Monday musings

Monday musings on Australian literature: Thoughts on Australian e-publishing

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I wasn’t sure whether to call this “an Australian’s thoughts on e-publishing” or “thoughts on e-publishing in Australia” or the title I ended up choosing. There are subtle differences but almost too subtle for me to tease out here, so I decided to use the shortest title.

I was inspired to write this post by Nigel Featherstone’s blog post a week or so ago about a special offer for his novella, Fall on me (my review). The deal is that you can buy the e-book version and “pay whatever you like”! Apparently, as some of you probably know, Radiohead tried something similar many years ago – and 60% chose to pay nothing. I certainly hope that’s not what happens to Nigel Featherstone and his publisher, Blemish Books. Featherstone writes of the Radiohead experiment that:

At the time, Radiohead’s approach was considered ground-breaking, but over the years there’s been debate about its impact on the music industry in general; even Thom Yorke, the band’s free-thinking frontman, said that the strategy may have been a mistake, as it played into the prevailing internet culture that everything should be free.

I certainly don’t think everything on the internet should be free. After all, everyone has to eat and if the internet is the best way to distribute the results of one’s work then one should get paid. And yet, when I first acquired my Kindle around three years ago now, my idea was that I’d only use it for free classics (such as those from Project Gutenberg)!  I wasn’t, I thought, going to spend real money on a virtual book!

But, with experience has come some change of mind. Here is what I do now:

  • Pride and Prejudice book covers

    Reading the classics

    Classics: I will still acquire free classics if that’s the only way I can acquire them but if, as with say Jane Austen’s novels, they can be bought I will pay for them. This is because, really, “you get what you pay for”. With a bought classic you can usually choose a version with an introduction by an academic or critic you respect or want to read, and the edition is less likely to have editing/proofreading errors and other conniptions (as my last free classic did – it just seized up at a certain chapter and that was it. I could have investigated – re-downloaded perhaps – but it was easier to pay a couple of dollars for a commercially published edition).

  • Journals: I have discovered that I quite like reading literary journals on my Kindle. I do miss the lovely physicality of many journals – some are just gorgeous (like Kill Your Darlings) and some contain pictorial content that aren’t easily reproduced (like Griffith Review) – but journal articles are perfect for spare moments when I’m out and about, and e-versions are convenient.
  • Newspapers: I also like to read the newspaper in e-format, particularly since my app also supports crosswords! So far our local newspaper app is free, as they are still ironing out bugs etc, but at the prices being charged for other metropolitan newspaper apps, I’d be happy to pay for ours here in e-format, when they decide to charge. It’s so easy to select the articles I want to read, and I can read it when travelling.
  • Contemporary literature: I have finally started acquiring contemporary literature – both fiction and non-fiction – on my Kindle. I still prefer print versions for this sort of reading but am teaching myself to enjoy e-versions. It is lovely to hear of a book, decide you want it right away, and be able to get it – particularly when it isn’t immediately available in my favourite bookshop (as I discovered recently with Courtney Collins’ The burial. “We can order it for you”, the salesperson helpfully said, but that can take two weeks or more and, being a child of the twenty-first century, I wanted it now!). I want to pay less for an e-version, but there are costs – including payment to the author – that are independent of the publishing platform, so we have to pay something. Right?

So, how reflective are my reading habits of e-publishing in Australia? Clearly, journals and newspapers are actively moving into e-formats. I don’t know how readers are responding to this, but anecdotal evidence tells me that people are increasingly interested in receiving their newspapers and journals electronically. However, the situation seems to me to be a little different when it comes to books. Again speaking anecdotally, there’s some resistance among my literary fiction cohorts to reading “whole” books electronically, with most still preferring print, even where, like me, they have e-book devices. I think there might be a bigger uptake among genre readers?

An article in The Australian earlier this year suggests that e-Books represent about 10% of book purchases here, which is less than in the US (20%) and the UK (16%). Publishers recognise that the e-book is here to stay but also believe that print will continue side-by-side (for some time to come, anyhow). Sensibly, publishers are starting to look more carefully at what they publish in what format when. Digital-first and digital-only publishing is now part of the business model. Penguin Australia, for example, has introduced its digital only Penguin Specials collection, with wonderful sounding fiction and non-fiction titles by the likes of Elizabeth Jolley, Gideon Haigh, and Orhan Pamuk. Ooh, I want to read them …

Also in The Australian article, the HarperCollins spokesperson said that:

Fiction readers, in particular, have responded enthusiastically to the e-reading experience and we have seen a significant upsurge of sales of backlist titles as people ‘discover’ a new author and then buy all previous books by them.

