Month: June 2024

Charlotte Wood, Stone Yard devotional (#BookReview)

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Charlotte Wood’s most recent novel, Stone Yard devotional, is set in the Monaro, a region just south of where I live. It’s a landscape that is much loved by many of us, including Nigel Featherstone, whose My heart is a little wild thing (my review) is also set there. The Monaro is expansive country, a dry, golden-brown plateau, characterised by rocky outcrops here and there, much as the cover shows. There are also hills in the distance, and big skies. Perfect country for contemplation, I’d say, which is exactly what Wood’s unnamed protagonist is doing there. (In fact, it’s also what Featherstone’s protagonist went there to do, for a very different reason – although, coincidentally, both books have something to do with mothers).

Stone Yard devotional is a quiet and warm-hearted read, one that asks its readers to not rush ahead looking for a plot, but to think about the deeper things that confront us all at one time or another. These things are hinted at by the two epigraphs, one being Australian musician Nick Cave’s “I felt chastened by the world”, and the other American writer Elizabeth Hardwick‘s “This is what I have decided to do with my life just now. I will do this work of transformed and even distorted memory and lead this life, the one I am leading today”. Add these to the title – with its hardscrabble sounding “Stone Yard” set against the gentle, inwardness of “devotional” – and you have a sense of the intensity to be found within.

“a place of industry, not recreation”

While this is not a plot-driven novel, there is a definite narrative arc. Taking the form of undated journal entries, the novel covers a period in the life of a middle-aged woman who has left her city life – her husband, her job in threatened species conservation, and her friends – to live in an abbey on the Monaro. It starts with a five-day stay, which is followed by more stays until the time comes when she arrives and doesn’t leave. Why she does this is not explicitly explained but through her contemplations we come to see that there’s unresolved grief in her life over the death of her parents some three decades earlier and, alongside this, a level of existential despair which has built up over time.

This is the set up. The narrative arc comes from three “visitations” to the abbey – a mouse plague which ramps up as the novel progresses, and the celebrity “environmental activist nun” Helen Parry, who accompanies the bones of the murdered Sister Jenny who had left the abbey decades ago to work among poor women in Thailand. These three events, both real and metaphoric in import, present practical and moral challenges, “a rupture” but also “a frisson of change”, for our narrator, and for all at the abbey.

So, we follow Wood’s narrator as she settles into life at the abbey, taking on the role of cooking for the group, and, as their non-religious member, the shopping and other errands that need to be done. Much industry is required to keep the place running when there is no financial help from the church, but the main industry is emotional and spiritual (in its wider meaning). Early on, our narrator recognises that prayer and contemplation “is the work … is the doing”. For her, as an atheist, this is not religious in origin or intent, but nonetheless contemplation is the real work she does while living at the abbey.

Much of this contemplation is invoked by flashbacks to and memories of events from the past, some experienced by her and others that happened around her (like the suicide of a farmer). Many involve her beloved and humane mother, who, like nuns Helen and Jenny, was an “unconventional”, determined to continue along her path despite what others thought. Such contemplation is hard, and our narrator is tested by the “visitations”, particularly Helen Parry with whom she has history involving bullying at school. Our narrator wishes to apologise but, as she comes to see, the hard work is in coming to that point of apology, not in having the apology accepted. But, forgiveness and atonement are only part of the bigger questions posed in this novel. Grief, despair and, ultimately, how to live are also part of its ambit – and are set against the shadow of climate change and its implications for our lives and choices.

This sort of exploration, however, can only work if we like the telling, and I found it thoroughly compelling. Stone Yard devotional is delicious for its details about life in an abbey on the “high, dry, Monaro plains, far from anywhere”, and for its insights into the women living there. No character is fully developed, but each, from the “business-like but soft-looking” leader Sister Simone to the distressed Sister Bonaventure, feels real in the role she’s been given in the narrative. While there’s not a lot of dialogue, our narrator reports on interactions between the women, and these contribute to her contemplations about life. She is not perfect and admits to moments of pettiness and poor judgement in her dealings with her co-habitants. Contrasting this little community is local farmer Richard Gittens, who supports the abbey in many practical ways and who represents, as our narrator recognises, “decency”.

All this is told in spare but expressive writing that maintains a tone which is serious and reflective, but which never becomes bleak.

There is no single, final enlightenment, but rather, as the narrator says earlier in the novel, “an incomplete, unhurried emergence of understanding, [a] sitting with questions that are sometimes never answered”. This is the sort of writing I love to read. In some fundamental way, it reminded me of my favourite Wallace Stegner quote. In Angle of repose, he wrote that “civilisations grow by agreements and accommodations and accretions, not by repudiations”. Through living this life in retreat, Wood’s narrator comes to know herself better. In so doing, she is able to lay some of her demons to rest, not through any major crisis but through quiet contemplation. The abbey does, indeed, turn out to be a “place of refuge, of steadiness. Not agitation”.

Interestingly, and perhaps pointedly, the novel ends on an anecdote about the narrator’s mother and her “reverence for the earth itself”. Ultimately, Wood invites us, without exhortation, to not be “chastened by the world” but to do the hard work of thinking about what is really important. A compassionate, and gently provocative, book.

Kimbofo (Reading Matters) also liked this book.

Charlotte Wood
Stone Yard devotional
Crows Nest: Allen & Unwin, 2023
297pp.
ISBN: 9781761069499

ACT Literary Awards 2024

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On Thursday evening, I attended the presentation of the ACT Literary Awards (which I also attended last year when they were called the ACT Notable Book Awards). These awards are made by Marion (the ACT Writers Centre), and this year’s event was MC’d by the CEO Katy Mutton (left) and Board Chair, Emma Batchelor. As last year, the event had a lovely relaxed informality, while still paying real respect to the authors and their works.

The evening opened with a moving (and informative) “rite of passage” offered by local Ngunawal elder, Wally Bell. He explained that granting attendees a “rite of passage” is the correct process – is the one enacted by First Nations Australians across the country when they visit each other’s countries – not the “welcome to country” that we commonly experience at events. We keep learning new things, I’m finding, as different elders talk to us, and it makes these rites or ceremonies increasingly meaningful to us non-Indigenous Australians.

The awards were held, as last year, in the Canberra Contemporary Art Space, which occupies a beautiful building on the edge of Lake Burley Griffin. As our MCs said, when thanking CCAS for its ongoing sponsorship, it is an appropriate venue because there are links between all artists, including the fact that many have interdisciplinary practices. (Other sponsors included Big River Distilling which provided gin for the evening.)

But now, the awards…

Marion notes on the awards webpage, that across all categories they ask judges to consider which entries “stand out in their brilliance” and demonstrate the following:

  • Literary excellence
  • Powerful narrative structure
  • Considered and impactful use of language

They also note that in Children’s literature they received a particularly broad field of entries from picture books through to YA Fiction, so would be awarding winners in both the younger and older reader sections.

It’s worth noting too that Marion accepts self-published entries, in recognition of the fact that this how many writers get started. This year two books were named self-published winners in their categories, and three were highly commended in theirs.

The judges were historian Professor Frank Bongiorno, First Nations author and academic Dr Paul Collis, writer Dan Hogan, children’s writer Krys Saclier, and literary critic/writer/Artistic Director of the Canberra Writers Festival Beejay Silcox.

