Monday musings

Monday musings on Australian literature: Forgotten writers 14, Gertrude Mack

/ Whispering Gums / 12 Comments

Gertrude Mack is the third of the Mack literary sisters, and by far the least known, though at the time she was well-recognised, with her activities and thoughts frequently reported in the newspapers. Her “disappearance” from view is most likely because, unlike her sisters, all her writing was for newspapers and magazines. She did not have one published book to her name. It makes a big difference to a writer’s longevity in the literary world.

As with many of my Forgotten Writers posts, I researched Gertrude Mack for the Australian Women Writers’ blog. This post is a minor revision of the one I posted there. So, who was she …

Gertrude Mack

Gertrude Mack (?-1937) was an Australian journalist and short story writer. The youngest of thirteen children – who included five daughters – Mack was born in Morpeth, New South Wales, to Irish-born parents, Jemima (nee James) Mack and the Rev’d Hans Mack. As a child, she lived in various parts of Sydney including Windsor, Balmain and Redfern, and was educated at Sydney Girls’ High School. Two of her older sisters also had literary careers, Louise Mack (see my posts) and Amy Mack (whom I featured last week). These sisters have been documented in Dale Spender’s Writing a new world: Two centuries of Australian women writers (1988) and by their niece Nancy Phelan in the Australian Dictionary of Biography, but neither Spender nor Phelan mention Gertrude. According AustLit, a diary of Mack’s is included in Phelan’s papers at the State Library of New South Wales. Curious.

This dearth of formal biographical information meant relying heavily, for this post, on Trove, where articles written by Mack abound. They tell of a curious and adventurous woman who was able to report firsthand on those challenging 1920s and 30s in Europe and the Americas. For example, in 1924, four years after the Mexican Revolution, she decided to go to Mexico City, something her American friends thought “a wild whim”. She writes for The Sydney Morning Herald (22 November 1924), that “according to American newspapers, it did seem a risk, but I knew their way of making any Mexican news appear hectic”. In the end, it does prove difficult, and she fails on her first attempt. She admits that she was not prepared for the poverty she sees in Juarez, just over the border from El Paso, and “was not yet accustomed to the unshaven Mexican”, but she later wrote admiring pieces on the country.

Mack spent eight years in London from around 1929 to 1937, and returned at least once for a few weeks in 1933. It was a difficult time in Europe, and The Sun (18 June 1933) reports that she had found “the same sense of strain in all the European countries, and this has been intensified more recently by the war menace, which seems to be very real.” I have not been able to find an image of her, but during this visit, sister Louise described her in “Louise Mack’s Diary” in the Australian Women’s Weekly (17 June 1933):

Tall, very slight and svelte, in a smart black frock of her own making, her hair marcelled, her big, grey eyes looking big-ger than ever under the glasses she had taken to lately. Elegant? Yes, certainly.

An interesting little fact which came up in a couple of the newspaper reports of this 1933 visit was that on her voyage she, and two other “matrons” had been in charge of 48 children, who had been selected for the Fairbridge Farm School to be taught various branches of farming. Sydney’s The Sun (June 18) explained that “the children, whose ages ranged from eight to twelve years, included both boys and girls, and were chosen by the selection committee of the Child Immigration Society, which body exercises the greatest care in choosing only suitable potential citizens for Australia, says Miss Mack”. If you haven’t heard about Fairbridge, check out Wikipedia. Miss Mack might have had faith in it, but the whole scheme was marred by dishonesty, and worse, child abuse.

Gertrude returned again to Australia in 1937. There was much interest in her return, with newspapers reporting on her thoughts from the moment she first touched the continent in Western Australia. The West Australian (3 March 1937) wrote that she had passed through Fremantle in the “Orama”, and quoted her as saying Australian writers were doing well in London. “Henry Handel Richardson was acclaimed by many critics as the finest writer of the day”; and Helen Simpson (my first Forgotten Writer) “had taken up broadcasting work in addition to her writing”. She said Nina Murdoch had had success with Tyrolean June and Christina Stead with Seven poor men of Sydney. The paper observed, tellingly, that “undoubtedly Australian writers were getting more recognition in London than in their own country”.

It also quoted Mack as saying she believed England was interested in stories about Australia, but that their interest depended “entirely on the topic of the story.” Unfortunately Australian writers “usually presented the drab side of the life of the country and laid too much stress on the droughts and the drawbacks” and “the frequent descriptions of struggles against drought and the hardships of Australian life gave readers a wrong impression of the country”. Consequently, readers “did not realise that the country had a normal life, with a bright social side, and the mass in England seldom knew that there was very fertile land in Australia”. According to Mack, “German people knew more about Australia and were more interested than the people of any other country”.

Adelaide’s News (6 March 1937) took up the issue of how Australia is viewed, but with a slightly different tack, writing:

“It would be difficult,” said Miss Mack, “to make the average uneducated English man or woman believe that there is, in Australia, such a thing as culture. English people would be surprised if they could have a glimpse of real country life on a big station.
The only way to overcome this wrong idea.” she said, “is by our literature, which has not yet developed fully.”

Although she was talking about staying in Australia for just 6 months, it appears that Gertrude Mack was seriously ill when she returned in 1937. She visited her brother C. A. Mack, of Mosman, but died in a private hospital in Darlinghurst on Wednesday 31 March and was buried at the Northern Suburbs Crematorium on the Friday.

A few days later “an appreciation” written by “W.B.”  appeared in The Sydney Morning Herald (6 April). W.B. It’s a moving tribute:

To those of us who had the happiness and the privilege of an intimate association with Gertrude Mack over a long period, abroad and in Australia, her death has meant a very poignant personal loss and sorrow. Her happy outlook on life, her faculty for perceiving the humorous side of things, and her sensitive reactions to atmosphere, made her a delightful companion, and she made friends among every class of people, whether they were foreigners or people of her own race. She had an unusual flair for getting at the heart of the interesting aspects of life and affairs, and this, added to her other gifts, enabled her to write such charming and interesting sketches, stories, and interviews. Her short stories and sketches were invariably the outcome of personal contacts. She could paint engaging pictures of people and places, and make them real to her readers. She also possessed outstanding musical ability, and might have won distinction as a pianist had she elected to take up music as a profession, for she had a fine critical perception and a rare appreciation of the true values in music.

