Australian literature

Monday musings on Australian literature: Bill’s Australian White Men Gen 1-3

/ Whispering Gums / 19 Comments

For several years now, Bill (The Australian Legend blog) has run a week dedicated to “generations” in Australian literature, focusing until this year on Australian Women Writers. This year, however, he has changed tack, and decided to look at Australia’s early male writers – who were, of course, in that colonial landscape, mostly white. He has also decided to do three generations at once, which means we are covering writers who were active from 1788 to the 1950s. This, says Bill, will be his last “Gen” – and fair enough, it’s been a big effort, one that many of us have enjoyed taking part in. Bill deserves a big thanks for bringing older Australian writers to the fore, and encouraging discussion about our literary history – the writers, the influences (including his “favourite”, The Bulletin) and the trends.

As before, Bill has created a page of Gen 1-3 writers to which he will add reviews posted for them or for writers he’s not yet listed. In this post I am going to list the writers I have read who suit this period, as my first contribution to Bill’s project.

Now, like Bill, my reading focus is women writers. Each year they represent 65-75% of my reading. I do like reading men too – and I would read more, if I could carve out more reading time – but my point here is to explain why my contribution is paltry.

Sometimes a bloke gits glimpses uv the truth
(CJ Dennis, “In Spadger’s Lane” in The moods of Ginger Mick)

The Gums’ Gen 1-3 List

In alphabetical order by author (compared with Bill’s chronological one by date of birth) … and with links on titles to my reviews of their books.

Knowledgable eyes will notice that my list does not include some of the big names of Australia’s male writers of the 19th century – Rolf Boldrewood, Marcus Clarke, Joseph Furphy, Henry Kingsley and Henry Lawson. Or Watkin Tench’s first hand accounts of the early colony. I have read a couple of these before blogging, but overall they have not been high priorities for me.

But, just to prove my interest, I have also read a couple of biographies of Australian male writers:

I have also read a couple of short journalistic pieces by Vance Palmer.

The books in my list span a century, from John Lang in the 1850s to Martin Boyd and D’Arcy Niland in the 1950s. John Lang’s A forger’s wife is a colonial novel with a 19th century melodrama feel, and is about, as I wrote in my post, issues like “the survival of the wiliest, and the challenge of identifying who you can trust”, things deemed critical to survival in the colonial mindset. By the ’90s, we were well into the time of social realism* and writers were looking outwards – to the sociopolitical conditions which oppressed so many. This is reflected in William Lane’s novel. It is also reflected in Price Warung’s stories, which, although “historical fiction” about the convict days, are written with a social realist’s eye on the inhumanity of the system. By the time we get to the mid-20th century, fiction was increasingly diversified. The world wars, increasing awareness of gender and continued concern about those issues the social realists cared about, not to mention modernism’s interest in the self, intellect, art, and their intersection with each other (to put it very loosely) can be found in the books I’ve read from that period.

When Bill started this project, he was inspired by the divisions suggested by Henry Green in his history of Australian literature. Green’s divisions were “conflict”, 1789-1850; “consolidation”, 1850-1890; “self-conscious nationalism” 1890-1923; and “world consciousness and disillusion”, 1923-1950. There is some sense to these divisions, and they provided a loose skeleton for the Gens! However, in her introduction to The Cambridge companion to Australian literature, Elizabeth Webby shares several studies or surveys of Australian literature, discussing their different approaches and goals, but she does say that several identify the 1890s as “being crucial to the development of a national literature”.

I could go on delving more deeply, but I won’t, as this post’s main goal was to tell Bill which books I can contribute to his male Gen 1 to 3 list, and I’ve done that.

Are you joining in or do you have any thoughts to add?

* There is some confusion regarding social versus socialist realism, but I am using social realism broadly to mean concern with sociopolitical issues – particularly regarding the working classes – with or without political “isms” behind it.

Marion Halligan, Words for Lucy (#BookReview)

/ Whispering Gums / 28 Comments

For my reading group’s tribute to Marion Halligan last year, I had planned to read one of her older novels, Wishbone, which I did (my review), and her last book, the memoir Words for Lucy, which I didn’t. But, I have now. I guess a book born of a mother’s grief for a daughter who died too young doesn’t make the cheeriest start to this year’s reviews. However, such is the life of a reader so you’ll just have to bear with me!

Lucy, for those who don’t know Halligan’s biography, was born in 1966, with a congenital heart defect. She was not expected to survive more than a few days, but she did – for nearly 39 years. In the end, however, in 2004, her heart gave out. I’ve read two other memoirs written by a mother about her seriously ill daughter, Isabel Allende’s Paula and Joan Didion’s The year of magical thinking. They are very different books and in fact, in Didion’s case, her daughter did not die during the book, though she did die young (and Didion wrote a book about that, Blue nights). The reason I am sharing this is that Halligan, Allende and Didion were all published authors, and it shows. As Halligan writes in the opening to her book, “My business is words”. For these three writers, the process of writing was an important part of how they processed their feelings. Halligan’s book might have come out some 18 years after Lucy’s death, but she’d been writing all that time.

While confirming my memory concerning Allende and Didion, I came across the Wikipedia article on Blue nights. It includes a quote from Rachel Cusk’s review of the book. She says “Didion’s writing is repetitive and nonlinear, reflecting the difficult process of coping with her daughter’s death”. While I don’t know about the reason, the “repetitive and nonlinear” description could equally be applied to Words for Lucy. The book is divided into twelve parts (plus a postscript), with each part comprising many small sections. There is an overall chronological arc to the book, in that after briefly describing Lucy’s death, Halligan does start with her birth, and tells of the funeral and wake near the end. What comes in between, however, is, writes Halligan, like “box of snapshots. You find your own way through the story, from random details”. In other words, if you are looking for a traditional grief memoir in which the memoirist works chronologically through the “stages” of their grief, you won’t find it here.

Carmel Bird and Marion Halligan
Carmel Bird and Marion Halligan, 2016

What you will find is a book about mothering and “daughtering”, about living with a chronically-ill child, about making memories and living with memories, about sadness and joy, about loss and grief (because Halligan has had more than you’d think fair), and about writing. It’s also about friendship. Having experienced my own devastating loss (of my sister in her early 30s), I know very well the value of friends. For Halligan, a great friend was the writer Carmel Bird. I was much moved by the role Carmel played in Lucy’s life, and by the love and support she clearly gave Marion.

Now, returning to Halligan’s “snapshots”, I enjoyed how, within a broad thematic structure, Halligan wanders through family life – from the lighthearted like Lucy’s love of things to the serious like her long and complex medical journey that cramped her life so much, from the family’s experience of living overseas to travelling there together later. From these, and more, so many truths emerge. For example, Halligan writes on page 2,

Love is so important to us. We so much need it. We can’t do without it. What we don’t realise at the beginning is the price it comes at.

