Author: Whispering Gums

Canberra Writers Festival 2024: 5, Your favourites: Anita Heiss

/ Whispering Gums / 11 Comments

In conversation with Astrid Edwards

Astrid Edwards is a podcaster who conducted a “conversation” I attended at last year’s Festival (my post), while Wiradyuri writer Anita Heiss (my posts) has made frequent appearances on my blog. This was my second (and final) “Your favourites” session at the Festival, though there were more in the program. Here is the program’s description: 

This year marks the 200th anniversary of the Bathurst Wars. Anita Heiss’s thrilling new novel, Dirrayawadha, takes its title from the Wiradyuri command ‘to rise up’ and is set during these pivotal frontier conflicts. Join Anita in conversation with Astrid Edwards (recorded for The Garret podcast).

Contrary to usual practice, it was the guest, Anita, who opened proceedings. She started by speaking in language which she then translated as acknowledging country, paying respects, honouring it, offering to be polite and gentle (I think this was it, as my note taking technology played up early in the session!)

Astrid then took the lead, saying it was a privilege and honour to be on stage with Anita Heiss. She did a brief introduction, including that Anita had written over 20 books across many forms, had published the first book with language on its cover, and was now a publisher. She also said there would be no Q&A, presumably because the session was being recorded for her podcast.

The Conversation proper then started, with Anita teaching us how to say the title of her new book, but I was still playing with my technology, so will have to look for YouTube instruction later, as I did with Bila Yarrudhanggalangdhuray. She then read from the beginning of Dirrayawadha.

On choosing fiction for the story

Astrid was not the only person to ask this question, said Anita. So had some of the Bathurst elders. Her answer was that we all read differently, so stories need to be told in all forms – children’s, young adult, adult fiction, poetry, nonfiction, and so on. She talked about her first novel, Who am I? The diary of Mary Talence (2001), which was commissioned by Scholastic for young adults in their My Australian Story series. Told in diary form, it’s about a young girl’s experience of the Stolen Generation – and it made a bookseller cry. That’s the power of fiction – to make people feel. Anita wants people to feel with her characters. You can’t do that in nonfiction, she believes.

She has four points-of-view (POVs) in the novel: the land, the historical warrior Windradyne, his fictional sister Miinaa, and the fictional Irish political convict Daniel. Her original idea had been to use Baiame (the creator) as her POV, but she’s received mixed feelings about this. She thought, then, of using the land, but she found it hard to tell her love story through that POV. So, she ended up with her four POV novel!

As well as fiction’s ability to appeal to our feelings, Anita said the other power of fiction is reach. She quoted someone (whom she can’t remember) who said that if women stopped reading, the novel would die. Men rarely read fiction, she believes, particularly fiction by women. The composition of this morning’s audience didn’t contradict this! Her aim is to reach women in book clubs. This led to a brief discussion about “commercial” being seen as a dirty word, but it means reach!

On the violence

An interesting segue perhaps from the idea of encouraging women readers! But, violence is the subject of this historical novel about the 1824 Bathurst War, which was fought between the Wiradyuri people and the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. Every act of violence by the settlers brought revenge. Anita described the Proclamation of Martial Law made by Governor Brisbane which included that “Bloodshed may be stopped by the Use of Arms against the Natives beyond the ordinary Rule of Law”. While there was reference to its being a last resort, it sanctioned violence.

Anita talked a little about the history, and recommended nonfiction books for further reading, but said she wanted to translate the massacres into a palatable form for wider audiences. And, she wants people to know this story through the Wiradyuri lens. (She commented that the colonisation of Gaza is the same story. What have we learnt as human beings.) She talks about the book so people can learn but every time she does, it is re-traumatising.

On her main characters

Anita spoke about each of the characters, about the historical Windradyne, and his bravery in fighting for his people. All she had to do to fight Bolt (see Am I black enough for you?) for his racist attacks was go to court, but in Windradyne’s time people lost their lives. She created his sister Miinaa because she wants to show strong Wiradjuri women (and Suzanne, for a strong settler woman).

As for Daniel O’Dwyer, she spoke about the Irish political convicts who were transported because they fought the Britain for their sovereignty. It’s the same story. However, most of Dan’s Irish convict friends did not recognise the similarity because, once in Australia, they were fighting for their own survival, for jobs.

Anita spoke quite a bit about Dan, because he helps represent conflict or opposition within settlers about what was happening. She talked about there being long standing connections between First Nations people and the Irish because they experienced loss of sovereignty at the same time. Through Dan, we see an Irish man who is conscious of being on Wiradyuri country. There are people who put themselves on the line for the right thing (like, today, the Jews for Peace group.)

And, Anita told us something I didn’t know which is that the word “deadly” as we hear used by First Nations people comes from the Irish, who use it in a similar way. There were other similarities between the Irish experience and that of First Nations people, including not being allowed to use their language.

Ultimately though, First Nations people were measured against Eurocentric behaviour. The Wiradyuri were seen as barbaric, and the convicts, who lived in fear, did not see that the violence they experienced was a reaction to their own behaviour

Astrid said she was catching a glimpse of a what if story – or alternative history. That is, what if the Irish had sided with the Wiradyuri?

The landownder family, the Nugents, and their place Cloverdale, were based on the Suttors and Brucedale in the Bathurst region. Sutter (who sounds a bit like Tom Petrie in Lucashenko’s Edenglassie) learnt Wiradyuri and built a relationship with the people. Co-existence, in other words, can happen. Again, what if? (Anita auctioned the name of her settler family in a Go Foundation fundraiser.)

On the love story

Anita said it is difficult to write about violence, so the love story between Miinaa and Dan, gave her a reprieve from violence and heartache. Further, through all her novels – this came through strongly in her early choclit books (see my review of Paris dreaming) – she wants to show that First Nations people have all the same human emotions, to show “us as complete, whole people”. She likes humour, but it was hard to find humour in a war story. Still, she tried to find moments of distance from painful reality.

On learning her language

Anita said her aim is not to write big literary novels, but using language does make her writing more rich, powerful. However, she is still learning it. She told a funny story about posting a YouTube video on how to pronounce Bila Yarrudhanggalangdhuray. Readers practised it, messaged her and sent clips of their achievement, but then an Aunty (I think) told her that she’d got it wrong. She was distressed, until a friend told her, “you are learning what should be your first language at the age of 50”. She does, however, feel privileged to be able to learn her language in a university setting when her mother wasn’t allowed to speak it at all.

There was more on language – including the Wiradyuri words for country, love, and respect, and that Wiradyuri words are always connected to place. Country matters to Anita. She talked a little about her growing up, and her parents, about her experience of living with love and humour. Race was never an issue between her Austrian father and Wiradyuri mother.

Astrid wondered whether there had been any pushback from using language – Bila Yarrudhanggalangdhuray – for her last novel’s title, given it was groundbreaking. It was during COVID, Anita said, and a Zoom meeting with her publisher, who wanted to push boundaries. Anita suggested taking English off the over – and the publishers went with it. Anita doesn’t want the title to be a barrier, and she doesn’t want people to get upset if they get it wrong, but no-one has pushed back.

On her new role as a publisher

I have written about this initiative which involves Anita being the publisher for Simon and Schuster’s new First Nation’s imprint, Bundyi, so I won’t repeat it here. She talked about the titles I mentioned, albeit in a little more detail. She wants to produce a commercial list, including works by already published authors doing different things and by emerging writers.

The session ended with another reading from Dirrayawadha – of the novel’s only humorous scene, which has Suzanne explaining Christianity to a very puzzled Miinaa.

A friendly, relaxed session, which nonetheless added to my knowledge and understanding of Anita Heiss and of First Nations history and experience.

Canberra Writers Festival, 2024
Your favourites: Anita Heiss
The Arc Theatre, NFSA
Sunday 27 October 2024, 10-11am

Canberra Writers Festival 2024: 4, Your favourites: Robbie Arnott

/ Whispering Gums / 10 Comments

In conversation with Karen Viggers

Karen Viggers is no stranger to this blog (my posts), and I have read Robbie Arnott’s previous novel, Limberlost (my review). One of several “Your favourites” sessions with loved authors, this one was described as

Robbie Arnott’s fiction is steeped in the wild: women return from the dead as walking ecosystems; mythic birds circle the skies; the water calls to us. In writing these sumptuous, near-sentient landscapes, he grapples with our most wrenching and necessary questions: eco-grief, stolen land and human frailty. He joins local author Karen Viggers to talk about his new novel, Dusk, a tale of a feral creature loose in the Tasmanian highlands.  

Karen commenced by acknowledging the Ngunnawal people, their generosity and their stories, and spoke with passion about the importance of stories in our lives.

She then introduced herself, explaining that as an animal and landscape person, she relates to Robbie’s books and was keen to conduct this conversation for the Festival. She then introduced Robbie, his four books to date, and his many awards – Flames (2018), Rain heron (2020), Limberlost (2022), and Dusk (2024). Wildness and landscapes feature in all his work.

This was a fascinating but sometimes somewhat anarchic discussion in which Robbie didn’t always quite answer the question being asked, or, perhaps, not in the expected way. But Karen is an expert at going with the flow, so we got great insights into Robbie and his approach to writing – which is what it’s all about.