Great, eh? The Blemish Books initiative which inspired this post is, really, about backlist. I hope it goes well. It isn’t easy being a small publisher – or one of its authors!

Monday musings on Australian literature: Notes on the Sydney Writers’ Festival from a non-attendee

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One day I swear I will get to the Sydney Writers’ Festival – properly, I mean. I have been to one session once, but that barely counts. Late May, though, tends to be one of my busiest times of the year, so the years pass and I don’t get to the Festival. I do, though, try to follow it a bit, and so today I thought I’d pass on a few, very idiosyncratic things, that I’ve picked up around the traps.

Discovering new writers

Festivals are great for discovering new writers. Although I watched Q&A last week and enjoyed the panel discussion with several writers from the Festival, my festival experience really started on Thursday with Michael Cathcart’s live interview with South African writer Lauren Beukes (broadcast on Books and Arts Daily on Radio National). Not being a big reader of psychological thrillers, I hadn’t heard of her before and wasn’t really sure I’d be interested in the interview but I would have been sorry to have missed this. Cathcart asked some pointed questions, including the implications of writing in detail about violent acts against women. Beukes, though, was up to the challenge. She spoke of how the real victims of violent crimes tend to be just names, that we don’t hear their stories, that we are never encouraged to think about the sort of deaths they faced – the terror, the pain, they go through before they die. She wrote her latest novel The shining girls from the girls’ points of view because she wanted us to know them, to empathise with them, though she recognised that titillation is also always there in the genre. She also set this novel in Chicago, not South Africa where rape and violence against women are rife, because she wanted to make it clear that there’s violence and corruption everywhere, not just South Africa.

Beukes believes that fiction has a social function. She writes, she said, because there are things we need to talk about. She doesn’t write to lecture, to specifically change people’s minds, but to encourage discussion.

For more interviews with writers from the Festival, do check out Radio National, particularly Books and Arts Daily’s page.

Dilettantish interests*

The secret River cover

Famous Chong cover (Courtesy: Text)

An important part of my Festival experience in recent years is reading John’s reports on his Musings of a Literary Dilettante blog. To date, John has written three posts on the Festival. The first was on a session called The Uncommon Reader, a panel discussion with critics James Wood, Geordie Williamson and Jane Gleeson-White, chaired by Tegan Bennett Daylight. In the session these critics named the books that they go to again and again. John’s post is interesting for this alone. Don’t all we readers love to know what books other readers love?

John’s second post was on book design. If you are interested in this topic, do read his post. He reports on what several designers had to say, including Text Publishing‘s award-winning designer, WH Chong. If you read Australian published books you are sure to have seen some Chong covers. John’s post resulted in a discussion (in the comments section) regarding design in the e-book world and the commercial function of design.

John’s third post is a moving tribute to Gillian Mears, author of Foal’s bread (my review), who, many of you will know, suffers from MS and needs to manage her energy carefully. It’s therefore a real treat to see her in public forums. John’s post provides a lovely insight into Mears now – the struggles she’s facing, the things that still interest and concern her, her love of nature and the outdoors, her change of mind concerning euthanasia, and, despite it all, her sense of humour.

Flying high … on poetry, stories and creativity*

This year, I also read another blogger’s reports, Jonathan of Me Fail? I Fly. Jonathan went to two days of the festival. In his first post Jonathan describes a few events, starting with the launch of four chapbooks of poetry by the poets, David Malouf, Robert Adamson, Martin Harrison and Adam Aitken. I loved Jonathan’s comment that “The mutual respect and affection among the five people [including poet Luke Davies who launched the books] on the dais was something wonderful: completely the opposite of the internecine strife for which poets are supposedly famous”. Jonathan then went to another poetry event, Harbour City Poets, at which five poets, Margaret Bradstock, John Carey, David Musgrave, Louise Wakeling and Les Wicks, read. His post concludes on two more events that day: Robert Green on Creativity and Stories Then and Now. This post gave me a good sense of how busy attending festivals can be – particularly since Jonathan had to rush home in the middle to feed his dog!

