Monday musings

Monday musings on Australian literature: Vietnam War fiction

/ Whispering Gums / 22 Comments

Having just posted on Biff Ward’s The third chopstick, and with the 50th anniversary of Gough Whitlam’s election (which set in train our final withdrawal from the war) being imminent, I felt now seemed an appropriate time to devote a Monday MusingsAustralian fiction about the war.

Ward’s book is nonfiction, but here I want to focus on fiction because of the special role the creative or imaginative arts play in reflecting who we are. Academic Geoffrey Davis makes the point that

there is an important distinction to be drawn between writing by former active combatants, which often appeared in the immediate post-war period and was largely inspired by personal experience of the war, and fiction by non-combatants, published considerably later. Each new generation must form an image of the wars that have shaped its times and must assess the way in which those wars have impacted on their own society.

Yes!

Viet Thanh Nguyen, The sympathizer

The most recent Vietnam (American) War novel I’ve read is Viet Thanh Nguyen’s Pulitzer Prize-winning The sympathiser (my review), which satirically confronts the mess of this war through the experience of Vietnamese refugees in the USA, but I have also read a handful of Australian novels about the war.

“All wars are fought twice, the first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory”
(Viet Thanh Nguyen, Nothing ever dies: Vietnam and the memory of war, cited by Davis)

A select list

Here is a select list of novels and short story collections, with a brief note on their focus or angle:

Charles Hall, Summer's gone, Margaret River Press
  • Alison Booth, A distant land: on war-reporting and corruption
  • Charles Hall’s Summer’s gone (2014) (my review): includes conscription and draft-dodging
  • Myfany Jones’ The rainy season (2009) (Lisa’s review): on war trauma and its effect on the family
  • Adib Khan’s Homecoming (2003): on a Vietnam vet’s postwar trauma
  • Nam Le’s The boat (2008): includes short stories about Vietnamese refugees
  • Gabrielle Lord’s The sharp end (1998): on traumatic psychological effects of the war on soldiers
  • Doug McEachern’s Stardust and Golden (2018) (Lisa’s review): on conscription
  • William Nagle’s The odd angry shot (1975): a war-time story based on the author’s experiences
  • Hoa Pham’s Lady of the realm (2017) (my review): set in Vietnam itself, pre, during and post war
  • Hoa Pham’s The other shore (2014) (Lisa’s review): on the impact in Vietnam itself
  • John Rowe’s Count your dead (1968): realities of war, and American policy, drawn from author’s time there
  • Jospephine Rowe’s A loving, faithful animal (2016) (my review): on PTSD and intergenerational trauma
  • Evie Wyld’s After the fire, a still small voice (2009) (Kim’s review): on war trauma in a Vietnam War conscript and his war-veteran father

I have called this a select list, which might imply that I’ve curated a special selection but in fact, I didn’t find many books beyond those I already knew, so this list includes most of those I found. Why are there so few?

This is a question author Alison Booth also raised in a post she wrote on “Australian Fiction and the Vietnam War”. She commences:

The Vietnam War is sometimes termed a forgotten war. Neglected by Australian literature until relatively recently, it seems it was the war that most of us wanted to forget. The last and most prolonged proxy battle of the Cold War, it saw Australians become increasingly divided. Should the country be at war at all, or had it been manipulated into involvement by its political leaders? Did people have the right to take to the streets and protest about the war? And just how far was the security intelligence organization prepared to go to silence the protesters? 

These issues offer endless possibilities for writers of fiction and yet they have been little used. 

When she looked for lists of fiction, what she found (as did I) was mostly written by American males. She finds this lack “puzzling” because so much of what happened then has relevance to now. For example, 50 years after that war, we are still confronting “those trade-offs between surveillance and security on the one hand, and personal liberty on the other”; we are still involved in unwinnable wars; and protests still generate conflict. She concludes by wondering whether it will take more time “before novelists find the Vietnam War period appealing” and “before publishers do as well”. Or, maybe it’s that “too many people remember that period with distaste” and we need to wait until the next generation is interested in historical fiction featuring the Vietnam War. I have no answers, but, like Booth, I do find it curious.

However, Davis observes that some of Australia’s non-Vietnam war literature might, in fact, be a response, to it. One critic, he writes, has suggested that the authors of some of our First World War novels, such as McDonald’s 1915 (1979) and Malouf’s Fly away Peter (1982), “may have chosen the divided, angry and anguished climate of that time as their setting as a means of dealing indirectly with Australia’s part in the Vietnam War, where similar social schisms greeted Australian involvement”. An interesting explanation, though these could also have been a reaction to the increasing interest in “celebrating” war? Further, Davis says that the same source has suggested that “the Vietnam War is the hidden subject” of some novels set in Southeast Asia, like Christopher Koch’s The year of living dangerously (1978) and Blanche d’Alpuget’s Turtle Beach (1981). Another interesting point.

Finally, Davis suggests early in his paper, and reiterates it at the end, that the anti-war novel has a long tradition in Australian literature, and that “this has been influential in shaping the attitudes of subsequent generations of Australians to their country’s history”.

What say you?

Sources

Monday musings on Australian literature: 1929 in fiction

/ Whispering Gums / 21 Comments

As many of you know by now, Karen (Kaggsy’s Bookish Rambling) and Simon (Stuck in a Book) run “reading weeks” in which they nominate a year from which “everyone reads, enjoys, posts and shares wonderful books and discoveries from the year in question”. The current year is 1929, and it runs from today, 24 October to 30 October. For the third time now, I have decided to devote a Monday Musings to the week (my previous two being 1936 and 1954).

1929 is a meaningful year for me, because that was the year my dear mum was born. It was, however, meaningful more universally too, given, as most of you will know, the Wall Street Crash came late in the year and ushered in the Great Depression. But, of course, this happened at end of 1929, so won’t be reflected in the books published that year.

