Monday musings

Monday musings on Australian literature: Let’s get physical – The Red Centre

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A couple of years ago I wrote three Let’s get physical posts in which I focused on physical descriptions of places in Australia. Since, I am currently in Central Australia (for my third time), I thought it would be good to write another post or two in this series. Central Australia – or the Alice Springs Region, or the Alice-MacDonnell Ranges area – comprises the southern part of the Northern Territory, and includes the famous sites of Uluru and Kata Tjuta.

Alice Springs, itself, is the second major city in the Northern Territory, after the capital, Darwin. My introduction to the Alice was through Nevil Shute’s novel A town like Alice, but but in fact very little of the book is set in Alice Springs. Eleanor Hogan author of Alice Springs in New South’s Cities series said recently in a Wheeler centre interview:

I was particularly interested in the idea of Alice as a microcosm of national identity and history. It’s not a metaphor that you can take to literal extremes, but there are plenty of conundrums and paradoxes about life in Alice as the premier outback town at the heart of the country that intrigued me.

Central Australia is the quintessential outback. It’s geologically old – very flat with low mountain ranges which were formed 350-300 million years ago – and the earth is red. Population is sparse and distances great. It’s replete with heroes and “characters” like explorer-prospector Lasseter, missionary and Flying Doctor Service founder John Flynn, anthropoligist Ted Strehlow, and indigenous artist Albert Namatjira. It has been criss-crossed by many explorers, and it is where Robyn Davidson started her across-desert trek with camels, chronicled in her book (and the later film), Tracks. And it is, most importantly, home to large communities of indigenous people, who, according to Wikipedia, make up about 50% of the region’s population.

Since my focus here is the physical, though, I won’t go further into the history (or we’ll be here all day). The most famous (white) explorer of colonial Australia in this region was John McDouall Stuart, whose south-north expeditions resulted in the establishment of the Australian Overland Telegraph Line and of the main route from Port Augusta to Darwin (now known as the Stuart Highway). Stuart’s journals (covering 1858 to 1862) are available at Project Gutenberg Australia. I’ll share a couple of excerpts from the Journal of Mr Stuart’s fourth expedition – fixing the centre of the continent. From March to September, 1860. These entries describe the landscape a little south of the Alice:

At eight miles the red sand hills commence, covered with spinifex; and on the small flats mulga scrub, which continues to the base of the hill. Red loose sand; no water (Tuesday, 3 April)

Finke River

Finke River, Glen Helen Gorge, West MacDonnells

The creek is very large, with the finest gum-trees we have yet seen, all sizes and heights. This seems to be a favourite place for the natives to camp, as there are eleven worleys in one encampment. We saw here a number of new parrots, the black cockatoo, and numerous other birds. The creek runs over a space of about two miles, coming from the west; the bed sandy. After leaving it … we passed over a plain of as fine a country as any man would wish to see–a beautiful red soil covered with grass a foot high; after that it becomes a little sandy. At fifteen miles we got into some sand hills, but the feed was still most abundant. I have not passed through such splendid country since I have been in the colony. I only hope it may continue. The creek I have named the Finke, after William Finke, Esquire, of Adelaide, my sincere and tried friend … (Wednesday 4 April)

It was he who “named” the MacDonnell Ranges. His journals are beautiful in their description of the geology, plants and fauna of the region. He also notes the presence of local indigenous people (either by seeing them or their tracks or campsites).

Uluru

Uluru – what more can you say. Ancient and sublime!

A little later came Ernest Giles, who “named” Mount Olga (now returned to the indigenous name of Kata Tjuta). The following comes from his Australia twice traversed:

Its appearance [Ayers Rock, now Uluru] and outline is most imposing, for it is simply a mammoth monolith that rises out of the sandy desert soil around, and stands with a perpendicular and totally inaccessible face at all points, except one slope near the north-west end, and that at least is but a precarious climbing ground to a height of more than 1100 feet. Down its furrowed and corrugated sides the trickling of water for untold ages has descended in times of rain, and for long periods after, until the drainage ceased, into sandy basins at its feet. The dimensions of this vast slab are over two miles long, over one mile through, and nearly a quarter of a mile high. The great difference between it and Mount Olga [now Kata Tjuta] is in the rock formation, for this is one solid granite stone, and is part and parcel of the original rock, which, having been formed after its state of fusion in the beginning, has there remained, while the aged Mount Olga has been thrown up subsequently from below. Mount Olga is the more wonderful and grotesque; Mount Ayers the more ancient and sublime. (July 1874)

And now, something written by an indigenous woman from a book titled Women of the centre (edited by Adele Pring, 1990). The story-teller is Ruth Mackenzie (b. 1919), an Aranda/Aluritja woman, born just south of the Northern Territory border. This particular description is of country a little further south again, but is still relevant. I’m including it because she’s describing traditional Aboriginal knowledge:

He [husband] told us stories … All this country was jungle. That’s a long way back and there used to be big snakes but the seasons changed. Drought and that came and buried everything up and what they call Yandama sandhills the other side of Lake Frome – all those sandhills – that’s all the trees that’s covered up. I think they’ve found animals there. Animals were bigger – wombat, kangaroo. Everything was a lot larger than what they are now. That’s what he said. Australia was different from what it is now, like it’s all barren country now. It was like Darwin I suppose.

For those of you inspired to read about the region, the following books may be of interest:

Many more books are listed on Wikipedia’s Australian outback literature of the 20th century page.