On how the accolades make him feel and their effect on his writing

It’s nice to be acknowledged, but living in Tasmania, away from the literary scene, they don’t make much difference to his daily life. Career-wise they’re good, but they don’t affect his writing. He is all about his work, to the detriment of his other responsibilities.

On the novel’s origin

Dusk is about twins Iris and Floyd joining the hunt for a feral puma, the titular Dusk, because a bounty has been offered. Karen described it as a story of wildness, freedom, connections, relationships, and asked about its origin. Robbie said it goes back to his childhood, and times in the bush when they would see feral deer which shouldn’t be there. He wanted to write this story.

On the siblings and their relationship to their parents

Iris and Floyd are 37-year-old twins whose parents had been convicts, then bushrangers, and had dragged their children through their life of crime. Now these children want to live straight. They need the bounty cash, but they have no idea about what they are doing.

He wanted two protagonists who have a close relationship, like siblings do. He didn’t make them twins for any particular twin-connection idea, but because he wanted a flatness of hierarchy between them. However, Karen felt that the sort of connection twins have comes through.

Karen wondered about the twins’ outsiderness, and whether it comes from within himself. Robbie, though – and this was reiterated throughout the interview – said he had no idea about himself. He hasn’t had therapy! They are outsiders because we live in colonial landscape. The other characters – except for some near the end (First Nations I’m guessing) – are outsiders too, but don’t realise it.

Later, Robbie talked about the deep trust Iris and Floyd have in each other. They are committed completely to each other, they rely on each other, despite frequently irritating each other.

On Dusk the puma, and wild beast myths

Dusk was not inspired by big cat stories but people are more scared of cats. They are terrifying, and play into our idea of wild landscapes. He is interested in outsiders tracking outsiders, in the strangeness of the colonial landscape. Colonists would bring things to new countries to hunt, also to rid other pests, so he had the idea that someone might bring a cat over to get rid of deer. But his pumas were more interested in easier animals than deer, like sheep. Like the cane toads brought over to eat cane beetles, but which ended up eating other things. (And, to extend this example, before the cane toads, the sugar cane itself was introduced, which then led to blackbirding.)

As for the name, Dusk, he didn’t choose it for any metaphorical meaning, but liked it as a name for a creature which appears at a liminal time of day.

Robbie doesn’t seek metaphor when he’s writing. It feels more like cleverness than openness. Karen suggested that a joy for writers is when readers see things that the writer doesn’t see. Robbie agreed, sharing Richard Flanagan’s advice that the least interesting thing in a novel is the writer’s intention. Flanagan, we learnt, is a friend and writing mentor for Robbie.

Despite this, readers did, said Karen, think about metaphorical meaning of Dusk!

On the wild and dangerous creatures in his novels, their source, relevance, meaning

Robbie has had no therapy, he reiterated, so can’t explain why! But, currently there is a focus in writing on the self and raising mundanity to art. However, he is interested in the world outside humanity. In stories, wild animals are often the impetus for change, but animals don’t work like that. They just are, going about their lives.

The discussion then turned to savagery and brutality. Humans can be as savage and brutal as wild animals, but in urban societies we fear wildness and savagery, and try to keep it at bay. However, we keep bumping up against the edges of it. Robbie has had publishers and readers complain about brutality in his novels, though it’s drawn from reality. For example, Iris and Floyd slaughtering bobby calves with sledgehammers comes from a friend’s experience in 2012. In another novel, his publisher tried to talk him out of a scene involving the skinning of rabbits. Where do they think meat comes from, Robbie asked. Savagery and brutality are part of us.

We have become separated from the bush. We say we love it but is our attitude to it essentially about power and control? For Robbie, taming the wilderness is ridiculous. He shared a scene from Richard Powers’ beautiful novel, Overstory, in which people suggested removing sticks and natural debris from the forest floor.

Staying with the idea of animals, Karen spoke of Iris and Floyd living in a savage world but taking such exquisite care of their horses. She asked Robbie about his thoughts on the human-animal bond. He wanted to show the intensity of the relationship, that it was an unquestioned one, and a necessity.

On what landscape means to him, and how he writes it

Robbie always starts with the landscape, not plot or character, and then thinks about who would be there. Landscape moves him. It offers the greatest way to feel small, the most beautiful form of insignificance. To write about landscape with feeling, the first thing he does is to free it of baggage, like the idea that the forest is green. He describes it as it is, which is not green, and then focuses on emotional reactions to it. For him, the aim of fiction is not to render the world as it is but how it feels.

To write freshly about landscape he gets out into it, and draws on his memory (memory is critical). He searches for the “atmosphere”. He most enjoys a book when he has slid into its atmosphere.

Staying with the idea of feelings, Karen asked him about the feelings he wanted for Dusk, who is omnipresent from the beginning. Robbie said that it wasn’t quite menace but a “hauntedness”. She’s not vengeful. He wanted her to feel alive.

On his novel as Western (and more!)

Robbie has described the novel as being something like a western, in that it is framed like a western, like a quest. It is also a journey novel, which makes it fun to write and enjoyable for the reader.

The discussion got into other aspects of his writing, such as his blurring of the line between realism and the magical in most of his books. It’s about, he said, conveying how the world feels. The magical wasn’t needed in Limberlost which was inspired by his grandfather. He edits a lot out, because it must feel real.

Karen loves the opening of Rain heron, and suggested that cutting out is an art. Robbie doesn’t want to waste anyone’s time. He wants to keep his books vivid, vibrant, alive. He doesn’t write drafts, but writes sentence by sentence, crafting each one carefully as he goes, so that by the end he has his book.

On Iris

Is Iris looking for belonging? Robbie said Iris feels connection to the landscape, and realises she doesn’t want to leave but she also recognises that she has no cultural connection to the place. Does she have a right to stay? This is the unanswered question – for Iris and for us. She does her best but the question is never resolved.

This point, this, above all else, makes me keen to read Dusk.

Q & A

On his becoming a writer, and his influences: He was a bookworm from the start (as soon as he learnt his sister got to stay up later because she could read!) He started writing when he was 11 or 12. There was never a decision, he just started writing. His literary influences are many, but he loves Annie Proulx for her amazing descriptions of the world; he loves Denis Johnston “at the sentence level”. He thinks Kevin Barry’s new novel is excellent, and later he mentioned David Mitchell and Claire Keegan.

On his thoughts about relationships between humans and wild animals (like the seal and fisherman in Flames): He agrees with ecologists who advocate staying away, but narratively he is pulled to these relationships.

On how he manages to keep his unique, glorious style: He can tell when he Is writing like himself, and when he “is wearing his influences too heavily”. When this happens, he writes a description of something he knows – not necessarily related to his current project – to get back to his own style.

On other art forms that influence or inspire his writing: Photography; poetry for its imagery; oh, and when he is writing he often puts on moving image of salmon leaping and grizzly bears trying (and usually failing) to catch them. This live and unscripted action inspires him.

Karen concluded by simply saying that Robbie’s writing is magical. This conversation would surely have convinced anyone not already in agreement.

Canberra Writers Festival, 2024
Your favourites: Robbie Arnott
The Arc Theatre, NFSA
Saturday 26 October 2024, 2-3pm

Canberra Writers Festival 2024: 3, Get thee to the nunnery

/ Whispering Gums / 5 Comments

Emily Maguire and Charlotte Wood with Kate Mildenhall

I chose this session primarily because of Charlotte Wood, given I’d seen Emily Maguire the day before, but her presence was plus, as was having author Kate Mildenhall conduct the conversation. Here is the session’s description in the program:

Emily Maguire and Charlotte Wood have both written novels of cloisters – of monks and nuns and clerical power-broking. What is it about these reclusive places that makes for such potent and irresistible storytelling? In conversation with Kate Mildenhall.

Kate did a lovely acknowledgement of country, starting by saying we were honoured to be on this land. She thanked the Ngunnawal people for their care and recognised that the country always was and always will be theirs. 

She then said that BeeJay Silcox deserved an A+ for the title of this session “Get thee to the Nunnery”, and did the usual introduction to the authors, Emily Maguire (and Rapture) and Charlotte Wood (and Stone Yard devotional), listing their books and achievements, which includes, of course, Charlotte being listed for this year’s Booker prize.

Kate introduced the conversation by saying that the two books were set more than 1000 years apart but both involved women – one young, one middle-aged – seeking monastic life albeit for different reasons, the former to live a life of the intellect and the latter to retreat from the world. 

On their characters

Emily explained that Agnes starts as child in Mainz, living with a widowed father who makes the shocking-for-the-time decision to keep his daughter. She consequently grows up listening to men. As a child of the era, she believes in God and constantly looks for signs of God.

Charlotte’s character, on the other hand, is unnamed and about Charlotte’s age. Charlotte liked a reader’s description that her character had “unsubscribed from her life”. She had hit an unspecified “wall of despair” so leaves her life as an environmental activist, and goes to a convent to rest. There is also a sort of “homing instinct” because she returns to the region where she had grown up. She initially finds the nuns’ lives embarrassing, all this singing and praying, until she realises that this is the work. After a narrative gap, we turn the page and find she’s been living there for a few years.