My research located books published across all forms, but my focus is fiction, so here is a selection of 1929-published novels:

  • Arthur H. Adams, Lola of the chocolate and A man’s life
  • Martin Boyd, Dearest idol
  • Bernard Cronin, Toad
  • John Bead Dalley, Max Flambard
  • Jean Devanny, Riven
  • M. Barnard Eldershaw, A house is built (John Boland’s review)
  • Arthur Gask, The lonely house
  • Mary Gaunt, The lawless frontier
  • William Hay, Strabane of the Mulberry Hills: the story of a Tasmanian lake in 1841
  • Fred Howard, Return ticket
  • Jack McLaren, A diver went down
  • Frederic Manning, The middle parts of fortune: Somme and Ancre, 1916 (Lisa’s review)
  • Myra Morris, Enchantment
  • Katharine Susannah Prichard, Coonardoo (Posts by Lisa and me)
  • Effie Sandery, Sunset Hill
  • Henry Handel Richardson, Ultima Thule (Brona’s review)
  • Alice Grant Rosman, Visitors to Hugo
  • James Tucker (as Giacomo di Rosenberg), Ralph Rashleigh (Bill’s review)
  • Arthur W. Upfield, The Barrakee mystery
  • Arthur Wright, Gaming for gold
Book cover

By the late 1920s, there was quite a flowering in women’s writing, which continued through the 1930s. This is reflected in the above list, which includes Jean Devanny, Marjorie Barnard and Flora Eldershaw (writing collaboratively as M. Barnard Eldershaw), Mary Gaunt, Katharine Susannah Prichard and the already-established Henry Handel Richardson. Effie Sandery (Elizabeth Powell), Myra Morris and Alice Grant Rosman also appear in the list, but are new to me.

There were very few literary awards at the time, but two that were established in 1928, made awards in 1929: the ALS Gold Medal went to Henry Handel Richardson’s Ultima Thule and The Bulletin’s (unpublished) Novel Competition was won by Vance Palmer’s The passage.

Writers born this year included poet Peter Porter, and novelists Kenneth Cook, Catherine Gaskin, Ray Mathew, and Glen Tomasetti (though she was better known as a singer-songwriter and activist). Deaths included Barbara Baynton, who continues to be the subject of some of my most popular posts.

The state of the art

Of course, I checked Trove to see what newspapers of the time were saying about Australian literature, and fiction in particular.

One of the things that shone through the newspaper articles I read was great enthusiasm to support and promote Australian literature. The papers reported on the meetings of many organisations, including the Australian Literature Society (which originated the ALS Gold Medal), the Queensland Authors’ and Artists’ Association, the Henry Lawson Literary Society of Sydney, and The Royal Australian Historical Society. The papers noted the issues they raised, and what guest speakers discussed. These included:

  • holdings of Australian literature in school, university and public libraries. There was clearly concern about either lack of good holdings and/or lack of promotion of those holdings. Brisbane’s The Telegraph (8 February), for example, reported that the University of Queensland had approved the purchase of books by Australian authors for the University library from the proceeds of Authors’ Week. Further south, Tasmania’s Mercury (6 December) reported that the Australian Natives’ Association* had decided to write to the Launceston Public Library committee, asking them to set aside a section of their library for “works of all descriptions by Australian authors” and to so identify them.
  • support for Australian literature. A couple of papers reported that organisations had expressed appreciation for the support given to Australian literature by newspapers. Melbourne’s Argus (19 March) quoted a speaker at the Australian Literature Society saying that “the best newspapers of the Commonwealth were making a definite attempt to create a literary tradition, and the standard of professional writing was high, despite the fact that writers appeared to be paid in inverse ratio to their qualities” [my emph]. The Sydney Morning Herald (11 June) repeated similar praise from the Henry Lawson Literary Society which said that “opportunities for Australian writers had been greatly extended by the interest displayed by Australian newspapers and journals prominent among which were the Sydney Morning Herald and the Bulletin. On the other hand, Melbourne’s The Age (16 March) wrote of Australian Literature Society’s point that “more is required of the public than a passive loyalty”, while the above quoted Argus wrote of the public’s “indifference”.
  • lectures on Australian literature. Papers also reported on various lectures given on Australian literature. The Australian Worker (28 August) promoted a series of three to be given by author, editor and critic A.G. Stephens. It was organised by the University Extension Board “in response to numerous requests for lectures on literary subjects”. His topics were Australian Poetry, Australian Humor, and Australian Literature.

This is just a small taste of the sorts of discussions of Australian literature that occurred throughout the year. The final recurring issue I want to share concerned the quality of Australian literature – to date.

Book cover

Journalist Firmin McKinnon had strong views about Australian literature, and I have reported on him before. Then, 1934, he was still speaking about what he was arguing in 1929, which was how “behind” Australian literature was compared with the settler societies like Canada and South Africa. Brisbane’s The Telegraph (6 August) reported on a lecture he gave, in which he pronounced that:

Australian novelists have failed in the main because they have no definite attitude towards life that is worth writing about, because many of the characters are unreal, and because they have failed to interpret the great soul of the real Australia.

He did, however, praise two novels from my list above. One was John Dalley’s Max Flambard, which he described as

the best novel yet produced of Sydney and suburban life, failing only because he had given his novel a tinge of satire which detracts from a true interpretation, and depicts snobbery as the dominating feature of suburban life.

Oh dear, we can’t be satirical about Australia? But, he saves his best praise for the one he sees as “the greatest Australian novel”:

“A House is Built,” by Miss Eldershaw and Miss Barnard. … while it may be too long and too particularised for the average reader, it was a story of the reconstruction of the past, covering the history of Sydney for half a century.

Overall, though, he argues that Australian literature to date was lacking a “definite constructive outlook towards life”. McKinnon was firmly of the opinion, as The Queenslander (6 June) reported on an earlier address, that

some writers unfortunately wallowed in the realism of misery, forgetting that misery was not a dominant feature of Australian life, but light-hearted optimism and courage.

Australian writers “must”, he told the meeting, “tell a story true to Australian life”. I think I’ll leave you with that little thought!

Additional sources:

* Natives, here, meaning “white” Australian-born, not First Nations people, an appropriation issue that was commented on by later historians.

Meanwhile, do you plan to take part in the 1929 Club?

Monday musings on Australian literature: Bush Book Club (2)

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Last week, I introduced the Bush Book Club. Established in Sydney in 1909, its aim was to get books out to remote areas of New South Wales not supported by other services like Schools of Arts and Mechanics Institutes. In my post I focused on its establishment and aims, but I found it so interesting that I’m back again, this time to share something about their book selections and early achievements.

