lawson. They were, he said, friends but they saw the bush in opposing ways: Lawson thought Paterson was too “romantic” while Paterson thought Lawson was all “doom and gloom”.

Caleo didn’t buy into the argument. That wasn’t, after all, his reason for being at the festival, but he did say that through publishing their poems and stories in The Bulletin they debated and defined our understanding of the city and the bush or outback. And he was right. Whether we read Paterson’s comedy or Lawson’s gloom or, even, Barbara Baynton‘s gothic, what we get is not only a sense of a divide between the city and the outback, but a rather schizophrenic view of the bush and/or outback. However, I don’t think these opposing views are irreconcilable: Paterson’s view of bushmen as heroic, free, and unsophisticated, and Lawson’s recognition of the harshness of outback life and the despairing resilience of the people are mutually exclusive. The way I see it, Lawson’s drover’s wife is heroic and Paterson’s Clancy works hard for his living. It’s more a matter of perspective than of there being a single truth … Don’t you think?

And yet, it’s not quite that simple either, because there is the issue of intention, or, at least, of impact. Paterson’s main goal seems to have been for city people to respect not ridicule bush people whereas Lawson, with his socialist leanings, may very well have hoped his writings would lead to practical improvements in the lot of the people he wrote about. On the other hand, maybe both just wanted to make a buck! Regardless, these two views of bush people are still relevant today ….  That’s what interests me the most when I read, or hear, their writing, the way those views persist. I’m sure to write more on’t.

Delicious descriptions from Down under: Andrew Croome on Nevada

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I recently reviewed Andrew Croome’s Midnight empire which is mostly set in and around Las Vegas, an area I have travelled through several times. Here is Croome’s description of his protagonist Daniel being introduced to the region:

English: Basin and range desert in Nevada

Mojave Desert, Nevada (Photo credit: amateria1121, CC-BY-SA 3.0, via Wikipedia)

Mythic horizons. They drove into the liquid road-shimmer of the desert, past the Joshua trees and the creosote bushes that bordered the I95.

It was midday, the sun unforgiving. They drove at seventy miles an hour but it seemed slower, the effects of the desert; their perceptions of depth made strange, as if light itself had shortened. It was terrain that felt planetary, the dry sink of an enormous Martian basin, a forever geology of heat and shale.

There is something otherworldly about deserts – any deserts – and the landscape around Las Vegas is typical desert in that sense. It’s vast, multi-hued, vegetated by unusual plants, and both forbidding and mesmerising in that way that is unique to deserts.

Deserts are popular places for secret military activity. Think atomic testing at White Sands in New Mexico and Maralinga in Australia. So too, Creech Airforce Base in Nevada, which is the setting for Midnight empire and which has a long military history from its early involvement in nuclear testing and to drone warfare today.

Croome’s description of the landscape Daniel drives through is evocative, although I do get a bit tripped up on the “terrain that felt planetary”. Isn’t the earth a planet? What exactly does “planetary” mean? I’m probably being a bit picky, though, because, overall the two paragraphs do herald the rather surreal world – physical and mental – that Daniel becomes embroiled in. And anyhow, I couldn’t resist sharing with you his reference to Joshua Trees (pictured in the photo above) because they are worth sharing …

On the literary road: Gundagai Redux

/ Whispering Gums / 10 Comments

20130509-154945.jpgGundagai, a small country town only two hours drive from my home, was the first place featured in my first literary road post back in 2009. I didn’t on that occasion write about its early history.

The Gundagai area was home to the Wiradjuri people, and was settled by white people in the late 1820s. It was officially gazetted in 1840 despite repeated warnings by the Wiradjuri about the risk of large floods to this part of the Murrumbidgee River floodplain.

According to the Poet’s Recall Motel, Gundagai’s first streets were named for poets: Shakespeare Tce, Milton St, Pope St, Johnson St, Maturin St, Landon St., Hemans St, Sheridan St, Otway St, Byron St, Homer St, Virgil St, and Ovid St. However, believe it or not, the Wiradjuri knew their country and in 1852 a huge flood destroyed the town. Over one third of the 250 inhabitants and a number of travellers died, and 71 buildings were destroyed. The old mill is the only building still standing from the original town. As for the poets, when the town was rebuilt, on higher ground, the poet street names, according to the Motel’s notes, were not reused. However, looking at a modern street map of Gundagai, I did spy Sheridan, Homer, Byron Streets, plus a reference to Ovid Lane and the other poets. Presumably these have been returned to the town in more recent times.

Anyhow, this is where the Poet’s Recall Motel comes in. The owner – I’m not sure when – decided to revive Gundagai’s poetic history. Each motel room is named for a poet – the original 13 and then some. I was rather delighted to find that our room was Banjo Paterson, and the two rooms next to us were Henry Lawson and Breaker Morant. Fine room-mates for Whispering Gums! In addition, the historic bar in the motel’s restaurant is decorated with painted portraits – on local slate – of the original 13 poets.

Once again I’ve learnt that country towns can be surprising places … I don’t imagine I would ever have heard of Felicia Hemans, who was published in the early nineteenth century by John Murray, Jane Austen’s publisher, if I hadn’t stayed at the Poet’s Recall Motel.