Edwina Preston’s Bad art mother was my reading group’s June book, replacing our previously scheduled book because we’d heard Bad art mother was to be the featured book in the Canberra Writers Festival session, Canberra’s Biggest Book Club. This suited me, as, coincidentally, I’d just started reading it!

Bad art mother has been shortlisted for two awards this year (so far), the Stella Prize, and the Christina Stead Award for Fiction (in the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards). Not a bad achievement for a book that was rejected by publishers over 20 times before being picked up by Wakefield Press.

The novel is mostly set in 1960s Melbourne, which was a time of social change. While feminism was around the corner but not there yet, the city’s life was being influenced by the postwar influx of European migrants. Preston captures this well, said our Melbourne-born members. The story draws its inspiration from various Australian arts practitioners who were active in the mid-twentieth century – the Heide Circle and the artist Mirka Mora and her husband Georges, in Melbourne, and the Tasmanian poet Gwen Harwood. Bad art mother is the third book I’ve read in recent years inspired in some way by the Heide story, the others being Emily Bitto’s novel The strays (my review) and Jane Sinclair’s memoir, Shy love smiles and acid drops (my review). Interestingly, all of them focus to some degree on the damage done to children.

I enjoyed the experience of reading Bad art mother, not only for its expressive language, but also for its intriguing, complex structure. It is told primarily from the point of view of a young boy, Owen, whose mother, Veda Grey, is struggling to make her name as a poet. However, we also get Veda’s point-of-view through letters she writes to her sister. After opening with Veda’s book launch in 1970, the novel is told in six parts, which to-and-fro in time, but it has an overall chronological trajectory, with part one telling of his parents’ meeting and his birth, and the final part being set around 2016 when Veda’s book is about to be republished in an anniversary edition. The central four parts commence with Owen as an adult in the 1980s, before returning to his childhood in the 1960s. It sounds complicated but it works. Lives, after all, are rarely simple and linear. Owen’s certainly wasn’t. Wanting to be just a kid, he had to be the grown-up more often than not.

The other thing to mention is that Owen tells his story first person, but to a specific person, “you”, whom we soon discover is Ornella, his father’s “sister”. That is, she was the daughter of the Italian family that “adopted” his father when he came to work in their restaurant at the age of 19. Throughout his childhood, Owen is passed between his parents, the rich but dysfunctional Parishes (to whom his mother entrusts him in a deal that buys her more time for her art), and Ornella. It is Ornella who saves him when all the others fail. She is the unimaginative one, the stern one, but also the stable, reliable one, the one who picked him up “on time, every time“. Owen knows that he owes his life to her, and now, as she is failing with dementia, he visits her and tells her his story, expressing what she means to him, while also working through his feelings for his mother.

“I will hang my anger out to dry” (Veda)

The book spans Owen’s life from the 1960s to the 2010s, but with its focus being the 1960s, it is, essentially, a work of historical fiction. Why did Preston choose to write about this time? I like my historical fiction to have some relevance to the time in which it is written. Fortunately, Preston’s novel does – and it concerns the challenge creative women face. There are three such women in the story. Rosa, the muralist, works in Owen’s father’s restaurant, and does it her way. She is not a tortured soul, but it takes a long time for her art to be accepted. Mrs Parish is an ikebana artist who quietly finds her own way by removing herself to Japan. And, of course, Veda, the poet – the only one who is a mother. She struggles big-time with her drive to create and her role as a mother. She writes to her sister:

How does one protect them? Sometimes I think I would throw in every hope of my own, every dream of literary prowess or success, to protect him, even for one second, from any hurt that might come to him.

But would I, Tilde? Would I?

If it came to it, I wonder how I would make such a choice. I should hope that if ever given that choice I would make the right one, but I know I would resent it for the rest of my life. I would never be happy. I would be a bloody, injured banshee who ruined everyone around her.

What sort of a mother chooses a book over a child?

Sometimes I am not sure what I am capable of at all.

The point, then, is that it is hard for women to make art and be recognised for it, and it is especially hard when the woman is also a mother. The tension for Veda is palpable through both Owen’s story and her own letters. And this brings me to the issue which triggers the novel’s crisis, anger. When Veda shows her anger at how she and her work had been treated, things go wrong and her life falls apart. Owen’s partner Julia tells him in 2016 when Veda’s poems are being re-released, that she remains relevant because, for all the progress that had been made in the interim, “it’s still hard to be angry, if you’re a woman. It’s still not allowed”. This was a major takeaway from the book for my reading group.

Bad art mother is an intelligent novel that offers no answers to the quandary it presents, but that asks the right questions. Good on Wakefield for taking it on.

Lisa also enjoyed this book.

Edwina Preston
Bad art mother
Mile End: Wakefield Press, 2022
317pp.
ISBN: 9781743059012

Review copy courtesy Wakefield Press