The majority of Australians live on the coast and are drawn to the sea. Not me. I am drawn to the deserts and the Outback. Maybe this post has explained why?

Note: An excellent discussion of “literary constructions” about the Centre can be found in Chapter 8 of The Cultural Values of the Central Ranges: a preliminary report (for the region’s inclusion as a World Heritage area) (2008).

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Monday musings on Australian literature: Guest post by Annette Marfording of the Bellingen Writers Festival

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Courtesy: Annette Marfording

Courtesy: Annette Marfording

Having been intrigued by comments made by Annette Marfording, Program Director of the Bellingen Readers and Writers Festival, about running a literary festival, I approached her about writing a guest post for my blog. I thought her experience might intrigue at least some of my readers here too.

Marfording chairs one-on-one conversations and panels at the Festival, and is also a broadcaster at Bellingen’s community radio station 2bbb fm for which she created a monthly program on Australian writers and their work. Marfording’s recently published book, Celebrating Australian Writing: Conversations with Australian Authors, is based on in-depth interviews broadcast on this program. All profits from the sale of the book will go to the Indigenous Literacy Foundation. What a generous gesture! I have bought a copy of this book, which includes writers like David Malouf, Cate Kennedy and Larissa Berendt. You can too at lulu.com.

Now, here’s Annette’s post …

Some time ago, Sue asked me as Program Director of the Bellingen Writers Festival (full name Bellingen Readers and Writers Festival) to do a guest post for her wonderful blog on the joys and challenges of organising a writers’ festival. I’m delighted to do so.

This year the Bellingen Writers Festival (full name Bellingen Readers and Writers Festival) had its fifth birthday. In the period since our first in 2011, there’s been an explosion of new literary festivals all around Australia. With the exception of big city specialised sub-festivals, such as the Sydney Jewish Writers’ Festival and its Festival of Speculative Fiction, and some school or suburb festivals, such as the Abbotsleigh Literary Festival and the Sutherland Shire Writers’ Festival, most of the new festivals are in small regional towns and not specialised in any particular genre. Even though not all of them survive (for example the Gloucester Writers Festival), at the time of writing there are at least nine such regional festivals in New South Wales alone in addition to the big ones: the Sydney Writers’ Festival, the Byron Bay Writers’ Festival and the Newcastle Writers Festival.

On the one hand, this proliferation of festivals is wonderful for readers and book sales and demonstrates that the book is not dead. On the other, for several reasons, it is cause for concern:

  1. All these festivals compete for government grants and sponsorships.
  2. They also compete for authors, and understandably authors tend to prefer the greater publicity and book sales associated with the big festivals. Our invitations are often declined on the grounds that the author is overseas at the time/wants to concentrate on her/his next book/can’t possibly attend every writers’ festival in the country.
  3. Several of the festivals are scheduled in winter, enhancing the competition for authors during those months.
  4. Sadly these difficulties are compounded when other regional festivals choose to schedule theirs at the exact same time as another, as the newer Batemans Bay Writers Festival did with the Bellingen Writers Festival. Thus two of the authors we had invited appeared in Batemans Bay instead. Similarly it is confronting to find that other regional festivals have copied your advertising slogan, as the Southern Highlands Writers’ Festival in Bowral did with their adoption of ‘Be a part of the story‘ (in comparison to Bellingen’s ‘Be part of the story.’

Even if there were only one literary festival in the country, organising a festival is not for the faint hearted. The large festivals attract big money from government agencies and sponsors while the smaller ones have to make do with far less. That usually means that large festivals have a large number of paid staff, while the smaller ones tend to be organised and run by volunteers.

In Bellingen all festival committee members work as unpaid volunteers, which means they have to be brimming with passion and enthusiasm for there is a lot of work to be done: books must be read, authors and chairs selected and invited, contracts drawn up, funding applied for, sponsorship sought, venues booked, an experienced bookseller chosen, transport and accommodation organised, possibly a schools program organised, the program put together and proof-read multiple times for print and website, newsletters written for the website, social media and print publicity employed to spread the word. For the event itself, you need an event producer/organiser, sound engineers, microphones for all venues and multiple speakers, additional volunteers and an organiser for those volunteers. After each festival there are clean-up tasks, author payments and accounting to be done. Over the five years we have lost several festival committee members due to burn-out or the need for an income-generating job. We have also gained a few new ones each year, but they don’t always stay. Only four members have been involved since the beginning.

Government funding bodies often demand the introduction of a new aspect or theme for each year’s festival. For 2013 the Bellingen Writers Festival chose Celebrating Women Writers and Women’s Stories, because 2012 marked the beginning of a conversation about gender in literary culture. In 2013 the Stella Literary Award was awarded for the first time. As the readers of this blog may remember, a number of women authors, critics and publishers pushed for the introduction of an award for women writers after women had been left off the shortlist for the Miles Franklin Literary Award for Fiction for two years in a row. Another response was the creation of the Australian Women Writer’s Challenge. For 2015 the Bellingen Writers Festival chose Politics and Society and attracted a number of politicians, journalists, screenwriters and fiction writers exploring social issues and added three forums on mental health issues with Professor of Psychiatry Gordon, clinical psychologist David Roland and author of Australia’s first memoir on youth suicide Missing Christopher Jayne Newling.

