Monday musings

Monday musings on Australian literature: Twenty Australian novelists in 1947

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My Monday Musings of two weeks ago was about the first book in a series of four books on Australian fiction. The books were written by Colin Roderick and published by Angus and Robertson. The second book, which is today’s topic, was published in 1947, two years after the first, and was titled Twenty Australian novelists.

The novelists Roderick chose for this volume are:

Wow! While there were only two or three authors I didn’t know in the first post’s list, there are several I’ve never heard of in this one. Interestingly, the writer in the West Australian on 12 July 1947 commented that “perhaps Katherine Susannah Pritchard (sic), Henrietta Drake-Brockman and other well-known writers have been selected for discussion in one or other of the two remaining volumes which are to complete the series”. Certainly, these two writers, particularly Prichard, are better known today than many in the above list. They must be … They have Wikipedia links and I’m sure most of you have heard of Wikipedia’s notability requirement!

Despite my ignorance, I enjoy seeing which authors a previous generation deems important … and I did learn something interesting. Seaforth Mackenzie apparently died by downing in Goulburn, which is about an hour’s drive from where I live. I knew his name but not that he had a connection to my region. And I haven’t, I’m ashamed to say, read him.

Geoffrey Hutton, writing in the Argus in September 1947, critiqued the book. He started by arguing that Australia had yet to produce:

a figure of the type of Hemingway or Falkner*. You may say God forbid, but the point I want to make about these two writers is that they built a literary style out of the speech-habits and speech-rhythms of the American people, which is as distinct from the metropolitan English style as it is from Hardy’s slow-moving Wessex dialect. Even when they are not talking local slang or describing canyons or skyscrapers, their writing has an un-English, a specifically American taste.

I do love that “You may say God forbid”? It speaks volumes. Anyhow, he went on to state that “Australian-ness” was conveyed primarily through subject matter rather than in “style or method”, and, while he agreed that Colin Roderick was undertaking a job worth doing”, he concluded that:

Mr Roderick’s study of the trees has little reference to the wood, and although you may say that the wood is only the sum total of what grows in it, there is a great difference between a tree that grows on its own and one that grows in company. Specifically, Mr Roderick gives little or no indication of the development of the Australian novel out of the colonial novel; he does not place his novelists or satisfactorily estimate their relative significance. He has done useful work, but the growth of the Australian novel is another story.

I haven’t read Roderick’s book, but my reading of the various newspaper reports and reviews suggests it is more survey (or “panoramic view” as one journalist put it) and anthology than an analysis. Hutton clearly wanted more … I will explore this mid-twentieth century issue of the developing Australian novel a little more in coming weeks.

* What’s that they say about learning something new every day? Today, about to leap in with my proofreading pen, I discovered that William Faulkner was born Falkner. However, the name change was apparently made in 1918, so perhaps I should have used my red pen anyhow!

Acknowledgement: National Library of Australia’s Trove and Newspaper Digitisation Project.

Monday musings on Australian literature: Patrick White (would be) 100 (today)

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I had planned to follow up last week’s Monday musings with another post on Colin Roderick’s mid-twentieth century series of books on Australian prose, but I hadn’t remembered then that today is the 100th anniversary of the birth of Patrick White, Australia’s only Nobel Laureate for Literature*. Colin Roderick will therefore have to wait for the man who wasn’t quite on his horizon when he was selecting his books and authors in the late 1940s.

White had, in fact, published three books by 1950 – Happy Valley, The living and the dead (1941) and The aunt’s story (1948) – but he clearly wasn’t quite on Roderick’s radar at the time. As you’ll see next week (be patient!), many of the writers who were recognised then have long faded from our collective memory, while White went on to put Australian literature firmly on the world stage.

As well as being our first Nobel Laureate in Literature, White has another “first” to his name. His 5th novel, Voss, won the first Miles Franklin Award in 1957. A fitting start, it seems to me, for what has become Australia’s most significant literary award. Voss was, also, my introduction to White, way back in my last year of high school. It astonished me, it grabbed me – and I immediately went out and bought his collection of short stories, The burnt ones, to keep on reading. Since those days, I have read more of his novels but I haven’t completed his oeuvre.

What is it about White? For me it’s his writing – his language and tone – and his humanity. He had a reputation for being grumpy and temperamental, but his caring for “other” (for “foreignness”, as the panel discussing him at this year’s Sydney Writers Festival put it) pervades his novels. His characters are, for the most part, ordinary or sidelined people. They are not heroes or heroines. They bumble through life. They are flawed (even the grand visionary, Voss!).