For full information on the awards, including all the highly commendeds, and judges’ comments, check out Marion’s website.

As I didn’t share the shortlists for these awards, I am listing them, and highlighting the winners in bold.

Poetry

  • Elanna Herbert, Sifting fire writing coast (Walleah Press)
  • Paul Hetherington, Sleeplessness (Pierian Springs Press)
  • Tim Metcalf, The moon the bone: Selected Poems 1986-2022 (Ginninderra Press)
  • KA Nelson, Meaty bones (Recent Work Press)
  • Sandra Renew, Apostles of anarchy (Recent Work Press)

Nonfiction

  • Kristen Alexander, Kriegies: The Australian airmen of Stalag Luft III
  • Ryan Cropp, Donald Horne: A life in the Lucky Country (Black Inc.)
  • Kate Fullagar, Bennelong & Phillip: A history unravelled (Scribner)
  • Kellie Nissen, What cancer said and what I said back
  • Fred Smith, The sparrows of Kabul (Puncher & Wattmann)
  • Angus Trumble, Helena Rubinstein: The Australian years (Black Inc.)

Kristen Alexander won the self-published award for Kriegies. As with many of the categories, there were highly commended awards. One in this category was the late Angus Trumble’s book on Helen Rubenstein. Trumble’s brother, Hamish, accepted the award, and spoke entertainingly about his brother’s obsession with sussing out Helena Rubenstein’s early years in Australia and argued, pointedly, that it was appropriate for this book to be recognised in Canberra, “the city of facts”! He didn’t need to tell us that facts are important.

Children’s

This was a bit confusing, because there were two Children’s shortlists but three winners, so I am listing the two shortlists and noting what each winner was for. Canberra is rich in children’s writers, and there were, Katy Mutton said, a large number of entries in this category.

Shortlist 1:

  • David Conley, That book about space stuff (Children’s self-published)
  • Tania McCartney, Wildlife compendium of the World (Hardie Grant) (Children’s nonfiction)
  • Kathy Weeden, Kim Drane, Phonobet (National Library of Australia)
  • Rhian Willams, Martina Heiduczek, Surprise at the end of Onkaparinga Lane (Walker Books Australia)
  • Barbie Robinson, Ian Robertson, Phoenix and Ralph

Shortlist 2:

  • Jackie French, Danny Snell, The turtle and the flood (HarperCollins Australia) (Children’s picture book)
  • Gary Lonesborough, We didn’t think it through (Allen & Unwin) (Children’s older readers)
  • Amelia McInerney, Lucinda Gifford, Neil the amazing sea cucumber (Affirm Press)
  • Emma Janssen, Strong little platypus

Fiction

  • J. Ashley Smith, The measure of sorrow: Stories (Meerkat Press)
  • Elisa Cristallo, The last famine
  • Emma Grey, The last love note (Penguin Books Australia)
  • Ayesha Inoon, Untethered (HarperCollins Australia)
  • Kylie Needham, Girl in a pink dress (Penguin Books Australia)

The Marion Halligan Award

The Marion Halligan Award honours the life and work of Marion Halligan, who died earlier this year (see my post), and who, Marion’s website says, “captivated readers with her elegant prose and insightful storytelling. She was an enduring force of creativity, intellect, wit, and wisdom”. The aim of this award is to recognise “works that demonstrate uniqueness, literary excellence, and/or surpass genre boundaries”.

The award was introduced by Alex Sloan (who has appeared several times here). She spoke about our much beloved Marion, and then announced the inaugural winner: Paul Hetherington for his poetry book Sleeplessness.

Other awards

Three other awards were made:

  • The Anne Edgeworth Emerging Writers Award, now in its 11th year, is made to an emerging writer and this year’s was shared between two writers – Jemima Parker and Gill Watson. It is worth up to $5,000 and is used “to advance the recipients’ development in the craft of writing”. The Fellowship is provided annually by the Anne Edgeworth Trust and administered by MARION.
  • The June Shenfield National Poetry Award for an individual poem was won by Cate Furey for Momentum
  • The MARION Fellowship to (TBA as I don’t see it on the website and I didn’t record the name)

Canberra (the ACT) is a small jurisdiction, but, as I wrote last year, it has an active, engaged and warm literary community that was once again well in evidence despite the rather chilly evening outside. After all, it is always wonderful to see writers being rewarded/recognised for their hard work – and, yes, writers, and their readers, do also like, sometimes, to party.

Monday musings on Australian literature: Forgotten writers 5, Lillian Pyke

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The subjects for my Monday Musings sub-series on forgotten Australian writers vary in the degree to which they’ve been forgotten, but those still remembered are only so in niche areas. Today’s subject Lillian Pyke is one of these, in that although no longer well-known, her reputation as a children’s writer has survived somewhat.

Pyke, like my two most recent Forgotten Writers, Marion Simons and Kate Helen Weston, was the subject of one of my posts on the Australian Women Writers (AWW) blog this year. As with these two, I am not including here the piece written by Pyke that I published at AWW. It is a sweet romance titled “Mary’s mother”, which means it’s not in the genre for which she is best known, but it offers an insight into the times while showing how, in some ways, times haven’t changed all that much … check it out at AWW.

Lillian Pyke

Lillian Pyke (1881-1927) was an Australian children’s writer, who also wrote adult novels under the pseudonym of Erica Maxwell. However, the adult short story I published at AWW was published under her real name, Lillian Pyke.

Pyke was born Lillian Maxwell Heath, the tenth child to her English-born parents, on 25 August 1881 at Port Fairy, in Victoria. She went to school in Melbourne, and then worked as a teacher and journalist there until she married Richard Dimond Pyke on 7 April 1906. According to her obituary in The Queenslander, Richard’s brother was W. T. Pyke, manager of Melbourne’s famous Cole’s Book Arcade. The couple moved to Gympie, Queensland, where he worked as an accountant for a railway construction company. (And where I lived for a brief time during my childhood.) They had three children, before he died by suicide in 1914. Pyke then returned to Melbourne where she took up writing again to support her family. In other words, like my previous subject in this series, Kate Helen Weston, she was widowed with young children and also seems to have managed to eke some sort of living from writing.

Pyke appears both in Wikipedia and the Australian dictionary of biography, and Trove searches also produced a few articles about her, so she clearly made some mark on her times. Kingston, in the ADB, says that between 1916 and 1927 she wrote sixteen books that were classified as children’s books, though today they’d probably be classified as Young Adult. She also wrote three novels for adults, as Erica Maxwell. One of these, A wife by proxy (1926), apparently contained Esperanto themes. It was translated into Esperanto, and published in 1930 as Anstataria Edzino. She also wrote A guide to Australian etiquette, edited short story collections, and adapted an Ethel Turner story.

Kingston writes that “most of her stories for both children and adults came out of her experience of Queensland railway construction camps or her involvement in education, and had an improving intention”. A Heath family tree webpage quotes the Oxford Companion to Australian Children’s Stories as saying of her school stories that her “educational ideas… are notably enlightened and ahead of her time”, and that her “novels about railway construction camps in Queensland are realistic insights into the life of construction workers and their families.” It’s worth noting, too, that in the list of her works on this page are three “Cole’s” books.