The books

Not having independent funds, besides what they fundraised, the Club (B.B.C.) planned to focus on donated secondhand books, but that didn’t mean they accepted anything. While they wanted to cater for males and females of all ages, their goals were worthy, which meant, as I quoted last week, there was a censoring committee to ensure that “vulgar, trashy, novels, and morbid, unwholesome works” would not be sent. Indeed, as the Mudgee Guardian and North-Western Representative (30 June 1910) reported, the Club’s aim was

To provide high-class literature to the dwellers in the bush districts of New South Wales, who live beyond the reach of any School of Arts. … The books for the club are provided by people who are interested in supplying really good literature. The club is non-political, and non-sectarian.

So, its early aims were good quality literature, that was non-political and non-sectarian. However, it seems that as it got underway, the materials sent were more varied than these goals imply, albeit, as the newspaper reports continued to confirm, books continued to be censored. This censorship doesn’t seem to have been questioned, though, suggesting that the censor’s pen was light or that the recipients were undemanding.

I read many reports about the club over its first decade, mostly comprising newspaper reports on the Club’s annual meeting. The story was the same – the good work being done, and increases every year in the number of “centres” being supported; the call for donations of money and books to support the work; and references to the dullness of life in “outback” and the need to support the people who were “breaking the sods of our new country and bearing the burden and heat of the day away from the pleasures and comforts of civilisation” (SMH 17 April 1912). These comments sound condescending at times, but many remote people were desperate for reading matter, all the same. No mention, of course, of First Nations people. It seems that the patron was always a “Lady” – like Lady Poore, Lady Chelmsford, Lady Strickland – most of them, vice-regal. The role was presumably passed on as each arrived with her husband, but there is a sense from the reporting that they took on the role with relish.

There were also some references to the actual books. Reporting on a Club meeting in December 1911, two years after the Club’s establishment, The Sydney Morning Herald, noted that there was a tendency for book donors to send

too many “serious” books. The lighter style of literature, tersely written, and of ordinarily human interest, was preferable.

A few months later, The Sydney Morning Herald’s (17 April 1912) report (linked above) commented that it’s alright “if they [the recipients] are not great readers, and if Marie Corelli and E. P. Roe are appreciated above Ruskin or Carlyle”.

On 18 April 1917, the same paper reported that

the demand among bush readers was chiefly for wholesome fiction, but tastes are very varied; “anything and everything about the war” being eagerly devoured.

And a few months later, on 4 July, it wrote that the Club’s:

library is gathered together, being truly an “omnium gatherum” of all sorts and descriptions, from Bacon to Artemus Ward, from Dickens to Charles Garvice, from Shakespeare to Gordon, all acceptable and all sure of their readers. The only literature barred from the shelves are political and sectarian works. … The parcels are selected, so that there is a sprinkling of heavier reading, one or two of Thackeray or Dickens, or suchlike; two or three boys’ and girls’ books, and about 20 light novels, besides magazines and small weekly publications galore.

“I must read or I shall go mad”*

The Club lasted some decades and expanded beyond New South Wales, but I will write more on this later. Here, I’ll focus on its first decade. The Sydney Stock and Station Journal regularly reported on it, which is not surprising given its rural focus, but this must also reflect the Club’s significance. In January 1912, just over 2 years after the Club was founded, the journal reported that there were 125 centres operating, adding that

There is a “centre” within coo-ee of the Queensland border, and there are several out on the Castlereagh. The Riverina knows the B.B.C. well, and the Club’s books are working out towards the Darling. No place is too far.

The journal also notes that a centre could be as small as a few families. I imagine the Club’s willingness to be organisationally flexible played a role in its success. It wouldn’t have hurt, either, that, as this journal also said, the Club “is anxious to send just what the centre wants. Its desire is to please. Say what you want and the Club will do its best to satisfy.”

Some of the newspaper reports describe the sorts of “centres” that were receiving books. On 7 May 1914, the Clarence and Richmond Examiner reported that there were 309 centres, which included “railway camps, sleeper cutters ‘ camps, shearing sheds, and country hospitals”. A year later, on 29 April 1915, The Sydney Morning Herald reported that there were 370 centres, and named the Light Horse Camp at Liverpool as one of them. It was, of course, wartime, by now.

The annual meetings, on which the newspapers reported, often also shared some of the letters of appreciation received. On 21 June 1916, The Sydney Morning Herald shared some:

One lady wrote that for years she had not been able to read anything except a newspaper, books being out of reach but now she is making up for lost time with the help of the Book Club. Another correspondent described the pleasure given to the children of the household when the parcel of books arrived; a lighthouse keeper sent his warm thanks for (presumably) “light” literature, which relieved his solitude.

Very funny! 

By 1918, the club was still going strong, with many of the original volunteers still involved. The majority of them were women, and they included some interesting names – but I will talk about that in my next B.B.C. post.

* The N.S.W. Red Cross Record (1 July 1919)

Monday musings on Australian literature: Bush Book Club (1)

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I came across a reference to the Bush Book Club during my research for those 1922 posts I’ve been doing this year. I flagged it for a post in the series – but then discovered that the Club was founded in 1910. It’s a fascinating project, and I haven’t reached the end of it yet, so am just starting here with an introduction to it.

What was it?

The Bush Book Club was not a book club in our contemporary, reading-group meaning of the word, but an organisation that was founded at the end of 1909 to send books to remote areas of New South Wales, specifically to those areas lacking a School of Arts (or Mechanics Institute). It was inspired by similar work being done by the England-based Victoria League in places like Canada.

The Club was formed by Mrs. Aubrey Withers during an “informal meeting” at Admiralty House, under the auspices of Lady Poore who became its first President. Several newspapers reported on it, including the Sydney Morning Herald (22 December), which explained that members of the first committee included women from the Women’s Branch of the Empire League (our version, apparently, of the Victoria League). The SMH added that the Girls’ Realm Guild had “been engaged in bush library work” for over a year, but “decided to join in the bigger movement” resulting in “no overlapping”.

The SMH also reported that some very clear principles were laid, which would make for success. These included that it would be “non-sectarian and non-political”, and for both men and women. There would also be

a censorship committee to see that only suitable literature is distributed. By “suitable” is not meant only standard works or books of a “goody goody” nature, but care will be taken that vulgar, trashy, novels, and morbid, unwholesome works are not amongst those sent out.