And this brings me to his autobiography, or “self-portrait”, which is tellingly titled Flaws in the glass (1981). What a great title for an autobiography! Early in this book he writes:

I grew conscious of wanting to be a writer on leaving my hated English school and returning to the Australia I had longed for. No, it wasn’t so much a case of growing consciousness as a matter of necessity. Surrounded by a vacuum, I needed a world in which to live with the degree of intensity my temperament demanded.

That he was an intense man shows in his writing and in his relationship with others. He fell out regularly with friends – “I have to admit to a bitter nature” he says. But he is also known for standing up for those in need and for his principles. He returned his Order of Australia medal after the Dismissal of the Australian Labor government in 1975. And on his death he left his money to his favourite causes: the Smith Family, the Art Gallery of New South Wales, the Aboriginal Education Council of NSW and NAISDA (the Aboriginal and Islander Dance College).

It is hard to know where to stop when talking about such a complex man, so I’ll just finish with two quotes depicting his love-hate relationship with Australia. He loved the landscape, as shown in this description of his absence during World War 2:

I read The Peapickers and was filled with a longing for Australia, a country I saw through a childhood glow … I could still grow drunk on visions of its landscape. (Flaws in the glass)

But his fellow Australians? That was another matter:

the Great Australian Emptiness, in which the mind is the least of possessions, in which the rich man is the most important, in which the schoolmaster and the journalist rule what intellectual roost there is, in which beautiful youths and girls stare at life through blind blue eyes… (White, quoted on Radio National’s website)

Regardless of what we think about the Great Australian novel, it’s hard not to see Patrick White as a, if not the, Great Australian Novelist.

* This is not to ignore the wonderful JM Coetzee who is also a Nobel Laureate … but, while he lives here now, it would be cheeky to claim his Nobel prize for our own.

Monday musings on Australian literature: The Australian Novel, 1945 style

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Joseph Furphy (Tom Collins)

Joseph Furphy (Presumed Public Domain, from the State Library of New South Wales, via Wikipedia)

Every now and then I like to delve into the newspapers digitised by the National Library of Australia and made available via its website. Last week, I was pottering around researching another topic for Monday Musings (for which you’ll now have to wait) when I came across an article written in 1945 about a series of books,”arranged” by Colin Roderick, being published about Australian prose. The series aimed “at introducing to students the work of Australian writers of prose fiction” but another article suggested that it would be of value to adult readers interested in the subject.

The first volume is titled The Australian novel and was published in 1945. It’s an anthology containing précis and excerpts from the selected works, and some critical analysis, and has a foreword by Miles Franklin. She wrote that:

People settling in new lands need novels and dramas closely concerned with their own time, place and community to support and lighten the great classics and world masterpieces in literature. Certain stories relate us to our own soil, and when such works find universal acceptance, they still retain greater significance for the people of their origin than for other readers by imparting a comforting glow which springs from the intimacy of home … writings, redolent of our own land and our life in it, thus fulfilled one of the functions of imaginative literature by heightening and illuminating everyday life in familiar surroundings.

I love her description of “writings redolent of our own land and our life in it” and their importance to “illuminating everyday life”.

The 19 (strange number, eh?) works were presented in order of their age:

It’s an intriguing list for me. Some of these works and authors I’ve read, and some have been on my list to read for a long time. But there are some here that I have never heard of – such as Brian Penton and Leonard Mann. It makes me wonder which writers from our last half century or so will be no longer well-known in 60 or 70 years. Longevity in the arts is such a fickle thing really, isn’t it?

Next week, I’ll write on the second volume in which Roderick presented 20 significant novelists.

Monday musings on Australian literature: Writers from New South Wales

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I’ve almost finished my Monday musings round-up of writers from the different states and territories of Australia, but have been putting off doing New South Wales because it’s a bit scary to confront. New South Wales is Australia’s most populous state. It is also, in terms of white settlement in Australia, our oldest state. And, more importantly in terms of literature, it’s where Australia’s only Nobel Laureate for Literature, Patrick White, came from. So, given all this, where to start?

