Monday musings

Monday musings on Australian literature: Top Aussie book sales in 2013

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This is, I suppose, another end of year round-up post – but one about bookselling in Australia, which is something I don’t usually write much about. However, since many of us love lists, I thought I’d share with you Australia’s top selling books for 2103:

  1. Jeff Kinney: Hard luck: Diary of a wimpy kid (UK, children’s)
  2. Jamie Oliver: Jamie’s 15 minute meals (UK, cookbook)
  3. Dan Brown: Inferno (US, fiction)
  4. Jamie Oliver: Save with Jamie (UK, cookbook)
  5. Andy Griffiths and Terry Denton: The 39-storey treehouse (Aus, children’s)
  6. Matthew Reilly: The tournament (Aus, fiction)
  7. Guinness world records 2014 (UK, reference)
  8. Sarah Wilson: I quit sugar (Aus, nonfiction)
  9. Ricky Ponting: Ponting at close of play (Aus, memoir)
  10. Jodi Picoult: The storyteller (USA, fiction)

It’s good to see some Aussies there, including popular children’s author Andy Griffiths and illustrator Terry Denton. I haven’t read Matthew Reilly but he has a reputation as a good story-teller in, mostly, the action and thriller genres.

Jason Steger, the Literary Editor of The Age and a regular panelist on the First Tuesday Bookclub, says of this year’s top ten:

The pulse rates of Australian readers were probably a bit slower last year, as the boom in erotic and dystopic fiction vanished, and old favourites such as Jamie Oliver, Jeff Kinney, Dan Brown and Matthew Reilly returned to dominate the national bestseller lists.

He is of course referring to the 2012 phenomena of E.L. James’ Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy, and Suzanne Collins’ Hunger Games. Apparently, without these juggernauts, overall sales were down in 2013 over 2012. According to Steger, the overall number of books sold dropped from 56.6 million to 54.1 million, resulting in a drop in value from $978 million to $917 million. Interesting isn’t it? What does this say about reading behaviour? That some people only read when a “huge” book appears on the scene. If everyone’s reading it, they will too, but otherwise reading is not for them? Is that the conclusion to draw from those figures, or am I missing something?

I can’t seem to find the fiction top ten for the year. I’m assuming that you have to pay Nielsen to get this information, but it seems telling that, while newspapers have reported (via journalists Blanche Clark and Jason Steger) on the overall top 10, no-one has listed, at least as far as I can find via Google, the fiction-specific list. The best that I could find was Steger, again, who reported that Tim Winton’s Eyrie (which I’ll be reading this year) was the best-performing literary novel. That says something about the Winton’s pull, as Eyrie wasn’t published until mid-October. Steger also reports that the Australian debut novels, Hannah Kent’s Burial rites (which I’ll also be reading this year) and Graeme Simsion’s The Rosie project (my review), both made the fiction top ten.  This is not surprising as they were probably the two biggest buzz books in the Australian literary firmament this year. However, I’m assuming that Steger’s singling out of these three books means that they are the only Aussies in the top to fiction list – and this means that the Miles Franklin award winning Questions of travel is not there.

None of this is earth shattering. We literary fiction readers know that the books we read rarely make general top 10s. It’s always interesting, however, to see what does. Were there any top 10 surprises in your neck of the woods?

Monday musings on Australian literature: Australian Women Writers’ Challenge 2013

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Australian Women Writers ChallengeAs last year, I’m devoting my last Monday Musings for 2013 to the Australian Women Writers Challenge. This challenge, instigated by Elizabeth Lhuede in response to growing concern in Australian literary circles about lack of recognition for women writers, was so successful in 2012 that Elizabeth, with the help of a team of volunteers, decided to continue the challenge in 2013. I am one of those volunteers – responsible for the Literary and Classics area – and, of course, am also a challenge participant. It was a quieter year for the challenge as we settled into a routine, but that doesn’t mean nothing memorable happened. So, before I round-up my own challenge I’d like to comment on a few of the highlights for me.

The main excitement was, I think, the announcement of the inaugural Stella Prize. The prize was not created by our Challenge, but it grew out of the same concerns that inspired the Challenge. Marg (Adventures of an Intrepid Reader) attended the award ceremony on behalf of the Challenge and wrote a post on the experience. The winner, Carrie Tiffany (for her novel Mateship with birds), impressed us all by sharing a portion of her prize with the shortlisted authors. A lovely gesture recognising the complex and uncomfortable nature of literary competition.