Festival visitors often don’t realise that authors need to be paid not only for their transport costs and accommodation, but also earn a fee for every festival appearance (in accordance with standards set by the Australian Society of Authors). In small regional towns such as Bellingen, where small businesses often struggle, it is very difficult to attract sponsorship from local businesses, especially since Bellingen hosts several music festivals as well. Government grants are difficult to obtain on a recurring basis, especially in these times of funding cuts to the arts. This means that smaller festivals become ever more reliant on ‘big name’ authors to attract visitors prepared to pay for tickets. The further away authors live from the festival location, the higher the authors’ transport costs. This means that authors who live on the other side of Australia, in Tasmania, let alone the US, are unaffordable for the Bellingen Writers Festival.

I think it’s obvious from the above that the challenges are formidable. The joys of organising a writers’ festival require far fewer words, but nevertheless win in the end for those who are engaged and passionate about reading and/or writing. The joys of introducing favourite authors to new readers, observing the audience’s enthusiastic faces, rapt attention, and long queues for books and autographs. Even better if the authors have a good time, too, and in Bellingen, they always do. For me personally, involvement in the festival has also made it easier to interview some of the authors in my recently released book Celebrating Australian Writing: Conversations with Australian Writers which has sold 80 copies in the first two weeks – to the benefit of the Indigenous Literacy Foundation, which will receive all the profits from the sale.

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Thanks so much Annette for this wonderful behind-the-scenes insight into running a festival. Readers like me owe a big debt to people like you who are willing to undertake the hard yakka of putting on a regional festival. I wish I lived closer to Bellingen!

 

 

Monday musings on Australian literature: David Unaipon Award

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David Unaipon (Courtesy State Library of NSW, via Wikipedia. Public Domain)

David Unaipon (Courtesy State Library of NSW, via Wikipedia. Public Domain)

I’ve mentioned the David Unaipon Award several times in passing but have never devoted a post specifically to it. Today seemed to be a good time to do it, as it would mean I’ve bookended this year’s NAIDOC week with Monday Musings posts devoted to indigenous literature.

Just to recap, David Unaipon is credited as the first indigenous author to be published, with a commissioned book on Aboriginal Legends in the early 1920s. He is featured on Australia’s $50 note. To commemorate him, the David Unaipon Award for unpublished Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders was established in 1988, and has had a rather chequered career. In 1999, it became part of the Queensland Premier’s Literary Awards. When those awards were abolished in 2012 by new Premier Campbell Newman, it was carried over to the new Queensland Literary Awards.

I have read and reviewed several past winners on this blog: Ellen van Neerven’s Heat and Light (2013), Jeanine Leane’s Purple Threads (2010), Marie Munkara’s Every Secret Thing (2008), and Tara June Winch’s Swallow the Air  (2004, originally titled Dust on Waterglass). 

But this is only a start. The list of winners, from the first award made in 1989, represents a useful list for anyone looking for works by indigenous authors to read. Here are a few writers that I’m keen to follow up:

  • Samuel Wagan Watson, a poet, who won in 1999 with Of Muse, Meandering and Midnight. According to the New South Wales Writers’ Centre this work is “a collection of moments: snatches of life in urban Brisbane, glimpses into childhood recollections”. Watson is a well-known raconteur, and during NAIDOC Week last week, I heard him recite a very entertaining, gently subversive poem “A message to my publisher”. It reminded me that I need to keep him high in my TBR list, either this book or one of his later ones.
  • Larissa Berendt, a writer, lawyer and academic, who won in 2002 with her novel Home. This novel also won the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best First Novel in the south-east Asian/South Pacific region. It explores the complex notion of “home” for people for whom home has become a fraught notion: they’ve been dispossessed, stolen, or separated for a variety of reasons from their roots and significant connections. Her second novel, Legacy, won the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Prize for Indigenous Writing in 2010. She is frequently recommended to me, and so is also high on my TBR list.
  • Gayle Kennedy, a writer who won in 2006 with her “road trip” novel Me, Antman and Fleabag. It was also shortlisted for the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award and Deadly Award. She was featured in a Guest Post on the Australian Women Writers Challenge last week so, rather than add my own words here, I’ll just point you to there! Fair enough? (There’s an added incentive for visiting that post. If you read and review a work by an indigenous Australian in July you can go in the draw to win a copy of Me, Antman and Fleabag.)
  • Dylan Coleman, a more recent winner of the award, winning in 2011 with Mazin’ Grace. It was also shortlisted for the Commonwealth Book Prize and longlisted for the 2013 Stella Prize. Like Marie Munkara’s Every secret thing, its subject is mission life, a significant part of indigenous Australian experience and a story that needs to be told.

These are just four from a much longer list. I have no idea how many of these books are still in print, but hopefully most if not all are available in libraries. I wonder?

Monday musings on Australian literature: NAIDOC Week 2015

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Australians will be aware that this week, July 5 to 12, is NAIDOC Week. NAIDOC originally stood for National Aborigines and Islanders Day Observance Committee, the committee that was once responsible for organising national activities during NAIDOC Week. However, this acronym has now become the name of the week, which suggests just how significant, and well-accepted, this week is now on Australia’s calendar.

The Week aims, as you would expect, “to celebrate the history, culture and achievements of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples”, and in doing so, to encourage all Australians to recognise and better understand indigenous Australians. Each year the week has a theme, and this year it is We all Stand on Sacred Ground: Learn, Respect and Celebrate.

This theme, according to the NAIDOC website

highlights Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples’ strong spiritual and cultural connection to land and sea. The theme is an opportunity to pay respects to country; honour those who work tirelessly on preserving land, sea and culture and to share the stories of many sites of significance or sacred places with the nation.

