Monday musings on Australian literature: Scattered thoughts on memoirs

March 30, 2015March 30, 2015 / Whispering Gums / 38 Comments

I’ve titled this Monday Musings “scattered thoughts” because I don’t want to raise expectations that I’m going to write a treatise on what is a fascinating but oh-so complex topic. I was inspired to write this post by author Annabel Smith’s asking me to take part in her Friday Faves* post on favourite memoirs. For this post, Smith asked six writers/bloggers to nominate their favourite memoir. Three of us chose Australian memoirs. Do check the link I’ve provided if you’re interested – I certainly enjoyed reading my co-invitees’ selections.

According to my stats, I have read and reviewed 24 autobiographies or memoirs over the history of this blog. I don’t want to get into discussions about autobiography vs memoir now, except to say that Wikipedia’s definition is pretty much how I see it:

An autobiography tells the story of a life, while a memoir tells a story from a life.

By this definition, a memoir will tend to focus on an aspect of a person’s life, often an event or activity that defines who they are or why they are the way they are! Over half of the 24 books I’ve reviewed are memoirs, and a little over half of them are by Australian writers.

The main point I want to make here is that while memoirs reach far back into time, as the Wikipedia article describes, they started gaining popularity – and, with it, visible literary status – in the last couple of decades. Early standouts for me were an Australian one, Sally Morgan’s My place, and an Irish-American one, Frank McCourt’s Angela’s ashes. Who hasn’t read these! Both are moving stories, and both are written by people who can write! It’s all very well to have a story to tell, but there’s more to it than that …

So much more, in fact, that memoirs have become the subject of academic and critical discussion. Where, for example, is the boundary between memoir and autobiographical fiction? Why would an author pass off as memoir a work that was fiction – such as James Frey’s A million little pieces. Despite controversies like this, however, memoirs have cachet and are appearing on literary prize shortlists.

Take, for example, the Kibble Literary Awards (the Nita B Kibble Literary Award for an established Australian female writer, and the Dobbie Literary Award for a first published work by a female writer). These awards are for “life-writing” and can be won by “novels, autobiographies, biographies, literature and any writing with a strong personal element”. In recent years, memoirs have been among the winners, such as Kristina Olsson’s Boy lost: A family memoir (2014), Kate Richards’ Madness: A memoir (2014), Lily Chan’s Toyo: A memoir (2013), and Inga Clendinnen’s Tiger eye (2001).

These awards, though, are for life writing so it’s not surprising that memoirs feature. Memoirs, however, also appear in non-fiction awards. Kate Richards, for example, won the non-fiction prize in the Adelaide Festival Awards for Literature in 2014 for Madness: A memoir. Kristina Olsson’s Boy lost: A family memoir won the Douglas Stewart Prize for Non-fiction in the 2014 New South Wales Premier’s Literary Awards, and Malcolm Fraser with Margaret Simons won the same award in 2011 for Malcolm Fraser: The political memoirs.

And then there’s the Stella Prize, established in 2012 for “writing by Australian women in all genres”. So far, a memoir hasn’t won, but they have been short and long-listed. The 2012 longlist included Patti Miller’s The mind of a thief; the 2013 longlist had Gabrielle Carey’s Moving Among Strangers: Randolph Stow and my family and Kristina Olsson’s Boy lost: A family memoir. Kristina Olsson also made it to the shortlist. This year, Biff Ward’s In my mother’s house which, coincidentally, will be my next review, was longlisted, though it didn’t make the shortlist.

Don’t worry, I’m not going to keep listing awards won by memoirs, because I think I’ve made my point that memoirs are worthy of serious consideration. Certainly, I enjoy a good memoir – and I like thinking about what makes a memoir. I’ve read several Australian memoirs last year which did not feature in awards but which had strong voices that engaged me, such as Margaret Rose Stringer’s And then like my dreams (my review) and Olivera Simić’s Surviving peace (my review).

I’m intrigued by novels which are closely autobiographical, like, say, Kate Jennings’ Snake (my review). It’s a novel, but Jennings used excerpts from it in Trouble (my review), which she called her “fragmented autobiography”. Barbara Hanrahan’s The scent of eucalyptus (my review) is also highly autobiographical.

Francesa Rendle-Short book cover Bite your tongue

(Courtesy: Spinifex Press)

Then there are the books that more explicitly span the memoir-fiction divide. Kate Holden’s The romantic: Italian nights and days (my review) is, she says, memoir. She started it as a novel, feeling memoirs are “narcissistic”, but realised it was her “life” so she turned back to memoir – and wrote it in third person! And this brings me to the book I nominated for Annabel Smith’s post, Francesca Rundle-Short’s Bite your tongue (my review). Described as a fiction-cum-memoir, it too is told third person – in the main, because a few first person chapters are interspersed in the book. Rendle-Short chose third person because the story was too hard to tell so she had to come at it “obliquely”, while Holden chose third person to maintain “critical distance” from her former self.

Oh dear, I think this has been a bit of a ramble … but it’s a topic I love thinking about. Thanks Annabel for inspiring me to post on it today!