This sort of sensibility would be typical of 1909, but I do love the language used. In terms of practicalities, the SMH notes that railway authorities had “promised” to send the books without charge, and that the committee hoped that school-houses would become distribution points for the books. As far as I’ve read to date, distribution was handled by different groups depending on the location – from schools and libraries to community organisations. In Kyogle, for example, it was the North Kyogle Progress Association, while in the Mudgee area it was Erda Vale Subsidised School. The service was not to be free, with the rural readers to be charged pay 3d. a month (or 2s. per annum) to access the books.

The project was very much a grass-roots activity, founded on volunteering and good-will. The expectation from the start was that it would be based primarily on second-hand books. As the SMH writes, “There is hardly a household in Sydney which does not have periodical clearings out of old books and magazines, and it is mainly on these that the club will depend.” The new Club, then, immediately started promoting the project, asking Sydney-siders to donate used (and new) books and magazines to the cause. The SMH put it this way:

So, if any of you wish to send a parcel of books to the bush people, do not reject this because it’s too deep, or that because it’s too fanciful. Remember that there are intellects in the back blocks just us keen as yours, and minds far more hungry than yours can be for mental meat. And please, please remember that there are little children whose minds are opening every day, and to whom the fairy tales, which are so old in your nursery, will carry a world of delight, and open up the fairyland of romance and imagination.

The condescension is palpable … meanwhile, the seemingly indefatigable Lady Poore did organise fundraisers, for “incidental expenses”.

Lady Poore – and a little controversy

From G Vandyk Ltd, An admiral’s wife in the making, 1860-1903 (1917), via Wikipedia. Public Domain.

Which brings me to Lady Poore. Ida Margaret Graves Poore (1859-1941) was, according to Wikipedia, “an Anglo-Irish autobiographer and poet”. Her husband was the baronet, Sir Richard Poore, who became an Admiral in the Royal Navy, and was posted to Sydney from 1908 to 1911.

As you can see from those dates, Lady Poore was only formally involved for a year or so, though later reports occasionally mention that she continued to ask about the Club long after she’d left. She was, though, involved in a little controversy, which many papers reported on – and which she herself managed to treat with self-deprecating humour. (She really sounds like something.) Here’s what happened …

In April 2010, Lady Poore presided over the first annual meeting of the Bush Book Club, at Sydney’s Town Hall. The Sydney Morning Herald (6 April) reported on the meeting, and noted that Lady Poore was keen to “impress … the actual need of books”. She talked about the paucity of reading matter in many remote areas, and argued against the opinion held in some quarters that people who had little leisure for reading needed nothing more than the weekly newspaper. The Sydney Morning Herald‘s report of her speech continues:

If she as a temporary, and she honestly thought, sympathetic dweller, in their midst, might be allowed to offer a criticism, she should say that what the Australian national character lacked was imagination. Commonsense was really “common” here, and she knew no quality of greater practical value but fancy, vision imagination, call it what they would, was not common, and without books she did not see how it was to be awakened, fostered, and rendered articulate. There might be in New South Wales bush-poets in embryo as powerful as Lindsay Gordon, as humorous and pathetic as A B Patterson* (who she was glad to say, was one of their vice-presidents) – bush-novelists too and bush naturalists; but without the help and stimulus provided by reading they would … die full of unexpressed, because un-expressible, ideas. Apart from those who might succeed in literature, there were many whose hard, workaday lives would be made brighter and more beautiful by the reading of books. 

I’m going to put aside her examples of writers to emulate, and cut to the controversy chase. As you can imagine, there was quite a reaction to the idea that Australians lacked imagination, though there was some misreporting. One columnist, for example, thought she was only referring to children, and another to women. Then there was “Roseda” writing in the Wellington Times (14 April 1910) in central western NSW. She (I assume) says that Lady Poore might be right about reading stimulating imagination but, she writes,

To me it seems the Great Silent Bush has more imaginative influences than any book. It is all inspiration and should beget the fancy monger. If it lacks this the fault is in the individual and yet not his fault either. Bush dwellers are too much occupied to have leisure for imagination. Patience say I ’twill come. Are we not producing some of the best songsters in the world? Soon there will be a need of songs for them and then poets will emerge from their slumbers. Bush bards evolve yourselves please.

I love the light tone … indeed, the interesting thing is that while the reports I saw didn’t agree with her, neither did they take severe umbrage, suggesting to me that she and/or her endeavour were much appreciated.

Later in April, Lady Poore attended the birthday of The Optimists’ Club (which she was encouraging to support the B.B.C.). The Daily Telegraph (27 April) reports her referencing her little faux pas. She apparently told the gathering that the press certainly didn’t lack imagination, and that

If she could conveniently take off her hat she would take it off to the press in recognition of the extraordinary kindness, not to say leniency, with which they had treated her— a stranger. A weekly publication of great literary merit likened her to a seagull. Could imagination go further? That was before she was a month in Australia, and it earned her undying gratitude, by the pretty, if unmerited, compliment. A daily paper of high standing credited her with a handsome heliotrope satin gown and a riviere of diamonds — neither of which she possessed — and she had never forgotten the inventive kindness of the writer. Indeed, the press of Australia had invariably used her with a generosity far beyond her deserts, and their recent criticisms had only whetted her appetite for information concerning a country and a people she had a good reason to love. 

Ah Lady Poore, what a charmer.

I was going to write more in this post, including about the actual books and the early achievements, but I don’t want to try your patience so I’m going to hold that over until next week. You will be hearing more about the B.B.C.

* In my reading of newspapers in Trove I come across many misspellings, particularly of Banjo Paterson (as Patterson) and Katharine Susannah Prichard (as Katherine and/or Pritchard), suggesting that sub-editing was not necessarily better in the olden days!

Monday musings on Australian literature: Community novels

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Recently, I came across a blogger discussing what she described as “community novels”. The blogger is Liz Dexter at Adventures in reading, running and working from home, and the book she was discussing was an English novel, Small miracles by Anne Booth. It got me thinking, because I love community.

Community, however, is a word with multiple meanings and applications, but Liz’s concept of “community novel” is one which has “a range of other characters, each with their own story that intertwines with the whole”. These characters, if I understand Liz’s blog correctly, can belong to communities that can range from those as “compressed” as a nunnery to those more open like a seaside town. The point is that the characters are all connected by their community, and the novel incorporates the stories of several members of that community.

