Monday musings

Monday musings on Australian literature: Writers from our north

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David Malouf picture at book meeting. (Taken b...

David Malouf, 2006. (Courtesy: Dariusz Peczek, via Wikipedia, using CC-BY-SA 3.0)

Queensland is the state of my birth, and that makes it special to me! It is a large state and one of our most geographically diverse, ranging from the tropical north to the arid west, from the subtropical south to the temperate inland southeast. It has one of Australia’s most popular tourist destinations, the Great Barrier Reef, and our best-known commercial tourist (and, retirement) mecca, the Gold Coast. It is unlikely, though, to be the first state people think of when asked about Australian writers …

Nonetheless, many significant writers have come from Queensland, including the indigenous poet Oodgeroo Noonuccal.

Of our contemporary writers, though, the best known Queenslander has to be David Malouf. Like most Queenslanders, he “emigrated” from there long ago and has lived in England and Tuscany as well as Sydney, but that doesn’t mean that his ties aren’t strong. Johnno, his first novel and the first one I read, is, like so many first novels, somewhat autobiographical. It describes a young boy growing up in Brisbane in the 1940s and 1950s and, as I recollect, evokes the place and time well. One of my favourite novels of his, Fly away Peter, is partly set in the (above-mentioned) Gold Coast and partly on the Western Front during World War 1. It’s a beautiful novella which explores friendship, love and life, not only against the challenges of war but also of class. And, while his most recent novel, Ransom, re-explores the story of Priam and Achilles, it was inspired by his introduction to the story of Troy in his schoolboy days. It seems, with Malouf, that you can take the boy out of Queensland but you can’t take Queensland out of the boy!

Like Malouf, Janette Turner Hospital left Queensland in early adulthood, and has spent most of her life in the United States and Canada, though she does return down under occasionally. She’s a writer who’s not afraid to take risks, and can push metaphors, sometimes to their limits (as in Charades and Borderline). Her novels range over the countries in which she’s lived, including for example, southern India in The ivory swing. Due preparations for the plague is one of those post 9/11 novels that deals with terrorism, and Orpheus lost also explores what happens when people get caught up, inadvertently for the most part, in political action. Few of her novels are set in Australia, but there’s often an Australian character.

By contrast, Andrew McGahan has remained in Australia, even if not in Queensland. He currently lives in Melbourne (I believe). His first two books, Praise and 1988, are the only books I’ve read in the “grunge” style – and I liked them. His Gen X characters are pretty aimless, and were an eye-opener for baby-boomer me. They are primarily set in Queensland. His novel The white earth won the Miles Franklin award, and is set in the Darling Downs of Queensland. It’s a coming-of-age story in which the protagonist is caught between his (white) uncle’s obsession with land and his growing awareness of indigenous people’s connection to land.

And this brings me to Alexis Wright, an indigenous Queensland writer whose larger-than-life wild-ride of a novel Carpentaria also won the Miles Franklin award. It deals with indigenous disenfranchisement, with how disconnection from the land results not only in conflict with white society but also within indigenous groups. Wright cleverly marries tragedy with comedy, and tosses in a little surrealism and magic, to demonstrate just how complex the situation is. The following excerpt captures something of the tone of the novel:

Old stories circulating around the Pricklebush were full of the utmost intrigues concerning the world. Legends of the sea were told in instalments every time you walked in the door of some old person’s house. Stories lasted months on end, and if you did not visit often, you would never know how the story ended.

That’s probably enough really, except I can’t finish without briefly mentioning two writers who were not born in Queensland but have strong associations with it. One is Thea Astley who wrote several novels set in Queensland including The multiple effects of rainshadow which I reviewed some time ago, and the poet Judith Wright about whom I must post in future. Wright used poetry not only to celebrate the landscapes she loved, but to promote issues of concern to her, including indigenous rights and environmental degradation.

Have you noticed the high proportion of women writers in this post? Queensland is often the butt of jokes in Australia for being conservative and yet, without design, I have come up with more women than men to represent writing in this state. Go figure (as they say)!

Monday musings on Australian literature: Where are our women writers?

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Miles Franklin, 1902, by H.Y. Dorner (Presumed Public Domain, from the State Library of New South Wales)

It might be just me, but it seems that women writers (I know the adjective should be female but it just doesn’t feel right in this context where “women writers” is short-hand for “women who are writers” or “writers who are women”) are somewhat thin on the ground in Australia at present, at least in terms of major visibility on the literary scene. There have been two, I think, significant flowerings of women’s writing in Australia in the last century. The first occurred in the first three to four decades of the twentieth century, and the second from the 1970s to 1990s.