Uluru

Uluru, taken August 2009

The site also tells us that this theme was particularly chosen this year “to highlight and celebrate the  anniversary of the ‘Handback’ of Uluru, one of these sacred sites, to its traditional owners on 26 October 30 years ago”. To that I say, wonderful, as I am visiting Uluru for my third time later this month.

I know my ways of celebrating and supporting indigenous Australian culture are pretty tokenistic in the scheme of things, but in the spirit of this week I thought I’d share with you some of the rather eclectic things I do throughout the year as the opportunities arise:

  • engage with local indigenous culture when I travel, mostly through tours led by indigenous Australians;
  • attend exhibitions featuring indigenous Australian art and culture, ancient, traditional and contemporary;
  • donate to the Indigenous Literacy Foundation;
  • attend performances by the Bangarra Dance Theatre; and,
  • read Indigenous Australian literature (though I don’t seem to read anywhere near as much as I’d like to).

It’s this last way, of course, that is most appropriate to my blog, so to mark this NAIDOC Week, I’m sharing links to posts written by me, and, with her permission, Lisa Hill (ANZLitLovers), on Indigenous Australian literature:

Some of you will know that Lisa has for the last few years run an Indigenous Literature Week during NAIDOC week but, as she wrote recently, this year she plans to run it to coincide with the First Nations Australia Writers’ Network Workshop which will be held in Melbourne next month. Watch out for that.

Meanwhile, Lisa and I hope our links help you discover more about Indigenous Australian culture through literature.

Monday musings on Australian literature: Black Inc’s Best 100 Poems

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I’ve been feeling rather guilty about a book sent to me in late 2013 by Black Inc. I’m usually very conscientious about reading and reviewing books that I’ve accepted for review – not so much for those sent to me “on spec” – but I slipped up with Black Inc’s The best 100 poems of Dorothy Porter. As I recollect, it came just after a major overseas trip and got caught up in the run-up to Christmas. I did read much of it, but just didn’t bring it to conclusion in order to review. So, I thought I’d talk about it “right here, right now”, to use some current vernacular.

The bee hut, by Dorothy Porter

Cover image (Courtesy: Black Inc)

Black Inc, which won ABIA’s Small Publisher of the Year award this year, is a small publisher that actively supports Australian poetry. Not only have they now produced three “best 100 poems” volumes, but they have published the annual Best Australian poems volumes for several years, as well as individual poetry collections like Les Murray’s Waiting for the past, Robert Gray’s Coast road, and Dorothy Porter’s The bee hut (which I reviewed a few years ago now). All these books, as far as I can tell, are published in print and electronic format.

Now, the topic in hand. Here are the three “best 100 poems” volumes published to date, listed in order of publication.

The best 100 poems of Les Murray (2012)

I bought the e-version of this after hearing Murray (b. 1938) speak last year at Poetry at the Gods. As the only living poet of the three, Murray made his own selection. Unlike the Porter collection, in which the poems are grouped in some way, Murray’s selection is simply (though some thought is sure to have gone into the order) a list of 100 poems with no reference to their original context. Murray’s oeuvre is huge – his career has been very long – so without extensive research I don’t know where every poem comes from or how each fits into his career. As you would expect from a “best 100” they  are diverse in subject and style.

The first poem is “Driving through sawmill towns”, from the 1990s I think. Read it and see what you think. I like its understanding of human behaviour – the “tall youths look away” while “it is the older men who/come out in blue singlets and talk softly to you”. Meanwhile, “all day in calendared kitchens, women listen/for cars on the road/lost children in the bush,/a cry from the mill, a footstep -/nothing happens”. I like the sense of resignation in the inhabitants, but no judgement from driver driving through. A later poem, “Mirrorball”, from 2010, describes travellers on a bus riding up the Hume Highway through old towns full of history, but when the driver sets off again “half his earplugged sitters wear/the look of deserted towns”. Oh dear. Not all Murray’s poems are about country towns, but rural life is one of his ongoing subjects.

I’m not sure I really like reading poems in e-format, in which I bought this book, but the upside is that you can carry some poetry with you wherever you go.

The best 100 poems of Dorothy Porter (2013)

PorterBest100BlackIncThis is a posthumous collection selected by Porter’s (1954-2008) partner, the novelist Andrea Goldsmith. It includes a small selection of poems from her verse novel The monkey’s mask which I’m ashamed to say I’ve never read. (Having now read the few poems Goldsmith included here, I’m inspired to rectify this.) It also contains poems from her verse novels El Dorado and Akhenaton, as well as from various other collections of her rather extensive oeuvre. The poems range, for me, from beautiful, heart-rending, funny, and/or wicked to rather obscure. But that’s probably the nature of poetry. Those that draw on classics and mythology sometimes lose me, I have to admit, with their erudition, but her heart, her imagery and the way she can cheekily play with rhyme and rhythm are what I love about Porter.

I’ll just share one of Porter’s poems. It’s called “Circular Quay” and expresses discomfort with perfection, because experience has taught her so: “This perfect day/makes me uneasy … I breathe easier/spying some scum/floating/on a lovely green wave./Nothing’s perfect”. In the middle of this short tight poem she is reminded of the past. It’s the sort of poem that makes me write “Oh, yes” in the margins.

I’m tempted to suggest that Murray writes more of People while Porter’s poetry is more about the Personal. This is a rather coarse generalisation I know. These poets are highly diverse, but it’s how their writing, such as I’ve read in recent years, strikes me.