Of course, I searched the internet for community novels, and found our own Annette Marfording (who has appeared on my blog). Back in 2016 she discussed the topic on her blog in a post titled 10 Great Novels on Community. Annette writes:

Using a community in fiction has several advantages: a community almost invariably provides a hotbed of conflict between its members, and it is conflict that drives a story. Communities also provide the opportunity for the author to begin the story with a new person joining the community, which can serve as the springboard or inciting incident for the story. Furthermore, community allows authors to display their skill at conveying a strong sense of the place where the writing is set. 

So, a significant feature for her are the dramatic opportunities offered by having a new person join a community. To this I would add the opportunities offered by someone returning to a community, which seems a common trope these days. Anyhow, Marfording goes on to list ten “great” Australian community-based novels – at the time of writing – noting that they tend to be set in “small rural or coastal towns, but it would, of course, also be possible, albeit more difficult, to build such communities in a city suburb”. (Check her post for her thoughtful list.)

Both Liz and Annette point to the factors that make “community novels” interesting. The small community, for one, which means readers can quickly come to know and feel engaged with it. The opportunity for conflict and difference – and hopefully resolution at the end – is another. In my internet search I found reference to a book published in 2014 by J. Hillis Miller. Titled Communities in fiction, its subject is described on Amazon as

the question of how communities or noncommunities are represented in fictional works. Such fictional communities help the reader understand real communities, including those in which the reader lives. As against the presumption that the trajectory in literature from Victorian to modern to postmodern is the story of a gradual loss of belief in the possibility of community, this book demonstrates that communities have always been presented in fiction as precarious and fractured.

I’ll leave the trajectory issue to the academics, but I’d be interested in your perspective on whether communities in fiction are always presented as “precarious and fractured”. For me, it depends on the definition of “precarious and fractured”. If “precarious” means “likely to fall or collapse” (Oxford Languages), I’d argue that many fictional communities might be fractured, that is, “damaged” or “broken”, but are not necessarily going to succumb. Take a recent American case, for example, Where the crawdads sing (my review). That community was never going to fall or disappear, but it sure was fractured.

I also found another interesting article* on JSTOR, from 1988, which I scanned. It’s about a genre the writer, Sandra Zagarell, calls “narrative of community”, which she describes as “committed to rendering the local life of a community to readers who lived in a world the authors thought fragmented, rationalised, individualised”. Zagarell and others argue that these novels see community as important to survival in an increasingly individualistic – or, some say – capitalistic world. Zagarell comments at the end of her article on the progress of this genre into modern times, writing that

Embracing increasingly heterogeneous visions of the collective life, narrative of community is expanding the story of human connection and continuity.

Melissa Lucashenko, Too Much Lip

Notably, she sees this happening particularly in the writing of African-American authors like Toni Morrison and Alice Walker. Interesting. We can surely see some of this in First Nations Australian literature. In Melissa Lucashenko’s Too much lip (my review) Kerrie returns to her community because her grandfather is dying but she decides to stay to fight for Granny Ava’s island. This is, in fact, a precarious community. It’s respected leader, Uncle Richard, says near the end that

We had to grow hard just to survive … But the hardness that saved us, it’s gonna kill us if it goes on much longer.

This is a community learning how to live in modern rural Australia. It’s a similar story in Nardi Simpson’s Song of the crocodile (my review) which is also about a community being torn apart, and about the resilience of a culture that is, philosophically, community-based.

Karen Viggers, The orchardist's daughter

Besides these and other First Nations novels, I’ve read other several community-set novels in recent years, such as Malcom Knox’s coastal Bluebird (my review) and Karen Viggers’ rural The orchardist’s daughter (my review). Both are set in vividly delineated communities and explore the tensions, prejudices, greed and/or corruption that can tear communities apart, while paradoxically also conveying the potential in community for the opposite.

I opened this post by saying I love community, which means I also love novels set in communities, so my question of course is …

Do you like “community novels” and if so, what do you like about them and would you like to share some favourites?

* Sandra A. Zagarell, “Narrative of Community: The Identification of a Genre” in Signs, 13 (3) Spring, 1988: 498-527

Monday musings on Australian literature: The Miles Franklin Rights Project

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Some months ago, I became aware of The Miles Franklin Rights Project, and of course, it piqued my interest, so I flagged it for a future Monday Musings. The project apparently commenced in early 2021, and is still continuing. Before I describe the project, though, I need to explain for non-Aussie readers here that the Miles Franklin Award, though no longer Australia’s most valuable award in monetary terms (albeit is still generous), is arguably our most prestigious literary award. It is also one of our oldest, having been first awarded in 1957. That first winner was Patrick White’s Voss.

So now, the project …

It is led by Dr Airlie Lawson, who is “a literary sociologist and cartographer, a Visiting Fellow at the ANU’s College of Arts and Social Sciences, and the Postdoctoral Fellow on Untapped: the Australian Literary Heritage Project (on which I posted earlier this year) at the University of Melbourne”. The project intrigues me because it asks some questions that are dear my heart. Here is how it is introduced on the AustLit website, which is funding the project:

Alexis Wright Carpentaria in Chinese
Chinese edition of Carpentaria

Over the last 21 years, the Miles Franklin Literary Award has been won by many acclaimed Australian novels including Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria, Michelle de Krester’s Questions of Travel, Tara June Winch’s The Yield, Peter Temple’s Truth and Tim Winton’s Dirt Music. But which of these novels has been published internationally—where and in what languages? And shortlisted titles—have they had international success? Is there a discernable gender difference? Associations between publishers? What about change over time? How might we find out?

The site goes on to say that

Globally, publishers and agents report a strong association between literary awards and prizes in international interest in a novel and, subsequently, the licensing of the publishing rights internationally.

The problem is that there’s been little research into what impact awards and prizes have had on rights transactions. A prerequisite for such research, really, is “a comprehensive set of international editions” of Miles Franklin Award winners, but this has not been easy to find. Consequently, the aim of this project is “to create such a list—and to create an efficient, accurate international edition identification model that can be used for other AustLit projects”. They are focusing on the novels which won or were shortlisted for the award from 2000 to 2020. This list, which comprises 22 winners and 93 shortlisted titles, will provide, they hope, a basis from which the global impact and value of this award can be explored.