With a little bit of background perhaps. It was here that Captain James Cook made his first landfall in Australia in 1770 … and it is where, 18 years later, Captain Arthur Phillip established Britain’s colony in Australia. In fact, originally, New South Wales encompassed the whole east coast of Australia but gradually, during the 19th century, Tasmania, South Australia, Victoria and Queensland were hived off to form separate colonies (and later states). It is a state that encompasses great variety of landscape, from desert outback to Australia’s highest mountain, from a temperate  southern coast to the subtropical northern one. The phrases commonly used by Australians to indicate remoteness, “back o’ Bourke” and “beyond the black stump”*, originate from the state.

For today’s post, I’m going to draw a selection of writers from those currently living. There’s time in the future, after all, for some retrospective region-based posts.

Kate Grenville, Australian author.

Kate Grenville, 2011. (Photo by Kathleen Smith via Wikipedia, using CC-BY-SA 3.0 Unported)

Kate Grenville

While I have referred to Grenville (b. 1950) many times on this blog, I haven’t reviewed her here as I haven’t read a novel by her in the last three years. I have however read and loved many of her novels. She is best known for her historical novel about the early days of the colony, The secret river, which won the Commonwealth Writers Prize and the NSW Premier’s Literary Award, as well as being shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award and the Man Booker Prize. Two of her books, Lilian’s story and Dreamhouse, have been adapted for film. My favourite, though, is her Orange Prize winning novel, The idea of perfection. Most of her novels are historical in subject, but this one is a contemporary story set in a country town struggling to survive the urban drift. Her picture of country town life is drawn with both affection and gentle satire.

Kate Jennings

The other Kate (b. 1948) is a couple of years older than her namesake and, while born in New South Wales, has lived much of her life in New York. I have reviewed two of her books here – her semi-autobiographical novel Snake and her “fragmented” autobiography Trouble. She is a poet, novelist and essayist. She has been nominated for several awards, and won the NSW Premier’s Literary Award for her novel Moral hazard. She’s a “pull-no-punches” intellectual who is prepared to confront difficult or unpopular issues and is concerned about what she sees the “moral poverty” of our times.

Thomas Keneally

Thomas Keneally (b. 1935) could, I think, be called our current grand old man of literature – though there are some other contenders, such as Frank Moorhouse (also in this list). He has won the Man Booker Prize with Schindler’s list and the Miles Franklin Award twice with Bring larks and heroes and Three cheers for the paraclete. In 1972, he wrote a confronting novel, The chant of Jimmie Blacksmith, about a young Aboriginal man who runs amok after years of discrimination. Keneally has since said that he wouldn’t, as a white man, dare to write a novel now in the voice of an Aboriginal person. He has taught fiction at University of California Irvine and while there wrote one of my favourite travel books, The place where souls are born: A journey to the Southwest. He is active in the Australian Republican movement. He trained to be a Catholic priest, but was not ordained. However, his writing is informed by his commitment to social justice and he is often heard on Australian TV and radio speaking about injustice, here and internationally. He’s truly and literally an Australian Living Treasure.

Gillian Mears

I reviewed Mears’ (b. 1964) most recent novel, Foal’s bread, a couple of months ago. It has since been nominated for this year’s Miles Franklin Award. Her first novel, The mint lawn, won The Australian/Vogel Literary Award for unpublished manuscripts. She has also written short stories and essays. Her three novels are all set in the hinterland of the northwest of the state, and explore loneliness, loss and longing.  There is, I think, a lush poetic sensibility to her writing that seems appropriate to the subtropical north.

Frank Moorhouse

And, finally, I come to Frank Moorhouse (b. 1938). I have to admit that I’ve only read one of his books but it was a great one, Grand days, the first of his League of Nations or Edith trilogy. The second in the trilogy, Dark Palace, won the Miles Franklin Award, and the last, Cold light, is, with Mears’ Foal’s bread, one of the five novels shortlisted for this year’s Miles Franklin. Moorhouse is another of our outspoken writers. He has been arrested for campaigning against censorship but, for me as a librarian, his main claim on my memory comes from his copyright infringement case against the University of New South Wales library. In 1973, the library authorised the making of photocopies of pages from his book, The Americans, baby. The court found that the university had infringed his copyright, setting in motion changes both to the Copyright Act and to the management of photocopiers. As much as I loved Grand Days, it is Moorhouse’s impact on copyright practice in Australia that I’ll never forget.

And that’s it from New South Wales, this time around. Have you read these authors? Do you have a favourite author from New South Wales – either one of the above or one I didn’t include?

* There are some counter claims for this one, as the Wikipedia article I’ve linked to explains.