Right there I knew I was going to like this book, because I was immediately taken back to my first pregnancy, and the fear I had that something would happen to this child I was bringing into the world. Ah well, I reassured myself, I didn’t have him (as the child turned out to be) before and I was fine, so I’d be alright! But of course, as soon as that child came into the world, my life changed and I realised things would never be the same, that if anything happened to him, I would not – indeed, could not – go back to how I was. The price of love…

The price of love isn’t all bad of course, even when the loved person dies, because there are the memories, and it is through memories that Halligan charts both Lucy’s life and her own grief. There is, though, a sort of paradox here that Halligan admits to. It’s what she calls the Janus face of grief. There’s the grief we feel for the person who has gone, for the life they are missing, the things they’ll not see or experience, and there’s that selfish grief the bereaved person feels, the loss, the misery, the wanting that person back in your life to make you happy (in effect).

It’s a complex thing grief – not linear, which Halligan knows and hence her book’s structure, and not all misery either, which Halligan also knows. Happy, joyful memories do pop up. You do laugh. Halligan describes some special memories, and then writes this beautiful thing about them:

Those are perfect memories, I can take them out whenever I like and run their cool and sparkling shapes though my fingers, look at their brilliant colours, the light refracting through them.

These memories may not be “factual”, may not be the same as those of others who experienced the same person or event, but as Halligan would tell her sisters who questioned her memory of some family event, “Write your own narratives … this is mine and I’m sticking to it”.

Throughout Words for Lucy there is the writer’s eye on what is fact and what is truth. Truths can be “different” (indeed, “many”, as Emmanuelle learns in Wishbone) while facts are “another matter”. And so, in the final pages of the book, Halligan, paying her due to “a memoir’s desire for honesty”, shares one last painful fact so that we don’t go away believing some wrong truths about her family.

Words for Lucy was Marion Halligan’s last book. It’s a memoir, and has the honesty that form demands. However, I see it as also containing her apologia, her final statement on what fiction is. For her, and she understood the slipperiness of this, it’s about truth, which is different from fact. “Fiction is always life”, she writes in this book. It means writers using life – including their own – “in all sorts of imaginative ways”. Think Jane Eyre, David Copperfield, and her own, somewhat controversial, The fog garden.

Ultimately, whether Halligan was writing fiction or nonfiction, words were her business. And these, her final ones, represent a fitting legacy for a brilliant career as well as a beautiful tribute to a beloved daughter.

Marion Halligan
Words for Lucy: A story of love, loss and the celebration of life
Port Melbourne: Thames and Hudson, 2022
218pp.
ISBN: 9781760762209

Monday musings on Australian literature: Some New Releases in 2025

/ Whispering Gums / 37 Comments

For some years now, my first Monday Musings of the year has comprised a selected list of new Australian book releases for the coming year. And, for many years, the bulk of this post came from a comprehensive list prepared by Jane Sullivan for the Sydney Morning Herald. However, this year’s SMH’s list, prepared by Melanie Kembrey, is highly selective, comprising just fifteen fiction and fifteen nonfiction titles. Further, it only covers the first half of the year, and as usual includes non-Australian books – meaning it has only a handful of Aussie titles.

So, I did a lot more research than usual. I checked many publisher websites, and found a couple of publisher emails useful. I also found The ArtsHub’s list prepared by Thuy On, which is a little longer than Kembrey’s and comprises selected Australian new releases for the first half of the year. I gleaned my list from these disparate sources, which varied in how well and thoroughly they shared their forthcoming titles.

The information I provide for each title varies a little, depending on what information I found easily. Links on the authors’ names are to my posts on those authors.

Fiction

As always, I have included some but not all the genre fiction I found to keep the list manageable and somewhat focused. Here’s my selection:

  • Mandy Beaumont, The thrill of it (March, Hachette)
  • Ashley Kalagian Blunt, Cold truth (February, Ultimo)
  • Tara Calaby, The spirit circle (historical fiction, January, Text)
  • Jane Caro, Lyrebird (April)
  • Shankari Chandran, Unfinished business (January, Ultimo)
  • Madeleine Cleary, The butterfly women (historical crime, April, Affirm Press)
  • Rachel Coad, Stray cats and bad fish: Silence of the eels (graphic novel, September, Upswell)
  • Anna Dombroski, After the great storm (February, Transit Lounge)
  • Laura Elvey, Nightingale (genre-bender, May, UQP)
  • Beverley Farmer, The seal woman (repub. of 1992 edition, March, Giramondo)
  • Irma Gold, Shift (March, MidnightSun)
  • Andrea Goldsmith, The buried life (March, Transit Lounge)
  • CE Grimes, The Guts (literary thriller, April, Puncher and Wattman)
  • Joanna Horton, Catching the light (April, Ultimo Press)
  • Luke Horton, Time together (March, Scribe)
  • Catherine Jinks, Panic (crime, January, Text)
  • Gail Jones, The name of the sister (June, Text)
  • Yumna Kassab, The theory of everything (March, Ultimo Press)
  • Vijay Khurana, The passenger seat (April, Ultimo Press)
  • William Lane, Saturation (May, Transit Lounge)
  • Zane Lovitt, The body next door (crime, March, Text)
  • Charlotte McConaghy, Wild dark shore (March, Penguin)
  • Nadia Mahjouri, Half truth (February, Penguin)
  • Steve MinOn, First name second name (March, UQP)
  • Debra Oswald, One hundred years of Betty (March, Allen & Unwin)
  • Jacquie Pham, Those opulent days (February, Upswell)
  • Sophie Quick, Confidence woman (April)
  • Diana Reid, Signs of damage (March)
  • Madeleine Ryan, The knowing (February, Scribe)
  • Josephine Rowe, Little world (April, Black Inc)
  • Ronni Salt, Gunnawah (historical rural crime fiction, January, Hachette)
  • Gretchen Shirm, Out of the woods (April, Transit Lounge)
  • Anna Snoekstra, The ones we love (June, Ultimo Press)
  • Jessica Stanley, Consider yourself kissed (April, Text)
  • Sinéad Stubbins, Stinkbug (May/June, Affirm Press)
  • Marion Taffe, By her hand (historical fiction, HarperCollins)
  • Hannah Tunnicliffe, The pool (January, Ultimo Press)
  • Madeleine Watts, Elegy, southwest (March, Ultimo Press)
  • Chloe Elisabeth Wilson, Rytual (May, Penguin)
  • Sean Wilson, You must remember this (January, Affirm Press)
  • Ouyang Yu, The sun at eight or nine (February, Puncher and Wattman)

Short stories

  • Peter M. Ball, What we talk about when we talk about brains: The Red Rain stories (January) 

Nonfiction

I am sorting these into two broad categories …

Life-writing (loosely defined)

