Monday musings

Monday musings on Australian literature: Some Australian travel writing

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At luggage carousels one can question travelling (Donald Horne, The intelligent tourist)

Having just returned from our trip to Hong Kong, I thought this would be a good opportunity to post about some Australian travel writing. Hmm … good idea, but where to start? The first problem is that while I usually enjoy travel literature when I read it, I don’t read it often. And the second one is the focus: should I post on Australians writing about travel or on anyone writing about travel in Australia? I’ve decided on the former, which means that while the writers will be Australian, their subjects will not necessarily be so. Travel writers, as you probably know, are a varied lot: some only write travel, but many are novelists, journalists and other sorts of writers who have, for some reason, written travel books.

To keep it simple, I’ve chosen 3 fairly recent examples that represent different types of travel writing.

1. Robyn Davidson‘s Tracks (1995)

Robyn Davidson has to be the Australian travel writer most contemporary Australians would first think of when asked. Tracks is Davidson’s first travel book and it chronicles her 1,700-mile trek across the central and west Australian deserts using camels. It resulted in her being dubbed “The camel lady”. It also resulted in her developing a fascination for deserts and nomadic life, and in 2006 she wrote an essay titled “No fixed address” for the Quarterly Essay. Her book is an example of what I would call adventure travel literature. There are many more examples of this type – from walkers, sailors, mountaineers and so on.

2. Thomas Keneally‘s The place where souls are born (1992)

Monument Valley

In Monument Valley, one of the areas that inspired Keneally

Australian novelist Keneally’s book is about the American southwest. It is one of my favourite pieces of travel writing because I lived (and travelled) in the area for three years and fell in love with it, and because Keneally writes about it so evocatively. He matches criticism with reverence, and shares the area’s history and culture with us alongside his own personal reaction to it. What more  do we want in travel writing? This book is from Jan Morris‘s Destinations series. Keneally says he considered Sudan (“that bitter, lovely republic”) and Australia before settling on the Southwest. He sees the Southwest the same way I do, as being different (“the space of enormous elevations of mountains, of canyons deep enough to make the brain creep and waver”) from Australia but also similar. He says:

An Australian has to keep on referring to the snow and the heights to remind himself that this is not some town in western New South Wales. It is as if similar passions have run through the earth’s crust and core and made an organic link between the two places.

I’d put this in the category of traditional travel literature – it’s both descriptive and reflective of place and people, and it shows what is individual to the place in question while also revealing the universals. He concludes the book with:

But, in the spirit of the book, it is the chanting [from the Pueblo] we fix on, going away with it more or less in our ears. I take to the road strangely assured that someone is singing for us, celebrating matters we have got out of the way of celebrating for ourselves. The eternity of things. Even of our own spirits.

3. Don Watson‘s American journeys (2008)

Don Watson has impeccable writing credentials. Not only has he written about cant, jargon and weasel words in Death sentence and Watson’s dictionary of weasel words but, with American journeys, which covers his travels in America, post-Hurricane Katrina, he won the Age Book of the Year and the Walkley Award for best non-fiction book. “To journey in America,” he says, “is to journey in language”. While the book is a little repetitive at times – because the same issues keep cropping up as he travels – it captures the paradox that is America. He sees how its wonderful can-do-ism is offset by a focus on individualism that refuses to see that sometimes individualism needs to be over-ridden for the common good, that there are some things that government should do to ensure that all its citizens are well cared for.  Katrina ably demonstrated this. Watson says:

… if it is true that private businesses are efficient because it is in their nature to seek and maximise profit – which is to say their self-interest – then the pursuit of the public interest is not in their nature, and one may as well look to a rattlesnake for kindness as to corporations for the rebuilding of a city full of people. It is pointless; and it follows that it’s just as pointless to imagine that a country governed by the principle of private interest is capable of fixing problems in the public interest – be they local, like New Orleans; national, like poverty; or global, like the environment or peace …

He goes on to say that while American churches, corporations and the nation as a whole

do good and selfless works at home and abroad, it is also true that, in these days of culture wars, the idea of government being the principal agent of such works is faded. That is what New Orleans revealed …

Watson’s book is in a category I’d call socio-political travel literature. This sort of writing tries to understand how a society works, what makes it what it is.

The travel writing I like best:

  • is generous towards its subject matter, that is, it doesn’t whitewash the negatives but neither does it refuse to understand them
  • uses language that captures my imagination
  • has a sense of humour (though not necessarily laugh-out-loud funny)
  • illuminates place and people – that is, it looks beyond the clichés

In his book The intelligent tourist, Donald Horne (known to most Australians as the author of The lucky country and The education of young Donald), suggests that tourists “give up sight-seeing for sight-experiencing“.  This sense of “experience” is what I look for in travel writing – as well as in my own travelling.

Do you have favourite pieces of travel writing?