From Abe Books – Lillian M Pyke

Contemporary reviewers and columnists were generally positive about her books. The Queenslander wrote (17 November 1923) that her “stories of public school life in Australia are becoming famous” and suggests that perhaps her “best work is in her descriptive novels with a railway construction camp for a back-ground; but there is no doubt her stories of school life in Australia are almost unrivalled”. The same paper, writing a year later (15 November 1924) says her latest novel Brothers of the fleet is set in “those far-off and almost forgotten days of Australia’s beginning” and is her first attempt at an historical novel. They hope that it’s “the beginning of another rich vein of her imagination”.

Pyke died of renal failure at Brighton, Victoria, on 31 August, 1927. Her obituary in Brisbane’s The Telegraph (8 September) provides a biography, and concludes that they understand that one of her latest books, Three bachelor girls, was being filmed. However, I can find no evidence that that eventuated. Launceston’s Examiner (22 October) offers a more effusive obituary, explaining that having been widowed young, she

gallantly took up the pen as a means of livelihood and it was not long before her name was bracketed with those of Ethel Turner and Mary Grant Bruce as the most popular authoress of minor fiction in this part of the world.

Big praise. The Examiner also makes an interesting political point. Having just commented on her having had to work to support her children, it suggests it’s “ironical”

that her death should have occurred just before the first Australian Authors’ Week, which may be the beginnings of better things for those who try to live by the pen out here. In a popularity plebiscite held in connection with this “week” Mrs. Pyke polled remarkably well.

It concludes:

Mrs. Pyke’s work has a rare charm, which is all the more to be appreciated when it is realised that most of her writing was done under great difficulties. She was young always in her outlook, and by no means old in years, and her death at a time when she still had years for development before her is a regrettable loss to Australian literature. She has left a name of which her children can be proud.

Sources

  • Beverley Kingston, ‘Pyke, Lillian Maxwell (1881–1927)‘, Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, 2005, accessed online 22 April 2024.
  • Lillian Pyke, in Wikipedia, accessed 22 April 2024
  • Other sources are linked in the article

Eli Funaro, The dog pit (#Review)

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Eli Funaro’s “The dog pit” is the twelfth of fourteen stories in the anthology, Great short stories by contemporary Native American writers. Like the previous stories by Thomas King and Duane Niatum, it was written in the 1990s.

Eli Funaro

Anthology editor Bob Blaisdell provides very little information about Funaro, and I have to say that I have very little more to add. Blaisdell says that he “seems to hail from Minnesota, where he is a video director” and that his “plain-spoken and shocking story was written for a program at the Institute of American Indian Arts at Santa Fe”. That’s it.

All I’ve found is that someone called Eli Funaro – presumably the same one – is part of a media company called A Tribe Called Geek, which describes itself as

an award-winning media platform for Indigenous Geek Culture and Stem. But we are more than just a media platform. We are a community of intelligent, imaginative, innovative and creative Indigenerds acknowledging and advancing the visibility of our contributions to pop culture and STEM. From indigenous superheroes to Harry Potter and more, our podcasts, website and social media are a celebration of Indigenous Representation and Geekery.

When I tried to enter the “A Tribe Called Geek” website, I got one of those “Not Secure” warnings. While it’s probably OK to proceed, I’m not prepared to take the risk.

So, all I have is a list of 35 articles by Eli Funaro at a site called Muck Rack. Clicking on the articles takes me to that website with its “not secure” warning, and to find out more about Funaro at Muck Rack I have to join, which I’m not going to do. Funaro is not in Wikipedia, and nor is A Tribe Called Geek, but Muck Rack is. It’s a software program that “connects public relation offices and journalist listing on social media”.

What all this says to me is that Funaro seems to be more a journalist than a writer of fiction, and that his affiliation and ongoing interest is Indigenous. His articles – some of which are dated “three months ago” – seem to be mostly reviews, such as of the Wolverine movie, and of Marvel comics. The list provides a brief summary, or the opening sentence, and it’s clear that most reference “Indigenous” issues. For example, on Marvel’s Echo comics, Funaro writes that “of all the Indigenous Heroes appearing in the Marvel Universe, Echo stands out as one of the more unique comic book characters”.  Echo – or Maya Lopez – is a Cheyenne woman.

“The dog pit”

“The dog pit” is one of the shortest stories in the anthology. It is told first person in the voice of an eight-year old boy who lives on the “rez” – reservation – where, he tells us, “no garbage trucks … came to pick up your trash”, the implication being that other people had this service. So, Saturday is Garbage Day, and our narrator and his dad’s job is to haul their garbage to the dump.

The story opens with “It was a sunny Saturday, the day that dog died”. A few paragraphs in we are introduced to our boy’s dog Corky, for which his father seems to have little time. “You fed that mutt yesterday” he says, when the boy wants to feed his dog before they head off. But soon they are on their way, along “untitled roads”. Another indication of their second-class status.

The boy finds a pink ball in the glove-box and starts playing with it. However, when his father, having told him he can have it, also tells him he’d taken it from a dead man at the hospital where he works as a janitor, the boy is not so sure he wants it. His father, we are learning, is a practical man. Life is tough and he doesn’t have time for sentiment.

So they get to the dump, with its piles of burning trash and rancid smell, empty their bins, and go through their routine of bleaching their bins before they leave for home. While this is happening, the boy picks up the ball again, only to be told by his dad that the old man who had died holding the ball had probably not been the only person to have died holding it. This makes him anxious; he fears there will be many dead people angry with him if he keeps the ball.

Then we get to the death of the dog mentioned in the opening sentence. It involves the titular dog pit, and is cruel. The boy doesn’t know what to make of it, but doesn’t want his dog to end up there. HIs father, who might be practical, is not hard and says this wouldn’t have to happen. The story concludes with the boy creating his own stories about death with his new Zartan and Stormshadow toys, but also on a sense of a childish ability to put it aside. This is where I come a bit unstuck, because a point is being made in referencing these GI Joe-series figures, but there are cultural nuances that I am not fully across.

On the surface, “The dog pit” is a story about the innocence-versus-experience aspect of youth, on the gradual way we become aware of the darker side of life without taking it all in at once, but there are deeper socioeconomic and sociocultural issues being explored here, ones that Funaro seems to have continued to explore.

It’s not a perfect story. The language doesn’t always stay true to an eight-year-old’s voice, but this is probably the work of a young writer. It works overall, however, because it’s tightly told.

Eli Funaro
“The dog pit” (orig. pub. 1994)
in Bob Blaisdell (ed.), Great short stories by contemporary Native American writers
Garden City: Dover Publications, 2014
pp. 95-99
ISBN: 9780486490953

Sean Doyle, Australia’s trail-blazing first novelist: John Lang (#BookReview)

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Sean Doyle’s literary biography, Australia’s trail-blazing first novelist: John Lang, provides insights not only into this “idiosyncratic” man, but into two colonial societies – Australia and India – through the early to mid nineteenth-century. Doyle’s is not the first biography of John Lang, but it’s the first I’ve read.