Now I’d love to know whether you, reading this, are memoir readers, and if you are, what makes a good one for you.

* Friday Faves is a series on Smith’s blogs in which she asks one or more writers and/or bloggers to write about a favourite book, often on a specific topic. I reviewed her novel/ebook/app The ark last year.

Charles Hall, Summer’s gone (Review)

March 29, 2015September 5, 2016 / Whispering Gums / 26 Comments

Charles Hall, Summer's gone, Margaret River Press

Courtesy: Margaret River Press

When Western Australian writer Craig Silvey set his coming-of-age novel Jasper Jones in the 1960s I was a bit surprised, as Silvey himself did not grow up in that era. I’m not so surprised, though, about Charles Hall’s debut novel Summer’s gone as Hall did grow up in the 1960s. The novel is, from my reading of the brief author biography, somewhat autobiographical, as debut novels often are: both Hall and his main character played guitar in bands, hitch-hiked across Australia, worked in labouring jobs and ended up studying at university. This, though, doesn’t mean the story is Hall’s story. It simply tells us that Hall wrote of a milieu he knows – a wise thing to do!

Summer’s gone is a part-mystery, part-coming-of-age narrative, and is told first person by Nick. It focuses on his relationship with two sisters, Helen and Alison, and another young man, Mitch, with whom he’d formed a folk band in 1960s Perth. The novel starts, however, in Melbourne in 1967 with Nick finding 20-year-old Helen dead (or dying) on their kitchen floor. What happened to her, why it happened, and Nick’s feelings of guilt about it, form the novel’s plot. The theme, though, is something else, it’s about

the trouble with dwelling too much on the past – sometimes you remember other things as well, things you don’t necessarily want to think about.

Except, of course, we do often need to dwell on the past if we haven’t resolved it, we need to think, as Nick does, about the things we did, didn’t do, or might have done differently. We need, in fact, as Nick has come to realise, “to say goodbye to things. And perhaps even to understand.”

To tell his story, Nick slips between the 1960s, the mid 1970s, the 1980s, and sometime around the present from which he is looking back. Hall handles these time-shifts well: it’s not difficult to know where you are, and it effectively replicates the way we often approach the past, that is, in fits and starts as we put together what happened.

It’s an engaging story. Nick, the young version anyhow, is a rather naive and not well-educated – but not unintelligent – young man. He’s not wise in the ways of the world, but he’s decent, and prepared to give things a go. He has a poor relationship with his Perth-based mother, and his only real adult role model is his uncle Clem in Melbourne. The relationship between the four young people is nicely evoked, though because it’s a first person story, the other three characters are only developed as far as Nick understands them, and Nick is not always the most perceptive person. I found this a little frustrating – I wanted to know the other characters more – but I suppose it’s fair enough given the narrative voice chosen.

What gives this book its greatest interest is the social history. Many of the main stories of the period are worked into the narrative – abortion, and the horrors resulting from lack of legalisation; the Vietnam War, conscription, draft-dodging, and the physical and psychological damage experienced by soldiers. Nick also spends time in a hippie commune, and other news events like the Poseidon bubble and crash, the beginnings of women’s liberation, and the release of the Beatles’ Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album also get a mention. If you lived through this era, the novel provides an enjoyable wander down memory lane. It reminds us of the hopes and ideals of a generation which felt free to explore life and love, to rebel against the constraints of their elders, even though this freedom wasn’t always all it seemed to promise. I did feel, however, that Hall could have left the social history to this era. The references to Chernobyl and mesothelioma started to feel a little forced, and not really necessary to the plot, even though the mesothelioma issue is used to tighten the noose around one character just that little bit more.

Hall’s dialogue is realistic, and gives flavour to the era, and I did enjoy his descriptions of place – of Perth suburbs, and Melbourne, of travelling the Nullarbor and of country Victoria. These descriptions are kept to a minimum, but are just enough to breathe life into the scene.

Early in the novel, Hall refers to chaos theory and the butterfly effect, to the idea that “a minor detail has the power to change everything”. That’s probably true but I’m not sure it tells us anything we don’t already know! There are many minor details in our lives, and we could go mad worrying about which is the one that will (or did) change everything. Fortunately, I think Nick eventually agrees.

This is not a difficult novel, but it is warm, readable, and sings to us of summers past when the world seemed golden, but when in fact there was, as there always is, much more to it than that.

Lisa at ANZLitLovers enjoyed the book also for its evocation of the era.

Charles Hall
Summer’s gone
Witchcliffe: Margaret River Press, 2014
288pp.
ISBN: 9780987561541

(Review copy supplied by Margaret River Press)

Miles Franklin, Brent of Bin Bin and the Great Australian Bight

March 25, 2015March 25, 2015 / Whispering Gums / 4 Comments

In this week’s Monday Musings I discussed the literary mystery concerning the identity of Brent of Bin Bin. I referred to an article written in 1954 after her death by Murray Tonkin in which he asked whether the truth that she is, or is a collaborator of, Brent of Bin Bin will now be revealed. I didn’t share though a delightful little story he includes.