In October, as a special “event”, the Challenge focused on women writers of diverse heritage, and asked four authors to write guest posts. If you’d like to read these posts, they are:

  • Tseen Khoo: on her frustration about “narrow interpretations of writing by Asian-Australian women writers”
  • Alice Pung: on, interestingly, “Ruth Park, class, and marginalisation”
  • Malla Nunn: on her experience as an African migrant turned Australian writer
  • Merlinda Bobis: on “the necessity of creating and defining ‘home’ both for herself, as a writer, and for her readers”.

Finally, one of the features I particularly enjoy about the challenge is seeing Australian women writers support it (and each other) by reviewing books by other women writers. Annabel Smith, Amanda Curtin and Jessica White are three who have been particularly active this year.

If you are interested in the challenge, you can check it out at the link above, and, if you’d like to join up for 2014, you can fill out the form on this page.  This year, it is possible to join up as a reader or as a reviewer. The challenge can also be found on Facebook, Twitter (@auswomenwriters), GoodReads and Google+.

As I explained in last year’s highlights post, the Australian Women Writers’ Challenge is my only challenge. Once again, I signed up for the Franklin-fantastic Dabbler level, which is that I’d read (and review) at least 10 books by Australian women writers in more than one genre/category. Here is my list (with links to my reviews) for this year.

FICTION

SHORT STORIES

POETRY

NON-FICTION

ESSAYS

ANTHOLOGIES

awwchallenge2014CHILDREN’S LITERATURE

I have enjoyed taking part in the challenge – for being part of a team of committed people keen to spread the word about the breadth of Australian women’s writing, and for being introduced to that breadth. I am learning a lot more about Australian women’s literature than I could possible have learnt by beavering away here on my own. Roll on the 2014 challenge.

Monday musings on Australian literature: Translated fiction, Australian-style

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Having just read and reviewed Linda Jaivin’s Quarterly essay, Lost in translation: In praise of a plural world, I thought I’d research the state of translated fiction in Australia. Jaivin doesn’t spend a lot of time of this particular issue, but in her concluding plea she says:

Publishers need to consider how to prise open their lists in order to let more translation in.

In other words, while she argues that students should learn foreign language/s, she also recognises that we can’t be across all languages. We should therefore have easy access to translated literature. However, in my experience and I’m sure that of Australian blogger Tony, who specialises in translated fiction, it is not easy to find material here and so, all too often, we turn to overseas publishers and distributors.

That said, there are some local sources of translated fiction. And there are – and have been – Australian translators of foreign fiction (besides, of course, Linda Jaivin). I have written before on this blog about poets Rosemary Dobson and David Campbell who translated Russian poetry into English.

The easiest type of translated fiction to find in Australia is of course the classics. It is not hard to find Russian, French and other classics in English in most decent bookshops. It is also relatively easy to find translated works by the better-known contemporary writers from non-English cultures. Random House Australia, for example, has published Japanese writers like Haruki Murakami and Yoko Ogawa. But they do not make it easy to find their translated books. They categorise fiction by genre/form, so if you search under crime, say, you will find translated works by, for instance, the Norwegian crime writer Jo Nesbø. It should be easy enough for them to add a category for translated works to help those of us who’d like to seek out non-English-centric works.

Many of Australia’s smaller independent publishers also publish translated fiction. For example, Text Publishing, probably the largest of the small presses, is currently publishing Diego Marani (whose The last of the Vostyachs I reviewed recently). On Text’s Fiction page is the category Translated, which takes readers to a list of around 60 titles.

Other small presses publishing translated works include:

  • Brandl + Schlesinger lists translated works as one of its focuses. Its list includes Russian author Igor Gelbach, and Hungarians István Örkény and György Dalos.
  • Giramondo specialises in “innovative fiction” and, while it is one of the smaller publishing houses, it includes translated fiction in its list including a work by French-Australian Catherine Rey.
  • Scribe, which has won the Small Publisher of the Year award four times since 2006, publishes foreign language authors such as Dutch writer Gerbrand Bakker. Bakker won the 2010 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award for his novel The Twin, which is one of his books published by Scribe.

I have to admit that I don’t know all these authors, but it’s great to know they are here!