My simplistic – read, not thoroughly researched but off the top of my head – explanation for these two bubbles is that they represent responses to the two major phases in the women’s movement of the last century – the suffrage movement of the late ninetheenth-early twentieth century, and the second wave of feminism which occurred in the 1960s-1970s. Certainly, in Australia, women writers were highly visible in the 1920s to 1940s, with writers such as Miles Franklin, Katharine Susannah Prichard, Marjorie Barnard, Eleanor Dark,  and Christina Stead. And again, in the 1970s to 1990s, we had Thea Astley, Elizabeth Jolley, Jessica Anderson, Kate Grenville, Helen Garner, to name a few. These women were all highly visible in literary circles and they managed to win some of the prizes going. In the last decade or so, though, women seem to have fallen behind again … though they are there, such as Eva Hornung who took out last year’s Prime Minister’s Literary Prize, Joan London, Gail Jones, and Amanda Lohrey to name a few. Grenville and Garner are still around. And yet, overall, these writers are just not highly visible. And visibility is the clue. I would hazard the “wild” guess that the first names off the tip of the tongue when people think current Australian literary writers would be Malouf, Winton, Carey, Miller, to name a few. Great writers all, but not, I think the only great writers we are producing.

I’m not the only one concerned. After deciding to write a post on this, I did a little research and there’s been quite a bit written recently on the issue. In fact, just earlier this month Angela Meyer of Literary Minded wrote a post titled Let’s read writing by women in which she reports on a new committee being set up:

to pursue equal rights for women writers in Australia. Besides research, lobbying and setting up mentorships, the committee is looking at establishing a literary prize for Australian women writers, along the lines of the UK’s Orange Prize. The steering committee (including novelist and publisher Sophie Cunningham, critic and former Miles Franklin judge Kerryn Goldsworthy and novelist Kirsten Tranter) feel the move is unfortunately, necessary, due to the unequal recognition of books by women in major literary award shortlists and in the book pages of the major newspapers in this country.

It’s unfortunate that this is needed … but I agree that it is needed. Gender shouldn’t matter. After all, what we like to read is good writing. But it’s hard, when you look at the facts (percentage of women published, shortlisted for awards, winning awards, being set for study) not to feel that there is some gender bias going on in the literary fiction world. I’m not going to second guess here how it happens, or what’s the chicken and what’s the egg, but I don’t like feeling that I may be missing out on good writing. Nor do I like to think that women writers are missing out on the opportunities their male peers are obtaining.

Do women only become “visible” – and achieve accordingly – when feminist movements flourish? Do you agree there is an issue regarding women writers on the literary scene (that is, not the genre scene) if you are Australian and, if you’re not, how do you see the situation in your country*? Do you agree that “affirmative” actions like gender-based awards are the way to go? Let’s get talking…

* Back in February, I reported on the VIDA Report on book writing and reviewing in the UK and the USA, so the “problem” is being noted elsewhere.

Monday musings on Australian literature: Travel writers on Australia

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Art installation-restaurant, Teshima

Don't panic (or, art installation-cum-restaurant by Tobias Rehberger, Teshima)

Don’t panic, I told myself, the universe with still continue if I miss one week’s Monday musings. You see, after having been in Japan for over two weeks now, my thoughts have strayed rather far from Australian literature. But then, necessity being the mother of invention, an idea came to me. While I’ve been travelling, I’ve been dipping into travel literature about Japan, such as Isabella Bird‘s Unbeaten tracks in Japan (1880), Donald Ritchie’s The inland sea (2002 Ed.), and Alex Kerr‘s Lost Japan (1994). And that made me wonder about travellers to Australia and what they read.

This is not an area I’m expert in. After all, being Australian, why would I actively read up on travel literature about my own country unless, of course, I want to see what others are saying about us? And of course sometimes it’s good to hear what others are saying, and so I have read some writers on Australia (foreigners, of course, because travel literature is, by definition, written by those foreign to the shores they write about). I’ll share a couple I’ve read though it’s been a while since I read them, and I don’t have them in my backpack to refer to now. I would love to hear if you know of others, and whether you would or would not recommend them.

Bruce Chatwin‘s The songlines (1987)

Most of you have probably heard of Bruce Chatwin and his travel writing. I have his In Patagonia on my virtual TBR though when (or if) I’ll get to it is a good question. I did enjoy The songlines, which I read about twenty years ago now, though I recollect that as a travel book it’s a bit problematical. How much of it is nonfiction, how much fiction? But perhaps you could say that about much travel writing? Anyhow, I particularly liked his discussion of indigenous songlines in Australia, and his use of that as a motif for his own travels. I also enjoyed the “snippets” he presented in the second half of the book comprising various thoughts generated by his experiences… They reminded me a little of a “commonplace book”, albeit one composed primarily of one’s own thoughts.