Angus & Robertson 1956 ed.

You see, those who argued that Brent of Bin Bin was Miles Franklin used stylistic and thematic similarities between the works of the two authors together with facts about Franklin’s life to prove their case. “Bin Bin”, for example, was the name of a property (or run) next to the one her father managed in Brindabella. There’s a “Gool Gool” in My brilliant career and All that swagger, and one of the books in the Brent of Bin Bin series is called Back to Bool Bool. Thematic similarities between the two “authors” include the exploration of the harshness of life for bush women, and stories about literary women.

But, I didn’t share a fun little point which Tonkin says had “escaped other literary detectives”. It comes from poet Ian Mudie, who apparently knew her well. Tonkin writes that Mudie had identified that

Both she and Brent, in their books, have the Murray River emptying itself into the Great Australian Bight. But when he taxed her with it she brushed the point aside. “Of course!” she said firmly. Every body knows the Murray runs into the Bight!”

Haha, I thought, he’s right, the Murray doesn’t flow into the Great Australian Bight but into Lake Alexandrina, which is rather east of the Bight. However, according to one definition of the Bight, Franklin was right. Wikipedia tells me there are two definitions of the extent of the Bight: The International Hydrographic Organization (IHO) sets its eastern limit as Cape Otway in Victoria, which easily encompasses the mouth of the Murray, while the Australian Hydrographic Service (AHS) has it as Cape Carnot which definitely does not.

By the IHO definition, then, Mudie’s argument doesn’t work as a coincidence outing Franklin as Brent of Bin Bin, but I suspect she probably had made a mistake and that most Australians then, and now, would not see the mouth of the Murray as being in the area we call the Bight. Fascinating the places that literary detection can take you, eh?

Anyhow, what do other Aussies think about the Murray and the Bight?

Monday musings on Australian literature: Miles Franklin, and the mysterious Brent of Bin Bin

March 23, 2015March 23, 2015 / Whispering Gums / 12 Comments

Miles Franklin, 1902, by H.Y. Dorner (Presumed Public Domain)

In last week’s Monday Musings I discussed an article by Canadian-born author Aidan de Brune on the novelist Bernard Cronin in his West Australian series on Australian Authors. The now little-known Bernard Cronin was no. 3 in his series. Number 4, though, was one of the giants of Australian literature – then, and still now – Miles Franklin. Most of you will know that she bequeathed our most significant literary prize, the Miles Franklin Award, and you probably have also heard of her most famous book, My brilliant career. But, Miles Franklin did have a secret …

This secret, as we now know, is that in addition to several other novels published under her name, she wrote a series of six novels using the pseudonym “Brent of Bin Bin”. They were completed by 1933 but not all had been published by her death in September 1954. According to Paul Brunton, editor of The diaries of Miles Franklin, Franklin saw this as “a publicity device”. She wrote in 1929 that “hiding under a pen-name … will be more fruitful of publicity”. Her plan was to retain the mystery until the last book was published at which time she would reveal her identity. Unfortunately, she died before they were all finished. Nonetheless, Brunton says, she “enjoyed the speculation on Brent’s identity”. In 1941 she chaired, “with a straight face”, a meeting of the Fellowship of Australian Writers at which Brent of Bin Bin’s identity was discussed. Brunton continues:

She had no scruples about praising Brent’s books publicly as though she had nothing to do with them, as she does in her diaries. She even praised them in her Commonwealth Literary Fund lectures in 1950.

She also wrote to others, including the critic Nettie Palmer, as Brent of Bin Bin. I should add here that the current theory is that she used “Brent of Bin Bin” (and her other pseudonyms) because she feared not being able to repeat her My brilliant career achievement.

Anyhow, back to Aidan de Brune writing in 1933. He commences his article with:

Thirty years ago literary circles in Australia were astounded by the publication of an extraordinary book, written by a girl of sixteen, Stella Miles Franklin. The title of the book was audacious — “My Brilliant Career.”

He praises the book saying:

It throbs with a passionate love of the Australian bush, and particularly of horses, and with an equal passionate hatred of the cruelties of life endured by the people on the land, particularly by the women. It is the first statement, and to this day it remains the greatest statement, of the case for Australian bush womanhood.

He also quotes Henry Lawson’s praise in the book’s preface for its “painfully real” depiction of “bush life and scenery”. De Brune is concerned that in 1933 it, like many “fine” Australian books had been allowed to go out of print, with copies being hard to come by. He then gives a little of Franklin’s biography – her twenty years abroad working for the Feminist Movement in the USA, in the Scottish Women’s Hospital in Salonika, and for a housing committee in London. But now, he tells his readers, she is back and in 1932 had published a book, Old Blastus of Bandicoot, “under her name”. (Hmm … !) It was highly praised by many critics including John Dalley in The Bulletin. He also advises that another book, a detective story, would be published in 1933.

But, he asks:

Is that, then, the whole story of Miles Franklin? We shall see. Is it likely, or possible, that a writer of such power and sheer genius as the author of “My Brilliant Career” should have been silent for more than twenty years?