She also translated stories from Russian, collaborating with Serge Ivanov to publish in English a volume of N. A. Baikov’s tales for children. Gertrude Mack was a fascinating woman, and would be a worthy subject for a biography – either on her own, or as part of a larger biography on the Mack sisters.

Sources

Monday musings on Australian literature: Forgotten writers 13, Amy Mack

/ Whispering Gums / 15 Comments

In the first decades of the 20th century, a family of sisters made some splash on Australia’s literary scene. I have already written about the eldest of them – Louise Mack – but there were also Amy (this post’s subject) and Gertrude, all of whom appeared in newspapers of the time as writers of interest. They were three of the thirteen children of their Irish-born parents, Rev. Hans Hamilton and his wife Jemima Mack. As with many of my Forgotten Writers articles, I researched Amy Mack for the Australian Women Writers’ blog, where we have several posts devoted to her.

Amy Mack

Amy Eleanor Mack (1876-1939) was a writer, journalist, and editor. She was six years younger than the more famous Louise, and, says Phelan in the Australian dictionary of biography, was “less temperamental … and lived more sedately”, which is not to say she lived a boring life.

Mack began work as a journalist soon after leaving school, and from 1907 to 1914 was editor of the ‘Women’s Page’ of the Sydney Morning Herald. She married zoologist Launcelot Harrison, in 1908, and in 1914, they went to England where he did postgraduate work at Cambridge, before serving in Mesopotamia as advisory entomologist to the British Expeditionary Force. While he was away, Mack worked in London as publicity officer for the ministries of munitions and food.

The couple returned to Sydney after the war, with Launce becoming professor of zoology at the University of Sydney, and Amy continuing her literary career among other roles and activities. They did not have children. According to Phelan, after her husband died she continued to publish occasional articles, but her impulse to write faded as her health declined. She died of arteriosclerosis in 1939.

Works

Amy Eleanor Mack’s subject was nature, and she wrote about it in newspapers and books, for adults and children. Australian ecologist, Manu Saunders, writes on her blog that:

Australia has a wonderful heritage of nature writers, many working before nature writing was ‘a thing’. The national collection of Australian children’s books about native wildlife is inspiring. Even more inspiring, many of Australia’s best nature stories were written in the early-mid 19th century, and mostly by women.

And one of those women, she continues, was Amy Eleanor Mack. (I have written before on one of our early colonial nature writers, the pioneering Louisa Atkinson.)

Book cover for Bushland stories

Mack’s first publications were two collections of essays, A bush calendar (1909) and Bush days (1911), which were compiled from articles she’d written for the Sydney Morning Herald. She also wrote two popular children’s books, Bushland stories (1910) and Scribbling Sue, and other stories (1915). Wikipedia lists 14 books, many of which were first published in newspapers, but all of which have nature-related titles, like The Fantail’s house (1928) and The gum leaf that flew: And other stories of the Australian bushland (1928).

Her books were well-reviewed in the newspapers of the time. Her first, A bush calendar, was described by Sydney’s The Farmer and Settler (26 November 1909), as charming, “a sympathetic review of bird life and plant life in the Australian bush during the four seasons of the year”. But what is interesting is what they say next:

It is the kind of book that ought to be on every girl’s bookshelf, and every thoughtful and intelligent boy’s also, being not only an exceedingly pleasant thing to look at and to read, but one calculated to induce in many a desire to get to know more of nature in some of her sweetest phases.

I’m intrigued by the gender differentiation – “every” girl, but only “every thoughtful and intelligent boy”. These sorts of insights into other times make researching Trove such a joy. Anyhow, the review also suggests that it would be “a delightful remembrancer for Australians abroad”. A year later, on 26 November 1910, Sydney’s The World’s News, reviewed Mack’s children’s book, Bushland stories, calling it an improvement on A bush calendar. It comprises a “collection of fables, allegories, fairy tales, or whatever one chooses to call them” which, the News says, has “created a folklore for young Australians”. In it, Mack personifies nature, with birds, beasts and fish all acting and speaking “like rational beings”. Each story has a moral but there is none of the “preachiness, which many youthful readers shy at”.

Reviews of later books continue in a smilier vein. In 1922, on 6 December, Lismore’s Northern Star writes about Wilderness, which, it says,”tells in a most interesting way of the fascinations of a piece of land which once had been a garden, planted with fruit trees and roses, but which has been neglected until the bush reclaimed it for its own”. This is the book that Saunders writes about in her blog in 2017. The book had been originally published in three parts in the Sydney Morning Herald. Saunders explains that it

tells the story of an unnamed patch of wild vegetation in Sydney (Mack never names the city, but given the original publisher and the wildlife she describes, it seems pretty obvious). Mack describes the plot so vividly and intimately that you imagine yourself there. You can visualise Nature reclaiming this plot of land, left untended after the keen gardener who owned it passed away.

Saunders then describes its content, including examples of the nature Mack describes, as well as her attitude to it and her observations. Saunders was surprised but “weirdly” comforted to find conservation messages that are still relevant today embedded within the book.

Legacy

Australian feminist Dale Spender, in her book Writing a new world, says a little about Amy Mack, though she spends more time on Louise. However, she makes a point about the Mack sisters and their peers, Lilian and Ethel Turner:

Lilian and Ethel Turner, Louise and Amy Mack were part of a small group of spirited literary pioneers who at very early ages adopted public profiles in relation to their work. When they moved into the rough and tumble world of journalism – when they entered competitions, won prizes, and published best-selling novels before they were barely out of their teens – they broke with some of the long-established literary conventions of female modesty and anonymity. They sought reputations and in doing so they show how far women had become full members of the literary profession: they also helped to pave the way for the equally youthful and exuberant Miles Franklin whose highly acclaimed novel, My Brilliant Career (1901), was published when the author was only twenty-one.

Ever political, Spender argues that had it “been brothers (and ‘mates’)” who created the sort “colourful and creative community” these sisters did, and achieved their level of literary success, we would have heard of them. Books would have been written about ‘their “literary mateship” and they would have been awarded a place in the readily accessible literary archives’. But,

because these writers were women, and because they have been consigned to the less prestigious categories of journalism and children’s fiction (both a classification and a status with which I do not agree) they, and their efforts, and their relationships – to rephrase Ethel Turner – go unsung.

