Month: April 2020

Monday musings on Australian literature: Spanish flu

/ Whispering Gums / 53 Comments

COVID-19, history tells us, is a one in 100 year event, the last such event being the Spanish flu of 1918 to 1920. This week, I thought I’d share some references to the Spanish flu from Trove – not news reports about the course of the flu itself, but some random references that indicate the flu’s legacy in various ways over the succeeding decade.

Jokes at the time …

Just like we are seeing now. Here is one from the Fitzroy City Press of 3 January 1920:

GETTING EVEN.

It was in the Spanish ‘flu period, and old Oppigar lay at death’s door. The priest came and told him he must forgive his enemies. Oppigar promised to do so with the single exception of Peter Svingen, against whom he had a very special grudge. But the priest insisted that even Peter must be forgiven. “All right then,” said Oppigar, ” I will forgive Peter also – but if I get well I’ll have it out with the old scoundrel!”

References in the following years …

In 1925, Perth’s Sunday Times of 31 May 1925 ran a story about the new cross-word craze that was sweeping the world, even reaching places like France and Italy. The article, ascribed to Twilight, is titled “The cross-word flu”. It takes the form of a conversation between a cynic, a cynosure (how many newspaper readers today would know that word), and others about the cross-word craze. The cynic starts it off:

“It was hardly to be expected,” re-marked our cynic, “that France would embrace the cross-word puzzle. France has suffered too many cross-purposes, double-crosses, and heard too many cross-words because she cannot forget the myriad crosses that dot, like forests, her fair provinces, to become enamored of a game whose name re-minds her of the bitterest things.”

To which the cynosure replies:

“True,” replied the cynosure, “France has puzzles enough at home, and the crosses that everywhere make memorial of her infinite sacrifice in the cause of the world’s liberty are at the same time mute warnings of what lurks threatening at her northern border; and further north in the land of the Bear. The marriage of the Bear with the Monkey has provided too big and perturbing a problem, without the importation of play puzzles from America.”

And here the cynic refers to the Spanish flu:

“As dangerous as Spanish ‘flu,” re-joined the cynic, “is the label French journalists have tagged to ‘cross-words.’ They warn the people to keep away from the new trans-Atlantic craze. One paper reminds its readers of a Frenchman who, before he died in a lunatic asylum, used to carry a paper, and pencil in his pocket and at parties would say, “Help me, my dear. I have lost my appetite and sleep because I cannot solve this problem.'”

I love the idea of cross-words being so popular, so engrossing, they were “as dangerous as the Spanish ‘flu“. The article goes on at some length discussing the craze. “A big tea-room proprietor” suggests “that nowadays all of us had mental worries enough without manufacturing new ones and calling them games”. It’s an entertaining piece – but interesting too with its references to the political situation, to the just-finished war, and also for its discussion about whether cross-words improve your mind or are just fun! Sounds exactly like current discussions about whether doing cross-words and sudokus ward off dementia, or just make you better at doing them!

As the years wore on, other references were made to the ‘flu, including by Canadian-American humorist and poet Walt Mason, whose pieces were published in Australian papers. On 24 April 1927, Brisbane’s Sunday Mail ran a piece of his called “No certainty”,

No man can with safety wager that the luck he knows to-day,
be it minor luck or major will not wilt and blow away.
None can say with show of reason that disease will pass him by,
that he won’t be, for a season, on a sick bed high and dry.
None can say what passing motor may assault and knock him flat,
flatter than a Yarmouth bloater, ruining his Sunday hat.
When we’re feeling strong and nifty, fit to struggle and to win,
it seems folly to be thrifty; better blow the money in.
We feel sure the future’s holding every blessing we desire,
and the wise man’s constant scolding only fills our breasts with ire.
But, behold, we faint and sicken as our labors we pursue,
and our pulses throb and quicken, and we’re down with Spanish flu.
Or perchance an auto climbs us where the hoaking lizzies fly,
and an undertaker times us, figuring on when we’ll die.
Then for weeks we loll and languish, wearing plasters night and day,
thinking in the deepest anguish of the bills we cannot pay.
While the torment racks and rages we resolve, if we get well,
we will listen to the sages and the shining truths they tell.