Fair questions! He goes on to tell his readers that “Miles Franklin will not admit it” but many people are identifying her with

the mysterious “Brent of Bin Bin,” whose books (published by Blackwood, of Edinburgh, be it noted) are acknowledegd to be the finest presentation in fiction of the Australian outback epic which have yet been written. “Brent of Bin Bin” loves the bush and understands horses, and hates injustice to bush women, as only the author of “My Brilliant Career” and “Old Blastus of Bandicoot” could love, and understand, and hate.

Brent of Bin Bin’s books are now Australian classics he says but, like My brilliant career, are hard to come by. How lucky we are that publishers like Text Publishing, Allen & Unwin, and others, are bringing back Australian classics in our times, eh?

Anyhow, I did love the conclusion to his article:

If Miles Franklin is also “Brent of Bin Bin,” then she is the greatest Australian bush novelist alive. And if she is only Miles Franklin of “My Brilliant Career” and “Old Blastus of Bandicoot” she takes second place to one writer alone — the tremendously gifted and mysterious author who writes in Miles Franklin’s manner under the pseudonym of “Brent.”

Ha ha … I bet he had fun writing that! I’m intrigued though that the praise is qualified, that she is “the greatest bush novelist”. I sense though that he doesn’t intend to diminish her achievement but to simply describe the milieu she was writing in. What I hear is that the bush continued to be a significant concern in 1930s Australia and was therefore seen as a worthy topic for our literature.

POSTSCRIPT: In an article written after her death, Murray Tonkin asks whether her death will finally solve the literary mystery. So, although many were confident they knew the identity, Franklin clearly kept up the pretence to the end. Tonkin says that he will “gladly eat his hat” if Franklin is not identified as “at least a close collaborator”. Love it!

Jane Austen, Emma Vol 2 (continuing thoughts)

March 22, 2015March 30, 2015 / Whispering Gums / 4 Comments

The friendship plot – that theme I discussed in my post on Volume 1 of Emma – thickens in Volume 2. Several “new” friendships are presented, as Austen continues to deepen our understanding of what constitutes community via the little village of Highbury. For Jane Austen, I think we are going to realise, friendship is both a deeply personal thing as well as something that underpins society.

In Volume 2, three people are introduced to Highbury – Jane Fairfax and Frank Churchill, about whom we’d heard heard in Volume 1, and Mrs Elton, the new bride of Highbury’s minister, Mr Elton. Through them, and the previously introduced characters, we are introduced to several facets of “friendship”. Positive examples include:

Colonel Campbell’s generous act of friendship to Jane Fairfax’s late father by taking Jane into his household and educating her along with his daughter;
Mr Knightley’s neighbourly style of friendship in providing food from his estate to the Bates and transport for them to a wintry evening dinner-dance;
Emma’s similarly neighbourly friendship in providing food to the Bates;
Miss Campbell’s open-hearted, trusting acceptance of her fiancé’s preference for her friend Jane Fairfax’s piano playing over her own; and even
Mr Woodhouse’s entertaining some of the older women in the town.

Jane Austen – protofeminist?

Just how “feminist” you see Jane Austen depends somewhat on your definition of feminism, but for me she demonstrates a clear recognition of the (economic) inequalities that affect women’s lives and of the (societal) factors that hold them back. She demonstrates this in Emma by presenting a heroine who is independently wealthy and who therefore has no economic need to marry. Emma recognises this and says early in the novel, in volume 1 in fact, that she won’t marry:

“I have none of the usual inducements of women to marry … without love, I am sure I should be a fool to change such a situation as mine. Fortune I do not want; employment I do not want; consequence I do not want: I believe few married women are half as much mistress of their husband’s house as I am of Hartfield; and never, never could I expect to be so truly beloved and important; so always first and always right in any man’s eyes as I am in my father’s.”

Part of the trajectory in Emma is for her to learn that there are other reasons to marry besides those of money and consequence. By contrast, her foil/double, Jane Fairfax has no independent wealth. The most likely course of life for her is to be a governess, but it’s not a cheery thought:

“I did not mean, I was not thinking of the slave-trade,” replied Jane; “governess-trade, I assure you, was all that I had in view; widely different certainly as to the guilt of those who carry it on; but as to the greater misery of the victims, I do not know where it lies…”

For Jane Fairfax, a good marriage would save her from what she sees as a pretty devastating fate.

Contrasting these two quite different situations is Mrs Elton. In Austen, as in most authors, you need to be aware of who is speaking when assessing what they say. Mrs Elton is a figure of ridicule in Emma, rather like Mr Collins in Pride and prejudice. She’s the upstart who “has a horror of upstarts”. Her idea of standing up for women involves counteracting Mr Weston’s statement that “delicate ladies have very extraordinary constitutions”. She says:

I always take the part of my own sex; I do indeed. I give you notice, you will find me a formidable antagonist on that point. I always stand up for women; and I assure you, if you knew how Selina feels with respect to sleeping at an inn, you would not wonder at Mrs. Churchill’s making incredible exertions to avoid it. Selina says it is quite horror to her; and I believe I have caught a little of her nicety. She always travels with her own sheets; an excellent precaution.

