The 2024 Stella Prize winner was announced last Thursday, the 2nd of May, but that was the also the day my blog turned 15, and I didn’t want to flood cyberspace with too many posts. Then this weekend was the SixDegrees meme which meant another post coming at you. So, I decided to do my Stella 2024 post, this year, as a Monday Musings. It makes sense to do so, in fact, because it’s an historic win. First though, the winner, for those of you who haven’t heard yet:
Alexis Wright’s Praiseworthy
Why historic? Again, some of you will already know this, but Alexis Wright, one of our leading First Nations writers, is the first writer to win the Stella twice in its 12 year history. An impressive achievement by any measure. I am embarrassed to say, however, that of the now four Stella winners I haven’t read, Wright’s two are among them. This is not because I don’t want to read them, but because they are big tomes, and my life doesn’t seem to lend itself these days to chunksters. I read and loved her multi-award winning novel Carpentaria (my post), which was big enough – at over 500 pages – but that was before blogging when time pressures felt different! Clearly, though, I should make time for this because, from what I can tell, its subject matter is something I care about and it has the wit and playfulness, passion and imagination, that I loved in Carpentaria.
Praiseworthy has already been recognised by the literary establishment. Last year it won the Fiction Book Award in the Queensland Literary Awards. Further, as publisher Giramondo shares, it has been shortlisted for many other awards: The Dublin Literary Award 2024; the People’s Choice Award, the Christine Stead Prize for Fiction and the Indigenous Writers Prize in the 2024 New South Wales Premier’s Literary Award; The James Tait Black Prize for Fiction 2024; and the Queensland Premier’s Award for a Work of State Significance in the 2023 Queensland Literary Awards.
The chair of the judging panel said this about the book:
Praiseworthy is mighty in every conceivable way: mighty of scope, mighty of fury, mighty of craft, mighty of humour, mighty of language, mighty of heart. Praiseworthy is not only a great Australian novel – perhaps the great Australian novel – it is also a great Waanyi novel. And it is written in the wild hope that, one day, all Australian readers might understand just what that means. I do not understand. Not yet. But I can feel history calling to me in these pages. Calling to all of us. Imagine if we listened.
Giramondo’s (above-linked) page for the book, includes excerpts from other critics and reviewers. Samuel Rutter of the New York Times Book Review describes it as “the most ambitious and accomplished Australian novel of this century”, while Jane Gleeson-White wrote in The Conversation that “Praiseworthy is Alexis Wright’s most formidable act of imaginative synthesis yet…a hero’s journey for an age of global warming, a devastating story of young love caught between two laws, and an extended elegy and ode to Aboriginal law and sovereignty”. More than one references Ulysses, such as Ruth Padel, who describes it in The Spectator as “an impassioned environmental Ulysses of the Northern Territory… Playful, formally innovative, multi-storied, allegorical, protean and dizzyingly exhilarating, it is long, lyrical and enraged”. Several, in fact, praise the language; and many comment on its satirical aspect, its lyricism, its comedy. Lynda Ng, in Meanjin, calls it:
The finest distillation yet of Wright’s themes – a bold assertion of Aboriginal sovereignty that successfully encompasses all areas of life: culture, economy, and jurisprudence.
Of course, Giramondo has selected excerpts that praise, but the sources of that praise are impressive.
There are those who think that she should/may/will be Australia’s next Nobel Laureate for Literature.
Returning to the Stella, you can read more on the Stella website, including a link to Alexis Wright’s acceptance speech, and an expressive video performance of a brief scene from the novel by Boonwurrung actor Tasma Walton.
Just to remind you, this year’s Stella judges were writer, literary critic, Artistic Director of the Canberra Writers Festival and this year’s chair, BeeJay Silcox; Filipino-Australian poet, performer, arts producer, and advocate, Eleanor Jackson; First Nations award-winning poet and arts board member, Cheryl Leavy; novelist, occasional critic and full-time dad, Bram Presser; and writer and historian, Dr Yves Rees.
Wikipedia offers a well-presented complete list of the winners and all the short and longlisted books.
In 2021, I started my Monday Musings sub-series on forgotten Australian writers, with posts on Helen Simpson and Eliza Hamilton Dunlop. This year I added Marion Simons, who was my first post on the Australian Women Writers (AWW) blog this year. As I explained then, Elizabeth Lhuede and I have decided to focus this year on sharing public domain works published in 1924 – or written by writers who died in 1924. So today, I am introducing another writer I’ve posted on there, Kate Helen Weston.
As with Marion Simons, I am not including here the piece written by Simons that I published at AWW. It is an entertaining piece titled “The ubiquitous apostrophe”. If love discussions of grammar and punctuation, do check it out at AWW.
Kate Helen Weston
Kate Helen Weston (1863-1929) was born Kate Helen Carter in Ballarat, Victoria, to British parents who came to Australia for the gold rush, but she died in Adelaide. Indeed, one “L.B.” described her in The Australian Woman’s Mirror (of 24 February 1925) as “one of the best-known of Adelaide’s feminine inky-wayfarers”. She has an entry in AustLit, and in Debra Adelaide’s Australian women writers: a bibliographic guide, but not in the Australian dictionary of biography or Wikipedia.Adelaide’s News (10 December 1924) provided a brief biography of her in their “Pen Portraits of People” series, after she was elected president of the Liberal Women’s Educational Association.
These sources aren’t quite in tune with each other. AustLit says that she married John Samuel Weston “in Adelaide in 1885, and moved there in 1892”. Adelaide’s News says she married “Mr. J.T. Weston … and later came to Adelaide”. AustLit says that she was widowed in 1894, and “turned to writing to provide financially for herself and her children. She contributed to many Australian newspapers, and published fiction between 1911 and 1928”. They also say that “she was Lady Superintendent of the Elder Conservatorium in Adelaide between 1900 and 1914”. The News, on the other hand, says that “after her husband’s death she accepted the position of secretary to the Elder Conservatorium, which she held for 22 years”. So, some minor differences in detail here – in the name of her husband and in her Elder Conservatorium role. These would be good to clarify, but for now I’m noting them and moving on.