Amy Mack is less well-known now than her sister Louise, and certainly less well-known than Ethel Turner, but in her time she was much loved. However, even then, she didn’t always get her due, as a reader wrote to The Sydney Morning Herald on 16 April 1935:

With reference to the articles on Australian women writers in the Supplement, one is surprised at the omission of Amy Eleanor Mack, who surely wrote two of the finest books for children ever published in Australia. In “Bushland Stories” and “Scribbling Sue” the true spirit of our bushland has been preserved with a charm and sincerity all its own, and I think I am right in stating that, with the exception of Miss Ethel Turner’s “Seven Little Australians,” no books published in Australia for children had greater sales.

Four years later, announcing her death on 7 November 1939, The Sydney Morning Herald said that her work “had a mark of reality about them that found for her an increasing circle of readers”, but it was “A.T.” of North Sydney, who wrote to this same paper on 8 November, who captured her essence:

Her culture, wit, and broadmindedness, and her marvellous sense of humour made her a figure in the northern suburb in which she resided.

Sources

Nancy Phelan, ‘Mack, Amy Eleanor (1876–1939)‘, Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, published first in hardcopy 1986.
Manu Saunders, “The wilderness: Amy Eleanor Mack“, ecologyisnotadirtyword.com, 4 March 1917
Dale Spender, Writing a new world: Two centuries of Australian women writers, originally published by Pandora Press, 1988 (sourced in Kindle ed.)

Monday musings on Australian literature: Michael Crouch Award

/ Whispering Gums / 12 Comments

The Michael Crouch Award is part of the National Biography Award (NBA) suite of prizes. I have written about the NBA before, but have never specifically focused on the Michael Crouch Award.

But first, a quick recap … the National Biography Award has been going since 1996, and celebrates excellence in life writing, that is, in biography, autobiography and memoir. It is, apparently, Australia’s richest prize for Australian biographical writing and memoir, with the prize-money being:

  • $25,000 for the National Biography Award winner
  • $2,000 for each of the six shortlisted authors
  • $5,000 for the Michael Crouch Award

Michael Crouch Award

Michael Crouch was one of the original sponsors of the NBA, but died in 2018. In 2019, the award came under new sponsors, who not only increased the prize money for the shortlisted authors, but also created a new prize to honour Michael Crouch. Named, obviously, the Michael Crouch Award, it is for a first (debut) published biography, autobiography or memoir by an Australian writer. It has been awarded since 2019, but most of the NBA reporting focus has continued to be the “main” award.

So, to give these writers some extra air, I’m listing here all its winners to date:

Book cover
  • 2025: Nikos Papastergiadis, John Berger and me (Giramondo Publishing, biography/memoir)
  • 2024: Jillian Graham, Inner song: A biography of Margaret Sutherland (Melbourne University Press, biography, Lisa’s review)
  • 2023: Tom Patterson, Missing (Allen & Unwin, biography)
  • 2022: Amani Haydar, The mother wound (Pan Macmillan, memoir, Kate’s review)
  • 2021: Andrew Kwong, One bright moon (HarperCollins, memoir)
  • 2020: Jessica White, Hearing Maud (UWA Publishing, biography/memoir, my review)
  • 2019: Sofija Stefanovic, Miss Ex-Yugoslavia (Atria Books, memoir)

It’s interesting, but not surprising, that the memoirs have it.

Having read several hybrid biography/memoirs, including Jessica White’s, I am particularly interested in this year’s winner. I enjoy the process – if done well of course – whereby a writer explores another person through some prism of their own life, though this prism varies widely. In some cases, the writer and subject are related (like mother and daughter), or they are friends (like Papastergiadis and Berger), or they have something in common (like deafness in the case of Jessica White and her long-dead subject, Maud Praed). If you want pure biography, these don’t do the job, as they tend not to be comprehensive. But, what I like about these hybrids, is how the writer explores some aspect of their subject’s life story alongside, or through the prism of, their own perspectives or experiences. Done well, and particularly if both writer and subject are interesting, this form can be satisfying – and illuminating.

This was the case with Jessica White’s Hearing Maud, as I discussed in my post, and I can understand its being the case with Papastergiadis’s book. The judges called it “an original hybrid form”. The website continues:

The judges chose John Berger and Me for the Michael Crouch Award for a Debut Work for its originality and clever, non-linear but accessible structure. The quality of the author’s perceptive, lyrical, subtly humorous prose also stood out among a highly competitive field of debut books. A unique and highly readable blend of biography and memoir.

And there, I think, is a major reason why I enjoy reading these hybrids, the fact that there is no set form or formula. Each one can reinvent the wheel, with authors free to choose the approach that best suits the story they want to tell, the ideas they want to explore. It’s exciting to read books like this where authors have to work out from scratch how to start, proceed, and finish!

As for this latest winner, I am particularly interested, because John Berger’s Ways of seeing made a lasting impression on me when I read it – and saw the BBC series – in the late 1970s. I can imagine why such a man would interest a sociologist like Papastergiadis, but I think their friendship and points of contact ended up being far deeper and broader than just sociology. I’m so tempted.

Have you read any of these winners – and/or are you interested in hybrid biography/memoirs?

Monday musings on Australian literature: Finlay Lloyd’s 20/40 Publishing Prize, progress report

/ Whispering Gums / 14 Comments

Nearly three years ago, I reported on a new literary prize, the 20/40 Publishing Prize which was being offered by the non-profit publisher, Finlay Lloyd. It has now been awarded in both 2023 and 2024, and preparations for announcing the 2025 winners are well under way.

Briefly, the aim of the award is to “encourage and support writing of the highest quality” by offering publication rather than cash. It has a specific criterion, however, as conveyed by its title: the works, which can be fiction or nonfiction, must be between 20,000 and 40,000 words. The submissions are read blind, and the judging panel includes the previous year’s winners. This means the judges for the 2025 award are Sonya Voumard, Penelope Cottier and Nick Hartland, alongside publisher, Julian Davies, and longtime Finlay Lloyd supporter (and writer), John Clanchy. 