On “the heat” or seed for their books

Emily was inspired a decade ago by the legend of a female pope, which was believed through the high Middle Ages. The story thrilled her. It is a great trickster narrative, and she is personally interested in the early church and early Christianity. She started the novel 10 years ago but didn’t have the skills to write it then.

Charlotte can’t remember the beginning, but she was interested in why would a contemporary woman become a Catholic nun. She shared some of her personal background with Catholicism. She had skedaddled from it as a young woman, for all the obvious reasons, but has remained interested. As she thought about her question regarding modern women becoming nuns, she came across the idea of retreat and she got that, the idea of leaving a chaotic world for one of order. Then the pandemic happened. It pulled the rug from under her. The 2019 fires and the pandemic felt like a biblical wave of catastrophe and made her realise that our certainties about our lives were a complete delusion. She had driven through the Monaro – where she had grown up – during pandemic. “Old stuff came up” and “brought unlike things together”, so she invented a nunnery on the Monaro.

On wrestling about faith, religion, church when writing these books

Emily had to buy wholeheartedly into Agnes’ world in which God is the answer to everything, the good and bad. She also plugged into her childhood when Jesus was her best friend. It was easy, but also complicated, to sink into that. She boiled her thinking down to one idea: What does personal faith have to do with organised religion? As Agnes gets entrenched into the life, she starts to question what are her wants versus God’s?

Charlotte doesn’t believe in God but also doesn’t sneer at people who do. She can’t make the step to believe, but dislikes the fundamentalist atheist’s view. Also, as a young person, she loved spectacle of the Catholic Church, the language, rhythm, poetry, metaphor, the imaginative world of Bible, the stories of saints (horror fiction, and crime, interjected Emily!)

On the suffering of women (physical, spiritual, emotional)

Charlotte referred to the church’s idea of the mortification of the flesh. In our you-can-have-everything world, she understands the appeal of asceticism as conveyed in Emily’s novel.

Emily spoke of the saints’ stories involving harm to women’s bodies. But women can also feel that the body is what they have control over, and can accept (or do) harm to it, because it’s the “last site of resistance”. Religion can see women’s bodies as bad, dirty but there are also ideas about cleansing. It’s not either-or.

On deep reading, the idea of “lectio divina” in both works

Charlotte described its use in her book – read, think, read the same again, think, then say what comes up – and Sister Bonaventure’s advice that if you don’t understand something hand it over to God. This idea of handing one’s confusion to God is both disturbing and a relief to her narrator.

Emily said there’s been a long tradition of this practice, which is not Bible study but repetitive reading and thinking. It surprises Agnes. Does this “copying”, as she sees it, this not questioning, mean anything? She is shut down when she tries to argue, but if God made her mind one that could argue isn’t that what she’s supposed to do? Yet, sometimes sitting with ideas offers clarity.

Charlotte suggested that this idea of obedience (versus wanting to argue) is a challenge for the ego in our egotistical world. Emily added that she loved the lectio divina section in Charlotte’s book. She had turned hardline atheist, after her deeply believing youth, but now she is more “I don’t know”.

On research

Charlotte talked about being asked to speak at a conference in Melbourne on “communicating monasticism” run by nuns and priests. She was very nervous, because she didn’t research nuns, didn’t even interview any. It’s all imagined. But the conference attendees were very warm because they saw that she was respectful about their chosen life. And, they asked incredible questions.

Kate commented on the freedom writers of fiction have in this regard, but said there was evidence of extraordinary research in Emily’s book, though it’s held lightly. Emily explained that to make Agnes’ world and choices real she needed to do the research, including very basic levels, such as what is a chair, were there roads, and bigger questions like why didn’t Agnes choose a convent and would she have done this. She talked about how the modesty in monasteries – versus in ordinary Middle Ages life – was a gift to her plot of a woman presenting herself as a man.

On plotting, whether it comes naturally or has to be worked at

For Charlotte the plot alleviates the boredom, provides a change in the rhythm. She wanted quietude, stillness, but also needed an energy spike. She told us about asking a still-life artist friend about how she gets her very still pictures to shimmer. The answer was that she breaks up surface, the texture of paint, making it a bit unstable, though the image remains static. Charlotte said using the diary form gave some narrative movement to her story, but then she included the mouse plague, and the return of the wild-child nun with the bones.

Emily used the journey taken Agnes by Brother Randolph, but also, the legend has built into it the risk of being uncovered. She has learnt that propulsion is in the craft – the language, the sentences. Every sentence must do something. Charlotte added that the voice is likewise critical. If the voice is strong, the reader will follow along. It’s propulsive. That’s the key.

On “devotion” being part of the artistic life

Emily said that you lean into your writing, you just do it (like religion), and constantly check whether you are getting the answer you expected. There is devotion to the art, a communion with the page.

Charlotte agreed saying most writers feel a sense of sacredness when doing their work. For her it’s a vocation, a calling, not a job. (It doesn’t pay like a job!) It taps into something bigger than the self, connects with something outside self. At times you can feel it’s coming through you. Not from God for her, but the unconscious, perhaps. She said that when you leave Catholicism there’s a big hole, a yearning. Writing, for her, fills that.

Q & A

On Rapture not looking down on women, while the character in Stone Yard devotional does: Emily described Agnes as a “pick-me” girl, an imposter. It’s a power move to keep women separate, but Agnes, who separates herself, also feels a loss. Charlotte agreed that her character is an outsider and “judgey”, feels separate. She has ego, but respects Sister Simone, who has rigour, versus the other women whom she sees as embarrassing little girls. Simone picks her as someone who finds obedience hard. Charlotte realises she often writes about women who have disagreements. She’s interested in power dynamics.

On whether Charlotte has a name for her character in her mind: No, partly because the character is partly Charlotte herself. She wanted to risk showing part of her real self (her feelings about her mother, her memories of the town). Also the form of book. Starting as a diary means she’s not going to name herself. Charlotte likes the interiority of that.

On Emily’s relationship with Agnes: yes, she misses her!

There was also a question to Charlotte from a Cooma person whose family had connections with Charlotte’s. They had all read the book, including the men, and found it real. She wanted to know how men had responded. Charlotte said there’d been intense responses, though fewer in number than she’d had for The weekend. People, both men and women, had particularly shared their feelings of grief.

Kate concluded by asking what Charlotte and Emily do when the touring is done, what they retreat to for contemplation: Emily said writing is meditation, it stills the internal chatter, and Charlotte agreed, saying “writing time is home”.

This was another engaging session, topped off by my having a great chat afterwards with Karen Viggers (my posts), who was also in the audience, about our favourite reads of the year.

Canberra Writers Festival, 2024
Get thee to the nunnery
The Arc Theatre, NFSA
Saturday 26 October 2024, 10-11am

Canberra Writers Festival 2024: 2, History repeating

/ Whispering Gums / 14 Comments

Another preamble

What I didn’t say in my first post on this year’s festival is that the venue where I attended the sessions today is a favourite of mine – and not only because it’s where I spent most of my working career. This year, some strands of the festival are being held at the National Film and Sound Archive, which has two beautiful theatres – the big Arc theatre and the gorgeous, cosy Theatrette. I love the Theatrette, which was carefully refurbished around a decade ago to meet modern needs but retain its heritage art deco style and fittings.

History repeating

I chose this session because it featured two authors I have read, and was about historical fiction which – I’m going to say it – in its more literary form, interests me greatly. The session was described in the program as:

Catherine McKinnon has woven her new book around Robert Oppenheimer and his wife Kitty – the ultimate nuclear family; Emily Maguire’s new novel is an audacious portrait of an audacious woman – a mystery from the Middle Ages. Rebecca Harkins-Cross joins these dauntless storytellers to discuss the narrative lure of historical legends, and what the past can tell us about our present.  

I have read Catherine McKinnon’s clever Storyland (my review) which took us from the early days of the Australian colony far into a dystopian future, and Emily Maguire’s not-quite crime fiction, An isolated incident (my review). (Interestingly, my 2022 post on an essay by Emily on Elizabeth Harrower’s short story, “The fun of the fair”, is among my most popular posts this year.)

Anyhow, Rebecca Harkins-Cross commenced by acknowledging the traditional owners of the land on which we were meeting, then shared a quote from McKinnon’s book:

When Robert [Oppenheimer] works, there is seemingly no intrusion from the past into the present. But this, he knows, is illusory. The past shapes the present, creates the future. If thoughts are a trinity of past, present and future, losing the past means obscuring the future. (p 21)*

On its own, this idea is not especially new or dramatic, but it nicely framed the discussion we were about to have.

She then went on to briefly summarise Emily Maguire’s and Catherine McKinnon’s new books, Rapture and To sing of war. Rapture is set in the ninth century and tells the story of a young girl who, at the age of 18, to avoid the usual life for a woman as wife or nun, enlists the help of a lovesick Benedictine monk to disguise herself as a man and secure a place at a monastery. This story was inspired by Pope Joan.

To sing of war, on the other hand, is a polyphonic story set in December 1944 – in New Guinea, with a young Australian nurse who meets her first love, Virgil Nicholson; in Los Alamos, with two young physicists Mim Carver and Fred Johnson who join Robert Oppenheimer and his team “to build a weapon that will stop all war”; and in Miyajima, with Hiroko Narushima who helps her husband’s grandmother run a ryokan.