  • Clem Bastow and Jo Case, Someone like me: An anthology of nonfiction by autistic writers (anthology, March, UQP)
  • Bron Bateman (ed), Women of a certain courage: Life stories (anthology, no month, Fremantle Press)
  • Brooke Boney, All of it (memoir, April)
  • Judith Brett, Fearless Beatrice Faust: Sex, feminism and body politics (biography, April, Text)
  • Geraldine Brooks, Memorial days (memoir, January)
  • Kerrie Davies, My brilliant career, Miles Franklin undercover (autobiography, March)
  • Robert Dessaix, Chameleon: A memoir of art, travel, ideas and love (memoir, March, Text)
  • Kate Grenville, Unsettled: A journey through time and place (Black Inc, April)
  • Hannah Kent, Always home, always homesick (memoir, May)
  • Sukhjit Kaur Khalsa, Fully Sikh: Hot chips and turmeric stains (memoir, February, Upswell)
  • Josie McSkimming, Gutsy girls (memoir, February, UQP)
  • Robert Manne, A political memoir: Intellectual combat in the Cold War and the Culture Wars (Black Inc, April)
  • Dean Manning, Mr Blank (memoir/biography, March, Puncher and Wattman)
  • Paul Marshall (ed), Raparapa: Stories from the Fitzroy River drovers (anthology, February, Magabala Books)
  • Brenda Niall, Joan Lindsay: The hidden life of the woman who wrote Picnic at Hanging Rock (biography, February, Text)
  • Sonia Orchard, Groomed: A memoir about abuse, the search for justice and how we fail to keep our children safe (memoir, January, Affirm Press)
  • Lucy Sussex and Megan Brown, Outrageous fortunes: The adventures of Mary Fortune, crime-writer, and her criminal son George (biography, Black Inc, February)
  • Grace Tame, The ninth life of a diamond miner: A memoir (memoir, repub., March, Pan Australia)
  • Naomi Watts, Dare I say it (memoir, January)
  • Jessica White, Silence is my habitat: Ecobiographical essays (memoir/ecoliterature, October, Upswell)

History and other non-fiction

  • Vanessa Berry, Calendar (essays, October, Upswell)
  • Anne-Marie Conde, The prime minister’s potato and other essays (June, Upswell)
  • Stephen Gapps, The Rising War in the colony of New South Wales, 1838-1944 (history, April)
  • Joshua Gilbert, Australia’s agricultural identity: an Aboriginal yarn (First Nations, Penguin, May)
  • Robert Godfree, Drought country: The dry times that have shaped Australia (eco-literature, February, CSIRO Publishing)
  • Alyx Gorman, All women want (women’s studies, March, HarperCollins)
  • Tom McIlroy, Blue Poles: Jackson Pollock, Gough Whitlam and the painting that changed a nation (history/biography, February/March, Hachette)
  • Alison Pouliot, Funga obscura: Photo journeys among fungi (photography/ecology, March, New South)
  • Belinda Probert, Bill’s secrets: Class, war and ambition (narrative nonfiction, January, Upswell)

Poetry

Finally, for poetry lovers, I found these, almost entirely from publisher websites:

  • Gregory Day, Southsightedness (April, Transit Lounge)
  • Yvette Henry Holt, Fitzroy North 3068 (March, Upswell)
  • Anna Jacobson, All rage blaze light (September, Upswell)
  • Šime Knežević, In your dreams (February, Giramondo)
  • Cameron Lowe, BliNk (February, Puncher and Wattman)
  • Thuy On, Essence (February, UWAP)
  • Helena Pantsis, Captcha (February, Puncher and Wattman)
  • Omar Sakr and Safdar Ahmed, The nightmare sequence (April, UQP)
  • David Stavanger, The drop off (April, Upswell)

So far I have read only three from my 2024 lists, though have several more on the TBR. How will I go this year?

Meanwhile, anything here interest you?

Monday musings on Australian literature: Some little recaps (2)

/ Whispering Gums / 22 Comments

Last year, my last Monday Musings of the year fell on Christmas Day, so I did what I called a little recap post. This year, my last Monday Musings occurs the day before my big two end-of-year posts – Reading Highlights and Blogging Highlights – so I’ve decided to do another little undemanding Recap Post.

Recap 1: Some All-time Tops

Back in May I celebrated fifteen years of blogging, but in that post I didn’t share much in the way of overall statistics. However, trends and stats interest me so I’m sharing a couple here. Do you ever look at long term stats and trends on your blogs? See anything interesting?

Book Cover

My top review post of all time is one I wrote back in 2010 on Edith Wharton’s short story “A journey”. It was a Top Ten post for a long time, and continues to garner enough hits each year to keep it in the top 30. Close on its heels is my top Australian review post of all time, the one on Red Dog, the movie and the book. Like Wharton’s story, it was a serial Top Ten post, but was a bit of an outlier because, for many years, my Top Ten was dominated by my posts on older short stories. The last few years, though, have seen a gradual switch to more recent posts on more recent works occupying the top. I wonder why?

My strangest Top, though, comes from the list of sites that “refer” (sends visitors) to my blog. Next in the list after obvious sites – WordPress Reader, WordPress Android App, Facebook and Twitter – comes mumsnet.com! It’s the “UK’s biggest network for parents” and for some reason my posts, such as one on Germaine Greer, seem to get discussed there, resulting in visitors to my site. Is it just me?

Recap 2: Australian Women Writers Challenge

I’ve been involved in the Australian Women Writers blog since 2012. In January 2022, it changed from being an all-encompassing challenge to a blog/website devoted to promoting older, often under-recognised or overlooked, women writers, from the 19th- and 20th-centuries. This year, Elizabeth Lhuede and I tried a new “twist” for our posts, and featured a work by authors who had published something in 1924. Some of the writers were so fascinating that I also wrote them up for my Forgotten Writers series.

We made another change in 2024, which was to reduce our posting from twice a week to once a week. For Elizabeth and me, this post comprised an introduction to our chosen writer followed by a piece published by that person, while Bill continued with his survey of the Independent Woman in Australian Literature (with posts by himself and some guest contributors). Bill has written a useful wrap-up of his AWWC posts over the year on his blog.

Despite these changes, including fewer posts, our stats continued to increase, after dropping in 2022. As last year, my post on Barbara Baynton’s short story “A dreamer” was the blog’s most visited post during the year.

The blog does take a lot of time, and we are currently talking about future plans. Bill has decided to hang up his commissioning editor’s hat after three hardworking years. We are hugely grateful for all he did, including finding guest contributors. Those contributors produced some of our most popular posts of the year. Michelle Scott Tucker’s post on the Billabong series, for example, was our third most-visited post for 2024.

Recap 3: Books given this year

As I wrote last year, this is not, technically, a recap, but I have often in the past shared the titles of Australian books I’ve given as Christmas gifts. This year I’m including Australian books I have given during the year – for birthdays, giveaways, and Christmas. They are not necessarily my favourite reads – indeed, I haven’t read them all – but were chosen to suit the recipients’ likes. Those I have read I did enjoy, otherwise I wouldn’t have given them to someone else, and some of those I haven’t read are on my TBR.