The satire here is multi-layered, but includes ridiculing Mrs Elton’s notion of standing up for women by asserting their focus on niceties!

More …

There’s a lot more I could discuss about this volume, such as its perfect plotting in which very little happens, or is said, that doesn’t move the plot forward, but that does it in such sly ways that we are barely aware it’s happening. However, I think I’ve made the main points here that particularly caught my attention during this re-read … so, onto volume 3 in April.

Ognjen Spahić, All of that (Review)

March 20, 2015September 29, 2020 / Whispering Gums / 12 Comments

Regulars here know that I enjoy short stories, and that I review them regularly. Most of these reviews, though, are of Australian writers. I was therefore pleased when blogger roughghosts, in his review of a novel by Ognjen Spahić, provided a link to a Spahić short story titled “All of that”. As I haven’t reviewed many Balkan writers here, and definitely no Montenegrin writers, I grabbed the opportunity to read this story.

According to the biography provided by the online journal BODY, Spahić “is the best-known member of the young generation of Montenegrin writers to have emerged since the collapse of former Yugoslavia”. He’s published two collections of short stories and his novel Hansen’s Children (the one reviewed by roughghosts) won the 2005 Meša Selimović Prize for the best new novel from Croatia, Serbia, Montenegro and Bosnia-Herzegovina. Elsewhere I read that he’s been a resident writer at the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program and won, in 2011, Romania’s Ovid Festival Prize for a prominent young talent. Have you heard of him? I hadn’t. Another win for litbloggers, methinks.

“All of that”, which I suspect comes from his first short story collection, All that, published in 2001, is a first person story by a father concerned about his son Danilo’s ability to cope with the death of a schoolfriend and with attending her funeral. Most of the story takes place on a father-son fishing trip in which the father plans to take his son’s mind off the death, but the son has other plans:

‘Dad, have you ever been to the cemetery?’ he asked as we were driving.

And so starts a conversation … I loved the writing (albeit I read a translation). The dialogue, which constitutes much of the story, is simple, direct, and true, but it is in the father’s reflections that the truth of the matter comes out. It’s the father who has problems with death. He’d lost his father (car-crash) when he was 6 years old and his mother (illness) when he was thirteen. “It’s difficult to talk about death”, he says

And even more difficult to explain to a child the ceremony and rituals which go with it in this rotten country.

“This rotten country” is alludes to something wider than the story at hand, and suggests to me there may be another level on which the story might be read. Interestingly too, as the father and son are rowing, the son says he doesn’t like fog though it doesn’t bother him. This surprises the father, but he suggests:

‘OK Danilo, Strange Prince of Darkness. Let’s row a little bit faster to that deserted island.’

Strange Prince of Darkness? Why does he call his son that? It seems affectionate. Other religious references, on the other hand, are more direct, such as “Deformed quotes from the Bible”.

Anyhow, the fog returns a few times in the story. At one time the father says it “creeps like a python after the slow process of digesting its prey”. It lifts towards the end, suggesting some resolution for the father/narrator’s anxieties.

What I enjoyed was the way Spahić slowly teases out the father’s feelings – through the dialogue, his reflections, the style (particularly the use of repetition), and the language and imagery – because in the end the story is more about the father’s feelings. Just after the “strange Prince of Darkness” comment, the father talks of making “a pretence at adventure, a small harmless attempt to escape from reality”. And yet, the son gives no sense of needing to escape from reality. It’s the father.

I’m not going to write more about this story. It would certainly bear multiple readings, but is powerful enough on the first reading to give a sense of yet another writer I’d like to get to know more. I might read Hansen’s children yet.

Ongjen Spahić
“All of that” in BODY, June 30, 2013
(Trans. by SD Curtis)
Available online at BODY

Monday musings on Australian literature: Bernard Cronin, an Old Derelict!

March 16, 2015March 16, 2015 / Whispering Gums / 19 Comments

Bernard Cronin (Presumed Public Domain, via Wikipedia)

It’s a bit cheeky, really, to write about a writer I’ve never read, but I do this occasionally, particularly in Monday Musings because I use them to educate myself as well as to share ideas and knowledge with you. I came across Bernard Cronin (1884-1968) when I was roving around Trove earlier this year. He’s an English-born Australian writer and you can read about him on Wikipedia and at the Australian Dictionary of Biography. If you want to read about his life, do go there, because my focus is not going to be that.

However, I will give you a nutshell! Cronin came to Australia when he was 6 years old, and graduated from an agricultural college. He worked in cattle-farming, as a salesman and clerk, and as a journalist, but for most of his life he was also writing. He wrote novels, short stories, plays, and verse, some in his own name and some using pseudonyms. In 1920, he co-founded the Old Derelicts’ Club (don’t you love that!) for struggling authors and writers. This became the Society of Australian Authors in 1927, with Cronin its first president, but in 1936 the society was wound up because, according to Cronin, it was becoming “infiltrated by politics”. Cronin St, in a suburb in my city, is named for him.