Bill Bryson‘s In a sunburned country (or, Down under) (2000)

Bryson’s book was published under different titles in Australia and overseas I believe. It’s a hoot of a book really and not to be taken too seriously. For example, he made it sound as though Australians face dangers everyday – from snakes, spiders, crocodiles, sharks, and various poisonous sea creatures – but that, while being good for a laugh, is of course an exaggeration. These creatures and associated dangers do exist and most Australians will come across some of them in their lives but we are far more likely to die on the roads or from melanoma than we are from dangerous animals.

What Bryson does well though is, in his lighthearted manner, give you a flavour of the Australian character and what you can expect to see and enjoy on your Australian travels. (You can take this as great praise from one whose city he rather panned, but Aussies themselves pan it too so what’s new?)

These are two recent books, but there has been a long tradition of people writing about Australia, from the First Fleet on. One of the earliest is Watkin Tench’s A narrative of the expedition to Botany Bay (though my copy is titled 1788). It’s an insightful read but perhaps a little too specific to be of interest to the general traveller.

So, do you read travel literature (as opposed to travel guides) when you travel and/or do you read travel literature to armchair travel? I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Monday musings on Australian literature: Helen Garner on writing about self

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I have mentioned Helen Garner several times in this blog, and the word I tend to use about her is “honest”. Her fiction is very much about “self”. And in her non-fiction that I’ve read – Joe Cinque’s consolation and The first stone – her “self” is an integral part. She is not what you’d call an objective writer. In fact, in a talk she gave in 2001 at the National Library of Australia’s conference titled “The Secret Self: Exploring Biography and Autobiography” someone who writes “helplessly about the intimate”.

This started with her first novel, Monkey Grip, which, though published to general overall acclaim, did attract some demurrers who argued that all she’d done was publish her diaries. That was in 1977. In her address at the National Library conference she spoke of how she’d been initially defensive about these criticisms but that in the succeeding years she’d thought about it and would now “come clean” because that’s exactly what she’d done. She’d cut out the boring bits, written bridging passages and changed names. And, she said, there’s craft in all that. “Why the sneer?” she asked,

…as if it were lazy. As if no work were involved in keeping a diary in the first place: no thinking, no discipline, no creative energy, no focusing or directing of creative energy; no intelligent or artful ordering of material; no choosing of material, for God’s sake; no shaping of narrative; no ear for the music of human speech; no portrayal of the physical world; no free movement back and forth in time; no leaping between inner and outer; no examination of motive; no imaginative use of language.

Sounds like a novelist’s manifesto to me! Anyhow, she goes on to say that she wrote it because she’s not such a narcissist as to believe that her story was so “hermetically enclosed in a bubble of self” that it could offer no value to anyone else. She’s talking, of course, about some level of universality.

Further, she says, when writing (whether from a diary or not), she has to find a persona … and it is different for every work. These personas may draw from her life but they are not identical with her. She cannot write until she finds this persona. (An aside. I love hearing from authors about what they need to get started. Australian young adult writer John Marsden says he must find “the voice”. Australian children’s writer, Paul Jennings, said he started with a “what if?”. Alan Gould about whom I posted recently starts with a sentence – which may or may not be the first in the book – and Helen Garner needs her persona.)

Garner’s persona, she admits, usually draws from herself, from “the intimate”. This inevitably results in some level of self-exposure, which, given our interdependent lives, can’t help but involve others. And so she has struck a deal with herself:

… if I’m rough on myself, it frees me to be rough on others as well. I stress the unappealing, mean, aggressive, unglamorous aspects of myself as a way of lessening my anxiety about portraying other people as they strike me.

She certainly keeps to her deal … and it often gets her into trouble, in both her fiction and non-fiction. Her latest novel The spare room is a raw exploration of a friendship between two women, one of whom is dying of cancer but refuses to accept it. The main character, the one not dying and who is challenged by her friend’s attitudes and demands, is called Helen! Life and art are very close in this book it seems, but she knows what she is doing. Her ethical challenge is about the “other” people in her life who get pulled into her exploration of “the intimate”. She says:

Writing, it seems, like the bringing up of children, can’t be done without damage.

Some time ago I reviewed a short story titled “The young painters” by Nicole Krauss. In it she explores the impact of writing from other people’s stories, and presents her case:

In the publicity interviews I gave, I emphasized that the book was fiction and professed my frustration with journalists and readers alike who insist on reading novels as the autobiographies of their authors, as if there were not such thing as the writer’s imagination …

Helen Garner has no real answer to the problems she poses (any more than Krauss’s fictional character does in the short story), except to say that

… if I can write well enough, rigorously and imaginatively enough, readers will be carried through the superficial levels of perviness and urged into the depths of themselves. I hope we can meet and know each other there further down, where each of us connects with every other person who has ever been loved, hurt and been wounded …

In other words, she’s looking for readers who can tell the difference between fiction and reality. This may not, I suspect, reassure all those close to her who may not want their lives to be caught up in such a risky writer-reader venture but, theoretically, I like what she says and the honesty with which she says it. I’d love to have been in the audience that day to hear the Q and As.