Monday musings on Australian literature: The other David Campbell and the sin of misattribution

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Much to my chagrin, the “other” poet named David Campbell drew to my attention recently to the fact that I had twice, in my blog, (mis)attributed a poem he’d written to the wrong David Campbell. The poem is “The Last Red Gum” and I first wrote about it in my post on The magnificent River Red Gums and then again, because it seemed relevant, in my post on Richard Allen and Kimbal Baker’s book Australia’s remarkable trees.

The David Campbell to whom I thought I was referring is the one who lived much of his life in my neck of the woods, that is, in the Australian Capital Territory and neighbouring areas of New South Wales. He did write a lot about nature and the landscape. In fact, his Wikipedia article (to which I’ve linked his name at the beginning of this paragraph) includes quotes from two poems about trees – “In summer’s tree” and “Snow gums”. It’s not surprising really that, at first glance, I thought I knew who I was quoting. This David Campbell wrote many volumes of poetry, edited anthologies and won some of our top poetry awards. He died in 1979.

However, the “other” David Campbell is very much alive – and just as well, because he was able to ensure I righted my wrong. He lives in Victoria and is a member of the Federation of Australian Writers. He too has won several poetry awards and has published volumes of poetry. While he also writes in free verse, his first love he says is bush poetry. As a lover of Banjo Paterson, I can relate to that. This Campbell is keen, he writes on his website, “to promote traditional poetry, particularly in terms of the assistance that a mastery of rhythm and rhyme gives to any form of writing”. He argues that this form of poetry “is accessible to all”. Like the first David Campbell, he has also written short stories (and appeared in Black Inc’s Best Australian stories, 2005).

In 2011, Campbell won the Bronze Swagman award for his poem about dementia, called Wasteland. You can read it on the ABC’s Western Queensland website. It’s a simple, accessible and moving poem.

And so, I apologise to this later David Campbell and hope he doesn’t mind if I quote another verse from “The Last Red Gum”, because I do like this poem and its environmental message:

Dead gums in Lake Mulwala

Dead gums in Lake Mulwala, on a late autumn afternoon

At Mulwala and Chowilla there are remnants of our kind
in a place where verdant floodplains used to be.
Now a ghostly red gum graveyard is the only thing you’ll find
and a desert is the only sight you’ll see
(from “The Last Red Gum”)

Oh, and I haven’t even mentioned “another” Australian David Campbell, the singer and son of rocker Jimmy Barnes! It clearly pays to be careful in your research – something I with my librarian-archivist background should have been well aware of!

Have you ever been guilty of misattribution – and how did you handle it?

Monday musings on Australian literature: Noongar/Nyungar, and the importance of place

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Conceptions of home and understanding of place are the central issues in Noongar author Kim Scott‘s Miles Franklin award winning novel, That deadman dance, which I reviewed last year. From the opening pages of the novel Scott explores notions of home, as the white settlers confront the indigenous inhabitants of the land they are trying to colonise.

Here is the main indigenous character, Bobby:

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, touched the stone, and sensed home. Something in the wind, in plants and land he’d at least heard of, and increasing signs of home. There were paths, and he knew where there’d be food […] Bobby closed his eyes, felt the wind tugging at his hair and rushing in the whorls of his ears. Breathed this particular air. Ngayn Wabalanginy moort, nitjak ngan kaarlak … Home (pp. 235, 238)

And here is the main would-be pastoralist settler, Chaine:

With no boat Chaine felt his loneliness … It was land he’d hoped for – pastoral country, with good water and close to a sheltered anchorage. But he had tried and been disappointed. It deflated him. (p. 239)

These occur during a long trek which Chaine and Bobby make when Chaine’s boat hits a reef and founders. Chaine thinks Flinders’ journal will provide the guidance he needs while Bobby, in country unfamiliar to him, relies on his understanding of the land’s clues. “This way, we go this way, follow the creek away from this spring and this estuary”, says Bobby, while Chaine insists “they keep to the coast … so he could catch sight of the sea every now and then”.

noongar1

Courtesy John D Croft, English Wikipedia, using CC-BY-SA-3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

All this is to introduce a fascinating seminar I attended today, at the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies. It was given by Associate Professor Len Collard, a Nyungar* scholar researching Nyungar place names, using an ARC research grant. The English title of his talk was “I am creating the knowledge of Country place names: from the past to now and into the future”.  His aim is to document Nyungar place names in Western Australia’s southwest on the basis that naming place confirms or establishes “ownership”. The project aims at

  • supporting reconciliation,
  • encouraging environmental understanding,
  • helping tourism ventures, and
  • “closing the gap of Australianness” by creating a common understanding of local indigenous geography.