As I was researching for this post, I came across the website for the Australian bookseller, Booktopia. Of course, as an Australian reader, I’ve known about them for some time, but I was pleasantly surprised when they popped up in my Google search for “translated fiction Australia”. Booktopia, I discovered, do, like Text Publishing, include translated fiction in their side-bar categories though, intriguingly, the click-through categorisation goes like this:

Books
|- Fiction
|- – Fiction in Translation and Short Stories (in a box labelled Subjects)
|- – – Fiction in Translation

Odd, that, the grouping of “Fiction in Translation” and “Short Stories” but at least Booktopia provides a path for readers to find translated works. Go Booktopia I say! They currently have 1862 titles in their list. There’s a lot of crime there, but they also carry classics, popular contemporary fiction (by such writers as Allende and Zafón), and books from independent publishers like Peirene Press, which is well regarded as a publisher of European literature in translation.

It’s probably a bit late for Christmas shopping, but why not include some translated works in your summer (or holiday) reading plan? Meanwhile, I’d love to hear your thoughts on the topic of sourcing and reading translated literature.

Monday musings on Australian literature: Australian migration literature

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Last week I reviewed Gabrielle Gouch’s memoir, Once, only the swallows were free, in which she tells of her family’s migration from Hungary to Romania to Israel, and then her own on to Australia. While Gouch focuses more on the brother left behind, she does touch on the challenges of migration – the dislocation and loneliness that often ensues. One of the commenters on that post, Ian Darling, suggested that “Australia must have produced some particularly fascinating emigrant accounts in its literature”. We have, and way too many to list here.

It would be worth some time exploring the changes in that literature over the two or so centuries since white settlement – from the early days of British confidence, through to the changes that came as different nationalities started to appear (such as the Chinese on the goldfields in the nineteenth century and the Italian and Greek migrants after the Second World War), to the Asian migration of the later 20th century. But, that’s not what I’m going to do here. It’s nearly Christmas, so I’m going to take it easy and just list a few  I’ve read in recent years that I found interesting. Migrant literature, as you’d expect, crosses genres, particularly literary fiction and memoir.

Yasmine Gooneratne’s A change of skies (1991)

Gooneratne emigrated to Australia from Sri Lanka. I first knew of her as a Jane Austen fan and English literature lecturer at Macquarie University, but then my reading group read her novel, A change of skies, about the experience of migration. She writes about educated middle class migrants – like herself I presume – who work to find a balance between fitting into the new culture while at the same time preserving their Sri Lankan identity.

Melina Marchetta‘s Looking for Alibrandi (1992)

Marchetta’s book is a young adult novel about the daughter of an Italian family and her desire to fit into an Australian world against the family pressure to live the old Italian way. She’s young, bright, and in the last year of high school. She wants to meet boys – and not just Italian ones. She wants to live as her friends do. Gradually, she learns to make peace with her family, to recognise the rich heritage she belongs to while at the same time showing them that she can walk two worlds. It was a hugely popular book when it was published and was later adapted into a successful movie. It is I believe taught in high schools.

Arnold Zable‘s Cafe Scheherezade (2001)

I read this novel a few years before I started blogging. It was inspired by the eponymous cafe in Melbourne at which Jewish immigrants – survivors mostly of the Second World War – would meet, talk and provide support for each other. It is a gorgeous novel, about the power of stories to provide support and aid survival. Zable is a warm, generous writer. I remember the book for that, but I also remember it for  teaching me about the various ways Jewish people came to Australia. I didn’t know, for example, how many had transitioned through Shanghai. Zable’s The sea of many returns, which I reviewed early in this blog, is also about migration and yearning for home – and about the power of stories. Stories, we know, are a powerful mechanism for preserving culture – whether it be our national identity or the micro-culture of our families!

Nam Le‘s The boat (2008)

Le’s book is a collection of short stories, many of which are not about migration, not specifically anyhow. However, two of the stories – ““Love and honour and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice” and the title story “The boat” which closes the collection – are autobiographical, and draw directly on his life and on family’s experience of migrating to Australia from Vietnam as boat refugees when he was just one. The interesting this is that, while most of the stories aren’t specifically about migration, they do tend to all be about survival, which suggests, to me anyhow, that the experience of migration has strongly informed Nam Le’s world view.

Alice Pung‘s Unpolished gem (2007) and Her father’s daughter (2011)

As with most of the books in this list, I read Pung’s memoir, Unpolished gem, before I started blogging. It tells the story of her growing up in an immigrant household. She focuses particularly on the challenges of being a child growing up in a culture that her parents are unfamiliar with, of being caught between two worlds. While I loved the book, it bothered me a little that she didn’t empathise with, or try to understand her parents as much as I would have liked. I guess she was just young! However, she rectifies this in her next memoir, Her father’s daughter, which I reviewed a couple of years ago. She starts to understand two things – what their lives were like and what they’d lost/sacrificed, and why they had worried about her and tried to protect her the way they did. I loved this recognition in the book:

She started to see her mother and father in a new light. They had a sense of humour! They knew their private lives were completely separate from the world their daughter had described in another language.