The winners to date have been:

  • 2023: Rebecca Burton, Ravenous girls (fiction, my review)
  • 2023: Kim Kelly, Ladies’ Rest and Writing Room (fiction, my review)
  • 2024: PS Cottier and NG Hartland, The thirty-one legs of Vladimir Putin (fiction, my review)
  • 2024: Sonya Voumard, Tremor (nonfiction, my review)

Most awards, particularly those coming from a small organisation, take time to build – and some disappear into the ether. So I worried that this award might not last – not only because Finlay Lloyd is small but also because this shorter form is not popular with everyone. I am therefore thrilled to hear that the third annual winners are on track for announcement, and that Finlay Lloyd is now calling for entries for the 2026 prize.

This is where today’s post comes in. I don’t make a practice of announcing calls for competition entries, but this attracted me for a couple of reasons. First, I often wonder what difference awards make to authors and their sales. Well, while I don’t know what the initial print runs were, Finlay Lloyd says that The thirty-one legs of Vladimir Putin has been reprinted twice since its first run, and Tremor is about to go into reprint. This must be encouraging, surely, for writers?

The other relates to the fact that Finlay Lloyd wants to offer a fiction and a nonfiction award each year. This didn’t happen in 2023 because they did not receive enough quality entries, but it happened in 2024. Sonya Voumard’s Tremor is an excellent example of novella-length (is there a better description for this) nonfiction.

In my report on the Winners Conversation last year, I shared Voumard’s discussion about length. She said that there’s “the assumption that to be marketable you need to write 55,000 plus words”. She had the bones of her story, but had then started filling them out, when, in reality, it was just “flab”. The competition, and then Julian Davies’ editing guidance, taught her that she had a good “muscular story”. So she set about “decluttering”. The end result is interesting, because this book doesn’t have that spare feeling common to short works, which is not at all a criticism of spare writing. However, Tremor feels tight. It has little extraneous detail, but it’s not pared back to a single core. I found it informative but also a personal and moving read, and I bought a few copies as gifts last year. I would love to read more shorter-length works of nonfiction.

All this is precursor to sharing that last week, I received a Media Release from Finlay Lloyd, in which publisher Julian Davies says:

As 20/40 builds momentum, our enthusiasm for encouraging this compact scope for both fiction and nonfiction has continued to grow. The length of 20,000 to 40,000 words allows for the rich development of an imaginative story or factual concept while being tight enough to encourage focus and succinctness. It’s a form we love and believe is apt for our moment in the history of thought and invention.

Each year we support the winning authors through a close and probing editorial process that works towards finding the best possible version of their book. We also take delight in a design process where books are created that feel like artefacts, that ask to be picked up and engaged with.

Submissions for 2026 will open in December. The prize is open to emerging and established writers, but they must be Australian citizens, permanent residents, or valid visa holders. It is a prose prize, but is open to all genres – as the winners to date demonstrate – including hybrid forms.

The original NaNoWriMo might have ended, but that doesn’t mean November (or any month of your choice) isn’t a good month for giving writing a go, particularly if there’s a publisher out there waiting for your work. For more information, check the prize’s webpage.

Monday musings on Australian literature: National Poetry Month 2025

/ Whispering Gums / 13 Comments

National Poetry Month – in Australia – is now five years old, and once again it is spearheaded by Red Room Poetry, which should not need any introduction by now to regular readers here. This year it runs a bit over a month, from 30 July to 3 September.

As before, they have appointed Poetry Month Ambassadors, with 2025’s being author and journalist Stan Grant, comedian Suren Jayemanne, screenwriter Luke Davies, rapper Dobby, musician Leah Senior, model Nyaluak Leth, and author and broadcaster Julia Baird. (You can read more about the Ambassadors on this dedicated page.) Arts Hub reports that this year they are introducing a Youth Ambassadors program “to showcase and foster the next generation of Australian poetic talent”. I understand that there will be four Poetry Month Youth Ambassadors, and that they will be announced online, tomorrow, 12 August, in time for International Youth Day.

Red Room is running similar events and activities to those they’ve run before – the 30in30 daily poems/reflections/writing prompts, and the National Poetry Month Gala, which will be on 28 August at the State Library of NSW (and also live-streamed via Red Room Poetry’s YouTube). This year’s 30in30 features, reported thatshowblog, “an impressive roster of contemporary Australian voices including Evelyn Araluen, David Brooks, Winnie Dunn, Nardi Simpson, and Tyson Yunkaporta, alongside emerging talents like Grace Yee and Madison Godfrey”.

New events and initiatives this year include (though some are now past!):

  • Art After Hours: Ekphastic Fantastic at AGNSW (Wednesday 6 August)
  • Middle of the Air: Lyric Writing Workshop (Wednesday 6 August)
  • Hatred of Poetry Great Debate (Thursday 14 August) at the Wheeler Centre in Melbourne: arguing that the hatred of poetry is justified will be Evelyn Araluen, Sez, and Suren Jayemanne, with their opponents being Eloise Grills, PiO, and Vidya Rajan.
  • Poetry After Dark: Panel & Performance at Dymocks, Sydney (Friday 22 August)
  • Middle of the Air Competition for poetry set to song, offered in partnership with the ABC: entries close on 1 September. The two winning songs/poems will be broadcast on The Music Show in November (More info here)
  • Poetry and Film Showcase (Wednesday 3 September) at the Sydney Opera House

Internet searches reveal more events – such as this page from What’s On City of Sydney. It feels like this month is becoming established in Australia’s literary calendar.

Poetry posts since the 2024 National Poetry Month

How slack have I been? I have only written two posts on poetry since last August:

I do have several poetry books on my TBR, including those mentioned in the World Poetry Day post, and Gregory Day’s gorgeously produced Southsightedness.

Red Room’s 10 essential Australian poetry collections

On 31 July, to herald National Poetry Month, The Guardian published “10 essential Australian collections that will change how you read”. It was compiled by Red Room Poetry’s artistic directors, David Stavanger and Nicole Smede, who said in their introduction:

This list isn’t about ranking or canon-building, but about spotlighting collections that crack language open, unsettle expectations, and echo long after the last line. From poetic noir, epic love lines and jazz-inflected dreamscapes to sovereign storytelling and lyrical confrontations with history, these books remind us of poetry’s unmatched ability to hold truth, tension, and transformation.