You’ve probably noticed the alternative spellings I’ve been using to name the people of this area. Alternative spellings are a significant challenge for both indigenous and non-indigenous people studying indigenous culture.  Collard made an interesting point regarding variant spellings. He says that a common reason given is that  the Nyungar (like many indigenous people) encompass several language groups and that the different spellings could therefore have come from different pronunciations, putting, in a sense, the onus of problematic spelling at the feet of the indigenous people. However, he suggests there is another possibility. His project is based on post-colonial historical records produced throughout the 19th and 20th centuries by settlers from a wider variety of countries – England, Ireland, Holland, France, and so on. The different spellings, he suggests, could be due to the way these recorders transcribed, using their own linguistic knowledge, the word/s they heard.

Early in his talk he talked of the “history of constructing the negative” in which indigenous people have been reduced to the role of sidekick in post-colonial Australia. The reason for variant spellings could be read as an example of this. Another is the attitude to indigenous trackers. Their knowledge, Collard said, was critical to the survival of the colony and yet, as Scott shows in his novel, this knowledge was either used ungraciously or, at worst, ignored.

I thoroughly enjoyed the talk, not only for its specific content but also for the way his scholarship intersects with contemporary indigenous literature. Home, land, place … they are important to all of us … recognising and respecting that is a good place to start. I’ll conclude with Bobby near the end of the novel:

On time we share kangaroo wallaby tammar quokka yongar wetj woylie boodi wetj koording kamak kaip … Too many. But now not like that, and sheep and bullock everywhere and too many strangers wanna take things for themselves and leave nothing […] And now we strangers in our special places.

Monday musings on Australian literature: World Book and Copyright Day, Australian-style

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World Book Day!

World Book Day! (Photo credit: Nimages DR, via Wikipedia, using CC-BY-NC-ND 2.0)

World Book Day 2012 was more than half over before I realised it existed. That could be my fault of course. I may have had my head so deep in my last blog post and my current book that I missed all the publicity …

Are you aware of World Book Day?  April 23 was established by UNESCO as World Book Day in 1995 to promote reading, publishing and copyright. Why April 23rd*? Because in 1616, Cervantes, Shakespeare and Inca Garcilaso de la Vega all died. April 23rd is also the date of birth or death of other authors such as Maurice Druon, Halldor Laxness, Vladimir Nabokov, Josep Pla and Manuel Mejía Vallejo. And, while she may not be in the same class as these luminaries, the Australian creator of Mary Poppins, P.L. Travers died on April 23 (in 1996).

Anyhow, upon discovering that today is World Book Day, I hit Google to see what I was missing. Not much it seems. I discovered, for example, that the Department of Education in Western Australia thought that March 1* was World Book Day. Hmm … yes it was, but in the United Kingdom. Several others thought the same. The English, it seems, are doing such a great job of promoting their celebration of World Book Day that they have confused we Antipodeans!

So what is World Book Day all about? Here is a description from UNESCO:

It is observed by millions of people in over 100 countries, in hundreds of voluntary organizations, schools, public bodies, professional groups and private businesses.  … World Book and Copyright Day has won over a considerable number of people from every continent and all cultural backgrounds to the cause of books and copyright. It has enabled them to discover, make the most of and explore in greater depth a multitude of aspects of the publishing world: books as vectors of values and knowledge, and depositories of the intangible heritage; books as windows onto the diversity of cultures and as tools for dialogue; books as sources of material wealth and copyright-protected works of creative artists. All of these aspects have been the subject of numerous awareness-raising and promotional initiatives that have had a genuine impact. There must nevertheless be no let-up in these efforts.

Oh dear … Australia could perhaps lift its game a little.  After some careful searching of the National Year of Reading 2012 website, I finally found a link to the World Book Night (which says that it will be celebrated in the UK, Ireland, Germany and the USA). I found no press releases or reports on World Book Day activities involving our first Children’s Laureates. And Google didn’t turn up anything from booksellers or publishers.