Cronin first came to my attention when he appeared in the top 10 of the 1927 plebiscite on Australian authors*. And then, as I was following other links, I came across him again in an article written in 1933 by Canadian writer, Aidan de Brune (1879-1946), who also settled in Australia. Aidan de Brune wrote a series of articles on Australian authors for The West Australian, devoting the third article to Cronin. By this time, 1933, Cronin had published around 15 or so novels, and saw himself as an Australian writer. De Brune writes that unlike many writers he had stayed in Australia, and quotes Cronin as saying:

The writer in the Old Country finds his scenery, as it were, ready made for him. In this country it is definitely not to be found upon the surface of things. One has to dig deeply to become aware of the very great natural beauties of the Australian landscape. Real treasure is mostly of the buried variety. To my mind there is more character in an old Aussie gum tree than in any other tree I ever heard of. Incidentally, I should say that that much abused genius, D. H. Lawrence, came closer to an understanding of the spirit of the Australian landscape than any other writer, local, or imported, has yet done. He is the first scribe definitely to sight the real genii of the bush.

De Brune interprets this as Cronin seeing “Australia as a literary theme”, but without a need to “sentimentalise” it. I’m intrigued by Cronin’s comment on DH Lawrence. I still haven’t read Kangaroo and, while I’m not driven to read Lawrence again, I feel I should make an exception for this, one day. I also love Cronin’s description the “Aussie gum tree”. Yes!

De Brune then quotes Cronin again:

Our trouble is that we lack real breeding, and crudeness is a poor scaffold for the Arts. Further, the indifference of our rulers to the absolute need to develop a national soul has not made matters any better. Hansard will never make this country aware of the sublimities of human destiny. We need to see Australia from her own standpoint, and with her own individuality. The Arts are our only hope of salvation.

De Brune comments that “by this last phrase our fierce realist is revealed as an idealist, after all”. Perhaps so. What interests me, these eight decades later, is that ongoing battle against indifferent rulers for validation of the arts, for recognition of the importance of the arts to our souls, national and otherwise.

Cronin’s next novel, to be published in 1933, was The sow’s ear. Set in Tasmanian timber country, it is, says De Brune, “a ruthless exposure of the tragic life of young girls enslaved by the system of marrying without love, at the command of domineering parents”. He writes that all Cronin’s novels have this “fierce” quality, exposing what Cronin “considers to be wrong, stupid or uneconomic. In this sense he is the strongest of the Australian writers who wish to make us aware of our short comings, so that we may eliminate them, and become a truly civilised nation.” So, Cronin had a very clear image of what sort of Australia, what sort of “national soul” he wanted us to develop.

After giving a brief rundown of Cronin’s life and career to date, de Brune concludes with Cronin’s role in the Australian Society of Authors. He again quotes Cronin:

There is much to discourage the Australian writer. Nevertheless, he holds steadily to his job. He hopes that the pioneering work which he is doing will prove an invaluable foundation for the generation of writers to come. Give him the support of his own Government and public, and he will win to wider distinction inside a decade. But he’ll win through, any way.

I love that optimism – that writers will “win through anyway”. In many ways I think they do – but I do often wish it were easier for them! De Brune ends his article forecasting that “when Australian authors have finally won recognition from their own people, the name of Bernard Cronin will stand high in the roll of honour of those who have fought for this objective”. Now, that makes me sad. Maybe this is a case of back-slapping between mates, but somehow, reading Cronin’s words, and of his role in various writers’ organisations, I suspect there is a good deal of truth in De Brune’s assessment – and yet I didn’t know Cronin. I’d love to know if other Aussies here do.

* I wrote on this plebiscite in a Monday Musings last year, but only gave the top 6 novelists. Cronin was number 7!

Jessica White, Entitlement (Review)

March 15, 2015November 22, 2018 / Whispering Gums / 12 Comments

Entitlement is a powerful title for Australian author Jessica White’s second novel, but then White wanted to explore some powerful themes – though they are, unfortunately, somewhat belied by the rural romance/saga looking cover. The author bio at the front of the book tells us that White grew up on a property in northwest New South Wales and it becomes clear very early in the book that she knows whereof she speaks!

Of what does she speak, then, you are probably asking? Entitlement is set in contemporary times on a cattle property near a fictional place called Tumbin. The story starts with 29-year-old Cate McConville, now a practising GP, returning home because her parents wish to sell the property. She, with other family members, is a partner in the business, and all need to agree to the sale. But, Cate’s holding out – not because she loves farming and wants to return, but because her only sibling, her much-loved brother Eliot, had disappeared several years earlier and she wants him to have a home to return to. The farm – the land – also contains her memories of, and therefore her link to, him.

While the plot-line is established gradually, the first chapter sets the book’s tone and style. It tells us there’s tension between Cate and her parents; that memory is going to feature strongly in the telling; and that indigenous issues are likely to be part of the story. The book then progresses, introducing more and more characters over the next few chapters. Each chapter tends to be dedicated to one character, or a small group of characters, and usually involves flashbacks, as the character remembers something from, or reflects on, the past. White handles this well. There are many characters, but the present-flashback narrative style keeps them clear and in their place (if that makes sense). This style does risk becoming a little rigid, but White breaks it up every now and then with a chapter purely set in the present, or one that commences in the past.