The collections are, in the (mysterious to me) order given:

Ali Cobby Eckermann, Inside my mother
  • Ali Cobby Eckermann, Inside my mother (2015, my review)
  • Dorothy Porter, The monkey’s mask (2000, on my TBR still, but I have read Porter’s The bee hut)
  • Sarah Holland-Batt, The jaguar (2022, on my TBR, Kate’s and kimbofo’s review)
  • Samuel Wagan Watson, Smoke encrypted whispers (2004)
  • Bill Neidjie, Story about feeling (1989)
  • Luke Davies, Totem (2004)
  • Judith Wright, The moving image (1946)
  • Alison Whittaker, Blakwork (2018, Bill’s and Brona’s posts)
  • Nam Le, 36 Ways of writing a Vietnamese poem (2024)
  • Shastra Deo and Kate Lilley, Best of Australian poems 2024 (2024)

It’s a good list, not the only list, because nothing is, but a good list. It’s diverse in authorship, and it includes a verse novel, a Stella winner, Judith Wright from the 1940s, and a Best of … anthology.

At the end of the article, The Guardian asks a question, so I’m asking it too:

Do you have a favourite Australian poetry book that wasn’t mentioned here? (Or any other poetry collection, particularly if you are not Australian!) Please share it in the comments.

Notes:

  • Links on writers’ names are to my posts for the writer (though the posts aren’t always about poetry).
  • Image: I assume Red Room Poetry is happy for their Poetry Month banner to be used in articles and posts about the month.

Monday musings on Australian literature: Quiet achievers 1, Terri-ann White of Upswell Publishing

/ Whispering Gums / 28 Comments

Over the years I have started several Monday Musings sub-series, some of which I’ve nearly completed (such as those on writers centres and on supporting genres) while others are still continuing (like Forgotten writers). Today, I’m introducing a new one. It was inspired by an email I received the other day from Terri-ann White of Upswell Publishing. It occurred to me that not only was here a quiet achiever, but that people like her were worth posting about.

Okay, so those in the industry will say that White is no quiet achiever. After all, she’s been around publishing for a long time, and successfully so. However, for the general reading public, people in the industry are not necessarily well-known, hence this new little sub-series. I hope to focus on the people more than their companies, but they and their jobs are intertwined. Still, I hope to at least give a sense of who they are. I start with Terri-ann White, but there will be more …

Terri-ann White

In 2022, I wrote about two new indie publishers, of which Upswell Publishing was one. As I wrote then, it came across as a passion project, but the passion project of someone with significant cred. It was triggered by – hmm – adversity. White had been running UWAP (University of Western Australia Press) since 2006 when, in 2019, the University announced that it would close its publishing arm. As most of us know, that didn’t happen, but White left in 2020 anyhow, unhappy with how she had been treated.

Not long after, on 25 December 2020 in fact, the Sydney Morning Herald’s Jason Steger reported that White had a plan. She wanted to publish books that for some reason couldn’t find an easy route to publication, “books that are too quiet, or the authors are older than 25, that are not about misery, that are not about trends”. She wanted to publish books, wrote Jason, “that speak to each other across a set of intellectual interests, and how they work language and revere it”. And so, Upswell Publishing was born.

Books are in White’s blood. As Upswell’s About page tells it, all her working life, from 1980 on, “has been arranged around books and ideas: as a bookseller, writer, publisher and organiser of public events involving literature and writing”. This new venture, however, broke new ground. For a start, it has been set up as a not-for-profit company, with three impressive women, Carmen Lawrence, Linda Savage and White, as its directors. It also has DGR status, which means that (Australian) donations to them are tax-deductible. Their tagline is “Support the future of Australian literary writing and publishing”. They hope that “the generosity of rusted-on, passionate readers” will help them extend their “work of commissioning writers and building audiences”.

Upswell is also selling a bit differently. While individual books can be bought from them directly or from booksellers, they also have a subscription program. I subscribed the first two years, but not since. They have been experimenting with their subscription packages, but my main issue is that I’m a bit too overwhelmed with books to keep subscribing (for a while, at least). I did however preorder two of their 2025 books. One has arrived, with Jessica White’s Silence is my habitat: Ecobiographical essays, to come.

Despite this, however, I have been watching and drooling, partially attracted, I admit, to their recognisable and gorgeous design, but also the content. White is, I believe, achieving what she set out to do, which was to publish distinctive works across narrative nonfiction, fiction and poetry, to publish books that “elude easy categorising and work somewhat against the grain of current trends … books that may have trouble finding a home in the contemporary Australian publishing sector”.

It hasn’t all been smooth sailing. In 2022 she was, as publisher, unwittingly caught up in the plagiarism controversy over John Hughes’ novel The dogs (my review) which was initially longlisted for the Miles Franklin Award.

If you really want to understand who she is, and what she believes, check out this opinion piece she wrote for Seesaw in September 2021. She wrote of

a withering of success for Australian literature of the ground-breaking variety. I think you’ll know what I’m getting at here: books that take more concentration, perhaps, with less of a direct connection to the idea of entertainment. By which I don’t mean the equivalence of cod liver oil – good for you but it’s unfathomable that you are sinking it down your gullet. I could be more explicit and name some names often cited as difficult writers: Shirley Hazzard, Randolph Stow, Beverley Farmer, Elizabeth Jolley, Kim Scott, Gerard Murnane. Or I could name literary forms that are not novels (including poetry and short stories, for instance).

Or, see her report, ‘There is nothing else quite like it’, in Books+Publishing about the Sharjah Publishers Conference, which she describes as “a corrective from the world of English-language commercial publishing, and a rich chance to meet the Arab world’s publishing enterprises, along with a raft of Eastern European book people and representatives from the wide-ranging Indian book industry.” Tells you something about her publishing philosophy.

Then there’s her interview in the Australian Book Review (ABR, November 2022, paywalled). Regarding the value of reviews, she says that they are “Very significant for the author and, to a lesser extent, the publisher. Potentially useful for finding readers”. And, regarding whether she thought individuality was a casualty of a highly competitive market, she responded:

No. I’m in this for the long haul. Even books that flop in their time end up in libraries and second-hand bookshops, ripe for discovery. The prospect of a living wage for writers, on the other hand, is even less likely these days.

I love this long view of what writing an publishing is about.

Finally, I’ll return to the email that inspired this post. It announced that Upswell’s book, Abbas El-Zein’s memoir, Bullet paper rock: A memoir of words and wars, had won the 2025 National Biography Award (having already won in the 2024 Queensland Literary Awards and been shortlisted in the 2024 NSW Premier’s Literary Awards). The NBA judges called it “a work of rare linguistic and emotional insight, and a tribute to the resilience of the human condition”. Awards aren’t the be-all and end-all of publishing, but it is still be a thrill for authors and their publishers when they win.