Monday musings on Australian literature: My literary home, more or less

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Once again Mr Gums and I have left daughter and dog at home in order to hit the road – well, in this case, the skies as by the time this is published we will be in Hong Kong. My posting and commenting will consequently somewhat sporadic for the next week…and so I decided to make this Monday musings a simple one.

National Library of Australia

National Library of Australia, viewed from Commonwealth Park on the opposite side of Lake Burley Griffin

Now, my real literary home is, as for most of us I expect, my childhood. That is where my love of reading started. I cannot remember a time without books. My parents read, and encouraged reading. Books were my favourite presents. For me, this all translated into choosing librarianship for my career, and this brings me to this post. I count myself lucky that my first professional job as a librarian was at the National Library of Australia. Eventually, the section I worked with separated and became a new institution. Since its work was where my heart lay, I went with it.

However, I have stayed close to the Library: I’m a “Friend” and, since taking early retirement a few years ago, I visit there regularly to read and research, attend seminars, visit the bookshop and exhibitions, and meet friends for lunch. I have heard many Australian writers speak there – including David Malouf, John Marsden, JM Coetzee, Geraldine Brooks, Janette Turner Hospital – and have seen some doing research there – including Kate Grenville.

Being our National Library, it is of course home to many of Australia’s most famous literary manuscripts – too numerous to mention here, but a fairly recent coup was the believed-to-have-been-destroyed papers of Patrick White. It is also where, due to legal deposit, you should be able to see any book published in Australia. A great resource!

The National Library has been one of the world’s forerunners in using and managing the digital domain. Here are some of its major projects:

  • Pandora, the Australian web archive, was among the first attempts in the world to archive online information. It was established in 1996.
  • Picture Australia is a federated search project providing access to image collections from institutions all over Australia. It was established in 1998.
  • Newspaper Digitisation Project, to which I referred in last week’s Monday musings, is a project to digitise, using OCR technology, Australia’s early newspapers up to 1954. Since OCR technology – particularly when used on old newsprint with old printing technologies – results in a lot of “errors”, the National Library invites users to edit the articles. Anytime I use it, I do my correcting bit on the articles I find. The top user-corrector, recorded on the project’s home page, has now made nearly 560,000 corrections. 560,000!! Now, that’s a lot of participatory value the Library has harnessed.
  • Trove is the Library’s latest big project and enables users to search “the deep web” for material relating to Australia and Australians. It uses modern search technologies to point to related material, to enable users to manage the information they find and contribute their own content, and to encourage users to actively engage with the library and each other through forums.

And there’s much more besides … but I’ll leave it here and let you explore my literary home through the links above while I explore Hong Kong …

Monday musings on Australian literature: Dear Sir, or The cult of ugliness

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As I was researching Ruth Park for last week’s Monday musings, I came across some “Letters to the editor” in The Sydney Morning Herald and thought they were worth sharing. (As you read them do note how some of the letter writers sign themselves.) I’ll start with a couple of letters criticising Park’s novels:

Sir, The type of literature exemplified in Ruth Park’s “Harp in the South” and the first two instalments of “Poor man’s orange” fits into a pattern which appears also in modern painting and sculpture, and perhaps in a lesser degree, in much modern music.

This general trend may be described as the “cult of ugliness” …

Why cannot she, with her undoubted talent for portraying people, let us believe there are some normal and pleasant people, whose trials and failures and successes, joys and sorrows, would still present a fruitful field for her literary powers?”

(H.E. Ellen, Cronulla, 13 July 1949, p. 2)

Ruth Park, in her novel about the Darcy family seems to revel in the unpleasantness and beastliness of life…

(K.W., Pymble, 15 July 1949)

… We all know that such conditions exist, but making them a subject for a novel will do nothing towards eliminating them.

It seems a pity that we should feel duty bound to hasten on Sunday morning to keep that part of the “Herald” from falling into the hands of the young.

(M. Blayney, Rozelle, 15 July 1949)

The Surry Hotel, Elizabeth Street, Surry Hills

Surry Hotel, Surry Hills (Courtesy: J Bar via Wikipedia, using CC-BY-SA 3.0)

Fortunately, though, other letter-writers saw value in the “cult of ugliness”, such as:

… Too many of us are cramped and stifled by our small world, so that when Miss Park flings a challenge to our “good” society, we shrink from the “ugliness” her claim contains, not willing to admit that the unpleasant morals of Surry Hills are to be found also in many a far more respectable suburb.

I should encourage my lads, were they old enough, to read these novels, for only by a personal touch with the fortunate and less fortunate, can they be really balanced in their adult outlook.

(Mother of Three, Lindfield, 15 July 1949)

… she has drawn a strong picture of loyalty and devotion in family life as it exists in the hearts of the poor and unfortunate, in spite of the worst possible conditions of living. One may just as well condemn Charles Dickens for exposing the horrors that existed in his day, as to condemn Ruth Park for the same objective …

(Mrs L.R. Fowler, 15 July 1949)

… Hughie Darcy’s loyalty to his friend, Mr Diamond, his understanding of his frailties, is born of a Christ-like love, however distorted it may appear to us …

Instead of writing scornfully about “nasty” novels, we need to “get under the skin” of our fellow Australian citizens and guard against such degradation in the future.