On his second day at the festival, Jonathan attended two events: Writers who blog with Mark Forsyth, Tara Moss, Lorraine Elliott and Angela Meyer, and Beyond Climate Denial on a Neoliberal Planet with Jeff Sparrow, Robert Manne and others. I was of course most interested in his report of the blogging session. Jonathan says he managed to ask the first question at the end of the session:

I asked about difficulties with comments. Mark had a ready, sensible answer: ‘Don’t start an argument on the Internet.’ Tara took the microphone: ‘My advice is, Start arguments on the Internet.’ They were both right, of course. I liked Tara’s final note: ‘When you do get into an argument, don’t say anything you wouldn’t want to see quoted in the newspaper.’

Love it … don’t you?

The Guardian doesn’t like Sydney’s rain

Yesterday’s Guardian (UK) online has an article titled “Ten thoughts to take from the Sydney Writers’ Festival”. The article is more entertaining than usefully edifying, but I did love “Five: on euphemisms” regarding “the sorts of euphemisms reviewers use to disguise their negative thoughts on books”. James Ley said that “‘Interesting’ is a usefully neutral term”, and Susan Wyndham suggested that “ambitious” is helpful, saying that “you don’t necessarily have to say whether the work achieved those ambitions or not”! I have two somewhat contradictory questions to ask you regarding this. Should reviewers disguise their negative thoughts? And, what euphemisms do you use? I must say that I try very hard not to use “interesting”!

But, what really made me laugh was the Guardian‘s parenthetical eleventh thought that “Sydney doesn’t do rain well. Know that you will not be able to buy an umbrella at the festival, anywhere, ever.”  The Guardian people clearly aren’t used to a country where drought is common! It wasn’t until we travelled to Japan that we discovered there are countries which sell umbrellas everywhere.

* I hope I haven’t stolen John and Jonathan‘s thunder. Their posts say much more than I’ve noted here. Do go read them at the links I’ve provided.

POSTSCRIPT: Podcasts are available of some talks. Go to the Sydney Writers’ Festival site and click on SWF Blog tab to find them. Thanks to DKS of Pykk for reminding me.

Monday musings on Australian literature: The History of Emotions

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I had something else planned for today’s Monday musings, but it can wait, because this afternoon a member of my Jane Austen group brought something rather interesting to my attention. It’s the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions.

Here is how it describes itself:

Emotions shape individual, community and national identities. The ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions uses Historical Knowledge from Europe, 1100-1800, to understand the long history of emotional behaviours.

How fascinating. It’s one of those joint ARC projects involving a number of universities: the University of Adelaide, the University of Melbourne, the University of Queensland, the University of Sydney, and the University of Western Australia. Given the cutbacks to tertiary studies in the humanities over recent years, I’m thrilled to see something like this being supported. The Centre was established in January 2011.

Lithograph of Cremorne Gardens in 1862

Lithograph of Cremorne Gardens in 1862 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

They divide their research areas into four programs: Meanings, Change, Performance and Shaping the modern. There’s a lot going on, but under Shaping the Modern I found an interesting current project being undertaken by Dr Katrina O’Loughlin, titled ‘A certain correspondence’: intellectual sociability and emotional community in the eighteenth century.  She’s interested in the “global early modern world” – seventeenth and eighteenth century Europe – and the explosion in trade and travel that led not only to movement of people and objects, but to “a lively exchange of ideas”. Her specific research interest is the “affective dimensions” of the “intellectual bonds” that were forged as people shared ideas – in salons, theatres, coffeehouses, pleasure gardens and so on.

I guess you know what this made me think of: how our current global communication explosion is resulting in a similar sharing of ideas – virtually – and how this too is having an affective dimension, both positive and negative. From my forays into online communities – starting with internet bookgroups operating via listservs in the mid to late 1990s – I have been thrilled by the sharing of ideas that I’ve been involved in but, just as importantly, also by the friendships that have developed as a result. I have also, as have any of us who’ve spent a lot of time online, experienced or witnessed a range of other, more negative, emotional behaviours. These emotional behaviours and patterns can clearly impact us as individuals, but the interesting thing is whether or how they impact society (or community) as a whole. For example, has (or will) our global sharing lead to improved understanding of “other” and therefore greater peace? Hmm … Anyhow, I’d love to see what conclusions O’Loughlin reaches, and how applicable they might be to the 21st century.