As you can imagine, it’s not easy tracking down the editions, but they are starting with two major international book databases: WorldCat (library-supplied data) and GoodReads (crowdsourced). As you would expect from an academic project, the information obtained from these databases, and elsewhere, is then checked against multiple sources, including authors, agents and publishers.

You can read about the project on the AustLit website. In fact, this website was my major source for this post, but I did find information about a paper given (via Zoom) by Airlie Lawson in May this year. The paper was titled “How Global is Australian Literature in the 21st century? A story of gender, genre and the international literary field”. The talks’ description says that the “paper draws primarily on data produced for the Conditions of Access (COA) project*, supplemented by data from the industry report Success Story (Crosby et al) and AustLit’s The Miles Franklin Rights Project. Specifically, it draws on data relating to what the COA project models as international rights ‘transactions’ for adult novels first published in print between 2000-2020″. The description also says this:

Analysis of this data reveals several rather different accounts of international access over a twenty-year period, but all have one element in comment: in contrast with the domestic field, they tell a positive story for women authors. 

Interesting, but not wholly surprising, because anecdotally-speaking, at least, my sense is that many of our women writers are finding their way to overseas readers. We are seeing it in posts by international bloggers, for a start. Presumably Lawson explored why this might be the case. The point she makes here is not comparing our women with our men authors overseas, but our women authors overseas versus them at home.

I also found a Q&A with Lawson. The first question concerned the inspiration for the project, and Lawson responded that

There’s been a lot of discussion in Australia about literary prizes in recent years—the cost of entering, the type of books more likely [to] win them, their proliferation—but there’s no question that a prize win can boost copy sales. I wanted to find out if there was a similar effect on international rights licensing.

Anecdotally, she said, Australian industry professionals claim some do have an influence, and her own research has supported this, but there’s no “reliable comprehensive data set of international editions” to enable this to be properly proved (or not). On why she chose the Miles Franklin Award as her basis, she said that

  • it is often described as Australia’s “most prestigious literary award”;
  • it’s long running (though they are starting with a 21-year period); and
  • it stipulates Australian content, so “examining the international publication records for works associated with it can tell us something about how Australian literary culture is valued internationally”.

As for who the research is for, it’s broad: it’s for other researchers (of course), students, readers, book clubs, and publishers.

Certainly, as a reader and book-club member, I am fascinated by the publishing environment within which authors work, and what can help them reach more readers. Moreover, as one who loves to read works from overseas writers, I am also keen to see overseas readers read our writers. Consequently, I love the idea of this project.

Does such research interest you – and why, if it does?

* The Conditions of Access project is another Airlie Lawson project. Its aim was, said the talk’s description, “to better understand, from a data-driven and conceptual perspective, where, when and why Australian novels have travelled in the early years of the twenty-first century”.

Monday musings on Australian literature: Fremantle Press

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Given I am currently in Fremantle, I felt it appropriate to give a little shout out to one of the first independent presses I became aware of, back in the 1980s, the Fremantle Press. Then it was called the Fremantle Arts Centre Press, and it published one of my favourite authors at the time, Elizabeth Jolley. 

Elizabeth Jolley's Diary of a weekend farmer

I must admit that felt sorry for them – and a little cross with Jolley – when she left them for Penguin, but I understood too. Writing is a tough business, and being in the stable of a company with the reputation and clout of Penguin must certainly help your visibility and thus your sales and income. Nonetheless, these small presses, which tend to be the ones to take a risk on new writers, are so important to Australia’s literary culture, so we need to support them.

A little history

Fremantle Arts Centre Press was established in 1976, and publishes a wide range of works – fiction and nonfiction, adult’s and children’s. The write that their

core purpose is to identify talented new and emerging Western Australian writers and artists, and to publish and distribute their work to the widest possible audience.

How did they start, though, and when did their name change? This sort of information is hard to find when organisations don’t document it on their site – and Fremantle doesn’t on their About Us page. My Internet search retrieved, of course, lots of hits on specific books they’ve published or the occasional news item about an award. However, I persevered and found an article written in the University of Western Australia’s Mots Pluriels (no. 5, 1998) by academic Phillip Winn. The issue is devoted to a study of the Press, and containsinterviews with authors and staff of the Press, as well as Winn’s article.

Winn’s article is titled “The Fremantle Arts Centre Press: a case study of a smaller publishing house”, and he explains the case study’s aims and hints at its findings:

Armed with a barrage of questions designed to expose the ‘how to’ of getting published in Western Australia, it soon became apparent that the search for a general response was the least fruitful. How do lesser-known authors get published? Is it easy? What help does a publisher give a budding writer? What is a good book in the eyes of the reading committee? In this study of FACP, such questions have been more meaningfully answered on the individual rather than the corporate level; for the dominant theme to emerge from this series of interviews is the importance of the personal touch. Public questions of universal interest have, it seems, very private and personal answers.

Winn documents a bit more of the Press’ history, saying that it is part of the cultural heritage of Fremantle itself. He says that by the mid 1970s, the Fremantle Arts Centre “had established a highly successful, community based, creative writing program” and that on the basis of this, the Centre’s then dire actor, Ian Templeman, “saw the possibility of establishing a press to gain wider recognition for Western Australian authors”. Winn says that the creation of the Press (FACP) in 1975 (not 1976 as the website says), “is now considered a watershed in Western Australian history”. He argues that part of the Press’s significance was that it was able to reduce ‘the so-called “brain-drain phenomenon”‘, that common problem in Australia’s artistic scene, whereby “those with talent in search of recognition are first seduced eastwards to Sydney and Melbourne, and then overseas”.

From the beginning, FACP’s focus was Western Australian artists and writers, and its early writers from the 1970s and 80s, like Elizabeth Jolley, Albert Facey (My fortunate life) and Sally Morgan (My place), are still internationally renowned.

This early success continued in the 1990s, with authors like Kim Scott, whose Benang won the 1999 Miles Franklin Award. Winn notes that in this decade FACP diversified, with their catalogue at the time of his writing, including “a wide variety of texts in the fields of art, history, education, biography and autobiography, cultural studies, and children’s books as well as their traditional lines of literary prose and poetry.”

Margaret Rose Stringer, And then like my dreams

And this has continued. Fremantle books I have reviewed in recent years include Margaret Rose Stringer’s memoir, And then like my dreams (2013), and Madelaine Dickie’s novels Troppo (2016) and Red can origami (2019). Fremantle has also started republishing classics, in a series they call Treasures. Books in this series include a collection of stories by T.A.G. Hungerford, Stories from Suburban Road.