The News tells us that she “developed literary and artistic tastes” and had published three novels in London. In fact, she published four novels, one a few years after the News’s article. Her novels were The partners (1911), The man MacDonald (1913), The prelude (1914) and The vagabond soul (1928). The man MacDonald, says News, “had a wide vogue”. Melbourne’s Table Talk (26 July 1928), announcing the publication of The vagabond soul, said that “the story, which contains a dramatic situation of some originality, is entirely Australian in setting, and it is written with the same facile spontaneity which characterises Mrs Weston’s other novels”. But, her novels have not lasted.
Both AustLit and the News mention her other literary and journalistic work, but AustLit is more specific, telling us that she contributed to many Australian newspapers. They say she was “music and art critic for The Register, contributed to The Woman’s Record – a monthly publication – and, according to her obituary in The Advertiser, she was the ‘founder of community singing in Adelaide’.” She received a Commonwealth Literary Fund Fellowship in 1915, and was also actively involved in the National Council of Women.
Weston was clearly well-known in Adelaide’s literary circles. The News (9 September 1924) reports on an address she gave at the monthly meeting of the Liberal Women’s Educational Association. (Th Association aimed to educate women in political and social matters, but, said The Registeron 2 March 1926, it could also become active in social reform, “when necessary”.)
Anyhow, the focus of Weston’s talk was Australian Women Writers. The News starts with:
It was not until one began to reckon up the women writers of Australia, said Mrs. Weston, that it was realised how many there were and what a contribution they had made to the literature of Australia in poetry, prose, and journalistic work, though it was only of late years that woman had met man on equal ground in the field of journalism.
Turning then to poetry, she said that Australian men were credited with being better poets than Australian women, but she believed that the work of women poets was “possibly much more original in style as it bore the impress of no old world stylist, and invariably expressed the writer’s personal outlook on life”. Mary Gilmore, for example, “spoke always with a woman’s voice and wrote, not of things but of humanity and the home”. She named, and apparently read from many, contemporary Australian poets.
She then talked about fiction, arguing that it’s through fiction that the life of an age is chronicled. She named many novelists including those we still recognise today, like Mary Gaunt, Ada Cambridge, Mrs Campbell (Rosa) Praed, and Ethel Turner. She also mentioned – and I think this is an astute and significant recognition – the “many letter writers, whose small contributions fitted into the interstices of the wall of literature which was being built”.
She concluded by arguing that the Commonwealth Government needed to more actively encourage Australian literature. She pointed to the lack of Australian publishing houses and the small market. She said, writes the News, that “writers of fiction could not afford to remain in their own country, but were forced to go to the fogs of London or the bustle of America, where they lost their nationality and their English”. And she urged would-be writers “to read all styles, and copy none” – and to practise constantly.
The News and AustLit both describe her other, considerable, community involvements and achievements. These included having a tilt at politics. The News writes that she stood for a ward in municipal elections in 1923, and “polled the highest percentage of votes ever gained by a woman in the elections in this State”. Her death, after falling from a tram from which she never regained consciousness, seems tragic.
So far I have written on four women writers for this year’s AWW project. Two, Marion Simons and Alice Tomholt, never married, and two, Kate Helen Weston and Lillian Pyke, were widowed with young children. All, it seems, managed to eke some sort of living from writing.
Karen’s (Kaggsy’s Bookish Rambling) and Simon’s (Stuck in a Book) “Year Club” officially finished yesterday, but I focused so much in last week’s post on the issue of the state of Australian criticism, that I didn’t get to share some other ideas I found. So, I’ve decided to bookend the week with Monday Musings posts!
Trove
First, though, I’d like to explain a little about how I use Trove. For those who don’t know what Trove is, it is an online library database managed by the National Library of Australia. It is a fantastic resource for researchers because it contains an extensive – in depth and breadth – range of digital resources, including newspapers, journals and gazettes; official and personal archives and manuscripts; images; archived websites; and more. I mostly use the digitised newspaper collection, so I’m going to focus on it.
The process for putting non-born-digital newspapers online involves scanning the papers (from print or microfiche form) and then using OCR (optical character recognition) to produce readable text. On Trove, we see both the original and the OCR-ed texts. The quality or accuracy of the OCR text varies greatly, depending on the quality of the original from which the scanning was done. Trove’s solution to this has been to use crowdsourced (aka volunteer) text-correction.
Of course, as a librarian, I can’t use a service like this without doing my bit, so whenever I search Trove I end up doing corrections. This can be a tedious business when the original was poor, and can take a large amount of time. But, I don’t want to link in my blog an article that my readers will find hard to read, so, to do the time! The result is that I may not always research Trove as much as I would like in order to write my posts, but I hope that I research enough to make what I say valid or worthwhile!
I do sometimes cut corners. Where the item I am interested in is, say, part of a multi-subject column, I will, occasionally, only correct the section of interest to me. That’s a pragmatic decision I just need to make sometimes. (Just telling you in case you click on one of these links and wonder what I have been doing!!)
Back to 1937
On developing Australian literature
In my last post I focused on discussion about the importance of a good critical culture to the development of an Australian literature, but other thoughts about the state of Australian literature were also shared during the year. For example, in February, commenting on a gathering – attended by “many prominent men” – to commemorate Henry Lawson, the Williamstown Advertiser observed that Lawson’s “Australianism” is a heritage to be treasured, and that Australians need to
encourage home writers whose individuality cuts through the meshes of old-world hyperorthodoxy in literature, which conveys an assumption that the “blawsted colonials” are mere vulgarians.