(G.M. Powell, St John’s Rectory, Mudgee, 15 July 1949)

Others distance themselves from the prudes and hypocrites who aren’t interested in facing society’s problems:

… “Poor man’s orange” … shows an understanding almost unrivalled in Australian literature of human psychology and of the problems facing certain sections of our society. I tender my congratulations to Miss Park and the “Herald” for writing and publishing, in spite of prudes and hypocrites, this human and moving story of slum life.

(Humanist, Sydney, 15 July 1949)

But my favourite of the supporters is G.M. Powell (already cited partially above) who praises Ruth Park’s ability to

look behind the dirty facade of human behaviour, and to find that the real personality behind it is really very lovable after all, and frequently very similar to us who walk the paths of rectitude…

Oh dear. Given more recent furores over books and “arts” in general (and I’m sure you all can name some favourite ones) which have engendered rather similar responses, it seems that we readers – including the prudes, hypocrites, and walkers in the paths of rectitude – are as universal as the subjects of the books we read. Funny that!

With thanks to the National Library of Australia for its wonderful newspaper digitisation project which made this post possible.

Monday musings on Australian literature: Ruth Park

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The muddle-headed wombat, book cover

Wombat book cover (Courtesy: HarperCollins Australia)

For a New Zealander, Ruth Park is a very popular Australian! Not only did she write the much-loved (and studied) Harp in the south trilogy, but she also wrote the hugely popular (in its time) radio serial The muddle-headed wombat, was married to the Australian D’Arcy Niland (now deceased) who wrote The shiralee, and is mother to children’s author-illustrators Deborah and Kilmeny (now deceased) Niland. Ruth Park also won the Miles Franklin Award with her Swords and crowns and rings, and wrote two very popular autobiographies, Fence around the cuckoo and Fishing in the Styx. And this is not all – or even all of the best – that she’s produced in her long career.

Park was born in New Zealand in the early 1920s and first came to Australia in 1940 when she met D’Arcy Niland. She writes that Australian writer Eve Langley*, with whom she had a longstanding friendship, said of Niland:

‘That’s a good face … Do you know what it is saying?’
‘No, what?’
‘It says “Take me or leave me.” I like that.’

So apparently did Park. She returned to Australia in 1942 to work as a journalist, and married Niland. They worked at various jobs in rural New South Wales for some years before Park’s stories gained the attention of the Australian Broadcasting Commission (ABC) resulting in their decision to try to make a living from free-lance writing. They wrote, and wrote, and wrote – anything that would earn money. They wrote, for example, short stories, genre stories (such as romances and westerns), radio talks and radio plays, scripts for radio comics, all the while honing their skills for their more serious writing goals. And they lived during these early years in Sydney’s inner city slum, Surry Hills.

These experiences of living in rural areas and city slums are clearly evident in Swords and crowns and rings (the story of the dwarf Jackie, and his love Cushie Moy) and the Harp in the south trilogy (the story of the Darcy – ha! – family). The thing I love about these books – both of which span the first 4-5 decades of the twentieth century – is the way Park explores gritty issues like poverty, abortion, religious bigotry, unemployment and illness with a psychological and social realism that also encompasses warmth and humour. Her main characters tend to be the quintessential Aussie battlers, but their concerns transcend time and place. It’s not surprising, really, that these works keep being read, re-published, set for study, and adapted for television and film.

Realism though is not the only string to Park’s fictional bow. She wrote in several “genres” for a range of audiences, including fantasy for children. Her Muddle-headed wombat stories ran on the ABC Children’s Session from 1957 to 1971. I have to say that I never have really been one for anthropomorphism, and have read few children’s classics featuring animals (no, not even The wind in the willows) but even I would tune in for the wombat! Park also wrote a children’s time-travel fantasy Playing Beatie Bow, which is taught in schools and has been made into a film.

And yet, for all this, I’m sure she is little known outside Australia … if I am wrong, please let me know!

In the meantime, I will conclude with her description in her first autobiography, Fence around the cuckoo, of her first sighting of Australia as she arrived by boat:

What I saw were endless sandstone cliffs reflecting the sunrise. A chill ran over my skin, my ears buzzed as they had once done when I was about to experience uncertainty about something as yet unknown. The sea fled south, its malachite green changing to beaming blue; the sky was sumptuous with a sun hotter than I had ever known.

This was my first glimpse of Australia Felix, the ancient, indifferent, nonpareil continent that was to become the love of my life.