  • Carmel Bird, Love letter to Lola (my review, short stories; also in my gift list last year)
  • Carmel Bird and Jace Rogers, Arabella (my review, children’s picture book)
  • P.S. Cottier and N.G. Hartland, The thirty-one legs of Vladimir Putin (my review, novella)
  • Ceridwen Dovey, Once were astronauts (to Melanie of Grab the Lapels – her review, short stories)
  • Ali Cobby Eckermann, Ruby Moonlight (my review, verse novel)
  • Anita Heiss, Barbed wire and cherry blossoms (novel)
  • Tania McCartney, Wildlife compendium of the world (children’s nonfiction book)
  • Andrew McDonald and Ben Woods, Hello Twigs: Time to paint (early graphic-novel reader)
  • Emily Maguire, Rapture (my CWF Conversations 1 and 2, novel)
  • Inga Simpson, The thinning (novel)
  • Nardi Simpson, Bellburd (novel)
  • Stephen Orr, Shining like the sun (my review, novel)
  • Benjamin Stevenson, Everyone on the train has murdered someone (novel)
  • Karen Viggers, Sidelines (my review, novel)
  • Sonya Voumard, Tremor (my review, memory/nonfiction)

This year I seem to have given more non-Australian writers as gifts than usual, including Mick Herron, Toshikazu Kawaguchi, Claire Keegan, Thomas King and Natasha Donovan, Seichō Matsumoto, Haruki Murakami, Sigrid Nunez, and the New Zealand children’s writer Pamela Allen. This might not support Australian writers, but it does support our bookshops, and literary culture which is what it’s all about – ultimately, isn’t it.

Care to share your Christmas book-giving?

Monday musings on Australian literature: Forgotten writers 9, Dulcie Deamer

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Dulcie Deamer, like my most recent Forgotten Writer, Jessie Urquhart, has retained some level of recognition – or, at least notability, with there being articles for her not only in Wikipedia and the AustLit database, but also in the Australian dictionary of biography (ADB). I have briefly mentioned her in my blog before, in Monday Musings posts on the 1930s and 40s.

Dulcie Deamer

Born Mary Elizabeth Kathleen Dulcie Deamer, Dulcie Deamer (1890-1972) was, says Wikipedia, a “novelist, poet, journalist, and actress”. ADB biographer Martha Rutledge, however, is more to the point, describing her as “writer and bohemian”, while her contemporary, the journalist and author Aidan de Brune, puts it differently again, commencing his piece with, “Dulcie Deamer has had an adventurous life”. From the little I’ve read of her and her work, it’s clear she was imaginative and fearless.

Born in Christchurch, New Zealand, to George Edwin Deamer, a physician from Lincolnshire, and his New Zealand-born wife Mable Reader, Dulcie Deamer was taught at home by her ex-governess mother. The timelines of her youth are sketchy in places, but Rutledge says that at 9, she appeared on stage, and De Brune writes that she was writing verses by the age of 11. A year after that, in 1902, De Brune and Rutledge agree that her family moved to Featherston, a small bush township in the North Island of New Zealand, where, de Brune says, “she ran wild” for five years, “riding unbroken colts, shooting, learning to swim in snow-fed creeks, and going for long, solitary rambles of exploration through the virgin bush”. It was here ‘that what she describes as “memories of the Stone Age” came to her’. Somewhere during this time, according to Rutledge, she was sent to Wellington to learn elocution and ballet lessons, apparently in preparation for the stage. At the age of 16, she submitted a story to the new Lone Hand magazine, and won the prize of 25 pounds. It was “a story of the savage love of a cave-man” and it changed the course of her life.

Image from eBay seller 7290_stone

This story, “As it was in the beginning”, won the prize in 1907, from around 300 entries, said one contemporary report (The Wellington Times, NSW, 18 November 1909), and was published in The Lone Hand at the beginning of 1908, illustrated by Norman Lindsay. The critical responses were shocked but, mostly, admiring, that such virile writing could come from such a young woman. The story went on to be published in a collection of her stories in 1909, titled In the beginning” : six studies of the stone age, and other stories ; including “A daughter of the Incas”, a short novel of the conquest of Peru. One reviewer of this collection (Barrier Miner, 27 May 1910), wrote that Deamer “writes with a freedom of speech and a knowledge of things in general which must have fairly astounded her respectable parents, one would think, when they first read her compositions”! You get the gist. This work was republished in 1929 in a special limited edition titled, As it was in the beginning. The Australasian (21 December 1929) reviewed this and wrote of that original award winning story:

It was a tale of primitive man and woman, of a wooing and winning and retaining with club and spear— an unmoral tale, utterly pagan, terrifically dramatic. Its paganism was unsophisticated; its dramatic force was the expression of natural gift. Mr. Norman Lindsay illustrated the story. His paganism could hardly be called unsophisticated, but there was no doubt about his dramatic power. 

She was really quite something it seems and I might research her a little more. Meanwhile, Wikipedia picks up the story (sourced from newspapers of the time). As well as writing, she continued her stage career. She married Albert Goldie, who was a theatrical agent for JC Williamson’s, in Perth, Australia, in 1908. She had six children, but separated from Goldie in 1922. Rutledge, writes that

In the crowded years 1908-1924 Dulcie bore six children (two sons died in infancy), travelled overseas in 1912, 1913-14, 1916-19 and 1921 and published a collection of short stories and four novels—The Suttee of Safa (New York, 1913) ‘a hot and strong love story about Akbar the Great’; Revelation (London, 1921) and The Street of the Gazelle (London, 1922), set in Jerusalem at the time of Christ; and The Devil’s Saint (London, 1924). Three were syndicated in Randolph Hearst’s newspapers in the United States of America. Her themes, including witchcraft, gave ‘free play to the lavish style of her writing, displaying opulence and sensuality or squalor of traditional scenes.

Reviewing The devil’s saint for Sydney’s The Sun, The Stoic gives a flavour of Deamer’s writing. “She has style (a little too ecstatic perhaps) and she has a fine instinct for story-telling”, but there is much kissing – quite explicitly described – and “Sheikish stuff”. However, as The Stoic knows, there are readers for such writing, and s/he concludes that ‘If anybody wants romance, with a flavor of the supernatural and plenty of “pash,” this is the book’.

Deamer left her husband in 1922, and lived a Bohemian life in Kings Cross, while her mother brought up her children. She worked as a freelance journalist, contributing stories, articles and verse to the Australian Woman’s Mirror, other journals and newspapers, including the Bulletin and the Sydney Morning Herald. Like other writers we have featured, she often used pseudonyms. Rutledge tells us that Zora Cross described her in 1928 as ‘Speedy as a swallow in movement, quick as sunlight in speech … [and] restless as the sea’. Debra Adelaide writes that she was known as the “Queen of Bohemia” due to her involvement with Norman Lindsay’s literary and artistic circle, with Kings Cross Bohemianism, and with vaudeville. Various commentators and critics refer to her interest in religion, mythology, classical literature and the ancient world.

Deamer was a founder in 1929 and committee-member of the Fellowship of Australian Writers. In the 1930s she wrote plays, and a volume of mystical poetry titled Messalina (1932), while in the 1940s she another novel, Holiday (1940), another volume of mystical poetry, and The silver branch (1948). De Brune, writing in 1933, says that she was also hoping “to contribute screen stories to the newly-established Australian film industry” but it doesn’t appear that she achieved in this sphere.