Monday musings on Australian literature: Guest authors at the Sydney Writers’ Festival

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Regular readers of Monday musings will remember that a recent post in the series was inspired by the Qantas flight magazine, The Australian way. Well, I’ve been in the air again … this time for a longer trip, as Mr Gums and I have again left daughter and dog in charge at home, and are holidaying in Japan. Of course I read The Australian way again, and in the May 2011 issue found an article about guest authors who will be attending this month’s Sydney Writers’ Festival. Now this, I thought, could make for an interesting Monday musings post. It’s not really about Australian literature but it is about some writers who’ll be attending an Australian literary event. The premise of the article is that its author, Paul Robinson, asked the authors to share their “literary discoveries”, and so I thought I could share them with you. I’ll say straight off though that I’m not familiar with all the authors mentioned. Would love to hear if you are, and what you think of them.

  •  Ingrid Betancourt, author of Even silence has an end: Mario Vargas Llosa’s The feast of the goat. Having read this one recently, I can concur with this discovery!
  • Fatima Bhutto, author of Songs of blood and sword: Colombian author Hector Abad’s Oblivion.
  • Philippa Fioretti, author of The fragment of dreams: Gay Talese’s The sons (1992).
  • Emma Forrest, author of Your voice in my head: Tom Rachman‘s The imperfectionists. I’ve seen this one reviewed around the blogs and have my eye on it for my TBR.
  • A A Gill, author of Here & there: Collected travel writing: Simon Sebag Montefiore‘s Jerusalem: A biography, and the complete works of H L Mencken.
  • A C Grayling, author of The good book: Dale Peterson’s The moral life of animals, and Michael Shirmer’s The believing brain.
  • Howard Jacobson, author of last year’s Booker Prize winner, The Finkler question: Milan Kundera‘s essay “The curtain”, and Ian Mackillop’s F R Leavis: A life in criticism.
  • David Mitchell, author of The thousand autumns of Jacob de Zoet: Simon Lelic’s The facility.
  • Favel Parrett, author of Past the shallows: Chris Wolmersley’s Bereft. (Ah, someone has nominated an Australian book.)

There you have it. Not much about Australian literature, but these are the people who’ll be speaking about books and writing to Australians this month – and that has to be interesting, hasn’t it?

POSTSCRIPT: This was supposed to have been published on Monday, but I made a mistake in the scheduling, so it is now Monday musings on Wednesday. Traveller’s brain!

Monday musings on Australian literature: Popular Penguins at a Perfect Price

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Penguin with No. 1 ribbon

Since Penguin never responds to my copyright queries (Courtesy: OCAL via clker.com)

You all know Penguin Books – and perhaps something about the company’s origin. The story goes that Allen Lane, standing on a train platform in 1935 and not being able to find “something good” to read, decided that there existed “a vast reading public for intelligent books at a low price”. He staked all he had, apparently, and a publishing giant was born.

Over time though, prices have climbed and so a few years ago, Penguin decided to introduce plain covered (much like the original orange and white covers) editions of popular titles. The first set was published (here, anyhow) in September 2008. The price, in Australia dollars, $9.95. I like them – their bindings are easy to open, they are light and easy to carry, they look classic, and they are inexpensive. What’s not to like?

Content-wise – and fair enough, since reading should not be not an exclusively nationalistic activity – the majority of the offerings are non-Australian. However, each release of new titles includes a small selection by Australian authors, and it is these that I look out for and buy if I don’t already have them (because some nationalism is good!). Here is a list of what I believe are the currently available Australian titles published as Popular Penguins:

  • Astley, Thea It’s Raining in Mango
  • Carmody, Isobelle Obernewtyn
  • Clarke, Marcus For the Term of His Natural Life
  • Conigrave, Timothy Holding the Man
  • Courtenay, Bryce Power of One
  • Cracknell, Ruth Journey from Venice
  • Drewe, Robert Bodysurfers
  • Drewe, Robert Our Sunshine
  • Garner, Helen Monkey Grip
  • Garner, Helen Postcards from Surfers
  • Hartnett, Sonya Of a Boy
  • Hartnett, Sonya Surrender
  • Horne, Donald Lucky Country
  • Hyland, M.J. How the Light Gets In
  • Jolley, Elizabeth The Well
  • Leunig, Michael Curly Verse: Selected Poems
  • Lindsay, Joan Picnic at Hanging Rock
  • Marshall, Alan I Can Jump Puddles
  • Niland, D’Arcy Shiralee
  • Park, Ruth Playing Beatie Bow
  • Park, Ruth Harp in the South
  • Richardson, Henry Handel Getting of Wisdom
  • Stow, Randolph Merry-Go-Round in the Sea
  • Turner, Ethel Seven Little Australians
  • Winton, Tim In the Winter Dark

That’s twenty-five titles, mostly novels, but some non-fiction as well as poetry and short stories. A couple of the novels are children’s or young adult.