Ruth Park is not one of those ground-breaking writers who makes you go, wow!, but  she is an excellent story-teller who has an enviable ability to create and develop memorable characters who confront the real “stuff” of life. You could do far worse than read her if you want an introduction to Australian literature. If I haven’t convinced you, read Lisa at ANZLitLovers and Tony of Tony’s Bookworld on Harp in the South, and kimbofo at Reading Matters on her “Top 10 novels about Australia”.

*Park mentions Langley (whom I reviewed early in this blog) several times in Fence around the cuckoo. One concerns Park’s decision to stay with Eve to escape a Peeping Tom uncle but, when she arrived at the windmill in which she believed Eve to be living, she found no Eve but another woman who had heard of Eve but not for some years. “What had happened to that weird girl?”, the new windmill resident wondered. Poor Eve. She was indeed a bit weird and had a rather sad life, but that is another story.

Monday musings on Australian literature: Elizabeth von Arnim

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Cover of "All the Dogs of My Life"

All the Dogs of My Life (Courtesy: Vintage Books, via Amazon)

This week’s Monday musings is a bit cheeky since Elizabeth von Arnim (or Mary Annette Beauchamp, her birth-name) was born in Sydney in 1866 but her parents left Australia in 1871 for Switzerland and then England. Von Arnim spent the rest of her life abroad. So, why am I writing about her? She didn’t grow up in Australia and doesn’t write about it either. Well, it’s because I love her writing and thought I could use the Australian birth justification to write about her now rather than later. After all, it’s my blog and I’ll do what I want to!

Before I talk about her writing, it’s worth mentioning that she has a famous relation: her first cousin was Katherine Mansfield (born Katherine Mansfield Beauchamp in 1888). But this isn’t the only name-dropping that can be done. The writer E.M. Forster tutored her children at one stage, she had a three-year relationship with H.G. Wells, and she married (but soon regretted it) Bertrand Russell‘s older brother. In other words, she had an interesting life.

I have read a few of her 20 or so books:

And, I have Vera (1921), which some see as her best, on my TBR pile.

So, why do I like her? Well, not only is her main theme, at least from the books I’ve read to date, women’s lack of power in a male-dominated world but, like Jane Austen, she approaches this with wit and irony and with a clear eye for human failings in general. In other words, she empathised with women’s lot but wasn’t blind to their faults and foibles (as individuals, as women and as representatives of humanity). Just read Mr Skeffington, and you will see what I mean.

To give you a sense of her writing, here are the opening paras of her “memoir” All the dogs of my life:

I would like, to begin with, to say that though parents, husbands, children, lovers and friends are all very well, they are not dogs. In my day and turn having been each of the above – except that instead of husbands I was wives – I know what I am talking about, and am well acquainted with the ups and downs, the daily ups and downs, the sometimes almost hourly ones in the thinskinned, which seem inevitably to accompany human loves.

Dogs are free from these fluctuations. Once they love, they love steadily, unchangingly, till their last breath.

That is how I like to be loved.

Therefore I will write of dogs.

How can you not be captivated by such a wry writer? The book continues in this teasing tone. She insists it is not her autobiography (“as this isn’t an autobiography, I needn’t go into that” is a refrain), but a story of her dogs, and regularly tells us so. But of course, through the story of her dogs, we get a pretty good impression of her life. She may not give us all the details, but we certainly learn about many of her “ups and downs”. This book, though, was not my introduction to von Arnim: that goes to the delightful Elizabeth and her German garden.

In a recent post, Max of Pechorin’s journal wrote that “the line between novel and memoir can be a tricky one”. I immediately thought of Elizabeth and her German garden, which I first read back in the mid 1980s. This is, I believe, a novel (in diary form) but it is also rather close to her life. She did, like the Elizabeth of the book, marry a German (count) and she did call him, as she does in the book, “The Man of wrath”. Furthermore, she did have several children. In fact her second book, The solitary summer, is dedicated “To the man of wrath, with some apologies and much love”.  Anyhow, here is the Elizabeth in the novel:

The people about are persuaded that I am, to put it as kindly as possible, exceedingly eccentric, for the news has travelled that I spend the day out of doors with a book, and that no mortal eye has ever yet seen me sew or cook. But why cook when you can get someone to cook for you?

OK, so she is well-to-do … but still, I love her priorities! Here she is in her (aforementioned) memoir, speaking of herself and one of her dogs:

Fortunately we liked the same things. She only wanted to be outdoors in the sun, and so did I …

And so, while some of the facts may differ (though I don’t know which ones), the basic “truth” of her life – her likes, dislikes and, more to the point, her attitudes and personality, come through both books.

Elizabeth von Arnim was a woman who tackled life head on. Her first husband died, she had affairs and a failed marriage; she lived in England, Europe and the USA; and she met some of the significant thinkers and writers of her time.  But, through it all, she never lost sight of “women’s lot” and the psychological ramifications of their powerlessness. Here she is in Elizabeth and her German garden on migrant workers:

From us they get a mark and a half to two marks a day, and as many potatoes as they can eat. The women get less, not because they work less but because they are women and must not be encouraged.