However, my favourite radio station, ABC Radio National, knew it was today … and posted so on Facebook! To commemorate it, they asked their Facebook fans what they were reading and got 12 responses (by early evening, anyhow). And BookTown Australia has a web page on World Book Day. They suggest “that the enthusiastic focus on Book Week later in the year and … the proximity to ANZAC Day (April 25)” are reasons for minimal observance in Australia. They would like this to change:

One aim of BookTown Australia is to give World Book Day a context to be celebrated in Australia and link it to the international community of booktowns. Using World Book Day as the commencement of the One Town – One Book community reading programs is seen as viable means of doing so, especially as the reading program can then culminate in August to coincide with Children’s Book Week. On World Book Day (April 23) in Australia in years to come, any community – village, town suburb or city – can be a “booktown” on that day, simply by declaring its participation in the reading program with the announcement of their chosen book.

This was probably written in 2002 and there’s nothing on the site to suggest that anything significant has eventuated. And yet, the day does seem like a great opportunity to make a bit of a splash – to promote our writers, to encourage reading, to stimulate discussion about copyright and books in the new digital environment.

The theme for the 2012 World Book Day is Books and Translation. At first glance this is not, really, a comfortable fit for we Australian readers who live in an anglo-centric island nation. And yet, it could be an opportunity to draw attention to the diversity in our population and how reading translated literature can help us learn about and understand our non-English speaking compatriots.

I’m afraid I’ve rambled a bit today (more than usual, anyhow!) because I’m a little flummoxed. Does anyone have any experience of World Book Day – in Australia or elsewhere? Are we so over-run with UN-designated World Days and International Years that they’ve just become too much noise?

* Apparently, while most countries keep to the April 23 date, there are some that don’t, including the United Kingdom. This year they celebrated it on March 1. I was intrigued to discover that the Bodleian Libraries in Oxford dedicated their celebration of World Book Day this year to Jane Austen. They had a display, a reception, and two talks, one of which was on a sequel (not PD James’s though)!

Monday musings on Australian literature: What value literary awards?

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If you are an Australian reader, you have probably heard that the new Premier of Queensland, Campbell Newman, has abolished the Queensland Premier’s Literary Awards. This was a shock as it had not been flagged during the election. His reason? To save some $250,000, as part of the Liberal National Party’s promised cost-cutting drive!

It was a wry moment for me when I heard the news, because only a few days before the announcement, I had pondered in my post about Adelaide Festival Awards for Literature whether, with the Festival becoming an annual event, South Australia would finally have an annual literary award, like most other Australian states.

Queensland’s literary awards program has been running since 1999 and is (hmm, was) one of the most comprehensive literary awards programs in Australia. It offers (offered) prizes in fourteen or fifteen categories, which included unpublished manuscripts, non-fiction, poetry, short stories, unpublished indigenous writers and fiction. Many of our significant writers have benefited from these awards, including Helen Garner, Alexis Wright, Tim Winton, Thea Astley, Nam Le, David Malouf, Judith Beveridge, Peter Carey, and Les Murray.

Australians will know that many of these award winners are not Queenslanders and their winning books were not necessarily about Queensland. Does this matter? All (I think) of Australia’s state-based awards are not state-limited in their criteria. I think that’s a good thing, though I can see arguments for limiting them to their states just as we have awards for women, for young writers, for indigenous writers, for unpublished works. What I don’t think is a good thing is to do away with awards. Awards for creative endeavours are always fraught. There are no objective standards to judge artistic creations by. But, this doesn’t mean they don’t have value – for the winners, for the short- and longlisted authors, and for the industry as a whole.

There are supporters of the decision. One is blogger Mark Fletcher who argues that these awards are “vanity projects” for Premiers and that “there are more significant funding opportunities for the arts in Queensland than the award: the end of the award does not mean the end of arts funding in Queensland”. Opponents, on the other hand, fear that this is the thin end of the wedge and that more cuts to arts funding are coming. Time will tell …

The topic has already been discussed on Australian blogs. Here are just a very few:

  • Angela Meyer of LiteraryMinded talks of the value of the prize to writers, publishers and booksellers
  • crikey.com calls it a sad announcement
  • Jeff Sparrow in Overland argues that this may be the harbinger of more cuts as more conservative governments gain power in Australia. He suggests that “There’s an urgent need for a new defence of literature, arguments that are neither philistine populism nor patronizing elitism but instead make the case why writing should matter to ordinary people. It’s something we’ve traditionally been very bad at. We need to get much better, very quickly.”
  • Lisa Hills of ANZLitLovers advises that the awards will be made with or without prize money and provides the link for submissions.
  • skepticlawyer describes plans by authors Matthew Condon and Krissy Kneen to continue the awards, probably using the law of trusts – and provides a link to their Facebook page for the awards.