However, Lang (1816-64) himself is not new to me. In 2018, I reviewed his 1853 novel, The forger’s wife, when it was published by Grattan Street Press in their Colonial Australian Popular Fiction series. But, even that wasn’t my first mention of Lang, as I had written briefly about him in a 2012 Monday Musings on Australia’s “pioneer novelists”. In that post, I wrote that he was born at Parramatta, went to Cambridge in 1838 where he became a barrister, and returned to Sydney in 1841, before leaving again a few years later to live in India and England. All this is covered in excellent detail in Doyle’s biography (with relevant clarifications).

John Lang, The forgers wife

I also noted that, according to (my 1994 edition of) The Oxford companion to Australian literature, “the enigma surrounding the life and personality of John Lang has not, even a century later and in spite of considerable literary research, been completely solved”. It is, however, believed he wrote the fiction work, Legends of Australia, which was anonymously published in 1842. The Oxford companion suggests that authorship of this “would entitle Lang to the distinction of being the first Australian-born novelist”. I added that there is a 2005 biography of Lang by Victor Crittenden, whose title says a lot: John Lang: Australia’s larrikin writer: barrister, novelist, journalist and gentleman. He was a contributor to Charles Dickens’ periodical Household Words. All of this is also covered by Doyle, but with additional research, which confirms some of the information that the Oxford companion writers “believed”.

Sean Doyle opens his book with a Preface which sets his biographer’s ground rules. Arguing that the richness of Lang’s life is in the details, he admits that not only did Lang lack a champion “to carry his flame posthumously”, but that there are few contemporary sources and what does exist is sketchy. No diaries or letters are known to survive. So, the temptation of course is to look to his novels, but, as Doyle cautions, while these can be “a looking-glass into his own life … any correlation requires caution”. His process then was “to assemble the verifiable facts, identify the spaces between them, and navigate the spaces with the firm aim of being true to what we know of his temperament, life and times”. He argues that Lang’s “known actions and ways inform the spaces of the unknown”.

Doyle then moves to his Introduction where he makes a strong argument for why this man deserves this biography, starting with Lang’s being “the first Australian-born novelist”, not with 1853’s The forger’s wife, but with Violet, or the danseuse, which was published in 1836 (and identified as being by Lang in Crittenden’s biography). Doyle names many other firsts, including the first Australian satire (Legends of Australia, 1842), full-length detective-novel in English (The forger’s wife, 1853), Indian travelogue by an Australian (Wanderings in India, 1859), and supernatural tale by an Australian (“Fisher’s ghost”, 1836). Other firsts include making the first translation of a classic (a Roman poem) in New South Wales. These firsts, Doyle admits, were more easily come by in the early days of a colony, but argues this doesn’t diminish the achievement.

“He just couldn’t help being idiosyncratic” (Doyle)

The rest of the book, until the Epilogue, chronicles Lang’s life, in nicely readable detail, through 25 chronological and clearly titled chapters, such as “Chapter 1, Family and Social Background”; “Chapter 11, Calcutta, 1842”; and “Chapter 21, Furlough in the UK (and a Creative Peak) 1852-’54”. In the telling, Doyle conveys much about Lang’s personality and character, which he gleans from the sources he has. These include, for example, newspaper reports of Lang’s “ill-advised” comments on the franchise and representation in New South Wales’s colonial legislature while seconding Wentworth’s motion supporting the idea. This is just one of many occasions in Lang’s life – as documented by Doyle – in which he shoots himself in the foot (as they say!) The end result is a biography that portrays a man – a “currency lad” no less – who had a lot of talent, a lot of heart and a lot to offer but who, more often than not, undercut himself through poor judgment and/or poor timing and/or an inability or refusal to read the times and produce accordingly. Lang wanted to emulate Dickens’ success, but “he just couldn’t help being idiosyncratic” – in his literary, personal and political lives.

Nonetheless, Lang achieved much in his relatively short life of 47 years. He is, argues Doyle, better known in India, than Australia, largely because of his support of Rani of Jhansi during her battles against the East India Company, but also for, as a barrister, winning Sikh Jyoti Prasad’s suit against the Company. Indeed, Doyle’s coverage of Lang in India at the time the Company fell and the British Raj commenced makes good, albeit distressing reading. It’s an ugly history, as we know. Lang also established, in 1845 in Meerut, a newspaper titled The Mofussilite, which documented many of India’s sociopolitical challenges of the time, and was often critical of the Company and the British.

The Epilogue provides a thoughtful summation of Lang’s achievements and significance, particularly in terms of his writing, and of the social, political, literary and personal circumstances that affected who he was and what he achieved. It makes a case for Lang’s place in Australia’s literary history, arguing that

without his balanced depiction of the convict era, the colony’s story is lopsided. This matters: a culture is the sum of the stories it tells itself.

The Epilogue, in fact, is a useful document on its own.

The biography is written in a popular-history style, meaning it has a strong narrative drive, with a liberal use of exclamation marks, some foreshadowing, and, for some chapters, serial-like cliff-hanger endings (which feel appropriate to Lang’s era). Doyle wants to understand Lang’s character and actions, and he pursues this with the gusto of a story-teller but with an eye on the facts and truths as he sees them.

Doyle is clearly keen to get the story of Lang and “his rollicking times” known. His research feels thorough and the characterisation as accurate as he can glean from this research. There are end-notes which cite sources for important points and a list of mainly secondary sources (biographies, histories, articles and websites). At times I would have liked to better understand which gaps were being filled, which thoughts and feelings were guessed rather than known, albeit Doyle heralds some with “maybe”-type markers and recognisable pop-psychology. There is no index, which is a big negative for me in biographies, but I know they are expensive, and the chronological telling will help people hone in on where the persons or events they are researching might be.

I did have questions as I read. What was Lang’s attitude to his wife and children, who left him in India, and whom he apparently never saw again, and where did First Nations people fit in those early colonial days of “big” men and their “progressive” ideas? But these are not necessarily germane to the main story here. Lang’s life is story enough, and Doyle has delved as far as he can.

Australian’s trail-blazing first novelist makes good reading for anyone interested in Australia’s literary history.

Note: Four of Lang’s works are available at Project Gutenberg Australia.

Sean Doyle
Australia’s first trail-blazing novelist: John Lang
Newport, NSW: Big Sky Publishing, 2023
372pp.
ISBN: 9781923004382

(Review copy courtesy the author.)

Monday musings on Australian literature: Book industry awards

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How to title today’s post was my first challenge – and I hope the title I settled on covers it well enough. What I am wanting to cover here are those awards that don’t go to books (or manuscripts) or writers, but to those in the industry – people and organisations – that support writers and their books. The ABIAs, or, Australian Book Industry Awards, have been doing this for some years.