Two months later on 10 April, Melbourne’s The Heraldran an article discussing the development of Australian literature, comparing it with the the challenges faced by American literature. It looked at the two nations, and commented on the problems faced by Australian writers. It suggested that America had now developed its own style. From the realism of Dreiser and Anderson, “the American literary spirit has taken lucid shape in the works of Ernest Hemingway and John Dos Passos”. It says that this new spirit represents “a revolt against nineteenth century English romanticism” and that the new style encompasses “typical Americanisms, the characteristic speech, the special vocabulary, the distinctive syntax and, above all, the natural mode of expression”.
Is Australia ready for “the emergence of a style in which an Australian outlook is implicit, and which would incorporate the characteristic speech, syntax and vocabulary of Australia?” Creating this, it argues, “is a labor of love; there is no material reward in it, at present”. Unfortunately, Australia, it says, has not recognised its similarity to America, and “is still awed by the heaped-up riches of the English literary tradition”. This does not, it concludes, prevent our making an “intelligent assessment of the lines upon which distinctively Australian writing should, develop”.
A week later, 17 April, there was a lengthy riposte in The Herald. You can read it at the link provided, because it covers several issues, but it starts by arguing that the most important issue is
that people read books not because they are written by Englishmen, or Americans, or Australians, but because they are entertaining.
So there, you writers! Write what the readers want! “Patriotism,” it says, “does not enter into the plain man’s choice of books”. It accepts that there’s a critical minority of readers who are interested in the technical experiments needed to improve literary standards, but
A critical minority … does not make a best-seller. For that the writer must look to the reading public as a whole, to the suburban libraries, to the man who has never heard of James Joyce or Aldous Huxley— except when one of his books is banned.
The article then argues that Australian artists have developed an Australian style, and suggests how Australian writers might proceed. It concludes that “it would be absurd to believe that the public is hostile or the Australian scene barren” (which I don’t believe the previous article argued.)
Education
Education is critical to encouraging interest in local literatures. At least, it is, I’d argue, for those whose culture has been – or risks being – swamped by larger cultures. The issue of education popped up a few times in 1937.
A pointed reference came from Brisbane’s The Catholic Advocate of 14 October. Written, I believe, by “Pasquin”, it opens with:
Is there a Chair of Australian Literature in any one of our six Universities?
It notes that “the University of Queensland tacks on to the course of English literature half-a-dozen lectures or so on Australian letters”, but then says
Surely it is a disgrace to Australia that in none of our seats of learning is our literature considered worth anything more than a digression or an aside.
It then goes on to ask how many Professors of English Literature are Australian? Go Pasquin, eh? “It is no wonder we have an inferiority complex”. Pasquin then pushes on:
How many are English ex-patriates like Professor Cowling of Melbourne, who in a recent article in the Sydney Morning Herald declared that he was at a loss to name a single Australian novel suitable for the classroom.
Hmm … Many journalists in 1937 could name “good” Australian writers, like, Henry Handel Richardson and Katharine Susannah Prichard! Pasquin concludes by saying that “Even J. T. Lang has been moved to describe the Senate of the Sydney University as “the most un-Australian body in Australia.”
Meanwhile, grass roots action was occurring. The Sydney Morning Herald reported (14 October) that the Workers’ Educational Association (WEA) had organised “a tutorial class in Australian Literature” for the summer. It was to be run by Fisher University librarian and critic H. M. Green, and Hartley Grattan, an American literary critic, with expertise in Australian literature.
On 9 November, Sydney’s The Workers Weekly reported that a Central Cultural Council had been established as the result of a conference convened by Sydney’s Writers’ Association. Indeed, it appears this conference had not only inspired the abovementioned WEA course but the Teachers’ Federation deciding to give more attention to the teaching of Australian literature in schools!
Keeping to the subject of schools, my last 1937 article comes from Queensland’s The Northern Miner on 18 December. It reported on a speaker at a Sydney luncheon. Dr. G. Mackaness, described by the ADB as “educationist, author and bibliophile”, made an “appeal for a better appreciation of Australian literature”. He saw the education system as one of the problems, and said “it was appalling that over a period of five years only one Australian writer was included in the books which had been chosen for Leaving or Intermediate Certificate examinations”. This report concluded that:
The fault of lack of appreciation of Australian literature was equally divided among those who had the selection of certain literature for studies, the non-progressiveness of Australian publishers to help the Australian writer, and the uneducated mind of the average Australian to the culture obtainable from Australian authorship.
We have come a long way since then, but there’s always more to do…
Once again it’s Karen’s (Kaggsy’s Bookish Rambling) and Simon’s (Stuck in a Book) “Year Club” week. This time the year is 1937, and it runs from today, 15th to 21st April. As I’ve been doing for a while now, I am devoting my Monday Musings to the week.
If the 1960s, from which our last “year” came, were exciting for many of us, the late 1930s were very different, particularly for those living in Europe. Of the 1930s, in general, Wikipedia writes that “the decade was defined by a global economic and political crisis that culminated in the Second World War”. For my purposes here, that just about says it all. It certainly provides a flavour for what concerned the major writers of the period. Realist fiction was still in force, and in Australia writers like Marjorie Barnard, Flora Eldershaw, Frank Dalby Davison, Eleanor Dark, and Katharine Susannah Prichard were expressing their ideas about social and economic injustice, for example. Many were pacifists, and many supported or worked for the trade union movement. It was, generally, an unsettled time, here and abroad. (By way of contrast, the best-selling book in the USA in 1937 was, apparently, Gone with the wind! But this was also the time of John Steinbeck, et al!)
I found books published across all forms, but as my focus here is Australian fiction, I’m just sharing a selection of novels published in 1937:
There were very few literary awards at the time, but the ALS Gold Medal went to Seaforth Mackenzie’s The young desire it. He is now among the least known of the authors listed above.