I suppose this post has a tenuous link to Australian literature but, looking at it broadly, the research being undertaken will add to the body of Australian academic literature, and I reckon that’s a good enough reason for writing about it in my Monday Musings series. And anyhow, isn’t emotion at the bottom of everything we read?

You can Like the Centre on Facebook to be kept informed about activities/events/research that are historically emotional or, is that, emotionally historical!

Monday musings on Australian literature: City, bush and outback

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If today weren’t Monday, this would probably be a literary road post but it is Monday which means of course that it’s a Monday Musings instead! See how flexible I am?

20130513-213226.jpg

I know I talk a lot here about the bush and the outback but they are topics that keep cropping up in my reading and thinking. They cropped up again yesterday during a performance we attended at the Ballarat Heritage Festival. It was Bernard Caleo of the Museum of Melbourne reciting Banjo Paterson‘s “Mulga Bill’s Bicycle” and “The Man from Ironbark“. He performed them beautifully, but even better he provided some background to Paterson and his times. He spoke of the rivalry between Paterson and Henry Lawson. They were, he said, friends but they saw the bush in opposing ways: Lawson thought Paterson was too “romantic” while Paterson thought Lawson was all “doom and gloom”.

Caleo didn’t buy into the argument. That wasn’t, after all, his reason for being at the festival, but he did say that through publishing their poems and stories in The Bulletin they debated and defined our understanding of the city and the bush or outback. And he was right. Whether we read Paterson’s comedy or Lawson’s gloom or, even, Barbara Baynton‘s gothic, what we get is not only a sense of a divide between the city and the outback, but a rather schizophrenic view of the bush and/or outback. However, I don’t think these opposing views are irreconcilable: Paterson’s view of bushmen as heroic, free, and unsophisticated, and Lawson’s recognition of the harshness of outback life and the despairing resilience of the people are mutually exclusive. The way I see it, Lawson’s drover’s wife is heroic and Paterson’s Clancy works hard for his living. It’s more a matter of perspective than of there being a single truth … Don’t you think?

And yet, it’s not quite that simple either, because there is the issue of intention, or, at least, of impact. Paterson’s main goal seems to have been for city people to respect not ridicule bush people whereas Lawson, with his socialist leanings, may very well have hoped his writings would lead to practical improvements in the lot of the people he wrote about. On the other hand, maybe both just wanted to make a buck! Regardless, these two views of bush people are still relevant today ….  That’s what interests me the most when I read, or hear, their writing, the way those views persist. I’m sure to write more on’t.

Monday musings on Australian literature: Miles Franklin Award shortlist and the woman question

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Miles Franklin

Miles Franklin ca 1940s (Presumed Public Domain, via Wikipedia)

Things have been looking up lately on the women writers front. Last year two women – Anna Funder (All that I am) and Gillian Mears (Foal’s bread) – made an almost clean sweep of our major literary awards. This year women writers are again faring well, with the Miles Franklin shortlist comprising all women. The shortlist, announced last week, is:

Three of these – Floundering, Beloved and The mountain – are debut novels, though Drusilla Modjeska has published several books, some of which play with the boundary between fact and fiction.

I’m not writing this post to gloat. After all, I love many contemporary Aussie male writers including those I’ve reviewed here, such as David Malouf, Tim Winton, Murray Bail, Gerald Murnane, Peter Carey, Richard Flanagan, and less well-known ones like Alan Gould, Andrew Croome and Nigel Featherstone. However, there have been some very lean years for women, including a couple of recent years (2009 and 2011) in which no women writers were shortlisted for the Miles Franklin. These, together with VIDA’s evidence regarding inequities in women being published and reviewed, and women being used as reviewers, were the prime impetus for the establishment of the Australian Women Writers Challenge (AWW). Last year’s stellar year for women and now this year’s Miles Franklin shortlist might suggest that the job is done – but I don’t think so. History has shown that gains made by women are often not sustained …

… and, anyhow, the AWW is not about ignoring men. It is simply about recognising and, in doing so, promoting women. Most of the women involved in the challenge also read male (or, should I say, men) writers. I sure do, as you can see if you scan my Author Index.