As for when it became “just” the Fremantle Press, that I found in Wikipedia – and it was 2007. Wikipedia doesn’t explain why, though.

In April 2022, the Fremantle Library unveiled “its extensive new collection” of Fremantle Press books. Local author David Whish-Wilson is quoted as saying:

“I applaud the step taken by Fremantle Library to gather Fremantle Press’ entire list and back-list in one place, and I, for one, will be eagerly perusing the shelves.”

Any initiative which aims to ensure continued availability of backlists (like the Untapped project I wrote about earlier this year) must be commended. Of course, you would expect libraries to be at the forefront of such endeavours, but in these days of reduced resources, even they cannot always provide the depth of collection that we would expect of them.

As well as publishing books, Fremantle sponsors two writers’ awards:

Book cover for Madelaine Dickie's Troppo
  • the City of Fremantle Hungerford Award, co-sponsored by the City of Fremantle and Fremantle Press, is “Western Australia’s most prestigious award for an unpublished work of adult fiction, narrative non-fiction or young adult fiction by an unpublished writer”. The prize is $15,000 cash and a publishing contract with Fremantle Press.
  • The Fogarty Literary Award, co-sponsored by the Fogarty Foundation and Fremantle Press, is a biennial award for an unpublished manuscript (of adult fiction, narrative non-fiction or young adult fiction) by a Western Australian author aged between 18 and 35. The prize is $20,000 cash and a publishing contract with Fremantle Press.

Fremantle Press is a non-profit publisher.

Monday musings on Australian literature: Introducing Rachel Henning

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If you are an Aussie who was sentient in the 1950s and/or 60s, you have probably heard of Rachel Henning. If not, she may be new to you, though she does have something of a classic status in Australia. Let me explain.

Rachel Henning (1826-1914) was an Englishwoman who came to Australia in 1854 with her sister Amy, following her brother Biddulph and another sister Annie who had come previously for Biddulph’s health. She did not enjoy the life: she was homesick, she disliked bush life “extremely”, and hated the hot climate. She wrote on 29 March 1855 of being

tired of the perpetual glare of sunshine. Fine days here bring me no pleasure as they do in England: they are too hot and too numerous, and besides, you cannot enjoy them by taking nice walks–there are no walks to take.

So, she returned to England in 1856. However, in 1861, back she came to Australia, determined to be more positive, and found it much more to her liking. It was well into autumn when she landed on this second trip, which helped. After spending a few days in Melbourne, she got a steamer up to Sydney arriving there in mid-May. She writes in her first letter after arrival:

The next morning I got up early, and a most lovely Australian morning it was, the sun shining and everything looking bright and beautiful.

…

I do not know how to give you any idea of the beauty of Sydney Harbour. I certainly underrated the Australian scenery, but, then, it is winter now; I should tell a different story in the heat and dust of summer. (Letter to sister Etta, May 15, 1861)

After spending a little time in New South Wales, she joined her Australian family in the Bowen region of Queensland where Biddulph had taken up a property. From there she lived in several parts of eastern Australia, before spending the end of her life in Sydney.

Penguin ed. 1969

Rachel Henning died in 1914, but her letters, which were never intended for publication, were not published until The Bulletin serialised them over 1951 and 1952. This was followed by publication as a book in 1954, illustrated by none other than Norman Lindsay, and edited by David Adams. Here is where it gets interesting because, as Bill writes (and as Judy Stove told my JASACT group), Adams severely edited them (reminding us of how Austen’s sister Cassandra “curated” Austen’s life by destroying so many of her letters). Bill reports that Adams reduced the original 179 letters down to 90. Not only did he remove repetitive salutations etc, but he also deleted references to “women’s problems” (which would be so interesting now) plus her most scathing comments about her fellows and most of her complaints about ‘colonials’. None of this editing was acknowledged at the time, and was only exposed decades later.

I’m not sure, and nor was Judy Stove, about the current state of the original manuscripts – or whether there are plans to release a more complete edition of the essays. However, Stove said that Norman Lindsay apparently liked the letters, and, I believe, likened them to Jane Austen’s letters which, unlike many male readers, he also liked.

Now, at the beginning I indicated that Henning’s letters were very popular in the 1950s and 60s, but implied that, if you weren’t sentient then, you may not have heard of her. This is because she fell out of favour, mainly, said Judy Stove, due to her “snobbish” attitudes, including to First Nations Australians. These attitudes changed a little over the time, with her expressing some humanity towards the original inhabitants. Fundamentally, though, it appears, as Bill cites cacademic Anne Allingham saying, that Henning “became party to the pastoralist’s pact to maintain silence on frontier conflict, the hope being that silence would imply that it simply did not exist.” In the letters, she clearly distinguishes between the “wild blacks” and the “boys” who worked on the station. She does seem aware that the term “boys” is not really right, but still, she accepts the status quo:

He [Biddulph] takes with him Alick, one of the blackboys–they are always called “boys”, though the said Alick must be thirty-five at least. People who are going for a long journey almost always take a blackboy with them. They are most useful servants in the bush, get up the horses in the morning, light fires at night, and know by a sort of instinct if there are any wild blacks lurking in the neighbourhood of their camp. They are very faithful, too. I never heard of an instance of a traveller being murdered or robbed by his own blackboy. (Letter to Mr Boyce, 23 March 1864)

Regardless (or perhaps because) of these attitudes – which were not uncommon in her time – Henning offers valuable insight into colonial Australia. Caldwell puts in this way, at the end of her ADB entry:

Her letters read like a novel with ‘darling’ Biddulph the hero, and give an invaluable picture of colonial life; with vivid descriptions and shrewd, if not always charitable, observations on people, they have both charm and humour.

Read more …

You can read the full text of her letters at Project Gutenberg Australia.

And here are some places where you can read more about her:

Have you read The letters of Rachel Henning? And if so, I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Monday musings on Australian literature: Local colour, 1920-style

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Back in June I wrote a post on the Australian Literature Society’s Women’s Night that they held in 1922. This Society, which was formed in Melbourne in 1899, has played an important role in supporting and promoting Australian literature for well over a century – first as itself, and then as part of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature (ASAL) with which it merged in 1982. As I’ve written before, ASAL continues to award the ALS Gold Medal which was established by the Society in 1928.