ABIAs

Established in 2006, these awards are, says Wikipedia, ‘publishers’ and literary awards held by the Australian Publishers Association annually in Sydney “to celebrate the achievements of authors and publishers in bringing Australian books to readers”‘. I have only written on them once before, and that was to highlight some of the winners in the 2019 awards that interested me. However, these awards also recognise others working in the industry. The categories change over the years, but since 2017 there have been awards for (listed with the winners in the years they were made):

  • Book Retailer of the Year: Readings (2020); Readings (2021); Harry Hartog Bookseller, Burnside Village, Adelaide (2022); Big W (2023)
  • Bookshop of the Year: Books Kinokuniya (2020); Avid Reader, Brisbane (2021); Avenue Bookstore, Albert Park, Melbourne (2022); Matilda Bookshop (2023); Fullers Bookshop, Hobart, Tasmania (2024)
  • Commissioning editor of the Year: Jane Palfreyman (Allen & Unwin) (2023); Catherine Milne (HarperCollins Publishers) (2024)
  • Independent Book Retailer of the Year: Readings Potts Point Bookshop (2017); Readings (2018); Mary Martin Bookshops (2019)
  • Marketing Strategy of the Year: Bloomsbury for Johann Hari’s Stolen Focus (2023); Affirm Press for Pip Williams’ The Bookbinder of Jericho (2024)
  • National Book Retailer of the Year: Booktopia (2017); Dymocks (2018); Booktopia (2019)
  • Publisher of the Year: Pan Macmillan Australia) (2017); HarperCollins (2018); Pan Macmillan Australia (2019); Allen and Unwin (2020); Penguin Random House Australia (2021); Penguin Random House Australia (2022); Allen and Unwin (2023); Penguin Random House Australia (2024)
  • Rising Star Award: Shalini Kunahlan, marketing manager at Text Publishing (2018); Ella Chapman, head of marketing communications at Hachette Australia (2019); Hazel Lam, senior book designer at HarperCollins (2020); Pooja Desai, head of design at Hardie Grant Children’s Publishing (2021); Emily Hart, Commissioning Editor, Hardie Grant Books (2022)
  • Small Publisher of the Year: NewSouth (2017); Thames & Hudson Australia (2018); Affirm Press, with Honourable Mention to Magabala Books (2019); Magabala Books (2020); UQP (or University of Queensland Press) (2021); UQP (or University of Queensland Press) (2022); UQP (or University of Queensland Press) (2023); Magabala Books (2024)

As you can see, the categories move around a bit, but there are awards for publishing companies, booksellers, and book industry professionals. I like seeing designers, commissioning editors and marketers being recognised in what is an awards-rich field.

ABDAs

The Australian Book Design Awards aim to “showcase the best of the best in book design in this country”. They are open to books designed and first published in Australia, in the year preceding the awards. They are offered in multiple categories. In 2024, some 19 categories are in the mix, including Best Designed Commercial Fiction Cover, Best Designed Literary Fiction/Poetry Cover, Best Designed Non-fiction Cover, and so on. There are awards for covers only and for overall book design. I have written about them once, in the past, for the 2017 Shortlist.

Sarah Krasnostein, The trauma cleaner

Their Awards Archive site takes a bit of navigation, and doesn’t always present the information in the most ideal way, but you can find some gorgeous covers there, including Sandy Cull’s award winning cover (2017) for Heather Rose’s The museum of modern love. Another award winner – cover and overall design (2018) – was W.H. Chong’s work on Sarah Krasnostein’s The trauma cleaner. Back in 2018, I attended and wrote up a Canberra Writers’ Festival event involving W.H. Chong.

Specialist Awards

There are also awards run by specialist or special interest publishers, like the Educational Publishing Awards Australia (or EPAAs). These were co-founded in 1993 by the APA (Australian Publishers Association) and the late Professor Mike Horsley, and are organised by the APA which also manages the ABIAs. Most of the award categories are for specific books/educational titles, but they also include Primary and Secondary Publisher of the Year, which, in 2023, were won by SevenSteps (Primary) and Cambridge University Press (Secondary). Publisher Jacaranda has been a regular winner of these awards.

Are you aware of these awards, or of similar awards in your location or area of interest? I’d love to hear about them.

Thomas King and Natasha Donovan, Borders (#BookReview)

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Earlier this year I posted on Thomas King’s short story “Borders” from Bob Blaisdell’s anthology, Great short stories by contemporary Native American writers. The story was written in 1991, but as I noted in my post, it has also been adapted into a teleplay for the CBC, and turned into a graphic novel for younger readers. I was intrigued, and because I loved the story, I bought the graphic novel, on the assumption that we will share it with our grandchildren in a few years.

To recap a little from my original post. Wikipedia describes King as an “American-born Canadian writer and broadcast presenter who most often writes about First Nations”. Born in California in 1943, he “self-identifies as being of Cherokee, Greek, and German descent”, and has written novels, children’s books, and short stories. I also shared from Wikipedia a quote they include from King’s book, The inconvenient Indian, because it’s relevant to Borders:

“The issue has always been land. It will always be land, until there isn’t a square foot of land left in North America that is controlled by Native people”.

In that post I summarised the story, and I’ll repeat that here too. The narrative comprises two alternating storylines, both of which are told first person through the eyes of a young boy. One storyline concerns his much older sister, Laetitia, leaving home at the age of 17 to live in Salt Lake City, Utah, while the other tells of a trip he makes with his mother some five or so years later to visit this sister.

The crux of the story lies in what happens at the US-Canada border. Asked to give her “citizenship”, the mother insists “Blackfoot” and is denied entry. She refuses to offer anything else. As a result, she and her son get caught in a no-man’s land when, attempting to return to Canada, the same response to the same question results in her being refused entry there too. As one of the border officials tries to explain to her, “it’s a legal technicality, that’s all”. Of course, that’s not all. Blackfoot people ranged across the great northwest of America in what is now known as America and Canada. For our narrator’s mother, that land is her “citizenship”, not that she is American or Canadian, and she will not back down.

So, to the graphic novel. The illustrator is Natasha Donovan, who is described at the back of the book as “a Métis illustrator, originally from Vancouver, Canada”. She has illustrated, among other books, “the award-winning graphic novel Surviving the city, as well as the award-winning Mothers of Xsan children’s book series.”

This graphic novel version of Borders is beautiful. It turns what is a perfectly suitable story for pre-adult readers into a book that should appeal to and engage these readers. It contains King’s full text as far as I can tell, enhanced (if I can use that word) with Donovan’s gorgeous drawings. Because it is designed for younger readers, the drawings are simple enough to appeal to younger readers, but they offer a subtle depth which make the story well worth reading in this form by older readers too. The original story is told in a spare style, which leaves the reader to imagine (work out) the ideas and emotions behind the words. In this graphic version, sometimes the illustrations replicate the words, but in many cases they value add. This is not to say that value-adding is necessary, as it’s a gem of a story, but that the drawings encourage the reader to stop, think, and consider what the words might be saying.

An example: of their second night stuck in border-limbo, our narrator says that “The second night in the car was not as much fun as the first, but my mother seemed in good spirits and, all in all, it was as much an adventure as an inconvenience”. The panel following this depicts chicken wire in the foreground with a flock of birds flying off in the background, conveying some of the tension between the constraint of borders and the idea of freedom. The next panel, also textless, shows mother and son companionably sitting on the boot of their car, eating their sandwiches. In the border-guard scenes, the narrator mentions their guns. Donovan picks this up, providing frequent close-ups of guns, gun belts and holsters when the guards are present, which suggests authority and, perhaps, menace without overplaying the idea of fear.