The temptation of course is to quibble with choices like this, to argue for one’s favourites, or on other grounds for why some other title/s may be more worthy … but why bother? The point is that it’s good to see an interesting variety of Australian titles being re-published in an affordable format – and, since the series seems to be popular, we can only expect that more Aussie titles will be published in the future. Meanwhile, non-Australian readers looking for Australian titles to read would not go too far wrong by choosing (according to their own interests) from this list.

A little postscript

I’m (well Whispering Gums, anyhow, is) 2 years old today. I can’t quite believe how quickly these two years have gone. It’s been great fun writing this blog, responding to comments on it, and reading the blogs of those I’ve met through blogging. Thanks a bunch for sharing your thoughts and ideas. And thanks especially to those who helped me get going in my early days. You know who you are and, while I won’t out you here, I want you to know that I greatly appreciate you! Roll on year 3 …

Monday musings on Australian literature: Literary Folk

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Jason and Chloe Roweth perform

Local folkies Chloe and Jason Roweth, in the Trocadero venue, 2011

As I attended my 13th or 14th (losing count now), National Folk Festival* this Easter weekend, I started to think about the relationship between folk music and literature. Some folk music is purely instrumental – think Celtic fiddling and bluegrass picking, for example – but, as a reader, it’s the storytelling side of folk that most draws me in. From traditional English folk songs to bush ballads, from the love songs of singer-songwriters to protest music, folkies tell stories that are sad, romantic, tragic, funny or angry, so  I thought that for today’s Monday Musings I’d write about a very select few Aussie folk musicians whose stories I’ve enjoyed.

Eric Bogle (b. 1944)

Bogle, though Scottish born, is now one of the grand old men of Australian folk. His most famous song is the antiwar song “And the band played Waltzing Matilda“. Another antiwar song, “No man’s land” (also known as “The green fields of France”) was, he told us at this year’s Festival, described by Tony Blair as his favourite war poem. Here’s the last verse:

And I can’t help but wonder, now Willie McBride
Do all those who lie here know why they died?
Did you really believe them when they told you ‘The Cause’?
Did you really believe that this war would end wars?
Well the suffering, the sorrow, the glory, the shame
The killing, the dying, it was all done in vain,
For Willie McBride, it all happened again,
And again, and again, and again, and again.

Not all Bogle’s songs, by any means, are about war, but this seemed a particularly appropriate one for today’s Monday Musings which happens to fall on ANZAC Day.

Margret RoadKnight (b. 1943)

If Bogle is one of the grand old men of Australian folk, Margret Roadknight is a grand old dame. Each year I think I won’t go see her this time because I saw her last year and there are no many to see, but I usually find myself gravitating yet again to one of her concerts, and I’m never disappointed. The woman just keeps on keeping on the way folkies – like Bogle, Pete Seeger (with whom she’s performed), Joan Baez and ilk – do. She sings her own compositions and those of others. Like most folkies she tells stories about her songs, about why she wrote them or sings them. She’s a social justice activist, but the lyrics I’ll excerpt today come from her “big” hit of the 1970s, “Girls in our town” (written by Bob Hudson):

Girls in our town get no help from their men
No one can let them be sixteen again
Things might get better but it’s hard to say when
If they only had someone to talk to…

The Fagans

If Eric is the grand … well you get the drift … the Fagans have to be Australia’s royal family of folk. It’s a rare festival that you don’t find them together, and/or subsets thereof, performing. They regularly appear in the Union Concert so you can guess that a major theme for them is justice for workers. But, just to be perverse, I’m going to give you an excerpt from Kate Fagan’s plaintive depression era waltz, “Old station sisters”:

Another year passed, we were sweethearts by then,
The government came and they called up our men
To work in the cities, the factories and mines,
The country had no time for dancing.
With three younger sisters, parents to feed
And land that was broken from drought and disease,
Well he had no choice …