Now, I had in fact planned a different post for today, but I have had a busy weekend, and am still away from home, so have not had the time to work on that post. I therefore thought I would share another one of the delightful snippets I found some months ago about about the work of the society. The wonderful thing is, you see, that this Society’s meetings were often written up in the newspapers of the day, which provides us with an interesting insight into what the literati of the time were thinking and caring about.

And, one of those things was what made “Australian” literature. In 1920, Melbourne’s The Herald (July 10), reported on the meeting that marked the Society’s attaining “its majority”. That is, it turned 21! The meeting’s topic was “Local Color in Women’s Work”, with a paper was presented by Mrs Hilda Vroland. She argued that Australia’s women writers “did not portray very vividly those features of our life which were distinctive”. The report went on to explain what she saw as local color:

What was meant by local color was certain incidents, scenes and language which were characteristic of a particular country, and not only that, but a portrayal of an outlook on life which was typical of the class of people dealt with. Our local color was derived from incidents which immediately suggested Australian life — scenes that were truly Australian, and traits of character which had been developed by the freedom of this new land and the broader outlook.

Mrs Vroland named some writers whom she thought did produce good local colour – Doris Egerton Jones, Marie Pitt and Mary Gaunt (the last of whom Brona of Brona’s Books wrote about for the new AWW). Brona notes that some of Gaunt’s attitudes are problematical now, but nonetheless,

her short stories show a writer concerned with the role of women in society. Mary’s privileged colonial upbringing may be apparent in her writing at times, but her focus was clearly on how double standards, lack of agency and patriarchal practices negatively impacted on the lives of women.

Sounds like excellent local color to me …

Anyhow, the poet and journalist Bernard O’Dowd, who presided over the meeting, clearly agreed with the importance of Hilda Vroland’s subject, arguing that

Australians had as much right to see the universe in our honeysuckle and wattle blossom or even in the opossum’s burrow as the Englishman had to see his world in the oak-tree.

Furthermore, he was concerned, said The Herald, that Australian literature was not valued unless it “received the hallmark of the English papers”. (The old cultural cringe.) Local journals, he apparently said, “dealt almost exclusively with American literature, and ignored Australian writers”. Another speaker at the meeting, a Charles Carter, is reported as having “said that he “was gratified to know that the women writers quoted did not wholly rely upon the use of slang, horse-racing or bush-ranging for local color”. According to Brona, Mary Gaunt’s stories did include bush-ranging, among other topics. But was Carter being sexist about what “women” writers should write about, or simply complimenting them because these were not truly local color?

I will close here … and simply say that I enjoyed reading about the passion of these Australians for our own literature, even if (not surprisingly) the idea of First Nations people contributing to that literature doesn’t seem to have crossed their minds. I hope you all have enjoyed this little insight too.

Monday musings on Australian literature: The new AWW, six months on

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In February, a new AWW (Australian Women Writers blog) team, comprising its founder, Elizabeth Lhuede, Bill Holloway (The Australian Legend) and me, published our first post in our revamped blog. Six months on we have settled into a nice little routine which I’d like to share with you, but first …

Let me recap what I explained in my last AWW Challenge post for 2021. This challenge was, as many of you know, instigated in 2012 in response to concerns in Australian literary circles about the lack of recognition for women writers. By 2021, things had changed significantly with women writers seeming to be well-established on Australia’s literary scene, at least by observable measures. Because of this and some additional practical reasons, it was agreed that the challenge would change tack in 2022 and focus on past, and often under-recognised or overlooked, women writers from the 19th- and 20th-centuries. The new team decided that we would write articles about and reviews of earlier writers, and publish their actual writings – in full or excerpt form, as appropriate. Our reasoning was that Australia’s rich heritage of Australian women’s writing hasn’t been fully explored and we wanted to nudge it into the limelight.

So, what have we done? We have established the following routine:

  • on Wednesdays we publish essays or articles on relevant writers, works, or topics; and
  • on Fridays we publish actual writings, related, where possible, to that Wednesday’s post.

Bill is our commissioning editor, which means he sets up our posting timetable and approaches others (mostly bloggers we know) to contribute to our Wednesday articles, while Elizabeth schedules the Friday posts, drawing from the work she’s done, and is still doing, on locating and listing online content for past women writers. I have the easy job, being part of the ongoing consultations and keeping an eye on some of the background issues like our category and label policy and practice. Each of us also writes one Wednesday article a month, with the other week/s (given there are three of us) being a guest post.

We have not imposed a structure over the content of the posts. That is, we have not decided to explore past Australian women writers chronologically or geographically or thematically. Instead, we have drawn on contributors’ interests and experiences. This has resulted in an eclectic mix of posts, but, we believe, an interesting one, that should appeal to a variety of tastes and interests.

So, for example, Jonathan Shaw (Me fail? I fly!), who contributed many poetry reviews to the original blog, agreed to write articles on past women poets. His first was on Zora Cross. Brona (Brona’s Books) posted on Mary Gaunt, while author and blogger Michelle Scott Tucker posted on the children’s writer Patricia Wrightson and the issue of appropriation. We have also been thrilled to have contributions from overseas bloggers interested in classic Australian literature, like French blogger Emma (Book Around the Corner) on Catherine Helen Spence’s Mr Hogarth’s will, and Canadian Marcie McCauley (Buried in Print) on Katherine Susannah Prichard’s Goldfield’s trilogy.

Meanwhile, Elizabeth has focused specifically on our goal of finding forgotten and overlooked writers. Putting her research skills to work, she has unearthed writers we really never have heard of – and, along the way, has discovered some fascinating stories. Netta Walker, for example, took her on a merry chase, as did another wonderful find of hers, the case of Eucalypta (or, Mrs H.E. Russell). As for Bill, in between tracking down guest posters, he has been contributing posts on works by some of his favourite independent women, like Miles Franklin and Ada Cambridge.

Posts on topics other than individual writers and works include guest poster and literature honours student Stacey Roberts on Using the AWWC Archives, and mine on Primary and Secondary Sources.

So, six months in, we seem to be going strong, though there’s not a lot of comment engagement on the blog. More of that would be lovely.

We’d love to know whether you’ve looked at the blog. If you have, what have you liked or not liked, and is there anything you would particularly like to see? (We are open to offers too!)