Hats off, I say, to all those families who traverse this tricky ground.

Kim Scott‘s That deadman dance (2010)

Up to this point, I’ve presenting this list chronologically, but I wanted to end with this one, because it is, for Australia, the ultimate migration story. Written by an indigenous Australian, it explores the first meeting in Western Australia between British migrants and the indigenous inhabitants. Drawing from documentary evidence, Scott tells a story in which arrogance reigns over good will, setting Australia down a path from which we haven’t yet recovered. Bobby, the main indigenous character, says at one point in the novel:

We thought making friends was the best thing, and never knew that when we took your flour and sugar and tea and blankets that we’d lose everything of ours. We learned your words and songs and stories, and never knew you didn’t want to hear ours.

I think I’ll leave it there …

Monday musings on Australian literature: Australia Council Award

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Last month the Australia Council announced this year’s Lifetime Achievement Award for Australian Literature. This award used to be called the Writer’s Emeritus Award, which I have written about before. Lifetime Achievement Award sounds better don’t you think? After all, “emeritus” implies retirement but most winners never really retire – at least as far as I can tell.

The award is worth $50,000 and it “acknowledges the achievements of eminent literary writers aged 60 years and over who have made an outstanding and lifelong contribution to Australian literature”. The Australia Council defines this contribution pretty specifically: “Nominated writers must have provided a critically acclaimed body of work with at least five full-length literary works published or performed over their creative life”. Five full-length literary works? I presume that means that if you are a poet or a short story writer, they would expect five published collections?

This year’s winner, though, is a novelist so no worries on the criteria front. The winner is Frank Moorhouse. The Australia Council Literary Strategy Chair, author Sophie Cunningham, said that while it was hard to select a winner:

Frank’s highly influential, intelligent, timely and sparkling contributions to Australian literature over so many years was hard to beat

Frank Moorhouse has an extensive body of work including novels, short stories and memoirs, but he is probably best known for his Edith trilogy, the third of which, Cold light, I reviewed earlier this year. The President of the Australian Publishers Association Louise Adler, who nominated him for the award, said that

Frank’s Edith is one of the great characters of Australian literature, but his career covers a lot more ground than that extraordinary achievement.

and that

His Edith trilogy is a magisterial work that takes Australia to the world and brings the world home to Australia in a hugely original literary endeavour.

Moorhouse is, I agree, a deserving winner. He’s one of the grand old men of Australian culture – and has been a strong advocate for writers and their rights, and for the book industry. He brought with the Australian Copyright Council, for example, a landmark copyright case against the University of New South Wales regarding the photocopying of pages from his work “The Americans, baby”. Controversy is, in fact, often not far from him, such as when in 1994, the Miles Franklin Award judges decided that his Grand days, the first Edith Trilogy book, was “insufficiently Australian” to be considered for the award. And then, there was even a little contretemps over the announcement of this very award. It was supposed to be announced at an event on November 21, but was pre-emptively announced much earlier on November 4. According to The Australian‘s Stephen Romei, in his blog A pair of ragged claws, this was due to Moorhouse who

said he didn’t want a media embargo in place until the announcement because he was opposed to the “cruel” trend towards treating literary awards “like the Oscars” and keeping shortlisted writers in the dark until the envelope was opened.

Clearly, at 75, Moorhouse is not going quietly!

Some past winners are pretty well-known, such as poet Bruce Dawe (200) and novelist Christopher Koch (2007), but others are not so well-known, including Dr Peter Kocan whose win I reported in 2010. Another lesser known winner is last year’s Herb Wharton, the indigenous Australian poet and novelist.

This is a significant award – and worth a decent amount of money – and yet it doesn’t receive a lot of publicity. That’s a shame, not only because the writers deserve recognition, but because better publicity could help inform Australians about their literary culture and about the work of the Australia Council which our taxes support. Anything that raises our literary consciousness would be a very good thing.

Monday musings on Australian literature: The Walkley Awards

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The Walkley Awards for Excellence in Journalism are Australia’s premier awards for journalists. Last week the winners of the 58th awards were announced.