These two novels are set far apart in place and time but they have, said Rebecca, some unexpected parallels – plucky women confronting a patriarchal society, an interest in the natural world and the sustenance it can offer, and the lives of ordinary people.

She then asked her first question which concerned the idea that with every novel writers often say they have to start anew. Is this how Emily and Catherine felt?

Emily said yes, because her previous novels are contemporary, so while she wanted to write this story it was a challenge. Her method was to stop thinking about it as historical fiction but to focus on the main character and her experience – because she is living in her “now” – and then sort out the necessary details.

Catherine also said yes, that with every new project you feel like a baby again. She looked to Pat Barker’s Regeneration trilogy, not because it’s the same subject, but for how Barker made her era feel like now.

This led Rebecca to ask Emily whether any historical fiction writers were a guiding light for her? Hilary Mantel looms large, she said, and she loves her work, but she wanted to write something shorter, tighter, something pacy. She turned most to Angela Carter, not an historical fiction writer, for how she handles this and for the carnality of her language. She also looked to Danielle Dutton’s Margaret the First, not for her language but for her pacing.

On why their topics

Rebecca, who mixed her questions up for the different authors, then asked Catherine why she’d chosen her particular period and those series of events. Catherine was interested in understanding our governments and the decisions they make. Also in what happens to the land we are on. In World War II, a global war, who were we trusting to make decisions? (This reminded me of Rodney Hall in the morning session and his point about what was being hatched that would affect us later.) She was also interested in who became leaders, in the decisions being made by young people, in the bomb and its impact on the land – and more. Her interest is cultural.

Turning then to Emily, Rebecca wanted to know why she’d chosen the story of the female pope which is now accepted as apocryphal. Emily had come across the story due to her interest in early Christianity, and how it had grown from a small desert cult to a big power. She was interested in this story which most people believed from 1200 to 1600 until the Reformation protestants started questioning Roman Catholicism and its promotion of this story.

But, continued Rebecca, why this particular story? It’s a trickster story, said Emily, and she’s interested in Christianity and the idea of belief vs faith. Her Agnes is a genuine believer. Emily is interested in people’s own beliefs regardless of what the institution is telling them, and in Agnes being in a position where she had to either deny her faith or her femaleness.

At this point Emily did a reading, from early on when Agnes recognises the “bloody service [aka breeding] required of girls”. (This reminded me of Jane Austen who, centuries later, shows, in her letters, acute awareness of what motherhood means for women, including death. She was not impressed or keen!) Emily talked about how she got into Agnes’ character, which included trying to read what she would have been reading – things like the lives of saints. Many of these were violent, including that of her namesake, St Agnes, whose body and purity were deemed more important than her life.

On research

Back to Catherine, Rebecca about her research. She did the common thing – too much! And started by including too much in her book. She went to New Guinea, and spoke to people whose families experienced the war, and researched the botany. She went to Japan – to Hiroshima and the Peace Park and Museum, and to Nagasaki. She read and spoke to people there. She went to America, where she followed the Oppenheimers’ life, and then specifically to Los Alamos and Alamogordo, looking at the desert landscape. She wanted to connect the horror of war with the beauty of the landscape.

She then did a reading, from the opening of the novel.

Rebecca asked Emily how she’d approached research as a novelist, that is, how she balanced doing enough research while leaving space for the imagination.

Emily’s challenge was needing to balance the myth and history surrounding her origin story – Pope Joan. She managed it by keeping tightly focused on the character, on what kind of person is she. She also kept in her head Elie Weisel’s comment that there’s a difference between a book that is 200 pages at the beginning and one that starts at 800 pages and ends up at 200. She started with a much longer draft, which had a lot of scaffolding which she gradually tore down as it was no longer needed. When the novel was well along, she gave it to her first reader, and asked whether there were bits that didn’t make sense because she’d taken too much out, and, conversely, if there was information still in that wasn’t needed.

On their writing choices

Asked about finding Agnes’ voice, Emily said she’d started first person, but it felt right when she turned to “deep third person”. She tried to keep the language to words with Germanic and Latin origins, and she was careful about concepts, metaphors, similes. Something can’t feel “electric”, or can’t “evolve”, for example, in the ninth century!

One choosing her polyphonic structure, Catherine said that the polyphonic or braided novel has been around for a long time. Look at Chaucer’s Canterbury tales. Certain stories call for it, like her interest in small lives in a global world. She wanted a young woman in Los Alamos. She wanted to retrieve New Guinean history because at the time the people were not named. And so on. Her challenge was to find a way to keep the reader interested while jumping from story to story.

And, on history

This led to a question about history and revisionism. What had been written out of the history books that they wanted to return? Emily wanted to show that women could be intellectual forces, be present, be visible, that, just like the present, different women could have different interests and ideas. She wanted to imagine these women into being. I appreciated this response because readers often see such individuals is anachronistic, but I’m with Emily. Intellectual women, feminist women, and so on, don’t pop out of thin air. They have just been hidden.

Similarly, Catherine wanted to bring woman to the fore as thinkers, as scientists, etc, not only as nurses. She wanted to tell of ordinary people, to share queer stories. In other words, she likes finding the hidden stories, and searching out what is kept secret (in societies, and personally). What are the inner emotions, drivers, experiences that frame actions?

Q & A

On Catherine’s inspirations for her characters: Mim was based on a few women who were chemists and mathematicians; Fred was based on a real person called Ted Hall, who worried about America having a monopoly on bomb after war.

On negotiating telling one’s story against big presences like Hilary Mantel’s grand, involving historical novels, and Prometheus Unbound (which was adapted into the film Oppenheimer):

  • Catherine didn’t know the film was coming out, but she did use American Prometheus in her research. However, you look for the story you want to tell now – at what is it about now that you want to speak to, at what is it about humans that is interesting to us now. American Prometheus , she felt, was about how people could be picked up and then dropped, but she is interested, for example, in how decisionmaking can be petty. Writers have control over what they see, over their version of it.
  • Emily said that “anxiety of influence” is part of being an author, but she has a set of touchstones – such as Angela Carter for this book – of things you admire but that aren’t doing what you are doing. Other Pope Joan stories, for example, have “truth” agendas, but that wasn’t her interest/angle.

I enjoy hearing historical fiction writers talking about what they do because it’s a challenging but, worthwhile, endeavour. This thoughtful session was capped off by my having a delightful private chat with author Robyn Cadwallader (my posts), who had also been in the audience, about some of her historical fiction writing experiences.

* Thanks to Robyn for providing this quote.

Canberra Writers Festival, 2024
History repeating
Friday 25 October 2024, 12:30-1:30pm

Canberra Writers Festival 2024: 1, The most interesting man in OzLit

/ Whispering Gums / 8 Comments

A preamble

The Canberra Writers Festival is back in 2024, with last year’s wonderful Artistic Director, the writer and critic Beejay Silcox. The Festival’s theme continues to be “Power Politics Passion”, although that tagline is not quite so visible on the website. This is good – to my mind at least. Last year, under Beejay Silcox, there was a clear shift in programming away from the heavy political flavour we’d been experiencing to something more diverse and literary. That must have been successful, as this year’s programming has continued this trend, so it has lot to offer the likes of me! So much so that more difficult decisions than usual had to be made about what to attend. Wah! But, that’s better than struggling to find appealing sessions.

The most interesting man in OzLit

Before I tell you WHO this “most interesting man in OzLit” is, I must share that attending this session involved one of those difficult decisions, because overlapping this session was one titled “The power of quiet”. It featured Robbie Arnott and Charlotte Wood discussing “their favourite hushed and gentle books, and the art of less is more”. I am a big believer in “less is more” so would love to have attended this session, but “the most interesting man in OzLit” called, and I will be seeing Arnott and Wood in their own dedicated sessions elsewhere in the festival.

So, who is this “most interesting” man? Well, it’s Rodney Hall. The session was described as follows:

Rodney Hall has stories to tell: he walked across Europe, harboured Salman Rushdie during the fatwa years, and has won the Miles Franklin Literary Award – twice. At 89, Rodney has a new novel to share, Vortex, and it just might be his best. Join Rodney and his devoted publisher, Geordie Williamson, as they discuss his magnificent life on and off the page.

Rodney Hall, A stolen season

To my shame, I have only read three of Hall’s novels, Just relations, The day we had Hitler home, and, since blogging, A stolen season (my review), but – here comes the reader’s plaint – I have always intended to read more. He is one of those writers who, despite a significant body of work, seems to be under the radar, and I really wanted to hear him in person.

The conversation

There was something different about the audience for this session – at least in my experience of festival attendance. First, over 50% were male, and the median age seemed higher than usual too. This clearly says something about the subject of the session.

Geordie commenced by suggesting that with the small audience (though it was larger than the afternoon session I attended) this could be a bespoke session. And, I think this is how it turned out because it seemed to flow naturally in reaction to Hall’s “stories”. Geordie clearly had ideas about what they’d explore, but he handled it with lovely fluidity. Before introducing “the most interesting man”, Geordie apologised to Peter Goldsworthy, another “interesting man”, who was in the audience!