Last year, Rebecca Giggs wrote an article in Overland about the “woman” issue. She was commenting on a question put to Anna Krien (I’ve reviewed Into the forest and Us and them) regarding why Australia’s best non-fiction is currently being written by women. Giggs pondered:

During this past summer – a time when women’s writing has been the subject of renewed attention – I have found myself wondering why a direct answer to that question is so hard. It would be exceptionally unusual, one imagines, for an emerging male author to be asked why so many of our best books are currently being written by men. And yet it would also be wrong to say that the query, asked of a female writer, is unforeseeable. As regressive and problematic as the question seems, it remains relevant because of the prevalence of its assumptions in publishing and readership communities. To foreclose on Attwood’s right to ask about the specific role of women in nonfiction is to abandon the opportunity to learn from our stumbling answers.

This is the point – to keep the conversation going, to better understand if there are any underlying issues preventing longterm equal treatment and recognition. Reading Giggs again, I was reminded of the recent discussions regarding Wikipedia’s removing women from their American novelists category to the American women novelists category. The impetus for the new category was valid: people do want to identify and locate women writers, just as people want to locate a country’s indigenous authors or LGBT authors or some other specific group. The problem was the “removing” of women novelists from the main list, thereby marginalising them while at the same time highlighting them. Wikipedia, being the collaborative venture that it is, is reviewing its policy to ensure that its categories work practically, equitably and philosophically.

It’s vexing, really, that the question is still vexed …

Monday musings on Australian literature: Place

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Place. It’s a complex thing isn’t it?

Arti (Ripple Effects) commented on my recent post on Gerard Manley Hopkins‘ “Spring and Fall” that

… while spring may be a welcome sight, for some strange reasons, I miss winter’s snow. (not the temp. just the beautiful snow scenes).

Would I miss winter and snow? Not on your nelly! Meanwhile, Nigel Featherstone (Under the counter or a flutter in the dovecot) wrote in response my comment on a recent post of his:

As to the drive to and from Canberra: most of my trips are through Lake Bathurst; so amazing – all that sky!

But arriving in the ACT is always a good feeling. Though almost immediately I miss my home town.

Isn’t place interesting? So difficult to capture accurately…

Wide Brown Land sculpture

Wide Brown Land (National Arboretum)

These comments got me to thinking about my sense of place – and then about place in literature. First me. My love of the Australian landscape came home to me when we returned in 1985 from a two-year posting in Virginia, USA. Like most Aussies, I’d read a lot of fiction from the northern hemisphere and had somehow been imbued with the idea that the loveliest landscape is lush and green and the best houses are two-storey. After enjoying two years in such a place, I wondered how I’d feel about returning home. I needn’t have worried. We drove back into my city and it felt wonderful. I knew then that here, this  browner place with its scraggly vegetation, was my place.

Now for literature. I can think of two main uses of place in literature. One is the obvious one, place as setting, as background for the action. I enjoy reading good descriptions of place, and have shared some in my reviews. My favourite descriptions are sensory, enabling me to “feel” and “see” the place and its impact on the characters. A favourite example is the opening paragraph of Charles Dickens‘ Bleak House. It’s hard to forget London and its fogs after that.

The other use, though, is more complex. It’s to do with our relationship to place – the way we interact with place, the way we feel about it, the way it interacts with us.

But here’s the rub. Relationship to place is complicated in colonial/settler societies like ours, societies which have taken over someone else’s place. How do we reconcile that? There’s a fundamental conflict between our two different experiences of place, and it’s discomforting. We want to respect and better understand the original owners’ values while validating our own. Literature (and the arts in general) can help us work through these issues –  by directly exposing and exploring the conflict, and more subtly by sharing our respective experiences. For literature to be effective, of course, we need universal literacy – but that’s another story.

Fortunately, more indigenous writers are being published and we are hearing their voices about land, about country. We need to hear it, we need to share and talk. In That deadman dance, Kim Scott tackles head on the issue of land and ownership, of competing values and different understandings, in the early days of settlement. Killam, the soldier, has to give up to the Governor a place he’d taken:

Mr Killam was learning what it was to have someone move in on what you thought was your very own home. He thought it was the last straw. The very last.

Meanwhile, Skelly tramps about the land with a gun in his hand, explaining:

Well, it’s not our home is it?

And entrepreneur Chaine decides, at one point, to give up his farming goal for whaling:

Whaling was better than attempting to work this land with its topsy-turvy seasons  and poor soil, and there’d be trouble with the natives, farming. The best land was their land, too.