Writers born this year include novelist Colleen McCullough (died 2015) and political scientist and writer Don Aitkin (died 2022). I didn’t find many deaths, but novelist Catherine Martin (born, 1848) died this year.
Finally, also in 1937, the Commonwealth Literature Censorship Board replaced the Book Censorship Advisory Committee. It temporarily lifted the ban on James Joyce’s Ulysses – only to re-apply it again in 1941 after pressure from church groups.
The state of the art
As always, I checked Trove to see what newspapers were saying about Australian literature, fiction in particular. In addition to references to specific books and events, what I found overall was concern about the state of Australian literature, along with discussions about causes and remedies. This is similar to 1936, which I wrote about in my Monday Musings for the 1936 Club, so I’ll try to supplement – rather than repeat – what found then.
One issue discussed several times through the year concerned the importance of a good critical culture, so that’s my focus for this post. The Telegraph (14 April) took up this issue, arguing that the “leading articles” papers publish at the end of the week, versus the reviews published during the week, make a “considered contribution” to “strengthening … literary values among the numerous readers who look to the daily Press for guidance among a vast and ever-changing array of books”. The article comments on the importance not of comparing (“grading”) writers, but of offering
a consideration of their absolute quality as writers. The practice of relative appraisal too often leads to confusion where the authors considered are admittedly worthy of critical study, but derive their literary strength from different sources. The wise newspaper critic of fiction — it is with fiction that for the moment we are primarily concerned — is he who endeavours to establish the qualities which explain his attraction to, or repulsion from, a writer and then evaluates those qualities by the degree and consistency of his own sensibility.
That’s a nice, clear description of criticism – to establish one’s criteria and then evaluate them.
The Telegraph makes the point that Australia is capable of producing good literature. It believes that while achievement is uneven across the different forms, there is “no cause for pessimism about the future of Australian literature”. Indeed, the article says that:
A country that has produced, among living novelists*, Henry Handel Richardson, Vance Palmer, Katherine Susannah Prichard, Miles Franklin, Helen Simpson, the Barnard-Eldershaw combination, and Brian Penton is not deficient in generative power …
And adds that more writers could be added to this list.
Meanwhile, “Norbar” (Dr Norman Bartlett) in The West Australian(7 August) also discussed critical culture, observing that
One of the great disadvantages under which those in Australia who are genuinely interested in national literature suffer is the lack of guidance. Other national literatures have reliable historical and critical signposts.
His point was that in Great Britain, for example, “reputable literary periodicals, with critical traditions”, help readers make choices. Critics, he admits, “are often wrong, and commercialism has tainted the trade of criticism, but there is a tradition of judgment”. No-one, he says, who is interested in Virginia Woolf would buy books by romance novelist Ethel M. Dell. He then discusses the work of two critics, the American expert on Australia, C. Hartley Grattan, and the Australian, H.M. Green. Speaking of Grattan, Norbar makes an important point about the role of critics:
To accept him as a guide is not to accept his judgments, but he serves the purpose that competent introductions to English literature serve, by erecting signposts in the wilderness of letters.
In other words, it’s not the “absolute” lists of names that are important but the guide they provide to the literary landscape – and, thus, presumably, encouragement for debate.
The final two articles I’ll refer to come from The Age. The first (18 September) is ascribed to R.G. (presumably, the academic and founding editor of Southerly, Robert Guy Howarth), and the second (2 October) is a response from poet and critic, Furnley Maurice (Frank Wilmot), who takes offence at R.G.’s analysis of the state of Australian literature.
R.G. commences by arguing that:
Contrary to the opinions of some critics, Australian literature is not a dependent off-shoot of English literature, but is a vital entity in process of achieving expression of its individuality.
He has very clear opinions about the development of a truly Australian literature, much of which we would agree with now. He talks about its needing to pursue its own course, to be released “from the curb of nineteenth century influences, which have so long entrammelled imagination and held it in subservience to traditional forms and ideas”. While he names some writing that he believes is truly Australian, such as that of Henry Lawson, he believes things have stagnated:
Lack of canonical criticism is responsible to an unfortunate degree for this stagnation, because contemporary Australian criticism stands equivocally in the midst of several schools of thought. A false standard of values has been created by the persistent determination of many commentators to include everything written since Wentworth’s “Australasia” in the category of literature.
Unfortunately, as well as taking criticism to task, he also finds failings in Australian writers! Some have attempted to capture Australian experience, he says, but have failed, and he gives his reasons. These Maurice does not like, so he fights back:
One fact to bear in mind is that the shortcomings of our criticism are as great as the shortcomings of the writing, if not greater. The chief fault of the criticism is one that “R.G.” appears to share — that of making sweeping general statements and giving no particulars. Surely our writers have not all “failed because they lacked technical equipment,” because they “chose banal themes,” or because they “did not possess the basic culture necessary!” Such statements would suggest that “R.G.” has the bad national habit of forming definite opinions before he assembles the facts.
Take that, R.G! He then goes on to identify what he sees as quality Australian literature, and includes* Price Warung, Vance Palmer, Brent of Bin Bin (Miles Franklin), Martin Mills (Martin Boyd), M Barnard Eldershaw, Eleanor Dark and Capel Boake. He challenges R.G. to provide evidence for his statements, and then discusses “the facts” as he sees them, identifying the “difficulties” and “practical conditions” under which Australian writers “must work”.
He is pleased though that ‘”R.G.” supports a proper national principle in writing even if he has not much to say for the work done to date’.
While I think Maurice over-reacted somewhat, as R.G. makes some good sense, both writers have something useful to add to the debate, and if you are interested, the articles make good reading. Meanwhile, I will close here – but may very well write a second post next Monday.