I’ve quoted the lot because Mason died in 1939 which I believe puts this out of copyright.

Walter Reed Hospital Flu Ward, 1918-19, Harris & Ewing photographers, via Library of Congress, Public Domain

Two years later, and about a decade after the flu, The Port Macquarie News and Hastings River Advocate published another piece by Walt Mason called “After the ‘flu” (21 September 1929). I found this also-rhyming piece in multiple Australian papers. Only some were attributed to Mason; others had no attribution at all.

The piece starts:

I had nine kinds of Spanish ‘flu, with sundry German brands thrown in; all day I coughed and said, ‘Ker-choo!’, all night I coughed and sneezed like sin.

The doctor said, as at my side he mixed up pills to feed my face, ‘The wonder is you have not died! I never saw so bad a case. I’ve seen a hundred taken down, I’ve seen them like the ripe grain fall; a thousand men are sick in town, but you are sicker than them all. It is a feather in my cap that I have pulled you through the strife; that you still loiter on the map, and breathe the well-known breath of life.’

And on it goes, describing what a wonder it is that he survived. Pronounced cured, he wants to brag to his friends:

There is no sense in being ill unless it gives you an excuse to talk about the doctor’s bill, and boast of pain to beat the deuce.

But they show no interest, calling his sickness fake, or telling him

You have your gall to talk of pain! A tin-horn ailment like the ‘flu. Your talk is frivolous and vain. Just wait until you have the gout, your toe swelled bigger than a brick! Then you may prance around, old scout, and claim that you really have been sick!

Our poor narrator concludes:

Alas, no matter what I do, my friends will never let me brag; in vain I hoped my siege of ‘flu would give a chance to chew the rag.

Simple humour by today’s standards, but interesting to see the lighthearted – but gently moralising – take on what was a terrible scourge at the time. Some describe Mason as a poet-philosopher.

Will we be writing about COVID-19 in similar tones over the next decade?

Six degrees of separation, FROM Stasiland TO …

/ Whispering Gums / 45 Comments

It’s April and finally the first starting book for 2020’s Six Degrees of Separation that I’ve read. If you are new to blogging and don’t know this meme and how it works, please check out meme host Kate’s blog – booksaremyfavouriteandbest.

Anna Funder's Stasiland bookcoverNow to April’s starting book, the critically acclaimed, multi-translated, award-winning nonfiction book by Australia’s Anna Funder – Stasiland (my review). Have you read it? If you haven’t do consider it because it’s not the sort of book to go out of date.

Janette Turner Hospital, Orpheus lostStasiland tells the stories of Stasi officers and collaborators and of those who suffered at the hands of the Stasi in the then East Germany. Largely because of this book, Mr Gums and I made a point of going to Leipzig in 2013 and visiting the Stasi’s Runde Ecke headquarters there. Anyhow, in announcing this book, Kate described it as a “classic on tyranny and resistance”. There are so many books that can link from that, so I’ll be interested to see what my co-meme-players do. I’ve decided to choose a related aspect, surveillance, which was fundamental to the Stasi’s tyrannical practices, and link to Janette Turner Hospital’s Orpheus lost (my review).Book cover

From here, I could take a cheery turn and link on, music, say, or the classics, but I’m going to stick with serious themes. Orpheus lost is partly about how terrorism leads to fear, surveillance and the loss of freedoms. Hospital was interested, she said, in the trading of civil liberties for safety in the post-9/11 world. However, I don’t want to spend all this post on this issue, so I’m making a cheeky jump to David Brooks’ The grass library (my review). It’s an animal rights focused memoir in which one of the main “characters” is Orpheus the lamb!