There is also, in the same book, an extended – and infuriating – discussion between Elizabeth, the Man of Wrath, and two others on German women having the same (lack of) rights as children and idiots. But politics was not her main game, I think. Rather, she was interested in women’s lives, in their wish and need to make self-determined, meaningful lives for themselves. So, I might just finish with another little excerpt from All the dogs of my life:

What on earth did I, of all people, want with a lot of husbands? I asked myself in wonder. Besides, by readily sticking to poached eggs for dinner I was getting abreast of my expenses, and the bills of Saturdays held no more terrors for me.

Ha! What indeed (at least in those inequitable days)!

Monday musings on Australian literature: The gum tree in the Australian imagination

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In the next week (I hope), I’ll be reviewing Anna Krien’s Into the forest, her investigation into the longstanding conflict over logging native forests in our southernmost state, Tasmania. In the meantime, though, as I’ve been reading the book, I’ve been thinking again of the role eucalypts play in Australian life and culture – and, voilà, this week’s Monday musings was born.

Salmon Gum (Eucalyptus Tintinnans)

Salmon Gum (probably Eucalyptus Tintinnans) at Nitmiluk National Park

But, where to start? Why not with Waltzing Australia, an American blogger who has travelled extensively in Australia, written a book as a result, and is now writing a blog about her experiences? She complained – nicely of course – in our little comment to-and-fro about her visit to my city that “My whole first day there, I didn’t see any gum trees, and that made it almost seem that I’d somehow left Australia”. If that doesn’t tell you something about gums and Australia nothing will!

My first memorable literary confrontation with gum trees came in the childhood classic, Seven little Australians (1894), which is, perhaps, to Australian girls what Little women is to American. It is about a family of children and includes a tragic death, but here the death is caused not by illness but, yes, by a falling gum:

There was a tree falling, one of the great, gaunt naked things that had been ringbarked long ago. All day it had swayed to and fro, rotten through and through; now there came up across the plain a puff of wind, and down it went before it. …They lifted it off the little bodies, the long silvered trunk with the gum dead and dried in streaks upon it… (from Seven little Australians, by Ethel Turner).

Never fails to move me. As for which of the seven is so tragically killed, my lips are sealed, but let’s just say that, in contrast to Alcott’s book, it is not the meek, mild one.

As backdrop or centre front, gums are rarely absent from our literature, but the next most memorable example for me has to be Murray Bail‘s mysterious and beautiful novel, Eucalyptus, which can be read as a modern fairy story: once upon a time there was a father who promised the hand of his daughter to the man who could name each eucalyptus species that the father had carefully and lovingly planted on his property. The book starts as follows:

We could begin with desertorum, common name hooked mallee … and anyway, the very word, desert-or-um, harks back to a stale version of the national landscape and from there in a more or less straight line onto the national character, all those linings of the soul and the larynx, which have their origin in the bush, so it is said, the poetic virtues (can you believe it?) of being belted about by droughts, bushfires, smelly sheep and so on; and let’s not forget the isolation …

It is these circumstances which have been responsible for all those extremely dry (dun-coloured – can we say that?) hardluck stories which have been told around fires and on the page. All that was once upon a time, interesting for a while, but largely irrelevant here.

If you haven’t gathered a sense of Bail’s tone and intent from this, you might when I tell you that the last species mentioned in the book is Eucalyptus Confluens! It is fairy story, a love story, and a meditation on stories, framed by gums in all their diversity: “A forest is language; accumulated years”.

In Peter Temple‘s Truth, which I reviewed here a month or so ago, a running motif is the eucalypt and oak forest planted by Villani and his father. The trees provide an important point of contact for father and son throughout their lives, and the forest’s survival in the fire at the end signifies the survival too of Villani’s relationship with his father.

Often of course, gums are simply the backdrop – the ever-present part of the landscape that makes that landscape recognisably Australian. They are an important part of the landscape in Chambers’ The vintage and the gleaning … just by being there.

The thing is, though, that gums are so ubiquitous that they can become clichéd. The 1930s was an important and active time in Australian literature – and a time when there was enthusiasm for defining and creating literature that was, in a word, Australian. Australian poet, Rex Ingamells wrote, in 1938, an article titled “Conditional culture” in which he explored “the state of the art” of Australian literature. Not surprisingly, gums pop up several times in the article, often to show failures in the Australian imagination, such as when gums are invoked in nondescript ways. However, he also sees them as a barometer for the maturation of our culture:

Before long, the strange, unorthodox beauty of the Australian gum tree, and many other manifestations of beauty peculiar to this country, will find a sure place in the standards of general culture, which will be one stage nearer universality and so much the richer.

All this makes me wonder whether there is anything similar – any motif that has as much universal recognition – in other national literatures? Anyone?

(Oh, and just in case you are interested, there is a pretty extensive listing of eucalyptus species at Wikipedia.)