In a long past Monday Musings I mentioned the names of several people who had commented on the state of Australian literature. Many of these were pseudonyms, including the intriguingly named “6×8”. I decided to dig further, and back in 2015, I pretty quickly discovered that his “real” name was Dick Holt. (It’s not always easy to track down pseudonyms used in the newspapers.)
First published, The Bulletin, 29 October 1898, from Middlemiss
I didn’t find a lot about him back then – besides his own writings – but from what I could gather, I ascertained that Dick Holt had travelled the outback doing charcoal drawings and writing articles for the Bulletin and other journals and newspapers of the time. I presume his “6×8″ pseudonym refers to the old (non-metric) picture size of 6″ x 8”, and the fact that he included drawings in his articles. Presumably there’s a metaphorical layer to this pseudonym, too, in that his stories provided little windows on his world.
In the 1890s, according to a 1934-written reminiscence by “Stockwhip”, Holt travelled with Henry Lawson. “Stockwhip” describes him as ‘the jocular writer and “charcoal” artist, Dick Holt” and says he was “a well-known writer to the Sydney Bulletin and Western Herald of Bourke”. He had his own newspaper column “On the Wallaby”. This title references the phrase “on the wallaby track”, which is Australian slang for travelling from place to place looking for work, which is exactly what he and Lawson were doing in Stockwhip’s anecdote. His columns, at least those I’ve seen, ran anywhere from 1500 to 3000 words, and tended to comprise a collection of anecdotes.
I haven’t found a biography for him – he doesn’t appear in the Australian Dictionary of Biography, for example – but returning to my old draft post this week in order to actually post it, I found that AustLit has documented him a little more. They give him as Richard Holt (a.k.a. Dick Holt, and also writing as 6 x 8), and say that he “wrote a weekly column called ‘On the Wallaby’ in the North Queensland Register from January 1899 to August 1920″. So, over twenty years. AustLit says he was born in 1868, and died ca. 1923 in Tasmania (though a reference to him in February 1923 said he was now “living near Melbourne”.) Anyhow, this roughly accords with my research, which had uncovered that he had died by the mid 1920s. The reference came from columnist, Bill Bowyang (pseudonym of Alexander Vindex Vennard, 1884-1947), who wrote the following little anecdote about him in 1926 in his column, “On the track”:
It was the late Dick Holt (‘6×8’) of ‘On the Wallaby’ fame in the ‘N.Q. Register’ who once stated that when he visited a bush township he always gazed into the jail yard to see if there was a load of wood within. If the wood was there it was a certainty that the police would be searching for some inebriated individual to use the axe or crosscut. The sight of that wood was sufficient for Dick Holt, and without wasting any time he always passed on to another town where there was no lone wood piled up in the jail yard.
Holt was, it seems, a character – but one of his time. I’ve only read a tiny proportion of his voluminous output, much of which is in a jocular vein. (Indeed, a 1923 article, identifying Bill Bowyang as his successor, describes them as writing “racy bush yarns”.)
In the post that inspired this one, I shared that “6×8” had criticised Australian literature as being characterised by too much exaggeration of characters and incidents, to which another had replied that the problem was not this sort of exaggeration but a “diseased hankering after the abnormal”. Anyhow, “6×8” clearly didn’t think he was exaggerating character and incident – and perhaps not. But he did like to put a humorous spin on his wanderings about the bush, commenting on anything from a terrible Australian stamp design to what you can read from the newspaper in which the butcher has wrapped your meat. He also saw the poverty that often attended life in the “backblox” noting that country people didn’t like to pay newspaper subscriptions (which affected him), school masters, and parsons. He frequently makes comments like “do these people expect parsons [or whomever] to live without food and clothes?”
However, there’s a problematic side too. Given he’s an outback “wallabist”, he comes across many characters, including non-white Australians. He identifies First Nations Australians with terms like “black fellows” or “dusky brethren” or “dark son of the forest” or, even, “n****r”, and the Chinese are “chows”. In one instance, when listing people of Asian and Islander origins, he adds “and other colored abominations”. I looked for anything that suggested an awareness of the racism implicit in these terms, but I didn’t see it. This makes distressing reading, but for contemporary readers it’s instructive about the attitudes of the day to those they saw as other. Also, by mentioning these “others”, he also tells us about the people who populated Australia and something about their relationships with each other, which I’d argue is better than rendering them invisible.
You can see, perhaps, why I’ve taken a while to write this post, but in the end I thought there was value. Hope you agree …
It was through the Jane Austen Society of Australia’s (JASA) newsletter, Practicalities, that I learned of the death of Yasmine Gooneratne, a woman with whom I have crossed paths – one way or another – three times. She was an academic at Macquarie University, where I did my undergraduate degree; she wrote a novel, A change of skies (1991), which my reading group discussed back in 1996; and, she was the patron of JASA (and you know how I love Jane).
You can find quite a lot about Yasmine Gooneratne on the Internet, if you are interested, so I’m just going to focus on a few points that struck me, and I hope will interest you.
“No nonsense”
A site called The Modern Novel provides a useful potted biography, so I will start with that. It says that she was born in Sri Lanka (then Ceylon) in 1935 as Yasmine Bandaranaike, which means she was “a member of the well-to-do Ceylonese family which included Sirimavo Bandaranaike, the first woman prime minister in the world”. She studied at the University of Ceylon and Cambridge University, and in 1962, she married the doctor and environmentalist Dr Brendan Gooneratne (who died in 2021). They emigrated to Australia in 1972, where she lived for 35 years, according to Wikipedia, before returning to Sri Lanka. It was here, in her home country, that she died on 18 February this year.
AustLit provides more detail, which includes that she was founding Director of Macquarie University’s Post-Colonial Literatures and Language Research Centre from 1989-1993, and that she was awarded an AO (Order of Australia) in 1990 “for her distinguished contribution to Sri Lankan and Australian literature”. She won (or was listed for) a number of awards in Australia and elsewhere.