What I liked about this graphic version, too, is how much it encouraged me to “see” things from our young protagonist’s perspective. I saw it in the text, but it becomes more vivid and immediate in this version. We see him report what he is seeing, and his own thoughts; we see him inserting his boy-ish wishes and perspectives. There is a running theme, from the beginning, about food which marks his focus on the concrete, on his needs. He asks Mel, the duty-free shopkeeper, for a hamburger, which he doesn’t get, but the next day:

Mel came over and gave us a bag of peanut brittle and told us that justice was a damn hard thing to get, but that we shouldn’t give up.

I would have preferred lemon drops, but it was nice of Mel anyway.

In this way, King conveys the truth as experienced by our young boy, but the wider truth that is happening around him – the strength of the mother’s identity and her determination to preserve it. Occasionally, our young narrator perceives some of these truths too. He sees the pride – and yes, the not always positive stubbornness – displayed by his mother and sister, but concludes:

Pride is a good thing to have, you know. Laetitia had a lot of pride, and so did my mother. I figured that someday I’d have it too.

Hachette’s promo for the graphic novel version describes it as resonating “with themes of identity, justice, and belonging”. It is exactly that – and conveys so much that is both personal and political, making it a rich book for any age to think about and consider.

Thomas King (story) and Natasha Donovan (Illustrator)
Borders (text from the 1993 published version)
New York and Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 2021
[192pp.]
ISBN: 9780316593052

Monday musings on Australian literature: Writers on artists

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Last week, the winner of Australia’s prestigious Archibald Prize was announced, Laura Jones for her portrait of Tim Winton.

Winton, as I read in the Herald’s The Booklist email, is the first novelist to be the subject of an Archibald Prize-winning portrait in more than two decades, with Geoffrey Dyer’s portrait of Richard Flanagan being the previous one in 2003. The email’s author, Melanie Kembrey, adds other Australian writers who have been the subject of prize-winning portraits include George Johnston (1969, Ray Crooke); Patrick White (1962, Louis Kahan); Banjo Patterson (1935, John Longstaff); and Ambrose Pratt (1933, Charles Wheeler). The National Portrait Gallery in Canberra has other portraits of writers, including Murray Bail (1980-1981, Fred Williams); Peter Carey (a few, including 2000, Bruce Armstrong); Robert Dessaix (a couple, including the one I know best, 1998, Robert Hannaford AM); Helen Garner (of whom there are many, including 2003, Jenny Sages); the poet Dame Mary Gilmore (c. 1938, Lyall Trindall); Elizabeth Jolley (2003, Mary Moore); Thomas Keneally (1987, Bernd Heinrich); Kath Walker (Oodgeroo Noonuccal) (1965, Clif Peir). Writers, like many people in the public eye, are popular portrait subjects, so I’ll stop here!

Kembrey then writes that “just as painters are interested in novelists, so novelists are in painters” and she lists some of her favourite “(more recent) novels about art and artists” – Alex Miller’s The sitters (1995); Peter Carey’s Theft (read before blogging); Emily Bitto’s The strays (my review). Kembrey also names some non-Australian novels but as you know by now, my Monday Musings is Australian-focused. Oh, just to be clear, we are talking visual art/artists, here, not artist in its wider meaning of any creative person).

Kembrey’s little list is just that, a little list to whet the appetite, but there are many more, including these (in alphabetical order by author):

Miles Allinson’s Fever of animals (2015): about a man’s search to solve the mystery of a Romanian surrealist, who had disappeared decades before, but the search brings up issues from his own life.

Jen Craig’s Wall (2023): about a woman who returns to Australia to clear out her father’s house, aiming to turn the contents into an art installation in the tradition of the Chinese artist Song Dong, but gets caught up family tensions.

Julian Davies, Crow mellow Book cover

Julian Davies’ Crow mellow (2014) (my review): a satirical (and illustrated) house party novel about a group of artists staying in a country house/bush retreat with their patrons and admirers; explores the complex relationship between art, its practitioners and followers, and life.

Sulari Gentill’s Rowland Sinclair series, starting with A few right thinking men (2010): Gentill explained during last week’s conversation that she made her protagonist, Rowland Sinclair, an artist, because an artist, particularly back in the 1930s, was a good profession for a character who needed to be able to move through different strata of society.

Gail Jones’ Salonika burning (2022) (my review): draws on the lives of four real people, including British artists Grace Pailthorpe and Stanley Spencer, to explore the experience of war, and, among other things, the idea of witness and representation. (Gail Jones often features art and artists in her novels, including her Miles Franklin award-winning The death of Noah Glass.)

Silvia Kwon’s Vincent and Sien (2023): based on the eighteen months or so that Vincent van Gogh and Sien Hoornik were together.

Book cover

William Lane’s The salamanders (2016) (my review): about events triggered by an obsessive artist father; “a broad, abstract story about our relationship to art, place and nature, and a more personal story about identity and family”.

Alex Miller’s Prochownik’s dream (2005): “reveals the inner life of an artist, torn between his obsession with his art and his love of his wife and daughter” (Readings). (Like Jones, Miller often features artists, another novel being Autumn Laing).

Ruby J. Murray, The biographer’s lover (2018): about a young writer who is hired to write about the life of an unknown woman artist in a family’s quest to bring her to public attention, and the complex issues re fame, art, memory, that arise. (Readings)

Angela O’Keeffe’s The sitter (2023) (Brona’s review): inspired by Hortense Cézanne, wife of artist Paul Cézanne, who sat for twenty-nine of his paintings, and a writer who is writing about her; another exploration of the tension between artist and subject, art and life.

Edwina Preston’s Bad art mother (2022) (my review): the protagonist is a poet, but two other women feature, a muralist and an ikebana artist; about how hard it is hard for women to make art and be recognised for it, and especially hard for woman who are mothers.

Heather Rose, The museum of modern love

Heather Rose’s The museum of modern love (2016) (my review): inspired by Marina Abramović and her performance piece, The artist is present, exploring, as I suggested in my review, the question of whether art is enough or is love more important? 

Dominic Smith’s The last painting of Sara de Vos (2016) (kimbofo’s review): a multi-pronged story spanning three centuries that “shines a light both on the hidden world of art forgery and women’s unrecognised contributions to the Dutch Golden Age”.

Patrick White’s The vivisector (1970): life story of a fictional artist/painter Hurtle Duffield; “explores universal themes like the suffering of the artist, the need for truth and the meaning of existence”. (Wikipedia)

Chris Womersley’s Cairo (2015): set in a bohemian world peopled by painters and poets, and explores deception and betrayal, within the context of one of the greatest unsolved art heists of the twentieth century, the infamous theft of Picasso’s Weeping Woman. (Readings)

So many novels, most from this century. Like Kembrey, I’ve barely touched the surface.

Some of these novels reference known artists, while others imagine their artists, but the question is, why do novelists choose to write about artists, real or otherwise? Chris Hammer said (in the abovelinked conversation with Sulari Gentill) that if you have 12 authors in a room, you’ll have 14 ways of doing things. This probably also works as an answer to my question here, but we can glean some recurring threads. A common one concerns the (often difficult) artist and his or her relationships (with partners, children, and others), alongside some sort of exploration of what price art in a wider life. There are many variations on this theme, because art is a rich vehicle for examining how we express ourselves and find meaning, how the all-consuming drive to create can become exploitative, how we balance our inner selves with the reality of existence, and so on. Another common theme is the feminist one of retrieving known women artists or muses from their undervalued or misrepresented place in history and/or exploring that challenges women artists face in practising their art.