Bidda Jones and Julian Davies, BacklashFrom here it’s a very simple jump to another animal rights book, this one about the live export business, Bidda Jones and Julian Davies’ Backlash: Australia’s conflict of values over live exports (my review). I remember that when he sent the book to me, co-author and publisher Julian Davies described it as the most important book they’d published.

Book coverSo, I’m going to stick now with Julian Davies, or, at least, with his publishing company Finlay Lloyd, and link to the latest book of theirs published, John Clanchy’s In whom we trust (my review). One of the commenters on my post – someone who knows the author – described it as “an origin story” for the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse. It is about child abuse, but is also about, as commenter David wrote, “the institutional tension between the Brother’s and Clergy power structure within the Church”. It’s a powerful, but deeply human read.

Rebecca Skloot, The immortal life of Henrietta LacksTrust, as Clanchy shows, is in short supply between powerful institutions and those who have no power and who, by rights, should be able to trust those who are not only able to but who morally should protect and support them. Rebecca Skloot had to work very hard to gain the trust of African-American Henrietta Lacks’ poverty-stricken family to write her scientific biography The immortal life of Henrietta Lacks (my review). This book is both a fascinating story of scientific discovery and a horrifying story of the abuse of people’s trust and, in fact, their rights.

Elliot Perlman, The street sweeperI am going to stay in America for last book, albeit the author is Australian, Elliot Perlman. The street sweeper (my review) is about many things, but the titular character is street sweeper Lamont Williams, an African-American, who has just started work as a janitor at a cancer hospital in a pilot program for ex-convicts. He is innocent of the crime that put him in jail but his colour and poverty meant he didn’t have a chance. This book which links the Holocaust to Civil Rights in America is fundamentally about moral responsibility – which, of course, is not what the Stasi practised at all!

I have stuck with politically charged books this month – and why not given the important role writers play in keeping us honest. So, I am going to conclude with Orwell from his essay, “Why I write”:

What I have most wanted to do throughout the past ten years is to make political writing into an art. My starting point is always a feeling of partisanship, a sense of injustice. When I sit down to write a book, I do not say to myself, ‘I am going to produce a work of art’. I write it because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing. But I could not do the work of writing a book, or even a long magazine article, if it were not also an aesthetic experience.

PS I wrote and scheduled this before COVID-19 restrictions took hold internationally. I decided not to rethink my post in the light of that but to leave you with what initially inspired me! However, I’ll add that I wonder what writers will make of COVID-19. When will the first COVID-19 novel appear? From where and from whom will it come, and what will be the take?

Anyhow, now the usual: Have you read Stasiland? And, regardless, what would you link to? 

Rick Morton, One hundred years of dirt (#BookReview)

/ Whispering Gums / 14 Comments

Book coverWay back in the early 1970s when I was an undergraduate university student, I did some sociology, and one of our set books was The myth of equality by Tom Roper. It, and the courses around it, have informed ever since my understanding of how our society operates. Morton’s book One hundred years of dirt would have been perfect recommended reading for these studies. At the end of his first chapter he says this:

the single experience of my sister’s road to this point detonates the argument that equality of opportunity is stitched into our nationhood.

One hundred years of dirt, in other words, is not a simple memoir, as it might initially appear, but is, rather, a cry to Australians to see that the ideas, the myths we hold dear, are just that, myths.

But now, back to the beginning. Rick Morton, a thirty-something journalist, grew up tough. Born on a remote outback cattle station to a family of violent men, he experienced more than his share of trauma. Besides the intergenerational violence, he saw, when he was 7 years old, his older brother nearly burn to death and then, while his mother was away with that brother in hospital, saw his father carry on an affair with the governess. Not surprisingly, this caused a family breakdown, resulting in his mother leaving with her three children and no financial support. Poverty was theirs from then on. Morton speaks eloquently of the struggle to make ends meet, making it clear that families like theirs have no time to consider issues of the day, like climate change, when even a mooted $7 Medicare co-payment “could be the difference between eating or not for a person on the poverty line.”