Gooneratne wrote over twenty books, including novels, some poetry and short story collections, as well as many works of non-fiction, but she seems little known outside academic circles (and JASA). Indeed, my initial – and general – search for this post brought up many references to her but no news items on her death. I had to search a little more specifically for that. This was interesting given that, on the several internet sites I found, she is described as widely known. DBpedia* calls her a “Sri Lankan poet, short story writer, university professor and essayist” and says that “she is recognised in Sri Lanka, Australia and throughout Europe and the U.S.A., due to her substantial creative and critical publications in the field of English and post-colonial literature”.
When I did find something about her death, I was delighted to find an obituary written by her daughter Dervika Brendon. Initially posted in the Sunday Times on 18 February 2024, it has been shared on many other sites including the blog I am quoting from. It provides a loving and personal tribute to her mother, but one which I suspect also rings true to the person Gooneratne was. Dervika Brendon tells us that:
Yasmine Gooneratne as a private individual left clear instructions about what she wished regarding her funeral. Her directives show a great deal about her character and her values. ‘No public notices. No public viewing. No public funeral. No memorial lectures. No fuss. No feathers. No posturing. No performativeness. No photographers. No selfies. No celebrities. No nonsense.’
I have mentioned Gooneratne a few times on this blog, including in a brief Monday Musings post I wrote in 2013 on Migrant literature. It had been a long time since I’d read A change of skies (and it’s even longer now), but I wrote that the novel was about “educated middle class migrants – like herself I presume – who work to find a balance between fitting into the new culture while at the same time preserving their Sri Lankan identity”. If you want a better flavour of this work, check out this post written in 2012 by someone called Elen on a blog called the southasiabookblog. Elen says that Gooneratne’s “portrayal of the immigrant experience is as funny and poignantly ironic as Jhumpa Lahiri’s work on a similar topic is earnest”. I wish I could remember it that well, but I read it when I was immersed in parenting and my memory is general. This description of Gooneratne’s tone, however, sounds like the writing of an Austen-lover!
I will end with another paragraph written by her daughter because, not only does it tell us a lot about Gooneratne but, if you are an Austen fan, you will love the final line:
She had great contempt for hypocrisy and cruelty. She had a great sense of humour and a lively sense of fun. As she was a person of moral integrity, the repulsive conduct of people who prey upon the vulnerable saddened her, especially as she grew older. While always choosing to believe the best in people, she found herself unable to accept the lies that are spun by opportunists and predators on a daily basis. Her good opinion, once lost, was lost forever.
* DBpedia describes itself as “a crowd-sourced community effort to extract structured content from the information created in various Wikimedia projects”
Today’s post is not especially Australian, but it was published in Australian newspapers as a recommended list of “masterpieces” or classics for Australians to read. It is in that sense that I am posting it in my Monday Musings series!
The list was published in 1910, with the heading “Best novels: A short list of masterpieces of fiction”. It explains that “an American paper offers the following as an excellent though, of course, limited list of the best books for one to read”. The interesting thing is that the books are categorised. See what you think.
It was replicated in many newspapers but the one I used for this post, because it needed little editing (as I recollect), is from Victoria’s Elmore Standard of 12 February (accessed 10 July 2023).
The list
I have value added with the author’s name, as this – curiously – was not included. Sure, most people probably knew the authors of these classics, but that’s not the point. The authors deserve recognition! I’ve also added first publication date, for interest.
The best historical novel: Ivanhoe (Sir Walter Scott, 1820)
The best dramatic novel: The Count of Monte Cristo (Alexandre Dumas, 1844-46 serialised)
The best domestic novel: The Vicar of Wakefield (Oliver Goldsmith, 1766)
The best marine novel: Mr. Midshipman Easy (Frederick Marryat, 1836)
The best country-life novel: Adam Bede (George Eliot, 1859)
The best military novel: Charles O’Malley (Charles James Lever, 1841)
The best religious novel: Ben Hur (Lew Wallace, 1880)
The best political novel: Lothair (Benjamin Disraeli, 1870)
The best novel written for a purpose: Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Harriet Beecher Stowe, 1852)
The best imaginative novel: She (H. Rider Haggard, 1887)
The best pathetic novel: The Old Curiosity Shop (Charles Dickens, 1840-41 serialised)
The best humorous novel: The Pickwick Papers (Charles Dickens, 1836-37 serialised)
The best Irish novel: Handy Andy (Samuel Lover, 1841)
The best Scotch novel: The Heart of Midlothian (Sir Walter Scott, 1818)
The best English novel: Vanity Fair (William Makepeace Thackeray, 1848)
The best American novel: The Scarlet Letter (Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1850)
The best sensational novel: The Woman in White (Wilkie Collins, 1859)
The best of all: Vanity Fair (William Makepeace Thackeray, 1848)
Don’t you just love these categories?
I’ve read some of these authors, but only a few of these particular books. Some I had to check who the authors were, like the author of Handy Andy. It is a male dominated list, though we do have George Eliot and Harriet Beecher Stowe, but what about Jane Austen! Ok, I’ll leave it there because my point is not to reconsider the list but share it as one reflection of the times, and what some American paper, apparently thought (though we don’t really know the provenance of the list).
All thoughts on any aspects of this list are welcome.
Eight years ago, I wrote a post about a new festival called Blak and Bright, which was described at the time as “the debut event of the Victorian Indigenous Literary Festival”. I am thrilled to find that eight years later, this festival is still going strong. So often festivals, and literary initiatives in general, appear on the scene, but soon falter. Not this one. Now formally named the Blak and Bright First Nations Literary Festival, it is held annually in Naarm (Melbourne). This year’s dates are March 14 to 17, making it a four-day event.
Their “mission statement”, to use my terminology, is simple and to the point:
We believe that Blak stories are for everyone.