In their short entry on her, Wilde, Hooton and Andrews say that her unpublished biography, The golden decade, “is informative on the literary circles of Sydney in the 1920s and 1930s”. They also say that she features in Peter Kirkpatrick’s 1992 book, The sea coast of Bohemia. Whatever we might think of her novels now, she was a lively and creative force in her time, and worth knowing about.

The piece I posted for the Australian Women Writers Challenge is titled “Fancy dress” (linked below). It provides insight into her interests in the magical and mystical and conveys something of her lively, humorous style.

Sources

  • Debra Adelaide, Australian women writers: A bibliographic guide. London, Sydney: Pandora, 1988.
  • Aidan de Brune, “Dulcie Deamer (1890-1972)” in Ten Australian Authors, by Aidan de Brune, Project Gutenberg Australia and Roy Glashan’s Library, 2017 (originally published in The West Australian, 13 May 1933) [Accessed: 21 November 2024]
  • Dulcie Deamer, “As it was in the beginning“, The Lone Hand (1 January 1908) [Accessed: 23 December 2024]
  • Dulcie Deamer, “Fancy Dress“, The Daily Mail (12 July 1924). [Accessed: 21 November 2024]
  • “Dulcie Deamer“, Wikipedia [Accessed 21 November 2024]
  • Martha Rutledge, ‘Deamer, Dulcie (1890–1972)‘, Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, 1981 [Accessed: 21 November 2024]
  • William H. Wilde, Joy Hooton and Barry Andrews, The Oxford companion to Australian literature. Melbourne, Oxford University Press, 2nd, edition, 1994

Sonya Voumard, Tremor (#BookReview)

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As I’ve previously reported, Sonya Voumard’s short memoir, Tremor, is one of the two winners of this year’s Finlay Lloyd 20/40 Publishing Prize. Earlier this month, I reviewed the fiction winner, P.S. Cottier and N.G. Hartland’s novella The thirty-one legs of Vladimir Putin. Now it’s Voumard’s turn, with her book on living with a neurological movement disorder called dystonia.

While essentially a memoir, Tremor also fits within that “genre” we call creative nonfiction. The judges would agree, I think, given their comment that Tremor is “notable for its compellingly astute interweaving of the author’s personal experience with our broader societal context where people with disabilities, often far more challenging than her own, try to adapt to the implicit expectations and judgements that surround them” (back cover). The interweaving of something personal with something wider is a common feature of creative nonfiction, but what seals the deal for me is its structure. Tremor has a strong – subjective – narrative arc that propels the reader on, with more objective information providing the necessary support.

The narrative opens on December 3, 2020, the day Voumard is to undergo brain surgery for her condition. It leaves us in no doubt that what we are about to read is a very personal journey. “I am”, she writes on this first page, “a hairless head on top of a flimsy cotton gown and long compression socks”. But then, two sentences later, she opens a new paragraph with, “as I wait to be taken to the operating theatre, I channel my inner journalist. I’m on a news assignment for which I have already gathered some key facts.” And just like that, we are in journalist mode, with Voumard describing her condition and the relatively new treatment she is about to receive, followed by some facts and figures. Around 800,000 Australians, she informs us, experience tremors of the body, and about 70,000 of these have dystonia. A couple of paragraphs later we flash back to early 1960s Melbourne. Voumard is four or five years old, and her personal trajectory begins with an anecdote about dropping a bottle of milk, about being “clumsy, prone to dropping things”, but also being “a risk-taker”.

From here, the book takes us on the two journeys I’ve just intimated. There’s the mostly chronological one tracking her life with dystonia until we arrive – at the end of the book – back at the beginning with her surgery and its aftermath. And there’s her exploration of dystonia, its causes, diagnosis, and treatment. Voumard binds these two journeys together with her astute, and empathetic, reflections and analyses. She knows what it’s like to live with a disability, even if early on she didn’t recognise it as such.

So, for example, she chronicles the tactics she’d use to hide her shaking, in order to get jobs and then to demonstrate she could do them (when clearly she could). She would sit on her hands, refuse offers of drinks, self-medicate with alcohol. Whatever it took to hide her condition. She talks about navigating a medical world that is so “siloed” that diagnoses ranged from the “psychogenic” (due to “some sort of failure of womanhood, an unfulfilled yearning, a cloak for something else”) to the “purely physical” (like a sports injury or from computer use) – depending on the speciality she was dealing with – when it was something else altogether. She touches on the cost of treatment, the overall politics of medicine, the gender issues which see women’s conditions so often dismissed.

And, lest I’ve given the wrong impression, she does this not only through her own experiences, but through those of others – met personally, or found through her research – ensuring that Tremor is not a “misery memoir” but something bigger, that contributes to our understanding of how people navigate a world in which they don’t fit the norm. This navigation has a few prongs: the obvious ones relate to coping with the physical limitations, discomfort, and/or pain the condition brings; and the less visible ones concern managing your expectations and aspirations, while also dealing with how people interact with you. Voumard shares the story of a woman who had suffered for over twenty years from cervical dystonia before she got a diagnosis. While diagnosis didn’t bring a cure, “identifying her condition had helped her to live her life more calmly, to not try to do too much and to understand something of others’ suffering”.

Voumard, you’ve probably realised by now, packs a lot into the 20/40 form (that is, into 20,000 to 40,000 words). At the winners’ conversation, she said there is the assumption that to be marketable you need to write 55,000 plus words. She had the bones, and had then started filling them out, but it was just “flab”. The competition, and then Julian Davies’ editing guidance, taught her that she had a good “muscular story”. So she set about “decluttering”. The end result is interesting, because this book doesn’t have that spare feeling common to short works. Tremor feels tight – there’s little extraneous detail – but not pared back to a single core.

Voumard, in fact, covers a lot of ground. She uses the Eurydice Dixon murder case, for example, to epitomise her ongoing interest in media and reporting, particularly regarding structural disadvantage and social justice. She also contextualises the latter stages of her journey against the 2019 bushfires, the 2020-2021 pandemic and lockdowns, and the 2022 floods in NSW’s northern rivers. Why all this? The subtitle explains it. This book, this “tremor”, is not just about a movement disorder but about something bigger:

My more recent thinking about disability has strengthened my belief in the urgent need to privilege the voices of others more marginalised than mine. But I also cling to the concept of freedom of speech – not as a neoliberal, tabloid-news defender of hate speech – but as someone striving to find ways to respond to the challenges of a democratic society that is becoming more disordered.

Tremor is another beautiful, thoughtful product of the Finlay Lloyd stable. Recommended.

Read for Novellas in November, because, while not a novella, it is a short work.

Sonya Voumard
Tremor: A movement disorder in a disordered world
Braidwood: Finlay Lloyd, 2024
129pp.
ISBN: 9780645927023

Review copy courtesy Finlay Lloyd.