According to the Walkley Foundation website, the awards were established in 1956 by Ampol Petroleum founder Sir William Gaston Walkley. Apparently, according to the website, William Walkley appreciated the media’s support for his oil exploration efforts. That’s rather telling of a different time isn’t it? Anyhow, as a result, he wanted to recognise and encourage emerging talent in the Australian media.

Back then the award categories – of which there were five – were all for print, even though radio had been around for a few decades. Television, on the other hand, had only just started – that year in fact – in Australia. Over the years the awards have changed, particularly with new categories added. In 2013, however, more changes were added, in categories and criteria, after a review was conducted of the awards, led by Walkley Advisory Board Chair and well-known Australian journalist, Laurie Oakes. The review recognised that modern journalism “draws on a broad range of interactive tools and multi-media platforms”.  It’s interesting that they needed a review to recognise this, that they hadn’t learnt the lessons from the past when new technologies like radio and television appeared. Anyhow, the aim of the awards is still to maintain and strengthen “commitment to the fundamentals of ‘quality, independent journalism'” but appreciates that quality journalism can appear in many different places.

Here’s what the website says:

For the first time, entry was open to Australian journalists who have self-published, including bloggers and independent operators of online news sites. So too, journalism was invited under the sections of text/print; audio/radio and audio-visual/television to better reflect journalism’s digital evolution as well as specialist All Media categories.

In other words, as Oakes said, “if it looks like journalism and feels like journalism it will be treated as journalism.” According to Oakes, the Walkleys are unique in the world for recognising “excellence across all areas of journalism”.

There are now over 30 categories in which awards are made – and as far as I can see there are no specific categories for blogging journalists. I guess it’s more that blog articles will now be considered in the relevant categories. Anyhow, I’m not going to list all the categories and this year’s winners here. There are some, though that particularly interest me.

  • All Media Coverage of Indigenous Affairs was won by Kathy Marks, Griffith Review, “Channelling Mannalargenna”. I don’t recollect having read Kathy Marks before, but apparently she won a Ned Kelly Award for her book Pitcairn: Paradise Lost and has written a few pieces for Griffith Review. This winning piece is about Aboriginal Tasmania, about “a people who were pronounced extinct in 1896, but a century later re-emerged to proclaim their Tasmanian Aboriginal identity, demand land rights and revive traditional cultural practices”.
  • Print/Text Feature Writing Long (Over 4000 words) was won by Melissa Lucashenko, Griffith Review, “Sinking below sight: Down and out in Brisbane and Logan”. Lucashenko has been a regular contributor to the Griffith Review pretty much since it was established. I have reviewed stories and articles by Lucashenko, and have now read this winning essay about poverty in Australia and some of its identifying features. The research is local and, as she says, not statistical but it is powerful nonetheless. I shall write it up separately.
  • Walkley Book Award was won by Pamela Williams for her book Killing Fairfax: Packer, Murdoch and the ultimate revenge, which is, rather ironically I suppose,  about the decline of one of Australia’s oldest and most respected media organisations. It’s a book I’d like to read. Anna Krein’s Night games: Sex, power and sport (which I reviewed here a few months ago) was one of the three books shortlisted for this award from a long list of nine.

As a fan of the Griffith Review, I’m thrilled to see that it picked up two awards. It has won Walkleys before. It’s good to see that this Griffith University initiative which, in each issue, tackles in some depth and from multiple angles a contemporary issue or concern, is being recognised for the quality of its writers and output.

I was rather hoping that one of the new quality on-line sites would win an award but, as far as I can tell from the list of winners I’ve seen, that doesn’t seem to have happened. However, there is an interesting article at The Conversation on the changes to the Walkleys and in regards to changes in journalism. It looks at the old digital versus analogue debate, the role of user-generated content, and our ongoing need for professional journalists to sift through the available information and present it to us in an intelligent way – because, in the end, it’s not the platform that matters, is it, but the content.

At a time when investigative and long-form journalism is being threatened and when the reputation of journalists for ethical reporting seems pretty low, it’s good to see the Walkley Foundation doing its best to support and encourage the best. I think that’s worth celebrating.

Monday musings on Australian literature: Sisters in Crime

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And now for something rather different here at Whispering Gums. Crime literature, as my regular readers know, is not my forte. In fact, I really only read crime if it comes my way for a specific reason – such as Peter Temple winning the Miles Franklin Award a few years ago. That doesn’t mean however that it’s not a relevant subject for Monday Musings. So today I bring you Sisters in Crime.