The Festival, they say, is unique, “with over sixty First Nations artists front and centre”. It celebrates “the diverse expressions of First Nations writers and covers all genres from oral stories to epic novels and plays to poetry”. In 2024, they are offering new events, alongside favourite events from past Festivals. Most sessions are free and some will be live-streamed, so you can register to receive the link. This is why I am posting on it now – there is still time to register!
The theme for 2024 is Blak Futures Now, with the tagline reading “Stories, epics, poems, monologues, history, activism. Embrace the diversity of expression, paving the way for Blak futures now.” This year’s keynote address, State of the Nations, will be delivered on opening night by Goa-Gunggari-Wakka Wakka Murri woman from Queensland, Leah Purcell (whose versions of The drover’s wife I posted on in 2022). This session does have an admission fee, as do a few, mostly performance-oriented, sessions.
To whet your appetite, here are some of the sessions (all of them free, but bookings are essential):
Yung, Blak and Bold: a festival regular, this year’s session is promoted as “get a glimpse into the minds of young writers who are shaping the future of Blak literature. With John Morrissey, Stone Motherless Cold, Susie Anderson and moderated by Neika Lehman”.
Blak Book Club:another regular, with this year’s club discussing Melissa Lucashenko’s Edenglassie and Jane Harrison’s The visitors, moderated by Daniel Browning.
YA Awesome: this session is just what its name implies, that is, it’s about writing “compelling narratives that young adult readers love to read”. It will feature some writers I don’t know, which is probably not surprising given my reading interests – Gary Lonesborough, Graham Akhurst, and Melanie Saward.
Sistas Are Doin’ It: another regular, with this year’s women being Deborah Cheetham Fraillon, Helen Milroy, and Debra Dank (see my review of her bookWe come with this place). They will talk about how they write “while juggling the many roles Aboriginal women fulfil in their communities”,
These next sessions are also free but I want to list them separately because their topics cross over all the others! They are:
Language Lives: the program describes it as follows, “What role do First Nations languages play in Australia’s creative outputs? You might be surprised. With Kim Scott, Kirli Saunders, and moderated by Philip Morrissey”. (I have written about a lecture Kim Scott gave on recovering languages.)
Blak Imprints: I don’t know which imprints the participants will be discussing, but we all know how critical supportive publishers are for getting diverse/minority writers out there. In this session, Rachel Bin Salleh, Tisha Carter, and Yasmin Smith will “discuss the importance of First Nations imprints in publishing. What else is needed in the publishing ecology?”
Who Can Critique Blak Work: I’d especially love to be at this one. We talk a lot about “own” story-writing, but I have raised a few times here the issue of critiquing the work of cultures very different from my own. How can I do it, or, in fact should I do it? What would it mean if I didn’t? The session is described as follows, “Should only Blak critics critique Blak work? What does the Blak lens bring to the process? With Bryan Andy, Daniel Browning, Declan Fry, Tristen Harwood and moderated by Davey Thompson”.
These are just a few of many sessions being offered. There are sessions on poetry and songwriting, there are readings, and more. Check out the program at this link if you are interested. You can see the names of all the artists, and the sessions they are appearing in, at this link.
Most readers here know the origins of the the Stella Prize. I have written about it many times before, but it was in my post on the inaugural longlist in 2013 that I described its origins and goals in a little detail. I wrote then that:
The award was created by a group of 11 women, including the writer Sophie Cunningham, in response to what many of us felt was an abysmal under-representation of women writers in Australia’s major literary awards and other literary activity (such as reviewing and being reviewed). The Stella Prize people want to turn this around …
And I then listed their goals as they expressed them at the time. These goals have remained roughly the same but are expressed on their website now in more depth and with clarity about how they are working to achieve them. They make it very clear that they are about more than the prize. Stella, they say,
delivers a suite of year-round initiatives which actively champion Australian women writers, tackle gender bias in the literary sector, and connect outstanding books with readers. (Accessed 26 February 2024)
As most Australian readers of my blog will know, many of the original drivers have been achieved, quantitatively speaking at least. There is better representation of women writers in our literary awards, and in the reviewing sector, as the Stella Counts of 2019 and 2020 showed.
Most of my posts, however, have been about the annual prize. I have rarely mentioned the other initiatives Stella has implemented, but they are important because Stella knows – we know – that achievement in the social justice arena can never be taken for granted. Their initiatives are many and you can read about them on the Initiative pages on their site. They range in size and reach, but include events, residencies, and a lot of work in education to encourage more reading of books by Australian women writers in schools because, really, that’s where reading habits very often start.
Stella Book of the Month
One of their more recent initiatives was announced in December last year, “the book of the month”. As far as I can tell – as there’s not much that I can find specifically about the initiative – the aim is to shine a light each month on a book which has been listed for, or won, the Stella Prize. We all know how easily books – no matter how good they are – disappear from the shelves and then from public consciousness. With this initiative, Stella is staying true to its aim of keeping Australian women’s writing to the fore, which means not just the latest writing, but the body of writing by women. Of course, the Stella prize is just over 10 years old, so a blip on the radar of Australian women’s writing, but 11 years worth of lists is not inconsequential either, and has a chance of still being available. They list the books on their own site, and on their Facebook page.
It’s a new initiative, so there just three books have been chosen to date:
January 2024: Georgia Blain’s Between a wolf and a dog: Stella introduces this choice by saying it “celebrates … a heartfelt and intelligent book shortlisted for the 2017 Stella Prize, and the life of its author, the late Georgia Blain”. They say that this, Blain’s last novel before she died, has been republished with an introduction by Charlotte Wood. This is what we like to hear, eh?