Monday musings on Australian literature: Favourite fiction 2024

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Around this time of December, I have, for a few years now, shared favourite Aussie reads of the year from various sources. The specific sources have varied a little from time to time. Last year, a significant source – The Sydney Morning Herald/The Age – became unavailable to me as it is now paywalled, and I haven’t prioritised going to the library to access the paper. I have no problem with paywalling. We should pay for journalism, and I do, but for different news sources (such as The Canberra Times, because it’s my local; The Guardian via its app; The Saturday Paper and The Monthly digital editions; and The Conversation by donation). Not being able to access The Age/SMH is a bit disappointing, because theirs is a comprehensive listing. I’d love it if more sites offered the option to buy individual articles.

Anyhow, these lists are all subjective, of course. Plus, the pickers vary. There are critics and reviewers, commentators and subject specialists, and publishers and booksellers. Also, different pickers use different criteria, besides the fact that what they are asked to do, in the first place, varies. For example, some pickers are “allowed” to name several books while others are limited to “one” best (or favourite). Further, as The Conversation wrote, these lists rely not only on what each person has read, but what they remember, all of which means this exercise of mine is more serendipitous than authoritative. But, I think it is still interesting!

As always, I’m only including the Aussie choices, but I am providing links, where they exist, to the original article/post so you can read all about it yourselves, should you so wish.

Here are the sources I used:

  • ABC RN (radio broadcaster), in which presenters and guests named their recommendations from their reading of the year
  • Allen & Unwin (publisher) email, which shared one favourite A&U book per staff member
  • Australian Financial Review (newspaper, traditional and online), which shared “the top picks from our journalists to make your summer reading list sizzle” 
  • The Conversation (online news source), which invited 30 of their writers, “from fields as disparate as wildlife ecology and mathematics to literature and politics, to share their best books of 2024”, as well as letting the Books and Ideas team name theirs!
  • The Guardian (online news source), which promotes its list as “Guardian Australia’s critics and staff pick[ing] out the best of the best”
  • Readings (independent bookseller), which has its staff “vote” for their favourite books of the year, and then lists the Top Ten in various categories – Australian fiction, picture books, international fiction, junior & middle grade fiction, nonfiction, and adult nonfiction.

I apologise in advance for those of you who love poetry, nonfiction, and children’s books – which I also enjoy – but to keep this post a manageable length, I have decided this year to limit the list to my main interest, fiction.

Novels

  • Robbie Arnott, Dusk (Michaela Kalowski and Kate Evans, ABC RN; James Bradley, The Guardian; Readings Staff; see my CWF conversation) (Lisa’s review)
  • Ella Baxter, Woo woo (Bec Kavanagh, The Guardian; Readings Staff)
  • Brian Castro, Chinese postman (Tony Hughes-d’Aeth, The Conversation)
  • Melanie Cheng, The burrow (Jason Steger, ABC RN; Steph Harmon, The Guardian; Readings Staff; on my TBR)
  • Pitaya Chin, The director and the demon (Giselle Au-Nhien Nguyen, The Guardian)
  • Miranda Darling, Thunderhead (Readings Staff)
  • Emma Darragh, Thanks for having me (Readings Staff)
  • Michelle de Kretser, Theory & practice (Julianne Van Loon, The Conversation; Susan Wyndham, The Guardian; on my TBR)
  • Alison Edwards, Two daughters (Jess, Allen & Unwin)
  • Lexi Freiman, The Book of Ayn (Michaela Kalowski, ABC RN)
  • Katerina Gibson, The temperature (Readings Staff)
  • Sara Haddad, The sunbird (Jumana Bayeh, The Conversation)
  • Dylin Hardcastle, A language of limbs (Kate Evans)
  • Anita Heiss, Dirrayawadha (Charmaine Papertalk-Green, The Conversation; see my CWF Conversation)
  • Heather Taylor Johnson, Little bit (Jason Steger, ABC RN)
  • Malcolm Knox, The first friend (James Bradley, The Guardian)
  • Siang Lu, Ghost cities (Beejay Silcox, The Guardian; Readings Staff)
  • Catherine McKinnon, To sing of war (Michaela Kalowski and Kate Evans, ABC RN; see my CWF Conversation)
  • Emily Maguire, Rapture (Rafqa Touma, The Guardian; see my CWF conversations one and two) (Lisa’s review)
  • Murray Middleton, No church in the wild (Readings Staff)
  • Louise Milligan, Pheasants Nest (Eleanor, Allen & Unwin)
  • Kylie Mirmohamadi, Diving, falling (Sian Cain, The Guardian)
  • Liane Moriarty, Here one moment (Cosima Marriner, Australian Financial Review)
  • Bruce Pascoe, Imperial harvest (Joseph Cummins, The Guardian)
  • Ailsa Piper, For life (Michaela Kalowski, ABC RN)
  • Jordan Prosser, Big time (Steph Harmon, The Guardian)
  • Jock Serong, Cherrywood (Dennis Altman, The Conversation) (Lisa’s review)
  • Inga Simpson, The thinning (Kate Evans, ABC RN; James Bradley, The Guardian) (Brona’s review)
  • Jessica Tu, The honeyeater (Anabel, Allen & Unwin)
  • Tim Winton, Juice (Michaela Kalowski, ABC RN; Sian Cain, The Guardian; Readings Staff; on my TBR)
  • Charlotte Wood, Stone Yard devotional (Cosima Marriner, Australian Financial Review) (my review)
  • Evie Wyld, The echoes (Readings Staff)

Short stories

  • Ceridwen Dovey, Only the Astronauts (Cassie McCullagh, ABC RN) (Melanie’s review)
  • Fiona McFarlane, Highway Thirteen: Stories (Jo Case, Honorable Mention, The Conversation; Kate Evans, ABC RN; Ash, Allen & Unwin) (Brona’s review)

Finally …

It’s interesting to see what books feature most. Popularity doesn’t equal quality, but it does provides a guide to the books that attracted the most attention in the year. Of last year’s six most mentioned books, three did receive significant notice at awards time, particularly the most popular 2023 pick, Alexis Wright’s Praiseworthy (as I noted in a recent post). The other two of the six which also featured well at awards time were Melissa Lucashenko’s Edenglassie and Charlotte Wood’s Stone yard devotional.

This year, I have a bit of help with identifying the most popular picks, because, thanks to Colin Steele again, I can report that Books + Publishing (an online book trade site) listed the most mentioned Australian books from five sources, three of which I’ve accessed (Guardian Australia, ABC RN and the Australian Financial Review) and two of which I’ve not been able to (The Age/Sydney Morning Herald and Australian Book Review)

These are the fiction books which received at least three mentions across the publications were (in alphabetical order):

  • Ella Baxter, Woo woo
  • Melanie Cheng, The burrow 
  • Michelle de Kretser, Theory & practice
  • Malcolm Knox, The first friend 
  • Emily Maguire, Rapture 
  • Tim Winton, Juice 
  • Charlotte Wood, Stone Yard devotional 

To these, I would add, from my sites:

  • Robbie Arnott, Dusk
  • Fiona McFarlane, Highway Thirteen

In 2024, I read five books from 2023’s lists, three novels (Shankari Chandran’s Chai time at Cinnamon Gardens, Melissa Lucashenko’s Edenglassie and Charlotte Wood’s Stone yard devotional) and two works of nonfiction (Anna Funder’s Wifedom, and Richard Flanagan’s Question 7). I would love to have read more, but I can attest that those I read were all worthy favourites.