Have you read any of these? Do you like novels about artists, and do you have any favourites?

Gail Jones, Salonika burning (#BookReview)

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Australian author Gail Jones’ ninth novel, Salonika burning, is a curious but beautiful novel, curious because she fictionalises four real people for whom she has no evidence that they met or knew each other, and beautiful because of her writing and the themes she explores. The novel is set during World War 1, but its focus is firmly on the interior rather than the grand stage of battle.

It opens dramatically with the burning of the city of Salonika (Thessaloniki). This is another curious thing, because this destructive event was caused not by an act of war but an accidental kitchen fire. Also, the novel is not set in Salonika but some 90 miles off, in and around “the field of tents that comprised the Scottish Women’s Hospital”, on the shores of Lake Ostrovo in Macedonia. It is 1917, and the novel’s narrative centre is this hospital and those working in and around it. Here, not Salonika, is where our four main characters are based — Stella, an assistant cook/hospital orderly; Olive, an ambulance driver; surgeon Grace; and Stanley, an orderly with the Royal Army Medical Corps. They are based on the Australians, writer Miles Franklin and adventurer Olive King, and the British painters, Grace Pailthorpe and Stanley Spencer. In her Author’s Note, Jones makes clear that she has fictionalised these characters, and that while all are known to have worked in the vicinity, there is no evidence that they met or even knew each other. It is “a novel which takes many liberties and is not intended to be read as a history”. This is fine with me. After all, a novel, by definition, is not history. The novel follows these characters over a few months after the burning of Salonika.

“everything was coming apart”

So, why Salonika? I see a few reasons. For a start, its burning sets the novel’s tone. On the first page we are presented with opposing ideas. The sight of the burning city is described as “strangely beautiful” but, on the other hand, “alarm, instant fear, the sufferings of others … were no match for excitement at a safe distance”. As the fire died, “excitement left and in its place was a murky lugging of spirit”. Throughout the novel, Salonika represents these contradictions, this tension between what is ugly, what is beautiful; between what is random, what is not; and in how to respond to, or feel about, what is being experienced.

The Salonika fire also encompasses the idea of witness and representation. In the opening scene, Jones describes a painting made of the fire by William T. Wood. It is a “morning-after scene, brightly calm, with a floaty view from the heavens” done in his “signature pastels, remote as a child’s dream and thinly decorative”. Those who saw this painting later, she writes, “saw the pretty lies of art”, whereas “former residents and soldiers said, No, it wasn’t like that”. This tension too is played out in the characters as they think about how they might represent their experience.

The burning of Salonika, then, embodies several ideas that are followed through in the novel. But, Salonika is also relevant to the plot. The novel’s narrative arc lies mainly in the characters and their emotional reactions to what is happening as the months wear on. Not only is there the war with its injured and dying soldiers, but malaria is rife, and the privations they experience, professionally and personally, are exacerbated by the burning of Salonika and the attendant shortage of essential provisions – food, petrol, medical supplies. However, a plot also unfolds, and it is something that happens on the way to Salonika, well into the story, which sets the novel’s final drama in motion.

Salonika burning traverses themes that are the stuff of the best war literature – themes that expose the “idiocy of this war, of all wars” and its impact on those caught up in it – but it offers its own take. The telling feels disjointed, particularly at the start, with its constant switching between the perspectives of the four characters who interact very little with each other until well into the novel – and even then it’s often uneasy, as befits their temperaments. And yet, the novel is compelling to read, primarily because of these characters. They are beautifully individuated, so flawed, so human, so real.

Olive, who is the first character we meet, and the one who closes the novel, is confident, tough and practical. Grace, too, is tough, doing her “duty” with a “dull vacancy”. Stella, at 38, the oldest of the four, is “cranky and wanting more”, more excitement to write about, but she believes in “chin-up and perseverance”, while the youngest, 26-year-old Stanley, is “ill-fitted … to this life of rough cynical men”.

These are “intolerable” times, and we are privy to their struggle to maintain their sanity. Olive resorts to her German grammar to escape the emotional load, while Stanley has his mules and favourite painters, his “Holy Rhymers”. Stella, “writing jolly accounts in her diary”, thinks about what stories she will tell, while Grace has her favourite brother to think about and write to. The disjointed structure mirrors, I think, their sense of isolation. Contact and the potential for friendship is there, but Matron discourages emotional engagement. There’s “no room for emotion”, she says, just “duty”. Olive, who seems to represent the novel’s moral centre, thinks otherwise:

It seemed another kind of duty, not to forget. Olive wanted to speak of what she had seen and known, though she suffered too much remembrance.

This could neatly segue to that issue of representation, and the post-war work done by Stella, Grace and Stanley, but instead, I want to conclude with another idea. On a supply trip to Salonika, Olive, “driving in her safe foreign aura”, had been indulging in a dose of self-pity, but is suddenly confronted by the loss Salonika’s burning represented for its residents, “and only now understood that it was the woe of others that claimed importance”. Likewise, Stanley, Grace and Stella are confronted with the woes of others through the novel’s closing drama, and must decide where their humanity lies.

I started this post noting some curious things about Jones’ approach to her story, but these didn’t spoil the read. Rather, they added to my interest as I read it. Ultimately, Salonika burning is a true and tenderly written novel that captures the essence of war’s inhumanity, and then goes about extracting the humanity out of it. A worthy winner of the 2023 ARA Historical Novel Prize.

Lisa and Brona also read and enjoyed this book.

Further reading

Gail Jones
Salonika Burning
Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2022
249pp.
ISBN: 9781922458834

Author Talk: the Craft of Crime, Sulari Gentill & Chris Hammer with Anna Steele

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This author talk was not one of my usual series – that is, not ANU/Canberra Times Meet the Author or Muse Canberra‘s conversations. Instead, it was presented by the Friends of the National Library of Australia, of which I am a member. Despite the cold, drizzly night, it was a full house, which is not surprising given the topic was crime fiction and the participants two local-ish, successful crime writers.

The event was MC’d by Nancy Clarke, from the Friends committee. After acknowledging country, she introduced the subject of the evening, and pointed us to a recent post on the NLA Blog on Australian crime fiction. She then introduced our authors and moderator:

  • Sulari Gentill: author of 15 novels, including 10 in her Rowland Sinclair series, since 2010, and winner of Ned Kelly and Davitt Awards.
  • Chris Hammer: author of two non-fiction works, and, since 2018, of 6 crime novels. And, winner of several awards.
  • Anna Steele: reviewer of crime and other fiction for local newspapers, including, currently, the City News. Before retirement she was Head of English at Canberra Grammar School. (She is also a friend of mine, through our local Jane Austen group).

The conversation

After also acknowledging country, Anna explained that the focus of the evening was the craft of crime writing, and suggested they start with how and why they became successful crime writers.

Sulari Gentill, A fete right thinking men

The ever-entertaining Sulari – I’ve heard her before – explained that she had been a lawyer, but also loved hobbies. After trying many, including welding, she thought she’d try writing. Very quickly, it “felt just right”, and she knew she wouldn’t stop. She lost interest in law. Her first foray was writing mythic fiction.