Sisters in Crime is an Australian organisation which aims “to celebrate women’s crime writing on the page and screen and bring a collective critical eye to the field.” Inspired by the American organisation of the same name, it was launched at the Feminist Book Festival in Melbourne in September 1991. It undertakes a range of activities supporting crime writing by women, including sponsoring two awards:

Because this is a reader’s blog rather than a writer’s one, I thought I’d focus on this awards aspect of their work – but for the record they offer a lot to writers, including workshops, networking opportunities, and promotion.

The Scarlett Stilettos

This year, 2013, was the twentieth anniversary of the Scarlett Stilettos, an award for short stories in the crime and mystery genre. The purpose of these awards is to “support and unearth new talent”. Over the years they have done just that with some of Australia’s top female crime writers having won the award, such as Cate Kennedy and Tara Moss. The Awards have an interesting “two-strikes-and-you’re-out” rule. That is, if you win twice you can’t enter again. I like this. It feels appropriately collaborative for an organisation that calls itself “Sisters”, and it shows they’re serious about the “unearth new talent” goal. Apparently, in its twenty years, four writers, including the inaugural winner, Cate Kennedy, have won twice.

Prizes are offered in multiple categories: First, Second and Third overall-prizes, Malice Domestic, Best Investigative, Cross Genre, The Body in the Library, Best New Talent, Great Film Idea, Funniest Crime, and a Youth Award.

In 2013 there were 175 entries, and an e-book of the 2013 winning stories, Scarlet Stiletto Short Stories: 2013 has been published. It’s available from Clan Destine Press (here), Amazon, Kobo and iTunes. At $4 it is surely a great deal if you love crime and mystery.

The Davitt Awards

These awards are a little younger, with this year being the 13th time they’ve been awarded. They are named for Ellen Davitt (1812-1879) who apparently wrote Australia’s first mystery novel, Force and fraud, in 1865. She was born in England, and married her husband, Arthur Davitt, there. According to the Australian Dictionary of Biography, they emigrated to Australia in 1854 “to take up a joint appointment with the National Board of Education, Davitt as principal of the Model and Normal Schools and his wife as superintendent of the female pupils and trainees”.

As with the Stilettos, several prizes are awarded: Best Novel (Adult), Best Novel (Children and Young Adult), Best True Crime Book, Best Debut Book, and Reader’s Choice (voted by members). In 2013 a new award was added, the Lifetime Achievement Award. Australian crime readers would not be surprised to learn that the inaugural winner of this award was Kerry Greenwood, author of the Phryne Fisher detective novels which have been recently adapted to a popular television series. I haven’t read the novels, but I love the 1920s inspired covers (of the current editions, anyhow) and have enjoyed the television series which beautifully reproduces the era in Melbourne.

Sixty-one books were entered for this year’s awards, which is apparently a record number. The winners are listed on the Sisters in Crime website so I won’t report on them all here. I was interested though to see that a Canberran whom I haven’t heard of, Pamela Burton, won the award for Best True Crime for her book The Waterlow killings: A portrait of a family tragedy. It’s about the murder of art curator Nick Waterlow and his daughter Chloe by their son and brother Anthony, a schizophrenia sufferer, and apparently explores the limits and failures of the mental health system. It’s the sort of crime book I could imagine reading!

There are other Australian awards for crime fiction – notably the Ned Kelly Awards. In fact, Kerry Greenwood won their Lifetime Achievement Award in 2003. I’m thinking I might do a bit of an occasional series on Australia’s literary awards for genre writing, if only to inform myself better on our literary landscape.

Monday musings on Australian literature: MUBA 2013

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Last year I reported on the inaugural MUBA – Most Under-rated Book Award. I hoped that it would continue, because it brings to our attention good books that somehow slide under the radar, mostly because their authors are less known and/or their publishers are small.

In 2012, I had read one of the four short-listed books, Irma Gold’s Two steps forward (my review), but it didn’t, unfortunately, win. This year again, I had read one of the four short-listed books, Merlinda Bobis‘ Fish-hair woman (my review). But, before I announce the winner, here is the shortlist:

  • Merlinda Bobis’ Fish-hair woman (Spinifex Press)
  • Ginger Briggs’ Staunch  (Affirm Press, which published Irma Gold’s book)
  • Annabel Smith’s Whiskey Charlie Foxtrot (Fremantle Press)
  • Anna Solding’s The hum of concrete  (MidnightSun Publishing)

The judges for this year, according to its sponsor SPUNC, included book reviewer/writer Stephanie Campisi, bookseller/poet Ben Walter, and writer/bibliotherapist, Estelle Tang. SPUNC says of the shortlist that:

The shortlisted writers represent four of the original and worthy voices to be published by independent Australian publishers in the 2012 calendar year. These books show excellence in their genre and demonstrate quality of writing, editorial integrity, and production. They have been overlooked for other prizes and have not generated the sales they deserve for any number of reasons other than the great quality of the products.