Geordie then did the usual author introduction, listing Hall’s output (which includes 14 novels, poetry, short fiction, two biographies, political polemics, plays, and librettos), his literary achievements (award wins and short listings), literary roles (including on the Australia Council) and political activism (in issues like the Republican movement and Indigenous Land Rights). Rodney – I have been using first names for author events for a while now so will continue – has been a very busy man.

I’m not going to do my more usual blow-by-blow account of this discussion because it seemed to revolve around a couple of main themes. In fact, I’m going to suggest that the way the session went might mirror somewhat Hall’s latest novel, Vortex, which he described as having the structure of a rondo, meaning it keeps returning to the same statement.

The point that kept recurring through the conversation was that Hall sees himself as a classicist. For him, this means that structure is fundamental to what he does, and this structure tends to be musically based. That is, he thinks in musical forms, and these provide the spine for his work. (Music, he said later, speaks to the divine, which doesn’t mean “God” so much as something more generally spiritual, inspirational.) Interestingly, and perhaps contradictorily – on the surface at least – he described himself as a “pantser” not a “planner”, though he didn’t use such informal terms. He spoke, for example, about his good friend Murray Bail who plans his work out meticulously, while Rodney described his writing projects as putting himself “in the way of a blundering machine”. He starts from some sort of interest and sees where it goes, which is sometimes nowhere.

It might be for this reason – for this “classicist”, structural, approach to his work – that Beejay Silcox recently told Rodney that he was “not political but ethical”.

And now, because I have departed from the structure of the conversation, I have to work out where to go next! But, let me see … Geordie started by trying obtain some sort of “origin myth” from Rodney, who had once told Geordie that his memoir was “rubbish”. But we didn’t get there in any straightforward way.

Responding to the idea of an “origin myth” and Geordie’s asking him to talk about his troublemaker mother and their experience of the blitz, Rodney shared a little of his background but then said that he is “deeply suspicious of the notion of stories” because they are “never true”. They leave out “the other bits”, the real or, I guess, true bits. 

He then talked a bit about his approach to writing. He doesn’t, for example, model his books on people he knows. This he feels is an intrusion on their privacy. Later, he talked about Vortex, which was inspired by some portraits he’d written of real people. They were in a book that was nearly published but he pulled it. Then, on reflection – I think I got this right – he felt he could pull out the “material” from these portraits, and us it in another work, without forensically analysing his friends.

Geordie reflected that what Rodney writes is the opposite of the current flavour of the month, autofiction, with which Rodney agreed. His classicism he said is out of step with his colleagues – whom he, nevertheless, likes and admires. They are interested in more personalised expression, because people “want the dirt of what you are yourself”. He, on the other hand, doesn’t seem to write what people want to read. Geordie commented on the sort of experimentation that Rodney likes to do, and asked whether he was conscious that people weren’t reading him!

It was probably around now that we got some of the aforementioned “origin story”. Rodney, who arrived in Australia (Brisbane) postwar, had to leave school at 16. So, unlike his peers, he never did “literary studies” but read what caught his attention. Caribbean literature, for example. He didn’t read Bleak house but did read Wilson Harris’ Palace of the peacock.

So, wondered Geordie, is autodidacticism the key to understanding him as a writer? And the conversation moved on to his formative influences, which included Caribbean literature; the 18th century Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico (and his book The New Science which teased out the differences between “myths” and “legends”); and Robert Graves. Each of these influences were formative in different ways, but Rodney spoke most about Graves, and a two-hour conversation he had had with him when he was a young man.

In fact, Robert Graves came up several times throughout the conversation, but I’ll try to bring it all together here. In 2011 (I think), Rodney lost his house in a fire – and with it went 30 to 40 unfinished novels, and his correspondence with people like Robert Graves and Judith Wright. (As a librarian-archivist I am aghast at what the literary community – let alone Rodney himself – lost through this.)

Geordie asked Rodney to name the book that was dearest to him, that he would save if he could save only one, and Rodney replied Just relations because in it he found what Robert Graves said was there to find. I take this to mean a sort of essence of things. (My words, not his.) He had a 2-hour meeting with Graves – after landing, uninvited, on his doorstep in Mallorca, and nearly being sent away by his wife. It sounds like Graves was generous with his advice. He talked to Rodney about writing being about “what don’t you know that you need to know”, about tapping into the “collective unconscious”, about finding the “inexplicable thing”. Graves recommended, when writing historical fiction, to write first (to find out what you need to know) and research later (to make sure people believe you). Graves, said Rodney, “was my university”.

There was much more to this session, more anecdotes – including a lovely one about labyrinths – but I’ll conclude with a few things about Vortex. It is set in 1954, the year of the Queen’s first visit, the Petrov scandal, Menzies (who had many years besides this one!) The underlying question for Rodney is that “we don’t know when the things that affect our lives are hatched”. You can call him a conspiracy theorist he said, because he believes there usually is one.

Geordie, who published the novel, believes Vortex is one of great contemporary Australian novels. It offers a long view. It is bookended by Royal Visits (being published just as we’ve just had another), and the nuclear issue is being raised again. Not much has changed, in other words – though maybe one thing has. In a discussion about students being radicalised in the late 1960s and early 1970s by the Vietnam War, and whether the same was happening now with Gaza and the October 7 attack, Rodney wasn’t sure. He said, back then, we knew what was being done in our name, but the news is so poor now we cannot be so sure of what we know. He also commented on the fact that no-one asks “why” things happen. When young First Nations people create havoc in Darwin, for example, they are locked up. No-one asks why they are angry.

Geordie shared an anecdote about Rodney pitching Vortex to him as a set of individual chapters that could be infinitely shuffle-able! But Geordie, self-deprecatingly calling himself “an agent of the industrialisation of art” looked horrified, so Rodney changed it!

There was more, including a short Q&A but it essentially built on what we’d heard rather than introducing anything new so, this post being long enough as it is, I’ll leave it here. I am so glad to have seen Rodney Hall in person. He is indeed most interesting!

Canberra Writers Festival, 2024
The most interesting man in OzLit
Friday 25 October 2024, 10:30-11:30am

Karen Jennings, Crooked seeds (#BookReview)

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Crooked seeds is the third novel I’ve read by South African writer Karen Jennings, and she continues to intrigue and impress me, because she seems to be quietly bubbling away in her little corner of the world writing books that grapple with the difficult questions. Unfortunately, I didn’t read her Booker-longlisted novel, An island (2020), but the two I have read, Finding Soutbek (my review) and Upturned earth (my review) are historical novels with strong political underpinnings. Crooked seeds has political import too, but is set in a somewhat dystopian near-future.

I say near future because my calculation from the information we are given has Crooked seeds set in Cape Town in the late 2020s, and it certainly feels dystopian with dire water shortages, fire on the surrounding mountains and ash falling. This setting is not, in fact, farfetched. Cape Town did experience a severe water shortage problem from 2015 to 2018, and climate change is an increasing problem in South Africa. Climate change, however, is not Jennings’ prime concern here. Rather, it provides a perfect, disturbing environment against which to explore the personal problems being faced by her protagonist, 53-year-old Deidre van Deventer, and the political problems threatening to undo post-Apartheid South Africa. The near-future timing enables Jennings to imagine a setting that is hard to question, but that is close enough to feel more than plausible.

The novel opens strongly. Deidre wakes up thirsty, dirty and smelly. Her personal grooming is almost non-existent and she doesn’t seem to care. By paragraph two, we learn she has false teeth and by paragraph three that she needs crutches. It’s 5.18am, and at 6am the water truck will arrive, so she sets out to join the queue. She speaks to people she knows, mostly to cadge cigarettes or other help from them, things she never pays back. Clearly though, the sympathy card works because, as demanding as she is, people continue to help her, often at some cost to themselves. She is, I should add, white.

This is the background. An unappealing woman fighting a world that is tough and difficult for all those at the less advantaged end of the spectrum. Into this setting comes the plot, when, early in the novel, Deidre is contacted by police officer Mabombo concerning some bodies – infants’ bodies – in the yard of her old home. This is the same yard where, at the age of 18, she had lost her leg in an explosion caused by her pro-Apartheid activist brother Ross. Deidre wants none of this investigation. It’s nothing to do with her, she says, directing them to find the family that had lived there before.

“I’m the one that needs help. Me. Look at me. I’m the one!” (Deidre)

From here we follow Deidre, as Jennings drips out more and more of her story, matching flashbacks to an unhappy past where Deidre came a poor second to her mother’s beloved Ross, with a present where a highly unlikable but clearly damaged Deidre tries to survive in a desolate world. Deidre is one of those characters who can frustrate some readers. She’s a taker not a giver. She is rude to those who help her, including her kind but long-suffering Coloured neighbour Miriam, not to mention those at the perfectly-named Nine Lives Club where she wastes spends her days. She refuses to consider any advice that might make her life easier. And she certainly doesn’t think for herself about how she might improve her situation.

Meanwhile, Deidre’s estranged mother, Trudy, lives across the road in a nursing home. Suffering from dementia, she is lost in the patriarchal past, yearning for her son, but it is she who holds the key to the mystery.