The best 100 poems of Gwen Harwood (2014)

Gwen Harwood (1920-1995) is the oldest of the three, and is the one I know least, so I won’t say much. I’ve heard her described as one of Australia’s finest poets, and readers I respect speak positively of her, but I really only discovered her when I started researching Australian poets for Wikipedia a few years ago. Why is this? I certainly didn’t study her at school or university, and since then, I must admit, my poetry reading has been very erratic. This selection was made by her son, John Harwood, who is also a writer. Her recurring themes, according to Wikipedia, include motherhood and the “stifled role of women”. Music, the Tasmanian landscape and Aboriginal dispossession also recur in her work.

From the compilers of these collections – the poet himself, the partner, the son – it appears that Black Inc has aimed to make these “best 100” volumes personal rather than academic in flavour, which is lovely I think.

Given these three volumes were published in the last three Novembers, I’m presuming another will be published this November. I wonder who it will be? Meanwhile, I’ll close by saying that these are gorgeously produced books – with lovely covers. They would suit those wanting an introduction to the specific poets as well as their fans.

 

Monday musings on Australian literature: The Conversation’s Writing History

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This is the post I planned for last week, when Jessica White hijacked me. Like that post, this one too was inspired by another person, this time my historian brother who sent me a link to an article in a new series by The Conversation called Writing History. This series aims to “examine the links, problems and dynamics of writing, recording and recreating history, whether in fiction or non-fiction”. A topic, as regular readers here will know, of interest to me.

I’m not sure how many articles are planned for the series, but here are the five that have been published to date:

I haven’t read them all yet, but I have read the first two, and dipped into another. In the first one, Nelson and de Matos explain that the series draws from essays that were published in a special issue of TEXT, an open-access academic journal. The issue is titled Fictional Histories and Historical Fictions, and its aim is to “get beyond … the often acrimonious exchanges between writers and historians that have been such a characteristic of the History Wars of the last ten years, with its boundary-riding rhetoric.”

The secret River cover

Now, if you are an Australian interested in this subject, you won’t be surprised to hear that both articles I’ve read refer to the conflict between historians and novelists inspired by Kate Grenville’s award-winning, best-selling novel The secret river – or, to be honest, by comments Grenville made about history in relation to her novel. Nelson and de Matos write that the question of who should interpret and write about the past and how the past should be taught or written about has been around for centuries but it was “made palpable” in the tussle over The secret river.

Nelson and de Matos discuss the accessibility of history – and the fact that historians can write accessible history, as proved by writers like Clare Wright in her award-winning The forgotten rebels of Eureka (my review). And they talk about the politicisation of history, referring to comments by politicians like Christopher Pyne bemoaning “the ostensible disappearance of western civilisation from the curriculum” and John Howard’s critiquing of “the black armband view of history”. While political interference is not a good thing, they suggest that in a sense, all history – in its relationship to debates about democracy, identity and social justice – is public history. It makes it even more critical, then, doesn’t it, that we understand what we are talking about and the grounds upon which we are doing it.

In the second article, Tom Griffiths tackles the intertwining of fiction and history. He argues that it was Eleanor Dark, a novelist, who confronted the complacent imperial view of history in Australia’s sesquicentenary, a view that ignored the place of “Aborigines, convicts and women”. She led the way in rethinking our history. Paradoxically, the poet Judith Wright, a few decades later, wrote a history, Cry for the dead, which “gave a secure scholarly foundation to the political campaign of the Aboriginal Treaty committee”. His point is that both writers chose the form that best suited their needs at the time. “Like Eleanor Dark”, he writes, “Judith Wright carefully set about becoming a historian”.

By 1990s, the idea of “frontier conflict” was an accepted part of our historiography but there was a conservative backlash which tried to discredit research by arguing detail such as the number of people who died “as if it decided the ethics of the issue”. It was into this “moral vacuum”, Griffiths writes, that books like Inga Clendinnen’s history Dancing with strangers (2003) and Kate Grenville’s novel The secret river (2005) appeared.

Unfortunately, Grenville’s comments on the value of fiction to history –

The voice of debate might stimulate the brain, the dry voice of ‘facts’ might make us comfortable, even relaxed. It takes the voice of fiction to get the feet walking in a new direction.

– got her involved in the wrong debates, in discussions about history and fiction rather than the topic she wanted, frontier violence. Griffiths suggested this occurred partly because of the timing, because the conservatives were interested, at that time, in debating the “precise, grounded, evidenced truths of history”. To debate on that ground you needed “time, place and specificity”. Grenville, in other words, “found herself at the centre of a debate that goes to the heart of the discipline of history”. I like this explanation. It explains for me some of the reactions to Grenville that never completely made sense, it explains why historians I admired came out so strongly against Grenville, whose story seemed to make a valid contribution to the discussion.

Griffiths concludes that history and fiction are “a tag team” in the study of the past, “sometimes taking turns, sometimes working in tandem”. “History doesn’t own the truth”, he writes, “and fiction doesn’t own the imagination”. We need to understand the distinctions and how they play out, but we shouldn’t see this discussion as “defending territory”.

I look forward to reading the other articles. But for now, I’ll close on a quote my brother also sent me last week. It’s from Jose Saramago’s The Elephant’s Journey (2008):

… that is how it’s set down in history, as an incontrovertible, documented fact, supported by historians and confirmed by the novelist, who must be forgiven for taking certain liberties with names, not only because it is his right to invent, but also because he had to fill in certain gaps so that the sacred coherence of the story was not lost. It must be said that history is always selective, and discriminatory too, selecting from life only what society deems to be historical and scorning the rest, which is precisely where we might find the true explanation of facts, of things, of wretched reality itself. In truth, I say to you, it is better to be a novelist, a fiction writer, a liar.