So, what has caught my eye from this year’s list. Those on my TBR, of course, and those I heard about at this year’s Canberra Writers Festival. Several more have now caught my eye, but as I’m unlikely to read many of them, I’ll just keep them to myself, and pass the baton over to you for your …

Thoughts – on this or lists from your neck of the wood?

Shirley Hazzard, The bay of noon (#BookReview)

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Shirley Hazzard’s novella, The bay of noon, has been in my sights for a long time, but finally, this Novellas-in-November year, I managed to get it out of my sights and into my hands. It’s the first of two novellas I read for the month, but the second to review. Such was my November (and we are now well into December!)

Published in 1970, The bay of noon was Hazzard’s second novel. It was one of six books nominated for the Lost Man Booker Prize in 2010. This was a special award created to, in effect, right a wrong which occurred when a change in the Booker Prize rules resulted in books published in 1970 missing out on a chance for Booker glory. The award was decided by public vote, with JG Farrell’s Troubles emerging the victor.

I’ve read three books by Hazzard before blogging, but since then I’ve just read one short story – “The picnic” – for the 1962 Club. In my post on that story, I referred to a review in The Guardian of Shirley Hazzard’s Collected stories. The reviewer Stephanie Merritt writes that “Hazzard’s recurring themes here – enlarged upon in her novels – are love, self-knowledge and disappointment”.

This is true of The bay of noon, which tells of a young Jenny, who, though born in England, had been sent to Cape Town with other young children to escape the Blitz. Post-war she was reunited with her older brother but, realising that her love for him was unhealthy, she leaves England to take up a job with NATO in Naples, bringing me to another of Hazzard’s recurring themes, that of young women leaving home to find their place. I understand from her biography that Hazzard herself worked for NATO in Naples in the timeframe this book is set, so she knows whereof she writes – which is not to say that she is writing her life. This is fiction, so while Hazzard draws on her own experiences, Jenny’s story is not hers.

Anyhow, we are in Naples, and it is some years after World War II, the mid 1950s in fact. Hazzard loved Italy, and her description of Naples at this time is imbued with a love born of knowing a place authentically, not as a sightseer. Naples is poor, and damaged both by war and a Mt Vesuvius eruption in 1944. Hazzard’s evocation of the city is a joy to read. A “through the looking-glass” city of both “apartness” and “continuity”, it also provides a moody, sometimes metaphoric, backdrop for our newcomer Jenny.

The storyline is straightforward. Knowing no-one outside of her work, Jenny follows up a letter of introduction to the charming and welcoming writer Gioconda, whose married lover, and Roman film director, Gianni, she also meets. Soon, however, through her work, Jenny also comes to know a Scotsman, Justin Tulloch, and a relationship of sorts develops between them. These relationships, and how they play out – with their mysteries and betrayals – form the nub of the story, but they are not what the novel is about. That is not so straightforward, but there are clues.

The title offers one clue, particularly, for me, the idea of “noon” as a time when the sun is at its highest, when the light is brightest, and so, perhaps representing a moment of clarity and, perhaps, also, of transition or change? Another clue is in the epigraph from Auden’s “Goodbye to the mezzogiorno” and in the opening paragraphs, both of which encompass ideas about memory and experience. The story is told first person through Jenny’s eyes, and there is a sense as the novel progresses of her working through an experience. Or, perhaps, not so much “working through” as allowing the passage of time to do its work. In the opening paragraphs, Jenny speaks of experiences building up “until you literally sink under them” but is also aware that, with the passage of time, memory, which was once “clouded with effects and what seemed to be their causes”, can become protective. As Auden concludes his poem:

… though one cannot always
Remember exactly why one has been happy,
There is no forgetting that one was.

But of course, not all memories are happy – and time can’t make them so. Gioconda, who had suffered loss, says

‘When people say of their tragedies, “I don’t often think of it now”, what they mean is it has entered permanently into their thoughts, and colours everything…’ (p. 67)

Just prior to this, she admits:

‘When I talk of it this way, now, to you, it all comes out as if there were some sequence, some logic, instead of moods, contradictions, alternatives. The design imposes itself afterwards. And is false, must be false.’ (p. 66)

It’s a curious but beguiling novel. The writing has a formal, intellectual – almost dispassionate, and sometimes elegiac – tone. It feels as though it belongs to a much earlier time, earlier in a way than the time in which it is set. This works somehow, partly because of Hazzard’s clear and measured prose, partly because the characters themselves seem to belong to an earlier time, and partly because Jenny is telling us the story from some time in the future.

As I read The bay of noon, I kept trying to place it within a wider literary tradition. It belongs, in part, to those stories about young people being taken under the wing by more experienced elders. Jenny observes the world she is drawn into, gradually becoming a more active and confident player in it. However, an Englishwoman, she remains an outsider, so retains her observer status which, over time enables her to see some realities she had missed in the first flush.

This is not a simple coming-of-age story, as it might look on the surface. Jenny is not an ingenue, but neither is she, at the start, experienced enough to understand the complex emotions and tragedies her older friends have experienced. Moreover, Hazzard has set the novel in a time that was itself complex, as Europe, and Naples specifically, was emerging from the war and – hmmm, was what? I wanted to say remaking itself, but that’s not the sense we get of Naples. It’s more one of being itself.

Towards the end, Jenny, reflecting on that past time in Naples, likens it to a

vineyard that had been left to flourish intact … among the deadly apartment buildings, not so much showing how it was as what has happened to it.

And that is the book’s ultimate meaning for me. It is not about who we are, what we hoped for, or where we have arrived, but about, in the closing words of the novel, “how we came”. Life, in other words, is a process, a journey that doesn’t always take us where we plan or expect.

Read for Novellas in November. Also read by Brona for the month. Read very late for the 1970 Year Club run by Karen (Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings) and Simon (Stuck in a Book)

Shirley Hazzard
The bay of noon
ISBN: 9781860494543
Virago Press, 2005 (originally published 1970)
182pp.

Monday musings on Australian literature: Australia’s bestsellers, Black Friday week 2024

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With thanks to Colin Steele – Canberra’s wonderful Meet The Author convenor, who is also one of my major sources of literary news – I have another list for you, this one of the top selling books in this year’s Black Friday sales. Black Friday is a post-Thanksgiving Day sales event with a long and complicated history in the USA, which Wikipedia explains in detail if you are interested. Australia has no Thanksgiving Day so, how do these things happen? (That’s a rhetorical question, folks). And how does Black FRIDAY become Black WEEK or so? (Another rhetorical question.)

Wikipedia also explains that it came to Australia in the 2010s, with Apple Inc being an early promoter of Black Friday deals. However it happened, and whenever it happened, today, if you enter “book sales black friday Australia” into your search engine you will get myriad results from the big well-known online places like fishpond, booktopia and amazon, through the shopfront/online booksellers like QBD, Dymocks and Big W, to publishers like Penguin Books Australia and specialist organisations like the Children’s Book Council of Australia. Everyone, it seems, had Black Friday book sales.