Halfway through the novel, Miriam’s frustrations with Deidre’s self-centredness boil over when Deidre admits that she has never voted, because the government doesn’t care for her. Miriam, remarking that this government provides her disability grant, continues:

“You know what, Deidre, you’re really something else. Every time I think I’ve seen the worst of you, you come out with something even more terrible. Every single time, no matter what. Are you trying to be unpleasant, tell me? Is that your plan, to be unpleasant and make everyone dislike you. I really want to know?”

Deidre looked down into her lap. “No, it’s just the way I am.”

So, frustrating, yes, but Jennings had me engaged from the start. For all her faults, I cared about Deidre and about that

invisible thing that came at her from all directions … this thing that was always watching her, that never took its eyes off her. That saw what she was and punished her for it.

Also, I wanted to see where Jennings was going with her story, because, as I’ve already intimated, there is a political layer – not only the water shortages and encroaching fires, but the forced removals from homes (which Deidre and Miriam had experienced) and an overall sense that the state isn’t working.

I don’t think I’m going too much out on a limb to suggest that we could read white, damaged Deidre as representing white, privileged South Africans who see themselves as victims in the post-Apartheid world. Like Deidre in terms of those infants’ bodies, they may not have been personally responsible for the worst that happened under the regime, but they need to face the truth of what happened under their noses. Towards the end, Deidre asks Mabombo about the point of chasing it all up now, decades later. He responds:

“Miss van Deventer, this is difficult for you, of course, but you must agree that the truth has to come out. To leave the thing alone would have been to deny it and cover it up. And we must consider the other people involved. Families lost their children, and have been living with questions and pain for all these years.”

Ultimately, what Jennings shows in Crooked seeds is a society at odds with itself, and I use the word “shows” intentionally because this is such a spare, tight book. There is no telling, just a powerful story about a woman from whom everything was taken, in her mind at least, when she was 18, and who has never been able to rise above it, seeing only her own pain and loss, never recognising others’ loss or that the possibility of change lies at least partly in her hands. A personal story with a political heart. This is a stylish, clever novel, with an ending that hits just the right note.

Karen Jennings
Crooked seeds
Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2024
219pp.
ISBN: 9781922790675

(Review copy courtesy Text Publishing)

Monday musings on Australian literature: Fearless reviewing in 1970

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I concluded last week’s Monday Musings by saying that I wasn’t finished with 1970. There are several posts I’m hoping to write, drawing from my 1970 research, but I’m starting with this one simply because it picks up on a comment I made last week.

That comment referenced George Johnston, and a review by John Lleonart of Barry Oakley’s A salute to the Great McCarthy in The Canberra Times (8 August). I wrote that Lleonart had some “niggles” about the book but concluded that Oakley had “given us in McCarthy a classic figure of Australian mores to rank with George Johnston’s My brother Jack“. I didn’t, however, share those niggles. He wasn’t the only one with “niggles” about the book he was reviewing, so I thought to write a post sharing some of the criticisms reviewers expressed, because they are enlightening about what was and wasn’t liked in writing and about the art of reviewing itself.

Lleonart starts his review by saying that “it’s a pity Barry Oakley shaped up for his new novel in the cultural cringe position”, and goes on to say that

Oakley could have scored both for Australian literature and the game had he followed the elementary rule that there are no beg pardons.

Instead of striding, chest out and blast you Jack after the ball, he tends to prop, apparently listening for the footsteps of intellectual hatchetmen.

But, these are not his main “niggles” (as he calls them). They include that, while “Oakley has a lot of natural ability with words … sometimes he carelessly drops into cliches”; that some of the characters are “cardboard”; and that the novel’s “social attitudes” look back to those of Lawson. Lleonart concludes, however, on the positives, which include not only the aforementioned reference to Johnston’s novel, but that our footballer protagonist McCarthy “finds in fiercely competitive sport a means of expression and, in its best moments, even a sense of the inner poetry of life.”

Suzanne Edgar, whose poetry collection The love procession I’ve reviewed here, wrote about two recent novels in The Canberra Times (March 7). She suggested that they had “appeared in answer to Thomas Keneally’s demand for acceptable middle-brow Australian fiction”. But,

The trouble is that only people who are serious about reading are likely to pay $3 and more for a hard cover book. If you pay that you are not usually after the sort of light-weight escapist stuff that can be had for 80c from any newsagent’s shelves.

Unfortunately, Jill Neville’s The love germ and Keith Leopold’s My brow is wet are just “simple, uncomplicated bed-time stories”. Neville, Edgar continues, writes “like a slick and practised copy writer slinging words and fashionable ideas around with studied, gay abandon and not too much discretion; ‘desorified’ is one of her more flippant coinings”.

Leopold’s book, on the other hand, is “your academic’s pipe dream, the clever, but of course tongue-in-cheek crime story relieved by satiric treatment of Australian ivory towers. The sort of thing they would all like to write if they were not so busy publishing or perishing six days a week”. Edgar then goes on to say that “Mr Leopold’s unexceptional thesis is that there is dishonesty in all of us”. She gives a brief run-down of the plot – which sounds basic on the face of it – and concludes that it’s “amusing enough, but not really solid value for your money”. So, overall, entertaining enough reads but not worth buying in a $3 hardback. (That said, don’t you think that Weidenfeld and Nicolson’s 1969 hardback cover for The love germ is pretty gorgeous!)

Finally, there’s Margaret Masterman, also writing in The Canberra Times (May 30). She reviews Colin Theile’s adult novel, Labourers in the vineyard. The review is headed “Novel improves as it goes along”. Masterman starts by quoting from the novel, then writes:

After encountering this rhetorical blast on page two of Colin Thiele’s latest novel nothing would have persuaded me to read the remaining 245 pages had I not, as a reviewer, been paid to do so.

But, she is being paid, so she continues:

As Mr Thiele gets a firm grip on his narrative however, it becomes clear that such assaults upon the natural resources of the English language are only the occasional excesses of an eloquent and highly inventive writer, one moreover who is directed by a positive if imperfectly sustained artistic purpose.

She tries to place the novel within a wider literary tradition. She suggests that Thiele “conceived Labourers in the vineyard on the lines of the traditional regional novel”, and says that

Focusing his story on a long-established German settlement in the Barossa Valley … he aims as I see it to invest “the valley” with something of the imaginative presence of Scott’s border country, George Eliot’s midlands, Mauriac’s sands and pine forests around Bordeaux, and above all Thomas Hardy’s Wessex.

She then compares the novel with Hardy’s Wessex novels, writing that

Into a modest 247 pages he has organised a remarkable variety of fictional material, much of which is nostalgically familiar to lovers of the Wessex novels. His plot is highly contrived and marked by melodramatic coincidences. The moods and predicaments of his characters are closely related to their rural environment and commented on by a chorus of humorous rustics.

Masterman discusses the book at some depth, pointing out its strengths but also its failings. Seasonal festivals and country trials, for example, “are vigorously and sometimes brilliantly described” but Thiele fails to “infuse the countryside with any genuine imaginative significance”. Because of his detailed knowledge of the region, he does give his story “an illusion of reality”. Her conclusion, however, is qualified. She’d clearly much rather be reading Hardy!

I enjoyed Labourers in the vineyard as a lavish and well organised entertainment which stirred memories of the people, the woodlands, the heaths and milky vales of a great novelist whose works in these days are too often neglected.

These are just three examples I found in my research, but they nicely exemplify some of the things that are important to me when I think about my reading. What is the writing like? How does the novel fit within its perceived “genre” (defined loosely)? How relevant is the novel to the concerns of its day?

What do you think?

Michael Wilding, The man of slow feeling (#Review, #1970 Club)

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Michael Wilding’s short story, “The man of slow feeling”, is hopefully the first of two reviews I post for the 1970 Club, but we’ll see if I get the second one done. I have been making a practice of reading Australian short stories for the Year Clubs, so when the year is chosen I go to my little collection of anthologies looking for something appropriate. My favourite anthology for this purpose is The Penguin century of Australian stories, edited by Carmel Bird, because it is a large comprehensive collection and because the stories are ordered chronologically with the year of publication clearly identified. Love it!

Who is Michael Wilding?

With these later year clubs, like 1970, there’s a higher chance that the authors we read might still be alive. This, I believe, is the case with Michael Wilding. Born in England in 1942, he took up a position as lecturer at the University of Sydney from 1963 to 1967, before returning to England. However, two years later, in 1969, he returned to Australia and stayed. He was appointed Professor of English and Australian Literature at the University of Sydney in 1993, and remained in that position until he retired in 2000.

AustLit provides an excellent summary of his career. As an academic, he has, they say, had a distinguished career as a literary scholar, critic, and editor”, specialising in seventeenth and early eighteenth century English literature. Since the early 1970s, he has also “built a reputation as an important critic and scholar of Australian literature” focusing in particular on Marcus Clarke, William Lane and Christina Stead. And, he has been active as a publisher, having co-founded two presses, and at least one literary magazine.