Jason and Chloe Roweth

Husband-and-wife team, Jason and Chloe Roweth are folklorists. They research and present Australian folklore, as well as perform original songs. For this year’s festival, which encompassed ANZAC Day, they reprised their show The riderless horse about the First World War. It is the result of significant research into the letters and diaries, not to mention the music and poems, of the era – and finds a good, if traditional, balance, between humour, tragedy and patriotism. The focus is the humanity of war – rather than the history and the deeds. One of the themes that runs through any stories of Australians at war is their anti-authoritarian/egalitarian stance (which was often at loggerheads with the British way of doing things). Here is an excerpt from “The army song”:

Now they give us chicken, they say it is the best,
But we get the neck and the arsehole.
The officers get the rest…

You need to have a laugh every now and then, or you’d be crying…

William Barton at the National Folk Festival, 2011

William Barton, in the Budawang, 2011

The Song Company and William Barton

The Song Company (with indigenous musician-didgeridoo player William Barton) is, really, the “odd man out” in this line-up – but they demonstrate what a wonderfully broad church the NFF is. The Song Company is a classically trained a capella group which, as their website describes, “is equally at home in medieval songs and chants, 16th-century polyphony, 20th-century classics and [which] creates innovative programs that cross the old divide between high-art and low-brow and old/new”. I’ve seen them in a few of these guises and enjoy their eclecticism (not to mention the quality of their execution). What they presented at the NFF was, I think, a version of their show Kalkadunga** Man which they toured with Barton a couple of years ago. Their program included an evocative piece, which Barton called a favourite, “Out there on the dry creek bed”, but I can’t find any lyrics online to excerpt for you. They also performed one of the best known (in white Australia) traditional Aboriginal songs, the “Maranoa Lullaby”:

Mumma warrunno
Murra wathunno,
Mumma warrunno
Murra wathunno.

You can hear a clip from a very scratchy 1950 recording sung by Australia’s first recognised classical indigenous singer, Harold Blair. This recording was among the first chosen for Sounds of Australia (the National Registry of Recorded Sound) developed and maintained by the National Film and Sound Archive …

… of course there’s more, but this seems a fitting way to conclude my little intro to the literary aspects of Folk.

*Folk is defined broadly … as I think it should be … by the National Folk Festival.
** Kalkadunga being the indigenous people from the Mt Isa region of NW Queensland.

Monday musings on Australian literature: Reverse expats

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Several months ago I wrote a Monday musings post on Australian expat novelists, so I thought it was only fair to write one on reverse expat novelists, that is, writers from elsewhere who have settled in Australia. Because, yes, some people DO come here as well as leave!

For this post, I’m choosing a few writers who settled (permanently or semi-permanently) in Australia in their adult lives … they are all English or South African born. (I wonder what that says? We are, of course, all Commonwealth countries, which may have some bearing on it all … but after that, I’ll leave it to others to ponder.) And, because I need to choose some order in which to list them, I’ve chosen the order of their arrival in Australia.

Elizabeth Jolley
(born in England in 1923, arrived in Western Australia in 1959, died in Western Australia in 2007)

Regular readers of my blog will know that Jolley is one of my favourite writers. All her novels were published after her arrival in Australia. In fact, like many authors, she was rejected many times before her first books, Miss Peabody’s inheritance and Mr Scobie’s riddle, were published in 1983. All the books of hers that I’ve read, with the exception of the autobiographical novel My father’s moon, are set in Australia though travel elsewhere does occur in some.  Jolley clearly settled well into Australia – and in 1970, when still living in Perth, she and her husband bought a 5 acre rural property outside of Perth. She chronicles this in her delightful “memoir” (if you can quite call it that), Diary of a weekend farmer. It is very much diary-style and starts with the search for land. You might like this one (from 10 October 1970):

Told of another place Mount Helena drove there, like a place in a Patrick White novel 27 acres covered in scrub and burned trees old cars and trucks, washing machines, it was like a dump, several dogs so turned the car as quickly as I could.

A week later, though, they find just the spot. It sounds English by her description (17 October 1970):

Serene. A high verandah, a fig tree, a loquat, honeysuckle, a hedge of rosemary. A gentle slope of bush down to a meadow, stream on land at both bottom corners …

And on 6 November she says “You look across to Tolstoy country. A paddock with horses running …”

It is however Australian – the snakes and bushfires tell us that. And, it is clear, this land, this experience, informed much of her writing, including, specifically, The five acre virgin and other stories, and The newspaper of Clarement Street.

Peter Temple
(born in South Africa in 1946, arrived in Australia in 1980)

Temple is one of Australia’s best regarded crime writers. In fact, his latest novel Truth was, rather controversially, the first genre novel to win our top literary award, the Miles Franklin. As with Jolley, all his novels have been published after his arrival in Australia and they are, at least to the best of my knowledge as I’ve only read two, set in Australia and very much imbued with Australian landscape and culture. His description of the land (in Victoria this time) in The broken shore sounds a bit Patrick White too:

Early settlers planted cypress trees and hedges as windbreaks around their houses. It worked to some extent but the displaced wind took its revenge. Trees, shrubs, hedges, tanks, windmills, dunnies, dog kennels, chickenhouses, old car bodies – everything in its path sloped to leeward.