And the winner is – ta da – Merlinda Bobis’ Fish-hair woman. As I said, I haven’t read the others though I do have Annabel Smith in my reading sights. However, I was highly impressed by Fish-hair woman, which is a challenging but rewarding read, and so am thrilled for her. It’s a timely win too as Merlinda Bobis is a Filippine-Australian. As Spinifex Press director Dr Renate Klein said in their Press Release on the award:

At this time when the Philippines is experiencing a humanitarian disaster on an epic scale, I’m pleased that a kernel of something positive has happened this week. Merlinda is a Philippine Australian writer who has shown how much she cares for the Philippines and its people, and I know this award means so much to her.

It is fantastic, but not surprising, that Fish-Hair woman captured the judges’ attention; it deserves a much wider audience, and this award will definitely assist in attracting more readers to the book.

So, huge congratulations to Bobis and Spinifex – and let’s hope it results in more sales.

Have you read any books in the last year or so that you believe are under-rated? Do let us know in the comments and give them a plug!

Monday musings on Australian literature: Writers’ archives

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Australian author and feminist Germaine Greer ...

Germaine Greer, 2006 Humber Mouth Festival (Photo: Walnut Whippet, CC-BY-2.0, via Wikipedia)

Having heard recently about the University of Melbourne‘s acquisition of Germaine Greer‘s archives and having written in last week’s Monday Musings about the biographer Hazel Rowley who spent hours researching such archives, I thought it would be worth writing a little about writers’ archives – their importance and challenges.

First off, I am, as many of you know, a (retired) librarian/archivist, so this topic is particularly dear to my heart. The personal papers or archives or manuscripts (terminology varies a bit) of significant creators are of course the lifeblood of researchers. Without them, writing biographies of people long gone is very difficult. Consequently, libraries often start negotiating for writers’ papers long before they die – to save that embarrassing, difficult vulture-like situation of contacting families after they’ve gone! Some donate outright, some sell (though money is tight so purchase is rare except for very significant papers), some are bequeathed, and some are donated through tax incentive schemes.

So, the first challenge is negotiating acquisition. I won’t detail the challenges regarding what is acquired, but this is another minefield. What does the library want? What is the creator prepared to offer? What indeed has the creator retained? Australians will know the story of the irascible Patrick White who wrote to the National Library in 1977 that:

I can’t let you have my papers because I don’t keep any. My manuscripts are destroyed as soon as the books are printed. I put very little into notebooks and I don’t keep friends’ letters as I urge them not to keep mine, and anything unfinished when I die is to be burnt.

However, wily that he was, this was not quite true, and some 16 years after his death, Barbara Mobbs, his literary agent and executor, pulled off what White biographer David Marr has called “perhaps the greatest surprise in this country’s literary history” by offering 33 boxes of White’s papers (including some manuscripts and correspondence) to the National Library of Australia. Very exciting for Australia’s literary culture – but somewhat of an ethical quandary, because White did direct in his will that his papers be burnt. Mobbs couldn’t do it, and argued that if White had really wanted this to happen he would have done it himself. She knew him very well so we have to assume she was right. Anyhow, she waited 16 years, three years after the death of Manoly Lascaris, White’s partner of 49 years, before she made the collection known.

Another challenge is that of embargoes. Many people, when donating their papers, put embargoes on some or all of the papers, usually to protect those named within, effectively preventing the use of those papers (or sections) for years, often decades. This is pretty frustrating for the librarians who want to make their collections available and for the researchers wanting to use them, but at least the collections are secure for the future.

And then there’s the challenge of organising the papers and making them available. This is an immense task, with some ethical challenges of their own. I don’t know of any major cultural collecting institution that doesn’t have large backlogs of papers needing to be sorted, arranged, indexed/catalogued and now, these days, digitised. The first reports I saw of the acquisition of Germaine Greer’s papers implied that they were bought for A$3million which made Greer sound a little money-grubbing but it turns out, as Greer clarified on ABC’s Q&A last week, that $3million is the cost of the archives. Katrina Dean, from the University of Melbourne, writes that this amount includes “transport, cataloguing, indexing and digitisation”. She says:

Despite the efforts of archivists and digital scholars, much of the archival legacy of the 20th century [and presumably preceding centuries] remains untranslated into computer-readable language and accessible only to those with traditional archival research skills and specialised reference services.