And so the discussion continues …

Monday musings on Australian literature: On what women write about

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I had planned another topic for today, but a tweet from Australian novelist Jessica White this morning sharing a link from The Conversation changed my mind. The link was to an article by Natalie Kon-yu, a lecturer in Creative Writing and Gender Studies at Victoria University. This article explores Nicola Griffith’s statement that “when women win literary awards for fiction it’s usually for writing from a male perspective and/or about men”. Griffith, a British-American novelist based in Seattle, surveyed the winners of multiple awards, including the Pulitzer Prize and the Man Booker Prize, from 2000 to 2015. Kon-yu says that Griffith’s findings accord with her own. She writes:

It is, sadly, unsurprising that male writers win more prestigious literary awards than female writers, but what is interesting is that when women do win these awards, it is typically because they write about male characters, or “masculine” topics.

Evie Wyld, All the birds, singing

Courtesy: Random House Australia

The “because” is a bit of an assumption, I suppose, but is an assumption based on a strong correlation noticed by these researchers. Kon-yu then gives examples, which you can read in the article I’ve linked to above.

Now, before you say “but, but…”, it’s true that women have won literary awards here in Australia over the last decade, and in fact have done comparatively well in the last couple of years, but Kon-yu asks us to look at what they’ve written about. Many of our women winners of the Miles Franklin award in the last 20 years, she suggests – Anna Funder, Alexis Wright, Shirley Hazzard and Helen Demidenko – “focus almost exclusively on capital-H ‘History'”. Other wins, like those by Evie Wyld and Thea Astley, were for books set in “the rugged landscape of the Australian bush”. The situation is particularly stark when you look at the Man Booker and the subject matter of recent women winners, Hilary Mantel and Eleanor Catton. Kon-Yu’s conclusion? Well,

It seems that, as a culture, we are still predominantly concerned with the lives of men or in themes that we view as “masculine” or “wordly”. We still relegate women’s work to the domestic, the interior, the personal.

You’ve probably heard VS Naipaul’s statement a couple of years ago that he couldn’t see any woman writer, even Jane Austen (what!?), being his literary equal. He “couldn’t possibly share her [Austen’s] sentimental ambitions, her sentimental sense of the world”. You may also have heard commentary* about schools, co-educational ones anyhow, tending to choose “set” books on the basis of what boys will read, because girls will read widely while boys will only read within a narrow range.

Kon-yu looks into the recent past, the 1970s to 1980s, and finds that a greater percentage of the books by women which won awards then (Man Booker, Miles Franklin, in particular) did focus on female characters. Two Miles Franklin winners in this period, for example, were by Jessica Anderson, Tirra Lirra by the River (1978) and The impersonators (1980). Both are set domestically and deal with family relationships. Around this time, too, writers like Elizabeth Jolley (here) and Anita Brookner (in the UK) were focusing closely on women’s experience and were receiving significant recognition. Kon-Yu reminds us that this was the period when feminist criticism was gaining ground, and publishers like Virago and The Woman’s Press were being established. A coincidence? Not likely.

Anyhow, back in the present, Kon-Yu’s conclusion is that:

It’s not enough to publish books by women, we need to focus more on telling women’s stories.

Kon-Yu, perhaps for reasons of space, doesn’t explore in detail what she means by telling “women’s stories”, but she does quote male American writer, Pankaj Mishra, as saying that:

Novels about suburban families are more likely to be greeted as microcosmic explorations of the human condition if they are by male writers; their female counterparts are rarely allowed to transcend the category of domestic fiction.

The overall point, of course, is not that women can’t, or shouldn’t, write about anything. They sure can – and clearly do. No, it’s more complex. It’s that writing on the domestic, and on the “interior” of women, particularly if it’s by women, does not receive adequate literary recognition; it’s the too-frequent assumption that this is the only sort of writing women can do; and/or it’s the belief that this sort of writing is only of interest, and value, to women. Such tosh! A healthy, vibrant culture needs to hear, and respect, diverse views on diverse subjects. We are, I believe, making gains across the whole diversity spectrum, but we have a way to go yet.

* Sorry that I can’t find a source for this now, so argue with me if you will.

Monday musings on Australian literature: Aussie Rules football in Australian literature

/ Whispering Gums / 36 Comments

If you live in Melbourne I’ve heard, you must have an AFL (Australian Football League or Aussie Rules) football team. There are those who tell me they survive without it, but if you are new to Melbourne it probably helps your integration to take an interest. Consequently, when Son Gums chose Melbourne for his home in 2009, he decided he’d better choose a team. He did. I, though, had managed to remain an AFL-virgin until this weekend when Mr Gums and I agreed to accompany him to a game. (After all, I dragged him along to lots of “experiences” when he was young. It’s only fair, I thought, that I should give him the same respect I demanded of him!) I’m glad I did, not just because it is part of local culture but because I found it more interesting (for several reasons) than I expected … And, anyhow, now I can tick it off my list.