That was the how, more or less. As to why crime, she said that her main reader, her English history teacher husband, found mythic fiction a challenge. He suggested she write “something with names you can pronounce”, and that including a murder might be good. Now, writers, she said, are obsessed, and often “absent”, so living with them can be hard. Given she didn’t want to give up writing or her husband – see what I mean about ever-entertaining – she had to make these two worlds work. So, she looked at her husband’s history thesis on 1930s Sydney and found her subject.

Chris started by quoting Balzac’s “behind every great fortune is a great crime”*. He jokingly said that turning to crime writing was easy because he got sacked! Actually, though, the trajectory was a little more complicated, but the gist is that after writing two low-selling non-fiction works around 2010, he returned to his journalism career. But, he missed writing, so decided to “have a crack at making things up”. He wrote Scrublands (2018) and got a publishing deal after an exciting auction process. His timing was perfect, as he wrote it just after Jane Harper’s huge success with The dry.

As to why crime for him, it was because he didn’t feel he was a good enough writer for literary fiction (his main reading go-to) and he didn’t have an idea. Also, he added – only partly joking – having been a journalist he really “wanted to kill someone”! He liked American hard-boiled writers like Dashiell Hammet, the Australian Shane Maloney, and, in particular, Peter Temple, who had shown the way in terms of combining plot, character, human drama, action.

Anna then asked, Where did their great characters come from?

Chris replied that Martin Scarsden was not based on himself. But, not knowing anything about police work and detectives, and given journalists are experienced investigators who poke their noses into things, he decided to make his protagonist a journalist. Martin, then, is based on his knowledge and experience, but not on his character. However, through his career as a journalist he had met many career war correspondents who were messed up. Scrublands is a redemption story for Martin.

Sulari talked about the challenge of deciding on her character. 1930s Sydney was highly class-based. She needed a character who came from a comfortable background, but who could walk easily among all classes. Then she had an epiphany, he could be an artist, as artists tend to accepted across the social spectrum. Also, she paints, and although she is not a painter, she understands how a painter looks at the world. Authors don’t need to be the same as their protagonist but it is useful to have some link with the character (like Hammer and his journalist.) She talked about some of the other ongoing characters, and why she created them. For example, she didn’t want to write sex scenes, but Martin needed romance, so she created an unrequited love for him.

Are they plotters or pantsers? (Some audience members didn’t know these terms, so for those here who don’t, plotters plan their plots out in advance – albeit to different degrees – while pantsers write “by the seat of their pants”.)

Both laid claim to being pantsers, though there was a little repartee about this at one stage with Sulari suggesting that someone who writes multiple drafts, as Chris does, can’t be a pantser. Chris retorted that if you only write one draft, as Sulari does, you must be a plotter! As Chris said later, if you get 12 writers together in a room together you’ll have 14 different ways of doing things!

Anyhow, back to the question. Notwithstanding Chris’ dig (and I’ll add here that these two get on very well), Sulari claimed to be an “extreme pantser”. She does no plotting at all; she has no idea who is going to die, let alone who did it. She writes while in bed, watching television shows like Midsomer murders, Lewis, etc. She believes, as author Kylie Ladd suggested, that this distraction enables her prefrontal cortex (our creative centre) to come up with the words. She’s not sure if this really is how it works, but she’s been writing this way for so long she doesn’t want to “poke around” in case it breaks the magic! So, things pop into her mind as she’s writing, and they will “suddenly” drive the narrative. Her novels are conversations with the reader about things she’s thinking about.

Chris is also a pantser, though not quite so extreme. For him setting is the critical thing – it’s how you cast a spell and invite the reader in. He might have a murder in mind, and a framing idea, but he won’t know who did what. He couldn’t be a plotter, because he would find it boring to know all in advance, and just have to “get on with it”. That Hollywood image of a book appearing to authors fully formed rarely happens.

Why leave behind successful characters? (As Sulari did with her metafictional Crossing the lines, and Chris in his shift to a police procedural series.)

Sulari said that her first book had been seen as literary fiction, but from then on they were slotted as genre. This separation of “serious” and “elite” from “just enjoyable” irritated her, so she wanted to try literacy fiction; she wanted to write a novel that explained how characters take on agency, and that explored the line between imagination and reality. Ironically, the book ended up including a crime! She sees this book, Crossing the lines, as her truly “novel” book, because there’s not other like it. She needed to do something different.

Chris was aware that booksellers need to know where to shelve your books. A police procedural is easy in that regard. Hence, Treasure and dirt, which was intended as a stand-alone, but has ended up not being so! Also, by end of third Martin Scarsden book, he could think up more crime but didn’t want just “mechanistic investigators”. He likes them to have “skin in the game”. Martin does appear in this new series, and he will probably return to Martin and Mandy in the future.

Then, Anna just had to ask him about his amusing character names. He said he got bored with plain names; he likes Dickensian names; and his editors didn’t complain! One reader has told him that his distinctive names help her keep track of who’s who in his complex plots.

Q & A

On how their “first readers” and drafting process works: Sulari’s husband – her first reader – sometimes sees a chapter at a time, sometimes sees the whole in a “last minute flurry”. He helps with plausibility. As a historian he can advise on the right tone in the language for her period, but as a grammarian and English teacher he will fuss over grammar and want to add adjectives! For Chris, journalist friends read his first book, but now, with the best editors in Australia, they are his first readers.

On their writing schedule/fitting writing into life: Sulari would rather write than do anything else so it’s easy. She does other things first, then settles down to her writing. She writes 1000 words a day, which results in a novel in 3 months. (Writing is like a relationship: you are passionate at the start; then it’s like a long-term marriage and you have to work. By the end you hate the “damn thing”, but when you come back to it you love it again.) Chris is at the stage where he has no kids, and no other job, so he has time. He is addicted to writing, and writes anywhere, including trains and noisy cafes. In the first part of the year he runs out of steam by lunchtime, but as year wears on, the book captures him and he thinks about it all the time.

On getting started, and what they wish they’d known: Chris said the best thing is to enter unpublished manuscript competitions, many of which are for debut authors. Also, try to find an agent, particularly for fiction. Read the acknowledgements at the end of books to get useful names of publishers, agents, editors. And get used to being rejected! Sulari said that it can be hard to get an agent, and they don’t guarantee getting published, but they can mitigate your gratitude to publishers when it comes time to sign the contract!

Conclusion

This was an excellent conversation because Anna used just a few well-targeted questions which kept it closely to the brief, the craft of crime writing.

Anna concluded by quoting Canberra thriller writer, Kaaron Warren, who recently said at the Bristol CrimeFest:

“I have a theory that people who deal with murder and death are always jolly in person … I mean have you ever met a miserable butcher?”

We all laughed and went off into the cold Canberra night feeling well-pleased with the effort we’d made to come out. Big thanks to the Friends, Anna, and our two writers, Sulari and Chris.

* The actual quote is, apparently, “Behind every great fortune is a crime”.

Author Talk: the Craft of Crime, Sulari Gentill & Chris Hammer with Anna Steele (Friends Event)
MC: Nancy Clarke (Committee of the Friends of the National Library of Australia)
National Library of Australia
Wednesday 5 June 2024