For our indigenous narrator, Bobby, land is something known, felt:

And then Bobby found a sheet of granite, and a small rock hole covered with a thin stone slab and filled with water. He crouched to it, he touched the stone, and sensed home.

In the end, of course, the “settlers” win and we descendants are left with the legacy of loving land that was not ours. Kim Scott has made an intelligent contribution to the conversation about this complex business of land.

Some years before Kim Scott’s book (2011), Andrew McGahan, a non-indigenous writer, wrote The white earth (2004), a contemporary story set on the eve of Native Title. It’s about the love of land, by both indigenous and non-indigenous people, about greed and putting money and land ahead of spiritual and emotional values. It’s a little melodramatic, but it’s a powerful read. The old grazier believes that:

Ownership could not be shared. Not the power of it, not the weight of it either. It could be crushing that weight, encompassing all the history that the land had ever witnessed, the summation of the lives and deaths of all those who had walked it before. But William [his great nephew] barely even knew the station – he hadn’t smelled it or touched it or felt the terrible age in its bones …

The irony is that this is a man who loves his land, but selfishly and greedily. There are indigenous people who own this land and Native Title is being enacted. His daughter says:

This law is brand new, it has to be interpreted by judges. Maybe the Kuran people haven’t kept up their presence, but if they argue that eighty years ago their entire male population was killed off while trying to – then what? What humane person isn’t going to consider that a reasonable excuse, no matter what the letter of the law might say?

This is a complex novel with no easy ending …

And I have ranged far from what inspired me to write this post but it comes down to this: we have a long way to go before we (non-indigenous people) can feel comfortable about our love of our place. We need the arts to help us through it … I suspect Nigel would agree.

Monday musings on Australian literature: Stella, Carrie and friends

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Mateship with Birds (Courtesy: Pan MacMillan)

Book Cover (Courtesy: Pan MacMillan)

For those of you who haven’t yet heard the news, I’d better start with the announcement that last week Carrie Tiffany‘s novel, Mateship with birds, was announced the winner of the inaugural Stella Prize. Unfortunately, the book is still on my TBR but with its also being shortlisted for the NSW Premier’s Literary Award and longlisted for the Miles Franklin Award, I need to get a move on.

Okay, now that I’ve got that off my chest, back to Stella and Carrie. When she was announced as the winner of the Prize, Tiffany, according to tweets on the night, immediately advised that she would return $10,000 of the $50,000 prize to be shared among the remaining shortlisted writers: Courtney Collins (The burial), Michelle de Kretser (Questions of travel), Lisa Jacobson (The sunlit zone), Cate Kennedy (Like a house on fire) and Margo Lanagan (Sea hearts). She wanted to recognise, I believe, the co-operative spirit of the Stella Prize, and the fact that women writers are supportive of each other. Go Carrie, I say.

Now to the “friends” part of this post’s title. In addition to the above gesture, she also said on the night that:

The Stella Prize is an opportunity to fete and honour writing by Australian women. When I sit down to write I am anchored by all of the books I have read. My sentences would not have been possible without the sentences of Christina Stead, Thea Astley, Elizabeth Jolley, Beverley Farmer, Kate Grenville, Gillian Mears, Helen Garner and the many other fine Australian writers that I have read and continue to read.

What a great list of writers. I first read all of these women, except Christina Stead, in the 1980s, and was blown away by the quality of their writing. Not only do they all tell wonderful stories but, as Tiffany implies, they write great sentences. You can have the best story in the world but if you can’t write a good sentence you’re not going to get far.

And sentences are clearly important to Tiffany, because in addition to mentioning them in her acceptance speech, she referred to them in an interview conducted by the Stella Prize team the day before the announcement. She was asked why she became a writer, and she said:

More than anything I wanted to become a reader and I’m pleased to have achieved that. In my early twenties I worked as a park ranger in Central Australia. I live in Melbourne now and work as a farming journalist. I started writing fiction ten or so years ago. I don’t remember any momentous shift, just a hankering to make some sentences of my own.

She was right to follow that hankering because, from what I’ve read and from the awards she’s won and been listed for, she too can write great sentences, can write in fact, like the women she named, brave sentences that take risks … I look forward to reading Mateship with birds.

Monday musings on Australian literature: Australia’s major Literary Awards

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This will be a short Monday Musings … aren’t you pleased!