However, he also, says AustLit, “came to prominence as creative writer in the late 1960s, when he was at the forefront of the ‘new writing’ movement which emerged in Australia in at that time”. He was part of a group of writers, editors and publishers “who were influential in promoting new and experimental writing, and in facilitating the revitalised Australian literary landscape of the late 1960s and 1970s”. AustLit doesn’t identify who was in that influential group, but I think Kerry Goldsworthy does in her introduction to Penguin’s anthology. She writes that “short fiction was the dominant literary form in Australia in the 1970s” and the most recognised practitioners were Frank Moorhouse, Peter Carey, Murray Bail and Michael Wilding. (All men, interestingly.) This writing, says Goldsworthy, was heavily influenced by European and American postmodern writing, but she doesn’t specifically reference Wilding’s story in her discussion.

Wilding has published over twenty novels and short story collections. AustLit adds that his short stories have also been published widely in anthologies, and that many have also been translated. Wikipedia provides an extensive list of his writing.

“The man with slow feeling”

“The man with slow feeling” is a third-person story about an unnamed man who, as the story opens, is in hospital after a serious accident from which he had not been expected to survive. However, he does survive. Gradually his sight and speech return, but not his sensation. That is, he can’t taste food or feel touch.

Soon though, he realises that sensation is returning, just some time after the actual experience. For example, he and his partner, Maria, make love, but he feels nothing – until some hours later. Not good! Not only is there the problem of feeling nothing, but when they are making love, he might experience some unpleasant sensation from three hours ago. Then, when he is out shopping three hours later, he experiences the orgasm. Or, regarding food, he will eat lunch but not taste it until 4pm. It is all, to say the least, disorienting. So, he sets up a system where he records his “sensate actions” so he can prepare (or “warn”) himself “after a three hours’ delay … of what he was about to feel”.

I’m sure you can see the practical problem with this. Soon, he becomes trapped in “a maze of playback and commentary and memory”, where he is trying to record the present for the future while at the same time experiencing the past. It becomes intolerable.

The tone is one of disassociation, alienation – which had me heading off down that more “modernist” path. But, the “recorder” aspect suggested that the theme involves partly, at least, exploring the conflicted role of recording versus experiencing – which is a more post-modern idea. Can you do both? Can a writer do both? Can, I remember discussing at length during my film librarian career, a documentary filmmaker record and not experience (or not affect the experience) during the act of recording? What are the bargains you make between the two?

I don’t know enough about this time in Australian literature – I haven’t read enough – to understand where Wilding’s ideas and thoughts fit into the zeitgeist. In her introduction to the anthology, Kerryn Goldsworthy says that the writing of this time incorporated “elements of fantasy, surrealism, fabulist, literary self-consciousness, and the process of storytelling itself”. She says the stories by Murray Bail and Peter Carey are concerned with “the riddles and paradoxes of representation itself”. Wilding’s story could also be read as part of this exploration.

This is a dark story in which, if I stick with my idea about the theme, Wilding suggests that the life of sensation is what it’s all about. Fair enough, but where does that leave the writer (or recorder)?

“The man with slow feeling” had me intrigued from its opening lines to its close. I’m not sure I have fully grasped all that Wilding intended by it, but this was a time of experimentation with the short fiction form and new writerly freedoms. I wish I could point you to an online version of the story.

* Read for the 1970 reading week run by Karen (Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings) and Simon (Stuck in a Book).

Michael Wilding
“The man with slow feeling” (orig. pub. Man: Australian Magazine for Men, July 1970)
in Carmel Bird (ed.), The Penguin century of Australian stories
Camberwell: Penguin Books, 2006 (first ed. 2000)
pp. 232-238

Monday musings on Australian literature: 1970 in fiction

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Once again it’s Karen’s (Kaggsy’s Bookish Rambling) and Simon’s (Stuck in a Book) “Year Club” week. This week, it is 1970, and it runs from today, 14th to 20th October. As for the last 6 clubs, I am devoting my Monday Musings to the week.

Despite the excitement and idealism of the 1960s, 1970 Australia was strongly conservative, politically speaking, with some notorious conservative leaders (like Joh Bjelke-Petersen, Sir Henry Bolte, and Robert Askin) being premiers of their respective states. But, there were exceptions. The socially progressive Don Dunstan became premier of South Australia during the year, and, while our Prime Minister, John Gorton, was a conservative, he was recognised as a supporter of the arts.

The war in Vietnam was still underway but was becoming increasingly unpopular. This was the year Australia decided to go metric for weights and measures, and, more relevant to this post, it was also the year that Germaine Greer’s The female eunuch (which I read the following year) was published.

A brief 1970 literary recap

Books were of course published across all forms, but my focus is Australian fiction, so here is a selection of novels published in 1970:

  • Jessica Anderson, The last man’s head
  • Richard Beilby, No medals for Aphrodite
  • Richard Butler, Sharkbait
  • Diane Cilento, Hybrid
  • Jon Cleary, Helga’s web
  • J.M. (John Mill) Couper, The thundering good today
  • Geoffrey Dutton, Tamara
  • Catherine Gaskin, Fiona
  • Shirley Hazzard, The Bay of Noon
  • Edward Lindall, A gathering of eagles
  • William Marshall, The age of death
  • Cynthia Nolan, A bride for St Thomas
  • Barry Oakley, A salute to the Great Macarthy AND Let’s hear it for Prendergast
  • Dal Stivens, A horse of air
  • Colin Thiele, Labourers in the vineyard
  • Ron Tullipan, Daylight robbery
  • Barbara Vernon, Bellbird (based on the ABC television series)
  • F.B. Vickers, No man is himself
  • Patrick White, The vivisector

A few of these writers are still respected and read today; a few are known but read less frequently; while some have fallen out of public consciousness (to my knowledge, anyhow!)

Of those I didn’t know, a couple caught my attention for their subject matter. F.B. Vickers is one. Trove describes No man is himself as “A novel set in the north west of Western Australia concerning an officer in charge of Native Welfare who is sympathetic to Aborigines but involved in personal difficulties with the white community and his wife.” The other is Edward Lindall whose A gathering of eagles is also set in Western Australia, and has a First Nations character. Google Books describes it as a “thriller set in the remote barren wasteland of north western Australia; an outcast Aboriginal woman, Ilkara, assists the survivors of a murderous plot to outwit their would-be killers.” The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction says Lindall was the pseudonym used by Edward Ernest Smith (1915-1978). He is also listed at a Classic Crime Fiction site.

Writers born this year include novelists Julia Leigh and Caroline Overington, and those who died include Herz Bergner (whose Between sea and sky I’ve reviewed), children’s fiction writer Nan Chauncy, Frank Dalby Davison (who was part of “the triumvirate” with Marjorie Barnard and Flora Eldershaw), and George Johnston.

There were not many literary awards, yet, though the state awards we know were getting close. And, several of the main awards made in 1970 weren’t to fiction. The ALS Gold Medal, for example, went to historian Manning Clark, and the Colin Roderick Award to Margaret Lawrie’s Myths and legends of Torres Strait.

There were some fiction awards, however, including of course, the Miles Franklin Award, which went to Dal Stevens’ A horse of air. The trade union-supported Mary Gilmore Award (my post on this award) was made to Keith Antill for Moon in the ground. It’s an Australian science fiction story set around the secretive Pine Gap near Alice Springs. The “$1,000 Rothman’s award for the best Australian novel of 1969” was awarded in 1970 to George Johnston‘s “semi-autobiography Clean straw for nothing” (from Trove).

The state of the art

As for previous club years, I checked Trove to see what newspapers were saying about Australian fiction. This was a little trickier for 1970 because, due to copyright, many newspapers from this time have not yet been digitised. However, some papers, most notably The Canberra Times and Tribune, along with some regional ones, have made their content available to Trove. To them I am most grateful.

George Johnston

Book cover

If one name loomed large in my my 1970 Trove research, it was George Johnston, and not just because he died in July. There were, of course, the obituaries, but, unrelated to his death, is his being used as a benchmark by commentators. For example, John Lleonart, reviewing Barry Oakley’s A salute to the Great McCarthy in The Canberra Times (8 August), has some “niggles” about the book but concludes that “Oakley has given us in McCarthy a classic figure of Australian mores to rank with George Johnston’s My brother Jack“.

Meanwhile, in discussions about the need for more Australian content on television, the television miniseries of My brother Jack was suggested as a benchmark for good Australian television content. Frances Kelly, writing in The Canberra Times (August 26), discusses the economic and artistic challenges to producing more “good” Australian content, and suggests one solution could be for Australia to

follow the BBC’s lead and begin work on adaptations. There are many fine Australian novels, which if we must still fly the flag, would bear dramatisation. My brother Jack was a shining example. 

The obituaries sum up Johnston’s career well – at least as it was seen at the time of his death. Maurice Dunlevy writes in The Canberra Times (23 July) that:

He had come back to his gumtree and kookaburra womb to find a new land, a people without a soul, and some uncomfortable ghosts from his past. “I would like to help Australians to find a new identity, a new soul, a new spirit”, he said on television. But to do so he had to sort out his own attitude to a country where he had left “the irrecapturable rapture of being young”. He was trying to do this in the third volume of the trilogy [A cartload of clay] during the past year.