Very early, as the characters are introduced, the themes start to become clear. The story is told within two main contexts – farming succession and indigenous connection to land. Over-riding all this is the notion of stolen and lost children. Local indigenous man, Mellor, has worked for a couple of decades for the McConvilles, as had his wife until she’d died of cancer. His extended family, particularly his two aunts, live with him on the edge of the property, and have experienced the stealing of their children. Cate’s father, Blake, is racist and dismissive of indigenous people and their rights, while her mother Leonora, by contrast, is on friendly relations with Mellor and his family.

Now, if you’ve been reading my blog for a while, you’ll have read some of my discussions of non-indigenous people writing about indigenous issues. It’s uneasy ground to walk on, but for White, with her farming background, the issues of stolen children and indigenous land rights are things she’s likely to have lived. I’m not surprised she wanted to explore it. Indeed, she wrote a comment on this blog nearly two years ago, saying that this novel:

raises the question of who, in contemporary Australia, is entitled to the land? I also tried to show, through the break up of a white family that was fighting over land, how Indigenous people have been affected by their dispossession. I don’t think it’s a question that can ever be answered, though I did aim for a (probably utopian) resolution at the end of the book.

She couldn’t do this, really, without creating indigenous characters and that means of course that she had to present (her understanding of) their attitudes. I think she’s handled this sensitively, but of course I’m non-indigenous. I did wonder if she’d stepped onto shakier ground when she drew comparisons between Cate’s mother’s loss with that of the stolen generation mothers. However, in her acknowledgements White thanks “Michael Aird and Sarah Martin for their conversations and resources on Indigenous culture and history”. She has not, it seems, walked this ground lightly. And she doesn’t leave it at country and stolen generation issues, but touches on other injustices, such as indigenous health and housing, and racist violence.

White is on safe ground when she discusses the land and farm from Cate’s point of view. I thoroughly enjoyed her descriptions of the landscape and farm life – little scenes of her father and uncle undertaking farm tasks, of Mellor tending to fences, or of Cate running through the land, for example. Here’s a description of an Australia Day picnic:

Flies and mosquitoes plucked at their skin. The scents of the bush were drawn out by the heat and bundled together like a sweet, loosely woven shawl. Kangaroos bounded away in alarm as they made their way up the hill. Crickets whirred, rising from the long grass, and cockatoos screeched.

Her characters, too, are real; they are imperfect, believable human beings. Cate’s inflexibility, her selfish unwillingness to understand the health issues forcing the need to sell, made me cross but the pain, the loss, driving her behaviour is believable. Her parents are presented as having a loving relationship, but not without its tensions and conflicts. And so on.

Entitlement is an engrossing and serious, though not a grim read. As White admits, she does try for a positive resolution, which could almost do the seriousness of the issues a disservice. However, the story is not completely neatly tidied up, presumably because she realised that her question – how do we handle conflicting relationships to this land so many of us call home – does not have a simple answer. It’s therefore important that both indigenous and non-indigenous writers put stories and ideas out there for us to think about. It can only help the discussion, don’t you think?

Jessica White
Entitlement
Melbourne: Viking, 2012
289pp.
ISBN: 9780670075935

(Signed copy won in a blog giveaway)

Stella Prize 2015 Shortlist

March 13, 2015March 15, 2015 / Whispering Gums / 14 Comments

I rarely write longlist, shortlist and winner posts, but for the Stella Prize I don’t mind making an exception. Last month, I posted on the longlist, and yesterday, the shortlist was announced.

Maxine Beneba Clarke’s Foreign Soil (Hachette): short story collection that I really must read, a debut book
Emily Bitto’s The Strays (Affirm Press): another debut book, this a novel that’s been garnering excellent reviews, and I’m keen to read this.
Christine Kenneally’s The Invisible History of the Human Race (Black Inc): the only non-fiction in the list, about her research into DNA and humanity’s origins.
Sofie Laguna’s The Eye of the Sheep (Allen & Unwin): second adult novel by an award-winning playwright and writer for children, about an individual young boy who may be, though it’s apparently not stated, on the autism spectrum.
Joan London’s The Golden Age (Random House): the only shortlisted book by a well-established novelist. I love her writing so need to read this. All these “must reads” make me wonder what I have been reading!
Ellen van Neerven’s Heat and Light (UQP): another debut book, and an intriguing collection of short, long and interrelated stories. I reviewed it last month.

It’s great seeing so many smaller publishers in the mix. Reminds us again that we should not overlook them when we are seeking quality books! This Stella Prize link will give you all the gen on the shortlist, including excerpts.

I was disappointed not to see Helen Garner’s The house of grief shortlisted, but not having read all the books, I’m in no position to pass judgement.

PS Apologies to those who saw it for the early incomplete posting of this post. I’m on the road and, against my better judgement, stupidly tried to use WordPress’s app. I like most things about WordPress, but detest the iPad app, so I tediously finished this in the browser on the iPad. Not a fun thing to do.