Any thoughts on this quiet achiever – and her contribution to the Australian literary scene?

Monday musings of Australian literature: National Tree Day

/ Whispering Gums / 31 Comments

Around ten years ago, I wrote a post on National Arbor Day. It was inspired by a Library of America story. The thing is that then I didn’t, and I still don’t hear, about Arbor Day anymore. Indeed, Mr Gums and I reminisced that it was mainly through school that we heard about it at all. Nor do I hear much about National Eucalypt Day, which I wrote about 8 years ago. I do hear sometimes about various tree-planting initiatives, but I was surprised to hear on ABC Classic FM on the weekend that Sunday was National Tree Day! A bit of research took me to the National Tree Day website.

Here, I learned that it was established in 1996, by Planet Ark, and that it has “grown into Australia’s largest community tree planting and nature care event”. The site continues that it is “a call to action for all Australians to get their hands dirty and give back to their community”.  I also learned that they run three tree days, whose dates for this year are:

  • Schools Tree Day Friday 25th July 2025 (set for the last Friday in July)
  • National Tree Day Sunday 27th July 2025 (set for the last Sunday in July)
  • Tropical Tree Day Sunday 7th December 2025

I said above that I don’t hear about Arbor Day anymore, so I checked Wikipedia. Under Australia, on the Arbor Day article, it says:

Arbor Day has been observed in Australia since the first event took place in Adelaide, South Australia on the 20th June 1889. National Schools Tree Day is held on the last Friday of July for schools and National Tree Day the last Sunday in July throughout Australia. Many states have Arbour Day, although Victoria has an Arbour Week, which was suggested by Premier Rupert (Dick) Hamer in the 1980s.

The implication is that it is still observed. It doesn’t, though, seem to get much publicity. I could research this, but so could you if you are interested! Meanwhile, I plan to use this post to share some tree quotes from Australian novels, and a couple of tree-inspired covers, as my little tribute to National Tree Day. 

My first quote is one I’ve shared before, because it’s my first memory of a tree playing a significant role in a novel. I’m referring to Ethel Turner’s children’s book, Seven little Australians (1894), and the death of our beloved Judy:

There was a tree falling, one of the great, gaunt, naked things that had been ringbarked long ago. All day it had swayed to and fro, rotten through and through; now there came up across the plain a puff of wind, and down it went before it. One wild ringing cry Judy gave, then she leaped across the ground, her arms outstretched to the little lad running with laughing eyes and lips straight to death.

This is realism. The tree has an important role to play in the plot. Another memorable novel featuring trees is Murray Bail’s Eucalyptus (1998). There is a narrative, of course, but it is framed around multiple species of gum trees, and opens with this:

We could begin with desertorum, common name hooked mallee … and anyway, the very word, desert-or-um, harks back to a stale version of the national landscape and from there in a more or less straight line onto the national character, all those linings of the soul and the larynx, which have their origin in the bush, so it is said, the poetic virtues (can you believe it?) of being belted about by droughts, bushfires, smelly sheep and so on; and let’s not forget the isolation …

As you can tell from the tone, the trees – although very real right down to their botanic descriptions – also set the novel’s tone and have something to say about Australian life and character.

More recent is Madelaine Dickie’s Red can origami (2019, my review). It is set in the Kimberley, but here is a description of a boab tree in Perth, a place where they don’t belong. It symbolises displacement:

The boab’s bark is cracked, its leaves are withered, and its roots strain from the soil, as if it’s planning on splitting town, hitching north.

There are more, but I’ll end with a writer who is loved for his landscape descriptions, Robbie Arnott. It’s hard to choose, but I’m going to use the one I used in my review of his novel, Limberlost, because it is a beautiful example of the landscape mirroring the emotions of the character moving through it. It occurs after a beautiful lovemaking scene:

Afterwards he’d driven them across the plateau through white-fingered fog, through ghostly stands of cider gums, through thick-needled pencil pines, through plains of button grass and tarns, through old rock and fresh lichen, until the road twisted and dived into a golden valley. Here at winter’s end, thousands of wattles had unfurled their gaudy colours. As they descended from the heights their vision was swarmed by the yellow fuzz. Every slope, every scree, every patch of forest, every glimpse through every window was a scene of flowering gold.

The book cover for this novel depicts what I assume is a stylised image of a Huon Pine with a boat, made by the protagonist using this wood.

Trees – or parts of trees, like branches or bark – often feature on book covers, because trees evoke so much in our consciousness. I guess they are easy to stimulate emotions in readers. They can be majestic and grand, or stark and threatening, or soft and sheltering – and suggest the associated feelings.

However, in doing a little research for this post, I stumbled across an old discussion about trees on book covers for crime novels. One was a 2007 blog post titled “Fright time in the forest”. The post broke down the four ways trees had been used on crime novel covers. There are those

  • used “more or less anthropomorphically–that is, as stand-ins for human-like monsters”
  • used “to establish a sense of desolation and bleakness, or mystery”
  • ominous-looking tree fronts, “on which the bark-encased stars loom belligerently overhead like villains preparing to fall upon and do violence to their victims”
  • used to “convey a mysterious atmosphere” through effects like fog, snow, a nighttime sky. 

Some of these overlap, I think, but I love the blogger’s conclusion, which suggests that

the designers of crime novels–like the storytellers who wanted to warn children off from wandering into the deep woods–have sought to associate trees with danger, disorientation, and despondency, all in the interests of book sales. One wonders whether this is healthy for the future of forests, a rapidly dwindling resource–or even healthy for the future of mankind, which might also become a dwindling resource.

I wonder whether book cover designers ever think of their larger responsibilities (besides garnering sales, I mean)!

I have strayed from where I started, which was to pay tribute to trees and share some favourite covers. However, this little discussion, which was picked up by England’s The Guardian was too interesting to ignore.

Any thoughts on trees in novels or on covers?

Monday musings on Australian literature: Factory novels

/ Whispering Gums / 21 Comments

“I love a factory novel”! So wrote Buried-In-Print blogger Marcie on my post earlier this year on the Australasian Book Society. I do too, I replied, and noted to myself that this could be a topic for Monday Musings. I have not done as much research as I would have liked, but I figured I never will, so why not just provide an intro and then call in all of you, the brains trust, for your contributions.