Roger Milliss discusses Johnston at some depth in Tribune (12 August), concluding that

the important thing is the task that George Johnston recognised and set for himself — that of modernising Australian literature, of dragging it screaming into the 1970’s, of giving it a shape consistent with the world around it. That task must now be taken over by someone else — perhaps a writer who will emerge from the ranks of this new emerging generation.

These two obituaries make good reading if you are a Johnston fan.

Bookworm diggers

Meanwhile, over in South Vietnam, reported the Victor Harbour Times (May 29), Australian soldiers were well supplied with most amenities, but were running short of reading material. They had, says the report, “ample supplies of newspapers and regularly published magazines” but “novels, other books and paperbacks [were] in short supply”. Donations were being called for, and the Army would deliver them.

Australian classics

Publishers publishing classics is not new, but it’s always interesting to see “what” publishers see as those worth publishing at a particular time. In 1970, the Australian publisher Rigby published two Australian classics, Rolf Boldrewood’s Robbery under arms and Marcus Clarke’s For the term of his natural life, in $1.25 paperback editions. The Canberra Times (May 30), described them as “quite massive little tomes as paperbacks go” but said they gave readers “the opportunity of owning at a reasonable price two books that will be read and reread as long as Australian literature survives”. I love the qualification, “as long as Australian literature survives”. I wonder what the reporter thought might happen? Anyhow, these are still recognised “classics” but more have been added to the Australian classics pantheon since then.

While not quite making classics status, two other authors from the past were mentioned in the year’s papers. One was Communist Party member, Jean Devanny, whose papers were donated by her daughter to the University of Townsville. (I included her in my post on women writers and politics in the 1930s.) The Tribune‘s report (January 28) says that Jean Devanny had had more than 20 books published by Australian and overseas publishers. One of her best known, Sugar heaven (1936), is a novel of class and politics on the Queensland cane fields, and was published in the Soviet Union in 1968.

The other author, Vance Palmer (1885-1959), came from the same era, and while not a Communist, was left-leaning politically. By 1970, he was seen as old-fashioned, but Professor Harry Heseltine thought he was due for a reassessment, and published his Vance Palmer in 1970. I will share more about this in another post.

Censorship and Book Bans

“Australia is still the country of interfering and sometimes ridiculous censorship, but there are signs of vitality on the cultural scene” (Paris newspaper Le Monde, The Canberra Times, December 21, 1970).

The last book banned in Australia was Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s complaint. It was banned in 1969, but after protestations by booksellers and publishers, and two trials in New South Wales which ended in hung juries, the ban was lifted in 1971. In 1970, however, it was all still happening. There’s way too much reporting for me to cover here, so I’m just to entertaining references to whet your appetite.

The University of New South Wales’ student newspaper, Tharunka (April 21), devoted a special literary supplement to the issue, asking writers to comment on censorship. One was Thomas Keneally, who commenced his piece by saying he felt “uneasy contributing to a forum on censorship because I have never achieved banmanship”. He is tongue-in-cheek about the reasons for the ban, which had to do with its being a “dirty” book. Keneally doesn’t see orgasm as “the key to the vision of man”, and argues that “there is very little of less value to the novelist than a person enjoying himself”. Fair point! Nonetheless, despite his “spinsterish views on eroticism in literature”, he thinks the ban is “an embarrassment”.

Maurice Dunlevy takes satire further in his article “The Portnoy tug-of-war” (The Canberra Times, September 5). Do read it … And, for a more recent history of the saga, check this article by Sian Cian in The Guardian (February 2, 2022). She quotes Des Cowley, of the State Library of Victoria:

“There’s been a lot written about the whole saga with Penguin and the legal case, but a little part of that story is that a small group of people got together and defended the right of literature to exist. It is such a beautiful case because, in a way, it ushers in the change Australia saw between the 1960s and 70s, with the progressive Whitlam government, and going from a literary backwater to a world stage.”

I’m not finished with 1970 … but this post is long enough. I’d love to hear any thoughts you have about the year, or about the stories I’ve shared here.

Sources

  • 1970 in Australian Literature (Wikipedia)
  • Joy Hooton and Harry Heseltine, Annals of Australian literature, 2nd ed. OUP, 1992

Previous Monday Musings for the “years”: 1929, 1936, 1937, 1954, 1940 and 1962.

Do you plan to take part in the 1970 Club – and if so how?

Stephen Orr, Shining like the sun (#BookReview)

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A question that confronts many young people as they reach adulthood – in western cultures at least – is, should I go or should I stay? This is particularly so for young people in small rural towns, and is the issue at the heart of Stephen Orr’s latest novel, Shining like the sun. Wilf Healy, the oldest of three brothers, stayed in Selwyn which is now dying, while his brother Colin left for the bright lights of America, as soon as he could. Now eighty years old, the widowed Wilf is confronting the rest of his life, and he is again pondering the question, except he is not thinking of heading for the bright lights but for Louth, the island on which he grew up. The thing is, that island is empty. No-one lives there now. But this doesn’t dissuade Wilf from his dream. Meanwhile, his 17-year-old great-nephew Connor is about to lose his Mum to cancer and sees no life for himself in Selwyn.

That is the basic plot. Selwyn is a fictional wheatbelt town in South Australia – only identified because Louth Island is a real island off the coast. Selwyn has “three hundred people coming and going, dying, lost in the cracks”, plus one of those signposts pointing to far-flung places around the world. Wilf lives and works in Monk’s pub, delivers the mail (not to mention vegetables and pharmaceuticals) around the community, and drives the school bus, all because he can’t say “no” when yet another job needs doing. However, as the novel opens, he’s had enough. He wants to retire, but his plans to leave are half-hearted at best – and not just because of his sense of responsibility for his sick niece Orla and her son, the disengaged Connor. Why?

The three epigraphs provide a clue, but so of course does the story. We follow Wilf through his days, as he engages with the people of Selwyn, people whom Orr paints beautifully with a description here, a piece of dialogue there. Take young Connor, “an out-of-tune whistle that just needed a breath of air”, or Bobby, the 85-year-old vegetable grower and builder of a kit plane “who is too old to deliver vegetables, but not fly”. Take the school principal, Noah, for whom Wilf drives the school bus. He’s a weak man, who, when a certain crunch comes, cannot stand up for right. And take Wilf’s school bus passengers who are so entertainingly individuated from the opinionated Sienna to the JK Rowling-wannabe Luke, from the withdrawn Trevor to the entitled bully Darcy. The bus-rides are interspersed through the novel, providing perfectly pitched comic relief while also playing an important role in moving the narrative along. It is something that happens on the bus that triggers the novel’s main crisis.

But, Wilf and Connor provide more than two ends of the “do I leave” spectrum. Wilf’s reflections on his growing up provide a stark contrast to the lives of Connor and his peers. Wilf, of course, came from the often brutal “spare the rod, and spoil the child” era, when you did what you were told and expected little else, whilst Connor is growing up at a time when young people are not directed, but encouraged to find themselves. Orr does not judge either way, but lets his readers see and ponder how it all plays out in a life.

I opened this post on the question of staying or going, identifying it as the novel’s central issue – which it is. However, this is not the theme. Rather, it is the question which gives the theme its push. The theme, itself, is something deeper, something so fundamentally human that it could almost sound trite, except it’s not. I’m talking about the idea of community, of connection, of being where you are part of something bigger, where you can make a difference to the lives of others. This might sound schmaltzy. However, because Orr’s characters are fallibly human, and because the socio-economic challenges facing small towns (in particular) are real, connection doesn’t come easily. Shining like the sun, with its cast of authentic characters and array of specific, yet also typical situations, teases out whether this connection, this idea of community, can in fact still fly.

“the possibility of being happy” (Connor)

Orr’s intention? There is surely some political intent, some wish to convey the value and importance of these towns which are being allowed to die through neglect and poor policy (“farms flattened”, and so on). But, it is also personal in terms of exploring what sustains human beings the most – a fancy job or house? Or connections with your community? Mr Gums and I wait for the cliched “tight-knit community” which is unfailingly trotted out after whatever disaster (natural or personal) is on the day’s news. Like most cliches, however, it has an element of truth. A “real” tight-knit community is worth its weight in gold – another cliche for you. Orr knows this, so does Wilf. There is nothing romantic to this story, just real life with all its questions and toughness alongside moments of humour and mutual support in which, even Connor realises, there is “the possibility of being happy”.

Shining like the sun, then, is another special Stephen Orr novel. It is not fancy in voice or structure. That is, it is told third person – albeit a first person narrator opens the proceedings – and is told chronologically, with occasional flashbacks as Wilf remembers his past. What makes it special is the quality of the descriptive writing, the knowing characterisation, the authentic dialogue, and the serious but warm tone leavened by natural humour that comes from ordinary people going about their business.

I read this novel immediately after my return from touring outback Queensland. We saw many small country towns, most of which were variations on the theme. Orr’s story rings true to these towns. Indeed, to end on a cliche – because, why not? – Shining like the sun is a love letter to an Australia little known to its mostly urban inhabitants. It has much to offer on both political and personal levels, but, beyond that, it is just a darned good read.

Stephen Orr
Shining like the sun
Mile End: Wakefield Press, 2024
313pp.
ISBN: 9781923042278
Review copy courtesy of Wakefield Press.