I think that’s enough. You get the drift I’m sure. But, I wonder, what do you think about Literary Awards. Are they worth defending? What do awards mean to you, as a reader?

Monday musings on Australian literature: Famous Australian literary couples

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Illustration derived from page scans of an ori...

The Bloke and Doreen go to a play, The Songs of a Sentimental Bloke, 2nd ed. 1917 (Presumed Public Domain: Wikipedia)

We all know Romeo and Juliet, Elizabeth and Darcy, and Cathy and Heathcliff. They are ingrained into the consciousness of readers of English literature. But we Aussies have some couples of our own and I thought it might be fun to introduce you to just a few. They are interesting, not only because they are great characters, but because they also represent of different aspects of Australian culture.

The Bloke and Doreen

Most Australians have at least heard of CJ Dennis‘ verse novel The songs of the Sentimental Bloke (1915) and might have studied an excerpt or two at school, like I did. It has been adapted for film and television, and been made into a musical and a ballet. It tells the story of a larrikin and Doreen, the young woman he falls head-over-heels for. The challenge for contemporary readers is that it’s written in the working class vernacular of its time. However, if you “listen” to the words, it doesn’t take long to pick it up and to become engaged by the Bloke and his attempts to win Doreen’s hand. Doreen is no easy pick-up, and to win her, he must fix up his act (such as give up drinking) and become a respectable man:

Fer ‘er sweet sake I’ve gone and chucked it clean:
The pubs an’ schools an’ all that leery game.
Fer when a bloke ‘as come to know Doreen,
It ain’t the same.
There’s ‘igher things, she sez, fer blokes to do.
An’ I am ‘arf believin’ that it’s true.
(from “Doreen”)

The songs of a sentimental bloke is, what we’d call today, romantic comedy so it all works out fine in the end. The Bloke develops and matures, wins his woman, and leads a productive and settled life as a happily married man.

Voss and Laura

By contrast, Voss and Laura’s story is a tragic romance. They are the creation of Patrick White in his novel, Voss (1957), which he based loosely on the German-born Australian explorer Ludwig Leichhardt who tried to cross Australia in the mid-19th century. Voss has been made into an opera, but so far attempts to adapt it to film have not come to fruition (something I expect to write more about later).

Voss meets Laura in the opening scene of the novel at the Sydney home of her uncle and Voss’s patron, but they spend very little time in each other’s physical presence because, for the majority of the novel, Voss is away on his ill-fated expedition. (I did say it was tragic.) Most of their relationship occurs via letters and telepathic communication. Theirs is a passion fed by a meeting of minds and spirit.

Voss thought how he would talk eventually with Laura Trevelyan, how they had never spoken together using the truly humble words that convey innermost reality: bread, for instance, or water. Obsessed by the struggle between their two souls, they had threatened each other with the flashing weapons of abstract reasoning, while overlooking the common need for substance. But now we shall understand each other, he said, glancing about. […] Human relationships are vast as deserts: they demand all daring, she seemed to suggest.

It’s a grandly conceived – and quintessentially Australian – epic in the way it confronts the outback, something that remains a somewhat odd, but very real, part of the Australian character. We are highly urbanised and yet the outback still plays a significant role in our consciousness. It’s there, just behind our cities, beautiful but threatening at the same time. Confronting this vastness is still seen, by many Australians, as an antidote to the the superficiality of city life – and Voss (with Laura, by his side in abstract) confronted it big-time.

Oscar and Lucinda

Oscar and Lucinda are the main characters in Peter Carey‘s novel of the same name. Published in 1988, it, like Voss, is set in 19th century Australia, but unlike Voss it has been successfully adapted to film. Oscar, the rebel son of a strict religious father, and Lucinda, an heiress who buys a glass factory, meet on board ship and are attracted to each other through their love of gambling and taking risks. Like Voss and Laura, they are outsiders and their story ends tragically …  but while Voss and Laura’s story is spare and intense, Oscar and Lucinda’s is wild and over-the-top. They construct a glass church which hydrophobic Oscar, in a grand gesture of love, sails a few hundred miles up river through uncharted country to Bellingen, providing an unforgettable image for anyone who has read the book. What makes this Australian is not only its description of white settlers confronting the bush and its particular exploration of religiosity in the colony, but in the way Carey uses the idea of gambling to weave the story because, Australia is (whether we like it or not) a big gambling nation.

Unfortunately, though, I can’t find my copy, so no quotes from this one for you.

Do you have favourite literary couples, Australian or otherwise? I’d love to hear of literary couples who have resonated with you.