The literary award season for 2013 is hotting up with the most exciting thing on the horizon being the announcement of the inaugural Stella Prize due tomorrow, 16 April. In addition to this, though, we have also seen the announcement of longlists and shortlists for a few other awards, and even a winner or two. I’m finding it hard to keep up …

Award Symbol

No. 1! (Courtesy: OCAL via clker.com)

Now, while I don’t make a practice of reporting on all awards, I do like to know what’s going on. So, I have created a new page on my blog for Australia’s main national literary awards. It’s not a complete list of all literary awards offered in Australia but of the significant ones that are exclusively or mostly awarded to fiction books or fiction writers in the national arena. I plan to include in the page the major dates for announcements of long lists, short lists, and winners for each award for the current year. I have linked each award, where possible, to its Wikipedia page, on the assumption that that’s likely to be the most stable page and will, in most cases, provide a link to the award’s official site – where there is one. I find it quite frustrating, in fact, that many of the awards do not have well-maintained sites. It is quite hard, for example, to find the important dates for this year’s announcements, and so you’ll see that the list is incomplete.

Anyhow, there you have it for this week … please look at the page if you are interested, and if you see any glaring omissions or errors, let me know.

Monday musings on Australian literature: AWW Challenge 2013 First Quarter Progress Report

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Regular readers here know that while I generally do not do challenges I am taking part in the Australian Women Writers’ Challenge – because it’s what I like to read anyhow. The challenge, which began last year, was so successful that the initiator Elizabeth Lhuede, decided to continue it this year – and called on other bloggers to help. I am one of those bloggers and have responsibility for overseeing the Literary (fiction and non-fiction) area. We have now completed the first quarter of 2013 – how can that be, by the way (!) – and I thought it might be interesting to produce a bit of a report card.

Australian Women Writers ChallengeBefore I continue, I need to explain that the “Literary” category isn’t easy to define. The Challenge’s policy is that reviewers allocate the category/ies to the books they review, though the AWW Blog Team does do the occasional editing or tweaking where there are glaring errors. Given that proviso, on with my quarterly report – and I’ll start by providing some perspective. In 2012 some 1526 reviews were logged for the challenge. So far, in the first quarter of 2013, 614 reviews have been logged. Clearly, the challenge is gaining momentum, which is really exciting. These reviews cover the whole gamut of women’s writing – all genres, non-fiction, poetry, short stories, and even some self-published works.

Kate Grenville - Cambridge - January 2012

Kate Grenville, Cambridge, January 2012 (Photo credit: Chris Boland, via Wikipedia)

In the “literary” area, which for the purposes of my survey here includes “Classics”, 112 reviews (or more) were logged in the first quarter, representing over 20% of the reviews posted. These reviews cover 71 authors, which means of course that several authors have been reviewed multiple times. The most frequently reviewed authors are:

  • Kate Forsyth whom I must admit I don’t know: Six reviews for her novel The wild girl
  • Karen Foxlee whose Anatomy of wings I read before I started blogging: Six reviews, including five for her current novel The midnight dress
  • Miles Franklin, of course: Five reviews ranging across her work, including one for her diaries
  • Kate Grenville whose The lieutenant I reviewed last year: Three reviews
  • Lisa Jacobson whose The sunlit zone has been shortlisted for the inaugural Stella Prize: Three reviews for The sunlit zone.
  • Dorothy Porter, whose The bee hut I’ve reviewed: Three reviews for two of her works
  • Madeleine St John, the subject of Helen Trinca’s biography which I’ve just reviewed: Three reviews for The women in black
  • ML Stedman whose debut novel The light between oceans is winning or being shortlisted for many awards: Four reviews for The light between oceans
  • Amy Witting, a late bloomer: Three reviews ranging across her work

Besides these, there are also reviews for well-known writers like Helen Garner, Anna Funder and Ruth Park and for writers not known to me. There are reviews for poetry, including verse novels by Lisa Jacobson and Dorothy Porter, and poetry collections by Amy Witting and Suzanne Edgar. There are of course gaps, but overall it’s encouraging to see such a diverse range of Aussie women writers brought together in one place. It can only be good for them, and for Australian literature in general, to be so clearly identified.

While the challenge is about reviewing women writers, this does not mean the reviewers have to be women. It’s encouraging to see several men actively contributing to the challenge. Some men are clearly not averse to reading books written by women!