Factory novels are, essentially, a subset of working class literature. They emerged in the 19th century as a result of the Industrial Revolution. They critiqued the exploitation of workers, and identified the poverty and social problems that accompanied industrialisation. Some also explored attempts to improve the situation. Dickens was a major exponent of writing about social problems, but one that made a big impression on me was Elizabeth Gaskell in North and south (read before blogging). Her Mary Barton (on my TBR) also falls within this group.

I love factory novels because the best are written with such heart and passion, with such desire to bring about change. As I’ve said before, I don’t believe literature (or any art) has to do this, but I enjoy art that does.

Selection of Australian factory novels

This small selection includes novels in which factory work and factory workers are the prime focus of the story. There are many other novels which incorporate factory themes or storylines, that I haven’t included. I was so tempted to expand my definition and include other sorts of labourers, such as wharf labourers, for example, but decided to keep it to my original goal.

The books are listed in alphabetical order by author, though I did consider ordering them by date of publication (from 1926 to 2024).

  • Mena Calthorpe, The dyehouse (1961) (my review): set in a Sydney dyehouse, this novel is about the impact on workers of capitalism-at-all-costs
  • Dennis Glover, Factory 19 (2020): set in the very near future, 2022, it depicts Hobart, devastated by economic recession, being recreated as a new industrial colony titled Factory 19 which is fixed in the pre-digital past of the 1940s. What can go wrong!
  • Rosalie Ham, Molly (2024) (Lisa’s review): prequel to Ham’s The dressmaker (read before blogging); starts with Molly helping to support her struggling family from her backbreaking work in a corset factory (when she’s not demonstrating for women’s rights)
  • Dorothy Hewitt, Bobbin up (1959) (kimbofo’s review): set in inner-city Sydney and about, says, kimbofo, “a bunch of hard-working women whose lives are dominated by their long shifts in the [woollen mill] factory”, not to mention the restrictions on their lives imposed by their gender.
  • David Ireland, The unknown industrial prisoner (1971) (Bill’s review): set in an oil refinery, a winner of the Miles Franklin Literary Award. Text classics describes it as “a fiercely brilliant comic portrait of Australia in the grip of a dehumanising labour system.”
  • Ruth Park, The harp in the south (1948) (read before blogging): several of the Darcie family work in factories; a warm-hearted novel in which Park documents the lives of people living on factory salaries and trying to lead a good life.
  • Katharine Susannah Prichard, Working bullocks (1926): includes depictions of a timber mill, and the broader issue of working conditions and industrial accidents.
Book cover

Not surprisingly, most factory novels tell their stories from the point of view of the workers. They chronicle the precarity of life when salary is low, rights are few, and there is little time or energy left for finding ways out. In some of the stories, the workers organise in the hope of forcing change and improving their lot, but our authors are under no illusion that this is easy. Most of the novels are contemporary – that is written around the time they are set – but Ham’s is historical fiction, and Glover’s is, technically, technically futuristic.

So now, my question to you is: Do you like factory novels, and would you like to share your favourites (from any nationality of writer)?

Monday musings on Australian literature: Prizes for Humour Writing

/ Whispering Gums / 31 Comments

There are not, apparently, many prizes for humour writing around the world, but we have two here in Australia, the Russell Prize and the John Clarke Prize. Those from other countries include the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize (UK), the Thurber Prize for American Humour, and the Leacock Memorial Medal for Canadian Humour. Do you know them? I’d be interested to know of your experience with them, but meanwhile, I’ll move on to the two Australian ones I’m featuring today.

Russel Prize for Humour Writing

According to the Prize website, this prize was established through a bequest from farmer and businessman Peter Wentworth Russell. Its aim is to “to celebrate, recognise and encourage humorous writing, and to promote public interest in this genre”. Established in 2014, it was the first award to recognise the art of humour writing in Australia and, argues the website, makes “a long overdue acknowledgment of the genre” here. They believe it will “promote public interest in humour writing just as its prestigious international counterparts have done”.

The prize is awarded biennially by the State Library of New South Wales, and the winner receives $10,000.

Associated with this award is a second prize, a Humour Writing for Young People Award for “a work promoting humour and championing laughter”. It is aimed at primary school level readers (5-12 years) and “recognises the role of humour in encouraging children to read”. The winner of this award receives $5,000. I love the spirit behind this.

Past winners

A full list of the winners and shortlists can be found at Wikipedia, but here are the winners to date:

  • 2015: Bernard Cohen, The antibiography of Robert F. Menzies (Fourth Estate)
  • 2017: Steve Toltz, Quicksand (Simon and Schuster) (my review)
  • 2019: David Cohen, The hunter and other stories of men (Transit Lounge)
  • 2021: Nakkiah Lui, Black is the new white (Allen and Unwin)
  • 2023: Martin McKenzie-Murray, The speechwriter (Scribe)
  • 2025: Madeleine Gray, The green dot (Henry Holt) (Theresa’s review) : “brings a new complexity to the genre sometimes called ‘rom-com’. It’s sweet but also sour. It’s terrifically funny as well as Anna Karenina sad … hilarious about the tedious realities of the modern workplace” (excerpted from the judges’ comments)

Writers shortlisted for this award over the years include some I have read and posted on, such as Trent Dalton for Boy swallows universe (my review), Chris Flynn’s Mammoth (my review) and Sun Jung, My name is Gucci (my review). They also include other writers I know or have reviewed or mentioned, just not their shortlisted books, like Annabel Crabb, Tracey Sorenson, Ryan O’Neill and Siang Lu. And, of course, there are new writers that I’m really pleased to hear about.

John Clarke Prize for Humour Writing

The second award is very new one. Titled the John Clarke Prize for Humour Writing, it is named for Australia’s much loved satirist and writer, John Clarke (1948–2017). It has been added to the suite of Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards, so will presumably be made annually. The award, which was established by the Victorian Government and the Clarke family, was open in its first year to books of comedic fiction, nonfiction and poetry published in 2023 and 2024. It offers a cash prize of $25,000.