Lynette Washington (ed), Breaking beauty (Review)

March 11, 2015September 5, 2016 / Whispering Gums / 8 Comments

Courtesy: MidnightSun

As I’ve said before, I usually don’t read book introductions until the end. In the case of Breaking beauty, an anthology of short stories edited by Lynette Washington, it wouldn’t have mattered if I had read it first because Brian Castro’s intro gave nothing away while at the same time saying a lot. He starts by noting that the short story is making a come-back, “and wondering why it ever went away, perhaps because we were too imbued with the great whatever novel in the Borealis of canons or by the glossy fits of fashionable shades of grey”. Love the bite in that!

It’s a great introduction. It’s erudite, pithy, and often tongue-in-cheek. Castro says, reading my mind, “what good is an intro-duction if you haven’t been in-ducted, or even read the stories”. What indeed? And yet, his “intro-duction” manages to craftily incorporate the stories and their contexts, the ideas that drive them, without over-explaining or giving anything away. It is one of the most delicious introductions I’ve read in a very long time – unlike my introduction, so let’s move on!

Breaking beauty is a collection of stories by graduates of the University of Adelaide’s Creative Writing course. As Castro hints through a reference to Rousseau and as Washington states more directly, the stories explore the “complementary forces” and “dualities” encompassed by the idea of beauty, the notion that “there is no beauty without ugliness”. There are 28 stories, of which 22 are by women. They range in length from three or four pages to ten or so. Five of the stories have been published elsewhere, including Melanie Kinsman’s heart-rending “A paper woman” which was published in the Margaret River Press’s The trouble with flying (my review).

As you would expect, the stories look at beauty from all sorts of angles, physical, emotional, spiritual, even intellectual, but they rarely tell it straight. In Matthew Gabriel’s “To my son”, for example, an ugly father presents, to his apparently similarly ugly son, his solution for “neutralising physical appearance” which, he believes, will “not only rid the world of ugly’s plague but also its inextricable and toxic inverse”. Jo Lennan’s “A real looker” explores an extra-marital passion that resulted in a daughter who struggles to understand the adult world of passion, and a father transfers this passion to a boat called Marilyn. Sean Williams’ “The beholders” is a speculative fiction piece which cleverly twists the idea that beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

In other stories, beauty is more abstract . The second story, Corrie Hosking’s “A well strained fence”, is told first person by a young man for whom beauty is neatness and order. It’s a nicely sustained story that epitomises what a complicated notion or concept beauty is. It also neatly provides me with an opportunity to talk about voice. Just over half the stories are told first person, and two are told second person. One of these, Mary Lynn Mather’s mother-and-child story, “Whatever happened to the fairy-tale ending”, uses second person effectively to convey an emotion that is almost beyond bearing.

But of course voice is about more than which “person” is used; it’s about the persona used to tell the story, that is, about how the narrator of that story sounds to us. In short story collections – particularly anthologies – we usually find a great variety in voice (and, related to this, tone). Lynette Washington, in “Lia and Amos”, uses a matter-of-fact, reporter-like third person voice to tell a story with an unusual twist. The voice keeps us on our toes, divulging only what is going on in the moment, with no backstory or additional information, so that the end, when it comes, surprises and yet seems natural at the same time, because nothing has been sensationalised. By contrast, Rosemary Jackson’s narrator, Athina in “Athina and the sixty-nine calorie burn”, exudes the distressing (in this case), naive confidence of the young while the reader knows exactly what’s going on.

Several stories, including some already mentioned, tackle contemporary society’s (over-)emphasis on beauty. Others look at a broader notion of aesthetics from some interesting angles. Rebekah Clarkson uses an argument about aesthetics – a finial, in fact – in “A simple matter of aesthetics” to expose male arrogance, while in Katherine Arguile’s “Wabi-Sabi” a man’s commitment to aesthetics puts his family’s health, indeed survival, at risk. Meanwhile, Stefan Laszczuk’s narrator in “The window winder” finds beauty in a very gruesome place.

There’s no way, of course, that I can mention all twenty-eight stories. The ones I’ve mentioned here aren’t the only ones I enjoyed. There are moving – and often painful – stories about love, about sons and mothers, nieces and aunts, husbands and wives, mothers and children. There are stories about ageing, and the losses that usually attend, in one form or another. And there’s Lilian Rose’s cheeky story about a very unusual “Ladies Tea Party”.

Castro writes in his introduction of “the fleeting and the fleeing before one’s eyes, as a good short story is wont to do, not allowing its meaning to fully emerge because that would kill it, but letting it flit mothlike into memory”. This definition of good short stories could also define “true” beauty – as I’m sure the writers in this diverse and enjoyable collection would agree.

Lynette Washington (ed)
Breaking Beauty
Rundle Mall: MidnightSun Publishing, 2014
228pp
ISBN: 978192522700

(Review copy supplied by Midnight Sun)

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Whispering Gums

Books, reading and more … with an Australian focus … written on Ngunnawal Country

Month: March 2015