Nicholas Shakespeare
(born in England in 1957, first visited Tasmania in 1999 and now divides his year between Tasmania and England)

Unfortunately, I haven’t yet read any Shakespeare, but I have Snowleg on my TBR pile and I have been wanting to read The dancer upstairs for some time too. So, I’ll just report on him using an interview with Susan Wyndham in 2007. He said that  “the thing about Tasmania that’s exciting for a writer is how close to the surface history is”. And, guess what, Patrick White rears his head again. Shakespeare tells Wyndham:

In my shed, one of the discoveries I made was Patrick White and The Tree of Man. It is extraordinary the way he took a marriage through all its vicissitude; most writers don’t take on that challenge.

A commenter on Susan Wyndham’s blog described his book Secrets of the sea as “So Australian with a strong thread connecting to Britain”. I must, must, must get to this writer.

Coetzee, Poland, 2006 (Photo: Mariusz Kubik, from Wikipedia, using CC-BY-SA 3.0)

JM Coetzee
(born in South Africa in 1940, arrived in Australia in 2002)

Coetzee, of course, had an established literary career before he arrived in Australia, but his rather stellar career has continued unabated since then. Elizabeth Costello concerns an Australian novelist, and Diary of a bad year is set in Australia. These books tend to the intellectual or philosophical, yet they too reflect on Australian culture often counterpointing international concerns. Coetzee is a rather reclusive man, but I have managed to once hear him speak. He briefly introduced and read from Slow man, and then immediately left the podium. There was, in other words, no opportunity for questions and answers. While that was a pity, I bear him no grudges. He is a writer after all and doesn’t have to join the literary promotion juggernaut if he doesn’t want to!

I’ve chosen these four reverse expats because they are of particular interest to me. There are others, such as British comedian and writer Ben Elton, and best-selling South African born author Bryce Courtenay. Having lived overseas on a couple of occasions, I am fascinated by the decision people make to leave their homes permanently for another country. There are many reasons why people might do so – political (of course), economic, personal (such as having a partner from another country), cultural, and so on. Some of you who read my blog have, I know, made the jump. I’d love to hear your perspectives on being an expat.

Monday musings on Australian literature: A message from the remote west

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Cape Leveque

Section of beach at Cape Leveque (rather north of Shark Bay)

Do you look at those airline magazines you find in planes? I usually do … and often find something of interest in Qantas: The Australian Way. Yesterday I left Mr Gums behind and flew west for a week’s work in a remote town in north-west-ish Western Australia. It was a long flight (three actually) so I managed to watch a movie or two, read most of my novel, do a crossword and dip into the magazine. And, I’m glad I did because …

… in it was an excerpt from a new edition of Tim Winton‘s Land’s edge. The article described is as memoir, but the back of an earlier edition called it “an autobiographical meditation about his obsession with the coast”. Whatever you call it, it is clearly about his experience of one aspect of his life. I like writers’ memoirs but have yet to read this one. Its language is, needless to say (well, for me, because I like Winton), delicious:

The land around it [Shark Bay] looks blotchy and beaten. Desert right up to the water, it stains the white beaches vaguely pink. The water is variegated with sandbar whorls, veins of channels, meadows of seagrasses like bruises. It’s here that Europeans first met the Great South Land – Hartog, Vlamigh, Dampier – and they didn’t linger because the landscape seemed to shut its eyes and fold its arm against them: it was inscrutable.

I love that description of the landscape. It’s actually a wide open landscape but it “looks” empty and mysterious, rather beautiful but also somewhat unwelcoming. These days though, people flock to Shark Bay because this is where Monkey Mia is, the place where you can swim with dolphins. I haven’t been there yet, but I’m planning to:

This is the only place in the world you can do this naturally, expect to stand in the water, before breakfast, in the middle of the morning, just before sunset, and touch a free dolphin, feel its powerful bulk, look it directly in the eye and feel it slide back out of reach, unafraid. This is what all these people have caught planes and buses or spent 10 hours in a hot car for. Because none of this is normal, and the ritual has gone on since 1964, before Flipper, before environmentalism, before the New Age came slinking upon us. Generations of humans and dolphins meeting on land’s verandah.