And of course, only accessible to people who can travel to the place where the papers are stored.

Some specific writers’ papers

David Marr wrote his Patrick White biography while White was alive. He did not see the papers that the library acquired until, well, they were acquired at which time he went through them in some detail. He says they contain no great revelations that would make him want to redo the biography, but:

Jumbled and haphazard though they are, the notebooks are filled with biographical gold: scraps of diary, poems, reflections, lists of characters (121 for The Vivisector), the first pages of at least six novels in early draft, reams of detailed research for Voss (“Sydney hospital was known as Sydney Infirmary till 1881”), timelines, fashion notes and fragments of conversations overheard in the street.

Just by way of example, I thought I’d mention a few writers’ archives, and the works they’ve supported:

  • Christina Stead’s papers at the National Library of Australia were used by Hazel Rowley in her biography of Stead. Interestingly, and as often happens, Rowley’s papers relating to her research for the Stead biography are also held by the Library.
  • Elizabeth Jolley’s papers at the Mitchell Library in the State Library of New South Wales were used by Susan Swingler in her memoir-of-sorts, House of fiction. Brian Dibble, who wrote a biography of Jolley, Doing life, did the same. There are apparently embargoes on these papers, but permission can be sought to access them.
  • Mary Durack’s papers (in the Durack Family Papers) at the State Library of Western Australia were used by Brenda Niall in her book, True north: The story of Mary and Elizabeth Durack. (See my review)
  • Miles Franklin’s papers at the Mitchell Library in the State Library of New South Wales were used by Jill Roe in her book,  Stella MIles Franklin: A biography.

A small sample but, as you can see, these papers are spread around Australia, which is a good thing, really, in terms of preserving literary heritage. Now all we need is for them to be digitised and readily available to all, eh?

Monday musings on Australian literature: Hazel Rowley Literary Fund

/ Whispering Gums / 14 Comments

It seemed appropriate to talk about the Hazel Rowley Literary Fund this week given that several commenters on my review of Christina Stead‘s For love alone mentioned Rowley’s well-regarded biography of Christina Stead. Quite coincidentally – amazing how often such coincidences occur isn’t it – AustLit posted on their blog last week a piece titled The names behind our literary awards #1: Hazel Rowley. Today’s post was clearly meant to be.

For those of you who don’t know, Hazel Rowley was one of Australia’s most respected biographers. Christina Stead: A biography, published in 1993, was her first biography. It won the National Book Council’s “Banjo” Award for non-fiction. Her next biography published in 2001 was on the African-American writer, Richard Wright, whose book Native son is on my TBR, courtesy of my daughter. This was followed by Tête-à-tête: the lives and loves of Simone de Beauvoir & Jean-Paul Sartre in 2005, and the biography I have read and reviewed, Franklin & Eleanor: an extraordinary marriage, in 2011. Unfortunately, this is where her work ends because Rowley, born in 1951, died in New York of a cerebral haemorrhage in 2011 as that last biography was coming out. What a tragedy – for her, her family, and us. I love the fact that she wasn’t afraid to tackle already well-covered subjects, like Sartre and de Beauvoir, and the Roosevelts. I’m not an expert on the Roosevelts but from my reading I think she did contribute an interesting perspective to the body of work about them.

Anyhow, soon after her death, her friends and family established the Hazel Rowley Literary Fund. It “aims to commemorate Hazel’s life and her writing legacy through activities that support biography and writing in general”. The main vehicle for this is the Hazel Rowley Literary Fellowship. It  is offered annually and provides up to $10,000  to a writer researching a biography, or “an aspect of cultural or social history compatible with Hazel’s interest areas”. The Fund states that “Preference will be given to projects that are about ‘risk-taking’ and expanding horizons, promote discussion of ideas, and make a significant contribution to public intellectual life”. That’s a big call – but an encouraging one too – particularly given the discussion in last week’s Monday Musings about “commercial imperatives” blocking “artistic ones”. More encouragement of “risk-taking” is what we want. Is it good enough though to rely on private funding to achieve this?

(With thanks to AustLit for the inspiration for this post)