Monday musings on Australian literature: In praise of the “taker-outers”

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Today’s Monday musings post is not solely about Australian literature but it was inspired by an Australian writer, Kate Jennings, about whom I’ve written a few times in the last month or so. In 2002 she wrote an essay titled “Bone and sinew”, for our now defunct Bulletin magazine, in which she praises short novels (or, novellas*). Tony of Tony’s Bookworld likes novellas, and so do I.

Anyhow, Jennings starts her essay with a statement that F. Scott Fitzgerald apparently made to Thomas Wolfe. He said:

You’re a putter-in, and I’m a taker-outer.

It seems that Wolfe believed a novelist couldn’t be taken seriously until, to use Jennings words, “he or she had produced something that could hold up a three-legged sofa”. Jennings likes Scott Fitzgerald’s description and goes on to say:

Putters-in and takers-out – as good a way as any to classify novelists. Putters-in: writers who pile on atmosphere, adjectives ad arguments, who share with readers all their thoughts, and research, who follow storylines like a dog on the loose. Takers-out: writers who fiddle with each comma and finesse every word, who know exactly what Samuel Johnson meant when he said that when you think you’ve written a particularly fine passage, strike it out.

Jennings admits to her bias – after all, she says, she’s written a couple of short novels herself – but says she does also enjoy  the likes of George Eliot, Christina Stead, Patrick White and Rohinton Mistry. Her point is that their novels are not “superior because of their length” and that short novels should not be perceived as “slight” simply because they are “slim”. There are many short novels with proven staying power (such as The great Gatsby, Joseph Conrad’s The heart of darkness and George Orwell‘s Animal farm) and yet, she says, publishers, recognising that readers and reviewers are prejudiced against shortness, “often ask writers to pad out short novels with stories. The term ‘novella’ is now pejorative: a marketing kiss of death”.

Well, it isn’t for me. Jennings quotes David Mamet on elegance in writing. He asked “how much can one remove and still have the composition be intelligible”. I like this way of describing it. Taker-outers, I believe, trust their readers, viewers and listeners (because this also works for theatre, film and music) to get it. They don’t believe they have to explain every detail. Kate Jennings certainly doesn’t in Snake. She presents a series of little vignettes and expects her readers to “get” the whole picture – and we do, only too vividly!

Kate Grenville with her cello

The versatile Kate Grenville (Courtesy: Peter Ellis via Wikipedia using CC-BY-SA 3.0)

Fortunately for me, many of my favourite Australian writers (hmm … is this a “chicken or the egg” situation?) have written short novels (as well as, for some, longer novels). I have listed some before and so here will add some others, mostly lesser known, that have impressed me:

  • Thea Astley’s Coda
  • Kate Grenville’s Dreamhouse
  • David Malouf’s Ransom
  • Eva Sallis’ The city of sealions
  • Tim Winton’s In the winter dark

Jennings writes “That short novels can be tough, specific and encompassing can come as a surprise to readers. Sinew and bone …”. Really, though, it’s a matter of what you read for. If your preference is to escape into fat and flesh, then short novels may not be for you, but if you like chewier fare, then a good short novel will rarely disappoint.

* I think novellas are generally defined as those under 150 pages, but I tend to include in my personal definition books that are up to 200 pages (or so).

Monday musings on Australian literature: Kookaburras at the coast

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Kookaburra

Kookaburra (Courtesy: Noodle Snacks via Wikipedia, using CC-BY-SA 3.0)

With daughter and dog left to guard the fort, Mr Gums and I are holidaying on the northern NSW coast with Ma and Pa Gums, and so this week’s musings will be short and more relaxed. In fact, I am just going to write about one thing: Kookaburras.

I was pondering what this week’s Musings should be, until I awoke on our first morning here to the wonderful sound of kookaburras. My topic was born, because they reminded me that there is another famous Australian song, perhaps almost as well-known as “Waltzing Matilda“:

Kookaburra sits in the old gum tree
Merry, merry king of the bush, is he.
Laugh, kookaburra, laugh, kookaburra,
Gay your life must be.

And they do laugh, even if New Zealand-born Australian poet Douglas Stewart didn’t think so. He described their sound as “a triumph of trumpets” (from “Kookaburras“). Their nickname, however, is the Laughing Kookaburra* or Laughing Jackass, though you don’t hear the latter name used so much these days. I’m not sure whether that’s because we’ve become more boring or more reverent! Kookaburras, carnivorous birds of the kingfisher family, are pretty ubiquitous in eastern Australia. We see them regularly on street lamp posts in our city, but we don’t hear them often from our house and so it is always a treat to hear them when we are out and about in the country – even if it’s at 4.30am on the first day of our holiday!

Anyhow, back to the song. It was written by a teacher, Marion Sinclair (1895-1988), for a Girl Guides Association of Victoria competition in 1934 … and the rest, as they say, is history! That said, I’ll conduct a little straw poll: are there any non-Australian readers here who have not heard or sung this song?