Time, in fact, is an interesting issue – and one that resonated with me, too, as a feminist. Time is a commodity and how we choose to spend it – or are able to spend it – is political. Like hours at the hairdresser for example. (I know I am treading on sensitive toes here, but so be it.) Anyhow, as Morton says, “only some people have the time” to be “woke”. Just “living for so many people in Australia is exhausting“.

So, on the surface, One hundred years of dirt could be seen as your standard misery memoir: Boy from poor and violent background struggles against the odds to make it good as a journalist and successful author, with the help of a loving mother. It is that, superficially, but it’s much more too.

There is a general chronological movement to the story. It starts in the present, when that point quoted above about “equality of opportunity” is made. It then flashes back to the family’s origins on huge cattle properties in southwest Queensland, focusing particularly on grandfather George Morton and his hard, violent ways. From here, Morton moves more or less chronologically through his life, but each chapter is framed around a theme, so the chronology is not exact. The chapters, in fact, could be read as individual essays on their specific topic, such as drug (ice) addiction, mental health, being gay, class, and otherness or outsiderness. For some readers – as some in my bookgroup found I think – this departure from a more typical narrative flow may make the book feel disjointed. However, for me, the clear heralding in the first chapter that One hundred years of dirt was about more than one life had me engaged and ready, perhaps, for anything!

That anything turned out to be a personal exploration of how inequality plays out in contemporary Australia, supported by smatterings of socioeconomic data. Morton is, after all, a journalist, and so he brings his journalistic nose for facts to bear on his and his family’s personal experiences. In doing so, he provides example after example of how out of touch the knowledge class or “commentariat” is with the lives of those at the bottom end of the income stream. He discusses, for example, unpaid internships and the incomprehension that there are people who just can’t afford to take advantage of them. Journalism, which is rife with unpaid internships as a pathway in, has become one of “the most exclusive middle-class professions of the 21st century”. Morton describes the complete ignorance many in the middle-class have about their privilege:

There are those who have had the good fortune to never have felt other than the silkiness of privilege, their bubbles so perfect they cannot feel the gravel underneath.

He also writes:

As a nation, we have convinced ourselves that all of us has the same standing start, but this is neither true for the working class whites from broken families nor for those with black or brown skin. It’s not true for those without a proper education nor for those who were abused.

However, this book is not just bitter medicine. It has a spoonful of sugar. There are some genuinely funny moments – some of them black of course – and there are Morton’s wonderful turns of phrase which illustrate his meaning beautifully. He talks, for example, about working in a workplace surrounded by colleagues from “moderately wealthy and upper class families”:

… my colleagues [whom he did see as “dear friends”] could not fathom the life I had led. There were frequent attempts at empathy but it sounded a lot like people who were reading pre-prepared lines. Imagine a fish turning up to discover her psychologist is a Very Concerned sea eagle.

Love the fish analogy, but ouch, really, ouch! I feel I have a good understanding of inequality of opportunity and the ways in which it underpins disadvantage in Australia, but finding the right language in face-to-face encounters is not easy.

I have probably made this book sound like a sociological thesis or polemic. There is that, but it is still, at heart, a memoir. It’s simply that I have focused on what I see as the book’s main message. However, this message is wrapped up in a story about human beings, and particularly about Rick and his dearly loved mother Deb. He describes her as “the hero of this piece”, the mother who

sees boy as special, tells him he was sent here from that big night sky by beings unknown to report back on what he sees. She invented the aliens because she couldn’t see herself as the protagonist. She outsourced the explanation for her own success as a mother to the aliens out there.

Lovely Deb; thoughtful, provocative Rick. This is a powerful read.

Rick Morton
One hundred years of dirt
Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 2018
191pp.
ISBN: 9780522873153