The first award was made this year, 2025, and it went to Robert Skinner’s I’d rather not say. I gave this to Son Gums for his birthday this year, but I’m not sure he’s read it. I certainly haven’t, though I’d like to. However, kimbofo has (her review). She comments that Skinner “knows how to craft a compelling narrative using jeopardy, self-deprecating humour and a deft turn of phrase”. This just makes me more keen. She also says that it was shortlisted for the Small Publishers’ Adult Book of the Year (in the 2024 ABIAs) and that The Guardian named it one of the Best Australian Books of 2023.

This award, as both the Clarke family and the Wheeler Centre’s CEO have been quoted as saying, is “a fitting tribute” to one of our greatest satirists. They hope it will help the careers of future humour writers. It will certainly help Skinner, whom the ABC reports as saying:

“When you’re writing in Australia, in the back of your mind, the question is always, How long can I keep affording to do this?” he says.

“And now the answer is: slightly longer.”

Echoing, in other words, what many authors say about awards with a decent cash prize. It buys them time.

I enjoy humorous writing, particularly at the satirical end of the spectrum, so I love that there are some awards aimed at supporting this sort of writing. I fear there’s almost a natural tendency in readers to equate better with serious, but that is not necessarily the case.

So now, my question to you is: Do you know of any other awards for Humour Writing, and, regardless, do you like Humour Writing? I’d love to hear anything you’d like to share about this.

Monday musings on Australian literature: Collaborative story-telling between First Nations Australian and white writers

/ Whispering Gums / 9 Comments
National NAIDOC Logo (2025)

NAIDOC Week 2025 started yesterday, and as I have done for many years now, I am devoting my NAIDOC Week Monday Musings to celebrating First Nations writers in some way.

This year is a particularly special year because it marks NAIDOC Week’s 50th anniversary, 50 years it says, “of honoring and elevating Indigenous voices, culture, and resilience”. The 2025 theme is “The Next Generation: Strength, Vision & Legacy,” and is intended to celebrate not only past achievements achievements, “but the bright future ahead, empowered by the strength of our young leaders, the vision of our communities, and the legacy of our ancestors”. 

.Now, over the years, I have written posts on a wide range of First Nations writing and storytelling, was wondering what to write about this year, when a couple of weeks ago this idea of collaborative writing projects popped into my head because I’ve come across a few in the last few years. Then, at the ACT Literary Awards last Thursday night, another such collaboration was not only shortlisted but won the Nonfiction award. The book is Warra Warra Wai: How Indigenous Australians discovered Captain Cook & what they tell about the coming of the Ghost People, and is by Darren Rix and Craig Cormick. That sealed the deal!

In the introduction to this book, Darren and Craig, the names they use to sign off the Introduction, say that:

This book has been a blackfella-whitefella collaboration, because too much of our history has been written by one voice only, and we need to find more collaborative ways to tell our past, present and future.

I would love to discuss all the collaborations I’m going to share in this post – including researching how the collaborations worked, who did what, and how differences (if any) were resolved – but that would be a big project. I have, however, met some of the writers involved, and have followed some of the projects on social media, so I am aware of some of the processes the writers followed. For now, though, I will share what Darren and Craig say in their Introduction:

In this collaboration, we each worked to our strengths. Craig did most of the work in the archives, and Darren did most of the oral interviews – and the people we talked to got the final say on the text. The stories we gathered belong to the individuals and communities we visited. This is their book.

Selected list of collaborative books

This list is presented in alphabetical order by the name of the first author listed on the title. I did think about dividing it into two lists – one fiction, one nonfiction – but decided that all these books aim to share truths about our society and culture, whether told within a factual or imaginative framework, so one list it is. (Links on authors’ names are to my posts on that author.)

There has been a lot collaborative publishing in the children’s literature sphere, over a significant period of time, but I’ve been less aware, until relatively recently, of similar activity in the adult sphere.

Wayne Bergmann and Madelaine Dickie, Some people want to shoot me (memoir, Fremantle Press, 2024, on my TBR): shortlisted for Nonfiction Book of the Year in the Western Australian Premier’s Book Awards.

Craig Cormick and Harold Ludwick, On a barbarous coast (historical fiction, Allen & Unwin, 2020, my review): a re-imagining of what happened when Captain Cook’s Endeavour was wrecked off the coast of Far North Queensland.

Aaron Fa’Aoso with Michelle Scott Tucker, So far, so good: On connection, loss, laughter and the Torres Strait (memoir, Pantera Press, 2022, Bill’s review): apparently the first memoir by a Torres Strait Islander to be commercially published, which means it addresses “the under-representation of Torres Strait Islander perspectives in Australian life”. You can read more about it on Tucker’s website.

Aaron Fa’Aoso and Michelle Scott Tucker with Lyn White, Spirit of the crocodile (YA fiction, Allen & Unwin, 2025, on my TBR, Bill’s review): a coming-of-age novel set against the challenges to the Saibai island community of climate change.

Carl Merrison and Hakea Hustler, with Dub Leffler (illus.), Black cockatoo (YA fiction, Magabala Books, 2018, my review): pleasingly, this book was in my Top 10 visited posts last year, and is in the Top 20 this year to date.

Boori Monty Pryor and Meme McDonald, Maybe tomorrow (memoir, 1998, my review): one of the first books I reviewed on this blog. Pryor has focused much of his life’s work on helping young people feel strong in their culture.

Boori Monty Pryor and Jan Ormerod, Shake a leg (Children’s picture book, Allen & Unwin, 2010): one of several children’s book collaborations involving Boori Monty Pryor.

Darren Rix and Craig Cormick, Warra Warra Wai: How Indigenous Australians discovered Captain Cook & what they tell about the coming of the Ghost People (history, Scribner, 2024, on my TBR): follows Cook’s journey up “Australia’s” east coast, visiting the places he renamed and gathering the local people’s stories.

Nicolas Rothwell and Alison Nampitjinpa Anderson, Yilkari: A desert suite (“unclassifiable” but fiction, Text Publishing, July 2025, on my TBR)

As the word “selected” conveys, this is not intended to be a comprehensive list, but an introduction to the range of collaborative writing that’s been happening. However, I (and readers of this blog I’m sure) would love to hear of other First Nations-settler collaborations, including from other parts of the world.

Click here for my previous NAIDOC Week-related Monday Musings.

Have you read any First Nations-white writer collaborations? And if so, care to recommend any?