And I think I’ll leave it at that …

Monday musings on Australian literature: Writers from our Deep South

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Yes, Australia has a “deep south”, though we may not necessarily call it that. It’s Tasmania, an island hanging off the southeast of mainland Australia. Like Western Australia, it can sometimes feel like another country. You have to go over the sea to it – and when you get there, you sometimes find yourself saying, “In Australia …”. Very embarrassing when you catch yourself doing it, but it does reflect how “different” Tasmania can seem. It can feel a bit English – it’s cooler, greener and more compact. And, because of its relative insularity, there are, I have to say, jokes about the mental acuity of its inhabitants (like those you also hear of about places like Appalachia). Totally unfair of course! Not only does my brother live there, but Tasmania is home to some significant Australian writers, not to mention creators of all persuasions. Peter Sculthorpe, who is arguably our most famous composer, is a Taswegian.

Saltwater River penal settlement ruins

Ruins of penal settlement at Saltwater River

Tasmania has a rather dramatic history, from the early days of white settlement when it was home to some of our worst convict prisons to more recent times when it has been at the centre of some of our most dramatic conflicts over the environment. It is also where one of the worst shooting rampages in the 20th century occurred (in 1996). Add to this the fact that it contains some of Australia’s most beautiful and inaccessible wilderness, and you can see why gothic is part of its literary tradition.

Probably the state’s two most famous writers are Marcus Clarke and Richard Flanagan, and Gothic influences can be found in the writings of both. Marcus Clarke wrote what is probably regarded as the Australian convict novel, (For the term of) His natural life (published in 1874). It tells the story of a young man wrongly transported for murder, and it documents the worst of the convict system. It is an Australian classic – and has been adapted to film and television.

Richard Flanagan is a contemporary writer and environmental activist. Most of his books are set in Tasmania. Gould’s book of fish (2001) is another convict novel and is inspired by convict artist, William Buelow Gould. It’s some years since I read it but I’d recommend it for its evocation of the horrors of colonial Tasmania in a voice you don’t quickly forget. Here he is on George Augustus Robinson (Chief Protector of Aborigines in Tasmania, 1839 to 1849):

Robinson treated the savages as though they were his entourage, & the savages treated him like he was one of the many stray dogs they picked up on their travels. Neither seemed to notice the earth falling away beneath them as a breaking wave.

No indeed… Gould’s main subject, though, is not the plight of “the savages” but his own survival in a world not kind to the poor and powerless:

For as Capois Death said, if shit ever becomes valuable, the poor will be born without arseholes. That was our fate, & I didn’t pretend I could alter it. I only wished to survive as best I could …

It is hard to find excerpts from this wild novel that make sense out of context, but I hope these two will give you a sense of the language and black comic tone. Flanagan’s latest novel Wanting (2008) also deals with Tasmania’s early colonial days and is similarly worth reading.

As with my post on Western Australian writers, I’m not going to give you a long list, so I’ll just mention a few other writers. High on my TBR is Jessie Couvreur (or Tasma). She migrated to Tasmania with her family as a young child in the early 1850s and lived there until her marriage. The book I have is her A Sydney sovereign and other tales (1890), but she also wrote novels. Anyhow, the first story in my book is titled “What an artist discovered in Tasmania” and concerns one Richard (“who is an artist, perhaps, more in sentiment than in execution”) and his trip to Tasmania (from England) to find “the most hardened criminal on earth” to sit for a portrait. When he announces his plan, his sister Polly asks where Tasmania is, and here is the narrator’s response:

Kind Tasmanians – whose blossom garlanded isle is the original Eden of the Anthropoghagi; whose aromatous breezes greet the pallid stranger, and efface from his recollection the haunting odours of Yarra* bank noisomeness – do not stigmatise Polly for her ignorance. She had been through a course in  school geography, and had mastered, you may be sure, the latitude and longitude of Hobart Town, just as she had mastered the latitude and longitude of Acapulca; but somehow the whereabouts of Tasmania had escaped her.

There is a delightful tongue-in-cheek tone to the story of an artist who doesn’t quite find what he went looking for … I must read the rest of the book.

Other writers from Tasmania worth checking out (but they aren’t the only ones) include novelist-essayist Amanda Lohrey, poet Gwen Harwood, and novelist Helen Hodgman (who emigrated from Scotland with her family, when she was a teenager, and some of whose novels are now being re-released by Text Publishing).

How I dreamed of Paradise,
this southern land at the world’s edge,
weeks of blue water separating old from new.
I tasted air in my dreams,
faint hills, mounds of whales;
the beginning of things.
(from Jane, Lady Franklin, by Adrienne Eberhard)

For all its ferocious past, Tasmania is a place many Australians dream of as our little Paradise down south. If you never have a chance to get there, you could do worse than check out some of its writers.

* With apologies to Melburnians. This is Tasma writing, not me!