Anna Krien, Night Games

Courtesy: Black Inc

It also got me thinking about representations of the game in Aussie literature. There are a lot of references to AFL in Aussie popular culture, as Wikipedia tells us, but I thought I’d just list a few that I’ve experienced. Here goes:

  • Barry Oakley’s A salute to the great Macarthy (1970). I was young when I read this novel so I remember little, but it did also become a movie, in 1975, during the 1970s Australian film renaissance. It’s about the “kidnapping” of a young local footballer, Macarthy, by the South Melbourne Football Club.
  • David Williamson’s The club (1977) is more memorable. A play by one of Australia’s best-known and most popular playwrights, it deals with politics in the administration of a club. Collingwood was apparently its inspiration, though it is not named in the play. It too was made into a movie – in 1980. The plot commences with a coach contracting a young player who does not, initially anyhow, perform well. Cracks and jealousies start to show …
  • Mike Brady’s “Up there Cazaly” (1979) is a popular song. Perhaps a stretch for inclusion here but I think there’s an argument for allowing song, as a form of verse or poetry, to be discussed in this forum. Whether you like football or not, whether you are into popular song or not, chances are you’ve heard this song if you’re Australia. According to Wikipedia, it’s named for an Australian rules football catchphrase that was used by St Kilda teammates when they wanted early 20th century St Kilda and South Melbourne great Roy Cazaly to hit the ball clear. Long before it became a song it was used by Aussie soldiers during World War II. I didn’t know that before!
  • Paul D. Carter’s Eleven Seasons (2012) won The Australian/Vogel Literary Award for an unpublished manuscript by an author under 35 years old. It’s a coming-of-age story about a teenager and the role football and family play in his development in 1980s-90s Melbourne. Tensions develop when the teenager’s mother doesn’t share his obsession with the game! (I’ve lied somewhat in including this one. I haven’t read it, but I remember its winning the award. It intrigued me.)
  • Anna Krien’s Night games (2013) is the only work I’ve reviewed here. Best described as narrative-non-fiction it explores football culture in relation to sex, power and women via the actual trial of a young footballer accused of rape. A powerful book, it resonates wider than football in terms of its analysis of celebrity, sex and the meaning of consent, but AFL football and the way it deals with gender is its core.

What is interesting about these works is the light they shine on Australian masculinity. Except for the rah-rah nature of “Up there Cazaly”, which was intended as a promotional song, the works I’ve named pose questions about masculinity as depicted in the world of football. There is a lot that is good about team sport, and football (all codes, I suspect) can provide a supportive network for (sometimes vulnerable) young men. Michael Sollis and the Griffyns showed this for Rugby League in their Dirty Red Digger performance, and the American TV series Friday Night Lights showed something similar for American football. But what bothers me is that, handled poorly, football can also bring out the worst in men. It can over-emphasise competitiveness to the point that winning overrides being fair and just, and it can value, and consequently promote, machismo over sensitivity and empathy. As a topic for literature, then, it has plenty of meat. I’m not surprised that writers have chosen to write about it. Do you read literature with sport as its theme? If so, do you have favourites?

Monday musings on Australian literature: AustLit Anthology of Criticism

/ Whispering Gums / 4 Comments

I’ve written about AustLit several times before, including their BlackWords and World War 1 in Australian Literary Culture projects. Today, I thought I’d highlight their AustLit Anthology of Criticism which was published online in 2010. AustLit, as I’ve mentioned before, is primarily a subscription service, but not all of the content is behind their paywall. Of course, I only discuss freely available content. What would be the point otherwise!

The AustLit Anthology of Criticism was funded by AustLit and the University of Queensland to be “a resource for students and their teachers at secondary and lower tertiary levels”. It contains 18 writers who, on first look, seem an eclectic bunch, with well-known people like Peter Carey, Les Murray, Patrick White, Tim Winton and Judith Wright represented alongside the less widely known like, say, Jack Davis, Michael Gow or Hannie Rayson. The choice of writers, editors Leigh Dale and Linda Hale say, “took into account [those] whose work was currently being studied in the senior secondary school English curriculum in all Australian States and Territories”.

The anthology contains a link to a brief biography for each author on the AustLit Database, followed by a small list of selected articles with links to the online content itself. The chosen articles are “criticism”, which the editors describe as “interpretation” and to be differentiated from “reviews” which they define as focusing more on “evaluation”. These “critical” articles they link to in their anthology can, they say, represent opposing points of view, and mostly come from academic or literary journals like Australian Literary Culture, Australasian Drama Studies, Southerly, and Westerly, or collections of critical essays. For novelists and playwrights, they have mostly chosen one work, but for poets, the articles can deal with a wider body of their work. 

David Malouf reading Ransom

Malouf reading Ransom, National Library of Australia, August 2009

So, for Peter Carey, the book chosen is True history of the Kelly Gang, for Patrick White it’s Fringe of leaves, and for Tim Winton it’s Cloudstreet. Interestingly, for David Malouf several of his works are covered including Fly away Peter, Child’s play and Remembering Babylon. I’ve read four of these six novels, but all before I started blogging. They would all have something to offer students studying them.

I’m interested, though, in what the selection says about what is (or was around 2010) being studied in schools and early tertiary courses around Australia. Only 5 (Dorothy Hewett, Sally Morgan, Hannie Rayson, Henry Handel Richardson and Judith Wright) of the 18 writers are women, and only two (Jack Davis and Sally Morgan) have indigenous background. All, except for the indigenous writers, are Anglo-Australian. These 18 aren’t the only writers being studied, of course, but from the editors’ point of view they are 18 of the most universally studied ones. Hmmm, I say, this probably means they are representative of the whole.