February 2024: Maxine Beneba Clarke’s The hate race (my review): The reason for choosing this memoir seems to be its having been “adapted to the stage”. It was shortlisted for the 2017 award along with Blain’s novel. Clarke was the first author to be shortlisted for the Stella Prize twice, after her short story collection, Foreign Soil, was listed in 2015
Each “book of the month” page (linked on the titles above) contains useful content about the books, such as interviews, and links to reviews and reading notes. This may not be the most exciting of their initiatives, like, say, their Stella Day Out program, but not all initiatives have to be exciting. They just have to play their part in achieving their overall vision. I have chosen it for my post tonight because we are readers, and we all love a list!
I wonder what will be next – and why? In the meantime, all being well, I will be posting on this year’s longlist next Monday, in lieu of Monday Musings.
What do you think about initiatives like this, and, is there a Stella winning or listed book you’d like to see as a “book of the month” selection?
As I research for my 1924 Monday Musings series, I am coming across articles that don’t neatly fit into 1924-dedicated posts but that I want to document. The most recent one concerned the Lothian Book Publishing Company. It was about a specific initiative, which I will discuss at the end of this post, but I was intrigued to find out more about the publisher itself.
AustLit tells us that, while now an imprint of Hachette Australia, Lothian has a long history, starting well over a century ago, in 1888 in fact, when it was founded by John Inglis Lothian. Then it was a Melbourne-based book distribution company, but it started publishing in December 1905 under John’s son, Thomas Carlyle Lothian. During its first three years, it produced 40 books and four periodicals. AustLit then jumps to the interwar years (the 1920s and 30s) and says that it “was particularly notable” for publishing Australian poets, such as Bernard O’Dowd and John Shaw Neilson. Lothian also represented Penguin Books in Australia until the end of the Second World War. Cecily Close, in her article on Thomas Carlyle in the ADB, provides more information, and adds other authors to their list, like Miles Franklin and Ida Outhwaite.
The company was active, and by 1945, it had offices around Australia and in Auckland, and had literary agents in London and New York. It remained a family-run affair, with Thomas Carlyle Lothian being followed by his son Louis Lothian, and then Louis’ son Peter Lothian.
Austlit says that the company moved into children’s publishing in 1982, which has remained a big part of its activity since. Then the take-overs started. In December 2005, the Time Warner Book Group acquired Lothian and formed the Time Warner Book Group (Australia), with Lothian Books becoming an imprint of Time Warner. Very soon after, in February 2006, Hachette Livre acquired the global Time Warner business, with Lothian Books now becaming an imprint of Hachette Livre Australia. Lothian Books’ CEO Peter Lothian retired in July 2006.
The focus on children’s books has continued with Hachette Australia expanding its children’s publishing, and branding its children’s books with the Lothian imprint. AustLit says that as part of the new arrangement, some adult publishing would continue, as a ’boutique’ list of Australiana titles, both already published and to be commissioned, but I’m not sure that this eventuated, or, if it did, that it lasted. Hachette Australia’s website does not clearly differentiate its imprints.
Lothian stories
It was a story about Lothian that inspired this post, but while researching it, I found another intriguing story, so I’m closing with two little anecdotes about Lothian.
Lothian and Henry Lawson
The State Library of Victoria’s La Trobe Journal carries an article by John Arnold about the relationship between Lothian founder, Thomas, and Henry Lawson. You can read the article yourself as the story is not a short one but, essentially, it started in 1907 when, on a business trip to Sydney, Thomas Lothian signed a contract with Henry Lawson to publish two collections of his writing, one of prose and one poetry. The contract was signed in James Tyrrell’s bookshop in Castlereagh Street, Sydney.
I won’t go into the details but it was a standard Lothian printed contract. The author would receive a 10% royalty for each title. Lawson was to deliver the completed manuscript of both titles to the publisher, two weeks after the signing of the contract, and Lothian was to publish the two books no later than three months from receipt of manuscript. The contract “declared that the author was the proprietor of the copyright of the material proposed to be published and it gave the publisher the world serial, translation and dramatic rights to the material in question”.
This is not what happened, and Arnold writes that “this commercial agreement … was in a short time revised, revised again, then broken, leading to false promises, abuse of copyright, and a falling out between author and publisher. The proposed books were not to appear for six and a half years”.
It was a tortuous process, due largely to Lawson’s “erratic behaviour” but also affected by Lothian’s busy and ambitious workload. Arnold concludes his article with:
Despite his unrewarding and frustrating dealings with Henry Lawson, Lothian was still willing to chip in when the Lawson hat was sent round after the author’s death. In 1928 he became a Life Member of the Footscray-based Henry Lawson Memorial Society, and in 1931, as one of Lawson’s publishers, wrote a one-page testimonial to be read at the society’s annual meeting.
The handsome certificate with which Lothian was presented by the Henry Lawson Society in 1938 stated that Life Membership was awarded for ‘Unselfish and Generous Services rendered to this Society and Australian Literature generally’ …
Lothian and Nettie Palmer
Finally we get to the article that inspired this post, the announcement in The Argus of 8 May 1924 that Nettie Palmer had won a “prize of £25 offered by the Lothian Book Publishing Company for the best critical essay dealing with Australian literature since 1900”. Her essay was titled “Australian literature in the Twentieth Century” and was to be published in June. On 18 July, The Albury Banner and Wodonga Express, reports on this work, now titled Modern Australian literature, describing it as ‘an interesting “measuring up” of Australian literary work from 1900 to 1923’. Vivian Smith, editor of UQP’s Nettie Palmer anthology, which includes this work, says the piece “is significant for what it reveals of the expectations and hopes of the time”, and also that
Nettie, like Vance, was concerned for the relationship between a national literature and the national experience behind it, but both explored this relationship in a tentative and programmatic way and had no readymade formula to account for it.
My initial idea was to write a post about this Lothian Prize, but I’m not sure it continued. However, I’ve written posts about publishers before, and Lothian seemed perfect for another.
Whispering Gums 