There are many ways we can think about this – in terms of capitalism and the encroachment of American culture, for example – but when it comes to books, there is a silver lining if it results in more people buying books they otherwise may not have. I’ll leave that for you to think about (and maybe discuss in the comments). Meanwhile, whatever we might think, it has presented another interesting way (for those of us who love statistics) to see what people are buying – presumably not only for themselves but for Christmas gifts.

Colin obtained this list from (the pay-walled) Books+Publishing, on Friday, 6 December 2024. They reported that according to Nielsen BookData, 2024 Black Friday–week sales ‘saw volume sales in the Australian book market 40% higher than the average weekly sales in the four weeks prior’, with sales volume in the week of Black Friday up 4% compared to the week of the retail promotion in 2023.

Australia’s bestsellers during Black Friday week, ranked by copies sold from 24 to 30 November 2024, were:

Top five overall bestsellers

  1. Nagi Maehashi, RecipeTin Eats: Tonight (Macmillan): Australian
  2. Guinness world records 2025 (Guinness World Records)
  3. Lee Child & Andrew Child, In too deep (Bantam)
  4. John Farnham & Poppy Stockell, The Voice inside (Hachette): Australian
  5. Liane Moriarty, Here one moment (Macmillan): Australian

Top five adult fiction

  1. Lee Child & Andrew Child, In too deep (Bantam)
  2. Liane Moriarty, Here one moment (Macmillan): Australian
  3. Carissa Broadbent, The songbird and the heart of stone (Tor Bramble)
  4. Richard Osman, We solve murders (Viking)
  5. Sally Rooney, Intermezzo (Faber)

Top five adult nonfiction

  1. Nagi Maehashi, RecipeTin Eats: Tonight (Macmillan): Australian
  2. Guinness world records 2025 (Guinness World Records)
  3. John Farnham & Poppy Stockell, The Voice inside (Hachette): Australian
  4. Nagi Maehashi, RecipeTin Eats: Dinner (Macmillan): Australian
  5. Helen Garner, The season (Text): Australian

While I’m sure Australia’s booksellers were pleased with the sales, and will hope that these sales continue through the holiday season, and while it’s good to see a strong showing of Australian writers in the non-fiction list, it is disappointing to see Australian writers all but absent from the fiction list. The crime novels in the list aren’t Australian, nor the fantasy. Even the one literary fiction work is not Australian. Why is that? Why do more people want to read Sally Rooney than the recent works of Charlotte Wood, or Melissa Lucashenko, or Robbie Arnott, or any of our many other wonderful writers of literary fiction?

Any thoughts?

Monday musings on Australian literature: Books set at the beach

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Summer has formally started here in the Southern Hemisphere, and in Australia that means (for most people), the beach. We have gorgeous beaches here – not that they are my go-to place – so I thought to share some books set at the beach, by the sea. Some of these may also be “beach reads” (see my post on that concept), but that idea, whatever it means to you, is not what is driving this selection. Rather, I’ve chosen these books for the different ways they explore the beach – or, the idea of the beach – in Australian culture.

This is a very selective list, and I’m presenting it in order of publication.

Beach set books

Nevil Shute, On the beach

Nevil Shute, On the beach (1957, read before blogging): Shute’s classic apocalyptic novel needs, surely, no introduction. It is perhaps a cheeky inclusion here as it is not so much set “on the beach” but in Melbourne where some of the last people alive on earth are awaiting death from radiation following a nuclear war in the Northern Hemisphere. The idea of beach, in fact, is more metaphoric, or allusive, than literal, though most covers show beach and/or sea scenes. This book keeps on keeping on. Only last year, Alexander Howard wrote in The Conversation that the Sydney Theatre Company was presenting the first stage adaptation, and commented that

Shute’s vision of humanity’s self-inflicted destruction is eerily resonant in our time of climate emergency. The nuclear threat remains, too, in our perilous historical moment of democratic backsliding and failing nuclear states.

Kathy Lette and Gabriel Carey, Puberty blues (1979, seen – but not read – before blogging): one of our most famous beach-set books, this is a coming-of-age novel about two friends growing up on Sydney’s beaches, and coming up against the gendered nature of the surfing community, where girls are accepted only so long as they support the males. Lette has described 70s surfing culture as “tribal and brutal”.

Robert Drewe, The bodysurfers

Robert Drewe, The bodysurfers (1983, on my TBR): Drewe regularly features the beach and/or the sea in his writing. Many of his books are titled for beach and sea themes. His novels and and short story collections include The rip, The drowner, and The true colour of the sea; his memoir is titled The shark net; and he edited an anthology titled The Penguin book of the beach. The bodysurfers is more a collection of interconnected short stories than a novel. According to the back cover blurb of my edition, it is “set among the surf and sandhills of the Australian beach – and the tidal changes of three generations of the Lang family”. Like many of the books I’m including here, it has been adapted to other media, in this case to film, television, radio and the theatre! I read the first two stories some time ago and loved the writing. I intend to finish it one day, which is why it is still on my bedside table.

George Turner, The sea and summer (1987): like Shute’s novel, this is not exactly set on the beach, but this dystopian novel by Miles Franklin award-winner Turner is about climate change and the sea flooding the city – Melbourne again, in fact. Fourtriplezed, who comments on my blog occasionally, has reviewed this novel on goodreads. The book, he says, conveys a “dystopian nightmare” characterised by “greenhouse induced floods that make large tracts unlivable, worldwide economic collapse, over population, mass starvation”. He quotes from the novel:

“This is Elwood and there was a beach here once. I used to paddle here. Then the water came up and there were the storm years and the pollution, and the water became too filthy.”

Tim Winton, Breath (2008, my post): like Puberty blues, Breath is set amongst surfers, though on the Western Australian coast. Also like Puberty blues, it’s not so much about surfing as the cultural issues around it. In this case, the protagonist is male, and the focus is masculinity and risk-taking, and how the choices you make follow you. Winton, like Drewe, writes frequently about the beach and the sea but never simply. The sea and surfing offer necessary rejuvenation for Winton the person, but writer Winton uses it effectively to explore the themes that concern him about family and love, values and responsibility, lost males, and the environment.

Malcolm Knox, Bluebird (2020, my review): a satirical novel set in a beachside suburb. I wrote in my post that it looks like a satire on all those beach communities that pepper Australia’s coasts – the middle-aged men who prefer surfing to working, the country-club set, the councils which sell out to developers, small-town racism and gay-bashing, and so on. However, I suggested that while a beach-town might be the setting, its satire is broader, reaching into wider aspects of contemporary Australian life – dysfunctional men and broken families, development, aged care, banking, local government, and so on. In other words, given Australians’ love for the beach, such a place makes the perfect, relatable, setting for his satire …

That seems a good point on which to end this little selection. The beach in Australia can mean and reference so many aspects of our lives and national psyche, from escape and relaxation through the many ways we relate, behave and think to apocalypse and dystopia.

Do you have favourite beach-set books, Australian or otherwise?