Kookaburras, of course, often feature in Australian writing. John O’Brien, whose “Said Hanrahan” I mentioned in last week’s musings, also wrote a poem called “The kookaburras”. While it’s a fairly sentimental poem, I can’t resist these lines:

Comes a buoyant peal of laughter from the tall, white, slender timber,
Rugged mirth that floods the bushland with the joy of brotherhood.

And that seems as good a place as any to end this week’s brief holiday musings.

*This is the more common kookaburra. There is another, the slightly smaller Blue-winged Kookaburra, but its call is also described as a “laugh”.

Monday musings on Australian literature: For the love of ballads

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Gum tree trunks, Rutherglen

Crisscrossing gum tree trunks at Rutherglen

I was first introduced to Australian ballads by my father who loved to read the works of AB (Banjo) Paterson to us. I loved it – my father’s reading and the poems themselves. This love was reinforced in my first year of high school, through my poetry textbook, The call of the gums: An anthology of Australian verse. I treasured this book – and still have it today. It’s organised by subjects/themes, with the first two sections being “Bush songs and ballads” and “Not very serious”.

First though, the introduction. The anthology was selected by one Ian V Hansen, and he starts his brief introduction by saying that:

The world knows Australia; she produces brilliant cricketers and formidable soldiers, athletes and tennis players. But this is not all. She also exports (mostly to Britain) painters, opera principals, concert musicians, scientists … and keeps her poets at home. Which is a pity. This book is an attempt to give some Australian poets the wider school public they deserve.

I don’t know much about Ian V. Hansen, the anthologist, but his introduction gives me a little pause. I wonder how much has changed in the last five decades regarding how the rest of the world sees Australia and its (we don’t use “her” anymore, do we) achievements? Methinks not quite as much as we’d like!

Anyhow, back to the book. It seems that I started my marginalia practice quite young. In the front of the book I have written the following, clearly based on what the teacher taught us:

Ballads

  1. Passed on from one man’s lips to another
  2. They varied because people could not remember all the words
  3. Easy rhythm that can be sung (Folk songs)
  4. A lot are anonymous
  5. A complete story about a happening or story
  6. A lot have a chorus
  7. Narrative (spoken by story-teller)

Well, a few of the ballads in the book are anonymous, they do tell stories, and I’m sure it was my love of ballads that led to my enthusiasm for folk music. While my interest in folk music now ranges widely, a good singer-songwriter telling a moving or funny story will always win me over.

Australia’s best known ballad has to be Banjo Paterson’s “Waltzing Matilda” which tells of the swagman who drowns himself in the billabong rather than be captured for stealing a sheep. It says something rather endearing I think about the Australian character that many would be happy to have this as our national anthem! It is, of course, in this anthology along with many others, including Paterson’s “Clancy of the Overflow”, Adam Lindsay Gordon’s poignant “The sick stockrider”, and Henry Lawson‘s “Andy’s gone with the cattle now”. I’m sure I don’t need to tell you their subject matter: droving was almost the universal theme of the nineteenth century Australian ballad.

Some of the ballads are tragic, and some wistful, but my favourites in this collection tend to be the funny ones, because humour in the face of adversity is often seen as an Australian trait. They celebrate ingenuity, such as Thomas E Spencer’s “How Macdougall topped the score”, or the determination of the bush to prove itself over the city, as in Banjo Paterson’s “The Geebung Polo Club”, or simply explore personality. One such is “Holy Dan” (anonymous), the story of a devout drover who, as he loses his cattle one by one to drought, continues to pray trustingly to God, until only one remains:

‘That’s nineteen thou hast taken, Lord
And now You’ll plainly see
You’d better take the bloody lot,
One’s no damn good to me.’
The other riders laughed so much
They shook the sky around;
The lightning flashed, the thunder roared,
And Holy Dan was drowned.

Another is John O’Brien’s “Said Hanrahan” who is the opposite of optimistic Dan. Hanrahan always expects the worst – and again the theme is the weather. It starts:

‘We’ll all be rooned,’ said Hanrahan
In accents most forlorn
Outside the church ere Mass began
One frosty Sunday morn.

And continues…

‘We’ll all be rooned,’ said Hanrahan,
‘If rain don’t come this week.’

Well, the rain does come but Hanrahan is still not satisfied. Rain, you see, means growth and knee-deep grass, and that means the risk of bushfires. As Hanrahan says, “We’ll all be rooned”!