Monday musings on Australian literature: Louisa Atkinson, and indigenous Australians

/ Whispering Gums / 28 Comments
Louisa Atkinson (1834-1872)

Louisa Atkinson (1834-1872) (Courtesy: Artist unknown, via Wikipedia)

Time for another Monday Musings highlighting an Australian literary pioneer, this time Louisa Atkinson. I came across Atkinson a few years ago when I was researching Australian women writers for Wikipedia. She’s one of those women who achieved much in her field but who, I believe, is little known. She was a journalist, novelist and naturalist. She was born in 1834, in the Southern Highlands of New South Wales, just a couple of hours’ drive from where I live.

There’s a good general biography of her online at the Australian Dictionary of Biography, but here is the gist:

  • She collected and painted plant specimens for well-known scientists of the time including Ferdinand von Mueller, and she is commemorated in the Atkinsonia genus as well as several plant species.
  • She was a rebel when it came to clothing. While, as is typical of her time, she was highly religious, she shocked the good women of her rural neighbourhood by wearing trousers for her naturalist ramblings and pony-riding.
  • She was a well-regarded botanical artist. Twentieth century Australian artist Margaret Preston described her drawings as having “unexpected elegance and extreme accuracy”.
  • She was the first Australian woman to have a long-running series of articles in a major newspaper. This was her natural history series, A Voice from the Country, which ran for 10 years from 1860.
  • AND she is credited as being the first Australian-born woman to publish a novel in Australia. It was titled Gertrude, the emigrant girl: A tale of colonial life (1857). This and her second novel, Cowanda: A veteran’s grant (1859), are available as etexts from the University of Sydney’s excellent SETIS project (to which I’ve linked the titles). Gertrude tells the story of a young immigrant girl hired to be a housekeeper in a country house by Mrs Doherty who, to give a sense of Atkinson’s style, is described in the first chapter as “a small woman, with a brown careworn countenance; the index of generous emotions, strong passions, and acute griefs, which had worn her straight features into sharp outlines, and given a restless keenness to her small dark eyes”.

I have only dipped into Atkinson’s novel, Gertrude, to get a sense of her writing so I won’t write any further on that. What is interesting to explore a little is her experience of indigenous Australians. Elizabeth Lawson in her book on Atkinson, The natural art of Louisa Atkinson, wrote that her father created a model farm, but

Oldbury’s promise was clouded by its exploitation of the convict system and by its dispossession of the local Gandangara people, a dispossession the family at least recognised. And just above the house on a natural terrace of the mountain rose a great Aboriginal grave-mound with carved funeral trees which Louisa was later to sketch. This mound and its increasing desolation stood in silent rebuke of Oldbury’s enterprise, of its new English place-names and all they signified.

Nonetheless, Lawson writes that Atkinson befriended, and retained life-long friendships with Aboriginal people both at Oldbury and in the Shoalhaven area where she spent some time. That she had sympathy for them is clear from one of her columns for A Voice from the Country (22 Sept 1863) in which she wrote:

These unhappy races have become rather a tradition, than a reality, already in many districts …

She describes their lives, their homes, their hunting with a naturalist’s, and sympathetic, eye:

On one occasion, when the remnants of three different friendly tribes had assembled for a grand corroboree or dance, I made plan of the encampment; each tribe was slightly apart trom the other, divided by a sort of street. Thus, the inviters (?) were clustered in the centre, having, I think, seventeen camps; the Picton tribe on the right hand, five camps, and the Shoalhaven on the left, comprising ten or eleven gunyahs, consecutively forming a village.

She also writes:

The men were severe to their wives, striking and even killing them – when under the influence of anger, but I believe these cases were far less frequent when they had not lost virtues and acquired vices from the so-called Christian people who invaded them.

Interesting, and sensitive, observation. She talks of the problem of drinking:

Intemperance is one of the vices so sadly prevalent among them, they know what its fatal results are, lament them, but have not courage to resist. How frequent is the paragraph in the country paper of an aborigine’s death from this cause, how many have sunk unrecorded. A great sin lies on us as a people, for much has been done to injure, and little to benefit the poor original possessors of our farms and runs.

And thus she confirms that thinking about indigenous Australians with a humane and clear-eye did not pop up suddenly in the mid to late 20th century!

Louisa Atkinson tragically died not long after (but not due to) the birth of her first child, when she was only 38. What a lot she achieved in a rather short life – and what an interesting person she would have been to know.