If you are interested in the challenge and would like to take part – it’s never too late – or would like to check out some of the reviews, click here for the challenge site and have a look around. I’d be surprised if you didn’t find something to interest you. And, if you see any major discrepancies in categorisation, please let us know.

Are you taking part in the Challenge? And if so, is it changing what you read?

Monday musings on Australian literature: The little Aussie battler

/ Whispering Gums / 14 Comments

Australian public intellectual and ethicist, Clive Hamilton, wrote in his 2005 book Affluenza (excerpted in The invisible thread) that

Politicians love to identify with the Aussie battler, that stoic, resilient character who has little and complains less. Fifty years ago Australia was full of battlers, people hardened by the rigours of depression and war and, if not proud of their penury, certainly not ashamed of it. The Aussie battler is the central icon of Australian political folklore, and the image persists despite the fact that, as a result of sustained economic growth in the past five decades, the number of people who truly struggle has shrunk to a small proportion of the population.

My plan here, though, is not to discuss the political use (about which Hamilton makes a lot of sense) but the literary one, because reading this excerpt of course made me think about what part this “motif” or “myth” has played in Australian literature. I’ve written a few Monday musings to date on “themes” (such as the lost child, the beach, the gum tree, even sheep). The little Aussie battler is worthy, I think, of similar, albeit introductory, exploration. Is this icon (or stereotype) that is so popular with politicians, also reflected in Australian literature?

Who then is the “little Aussie battler”? My understanding of the term is that it refers to men (or more broadly families) who are working class, urban or rural, who struggle (battle) to make a living.  Historically, they had few pretensions to upward mobility, except perhaps for their children. There’s a discussion of the word’s meaning on the Australian National University website, which includes the following definition of the “battler” as:

the person with few natural advantages, who works doggedly and with little reward, who struggles hard for a livelihood, and who displays enormous courage in so doing.

The notion of “the battler” probably originates in Australia’s convict heritage of the late 18th century and the battle to survive, but the early “battlers” in Australian literature were the itinerants and the struggling rural workers of the late 19th century, as glorified by writers like Banjo Paterson and Henry Lawson. They could be employed, irregularly employed, or unemployed. By the early to mid twentieth century, the “battlers” were often urban, though the country battler survived.

In fact, the iconic “battlers” of early 20th century literature were Steele Rudd‘s Dad and Dave, the struggling settler farmers who are often described as “the original Aussie battlers”. The first Dad and Dave book, On our Selection, was written in 1899, but the characters and their struggles became popularly known through plays, film and radio in the first decades of the 20th century. My favourite battlers, though, are those of Ruth Park. Her Harp in the south trilogy and her Miles Franklin Award winning Swords and crowns and rings are quintessential battler stories. New Zealand born Park got down pat the mid-twentieth century battler, the often flawed characters with big hearts and a desire to provide for their families and care for their mates. George Johnston’s My brother Jack is another example of a great battler of Aussie literature, as is Kylie Tennant‘s unfortunately lesser known novel The battlers. These mid-20th century battlers had usually experienced the Great Depression and/or the world wars. Life was difficult.

Jordan's Nine Days

Book cover (Courtesy: Text Publising)

Current writers like Joan London (Gilgamesh) and Toni Jordan (Nine days) have also written about these historic battlers, as has, most famously, Tim Winton in Cloudstreet. What does it say, I wonder, that the book which most often wins surveys seeking our favourite or best Australian novel is this one about Aussie battlers?

But what about late 20th or early 21st century battlers? Do they still exist (outside the politicians’ minds?). Are Tim Winton’s more contemporary-focused books, like The turning, also about “Aussie battlers”? If they are, they are written with a more realistic, less affectionate eye, I think, than the earlier books I’ve mentioned. Is the old definition of “battler” – essentially, a working class white Australian male – still reflective of contemporary Australian society, with its multicultural and increasingly middle-class make-up? Certainly, when I think about recent Australian literature that is set in current times, the “battler” theme, or even character really, does not come to the fore – and yet, if I Google, “aussie battler”, the idea is alive and well. It seems, perhaps, that literature has turned its eye to more complex notions of the Australian character while politicians and the media stick to a romanticised version of “the battler”. I’d love to know what other readers of Aussie literature think.