“Said Hanrahan” also appears in a recent anthology, 100 Australian poems you need to know. The anthologist of this collection, Jamie Grant, writes

…it is significant that a large proportion of the poems I have chosen are distinctly funny … The most striking achievement of our culture, and the distinctive element of our national character, lies in the Australian sense of humour. That sense of humour is often described as “dry”, like the Australian landscape, but it also includes an element of cheerful exaggeration, and a liking for the reversal of expectations. It amuses Australians that our most iconic military adventure was a failure, but it also amuses us that we have produced triumphs where none was anticipated, whether through a stroke of ingenuity such as a winged keel or by winning a race by being the last left standing…

(If you don’t know what Grant is referring to in these examples, just ask the next Australian you meet. S/he is sure to know.) Meanwhile, I’ll be posting more on Australian poetry, but I wanted to start with the ones that first captured my attention… Do you have poems that you remember from childhood?

The call of the gums
(The world of English poetry)
Selected by Ian V Hansen
London: Edward Arnold (Publishers), 1962
180pp.

Monday musings on Australian literature: Charles Dickens and Australia

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Charles Dicken, c1860

Dickens, c. 1860 (Presumed Public Domain, via Wikipedia)

Here’s something completely different for my Monday musings! Not an Australian author, not even a foreign born author who came to Australia (though, being the great traveller he was, he did consider a lecture tour), but Charles Dickens does have a couple of interesting “connections” with Australia. These connections are supported by the existence of some letters written by him at the National Library of Australia.

On convicts and migration in general

Transportation of convicts to Australia – actual, implied or threatened – features in several of his novels. These include John Edmunds in Pickwick Papers (1836-37), the Artful Dodger in Oliver Twist (1837-1839), Mr Squeers in NicholasNickleby (1838-39), Alice Marwood in Dombey and Son (1846-48), and Magwitch (probably the most famous of all) in Great expectations (1861), not to mention Jenny Wren who threatens her father with transportation in Our mutual friend (1864-65). Dickens apparently learnt quite a lot about convict life, and particularly the penal settlement on Norfolk Island, from his friend Alexander Maconochie (to whom I refer in my review of Price Warung’s Tales of the early days).

Clearly, it was this knowledge which inspired the letter he wrote to the 2nd Marquess of Normanby (George Augustus Constantine Phipps), who was Secretary of State for the Home Office . He suggests

a strong and vivid description of the terrors of Norfolk Island and such-like-places, told in a homely narrative with a great appearance of truth and reality, and circulated in some very cheap and easy form (if with the direct authority of the Government, so much the better) would have a very powerful effect on the minds of those badly disposed … I would have it on the pillow of every prisoner in England. (3 July 1840, Original in the National Library of Australia, Ms 6809)

He offers to write this narrative, gratis. As far as I know, although Dickens and the Marquess were friends, nothing ever came of this offer.

While Dickens deplored the treatment of convicts in the penal settlements, he also saw Australia as a land of opportunity. The transported Magwitch, as we know, made his fortune in Australia. Mr Micawber, debt-ridden at the end of David Copperfield, emigrates to Australia and becomes a sheepfarmer and magistrate. But, perhaps the strongest evidence of Dickens’ belief in Australia as a place where people could get ahead, is the emigation of his sons.

On his sons

Two of Dickens’ sons – Alfred D’Orsay Tennyson Dickens and Edward Bulwer Lytton Dickens* (nicknamed Plorn) – emigrated to Australia, both with their father’s encouragement.

Alfred (1845-1912) migrated to Australia in 1865. He worked on several stations/properties in Victoria and New South Wales and as a stock and station agent, before partnering with his brother in their own stock and station agency, EBL Dickens and Partners. He died in the United States in 1912, having left Australia on a lecture tour in 1910. Dickens’  youngest son, Edward (1852-1902), went to Australia in 1869. He also worked on stations before opening the stock and station agency with his brother. He later worked as a civil servant and represented Wilcannia in the New South Wales Legislative Assembly in 1889-94, but he died, debt-ridden, in 1902 at Moree. Australia did not quite turn out to be the land of opportunity for these two that Dickens had hoped, but fortunately he was not around to see it!

A couple of Dickens’ letters to his sons are held at the National Library of Australia. One was written in 1868, not long before Plorn left England, and includes some fatherly advice:

Never take a mean advantage of anyone in any transaction, and never be hard on people who are in your power …

The more we are in earnest as to feeling religion, the less we are disposed to hold forth on it. (26? September 1868, Original in National Library of Australia, Ms 2563)

One does rather wish that Dickens had taken his own advice regarding not being “hard on people who are in your power” in his treatment of his poor wife Catherine.

Eighteen days before he died in 1870, he wrote this to Alfred:

I am doubtful whether Plorn is taking to Australia. Can you find out his real mind? I note that he always writes as if his present life were the be-all and end-all of his emigration and as if I had no idea of you two becoming proprietors and aspiring to the first positions in the colony without casting off the old connexion (1870, Original in National Library of Australia, Ms 6420).

These are just two of the many letters that he wrote to (and about) his sons in Australia. More can be found in published editions of his letters. I have chosen these particular ones purely because we have them here in Canberra. It’s rather a treat to be able to see Dickens’ hand so far away from his home.

Do you enjoy close literary encounters of the handwritten kind?