And that’s all I’m going to say now. Regardless of this bias, it looks to be a useful resource and one I’ll return to if I read any of the works they cover. I do like to read good criticism. Do you have favourite sources you go to for criticism versus review?

 

Monday musings on Australian literature: Writers’ letters and diaries

/ Whispering Gums / 29 Comments

I am currently reading a book of selected letters, First things first, by Australian poet Kate Llewellyn. I’m loving it, so I thought that as a precursor to my review (which is a way off yet as I’ve only read a third), I’d do a Monday Musings on the published letters and diaries of Australian writers. Hmm, not “the” so much as “some”, I should say. And, I should also say that I haven’t read many.

But, I do enjoy reading letters and diaries. It comes, I think, of being a reader who reads more for character than plot. I have written several posts on Jane Austen’s letters which my local group read in sections over a few years. (My posts are listed under Jane Austen on my Author Index page). They were published after Austen’s death. Reading Lewellyn’s letters, I’m aware that she’s alive, and that many of her recipients still are too. It’s a brave thing, I think, to let these “private” communications be shared. Nettie Palmer prepared the extracts from her journal for publication, and recognised the challenges of publishing something that was initially intended only for herself. She says:

Many of the people mentioned in these pages are no longer alive, and as I could not ask all for consent to use their words or letters, I have not asked any. If my friends should think I have taken liberty with them … well, I should be sorry. They will believe nothing here was set down in malice, much in love and gratitude.

Most of the books I’ve listed, though, were published after the author’s death.

As I researched today’s post, I came across the Australian Government’s website on Australian literature. They mention the published letters of Gwen Harwood, which I will include in my little select list below. They include this description of her letters:

Spirited and witty, warm, reflective, at times enraged, often overcome by laughter, the letters are so varied that this large volume can be read as one might read a novel or an autobiography. It would be a pity just to dip in at random: this is the story of the making of a poet.

I’m not sure all collections of letters or diaries provide the story of the making of the writer involved, but they must give some insight into the person, their personality, interests, likes, loves and frustrations. So, here is a selection of published letters and diaries by Australian writers, ordered alphabetically by the name of the writer.

  • Franklin, Miles: The diaries of Miles Franklin, edited by Paul Brunton (2004). These diaries cover the period 1932 to 1954, and is enlightening about Australia’s literary life at the times. I’ve only dipped into it (oops) while doing other research, and look forward to reading more. Here, to give a taste, is an honest Franklin on Dame Mary Gilmore in 1947: “I called on Mary Gilmore. She is increasingly apocryphal in her assertions. Very against the British — an old snake really, seeing the way she touted for a British title …”
  • Harwood, Gwen: A Steady Storm of Correspondence: Selected Letters of Gwen Harwood 1943-1995, edited by Gregory Kratzmann (2001). See the quote above!
  • Llewellyn, Kate: First things first: Selected letters of Kate Llewellyn, 1977-2004, edited by Ruth Bacchus and Barbara Hill (2015). This is a lively, personal account of Llewellyn’s life, from what I’ve read so far. And it shows me the resilience you need to be a writer, given the very uncertain financial situation writers often find themselves in.
  • Palmer, Nettie: Nettie Palmer: her private journal ‘Fourteen years’, poems, reviews and literary essays (1988), edited by Vivian Smith. This is, really, an anthology, of various of Nettie Palmer’s writings, but it starts with Fourteen years which comprises extracts from Palmer’s journal from 1925 to 1936 and which was first published in Meanjin in 1948. Palmer prepared it for publication, and Smith writes in the introduction that, in arranging it, “notions of symmetry and design were of more importance to Nettie Palmer than an exact pocket diary account of those days”. So, perhaps, a diary that isn’t quite a diary?
  • Palmer, Vance and Nettie: Letters of Vance and Nettie Palmer 1915-1963, edited by Vivian Smith (1977). This is a selection of the “copious” letters the Palmers wrote to many people, including aspiring and established writers. The inside cover says that the “selection reveals the breadth of the Palmers’ interests and the generosity of their concern for young writers’ struggles, for the plight of Spain in the 1930s, for the problems of bringing up children, earning a living, and facing two world wars. The span of their letters provides an informed and lively perspective on this century. Through these day-to-day responses runs a constant theme: the need for Australians to assume a responsible national stance in politics, in public affairs and in the Palmers’ own profession, literature. They lament, in an entirely modern voice, the inconsecutive nature of Australian culture, the derivative admirations of academics and the public, and the philistinism evident in so much of our national life”.
  • Wright, Judith: With love and fury: Selected letters of Judith Wright, edited by Patricia Clarke and Meredith McKinney (2006). This collection includes her 1945-46 correspondence with Jack McKinney, who became her husband, and with Queensland poet, Jack Blight. Co-editor and coincidentally Wright’s daughter, Meredith McKinney, says that the letters with Blight “constitute a running commentary on the Australian literary scene as well as what she was reading and thinking about poetry and writing in general”. Wright was an activist for the environment and indigenous rights, among other social issues, so her letters are sure to be enlightening.

I’ll leave it here, but have you noticed something? With the exception of Vance Palmer, these all belong to women. It’s easy to suggest that letter writing and journal-keeping have traditionally been the realm of women, but there have been men too, like Samuel Pepys, of course. I did look for diaries and letters by men but with little success. I’m hoping they do exist and that some readers here will tell me about them. Regardless, I’d love to know if you, too, enjoy reading writers’ letters and journals.